The biggest reason novice and casual developers love Visual Basic is because it hides a lot of the complexities of a multi-tier environment. A great example of this is the ActiveX Data Object (ADO). This is a great way to access data in Enterprise data sources, provided that:
1) your needs are relatively simple
2) your backend is stable
What happens when either condition is not met? There are endless problems. What is the single biggest source of these problems? Lack of transparency of the components.
When I had to work with ADO, I found it impossible to debug. The biggest reason was because it made native calls to the ODBC driver on the platform, and never produced debuggable SQL code. This was true in spite of the fact that the database the code was accessing was a Sybase SQL Server. What a nightmare!
Most of the people in this community are not from a school of thought that would ever accept a tool like VB. Not only do we not typically use component assembly techniques to write our programs, but also many of us will not accept code from third parties in most cases unless we have the source.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that VB comes out high in a poll like this and many of us can't understand it. The same thing would happen with databases. Access, MS SQL Server, and Oracle would make the list. mySQL would be left off.
If Corel were an American company, they would have been put into a turnaround mode a long time ago. Cowpland would have either been forced out, or been kicked upstairs to the sole position of Chairman. Someone with the kind of resume of a Gil Amelio (pre-Apple) would have been brought in, and they would have rationalized their product lines.
So, regardless of the action by the Ontario Securities Commission, why hasn't this happened already? Because Corel, along with companies like Nortel, Newbridge Networks, and Hummingbird Communications, are considered technological crown jewels of the Canadian economy. Therefore, any major changes to their operating structures must be evaluated in terms of their political impact to the nation and the region where they are based.
A company the size of Corel simply would not have the political clout or the economic impact to stay in the position it is currently in, if it were based in the United States.
We can say all we want about the prescience of Corel to invest so much of its R&D into the Linux platform, but this would not be happening to the extent it is if the acquisition of the WordPerfect technologies from whomever held them last had played well in the Wintel market.
I guess the next question is, does the Linux community have as much at stake in this as the Canadian business establishment and the Ottawa region does? I would say that the Linux community does not have as much at stake, because we have StarOffice and Applix, and these are both viable office application suites for this platform.
In terms of what Corel should do at this point, it depends on how much weight they give to maximizing the value of the company to its shareholders and to the relative value of the stock before and after this announcement. The savvy move, from a shareholder value standpoint, would be to hire a new CEO with a history of turning around major technology companies. However, the company's ability to do that would be influenced heavily by the willingness of the Federal and Provincial governments to allow major changes to be made.
A new CEO could also end up benefitting the Linux community because the Linux effort (perhaps combined with the WordPerfect intellectual property) could be spun off into its own company. This would probably result in faster progress toward usable products than if things remained as they are today.
Not knowing what the WordPerfect suite looks like from a code standpoint, I would seriously consider opening the source code up, were I the new CEO. However, the viability of that strategy depends heavily on how simply the WordPerfect code is written.
Such a move would also be perilous because it would face the same issues as Mozilla has faced. Even with a good license, developers probably would not flock to it.
In any case, I am not sure how Corel expects to make any money from its current Linux investments, unless it expects to receive licensing revenues from hardware manufacturers that embed their product line in next generation network appliances that would replace PCs as we know them.
For the last two years, I have been watching x86 hardware manufacturers and application software vendors to see what they would do with respect to the portion of their base that has (historically) run on SCO. This is what I have seen:
SCO raised their license fees, and (theoretically) passed the margin dollars on to their partners.
Some hardware vendors (like Compaq) have continued to back SCO. These vendors tended to be the ones that had the largest base of x86 *NIX sales prior to the general acceptance of Linux.
Some software vendors jumped to platforms like AIX / RS/6000 to maintain their high margins.
Most of the others who have embraced Linux had little or no share of the preceding *NIX market on Intel.
I would guess that the people that embraced Linux and include a service component in their marketing strategy are generally making more money than they did in SCO. The rest are hoping that the SCO market doesn't collapse.
I find it interesting that most people I talk to about SCO qualify most of their comments in revenue terms. That ought to help us understand why the vendors are still supporting it. It also gives us an idea of what would be required in order to displace SCO as an OS platform, if that is what we wanted to do.
