No joke, or 10 quarter page ads in the Monday "Information Industries" business section spread over two and a half months. Instead, we get one useless ad, a pile of dough wasted and no coherent marketing plan. Of course, if these guys knew marketing, they wouldn't be working in OSS.
If you think a responsible CIO will implement company wide policy based on a single ad they saw on the train in a general readership publication (and that they were previously unaware of firefox), well, you must still be in college. An ad in CIO Insight, or even Eweek, maybe, but putting an ad in the ny times is about making the community feel warm and fuzzy.
Ask anyone in software who has bought advertising. You could burn $100 bills or buy ads, the only difference is burning cash produces heat and light.
That (what $300K?) could have done lots better things, like cash prizes for the best ad-in, a TCO study, or something that might affect the program as a whole.
I just saw it, and having been aware it was coming in advance, I still skipped those two pages and kept reading. Does anyone actually pore over the ads? Much more effective would be ads on regular web sites, since that is the actual target audience. But I guess this was more OSS community validation and bolstering self image (i.e. wanking) than about attracting new users anyway.
The idea is to see how schools perform by tracking student movement between schools. So yes, one needs to have the person identifiable in order to assess whether they left school A and never returned to school or left school A to attend B.
Do black students drop out of College A or do they just transfer from College A after their first year? One of those means that College A is doing a bad job of serving those students, the other may mean that it is doing a good job of serving those students by preparing them to go to the more prestigious College B.
How would one track such things without "private" information?
And what is the big deal again? If you went to college, your probably filled out a FAFSA and the DOE already knows about you, this just would be actually useful information. "But someone might use the information for EEEEVIIILL!" Please, Google is a bigger threat to your privacy. "Someone might use this information to steal my identity!" Yeah, either that or steal your wallet, or go through your trash, or pull it from your bank records, or your insurance policies, or your credit card company, or your credit raiting file, or you video club membership, or your....
I can see why colleges are freaking out. They will be held accountable like the public schools are. I would too if I was them. Obviously, a blank check is much preferrable to this kind of oversight.
Be honest with them, treat them well, and they often produce near professional quality work for nothing. Make sure you give them a good title and a nice rec letter.
After all, if the winner-take-all system ensures that all votes go to the two parties in power, why would the two parties in power want to change the system?
Exactly, hence why I don't think it is going to change. There is no incentive. Even if there were masses clamoring for a different system, you may have noticed that it is extremely difficult to change the constitution.
Go read your civics textbook. First you have to get either a commanding majority in both houses of Congress or get the states to organize a constitutional convention (which has never happened), then get it ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures, all run by people elected under winner take all. Good luck!
The 10% of the electorate voting Nader or whatever isn't going to bring off that change.
As we have already demonstrated, thrid party voters aren't worth the costs of going after anyway, so why would a pool of impossible to please voters be a prize worth ammending the constitution for?
So absent this change, we are supposed to pretend the rules have changed in hopes that the awesome force of our tiny sliver of the electorate will produce massive constitutional changes without going through the actual process of ammending the constitution? That's just wishful thinking.
Absolutely right. I'm assuming that our voting system, designed for the vagaries of 18th century communications, will remain with us. Given that we still use the electoral college, I think that is a safe bet. We can change it. I just don't think we will.
Should the rules of the game change, then by all means, they way actors play should change. Acting like the rules have changed before they actually have, however, is silly. First, get us on Proportional Represenation or Approval Voting. Then, vote for your pet cause as #1 and lesser of two evils as #2.
Ok, so let's ammend it: Voting for a third party, in a winner take all system, absent approval voting, is counterproductive.
I would note that by demanding a perfect libertarian (or whatever) candidate, you are making it less likely that mainstream candidates will embrace your positions.
Let me explain:
Example: say, the libs want less police powers, despite the spectre of international terrorism. (They may have very good reasons for their opinions, but whether or not we agree with them isn't important here.) Meeting these demands has political (not to mention real) costs. Accepting less intrusive policing opens a candidate to the charge of being "soft on terror" or whatever. So meeting these demands only makes sense if the benefit (lib voters) outway the costs (lost "authoritarian" voters).
