If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity. Then the word 'free' could mean what everybody (even non GNU people) thinks it means, and this new phrase could mean what the GNU people are thinking (ie, 'Open Source') when they use the word 'free'.
Damned if I can come up with a catchy phrase that means 'Open Source' though... so I guess we're stuck fumble-fcuking around with the word 'free' and alienating people away from Linux in the process.
When I was young I had an older man explain to me "I strongly disagree with what you are saying, but I would fight to the death for your right to say it." Perhaps the spirit of the Linux community would be better served by promoting true software freedom, including the freedom to use non-free software in order to do what a Linux user wants to do.
Ding ding ding - we have a winner. Real coders write code that you can take a ruler from any given close brace and draw a vertical line right up to the matching open brace, every time. Everybody else gets fired.
Lines are cheap. Time added trying to figure out an obfuscated code structure because somebody wanted to save lines (ie, put the open brace on the same line instead of doing the above) is expensive.
Good point. Three days ago network admins from here were lining up eagerly to hire on with the City of SF. Now that the whole story is coming out, nobody in their right minds would want to work for those back-stabbing motherfuckers for less than half a mil / year.
Holy crap, I never thought of the six degrees thing like that.
I met GWB in Bedford NH when he was campaigning in 2000, shook his hand and had a little chat (before he was elected.) I'm guessing mine goes GWB - some Army General - Army guy that found Saddam - Hussein = 4.
I never really looked it up, but if GWB thanked any of the guys that handled SH personally, I'm a 3. Crap.
Here's a thought - make that protective behavior work for, not against the city.
Have someone from Cisco walk in and say Terry, the network is down. The bytes aren't traveling any more. The users are crying because they can't use their applications any more. And you aren't helping, Terry. Why aren't you helping? Give me the password, Terry - the network is down. Every second we spend talking about it another million bytes of data die, unable to traverse your network.
That would work a LOT better than any other approach, I'm guessing.
$11,000 is considered enough to leave the country and start a new life under an assumed alias?
Shit I'm sitting on $71,000 in cash (well, invested in liquid investments) and there's no way I would even consider cashing out and hopping a plane to some far away country to start a new life. Even if I cashed out my 401(k) to double that sum to somewhere in the $150k range.. hmmm...
Begs a different question - just how much is 'enough' to cash out and do the non-forced equiv of flight risk (ie, go to some other country and start a new life)?
As a system administrator - oh I assure you, they ~can~.
Now whether they can use anything they found in there to assist police in their prosecution of someone, or whether they can even publicly or privately even admit that I did it is another story - but admins can look, and some do (I don't, out of personal conviction.)
Trust me on that. And they remember what they see.
Actually - I see this as a very good day. Today... is the day we really learn how secure a determined admin of whatever system this is can make a system. Today... we learn whether big systems have back doors for the NSA. Today... we learn whether physical access to a system really does mean pwned, or if we have passed that final barrier. Today... is Independence DAY!
(Plus - I don't live anywhere near SF, so I don't mind using their system as the scratch monkey.)
Maybe this guy could call Kevin Mitnick for some advice. No really - I'm guessing that Kev is probably still pretty upset about that whole 'five years in jail without being charged for a crime' or whatever it was, but if anybody is going to tell it like it is, it's Kev (because he knows - the rest of us are just speculating.)
Maybe SF can call in Kev as a hostage negotiator. Give the sys/admin his choice - talk to Kev and work it out, or talk to the waterboard.
At least give peace a chance - what's the worst that could happen?
I'm not sure what was funnier - his sarcasm, or your naivety. If you don't think that the SF government is already looking for a couple of pipe hittin' niggas to get medieval on his ass with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch... yes, to get a password... you're miserably deluded.
Secure business computer systems : [ ]cheap [ ]good (pick one.)
You can hire an entire team of sys/admins that share redundant responsibilities of running the boxes, a separate group of backup/admins that make sure the systems are backed up, a separate group that does id management, a security group that ties the id mgmt and sys/admin groups together, developers that only have access to dev / test systems (not production), a separate group of production support people that have access to the production boxes but not dev / test, a separate set of business users that test the code in test to insure it does what the coders say it does, a separate group that has no clue what the systems do but they move code that has been signed off on by the business testers from test to prod, and a separate audit group that makes sure each different group only does what they are supposed to do and nothing they are not supposed to do - if you do this, it is possible to have a secure system. Not cheap, but potentially secure.
