That perhaps the vulnerabilities are limited to Panther...
Just wild-ass speculation of course, I have no reason to believe this is the case...
However, my father, a long time Mac user has commented on this before. Now, being an educator, it was allways trivial for him to keep current, mostly the Faculty IT group would keep all the Macs current.
TBMK, there isn't any way to force Apple to offer the patch to preceding versions, and the license probably states as much. That said, it really isn't great publicity.
Kind of cries out to update the old aphorism:
Any press is good press, unless it limps you in with M$...
My dad wins this one, hands down...
He would have had to take the mainframe and the punch card machine... Since he was a grad student at Kent State at the time, instead of snow it would have been five miles back and forth dodging National Guardsmen...
I've seen a few comments to this effect.
No, there is no guarantee that the government of Vietnam will enforce the GPL.
But, we don't even know if the US Government will enforce it either...
However, the fact that this step is being taken to reduce software piracy is a positive indicator. Why would they reduce one exposure just to replace it with another.
On the other hand, the GPL is a pretty subversive document to be circulating among your intelligentsia for a totalitarian regime...
Just have to wait and see...
Napoleon on his way out campaigning wished to have trees on the side of his road to shade his soldiers while they marched. One of his aides pointed out that it would take at least 20 years before the trees would be big enough to even begin to satisfy that need. Napoleon turned to this officer and said, "Precisely why we should start immediately!"
Ultimately we'll have to do it anyways, if we wait until the need is manifest, it is probably too late.
But, I'll give you, we have to be cleaner about the process, if only to buy more time.
Also, how much of the basic science and engineering that we learned from sending men into space would we not have learned had that decision been otherwise?
It seems to me that the decision to send manned flights had to have reverberations through the entire program. Surviving re-entry for a manned flight is a completely different ball of wax than an unmanned flight where the instrument package can be re-engineered for higher heat and gravitic tolerances than the human body, that's a whole smeg-load of engineering know-how right there.
1) No civilization has succeeded or advanced by curtailing their use of resources. Ours is no different, we are increasing, practically daily, our consumption of every non-renawable resource on the planet. It's pretty much a binary solution set, we either use those resources while they are still available to access other sources of those resources, or we fade away. Most of them are right in our own solar system, we just got to go get them.
2) The planet's population continues to grow, the sure fired cure to this is to materially increase prosperity for large sections of the planet. That will require resources, see 1 above.
3) Polution and ecological damage result directly from both of the above. Both will be attenuated if we derive most of our resources off-planet, which will require colonization efforts, which should have a small, but positive effect on population. One which can be expected to rise over time.
4) We still retain the means to turn the planet into a radioactive wasteland, we are also starting to play in technologies which have the potential to make life on this planet problematic. The universe istself could have a long period comet bearing down on us right now. The planet has been hit before and can be hit again. The best defense against this is to proliferate.
There most certainly are some massive obstacles to overcome, but we won't overcome them by curtailing our space program, including the manned portion.
Radio, Sat Radio, iTunes, Napster2 Et. Al. are enforceable means for the recording industry to attain distribution.
Portable media are demonstrably unenforceable anymore. Or more correctly, the ease with which abuses can happen has risen sufficiently to make enforceability questionable.
Given RIAA isn't having a whole lot of success with it's current measures, and if they feel they are losing that much revenue, I would tend to think the smart business move is away from portable media to more enforceable paradigms.
If you think they are profiteering mercenaries now, just wait, if they have to make that kind of shift, it's gonna cost. Who do you think is going to end up footing the bill?
Hey folks, they can use technology to meet their goals too...
1) Buy CD at store, of course you may not want the whole CD in which case you will seriously consider:
2) Buy card which will let you mix and match what you want to download.
3) Buy beer and download music for free, while you're at it, drink a toast to the music you are killing.
IMHO, people who are downloading music for free are not doing so to protest the profiteering of music companies. No, they are doing it to get something for nothing. Well folks, it isn't for free. So far it has cost you the whole DRM bullshit, and RIAA and it's lawsuits.
And, it's only going to get more effective from here. That whole free music thing is driven by CDs folks. Who makes the CDs? Why should they continue to do so in the face of objective reality? What is to stop them from changing their distribution vector as an industry?
