How come when you hear about cracker/hacker groups , their exploits are always related to web servers? Are there no other forms of critical computers connected to the 'net at large? What's hacking? What's cracking?
It's the lack of background and CONTEXT that really detracts from the credibility of these mass media news reports (this applies to places like zdnet and c|net also). They never mention the types of computer services (aside from web servers) that are attacked, or even begin to hint at the general methods which are employed. This inability to provide real information seems to indicate that these articles are nothing more than fear mongering dollar grabbers.
I've read in a few posts here on/. that the target audience of these stories is not interested in the technical details. I will agree to a point, but only because I can't recall ever seeing real information ever being presented to the masses and it's never been tested. Until such a time as when they actually present a frame of reference for their stories, this amounts to nothing besides fear mongering.
What I'd like to see is an article on the damaging effects of fear mongering on businesses. How many dollars a year are lost due to uneducated pontification and agenda furthering FUD campaigns? How many businesses have lost money because a panicked executive heard from a friend of a friend that X problem is at hand and emergency procedures,costing millions of dollars in capital and man-hours, must be put into place, only to find out later that it was not good information?
Stop knee-jerk reactions. Put a muzzle on poor journalism. Educate, don't pontificate.
So a few days ago there was something about lawyers responding to/. questions about the MS monopoly situation, and I tried to make a few points about how no matter what "solution" is applied, we'll simply face the problem again because of two simple reasons:
we can't shut up marketing departments without infringing on their rights.
we can't educate the populace that enjoys being blissfully unaware of being led around by the nose by the hucksters.
Maybe my comments were not exactly on topic in the MS monopoly forum, and maybe they're not on topic here but when I read about this situation sometime this afternoon, I felt that maybe rehashing what I had to say might be appropriate.
No matter that free market theory is based on the ascendence of product superiority, reality indicates that it's simply about the sales job. It's all about mindshare and that's why the marketing department gets brand new workstations every year, and the actual product engineers get screwed. It's not about how good the product is, it's all about how well it sells.
So, the ArtX product chews. Rick the marketing guy is an ass. So what? It's all irrelevant.
The only sector of the populace that cares are those in the know, namely, us. We know that they're screwing the public and making big chunks of change in an underhanded manner. We're angry because they're doing it once again and we can't do a thing about it.
So we trash the ArtX product. It gets smeared across all forms of media. We laugh triumphantly at the doom that Rick brought down on their heads. Irrelevant. They'll probably still sell enough of the product to recoup their initial investement; remember, they are now in the public eye, thanks to our free negative _publicity_.
In any case, Rick will be sacked (along with a golden parachute) by ArtX as a gesture to the "community", proving their good intentions. Then Rick will get a job somewhere else. If he's been paying attention to his mistakes thus far, he has probably learned a lesson. Now he'll know how to coordinate a proper mindshare assault over the net. Maybe he'll end up working for MS on their next "stop picking on poor-little-old MS" grassroots campaign.
Whatever. He and his breed will always be there as long as people want to make lots of money. They're 10 times more important then the producers, because they have all the numbers to prove it.
"Hi, this is product XYZ. It does everything you can think of, does it better than any other competeting product and does it cheaper."
"Wow! This is exactly what I'm looking for."
Reality:
"Hi, this is product XYZ. It does everything you can think of, does it better than any other competeting product and does it cheaper."
"Does it work with Windows?"
"No"
"Sorry. I'm not interested."
"But... that's [insert reason X here] [eg. because the owners of Windows won't give me the necessary information to make it work with Windows, so we had to reinvent the wheel and in fact we did it much better as you'll see if you just give it a try.]"
"MS says that everything your product can do will be included in the next version of Windows, for free. All the magazines I've read talk about all the good things in Windows. All of my friends, family, and business associates use Windows, I've never heard of your product, I'm going to wait, bye."
The above scenario can probably go unmentioned as it's just an accepted fact, and it's what makes so many of us mad. But where's the REAL problem here?
MS controls the mindshare of the public. They control it via their o/s and it's desktop. They maintain this control by making their products in such a way as to make it next to impossible for competitors to work with them, but at the same time, making it impossible for their competitors to survive without them. In the mean time, they work to eliminate their competition. This sounds very much like a hybrid biological virus of some sort and it is pretty frightening. But you know what, I still don't see this as being the core of the problem.
The core is that we, the public, tend to bend over and take their shiny, infectious suppositories right up our poop chutes without ever blinking. Then go back to chewing our cud. And we don't take it from just MS, but from any number of sources, all of the time.
"Mmmmm... what? you say soylent green is people? oh well, it tastes great, can I have some more please?"
