FWIW, I work for an IT outsourcing company, and it looks like we are going to lose our contract to SBC. SBC wants to be the network provider both between cities/buildings and within the buildings. So our network group would get canned, and the customer would pay SBC to run the routers and switches.
I don't think we would mind as much if the competition for the bid was fair. But SBC's primary selling point is a cute girl in a very short skirt flirting with a member of the Board.
If the bid process was fair, we'd have a chance, because SBC's prices are ridiculous. But because of the personal relationship between the board member and the sales girl, the price gouging will be ignored.
you are inside the thing, and your server that controls the thing gets slashdotted? The VR software starts dropping the gravity simulation threads? The program renders trees falling up, epileptic seizure inducing flashes, you try to exit and you hear HAL 9000 say "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that."?
Sure, I can go along with that. Any "-ism" is an idea a person adopts for his/her self, and this particular one will test one's own personal integrity.
My personal hope is that people tackle difficulty instead of shy away from it.:-)
I used the word difficulty, because difficulties can be overcome. And it can very well be difficult for someone who thinks of his/her self as freedom loving, to come to the realization that there may be more control-freak in them that they originally thought.
I didn't like the word problem because of the emotional baggage that comes with that word. It conveys more blame and less hope. IMNSO, behind difficulty is more optimism.
"Houston, we have a problem."
"Houston, we have a difficulty." "What? The gum ball machine jammed?";-)
Getting people to come to grips with the idea that other people should be allowed freedom (even freedom to screw up big time) is a difficulty.
Most people easily see the "I must be free" part of Libertarianism. But if you present them with the idea that "That other jerk must be free, as well"... it takes a real self-assessment of your own concept of liberty. Do you actually believe it, when it applies to others?
(I'm not asking if you, Moofie, believe it. I'm suggesting that this question is the question with which a person would have to wrestle.)
I tend to hear people who say they are in favor of freedom, but act in favor of restriction. Well, freedom = good for themselves, but freedom = bad for others.
It is a difficulty, because people who self-assess honestly, may find out that they don't believe in freedom for others.
If you were an old timer, and lived through it, you would remember it.
A comment I wrote might bring you up to speed here
What typically happened (and happened in my case), is that the accountants, running Lotus 1-2-3, got the newest, fastest machines. So a new batch of PC's come in, and my job was to un-install Lotus off the old machine, move it and the accountant's files to the new machine, and then re-deploy the old machine to someone else.
Microsoft came out with the new version of DOS, and shipped it to PC OEMs. Thus, the new machines that arrived from IBM, HP, DEC, etc, came with the new sabotaged DOS pre-installed.
The same process that worked so many times before suddenly did not work. "This program has violated system integrity. Contact the vendor."
Of course, what happened to me also happened across the country, and the s*** hit the fan. Infoworld did several articles on it, and how it was coincident with an ad campaign to promote non-crashes when MS was both the application and OS supplier.
In my case, Hewlett-Packard recognised that they had been played for pawns in helping Microsoft stomp on a competitor. We got a letter from them, telling us that for every new machine we bought, they would ship us a copy of the old, non-sabotaged, DOS 3.30 - if we wanted. We took them up on it, as I had accountants that wanted the newest, fastest machines, and I needed Lotus to run on them. But it was about a month delay by the time we asked for the older DOS, and got the working version back to the users.
The purposeful breaking was between DOS versions 3.30 and 3.31. The part that was changed to break Lotus 1-2-3 was the Extended Memory Manager.
Microsoft's EMM grew out the LIM extended memory manager specification. LIM = Lotus, Intel, Microsoft.
Yes, Lotus and Microsoft partnered together to let DOS load a driver to access RAM greater than 640 KB. Prior to LIM, each memory card came with its own driver.
DOS 3.31 included a new EMM which aligned memory access on word boundaries, not byte boundaries.
Microsoft's claim was that this would be speedier; the trade off of speed for bloat was worth it to them - they saw the future, and it included more RAM.
And heck - it broke MS Excel's biggest competitor too: double win!
Infoworld did an in depth piece on the controversy, and got a quote from a product manager at Microsoft who stated that yes, they "knew there were problems." (When asked if they tested against Lotus 1-2-3 - the biggest app in the world at that time).
Note that Microsoft did not tell Lotus of the change to shipping code, prior to release. Well, not enough prior to let Lotus present a compatible version.
So the real test (mimicking the pain I went through at the time) is: find a copy of DOS 3.30, load it. Install Windows 3.0. Install the (non-GUI) Lotus 1-2-3. Verify it runs. Then "upgrade" to DOS 3.31. Attempt to run Lotus 1-2-3.
You will get a nasty "This application has violated system integrity" message and be told to reboot. You will also read the insinuation that Lotus has its head up its ass.
And if you then "downgrade" to DOS 3.30, things will be fine.
Just for grins, then run the character mode Lotus 1-2-3 in a window, and run the brand new GUI-based MS Excel on the same platform. Likely, you will be appalled at the snail pace of all that GUI junk. It would seriously cause you to wonder if the GUI was worth it.
Even on calculation bound sheets, Excel was 40% slower. Microsoft seriously needed something more important than MS Paint to convince people they needed Windows. And that was a spreadsheet - except Lotus 1-2-3 in character mode whipped Excel's ass. Intervention was needed.
Say, for example, your mail server is crashing, moments after it comes up. Do you really have the time to become a mail guru? Or does it make sense to cash in one of nnn free support incidents per year, and just call Novell to work through the problem?
