One. Relying on a single vendor is every bit as dangerous as building a stock "portfolio" with just one stock. Diversity is good.
Management just won't see it that way. They see an infrastructure comprised of products from a single vendor as more likely to 'interoperate'... and they theorise that support will be better, as the vendor won't be able to blame some third party.
The risk you identify is of that vendor going under. But, to use the example from my other post, no-one thinks IBM is about to fold. That would be a 'steady performer' in your stock portfolio.
But if you can convince management to use Free Software, then you are right, as that particular risk is not important, as long as someone else is available to take over support and maintenance.
The acid test of all ideas is 'convincing management'...
Three. Big vendor and single vendor are not the same as good support. One need merely read the Gripe Line column in InfoWorld to see how shabby the (often very expensive) "support" is from many large and supposedly solid and reputable companies.
You're right there. I have had a lot of dealings with IBM support lately, and though I like them as a company, their support simply stinks.
For instance, I had a problem with WebSphere which has a command line tool called WSCP. WebSphere keeps it's configuration information in a RDBMS repository. I had a lot of problems with corruption of this repository when doing 'incorrect' things using WSCP. These 'incorrect' things are the kind of things which you would expect to receive an error message for.
This corruption meant a drop of the RDBMS tables and either a rebuild of the config from scratch or a restore and import of the config which had previously been exported to a text file. When your DBAs are a different team and there are 'processes and procedures' to get them to do any work, dropping tables can be long-winded.
IBM's answer? Don't do that!
I spent several weeks dealing with level 2 support before escalating this to someone who saw my perspective on the issue. No fix yet (after another week).
The latest version of WebSphere, fortunately, uses XML files for it's configuration repository... but my company won't be using that for a couple of years...
Cendio in Sweden and OpenCare both provide support for Free Software packages for a fee. OpenCare also have offices in the States and Asia but are based in France.
Dumb fucker yourself. I am not interested in the slightest in karma, I hit the cap many moons ago anyway. I posted to raise awareness of the truth of the original post. If I had wanted karma I would just have made the point myself rather than drawing attention to an anonymous coward post.
I'd like to punch you for being unnecessarily abusive. I'm investigating travel arrangements for Androscoggin Valley now.
Please mod up anonymous coward parent. Or just read it:
Re:My IANAL conclusion by Anonymous Coward on 14/06/02 11:55 (Score:0) (#3700092) No. From clause 7 at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
"If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
Trim unnecessary whitespace, using short names (ie. i/x.png instead of buttonimages/left_page_arrow_top.png) and so on.
While the rest of your post contains many good points, I find this comment bizarre. The overhead of a few extra bytes is insignificant compared to the benefit of having maintainable code.
a thousand lines of code in an average productive coding day
so: ...
printf('Hello World');//Simply print hello world printf('Hello World');//Do it twice! printf('Hello World');//Now for the hard bit printf('Hello World');//yeah printf('Hello World');//This bit was tricky printf('Hello World');//See me for an explanation printf('Hello World');//so l33t printf('Hello World');//umm... printf('Hello World');//damn lameness filter printf('Hello World');//NEVER change this line printf('Hello World');//nearly lunch time printf('Hello World');//phew! it works!
Do you really want to see your bank manager every time you change any one of your passwords?
You do change them, right?
Or every time you get a password for a new service?
A better idea would be to keep the password to your private key in that bank safe, which decrypts your personal password file that you update regularly.
I'm reading Flatlander just now (taking me several weeks though, I read a couple of pages before I fall asleep at night).
Isn't Niven a first class author? My concern is when he hooks up with co-authors. I've never read any of his co-authored works, and I'm scared to. I worry that when co-authoring takes place, something is going to be lost.
I mean, take The Matrix: great film (IMHO). But vision - yeah, I can just see a near-future where man and machines fight a war, the machines win and enslave us all as power generators while building a convincing virtual world. Oh yeah, and the science holds up on that as well. Pfffft.
