"No. I'll tell you why. Encrypting takes money and time in order to set up procedures and train and implement."
It also adds a risk factor to the backup integrity. Tape can be unreliable enough, without adding the requirement that an entire stream must be perfect from head to tail, or else it becomes extremely difficult to recover any data at all.
"There should have been a detailed process done in conjunction with a reliable shipper to ensure protection ( or perhaps a private courier ) of the tape."
And there probably was. It won't pass your muster, in the court of public opinion, but it almost certainly will pass the due diligence test in a court of laws.
There's no case to be made that USPS, FedEX, UPS, DHL, etc, would not be considered a "reliable shippler" to a reasonable person. You'd have to ask whether the company had the authority to send this data through unsecured channels, and I'm afraid the answer to that, in court anyway, would be yes.
So the only thing left is for an individual with specific damages to file suit on the basis of those damages.
"Over a bonded private courier who would baby sit the package from beginning to end, and if anything happend to the package they'd be out lots of money and looking for a whole new career?"
You do one level of risk management for an organ transplant, and another level for routine data warehousing.
And it is. There's nothing specific like HIPAA to enumerate rights and responsibilities in the same way, but there certainly is nothing to stop a person with damages, taking their complaint to the courts.
If you cared that much, and if you actually had specific damages, you could sue, and in some states, you'd be guaranteed a hearing (with all the due process rights that come with it).
"Actually, they haven't. They understand that unless the community as a whole agrees to this kind of change, that all they'll accomplish is to create an anonymous fork."
>The Linux project needs to be partitioned up into >subprojects.
I can agree with this, even if the only "subproject" is X86 support for mainboard chipsets that are currently available. There is a whole lot of cruft in the kernel config, to support stuff going way back. I'm not saying "nobody" has this stuff. I keep some old hardware alive myself, including one or two really strange things (like Cyclades cards, and an old Hayes ESP serial device, stuff like that.)
Does there really need to be RZ1000 and CMD640 IDE support? (I honestly don't know; I pretty much use Intel 815 boards and VIA82C686 boards, since I know they work)
Likewise there are TONS of SCSI devices that, again, I don't want to suggest "nobody has", but they damn sure aren't what's flying off store shelves today, and they don't need to be included in whatever kernel branch would support contemporary hardware.
Unfortunately, there's also a ton of IO drivers that DO need to be included. Like every USB thing under the sun. And lots and lots of network devices. And all the filesystems.
I'm not sure what set of drivers you think should be moved into a new package, or how much space you think it would save to do that. But I'm sure my list would be different from yours.
Just branching the various architectures would be a big win. Seriously, the Intel users really don't need the Sparc64 and Alpha and MIPS codebase every time they update their kernel.
"To install Linux, one has to check out the hardware, or at least experiment with some of it, try out a few sound cards, graphics cards, etc."
No. It's 2004. I want to do the following:
Give me a model number and a vendor for the following items:
1. An 802.11g cardbus or PCI card as appropriate, known to work without resorting to extreme measures, with the current kernel version.
2. A 3D accelerated video card known to work with the current version, which also supports one or more high-resolution modes on the console.
3. A multi-channel sound card with digital I/O which is fully supported by Linux Audio and MIDI applications, and has driver support in the current version.
4. A voice modem which is fully supported in the current version.
I don't want to "try 10 different ones and return them." I want the vendor to assure *ME* that they work.
Start with the 802.11g PCI card. Which one should I get? Turns out you need more than just a catalog number, because that doesn't guarantee the chipset.
"pffft, I miss the days when I could run the kernel on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. You needed 8MB of RAM to run X well, but still."
I did this with a Yggdrasil CD. It was fairly decent on an 8MB 386DX system.
I *still* use a P-75 Toshiba notebook with 16MB RAM, still running the same 1.2.13 kernel it's had from the beginning of time. And I still find that notebook useful. And bulletproof, and it has nearly a 6 hour battery life.
Not that I'd trade any of my new machines for it, but hey, I'm still using it. I think, in the same configuration, since 1996.
"people update their code to match moving APIs or it doesn't compile."
What I hate is when it *does* compile, is presented as *stable* on a production tag, yet is fully broken.
The Radeon Framebuffer and DRI drivers were like this for a long time in 2.6. They might still be broken, I'm not even sure at this point whether I changed video cards.
You really shouldn't judge this on the size of the source code. Do you not want the myriad hardware support available? It's understandable if you don't want the support for the huge number of platforms that the kernel runs on, but the people who use the features you don't care about might disagree.
