Vendor: Why would you not want glossy? It looks cool! Customer:...but I want to *use* the product. Vendor:...but it looks cool! Everyone wants cool, right? Customer:...
I kind of see it both ways. Everyone expects a company to understand its customers, and to keep up with customer trends. Even when those trends include "people are pirating music because they don't want to pay for it" or "people in Singapore are pirating software because the licensing is too expensive."...yet no one wants their purchasing behaviors tracked, employee activities mined, etc. Employers want the freedom to be creative with the information retrieved so that they can more easily change with the market, employees and customers want any information they provide to be at least anonymous and preferably full disclosure on how the information is used.
Since I'm developing product requirements, that kind of information si very useful to me. A market research company gathers it and my department buys the research so that we can develop better products. Most of the information gathered is from people who have volunteered to share how the product is used. Try getting a software pirate to do that! So how do you gather data that's truly unbiased? I'm not a hypocrite... you'll find a lot of information about me online; yet I share the same concerns about identity theft as everyone else. Just what piece of personal information can be used to identify me vs. an imposter if everything the imposter needs can be learned from a spock.com, MySpace, or facebook profile?
Sears' spyware idea is extreme by any measure. There are less intrusive ways of gathering data about potential business opportunities. Referring URL tags, for example. Gathering data from the outside about who visited from a sears domain address as another....but just where do you draw the line?
Re:SETI won't find anybody (with current tech)
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
Right, and it was a known flaw from the conception of the project. That's why SETI was intended as a short term project (only a year or two from what I recall). I remember reading that aliens would have to really want to communicate with us for us to pick anything up with our current technology.
Still, at least we're listening.
Is it worth it? Not with the current technology. Nor do I think we're ready to grasp beings on other planets; most of us are still trying to deal with beings on other continents on the *same* planet, and not doing that very well, mind you (even if we aren't talking about wars, most international companies do not think beyond their fellow employees in the same company -- thinking across cultural differences is just not something we're good at doing).
Blisters appear when the air pressure and friction is enough that physical decay occurs in a way that is similar to solids rubbing against each other. Except that unlike a solid, a gas is fine enough to get under the surface and fill an area under the surface until it pops, creating a blister.
In this article, matter is traveling without abrasive friction from air -- the matter travels through a vacuum. So "blistering speed" isn't accurate when speaking of speeds in a vacuum....unless tachyons or other particles found in space can create the same effect.
FWIW (For What It's Worth), OSDL has become like SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) or KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). What the acronym once stood for is meaningless today. IIRC (If I Recall Correctly) OSDL used to hardware hosting organization -- a way that developers could get access to hardware in their lab. OSDL doesn't do that any more (that I know of anyway), and instead is best known as Linus's employer, and a membership consortia where the big companies who want to see Linux succeed work together to reduce adoption barriers.
Regardless, since OSDL and the FSG (Free Standards Group, maintainer of the LSB (Linux Standards Base) spec) have now merged, it's all the Linux Foundation (LF) now anyway.
Anyhow, because of all this, I'm now going back to not spelling out TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) effective as of the end of this sentence. L8R
Biometrics not the solution
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There's a way to exploit just about anything. It's guaranteed someone is going to invent a way to fake a fingerprint or a retina to gain access. At least a password can be changed once guessed. I'd like to see you try changing your fingerprints.
I think the closest we've seen to this so far is Disney's Circle Vision in Disneyland, except that rather than a simple 360 video, we're talking about spherical video.
What do the inventors of the following weapons have in common?
shot gun
machine gun
atomic bomb
Answer: Each thought that if they invented a weapon powerful enough, it might actually end war because the weapon would spill so much blood that no one would use it. That we would finally wake up and realize what we've done....and in each case, it just led to more bloodshed. When will we learn?
If you can't get the name of the telemarketing company they're with, I would go after the company whose products that person represents....but I've never had to do that.
Or this one, which describes how to get the information you would need to take them to court (and earn a little cash) if they didn't put you on their do-not-call list.
That's what I was thinking. If they don't like how the history is stored, they're free to rewrite it. Heck, maybe they can make it even easier to read than Internet Explorer. Hire one developer to set it up for them and push it back out to the Firefox code base.
