The set back here happened in Germany, which continues to bring into question the legitimacy of national courts in the international medium of the Internet. Micrsoft does business in Germany and will, of course, comply with the verdict to avoid pissing the Germans off. What if Microsoft had no direct dealings with Germany though?
Eventually a court case will come up in some major venue (the US, or a major eurpoean country I'd guess) that will be promptly ignored by the party involved because they don't operate under that country's jurisdiction. Then who knows what will happen.
I'd rather that I was given the chance to use some upgraded service than have them chopping off my bandwidth with caps. As long as the charges are clearly presented in advance and it's not some unexpected bill at the end of the month this sounds good to me. Wonder if they'll start offering multiple static IP's as an upgrade...
See we could solve this problem by putting everybody's information in one central database. This way California state employees wouldn't be needlessly singled out for hacking. ALL of us could get our information hijacked at once:)
Actually the OCN should be safe from attack. The reason is that from the get go is intended to distribute content that is totally legal to distribute. Now certainly some may abuse it, but the problem that Napster ran into was that it so clearly built it's business model on make a profit from contributing to piracy.
The courts are unlikely to shut down a network like this that makes a good faith effort to be legitimate. Most other P2P services establish themselves as trading points for all manner of illegal content. They try to cover this up to look good to the courts but there's no doubt that Kazaa, etc, wouldn't be this popular were it not for piracy.
The question that has to be asked here is this: do we really want to have our country so heavily dependent on an OS that is so apparently at risk of vunerabilities? Let's analyze the threat for a moment.
Let's say that this message queueing vulnerability that was spoken of in the article is a pretty substantial hole that could be a true threat to national security. What makes anybody think that because Microsoft refuses to talk about it hasn't already slipped out to all the wrong people. If some high level executive at Microsoft knows about it, you can guarantee that probably hundreds if not thousands of people within the orgnization know about the problem already. The more people that know about it, the better the odds that somebody nefarious will get a hold of that information.
If I were the intelligence service of some devious foreign power you can bet I'd have a few operatives working in Microsoft. I mean if you want to fight a war with the US, what would be better than an opening shot that can harm >90% of the computers in the country. So you have a few operatives finding what holes they can and slowly relay them back. Then you just sit and wait for the day when you need a real threat in your arsenal.
Imagine how nice it would be if you are some nefarious foreign power in tense negotiations with the US and you can walk in, and them a floppy disk and tell them to give in or else. I mean even if they find out what the vulnerability is, can they deploy a response to it fast enough that it matters? Nothing like the threat of having the electronic economy slagged to make you amicable to a bad deal.
I think that if Microsoft's the threat they seem to imply, the judge should order them to turn over the source code to the FBI to begin dissecting these problems. Do we really want to trust a private corporation with our national security? I don't think so...
The CCIE seems to be the one of the few certifications that, on it's own, will land you a job. Most certifications make you look a little better, but don't really mean jack against real world experience. The value of the cert is proportional to demand for the skills and the availability of those skills in the job market. For example, MCSE is in demand, but there are so many of them that it's not as valuable. CCIE's are in demand, but because it's hard to get the cert and expensive, it means the supply is still relatively low (at least last time I checked).
What I might suggest to you is simply get a list of a bunch of certifications and do searches on the various job sites to see how many hits you get, etc. That should give you a rough approximation of where the demand is. Also, maybe find a good technical recruiter and see what they recommend as the hot demand right now.
One bit of advice for you though is that I would put some careful thought into which direction you choose, be it programmer, admin, etc. A few years down the line you can change jobs, but if you do so you'll be very little better off than you are now due to the lack of relevant work experience in the new area. Tech jobs seem to seek people with very specific skill sets, and care less about general experience.
A friend of mine got into sysadmining but would much prefer being a developer now. Of course now if he was to try to go back and be a developer he'd have to take a substantial cut in pay. So if you might change your mind later, just be aware of this little trap and plan for it (save up some money, maybe do some side work in some open source projects, etc, just to keep your skills honed).
