Anybody who says this has anything to do with compensation of artists is arguing a red herring. We have wonderful (read: inexpensive, reliable, ubiquitous) mechanisms for mass information distribution now, and publishers are realizing that they are quickly becoming unnecessary, and they're scared.
There's nothing natural about the way our copyright law in the United States and "intellectual property" in general work. It's a social contract, and, frankly, that contract is tilted rather sharply in the direction of publishers at present. Of course, it only makes sense now that the publishers are going to catch the children at a young age, and indoctrinate them into this idea that the present social contract is "just how things are", and squelch the very idea that society might want to renegotiate the terms of the different monopoly grants afforded by our "intellectual property" law.
It's fucking depressing. We need "intellectual property" revolution while there's still enough of a public who understands that things don't have to be this way.
Forgive me-- if the audience for your application is strictly home users, then disregard everything I say below. If, however, your audience includes corporate LAN's, listen the fuck up.
I shudder every time I hear an app. manufacturer talking about their "innovative" online patch delivery systems. Frequently, "innovative" online patch delivery systems cover up for shitty software QA.
I am a network administsrator. I have to keep PC's, servers, and the applications running therein working properly. I have a lab. I test patches in that lab. I make sure that things continue to work. I don't want you to patch your fucking app without going thru me.
It's a 'doze application. Package the application as an MSI. Expect that it will be deployed with IntelliMirror. Issue MSP's when you need to patch the application. Problem solved.
Re:Internet legislation futility - alternate root
on
The Year In Tech Law
·
· Score: 1
Pacificroot had alternate servers running years ago.
Oh, I'm not arguing that they don't exist-- just that nobody really uses them.
I'd love to see what would happen, though, if someone "collided" with an existing ICANN TLD. I would expect that criminal proceedings could well be touched off.
Re:Internet legislation futility
on
The Year In Tech Law
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
(Oh dear-- I just found your blog on a Google search about a minute ago, and here you've replied to one of my posts. Now that's fuckin' spooky!)
To the extent that an external, unconnected visitor might see this resolution of "CartoonNetwork.com", it probably would be a crime, but not really one of those new-fangled "internet crimes", it'd just be fraud and/or trademark violations.
If it's purely internal then I can't imagine what the crime would be.
I wonder where the "line" between "internal" and "external" stops, eh? Suppose "my internet" was a private organization that you could join and particpate in. I wonder how trademark usage comes to bear in private communications between private individuals or companies. I don't know enough about how United States trademark law would work in this case, but I suspect that it's quite odious, given the mindset of "intellectual property" "owners". Our (worldwide) "intellectual property" law is outmodded and mismatched with technology.
Only to the extent that the legislation permits. I can imagine laws that can not be "routed around" in any significant way; an extreme, but perfectly viable, option is to ban the Internet altogether, or just whitelist it at the transport level.
I'm talking about countries, states, ethnic groups, etc that decide to simply "make their own internet" because "the Internet" isn't suitable for their needs anymore. Does this U.S. legisation that covers "the Internet" cover "my internet"? I seriously doubt these laws are sophisticated enough, and I doubt that there's necessarily jurisdiction for the United States government to control the operation of private computer networks-- especially those that are made up of physical components located outside their geographic borders.
Unfortunately, this logic promotes just sitting back and do nothing ("they will inevitably lose"), which is a Very Bad Idea, not least of which is that there is still a difference between "not losing" and "winning".
I'm not advocating that we "do nothing" because "they will inevitably lose". Rather, I'm saying that we might as well "do nothing" because (1) the emergence of private internets is inevitable, and (2) the interests of the public to freely communicate and exchange ideas have already taken a back seat to the greed of content distributors and "intellectual property" "owners".
You may know of Douglas Adams' character "Wonko the Sane". He decided that the world was incurably insane after he read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks. He reasoned that any society that needed instructions to use toothpicks was so sufficienty sick as to be beyond hope.
In that mindset, then, I knew we were "fucked" when, a few years ago, a simple piece of software that allowed users to make shared annotations on web sites (a piece of software that users consented to using by downloading and installing themselves) was held up as some kind of violation of intellectual property by content creators. If I remember correctly, the content creators bitched about "derivative works" and somesuch. The content creators were saying "They're still our bits, even when you're using your computer to display them". It's the same logic that says that making "mix tapes" should be illegal. It's the same logic that says that you shouldn't be permitted to make annotations in books that you've purchased. I don't believe the manufacturer of the software was litigated out of existance, per se, but I'm sure that any effort to do something similar today would be.
Once I saw that this logic was at play on the Internet, I knew we were fucked, and that there wasn't much point in doing anything else.
At one time we didn't NEED internet law. It was understood that certain standards of behavior we're required so that we could all "get along". People that refused to follow the rules were "banned", essentially made non citizens of the global eletronic world. It was a brutally effective punishment.
It's still a brutally effective "punishment" today. No one is stopping users (corporations, individuals, etc) from installing pop-up blockers, subscribing to blacklists, using alternative DNS roots, and generally mangling the hell out of the traffic they receive from the Internet.
The thing is, on the whole, we're not exercising our freedoms to shun others and "police" the Internet ourselves. The public support needed to really make these "punishments" work isn't here, and the waves of unsecured "zombie" computers give ammunition to those who would seek to thwart these "punishments" with denial-of-service attacks. We need better software solutions to help people "police" their view of the Internet, more secure client computer operationg systems (and no, I don't mean "trusted computing"), and more social education about acceptable behaviour (i.e. never buy anything you see advertised in a spam, stop patronizing companies that you see advertised in spam, etc).
United States legislators are more concerned about passing new laws to outlaw very abstract types of "crimes" ("illegal spamming", as defined by the direct marketing lobby, for example) than they are about working to see that our law enforcement has the necessary appropriations and tools to enforce those existing laws that are being broken now (spammers breaking into PC's and using them for spam factories, for example).
