How do you tell the difference between reading slashdot and having slashdot open in a window while you are working on something else. time() spent on the webbrowser process?
Actually, we measure the number of transactions between Slashdot and the host. So if you automatically reload Slashdot all the time, you'd win. We do differentiate RSS though and discount it. Note, we did not waste any time setting this up, we happen to develop a tool for sale that has this as a small chunk of the functionality and it takes care of it for us automagically.
Thousands of backers don't give you a realistic shot at winning a presidential election.
That is a presupposition and not something that should be allowed by the legal system. Who is to say that a candidate who has a smaller following entering the debates will not expose those he debates as incompetent and thus win the support of the people?
Hell, Mickey Mouse gets thousands of votes every four years; should Michael Eisner have been invited to the debates too?
No, but Mickey mouse should be, were he a real person.
But there is an annoying tendency for third-party supporters to sit around whining about how their people would do so much better if only artificial barriers X, Y, and Z weren't holding them back.
That is entirely true, but it no way invalidates the point that there are real barriers. You can argue that the strategy of third parties is all wrong or that the supporters themselves are ineffective, but the thing is, whether what you say is true or not, it does not address the barriers which is what we were discussing.
I was partly being facetious. Slashdot is not entirely a waste of time and does keep employees informed about current events in the tech field. It has, in fact, provided useful information that lead to further research and press announcements from our company. It is not, however, the primary duty of most employees so we can laughingly point out who spent the most time reading Slashdot instead of coding.
I did not mean to imply there is no worth to reading Slashdot. I obviously find it worthwhile or I would not be here.
Follow this Google cache link and read FAQ reply number 8 for the Website for the city of Lansing, MI. It reads, "In primary elections you cannot split your vote for partisan races, that is voting for one party and then voting for another party in another race. Doing so will void your vote for all the partisan races."
However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof.
It takes real time to develop a culture in a workplace. If your culture is such that managers are looking for evidence of "slacking" to try to motivate them or replace them, then you are probably looking at a lost cause. The only thing I can recommend is a well written letter to someone high up in the company about the dangers of an adversarial workplace culture and the resulting brain drain and poor quality.
We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"
Any manager that needs to look at logs like this for their employees is incompetent and dragging your company down. A good manager provides positive incentives for employees and creates loyalty both to himself and to the company by treating employees like people. The only reason to consider removing an employee is if they are not getting their job done. If this is the case, then they should be able to tell him why. If he does not trust them, he should find someone else regardless of what a log says.
Treating your employees as mercenaries will make them act that way. Why should they give 2 weeks notice if they're leaving? Why shouldn't they steal office supplies if they can get away with it. Why shouldn't they make a copy of your customer database or defect to the competition? If money is all you are offering, then you can always be outbid.
One thing you might want to consider and which might be able to pull you company out of its cultural death spin is moving drastically from secret monitoring to complete openness. Make an announcement to the whole company that internet monitoring is being applied and then open the system up to everyone. Managers will be able to see what sites their employees visit, but employees will be able to see what sites their bosses visit and when and for how long. We have such a system here, and every now and again we'll announce in a meeting the person who wasted the most time on Slashdot that month.
With such a move to openness i does not seem so much like an us versus them arrangement, but rather an even playing field for all. It works for us, but then we also have a very progressive culture of treating employees well and avoiding micro management. People take on responsibilities and the only problem is if they don't live up to them. No one cares if I post on Slashdot in the middle of the day, so long as I get my work done and it is of sufficient quality. It may be too late where you work, however. You might want to seriously consider looking for an employer that is smarter.
I didn't say it would be a bad thing, but only that it would probably mess things up in the short-term if everyone were suddenly forced to go open-source.
Any sudden, forced change is likely to screw things up in the short term. I did not know anyone was proposing forcing everyone to go open source? Being open source is a feature. It is a benefit to the purchaser. Mandating that feature for government purchases with the law, makes sense because the government is a very large buyer, most likely to benefit from that feature and because laws are how decisions in the government are made. As for the rest of the industry, the free market (in sectors where there is such a thing) will eventually demand it, just as the less expensive goods from automated manufacturing are demanded by the market.
So form your own party, see how well you can do it.
I don't think you understand the issue. When he said it is a two-party system, he meant laws have been passed to insure only members of those two parties are likely to be elected. Two registered presidential candidates with thousands of backers were forcibly ejected from the last presidential debates and not allowed to participate. The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
The laws have been written to prevent the people from electing anyone not republican or democrat and they have been written by the incumbent social groups to maintain their dominance. We will never have electoral reform because no one in favor of it can get elected.
Remember that democracy is the worst posible political system, except for all the others.
Ahh, but we don't quite have a democracy anymore, since the laws are written to make sure the will of the people is not enacted, but rather the will of those who are supposedly representative of the people.
Imagine a bank saying "Whoops! We lost all your money. It's the Windows ATMs we use. They're to blame for this." Rather than accepting responsibility for their processes and systems being faulty.
You're one level of indirection away from being accurate. The bank chooses to buy ATMs running a particular OS and is responsible for choosing a secure one for their customers. Apple chooses a vendor who provides them with manufactured iPods and is responsible for choosing what goes on them, but Apple probably has no idea what tools they use to make those iPods or if the tools run Windows.
So imagine if your bank ran OS2 ATMs, but the company that made them had a programmer using a Windows machine that had a huge hole in it that let someone modify the software which got put on the ATMs and hence they lost all your money.
Certainly the bank is responsible in this analogy, and Apple admits they should have done more QA, but it is also justifiable to be upset about the insecure crap used everywhere that allows this problem to be so widespread that even a company that goes out of their way to avoid Windows, still has security problems because one of their suppliers uses it.
Doesn't it seem like obsoleting most successful software business models all at once, making it harder to make a living as a programmer, would lead to a net loss in software development?
Yes. Of course moving to mechanized manufacturing has made it harder to get a job as a factory laborer, since fewer are needed. That does not mean this is a bad thing, in general. Using open source, duplication of work can be greatly reduced, which means fewer developers will be needed. This will probably not offset the increased need for software, in general.
If apple are going to make products for use with windows, then it is their responsibility to ensure that those products don't contain virii for windows systems. Suggesting that the virus being present in their product that they're shipping (regardless of the susceptibility of Windows to that virus) is the fault of Microsoft is passing the buck in a most horrible way.
