What the internet needs right now is more and more bandwidth both on the backbone networks.
I disagree. It seems that a lot of bandwidth is being wasted with pr0n and spam, both of which would probably saturate any pipe you cared to use.
So if you can solve the spam problem, and your ISP can build a massive cache exclusively for pr0n, the backbone bandwidth issues would simply disappear.
While I accept what you're saying, it is my opinion that the great majority of legislators aren't bright enough to appreciate the difference.
I was actually thinking more about porn in general than child porn in particular - though re-reading I obviously didn't make that clear. By which definition I probably am dumb.
I think you make some excellent points. Indeed, a similar system exists in many countries if you only think about it for a minute - I'll use the UK as an example here.
Child porn is illegal, but nobody has yet (to my knowledge) tried to enforce blocking at an ISP level. However, there is nothing to stop you buying Internet provision from a company which offers a "filtered" service, or installing software to filter it yourself.
How effective this all is is another issue altogether, but at least in the above example the decision is made by the individual rather than the government. Indeed, I can think of a few uses, both personal and organisational:
Schools/Prisons/Workplaces.
People in the public eye who are concerned having seen others' careers disappear following child porn allegations.
Michael Jackson.
Now, watch this get merrily modded down because I've said that people may voluntarily choose to have their internet access "censored".
You're absolutely right. But the increase in Linux server shipments says to me that acceptance is increasing.
Sooner or later, a Linux system crapping out will be perceived as being "one of those things", just like you described an MS system on Dell hardware. If/When Linux has reached that level of acceptance, the writing is almost certainly on the wall for traditional proprietary server systems - be it Microsoft, Sun or whatever.
Quite frankly, if it's that business critical you should have a recovery plan and possibly redundant systems anyhow.
I think this is what most people mean when they say that support isn't as good. It's annoying to the Microsoft user because the Open Source community's stock response is "You ever tried calling Microsoft Support?".
And, somewhat embarrassingly, that's exactly what I just did;)
But what the person really meant wasn't "vendor support isn't as good" but "I know who to speak to for support and there's plenty of people to choose from".
Having cleared that up, may I venture to make a few suggestions as a fellow IT professional and a Linux user?
Find a local Linux user group.
Find a spare PC, decide on something you'd like it to do and set up Linux on the PC to do it. A webserver is a nice easy start because most Linux distributions have reasonably sensible Apache installations available as distributed. Then you can look at email, SMB, LDAP etc...
Of course, finding time to do the above is the tricky bit....
the fact that they need to roll it out on clients and servers at the same time
All joking aside, how many corporations do you know that plan upgrades along the lines of "every single system in the business, desktop & server, must be upgraded simultaneously, there can be no exceptions"? If what you say is true, I can see it acting as a major stumbling block to Longhorn being adopted in business.
At least with Microsoft I have someone to "blame" when things go wrong
You (or your boss) may like the warm fuzzy feeling of having someone to hold responsible if things go wrong, but have either of you either tried contacting Microsoft technical support or read the EULA lately?
Unless you're a Super-Gold-Mega-Partner, my experience suggests: forget it.
Call me naive, but surely there's no such thing as an independent study? After all, someone's paying for it and usually the someone who's paying for it has already got an opinion. I've yet to see an "independent study" which didn't favour the organisation paying for it.
Speaking as a.uk'ian, the Bank of England completely redesigns and re-issues every single banknote denomination every few years and withdraws the old ones.
High street banks have to send worn out currency to the Bank of England for destruction anyway - the infrastructure to transport vast quantities of cold hard cash which is to be taken out of circulation is already there. The only real difference is that every few years it's got rather more to transport than usual.
I will concede that in a relatively small country with currency which isn't very well accepted in other countries, this is perhaps rather easier than it would be in the US. But I doubt it's impossible - more likely nobody in the US much wants to pay for it.
'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.'
That's a helluva lot of pr0n. I think there is a need for a definition of speed in terms of "number of horny people who can be satisfied per second".
