I knew that I would see a post saying something like this.
Yes encryption is a great thing and should be used all the time, especially on laptops. Well actually, there is one time when it *shouldn't* be used (or at least, not automatically). Want to know when that is?
For backups. THANK YOU. I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this.
The backup software I use (http://www.bacula.org - a fantastic piece of work) does have the facility to encrypt everything.
But I've considered the risk to the business in the event of tape loss versus the risk to the business in the event that we can't decrypt the data because for whatever reason the office has burnt to the ground and the offsite copies of the keys aren't recoverable.
I concluded that if it's a choice between explaining a lost tape and explaining the fact that I have the tape but the sun will have burnt itself into nothing before anyone can read it, "oops, I lost the tape" was easier to explain and rather less likely to result in the business going to the wall.
Why would you still use antiquated mainframes for your backups, particularly if it's 2 million records? If something happened at your site you'd need a similarly antiquated mainframe just to get your data back. That makes very little sense. Three reasons:
1. It works.
2. IBM (assuming they are using IBM kit) mainframes are still being built today, and while they're totally different internally to the systems of 30 years ago, they're still compatible.
3. This is what companies like SunGard and IBM (yes, they have a DR consultancy team) specialise in. You tell them what equipment you'll need in a disaster recovery scenario, they agree to loan it to you. In which case, who cares how old the system is?
Umm i will assume you are trying to be funny because you do not provide any references to back up your claim of 2 billion Linux devices vs about 600 million Windows devices. There probably are.
But when most of them are embedded and don't even integrate that well with other Linux boxes, it's really all rather academic.
Uh, both Shared Calendars and Public Folders are supported by IMAP.
(Has anyone else noticed that MAPI and IMAP are anagrams of each other?) The protocol may well have the facilities to support both.
Now go and find a client and a server which support them as cleanly as the Exchange/Outlook combination does, and a migration plan for existing installations.
You're quite correct, however the scenario you're railing against is exactly what you get when a person with little or no real-world IT experience is dictating IT requirements.
Such a person cannot be reasoned with using your reasoning, because in their world your reasoning makes no sense. I've been in exactly this position myself - and to be fair, their world makes more sense. Who ever heard of a world where a man could sell you a product and if it exploded, he could tell you that this was your problem?
The aforementioned companies who care about having someone to blame have a support contract with SLAs to the hilt. Let me tell you, if I log a Sev.A call with Microsoft, they damn well better have a senior tech onsite in two hours (at any time) or we bash them with SLA breach penalties. All joking aside, have you EVER tried invoking the penalties for an SLA breach?
Because I have, and in my experience it results in a reply of "What's an SLA?"
1. Bad application of technology, including massive security holes. 2. Bad management science, leading to sloppy security and confused product design. I disagree.
Engineering is all about making compromises - the old adage "good, fast, cheap, pick two" holds true today just as much as it always did, even if the three options in the list change occasionally.
In this case, I'd argue that the three options are "Simple, reliable, cheap, pick two".
Simple - any fool can use it, it's really not complicated. Reliable - Verifiably correct, very hard to mess around with without it being immediately obvious. Cheap - Pretty self-explanatory.
Ah, but what you fail to realize is that even if Americans are able to get outside info, a lot of them have no desire to DO so, hence they are effectively indoctrinated regardless of having access to this information. They either don't care, or wouldn't believe it in the first place.
By being able to obtain the will of the people without having to close-off outside info, you've achieved much more than just simple censorship. It's much worse. It's willful ignorance, and THAT'S the scariest of all. Trotsky, I believe, is credited with saying that any society is only three meals away from revolution.
I think the converse is also true - provided a society as a whole is happy that it has the next three meals coming, it will continue in its own status quo and is safe from revolution. It follows that most people will not seek out challenge the status quo.
I'll tell you which societies will change first - regardless of how indoctrinated they are. It'll be in those areas where peoples' wages barely cover buying food already. The worldwide increase in food costs will hit them first, and hardest. I wouldn't be too surprised to see another round of communist governments get in, subsidising staples like rice but letting everything else in the country go to hell.
Interestingly, the list of countries affected will very likely include at least a few places where it's possible to get decent Internet access but wages are very low - just the kind of place that things get outsourced to. Hmmm.
