Secret/Top Secret clearance just means that some people who are pretty good at that sort of thing think you can keep a secret, and that they haven't caught you proving them wrong yet.
How do they know that embarrassing material on Facebook is real? It could be fictional or, worse, it could be missdirection. As the CIA was infiltrated by Soviet agents, the experts don't look so good.
Govt. IT is highly fragmented. It took 20 years for DOD to switch to all-diesel. How long to switch to open-source?
Penis Cleaver, what a cute name you have. Oh well, it's worth the time to answer your silly question.
Intention is more important than time here. Now that the US DoD has realized and prooven the obvious, they will do it as they need to.
The rest of us can continue the migration and have fewer problem doing it. We can now point to it whenever we run into "Get the Facts" nonsense that M$ and other tin horn companies spend lots of money telling people. It was bullshit and this is one more nail in their credibility coffin. It's the kind of thing that makes their fanboys feel like they were lied to, because they were.
Enough hits like that makes things much easier. Between the government stating the obvious, DRM and corporate rip offs, M$ is losing most of it's fan base. Companies are feeling very burnt by the long time it's taking to get Vista out because of all the money the spent of code assurance plans. DRM disasters are turning off home users and reviewers because the systems are so buggy that all of M$'s hardware lock-ins and driver advantages are negated. Now everyone can look back at the things M$ has said about security and think, "those people are not very honest." All of that animosity makes it that much easier to advocate free software.
People in category (2) are hardly going to switch to a totally incompatible operating system that doesn't run any of their software: they'll keep on using their old computer until it breaks, and then they'll buy the cheapest Dell they can get and put Windows 98 on that.
That would be a shame because most of their software would work well with Wine, Crossover Office or other emulation software. Older applications, especially plain business programs, are what works best and a modern computer has no trouble emulating a whole Win98 desktop for you in an X window. This is how Munich was won. The only real problems come from things like games and media applications that use terminally nasty junk like directX. People who use stuff like that for entertainment most likely left 98 a long time ago or will use their current computer as a dedicated machine and re image it forever. The majority of Win98 users are prime candidates for Linux use on a cheaper than Dell used computer.
For those of you who haven't read it, here it is: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X all support long file names, albeit differently. Linux is case sensitive, the others are not.
Sure, that's good enough as long as you don't ever have to touch either OSX or Windows. In that case, you don't have to worry about the restrictions, sometimes pathetic, of those systems. If you are not so lucky and don't read the rest of that single almost advert free page, you might bone your finder with the wrong characters or blow pass the windoze 256 path + name length limit. This advice is worth following:
For maximum portability, avoid using characters that are illegal in any of the operating systems.
His follow up advice about spaces is also worth while.
A Not So Bright Flame by an Interested Party.
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 1
But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
It's good for Frank Ahrens to get the issue on the table, but his language is inflammatory and his conclusions are wrong. People know what they are getting into when they read Wikipedia, better than they know what they are getting when they read the Washington Post. Using terms like "agitprop" to equate Wikipedia to Stallin's communist slaughterhouse is reprehensible.
The Washington Post, as disinterested as it seems, has owners and everyone has their opinion. While we might not expect the Washington Post to have opinions about Ken Lay, they might be interests closer to their hearts. For instance, two of the largest US TV broadcast groups are owned by GE and Westinghouse. Most people don't know that and are unaware of the conflict of interest whenever those networks report on anything to do with energy production. Wikipedia gets around those problems by allowing everyone to have their say. It seems to be working for the most part and everyone who puts more than a minutes' though into it realizes the downside and further realizes that the resource will normalize to the truth in time when the interested parties have moved on .
It's bad form for Frank to wrongly accuse a "competitor" like that but worse for him to use terms like "agitprop". It kind of reminds me of M$ using terms like "cancer" and "software communism" to describe free software or the RIAA describing people who dare to make copies of their music as "pirates". It's just namecalling, and people who do it usually don't have much to stand on.
AHAHA! I never thought I'd see someone attempt to link Microsoft and loose sexual morality, but fuck me Twitter goes and does it!