They say that the disc is super sized. Any idea on how big that is? If it doesn't fit conveniently in the form fact of a PC, seems like it's not that great.
See here's what happens. The BSA says play nice with them and they'll be lenient with you. Nice means either paying for new software or paying for them to audit you and then pay for the license you were supposed to have. Keep in mind, that having a copy of office and a receipt for it is not legally licensed unless you've got the little certificate of authenticity. So if you weren't keep pristine records they'll possibly have you paying twice for your software.
Now, that's the "NICE" approach. The less than nice approach is that they file suit against you in court. During discovery they get to audit you and can find that lone piece of software that was infringing. Now you have to pay for that license, penalties, court costs, audit costs, damages. Now if it turns out that you are the one organization on earth that has all of your software licensed legitmately, then you can probably recover the costs for your legal defense, but even then you just wasted a lot of time and resources.
As an experiment, when I was moving my desktop at work to run on Linux (YAY!), I decided to try to do as much through the GUI as possible. I wanted to see how far things had come and answer your question which I was wondering about too. So, I installed redhat 7.2 loaded up KDE and got to work.
The simple answer is yes, you can do nearly everything through the GUI. I found that, I only had to move away from the GUI when I was doing non-standard things. For example I wanted to download a cutting edge version of a piece of software that had to be compiled. So, yeah I had to bring up a command-line to manage that. Overall though I think that anything I'd normally be able to do under windows I could do under Linux with no need of a command line.
It does seem like it should be that simple but you neglect the existence of the BSA audit. If you go that route you can expect to hear from the BSA before too long offering an amnesty if you buy the latest versions of the software. If you don't, of course, they'll take you to court and they'll get you for that one or two pieces of software you didn't license. Every company has one or two pieces of software they didn't license. That's all they need to get you for the software costs and legal fees. Fun, non?
My suggestion is that if you choose not to go the Microsoft route make a point of either:
1) purging every vestige of microsoft's sofware from your office
2) making sure everything is in pristine order for when the BSA comes along
What you are saying is that the way to prevent the subversion of freedom and democracy is to subvert freedom and democracy? The nazis came to power because Germany was in terrible shape after World War I. They were impoverished and they were looking for any solution. They wanted somebody to blame, a new direction to go. It has little to do with the specific message of nazism, it has far more to do with the state of the society they lived in.
This scene has played out in history time and time again. Desperate people do stupid things, and they will back insane radicals because they've got little to lose. Do you really think that if nazism was allowed to show it's head in public they would actually gain significant power? My supicion is that if it came out into the open, the nazism would face a backlash from people who now don't worry about it because it's all underground.
Granted, I don't live in Germany. Perhaps I'm seriously underestimating the tendancies of the german citizenry. My sense is that without some reason to drive them to the false promises of nazism, they'll just push nazism to the margins where it belongs.
Web services require two things that the Internet is not notorious for:
1) Security 2) Reliability
While the Internet works most of the time, is "most of the time" acceptable for web services? Some routing screw up happens and suddenly your ability to charge your customers is hosed.
Thought police don't need to resort to such primitive tactics. The reason that police states have always broken down is because there are too many cracks. There are too many places to hide, to slowly spred sedition, to slowly build a resistance to the oppressors. It's a simple matter of resources; you cannot track all the people all the time. Or can you?
With the vast increases in computing power, suddenly the ability to manage the raw data created by people on a daily basis is within reach. Suddenly using all of the cameras spread through the cities to track people's movements is completey possible. Suddenly an agent can go through credit receipts of millions of people and use a profiling system to weed out the people that are potentially unsavory for the government.
No need to take them out in the night and torture them. That's clumsy and builds hatred by the masses. Label the person an extremist, a terrorist, a pedophile. Talk abut all the terrible things the person's done. Some of it may be true, some not, but with all that data floating around out there, you can probably find a few juicy tidbits to destroy political opponents.
