Maybe you're an idiot and you should read the article and realize that the government could have returned a goat's bladder stapled to the paperwork with nothing else and it wouldn't matter since it's up to the JUDGE to rule on what the GOVERNMENT - not me - is saying.
... dude. Read the goddamn article. That's what the GOVERNMENT is saying. It's not anything out of the ordinary or unexpected. It's up to a court to decide the validity of the response.
Christ.. is it just me or does Slashdot actively make people dumber?
Your name is quite fitting. As you may notice, I said nothing about the validity of the claims made by the government, only that those are the governments claims and there is nothing significant to be made of it, nor anything surprising in them.
Despite the conveniently edited write up above such that the response appears to be an inflammatory one dismissing the EFF's claims on "terrorism" grounds, there's not much of anything to see here. Basically, they say the documents should remain sealed because 1) the EFF is not in any position to request that they be unsealed, that's up to Rackspace and 2) the documents are part of an ongoing investigation that could be jeopardized by the unsealing.
Nothing to see here, move along move along. I'm sure, of course, this won't stop a bunch of card-carrying tinfoil elitists from crying wolf.
You clearly don't understand your position in the company. Your job is to know technology, not theirs. You wouldn't blame yourself for being stupid and ignorant if you didn't understand the complexities of the company's accounting procedures, now would you? Of course not, it's not your job. However, if there were reason for you to know it, you would expect that the accountants would explain things in clear, concise terminology and present it in such a way that you can understand the concepts, if not the niggling details.
Likewise, it is not their job to understand the difference between NTFS and ReiserFS. If there are benefits and negatives, they must be phrased in relation to the companies operation. You don't talk about how great it is to have a jounraling file system that organizes on the disk in such a way that fragmentation is not an issue. That's stupid. You talk about how this filesystem will allow the company to cut losses related to lost data which will save $x per year by saving y hours of work on backup tape recovery.
Secondly, it is not management's job to provide tools, it's management's job to ensure that the tools each department says it needs are really what it needs. You can't sit back and be completely passive about your needs and expect management to come drop everything you want in your lap. You need to make proposals and justify them or you won't get ANYTHING. It's management's job to approve your decisions in the context of the entire business, it's not their job to make them for your in the first place.
Regarding your bitch fest about your incompetent management: big whoop. Weak companies run by weak people fail. What exactly was your point in complaining about the profiteers? If they're that incompetent then Linux is not an issue at all, the lack of direction is the problem, and no software platform was ever going to change that. You can't use overall weak management in a company as justification for your position that Linux only fails in businesses because of management. That doesn't even make any sense.
Yes, and all of these things count against Microsoft when you do your cost analysis. I fail to see what the point is. If you consider all of these factors and it's still cheaper to maintain Windows systems, what does it matter?
You are dead wrong. Managers and executives are not, for the most part, tech saavy or well informed.
Nor should they be as that's YOUR job, not theirs. I'd also like to note that the rest of your post shows the astounding arrogance displayed daily by the Slashdot community. Who cares what management uses? Maybe they prefer to be able to type up their documents and drag them onto an email to create an attachment rather than launch off a two line, archaic sendmail command with pipes and redirects sticking out all over the place. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason non-technical people use Windows is that it's for non-technical people, and technical people use UNIX like sytsems because they're for technical people?
And, management is interested in the bottom line. As a technical person presenting a migration proposal, it's your job to clearly explain the process, it's benefits, and it's risks. As such, failure to justify the process is entirely the fault of the presenter. If you have a management team that's honestly not interested in the bottom line, however, you have much bigger problems than your software platform.
No. Your first step, as with any business decision, is to justify the cost of the process. If you can't justify the one time cost vs. the ongoing costs, you don't do it. Businesses aren't generally interested in throwing money down the toilet in the interest of their IT department's idealogical bents, so if the cost justification doesn't exist, it doesn't happen. If the biggest problem you face in your quest for change is management not wanting to save money/increase productivity, your company has much deeper problems than their software platform. Blaming non-migrations on "stupid PHBs" is disingenuous. If they think that doing it will save money or increase productivity, they're not going to stand there and say "hmmm... something I could take at least some credit for - nope, I don't I'll further my career today".
