well, yes but, we wanna have all that new features OPEN too.. imagine RedHat tomorrow saying, "yo guys, RH engineers gonna add new advanced features closed source.."
this is not good, not good at al... EVERY commercial Linux distribution has parts which may or may not be open source, but if they are open they're certainly open to the extent that the GPL is.
Ubuntu has Landscape, a tool for managing a number of Ubuntu desktops. Only available if you're paying Canonical for support.
SuSE plugs into ZenWorks - most certainly not F/OSS.
RHEL has Fedora Directory Server (albeit rebranded as Red Hat). That one's open source but such an absolute dog to set up that you'd need your head examined if you tried doing it any way other than "throw money at Red Hat".
End of the day, lots of F/OSS projects have "Free" and "Commercial" versions, where the commercial version costs money and comes with a few extra bells & whistles. Just off the top of my head, there's Smoothwall, KnowledgeTree, any number of Exchange alternatives (free but if you want full Exchange-like functionality complete with Outlook integration it costs money) and ZenOSS. It seems to work as a business model, I can well understand Sun adopting it.
i think all these anti-spam ideas miss the big picture: if no one bought products from spam, they wouldnt do it. we should be going after the idiots who reply to spam.
IIRC there was someone who tried an experiment some time ago. They tried to buy some of the v1|4|g|r|4 that they'd seen advertised in spam.
They couldn't find a single spam which actually led to someone genuinely trying to sell something. I think they concluded that spam had mostly become a pyramid scheme, with a handful of people at the top trying (with some success) to persuade everyone below that they could make lots of money from spam - all they needed to do was buy this mailing list software and that list of email addresses...
while everything else goes to a yahoo account. The yahoo account is filled with spam...
Then you do get spam. You've just chosen to deal with it by making sure it all goes to a particular address.
As soon as you sign up to a public mailing list, post on usenet or put your email address on something not terribly well known for privacy (eg. Facebook), you'll find that - lo! - you get spam.
Either that or your school's email admin staff have finally discovered the Holy Grail of anti-spam solutions. Perhaps they'd care to share it with us?
If the Imperial system consisted of definitions like "Measure this like King George III would have", I'm sure people would argue against that being a standard also. The Imperial system did consist of such definitions. From the Wikipedia article about the foot:
Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I, who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardise the unit of measurement in England. However this is unlikely, because there are records of the word being used approximately 70 years before his birth (Laws Ãthelstan). This of course does not exclude the possibility that this old standard was redefined ("calibrated") according to the ruler's foot. In fact, there is evidence that this sort of process was common at least in earlier ages. In other words, a new important ruler could try to impose a new standard for an existent unit, but it is unlikely that any king's foot was ever as long as the modern unit of measurement. (emphasis mine)
If clicking a link poses even the slightest risk, you need to replace your software ASAP.
Websites don't "run" malware; users download and install malware with execution privileges. Or their defective user agents do it for them. CEOs don't need defective user agents. I'm not sure who does.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
Knowing (as discussed elsewhere) that email, while unusual, is in some circumstances a perfectly acceptable way to serve a subpoena, no responsible CEO is going to ignore the email unless pretty damn convinced that it's fake.
A user agent saying "Where do you want to save this?" won't help. All that will happen is they'll save it somewhere then run it from there.
The only solution is for the OS to actively prevent the end-user from executing code from random locations - in Unix, you'd mount their home directory and maybe/tmp with the noexec option.
Even then, the IT department is still going to have some work to do. You'll need to convince the CEO that the subpoena is fake without actually opening it.
90% of ADSL providers are reselling British Telecom's ADSL offering - and what with all that business over Phorm, I probably shouldn't trust any Internet connection which goes over BT's equipment unless/until I see evidence that BT didn't apply the Phorm trial to customers of other ISPs through their wholesale ADSL.
This leaves ISPs who have unbundled connections at my local exchange - in other words, they have their own DSLAM at the telephone exchange which they would wire into the line going to my house. Of these, the following serve my area:
Talk Talk - also known as Carphone Warehouse. They used to be well known for their customer service. Today they still are, but not for the right reasons.
