Dunno about Canada, but in the UK the former monopoly (BT's) CSRs certainly used to be under strict instruction not to enter into any discussion regarding a customer dispute "just in case they're a lawyer".
So if you disputed anything - anything - their answer would be to parrot the company line. Their supervisor was the same, all the way up.
This makes it very hard to get anywhere in a dispute unless you are a lawyer. Somehow, I suspect that was the general idea.
Symantec's the same. The corporate edition isn't too bad - but requires a minimum purchase of 10 licenses.
The support line can be a bit slow to answer the phone, but when they do it's a UK call centre in the UK (don't know about other countries) staffed by people with at least half a brain.
However Linux viruses do exist, and are trivial to write. The reason they don't spread is partly because users are used to getting their binaries from trusted sources, partly because they download things from source, and partly because most users don't run with the ability to modify system files. (Sure you might be able to infect ~/bin - but there isn't a big gain)
I've been saying this for ages but it's an excellent way to be modded "troll" on/. because everyone knows that Linux viruses do not and cannot exist. They're partly right - the traditional.exe infector which Linux provides protection against however is practically extinct.
Not true. Indeed, I received this email only a few days ago:
DEAR SIR,
I know you do not no me but I have been told you are good christian man. My name is DARL MCBRIDE and I am CEO of SCO organisation.
My company is based in Nigeri^H^H^H^H^H^HUtah, where we make softwares. However, an evil called Irish Business Machines has been steeling our softwares. We have lots of evide... evid... proof of this, which we will be happy to shew ewe. We are going to sue Irish Business Machines for $1,000,000,000 (ONE BILLION DOLLARS).
However, many people have been buying the stolen softwares and ignoring ours. We therefore do not have money for to be paying our lawyers. I am therefore asking you for help.
In return for your help, I be offer you 30% of the final settelment.
I beg of you to kep thsi miel sekrit, nobody must no about it. If you are interested, plese email me back at cos@hotmail.com
DRM is defective by design if part of the design is "and yet the user shall retain some control of their system"
If the information is stored on a private network which is locked down tight so it can only be accessed by "approved" PCs, and the "approved" corporate PCs are also locked down tight, then yes, DRM will work just fine (though it won't protect much against someone retyping a "protected" document onto another, non-corporate owned machine).
However, if we're talking about the information being made available on a public network to anyone with a PC, the only way DRM can be made to work is if everything is locked down tight - essentially, retrofitting the tight corporate lockdown described above to the Internet.
FWIW, I think DRM has some very useful applications - back in the days of Win9x, you could lock down a machine by setting a policy which dictated which programs could be executed, but it was a dumb list of filenames so could be defeated with a simple rename. By mandating "only signed applications from this list" (and set up different lists on a per-group basis), any organisation which needs tight control over its computers but still wants to be rolling out PCs (as opposed to dumb terminals) can do so - and there are lots of organisations which have that requirement. Think banks, hospitals, call centres, schools etc.
The minor problem with the mass market is that it's a mass market.
Boycotts very seldom happen en masse. Generally, they're so small as to pass completely under the radar of the people responsible for looking at sales figures.
Re:Where the Gimp really does excel.
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
True, but digital photography changes the rules slightly.
Once you're editing the photo in something like Gimp or Photoshop, there's a strong chance you're doing it with a particular end in mind - if you're a pro, for instance, the end may be "produce a large print" or "send it to the editor of the magazine which commissioned it".
If the magazine which commissioned it has a strict policy on accepting digital files - eg. that they must be in 48bit RGB - that immediately rules out the Gimp for at least the final save because it doesn't AFAIK support 16bpp. Which is not to say that you couldn't do all the processing in the Gimp and then export it later, but it seems kind of silly to go all out to produce a file with 16bpp colour depth when part of the image processing will have lost 8 of those 16 bits.
Re:Where the Gimp really does excel.
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your wife has discovered something that any half-decent photographer has known for year, long before digital cameras even existed.
You cannot turn a crap photographer into a good one by giving them fantastic tools. Ken Rockwell puts it quite nicely and I shan't waste my time further essentially repeating him: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm
Contrariwise, a good photographer who is used to the fantastic tools (ie. photoshop) may well find the Gimp limiting.
