I say this from experience. On one hand, I've had a personal conversation with Michael Dell, as a customer, where I complained about reliability and he offered recourse. At trade shows, I have attended his speeches and attended events with him. Michael Dell is no fun at parties. Judge his perspective accordingly.
I faced a choice under different, less immediate, and better circumstances. I had to choose between a career path that lead to management, and a career path that lead into a narrow technical specialty. Make sure you understand the fork before you.
My observation has been that once a company tries to push you into management, you either go into management or your career path will suffer. Time in position, rather than age, is what prompts most companies to see "failure to advance" where employees may see "comfortable in position." Starting over resets the clock, somewhere else.
To be fair, companies look at these long term employees, see the amount of organizational experience, and want to leverage that by promotion. Realize that these are very common pressures, and you'll likely encounter similar circumstances repeatedly over time if you choose to remain below management.
That said, taking the plunge into management might allow you to take your career to another level. If you fail, you'll probably be looking for work, but that's about the same likely result as staying, with more money and more experience on the way out. Failure under these circumstances will have very little effect on your ability to land another technical job, and might insulate against future attempts to promote you out of your comfort or skill zones.
I spent two decades as a network/pc tech and a systems administrator. When the time came to look around again, I was depressed by the thought of going through the job search, rolling the dice, settling in, performing triage and rebuilding, and then waiting to see how much management would allow to be done right in the long run. In my mind, it was the prospect of going somewhere else, doing the same things again, and spinning my wheels for a few years while I discovered which ways I'd be thwarted this time.
For background, I started off in the military (US Navy) and then transitioned to military/defense contractor (NAVSEA), then to civilian government contractor (USAID/STATE), and then I went corporate. I worked for a law firm, mistook the frying pan for the fire and jumped into the fire, went to work in a drug lab (a pre-clinical drug-development facility), was treated worse than the lab animals, found a K Street (Washington, DC) law firm with a casual dress code, and went back to working for lawyers. After about 5 years, I realized it was time to leave, and I no longer had much interest. Absent a carte-blanche startup opportunity, I walked away. Not the American Beauty deal, but I got 18 months of COBRA paid for, and continuing retirement plan contributions for the same term.
I bought the farm. Mortgaged my house, bought a 10-acre farm in West Virginia, and renovated. When complete, I sold the old house and decamped. Now, I grow peppers and make hot sauce. I keep bees and pack honey. I do what I want, when I want, and I answer to me. The farm's paid for, living expenses are minimal, and my retirement funds are intact. I'm a packrat, and I have a lifetime of collected stuff that's easily sold on eBay as needed. Even with medical expenses, I still have a positive cash flow.
There are many ways to do it. One of the easiest is to flee the big city for the middle of nowhere. My new place cost 1/4 of the old one, the new house is 20% bigger, and I have 80x more land. The trick may be funding the transition. I was lucky, my old house was paid for and I could borrow against it so the new place wouldn't have a mortgage.
While working as sysadmin at a pre-clinical drug-development company, AFTER a 24-hour shift migrating from old back-end systems to new, I was assigned a 6-hour shift doing calibration testing on animal room workstations.
The testing wasn't much, a few lines of script and a lot of repetitive runs on various terminals, but we had to do it in the dark, by flashlight, in jump suits (with booties, bouffants, and masks), in 90 degree heat, in an ammonia saturated atmosphere, in rooms full of unhappy and flatulent dogs, rats, mice, or monkeys.
The only thing that kept me from quitting on the spot, instead of a month later, was that my boss and his boss were doing it with me.
My last two major evolutions were mostly satisfying.
In the first, a multi-national pharamceutical development corp, I was supporting two major locations for one division. We had two major locations, and chose parallel naming systems of Greek and Roman gods, with the same (equivalent) servers in different locations being assigned equivalent names from differing mythologies.
In the second, a boutique law firm in a communications practice, we had only one location. I chose "the sites of the seven wonders of the ancient world" and (in sequence) we had giza, babylon, and ephesus, and occasionally olympia or even further.
As to why? I always perceived it as one of the few allowed areas of differentiation, like wearing a flashy tie that said something about you. Everyone outside the department, on the rare occasion that they had to deal with actual server names, was presented with a curious set.
