Sorry, sparky, but you're in the vast minority of people.
It is extraordinarily rare for a residential user to desire outbound traffic destined for TCP port 25 except to that ISP's SMTP servers. Personally, I would welcome ISPs making it standard policy to implement these blocks for all their residential customers.
Most ISP's SMTP servers work regardless of what you put in the From: line, meaning you gain nothing by running your own server. Some do restrict that all From: lines have their own domain name, however, this can typically be avoided either by using a Reply-To: address or simply getting an account on one of many public sendmail servers that function on ports other than 25 and require username/password authentication to operate properly.
If every residential ISP blocked outbound port 25, you'd see a *vast* decrease in the amount of spam overnight. That's a *fact*.
The X-Files was also given several years to blossom on Friday nights, and was a signature show for the Fox network -- which didn't (at the time) demand such high ratings for a television show. Friday nights had the ability to produce those kinds of ratings -- not the ones they want now.
Once Fox became a "big" network and started demanding more of X-Files, they moved it to Sunday nights, where it became even more popular than it was on Fridays.
Clusters are not the be-all end-all of supercomputers. Clusters are really only effective if you have a problem that can be paralellized -- or split into multiple parts that can each be worked independently of one another and then merged into a single result. Factorization, rendering, etc. are all examples of easily paralellized operations.
Certain operations, though, are highly dependant upon each previous result. Physics and chemical simulations are a good example. When you have situations like this, clusters don't do you a lot of good, since only one iteration can be worked on at a time -- leaving most of your cluster sitting there idle.
Switching providers means more than just cutting dialup and getting a faster connection for $X more a month. There's also a few other issues at hand. The main one, of course, is the e-mail address. People *hate* to change their e-mail address. I'm one of them -- I pay for a proxy spam filtering service and deal with 3000+ spams a month to an e-mail address I've had for the last 8 years. It's a purely psychological attachment.
And, the price difference is more than you might expect. Not everyone out there uses $24/month AOL. $9.95 dial-up is available from mom-and-pop ISPs all over the country, and some of these are even beginning to offer compressing proxies (ala AOL's "Optimized") to improve web browsing over 56k links.
As for the AOL users, they are accustomed to the special features of AOL, and yes, their aol.com e-mail address. AOL Broadband is $15 a month, on top of your connectivity bill.
And above that, there's just the percieved "hassle" of switching. They're relatively happy with what they have, and don't want to deal with getting a new service, cancelling the old one, telling their friends their new e-mail addresses, etc. etc. etc.
I wonder if number portability requirements will ever extend to e-mail addresses;-).
One slight inaccuracy to your post. The cost of adding a GPS receiver to a phone is inconsequential. Every new phone sold here is equipped with one -- even the freebies given out by providers -- thanks to E-911 legislation.
"1 in 5 lost their job or knew someone who lost their job."
Talk about hear-say. That's hardly indicative of how pervasive the problem really is. How about some hard numbers, instead of a bunch of sappy stories about people committing suicide?
Plus, the story claims that you won't get unemployment or might be fired because of something one woman said she believed when she was told she had to train replacements. That's a load of crap to anyone with any clue on how employment laws work.
If you're worried about the severance or are enticed by the extra carrots they're waving in front of you, well, then, dig your own grave.
If all employees resisted, completely walked out of places that were doing it, refused to train Indian replacements...then maybe these companies would think twice. Instead those that are left simply bow their heads down and think "Gee, too bad for Sally."
But...oh, yeah, that's right. IT is too good to be unionized.
Until a more viable solution is discovered, ISPs should block outgoing port 25 traffic on their user base.
Many people decry this type of activity, but the truth is, anyone running a publicly accessable, secured SMTP relay is probably already offering access on ports other than 25 already, simply because so many ISPs block it.
TLDs have been pointless for awhile -- they're little more than money-grubbing schemes by would-be registrars.
Check out any registration site out there now. You'll find that most people will just register all the non-ccTLDs they can whenever they register a domain name. In fact, they're ENCOURAGED to do so.
All more TLDs do is add more options to that list so that the new central authorities for those TLDs can start raking in the cash.
