Mabye we should create a new topic called "SCO vs. IBM"... ?
I was thinking along the lines of a daily update, a la Slashback, detailing the big headlines of the past 24 hours. One story per day, unless something really breakthrough happens ("IBM Buys SCO", "Judge laughs SCO out of court", "Five key SCO executives found 'swimming with fishes'", etc).
Too bad somebody with a mod point thought that my asking a question in order expand my understanding of what everybody else is saying is overrated.
{cough} Said moderator was probably expecting you to "RTFA", at which point you would have seen the line;
"Since filing a lawsuit against IBM, SCO has made public statements and accusations about IBM's Unix license and about Linux in an apparent attempt to create fear uncertainty and doubt among IBM's customers and the open source community."
As a matter of fact, it was the very first sentence of the article. Sorry, chum, but your moderation was fair.
Yes, and we all know that anyone can come up to speed on a product instantly.
Who says they're doing anything that earth-shatteringly difficult? If they're so important to the company and so skilled that nobody else could pick up what they're doing, why aren't they approaching management with a contract (re)negotiation? If they're so irreplacable, surely their employer realizes this and will react accordingly. If they are replacable, well, they may find themselves on the unemployment line.
Surely if their jobs are so spectacular they'd be seeking professional advice rather than Slashdot rantings.
In the computer field, pay is up 11% since 2000 (15% since 1999) and hours worked are down over 4% since 2000 (same since 1999). Again, all statistics come from http://www.bls.gov (the Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Your statistics don't account for unemployment in the IT industry (what, BTW, is considered "computer field" by the BLS?) or the number of people who've left IT altogether to find work in another field.
Statistics are fun for managers and the media to play with, but they don't particularly represent reality.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was talking exclusively about the tech sector. (Un)Employment figures for minimum wage and/or blue collar jobs aren't terribly relevant to the plight of the programmer.
I was going to suggest unionizing, but like I said, I Am Not A Lawyer Or A Union Organizer.
You don't need to be a union to walk out, neccesarily. Here in Canada we have something called "Wildcat strikes", where regular employees band together for a specific purpose and walk out.
The submitter would do best to contact his local labour board (and legal counsil) to determine his rights in this regard. If not properly researched, it's entirely plausible that his employer could fire his entire department as a result. Fired for walking out == no UI and a lousy reference.
Man, did I ever get a shock; with his comment modded down, it looked like you were responding to me! My asbestos undies are just a little singed.;)
You don't even have a clue, do you? Beyond deploying someone else's pre-packaged, pre-planned network of PCs that are all exactly the same, that all get their network information from a DHCP server (that someone else set up), you don't know shit. Yeah, if we all had to take care of the simple shit that you do, automatic update would be the answer.
Even a small network I administered (the last one that didn't require an NDA, and therefore the only one I've got on record on my website) things started off easy. A plethora of PC300GL machines came in by way of 53' trailer. They were deployed, one image created, and life was good.
But then, we got new machines. Faster machines. Different chipset. This was no good. Ok, two images.
Suddenly, the multimedia labs required extra programs; graphics, sound, video... ok, three images.
Now we have 24 AutoCAD licenses (and the two associated dongles per machine) that required a new image. Four images.
Business classes? Five images.
More new machines? SIX images. At this point our test period for each workstation image was all of 2-3 hours. Any longer and the images wouldn't ever make it to the machines before they had to be updated again.
Long story even longer, the image deployment method was fantastic in the beginning, but as time went on our needs diversified and suddenly maintaining images was taking up a large majority of our time. That wasn't even so bad; IE was around version 5.5 (6 was in beta) and patches seemed only a monthly experience. Patching the workstations meant re-imaging entire labs which, due to funding, were only at 10MBit/sec and 24 shared a single 100BaseSX uplink to the network backbone. Imaging the machines during class time was out of the question, lunchtime wasn't long enough, so that meant overtime every time we had to update the workstations. I don't know about you, but babysitting 500+ imaging workstations until 8-10PM is not my idea of a good day.
As for imaging the servers, well, we had to wait until the usage dropped to nothing (again, overtime) before we were allowed to take any of them down. We simply didn't have the budget to duplicate our NetFinity's in the interests of redundancy. So now we spend all evening testing the patch application, and the rest of the week eyeballing every activity log we could get our hands on to isolate and account for changes in behaviour the updates implemented.
