The problem is that "reclassification" betrays a mindset that thinks you can put the cat back in the bag. Once information is out, you have to assume it's out everywhere, for good, or you make bad security decisions. Conversely if it's not information that could conceivably impact your security decisions (i.e. "if the Chinese knew this we'd have to do X, Y and Z") then there's no reason to classify it other than simply to save face if it reveals something embarrassing (which isn't really a valid reason for classification).
Example: Once you (presumably inadvertently) "declassify" your private PGP key, you don't even bother trying to reclassify it (if you have a clue) -- you write it off as forever compromised and generate a new key. Continuing to act as though the previous key is still secret only reveals further info about you: that you are an idiot.
Fark.com won't allow story submissions from sources that require registration. Slashdot should do something similar.
As to the guy who asked "who cares, it's free, use bogus info to register blah blah blah", the problem with that approach is I end up with a Brazilian logins to remember -- unless I use the same user/pass for each one, which is a bad idea for reasons we all know. Maybe half a dozen times a year I have any incentive to read a NYT story, and most of those times it turns out that it's an AP story that the submitter could easily have linked from a better (read: more easily accessible) source by doing a quick Google News search.
If you had RTFA, it would have told you that because libraries are considered a public space like a street or town square, Constitutional guarantees of free speech trump any local law or institutional policy on "harassment". (Another area where this crops up routinely is laws designed to crack down on the homeless -- there have been a whole string of laws struck down because they went too far trying to stop homeless people from panhandling.)
The library may have its own policies on sexual harassment that government what the employees do as employees, but it cannot enforce them against patrons (or off-duty employees acting as patrons). The only reason private firms are even allowed to have such policies is because free speech guarantees do not apply (mostly) on private property -- the owner gets to dictate the rules (within the bounds of applicable laws) and if you don't like it you're free to leave. See a multitude of other court decisions on pornographic e-mails sent to co-workers, union organizing efforts, etc.
You're forgetting that the Orange Book criteria are very strict. You can't get a blanket certification for an operating system family, or even a single version running on all hardware. Only a complete PC configuration can be certified.
Windows NT 3.5, Service Pack 3, running on one of three specific PC configurations with no external communications (and no floppy drive, as I recall), reached C2 certification. NT 4.0 managed to get C2 certified running at Service Pack 6a with a special C2 update, again only on certain configurations. 3.51 was never certified at all. To the best of my knowledge, no Microsoft OS ever achieved or even began the process for B2 certification.
This is what the user guide for my wife's Latitude D505 says at the top of the section on installing Mini-PCI devices:
"[BIG YELLOW CAUTION ICON] CAUTION: FCC rules strictly prohibit users from installing 5-GHz (802.11a,802.11a/b, 802.11a/b/g) Wireless LAN Mini PCI cards. Under no circumstances should the user install such a device. Only trained Dell service personnel are authorized to install a 5-GHz Wireless LAN Mini PCI card."
I wouldn't put it past Dell to say that when it's not strictly true, but there appear to be some fairly stiff regulations in the 5 Ghz area. There's a fairly detailed writeup on just how complex the rules in the 5-GHz bands (there are several 5-GHz bands and two distinct sets of regulations, apparently) get. Caveat: apparently there were changes to the rules in October 2004 that loosened several restrictions considerably, but I don't know if an installer requirement still exists (or ever did).
...I hear people use it to search the web and find information, like the aforementioned ndiswrapper, ipw2200, rt2x00... madwifi, others...
That said, the state of Linux wireless networking today is similar to where its wired networking was say six or seven years ago -- a few solid drivers, a bunch of drivers that sorta work, and a bunch of drivers with promise but very experimental. When I bought a wireless card I took care to get one that I could find Linux native drivers for, an MSI US54G based on the Ralink RT2500 USB (RT2570) chipset. (The Ralink drivers are the basis of the rt2x00 project, which claims that the next-generation unified driver will do everything and make your coffee too, but last fall it was just getting to the point where you could associate to an AP). The situation is complicated by the fact that different versions of the same model card from the same manufacturer may have completely different chipsets -- not all Belkin F5D7050 adapters are Ralink-based like my wife's is. And even if you have the driver for the chipset, the device itself may be on a PCI ID the driver doesn't look for by default, necessitating a quick patch and recompile (I had to do this for my US54G to get the rt2570 driver to recognize it). Or the driver may not be preemption-safe, locking up your system when you up the interface unless you compile a custom version of the kernel without preemption enabled. There's a million niggly things you may run into, but most of them can be worked through or around in some way.
As time goes on, the good experimental drivers and the existing reliable drivers will develop full feature sets, the bad experimental drivers will be left in the dustbin, and it will become more common for manufacturers to follow Ralink's lead and open-source their drivers.
One reason for the lackluster support on many chips is that apparently US companies are bound by FCC regulations not to allow the TX power on their adapters to be boosted beyond a certain threshold, so e.g. Intel releases a Linux driver with a binary-only firmware file. If you look at the installation info for some wireless hardware (802.11a, I think) it will even say only FCC-certified installers can install the card in a host device (because of concerns about improper installation causing harmful interference). So there is a certain point beyond which manufacturers may never go and the community will have to reverse engineer if they want those drivers to be fully open-source (and said drivers may be illegal to use in the US or other places).
And if you want security on your network, oh boy, the fun you're going to have with wpa_supplicant (assuming it supports your card at all...)
