The whole concept of depriving people of the right to travel just because they are vaguely "suspected" of something stinks.
Not to split hairs, but you don't have a right to fly in the first place. Just like you don't have the right to drive, or the right to sit in Central Park with a bomb.
Certain powerful things (cars, planes, bombs) are very useful, but very dangerous. As a way of dealing with that, the government doesn't forbid them outright, but regulates and licenses them.
Yes, you can drive a car, but only if we're convinced you're competent enough to do it without crashing it into other people.
Yes, you can have explosives, but only if we're convinced you know what you're doing with them and have a legitimate, non-violent need for them.
Yes, you (the airlines, not the passengers) can fly planes over the country, filled with people, but only if we're convinced you're securing those planes and that they won't crash, either accidently or from hijacking.
I agree that the current security is too much intrusion and inconvenience and cost for too little actual security, but that's an efficiency issue, a cost issue. It's not violating your right to fly, because you never had one.
Actually, having worked network support in a large government department, I can tell you that his "connections" probably didn't help as much as the article description implies.
Where I work, about once a month or so some user with a problem flips out and goes directly to the head of the entire department. By the time he has forwarded the issue down the chain three or four steps to the relevant group of people, you're actually left with less relevant information about the problem than if they had just called the regular helpdesk, and we basically have to start the process over.
The article makes it sound like Kennedy's resolution was somehow expedited because he had an "in" with Ridge. I doubt Ridge likes him very much, so it's questionable how much of a favor he gets from that "connection". But ultimately, I wonder if things would actually have gone any slower if he had simply responded calmly to the misunderstanding and gone through normal channels.
These theories all seem backwards to me. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about stock markets can speak to my misunderstandings:
First of all, based on the way a dutch auction works, (you take bids on a total of X shares, and you sell to the top X bids) shouldn't lowering the number of shares offered have simply chopped off the bottom portion of the price range? Why did lowering the number of shares offered result in a lower price?
Secondly, why would a lower price and a bigger runup benefit Google? If they sell a bunch of stock to Alan for $100M, and it is immediately resold to Bob for $1B, Google has made $100M and Alan has made $900M. If Google just sold it for $1B to begin with, they make $1B. Why would they conspire to create a runup, when doing so costs them money?
I agree that it has probably gotten a bit more press than it really deserves, but here's why I think it's more significant than your average IPO:
Several years back, we had a big new tech company like this going public pretty much every month. Most people refer to that time as the dot-com era or the bubble. Most dot-coms died, and the bubble burst. I doubt that you're unaware of this, but to get a clear illustration look at a 5 year chart of the NASDAQ. In 2000, it was around 5,000, now it's at 1,800.
In the past couple years, people have basically been holding their breath. There hasn't been vast movement in the tech sector like there was back then. It's been relatively slow, with nobody running to fast for fear that they might crash into walls like they did back then.
The Google IPO is one of the first big new tech company IPOs since the bubble burst, so people are looking at it like it could be either a new beginning, or the final nail in the coffin of the dot-coms. Most of the experienced analysts and brokers are saying the same things about Google that were said about Amazon and Yahoo and all the big dot-coms: it's Profit/Earnings ratio nowhere near justifies the stock price, and that this current over-valuation will lead to a future plunge. Everyone else is watching anxiously to see if that's true.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any).
Much like posting content in English instead of machine code makes little sense? It's not about how the Internet works, it's about why it works and who it works for. The Internet is used by human beings who live in geographical (and more importantly, legal and political) areas.
If your website sells products that you can only ship domestically, then it makes sense to categorize it by region. Or in this case, if your website is funded by the taxes of one country only, then it makes sense to only implement its streaming to that country.
People who talk about the Internet as "cyberspace", as though it was some alternate world, some parallel dimension separate from our physical world are missing important points. The Internet as we know it is made up of servers in physical locations, paid for by citizens of specific countries using certain currencies, connected via ISPs and telecom companies who are located in specific countries and subject to certain regulations and taxes, and it is accessed by people living in certain places and subject to certain laws. In this case, the content is being hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Yes, it's fantastic that the Internet lets me communicate rapidly and cheaply all around the world. But that doesn't mean that it is somehow independent of geography, politics, and law.