What our dear friend 'anotherone' has to realize is that babysitting and updating Windows workstations alone is a full-time job. Most networks aren't even as cut-and-dry as the school I worked for; we were allowed to mass-wipe machines on a whim. Network policy forbid saving of anything on the local drives. When you're dealing with a network of thousands of workstations which are almost all unique, running updates is a small nightmare. When you run dozens of servers (enterprise or application), it's a big nightmare.
Employees don't tend to listen to "that network guy", so they save everything to their local drive (the Fujitsu fiasco smartened some people up, but many were still P.O.'ed at their sysadmin for not having backups of their PC...) so re-imaging is out of the question. Not to mention the fact that you have to get the consent of;
Your manager
Your manager's manager
Your department head
Users' manager
Users' manager's manager
Users' department head
...
Keeping in mind that likely 4-5 of those people know nothing about computers, but expect you to fix it without, in some cases it seems, touching it.
So you and your trained monkeys ("Junior Sysadmins") stroll about the office, updating and quickly testing each and every workstation. SO you miss one. It
I'm just about sick of people defending themselves by calling the opposing viewpoint a 'strawman'. It's not my fault that your argument is weak.
Perhaps you need more experience administrating real world servers before you go calling other people's arguments 'weak'. Applying patches to a production server is nowhere near the same animal as applying patches to your Dell running XP Home. Applying patches on 2000 machines is far from a simple task - especially with the frequency of patches out of Redmond lately.
As for accusing sysadmins of being lazy, incompetent, or outright negligent is not only disrespectful, it's downright arrogant of you. If you don't know what you're talking about, it's probably best to keep your mouth shut.
No, you are wrong. To suggest a user who clicks on an attachment that is sent to them by a person who is known to them, with a "part message" that may even be relevant to the attachement is a "moron", shows that you really don't have any respect for Users.
Respect is earned. Some users "get it", others try to use their mouse as a foot pedal.
Now you can explain to me why I should respect these users in the context of their PCs.
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
On Unix/Linux Desktop systems there is nothing on the system as important as the user's data in his home directory.
I don't know about you, but I administer systems with hundreds or thousands of users. It's *their* data I wish to protect, not that of the irresponsible schmoe who ran untrusted binary code.
<OBSIMOM> But if they ask me nicely, maybe I'll keep that backup tape away from the degausser. </OBSIMON>
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Give it time. As Linux permeates industry and business it will start getting more attention from the virus writers. It's all a matter of ROI. Right now, attacking windows has a very high ROI.
Which is exactly why so many worms target Apache rather than IIS.
Batting down strawmen for 12 years and counting...
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well then, any admin who runs outlook (or any email client, or browser, or ANYTHING that could potentially be comprimised) on a production server that absolutely can't stand to have any downtime needs to be terminated as well.
I think I've seen about enough of this particular strawman.
Nobody has to run anything on these servers; all they require is network connectvity. These worms propagate via network shares as well as e-mail. All it takes is one infected machine with a persistent connection to any production server in a trust network to cause headaches.
Microsoft has just started letting people use Office at home if their employer owns a copy.
Incorrect. This has been a long-standing licensing practise by Microsoft. Back as early as '97 I recall people being allowed to install software at home and use it as long as they were employed with the company/educational/government instutution. Matter of fact, I recall installing Office'95 on floppy disks (along with an accounting package and one or two other software titles neccesary to do work at home) from Digital Equipment Corporation for a couple family members who worked there at the time.
While IP is easy to copy, there is a limit on the supply (and thus a real price attached to it in the face of honest demand), and that is the cost of production, which you thieves are not taking into account when you say that a copy is free. It is a crime against your fellow man, no matter how you reason it away in your own deluded world.
[...]
DNA - fighting entropy for over 3.5 billion years
When I read your post WRT IP and then saw your signature, the first thing that came to mind was the great irony; so many researchers (read: Big Nasty Pharmaceutical Corporations) are working hard to make DNA (Genome) an item of IP, with everything that entails.
Imagine; "I couldn't afford to patent myself, so now I belong to RXY DrugCo Incorporated." or "I'd love to have this child, but the patent fees are ridiculous!"
They like to make up numbers. Same as "one pirated song costs us $X amount of dollars". I wonder how much of that piracy is highly priced productivity tools - Photoshop, Flash, 3DSMax, Visual Studio, etc etc, stuff that people can't really afford, so they are technically losing money, since it wouldn't have been bought in the first place.