For those of us in the middle of the spectrum, the Gimp is an ideal solution.
FTFS: "So that you can change tracks by changing lanes".
No, I'm not going to buy that. Nobody in the developed world is moronic enough to believe that to be a sensible, safe way of integrating the iPod with the car.
Ignore them. That kind of answer shows up in every damn discussion about anything sysadmin related, and if you read between the lines what they usually mean is "I'm 14 years old and my school has taken measures to prevent me plugging my own laptop into the network! Boo!"
350 million (or whatever the exact figure is) is a lot of money.
For your average/.'er, it's a huge amount, and for some governmental organisation to just turn around and say "Give us 350 million" doesn't sound that different to "This is a hold up and I've got a gun".
That may or may not be the case. But see how long Microsoft can retain staff in the UK if one of the perks of working there is your own prison cell with 24-hour anal rape facilities.
It will be if you're using it for desktop-type stuff.
Where this really shines is in the server room where you're less bothered about "does the display update quickly" and more bothered about "can it keep up with demand". When "demand" can't possibly be more than 100Mb/s (unless you're using gigabit throughout, of course), it takes a very processor-intensive app which requires 100% CPU time to keep up with 100Mbps.
You need to have a backup. Most of those people are required *by law* to keep their records for a fixed length of time, and losing it because a harddrive died would be considered negligent.
Hence a point I made upthread - in IT we expect people to change their passwords regularly; in this instance, if someone was indeed doing that it would be perfectly reasonable if they forgot one of their older passwords. Which would be a problem in this case if you need to recover old data.
I think it's better solved procedurally. "Ensuring that only trusted people within IT can access the data" has been a solved problem for years, and the username under which backups are run by definition has to be trusted enough to read everything. Once that's solved, if you're really that paranoid, the data safe can be held in the CEO's office and a minimum of two randomly selected people change the tapes daily.
Probably because "a nice user interface" doesn't tend to appear anywhere near as high on the list of "things this program needs" in the itch-scratching crowd with both the time and inclination to do something about it.
Once you have a basic user interface which does what it needs to (think: the command line tools Xen has now) that's quite often where things stop, because to add significantly to that is a helluva lot of work and by the time you've worked out the system you're building a UI for to the point where you can build a UI, the need to do so has dropped through the floor because to get to that point you first had to figure out how the existing console-based tools worked in explicit detail.
You already have a level of trust with your users. Why doesn't that trust extend to a new techology with the same level of associated potential concequences (data loss)?
Because every time data is lost, regardless of the cause, IT is expected to wave its magic wand and bring the data back. Sooner or later, the person losing the data is going to be high enough in the pecking order to get someone in IT sacked because the data wasn't recoverable.
By the way, the folders are fucking ENCRYPTED. You can't decrypt data by saying "THIS IS YOUR ADMINISTRATOR, OPEN UP!"
IMO, most of the "But we need to be able to stop the admin seeing stuff" comments are probably from kids still in school, who would rather the affected data was lost than be readable by the admin in the event of something bad happening. (They generally give themselves away when they say "My school blocked this...")
It would be interesting to see how many of them retain this view the first time they lose data in a work environment.
Being able to access the data and actually doing so are two different things.
I need to be able to access the data, if only for backup purposes. The person in the company with the password might be run over by a bus tommorow. Or if you prefer something less dramatic, they may regularly change their password (good!), forget their old one (who cares?) and then need to restore from an old backup to prove what was on the system 6 months ago (Ah....).
But at the same time, with that power comes responsibility. If I was found to be accessing the data for any purpose other than "to provide a copy to give people who have a legitimate need to access it", I'd be sacked so fast....
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno about Canada, but in the UK the former monopoly (BT's) CSRs certainly used to be under strict instruction not to enter into any discussion regarding a customer dispute "just in case they're a lawyer".
So if you disputed anything - anything - their answer would be to parrot the company line. Their supervisor was the same, all the way up.
This makes it very hard to get anywhere in a dispute unless you are a lawyer. Somehow, I suspect that was the general idea.
