I was thinking about having this procedure done. Image being able to see in the morning before putting on glasses. Anyway, I chose not to do so for the following reasons.
1. Night Vision problems. Yes, everyone I know that has had the procedure gets the night vision "starring" to some degree.
2. It's only as good as your BEST pair of glasses. It can't correct better than that.
3. Dr. Weiss from the Kresge Eye Institute in Detroit, MI counseled me and explained that people who are particular about detail, i.e. (engineers and some computer users) were typically not happy with the results.
4. The surgery is a tradeoff, if you are near sighted, the surgery corrects for this and make you more farsighted, but then you are unable to focus on close objects like you used to, and vice versa.
5. No anti glare coating. The anti-glare coating on my lenses really cuts down an eye strain.
6. The smaller glasses frames look good and help frame your face, especially as your hairline recedes.
7. As your eye heals and forms scar tissue post surgery, it could potentially reduce the benefit of the surgery and require another round of corrective surgery.
My solution to the problem has to get "Flexcon Titanium Frames, with Carbon Composite lenses". This makes the glasses extremely light as well as durable, since titanium has a memory and won't deform. Just make sure that when you have the eye exam that the centers of your pupils are checked and double checked since the titanium frames WILL NOT BEND to accomodate any errors in the lens.
In my analysis, the benefits of the procedure do not outweigh the negatives and I am sticking with glasses. The two biggest negatives are the "night vision" and "not being able to focus as near as I used to".
There is a saying I live by with respect to email and voicemail:
"Never argue with an idiot, since they will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
As a techie, this goes for all the email threads that people try to "suck" you in on daily. My rule of thumb is that you have to send me three queries in the form of voicemail, email, or memos in order to get me to consider getting involved in some whacky squabble or messy problem; AND, when I do reply, I am use the telephone so the reply can't turn into some bizarre email thread. Just because something is annoying or puzzling to a single person, doesn't mean you have to drop everthing and go solve their problem or even owe them a reply.
In case anyone missed it, let me say it again, "Just because you receive and email or voicemail with a question, doesn't mean you have to reply.".
It's always tempting to mash the "REPLY" button and show the world just how intelligent you are, but not everyone will see the glow of your intellect in an email message.
Just because someone asks a question, doesn't mean you have to answer.
Just because someone asks a technical question, doesn't mean you have to give a technical answer.
Never be afraid to use these phrases:
"I don't know, but I can look into it."
"Do you have any additional information."
"Is there anyone I can speak with that has additional information."
"Are you sure?"
"I would like to speak with my lawyer."
"Uhhh, Shuttup, Go away...." (From Beavis)
Unless you sent this guy your real name and contact info, I'd just stop writing back. Unless the guy is willing to invest money into tracking you down this is going no where. In fact if this CEO does hire someone with a brain, they will look at the email headers and see the "reply to" is forged, thus end of your involvement. If it makes it to you ISP, they will say, "Send us the email headers" and point out that the "reply-to" is forged.
Additionally, all CEO's should have their emails VIRUS and SPAM scanned. A CEO's time is far too important to waste on crap like this. Since he doesn't have any of these services he gets at least "2" looser points, and might not even be a CEO, but a genuine "Luuuhhhoooosssseeeerrrr!".
MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator)
Pin MAME (Pinball)
Nostalgia (Intellivision Emulator)
I don't have time to make it pretty, but check these sites as well for emulator ideas:
http://www.effinspam.com/
http://www.tombstones.org.uk/burners.php?us
In 1987, IBM announced that programmers would soon be obsolete and in the future, programs would write programs. We would simply speak to our computers and the computer would magically translate our commands to code, just like on "Star Trek".
As long as there are programmers, you will need SysAdmins to protect systems from programmers. Sure you can virtualize your servers, but what are you going to do when someone writes bad code or worse bad SQL (How about a nice cartesian join)? I guess you could just go to your hardware vendor like IBM or Sun and say, we need more hardware, more disk, more RAM, because the CEO says it's slow. The nice vendor will be happy to sell you a bigger "fish tank", but the real answer is PERFORMANCE TUNING and optimization.
Oracle is also announcing the end of DBA's with Oracle 9i, the database that runs itself.
Try this experiment.
1. Buy a Sun Server that doesn't need a Sysadmin.
2. By Oracle 9i, that doesn't need a DBA.
3. Let the vendors do the install and setup.
4. Turn your users and developers loose and let them go develop systems to run your company.
It won't take long until something very bad happens. After a few months, performance will start to degrade, production data will be deleted, disks will fill up, and any writable directory will contain large amounts of crap. Backups will be non-existant, user accounts will be mismanaged and have totally lame passwords, production and development will be running on the same virutal server and same database, there will be no such thing as a hotfailover system or failover system since you be fortunate to have production running at all.
