Licenses usually run about 250 per computer. When you have only 50 users or less. The hassles usually outway the benefits. One is morale. If you don't pay for it how can it be any good and if it takes me extra time to use it then you don't respect my time, because you won't give me the right tools to do my job.
Also there is the all important ability of file sharing. As of now I know of no version of OpenOffice that allows more than one person to have a file open and make changes to it. That has been supported since Office 2000 and is becoming a dominant issue.
The other problem is that customers and suppliers use MS Office and some will save it in 2007 and mail it to us. There are very few people who have the huevos to ask them to send it back in a readable file format. They would rather go to IT and bitch or to the President and bitch about how they don't have what they need.
3. Always use a database connection with the lowest necessary priveleges. This reduces the possible attack surface by preventing a successful attack from having the leverage to compromise the data or the database server itself. Couple this with item 1 and you have a security context in which the web application can only execute a handful of stored procedures and cannot directly read/write to any of the user tables.
Definitely first on the list. 1. Never concat input into SQL. In fact, avoid dynamic SQL entirely. Use stored procedures with parameter binding so that user input can never be used to inject SQL statements to the database.
When prototyping database interfaces, dynamic SQL is often used and in books on database interfaces this is 90% what is taught. So sometimes the prototype gets dumped into production without clean up this crap. There are so many good reasons to use stored procedures, beyond just protecting against SQL injection. 2. Always validate/encode user input. Even if you stave off SQL injection it's still possible for an attacker to attempt to hide HTML or JavaScript in their input. If the web application stores and displays the information as it has been entered it would be possible for the attacker to embed malicious script into the content sent to the browser. Most frameworks have the ability to find this material in user input, or you could encode it so that it's not executed by the browser and shown as plain text.
I have yet to see a book that covers this to any significant extent. I think most programmers learn this on the go. I can remember vividly the day I learned what the '++' does. You'd think that someone would have a posting of a module for validate/encoding.
I think the Linux and OS community has more to do with it than anything.
The Adobe equivalent is a minor issue in most business environments. I've seen acceptable replacements on Linux for most of what business's do. The killer in my situation is the Office Suite equivalent. Open Office does not have the capabilities to support 90% of our users. [Mainly it has to do with file sharing capabilities]. MS Office supports this and Open Office doesn't, so we are stuck with using Windows and MS Office.
There has been of late a serious discussion about starting to use Apple OS-X, but I don't think it will happen very soon, but I do believe it will happen before we switch to the Linux for desktops.
We have tried switching some users to Linux desktops with moderate success. But so far the difficulties users have had doesn't out weigh the price tag of an OEM version of XP. The Linux desktops we have deployed use MS Office with codeweaver. So cost wise it hasn't been a big money saver and it hasn't been deployed to a large enough scale to determine maintenance benefits.
Our servers are all Linux though, with the exception of a print server. There constantly was a problem with running printers on Samba and cups, about 3 months ago we moved half of them over to MS systems and problems were reduced dramatically. Almost as dramatic a change as switching users from IE to Firefox.
I can definitely say that switching to Linux servers has been a plus, with the exception of print servers.
I think this is part of the problem. I have already seen 3 database interfaces used internally where the coder didn't make allowances for how much data was being dumped on the client and what kind of clients he was dumping them on. So yes, learning the methods and properties is easy, but learning to constrain the usage of AJAX seems to be difficult.
There is a little more to it than learning just the methods/properties and DOM functions.
Currently their virtualization is based on Xen, but when I recently talked with a RH employee involved in this part, they hinted to a strong possibility of switching to KVM. Basically they said these commands can change, but if you learn how to do it with these commands then you won't have to worry as much about changes in the framework. The commands he was pushing me away from were Xen specific.
Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.
At the time I was a little confused as to whether it was a good thing they were dynamic enough to change or a bad thing. But I think that they have worked with Xen a long time and there were be pretty good reasons to change from a customer/business point of view.
My thought exactly when I saw this. I'll just put up a wiki with the Administrative password and provide them a step by step process for re installing Office and Windows. For some of our staff that have laptops and continue to use them to surf porn sites we pretty much do this already.
The only thing left to do is to buy stock in the telcos. That way, you can preserve your dignity by claiming that whereas everyone else is merely raped by the telcos, you are actually raping yourself.
I'd think of it more as masturbating while thinking about an ugly girl.
