Screw-drivers were intended to turn screws, but people use it for all different purposes from opening cans to picking teeth to scratching their backs.
But you couldn't complain at all if the screwdriver DIDN'T open a pop can, or if you cut your gums picking your teeth with one, because you're not using it as it was intended.
Figure about $3 for manufacturing, production and royalty costs for major mass market acts. Retailers (used to - haven't checked in a few years) pay between $7-$10 per CD in store, which they then sold for between $15-$18. The retailer's making a markup, and so are the record companies. On a $3 disc, they might make an extra 5 or 6 buck selling to retailers, who then double it. Yeah, that's a decent profit margin, but it's certainly not '5 cents -> $17' type margins.
One might argue that a EULA is more binding because someone agreed to it actively, instead of a law which one basically accepts passively. Oftentimes the laws may have been passed before you were even born, so there's not much realistically you can do, but you have every option of clicking 'accept' or 'do not accept' when the LA comes up.
Problem is, most companies don't accept the agreement themselves. A contractor installs stuff on their machines for them, clicks 'OK' 50 times, and leaves. Much like if we actually had to *pay* taxes, instead of most people having them withheld, if most people actually READ the LA with most software, there'd be a minor revolution.
I installed the mouse gestures package, expecting it to be like Opera. It should be labelled 'mouse + keystroke gestures'. 'Click + left button + left' = 'back'. Right-clicking for a context menu then selecting 'back' is easier. I thought mouse gestures were intended to make things easier. Having to click a key isn't. There are already keystrokes for many of the common 'mouse gestures'.
Re:This is the way it should be...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
(releasing a misconfigured product from competitors).
KDE is not a 'competitor' to RedHat. Mandrake would be a competitor to RedHat, as would Caldera. KDE is not a competitor.
Yeah, this is a day late, but I just downloaded the latest available Aethera, and it doesn't support IMAP. It's part of the configuration setup, but you can see messages in the command line area being passed back and "IMAP4::getMail() is not supported" is one of them (or something similar to that).
This much-lauded email/PIM thing is about to become 1.0 - still mostly aimed at geeks - and doesn't support IMAP? I don't get it.
In terms of comparing [Aethera] to Evolution, they both are at the heart email/PIM applications. We differ initially in the fact that ours will run on Linux and Windows
So does he mean 'will' as in 'in the future' or 'it will run today' on Windows? Native version, or this one of those 'install Cygwin' things?
Exactly my thoughts - I'd mod you up if I had the points. Why do people get so worked up about this? Perhaps if you were trying to look at a larger picture which scrolled around on the screen, this would be a problem, but I believe that for most uses it's fine as it is and you *can't* notice a difference.
You're fighting idiocy with more idiocy. You acknowledge that people WILL think stupid stuff, regardless of the facts/logic involved. So you think a disclaimer someplace is going to suddenly make everyone see sense? If you're REALLY that concerned about the potential involved, and you have some knowledge of potential risks, it's your fault if you don't take reasonable steps to CYA. In this case, reasonable means proactive *technical* steps.
If you knew the lock on a home's front door was broken or non-existent, do you think you'll get much sympathy from people when that home is broken in to, regardless of the 'keep out' signs that were posted. Sure, those signs were an assumed 'contract' between someone at the front door and the door's owner, but the fact that the lock was broken and the owner had knowledge of it can not be overlooked or played down.
But if it's some guy who posted a cool case mod on his computer connected by MediaOne or whatever, then give him a break, and send him a quick e-mail before you link to it. It's just common courtesy.
No, it's a waste of time, but if that's what you want to do, fine. Many of the 'i want to link to you' things I get are autogenerated 'emarketing' letters anyway that get caught by spam filters, so I never see them. The person who runs a 'cool' site on 14k dialup isn't the type of person who has a 'don't link to me' policy and a legal team to bother to write it in the first place, so what's the point? Oh yeah, your courtesy. Just realize most people running sites that have content worth linking to either don't have time to answer those types of emails (and don't care if you link) or will have stupid guidelines which may prohibit you anyway. In either case, it's usually a waste of time.
