Yes it is our fault because we have not tackled the issue of how to design an email system that (1) only functions between AUTHENTICATED participants and (2) incorporates accountability.
There are billions on the net. It is truely amasing that there are as few spammers as there are! As I read the artical I was amased that so many people are willing to sit and bitch about a problem rather than actually do something about it.
Systems like Spews, ORBS, RBL's and spam filters do help. But IMHO the problem is that the email systems we use are generally far to trusting.
Suppose email was an opt in system that required a sender cert before it would receive mail. This cert could cost real money (firstly) and could identify the sender (secondly). Furthermore it could be tied to a fair use contract where the participants agree to NOT send spam. They could agree to forfeit their connection rights and compensate for damages in the event they breach the contract.
This creates a situation where legitimate users can get their cert at a minor cost to themselves. On the other hand, a spammer will _usually_ find his cert is pulled probably within hours of abuse. For a spammer trying to use 100's of domains, the cost of the certs may prove prohibitive. If not, the contract can always be written so that abuse on one set of certs by an organisation prohibits them from getting a replacement.
Such a system IMHO should be purely optional. If people really do hate the spam they get then they would have the option of switching to a system designed to prohibit UCE. I'm sure the leading email clients would implement an interface to such a protocol relatively quickly.
Who knows - maybe a critical mass would develop and the majority would opt out of what we have now.
I think the programming would not be all that difficult so if such a project is not already underway then maybe a group of opensource programmers should band together and see if they can come up with ways to kill the abuse.
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. let me use an analogy.
Power is delivered in volts and amps just as internet content is delivered by bandwidth and time. The equations have the same form: p=v*a, c=b*t respectively.
Just because one might double the voltage, say from 120 to 240 volts does not mean they use more power. In fact if people check the insulation ratings of the NMD wiring in their homes then they can quickly determine that it is usually rated up to 600 volts and typically they run 120V over it.
So if the homeowner needs more juice at a particular spot, a really inexpensive way to achieve this is to ask an electrician to "upgrage" the circuit to 240v. This involved a tiny wiring change at the breaker and a new plug to be installed in the outlet. The other alternative might be to pull say 12 gauge wire through the walls and run 20 amps at 120V (instead of 10 amps at 240V).
So with a simple wiring mod, you get twice the juice man! But you have NOT stolen any power and the electical utility doesn't give a DAMN.
Simialry, if these accused felons need to transfer some large files, then they can use say 1 hour of time at 128KB/sec or 1/2 hour of time at 256KB/sec. They still used the same amount of capacity in the transmition system and thus didn't steal a thing. The only way that they can really increase the burden on the transmission system is if their total transmission is higher as a result of making the pipe fatter.
Our last ISP (cadvision) use to publish that they were providing up to 10 mb/sec access speeds to the internet. Technically they were - on the last mile. Of course, they hooked the 10MB/sec DSL modems into a Dslam on the net which was backhauled on a T1 lines running 24 or FEWER DS0's to the max shared capacity was only 1,536mb/sec.
Buckeye claiming theft here is about the same as your electrical uliltity bitching about wanting a voltage cap because they wish to ignore the amps term in the power equation.
I have Borland C++ professional builder and looked at the Kylix solution. IMHO it is not cross platform and we all know that MSFC and IBM's Visual Age libraries are intended to lock you in before you start.
So far WxWindows looks good. It gives good Windows/Unix/Max cross platform support.
Check out DEV-C++ for a Windows Gui builder. Unfortunatly DEV-C++ is written in Delphi. It needs to be ported to C++ and WxWindows then it too will be a cross platform development gui-builder.
I'll suggest a reason why certain manufacturers might not want to release driver sources. Suppose you have two competing products. One is a rather complex hardward based implemetation. The other is a rather simplistic hardware design with most of the functions implemented in software. WinModems come to mind but there are other "devices" where this can be done as well.
In a hypothetical design, if the vast majority of the functions can be moved to software, then even though the end users THINK they are buying a hardware solution they really are buying a software solution. This implies that if the "drivers" are open sourced, then the competition can easily match the product simply by assembling a primative hardware support card. The fewer functions actually implememnted in hardware the cheaper it is to build the card.
On the other hand, if most of the functionality of the card is handled in hardware, then the drivers become less of an issue. If the drivers are not all that significant then there is no reason not to release the sources.
The example of a WinModem can perhaps illustrate this. In the end - the modem interfaces to the real world on 2 wires. Voltages are applied to these wires at various levels and for various durations of time. As long as the interface device can interpret and create these signals - it qualifies as a modem.
The modem can be fairly complex, interfacing to the CPU via the serial interface where all the signaling and compression and error detection and correction is done on the card. In this case the device driver must deal with interupts and so forth, but it is handed bytes that are real bytes.
On the other hand, the modem can be very simple, providing little more than the digital equivalent of the analogue voltage levels it sees on the twisted pair. This leaves it up to the driver to decode that signal. In such a case the vendor is almost masquerading as a hardware vendor because perhaps 90% of the job is done in software. Clearly, and manufacturer who goes to the lengths of eliminating the majority of the hardware in his product and replacing same with a software implementation burried in a device driver is not going to want to let people get their hands on the device driver.
My ISP used to tell its customers that they had 10 MB/Sec download speeds. Indeed they did - on the DSL local loop. The problem is that upstream of the local loops they backhauled on T1 so the design of the system implied that 30-100 customers each thought they had 10MB/sec download speeds when the reality of the situation is that they all shared a 1.5 mb/sec T1 line. An even more important point is that with all the hops involved, nothing comes in anywhere near the speed advertised anyway.
All that a cap on a cable modem does is slow the load times of individual pages and it only slows it IF every hop to the server happens to be able to transmit at a speed in excess of the cap.
Admitedly if someone is using sustained transfers such as if one is running a game or video feed then they _may_ end up using extra bandwidth. But the vast majority of web surfing is to webpages and in this case if the "same number of pages" are downlaoded per day then even if the user does this in a shorter period of time - the user did not use extra bandwidth.
For instance, I read slashdot pretty much each day. If I read it via a modem it might take me an hour. I'm on a high speed link so perhaps I can read slashdot in 1/2 hour. This does not mean I read it twice. It also doesn't mean that I try to surf to more websites. The reason? Content is dropping folks and there are fewer websites worth visiting now than in the past.
Well, my line used to run at 768 MB/sec. Now it is 468 MB/sec. I do not notice the difference. My ISP's expect me to pay the same amount in fact. The difference in speed resulted because the telephone company (telus) decided to switch out paradyne MVS (ADSL) modems and replace them with D-Link. MVS has a 25,000+ foot reach whereas the D-Link system has a 15,000 foot reach. Hense D-Link runs slower. Even so, if I download a Debian install for instance, I do not necessarily get a lower level of service because it has not been established that the packets would have been made available to my new D-Link modem at a rate faster than it can accept them.
Does this mean that I can send the cops in to Telus claiming theft of service? IE. I paid Telus for the MVS solution and they switched it on me!!! So now I only get 1/2 the service?
