I would bet my money on that Acrobat has the exact same exploits that Adobe Reader of the same ganeration has. And by default Acrobat (the full version) acts also as a reader (you can install a newer reader on the side, though).
Office 2003 run just fine on Windows 7 - both in 32 and 64 bit versions. Ribbons I can agree you with - I'm not a great fan. But document formats? The old Office 2003/97 file format is a pile of crap. And OOXML is not perfect either, but it is at least an attempt to step forward and Office asks (at least here in Europe, I don't know if it is some EU-thing) the first time you start it if you want to use OOXML or ODT as default. I'm all for burying the old Office 97 format - good riddance.
As for Acrobat 6 - you know that using obsolete Adobe products is dangerous as hell (althought version 6 is so old that maybe the newest exploits don't work on it...).
According to various internet forums you can get a AHA-2940 working in 64bit Win7 with a driver ripped from x64 2003 or 2008 server.
It is a shame that driver support for old hardware is what it is but it is not really Microsoft's fault - it is not that hard for manufacturer to create a new driver - it is by choice is they will. But hey - XP works for you - but do keep in mind that it is now over 10 years old operating system so it has had a very long life - if you want to keep using it and hardware that only supports it; fine. But at some point of time the cost of self-supporting it becomes greater than breathing new life into old system.
(And yes, I know some Win 3.1 installations which are in use for the exact same reasons - no need to replace the hardware, no support on newer operating systems - but when I encounter those I strongly point out that these are legacy installations and you really should have a plan about how to replace them because they will break at some point in time - and it is better done gracefully with a plan than in an emergency with ad-hoc replacement when something breaks.)
Kickstarter is a huge gamble for everyone - in traditional publishing the publisher takes the risk and if a project falls flat they write it off. Big deal, they know that half of their investments are not going to fly, quarter will get their money back, 12,5% will make a decent profit and rest will be a success. But with kickstarter you have thousands of contributors for a project, and if, and eventually some project will, turn out to be a pancake on the floor there will be thousands complaining.
I wish all the best for the model, but it is risky as hell - it only needs one colossal failure and people will not donate again.
And here sir you go crazy as I suspected - they are not providing changes, they are not doing anything by the GPL (because chromium is not GPL, and that is completely ok) - I was just addressing your assumption that you are converting people from another FOSS browser to another FOSS browser - which you do not do - you convert people to a closed one, I'm not arguing against your reasons for doing so - just do not lie about it.
Well, the difference here is that these tricks are played by Marriot, which is not in the cheapskate class of hotels. If I'm paying top price for my room I expect that they offer a reasonably good (eg. I accept one-time signup based on mac, I can live with NAT, my VPN works with it but intercepting traffic...no, you do not get my business next time) internet service. As I would expect that the bed is not full of adds and to get warm water in shower I do not have to watch commercials for a few minutes first.
For free wifi providers around - I'm fine with you being jerks and requiring whatnot, but for hotel where I'm actually your customer and paying a premium - you do this once and I'm not coming again.
Comodo Dragon is not FOSS. It has a freeware license with restrictions, but you can't get your hands on their modifications to Chromium so you are switching your users from FOSS to non-free browser so your rant about FOSS is really merited - you are actually switching users away from FOSS...
In this case it was nothing like being a stripper, there are also limits on how far persons personal life can be monitored when they are evaluated if they are working with children.
And as an anecdote: I personally know strippers that have much higher ethical values and intelligence than some of my elementary school teachers had.
I find the security thing intrusive too. But on the other side this is something online stores do not have to deal with (at least with customers, they still have to keep their warehouse employees from stealing). When you get a reputation that you are an easy target to steal stuff you unfortunately end up with stores getting raided - why people do this is another discussion but if it is as easy as going in, taking stuff and leaving with unpaid stuff there will be people abusing it, loads of them in fact. This is nothing like TSA (aircraft hijacking have been rare in the history and they are very easy to prevent by common sense) - there is unfortunately a huge load of people willing to steal stuff if it easy - and they all do not look like hobos. And I have no silver bullet on how to deal with it - with online stores you only have to worry about credit card fraud and your employees, with B&M you have to worry about everyone walking in. The point I'm making is that it is not the store who is at fault - it is the people who think that it is ok to steal we have to deal with - and they are increasing in numbers.