If the libs consistently throw their votes to the candidate who has no chance of winning, but reflects their beliefs 100%, they present the mainstream candidate with all costs and no benefits. There is no incentive to make those people happy, because they won't vote for a mainstream candidate anyway. So paridoxically, always voting a third party inhibits the agenda of that party. Better to build a bloc, then threaten to walk out unless concessions are achieved. A bit of brinkmanship is called for, but that kind of thing is routine in most parliamentary systems.
In 2000 if Nader had more sense and less ego, he would have done exactly this: Callled Gore up two days before the election and cut a deal. Instead, he put a President in office who is inimical to his interests, and at the same time, got the Democrats to abandon his agenda. Double failure!
His supporters demonstrated that there is nothing to be gained by courting their votes.
You and I know how to do that. Try to get your grandmother, stupid cousin, or technophobe doctor to reveal mail headers and do an IPWHOIS every time they get a mail and you'll appreciate my point.
Exactly, which is why your mail client should do this automatically. Or at least have a nifty little "details" button or something.
Better yet, program it to fill in plausable data and let the bastards spend all their time trying to use bogus user info.
Or perhaps the solution is to send out a bunch of phishing emails and point them to a website that educates users: "You just gave your banking info to an unknown party. Had this been a real scam, you would be broke now."
Even if the info is available elsewhere, it would be the difference between publishing a phonebook and publishing a list of names and addresses to target. These folks were singled out for the role they play in the electoral process.
As a previous poster suggested, inversion is often the best way to determine the justice of a particular action. If the website was an anti-abortion site listing doctors addresses, we would consider this a threat and beyond the pale. If this was a list of community activists and election workers from some poor neighborhood, we would consider this an attempt at intimidation or a plot to prevent people from exercising their voting rights.
What makes this diffent, other than the fact that some do not agree with the delegates' political beliefs?
The author's point has nothing to do with how fast bugs get fixed,it has to do with the liklihood of finding them in the first place.
One of his contentions is that OSS isn't up to the kind of intense, organized, ground up focus on security because of its decentralized and volunteer nature. That and lack of good tools, followthrough, etc.
Nothing he says should be a shock to anyone who has thought about the organizational challenges of OSS.
Did they control for user skill? When I can't avoid it, I do phone support for users running XP Home. The first thing I do is tell them to reboot, since it guarantees that we clear out the gunk. It fixes 90% of the trouble, inlcuding unloading a crappy program I wrote years ago that has a tendency to quit the UI process while leaving its other processes running. When I have to use that app, I know enough to kill the headless process. My users don't know what a process is.
I would imagine that since the bar for "Windows desktop programmer" is so low there are 1) lots more crappy programs out there than other environments, and 2) since the bar for actually getting a *nix machine to do something useful is so high, those users can get it to work can also cope with trouble and don't call the helpdesk (who tell them to reboot and please go away).
The user's system is vandalized without reason. Actualy, the system is vandalized for a reason: they stole the vandalizer's software. This is perhaps akin to a burglary victim installing an incendary device in their vcr so that if stolen it burns down the thief's house. Excessive vigilantism, maybe, but it is done for a reason.
By the same logic, I shouldn't lock my door because someone could just use 200 grams of C4 to blow it off its hinges. After all, theives want stuff, right, so there is no point in taking any measures against them, even those of minimal cost.
Yeah, one more detail to worry about, one more skill to acquire, one more node to the conspiracy, and one more chance to unravel it. More likely, the chances for exposure grow exponentially the more people are involved.
Pakistan just caught the computer/logistics guy and grabbed a major "most wanted" from that one grab. If there was no need for logistics guys, they never would have got the Tanzanian living underground.
And how is anonymous travel on highly explosive vehicles that travel 500 miles an hour and are the favored target of Jihadis a hugely important right again? If you don't want to show id, don't fly buddy.
Way to engender yourselves to your biggest customer base.
Appalling ignorance of the English language aside, what good are customers who steal your product? Forget them and market to their parents.
No doubt some latter day Robin Hood will soon explain that it isn't stealing, it is just taking without asking.
Keeping my kids from growing up to be Howard Stern seems worth almost any price!
No joke. Why do people think that restricting their vocabulary to 7 special, magical, "sentence enhancers" makes them edgy, liberated, or some such nonsense?