Sure, if the problem is minor and non-urgent, it makes sense to do the research yourself. But if the problem is major and urgent, Novell has trained staff on hand, 24x7 if you need it. Better, those staff have (likely) seen your problem before, have a roadmap for a solution. They have roadmaps to narrow in on what exactly is the problem. And they can be on the phone with you now, working through the problem in a matter of an hour or two.
For desktops, it may not be likely that the problem is both major and urgent. But even then, if you find a quirky bug, you can get Novell to duplicate it. Novell will write up the bug report, and send it to their own (or open source) developers. Joe Sysadmin may not be comfortable writing up bug reports, but the paid Novell professionals won't shy away from it.
And of course, those bug reports become a part of the troubleshooting roadmap.
Essentially, by paying for support, you have someone on the hook to help you out when you need it most. And because they are pros, they are good at it.
Decades ago, one of the mainframe programmers I work with was bouncing between the test system and production, comparing the two. Found the difference, saved it to test, and hit the keystrokes to restart the test system. Except of course, that the programmer happened to be in the production system at the time. For some strange reason, people notice when the power plant nuclear reactor control system goes offline....
Pure human error - but that review board stuff kicks in no matter.
I'm just hope they haven't "upgraded" to Windows.;-)
Me, I make my terminal emulators have different background colors, to indicate which system I am in. People wonder why my DOS boxes are a funny color, but I don't end up typing a DOS command against a NetWare box that way.
Your attempt at mockery both 1) evades the point of our 'meddling' as the source of their hatred and 2) scorns the real damage caused by retaining people willing to fight a war for us, and then thanking them with nothing.
At least with the Laotian people, and our losses in Cambodia, we did the honorable thing, and helped them immigrate to here.
Personally, I think it was a mistake to meddle in the Afghan : USSR war. However, the case can be made that the USSR defeat substantially assisted the decline and fall of the entire USSR. Okay, so far, so good.
The problem came when the president and congress decided to pull their aid to Afghanistan. After two million Afghans were injured (some percentage of them killed), we said "You won. That's nice. Goodbye."
Either the State Department or the CIA should have warned Congress and the President what a huge mistake they were making. You don't sucker in a group of people, and then blow them off, and get away consequence-free.
Of course, IMO, the smart way to win the game was not to have played in the first place.
Nonetheless, having played the game, it was stupid to have walked away from warriors we had trained and supplied, letting them feel like we used them and then threw their worth away.
If you had an anti-USA agenda, could you have asked for better ammunition?
Take the Taliban for example. In the 1980's, Henry Kissinger advised Ronald Reagan that through Afghanistan, the USA could hand the USSR "Its Viet Nam".
Thus, the "Afghan Freedom Fighters" were born.
So, at our encouragement (and provision), they bled, and died, and won their freedom. Much like China backed the Viet Cong, we backed the Afghans.
And later presidents (and congress) changed their mind. We abandoned them.
The Taliban then started pounding the drum "They played us for suckers. Are you widows and orphans (and neighbors of widows and orphans) listening?"
The cause of all this trouble was not religious bigotry - it was meddling.
Well, it was meddling, and the lack of foresight to understand that presidents change, and there are no guarantees that the new president will maintain the policies of the old president. Any country or people that cut a deal with the USA needs to understand that. Frankly, our own State Department needs to warn the principals of this, at the beginning of any scheme.
To write off their anger as incoherent religious dogma is to delude yourself. We meddled. Then we walked away, without much, if any, thanks. Those actions had consequences.
As far as Grandma goes, if a zombie takes over her machine, she is going to be out her bond. Rather like someone stealing her car and committing a bank robbery with it - if the car gets dented, no-one is going to compensate her, unless she has been prepaying money to a bonded insurance company.
I expect her mail provider will provide some protections. It wouldn't be that hard to place a hold all messages with greater than n recipients and wait for a confirmation from Grandma that she did indeed intend to mass-mail 100 people / send 100 messages today.
As far as the spammers that actually do make money, my understanding is that they don't make it by selling Viagra or such. They have two sources of revenue: they sell a get rich quick scheme, and they sell advertising services.
Most of their money comes from the idea of 'spamming as free money'. "Here, buy this list of email addresses. Send out 400,000 emails for practically free and you'll make tons of money. My list of addresses is known good, and costs $400." It's the greater fool theory.
The other source of money is as an advertising agency. "Give me $400 dollars, and I'll send out 400,000 emails."
Both ideas fall down once each spam costs ten cents to send. Note that real mail does not incur the ten cent penalty.
Let me tell you another dirty secret of the spam industry - many of those emails do not have a legitimate reply address. So no - there is not always a contact to track down. The mail message does have a web bug, so that if Grandma opens it up, her address is flagged as a "live one" for selling to someone else - but there was never any intention of receiving a mail message back from her.
Although posting a bond seems like assuming criminal activity up front, it isn't all that different than paying for entertainment prior to seeing the show. A better analogy might be state-mandated automobile insurance. You lose your right to drive an automobile on public roads if you stop holding insurance. You still have the right to ride a bicycle, though.
You are correct that it is a larger burden on the end user. But rather like the early days of driving, the unregulated system has been abused enough that some remedy is required. Thus, we now have insurance and drivers licenses.
