I'm glad you mentioned that, as it's bitten me more than once in the past.
Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.
On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.
Face it, every new version of Windoze requires retraining equal to or greater than that required to shift to free software for users and administrators.
The assumption is "it'll be close enough to pick up pretty easily". Which, when compared to administering Linux (and I mean properly administering, understanding the command line and everything, because you never know if/when your fancy GUI tool will fail horribly) is actually not terribly far from the truth.
In a business where someone's head is on the block, it's very easy to say "I've called Dell, it's now their problem".
I've worked in a school and IME you can afford to be a lot more pragmatic and cost could easily trump moving responsibility elsewhere. Sounds like the tech is quite capable of doing the work himself so realistically I'm not sure how much of a benefit you would get with making the "call Dell" option available.
Things like motherboards tend to turn over pretty quick so a motherboard failure might be a problem - but let's be realistic, that's pretty rare.
I see from the email address you publish you're presumably UK based. I'd like to add a few more comments which might help explain things to our US cousins:
1. Fructose/corn syrup. I'd never even heard of corn syrup before I used/.. Corn syrup is used a lot less in the UK and fructose is something health food freaks eat (because it comes from fruit so it's "healthier", y'know) which costs 30% more than sugar.
I'd add, to point 4:
4. Land in the UK is rather less of a commodity than it is in the US - put simply, we've got much less space relative to the size of the population and local governments are under pressure to avoid growing towns outwards into neighbouring farmland. Combine that with most state-run schools being fairly desperate for cash - a lot of them have sold off some or all of their fields for development. Time or not, there's nowhere to run PE.
Be it through ignorance or malice, they're taking advantage of a nuance of the English language - that the same word often means different things to different people.
To the scientist, a theory is something which explains all the known facts and has no known problems but hard proof for which doesn't exist. It's important to note that even when there is a century or more worth of evidence which suggests that a theory is almost certainly correct, it is still a theory unless and until cold, hard proof can be found.
To the lay person, a theory is just an idea to explain something which may or may not be correct - we don't really know, we'd have to look a lot deeper to have any degree of certainty. It most certainly isn't backed up by any form of evidence to either prove or disprove it. In science, we'd call this a hypothesis.
I don't know about your part of the world, but here in the UK record labels decided that the logo wasn't very important years before they introduced DRM.
For some odd reason, it seems putting a 12cm shiny polycarbonate disc in a suitably sized box, printing an insert and having record stores put it with all the other 12cm shiny discs was enough to ensure customers didn't get confused at the lack of the logo.
companies will not trust to be hosted by some other company.
That's a very dangerous statement.
A few hundred years ago, you'd have been thought mad for suggesting that one very small group of people could persuade a much larger group of people to trust them with all their money. Today we call this "banking".
Plenty of companies, small and large, outsource large chunks of the accounting needed to run their business to others. And that's another example of the same idea - trusting someone else with some of the work.
Myself, I resigned myself to almost certainly having to retrain at some point a long time ago. I saw my father lose his job in his early 40's and finding another job he found practically impossible. He, like me, was in IT - and at the time (and still today, for that matter), there was a lot of ageism in the industry.
People don't really know what they need. There is an entire market full of software catering to this set, and this software probably takes up 70-80% of shelf space on the high street.
Example: There exists on the market software to "Migrate your old PC to the new one easily!!oneoneomgwtfbbq!". All of which is well and good, and people buy this software. Even if they don't, they somehow feel comforted by seeing it and 100 similar utilities all lined up in DVD cases in their local PC World (or insert local equivalent store if you're not in the UK).
Except that XP already offers this as a feature. However, because it's not brought up by the operating system when you first turn it on ("Do you already have a PC? I can migrate your stuff if you like"), it seems that there remains a market for such crap.
Example: There exists on the market software which is inferior to the Gimp, costs money and is closed source/commercial. A company called Serif specialises in such tat.
Except every Linux distribution worth its salt already has a package for the Gimp.
