You are being equally rediculous by insisting on using MySQL even when it is a non-optimal solution, as your boss was to require you to use Access! While SQL Server is usually less efficient for non-transaction based databases (since MySQL doesn't support transactions), it works well with Access. Instead of jury-rigging a MySQL Access ODBC driver, you should use MS Jet for SQL Server. That interface will likely allow for faster DB interaction than a jury rigged driver.
If you really have a problem using MS products, you should find a job where you are able to develop on an OS platform. Even though I tend to use more MS software than I have to, I understand where you are coming from. It is much easier and more efficient to develop a DB front end using Perl/DBI than Access/VBA.
This is absolutely hilarious. If I receive a snail-mail letter, I am free to do whatever I wish with it. The author cannot use copyright to prevent me from putting that letter in my neighbor's mailbox, throwing it out, or using it as toilet paper. The problem is that legislators are exploiting the fact that there is no tangible manifestation of an e-mail to create rediculous laws that are far more restrictive than anything that governs the use of physical property, like a letter.
The only problem with the unit is that it uses WinCE and an embedded processor; this basically means that there is zero application support. There is no reason that somebody cannot create a fully compatible Windows/Linux system using a portable pIII processor and solid state storage. The most difficult part about designing such a system is cutting cost and creating a usable display.
It seems that Hitachi has a decent display and they should focus on bundling it with a system that is actually flexibile enough to run complex Internet/Intranet connectivity applications.
You misunderstood my point. I agree that P2P file sharing services should be as legal as any other search engine. However, if Napster's service is deemed illegal under the DMCA, then Aimster's half a**ed ToS change will not alter their legal status. This is just another case where what should be and what is are two different things.
The problem is that most game manufacturers choose to program in the platform dependent DirectX instead of the platform independent OpenGL. DirectX is a classic example of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy in that it is less flexible than OpenGL but integrates well, and is easier to code, for the Windows platform.
Game developers wonder why they should deal with a more difficult API (even though there are some nifty effects that can be obtained--see Quake), when there is only a limited market for games on the Linux platform. Since most people who run Linux are already demonstrating your willingness to dual-boot w/Windows for games, porting games to Linux will not sell many more copies. There is simply no compelling economic reason to port.
Their claims of legality are dubious, at best. In addition, the DeCSS case has taught us that judges dispense with reason and existing precedent when profits are at stake. I think the entire P2P industry is running scared because even the possibility of a lawsuit could cripple many companies. By pulling this manuever (and appearing on/.), they have improved their visibility and drawn a target on their back.
The problem with OpenBSD is that it takes years to verify the security of new software releases and integrate them into the distro. Consequently, many of the included packages are old versions that have since been replaced. If DARPA could come up with a methodology that accelerated the pace of verification, they would be very useful to OpenBSD and other OS projects.
Bush has said publicly that "there should be limits to freedom" in response to criticism he faced from a satirical website. It seems he belives the freedom afforded by a separation of Church and State should be eliminated as well.
On FuckedCompany, a few weeks ago, somebody posted a link to a 1988 interview with Bush when he was running for governor. It is well-known that Bush supports prayer in public schools and, while being asked about atheists who object to this practice, he blurted out: everything American Atheists are is bullshit (sic). This offended a lot of people, who wrote his campaign asking him to retract the statement. Instead, they received a letter which explained how Bush is a man of faith who strongly believes in God and the merits of religion. Bush is an asshole.
You're assuming, however, that current workers should have an obligation to support individuals who no longer work. All people have the opportunity to save during their working years; those who choose to live beyond their means and maintain a negative savings rate should not become the burden of those who are saving while working.
That being said, I think the problem is that we have created a consumer culture where saving is not "cool." To simply stop paying those who did not have the foresight to save would be immoral, but launching a public education campaign encouraging people to save while phasing social security out over a few generations is simply good fiscal sense.
