After long debate, that was what we decided at a previous employer of mine.
People change their names, for many reasons, none of which are the employer's business. Marriage, divorce. etc. In some circumstances, someone's previous name may become deeply offensive or distressing to them.
Some people are only ever known by their nicknames.
Other examples abound.
Names are important to people. The employer has no business is saying (effectively) "We're going to call you Bruce!" (Cue Monty Python reference here).
We did however have a few extra rules that had to be applied.
First come, first served. No exceptions. If your preferred username is taken, choose another.
No re-use of the username. Ever.
Also important to understand that this was the username, which is not the same as the email address.
For email, we had another set of rules.
Right to have the email address 'unlisted' (not appear in the LDAP directory)
Default assigned name was firstname.lastname, disambiguated with initials if necessary.
Multiple email addresses were permitted (one was marked 'primary'). Users could choose multiple aliases if required.
While the idea that patenting the humouse is so morally repugnant that congress would be forced to act is good in theory, I'm not so sure that relying on moral repugnance is a good idea, based on current trends.
I would have been tempted to patent a non-human on the basis that "being non-human, it would be unprotected as a human under law and thus able to be exploited as a beast of burden or slave". And even then it might not be morally repugnant enough!
(Hmm, I think my anti-cynic meds are wearing off...)
It seems to me that what is needed is a new declaration on human rights vs technology. The current laws on patents, copyright etc. are being bent past their ability to cope with the new technologies. There are interpretations of judgments, taking into account opinions of what was originally intended by people for whom the current situation was unthinkable. Patches on patches on patches. It's a mess.
We need something new to work from.
Maybe we need to clone some of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment and have them draft something for us (that would probably make their cloning illegal).
Re:Network printing from Mac to Mac?
on
Jaguar Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Well, that was one of the announcements, buried in the noise. Printer sharing, for the education sector. I guess that means USB sharing might finally work.
I imagine that what is in Jaguar is a lot of 'minor' tweaks/refinements that add up to a much nicer experience overall. For instance, it appears as if scanners might finally get some decent support; the new Finder features sound like ones that might actually be useful rather than flashy; there is a GUI interface to the ipfw; there is support for IPv6.
A lot of these are not really earth shattering, but they make a first step to being useful in the corporate market, for instance.
Thanks. As FAQs go it has some interesting statements. Like not saving state more than once a day because "More frequent dumps would simply slow the integration down and eventually wear out your hard disk". Hmm. Interesting hard drives they seem to use.
I wonder if the model would benefit from some of the vector processing extensions on newer processors, and which the simulation needs more: MIPS or FLOPS.
Actually, it looks as though El Niño may have taken out the Mayans, so it's not just 'lately'.
(It appears from Mayan records that they had a few years off unseasonable weather that brought them to the edge---and redoubling the human sacrifice rate not only didn't work but ran into resource constraints).
I agree that the creators should be rewarded. Copyright is supposed to exist to do that. But greed from the middle men has sidelined artists and consumers both. You might be interested in these quotes from [New Zealand]Recording Industry Association president Michael Glading, who responded to a couple of questions about the price of CDs and cassettes.
Why are CDs so expensive?
In relative terms, CDs cost about the same today as vinyl did in the 1970s. Since then, artists' royalties have more than doubled. The price of a CD is made up of far more than the cost of the disc itself.
How come albums are cheaper on cassette?
Pre-recorded cassette tapes are cheaper because the technology is outdated and the numbers sold are small.
Yup, I want a Morgan for my next car. Small numbers, outdated technology. It should be really cheap!
If information products can be shared for free via the net, it will be very difficult for the creators to make a profit. And that means that there won't be many people making new music, movies, books and other information goods.
And so people will stop making music, movies, books or other information goods---such as Linux?
Evidently not so. The reasons for creating are many, but pure profit doesn't always figure top of the list.
The US had a wonderfully protectionist little law that only granted copyright after a book had been published (read, printed in) the US. (Pork barrel politics to protect the local printers). And it had to be published in the US within a year of first publication anywhere else or the author had no rights.
This led to the farcical situation of James Joyce being unable to sue piratical US publishers who were ripping off Ulysses because the US Customs service kept impounding his manuscript as being 'obscene', which meant he could not get it legitimately published in the US. Meanwhile, time was running out...
For many years, until the US finally adopted the Berne Convention, it was widely regarded as a pariah with respect to copyright.
