We have an Alfred Hitchcock fan here! I've actually seen the ancient episode where the murderous wife fed the lamb to the police, investigating her home.
It is, isn't it? While Richard Stallman certainly did not write all of it, the document shows his experience and intelligence at dealing with odd interactions. It's what I'd expect from someone so deeply involved in creating gcc and glibc and emacs, and the development of so many other GNU software tools.
Richard does not put in the odd language or strange requirements for no reason: he's usually quite correct in being paranoid of those strange cases, because as an experienced programmer and now an experienced political activist he's seen compelling reasons to handle them specifically. It's why code by older programmers often is longer and more extensive than the simpler, cleaner, but more trusting software written by less experienced developers. The new developers with exciting new approaches often haven't learned the lessons of our experience, and by the time they've done all the patching to avoid the same pitfalls, their code will be as arcane as ours.
Ikarys, you either have a lot of fun trolling this way, or you've not looked into the history of the GPL and the other licenses. Your posting history shows that you enjoy doing these drive-by instigations, but nevertheless, some newer folks on Slashdot may not know enough to realize why some folks say this.
GPL was formed to protect developers and users against restrictive licenses that prevented them from seeing or modifying their programs. It's a bit paranoid, but with reason. The DRM being inflicted on software, the security by obscurity, the locking in of software by refusing to permit non-vendor software to be installed, the refusal to allow others to modify and publish the software, all have been a real problem with other licenses.
GPL has effectively prevent hardware/software lockins, by Netgear and Linksys. The new GPLv3 will block patent lockins, such as those espoused by Microsoft, and DRM lockins, used by Tivo. None of the other licenses would have prevented this. We've also seen very specific abuses of the other licenses already, such as the Microsoft abuse of the MIT license on Kerberos to break non-Microsoft published Kerberos clients. And the GPL has already helped several companies that I'm aware of from simply adding on their own modifications, refusing to publish their modifications, deliberately making it inoperable with other's versions, and locking clients in this way.
The GPL protects the freedom of users, and other developers. The sacrifice of what is not freedom over the software, but power over its modification, comes at the benefit of retaining such power over the rest of GPL freedom, and I find it very handy.
You've also not mentioned that Network Solutions, and companies like them, would automatically 'taste' an inactive domain you did a DNS lookup for. This cost them next to nothing, but the very act of looking up a domain would give it to Network Solutions.
This is like going to a rummage sale and having someone else buy everything in their truck that you look at, and give it back free to the rummage sale manager if you didn't want it. The $0.20/per domain precisely stops this behavior.
There are hackers, and there are hackers. Some of us will blather about things that araen't part of the problem, and lose track of the issue, and forget the person with the problem (such as we're doing here). Others of us will pay attention to the original problem.
In this case, there are only a few industrial grade geo-IP setups that can support a client as large as Yahoo: that's a lot of DNS traffic to deal with. I'm not sure what they are this year (because of all the turnover in the field and companies buying companies or splitting off services, even if they're the same servers and staff as last year). Perhaps Yahoo can help our original poster more directly? And perhaps he can switch to using Google, which may be better about this particular issue? The only use I have for Yahoo is their old www.gamesdomain.com URL, which is now http://videogames.yahoo.com/.
Oh, this kind of problem especially occurs when tracking back spam to notify the spam sender that their machine has been zombified, or notifying an ISP that their mail server has been cracked. It's particularly bad right now because of the recent cracking of Google's 'CAPTCHA' logins, but having some nasty porn pop up on the screen while reviewing a spam isi unsurprising.
There's also www.thepiratebay.org, which is actually a handy site to find clean copies of out-of-date media that you own but is ruined, or new Linux distros on active Bittorrents, but has lots of nasty adult dating sites as advertisers. I used it, successfully, to find RedHat 7.3 CD images to download quickly. (And yes, I did check the md5sum's against those from my old data.)
That's worth a lot, but the lost time while the laptop is re-installed or while any information left on the laptop is replaced after it gets wiped. I've certainly seen this happen. And the software and tools to scrub and re-install laptops to a clean OS image is also quite expensive, which is why that $100 charge seems conservative.
Fortunately for some of us, a Linux network installation, set up once with PXE, is precisely what the doctor ordered for being able to re-image a laptop aat will. Even a DVD with a customized installer can do this quite trivially.
Or the judge decides you've suffered enough, it's not working, you've established that you're just not going to do it and the judge decides to try something else, etc. There are plenty of cases where reporters have defied court orders to reveal a source, for example, despite court orders. As much as a judge loathes being defied, there are numerous cases where it's been done successfully and later courts ruled that it was a matter of constitutiional law that the person did _not_ have to follow that particular order.
