The problem is that AOL has millions of subscribers, the vast majority of which just hit "yes" to everything when they install a program. Hell, there's been plenty of times when, either because of being tired or drunk or whatever, I just don't pay attention to half the prompts on the screen.
My company does support for a number of medium-sized organizations, and I've seen a couple instances of this sort of thing. While most of the sites we support have high-speed internet access through my company's network, a number of users have AOL software installed for one reason or another. Don't ask me why, I can't get a straight answer either.
Just today I had to reinstall one WinNT workstation in order to get it working properly again. Various actions on the system would reliably BSOD the machine. None of this started on this particular machine before the user installed AOL 5.0, and other than that the machine was configured just like the hundreds of others in the same organization that are chugging along just fine. Absolutely ridiculous. You think with the kind of resources they have they could put out something that works properly...but then again, look at most Microsoft products.
Ever think that maybe it was just that chipset, or perhaps that chipset + something else you had in the system?
I'm on my second motherboard with a VIA chipset (only reason I replaced the first one was to move up to one with K6-III support), and have been extremely happy with both of them. No problems whatsoever.
If you followed a proper and thorough troubleshooting process to determine as much as possible that the chipset was indeed the cause of your problem, then I apologize for doubting you.
Re:A Corporation Is Not Just One Person
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
On your example of "distributing" commercial software within a corporation...the reason multiple licenses must be purchased in that case is not because it is being distributed within the company, it is because most commercial software licenses contain a specific clause stating that the software is licensed to be installed on *one* computer at a time. If I buy a commercial software package, I certainly can't distribute it to myself, now can I? After all, I am just one entity, no matter how you interpret the laws. But if I have several personal machines I want to install it on, I am obligated to buy more licenses.
Of course, software licenses in general are bullshit and essentially unenforceable anyway, so who cares?
There's a number of reasons why the server would store the credit card number:
-If a customer calls to confirm the order and the credit card number used -For repeat shoppers so they don't have to enter the information every time -For "just in case" stuff, so there is a complete audit trail of everything that happened if they ever need to know -Plus a lot more that I don't feel like thinking up right now.
As far as the number on the card...at least once a month I go into some gas station and find that their reader is malfunctioning and won't read the strip properly, and they have to punch in the digits manually. Of course, you could counter this with having the cardholder remember the omitted sequence of numbers, but most people in the world are stupid and lazy and don't like to remember things, especially when it's an assigned number and not a number they chose themselves.
From the article: "Such federal agency "interpretation" letters to individual companies often are made public, and other businesses look to them for general guidance."
Yes, OSHA was asked for their opinion on the matter. But, as the above indicates, the responses to such question are considered pseudo-policy. Since no business wants to piss off OSHA, pseudo-policy is pretty much as good as the real thing.
I worked in a call center for 3 years. Yes, theoretically you can bring in a guy off the street and have him answering phones in 2-3 weeks. We had a term for these sorts...they were called "warm bodies." They could answer a phone, and they might be able to solve the problem if the problem fell within the exact ranges of one of the various examples on the company's intranet page. But actually troubleshoot a real problem that isn't one of the standard situations? They're instantly screwed. Very few of them ever bothered to go beyond that point, either. They were content to just pass the call off to myself or one of the other "real" techs.
I have also at least partially given up on attempting to teach the concept of troubleshooting. There is a mentality and a thought process one must posess in order to do it properly. I have tried to teach this process. I have explained it in thousands of ways. I have done it with all kinds of examples and flowcharts saying how it all fits together. You just can't teach it...you either have it or you don't
When the bacteria digest whatever it is that it has been targeted to digest (mercury in the article, though it mentions that it could be targeted at other elements), the stuff's gonna be compounded differently when it comes out the other end. I don't know enough about radiochemistry to know if your average radioactive element will continue to be radioactive when it is in a different molecular arrangement than it was in the original waste form. But, from a non-radioactive standpoint, and you're just talking about toxic elements and combinations thereof, bonding it differently makes a big difference. For a nice and simple example, look at sodium (a soft metal that reacts violently with water) and chlorine (a greenish gas that is extremely poisonous and corrosive). On their own, rather dangerous. Together, they're table salt.
