I'm not particularly uptight about my body. However, I still think being forced to submit to a full body scan as a prerequisite for flying on an airline is needlessly demeaning. And God help you if you question a TSA agent during the "performance of their jobs".
Sorry -- the culture of fear that has arisen in the wake of 9/11 is, IMHO, a far greater threat than any terrorist on airplane ever can be. This is just more of the same.
Police states have a boatload of flaws, as well. I'll gladly take the very, very slim odds of being blown up on an airplane to the certainty of a life of fear under a police state, thank you very much.
May I humbly suggest you read some history? You needn't go beyond the 20th century to see why police states are inherently evil.
That's kind of the point though -- IT *doesn't* deal with it. IT is pure overhead, so get rid of desktop support, and make IT responsible only for the network and servers. Make technical people (IT itself, engineers, etc.) responsible for their own equipment. You own it, you secure it, you fix it if it breaks. You get to choose the tool you use to get your job done (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) If you can't get your job done with the tools you selected, you're out of a job. If your security (or lack thereof) causes a data breach, you're responsible.
If we are reaching a point where even wiping a computer can't guarantee that it's free of malware, then perhaps it's time to rethink how companies deploy and maintain computers.
Interesting concept. About a decade ago, I used to work at an aircraft maintenance shop. Every mechanic there owned their own toolbox, maintained their own tools, and if they left one company to work for another, they took their tools and toolbox with them.
In light of this vulnerability, is the day coming when owning and maintaining your own PC "toolbox" will be required as well?
Will you MS fanboys give up the training issue already? When Microsoft shifted the look and feel of the GUI from 3.1 to 95, it required retraining. Office 2007 will require retraining. For businesses, Vista has training issues as well, because while Vista may be very similar to XP for the user, a lot of things have changed once you get beyond "click here to surf the web and click here to check your e-mail" and therefore the IT staff will need to be trained how to administer Vista. As a personal anecdote, I *cannot* for the life of me get my wife's Vista laptop to consistently find the shared printers from her 2K desktop, nor can I consistently get the wireless to work -- both tasks that were trivial in 2K and XP.
FWIW, we have rolled out a number of Linux desktops to our remote techs where I work, and have found that the Linux desktops are consistently easier for the (non-IT savvy) field techs to use and for the admin staff to manage than the Windows laptops we have deployed.
The purchase price is most certainly not the cost.
I don't know how you are getting $35 per server, unless OS licensing is vastly different than server products on top of the physical server's OS. Last time I checked (and it *has* been awhile, so that could be part of the difference, too) licensing for MS-SQL server was a couple K per CPU.
Even at ~$35 per server, that's more than the company I now work for pays to run Gentoo;) and that $35 per server adds up. The company that just bought the company I work for has over 300 servers...that's $10,500 just for licensing the OS that they already bought. Then they have to pay licensing for Exchange, and for anything bigger than a small office, it won't be just a single Exchange server. Then you'll need several admins to keep all of those Windows servers operational... I could go on, but you get the point.
You really can not talk someone into linux with a calm conscience without warning him that his system is considered "obsolete" by application makers the moment its published and a new development cycle has begun, and that there will be no way to install any older versions he might be got used to.
And that's different from Windows how?
Seriously, that's a load of FUD. I could post a list of counter-examples to both the Windows and Linux halves of your post, but the bottom line is that in my experience, I've had far, far less trouble getting old/obsolete software to run on new versions of Linux (or new software to run on old/obsolete distributions of Linux) than on Windows. Saying that "...there will be no way to install any older versions..." is just wrong.
I'm a Linux network admin professionally, but my wife uses Windows so she can run the Windows-only programs that she uses at her businesses. Less than six months ago, she bought a new laptop with Vista on it, and it's already hosed so thoroughly that it takes over half an hour to launch an application. I've done everything I know how to do to fix it (I'm a *nix admin, remember?), and I'm fed up with working on Vista now. I've asked her to dump all of her important data to a thumb drive, because at this point the only thing I can think to do is wipe Vista and reinstall.