The only real solution is a total overhaul to the way web pages are addressed. Rather than a DNS-specific method, a context-sensitive model would be infinitely more effective.
On the surface, if you don't pay for your bandwidth as you use it, Bittorrent seems like a great idea. In reality, though, its merely a way for the software companies to quit having to pay for all the bandwidth to serve the files that they insist on having centralized control over.
Now -- not only can they maintain positive control over the distribution (guaranteeing advertising as people come to their sites to get the demos) but also can get the people downloading to help foot the bill for the bandwidth. Again, great if you don't pay for the bandwidth -- but pretty damned sucky if you're a college who has to pay for all the bandwidth your customers use.
"Exclusive" demos and restrictive distribution are the causes of this. If any enthusiast site that wanted to could pick up the binary for a new demo and serve it from their server, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Let the old shareware model return -- like back in the days where every BBS around had Commander Keen and Wolf3d demos available for download.
Honestly, having worked with fiber for the last several years, I cannot tell you enough how much of a bad idea I think that is.
Fiber is time consuming and expensive to work with. It's also much more susceptable to wear and tear than copper wires.
Even then, what is the real benefit that could come out of it? Massive advancements come every year in the bandwidth that can be provided from telephone wires and coaxial TV cable.
100MBps to the home? Give me a break. 30,000+ user organizations get by with a DS-3 (45Mbps) or OC-3 (155Mbps). 100MBps to let Joe Blow check his e-mail, download music, and look for the Paris Hilton sex tape is a bit excessive to me.
Beyond that, the Internet's backbone is becoming saturated enough. Not only that, imagine what havoc the currect DDoS zombie-nets could do with an army of 100Mbps connections at their command?
The reason the printing companies are doing this is because they want to avoid liability similar to dram shop laws -- the laws that say the bar is responsible for you getting drunk, driving home, and plowing into a minivan full of good Christian children on their way to band camp.
If the printing companies continued to make better and better equipment without building in protections against counterfeiting, the government would eventually step in and force them to -- and most likely in a way that would be dramatic and expensive to implement.
The big problem is that counterfeiting is going from being a big-time operation to small-time. Teenagers on up now have the ability to print bills good enough to fool the Quick Stop clerk. These clerks, who cannot be bothered to run a counterfeit detection pen over the bill or even hold it up to the light to look for a watermark, don't give a rats ass about whether or not the bills they accept are real or not.
But Johnny Freeloader, he can go out, get some high-quality parchment paper, print out a load of $20s, throw them in the dryer, and by stopping at various gas stations to puchase bubble-gum can amass several hundred dollars in small bills with little more than a cheap Lexmark, a pack of paper, and a few skipped classes.
This is why there's a sudden interest in counterfeit prevention. Not to stop the drug runners from mass-producing the bills, but to stop your kids from doing it.
When programmers were rare, when the ability to develop digital solutions to real problems was an uncommon skill -- then software was science and art. However, today, programmers are a dime a dozen (at least in the states, overseas they're closer to three cents per bakers dozen) Software is now a tool to do a particular job.
When shopping for a tool, I don't look at how beautiful it is, or how elegant. Does it do the job I need it to do, and is it effective at doing so.
Software is the same way. Does this particular piece of software do the job that it's intended to do so, does it do it in an efficient manner that does not affect productivity or security in a negative fashion.
I honestly do not care how elegantly or clean the code is written, or that if I gave you four weeks of additional development time you could slim down the code by removing a few extraneous lines here and there. It quite simply does not matter.
This is why American programmers are failing when it comes to foreign competition. They view themselves as computer scientists -- or worse, digital artists of a sort -- and demand exorbant salaries for a job that someone shoved through two years of tech school can accomplish.
I am a network engineer -- I design and maintain telecommunications systems. I know that in a heartbeat there is probably someone out there that could snatch my job away from me at a moment's notice and for a significant paycut.
If American programmers would realize the same -- and accept the lower salaries that the global market is pushing on them -- then they may have a chance to compete.