If however, you legitimately do have moral or ethical objections to the profiteering behaviour of the recording industry, then you have options which make far more sense.
There are a few sites out there that allow artists to sell their music on-line, one of them even owned by one of the founders of RedHat. Doesn't this make more sense? You are supporting the artists whose music brings you pleasure, helping to ensure that they can do so into the future. As well you aren't giving your money to the record companies. But you are sending a clear message to those companies. The message is, I can support a service which sends most (I think 80%) of the revenues to the artists, but I will not support your profiteering.
The most powerful vote you have is with your dollars. Downloading music for free which you should be paying for is not voting, it does not send a clear message. Worse still you are exacerbating the problem.
Unfortunately the phenomenon is much more pervasive than that.
If you get too fat you die, or maybe you go to your local gym. You retain the services of a trainer who applies the 'technology' of modern physiology and kinsieology to obviate your problem. So, the problem created by improvements in the technology of agronomy are 'solved' by other technological advances...
The automobile is a self-contained example. The automobile itself increased the ability to travel, and the attendant risk of injury or death. However, airbags, seat-belts, steel door beams, unibody construction, have mitigated the attendant risk.
Simplisitcally this would tend to indicate that the problems created by technology can be repaired by technology.
In reality, the largest problems created by advances have no quick technological fix. This is because by and large the most pervasive effects of such change are on the fabric of society.
...with a GPLed program, it is not the people, it is the source code, that is in control; and with a company it is not the people, it is the corporate culture, that is in control.
Nope, in each case, it is the market that is in control. How many promising OpSrc projects have languished and died from apathy? How many promising new companies have gone the same way? Why is this the case? Because regardless of the merit of a given company/project, if there is no demand for the resulting product, this a natural result.
Incidentally, OpSrc is almost a purely capitalist phenom. OpSrc projects, as noted, are as affected by all the market factors that their Closed cousins are affected by. It really is easy to see if you can divorce the concept of money from the concept of profit.
This, more than anything else is the central thing that is being misunderstood. I forget where I read it, but capital of the soul is still capital.
Once you divorce monies from profits, the fact that both are essentially corollaries of each other becomes self-evident. OpSrc projects which better meet the demands of a given application environment will distribute more units. This profit results in that project being able to garner more developers and contributors. These folk too are driven by profit, in their case, the profit is the use of their contribution and the resulting ego massage.
The central difference between the two are not strictly market factors, but rather how market factors are interpreted and acted upon.
Consider versioning. In OpSrc, by and large new versions are incremental improvements on the previous version. File and binary formats tend to be relatively static. When they do change it is (usually) for the best of reasons. Backwards compatability tends not to be an issue because of this, even when backwards compatability is sacrificed, it is sacrificed on the altar of forward useability. The fluff which inevitably creeps into software is driven by the only real determining market factor, demand.
In ClSrc, new versions of programs are rarely incremental changes, most often they are radical changes compared to their OpSrc cousins. File and binary formats can change arbitrarily, often for no appreciable gain in performance or reliability. Backwards compatability is a requirement, even when such backwards compatability may be at the expense of forward useability. Fluff is often designed by committee, often on the basis of psuedo-scientific evidence which has at best a tenuous grip on the fluff which the market will actually demand.
Other fundamental differences exist, when you look through them the same underlying current repeats itself over and over. OpSrc is better a meeting what the market demands. ClSrc tends to aim for what the market can bear.
Ultimately, the OpSrc model is probably 'more capitalist' than the ClSrc model. However, just as the world has never seen true communism, it has never seen true capitalism either. The best products don't allways succeed in the real world, but in true capitalism, they _MUST_. But, more often than not, the emphasis has gone from responding to the demands of the market, to trying (with varying degrees of success) to shape or direct the demands of the market.
First of all, in order to prevent people from finding changes to past statements means ensuring that no previous copies of a given document can be found anywhere. Not exactly a high probability anymore, KWIM?
Second, there exists the potential for legitimate reasons behind the contents of the robots.txt file. (Like limiting the number of documents web-bots look through for performance reasons... or getting/.ed in order to provide impetus to legislation to shut down/. just to prevent laughable accusations of cover-ups.)
