The legal problem doesn't just sit with where the server is physically located; which sort-of determines where the auction is taking place. Even doubt could be cast where the server physically is located with enough DHTML wizardy, obnoxious frames, etc.
However, there is no doubt as to who owns the domain name of the URL or who owns the IP network from which the auction site is being served. That's bad because most of the time the domain-name or network owner is innocent; sometimes even unaware this stuff is going on.
There is also more than one way to build an auction site. Suppose you wanted to auction contraband almost no country would authorize? Perhaps you build an auction portal with the data coming from an XML source... you could use Java/MSXML/what-have-you for the data. The auction portal could be served anywhere... say GeoCities or Angelfire.
BUT, the contraband along with an XML feed of the auction data could physically live in Afghanistan or Libya along with the auctioneer. That's perfectly legal in those countries.
Who should be prosecuted? Did the web hosting company commit a crime? Clearly it can't be the company hosting the auction or even a 3rd party providing an auction portal (like e-bay) but the two parties involved in conducting the transaction of the contraband (provided they can be traced and caught and convicted in the countries involved).
Great. Now they'll have to worry about someone cutting off their power, their data lines, their cable TV, their phones, and they'll also have to worry about Islamic militants hired to work on the plumbing and flooding them out. They could all drown in there.
Smart.
Perhaps SourceForce is victim to the same worm that was trying to plug up Linux security holes by traversing source and identifying nasty undocumented source and sending remindergrams to authors to document their work?
I can see PDA users needing this when desktop space is at a premium (On a 747/757/777/Airbus, for example). I use the Targus keyboard with my HP Journada for notetaking and lecturework; been able to get 8.5 hours out of it between charges.
That being said, I don't think this concept will fly well on the desktop except for the select view who can master typing without beating the hell out of their machines. I can see labels on the box: "Not for Cybersquirters or e-Epileptics"
Frankly, for the longest time during the 80's when all we had were poor 8-bit graphics, punks where busy shooting up herion and spray painting subway cars all over Manhattan.
Thanks to online porn, today's little hoodlums are safe at home and away from the theatre so I can finally go out and enjoy a good time. We need to put together more "enterprise zones" to gets the hood rats to stay at home and order their porn and crack from Amazon.
Even if a disaster didn't occur because of the beam drifting off target, any bird that flies in the path of the beam and stays for too long becomes Kentucky Fried Chicken. GreenPeace won't be happy.
The problems with metrics on software has always revolved around the abstract nature of software itself. Almost any sort of metric can be misrepresented one way or another.
Long ago, companies measured programmer productivity by using the KLOCKs, 1,000-line blocks of code. The more KLOCKs you could kick out in a given time period on a task, the greater the perception was that you were working harder. We all now know how easy it is to manipulate that perception. 500 lines to add two integers, sprinkling 1000's of lines of useless looping code documented to look like it's crucial to the system.
Proper measurement of failure is further compounded by the complex nature of most products written in OOP. Underlayered components, physical devices, and operating system issues could be mistaken as problems with the software application, when in fact the application itself requires no modification to fix the problem. Metrics also rely on fixed points of time as references which make matters worse as some problems are beyond the scope of the project (i.e. product works fine, but customer later upgrades video drivers that cause app to break).
Carnegie Mellon University has pioneered the software maturity analysis area with its Capability Maturity Model for software shops (think ISO9000). If I was a large customer (say Boeing), I would probably make my purchase decision more along the lines of the CMM rating of the software team that created the product rather than some silly arbitrary metric that most suits probably wouldn't comprehend anyway.
The article mentions that the target is cybercafes. So what? If you're really determined, you can dial out internationally or disguise yourself through numerous shell accounts around the world.
If you expect privacy at a cybercafe, you have another thing coming.
If I were Indian, I really wouldn't be worried until the poh-leece make it a crime *not* to install a government version of Backorifice on all consumer PCs.
AOL's mail system, much like their own web server, is in house proprietary (no surprise there).
The bigger surprise is that the servers are Tandem. That's right, Tandem (now a div. of Compaq). Because of the select clientele that can afford to have one computer but 2 or more of everything, it (supposedly) provides unheard-of availability records.
The only bummer is that there isn't much software or the proprietary Non-Stop kernel, but you do get a decent C development environment and can port your Unix applications over to it, much like how EMX for OS/2 Warp goes about it.