She keeps griping at me because my Linux boxes always seem to be working, but her Windows PCs never do. It doesn't help that my answer is, "That's why I run Linux.":)
I'm a network admin in a shop that uses both open and closed source products. Most of our servers run Linux, and most of the services we run are open source, as well (postfix, lighttpd, bind-9, Samba, etc.). We do have a couple of Windows servers, and we also run MS-SQL for our billing system (another closed source product).
In my experience at this job, it is far, far easier to find solutions for the problems we've faced for our open-source software on Google than it is to find solutions for the problems we've faced on our proprietary systems. With open source software, chances are someone with enough coding skills to troubleshoot the software has already encountered the problem and has posted a fix. With proprietary systems, you can sometimes find a solution, but not always. In that case, your only solution is to contact the vendor...and nine times out of ten, they don't have any more clue than I or the other network admin do.
YMMV, but I'll gladly take open source and Google over a proprietary product any day of the week.
You've never owned a Ferrari -- or any other exotic sports car -- have you?
The Ferrari costs more to drive (fuel, tickets, insurance), is less reliable (my former boss used to own a Ferrari Mondial, and was *constantly* fixing things that were broken) and costs more to repair (premium parts for a premium vehicle). If all you need to do is drive to and from work, the Toyota is certainly the better product. On the other hand, if you want a conspicuous status symbol, buy the Ferrari.
And that's where your obligatory/. car analogy breaks down.
Windows is the Ferrari in this example. IME, it's less reliable, less suitable for what most people need, but it's what everybody (well, everybody who doesn't know better) wants. I'm not a Mac fanboy -- I use Linux -- but for most people, I suspect that a Mac would be the better tool. Need to type papers for school? Mac can do that. Need e-mail and to surf the web? Yep, Mac can do that. Don't want to waste your time and CPU cycles running A/V, anti-spyware, installing the endless critical security updates, etc.? Run a Mac, instead.
Need a high-performance, DirectX 10-capable, latest-greatest gaming rig? Neither Linux nor a Mac are probably going to do what you need; buy Vista with the most expensive hardware you can afford. But now you are talking about a PC as an entertainment device, not a tool. It's a Ferrari -- conspicuous consumption, totally unneccessary, and probably something you will constantly be tweaking, just to keep it running.
3) Not just a LONG time -- for as long as you have the transplant.
I got a kidney transplant in 1995, and I will be on anti-rejection drugs until either 1) I die, 2) something better comes along that doesn't require anti-rejection meds anymore (<crosses fingers>), 3) or I reject the kidney and it is removed.
A vote for Barr (same for Ron Paul) was an automatic vote against McCain...you...are just as much to blame for the current abomination. Probably more so.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
I hope he fails.
I hope you live in a different country then. If he fails, we'll all have to clean up the mess. I don't like Obama and I didn't vote for Obama, but I don't hope he fails. That's just stupid.
Domestically might be okay, if there were a snowball's chance that it would really turn the economy around. Personally, I think that companies that exhibit poor financial planning should fail. Nobody will be bailing my wife's businesses out if she can't handle the finances -- especially if they fail because my wife has been extravagant with upper management's salaries while profits are tanking. Why should GM or AIG be any different?
I agree with everything you said in the first two paragraphs as well as the spirit of what you said in that last paragraph, but I think your analysis was perhaps overly simplistic.
So why do deficits matter when Obama is running them up but they're awesome when Bush is doing it? Why are rebate cheques communist when Obama is sending them out but they're awesome when Bush is sending them out?
Deficits are bad regardless (which was, of course, your point). However, I think a lot of people are seriously against the way Obama is running up the deficit because Obama promised change, but is delivering more of the same. It's even more abhorrent when you consider that he is running up the deficit to bail out some of the largest corporations in the country -- corporations that essentially plundered our economy for short term gain and to line the pocketbooks of the CxO's of the corporations. The money Obama is giving to these companies has to come from somewhere, and in the end, it will be you and me who foot the bill. Apparently, it wasn't enough for the companies to wreck our economy with poor long-term planning and short term greed. Now, Obama is asking rank-and-file America -- you know, the people who are currently wondering how to make ends meet until the economy turns around -- to pony up so these companies can stay in business. Deficits are bad no matter who is in the Oval Office, but Obama is starting to sound a lot like Prince John from that one story about the guy who lived in Sherwood Forest.