For that matter, they could easily have someone code something that reads the Firefox/Opera history files and converts to a PDF or something.:-P
I wish there was a -1 "naiive" rating. Sure, a Linux box will keep running once installed. So will Windows. There are security and firewall patches to apply to Linux machines almost as often. True, it's not attacked as often as Windows, but you can spend the same amount of time (and money) on Linux server maintenance that you do on Windows.
Everyone claims lower TCO. The real TCO calculation is completely dependent on how the machine is going to be used, and what is important (in terms of protection) to the user. Sometimes Linux will come out ahead, sometimes Windows. What I'd like to see is an article comparing solution stack TCO (from hardware through OS all the way to the cost of maintenance of the applications installed). That at least will be a little more accurate.
After investigating this further, I found I was incorrect. QT can be redistributed at no charge, but if you want to write a commercial application based on QT, you have to pay Trolltech the licensing fees. Sorry for the confusion (and bad memory).
Give the Netscape 8 browser a whirl. It's Windows-only, unfortunately, but it can go back and forth between the Firefox and IE engines. Turn off what you don't need and you'll be set!
I found your post rather hard to follow, but GPL encourages redistribution. QT is dual-licensed, meaning you have to comply with any restrictions of the GPL + the QT license = redistribute it all you want as long as you purchase a license for QT.
The restriction of redistributing QT is because of QT's license, not because of GPL.
Interesting. I'd heard information to the contrary regarding LSB compliance. I guess I'd heard from a misinformed resource.
As to the location of configuration files (and libraries), that's part of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which is included in the LSB by reference.
That's part of what the LSB is supposed to be about. Standardizing the ABI, and making sure that the distribution passes a test suite across the board. Even Debian is LSB-compliant....and if the LSB doesn't go far enough, I'm hopeful that a combination of the LSB and the DCCA will provide enough of a standard that compatibility and stability are assured.
We also run into the fact that no distribution wants to be held to someone else's standards. It cramps their style and then they choose not to participate in the governing organization (especially if they're big enough that they believe they should be *setting* the standards). Trust me, I've been through this process with some of them.
DCCA is a baby step toward making Debian viable for the non-developers. It's a good step. As for its success and what its true role will end up being in the Debian community, it's early yet and time will tell.
Continental didn't use the Massport system, they would incur costs of maintaining their own network. So pay Massport some fraction of what it would cost to manage that network and work out a login by which the frequent fliers can have access to the free network and Massport can still manage the firewalls to its liking. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
inanimate carbon rod: Simpsons episode in which Homer Simpson used an inanimate carbon rod to close the door of a space shuttle during the return to Earth. The rod earned a parade and was pictured on the front of Time Magazine "In Rod We Trust". More here. As for the song reference, I don't know.
If I'd seen this before it went public I would have e-mailed the on-duty editor saying that there's a major problem with the headline. So let's clear the air and get the announcement right --
Novell's announcement was not that they're open sourcing SUSE. SUSE is already GPL. Novell is essentially announcing this:
The goal of OpenSUSE is to create a community-supported distribution similar to Fedora. Also, like Fedora, this becomes a code base that the developers of the commercially-supported distributions can pull from.
Mod up parent. A tax keeps pornography in check and makes the Internet a cleaner place to be. A tax that raises money to address the problem of child pornography -- all the better....but 25% on all porn?? My heavens that's a lot, especially considering the amount of money flowing through that industry. Who's buying the BMWs with the leftover money?
I should also note... Novell Linux Desktop is for the commercial desktop market and isn't intended to be a workstation product like RHEL WS is.
Yeah yeah; "desktop" and "workstation" are both clients, but us marketing people see the world a little differently. You wouldn't run a CAD program on an eMachine, would you?
You mean that WS used to stand for workstation. In fact, they changed it from "workstation" to WS because they wanted the product to be for more things than just workstations. For example, cluster nodes.
Regardless, SLES (despite the name) is Novell's enterprise code base and goes beyond servers. In fact, Novell Linux Desktop is based on SLES.
