Sure, they have a right to raise prices, as well as you, but that's not exactly what they did, now is it?
I'm going to assume that you run a computer shop. Let's say someone comes in to get a discounted PC bundle with all the trimmings. How do you think they'd feel if you went to their home, knocked on their door, and asked them for the cost of upgrading all of their software -- whether or not they were going to use it -- else you wouldn't offer them discounted prices in your store again? I'm betting that they wouldn't shop with you again, and we both agree that's fair.
However, Microsoft's position as the monopolist vendor of desktop software has left us little real choice. I'm a huge fan and proponent of Linux. I've been using it as my desktop for 5 years. But there's no way I'd recommend that my company switch to it entirely. I'm just developing things to run on it where I can in the server room. For Microsoft, this worked. They had record quarters because of the move. For you, on the other hand, it would be suicide, and I'm only saying that because for ANYone else, it'd be financial suicide, regardless of whether your customers have the "right" to future discounted prices or not.
I'm still incredulous that people can be comfortable with what Microsoft did. It's this sort of bending over that perpetuates the market condition. I made up my mind a long time ago that I'm not spending one more dime with Microsoft; this is just one of the reasons why.
We obviously have a strong difference of opinion, and I'm just glad that there are people like you who have nothing better to do with your money than to give it to Microsoft. I wish I was living so comfortably.:)
Yeah, and what well-known phrase encapsulates both of these thoughts? "Strong-arm sales tactics."
Let's take a hypothetical situation using your first example. Let's say you normally get your concert tickets from your scalper at 50% of full price. (Let's ignore how he's giving you that price for now.) Further, let's say you've already bought 20 tickets to a future concert for you and all of your friends, up in the cheap seats. Now, your scalper *comes to you* (i.e. you didn't ask), and tells you that you need to pay him the price for the front-row seats on all 20 tickets. But you don't want to pay for that? But you still want to sit in the nosebleed section? Doesn't matter to him. Unless you pay him for this, he won't sell you tickets at a discount again. You may as well buy your tickets from TicketMaster for full price along with everyone else.
Now how would you feel about doing business with this person? Aha! You say. But Microsoft is a legitimate business person. They wouldn't do these shady sorts of things.
I don't usually respond to my own comments, but this time, there's got to be an exception. What term would you use to describe how Microsoft told all of its Select customers that they can either pay to upgrade every license they have on the premises to XP levels (regardless of whether or not they're using the upgraded versions) or give up discounted pricing on any future licenses? Frankly, I don't think you have a clue as to the situation I'm talking about, and I think you need to read up on the story before you comment on it. My company was one that took the bait on this one, to the tune of millions of dollars. It was either that, or pay *more* millions of dollars down the road because they would have nullified our Select Agreement, and we would have had to start over from scratch on new licenses, losing our volume discount. (I'm also doubting you know what a "Select" licenese arrangement is.) We still install Windows and Office 2000 -- and don't even have *plans* to migrate -- but we've PAID for the upgrades to XP versions company-wide. In a company of 36,000 employees (and we just bought another division), that adds up to A LOT of desktops. So don't tell me what is or isn't being strong-armed, mmm k?
If you want longer support, you can always buy Advanced Server. The same announcement shows that they will always support that product for a minimum of 3 years.
Given the fact that Microsoft just STRONG-ARMED all their corporate buyers into upgrading every license in the company, WHETHER OR NOT THEY USE THE NEWER VERSIONS of their products, I can't see how ANYONE in their RIGHT MIND would accuse RedHat of being like Microsoft with this move.
I'm waiting for RedHat to *require* me to pay to download (or buy a boxed set of) their distribution. I want to give them money, but I personally haven't parted with it, and won't until they make me, but then I'll be fine with that. They deserve to get some money out of me. But I must admit that I would really like to see a 1.5 year support life for even the basic product.
I've used it for awhile. It basically has 3 parts: NFS (client and server), korn shell (and really basic utils), and Perl. (It also has a revamped telnet server, but so what?) The NFS stuff is... well, NFS. I hate NFS. (For some reason, I keep getting it cocked up such that I need a reboot.) The shell is worthless. The Perl is ActiveState's version, and you can get that for free anyway.
