It's an extension of WinFS (or I assume that's what it's for?). Basically, it's a way to associate meta data with a script without having filesystem support for it.
So, you want to run a script, you do tabbed completion, it gives you a list of scripts and a description of each one. You select it and it is pulled out of the XML repository and run.
Useful? I would think that metadata in the FS would be a better way to go about it, but I would love an easy way to browse the scripts on my system. New? I've never seen it before. Obvious? Probably?
On a local system, this is like being able to use winzip to execute scripts inside of the.zip file, complete with descriptions.
Patenting XML? Nope, not even close.
The example should make it pretty obvious... Can't include it here, cause slashdot removes the tags.:)
Seems their adword budget ran out. The adword links don't appear on "hutton report" or "hutton enquiry" anymore. At least not on google.co.nz, google.com or google.co.uk.
The top non-ad links are the BBC, but that is more than likely due to the fact that the BBC is generally considered a _very_ good source of news, with a great reputation.
As for the whole sexing up discussion, I'll wait until after I've seen the report.:)
I needed to blow away a tree of directories under/tmp on our development systems. Since they were all owned by various other developers, I needed root permission to clean out the space. I figured I would su, and then delete it.
10 seconds after starting the rm, I figured it was taking to long. I looked back up the log, and I noticed that I had done a "su -" instead of just a "su"! Freaked me out completely. Destroyed the whole machine, we had to rebuild from scratch. Thankfully, I hadn't gotten to the home directories yet.:)
I think this is an argument the lawyer will win. It all depends on interpretations of legal definitions - something I'm certainly not geared up for.
However, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms would seem to be more clear?
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/
7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
and then later on:
24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.
(2) Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
Basically, if the judge thinks that they were stretching the rules, it's out.:)
As for the US, I would expect that "papers" should be taken to mean personal information, since it talks about effects separately. Otherwise, wouldn't a paper under your control be an effect?
John Adams had a strong opinion, since he seems to have pushed through similar rights in the Massachusetts Declaration. It was in response to the behaviour of British soldiers before the revolution.
I guess we'll find out when it gets to the supreme court. The ACLU doesn't like it one bit, so it should be relatively quick.
Most of your personal information is limited to a small group of people. That includes:
your tax information
your health information (claims)
your juvenile criminal record
your insurance claims
...
The fact that it is known by people who _need_ to know about it to help you shouldn't be used as an excuse to allow access to a third party. They should be required to prove that they need access.
Otherwise, you'll end up like we almost did in Canada, with a single database linking all federal departments.
Would you really like to see the FBI/IRS/etc doing trend analysis and deciding who to investigate further based on differences from normal behaviour?
For an example of what can be done, look at fraud prevention at credit card and phone companies. One of the biggest things they do is "velocity checking" - flagging fraud based on the time/distance between two points.
I really don't want the FBI doing that to me. Single white male, travelling alone with single day stays in the US, with only carry on luggage.
Yep, at US customs I get flagged as a smuggler - until I start talking about Telecommunications protocols and their eyes glaze over.:)
"CVS doesn't need multi-site repositories, clearcase does if you have a lot of remote development."
Bold assertion, care to provide even the slightest amount of example, or dare I say proof? How about a plan for using CVS across 500 developers in 8 sites, on 5 time zones. Ohh, and we are a worldwide company, so all developers need access to all code.
Zowie. I've got ~100 in 5 locations using CVS without too many problems. Of course, every site has their own CVS repository - the host site is chosen based on who is doing the development. When the site changes, we tar it up and move it across.:) That way, the people doing frequent updates have local access, and everyone else does fine with not-so-frequent remote updates. Most people just soft-link the nightly smoke-test build for code they aren't directly working on - saves on compile time.:)
500 though, that's another scale entirely! Undoubtedly ClearCase will have moved on from when I last used it. Back then (95) you needed a dedicated person to keep the database up and merged. It wasn't pretty.:) I'll have to check it out the next time I'm looking for a revision control system.
Jason Pollock
Re:source code escrow not very useful
on
Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 1
Who said the original developers would be gone? I have found that the original developers get hired on a contract basis to perform maintenance on the existing escrow deposits. The fact that it is in escrow simply means the group handling the bankruptcy is not directly involved. The terms for the escrow release are met, and it is released to a new group (composed of staff from the original company).