Depends on how they're set up. If they were set up to fake their request, like "Bob's BotOS version 1.337" then that would obviously be classified as "other", but I would expect large datacenter systems doing this (maybe a company's website uses a script to query Google for information) would be likely to run on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc... Some flavor of Unix, not Linux.
I don't think that the 5% other statistic is that unreasonable, but I do agree it's frustrating that they took it down rather than responding to the question.
What you want is impossible. It is impossible to positively identify an operating system based on the HTTP requests it sends to your search engine. Even if you specifically queried the client, it could lie.
Yes, the Zeitgeist statistics were imperfect, but there is no realistic possibility of better, more credible statistics.
I'm glad the numbers are gone. I'd like to see a properly-done usage study around here some day.
Yeah, hold your breath for that one. I'm sure someone with access to more data and credibility than Google is gonna step up and do this for you any minute now. They'll also recreate their study every month to indicate changing trends instead of just a one-time snapshot, and they'll be a non-profit organization whose funding will come entirely from anonymous donations, so that people won't accuse them of being paid for by Microsoft and thus biased towards Windows.
It's not just direct deterrence from the OS itself, but also indirect deterrence in the form of lowering the signal to noise ratio.
I have a sort of mental fuse which blows when I'm reading a comment or article that seems to be more rhetoric than actual information. Most people do, though each person has a different threshold and responds to different triggers.
If I come across the term M$, you're about 90% of the way to blowing that fuse. The term FUD gets you to about 50%. The term "illegal monopoly" puts you around 70%. "Windoze" weighs in around 90%.
I've read stuff by loyal Microsoft users, and the worst impression I've gotten from them was that they were ignorant of some important information. When reading stuff by loyal Linux users, I'm often left with the impression that they are immature and have emotional biases, which would prevent them from accepting anything Microsoft related even if they were made aware of new information. That makes me less likely to read information from Linux advocates, and that's a really bad thing for Linux. There's important information about these operating systems which you need to get out there, and you won't be able to if you paint yourself as a zealot.
Passive-interfaces will still process incoming OSPF packets, it just won't send any out. From reading the bug description, it doesn't sound like an adjacency is required, so the first two suggestions, while sound practices, wouldn't protect you from this bug.
You are correct that OSPF Authentication will protect you, and that's Cisco's currently suggested "workaround" for this problem.
That was the part that confused me. In the dutch auction, if they decrease the number of shares they're offering, shouldn't the bottom part of the price range move up, and the top number stay the same?
I want to meet highly intelligent, thoughtful people. There tends to be a limited number of those per geographic area. Those limitations are removed online.
Why is it that every story that has the word job anywhere has to contain "dot.com hay day" of the late 90's
For the same reason that most major stories about terrorism refer to 9/11: It's a massive, world-changing event in the history of the field you're discussing, and it was less than a decade ago. As a result, current events in that field are still influenced by the wake left by that event.
Real world events aren't like TV shows; you can't just turn them off because they've gotten tedious and you're sick of them.
Yes, but a Linux Solutions Sales Engineer with 1 year of experience makes a better Linux Solutions Sales Engineer than an AIX Printing Software Programmer with 10 years of experience.
The firings likely represented mostly positions that were becoming less in demand, and the hirings represent ones that are becoming more in demand. Experience and knowledge aren't just scalar quantities.
There's short term $ and long term $. Right now it looks like MSFT is grabbing for any sales they can get today, while ignoring the long-term prospects for their platform.
I gotta disagree with you there. From what I've seen, they toss free copies around to schools and governments as much as possible, and they tried their best to get people off Win9x and onto WinNT ASAP, but to no avail. Many of their policies are about creating new platforms and locking users into them. I don't think they're neglecting the long-term view, but even if they made slip-ups in that respect, they've got the cash reserves to afford tearing down all their current policies and rebuilding if things aren't working.
I haven't been following MSFT's recent numbers but I know the company, and I know that it's not a place I'd put my money.
That's your call, but I don't think the rest of the market agrees with you. I think the posters here decrying Microsoft's moral decay are on firmer ground than those predicting its financial downfall.
