I never said that a URI was a link to anything. I realize that this new info URI is just a standardization of metadata, which is why I referred to the semantic web, another attempt to standardize metadata. I've been trying to explain for years to various people that XML URIs are not necessarily actual HTTP accessible resource addresses, and I always end up in futile discussions on the topic. Too confusing for many people, when people invent descriptive URIs that look exactly like resource locations in a particular addressing scheme based on DNS. So I think in a way, the info scheme is a good one if it reduces confusion about the meaning of these URIs.
But my major point is that metadata without trust is not very useful in today's world. Any reference I made to links was only incidental (describing the current search engine situation).
Yes, and unfortunately, like other semantic web-style proposals, it will take about 5 minutes to be abused so much by people trying to harvest clicks and user attention that it will rapidly become useless. If we can't rely on users to accurately list meta-keywords in HTML documents, why would any other such identifiers work better, without some sort of meaningful web-of-trust system built in?
Just a thought. I would hate to go looking for info:palm/model/P80900US and find 8 million links to people trying to get me to surf over to their porn site.
I used to go through these same sorts of gyrations with Verizon DSL. I recently switched to (cheaper) Time Warner cable service (in NYC) and I FINALLY have an ISP that will tell me when there's an outage at Level 1 tech support, and doesn't force me to step through some retarded script, "are all the filters still on the line?", "is your computer still connected to the DSL modem?, blah blah blah, force me to lie about having a router (I wasn't supposed to use one unless it was their approved model). Verizon sucked a bit fat hairy one, but they were by far better than having to deal with the 3-company DSL nightmare my friends used to have to deal with.
These days, it's quite clear that cable modem service seems far more reliable - much less downtime and weird fuckups than DSL, so they can afford to have semi-reasonable Level 1 techs. With Verizon, what finally prompted me to leave was when they had to escalate an issue to Level 3, then Level 3 had to call in the dread, secret Level 4, and then, after my service spontaneously started working again, 24 hours later, they pulled the plug to "transition me to their new dynamic IP platform", which would require a new DSL modem. But they did this to fix a problem that didn't exist anymore (it was already back online), and they didn't notify me in advance, and they didn't send me the new modem I needed until I talked to the Level 3 tech guy again who said it would be necessary, but it'd take 4 days to get it to me because it was a Friday.
Thank you Verizon for costing me thousands of dollars of lost time with your shitty DSL service. That's why now I'm getting DSL backup to failover to in the event that TW cable goes down. If your time is worth more than 40 bucks an hour, and you get even an hour of downtime a month, then it's worth it. When you start thinking about 2-3 days of downtime in a row, that 40 bucks of peace of mind makes sense.
Read the rest of my post. I was trying to explain in the simplest terms possible the rules of thumb for working with the GPL. For web apps and internal business apps, distribution is generally not an issue. For _product_ software (stuff that's going to be sold, either boxed consumer software, enterprise software, shareware, etc.), stay away from incorporating GPL source code.
Of course, you can still use GPLed tools and the like, and the GPL isn't some magic viral pollutant or anything, you just don't want to cut and paste source code or even consider GPL source code if you are making software that's going to get sold to other individuals or companies as part of a software company's business plan.
If you are writing software for a closed source product, you shouldn't incorporate any GPLed source code into your product, period. Pretty much any other Open Source license usually has some mechanism to make it permissible to use with a closed source product. Even the LGPL generally lets you use it (by building the LGPLed code into dynamically linked libraries, and calling them from your closed source binary code using a well-defined interface).
Then again, if you are just building websites or business software for internal use only, using GPLed software may not be an issue. With internal only software, it's never distributed outside your organization, so there's no concern about who requests copies of the source code, and it probably would be useless to people outside anyway. And for web software, you are generally only installing the software itself on a web server, not distributing it to anybody else. So it doesn't particularly matter if you're calling GPLed modules from your code, because you are never intending to distribute your code to anybody else.
Of course, if you were intending on using GPLed or any Open Source code in a commercial project, it should go through at least a modest vetting by a lawyer in advance if there are any doubts or lack of clarity about licenses, conflict between licenses and so forth. Don't forget that a big part of being a software developer in this day and age IS being an intellectual property vendor, and you NEED to be responsible for learning about and understanding how the law and licensing contracts affect your tools in trade. If you choose to be ignorant, don't be surprised when the market passes you by.