Also, many escrow companies will test and verify the software to ensure that it is "maintainable". That does cost A LOT extra though.
It all depends on how seriously all the parties in the escrow deposit take the situation. If it is taken seriously, it's pretty cool. Otherwise, it isn't worth the money spent to mail the backup tape.
Jason Pollock
Spammer software will just get smarter.
on
SPF Design Frozen
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· Score: 1
A lot of spam is supposedly coming from compromised hosts. Those systems will probably have a SMTP server on the local network that can be used. It is probably even already configured with the configuration easily found (outlook/mozilla/etc?). So, the software, instead of running it's own SMTP server, looks up the configured one and uses that, with a made-up account name on that server.
You still get the spam, it even looks more authentic!
I've just gotten through re-doing a lot of our support contracts at my last employer. I learned that in many jurisdictions, five years is the legal MINIMUM for a software support contract. It doesn't have to be cheap (woo hoo), but it does have to be available. In other words, you can't orphan a piece of software until 5 years after you've sold it.
I used to work for a company that started out providing number portability software to various carriers around the world. Every country that specified number portability was another customer in this Telecomms downturn.:)
I guess it would all come down to whether or not you would have an email address as connection identifier or if we would stick with phone numbers. My bet is that phone numbers will be here for a long time.:)
If you want to receive VoIP calls, you can't block the port. If you don't care about receiving the calls, then by all means block the ports! This is a discussion about using VoIP for your phone service. Blocking the ports in such a situation defeats the purpose.:)
As for the IP tracking, I see VoIP networks moving towards proxies (post regulation). That means that the spammers will all be going through carrier proxies in order to get correct address and intercept information, so the IP will be that of the carrier's edge gateway, not the spammer.:) You might have a valid return number, but that's about it. In SIP, there might be something in the hop list, but don't count on it. H.323 doesn't have a hop list (that I can remember).
Finally, I've only heard of VoIP carriers charging by the minute, not by the attempt, so they can initiate as many connections as they wish without a fee!
I agree that snooping on communications internal to a group will be harder (almost impossible?). As long as they are limited to that single group.:) Once people have to talk to someone else (outside of the private group), they will have to have some sort of interconnection agreement. Much like the fixed/mobile carriers that exist today.
With interconnection agreements comes regulation, and the government telling carriers what they need to keep voters happy.:) If people don't care about calling for a pizza or doing anything other than talking to your buddies on an encrypted link, they're fine - it's just a socket! But once they want to talk to anyone they don't have a pre-existing private agreement with, I believe the conversation will end up in the open.
Conversations can only stay encrypted if the networks in the middle allow the connection. One of the interconnection rules could very well be "no encrypted traffic". A client could lie about the codec, but then we're back to "private group" again.:)
If you want to talk to anyone other than your immediate friends, you will need to go through a directory service, and possibly some gateways. Once
it crosses a network, it can be detected.
Even better, there are a lot of police-driven requirements, such as call identification, tracing and intercept. Those WILL NOT be going away during the transition to VoIP. At the end of the day, if the government can't find any other way to do it, they'll force ISPs to put in VoIP proxies and regulate all of the VoIP carriers to route through them. Instant detection and billing. Heck, I wrote one for my last employer!
ISPs already implement charging by destination (mine does) and HTTP port proxies. It isn't hard to go from there to per-port billing.
Even better, SIP (unlike) H.323 tends to play nicer with proxies...
Someone also mentioned routing through Canada. I seem to remember that a US carrier is already in trouble for doing just that, so I think that people will be on the lookout for that one.:)
Regards,
Jason Pollock
On the flip side, has anyone considered what VoIP telemarketing spam would be like? Would the "do not call" list still apply? It would be very interesting to see a spammer initiate several thousand calls and only handle the ones that answer... No longer limited by the number of outgoing trunks...
It was always noisy, and I was a culprit yelling out questions.:)
The best we could come up with to stop interruptions was to purchase "road cones of silence". If someone had the cone on their monitor, they weren't to be interrupted. That killed the direct interruptions.
Here's an interesting question. One of the things that determines if you are an employee or not is if the company that is paying you provides you with a place to work. If they don't, or you have significant external presence (working from home!) could you be considered a "contractor"?