Please tell me you are kidding. Did you miss this line in TFS: "The bill... also grants the Secretary of Commerce 'access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.'"
"...without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy..."??? This is NSA wiretapping all over again! Our new "Change we can believe in" president has only been in office for ~90 days, and he's already shaping up to be 'Dub' on steriods.
The music industry *can't* choose to disconnect your Internet service; your statement to the contrary is, IME, hyperbole. All the **AA's can do is contact your ISP and ask them to enforce their ToS, which may be as simple as asking you to remove the allegedly infringing content or as severe as disconnecting your service. However, that is *always* at the ISPs discretion.
During my tenure as an ISP sys admin, I never once received a copyright infringement notice that asked for anything more than "please enforce your ToS, thanks" Our legal department did occasionally get subpoena requests, but whether they were from the **AA's for legal action against the customer or whether they were from irate people being flooded with spam and/or viruses, I don't know (based on other abuse complaints taken against some of these customers before the subpoenas, I suspect the latter, but I never saw the actual subpoena requests).
And I apologize...in hindsight, my initial reply to you came off a lot more snarky than it should have.
Your post here will show up as an argument in court that you were certainly aware that it was a possibility, and that you did nothing to prevent it. Therefore, while you may not have been the one distributing the content, you were negligent by not taking reasonable precautions to prevent it from happening. You should have posted as AC:)
IANAL, however, so in practice YMMV. But that's my guess, anyway.
Exactly. It costs money to produce and record music. In return, each of the people involved in that process ask that you compensate them for the money they spent to bring that music to you. Why is that evil???
If the music sucks, don't listen to it. If it's good, reward those who made the music by spending the money to buy it.
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I'm not particularly uptight about my body. However, I still think being forced to submit to a full body scan as a prerequisite for flying on an airline is needlessly demeaning. And God help you if you question a TSA agent during the "performance of their jobs".
Sorry -- the culture of fear that has arisen in the wake of 9/11 is, IMHO, a far greater threat than any terrorist on airplane ever can be. This is just more of the same.
Police states have a boatload of flaws, as well. I'll gladly take the very, very slim odds of being blown up on an airplane to the certainty of a life of fear under a police state, thank you very much.
May I humbly suggest you read some history? You needn't go beyond the 20th century to see why police states are inherently evil.
That's kind of the point though -- IT *doesn't* deal with it. IT is pure overhead, so get rid of desktop support, and make IT responsible only for the network and servers. Make technical people (IT itself, engineers, etc.) responsible for their own equipment. You own it, you secure it, you fix it if it breaks. You get to choose the tool you use to get your job done (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) If you can't get your job done with the tools you selected, you're out of a job. If your security (or lack thereof) causes a data breach, you're responsible.
If we are reaching a point where even wiping a computer can't guarantee that it's free of malware, then perhaps it's time to rethink how companies deploy and maintain computers.
Interesting concept. About a decade ago, I used to work at an aircraft maintenance shop. Every mechanic there owned their own toolbox, maintained their own tools, and if they left one company to work for another, they took their tools and toolbox with them.
In light of this vulnerability, is the day coming when owning and maintaining your own PC "toolbox" will be required as well?
Will you MS fanboys give up the training issue already? When Microsoft shifted the look and feel of the GUI from 3.1 to 95, it required retraining. Office 2007 will require retraining. For businesses, Vista has training issues as well, because while Vista may be very similar to XP for the user, a lot of things have changed once you get beyond "click here to surf the web and click here to check your e-mail" and therefore the IT staff will need to be trained how to administer Vista. As a personal anecdote, I *cannot* for the life of me get my wife's Vista laptop to consistently find the shared printers from her 2K desktop, nor can I consistently get the wireless to work -- both tasks that were trivial in 2K and XP.
FWIW, we have rolled out a number of Linux desktops to our remote techs where I work, and have found that the Linux desktops are consistently easier for the (non-IT savvy) field techs to use and for the admin staff to manage than the Windows laptops we have deployed.