A police state is now, more than ever, a viable possibility. With all of this information out there and, more importantly, the increasing ability to do something useful with that data, it becomes very easy to track the unsavories. It may even be made easier because the unsavories cover their tracks leaving obvious information voids in their wake.
Maybe this is a tad paranoid, but tell me that this isn't technically possible...
If we assume for the moment that they had thought of consulting an attorney when they first embarked on this project, would it have made a difference? I mean, seeing as the DMCA didn't actually exist in '98, how could they have made some plan to defend themselves against prosecution under it. As for the straight up copyright issues, it's total hogwash, but at least they could have gotten the lawyerly advice of, "well they haven't got jack on you, but can you afford to fight it?"
I was thinking about this earlier, and the really frustrating thing is how much of computer related tinkering seems to need to be run by a lawyer. I mean if you have a hobby like building kit cars, or constructing furniture, you have no need for attorneys. But if you want to get deeply involved in tinkering with software, etc, you suddenly need a law degree. Companies talk a lot about the damage that piracy has on the software economy, but I have to wonder how much more damage has been caused by the chilling effect on independent developers by this legal morass we call intellectual property.
I figured it out, just enjoying the opportunity to point out evidence that they are completely full of it. It's a shame that they have to be so stupid about it because I really like Java.
Sun is constantly talking about protecting the Java language for the sake of humanity. I find it rather amusing, by comparison, that C++ is so out there in the open that it took 5 years to actually get a complete implementation of it. Evidence that such tight controls aren't necessary to make a language stable and long lasting?
the link to fusionlighting.com works fine. Not a lot of details but it does describe the product, what it's good for and that it is supposed to be commercially available this year.
Say, what happens if an educational institution buys a machine from an OEM that pre-installs Windows on them? Aren't they, in effect, paying for that same copy twice?
If I was in charge of buying computers for a school I'd certainly want a price reduction because I'm not about to pay twice for that OS.
The fact of the matter is that in almost every case, taking an ethical stand is a costly thing. It can cost your job, your reputation, even your life. Now, it's not likely going to cost you your life if you take an ethical stand in your coding, but why should the computer world be any different than any other?
For the record, despite the substantial quality of the articles in playboy, it is none the less illegal to sell it to a minor. Now, I think this judge is being a little silly saying that video games are not expression, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the ordinance is a problem.
When forbidding access to things that are protected by the first amendment, like Playboy, there are certain requirements about it being the least burdensome approach to restriction, etc. If the court believes that there is a relevant social interest in preventing minor access to violent video games, then all this ruling determines is how they are allowed to go about preventing this access.
Personally I think that if this gets appealed it will get thrown back in the judge's face. He'll have to accept that it is a first amendment protected form of expression. Then he'll likely proceed to rule that the ban is okay anyhow, and then the court can review the issues of it being least restrictive, etc.
That is one valuable thing is that if they can combine forces with Compaq, they can put themselves in a better position in the commodotized market of PC's. The problem with a commoditized market is that margins are razor thing so you have to be able to produce in vast quantities to make any money. There is still good money there, but only for the biggest players. Seperately they might not have the power to survive in the market, but together they stand a better chance.
Sure the growth rate in PC's is slowing, but it's still growing at least and there will always be demand for upgrading of old systems, etc. It stands to be a cash cow for many years to come but only if you are a big player or a niche player (game machines, etc).
Also, in this deal, think about hand helds which is definitely a fast growing market. The two leading manufacturers (I think they are leading, but correct me if I'm wrong) of WinCE devices are becoming one. That's certainly putting them in a better position in that market.
Slashdot Mirror
The set back here happened in Germany, which continues to bring into question the legitimacy of national courts in the international medium of the Internet. Micrsoft does business in Germany and will, of course, comply with the verdict to avoid pissing the Germans off. What if Microsoft had no direct dealings with Germany though?