Sky - Rupert Murdoch's satellite company has apparently become an ISP. Equally well known for being a bunch of arses.
Orange - owned by France Telecom. Provide services both through BT Wholesale and their LLU exchanges to customers, and don't/won't tell the customer which they're getting. It's fair to assume that if Orange are at capacity in my local exchange, they'll pay BT Wholesale for the connection then resell it to me. So there's a real chance that I'll still be getting a BT ADSL connection.
Bulldog - owned by Cable and Wireless. I don't think I need say any more.
If he isn't co-operative, they'll cut off his telephone line and Internet access, send bailiffs around for the outstanding money and take him to court.
Granted, he could very well show up in court and say "I don't owe them anything, here's the proof, it's hardly my fault if their systems are set up in such a stupid way" but it's still even more hassle. Which isn't made any easier if you can't call anyone or use the Internet.
But how did metal with a high level of slag content come to be used to make the rivets? Was it fairly common at the time? A mistake made by whoever supplied the steel? The shipbuilder saving money?
The Wikipedia article (and various articles linked from it) make a number of other salient points, such as mistakes made by the crew who didn't account for the handling characteristics of such a ship, issues with the design of the steering system, issues with procedures for signalling a ship in distress - not standardised at the time - and the fact that the steel used was of a type which becomes very brittle in cold water - much more so than modern steel.
But without an expert on early 20th century smelting and shipbuilding techniques (and preferably the chance to speak to some of the engineers who worked on the Titanic - which might be a bit difficult without a ouija board), it's going to be very difficult to do much more than speculate.
There are so many variables that after all these years, who knows?
Perhaps the Titanic had one faulty batch of rivets which just happened to be in the wrong place. Perhaps the shipbuilders thought they could save a bit of money.
Well, if those were all downloads, you did delete ~ $7,500 worth of data - I'd be pretty keen to know why you did that to save (at today's prices) $6 of storage space. It's not $6 of storage space at today's prices.
Firstly, because any serious backend-server is going to be running SCSI or SAS disks, you can double that price straight away.
Now double it again - RAID 1+0 halves your storage capacity at a stroke.
Now multiply it by 5 - those 30GB were getting backed up, and if the backup procedure is any good there will be several full backups at any given point in time.
(OK, that's still a lot less than $7500. Hold on a moment...)
Now schedule downtime to increase storage capacity - and if your storage systems are already at capacity, include "upgrading the storage system to account for it". This will almost certainly require sign-off at a high level, so you'll have to speak to the IT director (or whoever is appropriate at your company).
Now explain to the IT Director that you're doing all this because someone decided that they'd like to store all their music from iTunes on a company system - despite there being a clear policy in place forbidding this. Let me know how you get on.
I suspect that these comments by the Virgin chap is the latest salvo. Agreed.
Virgin is certainly in a strong position, but I'm not sure it's unassailable.
Granted, they're a monopoly cable provider - but most if not all areas of the country which have cable are sufficiently urban that distance to the nearest telephone exchange for ADSL is unlikely to be a problem. And Sky 1 - the main reason a lot of people had for subscribing to Virgin - is no longer available on cable.
And it absolutely is unethical. The right thing to do here would be to just boycott Virgin -- everything Virgin -- until we get an apology. You do realise that Branson has sold rights to the Virgin brand many times?
Virgin Music stopped being part of the Virgin Group some years ago but only recently rebranded because the contract allowing them to use the Virgin brand expired.
Virgin Media also has nothing to do with Branson or the rest of the Virgin group. Instead, the UK's two cable providers merged, bought out Virgin Group's mobile telephone service and with it the right to brand the entire business "Virgin".
Mind you, perhaps something like this would cause Branson to rethink such branding rights.
So it's all right what he's doing, as long as he's honest about it?
Honestly, it annoys me that someone can do something as bad as this and be honest about it yet receive no repercussions. I don't know whether this says more about Western civilisation in general or British ignorance towards the internet. Internet neutrality seems like a much bigger deal over than than here. You're assuming that none of the DSL providers are doing the same thing.
