Larger companies will have corporate agendas that clash with the interests of the population at large. For smaller companies and individuals to be granted patents is an excellent way around this.
Who is to say that small companies won't have clashing interests as well? It seems to me that the motive of both large and small is profit. Is there anything to be gained by weakening a Microsoft to promote a Red Hat? Eventually one of the Red Hats will become the Microsoft, since by your own statement larger companies will have corporate agendas.
Your goal is only effective so long as it is in a continuous cycle. The large must always be waning, the small must always be starting up and growing larger. My question is still the same.. does that serve society? This fluid process will force the movement of workers from company to company or from region to region. Their benefits, their salaries, their sense of security most likely will suffer. This seems like a large quality of life issue to me.
If you really want to "play safe", and protect jobs, why not just go for state employement? The state isn't too different from a large company, you know...
Indeed, I often start typing company when I mean to type country. My issue here, is that there is no single panacea to fight greed. Many/most big corporations are greedy, no doubt about it. Executive salaries are out of line compared to the people that get the work done. Shareholders' only motives are the dividends. It's greed.
Yet.. I don't see small business as being the answer either. Like I said, eventually, some of them become the larger menace. They also aren't innocent. It may suprise you that even in small business, greed exists. Not all workers may be paid fairly and the owner and his or her cronies may get most of the earnings.
I've worked in that environment before. The company ultimately fails, but the leaders along the way all left with millions. If anything, having all these smaller companies in motion may make it even more difficult to single out the people taking undue advantage of its workers or their place in the market.
State employment actually doesn't seem so bad. Of course then greed turns into corruption and the same patterns emerge. I doubt there's any palatable solution so long as we're a money based society.
What is more beneficial to society, as a whole? Is it better for John Doe to patent something and then license it for a small fortune, or is it better for a corporation employing tens of thousands of workers to patent that something and not have to pay licensing? John Doe probably employs few workers, if any. The money he makes through licensing mostly benefits himself. Now if the corporation is able to retain the money by having had an "edge" in the patent process, theoretically that money could benefit tens of thousands of employees, or an even greater number of stock holders through dividends.
While would be unfair, perhaps, to John Doe, isn't a bigger win for more people if corporations can leverage their size in the process?
IIS and the repeatedly exploited index server were distributed with Win2000. The RPC port exploit was also a Win2000 issue.
I think it's a shame that they're twilighting the support for the OS. I still use it and have no real reason to upgrade to XP. I tend to wonder if the only "big deal" with XP is that it included a software firewall.
That is interesting. I wonder if somehow this ruling could help aftermarket companies sell scan tools that can speak the individual lingo of each car manufacturer. There are maintenance tasks which cannot be performed properly without that manufacturer's diagnostic computer which no individual car owner could ever hope to have.
Some companies sell tools that can read a trivial subset of the vehicle's sensors, but I'm not aware of any that actually instruct components of the vehicle to do things (such as control the throttle during diagnostics, instruct the transmission to cycle for changing the fluid, etc..).
I believe this is one of the script bots that caused/. to have us all "enter the code shown on the image below" before we could post replies. Some parents'-basement geek probably lost his karma bonus so he's "getting even" with the site.
Re:LCDs are still inferior to CRTs
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
There's far more than a simple "cool" factor. I bought my first LCD display to deal with CRT migraines I used to get. I don't have that problem with LCD's, though there is an "adjustment period" to get used to the crisp pixels. Not to mention the savings in desk space, weight when moving the darn thing, electricity, easy height adjustments and such. It's also nice that you don't have to worry about "trapezoid" or any of those other funky analog anomolies.
Higher refresh rates with CRT's? If you're running an LCD on DVI, like you should, there isn't such a thing as a refresh rate. So, uhm.. how could it be better on CRT?;)
It is already happening in small form. Back when the human genome project was still news there were pharma companies patening specific genetic sequences (sorry, I don't know the specific bio term). They had little to no knowledge of what the sequences were responsible for, but they were patenting them on the hopes that it was something big. They were playing a patent lottery and it was causing a flood of work for the patent office.
Most streets aren't toll roads, and street lights don't have a fee per block. These services are generally accepted to provide public benefit above and beyond the revenue they would bring if they relied on fee-for-service funding.
Yes, but roads are maintained, at least partly, through money collected by motor vehicle registrations. To carry the analogy we should institute a computer owner's tax to fund our "free" wireless.
Frankly, I think tax money would be better spent on affordable housing, crime prevention, parks and other ways of boosting the lure of certain areas. With housing so expensive in urban areas I can't believe the cost of Internet is a burden to anyone. It's a tiny sliver of the cost of living within "civilization".
