Anyone here remember the days of email nuke scripts? Aka, enter an address and it blows out 10k one line messages. Its a shame a couple of these couldn't be rigged to fire back at spammers...however I know its pretty easy to black hole such attempts because I wrote a number of scripts that did just that and ISP actually have filters in place to prevent that sort of things now.
Anyway, I use Spamassassin on our company mail server with spam going to/dev/null and automatically deleted and then use the Junk filter in Mac Mail. I know before I installed spamassassin we were getting about 3500 spam emails per day between the six of us in the office. Now maybe 1 a day gets to my inbox and about 4 are in my Junk filter. Funny thing is the filter takes mods and replys from slashdot and marks them as spam.
China also has a people in power that has enough sense to know that the use of nuclear weapons would assure their own destruction. They sabre rattle over Taiwann once a year, but are more interested in developing their economy than taking over their neighbors.
Iraq does not
True, thank you Isreal. They bombed Saddam's French supplied nuclear reactor in 1981. Isreal gets a lot flack for their unilateralist actions, but that probably prevented Saddam from having those weapons in 1991.
Much easier to invade a country and get rid of some assholes when they can't turn you or your major cities into a radioactive cinder.
Oh and then there's that thing about having a bajillion troops.
Yeah, why the development of ABM, especially of theatre level, defenses would be a good idea. And just remember this: a bajillion troops vs. the amount of firepower contain with in one of our ballistic missle subs...
Before people get to terriably paranoid, my basic read of the situation is that Taiwan is basically wanting to hold a vote to tell chia, "Please point your missiles in another direction".
Second off, we (the USA) have an agreement with Taiwan streching back to the 1950's stating that we will come to their defense in case of invastion or attack by China on Taiwan, and let's face it, that is one area China doesn't want to go. They have as much or more to lose in a conflict than anyone.
My favorite argument is that, "China has the largest army in the world with some 50million troops" My typical response is, "50 million men won't do you much good against the 50 megatons of nuclear warheads just one of our balistic missle subs carry."
The main reason why I am for keeping an active nuclear weapons stockpile on hand: Assured or Mutually Assured Destruction makes not even going there the only option...
I have been using Blender since 1.8. At the time I was working as a system admin for an arcitecture and GA firm. They were using a special packge designed for ALPHA processors and 3D studio for everything else.
Blender had that year of non-development and was stuck at 2.23 until NAN was able to get the donations to free the code.
Since Blender has come a long way adding in Quicktime export, a new interface, NTSC (16:9 HD) rendering size. Granted the Game engine had been removed, but still it was comming along and getting a lot of attention.
I just worked this fall for my old company as a consultant helping them move to Maya and Linux. They spend about $40k on Maya linceses. They looked at blender, but the fact that one had to export to a 3rd party app, like POV-Ray, for raytracing was a big strike against it.
I hope they leave Raytracing as an option, because one of Blender's advatages was it its speed without raytracing.
And WinME is any better? Or 2kpro or XP? How many people will receive spam, probably not too many. He maybe spends 3 hours online on a dial up connection a week. At those are the weeks he's at home. He's retired and spends a lot of time down at the farm.
Yes, I pointed out there would not be any more security updates. He uses Netscape and Netscape Mail for emailing and he has Zone Alarm and Norton 2003 installed.
Bottom line: Every Operating system is guaranteed vunerable. I've working in IT security for 3 years before going into consulting and I have run everything from Win 95 to OpenBSD. I mean having a firewall and antivirus is more than most home users have.
My father is still using 98. In fact he just had to reinstall everything after a virus. All he does is use it to check his stocks, email, and minor web surfing. I can't think of any good reason to spend the money upgrading his 400Mhz K6-2.
I walked him through the process and told him that Win 98 support was going out the window at year's end. This isn't the first time this story has graced/.. He didn't seem to care and has no plans to upgrade until the hardware gives out and the harddrive fails or something like that.
What business world do you live on? We have lost clients before when we failed to communicate within 24 hours. When you deal in consulting or anything in marketing and sales, if you fail to return a call or email, you've lost a customer.
There are times when I am out of town on business or we have a large project due and I have to shut off the cell phones and unplug from the internet. And everytime, we end up making someone mad because the couldn't reach us. Again this was the early days and there were times we had more jobs than time offered to us and to actually get anything done, we had too. Also, back then if we lost a cusomter, there were two more to replace them. However, our business thrives on repeat business. Your going to lose 20% every year no matter how good you are, and replacing those is expesnive in terms of marketing. Plus if you don't get back with one client, they tell 5 others about your shitty job.
