"Have you seen some of the users out there? they don't know how to use their computer and they don't want to know."
Yes, and here's the idea: it's not their job to know. What your customers want, and largely what is promised to them in all those ads, is something as easy to use as, say, a VCR or microwave oven.
_Not_ something where you need to spend months reading the manual and searching for information on the 'Net. Believe it or not, a lot of people have better stuff to do with their time than learn all about computers.
In fact, I'll say that if someone actually went and advertised that you need to take a course to safely use their products, they'd promptly go out of business. Again: that's _not_ what the customers want.
And in any other industry, the manufacturer at least tries to meet the customers' needs. E.g., instead of whining about lazy customers who are probably too stoned to stand up and go switch channels, the TV manufacturers have started shipping a remote control.
Only in the computer/IT industry we have the ridiculous situation where we want the exact opposite. We want the customer to meet our needs. E.g., he/she/it should damn well abbandon any hobbies/studies/life/etc, and become an expert in wireless protocols.
For the mandatory car-related analogy: if taxi companies worked like the computer industry does, a taxi would take you to the airport instead of the railway station. 'Cause that's where the driver feels like going, and he isn't gonna start giving a damn about what _you_ want. And then he'd call you an idiot for not knowing how to get to the railway station on your own from there.
Rudeboy1, there is just one problem with this snotty "it's not our product that's crap, it's those idiot users" attitude that's plaguing the industry.
The problem is that those "idiots" are paying your salary. In fact, if the industry remained an exclusive club where only the High Priests of The Sun (or IBM) have access to the Sacred Computer Room, your employer likely wouldn't even be in business. We'd still not need much more than whatever proprietary peripherals are officially blessed by the computer's manufacturer.
The growth of the whole computer industry was done precisely by promising ease of use to idiots. The fact that you can sell hundreds of thousands of cards, and not just hundreds, is precisely _because_ you're selling stuff to those idiots. Under the explicit promise that it'll be secure enough and easy to use.
And I'd like to see the people in this industry actually keeping their promises for a change. Because what everyone, including your employer, is doing is _fraud_. They're making some very explicit promises to get those people's money, but have no intention of respecting those promises.
You know what's the only difference between the computer industry nowadays and the snake oil peddlers of the old days? The snake oil charlatans knew that they're frauds. They didn't feel a need to call their victims "idiots" and other insulting names. That's all.
In a sense, the snake oil con artists were actually more honest. And a lot less snotty.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you feel a need to insult the user for your product's shortcomings.
Really? I thought it was the millions of Russians who died. The Americans got anywhere _near_ the war after the Russians were already stopping the Germans.
And those strategic bombings never did much damage either. In fact, it cost the US far more to bomb Germany, than it cost Germany to rebuild the odd factory that got hit by a bomb and replace/repair the fighters.
Now I'm not saying that US didn't help, and we're all grateful for that. (If nothing else, otherwise the whole Europe would have ended up communist.)
But, no offense, claiming to basically have singlehandedly won the war is a tad shameless. Without the USSR to hammer the Germans from the other side, and without the UK as a base, the US wouldn't even have made it onto the European mainland. Much less beatten Germany.
The thing is, the beast didn't have to be able to catch rabbits. It only needed to be able to outrun something comparable to its own size. Which was an even slower herbivore.
That said, I never said anything about Jurassic Park. Yes, a popular theory did use to be that those things were speedy predators.
Then someone went and simulated how fast _can_ you move one of those things, given, yes, the constraints you've mentioned: muscle mass versus muscle cross section. Turns out that unless you give it some ridiculous body shape (like leg muscles that account for 90% of its total body mass), it's not half as fast as we thought.
Also bear in mind that another popular theory was that the T-Rex was a scavenger. Its leg bones just don't seem to be made for running. Walking, maybe even walking quickly (or quicker than its prey, anyway), yes. A mad 45mph dash, no. No way.
Remember that animals are _much_ easier to get estinct than plants are.
For a plant to become extinct, you'd pretty much have to kill every single one, including all the seeds.
For animals it's merely enough to drop the population under a certain number (depending on the species). At that point it's highly unlikely that they'll breed quickly enough to offset the death from other causes. (Predators, diseases, etc.)
I.e., although some dinosaurs might have survived by being in water, or in deep canyons, or whatever, after that there were too few of them left to repopulate the world.
The only animal so far which has survived a near extinction of this kind, were... humans. At one point, if I remember right, there were less than 2000 of us left. For most other species, that would have been far below the bye-bye point.
(Kinda makes one wonder, doesn't it? _If_ there was a divine plan behind the extinctions, then we are also on the unwanted list.)
Either way, that is however a reason why I doubt that kind of a spectacular extinction happened to the dinosaurs. A heat wave of that proportions would have massively thinned out other species as well.
Sure, some birds would have survived because at that precise moment they had dived under water. Sure, some rats were just at that moment so deep underground that they weren't affected. Etc. But chances are enough of those species would have nevertheless gotten thinned down below the point of no return.
Actually, there are perfectly good biometric simulations that show that, at the exact same muscular efficiency as today's animal muscles, dinosaurs could jolly well exist and move.
The catch: they were most likely very slow. E.g., assuming a reasonable distribution of its muscles (and not, say, 90% of the body weight concentrated into the leg muscles), you could easily outrun a Tiranosaurus Rex.
That was one of the faster dinosaurs for its size, btw. A herbivore was a lot slower. It only had to walk very slowly from tree to tree.
Standing up is not just a questions of muscles, it's also one of bones. Try just standing up without moving. You don't have to work your muscles too hard to do that, do you? In fact you could be almost completely relaxed and still remain standing. Most of the weight is supported by the bones, not the muscles.
Even with the disparity in the exponent between muscle force and body weight, you could probably be 10 times taller and still have no problems.
For a four legged animal -- such as all the largest dinosaurs -- it's even easier. For that kind of animal, you don't have to use the muscles to keep the back straight. It's basically a suspended bridge between the hind legs and the fore legs.
I.e., to just stand at that size, the dinosaurs mostly needed good bones. Which they had. The larger dinosaurs had _massive_ bones to support their weight.
Now walking or running is another exercise. Then you actually have to move that mass around. For that you need muscles.
Fortunately, up to a point you can get away with just moving slower. You _can_ design an animal much larger than an elephant, but the catch is that it will run much slower than an elephant.
Which again, is what the dinosaurs most likely did.
Go back to sleep. I'm a programmer, not an admin, so:
1. no, I'm not paid to do that.
2. no, it wasn't my responsibility to secure the network
3. if you're really interested in the last time _I_ got hit by a virus, it was all the way back in 1995. That "less secure OS" isn't that insecure if you'll just install the updates, just like you'd do on a Linux or Solaris system too.
So, yes, if you still want to debate my old posts, comparing the time I've wasted on Windows to the time I've wasted on Linux (the previous message was written in Mozilla on Linux), Windows wins by a very large margin. It required far less babysitting.
However, regardless of who administered the network, and which system wins, even I tally up quite a number of hours wasted just because of the threat of viruses and hackers. I didn't get hit, but the act itself of securing it, means wasted hours. (Again: far less hours than I've wasted tracking dependencies and compiling libraries in Linux, but those I can't blame on viruses.)
Having to listen to the less clued neighbour or relative who did get hit, means more wasted hours. Spending time telling them _again_ to install a scanner already and ffs start reading popup boxes before clicking OK, that's more time out of my life. Collateral damage, but damage nevertheless.
Or at work try copying large numbers of small files to or from a file server, with that corporate edition of Norton Antivirus installed. Bearing in mind that your average corporate admin sets it to scan everything, including logs, source files, XML files, etc. I'll tell you the result: copying the exact same directory took almost an hour with NAV active, versus mere seconds with it deactivated.
Plus time added to build times, time added to deploy times, etc.
That too is collateral damage from those script kiddies.
Oh, I'll say that the punishment most definitely fits the crime.
And I won't even do the maths in dollars, because it seems to me like measuring someone's life in dollars is a horrible thought. I mean, I don't know. Putting equals between a life and how much can you profit from that poor bugger, is something I would expect to see from a Sith, but not from anyone else.
I'll do the maths in hours. A murderer can be executed for, basically, shortening someone's life. I'm assuming (and I'm pulling the number out of my ass) that, on the average, a victim would have lived an average of 30 years after the murder. Some would have lived much more than that, some would have been hit by a car the next day, some in between. But let's say on the average it's 30 years.
In hours that means 30 * 365.25 * 24 = 262,980 hours. That's it. We execute someone for stealing an average of 262,980 hours out of someone's life.
Now think a virus writer or spammer which steals less amounts from everyone. Not just time reinstalling the OS and/or cleaning the virus. But also time wasted because the pipe was choked with a packet storm. Time spent installing and updating AV programs. Time spent on tech support. Etc.
