Most of the Kontact member programs know how to use sftp. I have my contacts and calendar that way, though I don't use the calendar much. I first put contact pictures up for myself, then the whole std.vcf. The pictures are still on the sftp server, a mighty 90MHz Pentium. Kontact sucks it up as a tmp file which it puts back when you finish. This works very well with the version that now ships with Debian Etch. I keep a local copy on the laptop, in case I don't have network access, but that's rare and all my contacts stay in sync across any number of laptops and desktops I use. If I'm not on line, I just uncheck the networked file. Nice eh?
Email itself, I have not tackled yet. IMAP, obviously, goes where I go but I leave PoP accounts alone on the road. I'm going to be reading what others do about this.
we have a testing machine... connected to the internet of all things... AND connected to the same network the production system is running on... and evidently it's running on ms-windows...
Yes that sounds like a bad idea, but what can they do about it? The article is not very clear, but it looks like any other office to me:
Dmitry Shatsky, vice president of the Russian Trading System (RTS) said in a statement that a virus had infected a single computer used to test trading software that was connected to the internet. The entire network had to be temporarily shut down on Thursday as experts sought to isolate the infected machine and scanned others PCs for signs of infection.
Nowhere does the article say the Windoze testing machine was not firewalled, patched, subneted and gingerly treated the way it needs to be. You might even assume, as it was a test machine, that it was not used to surf "untrusted" sites. Yet, it was owned. Non networked bank ATM machines have been compromised by technician's laptops. There's a pattern here... if you are running Windows, you are going to have problems like this regardless of network configuration.
I suppose they could further separate the testing machine. If they set up a wvdial modem box and stuck the Windoze machine behind that, they could limit the damage the Windoze machine can do. The problem is that they might need better bandwith for their tests.
Lilnobody presents a long flame of perl and claims no one would be hired to do perl work. With resources like the Wikipedia, such trolls are hard to pull off:
So, if Perl is good enough to manage Slashdot and Wiki, I imagine it's good enough to manage any "enterprise" site and is very much worth knowing.
People are indeed hiring people who know perl. There might not be a spike in demand like there is in the non free world, where all the "partners" move lock step, but the jobs are there. I like the way Wall put it, "What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?" Companies that don't mind spending lots of money will continue to persue.NET, C#, M$whatever, and crack lots of heads doing it.
Two tech jobs in high demand these days are.NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts.
No mysteries here. Obviously, a company that uses many of the first needs even more of the second and other support. The base pay $65,000 is your average big dumb company salary because everything cost two to three times as much as it should for them. Only big dumb companies, aka Microsoft Partners, would be moving to the latest and greatest M$ junk, so this spike in demand is predictable. The eventual disposal of this batch of soon to be squeezed of their lives programmers is also predictable. M$ will upgrade train their skills into irrelevance two years from now and a new wave of hiring will be on, and so on ad infinitum.
People using other software are quietly using their existing staff, having lives, going on vacation, etc, etc. They hire every now and then.
Many of these.NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the.NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.
Did it ever strike you that the "legacy Windows app" might have been one of the least stable buzzword compliant flavors ever? Compare the changes required from Win3.1, 95, 98, NT, and XP to GNU/Linux applications. The people who fell for VB have it even worse and they are the ones forking out the big bucks all the time to "keep up". An application ported to GNU/Linux in 1998 would have worked on commodity hardware then and now with a minimum of fuss and upkeep, even if they used something quick and dirty like Tcl/Tk. It's that TCO thing again.
What I am saying is that entrepreneurs and paying customers develop markets faster, and to the extent that society values innovation that is a good thing.
People pay for free software creation too. The Gates model of, "do as I say, or nothing happens" is false and has more to do with what I found most ironic:
That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.
This is not entrepreneurship, it is entitlement. There are no Microsoft innovations and there never will be. It's all been whine, hype and bully from the beginning. The M$ ascendency has been at the cost of real innovators and the public at large.
That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.
It's funny that he now thinks of pioneers as "loss leaders" and pledges not to enter a "market" until it's "mature". "Mature" means there's enough public awareness to buy one of the "loss leaders" for a song or crush the rest of them for nothing.
The biggest mistake, however, is to buy the core message. Free software, developed by users, blows non free software away. The "quality" software and docmentation he said could only be created by paying him is here and "flooding the market." The whole binary ecology is based on a lie. The biggest part of that lie is that there's no other way to make software and that we must sacrifice our freedom to have computers that work.
