The windows explorer is horribly flawed, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely wrong that everything but Nautilus is copying that. The basics of the interface go back to programs like midnight commander and xtree. Windows explorer is a particularly horrible implementation of it* and by setting it up, unilaterally, as some sort of reference implementation that everyone else is supposedly copying from (including the many programs that predate it!) you get a strawman award.
*IMHOP explorer.exe from Windows 95 wasn't too bad, but it's been going steadily downhill since.
Laws based on intent are part of our legal heritage.
True to a degree. And those have always been among the most problematic legal distinctions, the ones that encourage corruption and the rule of men rather than law.
You see, a court simply isn't competent to determine a persons motivation in many cases. Judges and juries are no more qualified than the rest of us to read a mans mind, or look into his heart.
Your explanation of manslaughter and murder is incomplete and thus misleading. The old law on the subject relied not on mind reading, but on actions - a man who stood up on the spot and proclaimed his action was guilty of manslaughter - a man who tried to conceal his act and escape justice was guilty of murder. This is an immenently workable system. The abstraction behind it, of course, is what is called mens rea - but mens rea cannot be directly ascertained, but only guessed at based on ones actions.
Now in modern times we've twisted this horribly. A man who stands up and takes responsibility for his action will be punished MORESO than one who simply keeps his mouth shut, in most situations.
There is a difference between spray-painting "Nirvana rocks" on the back of your school and spray-painting "DIE JEWS DIE" on a synagogue.
There's a difference? Well obviously, there are several. The question is what are those differences, how significant are they, from whose point of view?
Objectively, they are both acts of vandalism, crimes against property. The difference in the words being spelled are very unlikely to be significant at all in any objective evaluation - the cost to repair the damage is going to be the same either way.
In the minds of the vandals, they are also likely to be nearly identical acts too. Once we get here, though, we can argue interminably with no way to ever settle the issue - unless of course the vandals tell us what they were thinking. Even then, though, that really settles nothing. Because we've already entered the realm of thought-crime, and the smart vandals, when caught, will keep their mouths shut or tell us what we want to hear.
It may well be that in the minds of some other person that sees the words there is a difference - but if we determine that we can punish people for how other people choose to respond to their words, we've abandoned anything even approximating a concern with justice or law.
I've been assaulted for being a 'filthy jew.' I've been assaulted for being 'queer.' I've been assaulted because someone resented how much attention I was getting from a girl he thought was his. I can assure you that for me, they were very equivelant experiences - but the more important point is that, regardless of my reaction, they were objectively the same crime.
Do you really want to live in a society where someone elses emotional reaction to your words determine the legality of your speech? I certainly don't. Neither do I want to live in a society where assault is tolerated - just as long as the assaulters are careful to avoid choosing the politically protected classes as their victims? I don't like that either, but unfortunately we're well down the path to both of those realities already.
The trouble is that you can't set ethics aside unless you're unethical.
Truer words were never spoken, and I thank you for posting them. Sad thing is the rest of your comment indicates you have set them aside already, or perhaps never had them.
There is absolutely nothing unethical in what Tridge did here, at least insofar as has been mentioned in any of the reporting on this in the past few days that we've both had access to. There is absolutely no ethical obligation to keep an agreement you were not a party to. The rest of your rant assumes facts not in evidence, without any source, and has the definate whiff of BS to me.
In fact, what Tridge has done here is the epitome of ethical behavior. Linus is stung now, understandably disoriented and angry because he's been proven wrong and, being human, his first response is to lash out at Tridge instead of thanking him. Give it a few years though... once his wounded pride settles down I'm sure he will, in fact, thank Tridge for this.
Locking your data into a proprietary single-vendor format for the sake of temporary convenience was never a good idea. Everyone told Linus this, but he was too smart to listen. Now exactly what he was warned about has happened. And it was inevitable all along - if Tridge hadn't done it someone or something else would have - McVoy was a ticking time bomb. The fact that the guy isn't very stable didn't help, but honestly - McVoy could have been a saint and the thing would have still been a ticking time bomb. If Tridges actions resulted in it going off a little sooner than otherwise, then he saved Linus and many others trouble in the long run. Replacing BK wasn't going to get any easier...
I don't really see an anti-discrimination law as "special rights".
Then you need to look closer, or take off your blinders, or something.
Assault someone because they're wearing yellow or very nearly any other stupid reason in the world, and it's assault. Assault that SAME person with a slightly different, similarly stupid motivation (skin tone, religous jewelry, presumed or acknowledged sexual orientation) and suddenly it's a "hate crime" with far more severe consequences.
If the law isn't taking assault seriously enough, then we should change that - not cook up extra "thought crime" statutes to tack on. And the use of the phrase "thought crime" here is completely apt - we're talking about a law that criminalises the thought behind the crime, rather than the act itself. This is a very very very bad precedent, regardless of any other aspects of it - thought crimes are a category of laws that should never be made, for any purpose whatsoever, period.
I agree wholeheartedly with all genuine efforts toward legal equality. The State shouldn't have anything whatsoever to do with defining, recognising, rewarding or penalising marriage. Propose eliminating those privileges and I'll back you. Propose expanding those privileges to cover new classes instead, and I'll fight you every step of the way.
