This is one of the fallacies of the IT world that so very many young IT guys think. THey think they are all powerful because they run the computers.
Well guess what.
Any worker could come in at night and smash the place up with an axe. Or burn the building down. The accountant could steal money. Does that make them all poweful?
Either way the action is illegal.
If you think you could trojan/delete/sabotage the company's systems and get away with it.. you are mistaken. It is illegal, you will most likely a) go to jail and/or b) never have a career in IT again.
It *may* be legal, however, if you 'agree' to it. If you simply state you want your full wage they owe you, maybe they have to pay.
Usually you only see stuff like this with union shops, in which case it's a negotiation between the company and the union. I've seen this at a copper mine before, but that's a whole different story. THe books are open to the union, the company showed they could not afford to keep going, and everyone came to an amicable agreement as to how things would proceed based on the performance of the copper market (if it picked up, things would return to normal). It worked out well for everyone.
This sounds like a bit of a different story.
A good friend told me a story once.. the long and short of it is: If your company ever cuts your pay or withholds your pay, or makes your pay late because of financial reasons, especially in a smaller company, your first question should be of your boss. Ask the boss if HE took a paycheque on time for the full amount. If he did not, and is also waiting (he should be paid LAST, after his employees) then maybe the company really does have to do this. If he did take his pay, it's time to look elsewhere.
So you mean if they only made 30 grand a year instead of 60 they would know how to manage the money and WOULD save for a rainy day? Hmm. Blaming not saving on making too much money.. interesting.
Now.. I can't talk. I'm in the same boat. I am in the same boat.. sort of. I haven't saved anything. I recognize, however, that this is due to my own stupidity, not due to my making too much money.
On the flip side, I don't have huge car payments or house payments. I am not living on the edge; I simply spend a lot of money. Should I be forced to live on half what I make now, I could do it without giving up any posessions. I would not have to re-morgage the house or trade in the car. I would just have to stop eating out at really expensive restaurants 4 days a week.
Otherwise... Keep in mind any time you let the store handle the financing, and don't use cash, you are paying more than the price of the item.. you are paying with your privacy.
Then you take the key, and the resulting 'encrypted' file, and send them on their merry way. Only when the two are placed together can the original data be recovered.
So as long as nobody obtains the original key, the data is uncrackable. You can't brute force it, because the keyspace is the size of the data itself. Brute forcing it would simply mean generating every single combination of 1k data fields and guessing which one was the original.
You can. But that's a drastically simplified way of doing things.
Sure, we can make drive F: just about anything these days, or we can network mount / to anything we want.
In plan9, every application works within a private namespace. Resources in that namespace can be mapped to anything, easily. It's not just about getting the files from somewhere else. it's about using different memory, processors, etc. It's like symlinking EVERYTHING.. even all your devices.. but that doesn't even really cover it. It's more than that.
It's not about platform independence.. it's about moving from a small scale system like a laptop to an absolutely huge-scale system like nothing you've ever seen before. It's about looking at resources.
From a developer (or user) point of view.. everything in plan9 is an abstraction. A window has the same properties as a native screen. Keyboard input is identical everywhere.
It's not about processor-architecture independent code actually. Code still has to be built for the proper platform. (it can be re-built with absolutely zero modification, however)
It's about re-mapping any kind of resource somewhere else at will. It's about scaling up to huge systems.
It's not just about code that can run anywhere.. it's more like, you sit at your workstation and run some code. It runs locally.. everything is local except say part of your namespace which is the equivalent to a networked home directory for your project. Then you want the project to run somewhere else... so you run another clone of it, but this time you adjust the namespace for the app to use the big CPU cluster rather than your desktop. Everything looks and feels the same, exactly. Your workstation coudl be at home, or on your boat even.
With java, sure you can move stuff around, upload it elsewhere, run it elsewhere.. with plan9 you can basically run a huge collection of computers as one big computer with lots of different resources.
