What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement...
Great! To settle the charges, they'll double your spam allocation!
Read the patent.
When you put one file cabinet in front of another, do file folders jump from one to the other to minimize the amount of space it takes up, while maximizing the number of tabs that can be seen? I'm not saying Adobe is right, just that things aren't as simple as you imply.
I would love to see their sales projections on something like this. Granted, there will be that handful of geewhizzers who jump on this, but the rest of us can make a complete system with $3800.00... easily!
I suspect they'll do okay if they court the VAR/System Integrator channel. Think airport displays, kiosks, etc. Sure, it's hard to hang a 23 lb display, but it's even harder to secure a 70+ lb monitor. That market won't need DVI, and is somewhat price-insensitive. Then they can treat the rich power user as a secondary market. The trick is to get volume, improve your processes, and maintain profit margins.
Apparently the company never heard of the studies that correlate employee honesty and employee satisfaction. If you screw your employees, a few will come to believe that it's ok to even the score. They also seem to have forgotten that the vast majority of the employees have NO stake in the company. They're probably not going to be thrilled to take a kick in the groin to shore up someone else's stock options. Finally, in the memo, it says if you don't accept it, notify the company and they "may" terminate your employment. Guess that's one way to find out whether you're really irreplaceable!
But the ultimate purpose in buying this was to make my wife's life a little easier when she's home with the baby, and it's definitely going to do that. This way, she can watch all the things she wants to, and do it when the baby gives her some free time.
First child, right? Babies are seriously incompatible with free time. Several orders of magnitude worse than spouses. Sorry to break the bad news, dude.
To be pedantic, you've got it backwards. Relaying was used for email long before Internet and universal connectivity. In the days of UUCP and bang paths, email was a store-and-forward system, and central relays made it work. It wasn't until the days of anyone-can-connect-to-anyone that relaying became a social nuisance rather than a gift to the community.
You dial to 555-1311 (CIA1) with your little 2400 baud modem, up pops the CIA logo with a login box, you type "BOSSHOG", password "SECRET" and in you go.. finding out all about those undercover operatives.
And of course, if you mistype the password, and the screen displays "Access Denied", just say
"bypass" and hit enter.
You don't need to worry about someone determining your scheme and starting to hunt through your ports using the naming scheme.
This is absolutely, positively guaranteed to stop any script kiddy not smart enough to choose a tool that accepts an IP address range to search.
Really, even given a naming scheme, which is easier: generate and type in a list of potential names; or get an IP address, guess a subnet, and scan it?
That's stupid. Now if I move the server from one rack space to another, or upgrade it to a different platform then all my users have to change the config on any applications that reference the server? Not a long term scalable solution.
Not so stupid. Hosts have hostnames; services have logical names. Users remember logical names, such as outsmtp, nycpop3, or engnfs1. In our environment, database instances are accessed via logicals; if an instance is moved to another machine, the application doesn't change, DNS does. Same with load-balancing or failover clusters. The application only knows the logical name used to access the service not a specific hostname (although failover software semi-transparently spoofs hostnames). Sysadmins look up which service runs on which host using nslookup, a web page, or a database on a PDA. Use computers to do what computers are good at.
If you want lots of names, why not buy a baby name book, such as 35,000+ Baby Names
by Bruce Lansky. Then adopt a convention for mapping server-type to those names. For example, a small site might use "servers are girls" and "clients are boys" (if only so you can make cheesy "Bob is mounting Mary" jokes). Or you could choose a mapping between Vendor and name:
HP --> henry, hank, howard; Sun --> sara, susan, sandra, etc.
Generate names to fit a pattern. Divide your servers into distinct classes, and allocate the 8 letters in a hostname to distinguish the classes.
For example, "Type" "Location" "Environment"
"Sequence", where:
Type: one letter giving system's purpose
a = application server
c = compute server
d = database server (or o=oracle, s=sybase, etc)
m = middleware services (e.g., BEA Weblogic)
n = nfs & file services
s = static web pages (graphics & canned pages)
w = dynamic web pages
z = admin server (DNS, mail, gateways, authentication servers)
Location is whatever makes sense to you. We have 6 data centers around the world, so it's easy to keep them straight with 2 letters. I have also seen the 3-letter FAA code for the closest airport used. That is more cryptic (CVG = Cincinnati? WTF?)
Environment, in our shop, is
p = production
q = quality assurance (used to test new releases, and debug problems in production
d = development
Sequence is (duh) a sequentially-allocated number. You can further subdivide this. Here, some systems are High-Availability (failover clustering). A sequence number starting with zero means clustered; the next two digits tell which cluster, and the final digit tells which member of the cluster.
Assign them all sequentially (after an initial letter, and use a database to keep them straight. Access the database using sql clients, a web front end, and via your PDA. (I keep 25 fields for 200 servers. I can find hardware configuration, unallocated disk space, the Oracle instances running on a machine, CPU serial number, maintenance contract number, etc.)
Everybody's gotta have a racket. Here's a free-as-in-beer scheme to try if the tariff only applies to blank media. Buy a stack of blank CD-RW media overseas. Record a copy of Richard Stallman singing "Software wants to be Free" on each. Import them as music; pay the import levy on the cost of the media. (IMHO, you ought to be able to set the value at -$100, but the taxman isn't a music critic). Then sell your hit single at prices below others, since you don't have to pay the RIAA tax.
Sssh! You're not supposed to tell foreigners that we're full of sh*t! Oh well, it's not like they don't know - We've been recycling our TV and movies overseas for years.
