Re:One option is treating your customer with respe
on
Linux and DRM?
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· Score: 4, Informative
That, and I'm not sure they're not watermarked with a personal identifier:).
I realize that you're joking, but actually I did check, with the help of an IRC acquaintance.
He and I both downloaded the same track from emusic -- at different times, just in case you're wondering, as it was a track I'd had for a while --, and then each ran md5sum on our copies. The md5sums matched. and for the truly tin-foil hatted, I had him give me the start of his md5sum first.;)
We weren't looking to pirate the tracks, we were just curious, given that emusic in its early incarnation as mp3.com had once boasted of its water-marking technology.
One option is treating your customer with respect
on
Linux and DRM?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As a employee of a large content provider, what current options are out there for groups that want to deploy protected content on Linux?"
Sell your product at a fair price, one that's low enough that most users will find it more convenient to buy than to pirate (surely your servers can deliver bandwidth faster and more reliably than P2P, right?). Learn from Baen Books -- Baen actually gives away books hat are a few years old, and in a convenient variety of formats. Baen makes money off this when readers buy sequels in hard-copy.
Sell your product in a an open format so that your customers can read it or listen to it with the applications and on the OSes they've become comfortable with. Learn for the Real Player debacle, and note how many people have said that no video is compelling enough to get them to install RealPlayer. Don't get your ass caught in the same vise.
Recognize that DRM or nor, some piracy is inevitable. Don't let this fool you into alienating the vast majority of your honest customers in a vain attempt to prevent piracy by a tiny minority that probably would never but your product anyway. learn from the Intuit debacle; count the number of customers who will never return to Intuit.
Trust and respect your customers, and many will extend that same trust and respect to you: I've gotten nearly 8000 non-DRM'd mp3s from emusic.com, and I won't even share them with friends -- because emusic showed me it trusted me, and I don't want to abuse that trust.
However, when you visit their links and install their "player" it seems that you are also installing software that takes control of your AIM buddy list and sends advertisments to those on your buddy list. The advertisements are obviously designed to look like innocent messages from your buddies asking you to check out certain links. Very scummy, indeed.
What's worse, in an effort to drive traffic to their site, their software hijacks your Slashdot login, forges complaints about their software, and submits those complaints to Slashdot as articles and comments.
You can distinguish their forged posts because invariably the last three words of any forged post are "Very scummy, indeed".
Yeah, I've seen it. Does it strike you as ironic to have to manually page through a text file like when you've shelled out $500 for a zaurus computer, presumably as a handheld, ever-present labor saving device?
I'm more than willing to do stuff that a computer can't do, but matching a description from a manifest file to a directory entry seems like a job perfectly suited to a computer.
(And PS, ipkg net-install fails to read this particular feed, and then fails to explain why beyond "ipkg encountered an error. Sorry".)
You idiots are turning an excellent browser into a weapon in your imaginary war. Why would you isolate it from Windows users with your shitty "us vs them" attitude? Firefox has nothing to do with the Linux "movement." It apparently works great regardless of the OS.
I'm afraid you've missed the point, AC. Linux isn't about linux.
No, really, I mean that.
That is, linux isn't about "the linux movement". I can see how the opinions of some super-zealot linux fanbois might have given you that impression, but they're a tiny minority.
But you're right about one thing: the fact that Mozilla works under linux -- or as you note, it "works great regardless of the OS" is the point.
Because linux isn't about linux. Linux's about the freedom to make up your own mind.
Let me explain by contrasting linux with MS-Windows. MS-Windows is about vendor lock-in, embraced standards that are extended to be proprietary and ad hoc, and above all making blanket decisions for all users that don't take into account individual variation among users.
Microsoft gives you XML that only Microsoft Word can read. Microsoft gives your disk formatters that can but won't format partitions lagrer than 32GB -- because Microsoft believes that partitions larger than 332GB should be NTFS. Microsoft's browser can't conceive of a situation where its proxy settings shouldn't apply to all programs -- so rather than have it's own proxy settings, it alters the settings for the overall network connection. And so forth.
Linux says to you, it's your computer, you can do whatever you want with it, if you're willing to take the time to figure out how, or -- if it can't yet be done -- figure out how to code it.
And Firefox is about that philosophy too. That's why Firefox runs regardless of OS: because your choice of OS shouldn't be dictated by your browser.
And that -- the browser dictating the OS, by means of embracing and extending the HTML markup language -- was what dave was complaining about in the first place.
The reason I use Firefox is two-fold: one, it's a better browser in most ways than IE (it's worse in others, especially Mozilla's doctrinaire insistence on not compensating for obviously incorrect mime types on mis-configured servers).
But the other reason I use Firefox is the same reason I use cygwin and Open Office and ScITE: Microsoft has put me in a corner one time to many, a corner where Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't llet me run my computer as I needed to.
And so I turned to linux-style tools. Cygwin, because Windows doesn't support command line tools or development well. mkfs (yes, a version of mkfs compiled for Windows!) in order to make a 60GB partition for my mp3s -- because, as I noted above, Windows could but would not write a partition bigger than 32GB, and I didn't want to and couldn't use NTFS for my mp3 partition.
Open Office and SciTE because it's clear that MS-Windows is going to keep restricting me. While I'm not ready to move to linux yet, I am making sure that my transition will be easy: Open Office and SciTE both run under both MS-Windows and linux, so I won;t have to learn news apps when I transition.
So Firefox's philosophy works hand-in-hand with linux's philosophy, and Firefox supports linux by giving it a browser that doesn't care what OS you're using. And that's the point.
dave writes "In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, in light of the excellent Firefox 0.8 release it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view."