My 2.6.11.7 kernel is 1.8MB in size on the disc.
The next release will have a reasonbly sized patch release, no 44 MB download required.
I don't know what you're trying to compare to, though. Gnome, KDE? Most users get binary distributions of those. And once you step one toe outside the GNU-ish world, you're doing binaries anyway.
Don't get me wrong; I find annoyances in the linux kernel and driver modules. I really do wish things would "just work" sometimes. I get tired of hearing about how only SCSI CD Writers matter, when every CD Writer I've seen in the last 5 years has been IDE, for instance.
On the other hand, I'm glad to see ALSA support bundled with the kernel.
"I buy a high end Nikon camera and find that part of the image data of pictures I took with MY CAMERA that I BOUGHT with MY MONEY is ENCRYPTED thereby DENYING ME, THE FUCKING OWNER, full unrestricted access to MY FUCKING DATA."
Your rights under copyright law being abridged? Sue and win. Just a hint, though, courts and adverse counsel do not respond well to demands involving the F-word.
But if you can make the case that Nikon is imporperly asserting an ownerwhip control over your intellectual property, by all mean, please make this case.
"I can't be happier with Canon's like of digital photography produts (I've been eyeballing a Rebel for months)."
Spend just a little more, and get a 20D. Don't buy the 18-55 kit lens. Well, the kit lens isn't bad, but if you are discriminating enough to want this camera, you'll be disgusted with the kit lens. It's pretty soft, but there are some *great* lenses available for this camera.
The 20D is a bunch more money than the Rebel I suppose you're looking at, but it's worth it. It's a much more interesting camera, is quite a bit snappier (no more latency than a 35mm camera, which is wonderful).
I paid a lot for mine, but some co-workers have done somewhat better, including one who got the 20D with the kit lens for a total of $1087 plus tax, about $400 less than I paid, straight from Canon!
The Nikon D70 is still in 8-bit colorspace. I was sorely tempted to buy a Nikon, since I've always used Nikons and I have a lot of really great lenses. But I don't have AF lenses, and the focal length isn't 1:1 anyway, so it's not really the big win it appeared to be at first. I just bought a $200 F2 body though. The camera I always wanted back in the day!!
Anyway, do consider the 20D if you're looking at Rebels. It is the expensive camera that it is, yes, but it's got some really nice features, and a certain quality, that's not quite there in the Rebels. OTOH, the Rebels aren't at all BAD, don't get me wrong!
Some of the features that make the 20D so cool don't even show up on feature comparison charts, and some of them sound pretty esoteric or even useless until you use them, like the white balance control.
To be honest, I don't know how the Rebel XT compares, since I bought a 20D after playing with a colleague's camera for a while. But seriously, after seeing this camera, there was no other choice. I'm only a mildly enthusiastic amateur shutterbug, and I'm not shilling for Canon. Do check out the 20D.
Can Microsoft be made a party to this subpoena on the basis of their ownership of the data?
To me, this is really the test of who "owns" the data. If a court must go to the proper owner to discover my documents, and that owner is not myself, then the answer to your question is "no."
I fully appreciate the value of naming, and I've even worn the hat of a DNS admin for many years. But I've never really understood why naming was so important that it became inconceivable to do without it.
An IP4 address is only two more digits than a phone number, but we work with phone numbers just fine. But if you try to make the case that we could work with IP numbers just like phone numbers, it's an insane suggestion.
So what we have is, instead of the idiom of an index from name to number, we've got the idiom where the name *is* the address. I've never been convinced that scheme has the value that it's believed to have, and even less so when most "domain names" end up being nothing more than a single ARecord for a website.
I didn't mean to imply I thought OO was bad. *I* use it to great success. I think the real surprise was learning who was the bigger geek between me and my spouse, and that people really do need a lot of the functionality (of Excel, particularly) that I never think much about.
Of course, all my papers are done with LaTeX and gnuplot scatters, so I'm in another world anyway.
Seems like someone this dumb would have the kind of weakness that you should be able to exploit. You're smarter, right? Then are you smart enough to find a way to make it so this guy is no longer the boss (e.g., you become the boss?)
I always wonder why people low on the org chart claim to be superior to those above them, yet they never seem to be able to exploit this in any way that translates to career development.
I really do hear a lot about how someone's boss is an idiot. But I never hear about how the used their superior intelligence to rise above. It's always a complaint of some low level IT or administrative worker, and never a senior vice president or director telling about how their boss was so dumb, but they were so smart, and that's how they got where they are today...