I've cleaned it up time and time and time again. There is only one person that can save you from this horrible mess, and that is your NAZI Sysadmin and NAZI DBA, both feared, revered, and smart.
Ever see that video "When Animals Attack!", there should be series called "When Users Attack!" and "When Developers Attack!".
Sysadmins are a cheap insurance policy and just plain handy to have around. Also, I just checked and Sun/Oracle still offer training for all their ADMIN-LESS products. If anyone has a success story, I want to hear it.
And if you upgrade your home PC to Windows XP you have to be "very paranoid" about what periphials (scanner, digital camera) you own, since they may or may not have drivers. It's the same on either O/S my friend. At least with Linux you have some hope that your periphial won't just be abandoned one day.
IANAL, but how can you see someone for violating Copyright, when you do not own the Copyright. Last I checked, Directors were hired by studios and the studio or the studio's parent company owned the Copyright,
This case doesn't even sound valid, since the DAG owns nothing in this case. Additionally, as long as clean flicks clearly states that the film content has been modified, personally I welcome movies with less "F" words. I hope they win.
Probably the only way you can start a radio station is to start a low power FM Pirate Radio Station. The reason for the tight control of the airwaves and spectrum is two fold.
1. Selling spectrum is source of revenue for the government. (That's why Digital Tuners in TV are now required by law, new spectrum=new revenue)
2. Controlling spectrum is a method of controlling what content reaches the masses (since FM radios are de facto standard).
If FM radio stations were to spring up and start playing non mainstream stuff and the masses liked it, what would that mean for the RIAA members? Consumers might start consuming from smaller labels and smaller local bands might start exposure and taking fans/money away from the mega-bands. It would be anarchy and thus not allowed my friend. Only the RIAA members are allowed to decide what is permissible and popular.
Control the revenue, control the content, and control the masses. About the only deviants allowed on FM are (very low power) College Stations and NPR.
I live in the Detroit area and there are a few pirate FM station that pop up from time to time. To my knowledge none have never gotten busted, but then again, they might be tranmitting from a boat in International waters.
I just finished watching it as well.. I have to agree, it sucks. However, always keep in mind that all SCI FI series tend to suck in the beginning, remember back to the beinning of ST:NG.
To me "John Doe" looks good, going to watch it next. Meanwhile, I'm awaiting, "The West Wing" premiere.
Can you tell us about the whole process of getting busted and interrogated? How was the DOJ able to learn about all the members and execute simultaneous busts?
How hard did the DOJ interrogators push to get names of accomplices and if you cooperated, did that reduce your sentencing?
What advice would you give to someone who finds themselves in a similar situation? e.g. ( Hire a good pre-trial lawyer. Flee the country. )
I assume that the DOJ confiscated all your servers and went through the logs and examined all the user accounts and IP addresses. What happened to the "small time users" or did the DOJ not bother to track them down?
Lastly, in hindsight if you had to do it all over again. What would you have done to stay under the radar and not get busted?
I agree, competition is what makes things better! Without competition, stagnation sets in, ala Micro$oft. Killing off either KDE or GNOME would be bad, very bad.
Go KDE!
Go Gnome!
Maybe Redhat should just make the standardization optional, however I know they are now trying to push into the desktop market which is a giant leap for Linux. Maybe, just maybe, their "Redhat-ized" version should like like Windoze XP.
"The Windoze related mispellings were intentional."
Last year Best Buy sent my friends and I (ultimate electronic consumers) coupons for various percentages off items. Thinking the the stores out of stock during the big "coupon sale", our plan was to go the day before the sale, buy the item, and then return the following day and do a price adjustment with the coupon.
Much to my surprise, the price on the item I purchased had been raised 10% for the sale and conveniently enough my coupon was for 10%. Nice trick. I felt like an idiot for waiting in line to get my non-existant cash back.
And yes, shortly after Christmas the price dropped even lower than the price I paid to make room for the the new model which (I think) arrived in the spring.
When hackers stop bothering to hack your software, it is a sign that their love for you has grown cold and you are now irrelevant. Has anyone hacked Novell lately?:)
To be truly loved is to get hacked! Someone out there must really love Microsoft, but I am glad they are starting to share the love with the Open Source community more and more. It is a sign that the love for Microsoft may be starting to fade or maybe hackers are just plain sick of "shooting fish" in the idomatic barrel.