Why are so many/. readers so frightened of work-for-hire arrangements? Copyright is not a birthright. You do not automatically own the rights to things you create.
You are quite right to recognize and debate the issue. But you start from a point of assuming you should retain those rights. Welcome to employment. Usually, you don't retain the rights to things you're paid to create. That the rules are different for professors is irrelevant.
You have the basic equation right -- the deal is what you agree to -- but you seem to be overlooking WHY people are paid to create software. People pay you to create software because (by doing so) the value accrues to them.
I don't understand something. Milkdrop is from Geisswerks. Winamp AVS is from Nullsoft, which AOL owns. I get that. I wasn't aware of any relationship between Geiss and AOL. How does AOL get credit for open sourcing Geiss' software?
I note that the reviewer doesn't like the title either. There are several things that all get tied up in "the bubble" that were really separate otherwise.
I think many people, even those of us who lived through it, discount the impact of Y2K on the marketplace. IT spending increased quickly in the late 90s as companies realized they had to address Y2K issues or (potentially) perish. As a result, much work was done that had previously been put off, sometimes for decades. There were massive migrations, massive upgrades, and massive change -- much of it long overdue. This created a bubble in hiring and purchasing, and that bubble largely burst about 15 seconds after midnight local time when Y2K happened and little else.
The internet bubble started earlier, and burst a little later. While Y2K was a 2-3 year bubble on a fast track, the internet bubble was a 5 year bubble that started slow but kept accellerating.
It's also hard to discount the impact of politics in the US on the economy. There are those who say that the bursting of the internet bubble has as much to do with tech stocks being overvalued as it did with George W. Bush practicing economic fear-mongering on the campaign trail -- in essence, talking the economy down. One thing appears clear: when Clinton took office, he had promised tax cuts, but upon meeting with Alan Greenspan, Clinton blinked; when W. took office, and met with Greenspan, Greenspan blinked.
Setting aside the market collapse, both bubbles did a lot to set the stage for long-term success. Y2K forced companies to make investments that will (mostly) stand them in good stead, and forced them to modernize their systems. The internet bubble pushed things past critical mass and got (almost) everyone on the bandwagon. Between 1995 and 2001, American industry probably advanced (or caught up) 20-30 years.
The market collapse may have been a long-term good thing as well, at least in the sense that everything got modernized, bunches of new tech got proven, then we collectively slammed on the brakes and spent the next 3-4 years retrenching. In that time, Apple and IBM have become market leaders in new areas, and a recession is a wonderful thing if you want to force people to consider free software.
I'm not saying all the pain was good. Many people did, indeed, lose paradise. But to me, it looks less and less like a train wreck in hindsight.
It used to be that Microsoft might be late, or misguided, but they didn't used to lean on fear as much. First Bill dissing the iPod, now Steve dissing Google's future.
Bill himself once told me that when Microsoft was taken out by a competitor -- something he always assumed will happen -- it wouldn't be a big company like IBM or Sun, but some little company you haven't ever heard of. Well, I hadn't heard of Google then (they didn't exist), but it seems odd for them to start pointing at market leaders like Apple and Google and talking about implosions. If they're worried about the big players now, Bill's vision has changed, or this is all just a marketing smokescreen.
I'm betting on smokescreen, but it portends a level of fear within Microsoft that's higher than I'd thought.
>with the cheerleaders being paranoid crackpot >leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.
The overall article is actually more balanced than that. But the name calling stikes me as very odd, coming from a "crackpot leftover from the waning days of OS/2" as it does.
How long has it been since Dvorak was relevant?
The strangest part is that while he debunks the entire premise and presentation, he rises to O'Gara's defense. That may be professional courtesy from someone who's been in the business long enough to see almost everything, but I wouldn't share a masthead with O'Gara after reading her writing. And while defending the person isn't the same as defending their work, O'Gara's work (in this case) is grossly prejudicial.
A bit of background to explain my perspective. I'm the network manager for a small law firm in DC. I've been doing this for about 25 years, starting with hardware, growing into software early, and working on everything from microcomputers in the 70s to minicomputers in the 80s to networks in the 90s and moving into management in 1999, about 90 days before Y2K. I've worked for the military, the government, government contractors, law firms, and drug labs.
