I'm on Comcast in Pennsylvania. A couple of weeks ago they rolled out a change which happened to cause a major screw-up in my (Comcast owned) cable modem, and really confused my poor little PC due to the fact they hadn't considered all the ramifications of their change. (Exact details: long and boring, and I'm still figuring some of them out, because Comcast won't give me the information.) They pushed it out twice in two days, which meant I had exactly the same problem two mornings in a row.
When I contacted them to ask them to politely explain what the heck they'd done (being a little irate as it had taken me two hours to determine just what was going on, not including all the downtime), they first told me they hadn't done anything, then admitted they had done something but it couldn't do what I said it had done and I was making it up, and finally told me "yes, we did it, gosh that's unfortunate, bad luck, goodbye".
Comcast is appalling, and has no technical ability at all. (If I had the same amount of outage as they do, I'd be fired so fast my feet wouldn't touch the ground.) By the way, did you have a service level agreement with your old ISP? You don't with Comcast -- at least in Pennsylvania, you don't. That's right -- NO SLA at all.
I could go on and on about Comcast. Unfortunately, they happen to fit in that last caveat of the parent poster -- they are indeed in a monopoly situation. Scum.
For the benefit of those of you who haven't read the article, but still want to get in a.s.a.p. -- how about this little gem?
The ability to create photorealistic virtual human beings raises unsettling questions, especially in conjunction with the means to cut-and-paste them into any landscape. These questions troubled Gaeta himself so much that, a few years ago, he wrote a letter alerting President Clinton to the fact that such technology could be used for purposes of mass deception. (The letter was never answered.)
As it happens, one group deeply interested in the new breed of hyperrealistic CG is the military. Darpa is fast-tracking image-based rendering and lighting for use in immersive battle simulations. In 1999, the US Army launched the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC, where Paul Debevec - Borshukov's former mentor at Berkeley - is now the head of graphics R&D.
Gaeta recognizes the paradox. "You have these paranoid films about the Matrix depicting how people are put in a mental prison by misusing this technology, and you have the military constructing something like the actual Matrix. Or maybe our technology will become the actual Matrix, and we have inadvertently spilled the vial of green shit out onto the planet."
1. Get two hard drives. 2. Install your system on one hard drive, and all your apps and data on the other hard drive.
Or, if you're really keen...
1. Get three hard drives. 2. Install your system on one hard drive, all your apps and data on the second hard drive, and put your swap file on the third hard drive.
Note the distinction: different hard drives, not different partitions. That way you get the benefits of multiple dedicated heads for each major function. Of course, you could also look at striping -- but remember that different RAID levels give different performance/reliability benefits depending on what sort of traffic you have going across the controllers.
As with anything else, you really need to understand where the bottlenecks are. You can have the latest whippy-skip computer with superfast everything...but it'll still suck if you're pulling scads of data across a network on a slow Token Ring NIC which is beaconing (which is perhaps rather unlikely in your scenario, but I wanted to make my point).
Remember this? The makers of Spider-Man imposed advertisements for companies including Cingular Wireless ("can you see me now? Good!") over genuine Times Square ads for companies like NBC and Samsung. Constitutionally protected, mate!
Regardless of whether that's legal, dodgy, or whatever, it's entirely different from manipulating the news. Journalists seem to forget what journalism actually is these days, and instead desperately want to be thought of as intellectually-astute commentators, while this photographer apparently would prefer to be a starving artist rather than an unbiased "just the facts, ma'am" news photographer. Silly sods. I so loathe the media.
I guess it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't work for clients and have to travel on site, and many of our clients will ONLY want US Citizens. So, that leaves the three of us to do ALL of the travelling, even if there has been a personal tragedy in our life.
Hmmm...can you say "illegal discrimination"?
I'm kind of sensitive to these sorts of issues because I'm a non-US citizen living in the U.S., working in the technical field, but not under the H1-B program (my wife is a US citizen). I consider myself fortunate; you wouldn't guess I didn't grow up here until I spoke, and English is my first language so I'm easily understandable to other English speakers.