I think we'd all agree that modifying bits bound for somebody else without their express consent is a bad idea, but modifying bits that I've requested is a-okay. Firewalls, proxy servers, intrusion detection and response systems-- all of these "technologies" function on that principle.
It's going to be really, really disturbing, though, when we all wake up and find out that we can't run our "popup blockers", use our blacklists, and filter responses through proxies anymore. It'll be "made illegal" to alter the contents of packets that we receive from the Internet because of "intellectual property" bogosity.
It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.
I may be overly pessimistic now, I guess, but I feel like we can't stop it. The Internet, as we know it now, is going to be gone sooner rather than later. There will be "other internets" that will be similar to this one, but the age of a single, unified, global Internet is going to pass quickly, and idiotic legislation, content publishers and distributions, and "intellectual property" are going to be the forces that break it apart.
Who says I have to use "official" ICANN IP address allocations?
Am I committing a crime in the United States if I put up a private network running TCP/IP, put up some DNS servers that are authoritative for "CartoonNetwork.com" and put up some web servers to host pornography for that domain name? What about if I invite other people to participate in my private network? What about if I sell access to the public to my private network? What if I sell rights to corporations to join my private network? Where does the idiocy end?
Idiotic legislation to attempt to control the behaviour of the Internet is going to result in "multiple internets". We may well end up with the "United States internet" and the "rest of the world internet". Hell-- we practically have a "Chinese internet" and a "rest of the world internet" now.
Cooperation on the Internet works on the basis of social pressure, not on legislation. Legislation will only cause the Internet to fragment and "route around" the stupidity.
This gets me thinking about Nat Friedman's GNU-rope (Grope) project. I heard him talk at ALS back in '98 and then the project seemed to completely disappear. Searching on "gnu.rope" leads to a few mailing list postings asking "where'd it go", but no good information about the project.
The basic idea was to reorder the functions in an executable so that locality of reference was maximized and cache hits were increased. The result is less paging and better performance and memory usage.
The really interesting bit is that the optimization is based on the usage of the program being optimized-- that is to say that my Grope-optimized version of Mozilla might be different than yours based on my differences in usage (i.e. perhaps I browse with images turned off, etc).
The tie-in to the article here is that Nat's system, Grope, used simulated annealing to traverse the n-dimensional space of potential function arrangements and profiled the memory paging of the application as a fitness function of the new arrangement. It's not a GA-- but it's functionally similar.
So-- anybody know what happened to Grope? I'd imagine that a community would spring up around it fairly quickly given the relatively high number of "performance zealots" who are busy "tricking out" their Linux boxes by compiling everything from scratch (think Gentoo) optimized for their procesor. Now they can add the "spolier" or "racing stripe" of having exectuables specifically re-ordered for their personal usage patterns! *smirk*
My largest fear from this type of proposal comes from the potentially vague definition of "email" that might be created. What is email, exactly? Are we talking about only SMTP? If so, what about "Instant Messenger" spam? Maybe we should classify instant message protocols as email, too. What about USENET? Should we classify NNTP as email, as well? What about SMS spam? What about the "next big thing", whatever it turns out to be? Perhaps we should have taxes based on IP packets sen1! That would be about as sane... yeesh!
Think I'm making this up? I had one customer who was ranting to me about their LAN-based "email" not working (a year ago, mind you). Upon closer inspection, I found their "email system" to be "WinPopUp" running on each PC that they'd use to send pop-up messages to each other. That was their "email". Think of your own relationships-- you know at least one person who calls instant messenger systems "email" (much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory").
The Internet works because we all agree to abide by the same standards, and agree that ICANN is the authority for naming / numbering. This spirit of cooperation works because we all benefit-- not because some government legislated it so. If some idiotic "email tax" does get legislated in the U.S., we run the risk of making ourselves into "second class" Internet citizens, and creating the "United States Internet" and the "rest of the world's Internet".
Spam is a social problem being "enabled" by technology. It cannot be legislated away, because it breeds on human nature: the desire to have large returns from little work. Real answers are things like ubiquitous public-key infrastructure, signed email, reputation "credits" (or "karma", if you like), and accountability. The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about. Imagine an email client program that categorizes incoming mail based on the "cred" accumulated by the sender in a decentralized, non-government controlled "reputation tracking" system.
Taxes and laws aren't going to solve the problem. They're going to stifle the real power the Internet has-- bringing people together and enhancing communication. Worse-- they risk making an "island" of any country who would enact such idiotic legislation.
I'm in the same situation far too often; only I am normally forced to get up out of my chair and walk over to their desk to look at something on their screen because they still forget about 'Print Screen' after I've shown them umpteen times.
Ahh! I remember being a full-time LAN administrator. I feel for you. It particularly frustrated me when "their screen" was in another office, miles away, and they'd already dismissed the error message w/o taking note of the content. (Argh!! Must... stop! Falling... into... rant about... error messages... Noooo!)
Most people, except me, have university degrees - it is not stupidity.
I can't buy that, though. A significant quantity of the people I deal with have substandard writing skills, and of them, a significant quantity also hold degrees. Good email composition comes from practice and frequent discourse. Repeatedly deferring to verbal conversations isn't going to help them get better, but they choose to defer to verbal communications because they aren't very good with email. A viscious cycle! I don't think collegiate programs teach the style of writing that's good for email, either.
"I am far, far too lazy to actually think about constructing sentences. I am also far too lazy to actually read all of your email even though it looks like it might of taken you five to ten minutes to write..."
There's very little that's more frustrating to me than putting in effort on a clear, readable, and well composed message, only to be deferred to verbal communication or graced with a simplistic and incomplete reply. At that point, I know that I'm not going to get answers to all (or even most) of my questions, and the answers I do get are going to be poorly thought out.