If yes, I forsee a lot of lawsuits when Cisco/Sun/etc figure out that they don't own the copyright to their code anymore. Copyright rules for contractors are very different than employees.
It isn't so rosy this year, but it isn't all doom and gloom.Overall, employment in Computer and Mathematical went from:
2000 2001 2002 2,932,810 2,825,870 2,772,620
But average wage was something else: 2000 2001 2002 27.91 29.02 29.63
So, we lost 53,250 people, mostly in straight computer programmers, 501,550->457,320, although Software Engineers lost as well.Amazingly enough, Network and Computer Systems Administrators gained ~5k people, and Network Systems and Computer Data Communications Analysts gained ~7k! Analysts are up almost 20k, as are support specialists.
If you want to see who's really getting hit by this, check out the results for management:
I most certainly am. I paid for the distro and I paid for RHN. I found both good value, whereas the free version of up2date was grating and unreliable (and nagware!).
Ximian's redcarpet is much the same. Slow unless you fork over the $$.
Now, I dunno where I'm going to go. If I have to switch, I'll probably look further afield to debian, xuse, or gentoo.
The moment end-to-end encryption and authentication is enabled, either via tunnels or by just encrypting the IP payload, no authority trying to assert control over VoIP will be able to identify one application verses another e.g., VoIP verses HTTP verses SMTP.
I agree, you will always be able to initiate a connection between any two points that you control and talk privately (between friends). How do you propose to talk with someone else you've not talked to before? Call for a Pizza? Call the Police?
I don't see Dominos becoming their own VoIP provider to allow everyone to talk to them without being overheard! They will let someone else do it. That means Telco which results in the government going "Where's my wiretap?". You'll be able to talk to any of your friends privately (where you can agree on a hacked/encrypted codec), but not everybody.
If people can convince their goverment representatives to drop their wiretapping/tracing legislation, it all changes...:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's an extension of WinFS (or I assume that's what it's for?). Basically, it's a way to associate meta data with a script without having filesystem support for it.
.zip file, complete with descriptions.
:)
So, you want to run a script, you do tabbed completion, it gives you a list of scripts and a description of each one. You select it and it is pulled out of the XML repository and run.
Useful? I would think that metadata in the FS would be a better way to go about it, but I would love an easy way to browse the scripts on my system. New? I've never seen it before. Obvious? Probably?
On a local system, this is like being able to use winzip to execute scripts inside of the
Patenting XML? Nope, not even close.
The example should make it pretty obvious... Can't include it here, cause slashdot removes the tags.
Jason Pollock
Seems their adword budget ran out. The adword links don't appear on "hutton report" or "hutton enquiry" anymore. At least not on google.co.nz, google.com or google.co.uk.
The top non-ad links are the BBC, but that is more than likely due to the fact that the BBC is generally considered a _very_ good source of news, with a great reputation.
As for the whole sexing up discussion, I'll wait until after I've seen the report. :)
Because:
Regards,
Jason Pollock
Bill? That you? Just checking so that we don't end up counting John twice. Wouldn't want to skew the results. :)
The name located it, Thanks!
n ba nc.htm
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/Cases/Veeck_v_SBCCI_e
It seems to be a writeup of the majority opinion? Lots of good information in there.
Wasn't there a recent court case that resulted in a ruling stating that anything used in a law has to be publicly available?
(I'm unable to find a google reference, but I distinctly remember it, honest!)
Jason Pollock
I needed to blow away a tree of directories under /tmp on our development systems. Since they were all owned by various other developers, I needed root permission to clean out the space. I figured I would su, and then delete it.
:)
10 seconds after starting the rm, I figured it was taking to long. I looked back up the log, and I noticed that I had done a "su -" instead of just a "su"! Freaked me out completely. Destroyed the whole machine, we had to rebuild from scratch. Thankfully, I hadn't gotten to the home directories yet.
Jason Pollock
I think this is an argument the lawyer will win. It all depends on interpretations of legal definitions - something I'm certainly not geared up for.
However, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms would seem to be more clear? http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/
and then later on:
Basically, if the judge thinks that they were stretching the rules, it's out. :)
As for the US, I would expect that "papers" should be taken to mean personal information, since it talks about effects separately. Otherwise, wouldn't a paper under your control be an effect?
