Er, by that reasoning, proprietary software is even *more* anti-business, since those resources must be expended in every case.
Since GPL'd software provides the opportunity for re-use of the code even by a business, it sure seems like the opposite of what you think you are arguing.
The GPL is a real license, and it does not conflict with nor weaken copyright law. Licensing the use of Intellectual Property does not in any way weaken ownership of that IP. Perhaps it's time that this point is driven home by a court. If I don't own the IP (if I don't control the copyright, either by virtue of being the author or by having that right assigned to me by the author), then I usually can't transfer that IP to someone else legally unless I have specific permission of the real owner to do that. The GPL is both the permission for that transfer, and the obligation to do so.
The GPL is not a transfer of copyright or IP ownership. Just as is true for releases of code to selected parties under more "traditional" licensing terms (like, for money;-), the copyright still rests with the author of the code released under GPL. The GPL simply licenses a recipient of that code to use it, modify it, and do whatever with it, with the restriction that if they distribute something based on or derived from that licensed code, their distribution must be no more restrictive than the GPL-licensed code they are incorporating.
If I release code into the community under the GPL, I still own it. I can license that very same code under different licensing terms to other people, as I choose. I can charge money for my code to some people, and give it for free to others.
But if I have licensed my code under the GPL, then anyone who receives it under that GPL license can propogate it per the terms of the GPL. Indeed, the GPL requires them to propogate my original code along with their modifications to it. Someone who got it for free from me can give it for free to someone who might otherwise have paid me for it.
The GPL might be scary to the corporate suits and lawyers, but it's really a lot simpler than they fear.
Or maybe it's actually scarier...
If SCO has released some code/IP under GPL, then by the terms of the GPL anyone who receives that code is obligated to pass on that code to anyone else who asks for it. Even if SCO charges money from someone else for that very same code.
But then, IANALBIHPWTMMTL (I Am Not A Laywer, But I've Paid Wayyyy Too Much Money To Lawyers)
But the people paying those supposedly "smart people" are pretty dumb. Lately I've been getting 12-15 spam messages every day from "Some Bozo". And with a subject line containing the literal string "random text".
Lots of the fools paying for the smart spam tools are too dumb to configure it. Eliminate those turkeys, and it will reduce the amount of spam significantly.
Yes, exactly. I also read it as saying basically that:
"We as Your Government may have access to the source code for our protection [and the value of 'our' may vary, but please trust Your Government]. And since We are a Benevolent Government, We understand that since We have access to the source code, We must abide by whatever requirements are imposed upon such access.
That means if We merely keep the source code so We can support Our own users in case the software supplier goes out of business, that's fine -- it's actually good business practice. It protects Us in the case We need to support Ourselves because the supplier can not (known in the industry as 'escrow code').
However, if We use the source code in any other way, such as
reverse-engineering to create our own code
enhancing or modifying the code to meet our own requirements
fixing bugs and errors in the code
then we must be careful, and legally we must observe the restrictions placed on the original Intellectual Property by the owner(s) of that IP. "
The GPL (and other similar licenses) make it quite clear what is required in each case.
This government memo basically seems to be nudging the government readers to take note that they need to be slightly alert.
Am I missing something? It seems to me that this memo actually indicates an improving awareness of the OSS concept.
Certainly until this comes to court (wherever), it will be pretty hard to tell what this really is about. However, in looking at the PSPD web page about this lawsuit, it appears to me as if it is claiming damage to all Korean Internet users caused by the MS bug (hard to dispute), and the crux of the question the court will have to decide is whether MS was negligent in allowing the bug to be released. The claim is that by negligently allowing the bug to escape Redmond in the first place, MS shares responosibility in the consequential damages that ensued.
All these comments about EULA, and whether a product was purchased, and you get what you pay for, and Open Software has no warranty, etc. are not relevant.
If MS released software into the wild which caused widespread actual loss to Internet-connected systems and their owners, whether or not those owners were MS customers, then is MS liable for those damages?
