As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.
If the data you are protecting is valuable enough to make the company bother with a setup like this, one can add a whole host of features.
You can limit the amount of data decripted (per day and per user). You can limit each user to certain periods of the day. You can enforce frequent password changes everywhere. You can even enforce a certain unrelated routine to be performed (say, daily or at turn shifts) in the exposed box console by a human operator.
Every one of these features by itself is breakable, and each one represents added costs and worse usability. But depending on what you are protecting you will want these and many more.
I believe this german coders were the same ones that afterwards were send to the famous "LCWC ESFN" battalion in the Russian Front. The "Lazy Coders Who Can't Even Spell the Fuher's Name" battalion were famous for its bright collored uniforms and its high turnover.
"But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed."
Has it? Last week some rich Venezuelan company owners, backed by some sectors of the Armed Forces AND by the US government, took down the democratically elected president and put in his place the president of the Venezuelan Federation of Industries.
In 48 hours the so-called "provisional" government was taken down by massive popular protest in Venezula's capital, Caracas. The Venuzuelan private networks AND CNN (both Spanish CNN and International CNN) never broadcasted the protests that brought the legitimate government back while they were happening. And not for the lack of cameras, the rich-people staged protests that some days before led to the coup were lavishly covered.
So, what good is the camera if the networks will not let it turn to the real facts when the real facts disagree with the "correct" point of view?
There is a problem when you send signals accross cultural borders, no matter how "neutral" those signals look: the interpretation of the said signals are always culture-dependent. So, unless you favour a unified global culture (and this is not only unattainable in any forseeable time-frame, but probably also undesired), an American-centric global media (and that is what we mostly have) will cause all sorts of problems.
Let me pick some of your own examples to try to explain it.
Child abuse is hot topic everywhere. But then one must define a child. An 8 years old is probably a child everywhere, but eleven year old girls are eligible for marriage in many parts of the world. Is this good? I don't think so, but that is the way things are in those regions.
Dictatorships are usually violent and always inefficient in the mediun/long run. But the definiton of what is a dictatorship is much, much harder to achieve. Just last week the US government was pretty busy first denying then spinning all they could, their clear involvement in a coup the took down for 48 hours the democratically elected president of Venezuela. And during the brief "provisional" government, during which the coup leaders tried to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Court, the US government and the IMF treated those guys as the de facto Venezuelan government. And the US press, CNN International in Spanish leading them, concurred all the way with the Washington view and with the provisional government view (to the point of hiding up to the last minute the mass protests that defeated the coup and brought back the elected president).
Pollution is another problem very linked to eye of the beholder. After Bush's pullout from the Kyoto Treaty, we in the rest of the world find it very amusing when CNN talks about pollution problems elsewhere. Sounds pretty like "Do what I say, not what I do". Naturally, the same goes for a lot of things.
So, there is a fundamental problem with US dominated news. And when a non-American media organization gains some proeminence, as Saudi Arabian Al-Jazeera network did during the months after September 11th, the reaction showed that Americans are not better than anyone when it comes to dealing with alternate points of view.
The URLs in the text (http://slashdot.org/Barnesandnoble.com and http://slashdot.org/BookSense.com) unfortunately fail to exist, since Slashdot has not yet bought those fine companies and incorporated their sites.
His name is now written in Linux history as a jerk, a PHB, an Enronish manager. Any tech aware of his past deeds will prefer working for Taco Bell or even Microsoft.
People here spend so much time staring at Microsoft that without noticing they start believing the Microsoft Marketing Department holds keys to the future in its hand. So eventually every phrase said in Slashdot is formed as an answer to reality as marketed by Microsoft, even when no question was asked.
Funnier still, since the [non-]linked article never states Unix was dead or dying.
The guys probably put the release in the FTP to allow the mirrors to update themselves BEFORE the official release being announced. Now, the main FTP will be slashdotted and the mirrors will have a great difficult updating themselves, harming everyone worldwide except a few greedy users that will be able to download KDE3 two or three days before the rest of us. Great job indeed.