In dave's original 1999 article, he had written:
"Attention: This is the battle that could cost us the war. If we come together and push all of our might toward a Free Web Browser for Linux, we have a good chance of winning this battle. If we fail, we will lose the war. This is the issue that Microsoft wants us to overlook."
I'm not quite sure how many times I need to explain this, maybe I should stick it in a FAQ or something, but Firefox is not a community driven project. While it gets a lot of benefit from testing, ideas, patches, etc, the prerogative for deciding what will and will not go into the product has always been held by the development group. This is not a new thing, this was in fact the reason this project was created.
In a subsequent message he explains further (emphasis mine):
Aside from the work that Pierre has done improving Bookmarks and digging around in the toolkit, patches from individual contributors and the infrasturcture (sic) work Brian has been doing on an ongoing basis,
Firefox is basically just me at the moment.
So are we all in this together, or is the community just sitting on its collective ass, waiting for bengoodger to vanquish Microsoft all by himself? (I realize it's not so black and white, especially given Mozilla's extensible structure, but still I found the contrast of opinions revelatory.)
Opie does some great work, and I've tried several times to install opie apps and Open zaurus on my 5600.
OZ never installs correctly, and half the Opie apps crashed under the original Sharp ROM, <i>even those in the Sharp-rom feed</i>.
Several times they crashed badly enough that the Qtopia window manager failed to start, and I had to interrupt the boot, go in via the console, and un-tar Sharp's backup tars. Not fun.
And the Opie web site seems almost intentionally hard to navigate, the way the feeds are just lists of un-described and un-documented programs (yes, I know they idea is to use the feeds with the install-from-network ipkg option).
I guess what I'm saying is, they best programs in the world are of limited use if the documentation is missing and you're left to guess at what something is and whether or not it'll work. If you disagree, first follow the link in the article, and then tell me what somebody new to Opie is supposed to figure out from (excerpt; notice the not-so-descriptive description column): Index of/feed/sharprom/1.0.3
Given the strong, almost religious feelings of OS-zealots, now that George W. Bush is advocating giving Federal money to religious ("faith-based") organizations, why not just declare BSD to be a religion (and the various *BSDs sects of that religion), and grab the Federal funds directly?
Imagine a "faithed-based" rehabilitation program run not by the Baptists or the Catholics, but by open source BSD zealots: "Joe, you can over come your Microsoft addiction if you just follow this 12-step program:
First, admit that you are powerless over Microsoft -- and thanks to their OSes, your life has become unmanageable.
Second, believe in a higher power: the Regents of the University of California.
Third, decide to use Richard Stallman's tool set.
Fourth, make a searching and fearless moral inventory of your hard drive for Microsoft products, then
Five show yourfaith by running fdisk on your MS-Windows partitions.
Yes, we must concentrate on these important matters!
Full speed ahead with the Federal investigation of Janet's tit!
Do not allow yourself to be distracted from this by unimportant minutia, like:
a national intelligence apparatus that never saw September 11th coming
but did "see" non-existent yellow cake and Weapons of Mass Destruction
in order to justify an ill-conceived war against a regime that, though evil, had nothing to do with terrorist attacks on the U.S.
which has led to even more people hating the U.S.
and millions in no-bid contracts for Hallibuton and
and a bill of at least 87 billion dollars
and 3000 American soldiers wounded and 500 American soldiers killed
like a domestic "war on terrorism" that has turned into a war on the Bill of Rights
including the subpoenaing anti-war protesters
and denying alleged terrorists the benefits of counsel
and the extension of special police powers like "sneak and peek" warrants originally granted to "fight terrorism" to the investigation of crimes having nothing to do with terrorism.
or like steadily increasing government spending, and an unprecedented deficit even as
the richest 1% of Americans get increased tax breaks, supposedly to increase employment, even as
the number of the unemployed swells to a size not seen in twenty years
Word is, an investigation of repeated intelligence failures will be postponed until after the election. I guess fixing an FBI and CIA that missed any clues about September 11th can wait.
Meanwhile, the investigation into Janet's tit goes full speed ahead.
So follow your government's example! Don't be distracted by these things that don't matter! Concentrate on Janet's tit!
If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't ask them to do this at all. Sure, it may boost short-term profits for them, but in the long-term, it could cause consumer rebellion against them and the revenue lost would probably far outweigh the short-term benefit
You're absolutely right.
But.
I don't know how Verisign's top management is compensated, but a big problem in the last decade across corporations has been the practice of tying executive compensation to short-term stock prices.
In other word (and again, I don't know this to be a fact in Verisgn's case) it may be that it's very bad for long-term stock price, very bad for common shareholders, ultimately bad for regular employees (who end up being laid off when the chickens come home to roost), but still very good for top management.
...that they would learn from past mistakes. But no, of course not.
They have.
What they've learned is that outrage, like everything else, is a limited quantity.
You and I can't spend afford eight hours a day, five days a week to watch and warn against Verisign.
We have other things to worry about: Belkin using routers to spam, New York's Livingston County Social Services Commission letting confidential data get posted on the web, Johm Ashcroft eviscerating the Bill of Rights.
But Verisign can trigger our outrage the first time around, back down in the face of our massed complaints, and then, like a spider in its hole, wait patiently until the time is ripe to strike again.
Just like the Department of Justice and the proposed "Patriot II" law; they withdrew it after furious opposition, wait a while, and then got key provisions passed after everyone had relaxed.
Verisign is banking that each time around, they'll be a few less people able or willing to work up any outrage, until only a small minority objects -- a small minority that can be derided with a dismissive comment about "tin foil hats".