The beauty of the bond scheme is that it is completely op-in. If Grandma tells you her new email address is granny.nghtmr@gmail.prepaid you can still try to talk her out of it. But if Google charges $24 per year for 'basic' service, and $36 per year for 'prepaid' service, it is likely Grandma will pay the extra amount just to avoid getting ads selling her on the idea of enlarging her penis.
I like the idea of having a email address I can display publicly, but know that spammers would avoid because it would cost them money. The email address attached to this/. account get upward of 160 spam per day - simply because it is public. Don't bother mailing me at it - everything received there goes into the junk filter.
Who collects and distributes these (micro)payments?
Google / Yahoo / Hotmail / Comcast.
Who enforces that the mailserver supports this?
Google, with their new for-pay service: GMail-Plus! My new mail address is joe.user@gmail.prepaid (the new for-pay domain). Yes, I paid a small bond for it. No - you don't want to send me spam at this address, as I might claim some of your bond money. It will accumulate against my annual fee for holding a gmail.prepaid account.
In the event of someone getting zombied, who is liable? Especially in the event that the zombied box is fully patched.
Doesn't apply. The servers at gmail.prepaid don't accept incoming mail from mail servers that don't have a current bond. 400 series SMTP error.
How does a 13 year old from a dirt poor country send an email from the shared village PC to a uni professor in London or NYC? Where is his escrow acct?
A decent question. The university, or the professor, or the village the kid lives in is going to have to chip in and post a bond. (Which, when you think about it, creates a sort of self-controlling responsibility. As soon as one of the smart asses in the village spams the world, the village loses its bond. They won't let that jerk near the keyboard again.....)
What about anon email accts? How is my bank/paypal/whatever tied to that? (Not that I want it that way)
For this, you will have to remain on the old fashioned mail servers. No charge, but lots of spam. That will be the price you pay.
How does a free, but popular mailing list afford the escrow acct needed to cover new recipients?
Someone is going to have to put up a bond. Rather like Public Broadcasting, the list server is going to need to run an annual beg-a-thon, or state that they cannot afford to send to the for-pay mail services. Perhaps the gmail.prepaid subscriber ought to send in a buck, to help out with the bond?
One point is that the bond doesn't have to be all that large. If a spammer shells out $10, and 100 messages later, has exhausted his bond, it is quickly going to become obvious that he is in a financially losing game. $10 for an average user isn't that great a burden. Better, as the bond money is claimed, the sender gets notified that they are losing money to that person. In the case of the listserver, the bond-claim process is also an automatic unsubscribe request.
As you can tell, I am in favor of the scheme. I used to be a mail server admin, and the waste of bandwidth, because abusing is essentially free for the abuser, is shameful. It won't take much; a tiny bit of real cash cost on the sender's part will solve this problem.
So the Scientific Method requires experimentation to confirm/deny the hypothesis.
"Intelligent Design" does not. In fact, there is no way to test whether "Intelligent Design" is valid or not. Therefore, "Intelligent Design" is useless as anything other than a religious statement.
I would argue that it is possible to generate mathematic models of biologic complexity, and subject those models to Scientific Method investigation. Exceedingly hard to do - but not impossible*. Given that Evolution is based on the assumption that anything is possible, ID ought to be held to at least that standard.
As an example of complexity, I saw a slide on a TV show recently which showed that some enzymatic protein replication operations at the cellular level appear to have redundancy checks built in. That is to say, as the process goes forward, portions of the resulting protein must physically match up with portions of the enzyme it hasn't yet touched.
An analogy would be bootcode checksumming its bootrom - if the checksum doesn't match, no sense continuing to boot. (Well, an intelligently designed system does not continue to attempt to boot. An even more intelligently designed system would have a backup rom and exception handling code. This level of complexity is recognizable as not random.)
One of the things that makes a modern CPU work is the perfection of atomic operations. You don't push 125 million transistors at 3.5 billion cycles per second if there are flaws in the microcode.
The hypothesis to test Evolution then, is: there exist biologic processes that are too complex to have 'evolved'.
The hypothesis to test Intelligent Design is then: all biologic processes are simple enough to have 'evolved'.
Using mathematical analysis of biologic processes, one can attempt to reduce the complexity of the process. If the complexity reduction simplifies to a point where spontaneous perfection of biologic processes is reasonable, then ID is out the window, and Evolution wins. On the other hand, if repeated experiments at getting simplified processes to work fail, without an intelligent designer interfering, then Evolution and ID are still tied.
If a process is found that cannot be simplified, Evolution has a lot of 'splainin to do.
At some point, Evolution is going to be asked to explain some very complex processes. Not that it can't be done; I'm just of the opinion that the transformation path from the single cell to the human body and mind wasn't accidental chaos.
My main point is that testing of ID is possible. The "let's pretend it isn't testable" argument doesn't carry weight. You wouldn't accept Evolution as a theory just because Someone Famous Says So. Nor should you accept an alternate theory without question. But to claim that the theory should tossed out, because its proof or disproof is hard isn't decent science.
* And what would be the worst case, of learning how to model, build and test complex biology? It's an overall win, even if one theory loses out to another.
Not to be too harsh here, but I couldn't help reading your 'subservience' post and think to myself "because defiance is so much more intelligent?";-)
I'm reminded of the classic lesson every two year old goes through. The first time they see fire up close and in real life, intense curiosity kicks in (birthday cake candle / fireplace / campfire, whatever). They reach for the flame. Mommy or Daddy or Grandma grabs their finger and says "No - don't touch the fire. It will hurt you." Child doesn't listen, wants proof for his/her self. It is a natural part of the "terrible two's."
