Why dont they demand all criminals to register their names? And why stop with registering their screen names, why cant we pass a law demanding that all criminals to give adequate notice of their intent to burgle homes, mug pedestrians and hold up banks? Imagine the teller saying, "No Mr McFly, you have not issued prior notification of your plan to rob this bank. You might have, but you how it is with paper work. So please come tomorrow to rob us." Or handing the money over in a fast, efficient and safe manner to the robbers so that rest of the customers are not inconvenienced or endangered in anyway.
Way to go Britain. We all will follow you. You lead the way.
I think some of these EULA is not really to sue the customer and those who click the accept button. If is more like telling the wall street crowd and their sugar dadday investors that the operators of the dotcom or the website "we have take adequate provisions and we seriously discourage our users from engaging in piracy. Just look at what our customers have agree to by clicking our EULA".
But still softwar installations have become very painful for many reasons. Everyone installs a link in the every user's menu, in the system tray in the desktop, install programs that run all the time when the computer boots, keep looking for updates bug your for upgrades etc etc.
When OpenOffice imports the Word document and it does not look exactly like it did in Word, people will blame OpenOffice. You can cry till you are hoarse that it was because of bugs in word, and no one would even listen to you.
Now you export word doc to ODF using Microsoft Ceritified Export tool, and if the user complains that it does not look exactly as it did in Word, we can 1. Blame Microsoft for insincere export. 2. Read it into Word and see if the document survives round-tripping. If it does not, we have proved that it is Microsoft's fault.
If the guy is incompetent or dishonest, why afford him the respect he didn't afford you?
It is not about the guy/gal I fired. It is about the rest of the people I retain. Firing is punishment enough for incompetency. The money I spend in buying temperary office space in Robert Half or Accountemps for six weeks, giving them resources to hunt for jobs, giving them references (without being untruthful), enough time for them to switch healthcare providers, letting them keep their two year old laptops (after clearing the company data from it) and in general being nice, helps my reputation among the rest I retain. And I care about those I keep.
I think it is high time Cliff gets a lawyer. The poster is Anonymous. He calls the company evil and provides a link too. It could be a well orchestrated smear campaign by a disgruntled fired employee out to get vengence. Cliff has played straight into his/her hands by giving it by posting the story. Unless Cliff has shown that he has shown due diligence and had not been criminally negligent, the company has a case against Cliff. Since the story accuses the company of being sue-happy Cliff cant claim, "What! I never thought they would sue me!".
Good companies dont treat the fired or laid off employees like dirt. Those who are not fired/laid off are watching how the company treats those who are fired/laid off. Usually they are friends/acquaintences. There is feedback. I make sure that even those who are fired by me get some subscription to placement/job search companies, decent health coverage for some months. Our company gives time for them to cash the stock options after they leave.
May be if would not be such a cynic if you read some of the articles by Robert Axelrod of Univ of Michigen on "Evolution of Cooperation", "Complexity of Cooperation", and BBC shows like "Nice Guys Finish First" by Richard Dawkins.
Usually companies give two week salary in lieu of two weeks of notice and get the employee off the premises immediately. They might also throw in some additional health care coverage and buy three months of service from job search service/placement service companies. Some take the laptop back and remove all source code and give it back for an extended period of time to the fired employee. Not all employers, but the good ones and the ones to build record of "good faith" in front of a jury incase the fired employee sues back.
There is only one inescapable conclusion. Slashdot is very easy to find. So nobody is searching for it. Sex is very hard to find. So they keep searching for it. Right?
Most marketing and sales departments approach emailing as just another way to send out advertising like junk mail through postal system or catalogues being mailed. Except it costs very little to send millions of mail. What they dont realize is that for the customers too have very little cost to respond to unsolicited messages. A car dealer can be obnoxious on radio or tv and people cant do much about it and if they p*ss off thousand listeners and get remembered by say two of them, the advertiser gains. In the net, if you p*ss off thousand, some 10 will respond negatively. Will report you as a spammer, create blockers to block you etc. Even if you gain two new customers, you have lost 10 old customers. Only when the marketing dept realizes this they will implement sane email policy.
