seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make.
Either you are one of the few technical writers or you never developed a software project.
Writing a good manual is damned hard. In many ways even harder then coding itself. Why?
Compare it with being an expert in your field and being an expert teacher in your field. Wich would you say is harder? The latter really needs to be good at three things. A good coder, a good writer and able to imagine how someone not intimatly familiar with the subject would look at it.
Maybe you are a natural at this but most are not.
For a laugh ask say a doctor to explain a complex medical condition in layman terms or a lawyer to explain SCO vs IBM in english. Now why should coders be any better?
Opensource is written by geeks for geeks. What people forget this is NOT "by geeks for OTHER geeks" but more "by Joe the geek for Joe the geek and if anyone else finds it helpfull then that is nice". Read the original usenet post on the linux kernel for the perfect example.
But of course that doesn't sit well with those who have an agenda to get Linux to fight their crusade. Or even worse to get them to not to have to pay Microsoft anymore.
But it is a sign of the time we life in. Give someone dying of a heart attack in the street CPR and they will sue you if you break a rib. Write an excellent printer sharing protocol and people will only bitch about how they need to read the manual.
Opensource doesn't just work with developers on one side and users on the other. If it is going to work then we need manual writers, forum guru's, gui designers, beta testers, patch submittrs.
Users are like customers. MS loves customers because they pay. Opensource is free. What do we care how many customers we have? 1 * $0 is the same as 1000 * $0 but it costs a hell of a lot more to have 1000 people asking stupid questions.
Rant: Old saying is there are no stupid questions only stupid answers. This was true before the invention of the net. Read any forum and you will see time and time again the same question being asked because the asker can't be bothered to first look. Then they will bitch that noone helps them. Obviously their time is more important then everyone elses. Recently saw the worst of all. 9 pages down a ***** said "I am not going to read all those pages give me the answer". ARGH!
So? Are people without indebt knowledge of unix worth more or something? You see the problem is that you don't have the time to learn linux BUT we don't have the time to teach you or to write tools that we don't need just to hold your hand.
There are basically two groups in the linux camp, those who want linux to rule the desktop and server market and those who couldn't give a hoot. When you say you prefer Windows I personally couldn't care less. It is no different then saying you prefer coffee and I prefer tea. If you then go complaining how you really don't like all that caffeine in it or how the coffee bean growers are treated then I will just shrug.
Just stop trying to turn my tea into coffee.
Elitist? You bet. May be a dirty word to some but I wear it with pride. If you want windows then run windows. Good luck getting microsoft to listen to your complaints. Opensource can't really be of service to you. By geeks for geeks. Go ask the people who want linux on every desktop. They have the agenda they should give you the code.
Question is how do we convince those who find gui development intrestting to work for free?
True UI experts are not exactly short of work. Why work for free in a very complex job when you can be paid big bucks?
UI development is a lot harder then "simply" coding a daemon. Mostly because the coder only has to know his subject matter. A good UI designer has to know his own subject matter, the subject matter of what he is designing a gui for AND every possible user of that gui.
You can even wonder is this is something people do as a hobby. Cooks can cook for fun, coders can code for fun but marketing people don't marketeer for fun (do they?). Do UI designers design for fun?
We got opensource lawyers, writers and coders. Now we need opensource UI designers. Gotta catch them all. (sorry)
You see you found a fix for a problem. But saying that here is of no use. Put it were others looking for help can find it.
You might even go so far as submit a patch for the documentation. Then everyone can find it easily.
To many of the other people who had/have troubles with cups seem to think the cups development team owns them something and seem to think their time is worth more. Doesn't work like that. It only works if users put energy back by submitting good bug reports and patches/fixes.
Disclaimer: this is not about vegetarians I am just using it as an example. Nor is this a judgement merely an observation
The ones who eat meat substitutes and those who don't. If you go into your local supermarket you will probabaly see veggie burgers trying to come as close to meat without being meat. I thought this was what vegetarians ate and had great admiration for being able to stomach that stuff. Turns out this is not the case for all of them. Some never borther with trying to create a non-meat hamburger and instead eat dishes made out of vegetables.
The first group basically wants to eat hamburgers but without it being made out of meat. The others simply don't want to eat meat at all and can live without having hamburger like products.
Some people seem to want to run windows but without it being Microsoft. Others just don't want anything to do with MS or similar at all and can live with it not being easy to use.
Sadly these two groups often seem to get in each others way. I myself must really control myself to not call Eric Raymond a whining kid. Oops. Others will applaud him for saying what they are thinking. Point is neither of us is right. We just want different things out of our software.
Problem is that most of the developers can't really be asked to cater for the first group. Why? Because to them it seems logical and easy. It reminds me of a dentist who can't understand why patients fear him more then constant tootache. Choose between cups and lpd? I find it hard to imagine a single cups developer not being able to give the correct answer any time of the day. So they think it is obvious for everyone. People that easily adjust to the fact that others do not know what they know are called teachers. Good teachers. How many have you met in your life?