Eventually a court case will come up in some major venue (the US, or a major eurpoean country I'd guess) that will be promptly ignored by the party involved because they don't operate under that country's jurisdiction. Then who knows what will happen.
I'd rather that I was given the chance to use some upgraded service than have them chopping off my bandwidth with caps. As long as the charges are clearly presented in advance and it's not some unexpected bill at the end of the month this sounds good to me. Wonder if they'll start offering multiple static IP's as an upgrade...
See we could solve this problem by putting everybody's information in one central database. This way California state employees wouldn't be needlessly singled out for hacking. ALL of us could get our information hijacked at once :)
Actually the OCN should be safe from attack. The reason is that from the get go is intended to distribute content that is totally legal to distribute. Now certainly some may abuse it, but the problem that Napster ran into was that it so clearly built it's business model on make a profit from contributing to piracy.
The courts are unlikely to shut down a network like this that makes a good faith effort to be legitimate. Most other P2P services establish themselves as trading points for all manner of illegal content. They try to cover this up to look good to the courts but there's no doubt that Kazaa, etc, wouldn't be this popular were it not for piracy.
read the subject. not much else to say...
The question that has to be asked here is this: do we really want to have our country so heavily dependent on an OS that is so apparently at risk of vunerabilities? Let's analyze the threat for a moment.
Let's say that this message queueing vulnerability that was spoken of in the article is a pretty substantial hole that could be a true threat to national security. What makes anybody think that because Microsoft refuses to talk about it hasn't already slipped out to all the wrong people. If some high level executive at Microsoft knows about it, you can guarantee that probably hundreds if not thousands of people within the orgnization know about the problem already. The more people that know about it, the better the odds that somebody nefarious will get a hold of that information.
If I were the intelligence service of some devious foreign power you can bet I'd have a few operatives working in Microsoft. I mean if you want to fight a war with the US, what would be better than an opening shot that can harm >90% of the computers in the country. So you have a few operatives finding what holes they can and slowly relay them back. Then you just sit and wait for the day when you need a real threat in your arsenal.
Imagine how nice it would be if you are some nefarious foreign power in tense negotiations with the US and you can walk in, and them a floppy disk and tell them to give in or else. I mean even if they find out what the vulnerability is, can they deploy a response to it fast enough that it matters? Nothing like the threat of having the electronic economy slagged to make you amicable to a bad deal.
I think that if Microsoft's the threat they seem to imply, the judge should order them to turn over the source code to the FBI to begin dissecting these problems. Do we really want to trust a private corporation with our national security? I don't think so...
The CCIE seems to be the one of the few certifications that, on it's own, will land you a job. Most certifications make you look a little better, but don't really mean jack against real world experience. The value of the cert is proportional to demand for the skills and the availability of those skills in the job market. For example, MCSE is in demand, but there are so many of them that it's not as valuable. CCIE's are in demand, but because it's hard to get the cert and expensive, it means the supply is still relatively low (at least last time I checked).
What I might suggest to you is simply get a list of a bunch of certifications and do searches on the various job sites to see how many hits you get, etc. That should give you a rough approximation of where the demand is. Also, maybe find a good technical recruiter and see what they recommend as the hot demand right now.
One bit of advice for you though is that I would put some careful thought into which direction you choose, be it programmer, admin, etc. A few years down the line you can change jobs, but if you do so you'll be very little better off than you are now due to the lack of relevant work experience in the new area. Tech jobs seem to seek people with very specific skill sets, and care less about general experience.
A friend of mine got into sysadmining but would much prefer being a developer now. Of course now if he was to try to go back and be a developer he'd have to take a substantial cut in pay. So if you might change your mind later, just be aware of this little trap and plan for it (save up some money, maybe do some side work in some open source projects, etc, just to keep your skills honed).
They say that the disc is super sized. Any idea on how big that is? If it doesn't fit conveniently in the form fact of a PC, seems like it's not that great.
