>the stock market and the >economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.
Years, ago, when Netscape did their own IPO, there was a list floating around SillyCon valley of calls that Netscape supposedly received before the release. (Someone may still have a copy; if so, please publish the URL.)
One story that I remembered summed up the entire exchange. Some guy calls, eager to talk to the CFO. He is told that the CFO is out of town (obviously peddling interest in the stock). But caller has an import question about Netscape's IPO.
``Maybe someone else can help you. What is your question?"
``Uh, what is an IPO?"
Could it be that the lusers who annoy the help desk are the same ones who bid up tech-related IPOs? Naw . . .
>My problem is I have no idea what to charge for a service like this.
IANABM, but I have worked at a couple of places where I saw the multiplier for services (that is, take what you pay J. Random Hacker, then multiply it by some number ``a" to cover not only J. Random's benefits & such overhead costs like marketting, equipment & training), I would say pick a number you feel is what you want to earn per year, divide it by 1500, then multiply it again by a number greater than 2.
(Yes, Social Security & Medicare withholdings will absorb at least that much, as well as business taxes, licensing & fees.)
I read it this summer, & speaking as someone who did his phone support time for this product (a period of pain I've been meaning to document somewhere -- think of it as 18 months spent teaching Joe Sixpack about networking) I found his silences more intreguing than his revelations.
According to this partial autobiography, Clark & Marc Andreesen almost *didn't* create Netscape: Andreesen was so sick of how his alma mater treated him over creating Mosaic, that his first thought was to write any kind of software -- as long as it was NOT a web browser.
His knowledge of the technical side of Netscape is weak at best. While he waxes eloquent about the long hours the original Netscape programmers spent coding version 0.9, he seems oblivious about just what they were actually doing, let alone the fact that the shrink-wrapped 1.1 version was released with some serious bugs (e.g., the winsock failed to work under Windows 3.11 for Workgroups due to NDIS driver conflicts). Heck, all of his knowledge about Jamie Zawinski -- probably the best known programmer at Netscape -- appears to have been drawn from JWZ's own web page.
Two leitmotifs shine thru Clark's book. The first one is the nature of Silicon Valley: its featureless suburban sprawl, constant pressure of work & deadlines, & ``get rich quick" mentality. And the other one is Clark's monomania with Bill Gates. (Yes, that is a reference to captain Ahab.)
From the very first chapter, Clark harps about Bill Gates & Microsoft, complains about them, worries about them, gets in some catty comments about them, & defends his behavior in reference to them. One would suspect, from this book, that Clark was creating Netscape as a company in order to destroy Microsoft, & woul dnot rest until he could plow Redmond & sow its field with salt.
In short, _Netscape_Time_ was in interesting read, but as every military veteran has said about written accounts of the war he has fought in, ``that wasn't *my* war."
I'm on the same mailing list. (Look for ``llywrch" in the records, & you'll find my real name. FWIW.) I just read about this episode at lunch. A few hours later, it's a hot topic on Slashdot.
Observation one: the wheels of justice may move slow, but the Internet's are turbocharged. All the more reason to think before acting.
Observation two: IDG has a weakness or two of their own. If a couple of people are exchanging email on a mail list about needing a book like ``Sendmail for Dummies" or ``SNMP for Dummies", & IDG goes after them for perceived Copyright Infringement, how likely are they going to get support for their next title from the Internet community?
(Have you heard about the abusive interview with Pete Rose? Did you also hear how the entire NY Yankee's team decided they would refuse all interviews with the journalist responsible?)
Observation three: Joe Dietz does not exist? Shoot. I had always thought he was one of the Usenet Freedom Knights on n.a.n.[eu]. Or maybe he *is*, & is the most respected one of that ilk.
>This is exactly what I would expect from MicroSoft, not Intel.
Intel has been getting away with being the ``good cop" of the Wintel alliance for years, but they can be just as sleezy & cut throat as their Redmond ally. The book _Inside_Intel_ documents a number of these practices, which apparently consists of -- but is not limited to -- screw your competition, screw your partners, & screw your employees.
Then again, name me one major high tech company that doesn't practice these kinds of treatment; _Inside_Intel_ is equally harsh on AMD.
>If the source weren't available from the get-go, people like Alan Cox and DaveM (along with thousands of other developers) would never >have jumped into kernel development. Without that kernel development, Linux would be one sorry-ass OS right now and no one in their right >minds would use it.
Foogle put the whole discussion in two sentences. Saying anything more would be redundant. (Prolly like this post.)
When I looked at the post I'm responding to, it had been rated, ``Offtopic", & probably downrated because instead of discussing the subject of Alan Cox's article, it comments on the server software at OSOpinion. And does so thoughtfully.
