How often in the Star Trek universe, from which we derive designs for membrane keypads and restaurants and flip-top cell phones among other things, does one hear the terms "intellectual property", "rights management", "file permissions", or any other such claptrap? Not that I worship at the feet of Roddenberry, but the general sci-fi vision of the future is usually more predictive than fantastical. I find that "access denied" occasionally answers requests for ship schematics or command functions, but even personal logs and communiques are commonly shared on these shows. Just curious.
Port 10000, Webmin's default port, is reserved by IANA for NDMP usage, a network data management service utilized by some backup softwares. I know this is a Webmin developer issue and not a book author issue, but it deserves to be mentioned in any comprehensive book on Webmin. Webmin installed from its native scripts or from RPM on a box that has backup software will barf at startup. Backup softwares installed after Webmin will barf at their startup. Not a good thing, something Webmin should have accomodated for by now.
BTW, I use Webmin all the time. Great product. I have wished out loud and in print that Red Hat had spent their "NT Admin migration" energy in a cooperative work on Webmin instead of on their distro's own python tools. redhat-config-print is a fine tool, but CUPS comes with a web interface and Webmin has modules for both CUPS and LPR. Focus, people! Focus!
I was ready to write this same post. There is a mindset prevalent today that we have the "right" to a long list of things, when those should actually be privileges. You are not automatically entitled to do whatever you want with recorded music. I will admit up-front that there's too much confusion between taping a song off the radio or borrowing a friend's cd while they listen to their legal, fair-use mp3 copy, and I won't argue that. But a parent that would say "we didn't do anything illegal" because of the age of their child is just deceived.
The question is not the age of the child but the legality of the action. Whether the child does some community service or the parent pays a fine is the very last decision here. The first decision to be tried in court is whether Kazaa's $29.99 service fee to download music indemnifies their users. You can't just offer a for-pay service when your users will be criminally liable for using it. That's like selling permission to speed on the freeway. That's interstate commerce fraud.
The age of the child is irrelevant, and this parent needs to quit making excuses and learn the difference between rights and privileges. She has the right to remain silent. She has the right to an attorney. She has the right to drag Kazaa into this, kicking and screaming. She at least deserves her $29.99/mo back, but she is not scot-free because her daughter's 12.
The "corporations", "corps", and apparently "croporation"... I'm seeing these words bandied about on Slashdot as if they bear the same impact and clarity of meaning as "AIDS", "Department of Energy", or "Oakland Raiders". Which corporations in particular are you folks all so afraid of? I'm just curious. I thought this was a capitalistic economy, functioning under a Democratic Republic government. Aren't we *supposed* to incorporate business when they reach a size worthy of public stock sale and governance by committee?
It's "lose" a customer. "Loose" a customer, interpreted with some leniency at that, means that they will release you from some sort of bond or containment, implying that you have even greater network freedom AFTER they block your ports than before.
I think your ISP would be most understanding if you left over this...
I'm reminded of one of the only TV commercials ever published by 3dfx. An engineer introduces his new chipset, capable of billions of calculations per second. With pride and courage in his voice, he speaks of how this chip will allow them to revolutionize medicine and scientific research, saving billions of lives. An interruption over the intercom says, "Excuse me people, we changed our minds; we're going to use it to play video games."
We have remarkable technology at hand, capable of verifying the source and integrity of data transmissions, communications, financial records, all manner of irreplacable information. We're going to use it to keep people from listening to music. Irrespective of copyright and how poor and hungry Metallica and Dr Dre are right now... that's a totally different issue. We're going to use it to keep people from listening to music. I hope somebody's proud.
It's amazing to me that any industry group would be so shallow. I don't espouse grabbing hundreds of mp3's without purchase, but I am not one to spend $15 or $20 on a cd without hearing more than just the first single that gets released early to radio and MTV. If I wanted to grab songs by some indie act or group that releases songs for free on their web sites (much thanks to those who do!), I'd likely go searching P2P. The fact that Metallica and Eminem are on these servers is technically not *my* fault. It's my fault for downloading them, but let me turn this scenario.
