That's actually company policy where I work. When traveling to the US, we keep our normal phones at home and we get a sort of burner phone from our company to take on the trip. It's basically empty except for a few emergency phone contact numbers.
This is really well played by Mozilla. We are witnessing a prime example of crisis-communication. The basic rules are:
- Communicate early (even if you don't have all the facts yet)
- Communicate honestly (even if you're to blame)
- Promise follow-up (as needed) Performing their crisis-communication this well will probably improve public perception of Mozilla. It will certainly raise the bar for other companies.
Small correction: The Great Wall of China is visible from space (which is amazing enough in itself) but the Great Firewall of China is visible from routers on the other site of the earth! Imagine that!
Actually, the goal of the data protection law is that IT systems are not allowed to keep any 'personal' information longer then 6 months.
'Personal' information is any information that can be linked to a person. This can be an (IP-)address, phone number, birth date and other data that is generally seen as being personal, but also information like the URL's visited by a person, or the e-mails sent to a person. The 6 months start counting as soon as a system no longer absolutely needs the data for its day-to-day operation.
As an example, http-logs showing which ip-address visited what URL can maximum be retained for 6 months. If you send out snail-mails to a bunch of subscribers, then you are obligated to delete the address of your subscriber maximum 6 months after he unsubscribes (or after he dies). If you still need the personal data (e.g. you need people's addresses to be able to send them invoices as long as they still have a contract with your company) then you are of course allowed to store that data. It also means that any statistics that you need to make on customer related data, will have to be made before that data is deleted, and the statistics cannot contain any information which would allow them to be tied to a person.
Another part of the data protection law mandates that a person has to be informed of every storage of his personal data, and has to right to look into that data and update it if there's errors in it.
All in all, the law ensures that Europeans can be pretty certain that their (online) privacy isn't invaded (as long as they surf only European websites).
I am entering this comment while using Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 8.
I am not a native English speaker, but I am usually able to say just about anything I want. In this comments, I have not altered any of the mistakes (if any) that Dragon NaturallySpeaking made while I was dictating. As you can see, the error rate is probably a bit higher than 99 per cent correctness. Nevertheless, I used this extensively, because it increases the speed at which I can work.I often have to type reports, and it goes a lot faster while using this tool. The only problem is that these reports contain lots of enterprise specific (and IT specific) terms. Naturally, it takes a while before Dragon NaturallySpeaking knows all of these terms.
Musther wrote: This is it, people keep going on about ODF v OOXML, and although I don't care for MS and their attempts at keeping the support of governments and the like in these interesting times, OOXML "meets the European Union definitions of an Open Standard, meaning the specification is freely available and implementable."
In layman's terms, the specification (which should be complete and exact) contains phrases like "implement this like in Word95" (search for "autoSpaceLikeWord95" on page 1378 in part 4), without defining exactly what this means. As a result, only Microsoft is able to implement this specification. Hence the Microsoft-specification does not meet the open standards definition formulated by the European Union.
And as for your point about not killing... the RIAA don't need to kill, because the necessary fright is created by the law that they helped create: if you don't comply, men with guns will turn up at your doorstep. That's actually a lot more frightening than the mob, since the mob isn't protected by the law and you could seek protection. You can't seek protection against the RIAA and their minions.
Actually, you can get away from the RIAA. Two possibilities come to mind:
- 95% of the people in this world live in a place where the RIAA can't touch them
- In this one place where the RIAA does seem to have some power, you could try voting for politicians that will stand up against such practices.
>>Given that the record companies' expert opined that the defendant had downloaded over 200 sound recordings during 2005, those requested damages will probably be substantial. Statutory damages under the Copyright Act can go as high as $150,000 per work infringed, in the most egregious cases.
>200*$150,000 = $30,000,000. Of course, this is just a maximum, but it's still scary.
The minimum penalty is 750$ per song, making for a total of 150.000$ for the 200 songs. I'd say that you don't need to calculate the maximum to become scared.
