Re:I'm not sure what you're getting at
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Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
See, with a PC it's not as simple as that.
Sure, for basic things that most home users deal with it is. But as soon as you start dealing with desktop support and 20, 50, 100 PCs, suddenly you have so many people doing so many things that you start to encounter all sorts of exotic problems sooner rather than later.
Example: Right now I've got a bunch of PCs which randomly disconnect drives which are mounted from a Samba share. Most of the people affected have a specific model of PC, but not all of those of this particular model are displaying this problem. Similarlywise, not everything displaying this problem is that specific model.
I don't think the Samba server itself is at fault, as there are a number of people who are never affected (myself included). Right now, my money's on the network card driver - everything affected has the same chipset running the network card. But you'd never spot that if all you dealt with was a couple of PCs.
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS?
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Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
A lot of businesses do the same thing. Far easier to support your PCs when you can be certain of what's installed on all of them, rather than discover that Dell's half-baked factory build has changed this week so all of a sudden you're faced with a different batch of problems.
And if it only happens occasionally, then the cost of rolling out encryption to every laptop owner (it's not just software cost, you've got to train them in something which most people have no understanding of whatsoever) seems absurdly expensive.
I'm a customer of Smile too. And I find their telephone banking worrying, to say the least.
I also have an account with Lloyds TSB. With them, the computer asks 3 questions which the phone bank person relays to you. They punch the answers in, computer either says "no" or "yes". It doesn't say which questions were wrong if access is denied. In any case, the person in the call centre can't get at your bank details until such time as the questions are answered.
Not so with Smile. With Smile, as soon as they have your account number they're in. They simply glance over your statement on their screen to decide which questions to ask.
Now, let's say I hang around outside the Lloyds TSB call centre with £5,000 in used notes in a paper bag. While I might get some useful information, it will be slow and painful and may not get me anywhere - certainly not if the computer asks the wrong questions when I ring up and impersonate a customer.
So instead I take my paper bag full of cash and hang around outside the Smile call centre. A few days later, someone in the call centre is £5,000 richer and I've got enough account details to recover that several times over.
I complained to them about this, and while they acknowledged that such a scenario would work, it "hadn't happened yet" so they didn't see the problem.
Nationwide are one of the few remaining building societies in the UK. This means that they're effectively a co-operative owned by their members rather than a bank.
Not that they would - the DPA isn't that heavily enforced - but I don't want them facing a fine that size. My mortgage is with them and the last thing I need is for them to foreclose everyone's mortgages to pay off a fine.
It may make you use an alternate port when you know who's connecting and from where. But an MX record doesn't specify which port your mail server is listening on, so there's no easy way around that.
There are, however, plenty of hard ways. Setting up a bot net so that systems which can't send spam can do something else instead is the first one that springs to mind.
It won't be impractical to change Linux. But in a big organisation, where you've got to go through change control procedures and test everything thoroughly before you can roll it out, any change which affects functionality is going to be a lot more work than simply typing rpm -Uvh new-package.rpm on a few servers.
Something similar would work fine. Block port 25 to SMTP by default and have a web config utility to change it. If you really wanted, you could set it up to email the user if they tried accessing port 25 when it was blocked ("You might be trying to get past this firewall. Or, you might have a virus. Here's how you can find out, and here's how you can disable it if you need . . . ")
I like that idea. Virus tries sending out 10,000 emails, user gets 10,000 emails saying "You might have a virus....".
Then don't rate limit at the SMTP level. It's easy enough to set up so outgoing traffic on port 25 is a lot slower without looking at what's going across the link.
Of course this will affect anyone who's using port 25 for something other than email, so it breaks horribly then.
'But rather than work out these dilemmas in partnership with their elected leaders, they were encouraged to regard all politicians as corrupt or mendacious by the media, which he described as 'a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage'.
- Matthew Taylor, former Chief Strategy Advisor to Tony Blair, November 2006.
Is this the same Tony Blair whose political party has been responsible for the Cash for Honours scandal which is currently being investigated by police? I think we should be told.
(For those who don't know, seats in the second house of parliament in the UK used to be got from either inheriting a lordship or being granted one by the Queen. These days, they're all appointed by the Queen - on the basis of the government's recommendations)
If Linux is infringing on MS patents, then why is MS paying Novell, a linux distributer?