...is what happened to the classical forms of education. Young stundents in their mid-teens could do complex mathetmatics in their heads, and knew classical Greek and Latin fluently in some upper-scale schools in the 1800s. Now it's not uncommon for students to graduate without a complete grasp of the English language -- much less math, foreign language, or anything else.
Honestly, I think that technology should be taught, but not used to teach, at least not up until a certain age. The classic forms of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic worked -- and they worked much better than any new fangled and more expensive method we have today.
It's not about the methods, it's not about the standardized tests. It's about the learning. Schools need to be reminded of this.
Instead, all they care about is high scores on the standardized tests. Damn the students beyond that.
Two keywords often missed in the analysis of the IT industry are implementation and support.
Up until around 2000, the IT industry was in the implementation phase for the most part. Companies were either in the process of implementing their first major IT integration, or were in the process of upgrading to a more modern one.
The implementation phase ended right along with the dot-com bust, leading to the double-whammy we all know and love.
Now we are in a support phase. Most companies already have an IT infrastructure in place -- those that don't are too small to require one. Work has shifted from new system build-out to the support and optimization of an existing system.
Slower growth and being less amicible to change are two of the hallmarks of the support phase. To change something, you have to have a good reason to change it. Will spending $20M on a total backoffice upgrade and desktop refresh net the company benefits in excess of $20M? Will those benefits be worth the hassle it will cause?
This is a lot of the reason that IT job growth has dropped. It's not just outsourcing -- although outsourcing does play a part in it. It simply takes less people to maintain a system than it does to build it.
Sure, if you want to go back to the days of web sites with little real content outside of a few technically oriented sites, GOPHER servers, and FTP sites, yay.
The fact is that the modern web puts at your fingertips a plethora of information that used to never be available nearly as quickly or as concicely. Entertainment, education, news, information.
For the bandwidth to be paid for -- for the people who spend their time to produce this content to be provided a living wage -- and to make it worth their while to provide these kinds of content to the masses at zero direct cost outside of a 'net connection -- funding has to come from somewhere. That funding, currently, comes in the form of advertising. Subscription-based models generally do not work except for the most popular websites.
Internet advertising in the last few years failed because of the fallacy of the click-through ratio. Banner ads were deemed effective judged on how many people clicked them compared to total impressions. Only in the last year, maybe less, have advertisers started to accept that these statistics are as meaningless as judging the effectiveness of a billboard on how many people veer off the road at that exact second to go buy a new Porsche SUV.
The big question, then, is not a question of illegal vs. illegal. It's a question of what's worth it to you, as a consumer. I have no problem with banner advertisements or interstituals -- sure sometimes they're annoying, but they're a fact of life. Just like those "special advertising sections" in magazines that you start to read and take three paragraphs before you realize you're not reading a real article. Pop-up and pop-under ads I find unacceptably interfering with my daily life (like telemarketing calls), and I block those as a tiny little form of civil disobedience.
Blocking all ads, though, is a different issue entirely. It is most definitely theft, in a way, but worse than that, if made too widespread, it threatens the very nature of the MODERN web.
So, if you want to go back to pre-1994 days, when you could get on USENET and make fun of Prodigy and AOL "lusers" and brag all about your new *NIX server at the university with two dial-in lines that always seem busy, so be it.
I like the web the way it is today. A little flashier, a little more annoying, but infinitely more useful.
And like all other good things, a few greedy freeloaders is all it takes to screw it up for everyone else.
The market chose NAT because it was the only technically feasible solution that could be implemented in the short term and still ensure interoperability with the rest of the Internet.
The fact remains that NAT is a kludge of a solution. We here in the US see NAT like you see in Linksys routers. There are many implementations of NAT that have hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of users hiding behind various layers of NAT. It's an administrative nightmare to say the least and is not a permanent solution to the problem.
All NAT has done is stave off the immediacy of the problem. Unfortuantely, no one will want to spend the money to fix the problem until it's too late -- just like the Y2K bug.
Ah, well, more money for network engineers like me. Woohoo.
NASA actually performed computer modeling tests on several different Star Trek ships to test structural stability during acceleration at sublight speeds.
The end result? Sans one, every single Star Trek ship fell apart.
