While Samba may be a better idea for a mixed Windows/Linux environment, if I change NFS for Samba, the point stays the same.
Their IT people were too incompetent to handle Linux networking, that's the bottom line. Which means they were too incompetent to handle Windows networking, which is at least as complex, if not more so.
He's been writing that Mike Lynn did the industry a disservice by revealing the buffer overflow class of Cisco vulnerabilities.
His logic is that as soon as you reveal a vulnerability, you accelerate the exploits, and therefore vulnerabilities should not be revealed. (In other words, the classic "security through obscurity argument.")
He seems to think it makes more work for him and other security people.
I pointed out to him that if we follow his logic, no vulnerability and no patch would ever be released. Here we have exploits following a patch. Does he now think Microsoft should not have released the advisory and patch because it "accelerated" the development of an exploit which will affect unpatched systems?
This is exactly his logic with Mike Lynn's actions. He claims revealing the buffer flaws, even though Cisco has patched the two actual flaws found, will cause an exploit to appear that will affect unpatched systems and cause him "more work."
I pointed out to him that he should thus blame Microsoft for patching the SQL Server flaws even though most admins didn't patch their servers in time for the worms that took advantage of them.
I also pointed out to him that if he thinks security is easy and he can't handle the "extra work" exploits cause, get out of the business.
His real motivation, of course, which I also pointed out to him, was simply sour grapes that he didn't get the press for revealing the flaws. The security business is very competitive, and every time a researcher announces something, everybody else denounces him as wrong, premature, or not following proper "protocol." All this just to keep THEIR names - and by extension, the same vulnerabilities they're complaining about - in the trade press. It's hypocritical.
It was Alfred masquerading as such to get royalties to augment his meager salary - despite the fact that the entire estate was assigned to him when Bruce was thought to be dead.
"The system is screwed, you can't blame MS for using it."
Yes, you can.
They bought their way out of an antitrust conviction. If they don't like the patent system, bribe the same assholes to change it.
I don't see them doing that.
Trust me, Gates LOVES the patent system. It's his last defense against OSS and he's going to use it.
Eben Moglen pointedly targeted Microsoft's patent acquisition program Tuesday at his talk at LinuxWorld. He KNOWS Microsoft is going to do this, and the OSDL Patent Commons Project and other methods for fighting the patent system are being put in place to make sure "SCO doesn't happen again."
Yeah, right, it just so happens that two sound Thai and one sounds Middle Eastern.
You see who Microsoft hires to do this sort of thing?
These guys went to MIT on Microsoft scholarships maybe?
Their U.S. visas are paid for by Microsoft maybe?
These guys are probably janitors whose names were put on the patents by Gates' lawyers.
Gimme a fucking break.
Tell me again, "Linux guy" working for Microsoft, that Microsoft doesn't intend to destroy open source with patents.
Fucking liars, the lot.
This is wholesale government-sanctioned coercive THEFT, not "intellectual property". These patents exist for one reason and one reason only - to be used as extortion against anyone in the business Gates doesn't like.
Fine. Go ahead, Bill. Try to destroy OSS using patents. I've got news for you - it will make the massive failure of the "War on Drugs" (not to mention Iraq) look like the greatest success you've ever had. People will fucking IGNORE YOU.
Any code I ever produce will be produced anonymously on the Net from fucking Colombia or a cave in Afghanistan, if necessary. Try suing that, asshole.
Hey, bin Laden! Drop a plane on Redmond, please. Best thing you could do for the US.
Eben's attitude yesterday at the OSDL talk at LinuxWorld was that SCO is "dead." And from here on out, he wants to make sure something like them doesn't happen again - so he pointedly targeted Microsoft and its patent campaign and announced a patent acquisition campaign for OSS.
And if you'd gone to LinuxWorld yesterday like I did, they are handing out SUSE 9.3 Professional DVDs to anybody who walks up to the booth. The hawker giving one of their talks was practically tossing them to people in the audience.
Still, $10 is nothing to cry over - unless you needed it for rent this month, which happens.
Speaking of Novell, they have a huge pavilion at LinuxWorld with 35 of their business partners umbrella-ed under it. They are as big a presence as IBM, Intel, and AMD there.
"if you have an industry that's not interested in having its tools play nicely with others then interoperability is just not going to happen."
Well, the whole point of the current SOA push in IT is to change that. Yes, they accept that the back-end stuff isn't going to be changed - but they put in front-end stuff so it doesn't matter until they can afford to migrate the back-end stuff.