We are past our start phase and now at least have a secetary in the office that handles our incomming calls and such, but email is a differnet story.
Often times my clients expect a respons within hours. Usually its within hours. It finally got to the point that I check my messages in the morning, handle any important stuff (usually an hour), spend my lunch answering messages while eating my sandwich, and then once before I leave at night to get anything important.
I average 200 messages a day non-spam and about 130 usually require a response of some kind. There have been days where I have spent 6 hours answering emails and not getting another blasted thing done.
That site about the macs is hilarious. What's he going to attack next? phpWebsite because users can be made "Deity" (admin)and others "Mortal".
I mean his talking about internal lingo like "firewire". WTF, I mean the real l33t speak would be IEEE 1394. I mean I am sure if I went to every digital photographer I knew and asked how they liked their 1394 port, 90% would say, "What?".
I am a mac user and switched from Linux to Mac because Windows 98 sucked so much I was willing to tweak Linux to get it to work as a desktop in 1998. I also use FreeBSD and have a pull over fleece I got as a door prize to a convention or seminar once. I stil like is "Obsolete BSD Unix". I mean I guess the next thread will be, "See even the radical christain right says BSD is dying!".
Anywho, I use macs on a daily basis at work and like them because they are a superior platform for our office. I still go to church, but hey, I'm an Episcopalian (Anglican). We seem to be pissing the good southern baptist off at the moment with our gay bishop...oh wait maybe this guy has a point...
I worked for a DOD sub-contractor that was writing such "Blackhole" scripts to block email nukers exploiting military mail servers back in the day (circa 1997). It will help, but its not a cure all.
I work with several small businesses, and the TCO for them to move off of windows to say Linux in many cases would be amazing. Why? These are not experts and often do not have internal IT staff to support products.
They aren't looking for choice as much as they are products that work and are easy to use. While Linux is getting better, its not there yet. At least with Windows, there is no shortage of people that know how to use it. Try explaining the difference between Mozilla and Netscape to these people. They don't care, all they want is a browser and they'll read about how some block pop-ups ads and will say, "Get me one of those".
We use SQL-Ledger for our company accounting, however we have the IT staff that understands PostgreSQL and Unix server along with PERL. Joe's Hobbies down the street doesn't and Simply Accounting or QuickBooks works for them.
Now we have sucessfully coverted several offices from Windows to Macintosh. Why? Its easy to use, it has a lot of commerical support from many software and hardware vendors, and it has SMB critical applications like Quickbooks ported to the system. Now, I have three contracts for after the beginning of the year to help businesses switch to OpenOffice. Once they discovered it will meet the basic needs, word processor and spreadsheet, and the presentation portition looks almost exactly like PowerPoint 2000, they loved the it and the price.
In the server world, its a different story. Typically datacenters and server admins will support what ever will work the best for them, even if it is a btich to set up. If fork x does better than y, great. Also, their managers and bosses don't care so long as it works.
Generally speaking, forking is one of the major reason I use FreeBSD over Linux. I like how the organization, as elitest as it may be, works. There are how many differnet distros of linux and how many FreeBSD's again. When we write software, it may work on SuSE and RH, but not slackware. When we write an application for FreeBSD, chances are its going work unless the admin has tweaked the hell out of the system.
Third, I have been in the real world thank you. The real world where college students can get worse punishment for copying CDs than robbing a bank. The real world, where companies like Mocrosoft leveraged "intellectual property" to put countless thousands out of work in other companies. The real world, where free to coppy opperating systems are more secure and reliable than closed ones, and more financially productive.I am so sick and tired of people screeming bloody murder that they have a right to make a living, while what they really want is the right to screw over, controll, and nickel and dime everyone else to their benefit.
It is bad enough that they screwed over everyone else with their worthless shallow attitude, but that they are also locking themselves out of the future is just plain sick.
Okay this is where I have to draw the line. If that's you beef with the music industry, I'm not going to argue. The RIAA is using dirty tactics and there are is a lot of abuses of the IP systems. RIAA and music industry is also guilty of price-fixing and unfair practices. I'm not going to argue that.
However, I work around people on a daily basis that earn the money to pay rent/house payment and buy food from the copyright system. And its not a bunch of bull. I make about $250 a month on royalities from my personal artwork I create in Blender. If I did not have the legal protection of the copyright, that's $250 a month that I wouldn't make. Why? Because chances are those that sell my work or use it for whatever purpose wouldn't have to pay me or at least get my permission to use the work.
