8c. Buy it and continue to step 9
Buy it? Slashdotters pay money for things? I thought they always just steal...I mean share other people's intellectual property.
No, they will depend on: 1) DMCA 2) Palladium 3) Congressional lobbying 4) DRM 5) FUD
to maintain their lead.
you wish buddy, more like: 1) Top to bottom integration from handhelds to set tops to desktops to database servers--all easily administered by non-experts. Your developers write code once and it runs on all of MS's products. They figured out how to take Java's appeal and make money at it. 2) Aggressive market research will produce products that corporate buyers actually want. Lots of box lunches for CIO's bring valuable information. 3) MS programmers actually get paid for their work. They delivering products while great ideas linger undeveloped on Sourceforge. (Um, where is the OSS version of Exchange? Maybe available in 2004, six years after MS's entry?) 4) Enough cash on hand to weather any storm. 5) Absence of RTFM in any documentation.
Go back and look at what they were selling in 1992 and compare to today. This is not a lumbering, incompetent oaf. This is one smart and mean competitor. Far from using political influence to get ahead, I see political concerns ("software wants to be free, man!" / "damn those Americans and their software too!" / "this company has too much power!") to be the main obstacles to their continued growth.
why on earth would we want a full profile, ready and waiting to be hacked?
Mostly because it would be a single point of failure as opposed to our current world of multiple points of failure, any of which lets the cat out of the bag.
I probably have my cc number in 200 different databases that are connected to the Internet. Some are well managed, some are not, and if my info gets out, I have no way of being sure which one failed.
The real wonder is why the consumer finance companies haven't come up with anything yet. It seems they suffer the most from internet fraud, compete in large measure on an image of security and reliability, and have the resources and the clout to make an electronic profile, whether on a smart card or a server, a viable possibility.
When they had a full list of all the libraries, packaging software, and testing packages that they'd need, the price was somewhat over $20,000.
Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey.
Or just get an MSDN universal license for $2500 from MS ($1300 on Ebay). Really, how did they go through $20,000 for 1 seat of MS dev software?
So it is replaced by 50,000 lines of bloated Java and.NET code.
Have you actually done anything with.NET?
Nasty, unreliable screen scraping is replaced with about four lines of code. The.NET framework is huge, but so are modern hard drives. The application programmer has an easy time of it:
1) declare the web service object 2) instantiate it 3) call the web method, returning something you want 4) dispose of the web service object now do something cool with what you got back.
Real world uses: how about an order tracking system for companies with hundreds of locations that don't want to lease T1 lines to tie everything together.
You can return data with web services, or use it just like a piece of middleware to write to a database.
Get a DSL line at each office, set up an IIS server, throw SSL on it to encrypt your soap communications, use client certs to identify your client workstations, firewall and IDS like hell, and you have a fully functional distributed order processing system for $100 a month per location in connectivity and $2000 for a decent managed server. No kludgy DHTML user interfaces. Reliable client side validation, a fancy Windows form UI, no expensive VPNs, no T1s, a cheap, fully functional distributed application.
Yeah, "you have to buy Windows... bitch, bitch, bitch..." yeah, but since Windows is 90 some odd percent of the OS market, and probably 98% of business market, who cares? You have to get tied to MS, but businesses get tied to vendors they resent all the time.
For people who need real world applications, want them done good enough and cheap enough and aren't engaged in the Linux Jihad,.NET is a killer platform.
"This guy must be an MS drone," No. A consultant who uses.NET to offer my clients services that the HTML/Perl solutions can't compete with.
There is a huge difference between digital copying and VHS. The delivery mechanism: The content for VHS tapes came either from the store or over the TV/Cable. Sure, you could tape movies off the TV or through cable, but it was a huge hassle. You had to start and stop the tape at the right time. You couldn't go search for the movie you wanted a copy of etc.
Internet file sharing networks change all that. You can ask for the song (or soon movie) you want and make a copy in a couple of minutes.
VHS was a new delivery technology that required a tape plant, trucks, retail outfits, etc. There were choke points where IP laws could be enforced. There are none of these now.
The analogy doesn't hold: MPAA was wrong about VHS. It didn't hurt their industry. They may very well be right about P2P and CD burners. These may prove highly damaging to an industry that produces, like it or not, a signifigant portion of our mass culture.
