Java and C# is where you'll find the old style coding you've been brought up. Those languages give themselves some new-fangled and modern look, but in reality the mess they create is just as bad as 150k lines of Cobol. If you were able to debug accounting applications 20 years ago, you still can do it today - they're just as bad, nothing really was learned.
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Well, to optimise it further, he just could give you the title and the page of the text book and save everyone to make and display power point slides. Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson. In the end, it doesn't really matter of the dance is writing on a chalk board or putting everyone to sleep with power point slides, the technology used has nothing to do with the learning success.
I would go so far to say, that someone who can't teach without technology gimmicks is a bad teacher. All the best teachers I met, didn't need it, although some of them liked to used it.
As usual, the success will be decided by two factors:
1) How cheap, reliable and easy it is for customers and vendors to implement. If I can't put up a collection pot for pennies without up-front costs going to Visa, the system is dead before it arrived.
2) How much can the provider be trusted. In that respect Paypal is a total mess and deserves to be shot down.
But going by previous attempts by Visa and Mastercard, the system will be a big pain in the behind for all concerned and people will get quickly get fed up being gouged by Visa, so it'll wither away just like the rest.
Who is more evil? Blizzard, for its blatant disrespect for their customers.
If the police had a reasonable suspicion, that this guy can be located via his WoW account, what did they stop to have the proper paperwork filled first? If Blizzards want to cooperate with the police, it even would be ok to tell them, that filling out the paperwork won't be a waste of time. That way, Blizzard would honour the trust its customers put into them by trusting them with their data and the dealer would be in the slammer too. That's how things should work.
But no, Blizzard seems to be playing it loose with their customer's privacy and handing it over as fast as they can.
As to the dealer, he's just and idiot deserving to get caught.
If someone can't even hack the basic protocol of human interaction and social graces, he can't be much of a programmer.
In my experience, getting rid of offensive people is always a boon. If a project needs primadonnas succeed, the project is doomed and won't succeed anyway.
Have you considered how you're going to enforce whatever rules you set for those laptops?
In a business environment, it's easy: you can just fire those that play stupid games to circumvent the acceptable use policies. Can you do the same with your students?
Physical restrictions on the laptops are the best:
Have not network access for them. Don't allow them in the classroom, just have a few public workstations in the library. Don't give them to students.
With the above restrictions, you save a lot of headaches. And you save also a lot of money which can be used to improve the education instead of wasting it on some gimmicks.
That sounds a little harsh, but what's the point of handing out laptops to basically hostile users?
Do you do it for the good press to be seen as a modern institution, which makes it even easier for the students to update their facebook pages during class?
Do you want to just save your teachers the hassle to print and grade multiple choice test and have the students fill them out on screen?
I know, I'm sounding like an old fart, but I have yet to see a general education curriculum that was improved by laptops. In most cases, it was just some principals getting fat kickbacks from some hardware or software vendors for wasting the education budget on toys. The other few cases were blind naivete.
It took awhile, but I eventually figured out why I am not generally in favour of programs against gun ownership. Simply, if I support the rights of individuals to own property for their own reasons and to conduct themselves as they see fit according to their personal morals and philosophies (classical liberalism), [...]
Do you think the same about my personal right to
drive the way and at speeds I see fit?
drive home after a getting drunk in the pub?
end unwanted pregnancies as I see fit?
smoke or inject fun substances?
sell those substances to kids because it's good money and I need to make a living anyway?
own my personal nuclear warhead as protection against neighbour's dog?
If guns were banned today, and all citizens were required to turn in their weapons, do you think that the criminals with guns would trot off to the police station to hand in those weapons? Sorry dude, they aren't going to turn in those weapons.
Speaking from experience living in a country where people don't go armed, it works in a little different way. Naturally, the evil criminals don't turn in their weapons.
Today, anyone can just claim he's just exercising his right to be armed right up to the point when he does something criminal with it. With a weapon ban in place, whenever a police officers finds someone with a weapon, they can take him off the streets on that charge. They don't have to wait for him to do his evil deed.
The second part is that burglars and petty thievery becomes much more serious, when they're caught with a weapon, as it then becomes armed delicts, which increases the jail time a lot. So many criminals decide not to risk that, plus the hassles of being caught with a weapon.
