Re:Modern companies can move around and avoid unio
on
Dial U for Union
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· Score: 2
The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
I generally agree with you. Free association is very important. But I don't think that trying to unionize a plant or other business location falls under the category of free association. You are certainly free to meet with union people, talk with them, and even discuss joining. But when a shop goes union, everybody in the shop is usually forced to go union, even those who wish to choose not to associate with union folks. So why is it that your freedom of association can infringe on my freedom of association?
Furthermore, how is closing down a site and moving it to another city infringing on your freedom to associate with whoever you choose? You can still meet with your union buddies all you want, you just can't do it in my shop.
"seniority tends to get be emphasized over ability."
So people keep on saying, and backing up with little evidence.
Having been in a union before, I can vouch for this statement. Promotions and transfers were always based solely upon 2 considerations:
1. Is the applicant for the promotion/transfer physically able to do the job?
2. Which of the applicants for the promotion/transfer has the most seniority.
I've only worked in one union, but from my dealings with other people who have been union members I get the rather strong impression that this is the norm for unions.
Unions reward loyalty, not ability. Unions exist to ensure that all employees are treated as equally as possible. In order to do this, everybody must be compensated equally. So there is a scale devised that compensates workers at a greater rate as their length of service increases. There is no such thing as the smart, young hotshot who can "do-it-all" in a union shop.
Another common union provision is "job security." If you are a produce worker in a union grocery store, the store can't have one of the cashiers cover for you while you are at lunch. It's forbidden by union rules. So the job goes unfulfilled unless you are there to do it. In the technical community there is typically a fair amount of overlap in ability between departments. But with the union notion of job security, a desktop technician couldn't troubleshoot a networking issue related to a desktop PC. A web developer would need to have the DBAs create all the queries for the web front-end that they were designing.
You will find that if you are paid on a salary basis (i.e. you don't have to clock in, and you are not docked for missing less than one day) in the computer industry you have no right to expect overtime pay.
Actually I think that the salaried exemption is only for "certain salaried managers." Unfortunately, most companies find some legal loophole to classify their salaried employees as managers, regardless of whether they truly are or not. Fortunately, my company pays straight-time for OT to salaried workers (and 1.5 times for hourly workers), so it all works out fine.
Well, that was my question too! How the hell do you let Craig "Opensource is evil and stifles innovation" Mundie to be the keynote speaker at an open source conference? Or more to the point, why would you want him to be the keybote speaker at an open source conference? Do you not know what Craig is going to say about open source? Is this not the world's largest troll?
1. Many people have "BB" access at work and simple spend time at the office surfing and thus don't need high speed access at home.
2. Many people have never used broadband, thus they don't know what the difference relative to dail-up is like.
That's funny. My father is a UNIX developer for a large international telco equipment manufacturer, so he's quite accustomed to browsing on the fat pipe at work. When cable modems first became available in his area he swore up and down that he didn't need it, he'd never use it, and his V.34 dialup was good enough.
That lasted until the day he needed me to test a piece of hardware on one of my PCs. He came over to my house and we had to download a 10MB driver package for the device. He was absolutely dumbstruck by how quickly it was downloaded to my system (cable modem). He had the cable modem service ordered and installed within a week. Apparently he knew that it would be faster than dialup, but didn't realize just how much faster it could be. I mean, I've got a T1 at work that I share with 60 other employees. My cable modem gives much better throughput than I get at the office. There's no comparison!
The other thing about broadband is that it changes the way I use the Internet (dad too). I used to spend a couple hours a day dialed in and reading various tech news sites or downloading drivers/patches. But I never played online games and I found it very difficult to take part in an online discussion (like Slashdot) because it takes so long to load pages that there's no hope of ever reading all the comments in a single article. During my first week of cable modem usage my "sessions" dropped from a couple hours every night on dialup to about 20-30 minutes on cable. I'm now back up to a couple hours per night, but I get a lot more done in that timeframe. Dad discovered the beauty of Napster and Gnutella and what-not. Now to mention he has VPN over cable to his office (now that's a true timesaver there!). He's very happy with it.
I can just imagine it: you get three quarters of the way through the book, having no clue what's really going on but expecting it to all make sense in the end...
...and then the rest of the book is blank, except for an editor's note at the end, explaining that the author died partway though.
People would argue for years over how he intended to finish it.
I dunno...there's a bit of poetic justice in it I think. Anyone recall how Adams had Samuel Taylor Coleridge finish out "Kublai Khan" with the "second and far more interesting part"?
