I'd say it's a poor man's database reporting system, perhaps.
Picture this scenario. Put your functions in one sheet, lock that sheet (if you can), and distribute a screen-based app in the default sheet. Every time the end-user updates a value in a query cell, the DB gets queried, the data gets transformed and formatted, and the results get updated. Need to update the app? Just force a transfer of the new "spreadsheet" file to all the clients.
Something like this might also make a custom time tracking or trouble ticketing system dead simple to throw together, too. Things like that have never really fit into a spreadsheet comfortably before, but they tend to contain lots of tabular data.
I'd say people who have programmed in ABC wouldn't have a problem, either, since that appears to be where Guido got the idea.
OTOH, in other languages, you can use whitespace in a few different ways and still have a pretty clean, properly indented syntax. It's just not enforced. Being able to say:
if ( foo ) { bar(); }
or in some languages:
if ( foo ) bar();
instead of
if ( foo )
bar();
-- or however it's exactly written in Python -- is nice if the code to be executed is really that short. Or, in the case of Perl, one can even write:
bar if foo;
How's that for eliminating ugly punctuation?
I don't think the use of whitespace as syntactically significant is necessarily a "problem", since a good text editor handles things like tab conversion and such. It's a preference, and I don't prefer it. Give me Lisp with parentheses everywhere before making whitespace so important.
At one time, they were making them as a contractor for IBM. IBM designed them, and paid people to do that. IBM sold them, and kept the markup. Now the money is going all to Lenovo. Yes, they got part of it before, but part is not all.
When IBM was selling them and having Lenovo make them, the story about Burmese police shooting at monks hadn't really broken yet, which is part of the OP's problem with supporting Chinese companies. Their tax yuan go to support this kind of stuff.
Many laptops are actually made in large part in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan still, aren't they? Perhaps someone needs to have a list of where components are sourced for the different brands and where the different models go through final assembly.
Throw it away? No, no. You sell it on iOffer* as a shortly-used pull of genuine Apple hardware. Someone who's more into cool logos than good computers will pay more for it than you'll pay for the upgrades. Then, someone who likes Apple, but not too much for his or her own good, gets a nice machine with cheap upgrades.
Of course, other than OS X, you can often beat Dell or Apple either one by building your own. Unfortunately for geeks, some of the packages they put together these days are too good to beat by building from parts. You still get more control when you do it yourself, though, and the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it.
* I'd say eBay, but that doesn't seem to be the safest place to put your credit card info this week.
People who are buying new OS licenses who choose XP still give MS money, yes. Those who stay with their current copy of XP rather than getting Vista have already paid.
Those of us with a retail license can move it to a newer computer so long as we remove it from the old system. That makes room for, say, Linux on the old system. OEM copies I don't think are supposed to be used that way, but they are.
Besides, what's the price of XP vs. the price of Vista in the channel? Sure, the price of XP might go back up some. Home probably won't hit $200 and Professional probably won't hit $400. You can currently find them for about half of that, yet what is Vista? Ultimate's $399? Home Basic upgrade is $99? Home Premium costs as much as XP Pro. As for those putting XP instead of Vista on PCs for the in-store sales crowd, I'd imagine Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and HP have a much better deal by now on XP than on Vista.
Besides, isn't Microsoft's plan to stop support for XP in a couple of years? If Vista is the only MS option, will people stick with MS?
Lots of it is probably, "Replace the rest of our proprietary Unix on x86 because SCO's not going to be around to support us and that whole specter of them suing anyone else is long gone", combined with "Well, if there are any conflicts between Unix and Linux, Novell is surely aware of them now and is willing to sell Linux under the GPL anyway. So there's no chance they can claim what SCO tried to claim."
Do you expect SCO customers to all switch to Solaris or AIX? I sure don't.
Using another mail server for my mail server's domains is a different problem and requires a different solution. SPF is one increasingly popular way to deal with that.
Anyone using role-based email should be sending from the role-based email. You're not going to respond to support@domain.com if I send you an email from bobroberts@domain.com, now are you? Just authenticate as support@domain.com, or have your policies set up to allow more than one account to map to a valid From: header for support@domain.com if you really need people who are all sending mail from that account and reading it not to know its password. People wanting such specialized control should have people on staff who understand complex custom mail configurations, after all.
Lots of email worms and trojans are written to be able to send through Outlook Express. They get on your system and send email through whatever outgoing account you have to whoever is in your address book. I'd suggest a virus and spyware sweep of your friend's computer, as it might be part of a botnet.
It's also pretty easy to get into any webmail account that doesn't use SSL for login credentials. Don't use webmail that doesn't encrypt your password.
It's also pretty easy to sniff plain-text usernames and password from POP3 servers using plaintext authentication. Use POP3 with TLS or SSL, or at least use secure password methods like md5 or APOP. If your ISP doesn't know what those are or doesn't care enough to set them up and give tech support on them, then switch ISPs or use an independent email provider.
It's also dead easy from many mail servers to just put the wrong From: header in -- this often is as easy as changing your settings in Outlook Express or Thunderbird to say you're someone else. If your SMTP server doesn't require -- not allow, but _require_ -- you to authenticate, this is often allowed. Switch ISPs or use an independent mail provider if this is the case.
What if the posts are real and really from those accounts, but the guy changed the credit card info to shield the users a bit. The personal information is bad, but valid credit card numbers would be worse. The guy claims over on YouTube that he just wants to wake eBay up, and that he's not out specifically to hurt the users.
All that said, if this guy's just a phisher, it's nothing about eBay's security to blame here. It's the stupid phish that took the bait.
