Software developers don't make money from developing Open Source software.
Why not? Someone has to pay the developers to create and maintain something new. Or am I missing something, and Microsoft Office 2005 will ship with WSIS templates?
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
And if you work for a closed-source vendor, you'd better be looking out for your "ox", because if you don't work in Redmond, chances are US Representitives didn't have your employer in mind.
They've already eliminated the open source option. That's a pretty good sign that they've already got a policy of exclusion in place.
A lot of these junk products remain legal because they very narrowly escape making outright false claims. My local radio stations are currently inundated with "star registry" commercials in time for V-day. The particular company claims that "the star name is registered in book form in the U.S. Copyright Office." Very clever. Name-dropping a government agency gives their claim an appearance of legitimacy, when in fact all they are doing is taking your $50 and writing down someone's name in a book. Hell, I can do that for $25. Another product claims to regrow hair, and "is so effective that it was awarded a patent." The truth, of course, is that a patent only says a particular party has claim to an idea or method, not that the idea or method actually does something useful.
My personal favorites are the suggested-physician scam products. These companies try to suggest that a doctor is/was involved with the product, and we are supposed to make the mental leap that this means the product has been proven to work through rigorous medical trials. The cheapest scammers use the words "doctor" or "physician" in the product name. Next are the doctors that speak to you on television, but hold a doctorate in some totally unrelated field (most likely business). Some of these guys manage to get a real M.D., but he only says something like "I use it", or perhaps "it worked for me", which really isn't making any legally-binding promises.
But, scammers can claim damn near anything they want, as long as they can make you keep it for [at most] 30 days, they have your money and you can't do a thing about it. (I love it when they claim a 60 or 90 day "guaranteed" refund -- as if they are required by law to honor that) The only thing the scammers have to worry about is if the product hurts you, so it's in their best interest that the product does nothing at all.
Right, like disturbing your sleep cycle by giving your brain visual stimulus late at night. Of course, if you're a person full of anxiety like me, the effect is amplified.
Frame it and hang it on your wall probably. It's a nice gesture, don't get me wrong, but the code is little more than a curiosity. There are other open source projects out there that are much more capable, and that aren't limited to NTSC format.
...In the Internet search engine arena. I already have a choice between Google, AV, Lycos and Yahoo. But I do like the idea about improving local searching. Before you pooh pooh entering the metadata for each file, consider this:
At my place of employment (a government organization), we generate thousands of new documents every year. Some of these need to be kept until the end of the fiscal year, others for as long as 10 years. Up until this point, the only metadata consisted of a descriptive file name. Administrators have assistants that file hard copies, and I've given these assistants access to Administrators' home directories to organize things there. It's not working. Because there is no metadata, when a file is lost, it's a nightmare to find again. Remembering approximate dates doesn't work. Attempting to recall some of the content doesn't work either, because the user can almost never recall an exact phrase in the document. Then, on top of this, we have documents stored in different places on and off the network, because of security requirements. Take this recipe, sprinkle with drive letters or mount points, mix in some documents transferred (and lost) through e-mail, and I have a hopeless mess on my hands. Most folks just give up and recreate the document from scratch.
I decided about two years ago to get a document management system in place, but the current crop are either out of our budget if proprietary, or barely functional if open source. I put off the project because other folks wanted to rearrange my priorities. I'm going to have to take up this project soon. I want to do away with all the network nonsense with drive letters, mount points and subsubsubsubdirectories filled with unhelpful file names. It'll have one interface on all platforms, and no knowledge of network design will be needed. The system will allow transfer of documents between all the employees or between groups of employees. It will incorporate virus scanning (not mapping r/w network shares is also an effective way to stop the spread of viruses/worms).
*And*... Users will not be allowed to put a document into the system without entering a description of the document.
So, it's down to breach of contract with IBM, also a dubious claim. How about all that other hoopla? How about threatening to extract fees from Linux users? If these barrators go unpunished, I think we need a list of all the perpetrators, so we can remind potential employers that these are not the kind of senior management you want in your company.
2.6.2 Fails to compile on any of my machines. It dies with an odd error during a modules compile. I'm not the only one that receives this error. Anyone else getting that EOF error?
Well, here's the whole situation: I have an MP3 player with internal memory and also a slot that accepts an SD card. In 2.4.20, I could only see the internal memory. I read that this was fixed in 2.4.21, but 2.4.24 was the latest, so I got that.