Slashdot Mirror
Vendor: Why would you not want glossy? It looks cool! ...but I want to *use* the product. ...but it looks cool! Everyone wants cool, right? ...
Customer:
Vendor:
Customer:
I kind of see it both ways. Everyone expects a company to understand its customers, and to keep up with customer trends. Even when those trends include "people are pirating music because they don't want to pay for it" or "people in Singapore are pirating software because the licensing is too expensive." ...yet no one wants their purchasing behaviors tracked, employee activities mined, etc. Employers want the freedom to be creative with the information retrieved so that they can more easily change with the market, employees and customers want any information they provide to be at least anonymous and preferably full disclosure on how the information is used.
...but just where do you draw the line?
Since I'm developing product requirements, that kind of information si very useful to me. A market research company gathers it and my department buys the research so that we can develop better products. Most of the information gathered is from people who have volunteered to share how the product is used. Try getting a software pirate to do that! So how do you gather data that's truly unbiased? I'm not a hypocrite... you'll find a lot of information about me online; yet I share the same concerns about identity theft as everyone else. Just what piece of personal information can be used to identify me vs. an imposter if everything the imposter needs can be learned from a spock.com, MySpace, or facebook profile?
Sears' spyware idea is extreme by any measure. There are less intrusive ways of gathering data about potential business opportunities. Referring URL tags, for example. Gathering data from the outside about who visited from a sears domain address as another.
Right, and it was a known flaw from the conception of the project. That's why SETI was intended as a short term project (only a year or two from what I recall). I remember reading that aliens would have to really want to communicate with us for us to pick anything up with our current technology. Still, at least we're listening. Is it worth it? Not with the current technology. Nor do I think we're ready to grasp beings on other planets; most of us are still trying to deal with beings on other continents on the *same* planet, and not doing that very well, mind you (even if we aren't talking about wars, most international companies do not think beyond their fellow employees in the same company -- thinking across cultural differences is just not something we're good at doing).
Blisters appear when the air pressure and friction is enough that physical decay occurs in a way that is similar to solids rubbing against each other. Except that unlike a solid, a gas is fine enough to get under the surface and fill an area under the surface until it pops, creating a blister.
...unless tachyons or other particles found in space can create the same effect.
In this article, matter is traveling without abrasive friction from air -- the matter travels through a vacuum. So "blistering speed" isn't accurate when speaking of speeds in a vacuum.
FWIW (For What It's Worth), OSDL has become like SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) or KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). What the acronym once stood for is meaningless today. IIRC (If I Recall Correctly) OSDL used to hardware hosting organization -- a way that developers could get access to hardware in their lab. OSDL doesn't do that any more (that I know of anyway), and instead is best known as Linus's employer, and a membership consortia where the big companies who want to see Linux succeed work together to reduce adoption barriers.
Regardless, since OSDL and the FSG (Free Standards Group, maintainer of the LSB (Linux Standards Base) spec) have now merged, it's all the Linux Foundation (LF) now anyway.
Anyhow, because of all this, I'm now going back to not spelling out TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) effective as of the end of this sentence. L8R
There's a way to exploit just about anything. It's guaranteed someone is going to invent a way to fake a fingerprint or a retina to gain access. At least a password can be changed once guessed. I'd like to see you try changing your fingerprints.
I think the closest we've seen to this so far is Disney's Circle Vision in Disneyland, except that rather than a simple 360 video, we're talking about spherical video.
Answer: Each thought that if they invented a weapon powerful enough, it might actually end war because the weapon would spill so much blood that no one would use it. That we would finally wake up and realize what we've done.
If you can't get the name of the telemarketing company they're with, I would go after the company whose products that person represents. ...but I've never had to do that.
Which was great until I gained a mother-in-law that blocks Caller ID and doesn't understand *82.
Or this one, which describes how to get the information you would need to take them to court (and earn a little cash) if they didn't put you on their do-not-call list.
That's what I was thinking. If they don't like how the history is stored, they're free to rewrite it. Heck, maybe they can make it even easier to read than Internet Explorer. Hire one developer to set it up for them and push it back out to the Firefox code base.