As far as your comparison between Windows and Knoppix, your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. OpenOffice does not function like Microsoft Office, like it or lump it. Nor does Evolution function like Outlook. Each of these also lack features of Office that some users will have difficulty getting over. On top of that, a GUI'ed Linux system is about as stable as a tower of Jell-O. The X Window System should've been scrapped and rebuilt as a real windowing system more than a decade ago. Amusingly enough, when Windows Explorer takes a shit, it respawns itself. When Gnome or KDE go belly up, they don't. They either throw a kernel panic (and good luck training Betsy the Bimbo Secretary the concept of Magic SysRq) or crash to a prompt. Linux is only stable when you don't add all the external cruft, and nobody wants to type memos in ed and pipe them to sendmail.
...$250,000 plus the licencing fees every 2-3 years.
Uh. No. The point stands as I made it: if you're paying $25,000 in licensing fees and support every year to maintain your windows platform and it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate to a UNIX type system, it's going to take you 10 years just to break even on the migration vs. maintaining a Windows base and you're going to carry a deficit for nine of those years.
That's a highly irrelevant point you made. Migrating from 9x to NT was a complete platform migration. NT functioned significantly differently than 9x did, it just retained the surface elements that made it look familiar. It was well known that much of what ran on 9x would not run on NT or XP because they were, in fact, different platforms. The change is not as drastic as moving from Windows to a UNIX like system, but it's pretty bloody close. Upgrading from NT to XP, by comparison, results in far fewer problems because they share a common base.
Well, while that's true, the point is that these people on Slashdot seem to spend most of their time whining like a bunch of crybaby zealots because they're too lazy/incompetent to do anything useful. In that context, it probably would be better if they did just shut up.
Tech know nothing PHBs know something you don't: if it's going to cost 2000 man hours of work at a $30 an hour average to redesign internal systems, templates, and procedures to work on a non-Microsoft system, that more than wipes out the cost of licensing the desktop systems. That doesn't include the cost of the lead up in which you have to test, deploy, and integrate all of your servers and desktops, plus the lost productivity from people needing to be retrained or retraining themselves on the shortcuts to use Linux.
People here act like a platform migration of this scale is simple as flipping a switch, and I think that really highlights how little experience in practical technology the Slashdot collective really has. You can reformat your system at home and install Linux in an hour depending on options and system speed. It's not that simple when you're talking about a business with 20 locations and 5000 workstations to migrate. It's not that simple when you have internal customer service apps to migrate. When you have internal template and procedures to rewrite. When you have to audit your hardware to ensure compatibility and then repurchase anything that might be too much hassle to fiddle with.
Migration to Linux isn't speading like wildfire for the same reason Windows shops don't jump ship to run to the superior UNIX systems even when that's cheaper: it's not as simple as you people think. It's not free. It's not even necessarily cheap. If it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate and you're only going to be saving an average of $25,000 in license fees and support each year, it will take you ten years just to break even. Linux is not a magic bullet. You people whine and whine like little babies, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is that 99% of you only whine because you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. And the more you whine about your complete and total lack of knowledge, the more steam you give to other companies to muscle in on place where Linux could be making inroads.
What you need to do, if you really want Linux to succeed that badly, is address its single biggest shortcoming: the difficulty in migrating systems from Windows to Linux. No, it's not your fault that it's so hard. Microsoft intentionally makes it difficult to leave the nest. However, since you keep bitching about it, it IS your problem.
Quit being a whiny little bitch and contribute some code, documentation, consultation, or just shut the hell up. Your whining isn't going to change the fact that Linux just plain isn't a good solution for a lot of shops, but if you'd actually do some freaking work you chould change that.
You can fix their little red wagon easier than that. Just don't pay attention to them.