Starts to sound like going after the author of a virus/worm. The boundary between the actual virus/worm which exploits a security flaw and the ubiquitous system which contains the flaw gets very fuzzy in the eyes of a lawyer who might be able to prove negligence.
Of course, IANAL (sounds pr0n-like, doesn't it?), but I wonder about ambulance-chasing or its equivalent, and definitely view it with mixed emotions. No matter how much I might side with the plaintiffs in this case.
No, this simply is not true. For every credit card transaction (card present in-store, mail order, phone, internet, whatever) there are these parties to the transaction:
cardholder presenting the card or providing the card number
merchant accepting the card and providing goods or service
cardholder's issuing bank, where the credit limit, current outstanding balance, billing address, etc. is kept
merchant's bank, where the funds eventually end up for transactions that go through
processing network, the transaction processing company at the other end of the number the "swipe terminal" calls at the store, or at the other end of Internet authorizations; this is the company that was broken into, according to the news stories. These are networks like NDC, Vital, VisaNet, etc. There are something like 7 major networks, some larger number of minor ones, and not too surprisingly, their number and identities are changing through mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations.
VISA International, MasterCard, Amex, Discover -- the marketing organizations that own the trademarks, and license (franchise?) the name to the issuing banks
Every credit card transaction goes through a processing network. Only the very largest merchant banks have their own network, and those banks as a rule don't have time for any but the largest (multi-billion-dollar) merchants. All the rest go through a "3rd party processor". You can bet that every neighborhood store, including your local member of a national chain, is processing their credit card transactions through one of the processing networks. It's not just "Internet transactions", and not just subscription accounts.
The article mentioned that both VISA and MasterCard have a "zero-liability policy" so that consumers are not liable for fraudulent charges made with stolen account numbers. Well, yes and no. The federal credit law does limit the liability, but there are limitations on the limits (distance from home, etc.). Usually this is not a problem, and almost always any charge the consumer contests is credited back in full, and charged back to the merchant who made the charge.
But what usually is ignored is that while the consumer might not have to pay, the merchant who sold the goodies does have to pay. The credit card issuer doesn't pay for fraudulent charges -- they get "charged back" to the merchant who made the charge, and the merchant pays, plus a "chargeback fee" of $15 - $50 per transaction. It's one thing for a software download to go unpaid, it's quite another for a merchant to ship actual physical goods and not get paid for them.
Eventually the consumer does end up paying for fraudulent credit card charges, but just like insurance premiums, where any individual charges or payments might be small relative to the total public cost of the incident, you can be sure that in the aggregate the fees, interest, and other charges imposed by the credit card issuing banks will cover their losses and still make a profit, and the prices merchants have to charge for goods will, in the long run, certainly have to cover their losses and still make a profit.
In other words, the cost of credit card fraud is shifted away from the consumer (who is innocent of any single fraudulent charge on their particular card, so of course should not be forced to pay it), and becomes instead just part of the cost of doing business for everyone on the other side of the transaction.
Hmm...If you create such a web site, and all you have is my password, may it be the same as my online banking password, what can you extract from that?
It gives you a very small dictionary to start with. Cracking is much easier (trivial?).
Last time I checked, the NJ driver's license # was a one-letter prefix plus 14 decimal digits. A total of 15 characters for the DL#. And the license was a printed paper card with a warning "DO NOT LAMINATE". And no photo.
Of course, this was some years ago, but nevertheless it was still true the last time I checked. In true Slashdot form, the current situation is not relevant to my rant^H^H^H^H comment.
So, it might very well be the case that NJ now, after all this time:
has a photo on the driver's license
uses the SSN as the DL#, or as part of the DL#
takes more care in giving out driver's licenses, which are often used as photo IDs, than they used to when my friends bragged about how easy it was to get fake ID to go bar-hopping
But now that I live in California, where photos have been included on driver's licenses for a very long time, and where the driving age is higher than in NJ, and fake driver's licenses or other photo IDs are trivially easy to acquire. These 15-year-olds often can pass for 21. It's incredibly common here for underage kids to have access to quite realistic-looking but fake photo IDs (driver license, non-driver ID, whatever).