Third, no law exists TIAO which stipulates that the white house can't control what content is searchable by web-bots.
Fourth, this really doesn't inspire tinfoil haberdashery. Now, if the files had been removed, and were denied by the White House as having ever existed, well then I might start shopping for an aluminum fedora, except for...
Fifth, there is no guarantee regarding the truth of any document on any webserver. Just 'cause it comes through your browser doesn't mean it's true.
and
Sixth, even if the documents are being blocked from bots for some nefarious purpose, whoever crafted that plan has set a new low even for the toadying political appointees. Even making the observation lacks a certain fundamental understanding of the checks and balances provided by the instituion of a Free Press... Which, incidentally is protected by the constitution, try and find a similar guarantee in that hallowed document for web content...
The spreadsheet thing is a hold-over from when I used to do a lot of cleaning of snail mail data. I'd routinely get Excel spreadsheets from clients which would contain 20,000+ addresses and phone numbers.
I know why this would happen, the people knew how to use Excel, but didn't know how to use Access. But because they didn't choose the right tool for the job, they would end up contracting my employer to do data clean-up and set-up for specialized purposes. In effect, they were paying my employer to have me dump the data, and put it int the right tool and generate the required output. The job required reasonably complicated filtering, sorting, and output formatting, the job did not require any calculations or formulae. All of which militated using a database in lieu of a spreadsheet.
In many cases, clients ended up paying us more to do data cleanup than their own copy of Access and getting two or three of their own people to courses would have cost them.
Considering most of them probably bought full-up Office suites, not using the right tool for the job makes even less sense. On the other side of the web, paying for UO and then spending large quantities of time chatting made no sense. While you could role-play over ICQ or similar, UO was created for that purpose, and was better suited for that job. The converse is true for ICQ, it was a far far better vehicle for chatting than UO.
In point of fact, I know folks who did both, chat for long periods of time on UO, and role play over IRC. While role playing over IRC might make sense if your favorite milieu or rules system didn't mesh with the MMORPG's available, I really don't see any advatange to using MMORPG clients as high-overhead chat-clients.
After I stopped playing UO, I played some of the private servers out there, and many specifically addressed this behaviour, since it could affect game-play for other folk on the server.
After thinking about it for awhile, I'm not sure that all of the recomendations necessarily make sense.
Branding does make a superficial sort of sense, but branding alone isn't going to make the fence sitters pick a side. By and large most users are fence sitters, they use IE 'cause they bought an M$ OS, and that's what it had. They didn't have to go and download a new browser.
The one I hold no truck with is the meshing with the OS. Several reasons, first is, where do you draw the line? Second, should a browser be poking that much into OS internals for the sake of a few icons? Third, this is a web browser, not a filesystem browser, if you see your OS icon, it's local, if you see your browser icon, it's remote. Fourth, the move to seperate applications vs. an appsuite means lighter, less bloated applications, why bloat them with a bunch of OS-specific code that isn't required for core-functionality? Fifth, the themeability of the chrome makes this redundant.
If this really is a need, write a seperate application to handle it for those platforms. That is the better way to handle it. Let the browser browse, and the themer theme.
The one good suggestion in that section was to move the menu items to where the OS user expects them, that is a legitimate usability concern.
However, identifying that one of the best features of the dev effort has been the willingness of the dev team to say no, was a very good inclusion. Hopefully the developers will exercise it once again on the issue of meshing with the OS.
Okay, now imagine a Bit Torrent-like service whose major difference is the bit rate comes from a large number of dedicated servers and mirrors connected to the 'net by fat pipes instead of pis-ant workstation with 128K upstream? But it doesn't end-run the legal issues. Regardless of how good P2P gets over time, you can't change the tainted reason for it's popularity and growth.
Rarely in my experience is the fastest download from a peer, usually the fastest download is froma server dedicated to that activity, with the bandwidth to prove it.
IMHO, P2P is a reaction to the napster case, not the best methodology. The best methodology is those big bandwidth servers, with mirrors. Let's face it, I've never topped out my downstream rate in a peer to peer situation. I routinely do hit my maximum downstream rate from dedicated servers.