I know there are companies sitting on thirty-year-old COBOL code who will undoubtedly go out of business before they try to convert it. But one of those things - conversion or going out of business - WILL happen eventually. THAT's inevitable.
Like I said, there are a variety of ways to deal with the issue. All it takes is some imagination and willingness to invest some short-term effort and expense for long-term gain.
"have the courrage to change what you can, the patience to accept the things you can't and the wisdom to know the difference."
We Transhumans don't accept death OR taxes, let alone an inability to switch software! Anybody who thinks they're stuck handling their IT needs isn't long for being in business if that's the only way they handle problems in general.
In general, your advice to the OP is correct - I would prefer not to let it be an excuse for not making the effort, however, or saying that it can't be done, as you did in your opening sentence.
Nobody said the guy has to do this on his own, either - he doesn't have the skills. There are plenty of bright people who can solve a lot of his problems for him if he's willing.
He's on dialup - now he's gotta find a way to get OpenOffice on CD or spend a day downloading it over a phone line. Plus he doesn't even know about OO, like most people.
Yes he can run OO on Windows. I do, too. He's still better off with Linux. I just used Office as an example of having to pay for apps on Windows. Of course, I use entirely freeware on Windows as well, so that really isn't true either. But not everyone knows about freeware. That was the point, really.
Well, I figure since he's already on eBay looking for 98, why not head over to the Linux section. Plus, he's on dialup.
Back when I was first looking for a full distro, a couple years ago, I got my RH 7.3 for around $18 on eBay. I didn't have broadband then, so downloading a half dozen CDs over dial-up was a no-go.
The issue is whether a given operation can AFFORD to do so on their own.
The answer is to get together with others, form an industry OSS group, then get some developers who work in that industry interested in doing the work.
By the way, let's be clear:
"Realtors who use the online MLS listing who need IE to access the website."
No, they DON'T need IE - they need a browser that does EXACTLY the same thing as IE vis-a-vis that site. Not the same thing at all.
And in that particular case, it probably wouldn't be hard to get the folks at Mozilla to find out exactly what that thing is and provide it - unless of course it's ActiveX - then you need some utility that allows ActiveX to run elsewhere than on IE. The ActiveX plugin available for Firefox is supposedly buggy - well, somebody at Mozilla needs to make it UN-buggy!
Another option is to use IE either on WINE or a VM to access that site - then use OSS to process the data in every other respect.
As Charles Bronson said in "The Mechanic": "There are alternatives to everything..."
Any "standard application" can be reverse- or re-engineered in OSS form, or surrounded by and run in an OSS environment, or otherwise taken out of the picture. You just have to have some imagination and the willingness to invest the effort.
It's not easy - I'm looking at some crappy Oracle Forms these days I wish could be made to go away - they're insanely complicated and undocumentable. It would be quicker to re-engineer them - IF I had some clear documentation as to how they work in the first place.
It's crappy design, not proprietary or OSS software, that causes all the problems in IT.
'it's got to get the final tier of reliability and predictability that I'm going to bet a multi-billion dollar corporation's future on.'
Spend a few million (hell, a couple hundred thousand!) of that money on supporting the guys and projects willing to write that stuff. It's chickenfeed and everybody benefits.
It's that simple. Invest in commercial software or invest in OSS. Start trading long-term benefit against short-term convenience.
"Most of whom who couldn't even get past the security guy on the desk at Redmond campus."
Last I heard, the Redmond campus has such lousy security almost anybody could get past it - you hardly even see any security people up there, I heard. And once you get in a door, you can wander around anywhere - nobody out of the 40,000 people there knows everybody else, and badges don't mean shit.
Not to mention that several hackers have gotten past MS security - which is an oxymoron at best.
"To get into MS in any role, you need to show that you are very clued up on current affairs, politics, food, sports, music, dancing, wine, culture, the arts you name it! AS WELL AS your tech subject."
Like I said before when/. had the discussion on MS employment practices, they want "geek morons" - people who know a lot about pointless shit but nothing about why not to do unethical and stupid practices.
They want the sort of/. Windows troll who thinks Bill Gates is God, who yearns to make the big bucks like Bill, and who can also unwittingly implement a buffer overflow very quickly without having to be paid overtime...
In other words, morons - just like Bill and Steve - but subservient to Bill and Steve.
"So, no, Microsoft is not out to exterminate Linux or Open Source"
ANYBODY who goes NEAR the Microsoft operation ends up a total, paid LIAR. (Either that or this guy is a serious idiot who thinks his salary is worth blowing and actually believing - bullshit like this.)