The golden years are gone. The age where I could walk into the room and hold people in awe has passed. It's not that my skills are less than they once were, it's that over time, people have become accustomed to what the IT people can do, and today, their expectations exceed their wildest imaginings of 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago.
To be honest, I think Y2K is where it tipped. Up until then, even when there was plenty of money, there was a lot of pressure to do more with less. Y2K forced many companies to make substantial IT investments, and since then, I've seen a greater willingness to maintain code, to upgrade systems, and to avoid creating similar problems in the future. Along with a greater awareness of how IT works and what IT can do for them, users expectations have risen. Somewhere aroune Y2K, we moved from users assuming we couldn't do things to users assuming we could do anything.
Over the same general period, a lot of technology that used to be tightly controlled by IT due to cost has become so cheap that consumers now litter their homes with it. In 1990, people thought I was insane to have managed ethernet hubs in my home network. Today, gigabit switches don't raise an eyebrow.
I think when this was more of a black art, and far less pervasive, people had a greater respect for our knowledge and skills. Now that they're constantly surrounded with the stuff, I've felt I get a lot less professional courtesy and respect.
Prior to Acrobat 6, if you said not to install PDFMaker, it didn't. Starting with 6, it does it anyway. However, we've found that simply deleting the templates placed in the Office startup folders is enough to remove the integration and toolbars.
The program installs things you specifically exclude. That is bad. The effect on end users is somewhere between confusing and aggravating. But at a support level, we've had very good luck removing the templates before creating workstation images, and we've been able to mostly avoid the problems as a result.
Of course he does -- he's working on King Kong. So, eventually, there's hope that we'll get this handed off to someone with serious geek understanding.
Alan Rickman as Marvin = genius Mos Def as Ford = insanity
I have a great deal of respect for Mos Def, but this isn't a role within his range. As for Trillian falling for Arthur, please.
>Yeah mom, to access my email which is on the same >server as my web host, just ssh into port 20002. >The username is "xxxx". Password? No, there's no >password, you have to use a DSA certificate. It >says in the man pages you can use '-i'....
You know, if they had that, they'd have an easy time finding someone who could make sense of it. Much easier, at least, than what they'd have to deal with otherwise. When I said "access methods" I was speaking pretty broadly -- what I was thinking about was URLs, basic site navigation, or things that requierd specific software.
My mom wouldn't know what to do with it either, but I don't think it would take her more than a day to find someone who did. The most important part would be making it obvious that "this is how you get into my email" so that the importance of the info was obvious. Otherwise, all that technobabble would go right by most people, especially when dealing with a death in the family.
>Because everything you own gets passed to your >inheritors automatically.
That's only true for descendents. Progenitors have fewer rights once the offspring reaches majority age. So while I would automatically inherit my mother's estate if she died intestate and did not have a spouse, she would inherit nothing from me if I died in the same circumstances.
This varies somewhat state-to-state in the US. In a few states, parents inherit automatically if there is no will and no other heir. In some, they have to petition the court. In most, at least the last time I checked, shit only flows downhill.
>That's why you get a buddy to come over to your >apartment after you die and clean out all the porn >and drugs you don't want your mom to find when she >comes to collect your belongings.
That's why you name your buddy as executor, even if everything goes to your family. That way, not only is your dead ass covered, but so is his.
If you are an ISP and operate a POP3 server for your users, the users hold their own mail on their own computer. In this case, ownership of the messages is pretty clear -- they're stored temporarily by the ISP, but this is transient, while the only permanent copies are under the direct control of the user.
If you are an ASP (like Yahoo! or Hotmail) and you provide a web-based mail application, and your users keep all their messages on your server. Here, ownership gets murky -- it's a free service, subject to terms and conditions, and everything lives with the ASP.
Now, another poster suspects that Yahoo!'s main motivation is to prevent establishing property rights for the users' mail stored on Yahoo! servers. I suspect there is truth in that -- Yahoo! should certainly want to avoid having to deal with the whole issue. If they assert that they only provided a service, and that there is no property to be transferred, that may do it.
