From Clearware.org:
Number of Voters: 92
First Vote: Sunday, 02 April 2006 03:22
Last Vote: Monday, 17 April 2006 16:24
Move along... Nothing to see here... this has been going on for over two weeks and has only 92 votes. This sample is so unrepresentative it's not funny. When they have well over 10,000 votes and have done a statistical analysis based on age, gender, household income, etc., let me know.
companyname.tel is so much better than companyname.com/contact.html!
But less intuitive and less economical than contact.companyname.com or telephone.companyname.com. Why should companies have to fork out even more money for more domains?
"We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."
Ladies and Gentlemen, Larry Ellison proudly presents -- Orix!
I for one am not jumping on this bandwagon, because Larry is driving and I don't think he has one hand firmly on the wheel as it is. This is a shotgun marriage and isn't liable to make Oracle any more competitive with Microsoft in the forseeable future. He should have probably done this 5 years ago.
Brand recognition. IBM - everyone knows it, company has been in America's consciousness forever. Lenovo - Chinese company no one knows and everyone assumes is planting spy chips in their computers.
When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems? What, is it impossible for people to update the contact information on their personal web sites now, or has their been some fundamental change to HTML/XML of which I am unaware?
This is a dumb idea. I won't even touch the personal namespace problem, which should be evident to anyone with a brain. The only way that would work is if everyone had five names. You know there are going to be squabbles over company names, as old and new companies jockey for the.tel names that offer them the best marketing bang for the buck.
Need a place to put your contact information? Try www.contact.your-web-site-name-here.whatever. ICANN needs to stop polluting the TLD pool.
Why not just use instant messaging when dealing with a "touchy" subject? Or is that monitored also?
If the US Government can do it, I don't see why the Chinese can't monitor emails, IM, mobile phone calls, etc. I don't think anyone in China can believe that there's a safe medium for communication that the government won't tap.
Not only that, only 111 million Chinese use the Internet out of a population of 1.3 billion. Most people in China are really not going to notice this or care.
State legislatures and tax officials, eager to find new ways to boost government spending and curb budget shortfalls, are eyeing the burgeoning market for digital downloads as a potentially lucrative source of revenue.
Isn't it the boost in government spending (read "waste") that is creating the budget shortfalls? Just like raising gas taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, cigarette taxes, liquor taxes -- it all happens because once lawmakers get their hands on those billions, they can't help but spend it recklessly, to the point of drilling an enourmous hole in the budget that John and Joan Taxpayer have to fill. This is just local government trying to find a way to cover its own ass by papering over the hole, when we all know any revenue generated by these taxes is going to simply be frittered away.
Maybe these state governments should try balancing their budgets first before bludgeoning their citizens over the head with more taxes.
Climate change was occurring long before our species arrived here, has been occurring ever since, and will continue to occur long after we're gone. Are we contributing to it? Yes. Does it really matter in the end? No. There are forces at work here that are a lot bigger and lot more powerful than we are.
From BBC News: The scientists making the predictions admit that the Earth's mechanisms are so complicated that their calculations are necessarily uncertain.
This uncertainty has led critics to accuse them of either exaggerating the threats to the planet, or under-playing them.
In the end, as I've said many times, we know how bits and pieces of things work, but we don't know how the system functions as a whole. This is very true in medicine, but especially true when it comes to climatology or any planetary science. Listen, you can take the base principles of physics, chemistry, etc. and create any kind of picture you want as to how a mechanism works, as long as it doesn't violate those principles. It doesn't mean you understand how the actual system works -- you only have a theory which happens to explain it in gross detail.
Look at Venus: we know the CO2 level there is extremely high, that the planet is scorchingly hot and devoid of large amounts of water. We can extrapolate from that and from experiments here that the Greenhouse Effect may have caused current conditions there. We can further theorize that a similar catastrophe awaits us here if we don't do anything. The problem is, we don't know how Venus got that way, or really how long it has been like that. We haven't studied it in detail geologically, so we can't be certain that Venus hasn't always been like this.
Yes, CO2 causes the Greenhouse Effect to trap more heat and raise global temperature. According to current theories, the Earth's biosphere has a mechanism for dealing with this, but of course that mechanism is affected by the things we do to it. It's folly to think we're having no effect on the climate, but it's also folly to say we're pushing it to the brink of catastrophe. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in the middle. I for one don't see the harm in reducing our CO2 emmissions; it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the fact that we have technologies available that could eliminate our need to use fossil fuels. We really don't need a debate over climate change to see that this is a good idea on general principles.
