Anyone want to take bets as to how long the Powers That Be Microsoft are going to let that stay up?
The phrase "GNU Public License" alone is anathema to MS these days.
Well, they essentially release IIS for free and have been releasing IE for free for some time now, though they aren't GPL'd. I would be willing to say that in a few hours (once the work day begins in Redmond) that this page will undergo a dramatic and sudden disappearance.
'Fnord' is a term that any "fringer" or geek will recognize, and it's a word with absolutely no meaning; I wonder if the codeworkers in MS have more of a sense of humor than we'd give them credit for (above and beyond 'Netscape engineers are weenies.')
Maybe the sheeple of the world aren't supposed to see this little gem? =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This is Salon we're reading here. Salon has proven many times in the past that they are extremely biased, amateur journalists with a very sensationalist streak. Just gotta love their article about 'alternative sexuality in the Open Source community,' and David Brin's whine -- er, rant about how Star Trek is better than Star Wars, and another rather bothersome article/rant about the BDSM community. Salon seems to go out of its way to be as sensational as possible. This isn't journalism; it's 'literary self-gratification.' They like seeing their names in print.
It's their opinions, of course, and they're welcome to them. I'd even read their opinions (for free, of course) but it bugs me that they're trying to pass their opinions as objective, unbiased journalism.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
And maybe, just maybe, they were saving their kid from the insulin roller-coaster which leads to belly fat, a lifetime of obesity and insulin-resistance diabetes later in life. Heck, maybe the schools SHOULDN'T SELL ice cream and "fruit juice" drinks that are 12% fruit juice and 80% corn syrup. At least one pair of parents are doing the right thing!
Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I can reply calmly. =)
You make a very good point, in that the kid's eating habits at school were certainly not good. I think, however, that we don't know enough about the case. This goes for me as well, actually. We don't know if the parents talked with the kid first before having the school start regulating his diet. My knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't, that they just up and took no input from the student at all, but only because the article didn't say a thing about them talking with him first.
Regarding the quality of food served at the school, I'll have to take your word for it. =) We brown-bagged it in middle school, and in high school the cafeteria actually seemed to have slightly healthier than average food. Which wasn't to say it was entirely palatable. =)
So, mea culpa, I shouldn't have assumed that the parents didn't talk to the kid first. Be better if we could find out one way or another. Does anyone out there have more details about this system?
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I like to think that I'd be a halfway decent father. I know what mistakes my parents made (and I admit to being lucky: there weren't many) and I know that the important thing about raising a child is to teach them how to be an independant, emancipated human being. If kids in general didn't freak me out so much, I could be a damn good parent, I think.
(Caution: Ranting ahead. Not that you'll really care! =)
Reading this article made me so glad I'm out of school, and made me realize just how fscked up some people are. For a variety of reasons, I may never have children, but reading this article made the prospects of raising a child in this culture bleak and depressing.
There's no other explaination. These parents, these administrators and teachers... they missed something seriously vital in this whole thing. I mean, do they really think that their childhood and teenage years would have been better and more tolerable if their parents had implanted brainwave recorders in their heads, given them microcameras for eyes, and clipped radio-tracking tags to their ears?
Hell, no!
Your child is not an automaton! He or she is not a little version of yourself with no consciousness! They are not zombies who without constant supervision would just walk off a cliff (but some of them might very well do that if it was the only escape from this culture of control that is developing!)
Let's get serious here:
In one instance, he said, parents suspected that their middle-school child wasn't eating a healthy lunch. Using the program, they found out that the child was buying fruit juice and ice cream every day.
They asked administrators to block their kid from buying juice and ice cream. Now, whenever the child shows up at the register, the computer tells the lunch lady: no juice, no ice cream.
Hmm... you think, possibly, that, maybe, the parents should have asked their own kid if there was something bothering him?! Call it a hunch, call it FSCKING INTUITION, but maybe, just maybe, something was eating at their kid badly enough to screw with his appetite. Or perhaps that there was something going on in his biochemistry which was making him crave sweets -- you think maybe this could be the first stage of diabetes, you stupid ignorant baka parents?
Oh, no. Nope, never in a million years. So they start to remote-control their kid. That's all this system is. Remote control for little automatons.
Parents, get it out of your heads that your teenagers can't open up bottles for themselves. Sure, they seem messed up, but think about what it was like when you were going through middle school and high school. The teenage years are the years where kids are starting to wake up to the fact that they are independant human beings, and a lot start craving their emancipation. Trying to keep a tight leash on your kids will do one of two things:
break them;
alienate them.
If the first happens, you have failed miserably as a parent and your kid is destined to be a doormat for the rest of their life unless they can get up enough self-confidence to fight themselves and seek help and get their lives together. Or they kill themselves before they get out of school, and you'll have nobody else to blem but yourself. (Though you'll try to. Oh, how you'll blame everyone else but yourselves! Your cries will ring out into the night and on till past dawn and drown out the funeral bells, but in the end, deep down inside, you stupid baka, you know it's your fault for pushing them and being clueless the whole while.) You certainly can't help them, that much is obvious.
If the second, you have just served to make your kid one of those wonderful disgruntled, disaffected few who get so much media attention these days, and they will revel in every second of discomfort they put you through before they finally kill themselves or run away, piling curses upon your name as they go.
Ultimately, we are responsible for our own actions. Each of us has it within ourselves to be an emancipated, independant human being, and this capability requires of us responsibility for our own actions. But make no mistake: until our children emancipate themselves from us, we are responsible for them. We must raise them and teach them what it means to be independant. It is up to us to tell them:
"You are not numbers! You are free persons!"
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This issue was raised on the SFCONSIM-L mailing list not too long ago. A number of important points were brought up. Please consult the SFCONSIM-L archives (sorry, I don't have a URL) for the full discussion.
First, supercav torps move at just over the speed of sound in water... which is considerably slower than how sound is in air. They might come up with some incredible numbers, but be forewarned: airborne weapons will still be incredibly faster.
Second, these things are LOUD. Now, they move faster than sound in water, so in that sense they are very sneaky. They'll hit before you know they're there. However, the defense for this is a distributed sonar net and a far-flung destroyer screen -- which is what GOOD navies do to protect their high-importance assets already, i.e. battleships and carriers. The destroyer screen and any roving underwater assets will detect the torpedo peripherally, notify the central asset vessel, upon which appropriate precautions will be taken.
In this sense, the supercav torpedo seems to make a better point-defense weapon when you know the bad guys are firing nuclear torps at you, or you absolutely cannot risk any damage whatsoever to your central asset (such as a carrier conducting flight operations.) A small, supercav torp fired in interception with an enemy torpedo. It could be a simple kinetic impactor, or a small explosive charge to spank the bad guys' torp, enough to generate a small pressure wave which will act like a wall to the enemy torp.