If you really want to put a bunch of Unix tools on Windows, you ought to look at CygWin. I've tested it only briefly, and it's even got an X server. In that regard, it's pretty cool. You can load what bits you want and leave the rest out.
The problem with putting Unix tools on Windows is that it's still Windows. I'm not trying to be funny here. The main advantage of having a shell is being able to administrate the system under which the shell is running. While it might be nice to do some awk'ing and sed'ing natively under Windows, you still can't do a whole lot of administration with it. Let's face it, for more than a few lines of shell script, Perl's a better way to go these days. At that point, what's the use of spending money on this product? NFS? Just put samba on your NFS servers instead and quit fooling around with the clients.
But what if I want to take my personal private key to work so that I can decrypt messages sent to my home email address while I'm there? (Which I do now.)
The bottom line in this whole story is that the power to change the situation rests with the "artists." I quote that word because I don't think much of anything being produced today is artistic, let alone worth money. We keep talking about how hard it is for a new band to get signed onto a label, and then further how hard it is except for the primo bands to make any money. Great. Then it sounds to me like the bands or individual artists are purposely taking it sideways from the recording industry. I guess everyone deserves what they get. If the "artists" would stop for a second, they might realize that they DON'T *HAVE* to do this. I hear a lot about "artists" saying that they'd do this no matter what. Ok... How about NOT doing it? How about doing something else, and perhaps making a decent living? I've got news for you, lots of us learned a skill or a trade and found a job, and you can do it too. THAT is the only thing that's going to change how the RIAA does business. We - the buying public - have already shown that there's little impact to our buying habits no matter how much they charge for a disc, or how much tax they levy against raw media, or how stupid the artists make themselves look on national television. So what's to stop them? Nothing, until the artists agree that their deals are so bad that they go do something else. Our buying is a given. So as long as the RIAA has a stream of one-hit-wonders to draw from, this will go on. The "artists" are the bottle-neck. The power to change the situation lies in their hands.
But they don't. That's one of the basic foundations of Mullen's whole argument. Furthermore, as someone who's running his own servers on a DSL connection - and therefore someone who keeps watch of blocked connection attempts - I know only too well how true his other point on this topic is: most of the time, you can't look up the IP address and find who's responsible for it. Furthermore, even when it's resolvable, only a fraction of those IP's will have an "abuse" email address to which to submit complaints. I use "psad" for watching these things. It makes it a lot easier to keep track of these events than the collection of scripts I had to munge the logs. I investigate real scans, and save all the emails in case (God forbid) I need them to help with a forensic investigation.
If this were to actually happen, their customers - i.e. people who are using Linux for business - would disown them in a heartbeat. There wouldn't be a SCO left to collect on this issue.
That depends on your point of view. There are conspiracy theorists that would like us to believe that the world banks are using UN policy to level the entire world into one denomination. To do that, you need to bring the USA "down," and third-world nations "up." (No one will value a "dollar" of Vanatu's money as a dollar of American money.) I always knew that if this theory was to be correct, then the sovereignity of nations would have to be equated as well. We've just seen two prominent cases where this is happening.
As a Christian, I note that these theories jive with events depicted in the book of The Revelation, so I'm keeping my eye on how these things proceed...
As an admin for a large engineering campus in a mutli-billion dollar company, I - with 3 other people - help oversee a mixed Unix and Windows environment representing about two dozen servers with several hundred clients.
I set up Nagios at the end of last year on an unused dual PII 266. I configured monitoring on 17 severs, both Unix and Windows. I was a little nervous about the "third-party" Windows service, but it's pleasantly been the best part of the system, since it ties up all the client-side stuff in one "script." In all, I currently have 50 services being monitored.
The corporate Windows group has had a $250,000 project on the books to buy some sort of all-in-all monitoring software for the 100 or so servers they have. This has been pushed back for 4 years because of budget issues. I suggested they try this. I have heard nothing.
The corporate Unix group recently put in a quarter million dollar system (which I was told would take 3 months to setup when I was in the group), but it's primarily running batch jobs for the Oracle system. The Unix admins haven't used it for anything.