This is why we need organizations like the EFF and EPIC (and the ACLU): so the we have someone in out corner who, like a Verisign employee, is paid five days a week to watch for and counter these outrages.
The more interesting question is why he felt the need to post the real data. If I had a database formatting error, I would have written a fake database that was corrupted in a similiar (sic) wayt (sic) and asked about it.
I'm guessing it's because he was a lazy dumbass who just didn't give a rip about the confidentiality of low-income kids in foster care.
Given that the article mentions he was informed that he'd posted live data, responded that he'd made a mistake and wouldn't repeat it, and then re-posted the same data the very next day I think supports my assessment.
As to why you would have gone to the trouble to substitute in fake data, well, you've got some equipment he apparently lacks: professional integrity and an ethical compass.
Who do you trust? And who do you get to solve something like this?
In this particular case, you needn't trust anyone.
Nothing that Mark Dennis wanted to do -- build the database structure, build the front-end, or get help with his "tricky formatting problem" required that he use supply real data to RentaACoders or other sub contractors
And furthermore, nothing the Livingston County Social Services Commission wanted required that Mark Dennis ever see live data.
This one's simple, folks -- sure, Mark (or someone) needed to do a requirements analysis, sure, somebody had to decide what data entities to capture -- but very little real data was needed.
First, make some dummy data for the developers' use: run through your real data -- if you even need to base the dummy data off the real data --, and replace every name with a random dictionary word. Do the same thing for addresses, and replace Social Security and other id numbers with randomly chosen numbers. In all cases, maintain a constant map of real to dummy, to preserve relations within the data: "Mike Smith" is always translated to "Armchair Landowner" and "1450 Main Street" to "3321 Crumpet Sponge".
Once you've finished your translation, throw away the map.
Now the coder has data that's exactly as diverse as the real data, shows the same frequencies and inter-relations as the real data, is as internally self-consistent as the real data, and yet is (nearly) completely meaningless in terms of the real world, and (nearly) impossible to link to any real persons, places, or identifying information.
(It's possible one could still do traffic analysis on the data, and come up with aggregate data: either more male or more female (but which?) children are in the Social Services system; two zip codes out of six produce 70% of the cases (but which two?). If this is a problem you have to take a weighted slice of the data, and provide the developer with only this weighted slice; that (intentionally) skews your frequencies, but still preserves diverse data and any inter-relations among that data, closely enough to be representative for almost all design and coding needs.)
No trust involved. Just a simple and mechanical translation process that has to take place only once.
(If you really have a situation where the developer must base his requirements and code against gradually accumulating real world data -- and you shouldn't if you've planned at all well -- let one non-out sourced person hold the translation map -- and be held responsible for keeping it secret.)
And a process like I've outlined should be standard for any organization dealing with sensitive data.
If I, as a young boy with cancer, actually cancer, a relapse and cancer again between the ages of 7 and 18, while going to chemo 3 times a week could make it to school, why couldn't Senator Kerry suck it up and go to vote in the Senate?
You know, Wyatt, I really can't explain it. I don't know you, I don't know what your circumstances were, I don't know John Kerry, I don't know how bad his cancer was. And I'm not about to start judging people based on my idea of how much they've suffered.
Talk to the voters of Massachusetts: last I heard they elected John Kerry to the Senate four times, and they haven't elected you even once. You'd better tell them that you're holier than John Kerry, and teel them to vote for you.
I guess you're a better cancer survivor than that wimp John Kerry.
You probably served more heroically in Vietnam too.
You win. You're a better person than John Kerry. Your suffering beats his suffering. Your tenacity in going to school beats John kerry's tenacity in going to the Senate.
Your should run for Senate, Wyatt. Or Jesus Christ. You're just a better person than any of us could hope to be. Our jaws drop in awe of you.
Actually in my circle of hardcore cancer survivors we consider [prostate cancer] to be about as bad as having the flu.
Did you know that you can vote by proxy in the senate? Senator Kerry did not even have to be there. He could have voted on important issues from his campaign bus or from his hospital bed.
Good point, and thanks for the useful glossary citation, but that's only for votes in committee, not votes on passage.
While I can't say for certain, the Congressional Quarterly report that "Wyatt Earp" quoted from The National Review almost certainly concerned votes for or against passage of laws; it wouldn't really be a fair comparison otherwise, as not all senators are on all committees, and so most wouldn't vote on any one committee matter.
Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job.... Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.
Most votes, as I'm sure you know, are nowhere near close, and in most cases when they are, it's known well ahead of time. A Senator's job is also to stand up for his principles -- and to challenge the President when the President is failing to lead. John Kerry is doing that. And when he stood up to run against Bush, all the smart money was that Bush would sail to an easy re-election. Kerry certainly wasn't "[choosing] personal advancement over... the voters".
So Kerry's in no way failing the people of Massachusetts, and they know it, and I know it, and you know.
It's a cheap bit of rhetoric.
But as long as we're comparing time off, let's note that the Republican controlled Congress is planning "the lightest legislative load in 40 years", even when compared to prior election years, according to a story in today's Washington Post.
And, As you also probably know, Dubya boasts the longest time spent on vacation of any modern president, at over a month per year. Only the French that Dubya also freely reviles get vacations like that. Americans -- normal, working Americans -- don't.
I know that Bush has been good enough to arrange even longer "vacations" for a lot of the work-force, but the key difference is that unlike those many Americans, Bush vacation doesn't consist of being laid off and watching his unemployment benefits run out.
You know what, I had cancer too, and I showed up for school
Sounds like you triumphed over your cancer, Wyatt, and more power to you. I hope that every family with a child with cancer has the same opportunity to receive the standard of care that you did, even if it means, as in your case, commuting as far as a five hundred miles to get that life-saving care.