The biggest problem with your argument is that oil is only a source of energy. It's not.
Our entire society is based around petrochemicals. Everything from the plastic our machines are made of to the energy that it runs off of, to the chemicals that are used in the process. Most drugs (ibuprofen, acetominiphen for two examples) are made from petrochemicals.
Running out of oil does not mean a fast change to some other energy source. It literally means the end of civilization. There are an innumerable number of things that we simply cannot make without petrochemicals. Not "it's more expensive to make alternatives" but "there are no alternatives".
The only solution to this is really limiting our use of petrochemicals for fuel and delegate their use to materials -- and heavy recycling of those materials. However, the short-sighted nature of Americans, East Asians, and Europeans means that this will probably not happen.
Actually, you're incorrect. There are very specific rules and guidelines regarding the classification and declassification of government data.
EO 12958 (Originally by Clinton, amended by Bush this year) specifies that all *new* information is to be automatically declassified after 10 years. Also, any older data 25 years of age or older is to be automatically declassified (starting Jan 2007) if it's considered "historically significant" by Title 44 USC -- regardless of whether or not it's been reviewed.
These are the only justifications for keeping something classified past the declassification deadline:
(1) reveal the identity of a confidential human source, or a human intelligence source, or reveal information about the application of an intelligence source or method;
(2) reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;
(3) reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities;
(4) reveal information that would impair the application of state of the art technology within a U.S. weapon system;
(5) reveal actual U.S. military war plans that remain in effect;
(6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would seriously and demonstrably impair relations between the United States and a foreign government, or seriously and demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
(7) reveal information that would clearly and demonstrably impair the current ability of United States Government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of the national security, are authorized;
(8) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair current national security emergency preparedness plans or reveal current vulnerabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, or projects relating to the national security;
or
(9) violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
The government is not supposed to classify data "just because". yeah, they can in practice, but that's not the point.
Believe it or not, the RIAA's relentless tactics against file sharing are what's made this work. If Napster was still around, and Kazaa and eMule weren't seeded with 90% crap, iTunes wouldn't have a chance.
Now, that of course is ignoring the concept that if something similar to iTunes had been around from the beginning, file sharing would have never had a chance, but hey, that's a different issue.
And this, I believe, is where the crux of religion comes into play. You either believe in determinism (even determinism ruled by truly random reactions at a quantum level) or you believe in something more esoteric.
Much as those in the days of yore sought out the supernatural to explain the world around them, people today, and much more so in the future, will be reaching to it to explain themselves.
I know what I think on the matter...but the remainder is left as an exercise to the reader.
While important, this article only addresses the cost of licenses, which most IT pros will tell you is on a fraction of the TCO for a system.
The remainder -- staffing costs, infrastructure requirements, etc. -- are what make up a bulk of the TCO.
Then, of course, you have to take that TCO and factor it into an ROI study to see if it's actually "worth it" in dollar figures to implement the system.
This is where Microsoft often beats Linux flat. In addition to the fact that Microsoft-trained staffers are significantly cheaper that Linux-trained staffers, there's the cost and hassle of the migration to worry about. Seeing as most companies only look to next quarter, it's seen as an increase in cost, not a decrease.
These rising costs, though, will encourage more and more companies to take the leap. As the required refresh cycle for software and hardware continues to get longer and longer, companies will start to look 5, 10, even 15 years down the road in respect to their planning, and Linux will begin to have an edge.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, sparky, but you're in the vast minority of people.
It is extraordinarily rare for a residential user to desire outbound traffic destined for TCP port 25 except to that ISP's SMTP servers. Personally, I would welcome ISPs making it standard policy to implement these blocks for all their residential customers.
Most ISP's SMTP servers work regardless of what you put in the From: line, meaning you gain nothing by running your own server. Some do restrict that all From: lines have their own domain name, however, this can typically be avoided either by using a Reply-To: address or simply getting an account on one of many public sendmail servers that function on ports other than 25 and require username/password authentication to operate properly.
If every residential ISP blocked outbound port 25, you'd see a *vast* decrease in the amount of spam overnight. That's a *fact*.