Your two statements are not mutually exclusive. More than one party can be responsible for some result. Apple accepts blame for the incident and admits they are at fault. They also point out that this type of thing happens a lot due to flaws in Windows. I'm sorry but the fact that Windows viruses are so common (common enough that lots of random manufacturers have them on their drives) and yet MS has done very little harden Windows (so little that a major manufacturer did not easily detect it) is MS's fault.
...if they are going to continue to market themselves by making stabs at Microsoft (and no I'm not suggesting the virus was placed intentionally), rather than by marketing their products' strengths and features, I'm not so sure I will continue to feel the same way.
I wish they mad more jabs at the weaknesses of Windows, maybe it would motivate MS to fix the problems. More than that, I wish the OS market were a competitive, free market instead of a monopolized one so MS would have real, financial incentive to fix the problems of their customers.
Now that Apple allows users to run Windows from the same hard disk as OSX and Windows virus can damage an OSX system, so effectivly any Windows virus _is_ an Apple virus.
By this logic, since I can run Windows in a VM on almost any platform all Windows viruses are also Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc. viruses. And since I can also run a Commodore 64 emulator, all viruses are Commodore 64 viruses. Of course this is a completely useless way to define things, but hey, whatever.
What about Media Player? It's been part of windows since at least windows 3.x. So it was bundled well before windows came to dominate. How is it wrong then that now that they have a bigger market share, they should remove it?
As I said before, the criteria are that there is an existing market for that product. Yes they should have to remove it, just like Apple has to stop bundling iTunes and the iTunes store with iPods if/when the courts rule that they have a monopoly on portable music players.
When consumers or retailers pick a jukebox software solution they should simply pick the best one based upon the features, ease of use, price, and whatever else they care about. They should not have that choice taken away by having a monopoly automatically including one option, that may not be the best, with something else they bought and that is really the only product of that type on the market. They should not have to choose a music jukebox software based upon whether or not it is the only one that can work with iPods since Apple has tied the two together. Nor should they have an option already included in their purchase of Windows and just use it because they don't even know there are other options and downloading one is hard. They should simply be choosing based upon the relative merits of the products. In that way and in that way only can capitalism function properly. When products compete the makers of those products have a direct financial incentive to make better, cheaper products. Functioning capitalism relies upon everyone to work in their own best interests. With monopolistic bundling, the best interests of the producer are not to make a better product and the best interests of the consumer may well be to use an inferior product.
I dont see any difference in bundling notepad, or paint with bundling media plyaer.
Is their an existing market for really basic text editors? That is to say, do people pay for them, or trade things for them? If so, I don't see it. The same goes for basic text editors. But people do pay for Real (by viewing ads) and people pay for the cost of iTunes and iTunes store development when they buy iPods.
Real demise had nothing to do with ms including media player with windows. Same goes for Netscape. MS simply offered a superior product at the time.
Yes, but look at the case of Netscape. You claim it lost in the market because it was inferior, but it lost also because IE was bundled (as the courts already established). Would you like proof? Take a look at IE6 and Firefox. People had years to choose which was better and even the biggest MS fanboy would be hard pressed to claim it was IE. The only advantage IE6 has had over Firefox is that it was bundled and that it was illegally tied to Windows in other ways. If IE was not bundled in Windows and each user chose at install time or each OEM chose freely which one to include without coercion Firefox would have won in the market. Instead, after years of this situation, IE still has 80% or more of the market. That is capitalism being broken. That is innovation grinding to a near halt because MS has no motivation to improve. That is consumers using an inferior product because of an illegal action by a monopoly.
Unless action is taken to prevent the same with media player, consumers and the industry will likewise suffer and they already do. Most people who rip music onto their computer rip to a DRM'd WMP format. Why? MP3 would play on any portable device they buy. AAC would be smaller, better quality, and play on the most common portable they are likely to buy. Non-DRM'd WMP would at least let them copy it easily to their other computers or a WMP based player. So why in the world would most people rip their songs to an inferior format? That's easy, it is the default in WMP which came with their Windows machine. So most consumers are using a product that is inferior for their needs? Why doesn't MS make it better for them by making non-dRM'd WMP or MP3 the default? Why should t
And I wonder what sort of limitations that license has.
The limitation is if you want the rights to use it and protection from patents and trademark you have to follow the standard and you have to call it "PDF." And that is all. You don't even have to sign anything because, like the GPL, it is only granting rights not taking any away thus if you don't agree to it, you only have fewer rights with regard to the copyright, patent, and trademark involved.
Really, this license has been used by GPL applications like xPDF, programs that take money away from Adobe, like LaTeXtoPDF, and commercial programs, like MacOS X. I don't understand how anyone can still be questioning this, like so many people here seem to be. Are there really that many people paid to spread misinformation by MS here, or is it just that a lot of Slashdotters are willing to repeat whatever nonsense is fed to them without even looking at the facts?
I understand the fact that I have friends who run 500k+ host botnets. I know people who have visits with federal agents. I have never herd of someone who just changes channels.
Okay, so the crowd you know does not do that. What is your point?
but what people who are a bit more 'advanced' have their own DNS's. And they just switch subdomains
Umm, if its in the same domain, it will be easy to track. If you switch domains and use a hostname to direct you have to either send the new name via the channel or you need to wait for the DNS change to propagate, unless you've set a specific DNS server for your botnet, in which case you've got another point of failure and another identifying feature for IDS's.
The point of sending an update as self decrypting binary is that it is obfuscated and less competent researchers have a hard time decoding the info in them quickly and using it in their own, customized client. A couple of quick switches leaves most researchers behind.
People who are more intelligent just get a new domain, or they just direct the bots to a ip that is in a country with other things on their mind besides botnets..
??? Does it matter so much what country the server hosting your control channel is on?
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say? If you're smart you've already ditched IRC for you control channel since it is a liability and a poor choice for such a mechanism, mostly used because the older, easily available tools were built for it.
How exactly would bundling Acrobat Reader with Office or Windows drive Adobe out of a market? That seems like it would expand their market, as they would suddenly jump from whatever market penetration number they're at now to a much higher number.