In order to support a "theft of service" the cable company should be required to demonstrate that the end users actually consumed more content. I'll suggest they likely cannot do this. All that has happened is that the end users _may_ have viewed the content for a shorter elapsed time. But even this idea is really questionable because most people read at speeds under 1000 words per minuet and most computers send at speeds 1000's of times faster. Even in the case of video, a slow link is fast enough for MPEG video. Inceasing the link speed does not mean the end user is going to pull in more content.
Its like saying that if we double the speed limit between you and the grocery store so you can get there in 1/2 the time - then you will go shopping twice as often and spend twice as much money. The assumtions are clearly rong! Continuing on assumptions like this, if we reduce the speed limit or cut the number of fast food restaurants in half, then people should lose weight because there would be less opportunity to get food.
I don't think capping cable modems does much in the way of putting people on an internet content diet. About all this might accomplish is forcing them to waste their time waiting for slow loading pages.
Indeed, junk advertising wastes bandwidth because it is not wanted. Perhaps the FBI should be sent into doubleclick! Mind you - I just firewall the ad servers. Guess I should be able to claim a refund from my phone company huh? Because I didn't consume the content they tried to shove into my computer.
Several years ago in Edmonton an IBM mainframe was nuked by radar. They were near the industrial airport and didn't anticipate anything. So the system was installed and they did the IPL. It was partway through and BOOM - it froze.
So the techs shut it down and retried. Again - everything looked fine and they started the IPL. Again the IPL was proceeding normally until BOOM - it froze.
So they did a complete diagnostic of all the hardware which basically meant disassembling the machine and rebuilding it. No joy - the exact same thing happened.
Well, to make a long story short, after a great deal of soul searching someone had the bright idea to look out the window at the airport tower and thought about their radar system. This lead them in the proper direction and they solved the problem by lining the computer room with foil.
I have 2 MGE UPS's. I supplied another to an associate. These things have a habit of just switching off under certain circumstances and I think this is a partial cycle dropout. The interesting thing is that when this happens systems that are NOT protected by the UPS survive!!! It appears to be a situation where the cure is worse than the problem.
Notwithstanding this - the UPS situation is crap as far as I'm concerned. UPS's use 12V batteries (Lead acid cell) and I'd like to see one where the battery and the control electronics are spearate. That way I can run out to a battery shop and buy a big deep cycle marine battery for a $100 bux or so and get some REAL protection... and be able to replace the battery if and when required.
Another thing is that we _should_ be able to get rid of the cheap P/S's inside the case and just run in the required DC from a shared power source. I have 5 servers running in one spot, 2 more in another with attached SCSI external devices. This means there are probably over 10 shitty little power supplies none of which have UPS capability built in.
Why not a well engineered say 4000watt DC with UPS built in and just run the wires to the machines?
My manuals do not contain useful information in this area for one of my systems. It is an older system but it does a fine job for me except that it periodically just sort of stops. There are no sex lites on the kb and the monitors go black and it appears dead. I'm not sure if this is hardware or a glitch in NT 4.0 with fp 6.0. There is no blue screen of death here. Powering off and rebooting is the ONLY solution.
Here is the config: 1) Asus P/I P65UP5 baseboard plus P55t2d cpu card 2) Dual 200 mHz P200's (might be ppro if the cpu card supports them) 3) 8x32MB ecc memory probably EDO (total 256MB) 4) Dual Matrox Millinium 4MB video (PCI) 5) 3.5 FDD 6) 5.25 FDD 7) 13GB Fujitsu HDD IDE 8) Panasonic PD650 Optical/CDROM 9) Adaptec 2940 SCSI (PCI) 10) GVC network card Realtec RTL8019 (ISA) 11) Creative labs soundblaster (PCI/ISA?) 12) KB/Mouse, 2cpu fans
When I added all this up using numbers guessed from what THG used I get about 300 watts which will be right at max for this 1991 case. I don't want to tear the case appart right now because I'm using it for this communication so I may have missed a card adn don't know the P/S brand name.
I have sever class power supplies here but I kinda think this case might hold a 250 watt P/S.
Can people who are up to speed on power requirments go through the above component list and put some numbers down and advise?
Maybe these failures are PS overload in which case I can double up power supplies or just swap to one with more capacity.
Suppose someone bookmarks the addresses and then gets hacked. We have this all the time. We have several info@addresses and we find that quite a lot of spam arrives with us as the "return address". People book mark us then get hacked and the address does end up being used to contact legitimate people. It is really defamation of our character that is going on here but it is presently not worth the trouble to track down those spoofing our addresses at this time.
One day, however, I'm sure we will be in court over this because we have atourneys on retainer in 2 countries and that is a little more fire power than most spammers think is pointed at them.
I've got a low milage calcomp 1038 and it _should_ be able to accept a vinyl cutter assembly. Do you have any info on where to get one?
I use to drive that plotter from DOS and I do have the low level drivers. I also did some neat things like creating a virtual pen number where I could assign the nib width to the pen via a table. Widest I tested was about 1/4" with a 0.010" real nib. The software just calculates however many passes are required to draw what a nib of the desired width would lay down. This is done in the low level drivers so I could link it into any software I wanted. At the time I was using the MCS contouring software out of Tulsa.
Anyway, I figure I can write what I need rather quickly and at this point basically I'd need to know what the problem is. Maybe we should put out heads together.
Linux is not a problem AFAIK. I drove that plotter from HP3000, DOS, OS/2 and from a lot of other mini's so I just can't see it really being a problem.
As for HPGL - that is really easy. I have HPGL drivers too so again I think the problem really is knowing what you need.
A comment was made a while back that worldcom had no interest in blocking span because they made money from it. You see - they got paid by the people who created it and furthermore they got paid by the telcos that paid them for access to the POP's.
Its all about money. When the Telco's find the pain from the wrath of people like you and me costs them more than they make from the bandwidth the ISP's pay for - then they will stop it.
This is also true of overseas connections.
Consider the position of a large company like AT&T. If they have 5 million angry customers phoning each day to bitch about spam from say Korea how will they react? One solution is for them to tell say their Korean counterparts to clean it up or they will be disconnected. Yup - most of us can live without Korea for instance being part of the net. But Koreans cannot.
So it is simply a matter of upping the anti so to speak.
When the cost of accomodating the shit exceeds the money they get from it then they will take action - not before. It is well within the control of the Telecommunications industry to eliminate the spam.
The simplest way is to require each adn every customer to sign an agreement that prohibts UCE and require them to agree to a penalty of say several $1000 bux is the create UCE. This can be on the visa cards of those who pay via Visa ot it can be by way of a deposit or a pledge of assets. Get the deposit in place - then when they send it out pinch the deposit. End of problem.
ISP's will catch on really quickly. Terms of service agreements already prohibit UCE. These just need to be enforced.
It is a simple problem to solve but again - why would any company take this problem on when people just bitch among themsleves?
--------------
This is true of Hacked servers too. The ISP I use to go through is Cadvision and those idjots were so bad that they didn't even bother to pull the plug on customers hacked with Code Red. They didn't even tell them. In fact when I phoned up Cadvision they blamed me for complaining. I told them I'd sic the cops on them for a denile of service attack. You see - the idjot factor is really high.
