I pay for my own broadband and cell phone, but my family also uses these things considerably outside of my work. If I never used those things for personal or side-job purposes, my employer would certainly be ponying up the costs. But because more than 50% of their use is personal, I pay for it myself.
Clearly, they're trying to imitate William Gibson's Panther Moderns, from Neuromancer. Their cloaking suits not only camoflaged them, but could be programmed to display other images as well -- patterns, textures, primary colors.
So, in about 50 years, we'll all have these suits, probably made by a joint effort between Microsoft and Banana Republic ("Micro Soft Banana"?) and we'll even have "suit saver" graphics we can choose -- like the screen savers of today, but far more public. Can't wait for the "flying windows" suit. Or plug your iPod (or wireless streamed music chip implant) into it and let people watch what you're listening to....
There is another ridiculous thing about Ken Brown's assertions against Torvald, which hasn't even been mentioned yet: most good, hard-core computer science majors in this country -- even undergraduate -- include upper-level courses for writing operating systems. I didn't major in CS (when I was undergrad more than a decade ago), but had many friends who did. In a single semester they wrote simple x86 operating systems, complete with file systems, command line interpreters, etc. Most of them used C, though the brave ones used assembly.
So if undergraduate students working on class projects, while still taking other classes and doing other classwork, can develop the basics of an operating system over a single semester (roughly three months)... why is it so bizarre to think that Torvalds could something better or more sophisticated in six months? This is a rhetorical question for Slashdot readers, but may be useful in combating FUD in the workplace (if Samizdat ever sees the light of day).
At the very least, IT people who took good CS courses in college should know this already.
This "bash Flash" thread is partially earned and partially geek FUD. In specific response to ".com B4.storm"s comments...
You can't bookmark a specific page in Flash unless the DEVELOPER has prepared a way for you to do so. Most don't bother. Ditto with frame-based sites, or sites that use extensive DHTML/JavaScript for UI adjustment. Heck, some form-based sites can't even be bookmarked.
Again, a drawback with the DEVELOPER, not the TECHNOLOGY. It's ridiculously easy to make a block of text selectable in a Flash movie.
Accessibility has been a sore spot for Flash, agreed. The most recent versions of Flash provide support for MSAA (Microsoft Access Accessibility) tags for browser readers -- think of it as ALT tags for Flash objects. Of course, it only works in IE on Windows, but it's a start.
Macromedia has published the specifications for SWF. This O'Reilly's article that points out Flash is closed but SWF is open. That's why Adobe made LiveMotion (now discontinued because it couldn't compete with Flash), or Electric Rain can make Swift3D... the SWF format is available. (I see you conveniently ignored GIF, even though it is far more widely used than PNG... but, alas, it is not an open standard.) Are PostScript and PDF bad because they are not open source? Omigod, what happens if Adobe goes out of business tomorrow? Uh... if you are seriously worried about things like that, you have a very weak grasp of the economy; companies with highly succesful products used by millions of people rarely "go under" without years of forewarning, and even then they are generally bought by others so the successful products can march on. (Flash was originally called FutureSplash, before being bought by Macromedia... Freehand was published by Aldus before Adobe bought the company for PageMaker and sold Freehand to Macromedia... hmmm...) As for the threat of royalties, neither Macromedia or Adobe are that stupid, and you know it.
Finally, of course Flash is not a replacement for HTML, XML and CSS. But those things are not replacements for Flash. None of the open standards you mentioned are even remotely capable of doing the things SWF does. You are not making a useful, level comparison. Next you'll say that DVDs are not as good as CDs because they can't be used to play music in your home stereo.
governments that standardise on open-source software are hurting their local software vendors as they can't make the money needed to invest in their own software products.
I suppose his point was: if the Chinese government standardizes on Linux and OpenOffice, then word processor software developers in Beijing will suffer. Huh? How is this different from standardizing on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office? If anything, OSS is better: the open source market is still relatively nascent, so there is greater opportunity for products to compete with each other on more level ground.
And developers will never be short on work as long as the government needs work done. Even today you can see a software industry that caters specifically to government needs. This will only increase with time.
Microsoft is just afraid that some day it will have to advertise that Windows integrates seamlessly into Linux environments.
The U.S. government keeps a great deal of secrets. From various lines of work in the past, I can assure you that you don't want to know everything our government knows and does. I don't even think our government knows everything it does. It's kind of like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, except there are about five million hands involved.