Biometric ID can fight identity theft.
on
National Biometric IDs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A biometric ID won't make us less free. It probably won't make us more secure against terror, although reliable ID might have caught Ahmed Ressam, the guy who plotted to blow up LAX, then panicked at a routine border search. He had come and gone across the US border with different Canadian passports. Sure, half of his names were on watch lists, so he just switched identities. Had he not blown his cool, a lot of people could have died.
But that isn't what interests me.
Here is where a biometric ID can help:Identity Theft It is trivially easy to impersonate someone and rack up credit card charges, commit crime with their identity, etc. Biometric IDs would put a stop to that.
A year ago, my wife's wallet was stolen from her gym locker. The usual credit card fraud ensued, which was stopped within a few hours.
Then the crook took her drivers license, somehow mangled it, and got the her picture on the front and my wife's name. Apparently, the Illinois DMV doesn't compare you to a file picture when you get an ID. This let them write checks on that identity, taking out loans (despite calls to every credit agency to put a watch on that sort of thing), culminating in the purchase (with a stolen check) and financing (naturally) of a used Ford Explorer at a sleazy car dealership too lazy to verify the bank balance or credit info.
Once the car check bounced, the dealer reported the theft, the cops came to us talking about grand theft auto. After some explaining, the license plate (in my wife's name, of course) was put into the police database. Amazingly, they actually caught this crook when she tried to pass one of the checks for a carton of smokes. The check came up bad (for once!), the store called the cops, who ran the plate of the SUV and got her. She naturally looks nothing like my wife, who is short, skinny, and white, not tall, obese, and black.
The moral of the story is that it is easy to impersonate someone, causing harm to that person because there is no biometric element at any point in the US ID system.
It doesn't make us more free because we have unreliable ID. Most of us never have a reason to fake an identity (save trivial stuff like faking your grocery club card). We don't get a privacy benefit from poor ID, we just have the risk of identity theft. How are you less free because your identity may be tied to your physical person? How are you more free because your identity is (at present) not 100% properly verified when you get a passport or drivers license?
We already leave data trails almost everywhere we go. These can be picked up by commercial concerns interested in selling you the exact type of extreme soda for your demographic. A biometric ID won't change that.
Your SSN will still be in 1000 poorly secured databases, ripe for the taking. The only thing a biometric ID will do is make it harder to impersonate someone else.
The difference being, is that Microsoft (say MSSQL) is pretty cheap, and yeah, I wouldn't use it to run a bank, but I do use it all over the place in part because it is cheap and good enough.
Oracle on the other hand, is monstrously expensive (and mostrously powerful). Sure, it is a great product, but a Golden Hammer over the top when any old hammer will do.
What strikes me about all this is how far behind the state is in survelieance technologies. My credit card company, heck Amazon, knows more about me than the government does. Private databases contain more information than any intrusive state could ever hope to collect. The trouble lies in using that information.
Twenty years ago when the Puzzle Palace was published, the NSA, with all its black budgets, computers and piles of cash, couldn't look at more than a tiny fraction of the data it collected. Think that problem has gone away?
Information collection is ubiquitious, but the use of that information by the state is limited. Limited by the capactity of state facilities, the staggering incompetence of the intelligence forces, etc.
Even without the state, we have moved into an era of relative transparency in our public acts. If someone really wants to know if you walked down a certain street, there is probably a camera that caught your image. The trick is to find out which camera it is. Our public acts are stored in an enormous record, just like a library without a catalog filled with of books without indices, the trick is going to be finding that what one is looking for.
Mundie's real function is to make asinine comments that whip OSSies into a rabid frenzy, keep them posting to slashdot all day instead of working on OS software. Bugs remain unfixed, utilities don't get developed. Meanwhile, the Evil Empire's minions code away in their cubicles.
Why pass a law? It would take years. These ISPs have the right idea, bounce traffic from spamming domains until their admins get a clue. The ISP's legit users will be the ones who put the pressure on. Would you pay an ISP that couldn't get your mail accepted anywhere else? As soon as this hits the bottom line, these guys will clean up their acts.
