This may sound strange, but if a company is recording your chat sessions, instant messages, or e-mail communications, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
Sure, it would get all the merit of some of the recent patent lawsuits, but it's perfectly legal. At work, you have no expectation of privacy and often you even explicitly waive these rights by AUPs, as others have mentioned, so you have no legal high ground.
However of all the AUPs I have seen, none mention the property transfer of your communications, which are effectively your thoughts and are unique to you. This is called your "likeness". You are expressing it in your messages and chat transcripts, and by your employer snooping on you and storing records, they are effectively "copying" your copyrighted material, which you can claim copyright to.
Unless you're in a contract situation, the only works your company owns are those, which it has commissioned. Despite popular belief, it doesn't own everything you do at work -- only the work from your assigned tasks/projects/whatever.
I am no legal expert by any means, but at lunch with a lawyer friend I brought this issue up, and he said if he had a client in this situation he would have whatever logs found non-admissible due to copyright infringement. He then told me about likeness and how it can be used against an employer and possibly even to be on the plaintiff side of a suit. I found it interesting he would challenge this privacy issue from this interesting angle.
I guess you're best actually doing work while at work. If you must have security, use the various methods of encryption. Don't be stupid.:-)
Doesn't it still mandate that telcom's must invest in expensive fiber optic rollouts, where they currently only have analog lines? Last mile may be ONLY a mile, but multiply that by 1000 communities and you have 1000 miles of short-path, difficult to maintain fiber in the field. Currently, fiber while being more versatile is still more expensive than rigid or semi-rigid coax that typically populates last-mile carrier networks.
It took my cable company years and $$$$$$ to replace the splitters to go up to 1000 MHz so they could offer digital TV and internet access. And that was *just* the splitters in the outdoor enclosures. Imagine digging up or laying down new cable...(and it would be fiber so labour would be higher and cable would be more expensive).
This seems like a very good idea for fiber to the door, but without investors willing to inject money into telcoms so they can build their networks, this just doesn't seem in the near future. The specs also don't look too promising --current cable modems can already do 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream, but are capped.
There seem to be a lot of comments about how this distracts from Linux's main vision on the distribution scene where you have everything -- literally -- but rather I see this as something very good and representing a wakeup from a dream world.
Basically, people don't want to have everything and anything. While it's true that a diverse selection of software packages, utilities, etc. has more of a chance to fit exactly what you need, people don't need exact solutions when it comes to consumer markets. In fact, most people don't even need customized solutions at all.
This can explain why Linux does so good in the server and critical markets where 100% fitting solutions are required, and at the same time it explains why Linux isn't growing at exponentional rates into consumer markets like some though it would.
That's why there is only one dominant Office suite for Windows, and why consumers tend to side with Microsoft in terms of things having integrated components such as web browsers and media players. It's just easier. No one really cares what software they're using as long as it gets the job done.
People outside the IT field don't have time to sit down and go through a dozen or more programs for a single task -- like playing a video file. In today's instant gratification society, people demand point and click usability. There's no time to compile the latest SDL release and then find a media player, compile it, configure it, etc. Kernel compilations for the regular user are defiantly out of the question unless some amazing new ease of use feature is developed in the future.
This is why a lot of Linux distributions haven't done so well with the consumer. You can throw as many CD's and as many free (as in beer and speech) solutions, programs, libraries, and development environments you want at the consumer and watch as they turn blindly to the technically inferior, monopolistic offering that also happens to be proprietary and not free.
This situation is mainly the product of the Linux enthusiast's personality. Most geeks are by nature introverted and withdrawn from society to some extent (myself included) and rarely can see the big picture of what the general public might think about Linux when it's billed as a competitor for Windows. People don't care about how architecturally sound a solution is or the kind of characteristics programmers look for. That's why programmers make poor business people and business people make poor programmers. See the dot com chapter for more examples of this.
Software has and will for probably some time be a business of how fast can you get something done, how cheaply, does it work, and will people buy it. Besides that, you can do whatever you want but will be only be useable fodder for a selective few -- a minority who choose to spend hours laboring over configuration and setup for even the most mundane tasks. Anyone who has ever worked in user level support can attest to the fact users want things and they want them NOW.
This may come as a big fat epiphany to the Linux world who hope to mirror Bill Gates' vision with an open source solution, but it's how it is. You can't change society no matter how hard you try. So now it's about how we can work around society. Lycoris seems a logical evolution as other distributions have failed (getting saved by customer charity doesn't count here).
But instead of having a closed-source monopoly, we are at a risk of having the same but open source with whatever distributor ends up becoming successful.
Please give me your e-mail address so I can contact you directly, so we can see if your network lacks the security to unlock your modem (very simple process from Windows or Linux).
I looked all over your web site and even on your resume, however I could not find any e-mail address of contact information.
If you're interested, let me know. But remember it may be for a limited time, as your cable company wises up, but as I mentioned users had been using 10 Mb/s symmetrical for at least 11 months that we could tell.
I guess this means we get to see another video clip of the Microsoft CEO stamping around on stage screaming. This time in a cowboy hat and boots of course. I wonder if they'll hand out temp tattoos that look like cow brands with the MS logo?
As a CMTS technician and head end operator who was around for the first rollout and one of the few who actually read the DOCSIS spec, I can testify what Time Warner is proposing is going to be difficult. Given the current state of the network, it's a wonder it even works. When I was there, we were doing things for the most part ad hoc and flying by the seat of our pants. The user database, cable modem SMS database, and interactive user content were completely separate on isolated systems, running on a variety of architectures and different places.
For example, the typical account server that manages BOOTP requests and allows modems on the network is operated by the national Road Runner, while we operate our own DHCP servers. The TFTP server that transfers configuration information to customer modems to adjust settings is hosted and operated by a 3rd party service. In the first case, the BOOTP server runs on an AIX system, the DHCP server is Win NT, and the TFTP server is run directly off of the Cisco UBR.
Currently, we have no way of knowing what users are even on the system (e.g. IP's or MAC's to names). Why? Because our user database isn't connected to the CMTS. When we have to turn off a modem for non-payment, we have to go in and add a line in the UBR's file to map specific MAC addresses to a disabled DOCSIS configuration file. So yes, it is controlled by your MAC addresses but still the config file can be forged to give you access anyway. Cable modems have voluntary network access, that is, they must restrict themselves from going on the network if the head end tells them. That doesn't mean they can't somehow still go on the network, albeit not 'authorized'. Quite literally, there are no network locks other than the customer's modem.
Things were more of a mess just a few weeks ago. The configuration files weren't even using shared secret or message integrity checks to ensure customers didn't tamper with the files to gain unauthorized service. We only found this out after our OC-192 was getting heavily saturated connected to the Road Runner backbone. Doing a dump of connected modems (which displays frequency info, signal info, etc. and is generally used for debugging), yielded over 65 modems operating in excess of 10 Mb/s up and down. Talk about getting a deal for $39 a month. I had no idea how long these users had been exploiting the system, but I suspected at least a few had done so for around 11 months based on old logs from one of our router, which keeps bandwidth info for specific IP's (we could determine it was these users because they were also using static IP's).