Huh...I could say the same thing about MS/proprietary software.
The purchase price is most certainly not the cost.
;) and that $35 per server adds up. The company that just bought the company I work for has over 300 servers...that's $10,500 just for licensing the OS that they already bought. Then they have to pay licensing for Exchange, and for anything bigger than a small office, it won't be just a single Exchange server. Then you'll need several admins to keep all of those Windows servers operational... I could go on, but you get the point.
I don't know how you are getting $35 per server, unless OS licensing is vastly different than server products on top of the physical server's OS. Last time I checked (and it *has* been awhile, so that could be part of the difference, too) licensing for MS-SQL server was a couple K per CPU.
Even at ~$35 per server, that's more than the company I now work for pays to run Gentoo
You really can not talk someone into linux with a calm conscience without warning him that his system is considered "obsolete" by application makers the moment its published and a new development cycle has begun, and that there will be no way to install any older versions he might be got used to.
And that's different from Windows how?
Seriously, that's a load of FUD. I could post a list of counter-examples to both the Windows and Linux halves of your post, but the bottom line is that in my experience, I've had far, far less trouble getting old/obsolete software to run on new versions of Linux (or new software to run on old/obsolete distributions of Linux) than on Windows. Saying that "...there will be no way to install any older versions..." is just wrong.
I'm a Linux network admin professionally, but my wife uses Windows so she can run the Windows-only programs that she uses at her businesses. Less than six months ago, she bought a new laptop with Vista on it, and it's already hosed so thoroughly that it takes over half an hour to launch an application. I've done everything I know how to do to fix it (I'm a *nix admin, remember?), and I'm fed up with working on Vista now. I've asked her to dump all of her important data to a thumb drive, because at this point the only thing I can think to do is wipe Vista and reinstall.
:)
She keeps griping at me because my Linux boxes always seem to be working, but her Windows PCs never do. It doesn't help that my answer is, "That's why I run Linux."
I'm a network admin in a shop that uses both open and closed source products. Most of our servers run Linux, and most of the services we run are open source, as well (postfix, lighttpd, bind-9, Samba, etc.). We do have a couple of Windows servers, and we also run MS-SQL for our billing system (another closed source product).
In my experience at this job, it is far, far easier to find solutions for the problems we've faced for our open-source software on Google than it is to find solutions for the problems we've faced on our proprietary systems. With open source software, chances are someone with enough coding skills to troubleshoot the software has already encountered the problem and has posted a fix. With proprietary systems, you can sometimes find a solution, but not always. In that case, your only solution is to contact the vendor...and nine times out of ten, they don't have any more clue than I or the other network admin do.
YMMV, but I'll gladly take open source and Google over a proprietary product any day of the week.
'Kay, I don't use Ubuntu, but on Gentoo, it was easy: "emerge app-office/openoffice-bin".
The Ferrari is certainly a better product...
You've never owned a Ferrari -- or any other exotic sports car -- have you?
/. car analogy breaks down.
The Ferrari costs more to drive (fuel, tickets, insurance), is less reliable (my former boss used to own a Ferrari Mondial, and was *constantly* fixing things that were broken) and costs more to repair (premium parts for a premium vehicle). If all you need to do is drive to and from work, the Toyota is certainly the better product. On the other hand, if you want a conspicuous status symbol, buy the Ferrari.
And that's where your obligatory
Windows is the Ferrari in this example. IME, it's less reliable, less suitable for what most people need, but it's what everybody (well, everybody who doesn't know better) wants. I'm not a Mac fanboy -- I use Linux -- but for most people, I suspect that a Mac would be the better tool. Need to type papers for school? Mac can do that. Need e-mail and to surf the web? Yep, Mac can do that. Don't want to waste your time and CPU cycles running A/V, anti-spyware, installing the endless critical security updates, etc.? Run a Mac, instead.
Need a high-performance, DirectX 10-capable, latest-greatest gaming rig? Neither Linux nor a Mac are probably going to do what you need; buy Vista with the most expensive hardware you can afford. But now you are talking about a PC as an entertainment device, not a tool. It's a Ferrari -- conspicuous consumption, totally unneccessary, and probably something you will constantly be tweaking, just to keep it running.