Either way, I am going to go block UDP on port 2002 on the fw/router and mumble to myself about buffer overflows.
"AMD said its laboratory demonstration of 10 nanometer
Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Fin Field Effect Transistor (CMOS FinFET) is the outcome of collaborative research between AMD and the University of California, Berkeley"
CMOS technology with a silicon "fin" to prevent electron leakage? Where on earth am I going to find a motherboard for a CMOS processor?
First CMOS, then Silicon, then Gallium (what ever happened GaAs anyway?), then Coppermine, and now back to CMOS with a silicon fin.....
Mmmrrrppphh, full circle you have come young Jedi.
-Yoda
This is a perfect opportunity to get a decent hacker inside Microsoft.
Sometimes to defeat the beast, you have to get into the "belly of the beast".
It is sad admission for Microsoft to put out this help wanted sign and admit that they don't already have the inhouse talent to deal with this problem. After all the XBOX is x86 architecture and no-one should do x86 better than the Microsoft.
If any XBOX hacker does decide to take this job and relocate to Redmond, whatever you do, don't sign your IP (Intellectual Property) rights away. That is the paper that states that Microsoft will own any thought you have past, present, or future just because they hired you at some point. Then when you quit, they can't threaten to sue you over every email and code post. You'll be FREE of the beast.
Once you are inside and have them believing you have turned to the darkside, we still need the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT so we can figure out exactly what a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) is doing. Also, we will need a back door engineering into the Palladium hardware so we can run all our Opensource rippers and players as trusted code on the x86 architecture.
And remember boys and girls, "Security is an illusion!"
I recently observed a "Forced Death March" to finish a project which involved working the development team 10 hours a day and Saturdays.
Some quit immediately and the ones that hung around did their best but, became very irrational and difficult to work with. The amount of stupid mistakes increased dramatically and after awhile they were just spinning their wheels due to fatigue.
Eventually, they had cobbled an application together which, sort of worked but needed nearly round the clock support, however they didn't have to work nights and weekends anymore as a team, just the oncall pager person.
After the "launch" many of them "quit" the company due to burnout and we are now left with only one developer that understands the system end to end.
So what has history taught us about forcing developers to go on a "Death March".
* Stupid Mistakes Increase * Tempers Flare * Developers Quit at the Onset of the March * Developers Experience Burnoutn During the March * Developers will exit the company at the end of the project with ill feelings and leave no one to support/cleanup whatever it was they created. * In my case the final product is so bad, it will probably need to be rewritten in the not too distant future.
As you can see, it's a win/win/win situation.
In my opinion, the only way to prevent development disaster is to spend a lot of time in
* Requirements Gathering (Ask the user) * Requirements Validation (Make sure the user isn't and idiot) * Design (This starts before you code) * Design Review (This is done before you code) * Module Planning (Break the project into chunks) * Module Testing (Test the thing before you slam it into production)
It may sound boring but it works........
Either you quit now or quit later... Might as well just quit now, unless of course you need to get kicked in the head to learn a lesson firsthand.
Let's assume that this legislation goes forward, how exactly can you implement such logging and who is going to pay for implementation?
Let's assume that ISPs block all traffic on port 80 and 443 then force everyone to use a proxy server which stores logs for 6 months.
Is this the intent of the legislation?
If so, all "terrorists" need to do is move their webservers to ports other than 80 and 443 to get around the blocking and logging? Currently there are around 65000 other ports to choose from.
Speaking as RCHE #807202341505038 I'd have to say that Red Hat is a force for good.
Red Hat is in a challenging spot, trying to survive as a company and post a profit while giving away their distro. The current business model is soley based on survival and what works.
Red Hat provides the following invaluable services:
1. Red Hat spends cash on EVIL lawyers to keep the Microsoft/Sony owned Congress from squashing the "cancer" known as "Open Source" and "GPL".
2. Red Hat maintains a lot of code, maybe too much code, and provides patches and bug fixes for FREE via up2date and RPM's. This is called the Red Hat Network.
3. Red Hat puts out a nicely integrated distro that supports nice integrated features like PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module).
4. Red Hat has created training cirriculum and has a very good and very tough certification program which provides quality screened people to employers looking for "Linux" experience.
5. Red Hat has created partnerships with commercial companies like Oracle and created a clusterable server distro which will only get upgrades once or twice a year called "Red Hat Advanced Server". Corporate America isn't going to cycle as fast as the rest of us and needs stability. One or two major releases a year is about all they can take.