Nobody HAS to listen to ICANN or any of the lackeys they delegate their power to. They're not actually providing anything that anybody else with the motivation to take over the job and some big iron can't provide, they're just the default body everybody goes to because they're SUPPOSED to be a convenient place for centralized governance of the various things that make the internet tick.
I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY YOU STAMMERING JACKASS.
I fucking hate that. I don't give a shit what you think about the goddamn democrats because I'm not one of them. I'm just a guy who's really pissed off that a bunch of ignorant fucks voted for a man with no platform outside of "You gonna die mothafucka!", a legacy of utter and complete failure, and a nasty case of pre-senile dementia.
That's because you're an idiot and you don't understand the concept behind referrer linking. Since that jackasses that post those links here are only looking to waste space so they can make money, it does not benefit anyone except them to encourage the behavior. If the link had been posted in the article where it was relevant, it would have been acceptable. However, it was posted in the body of messages only as board spam, which is not.
Not only that, how do you mitigate the risk of losing deleted information to the creation of other files? I've analyzed HDD images up to 40GB and they're no party. It can take quite a bit of time to do a thorough analysis of the disk. It seems to me that you'd run the risk of losing important filesystem information or the contents of unlinked files. If some idiot runs degrag or something you could lose a good bit of critical fs data before it's stopped. Hell, everytime you launch an Office document it seems like a temp file is created. What happens when one of those overwrites deleted log information on the disk?
Or maybe it's because of the fact that the RNC and the "conservative" ranks that are overrunning this country are coming out of the woodwork to support an idealogy that finally gives the retards that swung this last election what they want: reasons not to think for themselves about anything and a promise that their whacked out, ignorant beliefs will always take precedence over the facts.
It's not a matter of elitism or snobbishness. It's a matter that all the religious whackos and idiot Bush voters that are handing this country to a bunch of rich make-believe "conservatives" are a bunch of knuckle dragging chimps who hate gay people more than they like to think about real issues.
Soooo... your theory behind network intrusion testing is that you shouldn't try to break into the network while you're doing it, and therefore any tool that would help you do it must be useless or evil?
Remind me to never hire you for anything related to network security testing....
Sooooo... your theory here is that the customers are to blame for Best Buy's inability to properly track its stock and its decision to implement a pricing policy that severely inconveniences honest buyers while rewarding the dishonest ones?
Right. Here's a thought: instead of trying to rip honest people off by offering convoluted rebates that require you to offer your first born child to the Sun god while fighting off a den of lions with a tooth pick, maybe the idiots that run Best Buy would be better served to implement fair prices on ALL products WITHOUT forcing honest buyers to jump through hoops. Not only would this eliminate the loophole that lets dishonest buyers take advantage of the company, it would stop penalizing honest people for wanting to get a fair price on their purchases.
Boo hoo. Watch me cry for Best Buy's incompetent marketeers after they implemented a pricing policy meant to rip people off and a bunch of smarter consumers turned the tables on them. That's like crying foul because a mugging victim took the attacker's gun and used it to steal THEIR wallet.
I think you mean ECHELON and Carnivore. ECHELON is the multinational snoop system that catches everything from packet data to satcomms and cell tower transmissions. Eschelon is a telecommunications company.
Conclusion: people with completely different backgrounds than what you try to pigeonhole republicans as are still able to conclude that the GOP has their interests in mind.
Nowhere is that final statement supported, nor is there any evidence that "people" can be properly applied to your post. You are not proof of anything, and you didn't even prove that you are proof that ANYONE can come to these conclusions.
Besides which, you stated a conclusion about a whole party in reference to one person who claims to be a member of it even though he doesn't seem to follow any of its tenets.
And yet, nowhere in that rambling, incoherent, unfocused post did you actually present any factual basis for the conclusion you presented. This does not surprise me in the least.
I could sum up why you voted for Bush in three words: you are stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're an idiot and you should read the article and realize that the government could have returned a goat's bladder stapled to the paperwork with nothing else and it wouldn't matter since it's up to the JUDGE to rule on what the GOVERNMENT - not me - is saying.
