A child of 14 would begin to suspect that the "game" they are playing is more than a game. No so a 6 year old boy. At least, when *I* was 14 I started questioning the ulterior motives of those around me, particularly those that gave me something I wanted for no return.
A 6 year old could reasonably be that innocent.
Any 14 year old that stupid wouldn't survive long.
Sure, that's why all the B2B sites are doing so well and not one has ever gone out of business.
CONTENT drives the internet. Johnney-come-lately "business" driving the internet is a load of C. R. A. P.
Business is taking over the internet because there is a profit to be made from clueless AOHell'ers, they can move ads SOOO much cheaper, and it is more effecient to operate over the internet than, say, a fax or a letter.
Like any cool toy, the internet will have business looking at it until they break it or own it utterly. Won't be long now....
I think the point is that they are out of ideas.
Ddos attacks are hell to find, almost impossible to stop, and rarely, if ever, do the phreaks go to jail. There are some exceptions.
I want one that uses a pnumatic ram to toss salesmen off my property, after they ignore the 8"x11" NO SOLICITING THIS MEANS YOU sign.
One that can sense when I bring a visitor home and clean up real quick.
One that uses a deep booming voice to say "THAT SCUM IS SCAMMING YOU!" when the A/C repairman says my unit will colapse into dust in four seconds, posining my family and pets.
I want one that will project a hologram of Satan when Jehova's witnesses come around, or one of an avenging angel when satanist's come knocking.
One that will order booze when I'm low and send the bill to M$.
One with a radio control unit built in to mow the lawn.
Scans my e-mail and ZOT's spammers, then delete the e-mail.
Seriously, I don't know the relm of possibility with neural-networks. Haven't looked at 'em, don't know what's possible and what isn't. Guess I need to start looking around for info....
Spam is commercial speech. Commercial speech does not enjoy the protections that free speech does.
What's the diff? Free speech is saying the goverment is wrong, that you think a law should be changed, or that someone should be impeached.
Free speech isn't saying "Buy my product, you will lose 50 lbs fast!" or "Work from home and make millions!".
The Freedom of Information Act is a bit to permissive, IMHO
Without getting into a flame war, I disagree. Many things that are secret are just mundane, and of no real value to anyone at all. We have seen classified stamped all over crimes. Iran-Contra, Groom lake pollution, LSD experiements on the public without permission or warning, and others are all examples of bad security policy and butt covering. We do need to rework how security works in this country. It is possible for a citizen to be held for a crime where he doesn't know what crime he committed, can't see the evidence against him, isn't allowed to talk to the press, public or family, and can be convicted and sentenced to life in jail all without confronting his accusors or seeing the evidence. Sometimes even the judge can't see the evidence, other than to have it described to him.
Don't bother trying to make a normal monitor work with PC hardware. It will never provide resoulition worth a damn. Bite the bullet and toss in a 19 or 21 inch monitor. If at all possible, don't take the monitor out of it's case. Keeping the thing working right and looking right is a pain in the kernel.
I'd make up the control area on a wiring harness, especially if your current control field is like most, and it can be unlatched and removed. Use the old control field as a pattern to make up several other in different configurations. That way you can have one field for car games, another for shoot-um-ups, another for flight,.... you get the picture.
If you still have the coin mech, and state law allows it in your area (it wouldn't in Texas), keep those and hook them up to RI on a serial port or on one of the joystick buttons. Just for kicks, you understand...
Also, if the game cabnet has glass, not plexiglass, but glass, you may wish to take the glass off and scan it into a digitizer of some sort, then print it back out with a color printer onto plexiglass. These glass fronts are impossible to get anymore.
The company also announced that it would start cracking down on spam, or unsolicited email, sent to its members.
Starting with E-Bay themselves, we can only hope.
I quit using e-bay when I started getting spam to an account I only used for E-Bay. Never posted anywhere with that account, never used it but for e-bay. SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM.
I hope E-Bay goes out of business. I've hated their policy, "service", and attitude for quite a while. I was never scammed, but thousands were. Good ridence to them.
