You have a really good point and a great example that most everyone can relate to, replace the rage (and profanity) with intellectual disgust and it's hard not to agree.
Threatening the president and threatening the guy down the street are two entirely different scenarios. There was a young woman (Lisa Bianco) in my city whose ex-husband had threatened her in writing and via the telephone from Prison. He was released on an 8 hour pass where he proceeded to murder her, a crime for which he received the death penalty. This is the normal standard that threats must reach to attain credibility.
You have a right to free speech but there is no right to "not be offended". If I make comments that are not appreciated by everyone (these comments for example) I have excersized my right to speek in a public forum. I now have a responsibility to allow others to respond. Some of those responses will likely be offensive to me but I have accepted that I might not like what I hear when I spoke in public. Threats of physical violence must be credible threats before they break any laws. If someone says "I'll bash your head in!" the only way to determine that the threat is credible is after the bash my head in or are caught outside my house with a brick in hand repeating the threat. I think this steps over the bounds of free speech. The best response would have been for the moderator to terminate the accounts of the offenders (if they had accounts) and to delete the comments from the forum if they did not meet the standards of the forum.
Actually mine was written by someone who manages support for thousands of "End Users". My focus does tend to be how to keep systems running rather than making them easy to break. I would have to say that your comment shows your disdain for end users that is typical of the open source community and is a significant contributor to the lack of success of the linux desktop. You can't expect to succeed if you abhor your "customer".
I think you meant "Al" Capone not Joe (did Al have a brother?)
It could be that Linus Torvalds is a sleeper KGB agent trained by his father to help re-establish communist domination of Europe by defeating capitolism through the use of the open source concept. More evidence exists for this than your Death Squads idea. FYI - The leader of the Honduran Death Squads was Colonel Juan Lopéz Grijalba, a native Honduran.
No one is railing against the program just the author who is missing the point of providing this device to children in "the most remote regions of the globe". Making a device that is easy to break makes failure of a noble endeavor that much more likley. As long as it runs reliably (which apparently the Sugar OS did not) who cares what OS it uses.
My first computer was an Atari (yes young man they made computers back in the day) and it was a far cry from these systems. We did tinker with our hardware but these devices are made to allow access to information to school children in remote villages where power is an issue. I personally consider anything east of London to be Caveministan but having lived in Europe for a few years I do remember a few folks who thought some parts of France were civilized.
There is no proof that John Negroponte was not in Dallas in November of 1963. I'm not implying anthing, I'm just saying that there is no proof. Coincidence? I think not.
Please help me out here, does the author really think that kids in third world countries are going to be doing development work on these limited devices? Based on the quote below from the article the author really beleives that these devices should be open to tampering/fiddling. Does he think that if the device fails there will be a geek squad near by? Are hacking skills of value when you live in a mud hut?
Windows is designed against this, with no programming tools built in, and an almost anti-hacker/explorer/fiddler philosophy that goes beyond it merely being "closed source" to putting up impediments to learning any useful skills.
So he gave the password to the Mayor who then gave it to the same managers. I am waiting for the next article detailing the devastation in SF? This guy had no legal right nor moral obligation to keep access to the cities infrastructure only to himself. What would have happened if he were hit by a car? This spoiled child went out on a limb to get attention for himself. He put a city at risk and ruined his career to keep from doing what every other person who has ever worked in IT has had to do...Share control. In the end whether there are policies in place or competent employees to handle things it wasn't his call. I don't know about legalities but I can say that he deserves to have his career ruined as well as his boss who obviously had no idea what was going on in his own department.
I work in Healthcare IT. Sometimes when I think I have stress to deal with I walk to a patient care floor and watch what the nurses do for a living. I have seen a nurse changing a mans diarhea filled diaper in one bed while the patient in the other bed began to vomit violently. She helped both patients clean themselves with a smile telling them not to worry about the mess. This often helps me realize how much I love working in IT.