Eh, I like the post where I compare free software to marriage and non free software to prostitution better. You know, non free software being deceptive, cheap, only interested in your money and likely to give you diseases and make you rue your foolishness, where free software is open, honest and based on mutual trust and respect rather than usership. I don't really think that software use can be linked to sexual mores, but the attitudes can. Why don't you look that better post up, looser? You don't seem to have much better to do.
they are in the business of making money, not of causing problems for the user (that, to them, is merely an unfortunate side effect) - likely some people at that job slept easier knowing at least their software did one useful thing.
You are way too kind to this scum. Their rationalization was that there was money to be made but not for long and that only those who struck hardest would make it. The dirt bag interviewed admitted this by quoting Douglas, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." The business model only worked as long as there were only a few dirt bags trying to impose the maximum tolerable burden. They knew that everyone who could care less would jump into it and soon the burden would be intolerable to anyone.
The only thing that made them feel better was the money they were making as they burnt down your computer. Hopefully, most of that money will be taken away.
In less than 10 minutes one of the many pathetic people who like to heckle Twitter snears:
by any chance did you happen to notice this was an AP wire piece?
I would hardly call M$NBC anything close to original. Lack of originality won't excuse them from running such a nasty little smear piece. Nor does the story's origin refute any of the other things I said about it.
Dedazo, M$ is paying you too much for such shoddy work. Could you at least post something remotely useful between such obvious trolls as:
Woops, you can post something useful now and then. Thanks for suggesting people give money to the EFF, that's a good idea, complete with link worth reproducing. Of course, the other 6 of the seven posts I read from you were nothing but vile and mindless insult and your ratio of useful to insult is low.
Despite its many legal victories, critics charge the EFF with idealism... and sometimes extremist.
The article starts by describing the offices as informal and some fights within the organization, then descends into name calling and empty propaganda by some of the companies who's practices have been challenged by the EFF. The article is essentially a feel bad piece and people who want to know about the EFF would be better off visiting the site themselves.
Idealism, what a lame complaint. The nebulous ideals of "Intellectual Property" and "Competition" (nice M$ buzzword tie-in there M$NBC!) touted by the "critics" are much less concrete and practical than any the EFF stands for. The headline might as well have read, "The EFF, though it's success, has detractors."
They will claim ownership to whatever OS they buy, steal or build. That's what they did with the quick and dirty OS (QDOS > DOS > M$DOS > WIN3.1 > WIN9x > WINXP > VISTA), and every other application that is now "theirs".
The real question is how long they will survive as a company after Vista crashes and burns.
Microsfot is again trying to change the english language.
The above correction is small. Their intent is the same but it won't work.
Most people never will buy into their definition of malice. Despite all sorts of effort, users refuse to see their freedoms as "communist" or a "cancer". Very few people see copyright violation as the moral equivalent of "piracy", which is deception, theft and murder on the high seas. While individual software packages may be malicious, Microsoft is going to have hard time convincing people that using them on more than one system at a time or sharing with a friend are the real problems when the Kill Switch is invoked. People know what they wan their computers to do. Microsoft can spend billions more, but they can't change people's basic motivations.
Funny how Linux on the desktop has been stagnant or declined since I've been reading that. It is taking over the UNIX workstation market, it isn't making a dent in the installed base of Mac and Windows desktop machines.
Got a link for that nonsense? I don't think so. You are about as likely to meet a person who has not heard of Linux as you are to prove that stagnant. Everyone now knows about Linux and many more people are trying it out. The flood is coming.
Every workplace on earth (or at least in the US) has a policy in the employee rules warning against office romances.
Including Microsoft? You do know that Melinda was employee before she was a wife, don't you? Nothing new there, Bill has always put himself above such petty things as rules he expects others to obey.
It doesn't say they're forbidden, it says they should be disclosed to HR. It's a fairly common practice.
For judgment and advice, presumably? "You may bone our property only with our (ours == owned by Bill Gates) permission." The M$ micromanagement knows no bounds! Bill's attitude always has been "What's our is ours and what's yours is ours," I suppose he means it.
If they were being hypocritical, it would at least show a knowledge of morals.
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
The tutorial in Debian is a series of local Inkscape drawing examples telling you exactly how to manipulate the tools. If you have not gotten that far, I'm not sure how you can think of yourself as qualified to judge the program.
company with desktop applications isn't going to make a profitable business selling those applications on Linux, nor should an application company sell its own OS as a core focus... Sensible chap.