IMNSHO, I think it would be great if they released "The Salmon of Doubt" as it was originally written as a Dirk Gently book. I loved all of Adams work, but I think that I cared for the Dirk Gently books more that the HHGTTG books. And with that title...I mean, come on, it's got to be a Dirk Gently book.
My point was essentionally, what offers a juicier target to most hackers? Little known "Hi my name is Joe" sites, or various commercial ops?
Blah blah blah...yeah, we know. But your argument that only "hit my name is Joe sites" are the ones running Apache is somewhat flawed. Lots of commercial sites run Apache. Beyond that, there are a large number of business-oriented web sites that are not e-commerce sites. They may simply be online brochures for companies or a places to find more news and information about a company (like McDonald's and Burger King, two sites that were relatively recently cracked and defaced).
It all depends on so many factors. I also suspect the script kiddies tend to be more familiar with Windows.
And now you contradict yourself by implying that script kiddies are going out to hack commercial sites. They're not. Script kiddies are out to see their name in lights. If it's by defacing Burger King's online brochure, so be it. If it's by defacing Amazon.com and disrupting that days transactions, so be it. The business (or non-business) purpose of the site is irrelevant.
Go research the kinds of sites that have been breached over the past year. Start at attrition.org or alldas.de and keep going. I think that you'll find that very few of them are actually big "commercial operations" (or e-commerce sites). Most of them will be companies or organizations that you're probably never even heard of.
The point I made was that the higher percentage of SSL enabled IIS sites provided a much more attractive attack target.
Calling the point irrelevant has no bearing on the discussion. It may be irrelevant to you but that is only because you are either incapable or unwilling to understand the point.
I explained this to you once before but you didn't get it, so I will explain this to you yet again...in detail:
It may be true that SSL protected/e-commerce sites provide a more attractive target for some crackers (those who are financially motivated), but the vast majority of servers that are being cracked are not targeted for financial gain. They are simple exploit and deface tricks. They are script kiddies who want to show someone that they can exploit a well-publiscized security hole and see their name up in lights.
If the majority of security breaches were in fact finanically motivated or had some sort of financial component, then your excuse about MS having a hgiher marketshare among SSL enabled sites might be relevant. But since the overwhelming majority of security breaches are not financially motivated and are simple site defacements then obviously the "financial motivation" theory that you posit is not applicable to those cases.
Trying to insult me by implying that I'm stupid won't change that.
I have an old beat up Mazda truck. When it finally stops running, should Mazda be REQUIRED to take it back?
You bought a Mazda truck? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
OK, seriously though, that's an interesting point. I think that it's important that manufacturers be thinking of ways to make their cars/trucks/computers/whatever more easily recycled. But I don't think that they should be responsible for recycling it. I'm thinking of all the times when I've been able to go to the local junkyard/salvage yard and buy a used part from a junked car and put it on my car. It can be a real cost-saver. And auto recycling is fairly common nowdays anyway, so for non-usable parts they can be broken down.
C'mon now...technology was MEANT to be disposable.
disposable
adj.
Designed to be disposed of after use: disposable diapers; disposable razors.
By the dictionary definition of disposable, I'd argue that the adjective doesn't apply to either computers or technology. And even if it did apply to computers, there's nothing that says that something that is disposable is supposed to be thrown away if it is still useful. And most old PC's are still useful.
When it's lived out the lifetime of it's product cycle, bury it, burn it, crush it, or otherwise redender it permanently inoperative -- the tech support workers of the world will thank you.
As a tech support worker of the world (or at least my corner of it anyway), I think that you're full of shit. Only a total moron is going to destroy a piece of equipment that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars simply because it has exceeded the manufacturers product cycle. Product cycles nowdays can be as short as 6 months. And why on earth would you destroy a piece of equipment that is still useful for someone, even if it is not useful to you? Even a 2 year old computer can be sold for a little bit of cash.
I had a Sony 200ES monitor that would cost $200 to fix--not worth it. So, I put it out on the curb with my trash the night before and it was GONE within 20 minutes.
Well, that's the rub I guess. I've had a lot of old HP Laserjet II and III monstrosities die on me in the past few months. It would have cost us at least $100 apiece to get them all looked at and repaired, and then they'd still be shitty old slow printers. So I took the money that we would have spent on repairs and bought a couple LJ 4100N workgroup printers and chucked the old ones. It just wasn't worth the time or effort to fix them.
The power switch was tied to the old broken power supply from a second proprietary cable!