What's more important to you?
As some of you may remember, this was also remade into an episode of the (usually) fantastic Ray Bradbury Theater.
I'm really wondering how long it'll be before it gets released on DVD. [/hopeful]
The X-Files was also given several years to blossom on Friday nights, and was a signature show for the Fox network -- which didn't (at the time) demand such high ratings for a television show. Friday nights had the ability to produce those kinds of ratings -- not the ones they want now.
Once Fox became a "big" network and started demanding more of X-Files, they moved it to Sunday nights, where it became even more popular than it was on Fridays.
Clusters are not the be-all end-all of supercomputers. Clusters are really only effective if you have a problem that can be paralellized -- or split into multiple parts that can each be worked independently of one another and then merged into a single result. Factorization, rendering, etc. are all examples of easily paralellized operations.
Certain operations, though, are highly dependant upon each previous result. Physics and chemical simulations are a good example. When you have situations like this, clusters don't do you a lot of good, since only one iteration can be worked on at a time -- leaving most of your cluster sitting there idle.
Switching providers means more than just cutting dialup and getting a faster connection for $X more a month. There's also a few other issues at hand. The main one, of course, is the e-mail address. People *hate* to change their e-mail address. I'm one of them -- I pay for a proxy spam filtering service and deal with 3000+ spams a month to an e-mail address I've had for the last 8 years. It's a purely psychological attachment.
;-).
And, the price difference is more than you might expect. Not everyone out there uses $24/month AOL. $9.95 dial-up is available from mom-and-pop ISPs all over the country, and some of these are even beginning to offer compressing proxies (ala AOL's "Optimized") to improve web browsing over 56k links.
As for the AOL users, they are accustomed to the special features of AOL, and yes, their aol.com e-mail address. AOL Broadband is $15 a month, on top of your connectivity bill.
And above that, there's just the percieved "hassle" of switching. They're relatively happy with what they have, and don't want to deal with getting a new service, cancelling the old one, telling their friends their new e-mail addresses, etc. etc. etc.
I wonder if number portability requirements will ever extend to e-mail addresses
One slight inaccuracy to your post. The cost of adding a GPS receiver to a phone is inconsequential. Every new phone sold here is equipped with one -- even the freebies given out by providers -- thanks to E-911 legislation.
"1 in 5 lost their job or knew someone who lost their job."
Talk about hear-say. That's hardly indicative of how pervasive the problem really is. How about some hard numbers, instead of a bunch of sappy stories about people committing suicide?
Plus, the story claims that you won't get unemployment or might be fired because of something one woman said she believed when she was told she had to train replacements. That's a load of crap to anyone with any clue on how employment laws work.
If you're worried about the severance or are enticed by the extra carrots they're waving in front of you, well, then, dig your own grave.
If all employees resisted, completely walked out of places that were doing it, refused to train Indian replacements...then maybe these companies would think twice. Instead those that are left simply bow their heads down and think "Gee, too bad for Sally."
But...oh, yeah, that's right. IT is too good to be unionized.
Until a more viable solution is discovered, ISPs should block outgoing port 25 traffic on their user base.
Many people decry this type of activity, but the truth is, anyone running a publicly accessable, secured SMTP relay is probably already offering access on ports other than 25 already, simply because so many ISPs block it.
TLDs have been pointless for awhile -- they're little more than money-grubbing schemes by would-be registrars.
Check out any registration site out there now. You'll find that most people will just register all the non-ccTLDs they can whenever they register a domain name. In fact, they're ENCOURAGED to do so.
All more TLDs do is add more options to that list so that the new central authorities for those TLDs can start raking in the cash.
The only real solution is a total overhaul to the way web pages are addressed. Rather than a DNS-specific method, a context-sensitive model would be infinitely more effective.
On the surface, if you don't pay for your bandwidth as you use it, Bittorrent seems like a great idea. In reality, though, its merely a way for the software companies to quit having to pay for all the bandwidth to serve the files that they insist on having centralized control over.