I'm not repeating anything. The phrases I used were my own. Try to find them anywhere on any FSF site. I do not appreciate your accusation that I do not think.
The owner of a dual-licensed project is either the original author, without whom you'd never have a GPL or BSD version anyway, or someone who has had copyrights assigned to them for some reason that is sufficient for the original author(s). The original author never loses his or her rights as long as they keep the copyrights.
You can always fork anything released under a dual license if you don't want to assign your copyrights away to someone who won't include work owned by others.
Dual-licensed code is still GPLed code. With BSD you get the BSD, and if the original distributor shuts down, you might have BSD + 8 different other licenses or you might have just the 8 other mostly non-free licenses.
Some dual-licensed projects, such as Perl, offer the dual licenses specifically so you, the recipient, can choose to redistribute as open or closed source. The licenses in question are the GPL and the Artistic License. Lots of other projects are going this route, although not too many other major ones yet. It's pretty common especially among projects developed in Perl.
The FSF has nothing to do with my decisions. I don't live by RMS's philosophy. I think there's nothing wrong with GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, MPL, nor a bunch of other licenses. I don't have a problem with proprietary licenses on a philosophical level. I just think they suck compared to freer licenses, and it takes some other attributes of the code to overcome the license shortcomings.
As for having to abide by anyone's particular ideas of freedom, well, that's what you do any time you use a license. You're reinforcing the BSD camp's ideas when you distribute under a BSD license. You strengthen the FSF's positions when you distribute under the GPL. The Mozilla people love to see their license. In order to distribute under the GPL, you must offer the four freedoms. It's not because RMS wills it, but because the license says those four freedoms are available to the recipients of the code.
Yes, the BSD focuses on a different type of freedom. I said that. What part of "It's a trade-off, and which freedoms matter the most to an individual determine which license that person will choose. Some people use one for some projects and the other for some as well." did you fail to understand?
Unbox your own fucking mind. Mine is quite free to think for my benefit, thanks. You seem to be guilty of following Theo like you're accusing others of following RMS. For the most part, that's not how the world works. I'm not a disciple of anyone's licensing camp. I like New BSD, GPLv2, MPL, ASL, CC-SA, CC-Attribution, Artistic License, the MIT license, NetHack GPL, the PHP License, and more. GPLv3 is a bit harsher than I'd like, but not enough so that I'll entirely stop working with software licensed under it.
RMS thinks all software should be licensed exactly as GPLv3 does it. I'm saying both the GPL and the BSD camps have their points of view, and that which individual parts of a license mean the most to you determine which yuo should release your own code under. If you don't have code of your own to license, then you really needn't have an opinion, as it's the author's choice and not yours. Still, you're free to have an opinion even when it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. How does that make me the FSF drone you're saying I am?
The freedom of secondary or tertiary developers to close the source is reduced. The freedom of the initial developer to specify how his hard work is to be treated is increased. The freedom of the developer who would have only received the closed-source version of the software otherwise is also increased. It's a trade-off, and which freedoms matter the most to an individual determine which license that person will choose. Some people use one for some projects and the other for some as well.
I think you just hit on th very idea of foresight. It's one of those things that's supposed to separate the higher mammals from things like bacteria and from natural processes like evolution, after all.
That is, unless someone believes in sentient bacteria or a divine hand of an intelligent God/gods guiding evolution. Anything left to chance and trial will ultimately only rarely see a trade of a short-term negative for a long-term positive, because it would have to happen by chance and without conscious effort.
the right to create a derivative work is one of the rights held exclusively by the holder of copyright or those to whom the copyright holder assigns or licenses them.
Try on Copyright Office Basics from the U.S. Copyright Office for size. It is a good starting point for any content creator, and the bundle of rights that make up copyright in the U.S. are near the top.
This isn't legal advice, but while in a strict dictionary sense "defamation" might be anything said that hurts a reputation, truth is an affirmative defense. The articles linked above state that no action is called for and no damages occur when someone states a truth. The person whose reputation is tarnished by the truth earned that reputation. Speaking or printing the truth therefore does no damage to the rightful reputation. That seems to this non-attorney to mean you can call the speech or publication by any name you want, but you're not going to get money by suing someone for telling the truth.
Again, I am not a lawyer, but grade-school Social Studies teachers in the U.S. teach their students about John Peter Zenger and the case of New York v. Zenger. That case set forth truth as a defense for slander and libel in the common law of the North American colonies of England.
BTW, where are "defamiation" and "plaese" on any of the above sites? Do I need the latest edition of Black's? I can't find those definitions at all, oh careful and detail-oriented A. Coward. Without resolving those two issues, I'm having trouble following your carefully stated premise and well-reasoned arguments to your no doubt brilliant conclusion.
It could _work_, but how do you _prove_ it worked?
From my lay person's understanding, there'd be some physical evidence of something attributable to chance or choice, and only statistically could one start to piece together evidence for the theorem. That is, unless you can detect the alternate realities directly. How does one go about doing that?
It isn't defamation in most places unless it's a) untrue and b) used to harm the subject's reputation unfairly.
It isn't trademark infringement to include the name of a product you review in the review, although it's a good idea to include the proper marks and note that the marks and the product belong to a particular owner. The nature of a review should make it clear, I think, that no claim of ownership is being made by the reviewer. This is especially true of a negative review, I'd think, because who would expect a negative review from the product's vendor?
As always, law is stranger than common sense suggests, so nothing is certain. Hell, not even all lawyers can agree on things, or we wouldn't have lawsuits.
If you're focusing on contracts, English, mathematics, or philosophy (rhetoric, argument, logic) could make a big difference. English and philosophy could be good for litigation specialists, too. Some firms have people who go to court and make arguments while others do advising and case prep.