I don't really see a problem here. If they bought Novell, then there is RedHat and Ubuntu. Or vice versa. But if they bought Novell, Redhat and Ubuntu, then I could see a problem. I think that it would be a short lived problem, because another company/distribution would spring up to fill the void.
Hang onto your latest copies of Ubuntu,OpenSuse,CentOS, Fedora. You could start your own company and wait for MS to buy you out.
I think Redhat and Novell would be happy to sell out to MS for the right amount of money. As a stock holder in both those companies I would be happy. The only problem is I would have to switch distributions, which wouldn't be that big a deal since I only have about 40 servers. But for companies running server farms with these products it could be a big deal.
We have run into the same problem, but it started with Office 2003. We have people saving in different formats and finding that they can't open each others files. We would've adopted OO a long time ago, but we couldn't get around the file share feature in Excel. If it wasn't for this we would have had a mandatory adoption a month ago. But instead we spent a great amount of time teaching people how to save files in Excel and figuring out the registry settings for default save formats. They don't want to spend money updating every users version, so we end up with 3 versions of office in use. But until OO has file sharing features like MS Office we are stuck, because we can't do without file sharing. I have even looked at implementing grids in a web interface and users feel it lacks the flexibility they need or has to much overhead.
It doesn't hurt to join clubs or subscribe to magazines. On the other hand, you don't *have* to. There are plenty of astronomy forums online, and lots of articles.
Be kind of wary when you join a club. They tend to be clickish. One of the weirdest things I saw at a star party was 2 different clubs. Club A had all cassegrains and club B had all dobsonians. I'm sure that there is a club out there with all refractors.
I have a 10" cassegrain now. I used to have an 8". And for photography 5-8" may be as big an aperature as you would want to start with.
Photography the mount is everything. When you start talking Meade, Celestron, Orion the optics are going to be good enough. The mount varies from model to model though and in some cases time of purchase. So lurking in astronomy mailing lists can be a good way to find out who has a good mount.
You may want to thing ahead and get a telescope with a descent mount and think of making a permanent mount in the future.
I have wanted one of those for a long time. You get set up aligned and corrected and then in roll the clouds.
You really have to have a wild hair to do this and you can't get to disappointed with the results. Some nights that's just the way it is. But, for an excuse to sit out on a cold moonless night in the middle of nowhere, you can't beat it. Otherwise people would think you are weird.
I don't really care about this issue with linux. Because zero of my users know how to do this with linux. But MS advertises this as a feature and by god people around here want to be as secure as possible. God forbid someone should stubble on the porn they are storing on their computer. But occassionally they will encrypt something really important and just go, well if I forget it the IT guy can get it back.
We don't have bitlocker on any of our systems, but I'm sure we will in the next 3 months. I haven't even looked at it, but I am concerned that it may be too secure for the users own good.
I'm so tired of sitting here and getting them to explain how it fits into our business model and how it will actually improve business productivity. Oh and how they howl when I want a metric.
Case in point, I wouldn't adopt wireless until we had the budget to do it right and the personnel to monitor it. I listened for a year " So and so has wireless, why can't we have wireless. It would be neat if we had wireless. Then when people come and visit us they could connect to our network, just like so and so does". Four months later I ran into the VP of Technology for that company. I knew him and he said they were having problems with their network. They had spent a hundred dollars on AP's and couldn't understand why 15 computers couldn't connect to it and work across the network at the same time. I guess it's better to implement this stuff when you have no idea what your doing.
I also went back to the Sales manager and asked him why he forgot to tell me about their network issues.
Something's seems fishy here
Okay they are watching 2 million computers a day and they think the size is 10 million. Why can't they start creating a block list so that we would all know which computers are likely to be part of the network.
If some web sites, email server, mailing lists were monitored, then you could tell these people that they are infected.
This is a typical security story. The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Instead of everyone sitting around going this is bad.
Antivirus software could also be updated for the purpose of determining whether they are part of the network.
I don't think the Iranian's give as big a shit as the people on the coast.
This may be the big plan to cleanup after the next hurricane.
Fewer politicians look silly. Fewer people complaining. And George gets to do something his Daddy didn't do, light a nuke.
Now if it were to leak that a second or third plane or more warheads were to be transported due to a computer glitch, now that wouldn't seem so much as a standard cluster f*** or leak on the Administrations part, as it would good planning.