I would be astonished if they're not - if not now, certainly inside 12 months.
the only other alternative for digital TV would be freeview (limited channels) or Rupert Murdoch's Sky. Would that be the freeview which has a number of channels available free which you have to pay extra for with Virgin (such as ITV3, E4)?
Or the Sky whose flagship channel, Sky One, is no longer available on Virgin?
Ever since Telewest and NTL merged they've been going merrily to Hell. As far as I can gather, they've done an HP/Compaq - taken the worst aspects of each company and thrown away the best.
Because law and order in general terms (ie. I don't want to be scared to walk out of my own front door), education and health are bigger issues.
And no civilisation in the whole of history has revolted because they thought the government's surveillance was a bit nasty. Generally it doesn't happen until a significant proportion of the population are starving.
Sage have about half a dozen products all called "Line NNN". The relation between one product and the next one up is generally zero, other than "sage provide a tool to migrate data from one to the other".
Line 500 is fairly high up in the range - not the product which gets sold to small businesses by any means.
I know I'm going to get a few boots up my ass for it but I just don't see myself moving from Windows unless Vienna flops miserably. I don't use Vista but the Vista machines I have seen aren't as bad as what I've heard from the naysayers around here. To be fair, a lot of stuff depends on how you're using it.
I'm an IT manager and I've got a deployment process based on a scripted XP install which is automagically followed by a scripted apps install - mainly because I'm at a shop big enough to benefit from the automation, but not big enough to buy 50 identical PCs at once, so it has to be reasonably hardware independent. (Yes I've tried things like Ghost and Acronis. They make big promises about hardware-independent images but they don't deliver on them).
Vista breaks all this because UAC is enabled after install and there doesn't appear to be a well-documented non-interactive way to disable it. This is annoying because the whole point of the scripted install is that it's zero-interaction. Instead, I'll have to redesign the install so it plays nice with Vista - which also makes big promises about images being hardware independent. We'll soon see how true that is.
Once all that work's done, I wind up deploying an OS which is, as far as the end user's concerned, "XP with a slightly different shaped start menu and a different colour scheme". Gee thanks.
That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon. If I may say so: BULLSHIT.
These boxes are essentially glorified dumb terminals - boxes with a web browser and damn all else. It is quite possible to lock Windows down to the point where you won't be doing anything else no matter how hard you try. It has been quite possible to do this since the days of Windows 2000. I used to work with a group of people who did exactly this - mainly by implementing fantastically tight policies which blocked everything. Can't run some random app? Who cares, it's only meant to be running a web browser anyway.
Is it easy? Ah, well that's another issue. As I recall it did take a few weeks to get the policies fully ironed out.
Part of the problem with that is that Windows is too damn forgiving for its own good.
Slightly dubious ACPI implementation? Not to worry, Microsoft will work around it in software.
Graphics card was designed by someone who accidentally had a few pages stuck together in their copy of the PCI Express specification? Not to worry, we'll work around it in software. Microsoft will still sign the driver - or if they don't, we'll just tell people to click through the warning.
Here in the UK we've had cameras of some sort looking over traffic for years. Initially they were speed cameras; today there are also red light cameras.
The entire system is set up to make money and it's as clear as day. When a speed camera is placed at the bottom of a steep hill or in the middle of a 2-mile straight, clear stretch of road (with a tree hiding it), it's pretty unrealistic to claim they're purely for safety reasons
Add in the fact that lots of small and mid-size businesses use "friendly" accounting software that runs solely on Windows, and I think Microsoft has a much larger buffer for error than most people think.
You've alluded to the biggest issue.
Businesses depend on a whole bunch of software which isn't fun to write, requires enormous amounts of maintenance (you try telling your local taxman that your tax return is innaccurate because nobody's bothered to update your software for the recent changes in legislation!) and for which no sane Linux alternative exists.