If I went into a library and photocopied a hundred sets of chapter 1 of the new Stephen King novel, collated and stapled, then left them in stacks on the sidewalk, who would be guilty of breaking the law: me or the people who pick them up and take them home? This is not "illegal file sharing" by people who download music; this is "copyright violation" by people who make copyrighted songs available freely for download. Whether I share a gig of mp3's is a lot more important than whether I have a gig of mp3's. I don't agree with this misstatement of the law in self-righteous tones on behalf of a special interest group any more than searching shoes in airports because we had a "shoe bomber" or racial profiling or relabelling acts that used to be misdemeanors as terrorism because the term's popular. We have laws that aren't being properly defined and fairly enforced; that's not justification for making new laws. It's a freaking felony to share software, but it's a misdemeanor to beat someone up in a bar. That can't be right.
... is not exactly trivial. I've gotten into building rpms for my current job over the last four months. Built maybe 45 packages now. It's not terribly hard, per se, but it's not just "./configure ; make ; make install".
Red Hat Linux has made some avant garde strides in Filesystem Heirarchy Standard (FHS, www.pathname.com/fhs) compatibility over the last few versions. They were the first major distro that I was aware of using/var/www/ instead of/home/httpd/ and/var/ftp and all that other stuff I've finally grown accustomed to. It makes great sense under the FHS perspective, that binaries and libs would live under/usr and data would live under/var, so I adapted readily.
When some developer on project fooboo builds his package to./configure itself under/usr/local/fooboo, who exactly will be responsible to provide the.spec files and layout rules for fooboo.i386.rpm? I would presume that if Red Hat releases fooboo with version 10 or X or Chambrain or whatever, some developer at Red Hat will do the initial config and produce a fooboo.src.rpm, maybe. We all hope.
Let's not even get into dependencies. I've had to add a new module for PHP recently, which involved no end of conniptions after the modern php.spec file REQUIRED apache2 and a host of libs that aren't distributed in the version on my servers. The lack of backward compatibility, or even tolerance for minor version numbers with different release numbers, is frightening. Were I in a cube in Raleigh with my thumb on the whole web server project, I could coordinate that module's inclusion. Were I a developer working on PHP, I'd shoot myself now and avoid the rush.
It's been my observation that the Enterprise/AS lines advertise 3 years between releases, plus some additional time of errata support. I haven't seen "five years" anywhere. I've spoken to RH sales about this and been to the site. Never heard anything that long.
From the article, and please pardon my quoting... ========= "He really wanted to get into those machines," Kuo said. U.S. financial institutions probably arenâ(TM)t at risk from this technique, Kuo said, because most donâ(TM)t have modems attached to their critical computers any more. But "less technologically-advanced countries might," he said. Neither firm had evidence that a financial institution had been hit by the worm. The virus writer employed other methods to steal financial information, Sunner said. "Particularly worrying is the fact that not only can Bugbear leach confidential information from an infected machine, but it may also leave a backdoor wide open for hackers to take control of the machine and misappropriate passwords, credit-card details or for some other nefarious purpose", he said. =======
We have a byline quote that reads "Some of the wormâ(TM)s functions are designed to specially target financial institutions". The logic of this thread is that because this worm can use a modem, it's probably targeted at financial instutions. There are no known financial institutions infected yet, but anything that leaves a back door must be designed to steal credit card numbers, passwords, and money. That's a gross simplification, at best.
This worm communicates by modem as well as ethernet. Most of our recent worms have limited themselves to SMB file sharing and email for propagation. I will accept the logical connection to point-of-sale machines with dialup modems, but most of the ones I've looked at connect to a local server across a serial network or utilize an always-on isdn for external calls.
My first impression of this worm, as it was of earlier versions of BugBear and SoBig, was not that it was designed to get money. This one is modified to afflict dialup internet subscribers as well as broadband. I know companies that have a local LAN with one machine serving as a dialup gateway. They're hosed now. How the original article made the logical leap from modem to money so quickly is just beyond me.
I grew up with a dream of going into research in biology. Got a B.S. in it with an emphasis in cell biology and physiology. Did two years undergrad research. Taught "the DNA lectures" in 1001 as a guest speaker in my junior and senior years for two different profs. Got into grad school and worked there in molecular biology for two years. My name's on five papers and one conference presentation.
