I agree with you. Last time I installed it I wound up re-installing the OS. I also remember reading an article about the spyware components of the toolbar, though I can't pin it down right now. If anyone can clarify that I would appreciate it. It certainly matches my experience, however.
I would give you the benefit of the doubt and call you a 'victim' of this behavior without knowing the details. In other words, what follows surely does not apply to you, personally. I want to make sure you, MikeDawg, understand I'm not criticizing you personally AT ALL. 'K?
I've heard of this before. One of my Novell instructors (3.1, what? 20 years ago?) told us a story of a sysadmin who explored around his bank's files and discovered what everyone was paid. He broadcast this, was chastized for it, but they kept him on with a warning. Next time he screwed up (in my mind, inevitably) they called him over to 'fix' a problem with a computer in HR. When he got there, they fired him. Meanwhile, the other sysadmins axed his account. He immediately went back to the computer room and attempted to login. The implication was that he was about to 'do some harm.' The CNE instructor had been one of the sysadmins who axed this fellow's account, so his was a first-hand account.
If this has become common practice, the question is, why are sysadmins so distrusted? Could it possibly be that 'management' is aware of a pervasive attitude of cynacism in IT? Could it be that management has developed a view of IT people as socially awkward malcontents who think its okay not to use deodorant and have a pervasive attitude of superiority over other employees? Could it be that management reads/.?
Don't know--just asking.
Re:Go look for yourself: I did.
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Web 3.0
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· Score: 1
and does NOT order in bulk.
They DO order in bulk--for books that will sell. Actually, Amazon is probably the only place a small publisher like you has a chance at all. Why in heaven's name would they want to buy from you in bulk? They know your self-published wonder book isn't going to sell. It would be stupid for them to buy in large quantity. Further, it is standard practice in the publishing industry for retailers to buy books from publishers with a "return" privilege. Let's say B.Dalton buys 100 copies of a title from you. They sit on their shelves for a few months and don't sell. They get rifled through; the spines get beat up; the covers get torn. But they don't sell, So B.Dalton packs them up and sends them back to you for a FULL refund. So would you rather sell books permanently or get them back in poor condition after you thought they were sold? Also, B.Dalton paid postage to get books BACK to you, but you paid to send them to B.Dalton, just as you would to Amazon.com. You idict Amazon for not buying in bulk. Why should they and get stuck with dead merchandise? It doesn't make business sense at all.
Amazon incurs NO shipping costs
So those books just wrap themselves in bubble-wrap and address themselves, then?
But instead, they regularly take from 40% to 50%, and they do NOT pass a portion of that discount on to either retailer or customer.
You're still claiming Amazon is skimming 40-50%, but the numbers simply do not add up. They only GET a 40-50% discount, they can't therefore also TAKE it. I couldn't find a paperback with LESS than a full 20% discount, so the idea that they don't pass ANY of their discount onto a consumer is simply not true. ANY major publishing house hardback is in the 40% or close category. For those books on Amazon that DO sell at full retail, it is the PUBLISHER that is giving Amazon what is called a "short discount" which means next to nothing (e.g. circa 10%). Further, cheaper the book, less the discount. It costs dollars to send an item, whether it retails for $4.95 or $40.95. The cost of touching that book is more or less standard. It makes sense to offer less of a discount for cheaper items. If they offered 40% for a $4.95 pmass market, they'd lose money on every sale. So your numbers simply do not add up. You are accusing Amazon of taking a much bigger mark-up than they actually do.
Now, as to the fact that Amazon does not pay shipping. First of all, what does that have to do with anything? Neither does any bookstore. But the consumer is getting the book mailed to his doorstep. Why shouldn't he pay for shipping? Of course he should. Second of all, Amazon very often DOES pay for shipping. I haven't paid ANY shipping with Amazon for probably three or four years. Anybody with any savvy does not need to either. So as to your complaint about shipping: a) So? and b) That is often simply not true.
maintains NO stock
A friend of mine worked for a Christmas season in one of their several major distribution warehouses. The books were stacked from floor to ceiling on two major levels. The "pickers" (my friend) would take an order and pull from the shelves to a conveyor belt. The orders were packed at the end of the belt. They had espresso stands on every level so employees could fuel up on free caffein. He said it was like a party. Minimum wage or close to it as I remember. You wouldn't want to make a career of it. But the fact is, they DO have warehouses and they DO stock product--just not maybe yours. "Just in time" shipping makes a lot of sense for stiock, like yours, that is likely questionable.
Amazon engages in a common type of marketing which uses semantic tricks proven to give the average customer the impression that they are getting a good deal when they shop at a given outlet.
I don't see it that way. Amazon doesn't have to pay $5,000 a month rent for a 3,000 square foot retail space in a mall. I don't have to drive there. I order a book and it gets here as fast as I want it to
And for this 'service' Amazon feels right in taking a 50% cut of the book's cover price. --The remaining 50% must pay the publisher's production, printing and shipping costs. Is this reasonable? No, it is a damned rip-off. But that's Amazon
The percentages you quote have been normal in the publishing industry well before Amazon ever came upon the scene and grossly exaggerate what Amazon gets for a book. Ingram and Baker & Taylor, two of the largest wholesale book distributors around, get approximately this discount from publishers, then turn right around and give bookstores and libraries a discount of over 45%, thus skimming 4-5%. The retail bookstore then sells at retail, taking their profit, if possible, from their overall 45% discount. Compare this to the mark-up in some other consumer goods (Monster cables, for example, where a $15.00 cable gets sold for $120) and you see that the book industry operates on comparitively very thin margins.
Amazon, of course, sells direct to consumers and has no expensive retail shopping mall rents to pay. They pass much of this discount to consumers, who typically get mainline books for a 40% discount. So, once again, Amazon is skimming as much as 10%, but frequently much less. Thus, of course, the demise of retail bookstores.
But this is not always the case. Many small publishers refuse to sell at a discount to Amazon, or they offer such a small discount that Amazon charges full retail. This is often true of academic publishers, whose discounts range in the 10-15% range off retail. But it's also true of publishers like ARRL, for example, which sells technical books for amateur radio enthisiasts. These books sell for retail on amazon. The result is that it costs the consumer just as much to buy frpom amazon as it does directly from the publisher.
The bottom line is that Amazon DOES NOT GET 50% as you claimed. For most books they get a few percentage points, no greater than any other wholesaler in the mix. The result is that consumers get books cheaper, even with the added shipping, than they could from a retail store. That has implications for independent bookstores, of course, which I'm not arguing. But let's not say Amazon gets 50% when they average about 10% of that.
I think this is an interesting point. The moderation system as it stands tends to support group-think. It's mildly frustrating (though no Big Deal, really) to put some thought and time into a point of view that is ever-so-slightly contrary to mainstream/. attitude that it gets modded flamebait. To some extent the meta-mods ought to help alleviate this, but it's really the luck of the draw. After awhile it gets pretty obvious what will fly: anti-X, anti-Y, and anti-Z are all 'very cool' so if you say anything positive about X, Y, or Z or even point out one mildly positive thing they did, you know it's going to get modded down.
So as long as you realize that on/. the minority point of view get slapped around, you'll be fine. It's not like/. is committed to multi-cultural diversity.