Currently, there are around 80 modems on the system that technically shouldn't be. The reasons for this are varied, from mistyped MAC addresses to fraud, we don't have time to investigate and the current DOCSIS version we are using doesn't offer fixes for these types of problems.
Clearly, Time Warner needs to do a lot of work if they want to do anything like bandwidth limits. This may be a franchise-only problem, but the way I see it is the combination of the very much flawed DOCSIS spec to cable operators who ARE NOT internet service providers leads to these kinds of network abuses. Just look at TR's national web site that ends in errors every turn for proof they are running are glued together operation. This leads me to wonder if that article was to scare users into using less bandwidth, thus solving the problem for them? Otherwise they need a serious investment in infrastructure in order to make it happen in real life. Personally, I haven't heard anything to the affect of bandwidth limiting. We don't even have the capability to monitor it now, as I've said all along...
I agree completely with you. A commentary track is really a brand new medium independent of the quality of the film. Often times I will get a brand new DVD home, having bought it just for the commentary since I have seen the movie and the track just isn't worthy listening to. It really demonstrates not all people are good orators.
My favorite commentary is in the New Line "Lost In Space" movie. Like most movies with a member of the Friends cast, this one sucked big time. When I went to see it at the theater, I walked out about a half hour of the nonsense. Oddly enough, I received the DVD as a gift from a relative and before I tossed it, I thought I would actually watch the entire thing.
It's not the worst film ever, in fact at points it's mildly entertaining. What I found interesting was the technical commentary by the director, art director, CG lead, and a few others who explained just what it took to do all the effects, what the movie was aiming for, etc. All these people in the same room talking about the film, you really get some interesting dynamics.
At one point the writer admitted "Yeah, the script sucks as far as scripts go, but we never said we were doing anything revolutionary -- just entertainment,". This is followed by a speech about the current industry in what is art vs. disposable entertainment.
There is also a quite good basic documentary with appearances by many experts on the science behind the movie (as far as faster than light travel, worm holes, space time, general relativity, etc.). Another feature is a CG documentary which really makes you appreciate things a little bit more and marvel at all the little hacks they had to do to get something silly to work right.
We can assert he is a failure because if he was successful, his future-self would have visited him and congratulated him on his success, and his dead father would have risen from his grave to promptly bash him on the head for meddling in God's power.
Thus, I submit this is old news because it's not from the future, which is now considered the only "new" news, and slashdot should be sent to the parallel universe this wacko keeps yammering on about.
What if you would layer a bunch of these things together? That is, put a bunch of transparent LCD panels on top of one another, so you have a bunch of slices for 3D objects.
I could see this as something similar to the rapid-prototyping machines that compose an object out of tiny slices to turn 2D data into a 3D object.
One problem I would see is the visibility of the lower layers -- they would be obsecured by the top layers. This could be addressed by modulating the luminance value of the respective pixel in each layer, tuned to the depth of the layer (front layers would get less luminance while back would get more).
Would be cool, but expensive as single panels today are $$$.
Was your modem able to lock onto the downstream? If it wasn't this was a cable system problem affecting all providers.
If it was, and you were, for example, being denied access based on your modem's MAC address via the TFTP config, then it would be intentional.
Otherwise it's just a cable outage. We all have them -- in fact I have at least three of varying times every week.
Without knowing exactly what happened as far as the technical characteristics of your service, we can't make any judegements as to what the problem was.
As a DOCSIS tech, I might be able to help you -- especially with proving your cable provider is intentionally blocking your access via a 3rd provider. Quite easy to figure out, if you know the tricks...
First of all, your reply to my post really demonstrates your immaturity. The very people you are scoffing at. Intelligent people, like yourself, don't resort to insults a la Is it nice living in that small, smelly hole known as Youworld?.
I never made any statments about requiring intelligence tests to access the Internet,
Yes you did. In your original post you indicated that only people with a serious academic interest had any real claim to the Internet. This is a variation on the same theme.
...you make the assertion that I scoff at people possessing limited HTML skills, which is also false.
In your post you specifically stated and even made an example of an HTML tag, evidencing it as related to a bad web site and bad information, not "worthy" of existence on the Internet.
I *do* scoff at high-school graduates that are incapable of even the most basic tasks, who write like third-graders, and who interpret every bit of positive criticism that they get as a grave insult.
First, it's generally bad to scoff. So don't do it. To quote an old, wise Indian:
"Never judge a person unless you've walked a mile in their moccasins."
Different people have different skills, different situations, and different ways of life. You should learn to be tolerant of people unlike yourself and respect what they have to offer the world. We're all human, and we are all here to make mistakes. One day you'll make one too.
Your post wasn't positive criticism. It wasn't researched, and didn't address the real problem. At best, it was a rant. At worst it was a troll attempting to gain response and heated discussion.
Erm, "the ideas the Internet was founded upon"? I don't suppose you've ever heard of ARPANET at all? If we were all online for the original purpose that the Internet was founded for, than we'd have names beginning with 'Colonel' and 'Lieutenant'.
I was speaking figuratively about the general ideas of the modern Internet, not the Internet as we know it now. Everyone agrees the Internet has been reborn as this great public network, and that's what everyone talks about, not the military network which also happened to be based on TCP/IP. I never suggested this was a technical discussion of the origin of the Internet, but a philosophical discussion of just who has a right to use it.
If you look at the underpinnings of the 'modern' Internet, you'd see that it was created and used largely for- and by- academic institutions (after the split with the military). Freedom of information was one of the ideals of this emerging Internet, but it came with the understanding that the information one distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or important.
And you are to determine this? Or should the government determine what is 'relevant' for us to read? The point of having open protocols is to encourage public access. So why do we have open protocols if this wasn't the intention?
This quasi-utopian state continuted up until AOL released its moron horde onto the Internet, which promptly swamped the long-term net users (who were, for the most part, both polite and literate) in a massive river of digital sewage. Instead of the Internet acting to help enrich the minds of its users, it began serving as a type of mental bog -- much like television is today. The "intent" of the internet wasn't to provide a voice for every immature, uneducated, ignorant individual on the planet; it was a means of communication for the people who cared about using their minds.
So AOL is to blame for the rape of The Internet? Although I will agree AOL was successful in bringing less-advanced users to The Internet with their friendly user interface and intuitive software, as I said before you cannot judge a single source by a few people. Your statement seems to indicate 100% of AOL was a bunch of undereducated poor fools who contaminated the then sacred Internet with 'digital sewage'?
Then I forward why don't we just/24 the entire AOL IP allocation and be done with it?