I am not sure if you are just trolling or if you really work for Linksys. In any case, as others will doubtless point out, that is not operating under the terms of the GPL. Whether or not I like them or you like them, the GPL requires that you release all the source code to enable you to compile the binary in question, in this case, the kernel. You are not allowed to link GPLed source code statically with non-GPL-compatible code for this reason, and if you (or anybody) links GPLed code with proprietary/trade secret-protected code, you will either have to release that code, break trade secret, or you will have to pull the product from market as you have violated the GPL authors copyright and released an product containing illegally pilfered source code.
Your obligation under those binding third party agreements is really no different than your binding obligation to the third-party authors of the GPL source code in question. You similarly have no rights to the GPL source code (beyond the standard ones you have to any copyrighted work you see out there on the street) other than those you obtain under the GPL contract, and claiming that release of "the GPL source code we used" but not the entire source code for the module is definitely a breach of contract as well.
But then again, I think you're just trolling based on the blog entry you are linked to, and I think IHBT.
I'm currently involved in a consumer products (home/kitchen electronics, not a software business) and we have everybody under NDA. For two reasons - 1. Part of our product contains patentable design elements, and we are still working on detailed design specifications, which will be used in the patent application. 2. More importantly, with some kinds of products, time to market is really important. With these consumer products, a large established company could easily beat us to market using their existing manufacturing channels if they had a moderately detailed description of the product and concept. We just want to have the CYA-effect in action so if somebody miraculously comes out with an identical product, we can go after them with breach of contract.
Once we come to market, sure, somebody else will be able to make copycat products (limited perhaps by our patents), but we still get the first mover advantage with a new kind of device.
Now in this case, there is genuine uniqueness to the product. With a lot of software companies, their uniqueness is all about 2 or 3 features that somebody else can easily nab and throw into a competing product. In fact, since "manufacturing" in the software business involves clobbering in some new features and releasing a new build, which can usually be done in a few days, the time from reading some documentation to coming out with 1-for-1 matching feature sets is often measured in a matter of weeks, not months or years. I think that's why people in the software business are so paranoid about NDAs - keeping featurization and product details secret until it's on the market.
I think the other reason is many companies don't want anybody outside to hear how ugly and dirty their software is and what a big nasty hack it was to kludge it all together.
This is some sort of strange Slashdot nerd fantasy. Sure, all the people who brought us those world-changing innovations were odd, people who thought outside the box defined for them by society, who followed a dream even in the face of those who said it couldn't be done.
But that doesn't mean they were social rejects lacking the ability to communicate concepts to their fellow man without bristling every person they met. It doesn't mean they espoused ideologies with technology and tried to use their innovations as a way to force normative concepts and judgements down people's throats as payment for their work. They didn't loudly shout people down who didn't adhere to their preferred terminology for certain concepts and tried to engage them in discussion.
They didn't (necessarily) have strange concepts of personal hygeniene, speak with bizarre voices, or otherwise exhibit signs of utter social disfunction. You can contribute major innovations to the world without all this baggage, believe it or not. _Acting_ like this does not make you smart, brilliant, a genius, or a world-changer. It just makes you a nerdy asshole.
Sorry, but I want a cell phone with PDA capabilities, not a PDA with cell phone capabilities, and certainly not a weird square looking communicator device.
By far my favorite so far is the Samsung SPH-i500 (see it here), and it's upcoming successor, the SGH-i500, which will be the GSM version, with Palm OS 5 and other goodies.
This is what I've been waiting for, for some time - a cell phone, with a Palm OS PDA built in, and complete integration between the two. You can manage one address book, click on your Palm address book and dial from there, search Zagat.com with a Palm web browser to find restaurants while walking the streets of New York, and pretty much do all the stuff I've always wanted to do with a PDA, but couldn't because it didn't have an internet connection, and getting one added on was too bulky/expensive, and browsing on your cell phone was waaaay too awkward for anything other than the simplest polling of your email to see any new subject lines, maybe reading a short email from a friend.
The CNET reviews are definitely mixed, but I spent an hour or two playing with my friend's SPH-i500 and I'm totally hooked. Now I just need to convince myself to spend 600 bucks on it, after my last large PDA expenditure on a Clie that I use once every month or two.