IMHO you will do just fine. Most ppl will just tell their browser to accept the cert. I've seen this happen from a number of vendors including either M$ or Oracle... I don't quite recall now.
I don't know what city you are in but you need to hire a competant atourney to deal with this bullshit.
Never but never sign these agreements. The company probably never had a trade secret or even an idea that was worth anything and when you sign you just leave yourself wide open to accusations.
Several years ago I had an employer ask me to sign such a form and stated it was a "condition of employment". I replied that it was a "condition of employment" that I DO NOT sign agreements like this. I won. I guess they figured that since I was the only one they had on staff who knew how to develop the software they needed that they better back down.
The best advice I ever heard was from the fellow (now retired) who developed one the the best contouring packages in the world. It was the one that Amoco used. Yup - it was good. His point is that he doesn't want to be privy to other people's confidential information.
As he said: In the first place it probably isn't all that great and I'll probably come up with a better solution anyways. But, if I'm privy to what they claim they disclosed to me, then the door is open for them to claim I stole their ideas. In the second place, if what they have is really so great, then I can't use it anyway.
I think his reasoning is very clear. If you think it is confidential then I don't wnat to know about it. Sorry - just keep it to yourself!
-----------
Think about those confidentiality agreements employees are so willing to sign. It can limit their employment opportunities down the track. I am an employer. No way I'm going to get involved with an IP exposure if I can avoid it. So generally I hire consultant who are not encumbered.
Those agreements do not benefit the employee in any way and are pretty useless from the companys' standpoint as well. If someone IS interested in stealing trade secrets you can be sure that a little agreement is not even going to slow them down. You see, your ex employer has to PROVE that YOU DID IT. That can be nigh on impossible. But the litigation is real and it can cost you 1000's to defend yourself.
Just forget it. Read up on what RCA did to Philo Farnsworth, the chap who invented TV. He had his patents and died destitute. You can read about it here (Dead Inventor's Corner)
The point is that if your patent is valid then a large corporation will simply pick it up and claim that it is invalid for whatever reasons and you'll find yourself in court for the next 17 years.
On the other hand if a large corporation holds patents which are invalid or even absurdly simple - as many patents are - then if you do something close you may well find yourself in court defending yourself against a preditory lawsuit.
So IMHO you are wasting your time. Just bring the product out and hit the streets with the marketing and plan on making money right up front. Patent it if you wish but don't expect to be anything but a victim in this game. The patent will only cost you money and drain you every time you turn around.
It will drain you both intellectually and financially and like Farnsworth you may end up killing the pain with alcohol too.
I used OS/2 for years. IT was a nightmare. I had a service contract with IBM (extra but cheap). I set up dual monitor which OS/2 supported (poorly) - when the VGA screen came up the 8514 froze. IBM never did fix that problem.
XGA apparently solved dual screen. I was never able to find XGA video cards that would work in my clone dispite several calls to IBM tech support.
The single message queue problem was to the best of my knowledge never solved - hense the machine locked up quite often.
There were dosen's of trouble calls for this that and the other. Most of this I could have fixed myself if it was documented. Little things - like changing the domain of the system.... I even have the red books for OS/2 and subscribed to the OS/2 developers network. Nothing in there how to change even a domain name. I gave up and just used the numerical IP address. Well - the HDD crashed about 2 years ago and good riddence.
Now - those trouble calls. I lost HOURS on hold. The intake operators asked the same stupid questions over and over for 3 years. These people were not even able to set up a database with a phone number index. Even Sears can do that - but apparently not IBM.
How much memory - how much disk - what make of disk - what kind of video card and so on. Stoopid questions that had nothing to do with the problem. 3/4 of what was in config.sys was a mystery including the "undocumented" video configuration I ran with "undocumented" parameters that brought my dual head system up - complements from a senior tech from Boca Raton.
Oh the nightmare. I offered to WRITE a utilty for them to spin through the HDD and spit out version numbers and config info so we didn't have to wait on hold. This _could_ have been popped into an email. Nope - sit and wait on hold. Arrghh.
OS/2 failed because IBM never fixed the problems. OS/2 failed because IBM spent huge sums of money on intake operators that wasted people's time. A simple little file in the machine that the installer created that carries config and version info - simple things like placing the amount of memory, HDD size, drivers loaded and so on - things that could be emailed to the response tech were never done.
When I switched to NT4.0 (which has its own problems) it was like a breath of fresh air. NT even runs the text mode OS/2 apps (like Breif for OS/2) better than OS/2 ever did.
You are not correct when you suggest that there is no liability on the part of those people who are too incompetant to keep their machines healthy.
Consider: a guy owns a car and it is involved in an accident. The manufacturer may be partly liable if there is a defect. But the owner is also liable for the proper maintenance of said car and can be sued if proper maintenance has not been carried out. The garage can be sued if they contracted to conduct the maintenance and didn't perform it well enough. This is one reason I refuse to do security or maintenance work on Windose machines. IMHO it is not possible to secure them properly and I'm not accepting any responsibility for being unable to accomplish something that clearly M$ doesn't seem to be conserned about.
Accordingly, anyone running a cracked computer is liable for damages caused because an ordinarily prudent person would not be so irresponsible.
Of course, and ordinarily prudent lawyer would not email his client list to his clients either you would think. But one of my lawyers did just that. One would think that at $250 per hour billing rates they could hire a security consultant.
If you do not expect much in the way of competance you will not be disappointed.
Your ideas are valid but you are treading on dangerous ground. Let me explain.
Suppose your neighbour cranks up her stereo to bone vibrating levels. This is illegal in most neighbourhoods and you have a right to complain. Now, if you walk on her property to knock on her door then technically you _could_ be guilty of trespassing. Most courts would laugh at the idea of prosecuting someone for such a trivial offense mind you - but she would have the legal right to put you into a position where you have to explain your actions to the court.
The proper thing is for you to phone the police and let them deal with the problem.
Similarly, in the case of attacks on your server, the proper response is to phone the police. Of course they probably won't do anything about it so your next step is then to register a formal complaint about the police.
Given enough pressure they might actually start dealing with the situation and the side effect is that a LOT of people are going to react to a cop knocking on the front door and telling them to turn off their cracked machine whereas if you do it many are likely to attack you.
The analogy with the noise complaint is that if you respond to your neighbours bad deeds by turning your stereo up to max - then this simply creates the situation where both parties are breaking the law.
Finally, if you complain to the police and they do nothing and then you follow this up with formal complaints about the police, when you then contact people and nicely ask them to fix their damn machine or turn it off, at least you have a defense to put before a judge. Whether that defense means much is an open question. You might be better off just suing them in small claims court for the damages they cause you.
Much of this comes down to rights that are not clearly defined. For instance when you visit my web server and ask for something you would think you clearly have this right. I did after all put the web server on line for people to access (presumably). But what if the webserver was intended (by me) to be accessable on an intranet and I was too dumb to configure it properly? Do you still have the right to access it?
Suppose we are dealing with open windoze file shares. I do know at least one person who opened her hard drive up. She thought of it as a cheap anonymous FTP service - with read and write access to everyone. She wanted people to be able to distribute music. (seriously).
