No, we don't 'roll over and surrender.' Microsoft hardly bowed to the demands of the EU. It sounds like they found another way to, use the British expression, "place another spanner in the works." The so-called opening of the protocols is still not under a free license; Microsoft finds another way to earn more money. Due to a non-free license, our pals at Redmond successfully stymied open source again. Do not be so naive as to think Microsoft is being "a good citizen"
Unfortunately, a federal judge threw out the argument that RIAA's actions were in violation of the RICO (racketeering) statutes. Funny how RIAA's actions violate both letter and spirit of RICO. Even funnier how the difference between a criminal enterprise and a legitimate business seems merely based on the efficacy of its lobbyists.
Sure, but since there are critical shortages, salaries have been unchanged. In fact, as an outsourced, traveling technologist, I could earn even more money.
The good old days are over, period! I've been in IT for 5 long, hard years and am now completely burned out on it. Gone are the days when the IT professional was treated with any kind of respect. Now, I get the same treatment as the security officer and that is a shame, especially when I take pride in what I do. Have any other slashdotters experienced the pressures of offshoring? In my last IT job I was constantly 'reminded' that my job could be outsourced to India. It used to be just the low level help desk analysts. Now, as a systems administrator, I found out the hard way that a guy in India can maintain a Cisco Router remotely. The link inside the article, titled, "Report: Offshoring to have no sudden bad effects." is just plain wrong and I have my suspicions that the article may have corporate endorsement by companies seeking to sell certification tests and classes. The effects of outsourcing are hard hit and immediately felt. When you are laid off due to offshoring, you feel it immediately. And guess what folks, this a sudden bad effect. I am just offering my own.02 cents and should be, by no means, objective.
I'll just conclude by simply stating that health care is the direction to go. Per capita, the health care industry has the highest job growth potential and a critical shortage. As a relatively senior IT man, I made about 56,000 a year. This is on experience alone as I have a Criminal Justice Degree and no formal C.S. education. I have to work around 50-60 hours a week, counting on-call time. As an entry level x-ray technologist at the local hospital, I would be earning the same money while only really working 32 hours a week and a sign-on bonus. It is well worth returning to school for a 1.5 years to do this. Plus, x-rays are now high technology and the experience parlays well. My advice, work smarter not harder.
I can appreciate the security implications of blocking personal web email. However, I think most other organizations do it because they are concerned that employee use of personal web mail will cut into productivity or violate some other HR rule or regulation. I am a network administrator for a small manufacturing company and we trust our employees to be judicious and discrete. I only block P2P and chat stuff because they are gaping security wounds. Plus, I have taken a layering approach to security so it is fairly safe; we also do not do any hosting of our own. Thus far, knock on wood, no problems have arisen. I hope never to have to implement any kind of content filtering because I think we all like to able to enjoy surfing. That said, if it does become a problem, I will use Dan's Guardian.
The link between file sharing and a national security threat is weak to the point of ridicule. If you want to talk about a threat to national security, look at encrypted traffic over the internet. If you are concerned about internet-based national security threats, you only need look at an IPSEC based virtual private network where all the traffic is encrypted and the encryption keys rotate. What about the ability to send email with S/MIME or PGP encryption? So, I really don't want to hear weak, bullshit articles trying to make a case for file sharing as a national security issue.
As much as I hate M$, I have to cheer them on for this. These squatters are a major nuisance. Also, these squatters try to install spyware and trojans on your computer. Or even worse, try to spread a bot net attack.
Hmmmm . . . . . I never considered that this incentive would help the poor from becoming disenfranchised from democracy. If the program is tailored to assist ONLY poor citizens obtain the conversion unit, then I feel better about it.
We have a large number of social-welfare problems, we cannot provide adequate care for our veterans, we have people living in the streets and we are thinking of handing out billions of dollars to help the HDTV revolution. This is an absolute obscenity. Few articles have made me angrier. I do not want my tax dollars going to fund someone else's entertainment. Everyday on the way to work, I have to pass a homeless man so underweight that he looks like my grandfather did after liberation from Dachau in WWII. His body looks so hollow you can see ribs through his shirt just as my grandfather was. Never mind that he may have alcohol or drug problems; no human being should ever, ever have to experience this. And everyday, I buy him some food as I do not know how to really help him and that, by proxy, makes me a small part of the problem. In America, we should not be seeing people like this. Finally, when I see fucked-up, lame-brained plans like god-damned HDTV incentives I just want to yell.