I had that happen once. I pulled the power supply and switch from another even older machine and frankensteined it into the case of the broken system. Sure, the power switch was on the back instead of the front, but that just makes it harder to accidentally shut off my file server now.:-)
My point, unless the old system is in good working order I find no point of using it. If it works it will break in a few months it is also pointless. Systems are engineered to break down after 3 years.
Not true. I bought a 386sx in 1992 that is still running. As is the 486-80 that I bought in 1994, the 486-120 and the X5-133 (AMD chip) that I built in 1995 and numerours Pentium and 6x86 based systems that I built in 1997-1999.
What you're referring to is planned or programmed obsolesence. Appliance manufacturers do it for things like toasters and clock radios and whatnot. The rationale is that they can sell more units if they design them to only last a couple years. But you don't have to worry about engineered obsolesence in the PC industry because in 2 years the system (even if it is in like-new working order) will be technologically obsolete and "too slow" to be conventionally useful.
Dr. Demento: "I took a fish head out to see a movie, I didn't have to pay to bring it in."
And actually, that's from the song "Fish Heads" by The Buggles, and if I'm not mistaken the lyric was "I once took a fish head, out to see a movie, I didn't have to pay to get it in."
Schools are very happy to receive your "old" Pentiums.
Call your local primary school and ask when they will come pick it up:-)
Not true. I've worked at several companies in the past few years who needed to dispose of a fair number of PCs (ranging from 20 to 2000 depending on where I was working) and we never could find a school or library that would accept them. They always claimed that there was too much trouble involved in reconditioning and standardizing them for their environment, or that they already had newer computers and didn't need a bunch of old P166s, or they only use Dells and we had Compaqs. And then they whip out the whole software licensing issue whereby your donation to them is fairly useless unless they shell out cash for an OS or become non-compliant (schools around here just don't use Linux), so suddenly your donation of 30 "free" PCs has a $4500 price tag on it.
We've always just ended up calling a recycling place to take them away. Some of them will pay you $20 or $30 per unit for them and then clean them up and resell them or ship them to Ethiopia or wherever they think that they could be used. Either that or let employees have them. You'd be surprised at what kind of junk clueless secretaries will take home if they are in the "it's a free computer" mindset.
Windows is the target of choice because there are large numbers of clueless people with good connectivity running Windows.
However the clue level among random Linux users is not great, and Linux has implemented the full protocol all along. If the same people were all using Red Hat, that would be just as bad as everyone using Windows XP.
You're right. But unfortunately it's going to be WinXP that becomes the OS of choice for the clueless users, not RedHat (or some other distro). And while we can try like mad to educate the users, it's not going to happen. Clueless users will always outnumber clueful users. Look at how many people still can't program a VCR, and they've been in homes since the early 80's!
Sometimes you just have to give up on teching kids not to cut their hands off and start handing out safety scissors again. MS has been very keen on trying to control and limit the use of WinXP by endusers for only MS-approved purposes. This should just be one more safety feature that they implement to protect the users from their own ignorance.
On the other hand, the TCP/IP stack in Win2K is just awesome fast compared to the Win9x flavors...it sure was nice to have if you had to have Windows.
I have found that while Steve Gibson has had a taste for a melodramatic writing style, that the technical detail in his writing is fairly solid and is certainly above average. So with that grain of salt the article is worth looking at:
But the thing that I find great about Steve Gibson is that he writes things in a compelling storylike format and in plain english that even the clueless could understand. We techie types already know most of what he had to say in this article to begin with. It's the non-techies who need to read this stuff and learn how to protect themselves, and I think that he does an excellent job at targetting areas of his site to that particular audience.
That's not nearly as bad as being forwarded "email virus" warning messages from a user 3 weeks after the virus was discovered and AV apps were updated. It's even worse when you've sent out two warning broadcasts by email about that same virus. And shit like that happens all the time...
Please reread the original post. In SSL sites Apache is NOT king at this point -- it is a distant second to IIS.
But that is irrelevant to this discussion. We are talking about number of overall exploits/cracks/defacement incidents as a percentage relative to overall marketshare. In that arena, MS definitely scores the highest. Period. There is no wiggling out of it by citing SSL surveys instead of overall. SSL-enabled sites are not the only ones that get exploited! Your statement regarding Microsoft's marketshare according to the Netcraft SSL survey is about as relevant here as me pointing out that the average human head weighs 8 pounds.
Microsoft has around 50% of the commercial web server space according to the Netcraft SSL survey. That's a fairly large chunk considering the next competitor is Apache with 30%.