"Chief People Officer". There should be a law against job titles like that. That almost beats out the old "VP of Ideas" I met out at Idealab! in California. How 1999 can you get?
Okay, trollboy, I have to bite. American business subsidizes your phone line by paying business rates for business lines. But almost EVERY business in the country pays higher business rates. 99% of these businesses are small local businesses, large corporations, and other companies that have NOTHING whatsoever to do with telemarketing. They still pay higher rates that subsidize home phone service. You can axe the telemarketers and sure, it will eat some small amount of telco revenues, but your alarmist bullcrap is ridiculous. 99% of businesses will continue on their day-to-day business, paying inflated business line rates, and subsidizing your phone service.
If the cost of a slightly lower phone bill is harassing telemarketing calls, I think 9 out of 10 Americans would gladly pay a few cents more every month for the privilege of never hearing a telemarketer on the other end again.
That is a rather dumb interpretation of the Constitution. Even the most flagrantly constructionist, literalist interpretation of the Constitution acknowledges that in certain cases, fundamental rights may come in conflict with each other, and there is a need for prioritization of rights. Clearly in some cases your right to "free speech" is limited if that speech can impinge on my right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. What then? And the right to privacy is one that any rational person agrees exists in some form (and it goes waaay back to English common law, the basis and tradition on which our Constitution was built). What happens when my right to privacy within my own home conflicts with your right to say what you want?
First Amendment absolutism is just as silly as any other absolutism. How about we learn to read the First Amendment as "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except when that freedom of speech conflicts with other basic human rights, and in those cases, we have a judicial and legislative system for making those tough, subtle trade-offs."
In fact, the government produces and finances the production of (via academic grants) lots of Free Software. I doubt the US government has any idea how much FOSS they are themselves responsible for producing (I realize that code produced directly by the government is generally public domain, and not released under any license per se).
The government is no different from any large bureaucratic organization, like a Fortune 500 company. Tons of developers and IT people using Linux everywhere because they don't have to get umpteen budgetary approvals to take an old Pentium machine, throw it into the corner and make it a departmental or development server. Lots of Free Software behind the scenes everywhere that's supported internally.
Sure, more advocacy is needed by large shops like IBM of their Linux work so that large bureaucratic organizations (governments included) don't have to shamefully keep their Linux servers hidden away and can freely admit when a project uses Free Software. But this still isn't going to go anywhere toward getting Linux on the desktop.
I think the initial adoption of Windows on the desktop largely happened in corporations first and then overflowed into home use. But these days, I don't think it's that simple. I'm not convinced you can sell organizations on making a change to something that users aren't familiar with due to massive retraining costs (or at least the fear thereof) in the modern office, where Word, Powerpoint and so on are kind. I think you have to pursue the home audience first, where you can sell people on cost, features, reliability. Of course, you have to have a winning case before you can do that, and Linux doesn't really have that yet for the desktop.
Re:Super ultra elite developers
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Yes, and I'm *sure* you can easily hire the best of the best software developers who are really enthused about writing bug tracking and content management systems! err.... nevermind.
From my experience hiring, work environment is one factor, but interest level in the software being developed is definitely a big one in terms of the quality of developers you'll be able to attract. Great developers want to work on interesting, challenging products that do something new and different.
I also think it's nearly impossible to have a complete team of all "top 1 percent" developers. That's like having all chiefs and no indians (pardon the racially minded analogy, it's just an expression). You need people who are good competent developers, but aren't primma donna superstar types who know how good they are. It's a balancing act to build a competent team that works well together, and knows each other's strengths and weaknesses. Frankly, that's just as important than having "all top 1 percent developers" in the long run.
Re:Developer Office Design
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Nah, I never said anything about 9-5 chug-a-long programming. Just that balance is important in life, and I don't think it's a reasonable way to run a sustainable company, to try to burn out young programmers who will work for lower salaries and then toss them away when they get frustrated and angry by having too many unreasonable demands placed on them.
I support and agree with his office design decisions, I just question the wisdom of encouraging even the best programmers to make their work and their life one and the same. I prefer the idea of splitting gym membership fees (healthy programmers are good programmers), encouraging people to go out of the office for dinner if they are working late, and setting up incentives to taking reasonable amounts of time off to prevent burn-out, which is a bigger enemy to productivity in the long run than many people realize.