I think you're not qualified to discuss it, then. Seriously. If you knew enough to administer Netware, then you'd been working with it long enough you couldn't see its flaws.
Oh I must disagree. I saw it's flaws quite clearly - and I wasn't very experienced with it either. My background in computers started with soldering my own together, and later grew to include things like the Apple II and the Amiga as well as the x86 world (from MS DOS 3 on.) I had spent a little time working on HP-UX, but other than that I was strictly a micro guy. I got tasked with bringing us up to date - converting from sneaker net to token ring with a server. Netware was definately not 'friendly' and there were a lot of limitations I chafed against. I had been experminenting with NT, hoping it could do the job instead, but every trial showed the same thing - although it initially appeared easier to admin, the fact was that anything beyond the most common GUI options was even harder to do than it would be with netware. And the performance and stability comparisons - well, there was no comparison. Simple as that. We'd have gladly gone with NT from the start, if it could do the job, but it just couldn't. I also looked at Linux - in fact I first heard of linux at about this very time - but at the time it wasn't ready either, although it also looked promising for different reasons.
Case in point: it doesn't seem odd to you to say "I administered Novell". Novell was so complex you *needed* an administrator! (I can't say "I administered my mom's iMac" with a straight face.)
Well I administer several macs today, and I don't think the verb is misused there, although they are amazingly easy to admin and amazingly robust in the absence of an administrator.
But beyond that trifle, the notion that NT doesn't require administration is just absolutely backward. It's designed to LOOK like it's easy, but seriously, it required far more administrative work than Novel. If we just look at my personal experience with it, I found that it was routine for a task to take several times as long to perform on NT - but you may think that's because I knew Novel better of course. That's not actually true, but regardless, comparing my time on the Netware box with the time spent by a three man team shipped down from Redmond, it was just as bad. These guys were NT experts, and I was just a self-taught Netware guy that had to beg for a budget to buy a reference book on it.
The low end eats the high end is a good observation, and based very much in reality. I'm sure that was one of several trends going on there. At the same time, though, I'm absolutely sure that it was NOT the only, or even the most important, difficulty for Netware.
Ah, yes. You're living in the very tiny world consisting of "Netware admins". Out here in the real world, people want to get stuff done, and even rebooting an NT server now and then isn't so bad, compared to having to go through hours of training to do the simplest thing on Netware.
Hours of training once, and then afterwards you can do it in seconds. Compare to NT, little to no training in theory (although in fact that was never better than a half-truth) but then it took many times as long to actually get it done anyway.
Well, if it was a discount on something you were going to buy anyway, that's in essence a payment. I'm sure the payments were suitably camoflaged like this, to prevent legal troubles or whatever, and I'm not privy to the accounting details. But we got a LOT of 'sweetheart' deals for eating that particular dogfood - a big one at the beginning, and every time it caused us a big problem, our guys screamed at theirs for a little while and then a day or two later they got something nice and it was all smiles again...
The directory service is far superior (microsofts current incarnation of this is about where Novels was about '95) and this is an enourmous advantage in a large operation. Many large corporate networks are Novel for this reason already, so obviously if you're in one of those you need it for interoperability as well. You get greater stability, better performance (again, more important in a large operation where it may mean you can do the same job without buying as many servers) and it's a hell of a lot easier to administer properly.
With Novel into Linux now, you can expect it to continue to perform with less hassles in heterogenous environments as well.
Netware didn't just fail "with more than a little help from Microsoft". It failed because (and it kills me to say this), Windows NT was a better product than Netware in just about any way imaginable
ROFL. Yeah, right, sure. And rocks fall upward, and the moon is made of green cheese...
I administered Novell and NT both back in the days you're talking about. Netware 3.x beat NT 3.x so badly, on every possible applicable point, not even the most incompetent admin would have ever made the claim you just did with a straight face.
Microsoft PAYED my employer a huge sum to partially replace our Netware server with an NT 3.5 server. That little netware server was keeping the office served so far as email, web gateway, and file and print serving without a problem. NT on a slightly faster machine proved itself incapable of handling the EMAIL ALONE for the same office, and this AFTER having guys from MS fly down to work on it every couple of weeks for six months.
On top of lack of functionality and lack of stability, it was also impossible to properly admin. It was a total POS and everyone knew it. Even the PHBs were totally upfront about it - they knew it was trash. But whenever we had a problem, MS cut a check (or something to the same end effect) to more than cover the losses.
That's how they won. Novel certainly made mistakes, but that doesn't change the fact that their product was vastly superior and defeated on grounds other than technical.
What you're saying is true as far as it goes, but there are perfectly fine ways to satisfy both interests here - you can provide working contact info without actually revealing your identity to the entire world.
The only questions that are in doubt here are whether the 'non-infringement uses' identified meet the standard for fair use under the law. That is a question of law, not fact, the question is what the standard should be.
There is no question on that issue at all actually - the plaintiffs were unable to contest it. The question of law is simply whether they are liable for the actions of the portion of their users that are violating the law.