Unless they link him to Al Kayduh and his Band of Jihadies, I think all Mr. McKinnon has to worry about is a fair trial where the jury decides he's a loon and sends him away to the Place with the Padded Rooms.
As a poster in a previous article said, I'll keep my copy of W2K running as long as I can and when, for whatever reason, it is no longer useful I will devote my time and resources to learning how to use Linux though Apple might come first.
I feel the same way about XP. I have to say, it's been the most stable version of Windows for me so far, and I don't see a real need to change it. Knowing MS, they'll keep supporting it until the last XP programmer contracts Alzheimers and by then I'll have one or more Linux boxes and won't care. MS doesn't need any more of my cash.
AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.
In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
Big whoop. Copy the documents and hand them back to AT&T. What's the problem? Now that the genie is out of the secret room, so to speak, how does AT&T think this is going to help? They've just received a pretty severe black eye, though most of the public really doesn't know the details, despite the publicity. If I were AT&T, I'd maintain a low profile -- raising a fuss only makes more people get interested in what's in the documents.
We use only the finest monthly patches, dew picked and flow from Redmond, cleansed in the finest quality review process, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate update, and lovingly frosted with reboots.
This patch should come with a big red label: "WARNING: BALLMER VOMIT!"
Apparently levity now rates an "Offtopic"; will someone mod the parent of this reply up a bit?
Oh, wait. What's that you say? They might catch terrorists? Why, in that case, citizen #83264967 stands ready for duty! Just let me chug some victory gin before we get those bastards.
RTFA. The word "terror" or "terrorist" doesn't appear anywhere. This isn't the usual US Government obfuscation in the hunt for terrorists. It's asking a global company to help round up deadbeats so they can be shaken until their fair share of the tax burden falls out.
Sorry, but I have to side with the IRS here. Everyone who isn't paying the taxes they're supposed to be deserves to be found out. People who cheat on their taxes just make the rest of us pay more.
From CNN: The request for information is an outgrowth of an IRS effort, begun several years ago, to trace money that American taxpayers hold offshore to avoid paying taxes. The IRS said many of those taxpayers access their money through credit and debit cards. The tax collectors have already obtained information from some credit card companies, merchants and payment processors.
"PayPal is another one of the mechanisms by which money stashed overseas might be spent," Eileen O'Connor, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department Tax Division, told reporters.
Mind you, while I applaud the IRS's efforts (something I never thought I'd hear myself say), I'd like to know when they plan on applying the same hammer to US corporations and businesses that do the same thing. Hey, if the average dishonest American citizen is going to be made to pay up, let's have some of that dirty money that fatcat CEOs are squirreling away too. I don't like taxes, taxation, and the IRS any more than anyone else, but as long as we're going to have the current system of taxation, then everyone needs to play fair and pay up. If you're an honest citizen, you don't have much to worry about.
The real geniuses here are the SCO lawyers, for keeping this ridiculous dog & pony show going for as long as they have, although I admit that the admiration I experience witnessing their work is generously laced with nausea and trepidation. When SCO's house of cards finally falls, it will be with a deafening crash amid roars of appreciation from the OSS crowd, but in the meantime, hats off to the talented lawyers that have managed to keep it standing this long. They deserve respect, grudging though it my be.
One begins to wonder if the SCO lawyers are closet SUSE freaks who are doing their best to keep the show running, ensuring SCO's future bankruptcy with their billable hours and frequent filings. I'm sure the Novell lawyers are no less pleased their counterparts are doing such a tremendous job on such a hopeless case, since they too are no doubt lining their pockets. I suspect when it's over, both sides will be laughing it up at the bar.
Not bad, but your response time could use some imporvement.
From TFA: Microsoft Corp. has released its security software patches for April...
Microsoft has adopted the policy of "no patch before its time." These patches must be left on the vine, to ripen in the sun, until they are full of succulent flavor that brings out the best in an OS... sorry... anyway, it didn't matter how important the exploit was or that it was compromising machines left and right and letting the botnetters have a field day, Microsoft was in no rush. And you have to admit, that 3 weeks is not bad compared to some exploits which seem to be out there for months before anything is done. Now if Oracle could get their patch time down to three weeks...