I am not a Republican, though many people find me to be fiscally conservative. There is no question that some people are simply incapable of earning enough to support themselves, for whatever reason, and require public assistance. However, creating a blanket social security system that is supposed to benefit people who earn more than enough to save a portion of their income is incredibly wasteful and unfair. I do not mind giving money to the government in the form of taxes so long as I can be sure that people who really need the money receive it, and that I am not just subsidizing people's stupid financial decisions. Retirement should be a priviledge, not a right.
I think that many Americans are desperately *hoping* that political manuevering as we know it today will cease to exist, but the very institutions that we criticize are so fundamental to our system of government that reforming them is virtually impossibile.
Take Social Security for example. There is no question that social security will go bankrupt, it is only a question of when. As with any pyramid scheme, a linear increase in the number of people who are in a position to benefit from the system means that there is an exponential increase in the number of people who will ultimately not be able to reclaim their initial investment. It is taking longer and longer to seniors to reclaim their lifetime investment in social security because the scam has been running for 50 years.
However, it would be impossible to simply dispose of social security. Millions of Americans are depending on social security to fund their retirement; on average, individuals spend over 100% of what they earn. How can people with no savings ever retire? We would need to phase SS out over a period of 50-100 years with lower contributions/benefits every interval until the system is eliminated entirely. However, the dynamics of our democracy require a change in leadership every 4 years and the current partisan tendencies of the legislature would make it very difficult to convine 25 separate legislatures/executives to agree to the terms of the original arrangement. If there is merely one period of dissension, the proposal must be trashed.
Politicians are therefore limited to a very small number of programs that they can implement in individual terms. Consequently, the issues that campaigns cover is only a small range of issues that politicians feel confident addressing. Of course, the ability to hire a smart group of people to create a platform does not mean that one is a skillful leader or is capable of dealing with crises as they develop.
We can hope for reform, better leaders, or a better system of government, but I have yet to hear one convincing proposal of how these drastic changes could be carried out. In politics, as in philosophy, we cannot escape our past no matter how hard we try. We can be early adopters of new technology and ways of thinking, but we cannot expect society to follow suit. We hail every new development as "revolutionary" in the vein hope that it will somehow improve our present situation, but it rarely does.
Believe me, I am the closest thing to a Microsoft fan/apologist that you will find on Slashdot. I am not bashing.NET simply because MS makes it; I am bashing.net because it, combined with Passport, will give MS far too much access to users' personal information.
Hotmail alone has 60 million registered users. Windows sells hundreds of millions of copies. With.net, Microsoft will not only be able to track user behavior across its web network, it will have a comprehensive database of every Windows user's preferences--right down to what wallpaper he uses on his desktop.
The registry concept was pretty cool, because it allowed network administrators to standardize and modify desktop configuration settings remotely. That was a good feature that MS developed. However, putting this power in the hands of MS or malicious Internet users is not a good feature. Besides, MS has no right to compile a database of my preferences simply because I use Windows.
After all major research universities refused to apply to review Carnivore because the restrictions imposed on the reviewers are too stringent, why did IIT apply? What do you hope to acheive by reviewing Carnivore under the government's current terms?
I wrote this at almost the exact same time you did; hyperbole must be as important in winning the hearts of consumers as it is in...oh, wait a minute...
Is it just me or does denying the existance of a virtual community on/. remind you of claiming that a particular feat is impossible after it has already been accomplished? Perhaps this is Katz's roundabout refutation of the author's argument, which he clearly takes issue with.
I do not think that Digital Convergence has any intention of following through on their threats of litigation. The reverse engineering of the CueCat has put their entire business model in jeopardy in the same way that the hacking of the I-opener challenged Netpliance's.
Both companies gave away/sold loss-leaders in the hope of having customers sign up for a service. In Netpliance's case, the service was charged to the consumer while DC requires the customer to use the service so it can sell info to advertisers, but the net effect is the same: if the consumers obtain the loss-leader but do not sign up for the service, they are screwed.