YOU become the one with the money, or the valuable information, that HE needs. It's that simple.
The bottom line is that you choose to accept his document format, and you choose to allow him to reject yours. And you don't have anything that he needs badly enough to change the status quo putting you in the position to decide who does what.
If you could, say, make it so that his receiving a paycheck was dependent on his using an open document format, it would happen...
"Plus any boss who fiddles with Linux for a bit isn't going to take long before concluding Linux is retarded because you can't embed video in docs like you can in Word."
I don't understand how you get from "Linux", an Operating System, to "Word", an Application, and compare the two as if they are equivalent.
But it's clear that you haven't even used OpenOffice, and probably have not even used a well-configured Linux system. Like anything else, it's a bitch to configure from scratch (a little easier than Windows XP, with the right distro), but once that's done, there's really very little in the application space that's not covered. Including "embedded media in documents".
The things that are lacking, tend to be due to legal restrictions (such as certain unsupported media codecs, or DVD playback, or driver support for certain hardware). But plenty of stuff does work, and works well, for those who bother to use it.
It's not clear to me why the "Average PHB" would be using a personal computer in the first place, much less running Linux (or even Windows, for that matter).
"If I use code that's licensed under the GPL, I have to agree to the terms of the GPL, yes?"
No. And this is probably the most common, and most * *complete* misconception about the GPL. It requires nothing of the sort. An end-user does not need to agree with the GPL at all. Only a distributor, or anyone who distributes a modified copy, needs to even be *aware* of the GPL.
It is absolutely irrelevant to *use*, which, if you bothered to read the very concise, very clear, plain-English, common-sense GPL, you would know.
Slashdot Mirror
"No. I'll tell you why. Encrypting takes money and time in order to set up procedures and train and implement."
It also adds a risk factor to the backup integrity.
Tape can be unreliable enough, without adding the requirement that an entire stream must be perfect from head to tail, or else it becomes extremely difficult to recover any data at all.
"Ameritrade Customer Data Shared"
"This may open up an entire new world to identity thieves, if it was not already open."
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Messing with the US Mail can get you life without parole in a federal supermax.
"There should have been a detailed process done in conjunction with a reliable shipper to ensure protection ( or perhaps a private courier ) of the tape."
And there probably was. It won't pass your muster, in the court of public opinion, but it almost certainly will pass the due diligence test in a court of laws.
There's no case to be made that USPS, FedEX, UPS, DHL, etc, would not be considered a "reliable shippler" to a reasonable person. You'd have to ask whether the company had the authority to send this data through unsecured channels, and I'm afraid the answer to that, in court anyway, would be yes.
So the only thing left is for an individual with specific damages to file suit on the basis of those damages.
"Over a bonded private courier who would baby sit the package from beginning to end, and if anything happend to the package they'd be out lots of money and looking for a whole new career?"
You do one level of risk management for an organ transplant, and another level for routine data warehousing.
"It should be the same for personal data."
And it is. There's nothing specific like HIPAA to enumerate rights and responsibilities in the same way, but there certainly is nothing to stop a person with damages, taking their complaint to the courts.
If you cared that much, and if you actually had specific damages, you could sue, and in some states, you'd be guaranteed a hearing (with all the due process rights that come with it).
"Actually, they haven't. They understand that unless the community as a whole agrees to this kind of change, that all they'll accomplish is to create an anonymous fork."
Compare CA's experience with IBM's.
>Its great to see that this disk came from a
>"unexpected source".
No kidding. A truck driver that works for my family, who literally goes by the name "Bubba."
>The Linux project needs to be partitioned up into
>subprojects.
I can agree with this, even if the only "subproject" is X86 support for mainboard chipsets that are currently available. There is a whole lot of cruft in the kernel config, to support stuff going way back. I'm not saying "nobody" has this stuff. I keep some old hardware alive myself, including one or two really strange things (like Cyclades cards, and an old Hayes ESP serial device, stuff like that.)
Does there really need to be RZ1000 and CMD640 IDE support? (I honestly don't know; I pretty much use Intel 815 boards and VIA82C686 boards, since I know they work)
Likewise there are TONS of SCSI devices that, again, I don't want to suggest "nobody has", but they damn sure aren't what's flying off store shelves today, and they don't need to be included in whatever kernel branch would support contemporary hardware.
Unfortunately, there's also a ton of IO drivers that DO need to be included. Like every USB thing under the sun. And lots and lots of network devices. And all the filesystems.
