So, Mr Dawson took the time to leave everything else intact, but go out of his way to hunt down another link to a large corporate site. Hmmmm. He didn't pick the chronologically first one, which mine wasn't, and I can't see any real difference between the articles posted on the topic. The briefing Priest gave wasn't all that long or in depth, so we pretty much all got the same story.
Normally I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I did just spend the better part of a week at Defcon.
Jeff Bezos is wrong, Amazon's "'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles." is not a correct statement. DRM use was " the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.". OK, maybe not out of line with their principles, they are the purveyors of the 1-click patent if you recall.
As it just goes to show, if you pay for digital media, you get screwed. If you pirate it, you get a demonstrably and provably better product, albeit an illegal one. Then again, should you exercise your fair use rights to say, move it to a different device like your phone, you are being just as illegal, so is there a difference? Oh yeah, about $7.99.
So, here is a heartfelt response to Mr. Bezos: Jeff, if you are serious about caring for your customers, lose the DRM entirely. If not, you are nothing more than a hypocritical patent troll trying to polish your halo in public after getting caught doing something unsavory.
I have a Sony TZ right now, $3400. It started falling apart after 2 days. The SD card reader never worked, and in general, it has the fit and finish that would make a 1970s Detroit auto worker cringe. I got this as a gift, so I couldn't return it.:( All of the 'special' features don't work if you use any OS other than the one shipped on them, and they put you at the mercy of Sony's marginal support and non-existent driver upgrades. Upgrading to XP is so much pain it is not tenable, Linux is....... not easy, but I have Ububtu 8.10 FWIW on it now.
Sony makes beautiful (sometimes) parts that sell for a premium, and fall apart. If you buy a Sony computer, you have to be in their target audience, rich and dumb. If you know anything about PCs and buy one, you are, in my definitely not humble opinion, are an idiot.
Most people don't realize this, but birds are very smart. They learn very quickly after getting hit by an airplane or being sucked into an engine, they NEVER do it a second time. People are usually not that smart, but birds learn quickly.
The thing that most people don't get is that the spammers are known. We know where they are, we know who they are, and how they work. Cash does get traced, and it can't be hidden all that well.
The problem is that most of these cretins are either in countries that have governments that don't care, have no laws against this, or have better things to do. In some cases, they are, or have purchased the government.
So, since we know who they are, where they are, and many of the details, the solution is simple.
The US military has lots of guns and people trained to use them. If these people start showing up somewhat decomposed with a can of Spam (the meat-like product) in their mouths, people will get the message. Toss complicit ISPs in there, and viola, for the cost of a few bullets, spam goes away.
The only reason it is prevalent is that there is no down side to it. If people who advertised on it, stuffed it out there, or facilitated it's transfer start tipping up dead, well, things change quick.
Until then, basically they are smarter than you, have more time than you, and will beat any filter you put into place.
"It probably wasn't intentional". Yup, you are almost assuredly right. It does however show how piss-poor MS testing and QA is though. Then again, if you use their products, this is not news.
You. Yes you. You are the best filter for your kids. Keep them close when they are surfing, and educate them as to what is right and what is wrong.
Don't abdicate your parental responsibilities to a glorified script, do the work. You had the kid(s), you need to take responsibility. If you are going to allow them to use the net, you have to police it.
If you don't, things will lead to heavy metal music, video games, then mass murder, the choice is yours. (yes, that was sarcasm)
Seriously though, live up to your responsibilities, and you AND your child will be better off. No filter can or will do this, nor will it answer questions and educate.
I have 'pre-announced' several layoffs for tech companies over the years. None of it was malicious, none of it was meant to harm, it is just news that dropped into my lap. If management lets it get out to the press before they tell the employees, they are doing something very wrong. That said, most companies fall into this category.
This one is easy. Find out how much your university paid for the MS licenses over the last few contracts. Divide that by the number of students/users/relevant people to get a 'cost'. Then point out to the students, publicly and loudly, that because the University management felt compelled to enrich the billionaires at MS, they paid $xxxx more each year.
Then say there are just as good alternatives that will not only allow them to save money, but be more secure and take copies home to use on their home machines. Play up the lack of handcuffs and cost.
Make a list of application and total cost spent, then do it for application vs cost spent per student.
