The reason they don't do this now is that the spammers doing it are not geeks. They're taking pre-built scripts, modifying some parameters, and letting them go. They will keep doing this until those scripts no longer work, and then they will move onto newer ones. The only was this will happen is if some hacker gets bored, reads this article, and desides there's a lot of cash to be made selling just such a thing to the spammers.
Be real -- no matter how personalized an email gets, I'm still going to know it's not from somebody I know, because I don't make email my primary mode of correspondence and where I do, I can easily figure out that my mother isn't going to be sending me ads for Viagra.
Now, if they could make a Turing-capable spam generator, I'd be impressed.
If you are only using IP to generate your visitation metrics, then you're fooling yourself, for the reasons outlined in the blog. You can't guarantee an IP is unique to a user, any more than you can guarantee that a user is unique to an IP (think Internet cafe or library; different users, same machine with potentially the same IP)
You have to use a combination of log data to try and scope out exactly who's visiting: IP, browser type (can't count robots in your stats), membership id (if the site uses/requires it), and possibly cookie data (you assign a unique id when a user visits the site and they carry that data to every page). Here's a good breakdown of metrics processing and its pitfalls.
BlueFrog has been criticised for it's so-called "vigilante" approach.. it's not alone in this approach, but perhaps this does go to show a potential downside: spammers are evil - pissed off spammers will simply direct the evil at the people who pissed them off.
So what do we do -- surrender, because some spammer compromises this one system? Blue Frog has its own problems, but their idea is sound, if a bit "above the law." Let Blue Frog users forward the emails to them and let the company go after the spammers (aren't they violating CAN-SPAM or the law against harrassing emails?).
Look, Wyatt Earp was a lawman looking to see justice done and occassionally he had to step outside the law. Call it vigilantism if you like, but the fact is, these spammers have been operating under the assumption that they are untouchable, and can do this all day long with no repercussions. It's time for users around the globe to go on the offensive, give them a taste fo their own medicine. Shut down their ISPs if they won't stop the spam. Jam up their systems. Let them know we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. The court system can rule against them, but so many of them are overseas that I seriously doubt they can be touched. So hit 'em where it hurts, right in the servers.
One of the great things about FOSS is that it is driven by lots of individuals all of whom want something a bit different.
And while it seems like a strength, that is actually a weakness. It keeps Linux chained to the geek-programmer culture. The average-joe market need something they can use with minimal fuss and muss, and when they take their computer out of the box, they expect to turn it on and use it, not have to spend oodes of time confguring it. True, with Windows there is a set-up penalty, but I think since people are familiar with it, they don't think much of it.
There needs to be a pure, home-user version (no I don't mean Red Hat; Ubuntu might be closer at this point), one that has the minimum necessary to make a user happy, which is easy to maintain and upgrade, and doesn't require the user to know the arcana of the OS. I think this is generally contrary to what your average geek wants, and why it's hard to bring this into existence.
What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it - the Email Inbox. Think of your Email Inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their Email Inbox outside the corporate firewall, the Email Inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.
Unfortunately, the Walled Gardens of our Email Inboxes are deceivingly warm and cozy. This feigned-comfort of safety whispers into our ears like a wily devil to, "Just email the document to me" or "Just email that document to yourself" with the false-belief that it will remain safe, secure and locked away. But that is just it......its locked away so that NO ONE ELSE CAN ACCESS IT. This is counter-culture to team collaboration.
And how many times have you sent out a document for comment and gotten back 30 different versions with markups, which you then have to reintegrate into one document and somehow handle inconsistencies and overlap? Then of course you need the document, but don't have a copy where you're at, so you retrieve one from an email and use that, but it's an old version, so you have to recreate revisions. And then someone always emails you their revisions late, after you think you're all done (usually it's your boss, so it's not like you can just leave them out).
If nothing else, you need a document collaboration tool, to avoid this nightmare of multiple files, and email is not it.
Normally, I'd be a little put off by what amounts to an opinion piece bya lawyer on open source, but there are good points:
Current FOSS operating systems (OS) are targeted mainly at geeks, hackers and other technically skilled developers and users. While there have been some progress in making the installation and use of FOSS OSes like Ubuntu easier and simpler, they still do not have the "click-click-click" ease of installation of popular proprietary OSes like Windows XP or Mac OS X. In addition, even after one successfully installs a FOSS OS on a computer, a user will typically have to deal with issues like lack of drivers, incompatibility with third party devices or difficulty in installing new programs or software packages. A normal user wants everything to work out-of-the-box [emphasis mine]. This is especially true in developing countries where a computer costs more than a month's salary. Since a computer is a major purchase, it's usefulness and usability should be present at the moment a user turns on his or her computer. People are not interested in (in fact, most are adverse to) messing around with, tinkering or hacking a program - the second, third and fourth software freedoms.