My second year of grad school, I crossed two articles: one in Science, one in Nature. One was about career outlooks for PhD's. The other was on career paths for biology grads. Basically, I had to be in mechanical engineering or medicine to have any sort of future. That was 1993. At that time in my life, I lost hope and changed my career. This was not a hasty decision, so I should recap.
One of my undergrad profs had a promising research track going on. A box of videos was found in his lab, tapes of him and various young ladies who were not his wife. They were mailed to his parents by a graduate student, and he was working in another state in a matter of weeks.
I watched one of my undergrad profs miss tenure and leave the business entirely. He opened a house powerwashing business. This was in his late thirties, after two postdoctoral fellowships.
Another prof worked for the same college for seven years, being promised a room for his shark tank in the new aquaculture facility. His unassembled tank sat during construction of the basement facility. When they were done, his room was down a hall, with a U-turn through the door that his tank couldn't take. In six months, he was at a marine biology facility in Baltimore with a view of the ocean out a plate glass window.
In grad school, I watched a brilliant biochemist miss tenure and lose his job. He had worked seven years, accumulating piles of NIH funding for an enormous lab. He had a team of grad students and postdocs. He had a questionable attitude, and people who weren't working for him in his lab hated working with him at all. His review at the end of seven years showed problems with attitude and teamwork and some other things, and he was gone.
I learned computers in my late twenties, after devoting my life from elementary school to biology. I read it now for leisure, but I will never work in it. If you're not improving pregnancy-control medications or somehow involved in cloning, you're not news. It's going to fall back to privately funded industrial research one of these days. The good biology will be conducted by pharmaceutical companies. Good physics by chip designers and good chemistry by construction materials scientists. I'm just going to keep their systems running in the meantime.
Those of us who've grown up on Wintel might relate. I got to spend about an hour working on some Macs yesterday, a mix of OS 9 iMacs and new ones running OS X. For anyone who's grown up on Windows, this is a refreshing change of perspective. I never did find any sort of command line, even when I briefly needed one, but the machine just "worked". Everything was responsive and fast and gorgeous and simple. When I have my own Linux box really tweaked out the way I like it -- WM with the genmenu menu structure -- it just runs like a deer.
You reach a point in any well-designed system where you don't interact with the system itself anymore. For example, I've got a site I frequent with a login and the "submit" button drawn in JavaScript instead of as an HTML button. ie lets me just hit "Enter", but Mozilla requires that I mouse-click "Submit". That's a Mozilla problem. Windows XP allows you to burn cds and read zips right in the filesystem browser, which is a good thing. KDE used to have some five different apps under "Text Editors", which is just not useful. That WM menu I had was easy to customize and had only the one or two that I used. These are issues of system design, not program functionality.
I'm looking forward to the day I don't have to worry about how the system runs and whether it will continue to run. I'm not far from that with a Linux+WindowMaker desktop of my own design, but even then I have to struggle with issues like printing and file format compatibility and fonts. I guess there are people in corporate, standardized environments that have Microsoft SMS running and the whole MS Office suite customized and installed who probably feel their work is pretty transparent. I haven't yet SEEN one personally, but they probably exist.
"Estimating this at one tenth of an FTE and that FTE at a low $80,000 per year resolved to $8,000 per year. "
Where are these $80,000 full-time jobs working with open source software support? I've never made close to that. The one person I know personally (granted, I don't live somewhere it costs $40K to rent an apartment) who's made that kind of cheese did it working on some proprietary stuff. Nobody I know is required to support "the universe of open source software". We support a list like apache+mysql+proftpd+qmail or so. Other stuff is supported on an as-needed basis, but I'm not an expert in more than three or four of these products.
The scope and price of this whole things is just unheard of. I'm not saying the conclusion or the premise were totally off base, but the scope is just not practical. I don't know anyone who's an expert on the universe of proprietary software, either, so I don't look for one catch-all expert on OSS.
What's wrong with this is that we're intermingling Open Source and vehemently Closed Source ideologies. This isn't making us a serious contender; this is making us a white flag waving wannabe. Yes, we want intercompatibility, but not because we've adopted our foundation from a company known for changing public standards and republishing them into a monopoly environment with every year's mandatory upgrades.