6. Red Hat provides support at very reasonable rates.
7. Red Hat provides consulting.
8. Red Hat maintains many topical mailing lists including a very important one for security bulletins.
9. Red Hat Press has started to pump out decent books. I just picked up "Red Hat Linux Security and Optimization".
In the last UNIX war, everything became very fragmented into camps e.g. (Sun, Dec, SGI, HP, IBM). Everyone was pulling is a different direction.
Hopefully in this new era we can get things down to just a couple of players each with equal market share, I am rooting for Suse and RedHat. We can't have just one, because the competition is essential to continue to make things better and better. I sometimes lament at all the duplicated effort and think, if we could all just work together and strive for one goal, however, I realize that the competition is essential. There must be tail lights to chase or pass.
Additionally, Sun, HP, and IBM are all in the Linux game to make things even more interesting.
If anyone in the Linux game has the potential to be evil, I would say look it is he who holds the most patents... IBM and HP.
Until the current patent insanity is resolved in the USA anything can happen and probably will.
There are those that want the Linux community to go from "friendly competition" to "mean spirited destructive infighting". Linux has gained a lot of momentum and is still picking up speed. As the speed increases, I suspect the FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) will increase along with it. This FUD will probably be covertly generated by the true enemies of Linux and all things "open", who currently reside in Redmond and, are pushing a product called ".NET" which they can't even clearly articulate.
Let's hang together, try to resolve our differences peacefully and amicably while we strive to create the worlds ultimate computing platform.
Red Hat is NOT evil! Red Hat is NOT like MICROSOFT!
I too am gluing together an Open Source solution for email/webmail and the Calendaring is always the biggest pain....
Why?
The majority (not all) of geeks look at calendars, project plans, palm pilots as useless. In my case, I don't even wear a watch.
The only way to get this done is for someone to write a check and/or fund a grant. Once the project gets rolling, it will quickly catch up to Outlook and perhaps even merge a few OSS projects like Mozilla and Squirrelmail.
I hate to agree with the previous posters, but this is BORING, non-challenging work. Many have gone down this path, only to fall asleep and find something better to hack on.
Unfortunately, this is one case where Microsoft actually excels over Opensource. They have enough money to pay programmers to do mundane work and complete bloatware with a pretty front ends.
Has the Open Source Community mets it's match? Is creating calendaring code that interoperates with Outlook beyond our reach?
I have to agree, legislation that forces people to choose one type of sofware is not a good idea, since one day the tables might get turned. It is similar to legislating a national religion, which is fine as long as the "Fundamental Whackos" are not in power.
However I do understand the angst in the Open Source community against Microsoft, Palladium, and bad legistlation like the DMCA. The real question is should we allow ourselves to become as ruthless as companies like Microsoft who squish, crush, and steal from anyone who even remotely looks like a threat?
Does the Open Source Community really want to become what it despises or is it really a last ditch effort at survival?
Myself, I am trying to adopt the "agnostic IBM" view of the world and give people the best tool for the job, which usually offers a good blend of Open Source and proprietary software. I have learned a lot from watching IBM and, just by IBM "giving customers a choice" as opposed to ramrodding solutions, they have become Microsoft's enemy #1.
One important thing that Open Source/GNU/Linux has going for it, is the mere fact "it's cool". Also, chicks dig that cute little penguin because Tux is sooo cute.
Microsoft is currently not envogue or cool, except for maybe the XBOX, which I refuse to buy until it can run Linux. Let's face it, Bill Gates (the lead software architect of Microsoft) can't even explain their coolest product called ".NET" which doesn't even have a cute animal to represent it. In fact, ".NET" sounds downright anti-cute and anti-environmental.
Personally, I think if Bill Gates had any ballz, that he would quit Microsoft and start a new company that competed agaist Microsoft and introduced even more chaos and choice into the market.
Speaking of choice, I went down and looked at the new Apple Mac this week. That dual processor beast with the 16:9 aspect ratio LCD panel is just incredible and it even comes with all my favorite UNIX tools installed. I was so WoW'ed that I might buy one soon; WHY? because the Mac is now a mix of proprietary and Open Source which "GIVES ME A CHOICE!" and a darn good looking hardware solution wrapped in clear acrylic.
Slashdot Mirror
The end of modded XBOXes = The end of my desire to own one.
I'll just have to wait until non blessed code can be run on an XBOX without a mod chip.
I was thinking about having this procedure done. Image being able to see in the morning before putting on glasses. Anyway, I chose not to do so for the following reasons.
