By reminding people that if they take their licenses for granted then their rights will be stripped away from them slowly over time.
By reminding people that while their are easy, short-term fixes to the problem, that we still have a long way to go toward creating a completely free and open system.
By reminding people that they need to contribute new code and update old products to keep the free and open software base that is the foundation of Linux truly free and open.
Speaking of nutcases, lets talk about ESR, who is basically a programming libertarian (maybe even closer to a John Bircher) who has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to sell out Free Software to big companies in the name of Open-Source software. Talk about your raving lunatics, ESR has got to be one of the craziest crackpots in the community.
This is in not intended by way of a disparagement, but more properly to highlight that there are more than enough 'interesting' personalities in the Free and Open software movement to go around.
You know, flaming Stallman is getting to be a little bit overdone here. I think that maybe it is time to put some of these things in perspective.
Stallman's FSF is an entity with an over political purpose. To that end, sub projects that do not align themselves with that overt political purpose probably do not fit within the project and should be excluded. So Ghostscript wasn't aligned and it had to go.
Those who flame Stallman for his fanatacism or lack of current code shouldn't forget his critical early contributions - without Stallman working himself almost to death in the 80's, sacrificing money, power, time, and big fancy jobs to support his project, there would have been no base of free and open software for Linux to run. Stallman created from sratch (and in many places, single-handedly) the largest and most essential parts for a free operating environment, an open alternative to big,commercial, expensive Unix. Would Linus have really jumped into making a kernel (or had any experience with Minix) if there wasn't a widely available free and open set of libraries, utilitites, compilers, and debuggers to run on the system? Possibly, but it certainly seems less likely.
While I understand how tiresome and boring it can be to have our morals, ethics, and beliefs get in the way of our more immediate gratification, that doesn't change the fact that Stallman has done more than anyone to get free and open software where it is today. His relentless (and seemingly tireless) dedication to the cause launched free and open software for the world. That we have so many alternative licenses and viewpoints today is owed to his presenting the first so many years ago.
There is always a role (and a need) for the dedicated, single-minded project that defines a rigorous (and righteous) goal and pursues it unswervingly. I see GNU standing side by side with groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and the Medecins Sans Frontiers. It is so easy to forget how important free and open software is to the modern technological, economic, and now even political and social worlds that we find it easier to sneer and laugh at what seems like an anachronism. But Stallman's project is far more relevant and important to the continued success of technology than most will admit.
If free and open software marches on, then it will always need Stallman and the FSF hoisting the original colors and beating the drum to remind them of the pace, no matter how out of place or out of tune he may seem at the time.
The main problem with geeks, besides our spaghetti arms, is our Beer/Pop Bellies. You can get the 8 min abs DVD from half.com for like $10. If you use this coupon code, you'll get $5 off any order over $10: BUCK17014537
unless, of course, somebody comes out with 6 minute abs. then you're in trouble.
Nobody's going to come out with 6 minute abs! You can't get a good ab workout in six minutes!
> It's a mac - anti virus isn't worth having. I've had a mac for years and have never had any viruses.
Wow, I've been alive for 23 years and never had cancer. I guess nobody else has either.
Your no anti-virus argument is stupid and dumb. Waiting until you've gotten a virus to purchase anti-virus software is closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.
Ok, I feel like I am being a little bit off-topic by not jumping into the look at this/Exchange sucks/OpenMail/Domino/Eudora/mutt debate and instead choosing to RESPOND TO THE QUESTION, but here goes.
I am evaluating this product, and my reaction so far has been good/bad. First, the program does work as advertised. It's lightweight, pretty easy to use, and integrates well with Outlook. I have used it for a couple months, and it never broke on me. I haven't tested the bandwidth usage, which I might worry about, but overall it has done exactly what Bynari claims.
However, there are some real problems with it. First, Outlook likes its changes to be instantaneous, but Insight Connector only tracks updates on sync - a combination of time (every 15 secs, configurable) and action (every time you enter a folder, theoretically). When you move email, Outlook expects it to be gone. So when you move email using Insight Connector, it looks like it has moved to the new folder, but if you quickly look at either the old or new folders, sometimes emails show up in the old location or are absent from the new. After about 15-20 seconds and you re-enter the folder, things are ok, but it can be a little confusing / disconcerting at first. Who knows if they will ever address this.