Now, I understand that it's one thing to know damn well that company A will only accept a US citizen on site, and another thing to bring them up on discrimination charges, particularly if they're a paying customer. But this dismays me. Isn't America supposed to be the land of opportunity where the color of your skin and the country of your birth are irrelevant? The other thing is it hurts everyone -- you, as a US citizen, have a wreck of a life because you can't stay home, simply because your clients are xenophobic. (Having said that -- what is the rationale for not accepting non-US citizens? Lack of technical skill? Language barrier? Or simple xenophobic garbage?)
And most importantly, it's meant to fill positions for which qualified legal workers are not available. If the Rolling Stones want to tour the USA, sure, let 'em in. No one here does quite what they do.
Sorry to quibble (well, not really, it's fun), but the Rolling Stones wouldn't get in on an H1-B visa.
The H1-B is specifically for "Temporary workers: Specialty occupations, DOD workers, fashion models". There's the H1-C -- "Temporary workers: Nurses going to work for up to three years in health professional shortage areas".
IANAVE (I am not a visa expert), but I imagine the Rolling Stones would be P-1 -- "Athletes and Entertainers: Entertainment groups".
All of which is to make a point: namely, there's a lot of talk about the H1-B, but a lot of it is somewhat inaccurate. I'm not singling the parent poster out, as he didn't specifically state the Rolling Stones would get in on an H1-B; I just used his comment as a nice segue.
Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?
Yes. Tell him to be prepared to explain why it's not blackmail and how they'll be protected from possible legal ramifications.
Then tell him to further be prepared to demonstrate the figures proving the small (but vocal and passionate) upswing from Linux fanatics will outweigh the downswing from those realists who know there's a darned good chance they'll have to know some MS software in the course of their career.
this isn't a problem with OWA at all, it's a procedural/methodology problem
Yes indeedy. I cringe when people proclaim their utter reliance on PST files; they're not impervious to corruption, you know.
* Put it on the server. If there are quotas and it's that important, work with the admins or your manager to devise a proper and workable resolution. * Alternately, and again, if it's truly that important, consider a document management system or some other real mail handling system.
Either it really is that crucial, in which case you're living on a wing and a prayer with your current procedures, or it isn't that crucial, in which case you may need to re-evaluate your procedures.
I've been to italy, greece, turkey, and about half of the 50 states. I've seen the world, and you know what? With a few exceptions (greece was seriously bad ass), it was pretty boring, and some good tech would have made it much more fun for me.
So why did you go?
Honestly...what on earth was the point of you going to these places? What did you want to get out of your trips? What did you do in, say, Italy? Did you visit some of the most beautiful classical architecture to be found in the world? Or taste real Italian food, just to see what it's like? Enjoy a canal trip in Venice?
I'm honestly curious to know why you went, what you expected, and why you were disappointed. Mate, if you simply must take technology with you so you can be doing exactly the same things in a foreign country/state as you would be doing at home, that's your prerogative. I understand wanting to be contactable in the event of an emergency. (That's why God invented GSM and Internet cafes. Heaven forbid the U.S. wireless phone companies should ever get their act together so you can easily purchase a phone that'll work in the U.S. and the rest of the world -- you know, that whole GSM thing.) But in that case -- why spend the money to go to those countries? I'd have thought you'd rather spend it on a few nice geek toys for yourself, if you don't enjoy experiencing other countries and cultures.
(And by the way...half the U.S. and three other countries is not "seeing the world".)
Of course the big question is why can't you simply patch it to the prior version?
He may well be able to do this, and that may well work. (Actually, one of the big problems I have here with stating anything definitive is the original poster's statement:
Yesterday I discovered that the cause of the problem was probably due to a remote software update applied to my cable modem by the cable company 2 months ago.
Note that probably -- i.e. he doesn't know for sure.)
However, I digress. I have seen situations where a microcode/firmware update has messed things up so badly that you can't recover from it. I once had a client who applied an update to their Dell server and ended up getting a completely new motherboard from Dell for free as their server became quite useless as a result of the update. This doesn't sound quite that lethal, but it does happen.
There used to be a company called PC DOCS, who wrote a Document Management System called DOCS Open. The company was purchased by Hummingbird, and they have an updated version called PowerDOCS.