No, it's probably a good strategy. Ask people what it was that made them switch. Gives marketing some clues as to what they are doing right and should
Do better
advertise more:-)
This has an advantage: people are likely more honest on why they did make a purchase vs why they would (might) make a purchase.
Ask people what they want, and as Scott Adams says, they "want better products for free". Yup, I'll go for that. But it's not a lot of help in doing market research.
MacPerl took Perl and added enough glue to let you use it easily with MacOS. I.e. a tiny editor, debugger, man page, support for droplets etc.. It needed to do this because Perl made assumptions about its environment that did not hold true in the CLI-less world of MacOS.
However, some of the glue was pretty good in its own right. I like Shuck, I prefer it to man (or xman) for looking up Perl info.. In fact I've been known to run Shuck while debugging Perl on Solaris boxes.
Likewise, the integration with BBEdit made editing pretty cool. (Although the latest BBEdit under X takes things into its own hands and provides even better features, IMHO...but I digress).
In summary, the MacPerl folk did such a good job that I find I'm missing some of the MacPerl features when I'm running Mac OS X.
What I'd like to see is the power of those tools under Mac OS X---for example, something like AppleScript studio, but with Perl instead, would be really cool.
If MacPerl could give something back to the wider Perl community, that would be really cool.
Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, but it should be. Our laws are so complex...
Everybody mis-quotes this. The original is enlightening:
"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because `tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him." - JOHN SELDEN, Table Talk
The vulnerability can be exploited to produce a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. When the vulnerability is exploited, it can cause an affected Cisco product to crash and reload.
I suspect the same is true of many other implementations.
If you want to conduct your own tests, you can always run the PROTOS suite, but at over 53,000 individual tests that could take a while.
I rather suspect the script kiddies well let us know the specific vulnerabilities all too soon. Sigh.
Cisco have a rather plainer explanation of the impact (together with a fix for their equipment).
In summary, vulnerable customer facing equipment can be made to restart, or worse, if it runs SNMP, even with some access control in place.
Hmm, methinks we are all being played for suckers. The leak feels staged.
This will be the main event at the keynote, together with iPhoto, and I gather the 1GHz+ G4 towers will also be announced. But then... there will be "one more thing", and what it is I know not.
I still don't know why the keynote was moved forward a day, nor what all the Star Trek references betoken.
At an Apple Developer Conf in 87 (just after the introduction of the Mac II) they showed a technology demo of multimedia playing on the new Mac. IIRC this was the precursor of QuickTime. The cool thing was that it did not require any extra hardware.
Amiga did amazing things even then, but had loads of specialised video chips. The Mac II was a 68020 (!) with a very vanilla video card and truly pathetic video b/w by today's standards. Again, IIRC, one of the early milestones was not the CODEC but rather the blit code.
It was long ago and far away, the challenges then were not the challenges of today.
LOTR has been voted a couple of times as the "Greatest Book of The 20th Century". I don't think it's made "Greatest Book of All Time". Not only do I not think it is GBOAT, but I don't think that GBOAT is a a particularly useful or even a meaningful measure.
I'd be happy to rate LOTR as one of the great books of C20, but is LOTR > Ulysses? Catch-22 < Nostromo? They are too different, too complex, and as we all know, inequality operators don't work with complex numbers:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be the BSOD---Blue Sky Of Death---then?
People change their names, for many reasons, none of which are the employer's business. Marriage, divorce. etc. In some circumstances, someone's previous name may become deeply offensive or distressing to them.
Some people are only ever known by their nicknames.
Other examples abound.
Names are important to people. The employer has no business is saying (effectively) "We're going to call you Bruce!" (Cue Monty Python reference here).
We did however have a few extra rules that had to be applied.
Also important to understand that this was the username, which is not the same as the email address.
For email, we had another set of rules.
I would have been tempted to patent a non-human on the basis that "being non-human, it would be unprotected as a human under law and thus able to be exploited as a beast of burden or slave". And even then it might not be morally repugnant enough!
(Hmm, I think my anti-cynic meds are wearing off...)
It seems to me that what is needed is a new declaration on human rights vs technology. The current laws on patents, copyright etc. are being bent past their ability to cope with the new technologies. There are interpretations of judgments, taking into account opinions of what was originally intended by people for whom the current situation was unthinkable. Patches on patches on patches. It's a mess.
We need something new to work from.
Maybe we need to clone some of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment and have them draft something for us (that would probably make their cloning illegal).
