I used to think the same as the original poster - that RF was a non issue, and simply allowed the aircarriers to charge more for services such as airFone etc...
Now that I've spent the time and energy getting my private pilot certificate PP-ASEL (FAA standard etc...) I can tell you that the reason for not allowing 'personal electronics' on commercial aircraft during takeoff and landing is a very sound one.
Commercial flights are always on IFR flight plans. This means Instrument Flight Rules. Thie does Not mean that the flight is being conducted in clouds or other IMC, but that the controllers can expect the flight to behave according to IFR rules.
Now - IFR rules are there for a reason. One - primary navigation - if you have a plane going at any altitude above 18k feet, it has to be on an IFR flight plan, and be positively controlled (Read vectored/guided) by flight control. However, the pilots are still required at all times to avoid things like: Mountains. Many Many crashes, both commercial and private, are due to CFT - Controlled Flight into Terrain. This is when a pilot for reasons of pilot-error, or instrument error, flies a perfectly good airplane and passengers into a mountain or obstruction.
Many airports in the US have large obstructions and mountains in the vicinity of their respective airports. Compasses - while very useful as a cross check, or for VFR day flying, have significant errors accross the US (many places as high as 15 degrees - such as the SF Bay area) - and hence are not always the primary tool - particularly when they show the aircraft heading and not course (with a crosswind, the aircraft is headed somewhat sideways with respect to it's ground course). They use the radio nav aids such as VORs, NDBs, VORTACs, etc...
. There are also 'hidden' hazards such as military training routes that cover much of Northern California and Nevada - where if you veer off course by even a few miles, you could be subject to military intercept procedures, or worse: a midair with a heavy and well-build military aircraft (which often slice thru civilian aircraft).
To Sum Up: Unless you want your commercial flight to end up in a mountain, I suggest people don't play with this or treat it litely.
Interference with radio navigation signals is soo easy, that in a recent safety seminar held in Oakland - a flyer was presented that emphasized IFR hold zones - zones simply to keep waiting aircraft an additional distance from the runway and landing guidance ILS/other radio services.
Hey,
I got satellite TV last week. I won't say the brand (don't accuse me of advertising) but suffice it to say it was one of the two major players.
Picture quality: best I've ever seen. Far better than cable (analog) and far, far, *far* better than the crappy digital cable we here have in San Francisco (Thanks AT&T-crapola).
Restrictions: NONE!!!
I purchased a PVR that has no monthly fee - and I can record to outside devices such as VCR without macrovision - even from the PVR recorded content.
Now - I just got this last week - but must say: I'm 110% very happy with it. So flame away, but I'm sure that as soon as they *force* us on to digital TV, and *force* us not to record shows (hmmm - any TIVO fans???) there will be mass exodus from the evil *them* and people will start using alternatives.
Other thoughts: how about TV via DSL/other broadband in 5-10 years??? I think it's possible. Satellite - definitely possible.
For those of you who will flame that they "don't have access to satellite" due to landlords or physical space considerations - I'm sorry & just like many of us look for broadband with our next apartments/homes, I'll be looking for a clear view to the south:)
My company's application website has 1269 active jsps. I don't know if you have ever worked on a web-app, but it's not always easy to just use text to represent things.
Even with globally included menu-navigation, footers, headers, and css, doing a look-and-feel makeover took 3 engineers 4 months to implement and another 2 to test with the cooperation of several product designers and QA staff.
Now - (not directed at this post, but the rude one below with 0-karma). I don't care about my karma. What I do care about, is that/. is a good and honest forum for tech issues. The simple fact is (no talking out of my ass here) that it would cost my pre-IPO company several hundred thousand dollars to implement ADA standards - while we're barely scraping by as it is...
nuff said
I'm sorry to say I agree with the court ruling
on
ADA Doesn't Apply to Web
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Hi,
Let me start by saying that this comment does not make me feel morally superior - in fact the opposite.
The truth of the matter, is that there are multiple considerations (ignoring the specifics of the law for now). 1. The cost to existing and new websites would be extremely high to implement ADA standards. In addition, this could easily shut-down smaller businesses (i.e. those akin to yahoo stores etc...) and those serving small niche markets. A good example of this was a small Australian site selling serialR/C Servo controllers for less than 50% of the cheapest US-made part.
2. The web is not a physical space. I agree with this one also. While I really, really am sympathetic to the disabled, and wish to help-out whenever possible, at what point does the ADA/public-regulated support end? Should highways have bumper-car lanes for those with poor eyesight? Should the stock market have a slow motion exchange for those who need more time to think?
