This is a very nice statement of the problem, and of my position as well. I (like everyone) am apalled by recent events, of course, and am prepared to undergo reasonable (i.e. effective) changes in my life and behavior in response. But stupid, feel-good measures (like some of the new airport security rules) make me angry. As stated here so clearly, prohibitions and complicated rules that only affect the law-abiding population just make matters worse -- by ceding those very liberties we cherish.
The other particular problem with cryptography is that the big breakthroughs are nearly always at the theoretical level. So a new, super-secure product with a backdoor can always be replicated without such a backdoor by a sophisticated computer scientist. And there will always be somebody like that available to fix the inconvenience for the bad guys.
The rest of us will pay the price in reduced freedoms. In fifty years, we'll say the same thing we say today about income tax: "It was a temporary measure, just introduced to resolve a particular crisis."
So as far as I'm concerned, I'm pissed at the bad guys, and I am prepared for extreme measures as a result, on the part of my country and myself; but I hate the idea of extreme measures that are really just bullshit P.R. and politics. Leave the science to scientists.
Uhh... Just remember that these guys were presumably young, very fit, trained in armed and unarmed combat, and totally fearless. It is quite possible that a determined attack by the passengers would simply have resulted (and in fact, for all we know, may actually have resulted) in a bunch of brave people becoming very dead. (Maybe in fact that's how the fourth plane was downed off-target.) A trained fighter can usually beat the crap out of a bunch of overage overweight passengers, despite a little knowledge and courage on their part. The samurai movies don't exaggerate this aspect of combat. The better fighters usually win in lopsided victories.
Though of course the situations are radically different, there is an important way in which they are comparable: their impact on people throughout this country and the world. Pearl Harbor galvanized a divided nation, and drove thousands of earnest young men, such as my father, to shake hands with their friends and grimly march off to enlist. The destruction of the World Trade Center has filled millions of households with sadness, fear, and frustration. We may not have a visible enemy or a clear fight; but we're just as sobered. As a nation, we will never be the same. This was the result on 7 December 1941. For that reason, I think the comparison is valid and useful. We'll never be the same.
The American Government knows that if biological research is allowed to grow widly without controls, the results will be disasterous. -- Orbitalb
I find this statement wildly implausible and indefensible. Historically, pure scientific research has not tended to go wild and create disasters. Your cry for government intervention in science frightens me. We take such steps at our peril.
why, exactly, a kilogram [...] never weighs the same twice? MouseR
Presumably, because of engineering imperfections in the (mechanical) measurement devices, and perhaps also due to local variations in gravity, caused by tectonic forces, tides, etc.
The bottom line is: weighing a physical chunk of metal is as poor a standard as measuring the length of a chunk of metal. We do better if we can relate these standards to invariant values derived from basic physics.
When, why, and because of whom did the human hair become the standard unit of distance? -- Jeffery Baker
Hair diameter is a tried-and-true, reputable engineering metric. Every engineer has talked about something being a 'CH' or 'RCH' or 'BCH' too big or too small for a given application. It's therefore very natural that multiples of hair size would be used to describe other very small distances.
Perhaps this is only true for engineers of a particular generation and older. But it's a usage with plenty of tradition.:)
I see many good responses below. Let me add a few general points about how people invest in businesses, points that apply to all kinds of ventures including game companies. None of this is new or secret information; but it does reflect decades that I have spent working with various types of start-ups, and plenty of bruises along the way. There are indeed some special things about building a game business, and about developing a business that uses a large publisher as a distribution channel; but from an investment standpoint, I think the similarities with other types of businesses are probably more important than the differences.
Big risk means big reward. Investors in a start-up business are taking a risk -- a big risk. They will only do this if they can expect a very large return on their money after a few years. Expectations vary, but a common goal would be recovering ten times the investment within five years. This may sound like a lot, but you need to discount it by how many new businesses fail (most). The failure rate is how they decide what amount of return is needed. (If most new businesses succeeded, they'd be happy with a lower return.) So whatever scenario you paint had better show a strong likelihood of plenty of money returning to the investors.
Team outweighs idea. Investors generally perceive themselves as investing in the team rather than in an idea, a technology, a market opportunity, etc. There are always plenty of good ideas out there, and bright people will get more ideas than they can follow up. The investor wants to find the right group of people who will select the best ideas, fight to get things done, solve problems, recover from setbacks, tell the truth, and deliver on schedule. This is common sense. If you want to hire a contractor to build a garage, you're more interested in the people than in the type of trucks they drive.
Ideas can get attention if protected. There are exceptions to the previous rule -- smart people do sometimes invest in ideas. But investable ideas are more than back-of-the-envelope concepts; they're protected, by patents, by well-developed proprietary processes, or by having been reduced to practice in a complete product. In such cases, the investable team can be taken as a given, because they were able to develop this great concept into something marketable.
