My understanding is that sport pilot will not change FAR part 103. The only thing it might change related to you is that I can no longer tow you guys in my 2-seater "ultralight". I wonder if there will be a way for us to get an endorsement or waiver for that. We do it all the time now.
I also wonder about the 10,000' ASL/2,000' AGL limit. Right now I can legally go over 2,000' AGL if I am in radio contact with ATC and get permission. Maybe it'll be line anything else: if you have permission you can do ANYTHING. I don't go over 2,000 too often, but I like to give myself a little breathing room when I'm flying over rough terain and might need to glide a good distance for a safe landing. I'd rather not have to rely on my ballistic parachute any more than I have to;-)
My mother has pictures of me as a young child taking a bath in her wash tub. She also has many pictures of my brothers and sisters and I swimming in the local watering hole. We're all starkers. They're all in her old photo albums - she even used some of them as part of a collage at my HS grauation party as part of a "roast the grad" display. Is my mother a child pornographer? What if one of the guests looked at it a little too long? Obviously that makes them a pedophile and they should be locked away.
My brother just e-mailed me a picture of my niece playing in her wading pool - topless! What about pictures of my wife on the beach (in her bathing suit) with someone else's topless child in the background? Is that kiddy porn? My local hospital has a large full-color poster of about a dozen toddlers, lined up "cheek-to-cheek", with some sort of cute saying on it? KP? Why not? Are the toddlers too young?
What about a picture of a 12 year old girl in her underwear? That can't ever be right! Except in the Sears catalog. But only pedophiles read that section right? Is Sears contributing to the lust of pedophiles? Boycot them!
What about that Discovery Channel show about growing up and aging where they line up 100 people from infant to 100 years old, one for every age, all naked?
The argument for pornography, and by extension, kiddy porn, is "I'll know it when I see it". The problem with that argument is that what is one person's porn is another person's art (or research, or marketing, or memories, etc). Another problem with "kiddy porn" is that the subject is SO taboo and SO reprehensible that there is an instant knee-jerk reaction to it without any rational thought.
Even my questioning the "status-quo" like this will invariably brand me as a pedophile. This makes about as much sense as my being branded a terrorist because I question the effectiveness of "security measures" that substantially inconvenience me and terribly embarrased my 14 year old daughter who was "caught" wearing an underwire bra on our trip to Europe and had to be "felt-up" by "the lady", in front of everyone.
The cry is: "It's for security!"or "It's for the Children!". Well, security is good - if not taken to mindless extremes, and protecting children is also good. But are we really about protecting the children? If so, why is is so easy for people to find KP online but so hard for the police to find it and shut it down? And, as another poster pointed out, what about totaly computer generated or hand-drawn material? What happens when "no children were harmed in the making of this film?".
Yeah, I know, "the material will fuel the lusts of the demented pedophile" and he will therefore be forced to hunt down neighborhood kids. Just like my neighbor downloading pictures from alt.sex.bdsm.* will force him to become a sadistice rapist, or like playing GTA will force the my son to steal cars and run down pedestrians or, God forbid, the next time I see a cross-post of bestiality, I'm going to just have to take out after my poor dog.
OK, I'll admit that I'm stretching the connections a bit. But it seems to me that trying to censor the end-user is not the solution. While it MAY help those who use Internet Exploder from being "accidentally" exposed to KP when their computer get hijacked and bombarded with pop-ups, shouldn't the effort be focussed on finding the people who are actually exploiting these poor children? And don't tell me that viewing a cross-post on Usenet is "contributing to the exploitation". I didn't ask for it, I didn't pay for it, and I'm sure as hell not gonna act on it.
In my personal opinion, people who get sexually excited by looking at pre-pubescent children have a phlychological problem, just like people who look at a pony and get that "special feeling". But, and I'm going out on a limb here, I'd be willing to bet that, of those who don't just view ALL pornography as wrong, a vast majority prefer to look at younger,
Yeah, my iPod has different behaviors depending on how long I hold the button down during a click (ie. turning the back light on, skipping to the next song as opposed to fast forwarding the current one, turning the unit off as opposed to play/stop, etc.)
This is a "palm-type" device with hardware buttons in my book - I have my address book on it, a calendar, and even games.
This pattent crap is getting THICK! I actually half-hope it gets even worse so that there is no question but that we need to revamp or eliminate the USPO. Only when everyone sees the absolute lunacy of some of these pattents that are awarded will there be a reall cry for change!
One of the things that mozilla based browsers have over IE is that they run on almost ANY platform. If I were to develope a "web application" for deployment in my company, I'd choose XUL (as opposed to.NET) simply for the fact that I can ALWAYS say to my employees "to run this Application/Page, you need to use FireFox/Mozilla".
People have no problem firing up a separate software package for almost any other "application", they shouldn't have a problem with fireing up a different browser for running my application - and, once they realize how fast and powerfull it is in browsing the rest of the websites, they may very well stay. By developing in XUL (or any other "mozilla-supported" language) I am making sure that my software can literally run ANYWHERE. With IE and.NET, that can't be said.
THAT, IMHO, is the primary advantage of mozilla over IE. I'm not locked in to a single platform. Do you have any idea how many time I get strange looks from people when I ask them if their software runs on Mac or Linux, or if their "web-enabled content" is accessable with ForeFox. There are a lot of people out there who really do think that MS is the only game in town and they are astounded that we are moving away from them. As Linux gains more press and momentum these people will be forced to admit that they are painting themselves into a corner by supporting MS-specific things when instead, by using Open/Standards-based languages, they can honestly say, "Yes, our software runs on your platform".
So while I agree that while those who choose to follow MS will have a powerful tool for web-applications, they will also be locking themselves completely in with MS. I believe that more and more business will find this unacceptable - especially if F/OS provides an equal solution to the problem. All the company has to do is say "fire up Mozilla" and they can work even on Windows.
my assumptions. I started typing a reply along the lines of "yeah, but what about india? They have almost as many people, and have a much more educated population".
Then, I decided to actually check my facts. Boy, what a suprise. I was right about the population issue: India 1.03 billion, China 1.28 Billion. But what really shocked me was the figures on literacy. I would have bet a week's pay that India had a much better educated population. I assumed that most Chineese couldn't read or write, but a little googling showed that China has about 80% literacy while India has around 60% literacy. So much for assumptions.
I still think China is in for a tough time when more of their population gets access to outside information. It's difficult to excercise dictatorial control over a population that has ready access to contrary views and information. We'll have to see. Maybe this can be a "peaceful" revolution... Either way, China will be a force to be reconned with, but I seriously think creating their own standards will slow the growth process.
OK, confession time: When I looked over the Xandros screen shots they looked pretty slick to me. You know, polished. Many of the windowing environments I've seen and used on Linux has fallen a bit short on this point - much of it simply having to do with poor default choices for graphics and "clunky" (IMO) default choices for window decorations. Then I started reading the various posts about "why are they imitating windows?" and "why don't 'we' use our efforts to build a better interface?" followed shortly by arguments about what intuitive means.
I'll admit to being guilty of confusing intuitive with familiar. But let's be honest here, no interfaces are created or used in isolation. They are always based on some previous knowledge, understanding or bias and exploit a framework of shared understanding between users. That "Network Neighborhood" icon is only intuitive if you know what a "Network Neighborhood" is and can guess that the little drawing is about.
I ran into this problem while designing a webmail interface. I had to battle the impluse to go with my personal preferences for a clean, unobtrusve interface with small icons and hovering tools tips. I found out that icons that made perfect sense to me were uselsess to my users. My preference for having additional information appear only when an item was focused on (ie. hovered over) instead of splattered all over the screen up front wasn't shared by my users. Moreover, I found, when I asked for feedback and input, that "experienced" users alway asked for things to be laid out like the software it was replacing (Eudora, Outlook, etc.) while the "new" users, once given a brief tour accepted the interface much more readily. I'm guilty of that myself. I use the Gimp whenever I can, but because I cut my teeth on Photoshop and have hundreds of hours experience with it, I find myself giving the Gimp negative reviews - mostly because it's unfamiliar (read counter-intuitive) to me.
So, after sitting for a while and trying to literally think out of the box and come up with a truly new interface for an OS, I realized that almost everything I imagined was impossible (or at least impractical) with current technology, or heavily biased toward familiar paradigms and conventions. When it came down to it, most of the thing's I'd change are little annoyances instead of overall design. I think if anything, incorporating some fuzzy logic into the interface so that it morphs to my usage patterns. I mean subtlely, I hate it when windows chops off a menu and removes objects I haven't used yet. It's a good idea, but how about leaving them where I was used to seeing them but making the most used items progressively darker, sharper, bigger, whatever. Don't remove them from sight or even rearange them.