Sure you can correct stuff later, but it is generally better in photography to try to get the best image you can at the moment you are taking it; you've then have got a lot more to work with! The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind...
I would mod parent up, but a) I have no mod points right now and b) it's already at 5.
I saw a ton of this when I worked at Kinko's. People would bring in crappy ripped-up, stained, faded and overexposed wallet photos for enlargement. They didn't want to understand that crappy input like that = crappy output. We could do basic stuff like white correction (one guy liked the white-corrected copy I made for him better than the original photo) and maybe if a customer really begged for it, red-eye editing, but any kind of complicated restoration was beyond us.
But by God, they had seen the whiz-bang scanner commercials on TV! The guy on TV just clicked a button and everything looked brand-new! Why won't you serve me, I'm a customer dammit! What do you mean a 100x50 JPG, won't look good when you blow it up to 60"x30"? (Actually happened. I had to print an 8x10 section of the enlarged image before the guy would believe me when I told him how crappy it would look.)
In support of your argument, you cite... a blog?
on
Web 3.0
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· Score: 2, Insightful
jg21 wrote:
Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?
First, you obviously didn't read the link in the post you're replying to. (Unless you're being equally tongue-in-cheek.)
One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...
Second, the popularity of a blog or the ideas therein does not in any way constitute a benchmark of the validity of those ideas. And the stats you quoted (that I snipped) aren't even that impressive. 55 posts in a hundred days? Less than 400 comments? jwz posts more often than that in his LiveJournal and gets that many comments in a week. Should we be talking about jwz as the new hotness in web technologies? Obviously he's more relevant than Web 2.0!
The topic of Web 2.0, and related offshoot movements like Identity 2.0, TV 2.0, Democracy 2.0, Law 2.0 is a major grassroots topic of interest. It's as simple as that.
So is the alien autopsy at Roswell, the number of people associated with the Clintons who've died, and abiotic oil. Just because people have an opinion about it doesn't make it relevant either.
"Web 2.0" is just the latest incarnation of herd behavior in VCs and pretentious web-design fanboys who take themselves way too seriously. Google did not set out to create a "Web 2.0 application" with Google Maps, nor, I would wager, did the guys who created Flickr or other tagging sites, or the developers of any successful site using Ajax. They just created something they thought would be useful and used a new tool (AJAX/Ruby on Rails/etc.) to make it a little spiffier than it would have been otherwise.
Web 2.0 is not the radical break with the past that everyone seems to want to believe it is: this is just the latest swing of the user-side/content-side pendulum back toward putting code on the user side. (For another increment of the swing, see Google Earth.)
You will experience a huge variation in quality between the Dell "consumer-grade" gear (Dimension desktops and Inspiron laptops) and the business gear (Optiplex/Latitude). Dell themselves almost admit as much in their equipment selector -- they classify Optiplex and Latitude as being for the user who needs stable, standard hardware that may not be bleeding-edge, while the Dimension/Inspiron lines are for people who want the absolute latest and snazziest hardware (but the implicit admission is that it may be less stable and prone to fail).
We use Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks where I work (a unit of a major research university) and the reliability is impressive -- we have a Latitude C600 that still sees near-daily classroom use, with no component failures in its history despite a fair degree of abuse. Most of the techs (including me) have Dell Latitudes as our personal laptops (except one guy who swears by ThinkPad). By contrast, my sister (who worked for the school system where we grew up) came to hate Dell when her office bought a batch of Inspiron laptops that began failing within months.
My wife bought a Latitude D505 in the fall of 2004 and it has yet to have a failure (except for the Ethernet jack cracking when she dropped the laptop on its rear edge with a cable plugged in). By contrast her previous laptop, a Compaq Presario 1200XL model purchased in 2001, had at least one major part fail every year -- the floppy drive, the PCMCIA slot, the keyboard, and it's on its third power adapter.
Compaq has never and probably will never make a reliable system -- I've used their desktops, laptops and even their horrible little 1U Proliant rack-mount servers (ca. 2001) and they were all uniformly crap (the rack gear had a 40% defective-on-arrival rate according to the tech who came out to replace the motherboards in our 2 defective Proliants out of the 4 Compaq was loaning us for evaluation). Dell non-consumer gear, by contrast, has always worked great for me (that eval process ended when we standardized on Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers which, you know, actually worked).
The nature of the online game environment is such that if I tell you "My company spent $100 million on our new game portal", you have no way of knowing if we built the world's greatest game site for half what it would have cost anyone else, or a crappy game site like EA.com that will die a lingering death.
I'm not just picking on EA -- I worked there the entire time EA.com (the game service, remember, ca. late 1999 - late 2000) was being built, and saw firsthand what a festering pile of crap it was turning into. The plan was good (the plan was a product of my previous employer, Kesmai Corporation, who were bought by EA so EA could get their hands on our plan for The Mother of All Online Gaming Destinations), but various bad decisions and compromises were made -- like outsourcing the support website implementation to Accenture, who decided to give us the dumbest database consultants I ever heard someone explain databases to, who further decided to use a brand-new product called Octane 2000 that, it turned out, they had never touched before.
Oh, guess what the main EA.com revenue source was going to be? Banner ads. Yeah.