I would support a federally funded (not run) program to provide tools making it easier to design/implement/test sites for accessibility, but c'mon folks - we can't even get HTML compliant browsers...
what do you think would happen if the feds mandated a HTML-ADA spec???
Great work - but overstated security problems
on
Warflying: San Diego
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
First - I think these guys did an excellent job - and made a nice contribution by publishing their article w/pictures hosted etc...
My issue - is that the security problems are IMHO vastly overstated. I've worked at two companies with WAPs - and those were outside of our corporate/internal firewall.
If someone wanted to work over the WAPs, they would use them like a home DSL line, and simply VPN in. No security problem there.
As for private home users, and even some small businesses (as both my parents run offices with non-secured WAPs) - the security risk is only as great as the value of their data, divided by the cost to get to it. If any of you want to (i) find, and (ii) hack my father's office's legacy Dos-based auto/office management software, than by all means - we've been in need of a windows compatable update!!! (hehe).
But seriously - what use would you have for your neighbor's email or home document/resume, etc... and would you really go thru the trouble of hacking a next-door Pentium running WinXP? I think it's far more likely to be the sploits' of a script/trojan than an individual.
All good companies will have seperate VLANs (or equivalent) running different things - i.e. the WAP should be firewall'd like the rest of the net etc...
Not to mention - anyone can be hacked over the internet, even with firewalls, but to use WAPs, you have to be within the range - typically 1/4km. Do you have the time/car/laptop/battery life to drive to your 'enemy' or soccer-mom's house and hack the encryptions? (yes I can spell - watch some more southpark).
Sorry for swearing - but everyone reading/. is adult enough to get a dose of reality.
If you're actually reading this thread - you're wasting your time.
do you really care if someone can easily tap your phone conversations?.
More importantly:
is the value of your conversation worth the energy required for someone to crack your phone call?
In a security course (both in college, and later in a Cisco class) we heard that the risk is equal to the value divided by the effort required to get at that value. Now: I don't believe this quote exactly, but it's point is clear.
Nobody I know would spend the effort required to tap my personal line just to hear something I might not tell them directly. Further: Companies with secrets can use:
I. Standard Non-Secure Phone Lines
II. Secure VoIP solutions
III.Standard VoIP solutions over a VPN ... need I go on?
Now, we have to explain one more thing to VCs and MBAs. All they know is there is this thing called a website that exists on a thing called a webserver.
Hasn't anyone on/. ever taken a security class?
Has anyone on/. ever worked in on security projects and/or audits?
Let me break it down for the rest of you:
This ads exactly zero extra security for a well-run website. Most well-run sites already have seperately firewall'd http-webservers and database machines. Some well-run sites have the application server on yet a third firewall'd network (or vlan etc).
Any place worth 5cents will not have valued data sitting on an httpd server!
This is really Ooooga-Boooga in a nutshell for VCs and MBAs trying to make a buck on security-scared VCs and MBAs running other companies.
I don't buy it.
Secure your site properly - as one other poster mentioned, for the less-funded (read: cheap/poor/startup/blah) company/service you can simply mount a CD-R with your site's static content on it. Even JSPs can live on a CDr (as long as they're precompiled into servlets, or there's a scratch disk for the JSP-container to compile them).
Finally, real action by a recognized key-player in the space of online communities.
Imagine if one of the key slashdot players joined with the EFF and sued the RIAA for a declaratory judgement that mp3 use was legal.
My goal in this post is not to pressure any slashdot hanchos, nor criticize anyone. Simply this: Please: Those of you in the community with name-recognition, use your influence for good causes other than running linux on an aibo. You have the ears of 100,000s of/. readers, and we WILL support you in these important acts.
Please read:
The ATC / Control Tower is never responsible for controlling the aircraft, nor actually guiding aircraft between hills/etc. Even in a busy place like the San Francisco Bay, the ATC advises of traffic and coordinates inbound and outbound traffic lanes to keep traffic well spaced. ATC typical instructions, even with hills very nearby (1nm) usually consist of a destination landmark or vector, and an altitude.
Not to rant or anything, but from what I understand, the current system is incredibly out of date. It is important, not only to update the ATC gear, but that the FAA institude a complete overhaul of avionics. It is now possible with less than $1000 of gear to have in-flight collision detectors based on GPS, but this is uncommon on private aircraft costing $100k+.
The first link (off-site) from the article referred to, in fact the makor of said "RF-Lightning-Craptacular VC-Money Whoring" company has a "our website is under construction" on it.
C'mon people - stop posting obvious flamebait articles at the highest level. This was a freakin waste of everyone's time.
