Your statistics bear me out. I said there had been hundreds, perhaps by now, thousands of arrests. You cited 254 convictions in 1994 and 36 in 1997. So there have been several hundred convictions, at least, so at least that many arrests, probably more. The statisitic cited that fewer and fewer violaters are prosecuted is interesting. I wonder why?
Some criminals will get unregistered guns. But many, many violent criminals are... stupid, and will get caught. Hundreds, perhaps by now thousands, of people have been arrested when the background check revealed they had a criminal record making it a crime/parole violation for them to purchase a firearm. The gun lobby's argument against the background check was that criminals are too smart to buy their guns legally. It's bad enough not to own up to being wrong, but to marshall the same argument again for a different case just seems like such a... what's the word... limbaugh.
You make some very good points. But I don't know if the distinction you cite ever leads to good design. The software I've found most usable started with the UI, and then created the code to accomplish what the user desired. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all designs can work that way, I'm just saying the easiest to use seems to have been designed that way. The absolute most Harry Horsesh*t designs were the ones that took every possible mechanism in the underlying engine and just exposed them to the user. (I have actually seen a program targetted at industrial printing that exposed all font choices to the users. Not just point size and style, but also the things you almost never see, like seperate horizontal and vertical adjustments for the height. The target printer had rougly the resolution of a nine pin dot matrix! The target audience was minimum wage, english as a second language, computer illiterate operators who needed to put a one line description on a product!)
You wrote: Corel, with an objectively inferior product
I feel I am very objective in this. I used Word Perfect exclusively for a number of years and used Word for the past three. Word Perfect, for my uses, is a significantly better product, except for the compatibility issue. Unfortunately, the compatibility issue trumps the others.
If I had to pick five ways in which it is better:
1) Tables - WP has great table support and you can use them as a mini-spreadsheet or as a great formatting tool. Word has weak table support, I suppose because they want you to embed an excel spreadsheet instead. This imposes constraints on my customers (they have to have Excel) and has caused versioning and configuration problems.
2) Flaky behavior. Whenever I make a document of any length in Word, and any complexity, it (seemingly) randomly reformats text, renumbers lists, incorrectly "correct" my formatting, etc. It happens in WP, but not nearly as often. And once you get it right, it stays that way.
3) Reveal Codes. When WP does do something unexpected, you can reveal the formatting codes it inserted and edit or delete them to get back to what you want.
4) Doesn't run VB. No macro viruses
5) Graphics. In word, once a graphic has been imported, it converts it to some weird word format. You can't go back. In WP, you can go back.
I've always wanted to have a multi-day demo, where I would use a closed box and marbles, similiar to a Pachinko machine. There would be marbles of slightly different sizes, different weights and different colors. (Only the different colors would be immediately obvious to the observers.) I would put marbles in the top and they would come out of the bottom. Different places depending on certain criteria. For example, on the first day the red marbles would come out on the left, the green marbles would come out on the right and the blue in the middle. I would ask the students to a) predict where the marble I was putting in would come out, and b) how the result was accomplished. At the end of the class, I would open the box to reveal the various mechanisms. I would have several of these boxes, making the deductions increasingly difficult each day.
Both sites are hopelessly slashdotted. (We only slashdot the ones we love...) Here is an old page listing reasons why we should use this product. Reasons and another one, even older, that shows a picture. Picture
First Posting On the Wayback Machine (Correct)
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
Here is a link to the first posting available on the Wayback Machine. Wayback
It is from Dec 21st, 1997 and talks about how Netscape may be in danger from Internet Explorer. Can CmdrTaco pick 'em or what?
jotaeleemeese wrote: >You are right. Also remember that simplicity is inversely proportional to usefulness and flexibility.
This statement is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. Arguing by ananlogy, were automobiles that required exacting choke hand-adjustments, hand cranking, manual shifting, manual clutching, etc. more useful and flexible than a modern car. Don't get me wrong, I like manual shifting, both my cars are manuals, but I would be hard pressed to say it makes the car more useful. As for more flexible? Perhaps. On one hand, I can immediately go into the gear I want. But I can do that in most automatic transmissions too. I can use a low gear to help me go downhill. No wait, I can do that in the automatic too. Hmm... I can't think of anything... And on the other hand, a manual transmission is no fun at all in a traffic jam, resulting in shorter life on all transaxle components. And that goes double or triple if you pull a trailer.