It seems to me like these retards must be clocking at _least_ tens of millions of hours total out of other people's lives. Yes, we're talking a total equivalent to murdering _several_ _dozens_ of people. By comparison they make Jack the Ripper look tame and harmless. Heck, by comparison some of the Nazi massacres in WW2 don't tally up that high.
So why aren't we executing them yet? No, I'm dead serious.
See, that kind of inventing metaphors for supposedly retarded users is precisely one of the problems with this industry. If the users have a problem, it's not our product that's got piss-poor usability. We just need a more awkward metaphor.
The problem nowadays isn't that the users are retarded, nor that they're monkeys which need colourful visual aids to understand which buttons to use. And the sooner we get rid of that snotty "user=idiot" attitude, the better.
The same users didn't need any metaphor to learn how to use a TV remote control. Even the most uneducated peasant in the middle of nowhere, has no problem using his remote.
But they don't need to touch their remote to the TV and picture some invisible wire stretched between the two. They can very well understand concepts like "you're pushing a button here, and something happens over there."
E.g., the mouse is probably one of the most successful devices of this century. Even your non-techie grand-grandma has no problem using it, with some minimal showing her how.
It doesn't even try to simulate another real-life device, nor to rely on some convoluted metaphor. You don't need to touch it to the screen, nor perform some rituals to apease the gnomes in the monitor that push the cursor around, nor any other retarded metaphor. Again, people can very well understand the concept of "you push it here, and something moves over there."
E.g., take the hyperlink. It's so successful that it's pretty much become the standard interface wherever information is involved. Even the menus on DVDs basically use hyperlinks. Your retarded neighbours who call you to remove Gator off their PC, got it... by clicking on a hyperlink.
And again, it doesn't even try to rely on any metaphor. You don't need to give them a visual of something squeezing through that link and spilling all over their screen. Nor to show them some convoluted animation of a hand flipping through a book to find the page they've requested.
Etc.
All the successful interfaces are, in fact, abstract. They're easy to use for what they are, not because of needing mind-twisting visual metaphors to understand them.
I.e., while I do think that this use of RFID does bring a usability improvement, it will _not_ be because of convoluted mental acrobatics to imagine an invisible wire. It will be because the act of touching two things together is simple and intuitive, in and by itself. (Or at least easier than generating and distributing WEP keys.) You can tell anyone "just tap it to a poster to get a sample song", and rest assured that they'll understand it very well as such.
These convoluted visual metaphors aren't just unneeded, they create more problems and questions that they solve. E.g., if you tell someone to visualize an invisible wire, you just give them reason to ask wire-related questions. E.g., "what if someone walks through my invisible wire?"
I'm reading such _absurd_ stuff like "woohoo, neat. I bartered several hours of work for a six-pack of beer." Or cookies. Or pizza. Or like "woohoo, neat. I worked for hours to repair/assemble/disinfect someone's computer, and they gave me their ancient 3.6 GB MFM HDD." Or their cute little ancient 2x CD-ROM drive. (Believe it or not, I've actually read exactly that kind of barter idiocy in a Slashdot post.)
Now I know that traditionally geeks have zero sense of economics, but ffs, this is already absurd. Someone please tell me it's a bad dream, and I'll wake up to a sane world sometime soon.
How poor _are_ you people? _Where_ are you repairing servers, that several hours of your time are worth a couple of cookies? Elbonia? (Nothing against the fine people of Elbonia, of course.)
Look at the price of a sixpack of beer. Even at Indian tech support wages, that's peanuts. (Nothing against the fine Indian workers. Just using them as an example of underpaid labour.) You could get a second part-time job at tech support, and get money for more beer for less work than repairing the computer of every single retard you know... and all their friends, and their friends' friends' friends.
So let me tell you the _real_ deal you're getting. "Oooh, if you'll do unpaid work for me, I'll act as if I was your grateful friend."
There's a whole caste of parasites whose only skill is pretending to be your friend. But only as long as you work for them. Whether it's repairing their computer at home, or doing their work too at the office, or whatever other freeloading they can get off you.
And it's downright sad how many sad geeks think they're buying friendship that way. Not just sad because they have to _pay_ for even an illusion of having any friends. (Even if in work, it's still paying.) It's sad because they're not even getting any friends that way. All you're getting are some parasitic acquaintances who never see you as more than someone who'll fix their computer for free.
And the only difference between those who offer you cookies, and those who go "You get paid for this? All you did was press keys."... is merely that the first category are good at being parasites, while the second are lousy at it.
Here's a crazy idea: _Real_ friends are those you don't have to work for. People who, if you had to move to another country for the next 5 years and physically couldn't repair anything for them, would still want to keep in touch with you.
Whereas the neighbour who acts like the grateful puppy for fixing their computer, will forget that you ever existed, as soon as they can't get an advantage off you any more. That's not a friend.
Me? I'll be the asshole who won't fix their computer, nor their car, nor anything else. They can go pay to get it fixed, for all I care. Which, as a nice side effect, might do a lot more to teach them about clicking on crap.
"he fundamental problem with this analysis is the assumption that the worth of your time is a constant. For nearly everyone, it certainly is not."
A very valuable observation, and most definitely worth remembering.
However, I doubt that all these people who want their computers fixed for free ever thought of my time as being worth _anything_ at all. They're not assuming it to be worth my normal wage, nor half of it, nor 1/10 of it. They apparently think that surely I was just sitting at home staring at the walls, getting bored out of my skull, and I should probably be glad that they awarded me the honour of letting me fix their computer.
And it's not even that they didn't think of a cost, or that it never occured to them to do a cost analysis. They did. They just factored in my time as something that costs $0.00.
For example, take my favourite example, an ex-neighbour and landlord. He owns a construction company, so not exactly dirt poor. He could afford to just buy a new printer. (Cannon printers are dirt cheap, ffs.)
But no, he goes and buys some _ancient_ printer and scanner at a garrage sale. Ancient as in, their respective manufacturers don't even acknowledge that they ever made those models. The scanner with the oldest SCSI interface. An 8 bit ISA card with jumpers. None of this comes with any drivers, manuals, etc. (E.g., FFS, what do those jumpers do?)
And _expects_ me to spend the weekend just getting them to work. They get pissed off when I have a quick look at that garbage and tell them "no." Later they get another geek to actually spend most of a day getting that junk to work. They gave him exactly _nothing_ for that.
So to get back to the point, it's not that they never did a cost analysis. When they made the decision "do we (A) buy this junk and get some sad geek to make it run, or (B) go buy a new cheap scanner and printer", and decided that A was cheaper, that's already a cost analysis.
It's that they had already factored my time in it, at a price tag of $0.00. They never even considered that geek's time as being worth _anything_. That's why A ended up cheaper in their evaluation.
First of all, you're _not_ an oppressed minority. You're not even oppressed. When people will start throwing slurs at you on the street, cops start pulling you over for no reason all the time, you're given only crap jobs like manning the reception desk (because they need the token minority person in a very visible place, not in some well paid job), and even then at half the salary of the ethnic majority... _then_ you can claim to be oppressed.
Second, those minorities are oppressed for something completely out of their control. They didn't choose their skin colour or face type, like on MMORPGs. Even if they wanted to get expensive surgery to change that (which is already a demeaning and stupid thing to be forced to do), they couldn't afford it. Because they're only getting the crap jobs.
Which rules crap software programmers out of that category on both counts.
(A) Noone's going to do any real discrimination against you. Au contraire, you're one of those fairly rich white-collar guys.
(B) when a company deliberately decides to release crap products and cover it with lots of nasty PR (like JBoss did), they're discriminated against for their own goddamn fault. Not for something out of their control and which they can't change.
So spare me the whiny emotional rethoric already.
And here's another thought for you: software is a _tool_. Repeat after me: "software is a _tool_."
It's _only_ job and role is to get a job done. A company or individual using it should see some benefit from it. That's the _only_ reason they're using it.
It is _not_ a weapon of mass destruction in your retarded ideological wars. Which is exactly what you're proposing to use it as and for. You don't care what collateral damage you cause, you don't care if your lies and astroturfing cause someone a loss. You just care about getting ahead in a petty imaginary war against Microsoft.
In other words, the exact same morals as scammers and those virus writers selling zombie machines.
And I wish such people would die a slow painful death. It's about time this industry returned to being about providing something useful, instead of being one big bullshitter contest.
Actually, it's also something I would fully expect from someone who has a crap product or is otherwise losing. Microsoft did it because they thought they were losing to the DOJ, for example. (Turned out they could have just waited for a retard who bends over to the corporations to be elected president.)
