These languages are often held up as examples of how Open Source systems don't fork and are portable, but I don't think they are good examples.
Sure, but good examples of what? The lead developers are still in charge of the base years later, and still doing excellent & creative work, so the forking hurt the base exactly how again? And if old code (perl 4 -> 5) requires a rewrite to work, why is that a 'bad thing (TM)'?
I'm seriously not trying to piss on your Wheaties, just trying to understand the downsides to GPL'ing when there appear to be so many success stories.
locate and/or slocate are excellent tools for this. You may need to 'updatedb' as root in order to build the initial database of filenames / paths, but then it becomes extremely easy to '$ locate filename', and is a whole lot faster than using 'find' to traverse the entire directory structure to hunt down one file.
See Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for an expanded explanation of the filesystem structure, though your distro may vary significantly from it.
There are companies who actively want to fork it and produce incompatible non-portable versions that become the de-facto standard: Microsoft.
Yeah, thank god gcc can't be used on MS platforms, 'cuz lord knows they'd dominate and ruin the compiler! Oh, wait... I guess the assertion has proved entirely false so far, but keep up the senseless fud. The entertainment value of intelligent people drawing erroneous and spurious conclusions is pretty high.
The only way SUN could loose control of the main code base is if they refused to fold in highly usable and innovative forks developers want to work with. If there had been negative repercusions when Mingw was created, I could see a clear argument. So tell me, where is this GPL'd codebase ruined by MS developers?
If MS didn't percieve open source as one of the greatest threats to its market dominance, the bias against their dev's wouldn't seem so hilarious. Catch a clue guys.
WTF!? It's the same base NT kernel with some slight tweaks and services and a new front-end.
Sorry, they're not essentially the same, or you'd be correct. They did advertise and set off in that direction but found back-porting issues they couldn't overcome. (Stupid shit like every user needing admin/root permissions was a huge cluster fuck that turned out to be a hell of a lot more complicated to fix than they expected.)
It'll turn him into a monkey meatloaf crater I guess. But really, who gives a shit? How many astronauts paid for Russian and US rocketry development with their lives? Certainly not enough to stop development.
Though totally unqualified, I'd do it if I only had a one in 10k chance of ever returning safely. The potential gains are too great for anything less than guaranteed annihilation to slow development down, so be of good cheer. Also, if you RTFA, you'll see the pilot isn't just scratching his nuts in there. Monkey meatloaf wouldn't be able to contribute to deployment or landing, so you've gotta figure they're saving a ton in development cost by not having to fully automate every (sub)system. The lucky pilot's name will also be in the history books, so depending on your outlook, there's no risk that's not worth taking if there's even the narrowest chance of success.
"our greatest scientists" (and the rest of us!) tend to have even less of a productive half life, so I think death dying, and birth appears to be a good plan.
Sure, as I said, I don't think anyone engenious enough to qualify would be stupid enough to do it willingly. Still, often that initial creative burst in their early careers leaves so many interesting ideas totally unexplored, often due to under/undeveloped technologies, that society as a whole is tremendously cheated by death.
How far could Einstein have come on the GUT for example? Lord only knows what Teller and Bohr could've done with a few more centuries. And obviously it would have been handy to keep Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed, etc. around 'til the printing press was invented if for no other reason than to be able to clear up misunderstandings that have killed millions (and that's back in the days when killing a million was really an arduous task).
The point is the technology will be forthcoming. Shouldn't your grandchildren and society as a whole benefit? We've got enough crazy shitheads running around the globe, surely we can keep a few slots open for those who have benefitted us all in dramatic, interesting ways.
I think we should force certain people to stay alive at least a couple centuries. In particular, I'm thinking of our greatest scientists, engineers, and philosophers. One of the biggest losses to society is that these folks usually only have about 40 years of good output.
If we forced them to live to at least age 200, society as a whole might benefit immensely. After all, it's your tax dollars that taught them, perhaps it's not such a crazy idea.
I doubt most people smart enough to qualify would be stupid enough to want to do it, perhaps a surreptitious entity could 'infect' them during vaccinations, then kill 'em off when they've ceased to be productive, happy people. All my great grandparents lived to be over 100, and were enormously happy and generous folks (excepting WW's I & II, and Lincoln's assassination adversely affected some psychologically.)