I think if you're looking at Constitutional law, history and political science pretty much are your 'technical' background.
If you're focusing on software copyright, software licenses, algorithm patents, and such, then I think a computer science or information systems background is great.
If you're wanting to deal with the representing the public "little people" vs. "the system" then civil administration, education, hospital administration, or civil engineering could make an excellent background. Patients rights? Fighting City Hall? Students' rights? Suing over an unsafe roadway? These kinds of specialized backgrounds could be interesting.
Criminal justice and corrections is an interesting degree for future defense attorneys, I think. So is sociology or psychology.
Real estate is a good choice probably for real estate attorneys.
It all depends, but the most important thing when getting ready for law school isn't necessarily gaining skills relevant to your specialization. English, philosophy, poli sci, etc. prepare one for law school. What most of law school is isn't teaching you the laws. It's teaching you how to think about the laws, how to research them, how to find precedents, and how to apply precedents. It's about being able to think like a lawyer. Language skills, philosophy, history, and political science foster those skills needed to handle law school and that will be furthered by law school. A good understanding from a technical standpoint is wonderful, but being able to protect the clients' interests adequately is more important. Clients and expert witnesses can help with the technical bits, but the attorney is there for the legal part. If someone can walk both sides of the line, that's even better, but the lawyering should take precedence over the technical details.
Any good lawyer should be able, at a disadvantage, to deal with any area of law to some extent. They specialize simply because being familiar with a specialty makes researching that area of law much faster, and many come to be able to cite certain laws and decisions from memory. That'd be a lot to ask of a generalist attorney across the whole body of statutory and common law.
Re:If I could do it all over again...
on
MIT's SAT Math Error
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, English and philosophy are two of the recommended undergrad degrees taken in conjunction with pre-law to gain entry into law schools. So the Bachelor's degree by itself may not be spectacular, but it can set one apart from all those political science majors. History might also be a good choice. See University of Missouri St. Louis Political Science department's information on studying Law for just one program that mentions English and philosophy both as options.
Also, consider that many state government positions have a prerequisite of any Bachelor's degree from any accredited college. In Illinois, for example, many decent jobs with good benefits can plausibly be had with a degree in Liberal Arts or Medieval Literature, although you might be up against candidates who might have studied something more directly relevant. For some fields within the Illinois state government, the degree requirement can be waived for experience.
This is exactly why rooftop panels are so popular. It's area that already needs covering with something. Getting more panels then roof size, though, comes to a trade-off of what else the area could be doing, like growing crops or forests.
I for one am a big supporter of earth-berm homes for their efficiency and ground-source heat pumps as well. Put a greenhouse on your southern exposure above ground, and use the heat from that in the winter. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally cuts down on cooking energy and transport energy. In short, making smart choices for how to live with the land instead of separating ourselves from it so much can make a big difference.
Of course, in a 40-story high-rise, it's a little difficult to do many of these things. It's also not like we're going to get everyone to switch to a rural lifestyle. Mass transit, green rooftops, and light-colored exterior surfaces are some steps in the right direction in cities. It's an architectural challenge to make the interior rooms on the middle floors of a skyscraper passively heated, cooled, and lit. Yet it's not like we want all that vertical space to sprawl out horizontally either. This is tough stuff to figure out, and I hope some very smart people are working very hard on it.
You wanna know something? People downloaded movies over dial-up, too! Really!!! It just took longer!!!!!
Seriously, I know someone personally who downloaded Lightwave 3D and AutoCAD both over dial-up. You wanna know something else? He wasn't the typical use case for dial-up Internet.
Someone downloading a movie now and then is fairly typical now. Doing it every day is atypical, let alone 24 hours a day every day. One reason it's typical to do so once in a while now is because the time to do it isn't much, much longer than going to the store to rent it. If this T1 equivalent (there was no mention about PRI or DS-1, but I'm pretty sure it's not an actual 25-pair copper wire) is not an acceptable speed to do something, people won't use it for that as much.
One company I worked for had, in 2003 or so, a 250 hour a month limit on dial-up, above which was charged hourly. We decided to do away with it. What percentage of customers do you think _ever_ went over 250 hours once it was free? About 3%. They had the chance to be using bandwidth 672 to 744 hours a month, and about 3% ever used more than 250 hours. A whopping number used far less during an average month. Some of these were people sticking with dial-up despite faster options, so they might represent the less inclined to use the Net anyway. Almost half lived in towns where there was nothing faster than dial-up for less than $80 a month if at all, so those would be heavier dial-up users. Still, 6 or 7 to 1 on ports and 5 to 1 on bandwidth was plenty. Certain customers were online over 500 hours reliably, and almost always moving data. Others averaged those people out.
The thing is, overselling bandwidth isn't a business issue. Having happy customers is a business issue. Having sufficient bandwidth to keep customers happy is an operational issue. If the operations people can't deliver, the price needs to go up, the promises need to go down, or the operations people need to go out the door. You can't really know which is the problem until you look at the build-out costs, maintenance costs, and admin costs associated with lines, routers, firewalls, and servers. If the marketing department over-promises based on good numbers, that's the marketing people's fault. If the company can't produce good numbers, that's the accounting people's fault. If the operations people keep fucking up, that's the operations people's fault. The price being too low could be the fault of accounting, marketing, senior management, the board, or the market and it depends on the company how that really gets set. The delivery of the promised service for the promised price involves three factors, and it only takes adjusting one to make things right. Lower promises, raise prices, or raise delivery. The fact that the competition is unethical, dishonest, and underhanded is not a defense. Yet promising more, delivering less, and hooking people on prices too good to be true is the norm.
