I'm also taking advantage of VMWare to run Windows, but my goal is to reduce its footprint in my network, not increase it. For example, one VM is being prepared to only process documents with Office 2007 and Acrobat Professional. It's available via Remote Desktop and will never be used to access the Internet for anything other than software/security updates. Yes, the security of this system is hanging on a policy decision, but more secure and pleasurable environments are available in my network for web surfing and email (mainly Linux and OS X), so this isn't a burden at all. In fact, it's a welcome relief, since I can now archive images of the VM to restore whenever a software upgrade disrupts Windows (the main incentive for this move). There's no reason the same can't be done in a lot of environments using thin/fat linux clients and a Windows Terminal Server. Even nontechnical users can browse locally on Linux with Firefox and click an icon to run a Remote Desktop client for Windows-only tasks.
Linux : take the debian ssh disaster a few month ago as example. I read about it at Google News, head over here to check how the linux bashing was coming along, and while I was reading, the "update available" icon appeared. A few minutes later and the vulnerability was no more.
I think the response time of most Linux or BSD distributions is admirable where security patches are concerned, but the Debian OpenSSL fiasco was a longstanding bug that went undetected for years and will have ramifications for a very long time. It didn't merely affect running SSH servers, it made it easier to crack a variety of keys, regardless of their strength. Many of these were generated a long time ago and will remain in production until some overworked admin gets a chance to test the keys for the vulnerability. The test itself is pretty easy, and victims will be open to a variety of attacks. Those in the know are already incurring a labor cost of replacing SSL certificates (thank god the commercial CAs stepped up to the plate and offered free replacements), and face the even harder task of identifying vulnerable SSH keys used for public key authentication to their systems (any system, not just Debian-based). There may even be mounds of data that's been encrypted and archived, but not really safe. I'm extremely happy I switched from Debian before this bug was introduced (I loved Woody, but couldn't stand the way they were tampering with upstream source in Sarge, an instinct that I'm glad I followed). But I've watched other shops jump on the Ubuntu wagon for servers, because it's "easy", and all they've done is run the update. They haven't made an attempt to replace vulnerable keys. This has set the stage for a smear campaign against Linux in the enterprise, which is undeserved for most distributions. Kudos to Debian for their response, but this mess is reminiscent of the Victor Hugo story, "A Fight with a Cannon", where the hero is given a medal, then executed for being the cause of the catastrophe in the first place.
Copyright and the regulations that follow from it should, according to [Milton] Friedman, be described primarily as a limitation of free speech.
Put this way, it seems obvious that the sharing of ideas (and intellectual property is essentially ideas, isn't it?) is free speech. So, the question is: Is free speech free as in beer, or free as in... my head hurts.
I wish I had mod points to give you. While I don't think OLPC is perfect (from the beginning, I've wondered why poor children in the US were excluded), it partly seems to operate in the spirit of recognizing past mistakes and doing things better the second time around. I'm convinced this is one of the reasons the/. crowd is so interested. I know I'd welcome a new and improved common denominator in the babelsphere of computing...
I'm sick of all this recent BS about how bad MP3 is. I downloaded severals albums in FLAC...
And I'm sick of consumers thinking they are qualified to do A/B comparisons of audio formats. As a musician, I can tell you that they all pretty much suck. I compensate, tweak, & adjust endlessly to get the final digital master to sound the way I want. It's not perfect, but digital recording was a godsend compared to the analog equipment available in the same price range. There is simply no comparison.
So, when the time comes to pick a distribution format, I'm painfully aware of the shortcomings, after hearing the source hundreds or even thousands of times. I don't care about unquantifiable metrics like "warmth", "nuance", or "presence". I've already taken care of that in my recording. I want to be able to switch between the master and the copy and not be able to detect any difference on the multiple playback systems I test. Beyond that, I only care about following a mastering standard that lets the consumer listen to an assortment of music without constantly adjusting the volume control.
It's time for the Crappy Format A vs. Crappy Format B wars to end. It's hard to justify any data compression or audio degredation in light of today's available storage and bandwidth. As a consumer, I just realized I could rip all of my CD's onto a new hard drive in a lossless format at a trivial cost, with room to spare. Who knows? Then I might actually care about what sound card, D/A converter, amplifier, and speakers I use in my home entertainment system.
This is not a privacy issue, it's an issue of the university overreacting in a way that I'm sure would be inconsistent with their code of conduct.