Just in case everyone forgot, open source was meant to satisfy a programing itch, not necessarily provide a living. The fact that so many coders are able to use it to maintain a standard of living is an unintended side effect.
Though it would be possible for others to handle maintenance of the project, the quality won't be held to the same standards and will not progress with the same goals I have set for the project.
Without a signed, insured contract what guarantee did the sponsor(s) have that the maintainer(s) was doing a competent job anyway? I guess they had the same guarantee the main dev had in getting paid, i.e. none.
No offense meant to the dev, but come the hell on. This is one of the weirdest cases of sour grapes I've read in the OS department.
MS is prepared to give the operating system away for years if it has to in order to keep linux out of MS customer's hands. So this is a more cost effective step than just giving the latest product line away.
Still, it does nothing to address the very real problem MS continues to have with security. Talk to large corp.s CFO, and they're very aware that TCO now has to take security issues into a much greater account than it previously has. Linux simply doesn't have the same type or severity of vulnerabilities, and with SE linux being high on the list of priorities for most distro's, that's the real area MS is going to have a terrible time addressing in the future.
By keeping fedora buggy, RedHat is trying to show corporate customers that Free (as in beer) operating systems just won't cut it, so they can gouge them with high-priced licensing fees for their enterprise linux.
Fedora sucks, because it isn't in RH's benefit to make it anywhere near a quality product.
This is a completely unfair assertion. Developers maintain their packages on FC, and it's meant to be leading edge technology and a testbed for future RH releases. RTFM @ fedora.redhat.com.
And as for Fedora sucking, precisely what didn't work? I've installed FC2 on a dozen different machines (different HW) now, both upgrade and fresh, and have experienced no problems whatsoever. (I do tweak my yum/up2date/apt/synaptic repositories to use the fastest and closest, but the only problem I experienced was forgetting to rpm --import the sigs, which was my fucking fault, not theirs.)
The online support is both massive and easy to search. If you want to live in the virtual world where all things work without any research on your part, you sure as hell can't use XP, OSX, or any other damn OS out there. RH doesn't pretend that's what this distro is for, and neither should you.
There are differences between the British and American film canons, but it's nothing as simple as "subtlety".
It's the subtle sarcasm towards civilization's excesses and pointless social protocols, which are coincidentally none to subtle. How difficult is that?
I forget, or actually, I've never received a good objection to just launching rockets from 100k+ feet, why aren't we just doing this to start with? Seems like a no brainer, but IANARS. I'm assuming removing the part of the trip that uses up %90+ percent of your rocket fuel will allow you to accelerate to the requisite 17.5k mph rather easily, and considerably safer than dragging a few metric tons of expolosive propellant through the atmosphere.
Basically, professors want to hand me a big (often 100+ page) stack of their handwritten lecture notes (with messy text, equations, and diagrams; sometimes double-sided) and expect me to post a PDF-or-something-similar to their course's web page.
After I stopped laughing, I realized this may be a serious inquiry rather than a joke. I've assisted local government agencies in converting clear, printed, 8.5x11" text documents into searchable text / pdf documents, and the cost for these is over 10 cents a page. (Tax and mill levy records have to be verified 100% correct, as I'm sure your prof's notes need to be.) That's with volume discounting (> 500,000 pages), using nearly perfect ascii text documents, not scribbled notes.
So my advice is to get a few bids from outside contractors, then submit a realistic estimate based on the average. Hint: Given those spec's, it's clear you/your management have no idea what's involved in this process. (Shows at least a modicum of IQ that you had the good sense to ask, however.) If you simply need to scan/save as pics (jpg/tiff -> pdf), you can do this yourself at reasonable cost/effort expenditure. Seems to be implied that you need OCR capabilities for handwritten text, as complicated as equations at that, so you're really pretty screwed. Even simply creating 100-200 kb jpg's & emailing them in an automated process is going to run into problems when the campus mail servers refuse to accept attachements larger than a Meg.
I've been having good luck with gtk-gnutella, avg speeds very close to my max bandwidth, and I'll have the full set burned 4 hours. The interface is easy to work with, though filtering doesn't work as expected. (Since when doesn't 'Apply' mean right fucking now?)