You have some very good points here. It is sad that it so often takes tragedy and loss to make us realize what our family and friends mean to us. I lost my mother last month after a 3-year battle with cancer. It wasn't until the last year when I finally got rid of my pride and my anger and just talked to her, as often as I could.
We only get one shot at life (well, i guess reincarnation is possible, but let's stick to just one for the sake of discussion). Love your family. Love your friends. Don't argue over piddly shit. If there's one thing I've learned from losing my mother, it's that there is really no point to fighting over things that just don't matter.
If you haven't called your mom yet today, call her. Tell her you love her.
If you go and have a look at the information on the website, you'll see that their administrative offices are located in California. It makes sense that all correspondence, funds, etc be handled at the place where their staff works.
Well, the Dune books actually do discuss the prospect of computers and robots advancing to the point where mankind has to do absolutely nothing. At first it was Utopian, with everyone's needs provided for and maximized leisure time. Then, various power-hungry people used the robots to enslave the practically defenseless masses whose minds and bodies had deteriorated. This leads to the Butlerian Jihad, in which all the "thinking machines" are destroyed. A universal ban is put into place, forbidding the building of a machine in the likeness of the human mind.
Kind of a dark way of looking at the whole thing, but not entirely unrealistic.
Why can't people stop assaulting, robbing, raping, beating, murdering, driving aggressively, and all the other nasty things that can be done in the real world? Face it, people are bastards. People are mean. True pacifists are a rarity. With the internet, it is now often easier than ever to vent rage. No real skills often required, no physical prowess, not even much of a plan is needed to carry out many simple attacks against a poorly-secured target.
In the real world, we avoid eye contact with strangers, we lock our doors, we don't walk down the streets in "that neighborhood", and sometimes we carry protection. Why shouldn't the same apply to the electronic world?
FreeBSD (not sure about Open and Net) does have a Linux binary compatibility layer which is getting better all the time, but it's still a layer that it has to go through. That means increased cost of syscalls and everything else. A native FreeBSD binary of any program will be faster and more stable than the Linux binary running under emulation. I have run StarOffice under FreeBSD, and found it to be a little too unstable for my daily use...not that I use word processors and spreadsheets very much anyway.
>>Is this really so horrible that it's "the last straw?"
Think about the phrase "the last straw." By its very meaning, it is not necessarily something of overwhelming importance, just the latest in a pile. Just as with its origin phrase ("straw that broke the camel's back"), it is referring to a limit being breached that was nearly there already.
For example, I used the "last straw" metaphor when I quit a job I had a while ago. I quit after a friend of mine was fired for rather flaky reasons, but in reality it was just one small issue on top of many others (low pay, bad work environment, boss became a real asshole, crappy coworkers, etc). What was really great though was when my boss asked me if I really wanted to "ruin my career" over something that small, and then I enumerated everything ELSE to him.
I don't blame gun manufacturers or knife manufacturers for murders. I don't blame car manufacturers for drunk drivers. And I don't blame developers for writing software that could be used in an illegal way.
Dunno about you, but my FreeBSD boxes all have truss...if Linux doesn't have a version of truss written for it yet, somebody definitely needs to work on it.
In response to the first question in your list, what MS did was make it such that Win3.1 would not run on anything but MS-DOS. As mentioned in another post, it was possible with various patches and such (not from MS) to make Win3.1 think it was indeed running on MS-DOS when it was actually in the presence of DR-DOS, but the damage was already done.
In Doom, you were fighting against hell-spawned demons. You were also a "Space Marine." Given the highly Christian-dominated popluation of the US military, you'd think that they would have no problem with Doom if they have no problem with this War in Heaven crap.
The comparison to medical prognosis prediction systems is just wrong. As a general rule, most physical problems with the body tend to follow the same trends, because most parts of the body work the same way in everyone with very little variation. The similarities to various mechanical devices increases our ability to understand physical problems.
The mind, on the other hand, is tremendously more complex. We do not really understand yet what makes someone act the way they do. I'm not sure we ever will, since I think there may be an uncertainty principle involved with the human mind trying to understand the human mind; we may not be able to do that from within the context of being human.