Developer Office Design
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I agree with a lot of Spolsky's office design rant here, but I am not sure about the part about trying to get developers to live in the office, and that being key to software development success. Sure, you do want people to be happy in the office environment when they sometimes put in an extra long week, but do you really want to operate under the assumption that developers should "essentially live in" the office? I thought that in the post-1999 era, we realized that people need to have balance in their lives, that we can work hard sometimes, but that we should never have to put in consistent, regular 80 hour work weeks.
I have asked developers who worked for me to work those kinds of ridiculous hours before, and I've asked it of myself, mostly because I was forced to by forces outside of my control. These days I prefer to operate under the assumption that work should be scheduled around a 40-50 hour work week, and the office/working environment should be a nice and pleasant one, but it shouldn't supercede home, and you shouldn't have to eat dinner at work every day, spend all your free time with your co-workers, etc.
It's not a misconception. It's a first year law school concept - there is a distinction, based on several centuries of legislation and jurisprudence, and going back to English Common Law, between political speech, commercial speech, speech that consitutes "action" (yelling fire in a crowded theater), and other forms of speech. I didn't make it up, and though some Americans may think commercial speech isn't deserving of protection, I certainly shouldn't be thrown into that boat.
I support the accepted interpretation in the US legal system that commercial speech should be subject to more checks and balances, with respect to factual accuracy (see for example, the Nike case before the Supreme Court - this is definitely an example of unchecked commercial speech) and with respect to the manner in which it is balanced against individual rights. Privacy, for example, is a critical individual right in modern society (see something like this before you tell me that privacy isn't in the constitution), and it is certainly a good thing for our society that commercial speech and its imperatives are balanced against a right to privacy in our own homes. Neither the First Amendment nor the right to privacy are absolute rights - they often may conflict with each other, or with themselves.
I agree with you that it's not always crystal clear which category of protections and which balances or tradeoffs should be made, and that's why we have a court system. Hopefully the court system will rationally and sanely conclude that an individual's right to privacy takes precedence over a company's right to contact random people in their residences in an interruptive and disruptive manner trying to sell them goods or services they have never indicated any interest in.
I thought the FTC _was authorized_ by Congress to construct and issue the Do Not Call list. That's confirmed by several reps interviewed in the CNN article.
I went here to the FTC site on rulemaking re: telemarketing calls, and it looks to my eye like this is authorized by existing legislation. Also, I read this on the Telemarketing Sales Rule (Amended) and how it derives from Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
I guess this is just a case of the court being overly cautious here, but I fail to see how this is a restraint on Free Speech, since (a) the speech we are talking about here falls into the "commercial" category (b) it is "speech" directed into people's private homes without their authorization, permission or any expectation that they want to be bothered with it. Free Speech doesn't mean the freedom to yell your speech into my ear whenever you feel like it.
I suspect that trying to build a distributed RBL is a bit of a lost cause. Who is trusted to add and remove entries from it? The problem with all these lists is that they all rely on somebody's definition of a spam-threat (open relay, or maybe just an unpatched SMTP server, or maybe just being within a mile of an open relay, or maybe having a shitty ISP who doesn't act fast enough). Ultimately, this mechanism seems to disempower individuals from making their own decisions about email, and create complicated confusing situations where ISP A subscribes to RBL B, and thus ISP C can't send email to ISP A, etc. ad infinitum. Figuring out who blackholed whom is quite often confusing and difficult for non-experts. And it's not clear that this system prevents Joe User from getting spam. Yes, I realize it's supposed to punish people who don't play by the rules of common courtesy, but isn't the ratio of "collateral damage" to intended targets a relevant one?
I think there are a lot of other good solutions out there for spam. It would seem that blackholing has it's place, but that if you want to bring large ISPs into the fold, you have to do it without all the collateral damage. Pinpoint strikes, if you will, against compromised servers, rather than concentrating on "punishing" people who often have no choice about their situation. Just my 2 cents, but if you want to get big business on board with the spam fight, you have to do it in a way that doesn't hurt their customers, so when you get DDOSed, you have somebody to help call in the FBI.
I don't believe for a second that spammers could withstand an ongoing heightened legal and governmental response backed by AOL, MSN, etc.
I think I got flamed into losing my cool when I posted some of this stuff. I don't remember doing any name calling, and I certainly didn't intend to. It all started with one post, which I think was taken to mean something more than it did, and seemed to get a real flame war going.