I really don't understand this purposal. Are they that naive? it will be hacked within 1 week and there will be Windows/Linux/other-os's patches/firmwares/drivers that will bypass this stupid copy-protection.
I refer you to DMCA. It makes anything to bypass access control a crime to have. Get it? "You can't run LINUX! It's a CRACKER/HACKER tool! Go to jail. BAD computer user. BAD."
Orrin Hatch, while not my favorite pol, does have a clue about fair use. I urge everyone to e-mail him if you happen to live in the land of the (access) fee.
I've got a patent pending
on swallowing, oxidation, and chewing gum.
I've got patents pending on Sex, breathing, eating, going to the bathroom, and growing toe nails. I'm currently litigating sin with Satan, and grace with God. We don't expect to win with sin, but the grace thing we think we gotta chance.
E-mail is a touchstone of geekdom. One can tell the level of geekdom from how much exciment is generated. The more excitement, the less the geekdom.
This is one service that should be metered to the lowest common denominator and often isn't. By that I mean that when considering an e-mail system, one should factor in the least able reader that one will be sending to. Frequently, I see packages with integrated e-mail, such as a help desk application, that send only to itself, and don't integrate or communicate with other e-mail systems, or impose ridiculous concessions from it's users. This is its death knell.
OL2000 is another such package that should be listing. Hear the peals from the tolling bell, Microsoft?
In the silence between pulls of the bell rope, MS should turn it's gaze inward and root out it's basic fallacies, that they are the greatest, the one true way, the Holy Grail.
The geek community, at the same time, needs an understanding that what we do is not for our gratification only, or even first or second. Our work is to be like the light switch. Unnoticed and ignored (by the average user) until it doesn't work anymore. Which hopefully will not happen if we do our jobs well.
MS, by setting it's own e-mail system to break all others, it doing nothing more than the dog with the fire plug; just marking its range. We all know that MS is marking all over the computer industry. The real problem here is that, for the most part, MS is such a big dog it can get away with it.
The director doesn't care that MS is breaking things, he only knows that this MS package isn't working any more and it is obvious to him it's our fault because we are one of those subversive types that doesn't like MS, so we must have broken it.
I've heard MS sales drones espousing this to the higher ups more than once. So remember, if it's MS, and it isn't working, it's because of us subversive Open Source types making it break.
There is a destiny that shapes our ends, and it's MS. Good thing I believe in free will.
With the number of CC DB's being cracked, hijacked, cloned to hostile servers, I mean why the hell do that have to keep your number after you use it? Amazon does this, B&N, Buy.com, and most e-stores. Once the transaction is approved, wipe the number. You don't have to have it anymore.
If you really, really, want to keep it, set up a dot matrix and print it out. I think the Credit Card companies should charge the fraud back to the company that stored the number. That ought to promote securing a server!
...they have pledged not to discriminate against competing content providers or Internet services and have signed a memorandum of understanding promising to provide competitors access to
Time Warner's cable systems.
I forget who said "I don't care who does the electin', longs I get to do the nominatin'." Heuy Long, I think.
Funny that the EU is the only ones at this point says, "HEY, If AOL has the internet, TIME has all the news, Warner has all the movies, books and recording studios, gee, they might use all that news disemination to squelch oposing viewpoints!".
Duuhhh.
Everyone knows the great impartial coverage CNN and various newspapers they own gave to the DcCSS story. Sure, filter every bit of news through them! We Love It(tm)!.
Got to thinking about how to detect astroids
way off in space. OK, so the 4th root applies to detecting radiation off of an object (hey, it's just like calculating a flash picture) so the transmitter if using radar would have to be pretty powerfull. Granite does't have that great of a radar cross section, so you have to hit it with a lot of energy to get an echo at interplanatary distances. Iron and nickle would be a cinch, but we should worry about astroids that don't have metal in them.