:-P
For that matter, they could easily have someone code something that reads the Firefox/Opera history files and converts to a PDF or something.
I wish there was a -1 "naiive" rating. Sure, a Linux box will keep running once installed. So will Windows. There are security and firewall patches to apply to Linux machines almost as often. True, it's not attacked as often as Windows, but you can spend the same amount of time (and money) on Linux server maintenance that you do on Windows.
Everyone claims lower TCO. The real TCO calculation is completely dependent on how the machine is going to be used, and what is important (in terms of protection) to the user. Sometimes Linux will come out ahead, sometimes Windows. What I'd like to see is an article comparing solution stack TCO (from hardware through OS all the way to the cost of maintenance of the applications installed). That at least will be a little more accurate.
After investigating this further, I found I was incorrect. QT can be redistributed at no charge, but if you want to write a commercial application based on QT, you have to pay Trolltech the licensing fees. Sorry for the confusion (and bad memory).
Give the Netscape 8 browser a whirl. It's Windows-only, unfortunately, but it can go back and forth between the Firefox and IE engines. Turn off what you don't need and you'll be set!
I found your post rather hard to follow, but GPL encourages redistribution. QT is dual-licensed, meaning you have to comply with any restrictions of the GPL + the QT license = redistribute it all you want as long as you purchase a license for QT.
The restriction of redistributing QT is because of QT's license, not because of GPL.
Interesting. I'd heard information to the contrary regarding LSB compliance. I guess I'd heard from a misinformed resource.
As to the location of configuration files (and libraries), that's part of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which is included in the LSB by reference.
That's part of what the LSB is supposed to be about. Standardizing the ABI, and making sure that the distribution passes a test suite across the board. Even Debian is LSB-compliant. ...and if the LSB doesn't go far enough, I'm hopeful that a combination of the LSB and the DCCA will provide enough of a standard that compatibility and stability are assured.
We also run into the fact that no distribution wants to be held to someone else's standards. It cramps their style and then they choose not to participate in the governing organization (especially if they're big enough that they believe they should be *setting* the standards). Trust me, I've been through this process with some of them.
DCCA is a baby step toward making Debian viable for the non-developers. It's a good step. As for its success and what its true role will end up being in the Debian community, it's early yet and time will tell.
Continental didn't use the Massport system, they would incur costs of maintaining their own network. So pay Massport some fraction of what it would cost to manage that network and work out a login by which the frequent fliers can have access to the free network and Massport can still manage the firewalls to its liking. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
inanimate carbon rod: Simpsons episode in which Homer Simpson used an inanimate carbon rod to close the door of a space shuttle during the return to Earth. The rod earned a parade and was pictured on the front of Time Magazine "In Rod We Trust". More here. As for the song reference, I don't know.
If I'd seen this before it went public I would have e-mailed the on-duty editor saying that there's a major problem with the headline. So let's clear the air and get the announcement right --
Novell's announcement was not that they're open sourcing SUSE. SUSE is already GPL. Novell is essentially announcing this:
The goal of OpenSUSE is to create a community-supported distribution similar to Fedora. Also, like Fedora, this becomes a code base that the developers of the commercially-supported distributions can pull from.
or even a "Butterfly BSD" would be interesting, since Microsoft views the GPL to be so unfriendly.
Mod up parent. A tax keeps pornography in check and makes the Internet a cleaner place to be. A tax that raises money to address the problem of child pornography -- all the better. ...but 25% on all porn?? My heavens that's a lot, especially considering the amount of money flowing through that industry. Who's buying the BMWs with the leftover money?
I should also note... Novell Linux Desktop is for the commercial desktop market and isn't intended to be a workstation product like RHEL WS is.
Yeah yeah; "desktop" and "workstation" are both clients, but us marketing people see the world a little differently. You wouldn't run a CAD program on an eMachine, would you?
You mean that WS used to stand for workstation. In fact, they changed it from "workstation" to WS because they wanted the product to be for more things than just workstations. For example, cluster nodes.
Regardless, SLES (despite the name) is Novell's enterprise code base and goes beyond servers. In fact, Novell Linux Desktop is based on SLES.