I love the forthcoming ideas posted from slashdotters to the Dell IdeaStorm site. But, I would also like to see consideration for FreeBSD. FreeBSD and the BSDs are somewhat forgotten but should not be. If anybody else agrees that FreeBSD is good, please let the IdeaStorm know. I learned UNIX on FreeBSD and absolutely love it. Linux is also a good operating system but why not allow both camps to take advantage of Dell Hardware.
I think the IdeaStorm website is causing more chairs to be broken at Microsoft. And, by proxy, a few glass picture windows. Ballmer called open source a cancer. Well, if it is a cancer, it seems to have an affinity for M$.
National Security is the antithesis of rule of law. National security, when overdone, bears a scary resemblance to say, North Korea. I believe Thomas Jefferson was well ahead of his time when he stated, "Those that would give a little liberty for security get none and deserve neither." It is very sobering to consider the wisdom and insight his words offered over two centuries ago. Even more sobering is that his imparted wisdom falls on deaf and ignorant ears.
I don't really think Computer Science is dead but its face and meaning are changing. Computer Science is now more than just software engineering. It encompasses network, infrastructure, and information management. The internet has fundamentally changed Computer Science and the curriculum of old has not adapted to the change. This quite possibly might explain the drop off in enrollment. Students see that commodity applications are being more widely used. However, there needs to be competent web application developers. Competent web application developers are not just good software engineers, they have a thorough understanding of infrastructure and information management.
Another possible reason for dropping enrollments could be disillusionment with the field as good software engineer positions are being outsourced to save money. In many ways, lots of positions become victims of globalization. Many companies use software engineers for projects or as long term temporary employees to save on the bottom line. Software engineers may be better off seeking employment at companies that develop software versus, say, a bank.
Hey man! Nice idea! It just shows the unfortunate number of "Pointy-Haired Bosses" there are out there. I wish I'd thought of that. After all, Open Office is really a feature complete replacement of M$ Office. Either the FUD campaign launched by M$ is so good or our bosses are just too gullible. I leave that one for you to figure out.
This one gave me a belly ache from laughing. Imagine that MS would anti-phish itself. Gee, I wonder where the disconnect happen between product development and marketing. HAHA
I think this is one of the best ideas that I have heard to answer the problem of too many distributions. However, Dell would then need to employ a team of Linux OS developers and the cost would ultimately be passed on to the consumer. That said, this extra cost may only surface for a short time until sufficient product revenue happens. And, you kill the problem of compatibility. I think the reason Dell did not act sooner on open source was fear of the support behemouth that would be required. Michael Dell was quoted as saying he loved, "The web footed wonder." Once again, it was business economics that was the decision maker.
This idea is a good one provided that this autonomous division is given ample exposure by Dell. The risk in this kind of business model is that there will be not enough media exposure or advertising and just die off. The success is also heavily dependent upon good leadership in a very fragmented market. Unfortunately, Linux is a fragmented market with consumers coming up with excellent arguments for and against the use of, say, Ubuntu versus others. If I had my two cents, I'd love to see Dell consider PC-BSD. I have had an easier time installing PC-BSD. Realistically, how many distributions could one company support? By offering a choice of distributions that is too broad, more people would need to be hired, trained, and retained that have expertise in various Linux distributions. Linux experts do not come cheap and the extra cost would ultimately be passed on to the consumer through higher hardware prices for support and hardware. Therefore, the consumer seeking open source may pay more. This is unfortunate market economics in a David versus Goliath struggle. This is a type of dilemma that every business faces when introducing a new product. Dell may have faced this difficulty before, during the radical change from Windows 3.11 to 95.
After having lived life on both sides, I almost see this issue as a stalemate between the user base and the IT department. I certainly understand the frustration on the user side of things as I am in a position right now where I cannot get the tools from the IT department that I need (and I work in IT, just in a Data Analysis side instead of directly with infrastructure.) So, I am forced to use my USB thumb drive because I have am old Dell Optiplex GX120 at work where the hard drive might might die at any time. I need my server home drive mapped so I can backup but nobody can figure out why the mappings are not going through and it seems like feet are dragging. Finally, not all of my access is complete and I have been at the company for a little over a week.