Six conferences in two years?
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Peter Quinn Resigns
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I've read through over half the comments so far and seen some very good and cogent points on many sides of the issue. But what I haven't seen addressed is this:
Quinn is (was) a civil servant, though a pretty high ranking department head. He worked for the State. As a civil servant you are expected to do things like, you know, show up for work. You get only so many vacation days a year. Maybe he got 20 days (I don't know for sure, but that's typical). The point is that in an environment like that you are accountable for your time. You don't show up whenever you want to. So Quinn went to three conferences per year, some far away from home, dealing at least partially with ODF and at least partially because he was an upcoming 'star' for that agenda. Each one of these conferences took several days, including travel time, so I'm guessing a week each on average. In at least SOME of the cases the conferences paid for his way. Now it looks like his supervisors approved every one of these sorties, but that clears him of wrongdoing only in a technical sense.
Unless he took vacation for every one of these conferences, he attended them on the backs of the Massachussetts taxpayers. That is a legitimate issue to discuss and talk through. Over 5% of his working time was spent attending conferences to talk about ODF, which was HIS agenda for Massachussetts.
I've been in this sort of situation (though certainly not at that level) and the deal was always this: If I got paid by the conference, I had to take vacation, period, even if it were a speech for a measly $100. In some cases I was able to negotiate a "win-win" deal. If the conference paid my way (paid my expenses), but did NOT pay me for my presentations, then I could use my organization's time IF it were seen as pertinent to my position, or, frankly, brought glory to the institution. (e.g.: If I were a keynote speaker and my boss could brag to the board that I 'keynoted the blah blah conference') Even in these cases it ain't easy because it tends to cause dissent in the ranks. I once went to Sweden--at entirely my own expense--to receive an IT award and people griped that I was allowed to go.
I would think, however, that attending three conferences per year in any fashion like this would be really pushing it. I would think that a supervisor who was actually paying attention here would have said, "Hey, Quinn. You've been attending all these conferences, and, yes, I've given my permission so far on all of them, but it seems like every few weeks you are gone somewhere else and nowhere to be found. Now I find out you're pushing your OSD idea. We've talked about that and lets keep talking, but you know: this is not a done deal here and there are lots of issues to deal with before it is. Not everybody likes it and it's a problem when people see you pushing this on the outside. So I think that if you want to go to any more conferences, take vacation to do it. That way we avoid any sort of conflict of interest here where the taxpayer is footing the bill for your agenda. Deal?"
I think that pretty well would have taken care of the issue. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, in a dog-eat-dog environment, when you get into trouble, it's the little issues which normally slide that they'll get you on. You made a long distance call on a state telephone for a personal reason. You didn't fill out a silly form, that sort of thing.
So a pox on all the houses that deserve it here, including yet another journalist who thinks a B.A. in Communications makes him into a perceptive and worldly-wise person, but Quinn is not without some cuplability here. In hindsight, a little foresight might have prevented the entire affair.
I don't know if this is 100% related to your current problem, but it's an issue I have seen crop up. It's a 'story' and insofar as it helps--well, I hope so.
I was a self-taught IT guy. When I started at my company there were no PC's, which weren't really invented yet. We had two terminals hooked to a mainframe 300 miles away. Needless to say, there was no IT department. I am a guy in a female-dominated profession. When the TRS-80 was introduced I used to walk over to Radio Shack on my lunch hour and stare at the plastic case and waft in the polymers. About a year later the Apple ][ came out, and I was the first on my block to get one, serial #32678. I taught myself BASIC, then I stuck in a CP/M card and taught myself dBase. I had one commercial program that sold for ten years. My accounting stuff ran in several different organizations for over fifteen years. I got a CNE, was dragged kicking and screaming into Windows, and managed to survive.
A few years after I bought my Apple my boss came to me and said she'd been thinking we should get 'one of those computers,' and gave me the task. I bought an Apple ][, of course (no PCs then) and began to automate everything in sight, particularly statistics.
By the time I retired we had 500 PCs, 40-50 servers, and 9 sites on a WAN with fiber to the Net. We had replaced our core system, a very complex inventory control system, three times. Every employee had a computer on her desk. In fact, there were more computers than people.
That's background. Here's what happened. As soon as I retired management got together and decided they needed a/real/ computer person. There weren't any when I had been hired nearly 30 years prior, at least, not the kind like YOU ALL who are prevalent today. So they found a consultant, hired him, and he proceeded to get interested in a VoIP implementation at the expense of the core product. He let that slide because he really wasn't interested in inventory control. Employees were more and more frustrated. Finally after someone criticized him he said he was resigning in a huff (after 10 months or so) and went home to think about it. The organization wound up 'accepting' his resignation. So they hired another guy, a/real/ computer person as well, and he lasted about six months. In both cases the 'real computer person' mis-read the organization and didn't think the core automation product (the inventory control system) was worth his time and attention. As a result these two people failed and the organization went through a year and a half of floundering. Now they've hired a third IT person, a woman, by the way, who finally "gets it." I am hopeful (as I have 30 years of experience in that company and my blood and sweat are still there, my cables in the rafters and beneath the floorboards) that she will be able to put the IT team back together and they will live long and prosper.
But the real issue here is that many times IT people are so enamored with themselves and their 'equipment' that they fail to give management any credence at all. Every boss is a PHB. Every manager sucks. Every employee is a point above an idiot. And only slashdotters are cool. I've seen this several times before. The IT people do not have the same sense of public service that their orgnaizations would like them to have. If they are in love with their data, they often fail to see what the product is--the one that sells, makes money, and pays their salary. They are inwardly focused.
Actually I believe IT RUNS most organizations. That's very clear. No IT, No organization. But IT is not the REASON for the organization's existence. The best thing you could do is sit down with management with the attitude that it is your task to tailor IT to the needs of the organization rather than go in there screaming that management doesn't understand the needs of IT. If you do that, subsequently asking for resources to accomplish the goals of the organization will be much better received. I, for one, never lacked in resour
Libraries never have kept information of what you had checked out once it is returned (unlike Amazon that has a record of all your purchases). I've been working with library circulation systems for thirty years, and ALWAYS there is an RFP requirement that "the system shall not keep a record after the item is returned. The link between patron and item must be broken..."
(Full disclosure statement: Patron history is allowed and kept for so-called "Outreach patrons" who enjoy a personalized level of library service because they are homebound. They tend to be elderly and forgetful, and they tend to read genres like romances or westerns. They also are voracious readers who can easily 'read out' a collection. This "patron history" allows their caregiver to avoid giving them the same book on the very next visit. They just wait a couople and then maybe they won't remember anyway.)
During the last fit of hysteria over the Patriot Act our Board of Trustees even wanted to know the precise backup policy and suggested we keep FEWER BACKUPS! Yes, it is possible to restore the system state to four months ago and read what people had checked out then, but only if you disrupted a 24/7 system for a couple of days to do it. Beyond that it is pretty much impossible because the tapes get written over (Our variation on father/grandfather is Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri-1, Fri-2, Fri-3, Fri-4, Fri-5 to accommodate five-Friday months. The most you can stretch is about 4 months with this scheme. The dailies are written over in 7 days. The Fri-1-Fri-4 are written over the next month, and the Fri-5 is written over the next month that has five Fridays). Fortunately reason prevailed and they didn't mess with my backups.