The fact is that either Slashdot is a common journalist enterprise, that will break the news no matter what or they are part of the community that reads and feeds them and eventually pays for their existence. If it is the former, they are perfectly right. If they have any intent to keep being the latter, they just do this community harm for the joy of publishing something some hours ahead of other sites. Not to mention that the KDE team would probably be glad to break it first to Slashdot and that other OSDN site, FreshMeat.
I think Microsoft is sure to notice this one. We can only guess what their answer will be. A change in Office EULA forbidding use in Operating Systems other than the one the software is for, Windows or MacOS (but they probably can't change this for products already bought)? A cease and desist letter from their lawyers to CodeWeavers, quoting DMCA, EULAs, the Bible, the British Common Law and The Road Ahead? A cry for help to Congress to add a clause outlawing Linux, *BSD and any free OS in existence or to be developed to some law, any law, being currently discussed? Or just a "business as usual" attitude, a new marketing campaign pitching Office to Linux users?
On the other hand, judging by the test (they used RC1, not 1.0), this software still have some way to go before it can be said to be ready. But it is already a huge step forward. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Explorer running correctly under Linux are a huge incentive for corporations willing to move their desktops to Linux. Once there, moving people to Star/OpenOffice or even the recent gobe will be just a matter of corporate policy and time for the bean counters to add up the license savings of the switch out of Windows and the license savings to be gained by switching out of Office.
So you claim to be a game reviewer and at the same time proves that you can't really tell a great game from an "outstanding computer graphics achievement".
I am not blaming you. You are probably a perfect instance of the sad state of game reviewing today, people who can't understand what a game is about, who probably never played a good TEXT adventure and if presented to one would keep moving the mouse frantically, trying to make that blinking cursor move.
Under your line of thought, movies like "Citizen Kane" suck, because we all know black and white "sucked". "2001" sucks also, because we all know pre-computer special effects "sucked".
You should learn more about what games are about before saying you are a game reviewer. You are embarassing yourself and your employer.
Windows ME is probably the sorriest excuse for a Windows operating system since Windows 2.0. You would be far better served sticking to 98 SE or going directly to XP.
OpenOffice version numbering does not follow this pattern (current OpenOffice version is build 641C).
And StarOffice 6.0 is about to be officially launched (this week or the next). So I think it is really SO 6.0.
Moderation courtesy of Moderators on Crack, Inc.
on
Server Naming Conventions?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Do the kind people moderating the above as Informative cared to read RFC 2100? Have the said moderating beings cared to noticed it was issued on April 1st, 1997? Has the date ringed a bell? No? Guessed so.
As for RFC 2100, it is funny. Very old, but funny anyway.
So you never have a problem remembering their names as with that girl in the restaurant last weekend. Why they have to have different names anyway. So just call them Mary as it should be and add a nice reminder to self about where you last saw the babe, as in MaryFromAccounting, MaryWebServing. You can make the reminders more complex just to help a bit, as in GorgeusMaryWebServing, PlainMaryWebServing.
Down here, the equivalent of BSA runs ads with the skull and bones banner and eye-patched pirates in its campaigns against software copyright violations. The message comming across is much more like the later.
Sorry, I never knew that. As it is, being a foreigner from a non-English speaking country, I would hardly have ever come across such a piece of information.
My only doubt is if when a member of the general English speaking population hear the word "pirate" the image that comes to his/her mind is that of photocopiers/CD-burners/etc or that of bloody smeared swords and black banners under a tropical Sun.
Think about how much the people who make the phisical CDs are losing. If all these misguided students were actually buying the CDs they steal, we would probably be mining the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids Belt for raw materials to make all these discs.
And don't even get me started about the potential losses of the transport industry.
It was said in another context, about other kind of digital object:
"Owners use smear words such as 'piracy' and 'theft', as well as expert terminology such as 'intellectual property' and 'damage', to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public---a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.
Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway."
Actually, I believe the word "thief" is too much prone to libel. "Pirate", being not in any dictionary acception what someone who copies a song or a software is, helps reducing this risk while conveing the message of someone who will board the poor record company, rape its women, kill its men, sell its children as slaves and take away all its treasures.
The problem is that these executive and marketing types are easily confused. Sometimes in their small money counting brains the analogies get blurred and they start to believe the metaphor is real.
