Originally there was WebCrawler (among others). In late 1996, AOL acquired WebCrawler and turned it into AOL Netfind. Later, apparently, Excite bought it from AOL, made it a separate service, and Excite became the engine that powered AOL Netfind. After that apparently InfoSpace bought it in the Excite sell-off.
But after AOL bought it I lost track of it, because it started sucking (returning lots more stale links than before), and altavista.digital.com burst upon the scene (anyone else remember "kayak sailing San Juan islands"?).
My guess would be that the meta-search switch initially happened when Excite bought them.
When I worked at Kesmai, who had the Battletech Online franchise (not to be confused with MechWarrior), "legging" was a persistent problem in the game. Basically even a weak mech could snipe the leg off an opponent and then take their time finishing it off. This was because the paper version (they told me) didn't have the concept of deliberate aim -- what you hit and how hard you hit it were determined by die rolls. When they implemented aiming in the online version (which you just about have to or people would find it rather pointless...) they found out that the mechs' legs were not armored nearly well enough to offset the vulnerability to legging.
Eventually the player community solved its own problem by collectively deciding that legging (like camping in other games) was just Not Kosher and going after those suspected of it. (It's impressive to see a bunch of well-controlled mechs battling in an arena suddenly all turn in a coordinated attack on one unrepentant newbie who's running around taking leg shots.)
In engineering there's the maxim "build an idiot-proof device, and nature will build a better idiot." In RPGs there seems to be a parallel: build a better locked room, and someone will cast a better portal spell:
Re (2), if you don't trust the security of the distributed ssh, sendmail, etc, why should you trust the distributed glibc, vi, grep...
It's a point others have made before. Basically, I figure it's a lot easier and smarter (from a cracker's point of view) to insert backdoors in things that already deal with sensitive info and/or are commonly setuid, like ssh, sendmail, bind, etc. If you have the access to substitute backdoored versions of packages on a distro tree, those would be the ones you'd go for, especially since many people tend to keep them more up-to-date because of their frequent security issues.
Put another way, why go to all the trouble of putting a backdoor in vi, which isn't even network-aware to start with, when you could just as easily (probably more easily, even) do it in sendmail or ssh with the added bonus that some people are going to be running your backdoor setuid root?
Crackers are lazy. They're not going to make more work for themselves than they have to to have their fun.
I'm also aware that this is no protection at all if the original source is compromised, as I seem to recall happened with OpenSSH not too long ago. But then again there's no way to deal with that short of doing a full code review before installing anything on a machine.
By default, I apt-get packages. I break from that in basically 3 cases:
1) I really need or want something optimized for my hardware. Things like the kernel, obviously, or other hardware-intensive stuff (I don't do 3-D rendering but if I did it would fall into this category).
2) I'm concerned about the security of whatever I'm installing. This is things like SSH, bind, sendmail, etc. (Yes, I know nobody in their right mind uses bind or sendmail any more. Actually I use smail for mail, but if I did use sendmail still... And I'm trying to get djbdns running but I seem to be missing the part in the docs where it tells you what the "compile this so it runs by itself without requiring everything else djb ever wrote to be installed" flag is.)
3) I want features that aren't available in packaged stable- or testing-tree versions yet. This is why I ended up compiling AbiWord 2 from source, IIRC so I could get the mail-merge functionality. It's also why I compiled xchat from source last time I installed xchat, though I forget what features I was looking for there.
There are a few things I try not to compile from source if I can help it. Things like OpenOffice, XFree86, you know the drill. It just takes too damn long on a Celeron 433. (I know, I know. This summer I fully intend to build myself a nice almost-high-end Athlon system, before crowley turns 5 if possible.)
In N. America, shops try to play on this with psychology by having continuous sales... they're trying to convince buyers that there's currently a discount and if they don't hurry they will lose out. Of course, as the sales seem to go on all the time, they're not really having a sale.
Car salesmen have done this forever. "Once a year only! Year-end clearance! New cars from $5995!" Three weeks later: "Once a year only! Thanksgiving sale! New cars from $5995!" Pick a local dealership and watch their ads on TV from week to week. Note how not a day goes by that they don't have some kind of "special, one-time-only" sale, and how the "one-time-only" prices stay just about the same.
Of course the car dealerships have picked up a few things from the electronics industry, too. Mail-in rebate on a "free" PC = "guaranteed trade" on a car. And by now I'm sure we all know the games dealers play with manufacturer's rebates, dealer rebates, loyalty rebates...
Take a look at the low new-car prices in the newspaper ads and you'll notice that most of the best-looking ones are the price after all the possible rebates, trade-ins, etc. are applied, plus a minimum down payment of a couple grand. The real list price of that "$3000" new car is probably more like $10000 and an average customer can probably expect to pay around $7000.
So, yeah, commodity-luxury items are all coming to be sold the same way. Before long you'll hear corner drug dealers offering loyalty rebates and trade-ins...
the article says:
"For two hours, Perry tried to fix it, uninstalling and reinstalling antivirus software, but the system continued to malfunction. The next day, Perry gave the PC to Gross to back up, fearing it might crash and lose valuable data."
Any technician that "fix things" repeatedly installing and uninstalling the same software doesn't deserve the job... but that's my opinion...