That's why, like Senator Kerry, I believe we need a better health plan than President Bush's plan -- a plan that won't pay for sick children to travel five hundred miles to get care, but that will pay windfalls of millions more to the pharmaceutical companies, even while it specifically forbids the government from buying in bulk or negotiating more favorable drug prices.
(And having had to juggle grade school and cancer treatments, you must realize how ineffective and underfunded Bush's own "No Child Left Behind" education program is. I hope you'll help us to truly make sure no child is left behind, by leaving behind instead the lies of the Bush Administration.)
Memo to Mr. Dean: When you say things like, "we're going to take back the white house", exactly *who* took it? The spanish inquisition?
When the Bush administration decided to treat the White House like a football stadium and sell the naming rights to Halliburton.
Ok, to be fair, so far only the names of certain exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution (that's America's museum ) have been sold to corporate sponsors. According to an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Examples include the Lockheed Martin IMAX theater and the General Motors Hall of Transportation, $10 million each, and the Fujifilm Giant Panda Conservation Habitat at the National Zoo.....
In January, a coalition of scholars sent a letter to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Smithsonian's chancellor, to protest the way the institution "has allowed its name to be used for donors' commercial purposes, and let donors influence both the nature and content of exhibits. The result is an erosion of the Smithsonian's integrity and of the public's trust."
That's right, billions for Iraq, millions in no-bid set asides for Halliburton, but the premier American public monument to science and scholarship have to go hat in hand, selling off its reputation and impartiality piecemeal, as advertising for the same companies making millions off corporate welfare.
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york20040122083 5.asp "The publication Congressional Quarterly examined 119 recorded votes held in 2003 in which the president had taken a position. CQ found that Kerry was present for just 28 percent of those votes. In contrast, Kerry's colleague from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, was present for 97 percent of the votes."
Wyatt, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're not trying to dupe Slashdot, but the you've been duped by the National Review.
But whether you're a dupe or a Republican sock puppet, you're disingenuously misrepresenting Senator Kerry.
You mention that both Kerry and his dad were volunteers, but what you don't mention is that both Kerry and his Dad had prostate cancer.
Senator Kerry's father died from prostate cancer.
Senator Kerry's own prostate cancer was in -- surprise -- 2003. (He announced it a little less than a year ago today., on February 12, 2003.)
So yeah, he may have only been present for 28% of whatever subset of votes Congressional Quarterly was analyzing -- because he had cancer and at the same time he was running for his party's nomination for President.
In that light, I think showing up for more than a quarter of the votes sounds pretty hardworking, if not heroic.
Yes, but who was going to confuse a database with a web browser?
Google is changing the way we live.
Well, it started earlier than Google. I remember trying to search for pages with AltaVista. AltaVista didn't (at some point in its development) like single letters, like "C", so searching for pages about the "C Programming Language" was difficult. AltaVista used the prefix "+" operator to mean "require this word", so AltaVista was especially annoyed at searches for "C++"
The point is, even though you and I know that a database and a web browser are two different things, Google doesn't. Indeed, because you and "just know" that a Firebird is a browser or a database or a Pontiac, we don't tend to qualify any of them as such: we don't say "Firebird the browser" or "Firebird (database)" or "Pontiac Firebird", because we know that other humans will infer the correct Firebird from nearby words like "site", "select" or "gear shift". But Google won't, and we can't pile every possible nearby word into our queries.
And since we rely more and more on Google to find anything (hell, we even use it to verify spellings when perfectly good dictionaries are just as handy), people with an interest in Firebird the database are legitimately annoyed when an 800 pound gorilla of a browser invades their namespace. They don't want to have to trouble to weed out references to the browser every time they do the search.
We also know that the genetic sequencer, as long as it is, is nowhere near long enough to provide an actual "blueprint" of the organism being built.
Mmmmm, so it's just a checksum, then?
No.
It's data, but unlike a blueprint, there's not enough information to specify the placement of every cell, or every connection between neurons.
A better analogy (but still only an analogy) would be to a recipe: a recipe specifies the amounts of ingredients, and in the case of a marble (two batter) cake, may even specify that the cake is made of a mix of a chocolate and a vanilla batter, with icing on the top, but it doesn't specify that position (x, y, z) in the cake is made of chocolate or vanilla batter.
The exact marbling of any individual cake is not specified by the recipe and is contingent on random events in the mixing of the batters and the baking of the cake.
A blueprint, however, does specify -- to some arbitrary granularity -- the composition and layout of the entire structure to be built: this section is made of pine, that of oak, penny nails go here and here, a wood screw goes there.
Can people reproduce on other planets? Can any earth creature?
I don't know, but I'm willing to give it a try!
Rich.
Rich, Rich, Rich.
NASA, given its recent history, really needs more successes to name. Do you really think the first humans NASA will pick to reproduce on other planers will be Slashdot posters?
At the very least, NASA is going to want people with experience procreating -- or those having had the opportunity to procreate -- here on Earth.
if anything, babies would be larger due to the ability to grow larger with fewer bad effects.
Thank you Doctor.
But seriously folks, we just don't know.
We do know that evolution makes a lot of assumptions about an organism's environment, and that gravity is one assumption that could be strongly relied on for the last three billion years, from the origin of life on earth until Laika's the dog's first orbit in 1957.
We also know that the genetic sequencer, as long as it is, is nowhere near long enough to provide an actual "blueprint" of the organism being built. The human genome is approximately 3.2 billion base pairs long, but the number of -- for example -- neurons in the human brain is perhaps 100 billion, making for the possibility of as many as 100 billion squared connections between neurons. There is simply not enough information in the genome to specify the type, position, or inter-connections of every neuron in the brain, much less every cell in the body.