Queue up listening for the hiss of fire versus finger, because as soon as Mommy or Daddy or Grandma aren't looking, the child will test it his/herself*.
Of course, the parent then gets to say "I told you so. I told you 'no' because I knew it would hurt you. I don't want you hurt. Will you listen to me next time? Who can you trust?"
So which takes more intelligence? Deciding to give credence to those wiser than you? Or adopting defiance, and learning things the hard way?
Learned wisdom versus the school of hard knocks. Which requires more intellect? Hmmmm.
*The parent does have the option of dousing the flame before the child touches it. Better hide all the matches and lighters too. And prevent the kid from all unsupervised play with neighbor kids. And start saving up for the psychiatry bills.... Total domination can prevent this lesson, but at what price?
Fair enough - the evidence I cite, doesn't give you enough to know one way or the other.
Further happenings: at the time, they were planning a meetup to discuss the whistle stops the candidate was going to make through California (I don't know who that was, Nixon or Goldwater, or whomever - I was a kid at the time.) In the letters, they had planned to meet at a certain restaurant in Paso Robles, and now knew that 'the opposition' knew where and when the meeting was going to take place. They had to do a bunch of last minute telephone calls to change the restaurant. As a test, they did send one guy who (knew all the real players) to the original restaurant, and sure enough, someone he did not know showed up at the restaurant and asked for 'the Republican meeting'. When an imposter shows up at your meeting, do you assume its The Good Guys?;-)
To be completely fair, these kinds of cat-and-mouse games have been going on forever - on both sides of the aisle.
My basic point still holds though: privacy will be invaded for less than just motives. Know that, and deal with it.
Sure, in this case there was no attempt to hide the behavior - it was really blatant - which was probably intentional. One of the other means of solving the problem was that mail sent to my dad was taken to someone's home, then placed inside another envelope, with a different return address. Without the C.Y.R. return address, the post office didn't know which envelopes to open.
So "the system" was re-secured, so to speak.
But my basic point was that relying on government employee virtue for privacy is naive.
Of course they can. They are not supposed to, but they can, and do.
I vividly remember my dad going into a rage when his mail was being read by the local post office. He went to the mailbox, and I followed him (I was a little kid, it was natural for me to follow.) Had the letter in his hand, shaking it, saying "Look at this! Look at this! These bastards are reading my mail!" The whole top of the letter had been ripped open, and then taped shut.
At the time, he was a semi-high mucky-muck in the Republican Party in California. If the letter came from from party headquarters, some democrat (presumably) opened the letter and read it. After opening and reading it, they'd tape it shut, rubber stamp it with "sorry, damaged in handling", and send it on. Complaints to the local Post Master were ignored (federal government workers, at least at that time, were almost all Democrat, for some strange reason....) For a little more information, see the paragraph under Hobbies list here.
Privacy invasion is more subtle now, but there is zero reason to think things have changed for the better since then.
This one was published by Timothy, the weekend editor, where the first was published by Zonk, a weekday editor.
It does seem reasonable that weekend editors like Timothy should, at the beginning of each day, review at least the headlines of the previous three day's articles, before hitting the accept button.
Failing that, maybe someone should whip up a "check for duplicates" perl script for Timothy, and attach it to the Accept button on his edit submissions page. >:-)
Has NDS seriously changed since I last used it 5 years ago...?
Yes and no.
DS 8 has a new database backend, compared to DS 7. (NetWare 4 used DS 6, NetWare 5 can use either DS 7 or 8, and NetWare 6+ uses DS 8).
DS 8 allows for DS Repairs to happen 'live', where DS 7 repairs would lock the databases. DS 8 also changed the replication linking a little, to relax the connector links that were not crucial to authentication.
These changes are not that big. They make directory services work better, but "what DS does" is not significantly different.
The big changes are the extensions - the types of objects that can be managed.
ZENworks is big: workstations are imported into the tree. This provides 1) inventory, 2) desktop remote-control, 3) application deployment, 4) patch management and 5) disk imaging. ZENworks for Servers replicates the application objects (and patches) from server to server, and can throttle distribution bandwidth to not swamp a thin WAN pipe - all controlled via NDS.
SecureLogin creates single-sign-on methods which are distributed via NDS. BorderManager rules are distributed via NDS, and the log files report by logged in user name. GroupWise can use NDS Groups as email distribution lists. NMAS (Novell Modular Authentication Services) can tweak password requirements six ways to Sunday, and distribute those rules via NDS.
The other Novell products all use DS in some way.
Lastly, Novell has created a synchronizing product that used to be called DirXML, now Nsure Identity Manager. With it, NDS can be the source or recipient of any number of external databases. The obvious one is to synchronize passwords and group memberships with Active Directory - but connectors to a whole bunch of applications can be purchased.
To help Blizzard help you, offer to mail them the original materials - registered mail, of course.
I can see where Blizzard doesn't want to hand out a new key to anyone that picks up the phone with a story. But if you send them physical proof of your ownership - I doubt they would have a problem with grabbing a new CD w/ an original key and sending it back.
I would argue that the school system isn't dying from starvation. It might be dying from mismanagement - but throwing more money at the problem isn't going to fix it.
For example, Tulare County California sends 60% of its property tax revenue into the school system.
At the bottom of the page, you will see that in 2003, almost $200 million in property tax was collected. That means $120 million went into the schools in one year. At 400,000 people in the county, each and every person is coughing up $300 for the schools, and $200 for everything else: justice*, roads, fire, welfare**, records, deadbeat dads, redevelopment, library, building permits, health inspections, Ag sealer, elections, tax collector, and administration.