Symantec's the same. The corporate edition isn't too bad - but requires a minimum purchase of 10 licenses.
The support line can be a bit slow to answer the phone, but when they do it's a UK call centre in the UK (don't know about other countries) staffed by people with at least half a brain.
However Linux viruses do exist, and are trivial to write. The reason they don't spread is partly because users are used to getting their binaries from trusted sources, partly because they download things from source, and partly because most users don't run with the ability to modify system files. (Sure you might be able to infect ~/bin - but there isn't a big gain)
/. because everyone knows that Linux viruses do not and cannot exist. They're partly right - the traditional .exe infector which Linux provides protection against however is practically extinct.
I've been saying this for ages but it's an excellent way to be modded "troll" on
Are they complaining that IBM didn't copy code into Linux?
Very probably. Let's face it, complaining that IBM did copy code into Linux hasn't got them very far yet.
Not true. Indeed, I received this email only a few days ago:
DEAR SIR,
I know you do not no me but I have been told you are good christian man. My name is DARL MCBRIDE and I am CEO of SCO organisation.
My company is based in Nigeri^H^H^H^H^H^HUtah, where we make softwares. However, an evil called Irish Business Machines has been steeling our softwares. We have lots of evide... evid... proof of this, which we will be happy to shew ewe. We are going to sue Irish Business Machines for $1,000,000,000 (ONE BILLION DOLLARS).
However, many people have been buying the stolen softwares and ignoring ours. We therefore do not have money for to be paying our lawyers. I am therefore asking you for help.
In return for your help, I be offer you 30% of the final settelment.
I beg of you to kep thsi miel sekrit, nobody must no about it. If you are interested, plese email me back at cos@hotmail.com
Apple may not have always been pioneers historically, but they've often had the best implementation which has popularised a given technology.
And Microsoft is extremely good at jumping on what it perceives to be a popular technology bandwagon.
DRM is not going to work out in general and the Microsoft way has already failed spectacularly.
You'd better tell Apple to go close the iTunes music store then, as it will never work.
Agreed, not "ah, well".
Will it be "Ah, well" if (when?) Microsoft use the results from WGA to send in the BSA?
Is it "Ah, well" for the IT support folks who are hearing people call them saying "What's going on? This is a legitimate copy!"
DRM is defective by design if part of the design is "and yet the user shall retain some control of their system"
If the information is stored on a private network which is locked down tight so it can only be accessed by "approved" PCs, and the "approved" corporate PCs are also locked down tight, then yes, DRM will work just fine (though it won't protect much against someone retyping a "protected" document onto another, non-corporate owned machine).
However, if we're talking about the information being made available on a public network to anyone with a PC, the only way DRM can be made to work is if everything is locked down tight - essentially, retrofitting the tight corporate lockdown described above to the Internet.
FWIW, I think DRM has some very useful applications - back in the days of Win9x, you could lock down a machine by setting a policy which dictated which programs could be executed, but it was a dumb list of filenames so could be defeated with a simple rename. By mandating "only signed applications from this list" (and set up different lists on a per-group basis), any organisation which needs tight control over its computers but still wants to be rolling out PCs (as opposed to dumb terminals) can do so - and there are lots of organisations which have that requirement. Think banks, hospitals, call centres, schools etc.
The minor problem with the mass market is that it's a mass market.
Boycotts very seldom happen en masse. Generally, they're so small as to pass completely under the radar of the people responsible for looking at sales figures.
True, but digital photography changes the rules slightly.
Once you're editing the photo in something like Gimp or Photoshop, there's a strong chance you're doing it with a particular end in mind - if you're a pro, for instance, the end may be "produce a large print" or "send it to the editor of the magazine which commissioned it".
If the magazine which commissioned it has a strict policy on accepting digital files - eg. that they must be in 48bit RGB - that immediately rules out the Gimp for at least the final save because it doesn't AFAIK support 16bpp. Which is not to say that you couldn't do all the processing in the Gimp and then export it later, but it seems kind of silly to go all out to produce a file with 16bpp colour depth when part of the image processing will have lost 8 of those 16 bits.