And if some ISPs don't and lose all their legit business, than so what? We countinue to block them as all-spam ISPs. Either way, no loss.
Unless of course, the goal isn't to detect terrorists, just to highlight people who should get a bit more attention, attention that might reveal something really incriminating. In that case, a couple of false alarms is no real big deal, provided that the response to the alarm is relatively easy, like asking a few extra questions.
Think of Ahmad Rassam (Ressam?), the fellow who wanted to blow up LAX: When crossing into the US from Canada, he was taken aside and asked a couple of questions. He lost his cool and made a break for it, abandoning his car full of explosives at the checkpoint.
There is nothing wrong with false alarms in this context. The pattern match suggests something worthy of more attention, so the guy gets some extra questions to root out inconsistencies, a few more minutes to search his bags, etc. I would imagine that this information goes into a database which is then crosschecked in the event of a future questioning session.
"Gee, Mr. 28 year old Yemeni student with cash money and no visible means of support, when you crossed into the US from Canada last year you said that you spent 1998 in Pakistan, now you say you never left Hamburg. Are you sure you weren't in Afghanistan then?"
Is it a potentially ugly future? You bet, but I don't have a magic wand that can make violent fanatical neo-Wahhabi terrorists disappear.
It seems to me that right now, MS has to "roll" all its products every 2-3 years for income. So they stop shipping Win98 or whatever, break the file formats for O97 that work just fine in order to get folks to shell out for the next upgrade.
With a subscription model, they get your money without the incentive to upgrade. So we may actually see upgrade costs go down, albeit with a steady stream of bugfixes and patches that blur the product identity and make interfacing with anything non-standard (SAMBA, whatever) a real bear to support.
Mine too, and you know, it is the most helpful comment I have ever seen. Just when I am thking, "WTF??", I suddenly understand why the code looks like this, and yes, I feel their pain.
I agree, if one goes to a rental or subscription model, you get fixed costs, plus the software doesn't break every three years.
Under the present model, in order to get more revenue, the company has to take a fine product and break it in some way. MS is famous for changing proprietary file formats to make users upgrade. Under the subscription model, you still pay, but don't have the costs of upgrading to contend with.
The most signifigant role in winning this conflict will be played by a very old technique: the tribal subsidy.
Afghanistan is divided into lightly armed (compared to states) camps of rival tribal leaders. The key is going to be to make it worth their while to join a coalition govt. more favorable to US interests.
During the Yemeni civil war, the govt of N. Yemen mostly just bribed its way to victory, marching south and meeting with tribal chiefs as the army went.
If the US is smart, it will fire fewer million dollar missles and pay more ten thousand dollar bribes. Does that mean that these guys will stay bought? Of course not, but the trick is going to be to create enough incentives on the US/non-Taliban/UN sponsored nation building/whatever side to ensure that.
A few hundred thousand bucks in bribes is chump change compared to the costs, human, political, and finially economic, of fighting a long war.
My experience is that if you ever have any kind of technical problems, like the box suddenly not doing anything, forget calling Linksys.
My 4 port job failed in June, shutting down what was supposed to be a day of building websites at home for a client. No router/DHCP box = no network. Yeah, I could of configured a Win2k network by hand, but who really wants to do that just to hack up some quick and dirty asp pages?
So I went to their web site, where most support questions refer to the practicalnetworking site. Cute.
First Linksys jealously guards the tech support number. You have to look for a long time to find it. Then when you call either 1) it just rings and rings 2) the phone tree (push 1 for sales, 2 for support) disconnects every time you select support 3) if the phone tree doesn't just disconnect, it starts over when you select something 4) if you do talk to someone, you don't get a tech, but someone in the outsourced office in Bangalore, they haven't been trained, they don't know anything about your product, they can't troubleshoot it, the database is down so they can't check on any previous calls you have made about that sorry light blue piece of crap, but they will take your number and they promise that someone from tech support will never, ever call you back.
In my case, I just bought another one and sent the original c/o of the ceo with a note instructing what orifice it should be inserted into and with what degree of force.
Were these boxes not handy and cheap, they would have no repeat business. I hated doing it, but just buying another one was the fastest way to get me back up and running (and billing).
I just don't get the contempt some have for people who prefer the GUI.
