Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software.
The management mindset of "do it right now", as opposed to "do it right" is costing them more in both the short- and long-term. Until prevailing attitudes are changed on the part of those making the purchasing decisions, software makers will still have little motivation to change.
My employer is looking at a $1 million+ project for HR automation. $40k of that is for the unix server, the rest for software and "services". And this was, supposedly, the best software available. The vendor also recommended a.75 FTE for a Unix Admin for on-going support. This is about 5 times the need of any of our other Unix servers, and makes me wonder how much care & feeding the system will require just because of the buggy application. From my observations, the numbers quoted in the article for fixing software don't look high at all, and may in fact be too low.
Does existing state law allow them to sell this from any other venue than the DMV? And, does ebay really meet the legal definition of being publically accessible? Does any Internet web site? And if so, why ebay? Why not make it available from some already existing state government web site?
The real question here being which are they more interested in doing: creating the special-use lane, or gouging people over it?
With respect to getting some action on any future attacks - what should I do? Who should I call?
Write your state's attorney general. Include all the information you collected, a more detailed explanation of what you posted here of the incident. Let them know you've contacted the FBI but I would lead them to any conclusions about where that is going. Request that their office look into this from both a pespective on the potential harm from the hack, and the responsibilities of your ISP to respond to, and ultimately, prevent this sort of thing.
Then, write each of your senators and your congress person. Before you do that, find out which committees they sit on and see how you can tie this in to their oversight responsibilities with regard to the various goverment offices that could be dealing with this. Point to anti-hacking legislation like the Patriot Act and anything anyone suggests, and then point out how the laws are not uniformly enforced. Point out that potential harm and not sheer magnitude of dollars expended ought to be a desiding criteria for launching an investigation, or not.
If you haven't already, fill out an incident report for your ISP to cover yourself. Those IP addresses belong to someone, and they have a responsibility in this. Whether direct, or indirect, remains to be seen.
Finally, contact your lawyer. If for no other reason, you will need some legal CYA in your back pocket as insurance, given the stir you've already started by contacted those people that you have. Not that you should have to worry about liability issues, but you never now.
Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?"
If "overpromote" means we can now lose the phrase "not warranted for any particular use" from the various EULAs, then yes, we'd be better off. Software developers and distributors would then have to be people of their word, and their stuff would actually have to do what they say it does.
If the two were to partner up and dump huge amounts of capital into developing a more robust and usable desktop there may be a chance.
This is what I was meant and should have just stated. Given that this is exactly how MS got control of the desktop in the first place, it becomes one of the more obvious solutions to take that control away from them. Note that obvious != efficient.
that is would be Sun in need of RedHat and not the reverse? This could be the combination that breaks the Microsoft desktop hegemony, if Sun and Redhat market it correctly toward that end.
Maybe I'm assuming an overly-broad definition of "day trader", in that I wouldn't expect all of them do al their own trades. For people with larger and/or fairly diverse portfolios, there is an advantage to working with a brokerage firm. Doing your own research on the web to get the up-to-the-minute info (such as it is) combined with watching the markets move in relation to that info and to each other isn't something I would expect those who do make use of a broker to competely eschew.
Doing your own homework and making use of a broker gives you the best of both worlds in that now your are making an informed decision, but still getting some advice from another person who is (you hope) at least as well informed plus more experienced. Sure, it's a more costly route, but as long as that cost is covered by minimizing the risks inherant to stock and commodity trading, I'm sure there are those who find this approach well worth it.
Also, I would expect that the brokerage firms make use of on-line information to one degree or another, and thus contribute to the overall bandwidth consumption.
Has anyone done any sort of bandwidth study looking at sites like etrade and yahoo, for purposes of determining any correlation between bandwidth consumption and movement on the stock markets? Intuition says that Monday mornings ought to see some sort of correlated spike.
Does this validate Microsoft's view of a "viral GPL"?"
Not at all. Releasing software, whether under the GPL or the MS EULA is an intentional action. Any sloppiness resulting in disclosing and/or giving away IP is the responsibility of those doing the software release.
The GPL is a tool. Consequences resulting from the use of any given tool are the burden of the weilder, not the tool.
More and more science is relying upon computer simulations in the place of Real World testing. Simulations are only as good as the infomation available to create them. If we really knew everything we needed to know about a particular application of scientific theories, we wouldn't need to run simulations, just to verify against a rather long and complex checklist.