As far as supposedly only using the test on previously-identified "troubled" students, that just wont last. There are a large number of school administrators who are very power-hungry and love to show off what they can do. At the junior high school I attended, there was an assistant principal who was rather angry when she did not get the principal's job when he resigned at the end of one year. The next year was a disciplinary power trip from hell. Student punishment incidents rose in staggering numbers. Rules were placed on situations where there was no problem. And, most insulting to myself and the other students, talking was banned in the lunchroom. This was at an academic and arts magnet school, the one place in the school system where you would think that interstudent communication would be supported and encouraged. I shudder to think what might have been if she had access to the Mosaic software at the time. For "efficiency's sake" she would definitely have run profiles on ALL students. I doubt this is the only administrator out there who acts like this.
Just for clarification, it's POTS, not POT's...it stands for Plain Old Telephone Service.
Re:Everything is Censorship! The sky is falling!
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 1
One cornerstone of intelligence is the ability to take one situation and apply the concepts to another. I'm not convinced you have that ability, judging from your dismissal of that quote.
Here's another quote for you: "Give him an inch, and he'll take a mile."
It is a lot easier to continue to take freedoms from a population if the population has already had many freedoms removed. Each little tiny step taken seems "not so bad" at the time. Generally the process is slow enough that not enough people get angry about it at any given time. Today it's "somebody else's" toes getting stepped on and you don't care. Next year, your toes may be the target, but what if "somebody" doesn't care enough to complain about it when it doesn't affect them?
A good example of progressive-growth rights removal is the federal income tax. It started out extremely small when the idea was first introduced (it hasn't been around forever, you know). Now, an exorbitant amount of money is removed from my paycheck. It wasn't an overnight change. It was never enough of a singular increase to piss enough people off.
I definitely have to disagree with your statements. You learn MORE by reading the documentation and working it out on your own. If you were to ask me something, say, "how do I get the files out of this.tar.gz file", I could just say tar zxf filename.tar.gz. And you could do what you're trying to do. But, if I instead just told you to read the tar manpage, you'd learn why the z, x, and f are there. By knowing that z means to treat it as a compressed file, x means to extract files, and f means to read the data from a file rather than a device, you will probably actually REMEMBER it the next time instead of having to ask me or someone else again.
As far as "information irrelevant to you at the time", this is actually a good thing about reading the documentation yourself. To go back to the tar example, let's say you read the man page and found what options you needed for the task at hand. 2 weeks later, you need to make a tar file. There's a good chance that even if you don't remember the exact syntax to create a tar file, you'll know whereabouts to look in the man page. It's a progressive process...the more documentation you read, the more little bits of knowledge you'll build up without even realizing it. You'll be looking at manpages less and less and using your system better and faster.
Don't cheat yourself by depending on the minds and skills of others. RTFM, for your own sake.
No big deal. Just install from your 3.2 CD, and then start reading up in that wonderful book you got about how to CVSup your FreeBSD source tree. It will update all your sources to the latest versions available (even newer than 3.3-RELEASE if any changes have been committed to the servers). It can take a little while on a slow connection to update everything, but if you leave it running overnight you should be OK.
Once you've got your source updated, just cd/usr/src ; make world and wait for it to finish. Then read in that book again on how to configure and build a fresh kernel, do that, reboot, and whammo! You've got 3.3!
The various BSDs all maintain fairly decent websites (freebsd.org, netbsd.org, openbsd.org). My personal BSD of choice, FreeBSD, has an expansive online documentation resource, which you can also install to your local machine as an option during the setup program.
Also, #freebsd on EFnet IRC contains many people who are willing to help...just be sure you read the man pages first about whatever you're asking. Nothing's more annoying than a user who throws a fit because he can't figure out how to do something which is clearly explained in the relevant man pages.
I think that would open up even a larger flamebait source than requiring logins to post. I've been a moderator a few times, and I try to be as impartial as I can. But, what if the system you suggest was in place, and someone took my moderation the wrong way? I certainly know enough people in real life who take anything that does not completely jive with their way of thinking as a personal insult. This is sadly an attitude I see greatest in the geek community.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that AOL has millions of subscribers, the vast majority of which just hit "yes" to everything when they install a program. Hell, there's been plenty of times when, either because of being tired or drunk or whatever, I just don't pay attention to half the prompts on the screen.
