If I take my driver's licence out of my pocket I can still go drive my truck. What about a teller at the bank, a police officer, a clerk at a store you write a check to, a bouncer at a club, a bartender, and so on? They're people, you don't have any interest in letting these people know who you are?
Seriously those who thought I meant you have it so that you can tape it to your shirt and stick it in the face of everyone who walks by need to take a reading comprehension class.
I don't particularily like the Big Brother idea, but I have no qualms about this. You carry your licence so that people know who you are, and this would just provide a better way to verify that information. It would also be a nice way to lower the costs of corporate identification systems. I have a few workstations I manage for students to use at my college in the Physics office. I had gotten some old card readers and just set people's passwords to the raw string of text that their driver's licence would read out. It worked really well to keep them secure and the make it easy for people to log in, and if RFID tags were in our driver's licences it would make keyless entry systems and RFID based computer security systems a lot less expensive to get started with if there was enough secure information on the RFID tag.
Of course there are problems with the fact of how much data would be on there. Could I walk past a pillar in a mall that would read my address and phone number off my licence and sign me up to receive unsolicited calls and mailings? Also, would the data be secure enough if it were to be implemented in a security system? If these concerns were taken care of (well, the security system one less so, probably actually not that feasible, that's just the old hobbiest ticking inside me), then I wouldn't have a problem at all with a more secure and harder to forge driver's licence.
Well they don't make the displays or many of the other things on them that fail either, but they are responsible for the choices of those components. I'm just curious as to how those choices manage to keep them in business, I know I wouldn't by a Dell ever for any reason, because a week without a laptop because a part needs to be replaced would cost me far more than the value of the drive. So even though its covered under warranty it does me no good if I can count on it failing.
Seriously, something like this happening by itself would not be a major deal, even the world's finest manufacturers have their share of problems (Firestone, Apple, SUN, etc.)
But what really puzzels me, is that I have seen Dell to continuously put out the worst quality products over and over, and yet they remain a major player in the consumer computer market. My college switched three years ago from leasing IBM laptops to Dell, and the helpdesk just started to be swamped. There are about 2200 new laptops on lease every year. The first year we had Dell Latitudes over 1/4 of them needed locic board replacements because the network connector was only held onto the board by the contact soldering points, not mounted to the case and no mounting posts on the board. 1/8 of the one's this year have already had a hard disk replaced and we've had them for two months. Also about 400 of them have had to have their screens replaced in the last 3 years (from failure not student damage).
This makes me wonder how Dell manages to be profitable (all these items were replaced under warranty) and continue to have a loyal client base (despire a much more busy, thus costly, helpdesk the college stays with Dell).
That was more or less a joke. However, if Linux was found to acutally violate 283 patents that wouldn't at all have a catastrophic effect on the GPL, nor on MySQL's free licence code. But should Linux suffer a big hit and loss of user-base then MySQL would to, since a great deal of MySQL installations run on Linux.
Actually, I have been doing regular updates of sendmail, Spamassasin, MimeDefang, and twice now OpenSSL. Nothing requiring a reboot. There isn't much to the kernel on that machine, and so far since it was setup there hasn't been a known kernel exploit that has applied to a module compiled into that kernel.
Actaully I never said I couldn't imagine a Linux solution that didn't exceed the performance of a Windows solution. Both operating systems are far enough along that there really isn't a difference in how well they utilize system resources (well, maybe Disk I/O a little, but that's it). I prefer Linux because of the flexability it gives me. Such as when we deployed a mail filtering system for a school district we work with. It was an old PowerPC G3 that they hadd sitting around, 300 MHz and 128 MB or RAM. It has an uptime of over 400 days and handles over 20,000 messages a day.
But anyway, I stick by the fact that I can't imagine a properly deployed Linux solution underperforming a properly deployed Windows solution.