We don't see masses of software on the high street for Linux because a remarkable amount of what you see on the high street is basically shovelware - shovel out as much crap as possible and hope a few people buy it. That doesn't work when your target market has an application on their desktop to seek out more or less any software they might need, but at the same time it lends a remarkable amount of visibility to Windows. Almost none to the Mac (functionality not only built in but plainly obvious to even a retarded chimp) or to Linux (functionality probably not built in but so easy to find that the high street simply doesn't occur).
Perhaps passengers should simply be warned that any plane that gets hijacked, gets shot down without negotiation and we, as a society live with that. Problem solved.
Many countries adopted that exact policy some time ago - at least if the mode of hijacking includes "the nice man who's employed by the airline is no longer at the controls".
It wouldn't necessarily work the whole world over, though. IIRC Tokyo airport, for instance, is in such an urban area that by the time you realise that that fucking great 767 isn't planning to land on the runway it's already too late.
1. You recognise that there are serious gaps in your experience and understanding. 2. You are clearly motivated to do something about it. 3. But you also recognise that your inexperience means that you're not entirely sure which gaps you should be plugging first.
This puts you way ahead of a lot of computer "scientists" who are still in university.
Please, please, please do the entire industry a favour and work to maintain that passion. People who've lost their passion,who don't really care as long as the next paycheque comes in seldom make top class IT professionals, and frankly are ten a penny.
Prison time? Because your laptop wouldn't turn on?
My knowledge of the judicial system in this area is approximately nil, so I hope you'll forgive the wild speculation.
But I imagine that if you pissed off security enough, they would charge you for something connected with "causing a terror alert" (if such a crime exists - I'd be astonished if that or something similar didn't). The fact that all you did was disconnect your laptop mobo from the PSU is neither here nor there, it's that anyone who'd flown before could reasonably have predicted that attempting to get through security with a lump of grey plastic which looks like a laptop but has been intentionally disabled would be likely to cause a security problem.
Better yet, if you need to keep them from snooping around on it, just unhook the mobo from the PSU.
So let me get this straight.
Your suggestion is to go through security in an airport with a laptop which has been intentionally sabotaged such that it cannot be turned on without a screwdriver.
So when they say "Can you switch this on please, sir", you're going to have to either refuse or ask for a screwdriver (because I strongly doubt you'll be allowed to carry one).
That sounds like an extremely good way to have your laptop confiscated and destroyed in a controlled explosion, and for you to spend some years in prison.
It will be like every other kind of inspection; random, and just enough of them to keep people on their toes and discourage them from breaking the law.
Unless, perhaps, there was some sort of communications network they could use that can cross international boundaries without data being blocked. Sure, it might be liable to eavesdropping, but that's what encryption was invented for.
I wonder how practical such a system would be to set up?
IOW, Linux isn't fundamentally immune to such an issue. Having said that, neither is any OS which is designed around a hierarchical structure of "most powerful user at the top, other users have decreasing levels of power". Something like EROS might be able to prevent such things, but it's really a research operating system which AFAICT is a long way from reliably booting, much less doing anything useful. And EROS doesn't have the advantage that Linux had of having a fairly complete userland toolset ready and waiting, needing little more than a kernel.
It's at a bit of a tangent to the original topic, but I don't think anyone in a position of power at any record label really listens to what they're selling.
Or rather, they do but they don't listen to it because it gives them pleasure, they listen to it to determine whether or not it's the kind of thing they can sell. It's not the kind of thing they put in the car on the way to work.
This level of attention to what you're churning out might work OK when you're WalMart (or Asda in the UK) and work to a business model which can allow this kind of thing - pile it so high and sell it so cheap that a lot of people don't much care if it only lasts 5 minutes - but the record industry's business model has always been that regardless of what else is being sold, there's a few items at the top that sell so well they can afford to bankroll everything else until the Next Big Thing.
I'm really not sure how this can work if the quality of whatever the latest Big Thing is consistently drops from one year to the next.
I've not made any mention of DRM or other distribution media. That's because I don't believe they're relevant. The Internet provides a means of distribution much more efficient than anything in the past.
This isn't to say record labels will go away any time soon. There still isn't a very efficient way to type into Google "I like this band, this band and this band. Earlier work by this other band but I don't like their latest stuff much. What else might I like? How about new talent? Any new blood playing that kind of music?". I think the future looks more like Magnatune than Warner or Sony though.
