Well, I'm not you and I'm damned sick of having to keep a long-ass list of usernames and passwords for sites I really don't care much about.
Then try an approach that I've found incredibly useful... use generated site passwords along with address extensions!
First, for passwords, you only need to remember *1* and have the following javascript (which runs client side) from this most excellent site: GenPass.
Next, look into using address extensions (ala what are available via postfix) and define unique addresses per each site you visit (most that I visit have adopted the email address as the username).
For those not familiar with address extensions, you get a base user id within your email system that you're allowed to dynamically apply an extension to and it'll still get delivered to your base box.
So, if you're "sam@abc.com" with an extension, the address "sam+slashdot@abs.com" will still deliver to your base mailbox.
Then it is trivial to figure out which site leaked your address for spam as well as start blocking a particular address (either by using procmail or a combination of postfix with an SMTP proxy such as smtpprox.
And while we need to tech savvy of the world setting up the mailserver side of things for our less tech-interested friends (I've done this for friends and family and host mail for them), it simplifies by effectively making it easier to manage multiple identities instead of depending on a bastion one.
but could you prove the case if you left a note in your "private" diary that you thought someone could be killed in a certain fashion...
I'll preface this by saying IANAL... Prove? No. Provide circumstancial evidence? Yup.
As the grandparent stated, the real judgment behind this crime is one of intent. The nature of these links is so specific, targeted and intentional, that even if one didn't get accused of willful attacking, he'd be guilty of negligence.
Maybe it doesn't seem as clear-cut because we're "just talking about words."
But the web provides action to words, real things that can happen based on materials produced. So, if we put the question within a different context, maybe the "crime" part becomes more apparent:
How you you feel about a nuclear materials researcher leaving weapons grade plutonium in an unlocked box in his back yard while posting a notice in the local paper that such material exists unprotected for anyone to harvest? Would he be making the bomb himself and destroying people with it? No. Would it be tantamount to such an act? Yes.
I don't know how it would be prosecuted, but there's no doubt that it would be.
I think the reason there's even question of legality to these types of attacks isn't because the moral implications are ambiguous, but because the law hasn't been able to keep up with the latest in cybercrime.
There's still raging debate about the effectiveness of SPF in the war on SPAM.
While I agree that it will help prevent forgery of your own domain, it doesn't really prevent the spammers from setting up SPF records for their domains with really loose rules, thus circumventing the "I know who sent this" part of SPF.
And, not to be too negative, SPF still doesn't have a good solution for secondary delivery (BackupMX, email forwarders, etc).
If you're still positive on the technology, you might want to consider adopting Sender ID. Despite being a Microsoft-pushed tech, it does a "little bit more" in verifying both the "envelope from" and the "friendly from" are from a permitted domain. And, for waht it is worth, Microsoft recently put it under the Open Specification Promise.
One thing we can certainly all agree on: we'd like to see a permanent solution for the spam menace. >8(
To read this TPS report you are required to insert blood sample into the slot provided and place your left eye on the scanner.
Pshaw! I hear the next version, to support a better customer experience, is going to combine the eye scan with the blood sampling in a single step! No more worries about being squeamish pricking your own finger... the machine will simply draw a blood sample from your eye automatically! It'll be a hit with those consumers who want a "simplified, Microsoft experience." 8)
I think if I was making $2/hr (I made that up, I don't know what the real number is but I am sure it is low compared to the US) while I knew I was being exploited for cheap labor and was offered a large sum of money in exchange for personal data knowing I would lose my job but not be in trouble legally that I would probably take the money and go hunting for a new job.
You're spot-on.
The reason why low-wage centers are always going to have more fraud (whether located domestically or off-shore) than higher-wage locations is simply a matter of motivation to steal: the greater the disparity between what I earn normally and what I could make by stealing is directly proportional to how tempting it is.
For example, let's assume that data could be sold for $40K US.