Microsoft's.Net initiative, not to be confused with the ".net" top level domain, is still bound to a company with a long and thriving history of imposing itself on everything it touches. I don't trust their HTML, let alone their XML, let alone their fill-in-the-blank that's supposed to be "open" and "cross-platform". I'd rather work in an environment where my desktop won't just be 'poof' expensive, closed source, and reporting home to a monopoly every time I open a web page or a file manager. Microsoft's "beautiful security model" has landed them more exploits and holes than a block of swiss cheese with telnet, plus an FBI warning. No thanks. Not for me. Not in a million years. No offense intended, but I don't see what's "right" about this.
One issue. I admit up-front that I missed the exact location within Canada of this project... If you're anywhere within a few miles of a major waterway, this may be a problem. I live in south Louisiana, USA, and we can't dig more than a couple meters down without hitting the water table. And it floods during hurricane season. Burying your servers on the coast of B.C. or Nova Scotia or alongside one of the Great Lakes could be disastrous at the wrong time of year.
Wait, the object here is to do 'what' to my gaming addiction? I thought this story was a place to get more links to feed my craving. There's all this stuff about making gaming addiction sound like a BAD thing.
I feel this has been done. There's already a bash-for-windows and a ksh-for-windows, both of which come with a number of common Unix tools. There's vmware itself. It strikes me that a lot of "Debian tools" are simply GNU tools, freeware, open source software, and Linux ports of historical Unix tools. I visited the sourceforge "homepage" for this, and it was a few paragraphs about getting windows users accustomed to using "Debian tools". I did not get the feeling this was anything new or unique, or that it was Debian-specific, except for maybe the apt-get system. That's about it. Am I missing something?
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-j
somebody I know did this, an "acquaintance"
on
FiveFingerDiscount.com?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Somebody I know...barely... was working for a little dot-bomb in the making. They decided not to pay the last two weeks of work on time, and the last four weeks of expenses, while having their techs carpool 90 minutes daily to a customer site to continue working. When the paychecks didn't come in, two techs refused to drive until they got back expenses, having an empty gas tank and near-empty wallet. That message went through the bookkeeper to the pres and never got returned.
Over the next few days, rounds of email were sent requesting back expenses, requesting back pay, then requesting a simple reply. None were forthcoming. One of the techs finally postulated that if the pres couldn't reply, the tech couldn't work. If the tech couldn't be paid, he would accept the tools in his possession in leiu of a paycheck and move on to another job. The pres NEVER even answered. The whole thing just defaulted away.
I wouldn't guess how "legal" it was. Weeks of work without pay, weeks of expenses without reimbursement. A peaceable solution proposed by the employee and never answered by the boss. It was just ugly. No, "sad" is a better word. That money never did come in. Sucked to be those guys.
Anyone interested in trying out the telnet connection to the world's first OEM XP box can contact me for a username and password at l337H4X0R@no.com. First account goes to the highest bidder in a brief silent auction that will terminate at midnight CDT. Good luck, and happy hunting.
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-j
I notice there aren't any posts rated above 3, and only a few of those. I think this newslet misses so much in terms of real rational thought that no one really has anything substantial to say about it. Strikes me as odd that something so non-news would even make it online.
Personally, I bought Mandrake 6.2 when I was first learning Linux. $30. Haven't spent a dime on Linux since then. Technically, one could say I "didn't pay for Windows" because it came on the PC, but that's flawed reasoning. The licenses for MS products are all included in the sale price OF the PC. I payed for Outlook 98 when it came out, around $100. At that time in my life, it was worth every penny. It no longer is. I didn't pay a red cent for PINE, Evolution, NS Messenger, "Gnome Office", Star Office, or KOffice. MS Office, on the other hand, is up to something around $450 retail, and you pay more for a PC with it installed than without it.
I dual-boot a couple machines right now. I've worked for a Solaris shop that distributed every jot and tittle of company correspondence in Office 2000 format, so they required me to have available Windows and a company license of Office 2K. I found it a tragic joke, frankly. The day I need a new computer and it's only available with XP is the day I build one from scratch with Linux on it and never look back.
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-j
Slashdot Mirror
Let me inquire from a crowd that would know.
How often in the Star Trek universe, from which we derive designs for membrane keypads and restaurants and flip-top cell phones among other things, does one hear the terms "intellectual property", "rights management", "file permissions", or any other such claptrap? Not that I worship at the feet of Roddenberry, but the general sci-fi vision of the future is usually more predictive than fantastical. I find that "access denied" occasionally answers requests for ship schematics or command functions, but even personal logs and communiques are commonly shared on these shows. Just curious.