Basically you would need the interface and manuals co-designed by someone without a clue. These people are of course kinda hard to find for anyone who can't afford to hire them. Only companies like Red hat/Mandrake/Suse/IBM/HP will be able to spend the money that would be needed to truly make easy consitent configuration tools.
The cups people can't really do this. To them the subject matter is too well known to realize where the users hand needs to be held. At the same time at least half their users will be wanting them to concentrate on improving the core program and not to waste time fannying about with useless gui wich they never use anyway.
I think it is called being caught between a rock and a hard place. Now if only somone would start an opensource configuration project. But that is the problem isn't it. Those who could build that don't need it and those who need it can't build it.
This dillema is usually solved by the exchange of money.
The japanese certainly on one hand seem to lean to gigantic monster cooperations from an outside view. However most of them are just very large because they have a lot of different fields in wich they operate.
None of that "focusing on our core capabilities" crap. Japanese do everything. Look up what say a sony or hitachi or suzuki do. Now compare that to say even a philips. Let alone against american firms.
America has the x-box. Japan has nintendo and playstation AND the foreign devil X-box. Oversimplified example of course but you get the point.
Where in the west we shop at supermarkets wich are really controlled by a handfull of mega corps worldwide the japanese are only slowly shifting to this. Lots of small family owned shops still around.
So MS is in a unique position. Outside old incumbuments like telephone or utitlitie providers there isn't a company that has such a hold on its market. If you produce a pc then you cannot afford to not sell windows with it. And MS is accused of abusing this to force companies to agree to unreasonable terms.
Allegedly. A raid like this shows that either someone overreacted or that the japanese goverment is serious. Japan may have enough monster coorperations to ensure that each on its own is not a monopoly but if you come in from the outside they all band together with the goverment to make something far more difficult to overcome. Just look at the success of foreign companies in japan.
So to answer your question, yes they are but they don't want 1 single companie going out of control let alone a foreign company.
Both are useless. Of course if you know were the fault is and they are in different checksum parts then you can mesh them together to get a working file. But that is what recovery records are for.
No two files failing isn't likely to happen. We are however dealing here with disaster recovery. Disasters are always disastrous.
Of course error recovery won't work with a total failure like say a fire. Then your second copie is the better solution.
So two copies is a good idea. Error recovery is a good idea.
Two copies with error recovery is absolutly brilliant.
What do you mean do I own stock in media-storage companies. What a silly questiuon.
Mirroring is dumb, no not as in dumb to use it, dumb as in the way it works.
Mirroring HD's only protect against fatal failures of a single HD. Motor stops spinning? Then the other HD takes over.
It does NOT protect against failures on the disc. Errors while writing or reading or other fun stuff.
For true backup you need the following.
An original wich you know to be correct. Obvious but I seen failures start right here.
A reasonably secure storage medium of wich you know the life expectancy.
A checksum or similar wich can be used to verify that a copy is the same as the original the smaller the checksum the less sure you are your copy is 100% like the original.
Ideally extra data wich be used to recover any errors in the copy (crc I think it is called). Without it you only know your data is good or bad. Not how bad.
TWO copies both indentical each with their own checksum and recovery data.
The checksum on a extreme long life storage medium (written on the container).
If you follow all that and make sure you use proper storage conditions and stop unauthorized access and make sure that you keep equipment around to read you storage medium then you can make backups with a reasonble certainty that it will actually work.
Of course this never happens in real life. Only goverments can be bothered. In real life people invest in expensive tapes and backup everything on fresh tapes. Then throw away the tapedrive during an upgrade.
Geez all those people worried about shop privacy are the same people who use credit cards and "saving" cards. Then they are surprised companies use that info.
You can still use saving cards of course. Simply give a bogus address or use one you found. Local supermarket gave out 4 cards with every signup. Used a fake name and shared the cards. Hate to think what they make of that family in their stats.
So pay for your beer in cash and noone can trace you.
Okay agent smith I think I successfully managed to convince them that cash is safe and that we don't use the barcode on it to track every bill in europe
If harry potter sits down in the hall for a nice meal of human brains scooped from the heart with an after course of still beating heart I think it may be fair to say that childeren could get the wrong idea.
On the other hand some people feel that harry potters use of magic gives childeren the wrong idea.
Somewhere in between the rest of us have to live. The world and the law are not perfect places were you can live with absolutist ideas like "freedom of speech" or "protect the childeren".
I don't know what the sites in question contain but both deal with pure criminal acts. You can't be a cannibal or necrophiliac without breaking the law. And unless you are volunteering I think that is a pretty good law. There is a good reason for "bad" sites wich deal with the making of molotov cocktails and such, today's terrorists are tomorrows freedom fighters. Telling people how to eat other people is not a skill needed by people with access to the internet. Order a pizza instead.