If you don't have a team with international credentials, or a strong patent, or something else that is investable on its face, you have a few options.
1. Self funding. Find a way to build (most of) the product yourself, and get to the point where you can show a nearly-ready product. At that point, you'll have a chance of getting money for publication, distribution, support, etc. This is essentially the advice given in many of the other comments: build and test a strong demo.
2. Partnership. Establish a strategic partnership with somebody who can fund all or part of your work, in exchange for a substantial piece of the action. This is difficult, unless you already have a strong preexisting relationship. You generally have to provide enough information about your plans that the potential partner will decide "Good idea, but we can do this better ourselves." No nondisclosure agreement can really protect you from this risk. Often, the best you can expect is to work as a consultant implementing your idea as somebody else's product.
3. Shoestring. Do the project in your spare time, until you can pursue one of the above. This is difficult to do to a professional enough level, but it's not impossible. It often leads to shareware/freeware solutions.
No matter what, any potential investor is going to look carefully at the quality and completeness of your planning. Nobody is going to be impressed with "We have a great idea but we want somebody else to figure out how to market it." The most important aspects of the idea, from an investor's standpoint, require that you have a clear understanding of precisely who will buy the product, how many copies can be sold, what price can be supported, appropriate delivery and support channels, your potential competition, and all the other things that go into a business plan. So in addition to a running product or a strong demo, you need a strong business plan that shows a deep understanding of the business issues.
Again, the investor will only plunk down capital for people who understand those issues; such people will always be able to come up with good ideas and solutions as they're needed. If you don't have those skills, then you're asking the investor to provide a second team to do the business stuff . If he can find that team, why are you needed? Remember, the other team, if it's any good, will already have its own ideas about what products should be built. Who's the investor going to trust to make the tough decisions -- the team that knows the market, or a bunch of geeks who admit they don't?
I hope these comments are helpful. None of this should be taken as discouragement; if you've built a successful business, you realize most of this already.
Metorites from Mars are well documented. (Consider doing a little research first next time.) Check out for example this JPL site or this NASA site; the latter says the following:
"Why are they from Mars?...Most martian meteorites are 1.3 billion years old or less, much younger than typical igneous meteorites from asteroids which are 4.5 billion years old. They also have higher contents of volatiles than igneous meteorites. The conclusive evidence that the SNC meteorites originated on Mars comes from the measurement of gases trapped in one meteorite's interior. The trapped gases match those that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere.... How did they get here?Meteoroid impact is the only natural process capable of launching martian rocks to Earth. To be ejected from Mars a rock must reach the escape velocity of 5.4 km/sec, which is more than five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle. An impact capable of ejecting the martian meteorites into space would have left a crater of 10-100 km. The meteorites spent several million years in space before landing at various sites on Earth."
Ever hear of Jupiter's moons? Very interesting possible destinations by all accounts. Not that a manned mission to Jupiter seems to be a top priority. I think the idea is that if you *had* this technology than you *could* take a manned or robotted trip as far as Jupiter.
So, there you have it. User/Admin ignorance should not be an excuse for poor performance and problems in production environments. If you need help, ask questions, but make sure you give as many details as you can. Last I checked, none of our business cards had 'Mind Reader' in them.... -- SwiftKick
Yes, you could be right. I had read the post as more general, along the lines of "I just had this situation occur for the eight thousandth time...What strategies do *you* guys use to keep tabs on ill-behaved installs?" I didn't think it was a "what do I do now?" question, but maybe it was.
When I was talking about tools to 'cover your ass' I wasn't talking about dumbed-down wizards for beginners, but ironclad wrappers that keep tabs on the system environment, so things don't slip by that you wouldn't necessarily check for every day. Essentially, imagine a logging firewall for the OS file system. (Wouldn't you think it was cool if the FS could alert you if certain kinds of updates were attempted; or you could say "show me every change in/etc since Sunday night" and then selectively review/undo those changes?
Have you read the installation manuals/instructions at all?...Clueless and lazy admins are pretty abundant, it seems.... -- SwiftKick
Jeez, guy, no reason to flame what sounded like a reasonable general question, independent of the installation details you mention. Yeah, to deal with a particular install, all that stuff is relevant; and maybe the poster was in fact a 'clueless lazy admin' after all; but I don't think you have to be clueless and lazy to asking that question.