But we can think back to the "old days", and try to build Internet communites with higher standards in the future; ones like ASR, K5, and (formerly) Slashdot. Places where people can go, not just to be entertained, but to expand their minds.
I suggest you open your mind, because it is very much so closed. As you have indicated in your posts, you are a quite bitter individual who resents letting everyone have the same rights and access. I suppose you dislike people who are not your same ethnicity or do not possess the same skills as you (keeping in mind not all people are skilled in the same areas, and what is interesting to you may not be interesting to others -- and vise-versa).
I have met several people in the tech world like you. Know-it-all, stuck-up, rather foolish kids who ultimately meet their maker and then realize the error of their ways. Sound like the voice of experience? It is.
...since Konqueror and Mozilla are both excellent browsers.
The very first time I loaded up Slashdot in Konqueror, all the links were broken. When I tried in Mozilla, it segfaulted. I had to resort to Netscape for any useful browsing.
Of course that was when Linux would go through massive swapping storms every few hours leaving the system completly useless.
This is truly a testimate to how far we've come and how far we have to go! Now the important question: How long do we have to wait for 2.0?
Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the days of the Internet being a largely academic arena. Now that everybody and their pet dingo are online, the quality of content has gone down dramatically; especially on unmoderated forums. Proper spelling and grammar have all but disappeared from the 'net, and only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette.
Yeah. Why bother. We should erect separate walls to keep out the less intelligent and "us". An application of citizenship should ask for your slashdot username.
Your post is a direct contradiction of the ideas the Internet was founded on; open protocols, communication, and indiscriminate access. This affords with it a lot of junk, in fact the very definition of indiscriminate is haphazard. But that same feature also lets us make available that rare gem once in awhile.
Sure, everyone and their Grandma can create a web site with FrontPage, but shouldn't that be something celebrated? Would you rather force people to submit to intelligence tests before being able to publish on and over an open, universal medium? People will always follow a bell curve, and the Internet will do (has done) the same.
The fact web usage is on the decline is not news. When a new trend emerges, a lot of people flock to it, if only to try it at first. Naturally, human activities don't follow Moore's law. This report is like saying "Going to the park is down 10%.". That doesn't mean we can inference parks in jeopardy of being destroyed or city funding will decrease. It simply means people aren't robots and are doing something else for a change.
It's just a natural trend in human activity: people are dynamic and don't like doing the same thing all the time. There are new trends, new fads which initially attract a lot of attention and interest, and then gradually level out to fit in usage.
As an example, movies were a big hit in the early 1930's and 40's, with most people spending large amounts of time at first. Then, they leveled off as cinemascope was being introduced. Today, they have secured their own position next to other activities like TV, reading, etc.
The Internet will do the same. I think a lot of people are surprised at how it is entering the commodity stage rather quickly (however as history shows things that enter the commodity stage quickly have the longest history).
I would reexamine your policies on The Internet in general. Just because there are people out there that are not as smart as you (or so you think, HTML IMO should not be used as a method to determine intelligence) you shouldn't scoff at them with disregard for their right of access.
Can this ruling in a foreign court be used as a reference for cases here in the US/UK? More importantly, can Kazaa be brought to court in the US, or does this ruling afford it some type of protection?
I am wondering if the judge in this case was in some manner technically savy, since he noted Kazaa didn't depend on a central server and thus the user network is out of its control, thus Kazaa was just considered a software provider and did not directly break any laws.
We will have to see how this affects other court cases surrounding p2p in other countries.
I don't know about SomaFM, but there is another really great radio station called Wolf FM that stands to be wiped from the planet if CARP goes through.
In brief, Wolf FM is a commercial radio station. They play ads and sell ads for their online radio. However, as Steve Wolf (the owner of Wolf FM and quite an incredible man) says running the service costs thousands of dollars per month *just* for the bandwidth. That's not even counting licensing fees.
It's so bad in fact Wolf FM has resorted to asking for donations because companies are not advertising on online radio, even though the response rate per impression is exponentially higher than regular broadcast radio.
This is quite serious for the growing and quite large community of Internet radio. Most broadcasters either use donated bandwidth or take the burden on themselves as a hobby, continually seeing a loss at the expense of operating a world-wide station.
These stations can't live on compliments alone. They are in jeopardy everyday just because of the costs associated with delivering the content. What CARP would do is turn the Internet radio community into exactly what they are trying to prevent - the domain of pirates.
Let's face it, when something costs more than it's actually worth, is in high demand, and is controlled by one source who doesn't bend to the rule of supply and demand, people will resort to other ways of getting it. Suddenly the lines between fair use and illegal copying get blurred, and this is how an industry fails -- or worse, consumer rights get taken away and further restricted (read: the DMCA).
If CARP gets passed, we will see an influx of pirate and distributed services like the many p2p file sharing services. The reputable and legal online stations won't be able to survive and hence they will not be paying their broadcasting dues to organizations like BMI and ASCPI, who actually have moderate pricing that allows online broadcasters to exist.
So the effect of all this will be the artists and distributors loosing money, while creating a brand new pirate industry.
It's sad really, because there is a lot of talent in online radio today and it would be a shame if it all up and vanished, which is what will happen if CARP gets its way.
The Flag Lady. Who is she you ask? Well, here in a small town in Ohio there is a woman who has run a small flag shop in the small downtown area. The first day she got nearly 11,000 orders for flags. No kidding. She had to hire 150 employees, and she ended up renting a warehouse. There was a picture of her in the newspaper, and whereas before she had a little flag shop with a small dollar store cash register, she now had a giant warehouse complete with inventory control systems, production lines, etc.
She was standing next to a few servers, they looked like S/390's, explaining to the newspaper how she managed customer orders.
I assume she has scaled back now. However, before she used to be a very small, yet respected business owner in the community. Now she owns a huge house on the hill and has bought several franchises in town, and is running for a seat on City Council.
The moral of this story? Go into the flag business!
This may come as a surprise to you, but people under 18 can work. Go to your local fast food restaurant or grocery store, and you will see many 15 year olds and up working.
In fact, the only stipulation on working is a federal work act of 1912 which states children can't work over 40 hours in a school week or past 11 PM on a school night, not to exceed over 8 hours in any school day. In addition, people under 18 must receive a 1/2 hour break every 3 hours, or a 1 hour break every 6 hours.
Minors can also volunteer, but the same restrictions apply. Still, even though Apple is selling this kid's code, I doubt he put more than 40 hours per week in it, or worked on it more than 8 hours in a day.
It would also be impossible to prove he worked over what the law allows, because there is no time system.
I think what Apple is doing is trying to protect themselves from what his code might do, rather than their license on Darwin not applicable to him since he's not yet 18. I'm sure his code is perfectly fine, but Apple does not want the image of script kiddies pinning away in their parent's basements on their new OS. It might also be much more difficult to blame him for any damage his code might do to Apple's customers, considering he doesn't have to agree to Apple's terms and the GPL doesn't apply to him.
