Why is the question always put out as "Is art or is it science?" I don't know of anything that isn't both these days. I've done lighting design work for dance theater, which drew upon a lot of creativity and interaction with the choreographer to get the right kind of look. I also drew upon simple facts of science, like the notion that using purple is a terrible idea (comprised of only the light from opposing ends of the spectrum, apparently purple lighting makes it very hard for dancers to accurately focus their eyes on stage). Cooking is clearly considered art, but when you go to cooking school what you learn is as much chemistry as art. Sculpture is largely dependent on metallurgy and casting technologies (which can also be said to be science with art mixed in, when it comes to intuitive decisions on things like porting to make sure a cast fills properly). I also think that, depending on the particular act of any such endeavor, the proportion of art to science varies. Making some sauces can be pretty freeform, but baking usually demands strict adherence to certain proportions, for reasons of simple chemistry and biology.
I won't even get into the definition of "hacking," because on Slashdot getting into THAT semantic argument is neither art nor science...it's just crazy. Let's face it, nobody can win that argument no matter what their viewpoint:) But in my opinion, any definition of the word (including the pejorative term used in popular media to refer to spectacular computer security violations) are both. And I think the proportion is not a constant for any definition, or even for one person. It varies based upon the act.
I think we need to consider the drugs we're really talking about here, and what the risks are. This isn't like having to take asprin every morning to limit one's risk of heart attack. These are anti-rejection drugs...also known as immunosuppressants. When your body rejects a transplant, it's your immune system at work, seeing the organ (or in this case, face) as an invading organism. So the drugs that help prevent rejection do so by impeding your immune response.
Not to make it sound too dramatic, but imagine spending the rest of your life with a compromised immune system. Kind of like 50% of having AIDS, to simplify it. This is no minor thing. A common cold can hospitalize you; the flu would very possibly kill you. And you've got little option but to keep on them, no matter what, since cessation of the therapy could result in rejection of your new face, which would be catastrophic as well. The tissue would be attacked, would become necrotic, and you'd get the fun and joy of having your face succumb to gangrene before they sliced it all off just to save your life.
I don't know if I'd exactly post his phone number, but a good friend (and former boss) worked in the DEA for decades; he was there when it started, as someone starting off his career, and retired several years ago. He's the source. I never said he wasn't real, I said that at first there wasn't an album. And the CMT and wikipedia entries mirror the old commercials, so I tend to wonder about that as well.
This should be called the "Slim Whitman" laptop. Slim Whitman was a fictitious singer whose albums were for sale by tv commercials back in the '70s; the commercials stated that he'd sold hundreds of thousands of records in Europe or Elbonia or something like that. The guy looked lame, the music sounded like ass, and the whole thing was just a shell business for money laundering. There was no album, even. Trick was, he actually became something of a cult figure, so they ended up having to produce an album after all.
Well, that all depends. If by "giant chicks," they really meant to say "fat chicks" but were just being nice about it, I'd say your odds go up significantly.:)
Actually, no. I've checked it myself; because of the placement of the AP in the back of Tryst, the construction of the buildings on either side of it, and the alleyway behind it, the only way to get their signal is either to be inside, or on the sidewalk in front. The establishments on either side get really crappy signal and the one across the street (a bar known as "The Reef"...another fav of mine) gets none at all.
Excellent example, but a double-edged sword...
on
The Case for Free WiFi?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC, there's a coffee shop called "Tryst" (I like them, so I won't post a link here. Poor guys would get slashdotted into oblivion!) that has free wifi. Now, Adams Morgan is NOT a cheap place to have a business, and Tryst is simply huge. The place is full of sofas, loveseats and easy chairs...not a single mass-produced cafe chair can be found in the place, in all truth, so it actually has a relatively low density as far as customers per square foot. They do solid business, though, because they are reknowned as a great place for students, consultants, etc. to work. Go in there at night, and it's social. But go there during the middle of the day, and it's STILL busy, and looking like a forest of laptops. The people take advantage of the free wifi, and they buy coffee, beer, and food at the same time. I used to live mere blocks from them, and actually wrote most of my book in some of those comfortable chairs while racking up a tab consisting of caffeine and beer in alternating amounts. The place has this incredible buzz to it that makes it perfect to work in, and this in turn is the key to their being busy all day long, every day.