I have no idea if the government has aliens, or thinks they have aliens, or are simply dressing up as aliens at expensive parties, but to say that the government can't "keep a single secret longer than about 15 minutes" shows a remarkable misunderstanding of American intelligence agencies and the related industrial-military complex.
Strip all attachments?!? You're kidding, right? In a university or business setting, that is NOT a viable option for most people. They're still figuring out how to right-click under Windows and make things print correctly to the printer down the hall; forget teaching all of them how about FTP, SMB, NFS or some other file serving method.
And you've got to be kidding about blacklists being better than filters... talk about false positives, sheesh! Maybe the best blacklists are better than the worst filters, but that doesn't say much. Simple control lists (black or white) are not a long-term viable solution; if they were, none of us would ever get spam, would we? You really need something that makes your email trustworthy, like Zoemail.
In the drug industry and the software development industry (the two industries where people are called "users"), patents are the only reason we have the medicines and the software that are available today. If you can't protect your idea, then you can't make money off of it -- not gobs and gobs anyway. There are investors and stockholders and bottom lines all involved in the R&D process now, who must be answered to.
That's not to say that the entire patent system is good. The problem is not patents, but how the law protects and upholds them in the digital age. People with really good, creative ideas ought to be rewarded for them somehow. I cannot recall the exact quote, but to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, patents add the fuel of profitability to the fires of genius.
The idea that AT&T might patent anti-anti-spam technology in order to sue spammers is not far from how the notorious gangster Al Capone was finally jailed: despite gigantic illegal smuggling operations and various murder charges, they eventually got him for tax evasion.
Another reason AT&T might be interested in researching this kind of stuff: if you find a sure way to break a given anti-spam technology, then it sets up a perfect test for any other future anti-spam technology. In other words, it becomes the litmus test of future anti-spam tech from AT&T. "Does it pass this?"
If you're a student (or teacher), you ought to be buying your software academically anyway. Photoshop 7 is around $270 academically -- still not pocket change, but much better than $900. (Macromedia offers even more of an academic discount; you can get their whole Studio MX suite for $190, versus $900.)
In the digital video industry (and it's growing pretty fast) LOTS of people do movie editing on their laptops, myself included. Extra RAM really helps with Final Cut Pro (best Mac movie app) or Adobe Premiere (best PC movie app). Alternatively, if you are a graphic designer who works with high-resolution photographs for print, you'll find Photoshop begging for more than 512mb of memory.
In short, any large-scale imaging software (video or otherwise) will greedily eat whatever memory you have. 1gb? 2gb? Yum yum.
...you get 4 different resturaunts that you can choose which food element is most important to you, and go to and get passable choises for the rest of the items consumers understand choice, and they aren't afraid of it. They simply need to be educated about the choices out there.
Unfortunately that cannot work. People do not really want choice (except perhaps in California elections...?). Maybe they have 4 restaurants to choose from but in reality they will go to the same one over and over. The average person is a creature of habit, and once in that comfort zone, they will not leave.
This is particularly true in software. You and I are perfectly comfortable exploring new programs, UIs, operating systems, etc. We'll even intentionally do things that would be considered risky. It's a form of research for us, research into efficiency and enjoyment of our time. This is by far a minority behavior: most people can not or will not change for this. To them, the computer is a machine (interface and OS and all else be damned) and machines do not change.
While we're at it, let's complain about the keyboard layout that computers come with. There are other choices besides the standard QWERTY (some of which may be much more efficient), so how many of us use them? Oh wait, maybe it's too hard to change...
And retraining can be done for free - give a hungry man a can of food and he'll find a way to open it.
I don't totally agree with that. As someone who has been training people on various software products (MS, free, and everything in between) for 20 years, believe me when I say that "free" retraining is by far the most expensive option for a business, long-term.
But otherwise you're right-on.
It's interesting that the push is for "free" software. Does this mean no Brazilian software company will ever gain the same kind of market dominance in Brazil that MS and others have in the U.S.? I see how this greatly benefits IT departments, but it sounds like an early death knell for any Brazilian software companies, effectively saying, "Don't bother trying to make money." Even shareware would be affected, no? (Caveat: I don't know anything about the Brazilian software industry, so maybe this is a moot point.)