In the case of MS it only takes a handful of people to add up to a controlling stake in the company
This isn't about control. Yes, it's true that if Microsoft stock tanks, Gates and Allen and Ballmer would lose more money than your average investor. On the other hand, if you're the average investor and your retirement drops from $300k to $100k, that's horrible. If the Gates fortune drops from $30B to $10B, I think he'll be okay.
Nonesense. The top tier of MS are pathological liars and have proven themselves to be without any morals whatsoever. The are scum of the lowest order.
I almost didn't respond because this pathetically narrow-minded statement makes the post seem like a garden-vareity slashdot troll. But you did at least bother quoting and making a point or two, so I'll respond in kind. Gates alone has given vast amounts to charity. You can say "Yeah, but that's about tax-deductions and publicity" and without extended research, I can't logically refute your statement. But I don't believe it either. Besides which, it doesn't matter all that much. A starving man who's fed doesn't starve simply because his food was tax-deductible or made the donor look good. Gates' philanthropy has done a lot of good, whether you attribute it to pure motives or not.
But the bottom line is, I challenge you to name examples of ways in which Ballmer, Gates, and Allen are "without morals" and "scum of the lowest order". Failing to patch buffer-overflows isn't evil. Throwing your weight around to gain market share isn't evil. Genocide is evil. Slavery is evil. Rape is evil. If you have some genuine issue with these people, not just "Windoze is teh sux0r!!1!" or "They say the FUD about Linux!" or Monopoly! Big corporation!" then bring in some cites, not rhetoric.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole concept of depriving people of the right to travel just because they are vaguely "suspected" of something stinks.
Not to split hairs, but you don't have a right to fly in the first place. Just like you don't have the right to drive, or the right to sit in Central Park with a bomb.
Certain powerful things (cars, planes, bombs) are very useful, but very dangerous. As a way of dealing with that, the government doesn't forbid them outright, but regulates and licenses them.
Yes, you can drive a car, but only if we're convinced you're competent enough to do it without crashing it into other people.
Yes, you can have explosives, but only if we're convinced you know what you're doing with them and have a legitimate, non-violent need for them.
Yes, you (the airlines, not the passengers) can fly planes over the country, filled with people, but only if we're convinced you're securing those planes and that they won't crash, either accidently or from hijacking.
I agree that the current security is too much intrusion and inconvenience and cost for too little actual security, but that's an efficiency issue, a cost issue. It's not violating your right to fly, because you never had one.
Actually, having worked network support in a large government department, I can tell you that his "connections" probably didn't help as much as the article description implies.
Where I work, about once a month or so some user with a problem flips out and goes directly to the head of the entire department. By the time he has forwarded the issue down the chain three or four steps to the relevant group of people, you're actually left with less relevant information about the problem than if they had just called the regular helpdesk, and we basically have to start the process over.
The article makes it sound like Kennedy's resolution was somehow expedited because he had an "in" with Ridge. I doubt Ridge likes him very much, so it's questionable how much of a favor he gets from that "connection". But ultimately, I wonder if things would actually have gone any slower if he had simply responded calmly to the misunderstanding and gone through normal channels.
These theories all seem backwards to me. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about stock markets can speak to my misunderstandings:
First of all, based on the way a dutch auction works, (you take bids on a total of X shares, and you sell to the top X bids) shouldn't lowering the number of shares offered have simply chopped off the bottom portion of the price range? Why did lowering the number of shares offered result in a lower price?
Secondly, why would a lower price and a bigger runup benefit Google? If they sell a bunch of stock to Alan for $100M, and it is immediately resold to Bob for $1B, Google has made $100M and Alan has made $900M. If Google just sold it for $1B to begin with, they make $1B. Why would they conspire to create a runup, when doing so costs them money?
I agree that it has probably gotten a bit more press than it really deserves, but here's why I think it's more significant than your average IPO:
Several years back, we had a big new tech company like this going public pretty much every month. Most people refer to that time as the dot-com era or the bubble. Most dot-coms died, and the bubble burst. I doubt that you're unaware of this, but to get a clear illustration look at a 5 year chart of the NASDAQ. In 2000, it was around 5,000, now it's at 1,800.
In the past couple years, people have basically been holding their breath. There hasn't been vast movement in the tech sector like there was back then. It's been relatively slow, with nobody running to fast for fear that they might crash into walls like they did back then.
