found how many other types of people are actively starting their own "going to space" club. So far the only
ones I've heard of on slashdot are IT-industry veterans. Are they the only ones, or is there somebody else out
there with the money to pull it off?
Just a matter of time before IP Lawyers are in space...
"Jeff Bezos announces Amazon awarded patent for 1-click launch."
"Pan-IP files suit against PayPal for infringement of their patent on doing business from space."
"Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon and I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon, as vacation land for lawyers in love."
Current High Bid: $3,487,840.25 CmdrTacoBidsAMillion
Item Description: Actual part of Elon Musk's Rocket which landed in my back yard! RARE! Shipping to include $100 freight. Pay by check or money order, I DO *NOT* ACCEPT PAYPAL!
An errant launch vehicle kills someone (the goverment just gets all somber and hands out taxpayer money, what would a private company do, buy Space Explorer insurance? Bet that's not gonna be cheap...)
Servers are running in space, immune from meddling DMCA-type laws, sending spam, etc. ("In tonight's news, a SpamHaus missile took out RalskySat I, also the RIAA plans to launch a series of jamming satellites as CD prices top $75 each.")
People start spamming me with Timeshares over Florida offers...
Searching MSDN libraries I have done. Usually the reference comes up with a Google search, and more often than not, Google reveals other sites which are far more helpful. Microsoft technical documentation, pardon the comparison, is a bit like the Bible, it was written then people spent the next 2,000 years figuring out what it means. I'm sure this could be the start of a large an boisterous thread, but my intent is to say: The answers are there, but it usually takes the help of others to figure out what it means/how to apply it, and being able to talk to the original author would probably save a lot of time and bother (i.e. get a membership)
Most of the problems we've encountered require spending money on code written by other people. We're coders and we're positive we could do this simply ourselves, assuming they'd just inform us where to find the right classes. VB6 was rather neat in all the little hidden things you could find just by hitting '.' or putting up a '(' I've certainly discovered there are properties, methods, etc. which Intellisense doesn't tell the coder about now, but some if you type them in actually work. Very mysterious.
It's not that they're greedy, but that they have grown big, fast, and now need to keep the same revenue coming in as they did on the way up the ladder.
One financial analysis firm described them as a 'Mature Company', which means they have achieved most of the growth they could expect, now must focus on steady, slower growth and maintaining their market. Not easy when you consider many existing customers will look at what they already have invested in and be very skeptical of need to further invest while the present infrastructure does what they need. i.e. I know several people still plugging away on Win95 on Pentium 90-133 systems and quite content to remain there as they can already do everything they need.
The keys to squeezing revenue from these people are two:
Enhance, such that some feature everyone must have, so customers return on a regular basis.
Terminate old product, support. If Microsoft had built a feature in which made the O/S expire at a given number of years/months/days these existing customers would need to buy a replacement.
Convincing customers that they need XML and that.NET gives you functionality with XML in spades, well, that's the first way of doing it. I think XML is fine, but I think Microsoft is overselling it's usefulness.
Believability increases with increased media exposure.
This isn't anything particularly new though Microsoft, initially a slow learner, has certainly learned the ropes. There was a time Bill Gates eschewed politics. Nothing like a few anti-trust battles to adjust that thinking.
Notice how Steve "The Salesman" Ballmer talks. Where Bill was once combative, even arrogant, Steve is smoother, more dangerous.
Effectively, you get Oracle if you're a heavy duty DB shop, because the initial costs and overhead are considerable. Microsoft is more of a middle tier provider (looking to grow) and FoxBase/Access for smaller concerns. Trying to run PG&E billing on Microsoft SQL would be laughable, so long as you're not the one trying to do it.
Very close to nil. Our problem is that this is reality. We've dumped a lot of money in the past two years into MS products and training, only to see we need to continue to spend more money. We're a development shop, generally we could care less about users of Office, etc., (though my first retrieve from an SQL DB and export as XML was less than impressive in the way Excel understood it, hmm) We develop apps to run in a browser, pretty much any browser. They run on the server. Some servers are NT4 others 2000, yet to get an XP server up, but with luck that should be soon.
Our challenge is to support our current customers and grow our product line (a common theme, no?) Often we're stuck because Microsoft doesn't actually provide support for some ODBC driver, yet the damn thing shows up just fine, tables and schema, in Visual Studio.NET, I've researched it about as far as I can go, some company will sell us support, but again we don't have money. If I had the c code to this mess I'd pick a similar driver, find what's missing, code the support in and off we'd go, but sorry, you don't get source with your O/S. It's like trying to swim with your shoes on.
a new version of the company's server operating system that Microsoft's CEO
described as "the right product" to help companies stretch their IT budgets.