Perfectly fine, if you have guns enough big enough to back up your words. See what happened to the Native Americans before and during the 19th century to see what I mean. And that is just a particular instance. You can take a look at the history of the Armenians in Turkey, the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, the Aztecz and the Incas under the Spanish rule.
Morality arguments are always just a step from being a refuge for the coward to justify actions that can not be justified by reason.
Maybe, at the time when a constitutional decision about abortion was needed, the right-wing religious and morality zealots, the same funny nutty guys who think their religion should be used to brainwash every children disguised as Science, the same terrorists who bomb legal abortion clinics, the same lunatics that blame September 11 on "lesbians and queers", maybe at that time these people couldn't organize in time to prevent the Courts to give this kind of freedom to American women.
Maybe when a decision about cloning/harvesting was needed, those same maniacs that feel they have the right to impose their misguided views upon everybody had enough power to obtain such a decision from a simpathetic right wing Presidency.
That looks like exactly what the People's Republic needs, more republican people!
It also helps that one can clone the important Party officials and make even truer the tradicional Chinese fascination for long term planning (not the 3-month Wall Street long term standard, mind you, the Chinese long term is measured in centuries). In the future, one will plan and have a clone to implement the plan.
I hope they remember to learn how to clone the rice, the pork and the fish, to feed all the surplus people they will be making.
I remember well, friend, we have just got down from the trees then. If another simian tried to take your girl, it was just a matter of finding the nearest rock of the appropriate size and tear open his head. If an idiot made too much noise when we were trying to get the zebra, we just left him out of the cave during the night anfd the lions or the wolfes would feed themselves happily.
But even then grampa thought we were too soft. "Rocks", he used to say,"you young monkeys keep relying on modern technology for your killing and eventually you won't even know how to kill with your hands". And then he would go into an interminable rant about the time when we were in the ocean and there were no hands to hold the rocks and how big were the sharks. But, alas, it is as you say, and grampa knew what he was talking about...
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.
If the data you are protecting is valuable enough to make the company bother with a setup like this, one can add a whole host of features.
You can limit the amount of data decripted (per day and per user). You can limit each user to certain periods of the day. You can enforce frequent password changes everywhere. You can even enforce a certain unrelated routine to be performed (say, daily or at turn shifts) in the exposed box console by a human operator.
Every one of these features by itself is breakable, and each one represents added costs and worse usability. But depending on what you are protecting you will want these and many more.
I believe this german coders were the same ones that afterwards were send to the famous "LCWC ESFN" battalion in the Russian Front. The "Lazy Coders Who Can't Even Spell the Fuher's Name" battalion were famous for its bright collored uniforms and its high turnover.
Now, if you really want to impress us, come up with a search that returns all pages in the correct order.
:)
"But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed."
Has it? Last week some rich Venezuelan company owners, backed by some sectors of the Armed Forces AND by the US government, took down the democratically elected president and put in his place the president of the Venezuelan Federation of Industries.
In 48 hours the so-called "provisional" government was taken down by massive popular protest in Venezula's capital, Caracas. The Venuzuelan private networks AND CNN (both Spanish CNN and International CNN) never broadcasted the protests that brought the legitimate government back while they were happening. And not for the lack of cameras, the rich-people staged protests that some days before led to the coup were lavishly covered.
So, what good is the camera if the networks will not let it turn to the real facts when the real facts disagree with the "correct" point of view?
There is a problem when you send signals accross cultural borders, no matter how "neutral" those signals look: the interpretation of the said signals are always culture-dependent. So, unless you favour a unified global culture (and this is not only unattainable in any forseeable time-frame, but probably also undesired), an American-centric global media (and that is what we mostly have) will cause all sorts of problems.
Let me pick some of your own examples to try to explain it.
Child abuse is hot topic everywhere. But then one must define a child. An 8 years old is probably a child everywhere, but eleven year old girls are eligible for marriage in many parts of the world. Is this good? I don't think so, but that is the way things are in those regions.