I read the article and many of the issues faced by the "switch-backers" seemed to be issues with either the software they were running (illegal user entry crashed a web-store) or a poorly managed ISP (after switching from a Linux ISP to a Windows ISP downtime decreased). I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
In all my experience I could never imagine a properly developed and deployed Linux solution underperforming a Windows solution or being inadequatly stable. I think that the real problem this article points out (but dosen't mention) is that the numbers of skilled Linux administrators are thinning. Even worse, the number of Linux administrators that only think they are skilled is increasing. Many of my peers going through college now like Windows because that is all they have ever known and don't want to bother learning Linux. The problem also stems from how terrible the consulting business has become. There are far too many businesses out there today that I have run into that have a guy who read Linux for Dummies and is making cold calls to customer sites running Linux implementations.
Ghosting crossed my mind, but I don't always use the same hardware configuration. And anyone who uses Windows knows how much it hates a motherboard switch or other major hardware change.
Actaully a friend of mine once upgraded his motherboard and processor and left his activate copy of Windows XP on the drive and it told him that there was a radical hardware change and that he needed to re-activate.
Re:Damned if I'm going to use a copy protected OS.
on
Is That Pirated Software?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Exactly!!!
I do lots of custom programming and consulting. I have a few machines that I often use to replicate a client's environment. I have legal copies of Windows XP and Server 2003 for this, but I scrub them after each project. Of course, I can activate each one only twice, then I have to call Microsoft and tell them what I'm doing and get hassled like I'm putting off the mob for 20 minutes. That is really starting to piss me off, because as I activate them more and more I get hasseled more and more. I've had to do it over ten times now, and it is really irritating.
On a side note, for the few clients I have running Linux I don't even need seperate test machines, because I know that no matter what else I have running on my development server, the few things that I work on for my client will behave the same once its on their machine!
Seriously, after all the controversy over the heavily developed Diebold e-voting system, who comes out and says, "let's do it by email!".
If this refers to the SMTP/IMAP/POP3 email system then one wonders why such an insecure system would be considered.
With today's encryption technologies, it shouldn't be that big of a deal to do it securely, but suggesting to do this over standard email after all of the Diebold e-voting fear is rather bold.
In high school I swam on the men's swim team. Yeah not really a crowd puller. But we had to black out the SPEEDO on our goggle straps at meets. The officials all enforced it too. If they saw a logo you were DQed right there on the starting blocks. Given that for every meet except for state champs the only people watching were parents and girl-friends, and yet they enforced this, it dosen't surprise me that the olympics manages to take it just as seriously. (But I still find it rediculous)
You guys needed to see the movie, its the best =D I was just downloading it again to cache it here for a link and all of a sudden everything on the site stopped. I was right, the story had gone from a future post to a current post and that was it for the site. Maybe tomorrow some of you get to see it...
I still think OS X is going to save Apple. It may be a slower propegation than this narrow analysis on the iPod and iTunes, but from what I have seen it has been creating more and more demand for Apple products.
Just locally, I have been spreading a "Mac Fever" to many of my collegues. A friend of mine turned me Mac this past summer after leaving an iMac with Panther on it up in our office all summer. He was working out of town for several weeks, and I used it regularily. I would have never wanted a Mac running OS 9, but now that I've used Panther...
After he got back I had to return to my Winblowz box (as I cannot use StuidoMX or Photoshop on Linux =[ ). After that I was fevering for a Mac hardcore. I finally was able to pick up a new G5 around Christmas time.
Ever since, I have been estatic about its performance, beauty, and stability. This has lead to antoher PowerMAC for the office, and two iBooks between my friend and I. The other people we work with are seeing how well our Macs help us get our work done, and are now looking to buy Macs of their own.
At other places I have worked I see the same thing happening. Someone gets a Mac, and six months later four or five other people have gotten not just one, but usually two, for office and home.
Of course, a computer is more expensive than an iPod, so this growth will be slower, but I see it occuring in force all around me.
What's next - Developers having to pick up 'code malpractice' insurance?
I am in consulting and guess what, insurance to protect me in case of a damage causing programming error starts at over $2,000 a year! And for good reason, imagine you write something that rounds up instead of down in the hundredths place for some output from a data generatng monte carlo. It could go unnoticed for months, and then tens of millions of records in a database could need to be checked and recalculated. That would be HUGE $$$.
I was unable to find any more sources for this information, as something like Kodak sueing for a patent on "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" seems like one of those typical press exaggerations.