What companies would take them seriously if they packaged tools ported by a kid? Really, it's all about age discrimination and in this case all the kids who got a reputation of being malicious made it bad for everyone else. Now everyone automatically associates teenage programmer with script kiddies.
Personally, contract laws for minors exist to prevent companies from signing young people into something they don't understand. When you reach 18 it is assumed a magical switch is turned and you will then have the capability of making decisions for yourself. It's a sad thing that many people well over that age can't do the later while a few under it have been making decisions and signing uninforceable contracts for years.
In order to have seamless cross-platform, you have to have a very significant abstraction layer between the application and hardware. You have to have a layer that adapts to the specific querks and architecture of the underlying machine and presents a uniform interface to the application.
Well, in order for this to be done there will be significant overhead -- almost to the level of emulator overhead. It will need to be sufficently smart also, for example you can't use any of the standard libraries like OpenGL or DirectX because some hardware may not support them and thus the application will break. This implies the creation of your own libraries which scale to specific hardware to use its features and capabilities.
Well, Java currently does not offer this. What it does offer is a good way to get really good simple apps running on a wide variety of hardware. However, games will always need 100% of what hardware can do to stay competitive, and by nature need hardware-level access. This means stuck to a specific platform, which is unfortunate.
If Java can provide really good hardware abstraction, with really good 3D graphics and sound libaries which are not dependant on 3rd parties, then there will still be a speed hit. Game developers need to attract people based on the latest technology. Being able to have products play in already niche markets doesn't interest too many.
I am sure such platforms as Linux don't even enter a game developer's mind -- they're too worried about what the competitor is doing on the graphics/game end.
My god! The TRAVESTY! We all must be utterly retarded if we don't know the difference between a heat pump and a heat conductor!
Jeez, what a jerk. There are always common misconceptions, even among geeks. We're all here to learn and gain more knowledge via interesting and thought provoking conversation on Slashdot.
So don't come off like an ass hole. I'm sure someone has set you straight in something embarrassingly stupid that you should've known.
Subponea's don't have to be mailed certified, in fact if you have ever filled out the paperwork you are given many options:
- 1st class mail - Certified mail - Public notification (in newspaper) - etc.
The only reason certified is the poision of choice is so you have recourse when someone says they didn't get the subponea. You have proof that they did and will usually win by default.
It's the medium of choice for many very complex applications and scales nicely (think the WWW). Overall, it's going to be disorganized, but very organized as far as the document structure.
Depending on what type of software your company writes or is producing documentation for (I'm guessing web applications), the structure of the document would be tailored for this, with appropriate entries for functions, global variables, and document constructs.
What's good about this is you can turn HTML into anything any language, and if you write it right you can show it through just about any device. Later on, you might want to package windows help files with your shipping product for your client -- HTML would work well for that. Well, HTML would be much better than any custom or home-brew solution you could come up with.
I would start by looking at what other projects have done. Which project's docs are easy for you to understand and progress through? Copy them. Start with a good synopsis for your own, introduction, and begin planning your document structure. What you will probably find is that your documentation is going to look like (or should look like) your source tree.
Several months ago, I purchased an IBM 75 GB GXP hard drive for use on my personal system. Formats and tests worked fine and without any flaw. However, I first started noticing problems when I reached 65 GB on the drive.
A loud scratch-scratch-scratch noise followed by seek complete errors would occur whenever trying to do anything in the file system. Usually the errors were recoverable, but were major problems because they would hault the system while the drive tried three or four times to read from what seemed like a crashed head. Something like a file search would take hours because of these errors.
I determined it was the drive at fault by wiping it and writing 0's to all the sectors using IBM tools. After 65 GB the drive was completly useless, and furthermore once you reached this "magic barrier" files located elsewhere on the drive would suffer similar errors.
I called IBM and after insisting it was a hardware error ("Well, Linux tends to disturb the drive's caching abilities."), I informed them I would require a drive to be shipped to me as I didn't feel like reinstalling my custom-built Linux OS which I have been tweaking for the better part of a year. I offered to give them a credit card for obvious reasons, but they would not accept it.
This was odd to me, because shipping the goods and then receiving the defective unit back in a box in the same package is common practice for many hardware manufactures. Apparently, not IBM.
So I buckled and I went out and bought a new non-IBM drive. I sent my DeskStar back, and I am still waiting for one after two weeks. The tech support person I spoke with indicated I would receive the same exact model and part # back, which means it can be potentially from the bad batch of drives. After reading previous Slashdot stories on these drives I brought the general reliability of the product line to his attention, and his only comment was that return rates were "Nothing out of the ordinary.".
This whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth about purchasing from IBM again. I expect products which are not defective and if they are, a replacement is sent immediatly without having to burden the customer with YOUR mistake.
Frankly, I am disgusted with the reliability of these drives and the grief IBM has put me through trying to get what I paid for ($270). I would not suggest IBM drives for use in any kind of production enviornment as the one I had couldn't even survive personal use. I also suggested to my employer that THEY NOT purchase from this line (for both the reliability and service issues) when they do their upgrades next month.
Maybe I am just one of the little "end users" out there, but that kind of damage hurts.
It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it? Somehow this phrase is even more evident when reading a Jon Katz editorial, not always in the context of what he's reviewing.
According to Adleman and co-workers, their demonstration represents a watershed in DNA computation comparable with the first time that electronic computers solved a complex problem in the 1960s. They are optimistic that such 'molecular computing' could ultimately allow scientists to control biological and chemical systems in the way that electronic computers control mechanical and electrical systems now.
Huh? What they did here is use the self-construction property of DNA whereby only the respective nucleotides A, T, C, and G only form a bond with their compliment.
That means you can have millions of solutions and the whole thing will solve itself because only the correct solutions 'fit' into the problem which you have represented in the ATCG language. You can do the same thing when you add more variables, and it's just as easy. That is something very hard to do with electronic computers, because they deal with information on the quantity level whereas DNA is able to solve a problem on the problem "abstraction" level itself.
However, conventional *serial* problems are something very hard to do with DNA, because it involves the manipulation of a single strand whereas you would be working in parallel with millions, even billions of strands for NP complete problems. A DNA strand is infismal compared to today's current Si processes, where we measure things in micrometers. DNA is in the single nanometer range. That's several 100 times smaller than a single wavelength of light.
I don't think DNA will be viable for most standard computational tasks, or for a practial turing machine. Biological systems don't use DNA to do logical operations (that I know of), and the only thing they use it for is for data storage (instructions for building proteins). The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really.
This all seems very interesting albeit limited to the lab.