In addition to all of that, if weapons are banned, organising one becomes more difficult. So no more just whipping out the gun from grannies drawer when you want to teach someone a lesson, you need first to find a dealer you can trust, the stuff is more expensive, you risk legal trouble while buying the weapon and so on. Until one's done with all that, a lot of momentum is gone and most but the very dedicated won't bother with it.
But all of this is moot anyway, because handguns are a sacred cow in the USA and no amount of reasoning and real life experience in other parts of the world will change the mind of the public.
You want happy employees? Send them home at 5 o'clock every day, instead of having them play at work. Wasting time at work with games is a lot worse than giving them the opportunity to have a private life. That show a lot more you care about them and gives a bigger boost in productivity than any other measure I've seen.
If your guys have no life and the XBox is really an incentive they care about, provide some for private use at home, although most likely a visit to the local doll-house would be more educational for them.
Your software doesn't make money for the company, it's just producing costs.
Your customer need the software to use your stuff.
From your description, your customers might include quite a few very clever ones that constantly try to push the limit of your systems and thus damning your software to eternal hell for its shortcomings.
Any help you can get to develop it would be welcome, although don't expect your development costs to go down.
This sounds like the perfect scenario for open sourcing your software with you as the main developers maintaining it.
For the regular users, nothing much will change.
For the power users, those most likely to complain, this will be a tremendous benefit. If they don't like it, they have the possibility to improve it. This often reduce the number of problem reports and increase the good problem reports from your knowledgeable customers. Sometime you might even get useful patches, that save you some work. If you're really lucky, you might get a few users who start to code enhancements.
It also might generate some good-will towards your company and ease the integration of your bricks with other solutions.
What has this all to do with software quality? With your software out in the open, quality problems tend to be treated more like bugs that will be fixed as fast as necessary and possible and you get a better feedback where work is important. Making the software and drivers open source won't save your company any money, it won't cost more either, but it will improve what you get for your effort.
The previous poster is right, mostly. If your employer feels your wonderful software needs to be patented, you have to do it. No way around it.
On the other hand, you should strive to do your work as well as possible and support your employer whole-heartly and stay inside the law. Take it as an opportunity to learn more about the patent process. Try to provide good data for the patent.
First is the matter of previous art. Take your time and research it properly - no vague: Doh, someone must have done it before it isn't rocket science. Document your findings and keep the documentation and send it to the responsible people for filing the patent in a provable manner.
The other part is the obviousness, but that may be harder to document that management understands. You may get away with documenting that your things are just standard techniques any decent CS-major or developer knows about and uses daily.
Legal people really hate it, when they can't deny knowing about holes in their patent. And if you did your work properly, the patent shouldn't have many legs to stand on, should they go ahead.
Bob Sutor is a darned clever guy. I met him at ISSAC '94.
[...]
He's a lot more clever than you or I and definitely isn't clueless.
So if Mr. Sutor is so interested in getting open source industry solutions and he's such a clever guy, why can't he even convince his own manager colleagues at IBM that it would be a good idea for the Tivoli line?
The products there would perfectly fit the profile, quite a lot of them run under Linux and it really would help the quality of the products.
You know what the reason is? That Mr. Sutor manager colleagues don't give a rat's fart about how clever Mr. Sutor is and prefer to make their sales targets by selling licenses of said products and have no interest in open-saucing their cash cows.
And if Mr. Sutor can't even convince his own employer how good the idea to open-source useful industry applications, why should he have more luck with other vendors?
From a commercial point of view, making products open source makes only sense in certain circumstances. The development of useful open-source alternatives from scratch also need a certain environment to work. If neither is present for an application there won't be good open source software.
At the moment there are quite a few industry specific applications based on Linux
Examples, please?
There are quite a lot of element managers for Telco equipment that run on Linux. But those things usually come with a server included, pre-installed as a black box.
If you take a look at the IBM Tivoli Products, there are a lot that also run on Linux.
There are many more similar cases, but those companies are mostly in the business of selling their product or service and they don't seem themselves as Linux advocates.
