Yes, I've had to support a fair number of them. You see a lot of places like schools districts and libraries aren't going to hire a network admin. What they're going to do is put the teacher that has a computer at home and knows how to install a printer into the job of admin. In some cases I dealt with former typing teachers that were put in charge of computer labs. Tenured, with typewriters obsolete, they became defacto computer instructors.
I recall one particular painful experience where I had someone that was so ignorant that I recommended the for dummies series on the nt server she had. I made sure not to be condescending, told her that the title was tongue in cheek. She responded by trying to get me fired after the fact since she had a masters degree and was unfallable for it. My boss let me know, but I didn't get in trouble for it.
I walked into one business where the front desk secretary had configured everything. They had a network of some 40 computers all using netbui and the server had never been patched at all - not even service packs. The entire network was infested with spyware and the like, and I had to play the bad guy to get rid of bonzi buddy, remember him?
Now the point you raise leads to a question. When these people don't bother to maintain their networks and cant be bothered to learn, should they be held legally responsible? These networks leak personal data all the time, get used as zombies and the like. Why not hold these places accountable when their failure to practice due diligance causes harm to others? They have to hire licensed and competent people for any number of occupations, so why not IT?
And in other predictions I have determined with a similiar level of scientific accuracy using the same method of bovinefecalius that we'll see:
The Minnesota Vikings will almost win the Superbowl in 2010, but get nuked by a terrorist right before they clench the game.
Manchester United will become a has been team that leases space to danceline competitions to pay for stadium lights.
The New York Yankees won't actually have to play the World Series to win after their payroll exceeds 1 billion dollars to save on wasteful travel costs.
The NHL will fold to be replaced by the CHL and the AHL with the Stanley cup auctioned on Ebay.
Command line arrogance cost Novell the network market. They originaly had the market because their only competition was banyan vines. Then MS came along with a gui server that could be handled by someone who could stumble their way through with a mouse. Novell refused to add a gui to their server for reasons unknown and lost the multi-billion dollar server market for it. Novell was king back then, and MS had a product that while inferior, you could use without being a comp sci major. They eventually came out with some gui tools to administer the server like console one, but it was too little, too late.
Now before you flame me, I learned on command line before windows ever came out, and am quite comfortable using it with Cisco routers or the like. I also think learning DOS should be a requirement for any technician or IT person outside of the *nix world. However a pretty good chunk of the server market is administered by people who are/not/ IT personel, and this is the portion of the market that simply won't be bothered to learn command line. It doesn't matter if the alternative is superior, all that matters is that they can "see".
My experience that weened me from using encyclopedias. It was 95 or 96 and my teacher for an international business class in college wanted us to do research on a country of our choise using only the Internet. This was a several day assignment, and part way through the first class I got called out by the teacher in front of the students because I was photoshopping game pieces for one of the civ games. Conversation went roughly like this:
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already? Me. Yup Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information? Me. CIA Classroom. Laughter breaks out. Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA? Me. That's what I just said. Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class. Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
I presently use verizon with a motorola 270c. It only gets about 12 Kbps but it will get me online to check email and look for help when I am on the road. It's painful, but it works. It uses a special adapter, but it installs pretty stable.
Oi, I feel sorry for you, that was just supposed to be a bad example to avoid.
On your sig though, I wish it wasn't so true, we have too many people here that have the right to vote but don't. Last presidential election we had less than 60 million people vote, that's less than half the eligible population. Unfortunately people seem to think it's ok not to participate in their government election process and then turn around and complain when those people do things they don't like. If your in Poland (guessing based on comment), out of curiousity, what portion of the eligible population votes if you happen to know?
Almost switched to AT&T a little bit ago, but then found out that all of their modem capable cell phones can only use that capability on their digital network. I explained I was wanting to use my cell phone as a regular analog modem, and was told it didn't matter. It was charged by the MB regardless, and to get more than 4 MB a month was extroidnarily expensive. Can you imagine you land line provider telling you that you would have to pay extra for using your line for a modem instead of voice? This wasn't a case of minutes or the like either.