AOL's decision to use such an odd choice for an email server probably stems from the infamous outages early in AOL's history when it was duking it out with CompuServe (which H&R Block later dim-wittingly sold to AOL to boost its stock price and focus on the oversaturated financial-planning market).
When you consider that most of America's unwashed heathenlive off of AOL's mail system to swap massive amounts of pr0n, spam, and other senseless drivel, there is no way that a featureful groupware system can be added to the service easily and cope with the transaction load that the service currently endures.
Should AOL mail be scrapped? Probably not. Since AOL'ers are paying a fortune anyway for a shabby product, why not charge them a small convienence fee to "enrich" their email and and scheduling, database, forms, etc? Just build a seperate system or a small farm of Notes-Domino/390 and you got yerself uh system.
AOL might even rake in those mindless corporate druids by cooking up some synch tools for PalmOS, ActiveSync, AvantGo, whatnot.
And added bonus would be getting rid of that damned AOL Adapter &%^*(%^%&^%)%.
IMHO that is a silly silly silly architecture change. There is no possible way that AOHellTW will reduce cost by dumping Microsoft. Basically, they are doing it to make a passing "cheap shot" at Redmond when it began feeling around for the pros and cons of allowing the AOL environment to use Mozilla for its renderer and the continuing bruhaha over IM.
Face it. Yahoo has a better (and free) groupware solution. IBM/Lotus don't put out a shabby product. The latest rev. of Notes and Domino offers all the functionality that you need from Exchange 2000 except for perhaps the virtual IFS into the Notes database (wouldn't be surprised if that came along soon someday).
You want Groupware? If you hate MS why would you choose anything but Lotus? Helllllooooo!!! IBM and Lotus have been investing time and $$$ into groupware since Xerox PARC and the first release of PROFS (aka OfficeVision).
If you want to keep your server assets and still take a sh** on MS, why not just wipe off Exchange and replace it with something that has similar function? Don't ruin your productivity by taking away features you depend on and then spending tons of dough to build a replacement system that offers no benefits.
Corporate America - reinventing the wheel since 1876.
Everytime I hear theoretical physics discussions my mind starts to wonder...
When you look at matters of scale in theoretical physics and how we're now able to see inside the basic components of atoms; you have to wonder if God created His universe by a freak physicial breakthrough in a corporate lab, had time to observe us, then change our destiny and get a carptenter's wife pregant then mysteriously stop directly influencing our lives not soon afterward?
Maybe our universe is sitting in a dustbin as a spent experiment in some superuniverse. What happens to His creation when they take the trash out?
In the spirit of Carl Sagan (billyuns and billyuns of years ago), the cosmos was a large mix of "gahses" and "stooff" and empty space. Then came Barbara Striesand.
Lots of servers, huh? That's going to need lots of geeks for maintainance.
Think about the human factor:
Most datacenters big and small still have: massive tape libraries, whether it be DAT, 3278, or whatever, and many more still have optical disk burning facilities. You will have to bring in a lot of semiskilled labor to change out bad hardware, mount media, and perform routine troubleshooting.
Unlike in the oil & gas, fishing and crab industries, these "transplanted Alaskans" probably won't be working in stints like most other wage earners. They will have to make the North Slope their home for most of the year unless someone wants to setup a double or triple payroll and rotate the workforce in and out of the facility.
And unlike Austin/Houston/Dallas/San Jose/Seattle, you won't see many of these items readily available that lots of techies subsist on:
o Burgers/Pizza/Sushi/Beer
o Starbucks
o Strip clubs (Delphi programmers)
o Cellular access (wonder how good Globalstar is up there?)
o Computer hardware stores
o Any kind of store in particular
and most important of all (since I live in San Antonio): Mexican food
In a nutshell, anyone willing to build a facility like this probably will not be able to secure a loan or get any VC because of all the implicit costs bundled in with it.
Let's stick to renovating old inner-city downtown buildings to shove in more servers. Surprisingly there are lots of places you might not expect where you can erect a cheap farm close to major fiber lines.. and most of them are in the Southwest US. How about we put some folks in the square states to work?
Slashdot Mirror
Slightly slanted article. WAP (also misnamed WAPI by some e-bizzers) has its place. It's amazingly simple at giving you old and crusty stock quotes.