That may be true when you're looking at the SSL survey, but overall Apache is far and away ahead of NT/IIS. Not everybody is running an e-commerce site off their web servers.
Much more fun to hit the high profile sites. Especially if there are some juicy credit card numbers to be had because of poor site design.
That might be true for a small number of crackers, but the overwhelming majority of sites that get cracked are victims of simple exploit-and-deface maneuvers.
I wondered what had happened. I saw this on The Register this morning and was reading through the article at grc.com and the page never finished loading! I thought...hmmm...could he possibly be getting DDoS'd again for posting the story?
I can see it now... PR folks from Microsoft, and other closed-source businesses are going to jump all over this (or related matters):
Please...the absolute last thing MS wants to do is to actually get people started comparing the number of cracked web servers between NT/IIS and anything else. Even their corporate PR droids know that NT/IIS is by far the most exploited/cracked web server combination in the world (and disproportionately so when you consider that they have such a small percentage of the web server marketshare).
That's a poor example because you've brough in a third party with little or no interest in the situation.
In your example, the big landowner is the group of citizens, the little property owner is the railway and the telco, and the people running cables don't have a corresponding person.
It's one thing to contract for someone to run wiring for you through a right-of-way. It's a different thing for running the wiring through teh right-of-way yourself. The telcos weren't laying the fiber lines on behalf of the railroads.
Hope you've got a few days...the fiber is buried in a conduit at least six feet deep. Above the dirt is a huge amount of rock laid so the railroad ties could be put down. Plus the added fact that the ground beneath those ties has been highly compressed due to trains running over it for the past several years.
Apparently you are completely unfamiliar with this particular situation. They didn't lay the cables underneath the railroad tracks. To do so they would have had to tear out and rebuild the railroad tracks. They laid cable alongside the railroad tracks in the railroad right-of-way areas. These right-of-ways are usually 20-30 foot wide swaths of land with railroad tracks running down the middle.
If you'll recall that was one of the biggest selling points of Qwest: they had negotiated with the railroads to use that space to lay conduit. Other companies were doing it too, but nobody did it to the extent that Qwest was doing it. In fact, in some areas Qwest used specially designed railway cars/vehicles that actually drove on the tracks and had a boom that extended to one side of the railway to lay the conduit. Actually, they were laying two sets of conduit at the time: one for fiber and another empty one so that they could (relatively) cheaply pull through additional fiber as bandwidth demand increased without having to dig or lay additional conduit.
What if the R.R. Co, and I am not suggesting they did, falsely represented that they HAD the rights to authorize the cable ?
Well, in that case, you might have a case. Assuming that the telco suffered some sort of loss as the result of the misrepresentation, then once it was all said and done the telco would probably file a suit against the railroads and the telco's would probably have to prove that the railroads either:
Willfully misrepresented their rights.
Knowingly misrepresented their rights.
And/or negligently (but perhaps unknowingly) misrepresented their rights.
But then I'm not a lawyer. All I know is that the property owners probably don't have any recourse against the railroads, nor would they need any with telco fatcats around.
I live in a well to do part of a small town in california -- I drive past the "title 9" (goverment subsidised) housing all the time, and I see *BETTER CARS* parked outside the title 9 then I do in my own neighborhood (sp?) where the lowest household income is well over 100g/y.
You meant SUV's, didn't you? Heck, I'm not ashamed. I am a consultant driving a 1993 Honda Civic hatchback. Sure it's nothing fancy, but I don't make payments on it and it get's close to 40 MPG (watch me laugh at the SUV people when gas prices break $2.00/gallon this summer in the US).
I think we need to institute financial education in all 3 elementary, grade school and highschool -- and I also think theres forces out there that *DON'T WANT* consumers to understand financing (Banks, Credit Card Companies, auto-dealerships... you can walk into best buy any day of the week and get 5000$ credit on a best buy card)
Actually, that's a fantastic idea. I can't believe it never occurred to me before. When I was in middle school we took a class that was all about how to do day-to-day life stuff. Like how to fill out job applications, write resumes, read maps, etc. Why didn't they teach us how to balance checkbooks? Or the rudiments of investing for retirement, or how to find a good interest rate on a loan, or how to buy a house, or anything else that would end up in us being financially astute "consumers"?
If I give you permission to tear out a wall in my neighbor's house, who's to blame? Me, for telling you you could do it, or you for actually doing it? Besides, you should have had enough sense to ask my neighbor if it was OK with him before starting on it anyways.
On the other hand, railways don't have nearly the cash that most telcos have...
