Re:I can tell YOU don't run a business...
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F'd Companies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, for what it's worth, I have run a successful computer consulting business.
Basically all I'm saying is if a customer comes to you and says, "I need a website. This is what I want. I have a million dollars budgeted for this."
You have a number of options. You can:
1) Take all $1 million. The customer has it budgeted, they're willing to pay it, and if you get a million dollars from them for a 5 minute job it hardly matters if you keep them as a client.
2) Take only $100,000, or only $50,000. Sure, the job's not worth a million, but is it really worth $100,000 or $50,000 either? The difference here is one of scale. Either way you're charging more than the work is technically worth to you, so if you really feel bad about it, there's always...
3) Take only what it costs you, or even less. After all, if you do it at cost, or for free, they'll love you, and you'll have them as a client forever. In fact, they'll probably haunt you till the day you finally close up shop because you're burned out from handling all the jobs they throw your way and you're not making any money for your efforts.
The reality of the marketplace is that demand and willingness to pay for a product at a certain price dictate the product's price.
You can get all high and mighty about how you're honest and you still have a job, but maybe if you took a few of those million dollar throwaway jobs every now and again you'd have the luxury of posting to slashdot in the middle of the afternoon without your boss looking over your shoulder, instead of consoling yourself with how you're still in the web design business.
Of course. Because nobody ever remembers anything and a company's reputation isn't worth building. There's a difference between a healty profit and being a scam artist. Sure, there are a lot of quick bucks in being a scam artist, but you have to be ready to leave town quickly.
I think you are assuming there is some moral or ethical consideration here, where taking $1000 for a given site is fine but taking $1 million for it is unacceptable. And, depending on the situation, I might agree with you. But let's examine this particular situation more closely.
Point 1: The web design firm's clients clearly have little experience with web technology, or their in-house development team is too busy. I think most people would agree that it's acceptable for educated professionals to market their services at a certain level, regardless of the amount of effort that is actually put into rendering that service.
For example, if you hire a lawyer to review a contract, and he glances over it and finds a couple omissions and suggests a few additional clauses, you might expect to pay him a lot of money, even though he may not have spent much time on it. This is because the lawyer needed a lot of education to be able to do what he did in an hour, and lacking that education he probably could not have done it in any reasonable time frame.
Further, if both parties have the expectation that this work will yield future rewards -- be it less risk of being sued or a greater chance of prevailing in a suit -- it's hard to make a case that the lawyer is 'exploiting' anyone. Certainly this expectation is present in our hypothetical case with the dotcom and the web design firm.
Now, if the lawyer had trouble attracting clients, he might consider lowering his rate. But there's no reason he should start at the bottom just because some people might consider him overpriced. Traditionally, of course, lawyers charge by the hour, probably to avoid tiresome discussions on whether or not they earned their fee. However, you can also arrange for their services on a project or retainer basis, so it is not wholly dissimilar to the web design scenario.
Point 2: Anything involving a million dollars presumably involves a contract, as well as an RFP process in which multiple service vendors bid an estimate for delivering the project. If the client followed this procedure and settled on the firm that charged $1 million, it's hard to point the finger at the web design firm and accuse them of exploiting anyone. It was the client's decision, and for all we know, the web design firm may simply have tossed off a ridiculously high bid because their plate was already full and they didn't need another client.
Now, if all web design firms got together and decided to charge $1 million for each website any of them did, that would indeed be unethical and is very likely illegal. But we have not thus far asserted criminal behavior on the part of our web design firm; we are simply discussing whether or not it was a good business decision to charge a lot for relatively simple work.
Also consider that if everyone else bids $1 million or thereabouts to deliver a project, and your firm places a bid for only $5000, that sends a very strong signal to the person making the decision: namely, that your firm does second-rate work. Why else would it be so cheap? Your three year old son might agree to design an e-commerce site for only $5, but that doesn't mean it's a savvy business decision to pick him.
You can't expect the manager making the decision to know off-hand that the market is overvaluing the services he is soliciting. And once the market stops valuing your web design services so highly, why, simply lower the price. It's doubtful that your existing clients are going to be upset over a discount. And it's always a lot easier to keep old clients than to attract new ones, particularly if you've acquired a reputation as being substandard based on the prices you are quoting.
Of course, you and I both know that the work in question was not likely to merit a million dollars' outlay, on technical considerations alone. But the fact is that something's value is simply what people are willing to pay for it. And if demand outstrips supply significantly, then the market value of something can greatly exceed its material worth.
I'm an idiot and even I was able to build a successful small business building websites. Thing is, we didn't charge millions to build a five-minute CGI email form. That's why we're still around.
I'm sorry, but if companies are paying millions of dollars for a 5 minute CGI email script, and you decide your web design business is only going to charge a few hundred, then I have a hard time deciding who's the bigger fool here: the dotcom, or Philip "I'm an idiot" Kaplan.
Charge what the market will bear and don't leave money on the table. Sales and Marketing 101.
No, it's not. On paper, it appears to be a feature. Get a BIOS pre-palladium. List features and count. For exmaple, lets say 110 "features". Now add palladium to that same chip. We now count 111 features. Again, on paper it looks good. But in the real world, where we live and where the chip will run, it's bullshit.
I think it's a great feature. Seriously, sign me up.
No, I'm not crazy, and I'm not trolling. See, I'm a big fan of online gaming in general, and have logged more than my fair share of hours in quite a few games. Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 are among those.
Now, as anyone who played Diablo 2 longer than a few months after release knows, hacking and cheating were rampant on the supposedly secure realm servers. And anyone doing ladder games for Warcraft 3 presently knows that finding hack free games is increasingly rare, with the abundance of map hacks and disconnect hacks and the like circulating.
How would this be different in a TCPA-enabled future? Well, if Warcraft 3 ran in a trusted environment, with the memory regions it used isolated from non-trusted applications, then the creators of these hacks would have nowhere to begin, effectively eliminating the cheating problem.
It's my understanding that this is the sort of multiplayer environment Xbox Live can guarantee. And honestly, I really envy that. Hackers and cheaters can easily ruin the fun of the game for players that do not use such "aids." A case in point is the utter joke the Diablo 2 realm economy eventually became.
I'm not saying Blizzard or anyone else should actively shut out players who didn't have TCPA-based hardware; just that those of us who did have it could use that feature to play the game without the cheaters. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this particular sort of software would become more valuable to me if that sort of unbreakable, trustworthy guarantee of a clean game was available. And the more emphasis that was placed upon this feature -- such as by requiring all ladder games to take place between opponents running the game on a TCPA-enabled platform-- the more valuable it would become.
And to me that settles once and for all the question of whether or not TCPA and things like it are just "bullshit" as you claim.
Can it be abused? Yes. Of course. Most features of note can be, even down to the ability to execute programs on your computer, which can be abused to compromise your system in the event you execute malicious code.
So: don't run viruses, and don't run programs that demand you use any other feature, TCPA included, in a way that abuses and tramples your rights as a computer user. Believe it or not, such abusive "features" are unpopular and cause companies that employ them to lose market share. Companies that continue to do so, or fail to remove such abuses when pressured publicly to do so, do not continue to receive money from intelligent consumers.
-In fact, let me repeat that. "Linux/BSD won't boot trusted, so you can't put that SAMBA server on your Windows network." This is why MS gives a hoot, and while TCPA itself might not be an idea with [good|evil] alignment, beware of influence to the spec. Network filesystems are a good idea; CIFS is an example of a good idea manipulated for lock-in.
If this is truly Microsoft's plan, then Linux users can rejoice: they are about to inflict a mortal wound on themselves.
How many businesses with any serious investment in technology would willingly upgrade to an operating system / platform which deliberately breaks compatibility with servers and systems they have spent so much time and effort getting to interact correctly in the first place?