The Google IPO is one of the first big new tech company IPOs since the bubble burst, so people are looking at it like it could be either a new beginning, or the final nail in the coffin of the dot-coms. Most of the experienced analysts and brokers are saying the same things about Google that were said about Amazon and Yahoo and all the big dot-coms: it's Profit/Earnings ratio nowhere near justifies the stock price, and that this current over-valuation will lead to a future plunge. Everyone else is watching anxiously to see if that's true.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any).
Much like posting content in English instead of machine code makes little sense? It's not about how the Internet works, it's about why it works and who it works for. The Internet is used by human beings who live in geographical (and more importantly, legal and political) areas.
If your website sells products that you can only ship domestically, then it makes sense to categorize it by region. Or in this case, if your website is funded by the taxes of one country only, then it makes sense to only implement its streaming to that country.
People who talk about the Internet as "cyberspace", as though it was some alternate world, some parallel dimension separate from our physical world are missing important points. The Internet as we know it is made up of servers in physical locations, paid for by citizens of specific countries using certain currencies, connected via ISPs and telecom companies who are located in specific countries and subject to certain regulations and taxes, and it is accessed by people living in certain places and subject to certain laws. In this case, the content is being hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Yes, it's fantastic that the Internet lets me communicate rapidly and cheaply all around the world. But that doesn't mean that it is somehow independent of geography, politics, and law.
Depends on how they're set up.
If they were set up to fake their request, like "Bob's BotOS version 1.337" then that would obviously be classified as "other", but I would expect large datacenter systems doing this (maybe a company's website uses a script to query Google for information) would be likely to run on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc... Some flavor of Unix, not Linux.
I don't think that the 5% other statistic is that unreasonable, but I do agree it's frustrating that they took it down rather than responding to the question.
What you want is impossible.
It is impossible to positively identify an operating system based on the HTTP requests it sends to your search engine. Even if you specifically queried the client, it could lie.
Yes, the Zeitgeist statistics were imperfect, but there is no realistic possibility of better, more credible statistics.
and your question raises my question:
How fucked up would your alternate society be?
What's your solution to this problem? No lawsuits allowed at all? "Interesting" information is legally protected?
It's easy to say "your society is fucked up", because it's really hard to produce a better one.
I'm glad the numbers are gone. I'd like to see a properly-done usage study around here some day.
Yeah, hold your breath for that one. I'm sure someone with access to more data and credibility than Google is gonna step up and do this for you any minute now. They'll also recreate their study every month to indicate changing trends instead of just a one-time snapshot, and they'll be a non-profit organization whose funding will come entirely from anonymous donations, so that people won't accuse them of being paid for by Microsoft and thus biased towards Windows.
It's not just direct deterrence from the OS itself, but also indirect deterrence in the form of lowering the signal to noise ratio.
I have a sort of mental fuse which blows when I'm reading a comment or article that seems to be more rhetoric than actual information. Most people do, though each person has a different threshold and responds to different triggers.
If I come across the term M$, you're about 90% of the way to blowing that fuse. The term FUD gets you to about 50%. The term "illegal monopoly" puts you around 70%. "Windoze" weighs in around 90%.
I've read stuff by loyal Microsoft users, and the worst impression I've gotten from them was that they were ignorant of some important information. When reading stuff by loyal Linux users, I'm often left with the impression that they are immature and have emotional biases, which would prevent them from accepting anything Microsoft related even if they were made aware of new information. That makes me less likely to read information from Linux advocates, and that's a really bad thing for Linux. There's important information about these operating systems which you need to get out there, and you won't be able to if you paint yourself as a zealot.
Passive-interfaces will still process incoming OSPF packets, it just won't send any out. From reading the bug description, it doesn't sound like an adjacency is required, so the first two suggestions, while sound practices, wouldn't protect you from this bug.
You are correct that OSPF Authentication will protect you, and that's Cisco's currently suggested "workaround" for this problem.
Great post, and I agree that service is probably the single most important concern, but I'll add two more:
1. Finding admins. Go to monster.com and search for CCNA, CCNP, CCIE. Now search for "OpenBSD, WAN, BGP" Compare number of hits.
2. Performance. Hot swappable line cards running CEF on ASICs are going to vastly outperform even specialized PCI cards.
So what? It's still much cheaper than a real Cisco router. 8-)
Spoken like someone who has never had to calculate the cost of a large-scale service outage.