Linux to them is about as important as the brand of Petrol they use in their BMW.
This IBM guy is pretty clueless or just a vulture waiting for easy pickings to come around.
At the moment there are quite a few industry specific applications based on Linux, but they cost, often a lot and they come with their own servers. For those solutions, Linux was an attractive, because the development platform was easily available and the OS was free, thus reducing the cost for the vendor (but not the client).
Those companies make good money by selling those solutions and from them there's very little motivation to throw the money away.
From time to time there are open source clones started for some of these applications, but usually they don't go very far because often they lack the developer base. The potential clients are usually big enterprises who don't care much about license costs and who at the same time have no interest of letting their employees write open source software (usually because of the potential hassles with the legal department)
If Mr. Sutor wants to see more Open Source domain specific application, he should start at IBM. The whole Tivoli product line would be a good candidate.
The Article on Darkreading seems to be quite biased on blaming TrueCrypt, while the on in PC-world is more balanced.
The problem is that a lot of commonly used applications and operating systems love to splatter information about what you do around. So you end up with helpful entries in Recently used Documents, the registry and various temporary files contain part of your data.
If you now want to hide the fact that there's more data hidden somewhere, that's a big problem, one the authors believe won't be solvable by the hiding application alone.
This is how the discussion is planned to go:
Mr. Official: Hand over the password or take another dive.
You: Yes Mr. Official, Sir. It's p455w0rd
Mr. Official: Hmmm... Playboy nudies... where's the interesting stuff?
You: That's all there is, honestly.
Mr. Official: What about the hidden partition of TrueCrypt?
You: What partition? I just hide the nudies from my wife for lonely evenings. She would kill me if she new I have a faible for oiled 20 year old supermodels in exotic settings.
Here's how it should end. What people don't want is a continuation like this:
Mr. Official: It seems, you recently accessed h:\business\colombia\cokedelivery.xls. Hand over that second encryption key. We know there's more on that computer of yours.
the rules for the economy across this small globe are for a big part the way they are, because American policy and American interests made them this way to best serve America. You and your fellow citizens didn't give a damn in the past 40 years, if the the cards were stacked against coffee or banana farmers in some banana republics or where all the ore and oil came from and how it was produced - as long as you got it cheap.
Unfortunately for you, in the past years, clever and unscrupulous people across the world, specially in India and China, found ways to exploit those same rules to take advantage of America. This is very sad, about as sad as it was before for a good part of the rest of the world. And it would be only fair to quote you back all the helpful things uttered about this in the past by Americans, but that would be petty-minded.
So best get used to it and hope for the wind to change again. Whining really doesn't improve matters.
For example, with the rising oil prices, the production in China is becoming less profitable because transport will eat up the gains. A certain trend to move production back to America can be discerned. Once the costs of transport exceeds local production costs, Chinese factories could produce the stuff for free and it would be cheaper to produce locally.
Bringing back services might be a little harder, but here too some companies moved customer service back from India to the states, specially for people paying for the service.
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
So how was it before copyright was invented? There the artists did for a good part commission work and had no claims to any further pay after delivering the work. And, surprise over surprise they could also make a living.
I gotta rolls royce, cause its good for my voice, [...]
-- T. Rex
So what will happen in case that whole media business collapses and artists can't get any money at all from that evil internet for their hard work?
First, it'll affect only the very few acts that make it into the charts of any kind. Most musicians across the world don't live off their royalties, they live from playing music. Some famous acts like the Grateful Dead have proven it works.
Well, Britney-darling and Christina will have a harder time to get that Roll Royce for their voices, but do you really think this would be a global cataclysm?
It all depends on how much you depend on this one job. You say that's your first job after university, I assume you're quite young and I hope you don't have too many mouths to feed.
Try to be open and give the outsourcer a chance. Sometimes new avenues open up and you can move into directions you didn't expect before.
Start looking for a new job. The outsourcing is a change, and while you're changing, you might change to something better, if it presents itself. That makes the outsourcer compete with the regular job market.
After the outsourcing there'll be a lot of shuffling around and your new overlords don't know you. Visible people tend to get noticed more, the quite guy sitting in his corner and doing a good job is often missed. Try to be welcoming to them, appear cooperative and friendly. At the same time expect to be fed only bullshit, but that should be business as usual.