Well - I warned her. Within a month someone shut her down by running a program that erased the bios. I had warned her about that risk too.
Perhaps most people would not open network shares so that their files can be available to all. But most people do not run anonymous FTP servers and web servers either. Some people do open network shares on purpose and these people are in effect publishing on the net in the same way that a webmaster is (albeit - a far more primitive way).
So, if you happen apon a machine that is open - then you can certainly argue that you thought there was an open house. Thus you would not be guilty of "hacking" you would think. Just don't count on it. Some people will accuse you of trying to break into their machine and some will even argue that you should not tell the management because this might cause an incompetant MSCE to get fired. Some will even argue that if you do tell the management that your _PURPOSE_ is to try to get someone fired. I witnessed this in fact. What a dumb bunny!
Now - if they are customers it would be a very good idea to put a clause into their service contract that "requires" you to contact them in the case of hacks. Of course, write it so that there is nothing wrong if you fail to contact them. By doing this you create a very good defense if someone sues you for damages.
Just be careful _how_ you contact them. Throwing popups into the machine is probably a risky move. Suppose it is some advertizing firm and they are giving a demo to a major client about what a great web site they can build - and suddenly your pop-ups show up and they lose the client.
In many respects I consider these sorts of threats to be analogus to someone being accused of being a peeping tom because he pointed out that someone else's fly was open and his dick was hanging out. But we are still left with the situation where people really are pretty stupid and all sorts of accusations are going to be made - many of which do not make much sense.
The QMS printer is _NOT_ a very good printer. We tested a $10,000 CDN model quite thouroughly and could not get it to print any where near the resolution they advertise. Furthermore the printing speeds were no where near what was advertised either.
on the other hand, the Okidata performs like a charm and was well worth the money spent. It also is in the CDN$10,000 range.
Your professor underestimated. On many projects a "just" competant programmer will not succeed in a lifetime.
But your comment is good and I agree with what you say. Rather than "fire the rest" how about simply compensating on the basis of productivity. No productivity - no pay.
It sounds ruthless but I always liked the idea of paying the people that do the work and letting the others find something else to do.
I've been a manager for several years and a consultant for more. It is far more likely that ability is the issue than motivation. But whether ability or motivation it is the MANAGERS job to correct the problem.
The problem is that most managers will not effectively solve this sort of problem. Furthermore Human Resources people tend to think that if the programmer can find the office then somehow productivity amoung programmers will be somewhat similar and typically somewhat in line with their credentials. Simply put - these ideas are totally flawed.
Productivity between university educated programmers on the job can vary more than an order of magnitude between people on similar tasks. In addition, the highly productive programmers tend to be highly productive on all tasks and the unproductive programmers similarly tend to be unproductive on all tasks.
One solution is that if you write 1/2 th code for a project then you deserve 1/2 the salary budget. (in fact you might merit more than 1/2 the budget since the management overhead will tend to focus on the unproductive drones) Of course - this sort of fairness rarely happens.
A better solution is to just quit and hang out your own shingle so to speak. If you really are good, then you will develope a reputation rather quickly. You can earn more than 2x per hour compared to employees doing the exact same work.
Some of the pitfalls that I ran into during my days as an employee:
1) a co-worker suggested I stop working so hard because I was making "them" look bad.
2) co-workers tried to black list me from the informal office "good guys" because they resented my abilities. It turned out _all_ those co-workers quit save one and I ended up running the project.
3) co-worker tried to sabatoge my project team. This was quite subtle.
4) co-worker was assigned the task of developing a critical subsystem. After more than a year of pork barreling this co-worker had not written a single line of code and in fact was not technically able to do the job. This got to a very critical junction in the project and the chap was clearly counting on arguing to the managment that when we failed the reason for the failure was "my" specifications on how this subsystem had to function and not "his" inability to do the task.
In fact in this case there was a LOT more going on because head office was planning on deep sixing the whole project if we failed. There were more than 50 jobs at stake.
I grabbed my top programmer and wrote that subsystem while management was on the plane to Houston with a demo planed that of course needed this critical subsystem. It took us Friday til 2 am and part of Saturday afternoon and the subsystem was up and running and fully functional. This for a job the co-worker had sat on for more than a year.
The demo was a great success and it saved the whole project which employed more than 50 people. My co-worker's response was to go to the VP and claim I exceeded my authority when we developed the subsystem. He tried to get me fired! That backfired in his face because at the time he was on holidays and I had in fact been put in charge of his division as well as mine so I did have the authority to do his job.
So there are some of the dirty tricks that _some_ people will pull to get competant programmers out of the company. A highly skilled competant programmer is a threat to less skilled technically and usually more skilled socially brown nosers who are looking to climb the promotions ladder.
So if you are writing 50% or more of the code on a project then beware... typically there is a LOT more going on than recognition of productivity. You can't be brown nosing and office politicing if you are writing code.
You actually don't know what you are talking about.
I can find linux consultants quite easily and they are very knowledgeable. My ISP and my former ISP both have techs that run linux. They _love_ it and they are happy to help with connectivty problems.
I've seen people pick up the mouse and run the KDE desktop just as easily as if they were running winders.
Furthermore Walmart knows that if the O/S is a real problem that these customers are smart enough to find a way to get their old windoze 95 installed and since in general they already paid for windoze 95 there is nothing immoral or illegal about them continuing to use that old license rather than paying more money to M$ for the lastest XP bloatware.
First off, Stevia is about 40 times sweeter than sugar but it can't be called a sweetener. It can be called a dietary supplement. You can buy the powder in health food stores. So a good way to "supplement" your iced tea for instance:
3 tea bags. 1/8 lemon squeezed, 1/4 tsp stevia, 1 tsp sugar, 4 oz lemon juice. Makes 2 litres (or 2 quarts - either US or Imperial measure) Serve over ice (fill the glass). This eliminates 2 tablespoons of sugar and tastes better.
--------------
Monsanto is also heavily into genetically modifed foods such as Canola. I urge everyone reading this to demand certified canola products such as margarine which do not contain any genetially modified products . The problem with this idea is that the genetically modified canola currently planted is spreading these genes throughout the natural canola crops. Futhermore the genticially modified plant cannot be killed as easily because (you guessed it) the specific gene that was introduced was designed to make it hard to kill with normal herbicides like Roundup.
Please read the plight of this Saskatchewan farmer who has now been ordered by the court to pay damages because his seed got contaminated.
Surprise surprise, plants naturally try to spread their genes all over the place as every hay fever sufferer knows. But the ignorant Saskatchewan judge who ruled in this matter clearly doesn't know all that much about plant biology.
It is sad that the great unwashed public knows so little about this threat. But the introduction of genetically modifed genes affects and threatens each and every one of us because _NO_ONE_ can predict the effect a new gene will have in the wild.
The ONLY way to fight that I can think of is to make the message loud and clear: BOYCOTT MONSANTO!!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is our fault because we have not tackled the issue of how to design an email system that (1) only functions between AUTHENTICATED participants and (2) incorporates accountability.
There are billions on the net. It is truely amasing that there are as few spammers as there are! As I read the artical I was amased that so many people are willing to sit and bitch about a problem rather than actually do something about it.