Sure, but he has a problem with some people choosing to not charge for them? I think it's fair to assume that if there ever comes a time when it is possible for an organisation to come along and create and distribute drugs for free to anyone who wants them, the incumbent drugs companies would fight tooth and nail against it.
OK, now that I will concede does put a rather different spin on things.
However, I would point out that the reason for so much paranoia is that Microsoft have spent 25 years systematically destroying anything which stood in their way.
Now, while I don't debate it's possible that they're trying to turn their business model around so that it no longer depends upon being the dominant OS provider on the desktop and the server, unless and until we start to see real, hard evidence of this, I along with a lot of other/.'ers will take it with a large pinch of salt.
Sadly the Apache 2.0 license, which all the Apache Java code uses basically exclusively, is incompatible with the GPLv2. And, yes, it matters, because Java code links at runtime. This means that you fall under the GPL's "derived code" sections, Surely that's only an issue if you distribute in-memory runtime code (ie. stuff that's been through a JIT compiler)?
If compiled code as distributed hasn't got any code linked in at the point of distribution, then I wouldn't think it would be an issue.
If anything, it's more of an issue with C because that links at compile time, essentially forcing you to reinvent the wheel or write an abstraction layer if you plan to use anything that's part of a GPL C library.
Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud.
Extend to other devices? Unless they're running Windows Mobile, pull the other one.
To my mind, this is an attempt to create a killer app which will tie everyone to Windows for another 5-10 years much like "I want shared calendars in Outlook and I'm prepared to pay a lot of money to get it" has tied businesses to Exchange for so long.
Simple: You use only formats that are openly specified and free software. HTML and everything XML-based actually is text. Even if it's text you're not 100% out of the woods. EBCDIC, ASCII, Unicode plus however many others have existed over the years.
While it's not generally too awkward to convert from one characted encoding to another, "just text" is a slight oversimplification.
I'm not a US citizen, so frankly I don't give a fsck about your constitution.
But even if I were, in the real world you'll have to persuade a lot of people to agree with you. For best effect, you'll have to persuade them to agree with you all at once so a major airport suddenly finds it's got to arrest every single person there.
These searches have to be taking place inside the US border by definition. It's not like Canada would let a bunch of US agents operate a checkpoint in their territory. Not necessarily.
Airports are frequently defined as "international" soil.
Which, as far as I can tell, is a legal way of saying "We, the country in which the airport is nominally based, have the right to pick and choose which laws we follow when in the airport".
I don't know if the latest Truecrypt version supports this - if not, more's the pity - but what's needed is support for two partitions on the drive and which one it boots depends on which password you use.
Something similar already exists once you're booted - a single truecrypt file can contain two different sets of data and it's impossible to know whether or not that's the case just by looking at the data. Someone demanding the password? Give them the password which gains access to something which you may have a legitimate reason to protect, but you certainly don't have any legal concerns about. Extend that protection to the entire operating system, and it's now a lot more secure - who cares if something in memory got swapped out?
Yeah, what purpose does the military have in growing all natural 'breast implants'? (Note: I'm not a woman, so both the ladies on/. are free to flame me until I resemble a lightly toasted small buffalo.)
Joke all you want, but lots of women are very upset at the prospect of losing all or part of a breast through cancer.
It's not a particularly big leap to apply such concern to losing part of a breast through injuries sustained in combat. And breasts were invented for reasons other than "To give/.'ers something to furiously fwap over", y'know.
In which case, being able to regrow them could prove very helpful for morale amongst injured female soldiers.
Sure a local place may be better than mcdonalds, equally it may be terrible. When you are already tired and worn out and in an unfamiliar place do you really want to risk having to eat a horrible meal or spend yet more time and money going somewhere else? 10 or 20 years ago (in the UK at least), you were probably on the nail. The smaller, locally owned places were being out-competed by the likes of McDonalds mainly because many of them produced crap and charged the earth for it. (Incidentally, a lot of pubs in the UK are getting their just desserts in much the same way with the rise and rise of chains like Wetherspoons - another example of a company with a product that's mediocre at best, but brings in the customers by being cheap and familiar. Those pubs which were always run by a landlord who had the good sense to keep an eye on what brought the customers in and made good money rather than just get a license to serve alcohol and hope for the best seem to be having much less of a hard time).