However, cavitation is extremely hard on a body and causes a lot of drag and heat -- supersonic aircraft need to reach very high altitudes to be at all fuel-efficient. Supercav torps don't have that option; at any combat depth they are going to be almost literally plowing through a wall and rendering hideous stressors upon their shells. Add to this their incredible fuel consumption, and you have a frankly short-duration weapon. You won't be able to fire one of these puppies from the other side of the Atlantic, and they're not going to be 'supercruise torpedoes' by any stretch of the imagination.
They're a cool idea, though, if for no other reason than to have the fastest torps in the depths. *rimshot* =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
You can imagine what the Team Fortress gene-mod would be. You're either blue or red, you very much think 'in the box' and you like to stereotype everyone. Oh, and you get very possessive of your things.
The Action gene-mod. John Woo is your god, and Michelle Yeoh is his prophetess. Why do things halfway? You can drink soda from akimbo cans! You can dive through life with great vigour!
Counterstrike gene-mod. Too bad the world is all either for you or against you... unless they set the friendlyfire chromosome to ON, then it gets interesting.
Aliens TC gene-mod. Axed by 20th Century Fox. All your telomeres are belong to us. Besides, human body and acid blood just didn't go well together. Unless you're Sigourney Weaver.
DXMP gene-mod. You start thinking that, not only is everyone out to get you, but they, like you, have the ability to hide a sniper rifle, GEP gun, and a brace of LAMs in nothing more than a black leather trench coat. The US Genetic Regulatory Agency gets particularly nervous about this mod....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Recently, the US government passed regulations saying that genetic experiments will not be conducted on humans. This is most certainly a back door taken advantage of, because technically, the ova is not a human being until it is fertilized by spermatozoa.
I find myself subtly worried about this. On the one hand, it's a good thing if this means an easier, safer, and beter way to improve fertility. This is what medical science is supposed to be doing. On the other hand... it seems a bit early, doesn't it, to start actively messing with genetics?
Now, technically, this wasn't geneering, it was simple injection of mitochondia into ova. (Were they fertilized or unfertilized? I think I missed that in the article if they mentioned it.) This is a good thing! But we really don't know everything that mitochondia EM in a cell. While it's not genetic engineering, it's cellular engineering so early in development that it might have unforseen effects. These kids have mitochondrial DNA that belongs to neither their parents. While I don't think it's unethical, I have to wonder if this really is a path we want to start down at our level of knowledge.
And what the HELL is this "US Government Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee?" When the heck did our government cobble together this? It sounds like the seeds for some sort of genetic regulatory agency. Okay, maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't like it when my governm,ent starts making esoteric and little-known agencies that start issuing legistlation or making any srt of decisions that impact me. The Federalist Society and Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Affairs are already plugged into our events too much. Or maybe I've just been playing Deus Ex too much.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Not neccessarilly. MS is going to push, push, push the console market for all they're worth to break into it, and in some areas of the world they have a good shot. However, there is one place which I feel they will have trouble in:
The Japanese console market.
ALL of the successful consoles have been put out by Japanese companies. Sony and Nintendo are not going to take any sort of incursion of the X-box lightly. If we have not seen them before, expect some heavy licensing restricitons to be placed on console-game makers in response to MS's restrictions: companies will be made or broken based on what console they choose to develop for, which will be a shame.
The Japanese electronics consumers, morover, are very intense. Console gaming is a VERY big thing over there. While in the US and perhaps Europe, you may run into the occasional guy who has one of every console made (even an old Neo*Geo he takes out reverently now and then) in Japan multiple consoles are the norm. Multiple instances of the same consoles is also not unknown, within the same household. There are also consoles over there that are simply not known about abroad.
Gaming also covers a broader spectrum -- it's no joke that 'dating simulations' are pretty popular there, but there's even wierder stuff that has never been really exported (except for Japanese consoles abroad.) Morover, for more "conventional" games, some have never been exported, either. The array of games in the Japanese market is stunning.
X-box is going to have a really tough time in the Japanese market. I would not be surprised if it dies horribly over there, even if it does well in the US and Europe. And even then, expect a strong assault by Nintendo and (what's left of) Sony. If these two companies can keep their sh** together, they've got a fighting chance to survive the first year of X-Box (whenever that might be.)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
There's a very good reason why tech support for most companies sucks. Again, speaking as a Greymatta Flambe tech guy, helpdesk and tech support is INCREDIBLY painful. You sit at a desk all day, a little headphone thing digging into your temple, and when the phone rings you get some arrogant person on the other end who thinks it's YOUR fault for:
not getting the code right;
not getting the documentation right;
having the audacity to NOT come to their computer PERSONALLY and installing the software yourself;
not making it friendly (read: dumb) enough so that the user can understand it;
and your little dog, too!
Not everyone who calls up Tech Support is like that, of course. Just the ones that make you wish you could go postal on them over the phone. And they aren't solitary cases, if you get only one of these "problem users" a week you're lucky.
Another problem is that many computer users have been fooled into thinking that computers can be as easy to understand as their toaster oven, when in reality it's MUCH more complex than their VCR which still has "12:00" flashing on and off. They are indignant when things go wrong -- it's all supposed to be so simple!! Why isn't it working?! Windows is supposed to be easy to use!! -- and they vent it on the poor sod who answers the phone.
After a while, it gets to you.
I am not making an excuse for all the people who are in the trenches and on the phones. If you take a job, you've a responsibility to see it through to the end and do your damndest. But it's hard to do; and after a while of being blamed for everything from bluescreens and thinkly-disguised GPFs, to smoking video cards and buzzing power supplies, you get worn down. You feel beat. You feel like crap because everyone in every tech support call has told you that you are crap.* You want to take an axe to your computer.
You start getting burned out.
Your company isn't any help. "Take more cases!" they shout. "We need to maximize our customer productivity synergy!" (Translation, or at least what jaded IT workers hear: "Work, you scalawags! Kowtow to the customers, they're always right, you scurvy dogs!") You try and try your best, but the smile in your voice sounds a little forced, and you start to loose your patience, and putting a customer on hold is as much to give you a moment to calm down as it is to consult with another helpdesk staffer.
Of course technical support people are falling in droves, and of course tech support statistics show a plummeting quality rate. Tech support people have one of the lousiest service industry jobs on Earth: trying to fix computers which computers designed, with merely human might.
It is the rare person who has the patience of a saint and the optimism of an angel. They're incredibly rare in tech support. Those who are neither do their time until they fry, then they flee, far away; in some cases, they start to make plans to flee as far away from the computer industry as possible. And so the industry looses skilled (but emotionally exhausted) tech workers in droves. It's no wonder tech suport quality is dropping.