We run Perl5 in development but have been working very diligently to get it approved for prod, which currently uses v4. In my travels writing Perl code for Fortune 500 companies, this is a much more serious impediment to acceptance than the majority of Perl users realize. My largest clients are commercial banks and brokerage houses, and you constantly find machines at these places running versions like 5.002 or earlier.
The normal reaction from a Perl user at an ISP or an academic institution is that the people running that system must be really dumb or must not use Perl. This is not the case.
Many consultants like me and the software development staffs we work with are not the people that decide which development tools are used. These decisions are made by people at the Chief Technology Officer level at many companies. They tend to spend most of their time evaluating Closed Source Software because this is the software that is promoted through the corporate IT news, sales, and marketing channels.
OTOH, software that is actually used, like Perl, is considered an ancillary part of the UNIX OS build that is installed on each Sun, HP, or IBM server. The geeks in the back room often have to resort to civil disobedience in order to get a new version of Perl approved and installed.
Sorry if this seems slightly off-topic. To tie it back to the discussion about Perl 6 I would have to say, with all the new features we would like to add, we in the community need to re-double our efforts at advocacy. We need to do a better job of identifying places where obsolete Perl versions are still installed, and figure out ways to remedy the situation.
Probably better in audio, good history of W3C
on
Weaving The Web
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure that we should expect anything more, or less, from Tim Berners-Lee. Even with a ghost writer, he's not a historian, and the story that I think Jon Katz wanted to hear really required a historian to write in an entertaining and accessible fashion.
I was stumbling through a book store in the World Trade Center the other day and I found Weaving the Web in audiobook format. I had not heard about this book at all, and I was surprised that they chose to make it an audiobook because I assumed that it would be a fairly cerebral book.
Now that I have finished listening to it, and on the basis of what Jon said, I believe that the book benefitted from abridgement. The book is probably less out of focus and boring in the spoken form, although Tim Berners-Lee will not make a second career as a narrator.
I was glad to have picked this book up, as I was to pick up the book Dealers of Lightning, because it gave me an overview of formative events in the technology I use. I did not know very much about the W3C, who was involved in its creation, nor what they were trying to accomplish by creating it. If you wonder what happened before Netscape Navigator 1.0, you may find portions of this book quite useful.
I believe this book also gives credit to some of the more unsung pioneers of browser technology. And, for someone who probably does not live and breathe capitalism in the Darwinian sense, I think Tim Berners-Lee does a pretty good job explaining what made the first widely-distributed web browsers preferred over other technically-important, but less commercially viable, browsers.
Finally, had I not read this book, I would not know how much Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to be a medium for two-way communication. He clearly seems to favor the sort of community that is being built here. More interesting to me, however, was the idea that he thinks that browsers should include fairly robust editing tools, or that browser-server interaction should facilitate more seemless content contribution.
Overall, I'm glad I took the time to hear it, but I agree that it took commitment to get through parts of it.
No problem. Your effort to correct it is greatly appreciated. I wish you hadn't lost your moderation point.
With all the changes to the moderation system, it might be wise to let people adjust their moderations within one hour. I know this is yet another layer of complexity, but moderation mistakes could hurt ones Karma, right?
You guys might want to make this its own Web Site. The interest in this topic will not be limited to the existing Slashdot community. Although some will join Slashdot, you will not get as many new community members as if you make it its own site.
Of course the beauty of Slashdot is that you could link everything from yro.org to Slashdot's main page.
I have worked on the fringes of Corporate America for a long time, and this could have been the deal from the outset. AOL made this investment which hinged on everyone at Netscape not bailing out at once. They wanted to be in control and yet not be vilified for cutting the heart out of Netscape.
So, what they did was negotiated a deal where Barksdale would go almost immediately but stay on the Board of Directors, and Andreesen would stay for indefinitely in a fairly nebulous but senior role.
Now, sufficient time has passed where this is no longer on the public's RADAR screen. Sure, some will be interested, but most people won't see this as a big deal. After all, to the typical consumer, not much has changed. http://home.netscape.com/ is still there.
