06.23.07
Posted in FLOSS, Small Business at 0:33 by lnxwalt
I have spent the past few days trying to get a co-worker’s new Toshiba laptop, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Vista, set up. Being over 2700 miles away from home (and even further for my co-worker), it is essential that the laptop works with the hotel’s WiFi network. While my Dell, powered by Linux Mint, works reliably, his does not.
Apparently, some of the changes that Microsoft made to their TCP/IP stack are incompatible with some implementations of DHCP. In simple English, if you buy a computer with Vista on it, you may need to buy new networking equipment in order for the computer to connect reliably.
After all of this–try this fix and try that fix, including registry fixes and temporarily disabling the built-in firewall–there is still not a reliable way to connect his computer to the wireless network (and from there to the larger Internet).
I am sure that Microsoft will have a permanent solution to this within a month or two. They are pretty intelligent people, so they know about the problem and are working on a solution for it. It is too bad that they felt the pressure to push it out the door unfinished.
Still, if you have a small business that uses networked computers, your best bet is to insist on Linux-powered computers and standardized network protocols and file formats. If your people spend a week or two in a hotel, unable to connect to the network (and hence, unable to reach your VPN), you may lose a substantial amount of productivity with those employees. Instead of throwing your company’s money into a giant corporation’s “one-point-oh quality” product, so that you can be free tester to help them work out the bugs, check out the polished Linux distributions that are available for the desktop / client.
In our country, we have seen that larger companies, as they gain power and influence, tend to turn it against their employees, their customers, their neighbors, their communities, and their smaller competitors. It becomes a game of trying to use their money and influence to benefit themselves while transferring all costs to the rest of society. Often, if society as a whole “spanks” a particular corporation, it decides to be a good citizen and good neighbor, at least for the next several years.
If you still want the Microsoft blessing, look at Xandros for the desktop. Xandros is a small Linux distributor that has signed a blessing agreement with Microsoft. If that is not important to you, or if you explicitly wish to avoid the “blessing,” take a look at Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for the desktop. (For non-technical users, we recommend Mint or a Ubuntu-family [Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu] operating system.)
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06.17.07
Posted in Political at 2:38 by lnxwalt
Imagine if your town’s water district could not communicate with the water district in the next city, and neither of them could communicate with the sewer district. Further, imagine that they were all using the same brands of radios and the same brands of software. Could this cause loss or hardship? You know it.
Imagine if the space shuttle used 108050 kHz FM for its radios, while the space station used 98050 kHz AM, and the Russian space capsules used 102350 kHz SSB. How could they coordinate a docking maneuver? You would see a three-way collision, with all three vehicles breaking up and raining down fragments across a large swath of the globe.
This is where standards, open standards come in. Perhaps the standard will say that the local state police / highway patrol will have a channel that all other police agencies in the state must have the capability to utilize. So a chase that crosses a jurisdictional boundary is easily passed on to the proper agency, even before the news copters come overhead. Perhaps the standard will say that fire departments must use equipment (for example hydrant openings) that match specific common sizes of adapters for firehoses. Perhaps the standard will specify file formats and network protocols that emergency response agencies must use for their connections and communications between agencies. Perhaps the standard will apply to contractors and their work-product.
In any case, a standard is really best if it is set by a vendor-neutral group. For example, several years back, it was difficult to use many Web sites unless you were using the site’s chosen browser. If your chosen browser was different than their chosen browser, you sometimes got a horrid mess and sometimes got a message telling you to upgrade to the other product. (If you want a contemporary example of that, use Konqueror to visit the Yahoo home page.)
Now, at least, most sites are making some effort at working with multiple browsers. This can entail gobs of contingency code to handle compatibility, or sites can be written using Web standards such as XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Because no browser is 100% standards-compliant yet, even a standards-based site will needs some compatibility code, but it is lessened if the site adheres to open standards for Web development.
How would you feel if the use of a particular brand of proprietary software that did not adhere to open standards caused the IRS to reject your tax return? What if the government already knew that it needed to adopt open standards, but lobbyists for proprietary companies (with their own “secret sauce” file formats and network protocols) were able to prevent it?
The point of this is that there are potentially devastating, even deadly, consequences that come with using anything other than open, industry-standard file formats and network protocols. What if the governor sends a pardon by e-mail attachment (in a proprietary format, of course) and the warden cannot read it (because he can not open that format) before your execution? I am certain that there are not only theoretical events, but also actual events, where the lack of interoperability that happens when open and vendor-neutral standards are not used brings harm to someone.