Holy Bagels Batman:
If people start talking to other people, and agreeing on ideas, and practicing what they preach, who knows what will happen!
but seriously, while I personally have no problem with shopping for used books to save some $$$, what's not to like about authors speaking their minds. it's not like they hacked Amazon's website to remove the books - they simply made a group decision not to link to Amazon when it comes to promoting their book sales.
I really don't see the big deal here, and hope this doesn't become a flame war between people arguing over the virtues of used books, and those calling the authors elitist or whatever.
I currently work in an organization with 75 Engineers (50 USA, 20 India, 5 Asia) - and we use CVS. It's free, easy to use, and has a simple feature set so that more than one person has enough knowledge to do things like branching and merging branches.
We nearly never have merge problems. It is standard procedure that people keep their tree up-to-date with the cvs tree, and thus conflicts rarely arrise. Even at crunch-time, I probably have one merge conflict every 2 weeks, and with CVS - you are notified of the conflict and it is wrapped with CVS comments.
To put this in perspective - while at Oracle with 1000s of engineers working on the same tree, we used ClearCase and it was awesome. The difference here is that there was much steeper a learning curve, and no normal engineers could actually do complex tasks - i.e. create branches etc. We had a complete groud dedicated to ClearCase.
Conclusion:
Educate your engineers - and politely have the senior engineers tell them when they mess up - enforce a policy that people must update the source every day that they plan on checking-in files.
Also - I don't know what CVS versio you are using, but the latest free WinCVS client will not allow you to check in a file with a conflict! It will force you to update/merge/resolve the conflict before updating the tree. I highly recommend CVS and WinCVS due to the ease of use and cost.
The time article, and concept is really nothing that should incite the civil libertarian crowd. It mentions nothing of the rampant drivers license fraud already taking place in California and other states.
The main difference talked about in the article, is that a national system would allow law enforcment to check the record of someone in their home state when they are travelling. While there is a one-liner about biometric additions to the licenses, c'mon, do you really believe each state will implement a unique biometric system, or perhaps more imposing - that every person with a drivers license will have to stop-by the DMV and update their biometric scan?
This is merely the "homeland security" office attempt at getting the most gain from the least expense, and makes complete sense. For those who can't afford to purchase a "clean" drivers license, it would me much more difficult to hide convictions/offenses/immigration violations if your record followed you to any state.
Hey - I don't need any mod+ on this, but have to agree with you. Tomcat isn't a triumph, which is why I added the caveat that I was only referring to it's error-log implementation and configuration.
Why does it seem like there are as many people in the "community" criticizing open source as there are supporting it?
Two Words: Apache and Tomcat
I'm a professional who works with the closed source equivalents all the time: Netscape iPlanet server, IIS and WebLogic.
Now: before you flame - I like working with WebLogic, but it is no better than Tomcat in my opinion (as far as error reporting goes). And IIS is a piece of crap! Not to mention Netscape's overly complecated UI that blasts every change you've ever made and is completely out of sync with the flat file configs.
Need I mention that Tomcat error logging is set-up in an XML file that is easy to read, modify, and translate into a simple report for management (IT that is).
When was the last time Windows gave you a nice error.log when it blue-screened, or how about IIS on a buffer overflow?
I'm sick of bashing on the free stuff out there. Sure, just because I can release one of my college projects into the open source may mean that statistically there are more projects without good error reporting, the real projects are pretty darn good.
Hello fellow/.ers. I'm not a legal scholar, but please hear me out.
I think if the supreme court was asked weather I had the right to make a war-dailer script to call everyone in the country and harass them (and somehow do it for free without direct stealing of telco services), the supreme court would say no. If they were asked if I could hire 100,000 political 'activists', to manually dial/call every phone number in the country, and speak to them in an interactive, human voice, the decision might be different.
Before you go off on my first point, please read on:
Companies that Spam are not doing anything that the constitution was designed to protect, nor the first amendment. Freedom of speech, while it has been expanded to several media forms beyond the original spoken-word/printed-text, does not mean random harassment. I'm sure if you stood outside of a school-building screaming profanities for months on end, the school/courts/supreme-court would prosecute you. If there isn't a law now, they would write and approve one!
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior. While the common company party-line is 'to provide you with useful services' - think of the long term effects of digitally-created/automated 'freedom of speech'. What would keep us from/.ing a senator's video-voicemail box at home?
What would keep us from generating real physical mail by the thousands of pieces, and mailing it to a politician just to 'spam' them, or essentially perform a DOS attack on them.