Thank God if you must, but I'd thank the Texas senate first.;)
Ahh, yes.. good point. Cards can be forged but that would probably take too much effort. Online purchases could work.. but then there's the delivery problem.
I just can't believe that most of them are using merchant accounts. I'd love to know how they're actually getting them money.
Yes, stolen is a response although more often I think it comes back as a "must call for authorization" type of code.
Your scheme could work with the cards marked as such. However, I think if the cards were used at legitamite merchants by the spam harvesters that the credit card companies would have way too many false positives to filter through for the remote chance of finding a merchant account belonging to a spammer.
It could still work though, if you compared a history of uncontested purchases on the merchant account as compared to the number of flagged cards being charged.
I think the big question would be.. how do the spammers actually get money off the card numbers they receive?
The article states that she requested that the information be removed on several occasions. They didn't comply with her requests. That could make them jointly liable to the original act.
Should yahoo have to take the profiles down? The women does not legally own all nude pictures of herself. Her phone numbers do not legally receive any special priveledge either, or phone books would be outlawed.
I can't see how yahoo has done anything illegal, unless her state has specific privacy laws that apply.
I can think of one way it wouldn't work. Say the site collects a credit card number. Instead of pulling the funds out via their own merchant account they instead buy some goods at Walmart. The goods are then sold on eBay or similar. Your scheme would revoke Walmart's merchant account. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, as Walmart would've failed to verify the card holder was authentic, it's perhaps not a rational solution.
Yes, the tirade over BIOS is interesting. I can't say I recall any issue with a BIOS since the whole VIA/SB Live thing. Sure, there are updates once in a while, but they usually fix specific problems. It sure beats replacing the whole computer when there's a problem, doesn't it?
He also rants about the longevity of hard drives. I wasn't aware that Macs didn't use hard drives. Yet he says you can choose a drive that is reliable or you can choose one that isn't. So.. I guess he's angry that he has choices, and that leads him to a Mac.
Am I the only person on earth who still just wants a plain old keyboard?
No, there's at least two of us. Last time I had to replace a keyboard I ended up buying several "no frills" Natural Keyboards just in case they stop selling them in the near future. Yea.. it's slightly ergo so perhaps it's not plain, but at least it's not adorned with extra keys.
The same thing is going on with mice. Buttons on the side, buttons all over the top, scroll this way, that way.. all I really need is to be able to point at something and click. These mice with buttons all over them feel so flimsy. Not to mention the scarey scroll wheel that in Firefox on Linux sends me to strange random web pages on occasion.
I'm not. The font size is too small and if you have FF increase it their insipid formatting cuts off the top and bottom of the article.
The concept might have possibilities if done properly. On a wide screen it could expand horizontally without giving the reader lines of text the width of the screen. This makes it much easier to find your place on the next line.
I also have an 800x600 projector that I use as my "main tv". It's not a bad solution but it does have its drawbacks. The larger an image you project the more it gets washed out by light. For movies, sitting in the dark is fine but it's a little odd when simply watching the news. Ads using white backgrounds can be a bit painful, like staring into a car's headlights.
The rescaling is a bit odd too. On movie credits, particularly, you can see some irregularities where the projector fudged the NTSC resolution to its native resolution. It's this same issue that makes me hesitant to go HDTV with it. Even if I bought a 1024x768 res projector, it would still require scaling.
It's just like driving a car. You go over the speed limit and get caught, you pay the ticket. If people would bother to read and obey the rules they won't need a new account. If they do.. then the second time they might be more inclined to read the rules first.
Those rules are right out in the open for people to read before joining. I believe the leper colony is public too, so people thinking about joining can see why bannings happen. Lowtax doesn't hide this supposed "cash cow". Heck, often times people rejoice those who got banned, that tells me its supported by the community.
He also didn't make existing members pay. My own account was originally a free account before it went pay many years ago. I could still be posting there today, never having paid a dime. I enjoy the forums, so I have donated a bit from time to time.
If he's making money at it, good for him. I find his forums entertaining.. and that's the point, isn't it?
I think the number was more like half that, but even so.. that was before the tumble. Money was like toliet paper for the tech industry.. it is certainly not like that anymore. Except maybe for Google.
I don't think they even offer their employees options anymore. Let's focus on Microsoft now, not Microsoft then. Unless there's another tech boom, which is highly unlikely, employees shouldn't be holding their breath for their chance to strike it rich at M$.