Harold or Sid? Personaly, I'm a Sid fan, he's old and evil and reminds me of a friend of my fathers. That said, theres appeal to both methods. Sometimes you need finesse, sometimes you just need a hammer...
Site not hilarious, not well designed either. Have to scroll to read more than a half dozen lines of text in a story. It basicaly a small handful of stories about customers that don't understand DNS. As a sysadmin type, I was sorely dissapointed. Not only that, but the site melted almost right away. Yawn, next?
Why tumbleweeds? Next thing you know there are going to be giant beachball tumbleweeds by the thousands infesting that desert we call Mars. They'll be everywhere and future generations will have to see them in bad movies.
It's not welded shut, it's a one piece hood and quarterpanel assembly that can't be removed without the "special" tool. You can rest assured that the "special" tool is going to be a dealer only item. The DMCA also covers more than copying, it covers access to a system, and the bypassing the "special" tool could be considered circumsission.
This bears watching, especially since a "special" mechanics tool will be required to remove the one piece front end. Stick a "void if removed" warranty sticker over the "special" tool hole, enlist the DMCA and you've got an engine that can never legally be maintained by the owner. If you really want to go whole hog you call the "special" tool a security device and DMCA the car itself.
Just think, cars of the future could be the permanent property of the automotive world. You wouldn't but them, you would license them. I understand Idrive from BMW has a license sticker installed on the windshield that you are forced to accept (by removing) in some countries in order to use the car. All of this could be done with the law as it is today. Circumvention could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Manufactures would love this because it would force people to get their maintence, even routine maintenence would have to be done at the dealership at their extremely expensive rates. Rates so expensive an entire industry literaly grew up around alternative service options.
Now for the outlandish. This would be a good thing - because it would show joe sixpack how licensing and the DMCA are uncapitalistic and harmful. Your plumber may not give two hoots about a computer, but you can be sure he'll raise hell if he finds out he can't change his own oil or give the old jalolopee to his kids.
Interesting point, without question smaller land mass would certainly greatly influence the ease with which you can law infrastructure from fiber to mass transit. My point of view comes from people I've known who've worked in the telco's and what I've read in industry publications.
That being said, that would certainly be relevant for a large portion of the US geographicly speaking, but population wise most of the public lives in metro areas where you have a much higher density and where there is no good reason to have such deplorable last mile bandwidth solutions. Now I understand that places like downtown Boston and New York are effectively very short on space under the streets, but these areas are by far the exception.
We have got to get America up to the world stage if we want to compete on it. It was once ours and were paying people to take our place - there's something wrong with that.
Sad thing is that there are enormous quantities of dark fiber here in the US literaly doing nothing. Enormous increased bandwidth is immeadiately available and it is being kept off to create an artificial shortage. If telcos wont make their fiber available at reasonable rates to the people of the US, than the cities have to do it for them.
We here in the US are NOT at the top of the world when it comes to bandwidth available to the masses, I believe top would be South Korea. The whole thing is absolutely deplorable, were squandering our once high tech lead in the name of greater profits. By the time the powers that be finally realize it, it will be hell to catch up.
No I haven't, but I tend to read a fair chunk of British media online. Your horror stories did help inspire my comment if that makes a difference. It's just human nature. If something can be abused, it will be abused. From what I understand even with ungodly numbers or traffic cameras all about, fatalities and accidents haven't been reduced one iota, is that right?
Good idea but it won't work, here's why. This essentialy puts in real time monitoring information from your car's computer to a relay device that collates and condenses the information. In thoery this could allow more localized reporting conditions such as areas where a certain valley with a river can have weather different than the sorrounding community and so on. The article doesn't note if this is GPS enabled or not, but it would inevitably happen sooner or later.
But it wont work because if a device can tell if your antilock brakes are working it can just as easily tell if your speeding or any other number of big brother activities. This information could be relayed to your local municipality and insurance company. Imagine discovering that you've gotten a speeding ticket and your insurance rates went up before you even finished driving home.
This would be a very effective privacy erosion and people will rebel with the inevitable horror stories that would follow. Your boss could find out if you go drinking on the weekend, and so on. Imagine anyone being able to use this "public" information to stalk or harass someone. Since the information would reported to municipalities, it would by definition be public unless legislated otherwise.