In 2.4.24, when I plug the sucker in and turn it on, the internal and external memory show up as the two next available SCSI devices. When I temporarily moved to 2.6.1, I made sure that I had the USB kernel stuff configured the same way. Under 2.6.1, only the internal memory shows up.
Maybe I should be looking elsewhere for the device name other than/dev/sdx?
Anyone know what happened with the usb-storage module from 2.4.21 to the present? They added support for SD MMC cards, and it works fine in 2.4.24. But, 2.6.1 has a new SCSI driver that gives me up to a 20 per cent boost in throughput, however, the memory card support vanished.
Okay, this is the third attempt at a pay-per-play scheme specifically with the DVD format. STOP! God! Consumers don't want anything more than cheap rentals. They don't even like in on cable television, preferring instead to rent at dirt-cheap prices./me beats MPAA/Disney execs with rolled-up newspaper
We had NN set up on some boxes with Netscape. I found out that after NN shutdown the browser for attempting to access a restricted site, I could just open up the browser again and have a filter-free Internet experience.
By the way, CIPA is unenforceable. The technology to block pornographic or offensive images does not yet exist, because computers can't look at an image an recognize what it is. Even the best existing filters are less effective than a teacher. CIPA: A stupid, feel-good law that should be removed from the books.
How much of a threat could this guy have been? He uses Outlook for his e-mail. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of computer security would steer clear of this program. How much of a threat could he have been? Sounds like one clueless user inventing a hoax to get money out of another clueless user.
An Oslo Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a lower court's ruling clearing Jon Lech Johansen of charges related to his development and distribution of DeCSS, a software tool that can be used to crack copy protection on DVDs.
Wrong! CSS does not prevent DVDs from behing copied, it prevents "movies" from being read (played) on machines of which the MPAA does not approve. If this is how the American tech press is going to pick up on it, I'd rather they'd stick to something they understand.
The difference being that there is some legal protection with the stock market, and there are plenty of people who *have* made money on the stock market. Compare this with 419 scam victims. No one has ever made money on them. The stories about these scammers have appeared in just about every major newspaper, and the US government gives out free advice about avoiding overseas scammers.
I'll grant you this though: Direct-sell financial firms made a ton of money on twenty-somethings by reducing investment strategies to basically buying an expensive lottery ticket (on a single stock).
Who in the US administration actually stated that the US opposed a French site because of their opposition to the war in Iraq? What does this have to do with Iraq!? Wouldn't France be the obvious choice? The French have the most experience, e.g. keeping a whole country full of fission reactors humming along.
That's the fault of the administration in a way. A lot of small school systems are hard-pressed to find some kind of technical support within their ranks. It creates less issues with the Unions, and it's cheaper to pay a stipend than to create a new, full-time position with benefits. Unfortunately, they're not looking at the "big picture".
I think what your school system needs is a strong administrator that understands technology. A superintendent is probably in the best position to fix your school's technology program. It really makes my heart sink to think that about 7 years after the initial big push to get technology in schools, your district's administration sees fit to make tech such a low priority that they just throw a stipend at an art teacher, and hope for the best.
This goes a bit beyond annoyance, wouldn't you say? This is actually organized crime. Is this the first public example of someone using a virus/trojan to commit a crime?
There are a lot of irresponsible idiots out there. If guns are freely available, there will be a lot of irresponsible idiots out there with guns.
This has been brought up many, many times in the gun debate. In the US, guns have been freely available to everyone, including idiots, and have been affordable for most of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, idiots do buy guns, and idiots find a way to pass gun safety courses so they can own guns. The statistics do not show that idiots are responsible for the majority of gun injury and death. The two biggest groups are 1) people who use a gun to commit suicide, and 2) inner-city gang members.
I therefore think that guns should be regulated in much the same way that we don't allow any idiot to drive around with an 18 wheeler.
There is no comparison. An 18 wheeler is a much more complicated device to operate than even the most complicated gun, and arguably much more dangerous. I do believe in mandatory safety training, and it has been in place in some states for decades, but not standardized. It hasn't helped much because the majority of people who use a gun to kill meant to kill.
There are also a lot of pro-gun nuts on/. AFAICT, their opinion is: "I want a gun. I hate and fear all authorities, especially if they are called 'government'. I oppose any steps by said government to either make it harder for me to have a gun or to keep track of who has guns."
I have two feelings on this one. On the one hand, I like NICS (national instant-check system) because it keeps felons from getting guns from one source, and has actually been used to catch some criminals on the lam. I like the paperwork, because it helps that track down felons who steal guns and use them to commit crime.