There's a flipside to this, though. It's no secret that in some cases, coffee shops that offer free wifi end up with nothing more than wifi freeloaders, who go in, power up and sit down to work without ordering a thing. I honestly don't know how the flip comes about, but Tryst doesn't do anything to require that people purchase, it just takes care of itself. Part of it could be the quality of their food and drink...their coffee is just unbelievable. It's Seattle-good, to put it as a couple of my friends from there did.
I'm waiting for someone to essentially say that anyone who still relies on broadcast TV in 4 years (and who cannot afford a new television) needs to stop watching TV and get off their ass to get a new job.
But come to think of it...I think I just said it, didn't I?:)
Besides. Hackers have been doing serious damage from day one. Besides just breaking into networks for "curiosity sake" they've been planting worms, trojans, trolling entire credit card data bases, commiting DDoS attacts, etc etc. No, not all of them, but enough to make the OPs point a ridiculous one to even attempt to justify.
Uh...what's your definiton of "day one"? Hackers have been around LONG before there were worms, trojans, credit card databases, DDoS attacks, etc. Hackers actually have NOT been doing such incredibly destructive things since day one...not even close. Why else do you think the term for someone who can break into computers originally started out as a synonym for "a really, really good coder"?
I've read several posts now, asking "Why not just buy a new computer instead of paying the money for 3 hours of repairs?" I can answer that in one word: DATA.
That new computer won't have the pictures of their child's first birthday, or their honeymoon, which were moved onto the old computer from their digital camera. It won't have the files for Quicken, last year's TurboTax data, or the large MP3 collection. The new computer won't have their email, their resume, or anything else they may have worked on (but not backed up).
Yes, I know, they could just move the data over...well, not necessarily. I helped someone out once, and the computer was SO blown up with spyware that it was actually quite hard to get the data off. The guy had been using spyware-riddled apps of various sorts for so long, and waited so long to do something about the problem, that his system was barely stable enough to stay up, much less transfer data to another PC. He couldn't burn CDs, either. And this is the 'new computer' scenario.
I think a lot of people put up with a good bit of cruft on their systems; by the time they're calling for multi-hundred-dollar support, things have gotten so bad that it's not simple to just step off to another computer and move the data.
First of all, that a library is the force behind this astounds me. My significant other is a librarian (don't laugh...she's actually pretty hot), and if I've seen anything, it's that librarians are very much fans of civil freedom. They're often the first to be confronted with issues of censorship and repression of knowledge, and it's been that way for hundreds of years.
So, that said, I think I can accept their promise not to violate the confidentiality of their records, as long as they can accept the promise that government will only burn the "bad" books. Fair enough, right?:)
Have you ever tried managing antivirus and patching in an enterprise of any significant size? Trust me; nobody will ever be 100% patched and covered with antivirus. Things break, people with excessive rights decide to uninstall or disable things for various idiotic reasons, developers set up systems without fully patching them...the list of reasons goes on and on, and every security geek out there has one of their own to share.
It seems like they fail to take a number of things into account with the sim. For one, when I ran the Sasser simulation, it followed a pretty straightforward and accurate progression. Things went slowly at first, and then picket up speed as time progressed.
But within 20 days, there were no infected nodes, anywhere; as someone who works in a penetration testing lab without a firewall, I really have to say that this is not real. And within 52 days, 100% of the world was patched. What? It was more than 95% within 30 days too, and I don't believe that either. There's no accounting for new systems coming out of the box (and onto the net) without patches, and no representation for the fact that there will never, ever be 100% coverage for any patch.
That said, it is a pretty interesting tool to see how things spread, both globally and within an organization. You just have to keep in mind that it doesn't tell the whole story.
I find it so distressing when things like this show up on Slashdot. "X bad thing is dependent on Y characteristic of Z, which A doesn't have, so therefore, I suggest that A is better." No overall comparison of the two, no accounting for potential vulnerabilities in "A" that might not exist in "Z", and no accounting for the fact that since "Z" is almost always far more prevalent in the world than "A", more effort has been expended looking for bad things.
You would be using the exact same logic if you said, "There's a vulnerability in a model of Hamilton bank vaults relating to the way the 5-inch bolts secure the door. The little safes that are sold in Staples and Office Depot don't use these kinds of bolts...so they're better safes, right?"