I find it mildly amusing that as a tourist from Europe visiting Kennedy Space Center last summer I was told numerous times that no tax dollars are used to show me the things that they show. I had no problem with admission fee - but it was slightly humorous to listen to the "no taxpayer money spent on you" crap while watching the last shuttle being fueled and listening to how great NASA is now with free market doing the things NASA used to do, oh well, there are the launch platforms we used - decomission in progress now...
I wonder if a sexual survey conducted on those with leftist political views would show a predominance of "bottoms" (submissives) as opposed to population norms? After all, they seem to want to be told what to do, how to live, how much money to make, and even what to think by government. They keep voting for politicians who advocate for those things, after all
I was with you until this last ad-hominem garbage (nice touch taking sexual preference to political discussion) you came out with in the last paragraph. You are aware that "leftist" views have generated more radical and even violent revolutions than any "right" movements? (The final outcome has not by average been very great but the "leftist" cannot be blamed for the lack of trying...) - I would attribute the "normalcy" to the middle-class who depending on the country votes for the majority; be it by US standard "left" or "left-leaning right" and be comfortable with it - and it suits the majority fine.
Is the UK still skipping over EU directives regarding overtime? Here in Finland employers are by law required to observe the working hours and exceeding them can lead to serious trouble for management - and definitely employee falsifying records to show less hours than are actually done is as guilty as one lying the other way.
Of course if both the employer and the employee agree that falsifying for the possibility of inspection is ok there is little that can be done. But I would not want to work in a place like that or be a customer of a company that does that - what else are they falsifying if such a simple task as time-keeping can be doctored?
But they are also a leader in Europe at government-paid pensions (and even dead peoples pensions are happily collected...)
Years of work to earn a full pension; Greece: 35 Germany: 45 Proportion of wages as pension; Greece: 80% Germany: 46%
Also when wages are starting to more and more include things like "13th and 14th months pay" and bonuses just to show up to work something is wrong.
I'm not pointing fingers at ordinary Greeks or saying that they don't want to work - but unfortunately they have built a public sector that is unsustainable - and voted again and again to power those that have given more benefits from tax money to everyone, and when finally aided by some nice banks and accountants it has been possible to defraud everybody that this is actually possible.
Devils advocate would say that word "oil" in you job description (and in general in the economy of Norway) ruins out everything. As long as oil is expensive (and there is no way in sight it will go down in price ever again) Norway can just about do anything - which is the right thing. You guys have done many things right with the oil money, and as a fellow Northern European with quite nice relations to Norway (I'm a Finn) - great job, and while our rules are not as strict as yours seem to be according to your numbers we have similar restrictions. And it is working fine. The big thing here is how to get people to work for more years, and to do that making people healthy and able to enjoy life throughout their career is a major component.
I work in IT and I have seen multinationals where European workers are given European benefits (5 weeks of paid vacation / year for everyone is the norm) where the US counterpars offer similar benefits just for expats or executives. And numbers are still comparable on productivity. Of course when taken to the extreme these systems can and will be abused (Greece...) but Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and many other strong European AAA countries are doing just fine without the need to exhaust the workforce.
SSH has had several bugs - both design flaws and implementation flaws. Heck, even things like ntp servers have been exploited. Ssh is in no way "simple" (though it has been getting better at not having remote code execution flaws) and it can be misconfigured and used in very creative ways.
The "hate" here seems to be that it is actually possible to administer Windows conveniently using RDP and that there is something inherently wrong with that. Administering IT systems should not be black magic done in deep dungeons where mere mortals can't enter. Sure, it is wise to implement policies so that people are not going to easily screw up. GUI doesn't make any administration more secure on less secure, you can fail in unthinkable ways with or without gui tools...
By the way, X11 predates RDP and running graphical programs over network on UNIX machines has been common (including administration tools).
And btw, I do systems administration - on Linux and using console (and a few graphical tools like firefall builder) and on Windows using RDP to do stuff that is easily handled through GUI (one-time settings etc.) and through Powershell when automation is needed or tasks that would be hard or impossible in GUI. And I do not see my RDP usage no more a security risk than running ssh is (both environments have defined security policies with access rules / control, roles are used to separate privileges and users are not given unneeded privileges). I am screwed if my internet-facing sshd implementation has remote root exploit, as I am with RDP server. Or Apache. Or PostgreSQL.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the automated ABS systems in many cars will cut the brakes on fresh snow where locking the wheels would typically result in a shorter stopping distance.
Who exactly is going to program the car to deal with every possible dangerous situation?
This has been debunked a thousand times in real-world tests in snowy conditions - while in a laboratory setting braking distance without ABS can be shorter (allowing brakes to lock usually actually results in shorter braking distance on dry road!) in practically all real-world scenarios even experienced rally drivers who know what to expect perform worse without ABS.
