That is an excellent idea. It is impossible (and probably undesirable unless one advocates total anarchy) to dispense entirely with monitoring, but this method of community behavior can provide a modicum of intelligently-targeted cover for activities that ought not be infringed upon. It's not a great and sustainable solution, but it's probably an effective measure in a pinch: If you can't stop the monitoring, increase the noise level.
I was witness to a moment of beauty, which (though slightly OT) demonstrates this method:
One fine morning at a large telco I used to work for, I noticed that a couple of the senior network operations crew were dressed in crisp business finery. Ths usual uniform for this crew was a t-shirt, and jeans or shorts. Over the course of the next few hours (flextime), every single member of the group showed up in either a suit & tie or a business-formal dress.
No one said a word. About fifteen of them were in by 10am, each shrugging off the few inquiries about dressing up.
Finally, just before lunch, one of the project managers from a nearby group approached one of the senior ops team members.
Project Manager: "OK, I give. What's the deal?"
Staff Member: "One of us has a job interview today."
Project Manager: "Oh. OooOOoh."
Ouch. But what a great example of teamwork! Just as the management in this case had its own principles turned against it, it is entirely possible to use the methods of monitoring and analysis allowed by the Patriot Act/TIA against themselves. Inasmuch as it protects and preserves our constitutional rights, it's probably a moral duty to do so. Isn't fighting bad laws the sign of a good citizen? (But I digress...)
If memory serves me right, it was an unpleasant afternoon at AT&T when I had a senior VP personally rip me a new one over my use of several outside windows as a whiteboard for some rather mundane technical designs. It wasn't anything proprietary and the window faced the water, but he really was right. I was being flippant and obnoxious, and it just looks bad from an informaion security perspective.
Now imagine some poor sot who forgets to hit the "Outside window opaque" button, and projects sensitive data in a powerpoint presentation using a media-window. Even if such mistakes were prevented by a modicum of idiot-proofing, I can imagine a whole host of methods to read the data off of a media-window from many miles away. Forget bouncing a laser off the window to collect the vibrations & derive the conversations occuring therein -- I bet one could derive the entire display image by measuring thermal deflection of the outside display pane. And that's just the start.
The problem I see is this: while most companies' "super-secret" proprietary data really isn't worth a hill of french-roasted beans, they *think* it's worthy of the highest levels of TEMPEST protection. And any organization that actually has sensitive data would laugh this right off the vendor-presentation schedule. You'll never sell it to business or government, so the sales volumes will never bring the price down to where anyone but the hyper-techno-elite can afford it. And in the homes of the hyper-techno-elite, they just might like to control the display and ambient natural light separately.
Shame on you; how can you call him a bozo? Judging by his many "achievements," Mr. Pulitzer deserves the "respect" of the technical and "business" communities alike. His many "inventions" and "first" (such as the supraliminal barcode) have clearly been to the benefit of all humankind. And who could question the genius of a man who has leveraged his "obvious" "Invention and Passion Gene" to record 245 episodes of a show with an ! in the name.
Being the sort who appreciates some security in my everyday transactions, I actually like it when the Radio Shack people ask for my zip code. (They've never asked me for a name, is that unusual?) The fact that they have some idea of where they sell more batteries is fine by me -- it allows them to build market demographics without a notable loss of my privacy, and I get improved availability of products I like.
Likewise, I've been very encouraged to see some of those automated gas pumps now requiring that you key in a zip code from the billing statement -- not just possessing a credit card. Since I'm already providing my name and billing information through the credit card, this is not the invasion of privacy that some folks think it is. Yay authentication and authorization!
On the other hand, it used to be particularly irritating when I wrote a check and a clerk would insist that I provide a home phone number or even two phone numbers instead of some useful authorization info. (They're permitted to ask in my locale, but not allowed to require it.) After a particularly nasty incident at Ikea a few years ago -- when I declined to provide the number an assistant manager looked up my name in the phone directory and wrote the info on my check anyway, accompanied with a lot of foolish and insulting comments -- I decided to print TeleCheck's local phone number on the checks as a home phone. It doesn't stop the bad practice, but at least it protects my privacy a bit without wasting my time. (And it never comes up as a bad number:)
Most frustrating of all (recently) was an encounter with a certain large bank. To make a long story short, they informed me that electronic funds transfers can be executed by any merchant with my bank routing and account numbers. When I pointed out that the numbers are identification and not authorization, they replied (paraphrased) "Posession of the number IS authorization. If you didn't give them authorization, they wouldn't have the number." Can you believe a major bank thinks that possession of your authentication data is equal to authorization? AAUUUGGGHHH!!! When I pressed further and pointed out that the account & routing data is on every check that anyone writes, I was informed that they (the bank) know it's awful, but that's what the US Federal Reserve rules require. Double-AAUUUGGGHHH!!!
IMHO it's disappointing when the local Chevron station provides better financial transaction security than the bank managing my 401K.
This looks like a great entry into the stagnating pda field. However, can really stand the abuse associated with everyday life? First, I probably slam my wrist into some object or another about once every two weeks or so. This used to destroy cheaper watches until my wife bought me a near-indestructable watch (ESQ for anyone who cares). When I think about the fragile touch-screen on my Handera and my old Workpad (both palmOS devices), I wonder how Fossil manages to get a touch-screen that won't get smashed the first time I bump into something when working under my car.
Second, you've gotta wonder about battery life on an item that small. A closely-related third concerns accessories -- If they came out with one of these that could take an MMC card, supported bluetooth, or had any other fancy doodads, the battery life would be pretty abysmal. Then again, I'd nab one of these if it had any sort of expansion or networking capability. The notion of hotsyncing over bluetooth while in a charger stand next to my bed is very cool AND useful. And musing about the possibilities for corporate espionage with a SDIO 802.11 card in your watch strike me as the ultimate anti-Dick-Tracy chic.
I guess I will be first in line... for the second release.
It's the file formats. Not the apps themselves, but the goddamned proprietary formats. I use Linux at home and my wife & son use OS X, but I'm stuck on W2K at work because of complex Word documents and inscrutable Visio files. Just a few minutes ago, I overheard the document production manager for my company (responsible for coordinating big bids/proposals) insisting that she needed Office XP because there might be subtle errors in some of the complex Word XP documents that she was trying to open with Word 2k. Now if I had my druthers, the answer would be a resounding "no" and those who were producing documents and failing to save as RTF or other slightly-more-open formats would be thrown from the roof onto pikes, where they would hang impaled as an example to others.
But that's just me. I'm more concerned than the average geek about the long-term viability of my company and the ability to retain knowledge over the course of many years. Sure, I downloaded and use OpenOffice. But there are idosyncracies within proprietary documents that just don't translate well, and it's difficult to convince others in the office to save-as to anything but the latest default format. They're just too lazy, and don't have the foresight to understand that saving in the format-of-the-day is bad for knowledge retention. Thet're more concerned about kewl toys and not looking behind-the-times. Even my local IT lead referred to the Office XP upgrade as a "tithe," unable to cite even one functional requirement that the latest upgrade would satisfy. The result is that we waste money on unnecessary app upgrades. And with them come the recursive traps that are proprietary data formats.
Here's a first step: Proliferate open, fully disclosed, non-patented formats. What should those formats be? The OO XML formats are a good start. The Microsoft XML formats are contaminated with proprietary external reference bits and are a very bad start. I've read postings (a good one on OReilly.net) to the effect that open file formats ought to be required for government procurement. Bravo; that's a nice start. But the immediate obstacle is a practical one, and a very real one at that: You and everyone else in your office needs to get work done, and any switch must be unobtrusive.
So let's embrace and extend the Microsoft dime-bag model. Remember (for those old enough) how someone sent you a MSWord document that you couldn't open, and refered you to the downloadable MSWord Viewer? And when you got a few more.DOC files you bought into it and asked for a copy of Word? Let's use the same method to wean people off the bad stuff and onto the good stuff. It needs to be trivially easy for people to save and work in open formats. First, the OpenOffice developers need to write application plug-ins for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (on Windows and Mac) that set/enforce an open format as default. Motivated IT folks can install the plug-in everywhere, and let MSOffice's auto-convert feature hide the gory details of what's going on. Then we need a compact viewer program (or set of programs) that are quick downloads -- preferably under 1MB, and available on every notable platform. Remember, MS got a hell of a lot of market penetration through Word Viewer, Excel Viewer, and the like. Pretty soon the office will be using open formats with minimal pain within MS Office. Someone outside the office complain about open formats? Send 'em a tiny open viewer program. They whine about editing it? Give 'em the open format converter plug-in and a link to the OO.org site for a full download. But...
But don't try to displace MS Office with OpenOffice or anything else. Let Microsoft do that. Let the users come to their own conclusions based on experience. If you have enough people using open formats and there's an obvious alternative, you need only wait for Microsoft to come asking for tithes in the form of license renewal payments. Don't spend the time and effort to try and rip it out roots and all; let it whither and die in the ground.
Sure, you can take issue with the rules; in fact I think the rules could be more fair in my example. But that's not the point. The issue is when someone agrees to purchase a specific service for a specific price, taking more of the service than one agreed to is likely to be a breach of contract.