I'm not sure exactly myself, but it's not so wildly out-of-the-box an idea that nobody can have thought of it before. I assume there's something wrong with the economics of doing it at the generating station.
Actually, at least one company does exactly this. Electrabel (Belgium's main power supplier) primarily creates electricity by means of nuclear power. Since fluctuation of the demand for electricity is higher than the flexibility to produce this type of energy, there is typically an excess of electric energy during the night. This excess energy is among other things used to light our highways cheaply: I've once heard that Belgium is the only country that you can see from space at night.
It is also used every night to pump water from some river into an (artificial) lake on top of a mountain. During the day, energy is reclaimed from that water by a small hydroelectric plant (so the water returns to the river). Googling it actually turns up that it generates 1164 MegaWatts.. Impressive.
I wouldn't suggest this for use at home though. Your roof probably wouldn't cope with a lake on top of it.
The Entertainment Software Association today hailed efforts on the part of 'U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,....... Close to 100 searches were conducted globally within a 24-hour period.
Speedy Gonzales ?
How come they only shut down 8 servers if they're conducting searches in 11 countries?
Cringely writes: Apple, for example, will let you mount up to a 100 megabyte iDrive as part of its.mac Internet service, but that costs $99 per year. Eight dollars per month for 100 megabytes of storage is too darned much.
The company I work for (banking) sells storage for 120 euro per gigabyte per year to our internal clients. That's storage on RAID-disks (think StorageTek and the like), including backup (on tape) and all necessary services (people doing maintenance, restoring backups, etc). 120 euro / gigabyte / year comes to 1,22 dollar / month / 100 megabytes (compare to 8 $ per month with Apple). Considering our 1,22 $ plus some network costs, plus maintaining a billing system for a couple of million clients, and a bit of profit margin, maybe 8 $ per month is not a rip-off.
The numbers don't seem to add up. The article states:
the past two years, the company has made about 90 percent of its revenue from patent negotiations, and its software has yet to get much of a foothold.
In its fiscal 2003, for instance, software sales were just 8 percent of the company's $53.9 million in sales. These quotes say that $53.9 million in sales (which is consistent with what I find on Yahoo Financialcomes for 90% from patent negatiations, and 8% from software sales. Nowhere on the net can I find anything about where that other 2% comes from (they don't seem to do any consulting for instance).
Then there's these quotes:
Already, Forgent has reaped nearly $50 million by claiming that one of its patents covers JPEG, the popular standard for digital images.
Then there's Jenkens & Gilchrist, the Dallas-based law firm handling enforcement of the JPEG patent. Under a fee agreement, Jenkens receives 50 percent of the revenue from licensing the patent, plus some expenses. The law firm's take so far is an estimated $50 million.
The first one says Forgent made $50 million on jpeg patents so far. The last claims the lawyers get half, and that is also $50 million.
Not sure what I should think of a company that doesn't succeed in having it's numbers correctly communicated. I do know however that $50 million is peanuts on a global scale. Looking at Forgent' share price, the stock markets seem to agree with me.
For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles.
No article in there that says size doesn't matter?
They have lots of How-To's (which I use al the time) but I couldn't find a 'How to First Post succesfully'-article yet (apparantly).
Funny as above poster may be, he does have a point.
The company I work for (large European bank) is required by law to keep most records for 10 years, and some (thank god not all) for 30 years. Being law abiding citizens, we do exactly what the law prescribes: we have magnetic tapes written over 25 years ago containing whatever information that needed to be stored. These tapes are being taken care of with extreme caution: no light, constant humidity, fire proof environment,.... The works.
Only one slight problem: we do not have any tape readers that are able to actually read these tapes. I heard that supposedly these readers could be rented (IBM would have some of these left) but even if that's true, there's nobody that knows the record layout in which these tapes have been written, let alone that any software that is needed to interpret whatever data is on these tapes still exists.
Well, at least the media still exist, so we're still being legal.