Use alumni contacts to get internships and be willing to intern through college. If you are on mom and dad's health insurance and they put a roof over you, you don't need much money. Use this time wisely.
My company has four interns right now. They get paid peanuts but they do real work. They get to be lead developer on their own small projects with me looking over their shoulder.
To ensure I wasn't exploiting them, I asked each to come up with a list of what they want to learn this summer, and in exchange, they make me money. We do monthly formal reviews of their experience make sure everyone benefits. I feel that screwing knowledge workers is a bad proposition in the long run.
That said, I take mentoring seriously. Not everyone does.
Er, the address bar is already integrated with search. It sends you to the Google I'm feeling lucky result.
At least for me, I'm feeling lucky is never the page I want. Your experience has been different. But still, it should be changeable with a menu option, not this editing a js file nonsense.
because it hits before the Windows Updates and/or AV updates for the exploit/virus are available)
Actually, it usually hits seven months after the patch is available, but people don't get it together to patch. These virus/worm writers aren't Lex Luthor, they are chumps who start with the patch and work backwards to the vulnerability.
Unlike Mozilla, by default, you have to type google in a silly little search box instead of the address box. Which is silly, since google is all about finding what you want and the address box is all about going places.
I use google like an abused personal assistant: "Jenkins! get me foobar corp! If foobar.com doesn't exist then just get me the google search results on foobar, whatever, I don't have time to think about how to get it, just get it!"
The address bar is about going places and integrating it with search is such a stunningly obvious thing to do that I find it amazing that Foxfire has a different default behavior. The fact that I can't just go to options->Addressbarsearch> and change this nonsense is evidence some user testing would have been in order.
Instead, in typical "menus are for cretins, the 31337, use configs and command lines", I have to hunt down the instructions for changing this behavior, then edit the user.js file on every machine I use.
None of which is to say it is a bad browser, it just has a number of annoyances.
Slashdot Mirror
No joke, or 10 quarter page ads in the Monday "Information Industries" business section spread over two and a half months. Instead, we get one useless ad, a pile of dough wasted and no coherent marketing plan. Of course, if these guys knew marketing, they wouldn't be working in OSS.
If you think a responsible CIO will implement company wide policy based on a single ad they saw on the train in a general readership publication (and that they were previously unaware of firefox), well, you must still be in college. An ad in CIO Insight, or even Eweek, maybe, but putting an ad in the ny times is about making the community feel warm and fuzzy.
Ask anyone in software who has bought advertising. You could burn $100 bills or buy ads, the only difference is burning cash produces heat and light.
That (what $300K?) could have done lots better things, like cash prizes for the best ad-in, a TCO study, or something that might affect the program as a whole.
I just saw it, and having been aware it was coming in advance, I still skipped those two pages and kept reading. Does anyone actually pore over the ads?
Much more effective would be ads on regular web sites, since that is the actual target audience. But I guess this was more OSS community validation and bolstering self image (i.e. wanking) than about attracting new users anyway.
Did you actually RTFA?
....
The idea is to see how schools perform by tracking student movement between schools. So yes, one needs to have the person identifiable in order to assess whether they left school A and never returned to school or left school A to attend B.
Do black students drop out of College A or do they just transfer from College A after their first year? One of those means that College A is doing a bad job of serving those students, the other may mean that it is doing a good job of serving those students by preparing them to go to the more prestigious College B.
How would one track such things without "private" information?
And what is the big deal again? If you went to college, your probably filled out a FAFSA and the DOE already knows about you, this just would be actually useful information. "But someone might use the information for EEEEVIIILL!" Please, Google is a bigger threat to your privacy. "Someone might use this information to steal my identity!" Yeah, either that or steal your wallet, or go through your trash, or pull it from your bank records, or your insurance policies, or your credit card company, or your credit raiting file, or you video club membership, or your
I can see why colleges are freaking out. They will be held accountable like the public schools are. I would too if I was them. Obviously, a blank check is much preferrable to this kind of oversight.
Be honest with them, treat them well, and they often produce near professional quality work for nothing. Make sure you give them a good title and a nice rec letter.
After all, if the winner-take-all system ensures that all votes go to the two parties in power, why would the two parties in power want to change the system?