And, most of these cases are highly technical, something I don't think email is particularly suited to. Of course, my "technical" may differ to yours.
I'll be more specific - I did some amount of teaching (university) in mechanical engineering (all years). Ironically, one fo the things I taught was communication in engineering!
I should be a bit more clear-- sorry! In no way would I want to convey conceptual information via email. I agree with you in that respect wholeheartedly. I've been teaching, myself, for several years, and I can think of no worse torture than trying to explain something that's highly conceptual via written communication only.
Another situation where I think email has no place is for design brain-storming - you simply can't keep up with everyone's ideas and modifications and scratchings (drawings) over email. I'm talking about the kind of design brain storming you might do to solve a problem in mechanical engineering.
Absolute agreement here. "Groupware" systems that encourage written or electronic interaction for brainstorming type tasks are sheer lunacy. It takes a special group of people to collaborate well on a design, let alone collaborate on a design via email.
Mainly, the kinds of things I'm emailing are very mundane, but of a technical nature. Stuff like IP subnets, ports, VLAN's, version numbers, naming conventions, and ilk like that. Nothing conceptual, typically, and certainly not rocket science. Stuff that's nice to be exact and precise about.
Yes, your e-mail may be verbose and even quite thorough, but the technician on the other end may need to ask some probing questions. E-mail sucks for that type of discussion. It is almost always going to be more efficient to simply talk to you on the phone for 5-10 minutes and give you the answer(s) you need.
If not for the fact that I get stuck in voicemail-hell when calling third parties more often than not, I might buy this. I work outside my office, and while I carry a wireless phone, I don't consider it very courteous to my paying Customers to take phone calls "on their dime", and I don't care for the severe complication to time accouting that taking calls during a billable engagement creates.
I wish I could say that history proves your point true, but normally it does not. Normally it's a third party that didn't understand my email or didn't even bother to read it who wants to speak verbally. Usually they demonstrate, very quickly, a lack of having read the message. I usually end up having to read my email aloud, and they make hurried responses that are not well thought-out. It's sad and silly, really. If my writing style were really all that poor, I could probably be led to believe that I'm just not making sense to the third party-- but I can't buy that, either.
The other issue may be that the information can only be given in verbal format. There is probably nothing deceitful about the information, but written communication can be legally liable. It's a CYA thing, unfortunately.
IANAL, obviously. I can't think of any type of information that would fit those critera. My initial reaction would be something like: "If you can't "go on record" to answer my questions, I'll recommend products from your competitor who does." (Since I recommend products and services based partially on "good support", and I consider well-handled email support to be "good support", I usually end up recommending products and services that do a good job handling email support requests.)
I would agree that, in a time-sensitive situation, a verbal followup to an email may be necessary. Again, though, my personal history shows that third parties respond to email out of an irrational emotional attachment to verbal conversation and a lack of understanding of the advantages of written communication-- not out of desire to respond in a timely fashion.
In the end, it really doesn't matter. Most people can't communicate to save their lives anyway... *smile*
I find the article itself to be mostly annoying. Anyone who allows their work to be degraded as a result of email has a performance problem, and blaming email, meetings, phone conversations, etc, for that performance problem is just avoiding the real problem.
Having said that, I'm going to vent about a wildly annoying email situation that I run into frequently.
I write a lot of proposals and plan deployment projects. I usually have technical questions regarding some specific aspects of deployments that I work on. I've found that I often have many questions, most of which are fairly verbose, and that won't be answered with one-word answers.
Normally, I bundle all these questions up in an email, put a summary at the beginning and a nice synopsis at the end, and send it off. About 50% of the time I get a good response back with verbose answers (usually these things are going to pre-sales technical support at software and hardware manufacturers), but about the other 50% of the time I get:
This is too technical to discuss in email, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call." Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call." And then there's also: "I look busier to my boss when I talk on the phone. If I just send you an email, I won't look busy. Please call." Yeesh.
There appears to be a strong lack of appreciation for the benefits of email, including the "read and respond" anytime nature, the clarity of good writing (especially on technical topics), the historical reference value, and the easy searchability and recall. Somehow these fucking idiots labor under the assumption that a verbal conversation with them is going to somehow be of more use to me than a documented, searchable, archivable email message. They also labor under the assumption that talking to their fucking voicemail or playing phone-tag with them is something that I want to and have time to do.
Frankly, this article looks like the musings of somebody with poor time management skills and who is looking for something/someone to blame for it.
You can get a hardware IDE RAID controller from 3Ware right now that supports serial ATA (the model 8500) in 4, 8, and 12 channel varieties or parallel ATA in the same capacities (the 7500 series), and install commodity disk drives. The hardest part about this is getting a chassis with sufficient power and cooling capacity to handle all the drives.
It looks like running 12 Western Digital "Drivezilla" 200GB drives ought to give you somewhere around 2.0TB of storage (taking into account the bullshit mathematics of hard drives). At Pricewatch prices, I see about $3,500.00 tied up in the drives and the controller.
I bought the Dave Gingery Build Your Own Metalworking Shop From Scrap books a year or so ago, but haven't gotten around to building anything yet. It occurred to me, after reading the books, that dead hard drives would make a reasonable good source of aluminum. I guess I've been beaten to the punch.
I actually had a client request that I destroy some of their hard drives a couple years ago. Fun stuff, getting paid to break stuff. I dd'd/dev/zero over 'em, wrote some pseudorandom crap onto them after that, then popped the tops, pulled the platters out, and hit 'em with a belt sander-- all "on the clock"!
don't we send up a robot (Or what have you) into space and collect some rocks that have not been on earth?
No way! Haven't you read/seen The Andromeda Strain? We don't want to bring back a "super virus"!