The statements that Cloud Computing, grid computing, and open source software are not priorities is ludicrous. These are tools that are used to solve problems. It's like saying a hammer is a priority rather than building a house. No C?O will ever say that these are priorities while they may say that virtualization is a priority because it is often considered a project to virtualize as much as possible for DR and to cut costs. If spending on IT does dip we all know that only the bottom 10% will get their walking papers. I would assume that Charles King will be one of them.
Gartner announced today that based on it's analysis the wheel is long over due for replacement as there are several small companies experimenting with alternative means of moving small and large loads between different locations. "The wheel has been around for over 10,000 years and we thing it is nearing the end of it's improvement life cycle" said Jack Johnson and senior partner at Gartner. All indications point to the most likely replacement being slave labor. Slaves will carry loads on their backs for low weights and short trips with groups of slaves banding together larger loads and longer trips. As the TCO for slaves is quite low compared to maintaining a modern tractor trailer fleet this new direction will clearly benefit businesses all over the world. Where will all of these new slaves come from? Gartner predicts that Google will provide this new labor from it's current work force...
Gartners gift for prognostication leaves quite a bit to be desired. In 1997 they declared that the PC would be dead in 5 years in favor of thin client network terminals. This is but one of the many examples of just how wrong Gartner is in almost every case. Gartner bases all of their assumptions on TCO and what they would like to see rather than practicality. In 1997 their conclusions would have been different (and closer to correct) had they talked to anyone working in IT at the time. If you want to excel in IT find out what Gartner predicts will be the new trend and do the opposite, they are the George Castanza of the IT world.
You are 100% correct even though this crowd doesn't want to hear it. The pimple faced geek who talked me into RedHat told me that it was free and would never-ever-ever blue screen. He neglected to mention the concept of a "kernel panic". For some reason Linux folks do not see this as the equivilant of the BSOD. He also mentioned uptime and how I would never have to reboot for patches. He was right although I did have to stop nearly every process on the box to patch it (errata ?) which was just as bad as rebooting. I also paid Redhat for support on 10 systems for three years which cost over $81,000. To top it all off not only did RedHat support never solve a problem for us, it really seemed like my engineers were training RedHat support engineers everytime we called them. With the additional costs for support which far exceeded the licensing costs of Windows Server 2003 we really took a bath on the whole thing. Even the the pro Linux engineers I had hired really got tired of the 3:00 AM calls to deal with our main DB2 database failing from a kernel panic on a nearly monthly basis. Eventually we went back to Windows for everything and we all sleep a lot better. All Linux vendors need to converge under one banner and one code base if Linux is ever to have a chance at competing against MS.
Below is a good place to use as a starting point to document Linus' new Acknowledgment Policy.
" there has traditionally been an unwritten rule among security professionals that the discoverer of a security vulnerability has an obligation to give the vendor an opportunity to correct the vulnerability before publicly disclosing it."
And by not advertising you mean not publicly acknowledging for users of Linux the security flaw exists until it's fixed but allowing anyone access to the code who might want to find security holes such as hackers who might already have the capability write an exploit? So based on that criteria if I need to ensure that my Linux systems are secure I need to monitor the code myself? I have always thought that people who live downstream from a dam should be responsible for their own damn inspections. Apparently you agree.
Ok...Let's start over. Bill Gates is giving away billions to other nations with the goal of helping their people survive and gain an education. If the can of beans that they are eating from says Microsoft on the side are they some how less well fed? Would you refuse medicine on your death bed that had an MS logo on the bottle? If you are complaining about how a man gives away his money to the poor please take a deep breath and reread your post. Surely you can see the insanity of arguing that the poor are somehow better off without his help?
Perhaps a better analogy representing your argument would be "Build a man a fire and you warm him for the night but set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life."