It goes back to the whole idea of Linux as an everyday operating system. Anyone who is not a geek, i.e. most of the population, is not going to adopt something that isn't easy to operate. I mean, there's no reason to make a Windows-like GUI for Linux unless you want people to actually think of Linux as an alternative to Windows. And while you might impress the average user with a Windows-like look and feel, unless it's just as easy to use out of the box as their Windows PC is now, there will be no great swell of converts.
I've said it before: Linux's popularity depends on what it wants to be. If it wants to be the OS of geeks and hackers and multi-million dollar corporations, so be it. If Linux (or any of its derivatives) wish to compete against Windows for market share, there has to be a shift in thinking, away from kernel-centric, gizmos-and-gadgets way of thinking to the "what would a user want to do" mindset.
Here's a little trick for Google users who are going to use IE7: go to the address bar and type "www.google.com." Voila!
This is so much pissing in the wind. Google needs to get over itself and Microsoft needs a good, swift kick in the browser. Who cares! Use the browser you want to use and use the search engine you want to use! Until browsers start blocking particular search URLs of search engines refuse to run in certain browsers, there is... say it with me now... nothing to see here!
Associate Professor Pradeep Nathan of Monash University, an expert in behavioural neuroscience who was not involved in the research, says caffeine stimulates the central nervous system including the brain, where it affects several neurotransmitters.
The Melbourne-based researcher says it improves memory and makes us pay closer attention to tasks at hand.
"It does improve attention and it can improve memory so by being more attentive and remembering your attitude to a particular thing may change," he says.
"If you're more attentive, yes [it does have implications for advertising]. Advertising works on the principle of getting people's attention, you want to get as many people interested in your ads as possible."
Caffeine's great stuff for getting perked up and fired up, and I have been an addict since I can remember. I've tried to quit any number of times, but the mintue I find myself getting tired, I'm off to find java.
That said, there's a drawback to it: developing a tolerance. As time passes, I need more and more of it, which is fine if you're the operator of my local coffee stand but is bad for my wallet and bad for my attention span. Let's not forget the jitters you can get if you have too much or the withdrawl headaches you get if you cut your consumption too quickly.
I seriously doubt coffee can simply bend your will and make you more susceptible to anything, other than having more coffee.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved Independence Day, for the premise, the special effects, and a pretty damned good cast. But was any idea more absurd than Jeff Goldblum hacking into an alien computer system and planting a virus in it to destroy it. Did I miss the part where a crack team of hackers cracked their system and reverse engineered root access and the aliens' virus detection software? Is it possible a race with such militaristic intentions would miss the idea of trying to infect a computer system? It was great product placement for Apple at the time, but please! I find it more plausible to think a guy dresses up like a bat and fights crime.
The psychology and social structure of a bunch of disparate programmers who are not on your payroll is a pill just too difficult to swallow, and one that is usually farmed to the bottom of the 'lets do this' pile.
Are we all just difficult pills? Or are we the cure to the boring workplace?
From the beginning of that paragraph in the article: The mistake a number of companies, both large and small have made when approaching Open Source is that they lack an understanding of the people who drive the technology.
This isn't just true with OSS, it's true with all technology and all technology people. I used to work around project management; there's nothing more galling than the emphasis on the 'FTE' (Full-Time Employee for the non-business folk) and counting them up, shifting them around, plugging in 'Offshore' employees when FTEs are 'reduced' (euphemism for being outsourced). A company doesn't want to get to know its employees anymore -- they are simply commodities that can be swapped out like chips or hard drives most of the time.
When you stretch that to technology, it's important to realize that the knowledge of the individual is not half as important as the ability of a development team manager to let the higher ups and customers know that they have their people 'working on it.' Managers are very averse to trying to find more competent help to replace incompetent help, simply because it might cause the schedule to slip.
Managers with people handling skills are a dying breed in tech.
When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones?
Well, they would if they weren't busy fiddling with their Blackberrys.
In haste to be the first with the new features it seems the ramifications of what and how they add are considered little, if at all. It's money grabbing, and let the chips fall where they may, as long as the manufacturer is first and fastest with the latest new features. Sick.
Sound like you could apply that to just about anything: cell phones, cars, computers, etc.
I find it ironic, paradoxical(?), one of the features so darling and network centric is text messaging. I've referenced this before the T-Mobile Sidekick got written into an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory carried on a "conversation" with Daddy about arrangements to attend a function. I'm waiting for the next great headlines where someone discovered the newest and fastest way to communicate with one of these devices -- you can actually dial a number and talk to the other person!!!