However, if this really is a patent held by Kodak this is just another example of the failure of the patent system to issue appopriate tecchnology patents.
This is just like the "One Click Order" patent that Amazon was trying to enforce a while ago.
I don't understand how a patent could be issued for "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" when it is simply the assembly of dozens of really patent worth technologies:
CCD image sensor, electronicaly programmable non-volitile memory, compression algorithims, and the like
I sincerely hope that this is either a press exaggeration, otherwise it is clear that technology patent problems are still persisting.
I run into the same problem at my college which distributes laptops to all students. I have come up with a motto that has made life easier for a great many people...
"JUST SAY NO!"
No matter what it's asking, just click no. I've never run into a time where this can cause a problem. If it comes back a few times, (do you want to go to this encrypted page), read it. Then if you're really sure, click yes.
People I know have told be about nightmares with PayPal, but until this post I didn't realize it was so prevalent. I just closed my account, I really dislike the idea that PayPal can simply choose at will to freeze assets in any associated account.
Real Player used to be a simple piece of audio (then later video) playing software.
Now its becomeiwng one of those applications that wants to dominate your system and do everything
from playing media to making eggs. RealMessage Center? A constantly running tray icon? Asking
me every 2 seconds if I _really_ want it to not be the default player for everything...
RealNetworks might not be having troubles if they were able to produce significantly
more advanced codecs and didn't resort to bloat. No innovation, no company, regardless of whether
your player can polish my shoes or not.
I had an aquaintence who surfing the web while we were in the library one time and freaked out all of a sudden. She went up to ask the librarian if she wouldn't be able to get her "prize" she just "won" because she was in a library and the "web people" wouldn't know where to find her...
Slashdot Mirror
If I take my driver's licence out of my pocket I can still go drive my truck. What about a teller at the bank, a police officer, a clerk at a store you write a check to, a bouncer at a club, a bartender, and so on? They're people, you don't have any interest in letting these people know who you are?
Seriously those who thought I meant you have it so that you can tape it to your shirt and stick it in the face of everyone who walks by need to take a reading comprehension class.
I don't particularily like the Big Brother idea, but I have no qualms about this. You carry your licence so that people know who you are, and this would just provide a better way to verify that information. It would also be a nice way to lower the costs of corporate identification systems. I have a few workstations I manage for students to use at my college in the Physics office. I had gotten some old card readers and just set people's passwords to the raw string of text that their driver's licence would read out. It worked really well to keep them secure and the make it easy for people to log in, and if RFID tags were in our driver's licences it would make keyless entry systems and RFID based computer security systems a lot less expensive to get started with if there was enough secure information on the RFID tag.
Of course there are problems with the fact of how much data would be on there. Could I walk past a pillar in a mall that would read my address and phone number off my licence and sign me up to receive unsolicited calls and mailings? Also, would the data be secure enough if it were to be implemented in a security system? If these concerns were taken care of (well, the security system one less so, probably actually not that feasible, that's just the old hobbiest ticking inside me), then I wouldn't have a problem at all with a more secure and harder to forge driver's licence.
Well they don't make the displays or many of the other things on them that fail either, but they are responsible for the choices of those components. I'm just curious as to how those choices manage to keep them in business, I know I wouldn't by a Dell ever for any reason, because a week without a laptop because a part needs to be replaced would cost me far more than the value of the drive. So even though its covered under warranty it does me no good if I can count on it failing.
It seems that Dell quality is at it again.
Seriously, something like this happening by itself would not be a major deal, even the world's finest manufacturers have their share of problems (Firestone, Apple, SUN, etc.)
But what really puzzels me, is that I have seen Dell to continuously put out the worst quality products over and over, and yet they remain a major player in the consumer computer market. My college switched three years ago from leasing IBM laptops to Dell, and the helpdesk just started to be swamped. There are about 2200 new laptops on lease every year. The first year we had Dell Latitudes over 1/4 of them needed locic board replacements because the network connector was only held onto the board by the contact soldering points, not mounted to the case and no mounting posts on the board. 1/8 of the one's this year have already had a hard disk replaced and we've had them for two months. Also about 400 of them have had to have their screens replaced in the last 3 years (from failure not student damage).