In typical parlance this means make money go further, however in this context it means
'spend money, spend more money, keep spending money', until the budget snaps like an
rubberband when its elasticity has been exceded.
Well, our budget has already snapped, like the rubberband. Funny how budgets these days
aren't elastic and don't stretch. Perhaps setting up a demo MySQL or Postgres Linux server might
be in order to convince the powers that be that we can get along just fine without.
BTW, I love how Steve blathers on about having a corporation behind their product. Like support from
that has not pricetag. We're doing without MSDN because we can't afford that. Google is my friend.
Lastly, a customer can go to Microsoft and request a feature? Really? Even one as small as us?
Yeah, right. Time for a little off the end?
Simply put: if you didn't get any exciting results
by hitting it, hit it again, harder.
(This was basically how I learned about ants, broken glass and blood as a tyke.
Smack ants with a bottle. Smack them harder and it broken, cutting two fingers
rather badly. Besides the lesson about how glass brakes into sharp bits, I learned the
proper way to smack ants was with a hammer.)
So we discover bunker buster bombs (though delivered by jets and carrying large
warheads) are pretty effective at turning over the garden, buildings, toppling dictators (he's not really dead, y'know, he just started the evening shift down the street
at 7-11, relieving Elvis), etc. Fun, just like smacking ants! Now hitting the moon with a small probe was pretty exciting, but
the novelty wore off. Hit the moon with a bigger hammer and see what happens! That's probably really and exciting idea, but like the ants probably felt (assuming they could) indigant
about their fellows being hammered, I'm not at all down with someone smacking the moon just to see what color dust they kick up.
Maybe I subscribe (now that I'm older, don't hammer ants (as much) anymore) to the school of learn what you can without being destructive. I'd be someone bummed if
after a few years of these rascals rationalizing and throwing bombs at the moon if it changed its appearance. In other words, there's gotta be a better way, try a little harder
to figure it out without resulting to violence against my bud the moon.
It just goes to show how a few incredibly selfish individuals can bring chaos and ruin to society. It obviously
does not take many to bring huge costs to business and government, so why is it so hard to prosecute these few
individuals for abuse of the internet and indirect theft from business and government (taxpayer) coffers,
especially if they are known?
Because, although many in government have joked about Al Gore inventing the internet, the current crop in the US House and Senate have have very few among them who understand the problems, and fewer still who seem interested in doing anything about it. As I see it, most are dealing with problems brought to their attention by campaign donors or people highly motivated to remove them from office if they don't do something particular to their state or district. Though spam is a world-wide problem, they don't see it as important. There are laws which cover wire-fraud and such, but most people scammed are too embarassed or don't know their options well enough to do anything.
If you campaigned for office in my district and/or state, chances are you rattle on about social security, abortion, school funding, etc. If you did show up and I had the time to attend your rally, you'd get an earful from me about what a major pain this spam is and how its about time the Cybersecurity Czar or someone started knocking skulls. Unfortunately, most of the other people there would think I'm some nut and that spam isn't as important as the other issues. IMHO that pretty much explains the way it is.
BTW I was getting 30-40 spams a day back in November, 2002. A month ago it was up to about 120. Currently I'm getting about 180, during 1 hour break for lunch, today, I received 43 pieces. It seems to come in barrages, so I'm pretty convinced it's like Alan Ralsky just fired off his next pile of fetid crap and is getting ready for the next issue, probably about 8PM tonight.
... Winged Seals responsible for Columbia's desmise.
You know, with all the flying pigs we've seen lately...
and all the cow manure out of Washington lately, but that's beside the point. O-Rings, now T-Seals. There's an alphabetic trend here. I wonder if it was C-Foam.
Ever get the idea these things are built like models?
Lots of companies do this. I think Microsoft, again, gets too much credit here.
About 20 years ago I tried to get a holiday job as a salesman and was handed a questionaire, many offbeat questions. Upon reflection, they were probably very interested with how quickly I could think on my feet, considering I would be confronted by customers with all questions (often unable to describe in the correct terms, what they needed versus what they thought they wanted, and so on.) A bad salesman makes the business suffer.
(I was offered the job, but the cost of clothing would have eaten everything I'd make, so I had to turn it down:-(
One short-lived job involved an interview where the manager looked at my resume' and figured I was qualified and a good fit. He spent the rest of the interview joking about Monty Python. Nothing against MP, I love the stuff, but this should have been a clue that the guy was disorganised and had no idea what he was hiring me to for. It lasted two weeks, two weeks longer than I should have stayed there.