When the service finally "launched" after an interminable open beta period, it was posting something like 10% of usage projections. It was a debacle of such magnitude that EA finally bought Pogo.com and (as far as I know) dropped EA.com in the corporate dustbin. Now www.ea.com is back to being the plain old EA corporate website. (They have an annoying Flash intro now with no Skip option, which to me sums up the EA corporate mentality toward online gaming very well.)
What most companies fundamentally don't get is, online games are not box games. If you're an online game developer, I want you to repeat that out loud. ONLINE GAMES ARE NOT BOX GAMES. EA tried to think of EA.com in terms of moving box game units, and I'm sure if that's what EA.com had been for it would have done well. But selling someone an online gaming account is not the same as selling them a CD (Kesmai's game service, GameStorm, didn't even require a CD install to download the games, though it was recommended to save time downloading a hundred megs of Air Warrior at 28.8K; the only thing the user ever had to go to the trouble of installing manually was the GS downloader, and the web interface did the rest).
The other massive obstacle besides shifting your paradigm is integration. Navigating around a game portal should not feel like browsing some kind of crappy online-games webring -- the forums, support, chat, games, and all the rest of it have to be integrated into a SINGLE SEAMLESS SITE. In the ideal case I can read a forum post, IM the poster by clicking on his name, and start a game right from the IM interface so we can mix it up online in whatever game we're both fans of. EA.com never achieved nearly that, and I don't know offhand what modern services might come close.
The interesting thing is that one of EA's goals for EA.com was to capture the "casual gamer" market. I see the casual gamer remains as difficult as ever to get money from...
Somewhere online this very idea was being discussed years ago and someone made a comment like "It's all fun and games until you think you're playing Grand Theft Auto but you really just killed 4 pedestrians." Damn, I wish I could find the original quote.
The dirty little secret of the broadband market is that even assuming everybody else in the world has broadband, it still doesn't matter (yet), because once all those broadband users are aggregated into a backbone link going out of their ISPs, the backbones and peering points just won't handle but so much traffic. If you ever want to realistically get 10 MBit/s from one side of the country to the other, the peering points in the middle have to handle orders of magnitude more bandwidth to make it work. And while they do handle magnitudes more, it's just not enough orders of magnitude to really deliver the experience.
Put in local terms, if I'm an ISP with 1000 users who have 10 Mbit/s broadband, and they're all doing their thing at top speed (say they're all amateur directors doing peer-to-peer movie trading), I have to be able to handle 10 Gbit/s of real throughput across my switches to let them max out their connections to each other. Now scale up to a backbone ISP that handles traffic for ~10 million broadband users -- how much do their core routers have to pump through the network at a time to deliver 10 MBit/s at peak usage times?
The bandwidth in the interior of the network isn't there yet, so faster connections at the edges do limited (if any) good. It reminds me of people I know who were spending extra money running 100 MBit Cat5 around their house when their main link to the Internet was 384K DSL (or even dialup) and they had no internal traffic to speak of. What's the point? Spend the money when it makes sense to, it's not like this is your only chance.
I also love when I see doom-and-gloom articles about how the broadband uptake in places like South Korea is so much higher than the US. So what? What's the backbone speed going out of South Korea and how much of the South Korean Internet traffic is jamming into relatively slow overseas (presuming they don't have interconnects through North Korea) links? From where I sit it looks like a feeding frenzy for the sake of coolness more than any real benefit they're getting out of it. Am I wrong? If so, make sure you fully explain the benefit South Korea has seen from massive broadband uptake and (for bonus points) how that translates into the same or similar benefits in the US market.
If you look at the state of the PC in the early-to-middle 1990s, there was a company called Stac Inc. that had a very popular disk-compression package called Stacker. Microsoft at that time had no drive compression in MS-DOS like Digital Research had in DR-DOS, so Stac was cleaning up in the compression market. In a nutshell, Microsoft began by making overtures to Stac to grant MS a license for the Stac software patents. They wanted a royalty-free license though, so Stac told them to go peddle their papers elsewhere. MS tried to intimidate Stac by showing them a projection of Stac's lost revenue if MS-DOS 6.0 included a competitor's technology (which was really just a red herring since they wanted to incorporate Stac's algorithm into DOS royalty-free anyway, which meant Stac would still be screwed). Stac held firm.
MS then included drive compression called "DoubleSpace" in the beta versions of MS-DOS 6.0 which by their own admission infringed Stac's patents. Even after admitting this, though, they stalled as long as they could on providing a beta version of DOS 6.0 to Stac for its inspection (which, when it did happen, confirmed to Stac that DOS 6.0 infringed). Microsoft again tried to strongarm Stac into granting that royalty-free license. During this time they were even issuing promotional materials that said they would grant a royalty-free license for DoubleSpace to OEMs (the algorithm they stole from Stac). Eventually MS wound up paying Stac $120 million and releasing DOS 6.21, the purpose of which was solely to remove DoubleSpace from DOS 6.2 (the current version at that time). MS-DOS 6.22 was released shortly thereafter to replace it with non-infringing disk compression.
Even back at the beginning, Microsoft was either knowingly or recklessly committing wholesale theft of others' code. MS-DOS 1.0 could be made to generate a Digital Research copyright notice.
All of which is by way of saying, don't tell me Microsoft is ruthless but not criminal. They very much are criminal -- their entire empire originated in a key act of copyright infringement which was never really redressed (probably because the courts were afraid to assess a fine of the full retail price of CP/M plus statutory damages for every copy of MS-DOS ever sold).