How then, is a body built from the genetic code? The short is answer is that we don't (yet) fully know; the longer answer is that the genome does specify certain rules by which certain cells express certain parts of the genome, grow in certain directions, etc.
One typical strategy governing cell growth is a "tropism", growth toward or away from a particular environmental stimulus. Geotropism, growth toward the earth, is almost certainly mediated by gravity (as opposed to sensing the earth in some less obvious way).
It would be amazing if animal embryogenesis -- the growth of the baby organism -- did not involve geotropism to some degree. (We already know that the growth of plants and their seeds do rely on geotropism -- this is how roots grow down and stalks grow up). How geotropism is involved in animal embryogenesis, how and to what extent the developing embryo would be affected by reduced gravity -- all are unanswered questions.
A facile answer that lower gravity would means bigger babies with "fewer bad effects" isn't an answer at all; that is to say, the answer might even (though I doubt it) turn out to be right, but the answer is not reasoned.
Slashdot Mirror
That, and I'm not sure they're not watermarked with a personal identifier :).
;)
I realize that you're joking, but actually I did check, with the help of an IRC acquaintance.
He and I both downloaded the same track from emusic -- at different times, just in case you're wondering, as it was a track I'd had for a while --, and then each ran md5sum on our copies. The md5sums matched. and for the truly tin-foil hatted, I had him give me the start of his md5sum first.
We weren't looking to pirate the tracks, we were just curious, given that emusic in its early incarnation as mp3.com had once boasted of its water-marking technology.
As a employee of a large content provider, what current options are out there for groups that want to deploy protected content on Linux?"
Sell your product at a fair price, one that's low enough that most users will find it more convenient to buy than to pirate (surely your servers can deliver bandwidth faster and more reliably than P2P, right?). Learn from Baen Books -- Baen actually gives away books hat are a few years old, and in a convenient variety of formats. Baen makes money off this when readers buy sequels in hard-copy.
Sell your product in a an open format so that your customers can read it or listen to it with the applications and on the OSes they've become comfortable with. Learn for the Real Player debacle, and note how many people have said that no video is compelling enough to get them to install RealPlayer. Don't get your ass caught in the same vise.
Recognize that DRM or nor, some piracy is inevitable. Don't let this fool you into alienating the vast majority of your honest customers in a vain attempt to prevent piracy by a tiny minority that probably would never but your product anyway. learn from the Intuit debacle; count the number of customers who will never return to Intuit.
Trust and respect your customers, and many will extend that same trust and respect to you: I've gotten nearly 8000 non-DRM'd mp3s from emusic.com, and I won't even share them with friends -- because emusic showed me it trusted me, and I don't want to abuse that trust.
copyright (c) 2004, not-the-Gartner-Group
However, when you visit their links and install their "player" it seems that you are also installing software that takes control of your AIM buddy list and sends advertisments to those on your buddy list. The advertisements are obviously designed to look like innocent messages from your buddies asking you to check out certain links. Very scummy, indeed.
What's worse, in an effort to drive traffic to their site, their software hijacks your Slashdot login, forges complaints about their software, and submits those complaints to Slashdot as articles and comments.
You can distinguish their forged posts because invariably the last three words of any forged post are "Very scummy, indeed".
Very scummy, indeed.
You see that file called Packages?
Yeah, I've seen it. Does it strike you as ironic to have to manually page through a text file like when you've shelled out $500 for a zaurus computer, presumably as a handheld, ever-present labor saving device?
I'm more than willing to do stuff that a computer can't do, but matching a description from a manifest file to a directory entry seems like a job perfectly suited to a computer.
(And PS, ipkg net-install fails to read this particular feed, and then fails to explain why beyond "ipkg encountered an error. Sorry".)
You idiots are turning an excellent browser into a weapon in your imaginary war. Why would you isolate it from Windows users with your shitty "us vs them" attitude? Firefox has nothing to do with the Linux "movement." It apparently works great regardless of the OS.
I'm afraid you've missed the point, AC. Linux isn't about linux.
No, really, I mean that.
That is, linux isn't about "the linux movement". I can see how the opinions of some super-zealot linux fanbois might have given you that impression, but they're a tiny minority.
But you're right about one thing: the fact that Mozilla works under linux -- or as you note, it "works great regardless of the OS" is the point.
Because linux isn't about linux. Linux's about the freedom to make up your own mind.
Let me explain by contrasting linux with MS-Windows. MS-Windows is about vendor lock-in, embraced standards that are extended to be proprietary and ad hoc, and above all making blanket decisions for all users that don't take into account individual variation among users.
Microsoft gives you XML that only Microsoft Word can read. Microsoft gives your disk formatters that can but won't format partitions lagrer than 32GB -- because Microsoft believes that partitions larger than 332GB should be NTFS. Microsoft's browser can't conceive of a situation where its proxy settings shouldn't apply to all programs -- so rather than have it's own proxy settings, it alters the settings for the overall network connection. And so forth.
Linux says to you, it's your computer, you can do whatever you want with it, if you're willing to take the time to figure out how, or -- if it can't yet be done -- figure out how to code it.
And Firefox is about that philosophy too. That's why Firefox runs regardless of OS: because your choice of OS shouldn't be dictated by your browser.
And that -- the browser dictating the OS, by means of embracing and extending the HTML markup language -- was what dave was complaining about in the first place.
The reason I use Firefox is two-fold: one, it's a better browser in most ways than IE (it's worse in others, especially Mozilla's doctrinaire insistence on not compensating for obviously incorrect mime types on mis-configured servers).