At possibly one of my best jobs, the interview ran through the usual questions, but turned in the last to opinions. What were my opinions on various things. Bit of a shocker there, but apparently I answered satisfactorily. Usually opinions are a no-no for a candidate to express in an interview, particularly strong ones. Best to find what the employer's expectations are and see how they fit his/her opinions.
They also didn't have to deal with the realities of the DMCA where your entire ISP access can be yanked out
from under you with one threating letter
That never required the DMCA. The DMCA certainly helps, but a threatening letter to an ISP has been sufficient well before it was signed into law. ISP's have typically tended to take a dim view of customers placing the ISP between the customer and a complaintant, particularly where the ISP would have to expend its own money defending itself or the customer, whom likely never consulted with the ISP or ISP counsel before embarking on such ventures.
Newspaper comic syndicates have taken great care for decades not to place their client newspapers in a bind by running questionable strips, though a few notable ones have got through.
Funny, my Palm m100, upgraded to 8mb still does everything I need. Sure it doesn't play 31337 videos and MP3s, but 95% of what I need a PDA for can be satisified by an Ebay m105 for
I dig. I was home sick (non-SARS, thankyewveramuch) when/. carried the HSN/Zaurus deal, I plunked my cash and got the 5500 and it does more stuff than I'll probably ever need. I'm probably not the targetted audience, though I'm sure our CIO is, whatever is the latest and greatest, he's got it and turns green with envy when someone trots in the door with something newer, more flash A-1.
In other news: Colin Powell has suggested the US punish France for their principled stand on Iraq and I got 6 spams this morning (all identical subject, varying forged send addresses) telling me how I can "Take a BITE out of SPAM". New day, same old crappy world.
I thought copyright law had exemptions for satire and humour.
The target of satire was American McGee, unfortunately the vehicle used trademarked names and charactures in an unflattering way. I kinda wonder how American Greetings found this strip, are the PA subscribers, or did American McGee demonstrate lack of humor and direct their attention to it? Years ago National Lampoon did similar feature on Strawberry Cheesecake, where the character art was more true and used in a far less flattering position, with a smurf. I don't recall ever hearing American Greetings... uh... spank them for that. They sure didn't have any kind of apology in later issues.
April 22, 1994: The first successful requested web page is served.
April 23, 1994: Irwin Spelnik attempts to read a Hello World page and receives the first 404 page not found.
May 10, 1994: Charlie Northrup gives up on his dream to become a buddhist monk after a 4x4 spashes mud on him while he played a tamborine on a street corner, he decides to get even and files for web service patents.
June 7, 1995: Wanda Furdman, attempting to entice her boyfriend, Jimmy Pimpleton, into proposing, places a nude picture of herself on a webserver and emails him the URL. Rather than keep this to himself, he joins the spam craze and sends to URL to everyone he can find an email address for. His plan flops as he hasn't figured a way to collect money for this, however he is widely credited with establishing the business model of the.com era to come.
December 24, 1997: Melvin Gormly acts out an episode of Star Trek with figurines and his own voice, capturing it and converting it to an AVI file. He places it on his school web server and is promptly served the first Cease and Desist letter over web content and copyrighted material.
April 1, 1998: CowboyNeal finally abandons his trusted TRS-80, buys a PC and joins the information age. The internet will never be the same.
July 14, 1998: Wilbur Grimp, The CEO of Universal Business Associates, a fortune 100 company, suggests an discreet interlude with a detective posing as a 13 year old boy in an internet chat room. The pair are married on San Francisco 6 months later.
November 7, 1998: Hershel Plotz ignores requests to pay for an item he has won on eBay and receives the first negative feedback. Two days later Hershel is bitten by a dog, hit by a car, falls into an open manhole and drowns. The first troll on Slashdot finds him guilty of being in league with Microsoft and deserving of his fate.
November 11, 1998: The first troll on slashdot accuses a bitten, battered and drowned former Sun Java Developer and good friend of Scott McNeally, of being in league with Microsoft. Months later a stack of papers will be found in a brown paper bag in a Kent, WA bus depot locker connecting Hershel Plotz and William Gates III in a bogus jcode ring. The troll is vindicated, but the victory goes un-noticed in the torrent of me-too-trolls who followed.