Re:A "Scientist" wrote this!?!?!?!?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is currently a bill in Congress, in committee, that proposes chaning the reverse design for three years (2007 - 2009) to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birthday, and then would discontinue the penny. It specifically spells out how rounding would be done for cash transaction (down in amounts ending in 1, 2, 6, & 7 and up in amounts ending in 3, 4, 8, & 9). Check and electronic transactions would continue to be for exact amounts of the total purchase. Rounding would be done only on the total amount, and after state sales tax is applied.
Re:I hate math...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
and our coin system was specifically designed so that you'd be able to start from the biggest coin and work your way down
What is it with stories like this that prompt people to make-up (or pass one made up) stuff? "Our" (i.e. the US) coinage system was not specifically designed, it was the result of a compromise:
It is a quasi-decimal system. For it to be a true decimal system, we'd have a 20 cent piece instead of a quarter, and a 40 cent piece instead of a half dollar. The quarter was retained because for over 100 years Americans had been using 2 bit and 2 reale coins. The half dollar was actually a useful coin, a day's wages for the higher paying skilled labor jobs back in the day.
US paper money remained vitually unchanged from 1969 until we went to the "mononpoly" style money 7 years ago. Color could have been added a long time ago, as well as different sizes for different denominations. We have the Crane Company of Taxacheussetts to thank for our slow rate of change and improvement:
http://www.lynknight.com/articles/article2077.chtm l
I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing.
Sure there is. Just because a term is overused doesn't mean it does not have legit application. Just because he doesn't like the term because it doesn't fit in with his vision does not provide a basis from which to dismiss the term.
Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are.
How many people today only design software, and never code or test it? How many people design software for software's sake, as opposed to people who design software that is supposed to do something and thereby provide a means to an end?
And he couldn't even 'splain the Desi-Lucy relationship correctly.
Hardware vendors, sure. Software vendors? I doubt it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the issue here was software and computer security via software, which is not a "plug-and-play" compatible function.
Most security compromises are external attacks, not root vs. non-root issues
If we make Linux harder to use then other operating systems, users will not embrace it. Users just want to get their work done, they don't want to be computer experts and they shouldn't have to be.
The Microsoft stranglehold on OEMs must be cracked to change the dynamics of the PC business. Until this happens, no desktop Linux company should be considered a viable longterm company.
...the world they grew up in. 95% of the world has grown up in a Microsoft virus-infested project. Microsoft has cleverly positioned it as a solely external problem so they don't have to incur the cost to fix it. Bravo to Microsoft for good marketing which has saved them billions in support.
On one hand, Kudos for being forthright and all that. On the other, what the heck is up with all the FUD?
Computers are not applicances, and we are a looonngg way from being there. Marketing them as such doesn't change that, and only creates a segment of the market similar to what the auto industry has to contend with: People who buy a car and never so much as change the oil let alone tune it up or check it up; then they bitch and moan when they start having problems and ultimately trade it in on something else they aren't going to take care of before they are anywhere near 100k on the odometer. Catering to these people (i.e. substantiating the MS BS by pandering to it) isn't going to help any vendor in particular, or the industry in general.
This gives news groups a much longer memory and, in theory, should prevent repetitive posts.
Based on what? Google is a tool. The mere existance of a tool does not perpetuate its use, does not make its use culturally acceptable nor widely known. It is partially for these reasons that those who are prone to repetitive posts will continue to make them.
Behavior that was both courteous and common on Usenet 15 years ago was done so in part out of necessity. Nearly everyone was paying for bandwidth based on usage. Large ISPs, the WWW, and the notion that people could get net access via a "home appliance" watered-down those necessities to where we are today: least common denominator courtesies and behaviours across both Usenet and the WWW. Repetitive posts are just one symptom of the de-evolution of the Net.
Application choice as a security feature
on
Securing Your Network?
·
· Score: 3, Flamebait
Our network is Novell, our e-mail is groupwise, and we don't use Cisco products. While not necessarily "low budget" in terms that the original poster implied, the net affect is that we don't have to contend with many of the viri that other companies running the typical MS products do. And yes, we most definitly still have to have a good firewall, and a good firewall config with the appropriate ports either shutdown or monitored, and we still run an e-mail scanner on in- and out-bound mail as well as McAfee on the desktops.