No idea who's paying who, but you've alluded to a very good point here.
As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:
1. Linux really does infringe on Microsoft's patents.
Redhat have already announced that they have no intention of making a similar deal. If there really was infringement going on, Microsoft should have taken Redhat to court immediately - it would have just as much of a PR effect, if not greater, and would also establish some influence in the courts. I can't see Microsoft getting much sympathy if they demand millions in damages several years after they announce that Linux infringes.
2. Linux does infringe, but Microsoft aren't taking anyone to court for tactical reasons.
Such as: any infringement has a life expectancy measured in hours, if not minutes, as soon as it's disclosed. However large companies don't tend to roll out updates that quickly, so it would be more profitable to wait until Linux is firmly entrenched in a large company and it's impractical to make a major change to the install base. This brings us back to the first question: if the only reason Microsoft are holding off suing Redhat, Mandriva et al now is to make more money from suing them later, what will a judge say?
3. This is all a load of cobblers intended to frighten jumpy IT directors who are considering letting their staff investigate that major Linux rollout they keep on suggesting.
My money's on 3. Wouldn't be the first time a technology company has used FUD in this way.
It's just good preparation for the real world where most people don't read more than the first half-dozen lines or so of an email they receive.
You can turn this to your advantage if the person doing this is the same person who approves purchases. Bury at the end "If I don't hear from you, I'll assume it's OK to place an order for a 2 ton cerise pachyderm complete with a couple of metres of flexible trunking". Before you know it, they've agreed to buy a pink elephant.
Not to mention, a significant number (I'd say the majority) of the world's computers are, to a greater or lesser extent, running on managed networks where such things as power-saving settings are set by policy.
Don't get me wrong, the Samba project's done a fantastic job of reverse engineering SMB, but they're miles behind domain management - you can't run an Active Directory domain with a Samba backend, the best it supports is an NT 4 domain.
Work is afoot to support AD domain management, but realistically the release of something like that would probably give it a huge boost.
That may be why MS aren't too keen to release anything...
Were there ministers who were supposed to be overseeing this?
Yes. AFAIK, not one of them had any experience with a successful, large scale project of any description, let alone an IT project.
Was there a committee?
Plenty of them. But there is some truth in the adage that a camel is a horse designed by committee.
How could someone possibly spend $24 billion dollars for software?
I'm going to resort to cliche again here, sadly because it's true. In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In this case, the one eyed man is Bill Gates. (No, I don't mean "someone who worships at the temple of Bill and thinks the solution to everything is Microsoft". I mean Bill himself). And he says the amount of tech required is going to cost that kind of money.
How could someone not have a deployment plan with phased transition for such a big project?
See previous comment. I sincerely doubt anyone at the higher echelons of this has any experience with any large project.
We tried. Two thirds of the popular vote were against him at the last election.
No it wasn't.
One third of the popular vote was for him. Many of the rest didn't bother voting.
However, the nature of our system is that "expressed no preference" (ie. didn't vote) is effectively the same as "voted in favour of the status quo". (The government has even been known to admit this openly, with reports saying "15% the electorate is against this idea, 85% were either for it or expressed no opinion, so we should do it". Never mind that of those 85%, 5% wrote to their MP saying "Great idea!". The other 80% didn't even know about it, so didn't write to anybody).
Accenture is sufficient for a major fuckup. Been there done that and have the scars to prove it.
On a bit of a tangent, but how do people who've been employed by the likes of Accenture remain employable? I'd have thought something like that would be a helluva stain on the CV. (or resume, if you're a merkin).
Slashdot Mirror
Can we have a "-1, Too Much Information" mod?
See, with a PC it's not as simple as that.
Sure, for basic things that most home users deal with it is. But as soon as you start dealing with desktop support and 20, 50, 100 PCs, suddenly you have so many people doing so many things that you start to encounter all sorts of exotic problems sooner rather than later.
Example: Right now I've got a bunch of PCs which randomly disconnect drives which are mounted from a Samba share. Most of the people affected have a specific model of PC, but not all of those of this particular model are displaying this problem. Similarlywise, not everything displaying this problem is that specific model.