As an IT worker within the US, making $80K/year makes $40K tempting, but not really worthwhile if I like my job. But, if I am making $4K a year, I could effectively stop working for 10 years from the money made on that one theft... the temptation is much higher.
This doesn't even address the difficulty companies can have prosecuting internationally.
First, I wanted to say that I'm glad you didn't read my comment as flame-bait; I really was hoping you'd come back and qualify your remarks. 8)
Now, with that said...
This of course has now been proven to be total hogwash- it is possible for one side of the trade imbalance to have such a lower standard of living as to have a comparative advantage in any given manufactured good that they know how to make- thus completely destroying the economy of the country with the higher standard of living.
Sure, if one country has such a lower standard of living that they can produce items more cheaply (or in larger quantity) than a country with a higher standard of living, that country will have absolute advantage in terms of pricing.
And it is when reliance on this pricing is utilized that trade abuses more readily occur and you get an imbalance.
Maybe this was one of the mis-statements from your original post.
In an extremely simplified example (trade is never simple): (all numbers in US dollars) let's say the United States can produce wine for $15/bottle and can produce bread for $1/loaf and Argentina can produce wine for $10/bottle and bread for $.50/loaf. In both cases Argentina has the absolute advantage over the US. However, if Argentina were to focus its energy on the more expensive item and forego bread (produce wine exclusively) and the US foregoes producing wine and instead only produces bread, then each country can trade wine-for-bread.
We don't live in a world where comparative advantage exists in all trade (or even most trade), but it does exist and is the future of a world economy. Each country would produce those items which is best/easiest for them to produce and leave other countries to produce those items that they produce best/easiest. Then it is trade of one needed good for another. Trade imbalances work themselves out... if in the above example, Argentina needs 10-loaves of bread for every person and the US requires 1 bottle of wine for every person, then the trade will naturally "price" itself so there is no surplus nor shortage.
It isn't what we have today... but it is the direction of global trade.
The links you posted to are indeed indicative of the problems when there's a trade imbalance. However, you've failed to link that to comparative advantage.
If you have a point to make, I don't feel you've fully explained the connection between trade imbalance and the idea that one nation can make/trade products better than other countries giving them tangible trading power.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value.....
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).
That's not true.
A strong economy can be had with trade if the two nations have comparative advantage in trade. In real life there's rare examples of it existing only between two countries (usually more are involved), but it is an essential concept given that 28% of the global GDP was from exports.
Restricting trade between countries (so there are no imports/exports) would only affect pricing/availability of goods within a country. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a country without a rich oil supply, then all sorts of products that are created from that supply would either be extremely expensive or non-existant (plastics, fuel, etc).
And even if you were to restrice trade to "free trade partners" (as you reference), that doesn't guarantee that the trade won't negatively affect an economy either. Free trade only refers to allowing products to flow without tariffs; it doesn't stop one country from dumping products into another, thus artificially lowering the price of those goods to drive the foreign industry into the ground.
This is EXACTLY what financial institutions should be doing!! It would work like gangbusters.
All it would prevent is direct linking to institution images.
But, nothing would stop the phisher from downloading said images and hosting them off "their own" website.
And now "their own website" could be as easy to obtain as an account on Amazon's S3 with a stolen credit card to host said images.
Besides, any phisher that looks at their own phishing site would realize the problem almost instantly if they direct-linked to the bank's images and the bank had a simple Apache configuration to not allow external linking. So, no... it wouldn't be all that effective.
Why not record swerving? I would imagine that such devices would be recording all sorts of information including vertical acceleration (why not?).
The point isn't having absolute proof, but evidence that could support a story.
For example, if my car shows that I'm going from 0 to 10 miles per hour and the other car accelerated from 30 to 45 right before the accident, it would support my "the light turned green and I started to go when I got t-boned" story instead of his "*I* had the green light and he ran the red." Time sync isn't necessary; one just has to run the event clock backwards from each car's recording of the crash.