I work with writers that have their articles and stories published in magizines, newspapers, and journals from around the world. If they would release their work without copyright, what is to keep a company or org like the AP or Gannett or Tribune from running their work without paying them a dime? Remeber Stephen Ambros and how his career got ruined right before he died because he had stolen from other's works? If it was not for copyrights those whom he borrowed subjects and straight out copied text out of would have had no claims that he had ripped them off. He made a name for himself on the work of others. Whether it was intentional or not...that's a different story, but this is what would happen without copyrights.
College students should be held responsible for their actions. If you break a law, you should be punished. My biggest beef is the "Weasel out of it" and lack of personal integerity and stepping up for personal responsiblity in the world. I travel a lot to other countries on business and pleasure and sometimes I come home and get really mad when I see people blaming everyone else. If what your doing is illgeal and you know it, SOL.
Opensource/free software is not always cheaper or better. My main area in our company is technology consulting. I've overseen 2 office switch from Windows to Linux on their desktops. They had the internal IT staff that had been running Linux on servers since about 2000/2001.
For mom&pop shop on the corner, unless they are technically savvy, they are best to probably go with a windows or Macintosh system. I have two meetings this week with companies that are going to buying Mac's for their next desktop machines to discuss details. Both are leaving windows behind for their own reasons. But still, for small businesses, it has to be common and easy to use. Especially with the prices RH is going to start charging for their update services. For small business, Linux is out of reach (I am talking companies with less than 25 employees).
I know, because as a small business manager, I don't have time to mess with things. I left windows 98 for SuSE 6.4 as my desktop of choice in 1999 or early 2000. I can't remember now. I did so for about two years. Then I switched all my servers once I got familer with a *iux eviroment to FreeBSD because I liked the OS better. Its a personal ch
I help convert two offices with about 40 employees each from Win to Linux. One of the major reason was it would work on their ageing ~PIII 700Mhz with 256MB of ram without any issues. We chose SuSE for one and RH for the other and when they need new hardware, they can go get white boxes from tigerdirect or whomever running like 1.2 Ghz AMD chips for under $300 and be happy for many years to come. Barring hardware failures, that should extend their current technology's use by another 2 - 3 years. Our company uses 100% Macintosh on the desktop. I have an older 1.2Ghz Althon machine with FreeBSD at home I use and I don't plan on upgrading that anytime soon. Hell we have Pentium Pro 200 servers that are still running FreeBSD 3.4.
Hell I just installed an older version of NetBSD on a 486DX2 66Mhz last week that we use as a file server. We put a new 30GB HD in, but for an office of 4 employees needing to back up word documents, it chugs along nicely and we got it for free.
Linux needs to be upgraded and patched just like any OS, however you can purchase a single copy of say SuSE and install it on as many computers as you need. If a company has say 100 computers, you can save thousands everytime a new version of windows comes out.
I have spoken with many companies that are looking into Linux to increase the life of their existing hardware. COmapnies are tired of the 2 years upgrade game and after the first of the year, we have contracts to oversee 6 offices switching to OpenOffice and provide training and helping 3 other companies switch to or upgrade their Macintosh systems.
and his hospital, University of Missouri-Columbia's I think is the one he is at, they have been running Linux and MySQL for a couple years. I don't know for sure what data they are storing, but he said they haven't had any problems to speak of and are pleased with it speed and realiablity.
So do I, and I have had times where that has saved me money because I could report fraud to the CC company. Once I was being doubled billed for web-hosting and Mastercard took care of the problem when I alerted them of what was going on. I didn't have to pay a cent. In fact I don't care my Debit card anymore accept when I know I am going to the ATM.
So you'd want to starve writers of their hard work? What if you had a great idea you wanted to tell the world about. If there wasn't a copyright, then Joe down the street could cut and paste and say, "Hey, I had this great idea!" when all they did is copy your idea. You don't even get CREDIT for your work. Where is the motivation to do anything?
What about photographers? I work with a number of photographers in this area and they make their living by selling people pictures. If people can download or take to Walgreens and make copies freely, then that robs the artist of ther hard earned income.
I know a couple weeks ago wedding photographers were said to be overpaid, but that is bunk. My company does alot of advise and consult work and most now most buy a new digital camera ranging in price from $3k - $15k a year plus $1500 a year on software not to mention digital storage systems, etc. Also, most smaller photographers send their work off to photolabs. Yeah, they may charge like $3k to take pictures, but they might see $500 in actual profit when its all said and done.