Adobe objected to MS bundling XPS creation tools with Windows Vista, not Acrobat Reader with Office.
It appears to me that Adobe's bad choices in this is going to effectively drive them right out of the market.
It appears to me that if MS continues to break the law their illegal actions will drive Adobe right out of the market.
If they would have let MS bundle Acrobat Reader and make a 'Save to PDF' option in the File menu of Office products, they would have gained very deep penetration.
It isn't a matter of letting them bundle acrobat reader with Office. MS offered to do that as part of a deal that would let MS break the law without Adobe objecting loudly enough to get the justice department and EU commission involved. It would basically be short term benefits for long term guaranteed death in that market.
Of course, MS is also offering a plugin for 'Save to PDF' on their download site, but the net result is a PITA to the consumer.
Competing with WoW would mean launching for a single, more common & cost-effective platform....umm like Windows.
How much of the market is running OS X these days? How much of the market that has a fast internet connection, disposable income, and a relatively recent machine. Macs were what 12% of laptop sales last quarter? Competing effectively with WoW means targeting the same customers. WoW supported macs from day one and still does. If Warhammer online does not they will certainly not be capturing all of WoW's customer base. And not grabbing the Mac portion of the market can have a lot more of an effect then simply losing those customers. I know people who play WoW simply because it is one of the few MMORPGs that all their group of friends can play, including the girls in the dorms and the weird artist guy.
Actually, I see several chunks of the gaming market. There are big gaming companies owned by MS. They produce games that use DirectX and are not portable and sometimes release a Mac version using money from the Windows release to fund the port. There are big game companies not owned by MS. Most of them develop in OpenGL and code a portable product in the first place. They know their games will be successful and they include the mac port as part of the original plan. They usually release both at once or the mac version with a short delay. The third market chunk is small companies They are strapped for cash and don't know if a game will be popular or not. They usually code in DirectX because developers are more common and if they make money, spend some to port to the Mac. Most are not popular so they don't ever do the port.
I was just curious where Warhammer Online fit into the market.
The end-user experience for PDF's is that the PDF readers and writers are terrible. If the standards are usurped, we'll see different readers and writers. Hence, throw the bums out.
Umm, have you used any of the non-adobe PDF readers and writers? I don't have any problems with the ones I use on a variety of platforms. If MS manages to illegally bundle their format/toolset combination you think the situation is going to get better? Adobe won't be able to compete no matter how much better they get, so why should they even try? And MS, having taken over the market will do nothing in it at all, just like they have done nothing with IE.
Often they just use a/TOPIC, as most bots parse the topic when they join. Or the botter can just login (publically) and then do what ever.
You misunderstand. A lot of herders periodically move all their currently listening bots to another channel with different passwords as a security measure. That way, a security person or cop who has infiltrated must very quickly reverse engineer the update to find the new IRC server, login, and password. Some also have scripts that pose challenges and then kick those that do not respond with the right answer in a given timeframe.
...as I said above..Commonly the bots are coded (via the config.h) to accept commands only from a certain NICK, IDENT and HOST. You can change your nick and ident to what ever, but there is no way you can get the HOST that its set to have...That is, unless you manage to get operator status (that requires you to have the oper username, password, and to have the ident and host that the operator line is set for) and use/chghost on yourself to that of the 'herder'... Kick the real controller?
Heh. If you can take the control channel IRC server (machine not program) over, you can send anything you want to the bots because you can host your own IRC server there.
You would be suprised....
I don't have to surprised. Those botnet herders still using IRC are the bottom of the barrel, but a lot of them are happy to chat with random people and are surprisingly willing to help others learn the tools and techniques. I've read transcripts. I've also seen botnet operators try to issue a DoS attack and fail numerous times before getting the right command. I've seen them launch DoS attacks against random chunks of cable modem pools on ports that are not even in use because they obviously have no idea what they are doing.
The point is, yes, security researchers can shut down a fair number of botnets after taking them over, but they don't because of legal issues.
Is IE a match for Firefox? Nope. Does it hold 80% of the market anyway? Yup. Do 90% of people who use Firefox pay MS to develop IE? Yup.
If MS bundles portable document creation tools with Windows or a pro grade photo editor, they will become ubiquitous. As a result, those that don't know any better or who aren't motivated enough to pay twice for a good product, will stick with whatever MS has bundled. It doesn't have to better. It doesn't have to be as good. It simply needs to be "good enough" for most people not to spend money on something else.
That is why bundling a monopolized product with a product in a separate market is illegal. It means people acting in their own best interests will give their money to the company that makes an inferior product over one that makes a superior product. Basically, it removes all the benefits of innovation and low cost that make capitalism better than other economic models.
The 'control channel' is just a IRC channel. Usually running on UnrealIRCd. You can run Unreal on Windows or Linux.
Actually, not all control channels are IRC now, I've even heard of one using Tor, but yeah for the most part. I mentioned them because Linux bots are very rare, while Linux servers compromised and hosting the control channel are not.
At times this is possible, however, the smarter people make it so the bots will only accecpt login from a certain nick, ident and host. And this is assuming the person is using a well used trojan src. If it is custom how shall the security researcher know what command it is to download and exec it? It commonly is like.http.get and.exec and such, but it widely varies.
Infiltration. A lot of security researchers find a botnet by getting a copy of a worm and reverse engineering it or getting a known botnet control channel detected by an IDS. Then they join using an IRC client or whatever and pose as a bot. They watch the commands issued to learn how it works. Often botnet herders issue a command or update that switches the control channel (and sometimes rustlers join and do the same). Researchers then get the same executable, quickly reverse engineer it, and rejoin. At this point, they have plenty of knowledge to issue their own update and if a certain nick or whatever is required, they can usually kick the real controller or root the box the IRC channel is running on and send their own commands. Most of the botnet herders aren't really very competent and are basically script kiddies.
I sat in on a demo of this process once and someone asked if they could send an update to the bot and patch the vulnerability while taking it off the botnet and the answer was "sure, except we might get sued." I'm sure they were not the only ones.
What's interesting is that XPS will be more open for use than PDF once it's approved as an international standard, because MS also has a "Covenant not to sue", something that Adobe doesn't have for PDF. Adobe reserves the right to sue users of PDF, and threatened to do just that against MS's use of PDF in Office 2007.