Even with that said, such evidence could lead one to the wrong conclusion (take the above example, but assume the t-boning car actually _did_ have the green and I rolled out in front of him on purpose)... that would be quite a temptation for insurance fraud con artists. 8/
Parent is spot-on about latency when playing over the Internet. I haven't RTFA, but I suspect that the claims of increased performance will be on a LAN-only basis.
And not to try and legitimize what looks to be a sucker-magnet product (they seriously need to add neon to it!), but there could be optimizations related to having a local network of these things talking to one another. Or, the optimizations could be related to a cross-over cable scenario (not fun for gaming, but could be enough to "qualify" the marketing claims).
As others have pointed out, one still needs to optimize all the pieces that actually make-up the network. What about the switch that all these local machines would plug into? Wouldn't that need to be optimized, as well?
Indeed, this smells like MonsterCable selling GOLD PLATED Optical Fibre... only suckers need apply. 8/
I'll admit, I'm being a bit smarmy, but whomever modded the parent "Informative" was being exceptionally generous.
The post reads like a poorly constructed excuse: "So, I was GOING to do my paper on Google, but, um, there wasn't any stuff I could find about it anywhere because it wasn't possible to find. So, I did my paper on AOL instead because there was a lot of info about it when I logged into the Internet through my mom's AOL account."
Even if it is embarassing, care to share what it was you were searching for on Clusty that came back with relevant results quickly that had Google stumped?
I certainly hope you're not going to say, "I searched for: clusty."
Sega was the first to use the microphone as a gameplay device
Egad... I'm gonna show my age here. I remember "Echelon" for the C-64... it came with a headset that activated the fire button with any "significant sound."
Still, your point is well stated in that being an innovator doesn't always lead one to rousing success and can, in fact, cause a company to falter.
There's a reason why "stick to the knitting" is more likely to keep a company afloat (even as it stagnates) is a common truism.
Spot on... we all know the proper way to ensure high-quality software design is with a heavy Waterfall methodology. Ooo... and throw in lots of beurocratic layers in your organization, too! Lord knows software can't be high-quality without at least 10 separate management rubber-stamps on it.;)
Probably nothing. Just because a company's blunder gives a competitor a leg-up doesn't automatically imply the competitor had anything to do with it.
If I recall, Intel was (ineffectively) trying to utilize their monopoly on the processor/motherboard market to "encourage" the Rambus memory standard. They did this because they had a huge financial stake in Rambus. If they had succeeded, I'm sure we would have seen a flurry of lawsuits (ala the Microsoft/Netscape debacle) against Intel.
It isn't unlike the missteps of other companies trying (and failing) to use their market strength to push a proprietary standard:
A) It is something that doesn't fit "the norm" B) It can be used to set you apart from peers
Bear in mind that in 20 years, most of those bloggers are going to make up a significant (if not majority) chunk of the voting population.
We cannot assume that morality as it applies today will remain unchanged 20 years from now. I mean, there was a time it was indecent for a woman to show any leg above the knee; what won't be taboo in 20 years will probably shock you. And that is, at its base, part of what contributes to a "generation gap."
Its like trying to put a celebrity in jail, won't happen. There needs to be a big swing taken first by someone who packs a lot of punch to open a wound big enough for this type of lawsuit to have more teeth. Torrentspy does not have that kind of clout to land one.
All hail... King of the Mixed Metaphor! Hail! Hail!:)
In order for mass defections to occur, there has to be a viable alternative to defect to.
... and a compelling reason (ie, killer app) pushing them towards that alternative.
As most have been pointing out, what can't Joe Sixpack do with Win2000 or XP that can only be done with the "viable alternative?" It doesn't matter what the technical superiority of one vs. the other is; if there's no motivation, there'll be no move. 8P
It is more likely attributable to corporations setting up separate web/app servers. It is fairly common to have the front-end content served up by Apache and requests for dynamic content forwarded from the front-end webservers back through firewalls to application servers. Those backend appservers may still be anything... Websphere, IIS, WebLogic, etc.
