"I guess it must be the combination of absurd dependence on power point to think and communicate combined with the sheer soul-whithering miserliness to actually outsource the development of slideshows to overseas labor."
It's probably quite encouraging for those people who had to listen to the "we're making huge cuts and outsourcing to india for big profits" managerial speeches to learn that people have finally grasped the obvious conclusion:
Senior managers are the dumbest of all jobs -- why not outsource them to India?
"There is a flag on a pole that you can see with a powerful telescope, controlled by the same places that give us the wonders of technology we can see the outcome of on earth."
There was also a flagpole on the top of Mount McKinley / Denali, to prove that it was climbed, but people still didn't believe that the mountain had been reached. The alaskans took a massive flag and a tree up to the top, in the hope that it would prove conclusively to anyone with a telescope that the mountain had been climbed.
Not that you could see a flag from so far away of course, even with a telescope. It took a long time before the claims became generally believed.
"It was bound to happen. IE hasn't been updated for ages, and it's embarassingly out of kilter with standards, even in comparison to Internet Explorer for the PC."
Surely it's the other way around? Internet Explorer for Windows is embarassingly behind the times, and out of kilter with standards, and doesn't even stand up to comparaison with modern browsers.
Whereas many people have been saying that IE for Mac is actually quite good.
"Contact YOUR MEP as well. It will help them vote against any legislation..."
Okay, call for assistance:
Would anybody be interested in putting together a glossy leaflet explaining the software-patent issues, for mailing to memebers of the european parliament?
I'm asking people to gather their top-10 most powerful, consise, and hit-the-spot arguments, so we can explain in two sides of A5 to the MEPs what the dangers are, and why not everything the BSA tells them is true.
europatents@blibbleblobble.co.uk, or leave replies
"We're staying out of Europe partly because of the multitude of languages, but mainly because (I'm told) it's a morass of different regulations"
Thankyou for that insight, Mr Famulak. It's obviously very difficult to program software, what with all this having to comply with the law and all... perhaps trying to expand into 15 countries at once and expecting the laws to be all the same is a bit of a large step to take all at once without lawyers. After all, you could say that expending to america is a morass of different regulations, with candian laws so different from peruvian laws, and american laws so different from panama laws, it's a wonder anyone does business there...
Me, I'm staying out of America because the it's just plain evil. Nicely harmonized evil, completely the same in each state.
"What the GPL does is essentially *force* derivative works to be under the same pseudo-public domain ownership as the original. (thereby prohibiting proprietary derivatives..)"
Ever tried to release your own product based on the Windows Media Player source-code? Oops, got forced into a license, what a shame.
A Free program doesn't force the GPL license: you can go to the authors and ask them for an alternative arrangement, same as with all software. It might cost a little more, and you might have to ask quite a few people, but that's the power which copyright law gives people.
Anyway, this isn't about GPL, it's about software patents. They close off entire sectors of innovation, and leave a bare wasteland of ideas which nobody can use. Does the MEP even realise she's trying to give the European software market on a plate to american companies?
"The Russian Energia Booster (in current production) can lift 100 ton modules into LEO - this against the shuttles 30 ton payload."
Exactly. There's no good reason to be equipping bulk freighters [the shuttle's cargo bay] with heavy and expensive equipment to return it to earth, much less human life-support systems. It's arguable whether heavy-lifting vehicles even need to return to earth, or whether they would be better used as building-blocks for space-stations, once the cost of putting them into space has been paid.
If you removed everything from the shuttle which doesn't need to come back, you'd be left with some living space, some construction tools (the robot arm), and a capsule for the crew to return to earth. Perhaps then it would get off the ground without attaching fireworks to the side.
Given the amount it costs to put each kilogram into space, it would make sense to say what goes up should preferably not come down.
It's always interesting to see these people trying to build cockpits, etc. using microsoft flight simulator, and they always end up with a couple of computer monitors, and some attempt to get more than one screen working with it.
At work, we have simulation software which allows you to connect arbitrary numbers of computers, monitors, projectors, cockpit switches, etc. to a simulation. LCD screens with dials on? No problem. Put a panel in front of them with cut-outs, and they look like real instruments. Multiple projectors with outside-world views? No problem, and it gives you a much better sense of where you are and how the plane is moving.
Admittedly we have other cool stuff that you don't get on home flight sims, but the software itself is really not that hard.
It's just amazing that someone would go to all this work building a cockpit, and yet not have any suitable software to run it on.