The tide is already turning. DRM'd music is making the cost of non free software obvious to everyone. The abundance of free software that anyone can download and use, blows everything Bill says right out of the water. Your children will not be able to believe that public school systems were once sued for sharing text editors.
If somebody is selling software, taking a copy of it and using it without paying for it is not cool. Taking a copy and selling copies of the copies is even less cool.
Bill Gates would agree with you, but you might want to do as he does rather than as he says. Here's some nice reading material for you. It does not even mention the big greedy grab of macsyma, nastran and other software developed at public cost. Stealing software, on way or another, is something Bill is good at. It's a shame you should take any moral advice from someone who thinks it's OK to sue public school systems for sharing software.
What you walk away with is very wrong. In most circumstances, you should think sharing with your friends is more important than forcing your friends give more money to Bill and Co to be able to work with non free file formats. If you want to avoid punishment for sharing, avoid non-free software. You can't share what you don't know and free software is better than non free.
use GPL code in something and won't let people have the source code. Why is that bad? Because they are using somebody else's stuff without permission.
It is rude and wrong, but not because you violated the will of the "owners". The greater outrage is the reason for not sharing the source code: you are trying to control your users. There's no other reason to hide source code for software you want others to use. At the very least, your added features are difficult to modify, so the user is unable to use it for their purposes. At the worst, you add DRM abuse that directly limits what the user can do with their own time and effort. Do you really think you need someone else's permission to do things with your computer? Using code from people who know better only adds insult to injury.
Code ownership is only needed as long as people would try to steal your work to abuse others. When the last of the non free software companies that emerged thirty years ago finish sinking in red ink, and there's nothing left but free software why bother with "ownership"? Yes, you will still be able to earn a living by writing free software. It's easier when your tools and support environment is free.
The core argument Bill Gates made 30 years ago was wrong. No one needs commercial software because users and others will indeed provide quality software and documentation. The way Bill has driven others from the field proves that non free software can only proffit by theft and draconian control.
this is about serious plagiarism, the sort of copyright-infringement stuff that makes the lawyers come running. Half of these games spawned court cases; the other half by all rights should have.
The author likes lawyers?
Three cheers for Namco for not bothering with them for Pacman clones. Some ideas are so obvious and have so much non computer prior art that anything but a direct copy is hard to call plagiarism. It would suck if you could not borrow bitmaps for parody. I'm glad big dumb companies can't claim the IDEA for a game and that clones can be made. Sure, those clones might not have the genius the "original" creator did, but that's not always the big dumb company anyway.
What a stupid idea. That's like saying that if people buy condoms, they'll just have lots of unprotected sex and get HIV because they think they'll be protected, so it's best not to buy condoms. Any decent virus scanner worth its salt should pick up email viruses anyway.
Condoms in a kama sutra story, nice but not quite right. Condoms have been shown to be effective. Antivirus programs have yet to protect anyone from the yearly M$ spread disease. OpenBSD might be considered a good condom, GNU/Linux distributions are condoms too but some are like the kind you get at a truck stop or the feel good extra thin kind. A distro with Macromedia Flash might be considered, "ribbed for her pleasure." Hooking up Windoze to a network is kind of like going blind drunk at a gay bar on the wrong side of the tracks.
As it was in the beginning, is as it is and ever shall be.
If Linux were released under GPL3, then nobody with a DRM box could run Linux on it.
No, people will continue to use hardware as well as they can. The ability to use your hardware as you see fit is a core freedom that's not contradicted by GPL3. That's very different from making DRM friendly code.
The bottom line is that DRM will be used to deny you the ability to run your own code, regardless of your cooperation. DRM is about control and locking people out. You can see it coming.
Option B: Dell "pilfers" code, doesn't maintain it, leaves users with laptops and desktops that will only run 2 year out of date software they can't update. Bad business decision again; users revolt.
This is different from M$'s current "Trusted Computing" plan in what way besides the code base? I agree, it's a bad idea but that won't keep the losers from trying to extend their control over other people's software.
Yes, there's lots of damage but your reasoning is a little off. WMplayers do indeed suck. They are cheap and have poor or no shuffle ability. The pay music services and having to deal with WMP is a nightmare I can only imagine from the horror stories of my friends. But let's get this straight, standards not control is the answer.
Unfortuantely, this strict control of licensing (or lack thereof) is why the iPod works so well. Well, that and the software on the back-end, but that's a whole different argument.