Looking at the schools, we can find that for every one teacher, the school districts have one bonus person. Here is a sampling: that person might do or administer: Child Care, Tobacco / Drug / Mental Health, Resource Services (books / audio visual equipment), Planetarium, Migrant Education, School Health Programs, School-to-Career, Science and Conservation Camp,
Vocational programs, New Teacher Training, Theatre Company. Here is a list of names of people doing these - the list is quite long - and that does not include school administration!
The basics: reading / writing / arithmetic - were they in that list? (No.) Or was it all "sweating the small stuff"? (Yes.)
And don't even get me started on thievery and corruption. The examples are legend.
The fundamental problem is the lack of fiscal responsibility. The worse the problems get, the more likely you will capitulate to the requests for more money.
In short, throwing money at a system designed to waste money is foolhardy.
*Sheriff, Jails, District Attorney, Public Defender, Probation.
**County portion thereof, which means mental health, medical not covered by state or federal, and financial assistance not covered by state or federal.
Another slashdotter, I8TheWorm, pointed out in this thread, that his county building will give a badge to anyone willing to pay for it (and undergo a background check).
I have to admit, if that was the policy at the protester's courthouse, and court staff had a sign posted letting eveyone know that, then yes the 'protesters' were less than noble, and just troublemakers instead. My position would be all wet, so to speak.
Your point about the newspapers not neccessarily giving out all relevent information was a good one. The situation could indeed have been more complicated than it initially appeared.
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I don't think we would mind as much if the competition for the bid was fair. But SBC's primary selling point is a cute girl in a very short skirt flirting with a member of the Board.
If the bid process was fair, we'd have a chance, because SBC's prices are ridiculous. But because of the personal relationship between the board member and the sales girl, the price gouging will be ignored.
My personal hope is that people tackle difficulty instead of shy away from it. :-)
I didn't like the word problem because of the emotional baggage that comes with that word. It conveys more blame and less hope. IMNSO, behind difficulty is more optimism.
"Houston, we have a problem."
"Houston, we have a difficulty." "What? The gum ball machine jammed?" ;-)
My two cents.
Most people easily see the "I must be free" part of Libertarianism. But if you present them with the idea that "That other jerk must be free, as well"... it takes a real self-assessment of your own concept of liberty. Do you actually believe it, when it applies to others?
(I'm not asking if you, Moofie, believe it. I'm suggesting that this question is the question with which a person would have to wrestle.)
I tend to hear people who say they are in favor of freedom, but act in favor of restriction. Well, freedom = good for themselves, but freedom = bad for others.
It is a difficulty, because people who self-assess honestly, may find out that they don't believe in freedom for others.
A comment I wrote might bring you up to speed here
What typically happened (and happened in my case), is that the accountants, running Lotus 1-2-3, got the newest, fastest machines. So a new batch of PC's come in, and my job was to un-install Lotus off the old machine, move it and the accountant's files to the new machine, and then re-deploy the old machine to someone else.
Microsoft came out with the new version of DOS, and shipped it to PC OEMs. Thus, the new machines that arrived from IBM, HP, DEC, etc, came with the new sabotaged DOS pre-installed.
The same process that worked so many times before suddenly did not work. "This program has violated system integrity. Contact the vendor."
Of course, what happened to me also happened across the country, and the s*** hit the fan. Infoworld did several articles on it, and how it was coincident with an ad campaign to promote non-crashes when MS was both the application and OS supplier.
In my case, Hewlett-Packard recognised that they had been played for pawns in helping Microsoft stomp on a competitor. We got a letter from them, telling us that for every new machine we bought, they would ship us a copy of the old, non-sabotaged, DOS 3.30 - if we wanted. We took them up on it, as I had accountants that wanted the newest, fastest machines, and I needed Lotus to run on them. But it was about a month delay by the time we asked for the older DOS, and got the working version back to the users.
Microsoft's EMM grew out the LIM extended memory manager specification. LIM = Lotus, Intel, Microsoft.
Yes, Lotus and Microsoft partnered together to let DOS load a driver to access RAM greater than 640 KB. Prior to LIM, each memory card came with its own driver.
DOS 3.31 included a new EMM which aligned memory access on word boundaries, not byte boundaries.
Microsoft's claim was that this would be speedier; the trade off of speed for bloat was worth it to them - they saw the future, and it included more RAM.
And heck - it broke MS Excel's biggest competitor too: double win!
Infoworld did an in depth piece on the controversy, and got a quote from a product manager at Microsoft who stated that yes, they "knew there were problems." (When asked if they tested against Lotus 1-2-3 - the biggest app in the world at that time).
Note that Microsoft did not tell Lotus of the change to shipping code, prior to release. Well, not enough prior to let Lotus present a compatible version.
So the real test (mimicking the pain I went through at the time) is: find a copy of DOS 3.30, load it. Install Windows 3.0. Install the (non-GUI) Lotus 1-2-3. Verify it runs. Then "upgrade" to DOS 3.31. Attempt to run Lotus 1-2-3.
You will get a nasty "This application has violated system integrity" message and be told to reboot. You will also read the insinuation that Lotus has its head up its ass.
And if you then "downgrade" to DOS 3.30, things will be fine.