Or to quote (or probably mis-quote) something from the plan9 site.. Instead of building a system out of lots of little Unixes, we build an OS out of lots of little systems.
You look at a plan9 installation as one giant computer with resources, not as lots of independent computers that can communicate with each other.
So you want to change it from a namespace to an object space. That would work.. but you still need some form of communication between objects that can be abstracted over the network. Bytestreams anyone?
Putting objects on top of this would be no more kludgy than putting them on top of the underlying architecture. Bytestreams reflect reality.
IF you want to design a system that can utilize hardare the way plan9 does and use objects instead.. how would it work? Probably very similar to plan9
I think you should re-read what plan9 is all about. It's not about everything-is-a-file. That's unix.
Plan9 is in no way unix.
It tried (and succeeded) to do several things.
Plan9 removes the distinction between operating system, library, and application. These are things that an OS researcher cares about but a user doesn't.
So if you are developing plan9 apps, you *never* worry about the actual hardware. You worry about the program itself. The systems guys can map it to whatever hardware they want later. You create your own personal computing environment the way you like it, and that environment can be mapped onto whatever sized plan9 installation you find later.
Yes.. it makes everything a file, or more accurately, every resource has a name in a tree-like structure. (not so much that everything is a file but a file is just another resource). communications between resources is via a standard protocol (9p) that can be networked.
A system like you are proposing COULD go on top of plan9. That's more of a programming level thing than an OS level thing.
The thing is, plan9 offers no real benefit to a single user on a single computer. Running plan9 on your laptop is of no real use. Running plan9 on your laptop because you are developoing apps that will ultimately run on the globe-wide corporate plan9 system.. that's where plan9 excels, because the little namespace you construct on your laptop.. when you plug your laptop into the global network, you can re-map your cpus for a given application to the supercomputing cluster in shanghai, the storage vault in the Caymans, and the 12 gig removable drive on the workstation next to you, and the application you wrote sees nothing different at all.
I know that when I installed radlight, every copy I've ever installed has 2 very distinct, clear checkboxes that allow me to not install Savenow and new.net.
Neither of these are required for radlight to work.
So... *aside* from the evil uninstalling of ad-aware, what is so bad about radlight? Is it even really spyware when they actually *ask* you if you want it to be installed in the first place?
The point is, if you want to use lots, you are going to pay for it. I thought the original question was more along hte lines of "I wnat to be able to use lots of bandwidth but don't want to pay for it"
If you want to use a little, there are ways to ensure you don't end up paying a lot.
You can always pay based on an average, sure.
You are still covering the cost of the bandwidth. After all, it costs your provider money.
Hint: You won't avoid bandwidth fees one way or the other. Bandwidth costs money. You won't avoid them *especially* if you want to be left alone to do what you want to do.
Buy a server, colocate it somewhere, and set up what you want. Do your own mail, dns, everything.
Or... lease a cobalt raq somewhere, that might be a good start. Quick, easy, your own machine.
Where did you get the idea that reverse engineering software is illegal? (I assume that is what you mean by 'not quite legal')
It's completely legal to reverse engineer anything, unless you have some contractual agreement to the contrary.
You may be thinking of the clean-room techniques used to reverse engineer, then re-engineer software to build a competing product... but that's another story altogether. Those results are simply to show that none of the original work was copied. You have one team rip something down into a spec, then a totally different team build a product from that spec. And that's legal. Patents can get in the way of course....
I thinks his point is that if you take *any* creator of any work you like, you will find something you disagree with them with, perhaps strongly.
The same goes for any product you purchase. Go look at the corporate structure of every product you use in your day to day life, surely you will see that every item you purchase is somehow financing views and political agendas completely contrary to your own.
What if I didn't install it? What if I disassembled the installer without going through the clickthrough agreement? At that point, only standard copyright law exists to protect the authors.
is because people don't percieve them as legally enforceable. They see it as some stupid BS that they have to click on to use the product they *already* purchased.