Unless Digital Convergence challenges the manufacturers of alternative drivers, they will have absolutely no source of revenue to show potential second/third round investors and they may as well close their doors today. Personally, I think giving away thousands of CueCats in the hope of having people sign up for a service and scan ads is about the *stupidest*.com business model I have ever seen (except selling pet food online--that was classic). However, I don't think DC's investors are willing to give up and close shop.
That being said, they will not devote some of their rapidly depleting cash supply to fight a legal battle they cannot possibly win. Their goal was to get people to remove the drivers in the same way that the MPAA got people to remove DeCSS--by telling their *service providers* that their customer is engaged in illegal activity. Since DC has no legal basis for their claims (the DMCA does not cover hardware), people are not complying with their cease and desist letters. With the failure of this strategy, their company should not last more than another few months.
With all the talk about strengthening computer crime legislation and the penalties associated with violations, this scenario provides a perfect example of where an individual provided a service to the company in question by committing a "crime" against them.
Ralph Dressel provided Fiserv with the results of what would have been an expensive internal controls audit for free. If this vulnerability would have remained undiscovered, a malicious party that discovered it could have stolen money or blackmailed Fiserv in the same way that the hacker who stole CDUniverse's credit card database blackmailed them.
We should hesitate to condem these "grey hat" hackers by drafting legislations to criminalize their exploits.
In college, many of my friends and I do transfer music online. However, when somebody sets up an FTP server with 10,000 MP3s, using campus bandwidth, and gets enough traffic for the RIAA to be able to find his site, he deserves to get busted.
In the process of building up his collection, this student was hogging bandwidth that could have been used for academic or less bandwidth-intensive personal applications. Every once in a while, the network at my campus slows to a crawl and I *know* it is because somebody planning a party has decided to download 50-100 MP3s within the span of a few hours.
I would be upset if the RIAA harassed a casual MP3 user with only a few hundred files occasionally shared over Napster. But, this was an "always-on" FTP server with an inordinate amount of bandwidth. When somebody is so blatantly disrespecting all parties involved, I have no sympathy.
If I were in your position, I would ensure that no outbound traffic travels on non-standard ports that have not first been registered with IT (to prevent DDoS clients from being installed/managed, BackOrifice from being installed, etc. Also, I think that installing an automated scanner for e-mail, prohibiting attachments larger than a certain size, etc. would be prudent. Personally, I would not find it invasive if I was told, as an employee, what type of e-mail would raise a flag with the automatic scanner and esured that my mail would not be read by another human being unless it was potentially dangerous.
Basically, the most important thing, from an employees perspective, with network scanning is full disclosure. I would feel violated if my personal transmissions were searched without my knowledge, but I think most people would understand the need for tight security given the inherent insecurity of an Internet connection.
The difference is that Open Source Projects involve programmers managing programmers. As such, there is a level of understanding that is not present in a corporate bureaucracy, where feature sets and codebases are controlled from "above." While there must a a controlling authority of an OS project, that determines which modifications get included in the codebase, there is no guiding principle for development other than putting out good code--no hidden motives and no idiot managers.
I think that merely "accessing" a system illegally should not be a criminal offense, and should incur only minor civil damages. I am very disturbed by the trend towards legislation that allows people to collect damages that were never actually incurred. Giving a punitive award in addition to a actual award is one thing; allowing a plaintiff to collect damages when none were actually suffered is another. Since they did take m-net down, there were damages suffered in this case, however I think that the vague language used in the applicable law leaves it open to abuse.
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You are being equally rediculous by insisting on using MySQL even when it is a non-optimal solution, as your boss was to require you to use Access! While SQL Server is usually less efficient for non-transaction based databases (since MySQL doesn't support transactions), it works well with Access. Instead of jury-rigging a MySQL Access ODBC driver, you should use MS Jet for SQL Server. That interface will likely allow for faster DB interaction than a jury rigged driver.