But the other reason I use Firefox is the same reason I use cygwin and Open Office and ScITE: Microsoft has put me in a corner one time to many, a corner where Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't llet me run my computer as I needed to.
And so I turned to linux-style tools. Cygwin, because Windows doesn't support command line tools or development well. mkfs (yes, a version of mkfs compiled for Windows!) in order to make a 60GB partition for my mp3s -- because, as I noted above, Windows could but would not write a partition bigger than 32GB, and I didn't want to and couldn't use NTFS for my mp3 partition.
Open Office and SciTE because it's clear that MS-Windows is going to keep restricting me. While I'm not ready to move to linux yet, I am making sure that my transition will be easy: Open Office and SciTE both run under both MS-Windows and linux, so I won;t have to learn news apps when I transition.
So Firefox's philosophy works hand-in-hand with linux's philosophy, and Firefox supports linux by giving it a browser that doesn't care what OS you're using. And that's the point.
In dave's original 1999 article, he had written:
Meanwhile, over on MozillaZine's Firefox discussion board, Firefox developer "bengoodger" responds to criticism that Firefox is insensitive to the needs of its users:
In a subsequent message he explains further (emphasis mine):
So are we all in this together, or is the community just sitting on its collective ass, waiting for bengoodger to vanquish Microsoft all by himself? (I realize it's not so black and white, especially given Mozilla's extensible structure, but still I found the contrast of opinions revelatory.)
do people really feel that they are going to get a "Funny" moderation by saying such things as "i've got a boner."[?]
Penis envy rears its ugly head again on Slashdot.
Opie does some great work, and I've tried several times to install opie apps and Open zaurus on my 5600.
/feed/sharprom/1.0.3
OZ never installs correctly, and half the Opie apps crashed under the original Sharp ROM, <i>even those in the Sharp-rom feed</i>.
Several times they crashed badly enough that the Qtopia window manager failed to start, and I had to interrupt the boot, go in via the console, and un-tar Sharp's backup tars. Not fun.
And the Opie web site seems almost intentionally hard to navigate, the way the feeds are just lists of un-described and un-documented programs (yes, I know they idea is to use the feeds with the install-from-network ipkg option).
I guess what I'm saying is, they best programs in the world are of limited use if the documentation is missing and you're left to guess at what something is and whether or not it'll work. If you disagree, first follow the link in the article, and then tell me what somebody new to Opie is supposed to figure out from (excerpt; notice the not-so-descriptive description column):
Index of
Name Last modified Size Description
Parent Directory 09-Feb-2004 09:37 -
Packages 09-Feb-2004 09:34 32k
backgammon_1.0.3_arm..> 08-Feb-2004 16:34 146k
ftplib_1.0.3_arm.ipk 08-Feb-2004 16:34 9k
libopie1_1.0.3_arm.ipk 08-Feb-2004 16:38 266k
libopieobex1_1.0.3_a..> 08-Feb-2004 16:40 33k
libopietooth1_1.0.3_..> 08-Feb-2004 16:41 31k
Imagine a "faithed-based" rehabilitation program run not by the Baptists or the Catholics, but by open source BSD zealots: "Joe, you can over come your Microsoft addiction if you just follow this 12-step program:
Now it's all about Janet's tit.
Yes, we must concentrate on these important matters!
Full speed ahead with the Federal investigation of Janet's tit!
Do not allow yourself to be distracted from this by unimportant minutia, like:
Word is, an investigation of repeated intelligence failures will be postponed until after the election. I guess fixing an FBI and CIA that missed any clues about September 11th can wait.
Meanwhile, the investigation into Janet's tit goes full speed ahead.
So follow your government's example! Don't be distracted by these things that don't matter! Concentrate on Janet's tit!
If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't ask them to do this at all. Sure, it may boost short-term profits for them, but in the long-term, it could cause consumer rebellion against them and the revenue lost would probably far outweigh the short-term benefit
You're absolutely right.
But.
I don't know how Verisign's top management is compensated, but a big problem in the last decade across corporations has been the practice of tying executive compensation to short-term stock prices.
In other word (and again, I don't know this to be a fact in Verisgn's case) it may be that it's very bad for long-term stock price, very bad for common shareholders, ultimately bad for regular employees (who end up being laid off when the chickens come home to roost), but still very good for top management.
...that they would learn from past mistakes. But no, of course not.
They have.
What they've learned is that outrage, like everything else, is a limited quantity.
You and I can't spend afford eight hours a day, five days a week to watch and warn against Verisign.
We have other things to worry about: Belkin using routers to spam, New York's Livingston County Social Services Commission letting confidential data get posted on the web, Johm Ashcroft eviscerating the Bill of Rights.
But Verisign can trigger our outrage the first time around, back down in the face of our massed complaints, and then, like a spider in its hole, wait patiently until the time is ripe to strike again.
Just like the Department of Justice and the proposed "Patriot II" law; they withdrew it after furious opposition, wait a while, and then got key provisions passed after everyone had relaxed.
Verisign is banking that each time around, they'll be a few less people able or willing to work up any outrage, until only a small minority objects -- a small minority that can be derided with a dismissive comment about "tin foil hats".
This is why we need organizations like the EFF and EPIC (and the ACLU): so the we have someone in out corner who, like a Verisign employee, is paid five days a week to watch for and counter these outrages.
The more interesting question is why he felt the need to post the real data. If I had a database formatting error, I would have written a fake database that was corrupted in a similiar (sic) wayt (sic) and asked about it.
I'm guessing it's because he was a lazy dumbass who just didn't give a rip about the confidentiality of low-income kids in foster care.