I sense an abuse in moderation here. And I'm a little ticked that I can't find an easy way to tattle-tale about it to the guys running Slashdot.
And also the fact that the other day while meta-moderating I voted five ``troll" or ``offtopic" posts as being unfair ratings. Somebody was having a bad day & took it out with his 5 moderation points.
Look, people, all discussions wander a little from the main topic, & explore the subject or its context a little more fully. Sometimes the interest in a given item posted here is the context. And that context includes the software of the site.
In other words, lighten up on the moderation. Despite the reputation/. has gotten, there's been actually very few trolls or flamers here lately.
Honestly. Every interview with Gates I've read has proven that he's either clueless when it comes to what computers are capable of doing -- or several years behind in the technology. And he's obviously not going to give us the answers we want to know about Microsoft's future plans & how it is going to respond to Open Source software.
I would consider it a truly bad day to be stuck on an elevator with Bill Gates, & forced to have no one but that pathetic twerp to talk to for hours. If it were any other computer industry figure I can think of, the time trapped together could be spent talking about coomputers, or the weather -- or simply ignoring one another (which would prolly piss of Larry Ellison to no end;-). I figure with Gates almost any topic I would bring up would end with one of his Famous Childish Tirades (tm) in my face, with my loosing my temper, then my beating the crap out of him.
Quite simply, I don't want someone as aggressive & lacking in common courtesy as he in my world. And those characteristics apparently are his entire personality.
And while I might not be bright enough to win an argument with Bill Gates, I am bright enough to know you just don't beat the crap out of the world's richest man & expect to enjoy much of a life afterwards.
I fear that this may be the case, but the war was started long before Linus thought to even enquire about POSIX standards.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO & major shareholder: ``All we want is our fair share of the market. And that's 100%."
Until MS recognizes the right of other OS & software products to exist, we will have people crying, ``Microsoftus delenda est!" Or perhaps even armed hackers leading war elephants over the Cascades to bring the war to Redmond.
(If you can't STR, look up ``Punic War" in any decent encyclopedia.)
An easier response would be, ``I don't recognize that email. Someone must have forged it & made it look as if it came from me."
Anyone here who has received spam & trolled thru the headers knows how easy it is to forge return addresses. It requires a bit of effort to identify the location of the actual sender -- & exponentially more to actually identify the creep.
And then we get into the problem that anyone can take a piece of electronic data & manipulate it. Turning a harmless email from Jane Schmoe into a racist death threat is a trivial exercise. (And if you can't figure out how to do it, please leave Slashdot & find another forum more to your level -- like WebTV.)
Quite simply, if someone claims you wrote a given piece of email, the burden of proof is on them, not you.
Online forums, however, are a little more difficult -- but sites *do* get cracked all of the time. And passwords sniffed. Still insist on the accusing party to prove authorship.
I like a lot of the points that neophase makes here, & I'd like to add to a couple of them:
* Motivation. As pointed out elsewhere, any given company or government organization has more to fear from disgruntled employees than politically-motivated terrorists. A disgruntled employee will know the IT weaknesses (& in some cases is disgruntled because no one she/he has reported this to will either fix or let anyone fix these problems), while an external terrorist *has* to learn about them.
* Asset types. I have heard of one US government computer that is (or was -- I heard about this confiugration 4 years ago) secure because not only is it not connected to any network, access is only thru dump terminals, & no user has direct access to any printers or floppy drives. Assuming that this configuration is repeated in a number of other countries, social engineering (e.g., either bribe or blackmail the guards & sysadmins with access) would be the way to compromise this setup.
* IT infrastructure weaknesses. Consider the quality of phone systems outside Europe/North America/Far East. Would *you* want to try to crack a computer over a 2400 baud modem over a static-ridden phone line?
IMSNHO, People will remain the chief weakness in any security arangement for the foreseeable future -- but this does not excuse taking the steps to lock down networked computers.
FWIW, I have little experience with security issues, except for running a few kiddie scripts on NT servers & being appalled at the results.
Let's say we have a usenet group devoted to exposing the crimes of a small, fanatical group -- let's call it alt.surf-nazis.must.die. Said small, fanatical group obviously does not like this attention, & does what they can to neutralize the effectiveness of this newsgroup: rmgrouping it, cancelling posts, etc. Then they hit on the tactic of forging posts from submitters, full of nonsense.
And similar attacks have been launched against groups in the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy. Some of the net.kooks & spammers don't like people reporting their attacks for some reason.
Unless any rating system can distinguish between real posts & forgeries like these -- as well as cope with the distributed nature of Usenet -- this will be just another proposal that everyone considers is ``a nice idea if we could only get it to work".
Uh, I've been using stuff made from plants that been's biodegradeable for years -- cotton, paper, linen, wood -- you get the idea.
