I was dismayed to learn from http://cnnfn.com/1999/10/22/bizbuzz/amazon/ and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/22/095924 0 that you are suing barnsandnoble.com for the violation of your frivolous 1-click patent. I have used your service on several occasions in the past and found it relatively convenient, but not particularily cost effective. Now you are attacking a competitor which does a better job, in my experience, of sourcing hard to find books.
On what charge? A violation of a patent which takes the idea of calling up a store where I am known, asking them to send me an order and bill my account, and translates that idea into an internet context. The engineering side of the picture is no doubt of high quality, but was never worthy of a patent. Granted it was the USPTO which granted this valueless patent, and I understand it's value for defensive purposes, but to take this patent and use it for attack purposes subverts the intention of patents in a system of free enterprise.
I find myself with no choice than to stop using your service unless and until you withdraw this lawsuit. I may not come back even if you do stop the lawsuit. As you may have noticed, your competitors are actually _competing_ instead of trying to bully themselves into a dominant position with underhanded tactics.
With procmail, perl and star addressing (anything@somedomain.com goest to one mailbox) it would be trivial to do the confirmation and voting. The only way I can see to easily prevent voting fraud is to make it expensive to cast a vote. --
McDonald's kept coffee extra hot because it was convenient to them. They could pour cups beforehand and not have them get cold while sitting around. No other fast food place had coffee that hot, despite the fact that they presumably have the same customers. So, McDonalds had coffee too hot, had been warned about it many times so in this case it was issued a stiff punative judgement to get them to change their behavior, which they did.
I don't find McDonalds coffee to be too cold now, others may disagree but I doubt it's 999,999,999 out of a million as you suggest. The coffee tastes like shit, but that's a different story.
That's not to say I don't agree that frivilous lawsuits or at least the fear of frivilous lawsuits is invconvenient for companies and consumers. After all, if a few people hadn't gone and died from bad Jack In the Box beef, I could still get a decent medium rare burger. C'est la vie. --
Apple is NEVER going to unbundle those ATI cards. The entire goal of their product line is simplicity. It makes products cheaper, and it makes it easier for consumers to understand what they're buying. Giving the rare case (you) greater choice means making everything more expensive for everyone else. Sounds like poor economics to me.
I agree with you with respect to the iMac, but the G3's and G4's are expensive enough that they should really be more configurable, especially in video, a comparable performance PC workstation would certainly be configurable. --
If you had bought a B&W G3, your cup holder would have come with a ingenious blue brace, of course the cup holder itself is a little high for my liking and I'm not sure why they changed manufacturers, the cup holder itself isn't much different than the one made by CD, although my friend told me that DVD is the wave of the future so they must be doing something right. --
There's a cheap, easy and ethical method of genetic engineering that apparently not enough people are aware of.
Stop having sex with idiots. --
Plumbers aren't so bad off
on
Managing Geeks
·
· Score: 2
While plumbers will never enjoy status in high society, a good plumber will always have a job and be respected by people that matter.
I would be more fearful if I were a stock broker than a geek. His high flying job will be gone when everyone realizes that he is a glorified middleman. The plumber and the network administrator will continue to work: underappreciated perhaps, but never disposable. --
And perhaps if we want to criticize our respective governments we should use thinly veiled allegory and not the real names of officials or actions. In the US, Norway, and anywhere that there is true political freedom, such a suggestion would be justly ridiculed. In places which have less political freedom, the suggestion might allow brave and valiant protest that would otherwise be silenced.
Clearly we can remove the Meta tags. We can also use allegory to express our political views. One does what one must to continue to exist within the rules of a society. My question is how a society goes from complete repression to a more open one. I think the answer is that individuals push the envelope of acceptablity more and more until the natural right of being able to speak ones mind is liberated.