I agree that picking on middle aged women and their families doesn't really help, but neither does picking on business travelers who have to buy one way tickets. I was merely trying to advocate saner selection of attributes to "profile" based on. I realize how much it must suck to be a person who gets picked on when you are completely innocent (a "false positive" if you will), since I've been that person on EVERY commercial flight I've been on in the last year now. So I do feel for people who are innocent of any crimes and yet must be subject to extra searches and suspicion unfairly.
The problem is that _some_ sort of screening program is needed, and it needs to be a sane and honest one, unpredictable enough to be "ungameable" for the real evildoers (who are very small in number), but weighted in such a way that it tends to pick people with actual "risk factors". Selecting 100% of anything is probably a bad idea, like 100% of people with one way tickets, since it makes for an eminently gameable system. Similarly, if all they did was select 100% of people who "looked" Arab, the system would be completely gameable since all you would have to do is have a terrorist with a non-Arab name, who "looked" Caucasian. Clearly, that's not real security.
I don't want revenge against anybody for my airport experiences (except maybe some of those obnoxious TSA workers), and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I just want a fairer, more secure system for everybody. I think it's reasonable for certain people to accept that, through no fault of their own, due to their national or ethnic origin, gender, citizenship status, combined with other factors, they will be more likely to be subject to extra scrutiny since they fit a profile (which of course should consist of more than race alone). I don't think that this is "good" in an absolute moral sense, but I think that it is a statistical necessity at this time. Clearly, there are a lot of other things that could be done to improve security in general for airplane travel beyond using race as a factor in profiling (which is different from using race as THE factor in profiling).
Well, besides de facto power of all the DNS operators out there, if the ICANN says "thou art not root anymore", won't that more or less effectively make it so? I mean, I'm not saying I think ICANN is the greatest body to be doing this, since they aren't terrible responsive to the needs of the citizenry of the Internet, but doesn't it mostly seem odd that Verisign has such a sack on them that they think they can just pull this and get away with it?
I guess if you look at the way Verisign has tried to build their business, it will become rapidly clear that it's not enough for them to just Make Money, they want to be in the business of Monopolizing Stupid Infrastructure. No, really. I mean, they acquired their main competitor in the SSL cert business so they could jack up rates of "discount" Thawte certs to make their own ultra-expensive offering of NOTHINGNESS look appealing.
There has been talk about alternative root DNS servers/systems for some time, and several exist already. My guess is that this move will increase interest in alternatives, and eventually cause either increased regulation or policing by the ICANN of what those supposedly entrusted with managing the TLDs can do with them. And in the meantime, the de facto standards will be set by those who manage DNS servers and filter out Verisign's root entries, or who route sitefinder to/dev/null. The Internet is beautiful because it's a cooperative entity, and if everybody else decides the rules are different, Verisign can do their merry thing and everybody will eventually choose to ignore them.
How exactly was the data going to get used without a court order? I mean I would be concerned if I were in a car accident or something that this data could be used against me, but it sounds like it still can, if the court orders it. Maybe it should be mandatory that you be allowed to deactivate or remove these things, like you can with airbags. I like the idea of at least being able to opt-out of the monitoring of my car's usage in any way.
Now if only the government gave the foggiest shit about electronic privacy. People understand "little black box sitting in your car", and they just don't seem to get the other privacy atrocities that go on every day.
Can we predict the death of the RDBMS? Is it time for Oracle to roll over and play dead? Do I really know that the questions I'm asking are ridiculous? Is it possible that I'm just begging the question here? Do I realize that plenty of people have built systems to handle queries from memory without hitting the disk? Do I realize these are only appopriate for a very limited domain of problems? Could we come up with a worse name for a project than "Prevayler"?
And most importantly, was Cliff smoking something when he posted this, and if so, where can I get it?
Yes, genius, that's how UPS got it here so fast, but it doesn't explain the same day shipping, account activation email, issuance of a phone number, and so forth. I've never had any Real Utility Company (PSTN or otherwise) do anything for me that fast.
Based on my experience so far, and the feedback I've heard from friends, Vonage seems to be paying attention to customer service. And this new regulatory fee is more than offset by the decrease in their service fee.
