Does anyone know of a way I can keep the bank from wasting my valuable time?
Say it loud, say it proud, my brother: Credit Union.
A credit union is designed as a service to the community, not a way for yuppy bank employees to "earn" a new E55 AMG by dreaming up new ways to gouge you. Changing my car loan to a CU made my payment $50/month less than it was when financed by a private bank... The rates are lower just based on the fact that they aren't trying to make a profit.
Yes, there are fewer locations and ATMs, but if you can find one close to your home or office and plan your bank trips in advance, it isn't a hard adjustment to make. For me, the Credit Union is actually CLOSER to my house than National City's location was, and I am no longer being gouged a "Double-dip" ATM fee every time I withdrew cash. (One for the bank, one for the ATM owner.) Now I pay zero fees on almost all of my ATM transactions, and the few I do "off-network" only cost me one fee which is paid to the machine's owner. My CU doesn't try to weasel an extra $2.50 out of it... I figure this year I've saved enough in bank fees to pay 1+ car payments. Now THAT is ridiculous. (Okay, my car payment is pretty low, too, but still...)
In the end, taking your business to a Credit Union is the fastest way to show the bank you're done taking their crap.
That Diebold is now realizing the folly of opening themselves to discovery that filing a suit against the sites hosting the data would open them to. After all, if I go to court and claim I'm running an investigative report, the truthfulness of my report becomes a legitimate issue in court. If you're Diebold, do you really want it to be a matter of public record that your equipment is insecure, poorly designed, and easily manipulated?
How this can be an illegal coup if the matter was decided by US supreme court ? You might not agree with the decision but this sort of ruling was exactly what was supposed to happen in a situation like this. You are simply bitter that your side lost....
I normally don't respond to AC's, just because 99% of the AC posts are trolls, but your post was free of spelling and grammatical errors, and appeared to be making an attempt at legitimate discourse. (Which I applaud! I wish more AC's would say something useful...)
My objection is to the Republican party spin on Florida that has become the pervasive opinion of conservatives all over this country who still deny that the 2000 election was stolen/rigged/electioneered. I certainly agree, coup is the wrong term. However, there was a very serious crime committed: election fraud. A fraud so chilling and devious that the election (in Florida) was decided long before it even started.
And I'm not talking about disqualifying the "hanging chad" ballots, or the Supreme Court's ruling that the equal protection clause only counts if you're educated and white. In fact, their ruling on the matter would not have been sought were it not for the intentional, illegal actions of a few people in the Florida state government that wrongly disqualified about 50,000 voters.
Among those illegally disenfracnhised, a vast majority (90% or more) were blacks and hispanics, two groups that (among those who actually were permitted to cast ballots) voted overwhelmingly (85%) for Gore in the 2000 election.
Without this massive fraud perpetrated by Katherine Harris and her buddies at the private firm she hired to "purge" the voter rolls, there would not have been any need for the Supreme Court to rule at all, because the totals wouldn't have been close enough to waste time re-counting. You do the math: 50,000 total citizens systematically stripped of their rights for no reason, approximately 40,000 of whom most likely would have voted for Gore. If only 1/10 of them actually went to the polls, it would STILL have been a Gore win by a couple thousand votes.
This information can all be independently verified, if you're so inclined. (In fact, I insist you do so, since I would do the same if you offerred such damning evidence going the other way.) You could also read the official civil rights commissions report on the subject that says the same thing. (Albeit in drier, more technical language.) Here's a link to the executive summary as printed in the Washington Post.
Sadly, many Republicans would prefer to put their fingers in their ears rather than hear the ugly, well-documented truth: The course of democracy was perverted, resulting in a Bush presidency. Whether that perversion is the result of intentional institutional incompetence or the misdeeds of a small group is irrelevant...The outcome is the same either way: An engineered win for the republican party.
Or you could just turn off the preview pane. View, Preview Pane, (click on it to toggle). Not that you shouldn't move away from Outlook, it's just that your reasoning is lame and contrived.
Yeah, thanks, we already did that.
Maybe later you could give me instructions on how a nipple works. [/sarcasm]
Don't open Emails that you have no clue who they came from. This is just common sense.
Except that most Outlook users use the "Preview Pane" feature, which means all the scripts/"tracking images" get executed as soon as you click on the message and it shows up in that Preview Pane. Since you can't delete the message without clicking, it's a catch-22.
For this reason, we're moving away from Outlook, and also purchasing Adaware Pro licenses for our workstations. We are a financial institution and having somebody log our keystrokes could quite easily put us out of business.
you can't summarize by shifting something about you being a loyal customer, since your entire comment was about your workplace, which is not a customer.
I've given them money in the past--I'm trying to give them more money (albeit somebody else's) now. What the hell is the difference? Red Hat did shaft me... Shafted me into having to deal with IIS. If you don't consider that being shafted, you should try it... It isn't fun.
Also, it really doesn't matter that I was talking about in the first post--the complaint I ended up making was that they screwed ME, not the company, by doing this.
Unless you can come up with a good reason I should be delighted by this turn of events, I'm afraid I must write you off as either a troll, nutter, or Red Hat stock holder. Maybe all three!