Now, you could make it work, and it could produce very nice real time results. If several thousand cars all suddenly come to a crawl where traffic conditions wouldn't otherwise call for it an automated dispatch to 911 could be sent to find out why - there's probably a good reason for it. The problem is that you have to find a way of reporting the information in aggragate and without the ability to uniquely identify where it's coming from. If it can be uniquely identified it will be subponead by some lawyer and abused.
I agree not all old software should be upgraded. Windows 3.1 may rest in hell as far as I'm concerned. But it wasn't that long ago they tried to kill of Windows 98, that's what 25% or so of the home user base? I recognize that the 9.x kernel is inherintly insecure and outdated, but that's no excuse not to patch known exploits when their is a substantial user base out there.
I am not, by the way, saying that users should nut patch their systems, only that they should not be forced to upgrade working systems under auspices of security just because MS want's more revenue. They can pull that crap on the business market and get away with it, but joe sixpack can always go try that linux thingie he heard about.
"Almost all attacks against our software are against the legacy systems," he said.
"If you want more secure software, upgrade."
Sounds pretty close to an admission of deliberately leaving old OS's insecure to force upgrades to me. What really gets me though is the insinuation that those who don't hand over more money to the beast of redmond for shiny new software are somehow responsible for security exploits.
Certainly there are industry people that consider only NT 4 as being the only MS OS at all securable and only then because it has been around long enough to pretty much have it's holes ironed out. Is this just a prelude to their future excuse to force a rental model on the public?
Couple of thoughts on flash here. First in it's favor it would be quiter, have reduced heat load, power requirements and certainly faster. It would also be easier to implement DRM stuff and you could remotely flash someone's flash when they get online and wipe out any linux distros that got on their. More to the point they can DMCA the software on the flash especially if they mount the BIOS in the flash. It would also be nice to see from the standpoint of what it would do to flash memory prices. Remember the effect Windows 95 had on stagnant memory prices of $100 a meg (used to sell computers).
Now, that being said there is a serious problem with flash that prevents this from being used as a boot or swap partition of any kind. It has limited write capacity before it fails (10,000 writes or so).
Unless they can somehow develop new technology to get around this limitation, this could quickly become a very serious problem. For storing game saves and the like, 10,000 writes is plenty, but if your going to be constantly writing to the thing like a swap file would, you'll get about two weeks use before it's fried.
Possible solution; hybrid. Use a small microdrive from Hitachi similiar to what landed in the new mini ipod. Cheap, meant to be embedded, and hitachi will use a proprietary interface if you your big enough. Proprietary interface cuts down on hacks and helps make it a closed system. On top of this you put in a newcard (PCMCIA replacement) slot for a flash memory module that is used to store games. This would also allow you to run all kinds of other adapters. Keep in mind just like the usb slots in the current xbox, it doesn't have to be shaped like newcard to act like new card.
I don't think this would be covered under free speech as a fair use application. Instead this could be construed as defamation or slander. When these cases have come up in court before, the defining standard always has been that it must be obvious that the picture is either satire (Hustlers famous example of some evangelical priest) or being used to illustrate a political point (W with horns on his head or some such).
In this case what was done was not obvious until the original photographer looked at the picture and said "that's not right" and even he had to look at his original to be sure. It's certainly a good enough photoshop that it would easily fool most people who will give this only a scant few seconds before concluding Kerry did associate with Fonda. Since it depicted him side by side with Jane Fonda, with no way for the public to readily know it was a forgery, the only intent has to be slander.
Plagarist. I don't mind being copied, translated and quoted, but you passed this off as your own, and that's plagarism. Have you ripped off anything else I've written?
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Yes, I've had to support a fair number of them. You see a lot of places like schools districts and libraries aren't going to hire a network admin. What they're going to do is put the teacher that has a computer at home and knows how to install a printer into the job of admin. In some cases I dealt with former typing teachers that were put in charge of computer labs. Tenured, with typewriters obsolete, they became defacto computer instructors.