That said, I don't think this defendant has a chance in hell of resisting this order, but it will be fun to watch, especially if hte material gets passed along to Wikileaks.
Me, too, especially back in the days of 10Base2 and other co-axial network cabling. Explaining to people using sensitive equipment that they should _not_ bundle their network cables with oscilloscope scope probes with 120V power cables was quite interesting, especiallying explaining that it doesn't matter how well they ground the cables.
Oh, much easier. Just seal the room and pump out all that interfering air. Perhaps we could find a way to convince most of the Stereophile customers to do so all in one big concert hall?
I've known several such Ph.D's. They used to use redheads to do token ring, but she dated the only geek who wasn't frightened off, which is why they don't sell it anymore.
No. There's not a 'War on Viagra', nor a 'War on Mangosteen Juice' nor a 'War on Porn', and they'd easily expand their advertising to fill any gaps left by making the sale of fraudulent medications legal.
Or using Anne P. Mitchell's 'SuretyMail' services. Only a few hundred dollars a month to keep off the DNS blacklists, and she even helped write CAN-SPAM!
I'm afraid that you have powerful motives in protecting spam, and keepiingi CAN-SPAM useless. We only need to look at your business, 'SuretyMail', as described at http://www.suretymail.com/. It's apparently a 'keep your business spam off the blacklists' set of tools. And most spammers simply don't care. They're quite willing to use throwaway accounts or stolen computer time to send their spam, and they've been doing it since the original Canter&Siegel spam.
You are apparently trying to protect your business from being caught by anti-spam legislation. A robust anti-spam law, such as a simple extension of the junk fax laws to cover spam, would probably destroy your business because your legitimate customers would be forced to use opt-in and not face such blacklists. Most email 'accreditation' schemes such as yours are quickly infested by spammers who use it to pretend legitimacy, whether by buying your services or by simply stealing access from people like your customers. It's the same flaw suffered by various 'micropayment' email schemes, and by Microsoft's SenderID program.
Isolation of tasks can be overdone. When I have to ask my supervisor, to call their supervisor, to call their colleague, to call their employee, to call their intern, to answer a design question for me, it's gotten ridiculous. And this is not uncommon where personnel are encouraged to focus on their tiny part of the problem. It also pays quite a lot of my income to have to come in after the fact and clean up the resulting debris when tightly focused engineers are actively discouraged from sharing information with their colleagues in order to remain 'focused'.
I'd relish a Congressional committee on the warpath to investigate the fraudulent claims used to justify the Iraq war, and the AT&T telepphone system tapping, just to name two of the articles of impeachment. An impechment hearing has a lot more leverage to force testimony from CIA and NSA leaders than an ordinary court has.
Oh, my stars and garters. I'm going to recommend that you study a bit more history. For US history, we have the unconstitutional Civil War, and for failed acts of foreign military regime toppling that cost thousands of lives, we have Korea and Vietnam. Iraq has surpassed the US death toll for the first few years in Vietnam, I admit, and the civilian casualties have been even more lopsided than Vietnam. But for greater death tolls by state sponsored slaughter, I suggest you look at Ethiopia. Or the genocides of Native Americans, or plenty of people around the world murdered to take over their nation's resources.
That's because competition affects 'the price people are willing to pay for it', which a previous poster in this thread correctly described.
And the Apple product is _not_ the same. The support for Apple and subtle integration differences make a big difference to many users, just as a BMW handles better and is more reliable than a Volvo of the same overall size and carrying capacity.
> And I bet it could be done for peanuts, which means a huge profit margin beyond the wildest dreams of the commodity PC-compatible market.
Not the huge profit you might think, because competitors would also be making it, and selling it, for peanuts. Unless you were able to lock it up with patents, which involves its own costs in getting them passed and in keeping the lawyers available for the inevitable violations of such an attractive market.
Vista and NVidia makes me shudder anyway: the high-end graphics for Vista are already bothersome enough.
I see the article does not mention what they use for change management. I'm curious what they use: I like Bugzilla myself for ticket tracking, and it's potentially useful for configuration management as well, but needs significant revision to provide that or source control integration.
Most change control systems make odd choices between a business model of selling proprietary clients, strange choices of backend databases, and a focus on managing sales contact information, hardware inventory, software updates, filling out lots of forms for tracking minutes used doing the work, etc., etc. The choices of the change control system affect the workflow quite a lot: so I'm quite curious what they use. Does anyone here on Slashdot know?
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We have an Alfred Hitchcock fan here! I've actually seen the ancient episode where the murderous wife fed the lamb to the police, investigating her home.