In a similiar vein, embedded deep in UNIX are ways to set virtually every parameter you could imagine for communications through a serial port. Is this more useful than USB? You set those parameters because of shortcomings of the serial port, not because they are intrinsically desirable.
It would take a community effort, or perhaps a bot, but if enough of the scammers were inundated with seemingly interested replies, say a few thousand, they would have to give up. There may be a legitimate chump buried in all that guff, but how would they ever find them?
Most of your email addressed the difficulty in estimating market share, not percentage-of-instalations, which is of course a different number, and that is what I responded to. However, for people interested in Gartner statistics, market share may be much more interesting than installed base. I don't know what the current numbers are, but in past years new computer buyers had 5-10 times the add-on purchases (peripherals, software, furniture, etc) than existing users. So, for businesses, new purchasers are important.
Many people retort that Macs and Linux Boxen are like BMW's, so a small market share doesn't matter. This may be true, but to most add-on manufacturers, if something represents a tiny fraction of the market, even if you get a substantial premium, it is still a tiny fraction of the bottom line. A good example is auto parts (something I know about, professionally). Diesel passenger cars made by BMW, Mercedes, Volvo etc may command a premium but they are just an annoyance when it comes to after market replacement parts (at least to the big guys). They account for a fraction of one percent of their revenues. Any effort they spend in marketing and new product development will go towards the 99%+ of the market, and that is absolutely the correct business decision. The only reason they even support the desiels is to say they have 100% parts coverage, a tactically important claim (getting the first call from a mechanic shop is a crucial business win.)
Mac and Linux probably have more of a market percentage than the desiel vs. gasoline comparison. But Linux desktop users historically are not willing to pay a premium for software for Linux. Just look at the impact selling the best Word Processor for Linux/Unix had on Corel. Mac users will pay a premium, and they do require substantially less after sales support so a 4% market share may be viable, if they truly are at the 4% level.
The problem in this whole exercise is that both Linux and Macintosh are probably close to the error bar size no matter how you measure it.
It may be IDG and Gartner are blowing smoke, but if so, they are going extraordinarily far out of their way to obfuscate. Macintosh sales are very easy to estimate, since only one company (Apple) makes them, and the number of each model they ship is in the quarterly report.
It is in estimating the number of PC clones sold that they have a challenge. Worse yet, estimating how many are actually used for Linux.
FWIW, I know that the color in old photographs are sometimes 'restored' by applying algorhithms that 'know' how color is most likely to fade. Perhaps this technique could also be applied to video.
Horrible Deal? Which part of the deal is horrible? The part where they develop and deliver television shows, pay to have them part of your local cable, and don't charge you anything for them? Or the part where they say - Hey someone has to pay for them? Or the part where they choose advertisments? Or the part where advertisers are paying less because no one is watching them.
It may be the end of free shows, but it they are not doing anything horrible.
PD wrote: These are actual quotes from the article... Clearly, Ransom Love has fought no battles, written no code, has not earned any glory for his name. His heart is not truly Klingon.
RIGHT ON DUDE!! I have written the TRUE MEANING of a few of those quotes below. UP THE REVOLUTION! ***** local languages and channels (Obviously part of the Klingon Plan to subjegate or destroy all other species. And their television channels.)
sell their products on a global basis (This of course is where those Klingons all start, but the next thing you know you're getting in the wazoo from a Klingon shouting _Give it to me, my Linux Love Slave!_)
Supportable business quality product (Supporting a business quality product - my god, these klingons have no decency.)
facilitating a global distribution (yeah, and we all know what _distribution_ means in Klingon)
Internet client interfaces become dominant (yeah, right, buddy. For _Internet client interfaces_ we know you mean _Klingons_!)
continue to make inroads (nuff said!) ******** Geez! Who does this doofus think he is dealing with!? A bunch of dweebs!!??
I've posted this point several times before, but I have never read a decent response to it, just reiterations of belief. Why is that?