I have read the Betamax ruling,
What puzzles me is if you have read it, why you seem so ignorant of its details?
don't make the mistake of thinking that people who disagree with you must do so because they are ignorant.
I make it a rule to assume the opposite, until and unless it's disproven. Learn a lot more that way.
Which is why I actually engaged you in conversation on the issue. Trouble is, everything you've written just leads back to initial conclusion I was trying to avoid - that you're either ignorant or actively evil. When you post a comment so flat out wrong on verifiable points of fact on the subject, and your response to a correction on those points is to dissemble like you did here, you give yourself away.
Another way to get the RIAA and MPAA off your backs is to stop stealing.:)
Considering I've never stolen anything from them, then, why are they still on my back? Why are they spending billions of dollars on attempts to take away my rights?
The interpretation of the facts is a matter of law, not fact
Umm no. Courts routinely distinguish between the two. Appeals courts do not normally examine matters of fact at all - only whether or not the lower court applied the proper law and procedure in making their determination.
In Betamax the issue of intent, other ways to realie the same end etc. did not occur. The principle use of the VCR was manifestly a fair use in the sense that it did not negatively affect the copyright owners interests.
I think that it is pretty clear that the facts determined by the trial court indicate that the principle use of Grokster is for piracy.
Have you even read the betamax decision? It doesn't sound like it.
The court in betamax found not just that the vast majority of betamax owners were infringing copyrights, but also that sony could have easily added a chip to prevent or at least hinder copyright infringment and refused, that their advertisements invited customers to use it for copyright infringement, and they found further that there would be little or no demand for VCRs if it weren't for these illegal uses.
In other words, every one of these issues that you (and plaintiffs attorneys) have claimed distinguish this case from Betamax, were in fact present in Betamax.
The question in Grokster is whether there are genuine, substantial non-infringing uses or whether the theoretical and hypothetical uses being proposed are spurious and the only substantial use is to pirate stuff.
No, that's not true. The questions of fact were dealt with and decided by the lower court, are undisputed (read the plaintiffs briefs, and the oral arguments - they try very hard to claim to dispute the facts, but were clearly unable to do so. The Supremes, furthermore, rarely address questions of fact - the vast majority of their cases, like this one, are appeals, and appeals generally do not involve issues of fact, but rather of law and procedure. If, for instance, the Supremes were to find that the lower court determined issues of fact incorrectly, they would not then hold a trial and determine those issues themselves - they would rather return the case to the lower court with instructions detailing the errors made and instruct that lower court to take a redo.
Actually, if you'll check the original posters comments, you'll find that he's posted here clarifying. There was a conversation back and forth, not an automated notice at all, and the admin in question is indeed insisting that using BT is illegal in and of itself, with no indication whatever that he simply means it's against the TOS, but every indication he means illegal as in violation of state or federal law.
Assuming of course he's telling the truth. It is true that we only have his word on what's happened, of course. But if we're going to comment on this and offer advice on it, we kind of have to assume for the point of argument he's telling the truth, right? I mean, any article that's posted, you could just decide you don't think the facts as related are correct, make up a new set of facts instead, and talk about those... and you might even be right! But it still seems rather pointless.
exacty. since p2p apps tend to use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, it's only fair to the rest of the network's users to limit their use.
Quit trying to change the subject. They didn't say they were limiting bandwidth usage. They said they would yank him off the network for using 'illegal' software. That's not the same thing at all, and you can't just make it that because that's the case you'd rather argue.
i thought you assumed the network was publicly funded?
What I said was clear - the usual situation with universities in the US is that they are *partially* state funded, and have obligations to be non-discriminatory because of that, and also that they are partially funded by student fees, which are payments given for the services the university offers. One of those services is the network.
Surely you're not so simple minded that you have difficulty understanding that an institution can have several funding sources, and that each source can impose limitations and obligations?
At any rate, there's no point in responding at all to most of what you write, since it has nothing to do with this case. Sure, if they said 'we're going to use a traffic shaper to make sure that p2p apps don't use so much bandwidth other things quit working' they would likely be well within their rights to do that. So what? That's not the case. They are forbidding BT use on the grounds that it is illegal, so the issues involved are entirely different.
I've worked as an academic network admin, and I've worked with guys that do things like that. Nine out of ten are incompetent to begin with in my experience - the tenth being competetent technically but still incapable of doing his job properly as a result of his massive ego. I've had to cover for them, apologise for them, and work extra hours just to clean up the messes they made. I've been the one that got caught in the crossfire when their idiotic power trips wound up causing the users - you know, the people the network and us network admins are here to serve? - all kinds of unecessary problems. And I stand by what I said. Asshats like that have no place in network administration.
Don't bite the hand that gives you free internet access.
They give you nothing free. You pay for it in your fees, and what that doesn't cover comes out of our tax money.
I agree that the phrasings used are not the most diplomatic, for certain. And I would recommend not actually following it. Frankly, I would try once to be reasonable and diplomatic with this idiot, and then I'd let the lawyer talk to him instead after.