On the other hand, I'm a responsible adult with no criminal record. I've legally owned guns since I was a teenager. I've never had a "close call", and I've never threatened anyone. I drive the speed limit. I help old ladies across the street. I'm nice to kids and small household animals. Why do I have to apply for permits and take tests every time some new legislation is passed? It makes me wonder sometimes, especially in light of things like the "assault weapon ban", which... Well, it just doesn't make any sense. I have no problem with the ATF or the State Police keeping track of what guns I own. Why would I?
I'd say the reason why "more guns equals less crime" is so weak is because it is way too simplistic. I can't think of any study that has resulted in a formula to predict the crime rate based on the number of guns present in the sample. Consider that a single, lawful and peaceful owner could have more than one gun. Wouldn't this skew to results? About the strongest statements for/against gun ownership I've seen are:
For: Something like 80,000 US police reports show a gun was successfully used to fend off an attacker (not necessarily through deadly force). That's something like twice (or more) the rate of homicide involving guns.
Against: The study that showed the likelyhood of mortal injury was greatly increased when a gun was present.
"Less guns means less crime" isn't exactly true either. Was there a lot of gun-related crime between citizens in Saddam's Iraq? Probably not. Was Iraq a modern utopia? Uh... no. The "x guns = x crime" equation entirely ignores driving factors like population density, education level, poverty rate, and quality of police work (with regards to gun traces and preventing felons from acquiring guns). Presence of illegal drugs and crooked FFL dealers likewise drive gun crime.
Both the pro-gun and anti-gun groups have their heads firmly planted between their ass-cheeks if they continue to argue on this abridged view of the issue. The BATFE is probably in the best position to say what are the major driving forces of gun-related crime. The revised equated is probably closer to "more guns in the hands of felons = more crime".
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Software developers don't make money from developing Open Source software.
Why not? Someone has to pay the developers to create and maintain something new. Or am I missing something, and Microsoft Office 2005 will ship with WSIS templates?
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
And if you work for a closed-source vendor, you'd better be looking out for your "ox", because if you don't work in Redmond, chances are US Representitives didn't have your employer in mind.
They've already eliminated the open source option. That's a pretty good sign that they've already got a policy of exclusion in place.
Well, it's a stimulus similar to sunlight shining on you in the morning, especially if you're doing something "active", like playing a video game.
Mentioned here for example.
A lot of these junk products remain legal because they very narrowly escape making outright false claims. My local radio stations are currently inundated with "star registry" commercials in time for V-day. The particular company claims that "the star name is registered in book form in the U.S. Copyright Office." Very clever. Name-dropping a government agency gives their claim an appearance of legitimacy, when in fact all they are doing is taking your $50 and writing down someone's name in a book. Hell, I can do that for $25. Another product claims to regrow hair, and "is so effective that it was awarded a patent." The truth, of course, is that a patent only says a particular party has claim to an idea or method, not that the idea or method actually does something useful.
My personal favorites are the suggested-physician scam products. These companies try to suggest that a doctor is/was involved with the product, and we are supposed to make the mental leap that this means the product has been proven to work through rigorous medical trials. The cheapest scammers use the words "doctor" or "physician" in the product name. Next are the doctors that speak to you on television, but hold a doctorate in some totally unrelated field (most likely business). Some of these guys manage to get a real M.D., but he only says something like "I use it", or perhaps "it worked for me", which really isn't making any legally-binding promises.
But, scammers can claim damn near anything they want, as long as they can make you keep it for [at most] 30 days, they have your money and you can't do a thing about it. (I love it when they claim a 60 or 90 day "guaranteed" refund -- as if they are required by law to honor that) The only thing the scammers have to worry about is if the product hurts you, so it's in their best interest that the product does nothing at all.
Right, like disturbing your sleep cycle by giving your brain visual stimulus late at night. Of course, if you're a person full of anxiety like me, the effect is amplified.
Frame it and hang it on your wall probably. It's a nice gesture, don't get me wrong, but the code is little more than a curiosity. There are other open source projects out there that are much more capable, and that aren't limited to NTSC format.
That gets into reading specific file formats. No thanks.
Consumer: We want DRM-free, high-quality, downloadable music, and we want it for less money per track than a CD.
RIAA: OK, you can have moderate-quality, downloadable tracks laden with DRM for the same price per track as a CD.
Consumer: Uh... nevermind.