If that doesn't do it, people are dumb sheep that will never wake up. Shit, we have lost already.
Like he said, it is a murder simulator. You analyze your network performance to find out who you have to kill for torrenting porn at work, sucking up all YOUR bandwidth.
Am I the only one wondering what this story is about? Who is this guy, and why should we care? Everywhere I go on the net, I see references to him, and now it has invaded the geek sites I live on. SIGH.
Can we get back to cat pictures and things labeled fail again so I can feel secure?
-Charlie
(Note: The new/. engine strips out HTML sarcasm tags. Please imagine they are there.)
Numbers are totally irrelevant, or at least their magnitude is. The point is that Canonical is self-sustaining. Last time I checked, Mr Shuttleworth did not need the cash to mend his shoes, he wanted to make something that was good.
When Canonical becomes self-sustaining, he will have accomplished that goal. This means development will be funded, marketing efforts will be ongoing, and with luck, people will make money.
This means that if you like and use Ubuntu, it will be there in the future. I do for both, so this is very good.
The more money it makes, given their structure, the more development and marketing they will be able to do. I don't know the financial structure of Canonical, but I doubt the people with a piece of it are more interested in money than changing the world. That likely means the people who own it will dump the majority of anything over the $30M back into the distro.
If you see what they did with $30M, imagine what an extra $10M can do?
I do the computers for an organization of group homes for developmentally disabled people (www.wingspanlife.org), basically keep them running and patched.
They have some critical needs to put things that require recurrent paperwork on the net so that administration time can be cut, and to possibly avoid errors. Basically everything from time sheets to medication logs, simple forms that are tallied, reports generated, and the usual light duty stuff.
The problem is HIPPA and related patient privacy laws. It has to be secure, logged, and locked down in addition to being behind their existing firewall. At least that way it saves them the hassle of auditing where it will be posted.
My idea was to make an open source app/database/forms for doing this, but given my lack of security skills and the nuances of HIPPA, I can't do it myself. One missed key or hole, and the whole organization is in a world of governmental hurt.
If anyone wants to take a stab at this, or knows of an existing program/framework that does it, I would be glad to help out with my knowledge of the organization.
Given their recent budget cuts, there is no chance of pay at all, but you would be given a lot of praise, resume backing, and something you can point to that a large organization depends on. I would also be willing (if my editors agree - I write for the Inquirer FWIW) to post a story about it with your name in it.
Nothing hugely technical, just the Is dotted and the Ts crossed, while going back and forth until it is made the way they need it to be made. It will have a userbase of half really bright people, half mouth-breathers (the staff that is).
The idea is to free up time (and by proxy, money) to allow the staff to care for the people, not do repetitive paperwork. If it gets to a usable state, then post it somewhere so others can use it as well. Most of the forms are common to health care providers, or can be easily adapted.
If there is anyone interested, message or mail me. They are a completely legitimate charity, but you can't take a writeoff for time given.
-Charlie
Disclaimer: I spend a lot of time fixing their machines and servers, hours a week, and last I heard, was the single largest non-institutional donor they had. I put my money where my mouth is basically, and don't call for help so I can avoid work.
Yeah, but the key is simple, did data mining make the story, or did the story get noticed by data mining.
To use your infant mortality example, do you think that someone or a program was poking away at a database, noticed the correlation, and ran with it, or do you think someone had a theory and tested it by data mining? I would be willing to bet it is the latter, IE someone noticed a high rate of infant mortality, and tossed out a bunch of what if queries.
To me, and you very well might differ on this, the impetus for the story was already there, and the writer just proved the point with the data.
I agree with that, but do you think the person doing the mining decided to mine all option performance for all companies over the course of the last few years, or do you think they were working on a tip/hunch?
The situation you describe is some investigative journalist noticing something, and then using data mining as a tool to verify the issue. I may be wrong on this, but to me, there was a biological program at work that decided what and how to use the silicon program.
That is not to say the mining wasn't valuable, just that it was a tool, not the start, of the investigation. Having done some things like this myself, I can say it is usually a person noticing/overhearing/flat out being told of a problem, then they go on to prove or verify it enough to write.