Or you can have one guy do everything and get all of the above for $98k a year. It's secure until you piss off that one guy, then you're totally fucked. As we're seeing in this story.
To tell the truth - if the city had been following the same Sarbanes Oxley regulations that the government has imposed on every publicly traded company in the country - this never would have been possible. Come to think of it - shouldn't they have been SOX compliant also, not to mention HIPPA and maybe a few other security / privacy mandates? It's not just a good idea - it's the LAW.
It wasn't particularly difficult, since Novell booted first to the standard DOS (yes, THAT DOS) and was kicked into NetWare via a call to a batch file that was called by the autoexec.bat
Simply rename the called bat file (novell.bat, if I recall correctly - maybe not) and make a new one that echos to the screen THIS MACHINE HAS BEEN LOCKED FOR NON-PAYMENT TO THE NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR (or CONTRACTOR, if that was the case) in large letters. Think about it - not particularly difficult to fix if you know what you are doing, but most small companies that hire contractors to admin their NetWare boxes didn't - but what new contractor is going to even touch the box that says it is down because the client didn't pay their last contractor? Best thing is - it doesn't take effect until the next reboot, which could be days, months (or years - given it is a NetWare box.)
Woah - slow down there trigger. I rode a motorcycle in college that got 4 mph better gas mileage at 75 mph than it did at 55 mph - 44mpg vs 40mpg. Plus, people tend to get really, really irate about driving 55mph because what really happens is that one person drives 55 when everybody else wants to drive 75, causing tailgating and accidents. The 35mph number, if a car has to downshift a gear to run 35 without lugging the motor - actually causes WORSE gas mileage than perhaps a slightly faster number where cars can run in a higher gear. If we could figure out a way to let everybody drive the same speed, evenly spaced out with little or no speeding up / slowing down - then we would save gas - here's a thought : how about synchronizing the stoplights in town to maximize the flow of traffic...
Plus - the cocksuckers with the lights on their car roof take those numbers as a way to generate revenue, and you will NEVER get good enough gas mileage savings to make up the cost of all the speeding tickets / insurance rate increases that will hit across the nation.
Because I have the tire pressure gauge on my dash I noticed it was going up again, so I let some air out (so it was 35psi cold (ie, not driven yet that day), where cold was a lot warmer than in the winter.)
Moral of the story : measure and adjust your air pressure once every month or two, get better gas mileage. I knew a guy that measured his air pressure every time he filled the gas tank, but he was pretty meticulous (then again, he was also very wealthy. Correlation?)
That's where the fallacy lies - do the math. How about we actually put pen to paper on this one and figure out exactly how much money we would save in fuel costs each year :
I am going to be generous and work with easy numbers - $4 gasoline, 1,200 miles per month.
Start with a relatively easy to find 40 mpg car : 1,200 miles / 40mpg = 30 gallons * $4 = $120 per month.
Crank that up to one of those Volkswagon TDI or a hybrid getting 50 mpg : 1,200 miles / 50mpg = 24 gallons * $4 = $96 per month. Saved about $25 per month.
And now for this ultra-cool one man car made of recycled SR-71 parts at 235 mpg : 1,200 miles / 235mpg = 5 gallons! 5 * $4 = $20 total fuel costs for the month. Which sounds great, except it's only saving about $75 per month, assuming the production models get the same mileage as their hand made prototype - which isn't going to happen.
Let's pretend they get them in viable quantities getting 120mpg, which is still crazy good, right? 1,200 miles / 120mpg = still only 10 gallons, which is only $40. Pretty awesome! Except compared to a current Prius or a VW TDI, you're only saving $55 a month.
It's because of the way the 1/x curve flattens out on the tail end, after about 40-50 mpg it really doesn't make much of a difference. The dollar difference between 40mpg and 120mpg is the same dollar difference between 17mpg and 21mpg, again - because the curve of 1/x is so high below 20mpg. Get down into the 9mpg-11mpg range and difference for every 1mpg = $40.
Want to make a killer difference in our gas consumption, engineer a way to make the current 500 million cars already on the roads today get 3 more mpg, because I figure 1/3rd of the cars on the road are in the sub 20mpg range.