So what else could be used? Light? Well, OK, but what about low albedo (sp, sorry) objects? Use something like lidar? (Laser radar.) Again, low light reflection dictates high detection power.
If we could detect mass somehow, that would be the way to go, but we can only detect mass at a distance by observing how it affects other mass as it passes.
Well, radiation (and this means more than radioactive, it includes light, radar, ect.) would mean very high output power and very sensitive recievers, with long dwell time for speed of light delays.
Be able to read any of three or four dozen MARC "standards"
Search on any word (but the stop dictionary for words such as the and to of ect.) for a word in any one of over 1K places in the marc record.
Be able to handle more than one library.
be able to store books in different locations within the library
do user tracking by overdue, notes on the user, automatically import from other databases or text files, have any one of several options for the user such as loan period (but checks the holding to see if the standard period is longer or shorter, or if the fine for overdue is less or more), be able to block a user, be able to block a user based on what library they are a user for, much much more
be able to route books between libraries.
be able to route books to outside vendors such as binders, restorers, storage, ect.ect.ect.
be able to find out who checked out a book last.
maintain statitics on the book such as size, no. pages, language, print size, ISBN, LCCN, Be able to change the default loan period, how many times used in the library, checked out, inventoried, price, "extras" such as clear cover, a place for notes for the whole library system and another place for each library, ability to search on the note, title author, publisher, copyright date, date purchased, dewy, LCN cataloging or some other system, age limits for checking out.
keep track of budget and invoices, orders, barcodes, much much more,
Ability to keep track of when the next magizne is due, when the subscription runs out, where the old copies vs. new copies are, index the mags.,
Print reports on just about anything so throw a report generator at it.
And if you want more, there is about five hundred pages of basic requirements in any book on library science. Add to that you have to know who a user is and if they are authorized to do any particular function, (Some can check out, but not in, others can add a note but not edit the book, some can edit books but not at any library except where they are assigned) you get the picture.
Off hand, I'd say that a good library system is about four hundred times more difficult than writing Linux. I know. I do Unix admin and Library systems for a living.
Trust me, this is not simple. I do think it very worthwhile though.
In many instances during the trial, Judge Kaplin
seems downright nasty to you. Some times I thought you had stepped over a line he had clearly drawn, some times I thought it was totally unprovoked.
Is there some "history" between you and Kaplin? If so, will that affect your chances on appeal?
It seems to me that Kaplin had to turn handsprings in reading the law the way he did. The law seems fairly clear that "fair use" was to be preserved, and Kaplin had to go a long way out to read otherwise. Am I wrong, or is reading the law the way Kaplin did the correct way to read it?
I used to administrate 126 Unix boxen. I was able to update software, insert patches, remote controll the server, make backups, do restores, and just about anything that didn't need a hand to turn the screwdriver over the network. All by my lonesome.
Let's see that with NT. With only 35 NT boxen, we now have 4 full time NT administrators and they are bitching that they are too busy.
Meta Group Inc. analyst Peter Firstbrook goes so far as to say that "Linux
should be shunned. It should not be a part of the business process." Firstbrook
objects to the very feature that most tout as Linux's number one
asset--the fact that anyone can tweak the code--because it creates
a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else
knows about, and that probably go undocumented.
First, this is a human issue, not a technical issue. The same can (and
should) be said for any other operating system. One is able to tweak
NT's registry, or Novell's set parameters, and fail to document the
changes.
Second: This supposes that one did not make a full image backup of
the system. As an administrator, I would discharge anyone that did not
take this elementary and common precaution.
.
This is a trivial exercise in Unix, almost impossible in NT, and
somewhat difficult in Novell.
I timed initiating a complete restore for the following systems:
1. AIX - 15 minutes (mostly waiting for the tape to finish booting)
Extra software purchase required at unknown cost.
2. SCO - 5 minutes (2 diskettes to boot, insert tape, press 1)
Extra software purchase required at $300 US per system
3. Linux - 20 minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore
Used native software only at no extra cost
4. BSDi - 20 Minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore
Used native software only at no extra cost
5. Novell - 1 hour 50 minutes to load OS and restore application software.
Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system
Full restore from backup not possible because some files
were open during backup and not backed up.