A solution? There is none, except to reverse the trend that "Money" Gates and Stevie Jobs Wonder have started. Educate your users in the fact that a computer is insanely complex. Let them know that, these days, computers are designing computers, making the job even harder. If you both have a moment, crack open the case in front of them (preferably a hideously complex case with very delicate-looking and complex circuitry. Dell boards are good for this.) Emphasize that you are not just "the computer guy," and you are not the "local computer expert." You are a support technician, or a helpdesk footslogger. You do not know everything there is to know about computers. Nobody can know everything there is about computers.** In other words... you're just like them: you know your job, you're always trying to learn more, but there's only so much you can do when the component parts of what you work with can only be seen with an electron microscope.
Will it work? For some users. For others, hopefully not the majority, you have to take deep breaths, count to ten, and repeat, over and over again to yourself, I will not be the BOFH, I will not be the BOFH, I will not be... screw it! "What's your user name again, sir, and how much disk space did you need...?"
* Nevermind that these are the only calls which stand out in your mind, much more readilly than the cute-sounding / who thanked you warmly for all your help with sunshine and smiles.
** If you do, it took you a lifetime to learn it all, and you must be dead by now. If you are dead, congraulations! You're the first IT liche!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Please keep in mind that this is in reference only to active warships. Freighters flying under the flag of a given country are not sovereign territory; this is partly why the US Navy operates many of their auxiliaries through the quasi-civilian Military Sealift Command: they're run by civilians and are cheaper to operate, but they're sovereign territory.
(They add the moniker 'USNS' for "United States Naval Ship" for emphasis that yes, they are naval ships, darnit, and sovereign territory, and no, you cannot come aboard to conduct a safety inspection. Have a nice day, officer.)
However, Sealand is a decommissioned, abandoned sea fortress. When a base or ship is decommissioned, it is no longer sovereign territory. This actually works out well for us and Sealand, since the UK government relinquished control and sovereignity over the base which would become Sealand. It was, quite literally at the time, up for grabs since it was in international waters.
Britain setting their territorial waters out to 12 miles wouldn't change anything. The Principality of Sealand was there first, and the traditional way of settling these sorts of border disputes is by negotiation. But that would entail the UK acknowledging that Sealand is a sovereign nation. (Also, it's not exacttly kosher for them to do that; territorial waters reach out to only three miles. There's another boundary that reaches out to 12 miles, but it isn't territorial waters; the UK is pulling something silly. The Exclusive Economic Zone reaches to 200 miles, but that has no bearing here.)
Dammit, give it up, UK, and just acknowledge that Sealand is sovereign! The world could use a few places where people can flee oppression, and the established countries just aren't cutting it.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Novell already tried something to this effect from the NOS side of the house, using ZENworks. (Zero-Effort Networking.) The concept was that they would make the MIS dept's job easier, and reduce the need for IT staff, but putting more control into the hands of the MIS staff as to what goes on with the computers on the network.
ZENworks is a bear to deal with, and it is not the most pleasant of things to manage. Some great toys are in it, but all those toys need configuration and management. So, while potentially it could reduce the work of the MIS staff, in actuality it redistributes that work. More of the onus is on the administrator rather than the tier 1 guys or footsloggers who go out to the actual machines.
I cannot imagine that IBM's self-healing servers are any different. We've seen time and time again that computers really can't find out what's wrong with themselves. Part of this is because the operating systems themselves are incapable of covering all that can happen; hardware these days is remarkably stable, for the most part. In order to have self-healing servers, the OS and the server will have to be very tightly-knit, and there will have to be a way for the OS to understand what a "General Protection Fault in module INSANITY.EXE at 6F7D8E:7D33F" is, but also (1) what caused it (MS bashing aside, and remembering that any OS can be host to a GPF, GPFs do not occur in a vacuum) and (2) how to remedy it or work around it.
At the very least, for GPFs, this will require a very sophisticated memory manager which can reallocate memory used by programs, remembering that giving a program access to memory in such-and-such a location caused a GPF last time and so it will need to put that code in a different location.
What I see happening, is that IBM will do a decent job of these self-healing servers. Their complexity will neccessitate charging exorbitant fees for any problem you call in, and massive monthly maintenance fees (the "just in case" cost, which any smart company pays, diligently, and on time; and which dumb companies withhold, shy away from, and simply not pay. I have seen this. It causes mondo problems, and guess who gets told to "resolve it?" (One guess: *hack*MIS*cough*.) You will not see a reduction in the number or cost of footsloggers or tier 1 helpdesk people in your company, and you will ALWAYS need a certified, professional, experienced network admin at the helm.
This will not significantly reduce the need for an IT staff unless, of course, Google with their 8000 servers switch all of them over to self-healing servers.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
For more dark humor from the trenches (tip of the hat to that other place) have a gander at Idiot Watcher's technology section. As a burned-out, cerebrally friccassied tech worker whose seen his grey matter served up to himself flambe, though, I can say that a lot of them hit far too bloody close to home to be very funny. Less jaded geeks, though, should see a lot of humor in them!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
For starters, as everyone in the/. community knows, there is more than one way for a computer to crash. The problems run the gamut from hardware to operating system to software. It could have been literally anything, at least according to the article; they simply do not know yet. There is no mention made in the article that it was a Microsoft machine which crashed, and certainly no mention of any BSOD.
I realize that, in all liklihood it was a Windows machine, but that doesn't automatically mean it WAS, and it certainly does not justify calling it a BSOD crash.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I am a network administrator. For the past three years I have been mostly helpdesk, as well.
I have worked in the corporate world for pretty much all that time, though it wasn't as strict as you might find in a Fortune 500 or NYC Financial District company for most of that time.
It saddens me when I read articles like this, because I know that, once, I did enjoy technology, I did enjoy tinkering, playing with computers, learning new things about them, checking out the latest and greatest technology. I was never a programmer, but I did sort of hack on the hardware and procedure side of things, a very little bit. (I'd contend that procedures, as well as code, can be hacked. A bit of a stretch of the definition, but I think it's appropriate, maybe.) I used to get a lot of enjoyment from getting the computeers to work.
Three years is a long time. I now have (erm, had, it was taken down by my supe) a sign in my little tiny server room that relates that quote by Steve Wozniak: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." I come to work in dread. I have long since no longer considered computers to be a hobby. The less I open my case, the better, and so I praise the coming of USB and FireWire. I find myself groaning whenever my neighbor or even, Heaven help me, my own parents have even the most innocuous computer question. I would very much like to be in another field entirely, but quitting is not wise right now considering the job market, and that I already have a job (albeit a sucky one, IMO) that pays the bills and then some and which, I have to admit, when I'm not trying to keep myself from defenestrating the Dellboxen, I'm reasonably good at.