February 21, 1999: Freida Morganblat writes the first Internet Search Engine in VB.net Tragically, the first VB.net compiler and Microsofts CLR won't be created unil years later and she instead turns to a career as a stockbroker, makes millions and squirrels most of it away before the.com bust, but she will never be happy again, on her private island in the South Pacific.
October 31, 1999: CNN's main page is hacked, the days top news is replaced with preposerous headlines and idiotic stories. No one notices for hours, then stock closes up 3 points.
January 1, 1900: The first automobile plant opens in Vetchburg, ND. It closes three days later because of a horrific glitch in computer software.
January 3, 2000: First webcast of manufactured Hollywood brain-softening music. Rupert Windelpoons digitizes it and captures it to an array of hard disks. Initially pleased with capturing music, Rupert realizes its all tripe and reformats the drives, narrowly avoiding a not-social call from Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.
August 17, 2000: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda shyly and quivering with nervous energy, attempts to email Lara Croft, asking for a date. After days of silence he decides it was never to be, he turns with tearful eyes to a girl named Kathleen for consolation and the rest, as they say, is history.
March 24, 2001: A mothballed server is powered up and the sendmail daemon forwards a queued message from the french president to president@whitehouse.gov, what was meant as a personal jest between Francois Mitterand and Bill Clinton will eventually result in strained feelings between the US and France.
September 12, 2001: Virgil Nordling abandons his plan for a bloo
If you had a brain, you'd look outside your narrow little view of the world and realize that the Opteron is NOT
designed for the "average person"!!!
Semi's, Satellites, Submarines, all are irrelevant in this context.
Opterons will be aimed at workstations and those of us old enough can probably remember times when 386's, 486's and Pentiums were not for the average user. Well, time changes technological expectations. Once the price drops sufficiently it becomes the norm for the average user. Though AMD has a consumer model on the roadmap for September (which, quite honestly must be very worrying to Intel), you might expect in a couple years (which AMD is looking at) the current crop will (a) be out of date (b) their successors will probably be on the shelf at Office Depot.
Personally, I was quite stunned to see the Opteron 240 priced at $283. I paid $349, back in December, for an XP 2600/333, so that squarely plants it in my ballpark of affordability. Mobo availibility and memory prices may have more to say on this, but if schmucks like me slap one together to do A/V or high end games on, today, you can pretty much bet I won't be so cutting edge in 6 months. Particularly where the hyper-aggresive tech companies in Taiwan are concerned.
but if IBM wanted to be nasty, they could tie that suit up in court and bankrupt SCO over the next few years.
Or simple hold them at arms length until their lawyers get tired of flailing away and SCO runs out of cash. Might be time for them just to hang a "FOR SALE" sign on the front door. A shame, as many friends have gone to work there.
I have decided to retire after approximately 31 years of public service and return to the private sector,' Schmidt said in his April 21 e-mail."
That reads like he's been working in the public sector all that time. But, I'm sure he hasn't divided his attention when working in the public sector... unless it really turns out that Microsoft has been around longer than we all thought and the rise of Microsoft, Gates, et al, has been part of a massive plot!
No... I wouldn't even consider that... well, probably not anyway.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...
What makes you so sure this would blow up in his face? Pan-IP has taught us weasels of this sort go after small fish until they have sufficient war-chest, not to mention a slew of precedent, to throw in IBM's face. I case you haven't been paying attention, our favorite whipping boy Rambus has been making some headway, thanks to some judges overlooking their devious behaviour while a member of JEDEC.
The damn shame in all this, and I'd love nothing better at this date than for someone to dig something like this up, is that the founders of the internet didn't make some blanket statement such as, "Whomsoever shall conduct business using these tools shall forgo any claim to intellectual property of methods or procedures pursuant to conducting commerce." Perhaps back in the DARPA roots there may be such a thing as, all your base are belong to public domain in the interest of furthering research. Sadly the lack of reason appears to hold sway.
"Ah ha, sent one packet, have it processed, get one packet back! A novel idea, I shall patent it and all subsequent technology!"
Given the chance, some bastard would attempt to patent breathing air and the way things are going they'd be awarded the patent.
Also, the EULA requires that you distribute the files with a EULA that is at least as restrictive as the Microsoft EULA. It doesn't, however, require you to enforce that EULA if your client breaks it. So give the runtimes to your client, let 'em install them on thousands of desktops running Linux/Wine, and then let them be. The client has no contract with Microsoft regarding this, so Microsoft can't sue them. And you've upheld your end of the EULA, since you passed on as restrictive a EULA as Microsoft imposed on you.
Problem: Internet has security issues, various aspects which were never considered an issue until someone exploited them.