I already figured that one out too - tire pressure during the winter. I used to think that the gas stations used different formulas in the winter (which they probably do) which is why my gas mileage went from 21 in the summer to 17 in the winter (which wasn't why.) My most recent car has air pressure sensors on the tires so I noticed that during the winter months the air pressure in the tires dropped from 35psi to about 28psi (cold air shrinks) - when I pressured up my tires to the suggested 35psi, my gas mileage went right back to 21mpg. How many people go the entire winter without adding air to their tires (well... it doesn't look flat and it had plenty of air in August, air isn't leaking out...) and spend their entire lives thinking the reason they get crap gas mileage in the winter because of the 'winter gasoline formula'? Bingo.
Yea - when I can get 750MB/s sustained throughput to / from hard drives, count me in. Until then, I'm saving my pennies for a rig like Nostromo5 over on Overclockers. Six SSDs (Gigabyte iRAM) running RAID 0, using a second computer (actually just a powered motherboard) to host and power them. That's three Gigabytes of data every four seconds, sustained. Best part - he did it almost a year ago - not sure what's come of it since then.
Ask yourself how many DELL laptops are being shipped with Linux on them, and how many end users will leave the Linux on their new Dell laptop and actually use it regularly.
The answer will surprise you : almost ALL of them.
The MediaDirect functionality that's being shipped on every Dell laptop that comes with the media buttons on the front (so the user can play music, DVDs, etc) without booting the system - is running Linux. So yea - Linux is out there, and people are using it. Maybe not as originally intended, or to the limits of its ability - but it's definitely being used.
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If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity. Then the word 'free' could mean what everybody (even non GNU people) thinks it means, and this new phrase could mean what the GNU people are thinking (ie, 'Open Source') when they use the word 'free'.
Damned if I can come up with a catchy phrase that means 'Open Source' though ... so I guess we're stuck fumble-fcuking around with the word 'free' and alienating people away from Linux in the process.
All I know is that every time I even mention quantum computing my cat gets nervous and absolutely refuses to get in the box.
When I was young I had an older man explain to me "I strongly disagree with what you are saying, but I would fight to the death for your right to say it."
Perhaps the spirit of the Linux community would be better served by promoting true software freedom, including the freedom to use non-free software in order to do what a Linux user wants to do.
That is, after all, what freedom is all about.
Ding ding ding - we have a winner.
Real coders write code that you can take a ruler from any given close brace and draw a vertical line right up to the matching open brace, every time. Everybody else gets fired.
Lines are cheap. Time added trying to figure out an obfuscated code structure because somebody wanted to save lines (ie, put the open brace on the same line instead of doing the above) is expensive.
Good point. Three days ago network admins from here were lining up eagerly to hire on with the City of SF. Now that the whole story is coming out, nobody in their right minds would want to work for those back-stabbing motherfuckers for less than half a mil / year.
Maybe they have a policy that says he is never to give his password to anybody else. I'm guessing they do, and he is dutifully following policy.
Holy crap, I never thought of the six degrees thing like that.
I met GWB in Bedford NH when he was campaigning in 2000, shook his hand and had a little chat (before he was elected.) I'm guessing mine goes GWB - some Army General - Army guy that found Saddam - Hussein = 4.
I never really looked it up, but if GWB thanked any of the guys that handled SH personally, I'm a 3. Crap.
3. I know a girl ...
Ok, I call shenanigans.
But we can now add a new one to the list:
'What if you get thrown in jail with $5M bail?'
Because now all of us know someone like that.
Here's a thought - make that protective behavior work for, not against the city.
Have someone from Cisco walk in and say
Terry, the network is down.
The bytes aren't traveling any more.
The users are crying because they can't use their applications any more.
And you aren't helping, Terry.
Why aren't you helping?
Give me the password, Terry - the network is down. Every second we spend talking about it another million bytes of data die, unable to traverse your network.
That would work a LOT better than any other approach, I'm guessing.
$11,000 is considered enough to leave the country and start a new life under an assumed alias?
Shit I'm sitting on $71,000 in cash (well, invested in liquid investments) and there's no way I would even consider cashing out and hopping a plane to some far away country to start a new life. Even if I cashed out my 401(k) to double that sum to somewhere in the $150k range .. hmmm...