There's more to it than just forgery. It's been years so I may not remember this right, but here goes:
I had written an server service that sent out ICMP packets using TCP_RAW. What the service did was a custom tracert. I was looking for certain IP address patterns or certain parts of names corresponding to those addresses in the replies. This allowed me to ban or red flag ecommerce transactions from suspect networks or semi-geographical regions.
Perhaps my use of TCP_RAW was inappropriate but it enabled me to write the service very quickly and knock off 90% of the fraud we were experiencing.
If they left raw sockets alone on the server OS then I guess it doesn't matter to me.
DirecTV used to do the same thing. My first DSL line was through DirecTV-Internet. They were the only ISP I could find that was willing to force my local telco to get things setup properly. Sadly, they shut down the whole DSL venture a couple/few years ago. Best darn ISP I ever had.
What is it with these customer-oriented companies that forget where their money is coming from?
Who says they have?
Someone in an earlier/. article on the MPEG4 transition posted a link to an article stated what seemed to me to be a fair discount program for current owners.
I was on DirecTV's site over the weekend and didn't even see a mention of the new service. All I've seen is a vague commercial on some of the channels they carry. That would tell me they're still hashing it all out, it's absurd to assume they're going to screw current subscribers until they say as much.
The funny is that they're still selling the MPEG2 $1000 boxes (package deal with the dish I think). I want to go HD but I'm holding off until they're ready with this new system.
Yeah, who wants to do business, say, with tens of millions of people.
They're a risky isp to deal with, or maybe it just seems that way because of their size. I used to admin a site that sold long distance calling minutes. We had a disproportionate amount of fraud coming from their domain. I believe it has to do with their "free cd" blitzing and their size giving the ability to eat small losses.
You get fraudsters with stolen credit cards, an isp that enables you to use them and does not respond to merchant requests and bad things result. I reported many cases of aol accounts being drawn on stolen card numbers and never once would they respond. We lost tens of thousands of dollars to these fraudsters, no response. Now yes, they didn't have to help us. If they cared about identity theft and credit card fraud they would have. In the end we blocked any users that came from aol and displayed a "your isp is a haven for crime" type of message.
I imagine spam fell along these lines before spam filtering became as advanced as it is now. I just find it curious that they do so much to protect their customers but don't they protect the integrity of their customer base. At some point it may bite them, as with this story.
I don't think that's the same 64-bit XP that we're talking about here.
"Windows XP 64-Bit Edition supports the latest class of Intel Itanium processors designed for users who need to create and manipulate large amounts of complex data."
I believe they dumped Itanium processors a while ago. I think that's some bastard 64-bit XP you've linked us to.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is to say that small companies won't have clashing interests as well? It seems to me that the motive of both large and small is profit. Is there anything to be gained by weakening a Microsoft to promote a Red Hat? Eventually one of the Red Hats will become the Microsoft, since by your own statement larger companies will have corporate agendas.
Your goal is only effective so long as it is in a continuous cycle. The large must always be waning, the small must always be starting up and growing larger. My question is still the same.. does that serve society? This fluid process will force the movement of workers from company to company or from region to region. Their benefits, their salaries, their sense of security most likely will suffer. This seems like a large quality of life issue to me.
If you really want to "play safe", and protect jobs, why not just go for state employement? The state isn't too different from a large company, you know...
Indeed, I often start typing company when I mean to type country. My issue here, is that there is no single panacea to fight greed. Many/most big corporations are greedy, no doubt about it. Executive salaries are out of line compared to the people that get the work done. Shareholders' only motives are the dividends. It's greed.
Yet.. I don't see small business as being the answer either. Like I said, eventually, some of them become the larger menace. They also aren't innocent. It may suprise you that even in small business, greed exists. Not all workers may be paid fairly and the owner and his or her cronies may get most of the earnings.
I've worked in that environment before. The company ultimately fails, but the leaders along the way all left with millions. If anything, having all these smaller companies in motion may make it even more difficult to single out the people taking undue advantage of its workers or their place in the market.
State employment actually doesn't seem so bad. Of course then greed turns into corruption and the same patterns emerge. I doubt there's any palatable solution so long as we're a money based society.
What is more beneficial to society, as a whole? Is it better for John Doe to patent something and then license it for a small fortune, or is it better for a corporation employing tens of thousands of workers to patent that something and not have to pay licensing? John Doe probably employs few workers, if any. The money he makes through licensing mostly benefits himself. Now if the corporation is able to retain the money by having had an "edge" in the patent process, theoretically that money could benefit tens of thousands of employees, or an even greater number of stock holders through dividends.
While would be unfair, perhaps, to John Doe, isn't a bigger win for more people if corporations can leverage their size in the process?