You know what watch I've had for ages (compared to anything else electronic I've ever owned)? My plain old Casio five-function "Alarm Chrono". It's been ticking away since January or so of 1991, with two battery changes (early 1998 and mid-2002) and one O-ring replacement (later in 2002, because when I replaced the battery I noticed the rubber O-ring was basically gone -- it's supposed to be replaced every 2 years...) It's basically this watch in a slightly different casing.
It just works. It's been scratched, dropped, banged against walls and metal objects, and through one major car accident. It survived three summers of vibration and sweating when I mowed lawns as a teenager for spending money, which killed the Timex that preceded it in a single season. It's been through the shower, rain, pools, etc. God alone knows how many times. Other than the battery, O-ring, and the band which is a cheap metal expandable I bought to replace the crappy plastic band the watch came with, it's still completely intact compared to when I bought it.
Some of the LED segments have gotten dim in fluorescent light, but they're still readable. It still keeps time with the manual-specified accuracy of 30 seconds per month, as far as I can tell. Certainly I only set it a couple of times a year and I don't remember it ever being more than a minute or so off. If it should ever break or, I dunno, they quit making batteries to fit it or something, I guess I'd buy another watch. Probably just the current version of this one, though.
It's simple, it's unobtrusive, it's accurate, and it's reliable. To me, for a watch, that is the definition of style.
In a situation like that, the corporation will typically have bought a volume license for Windows. The volume license comes with a CD that will recognize a volume-license key (an off-the-shelf standard copy of Windows/etc. won't) The VLK also bypasses product activation, because when MS announced activation, its large corporate customers screamed bloody murder about it. (Imagine having to manually activate on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 desktops after a major OS rollout.)
So if they own and are using a volume-licensed copy of Windows, no, they are not out of compliance. If they installed an off-the-shelf copy of XP Pro and cloned that, then yes, they are, even if they also own a volume license for that software.
Out of compliance means you have more installations than you have licenses for.
Not necessarily. It can mean you have installations which use the "wrong" licenses. If I have three licenses for Office XP Pro, and three computers installed using the same license (say, two users who used the VLK version of the install disk on their personal computers because it was handy and they have the key memorized, instead of digging up the single-user disc just to install it), or using different licenses than the ones I own (such as computers bought secondhand with Office installed, which I then bought but didn't bother reinstalling), I'm technically out of compliance.
It can also mean I actually did buy the software legitimately and install it properly, but simply can't find my certificate of authenticity or receipts. Bam, out of compliance.
Basically unless you have N licenses and X installations, where X = N, and the installations use the licenses in the manner assigned (i.e. VLK only on the allowed computers, single-user licenses used only once, etc.) you are "out of compliance". It doesn't have to mean you did anything illegal or even underhanded.
It's all very easy to say "well, just log in and edit the article." But how useful is that really? He can edit but it's just as easy to come back and change it so his edits are undone. Case in point: when I skimmed the article in writing a previous comment, the first line under "Wikipedia controversy" began "On November 29, 2005, SeniorAsshat wrote..." (This had been corrected by the time I reloaded the article... but for how long?)
When the problem is good work being replaced by trollery, advising people to do extra work to untroll the trolling is just ducking the issue. This is the issue facing Wikipedia and it needs to be taken by the horns and dealt with.
Not knowing what you meant by "MSM", I Googled "define:MSM". Amid a lot of stuff involving gay sex and sulfur compounds, I found the definition that worked... taken from Wikipedia.
Lest we forget, Sony is still shipping CDs with SunnComm's MediaMax DRM on them -- ten times as many as the XCP rootkit, in fact (that's 20 million CDs at last count, for those keeping score at home). It's still just as easy to defeat as it was in 2003, but if you make the mistake of letting it install like my wife did, it's fairly nasty. In particular it actually installs before you agree to the EULA -- the only difference between agreeing and declining is that if you decline, the software is not activated (but it remains installed).
If you have a device driver named Sbcphid.sys (which shows up as a hidden non-plug-and-play device named Sbcphid when active), you've got MediaMax and should remove it.
Only the EFF has mentioned MediaMax in the various legal claims against Sony, and Sony has remained silent about it in public as well. Obviously they're not sorry about using DRM at all -- they're just sorry they got caught.
Awhile ago I posted my opinion that "(we)blog" is a really dumb term; originating in a needlessly confusing coinage and so vague as to be essentially meaning-free at this point. (Apologies to Jorn Barger, but that's how I feel.) Back when the infamous JonKatz posted his grand weblog article on Slashdot, a large minority of the commenters apparently had similar feelings. When I expressed the sentiment on Slashdot earlier this year, I got flamed (though again a significant minority agreed that it's potentially confusing and frankly just sounds dumb). What a difference six years makes, eh?
At this point I'm hoping blogs will do what portals did (you all remember portal mania, right? No?) -- become so blatantly overused and silly to the point of self-parody that they just dry up and blow away. What used to be "portals" continue to exist; they are known by the more pedestrian but more meaningful name "websites". Here's hoping all these "blogs" will become "journals" and "news" again.
This "story" is a link to this guy's press release on "eMediaWire" a "newswire" (and I use that term loosely) of PR Web. PR Web is a service that distributes press releases free of charge.