Hey, it would be nice if we could get one of the BSDs as an option. But, it probably won't happen. PC-BSD would be a great candidate. It is very easy to use and has software installers called PBIs which behave very similarly to the Windows installer interface. The only thing I am not so crazy about is that it is KDE based. I am more of a fan of Gnome. Have a look at the website. Methinks you'll like it. http://www.pcbsd.org
The DoD should create a firewall rule to automatically drop any packets it recieves from China, North Korea, South Korea, or any of those countries trying to root its machines. On my dad's dinky little small business network with one segment and 10 machines, I saw no less than 300 daily attempts to root the gateway via SSH coming from North Korean and Chinese IP addresses. Now, mind you, I use SSH to remotely administer the gateway. Naturally, the gateway is a secure BSD machine as I wouldn't dare front end a network with a Windows 2003 server. I was dismayed that, in these attempts, the attackers are getting a login and password prompt. Thank God syslog reported that no attempts got past that point. So, I made SSH listen to a non-standard port and added a PF firewall rule to drop ANY incoming connection attempts from Pacific Rim countries. I also checked to see if there were any strange binaries or daemons running and ran a netstat -n to look at activity and there was nothing suspicious. Finally, as an additional safety precaution, I decided I would add firewalls to drop the Microsoft ports in and outbound. Now, instead of reporting access denied, syslog reported copious amounts of dropped packets for about two weeks and then the attacks seemed to drop off altogether. Now I see one only occasionally.
Well, anarchism will never work. In social experiments that have been conducted by renowned sociologists like Robert Merton, it has been found that anarchism (or the lack of government and laws) is impractical. If people are left to their own devices, there is great potential for society to unravel. Look at the dark ages in ancient Greece where journals were discovered that described life in an anarchy. I think some government is a good idea but right now, there are WAY TOO MANY LAWS. We may agree on that. A government with less laws is better.
I'd say all the different desktop environments and window managers are pretty good. They each have their own niche and appeal to some while repulsing others. I happen to like gnome very much and it works very well for me. The bottom line is that one is not necessarily better than the other but boils down to personal preferences. We can all agree that, unlike Microsoft, open source operating system users have a choice in the presentation of their desktops and we celebrate this freedom. In a nutshell, ask yourself these questions: What are your needs? What are you looking for? I don't honestly see the reason to flame. But, I think Linus might make a point that a community-driven, open-source project should be interested in it's developer base and user feedback. That said, Linus' complaint was delivered in a less-than-professional manner. Name calling and labeling ends up alienating the people you are trying to reach.
Excellent point about bandwidth and a political statement. Also, schools want to eliminate the ability to view what they deem, objectionable material. If you did not have some kind of proxy in schools, our children would be even further behind than the world at large. They would be surfing instead of learning . . . . er, maybe they do that already. I can't help but notice that the Europeans place less emphasis on censorship, period! I'll hedge a guess that the school-based proxy might be the exception, rather than the rule but I do not know for sure.
In this day and age, I'd say it's best for you to cut your losses and run, legality notwithstanding. The laws are so muddied that it wouldn't surprise me in the least if you could and would be held liable for the students actions. It sounds like this third party is doing something illegal to generate traffic. He is even soliciting criminal activity from a student body. This would give me pause to even trust that individual.
If you are looking for a good, freely available antivirus application for Windows, check out Avaste. I have been using Avast for almost two years without a false positive and it has a much smaller memory foot-print than McAfee or Symantec. By far, it is the best antivirus application I have ever seen. Plus, it is free for home use and does not install any kind of ad or spyware. It is honest to god free.
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No, we don't 'roll over and surrender.' Microsoft hardly bowed to the demands of the EU. It sounds like they found another way to, use the British expression, "place another spanner in the works." The so-called opening of the protocols is still not under a free license; Microsoft finds another way to earn more money. Due to a non-free license, our pals at Redmond successfully stymied open source again. Do not be so naive as to think Microsoft is being "a good citizen"
Unfortunately, a federal judge threw out the argument that RIAA's actions were in violation of the RICO (racketeering) statutes. Funny how RIAA's actions violate both letter and spirit of RICO. Even funnier how the difference between a criminal enterprise and a legitimate business seems merely based on the efficacy of its lobbyists.
Sure, but since there are critical shortages, salaries have been unchanged. In fact, as an outsourced, traveling technologist, I could earn even more money.
Every time I see the PHB, I just want to take a scissors and cut off the pointy hair. Then, go for the jugular.
I'll just conclude by simply stating that health care is the direction to go. Per capita, the health care industry has the highest job growth potential and a critical shortage. As a relatively senior IT man, I made about 56,000 a year. This is on experience alone as I have a Criminal Justice Degree and no formal C.S. education. I have to work around 50-60 hours a week, counting on-call time. As an entry level x-ray technologist at the local hospital, I would be earning the same money while only really working 32 hours a week and a sign-on bonus. It is well worth returning to school for a 1.5 years to do this. Plus, x-rays are now high technology and the experience parlays well. My advice, work smarter not harder.