Just for grins, then run the character mode Lotus 1-2-3 in a window, and run the brand new GUI-based MS Excel on the same platform. Likely, you will be appalled at the snail pace of all that GUI junk. It would seriously cause you to wonder if the GUI was worth it.
Even on calculation bound sheets, Excel was 40% slower. Microsoft seriously needed something more important than MS Paint to convince people they needed Windows. And that was a spreadsheet - except Lotus 1-2-3 in character mode whipped Excel's ass. Intervention was needed.
Sure, if the problem is minor and non-urgent, it makes sense to do the research yourself. But if the problem is major and urgent, Novell has trained staff on hand, 24x7 if you need it. Better, those staff have (likely) seen your problem before, have a roadmap for a solution. They have roadmaps to narrow in on what exactly is the problem. And they can be on the phone with you now, working through the problem in a matter of an hour or two.
For desktops, it may not be likely that the problem is both major and urgent. But even then, if you find a quirky bug, you can get Novell to duplicate it. Novell will write up the bug report, and send it to their own (or open source) developers. Joe Sysadmin may not be comfortable writing up bug reports, but the paid Novell professionals won't shy away from it.
And of course, those bug reports become a part of the troubleshooting roadmap.
Essentially, by paying for support, you have someone on the hook to help you out when you need it most. And because they are pros, they are good at it.
Pure human error - but that review board stuff kicks in no matter.
I'm just hope they haven't "upgraded" to Windows. ;-)
Me, I make my terminal emulators have different background colors, to indicate which system I am in. People wonder why my DOS boxes are a funny color, but I don't end up typing a DOS command against a NetWare box that way.
Well, you can get them anyway - just send a SASE. But it would be kind of silly to put a NLD sticker on your RH box...
At least with the Laotian people, and our losses in Cambodia, we did the honorable thing, and helped them immigrate to here.
Personally, I think it was a mistake to meddle in the Afghan : USSR war. However, the case can be made that the USSR defeat substantially assisted the decline and fall of the entire USSR. Okay, so far, so good.
The problem came when the president and congress decided to pull their aid to Afghanistan. After two million Afghans were injured (some percentage of them killed), we said "You won. That's nice. Goodbye."
Either the State Department or the CIA should have warned Congress and the President what a huge mistake they were making. You don't sucker in a group of people, and then blow them off, and get away consequence-free.
Of course, IMO, the smart way to win the game was not to have played in the first place.
Nonetheless, having played the game, it was stupid to have walked away from warriors we had trained and supplied, letting them feel like we used them and then threw their worth away.
If you had an anti-USA agenda, could you have asked for better ammunition?
"Heartless" - I suppose. "Stupid" - definitely.
Take the Taliban for example. In the 1980's, Henry Kissinger advised Ronald Reagan that through Afghanistan, the USA could hand the USSR "Its Viet Nam".
Thus, the "Afghan Freedom Fighters" were born.
So, at our encouragement (and provision), they bled, and died, and won their freedom. Much like China backed the Viet Cong, we backed the Afghans.
And later presidents (and congress) changed their mind. We abandoned them.
The Taliban then started pounding the drum "They played us for suckers. Are you widows and orphans (and neighbors of widows and orphans) listening?"
The cause of all this trouble was not religious bigotry - it was meddling.
Well, it was meddling, and the lack of foresight to understand that presidents change, and there are no guarantees that the new president will maintain the policies of the old president. Any country or people that cut a deal with the USA needs to understand that. Frankly, our own State Department needs to warn the principals of this, at the beginning of any scheme.
To write off their anger as incoherent religious dogma is to delude yourself. We meddled. Then we walked away, without much, if any, thanks. Those actions had consequences.
As far as Grandma goes, if a zombie takes over her machine, she is going to be out her bond. Rather like someone stealing her car and committing a bank robbery with it - if the car gets dented, no-one is going to compensate her, unless she has been prepaying money to a bonded insurance company.
I expect her mail provider will provide some protections. It wouldn't be that hard to place a hold all messages with greater than n recipients and wait for a confirmation from Grandma that she did indeed intend to mass-mail 100 people / send 100 messages today.
As far as the spammers that actually do make money, my understanding is that they don't make it by selling Viagra or such. They have two sources of revenue: they sell a get rich quick scheme, and they sell advertising services.
Most of their money comes from the idea of 'spamming as free money'. "Here, buy this list of email addresses. Send out 400,000 emails for practically free and you'll make tons of money. My list of addresses is known good, and costs $400." It's the greater fool theory.
The other source of money is as an advertising agency. "Give me $400 dollars, and I'll send out 400,000 emails."
Both ideas fall down once each spam costs ten cents to send. Note that real mail does not incur the ten cent penalty.
Let me tell you another dirty secret of the spam industry - many of those emails do not have a legitimate reply address. So no - there is not always a contact to track down. The mail message does have a web bug, so that if Grandma opens it up, her address is flagged as a "live one" for selling to someone else - but there was never any intention of receiving a mail message back from her.
Although posting a bond seems like assuming criminal activity up front, it isn't all that different than paying for entertainment prior to seeing the show. A better analogy might be state-mandated automobile insurance. You lose your right to drive an automobile on public roads if you stop holding insurance. You still have the right to ride a bicycle, though.
You are correct that it is a larger burden on the end user. But rather like the early days of driving, the unregulated system has been abused enough that some remedy is required. Thus, we now have insurance and drivers licenses.