I may be a liberal, but I can be swayed so easily with a good fireworks show. I blame it on watching to much TV
When working in R&D we always had someone else sign the pages and date the pages of our notebooks. My boss could be or was anal retentive on this. On more than one occassion in 12 years (2 that I can remember) it showed a clear documented history of how we arrived at the process we were patenting.
Yeah it was really awkward at first. But we all really got the hang of it after awhile. Hey Bob I did some shit today and I need you to sign my notebook. It got to where you glanced at the pages and signed and dated them, yeah because they were mostly crap. But they led to a signed document that showed the history of how you were working on something and it led to this one day.
So for one of the patents it showed a history where we had been working on something and like 7 to 10 people had signed our work throughout the progression. I really think this is one of the better ways. Rarely does an idea on how to make a better mouse trap spring up in one day and having multiple people or a another person sign and date your progression provides pretty good evidence of when and how you arrived at an idea.
Which is probably way better than the evidence of say: We were sitting around and thought hey wouldn't it be neat if people could click on an icon and they could buy an item. So we patented it.
Versus: we were working on a web site and we were trying to come up with simple, secure ways for purchasing. We initially did this and then we realized that with javascript and cookies we could do this and then one day we realized that we could combine it all it one secure transaction.
I wasn't working in programming at the time, but this is more like how we arrived at stuff, a progression rather than eureka.
I talked with Jack Kilby once and he more or less had the same inputs about his invention (the integrated circuit), although it was rather condensed (he went from transistor to circuits in a matter of months). He knew where he was headed but there was a progression to what he was accomplishing. I believe that his notes showed this and that was why he was accredited with the invention of the integrated circuit. My boss knew him and that's how I met him. I am pretty sure that is why my boss was so anal about the notes we took.
Because if you look at it now the IC seems to be a inevitable progression from the transistor. But at the time Kilby was working on it, it wasn't an inevitable progression it was a lot of hard work proving and overcoming obstacles such as latching.
Use/dev/random or ask the slashdot community?/dev/random=slashdot_community
Haven't you noticed the little random integers that go with each posting. Duh!
OpenOffice still needs file sharing(multiple people can access and edit the file at the same time). In many offices this is a show stopper.
Samba, they have done a great job, but I would throw my support into making sure that Samba4 is integrated or can be integrated with LDAP so that management of growing and more complex infrastructures can be handled. Also that it makes remote management of networks easier.
Wireless, wireless is like the albatross hanging around the neck of most linux users and advocates. You can't just go and get any wireless card and integration into a secure environment hasn't been easy. How do you integrate your LDAP or your Radius with some of these wireless authentication products? Radius is so flexible it's mind boggling. LDAP is just complex. I would first take these wireless products and show you how to set up the servers and clients so that they are secure. Then how to group users so that you can limit/give them permissions.
I have yet to see a linux wireless card that can interact with AP and jump channel to a less active AP in the same area. (I would think it is out there somewhere I just haven't seen it).
3D effects are really cool, but >80% of the users don't know how to use them and don't care to.
But, hey 6 years ago I thought virtual desktops were just neat. 6 months later I don't know how I lived without them. Still drives me nuts on a windows system when I want another desktop.
The one app I would focus my developers on is OpenOffice. This is so close to be something that could actually replace MS Office it's a crying shame. The one piece of functionality that they are missing is file sharing. Over and over again I see where the chance of an office implementing OpenOffice just falls, because you can't share documents(multiple users have the same document open and can edit).
The other is wireless, this is actually where linux could still step ahead while still being so far behind. The implementation for secure wireless on windows systems are weak. Windows can be integrated with other systems to give a wireless system, but so can Linux and if more people would write good documents on how to do it with Linux then it would be seen as a solution. Try to read how to integrate Radius with some of the systems out there. The multiple possibilies make your head spin. If someone would show just one right way
Second Application or service would be Samba. They are doing an excellent job, but if they could use the help I would give it to them to speed up the integration of ldap with Samba domain servers. Samba4 is supposed to have it but will it be fine and polished when they get there, will it have the network management capabilities we are needing for our growing environments and remote management.
I wouldn't be to critical of the techy in this situation.
It's more about 2 screwed up business models (If you look at it from a technical point of view).