IIS and the repeatedly exploited index server were distributed with Win2000. The RPC port exploit was also a Win2000 issue.
I think it's a shame that they're twilighting the support for the OS. I still use it and have no real reason to upgrade to XP. I tend to wonder if the only "big deal" with XP is that it included a software firewall.
That is interesting. I wonder if somehow this ruling could help aftermarket companies sell scan tools that can speak the individual lingo of each car manufacturer. There are maintenance tasks which cannot be performed properly without that manufacturer's diagnostic computer which no individual car owner could ever hope to have.
Some companies sell tools that can read a trivial subset of the vehicle's sensors, but I'm not aware of any that actually instruct components of the vehicle to do things (such as control the throttle during diagnostics, instruct the transmission to cycle for changing the fluid, etc..).
I believe this is one of the script bots that caused /. to have us all "enter the code shown on the image below" before we could post replies. Some parents'-basement geek probably lost his karma bonus so he's "getting even" with the site.
There's far more than a simple "cool" factor. I bought my first LCD display to deal with CRT migraines I used to get. I don't have that problem with LCD's, though there is an "adjustment period" to get used to the crisp pixels. Not to mention the savings in desk space, weight when moving the darn thing, electricity, easy height adjustments and such. It's also nice that you don't have to worry about "trapezoid" or any of those other funky analog anomolies.
;)
Higher refresh rates with CRT's? If you're running an LCD on DVI, like you should, there isn't such a thing as a refresh rate. So, uhm.. how could it be better on CRT?
It is already happening in small form. Back when the human genome project was still news there were pharma companies patening specific genetic sequences (sorry, I don't know the specific bio term). They had little to no knowledge of what the sequences were responsible for, but they were patenting them on the hopes that it was something big. They were playing a patent lottery and it was causing a flood of work for the patent office.
Yes, but roads are maintained, at least partly, through money collected by motor vehicle registrations. To carry the analogy we should institute a computer owner's tax to fund our "free" wireless.
Frankly, I think tax money would be better spent on affordable housing, crime prevention, parks and other ways of boosting the lure of certain areas. With housing so expensive in urban areas I can't believe the cost of Internet is a burden to anyone. It's a tiny sliver of the cost of living within "civilization".
Thank God if you must, but I'd thank the Texas senate first. ;)
Ahh, yes.. good point. Cards can be forged but that would probably take too much effort. Online purchases could work.. but then there's the delivery problem.
I just can't believe that most of them are using merchant accounts. I'd love to know how they're actually getting them money.
What if he didn't steal the photos? What if he took them with permission while they were still dating?
Yes, stolen is a response although more often I think it comes back as a "must call for authorization" type of code.
Your scheme could work with the cards marked as such. However, I think if the cards were used at legitamite merchants by the spam harvesters that the credit card companies would have way too many false positives to filter through for the remote chance of finding a merchant account belonging to a spammer.
It could still work though, if you compared a history of uncontested purchases on the merchant account as compared to the number of flagged cards being charged.
I think the big question would be.. how do the spammers actually get money off the card numbers they receive?
Should yahoo have to take the profiles down? The women does not legally own all nude pictures of herself. Her phone numbers do not legally receive any special priveledge either, or phone books would be outlawed.
I can't see how yahoo has done anything illegal, unless her state has specific privacy laws that apply.
I can think of one way it wouldn't work. Say the site collects a credit card number. Instead of pulling the funds out via their own merchant account they instead buy some goods at Walmart. The goods are then sold on eBay or similar. Your scheme would revoke Walmart's merchant account. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, as Walmart would've failed to verify the card holder was authentic, it's perhaps not a rational solution.
Yes, the tirade over BIOS is interesting. I can't say I recall any issue with a BIOS since the whole VIA/SB Live thing. Sure, there are updates once in a while, but they usually fix specific problems. It sure beats replacing the whole computer when there's a problem, doesn't it?
He also rants about the longevity of hard drives. I wasn't aware that Macs didn't use hard drives. Yet he says you can choose a drive that is reliable or you can choose one that isn't. So.. I guess he's angry that he has choices, and that leads him to a Mac.
No, there's at least two of us. Last time I had to replace a keyboard I ended up buying several "no frills" Natural Keyboards just in case they stop selling them in the near future. Yea.. it's slightly ergo so perhaps it's not plain, but at least it's not adorned with extra keys.
The same thing is going on with mice. Buttons on the side, buttons all over the top, scroll this way, that way.. all I really need is to be able to point at something and click. These mice with buttons all over them feel so flimsy. Not to mention the scarey scroll wheel that in Firefox on Linux sends me to strange random web pages on occasion.
