>>>...who gets to define "terrorist"? > >If you attack me, I do.
Oh very good. Someone who attacks you is a terrorist. That kind of ruins the use of a perfectly good term by reducing it to mean "enemy".
Address the issue: does the Pentagon get to define "terrorist" any way they get to or does Congress get to define it or does the President get to define it?
This isn't mere quibbling. Defining "terrorist" is the very first thing that the programmers who write the datamining application will do. Otherwise what's the point of doing the data mining?
What do you want them to do, provide the source code?
Oh come on! There's a big difference between aiding and abetting virus writers and the totally tight-lipped and condescending platitudes that AV people give out.
For starters they could start correcting reporters who constantly confuse "trojan horse" with "virus" with "worm". They could quit referring to Outlook viruses like Klez and SirCam and ILOVEYOU as "worms". "Worm" "virus" and "trojan" all had very specific meanings before "Melissa" came around. Now all of those terms get used interchangeably even by AV firms.
Think this doesn't make a difference? What about if police departments confused terms like "theif" "murderer" and "parking tickets"? How would they know how many people to assign to Robbery or Homicide or Parking Enforcement? Sloppy terminology prevents people from taking appropriate action. A real worm like Code Red might not even affect Joe Dial-up running Win98 but a new "SirCam" sure would. Sloppy terminology even affects how the experts categorize threats. And the categorization does make a difference if you use it to prioritize what to work on or who to assign to a task as in the law enforcement example above.
Maybe it isn't - both seem like MSFT is charging their locked-in users for fixing a defective product.
I guess it depends on what they've sold you - a license to use their intellectual property or the actual product that you expect to be fit to use.
Software companies in general and MSFT in particular want things both ways: they want you to be a loyal product buyer AND they want what you buy to be a license to use. I think that promoting things one way (Great Product! Easy to Use! The Useful Internet!) and then actually selling you the other (EULA!) is the commercial eqivalent of equivocation.
Not only must Spammers Die, they must Die in a horrible, fearsome fashion, to scare off the other knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, pee-drinking, unethical low lives that might think of spamming on their own. A Spammer's death must teach the other hairy, rat-molesting Spammers a lesson that they won't forget.
Email spam is theft. Theft must be punishable. We must punishe email spammers.
Oh, please. Do you really think that managers really know who is dead weight and who isn't?
It's sort of like "Idea boxes" with monetary bonuses for accepted ideas. In practice, the people evaluating the ideas only understand accounting process improvements or "common sense" improvements. So, the only folks who get monetary bonuses are accounting department employees.
Similarly, the people doing the laying off only understand management jobs. They have no idea what those poorly dressed programmers or those guys in bad ties in engineering actually do. Managment understands glad-handing each other, and janitorial services. Everyone else is mysterious, making them superfluous, and therefore eligble for RIFing.
Code Red and Nimda actually did a bit more than that. See this report on global router instabilities during the Code Red and Nimda peak activity periods.
I'm not really thrilled with how that report words things, but then I don't really understand BGP and global routing. The interesting conclusion:
We speculate that, although most of the traffic in the Internet continued to flow normally through the small fraction of links that make up the global backbones, most of the links at the Internet edge had serious performance problems during the worms' probing and propagation phases. A complete list of reasons still needs to be documented, but we suspect i) congestion-induced failures of BGP sessions due to timeouts; ii) flow-diversity induced failures of BGP sesions due to router CPU overloads; iii) proactive disconnection of certain networks; and iv) failures of other equipment at the Internet edge such as DSL routers and other devices.
Once MSFT does dominate the Internet 100% we can expect this sort of thing to happen all the time:
A computing monoculture will allow 100% susceptiblity to whatever exploit-of-the-day comes around. For Code Red, only about 30% of all web servers were susceptible.
MSFT does protocol design very poorly, and documents it in even worse fashion. BGP is publicly documented, and it still has weird beard problems with tons of traffic. Imagine what some hacked-out, irregular piece of crap protocol like CIFS might do.
Security information will go back to living only in the shady underground. "Responsible disclosure", as advocated by MSFT toadies, will keep any and all security bugs from public knowledge.
This combination of factors will result in emergent behvior that nobody will understand. Networks will go up and down like a window shade, without warning and without apparent provocation.