Man, imagine the billable hours of digging through your unorganized crap. Whether you win or not the auditors will make you their new best friend!
See here's what happens. The BSA says play nice with them and they'll be lenient with you. Nice means either paying for new software or paying for them to audit you and then pay for the license you were supposed to have. Keep in mind, that having a copy of office and a receipt for it is not legally licensed unless you've got the little certificate of authenticity. So if you weren't keep pristine records they'll possibly have you paying twice for your software.
Now, that's the "NICE" approach. The less than nice approach is that they file suit against you in court. During discovery they get to audit you and can find that lone piece of software that was infringing. Now you have to pay for that license, penalties, court costs, audit costs, damages. Now if it turns out that you are the one organization on earth that has all of your software licensed legitmately, then you can probably recover the costs for your legal defense, but even then you just wasted a lot of time and resources.
As an experiment, when I was moving my desktop at work to run on Linux (YAY!), I decided to try to do as much through the GUI as possible. I wanted to see how far things had come and answer your question which I was wondering about too. So, I installed redhat 7.2 loaded up KDE and got to work.
The simple answer is yes, you can do nearly everything through the GUI. I found that, I only had to move away from the GUI when I was doing non-standard things. For example I wanted to download a cutting edge version of a piece of software that had to be compiled. So, yeah I had to bring up a command-line to manage that. Overall though I think that anything I'd normally be able to do under windows I could do under Linux with no need of a command line.
It does seem like it should be that simple but you neglect the existence of the BSA audit. If you go that route you can expect to hear from the BSA before too long offering an amnesty if you buy the latest versions of the software. If you don't, of course, they'll take you to court and they'll get you for that one or two pieces of software you didn't license. Every company has one or two pieces of software they didn't license. That's all they need to get you for the software costs and legal fees. Fun, non?
My suggestion is that if you choose not to go the Microsoft route make a point of either:
1) purging every vestige of microsoft's sofware from your office
2) making sure everything is in pristine order for when the BSA comes along
What you are saying is that the way to prevent the subversion of freedom and democracy is to subvert freedom and democracy? The nazis came to power because Germany was in terrible shape after World War I. They were impoverished and they were looking for any solution. They wanted somebody to blame, a new direction to go. It has little to do with the specific message of nazism, it has far more to do with the state of the society they lived in.
This scene has played out in history time and time again. Desperate people do stupid things, and they will back insane radicals because they've got little to lose. Do you really think that if nazism was allowed to show it's head in public they would actually gain significant power? My supicion is that if it came out into the open, the nazism would face a backlash from people who now don't worry about it because it's all underground.
Granted, I don't live in Germany. Perhaps I'm seriously underestimating the tendancies of the german citizenry. My sense is that without some reason to drive them to the false promises of nazism, they'll just push nazism to the margins where it belongs.
Web services require two things that the Internet is not notorious for:
1) Security
2) Reliability
While the Internet works most of the time, is "most of the time" acceptable for web services? Some routing screw up happens and suddenly your ability to charge your customers is hosed.
Thought police don't need to resort to such primitive tactics. The reason that police states have always broken down is because there are too many cracks. There are too many places to hide, to slowly spred sedition, to slowly build a resistance to the oppressors. It's a simple matter of resources; you cannot track all the people all the time. Or can you?
With the vast increases in computing power, suddenly the ability to manage the raw data created by people on a daily basis is within reach. Suddenly using all of the cameras spread through the cities to track people's movements is completey possible. Suddenly an agent can go through credit receipts of millions of people and use a profiling system to weed out the people that are potentially unsavory for the government.
No need to take them out in the night and torture them. That's clumsy and builds hatred by the masses. Label the person an extremist, a terrorist, a pedophile. Talk abut all the terrible things the person's done. Some of it may be true, some not, but with all that data floating around out there, you can probably find a few juicy tidbits to destroy political opponents.