Better yet, Artist. We run a digital reproduction facility and do a lot of reproduction work for local artists. If they paint a really cool picture, should they be allowed to reap the benefits? If there were no copyrights, we'd might buy it then resell the design on 1000's of items and not have to pay one cent to the artist that created it. Is that fair?
I also know someone that owns a local tool & die shop. He had invented a special die for mounting signs to poles and didn't get a patent on it. 18 months later, cheaper parts identical to his were comming in from Pakistan and India. That was his fault not to get the patent, but see what would happen if there wasn't such a system in place for rewarding creativity.
That's not to say there are some abuse in the current system and even more absurditive, but I for one believe there should be an incentive for people to create.
I do a lot of digital art in terragen, yes we have the commercial version, and sell prints as a hobby. I have had my art work ripped off before from the internet and had to sue the infringer. When I was in college, I used Napster, fell into the "Oh this Copyright is bunk" crowd, then got into the real world and found there are good reason to have such a system.
OSS is 1% gem, 99% crap. I mean honestly, how many hangman scripts does the world need?
There is a mentality by some, not all, in the OSS world that anything closed source to hit their computers is bad. I was at a convention recently about 3D animation software. One of my big consulting clients is a medium sized arcitecture/graphics firm. They had just abandoned some very cool software designed to run on the DEC Alpha platform for Maya and they chose to run it on Linux. Why? They tested Maya on both Wintel, Linux on x86, and Macintosh. The designers seem to like it on Linux and it was stable. Plus Linux would run on their existing hardware without any problems.
Anyway, at this convention, there was one Linux Zeloat there that couldn't "Believe you would tait the pureness of the OSS Linux with that commercial crap. Haven't you heard of Blender?" At first I thought he was joking.
I had used blender for personal use since 1.8. Yes, Blender is a good program, but even for someone like me the learning curve is steep as hell. Plus you have to export to a 3rd party app for rendering with raytracing. Blender is comming along and has had some nice features added since reaching OSS land.
However, 3 of their Graphic Artist had previous experience with Maya and could help the other two learn the program. The simple fact this company was going to ditch Windows for Linux should be a victory for the OS and OSS land. But the mentaily of "All OSS or non at all" held by some is a mistake.
Look at GIMP. I know 2.0 is scheduled for release soon, but GIMP today compared to that of 1999...it hasn't changed much. Back when I was using Photoshop 4 & the early days of 5, I thought for sure that GIMP would leap frog them or at least improve to the point of being an equal. It almost appears that GIMP developement stood still while Photoshop 6 and then 7 was realeased with many great new features. Maybe 2.0 will see some improvements, but that is one example of where OSS hasn't surpassed its commerical counterparts.
If Linux is going to thrive on the desktop, it will need supported non-OSS software from people like Adobe and Macromedia. I will pay for good software, and so will many others. Free is looked upon with a keen eye, Econ 101: THere is no free lunch.
The days of the governments not interfering with the internet and it being a "wild-west frontier" of technology are over. Its probably a poor analogy, but its like the old west, the Web will be tamed.
The questions the user-base of the Internet is who and how. I find it surprising that two of the biggest backer of the UN's idea of giving more control of the Internet are China and Cuba, both try to control what people can read and what sites their people can visit on the internet.
The days of the internet being a true medium for free-speach I think is alomst over. The problem now is if governments, that freedom will be gone for many people.
Low end...I just installed NetBSD on a 486-DX2 66 with 2 MB of ram and using it as a firewall, router, and a small file server for our office. Total cost: 4 hours of my time. My business Partner's dad had 3 of them lying around his old office.
We have several old PIII 700 with 256MB of ram and 16MB vid cards that run FreeBSD with KDE just fine.
Frankly, for offices that need accounting, office suite, and email, these boxes with your choice of Linux or FreeBSD are cheap and more then enough horsepower for the job.
I can send 20 messages in 10 minutes. I usually check my email at 7 AM when I get into the office. Many times its emails like "Can you update this item on my webpage". At the end of the day, say about 4PM. I will reply to these messages with a simple: Done, you have X hours of tech support left this month and I can send out 15 - 20 in 5 minutes easy.
400 in 15 minutes, yeah, that looks odd and should be checked into. 20 in 10...that's not too hard.
Most hacking are inside jobs
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
About 80% of the hacking attempts have had some sort of inside help. About half, in my 3 years of consulting on security, of the attempts are by disgruntled employees. Some sell passwords to competors, or at least try too, or someone calls on the phone saying, "This is Jeff Smith from branch office X and we can't log in. Can you provide a new password to my account".
