Leave it to a Physician to seek a formal educational path to a career in IT. Of course, you can't become a doctor through self-study, but you CAN become a programmer. Fortunately, all the information you need to start down the road to a career in IT is available online. I say "start", because the other two elements to a successful career aren't available in any book or on any site: The first is experience writing code and the second is experience dealing with other IT people professionally.
This reminds me of a problem I had with my minivan. I reported to the dealer that the "door ajar" light was NOT coming on when my left-side sliding door was obviously ajar. The guy's response was, "Well what you'll want to do is give it a good hard pull."
Yeah, thanks. I know how to close my door. That's not the point. The point is that, when I don't close my door (hey, stuff happens), the light doesn't work.
He thought it would be cool to have a domain name kind of like that of Microsoft, but not to the point that he used one that was "confusingly similar", as they say in the cease-and-desist letters. Not a single person would ever accidentally go to MikeRoweSoft.com in an effort to get to Microsoft. People would only go to this site trying to get to Mike Rowe's site, and Mike would probably even have to spell it for them (no, not the company... it's like, my name, then "soft"). It's moderately cute and nothing else. Not at all like whitehouse.com or nasa.com trying to get unsuspecting whitehouse.gov and nasa.gov surfers.
I agree that it's regretable that he turned their insulting offer into a respectable one, thereby appearing to be a squatter. I've always been a firm believer in the ability for individuals to register domains based on their name, and this is a good example of that. Hopefully the judge will realize why he made the offer and won't just make him out ot be a squatter based on that alone.
This is a very important discussion to have and I appreciate the information, but homebody needs to get his usage of commas straight. I first noticed it in the slashdot story:
"There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars..."
This should simple be, "There is no scientific reason why JPL is colorizing Mars". I was willing to let that one go, because it seems that sentences any more complex than object-verb-subject confuse a lot of people and they feel there's no harm in tossing a comma in there to chop things up a little. They're wrong, but I've gotten used to it. It annoys me, but I try not to criticize it too much.
So then I clicked on the link to his site about it, and found the following headline:
"The day, JPL stole the true blue"
You're kidding me. You don't really think there should be a comma there, do you? This is a textbook example of somebody adding a comma ANYWHERE there is more than subject-verb-object in a sentence. "JPL stole the true blue" is a very basic, completely unconfusing sentence. But add "the day" to it and it's causes the dizziness to come back, doesn't it? It's so overwhelming that we must insert commas to keep the senses.
Wrong. The comma shouldn't be there. And yes, it is very distracting to those of us who know.
For crying out loud. Please tell me you're compelled by the law or by a Supreme Court decision. Tell me you didn't notice. Tell me you don't care about privacy. Tell me it's an April Fools Joke. But please, please, don't tell me you're posting them because you can't get rid of them. It just makes you look silly. The answer is Perl and a competent scripter. Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you. It's not that much data anyway.
I think they should give the users an opportunity to follow the law. There are many valid and legal uses for manipulating currency in a graphics editing program. It seems like Adobe, of all companies, would realize that.
And with JASC doing it also, it kind of sounds like a government requested thing, which is not leaving the best taste in my mouth.
(Rimshot... laughter from a few... moderately interested nods from some... silence from most)
The joke here is that Panama doesn't have money. They use US currency. With the canal having been built by the US and run by the US for many years (from 1914 until 12/31/1999), and with many thousands of US military personnel, civilian employees, and dependents in that very small country, they never had the need for their own money. Of course, now that US presence has REALLY taken a downturn, so they probably need to come up with some currency.
Of course, "hacking" is a funny word to describe what he did, and it's not accurate to most of us. But he did something that was over the heads of the faculty and that was probably disruptive to the learning process. One "hey" on everybody's screen is a hiccup, but if everybody did it, you know the rest. He certainly should have been stopped from doing it, and a pattern of such misuse would warrant a suspension.
Quick example... when I was in the Air Force, we got a new HR system (I was in HR, sort of... it was called Personnel). Those of you who were in the Air Force in the 90s, in the Personnel field, will remember PC-III (PC Three), which was an AT&T 3B2 Unix system with dumb terminals. It was sort of a new front-end to Sperry, I guess, because I don't remember the Sperry system going away while I was still in. Wait, I said this was a QUICK example.