Some manual intervention was required during the restore process.
6. NT - over a day to load OS and restore software, configure same.
Not able to completely restore tape as some files were open
and not backed up, system repeatedly locked up during restore.
Manual intervention during restore process needed many times.
Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system.
NOTE: Only time spent actually completing tasks to start the backup
is included in these times. This also included the time needed to
configure the restore software, add the restore media device to
the OS including drivers and software. The time required to actually
complete the restore is not included as this is a function of the
amount of data on the system and the speed of the restore media
device, drivers and hardware.
Third: Gartner Groups analysis of NT shows that it takes 33% more
time to administrate NT as opposed to Novell and Unix system, requiring
more administrator time and cost.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact
that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating
system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server,"
he says.
And I suppose that once you buy a car, one never need buy gas? Only
a complete idiot thinks that the purchase is the end of expenditure
of any item.
Labor is a far more significant proportion of IT costs,
and the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time
tinkering with Linux.
Or playing Quake, or Arena, or Flight Simulator. My experience is that
my peers tend to tinker at home, where interruptions are at a minimum.
Again, this isn't an issue of the operating system, this is a management
issue. Bad management is possible in any operating system environment.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly
because of the cool factor," he says.
And it's likin' to be seein' the survey that
got those numbers I'd be.
As a class, systems people tend to ignore
hype and look to the heart of the matter. "Is this the appropriate
technology? Will it do what I need? Will the total cost be
reasonable? Is it dependable, and will it run on equipment
we can maintain?" are all questions my peers and I ask of any
product being deployed.
Mr. Firstbrook implies that my peers and I are idiots and will use any
cool tool that comes along. My response is that most of us choose the
tool best suited for the task as best we're able and given to
understand that task.
A survey of over eighteen million web sites by www.netcraft.net
shows that Linux is running 35.73%, Microsoft is running 21.32%.Source: www.netcraft.net/survey Further, studies show that
Linux/Apachie are gaining market share from almost everyone.
"Having somebody who can
screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says. --T.R.
Mr. Firstbrook must live in terror or only hire incompetent help.
It is possible to "screw around" with all operating systems
more complex than the one to run a toaster, and even that has an
adjustment for how brown you want your toast. NT has registry
settings, configuration files, and so on. Novell has it's set commands,
configuration files,.NLM's. Unix has programming, configuration
files, and many many other ways to "tweak" it.
My suggestion to Mr. Firstbrook is that he look for another line of
work, as he is ignorant of how and why computers work, what it takes
to run them, and how to choose what to run.
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Yet this simile keeps being used. These traits are relitive. When (or if) the change comes, one generation will become used to it, as we are used to medicine now. Our great grandparents would be agog with what the medical industry can do today, compaired to when they were alive.
Yes, we need to set some gound rules for how this information is used, no, it won't destroy us overnight.
Change is Gods way of telling us we are not dead yet.
Slashdot Mirror
A 6 year old could reasonably be that innocent. Any 14 year old that stupid wouldn't survive long.
Still listed as pending.... Hmmm.
Sure, that's why all the B2B sites are doing so well and not one has ever gone out of business.
CONTENT drives the internet. Johnney-come-lately "business" driving the internet is a load of C. R. A. P.
Business is taking over the internet because there is a profit to be made from clueless AOHell'ers, they can move ads SOOO much cheaper, and it is more effecient to operate over the internet than, say, a fax or a letter.
Like any cool toy, the internet will have business looking at it until they break it or own it utterly. Won't be long now....
IPv6, where are you?
I want one that uses a pnumatic ram to toss salesmen off my property, after they ignore the 8"x11" NO SOLICITING THIS MEANS YOU sign.
One that can sense when I bring a visitor home and clean up real quick.
One that uses a deep booming voice to say "THAT SCUM IS SCAMMING YOU!" when the A/C repairman says my unit will colapse into dust in four seconds, posining my family and pets.
