While I cannot comment on the US situation, I have been a self employed contractor in Australia for over 6 years - with 22 years in total of IT inndustry experience. Yes - I am over the hill - at 42.
But - in the time I have been a contractor, there has less than 3 weeks where I have not been in a contract. I am three months into a 12 month contract - back at a place where I was several years ago. The secret - do a bloody good job, have the skills that people want and know how to write good English (as well as C / Perl / whatever).
But - the things I have noticed here is the "snobbery" between various industry sectors. Banking has always viewed itself as the elite sector - and you cannot get an IT job in banking unless you are already in banking. This has been so for as long as I have been working. But this is now extending to other areas - particularly Telcos / Internet companies. I came very close to getting a role as an applications development manager for one of the biggies in the Internet industry (clue: they are owned by MCI). But - because I had not had Telco experience, they decided no to get with me.
Meanwhile in my current position, I am developing new e-commerce strategies, managing the overhaul of the complete applications development strategy, ya da ya da. UUNet's loss, not mine.
There is a shortage of good, experienced IT people - who can relate to an organisation's business needs.
Ken
<BLATANT JOB AD>
As a postscript - I am wanting to move to the US - Dallas in particular. Anyone who has a job going for a highly experienced apps dev manager, IT strategist, consultant . . email me at rayk@transport.nsw.gov.au or landkray@zeta.org.au
Despite IBM's (well stated) committment to Linux and Open source, it is their proprietary product lines - AS/400's, RS/6000's and the big iron dinosaur mainframes that still make the profits that allow them to undertake this R&D. These certainly sound impressive CPUs - and one wonders at how much money IBM is still spending on R&D each year to continue to come up with these devices.
Provided there is always a market for the top end, proprietary (and expensive) closed architectures, then IBM (and others) will continue to generate the profits to research and build leading edge stuff. Will you and I ever have one of these babies on our desktop, or will my server at home running Linux or FreeBSD or whatever thump along at 2+GHZ? Not likely, but you can bet that in the next few years, most consumer level chips will use some of these features.
Moore's Law will last at least a few more years, I expect.
Maclir
Disclaimer: I once worked for IBM in the bad old days.
I wish that fundamentalists would remember that this country was founded on the principals of religious freedom
Hmmm - as I seem to recall, your country was founded by a group of people that today would be called "christian fundamentalists" (read:- religious crackpots) who wanted the freedom to practise their religion - but who had very little tolerance of any other view than their own, and who actively suppressed and persecuted any others.
I suspect in many parts of the USA, the same views still apply today.
Now, let us all take a step or two above this and think - the Internet is no longer the preserve of the Universities and research places, supported by US Government handouts (read: ARPANET). The Internet is a large, complex commercial infrastructure that costs big dollars to establish, run and extend. No different to a phone company, TV network, electricity company, whatever.
Now - who pays for all that infrastructure, fibre cables, satellite channels, servers and so on? There are a few options:
The government(s)- so they will tax everone more to recover the cost;
The main content providers - so they will increase advertising even more to recover the cost;
The service providers - so they will charge their users to recover the costs.
Sooner or later, you and I pay. The predominant model (#3) means good old "user pays" applies. And, hey - if you suck down the odd gigabyte or two each month, then expect to pay more than Joe Emailer who is online for 10 hours a month and would be lucky to generate (or receive) more than a few meg.
Sure, it sucks that Telstra are changing the rules mid game - but, hey, what big corporation wouldn't if it knew it could get away with it. If you don't like it - vote with your wallet. Cancel you Bigpond service. Change your mobile phone to a competitor, change you home phone provider to a competitor, and tell them exactly why. Even if they don't change their ways, you well feel much better about it. Personally, I have experienced Telstra's Bigpond service (home dial up, not cable), and it is crap, and they charge like there is no tomorrow. I don't use them - and will never use them. Sooner or later, the message will sink home - they will loose money big time, and either change their ways, or get out of the business.
But, the bottom line is, for many of us, Internet access is either an essential part of business (and hence, an input cost to us, and is factored into our business plan), or for home use - a fun thing to do - and I pay for what I enjoy, to the level that I believe it is worth.
I was fortunate - no, privileged - to have been taught by John Lions, and to have learnt about operating system theory using these notes in 1977. He probably has as much to do with the success of Unix, and establishing the intellectual freedom that inspired those who followed (Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman) as the other Unix pioneers. We owe him a great deal.
My only regret - I sold my copies of his notes in 1978.