Here there is a chicken and egg scenario. The likes of Sage aren't going to port their product unless they've got serious numbers of customers lining up to say "We're putting Linux on the desktop. Port it or lose the contract.", and no customer can seriously make such a threat because right now, Sage can easily turn around and say "OK then. Let us know how you get on running a desktop platform which doesn't have any serious accounting packages."
The world didn't move off Lotus 1-2-3 overnight and it won't move off Office overnight.
You could logically argue that seeing as Microsoft's open license contracts are for a fixed period of time, and when that time expires you have to sign a new contract, any EU office which is signed up to such a contract which happens to be coming up for expiry may suddenly find on short notice that they've got to use some alternative and they aren't allowed to sign a new contract.
I think thrusting something like that on an IT department would be a tad awkward and would never fly in the real world.
Good. Maybe they'd learn something about software monoculture and vendor lock-in and design their systems better in the future. They made their bed, they should lie in it.
I'm not commenting on whether it's a good or a bad thing; just that these things seldom change overnight.
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this is not good, not good at al... EVERY commercial Linux distribution has parts which may or may not be open source, but if they are open they're certainly open to the extent that the GPL is.
Ubuntu has Landscape, a tool for managing a number of Ubuntu desktops. Only available if you're paying Canonical for support.
SuSE plugs into ZenWorks - most certainly not F/OSS.
RHEL has Fedora Directory Server (albeit rebranded as Red Hat). That one's open source but such an absolute dog to set up that you'd need your head examined if you tried doing it any way other than "throw money at Red Hat".
End of the day, lots of F/OSS projects have "Free" and "Commercial" versions, where the commercial version costs money and comes with a few extra bells & whistles. Just off the top of my head, there's Smoothwall, KnowledgeTree, any number of Exchange alternatives (free but if you want full Exchange-like functionality complete with Outlook integration it costs money) and ZenOSS. It seems to work as a business model, I can well understand Sun adopting it.
i think all these anti-spam ideas miss the big picture: if no one bought products from spam, they wouldnt do it. we should be going after the idiots who reply to spam.
IIRC there was someone who tried an experiment some time ago. They tried to buy some of the v1|4|g|r|4 that they'd seen advertised in spam.
They couldn't find a single spam which actually led to someone genuinely trying to sell something. I think they concluded that spam had mostly become a pyramid scheme, with a handful of people at the top trying (with some success) to persuade everyone below that they could make lots of money from spam - all they needed to do was buy this mailing list software and that list of email addresses...
while everything else goes to a yahoo account. The yahoo account is filled with spam...
Then you do get spam. You've just chosen to deal with it by making sure it all goes to a particular address.
As soon as you sign up to a public mailing list, post on usenet or put your email address on something not terribly well known for privacy (eg. Facebook), you'll find that - lo! - you get spam.
Either that or your school's email admin staff have finally discovered the Holy Grail of anti-spam solutions. Perhaps they'd care to share it with us?
Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I, who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardise the unit of measurement in England. However this is unlikely, because there are records of the word being used approximately 70 years before his birth (Laws Ãthelstan). This of course does not exclude the possibility that this old standard was redefined ("calibrated") according to the ruler's foot. In fact, there is evidence that this sort of process was common at least in earlier ages. In other words, a new important ruler could try to impose a new standard for an existent unit, but it is unlikely that any king's foot was ever as long as the modern unit of measurement. (emphasis mine)
Websites don't "run" malware; users download and install malware with execution privileges. Or their defective user agents do it for them. CEOs don't need defective user agents. I'm not sure who does.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.Knowing (as discussed elsewhere) that email, while unusual, is in some circumstances a perfectly acceptable way to serve a subpoena, no responsible CEO is going to ignore the email unless pretty damn convinced that it's fake.
A user agent saying "Where do you want to save this?" won't help. All that will happen is they'll save it somewhere then run it from there.
The only solution is for the OS to actively prevent the end-user from executing code from random locations - in Unix, you'd mount their home directory and maybe
Even then, the IT department is still going to have some work to do. You'll need to convince the CEO that the subpoena is fake without actually opening it.
Who?
Seriously.