Exactly, hence why I don't think it is going to change. There is no incentive. Even if there were masses clamoring for a different system, you may have noticed that it is extremely difficult to change the constitution.
Go read your civics textbook. First you have to get either a commanding majority in both houses of Congress or get the states to organize a constitutional convention (which has never happened), then get it ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures, all run by people elected under winner take all. Good luck!
The 10% of the electorate voting Nader or whatever isn't going to bring off that change.
As we have already demonstrated, thrid party voters aren't worth the costs of going after anyway, so why would a pool of impossible to please voters be a prize worth ammending the constitution for?
So absent this change, we are supposed to pretend the rules have changed in hopes that the awesome force of our tiny sliver of the electorate will produce massive constitutional changes without going through the actual process of ammending the constitution? That's just wishful thinking.
Absolutely right. I'm assuming that our voting system, designed for the vagaries of 18th century communications, will remain with us. Given that we still use the electoral college, I think that is a safe bet. We can change it. I just don't think we will.
Should the rules of the game change, then by all means, they way actors play should change. Acting like the rules have changed before they actually have, however, is silly. First, get us on Proportional Represenation or Approval Voting. Then, vote for your pet cause as #1 and lesser of two evils as #2.
Ok, so let's ammend it: Voting for a third party, in a winner take all system, absent approval voting, is counterproductive.
I would note that by demanding a perfect libertarian (or whatever) candidate, you are making it less likely that mainstream candidates will embrace your positions.
Let me explain:
Example: say, the libs want less police powers, despite the spectre of international terrorism. (They may have very good reasons for their opinions, but whether or not we agree with them isn't important here.) Meeting these demands has political (not to mention real) costs. Accepting less intrusive policing opens a candidate to the charge of being "soft on terror" or whatever. So meeting these demands only makes sense if the benefit (lib voters) outway the costs (lost "authoritarian" voters).
If the libs consistently throw their votes to the candidate who has no chance of winning, but reflects their beliefs 100%, they present the mainstream candidate with all costs and no benefits. There is no incentive to make those people happy, because they won't vote for a mainstream candidate anyway. So paridoxically, always voting a third party inhibits the agenda of that party. Better to build a bloc, then threaten to walk out unless concessions are achieved. A bit of brinkmanship is called for, but that kind of thing is routine in most parliamentary systems.
In 2000 if Nader had more sense and less ego, he would have done exactly this: Callled Gore up two days before the election and cut a deal. Instead, he put a President in office who is inimical to his interests, and at the same time, got the Democrats to abandon his agenda. Double failure!
His supporters demonstrated that there is nothing to be gained by courting their votes.
You and I know how to do that. Try to get your grandmother, stupid cousin, or technophobe doctor to reveal mail headers and do an IPWHOIS every time they get a mail and you'll appreciate my point.
Exactly, which is why your mail client should do this automatically. Or at least have a nifty little "details" button or something.
You my friend are a hero.
Better yet, program it to fill in plausable data and let the bastards spend all their time trying to use bogus user info.
Or perhaps the solution is to send out a bunch of phishing emails and point them to a website that educates users: "You just gave your banking info to an unknown party. Had this been a real scam, you would be broke now."
Even if the info is available elsewhere, it would be the difference between publishing a phonebook and publishing a list of names and addresses to target. These folks were singled out for the role they play in the electoral process.
As a previous poster suggested, inversion is often the best way to determine the justice of a particular action. If the website was an anti-abortion site listing doctors addresses, we would consider this a threat and beyond the pale. If this was a list of community activists and election workers from some poor neighborhood, we would consider this an attempt at intimidation or a plot to prevent people from exercising their voting rights.
What makes this diffent, other than the fact that some do not agree with the delegates' political beliefs?
Can use MSDE does use MSDE.
go RTFA as they say.
The author's point has nothing to do with how fast bugs get fixed,it has to do with the liklihood of finding them in the first place.
One of his contentions is that OSS isn't up to the kind of intense, organized, ground up focus on security because of its decentralized and volunteer nature. That and lack of good tools, followthrough, etc.
Nothing he says should be a shock to anyone who has thought about the organizational challenges of OSS.