We can't really judge the competence of the IT guys from how the news article describes their actions. Even if this is InfoWeek, you still can't assume that the reporter is technically competent enough to accurately sum up the actions described to him by the people he interviewed in this case. Reporters misquote and describe poorly all the time (I've been quoted in a newspaper 3 or 4 times and I think once were my words accurately transcribed).
And to report the problem to police is wrong, there is an hierarchy in the company, if they thought that the company wasn't acting accordingly to the case, the should anonymously fill a complain with authorities...
I keep seeing people saying "These people should have gone through the proper channels." This argument doesn't fly on two counts:
1) They did in fact go to their supervisor first. Their supervisor took it up the chain and police action resulted. Once police action resulted, it became a criminal matter and anyone with actual knowledge of the crime is perfectly entitled to take what they know to the police.
2) There are two hierarchies at work here, not just one, and they operate in parallel, not serially. One is your office's corporate hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the operation of the business. The other is the legal hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the legality of various actions. In this case, both came into play -- but the corporate hierarchy can't trump the legal one, or preempt it.
If you want another reason why it's not only justified but required to go to the law or otherwise make sure law enforcement is informed of a felony in progress in the workplace: Your office policies are a matter of contract law between you and your employer, and contracts are not allowed to force one party to commit a crime, or become an accessory to a crime. So if a crime is being committed in the workplace, you are required to report it to the legal authorities (or see that it's reported) if you know about it, and you may be required to report it to your boss.
None of the above should be taken as saying the company wasn't in the right in firing them, but the workers are justified and required to go to the law with what they knew, even if they knew it as a result of violating corporate policy (in which case the company is justified in firing them for said violations). The company doesn't get veto rights of any kind over the reporting of a crime in the workplace.
To make an analogy, if you broke into an employee's office to play a prank, and found a rape in progress, would you call the cops, or would you call your boss (assuming your boss isn't the rapist)? At that point it ceases to matter why you were there, for purposes of who to report the crime to, but it may matter in that you might lose your job over it (which is, really, as it should be).
The story submitter says that these people were fired because they gave the company a bad light, but this wouldn't even be about the company, since they were being outsourced.
The way these things usually go is like this:
Very Big Outsourcing Customer: "One of your employees embarrassed one of our employees publicly. This embarrasses us publicly. What are you going to do about it?"
Small Outsourcing Provider: "We will fire that employee, as quickly as we think we can get away with it, on any pretext we can find, and make sure he serves as an example to other employees to keep their mouths shut about you and yours."
Big companies that buy from small companies exercise the power of the purse to get their way all the time, just like the US government does to make states pass legislation it can't itself pass (viz. 21 drinking age).
Journalism in the 21st century
on
Ask Warren Ellis
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the things that resonated with me when I read Transmetropolitan was the journalism angle, since I was coming off a 2-year stint as a tech columnist in a small central Virginia city. Even in such a small market I was amazed -- you got all the same duplicity, heart, good and evil as what you read in the Washington Post or the New York Times, just on a smaller scale. There were people who tried to smear my reputation and people who passed the word that I was giving the straight goods with no bull.
Where do you see the quality of journalism going in our world in the next hundred years? Are we on an unstoppable downward spiral to the point where real journalists have to go underground like Spider on the Feed, or do you think there's a point coming where the public suddenly wakes up to the (lack of) quality of the pap they're getting fed every night on TV?
Where do you get your "real news" from -- are there certain small magazines and papers you read regularly or do you have to just puzzle out the real story from reading between the lines in the articles the big guys print?
And in the current events category, what's your take on the whole SARS flap?
I had an assortment of things that lived in my station wagon while I lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle from June to November of last year. Among these was my DVD player, my main Linux server, its monitor, my main Mac, and a token Windows box. When I moved up to Maryland in November, I finally had a place with some space to myself and I promptly unloaded the gear. None of this was less than 3 years old and most of it had already been ill-used in various ways.
Now realize that this was, essentially, six months in a car, during which time it baked in the summer sun, froze on winter nights, experienced various jolts from speed bumps and potholes (one of which broke a rather sturdy piece of dishware) due to my rear shocks badly needing replacing, got liberally dusted with old-car grit, and just generally got neglected and left to fend for itself.
After time to warm to room temp, the Linux box booted right up. The monitor still works fine except the occasional jitter and sudden increase or decrease in vertical scan, and the fact that the vertical offset control no longer works. The DVD player works better -- before, it often would fail to recognize a disc until you inserted and ejected it several times, now it's just fine. I still haven't booted the Performa or the HP, but even if they lose their magic smoke, I have all the important stuff working.
It would not cost them a $50 support call to answer direct technical questions from experienced users if they would route questions properly based on their content. For example, if a user calls up, explains that he has changed network cards and asks to have the MAC entry changed in their database, it is not effective customer service to work through a thirty minute script only to end with an escalation to second line support when a direct bump to second line could have finished the call in one minute! (Example from my experience, obviously)
I once got in the middle of a thread on the MindSpring customer-service newsgroups and posted a suggestion that they institute an "experienced customer" line. The idea being you get certified through them that yes, you really know what you're doing (maybe by taking the same tests of proficiency that their employees take?) and after that you're given access to a support line staffed by people who don't insist on going through the "is it turned on?" parts of the script. Who talk to you as though you have a clue, in other words. Hell, they could not only make money on it by charging a token fee (maybe $5 per month), they could use it as a pool to recruit new tech folks.