With respect to us (slashdot fans), many of us hadn't liked Netscape for a while anyway. We always suspected that Mozilla didn't have as much support as we would have liked. But, AOL hasn't actually killed it either.
I hope it doesn't make people mad to hear this (or to hear it again), but the AOL-Sun-Netscape deal wasn't about the browser anyway. Everyone knows that Micros~1 killed that market a while ago.
This was always about the servers -- not the SuiteSpot which are Netscape's basic server products. This is about the Xpert server series: PublishingXpert, CommerceXpert, etc. These are the Web-based workflow automation products that Netscape developed in a joint-venture with General Electric's EDI business. These are pound-for-pound the most valuable things that Netscape ever developed, from a commercial perspective.
So, if I am right in this analysis, I think that AOL, Sun, and the Netscape shareholders are getting what they wanted out of this deal. We shall see if it truly works to the competitive advantage of them all.
Sorry if this seems redundant to the moderators, but I wanted to second the suggestion of a subscription service. This is an excellent idea that ought to provide incremental, recurring revenue for O'Reilly's off-line publishing business.
I wonder if it would do any serious damage to the number of books that O'Reilly sells through distribution? I, for one, often buy two copies of the ORA books I use -- one for my office and one for my main client's site. Once they come out with CD-ROM compendiums of multiple books, I buy one of those and put it in my traveling CD case with my Netscape, Sybase, Perl, Apache, and Linux CD-based software.
I realize I am an extreme example of a satisfied ORA customer, but my consulting clients are just as satisfied with my work, and I owe as much to the guys at O'Reilly as I do to the Linux and Perl developers.
Sorry to digress.
If anyone reads this, would you care to reply with your thoughts on whether you think a subscription service would cannibalize O'Reilly's other businesses?
www.yankees.com works beautifully on a T1 with a 4.x browser. But, this is a consumer-oriented site, so it should work well on AOL at 14.4, and they have totally failed that test.
While the designers have clearly achieved a striking look and their navigational design is OK, they really hurt their site by using NESTED framesets. I couldn't believe it when I tried to load the largest pane into its own window.
Once I figured out how to break the page down into components, I took a look at the box-menu. This is displayed when you are in the Box Office section of the site. Is it really necessary to create a set of tables within this small segment of the page, just to give immediate visual feedback to a newby? Wouldn't you expect that a box labeled "Stadium Seating Map" would do something if you clicked it? Why not the old-fashioned GIF and image map?
With respect to the analogies to physical architectural design flying around in Katz's article, I'll agree that there are several schools of thought in the Web Development community. The people that designed this site belong to the Broadband School, which tends to neglect the typical user's configuration because they are trying to achieve a look that will knock your socks off. The Realist School knows that the typical consumer has a commercial on-line service (like AOL) and a Winmodem, which provides much less bandwidth than most of us are used to.
So, yes, I'll agree with Katz that they've got all of the information that their customers expect. But, I totally disagree that they have produced a usable site. The people in charge need to go back, deconstruct a few successful consumer sites, and figure out how to deliver the same information, with a similar look and feel, on much less complex pages.
I can't say if I would or wouldn't do it, but here are some things I would mention to my bosses if they asked me to do this:
1) If you work for a multinational, ask if management has asked Legal to determine if the new policy violates the privacy laws of the European Union. The EU privacy laws are slightly different in all member states, and they are much stronger than workplace and/or customer data protection laws in the United States.
2) If any of your users are known to be registered as contacts in the Network Solutions Whois database, they are almost certainly getting solicitations from purveyors of adult entertainment. Since many companies are not willing to disregard all inbound mail of a questionable nature, you probably ought to push for an specific provision in the policy which deals with this situation.
3) Many companies are moving to e-mail retention policies with extremely short holding periods in order to limit legal liability. I used to be against these, but I am starting to see the benefits when I think about the alternative of having to scan the content of mail messages.
Good luck, because this sounds like it won't be fun any way you slice it.
We're still talking about the statute right? Because you need a warrant to perform a wiretap. How do you get a warrant without going before a judge?
The government doesn't own the digital communications infrastructure. Therefore, it would be tough to get into commercial points of presence like digital phone switches, NAPs, and wireless communications cells for an illegal, covert operation.