I'm soooo embarrassed.... :/
3) Not just a LONG time -- for as long as you have the transplant.
I got a kidney transplant in 1995, and I will be on anti-rejection drugs until either 1) I die, 2) something better comes along that doesn't require anti-rejection meds anymore (<crosses fingers>), 3) or I reject the kidney and it is removed.
A vote for Barr (same for Ron Paul) was an automatic vote against McCain...you...are just as much to blame for the current abomination. Probably more so.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
I hope he fails.
I hope you live in a different country then. If he fails, we'll all have to clean up the mess. I don't like Obama and I didn't vote for Obama, but I don't hope he fails. That's just stupid.
Domestically might be okay, if there were a snowball's chance that it would really turn the economy around. Personally, I think that companies that exhibit poor financial planning should fail. Nobody will be bailing my wife's businesses out if she can't handle the finances -- especially if they fail because my wife has been extravagant with upper management's salaries while profits are tanking. Why should GM or AIG be any different?
So why do deficits matter when Obama is running them up but they're awesome when Bush is doing it? Why are rebate cheques communist when Obama is sending them out but they're awesome when Bush is sending them out?
Deficits are bad regardless (which was, of course, your point). However, I think a lot of people are seriously against the way Obama is running up the deficit because Obama promised change, but is delivering more of the same. It's even more abhorrent when you consider that he is running up the deficit to bail out some of the largest corporations in the country -- corporations that essentially plundered our economy for short term gain and to line the pocketbooks of the CxO's of the corporations. The money Obama is giving to these companies has to come from somewhere, and in the end, it will be you and me who foot the bill. Apparently, it wasn't enough for the companies to wreck our economy with poor long-term planning and short term greed. Now, Obama is asking rank-and-file America -- you know, the people who are currently wondering how to make ends meet until the economy turns around -- to pony up so these companies can stay in business. Deficits are bad no matter who is in the Oval Office, but Obama is starting to sound a lot like Prince John from that one story about the guy who lived in Sherwood Forest.
None of which nullifies GPP's point, which was entirely valid. Sheesh...he misspelled a word. Get over it.
It's only been three months. Give him time.
Please tell me you are kidding. Did you miss this line in TFS: "The bill... also grants the Secretary of Commerce 'access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.'"
"...without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy..."??? This is NSA wiretapping all over again! Our new "Change we can believe in" president has only been in office for ~90 days, and he's already shaping up to be 'Dub' on steriods.
What were they thinking?
"This is gonna be awesome!!!"
Just a hunch...
My, what a big tin-foil hat you have there...
/s
Yes, the **AA's are out to get you, for no other reason than pure malice.
The music industry *can't* choose to disconnect your Internet service; your statement to the contrary is, IME, hyperbole. All the **AA's can do is contact your ISP and ask them to enforce their ToS, which may be as simple as asking you to remove the allegedly infringing content or as severe as disconnecting your service. However, that is *always* at the ISPs discretion.
During my tenure as an ISP sys admin, I never once received a copyright infringement notice that asked for anything more than "please enforce your ToS, thanks" Our legal department did occasionally get subpoena requests, but whether they were from the **AA's for legal action against the customer or whether they were from irate people being flooded with spam and/or viruses, I don't know (based on other abuse complaints taken against some of these customers before the subpoenas, I suspect the latter, but I never saw the actual subpoena requests).
And I apologize...in hindsight, my initial reply to you came off a lot more snarky than it should have.
Your post here will show up as an argument in court that you were certainly aware that it was a possibility, and that you did nothing to prevent it. Therefore, while you may not have been the one distributing the content, you were negligent by not taking reasonable precautions to prevent it from happening. You should have posted as AC :)
IANAL, however, so in practice YMMV. But that's my guess, anyway.
Exactly. It costs money to produce and record music. In return, each of the people involved in that process ask that you compensate them for the money they spent to bring that music to you. Why is that evil???
If the music sucks, don't listen to it. If it's good, reward those who made the music by spending the money to buy it.