At the same time, don't take any crap - if you can afford it. If you don't like your new employer, this might be your one chance to fight for your rights and find out what your right are. Give the new employer good reasons to believe you won't go silently and go though all those fun worker protection regulations. Outsourcer really hate that. They want sheep they can slaughter in piece and who'll run to the abattoir on their own and wait silently in the queue to be processed. This obviously doesn't work if you have seven kids to feed and it's the only job you'll ever get.
If you don't want to stay there, it might be worth waiting for a decent severance package. Very often, at some points packages are offered and it would be waste if you left on your own without it shortly before it came availble.
That gimmick curtain will be a lot more expensive than a regular curtain, even one of better quality.
You'll better off if you get a regular curtain and use a fraction of the money saved to power your fan from the wall plug for the next 150 years.
If you can't do photovoltaics properly, don't do it. Half-baked solutions are only a waste of money and bad for the environment. It's a bit like driving 50 km extra to that other supermarket to save 5 cents on the bottle of cola.
If you have some magic photovoltaic cells that can be used as pavement and survive the wear and tear of daily traffic and still produce a good amount of power, it might work.
But as far as I know, no such thing exists, so this idea is about as good as the fart-collection undies to store the methane at the source and provide bio-gas energy.
If you want to do solar power, better do it properly and mount decent solar cells in a place where it really can generate power (eg on the roof in the right direction with the right inclination).
The idea of those curtains is just stupid, because you dole out good money to get some crappy cells which end up being mounted in a bad place.
If you happen to live in a hot area, it would be far more ecological if you invested in some proper shading that the load on the air conditioning can be reduced. That saves more that those stupid curtains will ever produce. For the money saved, get decent cells on the roof.
If you live in a cold area - usually with only few hours of good sunlight - the curtains are even more stupid, because they produce even less. Invest in good double or triple glazing to keep the heat in and catch the few sun-rays you get to heat the room.
To sum it up, this junk gimmick is exactly what home shopping TV would try push to ride the eco-wave. Do the environment a favor and forget about that stupid idea.
If they use Busybox or the kernel unmodified, it might be enough if they point you to the default repository. They also have no obligations, to make available applications they build on top of those packages or the configuration parameters.
Things usually get messy, if those people start to include their own drivers or modify the packages. Then they need to publish those for their customers.
Finding out which is the case can take time, and if they just tell you to get the sources at www.busybox.net, you have an uphill battle before you to find out if they modified the default package.
Privacy is not at all difficult to define, understand, or to properly address in either the social or political sense. The main problem I see in this discussion is, that people miss the important point. The whole privacy discussion shouldn't be about what information I can hide from other people. This has changed constantly over time and will change again. When living in open huts without walls, private mattress acrobatics can be less expected than when everyone has his own little fortress box with 1.5 rooms.
The real problem with privacy that makes it such a hot topic is the question: What does my neighbour know about me that I can't know about him?
And this can be addressed in two ways: Either try to keep stuff private or make the same stuff public for everyone.
The first approach is hard and recent experience indicates that it'll fail more often as time goes by.
The approach to make stuff public that can't be properly kept confidential has been taken a few times already, starting with SEC filings and public tax records in Finland. When the switch over happens, this will make a big splash and lead to a lot of discussions, but once that initial phase is over, people will learn to live with it. It's a bit like in a nudist community, the novelty of bare boobs fade quickly and people start to wish that some specimens where hidden beneath clothes.
So please, when dealing with privacy matters, also consider making the data public for everyone. Why not resolve the whole matter with a law along the lines:
Whoever processes data about third parties needs to make all data and all derived data public.
Same here, I also run Xubuntu on a quite nice Laptop with 2 GB. Why? Because at the time when I started out with Ubuntu it felt a little sluggish from time to time and Xubuntu didn't. I also realised that I don't care about Nautilus and those other fancy desktop thingies Gnome offers and XFCE pretty much does what I need without getting in my way. Most of my work is either in the mail client, the web browser (like now) or in a ssh session to a VM anyway.