It seems to be a religious belief among a large group of slashdot posters that _sharing_ cannot hurt record sales. Or, even if it does, it makes up for it by increasing concert attendence. There does not seem to be any factual basis for this opinion but, like most religious beliefs, it is defended with outright hostility.
In much of the third world, _sharing_ is the norm. In fact, in the two years spent I lived in sub-saharan Africa I never saw a legitimate copy. Not once. The governments simply do not enforce any copyright laws at all. Of course the bands that are popular in bootleg are popular at the clubs and play to packed houses. But a) it means the only way to survive is to play 400+ shows a year, have no family, or life outside the shows and b) as soon as you can no longer perform you are broke and washed up. Forget the non-performers like studio musicians and producers. The result? Virtually, every musician and technician who can get a contract immediately moves to a country that does enforce copyright.
I recently spent a great deal of time looking for a network device to backup a small (25 people) network, without having to learn a new operating system or master a complex package. Pretty basic needs, and one shared by (?)millions of offices around the world. I couldn't find one product. The Linux people suggested a whole bunch of stuff, and I eventually moved to that, but what a pain just to do something that should be set up and run through a browser interface. I'm thinking something like the Lantastic Firewall.
There are many, many emails sent to one person that really need to be stored in a project folder, an administrative folder, etc. When someone is searching for info, they want to go to a central location and search all the documents, folders and emails that have to do with those documents. Storing email as one file or many is a discussion orthagonal to this need. I don't have an answer on this one, only a need. How can I quickly drop an email into a directory?
I realize it is possible, but in Eudora or Mozilla's mail server, I have to do a Save As, rename, browse to a specific folder and finally save. It would be great to be able to put a folder someone and just drag and drop.
Demand didn't have anything to do with AOTC opening in fewer theatres. Of course theatre owners would want to book the sure thing (the fifth star wars movie - remember, even the movie in the series we all love to hate, The Phantom Menace - is the second biggest grosser of all time). But they couldn't book it on every screen because Lucas demanded a minimum level for sound system, projection quality and a maximum ambient noise level.
If you look at the IMDB numbers, the average for the first star wars days is over 25K per screen, not as good as the first spiderman weekend (31K+), but significantly better than the second (19K+). and as someone already pointed out, Spidey squeezes in an extra show per screen each day, maybe even two.
Everyone knows the first part of this. If a password is easy to remember, it is easy to crack. If a password is changed frequently, it is almost impossible to remember.
Why are we still using passwords? Passwords rarely catch on in any of the other places we try to use them (car locks, electronic padlocks, electronic house locks, etc.) The few places they have caught on are typically a joke. I recently went to the side door of my sister in law's high security apartment. There were four keys on the entry pad with the numbers worn off. I didn't even bother to call up to her until I had the sequence figured out.
Thirty years in trying to lock down systems seems to have taught us nothing. Why aren't we damanding something better, such as USB keys, fingerprint scanners, etc?
Whenever I discuss this, there are quite a few who say it is the users fault, that they must be trained to use passwords that are secure, and then everything would be fine. Sure, and if everyone loved each other, there would be no more war. But let's deal with people as they really are, not in some theoretical alternate universe. I'll say it again - thirty years of experience has taught us that passwords do not work. At some point we need to stop trying to start that car and get a new one.
First, I don't disagree with the need for parental involvement. It is very important and irreplacable. But there seems to be a reactionary myth floated by many in the Geek community: Parental Involvement Solves All. While there is no doubt that a parent sitting next to their child helping them surf is a good thing, do we let the web community become such a sewer it becomes the only way we can let kids surf? No, I'm not saying we are there now. But all laws are not automatically bad, and a continued insistance that the only accpetable way to limit what kids exposure is successful parental training is foolish at best. Because the reality, and I stress reality, is that young children don't have fully developed warning systems. They don't fully understand the consequences of their actions. And they don't always listen to their parents. Because they are _children_. It is unquestionably a parents job to train them. But there are parents who don't do this well, or at all, and we, as a society, can't just throw their children to the wolves.
I remember when HP was making big investments in the consumer printing (Deskjet) market (10 years ago? 15?) There was a lot of carping about HP moving away from their core values (does anyone remember that they were once primarily an electronics test equipment company?), and tons of Wall Street second guessing. For Walter Hewlett, who has never done anything except inherit his father's money, to talk about HP's tradition as Consumer Printing is absurd.