It takes years for products to gather momentum in a corporate environment, particularly in this era of reduced IT spending. If Microsoft's new server release won't trust the Unix servers down the hall that have been working right for the past decade, the chances of that server release actually making it out of testing stages are virtually nonexistent. Only the most reckless businesses would voluntarily buy in to a scheme which made them utterly dependent on the whims of a convicted monopoly.
Would Microsoft love it if businesses went along and ignored any misgivings? Of course! But why should businesses do this? Linux is being taken increasingly seriously on small to mid-end servers, and Windows has never had much of a foothold on big iron machines. Such an obvious ploy to cement Microsoft's hold just would not work. Microsoft would have to proceed gradually, carefully putting in compatibility problems and introducing difficulties where none previously existed, until finally they created an environment in which only Microsoft products can be used.
But even then businesses would stop one point release before total incompatibility is achieved, and refuse to go further. Moreover, as compatibility broke at an increasing pace, businesses would slow their upgrade rate to glacial speeds. They'd have to, to give time for compatibility fixes and hacks to come out from Microsoft's competitors, as well as to test future releases for similar issues.
One might observe that the above has been Microsoft's strategy for a long time now, and it may well be that DRM-based efforts like Palladium represent that final push towards full incompatibility. But to believe that Microsoft will succeed fails to take into account the increasing (and deserved) mistrust Microsoft has earned for itself over the years.
Please clarify, in 50 words or less, wether or not the trust model that TCPA implements will ever allow software to consider the owner and operator of a TCPA-enabled computer "not trusted."
Oh come on. Let's face reality: the fact of the matter is that your (proprietary) software hasn't trusted you for a while now. What exactly do CD keys and registration requirements indicate if not a complete distrust of the end user's good intentions?
Take the recent story on Quicken's Turbo Tax program, where Quicken removed your option to print returns on a computer other than the one the software was originally activated on. Do you think maybe Quicken did this because they don't trust you?
Another example off the top of my head are those annoying product activations the new Microsoft Office products require. Why would Microsoft do this if they trusted their customers? Hint: they wouldn't.
If you honestly believe any major software company trusts you to protect their own interests when your convenience or money is on the line, you are quite deluded. Management at these companies is only going to trust you insofar as this aligns with their long term strategic interests. Once this is no longer the case they will do everything in their power to make sure the untrusted end user cannot impact those interests, even if it makes their software substantially less useful to you.
Bottom line: software companies do not trust you. They have no reason to, and therefore should not be expected to. Adding TCPA does not change this reality; they will still not trust you. But they'll be more comfortable dealing with you because your potentially damaging actions are verifiably constrained by their software.
Don't like this? Buy/support/use software that does not constrain you. That's your option. Boycotting AMI or TCPA-enabled motherboards does not solve the problem; those manufacturers are responding to a demand from software developers and content owners. It is up to you to show those people that you do not want to be curtailed and restricted and denied at every juncture.
They are not however anywhere near the $200 price range of the nicer inkjets that I assume the original poster means by "affordable".
I got my girlfriend a HiTi 630PL Photo Printer for Christmas, which is a dyesub printer. I paid around $170 for it; you can also get a model that can print independently of a PC (by reading directly from the memory card) for around $250.
She's been pretty busy lately and hasn't had much of a chance to test it out, but all the reviews I saw were very positive. Additional supplies cost $20 for a 50 print kit (includes paper and ribbon), so cost per print is about $.40, which compares favorably to inkjets.
The downside is that it only prints 4x6 size prints, but her current camera can't really do anything better than 8x10 so it's not holding her back much.
I'd consider suing the kid just to get her convicted of a felony, which gets to go on her permanent record and fucks her life about as squarely as she just fucked his.
Slander/libel are civil torts, not criminal ones. Winning such a suit would therefore not "get her convicted of a felony." At best it would result in an award for damages being granted to the guidance counselor.
Furthermore I'm fairly sure others claiming that all he has to do is prevail in a lawsuit to be set for life are way off the mark. Chances are good that the girl's parents aren't loaded, so it isn't likely that he'll get much more than a six figure settlement, and even that is probably pushing it.
Despite what others are arguing, the true problem in this instance lies with the media, rather than the judicial system. This guy's problem is that he was unfairly tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion, and that is nothing that legal reform would prevent.
While the parents' willingness to litigate is obviously a factor, the media's eagerness to jump on exciting, scandalous news is a bigger part of the problem. They are quite good about tarring potential offenders with the broadest brush they can find, and considerably less ready to come forward and loudly retract and apologize.
But the media only provides content; it is the consumers of such content that are truly to blame for these unfortunate excesses. It is everyone with a small enough mind and mean enough heart that they would judge this man and condemn him, armed only with two minutes' worth of information on the matter.
The difficulty here lies in your assumption that people would use the Creative Commons licenses for software. They have a FAQ which answers this concern:
Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works. To the extent that we'll deal with types of content that others are already building licenses for -- take the EFF's Open Audio License, for example -- we view that as a good thing. The more ways authors have to get their works out in the public sphere, the better.
Your recommendations may well apply to software, and in all honesty I would probably GPL any software I wrote which I thought had any usefulness at all to others. However, I feel differently about my writing -- I consider it more important and more personal, and though I am willing to post it online for others to read, I have a couple concerns.
Basically I don't want anyone to take credit for something I've written, and I don't want anyone to make a profit off of it if I am not also included in the profiting. I know that I gain these rights automatically whenever I create a work, but it is not entirely clear to the casual visitor/reader what happens to those rights once I've placed something online.
So the Creative Commons licenses provide a fast, headache-free way for me to share my works while also spelling out what my intentions are. For example, I selected the "Attribution, No Derivatives, Non-commercial Use" license for one of my plays.
Any reader curious about what rights have been granted can easily find out, and if a dispute arises, I can point them to a legally sound resource supporting my position.
This particular play was available online previously as a locked down PDF, which was not a solution I was particularly happy with, but which seemed workable at the time. I am much more comfortable with the present license, which incidentally forbides the very digital restrictions I felt the need to impose before.
This is no big loss, in my opinion. My goal is to share, not to police, and the licenses that Creative Commons offers help me achieve that goal in a satisfactory way.
Oh, then it works just as it should. I mean, if that denifition of Hacking/Hacker is the right one, because the Hacker is the The Good Guy, Computer Geek, Professional who every corporation wants to have enrolled to them, instead of competition.
Oh, knock it off. If you want to pretend 'hacker' denotes the 'good guys', you are certainly entitled to, but don't expect those of us who live outside your magical fairyland to go along with it just because Eric S. Raymond says it's true.
You know what? For 99% of the population, a hacker is a bad guy and a cracker is something that Nabisco or Ritz makes. And nothing you post on Slashdot is going to change anyone's mind.
Quite honestly, I am sick of these lame attempts to co-opt the definition of hacker. I think it must be an ego thing. Hackers collectively have something of a dark/daring aura, which has been steadily shaped and reinforced by media portrayals over the past decade. More to the point, hackers are sometimes glamorized by those who really ought to know better: skilled computer professionals and hobbyists.
The prototypical hacker is a romantic figure, a roguish outlaw, whereas the average computer operator, like the average person, is probably average looking and somewhat dull. So there is a natural tendency for those on the right side of the law to suggest and imply that their activities are just as colorful and interesting as the exploits of hackers, because this imbues them with the hacker characteristics they envy.
Never mind that in reality, hackers are probably just as uninspiring as their law-abiding brothers, and undoubtedly harbor serious personality defects.
Learning to accept and like the person you are is part of maturing, and not necessarily an easy one. If you really need a label to pigeonhole yourself with, fine, but at least have the intellectual honesty to claim one that doesn't require you to constantly field specious arguments justifying your choice.