I've heard this crap many times but no one has been able to show a single source for this FUD. Adobe never threatened anyone with a lawsuit over the licensing of PDF. They threatened to get the courts involved to convict MS of their criminal antitrust violations which happened to involve tools that generated PDFs. It had nothing to do with the licensing.
As for the "Covenant not to sue" you mention.. From MS's license proposal (they have issued no license at all so far) "To ensure that any feedback that Microsoft received in the early stages of developing the specification would not create intellectual property concerns in the industry, Microsoft will include a narrow Covenant Not to Sue (CNS) provision.
This CNS provision will only apply to companies engaged in the following businesses..."
The lawsuit protection you cite is for discussing the format by certain groups, not for implementing it at all.
So, if XPS becomes a standard, and has technical advantages, and has a real "covenant not to sue", why would anyone use PDF besides the inertia of the format itself?
Given your complete failure to understand the proposed licensing, why should we assume your assessment of the technical capabilities or how "standard" it will be is correct? Do you have any objective data comparing PDF and XPS versions of the same document, using the current version of PDF, not one of the old ones used for compatibility? And how about a feature comparison? PDF has a whole shit load of features no one ever uses. Does XPS have all of them? Does anyone care?
But now that XPS will be a recognized standard, MS should feel free to include XPS in both Officw 2007 and Vista, and Adobe can't really do anything about it.
Umm, how in the world does it being declared a standard by anyone have any affect on whether or not they are violating anti-trust law? It is not even a consideration as far as I know. Several versions of PDF are certified ISO standards, but that does not mean it is legal for MS to bundle PDF creation tools in Vista. I think you're completely failing to understand what Adobe was talking about and why MS was and may be convicted of antitrust violation if they make the sale of Windows contingent on any other product in an existing market.
what? American has some of the most dedicated workers in the world. Also, some of the most smartest.
Do you work as hard as the average farmer in china? Do you have some statistics showing language independent IQ tests show the US as "smarter" than other nations. Does Bill Gates work 100,000 times as hard as you do to earn the proportionally higher income? Do you work 1000 times smarter and harder than people born into constant debt in the third world?
Life is not fair and people in the US and other wealthy countries are not inherently smarter or harder workers than people elsewhere, they were born into relative wealth. Your parents likely gave you more wealth at your high school graduation than many small towns in Africa possess all totaled together ($75). Because that is not fair, many people feel justified in balancing the scales.
I don't see Adobe beating down the door of these software vendors because they have Adobe PDF Export capabilities... Double Standard cause it was MS, ya think? Especially considering I can write an application with a PDF creator for my Word processor if I want, but when MS did this Adobe wanted money from just them.
Sigh. When a person is stopped from going into a preschool because they have a gun, but other people aren't, when they don't have guns, do you also complain that a double standard is being applied? Any company can gain a monopoly legally. It is legal to bundle two products together. It is not legal to bundle a product you have monopolized and one competing in another market. This is not a double standard. All companies are prohibited from this same action.
If Apple builds PDF generation capabilities into Pages, they are bundling two products they don't have a monopoly on. If, however, Apple were to bundle PDF creation tools with every iPod they sold, they would be in danger of a lawsuit since the courts are right now investigating whether or not the iPod constitutes a monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
Courts around the world have already declared MS to not only have a monopoly on desktop OS's, but to have illegally bundled other products with it. Thus, if they bundle PDF or XPS creation tools, with Windows they are obviously breaking the law (which they are). MS may have monopoly influence in the Office application space and MS's actions seem to indicate that they think they do, but that is not why Adobe will be bringing their case to the courts.
MS can get past the licensing by making...
This has absolutely nothing to do with licensing. This has to do with violations of the criminal justice code with regard to antitrust violations. MS is not violating the license by bundling, they're breaking the law.
The inclusion of a PDF Export/Save ability from MS Word would 'further' the PDF standard...
You've read too many MS press releases. This is primarily about XPS in Windows, not anything in Word.
So it wasn't like MS was putting out a crap Exporter or mis-using the standard.
IE did an okay job at first, too. The problem with bundling is, once they have taken over the majority of the market, it does not matter if they do a good job or not, so they don't bother. IE still does not support 6-8 year old standards that every other browser on the market does. It took them 4 years after they were standard everywhere else to add tabs and pop-up blocking. IE has held the entire Web industry back and cost Web developers billions in wasted time working around MS's failure to make improvements or fix bugs. The reason for this is because it is bundled it does not matter. They still have 80% of the market with a crappy product. If they bundle XPS tools, the portable document market will be the same way in another few years. That is why Adobe is right to insist the laws be enforced.
If it's open source why was Microsoft worried about legal action from Adobe for including the ability to create PDFs in their office program?
Because they're a monopolist and bundling anything in your programs when you're a monopolist is of questionable legality.
If it's open source, surely that allows them to write to it?
MS and anyone else can use the PDF license to read and write PDFs all they want. MS can create a PDF creation suite that does the exact same thing as Adobe's and there is no way Adobe can use the license to stop them. That does not mean anything MS does with the PDF format is legal if it breaks other laws. For example, if MS built a tool that used the PDF format to smuggle top secret pentagon files to the Chinese, they can still be found guilty of espionage. Likewise, if they use the PDF format in a tool that competes in one market and bundle that tool with a product that they have monopolized the market for, they can still be convicted of antitrust violation. You'll note, Adobe threatened to get the law involved if MS bundled PDF and/or XPS creation tools in Windows Vista, not MS Office.
Or is Microsoft barred from including the ability to create any open source file type in their Office program?
MS is barred from bundling or tying together the sale of a product on which they have a monopoly and a product in another, existing market. Whether or not Office constitutes a monopoly is an open question, but MS's actions seem to indicate they think it is. Adobe threatened to and will try to get the justice department to convict MS of antitrust violations for including XPS creation tools in Vista as it is blatantly illegal. If MS were to bundle PDF creation tools in Vista, they'd try to get them convicted for that too. All of this has nothign to do with the licensing for PDF or whether or not it is an open standard.
...publishing the specs does not make it a standard. neither does it make it any less proprietry.
