I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK if it's not formally approved and blessed by various government and pseudo-government bodies, if it doesn't comply with at least a dozen different sets of regulations - regardless of how relevant they are - and it's not sold by a company that loudly proclaims itself to be a specialist in education that guarantees it'll work with existing end-user PCs, it's going to have the devil's own job being accepted by many schools.
Seriously, what sort of a question is that? "will White's statement — 'It's hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?"
He'd do well not to underestimate Apple - they've got some damn good designers on staff and a team that's extremely good at turning technology on its head. And if there's one technology that's long overdue a head turning, it's TV.
Not much more than the price of a brand new hard drive,which last time I looked was about $90. Bury the old dribe somewhere unretrievable, install the new drive, and you either baccked up your data or you didn't. No worse than a hardware meltdown...
Considering how damn awkward some malware is to remove, this is probably not a bad solution for a lot of infestations. It's certainly quicker than a scan with a live CD followed by booting in safe mode, running every virus scanner you can think of, digging through HijackThis logs and still finding there's traces on there - and for a lot of people, time is money.
I've seen a version that's been localised to the UK; apparently there are also versions localised to Canada. I haven't analysed it but it wouldn't surprise me if it's all the same trojan and it uses geolocation to display an appropriate logo.
Brilliant scam because even if the user knows it's a load of rubbish, nobody wants to be even remotely associated with paedophilia. You'd have to be a bit of an idiot to think you could make such an accusation go away by paying a small fine - or for that matter to believe that the police's MO in these cases is to put a great big warning on your screen (rather than to arrest you at dawn and take all your computers away), but I suspect there are probably enough idiots in this world to make it profitable.
I find when paying top dollar is when you are least likely to get quality control. Look at really expensive software as a great example, I have never seen any costing 6 figures or more that was not a huge pain and did not fail to do its job on a regular basis.
Having seen what happens with Sharepoint, I'll put money on it the exact same thing happens with other really big expensive packages: some manager used a well-implemented Sharepoint/SAP/(insert product here) system in the past and - thinking it was something you could just install and run with like Office, rather than a toolkit that you're supposed to use to build a system around your business processes - ordered a system based on it to be installed.
$Thousands, maybe $tens of thousands in licensing later, the company has their system - it's a bog-standard install out of the box set up by someone in the IT department who literally just threw it up on a server and said "There you go. Job done".
Nobody can figure out why it does very little - particularly considering how the manager who ordered it evangelised it - yet most are afraid to say anything lest they get accused of questioning management decisions. By the time anyone figures out that it should have been treated as a formal project with requirements, processes and such, it's far too late to find money in the budget to go back and do it properly and far too humiliating to admit that the company - at the behest of a senior manager - went out and bought a very expensive product without first ensuring that said product would, in and of itself, achieve anything.
A rather less stupid solution would be to separate the original text from the boilerplate "Look out for our other books on Kindle!" and only apply the replacement to the boilerplate.
Very few technology laws explicitly mention specific technologies - normally they reference what the technology is trying to achieve. Otherwise laws would be obsolete within a few months as workarounds are developed.
Funny, I seem to remember a similar idea - about how dumb terminals were going to take over the world - back in, ooh, about 1998, 1999. Have we really gone full-circle already?
I never understood why buying a computer had to be a race for the bottom. Then people end up complaining about how crappy their computer is.
Because 90% of the computer industry - with one or two exceptions - sells on paper specification and price rather than human interface factors.
You can't build a laptop with a top of the range i7, a good-quality LCD panel, a backlit keyboard that doesn't flex when you type and an aluminium case for $600. But if the only thing you're going to push in your marketing is how fast it is, you can swap out the LCD and keyboard for cheaper items and put it in a cheap plastic case.
The odd thing is that for most people, price and features on paper are actually pretty low priorities - this is basic stuff that anyone in sales & marketing would have learned very early on. But nobody seems to have mentioned this to the product engineers.
I assume from tone that the OP is discussing Linux on the desktop rather than the server because there's already plenty of Linux servers out there doing lots of heavy lifting.
