[ale] Business Case Was Riddle me this

[Pete Hardie]

Given the many tales of the commercial Geek Squad snooping on computers
under repair, I think the NSA already is the Govt Geek Squad!

Pete Hardie
--------
Better Living Through Bitmaps


On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 10:24 AM, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:

> I think the NSA should be the Geek-Squad for other government agencies,
> nothing
> more.  Clearly the Commerce Department could use the help removing viruses
> instead of destroying perfectly fine hardware.
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-commerce-dept-false-alarm-on-cyberattack-cost-almost-3-million/2013/07/13/11b92690-ea41-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html
>
> Yep - Govt-Geek-Squad.gov would be a start.
>
> Then, if the CIA and/or FBI want to engage the NSA for specific, limited,
> legal,
> needs, fine.
>
>
> On 07/15/2013 10:10 AM, Jay Lozier wrote:
> > John Dvorak on pcmag.com has a post were he argues the MS-NSA joint
> venture
> > should make countries and companies rethink their reliance on proprietary
> > software especially OSes. Apparently Windows has had numerous backdoors
> and
> > slowly fixed zero-exploits so the NSA could "monitor" users. His comment
> was the
> > US Department of Commerce should be very upset over the NSA scandal. He
> did come
> > out and directly say switch to Linux or BSD but if you are not use a
> proprietary
> > OS what are your options? Particularly since some industries have legal
> > responsibilities to their clients not to share this information without
> express
> > approval of the client or a valid court order.
> >
> > On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:50:12 -0400, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Netflix and 86-Linux support isn't a technical issue.
> >> It is a cost-of-support, business decision, and perhaps contractual
> issue.
> >>
> >> Linux on the desktop has never taken off with the numbers desired to
> have a
> >> thriving business profit center for Adobe.  It is hard to justify
> spending
> >> thousands of hours creating, distributing and supporting a platform
> where there
> >> doesn't appear to be a future payback.  iOS/Apple's decision to end
> Flash
> >> support was the initial nail in the coffin. The fact that Android is
> Linux is
> >> the other, though a business case could be made to sell support for the
> 200M
> >> Android devices.  I think internally, Adobe management wants Flash to
> die.
> >>
> >> Then there are the contracts around commercial media offerings.  There
> are a few
> >> Linux-based devices that support Netflix, but these have DRM built-into
> the
> >> chip.  Look at the "WD-TV Live HD Plus" as a start. I suspect Roku does
> too.
> >>
> >> Heck, Netflix servers are all Linux-based, so I'm fairly positive that
> the
> >> Netflix engineers WANT to support Linux desktops, but again, it is a
> business
> >> decision.
> >>
> >> I can't blame any business for believing that the Linux market is
> small.  We are
> >> a noisy group, but not in the normal ways.  We don't advertise like
> Apple or
> >> Microsoft. 90% of the world has never seen or heard "Linux" before.
>  Until that
> >> changes, support for Linux will really be limited to niche users, fed-up
> >> businesses and servers.
> >>
> >> I've been thinking of an easy way to let people know how many Linux
> users and
> >> machines running Linux there are in the world .... perhaps the ALE
> group can be
> >> the starting point?  I'll make another post about this idea soon to let
> all of
> >> ALE see it better - not buried in another thread.  Basically, it is an
> >> email-footer with a count of machines/devices running Linux.  It needs
> to be
> >> simple, short, to the point.  I've had this footer for about 5 yrs
> myself:
> >>
> >
> >
>
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