LILO's a bit of a complicated one, because technically what happens is you write a configuration file, run a program (which is called lilo, but more accurately should be called lilo-installer or somesuch) and this program installs a small bootloader in your MBR based on the configuration file.
You wouldn't rerun the bootloader once booted - the harm comes from if you allow any user rather than just root/administrator/(insert equivalent here) to write to the MBR because malware installed in that way could guarantee it will be executed each time the user reboots and with, say, a hypervisor remain totally invisible to the operating system.
However, NT hasn't allowed non-Admin users to do stupid stuff like that ever so unless you're running everything as admin it's a nonissue.
It can be done from user mode, that's true, but unavoidable.
License conditions stop you from using OEM builds for mass deployment - unless you're the OEM. Many of these builds you don't even enter the serial number for.
So if you decide that you don't like the default Dell build, even though it may (or may not) be technically feasible, you can't base one on an existing Dell installation CD.
The "upgrade benefit" is a charade. Prior to Vista appearing on the scene, any business which ran XP on the desktop and had no desktop PCs which predated XP would logically not need such a license. And for those businesses which have figured out a way around the mass deployment problem but don't want to upgrade to Vista - that's not really a problem. Right now. But in a few months time, you either buy PCs with Vista preinstalled or you pay up for a site license which also gives you downgrade rights.
Did I mention that the terms and conditions state that every Windows PC you own must be covered under the site license, regardless of which version of Windows it was shipped with or whether or not you've actually reimaged it?
I'd be very suprised if there are any corporate environments (other than "mom and pop") which would run OEM preloads at all. Though the likes of Dell just don't get this.
Not true, actually. Dell offer a service whereby you can have PCs shipped preloaded with your own image rather than their OEM one.
The only problem is Dell don't offer it unless you're ordering something like 100 PCs per year - fair enough, any less than that probably isn't cost effective for them. But 100 PCs per year is a fair few for a smaller business - and IMO it starts becoming time-effective to ditch OEM preloads and start putting your own custom build on somewhere closer to around 20 reloads/new PCs per year.
They couldn't. The Windows site license from Microsoft is strictly upgrade only - you have to have a valid retail or OEM license to accompany the PC to begin with.
Actually, a number of large companies do outsource some or all of their IT - including a few large banks. I don't know about US-based companies, but certainly Lloyds TSB do, Bristol & West used to (don't know if it's still the case since they were bought by Bank of Ireland). IIRC BAe Systems have some outsourced, as do Rolls-Royce.
This is where the really large consultancies like IBM Global Services and HP work.
Generally what happens is the company has a large IT department, decide "someone else can do this better", outsource it (transferring all their staff to the outsourcing company), discover that this means that they now have procedures which make any changes to their IT cost more money and take twice as long, then bring it back in house. The cycle then repeats;)
If businesses knew that outsourcing services to other companies were cheaper, this would have happened a long time ago.
Depending entirely on the nature of the business, a lot of companies in some industries have done exactly this.
It makes sense for an organisation with very little requirements in terms of technology - £5,000-10,000 per year will provide a fair bit of consultancy as long as your requirements aren't that complicated, but won't pay much in the way of fulltime IT support staff.
It can also make sense in an industry where every IT-oriented aspect of your business is much the same as any other in your industry and more or less every IT problem has already been solved.
However, for large organisations it's always worth questioning the benefit. Unless your organisation is way overstaffed/overpaid, the outsourcer will require a similar number of staff at similar wages to do essentially the same job. And staff wages are far and away the greatest cost. So unless your outsourcer takes the jobs to a drastically cheaper country, they'll have the exact same costs - that's before you even consider that they need to make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you do?
Nothing. Federal prison is by definition a federal building, so without the Real ID, you can't go in.
I'm glad you mentioned that, as it's bitten me more than once in the past.
Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.
On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.
Face it, every new version of Windoze requires retraining equal to or greater than that required to shift to free software for users and administrators.
