I really want to know how I can send the Gartner guys a keg of beer. He hit the nail right on the head. Gartner is read by clueless management *mostly*. I find it humoristic at best, but they do appeal to the non-technical-decision making-budget carrying-person. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Now, it's not just some NYT story, or some C-Net story. This thing is from the Oh-So-Holy Gartner Group. These guys have "credibility" with management. And as I usually do not agree with their biased view, I'd like to reward them for going against the evil-empire with some factual info. for once.
This has probably been mentioned earlier, but what the heck:
What if this goes through ? Who's next on the list ? Are they going to start shutting down newspaper because people are advertising "massage parlors" in the ads ?
Are they going to shutdown the phonebook because some of these business are unethical and/or may provide illegal service ?
Face it people, Napster is just one big phonebook, with the difference that it's citizen are band's name and songs name, and phone number get replaced by an IP.
Woudl RIAA go up against a phone co ? Nah. They'd get litigated to a pulp. So they hit on the smaller guy.
I personally listen to AM radio, and I dont give a rat's about MP3's. It just freaks me out that they could go after you just for HAVING a directory of some sort. We all know that Napster facilitates piracy, _BUT_ in theory it has other use. If it only represent 0.00000000000001% of whatever you could use it for, it still warrants fair defense.
I have absolutely NO experiance with Sybase w/ Linux, but Sybase has claimed they support Linux, and are planning on being at Linux world, so it's worth calling them about it. (They seem to be trying to hire Linux techs pretty agressively!).
I have firsthand experience with this, and one thing I can say: Yes they do Linux, yes they do it well, support is awesome, and prices are very reasonable.
Cons: Their Openclient is not thread safe yet, and wont do well on SMP. I'd have to look back in the specs, but I dont think a 30Gb DB would be a problem.
One word of caution: As many have said, do not skimp on hardware. _ever_
So, I'll just sit here with my Mac, running Eudora, and wait for this new worm to come out, as it inevitably will, and not affect me.
You say it will not affect you ? I can tell you it will. If some or all of the recipient your are usually mailing to are infected. This reduces your efficiency at work, therefore affects you, and costs the company paying you in lost labor.
We all get affected to some level, infected or not.
I've got a kid. And while I dont let him watch porn, I really must wonder why. I mean, the kid's 3 yrs old. What could he see in porn that could "scar" him for life ? To me, porn is just RL sci-fi. It's about mens and womens in various combination having sex/getting it on/reproducing/making love/doin' the mambo, you name it. I do not see what is _WRONG_ with it.
I also agree with not being the government's place to decide what _MY_ kid does/watch/listens to. I have to live with him, care for him, and support him, so I damn better be the one allowed to decide what is good or not for my kid.
I'm one of the lucky few. I work for a boss that is a friend, and was my boss before (to make a long story short, I worked for him on a previous job, and now I'm working for him at a new joint.)
The guy was a tech before going management, so he knows what I have to go through each and every day. He also can cope with the idea that I'll take a day off now and then, and that a pager is a convenience, and not taken for granted. If I answer it, good, if not, I was "out of area". Luckily enough, I have a spot in the mountains, lakeside where radio wave are all deflected somewhere else. I use this spot a lot. I'll sometimes work 20-30 hours in a stretch. It keeps me on my toes. I can do the "quality-time" thing, but the fact is: I'm a job junkie. Wasnt it for my wife who gives me the oh-so-needed reality check, I'd barely ever leave work.
This makes me a valuable asset for the company (I dont mind being an asset. Asset dont get downsized.) and I get compensated accordingly.
To me, this new job has given me more "quality of life" and "leisure". Not because I get more free time. All the contrary. I put in longer hour, but after I turn the lights off, I have a warm-fuzzy feeling of a job that I enjoy that was well done.
Who do you respect more; the college kid who buys pre-made paints, canvases, and brushes, or the starving artist type who makes their own material, medium, and tools?
The best part about that is in Canada we have a little surcharge on every recordable CD. That money goes to the RIAA (or whatever the Canadian branch of it is), just in case you use that CD to pirate their music.
They have issued a indefinite lenght moratory on the issue, because they could not prove that blank CD's were solely used for pirating music. I for one run nightly backups on CDR's, and never (honest.) burned music on a blank. Quality is shitty anyways.
They also once tried to pull this stunt on VHS blanks and audio tapes. Keeps failing.