I for one know what to expect, and I don't bitch if my bandwidth isn't at its max all the time. I do bitch if it's consistently very much lower, especially since I download in infrequent bursts so I'm not likely to catch most slowdowns. I grab a game here, a new compiler there, and a new OS ISO or four every few weeks. I stream music for a couple of hours sometimes. For the past couple of years, SBC/AT&T has done pretty damn well in my area at delivering what I expect. I'm online and actually at my keyboard probably an average of 10 or so hours a day between home and work, including weekends. I'm probably using more than 1 Mbps maybe 4 hours a week, but when I do I use everything it'll give me, which is usually very close to the rated speed of 6 Mbps if the servers or torrent shares can keep up with it.
People like competition because it lowers prices. Guess what? Too much lower prices mean lower margins, which often means shittier service. It also means that lots of companies fail or sell out because they could be investing that money at a better margin somewhere else, whic
I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.
Most dial-up ISPs could run a town with 500 subscribers off of one DS-1 circuit and a bank of 64 or so DSP cards in the access concentrator. Not everyone was online at the same time, and not all of them were using all of their bandwidth when they were. 6 customers to a modem was considered extravagant over-building by many in the days of dial-up. In fact, the BRI or channelized DS-1 lines that customers dialed into were often more expensive than the backhaul lines, since one can fit more than 2.5 DS-1s worth of call terminations into one DS-1 worth of bandwidth.
Now, things might have changed a bit with more people being somewhat Internet savvy and with broadband penetration having risen, but the users probably haven't changed _that_ much since the days of dial-up, especially those that are still jsut coming from dial-up.
Yes, 1.544 Mbps divided by 64 is about 2.9 kbps. No, the customers would not generally notice a thing, because only about 1/6th of dial-up users were requesting anything at any given time. If half were, it was still 49kbps. It used to be quite safe to oversell bandwidth by at least 3 to 1 and often 4 to 1 or slightly higher even on fixed DS-1, SDSL, or frame relay. So 1.544 Mbps / ( 25 / 4 ) is kind of like 1.544 Mbps / 6.25, or about 252k per person average. 27 users is about 232 kbps. That might not be as accurate these days as it was when I was in the ISP field, though.
Even if you about half your oversell, 1.544 Mbps / 13 is 121 kbps or so, which is much better than the 26.4kbps to 41kbps most people end up getting for rural dial-up.
That's all your oversell to the ISP. You can generally "over apportion" internally between your NOC and those POPs if you run central bandwidth lines and have a star-pattern network of backhauls. Not all ISPs did this, because it's often cheaper in a particular area to have a local loop with bandwidth than to have a point-to-point between towns plus the extra bandwidth centrally. In those star-shaped, centralized uplink situations, though, you could save bandwidth lots of ways besides just plain overselling.
You often had P2P among your customers (some amount of this helps the local bandwidth plan, too, but only if the P2P never leaves the POP). You have the users connecting to your mail server a lot and the ISP's web site some. You can cache DNS lookups, which cuts down a little bit of traffic lots of times over. Mail that never leaves your domains need never leave your network, and lots of mail is sent to people your customers know locally. If the sender and recipient are both customers, you never route that mail outside your network. If you do web hosting besides just connectivity, anyone using the websites you host from your network never hits the public Internet. In crunch times for bandwidth upgrades, some ISPs were even known to give big price breaks on hosting the websites of popular local businesses, as bringing popular sites in-network saved on lots of bandwidth. Some found that being a mirror site for TUCOWS or such actually saved money, because the mirror updated during slow traffic and the end-user downloads then hit the local server. ISP-sponsored chat servers and ISP-run gaming servers were sometimes used both to better serve the customers and to keep the traffic local, but the extra maintenance required often outweighed bandwidth concerns. All of this adds up to many ISPs using far less bandwidth to the public network than what they sell to customers.
For one example, I once had a star-shaped network with more than 30 DS-1 equivalents (coming from DS-1s, PRIs, Frame Relays, frac DS-1s, BRIs, dialup POP in that NOC, etc.) of bandwidth fed into a NOC using a burstable DS-3 for main bandwidth. We paid for up to 6 Mbps all the time, and paid extra for 95th percentile usage over 6 Mbps. We rarely hit over 10 Mbps, and we rarely hit over 6 Mbps outside of the 3 PM to 11 PM window. I don't think we ever hit over 15 Mbps o
It's actually not so much the rate that's limited as the voltage. The voltage allowed is not high enough to get 56k. Certain long-stretch rural lines are an arc or possibly even fire risk at those voltages, which is why countries with newer, shorter runs of lines can get higher rates.
Interestingly, in the US with an ISDN line with voice switchover service you can get 56k connections. It seems silly to use a 64k data circuit as a voice line with a 56k modem on it. In most situations it would be silly. A good friend and I tried it out from his house when we worked for an ISP and he had ISDN at his house. Worked like a champ and was really stable -- great for a laugh. Then one evening our equipment mysteriously started dropping ISDN calls, but dial-up modems were staying connected. My friend was on call that night or was getting tired of getting dropped, I don't recall. So he dragged out the 56k, hooked it up, and dialed in. He did a little research, found that our most recent firmware update for the access concentrator in question was buggy. After X or Y number of days, it might not handle ISDN properly. So, he grabbed a different firmware version (I don't recall if it was another updgrade or a downgrade), tftped it, and flashed the box. After the reboot, ISDN was stable again, and noone had to go into the NOC.
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I'd say it's a poor man's database reporting system, perhaps.