When PC-III came out, we could send e-mail. Not only around our base, but also to other bases (we didn't have full internet access at the time). I realized that there was like a worldwide directory of some sort and that I could put in a search string. I put in MSPUM (or whatever the office symbol was for my office -- I was in Manning Control) and it gave me every Manning Control office in the entire Air Force. This was a temptation I could not resist. I sent a message to all of them that said something along the lines of "MSPUM Rocks!" Something really stupid. And I sent it. I thought absolutely nothing of it, because I didn't really understand network communications yet.
A couple of days went by, I think, and the other shoe dropped. I basically got hauled into the Captain's office ("Captain" being a relatively low rank in the Air Force... he was my boss's boss... not that big a deal, really) and I got a lecture. I don't think I ever got a Letter of Counseling, which would have been pretty much the minimim punishment.
What I did was certainly a bigger deal than what he did, since there were at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of e-mails that went through the system all over the world. And I was in the military, where we're all supposed to be adults (I was about 22, I guess).
The point is that they did overreact at this guy's school, and their label for what he did is surprising to us. But they don't understand what he did and it was wrong to do it and disruptive to the learning process. So let's not pretend this great kid is being railroaded. He's smart enough to know that he knows more about these things than the teachers, and that they'll likely blow these things out of proportion. Those of us who are smarter (at least in terms of computers) than most of those around us have a little bit of responsibility to not intentionally intimidate those people with our knowledge.
And hey, it could have been worse. I'm surprised they didn't charge him with domestic cyberterrorism or something.
Thank you for R'ingTFA. You forced me to do the same thing, whereas I had previously been comfortable accepting the submitter's/author's summary of the story, which turned out to be flawed.
This article does NOT comment on the percentage of connections of various protocols. This part of the story appears to be a figment of somebody's imagination. It comments on the percentage of USERS who use something more than a web browser (not instead of a web browser) as part of their internet usage. That's an interesting statistic, while not a surprising one, and a completeley different one than this story claims to be.
Just yesterday, my family approached and warily passed a car in which the driver was applying makeup. She was wandering all over the lane just like when one of the two cheeseburgers I'm holding starts dripping ketchup or when I (dread) drop a lit cigarette. This is not the first time I've seen this, and it's one of the many examples of distracted driving, which is the only acceptable label for what legislators are trying to stop. Ban as many electronic devices from as much of the car as you want, but people will continue to eat, apply makeup, argue with a passenger, stare at their fellow man, and watch low-flying airplances as they drive their vehicles. It's the distraction that causes a lower level of safety, not the very presence of certain types of devices.
That's a good point, actually. An attempt at scarcasm (and moderated up to 5 as "Funny"), but this is actually the worst thing that can happen to sites in many cases.
Front-end success was the worst thing that happened to a lot of dot-coms during the boom. A site would decide they wanted traffic so they would put on a cute Super Bowl commercial. Poof! No more site. Too many users, and none get served.
It's an interesting problem that doesn't apply to most things. TV shows, for example... too many viewers? No such thing. Radio is the same. Magazines, movies. Sure, theaters have only so many seats, but you can always see a movie in the first weekend if you really want to.
The only thing that comes close is call centers. Have you ever tried to call a radio station during a contest? Pretty hard to get through. So you don't want to advertise the greatest thing since Sliced Bread (tm) and just have one guy answering the phone, or 99% of your customers who have already decided to buy cease to exist.
I say "front-end" success because a whole lot of dot-coms had sites that didn't kill them, but fulfillment that did. Holy crap! 6,000 order today. It sounds cool, but have you ever tried to stuff and address 6,000 packages in day on your dining room table? And then get them shipped? You could take a week, but in that week you'll get tens of thousands of more orders.
Oh wait, I'm off topic. OK, I'm done. My point is that lots of traffic is not always a good thing, which is exactly what a slashdotting is all about. One of the most interesting games in this business is the game of figuring out how much traffic you really want, not to little and not too much, and getting your site ready to handle that range of traffic without making it too complicated or too expensive. Whoops, even more offtopic. Gotta go.
This was an interesting (and pretty short) read, referencing a few important cases. Bottom line: Is a CD of all National Geographic issues, with a search engine, a new product or is a a new version of an existing product?
The judge in this latest case compared it to a book of multiple issues of the magazine, with each page printed as it originally had been, and also containing an index in the back to make it easy to find things.
The fact that the content has been digitized, and the fact that this convenient format makes the magazines attractive to a much wider audience, were found to be irrelevant.