Moreover, computer professionals should not go around calling themselves hackers for the same reason firemen do not call themselves arsonists: it sends a message that a behavior which is illegal and harmful is condoned and that people who engage in such practices are accepted within the larger, law-abiding community.
Why would you want the directors cut ? Directors cut is what runs in the theater.
The fact that a plethora of "Director's Cut" DVDs argue against this claim notwithstanding, you are mistaken.
The director's cut is, simply enough, the director's last contribution to the film. Only a handful of directors are so well-respected/full of themselves to have so-called 'final cut' rights, wherein the director's cut really IS what you see on the theater screen.
For those directors not lucky enough to be in this group of maybe 5-10 directors, once they've finished their cut the film goes to the producers, who remove scenes that drag, reposition scenes to improve the flow of the story, and generally do their best to make sure the film is as accessible and lucrative as possible.
Some producers are phenomenally good at this. Jerry Bruckheimer springs to mind. He is as famous and sought after as he is because he can take a movie that's an utter piece of crap and turn it into a moderately high grossing piece of crap.
But, given that it is the fashion of the moment in Hollywood to imbue the director with a mystique that suggests he is the only person that really, truly counts when it comes to filmmaking, it is inevitable that "Director's Cut" DVDs get made. After all, who knows better than the director how the movie should be?
The sad truth that most movie fanboys (and naturally directors) ignore is that usually the director's cut is inferior to the cut put together by a talented producer. Often the director is so close to the source material that he cannot see subtle errors or elements that are inaccessible to the audience, let alone places that are simply uninteresting or weak. To him, those things have become a natural part of the plot, something the viewer *has* to see to truly appreciate the film.
Such problems are only compounded when the director, in addition to usurping the role of the producer, takes on the task of a screenwriter as well. None of these roles is especially easy, and while I concede that a rare individual might combine all the talents necessary to be a good writer, director and producer, I am quite unconvinced that any such individuals are presently working in the industry.
One example of this last should suffice: George Lucas' recent Star Wars films. Who out there hasn't longed for a "Producer's Cut" of Episode 1, where Jar Jar is silently snipped from sight for all time? Or for a "Talented Writer's Cut" of Episode 2, where Anakin is treated with more subtlety, given nuances of darkness rather than blatantly plotted as an angsty misunderstood passionate teenager whose turn to the dark side is inevitable?
Here's a suggestion. Whenever you come across a quote or fact or story so cute that you can't resist telling it to people, check with Google and see if it's been debunked.
The amount of myth and misinformation circulating through email and around the water cooler is staggering. Do your part to fight it.
I think that Into The Woods has the potential to be the Best musical of all time, but no professional production has a chorus of Trees like my high school did. And I can't think that my high school did the best performance of those songs.
Damn, where did you go to high school? Where I went we had a chorus line of dancing trees too. West Forsyth, North Carolina by any chance? I was on stage crew the year we did Into the Woods.
Here's my understanding of the reasoning behind it. Usually we did a musical production each spring (dance concert in the fall) and in musicals you have a lot more parts to fill -- all the random people who appear out of nowhere to burst into song have to be played by actors. But Into the Woods was like a straight play in the sense that it didn't have a lot of opportunities in the script for singing extras.
So the director wrote in the dancing trees. I think the concern was if you put on a play with only 10 or so main actors, only the families and friends of those people would actually show up. By casting more people you increased the potential attendance.
Previously I had thought this was his original (and rather absurd) idea, but it's possible he copied someone else's brainchild. I can't say I thought very much of his abilities.
Of course, I don't think he cared much for me either, after I donned a tree costume -- essentially a black outfit, which I was already wearing because I was on crew, plus some little vine things -- on the final night and went out with the rest of the trees. I did pretty well except for exiting on the wrong side of the stage. Supposedly the director was livid about that at the time, but I talked with him a little later and he seemed cordial enough.
Most of the people who read the works of Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged in particular, either find them to be plodding, execrable works of philosophy thinly disguised as (bad) fiction, or become foam-mouthed crazies who believe that at last they have found the One True Faith. This last group tends to actively promote Rand's works at every opportunity: message boards, web pages, dinner parties; you name it, they'll be there, singing objectivism's praises.
My experience with Ayn Rand's works is as follows:
I read Atlas Shrugged, cover to cover. If I were in a more cynical mood I might count this as an act of willpower unlikely to be duplicated in my lifetime. The premise is intriguing, the mystery ("Who is John Galt?") somewhat captivating, but the book is repetitive to the point of being nauseating. At this point I was somewhat ambivalent about Rand's theories, though I was thoroughly convinced that Rand herself believed them with a zeal unmatched by individuals of the sane persuasion.
I read The Fountainhead. I actually enjoyed this book, as it had a plot, likeable characters, and a somewhat moving ending. It was a trifle theoretical but nowhere near Atlas Shrugged in those terms. I would still recommend Fountainhead to others.
I attempted to read Atlas Shrugged again, out of intellectual perversity and sheer dogged-mindedness. I made it to about page 400 that time before swearing off of Rand forever.
I read Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen. In what could only be interpreted as nature's unfathomable attempt to get me to rescind my vow never to read another Ayn Rand book, Goodkind apparently decided to rewrite Fountainhead in a medieval setting, with the theoretical baggage of Atlas thrown in for good measure. I mention this because it is symptomatic of the fervor with which Rand true believers spread their gospel. To clarify: the best-selling author of a popular fantasy series wrote an entire book which mirrors Fountainhead in all essential elements, even down to the damn statue!
What I find most distasteful about Rand's theories is the disturbing tendency on the part of her and her followers to portray disagreements as wholly fallacious, if not precisely blasphemous. There is no meeting of the minds, no dialogue with the reader, no intellectual conversation made richer and fuller by the contributions of those with different experiences and novel ideas. If you find Rand's objectivism too harsh for your tastes, her world view has one place and one place only for you: lumped in with the rest of the heretics, the outsiders, the 'looters.'
My advice to you: read Fountainhead and leave it at that. Skip the religion and get the fable, and ignore those who claim you're missing out on the best part.
Many will tell you that Atlas changed their lives, or that it was the best work of literature ever created. Those people clearly did not have lives worth living before, or read very little after that phase in their lives I like to call "elementary school."
Just my $0.02. A little flamey, a little off-topic, but I hope it clarifies a few things that the other crazies replying to you will forget to mention.
AFAIK very few of these things that you assert fall under the ICANN umbrella are actually handled by ICANN.
I believe ICANN only controls the.com,.org, and.net TLDs (and maybe some of the newer ones they've added). That's it.
For the rest -- IP address allocation, MIB assignments -- you go to ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers.
Port numbers are either defined in RFCs (for core network services) or simply picked at random by application developers.
Ignoring ICANN is simply not going to happen, because those with a stake in the current system -- everyone with a.com,.net, and.org domain -- are simply never going to agree to simultaneously move to a different organization offering those domains.
I read an article in the (paper version of the) Wall Street Journal about a week ago that discussed MSN and Microsoft's plans for it. The article said that what Microsoft is largely focusing on in its new version is parental controls and spam filtering.
Among the features I recall is the ability to have weekly emails sent to you detailing the web browsing activities of your household users. Also, if a user, say your child writing a report on breast cancer, happens across a site that is blocked, they can email their parents at work requesting approval to visit the site. The parent can then examine the site and either approve or deny the request.
Again working from my memory of the article's contents, AOL has historically had the best parental controls while MSN has had virtually none. This release puts MSN ahead in that area, so they will likely market it as a more family-friendly ISP.
Another new feature from MSN is spam control, using a system which the article depicted as similar to Spam Assassin, with points assigned to various aspects of a message and a total value computed to indicate the likelihood that a particular message is spam.
As I recall AOL didn't have many new features, though I think spam control may have been one of them as well.
Any inaccuracies in the preceding information are entirely my own. Also, I'm not an MSN user, and don't particularly care about either AOL or MSN or their heavily version-inflated software.