1. Night Vision problems. Yes, everyone I know that has had the procedure gets the night vision "starring" to some degree.
2. It's only as good as your BEST pair of glasses. It can't correct better than that.
3. Dr. Weiss from the Kresge Eye Institute in Detroit, MI counseled me and explained that people who are particular about detail, i.e. (engineers and some computer users) were typically not happy with the results.
4. The surgery is a tradeoff, if you are near sighted, the surgery corrects for this and make you more farsighted, but then you are unable to focus on close objects like you used to, and vice versa.
5. No anti glare coating. The anti-glare coating on my lenses really cuts down an eye strain.
6. The smaller glasses frames look good and help frame your face, especially as your hairline recedes.
7. As your eye heals and forms scar tissue post surgery, it could potentially reduce the benefit of the surgery and require another round of corrective surgery.
My solution to the problem has to get "Flexcon Titanium Frames, with Carbon Composite lenses". This makes the glasses extremely light as well as durable, since titanium has a memory and won't deform. Just make sure that when you have the eye exam that the centers of your pupils are checked and double checked since the titanium frames WILL NOT BEND to accomodate any errors in the lens.
In my analysis, the benefits of the procedure do not outweigh the negatives and I am sticking with glasses. The two biggest negatives are the "night vision" and "not being able to focus as near as I used to".
Good Luck on your decision!
There is a saying I live by with respect to email and voicemail:
"Never argue with an idiot, since they will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
As a techie, this goes for all the email threads that people try to "suck" you in on daily. My rule of thumb is that you have to send me three queries in the form of voicemail, email, or memos in order to get me to consider getting involved in some whacky squabble or messy problem; AND, when I do reply, I am use the telephone so the reply can't turn into some bizarre email thread. Just because something is annoying or puzzling to a single person, doesn't mean you have to drop everthing and go solve their problem or even owe them a reply.
In case anyone missed it, let me say it again, "Just because you receive and email or voicemail with a question, doesn't mean you have to reply.".
It's always tempting to mash the "REPLY" button and show the world just how intelligent you are, but not everyone will see the glow of your intellect in an email message.
Just because someone asks a question, doesn't mean you have to answer.
Just because someone asks a technical question, doesn't mean you have to give a technical answer.
Never be afraid to use these phrases:
"I don't know, but I can look into it."
"Do you have any additional information."
"Is there anyone I can speak with that has additional information."
"Are you sure?"
"I would like to speak with my lawyer."
"Uhhh, Shuttup, Go away...." (From Beavis)
Unless you sent this guy your real name and contact info, I'd just stop writing back. Unless the guy is willing to invest money into tracking you down this is going no where. In fact if this CEO does hire someone with a brain, they will look at the email headers and see the "reply to" is forged, thus end of your involvement. If it makes it to you ISP, they will say, "Send us the email headers" and point out that the "reply-to" is forged.
Additionally, all CEO's should have their emails VIRUS and SPAM scanned. A CEO's time is far too important to waste on crap like this. Since he doesn't have any of these services he gets at least "2" looser points, and might not even be a CEO, but a genuine "Luuuhhhoooosssseeeerrrr!".
Good Luck and STOP REPLYING!
Don't forget the emulators...
MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator)
Pin MAME (Pinball)
Nostalgia (Intellivision Emulator)
I don't have time to make it pretty, but check these sites as well for emulator ideas:
http://www.effinspam.com/
http://www.tombstones.org.uk/burners.php?us
In 1987, IBM announced that programmers would soon be obsolete and in the future, programs would write programs. We would simply speak to our computers and the computer would magically translate our commands to code, just like on "Star Trek".
As long as there are programmers, you will need SysAdmins to protect systems from programmers. Sure you can virtualize your servers, but what are you going to do when someone writes bad code or worse bad SQL (How about a nice cartesian join)? I guess you could just go to your hardware vendor like IBM or Sun and say, we need more hardware, more disk, more RAM, because the CEO says it's slow. The nice vendor will be happy to sell you a bigger "fish tank", but the real answer is PERFORMANCE TUNING and optimization.
Oracle is also announcing the end of DBA's with Oracle 9i, the database that runs itself.
Try this experiment.
1. Buy a Sun Server that doesn't need a Sysadmin.
2. By Oracle 9i, that doesn't need a DBA.
3. Let the vendors do the install and setup.
4. Turn your users and developers loose and let them go develop systems to run your company.
It won't take long until something very bad happens. After a few months, performance will start to degrade, production data will be deleted, disks will fill up, and any writable directory will contain large amounts of crap. Backups will be non-existant, user accounts will be mismanaged and have totally lame passwords, production and development will be running on the same virutal server and same database, there will be no such thing as a hotfailover system or failover system since you be fortunate to have production running at all.