Think back to Sept 11, 2001. THEY HAD VALID PHOTO IDs.
So what? Does checking for photo ID make any difference? Was anyone at the airport capable of checking those IDs against lists of names or identities to watch for?
Is any airport security screener today capable of checking a photo ID presented against some list of known or suspicious people to watch for?
It's a joke! The entire purpose of this supposed security exercise is to get the US public accustomed to search and seizure.
I should be posting this as AC, but that's no different if you have root access to root...
I am constantly amazed at what my customers do on my web site. No matter what I think they are likely to do, no matter how easy it is to navigate or search, there are customers who can not find what is right there in front of their nose.
Of course, what is obvious to me, what is clearly the only sensible way to look for something, is only obvious and clear to me. And to people who think like me. My customers don't all think like me.
Since my (commercial) web site is there for the convenience of my customers, and the end goal is to generate more happy customers, and ultimately more sales, it doesn't really matter one bit what or how I think.
If you are talking about a small web site, like a vanity site, or a family photo-sharing site, or an on-line catalog for a company with a single product or a small number of products, the goals and constraints are quite different.
But a larger site, especially an informational site for a company with a large number of products (ours has over 900), has different issues and constraints. Each product has different informal popular names among users in addition to the "official" product name, product class, model number, etc. No one path will suffice to get to the information.
User A might use the model number from the box. User 2 might call it a "toaster for fat bread". User third might call it a "bread browner". Get used to it. Do you want to turn away users in frustration, or do you want to think in "twisty turns" and serendipitously provide the answer to that user who, as a child on TV, made Art Linkletter stop in his tracks and look at the camera after an unexpected response?
[apologies for the reference if it is not recognized; in the 1960's there was a daytime TV show hosted by Art Linkletter which featured a segment with Art interviewing young children, asking innocent questions, and getting answers from the children which were often quite surprising. Gave real meaning to the expression "out of the mouths of babes and fools comes wisdom". In the 1970's that segment was spun off into a separate TV show called "Kids Say The Darndest Things". Sometimes the most obvious answer is not the correct one. And vice versa.]
Every day my mind gets boggled by a question from a customer, someone who wants to give me their money, but they won't do it until I answer their stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H important question. Even if the answer is right there in front of them. Never mind a separate FAQ. I mean literally right there on the screen in front of them, on the page they are reading. No navigation or site map involved.
My personal favorite:
"These multi-colored magnetic letters -- are they all the same color?"
Answer the question well and nicely, and the customer is overjoyed because their problem is solved and their money is well-spent. I'm happy because I can help them invest their money wisely, with me, and I can solve their problem. We both win, no one is taking advantage of anyone else.
But it's essentially impossible to predict how the users of a web site will attempt to navigate it, or search for what they want. Outside of very narrow or specialized interests, the users of a web site must be expected to think differently than the designers of the web site do.
It's extremely important to have usability testing of the web site by a sample of users as representative as possible of the people who will be using the web site. Never mind that it's a moving target, and a largely unreachable one.
they have to use standard stock and account for this in their design, and still get the thing to work.