Licences, Rights and - gasp - Responsibilities
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
While many people are ready to blaze away about what their "rights" are - they forget that implicit in an individual having "rights", those rights also impose a set of "responsibilities". Under the US Constitution, people are granted the right to free speach. One would hope, that implicit in the grant of that right, individuals have a responsibility to use that right for the advancvement of society, not as a cover to abuse and denigrate.
Likewise, a right to drive on the public roads - there is a (legislated) responsibility to drive in a manner that protects and respects others. That is why there are road rules, and fines and penalties for those who choose to disobey them (no cynical comments about government revenue raising activities, please).
The trouble with the web, and the Internet in general, is that with the reasonably high degree of anonominity that is available, some people ignore any sense of responsiblity. And so we have the spammers, crackers, scam merchants, kiddie porn, and the like, mainly because these people believe thay can get away with it with no fear of retribution.
What is required is a process where people's rights (and I am not sure just where it is stated or implied that everyone has the "right" to free (as in speech, not beer) and unfettered use of what is becoming a privately owned infrastructure) are balanced by the responsibility to use the Internet in a way that respects everyone else's rights.
Whether or not "user licensing" is the way to go, but there needs to be some way to hold people accountable for what they do.
I agree with you but what if you post in an australian Message-Board? At what point does the us have/lose legal power when concerning the net?
Well - I am not a lawyer - but, lets think about this. Any actions I (or any other person, for that matter) do here in Australia are subject to Australian law. But, lets say someone in the US takes a feed of aus.flamebait.stupid.jerks, and then takes offense at one or more of my posts. What legal recourse do they have?
This gets in to aspects of extra-terratoriality, and other huge legal minefields. But, it should be no different to defaming / harassing / whatever via other means. I think we all (except for politicians) know that governments cannot control the Internet - but they can make laws that regulate the actions of its citizens and other people within its borders.
It is not a case of "the government" trying to control the internet. It appears that a US court has taken action under US law and - assuming the harasser was a US citizen - made a ruling against that person. The mere fact that a Usenet group was involved is not the issue.
Sure, the person can find another way to insult / flame / harass people - and if caught will find himself in greater trouble.
Bottom line - the government is not trying to regulate the 'net - but saying that actions of its citizens on the net are subject to the same laws that apply to US citizens in other aspects of life. If you make harrassing phone calls, or threatening letters, or turn up at a person's home or place of work - you can be subject to a restraining order - it is no different if they use the net to harass people.
Now - if a US court tried to tell me, an Australian, what I could or could not do in Australia - I would tell then to go away.
Geez, I would have gone berzerk if one of my professors tried to force his views down my throat in this manner. Sadly, you have missed the whole point of a true University education. It is NOT to turn you into the world's best Linux / C++ / Perl / Java / name-the latest-fad-here hacker so you can get a great six figure salary. The main point of going to University is to teach you how to think critically, to learn how to learn, as it were.
These questions are excellent - asking us why should we do things - not just how.
John Lyons, actually. I had the priveledge of having him teach me about Unix in 1977 at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). I constantly kick myself for losing the books and notes from that class.
One of the interesting comments was low voter turnout. Australia has had compulsory voting in Federal, State and Local elections, and Referenda since universal voting was introduced.
I can hear the objections already:
Forcing me to vote takes away my democratic right not to vote if I dont want to;
If people don't want to vote, forcing them to vote will mean they wont take it seriously; and
Yet another example of big brother and the universal conspiracy theory.
Well, my views are:
So, you think the right to vote is so unimportant, you don't bother to take advantage of what to many people, they have (or would be prepared to) fought for.
Not from experience here. Most people take it seriously.
Take three tablets, lie down, and see your doctor in the morning.
Because we have always had to vote, the number of fringe lunatics in power is greatly reduced, and we have had for at least 25 years, minor parties and independants holding the "balance of power" in the Federal and most state upper houses, to, as one party founder said "Keep the bastards honest."
I accept this wouldnot work in the US - no doubt enought fanatics will argue that doing this violates all articles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and is just one step from fascism / communism / the end of civilisation as we know it.
We have had these systems here in Australia for a least 5 years. They are very portable. And (from sad experience) effective.
They just match up the licence plate - confirm make and colour - and you have a fine in the mail. There is one system, wiht a radio link to the police / transport department, that has the fine being sent to you within a few minutes.