Second issue - IMAP uses Trash, Outlook Deleted Items + IMAP uses Purge/Delete while Outlook uses Delete. The first issue is that you need to move items from Deleted Items to Trash, which is redundant. Additionally, this makes things very confusing, esp. with Courier's Move to Trash on Purge feature. It is really easy to end up deleting mail from Deleted Items, only to have it show up in Trash, then when you delete it from Trash it shows up in Deleted Items again. So deleting email can be tough to configure, and it doesn't work like you might expect. If the program simply mapped Deleted Items to Trash and Empty Deleted Items Folder to Purge, things would be fine.
I'm guessing that these features work better with their additional IMAP server product, but I haven't tested that so I can't be sure.
The last problem is the most difficult to fix. Calendar/Contact/To Do items are stored as MIME emails on the server. This means that accessing the IMAP server via any other method (webmail, imap client, etc.) makes that info inaccessible. So you end up storing your data on the server, but you have no other way to access it. Beats me how to fix this one, unless they also distributed a free web client with it.
All in all, it is a very good product, but honestly better suited for the more tech savvy. Anyone who has either little computer experience or extensive Outlook experience is likely to be a little confused and annoyed, but should be able to work around it eventually.
If this goes through, then there will be no more taping of encounters with police officers, public officials. No more behind-the-scenes videos about restaurant kitchens. No covering your ass when you meet someone trying to get you to do something illegal.
I couldn't get this to work. No matter how many times I tried to remove Tim Johnson's account, it just wouldn't go away - that goddamn tjohnson deleted folder kept staring me in the face, so I reinstalled the OS.
On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know why my friend Steve Hortname who sometimes uses my machine lost all his stuff? They guy had some great mp3's in his home directory...
Ok, so maybe this is not the place for this, but I can't seem to get any answers out of the developers about this../configure still doesn't work.
I downloaded 2.0.28 in December and tried to./configure --enable-layout=opt. No dice - it still throws everything in/usr/local/apache2. I posted to the apache-users mailing list in December, and no one responded. I tried again yesterday, with 2.0.32, and it still doesn't work.
Looking through the bug tracking list, I can see that this bug has been filed since November 2001.
How can Apache 2 be nearing release if you still can't get it to install where you want it to?
And i agree that this is a really, really old trick. Anyone with half a clue would not get caught using this.
However, anyone stupid enough to have forwarded an email outside of his company to a newspaper in the past is likely dumb enough to fall for this.
The way I see it, there are 4 possibilities here:
1. My previously stated theory - this is a trick to catch a leaker.
2. This is just a brilliant piece of disinformation, designed to make people think that MS is brain-dead.
3. MS is brain-dead.
4. It's a hoax.
2 + 3 are very unlikely. 2 because it would only serve to disinform average-Joe users - anyone with half a brain will ignore this as too dumb to be true. And 3 is really unlikely - say what you want MS is not brain-dead. You can't call them arrogant, perverse, manipulative monopolists in one breath and then claim they are morons in the next.
So my explanation really just lays out how it could be 1 and not the possibility 4 many think it is.
I should add that it makes no difference whether the email was intended to be legit - it's possible that they just made it up to catch the leaker.
Which could explain the fact that it reads like such an unitelligent analysis. Gross oversimplification and stupidity == increased probability of leakers spreading it around.
It's a simple trick - they sent out slightly different copies of the email to everyone on the list. Then, when the public version gets published they can reference the published version against who got what.
The changes can be cosmetic - slight changes in phrasing, additional punctuation, spacing, line breaks. Stuff like this would be pretty much unnoticeable without having a couple of different copies to compare against. Even then, it would likely be tough to notice the difference.
Add in 3 separate requests to "not distribute" as a tempting goad to the leaker, and the odds are that MS has solved their problem with that person.
Unless The Register sliced up the email themselves....
the other problem with your analogy is that you have it backwards. this implies that the current discovery is the toaster and our existing knowledge is the computer. and i feel safe in stating that was not your intention.
