Since when does "extensible" mean the same thing as "open source"? For all we know, they could claim ownership of any derivatives works of their product, making any user-contributed code the property of the game manufacturer. Even if they don't intend to at first, who's to say they're not reserving the right for later? This is more like the "Anti-OSS", if anything: no guaranteed rights.
And I didn't see a reference anywhere to the license that covers mods. Maybe if someone did see it, they can point that out to me.
How did previous mod communities deal with this? Did modders just not care, or did the fact that the game manufacturer didn't claim rights over derivative works from the beginning save it?
Sorry for the excessive quotations marks, but I just feel like there's some simplistic thinking going on about the ability of human beings to react en masse like this.
If a scientific consensus exists that certain human activities (industry and commerce, mostly) are affecting the environment in ways that will eventually harm us, that's still a long way from doing anything about it. Reversing industrial and economic trends costs money--mostly opportunity costs from having to cease certain profitable, but polluting/warming endeavors. It's not always possible to set up a system in which those costs are rationalized to the people who can deal with them.
A lot of it comes down to what "we" means, in this context: you have to get a politically enabled consensus on the existence of the problem, AND on the view that the harms of environmental damage outweigh the economic costs of changing how we do things. In the US, right now, I don't see either of those realizations taking root enough to affect policy substantially. Even if the science and economic analyses are sound, there's still going to be a long, drawn-out debate over the merits.
But is this really so bad? We're deliberative, not knee-jerking. I've been convinced lately that the scientific evidence in favor of human climate influence is pretty strong, but it's still an enormously complex question.
And remember, getting the answer wrong will be just as harmful to the human race if we go overboard on trying to prevent climate change: all those opportunity costs, whoever pays them, will be felt collectively as a lower standard of living.
Basically, I just think you're being unfair by labelling humanity "stupid, paranoid, ignorant, and arrogant" (not to mention suggesting that we should go extinct!). This is an incredibly difficult question to get right, and the consequences EITHER way are pretty nasty if the human race gets it wrong.
Airsnort and Kismet both depend on a function called "RFMON mode", or just monitor mode. It's characterized by the card not transmitting any data, but receiving all 802.11 frames that it can sense. Every frame is passed to userspace--the card has no association to any access point, it's just a radio receiver and frame interpreter.
Monitor mode allows apps like Kismet and Airsnort to work by making wireless traffic visible to userspace without having an association to an AP. For instance, how can you gather encrypted WEP traffic without already knowing the WEP key, unless you can listen and record the traffic without associating?
The Windows driver model doesn't provide monitor mode facilities, and it probably never will. That's why NDISWrapper won't work with Kismet or Airsnort--you're restricted to Windows driver functions, which precludes using monitor mode.
Virtually all 802.11 cards have the ability to function in such a mode, but not all Linux/OSS drivers support these abilities. The drivers that I know do support it include: hostap, prism54, madwifi--maybe more. Unfortunately for us Centrino people, neither the ipw2100 driver (The 802.11B-only device) nor its sister project, ipw2200 (802.11b/g) support monitor mode.
That's why I'm pulling my ipw2200 MiniPCI card and replacing it with an Aetheros (MADWifi) tri-band card.
Where did you get this shit? You got a cite (and no, the Aryan Nation site doesn't count) to back that up?
This doesn't even make SENSE, though. I'll grant you, it's true that people around the world moved from hunting/foraging to other food-generation activities, and it's true that this change happened at different times in different areas (but pretty much within the last 11,000 years, world-wide). Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has a great synopsis of that stuff.
But when people stopped hunting, they moved to either agriculture or fishing. Both farming and fishing are REALLY physically intensive activities!! Huge portions of the population have been manual laborers for most of the history of the Americas and Europe. Hell, up until this century, more than half of the US population was agricultural. Look at the modern Amish lifestyle for data on how physically tough that stuff is--some of them burn as many calories a day as Lance Armstrong!
If I were so inclined, I'm sure I could setup a business in my house that sells purely online/through eBay and be able to make a better profit than a standard storefront, simply due to the considerable difference in overhead. However, I'm not interested in owning that kind of business.
Didn't stop to think about the realities of running a business, did you? If it were like you describe, wouldn't everybody be running a business online instead of "deal[ing] with the overhead of running a store"? Consider the realities of the situation:
1) If you're REALLY running your whole business out of your house, there's a limit on the size of your business. If you're in a shipped-goods industry (like these Ebay merchants), how much inventory can you actually fit in your house? Even if your wife is very understanding, the house is only so big, right?
2) But let's say you get a warehouse, which is cheaper than storefront commercial space, or you keep your volume of business low enough to keep it in your house. You're STILL not necessarily better off, because a storefront can be a route to a hell of a lot more incoming customers. People will walk in off-the-street from having seen your place (hopefully!), leading to more potential sales opportunities. And this isn't an either/or situation with the web (Ebay)--you can always do both, and pick up sales from both sources. As long as the storefront brings in more business than it costs in rent/other costs, it's adding profits to your bottom line, and you'd be poorer not to have it.
3) A storefront shop will see a whole category of very lucrative customers that mail-order, WWW, and Ebay-based stores cannot: people who need something RIGHT NOW and can't wait. Forgot a birthday gift, and the party's tonight? Can't wait for Ebay, can you? Or when your boss's laptop fritzes and he's leaving for Europe in a couple of hours? If you don't have a spare, you're going to be running down the Best Buy, aren't you? And these kinds of customers are wonderful because they generally don't care about price as much as regular shoppers--they'll pay whatever they can afford in order to get what they need, instead of trying to shop around and save.
4) Would you rather make %50 profit from your gross revenues, or %5 profit? That's a trick question. If you have the option of making %50 profit, but your revenues are only $100,000 a year, you make $50,000 in profits. If an alternative option is to make only %5 profit on gross revenues of $100,000,000, though, you'd lose $4,950,000 a year if you went with the %50 profit choice (0.05 x 100,000,000 = 5,000,000). It's not about how much profit you're making in comparison to your revenues--it's about how much absolute profit you can make given all your available options.
5) There are perfectly good reasons for staying on Ebay without having a regular storefront. You may not want to get involved in the possibly cutthroat business of ordinary retail because you don't know as much about it as the web, or because your customers tend to inhabit the web only. Or maybe you just don't want to have a big business, and so you decide to keep it small and low-cost.
I think your point is good (and possibly true), but are you sure this last sentence is the right way to phrase what you mean?
I think that correlation CAN imply causation. Often, correlation is the most obvious sign of causation. Of course, any responsible investigator would follow through by investigating the phenomena thoroughly in order to determine what the causal relationship actually is.
What you REALLY meant was "Correlation doesn't prove causation", right? That's correct. You probably just wanted to give the last sentence some emphasis, and used "never" without realizing how badly it modifies "implies", here.
Maybe a better choice would be "Correlation alone can never prove causation"--wordier, but correct.
Oh--and on Windows machines, you can't delete a running swap file, and you can't turn off a currently-used swap file. You HAVE to edit the registry and remove the key that determines the swap file's path, then reboot. But that won't get you anywhere, because you can't even login to a machine that has no swap file. So there's no way to even temporarily remove the swap file and still do anything useful with the machine, unless you pull the drive and mount it on another machine as a second drive. Your method just doesn't work.