They could take Linus himself, put him in an office in Redmond, and he'd be lying his ass off by noon tomorrow.
Somebody ask this moron when was the last time he talked to Bill and Steve personally about all this - instead of some peon he works for who blows smoke up his ass.
"What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
Nanotech.
Stop spending scores of billions on crappy primitive hardware from fraudulent government contractors and leapfrog the issue with nanotech (presumably from the same fraudulent government contractors, but hey, it might trickle down...as long as it doesn't "trickle down" as "grey goo.")
You also get the benefit that the same nanotech developments could be used to clean up and re-use the crap we've already dumped on the planet.
Not that it concerns me - get rid of the monkeys and the environment will rebound in a few hundred or a few thousand years - an eyeblink in geological - and Transhuman - time.
Had a guy call me yesterday wanting to know if I had a Windows 95 serial number so he could install Windows 95 so he could upgrade it to Windows 98 with the stupid Windows 98 upgrade CD!
I told him forget all that shit, go on eBay and spend $30 for a Windows 98 CD.
Better yet, spend $18 (or less) and buy a Linux distro on CD - which also saves him several hundred bucks on Office, etc.
Right - like anybody here gives a shit about karma, as long as they don't get banned (or as these idiots like to refer to it - "being put in the corner for a couple days" - right, like, eat me, fanboys, in your "corner".)
Mod this troll! Mod this flamebait! Mod this redundant! Give...it...up! Just...give...it...up! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
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You stop being an idiot.
While Samba may be a better idea for a mixed Windows/Linux environment, if I change NFS for Samba, the point stays the same.
Their IT people were too incompetent to handle Linux networking, that's the bottom line. Which means they were too incompetent to handle Windows networking, which is at least as complex, if not more so.
this will be installed at the White House?
Well, maybe on Karl's phone...After all, it doesn't detect leaks. But, then, Karl doesn't need it, does he?
The REALEST cops beat the text into the file with their nightsticks.
To open a file, they shove their nightsticks in it.
"it was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said"
In other words, a bunch of MCSE's couldn't figure out NFS.
This is a FUD piece written and distributed by Microsoft as usual.
Nothing to see here.
He's been writing that Mike Lynn did the industry a disservice by revealing the buffer overflow class of Cisco vulnerabilities.
His logic is that as soon as you reveal a vulnerability, you accelerate the exploits, and therefore vulnerabilities should not be revealed. (In other words, the classic "security through obscurity argument.")
He seems to think it makes more work for him and other security people.
I pointed out to him that if we follow his logic, no vulnerability and no patch would ever be released. Here we have exploits following a patch. Does he now think Microsoft should not have released the advisory and patch because it "accelerated" the development of an exploit which will affect unpatched systems?
This is exactly his logic with Mike Lynn's actions. He claims revealing the buffer flaws, even though Cisco has patched the two actual flaws found, will cause an exploit to appear that will affect unpatched systems and cause him "more work."
I pointed out to him that he should thus blame Microsoft for patching the SQL Server flaws even though most admins didn't patch their servers in time for the worms that took advantage of them.
I also pointed out to him that if he thinks security is easy and he can't handle the "extra work" exploits cause, get out of the business.
His real motivation, of course, which I also pointed out to him, was simply sour grapes that he didn't get the press for revealing the flaws. The security business is very competitive, and every time a researcher announces something, everybody else denounces him as wrong, premature, or not following proper "protocol." All this just to keep THEIR names - and by extension, the same vulnerabilities they're complaining about - in the trade press. It's hypocritical.
That wasn't Batman.
It was Alfred masquerading as such to get royalties to augment his meager salary - despite the fact that the entire estate was assigned to him when Bruce was thought to be dead.
Never trust a butler.
"The system is screwed, you can't blame MS for using it."
Yes, you can.
They bought their way out of an antitrust conviction. If they don't like the patent system, bribe the same assholes to change it.
I don't see them doing that.
Trust me, Gates LOVES the patent system. It's his last defense against OSS and he's going to use it.
Eben Moglen pointedly targeted Microsoft's patent acquisition program Tuesday at his talk at LinuxWorld. He KNOWS Microsoft is going to do this, and the OSDL Patent Commons Project and other methods for fighting the patent system are being put in place to make sure "SCO doesn't happen again."
Hell, no, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Look at George Bush.