In my opinion, an open standard needs to meet a few criteria in order to be useful:
- Open specification — the specification should be openly published and available; specifications are best when they are controlled by an independent (vendor-neutral) group within the industry.
- Clear of legal obstacles — any parties that may own relevant patents or other “intellectual property” rights that may affect the standard need to be identified and need to clearly state the criteria for usage of said rights
- Sufficiently detailed — A skilled person within the industry should be able to develop an implementation primarily from reading the specification
- Sufficiently generic — Implementers need some leeway in what they do and how they do it. If a spec is over-specified, or if there are legal obstacles for partial implementations, it becomes a problem
- Multiple implementations — in addition to a reference implementation (which generally should be open source if we are talking of software), there should be other implementers of a spec.
Beware of large vendors trying to tell you that their chosen formats and protocols are “standards”. Beware of government agencies specifying a “standard” that only one vendor can meet. If the standard is not controlled by a vendor-neutral group or if there is only one implementation of that standard, you are putting your company or your city (or county, state, or whatever) in the control of that vendor. Do you trust them? Really? Completely and totally? With the crown jewels?
I said it this way on XML.com:
Never forget the vendor-neutral part, because without it the switching cost makes choosing a vendor a high-stakes decision and subjects consumers to all sorts of abusive treatment from their suppliers (the vendors and those who distribute the products / services of the vendors)
Smaller businesses have to satisfy customers. Otherwise, those customers will quickly be gone. Larger companies have a cushion, so they can persist for years without really even trying to satisfy their customers. This is one reason why smaller companies like to base their offerings around the standards of their industries. In a larger company, customers sometimes have no choice but to pay the price and use the product, regardless of whether they like it, so those companies often use proprietary “extensions” to lock customers in.
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06.12.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:03 by lnxwalt
One thing that we often see in the IT field is someone starting to obsess about network security. They then want to layer firewall on top of firewall, anti-virus on top of anti-spyware, with plenty of pop-ups warning about pings and other network traffic directed toward the user’s computer.
I certainly do not advocate that someone allow their systems to go unprotected. There is a place for automated defenses–anywhere that human intervention would be ineffective, such as rapid-response situations or frequent but minor events–but the truth is, motivated humans acting upon knowledge are the best defense against malicious activities against the system and network.
I talked about this somewhat on my personal advocacy blog. We have to take reasonable precautions, but at some point, we need to accept some responsibility for our choices.
Already we have people who advocate going to extreme lengths to prevent even the most unlikely scenarios from occurring. Personally, I believe that we can never achieve perfect safety. At some point, we have to give up too much–in terms of freedom, in terms of happiness, in terms of concentrating power in the hands of our defenders–with only minimal improvements coming as a result.
You can tell that you’ve gone too far when your users willingly give their passwords to the I.T. guy, because he’s the hero. Your I.T. guy’s job is very simple: he must enable the rest of your employees to do their jobs productively. He’s a servant to the others. (Yes, I know that your “I.T. guy” may be female.)
As far as I.T. security goes, your I.T. staffers are just like any other employees. In many organizations, I.T. security is permission based. I am not talking about automated permissions granted through network roles. I am talking about “you can not print to the plotter without getting approvals from this list of people first.” That describes a permission-based network, which means you can not do anything that you are not explicitly authorized to do. In such a network, you must be careful not to treat your I.T. staff members like they are special and exempt from some of the restrictions that everyone else faces.
Beware of making certain people ultra-trusted and powerful, while others (just as vital to your organization) are looked at with suspicion and have their system rights restricted as though they are malicious. Does the CEO have a computer he takes home that can get through the VPN to access data on your main file server? Although you want most of your employees to relax and enjoy their time off, they will occasionally have an idea that they wish to work on before they forget.
“But what if they log in and steal data?”
A wrongly-motivated employee can steal data with flash drives, floppies, CDs, printouts, e-mail, FTP servers, or even old fashioned methods like rote memorization. You can never prevent a wrongly-motivated insider from finding a way to leak information. Once again, if you distrust your rank & file that much, you should also distrust your executives–after all, the CxOs are the ones most likely to commit the kind of large-scale fraud that brings regulators after the company itself.