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The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
I generally agree with you. Free association is very important. But I don't think that trying to unionize a plant or other business location falls under the category of free association. You are certainly free to meet with union people, talk with them, and even discuss joining. But when a shop goes union, everybody in the shop is usually forced to go union, even those who wish to choose not to associate with union folks. So why is it that your freedom of association can infringe on my freedom of association?
Furthermore, how is closing down a site and moving it to another city infringing on your freedom to associate with whoever you choose? You can still meet with your union buddies all you want, you just can't do it in my shop.
"seniority tends to get be emphasized over ability."
So people keep on saying, and backing up with little evidence.
Having been in a union before, I can vouch for this statement. Promotions and transfers were always based solely upon 2 considerations:
1. Is the applicant for the promotion/transfer physically able to do the job?
2. Which of the applicants for the promotion/transfer has the most seniority.
I've only worked in one union, but from my dealings with other people who have been union members I get the rather strong impression that this is the norm for unions.
Unions reward loyalty, not ability. Unions exist to ensure that all employees are treated as equally as possible. In order to do this, everybody must be compensated equally. So there is a scale devised that compensates workers at a greater rate as their length of service increases. There is no such thing as the smart, young hotshot who can "do-it-all" in a union shop.
Another common union provision is "job security." If you are a produce worker in a union grocery store, the store can't have one of the cashiers cover for you while you are at lunch. It's forbidden by union rules. So the job goes unfulfilled unless you are there to do it. In the technical community there is typically a fair amount of overlap in ability between departments. But with the union notion of job security, a desktop technician couldn't troubleshoot a networking issue related to a desktop PC. A web developer would need to have the DBAs create all the queries for the web front-end that they were designing.
Unions are breeding grounds for inefficiency.
You will find that if you are paid on a salary basis (i.e. you don't have to clock in, and you are not docked for missing less than one day) in the computer industry you have no right to expect overtime pay.
Actually I think that the salaried exemption is only for "certain salaried managers." Unfortunately, most companies find some legal loophole to classify their salaried employees as managers, regardless of whether they truly are or not. Fortunately, my company pays straight-time for OT to salaried workers (and 1.5 times for hourly workers), so it all works out fine.
Well, that was my question too! How the hell do you let Craig "Opensource is evil and stifles innovation" Mundie to be the keynote speaker at an open source conference? Or more to the point, why would you want him to be the keybote speaker at an open source conference? Do you not know what Craig is going to say about open source? Is this not the world's largest troll?
1. Many people have "BB" access at work and simple spend time at the office surfing and thus don't need high speed access at home.
2. Many people have never used broadband, thus they don't know what the difference relative to dail-up is like.
That's funny. My father is a UNIX developer for a large international telco equipment manufacturer, so he's quite accustomed to browsing on the fat pipe at work. When cable modems first became available in his area he swore up and down that he didn't need it, he'd never use it, and his V.34 dialup was good enough.
That lasted until the day he needed me to test a piece of hardware on one of my PCs. He came over to my house and we had to download a 10MB driver package for the device. He was absolutely dumbstruck by how quickly it was downloaded to my system (cable modem). He had the cable modem service ordered and installed within a week. Apparently he knew that it would be faster than dialup, but didn't realize just how much faster it could be. I mean, I've got a T1 at work that I share with 60 other employees. My cable modem gives much better throughput than I get at the office. There's no comparison!
The other thing about broadband is that it changes the way I use the Internet (dad too). I used to spend a couple hours a day dialed in and reading various tech news sites or downloading drivers/patches. But I never played online games and I found it very difficult to take part in an online discussion (like Slashdot) because it takes so long to load pages that there's no hope of ever reading all the comments in a single article. During my first week of cable modem usage my "sessions" dropped from a couple hours every night on dialup to about 20-30 minutes on cable. I'm now back up to a couple hours per night, but I get a lot more done in that timeframe. Dad discovered the beauty of Napster and Gnutella and what-not. Now to mention he has VPN over cable to his office (now that's a true timesaver there!). He's very happy with it.
I can just imagine it: you get three quarters of the way through the book, having no clue what's really going on but expecting it to all make sense in the end...
...and then the rest of the book is blank, except for an editor's note at the end, explaining that the author died partway though.
People would argue for years over how he intended to finish it.
I dunno...there's a bit of poetic justice in it I think. Anyone recall how Adams had Samuel Taylor Coleridge finish out "Kublai Khan" with the "second and far more interesting part"?