There's a Designer program used to customize the software -- add fields to the database, change the appearance of the forms, that sort of thing. If you start the Designer program with a command line parameter/XYZZY, it gets you into the sort-of-undocumented super-user design mode. I say sort-of-undocumented because, although the parameter is documented as a means of getting into the super-user mode, the additional functionality that it gives you is not documented, so you get to play guess-what-this-checkbox-does.
Dark Sun was the history of the hydrogen bomb. I greatly enjoyed his "Making of the Atomic Bomb", but didn't find "Dark Sun" quite as gripping a read. "Making of..." was perhaps more enjoyable to me both because of the context of the times and because of the tales of people such as Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, et. al.
By the way...it's a bit late for the review, isn't it? It made it to paperback in 1995 -- goodness knows when it was first published in hardback!
I'd mod you up and the parent post down. Really, I'd love to rant a little more, but you've pretty much said everything I wanted to say.
It's funny -- most of the replies in this topic basically prove what the article said -- that IT people have poor people skills and can't understand that different people think and work in different ways. Most of the replies are people pissing and moaning that users are stupid.
Amen. IT people are amongst the most arrogant and, paradoxically, insecure people in the world. When users are faced with increasingly complex systems and the only support to which they are pointed is a conceited jerk who can't understand why they don't get it and isn't shy about saying so, is it any wonder that IT departments are being disbanded in droves and the work is being outsourced? Generally speaking, the consultants who get paid more can work as a consultant at least in part because they -- shock, horror -- understand how to relate to people in a positive manner.
And part of relating to people in a positive manner -- bigger shock, horror -- means making software easier to use and ultimately more useful and productive for the end-user at which it is aimed. The people who fail to realize this are the same people who will also fail to understand that they're being laid off because the rest of the company is tired of dealing with prima donna brats.
The flaw is in not requiring the user to change it.
Sorry, but I disagree. It goes higher than that. This is a piece of equipment provided by Sprint to paying customers in order to facilitate the network service. Therefore, it's incumbent upon Sprint to modify the default password, not the user. The user is paying for a complete service, and as such should have a reasonable expectation of at least moderate safeguards in place, particularly given the well-known dangers of a permanent Internet connection.
By the way, just to point something out: lots of other hardware/software comes with default passwords. Remember the SQL Server worm a few months ago? (Sorry, can't recall the name of the worm.) It could only get in if you didn't change the default sa password away from blank. It's not just MS, either -- Sybase has exactly the same default logon name and password, and Oracle has a default logon name of system with a default password of manager.
However, that's a different situation -- a company buys a database server with the expectation of having to perform post-purchase configuration. Did you sign up for DSL or cable service, get a modem as part of the package, and expect to have to perform some final configuration?
Correct me if I'm wrong (probably no need to ask for that), but hasn't AlanRalsky already done this to a large extent? He claims he has servers in India, Canada, China, and Russia, and most of his mail is now sent from overseas countries. (This is taken from the second link provided.)
I hope this doesn't sound too harsh, but my first thought when I read this Ask Slashdot was "Mate, you need to get out more".
Perhaps look at some of the classics? (There's often a reason they're classics.) Personally, I dislike Charles Dickens, but love the Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. ("Dead Souls" (Gogol), "Anna Karenina" (Tolstoy), "The Idiot" (Dostoevsky) are all excellent reads.)
Or maybe some of the fluff, such as Agatha Christie. How about Sherlock Holmes, if Christie is a little too feminine?
But I think you deny yourself some of life's pleasures by narrowly defining your interests.
If the lawsuit is seen to be silly, it'll be tossed out, but people will say, "See, the system of checks and balances did the job. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- it's still a good law."
There are too many powerful groups with a vested interest to let this go by the way. Minor revisions, perhaps, but it's not going to create a huge ruckus or make any major difference to the law. Even if this particular case gains some notoriety, it'll be forgotten in a month and the vested interest groups will have won. Again.
I suspect literally every person I work with of, at least, taking the occasional personal phone call or surfing the web. Thus, I would have to report everyone who works for my firm, presumably every day.
Of course everyone does. I have a similar agreement in place -- heck, I have to click "OK" on some such agreement when I log in to my workstation -- and here I am posting to Slashdot. The higher-ups know that people do this, and are generally pretty easy-going about it. As long as you don't go overboard, no-one really minds.
