"I fundamentally object to carving out the Internet. Let's not single out and attack the medium,"
Except of course, if something on the internet is happening, which prevents it from turning into how we see it.
Namely those terrorists, who want to keep us from turning the Internet into a huge Cable Television thingie and a gigantic technicolor shopping mall, generation Bazillions of $$$.
The studies published Monday conclude that proposals to limit companies from sharing or selling customer information without permission would cost 90 of the largest financial institutions $17 billion a year of added expenses, and would result in a $1 billion "information tax" on consumers through costs tacked onto products from catalogs and Internet retailers.
Yeah right, of course those companies have the right to waste my time, by spamming me by every available means and at my expense.
What's really worrysome is that given enough money, those jokers are actually able to turn this into a repectable organisation with near-official status. See the BSA.
Linux, therefore, is only a hassle to run right now
See, when I incorporated my company somewhat over a year ago, I took the chance to run it as a (almost) Linux only shop.
The learning curve was (sometimes still is) steep. Wasting a day on hooking up a modem, only to find out it's defective, is no fun. Wading through an initially slightly incomprehensible documentation until you reach the point, where you find it's very well documented can be frustrating at times, but...
I use computers since 83 (ZX81, anyone ?). I really loved Macs at the end of the 80s, I could arrange myself with the somewhat flimsy DOS.
Things went straight to hell, when the evil empire introduced Windows, and even more so with the 9x incarnations.
Sure, you have a huge amount of software to chose from and pay the price of DL(hel)L, just for your attempt to try something and install it. FAT is a joke and virtually useless when you tinker with databases and every 6 month your best option is an installation from scratch; that's an isolated machine, I'm not even getting into networks.
Then there is the fact, that you're notoriously ripped off. I overall paid 600$ in licensing and upgrade fees for Win2k for a Dell notebook, for which I licensed and paid for the very same software, because the gangsters in Redmond decide that I'm only entitled to my Recovery Disk of the software.
Linux at this stage ist the OS that lets me work fairly painless since almost a year now.
Is it 100% perfect ? No, of course not. But if things break down, if software doesn't run or compile, it's either not vital or I can get around it. Usually by spending a fairly small amount of time.
Oh, yeah: And if M$ really goes through with their mandatory registration scheme. This W2K partition on my Latitude is the very last piece of M$ software I purchased and installed. EVER!!!
They have severe memory restrictions. Once we get to 128M palms
Yes, of course they do. There's also no threading, let alone multitasking.
On the other hand, ther's a stunningly small footprint. You have applications, that take 7-10k and are just great (even games).
As long Palm doesn't start to feature bloat it's products (in my book, even the IIIC was a stupid move). I'm very happy with what it provides.
It probably really depends where you're coming from: As a geek gizmo the Palm seems a bit, well, lame; if you find professional applications however then its simplicity (including itslimitations) is actually very appealing...
What disturbs me with pocket PCs is that M$ attempted to squeeze a desktop user interface into a PDA, while the Palm UI appears to be designed for just that.
It's sort of like some braindead marketers cooked up WAP, to give you the convenience of Web browsing on an eeny tiny display in black & white. I have yet to see a WAP service that a) works and b) adds some sort of value.
Further, I don't need features like color, the ability to play videaos or to listen to sound. I need (simple, almost primitive) software like Titrax to bill my customers and mangle the data into a perl script at the end of the month, which in turn mangles it into a nice, proper invoice.
I'm not slamming CE here, I'm just definitely not in their focus group.
Springboards I & II, which are aparrently incompatible
Memory sticks, for Sonys incarnation of the Palm platform
Palm, which doesn't really provide expansion, save for a keyboard, or a modem
Methinks, that if I'm in the business of building peripherals for the palm platform, I'd search for another field.
As much I love the Palm for it's simplicity and it's straightforwardness the concept of multiple, incompatible extension slots/ports is just damn stupid.
This reminds somewhat of Felix Somm, at that time European manager of Compuserve, who was found guilty by a Bavarian court. His heinous crime was that users where able to download pics of nekkid people and such and this is considered ptui and illegal within Bavarian moral standards.
Never mind that he was acquited a couple years later by a higher court. Huge damage was done alredy.
However, this was no match for the greatest damage that happened to Compuserve users. That was the buyout by AOL...
I don't see how this is different to making millions off dealing drugs and storing it in a swiss bank -- or a similiar situation for tax evasion purposes.