IMNSHO, I think it would be great if they released "The Salmon of Doubt" as it was originally written as a Dirk Gently book. I loved all of Adams work, but I think that I cared for the Dirk Gently books more that the HHGTTG books. And with that title...I mean, come on, it's got to be a Dirk Gently book.
My point was essentionally, what offers a juicier target to most hackers? Little known "Hi my name is Joe" sites, or various commercial ops?
Blah blah blah...yeah, we know. But your argument that only "hit my name is Joe sites" are the ones running Apache is somewhat flawed. Lots of commercial sites run Apache. Beyond that, there are a large number of business-oriented web sites that are not e-commerce sites. They may simply be online brochures for companies or a places to find more news and information about a company (like McDonald's and Burger King, two sites that were relatively recently cracked and defaced).
It all depends on so many factors. I also suspect the script kiddies tend to be more familiar with Windows.
And now you contradict yourself by implying that script kiddies are going out to hack commercial sites. They're not. Script kiddies are out to see their name in lights. If it's by defacing Burger King's online brochure, so be it. If it's by defacing Amazon.com and disrupting that days transactions, so be it. The business (or non-business) purpose of the site is irrelevant.
Go research the kinds of sites that have been breached over the past year. Start at attrition.org or alldas.de and keep going. I think that you'll find that very few of them are actually big "commercial operations" (or e-commerce sites). Most of them will be companies or organizations that you're probably never even heard of.
The point I made was that the higher percentage of SSL enabled IIS sites provided a much more attractive attack target.
Calling the point irrelevant has no bearing on the discussion. It may be irrelevant to you but that is only because you are either incapable or unwilling to understand the point.
I explained this to you once before but you didn't get it, so I will explain this to you yet again...in detail:
It may be true that SSL protected/e-commerce sites provide a more attractive target for some crackers (those who are financially motivated), but the vast majority of servers that are being cracked are not targeted for financial gain. They are simple exploit and deface tricks. They are script kiddies who want to show someone that they can exploit a well-publiscized security hole and see their name up in lights.
If the majority of security breaches were in fact finanically motivated or had some sort of financial component, then your excuse about MS having a hgiher marketshare among SSL enabled sites might be relevant. But since the overwhelming majority of security breaches are not financially motivated and are simple site defacements then obviously the "financial motivation" theory that you posit is not applicable to those cases.
Trying to insult me by implying that I'm stupid won't change that.
I have an old beat up Mazda truck. When it finally stops running, should Mazda be REQUIRED to take it back?
You bought a Mazda truck? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
OK, seriously though, that's an interesting point. I think that it's important that manufacturers be thinking of ways to make their cars/trucks/computers/whatever more easily recycled. But I don't think that they should be responsible for recycling it. I'm thinking of all the times when I've been able to go to the local junkyard/salvage yard and buy a used part from a junked car and put it on my car. It can be a real cost-saver. And auto recycling is fairly common nowdays anyway, so for non-usable parts they can be broken down.
C'mon now...technology was MEANT to be disposable.
disposable
adj.
Designed to be disposed of after use: disposable diapers; disposable razors.
By the dictionary definition of disposable, I'd argue that the adjective doesn't apply to either computers or technology. And even if it did apply to computers, there's nothing that says that something that is disposable is supposed to be thrown away if it is still useful. And most old PC's are still useful.
When it's lived out the lifetime of it's product cycle, bury it, burn it, crush it, or otherwise redender it permanently inoperative -- the tech support workers of the world will thank you.
As a tech support worker of the world (or at least my corner of it anyway), I think that you're full of shit. Only a total moron is going to destroy a piece of equipment that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars simply because it has exceeded the manufacturers product cycle. Product cycles nowdays can be as short as 6 months. And why on earth would you destroy a piece of equipment that is still useful for someone, even if it is not useful to you? Even a 2 year old computer can be sold for a little bit of cash.
I had a Sony 200ES monitor that would cost $200 to fix--not worth it. So, I put it out on the curb with my trash the night before and it was GONE within 20 minutes.
Well, that's the rub I guess. I've had a lot of old HP Laserjet II and III monstrosities die on me in the past few months. It would have cost us at least $100 apiece to get them all looked at and repaired, and then they'd still be shitty old slow printers. So I took the money that we would have spent on repairs and bought a couple LJ 4100N workgroup printers and chucked the old ones. It just wasn't worth the time or effort to fix them.
The power switch was tied to the old broken power supply from a second proprietary cable!
:-)
I had that happen once. I pulled the power supply and switch from another even older machine and frankensteined it into the case of the broken system. Sure, the power switch was on the back instead of the front, but that just makes it harder to accidentally shut off my file server now.