I'm seeing a change now - maybe it's because I live in a reasonably sized city which has historically been fairly friendly to local food producers. What's happening is smaller, locally owned places can't compete on price because they'd just be in a race to the bottom. Instead, they compete on quality and, to a certain extent, service. In some cases, they're even doing this for a similar price to the likes of McDonalds. And they're doing OK.
Actually most major financial companies already run entirely on open source servers. Maybe you need to get a job with one and find out. The underlying OS may be Free/Open Source.
The database and the application interacting with the database sure as hell aren't.
Just because the software is tested repeatedly for bugs that does not mean they might not exist. I have two issues with that:
1. First year computer science. It is possible, given known input, to mathematically prove that a program will always produce a given output. (It rapidly becomes impractical for most large projects in the real world, but that's mainly because it costs a lot of time and therefore money. The aviation industry is rather less concerned about time/money issues here).
2. Develop systems (Note: Entire systems. Not individual components) which can handle a component going screwy. Again, this is expensive - particularly if you want the systems to handle this with any degree of panache (ie. they may flash up a warning so the underlying cause can be dealt with in due course but other than that they just carry on working). But again, aviation tends not to be too concerned about the costs this introduces.
Now that the specification for OOXML is out, and Office 2007 has no implementation, you are not allowed to fill in the checkmark on the list. In fact, if you want a solution now, the only available choice is ODF. Until the next Office service pack, of course. Agreements for government departments - the main target for such standards - don't get done and dusted overnight.
A few sweet words from an MS salesweasel ("The next service pack, due out RSN will solve that issue, so you may as well tick it. Also, you won't have to retrain all your staff in a totally different office suite [ha ha] - imagine how much time, effort and money that will save!") should solve that issue.
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Yes encryption is a great thing and should be used all the time, especially on laptops. Well actually, there is one time when it *shouldn't* be used (or at least, not automatically). Want to know when that is?
For backups. THANK YOU. I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this.
The backup software I use (http://www.bacula.org - a fantastic piece of work) does have the facility to encrypt everything.
But I've considered the risk to the business in the event of tape loss versus the risk to the business in the event that we can't decrypt the data because for whatever reason the office has burnt to the ground and the offsite copies of the keys aren't recoverable.
I concluded that if it's a choice between explaining a lost tape and explaining the fact that I have the tape but the sun will have burnt itself into nothing before anyone can read it, "oops, I lost the tape" was easier to explain and rather less likely to result in the business going to the wall.
1. It works.
2. IBM (assuming they are using IBM kit) mainframes are still being built today, and while they're totally different internally to the systems of 30 years ago, they're still compatible.
3. This is what companies like SunGard and IBM (yes, they have a DR consultancy team) specialise in. You tell them what equipment you'll need in a disaster recovery scenario, they agree to loan it to you. In which case, who cares how old the system is?
But when most of them are embedded and don't even integrate that well with other Linux boxes, it's really all rather academic.
(Has anyone else noticed that MAPI and IMAP are anagrams of each other?) The protocol may well have the facilities to support both.
Now go and find a client and a server which support them as cleanly as the Exchange/Outlook combination does, and a migration plan for existing installations.
You're quite correct, however the scenario you're railing against is exactly what you get when a person with little or no real-world IT experience is dictating IT requirements.
Such a person cannot be reasoned with using your reasoning, because in their world your reasoning makes no sense. I've been in exactly this position myself - and to be fair, their world makes more sense. Who ever heard of a world where a man could sell you a product and if it exploded, he could tell you that this was your problem?
Because I have, and in my experience it results in a reply of "What's an SLA?"
It's science -- bad science -- of two types:
1. Bad application of technology, including massive security holes.
2. Bad management science, leading to sloppy security and confused product design. I disagree.
Engineering is all about making compromises - the old adage "good, fast, cheap, pick two" holds true today just as much as it always did, even if the three options in the list change occasionally.
In this case, I'd argue that the three options are "Simple, reliable, cheap, pick two".
Simple - any fool can use it, it's really not complicated.
Reliable - Verifiably correct, very hard to mess around with without it being immediately obvious.
Cheap - Pretty self-explanatory.
By being able to obtain the will of the people without having to close-off outside info, you've achieved much more than just simple censorship. It's much worse. It's willful ignorance, and THAT'S the scariest of all. Trotsky, I believe, is credited with saying that any society is only three meals away from revolution.
I think the converse is also true - provided a society as a whole is happy that it has the next three meals coming, it will continue in its own status quo and is safe from revolution. It follows that most people will not seek out challenge the status quo.