Abbar, Mohamed Anas; (Redmond, WA) ; Arayasantiparb, Athapan; (Redmond, WA) ; Wang-Aryattawanich, Thiti; (Sammamish, WA)
Yeah, right, it just so happens that two sound Thai and one sounds Middle Eastern.
You see who Microsoft hires to do this sort of thing?
These guys went to MIT on Microsoft scholarships maybe?
Their U.S. visas are paid for by Microsoft maybe?
These guys are probably janitors whose names were put on the patents by Gates' lawyers.
Gimme a fucking break.
Tell me again, "Linux guy" working for Microsoft, that Microsoft doesn't intend to destroy open source with patents.
Fucking liars, the lot.
This is wholesale government-sanctioned coercive THEFT, not "intellectual property". These patents exist for one reason and one reason only - to be used as extortion against anyone in the business Gates doesn't like.
Fine. Go ahead, Bill. Try to destroy OSS using patents. I've got news for you - it will make the massive failure of the "War on Drugs" (not to mention Iraq) look like the greatest success you've ever had. People will fucking IGNORE YOU.
Any code I ever produce will be produced anonymously on the Net from fucking Colombia or a cave in Afghanistan, if necessary. Try suing that, asshole.
Hey, bin Laden! Drop a plane on Redmond, please. Best thing you could do for the US.
"Microsoft bribes cops with $5 million to look the other way when Microsoft commits antitrust crimes."
And pays its legal fees with the rest...
Meanwhile, spam rolls on.
You're a rightwing whack job.
Nothing you've said in your post is true in any respect.
Fuck right off.
And to paraphrase what we say in the Federal joint, "I hope you're offended. Now what are you going to do about it?"
Eben's attitude yesterday at the OSDL talk at LinuxWorld was that SCO is "dead." And from here on out, he wants to make sure something like them doesn't happen again - so he pointedly targeted Microsoft and its patent campaign and announced a patent acquisition campaign for OSS.
His talk was very good, BTW.
Ahem, I own the patent on mod points, whether they are
My law firm will contact Boies in the morning.
And if you'd gone to LinuxWorld yesterday like I did, they are handing out SUSE 9.3 Professional DVDs to anybody who walks up to the booth. The hawker giving one of their talks was practically tossing them to people in the audience.
Still, $10 is nothing to cry over - unless you needed it for rent this month, which happens.
Speaking of Novell, they have a huge pavilion at LinuxWorld with 35 of their business partners umbrella-ed under it. They are as big a presence as IBM, Intel, and AMD there.
"if you have an industry that's not interested in having its tools play nicely with others then interoperability is just not going to happen."
Well, the whole point of the current SOA push in IT is to change that. Yes, they accept that the back-end stuff isn't going to be changed - but they put in front-end stuff so it doesn't matter until they can afford to migrate the back-end stuff.
I know there are companies sitting on thirty-year-old COBOL code who will undoubtedly go out of business before they try to convert it. But one of those things - conversion or going out of business - WILL happen eventually. THAT's inevitable.
Like I said, there are a variety of ways to deal with the issue. All it takes is some imagination and willingness to invest some short-term effort and expense for long-term gain.
"have the courrage to change what you can, the patience to accept the things you can't and the wisdom to know the difference."
We Transhumans don't accept death OR taxes, let alone an inability to switch software! Anybody who thinks they're stuck handling their IT needs isn't long for being in business if that's the only way they handle problems in general.
In general, your advice to the OP is correct - I would prefer not to let it be an excuse for not making the effort, however, or saying that it can't be done, as you did in your opening sentence.
Nobody said the guy has to do this on his own, either - he doesn't have the skills. There are plenty of bright people who can solve a lot of his problems for him if he's willing.
He's on dialup - now he's gotta find a way to get OpenOffice on CD or spend a day downloading it over a phone line. Plus he doesn't even know about OO, like most people.
Yes he can run OO on Windows. I do, too. He's still better off with Linux. I just used Office as an example of having to pay for apps on Windows. Of course, I use entirely freeware on Windows as well, so that really isn't true either. But not everyone knows about freeware. That was the point, really.
Well, I figure since he's already on eBay looking for 98, why not head over to the Linux section. Plus, he's on dialup.
Back when I was first looking for a full distro, a couple years ago, I got my RH 7.3 for around $18 on eBay. I didn't have broadband then, so downloading a half dozen CDs over dial-up was a no-go.
"you can't migrate everything to open source"
Well, yes, you can.
The issue is whether a given operation can AFFORD to do so on their own.
The answer is to get together with others, form an industry OSS group, then get some developers who work in that industry interested in doing the work.