You know, I own a cheap "Works for Sure" MP3 player. It works for me because usbfs works and it will play the music I put there that way and my ID3 tags show up. The thing I hate about it is the crappy shuffle. It has two orders of play, alphabetical and "random". Both orders only change if you change the files on the device.
If M$ wanted to have a rich media scene, they would come up with trade marks that mean a device complies with reasonable standards. They don't want that, they want control and think that will earn them more. It's damaged and people will continue to route around them.
The twisted logic involved with DRM is so extreme, it's hard to believe anyone can go along with any of it. Two minutes of thought expose the whole framework for what it is.
Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.
By protection, you must mean lock out all but a few publishers. Why else limit who can make a player? This is an "our way or the highway" kind of admission. Yes, trying to control popular culture through outdated laws and bogus technology is wrong.
Given the financial difficulty of building a full device capable of full media playback, what would hobbyists do with an SDK that allowed raw access to protected content - most of them would write software the emulates a virtual device to circumvent the DRM. That's exactly what Microsoft is attempting to prevent.
Oh yeah, piracy is the only reason people would ever want to watch a movie. No it's not.
This is about a foolish attempt to control. People are going to make and distribute players for M$'s crappy formats with or without an SDK to help them. This issue will come to a head and hopefully overturn the dumber restrictions of the DMCA, which was passed before most people understood it's implications. More importantly, people are going to publish in alternative formats and economic forces will pull the whole scheme under.
The harder they push, the faster they lose. The "Works for Sure" devices are miserable. WM formats are also second rate and the adoption of both is just not going to happen.
Is this proof enough [slashdot.org]? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update": [user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
You could read that both ways. IE7 could have caused Firefox to render incorrectly or it could be that IE7 still does not get css. Even a moron who spends all their free time harassing Slashdotters can see that.
Like I said, it's all a mater of trust and M$ blew that a long time ago. Even with blatant errors, you won't know who's at till the court order establishes Microsoft's fault again.
Since our users cannot agree to the EULA, our organization has banned Skype.
What EULA can your employees agree to? I'd say none and that no non-free software of any kind could be installed by end users. Surely, you would not consider an employee's installation of WMP or other M$ "upgrades" that make M$ root?
Do you monitor your network for bandwith wastage by spy and malware?
But to a business which lives by "you can EXpect what you INspect" Skype is a terrifying unknown.
All non free software is this way. Why pick on Skype?
The only thing you missed in your "perfect spyware" specification was this: the perfect spyware does nothing useful for the victim. Removing the program that installed the spyware often leaves the spyware.
The reason given by the company against Skype and P2P, "the exchanged data cannot be controlled" makes no sense. Do they think they can control the post in and out? Phone calls? Email? Better lock it all down. How stupid of them.
There's not much to read besides abstracts and that's too bad. One of the abstracts said it well:
Pretreatment of cells with ultrasound (20 kHz, 2 W cm(-2), 60 s) selectively induced cytotoxicity in skin and prostate cancer cells, while having minimal effect on corresponding normal cell lines.
Selective toxicity is what cancer treatment is all about, so while the sound man not "kill" cancer, it's a promising treatment.
It would be nice to see the actual studies. I'd like to see the statistics, and see if any other methods were tried and the researcher's reasoning. It may be that dysplastic cells are susceptible to sonic damage and this might work with other therapy methods, such as xray or heat. I'd also like to know how they treated prostate cancer, which is the number two cancer killer of men in the US.
I think the comment you just made could probably be considered slander unless you can back it up with facts. M$ have used some pretty questionable practices in the past but I somehow doubt even they would be as stupid as to intentionally cripple FF.
Is this proof enough? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update":
[user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
Is this intentional? We won't know till the next anti-trust trial, when they pull up another pile of email with phrases like, "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen supply" are published. Their behavior in the DrDOS case was bad enough to never trust them again.
Linux support, who cares? If it's going to have a runtime of more than 14 days, it's going to be running GNU/Linux, BSD or QNX. Being a M$ toy, we can be sure they won't tell anyone else how to use it and it will take a year or so for the free drivers to make their way into the kernel. Of course, M$ users are the only people who need such a silly thing and use with Vista is an admission of failure.
If you want to keep your laptop on all the time, just run GNU/Linux yourself and use APM/ACPI for hibernation/suspend. That way you can get your info when you want it and it's all where you left off. It's taken me some time to master APM/ACPI use for my laptops, but they are now flawless. I fully expect them to get better uptime than my desktops because they won't go down when the power company does. That kind of reliability is one of the huge advantages of running free software.