You're trolling here, right ? Or do you really want to tell us that swapping music is comparable to drug traffiking and money laundering ? Man, you should really stop reading tis MPAA/RIAA propaganda crap. You know, they lie a lot...
Maybe (IANAL, so I can only say maybe) this avoids responsibility but does this make it any less illegal?
Well, it depends. Check out Havenco's AUP. It's an interesting read and they don't permit to have everything hosted on their servers (e.g. spam is explicitely prohibited).
Arguably Sealand is an indpendent country and its governmental structure doesn't leave much leeway for brib^H^H^H^H threat^H^H^H^H^H^H buying l^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H to lobby it into putting more value into protection of corporate interests then individual rights.
Thankfully, the US doesn't have world jurisdiction. Recent incidents (supreme court on presidential elections, DeCSS ruling, eToys vs. the etoy.CORPORATION, etc...) make me believe that this would be a very bad idea indeed.
BTW: I never downloaded an MP3. It's just too darn tedious and expensive in Europe.
You say, that you could live well for a while with just those two initial customers. What comes into mind, when I read your question is the following:
I assume, that you work for a reasonable employer. I also assume, it's not a three man company, that they have resources, a marketing budget and even a decent sales force.
A further complication might be, that (another assumption) you know your future customers via your current employer. This would complicate things tremendously.
The first thing I'd do is talk to a lawyer, as it was said already.
Next, aim for a joint marketing agreement, where you license your product to your employer. As there appears to be an interest on the market, this could be a sweet deal for everybody involved. Plus his customer gets the product in 2-3 weeks and is a damn happy camper.
I worked for a version 1.0 company that had a great product, years ahead of it's time. The company went bust of course, because we had no clue what sales and marketing means. Even if you get 1/3 of the gross sales and a cut of the support fees, that could turn out into a much sweeter deal, then when you have to knock on doors yourself, or find out the hard way, that sales/marketing eat 50% of your turnover.
Whatever you do, don't try sneaky deals here. If you're employer is reasonable and you come with a good proposal, both profit. If however your employer feels crossed, you're essentially fucked.
A working micropayment infrastructure would be a good idea, provided a few must-haves are implemented.
Most importantly: Anonymity!
I really wouldn't want my fellow/.ers to know that I hang around Britney Spears chat rooms, or subscribe to Dear Abby.
For my part, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount for qualitycontent. There are really valuable resources and it's sure nice to get them for free. But for the contents dear to me (say Google or a huge repository of Linux documentation I see absolutely no problem to shell out a couple bucks a month, if this is necessary to maintain those resources without a streaming video showing a car commercial.
Implementation should be on a broad scale. So that spammers could be charged for their crap and small transactions can be handled transaprently, securely and anonymously.
Anonymity is probably the killer criteria, but I'll have to leave this problem to cryptographically far more competent folks.
Actually the name (python) derives from Monty Python. The inventors where looking for a snappy name and liked Monty Python movies. At least the FAQ says so...
In any legal case - and the brief supports that statement - you can bet that they drag out all the dirt and all the dead bodies ever hiden away. Regardless if there's merrit or not.
Nevermind that IT professionals and security consultants read hacker-zines. At least if they have a quarter of a clue they should...
Actually here (Switzerland that is) there is a really cool service that you can use with top of the line ISDN phones.
Basically for a price (25 cents) you have a real time reverse directory lookup feature. On the tip of the menubutton you get the callers name and address, with a few caveats of course:
If the number is blocked it obviously doesn't work
If the number's not listed (which is mostly the case with cell phone numbers) it doesn't work of course
It certainly only works on domestic calls.
Recently a head a brain dead market researcher calling 13 (!) times, I just ignored them after looking them up...
can certainly use it as a judgement against their moral character pertaining to anything else they can get 'em on. If the defendants look like bad guys to the general public then they must be bad guys.
It's the same tactic as sleazy ambulance chasers use in rape cases.
Jury, look at this women: she drinks, she hangs around bars and she dresses in skimpy skirts. Dear jury: Anybody can see that she actually wanted it
The strategy is to get somebody convicted (or vice versa) simply on moral grounds which are not whatsoever related to the cause
This, in my book is blattant abuse of the judical system.
Defendants publish a magazine for computer hackers, which "has included articles on such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, access to other peoples e-mail, intercept cellular phone calls, and break into computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express
Although this is factually right of course, it's an absolutely mean tactic to install the fear of god in the upright citizen.