The reality, as an earlier writer mentions, is that: Spam is a form of speach that denies people access to: Peace and Quiet Sanctity of the home their own useful information
Sometimes, in a real society, philosophy and idealism has to give way to reality. Until computers are sentient, they do not have freedom of speech.
I can't wait until it's easy to download pirated versions of Java/Oreilly books via gnureadster(tm). But seriously:
I will have a bookcase with real books on it, until someone with guns forcefully removes it from my house. You can't display great works of literature, or get the inspiration from a library, by reading an MP3-style playlist, and double clicking "War and Peace".
I enjoy not having to crypto-sign a release for a friend to borrow my copy of "1984", or even "Java in a Nutshell".
I think the only place for this is high-volume, low-cost books/literature: Newspapers Magazines
etc... etc...
When Computer books cost $80 or more, and travel books the same size/weight in paper can cost $9.95, it makes you wonder. The cost in publishing, is writing, editing, promotion, and distribution - of which only distribution is made partially easier with e-books.
I don't think many people would choose to have Java in a Nutshell for a mere $4.95 discount, in e-form only, dependent on electricity, etc...
My past two companies had their exchange servers overloaded and subsequently taken offline for several days.
Cost to company: No dumb powerpoints for a few days!.
The engineers who accounted for the majority of revenue at both firms, were able to continue working with less interruption from marketing weenies for hours on end. Our meetings went smoothly without M$ Project / Powerpoint files distributed by email.
At both companies, the IT departments were completely ill-prepared to deal with such problems. In fact, Power outages at both firms over 6 months ago (not related to current CA power funkiness), knocked out email and fileservers because of our IT department's small budget and poorly trained staff.
Bottom line: Find, Pay, Train, and Retain good IT staff, and fund them well enough to keep the business running. PG&E working down the street shouldn't disable engineering fileservers for a few days due to inadequate backups, nor should virii.
F$CK the client side virus scanners that bog down our systems. Our entire engineering team uninstalled the binaries for Sophos anti-virus / productivity-nullifier after out IT team remote-installed it, and it took up > 30% of all available cpu cycles and all disk cycles - even during development!
I hope this doesn't offend the poster, or any of the slashdot "elders", but I am sick and tired of this type of post.
1. Does anyone really care if a failing, over-hyped company such as transmeta may get bought out?
2. Is anyone else sick of "What will this do to Linux" posts?
3. C'mon people, there are plenty of good stories, and I would like there to be a Senseless speculation and/or Linux fears category.
Every day, it seems, there is a new post, about a big evil corporation with plans to fork linux, or perhaps spoon linux, or perhaps make Linus a job offer...
At least discussion of the MPAA gets me fired up & frustrated with stupid laws.
I urge others to speak-up if they too would like a seperate board/section for these stories.
Please - no offense to the poster, this is about the quality and usefullness of slashdot only.
I have seen several friends on H1 Visas abused in the workplace. I would happily join a union that would address this - and other issues.
Now, the above two lines were only an example.
The Real Meat of the matter: * Tech companies expect un-sustainable levels of work from their employees.
* Tech companies will lay-off people without a second thought if it helps the bottom line.
* Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all! (This is taken from real life experience - where a consulting firm completely revamped all employees stock option contract, without protection for wrongful termination / layoffs, and gave us no option but to sign or resign!)
For too long, people have been of the opinion that: Techies are overpaid, and thus should be mistreated.
I believe that Technical people are highly paid, for doing very challenging work, that most of the people (even educated well...) would not be able to or want to do.
Here's my support for Tech Unions and organizing. What does the industry have to fear, if everything is really A-OK already? Might we actually get more than a week of severance when the filthy-rich board of our dot-com decides to lay-off half of the company?
Might people working here, away from their families abroad, actually be able to take reasonable time-off to visit their relatives, and return to work?
Please be reasonable folks... add the influence of the slashdot readers to the Unions organizing. Listen to their goals if you personally meet those organizing, and if you agree with them, support them.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think the same as the original poster - that RF was a non issue, and simply allowed the aircarriers to charge more for services such as airFone etc...
Now that I've spent the time and energy getting my private pilot certificate PP-ASEL (FAA standard etc...) I can tell you that the reason for not allowing 'personal electronics' on commercial aircraft during takeoff and landing is a very sound one.
Commercial flights are always on IFR flight plans. This means Instrument Flight Rules. Thie does Not mean that the flight is being conducted in clouds or other IMC, but that the controllers can expect the flight to behave according to IFR rules.