In fact, I think it points up a systematic defect in most OS configurations. In my ideal world, file system primitives would be available that let me checkpoint and undo/unroll installations and other actions. The existence of some good tools to help with this is a Good Thing, but I don't think we should have to take extra steps to protect ourselves from misbehaved packages and bad installers. I'd like my OS to be smarter than the packages it installs, and I'd like those protections to be comfortable wrappers like ip_masquerade that keep me safe even if I'm careless.
FWIW, I don't expect a response from Amazon. I sent this message to them, and posted it here, mostly for the benefit of/. folks -- thinking this was the clearest way to state how I felt about the situation. And there's always the chance that they have somebody watching the email. I've basically been happy with their services as a company. It's not impossible.
I am disturbed by your new privacy policy with its provision to transfer customer information:
"In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets. Also, in the unlikely event that Amazon.com, Inc., or substantially all of its assets are acquired, customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets."
You will see from my account history that I have made many Amazon.com purchases in the past. I can't believe you want to lose me and other customers like me. But because of this provision, I am considering removing my customer information from your database, and stopping doing business with you. I have not yet made up my mind.
Please reconsider this policy, or consider adding a commitment that any transfer of my customer information to a third party will place the acquiring party under the same opt-out restrictions under which I provided that information to you. This does not seem an unreasonable restriction, and in fact might be seen as increasing the value of your assets, since it would ensure a happier customer base.
with all the marketing muscle of AMD... -- ColGraff
ROFLSHISTC. I'm afraid that even long-time AMD supporters, like myself, can't bring themselves to view AMD marketing as 'muscular.' And as the previous reply observes, transparent x86 support is the cornerstone of AMD's 64-bit strategy, in stark contrast to Intel's approach. Superior backward compatibility is what AMD is banking on -- and for my money, this is a good bet. Nobody ever lost money by overestimating corporate inertia. It's hard to force a paradigm shift down the throats of your customers.
Uh, did anybody *else* find this a source of confusion? Don't you think that 'megaton' is a familiar enough term in general use that it doesn't need to be translated or converted? Sheesh.
Do you have an 'S' on your shirt?
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RFC for Spammers
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I fired off complaints to geocities and earthlink as well as information on what happened to all the folks whose information was in the file. -- CritterNYC
You're a good man, Charlie Brown. It's like shoveling sand against the tide, but at least a few people probably got the message.
It's incredible to me that people respond to such solicitations. (My standard answer to unsolicited telephone sales reps is "I never do business over the phone." It stops them dead.) As long as just one person responds to a spam message, the spam campaign can pay for itself.
Such as I'm sure most of us don't use our tv to do shopping, but we can still shop from our home with our computer -- Mr. Sketch
I give him 100% right on that one. From the vantage point of 1950, a home computer *is* a kind of TV. You know: it has a screen, it gives access to information transmitted remotely, it provides audio and video output. He also gets 100% on the integration of telephone/TV/etc. and teleconferencing (interesting that he expected a separate screen for each participant, though). The fax revival and the decline of the USPS are other good calls.
And I think that some of the other items are closer than they seem at first. For example, the whole thing about disposable and washable items in the house is basically true; and though we don't hose things down, we do have Scotchguard, and we don't have to clean as religiously as we used to. Same thing with cooking: frozen food, microwaves, etc. have pretty much destroyed the traditional home meal.
ROFL; that's why it would have to be maintained by bunch of white-hats, folks we would all trust with our e-mail addresses. But in general I'll trust most legit businesses that far -- even though may dislike M$, I don't think they'll sell my name if I've told them not to do so. Pissing me and everybody else off wouldn't be worth it to them. It's the anonymous boiler rooms that create the problem. That's why I think part of the solution has to come from the top down, to the extent there is a 'top' to the Internet. I don't mean legislation; I mean assigning IP address space and domain names.
By the way, that above post was mine, I don't know how it wound up as AC (I went back and verified that 'post anonymously' was not checked). Another little mystery.
A number of good comments appear below, but let me suggest a different approach.
Managing a pool of published documents often doesn't need or respect the level of structure we use with source code. What are the business problems that led to this request? They may well be simply that nobody is sure which file version matches which publication date, that some files are missing, that nobody knows who reviewed which version, etc. In other words, these may be management problems rather than technical problems.
Very robust business solutions can be implemented just by defining and publishing simple common-sense procedures. "Every document has an official binder with the current hardcopy version. Before editing the document, you must have the binder sitting on your desk, you must save the new file with today's date, and you must put your initials and date on the title page in the binder."
So for example, you might create a directory tree for all published documents, and put somebody in charge (nothing goes in except through that person). At each node of the tree, create a tracking document recording all the associated leaves, with their titles, version numbers, draft dates, review dates, publication dates, authors, reviewers, etc. True, a software product could do this; but you're not usually dealing with hundreds of document state changes a day; you have a user's manual that Joe is revising for a month, that gets turned over to Sue for a few days, that goes back to Bob the librarian for final publication. This workflow can easily be managed on paper.