In essence this "news story" is no more authoritative than me posting on LiveJournal that I have conclusive proof that the moon is made of green cheese, and I have submitted a paper to the presentation committe of the IAU to demonstrate my proof at their next conference.
I'm not an Oracle user or admin, but I know many who are, some of whom have been for a decade or more, and their opinion of Oracle is almost uniformly negative. It's exactly like others have said here: you can get Oracle to do anything... eventually, and after spending multiple megabucks over the life of the project on consultants, Oracle support contracts, and accumulated aggravation as Oracle's legendary salespeople try to high-pressure you into yet another purchase you are pretty sure you don't need. For complexity and cruftiness it apparently evokes sendmail rewritten by a team of monkeys on crack at VT100 terminals with serious serial line noise issues, and you don't even get m4 to make your life that tiny bit easier.
Oracle was once highly regarded and apparently had a product that justified it, but it seems like they've been coasting on their reputation and CxO MEGO factor ("Oracle costs millions of dollars, surely it can't be bad, no one would buy it... right?") the past several years. (Accenture/Andersen Consulting, who I have worked with on a project at a previous employer, is in the same boat -- they charged us insane amounts of money to help us set up a CRM solution, promised us the moon, and when the rubber hit the road we had to explain to our database "expert" from AC what a relational database was, and what tables, records and files were. That pretty much cured my inferiority complex over AC refusing to even look at me for jobs because I have no college degree.)
I think the whole signature thing is stupid. I asked one merchant about them, and she said that she just throws them out at the end of the day.
Apologies if the merchant in question is someone you like or are close to, but: she's a moron. I handled till receipts of one kind or another in various jobs for a total of about 4 years. We were required to save the credit/debit card receipts for our own protection. It wasn't about protecting the customer at all (or at least, not so much), it was so that if the customer disputed a charge, we could immediately pull the receipt (or rather, the corporate office could) and demonstrate prima facie that a physical person wielding that card actually entered our shop and purchased goods or services for which they signed a charge slip as payment. If it were fraudulent and it slipped by us, it might still be reversed, but at least we would have performed some minimum amount of fiduciary duty rather than being a complete idiot about it.
If it had ever happened (although it didn't) that a customer disputed a charge and we couldn't do that, then it's game over, case closed, zip up your fly. Charges automatically reversed, and our merchant fees would go up if it happened often enough.
If word ever got out amongst this merchant's customers that she threw away their charge slips, a) they could start reversing charges willy-nilly on her and she'd end up broke and with no credit card capability and no recourse against either one, b) they'd likely be really pissed off that she was so cavalier with a sensitive legal document like that. That's how a lot of bad guys get your info in the first place -- dumpster-diving. If she's going to throw stuff like that away, she needs to burn it (your basic shredding isn't good enough, it's still too easy to piece that stuff together even with a crosscut shred).
Note that there's no point to starting a DSW on this, because Taco is actively posting with his UID of 1 (damn the bastard; usually if I get up-moderated I'm one of the oldest two or three visible on the comment page).
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Example: Once you (presumably inadvertently) "declassify" your private PGP key, you don't even bother trying to reclassify it (if you have a clue) -- you write it off as forever compromised and generate a new key. Continuing to act as though the previous key is still secret only reveals further info about you: that you are an idiot.
As to the guy who asked "who cares, it's free, use bogus info to register blah blah blah", the problem with that approach is I end up with a Brazilian logins to remember -- unless I use the same user/pass for each one, which is a bad idea for reasons we all know. Maybe half a dozen times a year I have any incentive to read a NYT story, and most of those times it turns out that it's an AP story that the submitter could easily have linked from a better (read: more easily accessible) source by doing a quick Google News search.
The library may have its own policies on sexual harassment that government what the employees do as employees, but it cannot enforce them against patrons (or off-duty employees acting as patrons). The only reason private firms are even allowed to have such policies is because free speech guarantees do not apply (mostly) on private property -- the owner gets to dictate the rules (within the bounds of applicable laws) and if you don't like it you're free to leave. See a multitude of other court decisions on pornographic e-mails sent to co-workers, union organizing efforts, etc.
Windows NT 3.5, Service Pack 3, running on one of three specific PC configurations with no external communications (and no floppy drive, as I recall), reached C2 certification. NT 4.0 managed to get C2 certified running at Service Pack 6a with a special C2 update, again only on certain configurations. 3.51 was never certified at all. To the best of my knowledge, no Microsoft OS ever achieved or even began the process for B2 certification.
If you want more details, look at the C2 evaluation reports.
"[BIG YELLOW CAUTION ICON] CAUTION: FCC rules strictly prohibit users from installing 5-GHz (802.11a,802.11a/b, 802.11a/b/g) Wireless LAN Mini PCI cards. Under no circumstances should the user install such a device. Only trained Dell service personnel are authorized to install a 5-GHz Wireless LAN Mini PCI card."
I wouldn't put it past Dell to say that when it's not strictly true, but there appear to be some fairly stiff regulations in the 5 Ghz area. There's a fairly detailed writeup on just how complex the rules in the 5-GHz bands (there are several 5-GHz bands and two distinct sets of regulations, apparently) get. Caveat: apparently there were changes to the rules in October 2004 that loosened several restrictions considerably, but I don't know if an installer requirement still exists (or ever did).