Now - IFR rules are there for a reason. One - primary navigation - if you have a plane going at any altitude above 18k feet, it has to be on an IFR flight plan, and be positively controlled (Read vectored/guided) by flight control. However, the pilots are still required at all times to avoid things like: Mountains. Many Many crashes, both commercial and private, are due to CFT - Controlled Flight into Terrain. This is when a pilot for reasons of pilot-error, or instrument error, flies a perfectly good airplane and passengers into a mountain or obstruction.
Many airports in the US have large obstructions and mountains in the vicinity of their respective airports. Compasses - while very useful as a cross check, or for VFR day flying, have significant errors accross the US (many places as high as 15 degrees - such as the SF Bay area) - and hence are not always the primary tool - particularly when they show the aircraft heading and not course (with a crosswind, the aircraft is headed somewhat sideways with respect to it's ground course). They use the radio nav aids such as VORs, NDBs, VORTACs, etc...
. There are also 'hidden' hazards such as military training routes that cover much of Northern California and Nevada - where if you veer off course by even a few miles, you could be subject to military intercept procedures, or worse: a midair with a heavy and well-build military aircraft (which often slice thru civilian aircraft). To Sum Up: Unless you want your commercial flight to end up in a mountain, I suggest people don't play with this or treat it litely.
Interference with radio navigation signals is soo easy, that in a recent safety seminar held in Oakland - a flyer was presented that emphasized IFR hold zones - zones simply to keep waiting aircraft an additional distance from the runway and landing guidance ILS/other radio services.
Hey,
well - ok, I don't work for any satellite company, and didn't want to advertise, but here's the PVR with no monthly fee (someone asked)...
Any of the DishNetwork PVRs... The UI is nowhere near as good as TIVO/Replay, but it gets the job done and I'm a happy customer (1 week).
Hey,
:)
I got satellite TV last week. I won't say the brand (don't accuse me of advertising) but suffice it to say it was one of the two major players.
Picture quality: best I've ever seen. Far better than cable (analog) and far, far, *far* better than the crappy digital cable we here have in San Francisco (Thanks AT&T-crapola).
Restrictions: NONE!!!
I purchased a PVR that has no monthly fee - and I can record to outside devices such as VCR without macrovision - even from the PVR recorded content.
Now - I just got this last week - but must say: I'm 110% very happy with it. So flame away, but I'm sure that as soon as they *force* us on to digital TV, and *force* us not to record shows (hmmm - any TIVO fans???) there will be mass exodus from the evil *them* and people will start using alternatives.
Other thoughts: how about TV via DSL/other broadband in 5-10 years??? I think it's possible. Satellite - definitely possible.
For those of you who will flame that they "don't have access to satellite" due to landlords or physical space considerations - I'm sorry & just like many of us look for broadband with our next apartments/homes, I'll be looking for a clear view to the south
quote:
watching it change is like watching evolution in motion
this is a bad pun, or a bad joke, or a funny mistake
I have to agree with you here.
After getting my comment slammed by angry people above, I realized that my one and only personal website has two things on it:
1. Photos
and
2. A Resume
In the current market - # 2 is useless, so how do you all bobby-totin' and courtesy-minded folks suggest that I make my photos accessible?
Wrong Wrong Wrong buddy.
/. is a good and honest forum for tech issues. The simple fact is (no talking out of my ass here) that it would cost my pre-IPO company several hundred thousand dollars to implement ADA standards - while we're barely scraping by as it is...
My company's application website has 1269 active jsps. I don't know if you have ever worked on a web-app, but it's not always easy to just use text to represent things.
Even with globally included menu-navigation, footers, headers, and css, doing a look-and-feel makeover took 3 engineers 4 months to implement and another 2 to test with the cooperation of several product designers and QA staff.
Now - (not directed at this post, but the rude one below with 0-karma). I don't care about my karma. What I do care about, is that
nuff said
Hi,
Let me start by saying that this comment does not make me feel morally superior - in fact the opposite.
The truth of the matter, is that there are multiple considerations (ignoring the specifics of the law for now).
1. The cost to existing and new websites would be extremely high to implement ADA standards. In addition, this could easily shut-down smaller businesses (i.e. those akin to yahoo stores etc...) and those serving small niche markets. A good example of this was a small Australian site selling serialR/C Servo controllers for less than 50% of the cheapest US-made part.
2. The web is not a physical space. I agree with this one also. While I really, really am sympathetic to the disabled, and wish to help-out whenever possible, at what point does the ADA/public-regulated support end? Should highways have bumper-car lanes for those with poor eyesight? Should the stock market have a slow motion exchange for those who need more time to think?