I'm not sure what set of drivers you think should be moved into a new package, or how much space you think it would save to do that. But I'm sure my list would be different from yours.
Just branching the various architectures would be a big win. Seriously, the Intel users really don't need the Sparc64 and Alpha and MIPS codebase every time they update their kernel.
"To install Linux, one has to check out the hardware, or at least experiment with some of it, try out a few sound cards, graphics cards, etc."
No. It's 2004. I want to do the following:
Give me a model number and a vendor for the following items:
1. An 802.11g cardbus or PCI card as appropriate, known to work without resorting to extreme measures, with the current kernel version.
2. A 3D accelerated video card known to work with the current version, which also supports one or more high-resolution modes on the console.
3. A multi-channel sound card with digital I/O which is fully supported by Linux Audio and MIDI applications, and has driver support in the current version.
4. A voice modem which is fully supported in the current version.
I don't want to "try 10 different ones and return them." I want the vendor to assure *ME* that they work.
Start with the 802.11g PCI card. Which one should I get? Turns out you need more than just a catalog number, because that doesn't guarantee the chipset.
"pffft, I miss the days when I could run the kernel on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. You needed 8MB of RAM to run X well, but still."
I did this with a Yggdrasil CD. It was fairly decent on an 8MB 386DX system.
I *still* use a P-75 Toshiba notebook with 16MB RAM, still running the same 1.2.13 kernel it's had from the beginning of time. And I still find that notebook useful. And bulletproof, and it has nearly a 6 hour battery life.
Not that I'd trade any of my new machines for it, but hey, I'm still using it. I think, in the same configuration, since 1996.
"people update their code to match moving APIs or it doesn't compile."
What I hate is when it *does* compile, is presented as *stable* on a production tag, yet is fully broken.
The Radeon Framebuffer and DRI drivers were like this for a long time in 2.6. They might still be broken, I'm not even sure at this point whether I changed video cards.
>That is what CA is complaining about.
If they are complaining about it, but not committing resources to fix it, then they have COMPLETELY MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT of Linux.
>Or you could always wait for Hurd.
If I would have taken that advice the first time it was offered to me, I'd have missed the whole revolution.
>linux-2.6.11 is forty four megabytes.
You really shouldn't judge this on the size of the source code. Do you not want the myriad hardware support available? It's understandable if you don't want the support for the huge number of platforms that the kernel runs on, but the people who use the features you don't care about might disagree.
My 2.6.11.7 kernel is 1.8MB in size on the disc.
The next release will have a reasonbly sized patch release, no 44 MB download required.
I don't know what you're trying to compare to, though. Gnome, KDE? Most users get binary distributions of those. And once you step one toe outside the GNU-ish world, you're doing binaries anyway.
Don't get me wrong; I find annoyances in the linux kernel and driver modules. I really do wish things would "just work" sometimes. I get tired of hearing about how only SCSI CD Writers matter, when every CD Writer I've seen in the last 5 years has been IDE, for instance.
On the other hand, I'm glad to see ALSA support bundled with the kernel.
I guess I'm conflicted.
"I buy a high end Nikon camera and find that part of the image data of pictures I took with MY CAMERA that I BOUGHT with MY MONEY is ENCRYPTED thereby DENYING ME, THE FUCKING OWNER, full unrestricted access to MY FUCKING DATA."
Your rights under copyright law being abridged? Sue and win. Just a hint, though, courts and adverse counsel do not respond well to demands involving the F-word.
But if you can make the case that Nikon is imporperly asserting an ownerwhip control over your intellectual property, by all mean, please make this case.
"I can't be happier with Canon's like of digital photography produts (I've been eyeballing a Rebel for months)."
Spend just a little more, and get a 20D. Don't buy the 18-55 kit lens. Well, the kit lens isn't bad, but if you are discriminating enough to want this camera, you'll be disgusted with the kit lens. It's pretty soft, but there are some *great* lenses available for this camera.
The 20D is a bunch more money than the Rebel I suppose you're looking at, but it's worth it. It's a much more interesting camera, is quite a bit snappier (no more latency than a 35mm camera, which is wonderful).
I paid a lot for mine, but some co-workers have done somewhat better, including one who got the 20D with the kit lens for a total of $1087 plus tax, about $400 less than I paid, straight from Canon!
The Nikon D70 is still in 8-bit colorspace. I was sorely tempted to buy a Nikon, since I've always used Nikons and I have a lot of really great lenses. But I don't have AF lenses, and the focal length isn't 1:1 anyway, so it's not really the big win it appeared to be at first. I just bought a $200 F2 body though. The camera I always wanted back in the day!!
