Many of the sites they're polling don't have anything to offer to a Linux or MacOS user- so they don't go to them and therefore don't get logged. Couple this with the ability to look like a completely different browser (present in the three top browsers for Linux, present in most of the alternate browser choices for Windows, and present in the alternate browser choice for MacOS...) and you've got nothing in the way of even remotely accurate stats.
The people selling that info are selling snake oil.
It's such that pair programming is SYNONYMOUS with Extreme Programming.
Every shop I've talked to, up to this date, about a job that did XP as their development methodology were strongly into the pair-programming along with everything else. I'm not sure WHY they seem to think that pair-programming is an absolute must with XP, but all the shops using it seem to think so.
A patent can be selectively enforced with relatively little consequences on the holder. They could opt to not enforce this against the other browsers (Not that I am saying they will do this thing, but it's entirely possible...).
...you're talking Patents. This is about contracts and the alleged breach thereof and about Copyrights, which while it's IP and covered by IP law (and has it's OWN messed up things about it) it is a completely different thing altogether.
Now, I will grant you that the US IP system IS all screwed up- Patents granted willy-nilly with no real application of the original (or, really, even the current set of) rules for them, Copyrights lasting forever (They're supposed to be for a limited time- at one point, they were not any longer than a Patent's time for legitimacy in these current days) for all intents and purposes, Trademarks being used to enforce nonexistant IP rights.
But in order to know what to talk about to FIX the mess, you have to understand that there really is three completely different and distinct things needing to be fixed and they need different fixes.
...and whether or not the judge thinks SCO's blowin' and goin'. That weak response from SCO in regards to the initial filing probably won't float, especially with Red Hat's reply to the response. SCO's got very little rope left from which to hang itself with the Red Hat case- the only way they're going to not get a declaratory decision on them very shortly is if they come back with an actual strong response to the recent Red Hat reply.
I don't see them doing it.
Based on Red Hat's claims in the filing, a temporary injunction is likely to be handed down from the court since there IS controversy and they ARE obviously guilty of what Red Hat's claiming if they can't come up with conclusive proof of their public, business statements.
Being a bit more serious, the situation you describe is fine for low level, commodity labor. Try hiring your friends to be your CFO or Director of R&D and see how long your company survives.
Depends on which calibre of friends you have...
Me, I have people like...
Nicolas Vining John R. Hall Mike Phillips Dan Olson
All the above were star coders at Loki at one point in time or another- and some of them are developers for LGP. If I were developing a computer game or porting one, I'd be naming any one of the above people as the Director of R&D if I wasn't filling the position myself.
Suffice it to say, it's as much the circles you run in as it is anything else with regards to the suitability of a "friend" for something like a Director of R&D or CFO position.
Now, having said this, I will, to some extent agree with the actual sentiment- it's not likely that you're going to get into that sort of position, or any substantive one. Most people don't run in the right circles to begin with.
...is through one. The HR departments at most places don't put up ads, they go through agencies to pre-filter candidates.
"Appealing" jobs rarely happen, by the way- and every one of the ones I DID get were through recruiters, because the companies were medium sized and networking just didn't bring them ideal candidates.
The ones that are currently actively working for me seem to be honest (Though I've not gotten results yet...).
Most of the small-time players seem to be interested in helping you. Working with you. Trying to represent you in a good light, i.e. when you don't have an exact match for a position's requirements, they start looking for similar experience that can be translated to the position and try to sell the clients on that aspect of your skills. They also seem to be a little more careful of who they're talking with to place you- relatively stable companies that look like they may work out for you.
The major players, especially in this day and age, seem to be more interested in raking in what dough they can. They're more interested in taking your resume and unless you've got a dead-on match for the position- and unless they see all the little buzzwords that the HR or Management from the prospective employer flung at them, you're "filed away for future reference", most likely never to hear from them again, let alone in the first place. Worse, they often don't care if the employer in question is at all stable, so long as they think they might get their fees from them.
Am I cynical- OH, HELL, YES!