The GUI is the single most signifigant development in computer user interfaces in the past 20 years. Sure OS's don't like using all those resources on a GUI, but for users, it turns the computer from a cryptic oracle that speaks in an arcane language to an tool that coresponds to our innate understanding of the world.
"I need to stop using this file, so I will drop it on the desktop for a minute."
When I fist installed Linux, my first reaction was: "So THIS is what the hype is all about? A user interface from the 1970s? No wonder this is free, who would pay for it?" I gave up on Linux for a year and have only recently tried again, mostly unsuccessfully because the install and hardware detection routines are damn so hard to use. The contempt that experienced users have for those of us who would prefer a GUI certainly doesn't help.
While I agree that Linux GUIs aren't really the right tool for interacting with a lot of Linux's features, that is a failing of the GUIs and distributions, not a failing of the concept of a GUI.
I doubt the rising IIS numbers are because of switches from *nix to Win, but rather from existing Win desktop apps being ported to the web.
A bunch of my clients are doing things like trying to get existing desktop apps (VB, MS Access, etc.) to run on remote users' laptops over vpn or ras and are discovering that it is a whole lot easier to just create a web app. Got a vb app and need to make it into a web app? ASP is the quick and dirty solution since much of the code is reusable.
Sure, they could pay me to implement in [insert non-MS technology here], but it would cost the client more, and, if the client is anything like mine, their IS department has to deal with IIS flakiness anyway.
The best book I have run into as a Win developer who can and does admin NT/2K is Mark Minasi's Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators: The Secret Decoder Ring.
Aside from a dumb title, the book makes Linux make some kind of sense for a person mainly familiar with Windows. If you don't need the concept of Login explained and are really more interested in how Linux handles authentication, for example, this is the book for you. I found it hugely useful to learning something about Linux and giving me a better appreciation of how NT/2K works by comparing it to a different approach to similar problems.
You will quickly outgrow it, as the author indicates, but that is the nature of any attempt to put a beginner's guide to anything *nix between two covers.
Slashdot Mirror
8c. Buy it and continue to step 9
Buy it? Slashdotters pay money for things?
I thought they always just steal...I mean share other people's intellectual property.
4) Will it include Trojans and Backdoors?
No, unfortunately sendmail isn't available for Windows.
Sorry. I couldn't resist!
No, they will depend on:
1) DMCA
2) Palladium
3) Congressional lobbying
4) DRM
5) FUD
to maintain their lead.
you wish buddy, more like:
1) Top to bottom integration from handhelds to set tops to desktops to database servers--all easily administered by non-experts. Your developers write code once and it runs on all of MS's products. They figured out how to take Java's appeal and make money at it.
2) Aggressive market research will produce products that corporate buyers actually want. Lots of box lunches for CIO's bring valuable information.
3) MS programmers actually get paid for their work. They delivering products while great ideas linger undeveloped on Sourceforge. (Um, where is the OSS version of Exchange? Maybe available in 2004, six years after MS's entry?)
4) Enough cash on hand to weather any storm.
5) Absence of RTFM in any documentation.
Go back and look at what they were selling in 1992 and compare to today. This is not a lumbering, incompetent oaf. This is one smart and mean competitor. Far from using political influence to get ahead, I see political concerns ("software wants to be free, man!" / "damn those Americans and their software too!" / "this company has too much power!") to be the main obstacles to their continued growth.
"Did Henry Rollins read you any of his poetry? If yes, how did you make him stop?"
why on earth would we want a full profile, ready and waiting to be hacked?
Mostly because it would be a single point of failure as opposed to our current world of multiple points of failure, any of which lets the cat out of the bag.
I probably have my cc number in 200 different databases that are connected to the Internet. Some are well managed, some are not, and if my info gets out, I have no way of being sure which one failed.
The real wonder is why the consumer finance companies haven't come up with anything yet. It seems they suffer the most from internet fraud, compete in large measure on an image of security and reliability, and have the resources and the clout to make an electronic profile, whether on a smart card or a server, a viable possibility.
Absolutely not.
.NET is an acronym for "Proprietary Lock-In".
And "Proprietary Lock-In" somehow *isn't* the future of the internet?