I've cleaned it up time and time and time again. There is only one person that can save you from this horrible mess, and that is your NAZI Sysadmin and NAZI DBA, both feared, revered, and smart.
Ever see that video "When Animals Attack!", there should be series called "When Users Attack!" and "When Developers Attack!".
Sysadmins are a cheap insurance policy and just plain handy to have around. Also, I just checked and Sun/Oracle still offer training for all their ADMIN-LESS products. If anyone has a success story, I want to hear it.
And if you upgrade your home PC to Windows XP you have to be "very paranoid" about what periphials (scanner, digital camera) you own, since they may or may not have drivers. It's the same on either O/S my friend. At least with Linux you have some hope that your periphial won't just be abandoned one day.
Directors don't own Copyrights. Actors don't own Copyrights.
Members of the MPAA own Copyrights e.g. (Sony, Fox, Universal).
Until these people decide to sue, there is no case.
IANAL, but how can you see someone for violating Copyright, when you do not own the Copyright. Last I checked, Directors were hired by studios and the studio or the studio's parent company owned the Copyright,
This case doesn't even sound valid, since the DAG owns nothing in this case. Additionally, as long as clean flicks clearly states that the film content has been modified, personally I welcome movies with less "F" words. I hope they win.
Probably the only way you can start a radio station is to start a low power FM Pirate Radio Station. The reason for the tight control of the airwaves and spectrum is two fold.
1. Selling spectrum is source of revenue for the government. (That's why Digital Tuners in TV are now required by law, new spectrum=new revenue)
2. Controlling spectrum is a method of controlling what content reaches the masses (since FM radios are de facto standard).
If FM radio stations were to spring up and start playing non mainstream stuff and the masses liked it, what would that mean for the RIAA members? Consumers might start consuming from smaller labels and smaller local bands might start exposure and taking fans/money away from the mega-bands. It would be anarchy and thus not allowed my friend. Only the RIAA members are allowed to decide what is permissible and popular.
Control the revenue, control the content, and control the masses. About the only deviants allowed on FM are (very low power) College Stations and NPR.
I live in the Detroit area and there are a few pirate FM station that pop up from time to time. To my knowledge none have never gotten busted, but then again, they might be tranmitting from a boat in International waters.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
I just finished watching it as well.. I have to agree, it sucks. However, always keep in mind that all SCI FI series tend to suck in the beginning, remember back to the beinning of ST:NG.
To me "John Doe" looks good, going to watch it next. Meanwhile, I'm awaiting, "The West Wing" premiere.
Yes, I think AspectJ is the reason he had to leave.
Just in case anyone is wondering what this is all about click here.
Can you tell us about the whole process of getting busted and interrogated? How was the DOJ able to learn about all the members and execute simultaneous busts?
How hard did the DOJ interrogators push to get names of accomplices and if you cooperated, did that reduce your sentencing?
What advice would you give to someone who finds themselves in a similar situation? e.g. ( Hire a good pre-trial lawyer. Flee the country. )
I assume that the DOJ confiscated all your servers and went through the logs and examined all the user accounts and IP addresses. What happened to the "small time users" or did the DOJ not bother to track them down?
Lastly, in hindsight if you had to do it all over again. What would you have done to stay under the radar and not get busted?
I agree, competition is what makes things better! Without competition, stagnation sets in, ala Micro$oft. Killing off either KDE or GNOME would be bad, very bad.
Go KDE!
Go Gnome!
Maybe Redhat should just make the standardization optional, however I know they are now trying to push into the desktop market which is a giant leap for Linux. Maybe, just maybe, their "Redhat-ized" version should like like Windoze XP.
"The Windoze related mispellings were intentional."
Last year Best Buy sent my friends and I (ultimate electronic consumers) coupons for various percentages off items. Thinking the the stores out of stock during the big "coupon sale", our plan was to go the day before the sale, buy the item, and then return the following day and do a price adjustment with the coupon.
Much to my surprise, the price on the item I purchased had been raised 10% for the sale and conveniently enough my coupon was for 10%. Nice trick. I felt like an idiot for waiting in line to get my non-existant cash back.
And yes, shortly after Christmas the price dropped even lower than the price I paid to make room for the the new model which (I think) arrived in the spring.