You imply you weren't a customer by saying your PH would ask "Who can I buy spport from if you die?".
Are you trying to imply I:
1) Haven't bought things from RH? (I have. Boxed RH 6-9, member of RHN since day one.) 2) Wasn't really trying to use RedHat for a project at work? (I was, because IIS has made my life hell before and I won't have it.) 3) Haven't used it in consulting situations for SOHO clients? (I have... Why should a six man dental office pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees to secure their tiny Windows LAN? Setup one Samba server, integrate with LDAP, and we're disco.)
If you could install Kimberlite and maintain your clustered advanced server yourself, why don't do you do that already? Furthermore, given what you say about your desktops, why do you need RedHat on them, if support is as minimal as you say.
Because very few of us actually make decisions about our work environments in a vacuum... And PHB's generally say "Who can I buy support from if you die?" Once upon a time, I could say "Red Hat." Now, not so much... This was the big selling point I've tried to use to get RedHat into our enterprise.
You can't imagine how far back this little stunt on their part has set my efforts. We went from having a tentative yes to run our new web-farm on Apache/RH9 to a "Hell no" in about fifteen seconds based on RH withdrawing support like this. It would've been the smartest move we'd ever made, and it would have led to more linux--a LOT more--but instead, I have to roll out (drum-roll please) five more god-damn IIS boxes. Yuck.
This might be the dumbest move I've seen in the history of the Operating System business, bar none. Way to shoot your Operating System (and, by proxy its loyal customers, i.e. me) in the foot.
I buy CD-Rs without any label, and mark them with a Sharpie... I've burned literally thousands of CDs since I got my first CD-RW drive, and still haven't had one fail.
And like you, I have kept Linux in my flat as a server OS (on a small, silent Dell OptiPlex) - it's a stunning combo
Heh... Our office garage sale liquidated 40 of these last week. Walked away with five for $50--Now I've got the machines I've always wanted to experiment with clustering. (And a fifth to replace my ANCIENT smoothwall firewall box.)
As a radio producer, I feel the real "art" in radio is well beyond just spinning tunes.
Amen brother... When I first got out of college, my career goal was radio personality. (I know, looking back it seems like a shallow goal..) I was floored when, in an interview to be an afternoon personality/production manager I was told "Hey man, this ain't art. Just a well researched playlist..."
It helped me understand that the radio industry I fell in love with had changed for the worse, into a glorified jukebox with very little original, compelling programming on the air. Gone was the idea that a radio show could make a difference in somebody's life, mood, or world view... Gone was the idea that a radio station did certain things for the community as a condition of being on the air, like local news, community affairs programs, and local election coverage. In its place was the idea that the rotary club should pay to have a show on your station on Sunday morning at 7am. That local election info is a "buzz-kill" and doesn't "fit with what we're doing here."
I was quite sad. Then I got into computers, where everything is wine and roses...
You could consider the lack of Mac deprecation a sign of Apple lagging behind and general stagnation.
You could also consider the lack of dog shit in a pumpkin pie to be a shortcoming, too... But that would just be stupid. Your troll message is a delightful bit of astro-turf...But this line proves out that you're just making it up as you go...
If Apple was really so "behind the times", their resale prices would be crap. If Apple equipment was really so obsolete, resale values would follow the trend you see other obsolete items take--they'd be worthless. Want to test the theory?
Put an ad in the paper for a rusted out non-fuel injected 1971 Chevy. See how many calls you get, and what price you are offered. My advice? Somebody offers $50, take it.
The sort of people who boast about how they've not spent much money on their Mac aside from the purchase price are being a bit unfair, IMO.
... I've just picked up a Toshiba Portege for 400 and it would suit her fine for another 4 years.
Unfair...how? For pointing out that while you were suckered in by the low, up-front cost, then will end up getting dinged for endless upgrades to get your PC to do what my Mac did out of the box?
I have a 1.3ghz p3 too (use it as a linux based server) and was curious about WinXP. Windows 2000 ran great on it when I tested it, but I ultimately went with Mandrake because the price was unbeatable. (I've never infringed on copyrights before, and I wasn't going to start just because it was a home server and probably nobody would ever know...) I thought that since it ran Win2k so well, XP would be no problem. I popped in the extra hard drive I keep laying around and installed WinXP Pro expecting similar results to my Windows 2000 test. Hardly!
It was chugging (and hit the swap file!) trying to bring up a start menu! That Toshiba Protege runs a 1.3 ghz P3 chip too. Lets hope that XP Tablet Edition runs better than XP Professional did on my (exactly the same) hardware!...And this is your $400 "mac-slayer"? What a joke!
Not only do I have a Samba/LDAP/Postfix server in my house, I also smoke weed. If the pot-smoking doesn't make me a terrorist, then the Linux server MUST seal my fate.
See you guys at Guantanamo! Maybe they'll give us all adjacent cages...
I think you're getting close, except who's to say the checksums on display are actualy the checksums of the program being used? Still not perfect. A paper trail that the voter can SEE being printed out is still better, and the only way, open or closed source, to be sure that what you actually voted for is reportable.