Instead, let's send lawyers into space to collect rocks. Entertainment industry and media lawyers. Yeah-- and marketing professionals. Perhaps politicians, too. We don't really particularly care if they come back or not, either!
Your EMPLOYER sure can, and that's what the newspaper article is all about - employees are hurded into the conference room and given the business about yet another system change, like it or quit.
Yep-- that's part of "working for somebody else". If you're not an equity-holder in your place of employment, you have no real say. That's just part of the grisly economics of life. If your job sucks and you can't do anything about it (i.e. crappy software, poor parking, very loud fat guy in next cubicle who smells vaguely like bacon), it's incumbent upon you to decide whether it's worth it or not to stay.
But still, no-one is forcing you to upgrade. It's just that it's getting more and more difficult for you to work with your existing versions.
With Free software, you are "supported" forever. Microsoft isn't "supporting" Windows 3.1 anymore-- if you find a showstopper bug and it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. You have no power to hire anyone to assit you-- Microsoft is the sole monopoly on "support" of that product. Nobody else has the source code, and nobody else can help you. I don't think this is particularly bad-- that's just the economics and reality of non-Free software.
I'd agree, you can keep using older versions forever-- but Free software remains "supported" forever, even if that means that you have to hire somebody.
You need to have some experience to become a "Junior Level" sysadmin.
Probably depends on your definition of "junior". Any interns I take on are usually on the basis of their interest, and the feeling that I get, from an interview, that they actually are interested and capable of learning something quickly. Admittedly, I'm not giving my interns any tasks that are really very critical-- at least at first. If I was looking for delegation of specific critical tasks, though, I would be looking for somebody more experienced. I'm quite willing, though, to trade experience for the skill of self-motivated and directed learning, if somebody demonstrates that they've got it.
But how does someone like me find these individuals that hack around on their own? Should all the IT managers start becoming IRC drones?
I'd argue that they need to be finding you. From a "job market" perspective, perhaps, that seems pretty bleak for someone who needs to hire a person "now". I don't think you find the really great people by putting out ads or hiring headhunters-- just like I don't think you can find a really good job by reading ads or going through some agency.
Of course, once somebody realizes that they're really, really good-- and they realize that most everyone else isn't as good, the arrogance flourishes... *snicker* Not to mention the unrealistic salary demands. *smirk*
No-- I don't know how you find the people who are interested in technology because it's cool, and who are self-motivated, enthusiastic, and employable. If I knew that, I'd probably be in better shape now, anyway.
Isn't that the browser project that goes through horrible code bloat every so often, then gets all trimmed down and redesigned, only to bloat right back up again?
We would all be complaining and kicking and screaming right now.
I don't see the need to "kick and scream", but I'd say that Microsoft-specific training is as useless as Cisco or RedHat specific training. Concepts and fundamentals are important. It doesn't matter if you know how to "Install Apache", "Configure EIGRP", or "Put up a DHCP Server" if you don't understand what those things do or the purpose they serve.
How is this a bad thing? Get the money first and go back to school later. That's my opinion.
I'll second that! I'm taking classes for my B.S. now, since I've decided that my Associate Degree doesn't really satisfy me. I'm amazed and pleased with the changes in my "study ethic" after being in the workforce for six (6) years. I find that I'm applying myself a lot more effectively, both because I've gained maturity in my organizational and time management skills, and because now it's MY money that's financing my education (though it was my money the first time, too... *sigh*).
I'm also a firm believer that the money you earn early in life is the money that's worth most to you. I'm glad I've spent the last six (6) years investing in my house and in my retirement-- that's years of compounding interest and appreciation of value that I'd have never had if I didn't start working young.
I suppose that depends on you expenses. Back in '96 living w/ my parents making $27K a year was pretty good stuff, especially considering that they didn't charge me rent. I saved some cash for year, spent a year in a shitty apartment, and made a sizeable downpayment on a cheap but liveable house w/ cash I'd saved in that time. I think it was a pretty good deal.
By no means, though, does that mean that I'd have stayed satisifed at $27K-- but then, I kept studying, testing, hacking around, and getting better, 'cuz I knew that if I didn't it'd be $27K forever... *shudder*
This applies especially to positions such as Systems Administration where experience, wisdom and maturity are an absolute necessity.
Ahh-- but the only true wisdom and experience comes from actually doing the work. Being a "junior" sysadmin or an intern under good people is the best training anybody can get. I try to take on at least one (1) intern every summer, and I encourage anybody who wants to see the median level of "suck" in our job field get lower to do the same...
That is, unless you are a sucky sysadmin to start with... *smirk*
But Weaver students can get Red Hat certification free -- and use it get a job paying more than $30,000 a year right out of high school.'
Oh, sweet $DEITY. They could spend time taking college classes in high school, learning marketable skills that aren't tied to a particular manufacturer's contrivances of what a computer operating system should look and act like, learning to code, READING BOOKS, and end up far valuable "just out of high school" than a little RedHat, Cisco, or Microsoft drone. It seems a little premature (high school) to be focusing so heavily on something so specialized instead of gaining an appreciation and general understanding of computing.
The kids that come out of these programs (I've got a "Cisco Academy" at a high school close by that I work with, and know people who teach at another high school that's been doing CompTIA "A+" training, and I've gotten to be around some of these kids) are mostly useless drones. The kids that really have potential are the ones that hack around on their own, have a genuine interest, and make something of themselves on their own. I'd take one (1) of them to ten (10) of these "cookie cutter kids". The training is just too specialized-- they can't handle something that wasn't "in the book".
Don't get me wrong-- I think it's great that schools are expanding their technical training-- but don't expect these kids to be useful for much other than what they've been "trained" for when they get done.
Those Cisco kiddies can sure make the patch cables, though. Snip-snip, crimp-crimp!
