Has anyone considered the possibility that, given all the embarrassment they suffered as ad-ware became a problem to rival viruses, they might be providing themselves some legal ammunition to use against future and monstrous ad-ware that might be introduced by advertising companies.
Companies who offer the payload of ad-ware with their "products" or not-in-quote products can justify their ad-ware through user agreements and warnings that users didn't bother to read and what-not, which often serves to differentiate their software from viruses.
But the possibility of patent-infringement lawsuits could provide new legal leverage to force these advertising companies to mend or at least modify their evil ways, where criminal law does not apply.
As if those of us in California ever see our bills cut, particularly in loony Monterey County - the wealthy area with wages untouched by the boom but lowered by the recession!
Not only do we have the obligatory Slashdot manual grammar/spell check, but we have it hours after the previous mention and light-hearted acknowledgement of that very same misspelling.
When Apple included speech recognition in some fancier Macs a long time ago, I found it completely unusable, because I couldn't get past a compulsion to speak clearly to it, using such features of speech as consonants. The thing apparently came pretrained to recognize something like "cumpoother" as "computer."
Now that you've quoted me, I'm a little embarassed about the "speek" business. Oops.
All of our dealings with Dell are for desktop hardware support - pretty much just replacing parts that failed during warranty. The servers we build and support all on our own. Past experience with pretty much any company would lead me to wince at the thought of having to try to climb the tiers of phone-in tech support.
While I first rejoiced at IT jobs returning to the US, I almost as immediately understood what had happened:
In this country, even the clearest mildest foreign accent elicits reactions of "he doesn't even speek English." Ig-nunt callers were more than likely reacting in this way to the likely very clear and probably better English of the Indian helpdesk workers.
Now that things have returned to Texas, we'll all hear our scripted support responses pronounced by the products of a school system where our own language is not really a priority when compared to football (especially in Texas, in the case of football). Now, in addition to the new accent, we'll have to deal with folks who have a hard time following our own questions, thanks to the fact that they will be the people who could not get better IT jobs in our slumped US IT labor market.
So, in the end, is it an outrage or a blessing that this particular shipping of jobs off shore has been ended by bigotry and ignorance?
What I actually meant was that we might, by dumping gobs of matter in, reach the doubling of mass, allowing us not to miss out on the supernovae from which other systems derive so much entertainment.
Though I am sure that you are right that my flippancy has a weak basis in science.
I have witnessed many an expert install every operating system he could get his hands on - and get it on the network, serving web and mail and whatever.
It takes no guru to install the software; it takes the guru to fix the breakage later or to perform non-evident configurations.
It takes someone worthy of certification to see a symptom and equate it to the real, underlying problem.
Certainly, planning and installing are an important part of this work, but they should only make up a tiny fraction of the life of any installation.
I can't say for a fact that _everything_ you wrote is a lie, but I didn't have to read very far at all to realize I needed to read no further.
Of note: The night of Muhammad's revelation included a trip which took him to Jerusalem.
Only Muslims positioned between Jerusalem and Mecca actually face away from Jerusalem when praying.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish population of "Transjordan" (not "Israel") was somewhere around 1%. The rest were primarily Christian and Muslim Arabs.
During British occupation, after the Ottoman Empire, the area was not known as "Israel" but as "Transjordan."
Please inform yourself and stop sending your apocalyptic misinformation. Jesus did not preach peace for everyone but Jews and Christians.
It seems to me that everyone (and I mean absolutely everyone) who has so far posted here is missing one important aspect of this licensing/evaluation issue.
Unix is a standard. As I understand it, Linux is referred to as "*nix" because it hasn't passed the Open group's Unix standards evaluation. Just as companies are ISO-certified when they meet certain workflow, structural, managerial, and who-knows-what standards according to a very expensive evaluation, an OS will be certified as "Unix" once having been evaluated as specifically matching those standards.