3.) Actually, if there is one lesson we have learned in the past 20 years, it is that hardware vendors have an almost impossible time making people recompile.You need only witness the design of IBM's OS/400 platform, which places a thin layer of microcode between the processor and the OS, the problems Intel has had in generating support for Itanium, and the transition to Java/C# from recompiles on every platform. You can innovate, but you had better not break compatibility with the existing platform.
So, as the old adage goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That FORTRAN may be crufty, but it never blue screens or segfaults.
I don't disagree with the idea that death needs a degree of lightening up, but that wasn't what this was. Many of these comments were directed squarely at the people who have these devices. That isn't funny - the circumstances which led to the implantation of the device were beyond their control.
Further, death as an abstract concept is funny. But in general, I don't think that the death of specific people in sad circumstances beyond their control is funny.
Regardless, these jokes weren't that funny anyways, and were more rude than anything else.
My father has one of these devices, and being able to have the cardiologists monitor and check the status of his ICD after or immediately before an event would be a godsend.
These stupid jokes about "fat slobs" and "people having crash carts in their chests" and "rebooting someone's heart" and "ping grandma" are all really funny, until you realize that these devices save people's lives, and people really die without them. I'm really disgusted that people find this stuff so funny. Though I generally consider my taste in humor to be pretty wide and esoteric, this is sick shit. That's like making fun of people with Alzheimer's or cancer - imagine a remote chemo device, leading to "haha, reboot his tumor!"
I am just disgusted, and I feel the need to go wash my hands.
Practices like this establish an antagonistic relationship between Microsoft and its customers. While I of course recognize that MS has the legal and ethical right to take whatever actions necessary to enforce compliance with any and all license agreements that it creates, this seems really, really stupid.
Sure, they need to combat piracy. Companies and individuals steal copies of Windows every day. I have, I'm sure many people have as well. While I think that MS charges too much for too little, they certainly have the right to do so. But again, this is a dumb way to combat piracy.
The solution is to entice people to pay for copies of Windows. Right now, there are no incentives (besides avoiding fees and fines if MS finds you) for being compliant. Thus, people pirate their copies. Simple actions like license amnesty days will not solve the problem. And now, by setting customers in opposition to MS, they have made it worse. If MS instead tried to figure out a way to make customers want to pay for licenses instead of simply ordering them to do so, they would be far more successful.
In psychology, business, and life, you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.
But isn't the point of a DDoS to flood the ISP connection? So isn't this just a quick way to acknowledge that you are screwed - because even though you are dropping packets like crazy, they keep coming in and you waste bandwith just to drop them. I am curious if this isn't going to have a fairly minimal impact, because the problem isn't the content of the packets, but the fact that they are coming.
Won't this just move the chokepoint higher up the ladder, making the bottleneck be the DDoS detectors ability to handle/drop those packets instead of your servers? So now your servers are up, but no one can get to them anyway.
Maybe someone who understands this better can explain.
not when they are being hired to develop an application for the IT department. GS has extensive interests in the real estate industry through its merchant banking department, and further they are very interested in developing the next generation of electronic marketplaces. It doesn't state in the article exactly what Goldman Sachs' tie to the company was.
It is possible that GS was paying them to develop a new application and cancelled it. That's certainly what my initial impression was. But you make a good point, it might also have been a straight investment.
If I didn't know first-hand from my time there what incredible retards the people in IT at GS were, I would be more surprised that they suddenly cut off funding to a company like that. But, in fact, they are retards of the first order, and their sudden urgency in cutting costs is not really remarkable.
Their IT budget for this year was projected to be $1.8 billion - quite a large number. Except that it was being entirely mismanaged and misspent - the place was being run like some crazy Silicon Valley dot-com. 3 consultants were being hired for 1 spot, people in field offices were leaving problems unresolved for days, half of the staff was stuck in planning meetings all day and the other half of the staff spent the day surfing the web for stocks and news on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And they were heaving a great time heaving money out the window - nothing was ever repaired, simply replaced. They even lost a Sun E450 server - lost it! They were pretty sure it wouldn't have made it out of the building past security, but they had no idea where the $150,000 machine was. So what did they do - they ordered another one!