I love SprintPCS's attempt at online chat through their WAP browser: "i wuv you aways m0mmie ddeares7." {3.5 hours to type that}
The legal problem doesn't just sit with where the server is physically located; which sort-of determines where the auction is taking place. Even doubt could be cast where the server physically is located with enough DHTML wizardy, obnoxious frames, etc.
However, there is no doubt as to who owns the domain name of the URL or who owns the IP network from which the auction site is being served. That's bad because most of the time the domain-name or network owner is innocent; sometimes even unaware this stuff is going on.
There is also more than one way to build an auction site. Suppose you wanted to auction contraband almost no country would authorize? Perhaps you build an auction portal with the data coming from an XML source... you could use Java/MSXML/what-have-you for the data. The auction portal could be served anywhere... say GeoCities or Angelfire.
BUT, the contraband along with an XML feed of the auction data could physically live in Afghanistan or Libya along with the auctioneer. That's perfectly legal in those countries.
Who should be prosecuted? Did the web hosting company commit a crime? Clearly it can't be the company hosting the auction or even a 3rd party providing an auction portal (like e-bay) but the two parties involved in conducting the transaction of the contraband (provided they can be traced and caught and convicted in the countries involved).
Case closed.
Great. Now they'll have to worry about someone cutting off their power, their data lines, their cable TV, their phones, and they'll also have to worry about Islamic militants hired to work on the plumbing and flooding them out. They could all drown in there. Smart.
Perhaps SourceForce is victim to the same worm that was trying to plug up Linux security holes by traversing source and identifying nasty undocumented source and sending remindergrams to authors to document their work?
I can see PDA users needing this when desktop space is at a premium (On a 747/757/777/Airbus, for example). I use the Targus keyboard with my HP Journada for notetaking and lecturework; been able to get 8.5 hours out of it between charges.
That being said, I don't think this concept will fly well on the desktop except for the select view who can master typing without beating the hell out of their machines. I can see labels on the box: "Not for Cybersquirters or e-Epileptics"
Frankly, for the longest time during the 80's when all we had were poor 8-bit graphics, punks where busy shooting up herion and spray painting subway cars all over Manhattan.
Thanks to online porn, today's little hoodlums are safe at home and away from the theatre so I can finally go out and enjoy a good time. We need to put together more "enterprise zones" to gets the hood rats to stay at home and order their porn and crack from Amazon.
Who doesn't want safe streets?
Yes I was incorrect it is KLOC... sleepy eyes =o)
Even if a disaster didn't occur because of the beam drifting off target, any bird that flies in the path of the beam and stays for too long becomes Kentucky Fried Chicken. GreenPeace won't be happy.
The problems with metrics on software has always revolved around the abstract nature of software itself. Almost any sort of metric can be misrepresented one way or another.
Long ago, companies measured programmer productivity by using the KLOCKs, 1,000-line blocks of code. The more KLOCKs you could kick out in a given time period on a task, the greater the perception was that you were working harder. We all now know how easy it is to manipulate that perception. 500 lines to add two integers, sprinkling 1000's of lines of useless looping code documented to look like it's crucial to the system.
Proper measurement of failure is further compounded by the complex nature of most products written in OOP. Underlayered components, physical devices, and operating system issues could be mistaken as problems with the software application, when in fact the application itself requires no modification to fix the problem. Metrics also rely on fixed points of time as references which make matters worse as some problems are beyond the scope of the project (i.e. product works fine, but customer later upgrades video drivers that cause app to break).
Carnegie Mellon University has pioneered the software maturity analysis area with its Capability Maturity Model for software shops (think ISO9000). If I was a large customer (say Boeing), I would probably make my purchase decision more along the lines of the CMM rating of the software team that created the product rather than some silly arbitrary metric that most suits probably wouldn't comprehend anyway.
Only in poor countries would you see this type of price shennanegans taking place.
What is this, e-bartering? What's next? E-Hunterer-and-Gatherer?
The article mentions that the target is cybercafes. So what? If you're really determined, you can dial out internationally or disguise yourself through numerous shell accounts around the world.
If you expect privacy at a cybercafe, you have another thing coming.
If I were Indian, I really wouldn't be worried until the poh-leece make it a crime *not* to install a government version of Backorifice on all consumer PCs.
AOL's mail system, much like their own web server, is in house proprietary (no surprise there).
The bigger surprise is that the servers are Tandem. That's right, Tandem (now a div. of Compaq). Because of the select clientele that can afford to have one computer but 2 or more of everything, it (supposedly) provides unheard-of availability records.