Though I'm guilty of using that argument myself, I only attribute it to my MP3 collection. I just don't have the cash lying around to purchase $5,000 worth of CDs, and right now I don't have the space to store all of them (half the time, the liner notes are more interesting than the CD, but I digress).
The difference being; I'm not making a product / money off of my MP3 collection. I use it for my personal enjoyment, period. When people download high-end image / video / audio editing applications, there's a good chance that they've got monetary interests. If that's the case, why should they have the right to make money using pirated (not duly paid for) tools?
I'll grant you it's a case of bad versus worse, but there is a legitimacy to the piracy claims and certainly people making money freely off somebody elses hard work has to be a limit.
more like its a lie. nvidia was trying to convince consumers that their product is better than it actually is.
granted you shouldnt draw conclusions from a single benchmark, but being led to use false information to base choices on is WRONG.
We know that nVidia optimize their drivers ('application layer') for performance enhancements in specific games, correct?
Therefore it would not be untrue to state that their hardware is, in fact, capable of such performance levels, correct?
If it takes a different 'mix' of settings to render the graphics in, say, Comanche 4 than to produce the same stunning effects in, say, Hitman 2, and they've figured out what these 'mixes' should be, what's the harm? We get better performance for our dollar, and nVidia looks good for it.
By extension of this, wouldn't it be fitting if nVidia applied the same optimizations to other software; be it benchmark or otherwise? Moreover, don't proper benchmarks use existing, off-the-shelf, popular industry games to round-out their results? Is it therefore 'cheating' in the same sense that nVidia recognizes the unique pixel shading (etc.) requirements of Quake III and accounts for them in their drivers?
The idea behind 3D optimized video drivers is to render that which is presented in its truest form as quickly and efficiently as possible. It sounds to me as if nVidia isn't doing anything more than that.
More imporantly - to nVidia's consumer base - do you feel that nVidia is peddling an inferior product on you? Have you been taken for shills? Are you truly dissatisfied with your gaming experience? In short, is there any reason for this tirade against nVidia? This company has long been the leading manufacturer of video products for gamers. Undisputed, I might add. So now they're eeking out a few percent performance boost (something they've likely been doing all along) in some software packages, and suddenly their products don't hold the same water?
Sounds like a witch hunt to me. I don't know about you people, but I still plan on picking up a GeForce for my next video card upgrade, and I'll use the Detonator FX drivers from their website. I bet I'll be happier'n a pig in shit for it, too.
Ok, go on then:
Explain to us all why the scientology links were removed from Google.
You mean the Xenu.net links? That would be because the "Church" of Scientology has billions of dollars bankrolled and acted the part of the 800lb gorilla, tangling Google up in court for having them. Google, however, wised up and replaced all removed links after discovering that {GASP!} the Scientologists had "no right" (to quote myself) to have their link removed. You'll note that when you search for scientology, our friend Operation Clambake shows up, right there at the top of the listings (#2 position as of right now).
For details, you can read this article and lo and behold, we find out that the much questioned, right infringing, more-than-likely illegal (certainly un-constitutional) DMCA is at fault for the mix-up.
So, my dear anonymous friend, why don't you explain Scientology for us?
Of cource no private company or individual can dictate to Google what to put on its site, but governments seem to be able to...
That's more than likely a measure taken by Google in order to keep their service from being banned in those countries. I bet if you looked into those sites and their removal, you'd find that they were voluntary removals on Google's part (note the word "complaint", not "mandate" in your above snippet).
By the same right, Google could remove all results pertaining to the German and French governments.
Oh yeah? Where in the Bill of Rights (thought I'd expand it to the Big Ten instead of just the first) does it say that Google can do anything they damn well please?
More importantly; where in the Bill of Rights is SearchKing guaranteed a prominant Google rank?
Google has come a long way since its beginnings, and is now sufficiently established that an abrupt and capricious change of personality would be a bad thing.
Since they are nowhere near a monopoly on search engines on the Internet, they're responsible to no one for anything. As I said in an earlier post, they could shut down abruptly and cause the same ripples in the WWW.
If all the other major (1 billion plus indexed pages) engines were defeated by Google, I'll concede that then, and only then do they hold some responsibility for their listings. But I don't forsee MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista et al. closing up shop any time soon.