But at any rate, the university network in this case is clearly being run by an incompetent and arrogant jackass that needs to be sent back to McDonalds where he belongs, and while it may be tactically wise not to tell him that in those words, it's obviously the truth of the matter. Again, I'd let the lawyer do it. They tend to be better than the rest of us at pointing out such undiplomatic facts diplomatically.
My old university had counsel on staff students could pretty much freely consult with for any reason. They were there to be advocates for the students. Lots of universities have this if you look closely for them - it may even be a federal requirement. I advise you strongly to go talk to a lawyer, and this would be the least expensive way (since you've already paid, it's a service covered in your fees) that will be an advocate for you here.
This guy is totally ignorant and offbase here, but he's unfortunately also in a postion of responsibility and power and you're going to need some support to put him in his place, or even just to get him to back off and leave you alone. So seriously. Find a counsel, make an appointment, bring a copy of the most recent decision which upheld sony vs. betamax, along with printouts of all your correspondence on the issue, and a list of the files you've shared along with evidence that it is perfectly legal for you to share them - for instance Azureus is under the GPL, bring a copy of that with you too. Sit down with the counsel, bring out the first letter from the guy that states that you cannot use BT because it is illegal. Set that down. Then the court decision. Then the GPL.... I think you see where this is going.
A call from a student advocate who knows the deal and is there to advocate for your rights is going to be a lot more effective at getting this asshats attention than anything you can do yourself.
First, I'm assuming his uni is in the states. IIRC there is only one totally private university in the US, the rest are either explicitly public or even if nominally private they are de facto public as well, due to accepting federal grant money with all of the strings that come with it.
So this is not really a private network we're talking about. It's state funded and therefore the administrator does have an obligation to provide the service in a fair and non discriminatory fashion. Also, this student is a customer of the school, and as such he has consumer protection as well. He paid for a service, and now after taking his money they unilaterally take it away? They need cause to do that, they can't simply do it because they feel like it, as they could if they were a truly private network and his service was a gift, rather than something he's paid for.
Furthermore, it sounds like he was explicitly told this action would be taken for cause, specifically for using illegal software. Since bittorrent is not illegal, this would be a wrongful action, and probably open the uni up to a lawsuit if the original poster wants to go find a lawyer.
Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network
This guy is an asshat, clearly. The courts have NOT ruled P2P activity illegal - in fact the most recent decision reinforced sony vs betamax and vindicated P2P!
But this asshat thinks it's illegal (error of fact) and also that he is judge, jury, and executioner in these cases.
He is begging to get put in his place, and he's given any enemies he has enough rope to hang him with this stance, if only any of them are willing to put some time and resources into frying him. And I hope someone does. There is no place for that sort of combination of ignorance, arrogance, and disrespect for the customer in the field of network administration so far as I am concerned.
Please, someone, send this asshat back to McDonalds where he belongs.
Please reconsider. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that 'CS' department is obviously simply an IT department, not a real CS department. They aren't going to teach you anything you want to know.
You almost got it right, but you left out something critical. Bitkeepers license prohibits anyone that uses it from ever working on a competing program!
THIS is a very big problem, and I don't think raising it repeatedly is 'whining' anymore than I would be whining if I repeatedly tried to warn someone of an oncoming train when they were standing on the tracks...
There are actually a lot of mac games available. Of course, there are a lot more windows games, and the consumer that simply must play EVERY new game that gets advertised wouldn't be happy with it - but if gaming is a relatively small part of what you do with the computer, and you're happy just to have a few of the better games available, it will do you just fine.
Europa Universalis II is one of my favourite games, for instance, and runs GREAT on my mac (although I am still mad that I had to pay so much more for that disk - it really was worth it.) Doom3 is REALLY nice on one of the new G5s. Companies like MacSoft and Virtual Programming are keeping Mac gaming very much alive. A few more current titles for Mac: Celtic Kings, Spartan, Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004, Hearts of Iron...
Actually I don't think you do. You see WAP devices don't work with HTML anyway. They always have to go through a converter, regardless. The converter reads the html and converts it to WML, which is then passed along to the phone.
You can literally serve the converter the same web page as everyone else, you cannot literally feed the phone the same HTML as anyone else - because the phone needs WML not HTML.
A webpage that doesn't choke the converter is WAP accessible, basically.
I have a question.. how do you fit images that are 250 pixels wide on a screen that is only 100 pixels wide?
Obviously any particular answer to this is going to be sub-optimal in some situations - which is exactly why HTML leaves this to the browser. The browser might, depending on the capabilities it has available and the users preferences, do one of several things. It might use a scroll bar. It might scale the image to fit. It might display (or speak) the ALT text instead. The BEAUTY of HTML is precisely in making sure that the designer, if he uses it correctly, doesn't need to spend time worrying about how a particular device can present the content .
One more question - how do you use the same version of your HTML output for WAP devices?
Simply following normal good practice - the same things you should be doing to make sure that text browsers and readers for the blind can get to your content - is enough on most pages. WAP converters tend to have problems with the same practices as cause accessibility problems generally - miscoded buttons, excessive reliance on scripting or plugins, and all those stupid tricks people use to try and control the layout, despite the fact that HTML deliberately and for good reason doesn't allow you to do that.