Any business has a whole list of things they need from their computer systems, and that list has a priority order. From what I've seen, that priority order is (roughly speaking):
- Our staff must be able to do their work with minimal hassle. If we use a legacy Windows application, we don't want to hear "you can't do that"; we want to use it. WINE isn't an option because our vendor will simply refuse to talk to us if we raise any issues with it under WINE.
- The system must be reliable. "Not crashing" is only part of this; reliable, consistent behaviour is also important. A desktop that radically changes with every new version is a sign of an immature product, not a revolutionary one.
- We must be able to easily find people we can trust to look after it. Not just vendor support, but local techs who can manage the system.
- We must be able to do all this for a price we're comfortable with. Note that "a price we're comfortable with" does NOT mean "free", nor does it necessarily mean "stupendously expensive". If the price we're quoted is too cheap, we'll be just as concerned as if it's too expensive.
(It's important to note that "free" has great connotations if it's a single free pint of beer; what's the worst that can happen? It's not very nice beer? Well, then don't drink it, you've not lost anything! But when it's the software your business, and therefore your livelihood depends on, "free" has terrible connotations).
- It must be reasonably secure. But we have very limited understanding of IT, and even less understanding of IT security. Our idea of secure is "You need a password to get in".
Note that there are four things above "secure" in the priorities list. If the alternative you're offering fails at any of those four points, you are wasting your time trying to persuade anyone to use it.
I think I know the contracts you're talking about.
They're not exclusionary in the way you describe, but IIRC one of the cheaper volume licensing schemes does include language to the effect of: "Count **every PC you own that is capable of running this software**, that's how many licenses you need to purchase if you want to use this cheap licensing scheme".
Suddenly the cost savings from F/OSS software - on the desktop at least - are dead in the water.
Can't say I've had any problems with it but I haven't rolled it out in an attempt to let Google replace Exchange; just let users install on an ad-hoc basis.
How the Hell do they even do that? Any half-way sane NTP configuration will ensure that a server won't even supply a time unless it can itself get a time from a higher-stratum NTP server.
And just so you know, Authentication is dead. If I've got malware on your machine, then I don't care how strong your password, OTP and biometric security is. I'm going to wait for you to login and then take over your session in the background. Security at this point is well beyond what's happening at the login stage. And don't get me wrong, the vendors that are doing the current security implementation for these banks have a lot more to offer, but it's the banks that are deciding that it doesn't matter to them.
Most half-decent banking systems that include a OTP require that OTP for carrying out transactions,
I can actually see Microsoft doing precisely this if they find their desktop monopoly in serious danger. Can't be good for Windows' image, the crap that gets shovelled into OEM builds.
What they should have done was update the system to read the full password entered by the end user, and submit that to the authentication system, and if it failed, submit the truncated password to the authentication system. If the truncated version matched, it should have then alerted the user that it was now storing the fully complex password and then updated the stored version.
They shouldn't. They should have expired the password and prompted the user for a new one immediately that happened.
Rationale: If the user made a typo after the 11th character (based on your 10-character-max example), you've just gone and stored a password that's subtly different from what the user thinks it is.
And any half-decent auditing system would catch you very quickly indeed.
The thing is I'm absolutely sure in my own mind that despite the fact that the means to develop half-decent auditing systems has existed for years, I don't think they're terribly widely deployed. And if they are, I don't think very many organisations have processes in place to make sure that action is taken when the audit blows the whistle on someone.
This is based mostly on speculation rather than having any hard evidence, though. Would welcome comments from someone who does IT security professionally.
4G is rather better than existing 3G networks for mobile internet. But (and TBH this is something that astonishes me) this is one of the few places where the US is ahead of the curve. Many other countries have only just auctioned the spectrum space for 4G networks; they're a long way off having actual live 4G networks.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with just having .org, .net, .com, a handful of others and then country coded ones?
Because then registrars can't spam you with "Register your new top-level domain now! Why be www.company.com when you can be just www.company?"
"How am I going to get the best out of this when all the switches are 10/100 models, without so much as a single gigabit uplink?"