They want cheap servers with bandwidth, buy cheap servers and buy shitloads of bandwidth. Offer them for really cheap prices ( 10,000 Servers. They may have five or six people on a shift for maintaining these systems. These guys are responsible for patch management and backup/restore, plus they have to physically replace the systems which crash (Usually there is very little forensics done. It's down, yank the box replace it and restore. This usually happens to about 15 boxes a week. Plus you have the hardware update cycle. There's another 100+ getting yanked per week). So these guys are usually pretty busy. There are only a few guys who actually look at the system and try and determine why it is running slow, but they aren't there to fix problems. There in place to tell customers they have a problem and tell them that they need to fix it or let them restore it(very very nicely). They aren't there to go through the intricacies of a hack.
Comp 2) Some guys heard about this web thingy and heard he can make money doing it. He knows very well that he can't have less than a full server for his 12 orders a week. Of course he originally thought it would be thousands, especially since he went out and had a professional build the whole site for him for $500 (looks good). He occassionally calls this guy up to update his site for $50 (content mind you).
So now we have 2 business's with interest in a server and neither one gives a shit about security. (Of course the techs working Company 1 do, but they don't have time for that)
Which brings us to Comp 3. These are the guys Comp2 turns to when their server isn't fixed or keeps crashing due to poor security. They charge 10% more, but this time Comp2 asks them about security. Comp3 answers yes we are vigilant about security "We do patch management and are vigilant about monitoring for hackers". "Ahh, you monitor for hackers" Comp2 says "I'll take it". Never realizing that he is getting no more than what he was getting from Comp1.
But won't Comp1 go out of business? No Comp1 is getting Comp3's old customers for the same problem.
Basically if you aren't paying $250/month for computer and bandwidth and paying $300 for management of a system, your getting a Dell Dimension in a barn somewhere. And Odd's are pretty good that a hacker is going to get it or a cow is going to shit on it.
I had a laptop which I have installed OpenOffice. They didn't want to use it because it didn't have Word. They wanted me to install a pirated MS Office on it. They were increduluos that I wouldn't install pirated MS Office on my computer.
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Licenses usually run about 250 per computer. When you have only 50 users or less. The hassles usually outway the benefits. One is morale. If you don't pay for it how can it be any good and if it takes me extra time to use it then you don't respect my time, because you won't give me the right tools to do my job.
Also there is the all important ability of file sharing. As of now I know of no version of OpenOffice that allows more than one person to have a file open and make changes to it. That has been supported since Office 2000 and is becoming a dominant issue.
The other problem is that customers and suppliers use MS Office and some will save it in 2007 and mail it to us. There are very few people who have the huevos to ask them to send it back in a readable file format. They would rather go to IT and bitch or to the President and bitch about how they don't have what they need.
3. Always use a database connection with the lowest necessary priveleges. This reduces the possible attack surface by preventing a successful attack from having the leverage to compromise the data or the database server itself. Couple this with item 1 and you have a security context in which the web application can only execute a handful of stored procedures and cannot directly read/write to any of the user tables.
Definitely first on the list.
1. Never concat input into SQL. In fact, avoid dynamic SQL entirely. Use stored procedures with parameter binding so that user input can never be used to inject SQL statements to the database. When prototyping database interfaces, dynamic SQL is often used and in books on database interfaces this is 90% what is taught. So sometimes the prototype gets dumped into production without clean up this crap. There are so many good reasons to use stored procedures, beyond just protecting against SQL injection.
2. Always validate/encode user input. Even if you stave off SQL injection it's still possible for an attacker to attempt to hide HTML or JavaScript in their input. If the web application stores and displays the information as it has been entered it would be possible for the attacker to embed malicious script into the content sent to the browser. Most frameworks have the ability to find this material in user input, or you could encode it so that it's not executed by the browser and shown as plain text.
I have yet to see a book that covers this to any significant extent. I think most programmers learn this on the go. I can remember vividly the day I learned what the '++' does. You'd think that someone would have a posting of a module for validate/encoding.
I think the Linux and OS community has more to do with it than anything.
The Adobe equivalent is a minor issue in most business environments. I've seen acceptable replacements on Linux for most of what business's do. The killer in my situation is the Office Suite equivalent. Open Office does not have the capabilities to support 90% of our users. [Mainly it has to do with file sharing capabilities]. MS Office supports this and Open Office doesn't, so we are stuck with using Windows and MS Office.
There has been of late a serious discussion about starting to use Apple OS-X, but I don't think it will happen very soon, but I do believe it will happen before we switch to the Linux for desktops.