Client.:...and I want this neato [flash thing]. You: But that would lock out your mobile customers! Client: How many people would that be? You: Well, less than 1%, but... Client: Uh huh, anyway, I want this neato [flash thing].
Sounds like "you" did a bad job of informing the client, and are letting him make a bad decision because he's not informed.
Now the customer has the right to make bad decisions. And if you need the money (and who doesn't) then I can certainly understand implementing what they want, even when it is stupid. But I think you have a responsibility, as a professional, to inform the client so he can make an informed decision, which is what was not done.
In this case, I'd point out that WAP users are a fast growing market, that they are likely to be better than average in terms of buying power, yes, but also that relying entirely on this flash gizmo for whatever it's doing is slamming the virtual door to your internet presence right in the face of many customers or potential customers, not just the WAP users but also the blind, those who for whatever reason still use an older browser, as well as the many who simply refuse to install or enable a flash plugin because we don't want that crap . All those groups together are probably going to be a minority of users, but it's not an insignificant one, and it really seems like bad business to me to deliberately and needlessly slam your door in their face, particularly when it's unecessary.
Then I would simply point out that I can use the flash and get what the customer wants, but still have a site that is accessible and functional to everyone.
That's assuming the conversation ever came up in the first place. But why would it? The client wants a flash doo-hickey? Fine. Give him one. Just do it right....
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The windows explorer is horribly flawed, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely wrong that everything but Nautilus is copying that. The basics of the interface go back to programs like midnight commander and xtree. Windows explorer is a particularly horrible implementation of it* and by setting it up, unilaterally, as some sort of reference implementation that everyone else is supposedly copying from (including the many programs that predate it!) you get a strawman award.
*IMHOP explorer.exe from Windows 95 wasn't too bad, but it's been going steadily downhill since.
True to a degree. And those have always been among the most problematic legal distinctions, the ones that encourage corruption and the rule of men rather than law.
You see, a court simply isn't competent to determine a persons motivation in many cases. Judges and juries are no more qualified than the rest of us to read a mans mind, or look into his heart.
Your explanation of manslaughter and murder is incomplete and thus misleading. The old law on the subject relied not on mind reading, but on actions - a man who stood up on the spot and proclaimed his action was guilty of manslaughter - a man who tried to conceal his act and escape justice was guilty of murder. This is an immenently workable system. The abstraction behind it, of course, is what is called mens rea - but mens rea cannot be directly ascertained, but only guessed at based on ones actions.
Now in modern times we've twisted this horribly. A man who stands up and takes responsibility for his action will be punished MORESO than one who simply keeps his mouth shut, in most situations.
There's a difference? Well obviously, there are several. The question is what are those differences, how significant are they, from whose point of view?
Objectively, they are both acts of vandalism, crimes against property. The difference in the words being spelled are very unlikely to be significant at all in any objective evaluation - the cost to repair the damage is going to be the same either way.
In the minds of the vandals, they are also likely to be nearly identical acts too. Once we get here, though, we can argue interminably with no way to ever settle the issue - unless of course the vandals tell us what they were thinking. Even then, though, that really settles nothing. Because we've already entered the realm of thought-crime, and the smart vandals, when caught, will keep their mouths shut or tell us what we want to hear.
It may well be that in the minds of some other person that sees the words there is a difference - but if we determine that we can punish people for how other people choose to respond to their words, we've abandoned anything even approximating a concern with justice or law.
I've been assaulted for being a 'filthy jew.' I've been assaulted for being 'queer.' I've been assaulted because someone resented how much attention I was getting from a girl he thought was his. I can assure you that for me, they were very equivelant experiences - but the more important point is that, regardless of my reaction, they were objectively the same crime.
Do you really want to live in a society where someone elses emotional reaction to your words determine the legality of your speech? I certainly don't. Neither do I want to live in a society where assault is tolerated - just as long as the assaulters are careful to avoid choosing the politically protected classes as their victims? I don't like that either, but unfortunately we're well down the path to both of those realities already.
Truer words were never spoken, and I thank you for posting them. Sad thing is the rest of your comment indicates you have set them aside already, or perhaps never had them.
There is absolutely nothing unethical in what Tridge did here, at least insofar as has been mentioned in any of the reporting on this in the past few days that we've both had access to. There is absolutely no ethical obligation to keep an agreement you were not a party to. The rest of your rant assumes facts not in evidence, without any source, and has the definate whiff of BS to me.
In fact, what Tridge has done here is the epitome of ethical behavior. Linus is stung now, understandably disoriented and angry because he's been proven wrong and, being human, his first response is to lash out at Tridge instead of thanking him. Give it a few years though... once his wounded pride settles down I'm sure he will, in fact, thank Tridge for this.
Locking your data into a proprietary single-vendor format for the sake of temporary convenience was never a good idea. Everyone told Linus this, but he was too smart to listen. Now exactly what he was warned about has happened. And it was inevitable all along - if Tridge hadn't done it someone or something else would have - McVoy was a ticking time bomb. The fact that the guy isn't very stable didn't help, but honestly - McVoy could have been a saint and the thing would have still been a ticking time bomb. If Tridges actions resulted in it going off a little sooner than otherwise, then he saved Linus and many others trouble in the long run. Replacing BK wasn't going to get any easier...