Investors and entities considering contracting a company's services will use the "ISO-whatever" certification as an indicator that that company has been evaluated to have a certain set of qualities, just as those evaluating operating systems for a project will use the "Unix" certification as an indication of the OS's having met a certain set of standards.
Now, I'll have to leave the value and full meaning of the "Unix" standard up to someone else to define for us, but the point is that it is not the simple purchase of the right to use a trademark name.
Starting with Windows NT, there was a "POSIX compatibility layer" in Windows, but I don't believe that Microsoft ever claimed to be offering "Unix." However, if Apple were to win this suit, it is conceivable that the precedent would be set that would allow Microsoft - and anyone else producing an operating system - to claim that their operating systems wer "Unix."
If the term "Unix" is judged to have become as generic as "Kleenex," then there might well be a need to come up with another name, so that there can be a standard for future reference.
Personally, I suspect that Apple is not "upholding a principle" by not paying for a name that should be available to all breeds of "*nix," but rather that they know of something or many somethings that would prevent OS X from meeting the Open Group's Unix standard.
I would go so far as to suggest compromise, if there is a means of calculating generally the bandwidth consumed by the badness. It is true that the customer must maintain and patch his server, but, at the same time, customers often rely on firewalls at the ISP to protect them from errant nonsense, and many exploits can be blocked at routers or firewalls.
As the customer does still bear some of the cost, there remains the incentive to close the holes, and there is also an opportunity for the ISP to earn some consulting money in providing the service of patching and locking down the system, if they can sell that service to the client.
Just as they would be providing a different, reduced, less valuable service by implementing CAT, it would seem to me that they are also cutting costs and corners by not implementing some sort of traffic-shaping solutions, preventing one user from consuming his entire network's bandwidth. Such a constraint should be part of the service, if they are going to guarantee all of their _paying_ users acceptable service.
I just finished reading your CED article regarding NAT and cable modem service, and I would like to throw my viewpoint back at you (as countless others have likely already done, since your article was mentioned on Slashdot today).
I think you clearly and rightly stated your comparison of NAT to cable TV theft. In this argument, I would not accuse you of expressing only the point of view of the cable company, because you are also addressing some simple concepts of what is fair.
However, I think the analogy to cable TV theft is an inaccurate representation, and that it makes some assumptions as to the service being purchased by "Customer Bob" that doom him and his neighbors to being defined as abusers.
In the world of TV cable theft, sharing your subscription with your neighbor had no detrimental effect on your own service, unless you were bad at splicing and damaged your own connections; the neighbor's stolen cable would normally be identical to the service to which paying subscribers were entitled. There was no noticeable issue of bandwidth.
However, in the world of cable modem service, the subscriber is renting a connection and purchasing bandwidth from the cable company. Unless prohibited (some would say arbitrarily, or in a slippery attempt to hedge off potential revenue loss) in the service agreement, it is not dishonest for Customer Bob to share that single connection and bandwidth with his neighbors, as he is not consuming ISP resources that he would not otherwise potentially have used. Bob's sharing of his own connection and bandwidth is very different from Bob somehow jury-rigging an independent cable or DSL connection at his neighbor's house using his neighbor's own cable or phone line.
Should such a standard as CAT be implemented, I would certainly hope that the cable companies using it would reduce their rates as they applied to single computers, as they would be reducing the service provided and severely limiting the customers' options as users of that reduced service.
Please understand that I approach this issue from the viewpoint of my own NATted network, all within my own home, using a DSL connection, with an ISP who has no qualms with the full usage by customers of their paid service.
Thank you for your presentation of this issue, and thank you for your attention. This reply is also being posted to the Slashdot thread where your article's URL appeared this morning.