For some time I considered looking for a distro better fitting my profile, but as I'm quite happy with the selection of packages and updates offered by Ubuntu, switching doesn't seem to promise too much benefit for the effort.
Somehow XUbuntu feels like a natural Upgrade from Windows 95. Unspectacular, but it doesn't get in your way and my grandmother doesn't get confused by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Java and C# is where you'll find the old style coding you've been brought up. Those languages give themselves some new-fangled and modern look, but in reality the mess they create is just as bad as 150k lines of Cobol. If you were able to debug accounting applications 20 years ago, you still can do it today - they're just as bad, nothing really was learned.
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Well, to optimise it further, he just could give you the title and the page of the text book and save everyone to make and display power point slides. Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson. In the end, it doesn't really matter of the dance is writing on a chalk board or putting everyone to sleep with power point slides, the technology used has nothing to do with the learning success.
I would go so far to say, that someone who can't teach without technology gimmicks is a bad teacher. All the best teachers I met, didn't need it, although some of them liked to used it.
As usual, the success will be decided by two factors:
1) How cheap, reliable and easy it is for customers and vendors to implement. If I can't put up a collection pot for pennies without up-front costs going to Visa, the system is dead before it arrived.
2) How much can the provider be trusted. In that respect Paypal is a total mess and deserves to be shot down.
But going by previous attempts by Visa and Mastercard, the system will be a big pain in the behind for all concerned and people will get quickly get fed up being gouged by Visa, so it'll wither away just like the rest.
Who is more evil? Blizzard, for its blatant disrespect for their customers.
If the police had a reasonable suspicion, that this guy can be located via his WoW account, what did they stop to have the proper paperwork filled first? If Blizzards want to cooperate with the police, it even would be ok to tell them, that filling out the paperwork won't be a waste of time. That way, Blizzard would honour the trust its customers put into them by trusting them with their data and the dealer would be in the slammer too. That's how things should work.
But no, Blizzard seems to be playing it loose with their customer's privacy and handing it over as fast as they can.
As to the dealer, he's just and idiot deserving to get caught.
If someone can't even hack the basic protocol of human interaction and social graces, he can't be much of a programmer.
In my experience, getting rid of offensive people is always a boon. If a project needs primadonnas succeed, the project is doomed and won't succeed anyway.
Have you considered how you're going to enforce whatever rules you set for those laptops?
In a business environment, it's easy: you can just fire those that play stupid games to circumvent the acceptable use policies. Can you do the same with your students?
Physical restrictions on the laptops are the best:
Have not network access for them.
Don't allow them in the classroom, just have a few public workstations in the library.
Don't give them to students.
With the above restrictions, you save a lot of headaches. And you save also a lot of money which can be used to improve the education instead of wasting it on some gimmicks.
That sounds a little harsh, but what's the point of handing out laptops to basically hostile users?
Do you do it for the good press to be seen as a modern institution, which makes it even easier for the students to update their facebook pages during class?
Do you want to just save your teachers the hassle to print and grade multiple choice test and have the students fill them out on screen?
I know, I'm sounding like an old fart, but I have yet to see a general education curriculum that was improved by laptops. In most cases, it was just some principals getting fat kickbacks from some hardware or software vendors for wasting the education budget on toys. The other few cases were blind naivete.
It took awhile, but I eventually figured out why I am not generally in favour of programs against gun ownership. Simply, if I support the rights of individuals to own property for their own reasons and to conduct themselves as they see fit according to their personal morals and philosophies (classical liberalism), [...]
Do you think the same about my personal right to
If guns were banned today, and all citizens were required to turn in their weapons, do you think that the criminals with guns would trot off to the police station to hand in those weapons? Sorry dude, they aren't going to turn in those weapons.
Speaking from experience living in a country where people don't go armed, it works in a little different way. Naturally, the evil criminals don't turn in their weapons.
Today, anyone can just claim he's just exercising his right to be armed right up to the point when he does something criminal with it. With a weapon ban in place, whenever a police officers finds someone with a weapon, they can take him off the streets on that charge. They don't have to wait for him to do his evil deed.