Anyway, do consider the 20D if you're looking at Rebels. It is the expensive camera that it is, yes, but it's got some really nice features, and a certain quality, that's not quite there in the Rebels. OTOH, the Rebels aren't at all BAD, don't get me wrong!
Some of the features that make the 20D so cool don't even show up on feature comparison charts, and some of them sound pretty esoteric or even useless until you use them, like the white balance control.
To be honest, I don't know how the Rebel XT compares, since I bought a 20D after playing with a colleague's camera for a while. But seriously, after seeing this camera, there was no other choice. I'm only a mildly enthusiastic amateur shutterbug, and I'm not shilling for Canon. Do check out the 20D.
"But the only way it could ever happen would be for somebody, somewhere to breach a Microsoft NDA -- and then there would be a figure to blame."
You find sociopaths in every walk of life. All you need is one person with nothing to lose, who just doesn't give a damn.
"I actually own my data - how about you?"
Well, here is a test:
My legal documents are created in Word.
They are subpoenaed by a court.
Can Microsoft be made a party to this subpoena on the basis of their ownership of the data?
To me, this is really the test of who "owns" the data. If a court must go to the proper owner to discover my documents, and that owner is not myself, then the answer to your question is "no."
I fully appreciate the value of naming, and I've even worn the hat of a DNS admin for many years. But I've never really understood why naming was so important that it became inconceivable to do without it.
An IP4 address is only two more digits than a phone number, but we work with phone numbers just fine. But if you try to make the case that we could work with IP numbers just like phone numbers, it's an insane suggestion.
So what we have is, instead of the idiom of an index from name to number, we've got the idiom where the name *is* the address. I've never been convinced that scheme has the value that it's believed to have, and even less so when most "domain names" end up being nothing more than a single ARecord for a website.
I didn't mean to imply I thought OO was bad. *I* use it to great success. I think the real surprise was learning who was the bigger geek between me and my spouse, and that people really do need a lot of the functionality (of Excel, particularly) that I never think much about.
Of course, all my papers are done with LaTeX and gnuplot scatters, so I'm in another world anyway.
Seems like someone this dumb would have the kind of weakness that you should be able to exploit. You're smarter, right? Then are you smart enough to find a way to make it so this guy is no longer the boss (e.g., you become the boss?)
I always wonder why people low on the org chart claim to be superior to those above them, yet they never seem to be able to exploit this in any way that translates to career development.
I really do hear a lot about how someone's boss is an idiot. But I never hear about how the used their superior intelligence to rise above. It's always a complaint of some low level IT or administrative worker, and never a senior vice president or director telling about how their boss was so dumb, but they were so smart, and that's how they got where they are today...
Why is that?
> (that's a quite unchangeable fact)
No. Very easy to change this kind of situation.
YOU become the one with the money, or the valuable information, that HE needs. It's that simple.
The bottom line is that you choose to accept his document format, and you choose to allow him to reject yours. And you don't have anything that he needs badly enough to change the status quo putting you in the position to decide who does what.
If you could, say, make it so that his receiving a paycheck was dependent on his using an open document format, it would happen...
"Plus any boss who fiddles with Linux for a bit isn't going to take long before concluding Linux is retarded because you can't embed video in docs like you can in Word."
I don't understand how you get from "Linux", an Operating System, to "Word", an Application, and compare the two as if they are equivalent.
But it's clear that you haven't even used OpenOffice, and probably have not even used a well-configured Linux system. Like anything else, it's a bitch to configure from scratch (a little easier than Windows XP, with the right distro), but once that's done, there's really very little in the application space that's not covered. Including "embedded media in documents".
The things that are lacking, tend to be due to legal restrictions (such as certain unsupported media codecs, or DVD playback, or driver support for certain hardware). But plenty of stuff does work, and works well, for those who bother to use it.
It's not clear to me why the "Average PHB" would be using a personal computer in the first place, much less running Linux (or even Windows, for that matter).
"If I use code that's licensed under the GPL, I have to agree to the terms of the GPL, yes?"
No. And this is probably the most common, and most * *complete* misconception about the GPL. It requires nothing of the sort. An end-user does not need to agree with the GPL at all. Only a distributor, or anyone who distributes a modified copy, needs to even be *aware* of the GPL.
It is absolutely irrelevant to *use*, which, if you bothered to read the very concise, very clear, plain-English, common-sense GPL, you would know.