It is not the network load that is the issue here. The short burst activity followed by long idle time that makes the applications respond slowly.
In our shop we use clearcase to do the source code management. To get developers stable update time, there is a code freeze between 3AM and 8AM. Most of us schedule our machines to update our sources sometime in that period. The network load is something like 100 developeres updating about 45,000 files each including four remote replica syncs. We could easily handle that kind of load and we are a very small company. Just made grade to Russell 2000 index. Nah, it is not the network load.
What kills them is the usage pattern. If you run Excel in one server and GUI in another everytime you move the mouse there is a burst of mouse moves to be transmitted to Excel, and its response to roundtrip back to the cursor on the screen. Many of these pure PC software is not designed to work that way. The network is not good for very short burst of activity followed by long idle times. Establish a connection and pump million packets from one end and get it at the other end, it will work flawlessly.
The new kind of Web2.0 and browser based applications are designed from the ground up to be asynchronous. They can work very well with thin browser running on dumb terminal with all processing done in the server. Google's office suite is primitive. But its spreadsheets and wordprocessing are really big breakthroughs. After debugging the process of editing a spreadsheet over an internet connection, it would be trivial for Google to offer to host that app in your server. Over intranet, it would work flawlessly.
Let us take a look at a few things with multiple standards.
TV we have NTSC in USA, PAL in most of BritishCommonwealth (UK, India, Pak, Srilanka, Singapore etc) and somethings like SECAM (not sure) in mostly France and former French colonies (north africa, middle east? not very sure here).
Grid electricity. 110 V 60 Hz in USA. 230 V 50 Hz in Europe, India and Japan(?).
A few things are universal. Audio cassettes, CDs, Batteries A, AA, AAA, C and D type.
Paper has US standards Letter/Legal etc. Or DIN standards A1, A2, A3, A4,... B1 etc.
Nuts and bolts have two major standards. SAE in imperial units and Metric.
In general multiple standards for the same thing in the same geographical area will only lead to market fragmentation, failure to take advantages of economies of scale to the full extent and will hurt the consumer. Look how cheap AA, AAA metal hydride batteries are and how expensive less capable Ni-Cad batteries used in cordless phones are. The cordless phone batteries dont have a standard and each manufacturer has a captive market in the replacement battery market. It is so bad people throw away perfectly good cordless phones when their batteries die because it is cheaper to buy a new phone than a replacement battery.
The standards should be open, agnostic and should not proselytize(sp?), sermonize, moralize or take sides and play politics about any issue like free ver paid software or open source vs closed source or private enterprise with govt companies. Standards have one and only one job. To provide a level playing field for all players.
Some said, PDF/LaTeX etc are layout engines. And OpenDoc is a GUI spec. And so they dont mix. So it is like compaing.
AA size battery with 5/16inch hex nut. If that is true then they are not two standards for the same thing. In that case my suggestion that OpenPDF and OpenDoc, is quite nonsensical. But I still think the MS's OpenXML is a very bad idea.
Let us not confuse Open Source with Open Standards with Free software.
There can be no doubt or argument that there should be only one open standard. Open meaning not owned by any entity or for-profit company. Ideally the standard should be specified and updated on behalf of all the consumers or all the people by the government or an institute chartered by it. The Standard specifying body should be completely neutral and agnostic. It should allow all players, big and small, for profit and non-profit, commercial and non commercial a level playing field. Such is the case with your nuts and bolts (SAE and DIN spec) or your engine oil or light bulbs or extension cords or ASCII encoding (not EBCDIE if any remembers that) and ANSI language specs.
Open Source, one can debate, one can agree to various extent the usefulness or the lack of it. Pros and cons you can disagree with me. As long as neither you nor I control the standards, it is a level playing field and the market and history will prove either you or me as correct. Same with free software.