Slashdot Mirror
This may sound strange, but if a company is recording your chat sessions, instant messages, or e-mail communications, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
:-)
Sure, it would get all the merit of some of the recent patent lawsuits, but it's perfectly legal. At work, you have no expectation of privacy and often you even explicitly waive these rights by AUPs, as others have mentioned, so you have no legal high ground.
However of all the AUPs I have seen, none mention the property transfer of your communications, which are effectively your thoughts and are unique to you. This is called your "likeness". You are expressing it in your messages and chat transcripts, and by your employer snooping on you and storing records, they are effectively "copying" your copyrighted material, which you can claim copyright to.
Unless you're in a contract situation, the only works your company owns are those, which it has commissioned. Despite popular belief, it doesn't own everything you do at work -- only the work from your assigned tasks/projects/whatever.
I am no legal expert by any means, but at lunch with a lawyer friend I brought this issue up, and he said if he had a client in this situation he would have whatever logs found non-admissible due to copyright infringement. He then told me about likeness and how it can be used against an employer and possibly even to be on the plaintiff side of a suit. I found it interesting he would challenge this privacy issue from this interesting angle.
I guess you're best actually doing work while at work. If you must have security, use the various methods of encryption. Don't be stupid.
Doesn't it still mandate that telcom's must invest in expensive fiber optic rollouts, where they currently only have analog lines? Last mile may be ONLY a mile, but multiply that by 1000 communities and you have 1000 miles of short-path, difficult to maintain fiber in the field. Currently, fiber while being more versatile is still more expensive than rigid or semi-rigid coax that typically populates last-mile carrier networks.
It took my cable company years and $$$$$$ to replace the splitters to go up to 1000 MHz so they could offer digital TV and internet access. And that was *just* the splitters in the outdoor enclosures. Imagine digging up or laying down new cable...(and it would be fiber so labour would be higher and cable would be more expensive).
This seems like a very good idea for fiber to the door, but without investors willing to inject money into telcoms so they can build their networks, this just doesn't seem in the near future. The specs also don't look too promising --current cable modems can already do 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream, but are capped.
The technology is there, the money just isn't.
There seem to be a lot of comments about how this distracts from Linux's main vision on the distribution scene where you have everything -- literally -- but rather I see this as something very good and representing a wakeup from a dream world.
Basically, people don't want to have everything and anything. While it's true that a diverse selection of software packages, utilities, etc. has more of a chance to fit exactly what you need, people don't need exact solutions when it comes to consumer markets. In fact, most people don't even need customized solutions at all.
This can explain why Linux does so good in the server and critical markets where 100% fitting solutions are required, and at the same time it explains why Linux isn't growing at exponentional rates into consumer markets like some though it would.
That's why there is only one dominant Office suite for Windows, and why consumers tend to side with Microsoft in terms of things having integrated components such as web browsers and media players. It's just easier. No one really cares what software they're using as long as it gets the job done.
People outside the IT field don't have time to sit down and go through a dozen or more programs for a single task -- like playing a video file. In today's instant gratification society, people demand point and click usability. There's no time to compile the latest SDL release and then find a media player, compile it, configure it, etc. Kernel compilations for the regular user are defiantly out of the question unless some amazing new ease of use feature is developed in the future.
This is why a lot of Linux distributions haven't done so well with the consumer. You can throw as many CD's and as many free (as in beer and speech) solutions, programs, libraries, and development environments you want at the consumer and watch as they turn blindly to the technically inferior, monopolistic offering that also happens to be proprietary and not free.
This situation is mainly the product of the Linux enthusiast's personality. Most geeks are by nature introverted and withdrawn from society to some extent (myself included) and rarely can see the big picture of what the general public might think about Linux when it's billed as a competitor for Windows. People don't care about how architecturally sound a solution is or the kind of characteristics programmers look for. That's why programmers make poor business people and business people make poor programmers. See the dot com chapter for more examples of this.
Software has and will for probably some time be a business of how fast can you get something done, how cheaply, does it work, and will people buy it. Besides that, you can do whatever you want but will be only be useable fodder for a selective few -- a minority who choose to spend hours laboring over configuration and setup for even the most mundane tasks. Anyone who has ever worked in user level support can attest to the fact users want things and they want them NOW.
This may come as a big fat epiphany to the Linux world who hope to mirror Bill Gates' vision with an open source solution, but it's how it is. You can't change society no matter how hard you try. So now it's about how we can work around society. Lycoris seems a logical evolution as other distributions have failed (getting saved by customer charity doesn't count here).
But instead of having a closed-source monopoly, we are at a risk of having the same but open source with whatever distributor ends up becoming successful.
Mike,
(I assume that's what your name is)
Please give me your e-mail address so I can contact you directly, so we can see if your network lacks the security to unlock your modem (very simple process from Windows or Linux).
I looked all over your web site and even on your resume, however I could not find any e-mail address of contact information.
If you're interested, let me know. But remember it may be for a limited time, as your cable company wises up, but as I mentioned users had been using 10 Mb/s symmetrical for at least 11 months that we could tell.
Don't you mean stampeding around on stage?
As a CMTS technician and head end operator who was around for the first rollout and one of the few who actually read the DOCSIS spec, I can testify what Time Warner is proposing is going to be difficult. Given the current state of the network, it's a wonder it even works. When I was there, we were doing things for the most part ad hoc and flying by the seat of our pants. The user database, cable modem SMS database, and interactive user content were completely separate on isolated systems, running on a variety of architectures and different places.
For example, the typical account server that manages BOOTP requests and allows modems on the network is operated by the national Road Runner, while we operate our own DHCP servers. The TFTP server that transfers configuration information to customer modems to adjust settings is hosted and operated by a 3rd party service. In the first case, the BOOTP server runs on an AIX system, the DHCP server is Win NT, and the TFTP server is run directly off of the Cisco UBR.
Currently, we have no way of knowing what users are even on the system (e.g. IP's or MAC's to names). Why? Because our user database isn't connected to the CMTS. When we have to turn off a modem for non-payment, we have to go in and add a line in the UBR's file to map specific MAC addresses to a disabled DOCSIS configuration file. So yes, it is controlled by your MAC addresses but still the config file can be forged to give you access anyway. Cable modems have voluntary network access, that is, they must restrict themselves from going on the network if the head end tells them. That doesn't mean they can't somehow still go on the network, albeit not 'authorized'. Quite literally, there are no network locks other than the customer's modem.
Things were more of a mess just a few weeks ago. The configuration files weren't even using shared secret or message integrity checks to ensure customers didn't tamper with the files to gain unauthorized service. We only found this out after our OC-192 was getting heavily saturated connected to the Road Runner backbone. Doing a dump of connected modems (which displays frequency info, signal info, etc. and is generally used for debugging), yielded over 65 modems operating in excess of 10 Mb/s up and down. Talk about getting a deal for $39 a month. I had no idea how long these users had been exploiting the system, but I suspected at least a few had done so for around 11 months based on old logs from one of our router, which keeps bandwidth info for specific IP's (we could determine it was these users because they were also using static IP's).