In features, Nagios rivals what both groups are still just TALKING about doing, because I didn't have to wrangle $250,000 out of the non-existant IT budget for the project. Plus, it only took me 3 weeks to get everything configured. (Compiling the client-side tools on AIX and Solaris took a lot of work. I ended up just downloading pre-compiled versions for Solaris.)
Not only that, but the true value of OPEN SOURCE software finally dawned on me. I took the FlexLM monitoring script, hacked it up into a PHP web page, and now the admins and users at this campus can see who has a license tied up on 19(!) different software packages we use.
My boss and co-workers both really like the system. It cost me nothing but a man-month of time (including hacking up the web page). It's been ROCK SOLID. It's been giving us appropriate alerts when something goes wrong. It's easy to set up the web site like you want. (You might have to recompile the CGI's to make some tweaks, but this isn't hard.)
Going forward, I plan to try automating some problem resolution steps on the one service that routinely gets wonky (guess which platform THAT one's on...). Also, I'm thinking about putting a modem in the machine, and trying some of the packages out there that would allow me to send a page over a phone line in case the network goes down.
Overall, I can say nothing - absolutely nothing - bad about Nagios. I haven't even read the interview yet because I was so excited at the opportunity to share my experience, but I know that Ethan MUST be a very fine person!;-) Awesome stuff, and I am SO thankful that he open-sourced it.
Be careful of your moral-equivalency arguments. Blocking someone's email hardly equates to throwing them out of their dwelling place and into the streets.
Good luck trying to sue spammers. The reason people don't try it is because it's just not going to work with any level of what you would call "success." It's difficult to track down the sender, and it's impossible to know where else they sent the message in order to aggregate the injury award to the point of being effective. Once you've found the sender, it's a horrible legal mess to prosecute (because all litigation is a mess), and you'll only be suing for perhaps a couple of emails per sender. Even if you ever get money out from behind a corporate veil - or whatever business machinations the sender hides behind - what's $500 per message YOU received going to do to his business? If you haven't been paying attention, spamming is good business. That's why there's so much of it.
In my opinion, blacklisting is akin to moderation. Is it perfect? No, but I'll take something over nothing. I read at +3 or +4 when I'm not moderating. Am I trampling the rights of the dispossesed and downtrodden by ignoring their "FP" and "ate my balls" posts? Yeah? So sue me.
Gimme a break. This may have been true in the past, but I can't see how it's valid any longer. With the number of spams I bounce from my server every day - never responding to any of them - it's obvious that my email address is being sold around (and around) the globe. I used to do a fair amount of USENET back in the day, and now that Google has created their news search page, I'm toast. I'll never get away from it. As you can see, I made my address somewhat obvious and inflexible because I never wanted to change it again. That's a personal problem, but it's just that I don't think that any spammers are paying any attention to anything but the links they embed that point the responder to someplace that means, "Why, yes, Mr. Spammer, I would like to give you $5000 to put me at the bottom of some pyramid scheme." I actually have a friend who did this.
Twice.
Then declared bankruptcy.
Spam won't stop until we educate everyone with email about it. I failed to intervene because I thought I had no business meddling in his affairs, but in retrospect, friends don't let friends reply positively to spam. Responding negatively won't mean anything anyway. I'm quite sure it all goes down a big black hole.
If you haven't checked into nagios yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Now. It's a monitoring application that can take action on problems. That's the first step to automating things in the datacenter. It's open-source, and it's highly useful, if a little tricky to get working.
I moved out of a group running a lot of big Sun machines (I set up an E10K for them) because of managerial issues. Before I left, we had a budget item for about $250,000 to set up a monitoring and job-scheduling application. It was going to take *another* Sun box to run, and we were being told that it would take 3 months to get it all set up and configured.
With Nagios, I can do everything we they were talking about implementing. I spent 3 weeks, and it cost me nothing. I employed a dual PII 266 that was collecting dust. (I also used an old P166 as a dedicated kiosk for showing the web page.) My boss and my co-workers think it's great. I'm dying to show it to my old group...