Any design documentation you find will be (a) Out of date; (b) Plain wrong; (c) Missing the five crucial pages that explain the really tricky bit; (d) All of the above
Seriously - A project will fail if the initial design and requirements is not documented. This does not meant a 400 page perfect bound thesis, completet with charts, diagrams, pictures and the whole shooting match. But - unless you and the client can express the requirements of the application such that it can be written down, and understood by someone else - then you are in big trouble.
But - and this is the big but - in general, the person / people who write the code are not the people to do the design and document it. You are looking at a different set of skills, and a completely different approach to the task.
Experience has taught me this - and experience is a brutal teacher.
Hmm - at home I have two phone lines - the standard Telstra line, and a line from C&W Optus, that connects to the cable tv system (not a cable modem, appears as a stanard alanog phone line). My 56 k mobem regularly connects at 49k or higher on either.
Costs are the same for untimed local calls. Reliability is excellent.
Does anyone past their teens and twenties actually like South Park?
Yup - I am 41 - and while the movie hasn't reached Australia yet - South Park "kicks ass" (or down under - kicks arse).
Actually, there is little controversity about it here - but then us Aussies - descended from convict stock with our disdain of authority - are nowhere near as uptight as the general 'merican - those pilgrim fathers (the utlra conservative christian fundamentalists of their day) still have a huge influence on your society and values.
Anything that takes the piss out of the hypocritical "moral majority" is A Good Thing
One would think that the internet is generating "unheard amounts" of loads on various systems for the first time.
One of the most sensible comments I have seen for a long time. High performance, high transaction rate, high availability systems have been around for a long time. Anyone remember the original Tandem machines? IBM Series 1s? By the mid 80's in Australia, a number of of financial institutions were using IBM System/38's for fore-X and similar stuff - dual systems, mirroring data base transactions.
Sure, all this stuff doesn't come cheap. I helped install a $1,000,000 fallback hot site for a major bus company here - but as their CEO said - if the system is off the air for more than 8 hours, all he could do would be to turn out the lights, and go home - his business would be dead.
You have to design the system - the total, end to end system - to handle the expected workload, and to provide the reliability your customers expect (and pay for). That also means havign the people with the required expertise to implement and manage the system.
An antenna radiates some (or most) of its energy, and sends the rest back toward the radio. This ratio is what we call SWR. Of the returned energy, some might be lost in the feedline. The rest reaches the radio and bouces back to the antenna for "another try".
Yeah, well, "sort of". There are three "media" to consider - the output stage of the transmitter, the feedline to the antenna, and the antenna itself. Standing Waves (the S W in SWR) are caused by an impedance mismatch at these transition points. Thus, not all of the energy the transmitter generates actually gets to the antenna to be squirted into the ether. Energy "lost" in the transmission line is just good old "ohms law" losses caused by electrical resistance.
This gets worse as the frequency gets higher - caused by the "skin effect" - only the outer part of the wire (or whatever) carries the electrical energy.
The other thing about antenna efficiency is that the antenna itself cannot increase energy - efficency of so called "gain" antannas is generally because they focus the transmitted energy in a particular direction, rather than spreading it equally in all directions.
What the antenna mey be able to do, with the great number of radiating elements, is effectively transmit with a mixed polarisation - so when the signal bounces around (line most cell phones signals do) there is still sufficient component with a polarisation that matches the antenna at the other end.
Well, I think all things considered, this is *a good thing*. A couple of comments, though.
First - consider the open source development approach - it works well when there are a large number of people involved in the development and testing, and all the little dot releases and patches and pre releases are part of this process. In the traditional "closed shop / source" model, the same often happens - but only those in the development team sees it. Having the "stable / public" stream, and the "(b)leading edge / development" stream helps. As others have said many times - "release early, release often". That way, we all benefit from each others contributions, and can build on other's work sooner.
What is required, though, is a way to make kernel upgrades easier and simpler for the "average joe" - and i imclude myself here. I still have 2.0.36 on my machine at home - partially because personal circunstances at hame have prevented me from doing too much - but I also have a sneaking suspicion that if I dont take extra caution, I may trash something. Sure, if I spent the time reading and experimenting, I would have greater confidence. I upgraded my Win 95 to Win 98 in under and hour - and no damage was done (assuming that you don't class wunning Windoze as being of irrepairable damage in the first place). Kernel upgrades should be able to be run as fairly simple and painless activities - and with a suitable "backout" capability. maybe that is already there - but I haven't discovered it yet. (yes, I know - RTFM).