Assuming a couple of hundred KB for a high-res JPEG, or about 30MB for a short film, 6.3Gbps would be equivalent to about 20 films or 3150 images per second.
With it's a 75/25 split between movies and still images, that's 15 films and 750 images.
Prediction: This will be modded -1 Flamebait because it's pretty scathing.
I hear what you're saying, but in my experience most UK government departments are at least three-parts crippled with petty beaurocracy devised by sad, pathetic little people who have decided to vest what little power they have into Making Things Work A Particular Way.
Not that this way is any better, it's just a demonstration of their power. It may be as small as a form which has to be filled in. I've seen cases where it actually dictates who an entire government agency will work with, regardless of who should be using their services.
Such dysfunctional organisation doesn't exactly lend itself to open discussion of requirements.
I sincerely hope the NHS IT project doesn't follow this course. But, for yours and other non-UK citizens benefit, there follows an explanation of how UK government IT projects are usually run.
Such projects usually start with great, noble intentions. They may be a tad ambitious, but that's about the worst thing about them.
The contract goes out to tender, and bids are taken. Eventually, supplier(s) are chosen.
Then the requirements change, usually because they weren't very clear to begin with, or they were too ambitious, or not ambitious enough or..... Most suppliers charge a fortune for changing requirements part way through a project, so this costs taxpayers quite a bit of money.
The project now continues (with its new requirements). The requirements then change again, with an attendant price increase.
Repeat this a few times, until you have a project which is up to 2 years late.
Finally, the nice shiny new system meets requirements (more-or-less). But non-functional requirements frequently haven't been considered. "Non-functional" requirements are those which make the system usable as opposed to functional. It might be that there's so much information presented at once that staff cannot easily use it, or that the system is considerably slower than expected. It's around now that the press starts to ask questions. Like "What happened to that new system which was supposed to revolutionise XXXX?"
The government blames the supplier(s) for failing to build an appropriate system. The supplier(s) blame the government for continually changing their requirements and generally being very difficult to work with.
After a while, the pattern becomes apparent - no matter which suppliers are chosen, the involvement of the government has become known as a kiss of death. This doesn't always help the supplier either, particularly if they bid for a number of government projects. Google for "crapita" to get an idea of what I mean.
You're absolutely right. Which makes me think this is a pilot. Maybe it's to put the frighteners on Microsoft to get a better deal, maybe it's serious.
However, it can't have escaped NHS management attention that a high-profile pilot of Linux on the desktop is an excellent way to negotiate discounts on Windows. Given the quantities involved, it is possible that the discounts could be worth considerably more than 5000 "throwaway" JDS licenses.
2. Drivers for medical devices: Most devices come with Windows drivers only.
I don't work in the NHS, but IME when an organisation the size of the NHS (one of the biggest employers in the country) says "we want it to work in Linux", the answer is not "We don't support Linux".
I'd imagine it depends on the ring tone. And since 3rd party ring tones are pretty popular in Europe, there's probably not much point in specifying particular ring tones. You'll just confuse the customer.
I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we should be able to get from $16-20,
IANAA (I am not an American) but isn't the obvious answer to Hatch's problem: Yes we know Senator. That's the idea.
Or are you saying that you're happy to ban a technology which has many fundamentally excellent reasons to exist purely because it can be used to infringe copyright?
That being the case, do you possess a camera? A VCR? A tape deck? You won't mind disposing of them, then?
Oh, you say that the bill would never be enforced in that way?
force them to pay for the privelege of being spied on?
Well, the right to tap phone conversations has existed in most Western countries for some time. The issue here is "who pays"?
In this case, it's either the customer who's bought a VoIP service or the government.
If the government pays, where do you think the government will get the money from? Free Clue: That tax you pay every year - not all of it goes to bombing third world countries whose name most Americans can't pronounce.
Or look at it another way, consider it insurance that Microsoft and IBM will never be made irrelevent by Open Source, as soon as it gets too popular, it will be litigated away.