What is 'linking'? The act of creating an 'a href' tag? The posting of that tag on a publicly accessible site? The act of clicking on a 'link'?
I can AIM 'www.logicreate.com' to someone - I've not 'made' a link. AOL's AIM client makes it into a link. Same for most email clients. The person who wrote http://www.phphelpdesk.com in an email didn't 'make' a link - the email software I chose to use created it for me.
So, it seems that instead of 'linking', there needs to be a clearer definition. 'Don't visit us without our express written permission' might be clearer.
I'm interested to know how many of these same companies with these stupid 'linking policies' have links on their intranets to common websites that also have stupid 'linking policies'.
The way Oracle does it, with a file(s) per tablespace, is a much easier option. You can put whatever you want in that tablespace and it makes it very easy to manage.
Oh, you mean like the innodb type in MySQL? This will, I believe, become the default table type in MySQL in the next year or so. Can't remember where I read that, but it seems to be stuck in my head from somewhere (maybe I'm just crazy!):0
Re:Is someone putting a gun to his head or somethi
on
#debian & IRC Politics
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· Score: 2
That said, it would be nice if people who provide a valuable service to the open source community could manage to live on community contributions... the problem is that there are too many people willing to do the same thing for free:)
Wow - if I had mod points I'd mod that up - quite insightful. Honestly, that about wraps it up. What I don't get is WHY everyone in the world is willing to do pretty much everything for free all the time. Obviously not money, but when I suggested it was ego driving this sort of stuff (on a local LUG list) I got lambasted for such a horrifying, slanderous thought.
Anyone else got any better ideas?
Re:How is this different from the Perl Foundation?
on
#debian & IRC Politics
·
· Score: 2
If people are going to donate money to Open Source/Free Software, it would be good to see the money actually go to support that, not pay lilo's gas bills.
You think donations of money go to 'free software'? Those donations eventually wind up paying *someone's* gas bill. If you don't like this lilo guy, fine, but he's asking for money to provide a service. You either don't like him or the service, then don't donate. Pretty simple - nothing that should get everyone so worked up.
bad example - anyone else could see the lock on the front door too, any could bring to bear their knowledge of locks on that with or without your symbols. It's much harder to 'see' invisible bandwidth availability that it is to see the type of lock on a door.
The store owner probably wouldn't press charges against a locksmith who happened to walk by the store, stick his head through the open door and say 'hey, I see this lock here is insecure - you should get it replaced with a better lock'. Random Joe walking in off the street to company X saying 'hey, your wireless network is insecure - trust me' is not going to get the same respect. There aren't federal laws about looking at someone's lock on a front door. There ARE federal laws against 'looking' at someone's network (you have to interact with it at some level to gain ANY knowledge about it at all).
I don't subscribe to the idea that these people are doing something 'covertly'. If it was 'covert' they wouldn't put it out in public, for starters. It'd be on a password-protected website or something else harders to get to.
Also, as many others have pointed out, some people chalk themselves to let people know that they can use the wireless access.
Your point was that people should tell the network point owner about the 'openness'. I say no - let people find out for themselves. Unless a company has some sort of 'contact us' form for technical people to submit real technical issues (website problems, security issues, etc) that will in fact be addressed by technical people who won't respond with lawsuits, I'm not bothering to do their work for them for free.
try to publicize the problem somewhere Putting chalk marks outside a building seems pretty public to me. I guess they could make the chalk marks larger, but then you'd be in trouble for graffitti (IBM/Linux chalkings). Warchalking IS a public approach, but it's not necessarily signifying a 'problem' - it's just pointing out a circumstance. The label of 'problem' is for the network owner to decide.
Have you ever TRIED telling someone that you're not employed by that they have security issues? (If you're an employee, it's still a hard enough issue sometimes, depending on politics).
I had a friend who had a friend who ran a webshop, with everything running NT. We benignly poked around for all of about 90 seconds probing for 2 known NT holes (had been known about for over a year at that point) and found the entire database for a local HR company completely exposed via the web (SQL Server 7 I believe it was). Repeated phone calls and emails to that shop went unnoticed. Notifying the HR company that their data was exposed and that they should notify their webshop resulted in threats of lawsuits and other less legal retaliatory measures for 'hacking', 'breaking in', etc.