You have odd judgment. Facts from the article: Correl has had trouble for the last six years but Xandros had continually increasing revenue. A fact from observation is the absolute destruction of Word Perfect market share. If selling off your only growing product is sensible, you have no sense or live under a monopoly cloud that is going to extinguish you anyway.
Word Perfect taught me everything I need to know about non free software. It was technically superior but ultimately a waste of time. I'd have been much better off learning emacs instead of WP on DOS.
Watching the Correl remnants grovel before M$ is depressing.
So, another hyped story killed with a modicum of common sense
Common sense does not apply with an organization like M$. From the fine article:
A ZDNet.com blogger reported earlier in the week on a conversation between a Windows user and a Microsoft support staffer, who allegedly admitted that users who refused to install the WGA update would be given 30 days before their copies of Windows would stop working. ZDNet.com said that Microsoft refused to deny the report at the time. But later, Microsoft appeared to sing a different tune. No, Microsoft antipiracy technologies cannot and will not turn off your computer,
That's what I remember too, amazing.
There would have been no kill switch story if M$ had just been honest to begin with. They are not honest, so all you are left with is the facts: WGA installs itself, if you don't have it they won't give you "updates", when installed it phones home every day.
Speculation based on those facts and previous behavior is natural. For years, minor changes to your hardware would stop your M$ computer from working ether through technical failure or forced reregistration. Given their willingness to ship buggy product and previous mechanisms that "turn your computer off", a reasonable person would guess WGA would be doing the same thing. Indeed, what's it going to do if it does find a "non genuine copy"?
M$'s intentionally bad non free driver situation can be compared to live CDs. Knoppix, auto configures in less time than it takes XP to boot and still has room for a complete office suite and web server. Changing hardware in a M$ computer is tricky at best. Even if you are successful, you will often be forced to re register.
M$'s practice of forced reregistration on minor hardware changes has no parallel in any industry.
Don't believe everything you read. It was true before computers and it will be true when you can't tell the difference between your friends and computers that are much smarter than you.
I hate that, but if I don't protect myself, I won't do anyone any good.
When you don't do the things you know are right, you help others do thing that you know are wrong.
Keep standing up for what you believe. Yes, at times it's good to do some things anonymously. Fliers are a good example. That does not keep you from telling others exactly what you think. If the people around you don't want you doing what's right, it's better to say good bye.
Slashdot Mirror
How do they know that embarrassing material on Facebook is real? It could be fictional or, worse, it could be missdirection. As the CIA was infiltrated by Soviet agents, the experts don't look so good.
The requests for phone taps were put in seven months before 9/11.
Govt. IT is highly fragmented. It took 20 years for DOD to switch to all-diesel. How long to switch to open-source?
Penis Cleaver, what a cute name you have. Oh well, it's worth the time to answer your silly question.
Intention is more important than time here. Now that the US DoD has realized and prooven the obvious, they will do it as they need to.
The rest of us can continue the migration and have fewer problem doing it. We can now point to it whenever we run into "Get the Facts" nonsense that M$ and other tin horn companies spend lots of money telling people. It was bullshit and this is one more nail in their credibility coffin. It's the kind of thing that makes their fanboys feel like they were lied to, because they were.
Enough hits like that makes things much easier. Between the government stating the obvious, DRM and corporate rip offs, M$ is losing most of it's fan base. Companies are feeling very burnt by the long time it's taking to get Vista out because of all the money the spent of code assurance plans. DRM disasters are turning off home users and reviewers because the systems are so buggy that all of M$'s hardware lock-ins and driver advantages are negated. Now everyone can look back at the things M$ has said about security and think, "those people are not very honest." All of that animosity makes it that much easier to advocate free software.
It's nice to see people finally catching on.
That would be a shame because most of their software would work well with Wine, Crossover Office or other emulation software. Older applications, especially plain business programs, are what works best and a modern computer has no trouble emulating a whole Win98 desktop for you in an X window. This is how Munich was won. The only real problems come from things like games and media applications that use terminally nasty junk like directX. People who use stuff like that for entertainment most likely left 98 a long time ago or will use their current computer as a dedicated machine and re image it forever. The majority of Win98 users are prime candidates for Linux use on a cheaper than Dell used computer.