I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK if it's not formally approved and blessed by various government and pseudo-government bodies, if it doesn't comply with at least a dozen different sets of regulations - regardless of how relevant they are - and it's not sold by a company that loudly proclaims itself to be a specialist in education that guarantees it'll work with existing end-user PCs, it's going to have the devil's own job being accepted by many schools.
Seriously, what sort of a question is that? "will White's statement — 'It's hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?"
He'd do well not to underestimate Apple - they've got some damn good designers on staff and a team that's extremely good at turning technology on its head. And if there's one technology that's long overdue a head turning, it's TV.
Not much more than the price of a brand new hard drive,which last time I looked was about $90. Bury the old dribe somewhere unretrievable, install the new drive, and you either baccked up your data or you didn't. No worse than a hardware meltdown...
Considering how damn awkward some malware is to remove, this is probably not a bad solution for a lot of infestations. It's certainly quicker than a scan with a live CD followed by booting in safe mode, running every virus scanner you can think of, digging through HijackThis logs and still finding there's traces on there - and for a lot of people, time is money.
I've seen a version that's been localised to the UK; apparently there are also versions localised to Canada. I haven't analysed it but it wouldn't surprise me if it's all the same trojan and it uses geolocation to display an appropriate logo.
Brilliant scam because even if the user knows it's a load of rubbish, nobody wants to be even remotely associated with paedophilia. You'd have to be a bit of an idiot to think you could make such an accusation go away by paying a small fine - or for that matter to believe that the police's MO in these cases is to put a great big warning on your screen (rather than to arrest you at dawn and take all your computers away), but I suspect there are probably enough idiots in this world to make it profitable.
I find when paying top dollar is when you are least likely to get quality control. Look at really expensive software as a great example, I have never seen any costing 6 figures or more that was not a huge pain and did not fail to do its job on a regular basis.
Having seen what happens with Sharepoint, I'll put money on it the exact same thing happens with other really big expensive packages: some manager used a well-implemented Sharepoint/SAP/(insert product here) system in the past and - thinking it was something you could just install and run with like Office, rather than a toolkit that you're supposed to use to build a system around your business processes - ordered a system based on it to be installed.
$Thousands, maybe $tens of thousands in licensing later, the company has their system - it's a bog-standard install out of the box set up by someone in the IT department who literally just threw it up on a server and said "There you go. Job done".
Nobody can figure out why it does very little - particularly considering how the manager who ordered it evangelised it - yet most are afraid to say anything lest they get accused of questioning management decisions. By the time anyone figures out that it should have been treated as a formal project with requirements, processes and such, it's far too late to find money in the budget to go back and do it properly and far too humiliating to admit that the company - at the behest of a senior manager - went out and bought a very expensive product without first ensuring that said product would, in and of itself, achieve anything.
A rather less stupid solution would be to separate the original text from the boilerplate "Look out for our other books on Kindle!" and only apply the replacement to the boilerplate.
You'd think they could put up a photograph of their packaging, rather than some cheesy stock "people shaking hands" photo.
Very few technology laws explicitly mention specific technologies - normally they reference what the technology is trying to achieve. Otherwise laws would be obsolete within a few months as workarounds are developed.
Funny, I seem to remember a similar idea - about how dumb terminals were going to take over the world - back in, ooh, about 1998, 1999. Have we really gone full-circle already?
I never understood why buying a computer had to be a race for the bottom. Then people end up complaining about how crappy their computer is.
Because 90% of the computer industry - with one or two exceptions - sells on paper specification and price rather than human interface factors.
You can't build a laptop with a top of the range i7, a good-quality LCD panel, a backlit keyboard that doesn't flex when you type and an aluminium case for $600. But if the only thing you're going to push in your marketing is how fast it is, you can swap out the LCD and keyboard for cheaper items and put it in a cheap plastic case.
The odd thing is that for most people, price and features on paper are actually pretty low priorities - this is basic stuff that anyone in sales & marketing would have learned very early on. But nobody seems to have mentioned this to the product engineers.
I assume from tone that the OP is discussing Linux on the desktop rather than the server because there's already plenty of Linux servers out there doing lots of heavy lifting.
