by entering an agreement with MS and MS giving out all those linux vouchers without expiration dates. According to the report on Groklaw MS may have shot themselves in their own patented foot(both feet while they had them stuck in their mouth).
I would have a hard time believing that Novell could be so sly and cunning, but hey stranger things have happened.
Maybe this is an anomaly of keeping your enemies closer.
God, I thought I was the only one that had a GF that did this.
I used to get embarassed, now I just walk out and let her come out with the money.
I mean when I go into a store now with a return I feel like I am trying to do them a favor. The last time I got lip from store personnel I was almost laughing on the inside, because I just felt like man your day is about to get so f**k$$. She just turns on the stupid knob and starts a rant.
I even think about whether I should put it on a credit card when I get an item. Because if I do I have to stay there for the rant and I would rather not.
I don't believe that this is really true.
One of the main reasons that Linux is safer is that the user is sandboxed. Whereas Windows is run in administrator mode by most people? Vista has features that to some extent mimic this but it is lost on the user when they have to acknowledge 4,000 pop up messages a day.
This is only part of their problem.
The other problem is that some companies have not made drivers for Vista yet and some people are getting really pissed off that they spent $300 bucks on an OS that makes their 1-year old hardware out dated.
These are just 2 reasons that I have heard from Windows users as of late who are thinking about switching to Linux.
I've quit telling people they should look at it. I run into too many people who want to argue with me about it. I just tell people I use Linux if it comes up in a conversation. If they want to try it I'll tell them how to download it or give them the disks, but I'm not banging my head against a stone wall any longer. It works just fine for me and my company.
This is just stupid. It really points to the problem of how bad our schools are. Because the stupid are teaching the ignorant.
I just found out that an aquaintance is teaching at computers at one of the highest rated schools in a metropolitan area.
This guy flunked out of burger king school. He was a total idiot
My point is that schools are supposed to be trying to teach them how to think on their feet and adjust to curve balls, but we have a disproportianate number of idiots teaching schools.
Some of this reminds me of the time they planned to reopen the tower in Austin. Someone else proposed that we put laser guns on the tower and have people run around the campus with those tag vests. They could charge people for every hour and see who could get the highest score. Money going to the library.
I think they voted against opening the towers.
You also realize that the innovations are being created by people that they are hiring on H1-B visa's from those countries and working over here as mathmeticians, statisticians, engineers, scientist. Basically they are here doing the technological innovations you are talking about while a number of the graduates from here cannot get these jobs. These companies are blatantly breaking laws or are skirting around the laws.
You'll find in some of these cases the issue has gotten so bad that a lot of the new innovative technologies are going to Asia as fast as it is proven here. Geez, I wonder how that could be happening? I also have seen some of these companies who turn around and just do there manufactuing in Asia after a year or six months ( No point in worrying about them stealing it, they've already got the technology)
So how about the patent disregard that MS has been showing lately to AT&T. Put the code in in Seattle and sell and install it in another country and it appears to be okay. Well at least according to the Supreme Court.
And as an aside, the reason modern CPUs are designed to "only" issue 4 instructions per cycle instead of 16 is because after years of careful research and testing real work applications, 4 instructions is almost always the maximum number of instructions any program can concurrently issue, due to issues like branches, cache-misses, data dependencies, etc. Makes me question just how much these "professors" really know.
This processor was designed for parallel processing. It's intent is to be used in a large super computer that they are building in Austin. So the programs will be designed to take advantage of the CPU capability. This is not a chip to replace a Pentium or AMD processor running MS Word. This is a chip that will be used in a huge parallel computer system replacing AMD or Intel quad core chips, which they are currently waiting on.
They got the funding by saying it could be used to design game plans that would defeat Oklahoma into the next century. Unless of course Oklahoma gets a really big super computer.
Most vendors I talk to have said that they are being allowed to sell XP until the end of the year. Systems sold in 2008 will have to have Vista.
Part of the problem is that there was not enough support for Vista ( a lot of people ran into problems with drivers ).
Basically MS got some of the pressure off of them to put a new OS out. Early adopters get to be the guinea pigs while the rest of us wait for the major problems to be fixed.