That's a very interesting point, and one that I think I agree with. My first impression would have probably been that this is a new product, but I can definitely see how it's a new version of a product they already produced, and that National Geographic should be allowed to do this type of thing with their content. Of course, if they had to pay all the photographers again, or even get their permission, the consumer would lose because they would never be able to do this type of thing.
I have two points. First, I think you're wrong about that. They speak in terms of the sender and the recipient taking actions, but I think they're referring to software on the sender and recipient computers taking these actions, and not humans. The only action that was clearly intended to be taken by a human was the part about agressively whitelisting good recipients, which is definitely something that I anticipate users will need to be willing to do.
The second point that I have is that the whining is interesting, and this is a big part of the problem. We, the lazy users, will absolutely have to get used to taking some sort of action ourselves as part of whatever the SPAM solution turns out to be. Right now we like the very low barrier to entry into the e-mail community, but that is exactly what makes SPAM possible.
I have taken a couple of very small steps in the direction of participation in the solution. I decided to start signing all of my e-mail with my PGP signature. It it ignored by many and it confuses many, and it probably makes some roll their eyes (it's quite a geek fashion statement). But it damn sure identifies the message as one that I wrote, and it (sort of, except without a CA) identifies me as a person and not a spammer. I feel that PGP signatures might very well be a part of the SPAM solution. Everybody could sign all of their e-mail, which is getting easier for non-geeks every day, and we could all start rejecting e-mail that is not signed. We could even all get real keys from real CAs and reject all mail from users that have not been independently verified. Send whatever you want in your e-mail, even Viagra ads, but make sure I can trace it back to YOU.
The second step I have taken is to install and use SpamAssassin on my mail server. It's something that is making the situation more tolerable, although it's still costing me a little in terms of bandwidth of the messages I never see and don't want to see being sent to my server. It also minimizes the impact of SPAM on me, which could be a bad thing because my SPAM problem is actually bigger than I regularly realize. But my point is that it required some effort on my part. It wasn't enough for me to bitch about SPAM. I had to take an action.
SPAM is more like terrorism (bear with me) than is initially obvious. Do you check under your car for a bomb before you get in? Neither do I. But I did when I lived in a place where car bombs against my demographic were a reality. I altered my behavior to counter the threat. I could have said, "I shouldn't have to check under my car," but instead I got down on the ground and took a look. I could also say, "Airport security is an inconvenience, " or "Do I look like a terrorist?" or "SPAM should just go away or be 'fixed' by the government or somebody like Microsoft, but not in a way that I have to participate." But the problem is here and it's staring us in the face. We must change our behavior in order to fix the problem. Once we're all on board with the fact that we are all a part of the solution, we can be free of it.
This MS Research stuff is all very interesting, and all ideas are welcome at the table of solutions, but the neat thing is that the technology to remove SPAM from our lives already exists. But it's a little strange and uncomfortable. It would be great if we could all pull together on some sort of e-mail signing solution and work together to get the word out to the world that we can take our e-mail system back.
First, though, we have to get over the fact that we MUST change our assumptions and we must raise the barrier to entry -- not much, but some.
Finally, I'm sure I probably misunderstood the spirit of your reply. It got me started on a vent, and that's not a bad thing.
Sorry, I couldn't help but notice that you used "java" and "good" in the same sentence. Just wanted to let you know, and I'm sure it won't happen again.
WASHINGTON, DC - Only minutes after Secretary of State Colin Powell this morning announced that computing talks with Israel had broken down, Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin held a press conference to declare that Israel intended to go ahead with this week's planned Mandrake Linux testing.
Minister Rivlin downplayed the computing tensions that might result along the Lebanese border. "Israel's computing sovereignty will not be challenged. If we want to move to BeOS, HP-UX, Solaris, PC-DOS... we cannot yield to world opinion when it comes to protecting our right to compute as God promised us we would be able to do."
Israel's testing of Mandrake Linux comes on the tails of a 7-month period of testing of FreeBSD by most of that countries Arab neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had instructed Minister Rivlin in recent weeks to begin preparations for Linux testing, despite President Bush's calls for restraint.
A Microsoft spokesman expressed sadness in a telephone conference call with the press this morning. "This is about more than a contract between the government of Israel and Microsoft," he said with a cracking voice. "It's about the stability of computing standards in the Middle East. I can't stop thinking about those kids." It is unclear at press time what in the world he was talking about.