Slashdot Mirror
But my major point is that metadata without trust is not very useful in today's world. Any reference I made to links was only incidental (describing the current search engine situation).
Just a thought. I would hate to go looking for info:palm/model/P80900US and find 8 million links to people trying to get me to surf over to their porn site.
These days, it's quite clear that cable modem service seems far more reliable - much less downtime and weird fuckups than DSL, so they can afford to have semi-reasonable Level 1 techs. With Verizon, what finally prompted me to leave was when they had to escalate an issue to Level 3, then Level 3 had to call in the dread, secret Level 4, and then, after my service spontaneously started working again, 24 hours later, they pulled the plug to "transition me to their new dynamic IP platform", which would require a new DSL modem. But they did this to fix a problem that didn't exist anymore (it was already back online), and they didn't notify me in advance, and they didn't send me the new modem I needed until I talked to the Level 3 tech guy again who said it would be necessary, but it'd take 4 days to get it to me because it was a Friday.
Thank you Verizon for costing me thousands of dollars of lost time with your shitty DSL service. That's why now I'm getting DSL backup to failover to in the event that TW cable goes down. If your time is worth more than 40 bucks an hour, and you get even an hour of downtime a month, then it's worth it. When you start thinking about 2-3 days of downtime in a row, that 40 bucks of peace of mind makes sense.
Of course, you can still use GPLed tools and the like, and the GPL isn't some magic viral pollutant or anything, you just don't want to cut and paste source code or even consider GPL source code if you are making software that's going to get sold to other individuals or companies as part of a software company's business plan.
Then again, if you are just building websites or business software for internal use only, using GPLed software may not be an issue. With internal only software, it's never distributed outside your organization, so there's no concern about who requests copies of the source code, and it probably would be useless to people outside anyway. And for web software, you are generally only installing the software itself on a web server, not distributing it to anybody else. So it doesn't particularly matter if you're calling GPLed modules from your code, because you are never intending to distribute your code to anybody else.
Of course, if you were intending on using GPLed or any Open Source code in a commercial project, it should go through at least a modest vetting by a lawyer in advance if there are any doubts or lack of clarity about licenses, conflict between licenses and so forth. Don't forget that a big part of being a software developer in this day and age IS being an intellectual property vendor, and you NEED to be responsible for learning about and understanding how the law and licensing contracts affect your tools in trade. If you choose to be ignorant, don't be surprised when the market passes you by.
Your obligation under those binding third party agreements is really no different than your binding obligation to the third-party authors of the GPL source code in question. You similarly have no rights to the GPL source code (beyond the standard ones you have to any copyrighted work you see out there on the street) other than those you obtain under the GPL contract, and claiming that release of "the GPL source code we used" but not the entire source code for the module is definitely a breach of contract as well.
But then again, I think you're just trolling based on the blog entry you are linked to, and I think IHBT.
Once we come to market, sure, somebody else will be able to make copycat products (limited perhaps by our patents), but we still get the first mover advantage with a new kind of device.
Now in this case, there is genuine uniqueness to the product. With a lot of software companies, their uniqueness is all about 2 or 3 features that somebody else can easily nab and throw into a competing product. In fact, since "manufacturing" in the software business involves clobbering in some new features and releasing a new build, which can usually be done in a few days, the time from reading some documentation to coming out with 1-for-1 matching feature sets is often measured in a matter of weeks, not months or years. I think that's why people in the software business are so paranoid about NDAs - keeping featurization and product details secret until it's on the market.
I think the other reason is many companies don't want anybody outside to hear how ugly and dirty their software is and what a big nasty hack it was to kludge it all together.
But that doesn't mean they were social rejects lacking the ability to communicate concepts to their fellow man without bristling every person they met. It doesn't mean they espoused ideologies with technology and tried to use their innovations as a way to force normative concepts and judgements down people's throats as payment for their work. They didn't loudly shout people down who didn't adhere to their preferred terminology for certain concepts and tried to engage them in discussion.
They didn't (necessarily) have strange concepts of personal hygeniene, speak with bizarre voices, or otherwise exhibit signs of utter social disfunction. You can contribute major innovations to the world without all this baggage, believe it or not. _Acting_ like this does not make you smart, brilliant, a genius, or a world-changer. It just makes you a nerdy asshole.