Basically, phone centers need to program their script bots with something akin to keyword matching to determine when the caller is not going to be served by a cookbook of click heres and tab theres. In my experience, it is luck of the draw whether you get a first line rep who knows their stuff or is just following the script, and there are a lot of gradations between first and second line that could be subdivided more efficiently. Can it really be that cost ineffective to provide decent, non-irritating support to all levels of users, as opposed to just the clueless ones?
It's all about metrics. If you don't force the techs to follow the same script, you can't effectively compare their performance and weed out the ones that aren't making good numbers. (The fact that you can't do that short of actually listening in on a tech's calls from time to time, we'll ignore for now.) ISO 9000 can be a good thing in its place; likewise Six-Sigma. This kind of cookie-cutter tech support is the worst possible application of both, but management just sees a documented, reproducible process and finds it Good.
[referring to using 'tar' to do daily backups] And people wonder why computer techs get a bad name.
Eh? There's nothing wrong with tar per se. For example, let's say you want to transport your backups over a network securely (i.e., via ssh). Your choices are:
1. Allow ssh access with no password (public-key access, preferably). I'm leery of this, because allowing anything like this to run automatically means entrusting all the auth data to the machine, where it can be compromised.
2. Copy the backups asynchronously from making them, allowing user-initiated authentication. This was the approach I opted for when I had to put together a backup system overnight at one company.
Couple of cron jobs that ran incremental tar's on a list of directories, storing them in the scratch partition with higher permissions (so user processes cleaning up after themselves couldn't nuke them accidentally). Then at my leisure I would run the transport script (mornings about 10 AM, typically) which would suck the backups across and copy them to the tape. This worked fine for the time the project was active. Note that I was backing up to tape, which meant I needed to manually rotate tapes anyway, so this system helped ensure that new backups didn't overwrite old ones if I came in late -- and we definitely did not want these backups exported to our network. I also had the advantage of only needing to worry about one server.
Just because tar is old and a bit... esoteric at times, doesn't mean it's therefore automatically a stupid idea to use it. If it's what you know, and it gets the job done, there's no need to feel guilty about not using a fancier system. Even Linus likes tar, because it's rock-solid reliable.
Now if you have (faint hope) a valid criticism of this guy's use of tar in his environment, then I'm all ears. But I doubt that, since he didn't give enough detail for you to have one.
I don't know why I even bother with this given it's an AC post, except that assholes like this are a major reason why Linux advocates get a bad rep.
Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
It's the natural trust some people have for authority. In the US, most people seem to have a greater degree of distrust in the government (in Europe and the UK it seems the balance goes more the other way -- my English friends are regularly shocked that I not only fail to be surprised by, but often expect, the US government acting in a shady, unethical manner.)
Another example of this is when people getting violently screwed by their Very Big Company employer assume that everything happening to them is legal, because "every company does it that way". A big, big example of this is salaried employees not getting paid overtime -- the onus is on the employer to prove you're exempt, and if they don't or can't, they are required to pay overtime. Even many HR folk seem to honestly be unaware of this rule of the game, and millions of salaried grunts are the losers.
[quoting a previous poster]: Make Linus do what you want by impugning his technical judgment,
So has Linus now been elevated to a point where his thoughts, opinions, and judgement are beyond question? Sorry, I didn't get the memo on that one.
No one said Linus was infallible. However, he has shown, in rather public fashion, that he is a quite capable maintainer. I can't think of anyone, including second-in-command Alan Cox, who could have brought Linux this far without, overall, getting mired in the politics of open source vs. free software vs. proprietary software vs....
Advising against insulting Linus' technical judgement isn't putting him on a pedestal, it's merely recognizing the vast odds against some random person being more knowledgeable about the technical issues involved in maintaining the kernel than Linus himself (even if said "random person" happens to be a member of the set of kernel developers).
By the way, this very issue has cropped up before, with largely the same results. For quite some time PowerPC Linux couldn't get merged into the main tree, because the people who were maintaining linux-ppc kept trying to submit massive "patches" to get the whole tree in at once. And Linus told them what he's telling Keith now. And they went and sulked in their sandbox awhile longer, and finally it all worked out. (But they at least didn't try to force Linus' hand with a mass-mailing campaign.)
This is not a new issue, nor has Linus' opinion on it changed, nor, IMHO, is there good reason for it to change here.
In the early days Netscape sold a Gold version in retail which included the HTML editor whereas the downloadable verson was only the browser (Navigator).
Not quite. You could download the Gold version too, but you were expected to pay for it after the eval period expired. The base version had an indefinite eval period (i.e. it was never specified how long it was) and certain entities like nonprofits and educationals could use it free of charge.
its based on a car/unibody chassis so you wont flip over if someone breathes on you.
Actually this is bad. Car chassis are common in SUVs because they're light, hence require less engine power and thus less gas to get from point A to point B. The problem is you have a light chassis with a big tall SUV body on it -- which means high center of gravity. This is why SUVs are notorious for rolling, and all the marketing money in the world can't change how physics works.
SUVs with truck chassis are not as common, but are out there. They're heavy-bottomed, which makes them less prone to rollover and also sturdier in general (this is a chassis built to support a body used to haul stuff, after all), but they need more power, more gas, and thus more money.