EULA's are still largely untested in the courts.
If it was a paper they were asked to sign.. that's another story.
I already said that under certain circumstances they have to take the item back, meaning exactly this.
If it's not fit for sale or up to standard or sold under false preteses, they must take the item back.
This is NOT the kind of return I meant. A great many people think they have some legal right to return anything for any reason if it's unopened or otherwise recently purchased, just because they don't like it, or the color doesn't match, or whatever. That's what I was talking about.
We call it spyware because it installs itself without asking, and because they tend to report certain usage statistics back to some server somewhere. Who cares if it's advertising.
If the company simply used some libraries and built some advertising into their app, hey, fine.
If they intall stuff to feed information to some third party company without ASKING me if it's okay, then it's not okay.
I find radlight to perform better and be a smoother player than the rest.
The new Windows Media player wno't reocgnize or work with all the codecs I have, and I hate juggling between versions. Radlight seems to work with them all. It does a better job of not crashing on bit errors in the stream, has better shuttle controls, and better keyboard controls, and has LESS bloat than windows media player.
Also, radlight has checkboxes on install to remove a couple piece of spyware...
I'm curious, what other spyware is present in radlight?
VoIP does not mean simply "Voice over the internet". Roger Wilco is not VoIP. Neither is Internet Phone. Etc. ETc.
VoIP is a set of standards for going standard telephony-like things over the Internet. IT allows for integration of the IP-based system and the standard telco system. IT's actually quite complex and detailed.
If all you want is voice between two computers, VoIP is overkill.
The benefit as I understand it of the VoIP blaster is that it does real VoIP. You can hook it up , subscribe, and get *real* telephone service to it. A phone number. You can make real calls to anyone, anywhere, and it will work quite well.
It's like replacing the last mile & local telco with VoIP & some remote telco.
On that note.. anyone know of any VoIP providers who will actuall, say, route you a lot of calls & numbers over the net? (say, if I want to avoid using the local telco completely and I want to bring in my business 800 line over my big fat internet pipe, then break it out into a standard PBX on my end) (No, I don't mean using a channelized T1 or something and multiplexing voice on it..)
These are the two things I keep hearing over and over in the retail business. Store policies are so common now that people think these things are law. They are not.
1) You can return most goods to the store for a full refund (sometimes with stipulations about whether or not it's been opened, unpacked, etc)
- This is false. A merchant is under no obligation to return your money and take back an item, even if it's unopened. A sale is a sale. No law requires this. Stores have policies allowing such returns for good customer relations, not for the law. The only exception to this is if the goods are sold under false pretenses, or are defective. If it's not what the store said it was, or doens't do what they said it would do, the sale is fraudulent, and they have to return your money.
2) Stores have to honor advertised prices, or mis-labeled prices on items. No, they do not. Again, most stores do this as a matter of good customer relations, but they are not required to by law. Fraudulent advertising IS illegal, and if you can show they are deliberately doing false advertising, then they can be sued (but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to honor the price) A grocery store honoring a dollar-too-low advertised price on a pack of noodles may lose some money over the week, but its'a small margin business, and customer loyalty is very important. A couple bucks loss per customer for a day or two is no big deal, and worth it to keep the customer who shops in your store every week for 10 years straight.
A $200 loss per customer IS a big deal, especially in a business with little customer loyalty.
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This is one of the fallacies of the IT world that so very many young IT guys think. THey think they are all powerful because they run the computers.
Well guess what.
Any worker could come in at night and smash the place up with an axe. Or burn the building down.
The accountant could steal money. Does that make them all poweful?
Either way the action is illegal.
If you think you could trojan/delete/sabotage the company's systems and get away with it.. you are mistaken. It is illegal, you will most likely a) go to jail and/or b) never have a career in IT again.
In many places, this would be illegal.
It *may* be legal, however, if you 'agree' to it. If you simply state you want your full wage they owe you, maybe they have to pay.