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who says this has anything to do with compensation of artists is arguing a red herring. We have wonderful (read: inexpensive, reliable, ubiquitous) mechanisms for mass information distribution now, and publishers are realizing that they are quickly becoming unnecessary, and they're scared.
There's nothing natural about the way our copyright law in the United States and "intellectual property" in general work. It's a social contract, and, frankly, that contract is tilted rather sharply in the direction of publishers at present. Of course, it only makes sense now that the publishers are going to catch the children at a young age, and indoctrinate them into this idea that the present social contract is "just how things are", and squelch the very idea that society might want to renegotiate the terms of the different monopoly grants afforded by our "intellectual property" law.
It's fucking depressing. We need "intellectual property" revolution while there's still enough of a public who understands that things don't have to be this way.
Forgive me-- if the audience for your application is strictly home users, then disregard everything I say below. If, however, your audience includes corporate LAN's, listen the fuck up.
I shudder every time I hear an app. manufacturer talking about their "innovative" online patch delivery systems. Frequently, "innovative" online patch delivery systems cover up for shitty software QA.
I am a network administsrator. I have to keep PC's, servers, and the applications running therein working properly. I have a lab. I test patches in that lab. I make sure that things continue to work. I don't want you to patch your fucking app without going thru me.
It's a 'doze application. Package the application as an MSI. Expect that it will be deployed with IntelliMirror. Issue MSP's when you need to patch the application. Problem solved.
Pacificroot had alternate servers running years ago.
Oh, I'm not arguing that they don't exist-- just that nobody really uses them.
I'd love to see what would happen, though, if someone "collided" with an existing ICANN TLD. I would expect that criminal proceedings could well be touched off.
(Oh dear-- I just found your blog on a Google search about a minute ago, and here you've replied to one of my posts. Now that's fuckin' spooky!)
To the extent that an external, unconnected visitor might see this resolution of "CartoonNetwork.com", it probably would be a crime, but not really one of those new-fangled "internet crimes", it'd just be fraud and/or trademark violations.
If it's purely internal then I can't imagine what the crime would be.
I wonder where the "line" between "internal" and "external" stops, eh? Suppose "my internet" was a private organization that you could join and particpate in. I wonder how trademark usage comes to bear in private communications between private individuals or companies. I don't know enough about how United States trademark law would work in this case, but I suspect that it's quite odious, given the mindset of "intellectual property" "owners". Our (worldwide) "intellectual property" law is outmodded and mismatched with technology.
Only to the extent that the legislation permits. I can imagine laws that can not be "routed around" in any significant way; an extreme, but perfectly viable, option is to ban the Internet altogether, or just whitelist it at the transport level.
I'm talking about countries, states, ethnic groups, etc that decide to simply "make their own internet" because "the Internet" isn't suitable for their needs anymore. Does this U.S. legisation that covers "the Internet" cover "my internet"? I seriously doubt these laws are sophisticated enough, and I doubt that there's necessarily jurisdiction for the United States government to control the operation of private computer networks-- especially those that are made up of physical components located outside their geographic borders.
Unfortunately, this logic promotes just sitting back and do nothing ("they will inevitably lose"), which is a Very Bad Idea, not least of which is that there is still a difference between "not losing" and "winning".
I'm not advocating that we "do nothing" because "they will inevitably lose". Rather, I'm saying that we might as well "do nothing" because (1) the emergence of private internets is inevitable, and (2) the interests of the public to freely communicate and exchange ideas have already taken a back seat to the greed of content distributors and "intellectual property" "owners".
You may know of Douglas Adams' character "Wonko the Sane". He decided that the world was incurably insane after he read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks. He reasoned that any society that needed instructions to use toothpicks was so sufficienty sick as to be beyond hope.
In that mindset, then, I knew we were "fucked" when, a few years ago, a simple piece of software that allowed users to make shared annotations on web sites (a piece of software that users consented to using by downloading and installing themselves) was held up as some kind of violation of intellectual property by content creators. If I remember correctly, the content creators bitched about "derivative works" and somesuch. The content creators were saying "They're still our bits, even when you're using your computer to display them". It's the same logic that says that making "mix tapes" should be illegal. It's the same logic that says that you shouldn't be permitted to make annotations in books that you've purchased. I don't believe the manufacturer of the software was litigated out of existance, per se, but I'm sure that any effort to do something similar today would be.
Once I saw that this logic was at play on the Internet, I knew we were fucked, and that there wasn't much point in doing anything else.
At one time we didn't NEED internet law. It was understood that certain standards of behavior we're required so that we could all "get along". People that refused to follow the rules were "banned", essentially made non citizens of the global eletronic world. It was a brutally effective punishment.
It's still a brutally effective "punishment" today. No one is stopping users (corporations, individuals, etc) from installing pop-up blockers, subscribing to blacklists, using alternative DNS roots, and generally mangling the hell out of the traffic they receive from the Internet.
The thing is, on the whole, we're not exercising our freedoms to shun others and "police" the Internet ourselves. The public support needed to really make these "punishments" work isn't here, and the waves of unsecured "zombie" computers give ammunition to those who would seek to thwart these "punishments" with denial-of-service attacks. We need better software solutions to help people "police" their view of the Internet, more secure client computer operationg systems (and no, I don't mean "trusted computing"), and more social education about acceptable behaviour (i.e. never buy anything you see advertised in a spam, stop patronizing companies that you see advertised in spam, etc).
United States legislators are more concerned about passing new laws to outlaw very abstract types of "crimes" ("illegal spamming", as defined by the direct marketing lobby, for example) than they are about working to see that our law enforcement has the necessary appropriations and tools to enforce those existing laws that are being broken now (spammers breaking into PC's and using them for spam factories, for example).