So if we accept a small restriction on our collective freedom of speech, we will continue to live and exist as a society, but I believe everyone will suffer from the decrease in freedom and push at the boundaries until those restrictions are relaxed. We will continue to fight restrictions on expression until we get to a balance of our rights to speech against other's rights of property, information, and freedom from confusion. (And then we'll fight some more)
The interesting thing here, is that Microsoft has taken significant strides with Windows Update (for Windows 98, I don't think it works with NT). For those that haven't used it, you go to a web page that matches your system config against the patch list (this is not supposed to send any info to MS, but I'm not sure I trust that), you then download and install the patches that you need. Security patches are separated out, and there is a decent notification feature. Now, big Unix vendors like SGI and Sun have had systems like this for some time, albeit a little more command line oriented. Personally I like the SGI system the best (not the rest of the OS, just the patch and package manager).
RedHat and other Linux distros should implement something of this nature (maybe some of them have). Sure, it's not strictly necessary, but then again very few things are. Ideally it would work from the command line and integrate with the existing FTP servers and package managers. New distributions should be set up to check for updates the first time you connect to the internet after an install, and perhaps weekly thereafter. I'm sure any sysadmin worth her salt has thrown together some scripts to do this already, or is happy with the manual process, but the user base is gettting less experienced and security should be as easy as possible. --
I went to a Microsoft recruitment session at my school, mostly to see a friend who works at Microsoft as a Program Manager for the Windows 200 0 kernel (yes he does like his job, and yes he makes gobs of money).
The funniest thing was the video they showed about interning at MS. They painted a glowing picture of the influence and satisfaction the interns get. Near the end, one of the interns was saying, "you really get to help people...I mean people cut and paste a lot, making that easier would be great." It was all I could do to not stand up and shout "that's what the middle button is for!!".
The point isn't that MS is staffed with idiots. Indeed MS employees are, on the whole probably very bright people, but I think they have the problem that a minority of the people that work there have experienced different operating system paradigms.
OS zealots are like religious zealots in their fanaticism, but like true religion, OS zealotry without world experience is empty and meaningless. This is as true for Linux, and Mac zealots as it is for MS zealots, but due to OS marketshare, at least Linux and Mac (and Be, *BSD, etc.) users have experienced other ways of doing things and should have a personal basis for their beliefs.
The Redhat FTP install doesn't install updates, and there is no option to do so. It is reasonably easy set an FTP server so it does so, but it takes a bit of tweaking. See RedHat CD mini-HOWTO --
MCI/Worldcom is buying Sprint which owns 20% (with an option to buy more) of Earthlink which is merging with MindSpring which bought Netcom. I think UUNet is in there somewhere and probably a few I'm forgetting (is PSINet still independent?).
While it's probably not as bad as it sounds, and certainly no bigger that AT&T/Cablewhatever. It makes sense to be wary. --
I don't think the SEC has jurisdiction in this case, probably more like DOJ, FTC, FCC, all the states and a few thousand municipalities. But judging from recent history the regulators won't do too much about this one. I don't see a real need for them to do so either, considering that long distance and wireless are both fairly competitive markets, and data is extremely competitive. --
August 1991 0.01 Linux (first release, not bootable) December 1993 0.99pl14 Linux (usable) December 1993 FreeBSD 1.0 (patches to encumbered "Net/2" 4.3BSDLite) November 1994 FreeBSD 2.0 First truly open source (no legal challenges) version
So, no, an open source version of BSD was being developed contemperaneously with Linux but not released in unemcumbered form until a little later. The fear of legal challenges probably kept some developers away in the early days, and there was certainly not even a gratis version of BSD for x86 when Linus started developing Linux. --
My other utilities send me real mail when they change things. Somehow they can deal with the customer service spikes. Now granted these messages are intentionally small print and cryptic so maybe that's the answer.
In any case, most ISPs already send out software upgrades when available. That certainly causes a customer service spike.
