make room, if you want, alongside the logo-emblazoned travel mugs and Starbucks brand press-pots for "Mermaid Music Vols. 1" through infinity.
This could be very cool. I don't have any of their mugs. I hate their coffee and think of them like McDonald's. Heck, I think McDonald's has better coffee. So what? I want non-DRM'd full quality custom CDs and I might even buy a cup of coffee while I'm there.
I've bought Starbuck's twice. Once because everyone deserves one chance and once because someone gave me gift cards. Here in Baton Rouge, there are actually places that import, blend and roast their own coffee. You might have heard of one of them, Comunity, they make half the country's coffee. They have much better and less expensive coffee than Starbucks. There are others too, Highland Road, PJ's being prominent. They have much better and less expensive coffee than Starbucks, so where to go is a no brainer.
Like a lot of people my age (old fart), I never did the MP3 and Napster thing. While I hate the RIAA and everything it stands for, downloading music makes me feel just as cheap as they are. What's more other people I know who did that kind of thing ended up with rooted machines and worse. I've got my simple and honest music collection, all ripped to Ogg from Vinyl, CDs bought at clubs or given to me as gifts. I've traded tapes and CDs but I'm a sucker and just can't bring myself to run P2P programs, anonymous ftp and that kind of thing even to collect music that would be public domain without Mickey Mouse. By the same token, I'm not going anywhere near DRM'd crap, especially stuff that has to be played on a $300 gadget.
There's plenty of music I'd like to have and Starbucks looks like the place to get it. Radio sucks, don't have time or money to waste buying pot luck at the record store, which is one place I hate to be more than Starbucks. Being able to pick and chose music for CDs where I can listen to them first in a nice calm place is very appealing. It's attractive enough that I'll put up with everything I hate about Starbucks.
It's up to Starbucks to use its enormous geographical clout to negotiate a sweetheart deal with the recording industry, and make it as attractive to the customer as possible.
If the record industry wants to pee on them, they need to look outside of the RIAA. There's a booming independent recording industry out there just waiting for something like this.
In the end, set ups like this will wreck the RIAA anyway. The RIAA was set up to sell 40 songs from 20 artists a week on vinyl. There's no way they can maintain their power without a broadcasting monopoly and robot DJs pumping out the same crapola everywhere. Once stores like this take over, RIAA will become just another supplier. For most of us they are already irrelevant. If they balk, they will become completely irrelevant. Distribution like this is taking music to people who don't know how to turn on a Mac. They are going to get used to having a choice that's not RIAA owned.
Otherwise, with audio-CD only Discmans going the way of the dodo, and the growing popularity of iTMS-like solutions, this scheme will turn out at best to be a novelty.
If they make real, non DRM'd CDs, they are my next music store. DRM'd junk is the flash in the pan, soon to go away. I've never bought into it and most people never will, just like DivX.
But ultimately what you're saying is that you're a dishonest deceitful liar and basically full of shit.
Not at all. Windoze has never worked as it should nor half as well as free software. I'll stand by all of the things I've described, from email rooting my machine at a fortune 500 company to whole labs of machines dying at LSU to my own and my brother's own computers simply dying of bit rot. I can easily do that and acknowledge that I and others may need to hang onto one last legacy install to access crappy old hardware.
No one really needs "proof" that Windoze sucks when 90% of the world has suffered under it themselves. It only takes on round of the upgrade train for people to figure out M$ for what it is. My stories have been my own and other people's experience.
[description of magnificent gateway] For now the attackers are winning the arms race. The technology we'll need to monitor, react, and adapt in real time has yet
to evolve, but it's headed in that direction.
I wish the net was headed in the right direction, but it's not. No single site or company will ever "win". The resilience of the web lies in it's redundancy and distribution. What I see is continued centralization and creation of points of failure. As "Broadband" internet access is more monopolized and treated as a platform for mindless browsing, and smaller ISPs are destroyed, the net is being squeezed into fewer and fewer hands. This invites attacks that can not be protected against. The real solution is to let everyone run everthing they want. That's the only way to route around damage.
