Even in Iraq, the regular army guys will either end up in the new Iraqi army, or possibly cut loose to seek other employment. They're just guys trying to earn a living.
SCO is hardly any different. Put the corporate officers' pictures on playing cards, capture them and ship them to Guantanimo Bay (starting with the Information Minister). The rest of the evil SCO empire is just a bunch of geeks like us.
"But you're telling me you can't fathom why people would want DRM on documents? How simplistic are you?"
Network Associates had very limited sales of the PGP product suite, depsite the fact that it brought good encryption to Windows. They had an Outlook plugin that worked well. It was a little pricey, and the concept of public & private keys was beyond what the average user could be expected to understand. Even so, if the market for DRM on documents was so hot, PGP would be on every desktop by now.
"What if you're the CEO of a company and you want to send around a strategy document to your C level executives?"
The most likely scenario is for the CEO to mess up the DRM and make the document either unsecure or irretrievable. Either way, the IT dept. gets the blame. In today's world, the CEO screws up the password on a Word document and the IT dept. cracks the password in 2 seconds with a utility designed for that purpose. Yay, security!
"And don't give me some bullcrap about each exec being able to encrypt the documents on their laptop... they are NOT going to go through the trouble, they're not IT people."
Well, now the fun really begins. Laptops. Windows DRM server. Back to our CEO example. The CEO and his laptop are sitting in the first class section on the way to Hong Kong. The corporate strategy document is now inaccessible because the laptop has no connection back to the Windows DRM server. When the CEO gets back to the US, somebody is going to get a lecture about the piss-poor strategy of selecting a proprietary DRM technology that requires connectivity to a server that the laptop can't reach while offline.
"To have security built in to the documents themselves is an important feature."
If the feature is so important, we should have a generic industry-wide standard. Then maybe (just maybe) Microsoft could deploy something that is not hacked by teenagers. Oh, by the way, just who is it that would trust our critical data to Microsoft in the first place? Isn't this just some lame scheme to impose an obnoxious EULA and mandatory upgrades along with wacky license fees for certificates? Isn't this the same company that repeatedly fails to protect a lousy address book???
I would rather see encrypted filesystems (or PGP-encrypted files) and a private key on a removable USB micro-drive. Simple, effective, minimal BS.
I just can't wait until we start receiving Office DRM documents as e-mail attachments from our customers and suppliers. Somehow I imagine having to open the firewall to exchange DRM information between servers and having that hole exploited by the next M$ worm. It might be easier to bounce Office DRM documents at the e-mail server.
"To say Microsoft made this up with no customer requests..."
There is a market for meaningful document security, but I doubt anyone was begging Microsoft to add a bunch of proprietary extensions to Office and to throw in a proprietary DRM server as part of the deal. What leads them down this path? "Gee, we need something to lock in our customers and trigger lots of upgrades. What can we add that people might want? Got it! DRM! And we'll bundle all kind of proprietary extensions into Office and use the DMCA to lock out competitors!" Have they given up on securing the OS? Are we supposed to tolerate the next round of viruses because our documents are allegedly secure?
I can think of so many ways for this to break, it's not even funny.
I read the article, but I found little direct evidence that customers want DRM or that anyone has suitably addressed the issue of backwards compatibility.
At first I wondered how Microsoft's assertion that a market exists for this would somehow turn into end user's assuming that there is a market and that Microsoft will make this very popular. Now I know.
How you make the jump from a basic requirement to use Word all the way to using the latest version with DRM is beyond me.
"Have you visited the Real World(tm) recently?...Many governments accept only Microsoft Office formats..."
Have you visited a government office recently? Office 2K is bleeding edge, 97 is very common, 95 is still out there. Ditto for most of the Fortune 500. How many Fortune 500 corporations have you visited in the past year? Probably not as many as I have.
"...HR drones will start requiring DRMed Word resumes..."
Until day two when they realize (a) it's a pain to open each one and (b) the response is about 50% of what was expected because half the candidates are home users who never bought the DRM version of Word. The other half will be unreadable because the candidates misconfigured DRM and the resumes are encrypted. Maybe nobody needs to read those anyway. I have seen mostly requirements for plain text (copy/paste your resume into this box). The most evil HR drones are using simple text scanners to essentially grep a pile of text for keywords and extract a list of candidates who know enough to manipulate the process.