The same has been (to a lesser extent) said about stability control - a few "experienced" drivers claim that they will perform better than any computer - but when they are actually tested they fail against the microchip every time.
I'm all for focusing on smaller problems at the same time as facing bigger issues. But these issues are not black and white, and while maybe true that if we would ban skinny models anorexia and bulimia in general could be avoided are we sure that those actions (this is a free speech issue in the core of it) would not have side effects?
Those pointing out that obesity is a bigger problem are right in a way that in post-industrial society overweight is the number one chronic problem. And there is a fine line between banning anorexia-suffering models and implying "it is ok to be fat". The first one can cause and has caused suffering among models (staying on a diet of one carrot and several doses of amfetamin per day for extended periods of time is not going to end up well) as well as people desperately trying to look like them but not realizing it is not humanly possible. But on the other hand...getting fat is easy (I know...) and we should not take the risk that by publicly saying "being too skinny is not ok, we are banning these images" we actually are sending a message that being fat is ok. It is not in the grand scheme of things in society.
I would not draw a direct correlation between fatter models and skinnier general population - there are many complex reasons why trends have been what they have been, and for general people to be fat basic requirement is easy and cheap access to unhealthy food in excessive amounts.
Even *if* all the patent holders would sell (and the list include names like Sony, Dolby, Fujitsu, Hitatchi, Samsung, Microsoft...) how it would be a smart business-move? Burn a ton of money, lose your rights to licensing revenue (Apple is one of the patent holders in MPEG-LA patent pool) and give everyone else a free ride. Yes, it would be nice and all, but very, very stupid business-wise at this point. Google was able to do that with WebM because it involved only buying one company, not sitting in negotiations with 20 entities where everyone wants to cash out the jackpot and not getting just one to agree can ruin your whole deal.
Patent-wise game on h.264 is lost. You either agree to licensing terms and risks involved and be done with it, or you try to change the game (which Google is trying to do with WebM).
Did you miss the part where he mentioned the business liaisons? Dropping out helpdesk and directly involving developers goes against all that ITIL and other best practices suggest - sure, direct access to developers may work on on a very small to modest size setups but once you get users counted in hudreds and not tens your model very easily becomes expensive and inflexible. And heldesk should not be just help desk (reset passwords, install software) but a service desk - *they* are the ones doing the service to the user and handle communication so that developers can do their work effectively - and that is precisely what previous poster described. Sure - sometimes you need to connect developer directly to the user, and that that should be defined too (when, how problem is handled so that other developers can pick up if needed and how to keep service desk in the loop) - sometimes you really need that, but in environment which is bigger than 3 developers and 50 users always connecting users to developers is asking for trouble and inefficient.
This of course requires that service desk knows their job and is competent to actually service the users and not just be replacement to sticky notes app. But that is not what the poster described - from what I'm seeing doing service desk how he described makes very happy users (in my workplace we continuously monitor end-user satisfaction about service desk and issue-solving times and user satisfaction about the whole process and we have quite happy users, scoring over industry averages every time).
It is happening everywhere. I have not been following Canadian internal politics lately but if the summary is correct this is at least partly used as a weapon on domestic political battle.
When times get tough it is easy to market to voters that "those others" are the bad people and we are stronger by not taking part in their business.
It is sad because things like climate are not things you can agree on per-election term basis. It is easy to walk away and portrait yourself as a national hero saving the nation and every family $1600 when you don't have to give a crap about what your decisions cause 20 years from now. Same can be seen everywhere - people are protesting in the UK, Italy and Greece about pensions - when the cold truth is that when people are living longer now than in the 1960s and greater part of people are on pension the levels must be frozen and retirement age has to go up - there simply is not enough money. But who gets elected again and again - those who promise to raise pensions and not touch retirement age and usually at the same time they tell that this is possible by for example resigning from international treaties and "save $1600 per family".
All what I have heard Google to say is "Android is open source and free to get, our apps are free and we give your share from ads when device user does a search with google search bar."
Manufacturers and operators are those who get money from Google, and google does as well. Everyone enjoys...
Details are not known to only those who are licensees but Google apps (GMail, Maps, Market etc.) are closed source and distributing them is not possible without a license (yes, they can be downloaded for free but for manufacturer to bundle them they have to make a deal with Google - I don't have the details about the cost of this deal and how money flows and in which direction...).
