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Programming

Submission + - Concealing documents and patents waives rights? (eweek.com)

Submitted by
gimme00
gimme00 writes: "If concealing documents and patents makes Qualcomm waive rights — how does this play into companies trying to pull the indemnity trick against linux or other companies and technologies? The following article triggers this type of question. Court Says . Slashdotters dound off..."
Operating Systems

Submission + - How do we teach users about filesystem locations?

Submitted by thc69
thc69 writes: The most common education problem I find in users is that they don't know where their files are. They don't understand the file system. They save a file and then wonder how to find it. If I ask them where a file is, they either say "It's in Word" or "I don't know."

"Introduction To Computers" courses apparently don't teach the concept, because users who aced such courses still have no clue. Even people who know lots of advanced stuff sometimes don't understand that their files are in a folder on their C: drive or whatever — I have a friend who knows SQL, C++, and Linux, but doesn't know the locations of her files.

Could it be a gender thing? It seems that the people who I've observed having this problem are all female. I remember reading about studies that show men and women navigate roads very differently; perhaps file system navigation is incompatible with the intuitive navigation method that women use?

It's a very important concept. Once you understand how files and folders (which I still like to call "directories", but I digress) work, everything on the computer becomes much easier. You become less dependent on your applications to keep track of everything for you. Backing up and restoring files becomes much easier.

How can I teach people this concept in a way that will stick? It's so intuitive to me that I don't know how to make it into lessons, it's just second-nature.
Businesses

Submission + - Are contracts valid if ... 1

Submitted by
MarkWatson
MarkWatson writes: "I am frequently asked to sign 2 copies of a consulting contract and send them to the other party. More often than you would think, the other party files away both copies, sends me an email saying everything is OK, but never signs and returns a copy to me.

My policy is to bring this to their attention, and if a signed copy is not forthcoming, complain.

One customer has never returned a contract, but have been promptly paying me for 6 months. In another case, a property management agent in another state never bothered to sign and return a copy of another contract with me, but proceeds as if we are under contract.

Are contracts legal if one party does not sign and return a copy to the other party?"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - what can you do with a cool antenna to make money? 1

Submitted by cryptozoologist
cryptozoologist writes: A friend of mine just purchased an old firehouse that has an 80 ft (24 m) mast and a 20 ft (6 m) antenna. the details on the antenna are not known but it was used by the fire and rescue folks there. My friend has been advised to tear it down, but before that happens i want to ask the slashdot community, what can be done with an antenna like this to make some money, or is just plain cool? it is not in a very densely populated area so a wifi hotspot is not gonna get many users. Thanks in advance for your ideas!
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - 25 Complaints For Sprint

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we read about Sprint's new policy to cancel accounts of burdensome customers; about 25 CS calls a month is the threshold. With the iPhone out, I couldn't wish for a better opportunity to weasel out of my early termination fee! I'd like to challenge like-minded Sprint-ing Slashdotters to join in, but we need the community's help: we need to put together a list of 25 or more unique complaints to throw at customer service. Any ideas?
Education

Submission + - Getting involved with writing open source licenses

Submitted by bulio
bulio writes: I'm planning on studying civil law, and would like to gain some experience in the field by helping to write and revise licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, and licenses such as Creative Commons (and its derivatives). My question is, how does one help to revise and improve licenses like these? Is there a mailing list or IRC channel that I could visit? On another note, how would one go about writing his own documentation license?
Programming

Submission + - Are IT deadlines too strict? (karastathis.org)

Submitted by
wikinerd
wikinerd writes: "Reading the latest issue of Information Age, a publication of the ACS (Australian Computer Society), an organisation with which I am associated, I became concerned by an article about ethics in ICT. Citing a recent ACS-funded online survey among public and private sector ICT professionals, with over 40% of them being aware of ACS Code of Ethics, the authors show that the leading cause of concern about ICT ethics among respondends is compromising quality to meet deadlines (54.9%), while the second (49.7%) is about unprofessional behaviour. Concerns over deadlines also appear as the 7th and 8th cause of worry among ICT pros: 29.9% say consider compromising user requirements to meet deadlines an ethical issue facing ICT, and 29.6% say the same about compromising functionality to meet deadlines.

What are your own personal observations regarding deadlines of IT and software projects and their correlation with the quality of the delivered projects? Have unrealistic deadline demands from PHBs forced you or your team to deliver something below your own quality standards? If you work solo, have you tried to explain to pushy clients that quality is not subject to cutbacks, especially in critical systems? Would you ever accept to deliver a system knowing that it is highly likely to fail in operation? How many do the right thing, ie attempting to discuss and explain the issue to the client and if unsuccessful turn down a contract before committing to a client asking you to underdeliver in your chosen profession?"
Spam

Submission + - Invasive popups, what can we do?