Currently, there are around 80 modems on the system that technically shouldn't be. The reasons for this are varied, from mistyped MAC addresses to fraud, we don't have time to investigate and the current DOCSIS version we are using doesn't offer fixes for these types of problems.
Clearly, Time Warner needs to do a lot of work if they want to do anything like bandwidth limits. This may be a franchise-only problem, but the way I see it is the combination of the very much flawed DOCSIS spec to cable operators who ARE NOT internet service providers leads to these kinds of network abuses. Just look at TR's national web site that ends in errors every turn for proof they are running are glued together operation. This leads me to wonder if that article was to scare users into using less bandwidth, thus solving the problem for them? Otherwise they need a serious investment in infrastructure in order to make it happen in real life. Personally, I haven't heard anything to the affect of bandwidth limiting. We don't even have the capability to monitor it now, as I've said all along...
I agree completely with you. A commentary track is really a brand new medium independent of the quality of the film. Often times I will get a brand new DVD home, having bought it just for the commentary since I have seen the movie and the track just isn't worthy listening to. It really demonstrates not all people are good orators.
My favorite commentary is in the New Line "Lost In Space" movie. Like most movies with a member of the Friends cast, this one sucked big time. When I went to see it at the theater, I walked out about a half hour of the nonsense. Oddly enough, I received the DVD as a gift from a relative and before I tossed it, I thought I would actually watch the entire thing.
It's not the worst film ever, in fact at points it's mildly entertaining. What I found interesting was the technical commentary by the director, art director, CG lead, and a few others who explained just what it took to do all the effects, what the movie was aiming for, etc. All these people in the same room talking about the film, you really get some interesting dynamics.
At one point the writer admitted "Yeah, the script sucks as far as scripts go, but we never said we were doing anything revolutionary -- just entertainment,". This is followed by a speech about the current industry in what is art vs. disposable entertainment.
There is also a quite good basic documentary with appearances by many experts on the science behind the movie (as far as faster than light travel, worm holes, space time, general relativity, etc.). Another feature is a CG documentary which really makes you appreciate things a little bit more and marvel at all the little hacks they had to do to get something silly to work right.
We can assert he is a failure because if he was successful, his future-self would have visited him and congratulated him on his success, and his dead father would have risen from his grave to promptly bash him on the head for meddling in God's power.
Thus, I submit this is old news because it's not from the future, which is now considered the only "new" news, and slashdot should be sent to the parallel universe this wacko keeps yammering on about.
What if you would layer a bunch of these things together? That is, put a bunch of transparent LCD panels on top of one another, so you have a bunch of slices for 3D objects.
I could see this as something similar to the rapid-prototyping machines that compose an object out of tiny slices to turn 2D data into a 3D object.
One problem I would see is the visibility of the lower layers -- they would be obsecured by the top layers. This could be addressed by modulating the luminance value of the respective pixel in each layer, tuned to the depth of the layer (front layers would get less luminance while back would get more).
Would be cool, but expensive as single panels today are $$$.
Was your modem able to lock onto the downstream? If it wasn't this was a cable system problem affecting all providers.
If it was, and you were, for example, being denied access based on your modem's MAC address via the TFTP config, then it would be intentional.
Otherwise it's just a cable outage. We all have them -- in fact I have at least three of varying times every week.
Without knowing exactly what happened as far as the technical characteristics of your service, we can't make any judegements as to what the problem was.
As a DOCSIS tech, I might be able to help you -- especially with proving your cable provider is intentionally blocking your access via a 3rd provider. Quite easy to figure out, if you know the tricks...
First of all, your reply to my post really demonstrates your
...you make the assertion that I scoff at people possessing limited HTML
/24 the entire AOL IP allocation and be done
immaturity. The very people you are scoffing at. Intelligent people, like
yourself, don't resort to insults a la Is it nice living in that small,
smelly hole known as Youworld?.
I never made any statments about requiring intelligence tests to access the
Internet,
Yes you did. In your original post you indicated that only people with a
serious academic interest had any real claim to the Internet. This is a
variation on the same theme.
skills, which is also false.
In your post you specifically stated and even made an example of an HTML tag,
evidencing it as related to a bad web site and bad information, not "worthy"
of existence on the Internet.
I *do* scoff at high-school graduates that are incapable of even the most
basic tasks, who write like third-graders, and who interpret every bit of
positive criticism that they get as a grave insult.
First, it's generally bad to scoff. So don't do it. To quote an old, wise
Indian:
"Never judge a person unless you've walked a mile in their moccasins."
Different people have different skills, different situations, and different
ways of life. You should learn to be tolerant of people unlike yourself and
respect what they have to offer the world. We're all human, and we are all here
to make mistakes. One day you'll make one too.
Your post wasn't positive criticism. It wasn't researched, and didn't
address the real problem. At best, it was a rant. At worst it was a troll
attempting to gain response and heated discussion.
Erm, "the ideas the Internet was founded upon"? I don't suppose
you've ever heard of ARPANET at all? If we were all online for the original
purpose that the Internet was founded for, than we'd have names beginning with
'Colonel' and 'Lieutenant'.
I was speaking figuratively about the general ideas of the modern Internet, not
the Internet as we know it now. Everyone agrees the Internet has been reborn as
this great public network, and that's what everyone talks about, not the
military network which also happened to be based on TCP/IP. I never suggested
this was a technical discussion of the origin of the Internet, but a philosophical
discussion of just who has a right to use it.
If you look at the underpinnings of the 'modern' Internet, you'd see that it
was created and used largely for- and by- academic institutions (after the
split with the military). Freedom of information was one of the ideals of this
emerging Internet, but it came with the understanding that the information one
distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or
important.
And you are to determine this? Or should the government determine what is
'relevant' for us to read? The point of having open protocols is to encourage
public access. So why do we have open protocols if this wasn't the intention?
This quasi-utopian state continuted up until AOL released its moron horde
onto the Internet, which promptly swamped the long-term net users (who were,
for the most part, both polite and literate) in a massive river of digital
sewage. Instead of the Internet acting to help enrich the minds of its users,
it began serving as a type of mental bog -- much like television is today. The
"intent" of the internet wasn't to provide a voice for every
immature, uneducated, ignorant individual on the planet; it was a means of
communication for the people who cared about using their minds.
So AOL is to blame for the rape of The Internet? Although I will agree AOL was
successful in bringing less-advanced users to The Internet with their friendly
user interface and intuitive software, as I said before you cannot judge a
single source by a few people. Your statement seems to indicate 100% of AOL was
a bunch of undereducated poor fools who contaminated the then sacred Internet
with 'digital sewage'?
Then I forward why don't we just
with it?
But we can think back to the "old days", and try to build Internet
communites with higher standards in the future; ones like ASR, K5, and
(formerly) Slashdot. Places where people can go, not just to be entertained,
but to expand their minds.