There is a fine line between showing a product is under active support, with new features being added quickly, improvements to security and performance coming all the time, and these enhancements being in response to what the users of the system want and need (and not just some market-droid's idea of how to sell more stuff); compared to having a product appear to be too experimental, with new versions released constantly without proper testing and quality control. I think that a major revision (2.0 => 2.2 => 2.4, etc) each 9 to 12 months is about right.
Where "disclaimers" tend to fall over is in the legal concept of "duty of care", and similar stuff established over a few centuries of case law (at least in the UK, and also Australia and some other Commonwealth countries). Basically, once you have been made aware of a situation that has potential to cause a problem - in this case, libel - courts take a dim view if you ignore things.
Another point not considered - just because I take exception to something said (posted / printed / published) about me - and I say "Hey, Mr ISP - that stuff in alt.stupid.wankers is libellous" - does that make it libellous, just because I think it is?
Slashdot Mirror
But - in the time I have been a contractor, there has less than 3 weeks where I have not been in a contract. I am three months into a 12 month contract - back at a place where I was several years ago. The secret - do a bloody good job, have the skills that people want and know how to write good English (as well as C / Perl / whatever).
But - the things I have noticed here is the "snobbery" between various industry sectors. Banking has always viewed itself as the elite sector - and you cannot get an IT job in banking unless you are already in banking. This has been so for as long as I have been working. But this is now extending to other areas - particularly Telcos / Internet companies. I came very close to getting a role as an applications development manager for one of the biggies in the Internet industry (clue: they are owned by MCI). But - because I had not had Telco experience, they decided no to get with me.
Meanwhile in my current position, I am developing new e-commerce strategies, managing the overhaul of the complete applications development strategy, ya da ya da. UUNet's loss, not mine.
There is a shortage of good, experienced IT people - who can relate to an organisation's business needs.
Ken
<BLATANT JOB AD>
As a postscript - I am wanting to move to the US - Dallas in particular. Anyone who has a job going for a highly experienced apps dev manager, IT strategist, consultant . . email me at
rayk@transport.nsw.gov.au or
landkray@zeta.org.au
</BLATANT JOB AD>
Provided there is always a market for the top end, proprietary (and expensive) closed architectures, then IBM (and others) will continue to generate the profits to research and build leading edge stuff. Will you and I ever have one of these babies on our desktop, or will my server at home running Linux or FreeBSD or whatever thump along at 2+GHZ? Not likely, but you can bet that in the next few years, most consumer level chips will use some of these features.
Moore's Law will last at least a few more years, I expect.
Maclir
Disclaimer: I once worked for IBM in the bad old days.
Hmmm - as I seem to recall, your country was founded by a group of people that today would be called "christian fundamentalists" (read:- religious crackpots) who wanted the freedom to practise their religion - but who had very little tolerance of any other view than their own, and who actively suppressed and persecuted any others.
I suspect in many parts of the USA, the same views still apply today.
"In God we Trust - all others pay cash."
Now - who pays for all that infrastructure, fibre cables, satellite channels, servers and so on? There are a few options:
Sooner or later, you and I pay. The predominant model (#3) means good old "user pays" applies. And, hey - if you suck down the odd gigabyte or two each month, then expect to pay more than Joe Emailer who is online for 10 hours a month and would be lucky to generate (or receive) more than a few meg.
Sure, it sucks that Telstra are changing the rules mid game - but, hey, what big corporation wouldn't if it knew it could get away with it. If you don't like it - vote with your wallet. Cancel you Bigpond service. Change your mobile phone to a competitor, change you home phone provider to a competitor, and tell them exactly why. Even if they don't change their ways, you well feel much better about it. Personally, I have experienced Telstra's Bigpond service (home dial up, not cable), and it is crap, and they charge like there is no tomorrow. I don't use them - and will never use them. Sooner or later, the message will sink home - they will loose money big time, and either change their ways, or get out of the business.
But, the bottom line is, for many of us, Internet access is either an essential part of business (and hence, an input cost to us, and is factored into our business plan), or for home use - a fun thing to do - and I pay for what I enjoy, to the level that I believe it is worth.
My 2 aussie cents worth.
I was fortunate - no, privileged - to have been taught by John Lions, and to have learnt about operating system theory using these notes in 1977. He probably has as much to do with the success of Unix, and establishing the intellectual freedom that inspired those who followed (Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman) as the other Unix pioneers. We owe him a great deal.
My only regret - I sold my copies of his notes in 1978.