My point, unless the old system is in good working order I find no point of using it. If it works it will break in a few months it is also pointless. Systems are engineered to break down after 3 years.
Not true. I bought a 386sx in 1992 that is still running. As is the 486-80 that I bought in 1994, the 486-120 and the X5-133 (AMD chip) that I built in 1995 and numerours Pentium and 6x86 based systems that I built in 1997-1999.
What you're referring to is planned or programmed obsolesence. Appliance manufacturers do it for things like toasters and clock radios and whatnot. The rationale is that they can sell more units if they design them to only last a couple years. But you don't have to worry about engineered obsolesence in the PC industry because in 2 years the system (even if it is in like-new working order) will be technologically obsolete and "too slow" to be conventionally useful.
Dr. Demento: "I took a fish head out to see a movie, I didn't have to pay to bring it in."
And actually, that's from the song "Fish Heads" by The Buggles, and if I'm not mistaken the lyric was "I once took a fish head, out to see a movie, I didn't have to pay to get it in."
Schools are very happy to receive your "old" Pentiums. Call your local primary school and ask when they will come pick it up :-)
Not true. I've worked at several companies in the past few years who needed to dispose of a fair number of PCs (ranging from 20 to 2000 depending on where I was working) and we never could find a school or library that would accept them. They always claimed that there was too much trouble involved in reconditioning and standardizing them for their environment, or that they already had newer computers and didn't need a bunch of old P166s, or they only use Dells and we had Compaqs. And then they whip out the whole software licensing issue whereby your donation to them is fairly useless unless they shell out cash for an OS or become non-compliant (schools around here just don't use Linux), so suddenly your donation of 30 "free" PCs has a $4500 price tag on it.
We've always just ended up calling a recycling place to take them away. Some of them will pay you $20 or $30 per unit for them and then clean them up and resell them or ship them to Ethiopia or wherever they think that they could be used. Either that or let employees have them. You'd be surprised at what kind of junk clueless secretaries will take home if they are in the "it's a free computer" mindset.
Windows is the target of choice because there are large numbers of clueless people with good connectivity running Windows.
However the clue level among random Linux users is not great, and Linux has implemented the full protocol all along. If the same people were all using Red Hat, that would be just as bad as everyone using Windows XP.
You're right. But unfortunately it's going to be WinXP that becomes the OS of choice for the clueless users, not RedHat (or some other distro). And while we can try like mad to educate the users, it's not going to happen. Clueless users will always outnumber clueful users. Look at how many people still can't program a VCR, and they've been in homes since the early 80's!
Sometimes you just have to give up on teching kids not to cut their hands off and start handing out safety scissors again. MS has been very keen on trying to control and limit the use of WinXP by endusers for only MS-approved purposes. This should just be one more safety feature that they implement to protect the users from their own ignorance.
On the other hand, the TCP/IP stack in Win2K is just awesome fast compared to the Win9x flavors...it sure was nice to have if you had to have Windows.
I have found that while Steve Gibson has had a taste for a melodramatic writing style, that the technical detail in his writing is fairly solid and is certainly above average. So with that grain of salt the article is worth looking at:
But the thing that I find great about Steve Gibson is that he writes things in a compelling storylike format and in plain english that even the clueless could understand. We techie types already know most of what he had to say in this article to begin with. It's the non-techies who need to read this stuff and learn how to protect themselves, and I think that he does an excellent job at targetting areas of his site to that particular audience.
That's not nearly as bad as being forwarded "email virus" warning messages from a user 3 weeks after the virus was discovered and AV apps were updated. It's even worse when you've sent out two warning broadcasts by email about that same virus. And shit like that happens all the time...
Please reread the original post. In SSL sites Apache is NOT king at this point -- it is a distant second to IIS.
But that is irrelevant to this discussion. We are talking about number of overall exploits/cracks/defacement incidents as a percentage relative to overall marketshare. In that arena, MS definitely scores the highest. Period. There is no wiggling out of it by citing SSL surveys instead of overall. SSL-enabled sites are not the only ones that get exploited! Your statement regarding Microsoft's marketshare according to the Netcraft SSL survey is about as relevant here as me pointing out that the average human head weighs 8 pounds.
Microsoft has around 50% of the commercial web server space according to the Netcraft SSL survey. That's a fairly large chunk considering the next competitor is Apache with 30%.
That may be true when you're looking at the SSL survey, but overall Apache is far and away ahead of NT/IIS. Not everybody is running an e-commerce site off their web servers.