This could be old-school cracking where people were actually attacking telco switching stations. It could interfere with just voice calls, ISDN or some sort of T1 or fiber optic that (although possibly handled by the telco) doesn't hit the backbone. For all we know it could have been someone scanning their voice mail system trying to find a way to make free long distance calls.
Even then, I strongly doubt that they have a "land line" hooked up to the shuttle. They go by radio wave / whatever-wave . So if someone managed to "overload" the system, they must have used something to screw with the radio signal (HERF gun maybe ?)
This article gives no useful information, and here we are getting all hot and bothered with something that could have been just another solar storm or what not.
** DISCLAIMER ** Even though I work for Videotron, I am in no way related with the cable business ** DISCLAIMER **
The 15kb limit reason really _is_ technical. Most cable cells are oversold. A place like St-Hubert is 180% oversold. Whatever they had planned for got shot to shit. In order to maintain decent service on the downstream (average mom and pop web downloads) they cut back on the upstream.
If you live in a non-crowded cell (like I do , 6 modems in one cell, on brand new fiber)you will have an uplink restriction, but it'll be around 30k second. Downlink is extremely fast at anywhere between 500 and 800k per second.
As far as bandwidth quota goes, you can cough up an extra 20$, get a second IP and 6Gb of extra bandwidth (which can be up or down, they dont regulate.) This should be more then enough for _anyone_ doing _LEGAL_ stuff with the box. I've been running a web/mail/ftp/ssh server for 15 months now, and never have I busted my quota.
On the Bell DSL side, the sad truth is that they're so full of shit it smells a mile around. I ordered DSL the second day it became available in my area, and tested it side by side (on identical hardware) with the cable modem. They have 100K uplink and 10K downlink _IF_ you're lucky. And they make you go through ATM authentification and their shitty Fastproxy.sympatico.ca . Not worth 50$ / month.
No where in the article do they mention that it was a system connected to the internet.
"We had an activity at NASA center where a hacker was overloading our system...to such an extent that it interfered with communications between the NASA center
They dont even seem to know _where_ it came from. From previous reading, these kind of system are/should be totally isolated from the outside world, relying on sneaker net to transfer data, and have a direct uplink with the shuttle.
This really sounds like and inside job, or poor engineering, but to save face, they blame it on the nasty hackers. Not to sure about this, but any system ran at NASA on which lifes rely should at least conform to B1 security specs. I know I would not want anything less if I was the poor Joe stuck in space.
Quoting: VCs don't have the time or the inclination so they spread the risk around and louse a little on things like this. If you invest in 5 pixelons it only takes 1 transmeta to wash away all your pain.
Not to mention that they probably get some very decent tax write-off by "losing" a bit of money. Not sure how the US system works, but in Canada, you can deduct your investment losses off your taxes. Therefore, if they make a big amount on one Transmeta, they'll pay big taxes. Having a few pixelon go under just makes them pay less taxes. They dont diserve any sympathy. They're in it for the money, and their every move is a cold-calculated risk. In the end, no matter what, they win.
Quoting: You do not have to make the source available for download, just available to whoever wants it (especially those that have binaries of the code - and your obligation might stop here).
That's the beauty of it. Sure, you have a right to a copy of the code with nominal fee for media. What if media to me represents a load of paper ? At 0.05$ a sheet, I'll let you have a "copy" (print-out) of my code (Which will amount to 10000 sheets (500$). This would be considered reasonable under the GPL. Now, just imagine how many pages a printout of the kernel might take. What if they run it through a swahili translator before hand ? Or use a non-ocr'able font type ? You have a copy of the source code, which is useless unless you type it back in manually. The license allows for that. Fun heh ?
Re:Question: What about remixes?
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
>All I want to do is listen to the CD's I already >own at work without having to cart them back and >forth, risking damage and loss.
This brings up an issue not many have mentionned. Sure, Napster is all good and nice, and as far as I'm concerned, as long as it is used for wink legal purposes, I dont have a problem with it. Now you're mentionning that you want to listen to your CD at work. I dont have a problem with one of my guy listening to CD's at work. What I have a problem with is my guys sucking up my bandwidth downloading music off the net. I dont give a flying rat's ass that they own the CD. They do not own _MY_ bandwidth, and I'm not about to pay for them to listen to legally owned music. Bandwidth ain't free.