RIAA: See? Music download services are not a legitimate business model!
Yeah. Maybe the EPA should look into that.
...In the Internet search engine arena. I already have a choice between Google, AV, Lycos and Yahoo. But I do like the idea about improving local searching. Before you pooh pooh entering the metadata for each file, consider this:
At my place of employment (a government organization), we generate thousands of new documents every year. Some of these need to be kept until the end of the fiscal year, others for as long as 10 years. Up until this point, the only metadata consisted of a descriptive file name. Administrators have assistants that file hard copies, and I've given these assistants access to Administrators' home directories to organize things there. It's not working. Because there is no metadata, when a file is lost, it's a nightmare to find again. Remembering approximate dates doesn't work. Attempting to recall some of the content doesn't work either, because the user can almost never recall an exact phrase in the document. Then, on top of this, we have documents stored in different places on and off the network, because of security requirements. Take this recipe, sprinkle with drive letters or mount points, mix in some documents transferred (and lost) through e-mail, and I have a hopeless mess on my hands. Most folks just give up and recreate the document from scratch.
I decided about two years ago to get a document management system in place, but the current crop are either out of our budget if proprietary, or barely functional if open source. I put off the project because other folks wanted to rearrange my priorities. I'm going to have to take up this project soon. I want to do away with all the network nonsense with drive letters, mount points and subsubsubsubdirectories filled with unhelpful file names. It'll have one interface on all platforms, and no knowledge of network design will be needed. The system will allow transfer of documents between all the employees or between groups of employees. It will incorporate virus scanning (not mapping r/w network shares is also an effective way to stop the spread of viruses/worms).
*And*... Users will not be allowed to put a document into the system without entering a description of the document.
So, it's down to breach of contract with IBM, also a dubious claim. How about all that other hoopla? How about threatening to extract fees from Linux users? If these barrators go unpunished, I think we need a list of all the perpetrators, so we can remind potential employers that these are not the kind of senior management you want in your company.
2.6.2 Fails to compile on any of my machines. It dies with an odd error during a modules compile. I'm not the only one that receives this error. Anyone else getting that EOF error?
Thanks for the follow-ups.
/dev/sdx?
Well, here's the whole situation: I have an MP3 player with internal memory and also a slot that accepts an SD card. In 2.4.20, I could only see the internal memory. I read that this was fixed in 2.4.21, but 2.4.24 was the latest, so I got that.
In 2.4.24, when I plug the sucker in and turn it on, the internal and external memory show up as the two next available SCSI devices. When I temporarily moved to 2.6.1, I made sure that I had the USB kernel stuff configured the same way. Under 2.6.1, only the internal memory shows up.
Maybe I should be looking elsewhere for the device name other than
Anyone know what happened with the usb-storage module from 2.4.21 to the present? They added support for SD MMC cards, and it works fine in 2.4.24. But, 2.6.1 has a new SCSI driver that gives me up to a 20 per cent boost in throughput, however, the memory card support vanished.
??
Okay, this is the third attempt at a pay-per-play scheme specifically with the DVD format. STOP! God! Consumers don't want anything more than cheap rentals. They don't even like in on cable television, preferring instead to rent at dirt-cheap prices. /me beats MPAA/Disney execs with rolled-up newspaper
Bad! Bad!
Here's the easier method:
We had NN set up on some boxes with Netscape. I found out that after NN shutdown the browser for attempting to access a restricted site, I could just open up the browser again and have a filter-free Internet experience.
By the way, CIPA is unenforceable. The technology to block pornographic or offensive images does not yet exist, because computers can't look at an image an recognize what it is. Even the best existing filters are less effective than a teacher. CIPA: A stupid, feel-good law that should be removed from the books.
How much of a threat could this guy have been? He uses Outlook for his e-mail. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of computer security would steer clear of this program. How much of a threat could he have been? Sounds like one clueless user inventing a hoax to get money out of another clueless user.
From Infoworld:
An Oslo Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a lower court's ruling clearing Jon Lech Johansen of charges related to his development and distribution of DeCSS, a software tool that can be used to crack copy protection on DVDs.
Wrong! CSS does not prevent DVDs from behing copied, it prevents "movies" from being read (played) on machines of which the MPAA does not approve. If this is how the American tech press is going to pick up on it, I'd rather they'd stick to something they understand.
The difference being that there is some legal protection with the stock market, and there are plenty of people who *have* made money on the stock market. Compare this with 419 scam victims. No one has ever made money on them. The stories about these scammers have appeared in just about every major newspaper, and the US government gives out free advice about avoiding overseas scammers.