I have more stories like that - like trying to update ntp.conf entries on 2,000 machines because one server went down instead of updating the DNS entries, but in general, the place was a zoo. And then the market crashed, and management in the other business units got pissed. As one exec said, "$1.8 billion, and all I got was a Palm Pilot!" So their budget was slashed, heads started rolling, and now things are a little bit more austere than last year.
we finish converting to the paperless office. Remember how computers were going to free us from the confines of forms, memos, and various other forms of paperwork? And how now we are up to our eyeballs in paper because computers make it so easy to generate?
If anything, I buy more books now to keep up to date on emerging computer technologies. So, I guess once again computers are having the opposite of the intended effect.
Technology of the past fifty years is just as innovative as it ever was, if not more. And that happens any way that you look at it.
If we analyze the impact in terms of the quantity of innovation, hands down, no comparison, 1950-2000 wins. The great number of fields which were not only innovated but invented during that time period is dramatic. Entire fields of study were created and largely mastered during the period - jet engines, communications theory, solid-state electronics.
If we look at quality, we need to consider the sum of these innovations. One area that we must consider is that of medicine. Sure, the introduction of penicillin in the 1920's was dramatic, but more dramatic than the polio vaccine? Or the eradication of smallpox? Or the introduction of cardiac defibrillators? I'm not so sure.
And we must surely consider the technology innovations which allow the technologies developed in the first half of this century to proliferate around the world. Technology innovation isn't merely about inventing things, it's about inventing new ways to make and integrate them into our lives. The Phoenecians discovered purple dyes, but it took a German chemical engineer in the 1800's to find a way to allow us to mass manufacture it.
This article is just more of the boring, short-sighted, nay-saying stuff that US News always cranks out. It's pretty boring, because if you consider the reality - that innovation comes in many forms, none better than any other - then you realize that innovation continues at the same pace as it always has
The ability to create is a fixed part of human nature. At most, the increased world population means that innovations are increasing, not decreasing. Silly article.
Slashdot Mirror
you have got to be kidding me
Legal Fees to Prepare a Spurious Lawsuit : $25000
Filing Fees in the Plaintiff-Friendly States of your Choice: $1000
2 Months of Free Press when the entire Tech Community goes apeshit: Priceless
For free and open source software, there's GNU. For everything else, there's SCO BastardCard.
By reminding people that if they take their licenses for granted then their rights will be stripped away from them slowly over time.
By reminding people that while their are easy, short-term fixes to the problem, that we still have a long way to go toward creating a completely free and open system.
By reminding people that they need to contribute new code and update old products to keep the free and open software base that is the foundation of Linux truly free and open.
Speaking of nutcases, lets talk about ESR, who is basically a programming libertarian (maybe even closer to a John Bircher) who has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to sell out Free Software to big companies in the name of Open-Source software. Talk about your raving lunatics, ESR has got to be one of the craziest crackpots in the community.
This is in not intended by way of a disparagement, but more properly to highlight that there are more than enough 'interesting' personalities in the Free and Open software movement to go around.
You know, flaming Stallman is getting to be a little bit overdone here. I think that maybe it is time to put some of these things in perspective.
Stallman's FSF is an entity with an over political purpose. To that end, sub projects that do not align themselves with that overt political purpose probably do not fit within the project and should be excluded. So Ghostscript wasn't aligned and it had to go.
Those who flame Stallman for his fanatacism or lack of current code shouldn't forget his critical early contributions - without Stallman working himself almost to death in the 80's, sacrificing money, power, time, and big fancy jobs to support his project, there would have been no base of free and open software for Linux to run. Stallman created from sratch (and in many places, single-handedly) the largest and most essential parts for a free operating environment, an open alternative to big,commercial, expensive Unix. Would Linus have really jumped into making a kernel (or had any experience with Minix) if there wasn't a widely available free and open set of libraries, utilitites, compilers, and debuggers to run on the system? Possibly, but it certainly seems less likely.
While I understand how tiresome and boring it can be to have our morals, ethics, and beliefs get in the way of our more immediate gratification, that doesn't change the fact that Stallman has done more than anyone to get free and open software where it is today. His relentless (and seemingly tireless) dedication to the cause launched free and open software for the world. That we have so many alternative licenses and viewpoints today is owed to his presenting the first so many years ago.