Answer: Compeletely remake the internet.
Problem: The cost would be prohibitive.
Answer: It'd trigger another tech boom and everyone would have jobs and even dumb people with marginal skills would be paid like chemical engineers.
Problem: The switch over would require eveyone to run parallel systems.
Answer: See above.
Problem: Current security depends more on exclusion than inclusion.
Answer: See above.
Problem: Who are you going to trust to write that security model? A wise collective endorsing open standards, an oligarchy of businesses vying for proprietary standards or the government?
Answer: Oh, the wise collective, for sure.
Problem: But do you honestly believe they'd be allowed to?
Even if it may result in more use and sales of their product, the name of the game is control
Well, they've only got so much control... you see this statement:
The EULA requires that the "Distributables"
(defined in a separate file that's part of the Visual FoxPro
installation) could only be used "in conjunction with the Windows
operating system".
And think how broad that is (assuming that's the actual wording, which it may not be, yet...) so you could, in the spirit in which many e-tailers sell Microsoft wares, etc. with "system hardware" (say, toss in a $2.00 cable and sell the OEM version of software) So... all you really may need is a PC somewhere with any version of a Microsoft operating system on it and perform a ping over some serial or network cable and you're in compliance, right?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Just a matter of time before IP Lawyers are in space...
"Jeff Bezos announces Amazon awarded patent for 1-click launch."
"Pan-IP files suit against PayPal for infringement of their patent on doing business from space."
"Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon and I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon, as vacation land for lawyers in love."
There's a big Nike swoosh in the night sky
An errant launch vehicle kills someone (the goverment just gets all somber and hands out taxpayer money, what would a private company do, buy Space Explorer insurance? Bet that's not gonna be cheap...)
Servers are running in space, immune from meddling DMCA-type laws, sending spam, etc. ("In tonight's news, a SpamHaus missile took out RalskySat I, also the RIAA plans to launch a series of jamming satellites as CD prices top $75 each.")
People start spamming me with Timeshares over Florida offers...
Most of the problems we've encountered require spending money on code written by other people. We're coders and we're positive we could do this simply ourselves, assuming they'd just inform us where to find the right classes. VB6 was rather neat in all the little hidden things you could find just by hitting '.' or putting up a '(' I've certainly discovered there are properties, methods, etc. which Intellisense doesn't tell the coder about now, but some if you type them in actually work. Very mysterious.
It's not that they're greedy, but that they have grown big, fast, and now need to keep the same revenue coming in as they did on the way up the ladder.
One financial analysis firm described them as a 'Mature Company', which means they have achieved most of the growth they could expect, now must focus on steady, slower growth and maintaining their market. Not easy when you consider many existing customers will look at what they already have invested in and be very skeptical of need to further invest while the present infrastructure does what they need. i.e. I know several people still plugging away on Win95 on Pentium 90-133 systems and quite content to remain there as they can already do everything they need.
The keys to squeezing revenue from these people are two:
Enhance, such that some feature everyone must have, so customers return on a regular basis.
Terminate old product, support. If Microsoft had built a feature in which made the O/S expire at a given number of years/months/days these existing customers would need to buy a replacement.
Convincing customers that they need XML and that .NET gives you functionality with XML in spades, well, that's the first way of doing it. I think XML is fine, but I think Microsoft is overselling it's usefulness.
That's SPIN, thank you very much.
Believability increases with increased media exposure.
This isn't anything particularly new though Microsoft, initially a slow learner, has certainly learned the ropes. There was a time Bill Gates eschewed politics. Nothing like a few anti-trust battles to adjust that thinking.
Notice how Steve "The Salesman" Ballmer talks. Where Bill was once combative, even arrogant, Steve is smoother, more dangerous.
Effectively, you get Oracle if you're a heavy duty DB shop, because the initial costs and overhead are considerable. Microsoft is more of a middle tier provider (looking to grow) and FoxBase/Access for smaller concerns. Trying to run PG&E billing on Microsoft SQL would be laughable, so long as you're not the one trying to do it.
Very close to nil. Our problem is that this is reality. We've dumped a lot of money in the past two years into MS products and training, only to see we need to continue to spend more money. We're a development shop, generally we could care less about users of Office, etc., (though my first retrieve from an SQL DB and export as XML was less than impressive in the way Excel understood it, hmm) We develop apps to run in a browser, pretty much any browser. They run on the server. Some servers are NT4 others 2000, yet to get an XP server up, but with luck that should be soon.
