Microsoft's R&D spending might make a private equity investor weep, but private equity investors are around to buy distressed or underperforming companies, make them lucrative, and sell them. They don't care about long-term R&D or having a product pipeline further out than when they cash in their investment by selling the company. Of course you could starve and loot Microsoft and make a lot of money, but only if your plan is to dispose of the carcase before it begins to rot.
To rehash the old joke about banks and lending [1]: If your application is a tiny niche application and the OS mutates, you have a problem. If your application is used by many of the OS users and the OS mutates, they (the OS vendor) has a problem.
M$ have a problem with Firefox and Vista.
[1] If you owe the bank $10000 and can't pay it back, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $10000000 and can't pay it back, they have a problem.
Shrinking the risk pool until only the lowest-risk drivers are left is good for you if you are in the risk pool, and not so good when you fall outside it. I'm afraid I doubt you are a much better driver than average, because almost noone is, so you will be outside that risk pool. I hope you like your higher premiums.
On the other side, obviously your "network security software" was always correctly written and configured, by people who understand the subtleties of how all the common network protocols work?
That's basically wrong. It's easy to scale web servers by adding more of them, with a load-balancer (such as a Cisco CSS, and/or a software layer like mod_jk) to distribute requests appropriate. It's hard to scale a database, especially one that gets updated, because distributed writable databases are hard to do, and even distributed read-only replicas get tricky, especially if they must be up to date. In any web services application you really want to avoid hitting the database if you can, by using simple data caching, client-side intelligence like AJAX, server-side session caching, etc.
"The only brand that tries to be everything to everyone". What about Richard Branson's Virgin Enterprises? Not as successful or cool as Google these days, but he certainly tries. He's also pretty successful on an absolute level.
The "soandso writes" is quite misleading; while I submitted this article I wrote almost none of the words I am credited with at the top of the piece; the entire paragraph was written by someone at Slashdot and any words in common with my submission appear conincidental. In particular, I didn't even submit the CNet story, I submitted the Groklaw story. Not that the Slashdot editor's words are much worse than mine were, but they're very different.
Hahaha. No, you won't see any cheaper cellphone plans. Cellcos, particularly in Europe and especially in the UK, Germany and some other countries, have paid huge 3G spectrum license fees that they have to get the consumer to pay. Governments were very pleased to get such a huge windfall - do you, the voting mobile phone user, think it was such a good idea now? Did you ever think anyone but you were going to pay for that license? There's also the rather huge cost of deploying the necessary infrastructure. Both of these are fixed costs. Since bandwidth available on 3G services is much higher, this leads to a cost plateau once they've managed to get you to pay out for some of the licence and kit, since the marginal extra cost of another megabyte transferred is very small. It's a high plateau because of the huge cost of the licenses and the equipment.
Your users ticked the box, right next to the clear warning of what it would do. Have you trained them not to do this? Are they being reckless anyway? Have you considered all the other ways they could get data out? Email, CD-R, USB key, taking their laptop home? Are you going to stop all of those? Did you install the Google Enterprise Desktop with the central control policies, forbidding installation of other copies of google desktop and forbidding copying of data offsite? Get some perspective on the REAL problems and stop going apeshit over Google.
Many concepts about designing databases that don't reveal all people's data to the database administrator are discussed in the book Translucent Databases
This is already true in the UK. Someone who downloads child pornography over the internet is considered to be "making pornography" under the same laws that the photographer taking the pictures would be charged under. This can lead to sentences for downloading or copying and distributing child pornography that approach those for making it in the first place, which is treating the two acts as equivalent, when they are not. More relevant to the slashdot crowd, if one copies child pornography for any reason whatsoever one can be considered to be "making pornography". If one administers computers used by others and discovers child pornography in one way or another, and copies it aside as evidence, one is at risk of being accused of "making pornography". Therefore the general advice is that if one finds a computer with child porn, one should step away from the computer and call the police, not attempt to do any of the usual sort of evidence preservation, further investigation, etc, that one might if it was another sort of computer intrusion.