I'll bet a lot of people here have grandparents who still have a refrigerator or freezer from the 50's. How many of us have a refrigerator that's still running after even 15 years? My parents still have their original washer and dryer, and I'm 33. *My* dryer's making really bad sounds after just 8 years. My point is that electronics are just following the same path as appliances.
And don't buy warranties. It would seem that it's much more likely that the company supposedly backing the product - appliance or electronics - will go out of business just before you need to avail yourself of that warranty. You want quality? You need to pay for it up front.
AS IF! I love how some people think that only their side of the issue is well thought and studied, and I notice that this attitude is far more prevalent in "liberal" circles that "conservative" ones. It would seem beyond goon_america's ability to grasp that an NRA member *did* go to the library, *did* research the issue, and *did* form a pro-gun position based on that research. How absolutely "stone age!" I think that there are PLENTY of facts from which to draw a conclusion in this debate, and when you talk to a liberal, you get mealy-mouthed platitudes. Talk to a conservative, and you get a reference like BattyMan gave to Kleck's book. That's why this discussion takes the form it does. The liberals (the keep-God-out-of-everything folks) in this country have made NON-ownership of guns their religion. And we all know how debates about religion end up, especially on the internet...
No... They're going to get most everyone moved over before people realize they've been had. Probably 3/4th's of my friends and family have computers, and there are only a handful that would even *know* the difference between owning a piece of software and "renting" it over the wire, let alone *care*. It's hopeless. Just like spam, if companies can continue to make money from practices that are - to people like Slashdot readers - basically bait-and-switch tactics, they're going to do it. All the more reason to move to OSS ASAP. Spend your money there and do without paid software. I tell you, I used to think Stallman was a certifiable nut, but the further the copyright holders take their position in today's electronic society, the more I think that his view is the only one that will stem the tide. Just say no to closed source.
Just use IMAP and be done with it. Yes, you must have the space on the server for everyone to store their mail, but you can limit the size of the mailbox on the Exchange server. That will eliminate the calls to the help desk when a user blows away his 2 GIGABYTE.pst file and needs it restored. (True story.) If you're still afraid of the storage requirements, then just consider that it's all disk space in your company, somewhere. Whether it's on the email server, or spread over the file and print servers, it's still the same company spending the same money on the same amount of disk storage.
As someone who is trying his best to move away from any and all Windows-related software, I make what may be a stupid suggestion. If you can find a GPL'ed piece of software that runs on Linux, go ahead and use it. Just use it while capturing what's happening on screen - and using VNC to get at a window of a Windows-based desktop running the vital application.
So what? That doesn't invalidate my point. The larger context here is that the library has always determined both what resources it will provide andhow they may be used. They determine how long you can check out a book, how long you can borrow a tape or a movie, and how old you need to be do these things. They should be the ones who get to set the rules. Again, if you don't like their decisions, then become part of the process or GO GET YOUR OWN RESOURCES.
This is not about demanding that the government does this or that. This is about ensuring that our tax dollars are not spent on filtering software without putting some thought into it.
Exactly my point. Librarians are already making decisions about what books to place on the shelves. They're doing the censorship - and that's exactly what it is - up front. They are putting thought into it. If you don't like the decisions they are making it's up to you to either become a part of the local government that makes the decisions on how to spend the money or satisfy your informational needs yourself.
I hope no one at the library wants to read about the fleshpots of Egypt.
As if there were no books on the subject.
Seriously, why is it that the slashdot community thinks that installing filtering software on a library's computer systems renders them useless, or, worse, renders the entire library useless? I just don't get it. There are still plenty of worthwhile books on the shelves. If they don't have the hard-bound book or magazine (or CD or LP or book-on-tape or whatever you want), then you go buy it yourself. Same thing with their computer systems. You don't like what you can get through their internet connection? GO GET YOUR OWN UNFILTERED FEED. It's not the job of the government to provide this to you. I cannot fathom why people extrapolate the fact that we have libraries in most cities to mean that the government has some Constitutionally-mandated responsibility to provide access to every resource under the sun.