Now -- not only can they maintain positive control over the distribution (guaranteeing advertising as people come to their sites to get the demos) but also can get the people downloading to help foot the bill for the bandwidth. Again, great if you don't pay for the bandwidth -- but pretty damned sucky if you're a college who has to pay for all the bandwidth your customers use.
"Exclusive" demos and restrictive distribution are the causes of this. If any enthusiast site that wanted to could pick up the binary for a new demo and serve it from their server, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Let the old shareware model return -- like back in the days where every BBS around had Commander Keen and Wolf3d demos available for download.
Don't screw the end user.
Honestly, having worked with fiber for the last several years, I cannot tell you enough how much of a bad idea I think that is.
Fiber is time consuming and expensive to work with. It's also much more susceptable to wear and tear than copper wires.
Even then, what is the real benefit that could come out of it? Massive advancements come every year in the bandwidth that can be provided from telephone wires and coaxial TV cable.
100MBps to the home? Give me a break. 30,000+ user organizations get by with a DS-3 (45Mbps) or OC-3 (155Mbps). 100MBps to let Joe Blow check his e-mail, download music, and look for the Paris Hilton sex tape is a bit excessive to me.
Beyond that, the Internet's backbone is becoming saturated enough. Not only that, imagine what havoc the currect DDoS zombie-nets could do with an army of 100Mbps connections at their command?
The reason the printing companies are doing this is because they want to avoid liability similar to dram shop laws -- the laws that say the bar is responsible for you getting drunk, driving home, and plowing into a minivan full of good Christian children on their way to band camp.
If the printing companies continued to make better and better equipment without building in protections against counterfeiting, the government would eventually step in and force them to -- and most likely in a way that would be dramatic and expensive to implement.
The big problem is that counterfeiting is going from being a big-time operation to small-time. Teenagers on up now have the ability to print bills good enough to fool the Quick Stop clerk. These clerks, who cannot be bothered to run a counterfeit detection pen over the bill or even hold it up to the light to look for a watermark, don't give a rats ass about whether or not the bills they accept are real or not.
But Johnny Freeloader, he can go out, get some high-quality parchment paper, print out a load of $20s, throw them in the dryer, and by stopping at various gas stations to puchase bubble-gum can amass several hundred dollars in small bills with little more than a cheap Lexmark, a pack of paper, and a few skipped classes.
This is why there's a sudden interest in counterfeit prevention. Not to stop the drug runners from mass-producing the bills, but to stop your kids from doing it.
When programmers were rare, when the ability to develop digital solutions to real problems was an uncommon skill -- then software was science and art. However, today, programmers are a dime a dozen (at least in the states, overseas they're closer to three cents per bakers dozen) Software is now a tool to do a particular job.
When shopping for a tool, I don't look at how beautiful it is, or how elegant. Does it do the job I need it to do, and is it effective at doing so.
Software is the same way. Does this particular piece of software do the job that it's intended to do so, does it do it in an efficient manner that does not affect productivity or security in a negative fashion.
I honestly do not care how elegantly or clean the code is written, or that if I gave you four weeks of additional development time you could slim down the code by removing a few extraneous lines here and there. It quite simply does not matter.
This is why American programmers are failing when it comes to foreign competition. They view themselves as computer scientists -- or worse, digital artists of a sort -- and demand exorbant salaries for a job that someone shoved through two years of tech school can accomplish.
I am a network engineer -- I design and maintain telecommunications systems. I know that in a heartbeat there is probably someone out there that could snatch my job away from me at a moment's notice and for a significant paycut.
If American programmers would realize the same -- and accept the lower salaries that the global market is pushing on them -- then they may have a chance to compete.
...is what happened to the classical forms of education. Young stundents in their mid-teens could do complex mathetmatics in their heads, and knew classical Greek and Latin fluently in some upper-scale schools in the 1800s. Now it's not uncommon for students to graduate without a complete grasp of the English language -- much less math, foreign language, or anything else.
Honestly, I think that technology should be taught, but not used to teach, at least not up until a certain age. The classic forms of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic worked -- and they worked much better than any new fangled and more expensive method we have today.
It's not about the methods, it's not about the standardized tests. It's about the learning. Schools need to be reminded of this.
