Читать книгу The Art in Business System Design - Jeff Chapman - Страница 13

Sometimes despite your desires to remain detached and analytical (you did after all choose to be a system design professional) you will land in a position that requires you to pass judgment on others. This is never more true than when you are selecting a vendor to sell you a software package. You have to be friendly but still cynical; vendors send you salespeople who know how to read your desires and make promises that cater to them. As a buyer you need to lean critically toward what you know as the facts.

Back in the early 1980s, when personal computers had 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and still went zyg zyg beep to start up (when ten megabyte hard disks were all the rage) I had the opportunity to review a few vendors to provide hard disk security systems. The concern back then was that somebody could boot up from a floppy, switch to the C drive, and read all your data.

One vendor impressed me by claiming that they not only could provide complete security, but actually prevent an unauthorized person from accessing the hard disk at all. As I had already reviewed the bios code and was familiar with how a computer loaded bootstrap, I found their claim to be, eh, interesting. I asked to see a demo and they arranged for a live salesman visit.

He gave a fairly professional dog and pony show, demonstrating how their software could be configured so that only specific people could see certain files. At the end of the demo I commented “gee nice. Hey I was wondering about this item I read here about total protection.” I told him that I seriously doubted their software could stop somebody from destroying all the data on the C drive. He adamantly assured me that it would. Well then, was he confident enough that he would let me have a crack at his demo computer? Without a flinch he said sure!

I carried up a boot disk with the old DOS debug program on it, turned off his computer, put the disk in, and turned the computer on again. Zyg zyg beep! At the DOS prompt I typed debug and then used a command to write all zeroes to the boot sector on the hard disk. “Well uh, I think I just wiped your C drive,” I shrugged. The salesperson didn’t believe me. I removed my floppy disk and watched in a pitying amusement as he tried to restart his computer. Naturally the C drive was no longer readable at all (now he would have to reformat it).

Needless to say we declined the offer to purchase their software. Moral of the story: when you are buying software, trust… but verify.