Privacy is still an issue if an administrator manipulates the counseling service to build a case against a student because the administrator feels politically threatened. Counseling at universities can save lives, but students will be less likely to use the service if they feel that they must sacrifice confidentiality. That would be a real tragedy.
Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.
This is not true in my experience. Slackware has legendary stability, partly due to not having a package manager that tracks dependencies. If you're missing something, just install it (however you want) and move along. Try repairing a dependency-based package manager when it becomes corrupt -- now, that's real chaos!
Seriously, if you've been given the opportunity to spec a room for equipment, do it right. The last thing you want is some heat-generating, water-vapor-producing meat bag rolling around on an office chair, piling up combustible paper, and opening the door fifty times a day. Get yourself a real office and a separate server/equipment room, so you can properly control the climate and secure each according to the needs of the occupants.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday November 11, @10:09AM
from the well-thats-just-not-cool dept.
I'd have to agree: It's just-not-cool to submit a story with a misleading attribution like this. Think what you may about Miguel de Icaza, it's not appropriate use his byline with no hint of satirical intent (at least alter the name a little to show it's fake). That the story was posted by the founder of SlashDot, CmdrTaco, saddens me. I see now that it has an added tag of migueldeicaza as a result. This would have been unjustified if the story hadn't been submitted this way.
Girls were banned from the parties when they began appearing in diapers, black wigs and latex gloves. Partygoers complained that the pepper spray was a turnoff...
Get thy bearings, practice some discipline, or you're in for one more red nightmare. Learn to eat your own cat food, great deceiver, before your coda is a requiem for a fallen angel. We'll let you know if we lament your passing in an epitaph. You may be walking on air now, but soon you'll have only the sheltering sky to protect your easy money, you dinosaur. One big happy family? It is for you, but not for us. If you think the fracture you get when Neal and Jack and me beat you with no warning will leave us sleepless, well, we'll let you know. You should be happy with what you have to be happy with.
Appropriate use of technology offered by a competent external provider can make up for the shortcomings of local IT staff.
Nobody's going to argue with that. But it's still a holy grail, and doesn't necessarily imply that the result is going to be less IT jobs. In fact, I've seen this turn into a need for more IT staff, simply because regular staff find the systems too complex or distracting from other duties. They still rely on local IT staff to troubleshoot, educate, and serve as liaison with the providers. And now it's these providers who are getting in the way of business. Everyone just moved one chair to the left and created a vacancy that must be filled.
Your local BOFH may seem like an obstructionist who likes to say no all the time, but this person may also be one of the few stewards in the department (or entire company) charged with protecting sensitive data in compliance with company policy and government regulations. If these gatekeepers start disappearing, the next story will be about managers whose heads are rolling because they entrusted their untrained staff to observe HIPAA, FERPA, and SOX regulations while creating mashups, wikis and blogs at free Web 2.0 services. It won't be long before a simple Google search for Excel spreadsheet markup or Word tables starts turning up payroll records and the like.
Where were you losers the last ten years when the practice became commonplace? Clue alert: Verizon sells Verizon-branded phones that.. surprise... only work on Verizon's network!!! OMG!!! Where's the outrage? Instead, the losers wait until there's a phone they actually want and suddenly discover a heretofore unknown principle to stand on.
Well... isn't that kind of the point? People are outraged. But, where before they could choose a lackluster phone from an offering of many lackluster phones, here's a desirable phone not available for their carrier. This forces them to ponder, "Why is my phone tied to a carrier in the first place?" The lightbulb goes on over their heads, and they collectively cry "We're sick and tired and we're not going to take it any more!" Realizing that's merely symbolic, they hire a lawyer.
I guarantee you, Apple could renig on (or renegotiate) the AT&T deal, unlock their phone, and dominate the market. Locking the iPhone to a single carrier was the stupidest thing Apple has done in a long, long time. What, did they think none of the carriers would offer it? Hindsight is 20/20, but people want this phone, and they'll leave carriers to get it.
TLDs are very useful. Registration for TLDs is also good. Reserving a few TLDs (like.gov) can also serve an important purpose. What's not so good is restricting all TLDs to a handful of arbitrary strings. Let people register whatever available TLD they want, and assign them to root name servers by hashing the first few letters. Instead of slashdot.org being handled by the org root name server, the slashdot TLD would be handled by the/s/l/a root name server.