We certainly must have a paper-trail, no disagreement there. It would have to exist for the purpose of ensuring an accurate re-count. However, in order to trust that paper-trail, I must be able to audit the code that generates it (personally.)
As for the second question (about showning a phony MD5 value): It would be hard to create a binary or executable with an identical checksum value using different code (nigh impossible,) so I'll assume you mean having it show a checksum of the legit file while the compromised one runs...
If we coded the application so that it runs a checksum against itself, then does a comparison to a checksum of the file at C:\Program Files\Diebold\vote.exe (or/usr/local/bin/diebold/vote, if you prefer) we could teach the program to know If they don't match, the program would be coded to generate a big hairy error message. This, combined with my ability to confirm the MD5 sum published on the project web-page, and to view the code that produced the binary would put us in a pretty good position to trust the output. (Whether it goes into a db or onto a paper audit ticket--but preferably both.)
If the person trying shenanigans put his modified.exe in the folder, although the automated checksum tests would match, the onscreen value still would not be the same as what is published on the project web-site. So again, at that point somebody can report the malfeasance/patch fiasco to the election judges. In short, you'd need to somehow generate a fraudulent three point match to pull a fast one in an election... All while somehow not having everybody who sees the source tree know you were doing it.
In short, that combination of situations seems unlikely. (Although I won't say totally impossible...)
On the other hand, since most of your users have probably lost the licenses that came with their PCs, upgrading will make you less susceptible to a BSA audit.
Certainly the BSA is evil, sick, and wrong, but...
Why would you let the users be responsible for keeping track of their own licensing info? We have a FTE who maintains our licensing database. With 5,000 users scattered across seven offices, we need to be certain we're in compliance, and having one guy whose only job is to make sure it works turned out to be our best option.
Oh and who's to say that what is installed on the systems is the same thing as what people are allowed the code to? Unless EVERYBODY has the right to inspect EVERY machine down to the hardware level you won't have to the tinfoil hat level, any more than you do if the ballots are signed in blood (could have a dishonest technition run a DNA testing system). If you want complete acountability the only way is to have votor ID numbers printed on the paper trail, and then we have the huge security risk of somebody finding out who voted how, and making it an issue. Exactly what secret ballots are designed to prevent. If you want certenty, you've been born into the wrong world.
Well, with open source, I can take the published code, compile it and generate a binary. I can then do an MD5 checksum against that binary. If I get a different MD5 value on the binary on the "Voting Device," I know I'm looking at a binary that wasn't generated from the same code.
With a proprietary solution, I won't have any access to code OR binaries, so I won't even be able to guarantee that I'm using what was approved by the review group.
Maybe build that MD5 checkup into the program... So the first step when I go to cast my vote is to compare the MD5 value shown onscreen with the MD5 value I noted from the project web-site. Yeah, all voters aren't going to do this, but they don't have to. It only takes one guy who takes the time to do this and notice a difference to blow the whistle on a rooted voting machine.
I realize this may require an expenditure of funds and a little extra effort... And that is okay with me. I want my elections to be fair AND accurate. If it costs a few bucks more to hire a tech to work at the polling place, so be it.
Hell, you could even take it a step further, and have the voting stations confirm that they are running the correct version before EACH vote is cast, by doing a checksum and transmitting the value to HQ...This way you would be checking each vote for trustworthiness before it goes into the DB.
Sorry, but a proprietary solution isn't going to hack it. Open source projects are beholden to nobody except their users. If the users want signed binaries with published MD5 checksum values, they'll get them.
Hey, I bet an OSS project could pay the government to use their project instead of the other way around... After all, the amount of volunteer labor that would be used would be immense. I would certainly pitch in to help an effort like this.
How are you going to force Diebold to do it? (Hint: Write a bigger check.) Could you even force them to? I mean, a commercial software company has so many motivations to hide their flaws... An OSS project can't possibly hide their flaws, because anybody who wants it can get the code. I'd be willing to bet Diebold would rather get out of the voting machine biz rather than let us see their code.
What does that tell you about who has something to hide?
Why. Why isn't a paper trail, that the voter SEES being printed insufficient. Such a paper trail would provide more accountability than even the open code because 99% of voters could decipher the paper trail while only (number pulled out of a hat) about 2% could make heads or tails out of the code.
Oversight. Who says what is printed on the receipt is what goes into the DB? With closed/non-reviewable source, we really have no way of knowing besides Deibold's "Good name, reputation, and assurances that everything is fine," and a (perhaps naive) hope that whatever reviewers they are showing the code to are really "independent." (By which I mean, have no motivation other than a fair election.)
Yeah, Diebold is supposed to be using independent auditors to make sure their code works and isn't backdoored--but until I can have somebody that I respect review it, I will have my doubts. Also, who says Diebold (or Karl Rove) hasn't bought off the independent reviewers so they "fail to notice" republicanvictory2004.c in the source tree?
Indeed, Diebold has already raised doubts about their being trustworthy during last year's Georgia governor's election. Ultimately, the key issue is trust: Whose experts do you trust to review the code of the software to ensure a fair election?