For me personally I rely on relative location of objects rather than what they look like for immediate recognition. It drives my wife (and my boss) crazy, but what migh look like a complete mess in my office to others is "organized" to me. Whatever you do, don't move anything. When I'm reading a book, I can literally stop in the middle of the page and be able to pick the book back up months later and know exactly what word I left off on, because it hasn't moved. So for me, spacial orientation is critical. For my wife, it has to be labled and "organized" according to the Dewey-decimal system or she's lost (I don't know how we've made it for 18 years).
So, I guess what I'm saying is that comming up with a revolutionarily intuitive user interface may be impossible. That leaves us with an evolutionarily familiar interface. I mean, my God, vi is NOT intuitive, by any streatch of the imagination. However, it IS powerfull and familiar to me, meaning that I'm more likely to turn to vi for many tasks and get things done more quickly, than I am to fire up a graphical editor. My mom on the other hand has no compatible frame of reference and would be totally lost in vi.
The article claims that the software could block encrypted communications, apparently indescriminantly. I wonder how that would affect legit transfers like scp, ssh or vpn connections.
I'm probably talking out of my butt here, but what if, instead of the entire "stream" being encrypted, just the "content" was, with a one-time, mutually agreed upon key? How would their software know the difference? It would never have the same "fingerprint" twice. Would it just block any traffic that looked like random noise?
I can see this software pissing a lot of sysadmins off - could you ever be absolutely sure those "ghosts" you've been chasing weren't this software being over zealous?
The parent is right though. This will just prompt those who wish to trade on P2P to take it to the next level. Especially now that the "Big Five" labels are trying to force Apple to charge $2.50 per song! If that happens I will stop buying songs from iTMS and say "screw the bastards, release the hounds", P2P here I come!
Have you ever noticed how often it's everyone else who's looking for the ringing phone instead of the person who's phone is actually ringing? Then after everyone else has determinied that it isn't theirs and are staring at the deaf idiot, they look around and say "oh, is it mine?!".
Is it just me, or does this happen to get worse when the tune is polyphonic? Do people do this on purpose to show off as long as possible with their expensive phones and ringtones? Get over yourselves already! We don't CARE if your phone plays Britany! It's a freakin' PHONE! Want Britany? Get an iPod!
My phone sits on my hip and vibrates first, then after a few "vibrations" actually emits a progressively louder ringing noise. 99% of the time I can answer it before it even starts making any noise. Except in a few obvious places (Church, Theaters, Classes, etc.) I have no problem with a cell phone ringing and someone answering it. I have a big problem with people who A) just let it ring, without any intention of answering (instead of reaching down and cancelling the call) or B) somehow are the only person within 300 yards that CAN'T hear the damn thing ring!
For your "average" user, all activity should, in fact, be accomplishable through the GUI. It allows a comfortable, visual method of performing ordinary, repetative tasks. And I do understand that you are, in fact, talking about your "average user". But remember, the "Linux geeks with the hardon" aren't your average user. So you can't really make the comparison like you have.
For "advanced" users, and users who are looking for efficiency, it's tough to beat the command-line. And I'm talking about the *nix command line - CMD.EXE is not, IMO, a usefull command line. True, using the command line (at first) requires a bit more basic knowledge than using a GUI, but a GUI cannot be as efficiently powerfull or as flexible.
Case in point: Last week my boss was talking to me, asking about some particular statistics and information thinking that I would gather the data and get back to him. I said "hang on", pulled up a terminal window, ssh'd in to the machine in question and changed to the log directory (all this can be done with a GUI too, BTW). I then typed a single line using a series of commands including grep, sed, awk, less and various regular expressions. Almost instantly, the relevant infomation scrolled onto the screen, rearranged, filtered and organized according to his particular question. Based on this information, he asked further questions which only required hitting the up arrow to recall the last command and editing a few characters to modify the command's behavior. BTW, this was on a 2GB+ log file. This could not have been accomplished with a GUI within any reasonable amount of time without the entire logging system having been organized ahead of time into a complex relational database and a GUI with the particular type of querying and filtering I needed at that moment having been designed in advance. It is thoretically possible that I could have imported the log into Excel and performed a series of queries, sorts, filters, etc, followed by dragging columns around to put appropriate info next to eachother while deleting other columns because the weren't pertinent. This is even assuming the log file was even organized into a "tabbular-friendly" format (which it is not as it aggregates textual information from several different sources).
Now, I understand that this example is an extreme one that the ordinary user would never need, or even be able, to do. However, I do this sort of thing most of the day and I can honestly say that most of it would be terribly onerous to do through a GUI interface.
The basic strength of the command-line is the ability to pass data through a series of small, powerfull programs, each one refining or processing the data from the previous one. A GUI implementation would require either a monolithic program that provided all the functionality of the thousands of specialized tools available from the command line, or, it would require the user to launch each GUI version of these programs, import the data successively into each, process it and then export it to the next.
By typing something like:
find . -mtime -1 -name *.log -exec grep "foo" | sed s/bar/\<censored\>/g >>/tmp/newlog \; && diff/tmp/oldlog/tmp/newlog | less
I've just taken all logs from my directory on down which have been modified in the last 24 hours, removed all lines except the ones I'm looking for, sanitized any references to a particularly sensitive piece of data, aggregated all matching resulting lines from all relavant files and compaired it to a reference file, producing a searchable, browseable report showing only the differences between my current search and the reference file. Now, short of having a custom-written application to do just that sort of thing, how are you going to use "included" GUI applications to accomplish the same or similar tasks with as much finesse or efficiency?
Those who have known nothing but windows (or classic mac
I, too have downloaded (stolen) software. I've done it out of curiosity and to learn their use. I'm not going to pay thousands of dollars to see if I'm going to like a piece of software or if it will really fit my needs. I freely admit I taught myself Photoshop and FinalCut Pro in this manner. I even used this software in completing a "comercial" project.
When I got paid for the project, I bought the software. I now legally own both Photoshop and FinalCut Pro. I learned them and found them to be useful to me. When the return on investment (i.e. I made enough money off using them that I could afford to buy them) was there, I bought them. I am teaching myself Maya and Cinema 4D. When/if they become usefull enough to me to warrant investing a HUGE amount of money (plus upgrade costs), I'll certainly purchase them.
I played Starcraft and Diablo with "stolen" copies until I found myself really enjoying them. I now OWN 3 copies so my kids can play too.
I'm not even going to try to claim what I'm doing is leagal or even ethical. But I can say that the ability for me to FULLY learn and USE a product before forking over a huge amount of money had DIRECTLY lead to my spending the money on purchasing the product.
On the other hand, I've taken the time to DL and learn other software that I've found to not do what I'd orriginally hoped it would. It is either sitting unused on my computer or has been deleted.
I recently sent my brother a "copy" of some expensive software I OWN. He needed to be able to install it at his work to prove to his supervisor that it would solve their problem. If it works, they will be switching company-wide to that software. If it doesn't, they won't and wouldn't have bought the software anyway.
I've been known to not even consider using software that is so paranoid as to require a dongle or phoning home regardless how great it's supposed to be. If the software is that good they shouldn't have to treat me like a criminal before-hand. I know it's a stupid knee-jerk reaction, but it's the way I feel. When I become your customer, treat me right. If you want me to be your customer, treat me right. Even my car dealership allowed me to take my mercedes home over the weekend to test it for free. And they made a sale.
In my school district we still have entire labs using NuBus PowerPC Macs. They're, what, almost 10 years old? Guess how many 10 year old PCs we are using... Right.
We REPLACE PCs every 4 years or less on average. When we buy new PCs we are usually surplussing the old hardware. When we buy Macs we are generally ADDING TO our inventory.
So if you just look at our "market share" it would appear that PCs have 2-3 times the market share. In reality, they only have a small fraction.
My PC using friends are constantly upgrading/replacing their PCs (which they can, because the hardware is cheap and ubiquitous). To the bean-counting dweebs, each new purchase counts as "new market share" when in reality, they don't have ANOTHER PC they've replaced their original one.
I'm not saying that there aren't many more PC's in use than Macs, what I am saying is that Macs tend to be used for far longer (than I think they should be) so the stats appear skewed. One of my personal clients is still using an LCIII for cryin' out loud! Last week we actually had a color-classic in for repair. I wonder how many 286's are still in daily use today?