The problem is the content. Because the content is unlawful, the best paradigm is not available for accessing the files. Really how many peers out there can provide full T-1 downstream to you? Usually their upstream is a fraction of your downstream. At the end of the day, no matter how much route optimization, your peer's upstream rate is the determining factor.
I never indicated that people wouldn't use the best available service. Bittorrent for you probably is. What I do maintain is that P2P cannot be the best possible implementation of the service. There is much evidence to support this conclusion. Therefore performance is not the driving factor in common P2P usage, rather it's legal-issue end-running properties.
Realistically this is the end use of P2P implementations on the net. P2P IP-based telephony may be coming, in fact P2P is in some ways the ideal modality for this concept. But again, it won't be because the quality of the calls made of P2PVoIP networks will be more reliable or better or faster, it will be cheaper. Incidentally all that will be occurring is end-running the established systems and the attendant fees for using those systems. What do you expect the phone companies to do?
I'm speaking from a purely nuts and bolts point of view. In my private life I'm a musician. So I have my own issues with RIAA. But the solution to those issues is not for me to encourage people to end-run the problem rather than exerting pressure to really solve the problem. Further, the general public could make their position better understood by boycotting the music that RIAA has it's paws in. Trust me, there are millions of musicians who want you to listen to them, free of the burden of RIAA, and it's member bodies. So, by end-running copyright law you are simply adding weight to the RIAA momentum. By boycotting, you make the same statement, in much more evident terms, without infringing copyright law, and thereby giving RIAA a valid vent for their claims.
In the end, the people who buy the music suffer from increased costs, and the people who create it suffer from reduced premiums on those same sales. So who are you really punishing?
Sure, the internet should be a bastion of freedoms, but people should be exercising their freedoms as adults, not as ego-centric toddlers. You have the freedom to obtain your music on-line, you also have the freedom to use iTunes, or to give your patronage directly to the artists themselves, rather than through RIAA member organizations. If you really truly believe that RIAA is evil, that is how you fight back, not by giving them a legitimate complaint by skirting the law.
If we hypothesize that SCO can win the contract dispute with IBM, but is not able to succesfully challenge the GPL, wouldn't selling licenses to Linux obligate them to expose the code which they are licensing under the GPL?
In fact, might this not be the root of the hasty back-pedalling on their part over the whole licensing thing? Really until the dust settles from all the legal cases, at the end of today, and every day until that happens, the GPL is the binding license document for that code.
I'm interested to find out if anyone has actually purchased a license. And if the folks over at FSF know about it...
I doubt SCO really wants to fight the GPL in court. I don't see anyway for them to prevail, but again IADNAL. The act of issuing licenses would (it seems to me) force them to become embroiled in a case, launched by the guys in the white hats, which could ultimately give the GPL it's baptism of fire.
Just speculation, but if anyone is a lawyer, maybe they can comment on the possibility?
Yeah, you may be right, but I'm not sure this is a desirable thing anymore.
First, P2P was a workaround to what killed Napster, no? Well, give em enough incentive and they'll co-ordinate their activities on that front as well.
Second, I have serious questions about the security of P2P networks, and I'm not overly crazy about the potential for abuse by these vendors.
Third, is it just me, or isn't P2P like the absolute mother of all malware distribution vectors? TBMK no-one has done it yet, but it's awfully tempting don't you think?
Fourth, P2P used to be pretty prevalent in business networking, not so anymore. There are many good reasons for this, almost all of which are applicable to P2P networking on the web.
Really the only reason for P2P networks like this is because of the copyright violations. Seriously, would you use Kazaa to download Music from other Kazaa users in the face of dedicated servers with sufficient mirrors, and no legal liability attendant? Probably not, most of us would go the dedicated server, or one of it's mirrors. The main reason for P2P networks like Kazaa Et. Al. is the fact the server centric deployment to provide the same service was vulnerable to legal action. Were the copyright issues to go away tomorrow, then the P2P versions of the service would follow in a very short time.
Slashdot Mirror
That perhaps the vulnerabilities are limited to Panther...
Just wild-ass speculation of course, I have no reason to believe this is the case...
However, my father, a long time Mac user has commented on this before. Now, being an educator, it was allways trivial for him to keep current, mostly the Faculty IT group would keep all the Macs current.