Stallman is a communist. This is not an opinion but rather a statement of fact. Like all communists he uses high minded ideals to describe a utopia where all work is shared equally and the rewards take care of everyone. But also like all communists the only way he can prosper is to have complete and total control removing all decision making capability from the masses with 100% centralized decision making and management. He denegrates those who are successful and demonizes them becasue they did not follow his model. He must as he cannot acknowledge success except with those who have followed his ideas. You only need to read these forums to realize that the Open Source Community has become what it fears most as they rage against anyone who disagrees with their ideas. Sadly the Open Source community appears to be a refuge for communists and socialists who have no real power in modern society. They seek to find some foot hold by using what they know to exert control over others. If you find yourself complaining that Bill Gates is not giving his money away in ways that you approve of you can rest assured that you are a control freak who is most saddened by the fact that you are not getting any of that money (or control of that money).
Congratulations on your new job. Keep this in mind as it is my mantra for a CIO - "Highly trained people can do great things with mediocre equipment but poorly trained people can't do anything with the best equipment money can buy". Step 1 to success is to raise your training budget to the level that everyone gets several classes per year.
The reason why CIO's are normally clueless is that you have to be competent to recognize incompetence. The folks who normally select the CIO are business people who have no understanding of technology whatsoever. The are in fact "technically" incompetent. They choose the person who scares them least. They want the person with whom that can communicate without being bogged down with any complexities or difficult concepts. They will stay far away from the most knowledgeable and experienced people in favor of someone who laughs and jokes with them about the big game, a television show, or anything else they can understand. They will reject someone with the capability to understand a system from the ground up as not seeing the "big picture". This is why CEO's are often unsure that they are getting the bang for the buck that an IT department should bring to the table. It's because they pick the least qualified person to lead based on their personality rather than ability. On the positive side the CIO who wants to keep his job will find a few key people who really know what their doing and throw money at them to ensure that they don't leave. They are the folks who really run the department by proxy.
I agree with those who have said "Oh well, more work for me". The fewer folks who are interested = better long term job and salary prospects for us. You must admit that only about 20% of the folks you deal with in IT actually know what their doing anyway. They spend much of their days directing the 70% who don't really understand what they are doing but know how to follow instructions and then they spend the rest of their time cleaning up after the 10% who are complete morons.
You have a really good point and a great example that most everyone can relate to, replace the rage (and profanity) with intellectual disgust and it's hard not to agree.
You are correct. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have paid no price for their numerous crimes.
Threatening the president and threatening the guy down the street are two entirely different scenarios. There was a young woman (Lisa Bianco) in my city whose ex-husband had threatened her in writing and via the telephone from Prison. He was released on an 8 hour pass where he proceeded to murder her, a crime for which he received the death penalty. This is the normal standard that threats must reach to attain credibility.
You have a right to free speech but there is no right to "not be offended". If I make comments that are not appreciated by everyone (these comments for example) I have excersized my right to speek in a public forum. I now have a responsibility to allow others to respond. Some of those responses will likely be offensive to me but I have accepted that I might not like what I hear when I spoke in public. Threats of physical violence must be credible threats before they break any laws. If someone says "I'll bash your head in!" the only way to determine that the threat is credible is after the bash my head in or are caught outside my house with a brick in hand repeating the threat. I think this steps over the bounds of free speech. The best response would have been for the moderator to terminate the accounts of the offenders (if they had accounts) and to delete the comments from the forum if they did not meet the standards of the forum.
Your comment was written like a true "Geek".
Actually mine was written by someone who manages support for thousands of "End Users". My focus does tend to be how to keep systems running rather than making them easy to break. I would have to say that your comment shows your disdain for end users that is typical of the open source community and is a significant contributor to the lack of success of the linux desktop. You can't expect to succeed if you abhor your "customer".
I think you meant "Al" Capone not Joe (did Al have a brother?)