It's when you get people who surf the web for hours at a time or take 40 minute personal phone calls that you have more of a problem, and this is fair enough. The other point is that they're covering themselves; usually the rule is, be fair by us, and we'll be fair by you, but remember that, should anything dubious come up, you've signed this agreement, so you can't come back and complain when you get fired for the pr0n surfing.
Nobody here gets fired when they have a picture of the wife and kids as their desktop background, even though it's technically a violation of the agreement. OTOH, I suspect they'd have a problem if they put up one of those...you know...adult pictures.
It comes down to this: letter of the law versus spirit of the law. And most people can recognize the difference. (Apparently, "most people" doesn't include the majority of posters who've commented on this story thus far.)
You wouldn't care to put money on that, would you? I can remember the surreptitious Wolfenstein games being played on the Apple ][ machines in my high school's computer lab back in 1983. I never could understand what the horrible noise emanating from the little speaker was saying.
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.
As you say you're not a fan, you can be forgiven for not knowing this. But Tolkien's point was to create an English mythology, not to entertain. (Well, "The Hobbit" was to entertain his son, but I digress. And apart from that I'm getting off the point.) He wrote that he had very little hope or expectation that anyone else would want to read it.
I went to a fairly bad school in New Zealand, and I learned trigonometry at age 13, and calculus at 15. If you didn't start trig until your GCSEs, when on earth did you get around to calculus? I would've loved to learn Latin, but my school didn't offer it. However, every student did have to take a semester of French in third form (13 years old).
the school I went to is in the top 5% of all comprehensives...but you're experience seems to have been a lot better than normal
Err, I think your school is probably quite relieved you don't name them, if they are ranked that highly, gave you a complete education, and you still don't know the difference between your and you're. And I'd have to say that this experience doesn't sound unusual given what I and all my friends and family experienced in schools throughout NZ, Australia, and England.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on Comcast in Pennsylvania. A couple of weeks ago they rolled out a change which happened to cause a major screw-up in my (Comcast owned) cable modem, and really confused my poor little PC due to the fact they hadn't considered all the ramifications of their change. (Exact details: long and boring, and I'm still figuring some of them out, because Comcast won't give me the information.) They pushed it out twice in two days, which meant I had exactly the same problem two mornings in a row.
When I contacted them to ask them to politely explain what the heck they'd done (being a little irate as it had taken me two hours to determine just what was going on, not including all the downtime), they first told me they hadn't done anything, then admitted they had done something but it couldn't do what I said it had done and I was making it up, and finally told me "yes, we did it, gosh that's unfortunate, bad luck, goodbye".
Comcast is appalling, and has no technical ability at all. (If I had the same amount of outage as they do, I'd be fired so fast my feet wouldn't touch the ground.) By the way, did you have a service level agreement with your old ISP? You don't with Comcast -- at least in Pennsylvania, you don't. That's right -- NO SLA at all.
I could go on and on about Comcast. Unfortunately, they happen to fit in that last caveat of the parent poster -- they are indeed in a monopoly situation. Scum.
For the benefit of those of you who haven't read the article, but still want to get in a.s.a.p. -- how about this little gem?
The ability to create photorealistic virtual human beings raises unsettling questions, especially in conjunction with the means to cut-and-paste them into any landscape. These questions troubled Gaeta himself so much that, a few years ago, he wrote a letter alerting President Clinton to the fact that such technology could be used for purposes of mass deception. (The letter was never answered.)
As it happens, one group deeply interested in the new breed of hyperrealistic CG is the military. Darpa is fast-tracking image-based rendering and lighting for use in immersive battle simulations. In 1999, the US Army launched the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC, where Paul Debevec - Borshukov's former mentor at Berkeley - is now the head of graphics R&D.
Gaeta recognizes the paradox. "You have these paranoid films about the Matrix depicting how people are put in a mental prison by misusing this technology, and you have the military constructing something like the actual Matrix. Or maybe our technology will become the actual Matrix, and we have inadvertently spilled the vial of green shit out onto the planet."
1. Get two hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, and all your apps and data on the other hard drive.
Or, if you're really keen...
1. Get three hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, all your apps and data on the second hard drive, and put your swap file on the third hard drive.