1. MS Outlook .Net Framework
2. W32/Sobig.F
3. W32/Klez-B
4. Gator
5. W32.IRCBot.B
6. BackOrifice
7.
8. W32/BugBear
9. Happy99.exe
10. W32/Dumaru
What else do you guys have installed?
Port 10000, Webmin's default port, is reserved by IANA for NDMP usage, a network data management service utilized by some backup softwares. I know this is a Webmin developer issue and not a book author issue, but it deserves to be mentioned in any comprehensive book on Webmin. Webmin installed from its native scripts or from RPM on a box that has backup software will barf at startup. Backup softwares installed after Webmin will barf at their startup. Not a good thing, something Webmin should have accomodated for by now.
BTW, I use Webmin all the time. Great product. I have wished out loud and in print that Red Hat had spent their "NT Admin migration" energy in a cooperative work on Webmin instead of on their distro's own python tools. redhat-config-print is a fine tool, but CUPS comes with a web interface and Webmin has modules for both CUPS and LPR. Focus, people! Focus!
I was ready to write this same post. There is a mindset prevalent today that we have the "right" to a long list of things, when those should actually be privileges. You are not automatically entitled to do whatever you want with recorded music. I will admit up-front that there's too much confusion between taping a song off the radio or borrowing a friend's cd while they listen to their legal, fair-use mp3 copy, and I won't argue that. But a parent that would say "we didn't do anything illegal" because of the age of their child is just deceived.
The question is not the age of the child but the legality of the action. Whether the child does some community service or the parent pays a fine is the very last decision here. The first decision to be tried in court is whether Kazaa's $29.99 service fee to download music indemnifies their users. You can't just offer a for-pay service when your users will be criminally liable for using it. That's like selling permission to speed on the freeway. That's interstate commerce fraud.
The age of the child is irrelevant, and this parent needs to quit making excuses and learn the difference between rights and privileges. She has the right to remain silent. She has the right to an attorney. She has the right to drag Kazaa into this, kicking and screaming. She at least deserves her $29.99/mo back, but she is not scot-free because her daughter's 12.
The "corporations", "corps", and apparently "croporation"... I'm seeing these words bandied about on Slashdot as if they bear the same impact and clarity of meaning as "AIDS", "Department of Energy", or "Oakland Raiders". Which corporations in particular are you folks all so afraid of? I'm just curious. I thought this was a capitalistic economy, functioning under a Democratic Republic government. Aren't we *supposed* to incorporate business when they reach a size worthy of public stock sale and governance by committee?
It's "lose" a customer. "Loose" a customer, interpreted with some leniency at that, means that they will release you from some sort of bond or containment, implying that you have even greater network freedom AFTER they block your ports than before.
I think your ISP would be most understanding if you left over this...
I'm reminded of one of the only TV commercials ever published by 3dfx. An engineer introduces his new chipset, capable of billions of calculations per second. With pride and courage in his voice, he speaks of how this chip will allow them to revolutionize medicine and scientific research, saving billions of lives. An interruption over the intercom says, "Excuse me people, we changed our minds; we're going to use it to play video games."
We have remarkable technology at hand, capable of verifying the source and integrity of data transmissions, communications, financial records, all manner of irreplacable information. We're going to use it to keep people from listening to music. Irrespective of copyright and how poor and hungry Metallica and Dr Dre are right now... that's a totally different issue. We're going to use it to keep people from listening to music. I hope somebody's proud.
It's amazing to me that any industry group would be so shallow. I don't espouse grabbing hundreds of mp3's without purchase, but I am not one to spend $15 or $20 on a cd without hearing more than just the first single that gets released early to radio and MTV. If I wanted to grab songs by some indie act or group that releases songs for free on their web sites (much thanks to those who do!), I'd likely go searching P2P. The fact that Metallica and Eminem are on these servers is technically not *my* fault. It's my fault for downloading them, but let me turn this scenario.