Dictatorships are usually violent and always inefficient in the mediun/long run. But the definiton of what is a dictatorship is much, much harder to achieve. Just last week the US government was pretty busy first denying then spinning all they could, their clear involvement in a coup the took down for 48 hours the democratically elected president of Venezuela. And during the brief "provisional" government, during which the coup leaders tried to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Court, the US government and the IMF treated those guys as the de facto Venezuelan government. And the US press, CNN International in Spanish leading them, concurred all the way with the Washington view and with the provisional government view (to the point of hiding up to the last minute the mass protests that defeated the coup and brought back the elected president).
Pollution is another problem very linked to eye of the beholder. After Bush's pullout from the Kyoto Treaty, we in the rest of the world find it very amusing when CNN talks about pollution problems elsewhere. Sounds pretty like "Do what I say, not what I do". Naturally, the same goes for a lot of things.
So, there is a fundamental problem with US dominated news. And when a non-American media organization gains some proeminence, as Saudi Arabian Al-Jazeera network did during the months after September 11th, the reaction showed that Americans are not better than anyone when it comes to dealing with alternate points of view.
Team Karma Whoring
The URLs in the text (http://slashdot.org/Barnesandnoble.com and http://slashdot.org/BookSense.com) unfortunately fail to exist, since Slashdot has not yet bought those fine companies and incorporated their sites.
Maybe the poster meant Barnesandnoble.com and BookSense
But he did.
His name is now written in Linux history as a jerk, a PHB, an Enronish manager. Any tech aware of his past deeds will prefer working for Taco Bell or even Microsoft.
In this sense, he is no longer with "us".
People here spend so much time staring at Microsoft that without noticing they start believing the Microsoft Marketing Department holds keys to the future in its hand. So eventually every phrase said in Slashdot is formed as an answer to reality as marketed by Microsoft, even when no question was asked.
Funnier still, since the [non-]linked article never states Unix was dead or dying.
The guys probably put the release in the FTP to allow the mirrors to update themselves BEFORE the official release being announced. Now, the main FTP will be slashdotted and the mirrors will have a great difficult updating themselves, harming everyone worldwide except a few greedy users that will be able to download KDE3 two or three days before the rest of us. Great job indeed.
The fact is that either Slashdot is a common journalist enterprise, that will break the news no matter what or they are part of the community that reads and feeds them and eventually pays for their existence. If it is the former, they are perfectly right. If they have any intent to keep being the latter, they just do this community harm for the joy of publishing something some hours ahead of other sites. Not to mention that the KDE team would probably be glad to break it first to Slashdot and that other OSDN site, FreshMeat.
I think Microsoft is sure to notice this one. We can only guess what their answer will be. A change in Office EULA forbidding use in Operating Systems other than the one the software is for, Windows or MacOS (but they probably can't change this for products already bought)? A cease and desist letter from their lawyers to CodeWeavers, quoting DMCA, EULAs, the Bible, the British Common Law and The Road Ahead? A cry for help to Congress to add a clause outlawing Linux, *BSD and any free OS in existence or to be developed to some law, any law, being currently discussed? Or just a "business as usual" attitude, a new marketing campaign pitching Office to Linux users?
On the other hand, judging by the test (they used RC1, not 1.0), this software still have some way to go before it can be said to be ready. But it is already a huge step forward. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Explorer running correctly under Linux are a huge incentive for corporations willing to move their desktops to Linux. Once there, moving people to Star/OpenOffice or even the recent gobe will be just a matter of corporate policy and time for the bean counters to add up the license savings of the switch out of Windows and the license savings to be gained by switching out of Office.
So you claim to be a game reviewer and at the same time proves that you can't really tell a great game from an "outstanding computer graphics achievement".
I am not blaming you. You are probably a perfect instance of the sad state of game reviewing today, people who can't understand what a game is about, who probably never played a good TEXT adventure and if presented to one would keep moving the mouse frantically, trying to make that blinking cursor move.
Under your line of thought, movies like "Citizen Kane" suck, because we all know black and white "sucked". "2001" sucks also, because we all know pre-computer special effects "sucked".
You should learn more about what games are about before saying you are a game reviewer. You are embarassing yourself and your employer.