David A. Mason
david.mason@miis.edu
Network Administrator
Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute for International Studies
http://cns.miis.edu/
A good, versatile, and easy solution would be gorilla racks, which are available at hardware stores in general. They are not expensive and come in differing depths. You could probably come up with something pretty useful using a few units of different depths for about $200. I just put a nice work area and two workstations together at my office last week using four 18"-deep pieces and one 24"-deep piece. You set the shelf heights appropriately, add a couple of keyboard drawers, and you'll have something that can handle a few computers (hopefully you use switchboxes to some extent). I've used baker's racks in the past, and I don't think they make a good workstation; they basically serve to keep your equipment off the floor, but the metal wiring does not provide any kind of nice surface or the solid feel I would want in a desk.
Prepare to be underwhelmed
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
As I posted at MSNBC:
I would tend to agree with this perspective.
It might be super energy efficient, or super quiet, or just plain made out of attractive, trendy, and translucent plastics.
Jobs's participation in this would tend to enforce this impression; Jobs is more of a personality and a motivator than any real visionary.
In addition, creating top-secret hype and innuendo a year before any kind of announcement leads me to think that the technology and application will be as revolutionary as a translucent all-in-one computer running MacOS.
On Tue Jan 9 21:27:56, Al Capone wrote:
> Is nothing more than a some cheesy overhyped skooter or
> rolling device thats electric or pedal power. YUCK!!
> Check the man's lineup of other inventions. Then ask
> your self could it really be anything else?
I must agree. I attempted to support a two-person network using Outlook 98 and NetFolders. The two people had _very_ loaded calendars, but I still thought it was ridiculous that those two would manage to kill NetFolders every two months.
Slashdot Mirror
Only in those situations where it makes for additional income.
Has anyone considered the possibility that, given all the embarrassment they suffered as ad-ware became a problem to rival viruses, they might be providing themselves some legal ammunition to use against future and monstrous ad-ware that might be introduced by advertising companies.
Companies who offer the payload of ad-ware with their "products" or not-in-quote products can justify their ad-ware through user agreements and warnings that users didn't bother to read and what-not, which often serves to differentiate their software from viruses.
But the possibility of patent-infringement lawsuits could provide new legal leverage to force these advertising companies to mend or at least modify their evil ways, where criminal law does not apply.
to a bunch of people's brainless, aimless, mindless ramblings.
Sure, there might well be a pearl of wisdom per gigabyte, but BLOG's are primarily for the poster's gratification.
Such things are just as well kept in a private journal.
Whoop-dee-doo.
As if those of us in California ever see our bills cut, particularly in loony Monterey County - the wealthy area with wages untouched by the boom but lowered by the recession!
Not only do we have the obligatory Slashdot manual grammar/spell check, but we have it hours after the previous mention and light-hearted acknowledgement of that very same misspelling.
Try again, but with some humor or imagination.
Oh, uh, yes. Yes, of course. I was illustrating my point. I'm glad you picked up on that.
When Apple included speech recognition in some fancier Macs a long time ago, I found it completely unusable, because I couldn't get past a compulsion to speak clearly to it, using such features of speech as consonants. The thing apparently came pretrained to recognize something like "cumpoother" as "computer."
Now that you've quoted me, I'm a little embarassed about the "speek" business. Oops.
That does sound like a nightmare.
All of our dealings with Dell are for desktop hardware support - pretty much just replacing parts that failed during warranty. The servers we build and support all on our own. Past experience with pretty much any company would lead me to wince at the thought of having to try to climb the tiers of phone-in tech support.
While I first rejoiced at IT jobs returning to the US, I almost as immediately understood what had happened:
In this country, even the clearest mildest foreign accent elicits reactions of "he doesn't even speek English." Ig-nunt callers were more than likely reacting in this way to the likely very clear and probably better English of the Indian helpdesk workers.
Now that things have returned to Texas, we'll all hear our scripted support responses pronounced by the products of a school system where our own language is not really a priority when compared to football (especially in Texas, in the case of football). Now, in addition to the new accent, we'll have to deal with folks who have a hard time following our own questions, thanks to the fact that they will be the people who could not get better IT jobs in our slumped US IT labor market.
So, in the end, is it an outrage or a blessing that this particular shipping of jobs off shore has been ended by bigotry and ignorance?