If I went into a library and photocopied a hundred sets of chapter 1 of the new Stephen King novel, collated and stapled, then left them in stacks on the sidewalk, who would be guilty of breaking the law: me or the people who pick them up and take them home? This is not "illegal file sharing" by people who download music; this is "copyright violation" by people who make copyrighted songs available freely for download. Whether I share a gig of mp3's is a lot more important than whether I have a gig of mp3's. I don't agree with this misstatement of the law in self-righteous tones on behalf of a special interest group any more than searching shoes in airports because we had a "shoe bomber" or racial profiling or relabelling acts that used to be misdemeanors as terrorism because the term's popular. We have laws that aren't being properly defined and fairly enforced; that's not justification for making new laws. It's a freaking felony to share software, but it's a misdemeanor to beat someone up in a bar. That can't be right.
... is not exactly trivial. I've gotten into building rpms for my current job over the last four months. Built maybe 45 packages now. It's not terribly hard, per se, but it's not just "./configure ; make ; make install".
/var/www/ instead of /home/httpd/ and /var/ftp and all that other stuff I've finally grown accustomed to. It makes great sense under the FHS perspective, that binaries and libs would live under /usr and data would live under /var, so I adapted readily.
./configure itself under /usr/local/fooboo, who exactly will be responsible to provide the .spec files and layout rules for fooboo.i386.rpm? I would presume that if Red Hat releases fooboo with version 10 or X or Chambrain or whatever, some developer at Red Hat will do the initial config and produce a fooboo.src.rpm, maybe. We all hope.
Red Hat Linux has made some avant garde strides in Filesystem Heirarchy Standard (FHS, www.pathname.com/fhs) compatibility over the last few versions. They were the first major distro that I was aware of using
When some developer on project fooboo builds his package to
Let's not even get into dependencies. I've had to add a new module for PHP recently, which involved no end of conniptions after the modern php.spec file REQUIRED apache2 and a host of libs that aren't distributed in the version on my servers. The lack of backward compatibility, or even tolerance for minor version numbers with different release numbers, is frightening. Were I in a cube in Raleigh with my thumb on the whole web server project, I could coordinate that module's inclusion. Were I a developer working on PHP, I'd shoot myself now and avoid the rush.
It's been my observation that the Enterprise/AS lines advertise 3 years between releases, plus some additional time of errata support. I haven't seen "five years" anywhere. I've spoken to RH sales about this and been to the site. Never heard anything that long.
-j
From the article, and please pardon my quoting...
=========
"He really wanted to get into those machines," Kuo said. U.S. financial institutions probably arenâ(TM)t at risk from this technique, Kuo said, because most donâ(TM)t have modems attached to their critical computers any more. But "less technologically-advanced countries might," he said.
Neither firm had evidence that a financial institution had been hit by the worm.
The virus writer employed other methods to steal financial information, Sunner said.
"Particularly worrying is the fact that not only can Bugbear leach confidential information from an infected machine, but it may also leave a backdoor wide open for hackers to take control of the machine and misappropriate passwords, credit-card details or for some other nefarious purpose", he said.
=======
We have a byline quote that reads "Some of the wormâ(TM)s functions are designed to specially target financial institutions". The logic of this thread is that because this worm can use a modem, it's probably targeted at financial instutions. There are no known financial institutions infected yet, but anything that leaves a back door must be designed to steal credit card numbers, passwords, and money. That's a gross simplification, at best.
This worm communicates by modem as well as ethernet. Most of our recent worms have limited themselves to SMB file sharing and email for propagation. I will accept the logical connection to point-of-sale machines with dialup modems, but most of the ones I've looked at connect to a local server across a serial network or utilize an always-on isdn for external calls.
My first impression of this worm, as it was of earlier versions of BugBear and SoBig, was not that it was designed to get money. This one is modified to afflict dialup internet subscribers as well as broadband. I know companies that have a local LAN with one machine serving as a dialup gateway. They're hosed now. How the original article made the logical leap from modem to money so quickly is just beyond me.
-j
Thanks. This helps. ;-)
because there is no story.
I grew up with a dream of going into research in biology. Got a B.S. in it with an emphasis in cell biology and physiology. Did two years undergrad research. Taught "the DNA lectures" in 1001 as a guest speaker in my junior and senior years for two different profs. Got into grad school and worked there in molecular biology for two years. My name's on five papers and one conference presentation.