I would support a federally funded (not run) program to provide tools making it easier to design/implement/test sites for accessibility, but c'mon folks - we can't even get HTML compliant browsers...
what do you think would happen if the feds mandated a HTML-ADA spec???
First - I think these guys did an excellent job - and made a nice contribution by publishing their article w/pictures hosted etc...
My issue - is that the security problems are IMHO vastly overstated. I've worked at two companies with WAPs - and those were outside of our corporate/internal firewall.
If someone wanted to work over the WAPs, they would use them like a home DSL line, and simply VPN in. No security problem there.
As for private home users, and even some small businesses (as both my parents run offices with non-secured WAPs) - the security risk is only as great as the value of their data, divided by the cost to get to it. If any of you want to (i) find, and (ii) hack my father's office's legacy Dos-based auto/office management software, than by all means - we've been in need of a windows compatable update!!! (hehe).
But seriously - what use would you have for your neighbor's email or home document/resume, etc... and would you really go thru the trouble of hacking a next-door Pentium running WinXP? I think it's far more likely to be the sploits' of a script/trojan than an individual.
All good companies will have seperate VLANs (or equivalent) running different things - i.e. the WAP should be firewall'd like the rest of the net etc...
Not to mention - anyone can be hacked over the internet, even with firewalls, but to use WAPs, you have to be within the range - typically 1/4km. Do you have the time/car/laptop/battery life to drive to your 'enemy' or soccer-mom's house and hack the encryptions? (yes I can spell - watch some more southpark).
BR
nuff said.
Sorry for swearing - but everyone reading /. is adult enough to get a dose of reality.
... need I go on?
If you're actually reading this thread - you're wasting your time.
do you really care if someone can easily tap your phone conversations?.
More importantly:
is the value of your conversation worth the energy required for someone to crack your phone call?
In a security course (both in college, and later in a Cisco class) we heard that the risk is equal to the value divided by the effort required to get at that value.
Now: I don't believe this quote exactly, but it's point is clear.
Nobody I know would spend the effort required to tap my personal line just to hear something I might not tell them directly.
Further: Companies with secrets can use:
I. Standard Non-Secure Phone Lines
II. Secure VoIP solutions
III.Standard VoIP solutions over a VPN
Great.
/. ever taken a security class? /. ever worked in on security projects and/or audits?
Now, we have to explain one more thing to VCs and MBAs. All they know is there is this thing called a website that exists on a thing called a webserver.
Hasn't anyone on
Has anyone on
Let me break it down for the rest of you:
This ads exactly zero extra security for a well-run website. Most well-run sites already have seperately firewall'd http-webservers and database machines. Some well-run sites have the application server on yet a third firewall'd network (or vlan etc).
Any place worth 5cents will not have valued data sitting on an httpd server!
This is really Ooooga-Boooga in a nutshell for VCs and MBAs trying to make a buck on security-scared VCs and MBAs running other companies.
I don't buy it.
Secure your site properly - as one other poster mentioned, for the less-funded (read: cheap/poor/startup/blah) company/service you can simply mount a CD-R with your site's static content on it. Even JSPs can live on a CDr (as long as they're precompiled into servlets, or there's a scratch disk for the JSP-container to compile them).
Finally, real action by a recognized key-player in the space of online communities.
/. readers, and we WILL support you in these important acts.
Imagine if one of the key slashdot players joined with the EFF and sued the RIAA for a declaratory judgement that mp3 use was legal.
My goal in this post is not to pressure any slashdot hanchos, nor criticize anyone.
Simply this:
Please: Those of you in the community with name-recognition, use your influence for good causes other than running linux on an aibo. You have the ears of 100,000s of
Now - off to the eff to make a donation.
Please read:
The ATC / Control Tower is never responsible for controlling the aircraft, nor actually guiding aircraft between hills/etc. Even in a busy place like the San Francisco Bay, the ATC advises of traffic and coordinates inbound and outbound traffic lanes to keep traffic well spaced. ATC typical instructions, even with hills very nearby (1nm) usually consist of a destination landmark or vector, and an altitude.
Not to rant or anything, but from what I understand, the current system is incredibly out of date. It is important, not only to update the ATC gear, but that the FAA institude a complete overhaul of avionics. It is now possible with less than $1000 of gear to have in-flight collision detectors based on GPS, but this is uncommon on private aircraft costing $100k+.
Just my 2 cents.
This article is utter garbage!!!
The first link (off-site) from the article referred to, in fact the makor of said "RF-Lightning-Craptacular VC-Money Whoring" company has a "our website is under construction" on it.