A secondary lesson we ought to have learned from the.com crash is that not everything under the sun can be funded via advertising. We already have most of television, radio, and the printed news media being funded via ads. A number of web sites get a significant amount of their revenue via ads. The trend here is that we keep expanding what advertising pays for with very little attrition at the legacy end of the spectrum. There are only so many advertising dollars available in the market, and they can only be spread so thin. With the recent trend for ad-creep in previously ad-free venues such as movie theatres, the room left for large industry shifts into ad-based revenue generation is practically non-existant. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for a product than pay higher costs on everything else to cover all the layers the money goes through.
So why haven't the arcade games so formative to geek youth (okay, geek 30somethings, young in the glory days of arcade play) gotten their due from the rest of popular culture?
As mentioned, this isn't exactly accurate. Arcades were and are still very much of an either/or proposition: Either you went, or you did not; and the folks in the later case greatly outnumbered those of us in the former. Yet anthor example of being good vs. being popular. If this doesn't make sense, watch Tron a couple of times through.
At my former job I was not allowed to code in C because the other System Admins (except 1) only knew shell programming, so everything was done via scripting, including some not-so-trivial EDI stuff that would have been much better done in C.
As soon as management gets involved with decisions like choice of development environment, politics and perceptions of cost (accurate or otherwise) become infinitely more important than applicability to the situation or efficiency of use.
That's quite a label for someone who wrote a basic compiler that's no longer used, and since has bought or borrowed code, or hired others to code the remainder of his company's technical products.
I think that this case (and subsequent appeal to the US Supremes, if that happens) will be a milestone precedent for privacy issues beyond its limited scope. This will be particularly so if/when this decision gets linked with the current government focus on identity theft by the FTC and other agencies. The key, as with many things, will be the timing. It may get lost for awhile behind Iraq, N. Korea, and the eoconomy, but I think the affects from this case will be long-term and far-reaching.
Slashdot Mirror
Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software.
.75 FTE for a Unix Admin for on-going support. This is about 5 times the need of any of our other Unix servers, and makes me wonder how much care & feeding the system will require just because of the buggy application. From my observations, the numbers quoted in the article for fixing software don't look high at all, and may in fact be too low.
The management mindset of "do it right now", as opposed to "do it right" is costing them more in both the short- and long-term. Until prevailing attitudes are changed on the part of those making the purchasing decisions, software makers will still have little motivation to change.
My employer is looking at a $1 million+ project for HR automation. $40k of that is for the unix server, the rest for software and "services". And this was, supposedly, the best software available. The vendor also recommended a
Does existing state law allow them to sell this from any other venue than the DMV? And, does ebay really meet the legal definition of being publically accessible? Does any Internet web site? And if so, why ebay? Why not make it available from some already existing state government web site?
The real question here being which are they more interested in doing: creating the special-use lane, or gouging people over it?
With respect to getting some action on any future attacks - what should I do? Who should I call?
Write your state's attorney general. Include all the information you collected, a more detailed explanation of what you posted here of the incident. Let them know you've contacted the FBI but I would lead them to any conclusions about where that is going. Request that their office look into this from both a pespective on the potential harm from the hack, and the responsibilities of your ISP to respond to, and ultimately, prevent this sort of thing.
Then, write each of your senators and your congress person. Before you do that, find out which committees they sit on and see how you can tie this in to their oversight responsibilities with regard to the various goverment offices that could be dealing with this. Point to anti-hacking legislation like the Patriot Act and anything anyone suggests, and then point out how the laws are not uniformly enforced. Point out that potential harm and not sheer magnitude of dollars expended ought to be a desiding criteria for launching an investigation, or not.
If you haven't already, fill out an incident report for your ISP to cover yourself. Those IP addresses belong to someone, and they have a responsibility in this. Whether direct, or indirect, remains to be seen.
Finally, contact your lawyer. If for no other reason, you will need some legal CYA in your back pocket as insurance, given the stir you've already started by contacted those people that you have. Not that you should have to worry about liability issues, but you never now.
HTH, good luck with it.
Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?"
If "overpromote" means we can now lose the phrase "not warranted for any particular use" from the various EULAs, then yes, we'd be better off. Software developers and distributors would then have to be people of their word, and their stuff would actually have to do what they say it does.