You watch "Gilmore Girls?" Anyway... I used to be an absolutist and a bit of a neo-Luddite when it came to mobile phones and their tech. At first I never wanted to own one. Then when my wife forced^H^H^H^H^H^Hasked me to carry one, I wanted a simple one and that's what I got and loathed it when I realized no one could hear me talk on it unless I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. Finally I got a Motorola V600 which had all the goodies and I began to miss my simple phone. The V600 was a hunk of junk which I finally lost in France. I now have a V360 and am very happy with it.
Mind you, I could live without the camera, though it's handy when you want to take a quick picture. The games aren't really that spectacular, though I play Pinball when I'm bored on the train. The one thing I really love about my V360 is the MP3 player. Of all the things they could add to a phone, that was the accessory I wanted the most. If that was the only extra gee-gaw, I'd be very happy. Unfortunately, the tendency os to make mobile phones be the Swiss-Army knife of mobile technology.
From the article: However, Smith said that a lot of Web 2.0 software still has serious technical pitfalls, like security, which should worry corporate customers. "If I'm mixing AJAX and wiki technology, I'm really creating a hacker's paradise," Smith said.
And that right there is the risk a lot of IT managers will not be willing to take, until these technologies can prove they are robust enough and secure enough to keep someone from gaining easy access to their systems. Companies spend vast amounts of time building defenses and aren't about to hand out the keys to the back door if they can help it.
Phishing scams are prevalent and continue to proliferate. In traditional scams, miscreants try to pilfer personal information by sending spam e-mail with links to a malicious Web site, crafted to look like a site belonging to a trusted service provider. The phone scams are a new twist, made possible by cheap Internet-based telephone services, Cloudmark said.
Fresh phish with a side of Skype, anyone?
Not to belabor the point that all the other posters have made so far -- it's just another example of human stupidity. If it doesn't occur to them to check at their local branch first then they're asking for trouble. Of course this ends up impacting senior citizens more than anyone. After all, given age and occasional infirmity, they'd be easy marks, probably trusting the phone more that email. I'm sure the spectrum of dupes is pretty broad, but mark the elderly especially vulnerable, mitigated by the fact that not too many of them are using the Internet as extensively.
To wander a bot off the topic, when they were building a new PNC Bank branch in my area, that had a Winnebago parked nearby that was apparently a mobile bank, with tellers and even an ATM machine in the side. Far from building a brick-and-mortatr branch, that seems a far more effective way of physically duping people, especially if you have all the trappings.
My own short experience with this article makes a fair example. After bringing up discussion on the topic in Wikipedia's generally IRC channel, a fellow user, Bogdangiusca, who had fought for a NPOV on the article as far back as May 1, 2005, added a totally disputed tag. This tag would mean that anyone visiting the page would see a red block at the top indicating that 'The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed'. This tag was removed the next day. The person who did so then defaced Bogdangiusca's user page with a long paragraph demanding that Bogdangiusca stop any contribution to the Wal-mart page. The user claimed to be an employee of Wal-mart and lamented, 'So why don't you just keep to what you know and allow those that do have facts about walmart to create an accurate picture of walmart for the world.' This pattern has been repeated over and over again about the Wal-mart page. Many users struggling for a NPOV have had their pages defaced, and defacers have in the past been banned.
Since Wal-Mart is so heavily in bed with China, is it any wonder? They're learning from the pros. Of course they are successful and their business model is indeed efficient. They put a lot of people to work and they offer the average consumer decent prices on all the things they want, from groceries to TVs. Unfortunately, they've taken this beyond the limit of decency.
They would point out the prosperity they bring to areas where they build stores, but they fail to mention the manufacturing jobs they eliminate in this country when they import cheap Chinese merchandise, thereby converting a lot of good-paying jobs into low-paying jobs and sucking money out of the tax base and Social Security.
Their commercials would have you believe that their staff is always friendly, attentive, and knowledgeable, when this is the furthest thing from the truth. I have been to a Wal-Mart in 10 different states and I've yet to find a store that wasn't chaotic, unkempt, and whose staff wasn't lacking decent social skills. I've become so fed up with them that I do not shop there, prefering Target, even when I could save money.
They don't want the truth to come out, to tarnish Sam Walton's reputation with reality. The fact is, these people who fanatically support Wal-Mart are to retail what Scientology is to religon (go ahead Cruise, sue me!). Wal-Mart is best described as the Microsoft of retail outlets, and it shows in the way they handle employee compensation and benefits, not to mention unionization. They are so profit-centric now that they don't care who they crush along the way.