Usually you only see stuff like this with union shops, in which case it's a negotiation between the company and the union. I've seen this at a copper mine before, but that's a whole different story. THe books are open to the union, the company showed they could not afford to keep going, and everyone came to an amicable agreement as to how things would proceed based on the performance of the copper market (if it picked up, things would return to normal). It worked out well for everyone.
This sounds like a bit of a different story.
A good friend told me a story once.. the long and short of it is: If your company ever cuts your pay or withholds your pay, or makes your pay late because of financial reasons, especially in a smaller company, your first question should be of your boss. Ask the boss if HE took a paycheque on time for the full amount. If he did not, and is also waiting (he should be paid LAST, after his employees) then maybe the company really does have to do this. If he did take his pay, it's time to look elsewhere.
So you mean if they only made 30 grand a year instead of 60 they would know how to manage the money and WOULD save for a rainy day?
Hmm.
Blaming not saving on making too much money.. interesting.
Now.. I can't talk. I'm in the same boat. I am in the same boat.. sort of. I haven't saved anything. I recognize, however, that this is due to my own stupidity, not due to my making too much money.
On the flip side, I don't have huge car payments or house payments. I am not living on the edge; I simply spend a lot of money. Should I be forced to live on half what I make now, I could do it without giving up any posessions. I would not have to re-morgage the house or trade in the car. I would just have to stop eating out at really expensive restaurants 4 days a week.
Otherwise...
Keep in mind any time you let the store handle the financing, and don't use cash, you are paying more than the price of the item.. you are paying with your privacy.
With a one-time pad. Like he just said.
Say you have 1kb you need to encrypt.
You generate a 1kb key, and do a simple XOR.
Then you take the key, and the resulting 'encrypted' file, and send them on their merry way. Only when the two are placed together can the original data be recovered.
So as long as nobody obtains the original key, the data is uncrackable. You can't brute force it, because the keyspace is the size of the data itself. Brute forcing it would simply mean generating every single combination of 1k data fields and guessing which one was the original.
Make sense?
You can. But that's a drastically simplified way of doing things.
Sure, we can make drive F: just about anything these days, or we can network mount / to anything we want.
In plan9, every application works within a private namespace. Resources in that namespace can be mapped to anything, easily. It's not just about getting the files from somewhere else. it's about using different memory, processors, etc.
It's like symlinking EVERYTHING.. even all your devices.. but that doesn't even really cover it.
It's more than that.
It's not about platform independence.. it's about moving from a small scale system like a laptop to an absolutely huge-scale system like nothing you've ever seen before. It's about looking at resources.
From a developer (or user) point of view.. everything in plan9 is an abstraction.
A window has the same properties as a native screen. Keyboard input is identical everywhere.
It's not about processor-architecture independent code actually. Code still has to be built for the proper platform. (it can be re-built with absolutely zero modification, however)
It's about re-mapping any kind of resource somewhere else at will. It's about scaling up to huge systems.
It's not just about code that can run anywhere.. it's more like, you sit at your workstation and run some code. It runs locally.. everything is local except say part of your namespace which is the equivalent to a networked home directory for your project. Then you want the project to run somewhere else... so you run another clone of it, but this time you adjust the namespace for the app to use the big CPU cluster rather than your desktop. Everything looks and feels the same, exactly. Your workstation coudl be at home, or on your boat even.
With java, sure you can move stuff around, upload it elsewhere, run it elsewhere..
with plan9 you can basically run a huge collection of computers as one big computer with lots of different resources.
Or to quote (or probably mis-quote) something from the plan9 site..
Instead of building a system out of lots of little Unixes, we build an OS out of lots of little systems.
You look at a plan9 installation as one giant computer with resources, not as lots of independent computers that can communicate with each other.
So you want to change it from a namespace to an object space. That would work.. but you still need some form of communication between objects that can be abstracted over the network. Bytestreams anyone?