They feel this way because google is so popular that, with some businesses online, google can make or break you.
This is not even reminiscant of a valid argument.
The CEO of Google could, perfectly within his rights, "hit the switch" right now. That's it; no more Google. Format the drives, massive eBay auction of the servers, and store the software safely in a vault for all eternity. By the logic above, that would "break" all of these businesses who, for whatever inexplicable reason are relying solely on Google's free services for their page hits. (Did I emphasize that enough? Free? Free. FREE!). Nobody has any right to be included in Google's database, likewise nobody has the right to demand that any site be removed from Google's database.
There's a concept in business known as "advertising". It is something that must be accounted for in a business plan, budgetted for annually, forecasted for the future and carefully considered at all times. Simply submitting your URL to an online form and hoping you get a good PageRank is NOT how a business advertises; it's how homepages and Blogs advertise.
Re:I'm a Mozilla user, but...
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
I really don't think it's necessary to announce every release cnadidate when there will likely be a couple. Alpha/beta/final? Great. RC's? Eh.
I'd love to test it, but it crashes hard on my laptop as soon as it loads. {ho-hum}
I could be mistaken, but I believe Win98 is out of support, and MS no longer produces "security updates" for it. In which case it would be VERY irresponsible to continue using it. Upgrade to Win2k or a recent Linux distro, but get off of Win98.
Technically incorrect, but talk to me in a year and you'll be bang-on.;)
Windows 98SE (the only 98 worth running) is still available for sale for another full month, and has a year of support left. Details here.
As for the responsibility of running it, when you have a corporate environment of tens of thousands of workstations to upgrade it's not exactly as easy as dropping the CD in the drive and waiting for an hour or two.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking along the lines of a daily update, a la Slashback, detailing the big headlines of the past 24 hours. One story per day, unless something really breakthrough happens ("IBM Buys SCO", "Judge laughs SCO out of court", "Five key SCO executives found 'swimming with fishes'", etc).
{cough} Said moderator was probably expecting you to "RTFA", at which point you would have seen the line;
As a matter of fact, it was the very first sentence of the article. Sorry, chum, but your moderation was fair.
Who says they're doing anything that earth-shatteringly difficult? If they're so important to the company and so skilled that nobody else could pick up what they're doing, why aren't they approaching management with a contract (re)negotiation? If they're so irreplacable, surely their employer realizes this and will react accordingly. If they are replacable, well, they may find themselves on the unemployment line.
Surely if their jobs are so spectacular they'd be seeking professional advice rather than Slashdot rantings.
Your statistics don't account for unemployment in the IT industry (what, BTW, is considered "computer field" by the BLS?) or the number of people who've left IT altogether to find work in another field.
Statistics are fun for managers and the media to play with, but they don't particularly represent reality.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was talking exclusively about the tech sector. (Un)Employment figures for minimum wage and/or blue collar jobs aren't terribly relevant to the plight of the programmer.
Isn't this the "crippled American economy" where the job market is so thin, people are taking twice the hours at half the pay?
I'll bet the employer has a thousand resumees sitting in a file in their HR department just itching for callbacks.
You don't need to be a union to walk out, neccesarily. Here in Canada we have something called "Wildcat strikes", where regular employees band together for a specific purpose and walk out.
The submitter would do best to contact his local labour board (and legal counsil) to determine his rights in this regard. If not properly researched, it's entirely plausible that his employer could fire his entire department as a result. Fired for walking out == no UI and a lousy reference.
Petswarehouse.com sucks!
Come sue me, biznatch!
Man, did I ever get a shock; with his comment modded down, it looked like you were responding to me! My asbestos undies are just a little singed. ;)
Even a small network I administered (the last one that didn't require an NDA, and therefore the only one I've got on record on my website) things started off easy. A plethora of PC300GL machines came in by way of 53' trailer. They were deployed, one image created, and life was good.
But then, we got new machines. Faster machines. Different chipset. This was no good. Ok, two images.
Suddenly, the multimedia labs required extra programs; graphics, sound, video ... ok, three images.
Now we have 24 AutoCAD licenses (and the two associated dongles per machine) that required a new image. Four images.
Business classes? Five images.
More new machines? SIX images. At this point our test period for each workstation image was all of 2-3 hours. Any longer and the images wouldn't ever make it to the machines before they had to be updated again.