TBMK, there isn't any way to force Apple to offer the patch to preceding versions, and the license probably states as much. That said, it really isn't great publicity.
Kind of cries out to update the old aphorism:
Any press is good press, unless it limps you in with M$...
My dad wins this one, hands down... He would have had to take the mainframe and the punch card machine... Since he was a grad student at Kent State at the time, instead of snow it would have been five miles back and forth dodging National Guardsmen...
I've seen a few comments to this effect. No, there is no guarantee that the government of Vietnam will enforce the GPL. But, we don't even know if the US Government will enforce it either... However, the fact that this step is being taken to reduce software piracy is a positive indicator. Why would they reduce one exposure just to replace it with another. On the other hand, the GPL is a pretty subversive document to be circulating among your intelligentsia for a totalitarian regime... Just have to wait and see...
Like 8 years ago, when i actually went to Lan party's!
Most of your major metals. The ones we currently get by strip-mining among them.
Ultimately we'll have to do it anyways, if we wait until the need is manifest, it is probably too late.
But, I'll give you, we have to be cleaner about the process, if only to buy more time.
It seems to me that the decision to send manned flights had to have reverberations through the entire program. Surviving re-entry for a manned flight is a completely different ball of wax than an unmanned flight where the instrument package can be re-engineered for higher heat and gravitic tolerances than the human body, that's a whole smeg-load of engineering know-how right there.
1) No civilization has succeeded or advanced by curtailing their use of resources. Ours is no different, we are increasing, practically daily, our consumption of every non-renawable resource on the planet. It's pretty much a binary solution set, we either use those resources while they are still available to access other sources of those resources, or we fade away. Most of them are right in our own solar system, we just got to go get them.
2) The planet's population continues to grow, the sure fired cure to this is to materially increase prosperity for large sections of the planet. That will require resources, see 1 above.
3) Polution and ecological damage result directly from both of the above. Both will be attenuated if we derive most of our resources off-planet, which will require colonization efforts, which should have a small, but positive effect on population. One which can be expected to rise over time.
4) We still retain the means to turn the planet into a radioactive wasteland, we are also starting to play in technologies which have the potential to make life on this planet problematic. The universe istself could have a long period comet bearing down on us right now. The planet has been hit before and can be hit again. The best defense against this is to proliferate.
There most certainly are some massive obstacles to overcome, but we won't overcome them by curtailing our space program, including the manned portion.
Radio, Sat Radio, iTunes, Napster2 Et. Al. are enforceable means for the recording industry to attain distribution.
Portable media are demonstrably unenforceable anymore. Or more correctly, the ease with which abuses can happen has risen sufficiently to make enforceability questionable.
Given RIAA isn't having a whole lot of success with it's current measures, and if they feel they are losing that much revenue, I would tend to think the smart business move is away from portable media to more enforceable paradigms.
If you think they are profiteering mercenaries now, just wait, if they have to make that kind of shift, it's gonna cost. Who do you think is going to end up footing the bill?
Hey folks, they can use technology to meet their goals too...
1) Buy CD at store, of course you may not want the whole CD in which case you will seriously consider:
2) Buy card which will let you mix and match what you want to download.
3) Buy beer and download music for free, while you're at it, drink a toast to the music you are killing.
IMHO, people who are downloading music for free are not doing so to protest the profiteering of music companies. No, they are doing it to get something for nothing. Well folks, it isn't for free. So far it has cost you the whole DRM bullshit, and RIAA and it's lawsuits.
And, it's only going to get more effective from here. That whole free music thing is driven by CDs folks. Who makes the CDs? Why should they continue to do so in the face of objective reality? What is to stop them from changing their distribution vector as an industry?
If however, you legitimately do have moral or ethical objections to the profiteering behaviour of the recording industry, then you have options which make far more sense.
There are a few sites out there that allow artists to sell their music on-line, one of them even owned by one of the founders of RedHat. Doesn't this make more sense? You are supporting the artists whose music brings you pleasure, helping to ensure that they can do so into the future. As well you aren't giving your money to the record companies. But you are sending a clear message to those companies. The message is, I can support a service which sends most (I think 80%) of the revenues to the artists, but I will not support your profiteering.