The stats listed might simply be reflecting this trend towards a split/more secure setup.
Oh, I agree with you that being a good coder is more than just knowing Java.
Can the COBOL programmer with 18 years of experience spot OO design issues? Some can, but most in my experience don't have the mindset to make the paradigm shift. That is not to pick on COBOL guys... this is true of anyone that is grooved into a set of "rules/thinking" and is suddenly shifted way outside of a comfort zone. If I had always only worked in OO, I might find structured programming equally difficult to get into (COBOL, for example).
But, let's for argument sake say that someone with a background in tech is going to be bright/flexible enough throughout his entire career to pick up a new tech at the same rate as a newer person who has the same aptitude but not the experience.
I think a lot of businesses (right or wrong) look at the value produced by those two people and compare the price tag. They expect the person that costs twice as much to bring twice as much "value" in some way... whether that be quality of code, amount produced, time to project completion, etc.
I believe there's a threshhold at which more experience is simply "more." I don't believe, for example, that a guy coding a user authentication system for the 20th time makes will make it much better than the guy coding it for the 15th time.
There's a "sweet spot" within a career where one hits the right balance of pay for experience. But after that point, he simply becomes more expensive for less incremental value. It then means that salaries have to stop growing or, more likely, the more expensive person is replaced with someone with near equivalent abilities, but at a lower price tag.
And if any organization has people that "can't be replaced" because of system knowledge, then that also represents a problem within that organization.
Try to look beyond my use of Java specifically; I referenced it merely as a technology-du-jour. In 10 years, I'd be facing the same limitations when (insert new paradigm) is created.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not you and I'm damned sick of having to keep a long-ass list of usernames and passwords for sites I really don't care much about.
Then try an approach that I've found incredibly useful... use generated site passwords along with address extensions!
First, for passwords, you only need to remember *1* and have the following javascript (which runs client side) from this most excellent site:
GenPass.
Next, look into using address extensions (ala what are available via postfix) and define unique addresses per each site you visit (most that I visit have adopted the email address as the username).
For those not familiar with address extensions, you get a base user id within your email system that you're allowed to dynamically apply an extension to and it'll still get delivered to your base box. So, if you're "sam@abc.com" with an extension, the address "sam+slashdot@abs.com" will still deliver to your base mailbox.
Then it is trivial to figure out which site leaked your address for spam as well as start blocking a particular address (either by using procmail or a combination of postfix with an SMTP proxy such as smtpprox.
And while we need to tech savvy of the world setting up the mailserver side of things for our less tech-interested friends (I've done this for friends and family and host mail for them), it simplifies by effectively making it easier to manage multiple identities instead of depending on a bastion one.
but could you prove the case if you left a note in your "private" diary that you thought someone could be killed in a certain fashion...
I'll preface this by saying IANAL...
Prove? No. Provide circumstancial evidence? Yup.
As the grandparent stated, the real judgment behind this crime is one of intent. The nature of these links is so specific, targeted and intentional, that even if one didn't get accused of willful attacking, he'd be guilty of negligence.
Maybe it doesn't seem as clear-cut because we're "just talking about words."
But the web provides action to words, real things that can happen based on materials produced. So, if we put the question within a different context, maybe the "crime" part becomes more apparent:
How you you feel about a nuclear materials researcher leaving weapons grade plutonium in an unlocked box in his back yard while posting a notice in the local paper that such material exists unprotected for anyone to harvest? Would he be making the bomb himself and destroying people with it? No. Would it be tantamount to such an act? Yes.
I don't know how it would be prosecuted, but there's no doubt that it would be.
I think the reason there's even question of legality to these types of attacks isn't because the moral implications are ambiguous, but because the law hasn't been able to keep up with the latest in cybercrime.
I wish I could claim this as mine, but someone else came up with it first. 8/
To have security be complete, you need three things:
1) What you have
2) What you are
3) What you know
In a simple case, this could be accomplished by using:
1) A SecureID fob
2) Your finger print
3) A PIN number
Together, it makes trying to impersonate a user dang-near impossible.