I don't know about margins, but a couple of months ago they closed down a Borders and were offering books at 40% off. On the four books that I checked I found that 3 were still actually cheaper on Amazon, but one was a dollar less (before taxes and shipping).
Lately I've found that nerdbooks.com is cheaper than Amazon .
I replied to this email because I agreed with this problem and wanted to step into the overall discussion. From my point of view this has been a lopsided discussion. My reply is not directed at or towards this previous post. This is more of a generic reply to a lot of the posts made.
Yes I am the internet fascist, hitler, nazi, and everything else that security admins can be called.
I have a budget and limited resources to stop the multiple attack vectors which our network is susceptible to.
I am in charge/responsible for computer uptime and the personnel time that IT spends cleaning up messes that users make. So I have been accused of all sorts of draconian practices. One banning use of IE. Even people in my IT department disagree with it, but since we've done it computer downtime has decreased significantly (3%).
Educating users only goes so far. At some point you have to say this is where we have to stop or pour more money into solutions to prevent the problem from happening.
To those jr admins who are spoiting all of these solutions, how about we take it out of your budget(your paycheck) to supply all of these things. Cisco firewalls with Trend micro and other solutions only go so far. I'm not saying they don't work or we don't use them, but totally relying on them is not really a good idea. Especially against targeted attacks. [Oh by the way, it pretty much did come out of your paycheck, unless you are working for gov.]
oh, but if you just keep all your patches up to date. You know how many applications we would break regularly. But if you just do QC on the patches. Yeah, well the junior guys aren't very good at it and the senior guys really don't want to be bothered with it. Maybe if I could give bonuses to the people who do a good job at it, Oh wait, I spent it on Cisco firewalls and Trend Micro solutions.
What do you think would happen to in the IT department if one day we came back and found all the systems down and had to do a major number of reinstalls and large amount of data recovery. How do you think it would benefit the company?[ I was the jr admin when that happened, about 35% down, another company]. How high do you think the morale is going to be in the IT department when I tell them they can't leave until this is all back up. Oh, yeah you server admins and developers in your little comfy cubby holes, I'm going to pull your asses out here working on client computers until this is fixed. Overtime, you don't get overtime because the CEO won't give me the money to cover it. It's much more cost effective to give you comp time. You don't like it, neither do I. Because you get pissed and leave and then I have to go get another dimwit (Remember you 2 years ago) and train them.
Why don't we just deploy the endless number of solutions that would have prevented all of this? 1)Money 2)Time (see 1 for definition) . BOD and investors want to see the largest amount they can, my boss wants to show it to them, because then they get off his back.
How do I get away with these draconian tactics. Usually because the biggest bitchers have the departments with the worst problems and the BOD has actually thought it was a good idea if I just started charging the departments for the extra time IT has to spend on their computers [Actually what they said was take it out of the paycheck of the employee like they do at his company. I checked and no shit they charge them $200 for the second occurrence (No I don't think it is a good idea, because that doesn't really seem like a good idea morale wise. Seems to have some moral and ethical problems also)]. So now the department managers know I haven't gone as far as I am authorized to, so they blame all this badness on me.
Oh yeah, I'd just go to another company where there are more forward thinkers and people who would let me have all the internet access I wanted. Well good luck.
You think we really like it and get some kind of charge out of pissing people off? Maybe some do. Most
It doesn't matter one way or another with the itentions of the bulletin board or what action they took. This just exemplifies Dell customer service and customer care. I think that is more of what people are bitchin about. I think anytime you have to put up with crappy Customer Service you'll throw a dart at the company whenever you can.
I had a phone call from their Customer Service group about an order, they left it on my voice mail, I passed it around to four of my co-workers and asked them if they could tell me what this guy was talking about. Only one person guessed that it was from Dell. I wasn't sure until the next day and a Dell rep called me.
Next
I returned 2 computers which did not meet the quote specifications that we had agreed upon. They took them back with only minor difficulties. The diffculties didn't start till after they got the equipment back. I got no less than 6 phone calls telling me they were crediting the companies account. The last time, just before I picked up the phone I told myself I was going to reach through the phone lines and strangle the bastard on the other end if it was Dell again.