Only about 20% of the attempts are actually people attempting to use exlpoits, bugs, or brut-force a password. There are measures against this 20%, but the other 80% has to have educated employees or a policy that is followed.
I have seen some people still have access months if not years after leaving or being let go, which is just bad sys management.
You left out the two ages BEFORE the war of the ring. Hell they could make two prequal trilogies if they wanted I guess. I mean there is a 12 volume of books written about the history and notes of tolkin edited by his son. I've thumbed through a couple once at the Library.
I mean, we all know in 2007 that they will try and launch anohter matrix tilogoy, well maybe I mean Its hard to fix now, and New Line may produce more movies in the series, but Jackson doesn't seem like the type that would go back and make more films. He's spent almost the last what, 10 years on this project and probably ready to move on.
That's one thing that gets me, 10 years on a single project. Wow. I get pissed when I have to spend more than 30 days on a project at work.
The end has come. Everyday we move closer to an opensource solution to the great desktop darkness of Bill Gates. This is our test, every failed attempt, OS/2, BeOS, Java, has led us down this road.
The Enemy will never let the penguin come to the thorwn of the desktop.
The war is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.
"I see it in you eye's, the fear of spending too much on software. A day may come when our servers may fail, y. When we forsake our code and break the GPL, but it is not this day. This day we fight!.
[echoing voice]All you have to decide is what to do with the hardware that is given to you[/echoing voice]
"We shall see the commandline again"
You gave away your root password, I can no longer protect you anymore.
"We cannot win this by source code alone."
Not for ourselves, but we can give GNU a chance...
*Followed by several quickly flashing scense of battle slowing as the string section in the back ground retards*
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
*black with titles: Lord of the Desktop: return of the command line.
Oh, wait, I thought this was the review of RotK...my bad...
because the experiance. Sorry, but my 27" flat panel TV is nice, but it doesn't hold par to a 50 foot screen. Now that it costs like $10 to see a movie, I wait for it to come to the cheap theater for $2.
Back in 1998 we had a choice between Micron and Dell. We went with Micron and one of our neighbors down the hall chose dell. We had a couple issues with the floppy drives dieing and the powersupply was too samll when started adding a new vid card, addition HDD, and CD-buner. Each time we called, we were usually on the phone less than 30 minutes and spoke to someone in Idaho. Usually within 5 minutes we had a new part on the way and it arrived via UPS or Fedex within 48 hours. And the powersupplies we got in replacement was 400w compared to the 300W it shipped with.
The office down the hall had issues with one of their machines and they had to jump through hoops just to get a new HDD. They still bought from them again in 2001 because, "there wasn't any other choice" in their minds. All they read was Dell, Dell, Dell. I know poor judgement on their part.
Today, my new company, runs on all Apple products. Why? Well we haven't had to call tech support yet...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I use Spamassassin on our company mail server with spam going to /dev/null and automatically deleted and then use the Junk filter in Mac Mail. I know before I installed spamassassin we were getting about 3500 spam emails per day between the six of us in the office. Now maybe 1 a day gets to my inbox and about 4 are in my Junk filter. Funny thing is the filter takes mods and replys from slashdot and marks them as spam.
Iraq does not
True, thank you Isreal. They bombed Saddam's French supplied nuclear reactor in 1981. Isreal gets a lot flack for their unilateralist actions, but that probably prevented Saddam from having those weapons in 1991.
Yeah, why the development of ABM, especially of theatre level, defenses would be a good idea. And just remember this: a bajillion troops vs. the amount of firepower contain with in one of our ballistic missle subs...
Second off, we (the USA) have an agreement with Taiwan streching back to the 1950's stating that we will come to their defense in case of invastion or attack by China on Taiwan, and let's face it, that is one area China doesn't want to go. They have as much or more to lose in a conflict than anyone.
My favorite argument is that, "China has the largest army in the world with some 50million troops" My typical response is, "50 million men won't do you much good against the 50 megatons of nuclear warheads just one of our balistic missle subs carry."
The main reason why I am for keeping an active nuclear weapons stockpile on hand: Assured or Mutually Assured Destruction makes not even going there the only option...
Blender had that year of non-development and was stuck at 2.23 until NAN was able to get the donations to free the code.
Since Blender has come a long way adding in Quicktime export, a new interface, NTSC (16:9 HD) rendering size. Granted the Game engine had been removed, but still it was comming along and getting a lot of attention.
I just worked this fall for my old company as a consultant helping them move to Maya and Linux. They spend about $40k on Maya linceses. They looked at blender, but the fact that one had to export to a 3rd party app, like POV-Ray, for raytracing was a big strike against it.