I don't think the Samba server itself is at fault, as there are a number of people who are never affected (myself included). Right now, my money's on the network card driver - everything affected has the same chipset running the network card. But you'd never spot that if all you dealt with was a couple of PCs.
A lot of businesses do the same thing. Far easier to support your PCs when you can be certain of what's installed on all of them, rather than discover that Dell's half-baked factory build has changed this week so all of a sudden you're faced with a different batch of problems.
And if it only happens occasionally, then the cost of rolling out encryption to every laptop owner (it's not just software cost, you've got to train them in something which most people have no understanding of whatsoever) seems absurdly expensive.
I'm a customer of Smile too. And I find their telephone banking worrying, to say the least.
I also have an account with Lloyds TSB. With them, the computer asks 3 questions which the phone bank person relays to you. They punch the answers in, computer either says "no" or "yes". It doesn't say which questions were wrong if access is denied. In any case, the person in the call centre can't get at your bank details until such time as the questions are answered.
Not so with Smile. With Smile, as soon as they have your account number they're in. They simply glance over your statement on their screen to decide which questions to ask.
Now, let's say I hang around outside the Lloyds TSB call centre with £5,000 in used notes in a paper bag. While I might get some useful information, it will be slow and painful and may not get me anywhere - certainly not if the computer asks the wrong questions when I ring up and impersonate a customer.
So instead I take my paper bag full of cash and hang around outside the Smile call centre. A few days later, someone in the call centre is £5,000 richer and I've got enough account details to recover that several times over.
I complained to them about this, and while they acknowledged that such a scenario would work, it "hadn't happened yet" so they didn't see the problem.
Nationwide are one of the few remaining building societies in the UK. This means that they're effectively a co-operative owned by their members rather than a bank.
Not that they would - the DPA isn't that heavily enforced - but I don't want them facing a fine that size. My mortgage is with them and the last thing I need is for them to foreclose everyone's mortgages to pay off a fine.
It may make you use an alternate port when you know who's connecting and from where. But an MX record doesn't specify which port your mail server is listening on, so there's no easy way around that.
There are, however, plenty of hard ways. Setting up a bot net so that systems which can't send spam can do something else instead is the first one that springs to mind.
It won't be impractical to change Linux. But in a big organisation, where you've got to go through change control procedures and test everything thoroughly before you can roll it out, any change which affects functionality is going to be a lot more work than simply typing rpm -Uvh new-package.rpm on a few servers.
Something similar would work fine. Block port 25 to SMTP by default and have a web config utility to change it. If you really wanted, you could set it up to email the user if they tried accessing port 25 when it was blocked ("You might be trying to get past this firewall. Or, you might have a virus. Here's how you can find out, and here's how you can disable it if you need . . . ")
I like that idea. Virus tries sending out 10,000 emails, user gets 10,000 emails saying "You might have a virus....".
Then don't rate limit at the SMTP level. It's easy enough to set up so outgoing traffic on port 25 is a lot slower without looking at what's going across the link.
Of course this will affect anyone who's using port 25 for something other than email, so it breaks horribly then.
This is not a new problem, and, frankly, a problem that only education.... can fix.
This hasn't worked yet. Why should we expect it to work now?
Rather than repeat the argument, read point number 5 in The six dumbest ideas in computer security
'But rather than work out these dilemmas in partnership with their elected leaders, they were encouraged to regard all politicians as corrupt or mendacious by the media, which he described as 'a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage'.
- Matthew Taylor, former Chief Strategy Advisor to Tony Blair, November 2006.
Is this the same Tony Blair whose political party has been responsible for the Cash for Honours scandal which is currently being investigated by police? I think we should be told.
(For those who don't know, seats in the second house of parliament in the UK used to be got from either inheriting a lordship or being granted one by the Queen. These days, they're all appointed by the Queen - on the basis of the government's recommendations)
If Linux is infringing on MS patents, then why is MS paying Novell, a linux distributer?
No idea who's paying who, but you've alluded to a very good point here.
