The defense given in the article echo's yours in a less rabid manner:
So we got another round of emails encouraging us to file patents, as a way of defensively time-stamping some of our work, and offering attractive bonuses for doing so. My area is particularly "bleeding edge", and my manager pointed out that we'd look pretty stupid if our everyday activities were patented by a rival.
This kind of time stamping and proof of prior work can be had for much less money than a patent. Call a notary, that's one of the things they are for. Make an deal with the local bank. There must be a simpler way to provide a court with definitive proof without validating software patents with mindshare, effort and money.
You also forward the bogus claim:
one of the Principles of Free Software, transparency, is fundamental in the patent process. The wisdom of the patent system is, In exchange for exclusive right-to-use on your invention, for a limited time, you must fully disclose that same invention.
That's the general idea, but you might note that it does not work like that at all. Engineers can not recognize their inventions after the lawyers get thought with them and it's a wonder that a court can enforce them anymore. Patents are being used to claim ideas, not inventions, and that's a perversion. Yes, software patents are the epitome of this abuse of principles.
If you want to share your source code, just publish it GPL in the usual ways. 10 points to the first person who can show me where Savannah or Sourceforge keep tabs on submissions to be able to show the definitive proof that's the reason so many lemmings are wasting so much money on so many lawyers and government processes.
Since when was running Linux an anti-Microsoft thing? This is the kind of crap the OSS community needs to stomp out in order to give Linux the reputation it deserves and broaden its adoption, especially on the desktop.
I don't think I'd call the Viperlair part of the OSS community. They are welcome to join, of course, but they look hoplessly meshed in the windoze world. All of their tests were Windoze based, so they could not really offer any performance measures for the same hardware under Linux.
The anti-M$ statement is very much at odds with the next breath they take:
Being a poor student on a budget, that doesn't mean I want a substandard CPU...
Well Golly! For the $200 the rest of us have to pay for Winblows, you might just get yourself a better processor. Given all the trouble Widows still is to configure, how many coppies of it will you have to buy? As a student, do you dare risk your gaming machine just to do your dull old homework and vice versa? If you buy two coppies of Winblows, you are half way to another excellent system in the hole. That's not anti-Microsoft, that's just the money talking.
There are live game CDs but they take the performance hit that implies. There are several Knoppix spinoffs that come this way. More importantly, Game companies themselves are looking at custom distros as a way out of the M$ tax.
Linux multimedia is better than ever and way better than the word had way back when I quit fooling with Windoze. It's gotten good enough so that a person who does not want to fidget endlessly with configurations might be able to be a gamer again under Linux. Quake 2 is available as a debpackage that works and runs better than it did on my last windoze system. Between that, better configured ALSA and real interest on the part of game makers, I'm very encouraged. Gaming may not be here now, I can't tell, but when it does arrive it will be much better than anything M$ because all of the subsystems are so much cleaner.
M$ is evil and their code blows. That's anti-Microsoft. Does my opinion somehow make you like M$ more? Strange. Hitting your hand with a hammer is stupid and hurts. I hope that does not force you into the "I love to hit my hand with a hammer" crowd.
They are not only about the same thing, they are written by the same journalist, and are identical, word-for-word. When that happens, newsbot is going to link to the MSNBC version.
That's not true at all. This is another tool of public manipulation. First, the order of article reporting is manipulated. Second, the same article by the same author can be manipulated by omission of sections. The fact that M$ "partnered" with NBC shows a keen desire to shape public opinion through "news".
I have an example of the first kind of manipulation and the reasons for it here.
They can perform the second kind of manipulation for the same reasons with a traditional justification that makes no sense on the internet. "News" articles were traditionally written in a style defined by print advertising. The entire story is confined to a single sentence opening paragraph which is explained by further short, often single sentence paragraphs. The paragraphs declined in order of perceived reader interest. This allowed the editor and print setter flexibility in page layout so that the adverts could all fit. There is obviously no longer a need to print, "All the news that fits," and more traditional and informative writing styles are the coin of internet news. It is, however, just as easy for M$NBC to cull articles to twist their meaning in the name of "reader interest" as it ever was.
Other news services, such as Google, operate on different principles. Their presentation shows duplicate articles in the same place so that it's easy to compare versions without making it difficult to navigate different stories. Google seeks to inform, Microsoft seeks to manipulate.