Therefore, we block all access to Napster at the firewall. Not to prevent the download of illegal music. Simply as a bandwidth economy measure. And with the number of sys admin's reading this, I'm surprised it didnt come out any sooner.
At the risk of starting yet another flamewar, I'll have to say that I dare anyone to remove my more "lively" comments from the code I write.
If I'm to be hacking away for hours on some difficult bit of code, you can bet that this code wont be legal anywhere in australia.
It's a know fact of life that anyone coding will stick a fuck()function somewhere in it. And my employer at the time just had to live with it, or run a find & replace.
Note: My employer does not share any opinion with me on this. They just make sure I'm well fed, well dressed and well paid. It ends there.
It probably sucks for the user being pulled off, but being in the ISP's sysadmin's chair, I would have taken that decision too.
Much like the insurances company do : You get in a whole shitload of car smash, you become a liability and eventually, all companies will refuse to sell you insurance. Those that will accept to will charge you 4-5-6x what you'd usually pay for it.
Let's give the user a choice. Let's bump his access charge 500% to cover for all the additional bandwidth he's using. If he wants to foot the bill, he'll pay up for the infrastructure upgrade. If not, well, be rid of him.
Well... Actually, I beg to differ: True, you can die at war. You can also get 3 out of 4 appendixes blown out, and wish you were dead. The same applies to "virtual" war. You can be flooded, nuked, destroyed, vandalized. Imagine all of the US's banks getting "virtually" attacked, and having their service down for a short (4-6 hours) period of time. Economy would most likely collapse, leading to civil riots and other acts that will "physically" harm a nation. But the attacker never dropped a bomb, or directly terminated someone's life.
Keep in mind that you can have a "virtual" war with casualties.
Plan for Microsoft's sinking: 1- Put a LEGIT RETAIL copy of Microsoft Windows (tm) for sale. 2- Put a price tag of 350 Billion dollars on it 3- Have your wife / dog / so create a separate LEGIT account. 4- Bid on the article. 5- Wait until MS gets the sale cancelled because they claim you're a criminal, and that it's counterfeit software. 6- Sue MS for 350 Billions + damages on loss of business due to slander / illegal monopolistic practices. (Remember, they want to be the ONLY ones selling Windows.) 7- Donate 349.5 Billions to Gnu Foundation, EFF, Debian, and any other charities you care about. 8- Better yet. Purchase Microsoft, open-source all of there product, and donate patents on what they have to public domain. 9- Brush your teeths, go to bed.
These opinions are mine, mine and only mine. If you want to quote me, please at least be decent enough to send me a copy of the article.
I'm facing the same issues right now, and trust me, it's not the nicest field to play in. Basically, you have four options : Get commercial off-the-shelf solutions, get some open source solution (IRM and PHPHelpdesk jumps to my mind right now.), hire a developper to make one custom fit, or make one yourself.
Now, on the the debunking of my own affirmation (Trust me, I've done 4 weeks of research on that recently).
1- Commercial off the shelf : I dont know how big a user base you'll be dealing with, but since you seem to be alone, I'll assume under 250 users. The cheapest "helpdesk" commercial solution you can get with web based problem reporting goes around 5000$. And you'll have to setup your own MS SQL / MS NT / IIS to support it.
2- Open source: IRM is nice, PHPHelpdesk seems promising, but unless you have extensive MySQL / PHP / Apache experience, I recommend you stay away from them. They are poorly documented, and even tho the end result is nice, they seem a bit "unfinished".
3- Getting someone to develop: Now, that's my best option so far. For under 5000$, I'll have someone develop a simple set of forms + reports + agent based on our Domino server architecture. Meaning I get an already enterprise supported platform to build on, some scripting I can understand, web-based user forms, and something that can grow. The best thing is that we plan to open source the scripts once we're up and running.
4- Developping the bugger yourself: Well. This one I crossed right off. If you're anything like me, you're already overloaded with supporting your users, and dont have much free time to start hacking a helpdesk together.
That being said, my opinion is to go for option 3, find some nice person that will custom-fit a solution to your needs, and make it usable for you. That way, you get support, working solution in no time, and expansion possibilities. You dont need / cant afford / dont want to support the cheapest of the "off-the-shelf" solution out there. Trust me. Mail me if you want to discuss this some more.
As a wise man once said: Intelligence and judgement are two very separate qualities.