Nevermind the could/should/would/fairness/ability issues and such. If you agree to contain your behavior within a contract and then fail to do so, an unfavorable response from the other contractual party is a likely consequence. But I think we agree -- nobody should go to jail over this.
Look, as much as I smile at stories of the little guy sticking it to the man, the fact is that these guys were helping themselves to a commercial resource for which they had not paid.
Here's a comparative example: I'm an amateur blacksmith. Not a really good one, but passable. I'm good enough that I've contenplated replacing the 100lb propane tank in my garage with a direct natural gas line from the city. The trouble is, a standard residential gas feed runs at about 3-5psi, while I might need somewhere upwards of 30psi to run my forge at a serious working temperature. Getting the city to provide this high-pressure "commercial grade" service to my house is no easy task. It's not part of their regular business service model, and they're resistant to making such a sale.
Now here's the deal: The high pressure gas line is in front of my house, just sitting there waiting to be tapped. The pressure regulator is on my property. In fact, the pressure regulator is mine. If I were so inclined, I could go out to the street, shut off the line at the main, and upgrade the pressure/flow regulator at my house. In theory, the city's public utility people would never be the wiser -- except that they'd start billing me for, say, and order of magnitude more gas than could theoretically be pushed thru the residential gas tap. Surely within a few billing cycles I would get a visit from the utility people, if not the police. I would be fined for making gas line changes w/o a permit, and probably have to pay the difference between residential/heating gas rates (cheap) and commercial (expensive) rates for the time I'd operated the modified service. I would expect no less from our well-paid and attentive city employees.
So why would anyone expect much different from another utility, even if the nature of the product is different? What if I helped myself to an extra phone line, because the wire was there and the local connection box happened to have extra lines? (I did that when I was a kid, by plugging in an extra card to the old Ma Bell phone control box in my folks' basement). I think the involvement of the FBI is overkill, and the example-making is wholly inappropriate/unprofessional behavior on the part of the ISP, but there's not much question that what these folks are doing is wrong and probably definable as theft of service.
Now there's one big caveat to this: I'm assuming that the rate/service limits are spelled out in these people's service contracts with the ISP. If not, then all bets are off, particularly if the modem/routers are the property of the subscriber. If all the ISP has to offer is an expectation of usage and not a bandwith limit in a contractual agreement, then the ISP's protest won't stand up in a stiff breeze, much less in court.
Jon
Bush & Ashcroft: Saving America, once secret trial at a time.
Bull. There's plenty of room in the grey-hat region, and plenty of population in it. The wiggle room for those who crack systems/software and then publicly announce the results is getting tighter. However there are an awful lot of people whose main concern is simply sharing results of bug/flaw discovery or other necessary activities that aren't good for vendor busines models. The fact that the DMCA seeks to redefine discovery and community notification as reverse-engineering and criminal collusion doesn't do a thing to shrink the number of people (admins, architects, programmers, dbas, etc) who simply need to do these things to do their jobs. The grey hat is still a thinking person's hat -- one abides by the letter of the law as best one can, and find ways around the obtuse or wrong-headed sections to accomplish primary goals of systems operation, data protection, and other work processes. Some prefer to skirt the line with black-hat-dom, while others simply protest bad law. Ain't nobody a white hat unless they utter phrases like "He was arrested so he must be guilty" or "The law is always right."
Not too long ago, I sent a note to several of my friends about a conflict I saw between the DMCA-esque proposed Microsoft security certification -- requiring software bug hiding and notification of the software vendor before notification of the affected client -- and the codes of ethics binding those with CISA and CISSP certifications -- both of which require protection or notification of the potential target/victim. (My personal favorite part of the ISC2/CISSP code is "Tell the truth" which is anathma to the DMCA/bug-hiding camp.)
Of course, since DMCA enforcement tends towards the corporate view of things (property, ownership, patents, royalties) rather than the societal view (ethics, trust, truth, community), if I follow the vendor-independent (societal) path, I get labelled as a grey-hat or a black-hat right out of the starting gate. Have I personally cracked and distributed software? No. But do I swear to uphold the right of the consumer to know of flaws in their software or implementation? Of course I do -- it's the core of my job as a consultant. But doing so may label me as a criminal, and not doing so is unethical and unprofessional. As the article point out, all you can do is try to do the right thing. Currently that may be illegal.
Maybe some of us will go to jail for it, but that's what it'll take to change or repeal ill-formed laws such as the DMCA. Nothing induces judicial scrutiny like a situation where a judge is embarassed to enforce a bad law against a just person. But for anyone contemplating the notion of a "test case", keep in mind that the ACLU only picks up your legal fees if you keep your nose clean while you're doing the (illegal) right thing.
What my grandfather did: He worked as a chemist for a big-name laboratory, and took a the first chunk of a metal alloy that he invented, and had it forged into a three-metal set of intertwined bands. The result looked similar to those silver-gold-copper ringsets that are pretty common, except that it was silver, gold, and this high-strength alloy he invented. No stone. His wife loved that it was (a) unique, (b) symbolized his effort and thought, (c) had high value but didn't make her feel like a target for muggers in 1920's NYC. They were still diggin' each other when they died in their 90's.
What my father did: Bought a gold ring with a run-o-the-mill diamond. Matching plain band. Divorced. Ugly, ugly divorce. Lots of money issues. Fought over the return of the ring.
What I did: I took my wife-to-be to a local place that did platinum casting through the lost-wax method. We created a design, checked out the wax models before casting, and let the metal artist do his thing. They're both a honeycomb design with no stone, which worked fine as engagement & wedding ring. My wife digs it because (a) our rings are unique/only similar to each other, (b) we designed them together, (c) they're *very* durable, and (d) there's a lot less guilt associated with a valuable metal than in an overpriced colorless stone. I still dig this chick after 15 years.
That isn't very many data points, but I think the lesson is that if the ring selection is more of a personal investment than a shopping effort, it's a good sign. Sure, the ring should have some durable value, but anyone who says only diamonds have value as a symbol of love needs to ponder on the primary practical use of diamonds: an abrasive.
I just had a perverse thought: What if this is how the Matrix starts? I mean, what better way to train a responsive and comprehensive environmental control system to become intelligent than to insert the activity of thousands of sentient entities into that environment? The words "self-fulfilling prophecy" come to mind.
Well, the words "improbable," "obtuse," and "gotta get out more" come to mind as well, but it's a curious thought.
Two hours? HOURS? Try days or weeks. I had one ISP a few years ago send me to a collections agency when I cancelled my credit card in desperate response to nine months of unauthorized charges. (They lost my check and asked for a credit card number to hold and use in case the second check didn't arrive. They found the first check, cashed it, cashed the second check, then billed my credit card periodically for nine months...)
My experience cancelling service with Speakeasy was much easier, but still not easy. I was particularly infuriated with the notion that I had to justify why I was cancelling, or they wouldn't stop billing me. (Notice the terminology: they consider it a "cancellation request" while I consider it a "cancellation order" -- just whose wallet is it?)
So for your amusement, I present the letter I sent to them (I don't have a place to host the original PDF):
----------begin----------
Speakeasy Networks
2222 Second Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
attn: Billing (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) [hardcopy sent by registered mail]
After filing two cancellation orders and following up with three messages, you're evidently
refusing to disconnect SDSL service to my house unless I provide you with some sort of
explanation for canceling the service. The simple answer is "because I don't want it anymore."
But apparently that's not good enough for you to act. So, here's...
The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Disconnect My SDSL
10. Every time you reboot the Redback, locusts shoot out of the unused ports on my router and the activity lights bleed.
9. I think you're a front for Al-Queda opium e-distribution networks, and President Dubba says that breaking my addictifications is a patriotic act against the Axle of Evil.
8. I got busted by the Amish Gelassenheit Squad, and they smashed the server running www.bonnetandbuggiewhip.com I'd hidden inside the butter churn.
7. The firewall melted when I tested it with a torch. What kind of crappy firewall is that?
6. SDSL uses an expensive dedicated line; unnecessary expense = pork; pork = unclean.
5. I'm going to work for a secret government agency and won't be home for a while.
4. With access to all that pr0n, I got masturbatory abrasion injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome, so what's the use of a fast line when I can only type with two splinted fingers?
3. The big round Speakeasy logo swirls the other way when I visit.au sites, causing me to become disoriented and vomit. Now my CueCat's all plugged up.
2. Using an 802.11 card, a Shannon Compensator, a homemade yagi, and a 60,000-watt amplifier, I'm getting Terabit service from a place on 2nd & Pine, right through your skulls. ...and the number one reason you should disconnect my SDSL line:
1. I'm the customer, and I told you to.
Please note that an unwillingness or procedural inability to act on your part does not compel me
to purchase or pay for unwanted service from you. I gave reasonable advance notice about
wanting the line disconnected, and provided an additional cancellation notice (two, actually)
through your support system on the day you requested I do so. At that time you did not notify
me that you would want some sort of justification, verbal defense, heartfelt apology, explanatory
Dear-John letter, or separation therapy sessions before you would act on my cancellation order.