Of course, insert your own favorite 1,2,3's. 8)
There's still raging debate about the effectiveness of SPF in the war on SPAM.
While I agree that it will help prevent forgery of your own domain, it doesn't really prevent the spammers from setting up SPF records for their domains with really loose rules, thus circumventing the "I know who sent this" part of SPF.
And, not to be too negative, SPF still doesn't have a good solution for secondary delivery (BackupMX, email forwarders, etc).
If you're still positive on the technology, you might want to consider adopting Sender ID. Despite being a Microsoft-pushed tech, it does a "little bit more" in verifying both the "envelope from" and the "friendly from" are from a permitted domain. And, for waht it is worth, Microsoft recently put it under the Open Specification Promise.
One thing we can certainly all agree on: we'd like to see a permanent solution for the spam menace. >8(
To read this TPS report you are required to insert blood sample into the slot provided and place your left eye on the scanner.
Pshaw! I hear the next version, to support a better customer experience, is going to combine the eye scan with the blood sampling in a single step! No more worries about being squeamish pricking your own finger... the machine will simply draw a blood sample from your eye automatically! It'll be a hit with those consumers who want a "simplified, Microsoft experience." 8)
I think if I was making $2/hr (I made that up, I don't know what the real number is but I am sure it is low compared to the US) while I knew I was being exploited for cheap labor and was offered a large sum of money in exchange for personal data knowing I would lose my job but not be in trouble legally that I would probably take the money and go hunting for a new job.
You're spot-on.
The reason why low-wage centers are always going to have more fraud (whether located domestically or off-shore) than higher-wage locations is simply a matter of motivation to steal: the greater the disparity between what I earn normally and what I could make by stealing is directly proportional to how tempting it is.
For example, let's assume that data could be sold for $40K US.
As an IT worker within the US, making $80K/year makes $40K tempting, but not really worthwhile if I like my job. But, if I am making $4K a year, I could effectively stop working for 10 years from the money made on that one theft... the temptation is much higher.
This doesn't even address the difficulty companies can have prosecuting internationally.
Last thing I'll say about this...
While I disagree with what you're saying, I can say that you've stated your point very well. 8)
Now, on to the next topic! 8)
First, I wanted to say that I'm glad you didn't read my comment as flame-bait; I really was hoping you'd come back and qualify your remarks. 8)
Now, with that said...
This of course has now been proven to be total hogwash- it is possible for one side of the trade imbalance to have such a lower standard of living as to have a comparative advantage in any given manufactured good that they know how to make- thus completely destroying the economy of the country with the higher standard of living.
I think you've confused comparative advantage with absolute advantage.
Sure, if one country has such a lower standard of living that they can produce items more cheaply (or in larger quantity) than a country with a higher standard of living, that country will have absolute advantage in terms of pricing.
And it is when reliance on this pricing is utilized that trade abuses more readily occur and you get an imbalance.
Maybe this was one of the mis-statements from your original post.
In an extremely simplified example (trade is never simple): (all numbers in US dollars) let's say the United States can produce wine for $15/bottle and can produce bread for $1/loaf and Argentina can produce wine for $10/bottle and bread for $.50/loaf. In both cases Argentina has the absolute advantage over the US. However, if Argentina were to focus its energy on the more expensive item and forego bread (produce wine exclusively) and the US foregoes producing wine and instead only produces bread, then each country can trade wine-for-bread.
We don't live in a world where comparative advantage exists in all trade (or even most trade), but it does exist and is the future of a world economy. Each country would produce those items which is best/easiest for them to produce and leave other countries to produce those items that they produce best/easiest. Then it is trade of one needed good for another. Trade imbalances work themselves out... if in the above example, Argentina needs 10-loaves of bread for every person and the US requires 1 bottle of wine for every person, then the trade will naturally "price" itself so there is no surplus nor shortage.