If you really have a problem using MS products, you should find a job where you are able to develop on an OS platform. Even though I tend to use more MS software than I have to, I understand where you are coming from. It is much easier and more efficient to develop a DB front end using Perl/DBI than Access/VBA.
Lenny
This is absolutely hilarious. If I receive a snail-mail letter, I am free to do whatever I wish with it. The author cannot use copyright to prevent me from putting that letter in my neighbor's mailbox, throwing it out, or using it as toilet paper. The problem is that legislators are exploiting the fact that there is no tangible manifestation of an e-mail to create rediculous laws that are far more restrictive than anything that governs the use of physical property, like a letter.
Lenny
The only problem with the unit is that it uses WinCE and an embedded processor; this basically means that there is zero application support. There is no reason that somebody cannot create a fully compatible Windows/Linux system using a portable pIII processor and solid state storage. The most difficult part about designing such a system is cutting cost and creating a usable display.
It seems that Hitachi has a decent display and they should focus on bundling it with a system that is actually flexibile enough to run complex Internet/Intranet connectivity applications.
Lenny
You misunderstood my point. I agree that P2P file sharing services should be as legal as any other search engine. However, if Napster's service is deemed illegal under the DMCA, then Aimster's half a**ed ToS change will not alter their legal status. This is just another case where what should be and what is are two different things.
Lenny
The problem is that most game manufacturers choose to program in the platform dependent DirectX instead of the platform independent OpenGL. DirectX is a classic example of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy in that it is less flexible than OpenGL but integrates well, and is easier to code, for the Windows platform.
Game developers wonder why they should deal with a more difficult API (even though there are some nifty effects that can be obtained--see Quake), when there is only a limited market for games on the Linux platform. Since most people who run Linux are already demonstrating your willingness to dual-boot w/Windows for games, porting games to Linux will not sell many more copies. There is simply no compelling economic reason to port.
Lenny
Their claims of legality are dubious, at best. In addition, the DeCSS case has taught us that judges dispense with reason and existing precedent when profits are at stake. I think the entire P2P industry is running scared because even the possibility of a lawsuit could cripple many companies. By pulling this manuever (and appearing on /.), they have improved their visibility and drawn a target on their back.
Lenny
The problem with OpenBSD is that it takes years to verify the security of new software releases and integrate them into the distro. Consequently, many of the included packages are old versions that have since been replaced. If DARPA could come up with a methodology that accelerated the pace of verification, they would be very useful to OpenBSD and other OS projects.
This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a while--an everquest organized crime syndicate!
The review is short, passionate, and to the point! Somebody must have hacked /. and stolen Katz's login :-)
Bush has said publicly that "there should be limits to freedom" in response to criticism he faced from a satirical website. It seems he belives the freedom afforded by a separation of Church and State should be eliminated as well.
On FuckedCompany, a few weeks ago, somebody posted a link to a 1988 interview with Bush when he was running for governor. It is well-known that Bush supports prayer in public schools and, while being asked about atheists who object to this practice, he blurted out: everything American Atheists are is bullshit (sic). This offended a lot of people, who wrote his campaign asking him to retract the statement. Instead, they received a letter which explained how Bush is a man of faith who strongly believes in God and the merits of religion. Bush is an asshole.
Does anybody still have the link?
Somebody should register:
fuckguiness.com
guinessshits.com
guinesstasteslikeshit.com
guinessisbad.com
guinessbeerblows.com
fuckguinessbeer.com
guinessbeersucksdick.com
etc.
Don't you love UCITA; it will give these rediculous clauses in license agreements even more legal footing. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
You're assuming, however, that current workers should have an obligation to support individuals who no longer work. All people have the opportunity to save during their working years; those who choose to live beyond their means and maintain a negative savings rate should not become the burden of those who are saving while working.