Let me know if I am missing an obvious dimension of this.
...law enforcement agencies routinely seize hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers and hard drives as evidence, but have so few computer experts that confiscated equipment can gather dust for months or years....
Let's apply some rationality to this. The total number of digital messages is expanding at such a rate that it is not even remotely possible for law enforcement, as we know it in America, to perform wiretaps on anyone but the most serious criminals. This doesn't even take into account the time and effort that is required from the State to obtain legal authorization to do this.
The other thing everyone should think about is the reponse of the FDIC to the so-called "Know Your Customer" Rule, that was killed due to unprecedented public opposition. If you really think that law enforcement should not be able to perform any one of the things that CALEA calls for, then the FCC should be slashdotted until they give up on that provision.
I can't get that upset about the privacy implications of new digital wiretapping rules, if they simply make law enforcement capable of performing surveillance to the same degree as they can with POTS technology. That's because I use all of the communications media, and I prefer to think that the law is being applied consistantly.
However, it would make me really upset if I found out that a person in the act of committing a crime could avoid prosecution, simply by choosing to communicate via digital technology.
The traditional news media says the same thing about The Drudge Report. It's bad journalism, but we look at it all the time for scoops.
The beauty of being part of the technology world is that engineering people in established companies at least recognize systems that work, even if they work differently from their own designs. Journalists seem obsessed with the orthodoxy of their process.
"In this model you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com.
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
It seems that the X10 folks are rolling this promotion through several on-line communities. I picked up the Firecracker package through the promotion they did with ZDNet a couple of weeks ago.
They certainly delivered what was advertised. The biggest complaint that I had with their approach is the amount of promotional e-mail that they have sent me since I signed up.
I am not sure if you can avoid the spam I've been getting by filling out the forms differently. In other words, I don't remember if I had the opportunity to opt out. I assume that I simply made a mistake.
However, I would point out that I subsequently followed their unsubscribe instructions, and the promotional e-mail has not stopped yet. YMMV.
As far as I'm concerned DirecTV is a great service, but you must also have: 1) a lifeline cable service (i.e. NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and Fox), 2) you must be in a good over-the-air reception area, or 3) you must not care about the Major Networks.
DirecTV's major benefit, IMHO, is the huge number of sports options. In the first year we had it, we took NFL Sunday Ticket, NHL Center Ice, and whatever the deluxe package of regional sports networks is called. This allowed us to watch almost any professional football, professional hockey, or Division I college hockey game that was televised. We have maintained our subscriptions to these services for at least three years.
Sure, there are multi-channel versions of MTV, HBO, Showtime, Stars, PPV movies, etc. But, I suspect that few who lurk on this site have enough free time to get there money's worth from these.
If a dish is the only way for you to get a specific channel you want, I would suggest that you get the most full featured service you can, in case you ever want to turn the additional features on. It can be worth the cost difference between DirecTV, and Primestar or the Dish Network just to have the ability to temporarily pay for a lot more services.
Finally, it is really important that you investigate the dish site requirements for each service you are contemplating. In order to get DirecTV, for example, you need a clear line of site to the Southwestern sky. That means no trees or buildings in the way. Also, the further north you are in the United States, the lower to the Southwestern horizon you will need to aim the dish.
Slashdot Mirror
1) your needs are relatively simple
2) your backend is stable
What happens when either condition is not met? There are endless problems. What is the single biggest source of these problems? Lack of transparency of the components.
When I had to work with ADO, I found it impossible to debug. The biggest reason was because it made native calls to the ODBC driver on the platform, and never produced debuggable SQL code. This was true in spite of the fact that the database the code was accessing was a Sybase SQL Server. What a nightmare!
Most of the people in this community are not from a school of thought that would ever accept a tool like VB. Not only do we not typically use component assembly techniques to write our programs, but also many of us will not accept code from third parties in most cases unless we have the source.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that VB comes out high in a poll like this and many of us can't understand it. The same thing would happen with databases. Access, MS SQL Server, and Oracle would make the list. mySQL would be left off.