Windows ME is probably the sorriest excuse for a Windows operating system since Windows 2.0. You would be far better served sticking to 98 SE or going directly to XP.
OpenOffice version numbering does not follow this pattern (current OpenOffice version is build 641C).
And StarOffice 6.0 is about to be officially launched (this week or the next). So I think it is really SO 6.0.
Do the kind people moderating the above as Informative cared to read RFC 2100? Have the said moderating beings cared to noticed it was issued on April 1st, 1997? Has the date ringed a bell? No? Guessed so.
As for RFC 2100, it is funny. Very old, but funny anyway.
So you never have a problem remembering their names as with that girl in the restaurant last weekend. Why they have to have different names anyway. So just call them Mary as it should be and add a nice reminder to self about where you last saw the babe, as in MaryFromAccounting, MaryWebServing. You can make the reminders more complex just to help a bit, as in GorgeusMaryWebServing, PlainMaryWebServing.
Down here, the equivalent of BSA runs ads with the skull and bones banner and eye-patched pirates in its campaigns against software copyright violations. The message comming across is much more like the later.
Sorry, I never knew that. As it is, being a foreigner from a non-English speaking country, I would hardly have ever come across such a piece of information.
My only doubt is if when a member of the general English speaking population hear the word "pirate" the image that comes to his/her mind is that of photocopiers/CD-burners/etc or that of bloody smeared swords and black banners under a tropical Sun.
Think about how much the people who make the phisical CDs are losing. If all these misguided students were actually buying the CDs they steal, we would probably be mining the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids Belt for raw materials to make all these discs.
And don't even get me started about the potential losses of the transport industry.
It was said in another context, about other kind of digital object:
"Owners use smear words such as 'piracy' and 'theft', as well as expert terminology such as 'intellectual property' and 'damage', to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public---a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.
Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway."
Read the whole text
Actually, I believe the word "thief" is too much prone to libel. "Pirate", being not in any dictionary acception what someone who copies a song or a software is, helps reducing this risk while conveing the message of someone who will board the poor record company, rape its women, kill its men, sell its children as slaves and take away all its treasures.
The problem is that these executive and marketing types are easily confused. Sometimes in their small money counting brains the analogies get blurred and they start to believe the metaphor is real.
Perfectly fine, if you have guns enough big enough to back up your words. See what happened to the Native Americans before and during the 19th century to see what I mean. And that is just a particular instance. You can take a look at the history of the Armenians in Turkey, the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, the Aztecz and the Incas under the Spanish rule.
Morality arguments are always just a step from being a refuge for the coward to justify actions that can not be justified by reason.
Maybe, at the time when a constitutional decision about abortion was needed, the right-wing religious and morality zealots, the same funny nutty guys who think their religion should be used to brainwash every children disguised as Science, the same terrorists who bomb legal abortion clinics, the same lunatics that blame September 11 on "lesbians and queers", maybe at that time these people couldn't organize in time to prevent the Courts to give this kind of freedom to American women.
Maybe when a decision about cloning/harvesting was needed, those same maniacs that feel they have the right to impose their misguided views upon everybody had enough power to obtain such a decision from a simpathetic right wing Presidency.
That looks like exactly what the People's Republic needs, more republican people!
It also helps that one can clone the important Party officials and make even truer the tradicional Chinese fascination for long term planning (not the 3-month Wall Street long term standard, mind you, the Chinese long term is measured in centuries). In the future, one will plan and have a clone to implement the plan.
I hope they remember to learn how to clone the rice, the pork and the fish, to feed all the surplus people they will be making.
I remember well, friend, we have just got down from the trees then. If another simian tried to take your girl, it was just a matter of finding the nearest rock of the appropriate size and tear open his head. If an idiot made too much noise when we were trying to get the zebra, we just left him out of the cave during the night anfd the lions or the wolfes would feed themselves happily.
But even then grampa thought we were too soft. "Rocks", he used to say,"you young monkeys keep relying on modern technology for your killing and eventually you won't even know how to kill with your hands". And then he would go into an interminable rant about the time when we were in the ocean and there were no hands to hold the rocks and how big were the sharks. But, alas, it is as you say, and grampa knew what he was talking about...