We have tried switching some users to Linux desktops with moderate success. But so far the difficulties users have had doesn't out weigh the price tag of an OEM version of XP. The Linux desktops we have deployed use MS Office with codeweaver. So cost wise it hasn't been a big money saver and it hasn't been deployed to a large enough scale to determine maintenance benefits.
Our servers are all Linux though, with the exception of a print server. There constantly was a problem with running printers on Samba and cups, about 3 months ago we moved half of them over to MS systems and problems were reduced dramatically. Almost as dramatic a change as switching users from IE to Firefox.
I can definitely say that switching to Linux servers has been a plus, with the exception of print servers.
I think this is part of the problem. I have already seen 3 database interfaces used internally where the coder didn't make allowances for how much data was being dumped on the client and what kind of clients he was dumping them on. So yes, learning the methods and properties is easy, but learning to constrain the usage of AJAX seems to be difficult. There is a little more to it than learning just the methods/properties and DOM functions.
Currently their virtualization is based on Xen, but when I recently talked with a RH employee involved in this part, they hinted to a strong possibility of switching to KVM. Basically they said these commands can change, but if you learn how to do it with these commands then you won't have to worry as much about changes in the framework. The commands he was pushing me away from were Xen specific.
Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.
At the time I was a little confused as to whether it was a good thing they were dynamic enough to change or a bad thing. But I think that they have worked with Xen a long time and there were be pretty good reasons to change from a customer/business point of view.
My thought exactly when I saw this.
I'll just put up a wiki with the Administrative password and provide them a step by step process for re installing Office and Windows.
For some of our staff that have laptops and continue to use them to surf porn sites we pretty much do this already.
The only thing left to do is to buy stock in the telcos. That way, you can preserve your dignity by claiming that whereas everyone else is merely raped by the telcos, you are actually raping yourself. I'd think of it more as masturbating while thinking about an ugly girl.
I don't really see a problem here. If they bought Novell, then there is RedHat and Ubuntu. Or vice versa. But if they bought Novell, Redhat and Ubuntu, then I could see a problem. I think that it would be a short lived problem, because another company/distribution would spring up to fill the void.
Hang onto your latest copies of Ubuntu,OpenSuse,CentOS, Fedora. You could start your own company and wait for MS to buy you out. I think Redhat and Novell would be happy to sell out to MS for the right amount of money. As a stock holder in both those companies I would be happy. The only problem is I would have to switch distributions, which wouldn't be that big a deal since I only have about 40 servers. But for companies running server farms with these products it could be a big deal.
How about the ones who send documents as .docx. I don't know of anyone who can open and read this without Office 2007.
.docx. Makes it easier and quicker to file.
I like it best when they send their IT resumes in
Dragging it behind your car would be patentable, but making it an unrecognizable bloody mess has already been done.
If nobody writes games for it, what's the point?
We have run into the same problem, but it started with Office 2003. We have people saving in different formats and finding that they can't open each others files. We would've adopted OO a long time ago, but we couldn't get around the file share feature in Excel. If it wasn't for this we would have had a mandatory adoption a month ago. But instead we spent a great amount of time teaching people how to save files in Excel and figuring out the registry settings for default save formats.
They don't want to spend money updating every users version, so we end up with 3 versions of office in use. But until OO has file sharing features like MS Office we are stuck, because we can't do without file sharing.
I have even looked at implementing grids in a web interface and users feel it lacks the flexibility they need or has to much overhead.
It doesn't hurt to join clubs or subscribe to magazines. On the other hand, you don't *have* to. There are plenty of astronomy forums online, and lots of articles.
Be kind of wary when you join a club. They tend to be clickish. One of the weirdest things I saw at a star party was 2 different clubs. Club A had all cassegrains and club B had all dobsonians. I'm sure that there is a club out there with all refractors.
I have a 10" cassegrain now. I used to have an 8". And for photography 5-8" may be as big an aperature as you would want to start with.
Photography the mount is everything.
When you start talking Meade, Celestron, Orion the optics are going to be good enough. The mount varies from model to model though and in some cases time of purchase. So lurking in astronomy mailing lists can be a good way to find out who has a good mount.
You may want to thing ahead and get a telescope with a descent mount and think of making a permanent mount in the future.
I have wanted one of those for a long time. You get set up aligned and corrected and then in roll the clouds.