This is not supposed to be called piracy of a company, it's a trademark violation, unauthorized and fraudulant usage of the NEC trademark. The affected factories claims that they have papers to prove that they were licensed to manufacturer the goods, but the papers were faked, which is considered fraud.
<pirate>Ahhrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!! Sign over yer intellectual property rights and branding, or yew'll be swimmin' with the sharks, Maties!</pirate>
Microsoft tried to block Kai-Fu Lee, an executive in its Chinese operations, from joining competitor Google (GOOG) last year. During court proceedings, Lee said Microsoft botched efforts in China by failing to make friends with the Chinese government early on. The software company may be making up for lost time. Some analysts say Microsoft could finally see returns in the next two years.
And so now China is up for grabs. Who will win: "The Evil Empire" or "The Do No Evil Empire?" I wonder if the Chinese government realizes that one of these companies may end up owning their country lock, stock, and barrel? "I'm sorry, Mr. Hu, but Chairman Ballmer won't be able to see you today -- he's trying to annex Mongolia."
Moreover, the way we remember things evolves. It may not be possible to design a system that can passively recognize the changing signature of the same thought by the same individual over time.
All other technical arguments for why it can't work aside, this is the biggest bugaboo. You're going to age; your faculties will age as well. Recall is iffy at best even when you're in a "normal" state, let's leave out being stoned, drunk, angry, depressed, etc. Just the simple aging of your brain is going to make this problematic. Beyond actually "forgetting" your password, there will be the distotrions of brain function that come with senile dementia or Alzheimer's Disease, not to mention strokes or heart attacks.
This is best relegated back to science fiction until we know a lot more about how the brain works as a unit and until we can measure brain activity accurately.
On Wednesday, Microsoft argued that the Commission's decision had shackled its ability to compete, an argument that Europe's top antitrust authority dismissed as "absurd" and "frivolous."
"We...submit that the (Commission) decision is an attempt to reconfigure (how the) market works by handicapping the leading player in perpetuity," Forrester told the court.
Perhaps "levelling the playing field" is a better way of looking at it. Look, I'm all for innovation and the right to make money off your ideas, but when it comes to computers and software, you have to bite the bullet and admit that people need choice. Admittedly, you want that choice to be your software or your server, and you can ensure that by dominating the market. Just as we've seen though, that makes you the target of everyone's wrath, whether from competitors, governments, or hackers.
So yes, Microsoft has a "right" to its intellectual property within reason, but when it come to interoperability, they need to rethink their stance. Ultimately they could conceivably eliminate most of their competition, but then that would spell the end of innovation on the grand scale, and force them to become even larger and more bloated than they are now. It's bad enough that one hand doesn't seem to know what the other is doing in Redmond, without consigning the rest of us to oblivion. MS needs to take its lumps, fix the interoperability/bundling issue, and move on.
"A lot of other industries are doing a whole lot better in terms of collaborating, but most are not competitive," he said. "For example, there are initiatives to make government systems open source and there is a lot of collaboration between universities. But the closer it comes to affecting the dollar, the less you will see people participating."
That's what it comes down to. If you are in a compettitve market, you need an edge, something you have that your competitors don't, that gives you more strength in your industry. Open source is great from a bottom line standpoint -- who doesn't want to save money on software? -- but it leaves a company wondering if anyone else could do the same things with it. So paranoia is bred. We keep our things in-house and don't let anyone see it. That's why when you are in tech and you leave a financial firm, you have to sign a non-competitiveness agreement and/or a non-disclosure agreement. They don't want your knowledge going somewhere else where it could benefit a competitor.
As long as there is a competitive advantage to be gained, major banks and financial firms will not contribute back to the OSS community if there's even the slightest possibility it will cause them to lose that advantage. It's their corporate culture and I don't think it'll change anytime soon.
Fact: If another copy of your personal information exists, it can only increase the chance of such data being stolen and used against you.
But, if it were the only copy of the data, and there was an easy way to report its loss, that would be much better. Let's face it, you have a profusion of IDs: driver's license, passport, work id, social security card, medical insurance card, etc. Most of them have some sort of redundancy of data, or at least enoug critical information that someone getting their hands on it can get the rest of your data. I think it would be advantageous to have it in one place and have that source easily replaced if lost or stolen. That would be the tricky part. That and sufficiently encrypting the data to make hacking it very hard.
Can we get this guy on the US Supreme Court? It's gotten way too stuffy for my test. Mr Justice Peter Smith might just bring some much-needed humanity to court deliberations.