"What will you do when, n years from now, filing for an insurance claim requires a Microsoft-approved format?"
Call my insurance agent and make them transcribe the information at their own expense. Most insurance companies don't want their policyholders filling out claim forms anyway. Too much bad data -- stupid answers to the poorly-written questions.
"I guess that'll make you either dumb [... dumb enough to use the DRM features] or jobless. "
Wrong on both counts, but thank you for being a contestant. You can buy the latest copy of Office and use the lovely DRM features in Word to apply for as many sysadmin positions as you like. Perhaps M$ has some kind of discount for ordering early. Let me know if they finally figure out how to keep 12-year-olds from writing viruses that read my Outlook address book. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
You don't live long in the publication industry by bad-mouthing your top advertisers. Microsoft gets remarkably gentle treatment from the press, when you consider that 18-year-olds are exploiting security holes pretty much at will. Now we have the SoBig and MsBlaster fiascos; I think an article directed against Linux would be just what the doctor ordered to take the heat off Redmond for a while.
Microsoft buys lots of full-page ads. How many ads does a monopoly need? Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
Microsoft can't turn off backwards compatibility overnight, because most of their customers will need to send documents to people with older versions of Office. This means they have to maintain the ability to read/write legacy Office formats.
It's a Catch-22 for Microsoft. Either force people to upgrade by mandating DRM (and risk losing everything), or continue supporting legacy versions (and eliminate the incentive to upgrade or use DRM).
I think the only customers who will be "locked into" an Office upgrade are those dumb enough to use the DRM features. The Darwin effect is coming soon, to an office near you.
If you do a great job taking care of a problem, you can expect plenty more of that problem. Compared to America, The Europeans do a great job taking care of the unemployed. Nationalized heath care, subsidies for this and that. They have 10% unemployment because they are good at keeping the humanitarian situation under control. I wonder how the Europeans get people to do crappy jobs that nobody wants. Why empty the trash at EuroDisney if you can sit home and live roughly the same life?
In America, we do less for the unemployed than some third-world countries. The assumption is that poverty is a powerful motivation to work. By inflicting (hopefully) short-term misery, we create more growth and less unemployment in the future. If we had long-term 10% unemployment, we would have to do what Europe does.
The Europeans are big on worker's rights and mandated benefits. They impose crippling taxes to pay for all of this. Nobody in Europe is going to hire more than the bare minimum number of people to stay in business. The result is of course higher unemployement. It all works well enough if they act as a closed society, with protectionist measures against the "work or die" approach of the Americans, Asians, etc. So long as the socialist burden is applied equally to all, they can supply a tolerable lifestyle to 90% of the population, and take pretty good care of the other 10%.
I sometimes wonder if America could improve the economy by paying 10% of the dumbest people to stay home. If we could carefully pick and choose the unemployed, maybe we could get more than 10% more productivity from the other 90%.
There are many ISPs complaining about the cost of spam, but there is a smaller number of ISPs that actually lose money on spam. If every ISP who complained about spam was not actually supporting it, there would be no problem to solve.
Insurance companies complain about fraud. Those who actually lose money due to fraud are going to go out of business. If they can pass on the cost to consumers, everything is ok (sort of). If fraud raises costs 25% and they can jack up the rates 35% (while complaining about fraud), then it becomes a profit center (more fraud == more profit). If the fraud were stopped dead in its tracks tomorrow, would your rates drop?
I would be more inclined to believe the ISPs if I had not seen so many cases of spam traceable back to the same ISPs, with zero response to complaints. There is very little enforcement of anything resembling an anti-spam AUP. It's totally obvious -- (a) the spammers are a source of revenue, (b) spam victims are not, (c) there are a whole lot more ISPs supporting spam than will admit it.
Margins are tight in the ISP business. Anyone who is having a rough ride is going to be mighty tempted to enter the world of sleaze. If the margins were better, I think most of the ISPs would behave. The bad apples could then be isolated and forced into compliance. But today's reality is just the opposite. There are so many spamming ISPs that you either quietly support spam or get drowned in cost by those who do. Very few managers are going to let their business go down the drain if they could save themselves (even if just for this month) with a pink contract.