Our challenge is to support our current customers and grow our product line (a common theme, no?) Often we're stuck because Microsoft doesn't actually provide support for some ODBC driver, yet the damn thing shows up just fine, tables and schema, in Visual Studio .NET, I've researched it about as far as I can go, some company will sell us support, but again we don't have money. If I had the c code to this mess I'd pick a similar driver, find what's missing, code the support in and off we'd go, but sorry, you don't get source with your O/S. It's like trying to swim with your shoes on.
In typical parlance this means make money go further, however in this context it means 'spend money, spend more money, keep spending money', until the budget snaps like an rubberband when its elasticity has been exceded.
Well, our budget has already snapped, like the rubberband. Funny how budgets these days aren't elastic and don't stretch. Perhaps setting up a demo MySQL or Postgres Linux server might be in order to convince the powers that be that we can get along just fine without.
BTW, I love how Steve blathers on about having a corporation behind their product. Like support from that has not pricetag. We're doing without MSDN because we can't afford that. Google is my friend. Lastly, a customer can go to Microsoft and request a feature? Really? Even one as small as us? Yeah, right. Time for a little off the end?
Simply put: if you didn't get any exciting results by hitting it, hit it again, harder.
(This was basically how I learned about ants, broken glass and blood as a tyke. Smack ants with a bottle. Smack them harder and it broken, cutting two fingers rather badly. Besides the lesson about how glass brakes into sharp bits, I learned the proper way to smack ants was with a hammer.)
So we discover bunker buster bombs (though delivered by jets and carrying large warheads) are pretty effective at turning over the garden, buildings, toppling dictators (he's not really dead, y'know, he just started the evening shift down the street at 7-11, relieving Elvis), etc. Fun, just like smacking ants! Now hitting the moon with a small probe was pretty exciting, but the novelty wore off. Hit the moon with a bigger hammer and see what happens! That's probably really and exciting idea, but like the ants probably felt (assuming they could) indigant about their fellows being hammered, I'm not at all down with someone smacking the moon just to see what color dust they kick up.
Maybe I subscribe (now that I'm older, don't hammer ants (as much) anymore) to the school of learn what you can without being destructive. I'd be someone bummed if after a few years of these rascals rationalizing and throwing bombs at the moon if it changed its appearance. In other words, there's gotta be a better way, try a little harder to figure it out without resulting to violence against my bud the moon.
Because, although many in government have joked about Al Gore inventing the internet, the current crop in the US House and Senate have have very few among them who understand the problems, and fewer still who seem interested in doing anything about it. As I see it, most are dealing with problems brought to their attention by campaign donors or people highly motivated to remove them from office if they don't do something particular to their state or district. Though spam is a world-wide problem, they don't see it as important. There are laws which cover wire-fraud and such, but most people scammed are too embarassed or don't know their options well enough to do anything.
If you campaigned for office in my district and/or state, chances are you rattle on about social security, abortion, school funding, etc. If you did show up and I had the time to attend your rally, you'd get an earful from me about what a major pain this spam is and how its about time the Cybersecurity Czar or someone started knocking skulls. Unfortunately, most of the other people there would think I'm some nut and that spam isn't as important as the other issues. IMHO that pretty much explains the way it is.
BTW I was getting 30-40 spams a day back in November, 2002. A month ago it was up to about 120. Currently I'm getting about 180, during 1 hour break for lunch, today, I received 43 pieces. It seems to come in barrages, so I'm pretty convinced it's like Alan Ralsky just fired off his next pile of fetid crap and is getting ready for the next issue, probably about 8PM tonight.
You know, with all the flying pigs we've seen lately...
and all the cow manure out of Washington lately, but that's beside the point. O-Rings, now T-Seals. There's an alphabetic trend here. I wonder if it was C-Foam.
Ever get the idea these things are built like models?
"Insert Seal (T) in Wing Assembly (A)"
About 20 years ago I tried to get a holiday job as a salesman and was handed a questionaire, many offbeat questions. Upon reflection, they were probably very interested with how quickly I could think on my feet, considering I would be confronted by customers with all questions (often unable to describe in the correct terms, what they needed versus what they thought they wanted, and so on.) A bad salesman makes the business suffer. (I was offered the job, but the cost of clothing would have eaten everything I'd make, so I had to turn it down :-(
One short-lived job involved an interview where the manager looked at my resume' and figured I was qualified and a good fit. He spent the rest of the interview joking about Monty Python. Nothing against MP, I love the stuff, but this should have been a clue that the guy was disorganised and had no idea what he was hiring me to for. It lasted two weeks, two weeks longer than I should have stayed there.