Your wife has discovered something that any half-decent photographer has known for year, long before digital cameras even existed.
You cannot turn a crap photographer into a good one by giving them fantastic tools. Ken Rockwell puts it quite nicely and I shan't waste my time further essentially repeating him: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm
Contrariwise, a good photographer who is used to the fantastic tools (ie. photoshop) may well find the Gimp limiting.
For those of us in the middle of the spectrum, the Gimp is an ideal solution.
FTFS:
"So that you can change tracks by changing lanes".
No, I'm not going to buy that. Nobody in the developed world is moronic enough to believe that to be a sensible, safe way of integrating the iPod with the car.
Ignore them. That kind of answer shows up in every damn discussion about anything sysadmin related, and if you read between the lines what they usually mean is "I'm 14 years old and my school has taken measures to prevent me plugging my own laptop into the network! Boo!"
350 million (or whatever the exact figure is) is a lot of money.
/.'er, it's a huge amount, and for some governmental organisation to just turn around and say "Give us 350 million" doesn't sound that different to "This is a hold up and I've got a gun".
For your average
That may or may not be the case. But see how long Microsoft can retain staff in the UK if one of the perks of working there is your own prison cell with 24-hour anal rape facilities.
It will be if you're using it for desktop-type stuff.
Where this really shines is in the server room where you're less bothered about "does the display update quickly" and more bothered about "can it keep up with demand". When "demand" can't possibly be more than 100Mb/s (unless you're using gigabit throughout, of course), it takes a very processor-intensive app which requires 100% CPU time to keep up with 100Mbps.
EXPN?
I know OpenMOSIX is something to do with clustering - but for it to be any real use you need a suitable application.
You need to have a backup. Most of those people are required *by law* to keep their records for a fixed length of time, and losing it because a harddrive died would be considered negligent.
Hence a point I made upthread - in IT we expect people to change their passwords regularly; in this instance, if someone was indeed doing that it would be perfectly reasonable if they forgot one of their older passwords. Which would be a problem in this case if you need to recover old data.
I think it's better solved procedurally. "Ensuring that only trusted people within IT can access the data" has been a solved problem for years, and the username under which backups are run by definition has to be trusted enough to read everything. Once that's solved, if you're really that paranoid, the data safe can be held in the CEO's office and a minimum of two randomly selected people change the tapes daily.
Probably because "a nice user interface" doesn't tend to appear anywhere near as high on the list of "things this program needs" in the itch-scratching crowd with both the time and inclination to do something about it.
Once you have a basic user interface which does what it needs to (think: the command line tools Xen has now) that's quite often where things stop, because to add significantly to that is a helluva lot of work and by the time you've worked out the system you're building a UI for to the point where you can build a UI, the need to do so has dropped through the floor because to get to that point you first had to figure out how the existing console-based tools worked in explicit detail.
Because every time data is lost, regardless of the cause, IT is expected to wave its magic wand and bring the data back. Sooner or later, the person losing the data is going to be high enough in the pecking order to get someone in IT sacked because the data wasn't recoverable.
If I had mod points and hadn't already posted, that would be getting a +1 insightful striaght away.
By the way, the folders are fucking ENCRYPTED. You can't decrypt data by saying "THIS IS YOUR ADMINISTRATOR, OPEN UP!"
IMO, most of the "But we need to be able to stop the admin seeing stuff" comments are probably from kids still in school, who would rather the affected data was lost than be readable by the admin in the event of something bad happening. (They generally give themselves away when they say "My school blocked this...")
It would be interesting to see how many of them retain this view the first time they lose data in a work environment.
Being able to access the data and actually doing so are two different things.
I need to be able to access the data, if only for backup purposes. The person in the company with the password might be run over by a bus tommorow. Or if you prefer something less dramatic, they may regularly change their password (good!), forget their old one (who cares?) and then need to restore from an old backup to prove what was on the system 6 months ago (Ah....).
But at the same time, with that power comes responsibility. If I was found to be accessing the data for any purpose other than "to provide a copy to give people who have a legitimate need to access it", I'd be sacked so fast....
I, for one, welcome our genetically modified supermouse overlords.