As someone who does investigative journalism for a living, data mining won't get you squat. Having done it for a living for 5+ years, and being very familiar with data mining, the two so rarely cross paths that it rounds to zero.
Why? Because if it is in minable form, it doesn't take any digging to find. If you can run a google search and get even a tidbit about what you need, you don't need investigative journalism.
Of the stories I have gotten, little ones like the P4 going 64 bits, it never reaching 4GHz, Dell exploding laptops (an assist on that one), and more recently the Nvidia bump cracking problem(s), none of that would have been possible through data mining.
If it is out there, it doesn't need an investigative journalist. If it isn't, than data mining won't help. The end.
People, remember, this is s rigorous scientific experiment based on literally billions of dollars worth of equipment.
If you look at this scientifically, the obvious conclusion is that spiders in space have a 50% chance of spontaneously developing teleportation powers. This vital experiment should put to rest all the loonies who claim space can't do that to people, we have hard proof now.
The more pressing question is why didn't NASA talk about the gecko heat vision experiments in the next chamber over?
Two words will get you far in this situation, Command Line. Low bandwidth, latency tolerant, and generally asynchronous. If you can get any tools with a command line option, embrace them.
GUIs suck, and they suck more over the conditions you describe. Avoid them like the plague. Also, think about mirroring the files you need to manage and editing them locally, then uploading them when you are done. Not always possible, but if it is doable, it can make your life a lot easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you really don't have a clue.
1) I am the source, I was there.
2) It is not a blog, it is a news site.
3) Why did they link me the day before then? http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/1658258/Apple-Keyboard-Firmware-Hack-Demonstrated
4) I won't make this personal and point out my feelings about your intelligence.
-Charlie
I screwed up, blame a week or so of no sleep. The second link should be.....
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/08/02/moron-tries-scamming-fake-atm-defcon/
Sorry.
-Charlie
What makes me really wonder about this post is why KDawson took my original submission here:
http://it.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=5416205&op=view
and edited ONLY the link. It originally pointed to my site here:
http://it.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=5416205&op=view
So, Mr Dawson took the time to leave everything else intact, but go out of his way to hunt down another link to a large corporate site. Hmmmm. He didn't pick the chronologically first one, which mine wasn't, and I can't see any real difference between the articles posted on the topic. The briefing Priest gave wasn't all that long or in depth, so we pretty much all got the same story.
Normally I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I did just spend the better part of a week at Defcon.
Mr. Dawson, can you explain?
-Charlie
Jeff Bezos is wrong, Amazon's "'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles." is not a correct statement. DRM use was " the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.". OK, maybe not out of line with their principles, they are the purveyors of the 1-click patent if you recall.
As it just goes to show, if you pay for digital media, you get screwed. If you pirate it, you get a demonstrably and provably better product, albeit an illegal one. Then again, should you exercise your fair use rights to say, move it to a different device like your phone, you are being just as illegal, so is there a difference? Oh yeah, about $7.99.
So, here is a heartfelt response to Mr. Bezos: Jeff, if you are serious about caring for your customers, lose the DRM entirely. If not, you are nothing more than a hypocritical patent troll trying to polish your halo in public after getting caught doing something unsavory.
-Charlie
I have a Sony TZ right now, $3400. It started falling apart after 2 days. The SD card reader never worked, and in general, it has the fit and finish that would make a 1970s Detroit auto worker cringe. I got this as a gift, so I couldn't return it. :( All of the 'special' features don't work if you use any OS other than the one shipped on them, and they put you at the mercy of Sony's marginal support and non-existent driver upgrades. Upgrading to XP is so much pain it is not tenable, Linux is....... not easy, but I have Ububtu 8.10 FWIW on it now.
Sony makes beautiful (sometimes) parts that sell for a premium, and fall apart. If you buy a Sony computer, you have to be in their target audience, rich and dumb. If you know anything about PCs and buy one, you are, in my definitely not humble opinion, are an idiot.
-Charlie
Last time I checked, the only Sony store I know of, across from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, closed. Can we persuade MS to take their lead?
-Charlie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_gpPbpONK4
And a bit more here:
http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Man_Sucked_Into_Jet_Engine
Good enough?
-Charlie
By 'them', do you mean the planes or the birds?