Likewise, a right to drive on the public roads - there is a (legislated) responsibility to drive in a manner that protects and respects others. That is why there are road rules, and fines and penalties for those who choose to disobey them (no cynical comments about government revenue raising activities, please).
The trouble with the web, and the Internet in general, is that with the reasonably high degree of anonominity that is available, some people ignore any sense of responsiblity. And so we have the spammers, crackers, scam merchants, kiddie porn, and the like, mainly because these people believe thay can get away with it with no fear of retribution.
What is required is a process where people's rights (and I am not sure just where it is stated or implied that everyone has the "right" to free (as in speech, not beer) and unfettered use of what is becoming a privately owned infrastructure) are balanced by the responsibility to use the Internet in a way that respects everyone else's rights.
Whether or not "user licensing" is the way to go, but there needs to be some way to hold people accountable for what they do.
Just my 2 bits worth, flames to /dev/null please.
Well - I am not a lawyer - but, lets think about this. Any actions I (or any other person, for that matter) do here in Australia are subject to Australian law. But, lets say someone in the US takes a feed of aus.flamebait.stupid.jerks, and then takes offense at one or more of my posts. What legal recourse do they have?
This gets in to aspects of extra-terratoriality, and other huge legal minefields. But, it should be no different to defaming / harassing / whatever via other means. I think we all (except for politicians) know that governments cannot control the Internet - but they can make laws that regulate the actions of its citizens and other people within its borders.
Sure, the person can find another way to insult / flame / harass people - and if caught will find himself in greater trouble.
Bottom line - the government is not trying to regulate the 'net - but saying that actions of its citizens on the net are subject to the same laws that apply to US citizens in other aspects of life. If you make harrassing phone calls, or threatening letters, or turn up at a person's home or place of work - you can be subject to a restraining order - it is no different if they use the net to harass people.
Now - if a US court tried to tell me, an Australian, what I could or could not do in Australia - I would tell then to go away.
Sadly, you have missed the whole point of a true University education. It is NOT to turn you into the world's best Linux / C++ / Perl / Java / name-the latest-fad-here hacker so you can get a great six figure salary. The main point of going to University is to teach you how to think critically, to learn how to learn, as it were.
These questions are excellent - asking us why should we do things - not just how.
It should have taught you how to spell "berserk".
John Lyons, actually. I had the priveledge of having him teach me about Unix in 1977 at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). I constantly kick myself for losing the books and notes from that class.
I can hear the objections already:
Well, my views are:
Because we have always had to vote, the number of fringe lunatics in power is greatly reduced, and we have had for at least 25 years, minor parties and independants holding the "balance of power" in the Federal and most state upper houses, to, as one party founder said "Keep the bastards honest."
I accept this wouldnot work in the US - no doubt enought fanatics will argue that doing this violates all articles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and is just one step from fascism / communism / the end of civilisation as we know it.
My 2 cents worth.
I think you mean "International Standard" - that is what "ISO A4" means.
Perhaps if the US fell into line with the rest of the world . . . .
Wishful thinking, I know.
We have had these systems here in Australia for a least 5 years. They are very portable. And (from sad experience) effective.
They just match up the licence plate - confirm make and colour - and you have a fine in the mail. There is one system, wiht a radio link to the police / transport department, that has the fine being sent to you within a few minutes.
Ken
Programmers cannot write good English
Maclir's second rule of software development:
Documentation never gets written
Maclir's third rule of software development:
Any design documentation you find will be (a) Out of date; (b) Plain wrong; (c) Missing the five crucial pages that explain the really tricky bit; (d) All of the above
Seriously - A project will fail if the initial design and requirements is not documented. This does not meant a 400 page perfect bound thesis, completet with charts, diagrams, pictures and the whole shooting match. But - unless you and the client can express the requirements of the application such that it can be written down, and understood by someone else - then you are in big trouble.
But - and this is the big but - in general, the person / people who write the code are not the people to do the design and document it. You are looking at a different set of skills, and a completely different approach to the task.
Experience has taught me this - and experience is a brutal teacher.
maclir
"Open the Jamison's bottle, Hal".
Ken
Hmm - at home I have two phone lines - the standard Telstra line, and a line from C&W Optus, that connects to the cable tv system (not a cable modem, appears as a stanard alanog phone line). My 56 k mobem regularly connects at 49k or higher on either.
Costs are the same for untimed local calls. Reliability is excellent.