Currently there are three standards being specified. Which itself is bad. OpenDoc, a microsoft thingie called OpenXML and now the OpenPDF. I like OpenXML least because it pretends to be a standard but it cant be implemented by all players without help/license from Microsoft. It has the audaucity to enshrine bugs of Office97 and Word6 and WordPerfect5 as standards . OpenDoc is already well on its way in the standards process. PDF has a much wider user installed base and has a financial muscle of a decent profit making company and its self interest. I wish PDF and OpenDoc will merge and come up with a unified standard.
Well, there should be consequences for falsely implicating an innocent party. Yes, it would be very difficult for the innocent party to prove its innocence. But when it does, the accuser should lose credibility too. Heck, with the amount of traffic slashdot gets, (netcraft ransk slashdot traffic to be in the top 100 most visited sites) slashdot is able to be relatively spam free. Even wikipedia with its high ranking is able to get some kind of usable trust building system. A similar networks of trust can be built.
OK, someone had such poor security that his/her machine gets rooted. Why should it be anyone else's responsibility to mark it legitimate as soon as it has been fixed? Why should it be easy to re-legitimize machines/ip addresses that get compromised. Let them jump through the hoops. Let them suffer a little. May be it will serve as a lesson for others to take security seriously.
Only when the consequences of allowing one's machines to be zombified is serious and high people will take security seriously.
NEWS STORY
50% movie piracy from Canada: Hollywood
Vito Pilieci
CanWest News Service
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Here's the scenario: You have a story about movies. But your story is also about pirates stealing movies. Clearly you have no choice but to run a picture of Johnny Depp playing a pirate in a movie. And voila, the Circle of Life is complete.
CREDIT: Disney Enterprises
Here's the scenario: You have a story about movies. But your story is also about pirates stealing movies. Clearly you have no choice but to run a picture of Johnny Depp playing a pirate in a movie. And voila, the Circle of Life is complete.
As much as 50 per cent of the world's pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
According to an investigation by Twentieth Century Fox, most of the illegal recording, or "camcording," is taking place in Montreal movie houses, taking advantage of bilingual releases and lax copyright laws. My quibble is saying "50% of the world" when they probablyt mean "50% of Hollywood". TFA clearly says 50% of the world movies. Emphasis mine.
So focussed on America, these guys dont consider rest of the world to be world. First off 50% of the world movies are not produced in America. India makes more movies.
Singapore is the piracy capital for Tamil/Telugu movies. Dubai is the palce to go to get Bollywood movies. Hongkong is the piracy portal for China and Korea. Canada is probably a distant fourth when it comes to movie piracy.
Next time when Microsoft buys itself another "independant" study comparing the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows with Linux, will they also include all these costs the Koreans are paying to keep up?
Why treat all the customers the same way? Right at the time of setting up the account ask the user:
1. I am worried about security. Please make me jump through hoops before logging in. I am tech savvy. Tough authenticaion? Bring it on.
2. I am not a very tech savvy customer. Please make it easy to log in.
Why look at it purely from Fidelity's point of view? What about the customer whose account gets compromised and has to jump through the hoops to get the account and money restored? I suspect you do not make policies there, just another fellow programmer, "ours is not to reason why! ours is to do and die". But your company bean counters have assigned zero value/cost to customer's time, energy and mental aggravation. No wonder nothing gets your company's attention other than lawsuits.
I'm surprised their economy did not overtake years ago
It was. Through the 18th century India was the largest economy in the world. Infact the GDP of UK is equal to the dividends paid by the East India Company compounded at 3% per year. Cant recall actual numbers, but it was paying 40 million pounds as dividends in the late 1700s. Each payment is worth 14.7 billion pounds today (40e06*(1.03^200)). Summed 100 years of the company rule and a 90 year rule by the Crown directly, one could argue that the entire British economy is what was stolen from India.
India developed the wealth. Got too fat. Got too fractured. Muslims came and looted for 800 years. Then the Europeans exploited them for anothe 200 years. Then Britain became proud that its 10 year olds can out drink a Mongolian and its 18year olds can act in porn movies legally and its porn stars pay income tax. So it is losing now. India is on the ascendant. Then it too will get fat. It is already fractured along caste, religion and language. It too will sink. Someone else will rise. That is the way of the world.