My notice of cancellation was sent before the paid-up period ended on 2002.02.02, so your delay
in processing the cancellation only increases your non-recoverable costs from Covad. I'm done
using the line, I'm done paying, and I'm done talking about it.
Just turn it off.
Sincerely,
Jon Espenschied
(if you wish to email me, please use my new address: xxxoffensivexxx@xxxdomainxxx.com)
I'd recommend springing for the Handera 330. I did, and I haven't regretted it a bit. You say: Handera has a nicer, bigger screen, but is also more expensive. I couldn't locate a price for the CF card either.
That's an understatement -- the Handera screen is very sharp and clear. The backlight is bright and clear in the dark, and because the grafitti area is part of the display (instead of being silk-screened on like all the other Palm devices) you can actually see what you're writing in the dark. In bright light, it's fantastic and quick to respond -- no screen artifacts. Folks used to rave about the b/w screen on the Rex units -- this is nicer.
As for the price of the Symbol 802.11b card, I've seen ~$175us. Note that the Symbol card is significantly smaller and less succeptable to damage than the Linksys -- the dongle on the latter is huge. From outside appearances, the Symbol card looks to be the same as the Socket brand 802.11 card. (Anyone?)
There are a lot of other benefits to the Handera 330 -- the battery life with the LiIon batter is great (important if you're using CF devices that require more power such as a microdrive or 802.11 card), the flexibility of the MMC/SD memory slot is great (and I'm hoping to see a bluetooth SD card soon). The power tap can rechange the battery while you're using the unit yet doesn't interfere with a Palm Portable Keyboard. The folks at Handera did a great job on this one; I'm very happy with it.
Handera 330 ($300) + battery ($50) + Symbol card ($175) + charger ($40, or you can pick up a Nokia ACH4U charger for $2 at a discount place or thrift store) and you're set for around $550us.
My view on this is heavily influenced by my location in the US, and my experience with other public institutions. My simple advice about trying to make up new policy:
Don't do it.
You don't need to. You work in a public school district, which is a government operating organization. Even where I live, with very strong university systems that have opted out of many state security and authentication programs, the school systems are still bound by the state's general laws on proper use of facilities. Without much doubt, you can find enough existing law in your locale that stipulates that state/county employees will not take government facilities/materials for their own benefit. Your approach should be one of "State law prohibits this type of use, and we have to come into compliance before all of us get reprimanded/penalized/fired." To back up this argument, you should have a look at:
copies of state/county/city law regarding (prohibited) private use of public facilities
copies of school regulations and school board decisions restricting use of educational resources to educational purposes
examples in your locale of educators penalized for excessive*** misuse of resources -- copiers, long distance phone, etc etc
specific examples of educators -- not necc. in your area -- penalized for misuse of internet-specific resources (examples that include fines and jail time are good)
printed sniffer logs that show the ratio of school-related vs. non-school-related (~95% if P2P media?) traffic
etc etc
***This is important to counter the argument that downloading 1.5GB/day of music is "incidental" and therefore permitted.
With this in hand, schedule a meeting and embarass/scare the hell out of them with the state govt looking over your shoulder. The key here is NOT to invent new policy, but to adapt your operating procedures to conform to existing requirements and regulations. Remember, as the sysadmin, you have much more power to control the technical interpretation of existing policy, than to invent new policy to make technical implementation more straightforward. Your legislature is probably on your side on this one -- you just have to dig up the relevant bits before you jump on the soapbox.
Oops. I stand corrected. Although, there's a certain appeal to "You've got big boxes." (I'll say it to my female co-worker tomorrow with excitement in my voice, and see what the utterance-to-slappage quotient is for that phrase.)
Also, doesn't the word "cajones" also mean "drawers" (as in underwear)? So big cojones necessitate big cajones, no? Just wondering.
Either way you cut it, it's still on topic, because Apple displays big cojones, while Jobs displays big cajones (as in "big britches"/ego). And if you think that's a stretch... <G>
Not quite. I agree that *Aqua* also falls into the "designed-by-Smurfs" category, but not the whole of OS X. I think it makes all the difference in the world that you can have all the eye candy you want (or can stand), while the underpinnings of OS X are tried-and-true and architecturally flexible.
You can make the argument that XP is also based on the tried-and-true NT-2000 code, but that lineage is pretty shallow and full of black sheep. Don't get me wrong, there are certain releases of NT/2K that I found quite dependable and useful, and I'm typing this now on a company-provided 2K laptop. But a monolithic and proprietary OS/app design that spans from the GUI to the kernel is -- in a word -- inelegant.
I would disagree with your contention that "difficult for (some) to use" is the same as "only usable with a designed-by-Smurfs UI". Perhaps it's just a matter of degree, but imho the flexible implementation of eye candy on a solid yet relatively modular OS is the difference between hitting the nail on the head (OS X) and pounding a crooked one into the wood (XP). Both get the job done, but there's a little more finesse in the former.
This is a fine response to MS's recent "We have the way out" ad campaign (with a graphic that indicates you should jump out a window -- apt in many ways, but I digress).
The tone of the "Way out" is a whiny "UNIX is too hard" that perfectly matches the designed-by-Smurfs interface they're pushing with XP. It's nice to see Apple having the collective cajones to ante up and reply "Yeah, UNIX can be hard, but (a) it's worth it, (b) we've done it, and (c) it just *works.*"
Interestingly (to me) this is the software version of what I thought Apple was going to do before the iPod was announced. When Jobs said the new hardware item would be "revolutionary", I imagined an industrial 2-U rackmount dual-G4 server with an Apple logo laser-cut into a burly-he-man stainless steel faceplate. With remote Aqua/X admin tools. Now *that* would have been revolutionary for Apple. iPod... not so much. But here they're doing the equivalent serious production-geek-appeal with software. I especially like that X is shown in the dock. Now there's a finger in Bill's eye.
If it is indeed true that Microsoft was running on Xenix up until Windows 3.1, it casts an interesting light on how flexible Bill's vision of the future was right up until the early 90s.
Funny, that. When I was at MS from 94 to 95 or so, there were still quite a few Xenix systems around in the "Business Systems" group or whatever the hell they were calling it then. I found it particularly humorous because I was working on the MS Exchange Server project, and here my co-workers were using Xenix mail. Some folks apparently wanted to *read* their email, not just to "eat dogfood"
When I think what MS *could* have done with the amount of development effort that went into MSExchange v. 1.0^H^H^H 4.0, if they had applied it to Xenix mail... We'd have rock-solid secure email that'd be delivered before it was sent, managed by a system running on a 486 with 16mb ram, hosting 10,000 accounts. Instead, we have memory leaks, a GUI designed by Smurfs, and secure coding philosophies that led to inclusion of auto-executing-content as message body (= by-design vehicle for viruses, which we reported internally in the company in '95). What a waste.
This article in the Economist is a heap of paternalistic claptrap. I usually respect most of the thinking that comes out of the Economist even if I don't agree with it, enough that I'm a paid subscriber. But the implication of this article is that the dotcom era was a childish tangent and that the technology industry has now grown up and realized how the real world works is a gross oversimplication at best, and more likely just hogwash. The technology industry has not reverted to the domain of the "suits" as the article implies. True, many of the internet revolutionaries have donned ties and pantsuits and risen through the ranks into executive management. Even Phil Zimmerman sold his soul to NAI. But there has been a fundamantal change in how the technology business world works.
To wit: You don't judge the severity of a climate change by seeing how well the oldest and fattest animals are. Many of the dead dotcoms were old-school organizations that took on new names and attempted to shovel their wares onto the internet, only to fail miserably. Although Microsoft gained a lot from the dotcom era, it's worth noting that Microsoft was the domain of "suits" from shortly after its inception. Gates himself railed against open code as far back as anyone can remember, insisted that the Internet was irrelevant to the software market, and has only recently noted that security in network-connected applications is of some importance. Microsoft stock has essentially plateaued -- it's been bouncing around $50-70 for about two years, and dividends are not paid to shareholders. The days of MSFT stock splits leading to the purchase of a new house are over. Microsoft may be a reliable internal moneymaker for some time to come, but it's no longer a realistic investment growth vehicle. Likewise the traditional model technology product business have suffered -- the computer hardware industry has become a lean area, squeezing the life out of traditional middle markets (and driving it online). Traditional old-school service organizations (KPMG and the like) have laid off tens of thousands.
On the other hand, new types of businesses are having an interesting go, and there's been a *lot* of irreversable change. Who'da thunk that Redhat could actually reach profitability? Proprietary networking protocols are dead. Sendmail has been commercialized. Apple has adopted an open-source core, and is now the world's most prolific UNIX software company. Major movies are being rendered with open-source code on clustered commodity computers. More women than ever are finding paths to executive status and power through the technology sector. The center of innovation in browser code is coming from Mozilla, with code more stable than either IE or Netscape on Windows. Java/J2EE has finished.NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet. Napster and its progeny have likewise insured the irrelevance of the existing recording industry giants (and the death of their ethically clouded business model). A little upstart company (Verisign) that issues virtual identity credentials bought a company that issues virtual addresses (Network Solutions), and has become the megalith that we should all be terrified by. And IBM, recognizing that there's good money to be made in services rather than only ownership of intellectual property, has hybridized itself through such things as Linux, and become much stronger for it.