IMHO, plastic has been marketed as a replacement for metal & ceramics, in part because it's cheaper, in part because it doesn't have some of the drawbacks the other two have (e.g., being hit over the head with a plastic phone won't cause the same damage that being hit with a metal one would).
Talk about reinventing the wheel. And doing it poorly in order to charge consumers more. Sometimes I'm certain the marketroids *do* have too much power.
>That's a really good way of thinking about it. This begs the question: what happens to the environment (the project) when the number of >inhabitants (the coders) outgrow it? > >Obviously, a bunch of coders will leave to start work on a new/different project. [...] > >I can't think of any opensource projects off the top of my head that have been stripped down to tree bark and dust because there were too >many coders.
My guess is that a flame war would break out over the adding/removal of some feature, which would give many contributors the excuse to leave & find another project to assist.
But I think the best example lies in the proprietary software arena: look at what Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, et cetera, all will do to keep growing their profits at a set percentage (which translates into continued exponential growth) --
Bloated software that increasingly does a little of everything adequately (for varying definitions of adequate) & nothing well, & that is increasingly more dependant on the efforts of aggressive marketing & restrictive licensing.
Not every desktop user needs an enterprise-strength database, nor does every server need a GUI interface dumbed down to a newbie's level. But that seems to be what the barons of the proprietary software industry are working towards.
This is a bit off topic, but the title begs for me to snag it for the following rant . . .
I have 2 ISPs. One I've had little to complain about, even though the owner runs it as a hobby & only does tech support thru email. (Maybe that separates the lusers from the newbies & others willing to learn. ) The other I had little to complain about until a month ago when they got bought out by a Very Big Corporation, who then changed something somewhere which has resulted in breaking every TCPIP connection to the Internet thru them.
If it wasn't for the first ISP, I'd be Up S*** Creek Without a Paddle in terms of Internet connectivity. Second ISP gave no warning that they were changing the ``something somewhere", so that users with a clue could anticipate this new development, hold times for tech support has gone from a few minutes to over twenty minutes, & one friend of mine who depends on them for email can't is three weeks behind.
(The ISP in question is Transport Logic in Portland. If you know the secret for fixing things, post it to pdx.general! My friend & I will be glad for the help.)
I suspect that what happened was some PHB in the new owner's corporate structure decided to make the change to ``simplify things", & since it was so important decided it wasn't worth the delay involved to email any of their 10,000+ users & let them know that said change would happen, & when hit with the resulting avalanche of calls all of their competent phone techs (or Bobs) walked out.
Have I shared with any of you my opinion that US business basically sucks?
>"Americans charge after success at any cost -- & the sacrifice of friendships or family ties is considered not only normal, but expected." > >Do you think Hollywood epitomizes the US? Yes, there are SOME people who lead such shallow lives that they have to be numero uno at >everything.
Years ago I saw an article in the WSJ about some Brits in Yorkshire, who would rather remain in the area on the dole than move to the South where there were jobs.
The writer of the article had the implicit attitude that these guys were more interested in living off of welfare than making something of themselves, but now -- having been to Europe a couple of times & gotten to know enough to compare European & US cultures -- I suspect the real reason they did not want to move was because they were that attached to their friends & family.
I haven't seen that kind of strong attatchment in the US outside of the Midwest (well, some people consider Ohio to be part of the Midwest) & the American South. And I have one friend who has complained about how shallow people in San Francisco are, compared to his hometown.
It's a matter of perspective. If you don't know any different, how can you see it?
>I don't enviseage having lights turn on for her when she enters a room, but it would not be difficult to do.
If our cat had a microchip iimpant, she wouldn't use the control to turn on lights. Naw: she'd open doors with a single thought, get fed whenever she was hungry, find someone to snuggle or play with her . . .
Waitasec -- she already has prosthetics that do this: her owners.
>You need only look at societies with strict gun >laws, and you'll se that deadly force is much >less normal.
(I'm responding to several points made in different posts here, so excuse me for making comments that do not seem relevant to this post.)
One point that I see come up again & again in this discussion is that ``well, if they didn't have guns, they would have found another way to kill people" -- as if the desire to use deadly force against others is acceptible in US society. Or maybe I'm misreading the aggressiveness nature of US culture.
I see this aggressiveness expressed in countless ways in US culture: businessmen or women are praised for being ruthless, or for ``destroying" the competition. (The principal complaint most nerds appear to have about Microsoft is the quality of their software: well, if you can get control of an industry by turning your competitors into so many acres of scorched earth or salted ruins faster than writing quality software, which would you rather do?)
Americans charge after success at any cost -- & the sacrifice of friendships or family ties is considered not only normal, but expected. If you don't have something other people to find useful, they will pass you by as they chase after the golden ring.