No, Augustus make his own definition of the word that is our understanding, but Princeps was used by the Senate before him. English speakers refer to it as the Principate. Britanica.
Given M$'s slave driving ambitions, the reference to autocracy must be intentional. Microsoft's audacity never ceases to amaze.
If you like that kind of thing, you might as well do your research in pre 1990 Pravda or Tass which are essentially identical. Remember the Russian proverb as you do, "There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth."
The admission of preference of message is a symptom of much greater dishonesty. The other symptom is the huge proportion of the Microsoft budget that goes into PR, hype and slander.
For all the alledged "noise" RMS is accused of, can anyone imagine him doing something as pointless as the things Bill Gates did for XP launch? Imagine RMS renting helicopters to transport a carboard box, hiring Madonna and putting his face on a 40 foot high screen to announce a new version of emacs. That, my friend, is the "news" MSNBC trumpets.
The use of the phrase, "a first among equals" is about as cynical a reference to their goals opposed to the goals of those who founded the internet as one can find. Microsoft seeks to control public opinion and that is why they have MSNBC. The goal of that control is further control, and so on. Sites are either peers or they follow the master/slave model. Microsoft prefers slaves.
These goals make it impossible for M$ to ever be objective or as good or better than Google. When Slate publishes an article recommending another browser over IE, Slate is sold off. Guess where that Slate article shows up on a newsbot search for "IE Firefox." Somewhere way way after four or five blurbs about Firefox errors. A Google news search for the same thing finds an article that references Slate at #10. Google's bias is to refelect the news not to make Firefox look bad like M$'s site is. The same pattern is demonstrated whenever anyone mentions a M$ search engine. The contents are filtered by meta rules that manipulate rather than inform the reader.
I can only hope that most people think like you that it's better to be informed than manipulated.
Assuming WTF stands for "What the fuck" I'll answer the foul mouthed crap flooder. I may be talking to a robot, but I enjoy the definition. This stuff is just too easy.
Windoze 1. (noun) an insecure collection of software used by indolent market droids, often cracked and used by spammers, scammers, script kiddies and porn site operators. Little changed since the 8 bit version was acquired in the early 80s but extensively added to by further acquisitions, it is now more of a distribution than an operating system 2. (verb) the futile effort of using 1 to get actual work done. A little click, a little nothing, a little click, a little crash. It generally ends like this.
Chances are, the AC fits both definitions.
Linux, a kernel that does what it should well, is nothing like Windoze.
He did his job, documented his case very well, and got screwed.
Did he? How do you know he did not take 2,000 screenshots and cull them? Always beware when an interested party hands you "random" samples. It would have been better if he tied the screenshots to time logs of applications. If his boss really played solitare all day, a log of applications would show it and the percentage time it was active. Even still, it would be difficult for him to prove as he could manipulate the logs manually.
What's called for is institutionalized watchdoging. There should have been someone who this man could have asked for help in doing his job. An IT person under another boss would be good. This institutional failure should as a basis for a transfer, not a firing.
I can imagine the state trying to slip out of the bind by saying that the boss was not abusing his computer or network time. It can always be argued that playing the boss was accomplishing his job description and what he did with his spare time was his business. Managerial positions can be that way.
A conscientious manager will roll up their sleeves and help get work done when they run out of planning, reports and all that boring crap. It helps to keep your feet on the ground.
A slob will sit around and turn into a moron. A slob that's drooling 90% of the time soon finds few topics for reports and might get axed. A dangerous slob is one that got themselves promoted to hide incompetence. They have a tendency to screw up and blame their underlings. I've had one of those and I think this one did too. Typically, those they leave in charge for an extended leave will say things like, "I did my job and his job with ease. My job usually takes all of my time. I wonder what the boss does all day."
It identifies the user and makes sure they pay! In the future, that identity and network control will be used to stop music sharing, broadcast flag violating, free software terrorists and force them to join the Napster paying slaves on Windoze only intranets with great big flashing Adverts taking up 1/2 of your bandwith and no mute or off buttons. Ah, the future, it's so much like the broadcasting present and past. 24/7, buy more soap!
Anonymous? I don't think so. It's not a free service, so I imagine they have a client that identifies the user for billing purposes. That's no more anonymous than dialup or cable operations. Nor are those other more expensive alternatives any more secure. As the waves of spam, virus and malware continue to be released without any accountability at all, it's clear that all commercial and government attempts to follow users around only affect honest people. Real criminals have armies of broken Windoze boxes on cable modem services to do their bidding.