If you really want a stable, roomy vehicle you can haul stuff around in, get a king-cab pickup, or get a light pickup and put a camper cap on it. With care and a little outlay for some furnishing, that can be a nice ride for passengers at a much more reasonable price than the SUVs that all the crazed soccer moms here in Northern Virginia drive.
(I swear, they must be snorting meth to keep up or something, the way they zip in and out of lanes with all of SIX INCHES OF CLEARANCE while carrying nine kids in the back.)
That really amuses me, simply because their flagship online content, ea.com, has always been very Linux-hostile. Try going to it with anything but Netscape >=4 && <6 or IE 4+, running on MacOS or Windows. Denied!
This despite the fact that if you tell Opera to masquerade as IE, thus fooling the site into letting you past the front page, most of the stuff works fine except a) some JavaScript that isn't essential anyway and b) some blatantly non-compliant HTML (which I tried to get fixed on ADA grounds, a request which was never actually denied but simply fell into the memory hole and disappeared).
I made a moderate-sized stink about this when I worked there and basically got told "Shut up, Linux is such a tiny fraction of the gamer market we don't give a shit."
Lynx on my system declines to auto-redirect without user intervention, so the site is actually semi-usable with it...
Somewhere tucked away at home is my dad's old Erector Set from when he was a kid (60's, early 70's). That was a very cool toy. The interesting thing about it is where Lego gives you exploded diagrams of where every single piece goes, Erector gave you unit assembly pictures with some detail pics of how hard-to-see stuff fit together. You had to figure out what you needed, and if you didn't have it handy, what you might use in its place.
Some professor over in Britain blames the decline in British engineering on the steady growth in dominance of Lego over Meccano. I can believe it -- Meccano/Erector makes you figure out how to build it and Lego doesn't.
Lego is like a prefab model kit, Erector is more like the further projects in those 180-in-1 breadboard electronics kits.
How do you prevent abuse of the system? First ask yourself if it is easier to control a well-defined system or a pell mell system like we currently have. If the system were well defined, you would have the right, as in credit reporting, to dispute your record and to know what it is.
Have you ever actually tried to get an incorrect item removed from your credit report? I've been going back and forth with Equifax for nearly a year. I send them a registered letter, they do nothing. I send another, they do nothing. Then the next time I apply for credit I find out that yet again, I'm being asked to explain this same entry that should have been removed back in January 2001.
By law they're supposed to investigate and if they cannot verify within 30 days that the entry is accurate (meaning they discover it's incorrect or just can't make a positive determination that it's correct), they're required to remove it. Have they done so? Of course not.
Oh well, election year is coming up, might as well give my favorite elected official's office of constituent services something productive to do.
My advice for you: Get a life, learn how to think for yourself, and learn how to draw your own intelligent conclusions.
Well, let's just see what you wrote above that, Mr. Jeffy the All-Wise.
ok, how many police officers are there in this country? Probably millions. How many have been caught abusing their power? About 100/year. 100 out of 1 million is less than 1%.
Where do you get this suspiciously nice, round, 100 per year number? Or this suspiciously nice, round, 1 million number?
As it happens the Bureau of Justice Statistics says there are about 664,000 police officers in the US (http://www.theiacp.org/faq.htm). But that 100 number needs a lot of explanation, I suspect it's at least one, and possibly two, orders of magnitude higher.
Think about it: COPS HAVE JOBS TO DO OTHER THAN ABUSIVELY TRACK INNOCENT PEOPLE!!
Some do. But see the Detroit Free Press of a year or two ago. The state of Michigan's Law Enforcement Information Network was widely and systematically abused by Michigan police. It does happen and it is not harmless. And when there is a tool that can be abused to harass the innocent, but has yet to show significant utility in protecting those same law-abiding citizens, it should not be placed in government hands. (Sometimes it shouldn't be placed in those hands even if it does have such utility.)
It's also important to note that those cops you talk about got caught. This means that those who abuse the system would sooner or later be caught themselves and other cops thinking about abusing it would learn from it.
You should look up something called a "fallacy of logic", because you just committed a classic one here, equating the portion with the whole. "Some corrupt cops are caught on a regular basis, therefore all corrupt cops will eventually be caught." Your conclusion does not follow. In fact we should be drawing entirely the opposite conclusion: police abuse of power is so widespread that its exposure has become literally an everyday event. The proper response is to tighten the screws, but not on us -- on the cops.
Cops have a job to do. If they were to abuse it, they would hurt themselves and further injure the public by failing to catch truly wanted crooks. That would make them lousy cops.
Taking this in order, yes they do; they do and they do because they do; and the ones who do are, and there are far too many of them.
There are some historical issues. But a little creative retconning takes care of them:
- This is the later Klingon look, but in TNG Worf says "something happened" to change the Klingons' appearance that they don't discuss. However, if there were originally two Klingon races, one with the "old" look and one with the new, maybe the old-style ones were forcibly changed to look like the others. Thus they (the formerly-old-style Klingons) would not like to talk about being forced to change their cultural identity.
- The first contact we have here might indeed be botched. We don't yet know. There might turn out to be something the Enterprise crew has done that the Klingons haven't found out about yet. Or maybe "first contact" is an ongoing event and this is just the first note of the movement.