What Fiorina recognizes is that HP has become a one trick Pony. They have exactly one significant source of profit: inkjet cartridge sales. In fact, they accounted for virtually every dime of their profit in the last year. They are completely at the mercy of someone making a printer/cartridge combination and selling the cartridges for half price. It could happen! Inkjet cartriges have an 80% margin for HP and they are selling to resellers! There are many, many companies that wish they had a product with 40% margin into the reseller market. If Fiorina lets HP go along the path it is on, and the bottom drops out of the cartridge market, her head will be on a platter faster than you can say "massive stock devaluation".
HP and Compaq together has nearly 85% of the retail PC market. They were vicious competitors. I would expect to see an immediate rise in PC prices at the the retail level, making those lines much more profitable. There are twenty other companies in that other 15% of the market. The real test for HPQ is whether they can hold onto that market share with a price increase. They've got a good shot, since IBM is out and no-one else has the name recognition they do.
...for obscure movie reference....What movie has an anti-climatic moment when the main character gets his long lusted-after secret decoder ring only to find the hidden message is just a crass advertisement for Ovaltine?
And the answer is....
A Christmas Story
After all, the news media focuses on the rapidly spreading viruses, and that is the only kind the anti-virus programs can stop. That stuff is the equivalent of kids spray painting a wall. The whole point of it is to spread itself and make the top 10 list, not do any serious damage. But this same technology could be used to, say, drop a trojan into a competitor, have it ferret out any files marked with "Marketing Plan" or "Project X" or "Financial Results", pop them back out to a waiting black hole, then quietly erase itself after 6-8 weeks. How would a sysadmin even know it happened? By the.00001% increase in net traffic?
I wish you all the luck in the world with selling your book, and am willing to take your post here at face value, i.e. an honest discussion point rather than a shameless plug:-) But of course the results the editor of a site gets with an ad for a completely off-topic book has almost no correlation to what say, Johnny Doe, might get for his book "Tiny Terror, The Ferocious Pekinese".
Slashdot Mirror
Your statistics bear me out. I said there had been hundreds, perhaps by now, thousands of arrests. You cited 254 convictions in 1994 and 36 in 1997. So there have been several hundred convictions, at least, so at least that many arrests, probably more. The statisitic cited that fewer and fewer violaters are prosecuted is interesting. I wonder why?
Some criminals will get unregistered guns. But many, many violent criminals are... stupid, and will get caught. Hundreds, perhaps by now thousands, of people have been arrested when the background check revealed they had a criminal record making it a crime/parole violation for them to purchase a firearm. The gun lobby's argument against the background check was that criminals are too smart to buy their guns legally. It's bad enough not to own up to being wrong, but to marshall the same argument again for a different case just seems like such a ... what's the word... limbaugh.
You make some very good points. But I don't know if the distinction you cite ever leads to good design. The software I've found most usable started with the UI, and then created the code to accomplish what the user desired. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all designs can work that way, I'm just saying the easiest to use seems to have been designed that way. The absolute most Harry Horsesh*t designs were the ones that took every possible mechanism in the underlying engine and just exposed them to the user. (I have actually seen a program targetted at industrial printing that exposed all font choices to the users. Not just point size and style, but also the things you almost never see, like seperate horizontal and vertical adjustments for the height. The target printer had rougly the resolution of a nine pin dot matrix! The target audience was minimum wage, english as a second language, computer illiterate operators who needed to put a one line description on a product!)
You wrote: Corel, with an objectively inferior product I feel I am very objective in this. I used Word Perfect exclusively for a number of years and used Word for the past three. Word Perfect, for my uses, is a significantly better product, except for the compatibility issue. Unfortunately, the compatibility issue trumps the others. If I had to pick five ways in which it is better: 1) Tables - WP has great table support and you can use them as a mini-spreadsheet or as a great formatting tool. Word has weak table support, I suppose because they want you to embed an excel spreadsheet instead. This imposes constraints on my customers (they have to have Excel) and has caused versioning and configuration problems. 2) Flaky behavior. Whenever I make a document of any length in Word, and any complexity, it (seemingly) randomly reformats text, renumbers lists, incorrectly "correct" my formatting, etc. It happens in WP, but not nearly as often. And once you get it right, it stays that way. 3) Reveal Codes. When WP does do something unexpected, you can reveal the formatting codes it inserted and edit or delete them to get back to what you want. 4) Doesn't run VB. No macro viruses 5) Graphics. In word, once a graphic has been imported, it converts it to some weird word format. You can't go back. In WP, you can go back.