This makes me wonder how Dell manages to be profitable (all these items were replaced under warranty) and continue to have a loyal client base (despire a much more busy, thus costly, helpdesk the college stays with Dell).
That was more or less a joke. However, if Linux was found to acutally violate 283 patents that wouldn't at all have a catastrophic effect on the GPL, nor on MySQL's free licence code. But should Linux suffer a big hit and loss of user-base then MySQL would to, since a great deal of MySQL installations run on Linux.
A MySQL software developer? Hmm, it would seem that it dosen't bother MySQL AB too much, so why should it bother Munich.
Seriously, if a MySQL developer is worried about the legality of running Linux then maybe he has the wrong job ;)
Actually, I have been doing regular updates of sendmail, Spamassasin, MimeDefang, and twice now OpenSSL. Nothing requiring a reboot. There isn't much to the kernel on that machine, and so far since it was setup there hasn't been a known kernel exploit that has applied to a module compiled into that kernel.
Actaully I never said I couldn't imagine a Linux solution that didn't exceed the performance of a Windows solution. Both operating systems are far enough along that there really isn't a difference in how well they utilize system resources (well, maybe Disk I/O a little, but that's it). I prefer Linux because of the flexability it gives me. Such as when we deployed a mail filtering system for a school district we work with. It was an old PowerPC G3 that they hadd sitting around, 300 MHz and 128 MB or RAM. It has an uptime of over 400 days and handles over 20,000 messages a day.
But anyway, I stick by the fact that I can't imagine a properly deployed Linux solution underperforming a properly deployed Windows solution.
I read the article and many of the issues faced by the "switch-backers" seemed to be issues with either the software they were running (illegal user entry crashed a web-store) or a poorly managed ISP (after switching from a Linux ISP to a Windows ISP downtime decreased). I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
In all my experience I could never imagine a properly developed and deployed Linux solution underperforming a Windows solution or being inadequatly stable. I think that the real problem this article points out (but dosen't mention) is that the numbers of skilled Linux administrators are thinning. Even worse, the number of Linux administrators that only think they are skilled is increasing. Many of my peers going through college now like Windows because that is all they have ever known and don't want to bother learning Linux. The problem also stems from how terrible the consulting business has become. There are far too many businesses out there today that I have run into that have a guy who read Linux for Dummies and is making cold calls to customer sites running Linux implementations.
I wonder if they ever verify their decisions with you:
Mark,
This is Eric, your spam d00d. You got a message about fisting, you into that? Let me know, thanks!
-- Eric
Ghosting crossed my mind, but I don't always use the same hardware configuration. And anyone who uses Windows knows how much it hates a motherboard switch or other major hardware change.
Actaully a friend of mine once upgraded his motherboard and processor and left his activate copy of Windows XP on the drive and it told him that there was a radical hardware change and that he needed to re-activate.
Exactly!!!
I do lots of custom programming and consulting. I have a few machines that I often use to replicate a client's environment. I have legal copies of Windows XP and Server 2003 for this, but I scrub them after each project. Of course, I can activate each one only twice, then I have to call Microsoft and tell them what I'm doing and get hassled like I'm putting off the mob for 20 minutes. That is really starting to piss me off, because as I activate them more and more I get hasseled more and more. I've had to do it over ten times now, and it is really irritating.
On a side note, for the few clients I have running Linux I don't even need seperate test machines, because I know that no matter what else I have running on my development server, the few things that I work on for my client will behave the same once its on their machine!
/rant
Seriously, after all the controversy over the heavily developed Diebold e-voting system, who comes out and says, "let's do it by email!".
If this refers to the SMTP/IMAP/POP3 email system then one wonders why such an insecure system would be considered.
With today's encryption technologies, it shouldn't be that big of a deal to do it securely, but suggesting to do this over standard email after all of the Diebold e-voting fear is rather bold.