Walking in to someone's house through their open front door is seen as bad, even if you're simply trying to tell them that their door is open and they should close/lock it because of burglars. Hell, you might even be a master locksmith, but they'll probably still call the police.
It's just not that easy to tell the network owners they are vulnerable. You may very well face 'hacking' charges.
"Identifying the presence of a wireless network may not be a criminal violation, however, there may be criminal violations if the network is actually accessed including theft of services, interception of communications, misuse of computing resources, up to and including violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute, Theft of Trade Secrets, and other federal violations."
If they wanted to press harder, essentially anyone who even 'wardrives' (what a stupid term!) looking around for open networks could be violating some federal law. You wouldn't be able to know if a network is open or not until you tried to access it, and you're attempt doesn't have explicit authorization. It'd be like tuning into a radio station (which plays just fine on your radio) that you didn't have authorization to listen to. You would be breaking the law just by checking if you get the station, because that's 'accessing' it.
It's a bit of a stretch, I know, but damn it, this kind of stuff just gets my goat. With all the money people spend on wireless networks and subsequent 'consultants' why the hell can't they lock these things down too? Is it because the bulk of these people really shouldn't be adminning or setting up any sort of network in the first place? Probably.
To follow up again, no medical transcriptionist I know of who's been in the biz for more than 5 years LIKES to use MS Word. Some hate it, some are indifferent, but no one LIKES it.
Yes, for you as an IT person, it might be less painful, but it's certainly not faster than DOS based WP. The transcriptionists I know are paid per line, and none have been as productive under MS Word as under WP/DOS. When it impacts your paycheck, you take more notice.
The point is the tools already exist, and keep people productive. Obviously the makers of these programs - the ones who already have years of terminology collected and organized - don't feel there's enough market to develop something. If they don't think it's worth it (either it won't be fast enough, or whatever) that should speak volumes to the hospitals out there, but it doesn't. Everyone gets shiny new Windows on their desks, even though it's patently the Wrong Tool For The Job(tm).
Stedman's dictionary product wasn't available last time I looked. Even products like it operate SLOWLY under Windows. This is not me saying this - this is coming from multiple transcriptionists who've been 'in the trenches' for years. Some marketing fluff states that there are equivalents, but those are not the equivalent functionality in real world usage.
"Shoehorning the wrong tool" - this happens OFTEN dealing with MS. Anecdotal case in point:
The transcription department at the hospital my mother works at transferred everyone over to MS Word a couple years ago, from DOS-based Word Perfect. The reason given was to 'increase productivity'. Well, it only helps the IT productivity, because it's less for them to 'learn' (never mind that they rarely actually help solve a problem anyway, that's another story).
The point is hundreds of people were trained and very productive in WordPerfect. They didn't WANT to switch to Office/Word, but were forced to. Productivity DROPPED like a rock. All the DOS-based tools (keymap-expanders - "alt-shift-gg" expands to "gyrointestinal gerontology", for example) don't exist for Word, and still haven't appeared on the market.
By pure line-count per hour based productivity, MANY people in the department fell at least 50%, some by as much as 80%, in terms of productivity.
This was and still is most definitely the 'wrong tool' for the job, but it's 'company policy' and everyone lives with it. Forcing people in a federal office building to learn OpenOffice after learning Word would be costly, yes, but it would fit the overarching IT vision, if it was articulated to demand open source stuff.
When the 'wrong tool' for the job is MS, people still seem to go along with it, but when the 'wrong tool' may be open source stuff, suddenly it can't happen?
Re:Government is *NOT* a private enterprise
on
Mega-Geek March?
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· Score: 2
"with just a wee bit of Government funding it would be."
It's got a multi billion dollar corp behind it already, and there's still problems with it. What would a 'wee bit' of funding do?
And investing money in openly available technologies helps all.
I don't see how this is always the case. It only helps those who use the technologies, it doesn't help the people who develop them. It most certainly doesn't help 'all'.
Slashdot Mirror
I could have sworn there was CORBA support (able to compile in CORBA support, anyway) but I can't find reference to it now. Has it gone?