Systems like Spews, ORBS, RBL's and spam filters do help. But IMHO the problem is that the email systems we use are generally far to trusting.
Suppose email was an opt in system that required a sender cert before it would receive mail. This cert could cost real money (firstly) and could identify the sender (secondly). Furthermore it could be tied to a fair use contract where the participants agree to NOT send spam. They could agree to forfeit their connection rights and compensate for damages in the event they breach the contract.
This creates a situation where legitimate users can get their cert at a minor cost to themselves. On the other hand, a spammer will _usually_ find his cert is pulled probably within hours of abuse. For a spammer trying to use 100's of domains, the cost of the certs may prove prohibitive. If not, the contract can always be written so that abuse on one set of certs by an organisation prohibits them from getting a replacement.
Such a system IMHO should be purely optional. If people really do hate the spam they get then they would have the option of switching to a system designed to prohibit UCE. I'm sure the leading email clients would implement an interface to such a protocol relatively quickly.
Who knows - maybe a critical mass would develop and the majority would opt out of what we have now.
I think the programming would not be all that difficult so if such a project is not already underway then maybe a group of opensource programmers should band together and see if they can come up with ways to kill the abuse.
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. let me use an analogy.
Power is delivered in volts and amps just as internet content is delivered by bandwidth and time. The equations have the same form: p=v*a, c=b*t respectively.
Just because one might double the voltage, say from 120 to 240 volts does not mean they use more power. In fact if people check the insulation ratings of the NMD wiring in their homes then they can quickly determine that it is usually rated up to 600 volts and typically they run 120V over it.
So if the homeowner needs more juice at a particular spot, a really inexpensive way to achieve this is to ask an electrician to "upgrage" the circuit to 240v. This involved a tiny wiring change at the breaker and a new plug to be installed in the outlet. The other alternative might be to pull say 12 gauge wire through the walls and run 20 amps at 120V (instead of 10 amps at 240V).
So with a simple wiring mod, you get twice the juice man! But you have NOT stolen any power and the electical utility doesn't give a DAMN.
Simialry, if these accused felons need to transfer some large files, then they can use say 1 hour of time at 128KB/sec or 1/2 hour of time at 256KB/sec. They still used the same amount of capacity in the transmition system and thus didn't steal a thing. The only way that they can really increase the burden on the transmission system is if their total transmission is higher as a result of making the pipe fatter.
Our last ISP (cadvision) use to publish that they were providing up to 10 mb/sec access speeds to the internet. Technically they were - on the last mile. Of course, they hooked the 10MB/sec DSL modems into a Dslam on the net which was backhauled on a T1 lines running 24 or FEWER DS0's to the max shared capacity was only 1,536mb/sec.
Buckeye claiming theft here is about the same as your electrical uliltity bitching about wanting a voltage cap because they wish to ignore the amps term in the power equation.
And I would agree with you.
Check out WxWindows. http://www.wxWindows.org
I have Borland C++ professional builder and looked at the Kylix solution. IMHO it is not cross platform and we all know that MSFC and IBM's Visual Age libraries are intended to lock you in before you start.
So far WxWindows looks good. It gives good Windows/Unix/Max cross platform support.
Check out DEV-C++ for a Windows Gui builder. Unfortunatly DEV-C++ is written in Delphi. It needs to be ported to C++ and WxWindows then it too will be a cross platform development gui-builder.
Good luck.
I'll suggest a reason why certain manufacturers might not want to release driver sources. Suppose you have two competing products. One is a rather complex hardward based implemetation. The other is a rather simplistic hardware design with most of the functions implemented in software. WinModems come to mind but there are other "devices" where this can be done as well.
In a hypothetical design, if the vast majority of the functions can be moved to software, then even though the end users THINK they are buying a hardware solution they really are buying a software solution. This implies that if the "drivers" are open sourced, then the competition can easily match the product simply by assembling a primative hardware support card. The fewer functions actually implememnted in hardware the cheaper it is to build the card.
On the other hand, if most of the functionality of the card is handled in hardware, then the drivers become less of an issue. If the drivers are not all that significant then there is no reason not to release the sources.
The example of a WinModem can perhaps illustrate this. In the end - the modem interfaces to the real world on 2 wires. Voltages are applied to these wires at various levels and for various durations of time. As long as the interface device can interpret and create these signals - it qualifies as a modem.
The modem can be fairly complex, interfacing to the CPU via the serial interface where all the signaling and compression and error detection and correction is done on the card. In this case the device driver must deal with interupts and so forth, but it is handed bytes that are real bytes.
On the other hand, the modem can be very simple, providing little more than the digital equivalent of the analogue voltage levels it sees on the twisted pair. This leaves it up to the driver to decode that signal. In such a case the vendor is almost masquerading as a hardware vendor because perhaps 90% of the job is done in software. Clearly, and manufacturer who goes to the lengths of eliminating the majority of the hardware in his product and replacing same with a software implementation burried in a device driver is not going to want to let people get their hands on the device driver.
My ISP used to tell its customers that they had 10 MB/Sec download speeds. Indeed they did - on the DSL local loop. The problem is that upstream of the local loops they backhauled on T1 so the design of the system implied that 30-100 customers each thought they had 10MB/sec download speeds when the reality of the situation is that they all shared a 1.5 mb/sec T1 line. An even more important point is that with all the hops involved, nothing comes in anywhere near the speed advertised anyway.
All that a cap on a cable modem does is slow the load times of individual pages and it only slows it IF every hop to the server happens to be able to transmit at a speed in excess of the cap.
Admitedly if someone is using sustained transfers such as if one is running a game or video feed then they _may_ end up using extra bandwidth. But the vast majority of web surfing is to webpages and in this case if the "same number of pages" are downlaoded per day then even if the user does this in a shorter period of time - the user did not use extra bandwidth.
For instance, I read slashdot pretty much each day. If I read it via a modem it might take me an hour. I'm on a high speed link so perhaps I can read slashdot in 1/2 hour. This does not mean I read it twice. It also doesn't mean that I try to surf to more websites. The reason? Content is dropping folks and there are fewer websites worth visiting now than in the past.
Well, my line used to run at 768 MB/sec. Now it is 468 MB/sec. I do not notice the difference. My ISP's expect me to pay the same amount in fact. The difference in speed resulted because the telephone company (telus) decided to switch out paradyne MVS (ADSL) modems and replace them with D-Link. MVS has a 25,000+ foot reach whereas the D-Link system has a 15,000 foot reach. Hense D-Link runs slower. Even so, if I download a Debian install for instance, I do not necessarily get a lower level of service because it has not been established that the packets would have been made available to my new D-Link modem at a rate faster than it can accept them.
Does this mean that I can send the cops in to Telus claiming theft of service? IE. I paid Telus for the MVS solution and they switched it on me!!! So now I only get 1/2 the service?
In order to support a "theft of service" the cable company should be required to demonstrate that the end users actually consumed more content. I'll suggest they likely cannot do this. All that has happened is that the end users _may_ have viewed the content for a shorter elapsed time. But even this idea is really questionable because most people read at speeds under 1000 words per minuet and most computers send at speeds 1000's of times faster. Even in the case of video, a slow link is fast enough for MPEG video. Inceasing the link speed does not mean the end user is going to pull in more content.