As to why MSN is so proud of their product: I think it's fairly obvious that nothing they provide is that revolutionary; they simply want to steal some of AOL's market share. At the moment the dialup market is more or less saturated, so MSN's customers have to come from another ISP. According to the article dialup accounts are more lucrative than broadband, so it makes sense for Microsoft to try and capture some of this potential revenue.
The relative profitability of dialup is, incidentally, one reason AOL/TW isn't pushing for its existing AOL subscribers to convert over to RoadRunner.
I use VOCP for my home voicemail system. It is essentially a Perl script that sits on top of mgetty+sendfax to provide entry level voicemail functionality (using the vgetty program that comes with mgetty+sendfax).
The real bear in getting this to work was finding a modem suitable for use with vgetty; vgetty's docs list some voice modems known to work, but most of these are 5+ years old and $300 and up, if you can even find them for sale.
Clued in by a Usenet post, I found a modern modem that works: the 3Com 2976 Voice/Fax/Data modem. It sells in online stores for around $50. (Note that not all modems which purport to have voice functionality are supported, and controllerless "winmodems" are not likely to work.)
I also tried using Asterisk, but it wasn't really suitable for my voicemail needs. As I recall it did not handle disconnect detection very well, potentially leaving the phone off the hook for a long time. There was also a pronounced lack of any HOWTOs or detailed documentation available either with the program, with the PBX card I purchased from them to run the program, or on the Internet in general.
My sense is that Asterisk's creator actively discourages freely available documentation, in order to have people avail themselves of paid support. To his credit you do get one month of free support for the software and the card when you purchase the latter, and he was helpful in IRC when I spoke with him.
Not knowing the specifics of your goal, I can only suggest that you explore various PAM modules, e.g. pam-mysql. If you don't want users to have shell access -- say, they are users of a mail system or some such -- then you probably don't even need to use PAM.
I personally run an apache/postfix/courier-IMAP/pure-ftpd server where all users are stored in a MySQL database. Courier-IMAP and Pure-FTPd both query the database directly, and Postfix does SASL-based SMTP authentication. SASL uses IMAP to perform the authentication, which ties it back to the same database. Users can upload web pages to an appropriate directory, which I manually direct Apache to serve as a specific website. Pure-FTPd handles the chrooting itself.
If you are free to choose the programs you will be running to support a specific task, you should be able to find one that supports MySQL-based virtual users without too much hassle.
Let's be clear here, Intel didn't steal Integraphs designs, but now everyone who purchases an Itanium CPU from Intel must subsidise Integraph who had no hand in designing or manufacturing them.
No, no, no! You might try reading up on this case a little before you rant about how Intergraph is trying to tax successful companies and hurting the consumers. Let's see what Intergraph says on the matter.
Intergraph claims that after several years of mutually beneficial work, in 1996 Intel began making unreasonable demands for royalty-free rights to Intergraph patents already being used in Intel microprocessors. When Intergraph refused, Intel abused its monopoly power by engaging in a series of illegal coercive actions intended to force Intergraph to give Intel access to the patents.
Clearly Intergraph and Intel actually did work together in the past. This is not a case where Intergraph patented lots and lots of processor-related ideas in the hopes that some bigger company would unknowingly implement them, whereupon they would smack them with lawsuit. The patents in question were not submarine patents.
Why take Intergraph's word for it? Well, look at the chronology of events. Intel tells Intergraph "we like your designs, give us royalty-free access to the patents." Intergraph refuses. Intel implements them anyhow. Intergraph sues. Intel asks the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming it is obvious that Intergraph gave them access to the patents. The judge sides with Intergraph and rejects Intel's argument that they had a license for implementing those patents.
At no point did Intel try to show prior art. At no point has Intel claimed that the patents were trivial and should not have been granted. On the contrary, Intel fully understood the usefulness of the patents and implemented them in its newer processors. The only thing they had a problem with was paying royalties to Intergraph. They decided that they could get away with not doing so, that they were a bigger company and could throw their weight around and force Intergraph to concede.
Moreover, Intergraph also sued Intel under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act for acting like a monopoly. Thus far that particular legal approach has amounted to very little, because the courts have said that Intergraph is not a direct competitor with Intel and is thus unable to sue under antitrust laws, but that does not change the point that the courts saw very real merit in Intergraph's allegations of abuse of monopoly power.
Why is it that one monopoly (Microsoft) is execrated whenever it engages in predatory business practices, but when Intel does something equally bullying and unfair, people decry Intergraph for picking on Intel?
I'd rather not scratch up the real deal, so I'd like to use copies.
I feel exactly the same way. A couple of years ago, while trying to play Diablo 2 with my little brother at home during Spring Break, I stumbled across a very nifty program: Daemon Tools. After you make a 1:1 copy of the original CD (I use ddump to accomplish this), Daemon Tools can load the ISO into a virtual CD-ROM drive. At the moment I have three virtual images loaded: Icewind Dale 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Warcraft 3. (Note that NWN worked perfectly even before they removed Securom support in a recent patch.)
The only game I have found that doesn't work with this program is Unreal Tournament 2003. I believe it uses the new Securom standard. I think you can recognize the games that use the new Securom because they cause the cursor to turn into a spinning green CD while the game is loading.
However, the Daemon Tools website indicates that, since August, their program supports CD images which describe the physical structure of the CD -- the problem is not with Daemon Tools, it's that there's no program available that can create a CD image which includes information about that structure. But such a program will most certainly not be long in coming, and when it does, the new Securerom standard will be just as useless as the old ones.
Returning to my Diablo 2 story, I had a legitimate copy of the game and a valid CD-key. I had stupidly left my game CD in my computer at school, however, so despite having access to my cd-key I could not play a game I had paid for. No-cd cracks for the executable are always available, but we wanted to play on Battle.net, so the solution couldn't touch the program files (or Battle.net would refuse to authenticate me.) I found Daemon Tools after an hour or so of searching, and have been a user ever since. It eliminates the CD juggling issue altogether.
Ironically enough, Daemon Tools' virtual CD-ROM drives almost invariably work with CD-based copy protection, while physical CD-ROM drives from some manufacturers often do not. If an end-user has this type of CD-ROM drive, they are simply unable to play the game they paid for -- and often unable to return it (thanks to draconian software return policies).
This, above all, is why I despise CD-based copy protection -- because it locks out legitimate users and does little to hinder more knowledgeable ones. This is almost certainly why Bioware eliminated the Securerom functionality from Neverwinter Nights during a patch -- legitimate users were unable to use a game they had paid for.
The IT dept. appears to be largely filled with retards (we run our webserver on Win2000 and our XP desktops have such restrictive user rights that we can't even check the calendar (by double-clicking the clock on the taskbar)!).
Changing system time is a relatively important action, under Windows NT/2K/XP -- and note that this is true even in Linux. For a variety of reasons it is not desireable to have every user of a system able to make such changes.
The root of the problem is really that the Windows variants do not allow for the possibility that someone might just want to open the Date Time Properties to look at the calendar. Microsoft's attitude seems to have been "if they open it they can commit changes, therefore they shouldn't be permitted to open it," rather than "maybe we should let them open it but not permit them to make changes."
So what it comes down to is that your retard-filled IT department doesn't give anyone with a logon Administrator or Power User rights to the lab PCs. The horror! Gee, they sure are retarded! Next you'll tell me they don't give everyone in the CS department root access to all the servers -- after all, that would certainly allow for lots of experimentation on the part of young and brilliant students! Sure, they might make a few mistakes, like deleting everyone's campus mail from the spool directory, but that would certainly be "perfectly educational."
Perhaps one day you will realize that the world is more complex than you imagine, and that in all likelihood your "retarded" systems administrators know more about those systems than you do. I know it's hard to believe that anyone could be smarter or less retarded than a CS student at NIU, but in all likelihood this won't be the biggest shock of your life.