Especially with larger companies, I see it more and more that telecommuting is a frowned upon idea. In fact, most of the articles on telecommuting today are instructions on how to argue with your boss because your boss is going to be the last person that wants you telecommuting.
And that's just for jobs in general. With software engineering jobs, the need to work together on a team is obviously a mandatory requirement. Very few solid and marketable software applications are written by one person. Telecommuting just raises another possible barrier and could compound dynamics and differences among team members. There are also security issues regarding the connection between work and home as well as the problem of productivity being a hard thing to measure when developing software.
I think it depends. When I worked for a major financial firm as an offshore employee (which was pretty funny since I was definitely on shore), they had me working from home 5 days a week to free up cubicle space. Mind you, I worked pretty much on my own, but with the panopoly of telecommuting tools available, it was easy to hold meetings and generally be involved. The downside is the lack of face time -- people tend to forget you exist if they don't see you, and while that's great if you're a programmer and want to get things done, it's lousy from a standpoint of keeping yoru job or moving up, as I found out when they ended my contract rather abruptly.
As to security issues, I think VPN software has matured quite a bit and depending on the precautions you take, remote computing is pretty secure. And as far as team members go, while tyou don't have that instant bonding and camraderie, nor do you have people borrowing your stapler or perring over your shoulder or filling your cube with chit-chat when you're trying to work. I think in the end, it's a mixed bag, and I suspect managers are reticent to let workers telecommute from the fear that they won't be able to control them and see what they're doing at a moment's notice. I suspect a lot of manager's don't really trust their programming staff.
I have noticed that as I deal more and more with upper management, selling them on products and direction, as well as with hardware/software vendors, the dreaded corporate speak slang is becoming part of my daily life.
There you have it. Upper management. The bane of IT's existence. Mostly vacuous, possibly harmless, but given the reins of power and turned loose with their copies of "The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People" and sent out to manage projects and departments which they know nothing about. And because they are for the most part ignorant, they develop these buzzwords and this slang to make them appear learned, while all it does is make them look stupider.
People are not consumers. Bacteria are consumers. Mindless consuming machines. The word itself is demeaning.
Agreed that vernacular has a lot to do with it, but I think that thanks to the marketing machine and the constant bombardment of people with advertising, people have become less "customers" and more "consumers." I don't think we spend nearly enough time researching things or voting with our wallets when something doesn't please us. Madison Avenue trots something out as the 'next big thing' and suddenly everyone wants one, even thought they don't know much about features but have been told "it's a good deal for the money." And we certainly don't complain the way we used to when we receive bad service -- people will habitually go back to the same stores they got lousy service from, simply because things they want are easily found there, even though they might be easily found elsewhere.
So semantically I agree with you, but the reality is, the word "customer" is the label of a dying breed./p>
Microsoft will essentially argue that it should not have to give away its intellectual property, having spent effort and money inventing it, only because it became successful.
Inventing it? Like Al Gore "invented" the Internet? I think Redmond has confused "stealing and obfuscating" with "inventing."
Slashdot Mirror
[Insert favorite Knight Rider joke here.]
From Clearware.org:
Number of Voters: 92
First Vote: Sunday, 02 April 2006 03:22
Last Vote: Monday, 17 April 2006 16:24
Move along... Nothing to see here... this has been going on for over two weeks and has only 92 votes. This sample is so unrepresentative it's not funny. When they have well over 10,000 votes and have done a statistical analysis based on age, gender, household income, etc., let me know.
But less intuitive and less economical than contact.companyname.com or telephone.companyname.com. Why should companies have to fork out even more money for more domains?
Ladies and Gentlemen, Larry Ellison proudly presents -- Orix!
I for one am not jumping on this bandwagon, because Larry is driving and I don't think he has one hand firmly on the wheel as it is. This is a shotgun marriage and isn't liable to make Oracle any more competitive with Microsoft in the forseeable future. He should have probably done this 5 years ago.
Brand recognition. IBM - everyone knows it, company has been in America's consciousness forever. Lenovo - Chinese company no one knows and everyone assumes is planting spy chips in their computers.
When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems? What, is it impossible for people to update the contact information on their personal web sites now, or has their been some fundamental change to HTML/XML of which I am unaware?
This is a dumb idea. I won't even touch the personal namespace problem, which should be evident to anyone with a brain. The only way that would work is if everyone had five names. You know there are going to be squabbles over company names, as old and new companies jockey for the .tel names that offer them the best marketing bang for the buck.