The sad part, is that you cannot have intelligence, and make good use of it without judgement.
Virus writers to me are sociopaths who have an unfulfilled craving for attention. The biggest virus to ever hit this planet were so crippled with incriminating evidences that the perpetrators were caught usually in a matter of weeks.
I keep hearing that these people's "skill" would be better off writing useful code, but I'll have to disagree. They would probably be incapable of writing useful code.
For example, demolition engineers. These guy can blow up a building to pieces. Would they be able to build the same building from the pieces ? Most likely not. They do not know the dynamics of building architecture and engineering. Those dynamics are different then those needed to bring the thing down. The same apply to virus writer. They all know how to destroy, but few of them know how to construct. Point in case: How many viruses with a decent UI have we seen lately ? (notwithstanding Windows.) ? Perhaps I'd be happier to have all my files thrashed if I had a "Clippy dance" along with it ?
"Bought a magazine today (PC Authority - Australian magazine). It contained Borland C++ Builder 3, and the licence contained the following"
He bought a magazine that probably had a demo / limited version in it. The license in no way removes him any rights, but is most likely different from the license you'd get purchasing a shrink wrapped version of the product.
Meanwhile, if I was Borland, I would probably not want some script kiddie to just build something out of my libraries, without bringing in any new elements, and then publish MY source code with no credits / royalties paid to me. But then again, it's just my old capitalist side talking.
Third, they're giving the stuff away. They can slap the license they want on it, because my ultimate right is to choose some other environment to work in. No one is cramming the software down our throats. We have options.
>I find all these "personal" pages on the web are a major irritant, as they seldom contain useful ?information, and they clog up the search >engines with non-relavent crap, by polluting the search space.
Has it ever occured to you that slashdot was once Rob's personal page ?
Is it just me, or some company have a lot of research money to waste ?
I skimmed through the article, and came up to a conclusion (which was lacking from the paper on IBM's site.) : What good does it do me to know the web is shaped like a bow tie ?
Slashdot Mirror
I really want to know how I can send the Gartner guys a keg of beer.
He hit the nail right on the head. Gartner is read by clueless management *mostly*. I find it humoristic at best, but they do appeal to the non-technical-decision making-budget carrying-person. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Now, it's not just some NYT story, or some C-Net story. This thing is from the Oh-So-Holy Gartner Group. These guys have "credibility" with management. And as I usually do not agree with their biased view, I'd like to reward them for going against the evil-empire with some factual info. for once.
Cheers to Gartner !
This has probably been mentioned earlier, but what the heck:
What if this goes through ? Who's next on the list ? Are they going to start shutting down newspaper because people are advertising "massage parlors" in the ads ?
Are they going to shutdown the phonebook because some of these business are unethical and/or may provide illegal service ?
Face it people, Napster is just one big phonebook, with the difference that it's citizen are band's name and songs name, and phone number get replaced by an IP.
Woudl RIAA go up against a phone co ? Nah. They'd get litigated to a pulp. So they hit on the smaller guy.
I personally listen to AM radio, and I dont give a rat's about MP3's. It just freaks me out that they could go after you just for HAVING a directory of some sort. We all know that Napster facilitates piracy, _BUT_ in theory it has other use. If it only represent 0.00000000000001% of whatever you could use it for, it still warrants fair defense.
I have firsthand experience with this, and one thing I can say: Yes they do Linux, yes they do it well, support is awesome, and prices are very reasonable.
Cons: Their Openclient is not thread safe yet, and wont do well on SMP. I'd have to look back in the specs, but I dont think a 30Gb DB would be a problem.
One word of caution: As many have said, do not skimp on hardware. _ever_
You say it will not affect you ? I can tell you it will. If some or all of the recipient your are usually mailing to are infected. This reduces your efficiency at work, therefore affects you, and costs the company paying you in lost labor.
We all get affected to some level, infected or not.
I've got a kid. And while I dont let him watch porn, I really must wonder why. I mean, the kid's 3 yrs old. What could he see in porn that could "scar" him for life ? To me, porn is just RL sci-fi. It's about mens and womens in various combination having sex/getting it on/reproducing/making love/doin' the mambo, you name it. I do not see what is _WRONG_ with it.
I also agree with not being the government's place to decide what _MY_ kid does/watch/listens to. I have to live with him, care for him, and support him, so I damn better be the one allowed to decide what is good or not for my kid.