So, regardless of the action by the Ontario Securities Commission, why hasn't this happened already? Because Corel, along with companies like Nortel, Newbridge Networks, and Hummingbird Communications, are considered technological crown jewels of the Canadian economy. Therefore, any major changes to their operating structures must be evaluated in terms of their political impact to the nation and the region where they are based.
A company the size of Corel simply would not have the political clout or the economic impact to stay in the position it is currently in, if it were based in the United States.
We can say all we want about the prescience of Corel to invest so much of its R&D into the Linux platform, but this would not be happening to the extent it is if the acquisition of the WordPerfect technologies from whomever held them last had played well in the Wintel market.
I guess the next question is, does the Linux community have as much at stake in this as the Canadian business establishment and the Ottawa region does? I would say that the Linux community does not have as much at stake, because we have StarOffice and Applix, and these are both viable office application suites for this platform.
In terms of what Corel should do at this point, it depends on how much weight they give to maximizing the value of the company to its shareholders and to the relative value of the stock before and after this announcement. The savvy move, from a shareholder value standpoint, would be to hire a new CEO with a history of turning around major technology companies. However, the company's ability to do that would be influenced heavily by the willingness of the Federal and Provincial governments to allow major changes to be made.
A new CEO could also end up benefitting the Linux community because the Linux effort (perhaps combined with the WordPerfect intellectual property) could be spun off into its own company. This would probably result in faster progress toward usable products than if things remained as they are today.
Not knowing what the WordPerfect suite looks like from a code standpoint, I would seriously consider opening the source code up, were I the new CEO. However, the viability of that strategy depends heavily on how simply the WordPerfect code is written.
Such a move would also be perilous because it would face the same issues as Mozilla has faced. Even with a good license, developers probably would not flock to it.
In any case, I am not sure how Corel expects to make any money from its current Linux investments, unless it expects to receive licensing revenues from hardware manufacturers that embed their product line in next generation network appliances that would replace PCs as we know them.
Who says this isn't News for Nerds.
SCO raised their license fees, and (theoretically) passed the margin dollars on to their partners.
Some hardware vendors (like Compaq) have continued to back SCO. These vendors tended to be the ones that had the largest base of x86 *NIX sales prior to the general acceptance of Linux.
Some software vendors jumped to platforms like AIX / RS/6000 to maintain their high margins.
Most of the others who have embraced Linux had little or no share of the preceding *NIX market on Intel.
I would guess that the people that embraced Linux and include a service component in their marketing strategy are generally making more money than they did in SCO. The rest are hoping that the SCO market doesn't collapse.
I find it interesting that most people I talk to about SCO qualify most of their comments in revenue terms. That ought to help us understand why the vendors are still supporting it. It also gives us an idea of what would be required in order to displace SCO as an OS platform, if that is what we wanted to do.
We run Perl5 in development but have been working very diligently to get it approved for prod, which currently uses v4. In my travels writing Perl code for Fortune 500 companies, this is a much more serious impediment to acceptance than the majority of Perl users realize. My largest clients are commercial banks and brokerage houses, and you constantly find machines at these places running versions like 5.002 or earlier.
The normal reaction from a Perl user at an ISP or an academic institution is that the people running that system must be really dumb or must not use Perl. This is not the case.
Many consultants like me and the software development staffs we work with are not the people that decide which development tools are used. These decisions are made by people at the Chief Technology Officer level at many companies. They tend to spend most of their time evaluating Closed Source Software because this is the software that is promoted through the corporate IT news, sales, and marketing channels.
OTOH, software that is actually used, like Perl, is considered an ancillary part of the UNIX OS build that is installed on each Sun, HP, or IBM server. The geeks in the back room often have to resort to civil disobedience in order to get a new version of Perl approved and installed.
Sorry if this seems slightly off-topic. To tie it back to the discussion about Perl 6 I would have to say, with all the new features we would like to add, we in the community need to re-double our efforts at advocacy. We need to do a better job of identifying places where obsolete Perl versions are still installed, and figure out ways to remedy the situation.
I was stumbling through a book store in the World Trade Center the other day and I found Weaving the Web in audiobook format. I had not heard about this book at all, and I was surprised that they chose to make it an audiobook because I assumed that it would be a fairly cerebral book.