Quite possibly true with Microsoft, but I would disagree with that statement as applied to IBM (or for that matter any major IT service-oriented company).
The logic being: most IT service/solution oriented companies make their money from support contracts. IBM, Sun, Novell - they all do it. A proper support contract with something like "4 hour response/8 hour fix, 24x365" does Not Come Cheap.
For them, software development is a cost centre rather than a profit centre. If that software development can be partly "outsourced" by open sourcing it and keeping a smaller team of programmers onboard, wonderful! Costs significantly reduced, the main source of income (support contracts) remains more-or-less intact.
True, someone else can offer support for it. But that's already been going on for years - why should it have any significant impact now?
It seems that anyone who shows an ounce of wariness when the GPL may face the courts is immediately derided as a non-believer, a heretic to be burned at the stake.
Yes, the GPL is clearly written. Yes, it's designed to give you rights rather than take them away. The rubbing point with some businesses is that it forces the "licensee" to honour those rights down the line rather than quietly ignore them - and the rights in question may well conflict with what the business wants to do.
This next bit is pure speculation, so go ahead and flame me:
Lawyers can understand the GPL because it's clearly written. But they get confused because they can't think why anyone would want to do this. Certainly, widespread acceptance of GPL'ed software has alleviated this problem to a certain extent but by no means has it vanished.
The same thing can be said of many managers. The very idea of giving your work away is flooble quartz dongdingdong digglewib ping.
You didn't understand that last sentence? Thought I'd lost my mind? That it made no sense at all?
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOUR MANAGER THINKS WHEN HE GIVES YOU THAT BLANK STARE AS YOU EXPLAIN FREE SOFTWARE.
Again, this is less of an issue than it used to be owing to more widespread acceptance of the GPL. But again, it has by no means disappeared.
Now, the big question is, will a judge understand what the purpose of the GPL is and uphold it, or will he think it's a lot of flooble quartz dongdingdong dibblewib ping? If the latter, what will the final judgement say?
Slashdot Mirror
What the internet needs right now is more and more bandwidth both on the backbone networks.
I disagree. It seems that a lot of bandwidth is being wasted with pr0n and spam, both of which would probably saturate any pipe you cared to use.
So if you can solve the spam problem, and your ISP can build a massive cache exclusively for pr0n, the backbone bandwidth issues would simply disappear.
While I accept what you're saying, it is my opinion that the great majority of legislators aren't bright enough to appreciate the difference.
I was actually thinking more about porn in general than child porn in particular - though re-reading I obviously didn't make that clear. By which definition I probably am dumb.
I think you make some excellent points. Indeed, a similar system exists in many countries if you only think about it for a minute - I'll use the UK as an example here.
Child porn is illegal, but nobody has yet (to my knowledge) tried to enforce blocking at an ISP level. However, there is nothing to stop you buying Internet provision from a company which offers a "filtered" service, or installing software to filter it yourself.
How effective this all is is another issue altogether, but at least in the above example the decision is made by the individual rather than the government. Indeed, I can think of a few uses, both personal and organisational:
Now, watch this get merrily modded down because I've said that people may voluntarily choose to have their internet access "censored".
You're absolutely right. But the increase in Linux server shipments says to me that acceptance is increasing.
Sooner or later, a Linux system crapping out will be perceived as being "one of those things", just like you described an MS system on Dell hardware. If/When Linux has reached that level of acceptance, the writing is almost certainly on the wall for traditional proprietary server systems - be it Microsoft, Sun or whatever.
Quite frankly, if it's that business critical you should have a recovery plan and possibly redundant systems anyhow.
And, somewhat embarrassingly, that's exactly what I just did
But what the person really meant wasn't "vendor support isn't as good" but "I know who to speak to for support and there's plenty of people to choose from".
Having cleared that up, may I venture to make a few suggestions as a fellow IT professional and a Linux user?