I suggest you open your mind, because it is very much so closed. As you have
indicated in your posts, you are a quite bitter individual who resents letting
everyone have the same rights and access. I suppose you dislike people who are
not your same ethnicity or do not possess the same skills as you (keeping in
mind not all people are skilled in the same areas, and what is interesting to
you may not be interesting to others -- and vise-versa).
I have met several people in the tech world like you. Know-it-all, stuck-up,
rather foolish kids who ultimately meet their maker and then realize the error
of their ways. Sound like the voice of experience? It is.
...but it sure would be nice every time hemos calls me from the discotheque.
I don't know what's more scary -- a new cellular electrode attachment or Hemos heating up (literally) the floor under a giant mirrored ball.
...since Konqueror and Mozilla are both excellent browsers.
The very first time I loaded up Slashdot in Konqueror, all the links were broken. When I tried in Mozilla, it segfaulted. I had to resort to Netscape for any useful browsing.
Of course that was when Linux would go through massive swapping storms every few hours leaving the system completly useless.
This is truly a testimate to how far we've come and how far we have to go! Now the important question: How long do we have to wait for 2.0?
Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the days of the Internet being a largely academic arena. Now that everybody and their pet dingo are online, the quality of content has gone down dramatically; especially on unmoderated forums. Proper spelling and grammar have all but disappeared from the 'net, and only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette.
Yeah. Why bother. We should erect separate walls to keep out the less intelligent and "us". An application of citizenship should ask for your slashdot username.
Your post is a direct contradiction of the ideas the Internet was founded on; open protocols, communication, and indiscriminate access. This affords with it a lot of junk, in fact the very definition of indiscriminate is haphazard. But that same feature also lets us make available that rare gem once in awhile.
Sure, everyone and their Grandma can create a web site with FrontPage, but shouldn't that be something celebrated? Would you rather force people to submit to intelligence tests before being able to publish on and over an open, universal medium? People will always follow a bell curve, and the Internet will do (has done) the same.
The fact web usage is on the decline is not news. When a new trend emerges, a lot of people flock to it, if only to try it at first. Naturally, human activities don't follow Moore's law. This report is like saying "Going to the park is down 10%.". That doesn't mean we can inference parks in jeopardy of being destroyed or city funding will decrease. It simply means people aren't robots and are doing something else for a change.
It's just a natural trend in human activity: people are dynamic and don't like doing the same thing all the time. There are new trends, new fads which initially attract a lot of attention and interest, and then gradually level out to fit in usage.
As an example, movies were a big hit in the early 1930's and 40's, with most people spending large amounts of time at first. Then, they leveled off as cinemascope was being introduced. Today, they have secured their own position next to other activities like TV, reading, etc.
The Internet will do the same. I think a lot of people are surprised at how it is entering the commodity stage rather quickly (however as history shows things that enter the commodity stage quickly have the longest history).
I would reexamine your policies on The Internet in general. Just because there are people out there that are not as smart as you (or so you think, HTML IMO should not be used as a method to determine intelligence) you shouldn't scoff at them with disregard for their right of access.
Can this ruling in a foreign court be used as a reference for cases here in the US/UK? More importantly, can Kazaa be brought to court in the US, or does this ruling afford it some type of protection?
I am wondering if the judge in this case was in some manner technically savy, since he noted Kazaa didn't depend on a central server and thus the user network is out of its control, thus Kazaa was just considered a software provider and did not directly break any laws.
We will have to see how this affects other court cases surrounding p2p in other countries.
I don't know about SomaFM, but there is another really great radio station called Wolf FM that stands to be wiped from the planet if CARP goes through.
In brief, Wolf FM is a commercial radio station. They play ads and sell ads for their online radio. However, as Steve Wolf (the owner of Wolf FM and quite an incredible man) says running the service costs thousands of dollars per month *just* for the bandwidth. That's not even counting licensing fees.
It's so bad in fact Wolf FM has resorted to asking for donations because companies are not advertising on online radio, even though the response rate per impression is exponentially higher than regular broadcast radio.
This is quite serious for the growing and quite large community of Internet radio. Most broadcasters either use donated bandwidth or take the burden on themselves as a hobby, continually seeing a loss at the expense of operating a world-wide station.
These stations can't live on compliments alone. They are in jeopardy everyday just because of the costs associated with delivering the content. What CARP would do is turn the Internet radio community into exactly what they are trying to prevent - the domain of pirates.
Let's face it, when something costs more than it's actually worth, is in high demand, and is controlled by one source who doesn't bend to the rule of supply and demand, people will resort to other ways of getting it. Suddenly the lines between fair use and illegal copying get blurred, and this is how an industry fails -- or worse, consumer rights get taken away and further restricted (read: the DMCA).
If CARP gets passed, we will see an influx of pirate and distributed services like the many p2p file sharing services. The reputable and legal online stations won't be able to survive and hence they will not be paying their broadcasting dues to organizations like BMI and ASCPI, who actually have moderate pricing that allows online broadcasters to exist.
So the effect of all this will be the artists and distributors loosing money, while creating a brand new pirate industry.
It's sad really, because there is a lot of talent in online radio today and it would be a shame if it all up and vanished, which is what will happen if CARP gets its way.
I'll tell you who has hit it big from 9/11:
The Flag Lady. Who is she you ask? Well, here in a small town in Ohio there is a woman who has run a small flag shop in the small downtown area. The first day she got nearly 11,000 orders for flags.
No kidding. She had to hire 150 employees, and she ended up renting a warehouse. There was a picture of her in the newspaper, and whereas before she had a little flag shop with a small dollar store cash register, she now had a giant warehouse complete with inventory control systems, production lines, etc.
She was standing next to a few servers, they looked like S/390's, explaining to the newspaper how she managed customer orders.
I assume she has scaled back now. However, before she used to be a very small, yet respected business owner in the community. Now she owns a huge house on the hill and has bought several franchises in town, and is running for a seat on City Council.
The moral of this story? Go into the flag business!
This may come as a surprise to you, but people under 18 can work. Go to your local fast food restaurant or grocery store, and you will see many 15 year olds and up working.
In fact, the only stipulation on working is a federal work act of 1912 which states children can't work over 40 hours in a school week or past 11 PM on a school night, not to exceed over 8 hours in any school day. In addition, people under 18 must receive a 1/2 hour break every 3 hours, or a 1 hour break every 6 hours.
Minors can also volunteer, but the same restrictions apply. Still, even though Apple is selling this kid's code, I doubt he put more than 40 hours per week in it, or worked on it more than 8 hours in a day.
It would also be impossible to prove he worked over what the law allows, because there is no time system.