That being said, I think the problem is that we have created a consumer culture where saving is not "cool." To simply stop paying those who did not have the foresight to save would be immoral, but launching a public education campaign encouraging people to save while phasing social security out over a few generations is simply good fiscal sense.
I am not a Republican, though many people find me to be fiscally conservative. There is no question that some people are simply incapable of earning enough to support themselves, for whatever reason, and require public assistance. However, creating a blanket social security system that is supposed to benefit people who earn more than enough to save a portion of their income is incredibly wasteful and unfair. I do not mind giving money to the government in the form of taxes so long as I can be sure that people who really need the money receive it, and that I am not just subsidizing people's stupid financial decisions. Retirement should be a priviledge, not a right.
I think that many Americans are desperately *hoping* that political manuevering as we know it today will cease to exist, but the very institutions that we criticize are so fundamental to our system of government that reforming them is virtually impossibile.
Take Social Security for example. There is no question that social security will go bankrupt, it is only a question of when. As with any pyramid scheme, a linear increase in the number of people who are in a position to benefit from the system means that there is an exponential increase in the number of people who will ultimately not be able to reclaim their initial investment. It is taking longer and longer to seniors to reclaim their lifetime investment in social security because the scam has been running for 50 years.
However, it would be impossible to simply dispose of social security. Millions of Americans are depending on social security to fund their retirement; on average, individuals spend over 100% of what they earn. How can people with no savings ever retire? We would need to phase SS out over a period of 50-100 years with lower contributions/benefits every interval until the system is eliminated entirely. However, the dynamics of our democracy require a change in leadership every 4 years and the current partisan tendencies of the legislature would make it very difficult to convine 25 separate legislatures/executives to agree to the terms of the original arrangement. If there is merely one period of dissension, the proposal must be trashed.
Politicians are therefore limited to a very small number of programs that they can implement in individual terms. Consequently, the issues that campaigns cover is only a small range of issues that politicians feel confident addressing. Of course, the ability to hire a smart group of people to create a platform does not mean that one is a skillful leader or is capable of dealing with crises as they develop.
We can hope for reform, better leaders, or a better system of government, but I have yet to hear one convincing proposal of how these drastic changes could be carried out. In politics, as in philosophy, we cannot escape our past no matter how hard we try. We can be early adopters of new technology and ways of thinking, but we cannot expect society to follow suit. We hail every new development as "revolutionary" in the vein hope that it will somehow improve our present situation, but it rarely does.
Believe me, I am the closest thing to a Microsoft fan/apologist that you will find on Slashdot. I am not bashing .NET simply because MS makes it; I am bashing .net because it, combined with Passport, will give MS far too much access to users' personal information.
.net, Microsoft will not only be able to track user behavior across its web network, it will have a comprehensive database of every Windows user's preferences--right down to what wallpaper he uses on his desktop.
Hotmail alone has 60 million registered users. Windows sells hundreds of millions of copies. With
The registry concept was pretty cool, because it allowed network administrators to standardize and modify desktop configuration settings remotely. That was a good feature that MS developed. However, putting this power in the hands of MS or malicious Internet users is not a good feature. Besides, MS has no right to compile a database of my preferences simply because I use Windows.
Since it's OSS, though, NOBODY NEEDS TO USE .net, even if it is included. So, who cares? Besides, Corel has almost no market share anyways.
After all major research universities refused to apply to review Carnivore because the restrictions imposed on the reviewers are too stringent, why did IIT apply? What do you hope to acheive by reviewing Carnivore under the government's current terms?
I wrote this at almost the exact same time you did; hyperbole must be as important in winning the hearts of consumers as it is in...oh, wait a minute...
Is it just me or does denying the existance of a virtual community on /. remind you of claiming that a particular feat is impossible after it has already been accomplished? Perhaps this is Katz's roundabout refutation of the author's argument, which he clearly takes issue with.