The assumption is "it'll be close enough to pick up pretty easily". Which, when compared to administering Linux (and I mean properly administering, understanding the command line and everything, because you never know if/when your fancy GUI tool will fail horribly) is actually not terribly far from the truth.
In a business where someone's head is on the block, it's very easy to say "I've called Dell, it's now their problem".
I've worked in a school and IME you can afford to be a lot more pragmatic and cost could easily trump moving responsibility elsewhere. Sounds like the tech is quite capable of doing the work himself so realistically I'm not sure how much of a benefit you would get with making the "call Dell" option available.
Things like motherboards tend to turn over pretty quick so a motherboard failure might be a problem - but let's be realistic, that's pretty rare.
I see from the email address you publish you're presumably UK based. I'd like to add a few more comments which might help explain things to our US cousins:
/.. Corn syrup is used a lot less in the UK and fructose is something health food freaks eat (because it comes from fruit so it's "healthier", y'know) which costs 30% more than sugar.
1. Fructose/corn syrup. I'd never even heard of corn syrup before I used
I'd add, to point 4:
4. Land in the UK is rather less of a commodity than it is in the US - put simply, we've got much less space relative to the size of the population and local governments are under pressure to avoid growing towns outwards into neighbouring farmland. Combine that with most state-run schools being fairly desperate for cash - a lot of them have sold off some or all of their fields for development. Time or not, there's nowhere to run PE.
Before the "It's just a theory" folks start up
Be it through ignorance or malice, they're taking advantage of a nuance of the English language - that the same word often means different things to different people.
To the scientist, a theory is something which explains all the known facts and has no known problems but hard proof for which doesn't exist. It's important to note that even when there is a century or more worth of evidence which suggests that a theory is almost certainly correct, it is still a theory unless and until cold, hard proof can be found.
To the lay person, a theory is just an idea to explain something which may or may not be correct - we don't really know, we'd have to look a lot deeper to have any degree of certainty. It most certainly isn't backed up by any form of evidence to either prove or disprove it. In science, we'd call this a hypothesis.
I don't know about your part of the world, but here in the UK record labels decided that the logo wasn't very important years before they introduced DRM.
For some odd reason, it seems putting a 12cm shiny polycarbonate disc in a suitably sized box, printing an insert and having record stores put it with all the other 12cm shiny discs was enough to ensure customers didn't get confused at the lack of the logo.
They're also the only personal computer maker from the early 1980's I know of who is still in business.
Then you don't know your history very well.
A small company you may have heard of called IBM made personal computers in around 1984. They're very much in business.
companies will not trust to be hosted by some other company.
That's a very dangerous statement.
A few hundred years ago, you'd have been thought mad for suggesting that one very small group of people could persuade a much larger group of people to trust them with all their money. Today we call this "banking".
Plenty of companies, small and large, outsource large chunks of the accounting needed to run their business to others. And that's another example of the same idea - trusting someone else with some of the work.
Myself, I resigned myself to almost certainly having to retrain at some point a long time ago. I saw my father lose his job in his early 40's and finding another job he found practically impossible. He, like me, was in IT - and at the time (and still today, for that matter), there was a lot of ageism in the industry.
People don't really know what they need. There is an entire market full of software catering to this set, and this software probably takes up 70-80% of shelf space on the high street.
Example: There exists on the market software to "Migrate your old PC to the new one easily!!oneoneomgwtfbbq!". All of which is well and good, and people buy this software. Even if they don't, they somehow feel comforted by seeing it and 100 similar utilities all lined up in DVD cases in their local PC World (or insert local equivalent store if you're not in the UK).
Except that XP already offers this as a feature. However, because it's not brought up by the operating system when you first turn it on ("Do you already have a PC? I can migrate your stuff if you like"), it seems that there remains a market for such crap.
Example: There exists on the market software which is inferior to the Gimp, costs money and is closed source/commercial. A company called Serif specialises in such tat.
Except every Linux distribution worth its salt already has a package for the Gimp.