Then you need to look closer, or take off your blinders, or something.
Assault someone because they're wearing yellow or very nearly any other stupid reason in the world, and it's assault. Assault that SAME person with a slightly different, similarly stupid motivation (skin tone, religous jewelry, presumed or acknowledged sexual orientation) and suddenly it's a "hate crime" with far more severe consequences.
If the law isn't taking assault seriously enough, then we should change that - not cook up extra "thought crime" statutes to tack on. And the use of the phrase "thought crime" here is completely apt - we're talking about a law that criminalises the thought behind the crime, rather than the act itself. This is a very very very bad precedent, regardless of any other aspects of it - thought crimes are a category of laws that should never be made, for any purpose whatsoever, period.
I agree wholeheartedly with all genuine efforts toward legal equality. The State shouldn't have anything whatsoever to do with defining, recognising, rewarding or penalising marriage. Propose eliminating those privileges and I'll back you. Propose expanding those privileges to cover new classes instead, and I'll fight you every step of the way.
Oh I must disagree. I saw it's flaws quite clearly - and I wasn't very experienced with it either. My background in computers started with soldering my own together, and later grew to include things like the Apple II and the Amiga as well as the x86 world (from MS DOS 3 on.) I had spent a little time working on HP-UX, but other than that I was strictly a micro guy. I got tasked with bringing us up to date - converting from sneaker net to token ring with a server. Netware was definately not 'friendly' and there were a lot of limitations I chafed against. I had been experminenting with NT, hoping it could do the job instead, but every trial showed the same thing - although it initially appeared easier to admin, the fact was that anything beyond the most common GUI options was even harder to do than it would be with netware. And the performance and stability comparisons - well, there was no comparison. Simple as that. We'd have gladly gone with NT from the start, if it could do the job, but it just couldn't. I also looked at Linux - in fact I first heard of linux at about this very time - but at the time it wasn't ready either, although it also looked promising for different reasons.
Well I administer several macs today, and I don't think the verb is misused there, although they are amazingly easy to admin and amazingly robust in the absence of an administrator.
But beyond that trifle, the notion that NT doesn't require administration is just absolutely backward. It's designed to LOOK like it's easy, but seriously, it required far more administrative work than Novel. If we just look at my personal experience with it, I found that it was routine for a task to take several times as long to perform on NT - but you may think that's because I knew Novel better of course. That's not actually true, but regardless, comparing my time on the Netware box with the time spent by a three man team shipped down from Redmond, it was just as bad. These guys were NT experts, and I was just a self-taught Netware guy that had to beg for a budget to buy a reference book on it.
The low end eats the high end is a good observation, and based very much in reality. I'm sure that was one of several trends going on there. At the same time, though, I'm absolutely sure that it was NOT the only, or even the most important, difficulty for Netware.
Hours of training once, and then afterwards you can do it in seconds. Compare to NT, little to no training in theory (although in fact that was never better than a half-truth) but then it took many times as long to actually get it done anyway.
Well, if it was a discount on something you were going to buy anyway, that's in essence a payment. I'm sure the payments were suitably camoflaged like this, to prevent legal troubles or whatever, and I'm not privy to the accounting details. But we got a LOT of 'sweetheart' deals for eating that particular dogfood - a big one at the beginning, and every time it caused us a big problem, our guys screamed at theirs for a little while and then a day or two later they got something nice and it was all smiles again...
The directory service is far superior (microsofts current incarnation of this is about where Novels was about '95) and this is an enourmous advantage in a large operation. Many large corporate networks are Novel for this reason already, so obviously if you're in one of those you need it for interoperability as well. You get greater stability, better performance (again, more important in a large operation where it may mean you can do the same job without buying as many servers) and it's a hell of a lot easier to administer properly.
With Novel into Linux now, you can expect it to continue to perform with less hassles in heterogenous environments as well.
ROFL. Yeah, right, sure. And rocks fall upward, and the moon is made of green cheese...
I administered Novell and NT both back in the days you're talking about. Netware 3.x beat NT 3.x so badly, on every possible applicable point, not even the most incompetent admin would have ever made the claim you just did with a straight face.
Microsoft PAYED my employer a huge sum to partially replace our Netware server with an NT 3.5 server. That little netware server was keeping the office served so far as email, web gateway, and file and print serving without a problem. NT on a slightly faster machine proved itself incapable of handling the EMAIL ALONE for the same office, and this AFTER having guys from MS fly down to work on it every couple of weeks for six months.
On top of lack of functionality and lack of stability, it was also impossible to properly admin. It was a total POS and everyone knew it. Even the PHBs were totally upfront about it - they knew it was trash. But whenever we had a problem, MS cut a check (or something to the same end effect) to more than cover the losses.
That's how they won. Novel certainly made mistakes, but that doesn't change the fact that their product was vastly superior and defeated on grounds other than technical.
What you're saying is true as far as it goes, but there are perfectly fine ways to satisfy both interests here - you can provide working contact info without actually revealing your identity to the entire world.