So you see, it is sheer idiocy to arbitrarily label some employees as trusted and others as untrusted. Does it improve security? Of course not, because the trusted ones now have far greater leeway and access, enabling a wrongly-motivated employee to cause much more damage.
As on my personal blog, this is going to be a series of articles (blog postings).
Next time, I hope to look at the idea that computer and network security is completely different from physical security.
MANDATORY DISCLAIMER:
Let me note that I am not a security guru or security consultant. I read news and articles about I.T. security, but this does not give me that background to offer a substitute for obtaining a real security guru’s advice. I recommend that your business should at some point look into ways to make your network more secure.
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06.06.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:32 by lnxwalt
I recently had an opportunity come up that sounded like it was perfect for me. It had elements of everything I have been doing for the past dozen years or so wrapped up in a combination of small business and technology. I cannot tell you how excited I was–according to family members, I hadn’t been this excited in over forty years–because it was an exact fit.
As time wore on, I felt uneasy about the company. At one point, I decided I was done, but the other party continued to press on and I continued to let the process unfold. Finally, the fruit of all this work was ready for my agreement. I found that we were not even on the same planet. Within a minute or two, I knew I could not go through with it.
It is important to retain the ability to say “No.” It does not make a difference if the negotiations are just beginning or if they have gone on for some time. If the agreement is not right for you, or if you have doubts about the other party, break it off. You will not be doing yourself any favors to get into something that you will regret.
Frequently, smaller businesses go after that contract with BigNationwideRetail Corp. (BNRC) Because BNRC represents a huge increase in sales and profits, these businesses may wind up abandoning their “business models” to chase the big payoff. Of course, BNRC is aware of just how desperate most businesses are to get this sales increase, and they will take advantage of this to get deals that clear-thinking suppliers might otherwise pass up.
Employees also need to be willing to turn down a job offer if the company seems like it will not be in their corner. The employees at Northwest would probably agree with this. Be willing to say, “it sounds good, but it is not for me.” Sometimes that little uneasiness or doubt is the only sign that something is wrong. Ignore it at your peril.
This would be a good lesson to teach your teen as he goes to buy his first car. He needs to be willing to stop the process and say “forget it, this is not what I want.” Perhaps this will affect the income of used car dealers, but it will also prevent you from having to bail junior out of an expensive mistake.
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06.05.07
Posted in Small Business at 1:53 by lnxwalt
One area where I think smaller businesses have plenty of built-in advantages is in the foodservice industries. Restaurants, cafeterias, fast food quick-service restaurants, coffee shops—anywhere that customers will crave something that is somehow unique or different from the norm. Large chains of restaurants, good as they may be (Mac Grill!) sooner or later begin to taste like everything they make is the same product.
This was brought into focus for me when I went to a quick-service fish place, but I really only wanted shrimp and french fries. It turned out that they had something roughly fitting that description, but it all tasted exactly like their fried fish patty. The experience led me to avoid them for some time, but I noticed that after you have eaten in restaurant chain X several times, all of chain X’s products tasted the same. This is the impetus behind the monthly special temporary products: “Would you like to try our new chicken sandwich?” Then, before you can get tired of the chicken sandwich, it is gone, replaced by another temporary product.
In a smaller business, you realize that people who choose you have probably driven past the large corporate competitor to do business with you. It frees you from the horrid slavery of trying to keep up with the corporate competitors’ constant changes. You can dare to be different–because you are already different–and refuse to change your offerings just because they do.
Last year, I was in a place (Binghamton, NY) where they have a local food product called the speedie. I was there during the annual speediefest, but I was working too many hours to participate. When you consider our area, where we have little in the way of local specialties, it was fascinating to see just how much the existence of locally-identified products and services can give focus to efforts to make your area stand out.
I am currently in New Jersey, about 2700 miles away from home. As I look around for places to eat each day, one thing stands out to me. A large number of the eateries are the same brands I know from home. The problem is, I was tired of those eateries before I came here, so I certainly do not want to eat there now. So I am more likely to try a place if it is a small, locally-owned business rather than a chain or franchise.
So for all of our small-business readers, I recommend that you stop looking at your business’ size as an obstacle. Look at it as an advantage, because you can afford to focus on your market and to adapt to your locality. Your larger competitors can not afford to give so much attention to L10N (localization), because their business models depend upon them being able to spread their costs and choices over a larger volume. Make sure that your customers can clearly see a difference between your business and BigCorporateCompetitor, Inc.
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