I'm one of the lucky few. I work for a boss that is a friend, and was my boss before (to make a long story short, I worked for him on a previous job, and now I'm working for him at a new joint.)
The guy was a tech before going management, so he knows what I have to go through each and every day.
He also can cope with the idea that I'll take a day off now and then, and that a pager is a convenience, and not taken for granted. If I answer it, good, if not, I was "out of area". Luckily enough, I have a spot in the mountains, lakeside where radio wave are all deflected somewhere else. I use this spot a lot.
I'll sometimes work 20-30 hours in a stretch. It keeps me on my toes. I can do the "quality-time" thing, but the fact is: I'm a job junkie. Wasnt it for my wife who gives me the oh-so-needed reality check, I'd barely ever leave work.
This makes me a valuable asset for the company (I dont mind being an asset. Asset dont get downsized.) and I get compensated accordingly.
To me, this new job has given me more "quality of life" and "leisure". Not because I get more free time. All the contrary. I put in longer hour, but after I turn the lights off, I have a warm-fuzzy feeling of a job that I enjoy that was well done.
Who do you respect more; the college kid who buys pre-made paints, canvases, and brushes, or the starving artist type who makes their own material, medium, and tools?
Hmmmm... The one with the bigger breasts ?
WARNING: This is intended to be humorous
Being a citizen of a non-lawyer-driven-country, I smell large profits here.
Starting now, for a nominal fee, I will post anything, anywhere, on anyone, as long as it is not a Canadian citizen/corporation/entity.
You can send all submissions to my attention, accompanied by your offshore bank account number, and I'll take care of the rest.
I dont plan on going to the great U.S. of A. anytime soon, so that should keep me off the hook for a while.
How does eWatch plan to catch non us citizen's ?
For the humor and sarcasm impaired, this was a humorous sarcastic comment
The best part about that is in Canada we have a little surcharge on every recordable CD. That money goes to the RIAA (or whatever the Canadian branch of it is), just in case you use that CD to pirate their music.
They have issued a indefinite lenght moratory on the issue, because they could not prove that blank CD's were solely used for pirating music. I for one run nightly backups on CDR's, and never (honest.) burned music on a blank. Quality is shitty anyways.
They also once tried to pull this stunt on VHS blanks and audio tapes. Keeps failing.
This could be old-school cracking where people were actually attacking telco switching stations. It could interfere with just voice calls, ISDN or some sort of T1 or fiber optic that (although possibly handled by the telco) doesn't hit the backbone. For all we know it could have been someone scanning their voice mail system trying to find a way to make free long distance calls.
Even then, I strongly doubt that they have a "land line" hooked up to the shuttle. They go by radio wave / whatever-wave . So if someone managed to "overload" the system, they must have used something to screw with the radio signal (HERF gun maybe ?)
This article gives no useful information, and here we are getting all hot and bothered with something that could have been just another solar storm or what not.
** DISCLAIMER **
Even though I work for Videotron, I am in no way related with the cable business
** DISCLAIMER **
The 15kb limit reason really _is_ technical. Most cable cells are oversold. A place like St-Hubert is 180% oversold. Whatever they had planned for got shot to shit. In order to maintain decent service on the downstream (average mom and pop web downloads) they cut back on the upstream.
If you live in a non-crowded cell (like I do , 6 modems in one cell, on brand new fiber)you will have an uplink restriction, but it'll be around 30k second. Downlink is extremely fast at anywhere between 500 and 800k per second.
As far as bandwidth quota goes, you can cough up an extra 20$, get a second IP and 6Gb of extra bandwidth (which can be up or down, they dont regulate.) This should be more then enough for _anyone_ doing _LEGAL_ stuff with the box. I've been running a web/mail/ftp/ssh server for 15 months now, and never have I busted my quota.
On the Bell DSL side, the sad truth is that they're so full of shit it smells a mile around. I ordered DSL the second day it became available in my area, and tested it side by side (on identical hardware) with the cable modem. They have 100K uplink and 10K downlink _IF_ you're lucky. And they make you go through ATM authentification and their shitty Fastproxy.sympatico.ca . Not worth 50$ / month.
No where in the article do they mention that it was a system connected to the internet.
"We had an activity at NASA center where a hacker was overloading our system...to such an extent that it interfered with communications between the NASA center
They dont even seem to know _where_ it came from. From previous reading, these kind of system are/should be totally isolated from the outside world, relying on sneaker net to transfer data, and have a direct uplink with the shuttle.