My second year of grad school, I crossed two articles: one in Science, one in Nature. One was about career outlooks for PhD's. The other was on career paths for biology grads. Basically, I had to be in mechanical engineering or medicine to have any sort of future. That was 1993. At that time in my life, I lost hope and changed my career. This was not a hasty decision, so I should recap.
One of my undergrad profs had a promising research track going on. A box of videos was found in his lab, tapes of him and various young ladies who were not his wife. They were mailed to his parents by a graduate student, and he was working in another state in a matter of weeks.
I watched one of my undergrad profs miss tenure and leave the business entirely. He opened a house powerwashing business. This was in his late thirties, after two postdoctoral fellowships.
Another prof worked for the same college for seven years, being promised a room for his shark tank in the new aquaculture facility. His unassembled tank sat during construction of the basement facility. When they were done, his room was down a hall, with a U-turn through the door that his tank couldn't take. In six months, he was at a marine biology facility in Baltimore with a view of the ocean out a plate glass window.
In grad school, I watched a brilliant biochemist miss tenure and lose his job. He had worked seven years, accumulating piles of NIH funding for an enormous lab. He had a team of grad students and postdocs. He had a questionable attitude, and people who weren't working for him in his lab hated working with him at all. His review at the end of seven years showed problems with attitude and teamwork and some other things, and he was gone.
I learned computers in my late twenties, after devoting my life from elementary school to biology. I read it now for leisure, but I will never work in it. If you're not improving pregnancy-control medications or somehow involved in cloning, you're not news. It's going to fall back to privately funded industrial research one of these days. The good biology will be conducted by pharmaceutical companies. Good physics by chip designers and good chemistry by construction materials scientists. I'm just going to keep their systems running in the meantime.
-j
Those of us who've grown up on Wintel might relate. I got to spend about an hour working on some Macs yesterday, a mix of OS 9 iMacs and new ones running OS X. For anyone who's grown up on Windows, this is a refreshing change of perspective. I never did find any sort of command line, even when I briefly needed one, but the machine just "worked". Everything was responsive and fast and gorgeous and simple. When I have my own Linux box really tweaked out the way I like it -- WM with the genmenu menu structure -- it just runs like a deer.
You reach a point in any well-designed system where you don't interact with the system itself anymore. For example, I've got a site I frequent with a login and the "submit" button drawn in JavaScript instead of as an HTML button. ie lets me just hit "Enter", but Mozilla requires that I mouse-click "Submit". That's a Mozilla problem. Windows XP allows you to burn cds and read zips right in the filesystem browser, which is a good thing. KDE used to have some five different apps under "Text Editors", which is just not useful. That WM menu I had was easy to customize and had only the one or two that I used. These are issues of system design, not program functionality.
I'm looking forward to the day I don't have to worry about how the system runs and whether it will continue to run. I'm not far from that with a Linux+WindowMaker desktop of my own design, but even then I have to struggle with issues like printing and file format compatibility and fonts. I guess there are people in corporate, standardized environments that have Microsoft SMS running and the whole MS Office suite customized and installed who probably feel their work is pretty transparent. I haven't yet SEEN one personally, but they probably exist.
"Estimating this at one tenth of an FTE and that FTE at a low $80,000 per year resolved to $8,000 per year. "
Where are these $80,000 full-time jobs working with open source software support? I've never made close to that. The one person I know personally (granted, I don't live somewhere it costs $40K to rent an apartment) who's made that kind of cheese did it working on some proprietary stuff. Nobody I know is required to support "the universe of open source software". We support a list like apache+mysql+proftpd+qmail or so. Other stuff is supported on an as-needed basis, but I'm not an expert in more than three or four of these products.
The scope and price of this whole things is just unheard of. I'm not saying the conclusion or the premise were totally off base, but the scope is just not practical. I don't know anyone who's an expert on the universe of proprietary software, either, so I don't look for one catch-all expert on OSS.
Linux has been running on Sparc for years. Solaris has been available for Intel for years. Was this a joke?
What's wrong with this is that we're intermingling Open Source and vehemently Closed Source ideologies. This isn't making us a serious contender; this is making us a white flag waving wannabe. Yes, we want intercompatibility, but not because we've adopted our foundation from a company known for changing public standards and republishing them into a monopoly environment with every year's mandatory upgrades.