At possibly one of my best jobs, the interview ran through the usual questions, but turned in the last to opinions. What were my opinions on various things. Bit of a shocker there, but apparently I answered satisfactorily. Usually opinions are a no-no for a candidate to express in an interview, particularly strong ones. Best to find what the employer's expectations are and see how they fit his/her opinions.
That never required the DMCA. The DMCA certainly helps, but a threatening letter to an ISP has been sufficient well before it was signed into law. ISP's have typically tended to take a dim view of customers placing the ISP between the customer and a complaintant, particularly where the ISP would have to expend its own money defending itself or the customer, whom likely never consulted with the ISP or ISP counsel before embarking on such ventures.
Newspaper comic syndicates have taken great care for decades not to place their client newspapers in a bind by running questionable strips, though a few notable ones have got through.
I dig. I was home sick (non-SARS, thankyewveramuch) when /. carried the HSN/Zaurus deal, I plunked my cash and got the 5500 and it does more stuff than I'll probably ever need. I'm probably not the targetted audience, though I'm sure our CIO is, whatever is the latest and greatest, he's got it and turns green with envy when someone trots in the door with something newer, more flash A-1.
In other news: Colin Powell has suggested the US punish France for their principled stand on Iraq and I got 6 spams this morning (all identical subject, varying forged send addresses) telling me how I can "Take a BITE out of SPAM". New day, same old crappy world.
The target of satire was American McGee, unfortunately the vehicle used trademarked names and charactures in an unflattering way. I kinda wonder how American Greetings found this strip, are the PA subscribers, or did American McGee demonstrate lack of humor and direct their attention to it? Years ago National Lampoon did similar feature on Strawberry Cheesecake, where the character art was more true and used in a far less flattering position, with a smurf. I don't recall ever hearing American Greetings ... uh ... spank them for that. They sure didn't have any kind of apology in later issues.
Well, they could have named it "Roc" then people could saye it, er, "Rocs"
"What? Pun Police? Ok, I'll go quietly?"
April 22, 1994: The first successful requested web page is served. .com era to come. .com bust, but she will never be happy again, on her private island in the South Pacific.
April 23, 1994: Irwin Spelnik attempts to read a Hello World page and receives the first 404 page not found.
May 10, 1994: Charlie Northrup gives up on his dream to become a buddhist monk after a 4x4 spashes mud on him while he played a tamborine on a street corner, he decides to get even and files for web service patents.
June 7, 1995: Wanda Furdman, attempting to entice her boyfriend, Jimmy Pimpleton, into proposing, places a nude picture of herself on a webserver and emails him the URL. Rather than keep this to himself, he joins the spam craze and sends to URL to everyone he can find an email address for. His plan flops as he hasn't figured a way to collect money for this, however he is widely credited with establishing the business model of the
December 24, 1997: Melvin Gormly acts out an episode of Star Trek with figurines and his own voice, capturing it and converting it to an AVI file. He places it on his school web server and is promptly served the first Cease and Desist letter over web content and copyrighted material.
April 1, 1998: CowboyNeal finally abandons his trusted TRS-80, buys a PC and joins the information age. The internet will never be the same.
July 14, 1998: Wilbur Grimp, The CEO of Universal Business Associates, a fortune 100 company, suggests an discreet interlude with a detective posing as a 13 year old boy in an internet chat room. The pair are married on San Francisco 6 months later.
November 7, 1998: Hershel Plotz ignores requests to pay for an item he has won on eBay and receives the first negative feedback. Two days later Hershel is bitten by a dog, hit by a car, falls into an open manhole and drowns. The first troll on Slashdot finds him guilty of being in league with Microsoft and deserving of his fate.
November 11, 1998: The first troll on slashdot accuses a bitten, battered and drowned former Sun Java Developer and good friend of Scott McNeally, of being in league with Microsoft. Months later a stack of papers will be found in a brown paper bag in a Kent, WA bus depot locker connecting Hershel Plotz and William Gates III in a bogus jcode ring. The troll is vindicated, but the victory goes un-noticed in the torrent of me-too-trolls who followed.
February 21, 1999: Freida Morganblat writes the first Internet Search Engine in VB.net Tragically, the first VB.net compiler and Microsofts CLR won't be created unil years later and she instead turns to a career as a stockbroker, makes millions and squirrels most of it away before the
October 31, 1999: CNN's main page is hacked, the days top news is replaced with preposerous headlines and idiotic stories. No one notices for hours, then stock closes up 3 points.
January 1, 1900: The first automobile plant opens in Vetchburg, ND. It closes three days later because of a horrific glitch in computer software.