When hackers stop bothering to hack your software, it is a sign that their love for you has grown cold and you are now irrelevant. Has anyone hacked Novell lately? :)
To be truly loved is to get hacked! Someone out there must really love Microsoft, but I am glad they are starting to share the love with the Open Source community more and more. It is a sign that the love for Microsoft may be starting to fade or maybe hackers are just plain sick of "shooting fish" in the idomatic barrel.
Either way, I am going to go block UDP on port 2002 on the fw/router and mumble to myself about buffer overflows.
Where on earth am I going to find a motherboard for a CMOS processor?
First CMOS, then Silicon, then Gallium (what ever happened GaAs anyway?), then Coppermine, and now back to CMOS with a silicon fin.....
Mmmrrrppphh, full circle you have come young Jedi.
-Yoda
This is a perfect opportunity to get a decent hacker inside Microsoft.
Sometimes to defeat the beast, you have to get into the "belly of the beast".
It is sad admission for Microsoft to put out this help wanted sign and admit that they don't already have the inhouse talent to deal with this problem. After all the XBOX is x86 architecture and no-one should do x86 better than the Microsoft.
If any XBOX hacker does decide to take this job and relocate to Redmond, whatever you do, don't sign your IP (Intellectual Property) rights away. That is the paper that states that Microsoft will own any thought you have past, present, or future just because they hired you at some point. Then when you quit, they can't threaten to sue you over every email and code post. You'll be FREE of the beast.
Once you are inside and have them believing you have turned to the darkside, we still need the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT so we can figure out exactly what a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) is doing. Also, we will need a back door engineering into the Palladium hardware so we can run all our Opensource rippers and players as trusted code on the x86 architecture.
And remember boys and girls, "Security is an illusion!"
I recently observed a "Forced Death March" to finish a project which involved working the development team 10 hours a day and Saturdays.
Some quit immediately and the ones that hung around did their best but, became very irrational and difficult to work with. The amount of stupid mistakes increased dramatically and after awhile they were just spinning their wheels due to fatigue.
Eventually, they had cobbled an application together which, sort of worked but needed nearly round the clock support, however they didn't have to work nights and weekends anymore as a team, just the oncall pager person.
After the "launch" many of them "quit" the company due to burnout and we are now left with only one developer that understands the system end to end.
So what has history taught us about forcing developers to go on a "Death March".
* Stupid Mistakes Increase
* Tempers Flare
* Developers Quit at the Onset of the March
* Developers Experience Burnoutn During the March
* Developers will exit the company at the end of the project with ill feelings and leave no one to support/cleanup whatever it was they created.
* In my case the final product is so bad, it will probably need to be rewritten in the not too distant future.
As you can see, it's a win/win/win situation.
In my opinion, the only way to prevent development disaster is to spend a lot of time in
* Requirements Gathering (Ask the user)
* Requirements Validation (Make sure the user isn't and idiot)
* Design (This starts before you code)
* Design Review (This is done before you code)
* Module Planning (Break the project into chunks)
* Module Testing (Test the thing before you slam it into production)
It may sound boring but it works........
Either you quit now or quit later... Might as well just quit now, unless of course you need to get kicked in the head to learn a lesson firsthand.
Or, "polyopoly" which seems to roll off the tongue easier with that extra "o".
Let's assume that this legislation goes forward, how exactly can you implement such logging and who is going to pay for implementation?
Let's assume that ISPs block all traffic on port 80 and 443 then force everyone to use a proxy server which stores logs for 6 months.
Is this the intent of the legislation?
If so, all "terrorists" need to do is move their webservers to ports other than 80 and 443 to get around the blocking and logging? Currently there are around 65000 other ports to choose from.
Is it just me or is this just stupid legislation?
I think you see more WMA because windows converts mp3s to WMA's auto-magically on save/download, unless you disable that feature.
Speaking as RCHE #807202341505038 I'd have to say that Red Hat is a force for good.
Red Hat is in a challenging spot, trying to survive as a company and post a profit while giving away their distro. The current business model is soley based on survival and what works.
Red Hat provides the following invaluable services:
1. Red Hat spends cash on EVIL lawyers to keep the Microsoft/Sony owned Congress from squashing the "cancer" known as "Open Source" and "GPL".
2. Red Hat maintains a lot of code, maybe too much code, and provides patches and bug fixes for FREE via up2date and RPM's. This is called the Red Hat Network.
3. Red Hat puts out a nicely integrated distro that supports nice integrated features like PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module).
4. Red Hat has created training cirriculum and has a very good and very tough certification program which provides quality screened people to employers looking for "Linux" experience.