If you can't figure out the correct workflow and the handoffs of responsibility, or people won't go along with the rules, then no automated system will do any good.
So by all means, look for an off-the-shelf product; but if you don't find one, try to solve the problem on paper first. For some extra glory and elegance, cons up a simple form-based app that lets you keep track of the document names, dates, approvals, etc., and you'll be the documentation god.
These are good resources that spam haters should know about. Both sites have lots of good background information on the whole issue, and the creators should be commended for being good guys.
It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating: An 'opt-out'/'unsubscribe' mechanism on an unsolicited e-mail simply can't work.
I won't respond to spam with an opt-out clause, because I know that many of those spammers are simply using my reply to validate my e-mail address -- they won't stop spamming me. So I'm afraid to opt-out through that route. It just generates more spam. I'm happy to opt-out on websites I visit, and I respect vendors with responsible privacy policies. No problem there. But once somebody has sent me a piece of spam, I'm powerless, and the situation just gets worse.
Another big problem with opting out is that an unscrupulous spammer can work around it so easily. What does opting out actually block? Another copy of the same message? Another message from the same advertiser? Much spam is sent out on contract, by little service bureaus. These outfits appear and disappear, change names, change IP addresses, etc. If I opt out of "Call us first for your copier supplies" they might remove me from that distribution and I won't get another version of that spam. But instead they'll send me "Training opportunity" or "Our next stock pic," or they'll pass my name along on one of those "CD's with 1,000,000 verified e-mail addresses." How do you opt out of a CD? How do you filter out the future incarnations of today's spammers? How many legitimate businesses advertise this way -- I rarely see a name I recognize or a permanent website or mailing address? And why should we have to spend time doing this?
The good guys will respect the intent of my opting out, but the good guys aren't the problem. It's the bad guys who will find a way to spam me no matter what. Even if they potentially have to pay a fine, many will simply evade the law. It's going to be hard to cut down on the spam, and it is we, the recipients, who are paying the cost of receiving the spam.
The solution is not censorship of e-mail, though some folks seem to view any anti-spam step as censorship. We're not talking about personal liberties, or protected commercial speech. We're talking about harrassment. It's the same as calling my home phone every hour from a different payphone and trying to sell me insurance.
I'm sick and tired of spending such a large part of my day dealing with e-mail from people I never heard of, never wanted, can't stop, and can't easily filter out without risking the loss of legit mail, which is the reason I pay for the connection in the first place.
It might not hurt to remember that what QNX is today isn't the only way QNX could have developed. (Quite) a few years ago, when it was just a lean, mean microkernel OS with beautiful internals and a great vision, it could have evolved in various technical and business directions. Its ultimate focus (on realtime and embedded applications) has more to do with who was prepared to invest dollars and risk in licensing a non-M$/non-Unix OS, than with any built-in technical spin to QNX or its developers. QNX was fighting an uphill battle, and I think the company deserves plenty of credit for surviving in *any* form at all.
If I had ruled the world back then, I would have made QNX the top dog, and we'd have a great OS paradigm for the next 20 years. No slight to Linux, which has its own strengths; but I'd say that Linux is more important for social reasons, i.e. open source, than for intrinsic architectural reasons. But that's not how things worked out. In the dark days, I kept telling people "It wouldn't be bad for humanity if the QNX guys just gave up and LGPL'd the whole system." The technology was superior enough that it could have eventually provided a viable alternative for a whole class of high-performance systems. This is sort of the path that Linux acceptance has in fact wound up taking, but QNX would have had a bit more technical depth at each end of the spectrum, I believe, ranging from gnarly big databases to tiny embedded systems.
But anyway, that's not how things went, and *my* path would have required that a good OS company admit defeat -- which wouldn't be a nice ending, even if the rest of us profited with a pretty open-source OS.
JMHO -- Trevor
This is why contracts include indemnification
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Supplier contracts (in fact, virtually every kind of contract) normally include indemnification language in which the upstream party agrees to bear the cost of any patent, copyright, or other infrigements. If you were buying 5,000 disk drives, you'd be sure your sales contract included similar language.
So the big-name manufacturers named in the suit will no doubt just whip out their contracts, and show that their suppliers are at fault. There's no way that the plaintiff could have known about the details of those private contracts (and of course, there's always the chance that some purchasing manager or house counsel screwed the pooch, and failed to include the right protections in those contracts, in which case there will be red faces and settlements). The way for the patentholder to find out that H-P *isn't* liable is to include them in the suit, and thereby learn what's in their (private) contracts.