JBoss is doing to J2EE what Microsoft was doing to Java back then, only worse. They implement only whatever parts of the standards they feel like coding, and in whatever incompatible way they feel like implementing them.
(Nothing against coding your own framework from scratch. Lots of people did that. E.g., Cocoon, Struts, Springs, etc. Very useful some of those. But FFS, don't call it a J2EE application server unless it actually implements the J2EE specs to the letter.)
Their official response to any complaints was basically "then you suck." E.g., when we complained that under JBoss 3.0 an application loads classes from another application (and then throws an error), their response was basically "then it's your problem. You should recompile all those apps to use the exact same versions of all libraries." The problem that in an enterprise environment someone deploying a totally unrelated application can break your app that worked for months, never seemed to sink in.
I'll go further and say: JBoss and IBM are also the main reasons I'm weary of the mantra "you don't need to sell software, you can make money by supporting it." Both JBoss and IBM's WebSphere (even though IBM's software isn't OSS) make their creators more money from selling expesive consultants than from selling software that works. And gee, in both cases, the software quality is _total_ _shit_.
And I can see how they have no incentive to improve it. Good software that just works, also doesn't need tons of support and consultancy. Crap software, on the other hand, needs tons of it.
On the flip side, they need tons of marketting to get more people to buy it... and end up needing expensive consultants to even just make it work. IBM has an army of salesmen to sell it to retarded managers. JBoss, turns out, has astroturfers. Why am I not surprised?
You know what I find even more funny? That all the Linux fanboys who are outraged by paying 80$ to keep your Windows running, conveniently ommit the _time_ cost to keep Linux running. Countless months of my life have been spent on just tracking library dependencies (whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of/usr/lib/* again), digging through cryptic incomplete outdated man pages, struggling with piss-poor user interfaces, etc.
You know what? Windows is actually cheaper. Even if you add 80$ for a router, it's still cheaper. Because my time is more valuable than that.
When the Linux world gets their act together and makes a system which doesn't require so much work just to get a program to run, _then_ you can tell me about how shitty Windows is right out of the box.
But anyway he's right: the value of the machine is in the data that's on it, and the programs it runs. That's the only reason to own a computer.
If that cool secure Linux box doesn't even run the programs I want to run, then it's far more broken than any version of Windows ever was. In fact, for what I need it's plain useless.
So here's basically the choice:
1. I pay another 80$ to keep using my computer. Yes, it's still got that shitty Windows on it, but it still runs my stuff.
2. I show the finger to MS, switch to Linux and... uh, now that 1500$ computer is a fucking useless doorstop, because it doesn't even run anything I want to run. (I know it's hard to believe, but most people have other ideas of fun on the computer than being able to recompile the kernel.)
Guess what? Choice 2 was actually the more expensive one. Go figure.
"The problem is in the precedent it sets. Once the public gets used to cellphone "dead zones", people will start using jammers in other areas for other reasons. How about at a movie theatre or concert? A fancy restaurant?"
Yep, as was already said: sign me up. I'll be willing to pay extra for the privilege.
"Many public safety personnell, like detectives, part-time police, and firefighters are on call for duty via their cellphones or pagers. What happens if they can't be contacted in an emergency?"
1. Oh please. I doubt that all the retards with ringing phones (or _talking_ on the phone) in a movie theatre are detectives and firefighters. In fact, I'll wager a bet that 99.99% of them don't have any legitimate life-treatening reason to ruin the movie for everyone else.
2. If that's a problem, just give the detectives and firefighters a silent text-only device which isn't jammed. Like a pager.
3. And anyway, I doubt that any single service is 100% dependent on people who need to be called from movie theatres and posh restaurants.
Any hospital has a bunch of doctors around at any hour, so an emergency intervention can be performed without having to call a particular doctor and wait for him to come from the movie theatre across the city. Any police department _can_ and does function just fine if one of their detectives is unavailable for 2 hours or even 2 weeks. (E.g., if the poor fellow broke a leg and is in hospital.) Etc.
I.e., this kind of arguments is mostly bogus and mostly supposed to be a piss-poor justification for being an individualistic annoying fuck. "Waah! I must be allowed to talk on the phone in a movie theatre! Because, even though I'm not a detective or firefighter, nor using the phone for an emergency, one of those _might_ be here too." I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not impressed.
"Also note how the "UNIX" tradition of chaining smaller, single-purpose applications together would have also prevented the problems described in this paper."
Just like they made CGI web sites secure? Oh wait, they weren't. For years, Perl/CGI was _the_ way to make a site that's one big heap of vulnerabilities.
There was no inherent problem or buffer overflow exploit in either the CGI engine of any server, nor in the Perl interpreter. The problem was... precisely clueless use of the Unix way of stringing together many small utilities. One can fill a whole tome with the bog standard exploits from that era, stemming precisely from improper use of other small programs.
For example, since you knew that (A) they'll call a command line mailer if their site can send you mails, and (B) the clueless monkeys they hired never checked their input, it was a bog standard exploit to give the site an "email address" which would actually mail you the "/etc/passwd" file. Or, in the case of the poor buggers running as root, overwrite it. (Yes, nowadays the passwords file is shaddowed. This exploit is one of the reasons why that happened.)
I.e., I'll have to call bullshit on that.
Just because you have a secure function call, you don't automatically have a secure application. Regardless of whether that function call actually is a proper function call, or the function is packed as a separate small executable file and invoked via pipes/shell-scripts/whatever. The same applies: shit can still happen before it, after it, and in between. Just replacing the call mechanism won't prevent incompetent coding.
And the Unix way only makes it more likely for shit to happen in between. You also have to be very sure of the shell's behaviour, the OS's implementation of pipes, etc.
E.g.: Had those CGI mailer calls happened as proper C calls, nothing bad would have happened: that email address is invalid, you get an error code and that's that. But instead, true to the Unix way, it was used to build a command line to call the separate mailer. Which, because it was interpreted by the shell, opened a new can of worms: stuff you wrote in that email text field could be interpreted by the shell as extra parameters, or whole extra commands, or piping the output to/from something else, or wildcard expansions, or whatever.
It ended up needing a buttload of parsing and validation code that wouldn't have been necessary for a plain C function call. Lots of man-hours were spent (and paid for) just to work around the defficiencies for that Unix way, in this particular situation. And in 9 out of 10 cases, they still didn't get all exploits out.
So again: just having a funny wrapper around your secure function, doesn't magically make the whole program secure. Regardless of whether that funny wrapper is called "SOAP", "EJB", "CORBA", "VB.NET" or the Unix pipes, there is no silver bullet that will make even monkeys write secure, bug-free programs.
(Of course, this still won't keep clueless PHB's from acting as if they wish _real_ hard, it will magically become true. They'll buy more and more soap oil wrapper, hire even less competent retards, and then wonder why it didn't work. Probably not enough of that magical snake oil. Next time let's buy more snake oil.)
Oh fucking please. You found him how? The proof was what?
And what the heck was your original proof that there is _no_ god, anyway? Last I've heard in science _absence_ of proof is never a proof of the contrary. Especially if the exact same facts and reasoning can "prove" two complete opposites to you, than that was no proof, how does that kind of "logic" work anyway?
Sounds to me like you never understood much about logic or science to start with. You just changed _religions_ at some point. You just switched from one illogical unproven belief, to another illogical unproven belief. Big change.
"When it's data that everybody has, then it's not so unbalancing. Joe average should be able to find someone's sensor trail on a website just as easily as the ranger sitting in the search-and-rescue booth."
You, my friend are nuts. You obviously have no idea what privacy means. Privacy means precisely that my private life remains just that: private. Not that "oh, we'll put it all on a web-site, so there's no invasion of privacy."
Basically privacy means that the _less_ people know everything you do, the better. Just as an example of this, let's think targetted marketting, which is the main reason why people want to invade your privacy. Would you prefer that only the store knows your preferences, _or_ that they put a billboard in front of your house saying "Hi, Jack! Can we interest you in more extra-small condoms?" (Not meant as an insult. It's just a random example, based on reading somewhere why a lot of people buy condoms on the net.) Or "Doesn't browsing the same lame free sites for 3 hours a day get boring, Jack? For only $9.99, you can get your own subscription to Well Hung Anal Sailors! Your subscription also includes access to 10 other gay and anal sex sites!" Or how long until people started acting funny if yours was THE house in the neighbourhood whose billboard alternates between booze ads and AAA ads?
Or what about the time you said that your boss is a retard? (We all did, at some point or another. At some moment of frustration, or given enough booze, or whatever.) How would making that information public help? Chances are the boss would still get pissed off.
But to get back to the topic of tracking hikers: Can you even imagine what boon would it be to a stalker to know that his victim is exactly there and heading that way? With even cell phones and PDAs able to browse the web, it's a stalker's dream come true.