How exactly could PDF be more of an open standard? It is published, licensed for free including trademark and patent protection with no fees and no requirements and several versions of it are ISO certified standards? There are open and closed source implementations for years, including those from direct competitors and there has not been one legal issue with the licensing ever, so far as I know. What more could you possibly want?
Slashdot Mirror
How do you tell the difference between reading slashdot and having slashdot open in a window while you are working on something else. time() spent on the webbrowser process?
Actually, we measure the number of transactions between Slashdot and the host. So if you automatically reload Slashdot all the time, you'd win. We do differentiate RSS though and discount it. Note, we did not waste any time setting this up, we happen to develop a tool for sale that has this as a small chunk of the functionality and it takes care of it for us automagically.
Thousands of backers don't give you a realistic shot at winning a presidential election.
That is a presupposition and not something that should be allowed by the legal system. Who is to say that a candidate who has a smaller following entering the debates will not expose those he debates as incompetent and thus win the support of the people?
Hell, Mickey Mouse gets thousands of votes every four years; should Michael Eisner have been invited to the debates too?
No, but Mickey mouse should be, were he a real person.
But there is an annoying tendency for third-party supporters to sit around whining about how their people would do so much better if only artificial barriers X, Y, and Z weren't holding them back.
That is entirely true, but it no way invalidates the point that there are real barriers. You can argue that the strategy of third parties is all wrong or that the supporters themselves are ineffective, but the thing is, whether what you say is true or not, it does not address the barriers which is what we were discussing.
I don't consider Slashdot a waste of time.
I was partly being facetious. Slashdot is not entirely a waste of time and does keep employees informed about current events in the tech field. It has, in fact, provided useful information that lead to further research and press announcements from our company. It is not, however, the primary duty of most employees so we can laughingly point out who spent the most time reading Slashdot instead of coding.
I did not mean to imply there is no worth to reading Slashdot. I obviously find it worthwhile or I would not be here.
Prove it.
Follow this Google cache link and read FAQ reply number 8 for the Website for the city of Lansing, MI. It reads, "In primary elections you cannot split your vote for partisan races, that is voting for one party and then voting for another party in another race. Doing so will void your vote for all the partisan races."
However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof.
It takes real time to develop a culture in a workplace. If your culture is such that managers are looking for evidence of "slacking" to try to motivate them or replace them, then you are probably looking at a lost cause. The only thing I can recommend is a well written letter to someone high up in the company about the dangers of an adversarial workplace culture and the resulting brain drain and poor quality.
We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"
Any manager that needs to look at logs like this for their employees is incompetent and dragging your company down. A good manager provides positive incentives for employees and creates loyalty both to himself and to the company by treating employees like people. The only reason to consider removing an employee is if they are not getting their job done. If this is the case, then they should be able to tell him why. If he does not trust them, he should find someone else regardless of what a log says.
Treating your employees as mercenaries will make them act that way. Why should they give 2 weeks notice if they're leaving? Why shouldn't they steal office supplies if they can get away with it. Why shouldn't they make a copy of your customer database or defect to the competition? If money is all you are offering, then you can always be outbid.
One thing you might want to consider and which might be able to pull you company out of its cultural death spin is moving drastically from secret monitoring to complete openness. Make an announcement to the whole company that internet monitoring is being applied and then open the system up to everyone. Managers will be able to see what sites their employees visit, but employees will be able to see what sites their bosses visit and when and for how long. We have such a system here, and every now and again we'll announce in a meeting the person who wasted the most time on Slashdot that month.
With such a move to openness i does not seem so much like an us versus them arrangement, but rather an even playing field for all. It works for us, but then we also have a very progressive culture of treating employees well and avoiding micro management. People take on responsibilities and the only problem is if they don't live up to them. No one cares if I post on Slashdot in the middle of the day, so long as I get my work done and it is of sufficient quality. It may be too late where you work, however. You might want to seriously consider looking for an employer that is smarter.
I didn't say it would be a bad thing, but only that it would probably mess things up in the short-term if everyone were suddenly forced to go open-source.
Any sudden, forced change is likely to screw things up in the short term. I did not know anyone was proposing forcing everyone to go open source? Being open source is a feature. It is a benefit to the purchaser. Mandating that feature for government purchases with the law, makes sense because the government is a very large buyer, most likely to benefit from that feature and because laws are how decisions in the government are made. As for the rest of the industry, the free market (in sectors where there is such a thing) will eventually demand it, just as the less expensive goods from automated manufacturing are demanded by the market.
So form your own party, see how well you can do it.
I don't think you understand the issue. When he said it is a two-party system, he meant laws have been passed to insure only members of those two parties are likely to be elected. Two registered presidential candidates with thousands of backers were forcibly ejected from the last presidential debates and not allowed to participate. The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
The laws have been written to prevent the people from electing anyone not republican or democrat and they have been written by the incumbent social groups to maintain their dominance. We will never have electoral reform because no one in favor of it can get elected.
Remember that democracy is the worst posible political system, except for all the others.
Ahh, but we don't quite have a democracy anymore, since the laws are written to make sure the will of the people is not enacted, but rather the will of those who are supposedly representative of the people.
Imagine a bank saying "Whoops! We lost all your money. It's the Windows ATMs we use. They're to blame for this." Rather than accepting responsibility for their processes and systems being faulty.
You're one level of indirection away from being accurate. The bank chooses to buy ATMs running a particular OS and is responsible for choosing a secure one for their customers. Apple chooses a vendor who provides them with manufactured iPods and is responsible for choosing what goes on them, but Apple probably has no idea what tools they use to make those iPods or if the tools run Windows.
So imagine if your bank ran OS2 ATMs, but the company that made them had a programmer using a Windows machine that had a huge hole in it that let someone modify the software which got put on the ATMs and hence they lost all your money.
Certainly the bank is responsible in this analogy, and Apple admits they should have done more QA, but it is also justifiable to be upset about the insecure crap used everywhere that allows this problem to be so widespread that even a company that goes out of their way to avoid Windows, still has security problems because one of their suppliers uses it.
Doesn't it seem like obsoleting most successful software business models all at once, making it harder to make a living as a programmer, would lead to a net loss in software development?