-Charlie
Most people don't realize this, but birds are very smart. They learn very quickly after getting hit by an airplane or being sucked into an engine, they NEVER do it a second time. People are usually not that smart, but birds learn quickly.
-Charlie
The thing that most people don't get is that the spammers are known. We know where they are, we know who they are, and how they work. Cash does get traced, and it can't be hidden all that well.
The problem is that most of these cretins are either in countries that have governments that don't care, have no laws against this, or have better things to do. In some cases, they are, or have purchased the government.
So, since we know who they are, where they are, and many of the details, the solution is simple.
The US military has lots of guns and people trained to use them. If these people start showing up somewhat decomposed with a can of Spam (the meat-like product) in their mouths, people will get the message. Toss complicit ISPs in there, and viola, for the cost of a few bullets, spam goes away.
The only reason it is prevalent is that there is no down side to it. If people who advertised on it, stuffed it out there, or facilitated it's transfer start tipping up dead, well, things change quick.
Until then, basically they are smarter than you, have more time than you, and will beat any filter you put into place.
Any other questions?
-Charlie
I don't know, he seemed to think I was a psycho when I asked him about it.(1)
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1012711/inq-interviews-the-gaming-greats
-Charlie
(1) I am, but not in that way.
"It probably wasn't intentional". Yup, you are almost assuredly right. It does however show how piss-poor MS testing and QA is though. Then again, if you use their products, this is not news.
-Charlie
You. Yes you. You are the best filter for your kids. Keep them close when they are surfing, and educate them as to what is right and what is wrong.
Don't abdicate your parental responsibilities to a glorified script, do the work. You had the kid(s), you need to take responsibility. If you are going to allow them to use the net, you have to police it.
If you don't, things will lead to heavy metal music, video games, then mass murder, the choice is yours. (yes, that was sarcasm)
Seriously though, live up to your responsibilities, and you AND your child will be better off. No filter can or will do this, nor will it answer questions and educate.
-Charlie
"Who knew suing potential customers would ruin your business?"
SCO did. Worked for them as well.
-Charlie
I have 'pre-announced' several layoffs for tech companies over the years. None of it was malicious, none of it was meant to harm, it is just news that dropped into my lap. If management lets it get out to the press before they tell the employees, they are doing something very wrong. That said, most companies fall into this category.
*SIGH*
-Charlie
This one is easy. Find out how much your university paid for the MS licenses over the last few contracts. Divide that by the number of students/users/relevant people to get a 'cost'. Then point out to the students, publicly and loudly, that because the University management felt compelled to enrich the billionaires at MS, they paid $xxxx more each year.
Then say there are just as good alternatives that will not only allow them to save money, but be more secure and take copies home to use on their home machines. Play up the lack of handcuffs and cost.
Make a list of application and total cost spent, then do it for application vs cost spent per student.
If that doesn't do it, people are dumb sheep that will never wake up. Shit, we have lost already.
-Charlie
Like he said, it is a murder simulator. You analyze your network performance to find out who you have to kill for torrenting porn at work, sucking up all YOUR bandwidth.
-Charlie
Am I the only one wondering what this story is about? Who is this guy, and why should we care? Everywhere I go on the net, I see references to him, and now it has invaded the geek sites I live on. SIGH.
Can we get back to cat pictures and things labeled fail again so I can feel secure?
-Charlie
(Note: The new /. engine strips out HTML sarcasm tags. Please imagine they are there.)
Numbers are totally irrelevant, or at least their magnitude is. The point is that Canonical is self-sustaining. Last time I checked, Mr Shuttleworth did not need the cash to mend his shoes, he wanted to make something that was good.
When Canonical becomes self-sustaining, he will have accomplished that goal. This means development will be funded, marketing efforts will be ongoing, and with luck, people will make money.
This means that if you like and use Ubuntu, it will be there in the future. I do for both, so this is very good.
The more money it makes, given their structure, the more development and marketing they will be able to do. I don't know the financial structure of Canonical, but I doubt the people with a piece of it are more interested in money than changing the world. That likely means the people who own it will dump the majority of anything over the $30M back into the distro.
If you see what they did with $30M, imagine what an extra $10M can do?
This is a good thing.
-Charlie
I do the computers for an organization of group homes for developmentally disabled people (www.wingspanlife.org), basically keep them running and patched.