5. Red Hat has created partnerships with commercial companies like Oracle and created a clusterable server distro which will only get upgrades once or twice a year called "Red Hat Advanced Server". Corporate America isn't going to cycle as fast as the rest of us and needs stability. One or two major releases a year is about all they can take.
6. Red Hat provides support at very reasonable rates.
7. Red Hat provides consulting.
8. Red Hat maintains many topical mailing lists including a very important one for security bulletins.
9. Red Hat Press has started to pump out decent books. I just picked up "Red Hat Linux Security and Optimization".
In the last UNIX war, everything became very fragmented into camps e.g. (Sun, Dec, SGI, HP, IBM). Everyone was pulling is a different direction.
Hopefully in this new era we can get things down to just a couple of players each with equal market share, I am rooting for Suse and RedHat. We can't have just one, because the competition is essential to continue to make things better and better. I sometimes lament at all the duplicated effort and think, if we could all just work together and strive for one goal, however, I realize that the competition is essential. There must be tail lights to chase or pass.
Additionally, Sun, HP, and IBM are all in the Linux game to make things even more interesting.
If anyone in the Linux game has the potential to be evil, I would say look it is he who holds the most patents... IBM and HP.
Until the current patent insanity is resolved in the USA anything can happen and probably will.
There are those that want the Linux community to go from "friendly competition" to "mean spirited destructive infighting". Linux has gained a lot of momentum and is still picking up speed. As the speed increases, I suspect the FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) will increase along with it. This FUD will probably be covertly generated by the true enemies of Linux and all things "open", who currently reside in Redmond and, are pushing a product called ".NET" which they can't even clearly articulate.
Let's hang together, try to resolve our differences peacefully and amicably while we strive to create the worlds ultimate computing platform.
Red Hat is NOT evil!
Red Hat is NOT like MICROSOFT!
Pick a distro, get behind it and PUSH!!!!!!!
I too am gluing together an Open Source solution for email/webmail and the Calendaring is always the biggest pain....
Why?
The majority (not all) of geeks look at calendars, project plans, palm pilots as useless. In my case, I don't even wear a watch.
The only way to get this done is for someone to write a check and/or fund a grant. Once the project gets rolling, it will quickly catch up to Outlook and perhaps even merge a few OSS projects like Mozilla and Squirrelmail.
I hate to agree with the previous posters, but this is BORING, non-challenging work. Many have gone down this path, only to fall asleep and find something better to hack on.
Unfortunately, this is one case where Microsoft actually excels over Opensource. They have enough money to pay programmers to do mundane work and complete bloatware with a pretty front ends.
Has the Open Source Community mets it's match?
Is creating calendaring code that interoperates with Outlook beyond our reach?
I have to agree, legislation that forces people to choose one type of sofware is not a good idea, since one day the tables might get turned. It is similar to legislating a national religion, which is fine as long as the "Fundamental Whackos" are not in power.
However I do understand the angst in the Open Source community against Microsoft, Palladium, and bad legistlation like the DMCA. The real question is should we allow ourselves to become as ruthless as companies like Microsoft who squish, crush, and steal from anyone who even remotely looks like a threat?
Does the Open Source Community really want to become what it despises or is it really a last ditch effort at survival?
Myself, I am trying to adopt the "agnostic IBM" view of the world and give people the best tool for the job, which usually offers a good blend of Open Source and proprietary software. I have learned a lot from watching IBM and, just by IBM "giving customers a choice" as opposed to ramrodding solutions, they have become Microsoft's enemy #1.
One important thing that Open Source/GNU/Linux has going for it, is the mere fact "it's cool". Also, chicks dig that cute little penguin because Tux is sooo cute.
Microsoft is currently not envogue or cool, except for maybe the XBOX, which I refuse to buy until it can run Linux. Let's face it, Bill Gates (the lead software architect of Microsoft) can't even explain their coolest product called ".NET" which doesn't even have a cute animal to represent it. In fact, ".NET" sounds downright anti-cute and anti-environmental.
Personally, I think if Bill Gates had any ballz, that he would quit Microsoft and start a new company that competed agaist Microsoft and introduced even more chaos and choice into the market.
Speaking of choice, I went down and looked at the new Apple Mac this week. That dual processor beast with the 16:9 aspect ratio LCD panel is just incredible and it even comes with all my favorite UNIX tools installed. I was so WoW'ed that I might buy one soon; WHY? because the Mac is now a mix of proprietary and Open Source which "GIVES ME A CHOICE!" and a darn good looking hardware solution wrapped in clear acrylic.