Remember, there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics!
Many of the comments today have revolved around the fact that "times, they are a-changin'". On one side, we see that the new technology has, almost overnight, obsoleted an entire industry (as it currently stands) especially WRT distribution and the infrastructure forced in place to support it.
On the other hand we have a technology which completely eliminates the burden and costs in distribution (and even advertising in large part), but will put the "mob" and the "teamsters" out of business. Although, idealogically, I tend to come down squarely on the side of freedom (as in speech - not beer), I am educated and intelligent enough to realize that this is NOT a black and white situation.
Today we have a huge number (admit it) of people getting something for nothing and then trying to come up with a myriad of justifications for it. This includes me;-) I have a ton of MP3's downloaded for free. Most of them, I also already own on cassette tape from years ago - which is my justification. I know, in my heart-of-hearts that it is a very tenuous argument, because no one promised me that I would have access to that particular recording for eternity accross the various delivery formats. But even when switching from vinyl to cassettes, I still have some hand-labelled ones that represent my own recordings from my albums to blank tapes.
When iTMS came out, I was happy. I re-downloaded a butt-load of tracks that I loved, but was unable to find a decent version of on-line. The IRAA's best friend is idiots who can't rip worth a damn. I now have almost all of my primary (ie, music I listen to consistently) tracks purchased from iTMS. I could really do without the DRM, because I have 4 main computers at home and can only allow 3 to contain a copy of the tracks, but this is all but eliminated because I just keep iTunes up in the background and my family can stream all my purchased music. I also make MP3 backups of everything I download to CD for strorage and playing in my car.
It works for me and, speaking only for myself, I'm obviously willing to spend $0.99 per song for the ones I downloaded. I'd like many others, but they aren't worth that much to me - I won't listen to them that often, so I don't buy them. This brings up the point that Apple, the RIAA, etc., would get more of my money if the price-point were better - but they have to balance their costs/greed/whatever. In the mean-time, I'll download music from P2P and get the hit-and-miss encoding for the songs I'm curious about or know I won't listen to more than once or twice anyway.
I'll not even try to claim that this is ethical, moral or legal. Let me say this though: as someone who normally does NOT buy a lot of music, I have actually stumbled accross some bands which do not get national play which I have REALLY liked on P2P. And due to this I have actually gone to iTMS and purchased several full albums (if they had them) which I would never have even known about because they aren't mainstream or in good enough graces with the powers that be to get any play on the local radio stations. So, on the one hand the RIAA wouldn't get any more money out of me anyway, and on the other, P2P has introduced me to bands and performances that I have spent more money on.
I can see this is going to be a long post, since I haven't even gotten to my main point yet, so if you are still with me, cool:-)
In reading the other "business model" posts I started thinking about what the future might bring, which might have even greater imact on "business as we know it". I started to think about the 3D printers and nano-tech. What happens to industry and manufacturing as we know it, when each home has a nano-assemby appliance that can take a digital representation of an object and assemble it from raw materials (perhaps pulled from dis-assembled products and garbage)? Think StarTrek replicators.
What happens to the business models of all those industries when
I'd like to see an online cookbook that gives me recipies based on what I have in the kitchen. Half the time I get home, look through cupboards and fridge and say "Crap! What the heck can I make out of this?".
I need RFID readers in the kitchen which tie directly into my fridge-mounted, internet-connected, touch-screen, Xterminal, cookbook!;-)
As much as RFID's make me nervous, I can see this as an inevitable commonplace in the future.
Although I use RedHat/Fedora almost exclusively my primary desktop OS at work (as a Systems Administrator of a large Windows/Linux/Mac network), I'd recommend ARK Linux for drop-dead simple installation and good beginner experience. I have to admit, the one-click install is pretty impressive. As you get more familiar with Linux you will probably look forward to "tweaking" the install and compiling your own kernels, etc. and may want to look at some of the "better known"/"mature" distros, but the pollished install and interface of Ark Linux is something I'd feel comfortable recommending to my Mom.
This is the most solid "Alpha" version of any OS I've seen. As always, YMMV depending on the type of hardware you run, but I've seen it install flawlessly on both Dells (Optiplex) and IBMs (300pls, etc). If you are installing it on a laptop you may run into some problems, as laptop hardware can be a bit odd at the best of times and finding Linux drivers for newer laptop hardware can be a challenge with ANY distro.
The debate over which flavor or distro to use depends heavily on what you're used to IMO. Although there are sure to be plenty of people out there who will point out specific instances where "Dist A is better because FOO", I've rarely seen one distibution NOT be able to do something another can with a little tweaking and perhaps some re-compiling. People tend to stick with what they know and will argue vehemently for it, to the exclusion of all else. I "know" RedHat Linux and as such, if I'm going to set up a workstation or server to do something I've already done, I'll tend use and recommend it. That doesn't mean that Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, or even OS X can't do it just as well. Each has their strengths and weaknesses based on many factors including choice of installer software, package manager, default driver-selection, default desktop/window-manager, etc. but just because the choices for the default install may be best for a given situation doesn't mean that another distro can't be made to work just as well.
Unfortunately, at this point in the game, running Linux as a primary desktop entails some extra learning and frustration. However, as someone who has moved completely off Windows, I can say that the discomfort is well worth it in the long run and the knowledge gained in the process will serve you well.
This summer I will be rolling out our first large-scale Linux thin-client network.
We have a new school being built, and two more being renovated. The workstations will be thin clients (built from new parts by students at about $150.00 ea. not including monitors - we will be putting some of our savings there to get flat panels). The servers will probably be Dell or Iron Systems Dual Processor systems with 4Gig Ram.
We will be installing a Mac OS X X-Serve kerberos/LDAP password server to take over autentication from our Active Directory Server (although the AD server will continue to provide account details for our Windows Clients). Our Mac and Linux clients will use LDAP for account information so we can have true single-signon district-wide.
Almost all standard usage for computers at the high-school level consists of web-based research (web-browser), typing notes and papers (basic word processing), developing presentations ("powerpoint"), and email (web-based). All of this can be done without pain, or viruses, or licenses, with Linux/OOo/Mozilla.
We also have an Apache/PHP/MySQL based student management system that we've developed in-house which automagically provides teachers and students with a web-based view of their classes, teachers, students, etc. This system auto-creates accounts and manages class enrollment associations based on information from HR and Student Records through the normal process of student-enrollment on our AS400. This means there is no staff/student account management. When a staff memeber is hired and assigned a teaching position (or other position) their account is auto-created (currently in Active Directory), they are assigned groups and a home directory on the server in the building they are assigned to. As students enroll in our district they get accounts auto-created in the same way, with passwords randomly assigned. When the student enrolls in a particular class, the teacher will see them on their class lists on the web and be able to tell them their default password so they can log in and change it via the web browser (which changes it in AD) Teachers can also "reset" a sudent's password for students in their case-load via the web - no more calling down to the helpdesk to and taking up everyone's time just to change a password (Admin-secretaries and other designated people can do the same for staff in their building).
Assignments and other resources can be uploaded via the web interface and "handed-out" to student in a class with the click of a button - this is available securely outside the firewall so teachers and students can access these files from home. All files are thus virus-checked and controlled as opposed to being carried in by floppies. Student can similarly hand-in documents to their teachers. Attendance, and grading will be rolled in next, at which point our hope is to post the source for other school districts to use.
What this means is that almost all daily functions can be managed in a completely platform-agnostic way. Accounts are the same regardless of OS. Home directories are available via the network district-wide with single-signon. And, with the exception of some of our "MS certification" classes (which will be delivered via Citrix and rdesktop) almost all other functions can happen with any OS and more importantly, with linux. Specifically, dumb-terminals, with no moving parts and no requirement for constant maintenance and upgrade. All users will be using Open Office where ever practical to avoid the overhead in license-fees and content lock-in.
Our students will graduate with a solid knowledge of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. They will be able to be flexible in the workplace because they won't start with the attitude we see in so many of our current teachers: "If it's not [insert the only App/OS they've ever used], I don't know how to use it".
Another advantage is that we can now actually use the many donated computers we get. Before, we would get an old PII 233 and spend more money tha
It will start with being able to "find the guilty", people who already have a warrant for their arrest out for "crimes" discovered via other means.
But soon it will be used for trolling in general for anyone who "does something bad" online.
Let me ask you this:
Have you ever read or downloaded any of those "survivalist" texts or "handbooks"?
Have you, for any reason, ever stumbled accross Pr0n with participants of questionable age?