The "A-V" people deny this sort of theory with perhaps a bit too much vigor. See The Virus Creation Labs by George Smith.
Also, the "A-V" people really do depend on a constant stream of new viruses, trojans, worms, chainmails, etc. They've got a distinct conflict of interest going on.
Basically, Schneier's 5-step plan is called the "Stock Issues" model for arguing a policy change.
Stock Issues has been around for a long time, which is not to say that Schneier is wrong in using it: to the contrary, he's correct. I wonder if he re-invented it, or if he knew about Stock Issues when writing that 5-step plan?
It's probably worthwhile to structure every "case" you hear for some change in the form of Stock Issues, even changes contrary to your own point of view. If you can figure out what the "case" for a change you don't like is missing, or where it's wrong, you can try to shoot down the change with that information.
You've hit the nail on the head. Compilers and even "cat" or "copy.exe" can have viral properties depending on the context.
Sarah Gordon is arguing sloppily - the audience she's speaking to allows it out of lack of rigor. She's hoping that a gut reaction to "virus" (Melissa etc) will get people to outlaw "virus" (in the form of self-replicating code).
Sarah Gordon may have some good points. It's hard to tell.
She never bothers to define the term "virus" in a way that an arbitrary individual (me or an intellectual property lawyer or a World Court Judge) can use to determine whether or not some source code constitutes a "virus".
If she follows Fred Cohen's definition ("sequences of instructons in machine code for a particular machine that make exact copies of themselves somewhere else in the machine" - "A Short Course on Computer Viruses" 2nd ed ISBN 0-471-00769-2 John Wiley & Sons 1994) which is pretty much an english transliteration of the mathematical definition - even things like/bin/cat or/bin/cc become "viruses" under some circumstances.
Sarah Gordon is just fear-mongering at this point. Until she says "The term 'virus' means code that....." objecting to her editorial is just automatic: she's using a term that has (1) a specific technical or mathematical meaning (to Fred Cohen and many Slashdot readers) and (2) a vague "common sense" meaning (to Windows users the general public and a few Slashdot readers). She's arguing based on both meanings. She's hoping that emotional or poorly intellectualized reactions to meaning (2) will get code representing meaning (1) outlawed.
It's crap. Give it up Sarah.
And just for good measure: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/doug/v101.ps Read it and weep Sarah. Neener neener neener!
3 floors and basement in the Cherry Creek location. 3 floors in downtown ("Lo Do") location.
Parenthetically - the Tattered Cover used to use a QNX-based system to do all their inventory and point-of-sale stuff. I was in the Tattered Cover last week but I can't recall what they used.
"Tru64" Unix is what DEC I mean Compaq puts out on Alpha-based computers. It's based on Mach 2.5 I believe.
Apple's OSX is based on Mach 1.0 I believe so there's a sort of kinship there.
And now for some stuff I'm less sure of: 1. MSFT Windows NT used to run on Alpha CPUs albeit not using the full 64-bits of addressing those CPUs can do. Rumor has it that DEC got a real sweetheart deal on NT licensing because the NT source code was (illegally!) based on "Micah" the operating system that Dave Cutler was working on at DEC before he moved to MSFT in 1988. Comments in the NT source code in the mid-90s confirmed this allowing DEC to get a bit of leverage when dealing with MSFT.
2. Sort of in contrast the first edition of "Inside Windows NT" described an operating system that just could have been Mach 1.0. A lot of the original NT was very reminiscent of Mach 1.0 except less rigorously done. I don't imagine there was any real similarity between the OS described in Helen Custer's book and the real NT though. Mach and Unix were scrupulously ignored in the bibliography and index of "Inside Windows NT" 1st edition. At the time MSFT clearly wanted to emphasize the "N" in NT as "new" even though it wasn't.
Testimony like this and Michael Tiemann's puts lie to the MSFT propaganda about how consumers made them the multi-billion dollar owner of 90% of the market.
It's pretty plain that consumers have *never* been offered a choice. No "market" for PC OSes ever existed.
You're just flat wrong. They (Microsoft) didn't make Windows work to the extent thatn 90% of all desktop computers runs it. The DoJ proved that in the trial. Microsoft rigged markets so that consumers didn't have a choice. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
You need to start using X11. The Windows API - embodied in Win32 - simply has troubles if you "remote" it.