The most powerful vote you have is with your dollars. Downloading music for free which you should be paying for is not voting, it does not send a clear message. Worse still you are exacerbating the problem.
If you get too fat you die, or maybe you go to your local gym. You retain the services of a trainer who applies the 'technology' of modern physiology and kinsieology to obviate your problem. So, the problem created by improvements in the technology of agronomy are 'solved' by other technological advances...
The automobile is a self-contained example. The automobile itself increased the ability to travel, and the attendant risk of injury or death. However, airbags, seat-belts, steel door beams, unibody construction, have mitigated the attendant risk.
Simplisitcally this would tend to indicate that the problems created by technology can be repaired by technology.
In reality, the largest problems created by advances have no quick technological fix. This is because by and large the most pervasive effects of such change are on the fabric of society.
Nope, in each case, it is the market that is in control. How many promising OpSrc projects have languished and died from apathy? How many promising new companies have gone the same way? Why is this the case? Because regardless of the merit of a given company/project, if there is no demand for the resulting product, this a natural result.
Incidentally, OpSrc is almost a purely capitalist phenom. OpSrc projects, as noted, are as affected by all the market factors that their Closed cousins are affected by. It really is easy to see if you can divorce the concept of money from the concept of profit.
This, more than anything else is the central thing that is being misunderstood. I forget where I read it, but capital of the soul is still capital.
Once you divorce monies from profits, the fact that both are essentially corollaries of each other becomes self-evident. OpSrc projects which better meet the demands of a given application environment will distribute more units. This profit results in that project being able to garner more developers and contributors. These folk too are driven by profit, in their case, the profit is the use of their contribution and the resulting ego massage.
The central difference between the two are not strictly market factors, but rather how market factors are interpreted and acted upon.
Consider versioning. In OpSrc, by and large new versions are incremental improvements on the previous version. File and binary formats tend to be relatively static. When they do change it is (usually) for the best of reasons. Backwards compatability tends not to be an issue because of this, even when backwards compatability is sacrificed, it is sacrificed on the altar of forward useability. The fluff which inevitably creeps into software is driven by the only real determining market factor, demand.
In ClSrc, new versions of programs are rarely incremental changes, most often they are radical changes compared to their OpSrc cousins. File and binary formats can change arbitrarily, often for no appreciable gain in performance or reliability. Backwards compatability is a requirement, even when such backwards compatability may be at the expense of forward useability. Fluff is often designed by committee, often on the basis of psuedo-scientific evidence which has at best a tenuous grip on the fluff which the market will actually demand.
Other fundamental differences exist, when you look through them the same underlying current repeats itself over and over. OpSrc is better a meeting what the market demands. ClSrc tends to aim for what the market can bear.
Ultimately, the OpSrc model is probably 'more capitalist' than the ClSrc model. However, just as the world has never seen true communism, it has never seen true capitalism either. The best products don't allways succeed in the real world, but in true capitalism, they _MUST_. But, more often than not, the emphasis has gone from responding to the demands of the market, to trying (with varying degrees of success) to shape or direct the demands of the market.
SCO apparently can't do either.RingTFA, and followed a couple of Stryker links, right into:
Gotta hate those VBScript errors during a fire-fight.
Not only paranoid, unrealistic.
First of all, in order to prevent people from finding changes to past statements means ensuring that no previous copies of a given document can be found anywhere. Not exactly a high probability anymore, KWIM?
Second, there exists the potential for legitimate reasons behind the contents of the robots.txt file. (Like limiting the number of documents web-bots look through for performance reasons... or getting /.ed in order to provide impetus to legislation to shut down /. just to prevent laughable accusations of cover-ups.)
Third, no law exists TIAO which stipulates that the white house can't control what content is searchable by web-bots.
Fourth, this really doesn't inspire tinfoil haberdashery. Now, if the files had been removed, and were denied by the White House as having ever existed, well then I might start shopping for an aluminum fedora, except for...
Fifth, there is no guarantee regarding the truth of any document on any webserver. Just 'cause it comes through your browser doesn't mean it's true.
and
Sixth, even if the documents are being blocked from bots for some nefarious purpose, whoever crafted that plan has set a new low even for the toadying political appointees. Even making the observation lacks a certain fundamental understanding of the checks and balances provided by the instituion of a Free Press... Which, incidentally is protected by the constitution, try and find a similar guarantee in that hallowed document for web content...