Note the distinction: different hard drives, not different partitions. That way you get the benefits of multiple dedicated heads for each major function. Of course, you could also look at striping -- but remember that different RAID levels give different performance/reliability benefits depending on what sort of traffic you have going across the controllers.
As with anything else, you really need to understand where the bottlenecks are. You can have the latest whippy-skip computer with superfast everything...but it'll still suck if you're pulling scads of data across a network on a slow Token Ring NIC which is beaconing (which is perhaps rather unlikely in your scenario, but I wanted to make my point).
Remember this? The makers of Spider-Man imposed advertisements for companies including Cingular Wireless ("can you see me now? Good!") over genuine Times Square ads for companies like NBC and Samsung. Constitutionally protected, mate!
Regardless of whether that's legal, dodgy, or whatever, it's entirely different from manipulating the news. Journalists seem to forget what journalism actually is these days, and instead desperately want to be thought of as intellectually-astute commentators, while this photographer apparently would prefer to be a starving artist rather than an unbiased "just the facts, ma'am" news photographer. Silly sods. I so loathe the media.
I guess it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't work for clients and have to travel on site, and many of our clients will ONLY want US Citizens. So, that leaves the three of us to do ALL of the travelling, even if there has been a personal tragedy in our life.
Hmmm...can you say "illegal discrimination"?
I'm kind of sensitive to these sorts of issues because I'm a non-US citizen living in the U.S., working in the technical field, but not under the H1-B program (my wife is a US citizen). I consider myself fortunate; you wouldn't guess I didn't grow up here until I spoke, and English is my first language so I'm easily understandable to other English speakers.
Now, I understand that it's one thing to know damn well that company A will only accept a US citizen on site, and another thing to bring them up on discrimination charges, particularly if they're a paying customer. But this dismays me. Isn't America supposed to be the land of opportunity where the color of your skin and the country of your birth are irrelevant? The other thing is it hurts everyone -- you, as a US citizen, have a wreck of a life because you can't stay home, simply because your clients are xenophobic. (Having said that -- what is the rationale for not accepting non-US citizens? Lack of technical skill? Language barrier? Or simple xenophobic garbage?)
And most importantly, it's meant to fill positions for which qualified legal workers are not available. If the Rolling Stones want to tour the USA, sure, let 'em in. No one here does quite what they do.
Sorry to quibble (well, not really, it's fun), but the Rolling Stones wouldn't get in on an H1-B visa.
The H1-B is specifically for "Temporary workers: Specialty occupations, DOD workers, fashion models". There's the H1-C -- "Temporary workers: Nurses going to work for up to three years in health professional shortage areas".
IANAVE (I am not a visa expert), but I imagine the Rolling Stones would be P-1 -- "Athletes and Entertainers: Entertainment groups".
Alternately, evaluate for yourself on the US Immigration web site.
All of which is to make a point: namely, there's a lot of talk about the H1-B, but a lot of it is somewhat inaccurate. I'm not singling the parent poster out, as he didn't specifically state the Rolling Stones would get in on an H1-B; I just used his comment as a nice segue.
Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?
Yes. Tell him to be prepared to explain why it's not blackmail and how they'll be protected from possible legal ramifications.
Then tell him to further be prepared to demonstrate the figures proving the small (but vocal and passionate) upswing from Linux fanatics will outweigh the downswing from those realists who know there's a darned good chance they'll have to know some MS software in the course of their career.
this isn't a problem with OWA at all, it's a procedural/methodology problem
Yes indeedy. I cringe when people proclaim their utter reliance on PST files; they're not impervious to corruption, you know.
* Put it on the server. If there are quotas and it's that important, work with the admins or your manager to devise a proper and workable resolution.
* Alternately, and again, if it's truly that important, consider a document management system or some other real mail handling system.
Either it really is that crucial, in which case you're living on a wing and a prayer with your current procedures, or it isn't that crucial, in which case you may need to re-evaluate your procedures.
...then why haven't they caught the person or persons responsible for sending the anthrax-laden letters shortly after the terrorist attacks?
I've been to italy, greece, turkey, and about half of the 50 states. I've seen the world, and you know what? With a few exceptions (greece was seriously bad ass), it was pretty boring, and some good tech would have made it much more fun for me.
So why did you go?