I recall one particular painful experience where I had someone that was so ignorant that I recommended the for dummies series on the nt server she had. I made sure not to be condescending, told her that the title was tongue in cheek. She responded by trying to get me fired after the fact since she had a masters degree and was unfallable for it. My boss let me know, but I didn't get in trouble for it.
I walked into one business where the front desk secretary had configured everything. They had a network of some 40 computers all using netbui and the server had never been patched at all - not even service packs. The entire network was infested with spyware and the like, and I had to play the bad guy to get rid of bonzi buddy, remember him?
Now the point you raise leads to a question. When these people don't bother to maintain their networks and cant be bothered to learn, should they be held legally responsible? These networks leak personal data all the time, get used as zombies and the like. Why not hold these places accountable when their failure to practice due diligance causes harm to others? They have to hire licensed and competent people for any number of occupations, so why not IT?
And in other predictions I have determined with a similiar level of scientific accuracy using the same method of bovinefecalius that we'll see:
The Minnesota Vikings will almost win the Superbowl in 2010, but get nuked by a terrorist right before they clench the game.
Manchester United will become a has been team that leases space to danceline competitions to pay for stadium lights.
The New York Yankees won't actually have to play the World Series to win after their payroll exceeds 1 billion dollars to save on wasteful travel costs.
The NHL will fold to be replaced by the CHL and the AHL with the Stanley cup auctioned on Ebay.
Makes me wonder, without sports and the likes of the Discovery and History channel if there would be any males of that age category watching TV.
Command line arrogance cost Novell the network market. They originaly had the market because their only competition was banyan vines. Then MS came along with a gui server that could be handled by someone who could stumble their way through with a mouse. Novell refused to add a gui to their server for reasons unknown and lost the multi-billion dollar server market for it. Novell was king back then, and MS had a product that while inferior, you could use without being a comp sci major. They eventually came out with some gui tools to administer the server like console one, but it was too little, too late.
/not/ IT personel, and this is the portion of the market that simply won't be bothered to learn command line. It doesn't matter if the alternative is superior, all that matters is that they can "see".
Now before you flame me, I learned on command line before windows ever came out, and am quite comfortable using it with Cisco routers or the like. I also think learning DOS should be a requirement for any technician or IT person outside of the *nix world. However a pretty good chunk of the server market is administered by people who are
My experience that weened me from using encyclopedias. It was 95 or 96 and my teacher for an international business class in college wanted us to do research on a country of our choise using only the Internet. This was a several day assignment, and part way through the first class I got called out by the teacher in front of the students because I was photoshopping game pieces for one of the civ games. Conversation went roughly like this:
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already?
Me. Yup
Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information?
Me. CIA
Classroom. Laughter breaks out.
Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA?
Me. That's what I just said.
Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class.
Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
I presently use verizon with a motorola 270c. It only gets about 12 Kbps but it will get me online to check email and look for help when I am on the road. It's painful, but it works. It uses a special adapter, but it installs pretty stable.
Oi, I feel sorry for you, that was just supposed to be a bad example to avoid.
On your sig though, I wish it wasn't so true, we have too many people here that have the right to vote but don't. Last presidential election we had less than 60 million people vote, that's less than half the eligible population. Unfortunately people seem to think it's ok not to participate in their government election process and then turn around and complain when those people do things they don't like. If your in Poland (guessing based on comment), out of curiousity, what portion of the eligible population votes if you happen to know?
Almost switched to AT&T a little bit ago, but then found out that all of their modem capable cell phones can only use that capability on their digital network. I explained I was wanting to use my cell phone as a regular analog modem, and was told it didn't matter. It was charged by the MB regardless, and to get more than 4 MB a month was extroidnarily expensive. Can you imagine you land line provider telling you that you would have to pay extra for using your line for a modem instead of voice? This wasn't a case of minutes or the like either.
Harold or Sid? Personaly, I'm a Sid fan, he's old and evil and reminds me of a friend of my fathers. That said, theres appeal to both methods. Sometimes you need finesse, sometimes you just need a hammer...