I am not so sure you have to move. Just work as a consultant for a European company. They will be pretty much free to develop whatever they want, and they can hire you to help.
Then again, why stop there? How hard would it be to set up a paper-only company in Europe? Then you could not only circumvent software patents, you could make tax-deductible business trips to the European "corporate headquarters". I recommend Switzerland.
It's like the electric company complaining about too many people using their air conditioners. Sure, they complain about people wasting energy, but at the end of the day, more product is sold, over-consumption justifies expanding the infrastructure, along with the next rate increase to pay for it all. Sound familiar?
By rejecting software patents, it is possible that Europe could rival and even surpass the US in software deveopment. Let's face it, Europe is not generally known for a pro-business environment. This is one of those rare occasions when the Europeans can offer an advantage without tax breaks or other subsidies. "You mean all we have to do is cut the BS, starting with software patents?" Yup.
The American system of patents and copyrights creates a few winners at the expense of a great many losers. Give "the other guys" a place to set up shop, and things get interesting. Toss in the ability of the Internet, where you can exist administratively in one country and do the actual work anywhere you want, and things get very interesting.
If they were really annoyed, they would cut out all the pink contracts. If spam were not profitable to the ISPs, it would be gone faster than you can say "fees and surcharges".
Perhaps these "antiquated" systems would work much better if the government compiled a list of people WILLING to receive telemarkting calls. It would be a damn short list, and no "processing" would be required.
Considering how many people are blacklisting entire B blocks, I am on the conservative end of the spectrum. No doubt about it, the people who live in the same C block as spammers are in for a world of hurt. With or without my automatic blacklist, they will simply have to move (I sure would!). In my experience, the spam-friendly ISPs are either REALLY bad (giving C blocks to each spammer), or they are practical enough to keep the spammers confined to a limited number of "slum" C-blocks, knowing those will be blacklisted. UUnet/MCI is well-known for having upset customers who end up as "collateral damage" in the war on spam.
I have some sympathy for customers who unwittingly inherit a C block that is blacklisted from here to Mars, but the ISPs are major contributors to the problem. Let them figure out how to deal with address space that is the equivalent of toxic waste. Maybe I could auto-purge the blacklist; eliminating those C-blocks that have sent no spam for a few months.
I can easily defeat the spammers who might try the Hotmail ploy by whitelisting Hotmail. To be honest, it's been a while since I have seen spam from Hotmail. Usually its just the hotmail.com name forged into the header (which fools nobody).
I have never seen a C block that cuts across ISPs. I suppose it could happen.
You have a point about messages from a virus, especially if the SoBig victim PCs become a giant spam network. If anything makes me reconsider the strategy, this might do it.
We use Spam Assasin on Sendmail. We have Sendmail configured so that when a message is positively identified as spam, we automatically update our local access file to blacklist the entire class C of the relay host.
I have been watching this closely for several weeks. Originally, I thought there would be trouble -- surely we would nail some legitimate networks and have to unblock them. But NOOOOO! Every day we reject more and more via the local blacklist and it's always the evildoers. I don't think anyone needs a DNS-based blacklist, all you have to do is harvest the power of the spam data you already have.
"A) Give you more money. B) Give you more time. C) Expect less at delivery(cut-corners) D) Withdraw their request"
The executive decision to "expect less" is generally forgotten within a few weeks. Whatever corner-cutting was acceptable when the request was on the table will result in (1) lengthy "bug-fixes" where we spend the time & money that was not supposed to be spent, or (2) new requests to build what was not delivered the first time.
Whenever I talk about option C, I explain that it is mostly management fantasy. In the long run, A,B, & D are the only real choices.
The only time option C comes into play is when you need to use the world of management fantasy to get a project off the ground. Getting a project launched takes an act of God, but the sky is the limit for finishing (or tweaking) a project that is already in progress.