At the age of 17 I spent a week in the Praxis offices on "Work Experience" (Americans may think of this as a very short internship), to find out what developing software would be like as a career. This was a major formative event of my life: I thought that developing software sounded good, I really liked using Real Computers (multiuser, multiprocessing systems with powerful operating software, like VMS and SunOS), and the people impressed me greatly. It definitely set me on the path to the career in systems development and administration that I have today. The person who made the biggest impression on me was the sysadmin. He got his own office-cube instead of having to share, he wore much more casual clothes and had a lot more hair and beard than most of the staff, he got to have big toys (several workstations, a LaserJet IIIsi big enough for an entire office that seemed to be his alone, etc) and he didn't seem to get much hassle from anyone else. This was obviously the job for me. The sysadmin was obviously rather a BOFH. When I was sat at the UNIX workstation for the first time, and had poked around with basic file-handling commands, I asked "What's the text editor on this system?". He answered "emacs - e m a c s - here's a manual" and picked about 300 sheets of paper off the Laserjet and handed it to me. I got to play with UNIX (SunOS), VMS, Oracle development environments. I still have the Emacs manual printout somewhere at home - it served me well when I went to University where printing anything out was charged by the sheet! I'm very glad they're still around.
The problem is assuming that all the infrastructure to run the IP network is going to stay up in a power outage, bad environmental (hurricane, flood) situation, or similar. That infrastructure is distributed all over the place, like the cable distribution boxes in streets, instead of in one well-built Central Office. Some of it is rated for 911-grade service (especially in places where the cable operator offers phone service), and some of it is not. Actual telcos have a lot of experience of building infrastructure to survive problems, and (simple wired) telephones are centrally-powered from the CO (or the nearest branch exchange) which makes it a lot easier to make them reliable. Some other IP operators aren't so experienced, or don't care so much.
Yes, it's excellent. The fundamental idea is not to reveal information even to a database administrator, whether the DBA-empowered entity is legit or not.
Nominet is hardly a policing organisation. They are operate the registry for uk. and so I expect they got a lot of complaints about him and decided to warn other people. Also his main crime was not spamming, but simple fraud: offering to sell that which he was not entitled to sell. This is poor sub-editing even by Slashdot, and BBC technology, standards.
I had to show ID to get into the Department of the Interior to visit their museum (which is in the building) last February.
Re:It's NOT a new idea - saw it in the 1980s
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 1
I think this would be one of those "protection" schemes which revolved (heh, heh) around a hole punched in the data area of the floppy. This gives a read error at a predictable location, one which cannot be duplicated by writing with a floppy drive.
The hole in the disc tended to damage floppy drives, as well as being reasonably easy to reproduce.
You forget farming - people suffer serious injuries regularly on farms (often through stupidity). Having fingers cut off on farms is depressingly common, for example. Also, any food processing on a large scale is also rather dangerous - the mincer that makes burgers on an industrial scale won't notice if your hand goes in it. I used to work in the large-scale food industry and the personnell manager of the company said to me, as I was building a database to track and report injuries, "The problem with this business is that you've got a lot of stupid people and a lot of dangerous machinery". As far as I could tell, the management were talking all reasonable precautions against injury, too.
My domestic freezer will freeze (40% ABV) vodka if you set the "superfreeze" (run compressor continuously) switch and leave the vodka in the freezer for about 3 days. It gets down to well below -30C. I don't know exactly how cold, because my freezer thermometer goes nonlinear below about -30C. Clearly you could freeze the vodka a lot faster with a serious freezer like yours, or one of the ones used to hold biological samples at -70C.
I have a 14" LCD panel that's very light and does not have a bulky surround which I use as a portable display for headless machines. It's made by "MAG Innovision", part number LT-456S, such as shown here by Froogle. I picked mine up at Best Buy but they no longer sell it last I looked.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's R&D spending might make a private equity investor weep, but private equity investors are around to buy distressed or underperforming companies, make them lucrative, and sell them. They don't care about long-term R&D or having a product pipeline further out than when they cash in their investment by selling the company.