C'mon people - stop posting obvious flamebait articles at the highest level. This was a freakin waste of everyone's time.
Holy Bagels Batman:
If people start talking to other people, and agreeing on ideas, and practicing what they preach, who knows what will happen!
but seriously, while I personally have no problem with shopping for used books to save some $$$, what's not to like about authors speaking their minds. it's not like they hacked Amazon's website to remove the books - they simply made a group decision not to link to Amazon when it comes to promoting their book sales.
I really don't see the big deal here, and hope this doesn't become a flame war between people arguing over the virtues of used books, and those calling the authors elitist or whatever.
I currently work in an organization with 75 Engineers (50 USA, 20 India, 5 Asia) - and we use CVS. It's free, easy to use, and has a simple feature set so that more than one person has enough knowledge to do things like branching and merging branches.
We nearly never have merge problems. It is standard procedure that people keep their tree up-to-date with the cvs tree, and thus conflicts rarely arrise. Even at crunch-time, I probably have one merge conflict every 2 weeks, and with CVS - you are notified of the conflict and it is wrapped with CVS comments.
To put this in perspective - while at Oracle with 1000s of engineers working on the same tree, we used ClearCase and it was awesome. The difference here is that there was much steeper a learning curve, and no normal engineers could actually do complex tasks - i.e. create branches etc. We had a complete groud dedicated to ClearCase.
Conclusion:
Educate your engineers - and politely have the senior engineers tell them when they mess up - enforce a policy that people must update the source every day that they plan on checking-in files.
Also - I don't know what CVS versio you are using, but the latest free WinCVS client will not allow you to check in a file with a conflict! It will force you to update/merge/resolve the conflict before updating the tree. I highly recommend CVS and WinCVS due to the ease of use and cost.
The time article, and concept is really nothing that should incite the civil libertarian crowd. It mentions nothing of the rampant drivers license fraud already taking place in California and other states.
The main difference talked about in the article, is that a national system would allow law enforcment to check the record of someone in their home state when they are travelling. While there is a one-liner about biometric additions to the licenses, c'mon, do you really believe each state will implement a unique biometric system, or perhaps more imposing - that every person with a drivers license will have to stop-by the DMV and update their biometric scan?
This is merely the "homeland security" office attempt at getting the most gain from the least expense, and makes complete sense. For those who can't afford to purchase a "clean" drivers license, it would me much more difficult to hide convictions/offenses/immigration violations if your record followed you to any state.
Uh - I don't know where you're getting this.
"Completely theoretical" ?????
Please - raise your hands if you've ever actually developed anything beyond asp for IIS?
It crashes left and right, with no memory protection for in process DLLs or custom proxy-plug-ins.
I don't care about the mod for this, but IIS is a piece of crap, with poor logging and it's easy to crash.
Hey - I don't need any mod+ on this, but have to agree with you. Tomcat isn't a triumph, which is why I added the caveat that I was only referring to it's error-log implementation and configuration.
Apache is definitely a triumph.
Why does it seem like there are as many people in the "community" criticizing open source as there are supporting it?
Two Words: Apache and Tomcat
I'm a professional who works with the closed source equivalents all the time: Netscape iPlanet server, IIS and WebLogic.
Now: before you flame - I like working with WebLogic, but it is no better than Tomcat in my opinion (as far as error reporting goes). And IIS is a piece of crap! Not to mention Netscape's overly complecated UI that blasts every change you've ever made and is completely out of sync with the flat file configs.
Need I mention that Tomcat error logging is set-up in an XML file that is easy to read, modify, and translate into a simple report for management (IT that is).
When was the last time Windows gave you a nice error.log when it blue-screened, or how about IIS on a buffer overflow?
I'm sick of bashing on the free stuff out there. Sure, just because I can release one of my college projects into the open source may mean that statistically there are more projects without good error reporting, the real projects are pretty darn good.
Hello fellow /.ers. I'm not a legal scholar, but please hear me out.
/.ing a senator's video-voicemail box at home?
I think if the supreme court was asked weather I had the right to make a war-dailer script to call everyone in the country and harass them (and somehow do it for free without direct stealing of telco services), the supreme court would say no. If they were asked if I could hire 100,000 political 'activists', to manually dial/call every phone number in the country, and speak to them in an interactive, human voice, the decision might be different.
Before you go off on my first point, please read on:
Companies that Spam are not doing anything that the constitution was designed to protect, nor the first amendment. Freedom of speech, while it has been expanded to several media forms beyond the original spoken-word/printed-text, does not mean random harassment. I'm sure if you stood outside of a school-building screaming profanities for months on end, the school/courts/supreme-court would prosecute you. If there isn't a law now, they would write and approve one!