Have you ever downloaded a krack or SN generator?
Have you ever checked out those "virus creation programs"?
Have you ever been pissed about something the "gubmint" did and perhaps "overstated" what you'd like to do about it online?
Have you ever gotten a virus or malware on you box that started opening websites you never asked for?
Have you ever [insert anything, which might become illegal in the future] online?
Although I'm a SysAdmin now, I've spent a good part of my youth "looking under rocks" on the internet out of [morbid?] curiosity. Some of it could be construed as "illegal" behavior - although I have never intentionally broken the law with any of the "knowledge" I've gotten from it.
If the Feds were to troll for my "surfing" habits, I'll bet I could be put on a watch list right now. Currently there are things like court orders limiting what can be gleaned and what can be done with the data once collected, but these checks and balances are quickly drying up.
For those who are quick to reach for their tin-foil hats (mine's right here) check out some fun, time-killin' reading. Errosion of privacy is one of his top points...
There are always ways to get around our "blocks". They were instituted to reduce the spread of viruses. If we would have had our smtp (outgoing) block in place before this we could have stopped the spread of this virus to others. If others had done the same, this virus would have been much less of an impact.
You are arguing that if you can't be 100% effective don't even try! At least, if ALL viri must use our SMTP server they would be scanned first. Maybe, since we update our virus defs 3 times an hour from 2 separate locations, we can stop the spread from us to you sooner. Wouldn't you appreciate that?
I not only have a responsibility as SysAdmin of my enterprise of protecting my own users. I must do everything in my power to protect others from the actions of nodes on my network!
This virus spread faster than anything I've ever seen to date - we "discovered" the virus on our system after one of our "brilliant users" forwarded an email to me that had a "clean".zip attachment they couldn't open (they thought). I use a RedHat box as my primary workstation, so I wasn't terribly nervous about a.zip, but I ran f-prot and clamav against the file anyway and it did indeed come back clean. I re-ran the definition updates and it still came back clean.
So I unzipped it and ran strings on it. The first things I saw were sync.c and all the.DLL's at the end of the file and I figured that it was a new virus. We immediately put a cludged filter in place on our email and went looking around the 'Net for some sort of announcement of this new virus - which we found on f-secure's web site. It was about an hour later that we were able to get a signature update for our anti-virus software on our mail server and about 6 hours later before we were able to get updates for our enterprise anti-virus software (I won't mention the vendor).
We "caught" over 400 infected messages before we even had a signature for it. That was scary. But what scared me most was the thought that this could have been a "real" worm. MyDoom isn't very creative and not that harmful - making me think it was written by/for spammers, myself. But a few of my coworkers got to talking. What would have happened if this had a more creative payload and it spread via network shares as well? What if, instead of opening back doors (which made it very easy to nmap our networks for infected machines even before we had a "detection" tool) it just looked for all.xls files and randomly changed numbers. What if it then looked for.doc files and randomly added garbage, deleted words, or some other crap? How long would it be before people started realizing this was larger than just a file or two getting corrupted? By then these files have been backed up and/or forwarded to others as well.
I remember several years back now there was a virus that replaced all.jpg files with copies of itself. It about ruined a friend of mine who was trying to start a "web design" business and had thousands of images, many custom made for his clients, destroyed in an instant. It devastated him (he does good backups now).
If someone decided to get serious and release a worm with a (dare I say) "terrorist" payload. They could, literaly bring my comapny to its knees in a matter of seconds.
Now before you go off half-cocked and yell at me for "giving people ideas", take a deep breath. Almost everyone in my office was thinking along the same lines. We were discussing ways to mitigate an event like this in our own enterprise and how we could block any spread out of our networks.
We came up with the obvious: have good backups, but then we started to think about how to stop the spread out of our networks and realized that up till that point anyone could have an SMTP "server"/virus set up and send mail out. We now block ALL incomming and outgoing SMTP except the ones to and from our mail servers. We also don't allow POP or IMAP in or out except to our mail servers. If people want to check other accounts they can RPOP from our server - at least it will go through our virus and spam filters first.
If more ISP's/companies did this, the spead of MyDoom would have been slower. But how do you mitigate the effects of having a virus "corrupt" all your documents? Even if you catch it right away and restore from last night's backups (after checking ALL your computers for infection) you still lose an entire day's worth of work for many departments. That's a big setback.
MyDoom infected department heads and department "techie" people first because their users came to them with an attachment that they "couldn't open". The "techie" people explained later that they had their virus s
Right now I'm working as a Systems Administrator. In the past I've been head of Software Engineering as well as project manager on various teams at the companies I've worked for. I tend to prefer to work with computers, rather than people. Perhaps it's that tendency which has forced me to be more aware of what it takes to Get Things Done(tm) it real life;-)
This is free advice, so you get what you pay for:-)
Don't come to me with problems; come to me with solutions.
If all you can do is give me a list of what is wrong, you're a whiner and I don't want to hear it. If, instead, you point out a problem and then offer a solution, I know you've taken ownership of the problem at least to the extent that you've given some thought to options. This generally means that you've considered more than one point of view - otherwise, it's hardly a solution.
Provide the proper context.
Often problems are discussed in isolation, so that even possible solutions appear to be disproportionate to the original problem. By framing the problem and the solutions in light of their relavance to the ultimate goal or direction of the (company/department/project/etc.) it can lend better perspective. When viewed in the right light, problems that don't affect others (but who's solutions would), might be considered more seriously. You may also find that it's simply an annoyance to you and, when placed in perspective isn't worth mentioning - especially in this venue.
Move the conversation forward.
If the horse is dead, stop beating it... Pay attention to how your suggestions are being received. If now is not the time, you should pick up on signals to that affect; move on. Don't keep comming back to the same old rant. This is politics, not a technical problem. If you sense you're losing your audience, don't piss them off. Work the problem out later through your chain of command. If it's really that important, put it in a memo.
Focus on the positives
OK, that seems trite, but it's true. I'm much more willing to pay attention to you if you have good things to say. If everytime I talk to you, you come off negative, I'm more apt to chalk your current rant up to just more complaining. Some people are never satisfied, and I have bigger fish to fry. I don't know how many times I've heard "You should ask for it. If I ask, we'll never get it." Well, duh. If everytime I turned around, I was complaining and asking someone else to solve my problems, I'd expect to be blown off too. I have a reputation for asking for very little, so when I do ask, I'm taken seriously.
Network first
Like I said earlier, this is politics. First impressions are important. Take that into consideration at this first meeting. Perhaps keeping this meeting very positive will earn a little karma that you can burn later. Geeks tend to view problems from a technical perspective and forget the human side of things. Don't burn your bridges by coming on too strong right from the beginning. Perhaps making a point of saying that you feel a follow-up meeting might be a better place to discuss specifics will show you as being aware and considerate.
When it comes down to it though, you know your company and coworkers better that we do, and must act accordingly. Some tactics may work at one company, but would be totaly inapproprate at another.
Actually, our current plan is to have them net-boot to a basic X11 Server and actually have the desktop and everything running off the server farm (we have a pretty good network and we won't be doing anything like live-video, etc. that would require super-high screen refesh rates). This means that we can literally remove all moving parts from the units (except cooling fans), including the hard drives and floppy drives if we can get a NIC that will take a boot ROM and will only need enough RAM to load a very basic kernel.
That's the tentative plan anyway. Most of these are so old we don't want to put ANY money into them, but if we can get some "dumb terminal" use out of them for free we will. It's cheaper for us to dump another 1U server in the rack and load balance than have to try to find, buy, and install new CPU's, RAM, HDs, etc. in all these old machines. When they truly die - they're dead and we pitch them. In the mean time they can be usefull.
This also opens us up to dropping in some true "terminals" down the road for a couple hundred bucks if we want. We are even trying to get Apple to produce some "stripped" eMacs with no HD and no CD's for use as netboot clients off our XServes to run our Apple Software for "cheap". We'll see how far that flies:-)
I, personally, think 2005/2005 will be critical for Linux on the desktop for serveral reasons.
First, with Microsoft EOL'ing support and bugfixes this year for NT4 and 98/SE, I see many users and organizations casting about for alternatives. IIR, about 25% of the Internet-connected users are still using 98/NT. With XP being expensive and probably requiring new HW as well, they will be forced to consider Something New(tm). This may mean looking at OS X - since they need new hardware anyway. Or, more likely, they may consider "trying" Linux on their current equipment - especially if they have a friend, or know someone, who can install in for them for cheap or free.