I recently got an account in Fidelity, one of the largest mutual funds with assets in billons of dollars. It has 6 to 10 digit numerical password. No special characters, no alphabets. Very simple authentication system. They should know that they will attract phishers and scammers like honey draws the bees. But still the top level decision makers still think like, "my customer is 65 years old and is not tech savvy. They will get confused, make it easy and simple for them". They are making it easy and simple for the phishers and scammers too. Schwab too has a simple username-password. Vanguard is a little better. It monitors the IP address of past logins and puts you through tougher login session first time you log in from a new location. Also it tries to login using two screens and displays a user selected personalization picture and caption to authenticate the server. My bank is horrible with just a four digit numerical password (for the quicken on line access atleast). Fidelity also uses Social Security number as a login id by default. Was not impressed by the login authentication methods of Alex Brown, National Discount Broker, Ameritrade and MFS in the past. Someday they are going to lose millions of dollars and then they will swing in the completely opposite direction and make use climb Mount Everest just to log in.
So many people dont seem to know how good digital broadcast TV is. By law almost all the HDTVs sold nowadays have tuners built in. All they need is a cheapo antenna and they pull stunning pictures off the air. Where I live I cant get a single analog TV off the air. I just live 10 miles from the transmitters, but this place is full of hills and
valleys. But with a cheapo antenna from Walmart I am getting 11 digital stations, one from some 80 miles away! I get CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, PBS, WB and one evangelical station. Some stations broadcast the same content in multiple formats (480i 4:3 and 780p 16:9 for example) accounting for the extra stations.
My DVR+DVD recorder (panasonic, very good one) cant handle HD content. My only peeve.
Slashdot Mirror
Way to go Britain. We all will follow you. You lead the way.
But still softwar installations have become very painful for many reasons. Everyone installs a link in the every user's menu, in the system tray in the desktop, install programs that run all the time when the computer boots, keep looking for updates bug your for upgrades etc etc.
Now you export word doc to ODF using Microsoft Ceritified Export tool, and if the user complains that it does not look exactly as it did in Word, we can 1. Blame Microsoft for insincere export. 2. Read it into Word and see if the document survives round-tripping. If it does not, we have proved that it is Microsoft's fault.
It is not about the guy/gal I fired. It is about the rest of the people I retain. Firing is punishment enough for incompetency. The money I spend in buying temperary office space in Robert Half or Accountemps for six weeks, giving them resources to hunt for jobs, giving them references (without being untruthful), enough time for them to switch healthcare providers, letting them keep their two year old laptops (after clearing the company data from it) and in general being nice, helps my reputation among the rest I retain. And I care about those I keep.
I think it is high time Cliff gets a lawyer. The poster is Anonymous. He calls the company evil and provides a link too. It could be a well orchestrated smear campaign by a disgruntled fired employee out to get vengence. Cliff has played straight into his/her hands by giving it by posting the story. Unless Cliff has shown that he has shown due diligence and had not been criminally negligent, the company has a case against Cliff. Since the story accuses the company of being sue-happy Cliff cant claim, "What! I never thought they would sue me!".
May be if would not be such a cynic if you read some of the articles by Robert Axelrod of Univ of Michigen on "Evolution of Cooperation", "Complexity of Cooperation", and BBC shows like "Nice Guys Finish First" by Richard Dawkins.
Usually companies give two week salary in lieu of two weeks of notice and get the employee off the premises immediately. They might also throw in some additional health care coverage and buy three months of service from job search service/placement service companies. Some take the laptop back and remove all source code and give it back for an extended period of time to the fired employee. Not all employers, but the good ones and the ones to build record of "good faith" in front of a jury incase the fired employee sues back.
Well Slashdot beat the pulp out of steelers. http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&wo rd1=slashdot&word2=steelers
http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+sex&cta b=0&geo=all&date=all
There is only one inescapable conclusion. Slashdot is very easy to find. So nobody is searching for it. Sex is very hard to find. So they keep searching for it. Right?
