Unfortunately, the boards of directors of many multi-nationals have formed interlocking directorates, and divorced their memberships and selection of leadership from the rest of the stockholders. The result is a pyramid scheme of executive salaries, run by the privileged few jumping from golden parachute to golden parachute, and being told by their peers at that level that they are well worth it.
And no, the difference between a CEO paid $1,000,000/year at a big company, and one paid $20,000,000/year, is usually nowhere near that large.
If you disable USB entirely, you disable touchpads, mice, and external CD drives necessary for laptops without DVD drives built in. Disabling the 'write' capability for those is awkward. And you'd better believe that I can attach a local networked memory device, such as a dumb web server, without detection unless the IT staff have invested one hell of a lot of effort in tracking and detection equipment.
Such detection is possible, but awfully expensive to set up. Very few facilities bother.
Although GCHQ does have this sort of thing (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun). They were basically revealed, by one of their own staff, to be involved in bugging the offices of six 'swing nations' of the UN, involved in the vote for the Iraq war.
Organizations with that kind of history and power can have publicity about their data losses quashed as 'national security', especially in a country as swayed by paperwork as England. Note that this does not necessarily apply to Ireland or Scotland, which have their own attitudes about privacy and government paperwork, but it especially applies to those actually in England that I've dealt with. They accept governmental paperwork manipulation to an extent that is shocking to most Americans I've worked with.
Well, yes. That was the one gaping flaw in IMAP client access to Google mail. (I was unclear in implying that they had their own IMAP client.) It's quite a new feature for them to correctly follow the IMAP standard and allow you to subscribe only to the folders of your choice.
The parents are doing something completely sane: fleeing poverty by working illegally in the US. It's good for them, it's good for their kids, and is a wise response to their situation. If we want to have them working here cheaply, we need to either control the border or tax their _employers_ enough to provide the necessary social services for them.
They finally fixed that IMAP folder subscription! That's great! It was my one big issue with Google IMAP services.
The recently featured drop-in Exchange replacement wasn't. It required Yeat Another Outlook Connector, and those have never worked well. That approach has been tried before by services like Netscape's server toolkits, which they sold off years ago. Remaining tied to Outlook as an Exchange replacement is never going to work well, because Microsoft can and will change the API's at will.
That is picking the cream of the crop, however. There, you have professionals running it, and some of them have gang bosses who would take failure very seriously. Like seeing the spam that gets past a modern filter, you're perhaps seeing the best of the huge sea of bad malware and worms out there.
This is counterbalanced by the 20 or 30 other athletes competing for the same prize, mostly working as McDonald's staff, security guards, etc. Sports salaries are a lottery: you have to factor in all the losing tickets people buy to make a sound investment in it. You also have to factor in the risks of becoming drug-addicted, getting your limbs mangled in a sports injury that destroys your career, and giving up the best years of your life to a generally very hard and strenuous lifestyle.
You've obviously not looked at much virus, worm, or malware software. It's mostly crap, assembled by people who think that inventing their own version of a sorting function or a password checker makes them 3l33t. Some of it is insightful, but mostly it's assembled like kids building go-carts from a junkyard of parts.
Does your system *insist* on encrypted protocols, especially for IMAP and POP, would be a better question. Gmail does not unless there's a group membership setup that can be used. And can POP be turned off? POP is an outdated protocol and leads to clients organizing their mail folders very carefully, running POP on a new machine and deleting everything off of the server. It's default settings are very dangerous and it should have been discarded years ago.
Google wrote a great white paper on this, too. Turns out RAID is not as reliable as you might think, because the drives tend to fail at the same time due to similar wear, and often without warning.
That's always a problem. With 4 staff and a large installation, you have to pick your levels of support for different services. I suggest that Google's very large customer base and experience will lead to far more reliability than having to train up an underfunded, in-house Zimbra or Exchange manager.
Exchange is awful, in terms of backup, mailing list handling, and account handling. It's also only properly available for Microsoft Outlook: nothing else provides the same set of festures. The only selling point for Exchange is its integrated calendar function, and _that_ sells a lot of software. For examples of missing features, pull up their web client and try to select all the messages on a page for deletion or transfer to another folder.
Google has been pretty stable, and knows how to make good, consistent, simple interfaces that work _anywhere_. They have some issues with the idea that all email should be saved forever, and their IMAP client does not allow you to select which mailboxes you want to see or not. This leads to a problem with the 'All Mail' group, which they really need to correct. But if you accept those limitations, it just works, for everyone, not just for Outlook users.
Yahoo seems interesting, with Zimbra available. But I agree with your stability concern for the company. Yahoo has basically lost the web search engine game, and their online services are trailing Google significantly, and they've just wasted a lot of time with at Microsoft takeover bid.