The problem is not wifi or the internet, it's Windoze.
Of course you did. You said that most of the bugs were the caused by user stupidity,
"plain user stupidity and the fundamental problems of the browser as an application platform make up for a large percentage of the perceived problems with IE."
You also defended M$ themselves:
That's nice, except that when "blackhats" do the same thing to people who use IE then it's Microsoft's fault.
As if M$'s bland and changeless interface were anyone but M$'s fault. That is, after all, one of the keys to the exploit that the cracker can make a one size fit's all spoof for M$ platforms.
I doubt anyone so offensive as yourself ever did anything for anyone else. "Party Line", piff. It would be nice if you did contribute something but your insulting comments here indicate something else.
Perhaps all our retarded zealot fanboys will being the understand that actual vulnerabilities aside (which affect all code), plain user stupidity and the fundamental problems of the browser as an application platform make up for a large percentage of the perceived problems with IE.
While most normal people would ignore something as insulting as that, I see that you have moderated your flambait up, so I'll bite your troll.
As someone who's seen an auto-root jump out of Outlook and completely co-op a well kept fortune 100 company machine, I can say that neither the user nor administrators are to blame for rampant M$ exploits. The problems poor OS design and idiotic application design and the problems still exist. Programs can hide from M$'s kernel. The file system does not have execute and user permissions built in and enforced by the kernel. The programs, such as IE and Outlook will execute local code on remote demand as root. Email that plays wav files is just one example. The result is the perpetual root of the week being forever fought by anti-virus companies and others.
The design of Linux itself goes a long way toward fighting malware of the type you complain about. This exploit, while serious, won't allow a non root user to install software and malware hits a dead end right there. As the author of the article points out, the spoofer does not know what UI you have and Firefox gives you different preferences even in the M$ monoculture. Such an attack is obvious to someone who runs KDE in a different window manager. A far more dangerous exploit is to forge the "this application requires root password" dialog. In a corporate environment, this is a non issue because the user won't know that password and users in a well configured environment won't have to enter their passwords more than once a day. They will recognize the dialog as bogus.
Nice try at a defense of an obviously defenseless browser. A few clueless market droids will shake their heads and congratulate themselves on their continued use of IE and all the effort and money spent after it. "IE, the worst your money can buy."
The problem here is that OpenOffice is even more useless. (I'd say even less useful, except that might lead you to think I found Word useful).
Ah, but it's not. Your manager has problems sharing flyers with you, but you can easily make a pdf to give her that will work anywhere the same way every time. Given a choice between the two pigs, the one that cost less and does more is the winner.
If you have a problem collaborating on the text of the flyer, you might hit her with the clue stick and ask her to send text to you instead of a dinky flyer. If you were both running Linux, you could shell into each other's machines and share your work the easy way.
Sure, you can do all of that but will you? The auto maker can price their parts just below what you will charge for all of your effort. Don't forget that they are also going to be using bogus IP laws to make sure there's no competition in the air bag maker's market. So, the customer will be faced with you messing with their car to put in the same part the dealership will without "damage" and in less time, perhaps for less money. It's hard to fight a rigged system physically.
A better solution is to hack the software and make laws that protect that effort, if not demand a release of specs.
This is sounds clean and groovy, but just like hydrogen-powered cars, is dirty and wasteful.
Blah, blah, blah, I can't hear you. When I find out that it's cheaper to use my wife's car to power my house all day than it is to use electricity off the grid, I'm going to do it.
When the automakers figure out that they can sell more cars this way, they are going to do it.
When GE sees the market going that way, they are going to sell equipment that makes it easy to do. They will tell the US military that distributed electric generation will make the country more resilient and they will be right.
The fact that everyone running their cars more will make more pollution and degrade everyone's standard of living will be lost in the money. If the surplus comes simply from driving around, it's not a big deal and we are all winners. If it encourages people to stop buying big Stupid Urban Vehicles that make as much smog in two commutes as a VW running all day, we will still be better off. One way or another, the idea is going to be hard to stop.
but you won't actually be using it. Every time I open a.doc file with the thing, I wonder in what new and exciting ways it's going to look goofy, or even be unreadable.