Actually, my main point of contention was that you said Windows crashed with regards to sound issues, which is unfounded hearsay. It's good to see you've dropped that, though.
Actually, that's half of what you said. And no, what reliable people tell me about their systems is not unfounded hearsay.
The other thing you said was to taunt me with
"The great thing about Linux is that it's free! Except for the new hardware you'll have to buy."
If you are going to call me presumptuous, I'd like to know what you think I presume. If it's that free software carries a lower cost of ownership, that's more of proven case than a presumption on my part. Your original, presumptuous, contention was I said that Linux was expensive because you had to buy hardware.
I know I've spent less on hardware than you have because I get fine performance from less than "top-of-the-line" hardware. I have one machine that's better than 1GHz and nothing taxes me so much that I feel the need to use it more often than I use a well tuned 650 MHz Athlon slot machine that I bought five years ago. If you've been ISA free for six years, you threw away hardware that I did not have to.
My software also costs less, despite your educational discount. I pay nothing, $0, for Debian and all that it comes with. I'm happy to say that I give the Free Software Foundation $10/month, but two year of that is less than I paid for one educational discount compiler I bought before moving to Linux. "Top-of-the-line" commercial software is very expensive and M$ does very little without it.
If I really have some serious computing to do, I could probably convince the owners of Super Mike, an LSU Linux cluster, to give me some time. Linux does much better when it comes to submitting "serious work" to University computing services. It's more likely, however, that I'll just leave the process running on my own machines. They stay up long enough to do useful work.
This review makes it look easier to set up 4 headed Linux. That makes sense, because custom hardware like that is almost always a nightmare to support. For the $275 price tag, you would do better buying a whole system. Applica costs more and provides less than the 441 system does.
The great thing about Linux is that it's free! Except for the new hardware you'll have to buy.
...
The last time I ran in to problems with multiple sounds playing at once was when I had an ISA Sound Blaster AWE 32.
Ahhh, but I still use Sound Blaster 16's that I pull from the garbage of Windoze users. No blue screens either. Trust me, you end up spending less on hardware when you step off the upgrade train. Of course, with all the money you save from not buying eXPensive software, you can run more and better selected hardware.
An AC who's way too interested in Twitter says and asks:
I seem to remember you've often lamented the fact that your wife needs to run "Windoze" for something or other.... Soooo... which is it, twit?
My wife's computer is now dual boot Windoze 98 and Debian Testing. We still have to boot it over to use a crappy old parallel scanner, but everything else works just fine under testing, even our USB cameras. The operating system history, without loss of information, was Red Hat 6.2, 7.0, 7.2, Debian Woody, Debian Sarge. Red Hat was Dual Booted through BIOS. Debian's Woody installed a dual boot LILO configuration. The 450MHz AMD K6/2 works very well under both OS, thank you, but Debian is much more useful.
98 was impossible to secure, so I did not instal network drivers and things have been OK. The system only has the problems introduced by DLL hell and the few programs required to run devices hooked to it. The most serious problem is non-standard bmp and tiff image formats introduced by the Kodak Imaging program installed by one or another of the cameras. These nonstandard file formats blow up most image programs including Paint Shop Pro. Electric Eyes under Woody manages to open them, so I can write them out into reasonable formats. As a retail tech, I've seen what has continued to happen to people who try to use M$ on the internet. It's not pretty, so that dual boot machine is protected by a linux firewall too.
In any case, Windoze does not get much use here anymore and both of us are happy about that. We both spend more time doing what we want on our computers and elswhere than people who suffer Windoze.
Are the grey hairs I got trying to make sound work in KDE in the Linux knowledgebase?
No need for an article when things just work. Knoppix, which uses KDE by default, almost always works sound. If Knoppix won't work, get another sound card. Almost all modern distros will configure themselves to work.