I've always wanted to have a multi-day demo, where I would use a closed box and marbles, similiar to a Pachinko machine. There would be marbles of slightly different sizes, different weights and different colors. (Only the different colors would be immediately obvious to the observers.) I would put marbles in the top and they would come out of the bottom. Different places depending on certain criteria. For example, on the first day the red marbles would come out on the left, the green marbles would come out on the right and the blue in the middle. I would ask the students to a) predict where the marble I was putting in would come out, and b) how the result was accomplished. At the end of the class, I would open the box to reveal the various mechanisms. I would have several of these boxes, making the deductions increasingly difficult each day.
Both sites are hopelessly slashdotted. (We only slashdot the ones we love...) Here is an old page listing reasons why we should use this product. Reasons and another one, even older, that shows a picture. Picture
Here is a link to the first posting available on the Wayback Machine. Wayback
It is from Dec 21st, 1997 and talks about how Netscape may be in danger from Internet Explorer. Can CmdrTaco pick 'em or what?
jotaeleemeese wrote:
>You are right. Also remember that simplicity is inversely proportional to usefulness and flexibility.
This statement is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. Arguing by ananlogy, were automobiles that required exacting choke hand-adjustments, hand cranking, manual shifting, manual clutching, etc. more useful and flexible than a modern car. Don't get me wrong, I like manual shifting, both my cars are manuals, but I would be hard pressed to say it makes the car more useful. As for more flexible? Perhaps. On one hand, I can immediately go into the gear I want. But I can do that in most automatic transmissions too. I can use a low gear to help me go downhill. No wait, I can do that in the automatic too. Hmm... I can't think of anything... And on the other hand, a manual transmission is no fun at all in a traffic jam, resulting in shorter life on all transaxle components. And that goes double or triple if you pull a trailer.
In a similiar vein, embedded deep in UNIX are ways to set virtually every parameter you could imagine for communications through a serial port. Is this more useful than USB? You set those parameters because of shortcomings of the serial port, not because they are intrinsically desirable.
It would take a community effort, or perhaps a bot, but if enough of the scammers were inundated with seemingly interested replies, say a few thousand, they would have to give up. There may be a legitimate chump buried in all that guff, but how would they ever find them?
Most of your email addressed the difficulty in estimating market share, not percentage-of-instalations, which is of course a different number, and that is what I responded to. However, for people interested in Gartner statistics, market share may be much more interesting than installed base. I don't know what the current numbers are, but in past years new computer buyers had 5-10 times the add-on purchases (peripherals, software, furniture, etc) than existing users. So, for businesses, new purchasers are important.
Many people retort that Macs and Linux Boxen are like BMW's, so a small market share doesn't matter. This may be true, but to most add-on manufacturers, if something represents a tiny fraction of the market, even if you get a substantial premium, it is still a tiny fraction of the bottom line. A good example is auto parts (something I know about, professionally). Diesel passenger cars made by BMW, Mercedes, Volvo etc may command a premium but they are just an annoyance when it comes to after market replacement parts (at least to the big guys). They account for a fraction of one percent of their revenues. Any effort they spend in marketing and new product development will go towards the 99%+ of the market, and that is absolutely the correct business decision. The only reason they even support the desiels is to say they have 100% parts coverage, a tactically important claim (getting the first call from a mechanic shop is a crucial business win.)
Mac and Linux probably have more of a market percentage than the desiel vs. gasoline comparison. But Linux desktop users historically are not willing to pay a premium for software for Linux. Just look at the impact selling the best Word Processor for Linux/Unix had on Corel. Mac users will pay a premium, and they do require substantially less after sales support so a 4% market share may be viable, if they truly are at the 4% level.
The problem in this whole exercise is that both Linux and Macintosh are probably close to the error bar size no matter how you measure it.