It could be that Linus Torvalds is a sleeper KGB agent trained by his father to help re-establish communist domination of Europe by defeating capitolism through the use of the open source concept. More evidence exists for this than your Death Squads idea. FYI - The leader of the Honduran Death Squads was Colonel Juan Lopéz Grijalba, a native Honduran.
No one is railing against the program just the author who is missing the point of providing this device to children in "the most remote regions of the globe". Making a device that is easy to break makes failure of a noble endeavor that much more likley. As long as it runs reliably (which apparently the Sugar OS did not) who cares what OS it uses.
My first computer was an Atari (yes young man they made computers back in the day) and it was a far cry from these systems. We did tinker with our hardware but these devices are made to allow access to information to school children in remote villages where power is an issue. I personally consider anything east of London to be Caveministan but having lived in Europe for a few years I do remember a few folks who thought some parts of France were civilized.
There is no proof that John Negroponte was not in Dallas in November of 1963. I'm not implying anthing, I'm just saying that there is no proof. Coincidence? I think not.
Windows is designed against this, with no programming tools built in, and an almost anti-hacker/explorer/fiddler philosophy that goes beyond it merely being "closed source" to putting up impediments to learning any useful skills.
So he gave the password to the Mayor who then gave it to the same managers. I am waiting for the next article detailing the devastation in SF? This guy had no legal right nor moral obligation to keep access to the cities infrastructure only to himself. What would have happened if he were hit by a car? This spoiled child went out on a limb to get attention for himself. He put a city at risk and ruined his career to keep from doing what every other person who has ever worked in IT has had to do...Share control. In the end whether there are policies in place or competent employees to handle things it wasn't his call. I don't know about legalities but I can say that he deserves to have his career ruined as well as his boss who obviously had no idea what was going on in his own department.
As if we don't already know the city of SF is horribly mismanaged and grossly out of touch with the rest of the planet.
I work in Healthcare IT. Sometimes when I think I have stress to deal with I walk to a patient care floor and watch what the nurses do for a living. I have seen a nurse changing a mans diarhea filled diaper in one bed while the patient in the other bed began to vomit violently. She helped both patients clean themselves with a smile telling them not to worry about the mess. This often helps me realize how much I love working in IT.
The statements that Cloud Computing, grid computing, and open source software are not priorities is ludicrous. These are tools that are used to solve problems. It's like saying a hammer is a priority rather than building a house. No C?O will ever say that these are priorities while they may say that virtualization is a priority because it is often considered a project to virtualize as much as possible for DR and to cut costs. If spending on IT does dip we all know that only the bottom 10% will get their walking papers. I would assume that Charles King will be one of them.
Gartner announced today that based on it's analysis the wheel is long over due for replacement as there are several small companies experimenting with alternative means of moving small and large loads between different locations. "The wheel has been around for over 10,000 years and we thing it is nearing the end of it's improvement life cycle" said Jack Johnson and senior partner at Gartner. All indications point to the most likely replacement being slave labor. Slaves will carry loads on their backs for low weights and short trips with groups of slaves banding together larger loads and longer trips. As the TCO for slaves is quite low compared to maintaining a modern tractor trailer fleet this new direction will clearly benefit businesses all over the world. Where will all of these new slaves come from? Gartner predicts that Google will provide this new labor from it's current work force...
Gartners gift for prognostication leaves quite a bit to be desired. In 1997 they declared that the PC would be dead in 5 years in favor of thin client network terminals. This is but one of the many examples of just how wrong Gartner is in almost every case. Gartner bases all of their assumptions on TCO and what they would like to see rather than practicality. In 1997 their conclusions would have been different (and closer to correct) had they talked to anyone working in IT at the time. If you want to excel in IT find out what Gartner predicts will be the new trend and do the opposite, they are the George Castanza of the IT world.