And if you DID try this, you'd notice that you've now fucked the machine up, good, because you can't even login to re-configure the swap file path. The only way to bring the machine back is to pull the disk, mount elsewhere, mount the registry hives on the other machine, and do some offline registry-editing. Assuming you were intelligent enough to pull the drive and mount elsewhere first thing, you can just delete the swap file while it's not activated and wipe the drive. When you replace the drive in the original machine and reboot, Windows will automatically re-allocate the swap file for you on login.
Why on earth MS decided to do this, I can't say. Why logins? You can boot the machine and services will start without a swap file, but you can't login? WTF? And why the hell doesn't it just warn you and let you login anyway?
As for you, Parent Poster, have you ever even tried this, or what? Good start, but you need to check these things out before you post them. People could get hurt!
Unfortunately, no. This still leaves a lot of tidbits on the disk in the "slack" space at the ends of clusters that aren't entirely utilized. ESPECIALLY with frequently allocated/deleted files like browser cache, which (being largely HTML) will be identifiable even as fragments.
Your solution does cut down on the risks, but you're still far from being in the clear. Besides, if you're leaving a company without any existing investigation/legal action over your head, what's the harm in wiping the disk? What are they going to do, fire you?
And seriously--I mentioned it earlier in terms of the potential for punishment, but if you delete data under a subpoena or similar circumstances, you're a scum-sucking shitbag who deserves several years in a federal, PMITA prison. You're no better than those Enron fuckwads, and no amount of justification can dig you out of that ethical black hole. So you shouldn't be trying to hide the wiping, anyway.
1) You would have to record a SHITload of data, in an organization of any size. And since HTTPS is so common, you're not going to get a lot of the juicer bits, anyway. Many companies keep logs of URLs visited in their proxy servers, and use those for policy enforcement, but recording the actual traffic is just too much. It's not just a problem of where to store the data--you also have to be able to sniff and record at the bandwidth of the gateway, which can be pretty big for a mid-sized office's firewall.
2) It's usually possible to get the incriminating bits after the fact, using forensic analysis of the user's hard drive. On report of an incident, you can pull the machine and take a bitstream, device-level copy of the whole disk. Various forensic tools are available to sift the drive and recover both allocated and deleted files, and even bits of partially overwritten files. Clearing your browser cache and deleting the history folder won't help you, here.
The nice thing about the method of #2 is that it's a reactive method--when something happens, you only have to go after the data of the people involved. Sure, it's not going to catch as much, but it will get a lot, and it's much more efficient.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Before leaving a company, try booting a Knoppix CD and doing a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda". It'll take a while (maybe 1 min/GB on a modern IDE disk with DMA enabled), but it might help. Though God save your mortal soul if you do this while you're under investigation or a subpoena--destroying data in that situation will probably get you in worse legal trouble than getting caught for whatever you tried to hide!
Did it ever occur to you that they might have modified code other than the UI? Maybe there are non-visible changes to the scanning engine or something, perhaps to enhance the integration with the Windows OS?
Imagine for a moment that the computer is doing more than painting pretty pictures on your monitor (that's the TV-thing on top). Could we agree that a program intended to detect spyware could be substantially modified without altering the appearance to the user?
Coincidentally, one of my favorite recipes for remote Windows work involves OpenVPN plus VNC--usually RealVNC server on the Windows boxes, and (whatever) VNC client on my Linux machines. Surprisingly responsive, especially when you set the VNC options that disable windows-dressing GUI crap like background picture, etc. Beautiful for helping friends and family out remotely--as long as they have network connectivity, you're solid gold.
Doesn't work so well for helping with DSL installations, but...
Installation on a Windows box is trivially easy--they built a standard Windows binary and an installer that sets it all up for you. There are still configuration details, so I wouldn't give it to your mom with a "Check this shit out!" admonition, but anybody with half a clue, or a little help, can be up and running in about 60 seconds.
If you want to use a pre-shared secret (symmetric passphrase) encryption instead of PKI, it's even faster.
The latest version of OVPN has a "multi-client server" mode that allows an admin to set up a single VPN server, kind of like a VPN concentrator box, that can maintain tunnels with an arbitrary number of remote hosts. This is REALLY nice, because setting up a new remote user only requires that you give them the installer, your server's public key, and that they generate a key pair and send the public part to you (pick a method).
OpenVPN really, REALLY is the bomb. Try it out sometime.
The OP never said this would make a solar sail WORK, dummy. And as the OP's response to your JP (jackass posting) would indicate, you're about the only person who didn't understand that.
Good try, though--you almost managed to sound intelligent. Keep it up, you'll do it eventually!
I hope for your hypothetical clients' sake that YANAL. The definition of criminal trespass varies from place to place, and in some states it IS illegal merely to be on someone else's private property when proper notice has been given (e.g., a "no trespassing" sign).
You obviously read the post--maybe I should have been clearer. TRESPASS BY ITSELF, WITH NO EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES, IS NOT A CRIME! Trespass in an area with posted warning signs, depending on jurisdiction, may be a crime, like you pointed out.
Now, do you see that what I said, and what you say, are the same thing? I knew you could.
About the public/private thing: driveways, a large lawn/garden, private parks in housing communities, private roads and parking lots, etc. are still private property on which you can be convicted for trespassing. Even the local mall can have you arrested for trespassing if you violate their rules (no loud music, no spamming cars with fliers, etc.).
You're wrong, but this is a commonly held misconception about trespass, related in part to people not knowing the difference between civil and criminal law.
Being on private property is NOT a crime. It's a tort, an offense for which you can be sued in civil court. If you've caused (legal) damages by trespassing, you can be sued for an award to compensate for the damage. If you haven't caused any damages, you can probably only be given a restraining order not to do it again. (If you violate a restraining order, in most places, that's a crime on its own.)
Trespass is only a criminal act under certain circumstances. Trespassing in order to commit another illegal act can make the trespass itself into another crime they'll charge you with. Trespass on federal property may be a crime in itself, too.
Breaking and entering is a crime, but by itself, not having anything to do with trespassing. It's not the fact that you entered private property that's the problem--it's that you broke through security measures to do it.
These standards mostly emerge from the understanding in courts that a person's actions are usually the best judge of their intentions. If you happen to trod on your neighbor's lawn, or if you wander across an unmarked boundary from national forest onto private property, you probably don't mean to cause the owner any harm. However, if you walk across your neighbor's lawn, crowbar open his back door, and creep inside, you probably DO mean him harm. Therefore, even if you get caught before you do anything else, the latter action is considered much more severe than the former.
So no, it's not at all self-evident that access to open APs without explicit permission is, in itself, a criminal act. In fact, most of the law that I've seen and cases I've dealt with say the opposite.
They don't have to purchase incoming and outgoing lines in equal amounts. If they have no customers in a given area, they just need to buy outgoing services. If they have tons of customers in a given area that only ever seem to call long-distance, they could well buy more incoming than outgoing capacity.