It's all in the marketing. The government cannot put a stop to the mouth-pieces of corporate entities without risking devolvement into a police state so therefore we are subject to the fickle winds of the uneducated marketplace. So what if they tear MS to shreds, a void will open up in the mindshare of the populace and there will simply be a need to fill that void. The success of a product has nothing to do with it's merits, but in how well it fills the void and consumes the mindshare of market. He who shouts loudest, longest, and simplest to understand, shall always win; make it shiny, tasty, and shaped to fill that void, and no matter if it's all hollow and does nothing good, it will appear to be good and therefore will be good.
Does this presume to much about idiocy of the population? I don't think so. Taken as individuals, there is a great range in ignorance, but when taken as a whole, we are not much more than a big cow that is poked and prodded in directions no one as an educated individual would take. All of the dissenters can't help but be caught up in the cows movements otherwise they risk being left by themselves. So maybe/.'s are a bunch of dissenters, and we might be very educated and intelligent, but we can't help but be carried along by the fickle tides; this could possibly be why so many of us on here are so bloody mad all the time.
So what's my point? Well, this case, though about MS and monopolies and such, serves to highlight a much greater problem with the way we do business and the way we as social organisms on a macro scale are doomed to repeat the same mistakes we presume to solve with this anti-trust case. This case will cure a symptom, but the problem of mass ignorance and our inability to remedy it will remain. We can't shut up the liers and snake oil sellers, and we can't force the populace to become educated overnight.
For all their (non)marketing genius/idiocy, you have to give this company credit just for whetting our appetites.
Still, from what information is on their website, it looks like it's another do-it-all processor for the next mobile all-in-wonder cell phone/pda/mp3 playing/cellular network beowulf cluster;)enabled monster that someone or other is about to come out with.
Don't let my tone fool you into thinking that I'm any less keen about what they have up their sleeves though. I'm thinking that it might be worth investigating further.
I work full time as an "Internet Systems Developer" for one of the provincial governments up here in Canada. I've designed and built, by myself, not only web pages but complete intra/internet applications using a wide variety of tools and techniques (CF, ASP, PHP, Perl, XML... mmmmmm acronym soup!). I don't really know what to think about my job as there are so many conflicting opinions about tech jobs, especially in the "web" area.
I'm a tech geek. I've been one for about 15 years now. One of those typical "I taught myself" type of people. Been working "professionally" (ie. with a diploma) for two years now, all at the same place. My hobbyist background is c/c++ and x86 assembler, but I've moved on to 4th level languages and rapid application development environments, but still write some backend stuff the old fashioned way.
I work 36.5 hours per week and get 3 weeks of holidays/yr. Good benefits. $40K cdn/yr salary. Looking at my salary, that's a mere pittance compared to the astronomical sums of cash that I hear are being made in the valley. Every 4 months or so, I read Wired and go through this bout of depression relating to my pauper status amongst the glittering rich of the tech world. I lose all perspective of the good things in my job and start to loathe it.
This lasts for about a month or so, where I tend to become uncommunicative and terse with my fellow employees as I feel it's my right, as the alpha geek around here, to do. Then I go through this wake up process where I realize, things aren't that damn bad around here.
I get to run a Linux box and two low volume NT development servers (the production servers are Solaris boxes managed by another division). I get to talk directly to my management about the issues I face, even if they are fairly clueless as to how I "make it work". My workstation isn't the greatest in the world, but the office is pretty nice. I wear khakis and button down shirts with semi dressy shoes, but I don't where a tie, I hardly ever have to shave, no one complains about my earings, and every Friday is casual day. My supervisor is a graphic designer by trade who's been thrust into management, so he's very laid-back and easy to talk to, even if he dosn't understand a quarter of what I'm talking about.
When I really get down to it, the only problem I have with this place is that I could probably be making better money somewhere else. Also, that this isn't an IT focused department so I'm relegated to a support role and my achievements are not the end all be all of the company, which sometimes hurts my ego, but from a business perspective that is entirely understandable.
I'm thinking that a lot of the bad feelings and resentment in the IT industry is from people letting their ego run away with their good sense. Sure, there are deffinately the underpaid and underappreciated out there, but I wonder sometimes if a lot of the horror stories are simply people with bruised egos making mountains out of mole hills and jumping on the "I'm an overworked underpaid IT person" bandwagon. I also wonder how much of it is jealousy towards those who "made it big" with their overblown high tech startup?