Second, and this ties in with the first, public schools and many businesses are really starting to feel the financial crunch of constant HW/Software/License upgrade. Many public schools (like ours) cannot lease equipment due to board policies against "incumbering subsequent administrations" (or some such nonsense) meaning that new equipment is cash out of pocket and old equipment, which can no longer be used/supported, is surplussed at a total loss. Businesses, as well, face the fact that upgrading older equipment in order to run the new OS from the Beast, simply to be able to have 10 more unused features added to Word, is stupid and wastefull.
When you sit back and think about it, for most schools and businesses, 95% of computer use is for what? Email, Internet access, basic word processing/spreadsheets/"powerpoint" and maybe some IM or connectivity to a "mainframe" for financials, records, etc. which generally means some sort of TN5250/whatever emulation. ALL of this can be done with Linux as the desktop - with the added bonus(?) of increased productivity due to end users not being as able to install Webshots, Kazaa, Trojan-loaderPro, or VirusOfTheHour 6.0. This means work can be done.
But there is still a huge hurdle. Most companies and schools don't necessarily have the technical know-how or confidence to roll out Linux on the desktop. I think this is a pretty big hurdle, but not a showstopper. First, I see a lot more advertising from big players ("no one ever got fired for recommending IBM") on prime-time TV for Linux. Second, I see that Sam's Club is selling a $300.00 Linux box with Linux pre-installed and (in our store) an entire row of monitors demoing it sitting next to the XP boxes selling for hundred$ more. This is bringing Linux into the conciousness of the public (although as geeks we seem wonder how anyone could have missed it for so long:-)
Let me speak from personal experience for a second. Last week we had an engineer from a software vendor show up to install an expensive, high-end HW/SW solution. Unfortunately, it runs on windows only, so we had to buy several Win2k3 Servers and have their engineer set it up for us (lot's of custom tweaks, lots of $$$). I asked him if there were any plans for porting it to Linux, especially considering that he recommended checking with their company first before applying any MS patches to these bexes as some of them have broken their software in the past (eek!). He turned and looked at me and said that over 80% of the places he's been to have asked the same question. So they've begun porting. It should be available next year sometime. Score one for the good guys.
Along those same lines, I took him around to some of our installations to test the new system on our workstations. Wanting to start with the possibility of having the greatest success, I sook him to one of our "newer" labs. His first comment was "You're using Dell GX110's still? Those are, like 4 years old!". I didn't bother to tell him that, as Systems Administrator, I'm still waiting for my GX110. In fact, we still have IBM 340 workstations deployed. Those are 6 or 7 years old.
We are facing a huge budget crunch. Because of this, we are being forced to do a close eval of possible ways to cut costs and squeeze the most out of our current investments. Af
There needs to be some kind of punitive damage for people who attempt to patent things that are not only covered by prior art, but has been in the Public Domain, for over 20 years before the application.
No. There needs to be some kind of punitive damage for the people who approve a patent application that is not only covered by prior art, but are in the Public Domain, for over 20 years before the application!
I say we need to start holding the U.S. Patent Office accountable for the actions of their "lazy, incompetent, government" employees.
BTW, I am a government employee. And if I did my job as poorly as they do, I'd expect to get my ass booted out into the cold, pronto!
Slashdot Mirror
I also wonder about the 10,000' ASL/2,000' AGL limit. Right now I can legally go over 2,000' AGL if I am in radio contact with ATC and get permission. Maybe it'll be line anything else: if you have permission you can do ANYTHING. I don't go over 2,000 too often, but I like to give myself a little breathing room when I'm flying over rough terain and might need to glide a good distance for a safe landing. I'd rather not have to rely on my ballistic parachute any more than I have to ;-)
This Sucks!
My mother has pictures of me as a young child taking a bath in her wash tub. She also has many pictures of my brothers and sisters and I swimming in the local watering hole. We're all starkers. They're all in her old photo albums - she even used some of them as part of a collage at my HS grauation party as part of a "roast the grad" display. Is my mother a child pornographer? What if one of the guests looked at it a little too long? Obviously that makes them a pedophile and they should be locked away.
My brother just e-mailed me a picture of my niece playing in her wading pool - topless! What about pictures of my wife on the beach (in her bathing suit) with someone else's topless child in the background? Is that kiddy porn? My local hospital has a large full-color poster of about a dozen toddlers, lined up "cheek-to-cheek", with some sort of cute saying on it? KP? Why not? Are the toddlers too young?
What about a picture of a 12 year old girl in her underwear? That can't ever be right! Except in the Sears catalog. But only pedophiles read that section right? Is Sears contributing to the lust of pedophiles? Boycot them!
What about that Discovery Channel show about growing up and aging where they line up 100 people from infant to 100 years old, one for every age, all naked?
The argument for pornography, and by extension, kiddy porn, is "I'll know it when I see it". The problem with that argument is that what is one person's porn is another person's art (or research, or marketing, or memories, etc). Another problem with "kiddy porn" is that the subject is SO taboo and SO reprehensible that there is an instant knee-jerk reaction to it without any rational thought.
Even my questioning the "status-quo" like this will invariably brand me as a pedophile. This makes about as much sense as my being branded a terrorist because I question the effectiveness of "security measures" that substantially inconvenience me and terribly embarrased my 14 year old daughter who was "caught" wearing an underwire bra on our trip to Europe and had to be "felt-up" by "the lady", in front of everyone.
The cry is: "It's for security!"or "It's for the Children!". Well, security is good - if not taken to mindless extremes, and protecting children is also good. But are we really about protecting the children? If so, why is is so easy for people to find KP online but so hard for the police to find it and shut it down? And, as another poster pointed out, what about totaly computer generated or hand-drawn material? What happens when "no children were harmed in the making of this film?".
Yeah, I know, "the material will fuel the lusts of the demented pedophile" and he will therefore be forced to hunt down neighborhood kids. Just like my neighbor downloading pictures from alt.sex.bdsm.* will force him to become a sadistice rapist, or like playing GTA will force the my son to steal cars and run down pedestrians or, God forbid, the next time I see a cross-post of bestiality, I'm going to just have to take out after my poor dog.
OK, I'll admit that I'm stretching the connections a bit. But it seems to me that trying to censor the end-user is not the solution. While it MAY help those who use Internet Exploder from being "accidentally" exposed to KP when their computer get hijacked and bombarded with pop-ups, shouldn't the effort be focussed on finding the people who are actually exploiting these poor children? And don't tell me that viewing a cross-post on Usenet is "contributing to the exploitation". I didn't ask for it, I didn't pay for it, and I'm sure as hell not gonna act on it.
In my personal opinion, people who get sexually excited by looking at pre-pubescent children have a phlychological problem, just like people who look at a pony and get that "special feeling". But, and I'm going out on a limb here, I'd be willing to bet that, of those who don't just view ALL pornography as wrong, a vast majority prefer to look at younger,
This is a "palm-type" device with hardware buttons in my book - I have my address book on it, a calendar, and even games.
This pattent crap is getting THICK! I actually half-hope it gets even worse so that there is no question but that we need to revamp or eliminate the USPO. Only when everyone sees the absolute lunacy of some of these pattents that are awarded will there be a reall cry for change!
People have no problem firing up a separate software package for almost any other "application", they shouldn't have a problem with fireing up a different browser for running my application - and, once they realize how fast and powerfull it is in browsing the rest of the websites, they may very well stay. By developing in XUL (or any other "mozilla-supported" language) I am making sure that my software can literally run ANYWHERE. With IE and .NET, that can't be said.
THAT, IMHO, is the primary advantage of mozilla over IE. I'm not locked in to a single platform. Do you have any idea how many time I get strange looks from people when I ask them if their software runs on Mac or Linux, or if their "web-enabled content" is accessable with ForeFox. There are a lot of people out there who really do think that MS is the only game in town and they are astounded that we are moving away from them. As Linux gains more press and momentum these people will be forced to admit that they are painting themselves into a corner by supporting MS-specific things when instead, by using Open/Standards-based languages, they can honestly say, "Yes, our software runs on your platform".
So while I agree that while those who choose to follow MS will have a powerful tool for web-applications, they will also be locking themselves completely in with MS. I believe that more and more business will find this unacceptable - especially if F/OS provides an equal solution to the problem. All the company has to do is say "fire up Mozilla" and they can work even on Windows.
Then, I decided to actually check my facts. Boy, what a suprise. I was right about the population issue: India 1.03 billion, China 1.28 Billion. But what really shocked me was the figures on literacy. I would have bet a week's pay that India had a much better educated population. I assumed that most Chineese couldn't read or write, but a little googling showed that China has about 80% literacy while India has around 60% literacy. So much for assumptions.