Yes...and this is why they should be providing context whenever possible to the "holes" they find, and verifying false positives (or qualifying them). I work for a security company, and we're very careful about this. For example, on many systems when a daemon is patched, the banners are not updated and so we'll see fully patched servers that flag on having vulnerable versions of software. We've seen this time and time again, and know that it could be the case each time we get that result. We either manually verify the finding in each case, or in our report, we explicitly state this for each such finding (if we can't verify due to the scope of work). My advice to you is this: Stay ahead of the game. While it's not so easy to duplicate the work of qualified security assessors who will provide a quality and carefully-checked deliverable, it's pretty easy to do what these script monkeys did, and thus know in advance what they'll say so that you can respond back to management. And while you're at it, pointing out that five figures were paid for something you did in a spare maintenance window for the hell of it helps protect you as well. Ultimately, it sounds like the vendor who did this assessment sucked, and it's just another case of "management paid to bring a crappy vendor in, and it made my life hard in _____ way." Fortunately, unlike most such situations, this is one where you can actually anticipate the way they'll screw up to some degree.
Okay, first the good news. Proving that it's not illegal is relatively simple. If something isn't explicitly rendered illegal by an act of law, it's legal. Ask them to point out the law that states (and here's the key point) that use of this particular protocol is illegal for distribution of freeware that is also available for unfettered download via the web. They obviously won't be able to...problem solved?
Not exactly. This isn't just a matter of legal versus not legal, it's a question of whether it complies with their own Acceptable Use Policies. And depending on how those policies are written, Bittorrent may be a no-no anyways, "Because we say so." And I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that when they say "illegal," they don't mean 'criminal,' they mean 'against our own policies.' Good luck to you, man (or woman, whichever).
The "supposed area of expertise" for someone in charge of alliances between massive technology companies isn't technology. It's legal and strategic planning, plus the diplomacy needed to get everyone to get together on the same page. For the love of god, man, you quoted his title yourself; did you not read it?
EDS is the most complex organization I've ever seen; they have entire divisions that do billions of dollars of business just for single industries. Partners of ours have entire departments just to deal with single divisions within EDS as well; it took me weeks to find the guy who could quote us a T1 line from MCI. I'm getting tired of reading posts from slashdotters who suddenly think they know all about EDS because they read some article somewhere.
And I wasn't apologizing for the manager, I was actually saying that his words were almost certainly taken out of context to enhance the scandal-causing potential of the article.
If it truly is this guy's personal opinions, or the opinions of the part of EDS he works for, then he ought to make that clear, and it is the responsibility of the company to make sure that he does not speak as if on behalf on the company as a whole.
Ah, this is where I point to the realities of the media. How do we know what he said that didn't get quoted? And let me point out that in a multi-billion dollar corporation, the PR department has extremely limited power to tell a Vice President to shut up.:)
Let's do a theoretical scenario here. You're a reporter. Ratings, whether on television, readership, or page loads, are what drives the profitability of your employer. Someone from a major corporation says some things about linux that are less than complimentary. Do you...
1.) Edit the whole length of what has been said with great difficulty to make sure to show the nuanced conversation as a whole, and keep it boring, or...
2.) Focus on a few specific points and write at the top, "EDS Says That Linux Sucks" with the full knowledge that the whole computing world will go gaga over it, and watch it get slashdotted.
Which one of these two has a stronger force driving it?
I work for EDS, and I have to point a few things out. For one, it's a HUGE corporation...it's a world unto itself. We've got over 120,000 employees all over the planet, on nearly every continent and in every time zone. You always have to take what one guy says with a grain of salt; there are very few universal truths that cover all of EDS, and none of them have to do with a preference for a kind of technology, one way or the other. For gods sake, I'm sure there's a linux beowulf cluster somewhere, and a whole lot of Windows ME somewhere else. I'd also like to point out that the previous article about the EDS "stance" was very likely taken somewhat out of context by the reporter. You've got a guy high up in EDS saying that in enterprise environments, linux doesn't match up to Solaris 10, and in a lot of ways he's right. If you doubt that, check out Solaris 10 and its new features. It rocks like mad, and I do prefer linux to Solaris. No large enterprise on the planet is all of anything; even Microsoft got caught running linux and a BSD variant at times. So let's get over the notion that one guy out of 120,000 may not like linux so much yet still have it in his corporate environment? Oh, and I use linux daily in my work at EDS, just to be clear on the subject, and rarely touch Solaris.