Linksys is a bad example (and you know that they are a subsidiary of Cisco, right?) - they use OSS as much as everybody else does, ie. they bundle busybox and Linux kernel with their own closed bits (UI, etc.) - they are not an OSS company.
And Google is in fact making money from Android - yes, they are giving the base for free but to get the Google logo and bundled software you have to pay - and a lot of manufacturers pay for that.
Success stories would include also MySQL, they really made it profitable with dual-licensing but I'm not really sure if they were OSS from day 1.
For the original poster: Think about what you can accomplish with going OSS (and what license you use!). It seems like you work in a niche industry and your software is not going to get millions of deployments so you are not going to get a lot of "crowd-sourcing" to do the grunt work - however, your clients (or partners) may be willing to pay more for open access so use your business sence. Choosing a very lax license were your competitors can basicly comple your library and bundle them with their hardware would definitely be a bad move if the core of your revenue is from your hardware which depends heavily on your software. On the other hand if your core revenue is services going OSS might produce more value to the customer.
So I do agree with parent - if it is software you are selling it propably is a bad move in business sense to give it away. But are you? I have worked in a similar field for a client (their "secret sauce" was an AI library for liquid chemistry) and after all it would not have really mattered if the "crown jewel" was Open Source from the start because their business was to bring clear improvements to their clients (you see, as our equipment has analyzed your process can be improved by tweaking this and that) and the software itself was just a tool, but knowing how to use the tool efficiently was the real business.
It varies greatly in Europe too. Some Scouts are sponsored by church and leaded by religious people and they tend to lean towards the religious stuff.
Baden-Powell is also not exactly very neutral person and he is interpreted in many ways.
My scout times...yes, it was mainly about building contraptions and camping in the woods, and occasionally making things explode when thrown into bonfire (canned peasoup does make a nice boom when cooked right...). And sneaking out nightly to Girl Guides tents was part of the fun on camps:)
What the hell is with Slashdot lately? Did the sysadmin for FSDN piss in everyone's coffee, and that's why the editors have such a hardon for anti-IT-worker stories?
There are people who, when given the opportunity, will lie and cheat about finances of whole countries or companies. Also there are sysadmins who have the power to read email or sniff network data to their benefit or just because they are curious and because they can. When there is opportunity to peek, there are people who will peek. Cops into crime databases, doctors and nurses to patient records, you name it.
Neither really is a surprise. These actions can be discouraged by logging and auditing and by making sure that if and when caught they can't get easily away with it. And reasonable precautions should be taken (use encryption and other best practices etc.) to not make such things extremely easy and undetectable.
And obligatory self-promotion: I have been an email admin since high school, and while sometimes temptation was high (it would be soooo easy to check who the girl I'm interested in is emailing with...) I never abused that power. And I have kept that attitude in the workplace and underlined that when training fellow sysadmins by directly confronting them, and so far results have been good. Everyone I have trained has figured out that logs are logs and you might see something interesting when doing admin work but you are not payed to dig deeper into that but instead you are trusted because you make things work. Zero problems so far. Attitude is what counts and training, role models and simply discussing these things openly in my experience greatly reduce problems, accountability by technical means comes as a great tool but it is no solution.
While the governments of Europe obviously aren't perfect, they don't show the utterly blatant abuses of power the US govt does, and they actually seem to provide some decent services for their citizens in exchange for their tax money, whereas the US govt takes our money, and spends far more (by borrowing from the Chinese and printing lots of money), doing things that don't help the citizens at all, and doing absolutely nothing that benefits them.
To be fair - governments in Europe are not doing that well either on the debt front (see the ongoing Euro-crisis), here governments have taken the money, borrowed more from the Chinese (and US) and handed out benefits which they really couldn't have afforded in the first place to everybody...
But back to privacy and on topic: Yes, this is "old news" in the sense that US has always been a bit of a bogeyman used in negotiations, before it was NSA or some of the other three letter agencies and it was implied that they secretly spy for big US money. Now the talking point is PATRIOT and it can be used as "see here, they really do this stuff and they don't even have to tell about it". While at the same time ignoring the fact that Europe has similar laws too regarding terrorism. What is interesting is that people in the US are generally more aware of privacy issues and don't like all kinds of registers of people. But when the the bad, bad terrorism is mentioned...all data is free loot. In the Europe it is quite other way around - laws are needed to actually protect people from themselves concerning data collection, and the means for law enforcement to collect data are strictly controlled (for the most part...)