Honestly...what on earth was the point of you going to these places? What did you want to get out of your trips? What did you do in, say, Italy? Did you visit some of the most beautiful classical architecture to be found in the world? Or taste real Italian food, just to see what it's like? Enjoy a canal trip in Venice?
I'm honestly curious to know why you went, what you expected, and why you were disappointed. Mate, if you simply must take technology with you so you can be doing exactly the same things in a foreign country/state as you would be doing at home, that's your prerogative. I understand wanting to be contactable in the event of an emergency. (That's why God invented GSM and Internet cafes. Heaven forbid the U.S. wireless phone companies should ever get their act together so you can easily purchase a phone that'll work in the U.S. and the rest of the world -- you know, that whole GSM thing.) But in that case -- why spend the money to go to those countries? I'd have thought you'd rather spend it on a few nice geek toys for yourself, if you don't enjoy experiencing other countries and cultures.
(And by the way...half the U.S. and three other countries is not "seeing the world".)
Of course the big question is why can't you simply patch it to the prior version?
He may well be able to do this, and that may well work. (Actually, one of the big problems I have here with stating anything definitive is the original poster's statement:
Yesterday I discovered that the cause of the problem was probably due to a remote software update applied to my cable modem by the cable company 2 months ago.
Note that probably -- i.e. he doesn't know for sure.)
However, I digress. I have seen situations where a microcode/firmware update has messed things up so badly that you can't recover from it. I once had a client who applied an update to their Dell server and ended up getting a completely new motherboard from Dell for free as their server became quite useless as a result of the update. This doesn't sound quite that lethal, but it does happen.
There used to be a company called PC DOCS, who wrote a Document Management System called DOCS Open. The company was purchased by Hummingbird, and they have an updated version called PowerDOCS.
/XYZZY, it gets you into the sort-of-undocumented super-user design mode. I say sort-of-undocumented because, although the parameter is documented as a means of getting into the super-user mode, the additional functionality that it gives you is not documented, so you get to play guess-what-this-checkbox-does.
There's a Designer program used to customize the software -- add fields to the database, change the appearance of the forms, that sort of thing. If you start the Designer program with a command line parameter
Dark Sun was the history of the hydrogen bomb. I greatly enjoyed his "Making of the Atomic Bomb", but didn't find "Dark Sun" quite as gripping a read. "Making of..." was perhaps more enjoyable to me both because of the context of the times and because of the tales of people such as Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, et. al.
By the way...it's a bit late for the review, isn't it? It made it to paperback in 1995 -- goodness knows when it was first published in hardback!
I'd mod you up and the parent post down. Really, I'd love to rant a little more, but you've pretty much said everything I wanted to say.
It's funny -- most of the replies in this topic basically prove what the article said -- that IT people have poor people skills and can't understand that different people think and work in different ways. Most of the replies are people pissing and moaning that users are stupid.
Amen. IT people are amongst the most arrogant and, paradoxically, insecure people in the world. When users are faced with increasingly complex systems and the only support to which they are pointed is a conceited jerk who can't understand why they don't get it and isn't shy about saying so, is it any wonder that IT departments are being disbanded in droves and the work is being outsourced? Generally speaking, the consultants who get paid more can work as a consultant at least in part because they -- shock, horror -- understand how to relate to people in a positive manner.
And part of relating to people in a positive manner -- bigger shock, horror -- means making software easier to use and ultimately more useful and productive for the end-user at which it is aimed. The people who fail to realize this are the same people who will also fail to understand that they're being laid off because the rest of the company is tired of dealing with prima donna brats.
The flaw is in not requiring the user to change it.
Sorry, but I disagree. It goes higher than that. This is a piece of equipment provided by Sprint to paying customers in order to facilitate the network service. Therefore, it's incumbent upon Sprint to modify the default password, not the user. The user is paying for a complete service, and as such should have a reasonable expectation of at least moderate safeguards in place, particularly given the well-known dangers of a permanent Internet connection.
By the way, just to point something out: lots of other hardware/software comes with default passwords. Remember the SQL Server worm a few months ago? (Sorry, can't recall the name of the worm.) It could only get in if you didn't change the default sa password away from blank. It's not just MS, either -- Sybase has exactly the same default logon name and password, and Oracle has a default logon name of system with a default password of manager.