The beauty of the bond scheme is that it is completely op-in. If Grandma tells you her new email address is granny.nghtmr@gmail.prepaid you can still try to talk her out of it. But if Google charges $24 per year for 'basic' service, and $36 per year for 'prepaid' service, it is likely Grandma will pay the extra amount just to avoid getting ads selling her on the idea of enlarging her penis.
I like the idea of having a email address I can display publicly, but know that spammers would avoid because it would cost them money. The email address attached to this /. account get upward of 160 spam per day - simply because it is public. Don't bother mailing me at it - everything received there goes into the junk filter.
Which is a damn shame.
Google / Yahoo / Hotmail / Comcast.
Google, with their new for-pay service: GMail-Plus! My new mail address is joe.user@gmail.prepaid (the new for-pay domain). Yes, I paid a small bond for it. No - you don't want to send me spam at this address, as I might claim some of your bond money. It will accumulate against my annual fee for holding a gmail.prepaid account.
Doesn't apply. The servers at gmail.prepaid don't accept incoming mail from mail servers that don't have a current bond. 400 series SMTP error.
A decent question. The university, or the professor, or the village the kid lives in is going to have to chip in and post a bond. (Which, when you think about it, creates a sort of self-controlling responsibility. As soon as one of the smart asses in the village spams the world, the village loses its bond. They won't let that jerk near the keyboard again.....)
For this, you will have to remain on the old fashioned mail servers. No charge, but lots of spam. That will be the price you pay.
Someone is going to have to put up a bond. Rather like Public Broadcasting, the list server is going to need to run an annual beg-a-thon, or state that they cannot afford to send to the for-pay mail services. Perhaps the gmail.prepaid subscriber ought to send in a buck, to help out with the bond?
One point is that the bond doesn't have to be all that large. If a spammer shells out $10, and 100 messages later, has exhausted his bond, it is quickly going to become obvious that he is in a financially losing game. $10 for an average user isn't that great a burden. Better, as the bond money is claimed, the sender gets notified that they are losing money to that person. In the case of the listserver, the bond-claim process is also an automatic unsubscribe request.
As you can tell, I am in favor of the scheme. I used to be a mail server admin, and the waste of bandwidth, because abusing is essentially free for the abuser, is shameful. It won't take much; a tiny bit of real cash cost on the sender's part will solve this problem.
I would argue that it is possible to generate mathematic models of biologic complexity, and subject those models to Scientific Method investigation. Exceedingly hard to do - but not impossible*. Given that Evolution is based on the assumption that anything is possible, ID ought to be held to at least that standard.
As an example of complexity, I saw a slide on a TV show recently which showed that some enzymatic protein replication operations at the cellular level appear to have redundancy checks built in. That is to say, as the process goes forward, portions of the resulting protein must physically match up with portions of the enzyme it hasn't yet touched.
An analogy would be bootcode checksumming its bootrom - if the checksum doesn't match, no sense continuing to boot. (Well, an intelligently designed system does not continue to attempt to boot. An even more intelligently designed system would have a backup rom and exception handling code. This level of complexity is recognizable as not random.)
One of the things that makes a modern CPU work is the perfection of atomic operations. You don't push 125 million transistors at 3.5 billion cycles per second if there are flaws in the microcode.
The hypothesis to test Evolution then, is: there exist biologic processes that are too complex to have 'evolved'.
The hypothesis to test Intelligent Design is then: all biologic processes are simple enough to have 'evolved'.
Using mathematical analysis of biologic processes, one can attempt to reduce the complexity of the process. If the complexity reduction simplifies to a point where spontaneous perfection of biologic processes is reasonable, then ID is out the window, and Evolution wins. On the other hand, if repeated experiments at getting simplified processes to work fail, without an intelligent designer interfering, then Evolution and ID are still tied.
If a process is found that cannot be simplified, Evolution has a lot of 'splainin to do.
At some point, Evolution is going to be asked to explain some very complex processes. Not that it can't be done; I'm just of the opinion that the transformation path from the single cell to the human body and mind wasn't accidental chaos.
My main point is that testing of ID is possible. The "let's pretend it isn't testable" argument doesn't carry weight. You wouldn't accept Evolution as a theory just because Someone Famous Says So. Nor should you accept an alternate theory without question. But to claim that the theory should tossed out, because its proof or disproof is hard isn't decent science.
* And what would be the worst case, of learning how to model, build and test complex biology? It's an overall win, even if one theory loses out to another.
I'm reminded of the classic lesson every two year old goes through. The first time they see fire up close and in real life, intense curiosity kicks in (birthday cake candle / fireplace / campfire, whatever). They reach for the flame. Mommy or Daddy or Grandma grabs their finger and says "No - don't touch the fire. It will hurt you." Child doesn't listen, wants proof for his/her self. It is a natural part of the "terrible two's."
Queue up listening for the hiss of fire versus finger, because as soon as Mommy or Daddy or Grandma aren't looking, the child will test it his/herself*.
Of course, the parent then gets to say "I told you so. I told you 'no' because I knew it would hurt you. I don't want you hurt. Will you listen to me next time? Who can you trust?"
So which takes more intelligence? Deciding to give credence to those wiser than you? Or adopting defiance, and learning things the hard way?
Learned wisdom versus the school of hard knocks. Which requires more intellect? Hmmmm.
*The parent does have the option of dousing the flame before the child touches it. Better hide all the matches and lighters too. And prevent the kid from all unsupervised play with neighbor kids. And start saving up for the psychiatry bills.... Total domination can prevent this lesson, but at what price?