I think the same thing when I use Word. Most of the day, I wonder when the OS itself is going to crap out and suck down an hour's worth of my work. OO is a pig, but format problems are Microsoft's fault and show up everywhere. They don't even have a consistent font set they distribute with Word, so the formating gets clobbered when you move it to another machine, another printer or another version of Word.
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.... . They'd waste a lot of time and effort reformatting documents sent to them, resending documents to others, etc.
You have never tried have you? There's no pain involved, except templates, but there's no reason to be mailing templates around is there?
Trust me, contractors will do whatever Lockheed Martin and the US government ask.
You misspelled "We're going to send jackbooted thugs to the google CO and we're going to hit their knees. We're going to break their knees very hard".
It should be followed by "Next Year" as they have been making the same stupid promisses for the last ten years. "An Integrated Browser.", "All of your data at your fingertip." Yawn. Yet all they can do is put other people, who deliver on those promisses, out of business. They could not buy Google, so they will break them if they can.
This time, I think they are up against something that's bigger than they are. They squashed OS/2 by making it more expensive than winblows. IBM could not do much about that with cross licensed and closed source code. Having vanquished reasonable competition on commodity hardware, they were free to crush Netscape because people felt they had no alternative to M$'s OS. All that's changed today. It's easy to swap the OS right out from under M$ and word is getting out that Microsoft is nothing but pain to the user. M$ wanted the world to be it's slave but the world has other ideas.
Stuff like this has been going on since the dawn of civilation, and it's going to continue to go on long after Gates is in the ground. If you're upset about it, you seem a bit thin-skinned to me, or perhaps hopelessly naive about how things happen in the real world.... it sounds like your envy has gotten the better of your logic.
I'll ignore the personal insults. I'm used to that kind of thing and worse from M$ apologists. Name calling is integral to enslavement, so those who wish to enslave will always have offensive mouths.
Bill Gates is getting unusual treatment and does not warrent it. Homeland Security itself is novel and repugnant in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Fawning over the "rich and powerful" is unAmerican and servile. It's disgusting enough when whole airports are shut down for Bill Clinton to fetch a hairdresser for himself. Extending the such obnoxious behavior to private citizens is too much. For a short time, Bill Gates owned the lake and the sky itself. The rest of the world had to put up with helicopter, road blocks and guards peering down at them as if they were criminals needing some deadly force. The people who run GE, Exxon and other large companies far more important to the US economy don't feel the need to bother their neighbors like this at their neighbor's expense. Nor, as I pointed out, did the government officials on their own. Bill Gates and the US government have some big screws lose to waste resources like that.
How about, "Homeland Security Usually Reserved for President of US and Military Bases extended to Bill Gate's House."
Note that the Government convention itself did not rate such mind numbing paranoia.
God help us if the owner of our worst artificial clerks should perish! Obviously, every frustrated terrorist in the world is targeting Bill Gates. Ali-Babba and his ilk must look up from his blue screen every day and curse old Bill. They got the little sticker, paid their money, registered, submitted and everything and it still crashes! How frustrating.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a "temporary security zone" earlier this month around Gates' Lake Washington home... Security zones prevent any person or watercraft from entering the area without explicit government permission. They're normally used to tighten security around military bases and naval facilities, and it's exceedingly rare for them to be erected around a private residence.
The government guests amounted to much less than national security. The National Governors Association in town did not get the same treatment elsewhere. Indeed, only the President of the United States, aka the leader of the free world, merits such attention.
So how did this happen? Must be something with the software used to predict terrorist attacks, eh?
It was also intersting to read the account of the intern with Mist in his eyes. The "Perfect" house and non intrusive guards and all the other fawning was perfectly sickening. It's so overblown that you have to wonder if he did it that way on purpose, knowing how scrubbed his writing would be by mindless PR drones. It did convey some interesting details. I'd never have guessed the overall sense of raving paranoid "security" that exists 24/7 in Gates land. The bit about t-badges was also interesting. What I'd really like, however, is the same story from someone with much less at stake, like a member of the catering crew, "dressed to match the adornment of the tables." Oh, that furniture might talk!
Other things to note are the usual progression of influence peddling. Big fancy meals, money flowing and even use of children. I do hope that the presentation of Gate's daughter was unplanned, but that would go against the sickening control exhibited by everything right down to the grass, "... the grass was groomed. It was groomed in a way that requires handheld scissors to prune daily." Me barfs.