Let's hope that it does die out by the time a major OS provides it to the next batch of teenagers.
We don't need still more drivelous rambelings cluttering our search results.
What I actually meant was that we might, by dumping gobs of matter in, reach the doubling of mass, allowing us not to miss out on the supernovae from which other systems derive so much entertainment.
Though I am sure that you are right that my flippancy has a weak basis in science.
That's why we should start slinging our trash (and material floating around in space) into the sun.
Think of the potential energy to be collected...
I have witnessed many an expert install every operating system he could get his hands on - and get it on the network, serving web and mail and whatever.
It takes no guru to install the software; it takes the guru to fix the breakage later or to perform non-evident configurations.
It takes someone worthy of certification to see a symptom and equate it to the real, underlying problem.
Certainly, planning and installing are an important part of this work, but they should only make up a tiny fraction of the life of any installation.
I can't say for a fact that _everything_ you wrote is a lie, but I didn't have to read very far at all to realize I needed to read no further.
Of note: The night of Muhammad's revelation included a trip which took him to Jerusalem.
Only Muslims positioned between Jerusalem and Mecca actually face away from Jerusalem when praying.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish population of "Transjordan" (not "Israel") was somewhere around 1%. The rest were primarily Christian and Muslim Arabs.
During British occupation, after the Ottoman Empire, the area was not known as "Israel" but as "Transjordan."
Please inform yourself and stop sending your apocalyptic misinformation. Jesus did not preach peace for everyone but Jews and Christians.
OK, sorry. It wasn't absolutely everyone. Those comments just hadn't appeared by the time I started typing. My apologies.
It seems to me that everyone (and I mean absolutely everyone) who has so far posted here is missing one important aspect of this licensing/evaluation issue.
Unix is a standard. As I understand it, Linux is referred to as "*nix" because it hasn't passed the Open group's Unix standards evaluation. Just as companies are ISO-certified when they meet certain workflow, structural, managerial, and who-knows-what standards according to a very expensive evaluation, an OS will be certified as "Unix" once having been evaluated as specifically matching those standards.
Investors and entities considering contracting a company's services will use the "ISO-whatever" certification as an indicator that that company has been evaluated to have a certain set of qualities, just as those evaluating operating systems for a project will use the "Unix" certification as an indication of the OS's having met a certain set of standards.
Now, I'll have to leave the value and full meaning of the "Unix" standard up to someone else to define for us, but the point is that it is not the simple purchase of the right to use a trademark name.
Starting with Windows NT, there was a "POSIX compatibility layer" in Windows, but I don't believe that Microsoft ever claimed to be offering "Unix." However, if Apple were to win this suit, it is conceivable that the precedent would be set that would allow Microsoft - and anyone else producing an operating system - to claim that their operating systems wer "Unix."
If the term "Unix" is judged to have become as generic as "Kleenex," then there might well be a need to come up with another name, so that there can be a standard for future reference.
Personally, I suspect that Apple is not "upholding a principle" by not paying for a name that should be available to all breeds of "*nix," but rather that they know of something or many somethings that would prevent OS X from meeting the Open Group's Unix standard.
I would go so far as to suggest compromise, if there is a means of calculating generally the bandwidth consumed by the badness. It is true that the customer must maintain and patch his server, but, at the same time, customers often rely on firewalls at the ISP to protect them from errant nonsense, and many exploits can be blocked at routers or firewalls.
As the customer does still bear some of the cost, there remains the incentive to close the holes, and there is also an opportunity for the ISP to earn some consulting money in providing the service of patching and locking down the system, if they can sell that service to the client.
My trolling paraphrase: [Inane, butt Apples are so expensive.]
Just as they would be providing a different, reduced, less valuable service by implementing CAT, it would seem to me that they are also cutting costs and corners by not implementing some sort of traffic-shaping solutions, preventing one user from consuming his entire network's bandwidth. Such a constraint should be part of the service, if they are going to guarantee all of their _paying_ users acceptable service.