I have reasons to be. (Let's just say there's a certain larger player recruiter in the Dallas/Atlanta areas that managed to get me in the mess I'm in by NOT doing their due dilligence and placed me in a position with a company that did not have the funds to pay me more than a couple months' worth of my salary. This left me scrambling to look for yet another job, and the market having imploded completely from 9/11...)
It dissipates less power than a comparable X-Scale does, so I'd think it'd be in the same ballpark or better. And, an X-Scale doesn't do full motion, full screen video QUITE as well at the 400MHz range.
Nice brush you're tarring people with. Keep in mind that Linux users aren't just hobbiests any more. They're the Fortune 1000. They're the S&P 500. They're Munich. They're other cities in Germany and elsewhere. They're Japan. They're Korea. They're ILM. They're Dreamworks. None of these users are pirates- most of them are the CORE customer group for Adobe in the first place.
I hope you get the point by now. That part's WRONG.
Now, as to the real reason, you've got it dead-on. Adobe's got the same erroneous perception you have about things and they don't see any money in it.
However, they'd better be careful as the customers are working on tools (Film GIMP, etc.) that pretty much render them irrelevent at some point in the near to medium future. Why are they doing this? Because Adobe won't sell to them- and they're just going to do it on their own. And don't discount them- the people in question doing the work are the people at the bleeding edge of computer graphics, whether it be 2D or 3D (After all ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks' sole purpose IS computer graphics...). They'd rather have someone else do the work for them so they can spend their efforts on other tasks- but if they can't find someone willing to do it, they'll do it themselves ANYWAY.
One can write code that will work correctly and cleanly in both, and retain all the look and feel of both environments. There's even three different toolkits under Linux that also work under MacOS X. In fact, LGP is wondering what to do with our Ballistics port once we get PPC Linux support working- it's just a VERY small hop over to MacOS X from there for the codebase.
Just because they're UNIX based but "different" is NOT an excuse for needing or even doing two different codebases.
They don't support my OS (Linux) properly with their IM client- the one they offer is so ancient it's pathetic. I DO, however, use their other services quite a lot. I don't think it's a lot to ask them to either support the OS in question or work with some people on our side to provide the same.
...so long as they support my chosen OS. Since the messanger client they offer is so hopelessly old and won't work right at all on a modern Linux distribution, I was relying on GAIM to handle that aspect, since I chat with people on ICQ AND Yahoo!.
Now, I'm QUITE pissed at them. Not sure what I'm going to do about it, but you're right- it's their network, they can do with it what they want. But not without some consequences for their actions.
If they get that one in, the execs are guilty of criminal activities (i.e. Criminal Infringement of Copyright)- which could land them in at least Club Fed for 5-20.
I'm afraid they're largely more naive than you initially thought. Most people have no real clue how dangerous spaceflight still is right at the moment- NASA's large success rate on things has people believing it's no more dangerous than an airline flight, albeit much, much more expensive.
Considering OpenVPN, FreeS/WAN, and TunnelVision are available, much more secure, etc. I doubt that anyone will step up to the plate for these. VTun's usable as it currently is for establishing quick and dirty SSH based tunnels- and that's about all I'd ever use it for (not that I'd use it, like I said, there's better and still OpenSource...).
Mostly technophobic propaganda
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
It really is mostly technophobic propaganda. You even pop off a few things, most probably based off of ignorance, that are pretty much unfounded statements.
RFID tags can be used by theives to find expensive items on your person or in your home.
With a normal range of 6-12 feet, with signals that can and usually are blocked by things like the construction materials used in a house? Yeah, riight. Most tags don't have a large range. Simple physics precludes it. The antennas on the tags are almost all electrically small. This limits recieved power from the reader and limits how much actual power that the tag can re-radiate back into it's environment. Equipment that can can resolve the signal at it's absolute maximum range would be about the size of a large PC tower case, require a log periodic directional array to extend the range, and generally cost tens of thousands of dollars- for a range boost to about 10 or so yards. Any further than that, and it doesn't matter how much RF power you pump out, the tag can't re-radiate enough signal to be resolvable any further out- the signal's deep into the noise floor at that point.
