Ok, he's not wanting action to enforce software design, but he does want to change legal behavior. Is this legislative action? I don't think so, but IANAL. I think there's all kind of information which is suppressed in court without explicit legislation suppressing it, not just illegally obtained material, but irrelevant material, hearsay, prejudicial material... This would just be one more category.
A legislative action would be overkill, but if the judicial change can be made in the normal legal channels -- a lawyer makes the case the some year-old deleted data should not be admissible, the judge agrees, the ruling suvives several layers of appeal and it becomes incorporated in standards of evidence -- then I don't have a problem with it and it certainly isn't legislating a fiction. (It does seem rather unlikely.) In fact I'd say it is the judicial system (I promise, last time I'll use any form of the word) "coping."
From what I read the judge was NOT advocating legislative or judicial action to enforce features of software design -- if he had, I'd be quite ready to rant about it myself.
Judge Rosenbaum points out that the incompleteness of deletions (as they stand now) is affecting the legal system and indirectly, everyday activity. Lawyers are going to go after any electronic record they can get and use it to their best advantage. Everybody has to cope with that and they do cope by restricting what they put in electronic writing. Judges and juries understand already what the status of such "deleted" records really is, but are you going to trust that a lawyer won't be able to make it appear more damning than it is? I'm not.
This de facto self-censorship of electronic discussions is what Judge Rosenbaum thinks is a bad thing that could be improved by making sure that "delete" means "delete."
I can't think of any way to say just how truly awful Verizon's DSL tech support is. Of course, when I had their DSL, it was Bell Atlantic. I'm sure everything's much better since the name change.
I've had experience with NuNet both at work (in the past) with an ISDN connection and at home (DSL, now). It works. When there are problems, the people I've dealt with have been able to track the problem down and fix it (or tell me what bone-headed mistake I've made).
printf will interpret codes like "%s" in the first parameter only as placeholders for additional parameters. By hardcoding the first parameter, you can make sure that no unexpected codes are processed.
The way most managers want to end the year is a little over budget and with his superiors quite happy. That way he gets a bigger budget next year (which is how managers measure the size of their manhood).
That's probably easier to do with experienced, higher-paid workers than with wet-behind-the-ears recent college grads.
The last thing in the world that Linux needs is an easy and consistent way of installing and configuring software.
99% of Linux's much ballyhooed ability to run for weeks, months, years on end is that users are NOT installing new software or new versions of software every other day.
Every installation is a chance to screw something new up, and because of the potential for interactions among all the softwares installed, the likelihood of problems increases exponentially with each package installed.
Ask your favorite local community service organization if they have any thing they can think of. I'll bet they can.
Not only is this genuinely useful (potentially anyway), but it can cover the whole gamut of techie issues from procurement (begging local companies for unused computers?) on.
Installation and network set up. Some app development. Maybe web/internet/intranet development. User training and education. System documentation.
You name it, some worthwhile outfit nearby could probably use it.
It would make sense that as high bandwidth becomes more available at ever greater distances, the effective use of that bandwidth should become less and less important. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way.
Instead, expectations seem to rise at a rate that is a multiple (>1) of the actual performance increases. Back in the day, people wanted to download, say, a clone of the Breakout arcade game (for DOS) quickly. Today, the same people want to download the Slackware Linux distro quickly. Is compression less important now?
Furthermore, the increasingly wide availability of decent bandwidth at work, at home, or wherever you have your gd cellphone, again, pushes those expectations further.
Another/. article today discuss getting/. wirelessly. Is there any doubt that soon we'll expect to watch a trailer for Star Wars on our cellphone/palm pilot before we order tickets on the same device? That ain't gonna happen without compression a little bit better than we have now.
The article says deployment of Itrace will take 18 months anyway, so why not put that money and effort into upgrading the infrastructure for IPv6 instead?
I'll agree that usability by Mom is important, she's got to be able to boot the box, browse to myfamily.com, and send e-mails.
Expert users? We don't need to support them, they'll figure out the most arcane syntax and munge through various config files until they get the box to work no matter what. (They use Linux now, don't they?)
The intermediate user, aka my brother, is key. My brother, until recently, had never had the cover off his computer. Did I hesitate in telling him to rip that cover off and stick in a NIC to build a little home network? Not for a minute. I could help him get it configured over the phone. That is, if he needs my help at all.
OTOH, would I even think about telling him to do that with a Linux box? Again, not for a minute. (Please don't bother to tell me how easy it really is to install a NIC. Sure, if everything goes right. But there are more potential points of failure and a lack of good feedback on the failure(s). I couldn't troubleshoot it over the phone, so I just wouldn't do it.)