Dear Leslie Ellis,
I just finished reading your CED article regarding NAT and cable modem service, and I would like to throw my viewpoint back at you (as countless others have likely already done, since your article was mentioned on Slashdot today).
I think you clearly and rightly stated your comparison of NAT to cable TV theft. In this argument, I would not accuse you of expressing only the point of view of the cable company, because you are also addressing some simple concepts of what is fair.
However, I think the analogy to cable TV theft is an inaccurate representation, and that it makes some assumptions as to the service being purchased by "Customer Bob" that doom him and his neighbors to being defined as abusers.
In the world of TV cable theft, sharing your subscription with your neighbor had no detrimental effect on your own service, unless you were bad at splicing and damaged your own connections; the neighbor's stolen cable would normally be identical to the service to which paying subscribers were entitled. There was no noticeable issue of bandwidth.
However, in the world of cable modem service, the subscriber is renting a connection and purchasing bandwidth from the cable company. Unless prohibited (some would say arbitrarily, or in a slippery attempt to hedge off potential revenue loss) in the service agreement, it is not dishonest for Customer Bob to share that single connection and bandwidth with his neighbors, as he is not consuming ISP resources that he would not otherwise potentially have used. Bob's sharing of his own connection and bandwidth is very different from Bob somehow jury-rigging an independent cable or DSL connection at his neighbor's house using his neighbor's own cable or phone line.
Should such a standard as CAT be implemented, I would certainly hope that the cable companies using it would reduce their rates as they applied to single computers, as they would be reducing the service provided and severely limiting the customers' options as users of that reduced service.
Please understand that I approach this issue from the viewpoint of my own NATted network, all within my own home, using a DSL connection, with an ISP who has no qualms with the full usage by customers of their paid service.
Thank you for your presentation of this issue, and thank you for your attention. This reply is also being posted to the Slashdot thread where your article's URL appeared this morning.
David A. Mason
david.mason@miis.edu
Network Administrator
Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute for International Studies
http://cns.miis.edu/
A good, versatile, and easy solution would be gorilla racks, which are available at hardware stores in general. They are not expensive and come in differing depths. You could probably come up with something pretty useful using a few units of different depths for about $200. I just put a nice work area and two workstations together at my office last week using four 18"-deep pieces and one 24"-deep piece. You set the shelf heights appropriately, add a couple of keyboard drawers, and you'll have something that can handle a few computers (hopefully you use switchboxes to some extent). I've used baker's racks in the past, and I don't think they make a good workstation; they basically serve to keep your equipment off the floor, but the metal wiring does not provide any kind of nice surface or the solid feel I would want in a desk.
As I posted at MSNBC:
I would tend to agree with this perspective.
It might be super energy efficient, or super quiet, or just plain made out of attractive, trendy, and translucent plastics.
Jobs's participation in this would tend to enforce this impression; Jobs is more of a personality and a motivator than any real visionary.
In addition, creating top-secret hype and innuendo a year before any kind of announcement leads me to think that the technology and application will be as revolutionary as a translucent all-in-one computer running MacOS.
On Tue Jan 9 21:27:56, Al Capone wrote:
> Is nothing more than a some cheesy overhyped skooter or
> rolling device thats electric or pedal power. YUCK!!
> Check the man's lineup of other inventions. Then ask
> your self could it really be anything else?
I must agree. I attempted to support a two-person network using Outlook 98 and NetFolders. The two people had _very_ loaded calendars, but I still thought it was ridiculous that those two would manage to kill NetFolders every two months.
The other important question would be if Linux can communicate with it?
or other versions of CE?
So, by now, what's left of NeXT in OS X, anyway?
They've ditched by now all the components that were pointed out in the endless MacWorld cover stories during the "Steve Jobs is back" hypestorm.
They might as well have bought BeOS for 1/10th the cost.
I'm talking technology here, not personality. That's a big discussion I'd rather not read again.