In the future when we build the next generation shuttle, they integrate some better sensors that would detect that kind of damage.
We already have them. They are called cameras.
If the two were to partner up and dump huge amounts of capital into developing a more robust and usable desktop there may be a chance.
This is what I was meant and should have just stated. Given that this is exactly how MS got control of the desktop in the first place, it becomes one of the more obvious solutions to take that control away from them. Note that obvious != efficient.
that is would be Sun in need of RedHat and not the reverse? This could be the combination that breaks the Microsoft desktop hegemony, if Sun and Redhat market it correctly toward that end.
Maybe I'm assuming an overly-broad definition of "day trader", in that I wouldn't expect all of them do al their own trades. For people with larger and/or fairly diverse portfolios, there is an advantage to working with a brokerage firm. Doing your own research on the web to get the up-to-the-minute info (such as it is) combined with watching the markets move in relation to that info and to each other isn't something I would expect those who do make use of a broker to competely eschew. Doing your own homework and making use of a broker gives you the best of both worlds in that now your are making an informed decision, but still getting some advice from another person who is (you hope) at least as well informed plus more experienced. Sure, it's a more costly route, but as long as that cost is covered by minimizing the risks inherant to stock and commodity trading, I'm sure there are those who find this approach well worth it. Also, I would expect that the brokerage firms make use of on-line information to one degree or another, and thus contribute to the overall bandwidth consumption.
Has anyone done any sort of bandwidth study looking at sites like etrade and yahoo, for purposes of determining any correlation between bandwidth consumption and movement on the stock markets? Intuition says that Monday mornings ought to see some sort of correlated spike.
Does this validate Microsoft's view of a "viral GPL"?"
Not at all. Releasing software, whether under the GPL or the MS EULA is an intentional action. Any sloppiness resulting in disclosing and/or giving away IP is the responsibility of those doing the software release.
The GPL is a tool. Consequences resulting from the use of any given tool are the burden of the weilder, not the tool.
More and more science is relying upon computer simulations in the place of Real World testing. Simulations are only as good as the infomation available to create them. If we really knew everything we needed to know about a particular application of scientific theories, we wouldn't need to run simulations, just to verify against a rather long and complex checklist.
There is currently a bill in Congress, in committee, that proposes chaning the reverse design for three years (2007 - 2009) to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birthday, and then would discontinue the penny. It specifically spells out how rounding would be done for cash transaction (down in amounts ending in 1, 2, 6, & 7 and up in amounts ending in 3, 4, 8, & 9). Check and electronic transactions would continue to be for exact amounts of the total purchase. Rounding would be done only on the total amount, and after state sales tax is applied.
and our coin system was specifically designed so that you'd be able to start from the biggest coin and work your way down
What is it with stories like this that prompt people to make-up (or pass one made up) stuff? "Our" (i.e. the US) coinage system was not specifically designed, it was the result of a compromise:
collectsource.com
It is a quasi-decimal system. For it to be a true decimal system, we'd have a 20 cent piece instead of a quarter, and a 40 cent piece instead of a half dollar. The quarter was retained because for over 100 years Americans had been using 2 bit and 2 reale coins. The half dollar was actually a useful coin, a day's wages for the higher paying skilled labor jobs back in the day.
Yes, the coin WAS broken up:
American Numismatic Association
And here's a chart illustrating the relation to the US quasi-decimal system that evolved from the Spanish system:
elcazador.com
Sorry, but these "was not/was so" postings get tiresome, particularly when substantiation can be googled-up so quickly.
US paper money remained vitually unchanged from 1969 until we went to the "mononpoly" style money 7 years ago. Color could have been added a long time ago, as well as different sizes for different denominations. We have the Crane Company of Taxacheussetts to thank for our slow rate of change and improvement:
m l
http://www.lynknight.com/articles/article2077.cht
I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing.
Sure there is. Just because a term is overused doesn't mean it does not have legit application. Just because he doesn't like the term because it doesn't fit in with his vision does not provide a basis from which to dismiss the term.
Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are.
How many people today only design software, and never code or test it? How many people design software for software's sake, as opposed to people who design software that is supposed to do something and thereby provide a means to an end?
And he couldn't even 'splain the Desi-Lucy relationship correctly.