Picture this scenario. Put your functions in one sheet, lock that sheet (if you can), and distribute a screen-based app in the default sheet. Every time the end-user updates a value in a query cell, the DB gets queried, the data gets transformed and formatted, and the results get updated. Need to update the app? Just force a transfer of the new "spreadsheet" file to all the clients.
Something like this might also make a custom time tracking or trouble ticketing system dead simple to throw together, too. Things like that have never really fit into a spreadsheet comfortably before, but they tend to contain lots of tabular data.
I'd say people who have programmed in ABC wouldn't have a problem, either, since that appears to be where Guido got the idea.
OTOH, in other languages, you can use whitespace in a few different ways and still have a pretty clean, properly indented syntax. It's just not enforced. Being able to say:
if ( foo ) { bar(); }
or in some languages:
if ( foo ) bar();
instead of
if ( foo )
bar();
-- or however it's exactly written in Python -- is nice if the code to be executed is really that short. Or, in the case of Perl, one can even write:
bar if foo;
How's that for eliminating ugly punctuation?
I don't think the use of whitespace as syntactically significant is necessarily a "problem", since a good text editor handles things like tab conversion and such. It's a preference, and I don't prefer it. Give me Lisp with parentheses everywhere before making whitespace so important.
At one time, they were making them as a contractor for IBM. IBM designed them, and paid people to do that. IBM sold them, and kept the markup. Now the money is going all to Lenovo. Yes, they got part of it before, but part is not all.
When IBM was selling them and having Lenovo make them, the story about Burmese police shooting at monks hadn't really broken yet, which is part of the OP's problem with supporting Chinese companies. Their tax yuan go to support this kind of stuff.
Many laptops are actually made in large part in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan still, aren't they? Perhaps someone needs to have a list of where components are sourced for the different brands and where the different models go through final assembly.
Throw it away? No, no. You sell it on iOffer* as a shortly-used pull of genuine Apple hardware. Someone who's more into cool logos than good computers will pay more for it than you'll pay for the upgrades. Then, someone who likes Apple, but not too much for his or her own good, gets a nice machine with cheap upgrades.
Of course, other than OS X, you can often beat Dell or Apple either one by building your own. Unfortunately for geeks, some of the packages they put together these days are too good to beat by building from parts. You still get more control when you do it yourself, though, and the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it.
* I'd say eBay, but that doesn't seem to be the safest place to put your credit card info this week.
People who are buying new OS licenses who choose XP still give MS money, yes. Those who stay with their current copy of XP rather than getting Vista have already paid.
Those of us with a retail license can move it to a newer computer so long as we remove it from the old system. That makes room for, say, Linux on the old system. OEM copies I don't think are supposed to be used that way, but they are.
Besides, what's the price of XP vs. the price of Vista in the channel? Sure, the price of XP might go back up some. Home probably won't hit $200 and Professional probably won't hit $400. You can currently find them for about half of that, yet what is Vista? Ultimate's $399? Home Basic upgrade is $99? Home Premium costs as much as XP Pro. As for those putting XP instead of Vista on PCs for the in-store sales crowd, I'd imagine Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and HP have a much better deal by now on XP than on Vista.
Besides, isn't Microsoft's plan to stop support for XP in a couple of years? If Vista is the only MS option, will people stick with MS?
Lots of it is probably, "Replace the rest of our proprietary Unix on x86 because SCO's not going to be around to support us and that whole specter of them suing anyone else is long gone", combined with "Well, if there are any conflicts between Unix and Linux, Novell is surely aware of them now and is willing to sell Linux under the GPL anyway. So there's no chance they can claim what SCO tried to claim."
Do you expect SCO customers to all switch to Solaris or AIX? I sure don't.
Or maybe they're there to play a game, and if they wanted porn they can find it on other sites.
Using another mail server for my mail server's domains is a different problem and requires a different solution. SPF is one increasingly popular way to deal with that.
Anyone using role-based email should be sending from the role-based email. You're not going to respond to support@domain.com if I send you an email from bobroberts@domain.com, now are you? Just authenticate as support@domain.com, or have your policies set up to allow more than one account to map to a valid From: header for support@domain.com if you really need people who are all sending mail from that account and reading it not to know its password. People wanting such specialized control should have people on staff who understand complex custom mail configurations, after all.
Lots of email worms and trojans are written to be able to send through Outlook Express. They get on your system and send email through whatever outgoing account you have to whoever is in your address book. I'd suggest a virus and spyware sweep of your friend's computer, as it might be part of a botnet.
It's also pretty easy to get into any webmail account that doesn't use SSL for login credentials. Don't use webmail that doesn't encrypt your password.
It's also pretty easy to sniff plain-text usernames and password from POP3 servers using plaintext authentication. Use POP3 with TLS or SSL, or at least use secure password methods like md5 or APOP. If your ISP doesn't know what those are or doesn't care enough to set them up and give tech support on them, then switch ISPs or use an independent email provider.
It's also dead easy from many mail servers to just put the wrong From: header in -- this often is as easy as changing your settings in Outlook Express or Thunderbird to say you're someone else. If your SMTP server doesn't require -- not allow, but _require_ -- you to authenticate, this is often allowed. Switch ISPs or use an independent mail provider if this is the case.
What if the posts are real and really from those accounts, but the guy changed the credit card info to shield the users a bit. The personal information is bad, but valid credit card numbers would be worse. The guy claims over on YouTube that he just wants to wake eBay up, and that he's not out specifically to hurt the users.
All that said, if this guy's just a phisher, it's nothing about eBay's security to blame here. It's the stupid phish that took the bait.
I'm not repeating anything. The phrases I used were my own. Try to find them anywhere on any FSF site. I do not appreciate your accusation that I do not think.