We don't see masses of software on the high street for Linux because a remarkable amount of what you see on the high street is basically shovelware - shovel out as much crap as possible and hope a few people buy it. That doesn't work when your target market has an application on their desktop to seek out more or less any software they might need, but at the same time it lends a remarkable amount of visibility to Windows. Almost none to the Mac (functionality not only built in but plainly obvious to even a retarded chimp) or to Linux (functionality probably not built in but so easy to find that the high street simply doesn't occur).
Perhaps passengers should simply be warned that any plane that gets hijacked, gets shot down without negotiation and we, as a society live with that. Problem solved.
Many countries adopted that exact policy some time ago - at least if the mode of hijacking includes "the nice man who's employed by the airline is no longer at the controls".
It wouldn't necessarily work the whole world over, though. IIRC Tokyo airport, for instance, is in such an urban area that by the time you realise that that fucking great 767 isn't planning to land on the runway it's already too late.
Let's see:
1. You recognise that there are serious gaps in your experience and understanding.
2. You are clearly motivated to do something about it.
3. But you also recognise that your inexperience means that you're not entirely sure which gaps you should be plugging first.
This puts you way ahead of a lot of computer "scientists" who are still in university.
Please, please, please do the entire industry a favour and work to maintain that passion. People who've lost their passion,who don't really care as long as the next paycheque comes in seldom make top class IT professionals, and frankly are ten a penny.
Prison time? Because your laptop wouldn't turn on?
My knowledge of the judicial system in this area is approximately nil, so I hope you'll forgive the wild speculation.
But I imagine that if you pissed off security enough, they would charge you for something connected with "causing a terror alert" (if such a crime exists - I'd be astonished if that or something similar didn't). The fact that all you did was disconnect your laptop mobo from the PSU is neither here nor there, it's that anyone who'd flown before could reasonably have predicted that attempting to get through security with a lump of grey plastic which looks like a laptop but has been intentionally disabled would be likely to cause a security problem.
Better yet, if you need to keep them from snooping around on it, just unhook the mobo from the PSU.
So let me get this straight.
Your suggestion is to go through security in an airport with a laptop which has been intentionally sabotaged such that it cannot be turned on without a screwdriver.
So when they say "Can you switch this on please, sir", you're going to have to either refuse or ask for a screwdriver (because I strongly doubt you'll be allowed to carry one).
That sounds like an extremely good way to have your laptop confiscated and destroyed in a controlled explosion, and for you to spend some years in prison.
It will be like every other kind of inspection; random, and just enough of them to keep people on their toes and discourage them from breaking the law.
Unless, perhaps, there was some sort of communications network they could use that can cross international boundaries without data being blocked. Sure, it might be liable to eavesdropping, but that's what encryption was invented for.
I wonder how practical such a system would be to set up?
Yes, but only root can do that.
IOW, Linux isn't fundamentally immune to such an issue. Having said that, neither is any OS which is designed around a hierarchical structure of "most powerful user at the top, other users have decreasing levels of power". Something like EROS might be able to prevent such things, but it's really a research operating system which AFAICT is a long way from reliably booting, much less doing anything useful. And EROS doesn't have the advantage that Linux had of having a fairly complete userland toolset ready and waiting, needing little more than a kernel.
It's at a bit of a tangent to the original topic, but I don't think anyone in a position of power at any record label really listens to what they're selling.
Or rather, they do but they don't listen to it because it gives them pleasure, they listen to it to determine whether or not it's the kind of thing they can sell. It's not the kind of thing they put in the car on the way to work.
This level of attention to what you're churning out might work OK when you're WalMart (or Asda in the UK) and work to a business model which can allow this kind of thing - pile it so high and sell it so cheap that a lot of people don't much care if it only lasts 5 minutes - but the record industry's business model has always been that regardless of what else is being sold, there's a few items at the top that sell so well they can afford to bankroll everything else until the Next Big Thing.
I'm really not sure how this can work if the quality of whatever the latest Big Thing is consistently drops from one year to the next.
I've not made any mention of DRM or other distribution media. That's because I don't believe they're relevant. The Internet provides a means of distribution much more efficient than anything in the past.