Did they control for user skill? When I can't avoid it, I do phone support for users running XP Home. The first thing I do is tell them to reboot, since it guarantees that we clear out the gunk. It fixes 90% of the trouble, inlcuding unloading a crappy program I wrote years ago that has a tendency to quit the UI process while leaving its other processes running. When I have to use that app, I know enough to kill the headless process. My users don't know what a process is.
I would imagine that since the bar for "Windows desktop programmer" is so low there are 1) lots more crappy programs out there than other environments, and 2) since the bar for actually getting a *nix machine to do something useful is so high, those users can get it to work can also cope with trouble and don't call the helpdesk (who tell them to reboot and please go away).
The user's system is vandalized without reason.
Actualy, the system is vandalized for a reason: they stole the vandalizer's software. This is perhaps akin to a burglary victim installing an incendary device in their vcr so that if stolen it burns down the thief's house. Excessive vigilantism, maybe, but it is done for a reason.
By the same logic, I shouldn't lock my door because someone could just use 200 grams of C4 to blow it off its hinges. After all, theives want stuff, right, so there is no point in taking any measures against them, even those of minimal cost.
It could easily happen again as long as they pick people with no previous "alerts" tied to them.
So at the cost of making passengers flash ID I just cut their recruiting pool by (say) 40%? Sounds like a good deal to me.
plastique, check
evil plans, check
fake ID -
Yeah, one more detail to worry about, one more skill to acquire, one more node to the conspiracy, and one more chance to unravel it. More likely, the chances for exposure grow exponentially the more people are involved.
Pakistan just caught the computer/logistics guy and grabbed a major "most wanted" from that one grab. If there was no need for logistics guys, they never would have got the Tanzanian living underground.
And how is anonymous travel on highly explosive vehicles that travel 500 miles an hour and are the favored target of Jihadis a hugely important right again? If you don't want to show id, don't fly buddy.
Way to engender yourselves to your biggest customer base.
Appalling ignorance of the English language aside, what good are customers who steal your product? Forget them and market to their parents.
No doubt some latter day Robin Hood will soon explain that it isn't stealing, it is just taking without asking.
Keeping my kids from growing up to be Howard Stern seems worth almost any price!
No joke. Why do people think that restricting their vocabulary to 7 special, magical, "sentence enhancers" makes them edgy, liberated, or some such nonsense?
Because the data is replicated across your cluster, no need for backups or RAID.
Um, until the house burns down or you fark your own data by mistake.
Use alumni contacts to get internships and be willing to intern through college. If you are on mom and dad's health insurance and they put a roof over you, you don't need much money. Use this time wisely.
My company has four interns right now. They get paid peanuts but they do real work. They get to be lead developer on their own small projects with me looking over their shoulder.
To ensure I wasn't exploiting them, I asked each to come up with a list of what they want to learn this summer, and in exchange, they make me money. We do monthly formal reviews of their experience make sure everyone benefits. I feel that screwing knowledge workers is a bad proposition in the long run.
That said, I take mentoring seriously. Not everyone does.
Er, the address bar is already integrated with search. It sends you to the Google I'm feeling lucky result.
At least for me, I'm feeling lucky is never the page I want. Your experience has been different. But still, it should be changeable with a menu option, not this editing a js file nonsense.
because it hits before the Windows Updates and/or AV updates for the exploit/virus are available)
Actually, it usually hits seven months after the patch is available, but people don't get it together to patch. These virus/worm writers aren't Lex Luthor, they are chumps who start with the patch and work backwards to the vulnerability.
Unlike Mozilla, by default, you have to type google in a silly little search box instead of the address box. Which is silly, since google is all about finding what you want and the address box is all about going places.
I use google like an abused personal assistant: "Jenkins! get me foobar corp! If foobar.com doesn't exist then just get me the google search results on foobar, whatever, I don't have time to think about how to get it, just get it!"
The address bar is about going places and integrating it with search is such a stunningly obvious thing to do that I find it amazing that Foxfire has a different default behavior. The fact that I can't just go to options->Addressbarsearch> and change this nonsense is evidence some user testing would have been in order.
Instead, in typical "menus are for cretins, the 31337, use configs and command lines", I have to hunt down the instructions for changing this behavior, then edit the user.js file on every machine I use.
None of which is to say it is a bad browser, it just has a number of annoyances.