That's a good point, but the fact seems to be that our culture-- maybe all cultures for all I know-- places a higher value on the lives of the very young, the very old, and women than on the lives of adult men.
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that our culture (in particular) places a higher value on the lives of the very old than on regular adults. I would say that American society in particular reveres youth and the image thereof. Further I would assert that this is true of most any Western culture, where innovation (the province of the young) is more highly thought of than tradition.
Chinese culture is an interesting exception, owing to the long tradition of Confucianism and ancestor worship there. However, my general impression -- admittedly conveyed through academia and personal intuition rather than firsthand experiences in China -- is that this has changed and continues to change as China embraces more Western ideals. Likely this holds for 'official' idealogy, though what the millions and millions of uneducated peasants in the Chinese countryside believe may be substantially different.
I think that the disgust most people feel towards those who victimize the elderly and the very young is due to how they are perceived as defenseless and worthy of sympathy/pity/protection. Note that this has little to do with the specifics of the situation -- as you correctly point out, everyone is equally defenseless from hundreds of feet away -- but simply with perceptions.
Going on purely visceral reactions, I would say that most people would consider someone who slaughtered a bus filled with schoolchildren or retired folks more despicable and abominable than someone who simply killed everyone on standard commuter bus. This would be true even if the retired folks bus was filled with ex-Navy Seals and the commuter bus filled with overweight, out-of-shape middle aged Americans.
Perhaps the key is that children and the elderly are perceived more as offenseless than defenseless -- meaning they have either done nothing that remotely merited being targetted, or did so such a long time ago that it can no longer be held against them.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically all I'm saying is if a customer comes to you and says, "I need a website. This is what I want. I have a million dollars budgeted for this."
You have a number of options. You can:
1) Take all $1 million. The customer has it budgeted, they're willing to pay it, and if you get a million dollars from them for a 5 minute job it hardly matters if you keep them as a client.
2) Take only $100,000, or only $50,000. Sure, the job's not worth a million, but is it really worth $100,000 or $50,000 either? The difference here is one of scale. Either way you're charging more than the work is technically worth to you, so if you really feel bad about it, there's always...
3) Take only what it costs you, or even less. After all, if you do it at cost, or for free, they'll love you, and you'll have them as a client forever. In fact, they'll probably haunt you till the day you finally close up shop because you're burned out from handling all the jobs they throw your way and you're not making any money for your efforts.
The reality of the marketplace is that demand and willingness to pay for a product at a certain price dictate the product's price.
You can get all high and mighty about how you're honest and you still have a job, but maybe if you took a few of those million dollar throwaway jobs every now and again you'd have the luxury of posting to slashdot in the middle of the afternoon without your boss looking over your shoulder, instead of consoling yourself with how you're still in the web design business.
I think you are assuming there is some moral or ethical consideration here, where taking $1000 for a given site is fine but taking $1 million for it is unacceptable. And, depending on the situation, I might agree with you. But let's examine this particular situation more closely.
Point 1: The web design firm's clients clearly have little experience with web technology, or their in-house development team is too busy. I think most people would agree that it's acceptable for educated professionals to market their services at a certain level, regardless of the amount of effort that is actually put into rendering that service.
For example, if you hire a lawyer to review a contract, and he glances over it and finds a couple omissions and suggests a few additional clauses, you might expect to pay him a lot of money, even though he may not have spent much time on it. This is because the lawyer needed a lot of education to be able to do what he did in an hour, and lacking that education he probably could not have done it in any reasonable time frame.
Further, if both parties have the expectation that this work will yield future rewards -- be it less risk of being sued or a greater chance of prevailing in a suit -- it's hard to make a case that the lawyer is 'exploiting' anyone. Certainly this expectation is present in our hypothetical case with the dotcom and the web design firm.
Now, if the lawyer had trouble attracting clients, he might consider lowering his rate. But there's no reason he should start at the bottom just because some people might consider him overpriced. Traditionally, of course, lawyers charge by the hour, probably to avoid tiresome discussions on whether or not they earned their fee. However, you can also arrange for their services on a project or retainer basis, so it is not wholly dissimilar to the web design scenario.
Point 2: Anything involving a million dollars presumably involves a contract, as well as an RFP process in which multiple service vendors bid an estimate for delivering the project. If the client followed this procedure and settled on the firm that charged $1 million, it's hard to point the finger at the web design firm and accuse them of exploiting anyone. It was the client's decision, and for all we know, the web design firm may simply have tossed off a ridiculously high bid because their plate was already full and they didn't need another client.
Now, if all web design firms got together and decided to charge $1 million for each website any of them did, that would indeed be unethical and is very likely illegal. But we have not thus far asserted criminal behavior on the part of our web design firm; we are simply discussing whether or not it was a good business decision to charge a lot for relatively simple work.
Also consider that if everyone else bids $1 million or thereabouts to deliver a project, and your firm places a bid for only $5000, that sends a very strong signal to the person making the decision: namely, that your firm does second-rate work. Why else would it be so cheap? Your three year old son might agree to design an e-commerce site for only $5, but that doesn't mean it's a savvy business decision to pick him.
You can't expect the manager making the decision to know off-hand that the market is overvaluing the services he is soliciting. And once the market stops valuing your web design services so highly, why, simply lower the price. It's doubtful that your existing clients are going to be upset over a discount. And it's always a lot easier to keep old clients than to attract new ones, particularly if you've acquired a reputation as being substandard based on the prices you are quoting.
Of course, you and I both know that the work in question was not likely to merit a million dollars' outlay, on technical considerations alone. But the fact is that something's value is simply what people are willing to pay for it. And if demand outstrips supply significantly, then the market value of something can greatly exceed its material worth.
I'm sorry, but if companies are paying millions of dollars for a 5 minute CGI email script, and you decide your web design business is only going to charge a few hundred, then I have a hard time deciding who's the bigger fool here: the dotcom, or Philip "I'm an idiot" Kaplan.
Charge what the market will bear and don't leave money on the table. Sales and Marketing 101.
I think it's a great feature. Seriously, sign me up.
No, I'm not crazy, and I'm not trolling. See, I'm a big fan of online gaming in general, and have logged more than my fair share of hours in quite a few games. Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 are among those.
Now, as anyone who played Diablo 2 longer than a few months after release knows, hacking and cheating were rampant on the supposedly secure realm servers. And anyone doing ladder games for Warcraft 3 presently knows that finding hack free games is increasingly rare, with the abundance of map hacks and disconnect hacks and the like circulating.
How would this be different in a TCPA-enabled future? Well, if Warcraft 3 ran in a trusted environment, with the memory regions it used isolated from non-trusted applications, then the creators of these hacks would have nowhere to begin, effectively eliminating the cheating problem.
It's my understanding that this is the sort of multiplayer environment Xbox Live can guarantee. And honestly, I really envy that. Hackers and cheaters can easily ruin the fun of the game for players that do not use such "aids." A case in point is the utter joke the Diablo 2 realm economy eventually became.
I'm not saying Blizzard or anyone else should actively shut out players who didn't have TCPA-based hardware; just that those of us who did have it could use that feature to play the game without the cheaters. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this particular sort of software would become more valuable to me if that sort of unbreakable, trustworthy guarantee of a clean game was available. And the more emphasis that was placed upon this feature -- such as by requiring all ladder games to take place between opponents running the game on a TCPA-enabled platform-- the more valuable it would become.
And to me that settles once and for all the question of whether or not TCPA and things like it are just "bullshit" as you claim.
Can it be abused? Yes. Of course. Most features of note can be, even down to the ability to execute programs on your computer, which can be abused to compromise your system in the event you execute malicious code.