This isn't to say record labels will go away any time soon. There still isn't a very efficient way to type into Google "I like this band, this band and this band. Earlier work by this other band but I don't like their latest stuff much. What else might I like? How about new talent? Any new blood playing that kind of music?". I think the future looks more like Magnatune than Warner or Sony though.
LILO's a bit of a complicated one, because technically what happens is you write a configuration file, run a program (which is called lilo, but more accurately should be called lilo-installer or somesuch) and this program installs a small bootloader in your MBR based on the configuration file.
You wouldn't rerun the bootloader once booted - the harm comes from if you allow any user rather than just root/administrator/(insert equivalent here) to write to the MBR because malware installed in that way could guarantee it will be executed each time the user reboots and with, say, a hypervisor remain totally invisible to the operating system.
However, NT hasn't allowed non-Admin users to do stupid stuff like that ever so unless you're running everything as admin it's a nonissue.
It can be done from user mode, that's true, but unavoidable.
It's even better.
License conditions stop you from using OEM builds for mass deployment - unless you're the OEM. Many of these builds you don't even enter the serial number for.
So if you decide that you don't like the default Dell build, even though it may (or may not) be technically feasible, you can't base one on an existing Dell installation CD.
The "upgrade benefit" is a charade. Prior to Vista appearing on the scene, any business which ran XP on the desktop and had no desktop PCs which predated XP would logically not need such a license. And for those businesses which have figured out a way around the mass deployment problem but don't want to upgrade to Vista - that's not really a problem. Right now. But in a few months time, you either buy PCs with Vista preinstalled or you pay up for a site license which also gives you downgrade rights.
Did I mention that the terms and conditions state that every Windows PC you own must be covered under the site license, regardless of which version of Windows it was shipped with or whether or not you've actually reimaged it?
You're both right and wrong at the same time.
In order to execute the code which bootstraps the OS, you're correct. But from context, I suspect the OP meant "in order to install LILO to the MBR".
Which you most certainly do need to be root to do.
I'd be very suprised if there are any corporate environments (other than "mom and pop") which would run OEM preloads at all. Though the likes of Dell just don't get this.
Not true, actually. Dell offer a service whereby you can have PCs shipped preloaded with your own image rather than their OEM one.
The only problem is Dell don't offer it unless you're ordering something like 100 PCs per year - fair enough, any less than that probably isn't cost effective for them. But 100 PCs per year is a fair few for a smaller business - and IMO it starts becoming time-effective to ditch OEM preloads and start putting your own custom build on somewhere closer to around 20 reloads/new PCs per year.
They couldn't. The Windows site license from Microsoft is strictly upgrade only - you have to have a valid retail or OEM license to accompany the PC to begin with.
Actually, a number of large companies do outsource some or all of their IT - including a few large banks. I don't know about US-based companies, but certainly Lloyds TSB do, Bristol & West used to (don't know if it's still the case since they were bought by Bank of Ireland). IIRC BAe Systems have some outsourced, as do Rolls-Royce.
;)
This is where the really large consultancies like IBM Global Services and HP work.
Generally what happens is the company has a large IT department, decide "someone else can do this better", outsource it (transferring all their staff to the outsourcing company), discover that this means that they now have procedures which make any changes to their IT cost more money and take twice as long, then bring it back in house. The cycle then repeats
If businesses knew that outsourcing services to other companies were cheaper, this would have happened a long time ago.
Depending entirely on the nature of the business, a lot of companies in some industries have done exactly this.
It makes sense for an organisation with very little requirements in terms of technology - £5,000-10,000 per year will provide a fair bit of consultancy as long as your requirements aren't that complicated, but won't pay much in the way of fulltime IT support staff.
It can also make sense in an industry where every IT-oriented aspect of your business is much the same as any other in your industry and more or less every IT problem has already been solved.
However, for large organisations it's always worth questioning the benefit. Unless your organisation is way overstaffed/overpaid, the outsourcer will require a similar number of staff at similar wages to do essentially the same job. And staff wages are far and away the greatest cost. So unless your outsourcer takes the jobs to a drastically cheaper country, they'll have the exact same costs - that's before you even consider that they need to make a profit.
Must say, it sounds like a distinct improvement over Dvorak's annual wrong-a-thon.