Given that the article mentions he was informed that he'd posted live data, responded that he'd made a mistake and wouldn't repeat it, and then re-posted the same data the very next day I think supports my assessment.
As to why you would have gone to the trouble to substitute in fake data, well, you've got some equipment he apparently lacks: professional integrity and an ethical compass.
Who do you trust? And who do you get to solve something like this?
In this particular case, you needn't trust anyone.
Nothing that Mark Dennis wanted to do -- build the database structure, build the front-end, or get help with his "tricky formatting problem" required that he use supply real data to RentaACoders or other sub contractors
And furthermore, nothing the Livingston County Social Services Commission wanted required that Mark Dennis ever see live data.
This one's simple, folks -- sure, Mark (or someone) needed to do a requirements analysis, sure, somebody had to decide what data entities to capture -- but very little real data was needed.
First, make some dummy data for the developers' use: run through your real data -- if you even need to base the dummy data off the real data --, and replace every name with a random dictionary word. Do the same thing for addresses, and replace Social Security and other id numbers with randomly chosen numbers. In all cases, maintain a constant map of real to dummy, to preserve relations within the data: "Mike Smith" is always translated to "Armchair Landowner" and "1450 Main Street" to "3321 Crumpet Sponge".
Once you've finished your translation, throw away the map.
Now the coder has data that's exactly as diverse as the real data, shows the same frequencies and inter-relations as the real data, is as internally self-consistent as the real data, and yet is (nearly) completely meaningless in terms of the real world, and (nearly) impossible to link to any real persons, places, or identifying information.
(It's possible one could still do traffic analysis on the data, and come up with aggregate data: either more male or more female (but which?) children are in the Social Services system; two zip codes out of six produce 70% of the cases (but which two?). If this is a problem you have to take a weighted slice of the data, and provide the developer with only this weighted slice; that (intentionally) skews your frequencies, but still preserves diverse data and any inter-relations among that data, closely enough to be representative for almost all design and coding needs.)
No trust involved. Just a simple and mechanical translation process that has to take place only once.
(If you really have a situation where the developer must base his requirements and code against gradually accumulating real world data -- and you shouldn't if you've planned at all well -- let one non-out sourced person hold the translation map -- and be held responsible for keeping it secret.)
And a process like I've outlined should be standard for any organization dealing with sensitive data.
If I, as a young boy with cancer, actually cancer, a relapse and cancer again between the ages of 7 and 18, while going to chemo 3 times a week could make it to school, why couldn't Senator Kerry suck it up and go to vote in the Senate?
You know, Wyatt, I really can't explain it. I don't know you, I don't know what your circumstances were, I don't know John Kerry, I don't know how bad his cancer was. And I'm not about to start judging people based on my idea of how much they've suffered.
Talk to the voters of Massachusetts: last I heard they elected John Kerry to the Senate four times, and they haven't elected you even once. You'd better tell them that you're holier than John Kerry, and teel them to vote for you.
I guess you're a better cancer survivor than that wimp John Kerry.
You probably served more heroically in Vietnam too.
You win. You're a better person than John Kerry. Your suffering beats his suffering. Your tenacity in going to school beats John kerry's tenacity in going to the Senate.
Your should run for Senate, Wyatt. Or Jesus Christ. You're just a better person than any of us could hope to be. Our jaws drop in awe of you.
Actually in my circle of hardcore cancer survivors we consider [prostate cancer] to be about as bad as having the flu.
Congratulations, Wyatt, it's all about you.
Did you know that you can vote by proxy in the senate? Senator Kerry did not even have to be there. He could have voted on important issues from his campaign bus or from his hospital bed.
Good point, and thanks for the useful glossary citation, but that's only for votes in committee, not votes on passage.
While I can't say for certain, the Congressional Quarterly report that "Wyatt Earp" quoted from The National Review almost certainly concerned votes for or against passage of laws; it wouldn't really be a fair comparison otherwise, as not all senators are on all committees, and so most wouldn't vote on any one committee matter.
Screw this! I'm getting away from my monitor until my ozone depletes.
Anyone know where I can get some clouroflourocarbons for lunch?
Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job.... Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.
Most votes, as I'm sure you know, are nowhere near close, and in most cases when they are, it's known well ahead of time. A Senator's job is also to stand up for his principles -- and to challenge the President when the President is failing to lead. John Kerry is doing that. And when he stood up to run against Bush, all the smart money was that Bush would sail to an easy re-election. Kerry certainly wasn't "[choosing] personal advancement over... the voters".
So Kerry's in no way failing the people of Massachusetts, and they know it, and I know it, and you know.
It's a cheap bit of rhetoric.
But as long as we're comparing time off, let's note that the Republican controlled Congress is planning "the lightest legislative load in 40 years", even when compared to prior election years, according to a story in today's Washington Post.
And, As you also probably know, Dubya boasts the longest time spent on vacation of any modern president, at over a month per year. Only the French that Dubya also freely reviles get vacations like that. Americans -- normal, working Americans -- don't.
I know that Bush has been good enough to arrange even longer "vacations" for a lot of the work-force, but the key difference is that unlike those many Americans, Bush vacation doesn't consist of being laid off and watching his unemployment benefits run out.
You know what, I had cancer too, and I showed up for school
Sounds like you triumphed over your cancer, Wyatt, and more power to you. I hope that every family with a child with cancer has the same opportunity to receive the standard of care that you did, even if it means, as in your case, commuting as far as a five hundred miles to get that life-saving care.
That's why, like Senator Kerry, I believe we need a better health plan than President Bush's plan -- a plan that won't pay for sick children to travel five hundred miles to get care, but that will pay windfalls of millions more to the pharmaceutical companies, even while it specifically forbids the government from buying in bulk or negotiating more favorable drug prices.