Electrical engineers are quite accustomed to this kind of restriction. The calculations may tell you that you want a 513.24-ohm resistor in your circuit, but you know that they are manufactured as standard components in 490, 500, 510, and 520-ohm values, but with tolerances of
+/-20% (cheap)
+/- 10% (more $$),
+/- 5% (expensive),
+/- 1% (gawd-awful expensive),
+/-0.5% (if you gotta ask, you can't afford it)
The thing that separates an Engineer from a Designer is that the Engineer understands the difference between Ideal and What is Available, and knows how to build tolerances into the design that will accept the variance in performance of What is Available, balanced against the cost, and still meet the performance specification. Four points to summarize:
Designers envision things that might not yet ever have existed; that does not mean they are possible given current technology and/or current best practice
Engineers (mechanical, civil, chemical, electrical, software, whatever) design Real Things made out of Real Components and Real Ingredients
Better Stuff (Components and Ingredients) costs more; Cheaper Stuff might be good, might be bad, might even be IDEAL, but you takes your chances
Engineers know that a robust design will include tolerances which accomodate the variance likely to be found in the Real Components and Real Ingredients used to implement the design, taking into account the cost for getting Better Stuff
This is too funny! I followed your link to their page, and one of their links is a "Test the Security of your Website" button. Click on that, and it requests the URL of a web site to check.
Enter their own URL. Click the "Proceed" button.
Shazam! The entire source code of the web page being tested is revealed and available to be stolen. So are all the images on the page.
They advise using their security software to protect the web page source code, and prevent it being stolen by unscrupulous thieves.
Please forgive any typos, I'm having trouble typing right now, I'm still laughing too hard...
No, a DNS blacklist does not keep him from getting mail that he wants. Not unless he sets up his incoming SMTP handler to reject email from relay hosts that are on the blacklist. His incoming SMTP server is free to accept any and all email, even including the "email that I wanted".
But for him to presume that he has a right to force his outgoing email into my inbox is another thing, and he does not have that right, no matter how many sleazy lawyer threats he cares to sling about.
In 1975 I was working in the IT shop of a big insurance company, straight IBM (TSO was an "experiment" they were tolerant enough to permit in the building for us youngsters to play with). They were one of the first production installations of TSAM, and had more 3270 terminals nationwide than you would ever believe.
We all knew very well about the Y2K issue inherent in the 2-digit packed decimal date formats that were used to store information. But expending the additional costs of storage for expanding that 2-digit 1-byte field was unthinkable for the company management.
Please keep in mind that this same insurance company had FARMS of those DASD disk drives (4330's would come later, never mind Winchester drives). Several dozen gigibytes of online storage, not tapes, for quick access to account information for millions of clients by thousands of insurance agents across the country. Pretty amazing in 1975, but very much taken for granted now. Think about it -- dozens of gigabytes. One little 5-1/4" drive now. But then? Two floors [raised floors with motion detectors and halon fire extinguishers] of washing machines, burning 1.5KW each drive. Mind-boggling both then and now, but for different reasons.
Bottom line: expanding that 2-digit packed field, from one byte to two bytes, to fix the future problem, would have cost several hundreds of thousands of 1970's dollars just for the hardware cost of the storage, never mind the professional labor cost to program it and do the conversion. It was decided for what, in hindsight, were good reasons: it will be much cheaper to fix it in the future, if in fact it is still a problem when that time comes.
The point is that people were not unaware of the problem, but that the cost of fixing the problem vs. the cost of fixing the problem "just in time" is not easy to compare. Today I can buy for $300 a single disk drive with the storage capacity that took 2 floors of a building, many KW of power, and a platoon of support staff all costing $300 a minute. This trend in online storage was not exactly predicted by Moore's Law, but we all knew that things would be far, far different by the time it really mattered.
It's all very easy to read stories of people saying "Let's not worry, they'll fix it later" and conclude that it was a cavalier decision, more like what Enron and Anderson have done more recently. But put on your engineer hat! Ignoring the media hype (and they do like to hype to sell papers/subscriptions/clicks), it really was much better to fix the problem in the '90s than it would have been to fix it in the '70s.
Never mind that no one then did or could have predicted the way that computers have become so firmly entrenched in our lives now. In many cases (Unix, Mac, etc) the problem went away by itself, or never was a problem in the first place. In others (mainframe legacy apps), the applications were replaced by new ones which avoided the problem from the start. There remained a much smaller number of applications to be repaired, and databases to be converted or segregated into "before" and "after" data formats. This was much less of a problem than it was blown up to be, and it pretty much was dealt with sucessfully without fanfare. The media hype did serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to the problem, and to the pervasive role computer systems play today.