I don't think you're going to see what you're claiming anytime soon. Even if the costs come down, it's still going to be in the thousands and the size won't shrink for quite a while (unless there's a quantum leap in RF engineering, that is.).
RFID tags provide a means your you to be tracked/spied on without your knowledge.
While the potential is there, it's a lot more difficult than one would think. 10 yards or so is the absolute best that most tags can do because of propagation characteristics of the frequency they're using, size of the antenna, etc. Backscatter tags can get much better, but the problem with those tags are that they're really, really picky about orientation, etc. If you change the orientation to be within 50deg or so of perpendicular to the reader's broadcast signal or do something like place your hand on the back of the tag, the range drops to only a couple of feet instead of 40 or so yards.
Uses for RFID...
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 2, Informative
The original use for the RFID technology that one of my former employers, Amtech (Animal Management TECHnologies), manufacturer of many, if not most of the tollway tags, was to help detect sick cattle in a feedlot/stockyards situation by pulling certain biometrics off the animal through a backscatter tag as the animals were passed from one location to another. Some illness in the human species comes from eating infected animal flesh.
As for something that you absolutely need RFID for, well, I wouldn't say you NEED it, but it can help for things like tracking/updating vehicle registration, for example.
Another thing is to handle logistics (which is what in the hell they're doing with those merchandise tags, by the way)- or in other words, track things like packing boxes of shoes from the manufacturer to the store so they know how many got there, etc.
Sure, RFID can be misused- it's just difficult to impossible to do the things the people keep going on about with it. Simple physics gets in the way, for starters- the RF power re-radiated from a tag is miniscule and limits the range to about 6-12 feet and after that the falloff is a logrithmic function, with the signal going quickly deep below the noise floor, such that it's undetectable by most anything we can come up with now or in the forseeable future...
Tollway tags are mostly passive.
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 4, Informative
Very, very few RFID devices are active in the sense that you're using.
The power requirements needed to provide range, etc. are enormous and an active tag would usually be the size of a cell-phone and have about the same operational lifetime.
RFID is limited in range under most cases because of the power requirements and the fact that most of these devices have electrically small antennas, limiting the effective power they can radiate. Because of this, the devices in question have range limits- dramatically small ones and you can't say that someone like the NSA has the resources to detect them at longer ranges. The signal at 12 or so feet from most tags are so deep in the noise floor that you're not going to get enough coherent signal to detect it with any tech we are going to have in the forseeable future.
In the case of the tollway tags, they may/may not have a battery in them, but the battery isn't to power a transmitter, nor does it make them active. The battery is there to shorten the turn-on time for the tag. Most of those tollway tags have an incredible range because they're not transmitters or traditional transponders (like most RFID tags), they are very sophisticated RF reflectors that resonate at the specified frequency and impinge a carrier on the reflected signal.
Sort of like putting an LCD in front of a mirror to modulate what its reflecting back to a light source.
All the power is in the reader. And even these devices tend to have a range of only about 20-30 yards. The range is there because you're stacking the deck- if the tag is oriented wrong, you capacitively couple the tag to a larger conductor (hold the thing cupped in your hands), or anything other than that relatively precice placement and the range goes to practically nothing or the reader can't even see it.
If you do not understand how RFID really works, you really and truely should learn how it does before making comments about the same.
I've been following the stock price for SCOX since the start of this stupid debacle.
It's up on very small volume, little trades of 100 shares here, 100 shares there. Any time that someone sells a block larger than 5k other than in after-hours trading, the price takes a $0.25-1.00 nosedive pretty much on the spot.