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I would bet my money on that Acrobat has the exact same exploits that Adobe Reader of the same ganeration has. And by default Acrobat (the full version) acts also as a reader (you can install a newer reader on the side, though).
Office 2003 run just fine on Windows 7 - both in 32 and 64 bit versions. Ribbons I can agree you with - I'm not a great fan. But document formats? The old Office 2003/97 file format is a pile of crap. And OOXML is not perfect either, but it is at least an attempt to step forward and Office asks (at least here in Europe, I don't know if it is some EU-thing) the first time you start it if you want to use OOXML or ODT as default. I'm all for burying the old Office 97 format - good riddance.
As for Acrobat 6 - you know that using obsolete Adobe products is dangerous as hell (althought version 6 is so old that maybe the newest exploits don't work on it...).
According to various internet forums you can get a AHA-2940 working in 64bit Win7 with a driver ripped from x64 2003 or 2008 server.
It is a shame that driver support for old hardware is what it is but it is not really Microsoft's fault - it is not that hard for manufacturer to create a new driver - it is by choice is they will. But hey - XP works for you - but do keep in mind that it is now over 10 years old operating system so it has had a very long life - if you want to keep using it and hardware that only supports it; fine. But at some point of time the cost of self-supporting it becomes greater than breathing new life into old system.
(And yes, I know some Win 3.1 installations which are in use for the exact same reasons - no need to replace the hardware, no support on newer operating systems - but when I encounter those I strongly point out that these are legacy installations and you really should have a plan about how to replace them because they will break at some point in time - and it is better done gracefully with a plan than in an emergency with ad-hoc replacement when something breaks.)
Kickstarter is a huge gamble for everyone - in traditional publishing the publisher takes the risk and if a project falls flat they write it off. Big deal, they know that half of their investments are not going to fly, quarter will get their money back, 12,5% will make a decent profit and rest will be a success. But with kickstarter you have thousands of contributors for a project, and if, and eventually some project will, turn out to be a pancake on the floor there will be thousands complaining.
I wish all the best for the model, but it is risky as hell - it only needs one colossal failure and people will not donate again.
And here sir you go crazy as I suspected - they are not providing changes, they are not doing anything by the GPL (because chromium is not GPL, and that is completely ok) - I was just addressing your assumption that you are converting people from another FOSS browser to another FOSS browser - which you do not do - you convert people to a closed one, I'm not arguing against your reasons for doing so - just do not lie about it.
-k
Well, the difference here is that these tricks are played by Marriot, which is not in the cheapskate class of hotels. If I'm paying top price for my room I expect that they offer a reasonably good (eg. I accept one-time signup based on mac, I can live with NAT, my VPN works with it but intercepting traffic...no, you do not get my business next time) internet service. As I would expect that the bed is not full of adds and to get warm water in shower I do not have to watch commercials for a few minutes first.
For free wifi providers around - I'm fine with you being jerks and requiring whatnot, but for hotel where I'm actually your customer and paying a premium - you do this once and I'm not coming again.
Comodo Dragon is not FOSS. It has a freeware license with restrictions, but you can't get your hands on their modifications to Chromium so you are switching your users from FOSS to non-free browser so your rant about FOSS is really merited - you are actually switching users away from FOSS...
In this case it was nothing like being a stripper, there are also limits on how far persons personal life can be monitored when they are evaluated if they are working with children.
And as an anecdote: I personally know strippers that have much higher ethical values and intelligence than some of my elementary school teachers had.
I find the security thing intrusive too. But on the other side this is something online stores do not have to deal with (at least with customers, they still have to keep their warehouse employees from stealing). When you get a reputation that you are an easy target to steal stuff you unfortunately end up with stores getting raided - why people do this is another discussion but if it is as easy as going in, taking stuff and leaving with unpaid stuff there will be people abusing it, loads of them in fact. This is nothing like TSA (aircraft hijacking have been rare in the history and they are very easy to prevent by common sense) - there is unfortunately a huge load of people willing to steal stuff if it easy - and they all do not look like hobos. And I have no silver bullet on how to deal with it - with online stores you only have to worry about credit card fraud and your employees, with B&M you have to worry about everyone walking in. The point I'm making is that it is not the store who is at fault - it is the people who think that it is ok to steal we have to deal with - and they are increasing in numbers.
I find it mildly amusing that as a tourist from Europe visiting Kennedy Space Center last summer I was told numerous times that no tax dollars are used to show me the things that they show. I had no problem with admission fee - but it was slightly humorous to listen to the "no taxpayer money spent on you" crap while watching the last shuttle being fueled and listening to how great NASA is now with free market doing the things NASA used to do, oh well, there are the launch platforms we used - decomission in progress now...