If a game or other program does not work in KDE try starting the game from the command line with "artsdsp" before the game name. This usually makes the legacy application work with ATRS.
The coolest thing about ARTS is it's ability to send input from multiple programs to the same or multiple sound cards without problem. A nice demonstration is to layer individual noises with multiple instances of kwave or similar. My favorite is cicada songs. I'm told that Windoze typically blue screens if you try to play music while playing games. This is so sad.
Let's just cut to the fucking chase and outlaw music altogether.
That sounds great, moral hypocrisy drives me nuts. I hate companies that advertise to children. I especially hate companies that promote such bad morals as seen in "popular" music. Self-indulgence, theft, murder, promiscuity and mindless demand for material goods of all sorts are what most music companies promote. Is it any wonder their customers "steal" from them? Most of all, I hate corporate welfare when it sponsors all of the above.
What the feds give, the feds can take away. The problem only exists because government intervention in the market has created a worldwide cartel of five music publishers. If it were not for the FCC and FTC, the RIAA would not exist. If the airwaves were cleaned of commercial smut and music were treated like tobacco, alcohol or the porn that it is, the RIAA would shrivel and die.
The music industry does not need Federal protection, it needs to be set free. P2P is not the problem, the industry is. Most independent music publishers have enough confidence in their product to ignore the kind of "theft" they consider advertising. Excessive regulation of the airwaves, created by a temporary technological need, has not given the public educational and entertaining programming, it's created an immoral monster that now threatens freedom of the press.
linux fanboys sporting freshly died deep dark hair, claiming the latest kernal has made them young.
It's a M$ problem, my hair won't turn grey over it or any of those other more serious problems with privacy, security, functionality, feature set, reliability and all those other things that make M$ fanboys, like yourself, so snippy.
Poor Stevie Balmer's hair, what's left of it, is turning grey over the number of his developers who have joined Linux User Groups. Cities turning to free software are another problem he has. Oh well, he could be making money off free software like everyone else if he had a clue.
If you can get card services up with your boot floppy, and you should, it should not be hard to mount the CF as a disk there. Access time is faster than most CF devices and PC card adaptors do not require you to open the laptop.
I'd just get another hard drive. If the system does not have a CD, do the install on another machine, move it and tweak it as required. Mepis and other Knoppix based distributions should work without much or any modification. Moreover, they should work very well on that hardware. For what it's worth, my 90MHz P1 Thinkpad is jealous of your memory and processor but happy with it's five gig hard drive and Woody. Save the HD caddy, if the yours has one! They are easy to work with, but hard to find.
Clubs are what every shopper needs to carry. When a saleman tries to do his sworn duty and extract extended warranty or some other fraud, Whump, smash them with the stick! Expired rebates for overpriced merchandise? Wack! Bait and switch, Blammo! All from one simple device.
Yes, I've been a retail sales dude. I hated the sleazy sales guys who followed along with the company's greed. They were such sheep, earning their crappy five bucks an hour. The most they could hope for, was 20k/year if they are lucky enough to have any form of profit sharing. Places that think the customer is wrong generally have punishment plans in place for employees too. They need the clue bat!
An AC concerned about mod points expresses their lack of clue:
I fail to see how this guy's insertion of the ever-quippy "M$" thing has anything to do with the topic at hand.
M$'s idiotic networking and desktop security models make "stealing" data easy. You don't even have to walk into a building to get data from a company that uses IE and Outlook. Other problems, such as network storage being unreliable, force people to use floppies and pen drives to do their job. Companies that use software like that are usually too stupid to have determined what data is important and what is not. What a nightmare. All of their security precautions are nothing more than an inconvenience to legitimate users.
You can actually do some of the proper work even if you are encumbered by M$. It is possible to keep real sensitive information on non networked PCs that are locked up and guarded by specific people. It's sort of in between paper systems and reasonable digital systems, but it can work. Thin clients with terminal services can help too, but you still have to worry about your servers working and not being rooted by the latest "I Love You" auto root.