You really have to have a wild hair to do this and you can't get to disappointed with the results. Some nights that's just the way it is. But, for an excuse to sit out on a cold moonless night in the middle of nowhere, you can't beat it. Otherwise people would think you are weird.
I don't really care about this issue with linux. Because zero of my users know how to do this with linux. But MS advertises this as a feature and by god people around here want to be as secure as possible. God forbid someone should stubble on the porn they are storing on their computer. But occassionally they will encrypt something really important and just go, well if I forget it the IT guy can get it back.
We don't have bitlocker on any of our systems, but I'm sure we will in the next 3 months. I haven't even looked at it, but I am concerned that it may be too secure for the users own good.
Nope, I think your insightful.
I'm so tired of sitting here and getting them to explain how it fits into our business model and how it will actually improve business productivity. Oh and how they howl when I want a metric.
Case in point, I wouldn't adopt wireless until we had the budget to do it right and the personnel to monitor it. I listened for a year " So and so has wireless, why can't we have wireless. It would be neat if we had wireless. Then when people come and visit us they could connect to our network, just like so and so does". Four months later I ran into the VP of Technology for that company. I knew him and he said they were having problems with their network. They had spent a hundred dollars on AP's and couldn't understand why 15 computers couldn't connect to it and work across the network at the same time.
I guess it's better to implement this stuff when you have no idea what your doing.
I also went back to the Sales manager and asked him why he forgot to tell me about their network issues.
Something's seems fishy here
Okay they are watching 2 million computers a day and they think the size is 10 million. Why can't they start creating a block list so that we would all know which computers are likely to be part of the network.
If some web sites, email server, mailing lists were monitored, then you could tell these people that they are infected.
This is a typical security story. The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Instead of everyone sitting around going this is bad.
Antivirus software could also be updated for the purpose of determining whether they are part of the network.
I don't think the Iranian's give as big a shit as the people on the coast.
This may be the big plan to cleanup after the next hurricane.
Fewer politicians look silly. Fewer people complaining. And George gets to do something his Daddy didn't do, light a nuke.
Now if it were to leak that a second or third plane or more warheads were to be transported due to a computer glitch, now that wouldn't seem so much as a standard cluster f*** or leak on the Administrations part, as it would good planning.
I may be a liberal, but I can be swayed so easily with a good fireworks show. I blame it on watching to much TV
When working in R&D we always had someone else sign the pages and date the pages of our notebooks. My boss could be or was anal retentive on this. On more than one occassion in 12 years (2 that I can remember) it showed a clear documented history of how we arrived at the process we were patenting.
Yeah it was really awkward at first. But we all really got the hang of it after awhile. Hey Bob I did some shit today and I need you to sign my notebook. It got to where you glanced at the pages and signed and dated them, yeah because they were mostly crap. But they led to a signed document that showed the history of how you were working on something and it led to this one day.
So for one of the patents it showed a history where we had been working on something and like 7 to 10 people had signed our work throughout the progression. I really think this is one of the better ways. Rarely does an idea on how to make a better mouse trap spring up in one day and having multiple people or a another person sign and date your progression provides pretty good evidence of when and how you arrived at an idea.
Which is probably way better than the evidence of say: We were sitting around and thought hey wouldn't it be neat if people could click on an icon and they could buy an item. So we patented it.
Versus: we were working on a web site and we were trying to come up with simple, secure ways for purchasing. We initially did this and then we realized that with javascript and cookies we could do this and then one day we realized that we could combine it all it one secure transaction.
I wasn't working in programming at the time, but this is more like how we arrived at stuff, a progression rather than eureka.
I talked with Jack Kilby once and he more or less had the same inputs about his invention (the integrated circuit), although it was rather condensed (he went from transistor to circuits in a matter of months). He knew where he was headed but there was a progression to what he was accomplishing. I believe that his notes showed this and that was why he was accredited with the invention of the integrated circuit. My boss knew him and that's how I met him. I am pretty sure that is why my boss was so anal about the notes we took.
Because if you look at it now the IC seems to be a inevitable progression from the transistor. But at the time Kilby was working on it, it wasn't an inevitable progression it was a lot of hard work proving and overcoming obstacles such as latching.
Use /dev/random or ask the slashdot community? /dev/random=slashdot_community
Haven't you noticed the little random integers that go with each posting. Duh!