See, when you're negotiating bulk traffic like this, you buy based on capacity and availability, not on a per-line basis like a consumer would. You can get asymmetric service.
I swear, the people on Slashdot who attack market systems are almost as bad as the people who defend them! Let's cover some basic ground, shall we?
1) Voice over IP should cost LESS not a bit less, it's not like they have to built a network or something
How much do you know about running a VOIP business? Have you been running models that demonstrate the enormous cost difference? I bet if you did, you'd notice that ISP-level providers generally pay backbone carriers on a flat-rate PLUS a per-byte basis, not the simple flat rates like home users pay to ISPs. So if AOL customers are sending shitloads of packetized voice (potentially a LOT more bytes than they send now), AOL will have to charge accordingly to pay for it. Not to mention the fact that AOL will definitely have to purchase tons of new capacity from carriers, which increases the flat-rate portion of their costs.
2)...it should cost that a year with NO long distance fee AT ALL, since no, absolutely no extra charge is placed upon the company when you make a long distance, you don't use more of their network you just connect an IP to another IP.
I'm sorry. You obviously misunderstand VOIP technology something awful. If a VOIP customer wants to talk to another VOIP customer, you are mostly correct about how you don't have to go through any phone systems or toll points. But if a VOIP customer wants to chat with a non-VOIP customer, how the FUCK is that call supposed to get into the POTS system without talking to the regular local phone company in the called area? So a VOIP provider has to maintain a VOIP gateway and a bank of outgoing phone lines in EVERY SINGLE local calling area so that its customers can reach those areaa without incurring phone toll charges once the calls leave the Internet. Now wouldn't that be kind of expensive? Especially when AOL has 30 million customers, a lot of whom probably might want to call any given area code at one time? I pity the fool ISP that gives too many busy signals to its customers.
Oh, and don't forget that VOIP gateways have to function the other way, too. How does a non-VOIP person call you, the VOIP customer? Well, your VOIP provider maintains a phone line connected to a VOIP gateway in the area code that you selected when you signed up with them, so that calls from the POTS system will be routed to that area code, and then into the VOIP gateway. Guess what? Phone lines cost money.
3) A company launch the service with the new technology and instead of the consummer paying less it's the company that makes more profit, VOIP, banking machines...
First of all, VOIP does promise to reduce the costs of consumer telephone service, but it takes time for the market to adjust to new products like this. Once VOIP gets generally accepted as a drop-in substitute for residential POTS service, the available ISPs will grow in number and customer base, and VOIP service will become just another commodity. VOIP providers will start competing with each other, and you'll see prices dropping down to the efficiency point (the price at which the business is just barely making enough profit to keep it in that market).
And for the record, banking machines HAVE reduced consumer banking costs, but in a way that you have to actually THINK about to notice. See, since consumer use of ATMs has made it possible for banks to serve a lot more customers with a lot less employees, banks have been able to either reduce costs by controlling staff (firing, or just hiring freezes) or add more paying customers to their clientele without having to pay more staff to service them. Either way, the banks have lowered their costs.
Joe Consumer sees a reduced cost, also: the banks see opportunities to undercut each others' prices (lowering or eliminating banking fees, offering higher interest rates) and gain market share, which they do. In the process, the price to the consumer drops toward the efficiency point.
This is where argument by analogy becomes suspect: there are too few similiarities between business competition in market systems and organism competition in ecosystems to make any real points based on that.
Let's try this instead
I still think that natural selection acting upon companies is less potent than you imply. Internal mechanisms can only go so far in fixing human flaws, and the marketplace determines the distribution of the managment workforce to a very much greater extent than its membership.
First of all, we AIN'T talking about "natural selection", here. We're talking about a selection mechanism that has certain similarities to the selection mechanisms of evolution, but that's really just because they both happen to be selection mechanisms. See my point aboout bad analogizing, above.
Carefull, here, when you talk about "management methods", because you're missing a fine distinction: there are methods for dealing weith people that are called "management", and then there is the whole process of running a business that is also sometimes called "management". The latter concept includes a whole hell of a lot of non-HR stuff, like accounting and modeling and lots more.
So you certainly have a point about management being roughly the same everywhere in the HR sense--in organizations of at least a certain size, professional and legal standards dictate a pretty big slice of how people are supposed to act toward each other. Beyond that, managers tend to learn similar methods because they learned from other people who used similar methods, whether teachers or former bosses. Pretty much everybody is just copying each other, with a bit of innovation from time to time.
But just because we all (in the USA) use the same methods right now doesn't mean that we always did. Other methods that were formerly used in this culture (like a lot of industrial stuff from the pre-Henry Ford days) have disappeared over time, slowly but surely.
And then you have accounting/modeling issues! The basic concepts of balance sheets and general ledgers that make up GAAP standards have evolved considerably over the last 200 years, with many experiments and variations and extensions by various companies. The current debate over whether to expense stock options or not is a good example of this, and it does have a BIG impact on the performance of companies that use such methods.
So yes, there ARE a lot of similarities, but there are also notable differences. More importantly, the process of selection of business methods has occured most obviously over time, one possible result of which is that everybody looks similar in certain ways. Compare this to something in animals like teeth or blood or oxidizing metabolisms--such common traits that they are shared by entire family trees of organisms (fish through people [minus birds] have teeth, and damn near the whole animal kingdom has an oxygen metabolism!) Everybody looks kinda the same because everybody learned a lot of the same methods that keep their companies in business. But it's a dynamic process, so it's not uniform or constant.
I agree that internal mechanisms will help make a company more sucessful regardless of management, but a successful company tends to make more profit per head; this means that they will be underrepresented in terms of workforce for their market penetration, so that good practice is not strongly selected for. Rather, satisficing is selected for, as that is the behaviour that distinguishes survival from outright failure.
Hold on a minute--you seem to be cornering your argument on this concept that:
1) efficient companies will have more market share per head than non-efficient companies, so
2) said efficient comapanies will employ less manageres to USE those efficient practices, so
3) that means efficiency is selecting against itself in terms of the people who actually use such methods!?
Your argument has hiden assumptions that the world
More the the point, Herman, where was Google in 1995? Are you even old enough to remember those days?
It may shock and amaze you to learn that there was a time BEFORE the WWW, and that up until about 1995-6, nobody except the geeks and some researchers gave a rats' ass. Hell, you probably weren't even aware of its existence unless you worked with it or were a Uni student.
Kids today. Think fucking Google can solve all their problems, anyway.
Sorry, I didn't mean (at all, really!) that market based-solutions are empirically correct. I should have known somebody would read "market system" next to "empirical" and knee-jerk his way into an attack on modern business management--this is Slashdot, after all.
A couple of things for you:
1) This discussion has nothing to do with bad management, or other Dilbert-isms. It's a fact that different companies have different internal operational methods, and I think the point about selection of companies with good methods is a pretty straightforward outgrowth of that. That part has NOTHING to do with empiricism, at all.
2) The empiricism thing is merely an example of a similar mechanism that selects for behaviors that tend to reflect accurate beliefs about reality, as opposed to those that reflect inaccurate beliefs about reality. I'm not a fucking Ayn Randite, here, okay? I'm offended at your intimations!