The next week the accountant comes to my office wanting to know where the packing slip was for the 2 computers that were ordered. I told them that the computers were sent back and he showed me the invoice. Within 4 hours of the equipment arriving I told Dell we were shipping them back and had a confirmation number, yet they never conferred this to their billing department, apparently even after the equipment had arrived back at Dell ( the date of arrival back at Dell was 6 days before billing).
No we usually find ourselves relying on foreign hardware. Quite a few of the chips which are used in military systems are made overseas.
It's one of the craziest most ludicrous things that you have ever seen.
You could steal another countries software much easier than you can steal their production capability
Why you would do either only a congressman could explain it.
I've got a stack of WD hard drives. About 2 years ago we went through the failed hard drives and found that of 10, 8 were WD. The other 2 were Fujitsu's.
Just last week I had a drive failure and thought this would be my second Seagate to crash. Pulled it out, low and behold it was a 300GB WD. I don't know how it got in there.
Basically quality appears to swing around. We went through a rash of failures on Fujitsu's about 4 years ago. It got so bad that we actually went around and replaced the hard drives in computers that were running Fujitsu's.
No kiddiing, especially with Dell, we needed computers with XP because our Apps are supported on XP and our users are trained on Office 2003. We expressly told them we wanted XP and not Vista and not Office 2007. The quote even specified it. The computers show up and they have Vista and Office 2007. We have to spend > 3 hours getting it arranged for them to come pick up the computers.
Same story different time. They sent 2 computers with Vista and Office 2007 when the quote specifically said XP Pro and Office 2003. Computers were sent back after a series of phone calls and Dell was taken off of the Approved Supplier List. Computers were purchased from another supplier.
Okay, so it points out that people don't pay attention to the security features which are available to them and use them.
Hell I could have told you that, without a big study I think reporting on this does a disservice to security more than it helps.
Now every other banking manager is going to say, why should we go to that much trouble. Some geek is going to find some flaw in it and then they are going to report all over the internet "how our security is flawed".
They added a security feature and nobody uses it, That is what it should say. Not that it is flawed.
I could report that Norton security, Sophos security, and various other Internet Security Suites are flawed because users can turn it off and not use it.
This is aluminum tin foil hat reporting at best.
I know of one major company with 40,000 employees that made the announcement company wide that no computers with Vista were to be installed until 2009. It was specifically directing to people who were buying equipment to make sure they told their vendors that equipment that ran with Vista was not to be purchased. The specifics of why I don't know.
I do know that some of our vendors were still in test last year for versions of software that would run on XP. We were offered a free copy of the $20,000 software if we would participate in their beta test. We said no thanks.
Okay so they stop a shoulder fired missile. What are they going to do about someone with a.50 caliber sniper rifle. Fire that into a turbine engine on takeoff and I bet it has the same affect.
I have needs for 500GB hard drives, but I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. So I have RAID configurations for those. All well and good more data means a need for a bigger hard drive. And with all these people ripping movies they need bigger hard drives.
But what I also have is a need for a really reliable 20-40GB hard drive. On 80% of my systems I put the OS on one drive and data on everything else. So I really don't need is a cheap 100GB hard drive for the OS. What I need is a very reliable 20-40GB for the OS?
Within 3 years though I bet I am running my OS from DVD and putting my log files on flash drives.
I'm not exactly sure this would be profitable unless I had somebody elses heat source.
$40 coal $1000 dollar homemade furnace or $400 acetylene torch assembly.
So 40000 pennies or or 8000 nickels. I'd probably still need another tank of acetylene.
So where do I sell this glob.
Slashdot Mirror
by entering an agreement with MS and MS giving out all those linux vouchers without expiration dates. According to the report on Groklaw MS may have shot themselves in their own patented foot(both feet while they had them stuck in their mouth).
I would have a hard time believing that Novell could be so sly and cunning, but hey stranger things have happened.
Maybe this is an anomaly of keeping your enemies closer.