A much more interesting question in my mind is what will happen in 2 years or so when we run out of area codes in the NANP (North American Numbering Plan)? Think of all those fax machines, and phone speed-dialers, and modems, and modem programs, and whatever, that presume that a phone number has 10 digits. Most of the rest of the world will have no problem, they already handle variable-length phone numbers. Many have put cell phones into their own area codes (or the equivalent), whereas in the US we have cell phones, faxes, and modems all competing for the same limited pool of numbers.
But not us!
We'll sure have fun here in North America when we have to add a digit to our phone numbers and can't handle it. The rest of the world will wonder what the problem is...
My own experience argues against you. I am a million-mile+ Executive Platinum with American, and 100K Premier with United (TDM flying). Both airlines pick me 8 out of 10 times for the "random" check at the gate.
And, tied to the DC's database, they can really get into the psychographic stuff. "This IP reads a lot of pr0n; this one is a snowboarding junkie; here's one that's been researching home decorating..."
But how will they know what IP addresses my IP is exchanging packets with, unless they somehow get wedged into my ISP's routers?
This is starting to sound like worrying about the wrong number caller "knowing" my phone number, and thereby being able to find out all the phone numbers that I call from my number. Please explain how my packet traffic can be tied to DoubleClick's or any other database just given my IP address, even with other information the ping/traceroute can give them, like time-of-day my IP responds.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, by that reasoning, proprietary software is even *more* anti-business, since those resources must be expended in every case.
Since GPL'd software provides the opportunity for re-use of the code even by a business, it sure seems like the opposite of what you think you are arguing.
Yes, they have mastered the concept of political correctness...
Oops! I mean they have woven the concept [into a tangled web?]
Ahem, isn't this slavishly bowing to Political Correctness?
As if there isn't already enough reason for the rest of the country, and the world, to laugh at California, with our new Governator...
The GPL is a real license, and it does not conflict with nor weaken copyright law. Licensing the use of Intellectual Property does not in any way weaken ownership of that IP. Perhaps it's time that this point is driven home by a court. If I don't own the IP (if I don't control the copyright, either by virtue of being the author or by having that right assigned to me by the author), then I usually can't transfer that IP to someone else legally unless I have specific permission of the real owner to do that. The GPL is both the permission for that transfer, and the obligation to do so.
;-), the copyright still rests with the author of the code released under GPL. The GPL simply licenses a recipient of that code to use it, modify it, and do whatever with it, with the restriction that if they distribute something based on or derived from that licensed code, their distribution must be no more restrictive than the GPL-licensed code they are incorporating.
The GPL is not a transfer of copyright or IP ownership. Just as is true for releases of code to selected parties under more "traditional" licensing terms (like, for money
If I release code into the community under the GPL, I still own it. I can license that very same code under different licensing terms to other people, as I choose. I can charge money for my code to some people, and give it for free to others.
But if I have licensed my code under the GPL, then anyone who receives it under that GPL license can propogate it per the terms of the GPL. Indeed, the GPL requires them to propogate my original code along with their modifications to it. Someone who got it for free from me can give it for free to someone who might otherwise have paid me for it.
The GPL might be scary to the corporate suits and lawyers, but it's really a lot simpler than they fear.
Or maybe it's actually scarier...
If SCO has released some code/IP under GPL, then by the terms of the GPL anyone who receives that code is obligated to pass on that code to anyone else who asks for it. Even if SCO charges money from someone else for that very same code.
But then, IANALBIHPWTMMTL (I Am Not A Laywer, But I've Paid Wayyyy Too Much Money To Lawyers)
Lots of the fools paying for the smart spam tools are too dumb to configure it. Eliminate those turkeys, and it will reduce the amount of spam significantly.