I hope they leave Raytracing as an option, because one of Blender's advatages was it its speed without raytracing.
Yes, I pointed out there would not be any more security updates. He uses Netscape and Netscape Mail for emailing and he has Zone Alarm and Norton 2003 installed.
Bottom line: Every Operating system is guaranteed vunerable. I've working in IT security for 3 years before going into consulting and I have run everything from Win 95 to OpenBSD. I mean having a firewall and antivirus is more than most home users have.
Because he uses quicken to check his stocks and manage his estate.
I walked him through the process and told him that Win 98 support was going out the window at year's end. This isn't the first time this story has graced /.. He didn't seem to care and has no plans to upgrade until the hardware gives out and the harddrive fails or something like that.
Then he's buying a mac...
There are times when I am out of town on business or we have a large project due and I have to shut off the cell phones and unplug from the internet. And everytime, we end up making someone mad because the couldn't reach us. Again this was the early days and there were times we had more jobs than time offered to us and to actually get anything done, we had too. Also, back then if we lost a cusomter, there were two more to replace them. However, our business thrives on repeat business. Your going to lose 20% every year no matter how good you are, and replacing those is expesnive in terms of marketing. Plus if you don't get back with one client, they tell 5 others about your shitty job.
We are past our start phase and now at least have a secetary in the office that handles our incomming calls and such, but email is a differnet story.
Often times my clients expect a respons within hours. Usually its within hours. It finally got to the point that I check my messages in the morning, handle any important stuff (usually an hour), spend my lunch answering messages while eating my sandwich, and then once before I leave at night to get anything important.
I average 200 messages a day non-spam and about 130 usually require a response of some kind. There have been days where I have spent 6 hours answering emails and not getting another blasted thing done.
I mean his talking about internal lingo like "firewire". WTF, I mean the real l33t speak would be IEEE 1394. I mean I am sure if I went to every digital photographer I knew and asked how they liked their 1394 port, 90% would say, "What?".
I am a mac user and switched from Linux to Mac because Windows 98 sucked so much I was willing to tweak Linux to get it to work as a desktop in 1998. I also use FreeBSD and have a pull over fleece I got as a door prize to a convention or seminar once. I stil like is "Obsolete BSD Unix". I mean I guess the next thread will be, "See even the radical christain right says BSD is dying!".
Anywho, I use macs on a daily basis at work and like them because they are a superior platform for our office. I still go to church, but hey, I'm an Episcopalian (Anglican). We seem to be pissing the good southern baptist off at the moment with our gay bishop...oh wait maybe this guy has a point...
I worked for a DOD sub-contractor that was writing such "Blackhole" scripts to block email nukers exploiting military mail servers back in the day (circa 1997). It will help, but its not a cure all.
They aren't looking for choice as much as they are products that work and are easy to use. While Linux is getting better, its not there yet. At least with Windows, there is no shortage of people that know how to use it. Try explaining the difference between Mozilla and Netscape to these people. They don't care, all they want is a browser and they'll read about how some block pop-ups ads and will say, "Get me one of those".
We use SQL-Ledger for our company accounting, however we have the IT staff that understands PostgreSQL and Unix server along with PERL. Joe's Hobbies down the street doesn't and Simply Accounting or QuickBooks works for them.
Now we have sucessfully coverted several offices from Windows to Macintosh. Why? Its easy to use, it has a lot of commerical support from many software and hardware vendors, and it has SMB critical applications like Quickbooks ported to the system. Now, I have three contracts for after the beginning of the year to help businesses switch to OpenOffice. Once they discovered it will meet the basic needs, word processor and spreadsheet, and the presentation portition looks almost exactly like PowerPoint 2000, they loved the it and the price.
In the server world, its a different story. Typically datacenters and server admins will support what ever will work the best for them, even if it is a btich to set up. If fork x does better than y, great. Also, their managers and bosses don't care so long as it works.
Generally speaking, forking is one of the major reason I use FreeBSD over Linux. I like how the organization, as elitest as it may be, works. There are how many differnet distros of linux and how many FreeBSD's again. When we write software, it may work on SuSE and RH, but not slackware. When we write an application for FreeBSD, chances are its going work unless the admin has tweaked the hell out of the system.
Okay this is where I have to draw the line. If that's you beef with the music industry, I'm not going to argue. The RIAA is using dirty tactics and there are is a lot of abuses of the IP systems. RIAA and music industry is also guilty of price-fixing and unfair practices. I'm not going to argue that.