- This Enterprise doesn't appear in Picard's set of models. But is it specifically stated that Picard's models are all the Enterprises? (I don't remember what ships exactly were included -- the carrier? the Space Shuttle? the wooden frigate?) Maybe he just had all the NCC-1701x Enterprises.
And I liked the theme. My favorite is still the Voyager intro (even though I never really liked the show) but this is a close second.
Do you seriously think an AMD chip can cause your house to burn down?
Do I think it's likely to? No. Do I think it's possible? Absolutely. And if I'm building PCs for sale to the public, I'm going to want to minimize the chance that somebody will do something totally daft that leads to a fire when my product fails.
Not to say I think this was a big concern to Gateway, but it's one of those things that floats around the back of a product director's head when he's deciding which side to lean toward.
the average commercial radio ad is an agonizing half a minute or longer of shouting propaganda and the public rado sponsorship spot is a highly tolerable 5 seconds or so.
I can't remember the last time I heard (or read myself) a sponsorship spot (not just the credit at the beginning of the program, but the actual spot you hear later) that was less than 20-30 seconds -- many run a full minute.
Slashdot Mirror
But after AOL bought it I lost track of it, because it started sucking (returning lots more stale links than before), and altavista.digital.com burst upon the scene (anyone else remember "kayak sailing San Juan islands"?).
My guess would be that the meta-search switch initially happened when Excite bought them.
Eventually the player community solved its own problem by collectively deciding that legging (like camping in other games) was just Not Kosher and going after those suspected of it. (It's impressive to see a bunch of well-controlled mechs battling in an arena suddenly all turn in a coordinated attack on one unrepentant newbie who's running around taking leg shots.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=35eaccc3.6520 1896%40news.earthlink.net
Re (2), if you don't trust the security of the distributed ssh, sendmail, etc, why should you trust the distributed glibc, vi, grep...
It's a point others have made before. Basically, I figure it's a lot easier and smarter (from a cracker's point of view) to insert backdoors in things that already deal with sensitive info and/or are commonly setuid, like ssh, sendmail, bind, etc. If you have the access to substitute backdoored versions of packages on a distro tree, those would be the ones you'd go for, especially since many people tend to keep them more up-to-date because of their frequent security issues.
Put another way, why go to all the trouble of putting a backdoor in vi, which isn't even network-aware to start with, when you could just as easily (probably more easily, even) do it in sendmail or ssh with the added bonus that some people are going to be running your backdoor setuid root?
Crackers are lazy. They're not going to make more work for themselves than they have to to have their fun.
I'm also aware that this is no protection at all if the original source is compromised, as I seem to recall happened with OpenSSH not too long ago. But then again there's no way to deal with that short of doing a full code review before installing anything on a machine.
1) I really need or want something optimized for my hardware. Things like the kernel, obviously, or other hardware-intensive stuff (I don't do 3-D rendering but if I did it would fall into this category).
2) I'm concerned about the security of whatever I'm installing. This is things like SSH, bind, sendmail, etc. (Yes, I know nobody in their right mind uses bind or sendmail any more. Actually I use smail for mail, but if I did use sendmail still... And I'm trying to get djbdns running but I seem to be missing the part in the docs where it tells you what the "compile this so it runs by itself without requiring everything else djb ever wrote to be installed" flag is.)
3) I want features that aren't available in packaged stable- or testing-tree versions yet. This is why I ended up compiling AbiWord 2 from source, IIRC so I could get the mail-merge functionality. It's also why I compiled xchat from source last time I installed xchat, though I forget what features I was looking for there.
There are a few things I try not to compile from source if I can help it. Things like OpenOffice, XFree86, you know the drill. It just takes too damn long on a Celeron 433. (I know, I know. This summer I fully intend to build myself a nice almost-high-end Athlon system, before crowley turns 5 if possible.)
In N. America, shops try to play on this with psychology by having continuous sales... they're trying to convince buyers that there's currently a discount and if they don't hurry they will lose out. Of course, as the sales seem to go on all the time, they're not really having a sale.
Car salesmen have done this forever. "Once a year only! Year-end clearance! New cars from $5995!" Three weeks later: "Once a year only! Thanksgiving sale! New cars from $5995!" Pick a local dealership and watch their ads on TV from week to week. Note how not a day goes by that they don't have some kind of "special, one-time-only" sale, and how the "one-time-only" prices stay just about the same.
Of course the car dealerships have picked up a few things from the electronics industry, too. Mail-in rebate on a "free" PC = "guaranteed trade" on a car. And by now I'm sure we all know the games dealers play with manufacturer's rebates, dealer rebates, loyalty rebates...
Take a look at the low new-car prices in the newspaper ads and you'll notice that most of the best-looking ones are the price after all the possible rebates, trade-ins, etc. are applied, plus a minimum down payment of a couple grand. The real list price of that "$3000" new car is probably more like $10000 and an average customer can probably expect to pay around $7000.
So, yeah, commodity-luxury items are all coming to be sold the same way. Before long you'll hear corner drug dealers offering loyalty rebates and trade-ins...
the article says: "For two hours, Perry tried to fix it, uninstalling and reinstalling antivirus software, but the system continued to malfunction. The next day, Perry gave the PC to Gross to back up, fearing it might crash and lose valuable data."
Any technician that "fix things" repeatedly installing and uninstalling the same software doesn't deserve the job... but that's my opinion...