One option that was not on the list is the concept of twisting the customer's request into something that is more feasible or can be combined with other similar requests so as to fit better into the big picture. Sure, it all comes back to options A, B, & D, but most oddball customer requests are simply one of many possible approaches to a problem. Drill down into the problem, and there is usually a reasonable solution to be found. If this is done poorly, the results are indistinguishable from corner-cutting. If done properly, the end result is better than anyone expected at a fraction of the cost.
"Revenue recognition" could mean they sent out the invoices. Most companies would book the receivables as an asset. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the GAAAP rules are for pump-and-dump scams.
The part I find interesting is that 61% of their revenue came from something other this little adventure. Maybe they caught a windfall in SCOForum cancellation fees.
Except Daryl is wondering why such so many people are aligned against him. At least bin Laden knows who is pissed and why. The OSS community is pretty much ready to rumble, even without a $25M price on Daryl's head. No need for anything violent or illegal, simple shame and poverty will do the trick.
As George W. Bush once said, "They think there's a cave deep enough -- they're wrong." I'm sure he meant that figuratively.
ftp.sco.com and ftp.caldera.com are both unreachable as well. That means their "outage" involves multiple boxes. While this does not prove the DMCA theory, it casts doubt on "weekend upgrade" or a run-of-the-mill DOS attack.
I sure hope nobody is launching an attack on SCO. Far better to let them stay online, especially since SCO is it's own worst enemy. There is much to be learned from their behavior, even if that behavior is bad.
Retaliation should be reserved for the top executives, after SCO is dead. The challenge will be to ensure that these people are treated like toxic waste wherever they go.
The price surge is a real mystery to me too. My theory is that the stock may be closely held; the price doesn't drop unless you have sellers who actually sell. Our friends at Canopy group may be holding, as they wait for the buyout they expect to come from M$ or IBM.
When you buy or sell a stock, you can offer something other than the listed price. No reasonable buyer would overpay the market price, and no reasonable seller would accept less than market price, but you can offer. This is the "bid" and "ask" that is sometimes displayed in a stock quote.
Most buy and sell orders are very close to market price, but nothing forces this to be true. I wonder what would happen if certain bad actors were to trade the stock among themselves, offering progressively higher prices to each other, knowing that nobody else was buying or selling. Carry the idea far enough, and maybe you find some fools who are begging to be separated from their money. Let a little bit of the stock bleed off to the fools, and continue the shell game. The buyers can be trusted to hold the stock as long as it keeps going up. At some point, the fools own most of the company and the music stops.
Agreed. It's easy to think ham radio is obsolete, UNTIL the power goes out or the cellular network goes byebye. If cell phones relied on Windows, the first hundred or so viruses that came along would make ham radio VERY popular.
If we want these people to be easily tracked, all we have to do is give them a few bucks and some grocery discount cards. They'll be announcing their location every time they buy something to eat. As an added bonus, we would not only know where they are, we would also know what they are eating! Probably cheaper than what the government wants to do, and no more a threat to privacy than the rest of us already tolerate.
By the casino, that is. If you think about it, what is the casino supposed to do when they detect an alleged "card counter"? Right now, they identify the most obvious ones and toss them. What happens when the snazzy software starts churning out false positives?
In my opinion, the real goal is to let the casino monitor the "count" in real time, and signal the dealer to either reshuffle or change his shuffling style in response to how the table is doing. At the end of a shoe, they might opt to replace the cards if there are too many face cards up front, while they might do a deliberately poor shuffle if the face cards are near the back and likely to end up behind the marker.There is no need to manage the players if you control the cards!
At first glance, you might think this destroys the appeal of the game, as nobody will win very much. But then again, people keep buying SCOX stock in spite of the odds, so perhaps the market for sucker bets has been underestimated.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO is hardly any different. Put the corporate officers' pictures on playing cards, capture them and ship them to Guantanimo Bay (starting with the Information Minister). The rest of the evil SCO empire is just a bunch of geeks like us.
"But you're telling me you can't fathom why people would want DRM on documents? How simplistic are you?"
Network Associates had very limited sales of the PGP product suite, depsite the fact that it brought good encryption to Windows. They had an Outlook plugin that worked well. It was a little pricey, and the concept of public & private keys was beyond what the average user could be expected to understand. Even so, if the market for DRM on documents was so hot, PGP would be on every desktop by now.