Basically, wrong tool for the job.
The spreadsheet thing is a hold-over from when I used to do a lot of cleaning of snail mail data. I'd routinely get Excel spreadsheets from clients which would contain 20,000+ addresses and phone numbers.
I know why this would happen, the people knew how to use Excel, but didn't know how to use Access. But because they didn't choose the right tool for the job, they would end up contracting my employer to do data clean-up and set-up for specialized purposes. In effect, they were paying my employer to have me dump the data, and put it int the right tool and generate the required output. The job required reasonably complicated filtering, sorting, and output formatting, the job did not require any calculations or formulae. All of which militated using a database in lieu of a spreadsheet.
In many cases, clients ended up paying us more to do data cleanup than their own copy of Access and getting two or three of their own people to courses would have cost them.
Considering most of them probably bought full-up Office suites, not using the right tool for the job makes even less sense. On the other side of the web, paying for UO and then spending large quantities of time chatting made no sense. While you could role-play over ICQ or similar, UO was created for that purpose, and was better suited for that job. The converse is true for ICQ, it was a far far better vehicle for chatting than UO.
In point of fact, I know folks who did both, chat for long periods of time on UO, and role play over IRC. While role playing over IRC might make sense if your favorite milieu or rules system didn't mesh with the MMORPG's available, I really don't see any advatange to using MMORPG clients as high-overhead chat-clients. After I stopped playing UO, I played some of the private servers out there, and many specifically addressed this behaviour, since it could affect game-play for other folk on the server.
Ultimately, this was allways my biggest pet peeve.
Wrong tool, wrong task syndrome.
It's almost like the only people MMORPGs appeal to are the type of people who use spreadsheets for data warehousing.
It would seem to me that irc was cheaper and easier to use, but...
After thinking about it for awhile, I'm not sure that all of the recomendations necessarily make sense.
Branding does make a superficial sort of sense, but branding alone isn't going to make the fence sitters pick a side. By and large most users are fence sitters, they use IE 'cause they bought an M$ OS, and that's what it had. They didn't have to go and download a new browser.
The one I hold no truck with is the meshing with the OS. Several reasons, first is, where do you draw the line? Second, should a browser be poking that much into OS internals for the sake of a few icons? Third, this is a web browser, not a filesystem browser, if you see your OS icon, it's local, if you see your browser icon, it's remote. Fourth, the move to seperate applications vs. an appsuite means lighter, less bloated applications, why bloat them with a bunch of OS-specific code that isn't required for core-functionality? Fifth, the themeability of the chrome makes this redundant.
If this really is a need, write a seperate application to handle it for those platforms. That is the better way to handle it. Let the browser browse, and the themer theme.
The one good suggestion in that section was to move the menu items to where the OS user expects them, that is a legitimate usability concern.
However, identifying that one of the best features of the dev effort has been the willingness of the dev team to say no, was a very good inclusion. Hopefully the developers will exercise it once again on the issue of meshing with the OS.
Okay, now imagine a Bit Torrent-like service whose major difference is the bit rate comes from a large number of dedicated servers and mirrors connected to the 'net by fat pipes instead of pis-ant workstation with 128K upstream? But it doesn't end-run the legal issues. Regardless of how good P2P gets over time, you can't change the tainted reason for it's popularity and growth.
I agree, I'll allways use the fastest download.
Rarely in my experience is the fastest download from a peer, usually the fastest download is froma server dedicated to that activity, with the bandwidth to prove it.
IMHO, P2P is a reaction to the napster case, not the best methodology. The best methodology is those big bandwidth servers, with mirrors. Let's face it, I've never topped out my downstream rate in a peer to peer situation. I routinely do hit my maximum downstream rate from dedicated servers.
The problem is the content. Because the content is unlawful, the best paradigm is not available for accessing the files. Really how many peers out there can provide full T-1 downstream to you? Usually their upstream is a fraction of your downstream. At the end of the day, no matter how much route optimization, your peer's upstream rate is the determining factor.