It may be IDG and Gartner are blowing smoke, but if so, they are going extraordinarily far out of their way to obfuscate. Macintosh sales are very easy to estimate, since only one company (Apple) makes them, and the number of each model they ship is in the quarterly report.
It is in estimating the number of PC clones sold that they have a challenge. Worse yet, estimating how many are actually used for Linux.
FWIW, I know that the color in old photographs are sometimes 'restored' by applying algorhithms that 'know' how color is most likely to fade. Perhaps this technique could also be applied to video.
Horrible Deal? Which part of the deal is horrible? The part where they develop and deliver television shows, pay to have them part of your local cable, and don't charge you anything for them? Or the part where they say - Hey someone has to pay for them? Or the part where they choose advertisments? Or the part where advertisers are paying less because no one is watching them.
It may be the end of free shows, but it they are not doing anything horrible.
PD wrote:
These are actual quotes from the article... Clearly, Ransom Love has fought no battles, written no code, has not earned any glory for his name. His heart is not truly Klingon.
RIGHT ON DUDE!! I have written the TRUE MEANING of a few of those quotes below. UP THE REVOLUTION!
*****
local languages and channels (Obviously part of the Klingon Plan to subjegate or destroy all other species. And their television channels.)
sell their products on a global basis (This of course is where those Klingons all start, but the next thing you know you're getting in the wazoo from a Klingon shouting _Give it to me, my Linux Love Slave!_)
Supportable business quality product (Supporting a business quality product - my god, these klingons have no decency.)
facilitating a global distribution (yeah, and we all know what _distribution_ means in Klingon)
Internet client interfaces become dominant (yeah, right, buddy. For _Internet client interfaces_ we know you mean _Klingons_!)
continue to make inroads (nuff said!)
********
Geez! Who does this doofus think he is dealing with!? A bunch of dweebs!!??
I've posted this point several times before, but I have never read a decent response to it, just reiterations of belief. Why is that?
It seems to be a religious belief among a large group of slashdot posters that _sharing_ cannot hurt record sales. Or, even if it does, it makes up for it by increasing concert attendence. There does not seem to be any factual basis for this opinion but, like most religious beliefs, it is defended with outright hostility.
In much of the third world, _sharing_ is the norm. In fact, in the two years spent I lived in sub-saharan Africa I never saw a legitimate copy. Not once. The governments simply do not enforce any copyright laws at all. Of course the bands that are popular in bootleg are popular at the clubs and play to packed houses. But a) it means the only way to survive is to play 400+ shows a year, have no family, or life outside the shows and b) as soon as you can no longer perform you are broke and washed up. Forget the non-performers like studio musicians and producers. The result? Virtually, every musician and technician who can get a contract immediately moves to a country that does enforce copyright.
I recently spent a great deal of time looking for a network device to backup a small (25 people) network, without having to learn a new operating system or master a complex package. Pretty basic needs, and one shared by (?)millions of offices around the world. I couldn't find one product. The Linux people suggested a whole bunch of stuff, and I eventually moved to that, but what a pain just to do something that should be set up and run through a browser interface. I'm thinking something like the Lantastic Firewall.
There are many, many emails sent to one person that really need to be stored in a project folder, an administrative folder, etc. When someone is searching for info, they want to go to a central location and search all the documents, folders and emails that have to do with those documents. Storing email as one file or many is a discussion orthagonal to this need. I don't have an answer on this one, only a need. How can I quickly drop an email into a directory?
I realize it is possible, but in Eudora or Mozilla's mail server, I have to do a Save As, rename, browse to a specific folder and finally save. It would be great to be able to put a folder someone and just drag and drop.
Demand didn't have anything to do with AOTC opening in fewer theatres. Of course theatre owners would want to book the sure thing (the fifth star wars movie - remember, even the movie in the series we all love to hate, The Phantom Menace - is the second biggest grosser of all time). But they couldn't book it on every screen because Lucas demanded a minimum level for sound system, projection quality and a maximum ambient noise level. If you look at the IMDB numbers, the average for the first star wars days is over 25K per screen, not as good as the first spiderman weekend (31K+), but significantly better than the second (19K+). and as someone already pointed out, Spidey squeezes in an extra show per screen each day, maybe even two.