How is this modded interesting? They might be Chinese but they're MSFT employees, they're not Chinese government bureaucrats looking at the Windows source code. And what does this have to with SCO??
So, I'm forced to explain myself.
By using Chinese slave labor they can patent twice as much as they did before. If chronological picture presentation is an indication of the quality of the new patents, I'm afraid that M$ is not getting much for their money. Pity the USPTO does not see it that way and will now keep us all from writing programs that present photographs in chronological order by doing such obvious things as looking at the file date and image metadata. I mentioned SCO because they are also involved in a huge M$ IP theft scheme. The M$ motto is, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, sign the dotted line, bitch, you're mine! I submit.
Got it yet? You will if you ever try to do anything for yourself and share it with your friends. By God, that would make you an IP thief because everyone knows that M$ make everything.
Ugh, not even Big Brother was brazen enough to take credit for everything. He was able to claim the helicopter, but not the airplane.
They must have looked at the source code M$ sold the Chinese. Good thing M$ co-opted them or they would have had to put SCO on their case for stealing ideas. I'm going to barf.
I like your homepage. Would you be so nice as to put something there so I can see what kind of dork likes to sit around an insult Slashdot readers? Really, I'd like to know what kind of moron equates Windoze security with free software's.
Slashdot Mirror
So we got another round of emails encouraging us to file patents, as a way of defensively time-stamping some of our work, and offering attractive bonuses for doing so. My area is particularly "bleeding edge", and my manager pointed out that we'd look pretty stupid if our everyday activities were patented by a rival.
This kind of time stamping and proof of prior work can be had for much less money than a patent. Call a notary, that's one of the things they are for. Make an deal with the local bank. There must be a simpler way to provide a court with definitive proof without validating software patents with mindshare, effort and money.
You also forward the bogus claim:
one of the Principles of Free Software, transparency, is fundamental in the patent process. The wisdom of the patent system is, In exchange for exclusive right-to-use on your invention, for a limited time, you must fully disclose that same invention.
That's the general idea, but you might note that it does not work like that at all. Engineers can not recognize their inventions after the lawyers get thought with them and it's a wonder that a court can enforce them anymore. Patents are being used to claim ideas, not inventions, and that's a perversion. Yes, software patents are the epitome of this abuse of principles.
If you want to share your source code, just publish it GPL in the usual ways. 10 points to the first person who can show me where Savannah or Sourceforge keep tabs on submissions to be able to show the definitive proof that's the reason so many lemmings are wasting so much money on so many lawyers and government processes.
I don't think I'd call the Viperlair part of the OSS community. They are welcome to join, of course, but they look hoplessly meshed in the windoze world. All of their tests were Windoze based, so they could not really offer any performance measures for the same hardware under Linux.
The anti-M$ statement is very much at odds with the next breath they take:
Being a poor student on a budget, that doesn't mean I want a substandard CPU ...
Well Golly! For the $200 the rest of us have to pay for Winblows, you might just get yourself a better processor. Given all the trouble Widows still is to configure, how many coppies of it will you have to buy? As a student, do you dare risk your gaming machine just to do your dull old homework and vice versa? If you buy two coppies of Winblows, you are half way to another excellent system in the hole. That's not anti-Microsoft, that's just the money talking.
There are live game CDs but they take the performance hit that implies. There are several Knoppix spinoffs that come this way. More importantly, Game companies themselves are looking at custom distros as a way out of the M$ tax.
Linux multimedia is better than ever and way better than the word had way back when I quit fooling with Windoze. It's gotten good enough so that a person who does not want to fidget endlessly with configurations might be able to be a gamer again under Linux. Quake 2 is available as a debpackage that works and runs better than it did on my last windoze system. Between that, better configured ALSA and real interest on the part of game makers, I'm very encouraged. Gaming may not be here now, I can't tell, but when it does arrive it will be much better than anything M$ because all of the subsystems are so much cleaner.
M$ is evil and their code blows. That's anti-Microsoft. Does my opinion somehow make you like M$ more? Strange. Hitting your hand with a hammer is stupid and hurts. I hope that does not force you into the "I love to hit my hand with a hammer" crowd.
That's not true at all. This is another tool of public manipulation. First, the order of article reporting is manipulated. Second, the same article by the same author can be manipulated by omission of sections. The fact that M$ "partnered" with NBC shows a keen desire to shape public opinion through "news".