I think we'd all agree that modifying bits bound for somebody else without their express consent is a bad idea, but modifying bits that I've requested is a-okay. Firewalls, proxy servers, intrusion detection and response systems-- all of these "technologies" function on that principle.
It's going to be really, really disturbing, though, when we all wake up and find out that we can't run our "popup blockers", use our blacklists, and filter responses through proxies anymore. It'll be "made illegal" to alter the contents of packets that we receive from the Internet because of "intellectual property" bogosity.
It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.
I may be overly pessimistic now, I guess, but I feel like we can't stop it. The Internet, as we know it now, is going to be gone sooner rather than later. There will be "other internets" that will be similar to this one, but the age of a single, unified, global Internet is going to pass quickly, and idiotic legislation, content publishers and distributions, and "intellectual property" are going to be the forces that break it apart.
Who says I have to use "the" root DNS servers?
Who says I have to use "official" ICANN IP address allocations?
Am I committing a crime in the United States if I put up a private network running TCP/IP, put up some DNS servers that are authoritative for "CartoonNetwork.com" and put up some web servers to host pornography for that domain name? What about if I invite other people to participate in my private network? What about if I sell access to the public to my private network? What if I sell rights to corporations to join my private network? Where does the idiocy end?
Idiotic legislation to attempt to control the behaviour of the Internet is going to result in "multiple internets". We may well end up with the "United States internet" and the "rest of the world internet". Hell-- we practically have a "Chinese internet" and a "rest of the world internet" now.
Cooperation on the Internet works on the basis of social pressure, not on legislation. Legislation will only cause the Internet to fragment and "route around" the stupidity.
This gets me thinking about Nat Friedman's GNU-rope (Grope) project. I heard him talk at ALS back in '98 and then the project seemed to completely disappear. Searching on "gnu.rope" leads to a few mailing list postings asking "where'd it go", but no good information about the project.
The basic idea was to reorder the functions in an executable so that locality of reference was maximized and cache hits were increased. The result is less paging and better performance and memory usage.
The really interesting bit is that the optimization is based on the usage of the program being optimized-- that is to say that my Grope-optimized version of Mozilla might be different than yours based on my differences in usage (i.e. perhaps I browse with images turned off, etc).
The tie-in to the article here is that Nat's system, Grope, used simulated annealing to traverse the n-dimensional space of potential function arrangements and profiled the memory paging of the application as a fitness function of the new arrangement. It's not a GA-- but it's functionally similar.
So-- anybody know what happened to Grope? I'd imagine that a community would spring up around it fairly quickly given the relatively high number of "performance zealots" who are busy "tricking out" their Linux boxes by compiling everything from scratch (think Gentoo) optimized for their procesor. Now they can add the "spolier" or "racing stripe" of having exectuables specifically re-ordered for their personal usage patterns! *smirk*
My largest fear from this type of proposal comes from the potentially vague definition of "email" that might be created. What is email, exactly? Are we talking about only SMTP? If so, what about "Instant Messenger" spam? Maybe we should classify instant message protocols as email, too. What about USENET? Should we classify NNTP as email, as well? What about SMS spam? What about the "next big thing", whatever it turns out to be? Perhaps we should have taxes based on IP packets sen1! That would be about as sane... yeesh!
Think I'm making this up? I had one customer who was ranting to me about their LAN-based "email" not working (a year ago, mind you). Upon closer inspection, I found their "email system" to be "WinPopUp" running on each PC that they'd use to send pop-up messages to each other. That was their "email". Think of your own relationships-- you know at least one person who calls instant messenger systems "email" (much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory").
The Internet works because we all agree to abide by the same standards, and agree that ICANN is the authority for naming / numbering. This spirit of cooperation works because we all benefit-- not because some government legislated it so. If some idiotic "email tax" does get legislated in the U.S., we run the risk of making ourselves into "second class" Internet citizens, and creating the "United States Internet" and the "rest of the world's Internet".
Spam is a social problem being "enabled" by technology. It cannot be legislated away, because it breeds on human nature: the desire to have large returns from little work. Real answers are things like ubiquitous public-key infrastructure, signed email, reputation "credits" (or "karma", if you like), and accountability. The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about. Imagine an email client program that categorizes incoming mail based on the "cred" accumulated by the sender in a decentralized, non-government controlled "reputation tracking" system.
Taxes and laws aren't going to solve the problem. They're going to stifle the real power the Internet has-- bringing people together and enhancing communication. Worse-- they risk making an "island" of any country who would enact such idiotic legislation.
I'm in the same situation far too often; only I am normally forced to get up out of my chair and walk over to their desk to look at something on their screen because they still forget about 'Print Screen' after I've shown them umpteen times.
Ahh! I remember being a full-time LAN administrator. I feel for you. It particularly frustrated me when "their screen" was in another office, miles away, and they'd already dismissed the error message w/o taking note of the content. (Argh!! Must... stop! Falling... into... rant about... error messages... Noooo!)
Most people, except me, have university degrees - it is not stupidity.
I can't buy that, though. A significant quantity of the people I deal with have substandard writing skills, and of them, a significant quantity also hold degrees. Good email composition comes from practice and frequent discourse. Repeatedly deferring to verbal conversations isn't going to help them get better, but they choose to defer to verbal communications because they aren't very good with email. A viscious cycle! I don't think collegiate programs teach the style of writing that's good for email, either.
"I am far, far too lazy to actually think about constructing sentences. I am also far too lazy to actually read all of your email even though it looks like it might of taken you five to ten minutes to write..."
There's very little that's more frustrating to me than putting in effort on a clear, readable, and well composed message, only to be deferred to verbal communication or graced with a simplistic and incomplete reply. At that point, I know that I'm not going to get answers to all (or even most) of my questions, and the answers I do get are going to be poorly thought out.