You can buy a keystroke capture unit that plugs in between the ps2 jack and the keyboard for 50 bucks anyway. A psuedo janitor can plug it in and take it away at will. Physical security is a key component that's a joke to bypass. Why bother with these higher tech schemes?
My expiration date is coming up (cancer fuckwad), but I made it long enough to see the LOTR trilogy, and now I'll even see Troy! I'm wondering if it's worth hanging on 'til this bitch hits the screens... I'm just finishing up the last of Doug's works (having infinite time to do crazy shit like read all day), so now that I've purused everything he's written, I'd love to see an updated version.
Anyone have a firm date?
Unless intellectual property assets are better protected, we will soon see information technology firms resorting to draconian measures even worse than outsourcing.
Rather than scorn this guy mercilessly, I'd rather wonder how he plans to put the genie back in the bottle? What's left to protect when it's all becoming irrevocably free, and not coincidentally improving rapidly because of it?
The assertion that US business won't be improved by open source innovation is absurd. We won't be able to hold the rest of the world hostage via our IP any longer, big friggin' deal. Industry will adjust, advance, and proliferate the same way it always has. The rules have changed, but open markets adapt better than any other. Have a little faith, or at least read a little history.
An ISP only has to log the packets of those users it receives complaints against. I said nothing about logging all packets (and in fact, I am against logging all packets).
That's good news. But essentially ISP's have little interest in doing this now because marketing sees it as alienating the client base. It only takes one idiot in a forum/chat room to scare off a hundred potential customers.
Remember Code Red? Remember how many users put up statistics on their web page about the people connecting? Why not turn that over to the ISP responsible and have them investigate it?
Um, probably because the ISP isn't actually the party responsible here, and they won't do it for free. After all, do you blame your states highway commission and civil engineering departments when someone runs into you on the highway?
Most ISPs will email users when they receive repeated complaints from their users, and even other service providers users. But as long as their client isn't spamming others with wack code intentionally, it isn't legally his or her fault they got infected in the first place. The main fault lies with the seller of the vulnerable OS and the virus writers who exploit it. Clearly they punish hackers continuously, doesn't seem to slow down though. And MS is covered by an iron clad EULA, so they don't really have the business motivation that would move them to harden their OS. Believe it or not, viri actually cause a significant percentage of users to upgrade their OS prematurely to escape the 'slow, hammered' machine. Mr. Gates has gotta be laughing his ass off at home. It's morally reprehensible, but not illegal.
our e-mail server is the one running in Taiwan, and it's very poorly setup
Wow, did I read that correctly? Your email is managed out of Taiwan, poorly, where they could be siphoning off your data and selling it to the highest bidder, but your not allowed to run an email server on site. Swell. That makes a lot of sense.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with the reasoning. If the work you do is a good, valid asset, it can stand on it's own two feet. The rest is a marketing ploy.
The real problem is that to date, we're all taught and trained in contact saturated environments. I can substantially cut down my troubleshooting and communicaton time if I can talk mano a mano to 90% of my clients and coworkers, and the topics stick with them at much higher level of cognizance.
It's not that they're stupid, or that I can't communicate with clarity. But even talking over the phone causes a fairly high level abstraction when discussing problem sets. It's very difficult to know whether an explanation, analogy or metaphor has been understood when you don't have facial recognition cues to relay and reaffirm them.
That said, I've been telecommuting more than five years and despise it. Days never officially end, and any imagined emergency can become psycologically crippling enough for management to call any hour of the night. This society has become so feminized and insecure that instead of conducting work via email and phone, most of it degenerates to a type of inter-personal jibberish you'd have punched someone for in the 50's. *WHACK!*
It's time to deploy routing and switching throughout the solar plain of eclipse so there's no such thing as a communications blackout when something as minor as a solar mass maneuvers between earth and the objective. Then it's time to deploy the nuclear powered web cams so we have live feed from every body cool enough not to melt the chasis. (Obviously it'd be better to deploy useful tools capable of testing and measurement, but people eat up eye candy and will support NASAs deployment.)
Smaller is better so we can launch 10's of thousands, and not sweat a few lost/malfunctioning units.