By far my favorite so far is the Samsung SPH-i500 (see it here), and it's upcoming successor, the SGH-i500, which will be the GSM version, with Palm OS 5 and other goodies.
This is what I've been waiting for, for some time - a cell phone, with a Palm OS PDA built in, and complete integration between the two. You can manage one address book, click on your Palm address book and dial from there, search Zagat.com with a Palm web browser to find restaurants while walking the streets of New York, and pretty much do all the stuff I've always wanted to do with a PDA, but couldn't because it didn't have an internet connection, and getting one added on was too bulky/expensive, and browsing on your cell phone was waaaay too awkward for anything other than the simplest polling of your email to see any new subject lines, maybe reading a short email from a friend.
The CNET reviews are definitely mixed, but I spent an hour or two playing with my friend's SPH-i500 and I'm totally hooked. Now I just need to convince myself to spend 600 bucks on it, after my last large PDA expenditure on a Clie that I use once every month or two.
"Chief People Officer". There should be a law against job titles like that. That almost beats out the old "VP of Ideas" I met out at Idealab! in California. How 1999 can you get?
If the cost of a slightly lower phone bill is harassing telemarketing calls, I think 9 out of 10 Americans would gladly pay a few cents more every month for the privilege of never hearing a telemarketer on the other end again.
First Amendment absolutism is just as silly as any other absolutism. How about we learn to read the First Amendment as "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except when that freedom of speech conflicts with other basic human rights, and in those cases, we have a judicial and legislative system for making those tough, subtle trade-offs."
The government is no different from any large bureaucratic organization, like a Fortune 500 company. Tons of developers and IT people using Linux everywhere because they don't have to get umpteen budgetary approvals to take an old Pentium machine, throw it into the corner and make it a departmental or development server. Lots of Free Software behind the scenes everywhere that's supported internally.
Sure, more advocacy is needed by large shops like IBM of their Linux work so that large bureaucratic organizations (governments included) don't have to shamefully keep their Linux servers hidden away and can freely admit when a project uses Free Software. But this still isn't going to go anywhere toward getting Linux on the desktop.
I think the initial adoption of Windows on the desktop largely happened in corporations first and then overflowed into home use. But these days, I don't think it's that simple. I'm not convinced you can sell organizations on making a change to something that users aren't familiar with due to massive retraining costs (or at least the fear thereof) in the modern office, where Word, Powerpoint and so on are kind. I think you have to pursue the home audience first, where you can sell people on cost, features, reliability. Of course, you have to have a winning case before you can do that, and Linux doesn't really have that yet for the desktop.
From my experience hiring, work environment is one factor, but interest level in the software being developed is definitely a big one in terms of the quality of developers you'll be able to attract. Great developers want to work on interesting, challenging products that do something new and different.
I also think it's nearly impossible to have a complete team of all "top 1 percent" developers. That's like having all chiefs and no indians (pardon the racially minded analogy, it's just an expression). You need people who are good competent developers, but aren't primma donna superstar types who know how good they are. It's a balancing act to build a competent team that works well together, and knows each other's strengths and weaknesses. Frankly, that's just as important than having "all top 1 percent developers" in the long run.
I support and agree with his office design decisions, I just question the wisdom of encouraging even the best programmers to make their work and their life one and the same. I prefer the idea of splitting gym membership fees (healthy programmers are good programmers), encouraging people to go out of the office for dinner if they are working late, and setting up incentives to taking reasonable amounts of time off to prevent burn-out, which is a bigger enemy to productivity in the long run than many people realize.
I have asked developers who worked for me to work those kinds of ridiculous hours before, and I've asked it of myself, mostly because I was forced to by forces outside of my control. These days I prefer to operate under the assumption that work should be scheduled around a 40-50 hour work week, and the office/working environment should be a nice and pleasant one, but it shouldn't supercede home, and you shouldn't have to eat dinner at work every day, spend all your free time with your co-workers, etc.
I support the accepted interpretation in the US legal system that commercial speech should be subject to more checks and balances, with respect to factual accuracy (see for example, the Nike case before the Supreme Court - this is definitely an example of unchecked commercial speech) and with respect to the manner in which it is balanced against individual rights. Privacy, for example, is a critical individual right in modern society (see something like this before you tell me that privacy isn't in the constitution), and it is certainly a good thing for our society that commercial speech and its imperatives are balanced against a right to privacy in our own homes. Neither the First Amendment nor the right to privacy are absolute rights - they often may conflict with each other, or with themselves.