Submitted by
phyrebyrd
phyrebyrd writes: "Everyone knows those annoying popups that seem to get through the popup blockers... One that seems prolific are those for NetFlix... But what can we do to seriously hurt this advertising model so that it's not so attractive to use? Is there a way we can automate spoofed 'clicks' so that this racks up the bill for the invasive advertiser? Can this be done 'legally'? After all, they're going against our own wishes and forcing ads upon us with the intent of circumventing our own blockers, couldn't we fight back and hurt them where it counts? Does such a technology already exist to combat these things and hit them where it really hurts instead of just blocking the ads? I feel like these advertisers have absolutely no regard for how they get their 'messages' across, so why can't we use the same tactics to get OUR message across? Why should we have to tolerate such practices?"
United States

Submission + - Hacktivism Questions for Presidential Candidates 1

Submitted by
DevanJedi
DevanJedi writes: "I am putting together a questionnaire of issues important to the geek hacktivists for each of the candidates for next years US Presidential Election. Most of the web sites of these candidates do not come close to addressing the issues that are important to us today and will affect society in general tomorrow. Issues of privacy, copyright and fair use, net neutrality, the DMCA, the PATRIOT act will obviously come up, but what are the questions that you would want to put to the people who may have the power to change the rules of the digital game?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot and the tagging fad 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a question for the slashdot crowd. Tagging is one of those fads that seems to be everywhere, and slashdot has picked it up too. After watching how people use tagging since it's introduction here, it appears that it's mostly useless though, given that nearly every article gets tagged with either contradictory tags ("yes","no","yesno", all on one post) or ones that are opinions of the tag posters ("slownewsday", "whoopeef*ck", "wewerenotmeanttobe", as a sampling from the current front page). The remaining tags of any value seem to be solely for the purpose of categorizing, and can be achieved without tagging by editors simply putting articles in the right category/subcategory. So my question: why bother with the tagging thing? Can we get that useless garbage off of the front page so we don't have to see "whoopeef*ck* and other childish noise?
Biotech

Submission + - Choosing a primary care physician

Submitted by Harmonious Botch
Harmonious Botch writes: I'm switching medical plans, and need to choose a primary care physician. I figure that slashdotters switch jobs — and thus medical plans — more often than the average person, and I also assume that they understand the science behind the medicine better than the average person. So, I'm asking slashdot how to do it.

First, of course, I checked google for questions to ask the candidate, and got obvious ones like "how long in practice", and an amazingly large number of lame ones like "what hours is your office open" and "do you have parking". WTF?? There seems to be many copies of one industry standard set of questions out there, and that set of questions is nearly worthless — almost as if it were designed to conceal incompetence.

I need questions to ask a physician so I can determine if he really knows his stuff. I'm inclined to start with "do you believe in astrology" to weed out the scientifically illiterate, but even that allows a dishonest one to see through my intentions and lie.

( BTW, if anybody has personal experience with Blue Cross of California in northern LA, any particular pro or con recomendations would be appreciated. )

Thanks to all contributors.
Communications

Submission + - Why do people tolerate false advertising? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
DA-MAN
DA-MAN writes: "Why is it that we, in the US, tolerate deliberate false advertising? ISP's advertise unlimited use or don't advertise limits, yet they get away with it. Mobile carriers claim to give unlimited mobile to mobile, never stating that they really mean mobile to mobile within the same network. Why is it that we allow companies to redefine "unlimited" and so forth?"
Spam

Submission + - What do you do when a botnet spams you to death? 1

Submitted by
micromuncher
micromuncher writes: "A month ago I was a happy IT geek. I host my own web site and email server (and have been for over 10 years), and I had been running MDaemon (v7) successfully for four years. A low percentage of spam reached my desktop, though admittedly its gone from a few a day a couple years ago to about twenty now, but then something bad happened. I had measures in place to rudely disconnect spammers; fail on no RDNS, fail on no MX records, and use several spam filters to weed out spam. But the trouble came, from what I can tell, when a non-existant email account got into a botnet — and from what I can tell — its huge. Even though my connections were throttled, I received so many requests, and something odd about the requests, it crashed my mail server. So I flipped on tarpitting and the like, and set my timeouts short, and throttle tight... and I still got crushed. All of the originating servers were passing through the spam filters. Most of them were passing through RBLs. I tried to find information on current spam outbreaks; and I didn't find much useful. I contacted my mail server vendor, and they suggested I fork out the money for an upgrade (that I did), that had the feature of a "bait account". But I'm still getting overloaded by spam (though I am not crashing as far as I can tell.) So my questions to the world; how the heck do you monitor spam outbreaks? What are the most effective measures for dealing with botnets (where all the senders seem legit)? And what the heck can you do to stick it to the foul scum who either advertise through this fraud, or facilitate it?"
Businesses

Submission + - Open source friendly employee agreement?

Submitted by bmarklein
bmarklein writes: I'm a startup founder & first-time CEO with an engineering background. I'm working with a law firm and they've given me their standard "Employee Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement". Anyone who does work for the company will have to sign this. It's absolutely necessary to have an agreement like this to make it clear that the company has legal rights to the work performed by an employee, but the version I have, like every other one I've seen in the past, seems overreaching to me. It defines an "invention" as almost anything one might have created, and then lays claim to all inventions conceived while employed by the company.

I plan on looking for engineers who have made significant open source contributions. I'd like to make clear that they're free to continue working on open source projects. Has anyone seen language in an agreement like this that attempts to do this? I plan on asking my attorney but I suspect they may not have something on hand, so examples would be very helpful.

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Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer

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