The dotcom world has grown up and joined the old world? I don't think so. Surely anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute can see the clear differentiation between dotcom-era companies that had good ideas such as Palm, and the multitudes of con artists whose shell corporation names are enumerated on the likes of fuckedcompany.com. What's happened is that the dotcom survivors (the ones who actually had ideas and value) have learned to adapt in ways that position them for survival (accepting small but dependable margins), and surprising dominance in others. Some are successfully selling things that are openly available. Others are successfully selling services where the old-school said there was no need or opportunity. The curious thing is that the old-school property sellers (software, music) are being slowly killed by the new-school service/access sellers, and the old-school service sellers are being slowly killed by the new-school open-source/property sellers who find smaller margins attractive. Only in the White House and the oil industry have we returned to the glory days of the 80's and early 90's (and after people look at the balance sheets, the next election will take care of that).
Hmm. As a "special covert operative" the badge stays in the top drawer of your dresser at home, while you are many many miles away, perhaps with having lunch with people who call you by a different name, and would kill you if they knew... You may not have a gun, and you most certainly will not wear a cool black suit with black sunglasses. You may not even get to finish your couscous before losing consciousness.
Seriously, government work does not always suck. Projects may move at aglacial pace, but they are frequently unstoppable. Compare that to the feeling of never getting to version 1.0. Compare that to having some of your best work thrown out because of some venture capitalist's "refocusing" whim. In gov't work, you occasionally get to work on something really, really cool for years and years. I'll take the chance of that rare opportunity over the constant rushing sound of bungie-CFOs flying by and flitting venture capitalists wringing their hands over excessive foosball usage any day.
Government contracting offers a lot of advantages over.com/high tech "permanent" work. If you are married, it might actually last. If you have a child, you're not automatically perceived as "undercomitted" (unless you have the operative job above). Your health insurance might actually be worth something, and you might actually retire only once, instead of retiring at 35 only to discover that your paper millions are... paper.
And there's one other huge advantage: no sales droids.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I put my money where my mouth is. I bought the 330 this christmas, and don't have a single regret. The screen is excellent (I only see scaling artifacts in one 3rd party app), the memory flexibility is nice, the voice recorder almost crosses over from nifty to useful, and the form factor allows me to use the doodads I've invested in (such as the keyboard, modem, extra cradles, palmpix camera, etc).
I spent a long time looking for an upgrade from my Workpad 20x (Palm III), and looked long and hard at the Sony PalmOS handhelds. But when the rubber hit the road, I came to some comparatively negative conclusions about the Sony:
color is nice but not really useful to any app I use (except maybe the PalmPix, which is just a toy)
the form factor/size isn't so much better as to justify buying a new keyboard & cradles
I'll buy into that proprietary MemoryStick(TM) crap when they pry my CF+ and MMC cards from my cold dead handheld.
OTOH, the 330 gave me some killer advantages:
Screen rotation combined with high-resolution text and spreadsheet apps is a compelling combination. Being able to reference items from large collections of synchronized information is why I carry this thing around. Seeing more of it at once (esp in landscape mode) is better. I'm anxiously awaiting the update to Brainforest, which Aportis says (as of last week) is in the queue behind a scalable/rotatable version of AportisDoc.
I can use memory expansion (MMC), network connectivity (CF), and a keyboard (serial) all at once. And I can plug in the power at the same time. It's not a laptop-killer, but then again, everything I've seen pitched as a laptop-killer is so bulky as to become what it's supposed to kill. This is as close as you can get and still shove the whole mess of system and accessories into a coat pocket.
The buttons are concave. I wouldn't have believed the difference this makes, but after using a Workpad for almost 3 years, the buttons on the 330 are a godsend. It really does make a huge difference in ease of use if you can just poke a button with the stylus and keep writing, rather than shifting your hand to finger it, then going back to the pen. These guys were being thoughtful in the design.
The LiIon battery is a very nice touch, balanced by the practical ability to pop in some AAA's if you don't have the recharger with you.
Overall, I just found the 330 a better combination of practical features than any other option.
That's my $0.02
-Jon
Good points and interesting stuff. I actually went to college near Hollywood a while back, and watched a lot of folks get swallowed up by the music business. Some of the geeks (like you, presumably) did well, the business folks got McJobs, and most of the artists got ground into dust.
But I beg to differ on the inevitability of continued music industry dominance. I know that age-wise I'm close to the target demographic, but as a well-educated geek I'm not. But it only takes a few geeks to poison the pot. The distant relatives living in BumbleF&ck Nowhere with 4 teenage children and a computer that only runs AOL -- they ARE the target demographic. Disposable income, media-driven tastes, and obedient consumerist behavior. But even if the kids have no idea what Napster was, someone in their school does, and they're getting cds full of MP3s from their friends just because it's easy. They think it's cool that they can make a copy on their Gateway PC (that came with a cd recorder in the base config), and go over to a friend's house (who has no computer) and pop it into the dvd player. To them, there's no issue of being a pirate, they just do it because it works. Hell, grandma doesn't want a stack of cds in her place; she wants one cd she leaves in the hand-me-down computer (not good enough for the grandkid's games anymore) with about 2-3 dozen songs she likes. The kids burn it for her, and voila, the revenue for those $39.95 As-Seen-On-TV compilations is gone. The kids did it. The 1-in-100 geek enabled it. And everyone else eats it up.
This IS middle America. And you know the kicker? The further out you get -- from Skowhegan ME to Needles CA -- these bored kids don't have much else to do than to drink, f&ck, and steal music. Forget the dedicated music pirates, they're not really the core of the problem for RIAA. The problem is that not one consumer sheds a single tear for the music industry when someone "steals" their "property." It's the indifference that'll kill 'em.
J
[my name's on this stuff, so you get a disclaimer: I don't traffic in music, but I teach kids how to use Unix.]
It seems obvious on its face, but here's the rough answer: Music is overpriced because the selling price of a cd is disproportionately large compared to the cost of materials and production cost of the recording. The majority of revenue goes into the producer's margins, and the typical definition of "profit" (by which an artist's earnings are determined) in a recording contract is obscenely distorted. Personally, I consider much of the services provided by the music producers/industry to be nonessential to the production and distribution of music, so when those nonessential services constitute the majority of my expense of buying a CD, I consider it to be de facto overpriced.
Courtney Love had a nice opinion piece in Salon a while back about the continual financial rape that the industry perpetrates on the artist community. Really, I can't think offhand of any other industry that treats its producers so poorly and is so parasitically structured except for prostitution.
As for Fairtunes, it is just what it is: a tip jar. Yeah, they're not a raving success. But when you consider that they're collecting about a buck a song, I don't think they're a failure either. If you have a better idea for low-overhead more-direct compensation to artists, lay it out.
Attention Universal: There is a Fat Lady at the door who wants to sing for you.
This is more gasping from a great giant that is slowly falling. It may take them years to do so, and they won't cease to exist when they fall apart, but the core of this industry is collapsing.
Why? Just my opinion. I and many of my friends are in a significant target demographic group for the music industry. But I bought my last cd more than a year and a half ago, with the sole exception of a $20 gift certificate I got from work. I don't see anyone at work under the age of 30 buying cds. I've spent somewhere between $500-800 on Xmas gifts for family and friends this year, and I have bought precisely -zero- music items. Why not? The question would be better posed as "why?" When there are so many avenues of free access to music on the internet, as well as ways to appease one's conscience, why would I or anyone else choose to buy a unit of music that is grossly overpriced, physically limited, contains material I don't want, and benefits the artist only minimally? And frankly, my friends and family don't want to get the damn things for Xmas.
Music cds are quickly approaching irrelevance. Most folks I know have some easy way of accessing MP3s. Even my Luddite relatives from central Washington get one of their friends to burn a cd full of mp3s and pop it into their dvd player. The receptionist at work (the one who opens all of the email trojans) gets her Tony Bennett fix from a friend in AZ who mails her a new recorded cd every month. And me? I vote with my dollars -- I'm spending my former-recorded-music budget on seeing live stuff locally.
Give it up, folks. The Fat Lady is already into the Imbroglio, and quickly approaching the Finale Ultimo.
Jon
cooling by piezo-electric cilia
on
Wriggling Heat Sinks
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ok, I just got this be-yoo-t-ful image in my mind:
Imagine the piezoelectric fan on a larger scale, not just waving a metal+ceramic blade (single flexible surface area), but creating an undulating sheet about the size of a letter/a4 size piece of paper using stripes of piezoelectric flexion areas that create a wave every 2-3cm. Now combine this with the latest in flexible printed circuitry top and bottom (or 2 layers top and bottom, for the really adventurous). I'd imagine you might also need periodic non-flexible stripes (ends?) for components and connects that can't be made flexible. Then add a lower-power processor and put it into an enclosure only slightly larger than the wave height, such as, say, a laptop computer housing. What do you have?