The only bummer is that there isn't much software or the proprietary Non-Stop kernel, but you do get a decent C development environment and can port your Unix applications over to it, much like how EMX for OS/2 Warp goes about it.
AOL's decision to use such an odd choice for an email server probably stems from the infamous outages early in AOL's history when it was duking it out with CompuServe (which H&R Block later dim-wittingly sold to AOL to boost its stock price and focus on the oversaturated financial-planning market).
When you consider that most of America's unwashed heathenlive off of AOL's mail system to swap massive amounts of pr0n, spam, and other senseless drivel, there is no way that a featureful groupware system can be added to the service easily and cope with the transaction load that the service currently endures.
Should AOL mail be scrapped? Probably not. Since AOL'ers are paying a fortune anyway for a shabby product, why not charge them a small convienence fee to "enrich" their email and and scheduling, database, forms, etc? Just build a seperate system or a small farm of Notes-Domino/390 and you got yerself uh system.
AOL might even rake in those mindless corporate druids by cooking up some synch tools for PalmOS, ActiveSync, AvantGo, whatnot.
And added bonus would be getting rid of that damned AOL Adapter &%^*(%^%&^%)%.
IMHO that is a silly silly silly architecture change. There is no possible way that AOHellTW will reduce cost by dumping Microsoft. Basically, they are doing it to make a passing "cheap shot" at Redmond when it began feeling around for the pros and cons of allowing the AOL environment to use Mozilla for its renderer and the continuing bruhaha over IM.
Face it. Yahoo has a better (and free) groupware solution. IBM/Lotus don't put out a shabby product. The latest rev. of Notes and Domino offers all the functionality that you need from Exchange 2000 except for perhaps the virtual IFS into the Notes database (wouldn't be surprised if that came along soon someday).
You want Groupware? If you hate MS why would you choose anything but Lotus? Helllllooooo!!! IBM and Lotus have been investing time and $$$ into groupware since Xerox PARC and the first release of PROFS (aka OfficeVision).
If you want to keep your server assets and still take a sh** on MS, why not just wipe off Exchange and replace it with something that has similar function? Don't ruin your productivity by taking away features you depend on and then spending tons of dough to build a replacement system that offers no benefits.
Corporate America - reinventing the wheel since 1876.
Everytime I hear theoretical physics discussions my mind starts to wonder...
When you look at matters of scale in theoretical physics and how we're now able to see inside the basic components of atoms; you have to wonder if God created His universe by a freak physicial breakthrough in a corporate lab, had time to observe us, then change our destiny and get a carptenter's wife pregant then mysteriously stop directly influencing our lives not soon afterward?
Maybe our universe is sitting in a dustbin as a spent experiment in some superuniverse. What happens to His creation when they take the trash out?
Just a thought.
--Theology + Physics = KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
In the spirit of Carl Sagan (billyuns and billyuns of years ago), the cosmos was a large mix of "gahses" and "stooff" and empty space. Then came Barbara Striesand.
--Entropy happens.
Lots of servers, huh? That's going to need lots of geeks for maintainance. Think about the human factor: Most datacenters big and small still have: massive tape libraries, whether it be DAT, 3278, or whatever, and many more still have optical disk burning facilities. You will have to bring in a lot of semiskilled labor to change out bad hardware, mount media, and perform routine troubleshooting. Unlike in the oil & gas, fishing and crab industries, these "transplanted Alaskans" probably won't be working in stints like most other wage earners. They will have to make the North Slope their home for most of the year unless someone wants to setup a double or triple payroll and rotate the workforce in and out of the facility. And unlike Austin/Houston/Dallas/San Jose/Seattle, you won't see many of these items readily available that lots of techies subsist on: o Burgers/Pizza/Sushi/Beer o Starbucks o Strip clubs (Delphi programmers) o Cellular access (wonder how good Globalstar is up there?) o Computer hardware stores o Any kind of store in particular and most important of all (since I live in San Antonio): Mexican food In a nutshell, anyone willing to build a facility like this probably will not be able to secure a loan or get any VC because of all the implicit costs bundled in with it. Let's stick to renovating old inner-city downtown buildings to shove in more servers. Surprisingly there are lots of places you might not expect where you can erect a cheap farm close to major fiber lines.. and most of them are in the Southwest US. How about we put some folks in the square states to work?