And, most of these cases are highly technical, something I don't think email is particularly suited to. Of course, my "technical" may differ to yours.
I'll be more specific - I did some amount of teaching (university) in mechanical engineering (all years). Ironically, one fo the things I taught was communication in engineering!
I should be a bit more clear-- sorry! In no way would I want to convey conceptual information via email. I agree with you in that respect wholeheartedly. I've been teaching, myself, for several years, and I can think of no worse torture than trying to explain something that's highly conceptual via written communication only.
Another situation where I think email has no place is for design brain-storming - you simply can't keep up with everyone's ideas and modifications and scratchings (drawings) over email. I'm talking about the kind of design brain storming you might do to solve a problem in mechanical engineering.
Absolute agreement here. "Groupware" systems that encourage written or electronic interaction for brainstorming type tasks are sheer lunacy. It takes a special group of people to collaborate well on a design, let alone collaborate on a design via email.
Mainly, the kinds of things I'm emailing are very mundane, but of a technical nature. Stuff like IP subnets, ports, VLAN's, version numbers, naming conventions, and ilk like that. Nothing conceptual, typically, and certainly not rocket science. Stuff that's nice to be exact and precise about.
Yes, your e-mail may be verbose and even quite thorough, but the technician on the other end may need to ask some probing questions. E-mail sucks for that type of discussion. It is almost always going to be more efficient to simply talk to you on the phone for 5-10 minutes and give you the answer(s) you need.
If not for the fact that I get stuck in voicemail-hell when calling third parties more often than not, I might buy this. I work outside my office, and while I carry a wireless phone, I don't consider it very courteous to my paying Customers to take phone calls "on their dime", and I don't care for the severe complication to time accouting that taking calls during a billable engagement creates.
I wish I could say that history proves your point true, but normally it does not. Normally it's a third party that didn't understand my email or didn't even bother to read it who wants to speak verbally. Usually they demonstrate, very quickly, a lack of having read the message. I usually end up having to read my email aloud, and they make hurried responses that are not well thought-out. It's sad and silly, really. If my writing style were really all that poor, I could probably be led to believe that I'm just not making sense to the third party-- but I can't buy that, either.
The other issue may be that the information can only be given in verbal format. There is probably nothing deceitful about the information, but written communication can be legally liable. It's a CYA thing, unfortunately.
IANAL, obviously. I can't think of any type of information that would fit those critera. My initial reaction would be something like: "If you can't "go on record" to answer my questions, I'll recommend products from your competitor who does." (Since I recommend products and services based partially on "good support", and I consider well-handled email support to be "good support", I usually end up recommending products and services that do a good job handling email support requests.)
I would agree that, in a time-sensitive situation, a verbal followup to an email may be necessary. Again, though, my personal history shows that third parties respond to email out of an irrational emotional attachment to verbal conversation and a lack of understanding of the advantages of written communication-- not out of desire to respond in a timely fashion.
In the end, it really doesn't matter. Most people can't communicate to save their lives anyway... *smile*
I find the article itself to be mostly annoying. Anyone who allows their work to be degraded as a result of email has a performance problem, and blaming email, meetings, phone conversations, etc, for that performance problem is just avoiding the real problem.
Having said that, I'm going to vent about a wildly annoying email situation that I run into frequently.
I write a lot of proposals and plan deployment projects. I usually have technical questions regarding some specific aspects of deployments that I work on. I've found that I often have many questions, most of which are fairly verbose, and that won't be answered with one-word answers.
Normally, I bundle all these questions up in an email, put a summary at the beginning and a nice synopsis at the end, and send it off. About 50% of the time I get a good response back with verbose answers (usually these things are going to pre-sales technical support at software and hardware manufacturers), but about the other 50% of the time I get:
This is too technical to discuss in email, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call." Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call." And then there's also: "I look busier to my boss when I talk on the phone. If I just send you an email, I won't look busy. Please call." Yeesh.
There appears to be a strong lack of appreciation for the benefits of email, including the "read and respond" anytime nature, the clarity of good writing (especially on technical topics), the historical reference value, and the easy searchability and recall. Somehow these fucking idiots labor under the assumption that a verbal conversation with them is going to somehow be of more use to me than a documented, searchable, archivable email message. They also labor under the assumption that talking to their fucking voicemail or playing phone-tag with them is something that I want to and have time to do.
Frankly, this article looks like the musings of somebody with poor time management skills and who is looking for something/someone to blame for it.
You can get a hardware IDE RAID controller from 3Ware right now that supports serial ATA (the model 8500) in 4, 8, and 12 channel varieties or parallel ATA in the same capacities (the 7500 series), and install commodity disk drives. The hardest part about this is getting a chassis with sufficient power and cooling capacity to handle all the drives.
It looks like running 12 Western Digital "Drivezilla" 200GB drives ought to give you somewhere around 2.0TB of storage (taking into account the bullshit mathematics of hard drives). At Pricewatch prices, I see about $3,500.00 tied up in the drives and the controller.
Whoopy shit.
I bought the Dave Gingery Build Your Own Metalworking Shop From Scrap books a year or so ago, but haven't gotten around to building anything yet. It occurred to me, after reading the books, that dead hard drives would make a reasonable good source of aluminum. I guess I've been beaten to the punch.
I actually had a client request that I destroy some of their hard drives a couple years ago. Fun stuff, getting paid to break stuff. I dd'd /dev/zero over 'em, wrote some pseudorandom crap onto them after that, then popped the tops, pulled the platters out, and hit 'em with a belt sander-- all "on the clock"!
don't we send up a robot (Or what have you) into space and collect some rocks that have not been on earth?
No way! Haven't you read/seen The Andromeda Strain? We don't want to bring back a "super virus"!