So yes, the issues of renumbering, routing, address-allocation and 'are IPs property' are getting discussed at length with more technical detail than slashdot
"The biggest problem actually comes from half-supporting browsers, not non-supporting browsers. A browser that can't handle PNGs will display the alt tag (or a gif, if you use content-negotiation), which isn't too bad. A half supporting browser will take the PNG and screw up everything."
Somewhat unsurprisingly, this can be said of most of Internet Explorer.
Example: CSS. A CSS page will render correctly in a browser which doesn't support CSS, and it will render correctly in a browser which does support CSS. However, it won't render correctly in Internet Explorer, because it claims to support CSS and doesn't.
MIME-types is probably another example, and the famous lack of support for these has enabled many malicious programs to run with impunity. I would hope it's been fixed now, but it's kind'a useful to be able to change files on anyone's computer, just because they're using Internet Explorer on the internet...
"It seems that they can not even perform basic background checks on their own employees"
Apparently the main checking for government employees is the lie-detector (sic) test. So dishonest people are more likely to pass, and more likely to work for the government. Who would have believed it?
"The question isn't "why are people still using Outlook", but rather "why isn't there a real Outlook killer for Windows?""
Why would it run on Windows? The convincing outlook replacement is Evolution, and it runs on the Ximian desktop.
"calendar, collaboration or integration that Outlook has."
The Kolab sever does this much better than the Exchange server, and not only supports Outlook, but Kmail and KCalendar as well. Not the calendaring / task-sharing etc. wouldn't be better done by an intranet webserver (TUTOS, PHP-Groupware, etc)
The arguments for Outlook sound a lot more convincing until you send someone a calendar appointment, and they ask you later "why did you send me a blank email?", or when the boss is constantly wondering why people have no idea of important events because "they're on the outlook server, all you need to do is..." and nobody knows about them.
"I don't really understand when people bring the subject of PGP being used by terrorists, and how this should weigh against the program."
If anything, PGP makes life more difficult for the terrorist, unless we're suggesting that it's a good idea that potential targets use plaintext email when whey're planning their journeys, emailing hotels, etc.
"Blah blah blah, did I mention the [famous person's name] is visiting next thursday, blah blah.
I don't need to encrypt this do I? The government says that encryption is a bad thing.
I'll just email the rental company and check our boss' car, then plan a route on Autoroute Express and email it to the chicago office. No need to worry about security, I'll email to let the guy meeting him know the license-place to look out for.
Encryption? What's that? The news says that only bad people use encryption. I'd best send all this information plain-text.
Is 9-11 actually valid in the ISO format? One of the main reasons for choosing the yyyy-mm-dd format was that it couldn't be mistaken for anything else, whereas 9-11 could easily be mistaken for a 2-hour (or 14-hour) period of time starting at 9 o'clock.
So far as I can tell, the standard doesn't allow any method to specify dates which repeat yearly, although you can use it for specifying lower precision (such as a month: 2003-04)
There are 20 types of people in the world -- those who understand the american date system, and those who don't
I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format.
Perhaps for continuity, you could write decimal numbers in the same way
So 243 would be three hundred and twenty four...
ISO standard is quite usual nowadays... It can get quite strange sometimes listening to americans talking about 9/11 and wondering what's special about the 9th of November.
Microsoft fixed this vulnerability more then 2 years ago. Why do people not update their software?
Microsoft wrote this vulnerability even longer ago. Why did they not stop to think "do we really, really want to automatically run any EXE files which are emailed to us?
Their excuse? "It's labelled audio/mp3" I don't know what kind of autonomy you give to your email client, but I'd revoke it if it started playing songs without my permission...
"On Unix/Linux Desktop systems there is nothing on the system as important as the user's data in his home directory."
Is there a standard method to keep copies of each/home/* directory in a/home/backup/* directory, owned by the backup user and readable by the respective users?
Or does every sysadmin write their own script to do it?
Slashdot Mirror
"If the brick says the buildings about to fall, what can the owners do?
Get on the phone to their brokers and triple their insurance policy"
Hopefully before the brick gets on the phone to your insurance company and triples the price of insurance...
"But does it run windows?"
... and a lot more keyboards, mice, and monitors.
I can just see the purchase-request now... 1000 copies of Windows at $250 each.
"I guess it must be the combination of absurd dependence on power point to think and communicate combined with the sheer soul-whithering miserliness to actually outsource the development of slideshows to overseas labor."