I'm not. The font size is too small and if you have FF increase it their insipid formatting cuts off the top and bottom of the article.
The concept might have possibilities if done properly. On a wide screen it could expand horizontally without giving the reader lines of text the width of the screen. This makes it much easier to find your place on the next line.
I also have an 800x600 projector that I use as my "main tv". It's not a bad solution but it does have its drawbacks. The larger an image you project the more it gets washed out by light. For movies, sitting in the dark is fine but it's a little odd when simply watching the news. Ads using white backgrounds can be a bit painful, like staring into a car's headlights.
The rescaling is a bit odd too. On movie credits, particularly, you can see some irregularities where the projector fudged the NTSC resolution to its native resolution. It's this same issue that makes me hesitant to go HDTV with it. Even if I bought a 1024x768 res projector, it would still require scaling.
It's just like driving a car. You go over the speed limit and get caught, you pay the ticket. If people would bother to read and obey the rules they won't need a new account. If they do.. then the second time they might be more inclined to read the rules first.
Those rules are right out in the open for people to read before joining. I believe the leper colony is public too, so people thinking about joining can see why bannings happen. Lowtax doesn't hide this supposed "cash cow". Heck, often times people rejoice those who got banned, that tells me its supported by the community.
He also didn't make existing members pay. My own account was originally a free account before it went pay many years ago. I could still be posting there today, never having paid a dime. I enjoy the forums, so I have donated a bit from time to time.
If he's making money at it, good for him. I find his forums entertaining.. and that's the point, isn't it?
I think the number was more like half that, but even so.. that was before the tumble. Money was like toliet paper for the tech industry.. it is certainly not like that anymore. Except maybe for Google.
I don't think they even offer their employees options anymore. Let's focus on Microsoft now, not Microsoft then. Unless there's another tech boom, which is highly unlikely, employees shouldn't be holding their breath for their chance to strike it rich at M$.
There's more to it than just forgery. It's been years so I may not remember this right, but here goes:
I had written an server service that sent out ICMP packets using TCP_RAW. What the service did was a custom tracert. I was looking for certain IP address patterns or certain parts of names corresponding to those addresses in the replies. This allowed me to ban or red flag ecommerce transactions from suspect networks or semi-geographical regions.
Perhaps my use of TCP_RAW was inappropriate but it enabled me to write the service very quickly and knock off 90% of the fraud we were experiencing.
If they left raw sockets alone on the server OS then I guess it doesn't matter to me.
Yea, his company hires contractors which they refuse to offer benefits from. Remember the big lawsuit they filed a while back?
I don't recall how it went, but MS is no friend of their employees. Not most of them anyway.
DirecTV used to do the same thing. My first DSL line was through DirecTV-Internet. They were the only ISP I could find that was willing to force my local telco to get things setup properly. Sadly, they shut down the whole DSL venture a couple/few years ago. Best darn ISP I ever had.
Who says they have?
Someone in an earlier
I was on DirecTV's site over the weekend and didn't even see a mention of the new service. All I've seen is a vague commercial on some of the channels they carry. That would tell me they're still hashing it all out, it's absurd to assume they're going to screw current subscribers until they say as much.
The funny is that they're still selling the MPEG2 $1000 boxes (package deal with the dish I think). I want to go HD but I'm holding off until they're ready with this new system.
They're a risky isp to deal with, or maybe it just seems that way because of their size. I used to admin a site that sold long distance calling minutes. We had a disproportionate amount of fraud coming from their domain. I believe it has to do with their "free cd" blitzing and their size giving the ability to eat small losses.
You get fraudsters with stolen credit cards, an isp that enables you to use them and does not respond to merchant requests and bad things result. I reported many cases of aol accounts being drawn on stolen card numbers and never once would they respond. We lost tens of thousands of dollars to these fraudsters, no response. Now yes, they didn't have to help us. If they cared about identity theft and credit card fraud they would have. In the end we blocked any users that came from aol and displayed a "your isp is a haven for crime" type of message.
I imagine spam fell along these lines before spam filtering became as advanced as it is now. I just find it curious that they do so much to protect their customers but don't they protect the integrity of their customer base. At some point it may bite them, as with this story.
I don't think that's the same 64-bit XP that we're talking about here.
"Windows XP 64-Bit Edition supports the latest class of Intel Itanium processors designed for users who need to create and manipulate large amounts of complex data."
I believe they dumped Itanium processors a while ago. I think that's some bastard 64-bit XP you've linked us to.