Long story even longer, the image deployment method was fantastic in the beginning, but as time went on our needs diversified and suddenly maintaining images was taking up a large majority of our time. That wasn't even so bad; IE was around version 5.5 (6 was in beta) and patches seemed only a monthly experience. Patching the workstations meant re-imaging entire labs which, due to funding, were only at 10MBit/sec and 24 shared a single 100BaseSX uplink to the network backbone. Imaging the machines during class time was out of the question, lunchtime wasn't long enough, so that meant overtime every time we had to update the workstations. I don't know about you, but babysitting 500+ imaging workstations until 8-10PM is not my idea of a good day.
As for imaging the servers, well, we had to wait until the usage dropped to nothing (again, overtime) before we were allowed to take any of them down. We simply didn't have the budget to duplicate our NetFinity's in the interests of redundancy. So now we spend all evening testing the patch application, and the rest of the week eyeballing every activity log we could get our hands on to isolate and account for changes in behaviour the updates implemented.
What our dear friend 'anotherone' has to realize is that babysitting and updating Windows workstations alone is a full-time job. Most networks aren't even as cut-and-dry as the school I worked for; we were allowed to mass-wipe machines on a whim. Network policy forbid saving of anything on the local drives. When you're dealing with a network of thousands of workstations which are almost all unique, running updates is a small nightmare. When you run dozens of servers (enterprise or application), it's a big nightmare.
Employees don't tend to listen to "that network guy", so they save everything to their local drive (the Fujitsu fiasco smartened some people up, but many were still P.O.'ed at their sysadmin for not having backups of their PC...) so re-imaging is out of the question. Not to mention the fact that you have to get the consent of;
Keeping in mind that likely 4-5 of those people know nothing about computers, but expect you to fix it without, in some cases it seems, touching it.
So you and your trained monkeys ("Junior Sysadmins") stroll about the office, updating and quickly testing each and every workstation. SO you miss one. It
Perhaps you need more experience administrating real world servers before you go calling other people's arguments 'weak'. Applying patches to a production server is nowhere near the same animal as applying patches to your Dell running XP Home. Applying patches on 2000 machines is far from a simple task - especially with the frequency of patches out of Redmond lately.
As for accusing sysadmins of being lazy, incompetent, or outright negligent is not only disrespectful, it's downright arrogant of you. If you don't know what you're talking about, it's probably best to keep your mouth shut.
Respect is earned. Some users "get it", others try to use their mouse as a foot pedal.
Now you can explain to me why I should respect these users in the context of their PCs.
I don't know about you, but I administer systems with hundreds or thousands of users. It's *their* data I wish to protect, not that of the irresponsible schmoe who ran untrusted binary code.
<OBSIMOM>
But if they ask me nicely, maybe I'll keep that backup tape away from the degausser.
</OBSIMON>
Which is exactly why so many worms target Apache rather than IIS.
Batting down strawmen for 12 years and counting ...
I think I've seen about enough of this particular strawman.
Nobody has to run anything on these servers; all they require is network connectvity. These worms propagate via network shares as well as e-mail. All it takes is one infected machine with a persistent connection to any production server in a trust network to cause headaches.
Incorrect. This has been a long-standing licensing practise by Microsoft. Back as early as '97 I recall people being allowed to install software at home and use it as long as they were employed with the company/educational/government instutution. Matter of fact, I recall installing Office'95 on floppy disks (along with an accounting package and one or two other software titles neccesary to do work at home) from Digital Equipment Corporation for a couple family members who worked there at the time.
When I read your post WRT IP and then saw your signature, the first thing that came to mind was the great irony; so many researchers (read: Big Nasty Pharmaceutical Corporations) are working hard to make DNA (Genome) an item of IP, with everything that entails.
Imagine; "I couldn't afford to patent myself, so now I belong to RXY DrugCo Incorporated." or "I'd love to have this child, but the patent fees are ridiculous!"
Though I'm guilty of using that argument myself, I only attribute it to my MP3 collection. I just don't have the cash lying around to purchase $5,000 worth of CDs, and right now I don't have the space to store all of them (half the time, the liner notes are more interesting than the CD, but I digress).
The difference being; I'm not making a product / money off of my MP3 collection. I use it for my personal enjoyment, period. When people download high-end image / video / audio editing applications, there's a good chance that they've got monetary interests. If that's the case, why should they have the right to make money using pirated (not duly paid for) tools?