I'll grant you this though: Direct-sell financial firms made a ton of money on twenty-somethings by reducing investment strategies to basically buying an expensive lottery ticket (on a single stock).
Who in the US administration actually stated that the US opposed a French site because of their opposition to the war in Iraq? What does this have to do with Iraq!? Wouldn't France be the obvious choice? The French have the most experience, e.g. keeping a whole country full of fission reactors humming along.
That's the fault of the administration in a way. A lot of small school systems are hard-pressed to find some kind of technical support within their ranks. It creates less issues with the Unions, and it's cheaper to pay a stipend than to create a new, full-time position with benefits. Unfortunately, they're not looking at the "big picture".
I think what your school system needs is a strong administrator that understands technology. A superintendent is probably in the best position to fix your school's technology program. It really makes my heart sink to think that about 7 years after the initial big push to get technology in schools, your district's administration sees fit to make tech such a low priority that they just throw a stipend at an art teacher, and hope for the best.
This goes a bit beyond annoyance, wouldn't you say? This is actually organized crime. Is this the first public example of someone using a virus/trojan to commit a crime?
Is this the infamous p-trace kernel mod exploit? Still, how was the attacker able to spawn a shell and run the binary to elevate his privileges?
There are a lot of irresponsible idiots out there. If guns are freely available, there will be a lot of irresponsible idiots out there with guns.
/.
This has been brought up many, many times in the gun debate. In the US, guns have been freely available to everyone, including idiots, and have been affordable for most of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, idiots do buy guns, and idiots find a way to pass gun safety courses so they can own guns. The statistics do not show that idiots are responsible for the majority of gun injury and death. The two biggest groups are 1) people who use a gun to commit suicide, and 2) inner-city gang members.
I therefore think that guns should be regulated in much the same way that we don't allow any idiot to drive around with an 18 wheeler.
There is no comparison. An 18 wheeler is a much more complicated device to operate than even the most complicated gun, and arguably much more dangerous. I do believe in mandatory safety training, and it has been in place in some states for decades, but not standardized. It hasn't helped much because the majority of people who use a gun to kill meant to kill.
There are also a lot of pro-gun nuts on
AFAICT, their opinion is: "I want a gun. I hate and fear all authorities, especially if they are called 'government'. I oppose any steps by said government to either make it harder for me to have a gun or to keep track of who has guns."
I have two feelings on this one. On the one hand, I like NICS (national instant-check system) because it keeps felons from getting guns from one source, and has actually been used to catch some criminals on the lam. I like the paperwork, because it helps that track down felons who steal guns and use them to commit crime.
On the other hand, I'm a responsible adult with no criminal record. I've legally owned guns since I was a teenager. I've never had a "close call", and I've never threatened anyone. I drive the speed limit. I help old ladies across the street. I'm nice to kids and small household animals. Why do I have to apply for permits and take tests every time some new legislation is passed? It makes me wonder sometimes, especially in light of things like the "assault weapon ban", which... Well, it just doesn't make any sense. I have no problem with the ATF or the State Police keeping track of what guns I own. Why would I?
I'd say the reason why "more guns equals less crime" is so weak is because it is way too simplistic. I can't think of any study that has resulted in a formula to predict the crime rate based on the number of guns present in the sample. Consider that a single, lawful and peaceful owner could have more than one gun. Wouldn't this skew to results? About the strongest statements for/against gun ownership I've seen are:
For: Something like 80,000 US police reports show a gun was successfully used to fend off an attacker (not necessarily through deadly force). That's something like twice (or more) the rate of homicide involving guns.
Against: The study that showed the likelyhood of mortal injury was greatly increased when a gun was present.
"Less guns means less crime" isn't exactly true either. Was there a lot of gun-related crime between citizens in Saddam's Iraq? Probably not. Was Iraq a modern utopia? Uh... no. The "x guns = x crime" equation entirely ignores driving factors like population density, education level, poverty rate, and quality of police work (with regards to gun traces and preventing felons from acquiring guns). Presence of illegal drugs and crooked FFL dealers likewise drive gun crime.
Both the pro-gun and anti-gun groups have their heads firmly planted between their ass-cheeks if they continue to argue on this abridged view of the issue. The BATFE is probably in the best position to say what are the major driving forces of gun-related crime. The revised equated is probably closer to "more guns in the hands of felons = more crime".