I think that's a obvious divide for now, at least with regard to mail -- if you want control of what happens after you die, you had better either A) use POP3 and assume direct custody of it so it can be physically transferred later, or B) make sure others have access to your online accounts before you die.
The question arises: If you can establish that there isn't any property right for web-based mail services (and by extension other web-based services), doesn't that also effectively establish that the ASP owns your data? Maybe "ownership" is too strong -- there are still substantial restrictions as part of the terms of service -- but it definitely would appear that the ASP would effectively own your data. Is that where we're headed?
If you want people to have access to your accounts, you had better document the accounts, the passwords, and the access methods for them before you die.
Why should my survivors get access to stuff in my virtual world after I die if I never gave them any rights to it while I was alive?
I understand, or at least I think I understand rights of survivorship. I have sympathy for those who have lost a loved one, but I don't see how that makes any legal difference.
So let's say that I'm involved in a bunch of stuff that I don't want my survivors to know about, and we automatically give them rights to my virtual stuff when I die. They find out what a bastard I am, and their memories of me are forever saddened.
Here's the opposing question: If we start handing out access to online resources when the account holder dies, don't we also have to make everything include an option to delete upon the death of the account holder?
TBS Superstation (WTBS, at least originally) started shows at 5 minutes after the hour starting back in the early 80s. They had the same idea 20 years ago.
No, that would be because I've noticed how frequently his writing matches a predetermined editorial viewpoint. As often as not, he seems to form a conclusion then support it, rather than conduct a detailed analysis and let the facts speak for themselves.
He writes well. But his writing too often consists of establishing a premise then presenting all the evidence he can find to support it. Often with blinders on and a heavy dose of spin.
In this particular instance, he starts with a premise I find specious -- that the number of patches is a valid indicator of product quality. My counter assumption is that the product with the largest installed base will have the largest number of reported bugs, therefore the largest number of patches. Which sort of makes his argument useless.
Why not instead compare alledged vulnerabilities, confirmed vulnerabilities, and actual exploits? There, you find that Microsoft products are often less secure, and the vulnerabilites more well known, documented, and exploited.
If you do it that way, you find even more interesting things. Apache has a much larger server market share, but is less frequently attacked. Which supports the theory that Microsoft products are often attacked because they're less secure and the exploits are more widely known.
But to base the analysis on the number of patches issued makes no sense -- anyone want to compare Microsoft's closed-source patch history for IIS with the CVS history on Apache? Take two (for example) products with completely different distribution mechanisms, including how patches are issued and incorporated, and your conclusions mean little. Even with Fedora, where there is a similar patch mechanism, you're still making pointless comparisons.
If I say elephants fart because the sun shines, and you observe an elephant farting, can you reasonably conclude that the sun is shining?
First, Petreley is biased. Those with a memory will remember him from the OS/2 wars. He is a long-term Microsoft critic with a long-established track record. This is a comment on the author, not on the work.
Second, comparing patches is inane. This is by no means a comprehensive security audit, just an enumeration of the fixes released by two vendors. It does nothing to compare the number of vulnerabilities in the respective products, it simply compares patches. Since Windows is used by far more people than Linux, it's reasonalbe to expect more bugs to be discovered in the Windows product. Assuming all other things are equal, which we know they're not.
Linux vs. Windows cannot be allowed to devolve into a repeat of OS/2 vs. Windows. I have nothing against Nick -- I often enjoy his writing -- but you have to recognize an established perspective.
>The FedEx Kinko's chain is also taking preventive >measures. It's deploying software designed to >automatically refresh its public access terminals to >a virgin state for each new customer
Seems like the perfect solution, and one that should be standard. I've used some internet cafes that had a few years worth of cached crap on a generic user session. I have a preference for those what don't allow profile changes to be saved, and revert to virgin on each reboot from a saved default profile.
Slashdot Mirror
it's not absurd to suggest that dealer networks add value. the question is, for whom? not the consumer, generally.
I say this from experience. On one hand, I've had a personal conversation with Michael Dell, as a customer, where I complained about reliability and he offered recourse. At trade shows, I have attended his speeches and attended events with him. Michael Dell is no fun at parties. Judge his perspective accordingly.