Instead, all they care about is high scores on the standardized tests. Damn the students beyond that.
Two keywords often missed in the analysis of the IT industry are implementation and support.
Up until around 2000, the IT industry was in the implementation phase for the most part. Companies were either in the process of implementing their first major IT integration, or were in the process of upgrading to a more modern one.
The implementation phase ended right along with the dot-com bust, leading to the double-whammy we all know and love.
Now we are in a support phase. Most companies already have an IT infrastructure in place -- those that don't are too small to require one. Work has shifted from new system build-out to the support and optimization of an existing system.
Slower growth and being less amicible to change are two of the hallmarks of the support phase. To change something, you have to have a good reason to change it. Will spending $20M on a total backoffice upgrade and desktop refresh net the company benefits in excess of $20M? Will those benefits be worth the hassle it will cause?
This is a lot of the reason that IT job growth has dropped. It's not just outsourcing -- although outsourcing does play a part in it. It simply takes less people to maintain a system than it does to build it.
This, sadly, will not change anytime soon.
The key problem with Friendster is the proliferation of fake people in the network.
I have exactly four friends on my list. One of them is mated to "Strongbad" as a friend -- which nets me a personal network of nearly 9,000 people.
The other three are stubs off of me.
Sure, if you want to go back to the days of web sites with little real content outside of a few technically oriented sites, GOPHER servers, and FTP sites, yay.
The fact is that the modern web puts at your fingertips a plethora of information that used to never be available nearly as quickly or as concicely. Entertainment, education, news, information.
For the bandwidth to be paid for -- for the people who spend their time to produce this content to be provided a living wage -- and to make it worth their while to provide these kinds of content to the masses at zero direct cost outside of a 'net connection -- funding has to come from somewhere. That funding, currently, comes in the form of advertising. Subscription-based models generally do not work except for the most popular websites.
Internet advertising in the last few years failed because of the fallacy of the click-through ratio. Banner ads were deemed effective judged on how many people clicked them compared to total impressions. Only in the last year, maybe less, have advertisers started to accept that these statistics are as meaningless as judging the effectiveness of a billboard on how many people veer off the road at that exact second to go buy a new Porsche SUV.
The big question, then, is not a question of illegal vs. illegal. It's a question of what's worth it to you, as a consumer. I have no problem with banner advertisements or interstituals -- sure sometimes they're annoying, but they're a fact of life. Just like those "special advertising sections" in magazines that you start to read and take three paragraphs before you realize you're not reading a real article. Pop-up and pop-under ads I find unacceptably interfering with my daily life (like telemarketing calls), and I block those as a tiny little form of civil disobedience.
Blocking all ads, though, is a different issue entirely. It is most definitely theft, in a way, but worse than that, if made too widespread, it threatens the very nature of the MODERN web.
So, if you want to go back to pre-1994 days, when you could get on USENET and make fun of Prodigy and AOL "lusers" and brag all about your new *NIX server at the university with two dial-in lines that always seem busy, so be it.
I like the web the way it is today. A little flashier, a little more annoying, but infinitely more useful.
And like all other good things, a few greedy freeloaders is all it takes to screw it up for everyone else.
The market chose NAT because it was the only technically feasible solution that could be implemented in the short term and still ensure interoperability with the rest of the Internet.
The fact remains that NAT is a kludge of a solution. We here in the US see NAT like you see in Linksys routers. There are many implementations of NAT that have hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of users hiding behind various layers of NAT. It's an administrative nightmare to say the least and is not a permanent solution to the problem.
All NAT has done is stave off the immediacy of the problem. Unfortuantely, no one will want to spend the money to fix the problem until it's too late -- just like the Y2K bug.
Ah, well, more money for network engineers like me. Woohoo.
NASA actually performed computer modeling tests on several different Star Trek ships to test structural stability during acceleration at sublight speeds.
The end result? Sans one, every single Star Trek ship fell apart.
The winner? The Cardassian warship.
Can't find a link, but oh well.
The biggest problem with your argument is that oil is only a source of energy. It's not.