It's up on gross speculation and market maker playing around with the valuation- it's nothing more than a bubble like Enron or WorldCom, and it's going to implode just like them soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the sites they're polling don't have anything to offer to a Linux or MacOS user- so they don't go to them and therefore don't get logged. Couple this with the ability to look like a completely different browser (present in the three top browsers for Linux, present in most of the alternate browser choices for Windows, and present in the alternate browser choice for MacOS...) and you've got nothing in the way of even remotely accurate stats.
The people selling that info are selling snake oil.
But, if I go to the Dallas session, I'll behave myself and wear something else...
Which is required for any piece of aviation (including spacecraft) flight control system that is not on an experimental plane.
It doesn't make for the stringent design specification requirements, let alone a few others.
I definitely do NOT want to be flying on a plane or having one fly over my head that doesn't meet the DO-178 certification.
It's such that pair programming is SYNONYMOUS with Extreme Programming.
Every shop I've talked to, up to this date, about a job that did XP as their development methodology were strongly into the pair-programming along with everything else. I'm not sure WHY they seem to think that pair-programming is an absolute must with XP, but all the shops using it seem to think so.
A patent can be selectively enforced with relatively little consequences on the holder. They could opt to not enforce this against the other browsers (Not that I am saying they will do this thing, but it's entirely possible...).
...you're talking Patents. This is about contracts and the alleged breach thereof and about Copyrights , which while it's IP and covered by IP law (and has it's OWN messed up things about it) it is a completely different thing altogether.
Now, I will grant you that the US IP system IS all screwed up- Patents granted willy-nilly with no real application of the original (or, really, even the current set of) rules for them, Copyrights lasting forever (They're supposed to be for a limited time- at one point, they were not any longer than a Patent's time for legitimacy in these current days) for all intents and purposes, Trademarks being used to enforce nonexistant IP rights.
But in order to know what to talk about to FIX the mess, you have to understand that there really is three completely different and distinct things needing to be fixed and they need different fixes.
...and whether or not the judge thinks SCO's blowin' and goin'. That weak response from SCO in regards to the initial filing probably won't float, especially with Red Hat's reply to the response. SCO's got very little rope left from which to hang itself with the Red Hat case- the only way they're going to not get a declaratory decision on them very shortly is if they come back with an actual strong response to the recent Red Hat reply.
I don't see them doing it.
Based on Red Hat's claims in the filing, a temporary injunction is likely to be handed down from the court since there IS controversy and they ARE obviously guilty of what Red Hat's claiming if they can't come up with conclusive proof of their public, business statements.
Just because the game is bundled with the OS, doesn't mean you can't get it un-bundled as well, or that you couldn't get it to work outside of the CD.
It's a good thing, just not as good as it could be.
As it stands, it may bring a few players over that would have otherwise stayed away from a Linux version or port of their products.
I can always use yet another bunch to help me find another job in this benighted market. THANKS.
Depends on which calibre of friends you have...
Me, I have people like...
Nicolas Vining
John R. Hall
Mike Phillips
Dan Olson
All the above were star coders at Loki at one point in time or another- and some of them are developers for LGP. If I were developing a computer game or porting one, I'd be naming any one of the above people as the Director of R&D if I wasn't filling the position myself.
Suffice it to say, it's as much the circles you run in as it is anything else with regards to the suitability of a "friend" for something like a Director of R&D or CFO position.
Now, having said this, I will, to some extent agree with the actual sentiment- it's not likely that you're going to get into that sort of position, or any substantive one. Most people don't run in the right circles to begin with.
...is through one. The HR departments at most places don't put up ads, they go through agencies to pre-filter candidates.
"Appealing" jobs rarely happen, by the way- and every one of the ones I DID get were through recruiters, because the companies were medium sized and networking just didn't bring them ideal candidates.
Would that be Matrix Resources, Inc.?
The ones that are currently actively working for me seem to be honest (Though I've not gotten results yet...).
Most of the small-time players seem to be interested in helping you. Working with you. Trying to represent you in a good light, i.e. when you don't have an exact match for a position's requirements, they start looking for similar experience that can be translated to the position and try to sell the clients on that aspect of your skills. They also seem to be a little more careful of who they're talking with to place you- relatively stable companies that look like they may work out for you.