You need to start using a remotable ("network transparent") windowing system. All your apps will come with it. All of the modern windowing systems (X11 Be whatever Apple calls NeXTStep now) are network transparent. Use a modern OS and a modern windowing system will come along for the ride.
Oh wait - you want Word I mean "productivity apps" to come along? I think you're stuck with being tied to a particular computer. And the situation there will only get worse - DMCA and newer EULAs are going to make it harder and harder to do things like have a backup use a remote desktop etc etc.
If I requested a statue of say, myself, I would expect a completion date. He should be able to figure out how long it would take to finish a statue of somebody my size.
You've never worked with an artist before have you? I say this with only love and affection for them, but artists cannot schedule in advance, and cannot meet agreed-upon deadlines.
That's why they're artists rather than assembly-line workers, that's why they're artists rather than small business people. The nature of art and artists just doesn't mesh well with schedules and deadlines.
Does "OFS" constitute a tacit admission that NTFS wasn't the best thing since sliced bread, but only a retread of DEC's Files-11 filesystem, and that NTFS had all the problems systemic to Files-11, like needing defragmentation?
Or is this just another instance of MSFT using it's monopoly power to screw over people who have bothered to reverse-engineer and implement a "de facto standard" like CIFS and SMB?
I really don't see how any rational being could interpret OFS as any other alternative.
Since MSFT did a half-assed job of copying Mach when they developed NT, they should take a look at Jeff Mogul's doctoral dissertation, "Represeting Information About Files": J. Mogul. Representing information about files. In Proc. 4th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 432-439. IEEE, May, 1984.. Maybe MSFT can read this and get it right, instead of half-assing it like 8.3 file names, drive letters, NetBIOS, NTFS, NT, and many other examples.
Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads.... but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.
Oh, please; Are you seriously asking me to believe that any business, especially "natural viagra" spammers, pyramid schemers and an ad company like DoubleClick actually use some kind of analysis to decide what to do? You might as well ask me to believe that Pro Wrestling isn't rigged. It's pretty clear that DoubleClick's backed into a corner by the low rates that people will pay for crappy banner ads. DoubleClick is grasping at straws in the only business they know: lying to people.
Besides the issue of businesses making decisions on minimal data, you should read what I wrote: spam may be around, but whether the amount of spam is growing or shrinking has little to do with selling products. Your intuition that a relationship exists between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak. Read the article to which you respond.
I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.
Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.
Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.
What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.
This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.
The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.
Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.
Spammers also try to spam their critics into submission. Early on, in '94 or '95, I would email spammers directly. This was before they became so "proficient" at hiding their own email address. I got a number of threats from spammers that they would just sign me up for more and more spam if I complained.
I only bring this up because I finally got my first piece of spam that I can track to my email address being harvested from Slashdot. I got a 69,376 byte hunk of crap from one "Daniel Barnard" addressed to "Philbert Desenex", my Slashdot nick. Daniel "Pig Intercourse" Barnard, of 3367 Eastern NE, Grand Rapids, MI, promotes a 5-level pyramid scheme. My guess is that some hairy, rat-molesting spammer harvested email addresses from Slashdot postings in anti-spam follow-ups, and has distributed those addresses as part of some "opt-in" list full of people who really don't want to opt-in.
And yes, email spam is theft plain and simple. Also, email spammers have incestuous relations with pigs. We must punish email spammers.
Sure, spam is probably profitable: it transfers most of the cost of advertising to the (probably unwilling) receipiant, and nobody ever went broke underestimating the Good Taste of the American public.
The problem with spam is that the dirty details of spam disassociates it from market forces, unlike other, more conventional forms of advertising.
In just about every other form of ad (radio or Tee Vee commercial, newspaper ad, billboard, etc) the advertiser pays for the ad up front, before you make a decision to buy the advertised product or not. So, if the ad is particularly repulsive, ("Ring around the collar!") the consumer can make a decision to not buy the product. The advertiser is out the cost of the ad. Of course, the cost of any advertised product is higher than an unadvertised product, so the consumers who chose to buy an advertised product ultimately pay for a portion of the advertising.
Contrast this with a spammed ad: the consumer has paid for his or her network time to receive the ad, the disk space to store the ad and the CPU cycles it took to process the email ad before getting a chance to decide whether to buy the spamvertised product or not. No matter how repugnant, stupid, wasteful, or dumb the ad is, the consumer ends up paying for the spamertising. Only very weak market forces control spamvertising. That's the real problem with spam.