It's probably quite encouraging for those people who had to listen to the "we're making huge cuts and outsourcing to india for big profits" managerial speeches to learn that people have finally grasped the obvious conclusion:
Senior managers are the dumbest of all jobs -- why not outsource them to India?
"There is a flag on a pole that you can see with a powerful telescope, controlled by the same places that give us the wonders of technology we can see the outcome of on earth."
There was also a flagpole on the top of Mount McKinley / Denali, to prove that it was climbed, but people still didn't believe that the mountain had been reached. The alaskans took a massive flag and a tree up to the top, in the hope that it would prove conclusively to anyone with a telescope that the mountain had been climbed.
Not that you could see a flag from so far away of course, even with a telescope. It took a long time before the claims became generally believed.
"It was bound to happen. IE hasn't been updated for ages, and it's embarassingly out of kilter with standards, even in comparison to Internet Explorer for the PC."
Surely it's the other way around? Internet Explorer for Windows is embarassingly behind the times, and out of kilter with standards, and doesn't even stand up to comparaison with modern browsers.
Whereas many people have been saying that IE for Mac is actually quite good.
"In the heat of the moment I was very rude to her but can I suggest others be moderate."
Howabout a "dammit, leave the lawmaking to people who understand it"
More moderate than that?
"Contact YOUR MEP as well. It will help them vote against any legislation..."
Okay, call for assistance:
Would anybody be interested in putting together a glossy leaflet explaining the software-patent issues, for mailing to memebers of the european parliament?
I'm asking people to gather their top-10 most powerful, consise, and hit-the-spot arguments, so we can explain in two sides of A5 to the MEPs what the dangers are, and why not everything the BSA tells them is true.
europatents@blibbleblobble.co.uk, or leave replies
"We're staying out of Europe partly because of the multitude of languages, but mainly because (I'm told) it's a morass of different regulations"
Thankyou for that insight, Mr Famulak. It's obviously very difficult to program software, what with all this having to comply with the law and all... perhaps trying to expand into 15 countries at once and expecting the laws to be all the same is a bit of a large step to take all at once without lawyers. After all, you could say that expending to america is a morass of different regulations, with candian laws so different from peruvian laws, and american laws so different from panama laws, it's a wonder anyone does business there...
Me, I'm staying out of America because the it's just plain evil. Nicely harmonized evil, completely the same in each state.
"thanks for the links. (polite) email sent..."
Make that two
"What the GPL does is essentially *force* derivative works to be under the same pseudo-public domain ownership as the original. (thereby prohibiting proprietary derivatives..)"
Ever tried to release your own product based on the Windows Media Player source-code? Oops, got forced into a license, what a shame.
A Free program doesn't force the GPL license: you can go to the authors and ask them for an alternative arrangement, same as with all software. It might cost a little more, and you might have to ask quite a few people, but that's the power which copyright law gives people.
Anyway, this isn't about GPL, it's about software patents. They close off entire sectors of innovation, and leave a bare wasteland of ideas which nobody can use. Does the MEP even realise she's trying to give the European software market on a plate to american companies?
"I'm curious, how DOES Russia handle things?"
Ejection systems for the manned capsule. It allows the crew to get back alive to earth even if their spaceship explodes during take-off.
"The Russian Energia Booster (in current production) can lift 100 ton modules into LEO - this against the shuttles 30 ton payload."
Exactly. There's no good reason to be equipping bulk freighters [the shuttle's cargo bay] with heavy and expensive equipment to return it to earth, much less human life-support systems. It's arguable whether heavy-lifting vehicles even need to return to earth, or whether they would be better used as building-blocks for space-stations, once the cost of putting them into space has been paid.
If you removed everything from the shuttle which doesn't need to come back, you'd be left with some living space, some construction tools (the robot arm), and a capsule for the crew to return to earth. Perhaps then it would get off the ground without attaching fireworks to the side.
Given the amount it costs to put each kilogram into space, it would make sense to say what goes up should preferably not come down.
It's always interesting to see these people trying to build cockpits, etc. using microsoft flight simulator, and they always end up with a couple of computer monitors, and some attempt to get more than one screen working with it.
At work, we have simulation software which allows you to connect arbitrary numbers of computers, monitors, projectors, cockpit switches, etc. to a simulation. LCD screens with dials on? No problem. Put a panel in front of them with cut-outs, and they look like real instruments. Multiple projectors with outside-world views? No problem, and it gives you a much better sense of where you are and how the plane is moving.