Burnout? Maybe. Maybe not from technology, but certainly from helpdesk. I certainly have no desire anymore to go out of my way to make these systems more than they are, despite working for a kicka$$ consulting group. It just bothers me, that the article above notes that the best people for these jobs are the people who enjoy the technology, who revel in the changing scope of it, at the advancement of the technological boundaries, at the realms of promise afforded us by Moore's Law.
My day is filled with examples of Murphy's Law. I used to like technology once.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
declined Microsoft's offer (summer 2000) to be the first enterprise software company with a.NET product (a Microsoft employee came back from a follow-up meeting with Allen and said "He reminds me of a lot of CEOs of companies that we've worked with... that have gone bankrupt.")
Did anyone else get a chill up their spine when they read this?
Mr. Greenspun's cautionary tale is extremely interesting, not only as a case example of how the dot-coms became dot-bombs, but also how the end of the era also affected more established and successful companies. It's also significant to read beteen the lines and see some of the corporate politics that are going on.
If you read the article, by all means, read it with a grain of salt. But keep in mind also that Greenspun's take on the situation, while bitter, and in some places mostly subjective, has some very good objective points which any startup or even small, established company should make note of.
In fact, I have one vendor we work with right now which I'd like to send this article to as a cautionary tale....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I think it's safe to say that Napster is on it's way to being an ex-Napster, and not just pining for the fjords. The hardcore music traders -- the question as to wether it's piracy or not is not the point here -- are getting what they can from Napster before it becomes too restrictive, then they'll find other venues, if they haven't already.
"Acoustic Fingerprinting" sounds like it'll be a 90% shot; there's a chance it'll stop the transfer of a file, but it won't catch all fo them, and it'll accidentally block others. (Some of them might be perfectly legal to exchange freely.) Also, the quality of the recording will have a significant effect on fingerprinting.
I wonder if this "fingerprinting" thing will read OGG files?
I think it's kind of sad; ICQ and other instant messengers have had peer-to-peer file sharing from the beginning.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
You bring up a good point. At that point it would be a case of thinkGeek proving that the e-mail they are charged with having sent out was spoofed.
There is a simple solution, I think: check the books. no company I know of is going to spend ANY amount of money on ANYTHING without keeping very good track of it. ThinkGeek would arrange for an independant auditor, agreed upon by both sides of the case, to go over their books. Somewhere in there, there will be eitehr nothing to see, or an amount indicating a payment to a spammer.
Eh, it's a kludge. I don't know if there's an easy solution, but it makes more sense to go after the person who pays to spam, if it can be pulled off properly.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
We've heard nothing but complaint about the spammers, but there may be a rather elegant way of getting back at the people who flood our e-mail boxen with inane drivel.
Instead of going after the spammers, go after the guys who pay the spammers to hawk their products.
If Spam is going to be constituted as a menace to the stability of the internet, the judicial system should acknowledges the inherent inability of investigators to determine the identity of all spammers, and instead find culpable for damages the people who commission spammers to do their advertizing for them.
Remember, spammers do not exist in a vacuum. It is a rare spammer who hawks their own services. The person who is selling something, and the spammers who are selling stuff themselves, must have some way of separating a user from his money. Thus, they must have some sort of contact point to send money to. There has to be a warm body somewhere along the line who collects the poor sods' money. And if there's a convoluted way of getting money to them, then the Feds of any number of countries will smell 'money laundering' or 'tax evasion' and start salivating like Pavlov's tax inspector.
This will ensure that companies will be very cautious as to who they commission to do their advertizing for them, and will specify that they do not want their product advertized for via unsolicited, bulk, server-crashing, net-clogging, router-crushing, POP3-hijacking, bloody well annoying mass mailing. And spammers will suddenly find their work drying up, and nobody will want to advertize in that manner.
That.. or I'd like to know why this isn't possible. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Something like this MUST be stated in the licensing. Any MIS director out there whose company goes to a software subscription plan should, right off the bat, have this in mind, and they should get something in writing in the subscription contract that the company has with the software vendor.
Ideally, they should have clauses in the contact for backup, in case they're unable to get a non-terminating key before the subscription expires.
Personally, if I had no choice about some sort of anti-piracy system (that is one thing I would NEVER advise any of my clients doing) I'd rather have a dongle hanging out of each of my client's machines COM ports. It's ugly, and supposedly expensive, but producing a hundred thousand of them has got to be cheaper than maintaining a subscriber database and the hassle of dealing with customers when the inevitable something goes wrong. Ideally, the software companies are going to realize that not all of us are VV4r3z pir8z.
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Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Okay, this was something that slipped by me. My apologies, I missed the fact that USB 2 would require new hardware, for somereason I'd thought it was a protocol/driver change. Thanks for the clarificaiton! ---
Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Just about all of us have USB ports on our computers. It would have been very nice for MS to support USB 2.0, that would mean we wouldn't have to install a FireWire card, or for the truly hardcore buy a whole new motherboard just to run Windows XP.
I'm a bit surprised, though, why MS didn't try to "embrace and extend" USB? Isn't Apple (who isn't in the best of positions with regards to MS, which is to say, it's position is basically that of being over a barrel) and Sony worried that MS is going to take FireWire and make it into something totally oddball, IEEE be damned?
We know that MS can't leave well enough alone, they will want to embrace and extend FireWire. They've already extended a number of protocols to the point where they break when exposed to their "standard" kin (or break said kin) so what will MS do to FireWire should be an important question.
I regularly get the Publishing Perfection catalog, and there's a lot of goodies there for Mac and Windows. One thing I've been very happy to see is hardware -- juicy, high-performance, and extremely expensive hardware -- that can work with both PCs and Macs. A good amount of that bicompatability stuff is USB or FireWire. What will happen when FireWire under Windows XP becomes MS FireWire Plus?
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Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
There was some talk in the article about how globalization might come about with the Internet. To which I have to say: is globalization really that good a thing?
Well, let's examing both sides of it. On the one hand, it would sure be nice if everyone settled their differences (cultural, ethnic, economic, political, genotypical, etc.) and started really working together. One world government. We probably could do a heck of a lot if that happened. As a single, united world, I don't think there'd be any barrier we couldn't break!
But... what if the government did something so egregious, so revolting, that (some or even many) people could not morally remain citizens subject ot that government? There are three choices: revolution and the inevitable chaos and destruction wrought by warfare; civil disobedience and the equally inevitable incarceration and, if the offense is deemed significant enough, possible execution; or emigration.
But with one world government, where do you emigrate to?
I know I'm going to be blasted for saying this, but in theory, we live in a world where we can move to another country, become citizens of another country, if our government does something which displeases us as citizens. I realize that many do not exactly have this option; that is the crimp in this argument. That leaves for those unfortunates, however, revolution and civil disobedience... and, thus, Tiannamen Square. There is no easy solution for them, and we can only help by raising our voices against their oppressors, and letting them know that we support their fight.