I really do hate reading about how almost every well coifed poster boy/girl with their hands in a tech business seems to be heralded as the next coming of christ by the tech hype machine. I hate how there's a class of people who love to pose as geeks by memorizing all of the buzzwords in those fluff mags and then spouting off about Linux (or whatever else) as if they actually KNOW something because they carry around a Palm V and a StarTac. Yes, all this crap makes me angry and jealous and resent my position, but only when I make myself aware of it.
So stop reading about that sort of crap then and start trying to enjoy your own life instead of constantly competing against the joneses. Yes, even for the intelligencia, a good dose of forced ignorance can be bliss. But it's up to the individual I guess.
Just my thoughts on the matter. Do they related to the topic in any way?
considering that the G400 was out on the shelves about 2 months before the public announcement of the PowerPC G$, I'd say that the situation might be the other way around... but I doubt it.
I'd really love to get an unbiased opinion on the licensing scheme, but from what I can see, the whole CAL thing regards those users who require Windows Authentication, not some proprietary user authentication scheme. I don't think that a website running it's own authentication scheme against a database of users is subject to the new terms of the CAL. Also, it does not appear that hits to a website count as connections requiring authentication therefore are not covered by the CAL requirements.
I'm not so sure about FTP access though as the IIS FTP server requires a Windows username/password to provide services even to an anonymous FTP connection. This might be a CAL situation, it might not, I'm not a licensing expert so I'm not 100% sure. Speaking of which, how many real experts are reading this at the moment and can provide some much needed insight into the nature of the license, not just the typical knee-jerk anti-microsoft reaction?
You just have to love/. where the motto is, "Our free Open Source FUD campaigns are far superior to any centralized marketing department FUD." Every time microsoft does something, we open our mouths and start to babble chaotically about the evil empire. It really is a discredit to the supposed level of intellect possesed by the average/. reader.
[ no I'm not a Microsoftie afraid of losing the coveted sheen of their newly minted MCSE or some other such nonsense. I could care less about MS, but I want the real deal about the W2K license, not some half-baked reactionary blathering. ]
In the environment where I work, most of the applications that run on the desktops are simply database access and maintenance oriented. These apps are easily converted into HTML form-based web-applications with little to no real effort.
We have ColdFusion 4.0 running on Sun Solaris w/ a large Oracle database server. This proves more than adequate when simply doing data processing and dosn't have much overhead. People access the apps over our intranet through their browsers and do what they have always done and because we stick to basics, it runs across many platforms without much worry.
I'm not saying this is the end-all be-all, but it has been very effective in our environment and shouldn't be dicounted just because it dosn't provide all of the bells and whistles. Of course, it depends on what you're doing.
If you need a real-time interface then you are SOL right now. Sorry, Java just hasn't lived up to it's promises; such an unfortunate thing.
I mean, are they planning to f o r c e kids to take this profile? CAN they force kids to take the test? I'm not sure if it's even legal to get them to take the test without their knowledge about the test's purpose.
As long as the options are clearly presented to the people that are to be subjected to the test, then this isn't as bad as it seems, I'd think. Either avoid it, or lie repeatedly so that it dosn't make any sense, just like we do with anonymous email accounts at uhmmmm Hotmail or someplace. For all Hotmail knows I could be a 93 year old widow with 15 kids and 200 grandchildren living in the Ozarks.
I'd take it that it's somewhat more difficult to skew the answers on one of these tests, but geeks are smart, no?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the lack of background and CONTEXT that really detracts from the credibility of these mass media news reports (this applies to places like zdnet and c|net also). They never mention the types of computer services (aside from web servers) that are attacked, or even begin to hint at the general methods which are employed. This inability to provide real information seems to indicate that these articles are nothing more than fear mongering dollar grabbers.
I've read in a few posts here on /. that the target audience of these stories is not interested in the technical details. I will agree to a point, but only because I can't recall ever seeing real information ever being presented to the masses and it's never been tested. Until such a time as when they actually present a frame of reference for their stories, this amounts to nothing besides fear mongering.
What I'd like to see is an article on the damaging effects of fear mongering on businesses. How many dollars a year are lost due to uneducated pontification and agenda furthering FUD campaigns? How many businesses have lost money because a panicked executive heard from a friend of a friend that X problem is at hand and emergency procedures ,costing millions of dollars in capital and man-hours, must be put into place, only to find out later that it was not good information?
Stop knee-jerk reactions. Put a muzzle on poor journalism. Educate, don't pontificate.
- we can't shut up marketing departments without infringing on their rights.
- we can't educate the populace that enjoys being blissfully unaware of being led around by the nose by the hucksters.