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Sure, they have a right to raise prices, as well as you, but that's not exactly what they did, now is it?
:)
I'm going to assume that you run a computer shop. Let's say someone comes in to get a discounted PC bundle with all the trimmings. How do you think they'd feel if you went to their home, knocked on their door, and asked them for the cost of upgrading all of their software -- whether or not they were going to use it -- else you wouldn't offer them discounted prices in your store again? I'm betting that they wouldn't shop with you again, and we both agree that's fair.
However, Microsoft's position as the monopolist vendor of desktop software has left us little real choice. I'm a huge fan and proponent of Linux. I've been using it as my desktop for 5 years. But there's no way I'd recommend that my company switch to it entirely. I'm just developing things to run on it where I can in the server room. For Microsoft, this worked. They had record quarters because of the move. For you, on the other hand, it would be suicide, and I'm only saying that because for ANYone else, it'd be financial suicide, regardless of whether your customers have the "right" to future discounted prices or not.
I'm still incredulous that people can be comfortable with what Microsoft did. It's this sort of bending over that perpetuates the market condition. I made up my mind a long time ago that I'm not spending one more dime with Microsoft; this is just one of the reasons why.
We obviously have a strong difference of opinion, and I'm just glad that there are people like you who have nothing better to do with your money than to give it to Microsoft. I wish I was living so comfortably.
Yeah, and what well-known phrase encapsulates both of these thoughts? "Strong-arm sales tactics."
Let's take a hypothetical situation using your first example. Let's say you normally get your concert tickets from your scalper at 50% of full price. (Let's ignore how he's giving you that price for now.) Further, let's say you've already bought 20 tickets to a future concert for you and all of your friends, up in the cheap seats. Now, your scalper *comes to you* (i.e. you didn't ask), and tells you that you need to pay him the price for the front-row seats on all 20 tickets. But you don't want to pay for that? But you still want to sit in the nosebleed section? Doesn't matter to him. Unless you pay him for this, he won't sell you tickets at a discount again. You may as well buy your tickets from TicketMaster for full price along with everyone else.
Now how would you feel about doing business with this person? Aha! You say. But Microsoft is a legitimate business person. They wouldn't do these shady sorts of things.
But that's *exactly* what they did.
I don't usually respond to my own comments, but this time, there's got to be an exception. What term would you use to describe how Microsoft told all of its Select customers that they can either pay to upgrade every license they have on the premises to XP levels (regardless of whether or not they're using the upgraded versions) or give up discounted pricing on any future licenses? Frankly, I don't think you have a clue as to the situation I'm talking about, and I think you need to read up on the story before you comment on it. My company was one that took the bait on this one, to the tune of millions of dollars. It was either that, or pay *more* millions of dollars down the road because they would have nullified our Select Agreement, and we would have had to start over from scratch on new licenses, losing our volume discount. (I'm also doubting you know what a "Select" licenese arrangement is.) We still install Windows and Office 2000 -- and don't even have *plans* to migrate -- but we've PAID for the upgrades to XP versions company-wide. In a company of 36,000 employees (and we just bought another division), that adds up to A LOT of desktops. So don't tell me what is or isn't being strong-armed, mmm k?
If you want longer support, you can always buy Advanced Server. The same announcement shows that they will always support that product for a minimum of 3 years.
Given the fact that Microsoft just STRONG-ARMED all their corporate buyers into upgrading every license in the company, WHETHER OR NOT THEY USE THE NEWER VERSIONS of their products, I can't see how ANYONE in their RIGHT MIND would accuse RedHat of being like Microsoft with this move.
I'm waiting for RedHat to *require* me to pay to download (or buy a boxed set of) their distribution. I want to give them money, but I personally haven't parted with it, and won't until they make me, but then I'll be fine with that. They deserve to get some money out of me. But I must admit that I would really like to see a 1.5 year support life for even the basic product.
I've used it for awhile. It basically has 3 parts: NFS (client and server), korn shell (and really basic utils), and Perl. (It also has a revamped telnet server, but so what?) The NFS stuff is... well, NFS. I hate NFS. (For some reason, I keep getting it cocked up such that I need a reboot.) The shell is worthless. The Perl is ActiveState's version, and you can get that for free anyway.