I personally don't agree with stealing domain names or hacking e-mail. But what the &^$%^%*$%( has this to do with the issue at hand or the first ammendment ?
Actually Microsoft didn't break the standard, they abused it.
The standard specifies a 64 byte field, which can be used and customized for application specific extensions.
They abused it to implement their idea of Kerberos and to enforce the use of NT only domain controllers.
The specs where released under a non-disclosure agreement, which, when you looked at the implementation document, disabled you to ever use that knowledge for non MS purpose.
It was an absolute dirty stint they tried to pull off and there is still an ongoing EU investigation, because of possible deliberate non-interoperabilty; but strictly speaking they didn't break the standard.
He simplified; which is a good thing(tm) in this case.
His statements are clear enough that a layman understands what a shitty thing Microsoft tried to pull off. And in this context he certainly didn't twist the facts.
I'm not altogether sure of the relationship between FSF and Linux, but didn't the FSF have plans for hurd to be the kernal. The only reasons that Linux became the kernel was that Linus released it under GPL and it worked.
GNU provided the foundation that Linux could start to exist at all. Specifically compilers, editors, assemblers, debuggers, etc...
Beginning of the nineties a serious programming environment usually hit you with hundreds, or thousands of dollers depending on the tools.
That you can just type./configure make etc nowadays is thanks to a lot of GNU tools doing the dirty work transparently in the background.
Although I perceive Mr. Stallmans views and approach sometimes as a tad radical, I don't think that the Free Software / Open Source / whatever movement would be where it is today without his efforts.
Not so much that KT dictates that you have one ADSL line per box (hey, they are a greedy corporation after all), but that they just cut off service for somebody disagreeing.
Is there possibly a face saving issue involved ?
Losing face in most Asian countries is about as bad as it gets, and maybe the TK folks feared face loss when too many petitioners stated the opinion that they run an overpriced, monopolistic, bureaucratic, crap shop!
Surely one of the Asian/. posters is better able to qualify such an assumption.
Acording to Bruce Schneier it is impossible to prove the unbreakability of a cryptographic algorithm.
The best you can do is to state I am not able to break it and then let the crypto community rip it appart.
This seems a fairly reasonable assessment in my book.
A security product claiming that it's unbreakable has the same credibility es "GET RICH NOW!" e-mail subjects or time share salesmen.
I'm not claiming that the good prof is a phony. But I sure as hell wouldn't trust a new crypto scheme just because the NYT reports about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except of course, if something on the internet is happening, which prevents it from turning into how we see it.
Namely those terrorists, who want to keep us from turning the Internet into a huge Cable Television thingie and a gigantic technicolor shopping mall, generation Bazillions of $$$.
The studies published Monday conclude that proposals to limit companies from sharing or selling customer information without permission would cost 90 of the largest financial institutions $17 billion a year of added expenses, and would result in a $1 billion "information tax" on consumers through costs tacked onto products from catalogs and Internet retailers.
Yeah right, of course those companies have the right to waste my time, by spamming me by every available means and at my expense.
What's really worrysome is that given enough money, those jokers are actually able to turn this into a repectable organisation with near-official status. See the BSA.
See, when I incorporated my company somewhat over a year ago, I took the chance to run it as a (almost) Linux only shop.
The learning curve was (sometimes still is) steep. Wasting a day on hooking up a modem, only to find out it's defective, is no fun. Wading through an initially slightly incomprehensible documentation until you reach the point, where you find it's very well documented can be frustrating at times, but...
I use computers since 83 (ZX81, anyone ?). I really loved Macs at the end of the 80s, I could arrange myself with the somewhat flimsy DOS.
Things went straight to hell, when the evil empire introduced Windows, and even more so with the 9x incarnations.
Sure, you have a huge amount of software to chose from and pay the price of DL(hel)L, just for your attempt to try something and install it. FAT is a joke and virtually useless when you tinker with databases and every 6 month your best option is an installation from scratch; that's an isolated machine, I'm not even getting into networks.
Then there is the fact, that you're notoriously ripped off. I overall paid 600$ in licensing and upgrade fees for Win2k for a Dell notebook, for which I licensed and paid for the very same software, because the gangsters in Redmond decide that I'm only entitled to my Recovery Disk of the software.
Linux at this stage ist the OS that lets me work fairly painless since almost a year now.