JMHO and IAMAL but this is how I believe it all works.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very nice statement of the problem, and of my position as well. I (like everyone) am apalled by recent events, of course, and am prepared to undergo reasonable (i.e. effective) changes in my life and behavior in response. But stupid, feel-good measures (like some of the new airport security rules) make me angry. As stated here so clearly, prohibitions and complicated rules that only affect the law-abiding population just make matters worse -- by ceding those very liberties we cherish.
The other particular problem with cryptography is that the big breakthroughs are nearly always at the theoretical level. So a new, super-secure product with a backdoor can always be replicated without such a backdoor by a sophisticated computer scientist. And there will always be somebody like that available to fix the inconvenience for the bad guys.
The rest of us will pay the price in reduced freedoms. In fifty years, we'll say the same thing we say today about income tax: "It was a temporary measure, just introduced to resolve a particular crisis."
So as far as I'm concerned, I'm pissed at the bad guys, and I am prepared for extreme measures as a result, on the part of my country and myself; but I hate the idea of extreme measures that are really just bullshit P.R. and politics. Leave the science to scientists.
-- Spiny
Uhh... Just remember that these guys were presumably young, very fit, trained in armed and unarmed combat, and totally fearless. It is quite possible that a determined attack by the passengers would simply have resulted (and in fact, for all we know, may actually have resulted) in a bunch of brave people becoming very dead. (Maybe in fact that's how the fourth plane was downed off-target.) A trained fighter can usually beat the crap out of a bunch of overage overweight passengers, despite a little knowledge and courage on their part. The samurai movies don't exaggerate this aspect of combat. The better fighters usually win in lopsided victories.
JMHO -- Spiny
Though of course the situations are radically different, there is an important way in which they are comparable: their impact on people throughout this country and the world. Pearl Harbor galvanized a divided nation, and drove thousands of earnest young men, such as my father, to shake hands with their friends and grimly march off to enlist. The destruction of the World Trade Center has filled millions of households with sadness, fear, and frustration. We may not have a visible enemy or a clear fight; but we're just as sobered. As a nation, we will never be the same. This was the result on 7 December 1941. For that reason, I think the comparison is valid and useful. We'll never be the same.
JMHO -- Spiny
The American Government knows that if biological research is allowed to grow widly without controls, the results will be disasterous. -- Orbitalb
I find this statement wildly implausible and indefensible. Historically, pure scientific research has not tended to go wild and create disasters. Your cry for government intervention in science frightens me. We take such steps at our peril.
Kewl, thanks for posting this.
why, exactly, a kilogram [...] never weighs the same twice? MouseR
Presumably, because of engineering imperfections in the (mechanical) measurement devices, and perhaps also due to local variations in gravity, caused by tectonic forces, tides, etc.
The bottom line is: weighing a physical chunk of metal is as poor a standard as measuring the length of a chunk of metal. We do better if we can relate these standards to invariant values derived from basic physics.
It's a goatsex link, unfortunately. Wish there was a real mirror.
When, why, and because of whom did the human hair become the standard unit of distance? -- Jeffery Baker
:)
Hair diameter is a tried-and-true, reputable engineering metric. Every engineer has talked about something being a 'CH' or 'RCH' or 'BCH' too big or too small for a given application. It's therefore very natural that multiples of hair size would be used to describe other very small distances.
Perhaps this is only true for engineers of a particular generation and older. But it's a usage with plenty of tradition.
--Trevor
Big risk means big reward. Investors in a start-up business are taking a risk -- a big risk. They will only do this if they can expect a very large return on their money after a few years. Expectations vary, but a common goal would be recovering ten times the investment within five years. This may sound like a lot, but you need to discount it by how many new businesses fail (most). The failure rate is how they decide what amount of return is needed. (If most new businesses succeeded, they'd be happy with a lower return.) So whatever scenario you paint had better show a strong likelihood of plenty of money returning to the investors.
Team outweighs idea. Investors generally perceive themselves as investing in the team rather than in an idea, a technology, a market opportunity, etc. There are always plenty of good ideas out there, and bright people will get more ideas than they can follow up. The investor wants to find the right group of people who will select the best ideas, fight to get things done, solve problems, recover from setbacks, tell the truth, and deliver on schedule. This is common sense. If you want to hire a contractor to build a garage, you're more interested in the people than in the type of trucks they drive.
Ideas can get attention if protected. There are exceptions to the previous rule -- smart people do sometimes invest in ideas. But investable ideas are more than back-of-the-envelope concepts; they're protected, by patents, by well-developed proprietary processes, or by having been reduced to practice in a complete product. In such cases, the investable team can be taken as a given, because they were able to develop this great concept into something marketable.