Screw-drivers were intended to turn screws, but people use it for all different purposes from opening cans to picking teeth to scratching their backs.
But you couldn't complain at all if the screwdriver DIDN'T open a pop can, or if you cut your gums picking your teeth with one, because you're not using it as it was intended.
Figure about $3 for manufacturing, production and royalty costs for major mass market acts. Retailers (used to - haven't checked in a few years) pay between $7-$10 per CD in store, which they then sold for between $15-$18. The retailer's making a markup, and so are the record companies. On a $3 disc, they might make an extra 5 or 6 buck selling to retailers, who then double it. Yeah, that's a decent profit margin, but it's certainly not '5 cents -> $17' type margins.
consider serving that information up on a web page via an IIS/SQL type of solution of some kind
:)
Cause we all know how secure *those* products are.
I'm not sure if HIPPA guidelines provide for this sort of thing, though.
That's the problem - I don't think *anybody* knows for certain at this stage. Things are too ambiguous (yes I've read most of the regulations)
One might argue that a EULA is more binding because someone agreed to it actively, instead of a law which one basically accepts passively. Oftentimes the laws may have been passed before you were even born, so there's not much realistically you can do, but you have every option of clicking 'accept' or 'do not accept' when the LA comes up.
Problem is, most companies don't accept the agreement themselves. A contractor installs stuff on their machines for them, clicks 'OK' 50 times, and leaves. Much like if we actually had to *pay* taxes, instead of most people having them withheld, if most people actually READ the LA with most software, there'd be a minor revolution.
I installed the mouse gestures package, expecting it to be like Opera. It should be labelled 'mouse + keystroke gestures'. 'Click + left button + left' = 'back'. Right-clicking for a context menu then selecting 'back' is easier. I thought mouse gestures were intended to make things easier. Having to click a key isn't. There are already keystrokes for many of the common 'mouse gestures'.
(releasing a misconfigured product from competitors).
KDE is not a 'competitor' to RedHat. Mandrake would be a competitor to RedHat, as would Caldera. KDE is not a competitor.
Yeah, this is a day late, but I just downloaded the latest available Aethera, and it doesn't support IMAP. It's part of the configuration setup, but you can see messages in the command line area being passed back and "IMAP4::getMail() is not supported" is one of them (or something similar to that).
This much-lauded email/PIM thing is about to become 1.0 - still mostly aimed at geeks - and doesn't support IMAP? I don't get it.
In terms of comparing [Aethera] to Evolution, they both are at the heart email/PIM applications. We differ initially in the fact that ours will run on Linux and Windows
So does he mean 'will' as in 'in the future' or 'it will run today' on Windows? Native version, or this one of those 'install Cygwin' things?
Exactly my thoughts - I'd mod you up if I had the points. Why do people get so worked up about this? Perhaps if you were trying to look at a larger picture which scrolled around on the screen, this would be a problem, but I believe that for most uses it's fine as it is and you *can't* notice a difference.
You're fighting idiocy with more idiocy. You acknowledge that people WILL think stupid stuff, regardless of the facts/logic involved. So you think a disclaimer someplace is going to suddenly make everyone see sense? If you're REALLY that concerned about the potential involved, and you have some knowledge of potential risks, it's your fault if you don't take reasonable steps to CYA. In this case, reasonable means proactive *technical* steps.
If you knew the lock on a home's front door was broken or non-existent, do you think you'll get much sympathy from people when that home is broken in to, regardless of the 'keep out' signs that were posted. Sure, those signs were an assumed 'contract' between someone at the front door and the door's owner, but the fact that the lock was broken and the owner had knowledge of it can not be overlooked or played down.
But if it's some guy who posted a cool case mod on his computer connected by MediaOne or whatever, then give him a break, and send him a quick e-mail before you link to it. It's just common courtesy.