Hey, people make web browsers for Atari ST's, and web servers built in PostScript, so why not run OS X on a beige box?
Okay, an admission: I have OS X 10.2.6 running on a beige box. It was formerly a 266mhz G3 but I upgraded it to a 366mhz G3 for about $40 (actually it was the 1mb cache I wanted, cuz the 266 only had a 512k cache). Through other cheap acquisitions I boosted the RAM to 512mb and added a 40gb ATA/100 drive (yes it required an ATA card). But it's just a pokey little home server that we use for email, network backups, sharing a printer, etc. I do real work on a G4. It's just not worth running Photoshop and Freehand and Microsoft Awfuss on OS X on such a slow computer.
So I'd agree with the general consensus: just buy an eMac. Get something used if you have to (Small Dog and PowerMax usually have good deals). But if you must upgrade, at least do it cheap: check out OtherWorld Computing and MacSolutions for good deals on upgrade parts of all types.
Alright, I agree it is a zillion-to-one long shot, but for the sake of argument...
First, the spammer could easily set up a system with disposable addresses that last long enough to handle C/R. Two, they could stay anonymous with disposable addresses and appropriate routing/masking. Three, spammers don't give a shit about ISP terms of service. Four, ten responses for a penny might be ludicrous, but there might be other economies that would work. *shrug* I don't know a lot about people in low-wage countries but even a child can be trained to recognize 3 cats instead of 2 in a picture.
--
"It's not the fact that we keep shooting ourselves in the foot that bothers me. It's that we reload so damn quickly." - Anon.
Someone suggested that if spammers moved to other countries (where many already are) then the U.S. would somehow "squeeze" those countries to extradite those spammers. That's ludicrous. The U.S. has far greater things to worry about in terms of international politics. If Americans are going to try to influence other countries, let it be for human rights, disarmament, peace, food, medical care, etc. -- not something that is merely an inconvenience associated with a technological advantage.
Seperately: I don't have the reference right now, but I recently read an article where the author suggested that spammers of the future might get around challenge-response by farming out response work to humans in low-wage countries. A penny for ten responses! The spammer would just raise their rates a little to sellers, maybe call it an extra service....
I said this elsewhere, but... sure it's corporate hypocrisy. But truthfully it indicates dissension in the ranks at SCO, a deep rift between the executives and the development people. Obviously their development team recognizes the value of GPL'd software such as Samba, or they wouldn't incorporate/sell/distribute it. More obviously, their executives and legal mosquitoes aren't communicating with the development team, or SCO never would have used GPL'd software. This is NOT just a sign of corporate stupidity. It is the last stage of economic suicide.
From the outside, and from a legal standpoint, yes this looks like corporate hypocrisy. But really it is dissension in the ranks at SCO, a serious disconnection between the executives and the technical/development people. Clearly their development team recognizes the *value* of GPL'd software such as Samba, or they wouldn't include it. But just as clearly, their executives and legal mosquitoes are not in communication with the development team, or they never would have incorporating GPL'd software.
This is not just a sign of corporate stupidity. It is the last stage of economic suicide.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay for my own broadband and cell phone, but my family also uses these things considerably outside of my work. If I never used those things for personal or side-job purposes, my employer would certainly be ponying up the costs. But because more than 50% of their use is personal, I pay for it myself.
Clearly, they're trying to imitate William Gibson's Panther Moderns, from Neuromancer. Their cloaking suits not only camoflaged them, but could be programmed to display other images as well -- patterns, textures, primary colors.
So, in about 50 years, we'll all have these suits, probably made by a joint effort between Microsoft and Banana Republic ("Micro Soft Banana"?) and we'll even have "suit saver" graphics we can choose -- like the screen savers of today, but far more public. Can't wait for the "flying windows" suit. Or plug your iPod (or wireless streamed music chip implant) into it and let people watch what you're listening to....
There is another ridiculous thing about Ken Brown's assertions against Torvald, which hasn't even been mentioned yet: most good, hard-core computer science majors in this country -- even undergraduate -- include upper-level courses for writing operating systems. I didn't major in CS (when I was undergrad more than a decade ago), but had many friends who did. In a single semester they wrote simple x86 operating systems, complete with file systems, command line interpreters, etc. Most of them used C, though the brave ones used assembly.