That said, the state of Linux wireless networking today is similar to where its wired networking was say six or seven years ago -- a few solid drivers, a bunch of drivers that sorta work, and a bunch of drivers with promise but very experimental. When I bought a wireless card I took care to get one that I could find Linux native drivers for, an MSI US54G based on the Ralink RT2500 USB (RT2570) chipset. (The Ralink drivers are the basis of the rt2x00 project, which claims that the next-generation unified driver will do everything and make your coffee too, but last fall it was just getting to the point where you could associate to an AP). The situation is complicated by the fact that different versions of the same model card from the same manufacturer may have completely different chipsets -- not all Belkin F5D7050 adapters are Ralink-based like my wife's is. And even if you have the driver for the chipset, the device itself may be on a PCI ID the driver doesn't look for by default, necessitating a quick patch and recompile (I had to do this for my US54G to get the rt2570 driver to recognize it). Or the driver may not be preemption-safe, locking up your system when you up the interface unless you compile a custom version of the kernel without preemption enabled. There's a million niggly things you may run into, but most of them can be worked through or around in some way.
As time goes on, the good experimental drivers and the existing reliable drivers will develop full feature sets, the bad experimental drivers will be left in the dustbin, and it will become more common for manufacturers to follow Ralink's lead and open-source their drivers.
One reason for the lackluster support on many chips is that apparently US companies are bound by FCC regulations not to allow the TX power on their adapters to be boosted beyond a certain threshold, so e.g. Intel releases a Linux driver with a binary-only firmware file. If you look at the installation info for some wireless hardware (802.11a, I think) it will even say only FCC-certified installers can install the card in a host device (because of concerns about improper installation causing harmful interference). So there is a certain point beyond which manufacturers may never go and the community will have to reverse engineer if they want those drivers to be fully open-source (and said drivers may be illegal to use in the US or other places).
And if you want security on your network, oh boy, the fun you're going to have with wpa_supplicant (assuming it supports your card at all...)
Sure you can correct stuff later, but it is generally better in photography to try to get the best image you can at the moment you are taking it; you've then have got a lot more to work with! The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind...
I would mod parent up, but a) I have no mod points right now and b) it's already at 5.
I saw a ton of this when I worked at Kinko's. People would bring in crappy ripped-up, stained, faded and overexposed wallet photos for enlargement. They didn't want to understand that crappy input like that = crappy output. We could do basic stuff like white correction (one guy liked the white-corrected copy I made for him better than the original photo) and maybe if a customer really begged for it, red-eye editing, but any kind of complicated restoration was beyond us.
But by God, they had seen the whiz-bang scanner commercials on TV! The guy on TV just clicked a button and everything looked brand-new! Why won't you serve me, I'm a customer dammit! What do you mean a 100x50 JPG, won't look good when you blow it up to 60"x30"? (Actually happened. I had to print an 8x10 section of the enlarged image before the guy would believe me when I told him how crappy it would look.)
Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?
First, you obviously didn't read the link in the post you're replying to. (Unless you're being equally tongue-in-cheek.)
One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...
Second, the popularity of a blog or the ideas therein does not in any way constitute a benchmark of the validity of those ideas. And the stats you quoted (that I snipped) aren't even that impressive. 55 posts in a hundred days? Less than 400 comments? jwz posts more often than that in his LiveJournal and gets that many comments in a week. Should we be talking about jwz as the new hotness in web technologies? Obviously he's more relevant than Web 2.0!
The topic of Web 2.0, and related offshoot movements like Identity 2.0, TV 2.0, Democracy 2.0, Law 2.0 is a major grassroots topic of interest. It's as simple as that.
So is the alien autopsy at Roswell, the number of people associated with the Clintons who've died, and abiotic oil. Just because people have an opinion about it doesn't make it relevant either.
"Web 2.0" is just the latest incarnation of herd behavior in VCs and pretentious web-design fanboys who take themselves way too seriously. Google did not set out to create a "Web 2.0 application" with Google Maps, nor, I would wager, did the guys who created Flickr or other tagging sites, or the developers of any successful site using Ajax. They just created something they thought would be useful and used a new tool (AJAX/Ruby on Rails/etc.) to make it a little spiffier than it would have been otherwise.
Web 2.0 is not the radical break with the past that everyone seems to want to believe it is: this is just the latest swing of the user-side/content-side pendulum back toward putting code on the user side. (For another increment of the swing, see Google Earth.)
We use Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks where I work (a unit of a major research university) and the reliability is impressive -- we have a Latitude C600 that still sees near-daily classroom use, with no component failures in its history despite a fair degree of abuse. Most of the techs (including me) have Dell Latitudes as our personal laptops (except one guy who swears by ThinkPad). By contrast, my sister (who worked for the school system where we grew up) came to hate Dell when her office bought a batch of Inspiron laptops that began failing within months.
My wife bought a Latitude D505 in the fall of 2004 and it has yet to have a failure (except for the Ethernet jack cracking when she dropped the laptop on its rear edge with a cable plugged in). By contrast her previous laptop, a Compaq Presario 1200XL model purchased in 2001, had at least one major part fail every year -- the floppy drive, the PCMCIA slot, the keyboard, and it's on its third power adapter.
Compaq has never and probably will never make a reliable system -- I've used their desktops, laptops and even their horrible little 1U Proliant rack-mount servers (ca. 2001) and they were all uniformly crap (the rack gear had a 40% defective-on-arrival rate according to the tech who came out to replace the motherboards in our 2 defective Proliants out of the 4 Compaq was loaning us for evaluation). Dell non-consumer gear, by contrast, has always worked great for me (that eval process ended when we standardized on Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers which, you know, actually worked).