If you really want to put a bunch of Unix tools on Windows, you ought to look at CygWin. I've tested it only briefly, and it's even got an X server. In that regard, it's pretty cool. You can load what bits you want and leave the rest out.
The problem with putting Unix tools on Windows is that it's still Windows. I'm not trying to be funny here. The main advantage of having a shell is being able to administrate the system under which the shell is running. While it might be nice to do some awk'ing and sed'ing natively under Windows, you still can't do a whole lot of administration with it. Let's face it, for more than a few lines of shell script, Perl's a better way to go these days. At that point, what's the use of spending money on this product? NFS? Just put samba on your NFS servers instead and quit fooling around with the clients.
But what if I want to take my personal private key to work so that I can decrypt messages sent to my home email address while I'm there? (Which I do now.)
The bottom line in this whole story is that the power to change the situation rests with the "artists." I quote that word because I don't think much of anything being produced today is artistic, let alone worth money. We keep talking about how hard it is for a new band to get signed onto a label, and then further how hard it is except for the primo bands to make any money. Great. Then it sounds to me like the bands or individual artists are purposely taking it sideways from the recording industry. I guess everyone deserves what they get. If the "artists" would stop for a second, they might realize that they DON'T *HAVE* to do this. I hear a lot about "artists" saying that they'd do this no matter what. Ok... How about NOT doing it? How about doing something else, and perhaps making a decent living? I've got news for you, lots of us learned a skill or a trade and found a job, and you can do it too. THAT is the only thing that's going to change how the RIAA does business. We - the buying public - have already shown that there's little impact to our buying habits no matter how much they charge for a disc, or how much tax they levy against raw media, or how stupid the artists make themselves look on national television. So what's to stop them? Nothing, until the artists agree that their deals are so bad that they go do something else. Our buying is a given. So as long as the RIAA has a stream of one-hit-wonders to draw from, this will go on. The "artists" are the bottle-neck. The power to change the situation lies in their hands.
Yes, but don't forget that Tommy Tutone has a precedent for owning 8675309...
But they don't. That's one of the basic foundations of Mullen's whole argument. Furthermore, as someone who's running his own servers on a DSL connection - and therefore someone who keeps watch of blocked connection attempts - I know only too well how true his other point on this topic is: most of the time, you can't look up the IP address and find who's responsible for it. Furthermore, even when it's resolvable, only a fraction of those IP's will have an "abuse" email address to which to submit complaints. I use "psad" for watching these things. It makes it a lot easier to keep track of these events than the collection of scripts I had to munge the logs. I investigate real scans, and save all the emails in case (God forbid) I need them to help with a forensic investigation.
If this were to actually happen, their customers - i.e. people who are using Linux for business - would disown them in a heartbeat. There wouldn't be a SCO left to collect on this issue.
That depends on your point of view. There are conspiracy theorists that would like us to believe that the world banks are using UN policy to level the entire world into one denomination. To do that, you need to bring the USA "down," and third-world nations "up." (No one will value a "dollar" of Vanatu's money as a dollar of American money.) I always knew that if this theory was to be correct, then the sovereignity of nations would have to be equated as well. We've just seen two prominent cases where this is happening.
As a Christian, I note that these theories jive with events depicted in the book of The Revelation, so I'm keeping my eye on how these things proceed...
And it was a SLAM DUNK!!!
;-) Awesome stuff, and I am SO thankful that he open-sourced it.
As an admin for a large engineering campus in a mutli-billion dollar company, I - with 3 other people - help oversee a mixed Unix and Windows environment representing about two dozen servers with several hundred clients.
I set up Nagios at the end of last year on an unused dual PII 266. I configured monitoring on 17 severs, both Unix and Windows. I was a little nervous about the "third-party" Windows service, but it's pleasantly been the best part of the system, since it ties up all the client-side stuff in one "script." In all, I currently have 50 services being monitored.
The corporate Windows group has had a $250,000 project on the books to buy some sort of all-in-all monitoring software for the 100 or so servers they have. This has been pushed back for 4 years because of budget issues. I suggested they try this. I have heard nothing.