Need a place to put your contact information? Try www.contact.your-web-site-name-here.whatever. ICANN needs to stop polluting the TLD pool.
If the US Government can do it, I don't see why the Chinese can't monitor emails, IM, mobile phone calls, etc. I don't think anyone in China can believe that there's a safe medium for communication that the government won't tap.
Not only that, only 111 million Chinese use the Internet out of a population of 1.3 billion. Most people in China are really not going to notice this or care.
Isn't it the boost in government spending (read "waste") that is creating the budget shortfalls? Just like raising gas taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, cigarette taxes, liquor taxes -- it all happens because once lawmakers get their hands on those billions, they can't help but spend it recklessly, to the point of drilling an enourmous hole in the budget that John and Joan Taxpayer have to fill. This is just local government trying to find a way to cover its own ass by papering over the hole, when we all know any revenue generated by these taxes is going to simply be frittered away.
Maybe these state governments should try balancing their budgets first before bludgeoning their citizens over the head with more taxes.
Climate change was occurring long before our species arrived here, has been occurring ever since, and will continue to occur long after we're gone. Are we contributing to it? Yes. Does it really matter in the end? No. There are forces at work here that are a lot bigger and lot more powerful than we are.
From BBC News: The scientists making the predictions admit that the Earth's mechanisms are so complicated that their calculations are necessarily uncertain.
This uncertainty has led critics to accuse them of either exaggerating the threats to the planet, or under-playing them.
In the end, as I've said many times, we know how bits and pieces of things work, but we don't know how the system functions as a whole. This is very true in medicine, but especially true when it comes to climatology or any planetary science. Listen, you can take the base principles of physics, chemistry, etc. and create any kind of picture you want as to how a mechanism works, as long as it doesn't violate those principles. It doesn't mean you understand how the actual system works -- you only have a theory which happens to explain it in gross detail.
Look at Venus: we know the CO2 level there is extremely high, that the planet is scorchingly hot and devoid of large amounts of water. We can extrapolate from that and from experiments here that the Greenhouse Effect may have caused current conditions there. We can further theorize that a similar catastrophe awaits us here if we don't do anything. The problem is, we don't know how Venus got that way, or really how long it has been like that. We haven't studied it in detail geologically, so we can't be certain that Venus hasn't always been like this.
Yes, CO2 causes the Greenhouse Effect to trap more heat and raise global temperature. According to current theories, the Earth's biosphere has a mechanism for dealing with this, but of course that mechanism is affected by the things we do to it. It's folly to think we're having no effect on the climate, but it's also folly to say we're pushing it to the brink of catastrophe. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in the middle. I for one don't see the harm in reducing our CO2 emmissions; it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the fact that we have technologies available that could eliminate our need to use fossil fuels. We really don't need a debate over climate change to see that this is a good idea on general principles.
You mean this isn't like Google beta?
But thanks to Google and other search engines, very easy to find... which makes you wonder when Google going to buy this guy out.
Unless they link him to Al Kayduh and his Band of Jihadies, I think all Mr. McKinnon has to worry about is a fair trial where the jury decides he's a loon and sends him away to the Place with the Padded Rooms.
I feel the same way about XP. I have to say, it's been the most stable version of Windows for me so far, and I don't see a real need to change it. Knowing MS, they'll keep supporting it until the last XP programmer contracts Alzheimers and by then I'll have one or more Linux boxes and won't care. MS doesn't need any more of my cash.
In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
Big whoop. Copy the documents and hand them back to AT&T. What's the problem? Now that the genie is out of the secret room, so to speak, how does AT&T think this is going to help? They've just received a pretty severe black eye, though most of the public really doesn't know the details, despite the publicity. If I were AT&T, I'd maintain a low profile -- raising a fuss only makes more people get interested in what's in the documents.
This patch should come with a big red label: "WARNING: BALLMER VOMIT!"
Apparently levity now rates an "Offtopic"; will someone mod the parent of this reply up a bit?
RTFA. The word "terror" or "terrorist" doesn't appear anywhere. This isn't the usual US Government obfuscation in the hunt for terrorists. It's asking a global company to help round up deadbeats so they can be shaken until their fair share of the tax burden falls out.
Sorry, but I have to side with the IRS here. Everyone who isn't paying the taxes they're supposed to be deserves to be found out. People who cheat on their taxes just make the rest of us pay more.