So if undergraduate students working on class projects, while still taking other classes and doing other classwork, can develop the basics of an operating system over a single semester (roughly three months)... why is it so bizarre to think that Torvalds could something better or more sophisticated in six months? This is a rhetorical question for Slashdot readers, but may be useful in combating FUD in the workplace (if Samizdat ever sees the light of day).
At the very least, IT people who took good CS courses in college should know this already.
This "bash Flash" thread is partially earned and partially geek FUD. In specific response to ".com B4 .storm"s comments...
Finally, of course Flash is not a replacement for HTML, XML and CSS. But those things are not replacements for Flash. None of the open standards you mentioned are even remotely capable of doing the things SWF does. You are not making a useful, level comparison. Next you'll say that DVDs are not as good as CDs because they can't be used to play music in your home stereo.
governments that standardise on open-source software are hurting their local software vendors as they can't make the money needed to invest in their own software products.
I suppose his point was: if the Chinese government standardizes on Linux and OpenOffice, then word processor software developers in Beijing will suffer. Huh? How is this different from standardizing on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office? If anything, OSS is better: the open source market is still relatively nascent, so there is greater opportunity for products to compete with each other on more level ground.
And developers will never be short on work as long as the government needs work done. Even today you can see a software industry that caters specifically to government needs. This will only increase with time.
Microsoft is just afraid that some day it will have to advertise that Windows integrates seamlessly into Linux environments.
The U.S. government keeps a great deal of secrets. From various lines of work in the past, I can assure you that you don't want to know everything our government knows and does. I don't even think our government knows everything it does. It's kind of like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, except there are about five million hands involved.
I have no idea if the government has aliens, or thinks they have aliens, or are simply dressing up as aliens at expensive parties, but to say that the government can't "keep a single secret longer than about 15 minutes" shows a remarkable misunderstanding of American intelligence agencies and the related industrial-military complex.
Strip all attachments?!? You're kidding, right? In a university or business setting, that is NOT a viable option for most people. They're still figuring out how to right-click under Windows and make things print correctly to the printer down the hall; forget teaching all of them how about FTP, SMB, NFS or some other file serving method.
And you've got to be kidding about blacklists being better than filters... talk about false positives, sheesh! Maybe the best blacklists are better than the worst filters, but that doesn't say much. Simple control lists (black or white) are not a long-term viable solution; if they were, none of us would ever get spam, would we? You really need something that makes your email trustworthy, like Zoemail.
Every time I see "Usenix", I think it says "Unisex"... that can't be good.
*sigh*
In the drug industry and the software development industry (the two industries where people are called "users"), patents are the only reason we have the medicines and the software that are available today. If you can't protect your idea, then you can't make money off of it -- not gobs and gobs anyway. There are investors and stockholders and bottom lines all involved in the R&D process now, who must be answered to.
That's not to say that the entire patent system is good. The problem is not patents, but how the law protects and upholds them in the digital age. People with really good, creative ideas ought to be rewarded for them somehow. I cannot recall the exact quote, but to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, patents add the fuel of profitability to the fires of genius.
The idea that AT&T might patent anti-anti-spam technology in order to sue spammers is not far from how the notorious gangster Al Capone was finally jailed: despite gigantic illegal smuggling operations and various murder charges, they eventually got him for tax evasion.
Another reason AT&T might be interested in researching this kind of stuff: if you find a sure way to break a given anti-spam technology, then it sets up a perfect test for any other future anti-spam technology. In other words, it becomes the litmus test of future anti-spam tech from AT&T. "Does it pass this?"
If you're a student (or teacher), you ought to be buying your software academically anyway. Photoshop 7 is around $270 academically -- still not pocket change, but much better than $900. (Macromedia offers even more of an academic discount; you can get their whole Studio MX suite for $190, versus $900.)
In the digital video industry (and it's growing pretty fast) LOTS of people do movie editing on their laptops, myself included. Extra RAM really helps with Final Cut Pro (best Mac movie app) or Adobe Premiere (best PC movie app). Alternatively, if you are a graphic designer who works with high-resolution photographs for print, you'll find Photoshop begging for more than 512mb of memory.
In short, any large-scale imaging software (video or otherwise) will greedily eat whatever memory you have. 1gb? 2gb? Yum yum.