If my car is used in a crime, say a ram-raid, then the car is impounded and kept for investigation possibly for months. Though if I need it for work.
If I run a hotel and someone is murdered in the hall? Then the hall is sealed off for as long as needed and my lost business is just though luck.
Of course this is unfair and mean and nasty and lots more. BUT imagine it the other way around.
Say the police had to reimburse the hotel for not being able to rent out its rooms. Had to give you a replacement car.
How many investigations would then take place in the ritz? How many investigations into ferraries involved in hit and runs?
In olden days the rich and powerfull could avoid the police by simply threatning to go over their heads. They had to ask permission to get access to land. This meant the law was only enforced on those without power. We changed the law to make this harder. To allow the police to investigate crimes under control of judges as they think is necessary without having to worry that someone is going to claim "oh but this is really to inconvenient just go away".
If you want to worry about something worry about the amount of compensation given to people who were wrongly convicted (not those who get out on a technicallity but the really innocent). These people really suffer far more but get nothing not even wages for the work they did in prison.
Search warrant seizures are part of the way the police has to work. Yes it is very bad if you are caught in the middle but just imagine what the world would be like without it. Do you think the police would dare raid an Enron or Worldcom if they had to worry about being sued for damages?
Yes it is a bit rough around the edges, a little less salt in future and perhaps the egg should have been boiled a little bit longer. But is has been done with love and at least you know what your eating.
I worked for a small sister company and when we were brought into the office of our mother company we had some troubles. You see we did the web for this mother company. So we wanted all sorts of crazy things. SSH access to the webservers. Reliable internet access. (their proxy was down constantly)
I even got snide comments on how I wasted all my time surfing. They saw me having having a browser window open all the time. Well duh, that was the preview of the code I was editing on another screen.
What I had to do to get a linux development box you wouldn't believe. Of course this wasted countless hours but that was of course not managements fault.
So I can understand what this guy is afraid of. Not fun when a very nice workplace is ruined by management from outside. Quitting is dangerous to do in this economy but so is burn out or getting fired for breaking the rules. Quitting at least allows you some dignity. If he is really good there still is work out there.
You want a phone that just makes calls AND stores addresses. But that is already an adition to the basic functionality of a phone. I am even presuming here that you meant phone numbers, not street addresses.
So you want it to remember phone numbers. How about some function so that you can add a small note to each entry? Like who that person is? How about an alternative number if they can't be reached on that one?
Soon you have a complete agenda. All its function perfectly reasonable to the people that use them.
Sure a phone company could make a phone that just makes calls. I tell you a little secret, they all did. Then they introduced phones with extra feautures and the old simple models stopped selling.
But there still are simple phones being sold. It is just that 99% of the buyers want the gadgets so that is were all the developments are taking place. Why should they release a new model that doesn't do anything new? The old phones from 4 years ago do what you want. Why design a new one.
Well reports are the machines are already coming back. So unless we are in a timewarp.
But even if they did that is the cost of having a police who can investigate anything. Would you prefer eastern europe? Where the police can't stop cars with certain license plates? Got the right plates you can kill someone in the road and not be stopped. Yeah that is freedom.
The FBI is not moving the servers to rebuild the network somewhere else. They are taking the entire machine. Then in their labs remove the HD's and copy the data. They don't need to turn the servers on at all.
In olden days they just took every piece of paper they could find and then sorted it out back in their own labs. They don't rebuild the office.
a suitable network, with configured routers, auth./DNS servers...
Nope not needed at all. This is an absurd idea. I suggest you thin-foil hat is on to thight.
logins/passwords for the servers
Only if you believe the FBI doesn't have computer experts. Windows and Unix machines password security is meaningless if you have physicall access to the machines. Only encrypted partitions are supposed to be difficult if you really believe the FBI is unable to crack them. Also keeping the passwords to them from the FBI is a crime.
knowledge, and not only general tech but specific setup of that company servers
The FBI has more then enough knowledge. If for some reason they don't know something they can always bring in the secret service or another agency.
There is somewhere a search warrant. This always lists the reason. It is required by law and if it didn't list it the hosting company could have barred access.
But claiming these laws don't exist in europe shows you as being totally ignorant. These are normal search and seizures. If this had been a raid on an office it wouldn't even be news. If it had been a raid on SCO/. would have been applauding it.
Seems they are investigating the attacks against mircx and aniverse. Since mircx is now down and aniverse is barely holding on I think you might claim that they are looking for someone with mass destruction capability.
the guy behind it seems to have been boosting about about a 200k botnet. 200.000 machines under his control. I think this is no longer some harmless hacking. This is stuff the fbi needs to investigate cause quit frankly nobody else seems able to stop this.