No, it's a waste of time, but if that's what you want to do, fine. Many of the 'i want to link to you' things I get are autogenerated 'emarketing' letters anyway that get caught by spam filters, so I never see them. The person who runs a 'cool' site on 14k dialup isn't the type of person who has a 'don't link to me' policy and a legal team to bother to write it in the first place, so what's the point? Oh yeah, your courtesy. Just realize most people running sites that have content worth linking to either don't have time to answer those types of emails (and don't care if you link) or will have stupid guidelines which may prohibit you anyway. In either case, it's usually a waste of time.
What is 'linking'? The act of creating an 'a href' tag? The posting of that tag on a publicly accessible site? The act of clicking on a 'link'?
I can AIM 'www.logicreate.com' to someone - I've not 'made' a link. AOL's AIM client makes it into a link. Same for most email clients. The person who wrote http://www.phphelpdesk.com in an email didn't 'make' a link - the email software I chose to use created it for me.
So, it seems that instead of 'linking', there needs to be a clearer definition. 'Don't visit us without our express written permission' might be clearer.
I'm interested to know how many of these same companies with these stupid 'linking policies' have links on their intranets to common websites that also have stupid 'linking policies'.
The way Oracle does it, with a file(s) per tablespace, is a much easier option. You can put whatever you want in that tablespace and it makes it very easy to manage.
:0
Oh, you mean like the innodb type in MySQL? This will, I believe, become the default table type in MySQL in the next year or so. Can't remember where I read that, but it seems to be stuck in my head from somewhere (maybe I'm just crazy!)
That said, it would be nice if people who provide a valuable service to the open source community could manage to live on community contributions ... the problem is that there are too many people willing to do the same thing for free :)
Wow - if I had mod points I'd mod that up - quite insightful. Honestly, that about wraps it up. What I don't get is WHY everyone in the world is willing to do pretty much everything for free all the time. Obviously not money, but when I suggested it was ego driving this sort of stuff (on a local LUG list) I got lambasted for such a horrifying, slanderous thought.
Anyone else got any better ideas?
If people are going to donate money to Open Source/Free Software, it would be good to see the money actually go to support that, not pay lilo's gas bills.
You think donations of money go to 'free software'? Those donations eventually wind up paying *someone's* gas bill. If you don't like this lilo guy, fine, but he's asking for money to provide a service. You either don't like him or the service, then don't donate. Pretty simple - nothing that should get everyone so worked up.
bad example - anyone else could see the lock on the front door too, any could bring to bear their knowledge of locks on that with or without your symbols. It's much harder to 'see' invisible bandwidth availability that it is to see the type of lock on a door.
The store owner probably wouldn't press charges against a locksmith who happened to walk by the store, stick his head through the open door and say 'hey, I see this lock here is insecure - you should get it replaced with a better lock'. Random Joe walking in off the street to company X saying 'hey, your wireless network is insecure - trust me' is not going to get the same respect. There aren't federal laws about looking at someone's lock on a front door. There ARE federal laws against 'looking' at someone's network (you have to interact with it at some level to gain ANY knowledge about it at all).
That's classic. :)
I don't subscribe to the idea that these people are doing something 'covertly'. If it was 'covert' they wouldn't put it out in public, for starters. It'd be on a password-protected website or something else harders to get to.
Also, as many others have pointed out, some people chalk themselves to let people know that they can use the wireless access.
Your point was that people should tell the network point owner about the 'openness'. I say no - let people find out for themselves. Unless a company has some sort of 'contact us' form for technical people to submit real technical issues (website problems, security issues, etc) that will in fact be addressed by technical people who won't respond with lawsuits, I'm not bothering to do their work for them for free.
try to publicize the problem somewhere
Putting chalk marks outside a building seems pretty public to me. I guess they could make the chalk marks larger, but then you'd be in trouble for graffitti (IBM/Linux chalkings). Warchalking IS a public approach, but it's not necessarily signifying a 'problem' - it's just pointing out a circumstance. The label of 'problem' is for the network owner to decide.
Have you ever TRIED telling someone that you're not employed by that they have security issues? (If you're an employee, it's still a hard enough issue sometimes, depending on politics).