Do I trust a company with billions of dollars riding on a quiet, successful election to admit to problems with their voting software? Hell no! Do I trust every open source code reviewer automatically? No, of course not. BUT, I am more likely to lend credence to somebody who 1) Has nothing to gain by lying to me and also 2) Has the entire open source universe looking over his shoulder to make sure his i's are dotted and t's crossed.
So...
Closed voting sytem: - Limited code review. Vulnerable to bribery of/pressure on reviewers, programmers, and handlers of all sorts. - Limited accountability, even with a receipt. How do you guarantee what is on paper is in the DB without either personally seeing the code or knowing and trusting the "reviewers"? - No real security: Anybody involved in the process can compromise the election's validity--untraceably!--with only an MS Office CD-ROM and the desire to do evil. You can't prove there were changes made in the DB because you can't prove the paper trail is accurate. (Since I don't know that what is running on the machine I voted on is the same version of the software reviewed by the reviewers I DON'T KNOW if my receipt reflects the DB, and neither does anybody else.)
Open system gives you: - Unlimited code review. Less vulnerable to bribery and pressure, since it would be hard for one person or conspiracy to find and attempt to payoff every single open source programmer on earth. - Accountability: With source code review and signed binaries I can guarantee what I have on a receipt is what is in the DB. - Real security: Inappropriate people don't have access to manipulate the data. But even if there IS A quetsion of the validity of the electronic data, we have a trustable paper trail.
Companies depending on SBS most likely use a MS Certified Partner to manage their IT problems. I doubt they are making calls to Microsoft directly to solve problems. Moreover, SBS is designed for a very generic solution, it's unlikely there are going to be advanced issues you need support from Microsoft on.
But certainly, those MS Certified Partners don't work for free... And if you're comparing the price of SBS without copmputing the cost of maintaining it (whether its FTE, or an MS Partner doing the maintaining) is not the most accurate comparison. Isn't this what Microsoft always says? "People who say Linux is free don't count what it costs to maintain." We need to force the MS shills of the world to compare apples to apples...or Apples.
Speaking of whom: OS X Server sounds much better for a small office to me than the unlimited/spiraling costs associated with Windows on the backend... $1000 for unlimited connections vs. $599 for a max of 50, plus a per user CAL fee for server and a CAL for Exchange. Not to mention the catastrophic expense coming down the road when they get to 51 employees...
Also, we had one of those "consultants" from an "MS Certified Partner" come in and help us solve an ongoing issue we had with Exchange 5.5. This is a paraphrase of our conversation about his recommendations for fixing this HUGE problem:
"Gee, that patch doesn't exist for 5.5, so you'll have to upgrade Exchange to do it... But you can't go to Exchange 2000/2003 without going to Active directory, and you can't use best features of active directory without upgrading all your workstations OS too. And that SQL Server is going to have a bitch of a time using NT auth once we go to native mode so you should upgrade that too, and hey, we see you've got a Linux box running DNS. That will have to go..."
At the end of the conversation, it was either $75,000-$80,000 to upgrade our ENTIRE enterprise to AD 2003, Exhcange 2003, SQL Server 2000, the whole enchilada (buying a dozen new servers in the process, and redeploying two dozen others.)
Or I could spend $11,000 for two XServes with unlimited OS X Server licenses, loaded, buy two extra power supplies to keep on site, and run my email, LDAP, and calendar publishing off one box, with the other box for redundancy. And continue to run my enterprise as I see fit, upgrading on my schedule and as needed by the users, not as forced by vendor lock-in. Guess which way I went?
Oh yeah--After we dumped Exchange, our very senior Exchange admin quit. (With the company almost 10 years.) Result? We've got an extra $60,000 in salary to spread around and keep our remaining employees happy. Or bring in an OSX specialist--or maybe both?
So far, we haven't had any need for a specialist. My own OS X/linux/unix experience has been enough to solve the two minor issues we've had since the switch, and I'm willing to use my sweat to keep my staff budget where it is and not displace any of my hard-earned, highly skilled workers.
I don't blame you for any of this, and I'm not trying to flame here, just wanted to share my experiences.
With Small Business Server 2003, Microsoft knocked 60% off the price of its previous Small Business Server, introducing a standard edition for only $599, right between Red Hat's $349 basic edition (software only) and $799 standard edition (software plus phone support).
I also wish IT Week would have pointed out that $599 for SBS 2003 doesn't include support of any kind. One incident requiring MS phone support and you've immediately eclipsed the price of RH Enterprise w/support. Not to mention that one of SBS 2003's biggest value points is Exchange server, which (in any reasonably large enterprise) necesitates a second layer "Mail router" to dump all the worms, virii, and spam before they hit the Exchange box and bring it to its knees... Think PostFix + Spam Assassin + a good set of attachment blocking rules.
Maybe I'm wrong (I'm sure someone will point me out if I am,) but I was under the impression that with SBS you had to run it all on one server. Is this still/Was this ever the case? Do extra servers under SBS cost extra money? (I've never worked anywhere that could consider SBS, since the limit is 50 users, so I'm admitedly ignorant of some facets of an SBS environment.)