Chuck Berry would agree with you. (There are some famous tapes of him doing just that, related to his conviction for putting cameras in women's toilets.)
Would you mind if I take your paragraph apart?
> dd is just as good a tool now as it has ever been.
Yes, this is true. It hasn't changed noticeably.
> Your arguments while valid only encompass a small subset of the use cases.
It's a surprisingly large set, in particular the wasteful of duplicating the unused and unlinked and occupied by old random bits parts of the disk. They don't compress well, they slow down transfers, etc.
> Additionally you are presenting a straw man by mentioning that the data on disk isn't going to match the active database since it is kept in memory.
This is not a straw man. It's a critical part of backup. I've encountered many new, excited admins who entirely neglect it when planning backup solutions, believing that 'dd' will handle their problems because people recommend it without explaining the dangers.
> It is just as accruate to say the same thing for ANY backup operation which uses the disk as a source; which is to say that the the "complex and service interrupting steps" of blocking new changes, flushing, and syncing will be required regardless of what tool you are using.
This is true. However, in addition, backing up with 'dd' does not allow you to exclude the potentially damaged raw data. And because dd is so relatively slow due to backing up all the unused contents of the partition and potentially useless files as part of it, that locking step becomes longer and even more painful to handle.
There are ways to make it work: using a snapshot-capable system, such as LVM, allow one to sync the data and snapshot it and dump _that_ with dd. But it requires a lot more thought and work for which the expense could go to a larger tape drive or other, more generally useful tool.
Probable cause at the border is pretty easy: suspicious paperwork, evidence of other smuggling, confusing statements about your activities during your stay (and all the other data they already have through all the border guard processing) can all lead to 'probable cause'. Then there's all the fine print on your airline tickets about your goods being inspected.
Unfortunately, many countries have engaged in regular federal and business espionage as part of reviewing traveler's laptops. I've got reports from professional peers of their laptops having been disassembled and reassembled, incorrectly, from inside their hotel rooms when visiting China, and our having to consider those laptops compromised with all data on them. And customs agents worldwide are notorious for stealing equipment and personal data to sell off. So allowing this kind of unmonitored, unrecorded, warrant and court and paperwork free ransacking of laptops is simply begging for trouble.
And I've already got someone at work who downloaded it from CPAN, expecting it to just work on their desktop. Do you think we could get your 1 1/2 year old to actually write an installer for it?
You deserve the downmods. The BSD is not about 'developer freedom', it's about 'freedom to lock code away from other developers'. That's a corporate tactic to control resources, and constrains development by anyone other than the original developer.
This is precisely why the GPL put in all those 'stupidly restrictive' hooks, to prevent collecting the benefits of open source development, taking it proprietary, and abonding the other open source developers who helped create it in the first place. It is also exactly how the BSD license was written, to permit exactly this behavior.
Nonsense. Many companies pay their employees in stock shares, at least partly. Reducing the value of those shares reduces people's perceived salaries, and encourages the best employees to leave. It also seriously impacts the companies ability to manage capital for buildings, equipment, expansion, pension funds, insurance, and lots of other things that cost money and are very difficult to save up money for without operating as a far, far smaller company and suffering the takeover risks of _that_.
This is first year economics material, bolstered by the experience of many of us in actual private industry. Try working in a job where you get stock options, and see if you don't pay more attention to how these things work.
Yes, it most certainly can be. Company stock can take a nose dive, this can _generate_ a rumor, and the sales can take off. This is another reason it's so difficult to find the people who deliberately create a dive on a stock to manipulate it and short sell it, and so important for the transaction records to be clear.
As an example, if you've never seen what happens as the VP's try to hide their stock manipulations as a company is having trouble and will not make its quarterly or annual goals, you weren't paying attention to the fiscal officers and venture capitalists during the dot-bomb a few years ago.
No, the terms as described are _completely_ consistent with the BSD-style licenses. The newly developed tools and patches can remain in-house, copyrighted or trade secreted, against any further such development. And they're offering him money for paid work which they would own. It is, in fact, a common behavior for such proprietray softwrae development.
What makes this one interesting is that the original poster asked about what to do. And there are questions: if this software is so valuable, perhaps another employer would pay for it to be more publicly licensed? Or another company with a similar, GPL-licensed project, would appreciate a new contributor and be willing to hire someone who's learned their lessons about the booby traps of BSD licenses?
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Unfortunately, the boards of directors of many multi-nationals have formed interlocking directorates, and divorced their memberships and selection of leadership from the rest of the stockholders. The result is a pyramid scheme of executive salaries, run by the privileged few jumping from golden parachute to golden parachute, and being told by their peers at that level that they are well worth it. And no, the difference between a CEO paid $1,000,000/year at a big company, and one paid $20,000,000/year, is usually nowhere near that large.