I would welcome fiber to my home. It's not like it's technologically or economically impossible.
NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.
The best part is it's cheap,
They usually cost a little more than $40 a month.
Of course, it's still twice the price of 12Mbs ADSL lines in Japan like Yahoo BB who offers 12Mbs speed for $21/month. Not that most people would know what to do with 100Mbs anyways (except for some stuff that RIAA doesn't really approve of).
Lately (the last two weeks) I've been noticing that my computer (Win XP) has a tendency to lose it's ability to resolve DNS-adresses if I've quit browsing for more than 15 minutes.
I was thinking that XP had developed an allergic reaction towards my broadband modem. However, now that I read this story, I'm starting to wonder if Verisign's actions have anything to do with this. Anybody got a clue?
I really don't see any difficulties in conducting manned drop-tests from 10.000 feet. I mean, anyone can drop from 10.000 feet. There's no problem there.
Unless of course if you're supposed to live through it. That may be somewhat more difficult.
Getting more people to sign consent-forms, and even making sure that families aren't able to stop organ donation when consent has been given by the donor, won't solve the problem.
Truth of the matter is that there are simply not enough donors / not the right donors to provide all necessary organs. Where I live (Belgium) organ donation works as an opt-out system. There's a law that says that everybody is an organ donor (when they die) unless they have a certain form in their wallet stating the opposite. Hardly anybody opts out yet still there are not enough organs. Reason for this is that people that die tend to have been old and sick, or (if it's someone young) have most likely been in a traffic accident. None of these are the right circumstances for organ donation. Add to this the fact that you need matching blood types, have very little time for the organ harvasting etc... and it gets pretty obvious that taking organs from humans as spare bodyparts will only help a small percentage of cases.
I'd place my money on using organs specifically grown for harvasting: e.g. pigs are used to grow skin that helps burn victims.
You don't need geeks to provide tech support. Actually geeks are just about the worst type of people to provide this service.
What you need are people that have people-skills: they must be capable to talk to people, calm them down and get them to understand stuff. That's not going to work if your attitude is going to be along the lines of "you stupid... why don't you just do x and leave me the alone". It's sufficient if you can understand what a customer is trying to ask and then read the correct answer from your screen.
Don't misunderstand me and read that I'm saying that no geeks are capable of doing this. It's just that your average geek didn't become a geek by being big on people skills.
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually company policy where I work. When traveling to the US, we keep our normal phones at home and we get a sort of burner phone from our company to take on the trip. It's basically empty except for a few emergency phone contact numbers.
This is really well played by Mozilla. We are witnessing a prime example of crisis-communication. The basic rules are:
- Communicate early (even if you don't have all the facts yet)
- Communicate honestly (even if you're to blame)
- Promise follow-up (as needed)
Performing their crisis-communication this well will probably improve public perception of Mozilla. It will certainly raise the bar for other companies.
I actually found it very hard, until I found this: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/magazine/20100616-watson-trivia-game/data.xml
Small correction: The Great Wall of China is visible from space (which is amazing enough in itself) but the Great Firewall of China is visible from routers on the other site of the earth! Imagine that!
There is a working version of Linky that is FF3-compatible which you can download from the website of the developer (try the first link).
'Personal' information is any information that can be linked to a person. This can be an (IP-)address, phone number, birth date and other data that is generally seen as being personal, but also information like the URL's visited by a person, or the e-mails sent to a person. The 6 months start counting as soon as a system no longer absolutely needs the data for its day-to-day operation.
As an example, http-logs showing which ip-address visited what URL can maximum be retained for 6 months. If you send out snail-mails to a bunch of subscribers, then you are obligated to delete the address of your subscriber maximum 6 months after he unsubscribes (or after he dies). If you still need the personal data (e.g. you need people's addresses to be able to send them invoices as long as they still have a contract with your company) then you are of course allowed to store that data. It also means that any statistics that you need to make on customer related data, will have to be made before that data is deleted, and the statistics cannot contain any information which would allow them to be tied to a person.