Email spamming is theft, plain and simple. Email spammers must be punished.
I admit that this comment is going to sound very ad hominum: We need to examine Obasanjo's claims carefully. He's worked for Microsoft very recently.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't call attention to this, but Microsoft as a company has a really bad track record of astroturfing just about any kind of on- or off-line forum:
I will resist renting or micro-paying-for "e" books for as long as I can. There are numerous reasons for doing so:
Renting or micropayments is giving in to MegaCorporations' fantasy that they own copyrighted content forever, rather than the short-term statutory limit.
Reading on-screen is much harder than reading paper. Many studies have confirmed this.
Can't write margin notes in an "e" book. Don't gloss over this! Technical books always have imprecise wordings that need annotation or correction.
"e" boooks are usually sloppily indexed, if they're indexed at all. People seem to accept lack of or crappy indexes and tables of contents in "e" books. "Find" dialog boxes are not an acceptable subsitute for a real human indexing things based on semantics rather than lexical similarity.
I bet that these objections are the exact things that make "e" books so attractive to big corporations. Readers (nay! "Users") pay for an "e" book by the page, every page. Fair use standards are in limbo for "e" books right now. An "e" book publisher can get rid of those squirrelly index nerds, too! While they're at it, sack all the proofreaders, because "Word" does a great job at checking spalling. And grammar plus usage checks get done.
Despite Lewis's claims to the contrary, no serious researcher in software engineering is trying to find a guaranteed method for producing estimates of time and effort that are certain to be correct. No one is even trying to find methods that produce estimates guaranteed to be correct within a known error range. The real-world problem of software estimation is much less strict than Lewis states. We are just trying to get somewhere close a reasonable percentage of the time!
Maybe you're correct: maybe no serious researcher claims these things, or is trying to get to a point to claim these things. But it's sure happening in the workplace. There are many "process" consultancies that do all but promise accurate, repeatable software development. Most of these consultancies advocate a process that gets you to ISO 9000 certification, or SEI's CMM Level N or some combination.
I've been victimized by just such a consultancy (used to have a name starting with "Bell" and ending with "Core") getting corporate upper management to buy into becoming CMM Level 3 certified. The method that this consultancy pushed claimed exactly what J.P. Lewis said: using their method got you to repeatable, predictable estimation.
Naturally, all this system actually required you to produce was "Word" documents, modified individually by highly paid programmers, architects and analysts.
Slashdot Mirror
>>> ...who gets to define "terrorist"?
>
>If you attack me, I do.
Oh very good. Someone who attacks you is a terrorist. That kind of ruins the use of a perfectly good term by reducing it to mean "enemy".
Address the issue: does the Pentagon get to define "terrorist" any way they get to or does Congress get to define it or does the President get to define it?
This isn't mere quibbling. Defining "terrorist" is the very first thing that the programmers who write the datamining application will do. Otherwise what's the point of doing the data mining?
Actually the background temperature of the universe is 2.7K (look here about a quarter of the way down).
The theory is that leftover radiation from the Big Bang makes the universe that temperature.
Oh come on! There's a big difference between aiding and abetting virus writers and the totally tight-lipped and condescending platitudes that AV people give out.
For starters they could start correcting reporters who constantly confuse "trojan horse" with "virus" with "worm". They could quit referring to Outlook viruses like Klez and SirCam and ILOVEYOU as "worms". "Worm" "virus" and "trojan" all had very specific meanings before "Melissa" came around. Now all of those terms get used interchangeably even by AV firms.
Think this doesn't make a difference? What about if police departments confused terms like "theif" "murderer" and "parking tickets"? How would they know how many people to assign to Robbery or Homicide or Parking Enforcement? Sloppy terminology prevents people from taking appropriate action. A real worm like Code Red might not even affect Joe Dial-up running Win98 but a new "SirCam" sure would. Sloppy terminology even affects how the experts categorize threats. And the categorization does make a difference if you use it to prioritize what to work on or who to assign to a task as in the law enforcement example above.
Maybe it isn't - both seem like MSFT is charging their locked-in users for fixing a defective product.
I guess it depends on what they've sold you - a license to use their intellectual property or the actual product that you expect to be fit to use.