If you don't have a team with international credentials, or a strong patent, or something else that is investable on its face, you have a few options.
1. Self funding. Find a way to build (most of) the product yourself, and get to the point where you can show a nearly-ready product. At that point, you'll have a chance of getting money for publication, distribution, support, etc. This is essentially the advice given in many of the other comments: build and test a strong demo.
2. Partnership. Establish a strategic partnership with somebody who can fund all or part of your work, in exchange for a substantial piece of the action. This is difficult, unless you already have a strong preexisting relationship. You generally have to provide enough information about your plans that the potential partner will decide "Good idea, but we can do this better ourselves." No nondisclosure agreement can really protect you from this risk. Often, the best you can expect is to work as a consultant implementing your idea as somebody else's product.
3. Shoestring. Do the project in your spare time, until you can pursue one of the above. This is difficult to do to a professional enough level, but it's not impossible. It often leads to shareware/freeware solutions.
No matter what, any potential investor is going to look carefully at the quality and completeness of your planning. Nobody is going to be impressed with "We have a great idea but we want somebody else to figure out how to market it." The most important aspects of the idea, from an investor's standpoint, require that you have a clear understanding of precisely who will buy the product, how many copies can be sold, what price can be supported, appropriate delivery and support channels, your potential competition, and all the other things that go into a business plan. So in addition to a running product or a strong demo, you need a strong business plan that shows a deep understanding of the business issues.
Again, the investor will only plunk down capital for people who understand those issues; such people will always be able to come up with good ideas and solutions as they're needed. If you don't have those skills, then you're asking the investor to provide a second team to do the business stuff . If he can find that team, why are you needed? Remember, the other team, if it's any good, will already have its own ideas about what products should be built. Who's the investor going to trust to make the tough decisions -- the team that knows the market, or a bunch of geeks who admit they don't?
I hope these comments are helpful. None of this should be taken as discouragement; if you've built a successful business, you realize most of this already.
- Trevor
Metorites from Mars are well documented. (Consider doing a little research first next time.) Check out for example this JPL site or this NASA site; the latter says the following:
...Most martian meteorites are 1.3 billion years old or less, much younger than typical igneous meteorites from asteroids which are 4.5 billion years old. They also have higher contents of volatiles than igneous meteorites. The conclusive evidence that the SNC meteorites originated on Mars comes from the measurement of gases trapped in one meteorite's interior. The trapped gases match those that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere....
"Why are they from Mars?
How did they get here?Meteoroid impact is the only natural process capable of launching martian rocks to Earth. To be ejected from Mars a rock must reach the escape velocity of 5.4 km/sec, which is more than five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle. An impact capable of ejecting the martian meteorites into space would have left a crater of 10-100 km. The meteorites spent several million years in space before landing at various sites on Earth."
Ever hear of Jupiter's moons? Very interesting possible destinations by all accounts. Not that a manned mission to Jupiter seems to be a top priority. I think the idea is that if you *had* this technology than you *could* take a manned or robotted trip as far as Jupiter.
So, there you have it. User/Admin ignorance should not be an excuse for poor performance and problems in production environments. If you need help, ask questions, but make sure you give as many details as you can. Last I checked, none of our business cards had 'Mind Reader' in them.... -- SwiftKick
/etc since Sunday night" and then selectively review/undo those changes?
Yes, you could be right. I had read the post as more general, along the lines of "I just had this situation occur for the eight thousandth time...What strategies do *you* guys use to keep tabs on ill-behaved installs?" I didn't think it was a "what do I do now?" question, but maybe it was.
When I was talking about tools to 'cover your ass' I wasn't talking about dumbed-down wizards for beginners, but ironclad wrappers that keep tabs on the system environment, so things don't slip by that you wouldn't necessarily check for every day. Essentially, imagine a logging firewall for the OS file system. (Wouldn't you think it was cool if the FS could alert you if certain kinds of updates were attempted; or you could say "show me every change in
Have you read the installation manuals/instructions at all?...Clueless and lazy admins are pretty abundant, it seems.... -- SwiftKick
Jeez, guy, no reason to flame what sounded like a reasonable general question, independent of the installation details you mention. Yeah, to deal with a particular install, all that stuff is relevant; and maybe the poster was in fact a 'clueless lazy admin' after all; but I don't think you have to be clueless and lazy to asking that question.
In fact, I think it points up a systematic defect in most OS configurations. In my ideal world, file system primitives would be available that let me checkpoint and undo/unroll installations and other actions. The existence of some good tools to help with this is a Good Thing, but I don't think we should have to take extra steps to protect ourselves from misbehaved packages and bad installers. I'd like my OS to be smarter than the packages it installs, and I'd like those protections to be comfortable wrappers like ip_masquerade that keep me safe even if I'm careless.