"We as Your Government may have access to the source code for our protection [and the value of 'our' may vary, but please trust Your Government]. And since We are a Benevolent Government, We understand that since We have access to the source code, We must abide by whatever requirements are imposed upon such access.
That means if We merely keep the source code so We can support Our own users in case the software supplier goes out of business, that's fine -- it's actually good business practice. It protects Us in the case We need to support Ourselves because the supplier can not (known in the industry as 'escrow code').
However, if We use the source code in any other way, such as
then we must be careful, and legally we must observe the restrictions placed on the original Intellectual Property by the owner(s) of that IP. "
The GPL (and other similar licenses) make it quite clear what is required in each case.
This government memo basically seems to be nudging the government readers to take note that they need to be slightly alert.
Am I missing something? It seems to me that this memo actually indicates an improving awareness of the OSS concept.
Certainly until this comes to court (wherever), it will be pretty hard to tell what this really is about. However, in looking at the PSPD web page about this lawsuit, it appears to me as if it is claiming damage to all Korean Internet users caused by the MS bug (hard to dispute), and the crux of the question the court will have to decide is whether MS was negligent in allowing the bug to be released. The claim is that by negligently allowing the bug to escape Redmond in the first place, MS shares responosibility in the consequential damages that ensued.
All these comments about EULA, and whether a product was purchased, and you get what you pay for, and Open Software has no warranty, etc. are not relevant.
If MS released software into the wild which caused widespread actual loss to Internet-connected systems and their owners, whether or not those owners were MS customers, then is MS liable for those damages?
Starts to sound like going after the author of a virus/worm. The boundary between the actual virus/worm which exploits a security flaw and the ubiquitous system which contains the flaw gets very fuzzy in the eyes of a lawyer who might be able to prove negligence.
Of course, IANAL (sounds pr0n-like, doesn't it?), but I wonder about ambulance-chasing or its equivalent, and definitely view it with mixed emotions. No matter how much I might side with the plaintiffs in this case.
Every credit card transaction goes through a processing network. Only the very largest merchant banks have their own network, and those banks as a rule don't have time for any but the largest (multi-billion-dollar) merchants. All the rest go through a "3rd party processor". You can bet that every neighborhood store, including your local member of a national chain, is processing their credit card transactions through one of the processing networks. It's not just "Internet transactions", and not just subscription accounts.
But what usually is ignored is that while the consumer might not have to pay, the merchant who sold the goodies does have to pay. The credit card issuer doesn't pay for fraudulent charges -- they get "charged back" to the merchant who made the charge, and the merchant pays, plus a "chargeback fee" of $15 - $50 per transaction. It's one thing for a software download to go unpaid, it's quite another for a merchant to ship actual physical goods and not get paid for them.
Eventually the consumer does end up paying for fraudulent credit card charges, but just like insurance premiums, where any individual charges or payments might be small relative to the total public cost of the incident, you can be sure that in the aggregate the fees, interest, and other charges imposed by the credit card issuing banks will cover their losses and still make a profit, and the prices merchants have to charge for goods will, in the long run, certainly have to cover their losses and still make a profit.
In other words, the cost of credit card fraud is shifted away from the consumer (who is innocent of any single fraudulent charge on their particular card, so of course should not be forced to pay it), and becomes instead just part of the cost of doing business for everyone on the other side of the transaction.
It gives you a very small dictionary to start with. Cracking is much easier (trivial?).
Of course, this was some years ago, but nevertheless it was still true the last time I checked. In true Slashdot form, the current situation is not relevant to my rant^H^H^H^H comment.
So, it might very well be the case that NJ now, after all this time:
But now that I live in California, where photos have been included on driver's licenses for a very long time, and where the driving age is higher than in NJ, and fake driver's licenses or other photo IDs are trivially easy to acquire. These 15-year-olds often can pass for 21. It's incredibly common here for underage kids to have access to quite realistic-looking but fake photo IDs (driver license, non-driver ID, whatever).