Any business has a whole list of things they need from their computer systems, and that list has a priority order. From what I've seen, that priority order is (roughly speaking):
- Our staff must be able to do their work with minimal hassle. If we use a legacy Windows application, we don't want to hear "you can't do that"; we want to use it. WINE isn't an option because our vendor will simply refuse to talk to us if we raise any issues with it under WINE.
- The system must be reliable. "Not crashing" is only part of this; reliable, consistent behaviour is also important. A desktop that radically changes with every new version is a sign of an immature product, not a revolutionary one.
- We must be able to easily find people we can trust to look after it. Not just vendor support, but local techs who can manage the system.
- We must be able to do all this for a price we're comfortable with. Note that "a price we're comfortable with" does NOT mean "free", nor does it necessarily mean "stupendously expensive". If the price we're quoted is too cheap, we'll be just as concerned as if it's too expensive.
(It's important to note that "free" has great connotations if it's a single free pint of beer; what's the worst that can happen? It's not very nice beer? Well, then don't drink it, you've not lost anything! But when it's the software your business, and therefore your livelihood depends on, "free" has terrible connotations).
- It must be reasonably secure. But we have very limited understanding of IT, and even less understanding of IT security. Our idea of secure is "You need a password to get in".
Note that there are four things above "secure" in the priorities list. If the alternative you're offering fails at any of those four points, you are wasting your time trying to persuade anyone to use it.
I think I know the contracts you're talking about.
They're not exclusionary in the way you describe, but IIRC one of the cheaper volume licensing schemes does include language to the effect of: "Count **every PC you own that is capable of running this software**, that's how many licenses you need to purchase if you want to use this cheap licensing scheme".
Suddenly the cost savings from F/OSS software - on the desktop at least - are dead in the water.
Can't say I've had any problems with it but I haven't rolled it out in an attempt to let Google replace Exchange; just let users install on an ad-hoc basis.
What problems have you had?
How the Hell do they even do that? Any half-way sane NTP configuration will ensure that a server won't even supply a time unless it can itself get a time from a higher-stratum NTP server.
Google Apps isn't bad; they give you a plugin for Outlook which works quite nicely.
I've already got a remote control of sorts that does that - it's called "big box of dry cat food".
And just so you know, Authentication is dead. If I've got malware on your machine, then I don't care how strong your password, OTP and biometric security is. I'm going to wait for you to login and then take over your session in the background. Security at this point is well beyond what's happening at the login stage. And don't get me wrong, the vendors that are doing the current security implementation for these banks have a lot more to offer, but it's the banks that are deciding that it doesn't matter to them.
Most half-decent banking systems that include a OTP require that OTP for carrying out transactions,
I can actually see Microsoft doing precisely this if they find their desktop monopoly in serious danger. Can't be good for Windows' image, the crap that gets shovelled into OEM builds.
What they should have done was update the system to read the full password entered by the end user, and submit that to the authentication system, and if it failed, submit the truncated password to the authentication system. If the truncated version matched, it should have then alerted the user that it was now storing the fully complex password and then updated the stored version.
They shouldn't. They should have expired the password and prompted the user for a new one immediately that happened.
Rationale: If the user made a typo after the 11th character (based on your 10-character-max example), you've just gone and stored a password that's subtly different from what the user thinks it is.
And any half-decent auditing system would catch you very quickly indeed.
The thing is I'm absolutely sure in my own mind that despite the fact that the means to develop half-decent auditing systems has existed for years, I don't think they're terribly widely deployed. And if they are, I don't think very many organisations have processes in place to make sure that action is taken when the audit blows the whistle on someone.
This is based mostly on speculation rather than having any hard evidence, though. Would welcome comments from someone who does IT security professionally.
Tell me, how well does that work on an iPad?
How much do you learn when everything's going right?
4G is rather better than existing 3G networks for mobile internet. But (and TBH this is something that astonishes me) this is one of the few places where the US is ahead of the curve. Many other countries have only just auctioned the spectrum space for 4G networks; they're a long way off having actual live 4G networks.