But to be serious, however...I have given CA a chance, in my role as a consultant, and it was a mistake of enormous proportions. Their software was a nightmare, and not even their own engineers could get it to work correctly; in the end the client had to forklift the whole thing and start over again. The only thing that saved my job was that the client's point of contact was with me all along, and saw that CA failed to deliver as promised, not that I had overstated their abilities. I can't afford to give them other chances after a debacle like that. This isn't some kind of a game; people's careers sometimes hinge on things like this, and I don't give a rat's ass if they want to open source software or not. They hosed a client before my eyes, and I narrowly missed a bullet as well, not to mention criminal behavior on a huge scale by their upper management until about 18 months ago. By many different yardsticks and measurements, they suck. And waving the "oh, how sweet, they want to support open source, ooh give them a free pass on being asshats for the past 10 years" flag, you do open source a disservice. Behavior has consequences, and rallying behind a relatively notorious company simply because they want to hop on the OSS bandwagon is the kind of thing that cannot help us. We need to focus on the strengths of open source, such as better code, open standards, easier interoperability, and potentially less security issues. Instant forgiveness for recidivist companies is not something we want to associate with the the open source movement.
You're kidding, right? They're afraid of releasing to open source because I think they suck? That has utterly nothing to do with it...it'd make about as much sense to blame the criminal prosecution of their former CEO by the SEC (which, by the way, is moving full steam ahead). Now, it might be more plausible to point to the reaction to their open-sourcing of Ingres, which was largely met by yawns and "Well, maybe we can fix the engine now, but I don't use it because it was terrible." But whose fault is it that CA gets a bad reaction in that case...are you actually faulting the geeks for disliking bad software? The point here isn't to get everything open-sourced, you know; it's to have good software, which requires the kind of evolutionary process that comes from giving credit and jeers where either are due.
Please, do sit aside and let those who have actually had to use some of their applications (particularly before/after they were acquired by CA, like many of the products of Cheyenne or Platinum software) discuss this. Listen and learn. They're known by many as a killer of technology for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the question always put out as "Is art or is it science?" I don't know of anything that isn't both these days. I've done lighting design work for dance theater, which drew upon a lot of creativity and interaction with the choreographer to get the right kind of look. I also drew upon simple facts of science, like the notion that using purple is a terrible idea (comprised of only the light from opposing ends of the spectrum, apparently purple lighting makes it very hard for dancers to accurately focus their eyes on stage). Cooking is clearly considered art, but when you go to cooking school what you learn is as much chemistry as art. Sculpture is largely dependent on metallurgy and casting technologies (which can also be said to be science with art mixed in, when it comes to intuitive decisions on things like porting to make sure a cast fills properly). I also think that, depending on the particular act of any such endeavor, the proportion of art to science varies. Making some sauces can be pretty freeform, but baking usually demands strict adherence to certain proportions, for reasons of simple chemistry and biology.
:) But in my opinion, any definition of the word (including the pejorative term used in popular media to refer to spectacular computer security violations) are both. And I think the proportion is not a constant for any definition, or even for one person. It varies based upon the act.
I won't even get into the definition of "hacking," because on Slashdot getting into THAT semantic argument is neither art nor science...it's just crazy. Let's face it, nobody can win that argument no matter what their viewpoint
I think we need to consider the drugs we're really talking about here, and what the risks are. This isn't like having to take asprin every morning to limit one's risk of heart attack. These are anti-rejection drugs...also known as immunosuppressants. When your body rejects a transplant, it's your immune system at work, seeing the organ (or in this case, face) as an invading organism. So the drugs that help prevent rejection do so by impeding your immune response.
Not to make it sound too dramatic, but imagine spending the rest of your life with a compromised immune system. Kind of like 50% of having AIDS, to simplify it. This is no minor thing. A common cold can hospitalize you; the flu would very possibly kill you. And you've got little option but to keep on them, no matter what, since cessation of the therapy could result in rejection of your new face, which would be catastrophic as well. The tissue would be attacked, would become necrotic, and you'd get the fun and joy of having your face succumb to gangrene before they sliced it all off just to save your life.
I don't know if I'd exactly post his phone number, but a good friend (and former boss) worked in the DEA for decades; he was there when it started, as someone starting off his career, and retired several years ago. He's the source. I never said he wasn't real, I said that at first there wasn't an album. And the CMT and wikipedia entries mirror the old commercials, so I tend to wonder about that as well.