Most marketing and sales departments approach emailing as just another way to send out advertising like junk mail through postal system or catalogues being mailed. Except it costs very little to send millions of mail. What they dont realize is that for the customers too have very little cost to respond to unsolicited messages. A car dealer can be obnoxious on radio or tv and people cant do much about it and if they p*ss off thousand listeners and get remembered by say two of them, the advertiser gains. In the net, if you p*ss off thousand, some 10 will respond negatively. Will report you as a spammer, create blockers to block you etc. Even if you gain two new customers, you have lost 10 old customers. Only when the marketing dept realizes this they will implement sane email policy.
In our shop we use clearcase to do the source code management. To get developers stable update time, there is a code freeze between 3AM and 8AM. Most of us schedule our machines to update our sources sometime in that period. The network load is something like 100 developeres updating about 45,000 files each including four remote replica syncs. We could easily handle that kind of load and we are a very small company. Just made grade to Russell 2000 index. Nah, it is not the network load.
What kills them is the usage pattern. If you run Excel in one server and GUI in another everytime you move the mouse there is a burst of mouse moves to be transmitted to Excel, and its response to roundtrip back to the cursor on the screen. Many of these pure PC software is not designed to work that way. The network is not good for very short burst of activity followed by long idle times. Establish a connection and pump million packets from one end and get it at the other end, it will work flawlessly.
The new kind of Web2.0 and browser based applications are designed from the ground up to be asynchronous. They can work very well with thin browser running on dumb terminal with all processing done in the server. Google's office suite is primitive. But its spreadsheets and wordprocessing are really big breakthroughs. After debugging the process of editing a spreadsheet over an internet connection, it would be trivial for Google to offer to host that app in your server. Over intranet, it would work flawlessly.
Yup, they still support it. In vista they have a new and improved "translucent opalascent irridiscent coruscant blue" screen of death.
TV we have NTSC in USA, PAL in most of BritishCommonwealth (UK, India, Pak, Srilanka, Singapore etc) and somethings like SECAM (not sure) in mostly France and former French colonies (north africa, middle east? not very sure here).
Grid electricity. 110 V 60 Hz in USA. 230 V 50 Hz in Europe, India and Japan(?).
A few things are universal. Audio cassettes, CDs, Batteries A, AA, AAA, C and D type.
Paper has US standards Letter/Legal etc. Or DIN standards A1, A2, A3, A4, ... B1 etc.
Nuts and bolts have two major standards. SAE in imperial units and Metric.
In general multiple standards for the same thing in the same geographical area will only lead to market fragmentation, failure to take advantages of economies of scale to the full extent and will hurt the consumer. Look how cheap AA, AAA metal hydride batteries are and how expensive less capable Ni-Cad batteries used in cordless phones are. The cordless phone batteries dont have a standard and each manufacturer has a captive market in the replacement battery market. It is so bad people throw away perfectly good cordless phones when their batteries die because it is cheaper to buy a new phone than a replacement battery.
The standards should be open, agnostic and should not proselytize(sp?), sermonize, moralize or take sides and play politics about any issue like free ver paid software or open source vs closed source or private enterprise with govt companies. Standards have one and only one job. To provide a level playing field for all players.
Some said, PDF/LaTeX etc are layout engines. And OpenDoc is a GUI spec. And so they dont mix. So it is like compaing. AA size battery with 5/16inch hex nut. If that is true then they are not two standards for the same thing. In that case my suggestion that OpenPDF and OpenDoc, is quite nonsensical. But I still think the MS's OpenXML is a very bad idea.
Am writing this book. Pre-register to buy it on Ebay! now.
Does slashdot or Sourceforge have a decent search engine to look for source code, sample code for particular APIs ?