From CNN: The request for information is an outgrowth of an IRS effort, begun several years ago, to trace money that American taxpayers hold offshore to avoid paying taxes. The IRS said many of those taxpayers access their money through credit and debit cards. The tax collectors have already obtained information from some credit card companies, merchants and payment processors.
"PayPal is another one of the mechanisms by which money stashed overseas might be spent," Eileen O'Connor, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department Tax Division, told reporters.
Mind you, while I applaud the IRS's efforts (something I never thought I'd hear myself say), I'd like to know when they plan on applying the same hammer to US corporations and businesses that do the same thing. Hey, if the average dishonest American citizen is going to be made to pay up, let's have some of that dirty money that fatcat CEOs are squirreling away too. I don't like taxes, taxation, and the IRS any more than anyone else, but as long as we're going to have the current system of taxation, then everyone needs to play fair and pay up. If you're an honest citizen, you don't have much to worry about.
One begins to wonder if the SCO lawyers are closet SUSE freaks who are doing their best to keep the show running, ensuring SCO's future bankruptcy with their billable hours and frequent filings. I'm sure the Novell lawyers are no less pleased their counterparts are doing such a tremendous job on such a hopeless case, since they too are no doubt lining their pockets. I suspect when it's over, both sides will be laughing it up at the bar.
Not bad, but your response time could use some imporvement.
From TFA: Microsoft Corp. has released its security software patches for April...
Microsoft has adopted the policy of "no patch before its time." These patches must be left on the vine, to ripen in the sun, until they are full of succulent flavor that brings out the best in an OS... sorry... anyway, it didn't matter how important the exploit was or that it was compromising machines left and right and letting the botnetters have a field day, Microsoft was in no rush. And you have to admit, that 3 weeks is not bad compared to some exploits which seem to be out there for months before anything is done. Now if Oracle could get their patch time down to three weeks...
And that's just for jobs in general. With software engineering jobs, the need to work together on a team is obviously a mandatory requirement. Very few solid and marketable software applications are written by one person. Telecommuting just raises another possible barrier and could compound dynamics and differences among team members. There are also security issues regarding the connection between work and home as well as the problem of productivity being a hard thing to measure when developing software.
I think it depends. When I worked for a major financial firm as an offshore employee (which was pretty funny since I was definitely on shore), they had me working from home 5 days a week to free up cubicle space. Mind you, I worked pretty much on my own, but with the panopoly of telecommuting tools available, it was easy to hold meetings and generally be involved. The downside is the lack of face time -- people tend to forget you exist if they don't see you, and while that's great if you're a programmer and want to get things done, it's lousy from a standpoint of keeping yoru job or moving up, as I found out when they ended my contract rather abruptly.
As to security issues, I think VPN software has matured quite a bit and depending on the precautions you take, remote computing is pretty secure. And as far as team members go, while tyou don't have that instant bonding and camraderie, nor do you have people borrowing your stapler or perring over your shoulder or filling your cube with chit-chat when you're trying to work. I think in the end, it's a mixed bag, and I suspect managers are reticent to let workers telecommute from the fear that they won't be able to control them and see what they're doing at a moment's notice. I suspect a lot of manager's don't really trust their programming staff.
There you have it. Upper management. The bane of IT's existence. Mostly vacuous, possibly harmless, but given the reins of power and turned loose with their copies of "The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People" and sent out to manage projects and departments which they know nothing about. And because they are for the most part ignorant, they develop these buzzwords and this slang to make them appear learned, while all it does is make them look stupider.
Tell them to piss off.
Other terms that may be helpful (WARNING: Some readers may find some of these words offensive)
Agreed that vernacular has a lot to do with it, but I think that thanks to the marketing machine and the constant bombardment of people with advertising, people have become less "customers" and more "consumers." I don't think we spend nearly enough time researching things or voting with our wallets when something doesn't please us. Madison Avenue trots something out as the 'next big thing' and suddenly everyone wants one, even thought they don't know much about features but have been told "it's a good deal for the money." And we certainly don't complain the way we used to when we receive bad service -- people will habitually go back to the same stores they got lousy service from, simply because things they want are easily found there, even though they might be easily found elsewhere.
So semantically I agree with you, but the reality is, the word "customer" is the label of a dying breed./p>
Inventing it? Like Al Gore "invented" the Internet? I think Redmond has confused "stealing and obfuscating" with "inventing."