Yes. Of course moving to mechanized manufacturing has made it harder to get a job as a factory laborer, since fewer are needed. That does not mean this is a bad thing, in general. Using open source, duplication of work can be greatly reduced, which means fewer developers will be needed. This will probably not offset the increased need for software, in general.
If apple are going to make products for use with windows, then it is their responsibility to ensure that those products don't contain virii for windows systems. Suggesting that the virus being present in their product that they're shipping (regardless of the susceptibility of Windows to that virus) is the fault of Microsoft is passing the buck in a most horrible way.
Your two statements are not mutually exclusive. More than one party can be responsible for some result. Apple accepts blame for the incident and admits they are at fault. They also point out that this type of thing happens a lot due to flaws in Windows. I'm sorry but the fact that Windows viruses are so common (common enough that lots of random manufacturers have them on their drives) and yet MS has done very little harden Windows (so little that a major manufacturer did not easily detect it) is MS's fault.
I wish they mad more jabs at the weaknesses of Windows, maybe it would motivate MS to fix the problems. More than that, I wish the OS market were a competitive, free market instead of a monopolized one so MS would have real, financial incentive to fix the problems of their customers.
Now that Apple allows users to run Windows from the same hard disk as OSX and Windows virus can damage an OSX system, so effectivly any Windows virus _is_ an Apple virus.
By this logic, since I can run Windows in a VM on almost any platform all Windows viruses are also Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc. viruses. And since I can also run a Commodore 64 emulator, all viruses are Commodore 64 viruses. Of course this is a completely useless way to define things, but hey, whatever.
What about Media Player? It's been part of windows since at least windows 3.x. So it was bundled well before windows came to dominate. How is it wrong then that now that they have a bigger market share, they should remove it?
As I said before, the criteria are that there is an existing market for that product. Yes they should have to remove it, just like Apple has to stop bundling iTunes and the iTunes store with iPods if/when the courts rule that they have a monopoly on portable music players.
When consumers or retailers pick a jukebox software solution they should simply pick the best one based upon the features, ease of use, price, and whatever else they care about. They should not have that choice taken away by having a monopoly automatically including one option, that may not be the best, with something else they bought and that is really the only product of that type on the market. They should not have to choose a music jukebox software based upon whether or not it is the only one that can work with iPods since Apple has tied the two together. Nor should they have an option already included in their purchase of Windows and just use it because they don't even know there are other options and downloading one is hard. They should simply be choosing based upon the relative merits of the products. In that way and in that way only can capitalism function properly. When products compete the makers of those products have a direct financial incentive to make better, cheaper products. Functioning capitalism relies upon everyone to work in their own best interests. With monopolistic bundling, the best interests of the producer are not to make a better product and the best interests of the consumer may well be to use an inferior product.
I dont see any difference in bundling notepad, or paint with bundling media plyaer.
Is their an existing market for really basic text editors? That is to say, do people pay for them, or trade things for them? If so, I don't see it. The same goes for basic text editors. But people do pay for Real (by viewing ads) and people pay for the cost of iTunes and iTunes store development when they buy iPods.
Real demise had nothing to do with ms including media player with windows. Same goes for Netscape. MS simply offered a superior product at the time.
Yes, but look at the case of Netscape. You claim it lost in the market because it was inferior, but it lost also because IE was bundled (as the courts already established). Would you like proof? Take a look at IE6 and Firefox. People had years to choose which was better and even the biggest MS fanboy would be hard pressed to claim it was IE. The only advantage IE6 has had over Firefox is that it was bundled and that it was illegally tied to Windows in other ways. If IE was not bundled in Windows and each user chose at install time or each OEM chose freely which one to include without coercion Firefox would have won in the market. Instead, after years of this situation, IE still has 80% or more of the market. That is capitalism being broken. That is innovation grinding to a near halt because MS has no motivation to improve. That is consumers using an inferior product because of an illegal action by a monopoly.
Unless action is taken to prevent the same with media player, consumers and the industry will likewise suffer and they already do. Most people who rip music onto their computer rip to a DRM'd WMP format. Why? MP3 would play on any portable device they buy. AAC would be smaller, better quality, and play on the most common portable they are likely to buy. Non-DRM'd WMP would at least let them copy it easily to their other computers or a WMP based player. So why in the world would most people rip their songs to an inferior format? That's easy, it is the default in WMP which came with their Windows machine. So most consumers are using a product that is inferior for their needs? Why doesn't MS make it better for them by making non-dRM'd WMP or MP3 the default? Why should t
And I wonder what sort of limitations that license has.
The limitation is if you want the rights to use it and protection from patents and trademark you have to follow the standard and you have to call it "PDF." And that is all. You don't even have to sign anything because, like the GPL, it is only granting rights not taking any away thus if you don't agree to it, you only have fewer rights with regard to the copyright, patent, and trademark involved.
Really, this license has been used by GPL applications like xPDF, programs that take money away from Adobe, like LaTeXtoPDF, and commercial programs, like MacOS X. I don't understand how anyone can still be questioning this, like so many people here seem to be. Are there really that many people paid to spread misinformation by MS here, or is it just that a lot of Slashdotters are willing to repeat whatever nonsense is fed to them without even looking at the facts?
I understand the fact that I have friends who run 500k+ host botnets. I know people who have visits with federal agents. I have never herd of someone who just changes channels.
Okay, so the crowd you know does not do that. What is your point?
but what people who are a bit more 'advanced' have their own DNS's. And they just switch subdomains
Umm, if its in the same domain, it will be easy to track. If you switch domains and use a hostname to direct you have to either send the new name via the channel or you need to wait for the DNS change to propagate, unless you've set a specific DNS server for your botnet, in which case you've got another point of failure and another identifying feature for IDS's.
The point of sending an update as self decrypting binary is that it is obfuscated and less competent researchers have a hard time decoding the info in them quickly and using it in their own, customized client. A couple of quick switches leaves most researchers behind.
People who are more intelligent just get a new domain, or they just direct the bots to a ip that is in a country with other things on their mind besides botnets..
??? Does it matter so much what country the server hosting your control channel is on?
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say? If you're smart you've already ditched IRC for you control channel since it is a liability and a poor choice for such a mechanism, mostly used because the older, easily available tools were built for it.