John Adams had a strong opinion, since he seems to have pushed through similar rights in the Massachusetts Declaration. It was in response to the behaviour of British soldiers before the revolution.
I guess we'll find out when it gets to the supreme court. The ACLU doesn't like it one bit, so it should be relatively quick.
Regards, Jason PollockMost of your personal information is limited to a small group of people. That includes:
...
The fact that it is known by people who _need_ to know about it to help you shouldn't be used as an excuse to allow access to a third party. They should be required to prove that they need access.
Otherwise, you'll end up like we almost did in Canada, with a single database linking all federal departments.
Would you really like to see the FBI/IRS/etc doing trend analysis and deciding who to investigate further based on differences from normal behaviour?
For an example of what can be done, look at fraud prevention at credit card and phone companies. One of the biggest things they do is "velocity checking" - flagging fraud based on the time/distance between two points.
I really don't want the FBI doing that to me. Single white male, travelling alone with single day stays in the US, with only carry on luggage.
Yep, at US customs I get flagged as a smuggler - until I start talking about Telecommunications protocols and their eyes glaze over. :)
Jason PollockZowie. I've got ~100 in 5 locations using CVS without too many problems. Of course, every site has their own CVS repository - the host site is chosen based on who is doing the development. When the site changes, we tar it up and move it across. :) That way, the people doing frequent updates have local access, and everyone else does fine with not-so-frequent remote updates. Most people just soft-link the nightly smoke-test build for code they aren't directly working on - saves on compile time. :)
500 though, that's another scale entirely! Undoubtedly ClearCase will have moved on from when I last used it. Back then (95) you needed a dedicated person to keep the database up and merged. It wasn't pretty. :) I'll have to check it out the next time I'm looking for a revision control system.
Jason PollockWho said the original developers would be gone? I have found that the original developers get hired on a contract basis to perform maintenance on the existing escrow deposits. The fact that it is in escrow simply means the group handling the bankruptcy is not directly involved. The terms for the escrow release are met, and it is released to a new group (composed of staff from the original company).
Also, many escrow companies will test and verify the software to ensure that it is "maintainable". That does cost A LOT extra though.
It all depends on how seriously all the parties in the escrow deposit take the situation. If it is taken seriously, it's pretty cool. Otherwise, it isn't worth the money spent to mail the backup tape.
Jason Pollock
A lot of spam is supposedly coming from compromised hosts. Those systems will probably have a SMTP server on the local network that can be used. It is probably even already configured with the configuration easily found (outlook/mozilla/etc?). So, the software, instead of running it's own SMTP server, looks up the configured one and uses that, with a made-up account name on that server.
You still get the spam, it even looks more authentic!
Jason
I've just gotten through re-doing a lot of our support contracts at my last employer. I learned that in many jurisdictions, five years is the legal MINIMUM for a software support contract. It doesn't have to be cheap (woo hoo), but it does have to be available. In other words, you can't orphan a piece of software until 5 years after you've sold it.
Regards,
Jason Pollock
I used to work for a company that started out providing number portability software to various carriers around the world. Every country that specified number portability was another customer in this Telecomms downturn. :)
Jason Pollock
I guess it would all come down to whether or not you would have an email address as connection identifier or if we would stick with phone numbers. My bet is that phone numbers will be here for a long time. :)
Jason
If you want to receive VoIP calls, you can't block the port. If you don't care about receiving the calls, then by all means block the ports! This is a discussion about using VoIP for your phone service. Blocking the ports in such a situation defeats the purpose. :)
:) You might have a valid return number, but that's about it. In SIP, there might be something in the hop list, but don't count on it. H.323 doesn't have a hop list (that I can remember).
As for the IP tracking, I see VoIP networks moving towards proxies (post regulation). That means that the spammers will all be going through carrier proxies in order to get correct address and intercept information, so the IP will be that of the carrier's edge gateway, not the spammer.
Finally, I've only heard of VoIP carriers charging by the minute, not by the attempt, so they can initiate as many connections as they wish without a fee!
Regards,
Jason Pollock
I agree that snooping on communications internal to a group will be harder (almost impossible?). As long as they are limited to that single group. :) Once people have to talk to someone else (outside of the private group), they will have to have some sort of interconnection agreement. Much like the fixed/mobile carriers that exist today.