The major players, especially in this day and age, seem to be more interested in raking in what dough they can. They're more interested in taking your resume and unless you've got a dead-on match for the position- and unless they see all the little buzzwords that the HR or Management from the prospective employer flung at them, you're "filed away for future reference", most likely never to hear from them again, let alone in the first place. Worse, they often don't care if the employer in question is at all stable, so long as they think they might get their fees from them.
Am I cynical- OH, HELL, YES !
I have reasons to be. (Let's just say there's a certain larger player recruiter in the Dallas/Atlanta areas that managed to get me in the mess I'm in by NOT doing their due dilligence and placed me in a position with a company that did not have the funds to pay me more than a couple months' worth of my salary . This left me scrambling to look for yet another job, and the market having imploded completely from 9/11...)
It dissipates less power than a comparable X-Scale does, so I'd think it'd be in the same ballpark or better. And, an X-Scale doesn't do full motion, full screen video QUITE as well at the 400MHz range.
Nice brush you're tarring people with. Keep in mind that Linux users aren't just hobbiests any more. They're the Fortune 1000. They're the S&P 500. They're Munich. They're other cities in Germany and elsewhere. They're Japan. They're Korea. They're ILM. They're Dreamworks. None of these users are pirates- most of them are the CORE customer group for Adobe in the first place .
I hope you get the point by now. That part's WRONG.
Now, as to the real reason, you've got it dead-on. Adobe's got the same erroneous perception you have about things and they don't see any money in it.
However, they'd better be careful as the customers are working on tools (Film GIMP, etc.) that pretty much render them irrelevent at some point in the near to medium future. Why are they doing this? Because Adobe won't sell to them- and they're just going to do it on their own. And don't discount them- the people in question doing the work are the people at the bleeding edge of computer graphics, whether it be 2D or 3D (After all ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks' sole purpose IS computer graphics...). They'd rather have someone else do the work for them so they can spend their efforts on other tasks- but if they can't find someone willing to do it, they'll do it themselves ANYWAY.
One can write code that will work correctly and cleanly in both, and retain all the look and feel of both environments. There's even three different toolkits under Linux that also work under MacOS X. In fact, LGP is wondering what to do with our Ballistics port once we get PPC Linux support working- it's just a VERY small hop over to MacOS X from there for the codebase.
Just because they're UNIX based but "different" is NOT an excuse for needing or even doing two different codebases.
They don't support my OS (Linux) properly with their IM client- the one they offer is so ancient it's pathetic. I DO , however, use their other services quite a lot. I don't think it's a lot to ask them to either support the OS in question or work with some people on our side to provide the same.
...so long as they support my chosen OS. Since the messanger client they offer is so hopelessly old and won't work right at all on a modern Linux distribution, I was relying on GAIM to handle that aspect, since I chat with people on ICQ AND Yahoo!.
Now, I'm QUITE pissed at them. Not sure what I'm going to do about it, but you're right- it's their network, they can do with it what they want. But not without some consequences for their actions.
If they get that one in, the execs are guilty of criminal activities (i.e. Criminal Infringement of Copyright)- which could land them in at least Club Fed for 5-20.
I'm afraid they're largely more naive than you initially thought. Most people have no real clue how dangerous spaceflight still is right at the moment- NASA's large success rate on things has people believing it's no more dangerous than an airline flight, albeit much, much more expensive.
Considering OpenVPN, FreeS/WAN, and TunnelVision are available, much more secure, etc. I doubt that anyone will step up to the plate for these. VTun's usable as it currently is for establishing quick and dirty SSH based tunnels- and that's about all I'd ever use it for (not that I'd use it, like I said, there's better and still OpenSource...).