JMHO -- Trevor
FWIW, I don't expect a response from Amazon. I sent this message to them, and posted it here, mostly for the benefit of /. folks -- thinking this was the clearest way to state how I felt about the situation. And there's always the chance that they have somebody watching the email. I've basically been happy with their services as a company. It's not impossible.
I sent the following email to Amazon.com:
I am disturbed by your new privacy policy with its provision to transfer customer information:
"In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets. Also, in the unlikely event that Amazon.com, Inc., or substantially all of its assets are acquired, customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets."
You will see from my account history that I have made many Amazon.com purchases in the past. I can't believe you want to lose me and other customers like me. But because of this provision, I am considering removing my customer information from your database, and stopping doing business with you. I have not yet made up my mind.
Please reconsider this policy, or consider adding a commitment that any transfer of my customer information to a third party will place the acquiring party under the same opt-out restrictions under which I provided that information to you. This does not seem an unreasonable restriction, and in fact might be seen as increasing the value of your assets, since it would ensure a happier customer base.
Thank you.
with all the marketing muscle of AMD... -- ColGraff
ROFLSHISTC. I'm afraid that even long-time AMD supporters, like myself, can't bring themselves to view AMD marketing as 'muscular.' And as the previous reply observes, transparent x86 support is the cornerstone of AMD's 64-bit strategy, in stark contrast to Intel's approach. Superior backward compatibility is what AMD is banking on -- and for my money, this is a good bet. Nobody ever lost money by overestimating corporate inertia. It's hard to force a paradigm shift down the throats of your customers.
How easy to compare and contrast!
Uh, did anybody *else* find this a source of confusion? Don't you think that 'megaton' is a familiar enough term in general use that it doesn't need to be translated or converted? Sheesh.
I fired off complaints to geocities and earthlink as well as information on what happened to all the folks whose information was in the file. -- CritterNYC
You're a good man, Charlie Brown. It's like shoveling sand against the tide, but at least a few people probably got the message.
It's incredible to me that people respond to such solicitations. (My standard answer to unsolicited telephone sales reps is "I never do business over the phone." It stops them dead.) As long as just one person responds to a spam message, the spam campaign can pay for itself.
Such as I'm sure most of us don't use our tv to do shopping, but we can still shop from our home with our computer -- Mr. Sketch
I give him 100% right on that one. From the vantage point of 1950, a home computer *is* a kind of TV. You know: it has a screen, it gives access to information transmitted remotely, it provides audio and video output. He also gets 100% on the integration of telephone/TV/etc. and teleconferencing (interesting that he expected a separate screen for each participant, though). The fax revival and the decline of the USPS are other good calls.
And I think that some of the other items are closer than they seem at first. For example, the whole thing about disposable and washable items in the house is basically true; and though we don't hose things down, we do have Scotchguard, and we don't have to clean as religiously as we used to. Same thing with cooking: frozen food, microwaves, etc. have pretty much destroyed the traditional home meal.
All in all, quite an interesting read.
ROFL; that's why it would have to be maintained by bunch of white-hats, folks we would all trust with our e-mail addresses. But in general I'll trust most legit businesses that far -- even though may dislike M$, I don't think they'll sell my name if I've told them not to do so. Pissing me and everybody else off wouldn't be worth it to them. It's the anonymous boiler rooms that create the problem. That's why I think part of the solution has to come from the top down, to the extent there is a 'top' to the Internet. I don't mean legislation; I mean assigning IP address space and domain names.
By the way, that above post was mine, I don't know how it wound up as AC (I went back and verified that 'post anonymously' was not checked). Another little mystery.
A number of good comments appear below, but let me suggest a different approach.
Managing a pool of published documents often doesn't need or respect the level of structure we use with source code. What are the business problems that led to this request? They may well be simply that nobody is sure which file version matches which publication date, that some files are missing, that nobody knows who reviewed which version, etc. In other words, these may be management problems rather than technical problems.
Very robust business solutions can be implemented just by defining and publishing simple common-sense procedures. "Every document has an official binder with the current hardcopy version. Before editing the document, you must have the binder sitting on your desk, you must save the new file with today's date, and you must put your initials and date on the title page in the binder."
So for example, you might create a directory tree for all published documents, and put somebody in charge (nothing goes in except through that person). At each node of the tree, create a tracking document recording all the associated leaves, with their titles, version numbers, draft dates, review dates, publication dates, authors, reviewers, etc. True, a software product could do this; but you're not usually dealing with hundreds of document state changes a day; you have a user's manual that Joe is revising for a month, that gets turned over to Sue for a few days, that goes back to Bob the librarian for final publication. This workflow can easily be managed on paper.