So unless you believe the net should be total anarachy ruled by those with the most bots then this kinda off stuff is sadly needed. To bad for those caught in the crossfire but that is live. Nothing really different from when all trains are disrupted because someone jumped in front of one. A marathon closing off all the streets despite the fact you hate sports. A demonstration causing massive gridlock despite the fact that only 200 people in a million people city are taking part.
Live sucks at times. Really this story shows that/. is getting more and more tabloid. A serious tech site would have asked what the fbi was investigating and wether the hosting company was hosting the person investigated or had servers wich were hacked or was simply a place where the hacker might have left evidence.
So if they are dusting for fingerprints they can only dust for the criminals prints? Geez.
How exactly are they supposed to take only the relevant evidence without first analyzing it? You don't think the hacker was so nice as to name all the files "hacker attempt on xxxx"?
The company itself wasn't involved in the crime just their machines. Wich means someone from OUTSIDE has access to them. Leaving the machines in place as you wade throught the evidence leaves it wide open for the outsider to erase evidence. Worse what if one of those helpfull techs has other motives?
You are a cop and arrive at a murder scene with a dozen doctors standing around the corpse. Would you really allow any of these medical experts to assist you with determining the cause of death?
A shutdown machine cannot erase data and the fbi got the tools to simply copy data from HD's without the computer it was in being involved. This prevents any chance of the data being destroyed.
Saying they replug them back in at the fbi shows you have no idea of what is involved in this kind of investigation. They copy the HD's directly and completly by taking them out and putting them in their own hardware.
How the fbi does this kinda stuff has been discussed often enough on/.
This is nothing else then the police sealing of a crime scene. Any inconvenience is considered though luck. It really is no different from streets being closed off to allow marathons or demonstrations or repairs. Yes they do attempt to minimize damage but the investigation comes first.
But lets turn it around. If the FBI raids a place like enron would you find it acceptable if the bosses were allowed to keep making phone calls and keep working on their pc's and play with their shredders as they could loose money if the police removed access and took everything away?
Of course not. Just because this is a small hosting company doesn't change the law.
The police and FBI can request from a judge a search warrant wich allows them to take pretty much everything as evidence and they don't have to search for it in a nice way. If they suspect that something is hidden in your sofa you can just as well order a new one. Doesn't matter wether you hid it or someone else did. If it did then all criminals could hide evidence in their neighbours house and be safe.
Wether you find this acceptable depends I guess on wether you find it acceptable that the police can investigate crimes beyond posting a little poster asking criminals to please come to the station and answer their questions and to bring in any evidence on their own.
Normal search warrants on an office mean that the FBI and police storm the building and everyone inside is ordered to stop doing anything. No more accessing PC's no shredding of documents no phone calls no nothing. The reason is simple to prevent evidence from being destroyed.
I am frankly amazed that they even allowed the company to provide the info this shows that they probably don't suspect the company but rather that they hope to find evidence against someone else on their systems.
There was a rather nasty ddos attack on mircx and aniverse. The FBI seems to be investigating wether the IRC network hosted by this company was used in the attack. There seems to be a lot of hints as to the person who was behind the attack but sadly in america you need that silly evidence stuff (at least for use against americans).
So the FBI asked and got a search warrant. They then gave the company time to hand over the data but they couldn't. So the FBI used the law and did what we expect them to do. Secure any evidence by removing access to it. They are even giving the hardware back. They waited wich they don't have to and give the hardware back after copying data wich they don't have to do. Frankly I think they went way beyond what they needed to do to minimize damage.
Quit frankly the original poster seems to be one of those people that want the police to disappear. That line about wich coorperate master they offended is clear bullshit. mircx and aniverse are hardly the powers that be.
In any society that doesn't chose to be an anarchy you have to give some powers to the police to investigate crimes. Search warrants are pretty common in all democracys and also work pretty much the same way. If you get one it sucks but so far noone has come up with a better alternative except to just allow criminals free reign.
I was thinking the same thing but this looks like it would just fit right over such a machine. It is basiclally a block with a slot in it to house the reader. but it wouldn't interfere with the atm at all.
As to how odd it looks. Well that is hard to say without seeing the original setup or even the machine to wich it was attached. Now it looks like an old movie prop. He should have taken a photo as it was in place.
So a demo lets me see for myself. I can see if the game plays. I can see if I enjoy the gameplay or hate it. Certain demos I played to death until finally the full game was released.
Some games even have user made content before the finished game is in the shops. OFP had more user made maps then were on the cd when it came out.
I don't buy the delaying crap either. A demo doesn't have to have all the extra's. It can be just a single mission/level without all the extra's that make a finished game. Also considering there is a gap between a game going gold and a game being on the shelves there is no real excuse for their not being a demo.
Basically a game without a demo is like buying a car you are not allowed to testdrive. I don't care what reviewers say about such a product. I smell something fishy.
Geez, I guess it makes sense in physical sports, although according to some reports women may start to outperform men in some of them, where the differences in body would make competition uneven.