The owner of a dual-licensed project is either the original author, without whom you'd never have a GPL or BSD version anyway, or someone who has had copyrights assigned to them for some reason that is sufficient for the original author(s). The original author never loses his or her rights as long as they keep the copyrights.
You can always fork anything released under a dual license if you don't want to assign your copyrights away to someone who won't include work owned by others.
Dual-licensed code is still GPLed code. With BSD you get the BSD, and if the original distributor shuts down, you might have BSD + 8 different other licenses or you might have just the 8 other mostly non-free licenses.
Some dual-licensed projects, such as Perl, offer the dual licenses specifically so you, the recipient, can choose to redistribute as open or closed source. The licenses in question are the GPL and the Artistic License. Lots of other projects are going this route, although not too many other major ones yet. It's pretty common especially among projects developed in Perl.
The FSF has nothing to do with my decisions. I don't live by RMS's philosophy. I think there's nothing wrong with GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, MPL, nor a bunch of other licenses. I don't have a problem with proprietary licenses on a philosophical level. I just think they suck compared to freer licenses, and it takes some other attributes of the code to overcome the license shortcomings.
As for having to abide by anyone's particular ideas of freedom, well, that's what you do any time you use a license. You're reinforcing the BSD camp's ideas when you distribute under a BSD license. You strengthen the FSF's positions when you distribute under the GPL. The Mozilla people love to see their license. In order to distribute under the GPL, you must offer the four freedoms. It's not because RMS wills it, but because the license says those four freedoms are available to the recipients of the code.
Yes, the BSD focuses on a different type of freedom. I said that. What part of "It's a trade-off, and which freedoms matter the most to an individual determine which license that person will choose. Some people use one for some projects and the other for some as well." did you fail to understand?
Unbox your own fucking mind. Mine is quite free to think for my benefit, thanks. You seem to be guilty of following Theo like you're accusing others of following RMS. For the most part, that's not how the world works. I'm not a disciple of anyone's licensing camp. I like New BSD, GPLv2, MPL, ASL, CC-SA, CC-Attribution, Artistic License, the MIT license, NetHack GPL, the PHP License, and more. GPLv3 is a bit harsher than I'd like, but not enough so that I'll entirely stop working with software licensed under it.
RMS thinks all software should be licensed exactly as GPLv3 does it. I'm saying both the GPL and the BSD camps have their points of view, and that which individual parts of a license mean the most to you determine which yuo should release your own code under. If you don't have code of your own to license, then you really needn't have an opinion, as it's the author's choice and not yours. Still, you're free to have an opinion even when it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. How does that make me the FSF drone you're saying I am?
So you're saying evolution is like MacGuyver?
The freedom of secondary or tertiary developers to close the source is reduced. The freedom of the initial developer to specify how his hard work is to be treated is increased. The freedom of the developer who would have only received the closed-source version of the software otherwise is also increased. It's a trade-off, and which freedoms matter the most to an individual determine which license that person will choose. Some people use one for some projects and the other for some as well.
I think you just hit on th very idea of foresight. It's one of those things that's supposed to separate the higher mammals from things like bacteria and from natural processes like evolution, after all.
That is, unless someone believes in sentient bacteria or a divine hand of an intelligent God/gods guiding evolution. Anything left to chance and trial will ultimately only rarely see a trade of a short-term negative for a long-term positive, because it would have to happen by chance and without conscious effort.
IANAL either, but...
the right to create a derivative work is one of the rights held exclusively by the holder of copyright or those to whom the copyright holder assigns or licenses them.
Try on Copyright Office Basics from the U.S. Copyright Office for size. It is a good starting point for any content creator, and the bundle of rights that make up copyright in the U.S. are near the top.
Gee, that's the exact opposite of every single definition of "defamation" available to check online.
This isn't legal advice, but while in a strict dictionary sense "defamation" might be anything said that hurts a reputation, truth is an affirmative defense. The articles linked above state that no action is called for and no damages occur when someone states a truth. The person whose reputation is tarnished by the truth earned that reputation. Speaking or printing the truth therefore does no damage to the rightful reputation. That seems to this non-attorney to mean you can call the speech or publication by any name you want, but you're not going to get money by suing someone for telling the truth.
Again, I am not a lawyer, but grade-school Social Studies teachers in the U.S. teach their students about John Peter Zenger and the case of New York v. Zenger. That case set forth truth as a defense for slander and libel in the common law of the North American colonies of England.
BTW, where are "defamiation" and "plaese" on any of the above sites? Do I need the latest edition of Black's? I can't find those definitions at all, oh careful and detail-oriented A. Coward. Without resolving those two issues, I'm having trouble following your carefully stated premise and well-reasoned arguments to your no doubt brilliant conclusion.
It could _work_, but how do you _prove_ it worked?
From my lay person's understanding, there'd be some physical evidence of something attributable to chance or choice, and only statistically could one start to piece together evidence for the theorem. That is, unless you can detect the alternate realities directly. How does one go about doing that?
This only proves you have bad aim, didn't load the gun, the safety is on, it's a water gun, or some other issue. ;-)
It isn't defamation in most places unless it's a) untrue and b) used to harm the subject's reputation unfairly.
It isn't trademark infringement to include the name of a product you review in the review, although it's a good idea to include the proper marks and note that the marks and the product belong to a particular owner. The nature of a review should make it clear, I think, that no claim of ownership is being made by the reviewer. This is especially true of a negative review, I'd think, because who would expect a negative review from the product's vendor?
As always, law is stranger than common sense suggests, so nothing is certain. Hell, not even all lawyers can agree on things, or we wouldn't have lawsuits.