So what are the 95% of us who don't fall in the category of ``the best of the best" supposed to do with ourselves?
One poster remarked that at one time everyone had 400 acres to ``let off steam" in. More likely, they went West to find Indians, Mexicans, Chinese & other starving, disenfranchised folks who could be killed with impunity. (A lot of 19th century hate crimes appear to have been committed with about as little forethought & justification as the Littleton massacre.) Nothing hides the fact that you aren't an alpha male if you can find someone else to fuck over.
And much US law makes sense if you look at it from the viewpoint that a property owner or landowner should not have to answer for his freehold to anyone except God -- & woe to the employee or subordinate who insists on respect or a living wage for their work.
So there is a lot of submerged anger in the US at the fact that if you aren't the best, you're shit. And I feel it has gotten worse in recent years: back in the 1980's, when it looked as if Japan would overtake the US as the leading world economy, many pundits opined that this was because Americans had forgotten how to be aggressive. So people worked harder, competed harder, & if one lost at this competition, the resulting anger was not as passive as it used to be. For example, my father once remarked how, when he was in boot camp during WWII, a man committed suicide after weeks of harassment for being gay; the murder/suicide scene from _Full Metal Jacket_ would never have been imagined then, let alone the primal anger expressed at Littleton.
Then I suspect enough people who post to Slashdot have bought into the philosophy of ``work harder, screw your competition over, & buy the best toys" & will flame me heartily for protesting the increased competition of recent days. They probably think I'd be happier as a slacker or a bum. Well, in turn I think that they probably just enjoy making their hamster wheels turn faster.
>You know what's really telling about this article? It's that slashdot readers don't even really feel >like commenting. We just take it as read that Microsoft does these kinds of things. It's not even news anymore.
Or it's the pattern that repeats every time MS is caught red-handed astroturfing support a la the Steve Bartko affair, or in 1997, when they tried to convince hundreds of journalists that public opinion thought an HTML browser *should be* part of the operating system:
1) nerds hear about this, many get upset, & respond in various fora with angry messages;
2) other nerds respond, defending MS, saying in effect ``well, everybody else does it" but neglect to provide examples;
3) discussion soon deteriorates into individual flame wars & OS religion wars, generating more heat than light;
4) Microsoft reacts (at least overtly) by waiting another year or two before repeating another astroturf attempt.
In other words, MS will continue to do this until they burn thru their multi-billion dollar warchest, no matter what we say or do.
Then again, there are more useful ways for them to burn their money, so maybe we shouldn't complain too much about this manner.
>Cringley makes it sound like these are 'poor >little rich folk' trapped by their own success. That is a load of crap, these people do what they do because they like to do it. They get a kick >out of it. Many of them would do much the same things if they didn't get half the money out of the effort simply because it is 'what they do'.
I guess it all depends on how you want to make a difference in the world.
Let's consider a hypothetical example: some psycho goes thru Silicon Valley & gets rid of a good share of all of the players Cringley talks about: the good, the bad, the faceless PHBs. Larry Ellison & the guy Linus Torvalds reports to. They're just gone.
How much of a difference would this massive carnage make in the world? From reading Cringley's article, & the Fortune article linked at pathfinder, I suspect that few people would miss many of them: & probably few spouses, children or parents.
Well, what I found interesting about the article was that CNET used some kind of definition of HTML that made Opera 3.50 unreadable. And IIRC, Opera is one of the few browsers that makes a serious attempt to be compliant to the version 4.0 standard.
I'll have have to look at the source & figure out just WTF they were doing to my browser.
>Anyhow, when will there be a Linux show in the Pacific Northwest?
Actually, PLUG in Portland, OR tried to start one this spring. Unfortunately a certain large corporation decided that the date picked would be a great date for LinuxWorld.:-( One reason you didn't hear much about it was that the people responsible were afraid that if they publicized it too early, another large corporation in Redmond would have a competing show at the same time.
Since I haven't been to any PLUG meetings lately, I don't know if the movers for this show will try again. We can hope.
Slashdot Mirror
>the stock market and the
>economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.
Years, ago, when Netscape did their own IPO, there was a list floating around SillyCon valley of calls that Netscape supposedly received before the release. (Someone may still have a copy; if so, please publish the URL.)
One story that I remembered summed up the entire exchange. Some guy calls, eager to talk to the CFO. He is told that the CFO is out of town (obviously peddling interest in the stock). But caller has an import question about Netscape's IPO.
``Maybe someone else can help you. What is your question?"
``Uh, what is an IPO?"
Could it be that the lusers who annoy the help desk are the same ones who bid up tech-related IPOs? Naw . . .
Geoff
>My problem is I have no idea what to charge for a service like this.