How exactly would bundling Acrobat Reader with Office or Windows drive Adobe out of a market? That seems like it would expand their market, as they would suddenly jump from whatever market penetration number they're at now to a much higher number.
Adobe objected to MS bundling XPS creation tools with Windows Vista, not Acrobat Reader with Office.
It appears to me that Adobe's bad choices in this is going to effectively drive them right out of the market.
It appears to me that if MS continues to break the law their illegal actions will drive Adobe right out of the market.
If they would have let MS bundle Acrobat Reader and make a 'Save to PDF' option in the File menu of Office products, they would have gained very deep penetration.
It isn't a matter of letting them bundle acrobat reader with Office. MS offered to do that as part of a deal that would let MS break the law without Adobe objecting loudly enough to get the justice department and EU commission involved. It would basically be short term benefits for long term guaranteed death in that market.
Of course, MS is also offering a plugin for 'Save to PDF' on their download site, but the net result is a PITA to the consumer.
Because OEMs aren't including it for some reason?
Competing with WoW would mean launching for a single, more common & cost-effective platform....umm like Windows.
How much of the market is running OS X these days? How much of the market that has a fast internet connection, disposable income, and a relatively recent machine. Macs were what 12% of laptop sales last quarter? Competing effectively with WoW means targeting the same customers. WoW supported macs from day one and still does. If Warhammer online does not they will certainly not be capturing all of WoW's customer base. And not grabbing the Mac portion of the market can have a lot more of an effect then simply losing those customers. I know people who play WoW simply because it is one of the few MMORPGs that all their group of friends can play, including the girls in the dorms and the weird artist guy.
Actually, I see several chunks of the gaming market. There are big gaming companies owned by MS. They produce games that use DirectX and are not portable and sometimes release a Mac version using money from the Windows release to fund the port. There are big game companies not owned by MS. Most of them develop in OpenGL and code a portable product in the first place. They know their games will be successful and they include the mac port as part of the original plan. They usually release both at once or the mac version with a short delay. The third market chunk is small companies They are strapped for cash and don't know if a game will be popular or not. They usually code in DirectX because developers are more common and if they make money, spend some to port to the Mac. Most are not popular so they don't ever do the port.
I was just curious where Warhammer Online fit into the market.
The end-user experience for PDF's is that the PDF readers and writers are terrible. If the standards are usurped, we'll see different readers and writers. Hence, throw the bums out.
Umm, have you used any of the non-adobe PDF readers and writers? I don't have any problems with the ones I use on a variety of platforms. If MS manages to illegally bundle their format/toolset combination you think the situation is going to get better? Adobe won't be able to compete no matter how much better they get, so why should they even try? And MS, having taken over the market will do nothing in it at all, just like they have done nothing with IE.
Often they just use a /TOPIC, as most bots parse the topic when they join. Or the botter can just login (publically) and then do what ever.
You misunderstand. A lot of herders periodically move all their currently listening bots to another channel with different passwords as a security measure. That way, a security person or cop who has infiltrated must very quickly reverse engineer the update to find the new IRC server, login, and password. Some also have scripts that pose challenges and then kick those that do not respond with the right answer in a given timeframe.
Heh. If you can take the control channel IRC server (machine not program) over, you can send anything you want to the bots because you can host your own IRC server there.
You would be suprised....
I don't have to surprised. Those botnet herders still using IRC are the bottom of the barrel, but a lot of them are happy to chat with random people and are surprisingly willing to help others learn the tools and techniques. I've read transcripts. I've also seen botnet operators try to issue a DoS attack and fail numerous times before getting the right command. I've seen them launch DoS attacks against random chunks of cable modem pools on ports that are not even in use because they obviously have no idea what they are doing.
The point is, yes, security researchers can shut down a fair number of botnets after taking them over, but they don't because of legal issues.
Microsoft is no match for Adobe Acrobat.
Is IE a match for Firefox? Nope. Does it hold 80% of the market anyway? Yup. Do 90% of people who use Firefox pay MS to develop IE? Yup.
If MS bundles portable document creation tools with Windows or a pro grade photo editor, they will become ubiquitous. As a result, those that don't know any better or who aren't motivated enough to pay twice for a good product, will stick with whatever MS has bundled. It doesn't have to better. It doesn't have to be as good. It simply needs to be "good enough" for most people not to spend money on something else.
That is why bundling a monopolized product with a product in a separate market is illegal. It means people acting in their own best interests will give their money to the company that makes an inferior product over one that makes a superior product. Basically, it removes all the benefits of innovation and low cost that make capitalism better than other economic models.
The 'control channel' is just a IRC channel. Usually running on UnrealIRCd. You can run Unreal on Windows or Linux.
Actually, not all control channels are IRC now, I've even heard of one using Tor, but yeah for the most part. I mentioned them because Linux bots are very rare, while Linux servers compromised and hosting the control channel are not.
At times this is possible, however, the smarter people make it so the bots will only accecpt login from a certain nick, ident and host. And this is assuming the person is using a well used trojan src. If it is custom how shall the security researcher know what command it is to download and exec it? It commonly is like .http.get and .exec and such, but it widely varies.
Infiltration. A lot of security researchers find a botnet by getting a copy of a worm and reverse engineering it or getting a known botnet control channel detected by an IDS. Then they join using an IRC client or whatever and pose as a bot. They watch the commands issued to learn how it works. Often botnet herders issue a command or update that switches the control channel (and sometimes rustlers join and do the same). Researchers then get the same executable, quickly reverse engineer it, and rejoin. At this point, they have plenty of knowledge to issue their own update and if a certain nick or whatever is required, they can usually kick the real controller or root the box the IRC channel is running on and send their own commands. Most of the botnet herders aren't really very competent and are basically script kiddies.
I sat in on a demo of this process once and someone asked if they could send an update to the bot and patch the vulnerability while taking it off the botnet and the answer was "sure, except we might get sued." I'm sure they were not the only ones.
What's interesting is that XPS will be more open for use than PDF once it's approved as an international standard, because MS also has a "Covenant not to sue", something that Adobe doesn't have for PDF. Adobe reserves the right to sue users of PDF, and threatened to do just that against MS's use of PDF in Office 2007.