Another part of the data protection law mandates that a person has to be informed of every storage of his personal data, and has to right to look into that data and update it if there's errors in it.
All in all, the law ensures that Europeans can be pretty certain that their (online) privacy isn't invaded (as long as they surf only European websites).
I am not a native English speaker, but I am usually able to say just about anything I want. In this comments, I have not altered any of the mistakes (if any) that Dragon NaturallySpeaking made while I was dictating. As you can see, the error rate is probably a bit higher than 99 per cent correctness. Nevertheless, I used this extensively, because it increases the speed at which I can work.I often have to type reports, and it goes a lot faster while using this tool. The only problem is that these reports contain lots of enterprise specific (and IT specific) terms. Naturally, it takes a while before Dragon NaturallySpeaking knows all of these terms.
Other than that, I am very happy with it.
These guys use it extensively: http://www.europa.eu/ (links to the joined websites of all the European institutions)
I'm afraid this is not entirely correct. While it is true (as far as we can discern at this point) that Microsoft plans on making and keeping the specification freely available, it is most certainly not "implementable". This is clear from the article that the parent posted to (search for the word legacy). It is even more clear in Grokdoc's document containing objections to the ISO-standardization of Microsoft's OOXML-specification.
In layman's terms, the specification (which should be complete and exact) contains phrases like "implement this like in Word95" (search for "autoSpaceLikeWord95" on page 1378 in part 4), without defining exactly what this means. As a result, only Microsoft is able to implement this specification. Hence the Microsoft-specification does not meet the open standards definition formulated by the European Union.
Actually, you can get away from the RIAA. Two possibilities come to mind:
- 95% of the people in this world live in a place where the RIAA can't touch them
- In this one place where the RIAA does seem to have some power, you could try voting for politicians that will stand up against such practices.
After all, even the UK has realized that there should be fair use rights.
>200*$150,000 = $30,000,000. Of course, this is just a maximum, but it's still scary.
The minimum penalty is 750$ per song, making for a total of 150.000$ for the 200 songs. I'd say that you don't need to calculate the maximum to become scared.
Actually, at least one company does exactly this. Electrabel (Belgium's main power supplier) primarily creates electricity by means of nuclear power. Since fluctuation of the demand for electricity is higher than the flexibility to produce this type of energy, there is typically an excess of electric energy during the night. This excess energy is among other things used to light our highways cheaply: I've once heard that Belgium is the only country that you can see from space at night.
It is also used every night to pump water from some river into an (artificial) lake on top of a mountain. During the day, energy is reclaimed from that water by a small hydroelectric plant (so the water returns to the river). Googling it actually turns up that it generates 1164 MegaWatts.. Impressive.
I wouldn't suggest this for use at home though. Your roof probably wouldn't cope with a lake on top of it.
Speedy Gonzales ?
How come they only shut down 8 servers if they're conducting searches in 11 countries?
The company I work for (banking) sells storage for 120 euro per gigabyte per year to our internal clients. That's storage on RAID-disks (think StorageTek and the like), including backup (on tape) and all necessary services (people doing maintenance, restoring backups, etc). 120 euro / gigabyte / year comes to 1,22 dollar / month / 100 megabytes (compare to 8 $ per month with Apple). Considering our 1,22 $ plus some network costs, plus maintaining a billing system for a couple of million clients, and a bit of profit margin, maybe 8 $ per month is not a rip-off.
the past two years, the company has made about 90 percent of its revenue from patent negotiations, and its software has yet to get much of a foothold.
In its fiscal 2003, for instance, software sales were just 8 percent of the company's $53.9 million in sales.
These quotes say that $53.9 million in sales (which is consistent with what I find on Yahoo Financialcomes for 90% from patent negatiations, and 8% from software sales. Nowhere on the net can I find anything about where that other 2% comes from (they don't seem to do any consulting for instance).