Well, you seem to be in a business where you should understand the impossiblity of what you propose, but here goes anyway...
Perhaps if companies had adequate staff on board to handle these problems, they wouldn't have them in the first place. I certainly would pay the extra money, or if not having the person on full-time, have a consultant on retainer or something.
An ISP is going to have at minimum several OC3's, with tens of thousands of users. Earthlink has 192's (think on a scale of all the phone traffic going to L.A.). To even begin analyzing those packets is going to take on the order of a few thousand processors, billions of bytes of RAM, etc. A few extra employees is not going to be able to handle the job for even tiny providers. It's not simply a lax oversight by you ISP, packet analysis on that scale is just not practicable, which is part of the reason why the FBI has to subpeona information from your ISP to track you instead of just copying packets as they leave the backend.
Even if we were to pass some crazy laws which mandated your scheme, most worm and virus communication is encrypted in at least one of a thousand ways. You can eventually crack that encryption (provided their not using a unique one time key), but were talking 100's of thousands of CPU hours per packet. And that ain't gonna happen Joe.
Why? Because people here listened to me when I told them not to open attachments from people they don't know.
No offense, but that's almost the lamest security scheme I've heard of. Your mail server should have a virus filter on the front end so users never have the chance to receive an infected attachment in the first place. Code Red and its dozens of permutations specifically accessed users address books in OutLook and replicated by attaching infected files to emails it sent from people users 'knew'. At that point, it wouldn't matter how tight your security was without email filtering.
That's okay. This obviously isn't your job or area of expertise, and your plainly doing the best you can with the resources at hand. But take heed, your work setup has security holes big enough to drive a truck through. Maybe you've been lucky so far, or more likely the virus definitions on your AV software hasn't been updated in quite a while so the logs are empty.
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These languages are often held up as examples of how Open Source systems don't fork and are portable, but I don't think they are good examples.
Sure, but good examples of what? The lead developers are still in charge of the base years later, and still doing excellent & creative work, so the forking hurt the base exactly how again? And if old code (perl 4 -> 5) requires a rewrite to work, why is that a 'bad thing (TM)'?
I'm seriously not trying to piss on your Wheaties, just trying to understand the downsides to GPL'ing when there appear to be so many success stories.
locate and/or slocate are excellent tools for this. You may need to 'updatedb' as root in order to build the initial database of filenames / paths, but then it becomes extremely easy to '$ locate filename', and is a whole lot faster than using 'find' to traverse the entire directory structure to hunt down one file.
See Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for an expanded explanation of the filesystem structure, though your distro may vary significantly from it.
There are companies who actively want to fork it and produce incompatible non-portable versions that become the de-facto standard: Microsoft.
Yeah, thank god gcc can't be used on MS platforms, 'cuz lord knows they'd dominate and ruin the compiler! Oh, wait... I guess the assertion has proved entirely false so far, but keep up the senseless fud. The entertainment value of intelligent people drawing erroneous and spurious conclusions is pretty high.
The only way SUN could loose control of the main code base is if they refused to fold in highly usable and innovative forks developers want to work with. If there had been negative repercusions when Mingw was created, I could see a clear argument. So tell me, where is this GPL'd codebase ruined by MS developers?
If MS didn't percieve open source as one of the greatest threats to its market dominance, the bias against their dev's wouldn't seem so hilarious. Catch a clue guys.
man Yep, seems to work on every version of *nix I'm working with.
WTF!? It's the same base NT kernel with some slight tweaks and services and a new front-end.
Sorry, they're not essentially the same, or you'd be correct. They did advertise and set off in that direction but found back-porting issues they couldn't overcome. (Stupid shit like every user needing admin/root permissions was a huge cluster fuck that turned out to be a hell of a lot more complicated to fix than they expected.)
I'm tired of fucking about with this obnoxious shit. Who do we fire, stab, blow up to stop these outrages? I'm bored with lots of free time...
It'll turn him into a monkey meatloaf crater I guess. But really, who gives a shit? How many astronauts paid for Russian and US rocketry development with their lives? Certainly not enough to stop development.