"What if you're the CEO of a company and you want to send around a strategy document to your C level executives?"
The most likely scenario is for the CEO to mess up the DRM and make the document either unsecure or irretrievable. Either way, the IT dept. gets the blame. In today's world, the CEO screws up the password on a Word document and the IT dept. cracks the password in 2 seconds with a utility designed for that purpose. Yay, security!
"And don't give me some bullcrap about each exec being able to encrypt the documents on their laptop... they are NOT going to go through the trouble, they're not IT people."
Well, now the fun really begins. Laptops. Windows DRM server. Back to our CEO example. The CEO and his laptop are sitting in the first class section on the way to Hong Kong. The corporate strategy document is now inaccessible because the laptop has no connection back to the Windows DRM server. When the CEO gets back to the US, somebody is going to get a lecture about the piss-poor strategy of selecting a proprietary DRM technology that requires connectivity to a server that the laptop can't reach while offline.
"To have security built in to the documents themselves is an important feature."
If the feature is so important, we should have a generic industry-wide standard. Then maybe (just maybe) Microsoft could deploy something that is not hacked by teenagers. Oh, by the way, just who is it that would trust our critical data to Microsoft in the first place? Isn't this just some lame scheme to impose an obnoxious EULA and mandatory upgrades along with wacky license fees for certificates? Isn't this the same company that repeatedly fails to protect a lousy address book???
I would rather see encrypted filesystems (or PGP-encrypted files) and a private key on a removable USB micro-drive. Simple, effective, minimal BS.
I just can't wait until we start receiving Office DRM documents as e-mail attachments from our customers and suppliers. Somehow I imagine having to open the firewall to exchange DRM information between servers and having that hole exploited by the next M$ worm. It might be easier to bounce Office DRM documents at the e-mail server.
"To say Microsoft made this up with no customer requests..."
There is a market for meaningful document security, but I doubt anyone was begging Microsoft to add a bunch of proprietary extensions to Office and to throw in a proprietary DRM server as part of the deal. What leads them down this path? "Gee, we need something to lock in our customers and trigger lots of upgrades. What can we add that people might want? Got it! DRM! And we'll bundle all kind of proprietary extensions into Office and use the DMCA to lock out competitors!" Have they given up on securing the OS? Are we supposed to tolerate the next round of viruses because our documents are allegedly secure?
I can think of so many ways for this to break, it's not even funny.
At first I wondered how Microsoft's assertion that a market exists for this would somehow turn into end user's assuming that there is a market and that Microsoft will make this very popular. Now I know.
How you make the jump from a basic requirement to use Word all the way to using the latest version with DRM is beyond me.
"Have you visited the Real World(tm) recently?...Many governments accept only Microsoft Office formats..."
Have you visited a government office recently? Office 2K is bleeding edge, 97 is very common, 95 is still out there. Ditto for most of the Fortune 500. How many Fortune 500 corporations have you visited in the past year? Probably not as many as I have.
"...HR drones will start requiring DRMed Word resumes..."
Until day two when they realize (a) it's a pain to open each one and (b) the response is about 50% of what was expected because half the candidates are home users who never bought the DRM version of Word. The other half will be unreadable because the candidates misconfigured DRM and the resumes are encrypted. Maybe nobody needs to read those anyway. I have seen mostly requirements for plain text (copy/paste your resume into this box). The most evil HR drones are using simple text scanners to essentially grep a pile of text for keywords and extract a list of candidates who know enough to manipulate the process.
"What will you do when, n years from now, filing for an insurance claim requires a Microsoft-approved format?"
Call my insurance agent and make them transcribe the information at their own expense. Most insurance companies don't want their policyholders filling out claim forms anyway. Too much bad data -- stupid answers to the poorly-written questions.