The tapes themselves are not going to help the cops. It's not as if the information is linear on the tapes. Library databases are incredibly complex with multiple tables, layers, and pointers. The information on the tapes is useless unless it is run through the programs themselves in exactly the right manner on a machine configured EXACTLY like the one it came off of (in terms of rev levels of the programs, config options, etc.)
I'd be perfectly happy giving the FBI or the NSA or whomever a full backup copy from my database. It would cost them about a million dollars and several months just to get to the point of making sense out of it, assuming they hired the right people to put it all back together.
The only practical way for an 'authority' to go back in time on check outs is to subpoena the library and force them to do it, in which case it would be national news in 24 hours. It would be easy to check on what you have checked out right now, and for that all you need is a subpoena.
No, I don't think so. You pay sales tax on anything leased, which is the same as renting, so I don't see how that argument holds. Your better argument is on property tax on capitalized software, but that depends on the state. Some states may very well tax tables, chairs, and software, but many just tax the building and reqal property.
This accusation is patently untrue. I've never thought of librarians as having much power, and they certainly don't have power over knowledge and they certainly are not guardimng knowledge FROM you. Your average librarian's concern is that people seem to have no powers of discrimination so that a Google search is a de facto search for truth when, in fact, it turns up unjuried, unverified, often wrong information as easily as it does something correct. Librarians select books and information based on reviews and veracity of the publisher as well as demand and other factors. Google, on the other hand, indexes anything it can find.
Conversely, librarians often help people who have no particular knowledge of the Internet to find the wide variety of information that IS there. Libraries, by and large, are the one institution that will give anyone off the street free access to the web and more often than not, teach them how to do it. One library I know of became an ISP and gave out 35,000 free e-mail accounts to its users (before email became so pervasive). No other institution is so dedicated to getting information into the hands of users than a library. If you're not lucky enough or rich enough to afford your precious DSL and PC, the ONE place you can go locally is to the library, where terminals line the walls with free access. (Sure you can at the U, but you pay tuition to go there.)
Further, libraries spend $millions per year for access to databases that you will never find on the Internet for free. These databases contain the full text of thousands of magazines, including academic resources, that put Goggle to shame, not to mention databases on nearly any topic you might be interested in.
In terms of copyright, librarians can be seen as violating copyright simply by allowing books to be checked out to more than one user. Publishers are not happy about that, but libraries provide significant income, particularly for the back list, so there is an uneasy truce. But publishers would VERY MUCH like to have a royalty for every time a book was checked out of a library. In some countries, this is called the "public lending right" and money is transferred to publishers from government to compensate them for this very issue.
The best thing you could do to keep more informed would be to get yourself a library card, get to your local library's web site, and gain online access to these databases, as well as eveything else your library has to offer.
If people want to leave, let 'em leave! If they won't leave, but you want them to, encourage them. If the company lets the good people leave, the company will fail. That's evolution. The saddest part of this is people who stay just because they're afraid to move on.
What I see here (and what has not been said of the several screens I've looked at so far) is a country of whiners who seem to feel that a company is RESPONSIBLE for their mental and physical well being and if a company does not respond to every whim that employees can dream up, then they 'don't care!' Workers want a one-sided socialism. Company must love you, take care of you, buy your medical insurance for you, present you with free food, goodies of all sorts, lots of off time, and keep you around forever, and in return you get to quit with two week's notice.
Now we here about the poor depressed workers who are sad because they don't have a well-defined 'career path.' For God sakes, people! Make one up for yourself!
Blaming banks for phishing is like blaming the woman for being raped because she's pretty and attracted the attention of the rapist by wearing a skirt above her ankle. It's the same old same old, predictable rants against the USA, government, big, bad banks. Hey! Why isn't Microsoft responsible? But here's the deal:
You need to take some responsibility yourself and enter into a partnership with your bank. That's right. I've been the 'victim' of credit card fraud twice, and the victim of an over-reacting bank once. They cut off my card, without telling me, simply because the replacement took too long to arrive. This caused me to be 'off the grid' for a spell (of anxiety), but it was really my own fault for not having a good back-up plan.
So I called up my bank and over several days and calls we developed a plan that would ensure I wasn't dead in the water if this ever happened again. I don't need to tell you excactly what the plan is, though you can probably guess. It entails multiple levels of security so that both the bank and I are better protected. I can call a live body 24/7. I inform them if I'm hopping over to, say, England for a month. They call me if something weird comes down the pike (like someone from Belaruss trying to charge $1200 of health food products on my card). This way, we help each other.
If you insist on believing and acting as if every other institution that is a part of your life is out to get you, then why not go off in the woods somewhere, make yourself a small cabin, and send in your bombs by parcel post. Oops, yeah. I forgot. That would be the fault of the post office.
I agree with her arguments about this class action lawsuit nonsense on trivialities. I would bet 99.9% of users of DOS 6.X didn't even know there was a compression program that came with it. Of those who had some vague inkling that this was a new "Feature" (i.e.: "a bug as defined by the marketing department" -- Manual for the Apple II circa 1979) very few used it. If they did use it, very few were "injured" because of it. And let's just pretend you WERE "injured" by losing some important data, why the hell didn't you create a backup before you tried something new on your precious bits and bytes? Don't plead ignorance there, plead stupidity, and that makes you culpable. Maybe it's you who needs to be sued (or fired) because you didn't use basic procedures to safeguard your data.
Yet an attempt was made to turn this into another of those infamous "class action suits," which means, really, that anyone can jump on the bandwagon and claim injury. You know: Notices in major newspapers and magazines, lots of fine print, years of parading in the press. And when all is said and done, if these things win, you might be eligible for a rebate worth a few bucks, maybe, if you send it in, which only a handful of people ever will. You know why Norton can pretend to offer you Systemworks for free at Fry's if you send in the multiple rebate forms. It's because you never will, and they know it. It may get you to buy it, but it's just too much of a hassle to bother when you get right down to it. Mission accomplished, chump!
Meanwhile, in this case, assuming it had been able to go forward, by the time it would have ended, DOX 6.X would have been history anyway. You would have upgraded to a faster box, guaranteed, with a new OS, just like you have since the dawn of IT history. So here's big, bad Microsoft that everyone loves to hate and hassle, with yet another frivolous lawsuit to deal with.
And who gets all the money? MILLIONS of dollars change hands in these things. You get nothing (but then, you weren't really injured), but the bucks go to the LAWYERS who made up all this stuff in the first place.
So good for her. She made a good argument and they made the right decision to toss such nonsense out of court.
(And, having said that, I think she is an extremely poor choice for the Supreme Court with no relevant experience at all.)
They simply are not. There are too many things to go wrong even if you double up every single component with the idea that if one side goes it will run on the other while you unplug the bad part and plug in the good part. It's been my experience that as likely as not they will both go at once anyway. I've had this happen with dual fault tolerant RAID systems more than once.
The neat thing about clustering, in my opinion, is that you get built-in redundancy AND you get the ability to take care of an increased load very neatly. Too many processes? Just plug in another CPU to the cluster and load balance it out. Did one break? OK, so you're under a load for a while until you can plug in a good one, but at least the app doesn't go down. And you DO have an extra ready to go just in case, don't you?