Of course you could starve and loot Microsoft and make a lot of money, but only if your plan is to dispose of the carcase before it begins to rot.
To rehash the old joke about banks and lending [1]:
If your application is a tiny niche application and the OS mutates, you have a problem.
If your application is used by many of the OS users and the OS mutates, they (the OS vendor) has a problem.
M$ have a problem with Firefox and Vista.
[1] If you owe the bank $10000 and can't pay it back, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $10000000 and can't pay it back, they have a problem.
Shrinking the risk pool until only the lowest-risk drivers are left is good for you if you are in the risk pool, and not so good when you fall outside it. I'm afraid I doubt you are a much better driver than average, because almost noone is, so you will be outside that risk pool. I hope you like your higher premiums.
Of course, children are attacking adults they find on MySpace too.
But it's all about the chiiiiiildren.
On the other side, obviously your "network security software" was always correctly written and configured, by people who understand the subtleties of how all the common network protocols work?
That's basically wrong.
It's easy to scale web servers by adding more of them, with a load-balancer (such as a Cisco CSS, and/or a software layer like mod_jk) to distribute requests appropriate.
It's hard to scale a database, especially one that gets updated, because distributed writable databases are hard to do, and even distributed read-only replicas get tricky, especially if they must be up to date.
In any web services application you really want to avoid hitting the database if you can, by using simple data caching, client-side intelligence like AJAX, server-side session caching, etc.
"The only brand that tries to be everything to everyone". What about Richard Branson's Virgin Enterprises? Not as successful or cool as Google these days, but he certainly tries. He's also pretty successful on an absolute level.
The "soandso writes" is quite misleading; while I submitted this article I wrote almost none of the words I am credited with at the top of the piece; the entire paragraph was written by someone at Slashdot and any words in common with my submission appear conincidental. In particular, I didn't even submit the CNet story, I submitted the Groklaw story. Not that the Slashdot editor's words are much worse than mine were, but they're very different.
Hahaha. No, you won't see any cheaper cellphone plans.
Cellcos, particularly in Europe and especially in the UK, Germany and some other countries, have paid huge 3G spectrum license fees that they have to get the consumer to pay. Governments were very pleased to get such a huge windfall - do you, the voting mobile phone user, think it was such a good idea now? Did you ever think anyone but you were going to pay for that license?
There's also the rather huge cost of deploying the necessary infrastructure.
Both of these are fixed costs. Since bandwidth available on 3G services is much higher, this leads to a cost plateau once they've managed to get you to pay out for some of the licence and kit, since the marginal extra cost of another megabyte transferred is very small. It's a high plateau because of the huge cost of the licenses and the equipment.
No.
The first duty of "corporate IT departments" is to provide the IT the company needs in the manner it needs it. IT is a service industry.
Your users ticked the box, right next to the clear warning of what it would do. Have you trained them not to do this? Are they being reckless anyway?
Have you considered all the other ways they could get data out? Email, CD-R, USB key, taking their laptop home? Are you going to stop all of those?
Did you install the Google Enterprise Desktop with the central control policies, forbidding installation of other copies of google desktop and forbidding copying of data offsite?
Get some perspective on the REAL problems and stop going apeshit over Google.
Many concepts about designing databases that don't reveal all people's data to the database administrator are discussed in the book Translucent Databases
Here is someone being charged with "making indecent pictures of a child".
This is already true in the UK. Someone who downloads child pornography over the internet is considered to be "making pornography" under the same laws that the photographer taking the pictures would be charged under.
This can lead to sentences for downloading or copying and distributing child pornography that approach those for making it in the first place, which is treating the two acts as equivalent, when they are not.
More relevant to the slashdot crowd, if one copies child pornography for any reason whatsoever one can be considered to be "making pornography". If one administers computers used by others and discovers child pornography in one way or another, and copies it aside as evidence, one is at risk of being accused of "making pornography". Therefore the general advice is that if one finds a computer with child porn, one should step away from the computer and call the police, not attempt to do any of the usual sort of evidence preservation, further investigation, etc, that one might if it was another sort of computer intrusion.