Russian Mafia.
Two more words:
Money Laundering.
This should be called the "Slim Whitman" laptop. Slim Whitman was a fictitious singer whose albums were for sale by tv commercials back in the '70s; the commercials stated that he'd sold hundreds of thousands of records in Europe or Elbonia or something like that. The guy looked lame, the music sounded like ass, and the whole thing was just a shell business for money laundering. There was no album, even. Trick was, he actually became something of a cult figure, so they ended up having to produce an album after all.
Well, that all depends. If by "giant chicks," they really meant to say "fat chicks" but were just being nice about it, I'd say your odds go up significantly. :)
Instead of Microsoft SFU, perhaps it would be better known as Microsoft STFU?
"We're so proud of our new server design, we even use one to run the company website!"
"Uh...why's it smoking?"
Actually, no. I've checked it myself; because of the placement of the AP in the back of Tryst, the construction of the buildings on either side of it, and the alleyway behind it, the only way to get their signal is either to be inside, or on the sidewalk in front. The establishments on either side get really crappy signal and the one across the street (a bar known as "The Reef"...another fav of mine) gets none at all.
In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC, there's a coffee shop called "Tryst" (I like them, so I won't post a link here. Poor guys would get slashdotted into oblivion!) that has free wifi. Now, Adams Morgan is NOT a cheap place to have a business, and Tryst is simply huge. The place is full of sofas, loveseats and easy chairs...not a single mass-produced cafe chair can be found in the place, in all truth, so it actually has a relatively low density as far as customers per square foot. They do solid business, though, because they are reknowned as a great place for students, consultants, etc. to work. Go in there at night, and it's social. But go there during the middle of the day, and it's STILL busy, and looking like a forest of laptops. The people take advantage of the free wifi, and they buy coffee, beer, and food at the same time. I used to live mere blocks from them, and actually wrote most of my book in some of those comfortable chairs while racking up a tab consisting of caffeine and beer in alternating amounts. The place has this incredible buzz to it that makes it perfect to work in, and this in turn is the key to their being busy all day long, every day.
There's a flipside to this, though. It's no secret that in some cases, coffee shops that offer free wifi end up with nothing more than wifi freeloaders, who go in, power up and sit down to work without ordering a thing. I honestly don't know how the flip comes about, but Tryst doesn't do anything to require that people purchase, it just takes care of itself. Part of it could be the quality of their food and drink...their coffee is just unbelievable. It's Seattle-good, to put it as a couple of my friends from there did.
"STOP! He who approaches the Online Banking Website of Death must answer me these questions three, 'ere the other side he see."
"What...is your name?"
"What...is your quest?"
"What...is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
I'm waiting for someone to essentially say that anyone who still relies on broadcast TV in 4 years (and who cannot afford a new television) needs to stop watching TV and get off their ass to get a new job.
:)
But come to think of it...I think I just said it, didn't I?
Besides. Hackers have been doing serious damage from day one. Besides just breaking into networks for "curiosity sake" they've been planting worms, trojans, trolling entire credit card data bases, commiting DDoS attacts, etc etc. No, not all of them, but enough to make the OPs point a ridiculous one to even attempt to justify.
Uh...what's your definiton of "day one"? Hackers have been around LONG before there were worms, trojans, credit card databases, DDoS attacks, etc. Hackers actually have NOT been doing such incredibly destructive things since day one...not even close. Why else do you think the term for someone who can break into computers originally started out as a synonym for "a really, really good coder"?
I've read several posts now, asking "Why not just buy a new computer instead of paying the money for 3 hours of repairs?" I can answer that in one word: DATA.
That new computer won't have the pictures of their child's first birthday, or their honeymoon, which were moved onto the old computer from their digital camera. It won't have the files for Quicken, last year's TurboTax data, or the large MP3 collection. The new computer won't have their email, their resume, or anything else they may have worked on (but not backed up).
Yes, I know, they could just move the data over...well, not necessarily. I helped someone out once, and the computer was SO blown up with spyware that it was actually quite hard to get the data off. The guy had been using spyware-riddled apps of various sorts for so long, and waited so long to do something about the problem, that his system was barely stable enough to stay up, much less transfer data to another PC. He couldn't burn CDs, either. And this is the 'new computer' scenario.