...a group of lawyers will make everything crystal clear to us. Then another, larger group of lawyers will come in and polish that crystal. Hmmm, looks like we better find someone to count the crystal...
There is a constant battle between the demands of the viewer and the demands of the provider. Switching the venue doesn't change a thing.
Sure, there is the brief period when the provider is wooing the viewer away from a rival. But once the transition is complete, things are subject to change in favor of the provider, who has the upper hand. There's no doubt that disruptive technologies deliver new benefits, but we've seen this before. I remember when cable was introduced in the US. One of the benefits was the vast improvement in signal quality, so that even local broadcast stations were easier to watch, if included (and in most cases, this was obligatory). But another major draw was the fact that many cable-only stations were commercial-free! And this was supposedly because direct payment by the viewer made advertising obsolete! Fast forward to the present, and you'll find the cable-only channels have the highest percentage of advertising, including endless popups that obscure the content you've paid to watch, but never the ads themselves. Am I getting what I paid for? Not anymore. It seems obvious that online media is poised and ready to follow the same course.
Traditional projects using so called "best practices" fail with atonishing regularity.
Most projects fail, regardless of whether best practices were followed (although I believe that implementing best practices informed by experience will improve the chances of a project's success).
Your list of problems that contribute to failure is spot on. To that list, I would add poor planning, which includes identifying if the need really exists. I'm sure many developers here have worked on a "high priority" project that became a failure simply because it was delivered, but never used, or even evaluated.
But TorrentSpy was trying to outsmart her with a bullshit argument. They were stressing that RAM is volatile, hoping the court would conclude that the information was unavailable for logging. Nice try, but we all know that isn't true, and if this argument was meant to avoid an order to log the information, it was pretty feeble. Their decision to block connections from the US, on the other hand, was brilliant. It may be a small win for the MPAA, but there's no reason TorrentSpy should facilitate the entrapment of their users.
I don't advocate censorship of the arts or product tampering. My understanding is that the music is altered voluntarily by the artist so that it may be considered for sale by Walmart. The artist does not have to comply. I very much agree with you that there should be a prominent notice that the product has been altered to meet certain guidelines. Just keep in mind that some people will seek out such a notice, especially if they want to be sure a purchase is age-appropriate. This adds value to some consumers. The fact that an artist will alter their work to participate has the same impact on their integrity as any other reaction they may have to their audience or market factors. At least with downloaded music, you can purchase individual songs, so the impact Walmart has had due to its instore album sales may actually decrease, since they can opt to make available online only the songs that meet their guidelines.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also taking advantage of VMWare to run Windows, but my goal is to reduce its footprint in my network, not increase it. For example, one VM is being prepared to only process documents with Office 2007 and Acrobat Professional. It's available via Remote Desktop and will never be used to access the Internet for anything other than software/security updates. Yes, the security of this system is hanging on a policy decision, but more secure and pleasurable environments are available in my network for web surfing and email (mainly Linux and OS X), so this isn't a burden at all. In fact, it's a welcome relief, since I can now archive images of the VM to restore whenever a software upgrade disrupts Windows (the main incentive for this move). There's no reason the same can't be done in a lot of environments using thin/fat linux clients and a Windows Terminal Server. Even nontechnical users can browse locally on Linux with Firefox and click an icon to run a Remote Desktop client for Windows-only tasks.
I think the response time of most Linux or BSD distributions is admirable where security patches are concerned, but the Debian OpenSSL fiasco was a longstanding bug that went undetected for years and will have ramifications for a very long time. It didn't merely affect running SSH servers, it made it easier to crack a variety of keys, regardless of their strength. Many of these were generated a long time ago and will remain in production until some overworked admin gets a chance to test the keys for the vulnerability. The test itself is pretty easy, and victims will be open to a variety of attacks. Those in the know are already incurring a labor cost of replacing SSL certificates (thank god the commercial CAs stepped up to the plate and offered free replacements), and face the even harder task of identifying vulnerable SSH keys used for public key authentication to their systems (any system, not just Debian-based). There may even be mounds of data that's been encrypted and archived, but not really safe. I'm extremely happy I switched from Debian before this bug was introduced (I loved Woody, but couldn't stand the way they were tampering with upstream source in Sarge, an instinct that I'm glad I followed). But I've watched other shops jump on the Ubuntu wagon for servers, because it's "easy", and all they've done is run the update. They haven't made an attempt to replace vulnerable keys. This has set the stage for a smear campaign against Linux in the enterprise, which is undeserved for most distributions. Kudos to Debian for their response, but this mess is reminiscent of the Victor Hugo story, "A Fight with a Cannon", where the hero is given a medal, then executed for being the cause of the catastrophe in the first place.