I had a friend who had a friend who ran a webshop, with everything running NT. We benignly poked around for all of about 90 seconds probing for 2 known NT holes (had been known about for over a year at that point) and found the entire database for a local HR company completely exposed via the web (SQL Server 7 I believe it was). Repeated phone calls and emails to that shop went unnoticed. Notifying the HR company that their data was exposed and that they should notify their webshop resulted in threats of lawsuits and other less legal retaliatory measures for 'hacking', 'breaking in', etc.
Walking in to someone's house through their open front door is seen as bad, even if you're simply trying to tell them that their door is open and they should close/lock it because of burglars. Hell, you might even be a master locksmith, but they'll probably still call the police.
It's just not that easy to tell the network owners they are vulnerable. You may very well face 'hacking' charges.
"Identifying the presence of a wireless network may not be a
criminal violation, however, there may be criminal violations if the
network is actually accessed including theft of services, interception
of communications, misuse of computing resources, up to and including
violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute, Theft of
Trade Secrets, and other federal violations."
If they wanted to press harder, essentially anyone who even 'wardrives' (what a stupid term!) looking around for open networks could be violating some federal law. You wouldn't be able to know if a network is open or not until you tried to access it, and you're attempt doesn't have explicit authorization. It'd be like tuning into a radio station (which plays just fine on your radio) that you didn't have authorization to listen to. You would be breaking the law just by checking if you get the station, because that's 'accessing' it.
It's a bit of a stretch, I know, but damn it, this kind of stuff just gets my goat. With all the money people spend on wireless networks and subsequent 'consultants' why the hell can't they lock these things down too? Is it because the bulk of these people really shouldn't be adminning or setting up any sort of network in the first place? Probably.
To follow up again, no medical transcriptionist I know of who's been in the biz for more than 5 years LIKES to use MS Word. Some hate it, some are indifferent, but no one LIKES it.
Yes, for you as an IT person, it might be less painful, but it's certainly not faster than DOS based WP. The transcriptionists I know are paid per line, and none have been as productive under MS Word as under WP/DOS. When it impacts your paycheck, you take more notice.
The point is the tools already exist, and keep people productive. Obviously the makers of these programs - the ones who already have years of terminology collected and organized - don't feel there's enough market to develop something. If they don't think it's worth it (either it won't be fast enough, or whatever) that should speak volumes to the hospitals out there, but it doesn't. Everyone gets shiny new Windows on their desks, even though it's patently the Wrong Tool For The Job(tm).
Stedman's dictionary product wasn't available last time I looked. Even products like it operate SLOWLY under Windows. This is not me saying this - this is coming from multiple transcriptionists who've been 'in the trenches' for years. Some marketing fluff states that there are equivalents, but those are not the equivalent functionality in real world usage.
"Shoehorning the wrong tool" - this happens OFTEN dealing with MS. Anecdotal case in point:
The transcription department at the hospital my mother works at transferred everyone over to MS Word a couple years ago, from DOS-based Word Perfect. The reason given was to 'increase productivity'. Well, it only helps the IT productivity, because it's less for them to 'learn' (never mind that they rarely actually help solve a problem anyway, that's another story).
The point is hundreds of people were trained and very productive in WordPerfect. They didn't WANT to switch to Office/Word, but were forced to. Productivity DROPPED like a rock. All the DOS-based tools (keymap-expanders - "alt-shift-gg" expands to "gyrointestinal gerontology", for example) don't exist for Word, and still haven't appeared on the market.
By pure line-count per hour based productivity, MANY people in the department fell at least 50%, some by as much as 80%, in terms of productivity.
This was and still is most definitely the 'wrong tool' for the job, but it's 'company policy' and everyone lives with it. Forcing people in a federal office building to learn OpenOffice after learning Word would be costly, yes, but it would fit the overarching IT vision, if it was articulated to demand open source stuff.
When the 'wrong tool' for the job is MS, people still seem to go along with it, but when the 'wrong tool' may be open source stuff, suddenly it can't happen?
"with just a wee bit of Government funding it would be."
It's got a multi billion dollar corp behind it already, and there's still problems with it. What would a 'wee bit' of funding do?
And investing money in openly available technologies helps all.
I don't see how this is always the case. It only helps those who use the technologies, it doesn't help the people who develop them. It most certainly doesn't help 'all'.