I built a cluster supporting a couple hundred thin clients, which tend to proliferate ("Hey! Gimme ten more in this room!") and once the bugs were worked out (Had to load balance the brain cells to get things working right) it works slick. If I had it to design and spec a systen from scratch knowing what I know now, I'd do it again in a heart beat.
So I say: Backup! Backup! Backup! and Cluster! Cluster! Cluster!
The DNC list has done some good, but it sure doesn't stop everything. I have two phone numbers. Both have answering machines on themn, but one has something Qwest called "Caller ID with Privacy Plus" (Moneymaker for them!) If a call comes in from a hot-house number the system interrupts and makes them say who they are. Then it calls me up with a distinctive double ring and with a couple of "Press 1 to continue" gyrations I can hear how the caller has identified himself and choose whether or not I want to accept the call. It's kind of a drag for legitimate callers, and it traps all overseas calls as a matter of course. But I get so few calls on that phone that it isn't really a bother at all. The other phone, without this feature, gets a couple of calls a night, but that phone always goes to voice mail where I tell them to call my other number. No telemarketer ever bothers. So, works for me.
I second that. We installed Active Response as well. It does a very good job and its reporting is a real eye-opener to how often you are scanned (complete with world map showing origin of scans). We've been up for over ten years with 11 Class C's, so I know we're out there, but you will be absolutely AMAZED at how often someone is knocking at your door looking for a way in.
In terms of "active," the way this thing works is by responding to port scans with false information. If that false information is subsequently used to attempt an intrusion, it has effectively 'taken the bait,' and is then blocked.
Very cool system by some Israelis who take security seriously.
It does provoke some thought aside from bringing a smile to our lips:)"
And THAT, my boys, is PRECISELY the problem. You smile at these issues as if they weren't really issues (cause you're so smart). You attribute Linux's lack of popularity with the masses to some MS conspiracy when the conspiracy, if there is any at all, is right at home with you. You imagine problems with Windows that don't exist; and you ignore problems with Linux that stare you in the face every day. You are so happy with yourselves for being so so clever to make Linux work and decry others who seem to have issues.
The first issue is: I don't want to "make" Linux work. I just want it to work. Understand the difference? I don't live for Linux; I live for the end product. I, and millions of people, do not give a rat's ass about Linux as an OS. It's a command-line interface that's a lot harder to use than MS-DOS. So what if you can stick an autoexec.bat in there to run up some copy-cat Windows-like, but not quite interface. And you want me to replace Windows with THAT?!? You have GOT to be kidding! I don't have time to learn Linux and all the cute little "verstaile" things you can do with it. I just want to use a word processor, a photo editor, and a spreadsheet. I just want to get on the Net and surf around, get my email and send it out. I want to share some files, buy some stuff online, and basically create product. That's all. End of story.
Second issue: Security. Oh, woe is me! Windows is so full of holes! Bad, bad, bad! Oh, really? Norton has zapped every virus which attempted to show up here. Spyware is down to a near zero--all with two easily-installed (I mean, like, Click->Done) programs. And Linux? Well, first there was this cool bomb that gave the idiot root, then the password file was cracked, then the box was used in a DDoS attack, and on, and on, and on, and on--even with guys (not me!) who had so much experience with Linux that their first distro was on a 5-1/4" floppy. To claim Windows is full of holes may very well be true, but to claim Linux is the alternative? You must be kidding!
Oh, and MS has inferior products--just so sucky as to be unbelievable. Right! You compare Office with what? Open Office? (SNORT!) You ever do tables in Open Office? You ever do an index? You ever do a full-length book? No wonder. I wouldn't trust it with something valuable either. Hey, I still like Lotus better than Excel (Well, I've got it memorized is the only reason), but the fact is that I can trust MS products to do more or less what they say they will do. No config files. Boot and shoot. I'm done. It works. If it won't do some 3D rendering weirdo application, fine. I don't care. My millions of co-workers don't care either. Pixar can do what they want. I watch their movies, not make them.
And Linux is "faster," right? Then why do I boot up and wait ten minutes for a $ when it has to load innumerable drivers (that I had to specify), read innumerable batch files from host.conf to whatever (that I had to edit), and then wind up with what?? A "$"? You must be kidding! (Oh, yeah. I forgot: Autoexec.bat: "Run a Windows-like copy-cat interface." How innovative!
Linux is "less expensive," right? It's a good thing you guys aren't in charge of real-world budgets. Let's just say: It ain't the cost of the distro, folks. It's keeping it running. That's expensive, and you guys all seem to think you deserve top dollar. You seem to think "If you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." You know what? You're right. You keep the more esoteric parts of Linux close to your chest, just obscure enough so no one else QUITE knows what's going on, then you're "needed." That's exactly right, and that's why you are going away. And my goal is to get rid of the last couple of Linux boxes I've got left so I don't have to deal with you any more. Then you can go collect unemployment for awhile and tell everyone else how smart you are. Two more to go, and one of them gets replaced next week
You DID say "small" private club. If the data requirements truly are on the small side, a daily DVD or CD mailed off-site would work and be well worth the few hundred bucks you'd pay per year doing it. Consider them expendable and do one a day. It's a failry inexpensive way to go.
I do not trust RAID at all, having had two of those suckers fail on me. "all you do is live swap a failed drive!" Right. Sure you do-- unless two drives and the controller all fail at once. That little issue forced me to move off of Novell in 8 hours, unplanned, a few years ago. I said, "Hey, Nancy, remember that experiment we were gonna do in a coupla months when we learned a little more?" "Yeah?" "Well, we're gonna do it today."
I do not trust tape (of any kind, DLT or no). They only fail when you need them. Nine inch reel to reel always worked, but it's a little late for that. For local backup to protect against idiocy ("I didn't realize that key labeled "D-E-L-E-T-E" actually erased anything. Sorry.") rather than nature, disk to disk on another machine entirely worked great for me, and I also use CompactFlash cards for small data sets. Of course, if you're talking triple digit gigabytes it's a different story.
Thank the Lord I'm retired and don't have to worry about this stuff any more!
The best hacker/geek I know once worked for me. He can program a Cisco router from his memory, which I still believe is photographic. I used to kid him that all her had to do was look at the cover of a book to know its contents. An amazing fellow, truly, who was into Linux when it came on a 5-1/4" floppy disk. Hard working when necessary, I think he has elements of genius.
However, his English skills were terrible. He could not put together a grammatical sentence. His punctuation was random at best. He couldn't spell the easiest words. His written work was a rambling mess and unpresentable.
As a result I could not allow him to originate any official written communication, on our letterhead or otherwise, to any decision-maker, supervisor, member of the public, customer, or anyone who might be adversely affected. Part of my job was to at least try to make my company sound literate.
This lack of English skill limits his advancement potential. He will always be a technical asset to the organization, but he will never rise above where he is. He's stuck where he is because he has never learned basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Too bad, but that's the way it is in real life. By the way, "English" is not the issue here. You could say the same thing in any other language.
Slashdot Mirror
Not my experience. MSN was the default. I had to manually change to Google.