Its like saying that if we double the speed limit between you and the grocery store so you can get there in 1/2 the time - then you will go shopping twice as often and spend twice as much money. The assumtions are clearly rong! Continuing on assumptions like this, if we reduce the speed limit or cut the number of fast food restaurants in half, then people should lose weight because there would be less opportunity to get food.
I don't think capping cable modems does much in the way of putting people on an internet content diet. About all this might accomplish is forcing them to waste their time waiting for slow loading pages.
Indeed, junk advertising wastes bandwidth because it is not wanted. Perhaps the FBI should be sent into doubleclick! Mind you - I just firewall the ad servers. Guess I should be able to claim a refund from my phone company huh? Because I didn't consume the content they tried to shove into my computer.
Ok so the short answer is that it is a back door. There is just no way I'll hand over root access to any of my machines. Sorry.
Any tech installing crap like this in any of my systems will be facing a judge. Cracking is cracking regardless how it is done.
Several years ago in Edmonton an IBM mainframe was nuked by radar. They were near the industrial airport and didn't anticipate anything. So the system was installed and they did the IPL. It was partway through and BOOM - it froze.
So the techs shut it down and retried. Again - everything looked fine and they started the IPL. Again the IPL was proceeding normally until BOOM - it froze.
So they did a complete diagnostic of all the hardware which basically meant disassembling the machine and rebuilding it. No joy - the exact same thing happened.
Well, to make a long story short, after a great deal of soul searching someone had the bright idea to look out the window at the airport tower and thought about their radar system. This lead them in the proper direction and they solved the problem by lining the computer room with foil.
I have 2 MGE UPS's. I supplied another to an associate. These things have a habit of just switching off under certain circumstances and I think this is a partial cycle dropout. The interesting thing is that when this happens systems that are NOT protected by the UPS survive!!! It appears to be a situation where the cure is worse than the problem.
Notwithstanding this - the UPS situation is crap as far as I'm concerned. UPS's use 12V batteries (Lead acid cell) and I'd like to see one where the battery and the control electronics are spearate. That way I can run out to a battery shop and buy a big deep cycle marine battery for a $100 bux or so and get some REAL protection... and be able to replace the battery if and when required.
Another thing is that we _should_ be able to get rid of the cheap P/S's inside the case and just run in the required DC from a shared power source. I have 5 servers running in one spot, 2 more in another with attached SCSI external devices. This means there are probably over 10 shitty little power supplies none of which have UPS capability built in.
Why not a well engineered say 4000watt DC with UPS built in and just run the wires to the machines?
My manuals do not contain useful information in this area for one of my systems. It is an older system but it does a fine job for me except that it periodically just sort of stops. There are no sex lites on the kb and the monitors go black and it appears dead. I'm not sure if this is hardware or a glitch in NT 4.0 with fp 6.0. There is no blue screen of death here. Powering off and rebooting is the ONLY solution.
Here is the config:
1) Asus P/I P65UP5 baseboard plus P55t2d cpu card
2) Dual 200 mHz P200's (might be ppro if the cpu card supports them)
3) 8x32MB ecc memory probably EDO (total 256MB)
4) Dual Matrox Millinium 4MB video (PCI)
5) 3.5 FDD
6) 5.25 FDD
7) 13GB Fujitsu HDD IDE
8) Panasonic PD650 Optical/CDROM
9) Adaptec 2940 SCSI (PCI)
10) GVC network card Realtec RTL8019 (ISA)
11) Creative labs soundblaster (PCI/ISA?)
12) KB/Mouse, 2cpu fans
When I added all this up using numbers guessed from what THG used I get about 300 watts which will be right at max for this 1991 case. I don't want to tear the case appart right now because I'm using it for this communication so I may have missed a card adn don't know the P/S brand name.
I have sever class power supplies here but I kinda think this case might hold a 250 watt P/S.
Can people who are up to speed on power requirments go through the above component list and put some numbers down and advise?
Maybe these failures are PS overload in which case I can double up power supplies or just swap to one with more capacity.
Thanks.
Suppose someone bookmarks the addresses and then gets hacked. We have this all the time. We have several info@addresses and we find that quite a lot of spam arrives with us as the "return address". People book mark us then get hacked and the address does end up being used to contact legitimate people. It is really defamation of our character that is going on here but it is presently not worth the trouble to track down those spoofing our addresses at this time.
One day, however, I'm sure we will be in court over this because we have atourneys on retainer in 2 countries and that is a little more fire power than most spammers think is pointed at them.
I've got a low milage calcomp 1038 and it _should_ be able to accept a vinyl cutter assembly. Do you have any info on where to get one?
I use to drive that plotter from DOS and I do have the low level drivers. I also did some neat things like creating a virtual pen number where I could assign the nib width to the pen via a table. Widest I tested was about 1/4" with a 0.010" real nib. The software just calculates however many passes are required to draw what a nib of the desired width would lay down. This is done in the low level drivers so I could link it into any software I wanted. At the time I was using the MCS contouring software out of Tulsa.
Anyway, I figure I can write what I need rather quickly and at this point basically I'd need to know what the problem is. Maybe we should put out heads together.
Linux is not a problem AFAIK. I drove that plotter from HP3000, DOS, OS/2 and from a lot of other mini's so I just can't see it really being a problem.
As for HPGL - that is really easy. I have HPGL drivers too so again I think the problem really is knowing what you need.
A comment was made a while back that worldcom had no interest in blocking span because they made money from it. You see - they got paid by the people who created it and furthermore they got paid by the telcos that paid them for access to the POP's.
Its all about money. When the Telco's find the pain from the wrath of people like you and me costs them more than they make from the bandwidth the ISP's pay for - then they will stop it.
This is also true of overseas connections.
Consider the position of a large company like AT&T. If they have 5 million angry customers phoning each day to bitch about spam from say Korea how will they react? One solution is for them to tell say their Korean counterparts to clean it up or they will be disconnected. Yup - most of us can live without Korea for instance being part of the net. But Koreans cannot.
So it is simply a matter of upping the anti so to speak.
When the cost of accomodating the shit exceeds the money they get from it then they will take action - not before. It is well within the control of the Telecommunications industry to eliminate the spam.
The simplest way is to require each adn every customer to sign an agreement that prohibts UCE and require them to agree to a penalty of say several $1000 bux is the create UCE. This can be on the visa cards of those who pay via Visa ot it can be by way of a deposit or a pledge of assets. Get the deposit in place - then when they send it out pinch the deposit. End of problem.
ISP's will catch on really quickly. Terms of service agreements already prohibit UCE. These just need to be enforced.
It is a simple problem to solve but again - why would any company take this problem on when people just bitch among themsleves?
--------------
This is true of Hacked servers too. The ISP I use to go through is Cadvision and those idjots were so bad that they didn't even bother to pull the plug on customers hacked with Code Red. They didn't even tell them. In fact when I phoned up Cadvision they blamed me for complaining. I told them I'd sic the cops on them for a denile of service attack. You see - the idjot factor is really high.