This really sounds like and inside job, or poor engineering, but to save face, they blame it on the nasty hackers. Not to sure about this, but any system ran at NASA on which lifes rely should at least conform to B1 security specs. I know I would not want anything less if I was the poor Joe stuck in space.
july 3rd, still looking for my shoes.
Quoting:
VCs don't have the time or the inclination so they spread the risk around and louse a little on things like this. If you invest in 5 pixelons it only takes 1 transmeta to wash away all your pain.
Not to mention that they probably get some very decent tax write-off by "losing" a bit of money. Not sure how the US system works, but in Canada, you can deduct your investment losses off your taxes. Therefore, if they make a big amount on one Transmeta, they'll pay big taxes. Having a few pixelon go under just makes them pay less taxes. They dont diserve any sympathy. They're in it for the money, and their every move is a cold-calculated risk. In the end, no matter what, they win.
Quoting: You do not have to make the source available for download, just available to whoever wants it (especially those that have binaries of the code - and your obligation might stop here).
That's the beauty of it. Sure, you have a right to a copy of the code with nominal fee for media. What if media to me represents a load of paper ? At 0.05$ a sheet, I'll let you have a "copy" (print-out) of my code (Which will amount to 10000 sheets (500$). This would be considered reasonable under the GPL. Now, just imagine how many pages a printout of the kernel might take. What if they run it through a swahili translator before hand ? Or use a non-ocr'able font type ? You have a copy of the source code, which is useless unless you type it back in manually. The license allows for that. Fun heh ?
>All I want to do is listen to the CD's I already
>own at work without having to cart them back and
>forth, risking damage and loss.
This brings up an issue not many have mentionned. Sure, Napster is all good and nice, and as far as I'm concerned, as long as it is used for wink legal purposes, I dont have a problem with it.
Now you're mentionning that you want to listen to your CD at work. I dont have a problem with one of my guy listening to CD's at work. What I have a problem with is my guys sucking up my bandwidth downloading music off the net. I dont give a flying rat's ass that they own the CD. They do not own _MY_ bandwidth, and I'm not about to pay for them to listen to legally owned music. Bandwidth ain't free.
Therefore, we block all access to Napster at the firewall. Not to prevent the download of illegal music. Simply as a bandwidth economy measure. And with the number of sys admin's reading this, I'm surprised it didnt come out any sooner.
At the risk of starting yet another flamewar, I'll have to say that I dare anyone to remove my more "lively" comments from the code I write.
If I'm to be hacking away for hours on some difficult bit of code, you can bet that this code wont be legal anywhere in australia.
It's a know fact of life that anyone coding will stick a fuck()function somewhere in it. And my employer at the time just had to live with it, or run a find & replace.
Note: My employer does not share any opinion with me on this. They just make sure I'm well fed, well dressed and well paid. It ends there.
It probably sucks for the user being pulled off, but being in the ISP's sysadmin's chair, I would have taken that decision too.
Much like the insurances company do : You get in a whole shitload of car smash, you become a liability and eventually, all companies will refuse to sell you insurance.
Those that will accept to will charge you 4-5-6x what you'd usually pay for it.
Let's give the user a choice. Let's bump his access charge 500% to cover for all the additional bandwidth he's using. If he wants to foot the bill, he'll pay up for the infrastructure upgrade. If not, well, be rid of him.
Well... Actually, I beg to differ:
True, you can die at war. You can also get 3 out of 4 appendixes blown out, and wish you were dead.
The same applies to "virtual" war. You can be flooded, nuked, destroyed, vandalized. Imagine all of the US's banks getting "virtually" attacked, and having their service down for a short (4-6 hours) period of time. Economy would most likely collapse, leading to civil riots and other acts that will "physically" harm a nation. But the attacker never dropped a bomb, or directly terminated someone's life.
Keep in mind that you can have a "virtual" war with casualties.
Plan for Microsoft's sinking:
1- Put a LEGIT RETAIL copy of Microsoft Windows (tm) for sale.
2- Put a price tag of 350 Billion dollars on it
3- Have your wife / dog / so create a separate LEGIT account.
4- Bid on the article.
5- Wait until MS gets the sale cancelled because they claim you're a criminal, and that it's counterfeit software.