There is no question on that issue at all actually - the plaintiffs were unable to contest it. The question of law is simply whether they are liable for the actions of the portion of their users that are violating the law.
What puzzles me is if you have read it, why you seem so ignorant of its details?
I make it a rule to assume the opposite, until and unless it's disproven. Learn a lot more that way.
Which is why I actually engaged you in conversation on the issue. Trouble is, everything you've written just leads back to initial conclusion I was trying to avoid - that you're either ignorant or actively evil. When you post a comment so flat out wrong on verifiable points of fact on the subject, and your response to a correction on those points is to dissemble like you did here, you give yourself away.
Quite a shame, but there it is.
Considering I've never stolen anything from them, then, why are they still on my back? Why are they spending billions of dollars on attempts to take away my rights?
Umm no. Courts routinely distinguish between the two. Appeals courts do not normally examine matters of fact at all - only whether or not the lower court applied the proper law and procedure in making their determination.
Have you even read the betamax decision? It doesn't sound like it.
The court in betamax found not just that the vast majority of betamax owners were infringing copyrights, but also that sony could have easily added a chip to prevent or at least hinder copyright infringment and refused, that their advertisements invited customers to use it for copyright infringement, and they found further that there would be little or no demand for VCRs if it weren't for these illegal uses.
In other words, every one of these issues that you (and plaintiffs attorneys) have claimed distinguish this case from Betamax, were in fact present in Betamax.
No, that's not true. The questions of fact were dealt with and decided by the lower court, are undisputed (read the plaintiffs briefs, and the oral arguments - they try very hard to claim to dispute the facts, but were clearly unable to do so. The Supremes, furthermore, rarely address questions of fact - the vast majority of their cases, like this one, are appeals, and appeals generally do not involve issues of fact, but rather of law and procedure. If, for instance, the Supremes were to find that the lower court determined issues of fact incorrectly, they would not then hold a trial and determine those issues themselves - they would rather return the case to the lower court with instructions detailing the errors made and instruct that lower court to take a redo.
Actually, if you'll check the original posters comments, you'll find that he's posted here clarifying. There was a conversation back and forth, not an automated notice at all, and the admin in question is indeed insisting that using BT is illegal in and of itself, with no indication whatever that he simply means it's against the TOS, but every indication he means illegal as in violation of state or federal law.
Assuming of course he's telling the truth. It is true that we only have his word on what's happened, of course. But if we're going to comment on this and offer advice on it, we kind of have to assume for the point of argument he's telling the truth, right? I mean, any article that's posted, you could just decide you don't think the facts as related are correct, make up a new set of facts instead, and talk about those... and you might even be right! But it still seems rather pointless.
Quit trying to change the subject. They didn't say they were limiting bandwidth usage. They said they would yank him off the network for using 'illegal' software. That's not the same thing at all, and you can't just make it that because that's the case you'd rather argue.
What I said was clear - the usual situation with universities in the US is that they are *partially* state funded, and have obligations to be non-discriminatory because of that, and also that they are partially funded by student fees, which are payments given for the services the university offers. One of those services is the network.
Surely you're not so simple minded that you have difficulty understanding that an institution can have several funding sources, and that each source can impose limitations and obligations?
At any rate, there's no point in responding at all to most of what you write, since it has nothing to do with this case. Sure, if they said 'we're going to use a traffic shaper to make sure that p2p apps don't use so much bandwidth other things quit working' they would likely be well within their rights to do that. So what? That's not the case. They are forbidding BT use on the grounds that it is illegal, so the issues involved are entirely different.
I've worked as an academic network admin, and I've worked with guys that do things like that. Nine out of ten are incompetent to begin with in my experience - the tenth being competetent technically but still incapable of doing his job properly as a result of his massive ego. I've had to cover for them, apologise for them, and work extra hours just to clean up the messes they made. I've been the one that got caught in the crossfire when their idiotic power trips wound up causing the users - you know, the people the network and us network admins are here to serve? - all kinds of unecessary problems. And I stand by what I said. Asshats like that have no place in network administration.
They give you nothing free. You pay for it in your fees, and what that doesn't cover comes out of our tax money.
I agree that the phrasings used are not the most diplomatic, for certain. And I would recommend not actually following it. Frankly, I would try once to be reasonable and diplomatic with this idiot, and then I'd let the lawyer talk to him instead after.
But at any rate, the university network in this case is clearly being run by an incompetent and arrogant jackass that needs to be sent back to McDonalds where he belongs, and while it may be tactically wise not to tell him that in those words, it's obviously the truth of the matter. Again, I'd let the lawyer do it. They tend to be better than the rest of us at pointing out such undiplomatic facts diplomatically.
This guy is totally ignorant and offbase here, but he's unfortunately also in a postion of responsibility and power and you're going to need some support to put him in his place, or even just to get him to back off and leave you alone. So seriously. Find a counsel, make an appointment, bring a copy of the most recent decision which upheld sony vs. betamax, along with printouts of all your correspondence on the issue, and a list of the files you've shared along with evidence that it is perfectly legal for you to share them - for instance Azureus is under the GPL, bring a copy of that with you too. Sit down with the counsel, bring out the first letter from the guy that states that you cannot use BT because it is illegal. Set that down. Then the court decision. Then the GPL.... I think you see where this is going.