I'll tell you which societies will change first - regardless of how indoctrinated they are. It'll be in those areas where peoples' wages barely cover buying food already. The worldwide increase in food costs will hit them first, and hardest. I wouldn't be too surprised to see another round of communist governments get in, subsidising staples like rice but letting everything else in the country go to hell.
Interestingly, the list of countries affected will very likely include at least a few places where it's possible to get decent Internet access but wages are very low - just the kind of place that things get outsourced to. Hmmm.
OK, now that I will concede does put a rather different spin on things.
/.'ers will take it with a large pinch of salt.
However, I would point out that the reason for so much paranoia is that Microsoft have spent 25 years systematically destroying anything which stood in their way.
Now, while I don't debate it's possible that they're trying to turn their business model around so that it no longer depends upon being the dominant OS provider on the desktop and the server, unless and until we start to see real, hard evidence of this, I along with a lot of other
If compiled code as distributed hasn't got any code linked in at the point of distribution, then I wouldn't think it would be an issue.
If anything, it's more of an issue with C because that links at compile time, essentially forcing you to reinvent the wheel or write an abstraction layer if you plan to use anything that's part of a GPL C library.
So?
OOXML is all XML, that doesn't mean it's particularly usable as a standard for others to implement right now.
Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud.
Extend to other devices? Unless they're running Windows Mobile, pull the other one.
To my mind, this is an attempt to create a killer app which will tie everyone to Windows for another 5-10 years much like "I want shared calendars in Outlook and I'm prepared to pay a lot of money to get it" has tied businesses to Exchange for so long.
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna say goodbye
Start Talking Love, Magnum
While it's not generally too awkward to convert from one characted encoding to another, "just text" is a slight oversimplification.
I'm not a US citizen, so frankly I don't give a fsck about your constitution.
But even if I were, in the real world you'll have to persuade a lot of people to agree with you. For best effect, you'll have to persuade them to agree with you all at once so a major airport suddenly finds it's got to arrest every single person there.
Anal Probe Corporation's Federal and military products are highly classified.
No. You wouldn't.
Airports are frequently defined as "international" soil.
Which, as far as I can tell, is a legal way of saying "We, the country in which the airport is nominally based, have the right to pick and choose which laws we follow when in the airport".
I don't know if the latest Truecrypt version supports this - if not, more's the pity - but what's needed is support for two partitions on the drive and which one it boots depends on which password you use.
Something similar already exists once you're booted - a single truecrypt file can contain two different sets of data and it's impossible to know whether or not that's the case just by looking at the data. Someone demanding the password? Give them the password which gains access to something which you may have a legitimate reason to protect, but you certainly don't have any legal concerns about. Extend that protection to the entire operating system, and it's now a lot more secure - who cares if something in memory got swapped out?
Joke all you want, but lots of women are very upset at the prospect of losing all or part of a breast through cancer.
It's not a particularly big leap to apply such concern to losing part of a breast through injuries sustained in combat. And breasts were invented for reasons other than "To give
In which case, being able to regrow them could prove very helpful for morale amongst injured female soldiers.
I'm seeing a change now - maybe it's because I live in a reasonably sized city which has historically been fairly friendly to local food producers. What's happening is smaller, locally owned places can't compete on price because they'd just be in a race to the bottom. Instead, they compete on quality and, to a certain extent, service. In some cases, they're even doing this for a similar price to the likes of McDonalds. And they're doing OK.
The database and the application interacting with the database sure as hell aren't.
1. First year computer science. It is possible, given known input, to mathematically prove that a program will always produce a given output. (It rapidly becomes impractical for most large projects in the real world, but that's mainly because it costs a lot of time and therefore money. The aviation industry is rather less concerned about time/money issues here).
2. Develop systems (Note: Entire systems. Not individual components) which can handle a component going screwy. Again, this is expensive - particularly if you want the systems to handle this with any degree of panache (ie. they may flash up a warning so the underlying cause can be dealt with in due course but other than that they just carry on working). But again, aviation tends not to be too concerned about the costs this introduces.
A few sweet words from an MS salesweasel ("The next service pack, due out RSN will solve that issue, so you may as well tick it. Also, you won't have to retrain all your staff in a totally different office suite [ha ha] - imagine how much time, effort and money that will save!") should solve that issue.