I never indicated that people wouldn't use the best available service. Bittorrent for you probably is. What I do maintain is that P2P cannot be the best possible implementation of the service. There is much evidence to support this conclusion. Therefore performance is not the driving factor in common P2P usage, rather it's legal-issue end-running properties.
Realistically this is the end use of P2P implementations on the net. P2P IP-based telephony may be coming, in fact P2P is in some ways the ideal modality for this concept. But again, it won't be because the quality of the calls made of P2PVoIP networks will be more reliable or better or faster, it will be cheaper. Incidentally all that will be occurring is end-running the established systems and the attendant fees for using those systems. What do you expect the phone companies to do?
I'm speaking from a purely nuts and bolts point of view. In my private life I'm a musician. So I have my own issues with RIAA. But the solution to those issues is not for me to encourage people to end-run the problem rather than exerting pressure to really solve the problem. Further, the general public could make their position better understood by boycotting the music that RIAA has it's paws in. Trust me, there are millions of musicians who want you to listen to them, free of the burden of RIAA, and it's member bodies. So, by end-running copyright law you are simply adding weight to the RIAA momentum. By boycotting, you make the same statement, in much more evident terms, without infringing copyright law, and thereby giving RIAA a valid vent for their claims.
In the end, the people who buy the music suffer from increased costs, and the people who create it suffer from reduced premiums on those same sales. So who are you really punishing?
Sure, the internet should be a bastion of freedoms, but people should be exercising their freedoms as adults, not as ego-centric toddlers. You have the freedom to obtain your music on-line, you also have the freedom to use iTunes, or to give your patronage directly to the artists themselves, rather than through RIAA member organizations. If you really truly believe that RIAA is evil, that is how you fight back, not by giving them a legitimate complaint by skirting the law.Bear with me a sec, and IADNAL
If we hypothesize that SCO can win the contract dispute with IBM, but is not able to succesfully challenge the GPL, wouldn't selling licenses to Linux obligate them to expose the code which they are licensing under the GPL?
In fact, might this not be the root of the hasty back-pedalling on their part over the whole licensing thing? Really until the dust settles from all the legal cases, at the end of today, and every day until that happens, the GPL is the binding license document for that code.
I'm interested to find out if anyone has actually purchased a license. And if the folks over at FSF know about it...
I doubt SCO really wants to fight the GPL in court. I don't see anyway for them to prevail, but again IADNAL. The act of issuing licenses would (it seems to me) force them to become embroiled in a case, launched by the guys in the white hats, which could ultimately give the GPL it's baptism of fire.
Just speculation, but if anyone is a lawyer, maybe they can comment on the possibility?
Yeah, you may be right, but I'm not sure this is a desirable thing anymore.
First, P2P was a workaround to what killed Napster, no? Well, give em enough incentive and they'll co-ordinate their activities on that front as well.
Second, I have serious questions about the security of P2P networks, and I'm not overly crazy about the potential for abuse by these vendors.
Third, is it just me, or isn't P2P like the absolute mother of all malware distribution vectors? TBMK no-one has done it yet, but it's awfully tempting don't you think?
Fourth, P2P used to be pretty prevalent in business networking, not so anymore. There are many good reasons for this, almost all of which are applicable to P2P networking on the web.
Really the only reason for P2P networks like this is because of the copyright violations. Seriously, would you use Kazaa to download Music from other Kazaa users in the face of dedicated servers with sufficient mirrors, and no legal liability attendant? Probably not, most of us would go the dedicated server, or one of it's mirrors. The main reason for P2P networks like Kazaa Et. Al. is the fact the server centric deployment to provide the same service was vulnerable to legal action. Were the copyright issues to go away tomorrow, then the P2P versions of the service would follow in a very short time.
I don't even think the misguided Rob Enderle truly believes this.
Unless you think he wanted to prove his point via electronic martyrdom.
And in view of the fact that when I last checked he was still trolling away, it seems that his fears, like his positions, are groundless.ummm
I click on SUBMIT and nothing happens...
Do I need to close my cup holder?
Mod me down! If /. reflects life my karma must be negative!
Blah blah blah
What I really want to know is when /. is going put Alfred E. Nueman ears on the Bill Gates gif?
Maybe a nice litte "What? Me Worry" caption along the bottom.
Way off topic, but the borg gif is stale.