If you want easy access to your information, get a good cell phone that works with Kandy or a reasonable PDA that works with Kpilot. Whipping out a laptop is not as easy as a good PDA and an extra display won't ever replace a pocket computer.
You have to get to the point where you get satisfaction just from finding and seeing an object, rather than being able to appreciate its beauty.
I'm waiting for a telescope that points itself and lables the object. Images from better telescopes on another screen would be nice, so I'd know what I'm looking at. Kstarts controlling tilt and swivel and projected into the eyepiece would be great.
Sounds like M$ has simply matched Google policy, if they bother to do more than talk. The M$N search engine is still at the service of the Chinese government and a rubber stamp will quickly be fabricated for the proper "lawful" request to nail bloggers. Cooperation with evil is still willing and full by both. Microsoft also has a nasty tendency to say one thing and do another, so we can't really trust them to do anything anyway.
What platform are you running on? If your answer is Windoze, well, you have your problem identified.
My wife, four year old girl and I never see problems like that on Debian or Mepis. If anything, it's gotten smaller, faster and better.
If you want to give your friends system stability, privacy and a better computer owning experience in general, you need to change your evangelism to platform migration. Microsoft sabotages the better programs on it's platform and the cumulative result is an complete lack of system stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Email itself, I have not tackled yet. IMAP, obviously, goes where I go but I leave PoP accounts alone on the road. I'm going to be reading what others do about this.
Yes that sounds like a bad idea, but what can they do about it? The article is not very clear, but it looks like any other office to me:
Dmitry Shatsky, vice president of the Russian Trading System (RTS) said in a statement that a virus had infected a single computer used to test trading software that was connected to the internet. The entire network had to be temporarily shut down on Thursday as experts sought to isolate the infected machine and scanned others PCs for signs of infection.
Nowhere does the article say the Windoze testing machine was not firewalled, patched, subneted and gingerly treated the way it needs to be. You might even assume, as it was a test machine, that it was not used to surf "untrusted" sites. Yet, it was owned. Non networked bank ATM machines have been compromised by technician's laptops. There's a pattern here ... if you are running Windows, you are going to have problems like this regardless of network configuration.
I suppose they could further separate the testing machine. If they set up a wvdial modem box and stuck the Windoze machine behind that, they could limit the damage the Windoze machine can do. The problem is that they might need better bandwith for their tests.
It has been used since the early days of the Web to write CGI scripts, and is an integral component of the popular LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / (Perl / PHP / Python)) platform for web development. Perl has been called "the glue that holds the web together". Large projects written in Perl include Slash, early implementations of PHP [1], and UseModWiki, the wiki software used in Wikipedia until 2002. ... New features have been added, yet virtually complete backwards compatibility with earlier versions is maintained.
So, if Perl is good enough to manage Slashdot and Wiki, I imagine it's good enough to manage any "enterprise" site and is very much worth knowing.
People are indeed hiring people who know perl. There might not be a spike in demand like there is in the non free world, where all the "partners" move lock step, but the jobs are there. I like the way Wall put it, "What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?" Companies that don't mind spending lots of money will continue to persue .NET, C#, M$whatever, and crack lots of heads doing it.
Two tech jobs in high demand these days are .NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts.
No mysteries here. Obviously, a company that uses many of the first needs even more of the second and other support. The base pay $65,000 is your average big dumb company salary because everything cost two to three times as much as it should for them. Only big dumb companies, aka Microsoft Partners, would be moving to the latest and greatest M$ junk, so this spike in demand is predictable. The eventual disposal of this batch of soon to be squeezed of their lives programmers is also predictable. M$ will upgrade train their skills into irrelevance two years from now and a new wave of hiring will be on, and so on ad infinitum.
People using other software are quietly using their existing staff, having lives, going on vacation, etc, etc. They hire every now and then.
Did it ever strike you that the "legacy Windows app" might have been one of the least stable buzzword compliant flavors ever? Compare the changes required from Win3.1, 95, 98, NT, and XP to GNU/Linux applications. The people who fell for VB have it even worse and they are the ones forking out the big bucks all the time to "keep up". An application ported to GNU/Linux in 1998 would have worked on commodity hardware then and now with a minimum of fuss and upkeep, even if they used something quick and dirty like Tcl/Tk. It's that TCO thing again.
People pay for free software creation too. The Gates model of, "do as I say, or nothing happens" is false and has more to do with what I found most ironic:
That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.