Think back to Sept 11, 2001. THEY HAD VALID PHOTO IDs.
So what? Does checking for photo ID make any difference? Was anyone at the airport capable of checking those IDs against lists of names or identities to watch for?
Is any airport security screener today capable of checking a photo ID presented against some list of known or suspicious people to watch for?
It's a joke! The entire purpose of this supposed security exercise is to get the US public accustomed to search and seizure.
I should be posting this as AC, but that's no different if you have root access to root...
Of course, what is obvious to me, what is clearly the only sensible way to look for something, is only obvious and clear to me. And to people who think like me. My customers don't all think like me.
Since my (commercial) web site is there for the convenience of my customers, and the end goal is to generate more happy customers, and ultimately more sales, it doesn't really matter one bit what or how I think.
If you are talking about a small web site, like a vanity site, or a family photo-sharing site, or an on-line catalog for a company with a single product or a small number of products, the goals and constraints are quite different.
But a larger site, especially an informational site for a company with a large number of products (ours has over 900), has different issues and constraints. Each product has different informal popular names among users in addition to the "official" product name, product class, model number, etc. No one path will suffice to get to the information.
User A might use the model number from the box. User 2 might call it a "toaster for fat bread". User third might call it a "bread browner". Get used to it. Do you want to turn away users in frustration, or do you want to think in "twisty turns" and serendipitously provide the answer to that user who, as a child on TV, made Art Linkletter stop in his tracks and look at the camera after an unexpected response?
[apologies for the reference if it is not recognized; in the 1960's there was a daytime TV show hosted by Art Linkletter which featured a segment with Art interviewing young children, asking innocent questions, and getting answers from the children which were often quite surprising. Gave real meaning to the expression "out of the mouths of babes and fools comes wisdom". In the 1970's that segment was spun off into a separate TV show called "Kids Say The Darndest Things". Sometimes the most obvious answer is not the correct one. And vice versa.]
Every day my mind gets boggled by a question from a customer, someone who wants to give me their money, but they won't do it until I answer their stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H important question. Even if the answer is right there in front of them. Never mind a separate FAQ. I mean literally right there on the screen in front of them, on the page they are reading. No navigation or site map involved.
My personal favorite:
Answer the question well and nicely, and the customer is overjoyed because their problem is solved and their money is well-spent. I'm happy because I can help them invest their money wisely, with me, and I can solve their problem. We both win, no one is taking advantage of anyone else.
But it's essentially impossible to predict how the users of a web site will attempt to navigate it, or search for what they want. Outside of very narrow or specialized interests, the users of a web site must be expected to think differently than the designers of the web site do.
It's extremely important to have usability testing of the web site by a sample of users as representative as possible of the people who will be using the web site. Never mind that it's a moving target, and a largely unreachable one.
Electrical engineers are quite accustomed to this kind of restriction. The calculations may tell you that you want a 513.24-ohm resistor in your circuit, but you know that they are manufactured as standard components in 490, 500, 510, and 520-ohm values, but with tolerances of
The thing that separates an Engineer from a Designer is that the Engineer understands the difference between Ideal and What is Available, and knows how to build tolerances into the design that will accept the variance in performance of What is Available, balanced against the cost, and still meet the performance specification.
Four points to summarize:
But seriously, this is a great riposte to the pr0n spam!
Enter their own URL. Click the "Proceed" button.
Shazam! The entire source code of the web page being tested is revealed and available to be stolen. So are all the images on the page.
They advise using their security software to protect the web page source code, and prevent it being stolen by unscrupulous thieves.
Please forgive any typos, I'm having trouble typing right now, I'm still laughing too hard...
Gaack! reply connected to wrong parent article!
Never mind...
- Emily Litella
This is a clear and present threat to our society. Good thing the FBI acted quickly!