I agree with you. Last time I installed it I wound up re-installing the OS. I also remember reading an article about the spyware components of the toolbar, though I can't pin it down right now. If anyone can clarify that I would appreciate it. It certainly matches my experience, however.
But wait! The earth was made in 4004 BC, on October 23rd, at 9:00 in the morning! What's this 'million year old' bit?
I would give you the benefit of the doubt and call you a 'victim' of this behavior without knowing the details. In other words, what follows surely does not apply to you, personally. I want to make sure you, MikeDawg, understand I'm not criticizing you personally AT ALL. 'K?
/.?
I've heard of this before. One of my Novell instructors (3.1, what? 20 years ago?) told us a story of a sysadmin who explored around his bank's files and discovered what everyone was paid. He broadcast this, was chastized for it, but they kept him on with a warning. Next time he screwed up (in my mind, inevitably) they called him over to 'fix' a problem with a computer in HR. When he got there, they fired him. Meanwhile, the other sysadmins axed his account. He immediately went back to the computer room and attempted to login. The implication was that he was about to 'do some harm.' The CNE instructor had been one of the sysadmins who axed this fellow's account, so his was a first-hand account.
If this has become common practice, the question is, why are sysadmins so distrusted? Could it possibly be that 'management' is aware of a pervasive attitude of cynacism in IT? Could it be that management has developed a view of IT people as socially awkward malcontents who think its okay not to use deodorant and have a pervasive attitude of superiority over other employees? Could it be that management reads
Don't know--just asking.
and does NOT order in bulk.
They DO order in bulk--for books that will sell. Actually, Amazon is probably the only place a small publisher like you has a chance at all. Why in heaven's name would they want to buy from you in bulk? They know your self-published wonder book isn't going to sell. It would be stupid for them to buy in large quantity. Further, it is standard practice in the publishing industry for retailers to buy books from publishers with a "return" privilege. Let's say B.Dalton buys 100 copies of a title from you. They sit on their shelves for a few months and don't sell. They get rifled through; the spines get beat up; the covers get torn. But they don't sell, So B.Dalton packs them up and sends them back to you for a FULL refund. So would you rather sell books permanently or get them back in poor condition after you thought they were sold? Also, B.Dalton paid postage to get books BACK to you, but you paid to send them to B.Dalton, just as you would to Amazon.com. You idict Amazon for not buying in bulk. Why should they and get stuck with dead merchandise? It doesn't make business sense at all.
Amazon incurs NO shipping costs
So those books just wrap themselves in bubble-wrap and address themselves, then?
But instead, they regularly take from 40% to 50%, and they do NOT pass a portion of that discount on to either retailer or customer.
You're still claiming Amazon is skimming 40-50%, but the numbers simply do not add up. They only GET a 40-50% discount, they can't therefore also TAKE it. I couldn't find a paperback with LESS than a full 20% discount, so the idea that they don't pass ANY of their discount onto a consumer is simply not true. ANY major publishing house hardback is in the 40% or close category. For those books on Amazon that DO sell at full retail, it is the PUBLISHER that is giving Amazon what is called a "short discount" which means next to nothing (e.g. circa 10%). Further, cheaper the book, less the discount. It costs dollars to send an item, whether it retails for $4.95 or $40.95. The cost of touching that book is more or less standard. It makes sense to offer less of a discount for cheaper items. If they offered 40% for a $4.95 pmass market, they'd lose money on every sale. So your numbers simply do not add up. You are accusing Amazon of taking a much bigger mark-up than they actually do.
Now, as to the fact that Amazon does not pay shipping. First of all, what does that have to do with anything? Neither does any bookstore. But the consumer is getting the book mailed to his doorstep. Why shouldn't he pay for shipping? Of course he should. Second of all, Amazon very often DOES pay for shipping. I haven't paid ANY shipping with Amazon for probably three or four years. Anybody with any savvy does not need to either. So as to your complaint about shipping: a) So? and b) That is often simply not true.
maintains NO stock
A friend of mine worked for a Christmas season in one of their several major distribution warehouses. The books were stacked from floor to ceiling on two major levels. The "pickers" (my friend) would take an order and pull from the shelves to a conveyor belt. The orders were packed at the end of the belt. They had espresso stands on every level so employees could fuel up on free caffein. He said it was like a party. Minimum wage or close to it as I remember. You wouldn't want to make a career of it. But the fact is, they DO have warehouses and they DO stock product--just not maybe yours. "Just in time" shipping makes a lot of sense for stiock, like yours, that is likely questionable.
Amazon engages in a common type of marketing which uses semantic tricks proven to give the average customer the impression that they are getting a good deal when they shop at a given outlet.
I don't see it that way. Amazon doesn't have to pay $5,000 a month rent for a 3,000 square foot retail space in a mall. I don't have to drive there. I order a book and it gets here as fast as I want it to
And for this 'service' Amazon feels right in taking a 50% cut of the book's cover price. --The remaining 50% must pay the publisher's production, printing and shipping costs. Is this reasonable? No, it is a damned rip-off. But that's Amazon
The percentages you quote have been normal in the publishing industry well before Amazon ever came upon the scene and grossly exaggerate what Amazon gets for a book. Ingram and Baker & Taylor, two of the largest wholesale book distributors around, get approximately this discount from publishers, then turn right around and give bookstores and libraries a discount of over 45%, thus skimming 4-5%. The retail bookstore then sells at retail, taking their profit, if possible, from their overall 45% discount. Compare this to the mark-up in some other consumer goods (Monster cables, for example, where a $15.00 cable gets sold for $120) and you see that the book industry operates on comparitively very thin margins.
Amazon, of course, sells direct to consumers and has no expensive retail shopping mall rents to pay. They pass much of this discount to consumers, who typically get mainline books for a 40% discount. So, once again, Amazon is skimming as much as 10%, but frequently much less. Thus, of course, the demise of retail bookstores.
But this is not always the case. Many small publishers refuse to sell at a discount to Amazon, or they offer such a small discount that Amazon charges full retail. This is often true of academic publishers, whose discounts range in the 10-15% range off retail. But it's also true of publishers like ARRL, for example, which sells technical books for amateur radio enthisiasts. These books sell for retail on amazon. The result is that it costs the consumer just as much to buy frpom amazon as it does directly from the publisher.
The bottom line is that Amazon DOES NOT GET 50% as you claimed. For most books they get a few percentage points, no greater than any other wholesaler in the mix. The result is that consumers get books cheaper, even with the added shipping, than they could from a retail store. That has implications for independent bookstores, of course, which I'm not arguing. But let's not say Amazon gets 50% when they average about 10% of that.
I think this is an interesting point. The moderation system as it stands tends to support group-think. It's mildly frustrating (though no Big Deal, really) to put some thought and time into a point of view that is ever-so-slightly contrary to mainstream /. attitude that it gets modded flamebait. To some extent the meta-mods ought to help alleviate this, but it's really the luck of the draw. After awhile it gets pretty obvious what will fly: anti-X, anti-Y, and anti-Z are all 'very cool' so if you say anything positive about X, Y, or Z or even point out one mildly positive thing they did, you know it's going to get modded down. /. the minority point of view get slapped around, you'll be fine. It's not like /. is committed to multi-cultural diversity.