I actually think the Matrix concept was borne of readings of the works of Carlos Castaneda, who describes us being enslaved to demonic beings he calls "flyers", who implant a foreign mindset into us to keep us distracted and feed of our awareness (like the computer in the Matrix provides a synthetic reality and uses us for batteries).
I've read all Castaneda's books and The Matrix scared the shit out of me, and no, not because I was tripping.
The movie to be good, in my opinion has to achieve it's goal. It is easy to realise what is the goal of a movie by it's teaser trailers, if I am not interested in a particular goal, I simply skip the movie, since I would not like it anyway.
Are you saying that if a movie does not agree with your preconceptions you will not watch it?
If the movie has a goal (other than to entertain), surely it is to persuade the audience of something. If the audience is 'interested' in being persuaded to the message of the movie, are they not persuaded already?
This quandry of how to get people to change the way the think irks me no end.
On the other hand, if a biometric database is compromised, you lose the integrity of a part of your body. This means someone can now use tricks like the gelatin one outlined here to impersonate you. But you can't get another body. You can't revoke the compromised data.
Well, I've got ten fingers and ten toes. That makes me good for twenty lost body parts, if I can get my foot up onto the checkout without straining my groin.
Not only are you offtopic, but you are OUT OF DATE!
I had karma to burn, so I thought I'd use it getting the karma-free InSaNiAk with his l337 name and zero-content posts modded down. Despite my complaints, I was happy with the results, lame or otherwise;)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately I have no mod points at the moment.
I should also say:
One. Relying on a single vendor is every bit as dangerous as building a stock "portfolio" with just one stock. Diversity is good.
Management just won't see it that way. They see an infrastructure comprised of products from a single vendor as more likely to 'interoperate'... and they theorise that support will be better, as the vendor won't be able to blame some third party.
The risk you identify is of that vendor going under. But, to use the example from my other post, no-one thinks IBM is about to fold. That would be a 'steady performer' in your stock portfolio.
But if you can convince management to use Free Software, then you are right, as that particular risk is not important, as long as someone else is available to take over support and maintenance.
The acid test of all ideas is 'convincing management'...
Three. Big vendor and single vendor are not the same as good support. One need merely read the Gripe Line column in InfoWorld to see how shabby the (often very expensive) "support" is from many large and supposedly solid and reputable companies.
You're right there. I have had a lot of dealings with IBM support lately, and though I like them as a company, their support simply stinks.
For instance, I had a problem with WebSphere which has a command line tool called WSCP. WebSphere keeps it's configuration information in a RDBMS repository. I had a lot of problems with corruption of this repository when doing 'incorrect' things using WSCP. These 'incorrect' things are the kind of things which you would expect to receive an error message for.
This corruption meant a drop of the RDBMS tables and either a rebuild of the config from scratch or a restore and import of the config which had previously been exported to a text file. When your DBAs are a different team and there are 'processes and procedures' to get them to do any work, dropping tables can be long-winded.
IBM's answer? Don't do that!
I spent several weeks dealing with level 2 support before escalating this to someone who saw my perspective on the issue. No fix yet (after another week).
The latest version of WebSphere, fortunately, uses XML files for it's configuration repository... but my company won't be using that for a couple of years...
Cendio in Sweden and OpenCare both provide support for Free Software packages for a fee. OpenCare also have offices in the States and Asia but are based in France.
Maybe nitpicking, but it's 'Arthur Andersen' not 'Author Andersen'.
Dumb fucker yourself. I am not interested in the slightest in karma, I hit the cap many moons ago anyway. I posted to raise awareness of the truth of the original post. If I had wanted karma I would just have made the point myself rather than drawing attention to an anonymous coward post.
I'd like to punch you for being unnecessarily abusive. I'm investigating travel arrangements for Androscoggin Valley now.
Please mod up anonymous coward parent. Or just read it:
Re:My IANAL conclusion
by Anonymous Coward on 14/06/02 11:55 (Score:0) (#3700092)
No.