I like this quote:
Put this way, it seems obvious that the sharing of ideas (and intellectual property is essentially ideas, isn't it?) is free speech. So, the question is: Is free speech free as in beer, or free as in... my head hurts.
I wonder how much energy would be generated by a hip brake as I perfect the ass groove in my office chair all day...
I'm a web developer, and I take exception to your remark. I do nothing simply.
I wish I had mod points to give you. While I don't think OLPC is perfect (from the beginning, I've wondered why poor children in the US were excluded), it partly seems to operate in the spirit of recognizing past mistakes and doing things better the second time around. I'm convinced this is one of the reasons the /. crowd is so interested. I know I'd welcome a new and improved common denominator in the babelsphere of computing...
And I'm sick of consumers thinking they are qualified to do A/B comparisons of audio formats. As a musician, I can tell you that they all pretty much suck. I compensate, tweak, & adjust endlessly to get the final digital master to sound the way I want. It's not perfect, but digital recording was a godsend compared to the analog equipment available in the same price range. There is simply no comparison.
So, when the time comes to pick a distribution format, I'm painfully aware of the shortcomings, after hearing the source hundreds or even thousands of times. I don't care about unquantifiable metrics like "warmth", "nuance", or "presence". I've already taken care of that in my recording. I want to be able to switch between the master and the copy and not be able to detect any difference on the multiple playback systems I test. Beyond that, I only care about following a mastering standard that lets the consumer listen to an assortment of music without constantly adjusting the volume control.
It's time for the Crappy Format A vs. Crappy Format B wars to end. It's hard to justify any data compression or audio degredation in light of today's available storage and bandwidth. As a consumer, I just realized I could rip all of my CD's onto a new hard drive in a lossless format at a trivial cost, with room to spare. Who knows? Then I might actually care about what sound card, D/A converter, amplifier, and speakers I use in my home entertainment system.
Privacy is still an issue if an administrator manipulates the counseling service to build a case against a student because the administrator feels politically threatened. Counseling at universities can save lives, but students will be less likely to use the service if they feel that they must sacrifice confidentiality. That would be a real tragedy.
This is not true in my experience. Slackware has legendary stability, partly due to not having a package manager that tracks dependencies. If you're missing something, just install it (however you want) and move along. Try repairing a dependency-based package manager when it becomes corrupt -- now, that's real chaos!
Seriously, if you've been given the opportunity to spec a room for equipment, do it right. The last thing you want is some heat-generating, water-vapor-producing meat bag rolling around on an office chair, piling up combustible paper, and opening the door fifty times a day. Get yourself a real office and a separate server/equipment room, so you can properly control the climate and secure each according to the needs of the occupants.
I'd have to agree: It's just-not-cool to submit a story with a misleading attribution like this. Think what you may about Miguel de Icaza, it's not appropriate use his byline with no hint of satirical intent (at least alter the name a little to show it's fake). That the story was posted by the founder of SlashDot, CmdrTaco, saddens me. I see now that it has an added tag of migueldeicaza as a result. This would have been unjustified if the story hadn't been submitted this way.
Girls were banned from the parties when they began appearing in diapers, black wigs and latex gloves. Partygoers complained that the pepper spray was a turnoff...
RIAA:
Get thy bearings, practice some discipline, or you're in for one more red nightmare. Learn to eat your own cat food, great deceiver, before your coda is a requiem for a fallen angel. We'll let you know if we lament your passing in an epitaph. You may be walking on air now, but soon you'll have only the sheltering sky to protect your easy money, you dinosaur. One big happy family? It is for you, but not for us. If you think the fracture you get when Neal and Jack and me beat you with no warning will leave us sleepless, well, we'll let you know. You should be happy with what you have to be happy with.
Or, to put your comment another way:
Nobody's going to argue with that. But it's still a holy grail, and doesn't necessarily imply that the result is going to be less IT jobs. In fact, I've seen this turn into a need for more IT staff, simply because regular staff find the systems too complex or distracting from other duties. They still rely on local IT staff to troubleshoot, educate, and serve as liaison with the providers. And now it's these providers who are getting in the way of business. Everyone just moved one chair to the left and created a vacancy that must be filled.