But in non-physical matches? Always wondered why there are no female F1 drivers. Anyone know if women drivers are even allowed?
Computer game matches are new and so we should have none of this old sexist crap. Jiggling a joystick a twiddling the mouse are skills were build of body don't matter. In online games you don't even know who you are playing against. Unless you got one of those people who think quake is an irc channel. Then you know it is a 12 yr old boy.
However I am an old person myself and I can understand why some women might be in favor. Personal I would be a in favor of being able to filter game servers on mental age of players.
The fact is that there are an awful lot of kids out there who think that on the net they can behave as complete assholes. Since I have a somewhat cute nick I get the old A/S/L routine as well. Since I tend to answer "30+/about to/right behind you" they usually shut up but I hate to think what would happen so anyone stupid enough to admit they are female.
The best online game sessions I have had I had no idea about the other players. Not their age or their location or their sex.
If we start with seperated matches then we have admitted that we are still a sexist society. I can understand why women might want to play apart from the boys. Just hope they allow old guys who just want to game.
Funny this. Almost the same happened to me.
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 3, Informative
Had a seagate raptor disk die on me and a LCD develop a bad sub-pixel. Yet no trouble getting them replaced. The HD was replaced in a few minutes. Took the guy in the shop time to find a new one. No problem with explaining. Said that it was dead with not even the motor spinning up and I got a new one.
The LCD was harder as I had to convince the staff that they had said any pixel problems was enough to get it changed and any pixel problem includes an always on red sub pixel. But got it changed.
Yet almost all people I meet say that they prefer to buy name brands because of the warranty and phone support. Both are crap but it probably gives them a nice fuzzy feeling.
I buy from shops and although I have needed it so far for computers it is far easier to demand to see the manager in person then it is over a phone line.
So I got exactly one question for you. Was this the last time you bought from this company or did you vote with your dollars and say "Yes sir thank you sir can you waste my time again SIR!"
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
WRONG Since people keep buying from companies with lousy support these companies have no incentive to improve tech support. The problem isn't the techs the problem is the customers who keep accepting this crap.
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Either you are one of the few technical writers or you never developed a software project.
Writing a good manual is damned hard. In many ways even harder then coding itself. Why?
Compare it with being an expert in your field and being an expert teacher in your field. Wich would you say is harder? The latter really needs to be good at three things. A good coder, a good writer and able to imagine how someone not intimatly familiar with the subject would look at it.
Maybe you are a natural at this but most are not.
For a laugh ask say a doctor to explain a complex medical condition in layman terms or a lawyer to explain SCO vs IBM in english. Now why should coders be any better?
But of course that doesn't sit well with those who have an agenda to get Linux to fight their crusade. Or even worse to get them to not to have to pay Microsoft anymore.
But it is a sign of the time we life in. Give someone dying of a heart attack in the street CPR and they will sue you if you break a rib. Write an excellent printer sharing protocol and people will only bitch about how they need to read the manual.
Opensource doesn't just work with developers on one side and users on the other. If it is going to work then we need manual writers, forum guru's, gui designers, beta testers, patch submittrs.
Users are like customers. MS loves customers because they pay. Opensource is free. What do we care how many customers we have? 1 * $0 is the same as 1000 * $0 but it costs a hell of a lot more to have 1000 people asking stupid questions.
Rant: Old saying is there are no stupid questions only stupid answers. This was true before the invention of the net. Read any forum and you will see time and time again the same question being asked because the asker can't be bothered to first look. Then they will bitch that noone helps them. Obviously their time is more important then everyone elses. Recently saw the worst of all. 9 pages down a ***** said "I am not going to read all those pages give me the answer". ARGH!
End rant.
So? Are people without indebt knowledge of unix worth more or something? You see the problem is that you don't have the time to learn linux BUT we don't have the time to teach you or to write tools that we don't need just to hold your hand.
There are basically two groups in the linux camp, those who want linux to rule the desktop and server market and those who couldn't give a hoot. When you say you prefer Windows I personally couldn't care less. It is no different then saying you prefer coffee and I prefer tea. If you then go complaining how you really don't like all that caffeine in it or how the coffee bean growers are treated then I will just shrug.
Just stop trying to turn my tea into coffee.
Elitist? You bet. May be a dirty word to some but I wear it with pride. If you want windows then run windows. Good luck getting microsoft to listen to your complaints. Opensource can't really be of service to you. By geeks for geeks. Go ask the people who want linux on every desktop. They have the agenda they should give you the code.
True UI experts are not exactly short of work. Why work for free in a very complex job when you can be paid big bucks?
UI development is a lot harder then "simply" coding a daemon. Mostly because the coder only has to know his subject matter. A good UI designer has to know his own subject matter, the subject matter of what he is designing a gui for AND every possible user of that gui.
You can even wonder is this is something people do as a hobby. Cooks can cook for fun, coders can code for fun but marketing people don't marketeer for fun (do they?). Do UI designers design for fun?
