Are you referring to BPBATCH (Free as in beer)?
That became Rembo (Not free, but we got a forever unlimited site licence for some few thousand pounds...)?
That is now IBM Tivoli Deployment Manager (Massively not free)?
We've used it for ten years, and it's excellent.
Well, given that we're presenting personal anecdotes as evidence in this little sub-thread....
Corporal punishment has caused me harm. I was subjected to it as a child. Not excessive, in terms of the general attitudes of society at the time, not brutal, not often. I was never insecure in the love of my parents. But they did beat me to correct me. And I did learn. I have grown up with a strong moral sense, etc, etc.
And now that I'm a parent, and my child stands up to me, I have nothing to draw on. My instinct is to beat him, until he complies. 'Cos that's what I grew up with. I resist, but I'd like to not have to.
On the main thread - no way should this pricnipal be allowed to avoid the courts. There's legal redress available to him, let him make us of it, or shut up. Yet another bullying, power-crazed blowhard in a position of power over the flowers of (your) youth.
Perhaps the yardstick for the degree of privacy afforded a person should be their capacity to achieve it? Or to put less pompously, by the time you were ready for 'glamour photography', you had developed sufficiently to successfully keep it private, and that's as it should be.
So, I suppose, parents should require that they know what young children are up to, but be a little bit shit at making it happen. More so as they get older. Which is I think what mostly happens.
Absolutely on point #2. #1, yeah, fair enough. #3 it doesn't really matter. I personally find it expressive and conversational.
But I digress. It's also important, I think, that compulsory parental oversight is open and transparent, and that security is implemented with an understanding of where the threat lies. And that can't be with the parents.
My son has a password, which we'll change together periodically, making it stronger as he grows older, until we judge that we don't need to protect him anymore. If he wants to set up a facebook account, while he still surfs in the living room with us, and he doesn't want to tell us, fine. It'll still be under our periodically attentive noses.
What I won't do it sneak around behind his back. If I'm going to impose supervision, it's going to be out in the open, where I can be required to justify it, and he can negotiate ( and bitch and whine, I have no doubt ).
Oh yeah. almost forgot. M$ Sux.
I'm sure we're many of us familiar with the story of a few months back about the nursing home dog (perhaps cat?) that appeared to be able to smell impending fatality amongst the residents. And I personally will not forget the smell of cancer on my father's breath before he died early.
It's not beyond reason that the chemical composition of the breath might be detectably altered by disease. Nor that sensitive enough equipment might be able to detect this early and cheaply enough to be usable as a screening method.
In the hands of medics, sworn to confidentiality, this could help avoid considerable suffering and early, pointless death.
I don't see it as a threat to civil liberties. It's like the hypodermic. It's been used for many years as a tool in the psychiatric opression of political dissidents, been used to murder, been used to torture and so on and so forth.
But would you honestly rather the hypodermic had never existed? Of course not.
A hammer can be used to hurt you. Would you have them banned?
(a) Spend several ten of thousands upfront and the another few thousand every year on a commercial product. Never have it integrate like they promised it would. Wait weeks or forever for fixes. Repeat every three years. Or..
(b) Buy a couple of servers. Spend time I would otherwise have spent trying not to fall asleep putting together what we need by gluing together a few open source systems. Fix it when it breaks. Maybe it takes a few weeks. But we always get there in the end.
I'd be much happier paying good money for commercial 'solutions' if they weren't pretty much always rubbish. And by rubbish I mean plaintext auth over http, I mean wasting a week whilst vendors argue over whose problem it is - without actually investigating, etc etc.
If want less-than-perfect products with substandard support, I can do that myself.
While anything is possible (I reverse engineer shit for a living), Wow. I didn't think that was possible. Pipe you the output of a toilet and we've a proper perpetual motion machine..
Surely that's what they pay us for?
I sysadmin in education, and it's clearly a complicated business, far too complicated for any one person to sweat all the details. So some of us sweat finance. And some of us sweat the procurement of funding for 16-19 year olds. Some of us know what 'pedagogical' means ( not me ).
Our senior management are pretty good at what they do, which is to trust their specialist to do our jobs, and challenge us to justify our calls for resources and excuses for problems.