3) When the existing argument is expressed in terms of tendencies, it's pointless to counter with examples of specific scenarios. When I say that there is a tendency in the market that businesses using unrealistic models will be selected against, and those with realistic models will be selected for, I'm admitting, ON FACE, that there are counterexamples of specific instances where realistic companies fail, and tons of situations where stupid, ill-managed, crappy companies succeed and thrive. On balance, though, it's more likely that any given company will do better if it's more realistic.
4) When you rant about why corporate management isn't perfect, your point SEEMS to be that bad management is proof that the market system is a failure. You miss the key understanding of markets: competitors only need to be barely good enough to feed themselves (net profit, over time), and barely good enough to outperform the other companies that they're competing with for resources and profits. Your argument is premised on an incorrect assumption that because I mentioned capitalism and empiricism in the same post, I somehow believe that capitalism is a perfect system. IT'S NOT--IT'S RUN BY PEOPLE! How could it possibly be a perfect system?!
5) You fail it. Next time, read the post, attempt to understand it, and respond to the actual argument being made
But the market is fundamentally a selective mechanism, right? People can and do make stupid, losing decisions, and many of them keep their jobs, but companies that have more people making better decisions tend to outperform companies that don't encourage good work as much. Over time and across the whole market, there is a tendency that bad methods disappear, because the companies in which those methods thrived paid the price with in market share.
Coincidentally, this is also why people who say that the law of gravity is a culturally-determined construct are technically correct and bone-headed in practice. Yes, it's entirely possible that cultures can exist where everyone believes utterly that if you drop a rock, it will fall upward, or that you can jump off a cliff and not hit the ground--but any such culture would probably vanish pretty quickly as its people failed to observe safe practices around cliffs and rocks.
We're not empiricists because we WANT to be, we're empiricists because it's a good survival strategy!
TCO studies are just standard business cost estimation models, with assumptions chosen by the authors of the study. Most of the models are pretty good, in theory, with sound reasoning and empirically-supportable construction. If they didn't work, or if they tended to provide misleading results when applied properly, why would businesses use them at all?
The problem is with the assumptions. Give me any financial model, from cost estimation to marketing models to arbitrage scenarios, and I can plug assumptions into it that will give any result you want. The models are fine, but the results are "the pits", as it were, unless the assumptions are carefully and honestly chosen.
This isn't to say that a TCO model, even with well-chosen assumptions, can provide an incredible amount of precision, but it CAN provide accuracy of result. That's what REALLY pisses me off about this article--they're quoting numbers to a whole percent, when it's pretty obvious that the precision of the result isn't anywhere near %10. If the article is to be believed, they're using intentionally pessimistic assumptions in order to bias the study against F/OSS, and still coming out with F/OSS on top. They're acknowledging that they can't bring supportable, precise assumptions into it!
So really, the study is saying "F/OSS is cheaper than MS by a good margin, but our precision is shitty enough that our actual number doesn't mean much. It might be %37 cheaper, it might be %80 cheaper, or it might be %1 cheaper--but we're pretty sure it's cheaper."
I guess it's like that old joke, where the museum guest asks the tour guide "How old are these dinosaur bones?" The guide says "The bones are 2 million and 10 years old." The guest, astonished, exclaims "That's amazing! How can we know the age so precisely, when it's that old?"
The guide responds, "Well, it was 2 million years old when I started working here, and I've been working here for 10 years."
Do you think it's pure coincidence that when a company does things that Slashdotters like (IBM recently, Google, etc.), everybody develops a soft spot?
Are you old enough to remember when Google first hit the scene a few years ago? Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other old-line search engines were becoming noticeably less useful every day, as opportunists found better and better ways of link-spamming the robots that fed those sites. The search engines themselves didn't seem to respond at all, which made searching more and more frustrating every day. In some cases (Yahoo comes to mind), the site pages became so bloated and portalesque that they offended aesthetics and load-time guidlines.
I remember clearly the first few weeks I was using Google: it was so refreshingly simple and clean, and it loaded in a snap. There was almost no link spam in the results, less than Yahoo by a factor of 100 for most searches. And there were no annoying, distracting ads. It was like paradise had been reborn.
Nowadays, that's not quite so true. Google has gotten more bloated than it used to be, but they've kept it pretty thin, all told. And they added advertisements, but kept them out of the normal flow of results and text-based only, which is a lot less aggravating to process in sight. And while the results occasionally get cocked up by spam, Google actively works to keep its results relevant by tweaking its algorithms and pruning spammers.
Also, I remember the rumors that started flying about various search engines raising revenues by selling hit placements, possibly without any on-the-spot notification to the user. This really offends the senses, because search engines lose value when the results aren't neutral and unbiased. Google does search-related ads, but in such a way that you trust what you see is aboveboard.
That's why everybody loves Google so much--they've consistently demonstrated a lot of concern for their customers, in ways that put them head and shoulders above the rest of the industry (and corporate entities in general, I'd imagine). Heck, Google is better behaved than most people I know!
We like them because they seem to be looking out for us.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but what makes you think that the government will do a better job looking out for a victim's interests than the victim himself (or herself)?
One of the NICE things about civil litigation is that you don't have to depend on the government to do anything except sit there and make decisions about issues that are put directly in front of it. You get your own lawyer to do the hard work, and (s)he's more than willing to go the extra mile because you're paying the bills.
Contrast this to situations that require government intervention: when your network gets attacked or your company is getting blackmailed by DDoS fuckers, you can't do a whole hell of a lot without getting the FBI or the USSS involved. But it might take weeks or months for them even start, if you can even get them to take the case. They always have too many cases and not enough agents.
Yeah, this means that people without money get fucked over sometimes, but that's why lawyers are allowed to take contingency fee cases, where they don't get paid unless they win. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Bah. And give up that thick, noxious odor of ox-urine in the subways? And the constant traffic jams in midtown? And the annoying hipster dipshit kids that have invaded the Williamsburg and Astoria like locusts?
Actually, I've lived in NYC for about six years, now, and I'm hooked on it. If I leave for more than about five days at a time, I get really homesick for it. This is probably a mental illness (or masochism), but I can't help it.
And there are a hell of a lot of great things that cannot be duplicated, anywhere:
1) cocktails in Bryant Park on a Summer evening; 2) walking across the Brooklyn bridge to have pizza at Grimaldi's in Dumbo; 3) being able to buy food, booze, cigarettes, jimmy hats, clothes, furniture, or just about anything else at ANY hour of day or night, even on holidays. 4) crusing down the FDR Drive, along the river, on a full-moon night; 5) the view from the top of the Empire State Building--holy shit, man! 6) walking into singles' bars in ANY OTHER CITY IN ANY OTHER CITY IN THE WORLD (LA, San Fran, Houston, Peoria, London, Beijing) and being automatically cooler than everybody else.
I could go on and on, but you get the point. This place is awesome.