So as long as you realize that on
You must be joking.
I've read through over half the comments so far and seen some very good and cogent points on many sides of the issue. But what I haven't seen addressed is this:
Quinn is (was) a civil servant, though a pretty high ranking department head. He worked for the State. As a civil servant you are expected to do things like, you know, show up for work. You get only so many vacation days a year. Maybe he got 20 days (I don't know for sure, but that's typical). The point is that in an environment like that you are accountable for your time. You don't show up whenever you want to. So Quinn went to three conferences per year, some far away from home, dealing at least partially with ODF and at least partially because he was an upcoming 'star' for that agenda. Each one of these conferences took several days, including travel time, so I'm guessing a week each on average. In at least SOME of the cases the conferences paid for his way. Now it looks like his supervisors approved every one of these sorties, but that clears him of wrongdoing only in a technical sense.
Unless he took vacation for every one of these conferences, he attended them on the backs of the Massachussetts taxpayers. That is a legitimate issue to discuss and talk through. Over 5% of his working time was spent attending conferences to talk about ODF, which was HIS agenda for Massachussetts.
I've been in this sort of situation (though certainly not at that level) and the deal was always this: If I got paid by the conference, I had to take vacation, period, even if it were a speech for a measly $100. In some cases I was able to negotiate a "win-win" deal. If the conference paid my way (paid my expenses), but did NOT pay me for my presentations, then I could use my organization's time IF it were seen as pertinent to my position, or, frankly, brought glory to the institution. (e.g.: If I were a keynote speaker and my boss could brag to the board that I 'keynoted the blah blah conference') Even in these cases it ain't easy because it tends to cause dissent in the ranks. I once went to Sweden--at entirely my own expense--to receive an IT award and people griped that I was allowed to go.
I would think, however, that attending three conferences per year in any fashion like this would be really pushing it. I would think that a supervisor who was actually paying attention here would have said, "Hey, Quinn. You've been attending all these conferences, and, yes, I've given my permission so far on all of them, but it seems like every few weeks you are gone somewhere else and nowhere to be found. Now I find out you're pushing your OSD idea. We've talked about that and lets keep talking, but you know: this is not a done deal here and there are lots of issues to deal with before it is. Not everybody likes it and it's a problem when people see you pushing this on the outside. So I think that if you want to go to any more conferences, take vacation to do it. That way we avoid any sort of conflict of interest here where the taxpayer is footing the bill for your agenda. Deal?"
I think that pretty well would have taken care of the issue. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, in a dog-eat-dog environment, when you get into trouble, it's the little issues which normally slide that they'll get you on. You made a long distance call on a state telephone for a personal reason. You didn't fill out a silly form, that sort of thing.
So a pox on all the houses that deserve it here, including yet another journalist who thinks a B.A. in Communications makes him into a perceptive and worldly-wise person, but Quinn is not without some cuplability here. In hindsight, a little foresight might have prevented the entire affair.
I don't know if this is 100% related to your current problem, but it's an issue I have seen crop up. It's a 'story' and insofar as it helps--well, I hope so.
/real/ computer person. There weren't any when I had been hired nearly 30 years prior, at least, not the kind like YOU ALL who are prevalent today. So they found a consultant, hired him, and he proceeded to get interested in a VoIP implementation at the expense of the core product. He let that slide because he really wasn't interested in inventory control. Employees were more and more frustrated. Finally after someone criticized him he said he was resigning in a huff (after 10 months or so) and went home to think about it. The organization wound up 'accepting' his resignation. So they hired another guy, a /real/ computer person as well, and he lasted about six months. In both cases the 'real computer person' mis-read the organization and didn't think the core automation product (the inventory control system) was worth his time and attention. As a result these two people failed and the organization went through a year and a half of floundering. Now they've hired a third IT person, a woman, by the way, who finally "gets it." I am hopeful (as I have 30 years of experience in that company and my blood and sweat are still there, my cables in the rafters and beneath the floorboards) that she will be able to put the IT team back together and they will live long and prosper.
I was a self-taught IT guy. When I started at my company there were no PC's, which weren't really invented yet. We had two terminals hooked to a mainframe 300 miles away. Needless to say, there was no IT department. I am a guy in a female-dominated profession. When the TRS-80 was introduced I used to walk over to Radio Shack on my lunch hour and stare at the plastic case and waft in the polymers. About a year later the Apple ][ came out, and I was the first on my block to get one, serial #32678. I taught myself BASIC, then I stuck in a CP/M card and taught myself dBase. I had one commercial program that sold for ten years. My accounting stuff ran in several different organizations for over fifteen years. I got a CNE, was dragged kicking and screaming into Windows, and managed to survive.
A few years after I bought my Apple my boss came to me and said she'd been thinking we should get 'one of those computers,' and gave me the task. I bought an Apple ][, of course (no PCs then) and began to automate everything in sight, particularly statistics.
By the time I retired we had 500 PCs, 40-50 servers, and 9 sites on a WAN with fiber to the Net. We had replaced our core system, a very complex inventory control system, three times. Every employee had a computer on her desk. In fact, there were more computers than people.
That's background. Here's what happened. As soon as I retired management got together and decided they needed a
But the real issue here is that many times IT people are so enamored with themselves and their 'equipment' that they fail to give management any credence at all. Every boss is a PHB. Every manager sucks. Every employee is a point above an idiot. And only slashdotters are cool. I've seen this several times before. The IT people do not have the same sense of public service that their orgnaizations would like them to have. If they are in love with their data, they often fail to see what the product is--the one that sells, makes money, and pays their salary. They are inwardly focused.
Actually I believe IT RUNS most organizations. That's very clear. No IT, No organization. But IT is not the REASON for the organization's existence. The best thing you could do is sit down with management with the attitude that it is your task to tailor IT to the needs of the organization rather than go in there screaming that management doesn't understand the needs of IT. If you do that, subsequently asking for resources to accomplish the goals of the organization will be much better received. I, for one, never lacked in resour
Libraries never have kept information of what you had checked out once it is returned (unlike Amazon that has a record of all your purchases). I've been working with library circulation systems for thirty years, and ALWAYS there is an RFP requirement that "the system shall not keep a record after the item is returned. The link between patron and item must be broken..."
(Full disclosure statement: Patron history is allowed and kept for so-called "Outreach patrons" who enjoy a personalized level of library service because they are homebound. They tend to be elderly and forgetful, and they tend to read genres like romances or westerns. They also are voracious readers who can easily 'read out' a collection. This "patron history" allows their caregiver to avoid giving them the same book on the very next visit. They just wait a couople and then maybe they won't remember anyway.)
During the last fit of hysteria over the Patriot Act our Board of Trustees even wanted to know the precise backup policy and suggested we keep FEWER BACKUPS! Yes, it is possible to restore the system state to four months ago and read what people had checked out then, but only if you disrupted a 24/7 system for a couple of days to do it. Beyond that it is pretty much impossible because the tapes get written over (Our variation on father/grandfather is Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri-1, Fri-2, Fri-3, Fri-4, Fri-5 to accommodate five-Friday months. The most you can stretch is about 4 months with this scheme. The dailies are written over in 7 days. The Fri-1-Fri-4 are written over the next month, and the Fri-5 is written over the next month that has five Fridays). Fortunately reason prevailed and they didn't mess with my backups.