I still think China is in for a tough time when more of their population gets access to outside information. It's difficult to excercise dictatorial control over a population that has ready access to contrary views and information. We'll have to see. Maybe this can be a "peaceful" revolution... Either way, China will be a force to be reconned with, but I seriously think creating their own standards will slow the growth process.
I'll admit to being guilty of confusing intuitive with familiar. But let's be honest here, no interfaces are created or used in isolation. They are always based on some previous knowledge, understanding or bias and exploit a framework of shared understanding between users. That "Network Neighborhood" icon is only intuitive if you know what a "Network Neighborhood" is and can guess that the little drawing is about.
I ran into this problem while designing a webmail interface. I had to battle the impluse to go with my personal preferences for a clean, unobtrusve interface with small icons and hovering tools tips. I found out that icons that made perfect sense to me were uselsess to my users. My preference for having additional information appear only when an item was focused on (ie. hovered over) instead of splattered all over the screen up front wasn't shared by my users. Moreover, I found, when I asked for feedback and input, that "experienced" users alway asked for things to be laid out like the software it was replacing (Eudora, Outlook, etc.) while the "new" users, once given a brief tour accepted the interface much more readily. I'm guilty of that myself. I use the Gimp whenever I can, but because I cut my teeth on Photoshop and have hundreds of hours experience with it, I find myself giving the Gimp negative reviews - mostly because it's unfamiliar (read counter-intuitive) to me.
So, after sitting for a while and trying to literally think out of the box and come up with a truly new interface for an OS, I realized that almost everything I imagined was impossible (or at least impractical) with current technology, or heavily biased toward familiar paradigms and conventions. When it came down to it, most of the thing's I'd change are little annoyances instead of overall design. I think if anything, incorporating some fuzzy logic into the interface so that it morphs to my usage patterns. I mean subtlely, I hate it when windows chops off a menu and removes objects I haven't used yet. It's a good idea, but how about leaving them where I was used to seeing them but making the most used items progressively darker, sharper, bigger, whatever. Don't remove them from sight or even rearange them.
For me personally I rely on relative location of objects rather than what they look like for immediate recognition. It drives my wife (and my boss) crazy, but what migh look like a complete mess in my office to others is "organized" to me. Whatever you do, don't move anything. When I'm reading a book, I can literally stop in the middle of the page and be able to pick the book back up months later and know exactly what word I left off on, because it hasn't moved. So for me, spacial orientation is critical. For my wife, it has to be labled and "organized" according to the Dewey-decimal system or she's lost (I don't know how we've made it for 18 years). So, I guess what I'm saying is that comming up with a revolutionarily intuitive user interface may be impossible. That leaves us with an evolutionarily familiar interface. I mean, my God, vi is NOT intuitive, by any streatch of the imagination. However, it IS powerfull and familiar to me, meaning that I'm more likely to turn to vi for many tasks and get things done more quickly, than I am to fire up a graphical editor. My mom on the other hand has no compatible frame of reference and would be totally lost in vi.
So, for those of you who ar
I'm probably talking out of my butt here, but what if, instead of the entire "stream" being encrypted, just the "content" was, with a one-time, mutually agreed upon key? How would their software know the difference? It would never have the same "fingerprint" twice. Would it just block any traffic that looked like random noise?
I can see this software pissing a lot of sysadmins off - could you ever be absolutely sure those "ghosts" you've been chasing weren't this software being over zealous?
The parent is right though. This will just prompt those who wish to trade on P2P to take it to the next level. Especially now that the "Big Five" labels are trying to force Apple to charge $2.50 per song! If that happens I will stop buying songs from iTMS and say "screw the bastards, release the hounds", P2P here I come!
Is it just me, or does this happen to get worse when the tune is polyphonic? Do people do this on purpose to show off as long as possible with their expensive phones and ringtones? Get over yourselves already! We don't CARE if your phone plays Britany! It's a freakin' PHONE! Want Britany? Get an iPod!
My phone sits on my hip and vibrates first, then after a few "vibrations" actually emits a progressively louder ringing noise. 99% of the time I can answer it before it even starts making any noise. Except in a few obvious places (Church, Theaters, Classes, etc.) I have no problem with a cell phone ringing and someone answering it. I have a big problem with people who A) just let it ring, without any intention of answering (instead of reaching down and cancelling the call) or B) somehow are the only person within 300 yards that CAN'T hear the damn thing ring!
For "advanced" users, and users who are looking for efficiency, it's tough to beat the command-line. And I'm talking about the *nix command line - CMD.EXE is not, IMO, a usefull command line. True, using the command line (at first) requires a bit more basic knowledge than using a GUI, but a GUI cannot be as efficiently powerfull or as flexible.
Case in point: Last week my boss was talking to me, asking about some particular statistics and information thinking that I would gather the data and get back to him. I said "hang on", pulled up a terminal window, ssh'd in to the machine in question and changed to the log directory (all this can be done with a GUI too, BTW). I then typed a single line using a series of commands including grep, sed, awk, less and various regular expressions. Almost instantly, the relevant infomation scrolled onto the screen, rearranged, filtered and organized according to his particular question. Based on this information, he asked further questions which only required hitting the up arrow to recall the last command and editing a few characters to modify the command's behavior. BTW, this was on a 2GB+ log file. This could not have been accomplished with a GUI within any reasonable amount of time without the entire logging system having been organized ahead of time into a complex relational database and a GUI with the particular type of querying and filtering I needed at that moment having been designed in advance. It is thoretically possible that I could have imported the log into Excel and performed a series of queries, sorts, filters, etc, followed by dragging columns around to put appropriate info next to eachother while deleting other columns because the weren't pertinent. This is even assuming the log file was even organized into a "tabbular-friendly" format (which it is not as it aggregates textual information from several different sources).
Now, I understand that this example is an extreme one that the ordinary user would never need, or even be able, to do. However, I do this sort of thing most of the day and I can honestly say that most of it would be terribly onerous to do through a GUI interface.
The basic strength of the command-line is the ability to pass data through a series of small, powerfull programs, each one refining or processing the data from the previous one. A GUI implementation would require either a monolithic program that provided all the functionality of the thousands of specialized tools available from the command line, or, it would require the user to launch each GUI version of these programs, import the data successively into each, process it and then export it to the next.
By typing something like:
I've just taken all logs from my directory on down which have been modified in the last 24 hours, removed all lines except the ones I'm looking for, sanitized any references to a particularly sensitive piece of data, aggregated all matching resulting lines from all relavant files and compaired it to a reference file, producing a searchable, browseable report showing only the differences between my current search and the reference file. Now, short of having a custom-written application to do just that sort of thing, how are you going to use "included" GUI applications to accomplish the same or similar tasks with as much finesse or efficiency?
Those who have known nothing but windows (or classic mac
When I got paid for the project, I bought the software. I now legally own both Photoshop and FinalCut Pro. I learned them and found them to be useful to me. When the return on investment (i.e. I made enough money off using them that I could afford to buy them) was there, I bought them. I am teaching myself Maya and Cinema 4D. When/if they become usefull enough to me to warrant investing a HUGE amount of money (plus upgrade costs), I'll certainly purchase them.
I played Starcraft and Diablo with "stolen" copies until I found myself really enjoying them. I now OWN 3 copies so my kids can play too.
I'm not even going to try to claim what I'm doing is leagal or even ethical. But I can say that the ability for me to FULLY learn and USE a product before forking over a huge amount of money had DIRECTLY lead to my spending the money on purchasing the product.
On the other hand, I've taken the time to DL and learn other software that I've found to not do what I'd orriginally hoped it would. It is either sitting unused on my computer or has been deleted.
I recently sent my brother a "copy" of some expensive software I OWN. He needed to be able to install it at his work to prove to his supervisor that it would solve their problem. If it works, they will be switching company-wide to that software. If it doesn't, they won't and wouldn't have bought the software anyway.
I've been known to not even consider using software that is so paranoid as to require a dongle or phoning home regardless how great it's supposed to be. If the software is that good they shouldn't have to treat me like a criminal before-hand. I know it's a stupid knee-jerk reaction, but it's the way I feel. When I become your customer, treat me right. If you want me to be your customer, treat me right. Even my car dealership allowed me to take my mercedes home over the weekend to test it for free. And they made a sale.
We REPLACE PCs every 4 years or less on average. When we buy new PCs we are usually surplussing the old hardware. When we buy Macs we are generally ADDING TO our inventory.