A call from a student advocate who knows the deal and is there to advocate for your rights is going to be a lot more effective at getting this asshats attention than anything you can do yourself.
Not exactly.
First, I'm assuming his uni is in the states. IIRC there is only one totally private university in the US, the rest are either explicitly public or even if nominally private they are de facto public as well, due to accepting federal grant money with all of the strings that come with it.
So this is not really a private network we're talking about. It's state funded and therefore the administrator does have an obligation to provide the service in a fair and non discriminatory fashion. Also, this student is a customer of the school, and as such he has consumer protection as well. He paid for a service, and now after taking his money they unilaterally take it away? They need cause to do that, they can't simply do it because they feel like it, as they could if they were a truly private network and his service was a gift, rather than something he's paid for.
Furthermore, it sounds like he was explicitly told this action would be taken for cause, specifically for using illegal software. Since bittorrent is not illegal, this would be a wrongful action, and probably open the uni up to a lawsuit if the original poster wants to go find a lawyer.
This guy is an asshat, clearly. The courts have NOT ruled P2P activity illegal - in fact the most recent decision reinforced sony vs betamax and vindicated P2P!
But this asshat thinks it's illegal (error of fact) and also that he is judge, jury, and executioner in these cases.
He is begging to get put in his place, and he's given any enemies he has enough rope to hang him with this stance, if only any of them are willing to put some time and resources into frying him. And I hope someone does. There is no place for that sort of combination of ignorance, arrogance, and disrespect for the customer in the field of network administration so far as I am concerned.
Please, someone, send this asshat back to McDonalds where he belongs.
Please reconsider. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that 'CS' department is obviously simply an IT department, not a real CS department. They aren't going to teach you anything you want to know.
You almost got it right, but you left out something critical. Bitkeepers license prohibits anyone that uses it from ever working on a competing program!
THIS is a very big problem, and I don't think raising it repeatedly is 'whining' anymore than I would be whining if I repeatedly tried to warn someone of an oncoming train when they were standing on the tracks...
There are actually a lot of mac games available. Of course, there are a lot more windows games, and the consumer that simply must play EVERY new game that gets advertised wouldn't be happy with it - but if gaming is a relatively small part of what you do with the computer, and you're happy just to have a few of the better games available, it will do you just fine.
Europa Universalis II is one of my favourite games, for instance, and runs GREAT on my mac (although I am still mad that I had to pay so much more for that disk - it really was worth it.) Doom3 is REALLY nice on one of the new G5s. Companies like MacSoft and Virtual Programming are keeping Mac gaming very much alive. A few more current titles for Mac: Celtic Kings, Spartan, Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004, Hearts of Iron...
Actually I don't think you do. You see WAP devices don't work with HTML anyway. They always have to go through a converter, regardless. The converter reads the html and converts it to WML, which is then passed along to the phone.
You can literally serve the converter the same web page as everyone else, you cannot literally feed the phone the same HTML as anyone else - because the phone needs WML not HTML.
A webpage that doesn't choke the converter is WAP accessible, basically.
Obviously any particular answer to this is going to be sub-optimal in some situations - which is exactly why HTML leaves this to the browser. The browser might, depending on the capabilities it has available and the users preferences, do one of several things. It might use a scroll bar. It might scale the image to fit. It might display (or speak) the ALT text instead. The BEAUTY of HTML is precisely in making sure that the designer, if he uses it correctly, doesn't need to spend time worrying about how a particular device can present the content .
Simply following normal good practice - the same things you should be doing to make sure that text browsers and readers for the blind can get to your content - is enough on most pages. WAP converters tend to have problems with the same practices as cause accessibility problems generally - miscoded buttons, excessive reliance on scripting or plugins, and all those stupid tricks people use to try and control the layout, despite the fact that HTML deliberately and for good reason doesn't allow you to do that.
Who said anything about making it 'mobile-optimized?' Where the heck did you get that from?
Sounds like "you" did a bad job of informing the client, and are letting him make a bad decision because he's not informed.
Now the customer has the right to make bad decisions. And if you need the money (and who doesn't) then I can certainly understand implementing what they want, even when it is stupid. But I think you have a responsibility, as a professional, to inform the client so he can make an informed decision, which is what was not done.
In this case, I'd point out that WAP users are a fast growing market, that they are likely to be better than average in terms of buying power, yes, but also that relying entirely on this flash gizmo for whatever it's doing is slamming the virtual door to your internet presence right in the face of many customers or potential customers, not just the WAP users but also the blind, those who for whatever reason still use an older browser, as well as the many who simply refuse to install or enable a flash plugin because we don't want that crap . All those groups together are probably going to be a minority of users, but it's not an insignificant one, and it really seems like bad business to me to deliberately and needlessly slam your door in their face, particularly when it's unecessary.
Then I would simply point out that I can use the flash and get what the customer wants, but still have a site that is accessible and functional to everyone.
That's assuming the conversation ever came up in the first place. But why would it? The client wants a flash doo-hickey? Fine. Give him one. Just do it right....