.Net initiative, not to be confused with the ".net" top level domain, is still bound to a company with a long and thriving history of imposing itself on everything it touches. I don't trust their HTML, let alone their XML, let alone their fill-in-the-blank that's supposed to be "open" and "cross-platform". I'd rather work in an environment where my desktop won't just be 'poof' expensive, closed source, and reporting home to a monopoly every time I open a web page or a file manager. Microsoft's "beautiful security model" has landed them more exploits and holes than a block of swiss cheese with telnet, plus an FBI warning. No thanks. Not for me. Not in a million years. No offense intended, but I don't see what's "right" about this.
Microsoft's
One issue. I admit up-front that I missed the exact location within Canada of this project... If you're anywhere within a few miles of a major waterway, this may be a problem. I live in south Louisiana, USA, and we can't dig more than a couple meters down without hitting the water table. And it floods during hurricane season. Burying your servers on the coast of B.C. or Nova Scotia or alongside one of the Great Lakes could be disastrous at the wrong time of year.
Wait, the object here is to do 'what' to my gaming addiction? I thought this story was a place to get more links to feed my craving. There's all this stuff about making gaming addiction sound like a BAD thing.
I feel this has been done. There's already a bash-for-windows and a ksh-for-windows, both of which come with a number of common Unix tools. There's vmware itself. It strikes me that a lot of "Debian tools" are simply GNU tools, freeware, open source software, and Linux ports of historical Unix tools. I visited the sourceforge "homepage" for this, and it was a few paragraphs about getting windows users accustomed to using "Debian tools". I did not get the feeling this was anything new or unique, or that it was Debian-specific, except for maybe the apt-get system. That's about it. Am I missing something?
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-j
Somebody I know...barely... was working for a little dot-bomb in the making. They decided not to pay the last two weeks of work on time, and the last four weeks of expenses, while having their techs carpool 90 minutes daily to a customer site to continue working. When the paychecks didn't come in, two techs refused to drive until they got back expenses, having an empty gas tank and near-empty wallet. That message went through the bookkeeper to the pres and never got returned.
Over the next few days, rounds of email were sent requesting back expenses, requesting back pay, then requesting a simple reply. None were forthcoming. One of the techs finally postulated that if the pres couldn't reply, the tech couldn't work. If the tech couldn't be paid, he would accept the tools in his possession in leiu of a paycheck and move on to another job. The pres NEVER even answered. The whole thing just defaulted away.
I wouldn't guess how "legal" it was. Weeks of work without pay, weeks of expenses without reimbursement. A peaceable solution proposed by the employee and never answered by the boss. It was just ugly. No, "sad" is a better word. That money never did come in. Sucked to be those guys.
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-j
Anyone interested in trying out the telnet connection to the world's first OEM XP box can contact me for a username and password at l337H4X0R@no.com. First account goes to the highest bidder in a brief silent auction that will terminate at midnight CDT. Good luck, and happy hunting.
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-j
I notice there aren't any posts rated above 3, and only a few of those. I think this newslet misses so much in terms of real rational thought that no one really has anything substantial to say about it. Strikes me as odd that something so non-news would even make it online.
Personally, I bought Mandrake 6.2 when I was first learning Linux. $30. Haven't spent a dime on Linux since then. Technically, one could say I "didn't pay for Windows" because it came on the PC, but that's flawed reasoning. The licenses for MS products are all included in the sale price OF the PC. I payed for Outlook 98 when it came out, around $100. At that time in my life, it was worth every penny. It no longer is. I didn't pay a red cent for PINE, Evolution, NS Messenger, "Gnome Office", Star Office, or KOffice. MS Office, on the other hand, is up to something around $450 retail, and you pay more for a PC with it installed than without it.
I dual-boot a couple machines right now. I've worked for a Solaris shop that distributed every jot and tittle of company correspondence in Office 2000 format, so they required me to have available Windows and a company license of Office 2K. I found it a tragic joke, frankly. The day I need a new computer and it's only available with XP is the day I build one from scratch with Linux on it and never look back.
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-j
I passed on September 22, 2000. I don't particularly care whether you believe me or not. You can be disgusted if you feel like it, Anonymous Coward.