I imagine that what is in Jaguar is a lot of 'minor' tweaks/refinements that add up to a much nicer experience overall. For instance, it appears as if scanners might finally get some decent support; the new Finder features sound like ones that might actually be useful rather than flashy; there is a GUI interface to the ipfw; there is support for IPv6.
A lot of these are not really earth shattering, but they make a first step to being useful in the corporate market, for instance.
And the mirror appears to be /. as well.
However, a Google on "Nadine" gets the story top of the list and you can work you way through the Google cache.
Love the line about keeping your PC on for a long time ("it is only worthwhile participating if you generally leave your PC on for long periods"), given the Windows crashing bug which takes it down after 49.5 days.
And how many people are running Win95 on a PII 450?
I can't comment on their climatology, but their computing cluefullness isn't looking too impressive.
I wonder if the model would benefit from some of the vector processing extensions on newer processors, and which the simulation needs more: MIPS or FLOPS.
(It appears from Mayan records that they had a few years off unseasonable weather that brought them to the edge---and redoubling the human sacrifice rate not only didn't work but ran into resource constraints).
No doubt the odd geek has a room full of Alphas to add to the cause.
Does that mean that JUNOS is the sixth BSD?
He also misspelled Novell, as Novel. You on the other hand, misspelled weird as wierd. Or was that a little meta humor?
Yup, I want a Morgan for my next car. Small numbers, outdated technology. It should be really cheap!
And so people will stop making music, movies, books or other information goods---such as Linux?
Evidently not so. The reasons for creating are many, but pure profit doesn't always figure top of the list.
This led to the farcical situation of James Joyce being unable to sue piratical US publishers who were ripping off Ulysses because the US Customs service kept impounding his manuscript as being 'obscene', which meant he could not get it legitimately published in the US. Meanwhile, time was running out...
For many years, until the US finally adopted the Berne Convention, it was widely regarded as a pariah with respect to copyright.
This has an advantage: people are likely more honest on why they did make a purchase vs why they would (might) make a purchase.
Ask people what they want, and as Scott Adams says, they "want better products for free". Yup, I'll go for that. But it's not a lot of help in doing market research.
However, some of the glue was pretty good in its own right. I like Shuck, I prefer it to man (or xman) for looking up Perl info.. In fact I've been known to run Shuck while debugging Perl on Solaris boxes.
Likewise, the integration with BBEdit made editing pretty cool. (Although the latest BBEdit under X takes things into its own hands and provides even better features, IMHO...but I digress).
In summary, the MacPerl folk did such a good job that I find I'm missing some of the MacPerl features when I'm running Mac OS X.
What I'd like to see is the power of those tools under Mac OS X---for example, something like AppleScript studio, but with Perl instead, would be really cool.
If MacPerl could give something back to the wider Perl community, that would be really cool.
Which is your point. The law has become impossibly complex in some areas, so much so that ignorance has been successfully pleaded.
So we could have:
- If I could not reasonably be expected to know a law exists, it does not apply to me.
- If the law is so complex it requires a lawyer to explain, it is reasonable for me to disregard it, per (1).
Which puts the onus on fewer and simpler laws. Wo hoo! Could make for Interesting Times. I wonder if David has written a sf story about it?I suspect the same is true of many other implementations.
If you want to conduct your own tests, you can always run the PROTOS suite, but at over 53,000 individual tests that could take a while.
I rather suspect the script kiddies well let us know the specific vulnerabilities all too soon. Sigh.
Cisco have a rather plainer explanation of the impact (together with a fix for their equipment). In summary, vulnerable customer facing equipment can be made to restart, or worse, if it runs SNMP, even with some access control in place.
This will be the main event at the keynote, together with iPhoto, and I gather the 1GHz+ G4 towers will also be announced. But then... there will be "one more thing", and what it is I know not.
I still don't know why the keynote was moved forward a day, nor what all the Star Trek references betoken.
At an Apple Developer Conf in 87 (just after the introduction of the Mac II) they showed a technology demo of multimedia playing on the new Mac. IIRC this was the precursor of QuickTime. The cool thing was that it did not require any extra hardware.
Amiga did amazing things even then, but had loads of specialised video chips. The Mac II was a 68020 (!) with a very vanilla video card and truly pathetic video b/w by today's standards. Again, IIRC, one of the early milestones was not the CODEC but rather the blit code.
It was long ago and far away, the challenges then were not the challenges of today.
I'd be happy to rate LOTR as one of the great books of C20, but is LOTR > Ulysses? Catch-22 < Nostromo? They are too different, too complex, and as we all know, inequality operators don't work with complex numbers :-)