However, I work around people on a daily basis that earn the money to pay rent/house payment and buy food from the copyright system. And its not a bunch of bull. I make about $250 a month on royalities from my personal artwork I create in Blender. If I did not have the legal protection of the copyright, that's $250 a month that I wouldn't make. Why? Because chances are those that sell my work or use it for whatever purpose wouldn't have to pay me or at least get my permission to use the work.
I work with writers that have their articles and stories published in magizines, newspapers, and journals from around the world. If they would release their work without copyright, what is to keep a company or org like the AP or Gannett or Tribune from running their work without paying them a dime? Remeber Stephen Ambros and how his career got ruined right before he died because he had stolen from other's works? If it was not for copyrights those whom he borrowed subjects and straight out copied text out of would have had no claims that he had ripped them off. He made a name for himself on the work of others. Whether it was intentional or not...that's a different story, but this is what would happen without copyrights.
College students should be held responsible for their actions. If you break a law, you should be punished. My biggest beef is the "Weasel out of it" and lack of personal integerity and stepping up for personal responsiblity in the world. I travel a lot to other countries on business and pleasure and sometimes I come home and get really mad when I see people blaming everyone else. If what your doing is illgeal and you know it, SOL.
Opensource/free software is not always cheaper or better. My main area in our company is technology consulting. I've overseen 2 office switch from Windows to Linux on their desktops. They had the internal IT staff that had been running Linux on servers since about 2000/2001.
For mom&pop shop on the corner, unless they are technically savvy, they are best to probably go with a windows or Macintosh system. I have two meetings this week with companies that are going to buying Mac's for their next desktop machines to discuss details. Both are leaving windows behind for their own reasons. But still, for small businesses, it has to be common and easy to use. Especially with the prices RH is going to start charging for their update services. For small business, Linux is out of reach (I am talking companies with less than 25 employees).
I know, because as a small business manager, I don't have time to mess with things. I left windows 98 for SuSE 6.4 as my desktop of choice in 1999 or early 2000. I can't remember now. I did so for about two years. Then I switched all my servers once I got familer with a *iux eviroment to FreeBSD because I liked the OS better. Its a personal ch
Hell I just installed an older version of NetBSD on a 486DX2 66Mhz last week that we use as a file server. We put a new 30GB HD in, but for an office of 4 employees needing to back up word documents, it chugs along nicely and we got it for free.
Linux needs to be upgraded and patched just like any OS, however you can purchase a single copy of say SuSE and install it on as many computers as you need. If a company has say 100 computers, you can save thousands everytime a new version of windows comes out.
I have spoken with many companies that are looking into Linux to increase the life of their existing hardware. COmapnies are tired of the 2 years upgrade game and after the first of the year, we have contracts to oversee 6 offices switching to OpenOffice and provide training and helping 3 other companies switch to or upgrade their Macintosh systems.
and his hospital, University of Missouri-Columbia's I think is the one he is at, they have been running Linux and MySQL for a couple years. I don't know for sure what data they are storing, but he said they haven't had any problems to speak of and are pleased with it speed and realiablity.
So do I, and I have had times where that has saved me money because I could report fraud to the CC company. Once I was being doubled billed for web-hosting and Mastercard took care of the problem when I alerted them of what was going on. I didn't have to pay a cent. In fact I don't care my Debit card anymore accept when I know I am going to the ATM.
What about photographers? I work with a number of photographers in this area and they make their living by selling people pictures. If people can download or take to Walgreens and make copies freely, then that robs the artist of ther hard earned income.
I know a couple weeks ago wedding photographers were said to be overpaid, but that is bunk. My company does alot of advise and consult work and most now most buy a new digital camera ranging in price from $3k - $15k a year plus $1500 a year on software not to mention digital storage systems, etc. Also, most smaller photographers send their work off to photolabs. Yeah, they may charge like $3k to take pictures, but they might see $500 in actual profit when its all said and done.
Better yet, Artist. We run a digital reproduction facility and do a lot of reproduction work for local artists. If they paint a really cool picture, should they be allowed to reap the benefits? If there were no copyrights, we'd might buy it then resell the design on 1000's of items and not have to pay one cent to the artist that created it. Is that fair?
I also know someone that owns a local tool & die shop. He had invented a special die for mounting signs to poles and didn't get a patent on it. 18 months later, cheaper parts identical to his were comming in from Pakistan and India. That was his fault not to get the patent, but see what would happen if there wasn't such a system in place for rewarding creativity.
That's not to say there are some abuse in the current system and even more absurditive, but I for one believe there should be an incentive for people to create.