90% of ADSL providers are reselling British Telecom's ADSL offering - and what with all that business over Phorm, I probably shouldn't trust any Internet connection which goes over BT's equipment unless/until I see evidence that BT didn't apply the Phorm trial to customers of other ISPs through their wholesale ADSL.
This leaves ISPs who have unbundled connections at my local exchange - in other words, they have their own DSLAM at the telephone exchange which they would wire into the line going to my house. Of these, the following serve my area:
Because they're a cable telco.
If he isn't co-operative, they'll cut off his telephone line and Internet access, send bailiffs around for the outstanding money and take him to court.
Granted, he could very well show up in court and say "I don't owe them anything, here's the proof, it's hardly my fault if their systems are set up in such a stupid way" but it's still even more hassle. Which isn't made any easier if you can't call anyone or use the Internet.
But how did metal with a high level of slag content come to be used to make the rivets? Was it fairly common at the time? A mistake made by whoever supplied the steel? The shipbuilder saving money?
The Wikipedia article (and various articles linked from it) make a number of other salient points, such as mistakes made by the crew who didn't account for the handling characteristics of such a ship, issues with the design of the steering system, issues with procedures for signalling a ship in distress - not standardised at the time - and the fact that the steel used was of a type which becomes very brittle in cold water - much more so than modern steel.
But without an expert on early 20th century smelting and shipbuilding techniques (and preferably the chance to speak to some of the engineers who worked on the Titanic - which might be a bit difficult without a ouija board), it's going to be very difficult to do much more than speculate.
There are so many variables that after all these years, who knows?
Perhaps the Titanic had one faulty batch of rivets which just happened to be in the wrong place. Perhaps the shipbuilders thought they could save a bit of money.
Firstly, because any serious backend-server is going to be running SCSI or SAS disks, you can double that price straight away.
Now double it again - RAID 1+0 halves your storage capacity at a stroke.
Now multiply it by 5 - those 30GB were getting backed up, and if the backup procedure is any good there will be several full backups at any given point in time.
(OK, that's still a lot less than $7500. Hold on a moment...)
Now schedule downtime to increase storage capacity - and if your storage systems are already at capacity, include "upgrading the storage system to account for it". This will almost certainly require sign-off at a high level, so you'll have to speak to the IT director (or whoever is appropriate at your company).
Now explain to the IT Director that you're doing all this because someone decided that they'd like to store all their music from iTunes on a company system - despite there being a clear policy in place forbidding this. Let me know how you get on.
Virgin is certainly in a strong position, but I'm not sure it's unassailable.
Granted, they're a monopoly cable provider - but most if not all areas of the country which have cable are sufficiently urban that distance to the nearest telephone exchange for ADSL is unlikely to be a problem. And Sky 1 - the main reason a lot of people had for subscribing to Virgin - is no longer available on cable.
Virgin Music stopped being part of the Virgin Group some years ago but only recently rebranded because the contract allowing them to use the Virgin brand expired.
Virgin Media also has nothing to do with Branson or the rest of the Virgin group. Instead, the UK's two cable providers merged, bought out Virgin Group's mobile telephone service and with it the right to brand the entire business "Virgin".
Mind you, perhaps something like this would cause Branson to rethink such branding rights.
Honestly, it annoys me that someone can do something as bad as this and be honest about it yet receive no repercussions. I don't know whether this says more about Western civilisation in general or British ignorance towards the internet. Internet neutrality seems like a much bigger deal over than than here. You're assuming that none of the DSL providers are doing the same thing.
I would be astonished if they're not - if not now, certainly inside 12 months.
Or the Sky whose flagship channel, Sky One, is no longer available on Virgin?
Ever since Telewest and NTL merged they've been going merrily to Hell. As far as I can gather, they've done an HP/Compaq - taken the worst aspects of each company and thrown away the best.
Because law and order in general terms (ie. I don't want to be scared to walk out of my own front door), education and health are bigger issues.
And no civilisation in the whole of history has revolted because they thought the government's surveillance was a bit nasty. Generally it doesn't happen until a significant proportion of the population are starving.