So: don't run viruses, and don't run programs that demand you use any other feature, TCPA included, in a way that abuses and tramples your rights as a computer user. Believe it or not, such abusive "features" are unpopular and cause companies that employ them to lose market share. Companies that continue to do so, or fail to remove such abuses when pressured publicly to do so, do not continue to receive money from intelligent consumers.
If this is truly Microsoft's plan, then Linux users can rejoice: they are about to inflict a mortal wound on themselves.
How many businesses with any serious investment in technology would willingly upgrade to an operating system / platform which deliberately breaks compatibility with servers and systems they have spent so much time and effort getting to interact correctly in the first place?
It takes years for products to gather momentum in a corporate environment, particularly in this era of reduced IT spending. If Microsoft's new server release won't trust the Unix servers down the hall that have been working right for the past decade, the chances of that server release actually making it out of testing stages are virtually nonexistent. Only the most reckless businesses would voluntarily buy in to a scheme which made them utterly dependent on the whims of a convicted monopoly.
Would Microsoft love it if businesses went along and ignored any misgivings? Of course! But why should businesses do this? Linux is being taken increasingly seriously on small to mid-end servers, and Windows has never had much of a foothold on big iron machines. Such an obvious ploy to cement Microsoft's hold just would not work. Microsoft would have to proceed gradually, carefully putting in compatibility problems and introducing difficulties where none previously existed, until finally they created an environment in which only Microsoft products can be used.
But even then businesses would stop one point release before total incompatibility is achieved, and refuse to go further. Moreover, as compatibility broke at an increasing pace, businesses would slow their upgrade rate to glacial speeds. They'd have to, to give time for compatibility fixes and hacks to come out from Microsoft's competitors, as well as to test future releases for similar issues.
One might observe that the above has been Microsoft's strategy for a long time now, and it may well be that DRM-based efforts like Palladium represent that final push towards full incompatibility. But to believe that Microsoft will succeed fails to take into account the increasing (and deserved) mistrust Microsoft has earned for itself over the years.
Oh come on. Let's face reality: the fact of the matter is that your (proprietary) software hasn't trusted you for a while now. What exactly do CD keys and registration requirements indicate if not a complete distrust of the end user's good intentions?
Take the recent story on Quicken's Turbo Tax program, where Quicken removed your option to print returns on a computer other than the one the software was originally activated on. Do you think maybe Quicken did this because they don't trust you?
Another example off the top of my head are those annoying product activations the new Microsoft Office products require. Why would Microsoft do this if they trusted their customers? Hint: they wouldn't.
If you honestly believe any major software company trusts you to protect their own interests when your convenience or money is on the line, you are quite deluded. Management at these companies is only going to trust you insofar as this aligns with their long term strategic interests. Once this is no longer the case they will do everything in their power to make sure the untrusted end user cannot impact those interests, even if it makes their software substantially less useful to you.
Bottom line: software companies do not trust you. They have no reason to, and therefore should not be expected to. Adding TCPA does not change this reality; they will still not trust you. But they'll be more comfortable dealing with you because your potentially damaging actions are verifiably constrained by their software.
Don't like this? Buy/support/use software that does not constrain you. That's your option. Boycotting AMI or TCPA-enabled motherboards does not solve the problem; those manufacturers are responding to a demand from software developers and content owners. It is up to you to show those people that you do not want to be curtailed and restricted and denied at every juncture.
I got my girlfriend a HiTi 630PL Photo Printer for Christmas, which is a dyesub printer. I paid around $170 for it; you can also get a model that can print independently of a PC (by reading directly from the memory card) for around $250.
She's been pretty busy lately and hasn't had much of a chance to test it out, but all the reviews I saw were very positive. Additional supplies cost $20 for a 50 print kit (includes paper and ribbon), so cost per print is about $.40, which compares favorably to inkjets.
The downside is that it only prints 4x6 size prints, but her current camera can't really do anything better than 8x10 so it's not holding her back much.
Windows XP 64-bit Edition is available for the Itanium architecture.
It even has a service pack out.
Moreover, the Itanium can run 32-bit programs. It just isn't very fast at doing so.
Slander/libel are civil torts, not criminal ones. Winning such a suit would therefore not "get her convicted of a felony." At best it would result in an award for damages being granted to the guidance counselor.
Furthermore I'm fairly sure others claiming that all he has to do is prevail in a lawsuit to be set for life are way off the mark. Chances are good that the girl's parents aren't loaded, so it isn't likely that he'll get much more than a six figure settlement, and even that is probably pushing it.
Despite what others are arguing, the true problem in this instance lies with the media, rather than the judicial system. This guy's problem is that he was unfairly tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion, and that is nothing that legal reform would prevent.
While the parents' willingness to litigate is obviously a factor, the media's eagerness to jump on exciting, scandalous news is a bigger part of the problem. They are quite good about tarring potential offenders with the broadest brush they can find, and considerably less ready to come forward and loudly retract and apologize.
But the media only provides content; it is the consumers of such content that are truly to blame for these unfortunate excesses. It is everyone with a small enough mind and mean enough heart that they would judge this man and condemn him, armed only with two minutes' worth of information on the matter.
Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works. To the extent that we'll deal with types of content that others are already building licenses for -- take the EFF's Open Audio License, for example -- we view that as a good thing. The more ways authors have to get their works out in the public sphere, the better.
Your recommendations may well apply to software, and in all honesty I would probably GPL any software I wrote which I thought had any usefulness at all to others. However, I feel differently about my writing -- I consider it more important and more personal, and though I am willing to post it online for others to read, I have a couple concerns.
Basically I don't want anyone to take credit for something I've written, and I don't want anyone to make a profit off of it if I am not also included in the profiting. I know that I gain these rights automatically whenever I create a work, but it is not entirely clear to the casual visitor/reader what happens to those rights once I've placed something online.
So the Creative Commons licenses provide a fast, headache-free way for me to share my works while also spelling out what my intentions are. For example, I selected the "Attribution, No Derivatives, Non-commercial Use" license for one of my plays.
Any reader curious about what rights have been granted can easily find out, and if a dispute arises, I can point them to a legally sound resource supporting my position.
This particular play was available online previously as a locked down PDF, which was not a solution I was particularly happy with, but which seemed workable at the time. I am much more comfortable with the present license, which incidentally forbides the very digital restrictions I felt the need to impose before.
This is no big loss, in my opinion. My goal is to share, not to police, and the licenses that Creative Commons offers help me achieve that goal in a satisfactory way.
Oh, knock it off. If you want to pretend 'hacker' denotes the 'good guys', you are certainly entitled to, but don't expect those of us who live outside your magical fairyland to go along with it just because Eric S. Raymond says it's true.
You know what? For 99% of the population, a hacker is a bad guy and a cracker is something that Nabisco or Ritz makes. And nothing you post on Slashdot is going to change anyone's mind.
Quite honestly, I am sick of these lame attempts to co-opt the definition of hacker. I think it must be an ego thing. Hackers collectively have something of a dark/daring aura, which has been steadily shaped and reinforced by media portrayals over the past decade. More to the point, hackers are sometimes glamorized by those who really ought to know better: skilled computer professionals and hobbyists.
The prototypical hacker is a romantic figure, a roguish outlaw, whereas the average computer operator, like the average person, is probably average looking and somewhat dull. So there is a natural tendency for those on the right side of the law to suggest and imply that their activities are just as colorful and interesting as the exploits of hackers, because this imbues them with the hacker characteristics they envy.
Never mind that in reality, hackers are probably just as uninspiring as their law-abiding brothers, and undoubtedly harbor serious personality defects.
Learning to accept and like the person you are is part of maturing, and not necessarily an easy one. If you really need a label to pigeonhole yourself with, fine, but at least have the intellectual honesty to claim one that doesn't require you to constantly field specious arguments justifying your choice.