My company does support for a number of medium-sized organizations, and I've seen a couple instances of this sort of thing. While most of the sites we support have high-speed internet access through my company's network, a number of users have AOL software installed for one reason or another. Don't ask me why, I can't get a straight answer either.
Just today I had to reinstall one WinNT workstation in order to get it working properly again. Various actions on the system would reliably BSOD the machine. None of this started on this particular machine before the user installed AOL 5.0, and other than that the machine was configured just like the hundreds of others in the same organization that are chugging along just fine. Absolutely ridiculous. You think with the kind of resources they have they could put out something that works properly...but then again, look at most Microsoft products.
Ever think that maybe it was just that chipset, or perhaps that chipset + something else you had in the system?
I'm on my second motherboard with a VIA chipset (only reason I replaced the first one was to move up to one with K6-III support), and have been extremely happy with both of them. No problems whatsoever.
If you followed a proper and thorough troubleshooting process to determine as much as possible that the chipset was indeed the cause of your problem, then I apologize for doubting you.
On your example of "distributing" commercial software within a corporation...the reason multiple licenses must be purchased in that case is not because it is being distributed within the company, it is because most commercial software licenses contain a specific clause stating that the software is licensed to be installed on *one* computer at a time. If I buy a commercial software package, I certainly can't distribute it to myself, now can I? After all, I am just one entity, no matter how you interpret the laws. But if I have several personal machines I want to install it on, I am obligated to buy more licenses.
Of course, software licenses in general are bullshit and essentially unenforceable anyway, so who cares?
There's a number of reasons why the server would store the credit card number:
-If a customer calls to confirm the order and the credit card number used
-For repeat shoppers so they don't have to enter the information every time
-For "just in case" stuff, so there is a complete audit trail of everything that happened if they ever need to know
-Plus a lot more that I don't feel like thinking up right now.
As far as the number on the card...at least once a month I go into some gas station and find that their reader is malfunctioning and won't read the strip properly, and they have to punch in the digits manually. Of course, you could counter this with having the cardholder remember the omitted sequence of numbers, but most people in the world are stupid and lazy and don't like to remember things, especially when it's an assigned number and not a number they chose themselves.
From the article:
"Such federal agency "interpretation" letters to individual companies often are made public, and other businesses look to them for general guidance."
Yes, OSHA was asked for their opinion on the matter. But, as the above indicates, the responses to such question are considered pseudo-policy. Since no business wants to piss off OSHA, pseudo-policy is pretty much as good as the real thing.
I was just about to post these exact same points.
I worked in a call center for 3 years. Yes, theoretically you can bring in a guy off the street and have him answering phones in 2-3 weeks. We had a term for these sorts...they were called "warm bodies." They could answer a phone, and they might be able to solve the problem if the problem fell within the exact ranges of one of the various examples on the company's intranet page. But actually troubleshoot a real problem that isn't one of the standard situations? They're instantly screwed. Very few of them ever bothered to go beyond that point, either. They were content to just pass the call off to myself or one of the other "real" techs.
I have also at least partially given up on attempting to teach the concept of troubleshooting. There is a mentality and a thought process one must posess in order to do it properly. I have tried to teach this process. I have explained it in thousands of ways. I have done it with all kinds of examples and flowcharts saying how it all fits together. You just can't teach it...you either have it or you don't
When the bacteria digest whatever it is that it has been targeted to digest (mercury in the article, though it mentions that it could be targeted at other elements), the stuff's gonna be compounded differently when it comes out the other end. I don't know enough about radiochemistry to know if your average radioactive element will continue to be radioactive when it is in a different molecular arrangement than it was in the original waste form. But, from a non-radioactive standpoint, and you're just talking about toxic elements and combinations thereof, bonding it differently makes a big difference. For a nice and simple example, look at sodium (a soft metal that reacts violently with water) and chlorine (a greenish gas that is extremely poisonous and corrosive). On their own, rather dangerous. Together, they're table salt.