While I agree that the unix security model has flaws, and there are in fact other models that work better, I don't know that Win2K will be any better. The Unix security model is based on the fact than any user that has full access to one or more of memory, disk, or priviledged ports can control the system fully. It is easiest to call that user root, or Administrator, and protect that user as well as possible. Alternatives include partitioning the Disk/OS along several capabilities sets but that requires hardware support to be really secure.
In practice, relatively few things actually need to run as root and they only need to be root for a short period of time (to open a port below 1024 for instance). The problem is that you are at the mercy of the daemon that you are running to open that port, especially badly written ones that don't give up root when they no longer need it. Capabilities sets can help this problem, by putting more of the responsibility in the OS's security rather than the application, but a clever cracker can get full control of your box using only the power to open priviledged ports.
Please tell me how WinNT is more granular than Unix. I fail to see the granularity in Administrator. Don't tell me about your Backup or Power User or I'll tell you about my news, www, ftp, backup, sysadm, wheel etc. That's still not granularity. It looks and feels like granularity but if I get Adminsitrator privs on your box or you get root privs on my box, we each have complete control. And while I don't know for sure I imagine that there are more casual users that give themselves Administrator privs on NT machines ("to get work done") than run unix as root.
I am not aware of any major changes in Win2K which would make it any better. Kerberos, which you ignorantly champion as a panacea will not help in this regard. Kerberos is secure authentication protocol, not an OS cababilites set. It will makes remote connections more secure than say, telnet or SMB, but not significantly more secure than SSH. It will not get rid of that pesky, monolithic, Administrator.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the funniest shit I've read in a long time.
--
If I could only figure out a way to bill my Slashdot time (competitive research? community outreach?), I'd be rich, rich I tell you!!!
--
How does Roundeye's post get a 0, I think it deserves at least a 1, possibly a 2.
--
I was dismayed to learn from http://cnnfn.com/1999/10/22/bizbuzz/amazon/4 0 that
and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/22/09592
you are suing barnsandnoble.com for the violation of your frivolous
1-click patent. I have used your service on several occasions in the past
and found it relatively convenient, but not particularily cost effective.
Now you are attacking a competitor which does a better job, in my
experience, of sourcing hard to find books.
On what charge? A violation of a patent which takes the idea of
calling up a store where I am known, asking them to send me an order and
bill my account, and translates that idea into an internet context. The
engineering side of the picture is no doubt of high quality, but was never
worthy of a patent. Granted it was the USPTO which granted this valueless
patent, and I understand it's value for defensive purposes, but to take
this patent and use it for attack purposes subverts the intention of
patents in a system of free enterprise.
I find myself with no choice than to stop using your service unless and
until you withdraw this lawsuit. I may not come back even if you do stop
the lawsuit. As you may have noticed, your competitors are actually
_competing_ instead of trying to bully themselves into a dominant
position with underhanded tactics.
Yours respectfully,
Michael Cope, former Amazon customer
--
With procmail, perl and star addressing (anything@somedomain.com goest to one mailbox) it would be trivial to do the confirmation and voting. The only way I can see to easily prevent voting fraud is to make it expensive to cast a vote.
--
I wrote the parent message but I apparentl wasn't logged in.
--
McDonald's kept coffee extra hot because it was convenient to them. They could pour cups beforehand and not have them get cold while sitting around. No other fast food place had coffee that hot, despite the fact that they presumably have the same customers. So, McDonalds had coffee too hot, had been warned about it many times so in this case it was issued a stiff punative judgement to get them to change their behavior, which they did.
I don't find McDonalds coffee to be too cold now, others may disagree but I doubt it's 999,999,999 out of a million as you suggest. The coffee tastes like shit, but that's a different story.
That's not to say I don't agree that frivilous lawsuits or at least the fear of frivilous lawsuits is invconvenient for companies and consumers. After all, if a few people hadn't gone and died from bad Jack In the Box beef, I could still get a decent medium rare burger. C'est la vie.