I think what Apple is doing is trying to protect themselves from what his code might do, rather than their license on Darwin not applicable to him since he's not yet 18. I'm sure his code is perfectly fine, but Apple does not want the image of script kiddies pinning away in their parent's basements on their new OS. It might also be much more difficult to blame him for any damage his code might do to Apple's customers, considering he doesn't have to agree to Apple's terms and the GPL doesn't apply to him.
What companies would take them seriously if they packaged tools ported by a kid? Really, it's all about age discrimination and in this case all the kids who got a reputation of being malicious made it bad for everyone else. Now everyone automatically associates teenage programmer with script kiddies.
Personally, contract laws for minors exist to prevent companies from signing young people into something they don't understand. When you reach 18 it is assumed a magical switch is turned and you will then have the capability of making decisions for yourself. It's a sad thing that many people well over that age can't do the later while a few under it have been making decisions and signing uninforceable contracts for years.
In order to have seamless cross-platform, you have to have a very significant abstraction layer between the application and hardware. You have to have a layer that adapts to the specific querks and architecture of the underlying machine and presents a uniform interface to the application.
Well, in order for this to be done there will be significant overhead -- almost to the level of emulator overhead. It will need to be sufficently smart also, for example you can't use any of the standard libraries like OpenGL or DirectX because some hardware may not support them and thus the application will break. This implies the creation of your own libraries which scale to specific hardware to use its features and capabilities.
Well, Java currently does not offer this. What it does offer is a good way to get really good simple apps running on a wide variety of hardware. However, games will always need 100% of what hardware can do to stay competitive, and by nature need hardware-level access. This means stuck to a specific platform, which is unfortunate.
If Java can provide really good hardware abstraction, with really good 3D graphics and sound libaries which are not dependant on 3rd parties, then there will still be a speed hit. Game developers need to attract people based on the latest technology. Being able to have products play in already niche markets doesn't interest too many.
I am sure such platforms as Linux don't even enter a game developer's mind -- they're too worried about what the competitor is doing on the graphics/game end.
My god! The TRAVESTY! We all must be utterly retarded if we don't know the difference between a heat pump and a heat conductor!
Jeez, what a jerk. There are always common misconceptions, even among geeks. We're all here to learn and gain more knowledge via interesting and thought provoking conversation on Slashdot.
So don't come off like an ass hole. I'm sure someone has set you straight in something embarrassingly stupid that you should've known.
Subponea's don't have to be mailed certified, in fact if you have ever filled out the paperwork you are given many options:
- 1st class mail
- Certified mail
- Public notification (in newspaper)
- etc.
The only reason certified is the poision of choice is so you have recourse when someone says they didn't get the subponea. You have proof that they did and will usually win by default.
It's the medium of choice for many very complex applications and scales nicely (think the WWW). Overall, it's going to be disorganized, but very organized as far as the document structure.
Depending on what type of software your company writes or is producing documentation for (I'm guessing web applications), the structure of the document would be tailored for this, with appropriate entries for functions, global variables, and document constructs.
What's good about this is you can turn HTML into anything any language, and if you write it right you can show it through just about any device. Later on, you might want to package windows help files with your shipping product for your client -- HTML would work well for that. Well, HTML would be much better than any custom or home-brew solution you could come up with.
I would start by looking at what other projects have done. Which project's docs are easy for you to understand and progress through? Copy them. Start with a good synopsis for your own, introduction, and begin planning your document structure. What you will probably find is that your documentation is going to look like (or should look like) your source tree.
Several months ago, I purchased an IBM 75 GB GXP hard drive for use on my personal system. Formats and tests worked fine and without any flaw. However, I first started noticing problems when I reached 65 GB on the drive.
A loud scratch-scratch-scratch noise followed by seek complete errors would occur whenever trying to do anything in the file system. Usually the errors were recoverable, but were major problems because they would hault the system while the drive tried three or four times to read from what seemed like a crashed head. Something like a file search would take hours because of these errors.
I determined it was the drive at fault by wiping it and writing 0's to all the sectors using IBM tools. After 65 GB the drive was completly useless, and furthermore once you reached this "magic barrier" files located elsewhere on the drive would suffer similar errors.
I called IBM and after insisting it was a hardware error ("Well, Linux tends to disturb the drive's caching abilities."), I informed them I would require a drive to be shipped to me as I didn't feel like reinstalling my custom-built Linux OS which I have been tweaking for the better part of a year. I offered to give them a credit card for obvious reasons, but they would not accept it.
This was odd to me, because shipping the goods and then receiving the defective unit back in a box in the same package is common practice for many hardware manufactures. Apparently, not IBM.
So I buckled and I went out and bought a new non-IBM drive. I sent my DeskStar back, and I am still waiting for one after two weeks. The tech support person I spoke with indicated I would receive the same exact model and part # back, which means it can be potentially from the bad batch of drives. After reading previous Slashdot stories on these drives I brought the general reliability of the product line to his attention, and his only comment was that return rates were "Nothing out of the ordinary.".
This whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth about purchasing from IBM again. I expect products which are not defective and if they are, a replacement is sent immediatly without having to burden the customer with YOUR mistake.
Frankly, I am disgusted with the reliability of these drives and the grief IBM has put me through trying to get what I paid for ($270). I would not suggest IBM drives for use in any kind of production enviornment as the one I had couldn't even survive personal use. I also suggested to my employer that THEY NOT purchase from this line (for both the reliability and service issues) when they do their upgrades next month.
Maybe I am just one of the little "end users" out there, but that kind of damage hurts.
It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?
Somehow this phrase is even more evident when reading a Jon Katz editorial, not always in the context of what he's reviewing.
According to Adleman and co-workers, their demonstration represents a watershed in DNA computation comparable with the first time that electronic computers solved a complex problem in the 1960s. They are optimistic that such 'molecular computing' could ultimately allow scientists to control biological and chemical systems in the way that electronic computers control mechanical and electrical systems now.
Huh? What they did here is use the self-construction property of DNA whereby only the respective nucleotides A, T, C, and G only form a bond with their compliment.
That means you can have millions of solutions and the whole thing will solve itself because only the correct solutions 'fit' into the problem which you have represented in the ATCG language. You can do the same thing when you add more variables, and it's just as easy. That is something very hard to do with electronic computers, because they deal with information on the quantity level whereas DNA is able to solve a problem on the problem "abstraction" level itself.
However, conventional *serial* problems are something very hard to do with DNA, because it involves the manipulation of a single strand whereas you would be working in parallel with millions, even billions of strands for NP complete problems. A DNA strand is infismal compared to today's current Si processes, where we measure things in micrometers. DNA is in the single nanometer range. That's several 100 times smaller than a single wavelength of light.
I don't think DNA will be viable for most standard computational tasks, or for a practial turing machine. Biological systems don't use DNA to do logical operations (that I know of), and the only thing they use it for is for data storage (instructions for building proteins). The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really.
This all seems very interesting albeit limited to the lab.