[click to read]Maybe my comments were not exactly on topic in the MS monopoly forum, and maybe they're not on topic here but when I read about this situation sometime this afternoon, I felt that maybe rehashing what I had to say might be appropriate.
No matter that free market theory is based on the ascendence of product superiority, reality indicates that it's simply about the sales job. It's all about mindshare and that's why the marketing department gets brand new workstations every year, and the actual product engineers get screwed. It's not about how good the product is, it's all about how well it sells.
So, the ArtX product chews. Rick the marketing guy is an ass. So what? It's all irrelevant.
The only sector of the populace that cares are those in the know, namely, us. We know that they're screwing the public and making big chunks of change in an underhanded manner. We're angry because they're doing it once again and we can't do a thing about it.
So we trash the ArtX product. It gets smeared across all forms of media. We laugh triumphantly at the doom that Rick brought down on their heads. Irrelevant. They'll probably still sell enough of the product to recoup their initial investement; remember, they are now in the public eye, thanks to our free negative _publicity_.
In any case, Rick will be sacked (along with a golden parachute) by ArtX as a gesture to the "community", proving their good intentions. Then Rick will get a job somewhere else. If he's been paying attention to his mistakes thus far, he has probably learned a lesson. Now he'll know how to coordinate a proper mindshare assault over the net. Maybe he'll end up working for MS on their next "stop picking on poor-little-old MS" grassroots campaign.
Whatever. He and his breed will always be there as long as people want to make lots of money. They're 10 times more important then the producers, because they have all the numbers to prove it.
MS controls the mindshare of the public. They control it via their o/s and it's desktop. They maintain this control by making their products in such a way as to make it next to impossible for competitors to work with them, but at the same time, making it impossible for their competitors to survive without them. In the mean time, they work to eliminate their competition. This sounds very much like a hybrid biological virus of some sort and it is pretty frightening. But you know what, I still don't see this as being the core of the problem.
The core is that we, the public, tend to bend over and take their shiny, infectious suppositories right up our poop chutes without ever blinking. Then go back to chewing our cud. And we don't take it from just MS, but from any number of sources, all of the time.
"Mmmmm... what? you say soylent green is people? oh well, it tastes great, can I have some more please?"
It's all in the marketing. The government cannot put a stop to the mouth-pieces of corporate entities without risking devolvement into a police state so therefore we are subject to the fickle winds of the uneducated marketplace. So what if they tear MS to shreds, a void will open up in the mindshare of the populace and there will simply be a need to fill that void. The success of a product has nothing to do with it's merits, but in how well it fills the void and consumes the mindshare of market. He who shouts loudest, longest, and simplest to understand, shall always win; make it shiny, tasty, and shaped to fill that void, and no matter if it's all hollow and does nothing good, it will appear to be good and therefore will be good.
Does this presume to much about idiocy of the population? I don't think so. Taken as individuals, there is a great range in ignorance, but when taken as a whole, we are not much more than a big cow that is poked and prodded in directions no one as an educated individual would take. All of the dissenters can't help but be caught up in the cows movements otherwise they risk being left by themselves. So maybe /.'s are a bunch of dissenters, and we might be very educated and intelligent, but we can't help but be carried along by the fickle tides; this could possibly be why so many of us on here are so bloody mad all the time.
So what's my point? Well, this case, though about MS and monopolies and such, serves to highlight a much greater problem with the way we do business and the way we as social organisms on a macro scale are doomed to repeat the same mistakes we presume to solve with this anti-trust case. This case will cure a symptom, but the problem of mass ignorance and our inability to remedy it will remain. We can't shut up the liers and snake oil sellers, and we can't force the populace to become educated overnight.
Gabbo!
Gabbo!
For all their (non)marketing genius/idiocy, you have to give this company credit just for whetting our appetites.
Still, from what information is on their website, it looks like it's another do-it-all processor for the next mobile all-in-wonder cell phone/pda/mp3 playing/cellular network beowulf cluster ;)enabled monster that someone or other is about to come out with.
Don't let my tone fool you into thinking that I'm any less keen about what they have up their sleeves though. I'm thinking that it might be worth investigating further.
Good luck Transmeta!
I'm a tech geek. I've been one for about 15 years now. One of those typical "I taught myself" type of people. Been working "professionally" (ie. with a diploma) for two years now, all at the same place. My hobbyist background is c/c++ and x86 assembler, but I've moved on to 4th level languages and rapid application development environments, but still write some backend stuff the old fashioned way.