Sure, that's good enough as long as you don't ever have to touch either OSX or Windows. In that case, you don't have to worry about the restrictions, sometimes pathetic, of those systems. If you are not so lucky and don't read the rest of that single almost advert free page, you might bone your finder with the wrong characters or blow pass the windoze 256 path + name length limit. This advice is worth following:
For maximum portability, avoid using characters that are illegal in any of the operating systems.
His follow up advice about spaces is also worth while.
I'm laughing at you, Dedazo.
It's good for Frank Ahrens to get the issue on the table, but his language is inflammatory and his conclusions are wrong. People know what they are getting into when they read Wikipedia, better than they know what they are getting when they read the Washington Post. Using terms like "agitprop" to equate Wikipedia to Stallin's communist slaughterhouse is reprehensible.
The Washington Post, as disinterested as it seems, has owners and everyone has their opinion. While we might not expect the Washington Post to have opinions about Ken Lay, they might be interests closer to their hearts. For instance, two of the largest US TV broadcast groups are owned by GE and Westinghouse. Most people don't know that and are unaware of the conflict of interest whenever those networks report on anything to do with energy production. Wikipedia gets around those problems by allowing everyone to have their say. It seems to be working for the most part and everyone who puts more than a minutes' though into it realizes the downside and further realizes that the resource will normalize to the truth in time when the interested parties have moved on .
It's bad form for Frank to wrongly accuse a "competitor" like that but worse for him to use terms like "agitprop". It kind of reminds me of M$ using terms like "cancer" and "software communism" to describe free software or the RIAA describing people who dare to make copies of their music as "pirates". It's just namecalling, and people who do it usually don't have much to stand on.
AHAHA! I never thought I'd see someone attempt to link Microsoft and loose sexual morality, but fuck me Twitter goes and does it!
Eh, I like the post where I compare free software to marriage and non free software to prostitution better. You know, non free software being deceptive, cheap, only interested in your money and likely to give you diseases and make you rue your foolishness, where free software is open, honest and based on mutual trust and respect rather than usership. I don't really think that software use can be linked to sexual mores, but the attitudes can. Why don't you look that better post up, looser? You don't seem to have much better to do.
they are in the business of making money, not of causing problems for the user (that, to them, is merely an unfortunate side effect) - likely some people at that job slept easier knowing at least their software did one useful thing.
You are way too kind to this scum. Their rationalization was that there was money to be made but not for long and that only those who struck hardest would make it. The dirt bag interviewed admitted this by quoting Douglas, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." The business model only worked as long as there were only a few dirt bags trying to impose the maximum tolerable burden. They knew that everyone who could care less would jump into it and soon the burden would be intolerable to anyone.
The only thing that made them feel better was the money they were making as they burnt down your computer. Hopefully, most of that money will be taken away.
The same thoughts can be applied to WGA.
I think what we REALLY need is a "uber-fast-forward button" so we can GET to the commercials!
That's what the broadcast flag is for. You won't be able to watch anything but the adverts.
Free media is going to eat their lunch.
by any chance did you happen to notice this was an AP wire piece?
I would hardly call M$NBC anything close to original. Lack of originality won't excuse them from running such a nasty little smear piece. Nor does the story's origin refute any of the other things I said about it.
Dedazo, M$ is paying you too much for such shoddy work. Could you at least post something remotely useful between such obvious trolls as:
Woops, you can post something useful now and then. Thanks for suggesting people give money to the EFF, that's a good idea, complete with link worth reproducing. Of course, the other 6 of the seven posts I read from you were nothing but vile and mindless insult and your ratio of useful to insult is low.
Despite its many legal victories, critics charge the EFF with idealism ... and sometimes extremist.
The article starts by describing the offices as informal and some fights within the organization, then descends into name calling and empty propaganda by some of the companies who's practices have been challenged by the EFF. The article is essentially a feel bad piece and people who want to know about the EFF would be better off visiting the site themselves.
Idealism, what a lame complaint. The nebulous ideals of "Intellectual Property" and "Competition" (nice M$ buzzword tie-in there M$NBC!) touted by the "critics" are much less concrete and practical than any the EFF stands for. The headline might as well have read, "The EFF, though it's success, has detractors."