The second part is that burglars and petty thievery becomes much more serious, when they're caught with a weapon, as it then becomes armed delicts, which increases the jail time a lot. So many criminals decide not to risk that, plus the hassles of being caught with a weapon.
In addition to all of that, if weapons are banned, organising one becomes more difficult. So no more just whipping out the gun from grannies drawer when you want to teach someone a lesson, you need first to find a dealer you can trust, the stuff is more expensive, you risk legal trouble while buying the weapon and so on. Until one's done with all that, a lot of momentum is gone and most but the very dedicated won't bother with it.
But all of this is moot anyway, because handguns are a sacred cow in the USA and no amount of reasoning and real life experience in other parts of the world will change the mind of the public.
You want happy employees? Send them home at 5 o'clock every day, instead of having them play at work. Wasting time at work with games is a lot worse than giving them the opportunity to have a private life. That show a lot more you care about them and gives a bigger boost in productivity than any other measure I've seen.
If your guys have no life and the XBox is really an incentive they care about, provide some for private use at home, although most likely a visit to the local doll-house would be more educational for them.
Keep in mind that the software in certain types of devices is part of the 'competitive advantage' over other suppliers.
If the software is such a competitive advantage, there's money in it and proper software-development should be possible.
This sounds like the perfect scenario for open sourcing your software with you as the main developers maintaining it.
For the regular users, nothing much will change.
For the power users, those most likely to complain, this will be a tremendous benefit. If they don't like it, they have the possibility to improve it. This often reduce the number of problem reports and increase the good problem reports from your knowledgeable customers. Sometime you might even get useful patches, that save you some work. If you're really lucky, you might get a few users who start to code enhancements.
It also might generate some good-will towards your company and ease the integration of your bricks with other solutions.
What has this all to do with software quality? With your software out in the open, quality problems tend to be treated more like bugs that will be fixed as fast as necessary and possible and you get a better feedback where work is important. Making the software and drivers open source won't save your company any money, it won't cost more either, but it will improve what you get for your effort.
The previous poster is right, mostly. If your employer feels your wonderful software needs to be patented, you have to do it. No way around it.
On the other hand, you should strive to do your work as well as possible and support your employer whole-heartly and stay inside the law. Take it as an opportunity to learn more about the patent process. Try to provide good data for the patent.
First is the matter of previous art. Take your time and research it properly - no vague: Doh, someone must have done it before it isn't rocket science. Document your findings and keep the documentation and send it to the responsible people for filing the patent in a provable manner.
The other part is the obviousness, but that may be harder to document that management understands. You may get away with documenting that your things are just standard techniques any decent CS-major or developer knows about and uses daily.
Legal people really hate it, when they can't deny knowing about holes in their patent. And if you did your work properly, the patent shouldn't have many legs to stand on, should they go ahead.
Bob Sutor is a darned clever guy. I met him at ISSAC '94.
[...]
He's a lot more clever than you or I and definitely isn't clueless.
So if Mr. Sutor is so interested in getting open source industry solutions and he's such a clever guy, why can't he even convince his own manager colleagues at IBM that it would be a good idea for the Tivoli line?
The products there would perfectly fit the profile, quite a lot of them run under Linux and it really would help the quality of the products.
You know what the reason is? That Mr. Sutor manager colleagues don't give a rat's fart about how clever Mr. Sutor is and prefer to make their sales targets by selling licenses of said products and have no interest in open-saucing their cash cows.
And if Mr. Sutor can't even convince his own employer how good the idea to open-source useful industry applications, why should he have more luck with other vendors?
From a commercial point of view, making products open source makes only sense in certain circumstances. The development of useful open-source alternatives from scratch also need a certain environment to work. If neither is present for an application there won't be good open source software.
Examples, please?
There are quite a lot of element managers for Telco equipment that run on Linux. But those things usually come with a server included, pre-installed as a black box.
If you take a look at the IBM Tivoli Products, there are a lot that also run on Linux.
There are many more similar cases, but those companies are mostly in the business of selling their product or service and they don't seem themselves as Linux advocates.
Linux to them is about as important as the brand of Petrol they use in their BMW.
This IBM guy is pretty clueless or just a vulture waiting for easy pickings to come around.