It is, isn't it? While Richard Stallman certainly did not write all of it, the document shows his experience and intelligence at dealing with odd interactions. It's what I'd expect from someone so deeply involved in creating gcc and glibc and emacs, and the development of so many other GNU software tools.
Richard does not put in the odd language or strange requirements for no reason: he's usually quite correct in being paranoid of those strange cases, because as an experienced programmer and now an experienced political activist he's seen compelling reasons to handle them specifically. It's why code by older programmers often is longer and more extensive than the simpler, cleaner, but more trusting software written by less experienced developers. The new developers with exciting new approaches often haven't learned the lessons of our experience, and by the time they've done all the patching to avoid the same pitfalls, their code will be as arcane as ours.
Ikarys, you either have a lot of fun trolling this way, or you've not looked into the history of the GPL and the other licenses. Your posting history shows that you enjoy doing these drive-by instigations, but nevertheless, some newer folks on Slashdot may not know enough to realize why some folks say this.
GPL was formed to protect developers and users against restrictive licenses that prevented them from seeing or modifying their programs. It's a bit paranoid, but with reason. The DRM being inflicted on software, the security by obscurity, the locking in of software by refusing to permit non-vendor software to be installed, the refusal to allow others to modify and publish the software, all have been a real problem with other licenses.
GPL has effectively prevent hardware/software lockins, by Netgear and Linksys. The new GPLv3 will block patent lockins, such as those espoused by Microsoft, and DRM lockins, used by Tivo. None of the other licenses would have prevented this. We've also seen very specific abuses of the other licenses already, such as the Microsoft abuse of the MIT license on Kerberos to break non-Microsoft published Kerberos clients. And the GPL has already helped several companies that I'm aware of from simply adding on their own modifications, refusing to publish their modifications, deliberately making it inoperable with other's versions, and locking clients in this way.
The GPL protects the freedom of users, and other developers. The sacrifice of what is not freedom over the software, but power over its modification, comes at the benefit of retaining such power over the rest of GPL freedom, and I find it very handy.
You've also not mentioned that Network Solutions, and companies like them, would automatically 'taste' an inactive domain you did a DNS lookup for. This cost them next to nothing, but the very act of looking up a domain would give it to Network Solutions.
This is like going to a rummage sale and having someone else buy everything in their truck that you look at, and give it back free to the rummage sale manager if you didn't want it. The $0.20/per domain precisely stops this behavior.
There are hackers, and there are hackers. Some of us will blather about things that araen't part of the problem, and lose track of the issue, and forget the person with the problem (such as we're doing here). Others of us will pay attention to the original problem.
In this case, there are only a few industrial grade geo-IP setups that can support a client as large as Yahoo: that's a lot of DNS traffic to deal with. I'm not sure what they are this year (because of all the turnover in the field and companies buying companies or splitting off services, even if they're the same servers and staff as last year). Perhaps Yahoo can help our original poster more directly? And perhaps he can switch to using Google, which may be better about this particular issue? The only use I have for Yahoo is their old www.gamesdomain.com URL, which is now http://videogames.yahoo.com/.
Oh, this kind of problem especially occurs when tracking back spam to notify the spam sender that their machine has been zombified, or notifying an ISP that their mail server has been cracked. It's particularly bad right now because of the recent cracking of Google's 'CAPTCHA' logins, but having some nasty porn pop up on the screen while reviewing a spam isi unsurprising.
There's also www.thepiratebay.org, which is actually a handy site to find clean copies of out-of-date media that you own but is ruined, or new Linux distros on active Bittorrents, but has lots of nasty adult dating sites as advertisers. I used it, successfully, to find RedHat 7.3 CD images to download quickly. (And yes, I did check the md5sum's against those from my old data.)
That's worth a lot, but the lost time while the laptop is re-installed or while any information left on the laptop is replaced after it gets wiped. I've certainly seen this happen. And the software and tools to scrub and re-install laptops to a clean OS image is also quite expensive, which is why that $100 charge seems conservative.
Fortunately for some of us, a Linux network installation, set up once with PXE, is precisely what the doctor ordered for being able to re-image a laptop aat will. Even a DVD with a customized installer can do this quite trivially.
New Zealanders don't import poisonous species on purpose? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_Toad)
Or the judge decides you've suffered enough, it's not working, you've established that you're just not going to do it and the judge decides to try something else, etc. There are plenty of cases where reporters have defied court orders to reveal a source, for example, despite court orders. As much as a judge loathes being defied, there are numerous cases where it's been done successfully and later courts ruled that it was a matter of constitutiional law that the person did _not_ have to follow that particular order.
That said, I don't think this defendant has a chance in hell of resisting this order, but it will be fun to watch, especially if hte material gets passed along to Wikileaks.
