I call bullshit on the first statement. I work in a sales related capacity (after spending 18 years in IT) and I don't exaggerate to make a sale.

Ask for financial metrics or calculate them yourself: what is the percentage reduction based on historical data of determining root cause of problems with Red Hat support vs. without? Multiply that by the going FTE for your industry / geographical region and you have hard dollar cost savings. Use a 20% discount rate (aggressive) to calculate future discounted cash flows (and determine Net Present Value). Solve for n% discount such that NPV = 0 and you have the Internal Rate of Return (IRR).

Then ask the CFO / Controller what the Hurdle Rate is and see if the IRR > Hurdle Rate. If so the investment is sound assuming the data on % savings for root cause analysis is sound.

With AES256 being a government standard for 10 years, why would anyone recommend CBC (which was considered weak long before AES was denoted the standard) as an encryption method?

You could use Diffie-Hellman key exchanges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_exchange#Diffie.E2.80.93Hellman_key_exchange) to strengthen this, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent the attack that was used in the demonstration.

"Welcome to hell, kid." - Wally (of Dilbert fame)

...and I'll even try to remember to check back in case people respond.

Assumption: the trading application being critiqued is the same one that was there when I was an IT consultant at Morgan Stanley. I left in August 2000.

I know the application well. It was developed by a department headed up by Vinny (whose name is withheld because...I'm senile and don't remember it). I worked in the department that wrote the messaging infrastructure that was used by every application on the sell side of the firm.

If the application is the same one then the mere fact that it was still in use when Mr. Fried left is a testament to the application's effectiveness. Would they do it better now if they were writing it from scratch? Of course. But Morgan Stanley has 3,000-4,000 IT staff in its ranks so they could easily do so if the application were as bad as he says. And the messaging infrastructure...well, I have no love for the original authors (no hard feelings Steve and Arthur...I'm lying of course), but that subsystem was extremely robust, predated TIBCO and Talarian, and provided more functionality that those two products until after they were on the market for several years.

There sure are a lot of Anonymous Cowards posting in here...Not for nothing, but I'd rather know the name of the person I shouldn't be listening to (purportedly the author of the article) rather than be expected to trust anything said by someone who doesn't have the balls to post under their Slashdot name. Just sayin'...

Two factor authentication is popular amongst corporations for a good reason: the password itself isn't sufficient to get access. Arcot's solutions not only provide decoys but also provide two factor authentication. And they are the ones that patented the 3-D Secure technology that Visa uses for mobile transactions.

...the comic was not about Gene Simmons?

I disagree. Just because you don't sign anything doesn't mean that your usage of the product doesn't constitute an acknowledgment and agreement to the terms of the EULA. Furthermore, you have the option of returning the product for a refund if you do not agree to the EULA so the fact that you can't read it until after you've purchased it does not hold water. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

1. If every camera is covered by the LA then how does this matter, i.e. regardless of the camera you are still infringing. Still, there are cameras (as noted in the article) that use codecs that do not infringe. In this instance... 2. ...the encoding used by a camera will have specific characteristics. While it is more cumbersome to prove in court, it is possible to demonstrate via circumstantial evidence that a particular video exhibits characteristics unique to a particular codec. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I guess the demo is somewhere in the 4th dimension...

And save electricity by not allowing the use of boldface, underline or strikethrough fonts.

Do "feet" count as OSS alternatives? ;)

Agreed. The Silmarillion has a lot of background information that people, especially those who aren't (yet) fans of the books, would find interesting.

I remember when The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and - at the movie's end - a lot of the teenagers who came to see the movie thought the ending was crappy. They didn't realize that the movie was only 1/3rd of the total story and commented that the movie itself was very exciting.

Oh yeah...I'm Larry Salomon. I forgot to include that tidbit in the article. :D