Or just get an MSDN universal license for $2500 from MS ($1300 on Ebay). Really, how did they go through $20,000 for 1 seat of MS dev software?
Have you actually done anything with .NET?
Nasty, unreliable screen scraping is replaced with about four lines of code. .NET framework is huge, but so are modern hard drives.
The
The application programmer has an easy time of it:
1) declare the web service object
2) instantiate it
3) call the web method, returning something you want
4) dispose of the web service object
now do something cool with what you got back.
Real world uses: how about an order tracking system for companies with hundreds of locations that don't want to lease T1 lines to tie everything together.
You can return data with web services, or use it just like a piece of middleware to write to a database.
Get a DSL line at each office, set up an IIS server, throw SSL on it to encrypt your soap communications, use client certs to identify your client workstations, firewall and IDS like hell, and you have a fully functional distributed order processing system for $100 a month per location in connectivity and $2000 for a decent managed server. No kludgy DHTML user interfaces. Reliable client side validation, a fancy Windows form UI, no expensive VPNs, no T1s, a cheap, fully functional distributed application.
Yeah, "you have to buy Windows... bitch, bitch, bitch..." yeah, but since Windows is 90 some odd percent of the OS market, and probably 98% of business market, who cares? You have to get tied to MS, but businesses get tied to vendors they resent all the time.
For people who need real world applications, want them done good enough and cheap enough and aren't engaged in the Linux Jihad, .NET is a killer platform.
"This guy must be an MS drone," No. A consultant who uses .NET to offer my clients services that the HTML/Perl solutions can't compete with.
There is a huge difference between digital copying and VHS. The delivery mechanism: The content for VHS tapes came either from the store or over the TV/Cable. Sure, you could tape movies off the TV or through cable, but it was a huge hassle. You had to start and stop the tape at the right time. You couldn't go search for the movie you wanted a copy of etc.
Internet file sharing networks change all that. You can ask for the song (or soon movie) you want and make a copy in a couple of minutes.
VHS was a new delivery technology that required a tape plant, trucks, retail outfits, etc. There were choke points where IP laws could be enforced. There are none of these now.
The analogy doesn't hold: MPAA was wrong about VHS. It didn't hurt their industry. They may very well be right about P2P and CD burners. These may prove highly damaging to an industry that produces, like it or not, a signifigant portion of our mass culture.
A biometric ID won't make us less free. It probably won't make us more secure against terror, although reliable ID might have caught Ahmed Ressam, the guy who plotted to blow up LAX, then panicked at a routine border search. He had come and gone across the US border with different Canadian passports. Sure, half of his names were on watch lists, so he just switched identities. Had he not blown his cool, a lot of people could have died.
But that isn't what interests me.
Here is where a biometric ID can help:Identity Theft
It is trivially easy to impersonate someone and rack up credit card charges, commit crime with their identity, etc. Biometric IDs would put a stop to that.
A year ago, my wife's wallet was stolen from her gym locker. The usual credit card fraud ensued, which was stopped within a few hours.
Then the crook took her drivers license, somehow mangled it, and got the her picture on the front and my wife's name. Apparently, the Illinois DMV doesn't compare you to a file picture when you get an ID. This let them write checks on that identity, taking out loans (despite calls to every credit agency to put a watch on that sort of thing), culminating in the purchase (with a stolen check) and financing (naturally) of a used Ford Explorer at a sleazy car dealership too lazy to verify the bank balance or credit info.
Once the car check bounced, the dealer reported the theft, the cops came to us talking about grand theft auto. After some explaining, the license plate (in my wife's name, of course) was put into the police database. Amazingly, they actually caught this crook when she tried to pass one of the checks for a carton of smokes. The check came up bad (for once!), the store called the cops, who ran the plate of the SUV and got her. She naturally looks nothing like my wife, who is short, skinny, and white, not tall, obese, and black.
The moral of the story is that it is easy to impersonate someone, causing harm to that person because there is no biometric element at any point in the US ID system.
It doesn't make us more free because we have unreliable ID. Most of us never have a reason to fake an identity (save trivial stuff like faking your grocery club card). We don't get a privacy benefit from poor ID, we just have the risk of identity theft. How are you less free because your identity may be tied to your physical person? How are you more free because your identity is (at present) not 100% properly verified when you get a passport or drivers license?