So if you just look at our "market share" it would appear that PCs have 2-3 times the market share. In reality, they only have a small fraction.
My PC using friends are constantly upgrading/replacing their PCs (which they can, because the hardware is cheap and ubiquitous). To the bean-counting dweebs, each new purchase counts as "new market share" when in reality, they don't have ANOTHER PC they've replaced their original one.
I'm not saying that there aren't many more PC's in use than Macs, what I am saying is that Macs tend to be used for far longer (than I think they should be) so the stats appear skewed. One of my personal clients is still using an LCIII for cryin' out loud! Last week we actually had a color-classic in for repair. I wonder how many 286's are still in daily use today?
Remember, there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics!
On the other hand we have a technology which completely eliminates the burden and costs in distribution (and even advertising in large part), but will put the "mob" and the "teamsters" out of business. Although, idealogically, I tend to come down squarely on the side of freedom (as in speech - not beer), I am educated and intelligent enough to realize that this is NOT a black and white situation.
Today we have a huge number (admit it) of people getting something for nothing and then trying to come up with a myriad of justifications for it. This includes me ;-) I have a ton of MP3's downloaded for free. Most of them, I also already own on cassette tape from years ago - which is my justification. I know, in my heart-of-hearts that it is a very tenuous argument, because no one promised me that I would have access to that particular recording for eternity accross the various delivery formats. But even when switching from vinyl to cassettes, I still have some hand-labelled ones that represent my own recordings from my albums to blank tapes.
When iTMS came out, I was happy. I re-downloaded a butt-load of tracks that I loved, but was unable to find a decent version of on-line. The IRAA's best friend is idiots who can't rip worth a damn. I now have almost all of my primary (ie, music I listen to consistently) tracks purchased from iTMS. I could really do without the DRM, because I have 4 main computers at home and can only allow 3 to contain a copy of the tracks, but this is all but eliminated because I just keep iTunes up in the background and my family can stream all my purchased music. I also make MP3 backups of everything I download to CD for strorage and playing in my car.
It works for me and, speaking only for myself, I'm obviously willing to spend $0.99 per song for the ones I downloaded. I'd like many others, but they aren't worth that much to me - I won't listen to them that often, so I don't buy them. This brings up the point that Apple, the RIAA, etc., would get more of my money if the price-point were better - but they have to balance their costs/greed/whatever. In the mean-time, I'll download music from P2P and get the hit-and-miss encoding for the songs I'm curious about or know I won't listen to more than once or twice anyway.
I'll not even try to claim that this is ethical, moral or legal. Let me say this though: as someone who normally does NOT buy a lot of music, I have actually stumbled accross some bands which do not get national play which I have REALLY liked on P2P. And due to this I have actually gone to iTMS and purchased several full albums (if they had them) which I would never have even known about because they aren't mainstream or in good enough graces with the powers that be to get any play on the local radio stations. So, on the one hand the RIAA wouldn't get any more money out of me anyway, and on the other, P2P has introduced me to bands and performances that I have spent more money on.
I can see this is going to be a long post, since I haven't even gotten to my main point yet, so if you are still with me, cool :-)
In reading the other "business model" posts I started thinking about what the future might bring, which might have even greater imact on "business as we know it". I started to think about the 3D printers and nano-tech. What happens to industry and manufacturing as we know it, when each home has a nano-assemby appliance that can take a digital representation of an object and assemble it from raw materials (perhaps pulled from dis-assembled products and garbage)? Think StarTrek replicators.
What happens to the business models of all those industries when
I need RFID readers in the kitchen which tie directly into my fridge-mounted, internet-connected, touch-screen, Xterminal, cookbook! ;-)
As much as RFID's make me nervous, I can see this as an inevitable commonplace in the future.
This is the most solid "Alpha" version of any OS I've seen. As always, YMMV depending on the type of hardware you run, but I've seen it install flawlessly on both Dells (Optiplex) and IBMs (300pls, etc). If you are installing it on a laptop you may run into some problems, as laptop hardware can be a bit odd at the best of times and finding Linux drivers for newer laptop hardware can be a challenge with ANY distro.
The debate over which flavor or distro to use depends heavily on what you're used to IMO. Although there are sure to be plenty of people out there who will point out specific instances where "Dist A is better because FOO", I've rarely seen one distibution NOT be able to do something another can with a little tweaking and perhaps some re-compiling. People tend to stick with what they know and will argue vehemently for it, to the exclusion of all else. I "know" RedHat Linux and as such, if I'm going to set up a workstation or server to do something I've already done, I'll tend use and recommend it. That doesn't mean that Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, or even OS X can't do it just as well. Each has their strengths and weaknesses based on many factors including choice of installer software, package manager, default driver-selection, default desktop/window-manager, etc. but just because the choices for the default install may be best for a given situation doesn't mean that another distro can't be made to work just as well.
Unfortunately, at this point in the game, running Linux as a primary desktop entails some extra learning and frustration. However, as someone who has moved completely off Windows, I can say that the discomfort is well worth it in the long run and the knowledge gained in the process will serve you well.
We have a new school being built, and two more being renovated. The workstations will be thin clients (built from new parts by students at about $150.00 ea. not including monitors - we will be putting some of our savings there to get flat panels). The servers will probably be Dell or Iron Systems Dual Processor systems with 4Gig Ram.
We will be installing a Mac OS X X-Serve kerberos/LDAP password server to take over autentication from our Active Directory Server (although the AD server will continue to provide account details for our Windows Clients). Our Mac and Linux clients will use LDAP for account information so we can have true single-signon district-wide.
Almost all standard usage for computers at the high-school level consists of web-based research (web-browser), typing notes and papers (basic word processing), developing presentations ("powerpoint"), and email (web-based). All of this can be done without pain, or viruses, or licenses, with Linux/OOo/Mozilla.
We also have an Apache/PHP/MySQL based student management system that we've developed in-house which automagically provides teachers and students with a web-based view of their classes, teachers, students, etc. This system auto-creates accounts and manages class enrollment associations based on information from HR and Student Records through the normal process of student-enrollment on our AS400. This means there is no staff/student account management. When a staff memeber is hired and assigned a teaching position (or other position) their account is auto-created (currently in Active Directory), they are assigned groups and a home directory on the server in the building they are assigned to. As students enroll in our district they get accounts auto-created in the same way, with passwords randomly assigned. When the student enrolls in a particular class, the teacher will see them on their class lists on the web and be able to tell them their default password so they can log in and change it via the web browser (which changes it in AD) Teachers can also "reset" a sudent's password for students in their case-load via the web - no more calling down to the helpdesk to and taking up everyone's time just to change a password (Admin-secretaries and other designated people can do the same for staff in their building).
Assignments and other resources can be uploaded via the web interface and "handed-out" to student in a class with the click of a button - this is available securely outside the firewall so teachers and students can access these files from home. All files are thus virus-checked and controlled as opposed to being carried in by floppies. Student can similarly hand-in documents to their teachers. Attendance, and grading will be rolled in next, at which point our hope is to post the source for other school districts to use.
What this means is that almost all daily functions can be managed in a completely platform-agnostic way. Accounts are the same regardless of OS. Home directories are available via the network district-wide with single-signon. And, with the exception of some of our "MS certification" classes (which will be delivered via Citrix and rdesktop) almost all other functions can happen with any OS and more importantly, with linux. Specifically, dumb-terminals, with no moving parts and no requirement for constant maintenance and upgrade. All users will be using Open Office where ever practical to avoid the overhead in license-fees and content lock-in.
Our students will graduate with a solid knowledge of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. They will be able to be flexible in the workplace because they won't start with the attitude we see in so many of our current teachers: "If it's not [insert the only App/OS they've ever used], I don't know how to use it".
Another advantage is that we can now actually use the many donated computers we get. Before, we would get an old PII 233 and spend more money tha
But soon it will be used for trolling in general for anyone who "does something bad" online.
Let me ask you this:
- Have you ever read or downloaded any of those "survivalist" texts or "handbooks"?
- Have you, for any reason, ever stumbled accross Pr0n with participants of questionable age?
- Have you ever downloaded a krack or SN generator?
- Have you ever checked out those "virus creation programs"?
- Have you ever been pissed about something the "gubmint" did and perhaps "overstated" what you'd like to do about it online?
- Have you ever gotten a virus or malware on you box that started opening websites you never asked for?
- Have you ever [insert anything, which might become illegal in the future] online?