If you disable USB entirely, you disable touchpads, mice, and external CD drives necessary for laptops without DVD drives built in. Disabling the 'write' capability for those is awkward. And you'd better believe that I can attach a local networked memory device, such as a dumb web server, without detection unless the IT staff have invested one hell of a lot of effort in tracking and detection equipment.
Such detection is possible, but awfully expensive to set up. Very few facilities bother.
Although GCHQ does have this sort of thing (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun). They were basically revealed, by one of their own staff, to be involved in bugging the offices of six 'swing nations' of the UN, involved in the vote for the Iraq war.
Organizations with that kind of history and power can have publicity about their data losses quashed as 'national security', especially in a country as swayed by paperwork as England. Note that this does not necessarily apply to Ireland or Scotland, which have their own attitudes about privacy and government paperwork, but it especially applies to those actually in England that I've dealt with. They accept governmental paperwork manipulation to an extent that is shocking to most Americans I've worked with.
Well, yes. That was the one gaping flaw in IMAP client access to Google mail. (I was unclear in implying that they had their own IMAP client.) It's quite a new feature for them to correctly follow the IMAP standard and allow you to subscribe only to the folders of your choice.
The parents are doing something completely sane: fleeing poverty by working illegally in the US. It's good for them, it's good for their kids, and is a wise response to their situation. If we want to have them working here cheaply, we need to either control the border or tax their _employers_ enough to provide the necessary social services for them.
It's not fair, of course, on their part, but I'm delighted that Google is actually following the IMAP specifications now.
They finally fixed that IMAP folder subscription! That's great! It was my one big issue with Google IMAP services.
The recently featured drop-in Exchange replacement wasn't. It required Yeat Another Outlook Connector, and those have never worked well. That approach has been tried before by services like Netscape's server toolkits, which they sold off years ago. Remaining tied to Outlook as an Exchange replacement is never going to work well, because Microsoft can and will change the API's at will.
That is picking the cream of the crop, however. There, you have professionals running it, and some of them have gang bosses who would take failure very seriously. Like seeing the spam that gets past a modern filter, you're perhaps seeing the best of the huge sea of bad malware and worms out there.
And whose fault is it that their parents are there, not paying taxes to pay for the school systems?
Go re-read Godwin's Law. That's not what it said.
This is counterbalanced by the 20 or 30 other athletes competing for the same prize, mostly working as McDonald's staff, security guards, etc. Sports salaries are a lottery: you have to factor in all the losing tickets people buy to make a sound investment in it. You also have to factor in the risks of becoming drug-addicted, getting your limbs mangled in a sports injury that destroys your career, and giving up the best years of your life to a generally very hard and strenuous lifestyle.
But that would mean understanding math.
You've obviously not looked at much virus, worm, or malware software. It's mostly crap, assembled by people who think that inventing their own version of a sorting function or a password checker makes them 3l33t. Some of it is insightful, but mostly it's assembled like kids building go-carts from a junkyard of parts.
Does your system *insist* on encrypted protocols, especially for IMAP and POP, would be a better question. Gmail does not unless there's a group membership setup that can be used. And can POP be turned off? POP is an outdated protocol and leads to clients organizing their mail folders very carefully, running POP on a new machine and deleting everything off of the server. It's default settings are very dangerous and it should have been discarded years ago.
Google wrote a great white paper on this, too. Turns out RAID is not as reliable as you might think, because the drives tend to fail at the same time due to similar wear, and often without warning.
That's always a problem. With 4 staff and a large installation, you have to pick your levels of support for different services. I suggest that Google's very large customer base and experience will lead to far more reliability than having to train up an underfunded, in-house Zimbra or Exchange manager.
Agreed: Squirrelmail is stable, but has unfortunate handling of its archives. Does Roundcube do them effectively?
Squirrelmail did set a standard for mailing list behavior that is difficult to beat: I'm delighted to hear others are doing as good of a job.
Exchange is awful, in terms of backup, mailing list handling, and account handling. It's also only properly available for Microsoft Outlook: nothing else provides the same set of festures. The only selling point for Exchange is its integrated calendar function, and _that_ sells a lot of software. For examples of missing features, pull up their web client and try to select all the messages on a page for deletion or transfer to another folder.
Google has been pretty stable, and knows how to make good, consistent, simple interfaces that work _anywhere_. They have some issues with the idea that all email should be saved forever, and their IMAP client does not allow you to select which mailboxes you want to see or not. This leads to a problem with the 'All Mail' group, which they really need to correct. But if you accept those limitations, it just works, for everyone, not just for Outlook users.