I want one that will project a hologram of Satan when Jehova's witnesses come around, or one of an avenging angel when satanist's come knocking.
One that will order booze when I'm low and send the bill to M$.
One with a radio control unit built in to mow the lawn.
Scans my e-mail and ZOT's spammers, then delete the e-mail.
Seriously, I don't know the relm of possibility with neural-networks. Haven't looked at 'em, don't know what's possible and what isn't. Guess I need to start looking around for info....
Call Texas Workforce Comm.
Call an attorney
file a lien against the real property of the business.
IANAL
Free speech isn't saying "Buy my product, you will lose 50 lbs fast!" or "Work from home and make millions!".
Without getting into a flame war, I disagree. Many things that are secret are just mundane, and of no real value to anyone at all. We have seen classified stamped all over crimes. Iran-Contra, Groom lake pollution, LSD experiements on the public without permission or warning, and others are all examples of bad security policy and butt covering. We do need to rework how security works in this country. It is possible for a citizen to be held for a crime where he doesn't know what crime he committed, can't see the evidence against him, isn't allowed to talk to the press, public or family, and can be convicted and sentenced to life in jail all without confronting his accusors or seeing the evidence. Sometimes even the judge can't see the evidence, other than to have it described to him.
No, I'm not making this up.
I'd make up the control area on a wiring harness, especially if your current control field is like most, and it can be unlatched and removed. Use the old control field as a pattern to make up several other in different configurations. That way you can have one field for car games, another for shoot-um-ups, another for flight, .... you get the picture.
If you still have the coin mech, and state law allows it in your area (it wouldn't in Texas), keep those and hook them up to RI on a serial port or on one of the joystick buttons. Just for kicks, you understand...
Also, if the game cabnet has glass, not plexiglass, but glass, you may wish to take the glass off and scan it into a digitizer of some sort, then print it back out with a color printer onto plexiglass. These glass fronts are impossible to get anymore.
Starting with E-Bay themselves, we can only hope.
I quit using e-bay when I started getting spam to an account I only used for E-Bay. Never posted anywhere with that account, never used it but for e-bay. SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM.
I hope E-Bay goes out of business. I've hated their policy, "service", and attitude for quite a while. I was never scammed, but thousands were. Good ridence to them.
In a minute I'll tell you how I really feel.
I refer you to DMCA. It makes anything to bypass access control a crime to have. Get it? "You can't run LINUX! It's a CRACKER/HACKER tool! Go to jail. BAD computer user. BAD."
Orrin Hatch, while not my favorite pol, does have a clue about fair use. I urge everyone to e-mail him if you happen to live in the land of the (access) fee.
Someone to love
Something to do
Something to look forward to
12 hugs a day.
sleep
fun
good news
I hope she was born in the US! We need a few smarter and kinder people here....
Where do you stand on this issue and what would you do?
I've got patents pending on Sex, breathing, eating, going to the bathroom, and growing toe nails. I'm currently litigating sin with Satan, and grace with God. We don't expect to win with sin, but the grace thing we think we gotta chance.
Laugh, it's funny.
This is one service that should be metered to the lowest common denominator and often isn't. By that I mean that when considering an e-mail system, one should factor in the least able reader that one will be sending to. Frequently, I see packages with integrated e-mail, such as a help desk application, that send only to itself, and don't integrate or communicate with other e-mail systems, or impose ridiculous concessions from it's users. This is its death knell.
OL2000 is another such package that should be listing. Hear the peals from the tolling bell, Microsoft?
In the silence between pulls of the bell rope, MS should turn it's gaze inward and root out it's basic fallacies, that they are the greatest, the one true way, the Holy Grail.
The geek community, at the same time, needs an understanding that what we do is not for our gratification only, or even first or second. Our work is to be like the light switch. Unnoticed and ignored (by the average user) until it doesn't work anymore. Which hopefully will not happen if we do our jobs well.