Further happenings: at the time, they were planning a meetup to discuss the whistle stops the candidate was going to make through California (I don't know who that was, Nixon or Goldwater, or whomever - I was a kid at the time.) In the letters, they had planned to meet at a certain restaurant in Paso Robles, and now knew that 'the opposition' knew where and when the meeting was going to take place. They had to do a bunch of last minute telephone calls to change the restaurant. As a test, they did send one guy who (knew all the real players) to the original restaurant, and sure enough, someone he did not know showed up at the restaurant and asked for 'the Republican meeting'. When an imposter shows up at your meeting, do you assume its The Good Guys? ;-)
To be completely fair, these kinds of cat-and-mouse games have been going on forever - on both sides of the aisle.
My basic point still holds though: privacy will be invaded for less than just motives. Know that, and deal with it.
So "the system" was re-secured, so to speak.
But my basic point was that relying on government employee virtue for privacy is naive.
I vividly remember my dad going into a rage when his mail was being read by the local post office. He went to the mailbox, and I followed him (I was a little kid, it was natural for me to follow.) Had the letter in his hand, shaking it, saying "Look at this! Look at this! These bastards are reading my mail!" The whole top of the letter had been ripped open, and then taped shut.
At the time, he was a semi-high mucky-muck in the Republican Party in California. If the letter came from from party headquarters, some democrat (presumably) opened the letter and read it. After opening and reading it, they'd tape it shut, rubber stamp it with "sorry, damaged in handling", and send it on. Complaints to the local Post Master were ignored (federal government workers, at least at that time, were almost all Democrat, for some strange reason....) For a little more information, see the paragraph under Hobbies list here.
Privacy invasion is more subtle now, but there is zero reason to think things have changed for the better since then.
It does seem reasonable that weekend editors like Timothy should, at the beginning of each day, review at least the headlines of the previous three day's articles, before hitting the accept button.
Failing that, maybe someone should whip up a "check for duplicates" perl script for Timothy, and attach it to the Accept button on his edit submissions page. >:-)
Yes and no.
DS 8 has a new database backend, compared to DS 7. (NetWare 4 used DS 6, NetWare 5 can use either DS 7 or 8, and NetWare 6+ uses DS 8).
DS 8 allows for DS Repairs to happen 'live', where DS 7 repairs would lock the databases. DS 8 also changed the replication linking a little, to relax the connector links that were not crucial to authentication.
These changes are not that big. They make directory services work better, but "what DS does" is not significantly different.
The big changes are the extensions - the types of objects that can be managed.
ZENworks is big: workstations are imported into the tree. This provides 1) inventory, 2) desktop remote-control, 3) application deployment, 4) patch management and 5) disk imaging. ZENworks for Servers replicates the application objects (and patches) from server to server, and can throttle distribution bandwidth to not swamp a thin WAN pipe - all controlled via NDS.
SecureLogin creates single-sign-on methods which are distributed via NDS. BorderManager rules are distributed via NDS, and the log files report by logged in user name. GroupWise can use NDS Groups as email distribution lists. NMAS (Novell Modular Authentication Services) can tweak password requirements six ways to Sunday, and distribute those rules via NDS.
The other Novell products all use DS in some way.
Lastly, Novell has created a synchronizing product that used to be called DirXML, now Nsure Identity Manager. With it, NDS can be the source or recipient of any number of external databases. The obvious one is to synchronize passwords and group memberships with Active Directory - but connectors to a whole bunch of applications can be purchased.
I can see where Blizzard doesn't want to hand out a new key to anyone that picks up the phone with a story. But if you send them physical proof of your ownership - I doubt they would have a problem with grabbing a new CD w/ an original key and sending it back.
It does seem like a simple solution.
For example, Tulare County California sends 60% of its property tax revenue into the school system. At the bottom of the page, you will see that in 2003, almost $200 million in property tax was collected. That means $120 million went into the schools in one year. At 400,000 people in the county, each and every person is coughing up $300 for the schools, and $200 for everything else: justice*, roads, fire, welfare**, records, deadbeat dads, redevelopment, library, building permits, health inspections, Ag sealer, elections, tax collector, and administration.
Looking at the schools, we can find that for every one teacher, the school districts have one bonus person. Here is a sampling: that person might do or administer: Child Care, Tobacco / Drug / Mental Health, Resource Services (books / audio visual equipment), Planetarium, Migrant Education, School Health Programs, School-to-Career, Science and Conservation Camp, Vocational programs, New Teacher Training, Theatre Company. Here is a list of names of people doing these - the list is quite long - and that does not include school administration!
The basics: reading / writing / arithmetic - were they in that list? (No.) Or was it all "sweating the small stuff"? (Yes.)
And don't even get me started on thievery and corruption. The examples are legend.
The fundamental problem is the lack of fiscal responsibility. The worse the problems get, the more likely you will capitulate to the requests for more money.
In short, throwing money at a system designed to waste money is foolhardy.
*Sheriff, Jails, District Attorney, Public Defender, Probation.
**County portion thereof, which means mental health, medical not covered by state or federal, and financial assistance not covered by state or federal.
I have to admit, if that was the policy at the protester's courthouse, and court staff had a sign posted letting eveyone know that, then yes the 'protesters' were less than noble, and just troublemakers instead. My position would be all wet, so to speak.
Your point about the newspapers not neccessarily giving out all relevent information was a good one. The situation could indeed have been more complicated than it initially appeared.