This is not entrepreneurship, it is entitlement. There are no Microsoft innovations and there never will be. It's all been whine, hype and bully from the beginning. The M$ ascendency has been at the cost of real innovators and the public at large.
It's funny that he now thinks of pioneers as "loss leaders" and pledges not to enter a "market" until it's "mature". "Mature" means there's enough public awareness to buy one of the "loss leaders" for a song or crush the rest of them for nothing.
The biggest mistake, however, is to buy the core message. Free software, developed by users, blows non free software away. The "quality" software and docmentation he said could only be created by paying him is here and "flooding the market." The whole binary ecology is based on a lie. The biggest part of that lie is that there's no other way to make software and that we must sacrifice our freedom to have computers that work.
The tide is already turning. DRM'd music is making the cost of non free software obvious to everyone. The abundance of free software that anyone can download and use, blows everything Bill says right out of the water. Your children will not be able to believe that public school systems were once sued for sharing text editors.
Bill Gates would agree with you, but you might want to do as he does rather than as he says. Here's some nice reading material for you. It does not even mention the big greedy grab of macsyma, nastran and other software developed at public cost. Stealing software, on way or another, is something Bill is good at. It's a shame you should take any moral advice from someone who thinks it's OK to sue public school systems for sharing software.
What you walk away with is very wrong. In most circumstances, you should think sharing with your friends is more important than forcing your friends give more money to Bill and Co to be able to work with non free file formats. If you want to avoid punishment for sharing, avoid non-free software. You can't share what you don't know and free software is better than non free.
use GPL code in something and won't let people have the source code. Why is that bad? Because they are using somebody else's stuff without permission.
It is rude and wrong, but not because you violated the will of the "owners". The greater outrage is the reason for not sharing the source code: you are trying to control your users. There's no other reason to hide source code for software you want others to use. At the very least, your added features are difficult to modify, so the user is unable to use it for their purposes. At the worst, you add DRM abuse that directly limits what the user can do with their own time and effort. Do you really think you need someone else's permission to do things with your computer? Using code from people who know better only adds insult to injury.
Code ownership is only needed as long as people would try to steal your work to abuse others. When the last of the non free software companies that emerged thirty years ago finish sinking in red ink, and there's nothing left but free software why bother with "ownership"? Yes, you will still be able to earn a living by writing free software. It's easier when your tools and support environment is free.
The core argument Bill Gates made 30 years ago was wrong. No one needs commercial software because users and others will indeed provide quality software and documentation. The way Bill has driven others from the field proves that non free software can only proffit by theft and draconian control.
The author likes lawyers?
Three cheers for Namco for not bothering with them for Pacman clones. Some ideas are so obvious and have so much non computer prior art that anything but a direct copy is hard to call plagiarism. It would suck if you could not borrow bitmaps for parody. I'm glad big dumb companies can't claim the IDEA for a game and that clones can be made. Sure, those clones might not have the genius the "original" creator did, but that's not always the big dumb company anyway.
Given your interest is in reducing S/N ratio here, I know your thanks are as sincere as the rest of your posts.
Condoms in a kama sutra story, nice but not quite right. Condoms have been shown to be effective. Antivirus programs have yet to protect anyone from the yearly M$ spread disease. OpenBSD might be considered a good condom, GNU/Linux distributions are condoms too but some are like the kind you get at a truck stop or the feel good extra thin kind. A distro with Macromedia Flash might be considered, "ribbed for her pleasure." Hooking up Windoze to a network is kind of like going blind drunk at a gay bar on the wrong side of the tracks.
As it was in the beginning, is as it is and ever shall be.
No, people will continue to use hardware as well as they can. The ability to use your hardware as you see fit is a core freedom that's not contradicted by GPL3. That's very different from making DRM friendly code.
The bottom line is that DRM will be used to deny you the ability to run your own code, regardless of your cooperation. DRM is about control and locking people out. You can see it coming.
This is different from M$'s current "Trusted Computing" plan in what way besides the code base? I agree, it's a bad idea but that won't keep the losers from trying to extend their control over other people's software.
Unfortuantely, this strict control of licensing (or lack thereof) is why the iPod works so well. Well, that and the software on the back-end, but that's a whole different argument.
You know, I own a cheap "Works for Sure" MP3 player. It works for me because usbfs works and it will play the music I put there that way and my ID3 tags show up. The thing I hate about it is the crappy shuffle. It has two orders of play, alphabetical and "random". Both orders only change if you change the files on the device.