In high school I swam on the men's swim team. Yeah not really a crowd puller. But we had to black out the SPEEDO on our goggle straps at meets. The officials all enforced it too. If they saw a logo you were DQed right there on the starting blocks. Given that for every meet except for state champs the only people watching were parents and girl-friends, and yet they enforced this, it dosen't surprise me that the olympics manages to take it just as seriously. (But I still find it rediculous)
You guys needed to see the movie, its the best =D I was just downloading it again to cache it here for a link and all of a sudden everything on the site stopped. I was right, the story had gone from a future post to a current post and that was it for the site. Maybe tomorrow some of you get to see it...
I still think OS X is going to save Apple. It may be a slower propegation than this narrow analysis on the iPod and iTunes, but from what I have seen it has been creating more and more demand for Apple products.
Just locally, I have been spreading a "Mac Fever" to many of my collegues. A friend of mine turned me Mac this past summer after leaving an iMac with Panther on it up in our office all summer. He was working out of town for several weeks, and I used it regularily. I would have never wanted a Mac running OS 9, but now that I've used Panther...
After he got back I had to return to my Winblowz box (as I cannot use StuidoMX or Photoshop on Linux =[ ). After that I was fevering for a Mac hardcore. I finally was able to pick up a new G5 around Christmas time.
Ever since, I have been estatic about its performance, beauty, and stability. This has lead to antoher PowerMAC for the office, and two iBooks between my friend and I. The other people we work with are seeing how well our Macs help us get our work done, and are now looking to buy Macs of their own.
At other places I have worked I see the same thing happening. Someone gets a Mac, and six months later four or five other people have gotten not just one, but usually two, for office and home.
Of course, a computer is more expensive than an iPod, so this growth will be slower, but I see it occuring in force all around me.
What's next - Developers having to pick up 'code malpractice' insurance?
I am in consulting and guess what, insurance to protect me in case of a damage causing programming error starts at over $2,000 a year! And for good reason, imagine you write something that rounds up instead of down in the hundredths place for some output from a data generatng monte carlo. It could go unnoticed for months, and then tens of millions of records in a database could need to be checked and recalculated. That would be HUGE $$$.
There actually was a Commodore 64 version of SimCity. And from what that was like, believe me, there shouldn't be a C64 version of the Sims =D
Now it just needs a loudspeaker and a recording of "BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS!"
I was unable to find any more sources for this information, as something like Kodak sueing for a patent on "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" seems like one of those typical press exaggerations.
However, if this really is a patent held by Kodak this is just another example of the failure of the patent system to issue appopriate tecchnology patents. This is just like the "One Click Order" patent that Amazon was trying to enforce a while ago.
I don't understand how a patent could be issued for "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" when it is simply the assembly of dozens of really patent worth technologies: CCD image sensor, electronicaly programmable non-volitile memory, compression algorithims, and the like
I sincerely hope that this is either a press exaggeration, otherwise it is clear that technology patent problems are still persisting.
I run into the same problem at my college which distributes laptops to all students. I have come up with a motto that has made life easier for a great many people...
"JUST SAY NO!"
No matter what it's asking, just click no. I've never run into a time where this can cause a problem. If it comes back a few times, (do you want to go to this encrypted page), read it. Then if you're really sure, click yes.
People I know have told be about nightmares with PayPal, but until this post I didn't realize it was so prevalent. I just closed my account, I really dislike the idea that PayPal can simply choose at will to freeze assets in any associated account.
I know why I don't use Real player anymore...
Real Player used to be a simple piece of audio (then later video) playing software. Now its becomeiwng one of those applications that wants to dominate your system and do everything from playing media to making eggs. RealMessage Center? A constantly running tray icon? Asking me every 2 seconds if I _really_ want it to not be the default player for everything...
RealNetworks might not be having troubles if they were able to produce significantly more advanced codecs and didn't resort to bloat. No innovation, no company, regardless of whether your player can polish my shoes or not.
I'll tell you who buys this stuff:
I had an aquaintence who surfing the web while we were in the library one time and freaked out all of a sudden. She went up to ask the librarian if she wouldn't be able to get her "prize" she just "won" because she was in a library and the "web people" wouldn't know where to find her...
That is who buys this stuff.
That would be slick! Even better if I could type "That asshole who hit me at the bar lastnight." if I didn't remeber exactly who it was ...