IMHO you will do just fine. Most ppl will just tell their browser to accept the cert. I've seen this happen from a number of vendors including either M$ or Oracle... I don't quite recall now.
I don't know what city you are in but you need to hire a competant atourney to deal with this bullshit.
Never but never sign these agreements. The company probably never had a trade secret or even an idea that was worth anything and when you sign you just leave yourself wide open to accusations.
Several years ago I had an employer ask me to sign such a form and stated it was a "condition of employment". I replied that it was a "condition of employment" that I DO NOT sign agreements like this. I won. I guess they figured that since I was the only one they had on staff who knew how to develop the software they needed that they better back down.
The best advice I ever heard was from the fellow (now retired) who developed one the the best contouring packages in the world. It was the one that Amoco used. Yup - it was good. His point is that he doesn't want to be privy to other people's confidential information.
As he said: In the first place it probably isn't all that great and I'll probably come up with a better solution anyways. But, if I'm privy to what they claim they disclosed to me, then the door is open for them to claim I stole their ideas. In the second place, if what they have is really so great, then I can't use it anyway.
I think his reasoning is very clear. If you think it is confidential then I don't wnat to know about it. Sorry - just keep it to yourself!
-----------
Think about those confidentiality agreements employees are so willing to sign. It can limit their employment opportunities down the track. I am an employer. No way I'm going to get involved with an IP exposure if I can avoid it. So generally I hire consultant who are not encumbered.
Those agreements do not benefit the employee in any way and are pretty useless from the companys' standpoint as well. If someone IS interested in stealing trade secrets you can be sure that a little agreement is not even going to slow them down. You see, your ex employer has to PROVE that YOU DID IT. That can be nigh on impossible. But the litigation is real and it can cost you 1000's to defend yourself.
Just say NO!
Just forget it. Read up on what RCA did to Philo Farnsworth, the chap who invented TV. He had his patents and died destitute. You can read about it here (Dead Inventor's Corner)
The point is that if your patent is valid then a large corporation will simply pick it up and claim that it is invalid for whatever reasons and you'll find yourself in court for the next 17 years.
On the other hand if a large corporation holds patents which are invalid or even absurdly simple - as many patents are - then if you do something close you may well find yourself in court defending yourself against a preditory lawsuit.
So IMHO you are wasting your time. Just bring the product out and hit the streets with the marketing and plan on making money right up front. Patent it if you wish but don't expect to be anything but a victim in this game. The patent will only cost you money and drain you every time you turn around.
It will drain you both intellectually and financially and like Farnsworth you may end up killing the pain with alcohol too.
I used OS/2 for years. IT was a nightmare. I had a service contract with IBM (extra but cheap). I set up dual monitor which OS/2 supported (poorly) - when the VGA screen came up the 8514 froze. IBM never did fix that problem.
XGA apparently solved dual screen. I was never able to find XGA video cards that would work in my clone dispite several calls to IBM tech support.
The single message queue problem was to the best of my knowledge never solved - hense the machine locked up quite often.
There were dosen's of trouble calls for this that and the other. Most of this I could have fixed myself if it was documented. Little things - like changing the domain of the system.... I even have the red books for OS/2 and subscribed to the OS/2 developers network. Nothing in there how to change even a domain name. I gave up and just used the numerical IP address. Well - the HDD crashed about 2 years ago and good riddence.
Now - those trouble calls. I lost HOURS on hold. The intake operators asked the same stupid questions over and over for 3 years. These people were not even able to set up a database with a phone number index. Even Sears can do that - but apparently not IBM.
How much memory - how much disk - what make of disk - what kind of video card and so on. Stoopid questions that had nothing to do with the problem. 3/4 of what was in config.sys was a mystery including the "undocumented" video configuration I ran with "undocumented" parameters that brought my dual head system up - complements from a senior tech from Boca Raton.
Oh the nightmare. I offered to WRITE a utilty for them to spin through the HDD and spit out version numbers and config info so we didn't have to wait on hold. This _could_ have been popped into an email. Nope - sit and wait on hold. Arrghh.
OS/2 failed because IBM never fixed the problems. OS/2 failed because IBM spent huge sums of money on intake operators that wasted people's time. A simple little file in the machine that the installer created that carries config and version info - simple things like placing the amount of memory, HDD size, drivers loaded and so on - things that could be emailed to the response tech were never done.
When I switched to NT4.0 (which has its own problems) it was like a breath of fresh air. NT even runs the text mode OS/2 apps (like Breif for OS/2) better than OS/2 ever did.
You are not correct when you suggest that there is no liability on the part of those people who are too incompetant to keep their machines healthy.
Consider: a guy owns a car and it is involved in an accident. The manufacturer may be partly liable if there is a defect. But the owner is also liable for the proper maintenance of said car and can be sued if proper maintenance has not been carried out. The garage can be sued if they contracted to conduct the maintenance and didn't perform it well enough. This is one reason I refuse to do security or maintenance work on Windose machines. IMHO it is not possible to secure them properly and I'm not accepting any responsibility for being unable to accomplish something that clearly M$ doesn't seem to be conserned about.
Accordingly, anyone running a cracked computer is liable for damages caused because an ordinarily prudent person would not be so irresponsible.
Of course, and ordinarily prudent lawyer would not email his client list to his clients either you would think. But one of my lawyers did just that. One would think that at $250 per hour billing rates they could hire a security consultant.
If you do not expect much in the way of competance you will not be disappointed.
Your ideas are valid but you are treading on dangerous ground. Let me explain.
Suppose your neighbour cranks up her stereo to bone vibrating levels. This is illegal in most neighbourhoods and you have a right to complain. Now, if you walk on her property to knock on her door then technically you _could_ be guilty of trespassing. Most courts would laugh at the idea of prosecuting someone for such a trivial offense mind you - but she would have the legal right to put you into a position where you have to explain your actions to the court.
The proper thing is for you to phone the police and let them deal with the problem.
Similarly, in the case of attacks on your server, the proper response is to phone the police. Of course they probably won't do anything about it so your next step is then to register a formal complaint about the police.
Given enough pressure they might actually start dealing with the situation and the side effect is that a LOT of people are going to react to a cop knocking on the front door and telling them to turn off their cracked machine whereas if you do it many are likely to attack you.
The analogy with the noise complaint is that if you respond to your neighbours bad deeds by turning your stereo up to max - then this simply creates the situation where both parties are breaking the law.
Finally, if you complain to the police and they do nothing and then you follow this up with formal complaints about the police, when you then contact people and nicely ask them to fix their damn machine or turn it off, at least you have a defense to put before a judge. Whether that defense means much is an open question. You might be better off just suing them in small claims court for the damages they cause you.
Much of this comes down to rights that are not clearly defined. For instance when you visit my web server and ask for something you would think you clearly have this right. I did after all put the web server on line for people to access (presumably). But what if the webserver was intended (by me) to be accessable on an intranet and I was too dumb to configure it properly? Do you still have the right to access it?