You'd get a motherboard that cools itself by cilia-like swimming/undulation movement that pushes air (against the enclosure) across its surface silently.
You'd get quieter rackmount systems, with 1U or "blade" servers that self-vent. ("Ah, yah need tah balance yer server there, buddy, the blades are outta sync.")
You get a laptop that you might enjoy putting in your lap. (On second thought, I'm not sure I want to sit next to someone on a plane with a two-stroke laptop...)
Slashdot Mirror
That is an excellent idea. It is impossible (and probably undesirable unless one advocates total anarchy) to dispense entirely with monitoring, but this method of community behavior can provide a modicum of intelligently-targeted cover for activities that ought not be infringed upon. It's not a great and sustainable solution, but it's probably an effective measure in a pinch: If you can't stop the monitoring, increase the noise level.
I was witness to a moment of beauty, which (though slightly OT) demonstrates this method:
One fine morning at a large telco I used to work for, I noticed that a couple of the senior network operations crew were dressed in crisp business finery. Ths usual uniform for this crew was a t-shirt, and jeans or shorts. Over the course of the next few hours (flextime), every single member of the group showed up in either a suit & tie or a business-formal dress.
No one said a word. About fifteen of them were in by 10am, each shrugging off the few inquiries about dressing up.
Finally, just before lunch, one of the project managers from a nearby group approached one of the senior ops team members.
Project Manager: "OK, I give. What's the deal?"
Staff Member: "One of us has a job interview today."
Project Manager: "Oh. OooOOoh."
Ouch. But what a great example of teamwork! Just as the management in this case had its own principles turned against it, it is entirely possible to use the methods of monitoring and analysis allowed by the Patriot Act/TIA against themselves. Inasmuch as it protects and preserves our constitutional rights, it's probably a moral duty to do so. Isn't fighting bad laws the sign of a good citizen? (But I digress...)
-Jon
If memory serves me right, it was an unpleasant afternoon at AT&T when I had a senior VP personally rip me a new one over my use of several outside windows as a whiteboard for some rather mundane technical designs. It wasn't anything proprietary and the window faced the water, but he really was right. I was being flippant and obnoxious, and it just looks bad from an informaion security perspective.
Now imagine some poor sot who forgets to hit the "Outside window opaque" button, and projects sensitive data in a powerpoint presentation using a media-window. Even if such mistakes were prevented by a modicum of idiot-proofing, I can imagine a whole host of methods to read the data off of a media-window from many miles away. Forget bouncing a laser off the window to collect the vibrations & derive the conversations occuring therein -- I bet one could derive the entire display image by measuring thermal deflection of the outside display pane. And that's just the start.
The problem I see is this: while most companies' "super-secret" proprietary data really isn't worth a hill of french-roasted beans, they *think* it's worthy of the highest levels of TEMPEST protection. And any organization that actually has sensitive data would laugh this right off the vendor-presentation schedule. You'll never sell it to business or government, so the sales volumes will never bring the price down to where anyone but the hyper-techno-elite can afford it. And in the homes of the hyper-techno-elite, they just might like to control the display and ambient natural light separately.
Jon
Shame on you; how can you call him a bozo? Judging by his many "achievements," Mr. Pulitzer deserves the "respect" of the technical and "business" communities alike. His many "inventions" and "first" (such as the supraliminal barcode) have clearly been to the benefit of all humankind. And who could question the genius of a man who has leveraged his "obvious" "Invention and Passion Gene" to record 245 episodes of a show with an ! in the name.
Royal German Ancestry meine Hinterteile.
-J
Being the sort who appreciates some security in my everyday transactions, I actually like it when the Radio Shack people ask for my zip code. (They've never asked me for a name, is that unusual?) The fact that they have some idea of where they sell more batteries is fine by me -- it allows them to build market demographics without a notable loss of my privacy, and I get improved availability of products I like.
:)
Likewise, I've been very encouraged to see some of those automated gas pumps now requiring that you key in a zip code from the billing statement -- not just possessing a credit card. Since I'm already providing my name and billing information through the credit card, this is not the invasion of privacy that some folks think it is. Yay authentication and authorization!
On the other hand, it used to be particularly irritating when I wrote a check and a clerk would insist that I provide a home phone number or even two phone numbers instead of some useful authorization info. (They're permitted to ask in my locale, but not allowed to require it.) After a particularly nasty incident at Ikea a few years ago -- when I declined to provide the number an assistant manager looked up my name in the phone directory and wrote the info on my check anyway, accompanied with a lot of foolish and insulting comments -- I decided to print TeleCheck's local phone number on the checks as a home phone. It doesn't stop the bad practice, but at least it protects my privacy a bit without wasting my time. (And it never comes up as a bad number
Most frustrating of all (recently) was an encounter with a certain large bank. To make a long story short, they informed me that electronic funds transfers can be executed by any merchant with my bank routing and account numbers. When I pointed out that the numbers are identification and not authorization, they replied (paraphrased) "Posession of the number IS authorization. If you didn't give them authorization, they wouldn't have the number." Can you believe a major bank thinks that possession of your authentication data is equal to authorization? AAUUUGGGHHH!!! When I pressed further and pointed out that the account & routing data is on every check that anyone writes, I was informed that they (the bank) know it's awful, but that's what the US Federal Reserve rules require. Double-AAUUUGGGHHH!!!
IMHO it's disappointing when the local Chevron station provides better financial transaction security than the bank managing my 401K.
-Jon
This looks like a great entry into the stagnating pda field. However, can really stand the abuse associated with everyday life? First, I probably slam my wrist into some object or another about once every two weeks or so. This used to destroy cheaper watches until my wife bought me a near-indestructable watch (ESQ for anyone who cares). When I think about the fragile touch-screen on my Handera and my old Workpad (both palmOS devices), I wonder how Fossil manages to get a touch-screen that won't get smashed the first time I bump into something when working under my car.
Second, you've gotta wonder about battery life on an item that small. A closely-related third concerns accessories -- If they came out with one of these that could take an MMC card, supported bluetooth, or had any other fancy doodads, the battery life would be pretty abysmal. Then again, I'd nab one of these if it had any sort of expansion or networking capability. The notion of hotsyncing over bluetooth while in a charger stand next to my bed is very cool AND useful. And musing about the possibilities for corporate espionage with a SDIO 802.11 card in your watch strike me as the ultimate anti-Dick-Tracy chic.
I guess I will be first in line... for the second release.
Jon
It's the file formats. Not the apps themselves, but the goddamned proprietary formats. I use Linux at home and my wife & son use OS X, but I'm stuck on W2K at work because of complex Word documents and inscrutable Visio files. Just a few minutes ago, I overheard the document production manager for my company (responsible for coordinating big bids/proposals) insisting that she needed Office XP because there might be subtle errors in some of the complex Word XP documents that she was trying to open with Word 2k. Now if I had my druthers, the answer would be a resounding "no" and those who were producing documents and failing to save as RTF or other slightly-more-open formats would be thrown from the roof onto pikes, where they would hang impaled as an example to others.
.DOC files you bought into it and asked for a copy of Word? Let's use the same method to wean people off the bad stuff and onto the good stuff. It needs to be trivially easy for people to save and work in open formats. First, the OpenOffice developers need to write application plug-ins for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (on Windows and Mac) that set/enforce an open format as default. Motivated IT folks can install the plug-in everywhere, and let MSOffice's auto-convert feature hide the gory details of what's going on. Then we need a compact viewer program (or set of programs) that are quick downloads -- preferably under 1MB, and available on every notable platform. Remember, MS got a hell of a lot of market penetration through Word Viewer, Excel Viewer, and the like. Pretty soon the office will be using open formats with minimal pain within MS Office . Someone outside the office complain about open formats? Send 'em a tiny open viewer program. They whine about editing it? Give 'em the open format converter plug-in and a link to the OO.org site for a full download. But...
But that's just me. I'm more concerned than the average geek about the long-term viability of my company and the ability to retain knowledge over the course of many years. Sure, I downloaded and use OpenOffice. But there are idosyncracies within proprietary documents that just don't translate well, and it's difficult to convince others in the office to save-as to anything but the latest default format. They're just too lazy, and don't have the foresight to understand that saving in the format-of-the-day is bad for knowledge retention. Thet're more concerned about kewl toys and not looking behind-the-times. Even my local IT lead referred to the Office XP upgrade as a "tithe," unable to cite even one functional requirement that the latest upgrade would satisfy. The result is that we waste money on unnecessary app upgrades. And with them come the recursive traps that are proprietary data formats.
Here's a first step: Proliferate open, fully disclosed, non-patented formats. What should those formats be? The OO XML formats are a good start. The Microsoft XML formats are contaminated with proprietary external reference bits and are a very bad start. I've read postings (a good one on OReilly.net) to the effect that open file formats ought to be required for government procurement. Bravo; that's a nice start. But the immediate obstacle is a practical one, and a very real one at that: You and everyone else in your office needs to get work done, and any switch must be unobtrusive.