I'm not just picking on EA -- I worked there the entire time EA.com (the game service, remember, ca. late 1999 - late 2000) was being built, and saw firsthand what a festering pile of crap it was turning into. The plan was good (the plan was a product of my previous employer, Kesmai Corporation, who were bought by EA so EA could get their hands on our plan for The Mother of All Online Gaming Destinations), but various bad decisions and compromises were made -- like outsourcing the support website implementation to Accenture, who decided to give us the dumbest database consultants I ever heard someone explain databases to, who further decided to use a brand-new product called Octane 2000 that, it turned out, they had never touched before.
Oh, guess what the main EA.com revenue source was going to be? Banner ads. Yeah.
When the service finally "launched" after an interminable open beta period, it was posting something like 10% of usage projections. It was a debacle of such magnitude that EA finally bought Pogo.com and (as far as I know) dropped EA.com in the corporate dustbin. Now www.ea.com is back to being the plain old EA corporate website. (They have an annoying Flash intro now with no Skip option, which to me sums up the EA corporate mentality toward online gaming very well.)
What most companies fundamentally don't get is, online games are not box games. If you're an online game developer, I want you to repeat that out loud. ONLINE GAMES ARE NOT BOX GAMES. EA tried to think of EA.com in terms of moving box game units, and I'm sure if that's what EA.com had been for it would have done well. But selling someone an online gaming account is not the same as selling them a CD (Kesmai's game service, GameStorm, didn't even require a CD install to download the games, though it was recommended to save time downloading a hundred megs of Air Warrior at 28.8K; the only thing the user ever had to go to the trouble of installing manually was the GS downloader, and the web interface did the rest).
The other massive obstacle besides shifting your paradigm is integration. Navigating around a game portal should not feel like browsing some kind of crappy online-games webring -- the forums, support, chat, games, and all the rest of it have to be integrated into a SINGLE SEAMLESS SITE. In the ideal case I can read a forum post, IM the poster by clicking on his name, and start a game right from the IM interface so we can mix it up online in whatever game we're both fans of. EA.com never achieved nearly that, and I don't know offhand what modern services might come close.
The interesting thing is that one of EA's goals for EA.com was to capture the "casual gamer" market. I see the casual gamer remains as difficult as ever to get money from...
Somewhere online this very idea was being discussed years ago and someone made a comment like "It's all fun and games until you think you're playing Grand Theft Auto but you really just killed 4 pedestrians." Damn, I wish I could find the original quote.
Put in local terms, if I'm an ISP with 1000 users who have 10 Mbit/s broadband, and they're all doing their thing at top speed (say they're all amateur directors doing peer-to-peer movie trading), I have to be able to handle 10 Gbit/s of real throughput across my switches to let them max out their connections to each other. Now scale up to a backbone ISP that handles traffic for ~10 million broadband users -- how much do their core routers have to pump through the network at a time to deliver 10 MBit/s at peak usage times?
The bandwidth in the interior of the network isn't there yet, so faster connections at the edges do limited (if any) good. It reminds me of people I know who were spending extra money running 100 MBit Cat5 around their house when their main link to the Internet was 384K DSL (or even dialup) and they had no internal traffic to speak of. What's the point? Spend the money when it makes sense to, it's not like this is your only chance.
I also love when I see doom-and-gloom articles about how the broadband uptake in places like South Korea is so much higher than the US. So what? What's the backbone speed going out of South Korea and how much of the South Korean Internet traffic is jamming into relatively slow overseas (presuming they don't have interconnects through North Korea) links? From where I sit it looks like a feeding frenzy for the sake of coolness more than any real benefit they're getting out of it. Am I wrong? If so, make sure you fully explain the benefit South Korea has seen from massive broadband uptake and (for bonus points) how that translates into the same or similar benefits in the US market.
They built a multibillion-dollar empire on their other known act of IP infringement, so the system is manifestly not working.
MS then included drive compression called "DoubleSpace" in the beta versions of MS-DOS 6.0 which by their own admission infringed Stac's patents. Even after admitting this, though, they stalled as long as they could on providing a beta version of DOS 6.0 to Stac for its inspection (which, when it did happen, confirmed to Stac that DOS 6.0 infringed). Microsoft again tried to strongarm Stac into granting that royalty-free license. During this time they were even issuing promotional materials that said they would grant a royalty-free license for DoubleSpace to OEMs (the algorithm they stole from Stac). Eventually MS wound up paying Stac $120 million and releasing DOS 6.21, the purpose of which was solely to remove DoubleSpace from DOS 6.2 (the current version at that time). MS-DOS 6.22 was released shortly thereafter to replace it with non-infringing disk compression.
Even back at the beginning, Microsoft was either knowingly or recklessly committing wholesale theft of others' code. MS-DOS 1.0 could be made to generate a Digital Research copyright notice.
All of which is by way of saying, don't tell me Microsoft is ruthless but not criminal. They very much are criminal -- their entire empire originated in a key act of copyright infringement which was never really redressed (probably because the courts were afraid to assess a fine of the full retail price of CP/M plus statutory damages for every copy of MS-DOS ever sold).