From clause 7 at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
"If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
Trim unnecessary whitespace, using short names (ie. i/x.png instead of buttonimages/left_page_arrow_top.png) and so on.
While the rest of your post contains many good points, I find this comment bizarre. The overhead of a few extra bytes is insignificant compared to the benefit of having maintainable code.
But it's the simplicity of the solution that makes it so elegant. Why say more when so little is enough?
so:
......
like that?
Seriously, most 'minimally skilled IT operators' write passwords to important systems on bits of paper (or in files) that their colleagues know about.
That's the accepted practice. If you're sensible you keep those bits of paper in a safe and keep an eye on who opens it.
Do you really want to see your bank manager every time you change any one of your passwords?
You do change them, right?
Or every time you get a password for a new service?
A better idea would be to keep the password to your private key in that bank safe, which decrypts your personal password file that you update regularly.
But Mozilla's 1.0 release is feature-equivalent or better than IE's 6.0 release.
Don't mean to spoil everyone's fun but I completely fail to see what's funny about breeding an animal so it loses an important part of it's body.
The chicken looks very odd, certainly, but as a joke I find it a bit of a damp squib.
Of course I'm a crazy vegetarian so you can write me off as a nutcase.
In my other post I said "Read Kant" and got an 'insightful'. Actually I should have got 'overrated'.
I was drunk and typed "Read Kant" when I should have typed:
"Read Popper"
Can I see a copy of your curriculum please?
Or perhaps "Ethics in Software" by Bill G.
I'm reading Flatlander just now (taking me several weeks though, I read a couple of pages before I fall asleep at night).
Isn't Niven a first class author? My concern is when he hooks up with co-authors. I've never read any of his co-authored works, and I'm scared to. I worry that when co-authoring takes place, something is going to be lost.
Any experience with the co-authored stuff?
I mean, take The Matrix: great film (IMHO). But vision - yeah, I can just see a near-future where man and machines fight a war, the machines win and enslave us all as power generators while building a convincing virtual world. Oh yeah, and the science holds up on that as well. Pfffft.
I actually think the Matrix concept was borne of readings of the works of Carlos Castaneda, who describes us being enslaved to demonic beings he calls "flyers", who implant a foreign mindset into us to keep us distracted and feed of our awareness (like the computer in the Matrix provides a synthetic reality and uses us for batteries).
I've read all Castaneda's books and The Matrix scared the shit out of me, and no, not because I was tripping.
Especially as the past imperfect (if I remember my tense terminology correctly, which I probably don't) of cum is generally came.
The movie to be good, in my opinion has to achieve it's goal. It is easy to realise what is the goal of a movie by it's teaser trailers, if I am not interested in a particular goal, I simply skip the movie, since I would not like it anyway.
Are you saying that if a movie does not agree with your preconceptions you will not watch it?
If the movie has a goal (other than to entertain), surely it is to persuade the audience of something. If the audience is 'interested' in being persuaded to the message of the movie, are they not persuaded already?
This quandry of how to get people to change the way the think irks me no end.
Are not Adrenaline, Vision, and Precision the outcome of good Writing, Acting, Direction?
Abstraction layers.
As you say, the origin is "all but certain" - which is fundamentally different from "known" in a logical, scientific sense.
Read Kant, nothing is "known" in science.
On the other hand, if a biometric database is compromised, you lose the integrity of a part of your body. This means someone can now use tricks like the gelatin one outlined here to impersonate you. But you can't get another body. You can't revoke the compromised data.
Well, I've got ten fingers and ten toes. That makes me good for twenty lost body parts, if I can get my foot up onto the checkout without straining my groin.
Not only are you offtopic, but you are OUT OF DATE!
;)
I had karma to burn, so I thought I'd use it getting the karma-free InSaNiAk with his l337 name and zero-content posts modded down. Despite my complaints, I was happy with the results, lame or otherwise