For the rest of us, who can change which government we owe alleigance to, I contend that this is a good thing, that it's something that we should not blithely throw away in a rush to globalization and consolidation. If you have a single monolithic world government, then you can't just say, "Fuq this, I'm going to Canada!" (You certainly can't say, "Fuq this, I'm going to Mars!") We would be in a situation not unlike that of the Chinese students trying to bring democracy to their country, except covert emigration would not even be a remote option.
It's about choice: choosing where you want to live and under what government.
Back to the topic: I fear that this is going to end in blood. China, I think, has stymied organizations such as the Bildergurg Group; the Trilateral Commission does not, IIRC, have any members from China in their number outside of 'participants,' no full members. This makes China extremely hard for the Commission to influence. (If you think I'm being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, please think again. Have a look at the Trilateral Commission's web site and any of a number of sites critical of the influence of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburg Group. These are groups of very powerful people, who have close contact and infuence with one another and their countries, and no accountability, not even to their own fellow citizens. These are the people who rally under that old saw, "Greed is good," and run economics for their livings.)
In short, there is not going to be a quick solution, and the UN will not be in a good position to intervene, since the US will adamantly refuse to apologize, and the Chinese will escalate their threats and promises until the US does.
I am hoping and praying that that captives do not become hostages.
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Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone want to take bets as to how long the Powers That Be Microsoft are going to let that stay up?
The phrase "GNU Public License" alone is anathema to MS these days.
Well, they essentially release IIS for free and have been releasing IE for free for some time now, though they aren't GPL'd. I would be willing to say that in a few hours (once the work day begins in Redmond) that this page will undergo a dramatic and sudden disappearance.
'Fnord' is a term that any "fringer" or geek will recognize, and it's a word with absolutely no meaning; I wonder if the codeworkers in MS have more of a sense of humor than we'd give them credit for (above and beyond 'Netscape engineers are weenies.')
Maybe the sheeple of the world aren't supposed to see this little gem? =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Didn't see THAT one coming a mile away. ;)
What surprises me is that there weren't more offers.
So here's mine: Wolf-chan, will you... at least let us get to know each each other so that maybe, in the future....
Oh, heck, I'll stop making an ass of myself now. ;)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This is Salon we're reading here. Salon has proven many times in the past that they are extremely biased, amateur journalists with a very sensationalist streak. Just gotta love their article about 'alternative sexuality in the Open Source community,' and David Brin's whine -- er, rant about how Star Trek is better than Star Wars, and another rather bothersome article/rant about the BDSM community. Salon seems to go out of its way to be as sensational as possible. This isn't journalism; it's 'literary self-gratification.' They like seeing their names in print.
It's their opinions, of course, and they're welcome to them. I'd even read their opinions (for free, of course) but it bugs me that they're trying to pass their opinions as objective, unbiased journalism.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I can reply calmly. =)
You make a very good point, in that the kid's eating habits at school were certainly not good. I think, however, that we don't know enough about the case. This goes for me as well, actually. We don't know if the parents talked with the kid first before having the school start regulating his diet. My knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't, that they just up and took no input from the student at all, but only because the article didn't say a thing about them talking with him first.
Regarding the quality of food served at the school, I'll have to take your word for it. =) We brown-bagged it in middle school, and in high school the cafeteria actually seemed to have slightly healthier than average food. Which wasn't to say it was entirely palatable. =)
So, mea culpa, I shouldn't have assumed that the parents didn't talk to the kid first. Be better if we could find out one way or another. Does anyone out there have more details about this system?
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I like to think that I'd be a halfway decent father. I know what mistakes my parents made (and I admit to being lucky: there weren't many) and I know that the important thing about raising a child is to teach them how to be an independant, emancipated human being. If kids in general didn't freak me out so much, I could be a damn good parent, I think.
(Caution: Ranting ahead. Not that you'll really care! =)
Reading this article made me so glad I'm out of school, and made me realize just how fscked up some people are. For a variety of reasons, I may never have children, but reading this article made the prospects of raising a child in this culture bleak and depressing.
There's no other explaination. These parents, these administrators and teachers... they missed something seriously vital in this whole thing. I mean, do they really think that their childhood and teenage years would have been better and more tolerable if their parents had implanted brainwave recorders in their heads, given them microcameras for eyes, and clipped radio-tracking tags to their ears?
Hell, no!
Your child is not an automaton! He or she is not a little version of yourself with no consciousness! They are not zombies who without constant supervision would just walk off a cliff (but some of them might very well do that if it was the only escape from this culture of control that is developing!)
Let's get serious here:
Hmm... you think, possibly, that, maybe, the parents should have asked their own kid if there was something bothering him?! Call it a hunch, call it FSCKING INTUITION, but maybe, just maybe, something was eating at their kid badly enough to screw with his appetite. Or perhaps that there was something going on in his biochemistry which was making him crave sweets -- you think maybe this could be the first stage of diabetes, you stupid ignorant baka parents?
Oh, no. Nope, never in a million years. So they start to remote-control their kid. That's all this system is. Remote control for little automatons.
Parents, get it out of your heads that your teenagers can't open up bottles for themselves. Sure, they seem messed up, but think about what it was like when you were going through middle school and high school. The teenage years are the years where kids are starting to wake up to the fact that they are independant human beings, and a lot start craving their emancipation. Trying to keep a tight leash on your kids will do one of two things:
If the first happens, you have failed miserably as a parent and your kid is destined to be a doormat for the rest of their life unless they can get up enough self-confidence to fight themselves and seek help and get their lives together. Or they kill themselves before they get out of school, and you'll have nobody else to blem but yourself. (Though you'll try to. Oh, how you'll blame everyone else but yourselves! Your cries will ring out into the night and on till past dawn and drown out the funeral bells, but in the end, deep down inside, you stupid baka, you know it's your fault for pushing them and being clueless the whole while.) You certainly can't help them, that much is obvious.
If the second, you have just served to make your kid one of those wonderful disgruntled, disaffected few who get so much media attention these days, and they will revel in every second of discomfort they put you through before they finally kill themselves or run away, piling curses upon your name as they go.
Ultimately, we are responsible for our own actions. Each of us has it within ourselves to be an emancipated, independant human being, and this capability requires of us responsibility for our own actions. But make no mistake: until our children emancipate themselves from us, we are responsible for them. We must raise them and teach them what it means to be independant. It is up to us to tell them:
"You are not numbers! You are free persons!"
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This issue was raised on the SFCONSIM-L mailing list not too long ago. A number of important points were brought up. Please consult the SFCONSIM-L archives (sorry, I don't have a URL) for the full discussion.
First, supercav torps move at just over the speed of sound in water... which is considerably slower than how sound is in air. They might come up with some incredible numbers, but be forewarned: airborne weapons will still be incredibly faster.