--
Apple is NEVER going to unbundle those ATI cards. The entire goal of their product line is simplicity. It makes products cheaper, and it makes it easier for consumers to understand what they're buying. Giving the rare case (you) greater choice means making everything more expensive for everyone else. Sounds like poor economics to me.
I agree with you with respect to the iMac, but the G3's and G4's are expensive enough that they should really be more configurable, especially in video, a comparable performance PC workstation would certainly be configurable.
--
Maybe the fact that they're annoying to use encourages one to use it less and hence experience less RSI. :-)
But seriously, I like my iCatch.
--
If you had bought a B&W G3, your cup holder would have come with a ingenious blue brace, of course the cup holder itself is a little high for my liking and I'm not sure why they changed manufacturers, the cup holder itself isn't much different than the one made by CD, although my friend told me that DVD is the wave of the future so they must be doing something right.
--
There's a cheap, easy and ethical method of genetic engineering that apparently not enough people are aware of.
Stop having sex with idiots.
--
While plumbers will never enjoy status in high society, a good plumber will always have a job and be respected by people that matter.
I would be more fearful if I were a stock broker than a geek. His high flying job will be gone when everyone realizes that he is a glorified middleman. The plumber and the network administrator will continue to work: underappreciated perhaps, but never disposable.
--
And perhaps if we want to criticize our respective governments we should use thinly veiled allegory and not the real names of officials or actions. In the US, Norway, and anywhere that there is true political freedom, such a suggestion would be justly ridiculed. In places which have less political freedom, the suggestion might allow brave and valiant protest that would otherwise be silenced.
Clearly we can remove the Meta tags. We can also use allegory to express our political views. One does what one must to continue to exist within the rules of a society. My question is how a society goes from complete repression to a more open one. I think the answer is that individuals push the envelope of acceptablity more and more until the natural right of being able to speak ones mind is liberated.
So if we accept a small restriction on our collective freedom of speech, we will continue to live and exist as a society, but I believe everyone will suffer from the decrease in freedom and push at the boundaries until those restrictions are relaxed. We will continue to fight restrictions on expression until we get to a balance of our rights to speech against other's rights of property, information, and freedom from confusion. (And then we'll fight some more)
--
http://www.iffmfish.com/ cgi-bin/WebObjects/iffm/BuyFish.wo
There's at least one, but not pez in the metatag.
--
The interesting thing here, is that Microsoft has taken significant strides with Windows Update (for Windows 98, I don't think it works with NT). For those that haven't used it, you go to a web page that matches your system config against the patch list (this is not supposed to send any info to MS, but I'm not sure I trust that), you then download and install the patches that you need. Security patches are separated out, and there is a decent notification feature. Now, big Unix vendors like SGI and Sun have had systems like this for some time, albeit a little more command line oriented. Personally I like the SGI system the best (not the rest of the OS, just the patch and package manager).
RedHat and other Linux distros should implement something of this nature (maybe some of them have). Sure, it's not strictly necessary, but then again very few things are. Ideally it would work from the command line and integrate with the existing FTP servers and package managers. New distributions should be set up to check for updates the first time you connect to the internet after an install, and perhaps weekly thereafter. I'm sure any sysadmin worth her salt has thrown together some scripts to do this already, or is happy with the manual process, but the user base is gettting less experienced and security should be as easy as possible.
--
I went to a Microsoft recruitment session at my school, mostly to see a friend who works at Microsoft as a Program Manager for the Windows 200 0 kernel (yes he does like his job, and yes he makes gobs of money).
The funniest thing was the video they showed about interning at MS. They painted a glowing picture of the influence and satisfaction the interns get. Near the end, one of the interns was saying, "you really get to help people...I mean people cut and paste a lot, making that easier would be great." It was all I could do to not stand up and shout "that's what the middle button is for!!".
The point isn't that MS is staffed with idiots. Indeed MS employees are, on the whole probably very bright people, but I think they have the problem that a minority of the people that work there have experienced different operating system paradigms.