The problem, I think, are twofold:
Us arrogant self-centred IT folk, who expect everyone else to care about how it all works, or just to accept without question what we assert. It's my job to explain to others, ** in terms they can comprehend **, what they need to know about my field.
Those arrogant, incompetent senior managers who won't trust their specialists to do what they're good at. It's their job, once we've explained in their terms, what the deal is, to make the call based on that, and trust us to sweat the details.
I agree with the other posters who advise couching security needs in financial/risk terms.
If Mozilla was a shell script for me and my buddies, then you can go jump. My stuff, I'll do what I like.
If Mozilla were some weirdo l33t browser for the seriously hardcore, it's a feature, caveat emptor.
But aren't we trying to get the world to switch to Mozilla? Yep. Does the world have the first clue about anything? Nope. So it's a bug. If it helps my mum get scammed cos she's not got the first clue and just clicks stuff, it's a bug.
At the very least, the hardcore should have to go find the option to hide decorations.
So far as bugs marked 'confidential'. For shame guys. For shame.
I'm Sorry. I know I shouldn't. But I can't help it.
First off, Brin's got a good point about 'playing with' stories. I'm gonna go and enjoy the Two Towers like I did FOTR.
But on to what's puckering me. Ronfar, do you regularly hijack literary discussions with your empty libertarian twaddle?
'is offensive to those who worhip the State', '"scientifically" plan..' blah blah. All in the context of a rant about socialist realism, SOVIET RUSSIA (why SHOUT?), oh yeah and the crypto-communist Hitler.
All likely posted by someone living in the good ol' US of A. <sarcasm> No state to speak of</sarcasm>, although your good ol' religionists do seem to have Darwin on the run....
I mean really. I was really enjoying that thread. Some beautiful, impassioned, wide ranging arguments around a bunch of subjects/concepts close to my heart.
Then Cletus pops up, spits tobacco on yer feet and defends fantasy by claiming now ain't shitty, not since we finished off the commies. <sigh>
Slashdot Mirror
Are you referring to BPBATCH (Free as in beer)? That became Rembo (Not free, but we got a forever unlimited site licence for some few thousand pounds...)? That is now IBM Tivoli Deployment Manager (Massively not free)? We've used it for ten years, and it's excellent.
Well, given that we're presenting personal anecdotes as evidence in this little sub-thread....
Corporal punishment has caused me harm. I was subjected to it as a child. Not excessive, in terms of the general attitudes of society at the time, not brutal, not often. I was never insecure in the love of my parents. But they did beat me to correct me. And I did learn. I have grown up with a strong moral sense, etc, etc.
And now that I'm a parent, and my child stands up to me, I have nothing to draw on. My instinct is to beat him, until he complies. 'Cos that's what I grew up with. I resist, but I'd like to not have to.
On the main thread - no way should this pricnipal be allowed to avoid the courts. There's legal redress available to him, let him make us of it, or shut up. Yet another bullying, power-crazed blowhard in a position of power over the flowers of (your) youth.
Where do I buy mod points. Parent. mod. up. +1bazillion. Funny. You know you want to.
And another thing...
Perhaps the yardstick for the degree of privacy afforded a person should be their capacity to achieve it? Or to put less pompously, by the time you were ready for 'glamour photography', you had developed sufficiently to successfully keep it private, and that's as it should be.
So, I suppose, parents should require that they know what young children are up to, but be a little bit shit at making it happen. More so as they get older. Which is I think what mostly happens.
Oh yeh. M$ Sux.
Absolutely on point #2. #1, yeah, fair enough. #3 it doesn't really matter. I personally find it expressive and conversational. But I digress. It's also important, I think, that compulsory parental oversight is open and transparent, and that security is implemented with an understanding of where the threat lies. And that can't be with the parents. My son has a password, which we'll change together periodically, making it stronger as he grows older, until we judge that we don't need to protect him anymore. If he wants to set up a facebook account, while he still surfs in the living room with us, and he doesn't want to tell us, fine. It'll still be under our periodically attentive noses. What I won't do it sneak around behind his back. If I'm going to impose supervision, it's going to be out in the open, where I can be required to justify it, and he can negotiate ( and bitch and whine, I have no doubt ). Oh yeah. almost forgot. M$ Sux.