I wonder if a sexual survey conducted on those with leftist political views would show a predominance of "bottoms" (submissives) as opposed to population norms? After all, they seem to want to be told what to do, how to live, how much money to make, and even what to think by government. They keep voting for politicians who advocate for those things, after all
I was with you until this last ad-hominem garbage (nice touch taking sexual preference to political discussion) you came out with in the last paragraph. You are aware that "leftist" views have generated more radical and even violent revolutions than any "right" movements? (The final outcome has not by average been very great but the "leftist" cannot be blamed for the lack of trying...) - I would attribute the "normalcy" to the middle-class who depending on the country votes for the majority; be it by US standard "left" or "left-leaning right" and be comfortable with it - and it suits the majority fine.
Is the UK still skipping over EU directives regarding overtime? Here in Finland employers are by law required to observe the working hours and exceeding them can lead to serious trouble for management - and definitely employee falsifying records to show less hours than are actually done is as guilty as one lying the other way.
Of course if both the employer and the employee agree that falsifying for the possibility of inspection is ok there is little that can be done. But I would not want to work in a place like that or be a customer of a company that does that - what else are they falsifying if such a simple task as time-keeping can be doctored?
By that metric yes,
But they are also a leader in Europe at government-paid pensions (and even dead peoples pensions are happily collected...)
Years of work to earn a full pension; Greece: 35 Germany: 45
Proportion of wages as pension; Greece: 80% Germany: 46%
Also when wages are starting to more and more include things like "13th and 14th months pay" and bonuses just to show up to work something is wrong.
I'm not pointing fingers at ordinary Greeks or saying that they don't want to work - but unfortunately they have built a public sector that is unsustainable - and voted again and again to power those that have given more benefits from tax money to everyone, and when finally aided by some nice banks and accountants it has been possible to defraud everybody that this is actually possible.
Devils advocate would say that word "oil" in you job description (and in general in the economy of Norway) ruins out everything. As long as oil is expensive (and there is no way in sight it will go down in price ever again) Norway can just about do anything - which is the right thing. You guys have done many things right with the oil money, and as a fellow Northern European with quite nice relations to Norway (I'm a Finn) - great job, and while our rules are not as strict as yours seem to be according to your numbers we have similar restrictions. And it is working fine. The big thing here is how to get people to work for more years, and to do that making people healthy and able to enjoy life throughout their career is a major component.
I work in IT and I have seen multinationals where European workers are given European benefits (5 weeks of paid vacation / year for everyone is the norm) where the US counterpars offer similar benefits just for expats or executives. And numbers are still comparable on productivity. Of course when taken to the extreme these systems can and will be abused (Greece...) but Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and many other strong European AAA countries are doing just fine without the need to exhaust the workforce.
SSH has had several bugs - both design flaws and implementation flaws. Heck, even things like ntp servers have been exploited. Ssh is in no way "simple" (though it has been getting better at not having remote code execution flaws) and it can be misconfigured and used in very creative ways.
The "hate" here seems to be that it is actually possible to administer Windows conveniently using RDP and that there is something inherently wrong with that. Administering IT systems should not be black magic done in deep dungeons where mere mortals can't enter. Sure, it is wise to implement policies so that people are not going to easily screw up. GUI doesn't make any administration more secure on less secure, you can fail in unthinkable ways with or without gui tools...
By the way, X11 predates RDP and running graphical programs over network on UNIX machines has been common (including administration tools).
And btw, I do systems administration - on Linux and using console (and a few graphical tools like firefall builder) and on Windows using RDP to do stuff that is easily handled through GUI (one-time settings etc.) and through Powershell when automation is needed or tasks that would be hard or impossible in GUI. And I do not see my RDP usage no more a security risk than running ssh is (both environments have defined security policies with access rules / control, roles are used to separate privileges and users are not given unneeded privileges). I am screwed if my internet-facing sshd implementation has remote root exploit, as I am with RDP server. Or Apache. Or PostgreSQL.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the automated ABS systems in many cars will cut the brakes on fresh snow where locking the wheels would typically result in a shorter stopping distance.
Who exactly is going to program the car to deal with every possible dangerous situation?
This has been debunked a thousand times in real-world tests in snowy conditions - while in a laboratory setting braking distance without ABS can be shorter (allowing brakes to lock usually actually results in shorter braking distance on dry road!) in practically all real-world scenarios even experienced rally drivers who know what to expect perform worse without ABS.