Most europeans don't consider national ID cards (let's stick to that terminology) evil in any way and wonder why you americans make such a big issue of it. We've had them for as long as anyone can remember.
It's precisely because we're Americans and have a long history of independence, not just in creating our nation, but in thought as well. You hear a lot in this country about the sacrifices of our forefathers and Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" and it becomes clear that Americans don't like restrictions. We don't like to be hemmed in -- look at the way we expanded across the North American continent.
I personally don't see the problem with ID cards. I want something that can unequivocally establish who I am and where I come from. I don't even mind the idea of information being encoded into the card that might prove useful in an emergency or when I need it: medical records, dental records, home address, etc. In this day and age, with identity theft on the rise and miscommunication and misperception rampant, and the rise of the Internet, it seems prudent to have some way to distinguish myself.
What I do object to is the "papers please" mentality that may come with a national ID card. I don't want it becoming a requirement to carry, and I certainly don't want to be jailed for not carrying it. Something like this could become draconian and eventually lead to more totalitarian measures. And that rubs my American sensibilities the wrong way.
FTA: Microsoft says that every time a notification is displayed, the user will receive detailed information about the specific validation failure. The information includes steps that can be taken to resolve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason they don't do this now is that the spammers doing it are not geeks. They're taking pre-built scripts, modifying some parameters, and letting them go. They will keep doing this until those scripts no longer work, and then they will move onto newer ones. The only was this will happen is if some hacker gets bored, reads this article, and desides there's a lot of cash to be made selling just such a thing to the spammers.
Be real -- no matter how personalized an email gets, I'm still going to know it's not from somebody I know, because I don't make email my primary mode of correspondence and where I do, I can easily figure out that my mother isn't going to be sending me ads for Viagra.
Now, if they could make a Turing-capable spam generator, I'd be impressed.
If you are only using IP to generate your visitation metrics, then you're fooling yourself, for the reasons outlined in the blog. You can't guarantee an IP is unique to a user, any more than you can guarantee that a user is unique to an IP (think Internet cafe or library; different users, same machine with potentially the same IP)
You have to use a combination of log data to try and scope out exactly who's visiting: IP, browser type (can't count robots in your stats), membership id (if the site uses/requires it), and possibly cookie data (you assign a unique id when a user visits the site and they carry that data to every page). Here's a good breakdown of metrics processing and its pitfalls.
So what do we do -- surrender, because some spammer compromises this one system? Blue Frog has its own problems, but their idea is sound, if a bit "above the law." Let Blue Frog users forward the emails to them and let the company go after the spammers (aren't they violating CAN-SPAM or the law against harrassing emails?).
Look, Wyatt Earp was a lawman looking to see justice done and occassionally he had to step outside the law. Call it vigilantism if you like, but the fact is, these spammers have been operating under the assumption that they are untouchable, and can do this all day long with no repercussions. It's time for users around the globe to go on the offensive, give them a taste fo their own medicine. Shut down their ISPs if they won't stop the spam. Jam up their systems. Let them know we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. The court system can rule against them, but so many of them are overseas that I seriously doubt they can be touched. So hit 'em where it hurts, right in the servers.
And while it seems like a strength, that is actually a weakness. It keeps Linux chained to the geek-programmer culture. The average-joe market need something they can use with minimal fuss and muss, and when they take their computer out of the box, they expect to turn it on and use it, not have to spend oodes of time confguring it. True, with Windows there is a set-up penalty, but I think since people are familiar with it, they don't think much of it.
There needs to be a pure, home-user version (no I don't mean Red Hat; Ubuntu might be closer at this point), one that has the minimum necessary to make a user happy, which is easy to maintain and upgrade, and doesn't require the user to know the arcana of the OS. I think this is generally contrary to what your average geek wants, and why it's hard to bring this into existence.
What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it - the Email Inbox. Think of your Email Inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their Email Inbox outside the corporate firewall, the Email Inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.
Unfortunately, the Walled Gardens of our Email Inboxes are deceivingly warm and cozy. This feigned-comfort of safety whispers into our ears like a wily devil to, "Just email the document to me" or "Just email that document to yourself" with the false-belief that it will remain safe, secure and locked away. But that is just it......its locked away so that NO ONE ELSE CAN ACCESS IT. This is counter-culture to team collaboration.
And how many times have you sent out a document for comment and gotten back 30 different versions with markups, which you then have to reintegrate into one document and somehow handle inconsistencies and overlap? Then of course you need the document, but don't have a copy where you're at, so you retrieve one from an email and use that, but it's an old version, so you have to recreate revisions. And then someone always emails you their revisions late, after you think you're all done (usually it's your boss, so it's not like you can just leave them out).