...And I'm glad I went back, because I've been looking for a well-implemented Multi-Network Firewall product that can be deployed for free (as in no money) for a couple of my non-profit clients. Certainly, the for-profits don't mind spending $1000+ on a good firewall software package, but the non-profits (a charity and a church) have need for something like this, but simply can't afford a non-open-source package. Hoorary for Mandrake!
I've already renewed my Mandrake Club membership, and if you appreciate the work they do, you should think about doing so as well.
Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a company with a Citrix server, there's a native OS X client for that.
Really? YOu can have ours... I hate it. Since migrating our legacy, reliable, functional application to a delivery via citrix we have heard nothing but complaints. It is unreliable (sessions hang for no reason), and just plain slow. Plus we've had various issues with Terminal Server profiles becoming corrupted (at random) that keep users out of their (business critical) Citrix app.
Frustrating? When we want to say something is really fucked up, we say it has "Citrixian" properties.
Saying that after they got this information that you started getting spam is purely circumstancial. Now if you used incorrect information and started getting direct marketing to that incorrect information then you would have a better chance. My advice to the original poster... get a new e-mail address. It wouldn't be worth the law suit.
It might not be a complete waste of time if they live in a state with an anti-SPAM law. Just name the CC company as a co-defendant on your next spam lawsuit... After all, they are involved in the enterprise of sending illegal e-mail messages. If they don't employ the people who harvested your info, you can probably settle the spam lawsuit with them in exchange for info on the company that sold them her "application."
Then you can start using THAT company as your co-defendant in your spam lawsuits... And then you can use their co-defendant status to subpeona their business records to find out who they sold her info to, and sue all those companies too.
20 messages per day x $500 per message ------- Damages that add up quickly.
Or she could just close the e-mail box and start using another one... Although if it is her private business address (used for her onlinebanking, bill pay, stuff like that) it would be a pain in the ass.... But if she really hates spam, it might be worth her time.
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Say it loud, say it proud, my brother: Credit Union
A credit union is designed as a service to the community, not a way for yuppy bank employees to "earn" a new E55 AMG by dreaming up new ways to gouge you. Changing my car loan to a CU made my payment $50/month less than it was when financed by a private bank... The rates are lower just based on the fact that they aren't trying to make a profit.
Yes, there are fewer locations and ATMs, but if you can find one close to your home or office and plan your bank trips in advance, it isn't a hard adjustment to make. For me, the Credit Union is actually CLOSER to my house than National City's location was, and I am no longer being gouged a "Double-dip" ATM fee every time I withdrew cash. (One for the bank, one for the ATM owner.) Now I pay zero fees on almost all of my ATM transactions, and the few I do "off-network" only cost me one fee which is paid to the machine's owner. My CU doesn't try to weasel an extra $2.50 out of it... I figure this year I've saved enough in bank fees to pay 1+ car payments. Now THAT is ridiculous. (Okay, my car payment is pretty low, too, but still...)
In the end, taking your business to a Credit Union is the fastest way to show the bank you're done taking their crap.
That Diebold is now realizing the folly of opening themselves to discovery that filing a suit against the sites hosting the data would open them to. After all, if I go to court and claim I'm running an investigative report, the truthfulness of my report becomes a legitimate issue in court. If you're Diebold, do you really want it to be a matter of public record that your equipment is insecure, poorly designed, and easily manipulated?
I normally don't respond to AC's, just because 99% of the AC posts are trolls, but your post was free of spelling and grammatical errors, and appeared to be making an attempt at legitimate discourse. (Which I applaud! I wish more AC's would say something useful...)
My objection is to the Republican party spin on Florida that has become the pervasive opinion of conservatives all over this country who still deny that the 2000 election was stolen/rigged/electioneered. I certainly agree, coup is the wrong term. However, there was a very serious crime committed: election fraud. A fraud so chilling and devious that the election (in Florida) was decided long before it even started.
And I'm not talking about disqualifying the "hanging chad" ballots, or the Supreme Court's ruling that the equal protection clause only counts if you're educated and white. In fact, their ruling on the matter would not have been sought were it not for the intentional, illegal actions of a few people in the Florida state government that wrongly disqualified about 50,000 voters.
Among those illegally disenfracnhised, a vast majority (90% or more) were blacks and hispanics, two groups that (among those who actually were permitted to cast ballots) voted overwhelmingly (85%) for Gore in the 2000 election.
Without this massive fraud perpetrated by Katherine Harris and her buddies at the private firm she hired to "purge" the voter rolls, there would not have been any need for the Supreme Court to rule at all, because the totals wouldn't have been close enough to waste time re-counting. You do the math: 50,000 total citizens systematically stripped of their rights for no reason, approximately 40,000 of whom most likely would have voted for Gore. If only 1/10 of them actually went to the polls, it would STILL have been a Gore win by a couple thousand votes.
This information can all be independently verified, if you're so inclined. (In fact, I insist you do so, since I would do the same if you offerred such damning evidence going the other way.) You could also read the official civil rights commissions report on the subject that says the same thing. (Albeit in drier, more technical language.) Here's a link to the executive summary as printed in the Washington Post.