The corporate Unix group recently put in a quarter million dollar system (which I was told would take 3 months to setup when I was in the group), but it's primarily running batch jobs for the Oracle system. The Unix admins haven't used it for anything.
In features, Nagios rivals what both groups are still just TALKING about doing, because I didn't have to wrangle $250,000 out of the non-existant IT budget for the project. Plus, it only took me 3 weeks to get everything configured. (Compiling the client-side tools on AIX and Solaris took a lot of work. I ended up just downloading pre-compiled versions for Solaris.)
Not only that, but the true value of OPEN SOURCE software finally dawned on me. I took the FlexLM monitoring script, hacked it up into a PHP web page, and now the admins and users at this campus can see who has a license tied up on 19(!) different software packages we use.
My boss and co-workers both really like the system. It cost me nothing but a man-month of time (including hacking up the web page). It's been ROCK SOLID. It's been giving us appropriate alerts when something goes wrong. It's easy to set up the web site like you want. (You might have to recompile the CGI's to make some tweaks, but this isn't hard.)
Going forward, I plan to try automating some problem resolution steps on the one service that routinely gets wonky (guess which platform THAT one's on...). Also, I'm thinking about putting a modem in the machine, and trying some of the packages out there that would allow me to send a page over a phone line in case the network goes down.
Overall, I can say nothing - absolutely nothing - bad about Nagios. I haven't even read the interview yet because I was so excited at the opportunity to share my experience, but I know that Ethan MUST be a very fine person!
Be careful of your moral-equivalency arguments. Blocking someone's email hardly equates to throwing them out of their dwelling place and into the streets.
Good luck trying to sue spammers. The reason people don't try it is because it's just not going to work with any level of what you would call "success." It's difficult to track down the sender, and it's impossible to know where else they sent the message in order to aggregate the injury award to the point of being effective. Once you've found the sender, it's a horrible legal mess to prosecute (because all litigation is a mess), and you'll only be suing for perhaps a couple of emails per sender. Even if you ever get money out from behind a corporate veil - or whatever business machinations the sender hides behind - what's $500 per message YOU received going to do to his business? If you haven't been paying attention, spamming is good business. That's why there's so much of it.
In my opinion, blacklisting is akin to moderation. Is it perfect? No, but I'll take something over nothing. I read at +3 or +4 when I'm not moderating. Am I trampling the rights of the dispossesed and downtrodden by ignoring their "FP" and "ate my balls" posts? Yeah? So sue me.
Gimme a break. This may have been true in the past, but I can't see how it's valid any longer. With the number of spams I bounce from my server every day - never responding to any of them - it's obvious that my email address is being sold around (and around) the globe. I used to do a fair amount of USENET back in the day, and now that Google has created their news search page, I'm toast. I'll never get away from it. As you can see, I made my address somewhat obvious and inflexible because I never wanted to change it again. That's a personal problem, but it's just that I don't think that any spammers are paying any attention to anything but the links they embed that point the responder to someplace that means, "Why, yes, Mr. Spammer, I would like to give you $5000 to put me at the bottom of some pyramid scheme." I actually have a friend who did this.
Twice.
Then declared bankruptcy.
Spam won't stop until we educate everyone with email about it. I failed to intervene because I thought I had no business meddling in his affairs, but in retrospect, friends don't let friends reply positively to spam. Responding negatively won't mean anything anyway. I'm quite sure it all goes down a big black hole.
If you haven't checked into nagios yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Now. It's a monitoring application that can take action on problems. That's the first step to automating things in the datacenter. It's open-source, and it's highly useful, if a little tricky to get working.
I moved out of a group running a lot of big Sun machines (I set up an E10K for them) because of managerial issues. Before I left, we had a budget item for about $250,000 to set up a monitoring and job-scheduling application. It was going to take *another* Sun box to run, and we were being told that it would take 3 months to get it all set up and configured.