So let's embrace and extend the Microsoft dime-bag model. Remember (for those old enough) how someone sent you a MSWord document that you couldn't open, and refered you to the downloadable MSWord Viewer? And when you got a few more
But don't try to displace MS Office with OpenOffice or anything else. Let Microsoft do that. Let the users come to their own conclusions based on experience. If you have enough people using open formats and there's an obvious alternative, you need only wait for Microsoft to come asking for tithes in the form of license renewal payments. Don't spend the time and effort to try and rip it out roots and all; let it whither and die in the ground.
Jon "open formats to the people"
Sure, you can take issue with the rules; in fact I think the rules could be more fair in my example. But that's not the point. The issue is when someone agrees to purchase a specific service for a specific price, taking more of the service than one agreed to is likely to be a breach of contract.
Nevermind the could/should/would/fairness/ability issues and such. If you agree to contain your behavior within a contract and then fail to do so, an unfavorable response from the other contractual party is a likely consequence. But I think we agree -- nobody should go to jail over this.
Look, as much as I smile at stories of the little guy sticking it to the man, the fact is that these guys were helping themselves to a commercial resource for which they had not paid.
Here's a comparative example: I'm an amateur blacksmith. Not a really good one, but passable. I'm good enough that I've contenplated replacing the 100lb propane tank in my garage with a direct natural gas line from the city. The trouble is, a standard residential gas feed runs at about 3-5psi, while I might need somewhere upwards of 30psi to run my forge at a serious working temperature. Getting the city to provide this high-pressure "commercial grade" service to my house is no easy task. It's not part of their regular business service model, and they're resistant to making such a sale.
Now here's the deal: The high pressure gas line is in front of my house, just sitting there waiting to be tapped. The pressure regulator is on my property. In fact, the pressure regulator is mine. If I were so inclined, I could go out to the street, shut off the line at the main, and upgrade the pressure/flow regulator at my house. In theory, the city's public utility people would never be the wiser -- except that they'd start billing me for, say, and order of magnitude more gas than could theoretically be pushed thru the residential gas tap. Surely within a few billing cycles I would get a visit from the utility people, if not the police. I would be fined for making gas line changes w/o a permit, and probably have to pay the difference between residential/heating gas rates (cheap) and commercial (expensive) rates for the time I'd operated the modified service. I would expect no less from our well-paid and attentive city employees.
So why would anyone expect much different from another utility, even if the nature of the product is different? What if I helped myself to an extra phone line, because the wire was there and the local connection box happened to have extra lines? (I did that when I was a kid, by plugging in an extra card to the old Ma Bell phone control box in my folks' basement). I think the involvement of the FBI is overkill, and the example-making is wholly inappropriate/unprofessional behavior on the part of the ISP, but there's not much question that what these folks are doing is wrong and probably definable as theft of service.
Now there's one big caveat to this: I'm assuming that the rate/service limits are spelled out in these people's service contracts with the ISP. If not, then all bets are off, particularly if the modem/routers are the property of the subscriber. If all the ISP has to offer is an expectation of usage and not a bandwith limit in a contractual agreement, then the ISP's protest won't stand up in a stiff breeze, much less in court.
Jon
Bush & Ashcroft: Saving America, once secret trial at a time.
Bull. There's plenty of room in the grey-hat region, and plenty of population in it. The wiggle room for those who crack systems/software and then publicly announce the results is getting tighter. However there are an awful lot of people whose main concern is simply sharing results of bug/flaw discovery or other necessary activities that aren't good for vendor busines models. The fact that the DMCA seeks to redefine discovery and community notification as reverse-engineering and criminal collusion doesn't do a thing to shrink the number of people (admins, architects, programmers, dbas, etc) who simply need to do these things to do their jobs. The grey hat is still a thinking person's hat -- one abides by the letter of the law as best one can, and find ways around the obtuse or wrong-headed sections to accomplish primary goals of systems operation, data protection, and other work processes. Some prefer to skirt the line with black-hat-dom, while others simply protest bad law. Ain't nobody a white hat unless they utter phrases like "He was arrested so he must be guilty" or "The law is always right."
Not too long ago, I sent a note to several of my friends about a conflict I saw between the DMCA-esque proposed Microsoft security certification -- requiring software bug hiding and notification of the software vendor before notification of the affected client -- and the codes of ethics binding those with CISA and CISSP certifications -- both of which require protection or notification of the potential target/victim. (My personal favorite part of the ISC2/CISSP code is "Tell the truth" which is anathma to the DMCA/bug-hiding camp.)
Of course, since DMCA enforcement tends towards the corporate view of things (property, ownership, patents, royalties) rather than the societal view (ethics, trust, truth, community), if I follow the vendor-independent (societal) path, I get labelled as a grey-hat or a black-hat right out of the starting gate. Have I personally cracked and distributed software? No. But do I swear to uphold the right of the consumer to know of flaws in their software or implementation? Of course I do -- it's the core of my job as a consultant. But doing so may label me as a criminal, and not doing so is unethical and unprofessional. As the article point out, all you can do is try to do the right thing. Currently that may be illegal.
Maybe some of us will go to jail for it, but that's what it'll take to change or repeal ill-formed laws such as the DMCA. Nothing induces judicial scrutiny like a situation where a judge is embarassed to enforce a bad law against a just person. But for anyone contemplating the notion of a "test case", keep in mind that the ACLU only picks up your legal fees if you keep your nose clean while you're doing the (illegal) right thing.
J
Some personal perspective on the issue:
That isn't very many data points, but I think the lesson is that if the ring selection is more of a personal investment than a shopping effort, it's a good sign. Sure, the ring should have some durable value, but anyone who says only diamonds have value as a symbol of love needs to ponder on the primary practical use of diamonds: an abrasive.
Jon
I just had a perverse thought: What if this is how the Matrix starts? I mean, what better way to train a responsive and comprehensive environmental control system to become intelligent than to insert the activity of thousands of sentient entities into that environment? The words "self-fulfilling prophecy" come to mind.
Well, the words "improbable," "obtuse," and "gotta get out more" come to mind as well, but it's a curious thought.
-Jon
Two hours? HOURS? Try days or weeks. I had one ISP a few years ago send me to a collections agency when I cancelled my credit card in desperate response to nine months of unauthorized charges. (They lost my check and asked for a credit card number to hold and use in case the second check didn't arrive. They found the first check, cashed it, cashed the second check, then billed my credit card periodically for nine months...)
.au sites, causing me to become disoriented and vomit. Now my CueCat's all plugged up.
...and the number one reason you should disconnect my SDSL line:
My experience cancelling service with Speakeasy was much easier, but still not easy. I was particularly infuriated with the notion that I had to justify why I was cancelling, or they wouldn't stop billing me. (Notice the terminology: they consider it a "cancellation request" while I consider it a "cancellation order" -- just whose wallet is it?)
So for your amusement, I present the letter I sent to them (I don't have a place to host the original PDF):
----------begin----------
Speakeasy Networks
2222 Second Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
attn: Billing (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) [hardcopy sent by registered mail]
8 February 2002
ref: Incident xxxxxx-xxxxxx, Incident xxxxxx-xxxxxx
Dear Speakeasy Minions:
After filing two cancellation orders and following up with three messages, you're evidently refusing to disconnect SDSL service to my house unless I provide you with some sort of explanation for canceling the service. The simple answer is "because I don't want it anymore." But apparently that's not good enough for you to act. So, here's...
The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Disconnect My SDSL
10. Every time you reboot the Redback, locusts shoot out of the unused ports on my router and the activity lights bleed.
9. I think you're a front for Al-Queda opium e-distribution networks, and President Dubba says that breaking my addictifications is a patriotic act against the Axle of Evil.
8. I got busted by the Amish Gelassenheit Squad, and they smashed the server running www.bonnetandbuggiewhip.com I'd hidden inside the butter churn.
7. The firewall melted when I tested it with a torch. What kind of crappy firewall is that?
6. SDSL uses an expensive dedicated line; unnecessary expense = pork; pork = unclean.
5. I'm going to work for a secret government agency and won't be home for a while.
4. With access to all that pr0n, I got masturbatory abrasion injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome, so what's the use of a fast line when I can only type with two splinted fingers?
3. The big round Speakeasy logo swirls the other way when I visit
2. Using an 802.11 card, a Shannon Compensator, a homemade yagi, and a 60,000-watt amplifier, I'm getting Terabit service from a place on 2nd & Pine, right through your skulls.
1. I'm the customer, and I told you to.
Please note that an unwillingness or procedural inability to act on your part does not compel me to purchase or pay for unwanted service from you. I gave reasonable advance notice about wanting the line disconnected, and provided an additional cancellation notice (two, actually) through your support system on the day you requested I do so. At that time you did not notify me that you would want some sort of justification, verbal defense, heartfelt apology, explanatory Dear-John letter, or separation therapy sessions before you would act on my cancellation order. My notice of cancellation was sent before the paid-up period ended on 2002.02.02, so your delay in processing the cancellation only increases your non-recoverable costs from Covad. I'm done using the line, I'm done paying, and I'm done talking about it.