Or even the random psycho or mugger or just drunk teenage redneck. "Ooh, someone called Cindy is going around the other side of the mountain. And we can follow her via our cell phone and this web site. Kewlies."
"I remember when Netscape first introduced cookies everyone was up and arms about the privacy issues. People were PISSED. And yes, plenty of people have abused cookies. But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks."
Well, here's some free clue for you: if it wasn't for those people who were up in arms, you'd still have every single moron with a site saving your password, credit card number, personal data, etc, in your cookies. Which aren't just stored in a non-encrypted file on that computer, but are also sent across the network for every single request. And then used those in non-encrypted requests. Effectively making it sure that eventually someone WILL sniff those.
Also without all those people up in arms about that, your credit card number and house address would still be in a plain-text file on every site's server. Or even available via Google, because that file was spidered.
If today you have the major sites giving at least some thought at all to issues like "privacy" or "security", it's _only_ because people have made a fuss. Otherwise, no company would have bothered with that.
Now I can see how it's cosier to keep living in your little phantasy world, where everyone is nice, and all technology is harmless. But the fact remains that it's those tin-foil hat people you deride that made it safe for you.
Again, it's got nothing to do with "Freedom of Speech", as in the ammendment to the constitution.
It's just an attempt to say "see, I can't possibly moderate all this, so please don't hold me responsible." But even that won't get you as far as some people think.
It works for ISPs because they can't possibly monitor all packets going through, and find which of them are copyrighted material or libel or whatnot. They have a very good defense there in the fact that it's not even technically possible, and much less economically possible. So, incidentally, they also have no incentive to start trying to prove that it is.
It also works, to some extent, for IRC servers, for much the same reason. It's (very roughly and incorrectly speaking) just a protocol for routing packets between IRC clients. AND noone's got the manpower or funds to monitor all private conversations, file transfers, private channels, etc. That isn't 100% correct, but as long as the perception is that, it serves as a damn good way to waive any responsibility.
It doesn't work that well for almost anything else. While "it can't possibly be moderated" does work as a legal defense, "I don't _want_ to moderate it" generally doesn't.
E.g., Google does routinely get asked to remove warez sites from its searches, and it actually has to comply.
E.g., think what would happen if (ad absurdum) I were to start uploading something illegal, like kiddie porn, on your site. (Many forums do let you attach pictures or files to the messages.) If you think that "I don't want to moderate that off my site" would get you too far in court, I would strongly suggest consulting with a lawyer first. Not a flame, just a friendly piece of advice.
And for stuff that's not illegal, nor a direct breach of contract (i.e., as long as you don't explicitly take money for posting on that board), there's no law that says you have to keep it fair.
Sure, you'll get a gazillion whine threads along the lines of "u suck!!! why did my post get deleted and others didn't?!?!?!?! My dad's a lawyer and I'll sue u!!!" They're tiresome and non-fun, and they can easily get out of hand. But they don't mean anyone can actually sue you for that.
In the end, the only real consequence is the potential loss of popularity to your site or MUD or whatever. Being fair usually means that you'll lose 100 flaming trolls, but keep the 1000 (or more) people whose life the trolls were making miserable. It may be worth it.
E.g., by "or more" I mean up to the extent that Ultima Online invented the genre, but it ended up in third place, precisely because of failing to stop the griefers from driving away other players. Its failing to keep the griefers in check has literally cost it hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Much of Everquest's or Asheron's Call's initial claim to fame and way to achieve critical mass was precisely being a safer place than UO.
On the other hand, being unfair may well mean losing both the griefers _and_ the non-griefers. Not a happy prospect, no doubt, but it definitely doesn't happen in a court of law.
"And more importantly, it's called Freedom of Speech"
Oh, flippin' please... For a while it was even funny to hear about how I _have_ to let fuckwits ruin forums, newsgroups, online games, etc, in the name of "freedom of speech." Then even that got old.
It was also funny for a while to notice how those making the biggest fuss about "fredom of speech", were the ones who had no fscking clue what it means. Or how it's usually the exact same fuckwit group which thrives on ruining everyone else's fun. Then even that got old.
Dig this: First, and most important, your beloved freedom of speech does not say anyone has to listen to your speech. Second, it only applies to the relationship between you and your government. Nothing more. It also doesn't mean that the owners of a medium, be it a newspaper or TV station or forum, have to publish your speech.
E.g., if I dropped by and started swearing a storm at your daughter's birthday party, you'd have all the right in the world to tell me to leave. And "Freedom of Speech" would have exactly _nothing_ to do with it.
E.g., if I don't like what you've said on my private web-site, MUD or IRC channel, I have all the right in the world to delete the message, or ban your IP range, delete your user, or whatever. Even if it's for some utterly stupid reason, such as me not liking name or your choice of online games. Tough luck. It's stupid, but it's got _nothing_ to do with freedom of speech.
Again: no law or ammendment says that anyone must publish your speech.
To quote my own starting paragraph: "Look, I'm against piracy. Not only I wouldn't give them any updates, but I think pirates should swing from the mast, like in 1600. Or make them walk the plank."
I'd think that's pretty clear, no? I'm not trying to legitimize piracy, and I'm not seeing it as legitimate in any way.
Yes, I do believe piracy does cost jobs, taxes and economic growth. I'll aggree with BSA on that.
Regardless of that, I think BSA's statistics are bogus, pulled out of someone's ass, and artifficially inflated. I think you can safely divide their figures by 10, and say that about 90% of that money would go to local small companies, not to Microsoft.
Is a chinese family, earning under $200 per month, going to pay $450 on MS Office? Or are they going to pay $4000 on 3D Studio Max? No way in heck. Yet BSA would want you to believe exactly that. Their figures are _based_ on that.
Again, I'm not against the BSA fighting to enforce copyrights. In fact, I'm very much for it. I'm just against shameless lies packed as statistics.
"I would bet they'd be at least as likely to use a free [beer] operating system or an older operating system before paying for Windows if it comes down to it."
This is actually what I hate the most about piracy. It's effectively helped kill a lot of other options.
Had it not been for piracy, a lot of people would have looked for cheaper alternatives. E.g., StarOffice was pretty damn cheap even before Sun bought it and made OpenOffice out of it.
There were plenty of products which might not have been good enough to go head-to-head with MS Office or MS Windows or whatever, but could have had a comfortable niche market among the less rich people. Except most of that potential market went and pirated MS Office and MS Windows instead.
And more importantly: had it not been for piracy, there'd have been a _lot_ of people who'd have started saying "no" when their boss or their government accepted only Word or Excel files. As in, "No. If you want me to use Word or Excel just for you, then _you_ pay for it."
The ease with which we all basically bent over and let MS shove their own proprietary file formats up our collective hiney, and then forced us up the threadmill of pointless upgrades just because the file format had been wantonly changed, had to do with the perception that everyone else had MS Office. Even if they had pirated it. They could read your files, you could read theirs. No problem, right?
The fact that we today end up judging OOo not based on how good it is on its onw, but on how well it reads and writes Microsoft files, that has a lot to do with piracy.
Well, personally I'll take that 170 billion figure with a bit of salt. Knowing BSA's bullshit statistics, say, divide it by 10.
But I do think it would create new jobs. Just not jobs at Microsoft.
See for example how Via makes some living selling cheap C3 CPUs. Yes, they're not fast chips. But here's how it works: some poor chinese wants to get a computer. He/she can't pirate a CPU, and can't afford to pay 400$ for a top of the line Intel chip. So he/she gets a 40$ VIA chip instead.
Which in turn keeps some people employed at VIA.
That's how it would work for software too.
If noone could pirate MS Office, a lot more of them would look into Open Office or some locally produced software. And a lot more people would be willing to tell their government or their boss "stop asking me to send you this stuff in MS Word or MS Excel. I'm not going to pay 450$ at home, out of my own pocket, just because you're too stupid to accept plain text files."
Or if so many Chinese and Eastern Europeans were't pirating those $40 games, a lot of them would be willing to pay, say, $5 for something produced by a small company in their own country. Especially for countries which by sheer size are potentially a huge market, like Russia or China, and where salaries are very low, I can see how someone could afford to produce cheaper games locally _if_ someone bought them. Most of those wouldn't be as good as Id's or Epic's games, but they'd be playable. And they'd keep a lot of talented programmers and designers in their own country employed.
Except in practice everyone there pirates the games, so such a market doesn't exist. And as a consequence those jobs don't exist either.
So, yes, piracy does cost jobs, economic growth and tax revenue. The only catch is: not at the big corporations, like BSA seems to think.
Slashdot Mirror
"Have you seen some of the users out there? they don't know how to use their computer and they don't want to know."