At the moment there are quite a few industry specific applications based on Linux, but they cost, often a lot and they come with their own servers. For those solutions, Linux was an attractive, because the development platform was easily available and the OS was free, thus reducing the cost for the vendor (but not the client).
Those companies make good money by selling those solutions and from them there's very little motivation to throw the money away.
From time to time there are open source clones started for some of these applications, but usually they don't go very far because often they lack the developer base. The potential clients are usually big enterprises who don't care much about license costs and who at the same time have no interest of letting their employees write open source software (usually because of the potential hassles with the legal department)
If Mr. Sutor wants to see more Open Source domain specific application, he should start at IBM. The whole Tivoli product line would be a good candidate.
The Article on Darkreading seems to be quite biased on blaming TrueCrypt, while the on in PC-world is more balanced.
The problem is that a lot of commonly used applications and operating systems love to splatter information about what you do around. So you end up with helpful entries in Recently used Documents, the registry and various temporary files contain part of your data.
If you now want to hide the fact that there's more data hidden somewhere, that's a big problem, one the authors believe won't be solvable by the hiding application alone.
This is how the discussion is planned to go:
Mr. Official: Hand over the password or take another dive.
You: Yes Mr. Official, Sir. It's p455w0rd
Mr. Official: Hmmm ... Playboy nudies ... where's the interesting stuff?
You: That's all there is, honestly.
Mr. Official: What about the hidden partition of TrueCrypt?
You: What partition? I just hide the nudies from my wife for lonely evenings. She would kill me if she new I have a faible for oiled 20 year old supermodels in exotic settings.
Here's how it should end. What people don't want is a continuation like this:
Mr. Official: It seems, you recently accessed h:\business\colombia\cokedelivery.xls. Hand over that second encryption key. We know there's more on that computer of yours.
You: What ... blubber ... blubber ... gasp ... blubber
My dear American Citizen,
the rules for the economy across this small globe are for a big part the way they are, because American policy and American interests made them this way to best serve America. You and your fellow citizens didn't give a damn in the past 40 years, if the the cards were stacked against coffee or banana farmers in some banana republics or where all the ore and oil came from and how it was produced - as long as you got it cheap.
Unfortunately for you, in the past years, clever and unscrupulous people across the world, specially in India and China, found ways to exploit those same rules to take advantage of America. This is very sad, about as sad as it was before for a good part of the rest of the world. And it would be only fair to quote you back all the helpful things uttered about this in the past by Americans, but that would be petty-minded.
So best get used to it and hope for the wind to change again. Whining really doesn't improve matters.
For example, with the rising oil prices, the production in China is becoming less profitable because transport will eat up the gains. A certain trend to move production back to America can be discerned. Once the costs of transport exceeds local production costs, Chinese factories could produce the stuff for free and it would be cheaper to produce locally.
Bringing back services might be a little harder, but here too some companies moved customer service back from India to the states, specially for people paying for the service.
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
So how was it before copyright was invented? There the artists did for a good part commission work and had no claims to any further pay after delivering the work. And, surprise over surprise they could also make a living.
I gotta rolls royce, cause its good for my voice, [...]
-- T. Rex
So what will happen in case that whole media business collapses and artists can't get any money at all from that evil internet for their hard work?
First, it'll affect only the very few acts that make it into the charts of any kind. Most musicians across the world don't live off their royalties, they live from playing music. Some famous acts like the Grateful Dead have proven it works.
Well, Britney-darling and Christina will have a harder time to get that Roll Royce for their voices, but do you really think this would be a global cataclysm?
It all depends on how much you depend on this one job. You say that's your first job after university, I assume you're quite young and I hope you don't have too many mouths to feed.
Try to be open and give the outsourcer a chance. Sometimes new avenues open up and you can move into directions you didn't expect before.
Start looking for a new job. The outsourcing is a change, and while you're changing, you might change to something better, if it presents itself. That makes the outsourcer compete with the regular job market.
After the outsourcing there'll be a lot of shuffling around and your new overlords don't know you. Visible people tend to get noticed more, the quite guy sitting in his corner and doing a good job is often missed. Try to be welcoming to them, appear cooperative and friendly. At the same time expect to be fed only bullshit, but that should be business as usual.