The tapes themselves are not going to help the cops. It's not as if the information is linear on the tapes. Library databases are incredibly complex with multiple tables, layers, and pointers. The information on the tapes is useless unless it is run through the programs themselves in exactly the right manner on a machine configured EXACTLY like the one it came off of (in terms of rev levels of the programs, config options, etc.)
I'd be perfectly happy giving the FBI or the NSA or whomever a full backup copy from my database. It would cost them about a million dollars and several months just to get to the point of making sense out of it, assuming they hired the right people to put it all back together.
The only practical way for an 'authority' to go back in time on check outs is to subpoena the library and force them to do it, in which case it would be national news in 24 hours. It would be easy to check on what you have checked out right now, and for that all you need is a subpoena.
No, I don't think so. You pay sales tax on anything leased, which is the same as renting, so I don't see how that argument holds. Your better argument is on property tax on capitalized software, but that depends on the state. Some states may very well tax tables, chairs, and software, but many just tax the building and reqal property.
This accusation is patently untrue. I've never thought of librarians as having much power, and they certainly don't have power over knowledge and they certainly are not guardimng knowledge FROM you. Your average librarian's concern is that people seem to have no powers of discrimination so that a Google search is a de facto search for truth when, in fact, it turns up unjuried, unverified, often wrong information as easily as it does something correct. Librarians select books and information based on reviews and veracity of the publisher as well as demand and other factors. Google, on the other hand, indexes anything it can find.
Conversely, librarians often help people who have no particular knowledge of the Internet to find the wide variety of information that IS there. Libraries, by and large, are the one institution that will give anyone off the street free access to the web and more often than not, teach them how to do it. One library I know of became an ISP and gave out 35,000 free e-mail accounts to its users (before email became so pervasive). No other institution is so dedicated to getting information into the hands of users than a library. If you're not lucky enough or rich enough to afford your precious DSL and PC, the ONE place you can go locally is to the library, where terminals line the walls with free access. (Sure you can at the U, but you pay tuition to go there.)
Further, libraries spend $millions per year for access to databases that you will never find on the Internet for free. These databases contain the full text of thousands of magazines, including academic resources, that put Goggle to shame, not to mention databases on nearly any topic you might be interested in.
In terms of copyright, librarians can be seen as violating copyright simply by allowing books to be checked out to more than one user. Publishers are not happy about that, but libraries provide significant income, particularly for the back list, so there is an uneasy truce. But publishers would VERY MUCH like to have a royalty for every time a book was checked out of a library. In some countries, this is called the "public lending right" and money is transferred to publishers from government to compensate them for this very issue.
The best thing you could do to keep more informed would be to get yourself a library card, get to your local library's web site, and gain online access to these databases, as well as eveything else your library has to offer.
All that can be said equally of Linux users.
If people want to leave, let 'em leave! If they won't leave, but you want them to, encourage them. If the company lets the good people leave, the company will fail. That's evolution. The saddest part of this is people who stay just because they're afraid to move on.
What I see here (and what has not been said of the several screens I've looked at so far) is a country of whiners who seem to feel that a company is RESPONSIBLE for their mental and physical well being and if a company does not respond to every whim that employees can dream up, then they 'don't care!' Workers want a one-sided socialism. Company must love you, take care of you, buy your medical insurance for you, present you with free food, goodies of all sorts, lots of off time, and keep you around forever, and in return you get to quit with two week's notice.
Now we here about the poor depressed workers who are sad because they don't have a well-defined 'career path.' For God sakes, people! Make one up for yourself!
Blaming banks for phishing is like blaming the woman for being raped because she's pretty and attracted the attention of the rapist by wearing a skirt above her ankle. It's the same old same old, predictable rants against the USA, government, big, bad banks. Hey! Why isn't Microsoft responsible? But here's the deal:
You need to take some responsibility yourself and enter into a partnership with your bank. That's right. I've been the 'victim' of credit card fraud twice, and the victim of an over-reacting bank once. They cut off my card, without telling me, simply because the replacement took too long to arrive. This caused me to be 'off the grid' for a spell (of anxiety), but it was really my own fault for not having a good back-up plan.
So I called up my bank and over several days and calls we developed a plan that would ensure I wasn't dead in the water if this ever happened again. I don't need to tell you excactly what the plan is, though you can probably guess. It entails multiple levels of security so that both the bank and I are better protected. I can call a live body 24/7. I inform them if I'm hopping over to, say, England for a month. They call me if something weird comes down the pike (like someone from Belaruss trying to charge $1200 of health food products on my card). This way, we help each other.
If you insist on believing and acting as if every other institution that is a part of your life is out to get you, then why not go off in the woods somewhere, make yourself a small cabin, and send in your bombs by parcel post. Oops, yeah. I forgot. That would be the fault of the post office.
I agree with her arguments about this class action lawsuit nonsense on trivialities. I would bet 99.9% of users of DOS 6.X didn't even know there was a compression program that came with it. Of those who had some vague inkling that this was a new "Feature" (i.e.: "a bug as defined by the marketing department" -- Manual for the Apple II circa 1979) very few used it. If they did use it, very few were "injured" because of it. And let's just pretend you WERE "injured" by losing some important data, why the hell didn't you create a backup before you tried something new on your precious bits and bytes? Don't plead ignorance there, plead stupidity, and that makes you culpable. Maybe it's you who needs to be sued (or fired) because you didn't use basic procedures to safeguard your data.
Yet an attempt was made to turn this into another of those infamous "class action suits," which means, really, that anyone can jump on the bandwagon and claim injury. You know: Notices in major newspapers and magazines, lots of fine print, years of parading in the press. And when all is said and done, if these things win, you might be eligible for a rebate worth a few bucks, maybe, if you send it in, which only a handful of people ever will. You know why Norton can pretend to offer you Systemworks for free at Fry's if you send in the multiple rebate forms. It's because you never will, and they know it. It may get you to buy it, but it's just too much of a hassle to bother when you get right down to it. Mission accomplished, chump!
Meanwhile, in this case, assuming it had been able to go forward, by the time it would have ended, DOX 6.X would have been history anyway. You would have upgraded to a faster box, guaranteed, with a new OS, just like you have since the dawn of IT history. So here's big, bad Microsoft that everyone loves to hate and hassle, with yet another frivolous lawsuit to deal with.
And who gets all the money? MILLIONS of dollars change hands in these things. You get nothing (but then, you weren't really injured), but the bucks go to the LAWYERS who made up all this stuff in the first place.
So good for her. She made a good argument and they made the right decision to toss such nonsense out of court.
(And, having said that, I think she is an extremely poor choice for the Supreme Court with no relevant experience at all.)
They simply are not. There are too many things to go wrong even if you double up every single component with the idea that if one side goes it will run on the other while you unplug the bad part and plug in the good part. It's been my experience that as likely as not they will both go at once anyway. I've had this happen with dual fault tolerant RAID systems more than once.
The neat thing about clustering, in my opinion, is that you get built-in redundancy AND you get the ability to take care of an increased load very neatly. Too many processes? Just plug in another CPU to the cluster and load balance it out. Did one break? OK, so you're under a load for a while until you can plug in a good one, but at least the app doesn't go down. And you DO have an extra ready to go just in case, don't you?