... dude. Read the goddamn article. That's what the GOVERNMENT is saying. It's not anything out of the ordinary or unexpected. It's up to a court to decide the validity of the response.
Christ.. is it just me or does Slashdot actively make people dumber?
Your name is quite fitting. As you may notice, I said nothing about the validity of the claims made by the government, only that those are the governments claims and there is nothing significant to be made of it, nor anything surprising in them.
Again, move along. Nothing to see here. Yet.
Despite the conveniently edited write up above such that the response appears to be an inflammatory one dismissing the EFF's claims on "terrorism" grounds, there's not much of anything to see here. Basically, they say the documents should remain sealed because 1) the EFF is not in any position to request that they be unsealed, that's up to Rackspace and 2) the documents are part of an ongoing investigation that could be jeopardized by the unsealing.
Nothing to see here, move along move along. I'm sure, of course, this won't stop a bunch of card-carrying tinfoil elitists from crying wolf.
You clearly don't understand your position in the company. Your job is to know technology, not theirs. You wouldn't blame yourself for being stupid and ignorant if you didn't understand the complexities of the company's accounting procedures, now would you? Of course not, it's not your job. However, if there were reason for you to know it, you would expect that the accountants would explain things in clear, concise terminology and present it in such a way that you can understand the concepts, if not the niggling details.
Likewise, it is not their job to understand the difference between NTFS and ReiserFS. If there are benefits and negatives, they must be phrased in relation to the companies operation. You don't talk about how great it is to have a jounraling file system that organizes on the disk in such a way that fragmentation is not an issue. That's stupid. You talk about how this filesystem will allow the company to cut losses related to lost data which will save $x per year by saving y hours of work on backup tape recovery.
Secondly, it is not management's job to provide tools, it's management's job to ensure that the tools each department says it needs are really what it needs. You can't sit back and be completely passive about your needs and expect management to come drop everything you want in your lap. You need to make proposals and justify them or you won't get ANYTHING. It's management's job to approve your decisions in the context of the entire business, it's not their job to make them for your in the first place.
Regarding your bitch fest about your incompetent management: big whoop. Weak companies run by weak people fail. What exactly was your point in complaining about the profiteers? If they're that incompetent then Linux is not an issue at all, the lack of direction is the problem, and no software platform was ever going to change that. You can't use overall weak management in a company as justification for your position that Linux only fails in businesses because of management. That doesn't even make any sense.
Yes, and all of these things count against Microsoft when you do your cost analysis. I fail to see what the point is. If you consider all of these factors and it's still cheaper to maintain Windows systems, what does it matter?
You are dead wrong. Managers and executives are not, for the most part, tech saavy or well informed.
Nor should they be as that's YOUR job, not theirs. I'd also like to note that the rest of your post shows the astounding arrogance displayed daily by the Slashdot community. Who cares what management uses? Maybe they prefer to be able to type up their documents and drag them onto an email to create an attachment rather than launch off a two line, archaic sendmail command with pipes and redirects sticking out all over the place. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason non-technical people use Windows is that it's for non-technical people, and technical people use UNIX like sytsems because they're for technical people?
And, management is interested in the bottom line. As a technical person presenting a migration proposal, it's your job to clearly explain the process, it's benefits, and it's risks. As such, failure to justify the process is entirely the fault of the presenter. If you have a management team that's honestly not interested in the bottom line, however, you have much bigger problems than your software platform.
No. Your first step, as with any business decision, is to justify the cost of the process. If you can't justify the one time cost vs. the ongoing costs, you don't do it. Businesses aren't generally interested in throwing money down the toilet in the interest of their IT department's idealogical bents, so if the cost justification doesn't exist, it doesn't happen. If the biggest problem you face in your quest for change is management not wanting to save money/increase productivity, your company has much deeper problems than their software platform. Blaming non-migrations on "stupid PHBs" is disingenuous. If they think that doing it will save money or increase productivity, they're not going to stand there and say "hmmm... something I could take at least some credit for - nope, I don't I'll further my career today".