The same has been (to a lesser extent) said about stability control - a few "experienced" drivers claim that they will perform better than any computer - but when they are actually tested they fail against the microchip every time.
I'm all for focusing on smaller problems at the same time as facing bigger issues. But these issues are not black and white, and while maybe true that if we would ban skinny models anorexia and bulimia in general could be avoided are we sure that those actions (this is a free speech issue in the core of it) would not have side effects?
Those pointing out that obesity is a bigger problem are right in a way that in post-industrial society overweight is the number one chronic problem. And there is a fine line between banning anorexia-suffering models and implying "it is ok to be fat". The first one can cause and has caused suffering among models (staying on a diet of one carrot and several doses of amfetamin per day for extended periods of time is not going to end up well) as well as people desperately trying to look like them but not realizing it is not humanly possible. But on the other hand...getting fat is easy (I know...) and we should not take the risk that by publicly saying "being too skinny is not ok, we are banning these images" we actually are sending a message that being fat is ok. It is not in the grand scheme of things in society.
I would not draw a direct correlation between fatter models and skinnier general population - there are many complex reasons why trends have been what they have been, and for general people to be fat basic requirement is easy and cheap access to unhealthy food in excessive amounts.
Even *if* all the patent holders would sell (and the list include names like Sony, Dolby, Fujitsu, Hitatchi, Samsung, Microsoft...) how it would be a smart business-move? Burn a ton of money, lose your rights to licensing revenue (Apple is one of the patent holders in MPEG-LA patent pool) and give everyone else a free ride. Yes, it would be nice and all, but very, very stupid business-wise at this point. Google was able to do that with WebM because it involved only buying one company, not sitting in negotiations with 20 entities where everyone wants to cash out the jackpot and not getting just one to agree can ruin your whole deal.
Patent-wise game on h.264 is lost. You either agree to licensing terms and risks involved and be done with it, or you try to change the game (which Google is trying to do with WebM).
Did you miss the part where he mentioned the business liaisons? Dropping out helpdesk and directly involving developers goes against all that ITIL and other best practices suggest - sure, direct access to developers may work on on a very small to modest size setups but once you get users counted in hudreds and not tens your model very easily becomes expensive and inflexible. And heldesk should not be just help desk (reset passwords, install software) but a service desk - *they* are the ones doing the service to the user and handle communication so that developers can do their work effectively - and that is precisely what previous poster described. Sure - sometimes you need to connect developer directly to the user, and that that should be defined too (when, how problem is handled so that other developers can pick up if needed and how to keep service desk in the loop) - sometimes you really need that, but in environment which is bigger than 3 developers and 50 users always connecting users to developers is asking for trouble and inefficient.
This of course requires that service desk knows their job and is competent to actually service the users and not just be replacement to sticky notes app. But that is not what the poster described - from what I'm seeing doing service desk how he described makes very happy users (in my workplace we continuously monitor end-user satisfaction about service desk and issue-solving times and user satisfaction about the whole process and we have quite happy users, scoring over industry averages every time).
It is happening everywhere. I have not been following Canadian internal politics lately but if the summary is correct this is at least partly used as a weapon on domestic political battle.
When times get tough it is easy to market to voters that "those others" are the bad people and we are stronger by not taking part in their business.
It is sad because things like climate are not things you can agree on per-election term basis. It is easy to walk away and portrait yourself as a national hero saving the nation and every family $1600 when you don't have to give a crap about what your decisions cause 20 years from now. Same can be seen everywhere - people are protesting in the UK, Italy and Greece about pensions - when the cold truth is that when people are living longer now than in the 1960s and greater part of people are on pension the levels must be frozen and retirement age has to go up - there simply is not enough money. But who gets elected again and again - those who promise to raise pensions and not touch retirement age and usually at the same time they tell that this is possible by for example resigning from international treaties and "save $1600 per family".
Erh.... Do you have sources?
All what I have heard Google to say is "Android is open source and free to get, our apps are free and we give your share from ads when device user does a search with google search bar."
Manufacturers and operators are those who get money from Google, and google does as well. Everyone enjoys...
Details are not known to only those who are licensees but Google apps (GMail, Maps, Market etc.) are closed source and distributing them is not possible without a license (yes, they can be downloaded for free but for manufacturer to bundle them they have to make a deal with Google - I don't have the details about the cost of this deal and how money flows and in which direction...).