It isn't what we have today... but it is the direction of global trade.
The links you posted to are indeed indicative of the problems when there's a trade imbalance.
However, you've failed to link that to comparative advantage.
If you have a point to make, I don't feel you've fully explained the connection between trade imbalance and the idea that one nation can make/trade products better than other countries giving them tangible trading power.
No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).
That's not true.
A strong economy can be had with trade if the two nations have comparative advantage in trade.
In real life there's rare examples of it existing only between two countries (usually more are involved), but it is an essential concept given that 28% of the global GDP was from exports.
Restricting trade between countries (so there are no imports/exports) would only affect pricing/availability of goods within a country. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a country without a rich oil supply, then all sorts of products that are created from that supply would either be extremely expensive or non-existant (plastics, fuel, etc).
And even if you were to restrice trade to "free trade partners" (as you reference), that doesn't guarantee that the trade won't negatively affect an economy either. Free trade only refers to allowing products to flow without tariffs; it doesn't stop one country from dumping products into another, thus artificially lowering the price of those goods to drive the foreign industry into the ground.
This is EXACTLY what financial institutions should be doing!! It would work like gangbusters.
All it would prevent is direct linking to institution images.
But, nothing would stop the phisher from downloading said images and hosting them off "their own" website.
And now "their own website" could be as easy to obtain as an account on Amazon's S3 with a stolen credit card to host said images.
Besides, any phisher that looks at their own phishing site would realize the problem almost instantly if they direct-linked to the bank's images and the bank had a simple Apache configuration to not allow external linking. So, no... it wouldn't be all that effective.
Review of Multiple D&D books, save vs. suck:
Failed.
Why not record swerving? I would imagine that such devices would be recording all sorts of information including vertical acceleration (why not?).
The point isn't having absolute proof, but evidence that could support a story.
For example, if my car shows that I'm going from 0 to 10 miles per hour and the other car accelerated from 30 to 45 right before the accident, it would support my "the light turned green and I started to go when I got t-boned" story instead of his "*I* had the green light and he ran the red." Time sync isn't necessary; one just has to run the event clock backwards from each car's recording of the crash.
Even with that said, such evidence could lead one to the wrong conclusion (take the above example, but assume the t-boning car actually _did_ have the green and I rolled out in front of him on purpose)... that would be quite a temptation for insurance fraud con artists. 8/
No, you missed the GP post's point...
The blackbox in the idiot's car would indicate his reckless driving.
Parent is spot-on about latency when playing over the Internet.
I haven't RTFA, but I suspect that the claims of increased performance will be on a LAN-only basis.
And not to try and legitimize what looks to be a sucker-magnet product (they seriously need to add neon to it!), but there could be optimizations related to having a local network of these things talking to one another. Or, the optimizations could be related to a cross-over cable scenario (not fun for gaming, but could be enough to "qualify" the marketing claims).
As others have pointed out, one still needs to optimize all the pieces that actually make-up the network. What about the switch that all these local machines would plug into? Wouldn't that need to be optimized, as well?
Indeed, this smells like MonsterCable selling GOLD PLATED Optical Fibre... only suckers need apply. 8/
I'll admit, I'm being a bit smarmy, but whomever modded the parent "Informative" was being exceptionally generous.
The post reads like a poorly constructed excuse: "So, I was GOING to do my paper on Google, but, um, there wasn't any stuff I could find about it anywhere because it wasn't possible to find. So, I did my paper on AOL instead because there was a lot of info about it when I logged into the Internet through my mom's AOL account."
Even if it is embarassing, care to share what it was you were searching for on Clusty that came back with relevant results quickly that had Google stumped?
I certainly hope you're not going to say, "I searched for: clusty."
Sega was the first to use the microphone as a gameplay device
Egad... I'm gonna show my age here. I remember "Echelon" for the C-64... it came with a headset that activated the fire button with any "significant sound."
Still, your point is well stated in that being an innovator doesn't always lead one to rousing success and can, in fact, cause a company to falter.