Your local BOFH may seem like an obstructionist who likes to say no all the time, but this person may also be one of the few stewards in the department (or entire company) charged with protecting sensitive data in compliance with company policy and government regulations. If these gatekeepers start disappearing, the next story will be about managers whose heads are rolling because they entrusted their untrained staff to observe HIPAA, FERPA, and SOX regulations while creating mashups, wikis and blogs at free Web 2.0 services. It won't be long before a simple Google search for Excel spreadsheet markup or Word tables starts turning up payroll records and the like.
They repeated the experiment in Canada, but they had to blur the crows' faces to comply with tougher privacy laws.
Well... isn't that kind of the point? People are outraged. But, where before they could choose a lackluster phone from an offering of many lackluster phones, here's a desirable phone not available for their carrier. This forces them to ponder, "Why is my phone tied to a carrier in the first place?" The lightbulb goes on over their heads, and they collectively cry "We're sick and tired and we're not going to take it any more!" Realizing that's merely symbolic, they hire a lawyer.
I guarantee you, Apple could renig on (or renegotiate) the AT&T deal, unlock their phone, and dominate the market. Locking the iPhone to a single carrier was the stupidest thing Apple has done in a long, long time. What, did they think none of the carriers would offer it? Hindsight is 20/20, but people want this phone, and they'll leave carriers to get it.
This is clearly Challenge/Response with automated whitelisting. The following Wikipedia entry addresses every facet of this system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge-response_spam_filteringTLDs are very useful. Registration for TLDs is also good. Reserving a few TLDs (like .gov) can also serve an important purpose. What's not so good is restricting all TLDs to a handful of arbitrary strings. Let people register whatever available TLD they want, and assign them to root name servers by hashing the first few letters. Instead of slashdot.org being handled by the org root name server, the slashdot TLD would be handled by the /s/l/a root name server.
Google is based on Clippy!
...a group of lawyers will make everything crystal clear to us. Then another, larger group of lawyers will come in and polish that crystal. Hmmm, looks like we better find someone to count the crystal...
But whose demands will be met?
There is a constant battle between the demands of the viewer and the demands of the provider. Switching the venue doesn't change a thing.
Sure, there is the brief period when the provider is wooing the viewer away from a rival. But once the transition is complete, things are subject to change in favor of the provider, who has the upper hand. There's no doubt that disruptive technologies deliver new benefits, but we've seen this before. I remember when cable was introduced in the US. One of the benefits was the vast improvement in signal quality, so that even local broadcast stations were easier to watch, if included (and in most cases, this was obligatory). But another major draw was the fact that many cable-only stations were commercial-free! And this was supposedly because direct payment by the viewer made advertising obsolete! Fast forward to the present, and you'll find the cable-only channels have the highest percentage of advertising, including endless popups that obscure the content you've paid to watch, but never the ads themselves. Am I getting what I paid for? Not anymore. It seems obvious that online media is poised and ready to follow the same course.
Most projects fail, regardless of whether best practices were followed (although I believe that implementing best practices informed by experience will improve the chances of a project's success).
Your list of problems that contribute to failure is spot on. To that list, I would add poor planning, which includes identifying if the need really exists. I'm sure many developers here have worked on a "high priority" project that became a failure simply because it was delivered, but never used, or even evaluated.
But TorrentSpy was trying to outsmart her with a bullshit argument. They were stressing that RAM is volatile, hoping the court would conclude that the information was unavailable for logging. Nice try, but we all know that isn't true, and if this argument was meant to avoid an order to log the information, it was pretty feeble. Their decision to block connections from the US, on the other hand, was brilliant. It may be a small win for the MPAA, but there's no reason TorrentSpy should facilitate the entrapment of their users.
I don't advocate censorship of the arts or product tampering. My understanding is that the music is altered voluntarily by the artist so that it may be considered for sale by Walmart. The artist does not have to comply. I very much agree with you that there should be a prominent notice that the product has been altered to meet certain guidelines. Just keep in mind that some people will seek out such a notice, especially if they want to be sure a purchase is age-appropriate. This adds value to some consumers. The fact that an artist will alter their work to participate has the same impact on their integrity as any other reaction they may have to their audience or market factors. At least with downloaded music, you can purchase individual songs, so the impact Walmart has had due to its instore album sales may actually decrease, since they can opt to make available online only the songs that meet their guidelines.