Sadly, many Republicans would prefer to put their fingers in their ears rather than hear the ugly, well-documented truth: The course of democracy was perverted, resulting in a Bush presidency. Whether that perversion is the result of intentional institutional incompetence or the misdeeds of a small group is irrelevant...The outcome is the same either way: An engineered win for the republican party.
Bill: "How does he stay so current?"
Marty: "Don't praise the machine..."
Yeah, thanks, we already did that.
Maybe later you could give me instructions on how a nipple works. [/sarcasm]
Except that most Outlook users use the "Preview Pane" feature, which means all the scripts/"tracking images" get executed as soon as you click on the message and it shows up in that Preview Pane. Since you can't delete the message without clicking, it's a catch-22.
For this reason, we're moving away from Outlook, and also purchasing Adaware Pro licenses for our workstations. We are a financial institution and having somebody log our keystrokes could quite easily put us out of business.
I've given them money in the past--I'm trying to give them more money (albeit somebody else's) now. What the hell is the difference? Red Hat did shaft me... Shafted me into having to deal with IIS. If you don't consider that being shafted, you should try it... It isn't fun.
Also, it really doesn't matter that I was talking about in the first post--the complaint I ended up making was that they screwed ME, not the company, by doing this.
Unless you can come up with a good reason I should be delighted by this turn of events, I'm afraid I must write you off as either a troll, nutter, or Red Hat stock holder. Maybe all three!
Are you trying to imply I:
1) Haven't bought things from RH? (I have. Boxed RH 6-9, member of RHN since day one.)
2) Wasn't really trying to use RedHat for a project at work? (I was, because IIS has made my life hell before and I won't have it.)
3) Haven't used it in consulting situations for SOHO clients? (I have... Why should a six man dental office pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees to secure their tiny Windows LAN? Setup one Samba server, integrate with LDAP, and we're disco.)
Are you even arguing a point, or trolling?
Because very few of us actually make decisions about our work environments in a vacuum... And PHB's generally say "Who can I buy support from if you die?" Once upon a time, I could say "Red Hat." Now, not so much... This was the big selling point I've tried to use to get RedHat into our enterprise.
You can't imagine how far back this little stunt on their part has set my efforts. We went from having a tentative yes to run our new web-farm on Apache/RH9 to a "Hell no" in about fifteen seconds based on RH withdrawing support like this. It would've been the smartest move we'd ever made, and it would have led to more linux--a LOT more--but instead, I have to roll out (drum-roll please) five more god-damn IIS boxes. Yuck.
This might be the dumbest move I've seen in the history of the Operating System business, bar none. Way to shoot your Operating System (and, by proxy its loyal customers, i.e. me) in the foot.
I buy CD-Rs without any label, and mark them with a Sharpie... I've burned literally thousands of CDs since I got my first CD-RW drive, and still haven't had one fail.
Heh... Our office garage sale liquidated 40 of these last week. Walked away with five for $50--Now I've got the machines I've always wanted to experiment with clustering. (And a fifth to replace my ANCIENT smoothwall firewall box.)
Amen brother... When I first got out of college, my career goal was radio personality. (I know, looking back it seems like a shallow goal..) I was floored when, in an interview to be an afternoon personality/production manager I was told "Hey man, this ain't art. Just a well researched playlist..."
It helped me understand that the radio industry I fell in love with had changed for the worse, into a glorified jukebox with very little original, compelling programming on the air. Gone was the idea that a radio show could make a difference in somebody's life, mood, or world view... Gone was the idea that a radio station did certain things for the community as a condition of being on the air, like local news, community affairs programs, and local election coverage. In its place was the idea that the rotary club should pay to have a show on your station on Sunday morning at 7am. That local election info is a "buzz-kill" and doesn't "fit with what we're doing here."
I was quite sad. Then I got into computers, where everything is wine and roses...
When I was in high school, it was easier to get pot than beer. Way easier. Why? The people selling pot aren't asking for proof of age.
You could also consider the lack of dog shit in a pumpkin pie to be a shortcoming, too... But that would just be stupid. Your troll message is a delightful bit of astro-turf...But this line proves out that you're just making it up as you go...
If Apple was really so "behind the times", their resale prices would be crap. If Apple equipment was really so obsolete, resale values would follow the trend you see other obsolete items take--they'd be worthless. Want to test the theory?
Put an ad in the paper for a rusted out non-fuel injected 1971 Chevy. See how many calls you get, and what price you are offered. My advice? Somebody offers $50, take it.
Unfair...how? For pointing out that while you were suckered in by the low, up-front cost, then will end up getting dinged for endless upgrades to get your PC to do what my Mac did out of the box?
I have a 1.3ghz p3 too (use it as a linux based server) and was curious about WinXP. Windows 2000 ran great on it when I tested it, but I ultimately went with Mandrake because the price was unbeatable. (I've never infringed on copyrights before, and I wasn't going to start just because it was a home server and probably nobody would ever know...) I thought that since it ran Win2k so well, XP would be no problem. I popped in the extra hard drive I keep laying around and installed WinXP Pro expecting similar results to my Windows 2000 test. Hardly!