God, I thought I was the only one that had a GF that did this.
I used to get embarassed, now I just walk out and let her come out with the money.
I mean when I go into a store now with a return I feel like I am trying to do them a favor. The last time I got lip from store personnel I was almost laughing on the inside, because I just felt like man your day is about to get so f**k$$. She just turns on the stupid knob and starts a rant.
I even think about whether I should put it on a credit card when I get an item. Because if I do I have to stay there for the rant and I would rather not.
It wasn't just complaints.
We sent a shipment back which we had ordered with XP and they sent it with Vista.
They are now off of our approved list.
We didn't complain we just sent the shit back and told them to not bill us.
I don't believe that this is really true.
One of the main reasons that Linux is safer is that the user is sandboxed. Whereas Windows is run in administrator mode by most people? Vista has features that to some extent mimic this but it is lost on the user when they have to acknowledge 4,000 pop up messages a day.
This is only part of their problem.
The other problem is that some companies have not made drivers for Vista yet and some people are getting really pissed off that they spent $300 bucks on an OS that makes their 1-year old hardware out dated.
These are just 2 reasons that I have heard from Windows users as of late who are thinking about switching to Linux.
I've quit telling people they should look at it. I run into too many people who want to argue with me about it. I just tell people I use Linux if it comes up in a conversation. If they want to try it I'll tell them how to download it or give them the disks, but I'm not banging my head against a stone wall any longer. It works just fine for me and my company.
This is just stupid. It really points to the problem of how bad our schools are. Because the stupid are teaching the ignorant.
I just found out that an aquaintance is teaching at computers at one of the highest rated schools in a metropolitan area.
This guy flunked out of burger king school. He was a total idiot
My point is that schools are supposed to be trying to teach them how to think on their feet and adjust to curve balls, but we have a disproportianate number of idiots teaching schools.
Some of this reminds me of the time they planned to reopen the tower in Austin. Someone else proposed that we put laser guns on the tower and have people run around the campus with those tag vests. They could charge people for every hour and see who could get the highest score. Money going to the library.
I think they voted against opening the towers.
I hope by "appropriate" they mean that if one of the escape routes is blocked by a gunman it will redirect me to a safe place.
You also realize that the innovations are being created by people that they are hiring on H1-B visa's from those countries and working over here as mathmeticians, statisticians, engineers, scientist. Basically they are here doing the technological innovations you are talking about while a number of the graduates from here cannot get these jobs. These companies are blatantly breaking laws or are skirting around the laws.
You'll find in some of these cases the issue has gotten so bad that a lot of the new innovative technologies are going to Asia as fast as it is proven here. Geez, I wonder how that could be happening? I also have seen some of these companies who turn around and just do there manufactuing in Asia after a year or six months ( No point in worrying about them stealing it, they've already got the technology)
So how about the patent disregard that MS has been showing lately to AT&T. Put the code in in Seattle and sell and install it in another country and it appears to be okay. Well at least according to the Supreme Court.
And as an aside, the reason modern CPUs are designed to "only" issue 4 instructions per cycle instead of 16 is because after years of careful research and testing real work applications, 4 instructions is almost always the maximum number of instructions any program can concurrently issue, due to issues like branches, cache-misses, data dependencies, etc. Makes me question just how much these "professors" really know.
This processor was designed for parallel processing. It's intent is to be used in a large super computer that they are building in Austin. So the programs will be designed to take advantage of the CPU capability. This is not a chip to replace a Pentium or AMD processor running MS Word. This is a chip that will be used in a huge parallel computer system replacing AMD or Intel quad core chips, which they are currently waiting on.
They got the funding by saying it could be used to design game plans that would defeat Oklahoma into the next century. Unless of course Oklahoma gets a really big super computer.
Most vendors I talk to have said that they are being allowed to sell XP until the end of the year. Systems sold in 2008 will have to have Vista.
Part of the problem is that there was not enough support for Vista ( a lot of people ran into problems with drivers ).
Basically MS got some of the pressure off of them to put a new OS out. Early adopters get to be the guinea pigs while the rest of us wait for the major problems to be fixed.