Spidering isn't for everybody. Well, neither is SPAM, but spidering is for a lot less people than SPAM because of the lack of financial incentive. As interesting as certain types of spidering is to certain geeks in certain situations, most people could care less.
I once thought about how neat it would be to start a spider running that would just go and go and go. It didn't take me long to get bored with it, just thinking about it. I do automate a lot of HTTP with Perl and LWP, and it's incredibly useful. But most people are going to have their little sandbox of usefulness, and I think the idea of hundreds of thousands of people just letting a spider run rampant is not likely.
In addition, there are bandwidth considerations. Even if the ideas of getting one site after another after another doesn't bore you silly (especially when you consider how long it will take you to get a decent percentage of the web, and even then you won't have anything anywhere close to as cool as Google), there are bound to be repercussions when it comes to bandwidth. Either you're on a line where you get charged for bandwidth, or your ISP will at least take notice and look closely at what you're doing.
The point is that I just don't see this as something that would get out of control like SPAM has gotten.
First of all, any operating system can have a bug in it, just like any other piece of software can have a bug in it. Some are serious, some are not. And anybody who knows anything about internet security can tell you that the next thing to get you will almost always be the thing that nobody thought of. If you're depending entirely open your OS security to keep you safe, you have a problem.
When bugs are found and updates are released, this is a good thing. If the vendor doesn't get an update out in a reasonable amount of time, that's a different issue.
Having said all that, I should say that OS X being Unix underneath certainly does come in handy for security issues that come up. Windows users do not have (and often could not use anyway) that luxury. Yes, I'm an OS X user, although I am a long-time Windows user (since 3.1) who still has a Windows box. Both of them are behind a firewall so I don't spend a whole lot of time sweating every little security hole that comes up in my operating systems.
I realize this discussion is already old in slashdot time, but I just read this reply and needed to respond to it. I never said that I or any other "hackers" broke into computers. I quite frankly don't have the knowledge to break into most computers, even if I did have that kind of interest. Yes, I could get it online I'm sure, along with the tools. The point is that being a "hacker" has nothing to do with breaking into computers. It's somebody who "hacks", which applies to computers the same way it applies to a playing the piano (I'm also that kind of hack) or dancing (I'm also that kind of hack). Somebody who gets by and can do some pretty interesting things, but who doesn't do it the "right" way or have a lot of formal training. That's a "hack", and it's that sense of the word that "hacker" has always been based on.
Yes, the public has a different interpretation of the word. But this is Slashdot, where we don't have to use the general public's glossary. Oh, and my real beef with the story was that fact that they equated hackers to cyberterrorists.
Yes, this is a valid concern -- tourism in Antarctica. My wife and I have been saving up for quite a while for one of those Princess cruises down to the southernmost continent. We've gotta get away from this unbearable superzero heat and get down to a good "back to nature" climate in Penguinland. We heard there are some really good restaurants and casinos down there also.
Yes, I would be very afraid of tourists coming around and ruining the researchers' private paradise.
I was surprised that this story wasn't pummelled with comments about the submitter's usage of "hackers and other cyberterrorists," suggesting again that hacking is terrorism. There are a couple of valid points to bring up:
1) The people you seem to be talking about are crackers, not hackers. Crackers are the bad guys (in most cases) and hackers aren't necessarily good or bad. We just hack around, for whatever reasons.
2) I have nothing good to say about crackers, but I hesitate to classify them as "terrorists". Terrorists kill or threaten to kill innocent civilians to instill terror on a society in hopes of encouraging that society to change it's behavior or policies. A server getting cracked is certainly a bad thing, and I don't tolerate or condone it, but to classify the fear of getting cracked as a terror comparable to a car bomb going off in your neighborhood is an insult to those who are terrorized every day.
I realize it wasn't intended as an insult. I'm just making a point. That point is that the protection should be "from crackers and cyberterrorists" and not "from hackers and other cyberterrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Folgers instant coffee. Deal with it
RP
Leave it to a Physician to seek a formal educational path to a career in IT. Of course, you can't become a doctor through self-study, but you CAN become a programmer. Fortunately, all the information you need to start down the road to a career in IT is available online. I say "start", because the other two elements to a successful career aren't available in any book or on any site: The first is experience writing code and the second is experience dealing with other IT people professionally.