Though totally unqualified, I'd do it if I only had a one in 10k chance of ever returning safely. The potential gains are too great for anything less than guaranteed annihilation to slow development down, so be of good cheer. Also, if you RTFA, you'll see the pilot isn't just scratching his nuts in there. Monkey meatloaf wouldn't be able to contribute to deployment or landing, so you've gotta figure they're saving a ton in development cost by not having to fully automate every (sub)system. The lucky pilot's name will also be in the history books, so depending on your outlook, there's no risk that's not worth taking if there's even the narrowest chance of success.
"our greatest scientists" (and the rest of us!) tend to have even less of a productive half life, so I think death dying, and birth appears to be a good plan.
Sure, as I said, I don't think anyone engenious enough to qualify would be stupid enough to do it willingly. Still, often that initial creative burst in their early careers leaves so many interesting ideas totally unexplored, often due to under/undeveloped technologies, that society as a whole is tremendously cheated by death.
How far could Einstein have come on the GUT for example? Lord only knows what Teller and Bohr could've done with a few more centuries. And obviously it would have been handy to keep Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed, etc. around 'til the printing press was invented if for no other reason than to be able to clear up misunderstandings that have killed millions (and that's back in the days when killing a million was really an arduous task).
The point is the technology will be forthcoming. Shouldn't your grandchildren and society as a whole benefit? We've got enough crazy shitheads running around the globe, surely we can keep a few slots open for those who have benefitted us all in dramatic, interesting ways.
I think we should force certain people to stay alive at least a couple centuries. In particular, I'm thinking of our greatest scientists, engineers, and philosophers. One of the biggest losses to society is that these folks usually only have about 40 years of good output.
If we forced them to live to at least age 200, society as a whole might benefit immensely. After all, it's your tax dollars that taught them, perhaps it's not such a crazy idea.
I doubt most people smart enough to qualify would be stupid enough to want to do it, perhaps a surreptitious entity could 'infect' them during vaccinations, then kill 'em off when they've ceased to be productive, happy people. All my great grandparents lived to be over 100, and were enormously happy and generous folks (excepting WW's I & II, and Lincoln's assassination adversely affected some psychologically.)
Just in case everyone forgot, open source was meant to satisfy a programing itch, not necessarily provide a living. The fact that so many coders are able to use it to maintain a standard of living is an unintended side effect.
Though it would be possible for others to handle maintenance of the project, the quality won't be held to the same standards and will not progress with the same goals I have set for the project.
Without a signed, insured contract what guarantee did the sponsor(s) have that the maintainer(s) was doing a competent job anyway? I guess they had the same guarantee the main dev had in getting paid, i.e. none.
No offense meant to the dev, but come the hell on. This is one of the weirdest cases of sour grapes I've read in the OS department.
MS is prepared to give the operating system away for years if it has to in order to keep linux out of MS customer's hands. So this is a more cost effective step than just giving the latest product line away.
Still, it does nothing to address the very real problem MS continues to have with security. Talk to large corp.s CFO, and they're very aware that TCO now has to take security issues into a much greater account than it previously has. Linux simply doesn't have the same type or severity of vulnerabilities, and with SE linux being high on the list of priorities for most distro's, that's the real area MS is going to have a terrible time addressing in the future.
By keeping fedora buggy, RedHat is trying to show corporate customers that Free (as in beer) operating systems just won't cut it, so they can gouge them with high-priced licensing fees for their enterprise linux. Fedora sucks, because it isn't in RH's benefit to make it anywhere near a quality product.
This is a completely unfair assertion. Developers maintain their packages on FC, and it's meant to be leading edge technology and a testbed for future RH releases. RTFM @ fedora.redhat.com.
And as for Fedora sucking, precisely what didn't work? I've installed FC2 on a dozen different machines (different HW) now, both upgrade and fresh, and have experienced no problems whatsoever. (I do tweak my yum/up2date/apt/synaptic repositories to use the fastest and closest, but the only problem I experienced was forgetting to rpm --import the sigs, which was my fucking fault, not theirs.)
The online support is both massive and easy to search. If you want to live in the virtual world where all things work without any research on your part, you sure as hell can't use XP, OSX, or any other damn OS out there. RH doesn't pretend that's what this distro is for, and neither should you.
There are differences between the British and American film canons, but it's nothing as simple as "subtlety".