Site not hilarious, not well designed either. Have to scroll to read more than a half dozen lines of text in a story. It basicaly a small handful of stories about customers that don't understand DNS. As a sysadmin type, I was sorely dissapointed. Not only that, but the site melted almost right away. Yawn, next?
Why tumbleweeds? Next thing you know there are going to be giant beachball tumbleweeds by the thousands infesting that desert we call Mars. They'll be everywhere and future generations will have to see them in bad movies.
I'm not defending this use of the DMCA, I'm stating that this use could be done. In fact it has already been done - by a woodworking tool company.
2 21 921/32
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2003/10/22/
It's not welded shut, it's a one piece hood and quarterpanel assembly that can't be removed without the "special" tool. You can rest assured that the "special" tool is going to be a dealer only item. The DMCA also covers more than copying, it covers access to a system, and the bypassing the "special" tool could be considered circumsission.
This bears watching, especially since a "special" mechanics tool will be required to remove the one piece front end. Stick a "void if removed" warranty sticker over the "special" tool hole, enlist the DMCA and you've got an engine that can never legally be maintained by the owner. If you really want to go whole hog you call the "special" tool a security device and DMCA the car itself.
Just think, cars of the future could be the permanent property of the automotive world. You wouldn't but them, you would license them. I understand Idrive from BMW has a license sticker installed on the windshield that you are forced to accept (by removing) in some countries in order to use the car. All of this could be done with the law as it is today. Circumvention could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Manufactures would love this because it would force people to get their maintence, even routine maintenence would have to be done at the dealership at their extremely expensive rates. Rates so expensive an entire industry literaly grew up around alternative service options.
Now for the outlandish. This would be a good thing - because it would show joe sixpack how licensing and the DMCA are uncapitalistic and harmful. Your plumber may not give two hoots about a computer, but you can be sure he'll raise hell if he finds out he can't change his own oil or give the old jalolopee to his kids.
Interesting point, without question smaller land mass would certainly greatly influence the ease with which you can law infrastructure from fiber to mass transit. My point of view comes from people I've known who've worked in the telco's and what I've read in industry publications.
That being said, that would certainly be relevant for a large portion of the US geographicly speaking, but population wise most of the public lives in metro areas where you have a much higher density and where there is no good reason to have such deplorable last mile bandwidth solutions. Now I understand that places like downtown Boston and New York are effectively very short on space under the streets, but these areas are by far the exception.
We have got to get America up to the world stage if we want to compete on it. It was once ours and were paying people to take our place - there's something wrong with that.
Sad thing is that there are enormous quantities of dark fiber here in the US literaly doing nothing. Enormous increased bandwidth is immeadiately available and it is being kept off to create an artificial shortage. If telcos wont make their fiber available at reasonable rates to the people of the US, than the cities have to do it for them.
We here in the US are NOT at the top of the world when it comes to bandwidth available to the masses, I believe top would be South Korea. The whole thing is absolutely deplorable, were squandering our once high tech lead in the name of greater profits. By the time the powers that be finally realize it, it will be hell to catch up.
And only on slashdot would they have a good chunk of the readers never bat an eye at such a combo.
No I haven't, but I tend to read a fair chunk of British media online. Your horror stories did help inspire my comment if that makes a difference. It's just human nature. If something can be abused, it will be abused. From what I understand even with ungodly numbers or traffic cameras all about, fatalities and accidents haven't been reduced one iota, is that right?
Good idea but it won't work, here's why. This essentialy puts in real time monitoring information from your car's computer to a relay device that collates and condenses the information. In thoery this could allow more localized reporting conditions such as areas where a certain valley with a river can have weather different than the sorrounding community and so on. The article doesn't note if this is GPS enabled or not, but it would inevitably happen sooner or later.
But it wont work because if a device can tell if your antilock brakes are working it can just as easily tell if your speeding or any other number of big brother activities. This information could be relayed to your local municipality and insurance company. Imagine discovering that you've gotten a speeding ticket and your insurance rates went up before you even finished driving home.