I have an example of the first kind of manipulation and the reasons for it here.
They can perform the second kind of manipulation for the same reasons with a traditional justification that makes no sense on the internet. "News" articles were traditionally written in a style defined by print advertising. The entire story is confined to a single sentence opening paragraph which is explained by further short, often single sentence paragraphs. The paragraphs declined in order of perceived reader interest. This allowed the editor and print setter flexibility in page layout so that the adverts could all fit. There is obviously no longer a need to print, "All the news that fits," and more traditional and informative writing styles are the coin of internet news. It is, however, just as easy for M$NBC to cull articles to twist their meaning in the name of "reader interest" as it ever was.
Other news services, such as Google, operate on different principles. Their presentation shows duplicate articles in the same place so that it's easy to compare versions without making it difficult to navigate different stories. Google seeks to inform, Microsoft seeks to manipulate.
Given M$'s slave driving ambitions, the reference to autocracy must be intentional. Microsoft's audacity never ceases to amaze.
If you like that kind of thing, you might as well do your research in pre 1990 Pravda or Tass which are essentially identical. Remember the Russian proverb as you do, "There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth."
The admission of preference of message is a symptom of much greater dishonesty. The other symptom is the huge proportion of the Microsoft budget that goes into PR, hype and slander.
For all the alledged "noise" RMS is accused of, can anyone imagine him doing something as pointless as the things Bill Gates did for XP launch? Imagine RMS renting helicopters to transport a carboard box, hiring Madonna and putting his face on a 40 foot high screen to announce a new version of emacs. That, my friend, is the "news" MSNBC trumpets.
These goals make it impossible for M$ to ever be objective or as good or better than Google. When Slate publishes an article recommending another browser over IE, Slate is sold off. Guess where that Slate article shows up on a newsbot search for "IE Firefox." Somewhere way way after four or five blurbs about Firefox errors. A Google news search for the same thing finds an article that references Slate at #10. Google's bias is to refelect the news not to make Firefox look bad like M$'s site is. The same pattern is demonstrated whenever anyone mentions a M$ search engine. The contents are filtered by meta rules that manipulate rather than inform the reader.
I can only hope that most people think like you that it's better to be informed than manipulated.
WTF is "Windoze"??
Assuming WTF stands for "What the fuck" I'll answer the foul mouthed crap flooder. I may be talking to a robot, but I enjoy the definition. This stuff is just too easy.
Windoze 1. (noun) an insecure collection of software used by indolent market droids, often cracked and used by spammers, scammers, script kiddies and porn site operators. Little changed since the 8 bit version was acquired in the early 80s but extensively added to by further acquisitions, it is now more of a distribution than an operating system 2. (verb) the futile effort of using 1 to get actual work done. A little click, a little nothing, a little click, a little crash. It generally ends like this.
Chances are, the AC fits both definitions.
Linux, a kernel that does what it should well, is nothing like Windoze.
Did he? How do you know he did not take 2,000 screenshots and cull them? Always beware when an interested party hands you "random" samples. It would have been better if he tied the screenshots to time logs of applications. If his boss really played solitare all day, a log of applications would show it and the percentage time it was active. Even still, it would be difficult for him to prove as he could manipulate the logs manually.
What's called for is institutionalized watchdoging. There should have been someone who this man could have asked for help in doing his job. An IT person under another boss would be good. This institutional failure should as a basis for a transfer, not a firing.
I can imagine the state trying to slip out of the bind by saying that the boss was not abusing his computer or network time. It can always be argued that playing the boss was accomplishing his job description and what he did with his spare time was his business. Managerial positions can be that way.
A conscientious manager will roll up their sleeves and help get work done when they run out of planning, reports and all that boring crap. It helps to keep your feet on the ground.
A slob will sit around and turn into a moron. A slob that's drooling 90% of the time soon finds few topics for reports and might get axed. A dangerous slob is one that got themselves promoted to hide incompetence. They have a tendency to screw up and blame their underlings. I've had one of those and I think this one did too. Typically, those they leave in charge for an extended leave will say things like, "I did my job and his job with ease. My job usually takes all of my time. I wonder what the boss does all day."