Ice cold!!
I'm sure we're many of us familiar with the story of a few months back about the nursing home dog (perhaps cat?) that appeared to be able to smell impending fatality amongst the residents. And I personally will not forget the smell of cancer on my father's breath before he died early.
It's not beyond reason that the chemical composition of the breath might be detectably altered by disease. Nor that sensitive enough equipment might be able to detect this early and cheaply enough to be usable as a screening method.
In the hands of medics, sworn to confidentiality, this could help avoid considerable suffering and early, pointless death.
I don't see it as a threat to civil liberties. It's like the hypodermic. It's been used for many years as a tool in the psychiatric opression of political dissidents, been used to murder, been used to torture and so on and so forth.
But would you honestly rather the hypodermic had never existed? Of course not.
A hammer can be used to hurt you. Would you have them banned?
Personally, I'm hopeful about this one.
Where I work, it seems to come down to
(a) Spend several ten of thousands upfront and the another few thousand every year on a commercial product. Never have it integrate like they promised it would. Wait weeks or forever for fixes. Repeat every three years. Or..
(b) Buy a couple of servers. Spend time I would otherwise have spent trying not to fall asleep putting together what we need by gluing together a few open source systems. Fix it when it breaks. Maybe it takes a few weeks. But we always get there in the end.
I'd be much happier paying good money for commercial 'solutions' if they weren't pretty much always rubbish. And by rubbish I mean plaintext auth over http, I mean wasting a week whilst vendors argue over whose problem it is - without actually investigating, etc etc.
If want less-than-perfect products with substandard support, I can do that myself.
Surely that's what they pay us for?
I sysadmin in education, and it's clearly a complicated business, far too complicated for any one person to sweat all the details. So some of us sweat finance. And some of us sweat the procurement of funding for 16-19 year olds. Some of us know what 'pedagogical' means ( not me ).
Our senior management are pretty good at what they do, which is to trust their specialist to do our jobs, and challenge us to justify our calls for resources and excuses for problems.
The problem, I think, are twofold:
Us arrogant self-centred IT folk, who expect everyone else to care about how it all works, or just to accept without question what we assert. It's my job to explain to others, ** in terms they can comprehend **, what they need to know about my field.
Those arrogant, incompetent senior managers who won't trust their specialists to do what they're good at. It's their job, once we've explained in their terms, what the deal is, to make the call based on that, and trust us to sweat the details.
I agree with the other posters who advise couching security needs in financial/risk terms.
5-15 : Firefox, Thunderbird, oocalc ( timesheet ), ldapbrowser, between 1 and 10 terminals. Er, that's it. But then, I am Weasel.
For ***** sake.
If Mozilla was a shell script for me and my buddies, then you can go jump. My stuff, I'll do what I like.
If Mozilla were some weirdo l33t browser for the seriously hardcore, it's a feature, caveat emptor.
But aren't we trying to get the world to switch to Mozilla? Yep. Does the world have the first clue about anything? Nope. So it's a bug. If it helps my mum get scammed cos she's not got the first clue and just clicks stuff, it's a bug.
At the very least, the hardcore should have to go find the option to hide decorations.
So far as bugs marked 'confidential'. For shame guys. For shame.
Mart
I'm Sorry. I know I shouldn't. But I can't help it.
..' blah blah. All in the context of a rant about socialist realism, SOVIET RUSSIA (why SHOUT?), oh yeah and the crypto-communist Hitler.
First off, Brin's got a good point about 'playing with' stories. I'm gonna go and enjoy the Two Towers like I did FOTR.
But on to what's puckering me. Ronfar, do you regularly hijack literary discussions with your empty libertarian twaddle?
'is offensive to those who worhip the State', '"scientifically" plan
All likely posted by someone living in the good ol' US of A. <sarcasm> No state to speak of</sarcasm>, although your good ol' religionists do seem to have Darwin on the run....
I mean really. I was really enjoying that thread. Some beautiful, impassioned, wide ranging arguments around a bunch of subjects/concepts close to my heart.
Then Cletus pops up, spits tobacco on yer feet and defends fantasy by claiming now ain't shitty, not since we finished off the commies. <sigh>