Yahoo seems interesting, with Zimbra available. But I agree with your stability concern for the company. Yahoo has basically lost the web search engine game, and their online services are trailing Google significantly, and they've just wasted a lot of time with at Microsoft takeover bid.
Chuck Berry would agree with you. (There are some famous tapes of him doing just that, related to his conviction for putting cameras in women's toilets.)
Would you mind if I take your paragraph apart? > dd is just as good a tool now as it has ever been. Yes, this is true. It hasn't changed noticeably. > Your arguments while valid only encompass a small subset of the use cases. It's a surprisingly large set, in particular the wasteful of duplicating the unused and unlinked and occupied by old random bits parts of the disk. They don't compress well, they slow down transfers, etc. > Additionally you are presenting a straw man by mentioning that the data on disk isn't going to match the active database since it is kept in memory. This is not a straw man. It's a critical part of backup. I've encountered many new, excited admins who entirely neglect it when planning backup solutions, believing that 'dd' will handle their problems because people recommend it without explaining the dangers. > It is just as accruate to say the same thing for ANY backup operation which uses the disk as a source; which is to say that the the "complex and service interrupting steps" of blocking new changes, flushing, and syncing will be required regardless of what tool you are using. This is true. However, in addition, backing up with 'dd' does not allow you to exclude the potentially damaged raw data. And because dd is so relatively slow due to backing up all the unused contents of the partition and potentially useless files as part of it, that locking step becomes longer and even more painful to handle. There are ways to make it work: using a snapshot-capable system, such as LVM, allow one to sync the data and snapshot it and dump _that_ with dd. But it requires a lot more thought and work for which the expense could go to a larger tape drive or other, more generally useful tool.
Probable cause at the border is pretty easy: suspicious paperwork, evidence of other smuggling, confusing statements about your activities during your stay (and all the other data they already have through all the border guard processing) can all lead to 'probable cause'. Then there's all the fine print on your airline tickets about your goods being inspected.
Unfortunately, many countries have engaged in regular federal and business espionage as part of reviewing traveler's laptops. I've got reports from professional peers of their laptops having been disassembled and reassembled, incorrectly, from inside their hotel rooms when visiting China, and our having to consider those laptops compromised with all data on them. And customs agents worldwide are notorious for stealing equipment and personal data to sell off. So allowing this kind of unmonitored, unrecorded, warrant and court and paperwork free ransacking of laptops is simply begging for trouble.
And I've already got someone at work who downloaded it from CPAN, expecting it to just work on their desktop. Do you think we could get your 1 1/2 year old to actually write an installer for it?
You deserve the downmods. The BSD is not about 'developer freedom', it's about 'freedom to lock code away from other developers'. That's a corporate tactic to control resources, and constrains development by anyone other than the original developer.
This is precisely why the GPL put in all those 'stupidly restrictive' hooks, to prevent collecting the benefits of open source development, taking it proprietary, and abonding the other open source developers who helped create it in the first place. It is also exactly how the BSD license was written, to permit exactly this behavior.
Nonsense. Many companies pay their employees in stock shares, at least partly. Reducing the value of those shares reduces people's perceived salaries, and encourages the best employees to leave. It also seriously impacts the companies ability to manage capital for buildings, equipment, expansion, pension funds, insurance, and lots of other things that cost money and are very difficult to save up money for without operating as a far, far smaller company and suffering the takeover risks of _that_.
This is first year economics material, bolstered by the experience of many of us in actual private industry. Try working in a job where you get stock options, and see if you don't pay more attention to how these things work.
Yes, it most certainly can be. Company stock can take a nose dive, this can _generate_ a rumor, and the sales can take off. This is another reason it's so difficult to find the people who deliberately create a dive on a stock to manipulate it and short sell it, and so important for the transaction records to be clear.
As an example, if you've never seen what happens as the VP's try to hide their stock manipulations as a company is having trouble and will not make its quarterly or annual goals, you weren't paying attention to the fiscal officers and venture capitalists during the dot-bomb a few years ago.
No, the terms as described are _completely_ consistent with the BSD-style licenses. The newly developed tools and patches can remain in-house, copyrighted or trade secreted, against any further such development. And they're offering him money for paid work which they would own. It is, in fact, a common behavior for such proprietray softwrae development.
What makes this one interesting is that the original poster asked about what to do. And there are questions: if this software is so valuable, perhaps another employer would pay for it to be more publicly licensed? Or another company with a similar, GPL-licensed project, would appreciate a new contributor and be willing to hire someone who's learned their lessons about the booby traps of BSD licenses?