I faced a choice under different, less immediate, and better circumstances. I had to choose between a career path that lead to management, and a career path that lead into a narrow technical specialty. Make sure you understand the fork before you.
My observation has been that once a company tries to push you into management, you either go into management or your career path will suffer. Time in position, rather than age, is what prompts most companies to see "failure to advance" where employees may see "comfortable in position." Starting over resets the clock, somewhere else.
To be fair, companies look at these long term employees, see the amount of organizational experience, and want to leverage that by promotion. Realize that these are very common pressures, and you'll likely encounter similar circumstances repeatedly over time if you choose to remain below management.
That said, taking the plunge into management might allow you to take your career to another level. If you fail, you'll probably be looking for work, but that's about the same likely result as staying, with more money and more experience on the way out. Failure under these circumstances will have very little effect on your ability to land another technical job, and might insulate against future attempts to promote you out of your comfort or skill zones.
I spent two decades as a network/pc tech and a systems administrator. When the time came to look around again, I was depressed by the thought of going through the job search, rolling the dice, settling in, performing triage and rebuilding, and then waiting to see how much management would allow to be done right in the long run. In my mind, it was the prospect of going somewhere else, doing the same things again, and spinning my wheels for a few years while I discovered which ways I'd be thwarted this time.
For background, I started off in the military (US Navy) and then transitioned to military/defense contractor (NAVSEA), then to civilian government contractor (USAID/STATE), and then I went corporate. I worked for a law firm, mistook the frying pan for the fire and jumped into the fire, went to work in a drug lab (a pre-clinical drug-development facility), was treated worse than the lab animals, found a K Street (Washington, DC) law firm with a casual dress code, and went back to working for lawyers. After about 5 years, I realized it was time to leave, and I no longer had much interest. Absent a carte-blanche startup opportunity, I walked away. Not the American Beauty deal, but I got 18 months of COBRA paid for, and continuing retirement plan contributions for the same term.
I bought the farm. Mortgaged my house, bought a 10-acre farm in West Virginia, and renovated. When complete, I sold the old house and decamped. Now, I grow peppers and make hot sauce. I keep bees and pack honey. I do what I want, when I want, and I answer to me. The farm's paid for, living expenses are minimal, and my retirement funds are intact. I'm a packrat, and I have a lifetime of collected stuff that's easily sold on eBay as needed. Even with medical expenses, I still have a positive cash flow.
There are many ways to do it. One of the easiest is to flee the big city for the middle of nowhere. My new place cost 1/4 of the old one, the new house is 20% bigger, and I have 80x more land. The trick may be funding the transition. I was lucky, my old house was paid for and I could borrow against it so the new place wouldn't have a mortgage.
While working as sysadmin at a pre-clinical drug-development company, AFTER a 24-hour shift migrating from old back-end systems to new, I was assigned a 6-hour shift doing calibration testing on animal room workstations.
The testing wasn't much, a few lines of script and a lot of repetitive runs on various terminals, but we had to do it in the dark, by flashlight, in jump suits (with booties, bouffants, and masks), in 90 degree heat, in an ammonia saturated atmosphere, in rooms full of unhappy and flatulent dogs, rats, mice, or monkeys.
The only thing that kept me from quitting on the spot, instead of a month later, was that my boss and his boss were doing it with me.
My last two major evolutions were mostly satisfying.
In the first, a multi-national pharamceutical development corp, I was supporting two major locations for one division. We had two major locations, and chose parallel naming systems of Greek and Roman gods, with the same (equivalent) servers in different locations being assigned equivalent names from differing mythologies.
In the second, a boutique law firm in a communications practice, we had only one location. I chose "the sites of the seven wonders of the ancient world" and (in sequence) we had giza, babylon, and ephesus, and occasionally olympia or even further.
As to why? I always perceived it as one of the few allowed areas of differentiation, like wearing a flashy tie that said something about you. Everyone outside the department, on the rare occasion that they had to deal with actual server names, was presented with a curious set.
Why are so many /. readers so frightened of work-for-hire arrangements? Copyright is not a birthright. You do not automatically own the rights to things you create.