Unfortunately that cannot work. People do not really want choice (except perhaps in California elections...?). Maybe they have 4 restaurants to choose from but in reality they will go to the same one over and over. The average person is a creature of habit, and once in that comfort zone, they will not leave.
This is particularly true in software. You and I are perfectly comfortable exploring new programs, UIs, operating systems, etc. We'll even intentionally do things that would be considered risky. It's a form of research for us, research into efficiency and enjoyment of our time. This is by far a minority behavior: most people can not or will not change for this. To them, the computer is a machine (interface and OS and all else be damned) and machines do not change.
While we're at it, let's complain about the keyboard layout that computers come with. There are other choices besides the standard QWERTY (some of which may be much more efficient), so how many of us use them? Oh wait, maybe it's too hard to change...
I don't totally agree with that. As someone who has been training people on various software products (MS, free, and everything in between) for 20 years, believe me when I say that "free" retraining is by far the most expensive option for a business, long-term.
But otherwise you're right-on.
It's interesting that the push is for "free" software. Does this mean no Brazilian software company will ever gain the same kind of market dominance in Brazil that MS and others have in the U.S.? I see how this greatly benefits IT departments, but it sounds like an early death knell for any Brazilian software companies, effectively saying, "Don't bother trying to make money." Even shareware would be affected, no? (Caveat: I don't know anything about the Brazilian software industry, so maybe this is a moot point.)
Okay, an admission: I have OS X 10.2.6 running on a beige box. It was formerly a 266mhz G3 but I upgraded it to a 366mhz G3 for about $40 (actually it was the 1mb cache I wanted, cuz the 266 only had a 512k cache). Through other cheap acquisitions I boosted the RAM to 512mb and added a 40gb ATA/100 drive (yes it required an ATA card). But it's just a pokey little home server that we use for email, network backups, sharing a printer, etc. I do real work on a G4. It's just not worth running Photoshop and Freehand and Microsoft Awfuss on OS X on such a slow computer.
So I'd agree with the general consensus: just buy an eMac. Get something used if you have to (Small Dog and PowerMax usually have good deals). But if you must upgrade, at least do it cheap: check out OtherWorld Computing and MacSolutions for good deals on upgrade parts of all types.
Alright, I agree it is a zillion-to-one long shot, but for the sake of argument... First, the spammer could easily set up a system with disposable addresses that last long enough to handle C/R. Two, they could stay anonymous with disposable addresses and appropriate routing/masking. Three, spammers don't give a shit about ISP terms of service. Four, ten responses for a penny might be ludicrous, but there might be other economies that would work. *shrug* I don't know a lot about people in low-wage countries but even a child can be trained to recognize 3 cats instead of 2 in a picture. -- "It's not the fact that we keep shooting ourselves in the foot that bothers me. It's that we reload so damn quickly." - Anon.
Someone suggested that if spammers moved to other countries (where many already are) then the U.S. would somehow "squeeze" those countries to extradite those spammers. That's ludicrous. The U.S. has far greater things to worry about in terms of international politics. If Americans are going to try to influence other countries, let it be for human rights, disarmament, peace, food, medical care, etc. -- not something that is merely an inconvenience associated with a technological advantage.
Seperately: I don't have the reference right now, but I recently read an article where the author suggested that spammers of the future might get around challenge-response by farming out response work to humans in low-wage countries. A penny for ten responses! The spammer would just raise their rates a little to sellers, maybe call it an extra service....
I said this elsewhere, but... sure it's corporate hypocrisy. But truthfully it indicates dissension in the ranks at SCO, a deep rift between the executives and the development people. Obviously their development team recognizes the value of GPL'd software such as Samba, or they wouldn't incorporate/sell/distribute it. More obviously, their executives and legal mosquitoes aren't communicating with the development team, or SCO never would have used GPL'd software. This is NOT just a sign of corporate stupidity. It is the last stage of economic suicide.
From the outside, and from a legal standpoint, yes this looks like corporate hypocrisy. But really it is dissension in the ranks at SCO, a serious disconnection between the executives and the technical/development people. Clearly their development team recognizes the *value* of GPL'd software such as Samba, or they wouldn't include it. But just as clearly, their executives and legal mosquitoes are not in communication with the development team, or they never would have incorporating GPL'd software. This is not just a sign of corporate stupidity. It is the last stage of economic suicide.