OS zealots are like religious zealots in their fanaticism, but like true religion, OS zealotry without world experience is empty and meaningless. This is as true for Linux, and Mac zealots as it is for MS zealots, but due to OS marketshare, at least Linux and Mac (and Be, *BSD, etc.) users have experienced other ways of doing things and should have a personal basis for their beliefs.
--
The Redhat FTP install doesn't install updates, and there is no option to do so. It is reasonably easy set an FTP server so it does so, but it takes a bit of tweaking. See RedHat CD mini-HOWTO
--
MCI/Worldcom is buying Sprint which owns 20% (with an option to buy more) of Earthlink which is merging with MindSpring which bought Netcom. I think UUNet is in there somewhere and probably a few I'm forgetting (is PSINet still independent?).
While it's probably not as bad as it sounds, and certainly no bigger that AT&T/Cablewhatever. It makes sense to be wary.
--
I don't think the SEC has jurisdiction in this case, probably more like DOJ, FTC, FCC, all the states and a few thousand municipalities. But judging from recent history the regulators won't do too much about this one. I don't see a real need for them to do so either, considering that long distance and wireless are both fairly competitive markets, and data is extremely competitive.
--
No, just the asinine type.
--
August 1991 0.01 Linux (first release, not bootable)
December 1993 0.99pl14 Linux (usable)
December 1993 FreeBSD 1.0 (patches to encumbered "Net/2" 4.3BSDLite)
November 1994 FreeBSD 2.0 First truly open source
(no legal challenges) version
This according to http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/histor y.html
and http://www.redhat.com/mirrors/L DP/LDP/gs/node3.html
So, no, an open source version of BSD was being developed contemperaneously with Linux but not released in unemcumbered form until a little later. The fear of legal challenges probably kept some developers away in the early days, and there was certainly not even a gratis version of BSD for x86 when Linus started developing Linux.
--
ftp://archive:oldies@archi ve.netscape.com/archive/index.html
--
Apparently the "abuse me" option.
--
My other utilities send me real mail when they change things. Somehow they can deal with the customer service spikes. Now granted these messages are intentionally small print and cryptic so maybe that's the answer.
In any case, most ISPs already send out software upgrades when available. That certainly causes a customer service spike.
--
While I agree that the unix security model has flaws, and there are in fact other models that work better, I don't know that Win2K will be any better. The Unix security model is based on the fact than any user that has full access to one or more of memory, disk, or priviledged ports can control the system fully. It is easiest to call that user root, or Administrator, and protect that user as well as possible. Alternatives include partitioning the Disk/OS along several capabilities sets but that requires hardware support to be really secure.
In practice, relatively few things actually need to run as root and they only need to be root for a short period of time (to open a port below 1024 for instance). The problem is that you are at the mercy of the daemon that you are running to open that port, especially badly written ones that don't give up root when they no longer need it. Capabilities sets can help this problem, by putting more of the responsibility in the OS's security rather than the application, but a clever cracker can get full control of your box using only the power to open priviledged ports.
Please tell me how WinNT is more granular than Unix. I fail to see the granularity in Administrator. Don't tell me about your Backup or Power User or I'll tell you about my news, www, ftp, backup, sysadm, wheel etc. That's still not granularity. It looks and feels like granularity but if I get Adminsitrator privs on your box or you get root privs on my box, we each have complete control. And while I don't know for sure I imagine that there are more casual users that give themselves Administrator privs on
NT machines ("to get work done") than run unix as root.
I am not aware of any major changes in Win2K which would make it any better. Kerberos, which you ignorantly champion as a panacea will not help in this regard. Kerberos is secure authentication protocol, not an OS cababilites set. It will makes remote connections more secure than say, telnet or SMB, but not significantly more secure than SSH. It will not get rid of that pesky, monolithic, Administrator.
--