You are quite right to recognize and debate the issue. But you start from a point of assuming you should retain those rights. Welcome to employment. Usually, you don't retain the rights to things you're paid to create. That the rules are different for professors is irrelevant.
You have the basic equation right -- the deal is what you agree to -- but you seem to be overlooking WHY people are paid to create software. People pay you to create software because (by doing so) the value accrues to them.
Work-for-hire is neither bad nor unfair.
I don't understand something. Milkdrop is from Geisswerks. Winamp AVS is from Nullsoft, which AOL owns. I get that. I wasn't aware of any relationship between Geiss and AOL. How does AOL get credit for open sourcing Geiss' software?
I note that the reviewer doesn't like the title either. There are several things that all get tied up in "the bubble" that were really separate otherwise.
I think many people, even those of us who lived through it, discount the impact of Y2K on the marketplace. IT spending increased quickly in the late 90s as companies realized they had to address Y2K issues or (potentially) perish. As a result, much work was done that had previously been put off, sometimes for decades. There were massive migrations, massive upgrades, and massive change -- much of it long overdue. This created a bubble in hiring and purchasing, and that bubble largely burst about 15 seconds after midnight local time when Y2K happened and little else.
The internet bubble started earlier, and burst a little later. While Y2K was a 2-3 year bubble on a fast track, the internet bubble was a 5 year bubble that started slow but kept accellerating.
It's also hard to discount the impact of politics in the US on the economy. There are those who say that the bursting of the internet bubble has as much to do with tech stocks being overvalued as it did with George W. Bush practicing economic fear-mongering on the campaign trail -- in essence, talking the economy down. One thing appears clear: when Clinton took office, he had promised tax cuts, but upon meeting with Alan Greenspan, Clinton blinked; when W. took office, and met with Greenspan, Greenspan blinked.
Setting aside the market collapse, both bubbles did a lot to set the stage for long-term success. Y2K forced companies to make investments that will (mostly) stand them in good stead, and forced them to modernize their systems. The internet bubble pushed things past critical mass and got (almost) everyone on the bandwagon. Between 1995 and 2001, American industry probably advanced (or caught up) 20-30 years.
The market collapse may have been a long-term good thing as well, at least in the sense that everything got modernized, bunches of new tech got proven, then we collectively slammed on the brakes and spent the next 3-4 years retrenching. In that time, Apple and IBM have become market leaders in new areas, and a recession is a wonderful thing if you want to force people to consider free software.
I'm not saying all the pain was good. Many people did, indeed, lose paradise. But to me, it looks less and less like a train wreck in hindsight.
It used to be that Microsoft might be late, or misguided, but they didn't used to lean on fear as much. First Bill dissing the iPod, now Steve dissing Google's future.
Bill himself once told me that when Microsoft was taken out by a competitor -- something he always assumed will happen -- it wouldn't be a big company like IBM or Sun, but some little company you haven't ever heard of. Well, I hadn't heard of Google then (they didn't exist), but it seems odd for them to start pointing at market leaders like Apple and Google and talking about implosions. If they're worried about the big players now, Bill's vision has changed, or this is all just a marketing smokescreen.
I'm betting on smokescreen, but it portends a level of fear within Microsoft that's higher than I'd thought.
>with the cheerleaders being paranoid crackpot
>leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.
The overall article is actually more balanced than that. But the name calling stikes me as very odd, coming from a "crackpot leftover from the waning days of OS/2" as it does.
How long has it been since Dvorak was relevant?
The strangest part is that while he debunks the entire premise and presentation, he rises to O'Gara's defense. That may be professional courtesy from someone who's been in the business long enough to see almost everything, but I wouldn't share a masthead with O'Gara after reading her writing. And while defending the person isn't the same as defending their work, O'Gara's work (in this case) is grossly prejudicial.
because software is free, while movies and music want to be...
A bit of background to explain my perspective. I'm the network manager for a small law firm in DC. I've been doing this for about 25 years, starting with hardware, growing into software early, and working on everything from microcomputers in the 70s to minicomputers in the 80s to networks in the 90s and moving into management in 1999, about 90 days before Y2K. I've worked for the military, the government, government contractors, law firms, and drug labs.