You are 100% correct even though this crowd doesn't want to hear it. The pimple faced geek who talked me into RedHat told me that it was free and would never-ever-ever blue screen. He neglected to mention the concept of a "kernel panic". For some reason Linux folks do not see this as the equivilant of the BSOD. He also mentioned uptime and how I would never have to reboot for patches. He was right although I did have to stop nearly every process on the box to patch it (errata ?) which was just as bad as rebooting. I also paid Redhat for support on 10 systems for three years which cost over $81,000. To top it all off not only did RedHat support never solve a problem for us, it really seemed like my engineers were training RedHat support engineers everytime we called them. With the additional costs for support which far exceeded the licensing costs of Windows Server 2003 we really took a bath on the whole thing. Even the the pro Linux engineers I had hired really got tired of the 3:00 AM calls to deal with our main DB2 database failing from a kernel panic on a nearly monthly basis. Eventually we went back to Windows for everything and we all sleep a lot better. All Linux vendors need to converge under one banner and one code base if Linux is ever to have a chance at competing against MS.
" there has traditionally been an unwritten rule among security professionals that the discoverer of a security vulnerability has an obligation to give the vendor an opportunity to correct the vulnerability before publicly disclosing it."
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/Security/bulletin/policy.mspx
And by not advertising you mean not publicly acknowledging for users of Linux the security flaw exists until it's fixed but allowing anyone access to the code who might want to find security holes such as hackers who might already have the capability write an exploit? So based on that criteria if I need to ensure that my Linux systems are secure I need to monitor the code myself? I have always thought that people who live downstream from a dam should be responsible for their own damn inspections. Apparently you agree.
Perhaps a better analogy representing your argument would be "Build a man a fire and you warm him for the night but set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life."
Stallman is a communist. This is not an opinion but rather a statement of fact. Like all communists he uses high minded ideals to describe a utopia where all work is shared equally and the rewards take care of everyone. But also like all communists the only way he can prosper is to have complete and total control removing all decision making capability from the masses with 100% centralized decision making and management. He denegrates those who are successful and demonizes them becasue they did not follow his model. He must as he cannot acknowledge success except with those who have followed his ideas. You only need to read these forums to realize that the Open Source Community has become what it fears most as they rage against anyone who disagrees with their ideas. Sadly the Open Source community appears to be a refuge for communists and socialists who have no real power in modern society. They seek to find some foot hold by using what they know to exert control over others. If you find yourself complaining that Bill Gates is not giving his money away in ways that you approve of you can rest assured that you are a control freak who is most saddened by the fact that you are not getting any of that money (or control of that money).
Congratulations on your new job. Keep this in mind as it is my mantra for a CIO - "Highly trained people can do great things with mediocre equipment but poorly trained people can't do anything with the best equipment money can buy". Step 1 to success is to raise your training budget to the level that everyone gets several classes per year.
The reason why CIO's are normally clueless is that you have to be competent to recognize incompetence. The folks who normally select the CIO are business people who have no understanding of technology whatsoever. The are in fact "technically" incompetent. They choose the person who scares them least. They want the person with whom that can communicate without being bogged down with any complexities or difficult concepts. They will stay far away from the most knowledgeable and experienced people in favor of someone who laughs and jokes with them about the big game, a television show, or anything else they can understand. They will reject someone with the capability to understand a system from the ground up as not seeing the "big picture". This is why CEO's are often unsure that they are getting the bang for the buck that an IT department should bring to the table. It's because they pick the least qualified person to lead based on their personality rather than ability. On the positive side the CIO who wants to keep his job will find a few key people who really know what their doing and throw money at them to ensure that they don't leave. They are the folks who really run the department by proxy.
Everyone who has read your post is now just a little bit dumber.
I agree with those who have said "Oh well, more work for me". The fewer folks who are interested = better long term job and salary prospects for us. You must admit that only about 20% of the folks you deal with in IT actually know what their doing anyway. They spend much of their days directing the 70% who don't really understand what they are doing but know how to follow instructions and then they spend the rest of their time cleaning up after the 10% who are complete morons.