MS, by setting it's own e-mail system to break all others, it doing nothing more than the dog with the fire plug; just marking its range. We all know that MS is marking all over the computer industry. The real problem here is that, for the most part, MS is such a big dog it can get away with it.
The director doesn't care that MS is breaking things, he only knows that this MS package isn't working any more and it is obvious to him it's our fault because we are one of those subversive types that doesn't like MS, so we must have broken it.
I've heard MS sales drones espousing this to the higher ups more than once. So remember, if it's MS, and it isn't working, it's because of us subversive Open Source types making it break.
There is a destiny that shapes our ends, and it's MS. Good thing I believe in free will.
IANAL: Actually, Errors and Omissions would be a better supposition.
If you really, really, want to keep it, set up a dot matrix and print it out. I think the Credit Card companies should charge the fraud back to the company that stored the number. That ought to promote securing a server!
I forget who said "I don't care who does the electin', longs I get to do the nominatin'." Heuy Long, I think.
Funny that the EU is the only ones at this point says, "HEY, If AOL has the internet, TIME has all the news, Warner has all the movies, books and recording studios, gee, they might use all that news disemination to squelch oposing viewpoints!".
Duuhhh.
Everyone knows the great impartial coverage CNN and various newspapers they own gave to the DcCSS story. Sure, filter every bit of news through them! We Love It(tm)!.
So what else could be used? Light? Well, OK, but what about low albedo (sp, sorry) objects? Use something like lidar? (Laser radar.) Again, low light reflection dictates high detection power.
If we could detect mass somehow, that would be the way to go, but we can only detect mass at a distance by observing how it affects other mass as it passes.
Well, radiation (and this means more than radioactive, it includes light, radar, ect.) would mean very high output power and very sensitive recievers, with long dwell time for speed of light delays.
Any thoughts?
Be able to read any of three or four dozen MARC "standards"
Search on any word (but the stop dictionary for words such as the and to of ect.) for a word in any one of over 1K places in the marc record.
Be able to handle more than one library.
be able to store books in different locations within the library
do user tracking by overdue, notes on the user, automatically import from other databases or text files, have any one of several options for the user such as loan period (but checks the holding to see if the standard period is longer or shorter, or if the fine for overdue is less or more), be able to block a user, be able to block a user based on what library they are a user for, much much more
be able to route books between libraries.
be able to route books to outside vendors such as binders, restorers, storage, ect.ect.ect.
be able to find out who checked out a book last.
maintain statitics on the book such as size, no. pages, language, print size, ISBN, LCCN, Be able to change the default loan period, how many times used in the library, checked out, inventoried, price, "extras" such as clear cover, a place for notes for the whole library system and another place for each library, ability to search on the note, title author, publisher, copyright date, date purchased, dewy, LCN cataloging or some other system, age limits for checking out.
keep track of budget and invoices, orders, barcodes, much much more,
Ability to keep track of when the next magizne is due, when the subscription runs out, where the old copies vs. new copies are, index the mags.,
Print reports on just about anything so throw a report generator at it. And if you want more, there is about five hundred pages of basic requirements in any book on library science. Add to that you have to know who a user is and if they are authorized to do any particular function, (Some can check out, but not in, others can add a note but not edit the book, some can edit books but not at any library except where they are assigned) you get the picture.
Off hand, I'd say that a good library system is about four hundred times more difficult than writing Linux. I know. I do Unix admin and Library systems for a living.
Trust me, this is not simple. I do think it very worthwhile though.
I think I first saw something like it:
You can't win
You can't quit
You can't break even
Is there some "history" between you and Kaplin? If so, will that affect your chances on appeal?
It seems to me that Kaplin had to turn handsprings in reading the law the way he did. The law seems fairly clear that "fair use" was to be preserved, and Kaplin had to go a long way out to read otherwise. Am I wrong, or is reading the law the way Kaplin did the correct way to read it?
Best of luck.
Let's see that with NT. With only 35 NT boxen, we now have 4 full time NT administrators and they are bitching that they are too busy.