I think a lot of people put up with a good bit of cruft on their systems; by the time they're calling for multi-hundred-dollar support, things have gotten so bad that it's not simple to just step off to another computer and move the data.
First of all, that a library is the force behind this astounds me. My significant other is a librarian (don't laugh...she's actually pretty hot), and if I've seen anything, it's that librarians are very much fans of civil freedom. They're often the first to be confronted with issues of censorship and repression of knowledge, and it's been that way for hundreds of years.
:)
So, that said, I think I can accept their promise not to violate the confidentiality of their records, as long as they can accept the promise that government will only burn the "bad" books. Fair enough, right?
Have you ever tried managing antivirus and patching in an enterprise of any significant size? Trust me; nobody will ever be 100% patched and covered with antivirus. Things break, people with excessive rights decide to uninstall or disable things for various idiotic reasons, developers set up systems without fully patching them...the list of reasons goes on and on, and every security geek out there has one of their own to share.
It seems like they fail to take a number of things into account with the sim. For one, when I ran the Sasser simulation, it followed a pretty straightforward and accurate progression. Things went slowly at first, and then picket up speed as time progressed.
But within 20 days, there were no infected nodes, anywhere; as someone who works in a penetration testing lab without a firewall, I really have to say that this is not real. And within 52 days, 100% of the world was patched. What? It was more than 95% within 30 days too, and I don't believe that either. There's no accounting for new systems coming out of the box (and onto the net) without patches, and no representation for the fact that there will never, ever be 100% coverage for any patch.
That said, it is a pretty interesting tool to see how things spread, both globally and within an organization. You just have to keep in mind that it doesn't tell the whole story.
I find it so distressing when things like this show up on Slashdot. "X bad thing is dependent on Y characteristic of Z, which A doesn't have, so therefore, I suggest that A is better." No overall comparison of the two, no accounting for potential vulnerabilities in "A" that might not exist in "Z", and no accounting for the fact that since "Z" is almost always far more prevalent in the world than "A", more effort has been expended looking for bad things.
You would be using the exact same logic if you said, "There's a vulnerability in a model of Hamilton bank vaults relating to the way the 5-inch bolts secure the door. The little safes that are sold in Staples and Office Depot don't use these kinds of bolts...so they're better safes, right?"
Yes...and this is why they should be providing context whenever possible to the "holes" they find, and verifying false positives (or qualifying them). I work for a security company, and we're very careful about this. For example, on many systems when a daemon is patched, the banners are not updated and so we'll see fully patched servers that flag on having vulnerable versions of software. We've seen this time and time again, and know that it could be the case each time we get that result. We either manually verify the finding in each case, or in our report, we explicitly state this for each such finding (if we can't verify due to the scope of work).
My advice to you is this: Stay ahead of the game. While it's not so easy to duplicate the work of qualified security assessors who will provide a quality and carefully-checked deliverable, it's pretty easy to do what these script monkeys did, and thus know in advance what they'll say so that you can respond back to management. And while you're at it, pointing out that five figures were paid for something you did in a spare maintenance window for the hell of it helps protect you as well.
Ultimately, it sounds like the vendor who did this assessment sucked, and it's just another case of "management paid to bring a crappy vendor in, and it made my life hard in _____ way." Fortunately, unlike most such situations, this is one where you can actually anticipate the way they'll screw up to some degree.
Okay, first the good news. Proving that it's not illegal is relatively simple. If something isn't explicitly rendered illegal by an act of law, it's legal. Ask them to point out the law that states (and here's the key point) that use of this particular protocol is illegal for distribution of freeware that is also available for unfettered download via the web. They obviously won't be able to...problem solved?
Not exactly. This isn't just a matter of legal versus not legal, it's a question of whether it complies with their own Acceptable Use Policies. And depending on how those policies are written, Bittorrent may be a no-no anyways, "Because we say so." And I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that when they say "illegal," they don't mean 'criminal,' they mean 'against our own policies.' Good luck to you, man (or woman, whichever).
The "supposed area of expertise" for someone in charge of alliances between massive technology companies isn't technology. It's legal and strategic planning, plus the diplomacy needed to get everyone to get together on the same page. For the love of god, man, you quoted his title yourself; did you not read it?