How is that overkill? Sounds like a common-sense move for a firm that wants to take steps so that sensitive information doesn't just walk out the door. It's not that much different than walking in with a USB CD burner under your arm.
If a company has not identified, segregated and locked up what it considers sensitive data, none of the other steps will work. If they have, none of the other steps are needed. This is the first step to be taken in real security.
Most of the stories I'm reading here sound like big dumb company M$ hell. Network storage that does not work and networks designed around M$ flaws by idiots. There are so many superior alternatives available with free software. When you are root, not MickeySoft, you can secure your desktops and your networks and not have to worry about people doing things they should not.
All Bootable media that could be used to start an sftp session:
CDs
floppies
USB devices
Anything that could be used to take a PC apart and steal it's hard drives:
Screw drivers
nail clippers
belts
paper clips
Anything that could contain any of the above
Wallets
Gloves
Pants with pockets.
Shirts with pockets.
The ideal uniform for employees would look like this.
Sanitation presents special problems because janitors must carry large amounts of material around. The trash should be searched daily by trained and trusted ninja weasles.
Or, you could determine what information is important and make safeguarding it a specific responsibility of a specific person who is trained in how to protect the information. That training used to say that the information should be kept under lock and key. Today, that training should include keeping that information of networked M$ PCs and keeping PCs with sensitive information on them under lock and key. If other people have to work on those PCs, they should be supervised by a person with a clue. That way, anyone can bring anything into your building and you don't have to perform strip searches and the like.
If a sysadmin is lazy and security unaware, he will ALWAYS be cracked into and exploited regardless of the OS system used, Windows Linux whatever. At the same time if he is vigulant and security aware he will unlikely to be seriously cracked and his systems will be stable, again regardless of the OS involved.
I'm tired of seeing this argument when the big advantage of Microsoft, and the excuse for M$'s poor security, is supposed to be EASE OF USE. That is the raison d'etre for an OS with a GUI that can't be turned off, right?
A diligent operator would rule out Microsoft for all but legacy applications. Besides security, cost and feature sets rule every deployment from web servers and databases to desktops. If you have not concluded this yet, you have not done your homework. If you don't believe this, ask yourself why so many diligent system administrators at well funded Fortune 100 companies continue to have their servers rooted and other companies do just fine with Apache and others.
This particular study seems to make the critical mistake of comparing an operating system to a software distribution. "Suse" with it's thousands of programs should be compared to ALL M$ and everything you could possibly put on it, not simply the $300 OS itself. How many of those Suse exploits came from running something silly like eterm for logs? There's a huge difference between M$ exploits on services that can't be turned off and an exploit in an optional program for which there are several secure alternatives. That this distinction was not clearly stated throws the article's conclusions into question.
You not only read, but actually post on Slashdot. And you think you are a "normal user"? I suspect you need to recalibrate your idea of normalcy.
Sorry bud, I set things up for other people too. My wife is very happy with Debian and has been for years. Last week I set up my next door neighbor with Mepis. She's an Interior design professor at LSU, and is also happy to leave the world of Windoze behind.
Too much trust in Paladium? Microsoft has placed far too much stock in it's monopoly position. With auto-updating able to break Mozilla and every other competitor on their platform, they have not taken competition seriously. Any program can be made to perform worse than the M$ equivalent. As all of this "signed" code is equated with "security", M$'s ability to keep competition off their platform will increase. When they put it into the BIOS they think they will be able to keep everyone else away forever. A year ago, they thought they had things so wrapped up they could shove down licensing plans that made the old mainframes look cheap.