Our entire society is based around petrochemicals. Everything from the plastic our machines are made of to the energy that it runs off of, to the chemicals that are used in the process. Most drugs (ibuprofen, acetominiphen for two examples) are made from petrochemicals.
Running out of oil does not mean a fast change to some other energy source. It literally means the end of civilization. There are an innumerable number of things that we simply cannot make without petrochemicals. Not "it's more expensive to make alternatives" but "there are no alternatives".
The only solution to this is really limiting our use of petrochemicals for fuel and delegate their use to materials -- and heavy recycling of those materials. However, the short-sighted nature of Americans, East Asians, and Europeans means that this will probably not happen.
Actually, you're incorrect. There are very specific rules and guidelines regarding the classification and declassification of government data.
EO 12958 (Originally by Clinton, amended by Bush this year) specifies that all *new* information is to be automatically declassified after 10 years. Also, any older data 25 years of age or older is to be automatically declassified (starting Jan 2007) if it's considered "historically significant" by Title 44 USC -- regardless of whether or not it's been reviewed.
These are the only justifications for keeping something classified past the declassification deadline:
(1) reveal the identity of a confidential human source, or a human intelligence source, or reveal information about the application of an intelligence source or method;
(2) reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;
(3) reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities;
(4) reveal information that would impair the application of state of the art technology within a U.S. weapon system;
(5) reveal actual U.S. military war plans that remain in effect;
(6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would seriously and demonstrably impair relations between the United States and a foreign government, or seriously and demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
(7) reveal information that would clearly and demonstrably impair the current ability of United States Government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of the national security, are authorized;
(8) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair current national security emergency preparedness plans or reveal current vulnerabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, or projects relating to the national security;
or
(9) violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
The government is not supposed to classify data "just because". yeah, they can in practice, but that's not the point.
WHEREAS,
We cancelled the critically acclaimed FARSCAPE.
WHEREAS,
We cancelled the critically acclaimed INVISIBLE MAN.
WHEREAS,
We cancelled the fan-adored THE CHRONICLE
WHEREAS,
We turned STARGATE SG-1 into total crap.
WHEREAS,
We did a crappy, low-budget version of DUNE.
WHEREAS
We replaced these shows with classics like TREMORS: THE SERIES and JOHN EDWARDS
WHEREAS,
We are about to rape the collective memories of classic sci-fi fans with our re-imaginging of BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA.
WE HEREBY
Attempt a really lame publicity stunt to try and appeal to the lowest common denominator of sci-fi fans there are: the UFO nuts.
iTunes isn't just competeing with "free".
Believe it or not, the RIAA's relentless tactics against file sharing are what's made this work. If Napster was still around, and Kazaa and eMule weren't seeded with 90% crap, iTunes wouldn't have a chance.
Now, that of course is ignoring the concept that if something similar to iTunes had been around from the beginning, file sharing would have never had a chance, but hey, that's a different issue.
And this, I believe, is where the crux of religion comes into play. You either believe in determinism (even determinism ruled by truly random reactions at a quantum level) or you believe in something more esoteric.
Much as those in the days of yore sought out the supernatural to explain the world around them, people today, and much more so in the future, will be reaching to it to explain themselves.
I know what I think on the matter...but the remainder is left as an exercise to the reader.
While important, this article only addresses the cost of licenses, which most IT pros will tell you is on a fraction of the TCO for a system.
The remainder -- staffing costs, infrastructure requirements, etc. -- are what make up a bulk of the TCO.
Then, of course, you have to take that TCO and factor it into an ROI study to see if it's actually "worth it" in dollar figures to implement the system.
This is where Microsoft often beats Linux flat. In addition to the fact that Microsoft-trained staffers are significantly cheaper that Linux-trained staffers, there's the cost and hassle of the migration to worry about. Seeing as most companies only look to next quarter, it's seen as an increase in cost, not a decrease.
These rising costs, though, will encourage more and more companies to take the leap. As the required refresh cycle for software and hardware continues to get longer and longer, companies will start to look 5, 10, even 15 years down the road in respect to their planning, and Linux will begin to have an edge.