It just works. It's been scratched, dropped, banged against walls and metal objects, and through one major car accident. It survived three summers of vibration and sweating when I mowed lawns as a teenager for spending money, which killed the Timex that preceded it in a single season. It's been through the shower, rain, pools, etc. God alone knows how many times. Other than the battery, O-ring, and the band which is a cheap metal expandable I bought to replace the crappy plastic band the watch came with, it's still completely intact compared to when I bought it.
Some of the LED segments have gotten dim in fluorescent light, but they're still readable. It still keeps time with the manual-specified accuracy of 30 seconds per month, as far as I can tell. Certainly I only set it a couple of times a year and I don't remember it ever being more than a minute or so off. If it should ever break or, I dunno, they quit making batteries to fit it or something, I guess I'd buy another watch. Probably just the current version of this one, though.
It's simple, it's unobtrusive, it's accurate, and it's reliable. To me, for a watch, that is the definition of style.
So if they own and are using a volume-licensed copy of Windows, no, they are not out of compliance. If they installed an off-the-shelf copy of XP Pro and cloned that, then yes, they are, even if they also own a volume license for that software.
Out of compliance means you have more installations than you have licenses for.
Not necessarily. It can mean you have installations which use the "wrong" licenses. If I have three licenses for Office XP Pro, and three computers installed using the same license (say, two users who used the VLK version of the install disk on their personal computers because it was handy and they have the key memorized, instead of digging up the single-user disc just to install it), or using different licenses than the ones I own (such as computers bought secondhand with Office installed, which I then bought but didn't bother reinstalling), I'm technically out of compliance.
It can also mean I actually did buy the software legitimately and install it properly, but simply can't find my certificate of authenticity or receipts. Bam, out of compliance.
Basically unless you have N licenses and X installations, where X = N, and the installations use the licenses in the manner assigned (i.e. VLK only on the allowed computers, single-user licenses used only once, etc.) you are "out of compliance". It doesn't have to mean you did anything illegal or even underhanded.
When the problem is good work being replaced by trollery, advising people to do extra work to untroll the trolling is just ducking the issue. This is the issue facing Wikipedia and it needs to be taken by the horns and dealt with.
Not knowing what you meant by "MSM", I Googled "define:MSM". Amid a lot of stuff involving gay sex and sulfur compounds, I found the definition that worked... taken from Wikipedia.
If you have a device driver named Sbcphid.sys (which shows up as a hidden non-plug-and-play device named Sbcphid when active), you've got MediaMax and should remove it.
Only the EFF has mentioned MediaMax in the various legal claims against Sony, and Sony has remained silent about it in public as well. Obviously they're not sorry about using DRM at all -- they're just sorry they got caught.
At this point I'm hoping blogs will do what portals did (you all remember portal mania, right? No?) -- become so blatantly overused and silly to the point of self-parody that they just dry up and blow away. What used to be "portals" continue to exist; they are known by the more pedestrian but more meaningful name "websites". Here's hoping all these "blogs" will become "journals" and "news" again.
In essence this "news story" is no more authoritative than me posting on LiveJournal that I have conclusive proof that the moon is made of green cheese, and I have submitted a paper to the presentation committe of the IAU to demonstrate my proof at their next conference.
Oracle was once highly regarded and apparently had a product that justified it, but it seems like they've been coasting on their reputation and CxO MEGO factor ("Oracle costs millions of dollars, surely it can't be bad, no one would buy it... right?") the past several years. (Accenture/Andersen Consulting, who I have worked with on a project at a previous employer, is in the same boat -- they charged us insane amounts of money to help us set up a CRM solution, promised us the moon, and when the rubber hit the road we had to explain to our database "expert" from AC what a relational database was, and what tables, records and files were. That pretty much cured my inferiority complex over AC refusing to even look at me for jobs because I have no college degree.)
I think the whole signature thing is stupid. I asked one merchant about them, and she said that she just throws them out at the end of the day.
Apologies if the merchant in question is someone you like or are close to, but: she's a moron. I handled till receipts of one kind or another in various jobs for a total of about 4 years. We were required to save the credit/debit card receipts for our own protection. It wasn't about protecting the customer at all (or at least, not so much), it was so that if the customer disputed a charge, we could immediately pull the receipt (or rather, the corporate office could) and demonstrate prima facie that a physical person wielding that card actually entered our shop and purchased goods or services for which they signed a charge slip as payment. If it were fraudulent and it slipped by us, it might still be reversed, but at least we would have performed some minimum amount of fiduciary duty rather than being a complete idiot about it.
If it had ever happened (although it didn't) that a customer disputed a charge and we couldn't do that, then it's game over, case closed, zip up your fly. Charges automatically reversed, and our merchant fees would go up if it happened often enough.
If word ever got out amongst this merchant's customers that she threw away their charge slips, a) they could start reversing charges willy-nilly on her and she'd end up broke and with no credit card capability and no recourse against either one, b) they'd likely be really pissed off that she was so cavalier with a sensitive legal document like that. That's how a lot of bad guys get your info in the first place -- dumpster-diving. If she's going to throw stuff like that away, she needs to burn it (your basic shredding isn't good enough, it's still too easy to piece that stuff together even with a crosscut shred).
Note that there's no point to starting a DSW on this, because Taco is actively posting with his UID of 1 (damn the bastard; usually if I get up-moderated I'm one of the oldest two or three visible on the comment page).