The golden years are gone. The age where I could walk into the room and hold people in awe has passed. It's not that my skills are less than they once were, it's that over time, people have become accustomed to what the IT people can do, and today, their expectations exceed their wildest imaginings of 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago.
To be honest, I think Y2K is where it tipped. Up until then, even when there was plenty of money, there was a lot of pressure to do more with less. Y2K forced many companies to make substantial IT investments, and since then, I've seen a greater willingness to maintain code, to upgrade systems, and to avoid creating similar problems in the future. Along with a greater awareness of how IT works and what IT can do for them, users expectations have risen. Somewhere aroune Y2K, we moved from users assuming we couldn't do things to users assuming we could do anything.
Over the same general period, a lot of technology that used to be tightly controlled by IT due to cost has become so cheap that consumers now litter their homes with it. In 1990, people thought I was insane to have managed ethernet hubs in my home network. Today, gigabit switches don't raise an eyebrow.
I think when this was more of a black art, and far less pervasive, people had a greater respect for our knowledge and skills. Now that they're constantly surrounded with the stuff, I've felt I get a lot less professional courtesy and respect.
Prior to Acrobat 6, if you said not to install PDFMaker, it didn't. Starting with 6, it does it anyway. However, we've found that simply deleting the templates placed in the Office startup folders is enough to remove the integration and toolbars.
The program installs things you specifically exclude. That is bad. The effect on end users is somewhere between confusing and aggravating. But at a support level, we've had very good luck removing the templates before creating workstation images, and we've been able to mostly avoid the problems as a result.
If they settle, it's not a win, it's a settlement. Does not set a very useful precedent, however correct the settlement appears to be.
Until it is tried, adjudicated, and upheld, the original statement stands. At best, the GPL has been tested, but not proven.
Get your facts straight. This headline is deceptive and wrong.
Of course he does -- he's working on King Kong. So, eventually, there's hope that we'll get this handed off to someone with serious geek understanding.
Alan Rickman as Marvin = genius
Mos Def as Ford = insanity
I have a great deal of respect for Mos Def, but this isn't a role within his range. As for Trillian falling for Arthur, please.
>Yeah mom, to access my email which is on the same ....
>server as my web host, just ssh into port 20002.
>The username is "xxxx". Password? No, there's no
>password, you have to use a DSA certificate. It
>says in the man pages you can use '-i'
You know, if they had that, they'd have an easy time finding someone who could make sense of it. Much easier, at least, than what they'd have to deal with otherwise. When I said "access methods" I was speaking pretty broadly -- what I was thinking about was URLs, basic site navigation, or things that requierd specific software.
My mom wouldn't know what to do with it either, but I don't think it would take her more than a day to find someone who did. The most important part would be making it obvious that "this is how you get into my email" so that the importance of the info was obvious. Otherwise, all that technobabble would go right by most people, especially when dealing with a death in the family.
>Because everything you own gets passed to your
>inheritors automatically.
That's only true for descendents. Progenitors have fewer rights once the offspring reaches majority age. So while I would automatically inherit my mother's estate if she died intestate and did not have a spouse, she would inherit nothing from me if I died in the same circumstances.
This varies somewhat state-to-state in the US. In a few states, parents inherit automatically if there is no will and no other heir. In some, they have to petition the court. In most, at least the last time I checked, shit only flows downhill.
>That's why you get a buddy to come over to your
>apartment after you die and clean out all the porn
>and drugs you don't want your mom to find when she
>comes to collect your belongings.
That's why you name your buddy as executor, even if everything goes to your family. That way, not only is your dead ass covered, but so is his.
Here's a question that's bugging me:
If you are an ISP and operate a POP3 server for your users, the users hold their own mail on their own computer. In this case, ownership of the messages is pretty clear -- they're stored temporarily by the ISP, but this is transient, while the only permanent copies are under the direct control of the user.
If you are an ASP (like Yahoo! or Hotmail) and you provide a web-based mail application, and your users keep all their messages on your server. Here, ownership gets murky -- it's a free service, subject to terms and conditions, and everything lives with the ASP.