(And having had to juggle grade school and cancer treatments, you must realize how ineffective and underfunded Bush's own "No Child Left Behind" education program is. I hope you'll help us to truly make sure no child is left behind, by leaving behind instead the lies of the Bush Administration.)
When the Bush administration decided to treat the White House like a football stadium and sell the naming rights to Halliburton.
Ok, to be fair, so far only the names of certain exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution (that's America's museum ) have been sold to corporate sponsors. According to an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette That's right, billions for Iraq, millions in no-bid set asides for Halliburton, but the premier American public monument to science and scholarship have to go hat in hand, selling off its reputation and impartiality piecemeal, as advertising for the same companies making millions off corporate welfare.
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york20040122083 5.asp
"The publication Congressional Quarterly examined 119 recorded votes held in 2003 in which the president had taken a position. CQ found that Kerry was present for just 28 percent of those votes. In contrast, Kerry's colleague from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, was present for 97 percent of the votes."
Wyatt, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're not trying to dupe Slashdot, but the you've been duped by the National Review.
But whether you're a dupe or a Republican sock puppet, you're disingenuously misrepresenting Senator Kerry.
You mention that both Kerry and his dad were volunteers, but what you don't mention is that both Kerry and his Dad had prostate cancer.
Senator Kerry's father died from prostate cancer.
Senator Kerry's own prostate cancer was in -- surprise -- 2003. (He announced it a little less than a year ago today., on February 12, 2003.)
So yeah, he may have only been present for 28% of whatever subset of votes Congressional Quarterly was analyzing -- because he had cancer and at the same time he was running for his party's nomination for President.
In that light, I think showing up for more than a quarter of the votes sounds pretty hardworking, if not heroic.
Yes, but who was going to confuse a database with a web browser?
Google is changing the way we live.
Well, it started earlier than Google. I remember trying to search for pages with AltaVista. AltaVista didn't (at some point in its development) like single letters, like "C", so searching for pages about the "C Programming Language" was difficult. AltaVista used the prefix "+" operator to mean "require this word", so AltaVista was especially annoyed at searches for "C++"
The point is, even though you and I know that a database and a web browser are two different things, Google doesn't. Indeed, because you and "just know" that a Firebird is a browser or a database or a Pontiac, we don't tend to qualify any of them as such: we don't say "Firebird the browser" or "Firebird (database)" or "Pontiac Firebird", because we know that other humans will infer the correct Firebird from nearby words like "site", "select" or "gear shift". But Google won't, and we can't pile every possible nearby word into our queries.
And since we rely more and more on Google to find anything (hell, we even use it to verify spellings when perfectly good dictionaries are just as handy), people with an interest in Firebird the database are legitimately annoyed when an 800 pound gorilla of a browser invades their namespace. They don't want to have to trouble to weed out references to the browser every time they do the search.
Mmmmm, so it's just a checksum, then?
No.
It's data, but unlike a blueprint, there's not enough information to specify the placement of every cell, or every connection between neurons.
A better analogy (but still only an analogy) would be to a recipe: a recipe specifies the amounts of ingredients, and in the case of a marble (two batter) cake, may even specify that the cake is made of a mix of a chocolate and a vanilla batter, with icing on the top, but it doesn't specify that position (x, y, z) in the cake is made of chocolate or vanilla batter.
The exact marbling of any individual cake is not specified by the recipe and is contingent on random events in the mixing of the batters and the baking of the cake.
A blueprint, however, does specify -- to some arbitrary granularity -- the composition and layout of the entire structure to be built: this section is made of pine, that of oak, penny nails go here and here, a wood screw goes there.
I don't know, but I'm willing to give it a try!
Rich.
Rich, Rich, Rich.
NASA, given its recent history, really needs more successes to name. Do you really think the first humans NASA will pick to reproduce on other planers will be Slashdot posters?
At the very least, NASA is going to want people with experience procreating -- or those having had the opportunity to procreate -- here on Earth.
if anything, babies would be larger due to the ability to grow larger with fewer bad effects.
Thank you Doctor.
But seriously folks, we just don't know.
We do know that evolution makes a lot of assumptions about an organism's environment, and that gravity is one assumption that could be strongly relied on for the last three billion years, from the origin of life on earth until Laika's the dog's first orbit in 1957.
We also know that the genetic sequencer, as long as it is, is nowhere near long enough to provide an actual "blueprint" of the organism being built. The human genome is approximately 3.2 billion base pairs long, but the number of -- for example -- neurons in the human brain is perhaps 100 billion, making for the possibility of as many as 100 billion squared connections between neurons. There is simply not enough information in the genome to specify the type, position, or inter-connections of every neuron in the brain, much less every cell in the body.
How then, is a body built from the genetic code? The short is answer is that we don't (yet) fully know; the longer answer is that the genome does specify certain rules by which certain cells express certain parts of the genome, grow in certain directions, etc.
One typical strategy governing cell growth is a "tropism", growth toward or away from a particular environmental stimulus. Geotropism, growth toward the earth, is almost certainly mediated by gravity (as opposed to sensing the earth in some less obvious way).
It would be amazing if animal embryogenesis -- the growth of the baby organism -- did not involve geotropism to some degree. (We already know that the growth of plants and their seeds do rely on geotropism -- this is how roots grow down and stalks grow up). How geotropism is involved in animal embryogenesis, how and to what extent the developing embryo would be affected by reduced gravity -- all are unanswered questions.
A facile answer that lower gravity would means bigger babies with "fewer bad effects" isn't an answer at all; that is to say, the answer might even (though I doubt it) turn out to be right, but the answer is not reasoned.