I can appreciate the security implications of blocking personal web email. However, I think most other organizations do it because they are concerned that employee use of personal web mail will cut into productivity or violate some other HR rule or regulation. I am a network administrator for a small manufacturing company and we trust our employees to be judicious and discrete. I only block P2P and chat stuff because they are gaping security wounds. Plus, I have taken a layering approach to security so it is fairly safe; we also do not do any hosting of our own. Thus far, knock on wood, no problems have arisen. I hope never to have to implement any kind of content filtering because I think we all like to able to enjoy surfing. That said, if it does become a problem, I will use Dan's Guardian.
The link between file sharing and a national security threat is weak to the point of ridicule. If you want to talk about a threat to national security, look at encrypted traffic over the internet. If you are concerned about internet-based national security threats, you only need look at an IPSEC based virtual private network where all the traffic is encrypted and the encryption keys rotate. What about the ability to send email with S/MIME or PGP encryption? So, I really don't want to hear weak, bullshit articles trying to make a case for file sharing as a national security issue.
As much as I hate M$, I have to cheer them on for this. These squatters are a major nuisance. Also, these squatters try to install spyware and trojans on your computer. Or even worse, try to spread a bot net attack.
Hmmmm . . . . . I never considered that this incentive would help the poor from becoming disenfranchised from democracy. If the program is tailored to assist ONLY poor citizens obtain the conversion unit, then I feel better about it.
We have a large number of social-welfare problems, we cannot provide adequate care for our veterans, we have people living in the streets and we are thinking of handing out billions of dollars to help the HDTV revolution. This is an absolute obscenity. Few articles have made me angrier. I do not want my tax dollars going to fund someone else's entertainment. Everyday on the way to work, I have to pass a homeless man so underweight that he looks like my grandfather did after liberation from Dachau in WWII. His body looks so hollow you can see ribs through his shirt just as my grandfather was. Never mind that he may have alcohol or drug problems; no human being should ever, ever have to experience this. And everyday, I buy him some food as I do not know how to really help him and that, by proxy, makes me a small part of the problem. In America, we should not be seeing people like this. Finally, when I see fucked-up, lame-brained plans like god-damned HDTV incentives I just want to yell.
I think the IdeaStorm website is causing more chairs to be broken at Microsoft. And, by proxy, a few glass picture windows. Ballmer called open source a cancer. Well, if it is a cancer, it seems to have an affinity for M$.
National Security is the antithesis of rule of law. National security, when overdone, bears a scary resemblance to say, North Korea. I believe Thomas Jefferson was well ahead of his time when he stated, "Those that would give a little liberty for security get none and deserve neither." It is very sobering to consider the wisdom and insight his words offered over two centuries ago. Even more sobering is that his imparted wisdom falls on deaf and ignorant ears.
Another possible reason for dropping enrollments could be disillusionment with the field as good software engineer positions are being outsourced to save money. In many ways, lots of positions become victims of globalization. Many companies use software engineers for projects or as long term temporary employees to save on the bottom line. Software engineers may be better off seeking employment at companies that develop software versus, say, a bank.
Hey man! Nice idea! It just shows the unfortunate number of "Pointy-Haired Bosses" there are out there. I wish I'd thought of that. After all, Open Office is really a feature complete replacement of M$ Office. Either the FUD campaign launched by M$ is so good or our bosses are just too gullible. I leave that one for you to figure out.
This one gave me a belly ache from laughing. Imagine that MS would anti-phish itself. Gee, I wonder where the disconnect happen between product development and marketing. HAHA
I think this is one of the best ideas that I have heard to answer the problem of too many distributions. However, Dell would then need to employ a team of Linux OS developers and the cost would ultimately be passed on to the consumer. That said, this extra cost may only surface for a short time until sufficient product revenue happens. And, you kill the problem of compatibility. I think the reason Dell did not act sooner on open source was fear of the support behemouth that would be required. Michael Dell was quoted as saying he loved, "The web footed wonder." Once again, it was business economics that was the decision maker.
This idea is a good one provided that this autonomous division is given ample exposure by Dell. The risk in this kind of business model is that there will be not enough media exposure or advertising and just die off. The success is also heavily dependent upon good leadership in a very fragmented market. Unfortunately, Linux is a fragmented market with consumers coming up with excellent arguments for and against the use of, say, Ubuntu versus others. If I had my two cents, I'd love to see Dell consider PC-BSD. I have had an easier time installing PC-BSD. Realistically, how many distributions could one company support? By offering a choice of distributions that is too broad, more people would need to be hired, trained, and retained that have expertise in various Linux distributions. Linux experts do not come cheap and the extra cost would ultimately be passed on to the consumer through higher hardware prices for support and hardware. Therefore, the consumer seeking open source may pay more. This is unfortunate market economics in a David versus Goliath struggle. This is a type of dilemma that every business faces when introducing a new product. Dell may have faced this difficulty before, during the radical change from Windows 3.11 to 95.