So what are you waiting for? Get to it.
RP
This reminds me of a problem I had with my minivan. I reported to the dealer that the "door ajar" light was NOT coming on when my left-side sliding door was obviously ajar. The guy's response was, "Well what you'll want to do is give it a good hard pull."
Yeah, thanks. I know how to close my door. That's not the point. The point is that, when I don't close my door (hey, stuff happens), the light doesn't work.
RP
He thought it would be cool to have a domain name kind of like that of Microsoft, but not to the point that he used one that was "confusingly similar", as they say in the cease-and-desist letters. Not a single person would ever accidentally go to MikeRoweSoft.com in an effort to get to Microsoft. People would only go to this site trying to get to Mike Rowe's site, and Mike would probably even have to spell it for them (no, not the company... it's like, my name, then "soft"). It's moderately cute and nothing else. Not at all like whitehouse.com or nasa.com trying to get unsuspecting whitehouse.gov and nasa.gov surfers.
I agree that it's regretable that he turned their insulting offer into a respectable one, thereby appearing to be a squatter. I've always been a firm believer in the ability for individuals to register domains based on their name, and this is a good example of that. Hopefully the judge will realize why he made the offer and won't just make him out ot be a squatter based on that alone.
RP
The story says, in part...
"Examples include IPv4 vs IPv6, Apache, Perl, Embperl, Netscape/Mozilla, HTML and Windows"
All props to IPv4 and all, but I don't think it stands a chance against all of those put together (even with Windows on their team).
RP
I thought they were still on tour. And, anyway, what do they know about -- oh wait... never mind.
RP
This is a very important discussion to have and I appreciate the information, but homebody needs to get his usage of commas straight. I first noticed it in the slashdot story:
"There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars..."
This should simple be, "There is no scientific reason why JPL is colorizing Mars". I was willing to let that one go, because it seems that sentences any more complex than object-verb-subject confuse a lot of people and they feel there's no harm in tossing a comma in there to chop things up a little. They're wrong, but I've gotten used to it. It annoys me, but I try not to criticize it too much.
So then I clicked on the link to his site about it, and found the following headline:
"The day, JPL stole the true blue"
You're kidding me. You don't really think there should be a comma there, do you? This is a textbook example of somebody adding a comma ANYWHERE there is more than subject-verb-object in a sentence. "JPL stole the true blue" is a very basic, completely unconfusing sentence. But add "the day" to it and it's causes the dizziness to come back, doesn't it? It's so overwhelming that we must insert commas to keep the senses.
Wrong. The comma shouldn't be there. And yes, it is very distracting to those of us who know.
RP
They should have written their site in one of the higher-performing languages.
RP
For crying out loud. Please tell me you're compelled by the law or by a Supreme Court decision. Tell me you didn't notice. Tell me you don't care about privacy. Tell me it's an April Fools Joke. But please, please, don't tell me you're posting them because you can't get rid of them. It just makes you look silly. The answer is Perl and a competent scripter. Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you. It's not that much data anyway.
For Pete's Sake!
RP
I think they should give the users an opportunity to follow the law. There are many valid and legal uses for manipulating currency in a graphics editing program. It seems like Adobe, of all companies, would realize that.
And with JASC doing it also, it kind of sounds like a government requested thing, which is not leaving the best taste in my mouth.
RP
This also works for Panamanian money.
(Rimshot... laughter from a few... moderately interested nods from some... silence from most)
The joke here is that Panama doesn't have money. They use US currency. With the canal having been built by the US and run by the US for many years (from 1914 until 12/31/1999), and with many thousands of US military personnel, civilian employees, and dependents in that very small country, they never had the need for their own money. Of course, now that US presence has REALLY taken a downturn, so they probably need to come up with some currency.
RP
Of course, "hacking" is a funny word to describe what he did, and it's not accurate to most of us. But he did something that was over the heads of the faculty and that was probably disruptive to the learning process. One "hey" on everybody's screen is a hiccup, but if everybody did it, you know the rest. He certainly should have been stopped from doing it, and a pattern of such misuse would warrant a suspension.
Quick example... when I was in the Air Force, we got a new HR system (I was in HR, sort of... it was called Personnel). Those of you who were in the Air Force in the 90s, in the Personnel field, will remember PC-III (PC Three), which was an AT&T 3B2 Unix system with dumb terminals. It was sort of a new front-end to Sperry, I guess, because I don't remember the Sperry system going away while I was still in. Wait, I said this was a QUICK example.