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Since when does "extensible" mean the same thing as "open source"? For all we know, they could claim ownership of any derivatives works of their product, making any user-contributed code the property of the game manufacturer. Even if they don't intend to at first, who's to say they're not reserving the right for later? This is more like the "Anti-OSS", if anything: no guaranteed rights.
And I didn't see a reference anywhere to the license that covers mods. Maybe if someone did see it, they can point that out to me.
How did previous mod communities deal with this? Did modders just not care, or did the fact that the game manufacturer didn't claim rights over derivative works from the beginning save it?
Help enlighten us--maybe I'm being too harsh.
Sorry for the excessive quotations marks, but I just feel like there's some simplistic thinking going on about the ability of human beings to react en masse like this.
If a scientific consensus exists that certain human activities (industry and commerce, mostly) are affecting the environment in ways that will eventually harm us, that's still a long way from doing anything about it. Reversing industrial and economic trends costs money--mostly opportunity costs from having to cease certain profitable, but polluting/warming endeavors. It's not always possible to set up a system in which those costs are rationalized to the people who can deal with them.
A lot of it comes down to what "we" means, in this context: you have to get a politically enabled consensus on the existence of the problem, AND on the view that the harms of environmental damage outweigh the economic costs of changing how we do things. In the US, right now, I don't see either of those realizations taking root enough to affect policy substantially. Even if the science and economic analyses are sound, there's still going to be a long, drawn-out debate over the merits.
But is this really so bad? We're deliberative, not knee-jerking. I've been convinced lately that the scientific evidence in favor of human climate influence is pretty strong, but it's still an enormously complex question.
And remember, getting the answer wrong will be just as harmful to the human race if we go overboard on trying to prevent climate change: all those opportunity costs, whoever pays them, will be felt collectively as a lower standard of living.
Basically, I just think you're being unfair by labelling humanity "stupid, paranoid, ignorant, and arrogant" (not to mention suggesting that we should go extinct!). This is an incredibly difficult question to get right, and the consequences EITHER way are pretty nasty if the human race gets it wrong.
Airsnort and Kismet both depend on a function called "RFMON mode", or just monitor mode. It's characterized by the card not transmitting any data, but receiving all 802.11 frames that it can sense. Every frame is passed to userspace--the card has no association to any access point, it's just a radio receiver and frame interpreter.
Monitor mode allows apps like Kismet and Airsnort to work by making wireless traffic visible to userspace without having an association to an AP. For instance, how can you gather encrypted WEP traffic without already knowing the WEP key, unless you can listen and record the traffic without associating?
The Windows driver model doesn't provide monitor mode facilities, and it probably never will. That's why NDISWrapper won't work with Kismet or Airsnort--you're restricted to Windows driver functions, which precludes using monitor mode.
Virtually all 802.11 cards have the ability to function in such a mode, but not all Linux/OSS drivers support these abilities. The drivers that I know do support it include: hostap, prism54, madwifi--maybe more. Unfortunately for us Centrino people, neither the ipw2100 driver (The 802.11B-only device) nor its sister project, ipw2200 (802.11b/g) support monitor mode.
That's why I'm pulling my ipw2200 MiniPCI card and replacing it with an Aetheros (MADWifi) tri-band card.
Where did you get this shit? You got a cite (and no, the Aryan Nation site doesn't count) to back that up?
This doesn't even make SENSE, though. I'll grant you, it's true that people around the world moved from hunting/foraging to other food-generation activities, and it's true that this change happened at different times in different areas (but pretty much within the last 11,000 years, world-wide). Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has a great synopsis of that stuff.
But when people stopped hunting, they moved to either agriculture or fishing. Both farming and fishing are REALLY physically intensive activities!! Huge portions of the population have been manual laborers for most of the history of the Americas and Europe. Hell, up until this century, more than half of the US population was agricultural. Look at the modern Amish lifestyle for data on how physically tough that stuff is--some of them burn as many calories a day as Lance Armstrong!
You're full of shit, and we all know it.
If I were so inclined, I'm sure I could setup a business in my house that sells purely online/through eBay and be able to make a better profit than a standard storefront, simply due to the considerable difference in overhead. However, I'm not interested in owning that kind of business.
Didn't stop to think about the realities of running a business, did you? If it were like you describe, wouldn't everybody be running a business online instead of "deal[ing] with the overhead of running a store"? Consider the realities of the situation:
1) If you're REALLY running your whole business out of your house, there's a limit on the size of your business. If you're in a shipped-goods industry (like these Ebay merchants), how much inventory can you actually fit in your house? Even if your wife is very understanding, the house is only so big, right?
2) But let's say you get a warehouse, which is cheaper than storefront commercial space, or you keep your volume of business low enough to keep it in your house. You're STILL not necessarily better off, because a storefront can be a route to a hell of a lot more incoming customers. People will walk in off-the-street from having seen your place (hopefully!), leading to more potential sales opportunities. And this isn't an either/or situation with the web (Ebay)--you can always do both, and pick up sales from both sources. As long as the storefront brings in more business than it costs in rent/other costs, it's adding profits to your bottom line, and you'd be poorer not to have it.
3) A storefront shop will see a whole category of very lucrative customers that mail-order, WWW, and Ebay-based stores cannot: people who need something RIGHT NOW and can't wait. Forgot a birthday gift, and the party's tonight? Can't wait for Ebay, can you? Or when your boss's laptop fritzes and he's leaving for Europe in a couple of hours? If you don't have a spare, you're going to be running down the Best Buy, aren't you? And these kinds of customers are wonderful because they generally don't care about price as much as regular shoppers--they'll pay whatever they can afford in order to get what they need, instead of trying to shop around and save.
4) Would you rather make %50 profit from your gross revenues, or %5 profit? That's a trick question. If you have the option of making %50 profit, but your revenues are only $100,000 a year, you make $50,000 in profits. If an alternative option is to make only %5 profit on gross revenues of $100,000,000, though, you'd lose $4,950,000 a year if you went with the %50 profit choice (0.05 x 100,000,000 = 5,000,000). It's not about how much profit you're making in comparison to your revenues--it's about how much absolute profit you can make given all your available options.
5) There are perfectly good reasons for staying on Ebay without having a regular storefront. You may not want to get involved in the possibly cutthroat business of ordinary retail because you don't know as much about it as the web, or because your customers tend to inhabit the web only. Or maybe you just don't want to have a big business, and so you decide to keep it small and low-cost.
Correlation never implies causation.
I think your point is good (and possibly true), but are you sure this last sentence is the right way to phrase what you mean?
I think that correlation CAN imply causation. Often, correlation is the most obvious sign of causation. Of course, any responsible investigator would follow through by investigating the phenomena thoroughly in order to determine what the causal relationship actually is.
What you REALLY meant was "Correlation doesn't prove causation", right? That's correct. You probably just wanted to give the last sentence some emphasis, and used "never" without realizing how badly it modifies "implies", here.
Maybe a better choice would be "Correlation alone can never prove causation"--wordier, but correct.
Oh--and on Windows machines, you can't delete a running swap file, and you can't turn off a currently-used swap file. You HAVE to edit the registry and remove the key that determines the swap file's path, then reboot. But that won't get you anywhere, because you can't even login to a machine that has no swap file. So there's no way to even temporarily remove the swap file and still do anything useful with the machine, unless you pull the drive and mount it on another machine as a second drive. Your method just doesn't work.