It was chugging (and hit the swap file!) trying to bring up a start menu! That Toshiba Protege runs a 1.3 ghz P3 chip too. Lets hope that XP Tablet Edition runs better than XP Professional did on my (exactly the same) hardware!
Not only do I have a Samba/LDAP/Postfix server in my house, I also smoke weed. If the pot-smoking doesn't make me a terrorist, then the Linux server MUST seal my fate.
See you guys at Guantanamo! Maybe they'll give us all adjacent cages...
We certainly must have a paper-trail, no disagreement there. It would have to exist for the purpose of ensuring an accurate re-count. However, in order to trust that paper-trail, I must be able to audit the code that generates it (personally.)
As for the second question (about showning a phony MD5 value): It would be hard to create a binary or executable with an identical checksum value using different code (nigh impossible,) so I'll assume you mean having it show a checksum of the legit file while the compromised one runs...
If we coded the application so that it runs a checksum against itself, then does a comparison to a checksum of the file at C:\Program Files\Diebold\vote.exe (or
If the person trying shenanigans put his modified
In short, that combination of situations seems unlikely. (Although I won't say totally impossible...)
Certainly the BSA is evil, sick, and wrong, but...
Why would you let the users be responsible for keeping track of their own licensing info? We have a FTE who maintains our licensing database. With 5,000 users scattered across seven offices, we need to be certain we're in compliance, and having one guy whose only job is to make sure it works turned out to be our best option.
Well, with open source, I can take the published code, compile it and generate a binary. I can then do an MD5 checksum against that binary. If I get a different MD5 value on the binary on the "Voting Device," I know I'm looking at a binary that wasn't generated from the same code.
With a proprietary solution, I won't have any access to code OR binaries, so I won't even be able to guarantee that I'm using what was approved by the review group.
Maybe build that MD5 checkup into the program... So the first step when I go to cast my vote is to compare the MD5 value shown onscreen with the MD5 value I noted from the project web-site. Yeah, all voters aren't going to do this, but they don't have to. It only takes one guy who takes the time to do this and notice a difference to blow the whistle on a rooted voting machine.
I realize this may require an expenditure of funds and a little extra effort... And that is okay with me. I want my elections to be fair AND accurate. If it costs a few bucks more to hire a tech to work at the polling place, so be it.
Hell, you could even take it a step further, and have the voting stations confirm that they are running the correct version before EACH vote is cast, by doing a checksum and transmitting the value to HQ...This way you would be checking each vote for trustworthiness before it goes into the DB.
Sorry, but a proprietary solution isn't going to hack it. Open source projects are beholden to nobody except their users. If the users want signed binaries with published MD5 checksum values, they'll get them.
Hey, I bet an OSS project could pay the government to use their project instead of the other way around... After all, the amount of volunteer labor that would be used would be immense. I would certainly pitch in to help an effort like this.
How are you going to force Diebold to do it? (Hint: Write a bigger check.) Could you even force them to? I mean, a commercial software company has so many motivations to hide their flaws... An OSS project can't possibly hide their flaws, because anybody who wants it can get the code. I'd be willing to bet Diebold would rather get out of the voting machine biz rather than let us see their code.
What does that tell you about who has something to hide?
Oversight. Who says what is printed on the receipt is what goes into the DB? With closed/non-reviewable source, we really have no way of knowing besides Deibold's "Good name, reputation, and assurances that everything is fine," and a (perhaps naive) hope that whatever reviewers they are showing the code to are really "independent." (By which I mean, have no motivation other than a fair election.)
Yeah, Diebold is supposed to be using independent auditors to make sure their code works and isn't backdoored--but until I can have somebody that I respect review it, I will have my doubts. Also, who says Diebold (or Karl Rove) hasn't bought off the independent reviewers so they "fail to notice" republicanvictory2004.c in the source tree?
Indeed, Diebold has already raised doubts about their being trustworthy during last year's Georgia governor's election. Ultimately, the key issue is trust: Whose experts do you trust to review the code of the software to ensure a fair election?
Do I trust a company with billions of dollars riding on a quiet, successful election to admit to problems with their voting software? Hell no! Do I trust every open source code reviewer automatically? No, of course not. BUT, I am more likely to lend credence to somebody who 1) Has nothing to gain by lying to me and also 2) Has the entire open source universe looking over his shoulder to make sure his i's are dotted and t's crossed.
So...
Closed voting sytem:
- Limited code review. Vulnerable to bribery of/pressure on reviewers, programmers, and handlers of all sorts.
- Limited accountability, even with a receipt. How do you guarantee what is on paper is in the DB without either personally seeing the code or knowing and trusting the "reviewers"?
- No real security: Anybody involved in the process can compromise the election's validity--untraceably!--with only an MS Office CD-ROM and the desire to do evil. You can't prove there were changes made in the DB because you can't prove the paper trail is accurate. (Since I don't know that what is running on the machine I voted on is the same version of the software reviewed by the reviewers I DON'T KNOW if my receipt reflects the DB, and neither does anybody else.)
Open system gives you:
- Unlimited code review. Less vulnerable to bribery and pressure, since it would be hard for one person or conspiracy to find and attempt to payoff every single open source programmer on earth.