Begs a different question - just how much is 'enough' to cash out and do the non-forced equiv of flight risk (ie, go to some other country and start a new life)?
As a system administrator - oh I assure you, they ~can~.
Now whether they can use anything they found in there to assist police in their prosecution of someone, or whether they can even publicly or privately even admit that I did it is another story - but admins can look, and some do (I don't, out of personal conviction.)
Trust me on that. And they remember what they see.
Take the hard drive out of the broken screen unit and put it in a new unit.
Sixty seconds later you are back in business.
The cost of the hardware is immaterial compared to the contents on the drive.
Actually - I see this as a very good day. ... is the day we really learn how secure a determined admin of whatever system this is can make a system. ... we learn whether big systems have back doors for the NSA. ... we learn whether physical access to a system really does mean pwned, or if we have passed that final barrier. ... is Independence DAY!
Today
Today
Today
Today
(Plus - I don't live anywhere near SF, so I don't mind using their system as the scratch monkey.)
Maybe this guy could call Kevin Mitnick for some advice.
No really - I'm guessing that Kev is probably still pretty upset about that whole 'five years in jail without being charged for a crime' or whatever it was, but if anybody is going to tell it like it is, it's Kev (because he knows - the rest of us are just speculating.)
Maybe SF can call in Kev as a hostage negotiator. Give the sys/admin his choice - talk to Kev and work it out, or talk to the waterboard.
At least give peace a chance - what's the worst that could happen?
I'm not sure what was funnier - his sarcasm, or your naivety. If you don't think that the SF government is already looking for a couple of pipe hittin' niggas to get medieval on his ass with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch ... yes, to get a password ... you're miserably deluded.
(Credits to Pulp Fiction.)
Patriot Act. Nuff said.
"First they came for the terrorists and I said nothing, for I was not a terrorist."
And THIS is the crux of the story.
Secure business computer systems :
[ ]cheap
[ ]good
(pick one.)
You can hire an entire team of sys/admins that share redundant responsibilities of running the boxes, a separate group of backup/admins that make sure the systems are backed up, a separate group that does id management, a security group that ties the id mgmt and sys/admin groups together, developers that only have access to dev / test systems (not production), a separate group of production support people that have access to the production boxes but not dev / test, a separate set of business users that test the code in test to insure it does what the coders say it does, a separate group that has no clue what the systems do but they move code that has been signed off on by the business testers from test to prod, and a separate audit group that makes sure each different group only does what they are supposed to do and nothing they are not supposed to do - if you do this, it is possible to have a secure system. Not cheap, but potentially secure.
Or you can have one guy do everything and get all of the above for $98k a year. It's secure until you piss off that one guy, then you're totally fucked. As we're seeing in this story.
To tell the truth - if the city had been following the same Sarbanes Oxley regulations that the government has imposed on every publicly traded company in the country - this never would have been possible. Come to think of it - shouldn't they have been SOX compliant also, not to mention HIPPA and maybe a few other security / privacy mandates? It's not just a good idea - it's the LAW.
It wasn't particularly difficult, since Novell booted first to the standard DOS (yes, THAT DOS) and was kicked into NetWare via a call to a batch file that was called by the autoexec.bat
Simply rename the called bat file (novell.bat, if I recall correctly - maybe not) and make a new one that echos to the screen THIS MACHINE HAS BEEN LOCKED FOR NON-PAYMENT TO THE NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR (or CONTRACTOR, if that was the case) in large letters.
Think about it - not particularly difficult to fix if you know what you are doing, but most small companies that hire contractors to admin their NetWare boxes didn't - but what new contractor is going to even touch the box that says it is down because the client didn't pay their last contractor? Best thing is - it doesn't take effect until the next reboot, which could be days, months (or years - given it is a NetWare box.)
Umm... or so I've heard.
Woah - slow down there trigger. I rode a motorcycle in college that got 4 mph better gas mileage at 75 mph than it did at 55 mph - 44mpg vs 40mpg. Plus, people tend to get really, really irate about driving 55mph because what really happens is that one person drives 55 when everybody else wants to drive 75, causing tailgating and accidents. The 35mph number, if a car has to downshift a gear to run 35 without lugging the motor - actually causes WORSE gas mileage than perhaps a slightly faster number where cars can run in a higher gear. If we could figure out a way to let everybody drive the same speed, evenly spaced out with little or no speeding up / slowing down - then we would save gas - here's a thought : how about synchronizing the stoplights in town to maximize the flow of traffic ...