Software companies in general and MSFT in particular want things both ways: they want you to be a loyal product buyer AND they want what you buy to be a license to use. I think that promoting things one way (Great Product! Easy to Use! The Useful Internet!) and then actually selling you the other (EULA!) is the commercial eqivalent of equivocation.
Not only must Spammers Die, they must Die in a horrible, fearsome fashion, to scare off the other knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, pee-drinking, unethical low lives that might think of spamming on their own. A Spammer's death must teach the other hairy, rat-molesting Spammers a lesson that they won't forget.
Email spam is theft. Theft must be punishable. We must punishe email spammers.
Oh, please. Do you really think that managers really know who is dead weight and who isn't?
It's sort of like "Idea boxes" with monetary bonuses for accepted ideas. In practice, the people evaluating the ideas only understand accounting process improvements or "common sense" improvements. So, the only folks who get monetary bonuses are accounting department employees.
Similarly, the people doing the laying off only understand management jobs. They have no idea what those poorly dressed programmers or those guys in bad ties in engineering actually do. Managment understands glad-handing each other, and janitorial services. Everyone else is mysterious, making them superfluous, and therefore eligble for RIFing.
Code Red and Nimda actually did a bit more than that. See this report on global router instabilities during the Code Red and Nimda peak activity periods.
I'm not really thrilled with how that report words things, but then I don't really understand BGP and global routing. The interesting conclusion:
Once MSFT does dominate the Internet 100% we can expect this sort of thing to happen all the time:
- A computing monoculture will allow 100% susceptiblity to whatever exploit-of-the-day comes around. For Code Red, only about 30% of all web servers were susceptible.
- MSFT does protocol design very poorly, and documents it in even worse fashion. BGP is publicly documented, and it still has weird beard problems with tons of traffic. Imagine what some hacked-out, irregular piece of crap protocol like CIFS might do.
- Security information will go back to living only in the shady underground. "Responsible disclosure", as advocated by MSFT toadies, will keep any and all security bugs from public knowledge.
This combination of factors will result in emergent behvior that nobody will understand. Networks will go up and down like a window shade, without warning and without apparent provocation.The "A-V" people deny this sort of theory with perhaps a bit too much vigor. See The Virus Creation Labs by George Smith.
Also, the "A-V" people really do depend on a constant stream of new viruses, trojans, worms, chainmails, etc. They've got a distinct conflict of interest going on.
Basically, Schneier's 5-step plan is called the "Stock Issues" model for arguing a policy change.
Stock Issues has been around for a long time, which is not to say that Schneier is wrong in using it: to the contrary, he's correct. I wonder if he re-invented it, or if he knew about Stock Issues when writing that 5-step plan?
It's probably worthwhile to structure every "case" you hear for some change in the form of Stock Issues, even changes contrary to your own point of view. If you can figure out what the "case" for a change you don't like is missing, or where it's wrong, you can try to shoot down the change with that information.
You've hit the nail on the head. Compilers and even "cat" or "copy.exe" can have viral properties depending on the context.
Sarah Gordon is arguing sloppily - the audience she's speaking to allows it out of lack of rigor. She's hoping that a gut reaction to "virus" (Melissa etc) will get people to outlaw "virus" (in the form of self-replicating code).
Sarah Gordon may have some good points. It's hard to tell.
/bin/cat or /bin/cc become "viruses" under some circumstances.
....." objecting to her editorial is just automatic: she's using a term that has (1) a specific technical or mathematical meaning (to Fred Cohen and many Slashdot readers) and (2) a vague "common sense" meaning (to Windows users the general public and a few Slashdot readers). She's arguing based on both meanings. She's hoping that emotional or poorly intellectualized reactions to meaning (2) will get code representing meaning (1) outlawed.
She never bothers to define the term "virus" in a way that an arbitrary individual (me or an intellectual property lawyer or a World Court Judge) can use to determine whether or not some source code constitutes a "virus".
If she follows Fred Cohen's definition ("sequences of instructons in machine code for a particular machine that make exact copies of themselves somewhere else in the machine" - "A Short Course on Computer Viruses" 2nd ed ISBN 0-471-00769-2 John Wiley & Sons 1994) which is pretty much an english transliteration of the mathematical definition - even things like
Sarah Gordon is just fear-mongering at this point. Until she says "The term 'virus' means code that
It's crap. Give it up Sarah.