When PC-III came out, we could send e-mail. Not only around our base, but also to other bases (we didn't have full internet access at the time). I realized that there was like a worldwide directory of some sort and that I could put in a search string. I put in MSPUM (or whatever the office symbol was for my office -- I was in Manning Control) and it gave me every Manning Control office in the entire Air Force. This was a temptation I could not resist. I sent a message to all of them that said something along the lines of "MSPUM Rocks!" Something really stupid. And I sent it. I thought absolutely nothing of it, because I didn't really understand network communications yet.
A couple of days went by, I think, and the other shoe dropped. I basically got hauled into the Captain's office ("Captain" being a relatively low rank in the Air Force... he was my boss's boss... not that big a deal, really) and I got a lecture. I don't think I ever got a Letter of Counseling, which would have been pretty much the minimim punishment.
What I did was certainly a bigger deal than what he did, since there were at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of e-mails that went through the system all over the world. And I was in the military, where we're all supposed to be adults (I was about 22, I guess).
The point is that they did overreact at this guy's school, and their label for what he did is surprising to us. But they don't understand what he did and it was wrong to do it and disruptive to the learning process. So let's not pretend this great kid is being railroaded. He's smart enough to know that he knows more about these things than the teachers, and that they'll likely blow these things out of proportion. Those of us who are smarter (at least in terms of computers) than most of those around us have a little bit of responsibility to not intentionally intimidate those people with our knowledge.
And hey, it could have been worse. I'm surprised they didn't charge him with domestic cyberterrorism or something.
RP
Thank you for R'ingTFA. You forced me to do the same thing, whereas I had previously been comfortable accepting the submitter's/author's summary of the story, which turned out to be flawed.
This article does NOT comment on the percentage of connections of various protocols. This part of the story appears to be a figment of somebody's imagination. It comments on the percentage of USERS who use something more than a web browser (not instead of a web browser) as part of their internet usage. That's an interesting statistic, while not a surprising one, and a completeley different one than this story claims to be.
RP
Just yesterday, my family approached and warily passed a car in which the driver was applying makeup. She was wandering all over the lane just like when one of the two cheeseburgers I'm holding starts dripping ketchup or when I (dread) drop a lit cigarette. This is not the first time I've seen this, and it's one of the many examples of distracted driving, which is the only acceptable label for what legislators are trying to stop. Ban as many electronic devices from as much of the car as you want, but people will continue to eat, apply makeup, argue with a passenger, stare at their fellow man, and watch low-flying airplances as they drive their vehicles. It's the distraction that causes a lower level of safety, not the very presence of certain types of devices.
RP
That's a good point, actually. An attempt at scarcasm (and moderated up to 5 as "Funny"), but this is actually the worst thing that can happen to sites in many cases.
Front-end success was the worst thing that happened to a lot of dot-coms during the boom. A site would decide they wanted traffic so they would put on a cute Super Bowl commercial. Poof! No more site. Too many users, and none get served.
It's an interesting problem that doesn't apply to most things. TV shows, for example... too many viewers? No such thing. Radio is the same. Magazines, movies. Sure, theaters have only so many seats, but you can always see a movie in the first weekend if you really want to.
The only thing that comes close is call centers. Have you ever tried to call a radio station during a contest? Pretty hard to get through. So you don't want to advertise the greatest thing since Sliced Bread (tm) and just have one guy answering the phone, or 99% of your customers who have already decided to buy cease to exist.
I say "front-end" success because a whole lot of dot-coms had sites that didn't kill them, but fulfillment that did. Holy crap! 6,000 order today. It sounds cool, but have you ever tried to stuff and address 6,000 packages in day on your dining room table? And then get them shipped? You could take a week, but in that week you'll get tens of thousands of more orders.
Oh wait, I'm off topic. OK, I'm done. My point is that lots of traffic is not always a good thing, which is exactly what a slashdotting is all about. One of the most interesting games in this business is the game of figuring out how much traffic you really want, not to little and not too much, and getting your site ready to handle that range of traffic without making it too complicated or too expensive. Whoops, even more offtopic. Gotta go.
RP
Come on, what's all this science crap? Let's get back to rumor and innuendo.