There can be no doubt or argument that there should be only one open standard. Open meaning not owned by any entity or for-profit company. Ideally the standard should be specified and updated on behalf of all the consumers or all the people by the government or an institute chartered by it. The Standard specifying body should be completely neutral and agnostic. It should allow all players, big and small, for profit and non-profit, commercial and non commercial a level playing field. Such is the case with your nuts and bolts (SAE and DIN spec) or your engine oil or light bulbs or extension cords or ASCII encoding (not EBCDIE if any remembers that) and ANSI language specs.
Open Source, one can debate, one can agree to various extent the usefulness or the lack of it. Pros and cons you can disagree with me. As long as neither you nor I control the standards, it is a level playing field and the market and history will prove either you or me as correct. Same with free software.
Currently there are three standards being specified. Which itself is bad. OpenDoc, a microsoft thingie called OpenXML and now the OpenPDF. I like OpenXML least because it pretends to be a standard but it cant be implemented by all players without help/license from Microsoft. It has the audaucity to enshrine bugs of Office97 and Word6 and WordPerfect5 as standards . OpenDoc is already well on its way in the standards process. PDF has a much wider user installed base and has a financial muscle of a decent profit making company and its self interest. I wish PDF and OpenDoc will merge and come up with a unified standard.
Well, there should be consequences for falsely implicating an innocent party. Yes, it would be very difficult for the innocent party to prove its innocence. But when it does, the accuser should lose credibility too. Heck, with the amount of traffic slashdot gets, (netcraft ransk slashdot traffic to be in the top 100 most visited sites) slashdot is able to be relatively spam free. Even wikipedia with its high ranking is able to get some kind of usable trust building system. A similar networks of trust can be built.
Only when the consequences of allowing one's machines to be zombified is serious and high people will take security seriously.
Singapore is the piracy capital for Tamil/Telugu movies. Dubai is the palce to go to get Bollywood movies. Hongkong is the piracy portal for China and Korea. Canada is probably a distant fourth when it comes to movie piracy.
Next time when Microsoft buys itself another "independant" study comparing the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows with Linux, will they also include all these costs the Koreans are paying to keep up?
1. I am worried about security. Please make me jump through hoops before logging in. I am tech savvy. Tough authenticaion? Bring it on.
2. I am not a very tech savvy customer. Please make it easy to log in.
Why look at it purely from Fidelity's point of view? What about the customer whose account gets compromised and has to jump through the hoops to get the account and money restored? I suspect you do not make policies there, just another fellow programmer, "ours is not to reason why! ours is to do and die". But your company bean counters have assigned zero value/cost to customer's time, energy and mental aggravation. No wonder nothing gets your company's attention other than lawsuits.
India developed the wealth. Got too fat. Got too fractured. Muslims came and looted for 800 years. Then the Europeans exploited them for anothe 200 years. Then Britain became proud that its 10 year olds can out drink a Mongolian and its 18year olds can act in porn movies legally and its porn stars pay income tax. So it is losing now. India is on the ascendant. Then it too will get fat. It is already fractured along caste, religion and language. It too will sink. Someone else will rise. That is the way of the world.
I recently got an account in Fidelity, one of the largest mutual funds with assets in billons of dollars. It has 6 to 10 digit numerical password. No special characters, no alphabets. Very simple authentication system. They should know that they will attract phishers and scammers like honey draws the bees. But still the top level decision makers still think like, "my customer is 65 years old and is not tech savvy. They will get confused, make it easy and simple for them". They are making it easy and simple for the phishers and scammers too. Schwab too has a simple username-password. Vanguard is a little better. It monitors the IP address of past logins and puts you through tougher login session first time you log in from a new location. Also it tries to login using two screens and displays a user selected personalization picture and caption to authenticate the server. My bank is horrible with just a four digit numerical password (for the quicken on line access atleast). Fidelity also uses Social Security number as a login id by default. Was not impressed by the login authentication methods of Alex Brown, National Discount Broker, Ameritrade and MFS in the past. Someday they are going to lose millions of dollars and then they will swing in the completely opposite direction and make use climb Mount Everest just to log in.
My DVR+DVD recorder (panasonic, very good one) cant handle HD content. My only peeve.