As far as your comparison between Windows and Knoppix, your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. OpenOffice does not function like Microsoft Office, like it or lump it. Nor does Evolution function like Outlook. Each of these also lack features of Office that some users will have difficulty getting over. On top of that, a GUI'ed Linux system is about as stable as a tower of Jell-O. The X Window System should've been scrapped and rebuilt as a real windowing system more than a decade ago. Amusingly enough, when Windows Explorer takes a shit, it respawns itself. When Gnome or KDE go belly up, they don't. They either throw a kernel panic (and good luck training Betsy the Bimbo Secretary the concept of Magic SysRq) or crash to a prompt. Linux is only stable when you don't add all the external cruft, and nobody wants to type memos in ed and pipe them to sendmail.
Uh. No. The point stands as I made it: if you're paying $25,000 in licensing fees and support every year to maintain your windows platform and it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate to a UNIX type system, it's going to take you 10 years just to break even on the migration vs. maintaining a Windows base and you're going to carry a deficit for nine of those years.
That's a highly irrelevant point you made. Migrating from 9x to NT was a complete platform migration. NT functioned significantly differently than 9x did, it just retained the surface elements that made it look familiar. It was well known that much of what ran on 9x would not run on NT or XP because they were, in fact, different platforms. The change is not as drastic as moving from Windows to a UNIX like system, but it's pretty bloody close. Upgrading from NT to XP, by comparison, results in far fewer problems because they share a common base.
Well, while that's true, the point is that these people on Slashdot seem to spend most of their time whining like a bunch of crybaby zealots because they're too lazy/incompetent to do anything useful. In that context, it probably would be better if they did just shut up.
Tech know nothing PHBs know something you don't: if it's going to cost 2000 man hours of work at a $30 an hour average to redesign internal systems, templates, and procedures to work on a non-Microsoft system, that more than wipes out the cost of licensing the desktop systems. That doesn't include the cost of the lead up in which you have to test, deploy, and integrate all of your servers and desktops, plus the lost productivity from people needing to be retrained or retraining themselves on the shortcuts to use Linux.
People here act like a platform migration of this scale is simple as flipping a switch, and I think that really highlights how little experience in practical technology the Slashdot collective really has. You can reformat your system at home and install Linux in an hour depending on options and system speed. It's not that simple when you're talking about a business with 20 locations and 5000 workstations to migrate. It's not that simple when you have internal customer service apps to migrate. When you have internal template and procedures to rewrite. When you have to audit your hardware to ensure compatibility and then repurchase anything that might be too much hassle to fiddle with.
Migration to Linux isn't speading like wildfire for the same reason Windows shops don't jump ship to run to the superior UNIX systems even when that's cheaper: it's not as simple as you people think. It's not free. It's not even necessarily cheap. If it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate and you're only going to be saving an average of $25,000 in license fees and support each year, it will take you ten years just to break even. Linux is not a magic bullet. You people whine and whine like little babies, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is that 99% of you only whine because you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. And the more you whine about your complete and total lack of knowledge, the more steam you give to other companies to muscle in on place where Linux could be making inroads.
What you need to do, if you really want Linux to succeed that badly, is address its single biggest shortcoming: the difficulty in migrating systems from Windows to Linux. No, it's not your fault that it's so hard. Microsoft intentionally makes it difficult to leave the nest. However, since you keep bitching about it, it IS your problem.
Quit being a whiny little bitch and contribute some code, documentation, consultation, or just shut the hell up. Your whining isn't going to change the fact that Linux just plain isn't a good solution for a lot of shops, but if you'd actually do some freaking work you chould change that.
You can fix their little red wagon easier than that. Just don't pay attention to them.
Nobody HAS to listen to ICANN or any of the lackeys they delegate their power to. They're not actually providing anything that anybody else with the motivation to take over the job and some big iron can't provide, they're just the default body everybody goes to because they're SUPPOSED to be a convenient place for centralized governance of the various things that make the internet tick.