I do a lot of digital art in terragen, yes we have the commercial version, and sell prints as a hobby. I have had my art work ripped off before from the internet and had to sue the infringer. When I was in college, I used Napster, fell into the "Oh this Copyright is bunk" crowd, then got into the real world and found there are good reason to have such a system.
There is a mentality by some, not all, in the OSS world that anything closed source to hit their computers is bad. I was at a convention recently about 3D animation software. One of my big consulting clients is a medium sized arcitecture/graphics firm. They had just abandoned some very cool software designed to run on the DEC Alpha platform for Maya and they chose to run it on Linux. Why? They tested Maya on both Wintel, Linux on x86, and Macintosh. The designers seem to like it on Linux and it was stable. Plus Linux would run on their existing hardware without any problems.
Anyway, at this convention, there was one Linux Zeloat there that couldn't "Believe you would tait the pureness of the OSS Linux with that commercial crap. Haven't you heard of Blender?" At first I thought he was joking.
I had used blender for personal use since 1.8. Yes, Blender is a good program, but even for someone like me the learning curve is steep as hell. Plus you have to export to a 3rd party app for rendering with raytracing. Blender is comming along and has had some nice features added since reaching OSS land.
However, 3 of their Graphic Artist had previous experience with Maya and could help the other two learn the program. The simple fact this company was going to ditch Windows for Linux should be a victory for the OS and OSS land. But the mentaily of "All OSS or non at all" held by some is a mistake.
Look at GIMP. I know 2.0 is scheduled for release soon, but GIMP today compared to that of 1999...it hasn't changed much. Back when I was using Photoshop 4 & the early days of 5, I thought for sure that GIMP would leap frog them or at least improve to the point of being an equal. It almost appears that GIMP developement stood still while Photoshop 6 and then 7 was realeased with many great new features. Maybe 2.0 will see some improvements, but that is one example of where OSS hasn't surpassed its commerical counterparts.
If Linux is going to thrive on the desktop, it will need supported non-OSS software from people like Adobe and Macromedia. I will pay for good software, and so will many others. Free is looked upon with a keen eye, Econ 101: THere is no free lunch.
The questions the user-base of the Internet is who and how. I find it surprising that two of the biggest backer of the UN's idea of giving more control of the Internet are China and Cuba, both try to control what people can read and what sites their people can visit on the internet.
The days of the internet being a true medium for free-speach I think is alomst over. The problem now is if governments, that freedom will be gone for many people.
We have several old PIII 700 with 256MB of ram and 16MB vid cards that run FreeBSD with KDE just fine.
Frankly, for offices that need accounting, office suite, and email, these boxes with your choice of Linux or FreeBSD are cheap and more then enough horsepower for the job.
400 in 15 minutes, yeah, that looks odd and should be checked into. 20 in 10...that's not too hard.
Only about 20% of the attempts are actually people attempting to use exlpoits, bugs, or brut-force a password. There are measures against this 20%, but the other 80% has to have educated employees or a policy that is followed.
I have seen some people still have access months if not years after leaving or being let go, which is just bad sys management.
Human error is 90% of the security threat...
I mean, we all know in 2007 that they will try and launch anohter matrix tilogoy, well maybe I mean Its hard to fix now, and New Line may produce more movies in the series, but Jackson doesn't seem like the type that would go back and make more films. He's spent almost the last what, 10 years on this project and probably ready to move on.
That's one thing that gets me, 10 years on a single project. Wow. I get pissed when I have to spend more than 30 days on a project at work.
The Enemy will never let the penguin come to the thorwn of the desktop.
The war is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.
"I see it in you eye's, the fear of spending too much on software. A day may come when our servers may fail, y. When we forsake our code and break the GPL, but it is not this day. This day we fight!.
[echoing voice]All you have to decide is what to do with the hardware that is given to you[/echoing voice]
"We shall see the commandline again"
You gave away your root password, I can no longer protect you anymore.
"We cannot win this by source code alone."
Not for ourselves, but we can give GNU a chance...
*Followed by several quickly flashing scense of battle slowing as the string section in the back ground retards*
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
*black with titles: Lord of the Desktop: return of the command line.
Oh, wait, I thought this was the review of RotK...my bad...
The office down the hall had issues with one of their machines and they had to jump through hoops just to get a new HDD. They still bought from them again in 2001 because, "there wasn't any other choice" in their minds. All they read was Dell, Dell, Dell. I know poor judgement on their part.
Today, my new company, runs on all Apple products. Why? Well we haven't had to call tech support yet...