Yes, and here's the idea: it's not their job to know. What your customers want, and largely what is promised to them in all those ads, is something as easy to use as, say, a VCR or microwave oven.
_Not_ something where you need to spend months reading the manual and searching for information on the 'Net. Believe it or not, a lot of people have better stuff to do with their time than learn all about computers.
In fact, I'll say that if someone actually went and advertised that you need to take a course to safely use their products, they'd promptly go out of business. Again: that's _not_ what the customers want.
And in any other industry, the manufacturer at least tries to meet the customers' needs. E.g., instead of whining about lazy customers who are probably too stoned to stand up and go switch channels, the TV manufacturers have started shipping a remote control.
Only in the computer/IT industry we have the ridiculous situation where we want the exact opposite. We want the customer to meet our needs. E.g., he/she/it should damn well abbandon any hobbies/studies/life/etc, and become an expert in wireless protocols.
For the mandatory car-related analogy: if taxi companies worked like the computer industry does, a taxi would take you to the airport instead of the railway station. 'Cause that's where the driver feels like going, and he isn't gonna start giving a damn about what _you_ want. And then he'd call you an idiot for not knowing how to get to the railway station on your own from there.
Sorry, no. That's not the way capitalism works.
Rudeboy1, there is just one problem with this snotty "it's not our product that's crap, it's those idiot users" attitude that's plaguing the industry.
The problem is that those "idiots" are paying your salary. In fact, if the industry remained an exclusive club where only the High Priests of The Sun (or IBM) have access to the Sacred Computer Room, your employer likely wouldn't even be in business. We'd still not need much more than whatever proprietary peripherals are officially blessed by the computer's manufacturer.
The growth of the whole computer industry was done precisely by promising ease of use to idiots. The fact that you can sell hundreds of thousands of cards, and not just hundreds, is precisely _because_ you're selling stuff to those idiots. Under the explicit promise that it'll be secure enough and easy to use.
And I'd like to see the people in this industry actually keeping their promises for a change. Because what everyone, including your employer, is doing is _fraud_. They're making some very explicit promises to get those people's money, but have no intention of respecting those promises.
You know what's the only difference between the computer industry nowadays and the snake oil peddlers of the old days? The snake oil charlatans knew that they're frauds. They didn't feel a need to call their victims "idiots" and other insulting names. That's all.
In a sense, the snake oil con artists were actually more honest. And a lot less snotty.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you feel a need to insult the user for your product's shortcomings.
Really? I thought it was the millions of Russians who died. The Americans got anywhere _near_ the war after the Russians were already stopping the Germans.
And those strategic bombings never did much damage either. In fact, it cost the US far more to bomb Germany, than it cost Germany to rebuild the odd factory that got hit by a bomb and replace/repair the fighters.
Now I'm not saying that US didn't help, and we're all grateful for that. (If nothing else, otherwise the whole Europe would have ended up communist.)
But, no offense, claiming to basically have singlehandedly won the war is a tad shameless. Without the USSR to hammer the Germans from the other side, and without the UK as a base, the US wouldn't even have made it onto the European mainland. Much less beatten Germany.
The thing is, the beast didn't have to be able to catch rabbits. It only needed to be able to outrun something comparable to its own size. Which was an even slower herbivore.
That said, I never said anything about Jurassic Park. Yes, a popular theory did use to be that those things were speedy predators.
Then someone went and simulated how fast _can_ you move one of those things, given, yes, the constraints you've mentioned: muscle mass versus muscle cross section. Turns out that unless you give it some ridiculous body shape (like leg muscles that account for 90% of its total body mass), it's not half as fast as we thought.
Also bear in mind that another popular theory was that the T-Rex was a scavenger. Its leg bones just don't seem to be made for running. Walking, maybe even walking quickly (or quicker than its prey, anyway), yes. A mad 45mph dash, no. No way.
Remember that animals are _much_ easier to get estinct than plants are.
For a plant to become extinct, you'd pretty much have to kill every single one, including all the seeds.
For animals it's merely enough to drop the population under a certain number (depending on the species). At that point it's highly unlikely that they'll breed quickly enough to offset the death from other causes. (Predators, diseases, etc.)
I.e., although some dinosaurs might have survived by being in water, or in deep canyons, or whatever, after that there were too few of them left to repopulate the world.
The only animal so far which has survived a near extinction of this kind, were... humans. At one point, if I remember right, there were less than 2000 of us left. For most other species, that would have been far below the bye-bye point.
(Kinda makes one wonder, doesn't it? _If_ there was a divine plan behind the extinctions, then we are also on the unwanted list.)
Either way, that is however a reason why I doubt that kind of a spectacular extinction happened to the dinosaurs. A heat wave of that proportions would have massively thinned out other species as well.
Sure, some birds would have survived because at that precise moment they had dived under water. Sure, some rats were just at that moment so deep underground that they weren't affected. Etc. But chances are enough of those species would have nevertheless gotten thinned down below the point of no return.
Actually, there are perfectly good biometric simulations that show that, at the exact same muscular efficiency as today's animal muscles, dinosaurs could jolly well exist and move.
The catch: they were most likely very slow. E.g., assuming a reasonable distribution of its muscles (and not, say, 90% of the body weight concentrated into the leg muscles), you could easily outrun a Tiranosaurus Rex.
That was one of the faster dinosaurs for its size, btw. A herbivore was a lot slower. It only had to walk very slowly from tree to tree.
Standing up is not just a questions of muscles, it's also one of bones. Try just standing up without moving. You don't have to work your muscles too hard to do that, do you? In fact you could be almost completely relaxed and still remain standing. Most of the weight is supported by the bones, not the muscles.
Even with the disparity in the exponent between muscle force and body weight, you could probably be 10 times taller and still have no problems.
For a four legged animal -- such as all the largest dinosaurs -- it's even easier. For that kind of animal, you don't have to use the muscles to keep the back straight. It's basically a suspended bridge between the hind legs and the fore legs.
I.e., to just stand at that size, the dinosaurs mostly needed good bones. Which they had. The larger dinosaurs had _massive_ bones to support their weight.
Now walking or running is another exercise. Then you actually have to move that mass around. For that you need muscles.
Fortunately, up to a point you can get away with just moving slower. You _can_ design an animal much larger than an elephant, but the catch is that it will run much slower than an elephant.
Which again, is what the dinosaurs most likely did.
Go back to sleep. I'm a programmer, not an admin, so:
1. no, I'm not paid to do that.
2. no, it wasn't my responsibility to secure the network
3. if you're really interested in the last time _I_ got hit by a virus, it was all the way back in 1995. That "less secure OS" isn't that insecure if you'll just install the updates, just like you'd do on a Linux or Solaris system too.
So, yes, if you still want to debate my old posts, comparing the time I've wasted on Windows to the time I've wasted on Linux (the previous message was written in Mozilla on Linux), Windows wins by a very large margin. It required far less babysitting.
However, regardless of who administered the network, and which system wins, even I tally up quite a number of hours wasted just because of the threat of viruses and hackers. I didn't get hit, but the act itself of securing it, means wasted hours. (Again: far less hours than I've wasted tracking dependencies and compiling libraries in Linux, but those I can't blame on viruses.)
Having to listen to the less clued neighbour or relative who did get hit, means more wasted hours. Spending time telling them _again_ to install a scanner already and ffs start reading popup boxes before clicking OK, that's more time out of my life. Collateral damage, but damage nevertheless.
Or at work try copying large numbers of small files to or from a file server, with that corporate edition of Norton Antivirus installed. Bearing in mind that your average corporate admin sets it to scan everything, including logs, source files, XML files, etc. I'll tell you the result: copying the exact same directory took almost an hour with NAV active, versus mere seconds with it deactivated.
Plus time added to build times, time added to deploy times, etc.
That too is collateral damage from those script kiddies.
I think he means that, at the same crime, black people are far more likely to get sentenced to death than white people.
Oh, I'll say that the punishment most definitely fits the crime.
And I won't even do the maths in dollars, because it seems to me like measuring someone's life in dollars is a horrible thought. I mean, I don't know. Putting equals between a life and how much can you profit from that poor bugger, is something I would expect to see from a Sith, but not from anyone else.
I'll do the maths in hours. A murderer can be executed for, basically, shortening someone's life. I'm assuming (and I'm pulling the number out of my ass) that, on the average, a victim would have lived an average of 30 years after the murder. Some would have lived much more than that, some would have been hit by a car the next day, some in between. But let's say on the average it's 30 years.
In hours that means 30 * 365.25 * 24 = 262,980 hours. That's it. We execute someone for stealing an average of 262,980 hours out of someone's life.