Then there's these quotes:
Already, Forgent has reaped nearly $50 million by claiming that one of its patents covers JPEG, the popular standard for digital images.
Then there's Jenkens & Gilchrist, the Dallas-based law firm handling enforcement of the JPEG patent. Under a fee agreement, Jenkens receives 50 percent of the revenue from licensing the patent, plus some expenses. The law firm's take so far is an estimated $50 million.
The first one says Forgent made $50 million on jpeg patents so far. The last claims the lawyers get half, and that is also $50 million.
Not sure what I should think of a company that doesn't succeed in having it's numbers correctly communicated. I do know however that $50 million is peanuts on a global scale. Looking at Forgent' share price, the stock markets seem to agree with me.
No article in there that says size doesn't matter?
They have lots of How-To's (which I use al the time) but I couldn't find a 'How to First Post succesfully'-article yet (apparantly).
The company I work for (large European bank) is required by law to keep most records for 10 years, and some (thank god not all) for 30 years. Being law abiding citizens, we do exactly what the law prescribes: we have magnetic tapes written over 25 years ago containing whatever information that needed to be stored. These tapes are being taken care of with extreme caution: no light, constant humidity, fire proof environment, .... The works.
Only one slight problem: we do not have any tape readers that are able to actually read these tapes. I heard that supposedly these readers could be rented (IBM would have some of these left) but even if that's true, there's nobody that knows the record layout in which these tapes have been written, let alone that any software that is needed to interpret whatever data is on these tapes still exists.
Well, at least the media still exist, so we're still being legal.
Come on, we all know thtat nobody needs more than 64K.
Hey, don't complain, it's a website for geeks, remember?
NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.
The best part is it's cheap, They usually cost a little more than $40 a month.
Of course, it's still twice the price of 12Mbs ADSL lines in Japan like Yahoo BB who offers 12Mbs speed for $21/month. Not that most people would know what to do with 100Mbs anyways (except for some stuff that RIAA doesn't really approve of).
Lately (the last two weeks) I've been noticing that my computer (Win XP) has a tendency to lose it's ability to resolve DNS-adresses if I've quit browsing for more than 15 minutes.
I was thinking that XP had developed an allergic reaction towards my broadband modem. However, now that I read this story, I'm starting to wonder if Verisign's actions have anything to do with this.
Anybody got a clue?
In related news, NYTimes is considering a namechange to NYFutureTimes
I really don't see any difficulties in conducting manned drop-tests from 10.000 feet. I mean, anyone can drop from 10.000 feet. There's no problem there.
Unless of course if you're supposed to live through it. That may be somewhat more difficult.
Getting more people to sign consent-forms, and even making sure that families aren't able to stop organ donation when consent has been given by the donor, won't solve the problem.
Truth of the matter is that there are simply not enough donors / not the right donors to provide all necessary organs. Where I live (Belgium) organ donation works as an opt-out system. There's a law that says that everybody is an organ donor (when they die) unless they have a certain form in their wallet stating the opposite. Hardly anybody opts out yet still there are not enough organs. Reason for this is that people that die tend to have been old and sick, or (if it's someone young) have most likely been in a traffic accident. None of these are the right circumstances for organ donation. Add to this the fact that you need matching blood types, have very little time for the organ harvasting etc... and it gets pretty obvious that taking organs from humans as spare bodyparts will only help a small percentage of cases.
I'd place my money on using organs specifically grown for harvasting: e.g. pigs are used to grow skin that helps burn victims.
You don't need geeks to provide tech support. Actually geeks are just about the worst type of people to provide this service.
... why don't you just do x and leave me the alone". It's sufficient if you can understand what a customer is trying to ask and then read the correct answer from your screen.
What you need are people that have people-skills: they must be capable to talk to people, calm them down and get them to understand stuff. That's not going to work if your attitude is going to be along the lines of "you stupid
Don't misunderstand me and read that I'm saying that no geeks are capable of doing this. It's just that your average geek didn't become a geek by being big on people skills.