We got opensource lawyers, writers and coders. Now we need opensource UI designers. Gotta catch them all. (sorry)
You might even go so far as submit a patch for the documentation. Then everyone can find it easily.
To many of the other people who had/have troubles with cups seem to think the cups development team owns them something and seem to think their time is worth more. Doesn't work like that. It only works if users put energy back by submitting good bug reports and patches/fixes.
The ones who eat meat substitutes and those who don't. If you go into your local supermarket you will probabaly see veggie burgers trying to come as close to meat without being meat. I thought this was what vegetarians ate and had great admiration for being able to stomach that stuff. Turns out this is not the case for all of them. Some never borther with trying to create a non-meat hamburger and instead eat dishes made out of vegetables.
The first group basically wants to eat hamburgers but without it being made out of meat. The others simply don't want to eat meat at all and can live without having hamburger like products.
Some people seem to want to run windows but without it being Microsoft. Others just don't want anything to do with MS or similar at all and can live with it not being easy to use.
Sadly these two groups often seem to get in each others way. I myself must really control myself to not call Eric Raymond a whining kid. Oops. Others will applaud him for saying what they are thinking. Point is neither of us is right. We just want different things out of our software.
Problem is that most of the developers can't really be asked to cater for the first group. Why? Because to them it seems logical and easy. It reminds me of a dentist who can't understand why patients fear him more then constant tootache. Choose between cups and lpd? I find it hard to imagine a single cups developer not being able to give the correct answer any time of the day. So they think it is obvious for everyone. People that easily adjust to the fact that others do not know what they know are called teachers. Good teachers. How many have you met in your life?
Basically you would need the interface and manuals co-designed by someone without a clue. These people are of course kinda hard to find for anyone who can't afford to hire them. Only companies like Red hat/Mandrake/Suse/IBM/HP will be able to spend the money that would be needed to truly make easy consitent configuration tools.
The cups people can't really do this. To them the subject matter is too well known to realize where the users hand needs to be held. At the same time at least half their users will be wanting them to concentrate on improving the core program and not to waste time fannying about with useless gui wich they never use anyway.
I think it is called being caught between a rock and a hard place. Now if only somone would start an opensource configuration project. But that is the problem isn't it. Those who could build that don't need it and those who need it can't build it.
This dillema is usually solved by the exchange of money.
None of that "focusing on our core capabilities" crap. Japanese do everything. Look up what say a sony or hitachi or suzuki do. Now compare that to say even a philips. Let alone against american firms.
America has the x-box. Japan has nintendo and playstation AND the foreign devil X-box. Oversimplified example of course but you get the point.
Where in the west we shop at supermarkets wich are really controlled by a handfull of mega corps worldwide the japanese are only slowly shifting to this. Lots of small family owned shops still around.
So MS is in a unique position. Outside old incumbuments like telephone or utitlitie providers there isn't a company that has such a hold on its market. If you produce a pc then you cannot afford to not sell windows with it. And MS is accused of abusing this to force companies to agree to unreasonable terms.
Allegedly. A raid like this shows that either someone overreacted or that the japanese goverment is serious. Japan may have enough monster coorperations to ensure that each on its own is not a monopoly but if you come in from the outside they all band together with the goverment to make something far more difficult to overcome. Just look at the success of foreign companies in japan.
So to answer your question, yes they are but they don't want 1 single companie going out of control let alone a foreign company.
No two files failing isn't likely to happen. We are however dealing here with disaster recovery. Disasters are always disastrous.
Of course error recovery won't work with a total failure like say a fire. Then your second copie is the better solution.
So two copies is a good idea. Error recovery is a good idea.
Two copies with error recovery is absolutly brilliant.
What do you mean do I own stock in media-storage companies. What a silly questiuon.
Mirroring HD's only protect against fatal failures of a single HD. Motor stops spinning? Then the other HD takes over.
It does NOT protect against failures on the disc. Errors while writing or reading or other fun stuff.
For true backup you need the following.
If you follow all that and make sure you use proper storage conditions and stop unauthorized access and make sure that you keep equipment around to read you storage medium then you can make backups with a reasonble certainty that it will actually work.
Of course this never happens in real life. Only goverments can be bothered. In real life people invest in expensive tapes and backup everything on fresh tapes. Then throw away the tapedrive during an upgrade.
You can still use saving cards of course. Simply give a bogus address or use one you found. Local supermarket gave out 4 cards with every signup. Used a fake name and shared the cards. Hate to think what they make of that family in their stats.
So pay for your beer in cash and noone can trace you.
Okay agent smith I think I successfully managed to convince them that cash is safe and that we don't use the barcode on it to track every bill in europe
On the other hand some people feel that harry potters use of magic gives childeren the wrong idea.
Somewhere in between the rest of us have to live. The world and the law are not perfect places were you can live with absolutist ideas like "freedom of speech" or "protect the childeren".