At the age of 17 I spent a week in the Praxis offices on "Work Experience" (Americans may think of this as a very short internship), to find out what developing software would be like as a career. This was a major formative event of my life: I thought that developing software sounded good, I really liked using Real Computers (multiuser, multiprocessing systems with powerful operating software, like VMS and SunOS), and the people impressed me greatly. It definitely set me on the path to the career in systems development and administration that I have today.
The person who made the biggest impression on me was the sysadmin. He got his own office-cube instead of having to share, he wore much more casual clothes and had a lot more hair and beard than most of the staff, he got to have big toys (several workstations, a LaserJet IIIsi big enough for an entire office that seemed to be his alone, etc) and he didn't seem to get much hassle from anyone else. This was obviously the job for me.
The sysadmin was obviously rather a BOFH. When I was sat at the UNIX workstation for the first time, and had poked around with basic file-handling commands, I asked "What's the text editor on this system?". He answered "emacs - e m a c s - here's a manual" and picked about 300 sheets of paper off the Laserjet and handed it to me.
I got to play with UNIX (SunOS), VMS, Oracle development environments. I still have the Emacs manual printout somewhere at home - it served me well when I went to University where printing anything out was charged by the sheet!
I'm very glad they're still around.
The problem is assuming that all the infrastructure to run the IP network is going to stay up in a power outage, bad environmental (hurricane, flood) situation, or similar. That infrastructure is distributed all over the place, like the cable distribution boxes in streets, instead of in one well-built Central Office. Some of it is rated for 911-grade service (especially in places where the cable operator offers phone service), and some of it is not.
Actual telcos have a lot of experience of building infrastructure to survive problems, and (simple wired) telephones are centrally-powered from the CO (or the nearest branch exchange) which makes it a lot easier to make them reliable. Some other IP operators aren't so experienced, or don't care so much.
Yes, it's excellent.
The fundamental idea is not to reveal information even to a database administrator, whether the DBA-empowered entity is legit or not.
Nominet is hardly a policing organisation. They are operate the registry for uk. and so I expect they got a lot of complaints about him and decided to warn other people.
Also his main crime was not spamming, but simple fraud: offering to sell that which he was not entitled to sell.
This is poor sub-editing even by Slashdot, and BBC technology, standards.
I had to show ID to get into the Department of the Interior to visit their museum (which is in the building) last February.
I think this would be one of those "protection" schemes which revolved (heh, heh) around a hole punched in the data area of the floppy. This gives a read error at a predictable location, one which cannot be duplicated by writing with a floppy drive.
The hole in the disc tended to damage floppy drives, as well as being reasonably easy to reproduce.
You forget farming - people suffer serious injuries regularly on farms (often through stupidity). Having fingers cut off on farms is depressingly common, for example.
Also, any food processing on a large scale is also rather dangerous - the mincer that makes burgers on an industrial scale won't notice if your hand goes in it.
I used to work in the large-scale food industry and the personnell manager of the company said to me, as I was building a database to track and report injuries, "The problem with this business is that you've got a lot of stupid people and a lot of dangerous machinery". As far as I could tell, the management were talking all reasonable precautions against injury, too.
Definitely worked to email people I know whose work email spam filter was over-enthuriastic about things like "scunthorpe".
My domestic freezer will freeze (40% ABV) vodka if you set the "superfreeze" (run compressor continuously) switch and leave the vodka in the freezer for about 3 days. It gets down to well below -30C. I don't know exactly how cold, because my freezer thermometer goes nonlinear below about -30C.
Clearly you could freeze the vodka a lot faster with a serious freezer like yours, or one of the ones used to hold biological samples at -70C.
I have a 14" LCD panel that's very light and does not have a bulky surround which I use as a portable display for headless machines. It's made by "MAG Innovision", part number LT-456S, such as shown here by Froogle. I picked mine up at Best Buy but they no longer sell it last I looked.
Not all cards have MR/MRS/etc on them. "DR" is ungendered.
Some of my cards start with "MR", some don't.