It's the subtle sarcasm towards civilization's excesses and pointless social protocols, which are coincidentally none to subtle. How difficult is that?
If Meatwad can't tickle your funny bone, your mother was a triple breasted Vogonian poetry whore.
"Yellow. No, bluuuueeeeee...."
3.5 foot iguana, and she is FAR stronger than any cat or dog of equal or greater size that I have ever owned or played with
Now improve her heart design from a bivalve to quad, and I think we can project some incredible performance improvements.
I forget, or actually, I've never received a good objection to just launching rockets from 100k+ feet, why aren't we just doing this to start with? Seems like a no brainer, but IANARS. I'm assuming removing the part of the trip that uses up %90+ percent of your rocket fuel will allow you to accelerate to the requisite 17.5k mph rather easily, and considerably safer than dragging a few metric tons of expolosive propellant through the atmosphere.
Basically, professors want to hand me a big (often 100+ page) stack of their handwritten lecture notes (with messy text, equations, and diagrams; sometimes double-sided) and expect me to post a PDF-or-something-similar to their course's web page.
After I stopped laughing, I realized this may be a serious inquiry rather than a joke. I've assisted local government agencies in converting clear, printed, 8.5x11" text documents into searchable text / pdf documents, and the cost for these is over 10 cents a page. (Tax and mill levy records have to be verified 100% correct, as I'm sure your prof's notes need to be.) That's with volume discounting (> 500,000 pages), using nearly perfect ascii text documents, not scribbled notes.
So my advice is to get a few bids from outside contractors, then submit a realistic estimate based on the average. Hint: Given those spec's, it's clear you/your management have no idea what's involved in this process. (Shows at least a modicum of IQ that you had the good sense to ask, however.) If you simply need to scan/save as pics (jpg/tiff -> pdf), you can do this yourself at reasonable cost/effort expenditure. Seems to be implied that you need OCR capabilities for handwritten text, as complicated as equations at that, so you're really pretty screwed. Even simply creating 100-200 kb jpg's & emailing them in an automated process is going to run into problems when the campus mail servers refuse to accept attachements larger than a Meg.
Good luck, BWAhahahahaha!
I've been having good luck with gtk-gnutella, avg speeds very close to my max bandwidth, and I'll have the full set burned 4 hours. The interface is easy to work with, though filtering doesn't work as expected. (Since when doesn't 'Apply' mean right fucking now?)
You can buy a keystroke capture unit that plugs in between the ps2 jack and the keyboard for 50 bucks anyway. A psuedo janitor can plug it in and take it away at will. Physical security is a key component that's a joke to bypass. Why bother with these higher tech schemes?
My expiration date is coming up (cancer fuckwad), but I made it long enough to see the LOTR trilogy, and now I'll even see Troy! I'm wondering if it's worth hanging on 'til this bitch hits the screens... I'm just finishing up the last of Doug's works (having infinite time to do crazy shit like read all day), so now that I've purused everything he's written, I'd love to see an updated version. Anyone have a firm date?
Unless intellectual property assets are better protected, we will soon see information technology firms resorting to draconian measures even worse than outsourcing.
Rather than scorn this guy mercilessly, I'd rather wonder how he plans to put the genie back in the bottle? What's left to protect when it's all becoming irrevocably free, and not coincidentally improving rapidly because of it?
The assertion that US business won't be improved by open source innovation is absurd. We won't be able to hold the rest of the world hostage via our IP any longer, big friggin' deal. Industry will adjust, advance, and proliferate the same way it always has. The rules have changed, but open markets adapt better than any other. Have a little faith, or at least read a little history.
An ISP only has to log the packets of those users it receives complaints against. I said nothing about logging all packets (and in fact, I am against logging all packets).
That's good news. But essentially ISP's have little interest in doing this now because marketing sees it as alienating the client base. It only takes one idiot in a forum/chat room to scare off a hundred potential customers.
Remember Code Red? Remember how many users put up statistics on their web page about the people connecting? Why not turn that over to the ISP responsible and have them investigate it?
Um, probably because the ISP isn't actually the party responsible here, and they won't do it for free. After all, do you blame your states highway commission and civil engineering departments when someone runs into you on the highway?