It identifies the user and makes sure they pay! In the future, that identity and network control will be used to stop music sharing, broadcast flag violating, free software terrorists and force them to join the Napster paying slaves on Windoze only intranets with great big flashing Adverts taking up 1/2 of your bandwith and no mute or off buttons. Ah, the future, it's so much like the broadcasting present and past. 24/7, buy more soap!
The problem is not wifi or the internet, it's Windoze.
Of course you did. You said that most of the bugs were the caused by user stupidity,
"plain user stupidity and the fundamental problems of the browser as an application platform make up for a large percentage of the perceived problems with IE."
You also defended M$ themselves:
That's nice, except that when "blackhats" do the same thing to people who use IE then it's Microsoft's fault.
As if M$'s bland and changeless interface were anyone but M$'s fault. That is, after all, one of the keys to the exploit that the cracker can make a one size fit's all spoof for M$ platforms.
I doubt anyone so offensive as yourself ever did anything for anyone else. "Party Line", piff. It would be nice if you did contribute something but your insulting comments here indicate something else.
While most normal people would ignore something as insulting as that, I see that you have moderated your flambait up, so I'll bite your troll.
As someone who's seen an auto-root jump out of Outlook and completely co-op a well kept fortune 100 company machine, I can say that neither the user nor administrators are to blame for rampant M$ exploits. The problems poor OS design and idiotic application design and the problems still exist. Programs can hide from M$'s kernel. The file system does not have execute and user permissions built in and enforced by the kernel. The programs, such as IE and Outlook will execute local code on remote demand as root. Email that plays wav files is just one example. The result is the perpetual root of the week being forever fought by anti-virus companies and others.
The design of Linux itself goes a long way toward fighting malware of the type you complain about. This exploit, while serious, won't allow a non root user to install software and malware hits a dead end right there. As the author of the article points out, the spoofer does not know what UI you have and Firefox gives you different preferences even in the M$ monoculture. Such an attack is obvious to someone who runs KDE in a different window manager. A far more dangerous exploit is to forge the "this application requires root password" dialog. In a corporate environment, this is a non issue because the user won't know that password and users in a well configured environment won't have to enter their passwords more than once a day. They will recognize the dialog as bogus.
Nice try at a defense of an obviously defenseless browser. A few clueless market droids will shake their heads and congratulate themselves on their continued use of IE and all the effort and money spent after it. "IE, the worst your money can buy."
Ah, but it's not. Your manager has problems sharing flyers with you, but you can easily make a pdf to give her that will work anywhere the same way every time. Given a choice between the two pigs, the one that cost less and does more is the winner.
If you have a problem collaborating on the text of the flyer, you might hit her with the clue stick and ask her to send text to you instead of a dinky flyer. If you were both running Linux, you could shell into each other's machines and share your work the easy way.
A better solution is to hack the software and make laws that protect that effort, if not demand a release of specs.
Blah, blah, blah, I can't hear you. When I find out that it's cheaper to use my wife's car to power my house all day than it is to use electricity off the grid, I'm going to do it.
When the automakers figure out that they can sell more cars this way, they are going to do it.
When GE sees the market going that way, they are going to sell equipment that makes it easy to do. They will tell the US military that distributed electric generation will make the country more resilient and they will be right.
The fact that everyone running their cars more will make more pollution and degrade everyone's standard of living will be lost in the money. If the surplus comes simply from driving around, it's not a big deal and we are all winners. If it encourages people to stop buying big Stupid Urban Vehicles that make as much smog in two commutes as a VW running all day, we will still be better off. One way or another, the idea is going to be hard to stop.
I think the same thing when I use Word. Most of the day, I wonder when the OS itself is going to crap out and suck down an hour's worth of my work. OO is a pig, but format problems are Microsoft's fault and show up everywhere. They don't even have a consistent font set they distribute with Word, so the formating gets clobbered when you move it to another machine, another printer or another version of Word.
You have never tried have you? There's no pain involved, except templates, but there's no reason to be mailing templates around is there?
Trust me, contractors will do whatever Lockheed Martin and the US government ask.
Yeah, they can keep PALing around with M$ and get replaced. Or they can work with free software and sell a lot of excellent hardware.
It should be followed by "Next Year" as they have been making the same stupid promisses for the last ten years. "An Integrated Browser.", "All of your data at your fingertip." Yawn. Yet all they can do is put other people, who deliver on those promisses, out of business. They could not buy Google, so they will break them if they can.