No, a DNS blacklist does not keep him from getting mail that he wants. Not unless he sets up his incoming SMTP handler to reject email from relay hosts that are on the blacklist. His incoming SMTP server is free to accept any and all email, even including the "email that I wanted".
But for him to presume that he has a right to force his outgoing email into my inbox is another thing, and he does not have that right, no matter how many sleazy lawyer threats he cares to sling about.
We all knew very well about the Y2K issue inherent in the 2-digit packed decimal date formats that were used to store information. But expending the additional costs of storage for expanding that 2-digit 1-byte field was unthinkable for the company management.
Please keep in mind that this same insurance company had FARMS of those DASD disk drives (4330's would come later, never mind Winchester drives). Several dozen gigibytes of online storage, not tapes, for quick access to account information for millions of clients by thousands of insurance agents across the country. Pretty amazing in 1975, but very much taken for granted now. Think about it -- dozens of gigabytes. One little 5-1/4" drive now. But then? Two floors [raised floors with motion detectors and halon fire extinguishers] of washing machines, burning 1.5KW each drive. Mind-boggling both then and now, but for different reasons.
Bottom line: expanding that 2-digit packed field, from one byte to two bytes, to fix the future problem, would have cost several hundreds of thousands of 1970's dollars just for the hardware cost of the storage, never mind the professional labor cost to program it and do the conversion. It was decided for what, in hindsight, were good reasons: it will be much cheaper to fix it in the future, if in fact it is still a problem when that time comes.
The point is that people were not unaware of the problem, but that the cost of fixing the problem vs. the cost of fixing the problem "just in time" is not easy to compare. Today I can buy for $300 a single disk drive with the storage capacity that took 2 floors of a building, many KW of power, and a platoon of support staff all costing $300 a minute. This trend in online storage was not exactly predicted by Moore's Law, but we all knew that things would be far, far different by the time it really mattered.
It's all very easy to read stories of people saying "Let's not worry, they'll fix it later" and conclude that it was a cavalier decision, more like what Enron and Anderson have done more recently. But put on your engineer hat! Ignoring the media hype (and they do like to hype to sell papers/subscriptions/clicks), it really was much better to fix the problem in the '90s than it would have been to fix it in the '70s.
Never mind that no one then did or could have predicted the way that computers have become so firmly entrenched in our lives now. In many cases (Unix, Mac, etc) the problem went away by itself, or never was a problem in the first place. In others (mainframe legacy apps), the applications were replaced by new ones which avoided the problem from the start. There remained a much smaller number of applications to be repaired, and databases to be converted or segregated into "before" and "after" data formats. This was much less of a problem than it was blown up to be, and it pretty much was dealt with sucessfully without fanfare. The media hype did serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to the problem, and to the pervasive role computer systems play today.
A much more interesting question in my mind is what will happen in 2 years or so when we run out of area codes in the NANP (North American Numbering Plan)? Think of all those fax machines, and phone speed-dialers, and modems, and modem programs, and whatever, that presume that a phone number has 10 digits. Most of the rest of the world will have no problem, they already handle variable-length phone numbers. Many have put cell phones into their own area codes (or the equivalent), whereas in the US we have cell phones, faxes, and modems all competing for the same limited pool of numbers.
But not us!
We'll sure have fun here in North America when we have to add a digit to our phone numbers and can't handle it. The rest of the world will wonder what the problem is...
My own experience argues against you. I am a million-mile+ Executive Platinum with American, and 100K Premier with United (TDM flying). Both airlines pick me 8 out of 10 times for the "random" check at the gate.
But how will they know what IP addresses my IP is exchanging packets with, unless they somehow get wedged into my ISP's routers?
This is starting to sound like worrying about the wrong number caller "knowing" my phone number, and thereby being able to find out all the phone numbers that I call from my number. Please explain how my packet traffic can be tied to DoubleClick's or any other database just given my IP address, even with other information the ping/traceroute can give them, like time-of-day my IP responds.