Moreover, computer professionals should not go around calling themselves hackers for the same reason firemen do not call themselves arsonists: it sends a message that a behavior which is illegal and harmful is condoned and that people who engage in such practices are accepted within the larger, law-abiding community.
The fact that a plethora of "Director's Cut" DVDs argue against this claim notwithstanding, you are mistaken.
The director's cut is, simply enough, the director's last contribution to the film. Only a handful of directors are so well-respected/full of themselves to have so-called 'final cut' rights, wherein the director's cut really IS what you see on the theater screen.
For those directors not lucky enough to be in this group of maybe 5-10 directors, once they've finished their cut the film goes to the producers, who remove scenes that drag, reposition scenes to improve the flow of the story, and generally do their best to make sure the film is as accessible and lucrative as possible.
Some producers are phenomenally good at this. Jerry Bruckheimer springs to mind. He is as famous and sought after as he is because he can take a movie that's an utter piece of crap and turn it into a moderately high grossing piece of crap.
But, given that it is the fashion of the moment in Hollywood to imbue the director with a mystique that suggests he is the only person that really, truly counts when it comes to filmmaking, it is inevitable that "Director's Cut" DVDs get made. After all, who knows better than the director how the movie should be?
The sad truth that most movie fanboys (and naturally directors) ignore is that usually the director's cut is inferior to the cut put together by a talented producer. Often the director is so close to the source material that he cannot see subtle errors or elements that are inaccessible to the audience, let alone places that are simply uninteresting or weak. To him, those things have become a natural part of the plot, something the viewer *has* to see to truly appreciate the film.
Such problems are only compounded when the director, in addition to usurping the role of the producer, takes on the task of a screenwriter as well. None of these roles is especially easy, and while I concede that a rare individual might combine all the talents necessary to be a good writer, director and producer, I am quite unconvinced that any such individuals are presently working in the industry.
One example of this last should suffice: George Lucas' recent Star Wars films. Who out there hasn't longed for a "Producer's Cut" of Episode 1, where Jar Jar is silently snipped from sight for all time? Or for a "Talented Writer's Cut" of Episode 2, where Anakin is treated with more subtlety, given nuances of darkness rather than blatantly plotted as an angsty misunderstood passionate teenager whose turn to the dark side is inevitable?
No, he didn't.
Here's a suggestion. Whenever you come across a quote or fact or story so cute that you can't resist telling it to people, check with Google and see if it's been debunked.
The amount of myth and misinformation circulating through email and around the water cooler is staggering. Do your part to fight it.
Damn, where did you go to high school? Where I went we had a chorus line of dancing trees too. West Forsyth, North Carolina by any chance? I was on stage crew the year we did Into the Woods.
Here's my understanding of the reasoning behind it. Usually we did a musical production each spring (dance concert in the fall) and in musicals you have a lot more parts to fill -- all the random people who appear out of nowhere to burst into song have to be played by actors. But Into the Woods was like a straight play in the sense that it didn't have a lot of opportunities in the script for singing extras.
So the director wrote in the dancing trees. I think the concern was if you put on a play with only 10 or so main actors, only the families and friends of those people would actually show up. By casting more people you increased the potential attendance.
Previously I had thought this was his original (and rather absurd) idea, but it's possible he copied someone else's brainchild. I can't say I thought very much of his abilities.
Of course, I don't think he cared much for me either, after I donned a tree costume -- essentially a black outfit, which I was already wearing because I was on crew, plus some little vine things -- on the final night and went out with the rest of the trees. I did pretty well except for exiting on the wrong side of the stage. Supposedly the director was livid about that at the time, but I talked with him a little later and he seemed cordial enough.
Ah, high school.
My experience with Ayn Rand's works is as follows:
- I read Atlas Shrugged, cover to cover. If I were in a more cynical mood I might count this as an act of willpower unlikely to be duplicated in my lifetime. The premise is intriguing, the mystery ("Who is John Galt?") somewhat captivating, but the book is repetitive to the point of being nauseating. At this point I was somewhat ambivalent about Rand's theories, though I was thoroughly convinced that Rand herself believed them with a zeal unmatched by individuals of the sane persuasion.
- I read The Fountainhead. I actually enjoyed this book, as it had a plot, likeable characters, and a somewhat moving ending. It was a trifle theoretical but nowhere near Atlas Shrugged in those terms. I would still recommend Fountainhead to others.
- I attempted to read Atlas Shrugged again, out of intellectual perversity and sheer dogged-mindedness. I made it to about page 400 that time before swearing off of Rand forever.
- I read Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen. In what could only be interpreted as nature's unfathomable attempt to get me to rescind my vow never to read another Ayn Rand book, Goodkind apparently decided to rewrite Fountainhead in a medieval setting, with the theoretical baggage of Atlas thrown in for good measure. I mention this because it is symptomatic of the fervor with which Rand true believers spread their gospel. To clarify: the best-selling author of a popular fantasy series wrote an entire book which mirrors Fountainhead in all essential elements, even down to the damn statue!
What I find most distasteful about Rand's theories is the disturbing tendency on the part of her and her followers to portray disagreements as wholly fallacious, if not precisely blasphemous. There is no meeting of the minds, no dialogue with the reader, no intellectual conversation made richer and fuller by the contributions of those with different experiences and novel ideas. If you find Rand's objectivism too harsh for your tastes, her world view has one place and one place only for you: lumped in with the rest of the heretics, the outsiders, the 'looters.'My advice to you: read Fountainhead and leave it at that. Skip the religion and get the fable, and ignore those who claim you're missing out on the best part.
Many will tell you that Atlas changed their lives, or that it was the best work of literature ever created. Those people clearly did not have lives worth living before, or read very little after that phase in their lives I like to call "elementary school."
Just my $0.02. A little flamey, a little off-topic, but I hope it clarifies a few things that the other crazies replying to you will forget to mention.
I learn something new every day. Thanks for the info.
I believe ICANN only controls the .com, .org, and .net TLDs (and maybe some of the newer ones they've added). That's it.
For the rest -- IP address allocation, MIB assignments -- you go to ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers.
Port numbers are either defined in RFCs (for core network services) or simply picked at random by application developers.
Ignoring ICANN is simply not going to happen, because those with a stake in the current system -- everyone with a .com, .net, and .org domain -- are simply never going to agree to simultaneously move to a different organization offering those domains.
Among the features I recall is the ability to have weekly emails sent to you detailing the web browsing activities of your household users. Also, if a user, say your child writing a report on breast cancer, happens across a site that is blocked, they can email their parents at work requesting approval to visit the site. The parent can then examine the site and either approve or deny the request.
Again working from my memory of the article's contents, AOL has historically had the best parental controls while MSN has had virtually none. This release puts MSN ahead in that area, so they will likely market it as a more family-friendly ISP.
Another new feature from MSN is spam control, using a system which the article depicted as similar to Spam Assassin, with points assigned to various aspects of a message and a total value computed to indicate the likelihood that a particular message is spam.
As I recall AOL didn't have many new features, though I think spam control may have been one of them as well.
Any inaccuracies in the preceding information are entirely my own. Also, I'm not an MSN user, and don't particularly care about either AOL or MSN or their heavily version-inflated software.
As to why MSN is so proud of their product: I think it's fairly obvious that nothing they provide is that revolutionary; they simply want to steal some of AOL's market share. At the moment the dialup market is more or less saturated, so MSN's customers have to come from another ISP. According to the article dialup accounts are more lucrative than broadband, so it makes sense for Microsoft to try and capture some of this potential revenue.
The relative profitability of dialup is, incidentally, one reason AOL/TW isn't pushing for its existing AOL subscribers to convert over to RoadRunner.
The real bear in getting this to work was finding a modem suitable for use with vgetty; vgetty's docs list some voice modems known to work, but most of these are 5+ years old and $300 and up, if you can even find them for sale.