Just turn it off.
Sincerely,
Jon Espenschied
(if you wish to email me, please use my new address: xxxoffensivexxx@xxxdomainxxx.com)
----------end----------
Yah, that did the trick.
-Jon
firstname.lastname - acm.org
I'd recommend springing for the Handera 330. I did, and I haven't regretted it a bit. You say: Handera has a nicer, bigger screen, but is also more expensive. I couldn't locate a price for the CF card either.
That's an understatement -- the Handera screen is very sharp and clear. The backlight is bright and clear in the dark, and because the grafitti area is part of the display (instead of being silk-screened on like all the other Palm devices) you can actually see what you're writing in the dark. In bright light, it's fantastic and quick to respond -- no screen artifacts. Folks used to rave about the b/w screen on the Rex units -- this is nicer.
As for the price of the Symbol 802.11b card, I've seen ~$175us. Note that the Symbol card is significantly smaller and less succeptable to damage than the Linksys -- the dongle on the latter is huge. From outside appearances, the Symbol card looks to be the same as the Socket brand 802.11 card. (Anyone?)
There are a lot of other benefits to the Handera 330 -- the battery life with the LiIon batter is great (important if you're using CF devices that require more power such as a microdrive or 802.11 card), the flexibility of the MMC/SD memory slot is great (and I'm hoping to see a bluetooth SD card soon). The power tap can rechange the battery while you're using the unit yet doesn't interfere with a Palm Portable Keyboard. The folks at Handera did a great job on this one; I'm very happy with it.
Handera 330 ($300) + battery ($50) + Symbol card ($175) + charger ($40, or you can pick up a Nokia ACH4U charger for $2 at a discount place or thrift store) and you're set for around $550us.
Don't do it.
You don't need to. You work in a public school district, which is a government operating organization. Even where I live, with very strong university systems that have opted out of many state security and authentication programs, the school systems are still bound by the state's general laws on proper use of facilities. Without much doubt, you can find enough existing law in your locale that stipulates that state/county employees will not take government facilities/materials for their own benefit. Your approach should be one of "State law prohibits this type of use, and we have to come into compliance before all of us get reprimanded/penalized/fired." To back up this argument, you should have a look at:
- copies of state/county/city law regarding (prohibited) private use of public facilities
- copies of school regulations and school board decisions restricting use of educational resources to educational purposes
- examples in your locale of educators penalized for excessive*** misuse of resources -- copiers, long distance phone, etc etc
- specific examples of educators -- not necc. in your area -- penalized for misuse of internet-specific resources (examples that include fines and jail time are good)
- printed sniffer logs that show the ratio of school-related vs. non-school-related (~95% if P2P media?) traffic
- etc etc
***This is important to counter the argument that downloading 1.5GB/day of music is "incidental" and therefore permitted.With this in hand, schedule a meeting and embarass/scare the hell out of them with the state govt looking over your shoulder. The key here is NOT to invent new policy, but to adapt your operating procedures to conform to existing requirements and regulations. Remember, as the sysadmin, you have much more power to control the technical interpretation of existing policy, than to invent new policy to make technical implementation more straightforward. Your legislature is probably on your side on this one -- you just have to dig up the relevant bits before you jump on the soapbox.
JEspenschied
Oops. I stand corrected. Although, there's a certain appeal to "You've got big boxes." (I'll say it to my female co-worker tomorrow with excitement in my voice, and see what the utterance-to-slappage quotient is for that phrase.)
Also, doesn't the word "cajones" also mean "drawers" (as in underwear)? So big cojones necessitate big cajones, no? Just wondering.
Either way you cut it, it's still on topic, because Apple displays big cojones, while Jobs displays big cajones (as in "big britches"/ego). And if you think that's a stretch... <G>
Not quite. I agree that *Aqua* also falls into the "designed-by-Smurfs" category, but not the whole of OS X. I think it makes all the difference in the world that you can have all the eye candy you want (or can stand), while the underpinnings of OS X are tried-and-true and architecturally flexible.
You can make the argument that XP is also based on the tried-and-true NT-2000 code, but that lineage is pretty shallow and full of black sheep. Don't get me wrong, there are certain releases of NT/2K that I found quite dependable and useful, and I'm typing this now on a company-provided 2K laptop. But a monolithic and proprietary OS/app design that spans from the GUI to the kernel is -- in a word -- inelegant.
I would disagree with your contention that "difficult for (some) to use" is the same as "only usable with a designed-by-Smurfs UI". Perhaps it's just a matter of degree, but imho the flexible implementation of eye candy on a solid yet relatively modular OS is the difference between hitting the nail on the head (OS X) and pounding a crooked one into the wood (XP). Both get the job done, but there's a little more finesse in the former.
Jon
This is a fine response to MS's recent "We have the way out" ad campaign (with a graphic that indicates you should jump out a window -- apt in many ways, but I digress).
The tone of the "Way out" is a whiny "UNIX is too hard" that perfectly matches the designed-by-Smurfs interface they're pushing with XP. It's nice to see Apple having the collective cajones to ante up and reply "Yeah, UNIX can be hard, but (a) it's worth it, (b) we've done it, and (c) it just *works.*"
Interestingly (to me) this is the software version of what I thought Apple was going to do before the iPod was announced. When Jobs said the new hardware item would be "revolutionary", I imagined an industrial 2-U rackmount dual-G4 server with an Apple logo laser-cut into a burly-he-man stainless steel faceplate. With remote Aqua/X admin tools. Now *that* would have been revolutionary for Apple. iPod... not so much. But here they're doing the equivalent serious production-geek-appeal with software. I especially like that X is shown in the dock. Now there's a finger in Bill's eye.
Jon
If it is indeed true that Microsoft was running on Xenix up until Windows 3.1, it casts an interesting light on how flexible Bill's vision of the future was right up until the early 90s.
Funny, that. When I was at MS from 94 to 95 or so, there were still quite a few Xenix systems around in the "Business Systems" group or whatever the hell they were calling it then. I found it particularly humorous because I was working on the MS Exchange Server project, and here my co-workers were using Xenix mail. Some folks apparently wanted to *read* their email, not just to "eat dogfood"
When I think what MS *could* have done with the amount of development effort that went into MSExchange v. 1.0^H^H^H 4.0, if they had applied it to Xenix mail... We'd have rock-solid secure email that'd be delivered before it was sent, managed by a system running on a 486 with 16mb ram, hosting 10,000 accounts. Instead, we have memory leaks, a GUI designed by Smurfs, and secure coding philosophies that led to inclusion of auto-executing-content as message body (= by-design vehicle for viruses, which we reported internally in the company in '95). What a waste.
The hell with it, I'm buying a Mac.
This article in the Economist is a heap of paternalistic claptrap. I usually respect most of the thinking that comes out of the Economist even if I don't agree with it, enough that I'm a paid subscriber. But the implication of this article is that the dotcom era was a childish tangent and that the technology industry has now grown up and realized how the real world works is a gross oversimplication at best, and more likely just hogwash. The technology industry has not reverted to the domain of the "suits" as the article implies. True, many of the internet revolutionaries have donned ties and pantsuits and risen through the ranks into executive management. Even Phil Zimmerman sold his soul to NAI. But there has been a fundamantal change in how the technology business world works.
.NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet. Napster and its progeny have likewise insured the irrelevance of the existing recording industry giants (and the death of their ethically clouded business model). A little upstart company (Verisign) that issues virtual identity credentials bought a company that issues virtual addresses (Network Solutions), and has become the megalith that we should all be terrified by. And IBM, recognizing that there's good money to be made in services rather than only ownership of intellectual property, has hybridized itself through such things as Linux, and become much stronger for it.
To wit: You don't judge the severity of a climate change by seeing how well the oldest and fattest animals are. Many of the dead dotcoms were old-school organizations that took on new names and attempted to shovel their wares onto the internet, only to fail miserably. Although Microsoft gained a lot from the dotcom era, it's worth noting that Microsoft was the domain of "suits" from shortly after its inception. Gates himself railed against open code as far back as anyone can remember, insisted that the Internet was irrelevant to the software market, and has only recently noted that security in network-connected applications is of some importance. Microsoft stock has essentially plateaued -- it's been bouncing around $50-70 for about two years, and dividends are not paid to shareholders. The days of MSFT stock splits leading to the purchase of a new house are over. Microsoft may be a reliable internal moneymaker for some time to come, but it's no longer a realistic investment growth vehicle. Likewise the traditional model technology product business have suffered -- the computer hardware industry has become a lean area, squeezing the life out of traditional middle markets (and driving it online). Traditional old-school service organizations (KPMG and the like) have laid off tens of thousands.