If nothing else, you need a document collaboration tool, to avoid this nightmare of multiple files, and email is not it.
Normally, I'd be a little put off by what amounts to an opinion piece bya lawyer on open source, but there are good points:
Current FOSS operating systems (OS) are targeted mainly at geeks, hackers and other technically skilled developers and users. While there have been some progress in making the installation and use of FOSS OSes like Ubuntu easier and simpler, they still do not have the "click-click-click" ease of installation of popular proprietary OSes like Windows XP or Mac OS X. In addition, even after one successfully installs a FOSS OS on a computer, a user will typically have to deal with issues like lack of drivers, incompatibility with third party devices or difficulty in installing new programs or software packages. A normal user wants everything to work out-of-the-box [emphasis mine]. This is especially true in developing countries where a computer costs more than a month's salary. Since a computer is a major purchase, it's usefulness and usability should be present at the moment a user turns on his or her computer. People are not interested in (in fact, most are adverse to) messing around with, tinkering or hacking a program - the second, third and fourth software freedoms.
It goes back to the whole idea of Linux as an everyday operating system. Anyone who is not a geek, i.e. most of the population, is not going to adopt something that isn't easy to operate. I mean, there's no reason to make a Windows-like GUI for Linux unless you want people to actually think of Linux as an alternative to Windows. And while you might impress the average user with a Windows-like look and feel, unless it's just as easy to use out of the box as their Windows PC is now, there will be no great swell of converts.
I've said it before: Linux's popularity depends on what it wants to be. If it wants to be the OS of geeks and hackers and multi-million dollar corporations, so be it. If Linux (or any of its derivatives) wish to compete against Windows for market share, there has to be a shift in thinking, away from kernel-centric, gizmos-and-gadgets way of thinking to the "what would a user want to do" mindset.
Here's a little trick for Google users who are going to use IE7: go to the address bar and type "www.google.com." Voila!
This is so much pissing in the wind. Google needs to get over itself and Microsoft needs a good, swift kick in the browser. Who cares! Use the browser you want to use and use the search engine you want to use! Until browsers start blocking particular search URLs of search engines refuse to run in certain browsers, there is... say it with me now... nothing to see here!
How do you miss something like that for so long?
The same way the idiot on his cell phone misses the red light and slams into you: inattention to your surroundings.
Associate Professor Pradeep Nathan of Monash University, an expert in behavioural neuroscience who was not involved in the research, says caffeine stimulates the central nervous system including the brain, where it affects several neurotransmitters.
The Melbourne-based researcher says it improves memory and makes us pay closer attention to tasks at hand.
"It does improve attention and it can improve memory so by being more attentive and remembering your attitude to a particular thing may change," he says.
"If you're more attentive, yes [it does have implications for advertising]. Advertising works on the principle of getting people's attention, you want to get as many people interested in your ads as possible."
Caffeine's great stuff for getting perked up and fired up, and I have been an addict since I can remember. I've tried to quit any number of times, but the mintue I find myself getting tired, I'm off to find java.
That said, there's a drawback to it: developing a tolerance. As time passes, I need more and more of it, which is fine if you're the operator of my local coffee stand but is bad for my wallet and bad for my attention span. Let's not forget the jitters you can get if you have too much or the withdrawl headaches you get if you cut your consumption too quickly.
I seriously doubt coffee can simply bend your will and make you more susceptible to anything, other than having more coffee.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved Independence Day, for the premise, the special effects, and a pretty damned good cast. But was any idea more absurd than Jeff Goldblum hacking into an alien computer system and planting a virus in it to destroy it. Did I miss the part where a crack team of hackers cracked their system and reverse engineered root access and the aliens' virus detection software? Is it possible a race with such militaristic intentions would miss the idea of trying to infect a computer system? It was great product placement for Apple at the time, but please! I find it more plausible to think a guy dresses up like a bat and fights crime.
The psychology and social structure of a bunch of disparate programmers who are not on your payroll is a pill just too difficult to swallow, and one that is usually farmed to the bottom of the 'lets do this' pile.
Are we all just difficult pills? Or are we the cure to the boring workplace?
From the beginning of that paragraph in the article: The mistake a number of companies, both large and small have made when approaching Open Source is that they lack an understanding of the people who drive the technology.
This isn't just true with OSS, it's true with all technology and all technology people. I used to work around project management; there's nothing more galling than the emphasis on the 'FTE' (Full-Time Employee for the non-business folk) and counting them up, shifting them around, plugging in 'Offshore' employees when FTEs are 'reduced' (euphemism for being outsourced). A company doesn't want to get to know its employees anymore -- they are simply commodities that can be swapped out like chips or hard drives most of the time.