"I guess that'll make you either dumb [... dumb enough to use the DRM features] or jobless. "
Wrong on both counts, but thank you for being a contestant. You can buy the latest copy of Office and use the lovely DRM features in Word to apply for as many sysadmin positions as you like. Perhaps M$ has some kind of discount for ordering early. Let me know if they finally figure out how to keep 12-year-olds from writing viruses that read my Outlook address book. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
Microsoft buys lots of full-page ads. How many ads does a monopoly need? Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
It's a Catch-22 for Microsoft. Either force people to upgrade by mandating DRM (and risk losing everything), or continue supporting legacy versions (and eliminate the incentive to upgrade or use DRM).
I think the only customers who will be "locked into" an Office upgrade are those dumb enough to use the DRM features. The Darwin effect is coming soon, to an office near you.
In America, we do less for the unemployed than some third-world countries. The assumption is that poverty is a powerful motivation to work. By inflicting (hopefully) short-term misery, we create more growth and less unemployment in the future. If we had long-term 10% unemployment, we would have to do what Europe does.
The Europeans are big on worker's rights and mandated benefits. They impose crippling taxes to pay for all of this. Nobody in Europe is going to hire more than the bare minimum number of people to stay in business. The result is of course higher unemployement. It all works well enough if they act as a closed society, with protectionist measures against the "work or die" approach of the Americans, Asians, etc. So long as the socialist burden is applied equally to all, they can supply a tolerable lifestyle to 90% of the population, and take pretty good care of the other 10%.
I sometimes wonder if America could improve the economy by paying 10% of the dumbest people to stay home. If we could carefully pick and choose the unemployed, maybe we could get more than 10% more productivity from the other 90%.
There are many ISPs complaining about the cost of spam, but there is a smaller number of ISPs that actually lose money on spam. If every ISP who complained about spam was not actually supporting it, there would be no problem to solve.
Insurance companies complain about fraud. Those who actually lose money due to fraud are going to go out of business. If they can pass on the cost to consumers, everything is ok (sort of). If fraud raises costs 25% and they can jack up the rates 35% (while complaining about fraud), then it becomes a profit center (more fraud == more profit). If the fraud were stopped dead in its tracks tomorrow, would your rates drop?
I would be more inclined to believe the ISPs if I had not seen so many cases of spam traceable back to the same ISPs, with zero response to complaints. There is very little enforcement of anything resembling an anti-spam AUP. It's totally obvious -- (a) the spammers are a source of revenue, (b) spam victims are not, (c) there are a whole lot more ISPs supporting spam than will admit it.
Margins are tight in the ISP business. Anyone who is having a rough ride is going to be mighty tempted to enter the world of sleaze. If the margins were better, I think most of the ISPs would behave. The bad apples could then be isolated and forced into compliance. But today's reality is just the opposite. There are so many spamming ISPs that you either quietly support spam or get drowned in cost by those who do. Very few managers are going to let their business go down the drain if they could save themselves (even if just for this month) with a pink contract.
Then again, why stop there? How hard would it be to set up a paper-only company in Europe? Then you could not only circumvent software patents, you could make tax-deductible business trips to the European "corporate headquarters". I recommend Switzerland.
It's like the electric company complaining about too many people using their air conditioners. Sure, they complain about people wasting energy, but at the end of the day, more product is sold, over-consumption justifies expanding the infrastructure, along with the next rate increase to pay for it all. Sound familiar?
By rejecting software patents, it is possible that Europe could rival and even surpass the US in software deveopment. Let's face it, Europe is not generally known for a pro-business environment. This is one of those rare occasions when the Europeans can offer an advantage without tax breaks or other subsidies. "You mean all we have to do is cut the BS, starting with software patents?" Yup.
The American system of patents and copyrights creates a few winners at the expense of a great many losers. Give "the other guys" a place to set up shop, and things get interesting. Toss in the ability of the Internet, where you can exist administratively in one country and do the actual work anywhere you want, and things get very interesting.
Perhaps these "antiquated" systems would work much better if the government compiled a list of people WILLING to receive telemarkting calls. It would be a damn short list, and no "processing" would be required.
I have some sympathy for customers who unwittingly inherit a C block that is blacklisted from here to Mars, but the ISPs are major contributors to the problem. Let them figure out how to deal with address space that is the equivalent of toxic waste. Maybe I could auto-purge the blacklist; eliminating those C-blocks that have sent no spam for a few months.