I agree with you that it's not always crystal clear which category of protections and which balances or tradeoffs should be made, and that's why we have a court system. Hopefully the court system will rationally and sanely conclude that an individual's right to privacy takes precedence over a company's right to contact random people in their residences in an interruptive and disruptive manner trying to sell them goods or services they have never indicated any interest in.
I went here to the FTC site on rulemaking re: telemarketing calls, and it looks to my eye like this is authorized by existing legislation. Also, I read this on the Telemarketing Sales Rule (Amended) and how it derives from Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
I guess this is just a case of the court being overly cautious here, but I fail to see how this is a restraint on Free Speech, since (a) the speech we are talking about here falls into the "commercial" category (b) it is "speech" directed into people's private homes without their authorization, permission or any expectation that they want to be bothered with it. Free Speech doesn't mean the freedom to yell your speech into my ear whenever you feel like it.
I think there are a lot of other good solutions out there for spam. It would seem that blackholing has it's place, but that if you want to bring large ISPs into the fold, you have to do it without all the collateral damage. Pinpoint strikes, if you will, against compromised servers, rather than concentrating on "punishing" people who often have no choice about their situation. Just my 2 cents, but if you want to get big business on board with the spam fight, you have to do it in a way that doesn't hurt their customers, so when you get DDOSed, you have somebody to help call in the FBI.
I don't believe for a second that spammers could withstand an ongoing heightened legal and governmental response backed by AOL, MSN, etc.
I agree that picking on middle aged women and their families doesn't really help, but neither does picking on business travelers who have to buy one way tickets. I was merely trying to advocate saner selection of attributes to "profile" based on. I realize how much it must suck to be a person who gets picked on when you are completely innocent (a "false positive" if you will), since I've been that person on EVERY commercial flight I've been on in the last year now. So I do feel for people who are innocent of any crimes and yet must be subject to extra searches and suspicion unfairly.
The problem is that _some_ sort of screening program is needed, and it needs to be a sane and honest one, unpredictable enough to be "ungameable" for the real evildoers (who are very small in number), but weighted in such a way that it tends to pick people with actual "risk factors". Selecting 100% of anything is probably a bad idea, like 100% of people with one way tickets, since it makes for an eminently gameable system. Similarly, if all they did was select 100% of people who "looked" Arab, the system would be completely gameable since all you would have to do is have a terrorist with a non-Arab name, who "looked" Caucasian. Clearly, that's not real security.
I don't want revenge against anybody for my airport experiences (except maybe some of those obnoxious TSA workers), and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I just want a fairer, more secure system for everybody. I think it's reasonable for certain people to accept that, through no fault of their own, due to their national or ethnic origin, gender, citizenship status, combined with other factors, they will be more likely to be subject to extra scrutiny since they fit a profile (which of course should consist of more than race alone). I don't think that this is "good" in an absolute moral sense, but I think that it is a statistical necessity at this time. Clearly, there are a lot of other things that could be done to improve security in general for airplane travel beyond using race as a factor in profiling (which is different from using race as THE factor in profiling).
Great, just what I need.
I guess if you look at the way Verisign has tried to build their business, it will become rapidly clear that it's not enough for them to just Make Money, they want to be in the business of Monopolizing Stupid Infrastructure. No, really. I mean, they acquired their main competitor in the SSL cert business so they could jack up rates of "discount" Thawte certs to make their own ultra-expensive offering of NOTHINGNESS look appealing.
There has been talk about alternative root DNS servers/systems for some time, and several exist already. My guess is that this move will increase interest in alternatives, and eventually cause either increased regulation or policing by the ICANN of what those supposedly entrusted with managing the TLDs can do with them. And in the meantime, the de facto standards will be set by those who manage DNS servers and filter out Verisign's root entries, or who route sitefinder to
Now if only the government gave the foggiest shit about electronic privacy. People understand "little black box sitting in your car", and they just don't seem to get the other privacy atrocities that go on every day.
And most importantly, was Cliff smoking something when he posted this, and if so, where can I get it?
Based on my experience so far, and the feedback I've heard from friends, Vonage seems to be paying attention to customer service. And this new regulatory fee is more than offset by the decrease in their service fee.