However, that's a different situation -- a company buys a database server with the expectation of having to perform post-purchase configuration. Did you sign up for DSL or cable service, get a modem as part of the package, and expect to have to perform some final configuration?
Correct me if I'm wrong (probably no need to ask for that), but hasn't Alan Ralsky already done this to a large extent? He claims he has servers in India, Canada, China, and Russia, and most of his mail is now sent from overseas countries. (This is taken from the second link provided.)
I hope this doesn't sound too harsh, but my first thought when I read this Ask Slashdot was "Mate, you need to get out more".
Perhaps look at some of the classics? (There's often a reason they're classics.) Personally, I dislike Charles Dickens, but love the Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. ("Dead Souls" (Gogol), "Anna Karenina" (Tolstoy), "The Idiot" (Dostoevsky) are all excellent reads.)
Or maybe some of the fluff, such as Agatha Christie. How about Sherlock Holmes, if Christie is a little too feminine?
But I think you deny yourself some of life's pleasures by narrowly defining your interests.
I can't say it better, so I won't even try.
If the lawsuit is seen to be silly, it'll be tossed out, but people will say, "See, the system of checks and balances did the job. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- it's still a good law."
There are too many powerful groups with a vested interest to let this go by the way. Minor revisions, perhaps, but it's not going to create a huge ruckus or make any major difference to the law. Even if this particular case gains some notoriety, it'll be forgotten in a month and the vested interest groups will have won. Again.
Not that I'm jaded or cynical or anything.
I suspect literally every person I work with of, at least, taking the occasional personal phone call or surfing the web. Thus, I would have to report everyone who works for my firm, presumably every day.
Of course everyone does. I have a similar agreement in place -- heck, I have to click "OK" on some such agreement when I log in to my workstation -- and here I am posting to Slashdot. The higher-ups know that people do this, and are generally pretty easy-going about it. As long as you don't go overboard, no-one really minds.
It's when you get people who surf the web for hours at a time or take 40 minute personal phone calls that you have more of a problem, and this is fair enough. The other point is that they're covering themselves; usually the rule is, be fair by us, and we'll be fair by you, but remember that, should anything dubious come up, you've signed this agreement, so you can't come back and complain when you get fired for the pr0n surfing.
Nobody here gets fired when they have a picture of the wife and kids as their desktop background, even though it's technically a violation of the agreement. OTOH, I suspect they'd have a problem if they put up one of those...you know...adult pictures.
It comes down to this: letter of the law versus spirit of the law. And most people can recognize the difference. (Apparently, "most people" doesn't include the majority of posters who've commented on this story thus far.)
Or any of the other news sources (e.g. go to CNN and search for Sklyarov).
Poor Slashdot -- for once in their life they get it right and they still get bashed.
I got a +5 (Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18, @12:12PM (#4916014)
And I forgot to be logged in.
Arrrggggghhhhh. Isn't that how it always goes.
Apparently, with you, yes it is. Jolly bad show, old chap.
You wouldn't care to put money on that, would you? I can remember the surreptitious Wolfenstein games being played on the Apple ][ machines in my high school's computer lab back in 1983. I never could understand what the horrible noise emanating from the little speaker was saying.
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So far, so bad...
I could have swore the point was entertainment
As you say you're not a fan, you can be forgiven for not knowing this. But Tolkien's point was to create an English mythology, not to entertain. (Well, "The Hobbit" was to entertain his son, but I digress. And apart from that I'm getting off the point.) He wrote that he had very little hope or expectation that anyone else would want to read it.
I went to a fairly bad school in New Zealand, and I learned trigonometry at age 13, and calculus at 15. If you didn't start trig until your GCSEs, when on earth did you get around to calculus? I would've loved to learn Latin, but my school didn't offer it. However, every student did have to take a semester of French in third form (13 years old).
the school I went to is in the top 5% of all comprehensives...but you're experience seems to have been a lot better than normal
Err, I think your school is probably quite relieved you don't name them, if they are ranked that highly, gave you a complete education, and you still don't know the difference between your and you're. And I'd have to say that this experience doesn't sound unusual given what I and all my friends and family experienced in schools throughout NZ, Australia, and England.