Hardware vendors, sure. Software vendors? I doubt it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the issue here was software and computer security via software, which is not a "plug-and-play" compatible function.
Most security compromises are external attacks, not root vs. non-root issues
...the world they grew up in. 95% of the world has grown up in a Microsoft virus-infested project. Microsoft has cleverly positioned it as a solely external problem so they don't have to incur the cost to fix it. Bravo to Microsoft for good marketing which has saved them billions in support.
If we make Linux harder to use then other operating systems, users will not embrace it. Users just want to get their work done, they don't want to be computer experts and they shouldn't have to be.
The Microsoft stranglehold on OEMs must be cracked to change the dynamics of the PC business. Until this happens, no desktop Linux company should be considered a viable longterm company.
On one hand, Kudos for being forthright and all that. On the other, what the heck is up with all the FUD? Computers are not applicances, and we are a looonngg way from being there. Marketing them as such doesn't change that, and only creates a segment of the market similar to what the auto industry has to contend with: People who buy a car and never so much as change the oil let alone tune it up or check it up; then they bitch and moan when they start having problems and ultimately trade it in on something else they aren't going to take care of before they are anywhere near 100k on the odometer. Catering to these people (i.e. substantiating the MS BS by pandering to it) isn't going to help any vendor in particular, or the industry in general.
This gives news groups a much longer memory and, in theory, should prevent repetitive posts.
Based on what? Google is a tool. The mere existance of a tool does not perpetuate its use, does not make its use culturally acceptable nor widely known. It is partially for these reasons that those who are prone to repetitive posts will continue to make them.
Behavior that was both courteous and common on Usenet 15 years ago was done so in part out of necessity. Nearly everyone was paying for bandwidth based on usage. Large ISPs, the WWW, and the notion that people could get net access via a "home appliance" watered-down those necessities to where we are today: least common denominator courtesies and behaviours across both Usenet and the WWW. Repetitive posts are just one symptom of the de-evolution of the Net.
Our network is Novell, our e-mail is groupwise, and we don't use Cisco products. While not necessarily "low budget" in terms that the original poster implied, the net affect is that we don't have to contend with many of the viri that other companies running the typical MS products do. And yes, we most definitly still have to have a good firewall, and a good firewall config with the appropriate ports either shutdown or monitored, and we still run an e-mail scanner on in- and out-bound mail as well as McAfee on the desktops.
...The author discusses ad based models...
.com crash is that not everything under the sun can be funded via advertising. We already have most of television, radio, and the printed news media being funded via ads. A number of web sites get a significant amount of their revenue via ads. The trend here is that we keep expanding what advertising pays for with very little attrition at the legacy end of the spectrum. There are only so many advertising dollars available in the market, and they can only be spread so thin. With the recent trend for ad-creep in previously ad-free venues such as movie theatres, the room left for large industry shifts into ad-based revenue generation is practically non-existant. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for a product than pay higher costs on everything else to cover all the layers the money goes through.
A secondary lesson we ought to have learned from the
So why haven't the arcade games so formative to geek youth (okay, geek 30somethings, young in the glory days of arcade play) gotten their due from the rest of popular culture?
As mentioned, this isn't exactly accurate. Arcades were and are still very much of an either/or proposition: Either you went, or you did not; and the folks in the later case greatly outnumbered those of us in the former. Yet anthor example of being good vs. being popular. If this doesn't make sense, watch Tron a couple of times through.
mark
At my former job I was not allowed to code in C because the other System Admins (except 1) only knew shell programming, so everything was done via scripting, including some not-so-trivial EDI stuff that would have been much better done in C.
As soon as management gets involved with decisions like choice of development environment, politics and perceptions of cost (accurate or otherwise) become infinitely more important than applicability to the situation or efficiency of use.
"...the boy-wonder techie...
That's quite a label for someone who wrote a basic compiler that's no longer used, and since has bought or borrowed code, or hired others to code the remainder of his company's technical products.
I think that this case (and subsequent appeal to the US Supremes, if that happens) will be a milestone precedent for privacy issues beyond its limited scope. This will be particularly so if/when this decision gets linked with the current government focus on identity theft by the FTC and other agencies. The key, as with many things, will be the timing. It may get lost for awhile behind Iraq, N. Korea, and the eoconomy, but I think the affects from this case will be long-term and far-reaching.