Putting objects on top of this would be no more kludgy than putting them on top of the underlying architecture. Bytestreams reflect reality.
IF you want to design a system that can utilize hardare the way plan9 does and use objects instead.. how would it work? Probably very similar to plan9
I think you should re-read what plan9 is all about. It's not about everything-is-a-file. That's unix.
Plan9 is in no way unix.
It tried (and succeeded) to do several things.
Plan9 removes the distinction between operating system, library, and application. These are things that an OS researcher cares about but a user doesn't.
So if you are developing plan9 apps, you *never* worry about the actual hardware. You worry about the program itself. The systems guys can map it to whatever hardware they want later.
You create your own personal computing environment the way you like it, and that environment can be mapped onto whatever sized plan9 installation you find later.
Yes.. it makes everything a file, or more accurately, every resource has a name in a tree-like structure. (not so much that everything is a file but a file is just another resource).
communications between resources is via a standard protocol (9p) that can be networked.
A system like you are proposing COULD go on top of plan9. That's more of a programming level thing than an OS level thing.
The thing is, plan9 offers no real benefit to a single user on a single computer. Running plan9 on your laptop is of no real use.
Running plan9 on your laptop because you are developoing apps that will ultimately run on the globe-wide corporate plan9 system.. that's where plan9 excels, because the little namespace you construct on your laptop.. when you plug your laptop into the global network, you can re-map your cpus for a given application to the supercomputing cluster in shanghai, the storage vault in the Caymans, and the 12 gig removable drive on the workstation next to you, and the application you wrote sees nothing different at all.
I know that when I installed radlight, every copy I've ever installed has 2 very distinct, clear checkboxes that allow me to not install Savenow and new.net.
Neither of these are required for radlight to work.
So... *aside* from the evil uninstalling of ad-aware, what is so bad about radlight? Is it even really spyware when they actually *ask* you if you want it to be installed in the first place?
Yeah. And you are still paying for bandwidth.
The point is, if you want to use lots, you are going to pay for it. I thought the original question was more along hte lines of "I wnat to be able to use lots of bandwidth but don't want to pay for it"
If you want to use a little, there are ways to ensure you don't end up paying a lot.
You can always pay based on an average, sure.
You are still covering the cost of the bandwidth. After all, it costs your provider money.
All it did was tighten itself up.
They heat it up, it shrinks, and tightens the knot nicely.
Useful, but not exactly a self tying knot.
Colocate a server somewhere.
Hint: You won't avoid bandwidth fees one way or the other. Bandwidth costs money.
You won't avoid them *especially* if you want to be left alone to do what you want to do.
Buy a server, colocate it somewhere, and set up what you want. Do your own mail, dns, everything.
Or... lease a cobalt raq somewhere, that might be a good start. Quick, easy, your own machine.
Where did you get the idea that reverse engineering software is illegal? (I assume that is what you mean by 'not quite legal')
It's completely legal to reverse engineer anything, unless you have some contractual agreement to the contrary.
You may be thinking of the clean-room techniques used to reverse engineer, then re-engineer software to build a competing product... but that's another story altogether. Those results are simply to show that none of the original work was copied. You have one team rip something down into a spec, then a totally different team build a product from that spec. And that's legal.
Patents can get in the way of course....
I thinks his point is that if you take *any* creator of any work you like, you will find something you disagree with them with, perhaps strongly.
The same goes for any product you purchase. Go look at the corporate structure of every product you use in your day to day life, surely you will see that every item you purchase is somehow financing views and political agendas completely contrary to your own.
That's his point.
What if I didn't install it? What if I disassembled the installer without going through the clickthrough agreement? At that point, only standard copyright law exists to protect the authors.
is because people don't percieve them as legally enforceable. They see it as some stupid BS that they have to click on to use the product they *already* purchased.
EULA's are still largely untested in the courts.
If it was a paper they were asked to sign.. that's another story.