I'd regard all law as criminal or civil law.
If you're focusing on contracts, English, mathematics, or philosophy (rhetoric, argument, logic) could make a big difference. English and philosophy could be good for litigation specialists, too. Some firms have people who go to court and make arguments while others do advising and case prep.
I think if you're looking at Constitutional law, history and political science pretty much are your 'technical' background.
If you're focusing on software copyright, software licenses, algorithm patents, and such, then I think a computer science or information systems background is great.
If you're wanting to deal with the representing the public "little people" vs. "the system" then civil administration, education, hospital administration, or civil engineering could make an excellent background. Patients rights? Fighting City Hall? Students' rights? Suing over an unsafe roadway? These kinds of specialized backgrounds could be interesting.
Criminal justice and corrections is an interesting degree for future defense attorneys, I think. So is sociology or psychology.
Real estate is a good choice probably for real estate attorneys.
It all depends, but the most important thing when getting ready for law school isn't necessarily gaining skills relevant to your specialization. English, philosophy, poli sci, etc. prepare one for law school. What most of law school is isn't teaching you the laws. It's teaching you how to think about the laws, how to research them, how to find precedents, and how to apply precedents. It's about being able to think like a lawyer. Language skills, philosophy, history, and political science foster those skills needed to handle law school and that will be furthered by law school. A good understanding from a technical standpoint is wonderful, but being able to protect the clients' interests adequately is more important. Clients and expert witnesses can help with the technical bits, but the attorney is there for the legal part. If someone can walk both sides of the line, that's even better, but the lawyering should take precedence over the technical details.
Any good lawyer should be able, at a disadvantage, to deal with any area of law to some extent. They specialize simply because being familiar with a specialty makes researching that area of law much faster, and many come to be able to cite certain laws and decisions from memory. That'd be a lot to ask of a generalist attorney across the whole body of statutory and common law.
Well, English and philosophy are two of the recommended undergrad degrees taken in conjunction with pre-law to gain entry into law schools. So the Bachelor's degree by itself may not be spectacular, but it can set one apart from all those political science majors. History might also be a good choice. See University of Missouri St. Louis Political Science department's information on studying Law for just one program that mentions English and philosophy both as options.
Also, consider that many state government positions have a prerequisite of any Bachelor's degree from any accredited college. In Illinois, for example, many decent jobs with good benefits can plausibly be had with a degree in Liberal Arts or Medieval Literature, although you might be up against candidates who might have studied something more directly relevant. For some fields within the Illinois state government, the degree requirement can be waived for experience.
This is exactly why rooftop panels are so popular. It's area that already needs covering with something. Getting more panels then roof size, though, comes to a trade-off of what else the area could be doing, like growing crops or forests.
I for one am a big supporter of earth-berm homes for their efficiency and ground-source heat pumps as well. Put a greenhouse on your southern exposure above ground, and use the heat from that in the winter. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally cuts down on cooking energy and transport energy. In short, making smart choices for how to live with the land instead of separating ourselves from it so much can make a big difference.
Of course, in a 40-story high-rise, it's a little difficult to do many of these things. It's also not like we're going to get everyone to switch to a rural lifestyle. Mass transit, green rooftops, and light-colored exterior surfaces are some steps in the right direction in cities. It's an architectural challenge to make the interior rooms on the middle floors of a skyscraper passively heated, cooled, and lit. Yet it's not like we want all that vertical space to sprawl out horizontally either. This is tough stuff to figure out, and I hope some very smart people are working very hard on it.
You wanna know something? People downloaded movies over dial-up, too! Really!!! It just took longer!!!!!
Seriously, I know someone personally who downloaded Lightwave 3D and AutoCAD both over dial-up. You wanna know something else? He wasn't the typical use case for dial-up Internet.
Someone downloading a movie now and then is fairly typical now. Doing it every day is atypical, let alone 24 hours a day every day. One reason it's typical to do so once in a while now is because the time to do it isn't much, much longer than going to the store to rent it. If this T1 equivalent (there was no mention about PRI or DS-1, but I'm pretty sure it's not an actual 25-pair copper wire) is not an acceptable speed to do something, people won't use it for that as much.
One company I worked for had, in 2003 or so, a 250 hour a month limit on dial-up, above which was charged hourly. We decided to do away with it. What percentage of customers do you think _ever_ went over 250 hours once it was free? About 3%. They had the chance to be using bandwidth 672 to 744 hours a month, and about 3% ever used more than 250 hours. A whopping number used far less during an average month. Some of these were people sticking with dial-up despite faster options, so they might represent the less inclined to use the Net anyway. Almost half lived in towns where there was nothing faster than dial-up for less than $80 a month if at all, so those would be heavier dial-up users. Still, 6 or 7 to 1 on ports and 5 to 1 on bandwidth was plenty. Certain customers were online over 500 hours reliably, and almost always moving data. Others averaged those people out.
The thing is, overselling bandwidth isn't a business issue. Having happy customers is a business issue. Having sufficient bandwidth to keep customers happy is an operational issue. If the operations people can't deliver, the price needs to go up, the promises need to go down, or the operations people need to go out the door. You can't really know which is the problem until you look at the build-out costs, maintenance costs, and admin costs associated with lines, routers, firewalls, and servers. If the marketing department over-promises based on good numbers, that's the marketing people's fault. If the company can't produce good numbers, that's the accounting people's fault. If the operations people keep fucking up, that's the operations people's fault. The price being too low could be the fault of accounting, marketing, senior management, the board, or the market and it depends on the company how that really gets set. The delivery of the promised service for the promised price involves three factors, and it only takes adjusting one to make things right. Lower promises, raise prices, or raise delivery. The fact that the competition is unethical, dishonest, and underhanded is not a defense. Yet promising more, delivering less, and hooking people on prices too good to be true is the norm.