A police state is now, more than ever, a viable possibility. With all of this information out there and, more importantly, the increasing ability to do something useful with that data, it becomes very easy to track the unsavories. It may even be made easier because the unsavories cover their tracks leaving obvious information voids in their wake.
Maybe this is a tad paranoid, but tell me that this isn't technically possible...
If we assume for the moment that they had thought of consulting an attorney when they first embarked on this project, would it have made a difference? I mean, seeing as the DMCA didn't actually exist in '98, how could they have made some plan to defend themselves against prosecution under it. As for the straight up copyright issues, it's total hogwash, but at least they could have gotten the lawyerly advice of, "well they haven't got jack on you, but can you afford to fight it?"
I was thinking about this earlier, and the really frustrating thing is how much of computer related tinkering seems to need to be run by a lawyer. I mean if you have a hobby like building kit cars, or constructing furniture, you have no need for attorneys. But if you want to get deeply involved in tinkering with software, etc, you suddenly need a law degree. Companies talk a lot about the damage that piracy has on the software economy, but I have to wonder how much more damage has been caused by the chilling effect on independent developers by this legal morass we call intellectual property.
I figured it out, just enjoying the opportunity to point out evidence that they are completely full of it. It's a shame that they have to be so stupid about it because I really like Java.
Sun is constantly talking about protecting the Java language for the sake of humanity. I find it rather amusing, by comparison, that C++ is so out there in the open that it took 5 years to actually get a complete implementation of it. Evidence that such tight controls aren't necessary to make a language stable and long lasting?
Intelligent comments? I thought this was slashdot :)
the link to fusionlighting.com works fine. Not a lot of details but it does describe the product, what it's good for and that it is supposed to be commercially available this year.
Say, what happens if an educational institution buys a machine from an OEM that pre-installs Windows on them? Aren't they, in effect, paying for that same copy twice?
If I was in charge of buying computers for a school I'd certainly want a price reduction because I'm not about to pay twice for that OS.
The fact of the matter is that in almost every case, taking an ethical stand is a costly thing. It can cost your job, your reputation, even your life. Now, it's not likely going to cost you your life if you take an ethical stand in your coding, but why should the computer world be any different than any other?
And my first nomination: Jon Katz!
:)
:)
Okay, I am SOOOO just kidding
A couple ideas for candidates I can think of off the top of my head:
-Stephen Hawking
-Bruce Sterling
-Woz
Sick idea: have one nominee every month for the year, then have the award be determined via a slashdot poll?
For the record, despite the substantial quality of the articles in playboy, it is none the less illegal to sell it to a minor. Now, I think this judge is being a little silly saying that video games are not expression, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the ordinance is a problem.
When forbidding access to things that are protected by the first amendment, like Playboy, there are certain requirements about it being the least burdensome approach to restriction, etc. If the court believes that there is a relevant social interest in preventing minor access to violent video games, then all this ruling determines is how they are allowed to go about preventing this access.
Personally I think that if this gets appealed it will get thrown back in the judge's face. He'll have to accept that it is a first amendment protected form of expression. Then he'll likely proceed to rule that the ban is okay anyhow, and then the court can review the issues of it being least restrictive, etc.
That is one valuable thing is that if they can combine forces with Compaq, they can put themselves in a better position in the commodotized market of PC's. The problem with a commoditized market is that margins are razor thing so you have to be able to produce in vast quantities to make any money. There is still good money there, but only for the biggest players. Seperately they might not have the power to survive in the market, but together they stand a better chance.
Sure the growth rate in PC's is slowing, but it's still growing at least and there will always be demand for upgrading of old systems, etc. It stands to be a cash cow for many years to come but only if you are a big player or a niche player (game machines, etc).
Also, in this deal, think about hand helds which is definitely a fast growing market. The two leading manufacturers (I think they are leading, but correct me if I'm wrong) of WinCE devices are becoming one. That's certainly putting them in a better position in that market.