Much more fun to hit the high profile sites. Especially if there are some juicy credit card numbers to be had because of poor site design.
That might be true for a small number of crackers, but the overwhelming majority of sites that get cracked are victims of simple exploit-and-deface maneuvers.
I wondered what had happened. I saw this on The Register this morning and was reading through the article at grc.com and the page never finished loading! I thought...hmmm...could he possibly be getting DDoS'd again for posting the story?
Then I find out that it's just you guys...
I can see it now... PR folks from Microsoft, and other closed-source businesses are going to jump all over this (or related matters):
Please...the absolute last thing MS wants to do is to actually get people started comparing the number of cracked web servers between NT/IIS and anything else. Even their corporate PR droids know that NT/IIS is by far the most exploited/cracked web server combination in the world (and disproportionately so when you consider that they have such a small percentage of the web server marketshare).
That's a poor example because you've brough in a third party with little or no interest in the situation. In your example, the big landowner is the group of citizens, the little property owner is the railway and the telco, and the people running cables don't have a corresponding person. It's one thing to contract for someone to run wiring for you through a right-of-way. It's a different thing for running the wiring through teh right-of-way yourself. The telcos weren't laying the fiber lines on behalf of the railroads.
Hope you've got a few days...the fiber is buried in a conduit at least six feet deep. Above the dirt is a huge amount of rock laid so the railroad ties could be put down. Plus the added fact that the ground beneath those ties has been highly compressed due to trains running over it for the past several years.
Apparently you are completely unfamiliar with this particular situation. They didn't lay the cables underneath the railroad tracks. To do so they would have had to tear out and rebuild the railroad tracks. They laid cable alongside the railroad tracks in the railroad right-of-way areas. These right-of-ways are usually 20-30 foot wide swaths of land with railroad tracks running down the middle.
If you'll recall that was one of the biggest selling points of Qwest: they had negotiated with the railroads to use that space to lay conduit. Other companies were doing it too, but nobody did it to the extent that Qwest was doing it. In fact, in some areas Qwest used specially designed railway cars/vehicles that actually drove on the tracks and had a boom that extended to one side of the railway to lay the conduit. Actually, they were laying two sets of conduit at the time: one for fiber and another empty one so that they could (relatively) cheaply pull through additional fiber as bandwidth demand increased without having to dig or lay additional conduit.
Hope you've got a good shovel!
Hope you've finally gotten a clue!
What if the R.R. Co, and I am not suggesting they did, falsely represented that they HAD the rights to authorize the cable ?
Well, in that case, you might have a case. Assuming that the telco suffered some sort of loss as the result of the misrepresentation, then once it was all said and done the telco would probably file a suit against the railroads and the telco's would probably have to prove that the railroads either:
Willfully misrepresented their rights.
Knowingly misrepresented their rights.
And/or negligently (but perhaps unknowingly) misrepresented their rights.
But then I'm not a lawyer. All I know is that the property owners probably don't have any recourse against the railroads, nor would they need any with telco fatcats around.
I live in a well to do part of a small town in california -- I drive past the "title 9" (goverment subsidised) housing all the time, and I see *BETTER CARS* parked outside the title 9 then I do in my own neighborhood (sp?) where the lowest household income is well over 100g/y.
... you can walk into best buy any day of the week and get 5000$ credit on a best buy card)
You meant SUV's, didn't you? Heck, I'm not ashamed. I am a consultant driving a 1993 Honda Civic hatchback. Sure it's nothing fancy, but I don't make payments on it and it get's close to 40 MPG (watch me laugh at the SUV people when gas prices break $2.00/gallon this summer in the US).
I think we need to institute financial education in all 3 elementary, grade school and highschool -- and I also think theres forces out there that *DON'T WANT* consumers to understand financing (Banks, Credit Card Companies, auto-dealerships
Actually, that's a fantastic idea. I can't believe it never occurred to me before. When I was in middle school we took a class that was all about how to do day-to-day life stuff. Like how to fill out job applications, write resumes, read maps, etc. Why didn't they teach us how to balance checkbooks? Or the rudiments of investing for retirement, or how to find a good interest rate on a loan, or how to buy a house, or anything else that would end up in us being financially astute "consumers"?
If I give you permission to tear out a wall in my neighbor's house, who's to blame? Me, for telling you you could do it, or you for actually doing it? Besides, you should have had enough sense to ask my neighbor if it was OK with him before starting on it anyways.
On the other hand, railways don't have nearly the cash that most telcos have...