Now that I have finished listening to it, and on the basis of what Jon said, I believe that the book benefitted from abridgement. The book is probably less out of focus and boring in the spoken form, although Tim Berners-Lee will not make a second career as a narrator.
I was glad to have picked this book up, as I was to pick up the book Dealers of Lightning, because it gave me an overview of formative events in the technology I use. I did not know very much about the W3C, who was involved in its creation, nor what they were trying to accomplish by creating it. If you wonder what happened before Netscape Navigator 1.0, you may find portions of this book quite useful.
I believe this book also gives credit to some of the more unsung pioneers of browser technology. And, for someone who probably does not live and breathe capitalism in the Darwinian sense, I think Tim Berners-Lee does a pretty good job explaining what made the first widely-distributed web browsers preferred over other technically-important, but less commercially viable, browsers.
Finally, had I not read this book, I would not know how much Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to be a medium for two-way communication. He clearly seems to favor the sort of community that is being built here. More interesting to me, however, was the idea that he thinks that browsers should include fairly robust editing tools, or that browser-server interaction should facilitate more seemless content contribution.
Overall, I'm glad I took the time to hear it, but I agree that it took commitment to get through parts of it.
With all the changes to the moderation system, it might be wise to let people adjust their moderations within one hour. I know this is yet another layer of complexity, but moderation mistakes could hurt ones Karma, right?
Of course the beauty of Slashdot is that you could link everything from yro.org to Slashdot's main page.
So, what they did was negotiated a deal where Barksdale would go almost immediately but stay on the Board of Directors, and Andreesen would stay for indefinitely in a fairly nebulous but senior role.
Now, sufficient time has passed where this is no longer on the public's RADAR screen. Sure, some will be interested, but most people won't see this as a big deal. After all, to the typical consumer, not much has changed. http://home.netscape.com/ is still there.
With respect to us (slashdot fans), many of us hadn't liked Netscape for a while anyway. We always suspected that Mozilla didn't have as much support as we would have liked. But, AOL hasn't actually killed it either.
I hope it doesn't make people mad to hear this (or to hear it again), but the AOL-Sun-Netscape deal wasn't about the browser anyway. Everyone knows that Micros~1 killed that market a while ago.
This was always about the servers -- not the SuiteSpot which are Netscape's basic server products. This is about the Xpert server series: PublishingXpert, CommerceXpert, etc. These are the Web-based workflow automation products that Netscape developed in a joint-venture with General Electric's EDI business. These are pound-for-pound the most valuable things that Netscape ever developed, from a commercial perspective.
So, if I am right in this analysis, I think that AOL, Sun, and the Netscape shareholders are getting what they wanted out of this deal. We shall see if it truly works to the competitive advantage of them all.
I wonder if it would do any serious damage to the number of books that O'Reilly sells through distribution? I, for one, often buy two copies of the ORA books I use -- one for my office and one for my main client's site. Once they come out with CD-ROM compendiums of multiple books, I buy one of those and put it in my traveling CD case with my Netscape, Sybase, Perl, Apache, and Linux CD-based software.
I realize I am an extreme example of a satisfied ORA customer, but my consulting clients are just as satisfied with my work, and I owe as much to the guys at O'Reilly as I do to the Linux and Perl developers.
Sorry to digress.
If anyone reads this, would you care to reply with your thoughts on whether you think a subscription service would cannibalize O'Reilly's other businesses?
While the designers have clearly achieved a striking look and their navigational design is OK, they really hurt their site by using NESTED framesets. I couldn't believe it when I tried to load the largest pane into its own window.
Once I figured out how to break the page down into components, I took a look at the box-menu. This is displayed when you are in the Box Office section of the site. Is it really necessary to create a set of tables within this small segment of the page, just to give immediate visual feedback to a newby? Wouldn't you expect that a box labeled "Stadium Seating Map" would do something if you clicked it? Why not the old-fashioned GIF and image map?
With respect to the analogies to physical architectural design flying around in Katz's article, I'll agree that there are several schools of thought in the Web Development community. The people that designed this site belong to the Broadband School, which tends to neglect the typical user's configuration because they are trying to achieve a look that will knock your socks off. The Realist School knows that the typical consumer has a commercial on-line service (like AOL) and a Winmodem, which provides much less bandwidth than most of us are used to.