The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money.
According to the website, it runs $0.50/student/year. My guess is that they price it cheaply, since schools don't have much money, and since it helps them build a database for comparisions faster. Wonder what would happen if you put a copyright notice (not a GPL copyleft) that specifically disallowed submission to this service? Oh yeah, you'd get squished like a bug. Students rank lower than ants at American public schools.
Don't we all! Read the entire paper. Hell, read the short html version linked to on that page. If he read and understood the "Related Work" section he's earned an MS! Gotta stick up for a fellow Bearcat...
But the "Hot Deals 20 feet ahead" sort of spam implies (IMHO) that it won't necessarily be SMS that is used. If bluetooth (finally) takes off, a low-budget PC with bluetooth card could put a shopkeeper's ad in front of every enabled device that passes by...
Perhaps, perhaps not. Suppose you create a dummy bnetd server that just bombards the Battle.net auth daemon until it finds an acceptable key? In theory you could do that today, but searches would take longer, since you have to fake more of the login process.
Patents have to describe not just what you did, but how. That is why so many are "A Method for". It's entirely possible that they got the patent because they found a new, non-obvious method for providing force feedback, or a new application for the technology, not for the idea of force feedback in arcade games.
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What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement...
Great! To settle the charges, they'll double your spam allocation!
Read the patent.
When you put one file cabinet in front of another, do file folders jump from one to the other to minimize the amount of space it takes up, while maximizing the number of tabs that can be seen?
I'm not saying Adobe is right, just that things aren't as simple as you imply.
I suspect they'll do okay if they court the VAR/System Integrator channel. Think airport displays, kiosks, etc. Sure, it's hard to hang a 23 lb display, but it's even harder to secure a 70+ lb monitor. That market won't need DVI, and is somewhat price-insensitive. Then they can treat the rich power user as a secondary market. The trick is to get volume, improve your processes, and maintain profit margins.
Apparently the company never heard of the studies that correlate employee honesty and employee satisfaction. If you screw your employees, a few will come to believe that it's ok to even the score.
They also seem to have forgotten that the vast majority of the employees have NO stake in the company. They're probably not going to be thrilled to take a kick in the groin to shore up someone else's stock options.
Finally, in the memo, it says if you don't accept it, notify the company and they "may" terminate your employment. Guess that's one way to find out whether you're really irreplaceable!
First child, right? Babies are seriously incompatible with free time. Several orders of magnitude worse than spouses.
Sorry to break the bad news, dude.
-
Because I want to install 100+ machines in an hour, and don't want to make 100 CDs or floppies?
- Because I want to re-image a machine in the field office 3000 miles away, and I'd rather not talk a secretary through the procedure?
Dude, the network IS the computer...No, silly, that's what the geneology websites are for...
To be pedantic, you've got it backwards. Relaying was used for email long before Internet and universal connectivity. In the days of UUCP and bang paths, email was a store-and-forward system, and central relays made it work. It wasn't until the days of anyone-can-connect-to-anyone that relaying became a social nuisance rather than a gift to the community.
In fact, be helpful proactively - go to the "Remove Me" webpage, if offered, and enter the pols' addresses.
ttl? Time to launch? I'll just wait over there, cowering in the basement.
This is absolutely, positively guaranteed to stop any script kiddy not smart enough to choose a tool that accepts an IP address range to search.
Really, even given a naming scheme, which is easier: generate and type in a list of potential names; or get an IP address, guess a subnet, and scan it?
Everybody's gotta have a racket. Here's a free-as-in-beer scheme to try if the tariff only applies to blank media. Buy a stack of blank CD-RW media overseas. Record a copy of Richard Stallman singing "Software wants to be Free" on each. Import them as music; pay the import levy on the cost of the media. (IMHO, you ought to be able to set the value at -$100, but the taxman isn't a music critic). Then sell your hit single at prices below others, since you don't have to pay the RIAA tax.
Sssh! You're not supposed to tell foreigners that we're full of sh*t!
Oh well, it's not like they don't know - We've been recycling our TV and movies overseas for years.
That's nothing. The beta version with better AI suggests:
Did you mean to search for: CROSSDRESSING MONK PORN
According to the website, it runs $0.50/student/year. My guess is that they price it cheaply, since schools don't have much money, and since it helps them build a database for comparisions faster.
Wonder what would happen if you put a copyright notice (not a GPL copyleft) that specifically disallowed submission to this service? Oh yeah, you'd get squished like a bug. Students rank lower than ants at American public schools.
Don't we all! Read the entire paper. Hell, read the short html version linked to on that page. If he read and understood the "Related Work" section he's earned an MS!
Gotta stick up for a fellow Bearcat...
But the "Hot Deals 20 feet ahead" sort of spam implies (IMHO) that it won't necessarily be SMS that is used. If bluetooth (finally) takes off, a low-budget PC with bluetooth card could put a shopkeeper's ad in front of every enabled device that passes by...
Of course, no one said SMS would be the medium used. Think about bluetooth, where a $100-200 PC could spam everyone who walked past your shop door.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Suppose you create a dummy bnetd server that just bombards the Battle.net auth daemon until it finds an acceptable key? In theory you could do that today, but searches would take longer, since you have to fake more of the login process.
You're new here, right? Welcome to Slashdot.
Patents have to describe not just what you did, but how. That is why so many are "A Method for". It's entirely possible that they got the patent because they found a new, non-obvious method for providing force feedback, or a new application for the technology, not for the idea of force feedback in arcade games.