Second, these things are LOUD. Now, they move faster than sound in water, so in that sense they are very sneaky. They'll hit before you know they're there. However, the defense for this is a distributed sonar net and a far-flung destroyer screen -- which is what GOOD navies do to protect their high-importance assets already, i.e. battleships and carriers. The destroyer screen and any roving underwater assets will detect the torpedo peripherally, notify the central asset vessel, upon which appropriate precautions will be taken.
In this sense, the supercav torpedo seems to make a better point-defense weapon when you know the bad guys are firing nuclear torps at you, or you absolutely cannot risk any damage whatsoever to your central asset (such as a carrier conducting flight operations.) A small, supercav torp fired in interception with an enemy torpedo. It could be a simple kinetic impactor, or a small explosive charge to spank the bad guys' torp, enough to generate a small pressure wave which will act like a wall to the enemy torp.
However, cavitation is extremely hard on a body and causes a lot of drag and heat -- supersonic aircraft need to reach very high altitudes to be at all fuel-efficient. Supercav torps don't have that option; at any combat depth they are going to be almost literally plowing through a wall and rendering hideous stressors upon their shells. Add to this their incredible fuel consumption, and you have a frankly short-duration weapon. You won't be able to fire one of these puppies from the other side of the Atlantic, and they're not going to be 'supercruise torpedoes' by any stretch of the imagination.
They're a cool idea, though, if for no other reason than to have the fastest torps in the depths. *rimshot* =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
It just struck me that this is a fine definition of a virus, as well. (A biological virus, not a computer virus.)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This'll probably get modded down, but....
You can imagine what the Team Fortress gene-mod would be. You're either blue or red, you very much think 'in the box' and you like to stereotype everyone. Oh, and you get very possessive of your things.
The Action gene-mod. John Woo is your god, and Michelle Yeoh is his prophetess. Why do things halfway? You can drink soda from akimbo cans! You can dive through life with great vigour!
Counterstrike gene-mod. Too bad the world is all either for you or against you... unless they set the friendlyfire chromosome to ON, then it gets interesting.
Aliens TC gene-mod. Axed by 20th Century Fox. All your telomeres are belong to us. Besides, human body and acid blood just didn't go well together. Unless you're Sigourney Weaver.
DXMP gene-mod. You start thinking that, not only is everyone out to get you, but they, like you, have the ability to hide a sniper rifle, GEP gun, and a brace of LAMs in nothing more than a black leather trench coat. The US Genetic Regulatory Agency gets particularly nervous about this mod....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Recently, the US government passed regulations saying that genetic experiments will not be conducted on humans. This is most certainly a back door taken advantage of, because technically, the ova is not a human being until it is fertilized by spermatozoa.
I find myself subtly worried about this. On the one hand, it's a good thing if this means an easier, safer, and beter way to improve fertility. This is what medical science is supposed to be doing. On the other hand... it seems a bit early, doesn't it, to start actively messing with genetics?
Now, technically, this wasn't geneering, it was simple injection of mitochondia into ova. (Were they fertilized or unfertilized? I think I missed that in the article if they mentioned it.) This is a good thing! But we really don't know everything that mitochondia EM in a cell. While it's not genetic engineering, it's cellular engineering so early in development that it might have unforseen effects. These kids have mitochondrial DNA that belongs to neither their parents. While I don't think it's unethical, I have to wonder if this really is a path we want to start down at our level of knowledge.
And what the HELL is this "US Government Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee?" When the heck did our government cobble together this? It sounds like the seeds for some sort of genetic regulatory agency. Okay, maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't like it when my governm,ent starts making esoteric and little-known agencies that start issuing legistlation or making any srt of decisions that impact me. The Federalist Society and Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Affairs are already plugged into our events too much. Or maybe I've just been playing Deus Ex too much.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Not neccessarilly. MS is going to push, push, push the console market for all they're worth to break into it, and in some areas of the world they have a good shot. However, there is one place which I feel they will have trouble in:
The Japanese console market.
ALL of the successful consoles have been put out by Japanese companies. Sony and Nintendo are not going to take any sort of incursion of the X-box lightly. If we have not seen them before, expect some heavy licensing restricitons to be placed on console-game makers in response to MS's restrictions: companies will be made or broken based on what console they choose to develop for, which will be a shame.
The Japanese electronics consumers, morover, are very intense. Console gaming is a VERY big thing over there. While in the US and perhaps Europe, you may run into the occasional guy who has one of every console made (even an old Neo*Geo he takes out reverently now and then) in Japan multiple consoles are the norm. Multiple instances of the same consoles is also not unknown, within the same household. There are also consoles over there that are simply not known about abroad.
Gaming also covers a broader spectrum -- it's no joke that 'dating simulations' are pretty popular there, but there's even wierder stuff that has never been really exported (except for Japanese consoles abroad.) Morover, for more "conventional" games, some have never been exported, either. The array of games in the Japanese market is stunning.
X-box is going to have a really tough time in the Japanese market. I would not be surprised if it dies horribly over there, even if it does well in the US and Europe. And even then, expect a strong assault by Nintendo and (what's left of) Sony. If these two companies can keep their sh** together, they've got a fighting chance to survive the first year of X-Box (whenever that might be.)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
You forgot to attribute this to the proper author, since it appeared in The Onion a while ago.
H-Dog rocks, though, and his column in the Onion kicks! =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
There's a very good reason why tech support for most companies sucks. Again, speaking as a Greymatta Flambe tech guy, helpdesk and tech support is INCREDIBLY painful. You sit at a desk all day, a little headphone thing digging into your temple, and when the phone rings you get some arrogant person on the other end who thinks it's YOUR fault for:
Not everyone who calls up Tech Support is like that, of course. Just the ones that make you wish you could go postal on them over the phone. And they aren't solitary cases, if you get only one of these "problem users" a week you're lucky.
Another problem is that many computer users have been fooled into thinking that computers can be as easy to understand as their toaster oven, when in reality it's MUCH more complex than their VCR which still has "12:00" flashing on and off. They are indignant when things go wrong -- it's all supposed to be so simple!! Why isn't it working?! Windows is supposed to be easy to use!! -- and they vent it on the poor sod who answers the phone.
After a while, it gets to you.
I am not making an excuse for all the people who are in the trenches and on the phones. If you take a job, you've a responsibility to see it through to the end and do your damndest. But it's hard to do; and after a while of being blamed for everything from bluescreens and thinkly-disguised GPFs, to smoking video cards and buzzing power supplies, you get worn down. You feel beat. You feel like crap because everyone in every tech support call has told you that you are crap.* You want to take an axe to your computer.
You start getting burned out.