By the way, let's be clear:
"Realtors who use the online MLS listing who need IE to access the website."
No, they DON'T need IE - they need a browser that does EXACTLY the same thing as IE vis-a-vis that site. Not the same thing at all.
And in that particular case, it probably wouldn't be hard to get the folks at Mozilla to find out exactly what that thing is and provide it - unless of course it's ActiveX - then you need some utility that allows ActiveX to run elsewhere than on IE. The ActiveX plugin available for Firefox is supposedly buggy - well, somebody at Mozilla needs to make it UN-buggy!
Another option is to use IE either on WINE or a VM to access that site - then use OSS to process the data in every other respect.
As Charles Bronson said in "The Mechanic": "There are alternatives to everything..."
Any "standard application" can be reverse- or re-engineered in OSS form, or surrounded by and run in an OSS environment, or otherwise taken out of the picture. You just have to have some imagination and the willingness to invest the effort.
It's not easy - I'm looking at some crappy Oracle Forms these days I wish could be made to go away - they're insanely complicated and undocumentable. It would be quicker to re-engineer them - IF I had some clear documentation as to how they work in the first place.
It's crappy design, not proprietary or OSS software, that causes all the problems in IT.
'it's got to get the final tier of reliability and predictability that I'm going to bet a multi-billion dollar corporation's future on.'
Spend a few million (hell, a couple hundred thousand!) of that money on supporting the guys and projects willing to write that stuff. It's chickenfeed and everybody benefits.
It's that simple. Invest in commercial software or invest in OSS. Start trading long-term benefit against short-term convenience.
Oh, wait, US corporations aren't known for that.
"Most of whom who couldn't even get past the security guy on the desk at Redmond campus."
/. had the discussion on MS employment practices, they want "geek morons" - people who know a lot about pointless shit but nothing about why not to do unethical and stupid practices.
/. Windows troll who thinks Bill Gates is God, who yearns to make the big bucks like Bill, and who can also unwittingly implement a buffer overflow very quickly without having to be paid overtime...
Last I heard, the Redmond campus has such lousy security almost anybody could get past it - you hardly even see any security people up there, I heard. And once you get in a door, you can wander around anywhere - nobody out of the 40,000 people there knows everybody else, and badges don't mean shit.
Not to mention that several hackers have gotten past MS security - which is an oxymoron at best.
"To get into MS in any role, you need to show that you are very clued up on current affairs, politics, food, sports, music, dancing, wine, culture, the arts you name it! AS WELL AS your tech subject."
Like I said before when
They want the sort of
In other words, morons - just like Bill and Steve - but subservient to Bill and Steve.
"So, no, Microsoft is not out to exterminate Linux or Open Source"
ANYBODY who goes NEAR the Microsoft operation ends up a total, paid LIAR. (Either that or this guy is a serious idiot who thinks his salary is worth blowing and actually believing - bullshit like this.)
They could take Linus himself, put him in an office in Redmond, and he'd be lying his ass off by noon tomorrow.
Somebody ask this moron when was the last time he talked to Bill and Steve personally about all this - instead of some peon he works for who blows smoke up his ass.
"What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
Nanotech.
Stop spending scores of billions on crappy primitive hardware from fraudulent government contractors and leapfrog the issue with nanotech (presumably from the same fraudulent government contractors, but hey, it might trickle down...as long as it doesn't "trickle down" as "grey goo.")
You also get the benefit that the same nanotech developments could be used to clean up and re-use the crap we've already dumped on the planet.
Not that it concerns me - get rid of the monkeys and the environment will rebound in a few hundred or a few thousand years - an eyeblink in geological - and Transhuman - time.
"If I tell you negative information, you'll know less."
/. anytime.
You can see the effects on
Nothing new here. Move along.
Or just buy the $25-35 full install CD on eBay.
Had a guy call me yesterday wanting to know if I had a Windows 95 serial number so he could install Windows 95 so he could upgrade it to Windows 98 with the stupid Windows 98 upgrade CD!
I told him forget all that shit, go on eBay and spend $30 for a Windows 98 CD.
Better yet, spend $18 (or less) and buy a Linux distro on CD - which also saves him several hundred bucks on Office, etc.
Right - like anybody here gives a shit about karma, as long as they don't get banned (or as these idiots like to refer to it - "being put in the corner for a couple days" - right, like, eat me, fanboys, in your "corner".)
Mod this troll! Mod this flamebait! Mod this redundant! Give...it...up! Just...give...it...up! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!