This time, I think they are up against something that's bigger than they are. They squashed OS/2 by making it more expensive than winblows. IBM could not do much about that with cross licensed and closed source code. Having vanquished reasonable competition on commodity hardware, they were free to crush Netscape because people felt they had no alternative to M$'s OS. All that's changed today. It's easy to swap the OS right out from under M$ and word is getting out that Microsoft is nothing but pain to the user. M$ wanted the world to be it's slave but the world has other ideas.
I'll ignore the personal insults. I'm used to that kind of thing and worse from M$ apologists. Name calling is integral to enslavement, so those who wish to enslave will always have offensive mouths.
Bill Gates is getting unusual treatment and does not warrent it. Homeland Security itself is novel and repugnant in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Fawning over the "rich and powerful" is unAmerican and servile. It's disgusting enough when whole airports are shut down for Bill Clinton to fetch a hairdresser for himself. Extending the such obnoxious behavior to private citizens is too much. For a short time, Bill Gates owned the lake and the sky itself. The rest of the world had to put up with helicopter, road blocks and guards peering down at them as if they were criminals needing some deadly force. The people who run GE, Exxon and other large companies far more important to the US economy don't feel the need to bother their neighbors like this at their neighbor's expense. Nor, as I pointed out, did the government officials on their own. Bill Gates and the US government have some big screws lose to waste resources like that.
Note that the Government convention itself did not rate such mind numbing paranoia.
God help us if the owner of our worst artificial clerks should perish! Obviously, every frustrated terrorist in the world is targeting Bill Gates. Ali-Babba and his ilk must look up from his blue screen every day and curse old Bill. They got the little sticker, paid their money, registered, submitted and everything and it still crashes! How frustrating.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a "temporary security zone" earlier this month around Gates' Lake Washington home ... Security zones prevent any person or watercraft from entering the area without explicit government permission. They're normally used to tighten security around military bases and naval facilities, and it's exceedingly rare for them to be erected around a private residence.
The government guests amounted to much less than national security. The National Governors Association in town did not get the same treatment elsewhere. Indeed, only the President of the United States, aka the leader of the free world, merits such attention.
So how did this happen? Must be something with the software used to predict terrorist attacks, eh?
It was also intersting to read the account of the intern with Mist in his eyes. The "Perfect" house and non intrusive guards and all the other fawning was perfectly sickening. It's so overblown that you have to wonder if he did it that way on purpose, knowing how scrubbed his writing would be by mindless PR drones. It did convey some interesting details. I'd never have guessed the overall sense of raving paranoid "security" that exists 24/7 in Gates land. The bit about t-badges was also interesting. What I'd really like, however, is the same story from someone with much less at stake, like a member of the catering crew, "dressed to match the adornment of the tables." Oh, that furniture might talk!
Other things to note are the usual progression of influence peddling. Big fancy meals, money flowing and even use of children. I do hope that the presentation of Gate's daughter was unplanned, but that would go against the sickening control exhibited by everything right down to the grass, "... the grass was groomed. It was groomed in a way that requires handheld scissors to prune daily." Me barfs.
How is this modded interesting? They might be Chinese but they're MSFT employees, they're not Chinese government bureaucrats looking at the Windows source code. And what does this have to with SCO??
So, I'm forced to explain myself.
By using Chinese slave labor they can patent twice as much as they did before. If chronological picture presentation is an indication of the quality of the new patents, I'm afraid that M$ is not getting much for their money. Pity the USPTO does not see it that way and will now keep us all from writing programs that present photographs in chronological order by doing such obvious things as looking at the file date and image metadata. I mentioned SCO because they are also involved in a huge M$ IP theft scheme. The M$ motto is, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, sign the dotted line, bitch, you're mine! I submit.
Got it yet? You will if you ever try to do anything for yourself and share it with your friends. By God, that would make you an IP thief because everyone knows that M$ make everything.
Ugh, not even Big Brother was brazen enough to take credit for everything. He was able to claim the helicopter, but not the airplane.
Sun, Yan-Feng; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Lei; (Beijing, CN) ; Li, Mingjing; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Hong-Jiang; (Beijing, CN)
They must have looked at the source code M$ sold the Chinese. Good thing M$ co-opted them or they would have had to put SCO on their case for stealing ideas. I'm going to barf.
Nothing but their explicit denial. Go figure, that's like a M$ apologist.