Your company isn't any help. "Take more cases!" they shout. "We need to maximize our customer productivity synergy!" (Translation, or at least what jaded IT workers hear: "Work, you scalawags! Kowtow to the customers, they're always right, you scurvy dogs!") You try and try your best, but the smile in your voice sounds a little forced, and you start to loose your patience, and putting a customer on hold is as much to give you a moment to calm down as it is to consult with another helpdesk staffer.
Of course technical support people are falling in droves, and of course tech support statistics show a plummeting quality rate. Tech support people have one of the lousiest service industry jobs on Earth: trying to fix computers which computers designed, with merely human might.
It is the rare person who has the patience of a saint and the optimism of an angel. They're incredibly rare in tech support. Those who are neither do their time until they fry, then they flee, far away; in some cases, they start to make plans to flee as far away from the computer industry as possible. And so the industry looses skilled (but emotionally exhausted) tech workers in droves. It's no wonder tech suport quality is dropping.
A solution? There is none, except to reverse the trend that "Money" Gates and Stevie Jobs Wonder have started. Educate your users in the fact that a computer is insanely complex. Let them know that, these days, computers are designing computers, making the job even harder. If you both have a moment, crack open the case in front of them (preferably a hideously complex case with very delicate-looking and complex circuitry. Dell boards are good for this.) Emphasize that you are not just "the computer guy," and you are not the "local computer expert." You are a support technician, or a helpdesk footslogger. You do not know everything there is to know about computers. Nobody can know everything there is about computers.** In other words... you're just like them: you know your job, you're always trying to learn more, but there's only so much you can do when the component parts of what you work with can only be seen with an electron microscope.
Will it work? For some users. For others, hopefully not the majority, you have to take deep breaths, count to ten, and repeat, over and over again to yourself, I will not be the BOFH, I will not be the BOFH, I will not be... screw it! "What's your user name again, sir, and how much disk space did you need...?"
* Nevermind that these are the only calls which stand out in your mind, much more readilly than the cute-sounding / who thanked you warmly for all your help with sunshine and smiles.
** If you do, it took you a lifetime to learn it all, and you must be dead by now. If you are dead, congraulations! You're the first IT liche!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
(They add the moniker 'USNS' for "United States Naval Ship" for emphasis that yes, they are naval ships, darnit, and sovereign territory, and no, you cannot come aboard to conduct a safety inspection. Have a nice day, officer.)
However, Sealand is a decommissioned, abandoned sea fortress. When a base or ship is decommissioned, it is no longer sovereign territory. This actually works out well for us and Sealand, since the UK government relinquished control and sovereignity over the base which would become Sealand. It was, quite literally at the time, up for grabs since it was in international waters.
Britain setting their territorial waters out to 12 miles wouldn't change anything. The Principality of Sealand was there first, and the traditional way of settling these sorts of border disputes is by negotiation. But that would entail the UK acknowledging that Sealand is a sovereign nation. (Also, it's not exacttly kosher for them to do that; territorial waters reach out to only three miles. There's another boundary that reaches out to 12 miles, but it isn't territorial waters; the UK is pulling something silly. The Exclusive Economic Zone reaches to 200 miles, but that has no bearing here.)
Dammit, give it up, UK, and just acknowledge that Sealand is sovereign! The world could use a few places where people can flee oppression, and the established countries just aren't cutting it.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
ZENworks is a bear to deal with, and it is not the most pleasant of things to manage. Some great toys are in it, but all those toys need configuration and management. So, while potentially it could reduce the work of the MIS staff, in actuality it redistributes that work. More of the onus is on the administrator rather than the tier 1 guys or footsloggers who go out to the actual machines.
I cannot imagine that IBM's self-healing servers are any different. We've seen time and time again that computers really can't find out what's wrong with themselves. Part of this is because the operating systems themselves are incapable of covering all that can happen; hardware these days is remarkably stable, for the most part. In order to have self-healing servers, the OS and the server will have to be very tightly-knit, and there will have to be a way for the OS to understand what a "General Protection Fault in module INSANITY.EXE at 6F7D8E:7D33F" is, but also (1) what caused it (MS bashing aside, and remembering that any OS can be host to a GPF, GPFs do not occur in a vacuum) and (2) how to remedy it or work around it.
At the very least, for GPFs, this will require a very sophisticated memory manager which can reallocate memory used by programs, remembering that giving a program access to memory in such-and-such a location caused a GPF last time and so it will need to put that code in a different location.
What I see happening, is that IBM will do a decent job of these self-healing servers. Their complexity will neccessitate charging exorbitant fees for any problem you call in, and massive monthly maintenance fees (the "just in case" cost, which any smart company pays, diligently, and on time; and which dumb companies withhold, shy away from, and simply not pay. I have seen this. It causes mondo problems, and guess who gets told to "resolve it?" (One guess: *hack*MIS*cough*.) You will not see a reduction in the number or cost of footsloggers or tier 1 helpdesk people in your company, and you will ALWAYS need a certified, professional, experienced network admin at the helm.
This will not significantly reduce the need for an IT staff unless, of course, Google with their 8000 servers switch all of them over to self-healing servers.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
For more dark humor from the trenches (tip of the hat to that other place) have a gander at Idiot Watcher's technology section. As a burned-out, cerebrally friccassied tech worker whose seen his grey matter served up to himself flambe, though, I can say that a lot of them hit far too bloody close to home to be very funny. Less jaded geeks, though, should see a lot of humor in them!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I realize that, in all liklihood it was a Windows machine, but that doesn't automatically mean it WAS, and it certainly does not justify calling it a BSOD crash.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I have worked in the corporate world for pretty much all that time, though it wasn't as strict as you might find in a Fortune 500 or NYC Financial District company for most of that time.
It saddens me when I read articles like this, because I know that, once, I did enjoy technology, I did enjoy tinkering, playing with computers, learning new things about them, checking out the latest and greatest technology. I was never a programmer, but I did sort of hack on the hardware and procedure side of things, a very little bit. (I'd contend that procedures, as well as code, can be hacked. A bit of a stretch of the definition, but I think it's appropriate, maybe.) I used to get a lot of enjoyment from getting the computeers to work.
Three years is a long time. I now have (erm, had, it was taken down by my supe) a sign in my little tiny server room that relates that quote by Steve Wozniak: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." I come to work in dread. I have long since no longer considered computers to be a hobby. The less I open my case, the better, and so I praise the coming of USB and FireWire. I find myself groaning whenever my neighbor or even, Heaven help me, my own parents have even the most innocuous computer question. I would very much like to be in another field entirely, but quitting is not wise right now considering the job market, and that I already have a job (albeit a sucky one, IMO) that pays the bills and then some and which, I have to admit, when I'm not trying to keep myself from defenestrating the Dellboxen, I'm reasonably good at.