There is always a role (and a need) for the dedicated, single-minded project that defines a rigorous (and righteous) goal and pursues it unswervingly. I see GNU standing side by side with groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and the Medecins Sans Frontiers. It is so easy to forget how important free and open software is to the modern technological, economic, and now even political and social worlds that we find it easier to sneer and laugh at what seems like an anachronism. But Stallman's project is far more relevant and important to the continued success of technology than most will admit.
If free and open software marches on, then it will always need Stallman and the FSF hoisting the original colors and beating the drum to remind them of the pace, no matter how out of place or out of tune he may seem at the time.
The main problem with geeks, besides our spaghetti arms, is our Beer/Pop Bellies. You can get the 8 min abs DVD from half.com for like $10. If you use this coupon code, you'll get $5 off any order over $10: BUCK17014537 unless, of course, somebody comes out with 6 minute abs. then you're in trouble. Nobody's going to come out with 6 minute abs! You can't get a good ab workout in six minutes!
> It's a mac - anti virus isn't worth having. I've had a mac for years and have never had any viruses.
Wow, I've been alive for 23 years and never had cancer. I guess nobody else has either.
Your no anti-virus argument is stupid and dumb. Waiting until you've gotten a virus to purchase anti-virus software is closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.
Ok, I feel like I am being a little bit off-topic by not jumping into the look at this/Exchange sucks/OpenMail/Domino/Eudora/mutt debate and instead choosing to RESPOND TO THE QUESTION, but here goes.
I am evaluating this product, and my reaction so far has been good/bad. First, the program does work as advertised. It's lightweight, pretty easy to use, and integrates well with Outlook. I have used it for a couple months, and it never broke on me. I haven't tested the bandwidth usage, which I might worry about, but overall it has done exactly what Bynari claims.
However, there are some real problems with it. First, Outlook likes its changes to be instantaneous, but Insight Connector only tracks updates on sync - a combination of time (every 15 secs, configurable) and action (every time you enter a folder, theoretically). When you move email, Outlook expects it to be gone. So when you move email using Insight Connector, it looks like it has moved to the new folder, but if you quickly look at either the old or new folders, sometimes emails show up in the old location or are absent from the new. After about 15-20 seconds and you re-enter the folder, things are ok, but it can be a little confusing / disconcerting at first. Who knows if they will ever address this.
Second issue - IMAP uses Trash, Outlook Deleted Items + IMAP uses Purge/Delete while Outlook uses Delete. The first issue is that you need to move items from Deleted Items to Trash, which is redundant. Additionally, this makes things very confusing, esp. with Courier's Move to Trash on Purge feature. It is really easy to end up deleting mail from Deleted Items, only to have it show up in Trash, then when you delete it from Trash it shows up in Deleted Items again. So deleting email can be tough to configure, and it doesn't work like you might expect. If the program simply mapped Deleted Items to Trash and Empty Deleted Items Folder to Purge, things would be fine.
I'm guessing that these features work better with their additional IMAP server product, but I haven't tested that so I can't be sure.
The last problem is the most difficult to fix. Calendar/Contact/To Do items are stored as MIME emails on the server. This means that accessing the IMAP server via any other method (webmail, imap client, etc.) makes that info inaccessible. So you end up storing your data on the server, but you have no other way to access it. Beats me how to fix this one, unless they also distributed a free web client with it.
All in all, it is a very good product, but honestly better suited for the more tech savvy. Anyone who has either little computer experience or extensive Outlook experience is likely to be a little confused and annoyed, but should be able to work around it eventually.
If this goes through, then there will be no more taping of encounters with police officers, public officials. No more behind-the-scenes videos about restaurant kitchens. No covering your ass when you meet someone trying to get you to do something illegal.
Or have I missed something?
I couldn't get this to work. No matter how many times I tried to remove Tim Johnson's account, it just wouldn't go away - that goddamn tjohnson deleted folder kept staring me in the face, so I reinstalled the OS.
On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know why my friend Steve Hortname who sometimes uses my machine lost all his stuff? They guy had some great mp3's in his home directory...
Ok, so maybe this is not the place for this, but I can't seem to get any answers out of the developers about this. ./configure still doesn't work.
./configure --enable-layout=opt. No dice - it still throws everything in /usr/local/apache2.
I downloaded 2.0.28 in December and tried to
I posted to the apache-users mailing list in December, and no one responded. I tried again yesterday, with 2.0.32, and it still doesn't work.