Of course, finding time to do the above is the tricky bit....
the fact that they need to roll it out on clients and servers at the same time
All joking aside, how many corporations do you know that plan upgrades along the lines of "every single system in the business, desktop & server, must be upgraded simultaneously, there can be no exceptions"? If what you say is true, I can see it acting as a major stumbling block to Longhorn being adopted in business.
At least with Microsoft I have someone to "blame" when things go wrong
You (or your boss) may like the warm fuzzy feeling of having someone to hold responsible if things go wrong, but have either of you either tried contacting Microsoft technical support or read the EULA lately?
Unless you're a Super-Gold-Mega-Partner, my experience suggests: forget it.
Call me naive, but surely there's no such thing as an independent study? After all, someone's paying for it and usually the someone who's paying for it has already got an opinion. I've yet to see an "independent study" which didn't favour the organisation paying for it.
Speaking as a .uk'ian, the Bank of England completely redesigns and re-issues every single banknote denomination every few years and withdraws the old ones.
High street banks have to send worn out currency to the Bank of England for destruction anyway - the infrastructure to transport vast quantities of cold hard cash which is to be taken out of circulation is already there. The only real difference is that every few years it's got rather more to transport than usual.
I will concede that in a relatively small country with currency which isn't very well accepted in other countries, this is perhaps rather easier than it would be in the US. But I doubt it's impossible - more likely nobody in the US much wants to pay for it.
'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.'
That's a helluva lot of pr0n. I think there is a need for a definition of speed in terms of "number of horny people who can be satisfied per second".
Assuming a couple of hundred KB for a high-res JPEG, or about 30MB for a short film, 6.3Gbps would be equivalent to about 20 films or 3150 images per second.
With it's a 75/25 split between movies and still images, that's 15 films and 750 images.
Or 765 orgasms per second.
Prediction: This will be modded -1 Flamebait because it's pretty scathing.
I hear what you're saying, but in my experience most UK government departments are at least three-parts crippled with petty beaurocracy devised by sad, pathetic little people who have decided to vest what little power they have into Making Things Work A Particular Way.
Not that this way is any better, it's just a demonstration of their power. It may be as small as a form which has to be filled in. I've seen cases where it actually dictates who an entire government agency will work with, regardless of who should be using their services.
Such dysfunctional organisation doesn't exactly lend itself to open discussion of requirements.
I sincerely hope the NHS IT project doesn't follow this course. But, for yours and other non-UK citizens benefit, there follows an explanation of how UK government IT projects are usually run.
Such projects usually start with great, noble intentions. They may be a tad ambitious, but that's about the worst thing about them.
The contract goes out to tender, and bids are taken. Eventually, supplier(s) are chosen.
Then the requirements change, usually because they weren't very clear to begin with, or they were too ambitious, or not ambitious enough or..... Most suppliers charge a fortune for changing requirements part way through a project, so this costs taxpayers quite a bit of money.
The project now continues (with its new requirements). The requirements then change again, with an attendant price increase.
Repeat this a few times, until you have a project which is up to 2 years late.
Finally, the nice shiny new system meets requirements (more-or-less). But non-functional requirements frequently haven't been considered. "Non-functional" requirements are those which make the system usable as opposed to functional. It might be that there's so much information presented at once that staff cannot easily use it, or that the system is considerably slower than expected. It's around now that the press starts to ask questions. Like "What happened to that new system which was supposed to revolutionise XXXX?"
The government blames the supplier(s) for failing to build an appropriate system. The supplier(s) blame the government for continually changing their requirements and generally being very difficult to work with.
After a while, the pattern becomes apparent - no matter which suppliers are chosen, the involvement of the government has become known as a kiss of death. This doesn't always help the supplier either, particularly if they bid for a number of government projects. Google for "crapita" to get an idea of what I mean.
I'm sure there is a very detailed plan, just not one we are privy to.
Not a troll, but you're not very familiar with UK governement IT projects, are you?
You're absolutely right. Which makes me think this is a pilot. Maybe it's to put the frighteners on Microsoft to get a better deal, maybe it's serious.