When you stretch that to technology, it's important to realize that the knowledge of the individual is not half as important as the ability of a development team manager to let the higher ups and customers know that they have their people 'working on it.' Managers are very averse to trying to find more competent help to replace incompetent help, simply because it might cause the schedule to slip.
Managers with people handling skills are a dying breed in tech.
When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones?
Well, they would if they weren't busy fiddling with their Blackberrys.
In haste to be the first with the new features it seems the ramifications of what and how they add are considered little, if at all. It's money grabbing, and let the chips fall where they may, as long as the manufacturer is first and fastest with the latest new features. Sick.
Sound like you could apply that to just about anything: cell phones, cars, computers, etc.
I find it ironic, paradoxical(?), one of the features so darling and network centric is text messaging. I've referenced this before the T-Mobile Sidekick got written into an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory carried on a "conversation" with Daddy about arrangements to attend a function. I'm waiting for the next great headlines where someone discovered the newest and fastest way to communicate with one of these devices -- you can actually dial a number and talk to the other person!!!
You watch "Gilmore Girls?" Anyway... I used to be an absolutist and a bit of a neo-Luddite when it came to mobile phones and their tech. At first I never wanted to own one. Then when my wife forced^H^H^H^H^H^Hasked me to carry one, I wanted a simple one and that's what I got and loathed it when I realized no one could hear me talk on it unless I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. Finally I got a Motorola V600 which had all the goodies and I began to miss my simple phone. The V600 was a hunk of junk which I finally lost in France. I now have a V360 and am very happy with it.
Mind you, I could live without the camera, though it's handy when you want to take a quick picture. The games aren't really that spectacular, though I play Pinball when I'm bored on the train. The one thing I really love about my V360 is the MP3 player. Of all the things they could add to a phone, that was the accessory I wanted the most. If that was the only extra gee-gaw, I'd be very happy. Unfortunately, the tendency os to make mobile phones be the Swiss-Army knife of mobile technology.
From the article: However, Smith said that a lot of Web 2.0 software still has serious technical pitfalls, like security, which should worry corporate customers. "If I'm mixing AJAX and wiki technology, I'm really creating a hacker's paradise," Smith said.
And that right there is the risk a lot of IT managers will not be willing to take, until these technologies can prove they are robust enough and secure enough to keep someone from gaining easy access to their systems. Companies spend vast amounts of time building defenses and aren't about to hand out the keys to the back door if they can help it.
No, I believe that was Marco Polo.
Fresh phish with a side of Skype, anyone?
Not to belabor the point that all the other posters have made so far -- it's just another example of human stupidity. If it doesn't occur to them to check at their local branch first then they're asking for trouble. Of course this ends up impacting senior citizens more than anyone. After all, given age and occasional infirmity, they'd be easy marks, probably trusting the phone more that email. I'm sure the spectrum of dupes is pretty broad, but mark the elderly especially vulnerable, mitigated by the fact that not too many of them are using the Internet as extensively.
To wander a bot off the topic, when they were building a new PNC Bank branch in my area, that had a Winnebago parked nearby that was apparently a mobile bank, with tellers and even an ATM machine in the side. Far from building a brick-and-mortatr branch, that seems a far more effective way of physically duping people, especially if you have all the trappings.
Since Wal-Mart is so heavily in bed with China, is it any wonder? They're learning from the pros. Of course they are successful and their business model is indeed efficient. They put a lot of people to work and they offer the average consumer decent prices on all the things they want, from groceries to TVs. Unfortunately, they've taken this beyond the limit of decency.
They would point out the prosperity they bring to areas where they build stores, but they fail to mention the manufacturing jobs they eliminate in this country when they import cheap Chinese merchandise, thereby converting a lot of good-paying jobs into low-paying jobs and sucking money out of the tax base and Social Security.
Their commercials would have you believe that their staff is always friendly, attentive, and knowledgeable, when this is the furthest thing from the truth. I have been to a Wal-Mart in 10 different states and I've yet to find a store that wasn't chaotic, unkempt, and whose staff wasn't lacking decent social skills. I've become so fed up with them that I do not shop there, prefering Target, even when I could save money.
They don't want the truth to come out, to tarnish Sam Walton's reputation with reality. The fact is, these people who fanatically support Wal-Mart are to retail what Scientology is to religon (go ahead Cruise, sue me!). Wal-Mart is best described as the Microsoft of retail outlets, and it shows in the way they handle employee compensation and benefits, not to mention unionization. They are so profit-centric now that they don't care who they crush along the way.