:) If people don't care about calling for a pizza or doing anything other than talking to your buddies on an encrypted link, they're fine - it's just a socket! But once they want to talk to anyone they don't have a pre-existing private agreement with, I believe the conversation will end up in the open.
:)
With interconnection agreements comes regulation, and the government telling carriers what they need to keep voters happy.
Conversations can only stay encrypted if the networks in the middle allow the connection. One of the interconnection rules could very well be "no encrypted traffic". A client could lie about the codec, but then we're back to "private group" again.
Regards,
Jason Pollock
If you don't have some sort of address, no one will be able to call you.
As soon as you have a published address (phone numbers still work for this), you can be put on a list.
Jason Pollock
If you want to talk to anyone other than your immediate friends, you will need to go through a directory service, and possibly some gateways. Once it crosses a network, it can be detected.
Even better, there are a lot of police-driven requirements, such as call identification, tracing and intercept. Those WILL NOT be going away during the transition to VoIP. At the end of the day, if the government can't find any other way to do it, they'll force ISPs to put in VoIP proxies and regulate all of the VoIP carriers to route through them. Instant detection and billing. Heck, I wrote one for my last employer!
ISPs already implement charging by destination (mine does) and HTTP port proxies. It isn't hard to go from there to per-port billing.
Even better, SIP (unlike) H.323 tends to play nicer with proxies...
Someone also mentioned routing through Canada. I seem to remember that a US carrier is already in trouble for doing just that, so I think that people will be on the lookout for that one. :)
Regards,Jason Pollock
On the flip side, has anyone considered what VoIP telemarketing spam would be like? Would the "do not call" list still apply? It would be very interesting to see a spammer initiate several thousand calls and only handle the ones that answer... No longer limited by the number of outgoing trunks...
Sounds like the place that I used to work in.
:)
It was always noisy, and I was a culprit yelling out questions.
The best we could come up with to stop interruptions was to purchase "road cones of silence". If someone had the cone on their monitor, they weren't to be interrupted. That killed the direct interruptions.
Jason Pollock
Here's an interesting question. One of the things that determines if you are an employee or not is if the company that is paying you provides you with a place to work. If they don't, or you have significant external presence (working from home!) could you be considered a "contractor"?
If yes, I forsee a lot of lawsuits when Cisco/Sun/etc figure out that they don't own the copyright to their code anymore. Copyright rules for contractors are very different than employees.
Jason PollockAnd it's the Bureau of Labour Statistics. :)
Their results (amazingly enough) were out today as well. Only, they don't feed stories to slashdot. :)
w age.11142001.news
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.toc.h tm
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/history/oc
It isn't so rosy this year, but it isn't all doom and gloom.Overall, employment in Computer and Mathematical went from:
2000 2001 2002
2,932,810 2,825,870 2,772,620
But average wage was something else:
2000 2001 2002
27.91 29.02 29.63
So, we lost 53,250 people, mostly in straight computer programmers, 501,550->457,320, although Software Engineers lost as well.Amazingly enough, Network and Computer Systems Administrators gained ~5k people, and Network Systems and Computer Data Communications Analysts gained ~7k! Analysts are up almost 20k, as are support specialists.
If you want to see who's really getting hit by this, check out the results for management:
2000 2001 2002
7,782,680 7,212,360 7,092,460
I think they've lost more than techies.
Jason Pollock
I most certainly am. I paid for the distro and I paid for RHN. I found both good value, whereas the free version of up2date was grating and unreliable (and nagware!).
Ximian's redcarpet is much the same. Slow unless you fork over the $$.
Now, I dunno where I'm going to go. If I have to switch, I'll probably look further afield to debian, xuse, or gentoo.
Jason Pollock
I agree, you will always be able to initiate a connection between any two points that you control and talk privately (between friends). How do you propose to talk with someone else you've not talked to before? Call for a Pizza? Call the Police?
I don't see Dominos becoming their own VoIP provider to allow everyone to talk to them without being overheard! They will let someone else do it. That means Telco which results in the government going "Where's my wiretap?". You'll be able to talk to any of your friends privately (where you can agree on a hacked/encrypted codec), but not everybody.
If people can convince their goverment representatives to drop their wiretapping/tracing legislation, it all changes... :)
Jason Pollock