If you can't figure out the correct workflow and the handoffs of responsibility, or people won't go along with the rules, then no automated system will do any good.
So by all means, look for an off-the-shelf product; but if you don't find one, try to solve the problem on paper first. For some extra glory and elegance, cons up a simple form-based app that lets you keep track of the document names, dates, approvals, etc., and you'll be the documentation god.
JMHO -- Trevor
These are good resources that spam haters should know about. Both sites have lots of good background information on the whole issue, and the creators should be commended for being good guys.
It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating: An 'opt-out'/'unsubscribe' mechanism on an unsolicited e-mail simply can't work.
I won't respond to spam with an opt-out clause, because I know that many of those spammers are simply using my reply to validate my e-mail address -- they won't stop spamming me. So I'm afraid to opt-out through that route. It just generates more spam. I'm happy to opt-out on websites I visit, and I respect vendors with responsible privacy policies. No problem there. But once somebody has sent me a piece of spam, I'm powerless, and the situation just gets worse.
Another big problem with opting out is that an unscrupulous spammer can work around it so easily. What does opting out actually block? Another copy of the same message? Another message from the same advertiser? Much spam is sent out on contract, by little service bureaus. These outfits appear and disappear, change names, change IP addresses, etc. If I opt out of "Call us first for your copier supplies" they might remove me from that distribution and I won't get another version of that spam. But instead they'll send me "Training opportunity" or "Our next stock pic," or they'll pass my name along on one of those "CD's with 1,000,000 verified e-mail addresses." How do you opt out of a CD? How do you filter out the future incarnations of today's spammers? How many legitimate businesses advertise this way -- I rarely see a name I recognize or a permanent website or mailing address? And why should we have to spend time doing this?
The good guys will respect the intent of my opting out, but the good guys aren't the problem. It's the bad guys who will find a way to spam me no matter what. Even if they potentially have to pay a fine, many will simply evade the law. It's going to be hard to cut down on the spam, and it is we, the recipients, who are paying the cost of receiving the spam.
The solution is not censorship of e-mail, though some folks seem to view any anti-spam step as censorship. We're not talking about personal liberties, or protected commercial speech. We're talking about harrassment. It's the same as calling my home phone every hour from a different payphone and trying to sell me insurance.
I'm sick and tired of spending such a large part of my day dealing with e-mail from people I never heard of, never wanted, can't stop, and can't easily filter out without risking the loss of legit mail, which is the reason I pay for the connection in the first place.
It might not hurt to remember that what QNX is today isn't the only way QNX could have developed. (Quite) a few years ago, when it was just a lean, mean microkernel OS with beautiful internals and a great vision, it could have evolved in various technical and business directions. Its ultimate focus (on realtime and embedded applications) has more to do with who was prepared to invest dollars and risk in licensing a non-M$/non-Unix OS, than with any built-in technical spin to QNX or its developers. QNX was fighting an uphill battle, and I think the company deserves plenty of credit for surviving in *any* form at all.
If I had ruled the world back then, I would have made QNX the top dog, and we'd have a great OS paradigm for the next 20 years. No slight to Linux, which has its own strengths; but I'd say that Linux is more important for social reasons, i.e. open source, than for intrinsic architectural reasons. But that's not how things worked out. In the dark days, I kept telling people "It wouldn't be bad for humanity if the QNX guys just gave up and LGPL'd the whole system." The technology was superior enough that it could have eventually provided a viable alternative for a whole class of high-performance systems. This is sort of the path that Linux acceptance has in fact wound up taking, but QNX would have had a bit more technical depth at each end of the spectrum, I believe, ranging from gnarly big databases to tiny embedded systems.
But anyway, that's not how things went, and *my* path would have required that a good OS company admit defeat -- which wouldn't be a nice ending, even if the rest of us profited with a pretty open-source OS.
JMHO -- Trevor
Supplier contracts (in fact, virtually every kind of contract) normally include indemnification language in which the upstream party agrees to bear the cost of any patent, copyright, or other infrigements. If you were buying 5,000 disk drives, you'd be sure your sales contract included similar language.
So the big-name manufacturers named in the suit will no doubt just whip out their contracts, and show that their suppliers are at fault. There's no way that the plaintiff could have known about the details of those private contracts (and of course, there's always the chance that some purchasing manager or house counsel screwed the pooch, and failed to include the right protections in those contracts, in which case there will be red faces and settlements). The way for the patentholder to find out that H-P *isn't* liable is to include them in the suit, and thereby learn what's in their (private) contracts.
JMHO and IAMAL but this is how I believe it all works.