It's not happening the way they wanted it. Corporate users balked at the new licensing. Hardware makers don't like the idea of hardware being "free" as in cost and fail to share M$'s vision. Microsoft's users are going to keep jumping ship because Microsoft did not put their resources where they should have. All of their anti-competitive activities have been a huge waste of resources and their products are showing it off. Their competitors have continued to improve and now have obviously superior products that people want. It's all over for them.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be very cool. I don't have any of their mugs. I hate their coffee and think of them like McDonald's. Heck, I think McDonald's has better coffee. So what? I want non-DRM'd full quality custom CDs and I might even buy a cup of coffee while I'm there.
I've bought Starbuck's twice. Once because everyone deserves one chance and once because someone gave me gift cards. Here in Baton Rouge, there are actually places that import, blend and roast their own coffee. You might have heard of one of them, Comunity, they make half the country's coffee. They have much better and less expensive coffee than Starbucks. There are others too, Highland Road, PJ's being prominent. They have much better and less expensive coffee than Starbucks, so where to go is a no brainer.
Like a lot of people my age (old fart), I never did the MP3 and Napster thing. While I hate the RIAA and everything it stands for, downloading music makes me feel just as cheap as they are. What's more other people I know who did that kind of thing ended up with rooted machines and worse. I've got my simple and honest music collection, all ripped to Ogg from Vinyl, CDs bought at clubs or given to me as gifts. I've traded tapes and CDs but I'm a sucker and just can't bring myself to run P2P programs, anonymous ftp and that kind of thing even to collect music that would be public domain without Mickey Mouse. By the same token, I'm not going anywhere near DRM'd crap, especially stuff that has to be played on a $300 gadget.
There's plenty of music I'd like to have and Starbucks looks like the place to get it. Radio sucks, don't have time or money to waste buying pot luck at the record store, which is one place I hate to be more than Starbucks. Being able to pick and chose music for CDs where I can listen to them first in a nice calm place is very appealing. It's attractive enough that I'll put up with everything I hate about Starbucks.
If the record industry wants to pee on them, they need to look outside of the RIAA. There's a booming independent recording industry out there just waiting for something like this.
In the end, set ups like this will wreck the RIAA anyway. The RIAA was set up to sell 40 songs from 20 artists a week on vinyl. There's no way they can maintain their power without a broadcasting monopoly and robot DJs pumping out the same crapola everywhere. Once stores like this take over, RIAA will become just another supplier. For most of us they are already irrelevant. If they balk, they will become completely irrelevant. Distribution like this is taking music to people who don't know how to turn on a Mac. They are going to get used to having a choice that's not RIAA owned.
Otherwise, with audio-CD only Discmans going the way of the dodo, and the growing popularity of iTMS-like solutions, this scheme will turn out at best to be a novelty.
If they make real, non DRM'd CDs, they are my next music store. DRM'd junk is the flash in the pan, soon to go away. I've never bought into it and most people never will, just like DivX.
Not at all. Windoze has never worked as it should nor half as well as free software. I'll stand by all of the things I've described, from email rooting my machine at a fortune 500 company to whole labs of machines dying at LSU to my own and my brother's own computers simply dying of bit rot. I can easily do that and acknowledge that I and others may need to hang onto one last legacy install to access crappy old hardware.
No one really needs "proof" that Windoze sucks when 90% of the world has suffered under it themselves. It only takes on round of the upgrade train for people to figure out M$ for what it is. My stories have been my own and other people's experience.
I wish the net was headed in the right direction, but it's not. No single site or company will ever "win". The resilience of the web lies in it's redundancy and distribution. What I see is continued centralization and creation of points of failure. As "Broadband" internet access is more monopolized and treated as a platform for mindless browsing, and smaller ISPs are destroyed, the net is being squeezed into fewer and fewer hands. This invites attacks that can not be protected against. The real solution is to let everyone run everthing they want. That's the only way to route around damage.
Bind9 in Woody never dies.
Actually, that's half of what you said. And no, what reliable people tell me about their systems is not unfounded hearsay.
The other thing you said was to taunt me with
"The great thing about Linux is that it's free! Except for the new hardware you'll have to buy."