This would be a very effective privacy erosion and people will rebel with the inevitable horror stories that would follow. Your boss could find out if you go drinking on the weekend, and so on. Imagine anyone being able to use this "public" information to stalk or harass someone. Since the information would reported to municipalities, it would by definition be public unless legislated otherwise.
Now, you could make it work, and it could produce very nice real time results. If several thousand cars all suddenly come to a crawl where traffic conditions wouldn't otherwise call for it an automated dispatch to 911 could be sent to find out why - there's probably a good reason for it. The problem is that you have to find a way of reporting the information in aggragate and without the ability to uniquely identify where it's coming from. If it can be uniquely identified it will be subponead by some lawyer and abused.
I agree not all old software should be upgraded. Windows 3.1 may rest in hell as far as I'm concerned. But it wasn't that long ago they tried to kill of Windows 98, that's what 25% or so of the home user base? I recognize that the 9.x kernel is inherintly insecure and outdated, but that's no excuse not to patch known exploits when their is a substantial user base out there.
I am not, by the way, saying that users should nut patch their systems, only that they should not be forced to upgrade working systems under auspices of security just because MS want's more revenue. They can pull that crap on the business market and get away with it, but joe sixpack can always go try that linux thingie he heard about.
Sounds pretty close to an admission of deliberately leaving old OS's insecure to force upgrades to me. What really gets me though is the insinuation that those who don't hand over more money to the beast of redmond for shiny new software are somehow responsible for security exploits.
Certainly there are industry people that consider only NT 4 as being the only MS OS at all securable and only then because it has been around long enough to pretty much have it's holes ironed out. Is this just a prelude to their future excuse to force a rental model on the public?
Couple of thoughts on flash here. First in it's favor it would be quiter, have reduced heat load, power requirements and certainly faster. It would also be easier to implement DRM stuff and you could remotely flash someone's flash when they get online and wipe out any linux distros that got on their. More to the point they can DMCA the software on the flash especially if they mount the BIOS in the flash. It would also be nice to see from the standpoint of what it would do to flash memory prices. Remember the effect Windows 95 had on stagnant memory prices of $100 a meg (used to sell computers).
e .h tm
Now, that being said there is a serious problem with flash that prevents this from being used as a boot or swap partition of any kind. It has limited write capacity before it fails (10,000 writes or so).
http://www.esacademy.com/faq/docs/flash/lifetim
Unless they can somehow develop new technology to get around this limitation, this could quickly become a very serious problem. For storing game saves and the like, 10,000 writes is plenty, but if your going to be constantly writing to the thing like a swap file would, you'll get about two weeks use before it's fried.
Possible solution; hybrid. Use a small microdrive from Hitachi similiar to what landed in the new mini ipod. Cheap, meant to be embedded, and hitachi will use a proprietary interface if you your big enough. Proprietary interface cuts down on hacks and helps make it a closed system. On top of this you put in a newcard (PCMCIA replacement) slot for a flash memory module that is used to store games. This would also allow you to run all kinds of other adapters. Keep in mind just like the usb slots in the current xbox, it doesn't have to be shaped like newcard to act like new card.
I don't think this would be covered under free speech as a fair use application. Instead this could be construed as defamation or slander. When these cases have come up in court before, the defining standard always has been that it must be obvious that the picture is either satire (Hustlers famous example of some evangelical priest) or being used to illustrate a political point (W with horns on his head or some such).
In this case what was done was not obvious until the original photographer looked at the picture and said "that's not right" and even he had to look at his original to be sure. It's certainly a good enough photoshop that it would easily fool most people who will give this only a scant few seconds before concluding Kerry did associate with Fonda. Since it depicted him side by side with Jane Fonda, with no way for the public to readily know it was a forgery, the only intent has to be slander.
You ripped me off. Word for word.
5 59 755
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=87052&cid=7
Plagarist. I don't mind being copied, translated and quoted, but you passed this off as your own, and that's plagarism. Have you ripped off anything else I've written?
Donate your check to the EFF and help fight for those freedoms you keep complaining about being taken away. Just forward your check to:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell
San Francisco, CA 94110
You can also make a donation at their website:
https://secure.eff.org/