Freedom of speech is simply a ploy by companies to excuse their behavior. While the common company party-line is 'to provide you with useful services' - think of the long term effects of digitally-created/automated 'freedom of speech'. What would keep us from
What would keep us from generating real physical mail by the thousands of pieces, and mailing it to a politician just to 'spam' them, or essentially perform a DOS attack on them.
The reality, as an earlier writer mentions, is that: Spam is a form of speach that denies people access to:
Peace and Quiet
Sanctity of the home
their own useful information
Sometimes, in a real society, philosophy and idealism has to give way to reality.
Until computers are sentient, they do not have freedom of speech.
We're gonna put Bill Gates in the Poor-house!
I can't wait until it's easy to download pirated versions of Java/Oreilly books via gnureadster(tm). But seriously:
I will have a bookcase with real books on it, until someone with guns forcefully removes it from my house. You can't display great works of literature, or get the inspiration from a library, by reading an MP3-style playlist, and double clicking "War and Peace".
I enjoy not having to crypto-sign a release for a friend to borrow my copy of "1984", or even "Java in a Nutshell".
I think the only place for this is high-volume, low-cost books/literature:
Newspapers
Magazines
etc... etc...
When Computer books cost $80 or more, and travel books the same size/weight in paper can cost $9.95, it makes you wonder. The cost in publishing, is writing, editing, promotion, and distribution - of which only distribution is made partially easier with e-books.
I don't think many people would choose to have Java in a Nutshell for a mere $4.95 discount, in e-form only, dependent on electricity, etc...
My past two companies had their exchange servers overloaded and subsequently taken offline for several days.
Cost to company: No dumb powerpoints for a few days!.
The engineers who accounted for the majority of revenue at both firms, were able to continue working with less interruption from marketing weenies for hours on end. Our meetings went smoothly without M$ Project / Powerpoint files distributed by email.
At both companies, the IT departments were completely ill-prepared to deal with such problems.
In fact, Power outages at both firms over 6 months ago (not related to current CA power funkiness), knocked out email and fileservers because of our IT department's small budget and poorly trained staff.
Bottom line: Find, Pay, Train, and Retain good IT staff, and fund them well enough to keep the business running.
PG&E working down the street shouldn't disable engineering fileservers for a few days due to inadequate backups, nor should virii.
F$CK the client side virus scanners that bog down our systems. Our entire engineering team uninstalled the binaries for Sophos anti-virus / productivity-nullifier after out IT team remote-installed it, and it took up > 30% of all available cpu cycles and all disk cycles - even during development!
I hope this doesn't offend the poster, or any of the slashdot "elders", but I am sick and tired of this type of post.
1. Does anyone really care if a failing, over-hyped company such as transmeta may get bought out?
2. Is anyone else sick of "What will this do to Linux" posts?
3. C'mon people, there are plenty of good stories, and I would like there to be a Senseless speculation and/or Linux fears category.
Every day, it seems, there is a new post, about a big evil corporation with plans to fork linux, or perhaps spoon linux, or perhaps make Linus a job offer...
At least discussion of the MPAA gets me fired up & frustrated with stupid laws.
I urge others to speak-up if they too would like a seperate board/section for these stories.
Please - no offense to the poster, this is about the quality and usefullness of slashdot only.
I survived the hype of survivor.
Please read this before flaming ;)
I have seen several friends on H1 Visas abused in the workplace. I would happily join a union that would address this - and other issues.
Now, the above two lines were only an example.
The Real Meat of the matter:
* Tech companies expect un-sustainable levels of work from their employees.
* Tech companies will lay-off people without a second thought if it helps the bottom line.
* Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all! (This is taken from real life experience - where a consulting firm completely revamped all employees stock option contract, without protection for wrongful termination / layoffs, and gave us no option but to sign or resign!)
For too long, people have been of the opinion that: Techies are overpaid, and thus should be mistreated.
I believe that Technical people are highly paid, for doing very challenging work, that most of the people (even educated well...) would not be able to or want to do.
Here's my support for Tech Unions and organizing. What does the industry have to fear, if everything is really A-OK already?
Might we actually get more than a week of severance when the filthy-rich board of our dot-com decides to lay-off half of the company?
Might people working here, away from their families abroad, actually be able to take reasonable time-off to visit their relatives, and return to work?
Please be reasonable folks... add the influence of the slashdot readers to the Unions organizing. Listen to their goals if you personally meet those organizing, and if you agree with them, support them.