6- Sue MS for 350 Billions + damages on loss of business due to slander / illegal monopolistic practices. (Remember, they want to be the ONLY ones selling Windows.)
7- Donate 349.5 Billions to Gnu Foundation, EFF, Debian, and any other charities you care about.
8- Better yet. Purchase Microsoft, open-source all of there product, and donate patents on what they have to public domain.
9- Brush your teeths, go to bed.
These opinions are mine, mine and only mine. If you want to quote me, please at least be decent enough to send me a copy of the article.
I'm facing the same issues right now, and trust me, it's not the nicest field to play in. Basically, you have four options : Get commercial off-the-shelf solutions, get some open source solution (IRM and PHPHelpdesk jumps to my mind right now.), hire a developper to make one custom fit, or make one yourself.
Now, on the the debunking of my own affirmation (Trust me, I've done 4 weeks of research on that recently).
1- Commercial off the shelf : I dont know how big a user base you'll be dealing with, but since you seem to be alone, I'll assume under 250 users. The cheapest "helpdesk" commercial solution you can get with web based problem reporting goes around 5000$. And you'll have to setup your own MS SQL / MS NT / IIS to support it.
2- Open source: IRM is nice, PHPHelpdesk seems promising, but unless you have extensive MySQL / PHP / Apache experience, I recommend you stay away from them. They are poorly documented, and even tho the end result is nice, they seem a bit "unfinished".
3- Getting someone to develop: Now, that's my best option so far. For under 5000$, I'll have someone develop a simple set of forms + reports + agent based on our Domino server architecture. Meaning I get an already enterprise supported platform to build on, some scripting I can understand, web-based user forms, and something that can grow. The best thing is that we plan to open source the scripts once we're up and running.
4- Developping the bugger yourself: Well. This one I crossed right off. If you're anything like me, you're already overloaded with supporting your users, and dont have much free time to start hacking a helpdesk together.
That being said, my opinion is to go for option 3, find some nice person that will custom-fit a solution to your needs, and make it usable for you. That way, you get support, working solution in no time, and expansion possibilities. You dont need / cant afford / dont want to support the cheapest of the "off-the-shelf" solution out there. Trust me. Mail me if you want to discuss this some more.
As a wise man once said: Intelligence and judgement are two very separate qualities.
The sad part, is that you cannot have intelligence, and make good use of it without judgement.
Virus writers to me are sociopaths who have an unfulfilled craving for attention. The biggest virus to ever hit this planet were so crippled with incriminating evidences that the perpetrators were caught usually in a matter of weeks.
I keep hearing that these people's "skill" would be better off writing useful code, but I'll have to disagree. They would probably be incapable of writing useful code.
For example, demolition engineers. These guy can blow up a building to pieces. Would they be able to build the same building from the pieces ? Most likely not. They do not know the dynamics of building architecture and engineering. Those dynamics are different then those needed to bring the thing down. The same apply to virus writer. They all know how to destroy, but few of them know how to construct. Point in case: How many viruses with a decent UI have we seen lately ? (notwithstanding Windows.) ? Perhaps I'd be happier to have all my files thrashed if I had a "Clippy dance" along with it ?
"Bought a magazine today (PC Authority - Australian magazine). It contained Borland C++ Builder 3, and the licence contained the following"
He bought a magazine that probably had a demo / limited version in it. The license in no way removes him any rights, but is most likely different from the license you'd get purchasing a shrink wrapped version of the product.
Meanwhile, if I was Borland, I would probably not want some script kiddie to just build something out of my libraries, without bringing in any new elements, and then publish MY source code with no credits / royalties paid to me. But then again, it's just my old capitalist side talking.
Third, they're giving the stuff away. They can slap the license they want on it, because my ultimate right is to choose some other environment to work in. No one is cramming the software down our throats. We have options.
>I find all these "personal" pages on the web are a major irritant, as they seldom contain useful ?information, and they clog up the search >engines with non-relavent crap, by polluting the search space.
Has it ever occured to you that slashdot was once Rob's personal page ?
Is it just me, or some company have a lot of research money to waste ?
I skimmed through the article, and came up to a conclusion (which was lacking from the paper on IBM's site.) : What good does it do me to know the web is shaped like a bow tie ?
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Surely not? I don't see how you can possibly pirate music with an assault rifle. --
I can think of a millions way to pirate music with the help of an assault rifle.