Ken
Does anyone past their teens and twenties actually like South Park?
Yup - I am 41 - and while the movie hasn't reached Australia yet - South Park "kicks ass" (or down under - kicks arse).
Actually, there is little controversity about it here - but then us Aussies - descended from convict stock with our disdain of authority - are nowhere near as uptight as the general 'merican - those pilgrim fathers (the utlra conservative christian fundamentalists of their day) still have a huge influence on your society and values.
Anything that takes the piss out of the hypocritical "moral majority" is A Good Thing
Ken
One of the most sensible comments I have seen for a long time. High performance, high transaction rate, high availability systems have been around for a long time. Anyone remember the original Tandem machines? IBM Series 1s? By the mid 80's in Australia, a number of of financial institutions were using IBM System/38's for fore-X and similar stuff - dual systems, mirroring data base transactions.
Sure, all this stuff doesn't come cheap. I helped install a $1,000,000 fallback hot site for a major bus company here - but as their CEO said - if the system is off the air for more than 8 hours, all he could do would be to turn out the lights, and go home - his business would be dead.
You have to design the system - the total, end to end system - to handle the expected workload, and to provide the reliability your customers expect (and pay for). That also means havign the people with the required expertise to implement and manage the system.
Cut costs - and you get what you pay for.
Ken
Yeah, well, "sort of". There are three "media" to consider - the output stage of the transmitter, the feedline to the antenna, and the antenna itself. Standing Waves (the S W in SWR) are caused by an impedance mismatch at these transition points. Thus, not all of the energy the transmitter generates actually gets to the antenna to be squirted into the ether. Energy "lost" in the transmission line is just good old "ohms law" losses caused by electrical resistance.
This gets worse as the frequency gets higher - caused by the "skin effect" - only the outer part of the wire (or whatever) carries the electrical energy.
The other thing about antenna efficiency is that the antenna itself cannot increase energy - efficency of so called "gain" antannas is generally because they focus the transmitted energy in a particular direction, rather than spreading it equally in all directions.
What the antenna mey be able to do, with the great number of radiating elements, is effectively transmit with a mixed polarisation - so when the signal bounces around (line most cell phones signals do) there is still sufficient component with a polarisation that matches the antenna at the other end.
Still, an interesting concept. Ken
Well, I think all things considered, this is *a good thing*. A couple of comments, though.
First - consider the open source development approach - it works well when there are a large number of people involved in the development and testing, and all the little dot releases and patches and pre releases are part of this process. In the traditional "closed shop / source" model, the same often happens - but only those in the development team sees it. Having the "stable / public" stream, and the "(b)leading edge / development" stream helps. As others have said many times - "release early, release often". That way, we all benefit from each others contributions, and can build on other's work sooner.
What is required, though, is a way to make kernel upgrades easier and simpler for the "average joe" - and i imclude myself here. I still have 2.0.36 on my machine at home - partially because personal circunstances at hame have prevented me from doing too much - but I also have a sneaking suspicion that if I dont take extra caution, I may trash something. Sure, if I spent the time reading and experimenting, I would have greater confidence. I upgraded my Win 95 to Win 98 in under and hour - and no damage was done (assuming that you don't class wunning Windoze as being of irrepairable damage in the first place). Kernel upgrades should be able to be run as fairly simple and painless activities - and with a suitable "backout" capability. maybe that is already there - but I haven't discovered it yet. (yes, I know - RTFM).
There is a fine line between showing a product is under active support, with new features being added quickly, improvements to security and performance coming all the time, and these enhancements being in response to what the users of the system want and need (and not just some market-droid's idea of how to sell more stuff); compared to having a product appear to be too experimental, with new versions released constantly without proper testing and quality control. I think that a major revision (2.0 => 2.2 => 2.4, etc) each 9 to 12 months is about right.
Ken
Where "disclaimers" tend to fall over is in the legal concept of "duty of care", and similar stuff established over a few centuries of case law (at least in the UK, and also Australia and some other Commonwealth countries). Basically, once you have been made aware of a situation that has potential to cause a problem - in this case, libel - courts take a dim view if you ignore things.
Another point not considered - just because I take exception to something said (posted / printed / published) about me - and I say "Hey, Mr ISP - that stuff in alt.stupid.wankers is libellous" - does that make it libellous, just because I think it is?
>It was back in 1995, so RSI was still not as much in the spotlight.
What?? I was diagnosed with RSI in 1984. The solutions have been stated - rest, expert advice, posture.