I don't know what the sites in question contain but both deal with pure criminal acts. You can't be a cannibal or necrophiliac without breaking the law. And unless you are volunteering I think that is a pretty good law. There is a good reason for "bad" sites wich deal with the making of molotov cocktails and such, today's terrorists are tomorrows freedom fighters. Telling people how to eat other people is not a skill needed by people with access to the internet. Order a pizza instead.
If I run a hotel and someone is murdered in the hall? Then the hall is sealed off for as long as needed and my lost business is just though luck.
Of course this is unfair and mean and nasty and lots more. BUT imagine it the other way around.
Say the police had to reimburse the hotel for not being able to rent out its rooms. Had to give you a replacement car.
How many investigations would then take place in the ritz? How many investigations into ferraries involved in hit and runs?
In olden days the rich and powerfull could avoid the police by simply threatning to go over their heads. They had to ask permission to get access to land. This meant the law was only enforced on those without power. We changed the law to make this harder. To allow the police to investigate crimes under control of judges as they think is necessary without having to worry that someone is going to claim "oh but this is really to inconvenient just go away".
If you want to worry about something worry about the amount of compensation given to people who were wrongly convicted (not those who get out on a technicallity but the really innocent). These people really suffer far more but get nothing not even wages for the work they did in prison.
Search warrant seizures are part of the way the police has to work. Yes it is very bad if you are caught in the middle but just imagine what the world would be like without it. Do you think the police would dare raid an Enron or Worldcom if they had to worry about being sued for damages?
Windows is a twinky.
I even got snide comments on how I wasted all my time surfing. They saw me having having a browser window open all the time. Well duh, that was the preview of the code I was editing on another screen.
What I had to do to get a linux development box you wouldn't believe. Of course this wasted countless hours but that was of course not managements fault.
So I can understand what this guy is afraid of. Not fun when a very nice workplace is ruined by management from outside. Quitting is dangerous to do in this economy but so is burn out or getting fired for breaking the rules. Quitting at least allows you some dignity. If he is really good there still is work out there.
So you want it to remember phone numbers. How about some function so that you can add a small note to each entry? Like who that person is? How about an alternative number if they can't be reached on that one?
Soon you have a complete agenda. All its function perfectly reasonable to the people that use them.
Sure a phone company could make a phone that just makes calls. I tell you a little secret, they all did. Then they introduced phones with extra feautures and the old simple models stopped selling.
But there still are simple phones being sold. It is just that 99% of the buyers want the gadgets so that is were all the developments are taking place. Why should they release a new model that doesn't do anything new? The old phones from 4 years ago do what you want. Why design a new one.
Shop around, they are still out there.
But even if they did that is the cost of having a police who can investigate anything. Would you prefer eastern europe? Where the police can't stop cars with certain license plates? Got the right plates you can kill someone in the road and not be stopped. Yeah that is freedom.
In olden days they just took every piece of paper they could find and then sorted it out back in their own labs. They don't rebuild the office.
Nope not needed at all. This is an absurd idea. I suggest you thin-foil hat is on to thight.
Only if you believe the FBI doesn't have computer experts. Windows and Unix machines password security is meaningless if you have physicall access to the machines. Only encrypted partitions are supposed to be difficult if you really believe the FBI is unable to crack them. Also keeping the passwords to them from the FBI is a crime.
The FBI has more then enough knowledge. If for some reason they don't know something they can always bring in the secret service or another agency.
There is somewhere a search warrant. This always lists the reason. It is required by law and if it didn't list it the hosting company could have barred access.
But claiming these laws don't exist in europe shows you as being totally ignorant. These are normal search and seizures. If this had been a raid on an office it wouldn't even be news. If it had been a raid on SCO /. would have been applauding it.
Paranoia is a good thing. Sillyness isn't.
the guy behind it seems to have been boosting about about a 200k botnet. 200.000 machines under his control. I think this is no longer some harmless hacking. This is stuff the fbi needs to investigate cause quit frankly nobody else seems able to stop this.
So unless you believe the net should be total anarachy ruled by those with the most bots then this kinda off stuff is sadly needed. To bad for those caught in the crossfire but that is live. Nothing really different from when all trains are disrupted because someone jumped in front of one. A marathon closing off all the streets despite the fact you hate sports. A demonstration causing massive gridlock despite the fact that only 200 people in a million people city are taking part.
Live sucks at times. Really this story shows that /. is getting more and more tabloid. A serious tech site would have asked what the fbi was investigating and wether the hosting company was hosting the person investigated or had servers wich were hacked or was simply a place where the hacker might have left evidence.
How exactly are they supposed to take only the relevant evidence without first analyzing it? You don't think the hacker was so nice as to name all the files "hacker attempt on xxxx"?
You are a cop and arrive at a murder scene with a dozen doctors standing around the corpse. Would you really allow any of these medical experts to assist you with determining the cause of death?