We already leave data trails almost everywhere we go. These can be picked up by commercial concerns interested in selling you the exact type of extreme soda for your demographic. A biometric ID won't change that.
Your SSN will still be in 1000 poorly secured databases, ripe for the taking. The only thing a biometric ID will do is make it harder to impersonate someone else.
I say it is high time we get ID that works.
The difference being, is that Microsoft (say MSSQL) is pretty cheap, and yeah, I wouldn't use it to run a bank, but I do use it all over the place in part because it is cheap and good enough.
Oracle on the other hand, is monstrously expensive (and mostrously powerful). Sure, it is a great product, but a Golden Hammer over the top when any old hammer will do.
What strikes me about all this is how far behind the state is in survelieance technologies. My credit card company, heck Amazon, knows more about me than the government does. Private databases contain more information than any intrusive state could ever hope to collect. The trouble lies in using that information.
Twenty years ago when the Puzzle Palace was published, the NSA, with all its black budgets, computers and piles of cash, couldn't look at more than a tiny fraction of the data it collected. Think that problem has gone away?
Information collection is ubiquitious, but the use of that information by the state is limited. Limited by the capactity of state facilities, the staggering incompetence of the intelligence forces, etc.
Even without the state, we have moved into an era of relative transparency in our public acts. If someone really wants to know if you walked down a certain street, there is probably a camera that caught your image. The trick is to find out which camera it is. Our public acts are stored in an enormous record, just like a library without a catalog filled with of books without indices, the trick is going to be finding that what one is looking for.
Mundie's real function is to make asinine comments that whip OSSies into a rabid frenzy, keep them posting to slashdot all day instead of working on OS software. Bugs remain unfixed, utilities don't get developed. Meanwhile, the Evil Empire's minions code away in their cubicles.
Why pass a law? It would take years. These ISPs have the right idea, bounce traffic from spamming domains until their admins get a clue. The ISP's legit users will be the ones who put the pressure on. Would you pay an ISP that couldn't get your mail accepted anywhere else? As soon as this hits the bottom line, these guys will clean up their acts.
And if some ISPs don't and lose all their legit business, than so what? We countinue to block them as all-spam ISPs. Either way, no loss.
Seen Mark Minasi's Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators? While by no means complete, it does give a good introduction.
Unless of course, the goal isn't to detect terrorists, just to highlight people who should get a bit more attention, attention that might reveal something really incriminating. In that case, a couple of false alarms is no real big deal, provided that the response to the alarm is relatively easy, like asking a few extra questions.
Think of Ahmad Rassam (Ressam?), the fellow who wanted to blow up LAX: When crossing into the US from Canada, he was taken aside and asked a couple of questions. He lost his cool and made a break for it, abandoning his car full of explosives at the checkpoint.
There is nothing wrong with false alarms in this context. The pattern match suggests something worthy of more attention, so the guy gets some extra questions to root out inconsistencies, a few more minutes to search his bags, etc. I would imagine that this information goes into a database which is then crosschecked in the event of a future questioning session.
"Gee, Mr. 28 year old Yemeni student with cash money and no visible means of support, when you crossed into the US from Canada last year you said that you spent 1998 in Pakistan, now you say you never left Hamburg. Are you sure you weren't in Afghanistan then?"
Is it a potentially ugly future? You bet, but I don't have a magic wand that can make violent fanatical neo-Wahhabi terrorists disappear.
Um, actually it does. #7.
Yeah, but will there be future upgrades?
It seems to me that right now, MS has to "roll" all its products every 2-3 years for income. So they stop shipping Win98 or whatever, break the file formats for O97 that work just fine in order to get folks to shell out for the next upgrade.
With a subscription model, they get your money without the incentive to upgrade. So we may actually see upgrade costs go down, albeit with a steady stream of bugfixes and patches that blur the product identity and make interfacing with anything non-standard (SAMBA, whatever) a real bear to support.
Mine too, and you know, it is the most helpful comment I have ever seen. Just when I am thking, "WTF??", I suddenly understand why the code looks like this, and yes, I feel their pain.
I agree, if one goes to a rental or subscription model, you get fixed costs, plus the software doesn't break every three years.