So, yes, I'll agree with Katz that they've got all of the information that their customers expect. But, I totally disagree that they have produced a usable site. The people in charge need to go back, deconstruct a few successful consumer sites, and figure out how to deliver the same information, with a similar look and feel, on much less complex pages.
1) If you work for a multinational, ask if management has asked Legal to determine if the new policy violates the privacy laws of the European Union. The EU privacy laws are slightly different in all member states, and they are much stronger than workplace and/or customer data protection laws in the United States.
2) If any of your users are known to be registered as contacts in the Network Solutions Whois database, they are almost certainly getting solicitations from purveyors of adult entertainment. Since many companies are not willing to disregard all inbound mail of a questionable nature, you probably ought to push for an specific provision in the policy which deals with this situation.
3) Many companies are moving to e-mail retention policies with extremely short holding periods in order to limit legal liability. I used to be against these, but I am starting to see the benefits when I think about the alternative of having to scan the content of mail messages.
Good luck, because this sounds like it won't be fun any way you slice it.
The government doesn't own the digital communications infrastructure. Therefore, it would be tough to get into commercial points of presence like digital phone switches, NAPs, and wireless communications cells for an illegal, covert operation.
Let me know if I am missing an obvious dimension of this.
Let's apply some rationality to this. The total number of digital messages is expanding at such a rate that it is not even remotely possible for law enforcement, as we know it in America, to perform wiretaps on anyone but the most serious criminals. This doesn't even take into account the time and effort that is required from the State to obtain legal authorization to do this.
The other thing everyone should think about is the reponse of the FDIC to the so-called "Know Your Customer" Rule, that was killed due to unprecedented public opposition. If you really think that law enforcement should not be able to perform any one of the things that CALEA calls for, then the FCC should be slashdotted until they give up on that provision.
I can't get that upset about the privacy implications of new digital wiretapping rules, if they simply make law enforcement capable of performing surveillance to the same degree as they can with POTS technology. That's because I use all of the communications media, and I prefer to think that the law is being applied consistantly.
However, it would make me really upset if I found out that a person in the act of committing a crime could avoid prosecution, simply by choosing to communicate via digital technology.
The beauty of being part of the technology world is that engineering people in established companies at least recognize systems that work, even if they work differently from their own designs. Journalists seem obsessed with the orthodoxy of their process.
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
They certainly delivered what was advertised. The biggest complaint that I had with their approach is the amount of promotional e-mail that they have sent me since I signed up.
I am not sure if you can avoid the spam I've been getting by filling out the forms differently. In other words, I don't remember if I had the opportunity to opt out. I assume that I simply made a mistake.
However, I would point out that I subsequently followed their unsubscribe instructions, and the promotional e-mail has not stopped yet. YMMV.
As far as I'm concerned DirecTV is a great service, but you must also have: 1) a lifeline cable service (i.e. NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and Fox), 2) you must be in a good over-the-air reception area, or 3) you must not care about the Major Networks.
DirecTV's major benefit, IMHO, is the huge number of sports options. In the first year we had it, we took NFL Sunday Ticket, NHL Center Ice, and whatever the deluxe package of regional sports networks is called. This allowed us to watch almost any professional football, professional hockey, or Division I college hockey game that was televised. We have maintained our subscriptions to these services for at least three years.
Sure, there are multi-channel versions of MTV, HBO, Showtime, Stars, PPV movies, etc. But, I suspect that few who lurk on this site have enough free time to get there money's worth from these.
If a dish is the only way for you to get a specific channel you want, I would suggest that you get the most full featured service you can, in case you ever want to turn the additional features on. It can be worth the cost difference between DirecTV, and Primestar or the Dish Network just to have the ability to temporarily pay for a lot more services.
Finally, it is really important that you investigate the dish site requirements for each service you are contemplating. In order to get DirecTV, for example, you need a clear line of site to the Southwestern sky. That means no trees or buildings in the way. Also, the further north you are in the United States, the lower to the Southwestern horizon you will need to aim the dish.
Good luck.