I work 36.5 hours per week and get 3 weeks of holidays/yr. Good benefits. $40K cdn/yr salary. Looking at my salary, that's a mere pittance compared to the astronomical sums of cash that I hear are being made in the valley. Every 4 months or so, I read Wired and go through this bout of depression relating to my pauper status amongst the glittering rich of the tech world. I lose all perspective of the good things in my job and start to loathe it.
This lasts for about a month or so, where I tend to become uncommunicative and terse with my fellow employees as I feel it's my right, as the alpha geek around here, to do. Then I go through this wake up process where I realize, things aren't that damn bad around here.
I get to run a Linux box and two low volume NT development servers (the production servers are Solaris boxes managed by another division). I get to talk directly to my management about the issues I face, even if they are fairly clueless as to how I "make it work". My workstation isn't the greatest in the world, but the office is pretty nice. I wear khakis and button down shirts with semi dressy shoes, but I don't where a tie, I hardly ever have to shave, no one complains about my earings, and every Friday is casual day. My supervisor is a graphic designer by trade who's been thrust into management, so he's very laid-back and easy to talk to, even if he dosn't understand a quarter of what I'm talking about.
When I really get down to it, the only problem I have with this place is that I could probably be making better money somewhere else. Also, that this isn't an IT focused department so I'm relegated to a support role and my achievements are not the end all be all of the company, which sometimes hurts my ego, but from a business perspective that is entirely understandable.
I'm thinking that a lot of the bad feelings and resentment in the IT industry is from people letting their ego run away with their good sense. Sure, there are deffinately the underpaid and underappreciated out there, but I wonder sometimes if a lot of the horror stories are simply people with bruised egos making mountains out of mole hills and jumping on the "I'm an overworked underpaid IT person" bandwagon. I also wonder how much of it is jealousy towards those who "made it big" with their overblown high tech startup?
I really do hate reading about how almost every well coifed poster boy/girl with their hands in a tech business seems to be heralded as the next coming of christ by the tech hype machine. I hate how there's a class of people who love to pose as geeks by memorizing all of the buzzwords in those fluff mags and then spouting off about Linux (or whatever else) as if they actually KNOW something because they carry around a Palm V and a StarTac. Yes, all this crap makes me angry and jealous and resent my position, but only when I make myself aware of it.
So stop reading about that sort of crap then and start trying to enjoy your own life instead of constantly competing against the joneses. Yes, even for the intelligencia, a good dose of forced ignorance can be bliss. But it's up to the individual I guess.
Just my thoughts on the matter. Do they related to the topic in any way?
I'm not so sure about FTP access though as the IIS FTP server requires a Windows username/password to provide services even to an anonymous FTP connection. This might be a CAL situation, it might not, I'm not a licensing expert so I'm not 100% sure. Speaking of which, how many real experts are reading this at the moment and can provide some much needed insight into the nature of the license, not just the typical knee-jerk anti-microsoft reaction?
You just have to love /. where the motto is, "Our free Open Source FUD campaigns are far superior to any centralized marketing department FUD." Every time microsoft does something, we open our mouths and start to babble chaotically about the evil empire. It really is a discredit to the supposed level of intellect possesed by the average /. reader.
[ no I'm not a Microsoftie afraid of losing the coveted sheen of their newly minted MCSE or some other such nonsense. I could care less about MS, but I want the real deal about the W2K license, not some half-baked reactionary blathering. ]
We have ColdFusion 4.0 running on Sun Solaris w/ a large Oracle database server. This proves more than adequate when simply doing data processing and dosn't have much overhead. People access the apps over our intranet through their browsers and do what they have always done and because we stick to basics, it runs across many platforms without much worry.
I'm not saying this is the end-all be-all, but it has been very effective in our environment and shouldn't be dicounted just because it dosn't provide all of the bells and whistles. Of course, it depends on what you're doing.
If you need a real-time interface then you are SOL right now. Sorry, Java just hasn't lived up to it's promises; such an unfortunate thing.
I mean, are they planning to f o r c e kids to take this profile? CAN they force kids to take the test? I'm not sure if it's even legal to get them to take the test without their knowledge about the test's purpose.
As long as the options are clearly presented to the people that are to be subjected to the test, then this isn't as bad as it seems, I'd think. Either avoid it, or lie repeatedly so that it dosn't make any sense, just like we do with anonymous email accounts at uhmmmm Hotmail or someplace. For all Hotmail knows I could be a 93 year old widow with 15 kids and 200 grandchildren living in the Ozarks.
I'd take it that it's somewhat more difficult to skew the answers on one of these tests, but geeks are smart, no?
"...server with subpoenas!" ??
oi vey! I guess it's apparent where my head is at this morning... sheesh.
You will all be server with subpoenas!
hahaha... what a laugh.