Me, too, especially back in the days of 10Base2 and other co-axial network cabling. Explaining to people using sensitive equipment that they should _not_ bundle their network cables with oscilloscope scope probes with 120V power cables was quite interesting, especiallying explaining that it doesn't matter how well they ground the cables.
Oh, much easier. Just seal the room and pump out all that interfering air. Perhaps we could find a way to convince most of the Stereophile customers to do so all in one big concert hall?
I've known several such Ph.D's. They used to use redheads to do token ring, but she dated the only geek who wasn't frightened off, which is why they don't sell it anymore.
No. There's not a 'War on Viagra', nor a 'War on Mangosteen Juice' nor a 'War on Porn', and they'd easily expand their advertising to fill any gaps left by making the sale of fraudulent medications legal.
Unless you've got corn chips and salsa. It's amazing what a stoned roommate will do your cupboards looking for a snack.
Or using Anne P. Mitchell's 'SuretyMail' services. Only a few hundred dollars a month to keep off the DNS blacklists, and she even helped write CAN-SPAM!
You apparently don't have to handle mail to 'postmaster' or 'admin'. It gets pretty hard to let the real email through.
I'm afraid that you have powerful motives in protecting spam, and keepiingi CAN-SPAM useless. We only need to look at your business, 'SuretyMail', as described at http://www.suretymail.com/. It's apparently a 'keep your business spam off the blacklists' set of tools. And most spammers simply don't care. They're quite willing to use throwaway accounts or stolen computer time to send their spam, and they've been doing it since the original Canter&Siegel spam.
You are apparently trying to protect your business from being caught by anti-spam legislation. A robust anti-spam law, such as a simple extension of the junk fax laws to cover spam, would probably destroy your business because your legitimate customers would be forced to use opt-in and not face such blacklists. Most email 'accreditation' schemes such as yours are quickly infested by spammers who use it to pretend legitimacy, whether by buying your services or by simply stealing access from people like your customers. It's the same flaw suffered by various 'micropayment' email schemes, and by Microsoft's SenderID program.
Do you see some flaw in my analysis?
Isolation of tasks can be overdone. When I have to ask my supervisor, to call their supervisor, to call their colleague, to call their employee, to call their intern, to answer a design question for me, it's gotten ridiculous. And this is not uncommon where personnel are encouraged to focus on their tiny part of the problem. It also pays quite a lot of my income to have to come in after the fact and clean up the resulting debris when tightly focused engineers are actively discouraged from sharing information with their colleagues in order to remain 'focused'.
Some of us do. Have you ever tried to get a Winmodem working reliably under _any_ operating system?
I'd relish a Congressional committee on the warpath to investigate the fraudulent claims used to justify the Iraq war, and the AT&T telepphone system tapping, just to name two of the articles of impeachment. An impechment hearing has a lot more leverage to force testimony from CIA and NSA leaders than an ordinary court has.
Oh, my stars and garters. I'm going to recommend that you study a bit more history. For US history, we have the unconstitutional Civil War, and for failed acts of foreign military regime toppling that cost thousands of lives, we have Korea and Vietnam. Iraq has surpassed the US death toll for the first few years in Vietnam, I admit, and the civilian casualties have been even more lopsided than Vietnam. But for greater death tolls by state sponsored slaughter, I suggest you look at Ethiopia. Or the genocides of Native Americans, or plenty of people around the world murdered to take over their nation's resources.
That's because competition affects 'the price people are willing to pay for it', which a previous poster in this thread correctly described.
And the Apple product is _not_ the same. The support for Apple and subtle integration differences make a big difference to many users, just as a BMW handles better and is more reliable than a Volvo of the same overall size and carrying capacity.
> And I bet it could be done for peanuts, which means a huge profit margin beyond the wildest dreams of the commodity PC-compatible market.
Not the huge profit you might think, because competitors would also be making it, and selling it, for peanuts. Unless you were able to lock it up with patents, which involves its own costs in getting them passed and in keeping the lawyers available for the inevitable violations of such an attractive market.
Vista and NVidia makes me shudder anyway: the high-end graphics for Vista are already bothersome enough.
You mean like this? http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
I see the article does not mention what they use for change management. I'm curious what they use: I like Bugzilla myself for ticket tracking, and it's potentially useful for configuration management as well, but needs significant revision to provide that or source control integration.
Most change control systems make odd choices between a business model of selling proprietary clients, strange choices of backend databases, and a focus on managing sales contact information, hardware inventory, software updates, filling out lots of forms for tracking minutes used doing the work, etc., etc. The choices of the change control system affect the workflow quite a lot: so I'm quite curious what they use. Does anyone here on Slashdot know?