I don't know about margins, but a couple of months ago they closed down a Borders and were offering books at 40% off. On the four books that I checked I found that 3 were still actually cheaper on Amazon, but one was a dollar less (before taxes and shipping).
Lately I've found that nerdbooks.com is cheaper than Amazon
.
I replied to this email because I agreed with this problem and wanted to step into the overall discussion. From my point of view this has been a lopsided discussion. My reply is not directed at or towards this previous post. This is more of a generic reply to a lot of the posts made.
Yes I am the internet fascist, hitler, nazi, and everything else that security admins can be called.
I have a budget and limited resources to stop the multiple attack vectors which our network is susceptible to.
I am in charge/responsible for computer uptime and the personnel time that IT spends cleaning up messes that users make. So I have been accused of all sorts of draconian practices. One banning use of IE. Even people in my IT department disagree with it, but since we've done it computer downtime has decreased significantly (3%).
Educating users only goes so far. At some point you have to say this is where we have to stop or pour more money into solutions to prevent the problem from happening.
To those jr admins who are spoiting all of these solutions, how about we take it out of your budget(your paycheck) to supply all of these things. Cisco firewalls with Trend micro and other solutions only go so far. I'm not saying they don't work or we don't use them, but totally relying on them is not really a good idea. Especially against targeted attacks. [Oh by the way, it pretty much did come out of your paycheck, unless you are working for gov.]
oh, but if you just keep all your patches up to date. You know how many applications we would break regularly. But if you just do QC on the patches. Yeah, well the junior guys aren't very good at it and the senior guys really don't want to be bothered with it. Maybe if I could give bonuses to the people who do a good job at it, Oh wait, I spent it on Cisco firewalls and Trend Micro solutions.
What do you think would happen to in the IT department if one day we came back and found all the systems down and had to do a major number of reinstalls and large amount of data recovery. How do you think it would benefit the company?[ I was the jr admin when that happened, about 35% down, another company]. How high do you think the morale is going to be in the IT department when I tell them they can't leave until this is all back up. Oh, yeah you server admins and developers in your little comfy cubby holes, I'm going to pull your asses out here working on client computers until this is fixed. Overtime, you don't get overtime because the CEO won't give me the money to cover it. It's much more cost effective to give you comp time. You don't like it, neither do I. Because you get pissed and leave and then I have to go get another dimwit (Remember you 2 years ago) and train them.
Why don't we just deploy the endless number of solutions that would have prevented all of this? 1)Money 2)Time (see 1 for definition) . BOD and investors want to see the largest amount they can, my boss wants to show it to them, because then they get off his back.
How do I get away with these draconian tactics. Usually because the biggest bitchers have the departments with the worst problems and the BOD has actually thought it was a good idea if I just started charging the departments for the extra time IT has to spend on their computers [Actually what they said was take it out of the paycheck of the employee like they do at his company. I checked and no shit they charge them $200 for the second occurrence (No I don't think it is a good idea, because that doesn't really seem like a good idea morale wise. Seems to have some moral and ethical problems also)]. So now the department managers know I haven't gone as far as I am authorized to, so they blame all this badness on me.
Oh yeah, I'd just go to another company where there are more forward thinkers and people who would let me have all the internet access I wanted. Well good luck.
You think we really like it and get some kind of charge out of pissing people off? Maybe some do. Most
It doesn't matter one way or another with the itentions of the bulletin board or what action they took. This just exemplifies Dell customer service and customer care. I think that is more of what people are bitchin about. I think anytime you have to put up with crappy Customer Service you'll throw a dart at the company whenever you can.
I had a phone call from their Customer Service group about an order, they left it on my voice mail, I passed it around to four of my co-workers and asked them if they could tell me what this guy was talking about. Only one person guessed that it was from Dell. I wasn't sure until the next day and a Dell rep called me.
Next
I returned 2 computers which did not meet the quote specifications that we had agreed upon. They took them back with only minor difficulties. The diffculties didn't start till after they got the equipment back. I got no less than 6 phone calls telling me they were crediting the companies account. The last time, just before I picked up the phone I told myself I was going to reach through the phone lines and strangle the bastard on the other end if it was Dell again.