We can't really judge the competence of the IT guys from how the news article describes their actions. Even if this is InfoWeek, you still can't assume that the reporter is technically competent enough to accurately sum up the actions described to him by the people he interviewed in this case. Reporters misquote and describe poorly all the time (I've been quoted in a newspaper 3 or 4 times and I think once were my words accurately transcribed).
And to report the problem to police is wrong, there is an hierarchy in the company, if they thought that the company wasn't acting accordingly to the case, the should anonymously fill a complain with authorities...
I keep seeing people saying "These people should have gone through the proper channels." This argument doesn't fly on two counts:
1) They did in fact go to their supervisor first. Their supervisor took it up the chain and police action resulted. Once police action resulted, it became a criminal matter and anyone with actual knowledge of the crime is perfectly entitled to take what they know to the police.
2) There are two hierarchies at work here, not just one, and they operate in parallel, not serially. One is your office's corporate hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the operation of the business. The other is the legal hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the legality of various actions. In this case, both came into play -- but the corporate hierarchy can't trump the legal one, or preempt it.
If you want another reason why it's not only justified but required to go to the law or otherwise make sure law enforcement is informed of a felony in progress in the workplace: Your office policies are a matter of contract law between you and your employer, and contracts are not allowed to force one party to commit a crime, or become an accessory to a crime. So if a crime is being committed in the workplace, you are required to report it to the legal authorities (or see that it's reported) if you know about it, and you may be required to report it to your boss.
None of the above should be taken as saying the company wasn't in the right in firing them, but the workers are justified and required to go to the law with what they knew, even if they knew it as a result of violating corporate policy (in which case the company is justified in firing them for said violations). The company doesn't get veto rights of any kind over the reporting of a crime in the workplace.
To make an analogy, if you broke into an employee's office to play a prank, and found a rape in progress, would you call the cops, or would you call your boss (assuming your boss isn't the rapist)? At that point it ceases to matter why you were there, for purposes of who to report the crime to, but it may matter in that you might lose your job over it (which is, really, as it should be).
The story submitter says that these people were fired because they gave the company a bad light, but this wouldn't even be about the company, since they were being outsourced.
The way these things usually go is like this:
Very Big Outsourcing Customer: "One of your employees embarrassed one of our employees publicly. This embarrasses us publicly. What are you going to do about it?"
Small Outsourcing Provider: "We will fire that employee, as quickly as we think we can get away with it, on any pretext we can find, and make sure he serves as an example to other employees to keep their mouths shut about you and yours."
Big companies that buy from small companies exercise the power of the purse to get their way all the time, just like the US government does to make states pass legislation it can't itself pass (viz. 21 drinking age).
Where do you see the quality of journalism going in our world in the next hundred years? Are we on an unstoppable downward spiral to the point where real journalists have to go underground like Spider on the Feed, or do you think there's a point coming where the public suddenly wakes up to the (lack of) quality of the pap they're getting fed every night on TV?
Where do you get your "real news" from -- are there certain small magazines and papers you read regularly or do you have to just puzzle out the real story from reading between the lines in the articles the big guys print?
And in the current events category, what's your take on the whole SARS flap?
Now realize that this was, essentially, six months in a car, during which time it baked in the summer sun, froze on winter nights, experienced various jolts from speed bumps and potholes (one of which broke a rather sturdy piece of dishware) due to my rear shocks badly needing replacing, got liberally dusted with old-car grit, and just generally got neglected and left to fend for itself.
After time to warm to room temp, the Linux box booted right up. The monitor still works fine except the occasional jitter and sudden increase or decrease in vertical scan, and the fact that the vertical offset control no longer works. The DVD player works better -- before, it often would fail to recognize a disc until you inserted and ejected it several times, now it's just fine. I still haven't booted the Performa or the HP, but even if they lose their magic smoke, I have all the important stuff working.
It would not cost them a $50 support call to answer direct technical questions from experienced users if they would route questions properly based on their content. For example, if a user calls up, explains that he has changed network cards and asks to have the MAC entry changed in their database, it is not effective customer service to work through a thirty minute script only to end with an escalation to second line support when a direct bump to second line could have finished the call in one minute! (Example from my experience, obviously)
I once got in the middle of a thread on the MindSpring customer-service newsgroups and posted a suggestion that they institute an "experienced customer" line. The idea being you get certified through them that yes, you really know what you're doing (maybe by taking the same tests of proficiency that their employees take?) and after that you're given access to a support line staffed by people who don't insist on going through the "is it turned on?" parts of the script. Who talk to you as though you have a clue, in other words. Hell, they could not only make money on it by charging a token fee (maybe $5 per month), they could use it as a pool to recruit new tech folks.
Basically, phone centers need to program their script bots with something akin to keyword matching to determine when the caller is not going to be served by a cookbook of click heres and tab theres. In my experience, it is luck of the draw whether you get a first line rep who knows their stuff or is just following the script, and there are a lot of gradations between first and second line that could be subdivided more efficiently. Can it really be that cost ineffective to provide decent, non-irritating support to all levels of users, as opposed to just the clueless ones?
It's all about metrics. If you don't force the techs to follow the same script, you can't effectively compare their performance and weed out the ones that aren't making good numbers. (The fact that you can't do that short of actually listening in on a tech's calls from time to time, we'll ignore for now.) ISO 9000 can be a good thing in its place; likewise Six-Sigma. This kind of cookie-cutter tech support is the worst possible application of both, but management just sees a documented, reproducible process and finds it Good.