Looking through the bug tracking list, I can see that this bug has been filed since November 2001.
How can Apache 2 be nearing release if you still can't get it to install where you want it to?
now that would be funny.
And i agree that this is a really, really old trick. Anyone with half a clue would not get caught using this.
However, anyone stupid enough to have forwarded an email outside of his company to a newspaper in the past is likely dumb enough to fall for this.
The way I see it, there are 4 possibilities here:
1. My previously stated theory - this is a trick to catch a leaker.
2. This is just a brilliant piece of disinformation, designed to make people think that MS is brain-dead.
3. MS is brain-dead.
4. It's a hoax.
2 + 3 are very unlikely. 2 because it would only serve to disinform average-Joe users - anyone with half a brain will ignore this as too dumb to be true. And 3 is really unlikely - say what you want MS is not brain-dead. You can't call them arrogant, perverse, manipulative monopolists in one breath and then claim they are morons in the next.
So my explanation really just lays out how it could be 1 and not the possibility 4 many think it is.
I should add that it makes no difference whether the email was intended to be legit - it's possible that they just made it up to catch the leaker.
Which could explain the fact that it reads like such an unitelligent analysis. Gross oversimplification and stupidity == increased probability of leakers spreading it around.
unless they are really stupid.
It's a simple trick - they sent out slightly different copies of the email to everyone on the list. Then, when the public version gets published they can reference the published version against who got what.
The changes can be cosmetic - slight changes in phrasing, additional punctuation, spacing, line breaks. Stuff like this would be pretty much unnoticeable without having a couple of different copies to compare against. Even then, it would likely be tough to notice the difference.
Add in 3 separate requests to "not distribute" as a tempting goad to the leaker, and the odds are that MS has solved their problem with that person.
Unless The Register sliced up the email themselves....
the other problem with your analogy is that you have it backwards. this implies that the current discovery is the toaster and our existing knowledge is the computer. and i feel safe in stating that was not your intention.
this is why people struggle with their SAT's...
I agree with one of these.
3.) Actually, if there is one lesson we have learned in the past 20 years, it is that hardware vendors have an almost impossible time making people recompile.You need only witness the design of IBM's OS/400 platform, which places a thin layer of microcode between the processor and the OS, the problems Intel has had in generating support for Itanium, and the transition to Java/C# from recompiles on every platform. You can innovate, but you had better not break compatibility with the existing platform.
So, as the old adage goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That FORTRAN may be crufty, but it never blue screens or segfaults.
--tkr
I don't disagree with the idea that death needs a degree of lightening up, but that wasn't what this was. Many of these comments were directed squarely at the people who have these devices. That isn't funny - the circumstances which led to the implantation of the device were beyond their control.
Further, death as an abstract concept is funny. But in general, I don't think that the death of specific people in sad circumstances beyond their control is funny.
Regardless, these jokes weren't that funny anyways, and were more rude than anything else.
My father has one of these devices, and being able to have the cardiologists monitor and check the status of his ICD after or immediately before an event would be a godsend.
These stupid jokes about "fat slobs" and "people having crash carts in their chests" and "rebooting someone's heart" and "ping grandma" are all really funny, until you realize that these devices save people's lives, and people really die without them. I'm really disgusted that people find this stuff so funny. Though I generally consider my taste in humor to be pretty wide and esoteric, this is sick shit. That's like making fun of people with Alzheimer's or cancer - imagine a remote chemo device, leading to "haha, reboot his tumor!"
I am just disgusted, and I feel the need to go wash my hands.
Practices like this establish an antagonistic relationship between Microsoft and its customers. While I of course recognize that MS has the legal and ethical right to take whatever actions necessary to enforce compliance with any and all license agreements that it creates, this seems really, really stupid.
Sure, they need to combat piracy. Companies and individuals steal copies of Windows every day. I have, I'm sure many people have as well. While I think that MS charges too much for too little, they certainly have the right to do so. But again, this is a dumb way to combat piracy.