Now think a virus writer or spammer which steals less amounts from everyone. Not just time reinstalling the OS and/or cleaning the virus. But also time wasted because the pipe was choked with a packet storm. Time spent installing and updating AV programs. Time spent on tech support. Etc.
It seems to me like these retards must be clocking at _least_ tens of millions of hours total out of other people's lives. Yes, we're talking a total equivalent to murdering _several_ _dozens_ of people. By comparison they make Jack the Ripper look tame and harmless. Heck, by comparison some of the Nazi massacres in WW2 don't tally up that high.
So why aren't we executing them yet? No, I'm dead serious.
See, that kind of inventing metaphors for supposedly retarded users is precisely one of the problems with this industry. If the users have a problem, it's not our product that's got piss-poor usability. We just need a more awkward metaphor.
The problem nowadays isn't that the users are retarded, nor that they're monkeys which need colourful visual aids to understand which buttons to use. And the sooner we get rid of that snotty "user=idiot" attitude, the better.
The same users didn't need any metaphor to learn how to use a TV remote control. Even the most uneducated peasant in the middle of nowhere, has no problem using his remote.
But they don't need to touch their remote to the TV and picture some invisible wire stretched between the two. They can very well understand concepts like "you're pushing a button here, and something happens over there."
E.g., the mouse is probably one of the most successful devices of this century. Even your non-techie grand-grandma has no problem using it, with some minimal showing her how.
It doesn't even try to simulate another real-life device, nor to rely on some convoluted metaphor. You don't need to touch it to the screen, nor perform some rituals to apease the gnomes in the monitor that push the cursor around, nor any other retarded metaphor. Again, people can very well understand the concept of "you push it here, and something moves over there."
E.g., take the hyperlink. It's so successful that it's pretty much become the standard interface wherever information is involved. Even the menus on DVDs basically use hyperlinks. Your retarded neighbours who call you to remove Gator off their PC, got it... by clicking on a hyperlink.
And again, it doesn't even try to rely on any metaphor. You don't need to give them a visual of something squeezing through that link and spilling all over their screen. Nor to show them some convoluted animation of a hand flipping through a book to find the page they've requested.
Etc.
All the successful interfaces are, in fact, abstract. They're easy to use for what they are, not because of needing mind-twisting visual metaphors to understand them.
I.e., while I do think that this use of RFID does bring a usability improvement, it will _not_ be because of convoluted mental acrobatics to imagine an invisible wire. It will be because the act of touching two things together is simple and intuitive, in and by itself. (Or at least easier than generating and distributing WEP keys.) You can tell anyone "just tap it to a poster to get a sample song", and rest assured that they'll understand it very well as such.
These convoluted visual metaphors aren't just unneeded, they create more problems and questions that they solve. E.g., if you tell someone to visualize an invisible wire, you just give them reason to ask wire-related questions. E.g., "what if someone walks through my invisible wire?"
You know what's really bugging me?
I'm reading such _absurd_ stuff like "woohoo, neat. I bartered several hours of work for a six-pack of beer." Or cookies. Or pizza. Or like "woohoo, neat. I worked for hours to repair/assemble/disinfect someone's computer, and they gave me their ancient 3.6 GB MFM HDD." Or their cute little ancient 2x CD-ROM drive. (Believe it or not, I've actually read exactly that kind of barter idiocy in a Slashdot post.)
Now I know that traditionally geeks have zero sense of economics, but ffs, this is already absurd. Someone please tell me it's a bad dream, and I'll wake up to a sane world sometime soon.
How poor _are_ you people? _Where_ are you repairing servers, that several hours of your time are worth a couple of cookies? Elbonia? (Nothing against the fine people of Elbonia, of course.)
Look at the price of a sixpack of beer. Even at Indian tech support wages, that's peanuts. (Nothing against the fine Indian workers. Just using them as an example of underpaid labour.) You could get a second part-time job at tech support, and get money for more beer for less work than repairing the computer of every single retard you know... and all their friends, and their friends' friends' friends.
So let me tell you the _real_ deal you're getting. "Oooh, if you'll do unpaid work for me, I'll act as if I was your grateful friend."
There's a whole caste of parasites whose only skill is pretending to be your friend. But only as long as you work for them. Whether it's repairing their computer at home, or doing their work too at the office, or whatever other freeloading they can get off you.
And it's downright sad how many sad geeks think they're buying friendship that way. Not just sad because they have to _pay_ for even an illusion of having any friends. (Even if in work, it's still paying.) It's sad because they're not even getting any friends that way. All you're getting are some parasitic acquaintances who never see you as more than someone who'll fix their computer for free.
And the only difference between those who offer you cookies, and those who go "You get paid for this? All you did was press keys."... is merely that the first category are good at being parasites, while the second are lousy at it.
Here's a crazy idea: _Real_ friends are those you don't have to work for. People who, if you had to move to another country for the next 5 years and physically couldn't repair anything for them, would still want to keep in touch with you.
Whereas the neighbour who acts like the grateful puppy for fixing their computer, will forget that you ever existed, as soon as they can't get an advantage off you any more. That's not a friend.
Me? I'll be the asshole who won't fix their computer, nor their car, nor anything else. They can go pay to get it fixed, for all I care. Which, as a nice side effect, might do a lot more to teach them about clicking on crap.
"he fundamental problem with this analysis is the assumption that the worth of your time is a constant. For nearly everyone, it certainly is not."
A very valuable observation, and most definitely worth remembering.
However, I doubt that all these people who want their computers fixed for free ever thought of my time as being worth _anything_ at all. They're not assuming it to be worth my normal wage, nor half of it, nor 1/10 of it. They apparently think that surely I was just sitting at home staring at the walls, getting bored out of my skull, and I should probably be glad that they awarded me the honour of letting me fix their computer.
And it's not even that they didn't think of a cost, or that it never occured to them to do a cost analysis. They did. They just factored in my time as something that costs $0.00.
For example, take my favourite example, an ex-neighbour and landlord. He owns a construction company, so not exactly dirt poor. He could afford to just buy a new printer. (Cannon printers are dirt cheap, ffs.)
But no, he goes and buys some _ancient_ printer and scanner at a garrage sale. Ancient as in, their respective manufacturers don't even acknowledge that they ever made those models. The scanner with the oldest SCSI interface. An 8 bit ISA card with jumpers. None of this comes with any drivers, manuals, etc. (E.g., FFS, what do those jumpers do?)
And _expects_ me to spend the weekend just getting them to work. They get pissed off when I have a quick look at that garbage and tell them "no." Later they get another geek to actually spend most of a day getting that junk to work. They gave him exactly _nothing_ for that.
So to get back to the point, it's not that they never did a cost analysis. When they made the decision "do we (A) buy this junk and get some sad geek to make it run, or (B) go buy a new cheap scanner and printer", and decided that A was cheaper, that's already a cost analysis.
It's that they had already factored my time in it, at a price tag of $0.00. They never even considered that geek's time as being worth _anything_. That's why A ended up cheaper in their evaluation.
First of all, you're _not_ an oppressed minority. You're not even oppressed. When people will start throwing slurs at you on the street, cops start pulling you over for no reason all the time, you're given only crap jobs like manning the reception desk (because they need the token minority person in a very visible place, not in some well paid job), and even then at half the salary of the ethnic majority... _then_ you can claim to be oppressed.
Second, those minorities are oppressed for something completely out of their control. They didn't choose their skin colour or face type, like on MMORPGs. Even if they wanted to get expensive surgery to change that (which is already a demeaning and stupid thing to be forced to do), they couldn't afford it. Because they're only getting the crap jobs.
Which rules crap software programmers out of that category on both counts.
(A) Noone's going to do any real discrimination against you. Au contraire, you're one of those fairly rich white-collar guys.
(B) when a company deliberately decides to release crap products and cover it with lots of nasty PR (like JBoss did), they're discriminated against for their own goddamn fault. Not for something out of their control and which they can't change.
So spare me the whiny emotional rethoric already.
And here's another thought for you: software is a _tool_. Repeat after me: "software is a _tool_."
It's _only_ job and role is to get a job done. A company or individual using it should see some benefit from it. That's the _only_ reason they're using it.
It is _not_ a weapon of mass destruction in your retarded ideological wars. Which is exactly what you're proposing to use it as and for. You don't care what collateral damage you cause, you don't care if your lies and astroturfing cause someone a loss. You just care about getting ahead in a petty imaginary war against Microsoft.
In other words, the exact same morals as scammers and those virus writers selling zombie machines.
And I wish such people would die a slow painful death. It's about time this industry returned to being about providing something useful, instead of being one big bullshitter contest.
Actually, it's also something I would fully expect from someone who has a crap product or is otherwise losing. Microsoft did it because they thought they were losing to the DOJ, for example. (Turned out they could have just waited for a retard who bends over to the corporations to be elected president.)