And just for good measure: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/doug/v101.ps Read it and weep Sarah. Neener neener neener!
3 floors and basement in the Cherry Creek location. 3 floors in downtown ("Lo Do") location.
Parenthetically - the Tattered Cover used to use a QNX-based system to do all their inventory and point-of-sale stuff. I was in the Tattered Cover last week but I can't recall what they used.
"Tru64" Unix is what DEC I mean Compaq puts out on Alpha-based computers. It's based on Mach 2.5 I believe.
Apple's OSX is based on Mach 1.0 I believe so there's a sort of kinship there.
And now for some stuff I'm less sure of:
1. MSFT Windows NT used to run on Alpha CPUs albeit not using the full 64-bits of addressing those CPUs can do. Rumor has it that DEC got a real sweetheart deal on NT licensing because the NT source code was (illegally!) based on "Micah" the operating system that Dave Cutler was working on at DEC before he moved to MSFT in 1988. Comments in the NT source code in the mid-90s confirmed this allowing DEC to get a bit of leverage when dealing with MSFT.
2. Sort of in contrast the first edition of "Inside Windows NT" described an operating system that just could have been Mach 1.0. A lot of the original NT was very reminiscent of Mach 1.0 except less rigorously done. I don't imagine there was any real similarity between the OS described in Helen Custer's book and the real NT though. Mach and Unix were scrupulously ignored in the bibliography and index of "Inside Windows NT" 1st edition. At the time MSFT clearly wanted to emphasize the "N" in NT as "new" even though it wasn't.
Testimony like this and Michael Tiemann's puts lie to the MSFT propaganda about how consumers made them the multi-billion dollar owner of 90% of the market.
It's pretty plain that consumers have *never* been offered a choice. No "market" for PC OSes ever existed.
You're just flat wrong. They (Microsoft) didn't make Windows work to the extent thatn 90% of all desktop computers runs it. The DoJ proved that in the trial. Microsoft rigged markets so that consumers didn't have a choice. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
You need to start using X11. The Windows API - embodied in Win32 - simply has troubles if you "remote" it.
You need to start using a remotable ("network transparent") windowing system. All your apps will come with it. All of the modern windowing systems (X11 Be whatever Apple calls NeXTStep now) are network transparent. Use a modern OS and a modern windowing system will come along for the ride.
Oh wait - you want Word I mean "productivity apps" to come along? I think you're stuck with being tied to a particular computer. And the situation there will only get worse - DMCA and newer EULAs are going to make it harder and harder to do things like have a backup use a remote desktop etc etc.
If I requested a statue of say, myself, I would expect a completion date. He should be able to figure out how long it would take to finish a statue of somebody my size.
You've never worked with an artist before have you? I say this with only love and affection for them, but artists cannot schedule in advance, and cannot meet agreed-upon deadlines.
That's why they're artists rather than assembly-line workers, that's why they're artists rather than small business people. The nature of art and artists just doesn't mesh well with schedules and deadlines.
Does "OFS" constitute a tacit admission that NTFS wasn't the best thing since sliced bread, but only a retread of DEC's Files-11 filesystem, and that NTFS had all the problems systemic to Files-11, like needing defragmentation?
Or is this just another instance of MSFT using it's monopoly power to screw over people who have bothered to reverse-engineer and implement a "de facto standard" like CIFS and SMB?
I really don't see how any rational being could interpret OFS as any other alternative.
Since MSFT did a half-assed job of copying Mach when they developed NT, they should take a look at Jeff Mogul's doctoral dissertation, "Represeting Information About Files": J. Mogul. Representing information about files. In Proc. 4th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 432-439. IEEE, May, 1984.. Maybe MSFT can read this and get it right, instead of half-assing it like 8.3 file names, drive letters, NetBIOS, NTFS, NT, and many other examples.
Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. ... but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.
Oh, please; Are you seriously asking me to believe that any business, especially "natural viagra" spammers, pyramid schemers and an ad company like DoubleClick actually use some kind of analysis to decide what to do? You might as well ask me to believe that Pro Wrestling isn't rigged. It's pretty clear that DoubleClick's backed into a corner by the low rates that people will pay for crappy banner ads. DoubleClick is grasping at straws in the only business they know: lying to people.