As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:
1. Linux really does infringe on Microsoft's patents.
Redhat have already announced that they have no intention of making a similar deal. If there really was infringement going on, Microsoft should have taken Redhat to court immediately - it would have just as much of a PR effect, if not greater, and would also establish some influence in the courts. I can't see Microsoft getting much sympathy if they demand millions in damages several years after they announce that Linux infringes.
2. Linux does infringe, but Microsoft aren't taking anyone to court for tactical reasons.
Such as: any infringement has a life expectancy measured in hours, if not minutes, as soon as it's disclosed. However large companies don't tend to roll out updates that quickly, so it would be more profitable to wait until Linux is firmly entrenched in a large company and it's impractical to make a major change to the install base. This brings us back to the first question: if the only reason Microsoft are holding off suing Redhat, Mandriva et al now is to make more money from suing them later, what will a judge say?
3. This is all a load of cobblers intended to frighten jumpy IT directors who are considering letting their staff investigate that major Linux rollout they keep on suggesting.
My money's on 3. Wouldn't be the first time a technology company has used FUD in this way.
by the way they are really damn expensive
All data recovery companies are expensive.
Generally, by the time you're sending a disk to them, it's because they're rather cheaper than losing the data forever.
It's just good preparation for the real world where most people don't read more than the first half-dozen lines or so of an email they receive.
You can turn this to your advantage if the person doing this is the same person who approves purchases. Bury at the end "If I don't hear from you, I'll assume it's OK to place an order for a 2 ton cerise pachyderm complete with a couple of metres of flexible trunking". Before you know it, they've agreed to buy a pink elephant.
Don't know if it's still the case, but historically Wake-on-LAN has been fantastically unreliable.
Not to mention, a significant number (I'd say the majority) of the world's computers are, to a greater or lesser extent, running on managed networks where such things as power-saving settings are set by policy.
Do you want Media center on all of your employee machines?
Depends. If I'm developing a product for use on Media Centre - maybe not on everyone's machine, but certainly on a substantial number.
yes you can run more Windows programs under Linux than under Windows if you include win 3.11 to xp sp2!
Maybe, but here in the real world I'm more interested in continuing to run a program which I've been using for 2-3 years, not 12-15 years.
You know at the height of her popularity, Maggie Thatcher only got 42% of the vote.
IOW, almost 60% of the country didn't want her in power.
I think the Monster Raving Loony party have the right idea.
CIFS, for a start.
Don't get me wrong, the Samba project's done a fantastic job of reverse engineering SMB, but they're miles behind domain management - you can't run an Active Directory domain with a Samba backend, the best it supports is an NT 4 domain.
Work is afoot to support AD domain management, but realistically the release of something like that would probably give it a huge boost.
That may be why MS aren't too keen to release anything...
Were there ministers who were supposed to be overseeing this?
Yes. AFAIK, not one of them had any experience with a successful, large scale project of any description, let alone an IT project.
Was there a committee?
Plenty of them. But there is some truth in the adage that a camel is a horse designed by committee.
How could someone possibly spend $24 billion dollars for software?
I'm going to resort to cliche again here, sadly because it's true. In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In this case, the one eyed man is Bill Gates. (No, I don't mean "someone who worships at the temple of Bill and thinks the solution to everything is Microsoft". I mean Bill himself). And he says the amount of tech required is going to cost that kind of money.
How could someone not have a deployment plan with phased transition for such a big project?
See previous comment. I sincerely doubt anyone at the higher echelons of this has any experience with any large project.
We tried. Two thirds of the popular vote were against him at the last election.
No it wasn't.
One third of the popular vote was for him. Many of the rest didn't bother voting.
However, the nature of our system is that "expressed no preference" (ie. didn't vote) is effectively the same as "voted in favour of the status quo". (The government has even been known to admit this openly, with reports saying "15% the electorate is against this idea, 85% were either for it or expressed no opinion, so we should do it". Never mind that of those 85%, 5% wrote to their MP saying "Great idea!". The other 80% didn't even know about it, so didn't write to anybody).
Accenture is sufficient for a major fuckup. Been there done that and have the scars to prove it.
On a bit of a tangent, but how do people who've been employed by the likes of Accenture remain employable? I'd have thought something like that would be a helluva stain on the CV. (or resume, if you're a merkin).
And at least with a hooker you KNOW you're getting screwed.