Instead, let's send lawyers into space to collect rocks. Entertainment industry and media lawyers. Yeah-- and marketing professionals. Perhaps politicians, too. We don't really particularly care if they come back or not, either!
Your EMPLOYER sure can, and that's what the newspaper article is all about - employees are hurded into the conference room and given the business about yet another system change, like it or quit.
Yep-- that's part of "working for somebody else". If you're not an equity-holder in your place of employment, you have no real say. That's just part of the grisly economics of life. If your job sucks and you can't do anything about it (i.e. crappy software, poor parking, very loud fat guy in next cubicle who smells vaguely like bacon), it's incumbent upon you to decide whether it's worth it or not to stay.
But still, no-one is forcing you to upgrade. It's just that it's getting more and more difficult for you to work with your existing versions.
With Free software, you are "supported" forever. Microsoft isn't "supporting" Windows 3.1 anymore-- if you find a showstopper bug and it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. You have no power to hire anyone to assit you-- Microsoft is the sole monopoly on "support" of that product. Nobody else has the source code, and nobody else can help you. I don't think this is particularly bad-- that's just the economics and reality of non-Free software.
I'd agree, you can keep using older versions forever-- but Free software remains "supported" forever, even if that means that you have to hire somebody.
You need to have some experience to become a "Junior Level" sysadmin.
Probably depends on your definition of "junior". Any interns I take on are usually on the basis of their interest, and the feeling that I get, from an interview, that they actually are interested and capable of learning something quickly. Admittedly, I'm not giving my interns any tasks that are really very critical-- at least at first. If I was looking for delegation of specific critical tasks, though, I would be looking for somebody more experienced. I'm quite willing, though, to trade experience for the skill of self-motivated and directed learning, if somebody demonstrates that they've got it.
But how does someone like me find these individuals that hack around on their own? Should all the IT managers start becoming IRC drones?
I'd argue that they need to be finding you. From a "job market" perspective, perhaps, that seems pretty bleak for someone who needs to hire a person "now". I don't think you find the really great people by putting out ads or hiring headhunters-- just like I don't think you can find a really good job by reading ads or going through some agency.
Of course, once somebody realizes that they're really, really good-- and they realize that most everyone else isn't as good, the arrogance flourishes... *snicker* Not to mention the unrealistic salary demands. *smirk*
No-- I don't know how you find the people who are interested in technology because it's cool, and who are self-motivated, enthusiastic, and employable. If I knew that, I'd probably be in better shape now, anyway.
I guess I need Oprah browser or something
Isn't that the browser project that goes through horrible code bloat every so often, then gets all trimmed down and redesigned, only to bloat right back up again?
(I couldn't resist...)
We would all be complaining and kicking and screaming right now.
I don't see the need to "kick and scream", but I'd say that Microsoft-specific training is as useless as Cisco or RedHat specific training. Concepts and fundamentals are important. It doesn't matter if you know how to "Install Apache", "Configure EIGRP", or "Put up a DHCP Server" if you don't understand what those things do or the purpose they serve.
How is this a bad thing? Get the money first and go back to school later. That's my opinion.
I'll second that! I'm taking classes for my B.S. now, since I've decided that my Associate Degree doesn't really satisfy me. I'm amazed and pleased with the changes in my "study ethic" after being in the workforce for six (6) years. I find that I'm applying myself a lot more effectively, both because I've gained maturity in my organizational and time management skills, and because now it's MY money that's financing my education (though it was my money the first time, too... *sigh*).
I'm also a firm believer that the money you earn early in life is the money that's worth most to you. I'm glad I've spent the last six (6) years investing in my house and in my retirement-- that's years of compounding interest and appreciation of value that I'd have never had if I didn't start working young.
Is that considered a descent salary?
I suppose that depends on you expenses. Back in '96 living w/ my parents making $27K a year was pretty good stuff, especially considering that they didn't charge me rent. I saved some cash for year, spent a year in a shitty apartment, and made a sizeable downpayment on a cheap but liveable house w/ cash I'd saved in that time. I think it was a pretty good deal.
By no means, though, does that mean that I'd have stayed satisifed at $27K-- but then, I kept studying, testing, hacking around, and getting better, 'cuz I knew that if I didn't it'd be $27K forever... *shudder*
This applies especially to positions such as Systems Administration where experience, wisdom and maturity are an absolute necessity.
Ahh-- but the only true wisdom and experience comes from actually doing the work. Being a "junior" sysadmin or an intern under good people is the best training anybody can get. I try to take on at least one (1) intern every summer, and I encourage anybody who wants to see the median level of "suck" in our job field get lower to do the same...
That is, unless you are a sucky sysadmin to start with... *smirk*
But Weaver students can get Red Hat certification free -- and use it get a job paying more than $30,000 a year right out of high school.'
Oh, sweet $DEITY. They could spend time taking college classes in high school, learning marketable skills that aren't tied to a particular manufacturer's contrivances of what a computer operating system should look and act like, learning to code, READING BOOKS, and end up far valuable "just out of high school" than a little RedHat, Cisco, or Microsoft drone. It seems a little premature (high school) to be focusing so heavily on something so specialized instead of gaining an appreciation and general understanding of computing.
The kids that come out of these programs (I've got a "Cisco Academy" at a high school close by that I work with, and know people who teach at another high school that's been doing CompTIA "A+" training, and I've gotten to be around some of these kids) are mostly useless drones. The kids that really have potential are the ones that hack around on their own, have a genuine interest, and make something of themselves on their own. I'd take one (1) of them to ten (10) of these "cookie cutter kids". The training is just too specialized-- they can't handle something that wasn't "in the book".
Don't get me wrong-- I think it's great that schools are expanding their technical training-- but don't expect these kids to be useful for much other than what they've been "trained" for when they get done.
Those Cisco kiddies can sure make the patch cables, though. Snip-snip, crimp-crimp!