IANABM, but I have worked at a couple of places where I saw the multiplier for services (that is, take what you pay J. Random Hacker, then multiply it by some number ``a" to cover not only J. Random's benefits & such overhead costs like marketting, equipment & training), I would say pick a number you feel is what you want to earn per year, divide it by 1500, then multiply it again by a number greater than 2.
(Yes, Social Security & Medicare withholdings will absorb at least that much, as well as business taxes, licensing & fees.)
Geoff
How about _Netscape_Time_ by Jim Clark himself?
I read it this summer, & speaking as someone who did his phone support time for this product (a period of pain I've been meaning to document somewhere -- think of it as 18 months spent teaching Joe Sixpack about networking) I found his silences more intreguing than his revelations.
According to this partial autobiography, Clark & Marc Andreesen almost *didn't* create Netscape: Andreesen was so sick of how his alma mater treated him over creating Mosaic, that his first thought was to write any kind of software -- as long as it was NOT a web browser.
His knowledge of the technical side of Netscape is weak at best. While he waxes eloquent about the long hours the original Netscape programmers spent coding version 0.9, he seems oblivious about just what they were actually doing, let alone the fact that the shrink-wrapped 1.1 version was released with some serious bugs (e.g., the winsock failed to work under Windows 3.11 for Workgroups due to NDIS driver conflicts). Heck, all of his knowledge about Jamie Zawinski -- probably the best known programmer at Netscape -- appears to have been drawn from JWZ's own web page.
Two leitmotifs shine thru Clark's book. The first one is the nature of Silicon Valley: its featureless suburban sprawl, constant pressure of work & deadlines, & ``get rich quick" mentality. And the other one is Clark's monomania with Bill Gates. (Yes, that is a reference to captain Ahab.)
From the very first chapter, Clark harps about Bill Gates & Microsoft, complains about them, worries about them, gets in some catty comments about them, & defends his behavior in reference to them. One would suspect, from this book, that Clark was creating Netscape as a company in order to destroy Microsoft, & woul dnot rest until he could plow Redmond & sow its field with salt.
In short, _Netscape_Time_ was in interesting read, but as every military veteran has said about written accounts of the war he has fought in, ``that wasn't *my* war."
Geoff
Comments? Sure.
I'm on the same mailing list. (Look for ``llywrch" in the records, & you'll find my real name. FWIW.) I just read about this episode at lunch. A few hours later, it's a hot topic on Slashdot.
Observation one: the wheels of justice may move slow, but the Internet's are turbocharged. All the more reason to think before acting.
Observation two: IDG has a weakness or two of their own. If a couple of people are exchanging email on a mail list about needing a book like ``Sendmail for Dummies" or ``SNMP for Dummies", & IDG goes after them for perceived Copyright Infringement, how likely are they going to get support for their next title from the Internet community?
(Have you heard about the abusive interview with Pete Rose? Did you also hear how the entire NY Yankee's team decided they would refuse all interviews with the journalist responsible?)
Observation three: Joe Dietz does not exist? Shoot. I had always thought he was one of the Usenet Freedom Knights on n.a.n.[eu]. Or maybe he *is*, & is the most respected one of that ilk.
Geoff
>This is exactly what I would expect from MicroSoft, not Intel.
Intel has been getting away with being the ``good cop" of the Wintel alliance for years, but they can be just as sleezy & cut throat as their Redmond ally. The book _Inside_Intel_ documents a number of these practices, which apparently consists of -- but is not limited to -- screw your competition, screw your partners, & screw your employees.
Then again, name me one major high tech company that doesn't practice these kinds of treatment; _Inside_Intel_ is equally harsh on AMD.
Geoff
>If the source weren't available from the get-go, people like Alan Cox and DaveM (along with thousands of other developers) would never
>have jumped into kernel development. Without that kernel development, Linux would be one sorry-ass OS right now and no one in their right
>minds would use it.
Foogle put the whole discussion in two sentences. Saying anything more would be redundant. (Prolly like this post.)
Geoff
When I looked at the post I'm responding to, it had been rated, ``Offtopic", & probably downrated because instead of discussing the subject of Alan Cox's article, it comments on the server software at OSOpinion. And does so thoughtfully.
/. has gotten, there's been actually very few trolls or flamers here lately.
I sense an abuse in moderation here. And I'm a little ticked that I can't find an easy way to tattle-tale about it to the guys running Slashdot.
And also the fact that the other day while meta-moderating I voted five ``troll" or ``offtopic" posts as being unfair ratings. Somebody was having a bad day & took it out with his 5 moderation points.
Look, people, all discussions wander a little from the main topic, & explore the subject or its context a little more fully. Sometimes the interest in a given item posted here is the context. And that context includes the software of the site.