After having lived life on both sides, I almost see this issue as a stalemate between the user base and the IT department. I certainly understand the frustration on the user side of things as I am in a position right now where I cannot get the tools from the IT department that I need (and I work in IT, just in a Data Analysis side instead of directly with infrastructure.) So, I am forced to use my USB thumb drive because I have am old Dell Optiplex GX120 at work where the hard drive might might die at any time. I need my server home drive mapped so I can backup but nobody can figure out why the mappings are not going through and it seems like feet are dragging. Finally, not all of my access is complete and I have been at the company for a little over a week.
Hey, it would be nice if we could get one of the BSDs as an option. But, it probably won't happen. PC-BSD would be a great candidate. It is very easy to use and has software installers called PBIs which behave very similarly to the Windows installer interface. The only thing I am not so crazy about is that it is KDE based. I am more of a fan of Gnome. Have a look at the website. Methinks you'll like it. http://www.pcbsd.org
The DoD should create a firewall rule to automatically drop any packets it recieves from China, North Korea, South Korea, or any of those countries trying to root its machines. On my dad's dinky little small business network with one segment and 10 machines, I saw no less than 300 daily attempts to root the gateway via SSH coming from North Korean and Chinese IP addresses. Now, mind you, I use SSH to remotely administer the gateway. Naturally, the gateway is a secure BSD machine as I wouldn't dare front end a network with a Windows 2003 server. I was dismayed that, in these attempts, the attackers are getting a login and password prompt. Thank God syslog reported that no attempts got past that point. So, I made SSH listen to a non-standard port and added a PF firewall rule to drop ANY incoming connection attempts from Pacific Rim countries. I also checked to see if there were any strange binaries or daemons running and ran a netstat -n to look at activity and there was nothing suspicious. Finally, as an additional safety precaution, I decided I would add firewalls to drop the Microsoft ports in and outbound. Now, instead of reporting access denied, syslog reported copious amounts of dropped packets for about two weeks and then the attacks seemed to drop off altogether. Now I see one only occasionally.
Well, anarchism will never work. In social experiments that have been conducted by renowned sociologists like Robert Merton, it has been found that anarchism (or the lack of government and laws) is impractical. If people are left to their own devices, there is great potential for society to unravel. Look at the dark ages in ancient Greece where journals were discovered that described life in an anarchy. I think some government is a good idea but right now, there are WAY TOO MANY LAWS. We may agree on that. A government with less laws is better.
I'd say all the different desktop environments and window managers are pretty good. They each have their own niche and appeal to some while repulsing others. I happen to like gnome very much and it works very well for me. The bottom line is that one is not necessarily better than the other but boils down to personal preferences. We can all agree that, unlike Microsoft, open source operating system users have a choice in the presentation of their desktops and we celebrate this freedom. In a nutshell, ask yourself these questions: What are your needs? What are you looking for? I don't honestly see the reason to flame. But, I think Linus might make a point that a community-driven, open-source project should be interested in it's developer base and user feedback. That said, Linus' complaint was delivered in a less-than-professional manner. Name calling and labeling ends up alienating the people you are trying to reach.
Excellent point about bandwidth and a political statement. Also, schools want to eliminate the ability to view what they deem, objectionable material. If you did not have some kind of proxy in schools, our children would be even further behind than the world at large. They would be surfing instead of learning . . . . er, maybe they do that already. I can't help but notice that the Europeans place less emphasis on censorship, period! I'll hedge a guess that the school-based proxy might be the exception, rather than the rule but I do not know for sure.
In this day and age, I'd say it's best for you to cut your losses and run, legality notwithstanding. The laws are so muddied that it wouldn't surprise me in the least if you could and would be held liable for the students actions. It sounds like this third party is doing something illegal to generate traffic. He is even soliciting criminal activity from a student body. This would give me pause to even trust that individual.
If you are looking for a good, freely available antivirus application for Windows, check out Avaste. I have been using Avast for almost two years without a false positive and it has a much smaller memory foot-print than McAfee or Symantec. By far, it is the best antivirus application I have ever seen. Plus, it is free for home use and does not install any kind of ad or spyware. It is honest to god free.