[referring to using 'tar' to do daily backups]
And people wonder why computer techs get a bad name.
Eh? There's nothing wrong with tar per se. For example, let's say you want to transport your backups over a network securely (i.e., via ssh). Your choices are:
1. Allow ssh access with no password (public-key access, preferably). I'm leery of this, because allowing anything like this to run automatically means entrusting all the auth data to the machine, where it can be compromised.
2. Copy the backups asynchronously from making them, allowing user-initiated authentication. This was the approach I opted for when I had to put together a backup system overnight at one company.
Couple of cron jobs that ran incremental tar's on a list of directories, storing them in the scratch partition with higher permissions (so user processes cleaning up after themselves couldn't nuke them accidentally). Then at my leisure I would run the transport script (mornings about 10 AM, typically) which would suck the backups across and copy them to the tape. This worked fine for the time the project was active. Note that I was backing up to tape, which meant I needed to manually rotate tapes anyway, so this system helped ensure that new backups didn't overwrite old ones if I came in late -- and we definitely did not want these backups exported to our network. I also had the advantage of only needing to worry about one server.
Just because tar is old and a bit... esoteric at times, doesn't mean it's therefore automatically a stupid idea to use it. If it's what you know, and it gets the job done, there's no need to feel guilty about not using a fancier system. Even Linus likes tar, because it's rock-solid reliable.
Now if you have (faint hope) a valid criticism of this guy's use of tar in his environment, then I'm all ears. But I doubt that, since he didn't give enough detail for you to have one.
I don't know why I even bother with this given it's an AC post, except that assholes like this are a major reason why Linux advocates get a bad rep.
Now I can have the radioshack pimply teenagre nervously listen to my orders of Anza Nodes and Niad Brasuhes not knowing if I'm for real or not.
It's a NIAD pulse converter and an ANZA brush. Jeez, you kids today.
Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
It's the natural trust some people have for authority. In the US, most people seem to have a greater degree of distrust in the government (in Europe and the UK it seems the balance goes more the other way -- my English friends are regularly shocked that I not only fail to be surprised by, but often expect, the US government acting in a shady, unethical manner.)
Another example of this is when people getting violently screwed by their Very Big Company employer assume that everything happening to them is legal, because "every company does it that way". A big, big example of this is salaried employees not getting paid overtime -- the onus is on the employer to prove you're exempt, and if they don't or can't, they are required to pay overtime. Even many HR folk seem to honestly be unaware of this rule of the game, and millions of salaried grunts are the losers.
[quoting a previous poster]:
Make Linus do what you want by impugning his technical judgment,
So has Linus now been elevated to a point where his thoughts, opinions, and judgement are beyond question? Sorry, I didn't get the memo on that one.
No one said Linus was infallible. However, he has shown, in rather public fashion, that he is a quite capable maintainer. I can't think of anyone, including second-in-command Alan Cox, who could have brought Linux this far without, overall, getting mired in the politics of open source vs. free software vs. proprietary software vs....
Advising against insulting Linus' technical judgement isn't putting him on a pedestal, it's merely recognizing the vast odds against some random person being more knowledgeable about the technical issues involved in maintaining the kernel than Linus himself (even if said "random person" happens to be a member of the set of kernel developers).
By the way, this very issue has cropped up before, with largely the same results. For quite some time PowerPC Linux couldn't get merged into the main tree, because the people who were maintaining linux-ppc kept trying to submit massive "patches" to get the whole tree in at once. And Linus told them what he's telling Keith now. And they went and sulked in their sandbox awhile longer, and finally it all worked out. (But they at least didn't try to force Linus' hand with a mass-mailing campaign.)
This is not a new issue, nor has Linus' opinion on it changed, nor, IMHO, is there good reason for it to change here.
Maybe it's just me, but this sticks out like a sore thumb every time I see a year in a Jon Katz piece.
In the early days Netscape sold a Gold version in retail which included the HTML editor whereas the downloadable verson was only the browser (Navigator).
Not quite. You could download the Gold version too, but you were expected to pay for it after the eval period expired. The base version had an indefinite eval period (i.e. it was never specified how long it was) and certain entities like nonprofits and educationals could use it free of charge.
its based on a car/unibody chassis so you wont flip over if someone breathes on you.
Actually this is bad. Car chassis are common in SUVs because they're light, hence require less engine power and thus less gas to get from point A to point B. The problem is you have a light chassis with a big tall SUV body on it -- which means high center of gravity. This is why SUVs are notorious for rolling, and all the marketing money in the world can't change how physics works.
SUVs with truck chassis are not as common, but are out there. They're heavy-bottomed, which makes them less prone to rollover and also sturdier in general (this is a chassis built to support a body used to haul stuff, after all), but they need more power, more gas, and thus more money.
If you really want a stable, roomy vehicle you can haul stuff around in, get a king-cab pickup, or get a light pickup and put a camper cap on it. With care and a little outlay for some furnishing, that can be a nice ride for passengers at a much more reasonable price than the SUVs that all the crazed soccer moms here in Northern Virginia drive.
(I swear, they must be snorting meth to keep up or something, the way they zip in and out of lanes with all of SIX INCHES OF CLEARANCE while carrying nine kids in the back.)