With a normal range of 6-12 feet, with signals that can and usually are blocked by things like the construction materials used in a house? Yeah, riight. Most tags don't have a large range. Simple physics precludes it. The antennas on the tags are almost all electrically small. This limits recieved power from the reader and limits how much actual power that the tag can re-radiate back into it's environment. Equipment that can can resolve the signal at it's absolute maximum range would be about the size of a large PC tower case, require a log periodic directional array to extend the range, and generally cost tens of thousands of dollars- for a range boost to about 10 or so yards. Any further than that, and it doesn't matter how much RF power you pump out, the tag can't re-radiate enough signal to be resolvable any further out- the signal's deep into the noise floor at that point.
I don't think you're going to see what you're claiming anytime soon. Even if the costs come down, it's still going to be in the thousands and the size won't shrink for quite a while (unless there's a quantum leap in RF engineering, that is.).
While the potential is there, it's a lot more difficult than one would think. 10 yards or so is the absolute best that most tags can do because of propagation characteristics of the frequency they're using, size of the antenna, etc. Backscatter tags can get much better, but the problem with those tags are that they're really, really picky about orientation, etc. If you change the orientation to be within 50deg or so of perpendicular to the reader's broadcast signal or do something like place your hand on the back of the tag, the range drops to only a couple of feet instead of 40 or so yards.
The original use for the RFID technology that one of my former employers, Amtech (Animal Management TECHnologies), manufacturer of many, if not most of the tollway tags, was to help detect sick cattle in a feedlot/stockyards situation by pulling certain biometrics off the animal through a backscatter tag as the animals were passed from one location to another. Some illness in the human species comes from eating infected animal flesh.
As for something that you absolutely need RFID for, well, I wouldn't say you NEED it, but it can help for things like tracking/updating vehicle registration, for example.
Another thing is to handle logistics (which is what in the hell they're doing with those merchandise tags, by the way)- or in other words, track things like packing boxes of shoes from the manufacturer to the store so they know how many got there, etc.
Sure, RFID can be misused- it's just difficult to impossible to do the things the people keep going on about with it. Simple physics gets in the way, for starters- the RF power re-radiated from a tag is miniscule and limits the range to about 6-12 feet and after that the falloff is a logrithmic function, with the signal going quickly deep below the noise floor, such that it's undetectable by most anything we can come up with now or in the forseeable future...
Very, very few RFID devices are active in the sense that you're using.
The power requirements needed to provide range, etc. are enormous and an active tag would usually be the size of a cell-phone and have about the same operational lifetime.
RFID is limited in range under most cases because of the power requirements and the fact that most of these devices have electrically small antennas, limiting the effective power they can radiate. Because of this, the devices in question have range limits- dramatically small ones and you can't say that someone like the NSA has the resources to detect them at longer ranges. The signal at 12 or so feet from most tags are so deep in the noise floor that you're not going to get enough coherent signal to detect it with any tech we are going to have in the forseeable future.
In the case of the tollway tags, they may/may not have a battery in them, but the battery isn't to power a transmitter, nor does it make them active. The battery is there to shorten the turn-on time for the tag. Most of those tollway tags have an incredible range because they're not transmitters or traditional transponders (like most RFID tags), they are very sophisticated RF reflectors that resonate at the specified frequency and impinge a carrier on the reflected signal.
Sort of like putting an LCD in front of a mirror to modulate what its reflecting back to a light source.
All the power is in the reader. And even these devices tend to have a range of only about 20-30 yards. The range is there because you're stacking the deck- if the tag is oriented wrong, you capacitively couple the tag to a larger conductor (hold the thing cupped in your hands), or anything other than that relatively precice placement and the range goes to practically nothing or the reader can't even see it.
If you do not understand how RFID really works, you really and truely should learn how it does before making comments about the same.
I've been following the stock price for SCOX since the start of this stupid debacle.
It's up on very small volume, little trades of 100 shares here, 100 shares there. Any time that someone sells a block larger than 5k other than in after-hours trading, the price takes a $0.25-1.00 nosedive pretty much on the spot.
It's up on gross speculation and market maker playing around with the valuation- it's nothing more than a bubble like Enron or WorldCom, and it's going to implode just like them soon enough.