<pirate>Ahhrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!! Sign over yer intellectual property rights and branding, or yew'll be swimmin' with the sharks, Maties!</pirate>
And so now China is up for grabs. Who will win: "The Evil Empire" or "The Do No Evil Empire?" I wonder if the Chinese government realizes that one of these companies may end up owning their country lock, stock, and barrel? "I'm sorry, Mr. Hu, but Chairman Ballmer won't be able to see you today -- he's trying to annex Mongolia."
All other technical arguments for why it can't work aside, this is the biggest bugaboo. You're going to age; your faculties will age as well. Recall is iffy at best even when you're in a "normal" state, let's leave out being stoned, drunk, angry, depressed, etc. Just the simple aging of your brain is going to make this problematic. Beyond actually "forgetting" your password, there will be the distotrions of brain function that come with senile dementia or Alzheimer's Disease, not to mention strokes or heart attacks.
This is best relegated back to science fiction until we know a lot more about how the brain works as a unit and until we can measure brain activity accurately.
"We...submit that the (Commission) decision is an attempt to reconfigure (how the) market works by handicapping the leading player in perpetuity," Forrester told the court.
Perhaps "levelling the playing field" is a better way of looking at it. Look, I'm all for innovation and the right to make money off your ideas, but when it comes to computers and software, you have to bite the bullet and admit that people need choice. Admittedly, you want that choice to be your software or your server, and you can ensure that by dominating the market. Just as we've seen though, that makes you the target of everyone's wrath, whether from competitors, governments, or hackers.
So yes, Microsoft has a "right" to its intellectual property within reason, but when it come to interoperability, they need to rethink their stance. Ultimately they could conceivably eliminate most of their competition, but then that would spell the end of innovation on the grand scale, and force them to become even larger and more bloated than they are now. It's bad enough that one hand doesn't seem to know what the other is doing in Redmond, without consigning the rest of us to oblivion. MS needs to take its lumps, fix the interoperability/bundling issue, and move on.
Won't happen anytime soon.
That's what it comes down to. If you are in a compettitve market, you need an edge, something you have that your competitors don't, that gives you more strength in your industry. Open source is great from a bottom line standpoint -- who doesn't want to save money on software? -- but it leaves a company wondering if anyone else could do the same things with it. So paranoia is bred. We keep our things in-house and don't let anyone see it. That's why when you are in tech and you leave a financial firm, you have to sign a non-competitiveness agreement and/or a non-disclosure agreement. They don't want your knowledge going somewhere else where it could benefit a competitor.
As long as there is a competitive advantage to be gained, major banks and financial firms will not contribute back to the OSS community if there's even the slightest possibility it will cause them to lose that advantage. It's their corporate culture and I don't think it'll change anytime soon.
But, if it were the only copy of the data, and there was an easy way to report its loss, that would be much better. Let's face it, you have a profusion of IDs: driver's license, passport, work id, social security card, medical insurance card, etc. Most of them have some sort of redundancy of data, or at least enoug critical information that someone getting their hands on it can get the rest of your data. I think it would be advantageous to have it in one place and have that source easily replaced if lost or stolen. That would be the tricky part. That and sufficiently encrypting the data to make hacking it very hard.
Can we get this guy on the US Supreme Court? It's gotten way too stuffy for my test. Mr Justice Peter Smith might just bring some much-needed humanity to court deliberations.
It's precisely because we're Americans and have a long history of independence, not just in creating our nation, but in thought as well. You hear a lot in this country about the sacrifices of our forefathers and Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" and it becomes clear that Americans don't like restrictions. We don't like to be hemmed in -- look at the way we expanded across the North American continent.
I personally don't see the problem with ID cards. I want something that can unequivocally establish who I am and where I come from. I don't even mind the idea of information being encoded into the card that might prove useful in an emergency or when I need it: medical records, dental records, home address, etc. In this day and age, with identity theft on the rise and miscommunication and misperception rampant, and the rise of the Internet, it seems prudent to have some way to distinguish myself.
What I do object to is the "papers please" mentality that may come with a national ID card. I don't want it becoming a requirement to carry, and I certainly don't want to be jailed for not carrying it. Something like this could become draconian and eventually lead to more totalitarian measures. And that rubs my American sensibilities the wrong way.
FTA: Microsoft says that every time a notification is displayed, the user will receive detailed information about the specific validation failure. The information includes steps that can be taken to resolve the problem.
These don't seem to include, "try Linux instead".
Oh to be able to hack Genuine Advantage...