On the other hand, new types of businesses are having an interesting go, and there's been a *lot* of irreversable change. Who'da thunk that Redhat could actually reach profitability? Proprietary networking protocols are dead. Sendmail has been commercialized. Apple has adopted an open-source core, and is now the world's most prolific UNIX software company. Major movies are being rendered with open-source code on clustered commodity computers. More women than ever are finding paths to executive status and power through the technology sector. The center of innovation in browser code is coming from Mozilla, with code more stable than either IE or Netscape on Windows. Java/J2EE has finished
The dotcom world has grown up and joined the old world? I don't think so. Surely anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute can see the clear differentiation between dotcom-era companies that had good ideas such as Palm, and the multitudes of con artists whose shell corporation names are enumerated on the likes of fuckedcompany.com. What's happened is that the dotcom survivors (the ones who actually had ideas and value) have learned to adapt in ways that position them for survival (accepting small but dependable margins), and surprising dominance in others. Some are successfully selling things that are openly available. Others are successfully selling services where the old-school said there was no need or opportunity. The curious thing is that the old-school property sellers (software, music) are being slowly killed by the new-school service/access sellers, and the old-school service sellers are being slowly killed by the new-school open-source/property sellers who find smaller margins attractive. Only in the White House and the oil industry have we returned to the glory days of the 80's and early 90's (and after people look at the balance sheets, the next election will take care of that).
Jon
Hmm. As a "special covert operative" the badge stays in the top drawer of your dresser at home, while you are many many miles away, perhaps with having lunch with people who call you by a different name, and would kill you if they knew... You may not have a gun, and you most certainly will not wear a cool black suit with black sunglasses. You may not even get to finish your couscous before losing consciousness.
.com/high tech "permanent" work. If you are married, it might actually last. If you have a child, you're not automatically perceived as "undercomitted" (unless you have the operative job above). Your health insurance might actually be worth something, and you might actually retire only once, instead of retiring at 35 only to discover that your paper millions are... paper.
Seriously, government work does not always suck. Projects may move at aglacial pace, but they are frequently unstoppable. Compare that to the feeling of never getting to version 1.0. Compare that to having some of your best work thrown out because of some venture capitalist's "refocusing" whim. In gov't work, you occasionally get to work on something really, really cool for years and years. I'll take the chance of that rare opportunity over the constant rushing sound of bungie-CFOs flying by and flitting venture capitalists wringing their hands over excessive foosball usage any day.
Government contracting offers a lot of advantages over
And there's one other huge advantage: no sales droids.
Jon
I spent a long time looking for an upgrade from my Workpad 20x (Palm III), and looked long and hard at the Sony PalmOS handhelds. But when the rubber hit the road, I came to some comparatively negative conclusions about the Sony:
- color is nice but not really useful to any app I use (except maybe the PalmPix, which is just a toy)
- the form factor/size isn't so much better as to justify buying a new keyboard & cradles
- I'll buy into that proprietary MemoryStick(TM) crap when they pry my CF+ and MMC cards from my cold dead handheld.
OTOH, the 330 gave me some killer advantages:- Screen rotation combined with high-resolution text and spreadsheet apps is a compelling combination. Being able to reference items from large collections of synchronized information is why I carry this thing around. Seeing more of it at once (esp in landscape mode) is better. I'm anxiously awaiting the update to Brainforest, which Aportis says (as of last week) is in the queue behind a scalable/rotatable version of AportisDoc.
- I can use memory expansion (MMC), network connectivity (CF), and a keyboard (serial) all at once. And I can plug in the power at the same time. It's not a laptop-killer, but then again, everything I've seen pitched as a laptop-killer is so bulky as to become what it's supposed to kill. This is as close as you can get and still shove the whole mess of system and accessories into a coat pocket.
- The buttons are concave. I wouldn't have believed the difference this makes, but after using a Workpad for almost 3 years, the buttons on the 330 are a godsend. It really does make a huge difference in ease of use if you can just poke a button with the stylus and keep writing, rather than shifting your hand to finger it, then going back to the pen. These guys were being thoughtful in the design.
- The LiIon battery is a very nice touch, balanced by the practical ability to pop in some AAA's if you don't have the recharger with you.
Overall, I just found the 330 a better combination of practical features than any other option.That's my $0.02
-Jon
Good points and interesting stuff. I actually went to college near Hollywood a while back, and watched a lot of folks get swallowed up by the music business. Some of the geeks (like you, presumably) did well, the business folks got McJobs, and most of the artists got ground into dust.
But I beg to differ on the inevitability of continued music industry dominance. I know that age-wise I'm close to the target demographic, but as a well-educated geek I'm not. But it only takes a few geeks to poison the pot. The distant relatives living in BumbleF&ck Nowhere with 4 teenage children and a computer that only runs AOL -- they ARE the target demographic. Disposable income, media-driven tastes, and obedient consumerist behavior. But even if the kids have no idea what Napster was, someone in their school does, and they're getting cds full of MP3s from their friends just because it's easy. They think it's cool that they can make a copy on their Gateway PC (that came with a cd recorder in the base config), and go over to a friend's house (who has no computer) and pop it into the dvd player. To them, there's no issue of being a pirate, they just do it because it works. Hell, grandma doesn't want a stack of cds in her place; she wants one cd she leaves in the hand-me-down computer (not good enough for the grandkid's games anymore) with about 2-3 dozen songs she likes. The kids burn it for her, and voila, the revenue for those $39.95 As-Seen-On-TV compilations is gone. The kids did it. The 1-in-100 geek enabled it. And everyone else eats it up.
This IS middle America. And you know the kicker? The further out you get -- from Skowhegan ME to Needles CA -- these bored kids don't have much else to do than to drink, f&ck, and steal music. Forget the dedicated music pirates, they're not really the core of the problem for RIAA. The problem is that not one consumer sheds a single tear for the music industry when someone "steals" their "property." It's the indifference that'll kill 'em.
J
[my name's on this stuff, so you get a disclaimer: I don't traffic in music, but I teach kids how to use Unix.]
It seems obvious on its face, but here's the rough answer: Music is overpriced because the selling price of a cd is disproportionately large compared to the cost of materials and production cost of the recording. The majority of revenue goes into the producer's margins, and the typical definition of "profit" (by which an artist's earnings are determined) in a recording contract is obscenely distorted. Personally, I consider much of the services provided by the music producers/industry to be nonessential to the production and distribution of music, so when those nonessential services constitute the majority of my expense of buying a CD, I consider it to be de facto overpriced.
Courtney Love had a nice opinion piece in Salon a while back about the continual financial rape that the industry perpetrates on the artist community. Really, I can't think offhand of any other industry that treats its producers so poorly and is so parasitically structured except for prostitution.
As for Fairtunes, it is just what it is: a tip jar. Yeah, they're not a raving success. But when you consider that they're collecting about a buck a song, I don't think they're a failure either. If you have a better idea for low-overhead more-direct compensation to artists, lay it out.
To adapt an apropos headline from another site:
Attention Universal: There is a Fat Lady at the door who wants to sing for you.
This is more gasping from a great giant that is slowly falling. It may take them years to do so, and they won't cease to exist when they fall apart, but the core of this industry is collapsing.
Why? Just my opinion. I and many of my friends are in a significant target demographic group for the music industry. But I bought my last cd more than a year and a half ago, with the sole exception of a $20 gift certificate I got from work. I don't see anyone at work under the age of 30 buying cds. I've spent somewhere between $500-800 on Xmas gifts for family and friends this year, and I have bought precisely -zero- music items. Why not? The question would be better posed as "why?" When there are so many avenues of free access to music on the internet, as well as ways to appease one's conscience, why would I or anyone else choose to buy a unit of music that is grossly overpriced, physically limited, contains material I don't want, and benefits the artist only minimally? And frankly, my friends and family don't want to get the damn things for Xmas.
Music cds are quickly approaching irrelevance. Most folks I know have some easy way of accessing MP3s. Even my Luddite relatives from central Washington get one of their friends to burn a cd full of mp3s and pop it into their dvd player. The receptionist at work (the one who opens all of the email trojans) gets her Tony Bennett fix from a friend in AZ who mails her a new recorded cd every month. And me? I vote with my dollars -- I'm spending my former-recorded-music budget on seeing live stuff locally.
Give it up, folks. The Fat Lady is already into the Imbroglio, and quickly approaching the Finale Ultimo.
Jon
Ok, I just got this be-yoo-t-ful image in my mind:
Imagine the piezoelectric fan on a larger scale, not just waving a metal+ceramic blade (single flexible surface area), but creating an undulating sheet about the size of a letter/a4 size piece of paper using stripes of piezoelectric flexion areas that create a wave every 2-3cm. Now combine this with the latest in flexible printed circuitry top and bottom (or 2 layers top and bottom, for the really adventurous). I'd imagine you might also need periodic non-flexible stripes (ends?) for components and connects that can't be made flexible. Then add a lower-power processor and put it into an enclosure only slightly larger than the wave height, such as, say, a laptop computer housing. What do you have?
You'd get a motherboard that cools itself by cilia-like swimming/undulation movement that pushes air (against the enclosure) across its surface silently.
You'd get quieter rackmount systems, with 1U or "blade" servers that self-vent. ("Ah, yah need tah balance yer server there, buddy, the blades are outta sync.")
You get a laptop that you might enjoy putting in your lap. (On second thought, I'm not sure I want to sit next to someone on a plane with a two-stroke laptop...)
just my $0.02
-Jon Espenschied