You have some very good points here. It is sad that it so often takes tragedy and loss to make us realize what our family and friends mean to us. I lost my mother last month after a 3-year battle with cancer. It wasn't until the last year when I finally got rid of my pride and my anger and just talked to her, as often as I could.
We only get one shot at life (well, i guess reincarnation is possible, but let's stick to just one for the sake of discussion). Love your family. Love your friends. Don't argue over piddly shit. If there's one thing I've learned from losing my mother, it's that there is really no point to fighting over things that just don't matter.
If you haven't called your mom yet today, call her. Tell her you love her.
If you go and have a look at the information on the website, you'll see that their administrative offices are located in California. It makes sense that all correspondence, funds, etc be handled at the place where their staff works.
Well, the Dune books actually do discuss the prospect of computers and robots advancing to the point where mankind has to do absolutely nothing. At first it was Utopian, with everyone's needs provided for and maximized leisure time. Then, various power-hungry people used the robots to enslave the practically defenseless masses whose minds and bodies had deteriorated. This leads to the Butlerian Jihad, in which all the "thinking machines" are destroyed. A universal ban is put into place, forbidding the building of a machine in the likeness of the human mind.
Kind of a dark way of looking at the whole thing, but not entirely unrealistic.
Why can't people stop assaulting, robbing, raping, beating, murdering, driving aggressively, and all the other nasty things that can be done in the real world? Face it, people are bastards. People are mean. True pacifists are a rarity. With the internet, it is now often easier than ever to vent rage. No real skills often required, no physical prowess, not even much of a plan is needed to carry out many simple attacks against a poorly-secured target.
In the real world, we avoid eye contact with strangers, we lock our doors, we don't walk down the streets in "that neighborhood", and sometimes we carry protection. Why shouldn't the same apply to the electronic world?
FreeBSD (not sure about Open and Net) does have a Linux binary compatibility layer which is getting better all the time, but it's still a layer that it has to go through. That means increased cost of syscalls and everything else. A native FreeBSD binary of any program will be faster and more stable than the Linux binary running under emulation. I have run StarOffice under FreeBSD, and found it to be a little too unstable for my daily use...not that I use word processors and spreadsheets very much anyway.
>>Is this really so horrible that it's "the last straw?"
Think about the phrase "the last straw." By its very meaning, it is not necessarily something of overwhelming importance, just the latest in a pile. Just as with its origin phrase ("straw that broke the camel's back"), it is referring to a limit being breached that was nearly there already.
For example, I used the "last straw" metaphor when I quit a job I had a while ago. I quit after a friend of mine was fired for rather flaky reasons, but in reality it was just one small issue on top of many others (low pay, bad work environment, boss became a real asshole, crappy coworkers, etc). What was really great though was when my boss asked me if I really wanted to "ruin my career" over something that small, and then I enumerated everything ELSE to him.
I don't blame gun manufacturers or knife manufacturers for murders. I don't blame car manufacturers for drunk drivers. And I don't blame developers for writing software that could be used in an illegal way.
Dunno about you, but my FreeBSD boxes all have truss...if Linux doesn't have a version of truss written for it yet, somebody definitely needs to work on it.
In response to the first question in your list, what MS did was make it such that Win3.1 would not run on anything but MS-DOS. As mentioned in another post, it was possible with various patches and such (not from MS) to make Win3.1 think it was indeed running on MS-DOS when it was actually in the presence of DR-DOS, but the damage was already done.
In Doom, you were fighting against hell-spawned demons. You were also a "Space Marine." Given the highly Christian-dominated popluation of the US military, you'd think that they would have no problem with Doom if they have no problem with this War in Heaven crap.
The comparison to medical prognosis prediction systems is just wrong. As a general rule, most physical problems with the body tend to follow the same trends, because most parts of the body work the same way in everyone with very little variation. The similarities to various mechanical devices increases our ability to understand physical problems.
The mind, on the other hand, is tremendously more complex. We do not really understand yet what makes someone act the way they do. I'm not sure we ever will, since I think there may be an uncertainty principle involved with the human mind trying to understand the human mind; we may not be able to do that from within the context of being human.