This was an interesting (and pretty short) read, referencing a few important cases. Bottom line: Is a CD of all National Geographic issues, with a search engine, a new product or is a a new version of an existing product?
The judge in this latest case compared it to a book of multiple issues of the magazine, with each page printed as it originally had been, and also containing an index in the back to make it easy to find things.
The fact that the content has been digitized, and the fact that this convenient format makes the magazines attractive to a much wider audience, were found to be irrelevant.
That's a very interesting point, and one that I think I agree with. My first impression would have probably been that this is a new product, but I can definitely see how it's a new version of a product they already produced, and that National Geographic should be allowed to do this type of thing with their content. Of course, if they had to pay all the photographers again, or even get their permission, the consumer would lose because they would never be able to do this type of thing.
RP
I have two points. First, I think you're wrong about that. They speak in terms of the sender and the recipient taking actions, but I think they're referring to software on the sender and recipient computers taking these actions, and not humans. The only action that was clearly intended to be taken by a human was the part about agressively whitelisting good recipients, which is definitely something that I anticipate users will need to be willing to do.
The second point that I have is that the whining is interesting, and this is a big part of the problem. We, the lazy users, will absolutely have to get used to taking some sort of action ourselves as part of whatever the SPAM solution turns out to be. Right now we like the very low barrier to entry into the e-mail community, but that is exactly what makes SPAM possible.
I have taken a couple of very small steps in the direction of participation in the solution. I decided to start signing all of my e-mail with my PGP signature. It it ignored by many and it confuses many, and it probably makes some roll their eyes (it's quite a geek fashion statement). But it damn sure identifies the message as one that I wrote, and it (sort of, except without a CA) identifies me as a person and not a spammer. I feel that PGP signatures might very well be a part of the SPAM solution. Everybody could sign all of their e-mail, which is getting easier for non-geeks every day, and we could all start rejecting e-mail that is not signed. We could even all get real keys from real CAs and reject all mail from users that have not been independently verified. Send whatever you want in your e-mail, even Viagra ads, but make sure I can trace it back to YOU.
The second step I have taken is to install and use SpamAssassin on my mail server. It's something that is making the situation more tolerable, although it's still costing me a little in terms of bandwidth of the messages I never see and don't want to see being sent to my server. It also minimizes the impact of SPAM on me, which could be a bad thing because my SPAM problem is actually bigger than I regularly realize. But my point is that it required some effort on my part. It wasn't enough for me to bitch about SPAM. I had to take an action.
SPAM is more like terrorism (bear with me) than is initially obvious. Do you check under your car for a bomb before you get in? Neither do I. But I did when I lived in a place where car bombs against my demographic were a reality. I altered my behavior to counter the threat. I could have said, "I shouldn't have to check under my car," but instead I got down on the ground and took a look. I could also say, "Airport security is an inconvenience, " or "Do I look like a terrorist?" or "SPAM should just go away or be 'fixed' by the government or somebody like Microsoft, but not in a way that I have to participate." But the problem is here and it's staring us in the face. We must change our behavior in order to fix the problem. Once we're all on board with the fact that we are all a part of the solution, we can be free of it.
This MS Research stuff is all very interesting, and all ideas are welcome at the table of solutions, but the neat thing is that the technology to remove SPAM from our lives already exists. But it's a little strange and uncomfortable. It would be great if we could all pull together on some sort of e-mail signing solution and work together to get the word out to the world that we can take our e-mail system back.
First, though, we have to get over the fact that we MUST change our assumptions and we must raise the barrier to entry -- not much, but some.
Finally, I'm sure I probably misunderstood the spirit of your reply. It got me started on a vent, and that's not a bad thing.
RP
Sorry, I couldn't help but notice that you used "java" and "good" in the same sentence. Just wanted to let you know, and I'm sure it won't happen again.
RP
WASHINGTON, DC - Only minutes after Secretary of State Colin Powell this morning announced that computing talks with Israel had broken down, Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin held a press conference to declare that Israel intended to go ahead with this week's planned Mandrake Linux testing.
Minister Rivlin downplayed the computing tensions that might result along the Lebanese border. "Israel's computing sovereignty will not be challenged. If we want to move to BeOS, HP-UX, Solaris, PC-DOS... we cannot yield to world opinion when it comes to protecting our right to compute as God promised us we would be able to do."