Under the present model, in order to get more revenue, the company has to take a fine product and break it in some way. MS is famous for changing proprietary file formats to make users upgrade. Under the subscription model, you still pay, but don't have the costs of upgrading to contend with.
Afghanistan is divided into lightly armed (compared to states) camps of rival tribal leaders. The key is going to be to make it worth their while to join a coalition govt. more favorable to US interests.
During the Yemeni civil war, the govt of N. Yemen mostly just bribed its way to victory, marching south and meeting with tribal chiefs as the army went.
If the US is smart, it will fire fewer million dollar missles and pay more ten thousand dollar bribes. Does that mean that these guys will stay bought? Of course not, but the trick is going to be to create enough incentives on the US/non-Taliban/UN sponsored nation building/whatever side to ensure that.
A few hundred thousand bucks in bribes is chump change compared to the costs, human, political, and finially economic, of fighting a long war.
My experience is that if you ever have any kind of technical problems, like the box suddenly not doing anything, forget calling Linksys.
My 4 port job failed in June, shutting down what was supposed to be a day of building websites at home for a client. No router/DHCP box = no network. Yeah, I could of configured a Win2k network by hand, but who really wants to do that just to hack up some quick and dirty asp pages?
So I went to their web site, where most support questions refer to the practicalnetworking site. Cute.
First Linksys jealously guards the tech support number. You have to look for a long time to find it. Then when you call either
1) it just rings and rings
2) the phone tree (push 1 for sales, 2 for support) disconnects every time you select support
3) if the phone tree doesn't just disconnect, it starts over when you select something
4) if you do talk to someone, you don't get a tech, but someone in the outsourced office in Bangalore, they haven't been trained, they don't know anything about your product, they can't troubleshoot it, the database is down so they can't check on any previous calls you have made about that sorry light blue piece of crap, but they will take your number and they promise that someone from tech support will never, ever call you back.
In my case, I just bought another one and sent the original c/o of the ceo with a note instructing what orifice it should be inserted into and with what degree of force.
Were these boxes not handy and cheap, they would have no repeat business. I hated doing it, but just buying another one was the fastest way to get me back up and running (and billing).
I just don't get the contempt some have for people who prefer the GUI.
The GUI is the single most signifigant development in computer user interfaces in the past 20 years. Sure OS's don't like using all those resources on a GUI, but for users, it turns the computer from a cryptic oracle that speaks in an arcane language to an tool that coresponds to our innate understanding of the world. "I need to stop using this file, so I will drop it on the desktop for a minute."
When I fist installed Linux, my first reaction was: "So THIS is what the hype is all about? A user interface from the 1970s? No wonder this is free, who would pay for it?" I gave up on Linux for a year and have only recently tried again, mostly unsuccessfully because the install and hardware detection routines are damn so hard to use. The contempt that experienced users have for those of us who would prefer a GUI certainly doesn't help.
While I agree that Linux GUIs aren't really the right tool for interacting with a lot of Linux's features, that is a failing of the GUIs and distributions, not a failing of the concept of a GUI.
I doubt the rising IIS numbers are because of switches from *nix to Win, but rather from existing Win desktop apps being ported to the web.
A bunch of my clients are doing things like trying to get existing desktop apps (VB, MS Access, etc.) to run on remote users' laptops over vpn or ras and are discovering that it is a whole lot easier to just create a web app. Got a vb app and need to make it into a web app? ASP is the quick and dirty solution since much of the code is reusable.
Sure, they could pay me to implement in [insert non-MS technology here], but it would cost the client more, and, if the client is anything like mine, their IS department has to deal with IIS flakiness anyway.
The best book I have run into as a Win developer who can and does admin NT/2K is Mark Minasi's Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators: The Secret Decoder Ring.
Aside from a dumb title, the book makes Linux make some kind of sense for a person mainly familiar with Windows. If you don't need the concept of Login explained and are really more interested in how Linux handles authentication, for example, this is the book for you. I found it hugely useful to learning something about Linux and giving me a better appreciation of how NT/2K works by comparing it to a different approach to similar problems.
You will quickly outgrow it, as the author indicates, but that is the nature of any attempt to put a beginner's guide to anything *nix between two covers.