This despite the fact that if you tell Opera to masquerade as IE, thus fooling the site into letting you past the front page, most of the stuff works fine except a) some JavaScript that isn't essential anyway and b) some blatantly non-compliant HTML (which I tried to get fixed on ADA grounds, a request which was never actually denied but simply fell into the memory hole and disappeared).
I made a moderate-sized stink about this when I worked there and basically got told "Shut up, Linux is such a tiny fraction of the gamer market we don't give a shit."
Lynx on my system declines to auto-redirect without user intervention, so the site is actually semi-usable with it...
Some professor over in Britain blames the decline in British engineering on the steady growth in dominance of Lego over Meccano. I can believe it -- Meccano/Erector makes you figure out how to build it and Lego doesn't.
Lego is like a prefab model kit, Erector is more like the further projects in those 180-in-1 breadboard electronics kits.
How do you prevent abuse of the system? First ask yourself if it is easier to control a well-defined system or a pell mell system like we currently have. If the system were well defined, you would have the right, as in credit reporting, to dispute your record and to know what it is.
Have you ever actually tried to get an incorrect item removed from your credit report? I've been going back and forth with Equifax for nearly a year. I send them a registered letter, they do nothing. I send another, they do nothing. Then the next time I apply for credit I find out that yet again, I'm being asked to explain this same entry that should have been removed back in January 2001.
By law they're supposed to investigate and if they cannot verify within 30 days that the entry is accurate (meaning they discover it's incorrect or just can't make a positive determination that it's correct), they're required to remove it. Have they done so? Of course not.
Oh well, election year is coming up, might as well give my favorite elected official's office of constituent services something productive to do.
My advice for you: Get a life, learn how to think for yourself, and learn how to draw your own intelligent conclusions.
Well, let's just see what you wrote above that, Mr. Jeffy the All-Wise.
ok, how many police officers are there in this country? Probably millions. How many have been caught abusing their power? About 100/year. 100 out of 1 million is less than 1%.
Where do you get this suspiciously nice, round, 100 per year number? Or this suspiciously nice, round, 1 million number?
As it happens the Bureau of Justice Statistics says there are about 664,000 police officers in the US (http://www.theiacp.org/faq.htm). But that 100 number needs a lot of explanation, I suspect it's at least one, and possibly two, orders of magnitude higher.
Think about it: COPS HAVE JOBS TO DO OTHER THAN ABUSIVELY TRACK INNOCENT PEOPLE!!
Some do. But see the Detroit Free Press of a year or two ago. The state of Michigan's Law Enforcement Information Network was widely and systematically abused by Michigan police. It does happen and it is not harmless. And when there is a tool that can be abused to harass the innocent, but has yet to show significant utility in protecting those same law-abiding citizens, it should not be placed in government hands. (Sometimes it shouldn't be placed in those hands even if it does have such utility.)
It's also important to note that those cops you talk about got caught. This means that those who abuse the system would sooner or later be caught themselves and other cops thinking about abusing it would learn from it.
You should look up something called a "fallacy of logic", because you just committed a classic one here, equating the portion with the whole. "Some corrupt cops are caught on a regular basis, therefore all corrupt cops will eventually be caught." Your conclusion does not follow. In fact we should be drawing entirely the opposite conclusion: police abuse of power is so widespread that its exposure has become literally an everyday event. The proper response is to tighten the screws, but not on us -- on the cops.
Cops have a job to do. If they were to abuse it, they would hurt themselves and further injure the public by failing to catch truly wanted crooks. That would make them lousy cops.
Taking this in order, yes they do; they do and they do because they do; and the ones who do are, and there are far too many of them.
- This is the later Klingon look, but in TNG Worf says "something happened" to change the Klingons' appearance that they don't discuss. However, if there were originally two Klingon races, one with the "old" look and one with the new, maybe the old-style ones were forcibly changed to look like the others. Thus they (the formerly-old-style Klingons) would not like to talk about being forced to change their cultural identity.
- The first contact we have here might indeed be botched. We don't yet know. There might turn out to be something the Enterprise crew has done that the Klingons haven't found out about yet. Or maybe "first contact" is an ongoing event and this is just the first note of the movement.
- This Enterprise doesn't appear in Picard's set of models. But is it specifically stated that Picard's models are all the Enterprises? (I don't remember what ships exactly were included -- the carrier? the Space Shuttle? the wooden frigate?) Maybe he just had all the NCC-1701x Enterprises.
And I liked the theme. My favorite is still the Voyager intro (even though I never really liked the show) but this is a close second.
Do you seriously think an AMD chip can cause your house to burn down?
Do I think it's likely to? No. Do I think it's possible? Absolutely. And if I'm building PCs for sale to the public, I'm going to want to minimize the chance that somebody will do something totally daft that leads to a fire when my product fails.
Not to say I think this was a big concern to Gateway, but it's one of those things that floats around the back of a product director's head when he's deciding which side to lean toward.
the average commercial radio ad is an agonizing half a minute or longer of shouting propaganda and the public rado sponsorship spot is a highly tolerable 5 seconds or so.
I can't remember the last time I heard (or read myself) a sponsorship spot (not just the credit at the beginning of the program, but the actual spot you hear later) that was less than 20-30 seconds -- many run a full minute.