They have some critical needs to put things that require recurrent paperwork on the net so that administration time can be cut, and to possibly avoid errors. Basically everything from time sheets to medication logs, simple forms that are tallied, reports generated, and the usual light duty stuff.
The problem is HIPPA and related patient privacy laws. It has to be secure, logged, and locked down in addition to being behind their existing firewall. At least that way it saves them the hassle of auditing where it will be posted.
My idea was to make an open source app/database/forms for doing this, but given my lack of security skills and the nuances of HIPPA, I can't do it myself. One missed key or hole, and the whole organization is in a world of governmental hurt.
If anyone wants to take a stab at this, or knows of an existing program/framework that does it, I would be glad to help out with my knowledge of the organization.
Given their recent budget cuts, there is no chance of pay at all, but you would be given a lot of praise, resume backing, and something you can point to that a large organization depends on. I would also be willing (if my editors agree - I write for the Inquirer FWIW) to post a story about it with your name in it.
Nothing hugely technical, just the Is dotted and the Ts crossed, while going back and forth until it is made the way they need it to be made. It will have a userbase of half really bright people, half mouth-breathers (the staff that is).
The idea is to free up time (and by proxy, money) to allow the staff to care for the people, not do repetitive paperwork. If it gets to a usable state, then post it somewhere so others can use it as well. Most of the forms are common to health care providers, or can be easily adapted.
If there is anyone interested, message or mail me. They are a completely legitimate charity, but you can't take a writeoff for time given.
-Charlie
Disclaimer: I spend a lot of time fixing their machines and servers, hours a week, and last I heard, was the single largest non-institutional donor they had. I put my money where my mouth is basically, and don't call for help so I can avoid work.
Yeah, but the key is simple, did data mining make the story, or did the story get noticed by data mining.
To use your infant mortality example, do you think that someone or a program was poking away at a database, noticed the correlation, and ran with it, or do you think someone had a theory and tested it by data mining? I would be willing to bet it is the latter, IE someone noticed a high rate of infant mortality, and tossed out a bunch of what if queries.
To me, and you very well might differ on this, the impetus for the story was already there, and the writer just proved the point with the data.
-Charlie
I agree with that, but do you think the person doing the mining decided to mine all option performance for all companies over the course of the last few years, or do you think they were working on a tip/hunch?
The situation you describe is some investigative journalist noticing something, and then using data mining as a tool to verify the issue. I may be wrong on this, but to me, there was a biological program at work that decided what and how to use the silicon program.
That is not to say the mining wasn't valuable, just that it was a tool, not the start, of the investigation. Having done some things like this myself, I can say it is usually a person noticing/overhearing/flat out being told of a problem, then they go on to prove or verify it enough to write.
-Charlie
As someone who does investigative journalism for a living, data mining won't get you squat. Having done it for a living for 5+ years, and being very familiar with data mining, the two so rarely cross paths that it rounds to zero.
Why? Because if it is in minable form, it doesn't take any digging to find. If you can run a google search and get even a tidbit about what you need, you don't need investigative journalism.
Of the stories I have gotten, little ones like the P4 going 64 bits, it never reaching 4GHz, Dell exploding laptops (an assist on that one), and more recently the Nvidia bump cracking problem(s), none of that would have been possible through data mining.
If it is out there, it doesn't need an investigative journalist. If it isn't, than data mining won't help. The end.
-Charlie
People, remember, this is s rigorous scientific experiment based on literally billions of dollars worth of equipment.
If you look at this scientifically, the obvious conclusion is that spiders in space have a 50% chance of spontaneously developing teleportation powers. This vital experiment should put to rest all the loonies who claim space can't do that to people, we have hard proof now.
The more pressing question is why didn't NASA talk about the gecko heat vision experiments in the next chamber over?
-Charlie
Two words will get you far in this situation, Command Line. Low bandwidth, latency tolerant, and generally asynchronous. If you can get any tools with a command line option, embrace them.
GUIs suck, and they suck more over the conditions you describe. Avoid them like the plague. Also, think about mirroring the files you need to manage and editing them locally, then uploading them when you are done. Not always possible, but if it is doable, it can make your life a lot easier.
Scripting is your friend here.
-Charlie