Most ISPs will email users when they receive repeated complaints from their users, and even other service providers users. But as long as their client isn't spamming others with wack code intentionally, it isn't legally his or her fault they got infected in the first place. The main fault lies with the seller of the vulnerable OS and the virus writers who exploit it. Clearly they punish hackers continuously, doesn't seem to slow down though. And MS is covered by an iron clad EULA, so they don't really have the business motivation that would move them to harden their OS. Believe it or not, viri actually cause a significant percentage of users to upgrade their OS prematurely to escape the 'slow, hammered' machine. Mr. Gates has gotta be laughing his ass off at home. It's morally reprehensible, but not illegal.
our e-mail server is the one running in Taiwan, and it's very poorly setup
Wow, did I read that correctly? Your email is managed out of Taiwan, poorly, where they could be siphoning off your data and selling it to the highest bidder, but your not allowed to run an email server on site. Swell. That makes a lot of sense.
Good luck man, you're gonna need it.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with the reasoning. If the work you do is a good, valid asset, it can stand on it's own two feet. The rest is a marketing ploy.
The real problem is that to date, we're all taught and trained in contact saturated environments. I can substantially cut down my troubleshooting and communicaton time if I can talk mano a mano to 90% of my clients and coworkers, and the topics stick with them at much higher level of cognizance.
It's not that they're stupid, or that I can't communicate with clarity. But even talking over the phone causes a fairly high level abstraction when discussing problem sets. It's very difficult to know whether an explanation, analogy or metaphor has been understood when you don't have facial recognition cues to relay and reaffirm them.
That said, I've been telecommuting more than five years and despise it. Days never officially end, and any imagined emergency can become psycologically crippling enough for management to call any hour of the night. This society has become so feminized and insecure that instead of conducting work via email and phone, most of it degenerates to a type of inter-personal jibberish you'd have punched someone for in the 50's. *WHACK!*
It's time to deploy routing and switching throughout the solar plain of eclipse so there's no such thing as a communications blackout when something as minor as a solar mass maneuvers between earth and the objective. Then it's time to deploy the nuclear powered web cams so we have live feed from every body cool enough not to melt the chasis. (Obviously it'd be better to deploy useful tools capable of testing and measurement, but people eat up eye candy and will support NASAs deployment.)
Smaller is better so we can launch 10's of thousands, and not sweat a few lost/malfunctioning units.
Well, you seem to be in a business where you should understand the impossiblity of what you propose, but here goes anyway...
Perhaps if companies had adequate staff on board to handle these problems, they wouldn't have them in the first place. I certainly would pay the extra money, or if not having the person on full-time, have a consultant on retainer or something.
An ISP is going to have at minimum several OC3's, with tens of thousands of users. Earthlink has 192's (think on a scale of all the phone traffic going to L.A.). To even begin analyzing those packets is going to take on the order of a few thousand processors, billions of bytes of RAM, etc. A few extra employees is not going to be able to handle the job for even tiny providers. It's not simply a lax oversight by you ISP, packet analysis on that scale is just not practicable, which is part of the reason why the FBI has to subpeona information from your ISP to track you instead of just copying packets as they leave the backend.
Even if we were to pass some crazy laws which mandated your scheme, most worm and virus communication is encrypted in at least one of a thousand ways. You can eventually crack that encryption (provided their not using a unique one time key), but were talking 100's of thousands of CPU hours per packet. And that ain't gonna happen Joe.
Why? Because people here listened to me when I told them not to open attachments from people they don't know.
No offense, but that's almost the lamest security scheme I've heard of. Your mail server should have a virus filter on the front end so users never have the chance to receive an infected attachment in the first place. Code Red and its dozens of permutations specifically accessed users address books in OutLook and replicated by attaching infected files to emails it sent from people users 'knew'. At that point, it wouldn't matter how tight your security was without email filtering.
That's okay. This obviously isn't your job or area of expertise, and your plainly doing the best you can with the resources at hand. But take heed, your work setup has security holes big enough to drive a truck through. Maybe you've been lucky so far, or more likely the virus definitions on your AV software hasn't been updated in quite a while so the logs are empty.
Continued good luck hopefully.