I can easily defeat the spammers who might try the Hotmail ploy by whitelisting Hotmail. To be honest, it's been a while since I have seen spam from Hotmail. Usually its just the hotmail.com name forged into the header (which fools nobody).
I have never seen a C block that cuts across ISPs. I suppose it could happen.
You have a point about messages from a virus, especially if the SoBig victim PCs become a giant spam network. If anything makes me reconsider the strategy, this might do it.
We use Spam Assasin on Sendmail. We have Sendmail configured so that when a message is positively identified as spam, we automatically update our local access file to blacklist the entire class C of the relay host.
I have been watching this closely for several weeks. Originally, I thought there would be trouble -- surely we would nail some legitimate networks and have to unblock them. But NOOOOO! Every day we reject more and more via the local blacklist and it's always the evildoers. I don't think anyone needs a DNS-based blacklist, all you have to do is harvest the power of the spam data you already have.
"A) Give you more money.
B) Give you more time.
C) Expect less at delivery(cut-corners)
D) Withdraw their request"
The executive decision to "expect less" is generally forgotten within a few weeks. Whatever corner-cutting was acceptable when the request was on the table will result in (1) lengthy "bug-fixes" where we spend the time & money that was not supposed to be spent, or (2) new requests to build what was not delivered the first time.
Whenever I talk about option C, I explain that it is mostly management fantasy. In the long run, A,B, & D are the only real choices.
The only time option C comes into play is when you need to use the world of management fantasy to get a project off the ground. Getting a project launched takes an act of God, but the sky is the limit for finishing (or tweaking) a project that is already in progress.
One option that was not on the list is the concept of twisting the customer's request into something that is more feasible or can be combined with other similar requests so as to fit better into the big picture. Sure, it all comes back to options A, B, & D, but most oddball customer requests are simply one of many possible approaches to a problem. Drill down into the problem, and there is usually a reasonable solution to be found. If this is done poorly, the results are indistinguishable from corner-cutting. If done properly, the end result is better than anyone expected at a fraction of the cost.
The part I find interesting is that 61% of their revenue came from something other this little adventure. Maybe they caught a windfall in SCOForum cancellation fees.
As George W. Bush once said, "They think there's a cave deep enough -- they're wrong." I'm sure he meant that figuratively.
I sure hope nobody is launching an attack on SCO. Far better to let them stay online, especially since SCO is it's own worst enemy. There is much to be learned from their behavior, even if that behavior is bad.
Retaliation should be reserved for the top executives, after SCO is dead. The challenge will be to ensure that these people are treated like toxic waste wherever they go.
The price surge is a real mystery to me too. My theory is that the stock may be closely held; the price doesn't drop unless you have sellers who actually sell. Our friends at Canopy group may be holding, as they wait for the buyout they expect to come from M$ or IBM.
When you buy or sell a stock, you can offer something other than the listed price. No reasonable buyer would overpay the market price, and no reasonable seller would accept less than market price, but you can offer. This is the "bid" and "ask" that is sometimes displayed in a stock quote.
Most buy and sell orders are very close to market price, but nothing forces this to be true. I wonder what would happen if certain bad actors were to trade the stock among themselves, offering progressively higher prices to each other, knowing that nobody else was buying or selling. Carry the idea far enough, and maybe you find some fools who are begging to be separated from their money. Let a little bit of the stock bleed off to the fools, and continue the shell game. The buyers can be trusted to hold the stock as long as it keeps going up. At some point, the fools own most of the company and the music stops.
Perhaps Daryl will get a chance to join Martha Stewart at Club Fed.
http://machine.domain.com:portnumber/dev60cgi/f
In my opinion, the real goal is to let the casino monitor the "count" in real time, and signal the dealer to either reshuffle or change his shuffling style in response to how the table is doing. At the end of a shoe, they might opt to replace the cards if there are too many face cards up front, while they might do a deliberately poor shuffle if the face cards are near the back and likely to end up behind the marker.There is no need to manage the players if you control the cards!
At first glance, you might think this destroys the appeal of the game, as nobody will win very much. But then again, people keep buying SCOX stock in spite of the odds, so perhaps the market for sucker bets has been underestimated.