Now, another poster suspects that Yahoo!'s main motivation is to prevent establishing property rights for the users' mail stored on Yahoo! servers. I suspect there is truth in that -- Yahoo! should certainly want to avoid having to deal with the whole issue. If they assert that they only provided a service, and that there is no property to be transferred, that may do it.
I think that's a obvious divide for now, at least with regard to mail -- if you want control of what happens after you die, you had better either A) use POP3 and assume direct custody of it so it can be physically transferred later, or B) make sure others have access to your online accounts before you die.
The question arises: If you can establish that there isn't any property right for web-based mail services (and by extension other web-based services), doesn't that also effectively establish that the ASP owns your data? Maybe "ownership" is too strong -- there are still substantial restrictions as part of the terms of service -- but it definitely would appear that the ASP would effectively own your data. Is that where we're headed?
If you want people to have access to your accounts, you had better document the accounts, the passwords, and the access methods for them before you die.
Why should my survivors get access to stuff in my virtual world after I die if I never gave them any rights to it while I was alive?
I understand, or at least I think I understand rights of survivorship. I have sympathy for those who have lost a loved one, but I don't see how that makes any legal difference.
So let's say that I'm involved in a bunch of stuff that I don't want my survivors to know about, and we automatically give them rights to my virtual stuff when I die. They find out what a bastard I am, and their memories of me are forever saddened.
Here's the opposing question: If we start handing out access to online resources when the account holder dies, don't we also have to make everything include an option to delete upon the death of the account holder?
TBS Superstation (WTBS, at least originally) started shows at 5 minutes after the hour starting back in the early 80s. They had the same idea 20 years ago.
This is not news.
No, that would be because I've noticed how frequently his writing matches a predetermined editorial viewpoint. As often as not, he seems to form a conclusion then support it, rather than conduct a detailed analysis and let the facts speak for themselves.
He writes well. But his writing too often consists of establishing a premise then presenting all the evidence he can find to support it. Often with blinders on and a heavy dose of spin.
In this particular instance, he starts with a premise I find specious -- that the number of patches is a valid indicator of product quality. My counter assumption is that the product with the largest installed base will have the largest number of reported bugs, therefore the largest number of patches. Which sort of makes his argument useless.
Why not instead compare alledged vulnerabilities, confirmed vulnerabilities, and actual exploits? There, you find that Microsoft products are often less secure, and the vulnerabilites more well known, documented, and exploited.
If you do it that way, you find even more interesting things. Apache has a much larger server market share, but is less frequently attacked. Which supports the theory that Microsoft products are often attacked because they're less secure and the exploits are more widely known.
But to base the analysis on the number of patches issued makes no sense -- anyone want to compare Microsoft's closed-source patch history for IIS with the CVS history on Apache? Take two (for example) products with completely different distribution mechanisms, including how patches are issued and incorporated, and your conclusions mean little. Even with Fedora, where there is a similar patch mechanism, you're still making pointless comparisons.
If I say elephants fart because the sun shines, and you observe an elephant farting, can you reasonably conclude that the sun is shining?
First, Petreley is biased. Those with a memory will remember him from the OS/2 wars. He is a long-term Microsoft critic with a long-established track record. This is a comment on the author, not on the work.
Second, comparing patches is inane. This is by no means a comprehensive security audit, just an enumeration of the fixes released by two vendors. It does nothing to compare the number of vulnerabilities in the respective products, it simply compares patches. Since Windows is used by far more people than Linux, it's reasonalbe to expect more bugs to be discovered in the Windows product. Assuming all other things are equal, which we know they're not.
Linux vs. Windows cannot be allowed to devolve into a repeat of OS/2 vs. Windows. I have nothing against Nick -- I often enjoy his writing -- but you have to recognize an established perspective.
>The FedEx Kinko's chain is also taking preventive
>measures. It's deploying software designed to
>automatically refresh its public access terminals to
>a virgin state for each new customer
Seems like the perfect solution, and one that should be standard. I've used some internet cafes that had a few years worth of cached crap on a generic user session. I have a preference for those what don't allow profile changes to be saved, and revert to virgin on each reboot from a saved default profile.