Linksys is a bad example (and you know that they are a subsidiary of Cisco, right?) - they use OSS as much as everybody else does, ie. they bundle busybox and Linux kernel with their own closed bits (UI, etc.) - they are not an OSS company.
And Google is in fact making money from Android - yes, they are giving the base for free but to get the Google logo and bundled software you have to pay - and a lot of manufacturers pay for that.
Success stories would include also MySQL, they really made it profitable with dual-licensing but I'm not really sure if they were OSS from day 1.
For the original poster: Think about what you can accomplish with going OSS (and what license you use!). It seems like you work in a niche industry and your software is not going to get millions of deployments so you are not going to get a lot of "crowd-sourcing" to do the grunt work - however, your clients (or partners) may be willing to pay more for open access so use your business sence. Choosing a very lax license were your competitors can basicly comple your library and bundle them with their hardware would definitely be a bad move if the core of your revenue is from your hardware which depends heavily on your software. On the other hand if your core revenue is services going OSS might produce more value to the customer.
So I do agree with parent - if it is software you are selling it propably is a bad move in business sense to give it away. But are you? I have worked in a similar field for a client (their "secret sauce" was an AI library for liquid chemistry) and after all it would not have really mattered if the "crown jewel" was Open Source from the start because their business was to bring clear improvements to their clients (you see, as our equipment has analyzed your process can be improved by tweaking this and that) and the software itself was just a tool, but knowing how to use the tool efficiently was the real business.
It varies greatly in Europe too. Some Scouts are sponsored by church and leaded by religious people and they tend to lean towards the religious stuff.
Baden-Powell is also not exactly very neutral person and he is interpreted in many ways.
My scout times...yes, it was mainly about building contraptions and camping in the woods, and occasionally making things explode when thrown into bonfire (canned peasoup does make a nice boom when cooked right...). And sneaking out nightly to Girl Guides tents was part of the fun on camps :)
What the hell is with Slashdot lately? Did the sysadmin for FSDN piss in everyone's coffee, and that's why the editors have such a hardon for anti-IT-worker stories?
There are people who, when given the opportunity, will lie and cheat about finances of whole countries or companies. Also there are sysadmins who have the power to read email or sniff network data to their benefit or just because they are curious and because they can. When there is opportunity to peek, there are people who will peek. Cops into crime databases, doctors and nurses to patient records, you name it.
Neither really is a surprise. These actions can be discouraged by logging and auditing and by making sure that if and when caught they can't get easily away with it. And reasonable precautions should be taken (use encryption and other best practices etc.) to not make such things extremely easy and undetectable.
And obligatory self-promotion: I have been an email admin since high school, and while sometimes temptation was high (it would be soooo easy to check who the girl I'm interested in is emailing with...) I never abused that power. And I have kept that attitude in the workplace and underlined that when training fellow sysadmins by directly confronting them, and so far results have been good. Everyone I have trained has figured out that logs are logs and you might see something interesting when doing admin work but you are not payed to dig deeper into that but instead you are trusted because you make things work. Zero problems so far. Attitude is what counts and training, role models and simply discussing these things openly in my experience greatly reduce problems, accountability by technical means comes as a great tool but it is no solution.
While the governments of Europe obviously aren't perfect, they don't show the utterly blatant abuses of power the US govt does, and they actually seem to provide some decent services for their citizens in exchange for their tax money, whereas the US govt takes our money, and spends far more (by borrowing from the Chinese and printing lots of money), doing things that don't help the citizens at all, and doing absolutely nothing that benefits them.
To be fair - governments in Europe are not doing that well either on the debt front (see the ongoing Euro-crisis), here governments have taken the money, borrowed more from the Chinese (and US) and handed out benefits which they really couldn't have afforded in the first place to everybody...
But back to privacy and on topic: Yes, this is "old news" in the sense that US has always been a bit of a bogeyman used in negotiations, before it was NSA or some of the other three letter agencies and it was implied that they secretly spy for big US money. Now the talking point is PATRIOT and it can be used as "see here, they really do this stuff and they don't even have to tell about it". While at the same time ignoring the fact that Europe has similar laws too regarding terrorism. What is interesting is that people in the US are generally more aware of privacy issues and don't like all kinds of registers of people. But when the the bad, bad terrorism is mentioned...all data is free loot. In the Europe it is quite other way around - laws are needed to actually protect people from themselves concerning data collection, and the means for law enforcement to collect data are strictly controlled (for the most part...)