Is it 100% perfect ? No, of course not. But if things break down, if software doesn't run or compile, it's either not vital or I can get around it. Usually by spending a fairly small amount of time.
Oh, yeah: And if M$ really goes through with their mandatory registration scheme. This W2K partition on my Latitude is the very last piece of M$ software I purchased and installed. EVER!!!
Yes, of course they do. There's also no threading, let alone multitasking.
On the other hand, ther's a stunningly small footprint. You have applications, that take 7-10k and are just great (even games).
As long Palm doesn't start to feature bloat it's products (in my book, even the IIIC was a stupid move). I'm very happy with what it provides.
It probably really depends where you're coming from: As a geek gizmo the Palm seems a bit, well, lame; if you find professional applications however then its simplicity (including itslimitations) is actually very appealing...
What disturbs me with pocket PCs is that M$ attempted to squeeze a desktop user interface into a PDA, while the Palm UI appears to be designed for just that.
It's sort of like some braindead marketers cooked up WAP, to give you the convenience of Web browsing on an eeny tiny display in black & white. I have yet to see a WAP service that a) works and b) adds some sort of value.
Further, I don't need features like color, the ability to play videaos or to listen to sound. I need (simple, almost primitive) software like Titrax to bill my customers and mangle the data into a perl script at the end of the month, which in turn mangles it into a nice, proper invoice.
I'm not slamming CE here, I'm just definitely not in their focus group.
Springboards I & II, which are aparrently incompatible
Memory sticks, for Sonys incarnation of the Palm platform
Palm, which doesn't really provide expansion, save for a keyboard, or a modem
Methinks, that if I'm in the business of building peripherals for the palm platform, I'd search for another field.
As much I love the Palm for it's simplicity and it's straightforwardness the concept of multiple, incompatible extension slots/ports is just damn stupid.
Never mind that he was acquited a couple years later by a higher court. Huge damage was done alredy.
However, this was no match for the greatest damage that happened to Compuserve users. That was the buyout by AOL...
You're trolling here, right ? Or do you really want to tell us that swapping music is comparable to drug traffiking and money laundering ? Man, you should really stop reading tis MPAA/RIAA propaganda crap. You know, they lie a lot...
Maybe (IANAL, so I can only say maybe) this avoids responsibility but does this make it any less illegal?
Well, it depends. Check out Havenco's AUP. It's an interesting read and they don't permit to have everything hosted on their servers (e.g. spam is explicitely prohibited).
Arguably Sealand is an indpendent country and its governmental structure doesn't leave much leeway for brib^H^H^H^H threat^H^H^H^H^H^H buying l^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H to lobby it into putting more value into protection of corporate interests then individual rights.
Thankfully, the US doesn't have world jurisdiction. Recent incidents (supreme court on presidential elections, DeCSS ruling, eToys vs. the etoy.CORPORATION, etc...) make me believe that this would be a very bad idea indeed.
BTW: I never downloaded an MP3. It's just too darn tedious and expensive in Europe.
I assume, that you work for a reasonable employer. I also assume, it's not a three man company, that they have resources, a marketing budget and even a decent sales force.
A further complication might be, that (another assumption) you know your future customers via your current employer. This would complicate things tremendously.
The first thing I'd do is talk to a lawyer, as it was said already.
Next, aim for a joint marketing agreement, where you license your product to your employer. As there appears to be an interest on the market, this could be a sweet deal for everybody involved. Plus his customer gets the product in 2-3 weeks and is a damn happy camper.
I worked for a version 1.0 company that had a great product, years ahead of it's time. The company went bust of course, because we had no clue what sales and marketing means. Even if you get 1/3 of the gross sales and a cut of the support fees, that could turn out into a much sweeter deal, then when you have to knock on doors yourself, or find out the hard way, that sales/marketing eat 50% of your turnover.
Whatever you do, don't try sneaky deals here. If you're employer is reasonable and you come with a good proposal, both profit. If however your employer feels crossed, you're essentially fucked.
Most importantly: Anonymity!
I really wouldn't want my fellow /.ers to know that I hang around Britney Spears chat rooms, or subscribe to Dear Abby.
For my part, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount for qualitycontent. There are really valuable resources and it's sure nice to get them for free. But for the contents dear to me (say Google or a huge repository of Linux documentation I see absolutely no problem to shell out a couple bucks a month, if this is necessary to maintain those resources without a streaming video showing a car commercial.