As far as supposedly only using the test on previously-identified "troubled" students, that just wont last. There are a large number of school administrators who are very power-hungry and love to show off what they can do. At the junior high school I attended, there was an assistant principal who was rather angry when she did not get the principal's job when he resigned at the end of one year. The next year was a disciplinary power trip from hell. Student punishment incidents rose in staggering numbers. Rules were placed on situations where there was no problem. And, most insulting to myself and the other students, talking was banned in the lunchroom. This was at an academic and arts magnet school, the one place in the school system where you would think that interstudent communication would be supported and encouraged. I shudder to think what might have been if she had access to the Mosaic software at the time. For "efficiency's sake" she would definitely have run profiles on ALL students. I doubt this is the only administrator out there who acts like this.
Just for clarification, it's POTS, not POT's...it stands for Plain Old Telephone Service.
One cornerstone of intelligence is the ability to take one situation and apply the concepts to another. I'm not convinced you have that ability, judging from your dismissal of that quote.
Here's another quote for you: "Give him an inch, and he'll take a mile."
It is a lot easier to continue to take freedoms from a population if the population has already had many freedoms removed. Each little tiny step taken seems "not so bad" at the time. Generally the process is slow enough that not enough people get angry about it at any given time. Today it's "somebody else's" toes getting stepped on and you don't care. Next year, your toes may be the target, but what if "somebody" doesn't care enough to complain about it when it doesn't affect them?
A good example of progressive-growth rights removal is the federal income tax. It started out extremely small when the idea was first introduced (it hasn't been around forever, you know). Now, an exorbitant amount of money is removed from my paycheck. It wasn't an overnight change. It was never enough of a singular increase to piss enough people off.
I definitely have to disagree with your statements. You learn MORE by reading the documentation and working it out on your own. If you were to ask me something, say, "how do I get the files out of this .tar.gz file", I could just say tar zxf filename.tar.gz. And you could do what you're trying to do. But, if I instead just told you to read the tar manpage, you'd learn why the z, x, and f are there. By knowing that z means to treat it as a compressed file, x means to extract files, and f means to read the data from a file rather than a device, you will probably actually REMEMBER it the next time instead of having to ask me or someone else again.
As far as "information irrelevant to you at the time", this is actually a good thing about reading the documentation yourself. To go back to the tar example, let's say you read the man page and found what options you needed for the task at hand. 2 weeks later, you need to make a tar file. There's a good chance that even if you don't remember the exact syntax to create a tar file, you'll know whereabouts to look in the man page. It's a progressive process...the more documentation you read, the more little bits of knowledge you'll build up without even realizing it. You'll be looking at manpages less and less and using your system better and faster.
Don't cheat yourself by depending on the minds and skills of others. RTFM, for your own sake.
No big deal. Just install from your 3.2 CD, and then start reading up in that wonderful book you got about how to CVSup your FreeBSD source tree. It will update all your sources to the latest versions available (even newer than 3.3-RELEASE if any changes have been committed to the servers). It can take a little while on a slow connection to update everything, but if you leave it running overnight you should be OK.
/usr/src ; make world and wait for it to finish. Then read in that book again on how to configure and build a fresh kernel, do that, reboot, and whammo! You've got 3.3!
Once you've got your source updated, just cd
The various BSDs all maintain fairly decent websites (freebsd.org, netbsd.org, openbsd.org). My personal BSD of choice, FreeBSD, has an expansive online documentation resource, which you can also install to your local machine as an option during the setup program.
Also, #freebsd on EFnet IRC contains many people who are willing to help...just be sure you read the man pages first about whatever you're asking. Nothing's more annoying than a user who throws a fit because he can't figure out how to do something which is clearly explained in the relevant man pages.
I think that would open up even a larger flamebait source than requiring logins to post. I've been a moderator a few times, and I try to be as impartial as I can. But, what if the system you suggest was in place, and someone took my moderation the wrong way? I certainly know enough people in real life who take anything that does not completely jive with their way of thinking as a personal insult. This is sadly an attitude I see greatest in the geek community.