And if you DID try this, you'd notice that you've now fucked the machine up, good, because you can't even login to re-configure the swap file path. The only way to bring the machine back is to pull the disk, mount elsewhere, mount the registry hives on the other machine, and do some offline registry-editing. Assuming you were intelligent enough to pull the drive and mount elsewhere first thing, you can just delete the swap file while it's not activated and wipe the drive. When you replace the drive in the original machine and reboot, Windows will automatically re-allocate the swap file for you on login.
Why on earth MS decided to do this, I can't say. Why logins? You can boot the machine and services will start without a swap file, but you can't login? WTF? And why the hell doesn't it just warn you and let you login anyway?
As for you, Parent Poster, have you ever even tried this, or what? Good start, but you need to check these things out before you post them. People could get hurt!
Unfortunately, no. This still leaves a lot of tidbits on the disk in the "slack" space at the ends of clusters that aren't entirely utilized. ESPECIALLY with frequently allocated/deleted files like browser cache, which (being largely HTML) will be identifiable even as fragments.
Your solution does cut down on the risks, but you're still far from being in the clear. Besides, if you're leaving a company without any existing investigation/legal action over your head, what's the harm in wiping the disk? What are they going to do, fire you?
And seriously--I mentioned it earlier in terms of the potential for punishment, but if you delete data under a subpoena or similar circumstances, you're a scum-sucking shitbag who deserves several years in a federal, PMITA prison. You're no better than those Enron fuckwads, and no amount of justification can dig you out of that ethical black hole. So you shouldn't be trying to hide the wiping, anyway.
Nobody sniffs the network like this. Two reasons:
1) You would have to record a SHITload of data, in an organization of any size. And since HTTPS is so common, you're not going to get a lot of the juicer bits, anyway. Many companies keep logs of URLs visited in their proxy servers, and use those for policy enforcement, but recording the actual traffic is just too much. It's not just a problem of where to store the data--you also have to be able to sniff and record at the bandwidth of the gateway, which can be pretty big for a mid-sized office's firewall.
2) It's usually possible to get the incriminating bits after the fact, using forensic analysis of the user's hard drive. On report of an incident, you can pull the machine and take a bitstream, device-level copy of the whole disk. Various forensic tools are available to sift the drive and recover both allocated and deleted files, and even bits of partially overwritten files. Clearing your browser cache and deleting the history folder won't help you, here.
The nice thing about the method of #2 is that it's a reactive method--when something happens, you only have to go after the data of the people involved. Sure, it's not going to catch as much, but it will get a lot, and it's much more efficient.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Before leaving a company, try booting a Knoppix CD and doing a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda". It'll take a while (maybe 1 min/GB on a modern IDE disk with DMA enabled), but it might help. Though God save your mortal soul if you do this while you're under investigation or a subpoena--destroying data in that situation will probably get you in worse legal trouble than getting caught for whatever you tried to hide!
Did it ever occur to you that they might have modified code other than the UI? Maybe there are non-visible changes to the scanning engine or something, perhaps to enhance the integration with the Windows OS?
Imagine for a moment that the computer is doing more than painting pretty pictures on your monitor (that's the TV-thing on top). Could we agree that a program intended to detect spyware could be substantially modified without altering the appearance to the user?
How did this get modded as "informative"?
Oh, that's right--he bashed MS. Sorry.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite recipes for remote Windows work involves OpenVPN plus VNC--usually RealVNC server on the Windows boxes, and (whatever) VNC client on my Linux machines. Surprisingly responsive, especially when you set the VNC options that disable windows-dressing GUI crap like background picture, etc. Beautiful for helping friends and family out remotely--as long as they have network connectivity, you're solid gold.
Doesn't work so well for helping with DSL installations, but...
Installation on a Windows box is trivially easy--they built a standard Windows binary and an installer that sets it all up for you. There are still configuration details, so I wouldn't give it to your mom with a "Check this shit out!" admonition, but anybody with half a clue, or a little help, can be up and running in about 60 seconds.
If you want to use a pre-shared secret (symmetric passphrase) encryption instead of PKI, it's even faster.
The latest version of OVPN has a "multi-client server" mode that allows an admin to set up a single VPN server, kind of like a VPN concentrator box, that can maintain tunnels with an arbitrary number of remote hosts. This is REALLY nice, because setting up a new remote user only requires that you give them the installer, your server's public key, and that they generate a key pair and send the public part to you (pick a method).
OpenVPN really, REALLY is the bomb. Try it out sometime.
The OP never said this would make a solar sail WORK, dummy. And as the OP's response to your JP (jackass posting) would indicate, you're about the only person who didn't understand that.
Good try, though--you almost managed to sound intelligent. Keep it up, you'll do it eventually!
I hope for your hypothetical clients' sake that YANAL. The definition of criminal trespass varies from place to place, and in some states it IS illegal merely to be on someone else's private property when proper notice has been given (e.g., a "no trespassing" sign).
You obviously read the post--maybe I should have been clearer. TRESPASS BY ITSELF, WITH NO EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES, IS NOT A CRIME! Trespass in an area with posted warning signs, depending on jurisdiction, may be a crime, like you pointed out.
Now, do you see that what I said, and what you say, are the same thing? I knew you could.
About the public/private thing: driveways, a large lawn/garden, private parks in housing communities, private roads and parking lots, etc. are still private property on which you can be convicted for trespassing. Even the local mall can have you arrested for trespassing if you violate their rules (no loud music, no spamming cars with fliers, etc.).
You're wrong, but this is a commonly held misconception about trespass, related in part to people not knowing the difference between civil and criminal law.
Being on private property is NOT a crime. It's a tort, an offense for which you can be sued in civil court. If you've caused (legal) damages by trespassing, you can be sued for an award to compensate for the damage. If you haven't caused any damages, you can probably only be given a restraining order not to do it again. (If you violate a restraining order, in most places, that's a crime on its own.)
Trespass is only a criminal act under certain circumstances. Trespassing in order to commit another illegal act can make the trespass itself into another crime they'll charge you with. Trespass on federal property may be a crime in itself, too.
Breaking and entering is a crime, but by itself, not having anything to do with trespassing. It's not the fact that you entered private property that's the problem--it's that you broke through security measures to do it.
These standards mostly emerge from the understanding in courts that a person's actions are usually the best judge of their intentions. If you happen to trod on your neighbor's lawn, or if you wander across an unmarked boundary from national forest onto private property, you probably don't mean to cause the owner any harm. However, if you walk across your neighbor's lawn, crowbar open his back door, and creep inside, you probably DO mean him harm. Therefore, even if you get caught before you do anything else, the latter action is considered much more severe than the former.
So no, it's not at all self-evident that access to open APs without explicit permission is, in itself, a criminal act. In fact, most of the law that I've seen and cases I've dealt with say the opposite.
They don't have to purchase incoming and outgoing lines in equal amounts. If they have no customers in a given area, they just need to buy outgoing services. If they have tons of customers in a given area that only ever seem to call long-distance, they could well buy more incoming than outgoing capacity.