Implementation should be on a broad scale. So that spammers could be charged for their crap and small transactions can be handled transaprently, securely and anonymously.
Anonymity is probably the killer criteria, but I'll have to leave this problem to cryptographically far more competent folks.
There is a {free | open source} product which is called TCM.
It is not specifically an ERD editor, but provides a set of various diagramming editors and tools.
Overall I like it, but since it attempts to support a lot of diagrams, I don't perceive it as very strong in the ERD area.
If you don't want to delve into details (attributes, constraints) and remain on a fairly high level (entities), this might work for you.
Usual disclaimer: It's 6 month ago when I tried it, it might have improved a lot...
Personally, I use W2K and a product called DeZign, which is reasonably priced and offers a cripple ware version for download and trial.
Good Luck..
Actually the name (python) derives from Monty Python. The inventors where looking for a snappy name and liked Monty Python movies. At least the FAQ says so...
In any legal case - and the brief supports that statement - you can bet that they drag out all the dirt and all the dead bodies ever hiden away. Regardless if there's merrit or not.
Nevermind that IT professionals and security consultants read hacker-zines. At least if they have a quarter of a clue they should...
This is totally irelevant.
I wouldn't deny USA Today the right to be published based on the fact that they only printed crap from the first day of their very existence.
If I don't like a publication I neither buy nor read it.
Basically for a price (25 cents) you have a real time reverse directory lookup feature. On the tip of the menubutton you get the callers name and address, with a few caveats of course:
If the number is blocked it obviously doesn't work
If the number's not listed (which is mostly the case with cell phone numbers) it doesn't work of course
It certainly only works on domestic calls.
Recently a head a brain dead market researcher calling 13 (!) times, I just ignored them after looking them up...
Hey, after all they linked to the possibility to commit a crime...
It's the same tactic as sleazy ambulance chasers use in rape cases.
Jury, look at this women: she drinks, she hangs around bars and she dresses in skimpy skirts. Dear jury: Anybody can see that she actually wanted it
The strategy is to get somebody convicted (or vice versa) simply on moral grounds which are not whatsoever related to the cause
This, in my book is blattant abuse of the judical system.
Although this is factually right of course, it's an absolutely mean tactic to install the fear of god in the upright citizen.
I personally don't agree with stealing domain names or hacking e-mail. But what the &^$%^%*$%( has this to do with the issue at hand or the first ammendment ?
And you point out very nicely that what the public perceives as innovation is what's visible to them.
The standard specifies a 64 byte field, which can be used and customized for application specific extensions.
They abused it to implement their idea of Kerberos and to enforce the use of NT only domain controllers.
The specs where released under a non-disclosure agreement, which, when you looked at the implementation document, disabled you to ever use that knowledge for non MS purpose.
It was an absolute dirty stint they tried to pull off and there is still an ongoing EU investigation, because of possible deliberate non-interoperabilty; but strictly speaking they didn't break the standard.
His statements are clear enough that a layman understands what a shitty thing Microsoft tried to pull off. And in this context he certainly didn't twist the facts.
GNU provided the foundation that Linux could start to exist at all. Specifically compilers, editors, assemblers, debuggers, etc...
Beginning of the nineties a serious programming environment usually hit you with hundreds, or thousands of dollers depending on the tools.
That you can just type ./configure make etc nowadays is thanks to a lot of GNU tools doing the dirty work transparently in the background.
Although I perceive Mr. Stallmans views and approach sometimes as a tad radical, I don't think that the Free Software / Open Source / whatever movement would be where it is today without his efforts.
...the BSOD that is, in the middle of my flaming pladoyer
And I appreciate, that you don't just yell *MISQUOTE*, but actually provide educational information.
Apologies to Mr. Schneier for oversimplifying...
Is there possibly a face saving issue involved ?
Losing face in most Asian countries is about as bad as it gets, and maybe the TK folks feared face loss when too many petitioners stated the opinion that they run an overpriced, monopolistic, bureaucratic, crap shop!
Surely one of the Asian /. posters is better able to qualify such an assumption.
This seems a fairly reasonable assessment in my book.
A security product claiming that it's unbreakable has the same credibility es "GET RICH NOW!" e-mail subjects or time share salesmen.
I'm not claiming that the good prof is a phony. But I sure as hell wouldn't trust a new crypto scheme just because the NYT reports about it.