I do not think that Digital Convergence has any intention of following through on their threats of litigation. The reverse engineering of the CueCat has put their entire business model in jeopardy in the same way that the hacking of the I-opener challenged Netpliance's.
.com business model I have ever seen (except selling pet food online--that was classic). However, I don't think DC's investors are willing to give up and close shop.
Both companies gave away/sold loss-leaders in the hope of having customers sign up for a service. In Netpliance's case, the service was charged to the consumer while DC requires the customer to use the service so it can sell info to advertisers, but the net effect is the same: if the consumers obtain the loss-leader but do not sign up for the service, they are screwed.
Unless Digital Convergence challenges the manufacturers of alternative drivers, they will have absolutely no source of revenue to show potential second/third round investors and they may as well close their doors today. Personally, I think giving away thousands of CueCats in the hope of having people sign up for a service and scan ads is about the *stupidest*
That being said, they will not devote some of their rapidly depleting cash supply to fight a legal battle they cannot possibly win. Their goal was to get people to remove the drivers in the same way that the MPAA got people to remove DeCSS--by telling their *service providers* that their customer is engaged in illegal activity. Since DC has no legal basis for their claims (the DMCA does not cover hardware), people are not complying with their cease and desist letters. With the failure of this strategy, their company should not last more than another few months.
With all the talk about strengthening computer crime legislation and the penalties associated with violations, this scenario provides a perfect example of where an individual provided a service to the company in question by committing a "crime" against them.
Ralph Dressel provided Fiserv with the results of what would have been an expensive internal controls audit for free. If this vulnerability would have remained undiscovered, a malicious party that discovered it could have stolen money or blackmailed Fiserv in the same way that the hacker who stole CDUniverse's credit card database blackmailed them.
We should hesitate to condem these "grey hat" hackers by drafting legislations to criminalize their exploits.
In college, many of my friends and I do transfer music online. However, when somebody sets up an FTP server with 10,000 MP3s, using campus bandwidth, and gets enough traffic for the RIAA to be able to find his site, he deserves to get busted.
In the process of building up his collection, this student was hogging bandwidth that could have been used for academic or less bandwidth-intensive personal applications. Every once in a while, the network at my campus slows to a crawl and I *know* it is because somebody planning a party has decided to download 50-100 MP3s within the span of a few hours.
I would be upset if the RIAA harassed a casual MP3 user with only a few hundred files occasionally shared over Napster. But, this was an "always-on" FTP server with an inordinate amount of bandwidth. When somebody is so blatantly disrespecting all parties involved, I have no sympathy.
If I were in your position, I would ensure that no outbound traffic travels on non-standard ports that have not first been registered with IT (to prevent DDoS clients from being installed/managed, BackOrifice from being installed, etc. Also, I think that installing an automated scanner for e-mail, prohibiting attachments larger than a certain size, etc. would be prudent. Personally, I would not find it invasive if I was told, as an employee, what type of e-mail would raise a flag with the automatic scanner and esured that my mail would not be read by another human being unless it was potentially dangerous.
Basically, the most important thing, from an employees perspective, with network scanning is full disclosure. I would feel violated if my personal transmissions were searched without my knowledge, but I think most people would understand the need for tight security given the inherent insecurity of an Internet connection.
The difference is that Open Source Projects involve programmers managing programmers. As such, there is a level of understanding that is not present in a corporate bureaucracy, where feature sets and codebases are controlled from "above." While there must a a controlling authority of an OS project, that determines which modifications get included in the codebase, there is no guiding principle for development other than putting out good code--no hidden motives and no idiot managers.
I think that merely "accessing" a system illegally should not be a criminal offense, and should incur only minor civil damages. I am very disturbed by the trend towards legislation that allows people to collect damages that were never actually incurred. Giving a punitive award in addition to a actual award is one thing; allowing a plaintiff to collect damages when none were actually suffered is another. Since they did take m-net down, there were damages suffered in this case, however I think that the vague language used in the applicable law leaves it open to abuse.