- Accountability: With source code review and signed binaries I can guarantee what I have on a receipt is what is in the DB.
- Real security: Inappropriate people don't have access to manipulate the data. But even if there IS A quetsion of the validity of the electronic data, we have a trustable paper trail.
But certainly, those MS Certified Partners don't work for free... And if you're comparing the price of SBS without copmputing the cost of maintaining it (whether its FTE, or an MS Partner doing the maintaining) is not the most accurate comparison. Isn't this what Microsoft always says? "People who say Linux is free don't count what it costs to maintain." We need to force the MS shills of the world to compare apples to apples...or Apples.
Speaking of whom: OS X Server sounds much better for a small office to me than the unlimited/spiraling costs associated with Windows on the backend... $1000 for unlimited connections vs. $599 for a max of 50, plus a per user CAL fee for server and a CAL for Exchange. Not to mention the catastrophic expense coming down the road when they get to 51 employees...
Also, we had one of those "consultants" from an "MS Certified Partner" come in and help us solve an ongoing issue we had with Exchange 5.5. This is a paraphrase of our conversation about his recommendations for fixing this HUGE problem:
"Gee, that patch doesn't exist for 5.5, so you'll have to upgrade Exchange to do it... But you can't go to Exchange 2000/2003 without going to Active directory, and you can't use best features of active directory without upgrading all your workstations OS too. And that SQL Server is going to have a bitch of a time using NT auth once we go to native mode so you should upgrade that too, and hey, we see you've got a Linux box running DNS. That will have to go..."
At the end of the conversation, it was either $75,000-$80,000 to upgrade our ENTIRE enterprise to AD 2003, Exhcange 2003, SQL Server 2000, the whole enchilada (buying a dozen new servers in the process, and redeploying two dozen others.)
Or I could spend $11,000 for two XServes with unlimited OS X Server licenses, loaded, buy two extra power supplies to keep on site, and run my email, LDAP, and calendar publishing off one box, with the other box for redundancy. And continue to run my enterprise as I see fit, upgrading on my schedule and as needed by the users, not as forced by vendor lock-in. Guess which way I went?
Oh yeah--After we dumped Exchange, our very senior Exchange admin quit. (With the company almost 10 years.) Result? We've got an extra $60,000 in salary to spread around and keep our remaining employees happy. Or bring in an OSX specialist--or maybe both?
So far, we haven't had any need for a specialist. My own OS X/linux/unix experience has been enough to solve the two minor issues we've had since the switch, and I'm willing to use my sweat to keep my staff budget where it is and not displace any of my hard-earned, highly skilled workers.
I don't blame you for any of this, and I'm not trying to flame here, just wanted to share my experiences.
I also wish IT Week would have pointed out that $599 for SBS 2003 doesn't include support of any kind. One incident requiring MS phone support and you've immediately eclipsed the price of RH Enterprise w/support. Not to mention that one of SBS 2003's biggest value points is Exchange server, which (in any reasonably large enterprise) necesitates a second layer "Mail router" to dump all the worms, virii, and spam before they hit the Exchange box and bring it to its knees... Think PostFix + Spam Assassin + a good set of attachment blocking rules.
Maybe I'm wrong (I'm sure someone will point me out if I am,) but I was under the impression that with SBS you had to run it all on one server. Is this still/Was this ever the case? Do extra servers under SBS cost extra money? (I've never worked anywhere that could consider SBS, since the limit is 50 users, so I'm admitedly ignorant of some facets of an SBS environment.)
...And I'm glad I went back, because I've been looking for a well-implemented Multi-Network Firewall product that can be deployed for free (as in no money) for a couple of my non-profit clients. Certainly, the for-profits don't mind spending $1000+ on a good firewall software package, but the non-profits (a charity and a church) have need for something like this, but simply can't afford a non-open-source package. Hoorary for Mandrake!
I've already renewed my Mandrake Club membership, and if you appreciate the work they do, you should think about doing so as well.
Really? YOu can have ours... I hate it. Since migrating our legacy, reliable, functional application to a delivery via citrix we have heard nothing but complaints. It is unreliable (sessions hang for no reason), and just plain slow. Plus we've had various issues with Terminal Server profiles becoming corrupted (at random) that keep users out of their (business critical) Citrix app.
Frustrating? When we want to say something is really fucked up, we say it has "Citrixian" properties.
It might not be a complete waste of time if they live in a state with an anti-SPAM law. Just name the CC company as a co-defendant on your next spam lawsuit... After all, they are involved in the enterprise of sending illegal e-mail messages. If they don't employ the people who harvested your info, you can probably settle the spam lawsuit with them in exchange for info on the company that sold them her "application."
Then you can start using THAT company as your co-defendant in your spam lawsuits... And then you can use their co-defendant status to subpeona their business records to find out who they sold her info to, and sue all those companies too.
20 messages per day
x $500 per message
-------
Damages that add up quickly.
Or she could just close the e-mail box and start using another one... Although if it is her private business address (used for her onlinebanking, bill pay, stuff like that) it would be a pain in the ass.... But if she really hates spam, it might be worth her time.