Admittedly we have other cool stuff that you don't get on home flight sims, but the software itself is really not that hard.
It's just amazing that someone would go to all this work building a cockpit, and yet not have any suitable software to run it on.
The discussions for this are all on NANOG
So yes, the issues of renumbering, routing, address-allocation and 'are IPs property' are getting discussed at length with more technical detail than slashdot
"The biggest problem actually comes from half-supporting browsers, not non-supporting browsers. A browser that can't handle PNGs will display the alt tag (or a gif, if you use content-negotiation), which isn't too bad. A half supporting browser will take the PNG and screw up everything."
Somewhat unsurprisingly, this can be said of most of Internet Explorer.
Example: CSS. A CSS page will render correctly in a browser which doesn't support CSS, and it will render correctly in a browser which does support CSS. However, it won't render correctly in Internet Explorer, because it claims to support CSS and doesn't.
MIME-types is probably another example, and the famous lack of support for these has enabled many malicious programs to run with impunity. I would hope it's been fixed now, but it's kind'a useful to be able to change files on anyone's computer, just because they're using Internet Explorer on the internet...
"Besides, Battlecruiser 3000AD was Vaporware for like eight years"?
What's wrong with that? 997 years early...
"large file size- much larger than gif or jpg"
You're not using Save rather than Export, in MacroMedia Fireworks are you?
"It seems that they can not even perform basic background checks on their own employees"
Apparently the main checking for government employees is the lie-detector (sic) test. So dishonest people are more likely to pass, and more likely to work for the government. Who would have believed it?
"The question isn't "why are people still using Outlook", but rather "why isn't there a real Outlook killer for Windows?""
Why would it run on Windows? The convincing outlook replacement is Evolution, and it runs on the Ximian desktop.
"calendar, collaboration or integration that Outlook has."
The Kolab sever does this much better than the Exchange server, and not only supports Outlook, but Kmail and KCalendar as well. Not the calendaring / task-sharing etc. wouldn't be better done by an intranet webserver (TUTOS, PHP-Groupware, etc)
The arguments for Outlook sound a lot more convincing until you send someone a calendar appointment, and they ask you later "why did you send me a blank email?", or when the boss is constantly wondering why people have no idea of important events because "they're on the outlook server, all you need to do is..." and nobody knows about them.
"I don't really understand when people bring the subject of PGP being used by terrorists, and how this should weigh against the program."
If anything, PGP makes life more difficult for the terrorist, unless we're suggesting that it's a good idea that potential targets use plaintext email when whey're planning their journeys, emailing hotels, etc.
"Blah blah blah, did I mention the [famous person's name] is visiting next thursday, blah blah.
I don't need to encrypt this do I? The government says that encryption is a bad thing.
I'll just email the rental company and check our boss' car, then plan a route on Autoroute Express and email it to the chicago office. No need to worry about security, I'll email to let the guy meeting him know the license-place to look out for.
Encryption? What's that? The news says that only bad people use encryption. I'd best send all this information plain-text.
Is 9-11 actually valid in the ISO format? One of the main reasons for choosing the yyyy-mm-dd format was that it couldn't be mistaken for anything else, whereas 9-11 could easily be mistaken for a 2-hour (or 14-hour) period of time starting at 9 o'clock.
So far as I can tell, the standard doesn't allow any method to specify dates which repeat yearly, although you can use it for specifying lower precision (such as a month: 2003-04)
There are 20 types of people in the world -- those who understand the american date system, and those who don't
I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format.
Perhaps for continuity, you could write decimal numbers in the same way
So 243 would be three hundred and twenty four...
ISO standard is quite usual nowadays... It can get quite strange sometimes listening to americans talking about 9/11 and wondering what's special about the 9th of November.
How to find applications which use a port (necessarily incomplete)
Microsoft fixed this vulnerability more then 2 years ago. Why do people not update their software?
Microsoft wrote this vulnerability even longer ago. Why did they not stop to think "do we really, really want to automatically run any EXE files which are emailed to us?
Their excuse? "It's labelled audio/mp3" I don't know what kind of autonomy you give to your email client, but I'd revoke it if it started playing songs without my permission...
"On Unix/Linux Desktop systems there is nothing on the system as important as the user's data in his home directory."
/home/* directory in a /home/backup/* directory, owned by the backup user and readable by the respective users?
Is there a standard method to keep copies of each
Or does every sysadmin write their own script to do it?