First, this is a human issue, not a technical issue. The same can (and should) be said for any other operating system. One is able to tweak NT's registry, or Novell's set parameters, and fail to document the changes.
Second: This supposes that one did not make a full image backup of the system. As an administrator, I would discharge anyone that did not take this elementary and common precaution. . This is a trivial exercise in Unix, almost impossible in NT, and somewhat difficult in Novell.
I timed initiating a complete restore for the following systems:
1. AIX - 15 minutes (mostly waiting for the tape to finish booting) Extra software purchase required at unknown cost.
2. SCO - 5 minutes (2 diskettes to boot, insert tape, press 1) Extra software purchase required at $300 US per system
3. Linux - 20 minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore Used native software only at no extra cost
4. BSDi - 20 Minutes to configure partitions and format, then restore Used native software only at no extra cost
5. Novell - 1 hour 50 minutes to load OS and restore application software. Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system Full restore from backup not possible because some files were open during backup and not backed up. Some manual intervention was required during the restore process.
6. NT - over a day to load OS and restore software, configure same. Not able to completely restore tape as some files were open and not backed up, system repeatedly locked up during restore. Manual intervention during restore process needed many times. Extra software purchase required at $1000 US per system.
NOTE: Only time spent actually completing tasks to start the backup is included in these times. This also included the time needed to configure the restore software, add the restore media device to the OS including drivers and software. The time required to actually complete the restore is not included as this is a function of the amount of data on the system and the speed of the restore media device, drivers and hardware.
Third: Gartner Groups analysis of NT shows that it takes 33% more time to administrate NT as opposed to Novell and Unix system, requiring more administrator time and cost.
Firstbrook also takes issue with Linux's most famous feature--the fact that it is free. "Our analysis says that the cost of the operating system is only 3 percent of the total cost of ownership of the server," he says.
And I suppose that once you buy a car, one never need buy gas? Only a complete idiot thinks that the purchase is the end of expenditure of any item.
Labor is a far more significant proportion of IT costs, and the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time tinkering with Linux.
Or playing Quake, or Arena, or Flight Simulator. My experience is that my peers tend to tinker at home, where interruptions are at a minimum. Again, this isn't an issue of the operating system, this is a management issue. Bad management is possible in any operating system environment.
"Linux is out there and people are using it, but it is mostly because of the cool factor," he says.
And it's likin' to be seein' the survey that got those numbers I'd be.
As a class, systems people tend to ignore hype and look to the heart of the matter. "Is this the appropriate technology? Will it do what I need? Will the total cost be reasonable? Is it dependable, and will it run on equipment we can maintain?" are all questions my peers and I ask of any product being deployed. Mr. Firstbrook implies that my peers and I are idiots and will use any cool tool that comes along. My response is that most of us choose the tool best suited for the task as best we're able and given to understand that task.
A survey of over eighteen million web sites by www.netcraft.net shows that Linux is running 35.73%, Microsoft is running 21.32%.Source: www.netcraft.net/survey Further, studies show that Linux/Apachie are gaining market share from almost everyone.
"Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous," he says. --T.R.
Mr. Firstbrook must live in terror or only hire incompetent help. It is possible to "screw around" with all operating systems more complex than the one to run a toaster, and even that has an adjustment for how brown you want your toast. NT has registry settings, configuration files, and so on. Novell has it's set commands, configuration files, .NLM's. Unix has programming, configuration
files, and many many other ways to "tweak" it.
My suggestion to Mr. Firstbrook is that he look for another line of work, as he is ignorant of how and why computers work, what it takes to run them, and how to choose what to run.
Yet this simile keeps being used. These traits are relitive. When (or if) the change comes, one generation will become used to it, as we are used to medicine now. Our great grandparents would be agog with what the medical industry can do today, compaired to when they were alive.
Yes, we need to set some gound rules for how this information is used, no, it won't destroy us overnight.
Change is Gods way of telling us we are not dead yet.