564534
submission
Penguinisto writes:
According to C|NET news, Martin Buckley, who was a product manager for Novell's Systems and Resource Management products (e.g. Zenworks), has quit. Buckley confirms it on his blog. He only cited "certain principles" in doing so. No word on whether those principles involves Zenworks possibly getting killed, or ...?
446616
submission
Penguinisto writes:
Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry has confirmed that it is detaining Fouah al-Farhan for violation of 'security laws'. Farhan apparently knew it was coming, and warned about it almost two weeks in advance on his blog. Even in Pro-Western Saudi Arabia, laws are known to be rather draconian... while the poor guy most likely won't get his tongue cut out (so far they said that they merely wanted him to sign and post an apology), this bodes not well for attempts at opening up societies in the Middle East.
366249
submission
Penguinisto writes:
C|Net news reports that CIO Stuart Scott has been fired (not resigned, not retired... fired. (this is backed up by official MSFT reports on the matter. Not sure if it's because of something serious, if he got into an argument with one of the Board Members, or what... but it's rare that you see someone literally "fired" in print and otherwise.
256713
submission
Penguinisto writes:
After the last incident involving Geeks Squad and pornography, one would think they would tend to avoid prowling through users' hard drives. Then again, sometimes it can have, well positive consequences. Yet in supreme irony (in more ways than one), actor Albert Insinnia (of the television show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) took his PC in to Geek Squad, where a worker there found child porn on his hard drive and turned him in to the cops.
254909
submission
Penguinisto writes:
Apparently Citrix doesn't want to be left out in the cold when it came to Virtualization.So, it decided to snap up Xen Source in whole, with a combination of cash and stock. Question is, what impact exactly will this have on Linux as a whole? (Xen runs on/under Windows too, but Linux is arguably its biggest playground to date). Also, is this a defensive move on Citrix' part, given Microsoft's development of potential VMWare and Xen competitor Viridian?
216611
submission
Penguinisto writes:
Well, here it comes, as we hear AMD cry "Havok!" and let slip the pricetags of war". From the article: "the price cuts mean that all of the company's dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors will be priced at less than $200, with the top-end Athlon 64 X2 6000+ now selling for $178. The two low-end models in AMD's dual-core line, the Athlon X2 3600+ and 3800+, have been dropped, making the Athlon X2 4000+ the new entry-level dual-core model at $73." Coupled with impending Intel price slashing, do we sit around and wait for the prices to get real good, or upgrade the older beasties among our collections this summer?
113487
submission
Penguinisto writes:
A business has so far felt the very real pain of sotware patent enforcement — but this time, it is a large company who extinguished the little guy. Reyes Infografica had recently sent a Cease and Desist notice to a small Poser hobbyist programmer named Phil Cooke for his "Clothing Creator" program, claiming that it violates one of their patents (Phil's own site/support forum contains the copy of Reyes' C&D, Phil's announcement, and relevant discussions.) Clothing Creator has been out for a couple of years now. Basically, it builds quick custom clothing for humanoid 3d figures within the 3d compositing/rendering program called Poser. Recently, E-Frontier, the current owner of Poser, had partnered with Reyes to sell a competing product in E-Frontier's online store, called "Virtual Fashion". To E-Frontier's credit, they recently announced that they would stop selling the Reyes product until the dispute is settled, though at time of writing the product is still available for sale. So is this the "innovation" that software patents were supposed to foster?
111327
submission
Penguinisto writes:
A few days ago, Phil Cooke, a small-time hobbyist 3D/CG programmer, was sent a Cease and Desist notice from Reyes Infografica over a small 3D/CG clothes-generating program he had sold for years (it generated clothing mesh for a figures in a CG hobbyist program known as Poser). The program has since been pulled from the maker's site, as he cannot afford to retain counsel with which to fight back. Apparently, Phil's program had collided against a software patent that Reyes filed in 2001 (the patent was filed in the US and Spain). The C&D notice, and some of the discussion surrounding it can be found a PhilC's site discussion forums. While we usually see stories about small-time patent trolls raking in huge bucks from large companies, is this an indication of a disturbing trend by larger companies using software patents to intimidate and eliminate their smaller competition? And if so, then how on Earth is this supposed to foster innovation and creativity?
75010
submission
Penguinisto writes:
Apparently in the Senate, at least one scientist wants to put a permanent stop to any arguments over Global Warming. "The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming." I'm hopeful that this is only one scientist's opinion.
45682
submission
Penguinisto writes:
Do we dare hope? It seems that come tomorrow morning, The US Supreme Court is about to examine the "Obviousness" of software patents, thanks to an upcoming patent case by eBay. If the justices actually decide to do something about this, it could slow down the patent trolls (but then, it could embolden them too... depending on how things turn out).
35998
submission
Penguinisto writes:
So — if a big corporation wherein there is someone (in the IT department) you need to get hold of on the phone doesn't have a publicly published number, how do you get hold of them? Usually this isn't a problem, but sometimes it just gets ugly in trying to get hold of someone else's IT department...
Okay, here's the background: I'm a mail admin who is currently t-shooting a bit of a problem between my SMTP relay servers. A handful of recipient clients have an ISP (Verizon) that keeps bouncing mail. All other recipient ISP's I send to receive mail just fine; the problem most likely lies in how Verizon filters inbound mail.
Now here's the problem: After trying to get hold of someone (anyone!) there who actually knows how Verizon's SMTP servers run, I've run into a series of brick walls. Almost every number they post or provide online funnels you straight into their call center, where I have been told all kinds of fun and wild things I could do to troubleshoot my little SMTP problem (e.g., and I'm not kidding: "Maybe you should check the POP settings on your mail servers.") Asking for a supervisor gives no joy thus far — usually I'm informed that they cannot cough up the phone number of the people I need to speak with (usually because they don't know it). Their corporate website contact info either bumps you back to the call centers, or flat-out gives no results (their corporate HQ number is almost always too busy or their voice system gets confused and throws you back into the tech support queue). Emailing them (in my case, from another SMTP server entirely outside the affected domain) results in the sent mail falling into a black hole, where literally a week has gone by with no response. Databases like GetHuman are good sometimes, but sometimes it gives the same results.
So, here's the question: How on Earth does an ordinary sysadmin get around this problem when it arises (I know I can't be the only one to have come up against this)? Call Centers I know are usually contracted-out to third parties, so there is a huge disconnect between tech support and the people you actually need to get hold of. Is there something I'm completely ignorant of here, or are there just companies whose organization is so mucked-up that they completely neglect to take these things into account?