Besides the issue of businesses making decisions on minimal data, you should read what I wrote: spam may be around, but whether the amount of spam is growing or shrinking has little to do with selling products. Your intuition that a relationship exists between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak. Read the article to which you respond.
I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.
Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.
Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.
What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.
This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.
The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.
Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.
Spammers also try to spam their critics into submission. Early on, in '94 or '95, I would email spammers directly. This was before they became so "proficient" at hiding their own email address. I got a number of threats from spammers that they would just sign me up for more and more spam if I complained.
I only bring this up because I finally got my first piece of spam that I can track to my email address being harvested from Slashdot. I got a 69,376 byte hunk of crap from one "Daniel Barnard" addressed to "Philbert Desenex", my Slashdot nick. Daniel "Pig Intercourse" Barnard, of 3367 Eastern NE, Grand Rapids, MI, promotes a 5-level pyramid scheme. My guess is that some hairy, rat-molesting spammer harvested email addresses from Slashdot postings in anti-spam follow-ups, and has distributed those addresses as part of some "opt-in" list full of people who really don't want to opt-in.
And yes, email spam is theft plain and simple. Also, email spammers have incestuous relations with pigs. We must punish email spammers.
Sure, spam is probably profitable: it transfers most of the cost of advertising to the (probably unwilling) receipiant, and nobody ever went broke underestimating the Good Taste of the American public.
The problem with spam is that the dirty details of spam disassociates it from market forces, unlike other, more conventional forms of advertising.
In just about every other form of ad (radio or Tee Vee commercial, newspaper ad, billboard, etc) the advertiser pays for the ad up front, before you make a decision to buy the advertised product or not. So, if the ad is particularly repulsive, ("Ring around the collar!") the consumer can make a decision to not buy the product. The advertiser is out the cost of the ad. Of course, the cost of any advertised product is higher than an unadvertised product, so the consumers who chose to buy an advertised product ultimately pay for a portion of the advertising.
Contrast this with a spammed ad: the consumer has paid for his or her network time to receive the ad, the disk space to store the ad and the CPU cycles it took to process the email ad before getting a chance to decide whether to buy the spamvertised product or not. No matter how repugnant, stupid, wasteful, or dumb the ad is, the consumer ends up paying for the spamertising. Only very weak market forces control spamvertising. That's the real problem with spam.
Email spamming is theft, plain and simple. Email spammers must be punished.
I admit that this comment is going to sound very ad hominum: We need to examine Obasanjo's claims carefully. He's worked for Microsoft very recently.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't call attention to this, but Microsoft as a company has a really bad track record of astroturfing just about any kind of on- or off-line forum:
Sorry, Dare, but that's the facts: if you lie down with pigs, you wake up smelling a bit like pig excrement.
I will resist renting or micro-paying-for "e" books for as long as I can. There are numerous reasons for doing so:
I bet that these objections are the exact things that make "e" books so attractive to big corporations. Readers (nay! "Users") pay for an "e" book by the page, every page. Fair use standards are in limbo for "e" books right now. An "e" book publisher can get rid of those squirrelly index nerds, too! While they're at it, sack all the proofreaders, because "Word" does a great job at checking spalling. And grammar plus usage checks get done.
Despite Lewis's claims to the contrary, no serious researcher in software engineering is trying to find a guaranteed method for producing estimates of time and effort that are certain to be correct. No one is even trying to find methods that produce estimates guaranteed to be correct within a known error range. The real-world problem of software estimation is much less strict than Lewis states. We are just trying to get somewhere close a reasonable percentage of the time!
Maybe you're correct: maybe no serious researcher claims these things, or is trying to get to a point to claim these things. But it's sure happening in the workplace. There are many "process" consultancies that do all but promise accurate, repeatable software development. Most of these consultancies advocate a process that gets you to ISO 9000 certification, or SEI's CMM Level N or some combination.
I've been victimized by just such a consultancy (used to have a name starting with "Bell" and ending with "Core") getting corporate upper management to buy into becoming CMM Level 3 certified. The method that this consultancy pushed claimed exactly what J.P. Lewis said: using their method got you to repeatable, predictable estimation.
Naturally, all this system actually required you to produce was "Word" documents, modified individually by highly paid programmers, architects and analysts.