That's Sage Line 500.
Sage have about half a dozen products all called "Line NNN". The relation between one product and the next one up is generally zero, other than "sage provide a tool to migrate data from one to the other".
Line 500 is fairly high up in the range - not the product which gets sold to small businesses by any means.
I'm an IT manager and I've got a deployment process based on a scripted XP install which is automagically followed by a scripted apps install - mainly because I'm at a shop big enough to benefit from the automation, but not big enough to buy 50 identical PCs at once, so it has to be reasonably hardware independent. (Yes I've tried things like Ghost and Acronis. They make big promises about hardware-independent images but they don't deliver on them).
Vista breaks all this because UAC is enabled after install and there doesn't appear to be a well-documented non-interactive way to disable it. This is annoying because the whole point of the scripted install is that it's zero-interaction. Instead, I'll have to redesign the install so it plays nice with Vista - which also makes big promises about images being hardware independent. We'll soon see how true that is.
Once all that work's done, I wind up deploying an OS which is, as far as the end user's concerned, "XP with a slightly different shaped start menu and a different colour scheme". Gee thanks.
These boxes are essentially glorified dumb terminals - boxes with a web browser and damn all else. It is quite possible to lock Windows down to the point where you won't be doing anything else no matter how hard you try. It has been quite possible to do this since the days of Windows 2000. I used to work with a group of people who did exactly this - mainly by implementing fantastically tight policies which blocked everything. Can't run some random app? Who cares, it's only meant to be running a web browser anyway.
Is it easy? Ah, well that's another issue. As I recall it did take a few weeks to get the policies fully ironed out.
Part of the problem with that is that Windows is too damn forgiving for its own good.
Slightly dubious ACPI implementation? Not to worry, Microsoft will work around it in software.
Graphics card was designed by someone who accidentally had a few pages stuck together in their copy of the PCI Express specification? Not to worry, we'll work around it in software. Microsoft will still sign the driver - or if they don't, we'll just tell people to click through the warning.
Here in the UK we've had cameras of some sort looking over traffic for years. Initially they were speed cameras; today there are also red light cameras.
The entire system is set up to make money and it's as clear as day. When a speed camera is placed at the bottom of a steep hill or in the middle of a 2-mile straight, clear stretch of road (with a tree hiding it), it's pretty unrealistic to claim they're purely for safety reasons
Add in the fact that lots of small and mid-size businesses use "friendly" accounting software that runs solely on Windows, and I think Microsoft has a much larger buffer for error than most people think.
You've alluded to the biggest issue.
Businesses depend on a whole bunch of software which isn't fun to write, requires enormous amounts of maintenance (you try telling your local taxman that your tax return is innaccurate because nobody's bothered to update your software for the recent changes in legislation!) and for which no sane Linux alternative exists.
Here there is a chicken and egg scenario. The likes of Sage aren't going to port their product unless they've got serious numbers of customers lining up to say "We're putting Linux on the desktop. Port it or lose the contract.", and no customer can seriously make such a threat because right now, Sage can easily turn around and say "OK then. Let us know how you get on running a desktop platform which doesn't have any serious accounting packages."
Probably because they don't want customers to start thinking "This internet is more trouble than it's worth - I'm going to cancel it".
And it's rather hard to charge a monthly fee if you've cut the customer off.
The keyword is "suddenly".
The world didn't move off Lotus 1-2-3 overnight and it won't move off Office overnight.
You could logically argue that seeing as Microsoft's open license contracts are for a fixed period of time, and when that time expires you have to sign a new contract, any EU office which is signed up to such a contract which happens to be coming up for expiry may suddenly find on short notice that they've got to use some alternative and they aren't allowed to sign a new contract.
I think thrusting something like that on an IT department would be a tad awkward and would never fly in the real world.
Good. Maybe they'd learn something about software monoculture and vendor lock-in and design their systems better in the future. They made their bed, they should lie in it.
I'm not commenting on whether it's a good or a bad thing; just that these things seldom change overnight.