JBoss is doing to J2EE what Microsoft was doing to Java back then, only worse. They implement only whatever parts of the standards they feel like coding, and in whatever incompatible way they feel like implementing them.
(Nothing against coding your own framework from scratch. Lots of people did that. E.g., Cocoon, Struts, Springs, etc. Very useful some of those. But FFS, don't call it a J2EE application server unless it actually implements the J2EE specs to the letter.)
Their official response to any complaints was basically "then you suck." E.g., when we complained that under JBoss 3.0 an application loads classes from another application (and then throws an error), their response was basically "then it's your problem. You should recompile all those apps to use the exact same versions of all libraries." The problem that in an enterprise environment someone deploying a totally unrelated application can break your app that worked for months, never seemed to sink in.
I'll go further and say: JBoss and IBM are also the main reasons I'm weary of the mantra "you don't need to sell software, you can make money by supporting it." Both JBoss and IBM's WebSphere (even though IBM's software isn't OSS) make their creators more money from selling expesive consultants than from selling software that works. And gee, in both cases, the software quality is _total_ _shit_.
And I can see how they have no incentive to improve it. Good software that just works, also doesn't need tons of support and consultancy. Crap software, on the other hand, needs tons of it.
On the flip side, they need tons of marketting to get more people to buy it... and end up needing expensive consultants to even just make it work. IBM has an army of salesmen to sell it to retarded managers. JBoss, turns out, has astroturfers. Why am I not surprised?
You know what I find even more funny? That all the Linux fanboys who are outraged by paying 80$ to keep your Windows running, conveniently ommit the _time_ cost to keep Linux running. Countless months of my life have been spent on just tracking library dependencies (whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of /usr/lib/* again), digging through cryptic incomplete outdated man pages, struggling with piss-poor user interfaces, etc.
You know what? Windows is actually cheaper. Even if you add 80$ for a router, it's still cheaper. Because my time is more valuable than that.
When the Linux world gets their act together and makes a system which doesn't require so much work just to get a program to run, _then_ you can tell me about how shitty Windows is right out of the box.
But anyway he's right: the value of the machine is in the data that's on it, and the programs it runs. That's the only reason to own a computer.
If that cool secure Linux box doesn't even run the programs I want to run, then it's far more broken than any version of Windows ever was. In fact, for what I need it's plain useless.
So here's basically the choice:
1. I pay another 80$ to keep using my computer. Yes, it's still got that shitty Windows on it, but it still runs my stuff.
2. I show the finger to MS, switch to Linux and... uh, now that 1500$ computer is a fucking useless doorstop, because it doesn't even run anything I want to run. (I know it's hard to believe, but most people have other ideas of fun on the computer than being able to recompile the kernel.)
Guess what? Choice 2 was actually the more expensive one. Go figure.
"The problem is in the precedent it sets. Once the public gets used to cellphone "dead zones", people will start using jammers in other areas for other reasons. How about at a movie theatre or concert? A fancy restaurant?"
Yep, as was already said: sign me up. I'll be willing to pay extra for the privilege.
"Many public safety personnell, like detectives, part-time police, and firefighters are on call for duty via their cellphones or pagers. What happens if they can't be contacted in an emergency?"
1. Oh please. I doubt that all the retards with ringing phones (or _talking_ on the phone) in a movie theatre are detectives and firefighters. In fact, I'll wager a bet that 99.99% of them don't have any legitimate life-treatening reason to ruin the movie for everyone else.
2. If that's a problem, just give the detectives and firefighters a silent text-only device which isn't jammed. Like a pager.
3. And anyway, I doubt that any single service is 100% dependent on people who need to be called from movie theatres and posh restaurants.
Any hospital has a bunch of doctors around at any hour, so an emergency intervention can be performed without having to call a particular doctor and wait for him to come from the movie theatre across the city. Any police department _can_ and does function just fine if one of their detectives is unavailable for 2 hours or even 2 weeks. (E.g., if the poor fellow broke a leg and is in hospital.) Etc.
I.e., this kind of arguments is mostly bogus and mostly supposed to be a piss-poor justification for being an individualistic annoying fuck. "Waah! I must be allowed to talk on the phone in a movie theatre! Because, even though I'm not a detective or firefighter, nor using the phone for an emergency, one of those _might_ be here too." I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not impressed.
"Also note how the "UNIX" tradition of chaining smaller, single-purpose applications together would have also prevented the problems described in this paper."
Just like they made CGI web sites secure? Oh wait, they weren't. For years, Perl/CGI was _the_ way to make a site that's one big heap of vulnerabilities.
There was no inherent problem or buffer overflow exploit in either the CGI engine of any server, nor in the Perl interpreter. The problem was... precisely clueless use of the Unix way of stringing together many small utilities. One can fill a whole tome with the bog standard exploits from that era, stemming precisely from improper use of other small programs.
For example, since you knew that (A) they'll call a command line mailer if their site can send you mails, and (B) the clueless monkeys they hired never checked their input, it was a bog standard exploit to give the site an "email address" which would actually mail you the "/etc/passwd" file. Or, in the case of the poor buggers running as root, overwrite it. (Yes, nowadays the passwords file is shaddowed. This exploit is one of the reasons why that happened.)
I.e., I'll have to call bullshit on that.
Just because you have a secure function call, you don't automatically have a secure application. Regardless of whether that function call actually is a proper function call, or the function is packed as a separate small executable file and invoked via pipes/shell-scripts/whatever. The same applies: shit can still happen before it, after it, and in between. Just replacing the call mechanism won't prevent incompetent coding.
And the Unix way only makes it more likely for shit to happen in between. You also have to be very sure of the shell's behaviour, the OS's implementation of pipes, etc.
E.g.: Had those CGI mailer calls happened as proper C calls, nothing bad would have happened: that email address is invalid, you get an error code and that's that. But instead, true to the Unix way, it was used to build a command line to call the separate mailer. Which, because it was interpreted by the shell, opened a new can of worms: stuff you wrote in that email text field could be interpreted by the shell as extra parameters, or whole extra commands, or piping the output to/from something else, or wildcard expansions, or whatever.
It ended up needing a buttload of parsing and validation code that wouldn't have been necessary for a plain C function call. Lots of man-hours were spent (and paid for) just to work around the defficiencies for that Unix way, in this particular situation. And in 9 out of 10 cases, they still didn't get all exploits out.
So again: just having a funny wrapper around your secure function, doesn't magically make the whole program secure. Regardless of whether that funny wrapper is called "SOAP", "EJB", "CORBA", "VB.NET" or the Unix pipes, there is no silver bullet that will make even monkeys write secure, bug-free programs.
(Of course, this still won't keep clueless PHB's from acting as if they wish _real_ hard, it will magically become true. They'll buy more and more soap oil wrapper, hire even less competent retards, and then wonder why it didn't work. Probably not enough of that magical snake oil. Next time let's buy more snake oil.)
Oh fucking please. You found him how? The proof was what?
And what the heck was your original proof that there is _no_ god, anyway? Last I've heard in science _absence_ of proof is never a proof of the contrary. Especially if the exact same facts and reasoning can "prove" two complete opposites to you, than that was no proof, how does that kind of "logic" work anyway?
Sounds to me like you never understood much about logic or science to start with. You just changed _religions_ at some point. You just switched from one illogical unproven belief, to another illogical unproven belief. Big change.
"When it's data that everybody has, then it's not so unbalancing. Joe average should be able to find someone's sensor trail on a website just as easily as the ranger sitting in the search-and-rescue booth."
You, my friend are nuts. You obviously have no idea what privacy means. Privacy means precisely that my private life remains just that: private. Not that "oh, we'll put it all on a web-site, so there's no invasion of privacy."
Basically privacy means that the _less_ people know everything you do, the better. Just as an example of this, let's think targetted marketting, which is the main reason why people want to invade your privacy. Would you prefer that only the store knows your preferences, _or_ that they put a billboard in front of your house saying "Hi, Jack! Can we interest you in more extra-small condoms?" (Not meant as an insult. It's just a random example, based on reading somewhere why a lot of people buy condoms on the net.) Or "Doesn't browsing the same lame free sites for 3 hours a day get boring, Jack? For only $9.99, you can get your own subscription to Well Hung Anal Sailors! Your subscription also includes access to 10 other gay and anal sex sites!" Or how long until people started acting funny if yours was THE house in the neighbourhood whose billboard alternates between booze ads and AAA ads?
Or what about the time you said that your boss is a retard? (We all did, at some point or another. At some moment of frustration, or given enough booze, or whatever.) How would making that information public help? Chances are the boss would still get pissed off.