So a true plumber only likes to work with pipes, and a true carpenter only like sto work with wood?
A true garbageman only likes to work with garbage?
Don't mix obsession up with skill. They are not at all related.
Somehow I doubt that merchants are required by law to honor misprints.
I already said that under certain circumstances they have to take the item back, meaning exactly this.
If it's not fit for sale or up to standard or sold under false preteses, they must take the item back.
This is NOT the kind of return I meant. A great many people think they have some legal right to return anything for any reason if it's unopened or otherwise recently purchased, just because they don't like it, or the color doesn't match, or whatever. That's what I was talking about.
Idid.
Yes, it uninstalled ad-aware.
It did not, however, install it's spyware.
It definately does provide you with simple and clear checkboxes as to the spyware it wants to install (new.net and something else)
We call it spyware because it installs itself without asking, and because they tend to report certain usage statistics back to some server somewhere. Who cares if it's advertising.
If the company simply used some libraries and built some advertising into their app, hey, fine.
If they intall stuff to feed information to some third party company without ASKING me if it's okay, then it's not okay.
Not at all.
Using part of the program and not using the rest is your right. It falls under fair use.
Copyright does not extend to telling you exactly how to use something.
Coprygiht does not give you absolute control over every single copy of your work... it merely establishes some basic rights.
I find radlight to perform better and be a smoother player than the rest.
The new Windows Media player wno't reocgnize or work with all the codecs I have, and I hate juggling between versions.
Radlight seems to work with them all. It does a better job of not crashing on bit errors in the stream, has better shuttle controls, and better keyboard controls, and has LESS bloat than windows media player.
Also, radlight has checkboxes on install to remove a couple piece of spyware...
I'm curious, what other spyware is present in radlight?
VoIP does not mean simply "Voice over the internet". Roger Wilco is not VoIP. Neither is Internet Phone. Etc. ETc.
VoIP is a set of standards for going standard telephony-like things over the Internet. IT allows for integration of the IP-based system and the standard telco system. IT's actually quite complex and detailed.
If all you want is voice between two computers, VoIP is overkill.
The benefit as I understand it of the VoIP blaster is that it does real VoIP. You can hook it up , subscribe, and get *real* telephone service to it. A phone number. You can make real calls to anyone, anywhere, and it will work quite well.
It's like replacing the last mile & local telco with VoIP & some remote telco.
On that note.. anyone know of any VoIP providers who will actuall, say, route you a lot of calls & numbers over the net?
(say, if I want to avoid using the local telco completely and I want to bring in my business 800 line over my big fat internet pipe, then break it out into a standard PBX on my end) (No, I don't mean using a channelized T1 or something and multiplexing voice on it..)
These are the two things I keep hearing over and over in the retail business. Store policies are so common now that people think these things are law. They are not.
1) You can return most goods to the store for a full refund (sometimes with stipulations about whether or not it's been opened, unpacked, etc)
- This is false. A merchant is under no obligation to return your money and take back an item, even if it's unopened. A sale is a sale. No law requires this. Stores have policies allowing such returns for good customer relations, not for the law.
The only exception to this is if the goods are sold under false pretenses, or are defective. If it's not what the store said it was, or doens't do what they said it would do, the sale is fraudulent, and they have to return your money.
2) Stores have to honor advertised prices, or mis-labeled prices on items.
No, they do not. Again, most stores do this as a matter of good customer relations, but they are not required to by law. Fraudulent advertising IS illegal, and if you can show they are deliberately doing false advertising, then they can be sued (but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to honor the price)
A grocery store honoring a dollar-too-low advertised price on a pack of noodles may lose some money over the week, but its'a small margin business, and customer loyalty is very important. A couple bucks loss per customer for a day or two is no big deal, and worth it to keep the customer who shops in your store every week for 10 years straight.
A $200 loss per customer IS a big deal, especially in a business with little customer loyalty.