That search ain't right....
I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY YOU STAMMERING JACKASS.
I fucking hate that. I don't give a shit what you think about the goddamn democrats because I'm not one of them. I'm just a guy who's really pissed off that a bunch of ignorant fucks voted for a man with no platform outside of "You gonna die mothafucka!", a legacy of utter and complete failure, and a nasty case of pre-senile dementia.
It's not elitism, you're just an idiot.
That's because you're an idiot and you don't understand the concept behind referrer linking. Since that jackasses that post those links here are only looking to waste space so they can make money, it does not benefit anyone except them to encourage the behavior. If the link had been posted in the article where it was relevant, it would have been acceptable. However, it was posted in the body of messages only as board spam, which is not.
Or here if you'd rather not use an affiliate link and pay someone who didn't do anything more than type a few words into a search box.
Not only that, how do you mitigate the risk of losing deleted information to the creation of other files? I've analyzed HDD images up to 40GB and they're no party. It can take quite a bit of time to do a thorough analysis of the disk. It seems to me that you'd run the risk of losing important filesystem information or the contents of unlinked files. If some idiot runs degrag or something you could lose a good bit of critical fs data before it's stopped. Hell, everytime you launch an Office document it seems like a temp file is created. What happens when one of those overwrites deleted log information on the disk?
Or maybe it's because of the fact that the RNC and the "conservative" ranks that are overrunning this country are coming out of the woodwork to support an idealogy that finally gives the retards that swung this last election what they want: reasons not to think for themselves about anything and a promise that their whacked out, ignorant beliefs will always take precedence over the facts.
It's not a matter of elitism or snobbishness. It's a matter that all the religious whackos and idiot Bush voters that are handing this country to a bunch of rich make-believe "conservatives" are a bunch of knuckle dragging chimps who hate gay people more than they like to think about real issues.
Soooo... your theory behind network intrusion testing is that you shouldn't try to break into the network while you're doing it, and therefore any tool that would help you do it must be useless or evil?
Remind me to never hire you for anything related to network security testing....
Sooooo... your theory here is that the customers are to blame for Best Buy's inability to properly track its stock and its decision to implement a pricing policy that severely inconveniences honest buyers while rewarding the dishonest ones?
Right. Here's a thought: instead of trying to rip honest people off by offering convoluted rebates that require you to offer your first born child to the Sun god while fighting off a den of lions with a tooth pick, maybe the idiots that run Best Buy would be better served to implement fair prices on ALL products WITHOUT forcing honest buyers to jump through hoops. Not only would this eliminate the loophole that lets dishonest buyers take advantage of the company, it would stop penalizing honest people for wanting to get a fair price on their purchases.
Boo hoo. Watch me cry for Best Buy's incompetent marketeers after they implemented a pricing policy meant to rip people off and a bunch of smarter consumers turned the tables on them. That's like crying foul because a mugging victim took the attacker's gun and used it to steal THEIR wallet.
Eschelon? You got something against Telecoms?
I think you mean ECHELON and Carnivore. ECHELON is the multinational snoop system that catches everything from packet data to satcomms and cell tower transmissions. Eschelon is a telecommunications company.
Fortunately for me, I don't give a rat's ass about the democratic party...
Conclusion: people with completely different backgrounds than what you try to pigeonhole republicans as are still able to conclude that the GOP has their interests in mind.
Nowhere is that final statement supported, nor is there any evidence that "people" can be properly applied to your post. You are not proof of anything, and you didn't even prove that you are proof that ANYONE can come to these conclusions.
Besides which, you stated a conclusion about a whole party in reference to one person who claims to be a member of it even though he doesn't seem to follow any of its tenets.
And yet, nowhere in that rambling, incoherent, unfocused post did you actually present any factual basis for the conclusion you presented. This does not surprise me in the least.
I could sum up why you voted for Bush in three words: you are stupid.