A shutdown machine cannot erase data and the fbi got the tools to simply copy data from HD's without the computer it was in being involved. This prevents any chance of the data being destroyed.
Saying they replug them back in at the fbi shows you have no idea of what is involved in this kind of investigation. They copy the HD's directly and completly by taking them out and putting them in their own hardware.
How the fbi does this kinda stuff has been discussed often enough on /.
This is nothing else then the police sealing of a crime scene. Any inconvenience is considered though luck. It really is no different from streets being closed off to allow marathons or demonstrations or repairs. Yes they do attempt to minimize damage but the investigation comes first.
But lets turn it around. If the FBI raids a place like enron would you find it acceptable if the bosses were allowed to keep making phone calls and keep working on their pc's and play with their shredders as they could loose money if the police removed access and took everything away?
Of course not. Just because this is a small hosting company doesn't change the law.
Wether you find this acceptable depends I guess on wether you find it acceptable that the police can investigate crimes beyond posting a little poster asking criminals to please come to the station and answer their questions and to bring in any evidence on their own.
Normal search warrants on an office mean that the FBI and police storm the building and everyone inside is ordered to stop doing anything. No more accessing PC's no shredding of documents no phone calls no nothing. The reason is simple to prevent evidence from being destroyed.
I am frankly amazed that they even allowed the company to provide the info this shows that they probably don't suspect the company but rather that they hope to find evidence against someone else on their systems.
There was a rather nasty ddos attack on mircx and aniverse. The FBI seems to be investigating wether the IRC network hosted by this company was used in the attack. There seems to be a lot of hints as to the person who was behind the attack but sadly in america you need that silly evidence stuff (at least for use against americans).
So the FBI asked and got a search warrant. They then gave the company time to hand over the data but they couldn't. So the FBI used the law and did what we expect them to do. Secure any evidence by removing access to it. They are even giving the hardware back. They waited wich they don't have to and give the hardware back after copying data wich they don't have to do. Frankly I think they went way beyond what they needed to do to minimize damage.
Quit frankly the original poster seems to be one of those people that want the police to disappear. That line about wich coorperate master they offended is clear bullshit. mircx and aniverse are hardly the powers that be.
In any society that doesn't chose to be an anarchy you have to give some powers to the police to investigate crimes. Search warrants are pretty common in all democracys and also work pretty much the same way. If you get one it sucks but so far noone has come up with a better alternative except to just allow criminals free reign.
As to how odd it looks. Well that is hard to say without seeing the original setup or even the machine to wich it was attached. Now it looks like an old movie prop. He should have taken a photo as it was in place.
Oh well, better be extra carefull.
Some games even have user made content before the finished game is in the shops. OFP had more user made maps then were on the cd when it came out.
I don't buy the delaying crap either. A demo doesn't have to have all the extra's. It can be just a single mission/level without all the extra's that make a finished game. Also considering there is a gap between a game going gold and a game being on the shelves there is no real excuse for their not being a demo.
Basically a game without a demo is like buying a car you are not allowed to testdrive. I don't care what reviewers say about such a product. I smell something fishy.
But in non-physical matches? Always wondered why there are no female F1 drivers. Anyone know if women drivers are even allowed?
Computer game matches are new and so we should have none of this old sexist crap. Jiggling a joystick a twiddling the mouse are skills were build of body don't matter. In online games you don't even know who you are playing against. Unless you got one of those people who think quake is an irc channel. Then you know it is a 12 yr old boy.
However I am an old person myself and I can understand why some women might be in favor. Personal I would be a in favor of being able to filter game servers on mental age of players.
The fact is that there are an awful lot of kids out there who think that on the net they can behave as complete assholes. Since I have a somewhat cute nick I get the old A/S/L routine as well. Since I tend to answer "30+/about to/right behind you" they usually shut up but I hate to think what would happen so anyone stupid enough to admit they are female.
The best online game sessions I have had I had no idea about the other players. Not their age or their location or their sex.
If we start with seperated matches then we have admitted that we are still a sexist society. I can understand why women might want to play apart from the boys. Just hope they allow old guys who just want to game.
The LCD was harder as I had to convince the staff that they had said any pixel problems was enough to get it changed and any pixel problem includes an always on red sub pixel. But got it changed.
Yet almost all people I meet say that they prefer to buy name brands because of the warranty and phone support. Both are crap but it probably gives them a nice fuzzy feeling.
I buy from shops and although I have needed it so far for computers it is far easier to demand to see the manager in person then it is over a phone line.
So I got exactly one question for you. Was this the last time you bought from this company or did you vote with your dollars and say "Yes sir thank you sir can you waste my time again SIR!"
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
WRONG Since people keep buying from companies with lousy support these companies have no incentive to improve tech support. The problem isn't the techs the problem is the customers who keep accepting this crap.