January 3, 2000: First webcast of manufactured Hollywood brain-softening music. Rupert Windelpoons digitizes it and captures it to an array of hard disks. Initially pleased with capturing music, Rupert realizes its all tripe and reformats the drives, narrowly avoiding a not-social call from Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.
August 17, 2000: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda shyly and quivering with nervous energy, attempts to email Lara Croft, asking for a date. After days of silence he decides it was never to be, he turns with tearful eyes to a girl named Kathleen for consolation and the rest, as they say, is history.
March 24, 2001: A mothballed server is powered up and the sendmail daemon forwards a queued message from the french president to president@whitehouse.gov, what was meant as a personal jest between Francois Mitterand and Bill Clinton will eventually result in strained feelings between the US and France.
September 12, 2001: Virgil Nordling abandons his plan for a bloo
Semi's, Satellites, Submarines, all are irrelevant in this context. Opterons will be aimed at workstations and those of us old enough can probably remember times when 386's, 486's and Pentiums were not for the average user. Well, time changes technological expectations. Once the price drops sufficiently it becomes the norm for the average user. Though AMD has a consumer model on the roadmap for September (which, quite honestly must be very worrying to Intel), you might expect in a couple years (which AMD is looking at) the current crop will (a) be out of date (b) their successors will probably be on the shelf at Office Depot.
Personally, I was quite stunned to see the Opteron 240 priced at $283. I paid $349, back in December, for an XP 2600/333, so that squarely plants it in my ballpark of affordability. Mobo availibility and memory prices may have more to say on this, but if schmucks like me slap one together to do A/V or high end games on, today, you can pretty much bet I won't be so cutting edge in 6 months. Particularly where the hyper-aggresive tech companies in Taiwan are concerned.
Evidently.
but if IBM wanted to be nasty, they could tie that suit up in court and bankrupt SCO over the next few years.
Or simple hold them at arms length until their lawyers get tired of flailing away and SCO runs out of cash. Might be time for them just to hang a "FOR SALE" sign on the front door. A shame, as many friends have gone to work there.
That reads like he's been working in the public sector all that time. But, I'm sure he hasn't divided his attention when working in the public sector ... unless it really turns out that Microsoft has been around longer than we all thought and the rise of Microsoft, Gates, et al, has been part of a massive plot!
No... I wouldn't even consider that... well, probably not anyway.
What makes you so sure this would blow up in his face? Pan-IP has taught us weasels of this sort go after small fish until they have sufficient war-chest, not to mention a slew of precedent, to throw in IBM's face. I case you haven't been paying attention, our favorite whipping boy Rambus has been making some headway, thanks to some judges overlooking their devious behaviour while a member of JEDEC.
The damn shame in all this, and I'd love nothing better at this date than for someone to dig something like this up, is that the founders of the internet didn't make some blanket statement such as, "Whomsoever shall conduct business using these tools shall forgo any claim to intellectual property of methods or procedures pursuant to conducting commerce." Perhaps back in the DARPA roots there may be such a thing as, all your base are belong to public domain in the interest of furthering research. Sadly the lack of reason appears to hold sway.
"Ah ha, sent one packet, have it processed, get one packet back! A novel idea, I shall patent it and all subsequent technology!"
Given the chance, some bastard would attempt to patent breathing air and the way things are going they'd be awarded the patent.
Sort of a 'EULA: All your base are belong to us.'
Answer: Compeletely remake the internet.
Problem: The cost would be prohibitive.
Answer: It'd trigger another tech boom and everyone would have jobs and even dumb people with marginal skills would be paid like chemical engineers.
Problem: The switch over would require eveyone to run parallel systems.
Answer: See above.
Problem: Current security depends more on exclusion than inclusion.
Answer: See above.
Problem: Who are you going to trust to write that security model? A wise collective endorsing open standards, an oligarchy of businesses vying for proprietary standards or the government?
Answer: Oh, the wise collective, for sure.
Problem: But do you honestly believe they'd be allowed to?
Answer: Uh, no ...
Problem: So what do you see?
Answer: A problem.
Well, they've only got so much control... you see this statement:
And think how broad that is (assuming that's the actual wording, which it may not be, yet...) so you could, in the spirit in which many e-tailers sell Microsoft wares, etc. with "system hardware" (say, toss in a $2.00 cable and sell the OEM version of software) So... all you really may need is a PC somewhere with any version of a Microsoft operating system on it and perform a ping over some serial or network cable and you're in compliance, right? ;-)