They will claim ownership to whatever OS they buy, steal or build. That's what they did with the quick and dirty OS (QDOS > DOS > M$DOS > WIN3.1 > WIN9x > WINXP > VISTA), and every other application that is now "theirs".
The real question is how long they will survive as a company after Vista crashes and burns.
Microsfot is again trying to change the english language.
The above correction is small. Their intent is the same but it won't work.
Most people never will buy into their definition of malice. Despite all sorts of effort, users refuse to see their freedoms as "communist" or a "cancer". Very few people see copyright violation as the moral equivalent of "piracy", which is deception, theft and murder on the high seas. While individual software packages may be malicious, Microsoft is going to have hard time convincing people that using them on more than one system at a time or sharing with a friend are the real problems when the Kill Switch is invoked. People know what they wan their computers to do. Microsoft can spend billions more, but they can't change people's basic motivations.
Why go through all that trouble when you could just run dosbox and have the same effect?
Got a link for that nonsense? I don't think so. You are about as likely to meet a person who has not heard of Linux as you are to prove that stagnant. Everyone now knows about Linux and many more people are trying it out. The flood is coming.
Including Microsoft? You do know that Melinda was employee before she was a wife, don't you? Nothing new there, Bill has always put himself above such petty things as rules he expects others to obey.
For judgment and advice, presumably? "You may bone our property only with our (ours == owned by Bill Gates) permission." The M$ micromanagement knows no bounds! Bill's attitude always has been "What's our is ours and what's yours is ours," I suppose he means it.
If they were being hypocritical, it would at least show a knowledge of morals.
In your dreams or when it blue screens.
The tutorial in Debian is a series of local Inkscape drawing examples telling you exactly how to manipulate the tools. If you have not gotten that far, I'm not sure how you can think of yourself as qualified to judge the program.
You have odd judgment. Facts from the article: Correl has had trouble for the last six years but Xandros had continually increasing revenue. A fact from observation is the absolute destruction of Word Perfect market share. If selling off your only growing product is sensible, you have no sense or live under a monopoly cloud that is going to extinguish you anyway.
Word Perfect taught me everything I need to know about non free software. It was technically superior but ultimately a waste of time. I'd have been much better off learning emacs instead of WP on DOS.
Watching the Correl remnants grovel before M$ is depressing.
So, another hyped story killed with a modicum of common sense
Common sense does not apply with an organization like M$. From the fine article:
A ZDNet.com blogger reported earlier in the week on a conversation between a Windows user and a Microsoft support staffer, who allegedly admitted that users who refused to install the WGA update would be given 30 days before their copies of Windows would stop working. ZDNet.com said that Microsoft refused to deny the report at the time. But later, Microsoft appeared to sing a different tune. No, Microsoft antipiracy technologies cannot and will not turn off your computer,
That's what I remember too, amazing.
There would have been no kill switch story if M$ had just been honest to begin with. They are not honest, so all you are left with is the facts: WGA installs itself, if you don't have it they won't give you "updates", when installed it phones home every day.
Speculation based on those facts and previous behavior is natural. For years, minor changes to your hardware would stop your M$ computer from working ether through technical failure or forced reregistration. Given their willingness to ship buggy product and previous mechanisms that "turn your computer off", a reasonable person would guess WGA would be doing the same thing. Indeed, what's it going to do if it does find a "non genuine copy"?
M$'s intentionally bad non free driver situation can be compared to live CDs. Knoppix, auto configures in less time than it takes XP to boot and still has room for a complete office suite and web server. Changing hardware in a M$ computer is tricky at best. Even if you are successful, you will often be forced to re register.
M$'s practice of forced reregistration on minor hardware changes has no parallel in any industry.
The William Gates Agent [WGA] is going to suck.
Don't believe everything you read. It was true before computers and it will be true when you can't tell the difference between your friends and computers that are much smarter than you.
I hate that, but if I don't protect myself, I won't do anyone any good.
When you don't do the things you know are right, you help others do thing that you know are wrong.
Keep standing up for what you believe. Yes, at times it's good to do some things anonymously. Fliers are a good example. That does not keep you from telling others exactly what you think. If the people around you don't want you doing what's right, it's better to say good bye.