See, when you're negotiating bulk traffic like this, you buy based on capacity and availability, not on a per-line basis like a consumer would. You can get asymmetric service.
I swear, the people on Slashdot who attack market systems are almost as bad as the people who defend them! Let's cover some basic ground, shall we?
...it should cost that a year with NO long distance fee AT ALL, since no, absolutely no extra charge is placed upon the company when you make a long distance, you don't use more of their network you just connect an IP to another IP.
1) Voice over IP should cost LESS not a bit less, it's not like they have to built a network or something
How much do you know about running a VOIP business? Have you been running models that demonstrate the enormous cost difference? I bet if you did, you'd notice that ISP-level providers generally pay backbone carriers on a flat-rate PLUS a per-byte basis, not the simple flat rates like home users pay to ISPs. So if AOL customers are sending shitloads of packetized voice (potentially a LOT more bytes than they send now), AOL will have to charge accordingly to pay for it. Not to mention the fact that AOL will definitely have to purchase tons of new capacity from carriers, which increases the flat-rate portion of their costs.
2)
I'm sorry. You obviously misunderstand VOIP technology something awful. If a VOIP customer wants to talk to another VOIP customer, you are mostly correct about how you don't have to go through any phone systems or toll points. But if a VOIP customer wants to chat with a non-VOIP customer, how the FUCK is that call supposed to get into the POTS system without talking to the regular local phone company in the called area? So a VOIP provider has to maintain a VOIP gateway and a bank of outgoing phone lines in EVERY SINGLE local calling area so that its customers can reach those areaa without incurring phone toll charges once the calls leave the Internet. Now wouldn't that be kind of expensive? Especially when AOL has 30 million customers, a lot of whom probably might want to call any given area code at one time? I pity the fool ISP that gives too many busy signals to its customers.
Oh, and don't forget that VOIP gateways have to function the other way, too. How does a non-VOIP person call you, the VOIP customer? Well, your VOIP provider maintains a phone line connected to a VOIP gateway in the area code that you selected when you signed up with them, so that calls from the POTS system will be routed to that area code, and then into the VOIP gateway. Guess what? Phone lines cost money.
3) A company launch the service with the new technology and instead of the consummer paying less it's the company that makes more profit, VOIP, banking machines...
First of all, VOIP does promise to reduce the costs of consumer telephone service, but it takes time for the market to adjust to new products like this. Once VOIP gets generally accepted as a drop-in substitute for residential POTS service, the available ISPs will grow in number and customer base, and VOIP service will become just another commodity. VOIP providers will start competing with each other, and you'll see prices dropping down to the efficiency point (the price at which the business is just barely making enough profit to keep it in that market).
And for the record, banking machines HAVE reduced consumer banking costs, but in a way that you have to actually THINK about to notice. See, since consumer use of ATMs has made it possible for banks to serve a lot more customers with a lot less employees, banks have been able to either reduce costs by controlling staff (firing, or just hiring freezes) or add more paying customers to their clientele without having to pay more staff to service them. Either way, the banks have lowered their costs.
Joe Consumer sees a reduced cost, also: the banks see opportunities to undercut each others' prices (lowering or eliminating banking fees, offering higher interest rates) and gain market share, which they do. In the process, the price to the consumer drops toward the efficiency point.
It is a HELPFUL t
This is where argument by analogy becomes suspect: there are too few similiarities between business competition in market systems and organism competition in ecosystems to make any real points based on that.
Let's try this instead
I still think that natural selection acting upon companies is less potent than you imply. Internal mechanisms can only go so far in fixing human flaws, and the marketplace determines the distribution of the managment workforce to a very much greater extent than its membership.
First of all, we AIN'T talking about "natural selection", here. We're talking about a selection mechanism that has certain similarities to the selection mechanisms of evolution, but that's really just because they both happen to be selection mechanisms. See my point aboout bad analogizing, above.
Carefull, here, when you talk about "management methods", because you're missing a fine distinction: there are methods for dealing weith people that are called "management", and then there is the whole process of running a business that is also sometimes called "management". The latter concept includes a whole hell of a lot of non-HR stuff, like accounting and modeling and lots more.
So you certainly have a point about management being roughly the same everywhere in the HR sense--in organizations of at least a certain size, professional and legal standards dictate a pretty big slice of how people are supposed to act toward each other. Beyond that, managers tend to learn similar methods because they learned from other people who used similar methods, whether teachers or former bosses. Pretty much everybody is just copying each other, with a bit of innovation from time to time.
But just because we all (in the USA) use the same methods right now doesn't mean that we always did. Other methods that were formerly used in this culture (like a lot of industrial stuff from the pre-Henry Ford days) have disappeared over time, slowly but surely.
And then you have accounting/modeling issues! The basic concepts of balance sheets and general ledgers that make up GAAP standards have evolved considerably over the last 200 years, with many experiments and variations and extensions by various companies. The current debate over whether to expense stock options or not is a good example of this, and it does have a BIG impact on the performance of companies that use such methods.
So yes, there ARE a lot of similarities, but there are also notable differences. More importantly, the process of selection of business methods has occured most obviously over time, one possible result of which is that everybody looks similar in certain ways. Compare this to something in animals like teeth or blood or oxidizing metabolisms--such common traits that they are shared by entire family trees of organisms (fish through people [minus birds] have teeth, and damn near the whole animal kingdom has an oxygen metabolism!) Everybody looks kinda the same because everybody learned a lot of the same methods that keep their companies in business. But it's a dynamic process, so it's not uniform or constant.
I agree that internal mechanisms will help make a company more sucessful regardless of management, but a successful company tends to make more profit per head; this means that they will be underrepresented in terms of workforce for their market penetration, so that good practice is not strongly selected for. Rather, satisficing is selected for, as that is the behaviour that distinguishes survival from outright failure.
Hold on a minute--you seem to be cornering your argument on this concept that:
1) efficient companies will have more market share per head than non-efficient companies, so
2) said efficient comapanies will employ less manageres to USE those efficient practices, so
3) that means efficiency is selecting against itself in terms of the people who actually use such methods!?
Your argument has hiden assumptions that the world
More the the point, Herman, where was Google in 1995? Are you even old enough to remember those days?
It may shock and amaze you to learn that there was a time BEFORE the WWW, and that up until about 1995-6, nobody except the geeks and some researchers gave a rats' ass. Hell, you probably weren't even aware of its existence unless you worked with it or were a Uni student.
Kids today. Think fucking Google can solve all their problems, anyway.
Sorry, I didn't mean (at all, really!) that market based-solutions are empirically correct. I should have known somebody would read "market system" next to "empirical" and knee-jerk his way into an attack on modern business management--this is Slashdot, after all.
A couple of things for you:
1) This discussion has nothing to do with bad management, or other Dilbert-isms. It's a fact that different companies have different internal operational methods, and I think the point about selection of companies with good methods is a pretty straightforward outgrowth of that. That part has NOTHING to do with empiricism, at all.