However, it can't have escaped NHS management attention that a high-profile pilot of Linux on the desktop is an excellent way to negotiate discounts on Windows. Given the quantities involved, it is possible that the discounts could be worth considerably more than 5000 "throwaway" JDS licenses.
2. Drivers for medical devices: Most devices come with Windows drivers only.
I don't work in the NHS, but IME when an organisation the size of the NHS (one of the biggest employers in the country) says "we want it to work in Linux", the answer is not "We don't support Linux".
I'd imagine it depends on the ring tone. And since 3rd party ring tones are pretty popular in Europe, there's probably not much point in specifying particular ring tones. You'll just confuse the customer.
Clearly that isn't enough evidence for some...
(SCO-Microsoft connection)
t ml
5 9.shtml
h tm
Where is the source for this information?
Does this little lot help?
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.h
http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/04/03/08/04572
http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b05212003.
Oh they'll make parts which fail all right. Usually about a week after the warranty runs out.
No you won't. Can you imagine Compaq, Dell or IBM voluntarily producing a PC which never wears out?
IANAA (I am not an American) but isn't the obvious answer to Hatch's problem: Yes we know Senator. That's the idea.
Or are you saying that you're happy to ban a technology which has many fundamentally excellent reasons to exist purely because it can be used to infringe copyright?
That being the case, do you possess a camera? A VCR? A tape deck? You won't mind disposing of them, then?
Oh, you say that the bill would never be enforced in that way?
WELL DON'T WRITE IT IN THAT WAY, STUPID!
force them to pay for the privelege of being spied on?
Well, the right to tap phone conversations has existed in most Western countries for some time. The issue here is "who pays"?
In this case, it's either the customer who's bought a VoIP service or the government.
If the government pays, where do you think the government will get the money from? Free Clue: That tax you pay every year - not all of it goes to bombing third world countries whose name most Americans can't pronounce.
Or look at it another way, consider it insurance that Microsoft and IBM will never be made irrelevent by Open Source, as soon as it gets too popular, it will be litigated away.
Quite possibly true with Microsoft, but I would disagree with that statement as applied to IBM (or for that matter any major IT service-oriented company).
The logic being: most IT service/solution oriented companies make their money from support contracts. IBM, Sun, Novell - they all do it. A proper support contract with something like "4 hour response/8 hour fix, 24x365" does Not Come Cheap.
For them, software development is a cost centre rather than a profit centre. If that software development can be partly "outsourced" by open sourcing it and keeping a smaller team of programmers onboard, wonderful! Costs significantly reduced, the main source of income (support contracts) remains more-or-less intact.
True, someone else can offer support for it. But that's already been going on for years - why should it have any significant impact now?
It seems that anyone who shows an ounce of wariness when the GPL may face the courts is immediately derided as a non-believer, a heretic to be burned at the stake.
Yes, the GPL is clearly written. Yes, it's designed to give you rights rather than take them away. The rubbing point with some businesses is that it forces the "licensee" to honour those rights down the line rather than quietly ignore them - and the rights in question may well conflict with what the business wants to do.
This next bit is pure speculation, so go ahead and flame me:
Lawyers can understand the GPL because it's clearly written. But they get confused because they can't think why anyone would want to do this. Certainly, widespread acceptance of GPL'ed software has alleviated this problem to a certain extent but by no means has it vanished.
The same thing can be said of many managers. The very idea of giving your work away is flooble quartz dongdingdong digglewib ping.
You didn't understand that last sentence? Thought I'd lost my mind? That it made no sense at all?
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOUR MANAGER THINKS WHEN HE GIVES YOU THAT BLANK STARE AS YOU EXPLAIN FREE SOFTWARE.
Again, this is less of an issue than it used to be owing to more widespread acceptance of the GPL. But again, it has by no means disappeared.
Now, the big question is, will a judge understand what the purpose of the GPL is and uphold it, or will he think it's a lot of flooble quartz dongdingdong dibblewib ping? If the latter, what will the final judgement say?
Yes, but do they run it on Linux?