If M$ wanted to have a rich media scene, they would come up with trade marks that mean a device complies with reasonable standards. They don't want that, they want control and think that will earn them more. It's damaged and people will continue to route around them.
Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.
By protection, you must mean lock out all but a few publishers. Why else limit who can make a player? This is an "our way or the highway" kind of admission. Yes, trying to control popular culture through outdated laws and bogus technology is wrong.
Given the financial difficulty of building a full device capable of full media playback, what would hobbyists do with an SDK that allowed raw access to protected content - most of them would write software the emulates a virtual device to circumvent the DRM. That's exactly what Microsoft is attempting to prevent.
Oh yeah, piracy is the only reason people would ever want to watch a movie. No it's not.
This is about a foolish attempt to control. People are going to make and distribute players for M$'s crappy formats with or without an SDK to help them. This issue will come to a head and hopefully overturn the dumber restrictions of the DMCA, which was passed before most people understood it's implications. More importantly, people are going to publish in alternative formats and economic forces will pull the whole scheme under.
The harder they push, the faster they lose. The "Works for Sure" devices are miserable. WM formats are also second rate and the adoption of both is just not going to happen.
Certainly IE7 didn't do anything to Firefox.
That's not so certain. Look again:
Is this proof enough [slashdot.org]? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update": [user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
You could read that both ways. IE7 could have caused Firefox to render incorrectly or it could be that IE7 still does not get css. Even a moron who spends all their free time harassing Slashdotters can see that.
Like I said, it's all a mater of trust and M$ blew that a long time ago. Even with blatant errors, you won't know who's at till the court order establishes Microsoft's fault again.
What EULA can your employees agree to? I'd say none and that no non-free software of any kind could be installed by end users. Surely, you would not consider an employee's installation of WMP or other M$ "upgrades" that make M$ root?
Do you monitor your network for bandwith wastage by spy and malware?
All non free software is this way. Why pick on Skype?
The only thing you missed in your "perfect spyware" specification was this: the perfect spyware does nothing useful for the victim. Removing the program that installed the spyware often leaves the spyware.
The reason given by the company against Skype and P2P, "the exchanged data cannot be controlled" makes no sense. Do they think they can control the post in and out? Phone calls? Email? Better lock it all down. How stupid of them.
Pretreatment of cells with ultrasound (20 kHz, 2 W cm(-2), 60 s) selectively induced cytotoxicity in skin and prostate cancer cells, while having minimal effect on corresponding normal cell lines.
Selective toxicity is what cancer treatment is all about, so while the sound man not "kill" cancer, it's a promising treatment.
It would be nice to see the actual studies. I'd like to see the statistics, and see if any other methods were tried and the researcher's reasoning. It may be that dysplastic cells are susceptible to sonic damage and this might work with other therapy methods, such as xray or heat. I'd also like to know how they treated prostate cancer, which is the number two cancer killer of men in the US.
Is this proof enough? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update": [user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
Is this intentional? We won't know till the next anti-trust trial, when they pull up another pile of email with phrases like, "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen supply" are published. Their behavior in the DrDOS case was bad enough to never trust them again.
Linux support, who cares? If it's going to have a runtime of more than 14 days, it's going to be running GNU/Linux, BSD or QNX. Being a M$ toy, we can be sure they won't tell anyone else how to use it and it will take a year or so for the free drivers to make their way into the kernel. Of course, M$ users are the only people who need such a silly thing and use with Vista is an admission of failure.
If you want to keep your laptop on all the time, just run GNU/Linux yourself and use APM/ACPI for hibernation/suspend. That way you can get your info when you want it and it's all where you left off. It's taken me some time to master APM/ACPI use for my laptops, but they are now flawless. I fully expect them to get better uptime than my desktops because they won't go down when the power company does. That kind of reliability is one of the huge advantages of running free software.
If you want easy access to your information, get a good cell phone that works with Kandy or a reasonable PDA that works with Kpilot. Whipping out a laptop is not as easy as a good PDA and an extra display won't ever replace a pocket computer.
I'm waiting for a telescope that points itself and lables the object. Images from better telescopes on another screen would be nice, so I'd know what I'm looking at. Kstarts controlling tilt and swivel and projected into the eyepiece would be great.
The right thing to do is nothing.
My wife, four year old girl and I never see problems like that on Debian or Mepis. If anything, it's gotten smaller, faster and better.
If you want to give your friends system stability, privacy and a better computer owning experience in general, you need to change your evangelism to platform migration. Microsoft sabotages the better programs on it's platform and the cumulative result is an complete lack of system stability.