I built a cluster supporting a couple hundred thin clients, which tend to proliferate ("Hey! Gimme ten more in this room!") and once the bugs were worked out (Had to load balance the brain cells to get things working right) it works slick. If I had it to design and spec a systen from scratch knowing what I know now, I'd do it again in a heart beat.
So I say: Backup! Backup! Backup! and Cluster! Cluster! Cluster!
The DNC list has done some good, but it sure doesn't stop everything. I have two phone numbers. Both have answering machines on themn, but one has something Qwest called "Caller ID with Privacy Plus" (Moneymaker for them!) If a call comes in from a hot-house number the system interrupts and makes them say who they are. Then it calls me up with a distinctive double ring and with a couple of "Press 1 to continue" gyrations I can hear how the caller has identified himself and choose whether or not I want to accept the call. It's kind of a drag for legitimate callers, and it traps all overseas calls as a matter of course. But I get so few calls on that phone that it isn't really a bother at all. The other phone, without this feature, gets a couple of calls a night, but that phone always goes to voice mail where I tell them to call my other number. No telemarketer ever bothers. So, works for me.
I second that. We installed Active Response as well. It does a very good job and its reporting is a real eye-opener to how often you are scanned (complete with world map showing origin of scans). We've been up for over ten years with 11 Class C's, so I know we're out there, but you will be absolutely AMAZED at how often someone is knocking at your door looking for a way in.
In terms of "active," the way this thing works is by responding to port scans with false information. If that false information is subsequently used to attempt an intrusion, it has effectively 'taken the bait,' and is then blocked.
Very cool system by some Israelis who take security seriously.
And they just happen to be out of stock right now. Wonder who bought all theor keyboards?
It does provoke some thought aside from bringing a smile to our lips :)"
And THAT, my boys, is PRECISELY the problem. You smile at these issues as if they weren't really issues (cause you're so smart). You attribute Linux's lack of popularity with the masses to some MS conspiracy when the conspiracy, if there is any at all, is right at home with you. You imagine problems with Windows that don't exist; and you ignore problems with Linux that stare you in the face every day. You are so happy with yourselves for being so so clever to make Linux work and decry others who seem to have issues.
The first issue is: I don't want to "make" Linux work. I just want it to work. Understand the difference? I don't live for Linux; I live for the end product. I, and millions of people, do not give a rat's ass about Linux as an OS. It's a command-line interface that's a lot harder to use than MS-DOS. So what if you can stick an autoexec.bat in there to run up some copy-cat Windows-like, but not quite interface. And you want me to replace Windows with THAT?!? You have GOT to be kidding! I don't have time to learn Linux and all the cute little "verstaile" things you can do with it. I just want to use a word processor, a photo editor, and a spreadsheet. I just want to get on the Net and surf around, get my email and send it out. I want to share some files, buy some stuff online, and basically create product. That's all. End of story.
Second issue: Security. Oh, woe is me! Windows is so full of holes! Bad, bad, bad! Oh, really? Norton has zapped every virus which attempted to show up here. Spyware is down to a near zero--all with two easily-installed (I mean, like, Click->Done) programs. And Linux? Well, first there was this cool bomb that gave the idiot root, then the password file was cracked, then the box was used in a DDoS attack, and on, and on, and on, and on--even with guys (not me!) who had so much experience with Linux that their first distro was on a 5-1/4" floppy. To claim Windows is full of holes may very well be true, but to claim Linux is the alternative? You must be kidding!
Oh, and MS has inferior products--just so sucky as to be unbelievable. Right! You compare Office with what? Open Office? (SNORT!) You ever do tables in Open Office? You ever do an index? You ever do a full-length book? No wonder. I wouldn't trust it with something valuable either. Hey, I still like Lotus better than Excel (Well, I've got it memorized is the only reason), but the fact is that I can trust MS products to do more or less what they say they will do. No config files. Boot and shoot. I'm done. It works. If it won't do some 3D rendering weirdo application, fine. I don't care. My millions of co-workers don't care either. Pixar can do what they want. I watch their movies, not make them.
And Linux is "faster," right? Then why do I boot up and wait ten minutes for a $ when it has to load innumerable drivers (that I had to specify), read innumerable batch files from host.conf to whatever (that I had to edit), and then wind up with what?? A "$"? You must be kidding! (Oh, yeah. I forgot: Autoexec.bat: "Run a Windows-like copy-cat interface." How innovative!
Linux is "less expensive," right? It's a good thing you guys aren't in charge of real-world budgets. Let's just say: It ain't the cost of the distro, folks. It's keeping it running. That's expensive, and you guys all seem to think you deserve top dollar. You seem to think "If you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." You know what? You're right. You keep the more esoteric parts of Linux close to your chest, just obscure enough so no one else QUITE knows what's going on, then you're "needed." That's exactly right, and that's why you are going away. And my goal is to get rid of the last couple of Linux boxes I've got left so I don't have to deal with you any more. Then you can go collect unemployment for awhile and tell everyone else how smart you are. Two more to go, and one of them gets replaced next week
You DID say "small" private club. If the data requirements truly are on the small side, a daily DVD or CD mailed off-site would work and be well worth the few hundred bucks you'd pay per year doing it. Consider them expendable and do one a day. It's a failry inexpensive way to go.
I do not trust RAID at all, having had two of those suckers fail on me. "all you do is live swap a failed drive!" Right. Sure you do-- unless two drives and the controller all fail at once. That little issue forced me to move off of Novell in 8 hours, unplanned, a few years ago. I said, "Hey, Nancy, remember that experiment we were gonna do in a coupla months when we learned a little more?" "Yeah?" "Well, we're gonna do it today."
I do not trust tape (of any kind, DLT or no). They only fail when you need them. Nine inch reel to reel always worked, but it's a little late for that. For local backup to protect against idiocy ("I didn't realize that key labeled "D-E-L-E-T-E" actually erased anything. Sorry.") rather than nature, disk to disk on another machine entirely worked great for me, and I also use CompactFlash cards for small data sets. Of course, if you're talking triple digit gigabytes it's a different story.
Thank the Lord I'm retired and don't have to worry about this stuff any more!
That begs the question.
The best hacker/geek I know once worked for me. He can program a Cisco router from his memory, which I still believe is photographic. I used to kid him that all her had to do was look at the cover of a book to know its contents. An amazing fellow, truly, who was into Linux when it came on a 5-1/4" floppy disk. Hard working when necessary, I think he has elements of genius.
However, his English skills were terrible. He could not put together a grammatical sentence. His punctuation was random at best. He couldn't spell the easiest words. His written work was a rambling mess and unpresentable.
As a result I could not allow him to originate any official written communication, on our letterhead or otherwise, to any decision-maker, supervisor, member of the public, customer, or anyone who might be adversely affected. Part of my job was to at least try to make my company sound literate.
This lack of English skill limits his advancement potential. He will always be a technical asset to the organization, but he will never rise above where he is. He's stuck where he is because he has never learned basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Too bad, but that's the way it is in real life. By the way, "English" is not the issue here. You could say the same thing in any other language.