Burnout? Maybe. Maybe not from technology, but certainly from helpdesk. I certainly have no desire anymore to go out of my way to make these systems more than they are, despite working for a kicka$$ consulting group. It just bothers me, that the article above notes that the best people for these jobs are the people who enjoy the technology, who revel in the changing scope of it, at the advancement of the technological boundaries, at the realms of promise afforded us by Moore's Law.
My day is filled with examples of Murphy's Law. I used to like technology once.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Mr. Greenspun's cautionary tale is extremely interesting, not only as a case example of how the dot-coms became dot-bombs, but also how the end of the era also affected more established and successful companies. It's also significant to read beteen the lines and see some of the corporate politics that are going on.
If you read the article, by all means, read it with a grain of salt. But keep in mind also that Greenspun's take on the situation, while bitter, and in some places mostly subjective, has some very good objective points which any startup or even small, established company should make note of.
In fact, I have one vendor we work with right now which I'd like to send this article to as a cautionary tale....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"Acoustic Fingerprinting" sounds like it'll be a 90% shot; there's a chance it'll stop the transfer of a file, but it won't catch all fo them, and it'll accidentally block others. (Some of them might be perfectly legal to exchange freely.) Also, the quality of the recording will have a significant effect on fingerprinting.
I wonder if this "fingerprinting" thing will read OGG files?
I think it's kind of sad; ICQ and other instant messengers have had peer-to-peer file sharing from the beginning.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
There is a simple solution, I think: check the books. no company I know of is going to spend ANY amount of money on ANYTHING without keeping very good track of it. ThinkGeek would arrange for an independant auditor, agreed upon by both sides of the case, to go over their books. Somewhere in there, there will be eitehr nothing to see, or an amount indicating a payment to a spammer.
Eh, it's a kludge. I don't know if there's an easy solution, but it makes more sense to go after the person who pays to spam, if it can be pulled off properly.
--- Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Instead of going after the spammers, go after the guys who pay the spammers to hawk their products.
If Spam is going to be constituted as a menace to the stability of the internet, the judicial system should acknowledges the inherent inability of investigators to determine the identity of all spammers, and instead find culpable for damages the people who commission spammers to do their advertizing for them.
Remember, spammers do not exist in a vacuum. It is a rare spammer who hawks their own services. The person who is selling something, and the spammers who are selling stuff themselves, must have some way of separating a user from his money. Thus, they must have some sort of contact point to send money to. There has to be a warm body somewhere along the line who collects the poor sods' money. And if there's a convoluted way of getting money to them, then the Feds of any number of countries will smell 'money laundering' or 'tax evasion' and start salivating like Pavlov's tax inspector.
This will ensure that companies will be very cautious as to who they commission to do their advertizing for them, and will specify that they do not want their product advertized for via unsolicited, bulk, server-crashing, net-clogging, router-crushing, POP3-hijacking, bloody well annoying mass mailing. And spammers will suddenly find their work drying up, and nobody will want to advertize in that manner.
That.. or I'd like to know why this isn't possible. =)
--- Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Ideally, they should have clauses in the contact for backup, in case they're unable to get a non-terminating key before the subscription expires.
Personally, if I had no choice about some sort of anti-piracy system (that is one thing I would NEVER advise any of my clients doing) I'd rather have a dongle hanging out of each of my client's machines COM ports. It's ugly, and supposedly expensive, but producing a hundred thousand of them has got to be cheaper than maintaining a subscriber database and the hassle of dealing with customers when the inevitable something goes wrong. Ideally, the software companies are going to realize that not all of us are VV4r3z pir8z.
--- Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Okay, this was something that slipped by me. My apologies, I missed the fact that USB 2 would require new hardware, for somereason I'd thought it was a protocol/driver change. Thanks for the clarificaiton!
--- Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I'm a bit surprised, though, why MS didn't try to "embrace and extend" USB? Isn't Apple (who isn't in the best of positions with regards to MS, which is to say, it's position is basically that of being over a barrel) and Sony worried that MS is going to take FireWire and make it into something totally oddball, IEEE be damned?
We know that MS can't leave well enough alone, they will want to embrace and extend FireWire. They've already extended a number of protocols to the point where they break when exposed to their "standard" kin (or break said kin) so what will MS do to FireWire should be an important question.
I regularly get the Publishing Perfection catalog, and there's a lot of goodies there for Mac and Windows. One thing I've been very happy to see is hardware -- juicy, high-performance, and extremely expensive hardware -- that can work with both PCs and Macs. A good amount of that bicompatability stuff is USB or FireWire. What will happen when FireWire under Windows XP becomes MS FireWire Plus?
--- Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Well, let's examing both sides of it. On the one hand, it would sure be nice if everyone settled their differences (cultural, ethnic, economic, political, genotypical, etc.) and started really working together. One world government. We probably could do a heck of a lot if that happened. As a single, united world, I don't think there'd be any barrier we couldn't break!
But... what if the government did something so egregious, so revolting, that (some or even many) people could not morally remain citizens subject ot that government? There are three choices: revolution and the inevitable chaos and destruction wrought by warfare; civil disobedience and the equally inevitable incarceration and, if the offense is deemed significant enough, possible execution; or emigration.
But with one world government, where do you emigrate to?
I know I'm going to be blasted for saying this, but in theory, we live in a world where we can move to another country, become citizens of another country, if our government does something which displeases us as citizens. I realize that many do not exactly have this option; that is the crimp in this argument. That leaves for those unfortunates, however, revolution and civil disobedience... and, thus, Tiannamen Square. There is no easy solution for them, and we can only help by raising our voices against their oppressors, and letting them know that we support their fight.
For the rest of us, who can change which government we owe alleigance to, I contend that this is a good thing, that it's something that we should not blithely throw away in a rush to globalization and consolidation. If you have a single monolithic world government, then you can't just say, "Fuq this, I'm going to Canada!" (You certainly can't say, "Fuq this, I'm going to Mars!") We would be in a situation not unlike that of the Chinese students trying to bring democracy to their country, except covert emigration would not even be a remote option.
It's about choice: choosing where you want to live and under what government.
Back to the topic: I fear that this is going to end in blood. China, I think, has stymied organizations such as the Bildergurg Group; the Trilateral Commission does not, IIRC, have any members from China in their number outside of 'participants,' no full members. This makes China extremely hard for the Commission to influence. (If you think I'm being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, please think again. Have a look at the Trilateral Commission's web site and any of a number of sites critical of the influence of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburg Group. These are groups of very powerful people, who have close contact and infuence with one another and their countries, and no accountability, not even to their own fellow citizens. These are the people who rally under that old saw, "Greed is good," and run economics for their livings.)
In short, there is not going to be a quick solution, and the UN will not be in a good position to intervene, since the US will adamantly refuse to apologize, and the Chinese will escalate their threats and promises until the US does.
I am hoping and praying that that captives do not become hostages.
--- Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World