The solution is to entice people to pay for copies of Windows. Right now, there are no incentives (besides avoiding fees and fines if MS finds you) for being compliant. Thus, people pirate their copies. Simple actions like license amnesty days will not solve the problem. And now, by setting customers in opposition to MS, they have made it worse. If MS instead tried to figure out a way to make customers want to pay for licenses instead of simply ordering them to do so, they would be far more successful.
In psychology, business, and life, you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.
Okay, so this is probably a pretty useful idea?
But isn't the point of a DDoS to flood the ISP connection? So isn't this just a quick way to acknowledge that you are screwed - because even though you are dropping packets like crazy, they keep coming in and you waste bandwith just to drop them. I am curious if this isn't going to have a fairly minimal impact, because the problem isn't the content of the packets, but the fact that they are coming.
Won't this just move the chokepoint higher up the ladder, making the bottleneck be the DDoS detectors ability to handle/drop those packets instead of your servers? So now your servers are up, but no one can get to them anyway.
Maybe someone who understands this better can explain.
not when they are being hired to develop an application for the IT department. GS has extensive interests in the real estate industry through its merchant banking department, and further they are very interested in developing the next generation of electronic marketplaces. It doesn't state in the article exactly what Goldman Sachs' tie to the company was.
It is possible that GS was paying them to develop a new application and cancelled it. That's certainly what my initial impression was. But you make a good point, it might also have been a straight investment.
If I didn't know first-hand from my time there what incredible retards the people in IT at GS were, I would be more surprised that they suddenly cut off funding to a company like that. But, in fact, they are retards of the first order, and their sudden urgency in cutting costs is not really remarkable.
Their IT budget for this year was projected to be $1.8 billion - quite a large number. Except that it was being entirely mismanaged and misspent - the place was being run like some crazy Silicon Valley dot-com. 3 consultants were being hired for 1 spot, people in field offices were leaving problems unresolved for days, half of the staff was stuck in planning meetings all day and the other half of the staff spent the day surfing the web for stocks and news on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And they were heaving a great time heaving money out the window - nothing was ever repaired, simply replaced. They even lost a Sun E450 server - lost it! They were pretty sure it wouldn't have made it out of the building past security, but they had no idea where the $150,000 machine was. So what did they do - they ordered another one!
I have more stories like that - like trying to update ntp.conf entries on 2,000 machines because one server went down instead of updating the DNS entries, but in general, the place was a zoo. And then the market crashed, and management in the other business units got pissed. As one exec said, "$1.8 billion, and all I got was a Palm Pilot!" So their budget was slashed, heads started rolling, and now things are a little bit more austere than last year.
Not surprising, not even one bit.
we finish converting to the paperless office. Remember how computers were going to free us from the confines of forms, memos, and various other forms of paperwork? And how now we are up to our eyeballs in paper because computers make it so easy to generate?
If anything, I buy more books now to keep up to date on emerging computer technologies. So, I guess once again computers are having the opposite of the intended effect.
Technology of the past fifty years is just as innovative as it ever was, if not more. And that happens any way that you look at it.
If we analyze the impact in terms of the quantity of innovation, hands down, no comparison, 1950-2000 wins. The great number of fields which were not only innovated but invented during that time period is dramatic. Entire fields of study were created and largely mastered during the period - jet engines, communications theory, solid-state electronics.
If we look at quality, we need to consider the sum of these innovations. One area that we must consider is that of medicine. Sure, the introduction of penicillin in the 1920's was dramatic, but more dramatic than the polio vaccine? Or the eradication of smallpox? Or the introduction of cardiac defibrillators? I'm not so sure.
And we must surely consider the technology innovations which allow the technologies developed in the first half of this century to proliferate around the world. Technology innovation isn't merely about inventing things, it's about inventing new ways to make and integrate them into our lives. The Phoenecians discovered purple dyes, but it took a German chemical engineer in the 1800's to find a way to allow us to mass manufacture it.
This article is just more of the boring, short-sighted, nay-saying stuff that US News always cranks out. It's pretty boring, because if you consider the reality - that innovation comes in many forms, none better than any other - then you realize that innovation continues at the same pace as it always has
The ability to create is a fixed part of human nature. At most, the increased world population means that innovations are increasing, not decreasing. Silly article.
Well, I mean, to be honest, you don't have to run it.
I would just advise you that rather than bitch and complain, just don't run it. Problem solved, no need to get worked up.