I've heard this crap many times but no one has been able to show a single source for this FUD. Adobe never threatened anyone with a lawsuit over the licensing of PDF. They threatened to get the courts involved to convict MS of their criminal antitrust violations which happened to involve tools that generated PDFs. It had nothing to do with the licensing.
As for the "Covenant not to sue" you mention.. From MS's license proposal (they have issued no license at all so far) "To ensure that any feedback that Microsoft received in the early stages of developing the specification would not create intellectual property concerns in the industry, Microsoft will include a narrow Covenant Not to Sue (CNS) provision. This CNS provision will only apply to companies engaged in the following businesses..."
The lawsuit protection you cite is for discussing the format by certain groups, not for implementing it at all.
So, if XPS becomes a standard, and has technical advantages, and has a real "covenant not to sue", why would anyone use PDF besides the inertia of the format itself?
Given your complete failure to understand the proposed licensing, why should we assume your assessment of the technical capabilities or how "standard" it will be is correct? Do you have any objective data comparing PDF and XPS versions of the same document, using the current version of PDF, not one of the old ones used for compatibility? And how about a feature comparison? PDF has a whole shit load of features no one ever uses. Does XPS have all of them? Does anyone care?
But now that XPS will be a recognized standard, MS should feel free to include XPS in both Officw 2007 and Vista, and Adobe can't really do anything about it.
Umm, how in the world does it being declared a standard by anyone have any affect on whether or not they are violating anti-trust law? It is not even a consideration as far as I know. Several versions of PDF are certified ISO standards, but that does not mean it is legal for MS to bundle PDF creation tools in Vista. I think you're completely failing to understand what Adobe was talking about and why MS was and may be convicted of antitrust violation if they make the sale of Windows contingent on any other product in an existing market.
what? American has some of the most dedicated workers in the world. Also, some of the most smartest.
Do you work as hard as the average farmer in china? Do you have some statistics showing language independent IQ tests show the US as "smarter" than other nations. Does Bill Gates work 100,000 times as hard as you do to earn the proportionally higher income? Do you work 1000 times smarter and harder than people born into constant debt in the third world?
Life is not fair and people in the US and other wealthy countries are not inherently smarter or harder workers than people elsewhere, they were born into relative wealth. Your parents likely gave you more wealth at your high school graduation than many small towns in Africa possess all totaled together ($75). Because that is not fair, many people feel justified in balancing the scales.
I don't see Adobe beating down the door of these software vendors because they have Adobe PDF Export capabilities... Double Standard cause it was MS, ya think? Especially considering I can write an application with a PDF creator for my Word processor if I want, but when MS did this Adobe wanted money from just them.
Sigh. When a person is stopped from going into a preschool because they have a gun, but other people aren't, when they don't have guns, do you also complain that a double standard is being applied? Any company can gain a monopoly legally. It is legal to bundle two products together. It is not legal to bundle a product you have monopolized and one competing in another market. This is not a double standard. All companies are prohibited from this same action.
If Apple builds PDF generation capabilities into Pages, they are bundling two products they don't have a monopoly on. If, however, Apple were to bundle PDF creation tools with every iPod they sold, they would be in danger of a lawsuit since the courts are right now investigating whether or not the iPod constitutes a monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
Courts around the world have already declared MS to not only have a monopoly on desktop OS's, but to have illegally bundled other products with it. Thus, if they bundle PDF or XPS creation tools, with Windows they are obviously breaking the law (which they are). MS may have monopoly influence in the Office application space and MS's actions seem to indicate that they think they do, but that is not why Adobe will be bringing their case to the courts.
MS can get past the licensing by making...
This has absolutely nothing to do with licensing. This has to do with violations of the criminal justice code with regard to antitrust violations. MS is not violating the license by bundling, they're breaking the law.
The inclusion of a PDF Export/Save ability from MS Word would 'further' the PDF standard...
You've read too many MS press releases. This is primarily about XPS in Windows, not anything in Word.
So it wasn't like MS was putting out a crap Exporter or mis-using the standard.
IE did an okay job at first, too. The problem with bundling is, once they have taken over the majority of the market, it does not matter if they do a good job or not, so they don't bother. IE still does not support 6-8 year old standards that every other browser on the market does. It took them 4 years after they were standard everywhere else to add tabs and pop-up blocking. IE has held the entire Web industry back and cost Web developers billions in wasted time working around MS's failure to make improvements or fix bugs. The reason for this is because it is bundled it does not matter. They still have 80% of the market with a crappy product. If they bundle XPS tools, the portable document market will be the same way in another few years. That is why Adobe is right to insist the laws be enforced.
If it's open source why was Microsoft worried about legal action from Adobe for including the ability to create PDFs in their office program?
Because they're a monopolist and bundling anything in your programs when you're a monopolist is of questionable legality.
If it's open source, surely that allows them to write to it?
MS and anyone else can use the PDF license to read and write PDFs all they want. MS can create a PDF creation suite that does the exact same thing as Adobe's and there is no way Adobe can use the license to stop them. That does not mean anything MS does with the PDF format is legal if it breaks other laws. For example, if MS built a tool that used the PDF format to smuggle top secret pentagon files to the Chinese, they can still be found guilty of espionage. Likewise, if they use the PDF format in a tool that competes in one market and bundle that tool with a product that they have monopolized the market for, they can still be convicted of antitrust violation. You'll note, Adobe threatened to get the law involved if MS bundled PDF and/or XPS creation tools in Windows Vista, not MS Office.
Or is Microsoft barred from including the ability to create any open source file type in their Office program?
MS is barred from bundling or tying together the sale of a product on which they have a monopoly and a product in another, existing market. Whether or not Office constitutes a monopoly is an open question, but MS's actions seem to indicate they think it is. Adobe threatened to and will try to get the justice department to convict MS of antitrust violations for including XPS creation tools in Vista as it is blatantly illegal. If MS were to bundle PDF creation tools in Vista, they'd try to get them convicted for that too. All of this has nothign to do with the licensing for PDF or whether or not it is an open standard.
How exactly could PDF be more of an open standard? It is published, licensed for free including trademark and patent protection with no fees and no requirements and several versions of it are ISO certified standards? There are open and closed source implementations for years, including those from direct competitors and there has not been one legal issue with the licensing ever, so far as I know. What more could you possibly want?