As Democrats, or Bush-opponents or whatever, what do they expect to gain?
To piss off a lot of Republicans.
A lot of protest is more about venting emotion than effecting change.
That was the part that confused me. In the dutch auction, if they decrease the number of shares they're offering, shouldn't the bottom part of the price range move up, and the top number stay the same?
This is perhaps the saddest thread I've even read on slashdot. Well, okay, at least this week.
Not just for its content, but for its moderation.
Of course, the truly paranoid would be crazy to use LOAF.
Aren't the truly paranoid already crazy based on their being truly paranoid?
I want to meet highly intelligent, thoughtful people. There tends to be a limited number of those per geographic area. Those limitations are removed online.
You must be new here.
Why is it that every story that has the word job anywhere has to contain "dot.com hay day" of the late 90's
For the same reason that most major stories about terrorism refer to 9/11: It's a massive, world-changing event in the history of the field you're discussing, and it was less than a decade ago. As a result, current events in that field are still influenced by the wake left by that event.
Real world events aren't like TV shows; you can't just turn them off because they've gotten tedious and you're sick of them.
Yes, but a Linux Solutions Sales Engineer with 1 year of experience makes a better Linux Solutions Sales Engineer than an AIX Printing Software Programmer with 10 years of experience.
The firings likely represented mostly positions that were becoming less in demand, and the hirings represent ones that are becoming more in demand. Experience and knowledge aren't just scalar quantities.
Yeah, 'cause everyone knows more Internet bandwidth is used on geek-news sites than porn sites.
Just release Magic-Eye drivers!
That's odd, my first thought was of a Futurama reference too, but I came up with:
Zoidberg: They said I probably shouldn't be a surgeon
Professor: The poo-poo'ed my electric-frankfurter!
Leela: They said I probably shouldn't fly, with just one eye
Bender: I am Bender, please insert girder.
There's short term $ and long term $. Right now it looks like MSFT is grabbing for any sales they can get today, while ignoring the long-term prospects for their platform.
I gotta disagree with you there. From what I've seen, they toss free copies around to schools and governments as much as possible, and they tried their best to get people off Win9x and onto WinNT ASAP, but to no avail. Many of their policies are about creating new platforms and locking users into them. I don't think they're neglecting the long-term view, but even if they made slip-ups in that respect, they've got the cash reserves to afford tearing down all their current policies and rebuilding if things aren't working.
I haven't been following MSFT's recent numbers but I know the company, and I know that it's not a place I'd put my money.
That's your call, but I don't think the rest of the market agrees with you. I think the posters here decrying Microsoft's moral decay are on firmer ground than those predicting its financial downfall.
In the case of MS it only takes a handful of people to add up to a controlling stake in the company
This isn't about control. Yes, it's true that if Microsoft stock tanks, Gates and Allen and Ballmer would lose more money than your average investor. On the other hand, if you're the average investor and your retirement drops from $300k to $100k, that's horrible. If the Gates fortune drops from $30B to $10B, I think he'll be okay.
Nonesense. The top tier of MS are pathological liars and have proven themselves to be without any morals whatsoever. The are scum of the lowest order.
I almost didn't respond because this pathetically narrow-minded statement makes the post seem like a garden-vareity slashdot troll. But you did at least bother quoting and making a point or two, so I'll respond in kind. Gates alone has given vast amounts to charity. You can say "Yeah, but that's about tax-deductions and publicity" and without extended research, I can't logically refute your statement. But I don't believe it either. Besides which, it doesn't matter all that much. A starving man who's fed doesn't starve simply because his food was tax-deductible or made the donor look good. Gates' philanthropy has done a lot of good, whether you attribute it to pure motives or not.
But the bottom line is, I challenge you to name examples of ways in which Ballmer, Gates, and Allen are "without morals" and "scum of the lowest order". Failing to patch buffer-overflows isn't evil. Throwing your weight around to gain market share isn't evil. Genocide is evil. Slavery is evil. Rape is evil. If you have some genuine issue with these people, not just "Windoze is teh sux0r!!1!" or "They say the FUD about Linux!" or Monopoly! Big corporation!" then bring in some cites, not rhetoric.