Plus - the cocksuckers with the lights on their car roof take those numbers as a way to generate revenue, and you will NEVER get good enough gas mileage savings to make up the cost of all the speeding tickets / insurance rate increases that will hit across the nation.
I may be mistaken, but a leaner running engine is more efficient, not less.
Because I have the tire pressure gauge on my dash I noticed it was going up again, so I let some air out (so it was 35psi cold (ie, not driven yet that day), where cold was a lot warmer than in the winter.)
Moral of the story : measure and adjust your air pressure once every month or two, get better gas mileage. I knew a guy that measured his air pressure every time he filled the gas tank, but he was pretty meticulous (then again, he was also very wealthy. Correlation?)
That's where the fallacy lies - do the math.
How about we actually put pen to paper on this one and figure out exactly how much money we would save in fuel costs each year :
I am going to be generous and work with easy numbers - $4 gasoline, 1,200 miles per month.
Start with a relatively easy to find 40 mpg car :
1,200 miles / 40mpg = 30 gallons * $4 = $120 per month.
Crank that up to one of those Volkswagon TDI or a hybrid getting 50 mpg :
1,200 miles / 50mpg = 24 gallons * $4 = $96 per month. Saved about $25 per month.
And now for this ultra-cool one man car made of recycled SR-71 parts at 235 mpg :
1,200 miles / 235mpg = 5 gallons!
5 * $4 = $20 total fuel costs for the month. Which sounds great, except it's only saving about $75 per month, assuming the production models get the same mileage as their hand made prototype - which isn't going to happen.
Let's pretend they get them in viable quantities getting 120mpg, which is still crazy good, right?
1,200 miles / 120mpg = still only 10 gallons, which is only $40. Pretty awesome!
Except compared to a current Prius or a VW TDI, you're only saving $55 a month.
It's because of the way the 1/x curve flattens out on the tail end, after about 40-50 mpg it really doesn't make much of a difference. The dollar difference between 40mpg and 120mpg is the same dollar difference between 17mpg and 21mpg, again - because the curve of 1/x is so high below 20mpg. Get down into the 9mpg-11mpg range and difference for every 1mpg = $40.
Want to make a killer difference in our gas consumption, engineer a way to make the current 500 million cars already on the roads today get 3 more mpg, because I figure 1/3rd of the cars on the road are in the sub 20mpg range.
I already figured that one out too - tire pressure during the winter. I used to think that the gas stations used different formulas in the winter (which they probably do) which is why my gas mileage went from 21 in the summer to 17 in the winter (which wasn't why.) My most recent car has air pressure sensors on the tires so I noticed that during the winter months the air pressure in the tires dropped from 35psi to about 28psi (cold air shrinks) - when I pressured up my tires to the suggested 35psi, my gas mileage went right back to 21mpg. How many people go the entire winter without adding air to their tires (well ... it doesn't look flat and it had plenty of air in August, air isn't leaking out ...) and spend their entire lives thinking the reason they get crap gas mileage in the winter because of the 'winter gasoline formula'? Bingo.
Sort of reminds me of this little exchange :
Mr. Dent, have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?
How much?
None at all.
Yea - when I can get 750MB/s sustained throughput to / from hard drives, count me in. Until then, I'm saving my pennies for a rig like Nostromo5 over on Overclockers. Six SSDs (Gigabyte iRAM) running RAID 0, using a second computer (actually just a powered motherboard) to host and power them. That's three Gigabytes of data every four seconds, sustained. Best part - he did it almost a year ago - not sure what's come of it since then.
Details here
Ask yourself how many DELL laptops are being shipped with Linux on them, and how many end users will leave the Linux on their new Dell laptop and actually use it regularly.
The answer will surprise you : almost ALL of them.
The MediaDirect functionality that's being shipped on every Dell laptop that comes with the media buttons on the front (so the user can play music, DVDs, etc) without booting the system - is running Linux.
So yea - Linux is out there, and people are using it. Maybe not as originally intended, or to the limits of its ability - but it's definitely being used.