Israel's testing of Mandrake Linux comes on the tails of a 7-month period of testing of FreeBSD by most of that countries Arab neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had instructed Minister Rivlin in recent weeks to begin preparations for Linux testing, despite President Bush's calls for restraint.
A Microsoft spokesman expressed sadness in a telephone conference call with the press this morning. "This is about more than a contract between the government of Israel and Microsoft," he said with a cracking voice. "It's about the stability of computing standards in the Middle East. I can't stop thinking about those kids." It is unclear at press time what in the world he was talking about.
Spidering isn't for everybody. Well, neither is SPAM, but spidering is for a lot less people than SPAM because of the lack of financial incentive. As interesting as certain types of spidering is to certain geeks in certain situations, most people could care less.
I once thought about how neat it would be to start a spider running that would just go and go and go. It didn't take me long to get bored with it, just thinking about it. I do automate a lot of HTTP with Perl and LWP, and it's incredibly useful. But most people are going to have their little sandbox of usefulness, and I think the idea of hundreds of thousands of people just letting a spider run rampant is not likely.
In addition, there are bandwidth considerations. Even if the ideas of getting one site after another after another doesn't bore you silly (especially when you consider how long it will take you to get a decent percentage of the web, and even then you won't have anything anywhere close to as cool as Google), there are bound to be repercussions when it comes to bandwidth. Either you're on a line where you get charged for bandwidth, or your ISP will at least take notice and look closely at what you're doing.
The point is that I just don't see this as something that would get out of control like SPAM has gotten.
First of all, any operating system can have a bug in it, just like any other piece of software can have a bug in it. Some are serious, some are not. And anybody who knows anything about internet security can tell you that the next thing to get you will almost always be the thing that nobody thought of. If you're depending entirely open your OS security to keep you safe, you have a problem.
When bugs are found and updates are released, this is a good thing. If the vendor doesn't get an update out in a reasonable amount of time, that's a different issue.
Having said all that, I should say that OS X being Unix underneath certainly does come in handy for security issues that come up. Windows users do not have (and often could not use anyway) that luxury. Yes, I'm an OS X user, although I am a long-time Windows user (since 3.1) who still has a Windows box. Both of them are behind a firewall so I don't spend a whole lot of time sweating every little security hole that comes up in my operating systems.
RP
I realize this discussion is already old in slashdot time, but I just read this reply and needed to respond to it. I never said that I or any other "hackers" broke into computers. I quite frankly don't have the knowledge to break into most computers, even if I did have that kind of interest. Yes, I could get it online I'm sure, along with the tools. The point is that being a "hacker" has nothing to do with breaking into computers. It's somebody who "hacks", which applies to computers the same way it applies to a playing the piano (I'm also that kind of hack) or dancing (I'm also that kind of hack). Somebody who gets by and can do some pretty interesting things, but who doesn't do it the "right" way or have a lot of formal training. That's a "hack", and it's that sense of the word that "hacker" has always been based on.
Yes, the public has a different interpretation of the word. But this is Slashdot, where we don't have to use the general public's glossary. Oh, and my real beef with the story was that fact that they equated hackers to cyberterrorists.
Thanks,
RP
Yes, this is a valid concern -- tourism in Antarctica. My wife and I have been saving up for quite a while for one of those Princess cruises down to the southernmost continent. We've gotta get away from this unbearable superzero heat and get down to a good "back to nature" climate in Penguinland. We heard there are some really good restaurants and casinos down there also.
Yes, I would be very afraid of tourists coming around and ruining the researchers' private paradise.
RP
I was surprised that this story wasn't pummelled with comments about the submitter's usage of "hackers and other cyberterrorists," suggesting again that hacking is terrorism. There are a couple of valid points to bring up:
1) The people you seem to be talking about are crackers, not hackers. Crackers are the bad guys (in most cases) and hackers aren't necessarily good or bad. We just hack around, for whatever reasons.
2) I have nothing good to say about crackers, but I hesitate to classify them as "terrorists". Terrorists kill or threaten to kill innocent civilians to instill terror on a society in hopes of encouraging that society to change it's behavior or policies. A server getting cracked is certainly a bad thing, and I don't tolerate or condone it, but to classify the fear of getting cracked as a terror comparable to a car bomb going off in your neighborhood is an insult to those who are terrorized every day.
I realize it wasn't intended as an insult. I'm just making a point. That point is that the protection should be "from crackers and cyberterrorists" and not "from hackers and other cyberterrorists.
RP