In other words, lighten up on the moderation. Despite the reputation
Geoff
Honestly. Every interview with Gates I've read has proven that he's either clueless when it comes to what computers are capable of doing -- or several years behind in the technology. And he's obviously not going to give us the answers we want to know about Microsoft's future plans & how it is going to respond to Open Source software.
;-). I figure with Gates almost any topic I would bring up would end with one of his Famous Childish Tirades (tm) in my face, with my loosing my temper, then my beating the crap out of him.
I would consider it a truly bad day to be stuck on an elevator with Bill Gates, & forced to have no one but that pathetic twerp to talk to for hours. If it were any other computer industry figure I can think of, the time trapped together could be spent talking about coomputers, or the weather -- or simply ignoring one another (which would prolly piss of Larry Ellison to no end
Quite simply, I don't want someone as aggressive & lacking in common courtesy as he in my world. And those characteristics apparently are his entire personality.
And while I might not be bright enough to win an argument with Bill Gates, I am bright enough to know you just don't beat the crap out of the world's richest man & expect to enjoy much of a life afterwards.
Geoff
>And the day I see Linux hackers on war elephants is the day I buy an iMac (without LinuxPPC) :)
;-)
Well, the day *I* see Linux hackers on war elephants (in Redmond or anywhere) is the day I check in to Betty Ford for drug-induced hallucinations.
I am assuming that there is a difference between abusing psychotropic drugs & using an iMac.
Geoff
>Why does Microsoft have to lose for us to win?
I fear that this may be the case, but the war was started long before Linus thought to even enquire about POSIX standards.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO & major shareholder: ``All we want is our fair share of the market. And that's 100%."
Until MS recognizes the right of other OS & software products to exist, we will have people crying, ``Microsoftus delenda est!" Or perhaps even armed hackers leading war elephants over the Cascades to bring the war to Redmond.
(If you can't STR, look up ``Punic War" in any decent encyclopedia.)
Geoff
An easier response would be, ``I don't recognize that email. Someone must have forged it & made it look as if it came from me."
Anyone here who has received spam & trolled thru the headers knows how easy it is to forge return addresses. It requires a bit of effort to identify the location of the actual sender -- & exponentially more to actually identify the creep.
And then we get into the problem that anyone can take a piece of electronic data & manipulate it. Turning a harmless email from Jane Schmoe into a racist death threat is a trivial exercise. (And if you can't figure out how to do it, please leave Slashdot & find another forum more to your level -- like WebTV.)
Quite simply, if someone claims you wrote a given piece of email, the burden of proof is on them, not you.
Online forums, however, are a little more difficult -- but sites *do* get cracked all of the time. And passwords sniffed. Still insist on the accusing party to prove authorship.
Geoff
(or perhaps a cracker pretending to be him)
>The link posted above requires javascript to be enabled.
Mea culpa. This poster will be more careful in the future.
Geoff
I like a lot of the points that neophase makes here, & I'd like to add to a couple of them:
* Motivation. As pointed out elsewhere, any given company or government organization has more to fear from disgruntled employees than politically-motivated terrorists. A disgruntled employee will know the IT weaknesses (& in some cases is disgruntled because no one she/he has reported this to will either fix or let anyone fix these problems), while an external terrorist *has* to learn about them.
* Asset types. I have heard of one US government computer that is (or was -- I heard about this confiugration 4 years ago) secure because not only is it not connected to any network, access is only thru dump terminals, & no user has direct access to any printers or floppy drives. Assuming that this configuration is repeated in a number of other countries, social engineering (e.g., either bribe or blackmail the guards & sysadmins with access) would be the way to compromise this setup.
* IT infrastructure weaknesses. Consider the quality of phone systems outside Europe/North America/Far East. Would *you* want to try to crack a computer over a 2400 baud modem over a static-ridden phone line?
IMSNHO, People will remain the chief weakness in any security arangement for the foreseeable future -- but this does not excuse taking the steps to lock down networked computers.
FWIW, I have little experience with security issues, except for running a few kiddie scripts on NT servers & being appalled at the results.
Geoff
Let's say we have a usenet group devoted to exposing the crimes of a small, fanatical group -- let's call it alt.surf-nazis.must.die. Said small, fanatical group obviously does not like this attention, & does what they can to neutralize the effectiveness of this newsgroup: rmgrouping it, cancelling posts, etc. Then they hit on the tactic of forging posts from submitters, full of nonsense.
. htm?/frameset/promo.htm,/features/f90916b. htm
Think that this can't happen? Look at
http://technology.news.com.au/frameset/frameset
And similar attacks have been launched against groups in the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy. Some of the net.kooks & spammers don't like people reporting their attacks for some reason.
Unless any rating system can distinguish between real posts & forgeries like these -- as well as cope with the distributed nature of Usenet -- this will be just another proposal that everyone considers is ``a nice idea if we could only get it to work".