OpenOffice still needs file sharing(multiple people can access and edit the file at the same time). In many offices this is a show stopper.
Samba, they have done a great job, but I would throw my support into making sure that Samba4 is integrated or can be integrated with LDAP so that management of growing and more complex infrastructures can be handled. Also that it makes remote management of networks easier.
Wireless, wireless is like the albatross hanging around the neck of most linux users and advocates. You can't just go and get any wireless card and integration into a secure environment hasn't been easy. How do you integrate your LDAP or your Radius with some of these wireless authentication products? Radius is so flexible it's mind boggling. LDAP is just complex. I would first take these wireless products and show you how to set up the servers and clients so that they are secure. Then how to group users so that you can limit/give them permissions. I have yet to see a linux wireless card that can interact with AP and jump channel to a less active AP in the same area. (I would think it is out there somewhere I just haven't seen it).
3D effects are really cool, but >80% of the users don't know how to use them and don't care to.
But, hey 6 years ago I thought virtual desktops were just neat. 6 months later I don't know how I lived without them. Still drives me nuts on a windows system when I want another desktop.
The one app I would focus my developers on is OpenOffice. This is so close to be something that could actually replace MS Office it's a crying shame. The one piece of functionality that they are missing is file sharing. Over and over again I see where the chance of an office implementing OpenOffice just falls, because you can't share documents(multiple users have the same document open and can edit).
The other is wireless, this is actually where linux could still step ahead while still being so far behind. The implementation for secure wireless on windows systems are weak. Windows can be integrated with other systems to give a wireless system, but so can Linux and if more people would write good documents on how to do it with Linux then it would be seen as a solution. Try to read how to integrate Radius with some of the systems out there. The multiple possibilies make your head spin. If someone would show just one right way
Second Application or service would be Samba. They are doing an excellent job, but if they could use the help I would give it to them to speed up the integration of ldap with Samba domain servers. Samba4 is supposed to have it but will it be fine and polished when they get there, will it have the network management capabilities we are needing for our growing environments and remote management.
I wouldn't be to critical of the techy in this situation.
It's more about 2 screwed up business models (If you look at it from a technical point of view).
They want cheap servers with bandwidth, buy cheap servers and buy shitloads of bandwidth. Offer them for really cheap prices ( 10,000 Servers. They may have five or six people on a shift for maintaining these systems. These guys are responsible for patch management and backup/restore, plus they have to physically replace the systems which crash (Usually there is very little forensics done. It's down, yank the box replace it and restore. This usually happens to about 15 boxes a week. Plus you have the hardware update cycle. There's another 100+ getting yanked per week). So these guys are usually pretty busy. There are only a few guys who actually look at the system and try and determine why it is running slow, but they aren't there to fix problems. There in place to tell customers they have a problem and tell them that they need to fix it or let them restore it(very very nicely). They aren't there to go through the intricacies of a hack.
Comp 2) Some guys heard about this web thingy and heard he can make money doing it. He knows very well that he can't have less than a full server for his 12 orders a week. Of course he originally thought it would be thousands, especially since he went out and had a professional build the whole site for him for $500 (looks good). He occassionally calls this guy up to update his site for $50 (content mind you).
So now we have 2 business's with interest in a server and neither one gives a shit about security. (Of course the techs working Company 1 do, but they don't have time for that)
Which brings us to Comp 3. These are the guys Comp2 turns to when their server isn't fixed or keeps crashing due to poor security. They charge 10% more, but this time Comp2 asks them about security. Comp3 answers yes we are vigilant about security "We do patch management and are vigilant about monitoring for hackers". "Ahh, you monitor for hackers" Comp2 says "I'll take it". Never realizing that he is getting no more than what he was getting from Comp1.
But won't Comp1 go out of business? No Comp1 is getting Comp3's old customers for the same problem.
Basically if you aren't paying $250/month for computer and bandwidth and paying $300 for management of a system, your getting a Dell Dimension in a barn somewhere. And Odd's are pretty good that a hacker is going to get it or a cow is going to shit on it.
Linux servers cannot be cracked. They may be borrowed every once in a while but not cracked.
I had a laptop which I have installed OpenOffice. They didn't want to use it because it didn't have Word. They wanted me to install a pirated MS Office on it. They were increduluos that I wouldn't install pirated MS Office on my computer.
...I don't know why more effort isn't being put into FreeBSD, where the licensing isn't an issue.