With Nagios, I can do everything we they were talking about implementing. I spent 3 weeks, and it cost me nothing. I employed a dual PII 266 that was collecting dust. (I also used an old P166 as a dedicated kiosk for showing the web page.) My boss and my co-workers think it's great. I'm dying to show it to my old group...
I'll bet a lot of people here have grandparents who still have a refrigerator or freezer from the 50's. How many of us have a refrigerator that's still running after even 15 years? My parents still have their original washer and dryer, and I'm 33. *My* dryer's making really bad sounds after just 8 years. My point is that electronics are just following the same path as appliances.
And don't buy warranties. It would seem that it's much more likely that the company supposedly backing the product - appliance or electronics - will go out of business just before you need to avail yourself of that warranty. You want quality? You need to pay for it up front.
Likewise, I'm sure.
Yeah, but according to this article, do you really want to?
AS IF! I love how some people think that only their side of the issue is well thought and studied, and I notice that this attitude is far more prevalent in "liberal" circles that "conservative" ones. It would seem beyond goon_america's ability to grasp that an NRA member *did* go to the library, *did* research the issue, and *did* form a pro-gun position based on that research. How absolutely "stone age!" I think that there are PLENTY of facts from which to draw a conclusion in this debate, and when you talk to a liberal, you get mealy-mouthed platitudes. Talk to a conservative, and you get a reference like BattyMan gave to Kleck's book. That's why this discussion takes the form it does. The liberals (the keep-God-out-of-everything folks) in this country have made NON-ownership of guns their religion. And we all know how debates about religion end up, especially on the internet...
No... They're going to get most everyone moved over before people realize they've been had. Probably 3/4th's of my friends and family have computers, and there are only a handful that would even *know* the difference between owning a piece of software and "renting" it over the wire, let alone *care*. It's hopeless. Just like spam, if companies can continue to make money from practices that are - to people like Slashdot readers - basically bait-and-switch tactics, they're going to do it. All the more reason to move to OSS ASAP. Spend your money there and do without paid software. I tell you, I used to think Stallman was a certifiable nut, but the further the copyright holders take their position in today's electronic society, the more I think that his view is the only one that will stem the tide. Just say no to closed source.
Just use IMAP and be done with it. Yes, you must have the space on the server for everyone to store their mail, but you can limit the size of the mailbox on the Exchange server. That will eliminate the calls to the help desk when a user blows away his 2 GIGABYTE .pst file and needs it restored. (True story.) If you're still afraid of the storage requirements, then just consider that it's all disk space in your company, somewhere. Whether it's on the email server, or spread over the file and print servers, it's still the same company spending the same money on the same amount of disk storage.
As someone who is trying his best to move away from any and all Windows-related software, I make what may be a stupid suggestion. If you can find a GPL'ed piece of software that runs on Linux, go ahead and use it. Just use it while capturing what's happening on screen - and using VNC to get at a window of a Windows-based desktop running the vital application.
So what? That doesn't invalidate my point. The larger context here is that the library has always determined both what resources it will provide and how they may be used. They determine how long you can check out a book, how long you can borrow a tape or a movie, and how old you need to be do these things. They should be the ones who get to set the rules. Again, if you don't like their decisions, then become part of the process or GO GET YOUR OWN RESOURCES.
Exactly my point. Librarians are already making decisions about what books to place on the shelves. They're doing the censorship - and that's exactly what it is - up front. They are putting thought into it. If you don't like the decisions they are making it's up to you to either become a part of the local government that makes the decisions on how to spend the money or satisfy your informational needs yourself.
As if there were no books on the subject.
Seriously, why is it that the slashdot community thinks that installing filtering software on a library's computer systems renders them useless, or, worse, renders the entire library useless? I just don't get it. There are still plenty of worthwhile books on the shelves. If they don't have the hard-bound book or magazine (or CD or LP or book-on-tape or whatever you want), then you go buy it yourself. Same thing with their computer systems. You don't like what you can get through their internet connection? GO GET YOUR OWN UNFILTERED FEED . It's not the job of the government to provide this to you. I cannot fathom why people extrapolate the fact that we have libraries in most cities to mean that the government has some Constitutionally-mandated responsibility to provide access to every resource under the sun.