The experts need intermediates who can follow what they've discovered, and the beginners need intermediates who can swap a NIC or add a SIMM. On the whole, the GUI seems one of the least problematic areas of Linux -- its more the Gnome vs. KDE wars that stimulate effort than any real need on users parts.
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Ok, he's not wanting action to enforce software design, but he does want to change legal behavior. Is this legislative action? I don't think so, but IANAL. I think there's all kind of information which is suppressed in court without explicit legislation suppressing it, not just illegally obtained material, but irrelevant material, hearsay, prejudicial material... This would just be one more category.
A legislative action would be overkill, but if the judicial change can be made in the normal legal channels -- a lawyer makes the case the some year-old deleted data should not be admissible, the judge agrees, the ruling suvives several layers of appeal and it becomes incorporated in standards of evidence -- then I don't have a problem with it and it certainly isn't legislating a fiction. (It does seem rather unlikely.) In fact I'd say it is the judicial system (I promise, last time I'll use any form of the word) "coping."
Judge Rosenbaum points out that the incompleteness of deletions (as they stand now) is affecting the legal system and indirectly, everyday activity. Lawyers are going to go after any electronic record they can get and use it to their best advantage. Everybody has to cope with that and they do cope by restricting what they put in electronic writing. Judges and juries understand already what the status of such "deleted" records really is, but are you going to trust that a lawyer won't be able to make it appear more damning than it is? I'm not.
This de facto self-censorship of electronic discussions is what Judge Rosenbaum thinks is a bad thing that could be improved by making sure that "delete" means "delete."
It's unlikely to happen, but he has a point.
I've had experience with NuNet both at work (in the past) with an ISDN connection and at home (DSL, now). It works. When there are problems, the people I've dealt with have been able to track the problem down and fix it (or tell me what bone-headed mistake I've made).
I tought it was the HEAT SINK that was a TON.
Yet another silly feature Intel, no doubt, encourages to suck up cpu cycles.
You can buy CCD backs that fit your Hasselblad/Bronica/Mamiya or even 4x5 system, but even next to 'blad lenses, they're still expensive.
printf will interpret codes like "%s" in the first parameter only as placeholders for additional parameters. By hardcoding the first parameter, you can make sure that no unexpected codes are processed.
The way most managers want to end the year is a little over budget and with his superiors quite happy. That way he gets a bigger budget next year (which is how managers measure the size of their manhood).
That's probably easier to do with experienced, higher-paid workers than with wet-behind-the-ears recent college grads.
Of course, some managers are just plain stoopid.
People who think for themselves don't have to steal someone else's intellectual property.
99% of Linux's much ballyhooed ability to run for weeks, months, years on end is that users are NOT installing new software or new versions of software every other day.
Every installation is a chance to screw something new up, and because of the potential for interactions among all the softwares installed, the likelihood of problems increases exponentially with each package installed.
Not only is this genuinely useful (potentially anyway), but it can cover the whole gamut of techie issues from procurement (begging local companies for unused computers?) on.
Installation and network set up.
Some app development.
Maybe web/internet/intranet development.
User training and education.
System documentation.
You name it, some worthwhile outfit nearby could probably use it.
Instead, expectations seem to rise at a rate that is a multiple (>1) of the actual performance increases. Back in the day, people wanted to download, say, a clone of the Breakout arcade game (for DOS) quickly. Today, the same people want to download the Slackware Linux distro quickly. Is compression less important now?
Furthermore, the increasingly wide availability of decent bandwidth at work, at home, or wherever you have your gd cellphone, again, pushes those expectations further.
Another /. article today discuss getting /. wirelessly. Is there any doubt that soon we'll expect to watch a trailer for Star Wars on our cellphone/palm pilot before we order tickets on the same device? That ain't gonna happen without compression a little bit better than we have now.
The article says deployment of Itrace will take 18 months anyway, so why not put that money and effort into upgrading the infrastructure for IPv6 instead?
Expert users? We don't need to support them, they'll figure out the most arcane syntax and munge through various config files until they get the box to work no matter what. (They use Linux now, don't they?)
The intermediate user, aka my brother, is key. My brother, until recently, had never had the cover off his computer. Did I hesitate in telling him to rip that cover off and stick in a NIC to build a little home network? Not for a minute. I could help him get it configured over the phone. That is, if he needs my help at all.
OTOH, would I even think about telling him to do that with a Linux box? Again, not for a minute. (Please don't bother to tell me how easy it really is to install a NIC. Sure, if everything goes right. But there are more potential points of failure and a lack of good feedback on the failure(s). I couldn't troubleshoot it over the phone, so I just wouldn't do it.)
The experts need intermediates who can follow what they've discovered, and the beginners need intermediates who can swap a NIC or add a SIMM. On the whole, the GUI seems one of the least problematic areas of Linux -- its more the Gnome vs. KDE wars that stimulate effort than any real need on users parts.