I for one know what to expect, and I don't bitch if my bandwidth isn't at its max all the time. I do bitch if it's consistently very much lower, especially since I download in infrequent bursts so I'm not likely to catch most slowdowns. I grab a game here, a new compiler there, and a new OS ISO or four every few weeks. I stream music for a couple of hours sometimes. For the past couple of years, SBC/AT&T has done pretty damn well in my area at delivering what I expect. I'm online and actually at my keyboard probably an average of 10 or so hours a day between home and work, including weekends. I'm probably using more than 1 Mbps maybe 4 hours a week, but when I do I use everything it'll give me, which is usually very close to the rated speed of 6 Mbps if the servers or torrent shares can keep up with it.
People like competition because it lowers prices. Guess what? Too much lower prices mean lower margins, which often means shittier service. It also means that lots of companies fail or sell out because they could be investing that money at a better margin somewhere else, whic
I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.
Most dial-up ISPs could run a town with 500 subscribers off of one DS-1 circuit and a bank of 64 or so DSP cards in the access concentrator. Not everyone was online at the same time, and not all of them were using all of their bandwidth when they were. 6 customers to a modem was considered extravagant over-building by many in the days of dial-up. In fact, the BRI or channelized DS-1 lines that customers dialed into were often more expensive than the backhaul lines, since one can fit more than 2.5 DS-1s worth of call terminations into one DS-1 worth of bandwidth.
Now, things might have changed a bit with more people being somewhat Internet savvy and with broadband penetration having risen, but the users probably haven't changed _that_ much since the days of dial-up, especially those that are still jsut coming from dial-up.
Yes, 1.544 Mbps divided by 64 is about 2.9 kbps. No, the customers would not generally notice a thing, because only about 1/6th of dial-up users were requesting anything at any given time. If half were, it was still 49kbps. It used to be quite safe to oversell bandwidth by at least 3 to 1 and often 4 to 1 or slightly higher even on fixed DS-1, SDSL, or frame relay. So 1.544 Mbps / ( 25 / 4 ) is kind of like 1.544 Mbps / 6.25, or about 252k per person average. 27 users is about 232 kbps. That might not be as accurate these days as it was when I was in the ISP field, though.
Even if you about half your oversell, 1.544 Mbps / 13 is 121 kbps or so, which is much better than the 26.4kbps to 41kbps most people end up getting for rural dial-up.
That's all your oversell to the ISP. You can generally "over apportion" internally between your NOC and those POPs if you run central bandwidth lines and have a star-pattern network of backhauls. Not all ISPs did this, because it's often cheaper in a particular area to have a local loop with bandwidth than to have a point-to-point between towns plus the extra bandwidth centrally. In those star-shaped, centralized uplink situations, though, you could save bandwidth lots of ways besides just plain overselling.
You often had P2P among your customers (some amount of this helps the local bandwidth plan, too, but only if the P2P never leaves the POP). You have the users connecting to your mail server a lot and the ISP's web site some. You can cache DNS lookups, which cuts down a little bit of traffic lots of times over. Mail that never leaves your domains need never leave your network, and lots of mail is sent to people your customers know locally. If the sender and recipient are both customers, you never route that mail outside your network. If you do web hosting besides just connectivity, anyone using the websites you host from your network never hits the public Internet. In crunch times for bandwidth upgrades, some ISPs were even known to give big price breaks on hosting the websites of popular local businesses, as bringing popular sites in-network saved on lots of bandwidth. Some found that being a mirror site for TUCOWS or such actually saved money, because the mirror updated during slow traffic and the end-user downloads then hit the local server. ISP-sponsored chat servers and ISP-run gaming servers were sometimes used both to better serve the customers and to keep the traffic local, but the extra maintenance required often outweighed bandwidth concerns. All of this adds up to many ISPs using far less bandwidth to the public network than what they sell to customers.
For one example, I once had a star-shaped network with more than 30 DS-1 equivalents (coming from DS-1s, PRIs, Frame Relays, frac DS-1s, BRIs, dialup POP in that NOC, etc.) of bandwidth fed into a NOC using a burstable DS-3 for main bandwidth. We paid for up to 6 Mbps all the time, and paid extra for 95th percentile usage over 6 Mbps. We rarely hit over 10 Mbps, and we rarely hit over 6 Mbps outside of the 3 PM to 11 PM window. I don't think we ever hit over 15 Mbps o
It's actually not so much the rate that's limited as the voltage. The voltage allowed is not high enough to get 56k. Certain long-stretch rural lines are an arc or possibly even fire risk at those voltages, which is why countries with newer, shorter runs of lines can get higher rates.
Interestingly, in the US with an ISDN line with voice switchover service you can get 56k connections. It seems silly to use a 64k data circuit as a voice line with a 56k modem on it. In most situations it would be silly. A good friend and I tried it out from his house when we worked for an ISP and he had ISDN at his house. Worked like a champ and was really stable -- great for a laugh. Then one evening our equipment mysteriously started dropping ISDN calls, but dial-up modems were staying connected. My friend was on call that night or was getting tired of getting dropped, I don't recall. So he dragged out the 56k, hooked it up, and dialed in. He did a little research, found that our most recent firmware update for the access concentrator in question was buggy. After X or Y number of days, it might not handle ISDN properly. So, he grabbed a different firmware version (I don't recall if it was another updgrade or a downgrade), tftped it, and flashed the box. After the reboot, ISDN was stable again, and noone had to go into the NOC.