The next week the accountant comes to my office wanting to know where the packing slip was for the 2 computers that were ordered. I told them that the computers were sent back and he showed me the invoice. Within 4 hours of the equipment arriving I told Dell we were shipping them back and had a confirmation number, yet they never conferred this to their billing department, apparently even after the equipment had arrived back at Dell ( the date of arrival back at Dell was 6 days before billing).
No we usually find ourselves relying on foreign hardware. Quite a few of the chips which are used in military systems are made overseas.
It's one of the craziest most ludicrous things that you have ever seen.
You could steal another countries software much easier than you can steal their production capability
Why you would do either only a congressman could explain it.
As long as your only enemy is the French or you are the French, Windows in a military environment shouldn't be a problem.
I've got a stack of WD hard drives. About 2 years ago we went through the failed hard drives and found that of 10, 8 were WD. The other 2 were Fujitsu's.
Just last week I had a drive failure and thought this would be my second Seagate to crash. Pulled it out, low and behold it was a 300GB WD. I don't know how it got in there.
Basically quality appears to swing around. We went through a rash of failures on Fujitsu's about 4 years ago. It got so bad that we actually went around and replaced the hard drives in computers that were running Fujitsu's.
No kiddiing, especially with Dell, we needed computers with XP because our Apps are supported on XP and our users are trained on Office 2003. We expressly told them we wanted XP and not Vista and not Office 2007.
The quote even specified it.
The computers show up and they have Vista and Office 2007. We have to spend > 3 hours getting it arranged for them to come pick up the computers.
Same story different time. They sent 2 computers with Vista and Office 2007 when the quote specifically said XP Pro and Office 2003. Computers were sent back after a series of phone calls and Dell was taken off of the Approved Supplier List. Computers were purchased from another supplier.
Okay, so it points out that people don't pay attention to the security features which are available to them and use them.
Hell I could have told you that, without a big study
I think reporting on this does a disservice to security more than it helps. Now every other banking manager is going to say, why should we go to that much trouble. Some geek is going to find some flaw in it and then they are going to report all over the internet "how our security is flawed".
They added a security feature and nobody uses it, That is what it should say. Not that it is flawed.
I could report that Norton security, Sophos security, and various other Internet Security Suites are flawed because users can turn it off and not use it.
This is aluminum tin foil hat reporting at best.
This also happens to be the year after they are scheduled to facilitize their new manufacturing facility.
I know of one major company with 40,000 employees that made the announcement company wide that no computers with Vista were to be installed until 2009. It was specifically directing to people who were buying equipment to make sure they told their vendors that equipment that ran with Vista was not to be purchased. The specifics of why I don't know.
I do know that some of our vendors were still in test last year for versions of software that would run on XP.
We were offered a free copy of the $20,000 software if we would participate in their beta test. We said no thanks.
Okay so they stop a shoulder fired missile. What are they going to do about someone with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Fire that into a turbine engine on takeoff and I bet it has the same affect.
I have needs for 500GB hard drives, but I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. So I have RAID configurations for those. All well and good more data means a need for a bigger hard drive. And with all these people ripping movies they need bigger hard drives.
But what I also have is a need for a really reliable 20-40GB hard drive. On 80% of my systems I put the OS on one drive and data on everything else. So I really don't need is a cheap 100GB hard drive for the OS. What I need is a very reliable 20-40GB for the OS?
Within 3 years though I bet I am running my OS from DVD and putting my log files on flash drives.
I bet that if you run your web server on a MS platform with licensing purchased from MS you can get the cert no matter what.
They can do this and people will use it. The only thing we can do is try to figure out an alternative or a better mouse trap
I'm not exactly sure this would be profitable unless I had somebody elses heat source. $40 coal $1000 dollar homemade furnace or $400 acetylene torch assembly. So 40000 pennies or or 8000 nickels. I'd probably still need another tank of acetylene. So where do I sell this glob.
The lower temperature will make it easier to provide a room temperature superconductor.