2) The empiricism thing is merely an example of a similar mechanism that selects for behaviors that tend to reflect accurate beliefs about reality, as opposed to those that reflect inaccurate beliefs about reality. I'm not a fucking Ayn Randite, here, okay? I'm offended at your intimations!
3) When the existing argument is expressed in terms of tendencies, it's pointless to counter with examples of specific scenarios. When I say that there is a tendency in the market that businesses using unrealistic models will be selected against, and those with realistic models will be selected for, I'm admitting, ON FACE, that there are counterexamples of specific instances where realistic companies fail, and tons of situations where stupid, ill-managed, crappy companies succeed and thrive. On balance, though, it's more likely that any given company will do better if it's more realistic.
4) When you rant about why corporate management isn't perfect, your point SEEMS to be that bad management is proof that the market system is a failure. You miss the key understanding of markets: competitors only need to be barely good enough to feed themselves (net profit, over time), and barely good enough to outperform the other companies that they're competing with for resources and profits. Your argument is premised on an incorrect assumption that because I mentioned capitalism and empiricism in the same post, I somehow believe that capitalism is a perfect system. IT'S NOT--IT'S RUN BY PEOPLE! How could it possibly be a perfect system?!
5) You fail it. Next time, read the post, attempt to understand it, and respond to the actual argument being made
But the market is fundamentally a selective mechanism, right? People can and do make stupid, losing decisions, and many of them keep their jobs, but companies that have more people making better decisions tend to outperform companies that don't encourage good work as much. Over time and across the whole market, there is a tendency that bad methods disappear, because the companies in which those methods thrived paid the price with in market share.
Coincidentally, this is also why people who say that the law of gravity is a culturally-determined construct are technically correct and bone-headed in practice. Yes, it's entirely possible that cultures can exist where everyone believes utterly that if you drop a rock, it will fall upward, or that you can jump off a cliff and not hit the ground--but any such culture would probably vanish pretty quickly as its people failed to observe safe practices around cliffs and rocks.
We're not empiricists because we WANT to be, we're empiricists because it's a good survival strategy!
Skippy has a point, but...
TCO studies are just standard business cost estimation models, with assumptions chosen by the authors of the study. Most of the models are pretty good, in theory, with sound reasoning and empirically-supportable construction. If they didn't work, or if they tended to provide misleading results when applied properly, why would businesses use them at all?
The problem is with the assumptions. Give me any financial model, from cost estimation to marketing models to arbitrage scenarios, and I can plug assumptions into it that will give any result you want. The models are fine, but the results are "the pits", as it were, unless the assumptions are carefully and honestly chosen.
This isn't to say that a TCO model, even with well-chosen assumptions, can provide an incredible amount of precision, but it CAN provide accuracy of result. That's what REALLY pisses me off about this article--they're quoting numbers to a whole percent, when it's pretty obvious that the precision of the result isn't anywhere near %10. If the article is to be believed, they're using intentionally pessimistic assumptions in order to bias the study against F/OSS, and still coming out with F/OSS on top. They're acknowledging that they can't bring supportable, precise assumptions into it!
So really, the study is saying "F/OSS is cheaper than MS by a good margin, but our precision is shitty enough that our actual number doesn't mean much. It might be %37 cheaper, it might be %80 cheaper, or it might be %1 cheaper--but we're pretty sure it's cheaper."
I guess it's like that old joke, where the museum guest asks the tour guide "How old are these dinosaur bones?" The guide says "The bones are 2 million and 10 years old." The guest, astonished, exclaims "That's amazing! How can we know the age so precisely, when it's that old?"
The guide responds, "Well, it was 2 million years old when I started working here, and I've been working here for 10 years."
Do you think it's pure coincidence that when a company does things that Slashdotters like (IBM recently, Google, etc.), everybody develops a soft spot?
Are you old enough to remember when Google first hit the scene a few years ago? Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other old-line search engines were becoming noticeably less useful every day, as opportunists found better and better ways of link-spamming the robots that fed those sites. The search engines themselves didn't seem to respond at all, which made searching more and more frustrating every day. In some cases (Yahoo comes to mind), the site pages became so bloated and portalesque that they offended aesthetics and load-time guidlines.
I remember clearly the first few weeks I was using Google: it was so refreshingly simple and clean, and it loaded in a snap. There was almost no link spam in the results, less than Yahoo by a factor of 100 for most searches. And there were no annoying, distracting ads. It was like paradise had been reborn.
Nowadays, that's not quite so true. Google has gotten more bloated than it used to be, but they've kept it pretty thin, all told. And they added advertisements, but kept them out of the normal flow of results and text-based only, which is a lot less aggravating to process in sight. And while the results occasionally get cocked up by spam, Google actively works to keep its results relevant by tweaking its algorithms and pruning spammers.
Also, I remember the rumors that started flying about various search engines raising revenues by selling hit placements, possibly without any on-the-spot notification to the user. This really offends the senses, because search engines lose value when the results aren't neutral and unbiased. Google does search-related ads, but in such a way that you trust what you see is aboveboard.
That's why everybody loves Google so much--they've consistently demonstrated a lot of concern for their customers, in ways that put them head and shoulders above the rest of the industry (and corporate entities in general, I'd imagine). Heck, Google is better behaved than most people I know!
We like them because they seem to be looking out for us.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but what makes you think that the government will do a better job looking out for a victim's interests than the victim himself (or herself)?
One of the NICE things about civil litigation is that you don't have to depend on the government to do anything except sit there and make decisions about issues that are put directly in front of it. You get your own lawyer to do the hard work, and (s)he's more than willing to go the extra mile because you're paying the bills.
Contrast this to situations that require government intervention: when your network gets attacked or your company is getting blackmailed by DDoS fuckers, you can't do a whole hell of a lot without getting the FBI or the USSS involved. But it might take weeks or months for them even start, if you can even get them to take the case. They always have too many cases and not enough agents.
Yeah, this means that people without money get fucked over sometimes, but that's why lawyers are allowed to take contingency fee cases, where they don't get paid unless they win. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Bah. And give up that thick, noxious odor of ox-urine in the subways? And the constant traffic jams in midtown? And the annoying hipster dipshit kids that have invaded the Williamsburg and Astoria like locusts?
Actually, I've lived in NYC for about six years, now, and I'm hooked on it. If I leave for more than about five days at a time, I get really homesick for it. This is probably a mental illness (or masochism), but I can't help it.
And there are a hell of a lot of great things that cannot be duplicated, anywhere:
1) cocktails in Bryant Park on a Summer evening;
2) walking across the Brooklyn bridge to have pizza at Grimaldi's in Dumbo;
3) being able to buy food, booze, cigarettes, jimmy hats, clothes, furniture, or just about anything else at ANY hour of day or night, even on holidays.
4) crusing down the FDR Drive, along the river, on a full-moon night;
5) the view from the top of the Empire State Building--holy shit, man!
6) walking into singles' bars in ANY OTHER CITY IN ANY OTHER CITY IN THE WORLD (LA, San Fran, Houston, Peoria, London, Beijing) and being automatically cooler than everybody else.
I could go on and on, but you get the point. This place is awesome.