At the same time, don't take any crap - if you can afford it. If you don't like your new employer, this might be your one chance to fight for your rights and find out what your right are. Give the new employer good reasons to believe you won't go silently and go though all those fun worker protection regulations. Outsourcer really hate that. They want sheep they can slaughter in piece and who'll run to the abattoir on their own and wait silently in the queue to be processed. This obviously doesn't work if you have seven kids to feed and it's the only job you'll ever get.
If you don't want to stay there, it might be worth waiting for a decent severance package. Very often, at some points packages are offered and it would be waste if you left on your own without it shortly before it came availble.
That gimmick curtain will be a lot more expensive than a regular curtain, even one of better quality.
You'll better off if you get a regular curtain and use a fraction of the money saved to power your fan from the wall plug for the next 150 years.
If you can't do photovoltaics properly, don't do it. Half-baked solutions are only a waste of money and bad for the environment. It's a bit like driving 50 km extra to that other supermarket to save 5 cents on the bottle of cola.
If you have some magic photovoltaic cells that can be used as pavement and survive the wear and tear of daily traffic and still produce a good amount of power, it might work.
But as far as I know, no such thing exists, so this idea is about as good as the fart-collection undies to store the methane at the source and provide bio-gas energy.
Stupid idea, the whole gimmick.
If you want to do solar power, better do it properly and mount decent solar cells in a place where it really can generate power (eg on the roof in the right direction with the right inclination).
The idea of those curtains is just stupid, because you dole out good money to get some crappy cells which end up being mounted in a bad place.
If you happen to live in a hot area, it would be far more ecological if you invested in some proper shading that the load on the air conditioning can be reduced. That saves more that those stupid curtains will ever produce. For the money saved, get decent cells on the roof.
If you live in a cold area - usually with only few hours of good sunlight - the curtains are even more stupid, because they produce even less. Invest in good double or triple glazing to keep the heat in and catch the few sun-rays you get to heat the room.
To sum it up, this junk gimmick is exactly what home shopping TV would try push to ride the eco-wave. Do the environment a favor and forget about that stupid idea.
If they use Busybox or the kernel unmodified, it might be enough if they point you to the default repository. They also have no obligations, to make available applications they build on top of those packages or the configuration parameters.
Things usually get messy, if those people start to include their own drivers or modify the packages. Then they need to publish those for their customers.
Finding out which is the case can take time, and if they just tell you to get the sources at www.busybox.net, you have an uphill battle before you to find out if they modified the default package.
The real problem with privacy that makes it such a hot topic is the question: What does my neighbour know about me that I can't know about him?
And this can be addressed in two ways: Either try to keep stuff private or make the same stuff public for everyone.
The first approach is hard and recent experience indicates that it'll fail more often as time goes by.
The approach to make stuff public that can't be properly kept confidential has been taken a few times already, starting with SEC filings and public tax records in Finland. When the switch over happens, this will make a big splash and lead to a lot of discussions, but once that initial phase is over, people will learn to live with it. It's a bit like in a nudist community, the novelty of bare boobs fade quickly and people start to wish that some specimens where hidden beneath clothes.
So please, when dealing with privacy matters, also consider making the data public for everyone. Why not resolve the whole matter with a law along the lines:
Whoever processes data about third parties needs to make all data and all derived data public.
Same here, I also run Xubuntu on a quite nice Laptop with 2 GB. Why? Because at the time when I started out with Ubuntu it felt a little sluggish from time to time and Xubuntu didn't. I also realised that I don't care about Nautilus and those other fancy desktop thingies Gnome offers and XFCE pretty much does what I need without getting in my way. Most of my work is either in the mail client, the web browser (like now) or in a ssh session to a VM anyway.
For some time I considered looking for a distro better fitting my profile, but as I'm quite happy with the selection of packages and updates offered by Ubuntu, switching doesn't seem to promise too much benefit for the effort.
Somehow XUbuntu feels like a natural Upgrade from Windows 95. Unspectacular, but it doesn't get in your way and my grandmother doesn't get confused by it.