I'll grant you it's a case of bad versus worse, but there is a legitimacy to the piracy claims and certainly people making money freely off somebody elses hard work has to be a limit.
We know that nVidia optimize their drivers ('application layer') for performance enhancements in specific games, correct?
Therefore it would not be untrue to state that their hardware is, in fact, capable of such performance levels, correct?
If it takes a different 'mix' of settings to render the graphics in, say, Comanche 4 than to produce the same stunning effects in, say, Hitman 2, and they've figured out what these 'mixes' should be, what's the harm? We get better performance for our dollar, and nVidia looks good for it.
By extension of this, wouldn't it be fitting if nVidia applied the same optimizations to other software; be it benchmark or otherwise? Moreover, don't proper benchmarks use existing, off-the-shelf, popular industry games to round-out their results? Is it therefore 'cheating' in the same sense that nVidia recognizes the unique pixel shading (etc.) requirements of Quake III and accounts for them in their drivers?
The idea behind 3D optimized video drivers is to render that which is presented in its truest form as quickly and efficiently as possible. It sounds to me as if nVidia isn't doing anything more than that.
More imporantly - to nVidia's consumer base - do you feel that nVidia is peddling an inferior product on you? Have you been taken for shills? Are you truly dissatisfied with your gaming experience? In short, is there any reason for this tirade against nVidia? This company has long been the leading manufacturer of video products for gamers. Undisputed, I might add. So now they're eeking out a few percent performance boost (something they've likely been doing all along) in some software packages, and suddenly their products don't hold the same water?
Sounds like a witch hunt to me. I don't know about you people, but I still plan on picking up a GeForce for my next video card upgrade, and I'll use the Detonator FX drivers from their website. I bet I'll be happier'n a pig in shit for it, too.
You mean the Xenu.net links? That would be because the "Church" of Scientology has billions of dollars bankrolled and acted the part of the 800lb gorilla, tangling Google up in court for having them. Google, however, wised up and replaced all removed links after discovering that {GASP!} the Scientologists had "no right" (to quote myself) to have their link removed. You'll note that when you search for scientology, our friend Operation Clambake shows up, right there at the top of the listings (#2 position as of right now).
For details, you can read this article and lo and behold, we find out that the much questioned, right infringing, more-than-likely illegal (certainly un-constitutional) DMCA is at fault for the mix-up.
So, my dear anonymous friend, why don't you explain Scientology for us?
That's more than likely a measure taken by Google in order to keep their service from being banned in those countries. I bet if you looked into those sites and their removal, you'd find that they were voluntary removals on Google's part (note the word "complaint", not "mandate" in your above snippet).
By the same right, Google could remove all results pertaining to the German and French governments.
More importantly; where in the Bill of Rights is SearchKing guaranteed a prominant Google rank?
Since they are nowhere near a monopoly on search engines on the Internet, they're responsible to no one for anything. As I said in an earlier post, they could shut down abruptly and cause the same ripples in the WWW.
If all the other major (1 billion plus indexed pages) engines were defeated by Google, I'll concede that then, and only then do they hold some responsibility for their listings. But I don't forsee MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista et al. closing up shop any time soon.
This is not even reminiscant of a valid argument.
The CEO of Google could, perfectly within his rights, "hit the switch" right now . That's it; no more Google. Format the drives, massive eBay auction of the servers, and store the software safely in a vault for all eternity. By the logic above, that would "break" all of these businesses who, for whatever inexplicable reason are relying solely on Google's free services for their page hits. (Did I emphasize that enough? Free? Free. FREE !). Nobody has any right to be included in Google's database, likewise nobody has the right to demand that any site be removed from Google's database.
There's a concept in business known as "advertising". It is something that must be accounted for in a business plan, budgetted for annually, forecasted for the future and carefully considered at all times. Simply submitting your URL to an online form and hoping you get a good PageRank is NOT how a business advertises; it's how homepages and Blogs advertise.
I'd love to test it, but it crashes hard on my laptop as soon as it loads. {ho-hum}
Technically incorrect, but talk to me in a year and you'll be bang-on. ;)
Windows 98SE (the only 98 worth running) is still available for sale for another full month, and has a year of support left. Details here.
As for the responsibility of running it, when you have a corporate environment of tens of thousands of workstations to upgrade it's not exactly as easy as dropping the CD in the drive and waiting for an hour or two.