Everyone knows the first part of this. If a password is easy to remember, it is easy to crack. If a password is changed frequently, it is almost impossible to remember. Why are we still using passwords? Passwords rarely catch on in any of the other places we try to use them (car locks, electronic padlocks, electronic house locks, etc.) The few places they have caught on are typically a joke. I recently went to the side door of my sister in law's high security apartment. There were four keys on the entry pad with the numbers worn off. I didn't even bother to call up to her until I had the sequence figured out. Thirty years in trying to lock down systems seems to have taught us nothing. Why aren't we damanding something better, such as USB keys, fingerprint scanners, etc? Whenever I discuss this, there are quite a few who say it is the users fault, that they must be trained to use passwords that are secure, and then everything would be fine. Sure, and if everyone loved each other, there would be no more war. But let's deal with people as they really are, not in some theoretical alternate universe. I'll say it again - thirty years of experience has taught us that passwords do not work. At some point we need to stop trying to start that car and get a new one.
First, I don't disagree with the need for parental involvement. It is very important and irreplacable. But there seems to be a reactionary myth floated by many in the Geek community: Parental Involvement Solves All. While there is no doubt that a parent sitting next to their child helping them surf is a good thing, do we let the web community become such a sewer it becomes the only way we can let kids surf? No, I'm not saying we are there now. But all laws are not automatically bad, and a continued insistance that the only accpetable way to limit what kids exposure is successful parental training is foolish at best. Because the reality, and I stress reality, is that young children don't have fully developed warning systems. They don't fully understand the consequences of their actions. And they don't always listen to their parents. Because they are _children_. It is unquestionably a parents job to train them. But there are parents who don't do this well, or at all, and we, as a society, can't just throw their children to the wolves.
... what is meant by 133 x 4? Does the bus run at 533 MHz or is it four channels running at 133 MHz?
I remember when HP was making big investments in the consumer printing (Deskjet) market (10 years ago? 15?) There was a lot of carping about HP moving away from their core values (does anyone remember that they were once primarily an electronics test equipment company?), and tons of Wall Street second guessing. For Walter Hewlett, who has never done anything except inherit his father's money, to talk about HP's tradition as Consumer Printing is absurd. What Fiorina recognizes is that HP has become a one trick Pony. They have exactly one significant source of profit: inkjet cartridge sales. In fact, they accounted for virtually every dime of their profit in the last year. They are completely at the mercy of someone making a printer/cartridge combination and selling the cartridges for half price. It could happen! Inkjet cartriges have an 80% margin for HP and they are selling to resellers! There are many, many companies that wish they had a product with 40% margin into the reseller market. If Fiorina lets HP go along the path it is on, and the bottom drops out of the cartridge market, her head will be on a platter faster than you can say "massive stock devaluation". HP and Compaq together has nearly 85% of the retail PC market. They were vicious competitors. I would expect to see an immediate rise in PC prices at the the retail level, making those lines much more profitable. There are twenty other companies in that other 15% of the market. The real test for HPQ is whether they can hold onto that market share with a price increase. They've got a good shot, since IBM is out and no-one else has the name recognition they do.
...for obscure movie reference....What movie has an anti-climatic moment when the main character gets his long lusted-after secret decoder ring only to find the hidden message is just a crass advertisement for Ovaltine? And the answer is.... A Christmas Story
After all, the news media focuses on the rapidly spreading viruses, and that is the only kind the anti-virus programs can stop. That stuff is the equivalent of kids spray painting a wall. The whole point of it is to spread itself and make the top 10 list, not do any serious damage. But this same technology could be used to, say, drop a trojan into a competitor, have it ferret out any files marked with "Marketing Plan" or "Project X" or "Financial Results", pop them back out to a waiting black hole, then quietly erase itself after 6-8 weeks. How would a sysadmin even know it happened? By the .00001% increase in net traffic?
I wish you all the luck in the world with selling your book, and am willing to take your post here at face value, i.e. an honest discussion point rather than a shameless plug:-) But of course the results the editor of a site gets with an ad for a completely off-topic book has almost no correlation to what say, Johnny Doe, might get for his book "Tiny Terror, The Ferocious Pekinese".