There's a reason why "stick to the knitting" is more likely to keep a company afloat (even as it stagnates) is a common truism.
Spot on... we all know the proper way to ensure high-quality software design is with a heavy Waterfall methodology. ;)
Ooo... and throw in lots of beurocratic layers in your organization, too!
Lord knows software can't be high-quality without at least 10 separate management rubber-stamps on it.
Probably nothing. Just because a company's blunder gives a competitor a leg-up doesn't automatically imply the competitor had anything to do with it.
If I recall, Intel was (ineffectively) trying to utilize their monopoly on the processor/motherboard market to "encourage" the Rambus memory standard. They did this because they had a huge financial stake in Rambus. If they had succeeded, I'm sure we would have seen a flurry of lawsuits (ala the Microsoft/Netscape debacle) against Intel.
It isn't unlike the missteps of other companies trying (and failing) to use their market strength to push a proprietary standard:
Black-mail material only has power if:
A) It is something that doesn't fit "the norm"
B) It can be used to set you apart from peers
Bear in mind that in 20 years, most of those bloggers are going to make up a significant (if not majority) chunk of the voting population.
We cannot assume that morality as it applies today will remain unchanged 20 years from now. I mean, there was a time it was indecent for a woman to show any leg above the knee; what won't be taboo in 20 years will probably shock you. And that is, at its base, part of what contributes to a "generation gap."
Its like trying to put a celebrity in jail, won't happen. There needs to be a big swing taken first by someone who packs a lot of punch to open a wound big enough for this type of lawsuit to have more teeth. Torrentspy does not have that kind of clout to land one.
:)
All hail... King of the Mixed Metaphor! Hail! Hail!
and of course...
Tip 7: Profit!
In order for mass defections to occur, there has to be a viable alternative to defect to.
... and a compelling reason (ie, killer app) pushing them towards that alternative.
As most have been pointing out, what can't Joe Sixpack do with Win2000 or XP that can only be done with the "viable alternative?" It doesn't matter what the technical superiority of one vs. the other is; if there's no motivation, there'll be no move. 8P
It is more likely attributable to corporations setting up separate web/app servers. It is fairly common to have the front-end content served up by Apache and requests for dynamic content forwarded from the front-end webservers back through firewalls to application servers. Those backend appservers may still be anything... Websphere, IIS, WebLogic, etc.
The stats listed might simply be reflecting this trend towards a split/more secure setup.
Oh, I agree with you that being a good coder is more than just knowing Java.
Can the COBOL programmer with 18 years of experience spot OO design issues? Some can, but most in my experience don't have the mindset to make the paradigm shift. That is not to pick on COBOL guys... this is true of anyone that is grooved into a set of "rules/thinking" and is suddenly shifted way outside of a comfort zone. If I had always only worked in OO, I might find structured programming equally difficult to get into (COBOL, for example).
But, let's for argument sake say that someone with a background in tech is going to be bright/flexible enough throughout his entire career to pick up a new tech at the same rate as a newer person who has the same aptitude but not the experience.
I think a lot of businesses (right or wrong) look at the value produced by those two people and compare the price tag. They expect the person that costs twice as much to bring twice as much "value" in some way... whether that be quality of code, amount produced, time to project completion, etc.
I believe there's a threshhold at which more experience is simply "more." I don't believe, for example, that a guy coding a user authentication system for the 20th time makes will make it much better than the guy coding it for the 15th time.
There's a "sweet spot" within a career where one hits the right balance of pay for experience. But after that point, he simply becomes more expensive for less incremental value. It then means that salaries have to stop growing or, more likely, the more expensive person is replaced with someone with near equivalent abilities, but at a lower price tag.
And if any organization has people that "can't be replaced" because of system knowledge, then that also represents a problem within that organization.
Try to look beyond my use of Java specifically; I referenced it merely as a technology-du-jour. In 10 years, I'd be facing the same limitations when (insert new paradigm) is created.