Clued in by a Usenet post, I found a modern modem that works: the 3Com 2976 Voice/Fax/Data modem. It sells in online stores for around $50. (Note that not all modems which purport to have voice functionality are supported, and controllerless "winmodems" are not likely to work.)
I also tried using Asterisk, but it wasn't really suitable for my voicemail needs. As I recall it did not handle disconnect detection very well, potentially leaving the phone off the hook for a long time. There was also a pronounced lack of any HOWTOs or detailed documentation available either with the program, with the PBX card I purchased from them to run the program, or on the Internet in general.
My sense is that Asterisk's creator actively discourages freely available documentation, in order to have people avail themselves of paid support. To his credit you do get one month of free support for the software and the card when you purchase the latter, and he was helpful in IRC when I spoke with him.
I personally run an apache/postfix/courier-IMAP/pure-ftpd server where all users are stored in a MySQL database. Courier-IMAP and Pure-FTPd both query the database directly, and Postfix does SASL-based SMTP authentication. SASL uses IMAP to perform the authentication, which ties it back to the same database. Users can upload web pages to an appropriate directory, which I manually direct Apache to serve as a specific website. Pure-FTPd handles the chrooting itself.
If you are free to choose the programs you will be running to support a specific task, you should be able to find one that supports MySQL-based virtual users without too much hassle.
No, no, no! You might try reading up on this case a little before you rant about how Intergraph is trying to tax successful companies and hurting the consumers. Let's see what Intergraph says on the matter.
Intergraph claims that after several years of mutually beneficial work, in 1996 Intel began making unreasonable demands for royalty-free rights to Intergraph patents already being used in Intel microprocessors. When Intergraph refused, Intel abused its monopoly power by engaging in a series of illegal coercive actions intended to force Intergraph to give Intel access to the patents.
Clearly Intergraph and Intel actually did work together in the past. This is not a case where Intergraph patented lots and lots of processor-related ideas in the hopes that some bigger company would unknowingly implement them, whereupon they would smack them with lawsuit. The patents in question were not submarine patents.
Why take Intergraph's word for it? Well, look at the chronology of events. Intel tells Intergraph "we like your designs, give us royalty-free access to the patents." Intergraph refuses. Intel implements them anyhow. Intergraph sues. Intel asks the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming it is obvious that Intergraph gave them access to the patents. The judge sides with Intergraph and rejects Intel's argument that they had a license for implementing those patents.
At no point did Intel try to show prior art. At no point has Intel claimed that the patents were trivial and should not have been granted. On the contrary, Intel fully understood the usefulness of the patents and implemented them in its newer processors. The only thing they had a problem with was paying royalties to Intergraph. They decided that they could get away with not doing so, that they were a bigger company and could throw their weight around and force Intergraph to concede.
Moreover, Intergraph also sued Intel under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act for acting like a monopoly. Thus far that particular legal approach has amounted to very little, because the courts have said that Intergraph is not a direct competitor with Intel and is thus unable to sue under antitrust laws, but that does not change the point that the courts saw very real merit in Intergraph's allegations of abuse of monopoly power.
Why is it that one monopoly (Microsoft) is execrated whenever it engages in predatory business practices, but when Intel does something equally bullying and unfair, people decry Intergraph for picking on Intel?
Thanks for the tip!
I feel exactly the same way. A couple of years ago, while trying to play Diablo 2 with my little brother at home during Spring Break, I stumbled across a very nifty program: Daemon Tools. After you make a 1:1 copy of the original CD (I use ddump to accomplish this), Daemon Tools can load the ISO into a virtual CD-ROM drive. At the moment I have three virtual images loaded: Icewind Dale 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Warcraft 3. (Note that NWN worked perfectly even before they removed Securom support in a recent patch.)
The only game I have found that doesn't work with this program is Unreal Tournament 2003. I believe it uses the new Securom standard. I think you can recognize the games that use the new Securom because they cause the cursor to turn into a spinning green CD while the game is loading.
However, the Daemon Tools website indicates that, since August, their program supports CD images which describe the physical structure of the CD -- the problem is not with Daemon Tools, it's that there's no program available that can create a CD image which includes information about that structure. But such a program will most certainly not be long in coming, and when it does, the new Securerom standard will be just as useless as the old ones.
Returning to my Diablo 2 story, I had a legitimate copy of the game and a valid CD-key. I had stupidly left my game CD in my computer at school, however, so despite having access to my cd-key I could not play a game I had paid for. No-cd cracks for the executable are always available, but we wanted to play on Battle.net, so the solution couldn't touch the program files (or Battle.net would refuse to authenticate me.) I found Daemon Tools after an hour or so of searching, and have been a user ever since. It eliminates the CD juggling issue altogether.
Ironically enough, Daemon Tools' virtual CD-ROM drives almost invariably work with CD-based copy protection, while physical CD-ROM drives from some manufacturers often do not. If an end-user has this type of CD-ROM drive, they are simply unable to play the game they paid for -- and often unable to return it (thanks to draconian software return policies).
This, above all, is why I despise CD-based copy protection -- because it locks out legitimate users and does little to hinder more knowledgeable ones. This is almost certainly why Bioware eliminated the Securerom functionality from Neverwinter Nights during a patch -- legitimate users were unable to use a game they had paid for.
Changing system time is a relatively important action, under Windows NT/2K/XP -- and note that this is true even in Linux. For a variety of reasons it is not desireable to have every user of a system able to make such changes.
The root of the problem is really that the Windows variants do not allow for the possibility that someone might just want to open the Date Time Properties to look at the calendar. Microsoft's attitude seems to have been "if they open it they can commit changes, therefore they shouldn't be permitted to open it," rather than "maybe we should let them open it but not permit them to make changes."
So what it comes down to is that your retard-filled IT department doesn't give anyone with a logon Administrator or Power User rights to the lab PCs. The horror! Gee, they sure are retarded! Next you'll tell me they don't give everyone in the CS department root access to all the servers -- after all, that would certainly allow for lots of experimentation on the part of young and brilliant students! Sure, they might make a few mistakes, like deleting everyone's campus mail from the spool directory, but that would certainly be "perfectly educational."
Perhaps one day you will realize that the world is more complex than you imagine, and that in all likelihood your "retarded" systems administrators know more about those systems than you do. I know it's hard to believe that anyone could be smarter or less retarded than a CS student at NIU, but in all likelihood this won't be the biggest shock of your life.
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that our culture (in particular) places a higher value on the lives of the very old than on regular adults. I would say that American society in particular reveres youth and the image thereof. Further I would assert that this is true of most any Western culture, where innovation (the province of the young) is more highly thought of than tradition.
Chinese culture is an interesting exception, owing to the long tradition of Confucianism and ancestor worship there. However, my general impression -- admittedly conveyed through academia and personal intuition rather than firsthand experiences in China -- is that this has changed and continues to change as China embraces more Western ideals. Likely this holds for 'official' idealogy, though what the millions and millions of uneducated peasants in the Chinese countryside believe may be substantially different.
I think that the disgust most people feel towards those who victimize the elderly and the very young is due to how they are perceived as defenseless and worthy of sympathy/pity/protection. Note that this has little to do with the specifics of the situation -- as you correctly point out, everyone is equally defenseless from hundreds of feet away -- but simply with perceptions.
Going on purely visceral reactions, I would say that most people would consider someone who slaughtered a bus filled with schoolchildren or retired folks more despicable and abominable than someone who simply killed everyone on standard commuter bus. This would be true even if the retired folks bus was filled with ex-Navy Seals and the commuter bus filled with overweight, out-of-shape middle aged Americans.
Perhaps the key is that children and the elderly are perceived more as offenseless than defenseless -- meaning they have either done nothing that remotely merited being targetted, or did so such a long time ago that it can no longer be held against them.