Suppose we are dealing with open windoze file shares. I do know at least one person who opened her hard drive up. She thought of it as a cheap anonymous FTP service - with read and write access to everyone. She wanted people to be able to distribute music. (seriously).
Well - I warned her. Within a month someone shut her down by running a program that erased the bios. I had warned her about that risk too.
Perhaps most people would not open network shares so that their files can be available to all. But most people do not run anonymous FTP servers and web servers either. Some people do open network shares on purpose and these people are in effect publishing on the net in the same way that a webmaster is (albeit - a far more primitive way).
So, if you happen apon a machine that is open - then you can certainly argue that you thought there was an open house. Thus you would not be guilty of "hacking" you would think. Just don't count on it. Some people will accuse you of trying to break into their machine and some will even argue that you should not tell the management because this might cause an incompetant MSCE to get fired. Some will even argue that if you do tell the management that your _PURPOSE_ is to try to get someone fired. I witnessed this in fact. What a dumb bunny!
Now - if they are customers it would be a very good idea to put a clause into their service contract that "requires" you to contact them in the case of hacks. Of course, write it so that there is nothing wrong if you fail to contact them. By doing this you create a very good defense if someone sues you for damages.
Just be careful _how_ you contact them. Throwing popups into the machine is probably a risky move. Suppose it is some advertizing firm and they are giving a demo to a major client about what a great web site they can build - and suddenly your pop-ups show up and they lose the client.
In many respects I consider these sorts of threats to be analogus to someone being accused of being a peeping tom because he pointed out that someone else's fly was open and his dick was hanging out. But we are still left with the situation where people really are pretty stupid and all sorts of accusations are going to be made - many of which do not make much sense.
So, be careful.
The QMS printer is _NOT_ a very good printer. We tested a $10,000 CDN model quite thouroughly and could not get it to print any where near the resolution they advertise. Furthermore the printing speeds were no where near what was advertised either.
on the other hand, the Okidata performs like a charm and was well worth the money spent. It also is in the CDN$10,000 range.
Your professor underestimated. On many projects a "just" competant programmer will not succeed in a lifetime.
But your comment is good and I agree with what you say. Rather than "fire the rest" how about simply compensating on the basis of productivity. No productivity - no pay.
It sounds ruthless but I always liked the idea of paying the people that do the work and letting the others find something else to do.
I've been a manager for several years and a consultant for more. It is far more likely that ability is the issue than motivation. But whether ability or motivation it is the MANAGERS job to correct the problem.
The problem is that most managers will not effectively solve this sort of problem. Furthermore Human Resources people tend to think that if the programmer can find the office then somehow productivity amoung programmers will be somewhat similar and typically somewhat in line with their credentials. Simply put - these ideas are totally flawed.
Productivity between university educated programmers on the job can vary more than an order of magnitude between people on similar tasks. In addition, the highly productive programmers tend to be highly productive on all tasks and the unproductive programmers similarly tend to be unproductive on all tasks.
One solution is that if you write 1/2 th code for a project then you deserve 1/2 the salary budget. (in fact you might merit more than 1/2 the budget since the management overhead will tend to focus on the unproductive drones) Of course - this sort of fairness rarely happens.
A better solution is to just quit and hang out your own shingle so to speak. If you really are good, then you will develope a reputation rather quickly. You can earn more than 2x per hour compared to employees doing the exact same work.
Some of the pitfalls that I ran into during my days as an employee:
1) a co-worker suggested I stop working so hard because I was making "them" look bad.
2) co-workers tried to black list me from the informal office "good guys" because they resented my abilities. It turned out _all_ those co-workers quit save one and I ended up running the project.
3) co-worker tried to sabatoge my project team. This was quite subtle.
4) co-worker was assigned the task of developing a critical subsystem. After more than a year of pork barreling this co-worker had not written a single line of code and in fact was not technically able to do the job. This got to a very critical junction in the project and the chap was clearly counting on arguing to the managment that when we failed the reason for the failure was "my" specifications on how this subsystem had to function and not "his" inability to do the task.
In fact in this case there was a LOT more going on because head office was planning on deep sixing the whole project if we failed. There were more than 50 jobs at stake.
I grabbed my top programmer and wrote that subsystem while management was on the plane to Houston with a demo planed that of course needed this critical subsystem. It took us Friday til 2 am and part of Saturday afternoon and the subsystem was up and running and fully functional. This for a job the co-worker had sat on for more than a year.
The demo was a great success and it saved the whole project which employed more than 50 people. My co-worker's response was to go to the VP and claim I exceeded my authority when we developed the subsystem. He tried to get me fired! That backfired in his face because at the time he was on holidays and I had in fact been put in charge of his division as well as mine so I did have the authority to do his job.
So there are some of the dirty tricks that _some_ people will pull to get competant programmers out of the company. A highly skilled competant programmer is a threat to less skilled technically and usually more skilled socially brown nosers who are looking to climb the promotions ladder.
So if you are writing 50% or more of the code on a project then beware... typically there is a LOT more going on than recognition of productivity. You can't be brown nosing and office politicing if you are writing code.
You actually don't know what you are talking about.
I can find linux consultants quite easily and they are very knowledgeable. My ISP and my former ISP both have techs that run linux. They _love_ it and they are happy to help with connectivty problems.
I've seen people pick up the mouse and run the KDE desktop just as easily as if they were running winders.
Furthermore Walmart knows that if the O/S is a real problem that these customers are smart enough to find a way to get their old windoze 95 installed and since in general they already paid for windoze 95 there is nothing immoral or illegal about them continuing to use that old license rather than paying more money to M$ for the lastest XP bloatware.
What you cite in your post is free in Linux. There is no reason for a 15YO to break the law when better products are available for free damit!!!
First off, Stevia is about 40 times sweeter than sugar but it can't be called a sweetener. It can be called a dietary supplement. You can buy the powder in health food stores. So a good way to "supplement" your iced tea for instance:
3 tea bags. 1/8 lemon squeezed, 1/4 tsp stevia, 1 tsp sugar, 4 oz lemon juice. Makes 2 litres (or 2 quarts - either US or Imperial measure) Serve over ice (fill the glass). This eliminates 2 tablespoons of sugar and tastes better.
--------------
Monsanto is also heavily into genetically modifed foods such as Canola. I urge everyone reading this to demand certified canola products such as margarine which do not contain any genetially modified products . The problem with this idea is that the genetically modified canola currently planted is spreading these genes throughout the natural canola crops. Futhermore the genticially modified plant cannot be killed as easily because (you guessed it) the specific gene that was introduced was designed to make it hard to kill with normal herbicides like Roundup.
Please read the plight of this Saskatchewan farmer who has now been ordered by the court to pay damages because his seed got contaminated.
Surprise surprise, plants naturally try to spread their genes all over the place as every hay fever sufferer knows. But the ignorant Saskatchewan judge who ruled in this matter clearly doesn't know all that much about plant biology.
It is sad that the great unwashed public knows so little about this threat. But the introduction of genetically modifed genes affects and threatens each and every one of us because _NO_ONE_ can predict the effect a new gene will have in the wild.
The ONLY way to fight that I can think of is to make the message loud and clear: BOYCOTT MONSANTO!!