But to get back to the topic of tracking hikers: Can you even imagine what boon would it be to a stalker to know that his victim is exactly there and heading that way? With even cell phones and PDAs able to browse the web, it's a stalker's dream come true.
Or even the random psycho or mugger or just drunk teenage redneck. "Ooh, someone called Cindy is going around the other side of the mountain. And we can follow her via our cell phone and this web site. Kewlies."
"I remember when Netscape first introduced cookies everyone was up and arms about the privacy issues. People were PISSED. And yes, plenty of people have abused cookies. But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks."
Well, here's some free clue for you: if it wasn't for those people who were up in arms, you'd still have every single moron with a site saving your password, credit card number, personal data, etc, in your cookies. Which aren't just stored in a non-encrypted file on that computer, but are also sent across the network for every single request. And then used those in non-encrypted requests. Effectively making it sure that eventually someone WILL sniff those.
Also without all those people up in arms about that, your credit card number and house address would still be in a plain-text file on every site's server. Or even available via Google, because that file was spidered.
If today you have the major sites giving at least some thought at all to issues like "privacy" or "security", it's _only_ because people have made a fuss. Otherwise, no company would have bothered with that.
Now I can see how it's cosier to keep living in your little phantasy world, where everyone is nice, and all technology is harmless. But the fact remains that it's those tin-foil hat people you deride that made it safe for you.
Just some food for thought.
Again, it's got nothing to do with "Freedom of Speech", as in the ammendment to the constitution.
It's just an attempt to say "see, I can't possibly moderate all this, so please don't hold me responsible." But even that won't get you as far as some people think.
It works for ISPs because they can't possibly monitor all packets going through, and find which of them are copyrighted material or libel or whatnot. They have a very good defense there in the fact that it's not even technically possible, and much less economically possible. So, incidentally, they also have no incentive to start trying to prove that it is.
It also works, to some extent, for IRC servers, for much the same reason. It's (very roughly and incorrectly speaking) just a protocol for routing packets between IRC clients. AND noone's got the manpower or funds to monitor all private conversations, file transfers, private channels, etc. That isn't 100% correct, but as long as the perception is that, it serves as a damn good way to waive any responsibility.
It doesn't work that well for almost anything else. While "it can't possibly be moderated" does work as a legal defense, "I don't _want_ to moderate it" generally doesn't.
E.g., Google does routinely get asked to remove warez sites from its searches, and it actually has to comply.
E.g., think what would happen if (ad absurdum) I were to start uploading something illegal, like kiddie porn, on your site. (Many forums do let you attach pictures or files to the messages.) If you think that "I don't want to moderate that off my site" would get you too far in court, I would strongly suggest consulting with a lawyer first. Not a flame, just a friendly piece of advice.
And for stuff that's not illegal, nor a direct breach of contract (i.e., as long as you don't explicitly take money for posting on that board), there's no law that says you have to keep it fair.
Sure, you'll get a gazillion whine threads along the lines of "u suck!!! why did my post get deleted and others didn't?!?!?!?! My dad's a lawyer and I'll sue u!!!" They're tiresome and non-fun, and they can easily get out of hand. But they don't mean anyone can actually sue you for that.
In the end, the only real consequence is the potential loss of popularity to your site or MUD or whatever. Being fair usually means that you'll lose 100 flaming trolls, but keep the 1000 (or more) people whose life the trolls were making miserable. It may be worth it.
E.g., by "or more" I mean up to the extent that Ultima Online invented the genre, but it ended up in third place, precisely because of failing to stop the griefers from driving away other players. Its failing to keep the griefers in check has literally cost it hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Much of Everquest's or Asheron's Call's initial claim to fame and way to achieve critical mass was precisely being a safer place than UO.
On the other hand, being unfair may well mean losing both the griefers _and_ the non-griefers. Not a happy prospect, no doubt, but it definitely doesn't happen in a court of law.
"And more importantly, it's called Freedom of Speech"
Oh, flippin' please... For a while it was even funny to hear about how I _have_ to let fuckwits ruin forums, newsgroups, online games, etc, in the name of "freedom of speech." Then even that got old.
It was also funny for a while to notice how those making the biggest fuss about "fredom of speech", were the ones who had no fscking clue what it means. Or how it's usually the exact same fuckwit group which thrives on ruining everyone else's fun. Then even that got old.
Dig this: First, and most important, your beloved freedom of speech does not say anyone has to listen to your speech. Second, it only applies to the relationship between you and your government. Nothing more. It also doesn't mean that the owners of a medium, be it a newspaper or TV station or forum, have to publish your speech.
E.g., if I dropped by and started swearing a storm at your daughter's birthday party, you'd have all the right in the world to tell me to leave. And "Freedom of Speech" would have exactly _nothing_ to do with it.
E.g., if I don't like what you've said on my private web-site, MUD or IRC channel, I have all the right in the world to delete the message, or ban your IP range, delete your user, or whatever. Even if it's for some utterly stupid reason, such as me not liking name or your choice of online games. Tough luck. It's stupid, but it's got _nothing_ to do with freedom of speech.
Again: no law or ammendment says that anyone must publish your speech.
To quote my own starting paragraph: "Look, I'm against piracy. Not only I wouldn't give them any updates, but I think pirates should swing from the mast, like in 1600. Or make them walk the plank."
I'd think that's pretty clear, no? I'm not trying to legitimize piracy, and I'm not seeing it as legitimate in any way.
Yes, I do believe piracy does cost jobs, taxes and economic growth. I'll aggree with BSA on that.
Regardless of that, I think BSA's statistics are bogus, pulled out of someone's ass, and artifficially inflated. I think you can safely divide their figures by 10, and say that about 90% of that money would go to local small companies, not to Microsoft.
Is a chinese family, earning under $200 per month, going to pay $450 on MS Office? Or are they going to pay $4000 on 3D Studio Max? No way in heck. Yet BSA would want you to believe exactly that. Their figures are _based_ on that.
Again, I'm not against the BSA fighting to enforce copyrights. In fact, I'm very much for it. I'm just against shameless lies packed as statistics.
"I would bet they'd be at least as likely to use a free [beer] operating system or an older operating system before paying for Windows if it comes down to it."
This is actually what I hate the most about piracy. It's effectively helped kill a lot of other options.
Had it not been for piracy, a lot of people would have looked for cheaper alternatives. E.g., StarOffice was pretty damn cheap even before Sun bought it and made OpenOffice out of it.
There were plenty of products which might not have been good enough to go head-to-head with MS Office or MS Windows or whatever, but could have had a comfortable niche market among the less rich people. Except most of that potential market went and pirated MS Office and MS Windows instead.
And more importantly: had it not been for piracy, there'd have been a _lot_ of people who'd have started saying "no" when their boss or their government accepted only Word or Excel files. As in, "No. If you want me to use Word or Excel just for you, then _you_ pay for it."
The ease with which we all basically bent over and let MS shove their own proprietary file formats up our collective hiney, and then forced us up the threadmill of pointless upgrades just because the file format had been wantonly changed, had to do with the perception that everyone else had MS Office. Even if they had pirated it. They could read your files, you could read theirs. No problem, right?
The fact that we today end up judging OOo not based on how good it is on its onw, but on how well it reads and writes Microsoft files, that has a lot to do with piracy.
Well, personally I'll take that 170 billion figure with a bit of salt. Knowing BSA's bullshit statistics, say, divide it by 10.
But I do think it would create new jobs. Just not jobs at Microsoft.
See for example how Via makes some living selling cheap C3 CPUs. Yes, they're not fast chips. But here's how it works: some poor chinese wants to get a computer. He/she can't pirate a CPU, and can't afford to pay 400$ for a top of the line Intel chip. So he/she gets a 40$ VIA chip instead.
Which in turn keeps some people employed at VIA.
That's how it would work for software too.
If noone could pirate MS Office, a lot more of them would look into Open Office or some locally produced software. And a lot more people would be willing to tell their government or their boss "stop asking me to send you this stuff in MS Word or MS Excel. I'm not going to pay 450$ at home, out of my own pocket, just because you're too stupid to accept plain text files."
Or if so many Chinese and Eastern Europeans were't pirating those $40 games, a lot of them would be willing to pay, say, $5 for something produced by a small company in their own country. Especially for countries which by sheer size are potentially a huge market, like Russia or China, and where salaries are very low, I can see how someone could afford to produce cheaper games locally _if_ someone bought them. Most of those wouldn't be as good as Id's or Epic's games, but they'd be playable. And they'd keep a lot of talented programmers and designers in their own country employed.
Except in practice everyone there pirates the games, so such a market doesn't exist. And as a consequence those jobs don't exist either.
So, yes, piracy does cost jobs, economic growth and tax revenue. The only catch is: not at the big corporations, like BSA seems to think.