EDS is the most complex organization I've ever seen; they have entire divisions that do billions of dollars of business just for single industries. Partners of ours have entire departments just to deal with single divisions within EDS as well; it took me weeks to find the guy who could quote us a T1 line from MCI. I'm getting tired of reading posts from slashdotters who suddenly think they know all about EDS because they read some article somewhere.
And I wasn't apologizing for the manager, I was actually saying that his words were almost certainly taken out of context to enhance the scandal-causing potential of the article.
Ah, this is where I point to the realities of the media. How do we know what he said that didn't get quoted? And let me point out that in a multi-billion dollar corporation, the PR department has extremely limited power to tell a Vice President to shut up.
Let's do a theoretical scenario here. You're a reporter. Ratings, whether on television, readership, or page loads, are what drives the profitability of your employer. Someone from a major corporation says some things about linux that are less than complimentary. Do you...
1.) Edit the whole length of what has been said with great difficulty to make sure to show the nuanced conversation as a whole, and keep it boring, or...
2.) Focus on a few specific points and write at the top, "EDS Says That Linux Sucks" with the full knowledge that the whole computing world will go gaga over it, and watch it get slashdotted.
Which one of these two has a stronger force driving it?
I work for EDS, and I have to point a few things out. For one, it's a HUGE corporation...it's a world unto itself. We've got over 120,000 employees all over the planet, on nearly every continent and in every time zone. You always have to take what one guy says with a grain of salt; there are very few universal truths that cover all of EDS, and none of them have to do with a preference for a kind of technology, one way or the other. For gods sake, I'm sure there's a linux beowulf cluster somewhere, and a whole lot of Windows ME somewhere else.
I'd also like to point out that the previous article about the EDS "stance" was very likely taken somewhat out of context by the reporter. You've got a guy high up in EDS saying that in enterprise environments, linux doesn't match up to Solaris 10, and in a lot of ways he's right. If you doubt that, check out Solaris 10 and its new features. It rocks like mad, and I do prefer linux to Solaris.
No large enterprise on the planet is all of anything; even Microsoft got caught running linux and a BSD variant at times. So let's get over the notion that one guy out of 120,000 may not like linux so much yet still have it in his corporate environment?
Oh, and I use linux daily in my work at EDS, just to be clear on the subject, and rarely touch Solaris.
Dude, it was just meant to be funny.
But to be serious, however...I have given CA a chance, in my role as a consultant, and it was a mistake of enormous proportions. Their software was a nightmare, and not even their own engineers could get it to work correctly; in the end the client had to forklift the whole thing and start over again. The only thing that saved my job was that the client's point of contact was with me all along, and saw that CA failed to deliver as promised, not that I had overstated their abilities. I can't afford to give them other chances after a debacle like that. This isn't some kind of a game; people's careers sometimes hinge on things like this, and I don't give a rat's ass if they want to open source software or not. They hosed a client before my eyes, and I narrowly missed a bullet as well, not to mention criminal behavior on a huge scale by their upper management until about 18 months ago. By many different yardsticks and measurements, they suck. And waving the "oh, how sweet, they want to support open source, ooh give them a free pass on being asshats for the past 10 years" flag, you do open source a disservice. Behavior has consequences, and rallying behind a relatively notorious company simply because they want to hop on the OSS bandwagon is the kind of thing that cannot help us. We need to focus on the strengths of open source, such as better code, open standards, easier interoperability, and potentially less security issues. Instant forgiveness for recidivist companies is not something we want to associate with the the open source movement.
You're kidding, right? They're afraid of releasing to open source because I think they suck? That has utterly nothing to do with it...it'd make about as much sense to blame the criminal prosecution of their former CEO by the SEC (which, by the way, is moving full steam ahead). Now, it might be more plausible to point to the reaction to their open-sourcing of Ingres, which was largely met by yawns and "Well, maybe we can fix the engine now, but I don't use it because it was terrible." But whose fault is it that CA gets a bad reaction in that case...are you actually faulting the geeks for disliking bad software? The point here isn't to get everything open-sourced, you know; it's to have good software, which requires the kind of evolutionary process that comes from giving credit and jeers where either are due.
Please, do sit aside and let those who have actually had to use some of their applications (particularly before/after they were acquired by CA, like many of the products of Cheyenne or Platinum software) discuss this. Listen and learn. They're known by many as a killer of technology for a reason.
Great, now there'll be open source software that DOES really suck!