Geoff
***boggle***
Uh, I've been using stuff made from plants that been's biodegradeable for years -- cotton, paper, linen, wood -- you get the idea.
IMHO, plastic has been marketed as a replacement for metal & ceramics, in part because it's cheaper, in part because it doesn't have some of the drawbacks the other two have (e.g., being hit over the head with a plastic phone won't cause the same damage that being hit with a metal one would).
Talk about reinventing the wheel. And doing it poorly in order to charge consumers more. Sometimes I'm certain the marketroids *do* have too much power.
Geoff
>That's a really good way of thinking about it. This begs the question: what happens to the environment (the project) when the number of
>inhabitants (the coders) outgrow it?
>
>Obviously, a bunch of coders will leave to start work on a new/different project. [...]
>
>I can't think of any opensource projects off the top of my head that have been stripped down to tree bark and dust because there were too
>many coders.
My guess is that a flame war would break out over the adding/removal of some feature, which would give many contributors the excuse to leave & find another project to assist.
But I think the best example lies in the proprietary software arena: look at what Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, et cetera, all will do to keep growing their profits at a set percentage (which translates into continued exponential growth) --
Bloated software that increasingly does a little of everything adequately (for varying definitions of adequate) & nothing well, & that is increasingly more dependant on the efforts of aggressive marketing & restrictive licensing.
Not every desktop user needs an enterprise-strength database, nor does every server need a GUI interface dumbed down to a newbie's level. But that seems to be what the barons of the proprietary software industry are working towards.
. . . & it will all have email, too!
Geoff
This is a bit off topic, but the title begs for me to snag it for the following rant . . .
I have 2 ISPs. One I've had little to complain about, even though the owner runs it as a hobby & only does tech support thru email. (Maybe that separates the lusers from the newbies & others willing to learn. ) The other I had little to complain about until a month ago when they got bought out by a Very Big Corporation, who then changed something somewhere which has resulted in breaking every TCPIP connection to the Internet thru them.
If it wasn't for the first ISP, I'd be Up S*** Creek Without a Paddle in terms of Internet connectivity. Second ISP gave no warning that they were changing the ``something somewhere", so that users with a clue could anticipate this new development, hold times for tech support has gone from a few minutes to over twenty minutes, & one friend of mine who depends on them for email can't is three weeks behind.
(The ISP in question is Transport Logic in Portland. If you know the secret for fixing things, post it to pdx.general! My friend & I will be glad for the help.)
I suspect that what happened was some PHB in the new owner's corporate structure decided to make the change to ``simplify things", & since it was so important decided it wasn't worth the delay involved to email any of their 10,000+ users & let them know that said change would happen, & when hit with the resulting avalanche of calls all of their competent phone techs (or Bobs) walked out.
Have I shared with any of you my opinion that US business basically sucks?
Geoff
>"Americans charge after success at any cost -- & the sacrifice of friendships or family ties is considered not only normal, but expected."
>
>Do you think Hollywood epitomizes the US? Yes, there are SOME people who lead such shallow lives that they have to be numero uno at
>everything.
Years ago I saw an article in the WSJ about some Brits in Yorkshire, who would rather remain in the area on the dole than move to the South where there were jobs.
The writer of the article had the implicit attitude that these guys were more interested in living off of welfare than making something of themselves, but now -- having been to Europe a couple of times & gotten to know enough to compare European & US cultures -- I suspect the real reason they did not want to move was because they were that attached to their friends & family.
I haven't seen that kind of strong attatchment in the US outside of the Midwest (well, some people consider Ohio to be part of the Midwest) & the American South. And I have one friend who has complained about how shallow people in San Francisco are, compared to his hometown.
It's a matter of perspective. If you don't know any different, how can you see it?
Geoff
>I don't enviseage having lights turn on for her when she enters a room, but it would not be difficult to do.
If our cat had a microchip iimpant, she wouldn't use the control to turn on lights. Naw: she'd open doors with a single thought, get fed whenever she was hungry, find someone to snuggle or play with her . . .
Waitasec -- she already has prosthetics that do this: her owners.
Geoff
>You need only look at societies with strict gun
>laws, and you'll se that deadly force is much
>less normal.
(I'm responding to several points made in different posts here, so excuse me for making comments that do not seem relevant to this post.)
One point that I see come up again & again in this discussion is that ``well, if they didn't have guns, they would have found another way to kill people" -- as if the desire to use deadly force against others is acceptible in US society. Or maybe I'm misreading the aggressiveness nature of US culture.