Although I'm a SysAdmin now, I've spent a good part of my youth "looking under rocks" on the internet out of [morbid?] curiosity. Some of it could be construed as "illegal" behavior - although I have never intentionally broken the law with any of the "knowledge" I've gotten from it.If the Feds were to troll for my "surfing" habits, I'll bet I could be put on a watch list right now. Currently there are things like court orders limiting what can be gleaned and what can be done with the data once collected, but these checks and balances are quickly drying up.
For those who are quick to reach for their tin-foil hats (mine's right here) check out some fun, time-killin' reading. Errosion of privacy is one of his top points...
You are arguing that if you can't be 100% effective don't even try! At least, if ALL viri must use our SMTP server they would be scanned first. Maybe, since we update our virus defs 3 times an hour from 2 separate locations, we can stop the spread from us to you sooner. Wouldn't you appreciate that?
I not only have a responsibility as SysAdmin of my enterprise of protecting my own users. I must do everything in my power to protect others from the actions of nodes on my network!
This virus spread faster than anything I've ever seen to date - we "discovered" the virus on our system after one of our "brilliant users" forwarded an email to me that had a "clean" .zip attachment they couldn't open (they thought). I use a RedHat box as my primary workstation, so I wasn't terribly nervous about a .zip, but I ran f-prot and clamav against the file anyway and it did indeed come back clean. I re-ran the definition updates and it still came back clean.
So I unzipped it and ran strings on it. The first things I saw were sync.c and all the .DLL's at the end of the file and I figured that it was a new virus. We immediately put a cludged filter in place on our email and went looking around the 'Net for some sort of announcement of this new virus - which we found on f-secure's web site. It was about an hour later that we were able to get a signature update for our anti-virus software on our mail server and about 6 hours later before we were able to get updates for our enterprise anti-virus software (I won't mention the vendor).
We "caught" over 400 infected messages before we even had a signature for it. That was scary. But what scared me most was the thought that this could have been a "real" worm. MyDoom isn't very creative and not that harmful - making me think it was written by/for spammers, myself. But a few of my coworkers got to talking. What would have happened if this had a more creative payload and it spread via network shares as well? What if, instead of opening back doors (which made it very easy to nmap our networks for infected machines even before we had a "detection" tool) it just looked for all .xls files and randomly changed numbers. What if it then looked for .doc files and randomly added garbage, deleted words, or some other crap? How long would it be before people started realizing this was larger than just a file or two getting corrupted? By then these files have been backed up and/or forwarded to others as well.
I remember several years back now there was a virus that replaced all .jpg files with copies of itself. It about ruined a friend of mine who was trying to start a "web design" business and had thousands of images, many custom made for his clients, destroyed in an instant. It devastated him (he does good backups now).
If someone decided to get serious and release a worm with a (dare I say) "terrorist" payload. They could, literaly bring my comapny to its knees in a matter of seconds.
Now before you go off half-cocked and yell at me for "giving people ideas", take a deep breath. Almost everyone in my office was thinking along the same lines. We were discussing ways to mitigate an event like this in our own enterprise and how we could block any spread out of our networks.
We came up with the obvious: have good backups, but then we started to think about how to stop the spread out of our networks and realized that up till that point anyone could have an SMTP "server"/virus set up and send mail out. We now block ALL incomming and outgoing SMTP except the ones to and from our mail servers. We also don't allow POP or IMAP in or out except to our mail servers. If people want to check other accounts they can RPOP from our server - at least it will go through our virus and spam filters first.
If more ISP's/companies did this, the spead of MyDoom would have been slower. But how do you mitigate the effects of having a virus "corrupt" all your documents? Even if you catch it right away and restore from last night's backups (after checking ALL your computers for infection) you still lose an entire day's worth of work for many departments. That's a big setback.
MyDoom infected department heads and department "techie" people first because their users came to them with an attachment that they "couldn't open". The "techie" people explained later that they had their virus s
Right now I'm working as a Systems Administrator. In the past I've been head of Software Engineering as well as project manager on various teams at the companies I've worked for. I tend to prefer to work with computers, rather than people. Perhaps it's that tendency which has forced me to be more aware of what it takes to Get Things Done(tm) it real life ;-)
Don't come to me with problems; come to me with solutions.
Provide the proper context. Move the conversation forward. Focus on the positives Network first When it comes down to it though, you know your company and coworkers better that we do, and must act accordingly. Some tactics may work at one company, but would be totaly inapproprate at another.That's the tentative plan anyway. Most of these are so old we don't want to put ANY money into them, but if we can get some "dumb terminal" use out of them for free we will. It's cheaper for us to dump another 1U server in the rack and load balance than have to try to find, buy, and install new CPU's, RAM, HDs, etc. in all these old machines. When they truly die - they're dead and we pitch them. In the mean time they can be usefull.
This also opens us up to dropping in some true "terminals" down the road for a couple hundred bucks if we want. We are even trying to get Apple to produce some "stripped" eMacs with no HD and no CD's for use as netboot clients off our XServes to run our Apple Software for "cheap". We'll see how far that flies :-)
First, with Microsoft EOL'ing support and bugfixes this year for NT4 and 98/SE, I see many users and organizations casting about for alternatives. IIR, about 25% of the Internet-connected users are still using 98/NT. With XP being expensive and probably requiring new HW as well, they will be forced to consider Something New(tm). This may mean looking at OS X - since they need new hardware anyway. Or, more likely, they may consider "trying" Linux on their current equipment - especially if they have a friend, or know someone, who can install in for them for cheap or free.
Second, and this ties in with the first, public schools and many businesses are really starting to feel the financial crunch of constant HW/Software/License upgrade. Many public schools (like ours) cannot lease equipment due to board policies against "incumbering subsequent administrations" (or some such nonsense) meaning that new equipment is cash out of pocket and old equipment, which can no longer be used/supported, is surplussed at a total loss. Businesses, as well, face the fact that upgrading older equipment in order to run the new OS from the Beast, simply to be able to have 10 more unused features added to Word, is stupid and wastefull.
When you sit back and think about it, for most schools and businesses, 95% of computer use is for what? Email, Internet access, basic word processing/spreadsheets/"powerpoint" and maybe some IM or connectivity to a "mainframe" for financials, records, etc. which generally means some sort of TN5250/whatever emulation. ALL of this can be done with Linux as the desktop - with the added bonus(?) of increased productivity due to end users not being as able to install Webshots, Kazaa, Trojan-loaderPro, or VirusOfTheHour 6.0. This means work can be done.
But there is still a huge hurdle. Most companies and schools don't necessarily have the technical know-how or confidence to roll out Linux on the desktop. I think this is a pretty big hurdle, but not a showstopper. First, I see a lot more advertising from big players ("no one ever got fired for recommending IBM") on prime-time TV for Linux. Second, I see that Sam's Club is selling a $300.00 Linux box with Linux pre-installed and (in our store) an entire row of monitors demoing it sitting next to the XP boxes selling for hundred$ more. This is bringing Linux into the conciousness of the public (although as geeks we seem wonder how anyone could have missed it for so long :-)
Let me speak from personal experience for a second. Last week we had an engineer from a software vendor show up to install an expensive, high-end HW/SW solution. Unfortunately, it runs on windows only, so we had to buy several Win2k3 Servers and have their engineer set it up for us (lot's of custom tweaks, lots of $$$). I asked him if there were any plans for porting it to Linux, especially considering that he recommended checking with their company first before applying any MS patches to these bexes as some of them have broken their software in the past (eek!). He turned and looked at me and said that over 80% of the places he's been to have asked the same question. So they've begun porting. It should be available next year sometime. Score one for the good guys.
Along those same lines, I took him around to some of our installations to test the new system on our workstations. Wanting to start with the possibility of having the greatest success, I sook him to one of our "newer" labs. His first comment was "You're using Dell GX110's still? Those are, like 4 years old!". I didn't bother to tell him that, as Systems Administrator, I'm still waiting for my GX110. In fact, we still have IBM 340 workstations deployed. Those are 6 or 7 years old.
We are facing a huge budget crunch. Because of this, we are being forced to do a close eval of possible ways to cut costs and squeeze the most out of our current investments. Af
I work for a public school district.
No. There needs to be some kind of punitive damage for the people who approve a patent application that is not only covered by prior art, but are in the Public Domain, for over 20 years before the application!
I say we need to start holding the U.S. Patent Office accountable for the actions of their "lazy, incompetent, government" employees.
BTW, I am a government employee. And if I did my job as poorly as they do, I'd expect to get my ass booted out into the cold, pronto!