I see this aggressiveness expressed in countless ways in US culture: businessmen or women are praised for being ruthless, or for ``destroying" the competition. (The principal complaint most nerds appear to have about Microsoft is the quality of their software: well, if you can get control of an industry by turning your competitors into so many acres of scorched earth or salted ruins faster than writing quality software, which would you rather do?)
Americans charge after success at any cost -- & the sacrifice of friendships or family ties is considered not only normal, but expected. If you don't have something other people to find useful, they will pass you by as they chase after the golden ring.
So what are the 95% of us who don't fall in the category of ``the best of the best" supposed to do with ourselves?
One poster remarked that at one time everyone had 400 acres to ``let off steam" in. More likely, they went West to find Indians, Mexicans, Chinese & other starving, disenfranchised folks who could be killed with impunity. (A lot of 19th century hate crimes appear to have been committed with about as little forethought & justification as the Littleton massacre.) Nothing hides the fact that you aren't an alpha male if you can find someone else to fuck over.
And much US law makes sense if you look at it from the viewpoint that a property owner or landowner should not have to answer for his freehold to anyone except God -- & woe to the employee or subordinate who insists on respect or a living wage for their work.
So there is a lot of submerged anger in the US at the fact that if you aren't the best, you're shit. And I feel it has gotten worse in recent years: back in the 1980's, when it looked as if Japan would overtake the US as the leading world economy, many pundits opined that this was because Americans had forgotten how to be aggressive. So people worked harder, competed harder, & if one lost at this competition, the resulting anger was not as passive as it used to be. For example, my father once remarked how, when he was in boot camp during WWII, a man committed suicide after weeks of harassment for being gay; the murder/suicide scene from _Full Metal Jacket_ would never have been imagined then, let alone the primal anger expressed at Littleton.
Then I suspect enough people who post to Slashdot have bought into the philosophy of ``work harder, screw your competition over, & buy the best toys" & will flame me heartily for protesting the increased competition of recent days. They probably think I'd be happier as a slacker or a bum. Well, in turn I think that they probably just enjoy making their hamster wheels turn faster.
Geoff
Yep. Still have mine with the expansion cards, & two I created: one for Amway & another for the Scientologists.
;-)
Every game would go the same way: my buddy Bruce & I would start a war with each other, & our other friend Kyle would end up winning.
Hmmm. Maybe it wasn't as much fun as I remember.
Geoff
>You know what's really telling about this article? It's that slashdot readers don't even really feel
>like commenting. We just take it as read that Microsoft does these kinds of things. It's not even news anymore.
Or it's the pattern that repeats every time MS is caught red-handed astroturfing support a la the Steve Bartko affair, or in 1997, when they tried to convince hundreds of journalists that public opinion thought an HTML browser *should be* part of the operating system:
1) nerds hear about this, many get upset, & respond in various fora with angry messages;
2) other nerds respond, defending MS, saying in effect ``well, everybody else does it" but neglect to provide examples;
3) discussion soon deteriorates into individual flame wars & OS religion wars, generating more heat than light;
4) Microsoft reacts (at least overtly) by waiting another year or two before repeating another astroturf attempt.
In other words, MS will continue to do this until they burn thru their multi-billion dollar warchest, no matter what we say or do.
Then again, there are more useful ways for them to burn their money, so maybe we shouldn't complain too much about this manner.
Geoff
>Cringley makes it sound like these are 'poor
>little rich folk' trapped by their own success. That is a load of crap, these people do what they do because they like to do it. They get a kick
>out of it. Many of them would do much the same things if they didn't get half the money out of the effort simply because it is 'what they do'.
I guess it all depends on how you want to make a difference in the world.
Let's consider a hypothetical example: some psycho goes thru Silicon Valley & gets rid of a good share of all of the players Cringley talks about: the good, the bad, the faceless PHBs. Larry Ellison & the guy Linus Torvalds reports to. They're just gone.
How much of a difference would this massive carnage make in the world? From reading Cringley's article, & the Fortune article linked at pathfinder, I suspect that few people would miss many of them: & probably few spouses, children or parents.
Prove me wrong. Please.
Geoff
Well, what I found interesting about the article was that CNET used some kind of definition of HTML that made Opera 3.50 unreadable. And IIRC, Opera is one of the few browsers that makes a serious attempt to be compliant to the version 4.0 standard.
I'll have have to look at the source & figure out just WTF they were doing to my browser.
Geoff
>Anyhow, when will there be a Linux show in the Pacific Northwest?
:-( One reason you didn't hear much about it was that the people responsible were afraid that if they publicized it too early, another large corporation in Redmond would have a competing show at the same time.
Actually, PLUG in Portland, OR tried to start one this spring. Unfortunately a certain large corporation decided that the date picked would be a great date for LinuxWorld.
Since I haven't been to any PLUG meetings lately, I don't know if the movers for this show will try again. We can hope.
Geoff