Which you know is bullshit.
I know I've spent less on hardware than you have because I get fine performance from less than "top-of-the-line" hardware. I have one machine that's better than 1GHz and nothing taxes me so much that I feel the need to use it more often than I use a well tuned 650 MHz Athlon slot machine that I bought five years ago. If you've been ISA free for six years, you threw away hardware that I did not have to.
My software also costs less, despite your educational discount. I pay nothing, $0, for Debian and all that it comes with. I'm happy to say that I give the Free Software Foundation $10/month, but two year of that is less than I paid for one educational discount compiler I bought before moving to Linux. "Top-of-the-line" commercial software is very expensive and M$ does very little without it.
If I really have some serious computing to do, I could probably convince the owners of Super Mike, an LSU Linux cluster, to give me some time. Linux does much better when it comes to submitting "serious work" to University computing services. It's more likely, however, that I'll just leave the process running on my own machines. They stay up long enough to do useful work.
...
The last time I ran in to problems with multiple sounds playing at once was when I had an ISA Sound Blaster AWE 32.
Ahhh, but I still use Sound Blaster 16's that I pull from the garbage of Windoze users. No blue screens either. Trust me, you end up spending less on hardware when you step off the upgrade train. Of course, with all the money you save from not buying eXPensive software, you can run more and better selected hardware.
I seem to remember you've often lamented the fact that your wife needs to run "Windoze" for something or other. ... Soooo... which is it, twit?
My wife's computer is now dual boot Windoze 98 and Debian Testing. We still have to boot it over to use a crappy old parallel scanner, but everything else works just fine under testing, even our USB cameras. The operating system history, without loss of information, was Red Hat 6.2, 7.0, 7.2, Debian Woody, Debian Sarge. Red Hat was Dual Booted through BIOS. Debian's Woody installed a dual boot LILO configuration. The 450MHz AMD K6/2 works very well under both OS, thank you, but Debian is much more useful.
98 was impossible to secure, so I did not instal network drivers and things have been OK. The system only has the problems introduced by DLL hell and the few programs required to run devices hooked to it. The most serious problem is non-standard bmp and tiff image formats introduced by the Kodak Imaging program installed by one or another of the cameras. These nonstandard file formats blow up most image programs including Paint Shop Pro. Electric Eyes under Woody manages to open them, so I can write them out into reasonable formats. As a retail tech, I've seen what has continued to happen to people who try to use M$ on the internet. It's not pretty, so that dual boot machine is protected by a linux firewall too.
In any case, Windoze does not get much use here anymore and both of us are happy about that. We both spend more time doing what we want on our computers and elswhere than people who suffer Windoze.
No need for an article when things just work. Knoppix, which uses KDE by default, almost always works sound. If Knoppix won't work, get another sound card. Almost all modern distros will configure themselves to work.
If a game or other program does not work in KDE try starting the game from the command line with "artsdsp" before the game name. This usually makes the legacy application work with ATRS.
The coolest thing about ARTS is it's ability to send input from multiple programs to the same or multiple sound cards without problem. A nice demonstration is to layer individual noises with multiple instances of kwave or similar. My favorite is cicada songs. I'm told that Windoze typically blue screens if you try to play music while playing games. This is so sad.
Like Project Athena? Sure, it was breakthrough. It's amazing how people prefer inferior solutions to free ones.
That sounds great, moral hypocrisy drives me nuts. I hate companies that advertise to children. I especially hate companies that promote such bad morals as seen in "popular" music. Self-indulgence, theft, murder, promiscuity and mindless demand for material goods of all sorts are what most music companies promote. Is it any wonder their customers "steal" from them? Most of all, I hate corporate welfare when it sponsors all of the above.
What the feds give, the feds can take away. The problem only exists because government intervention in the market has created a worldwide cartel of five music publishers. If it were not for the FCC and FTC, the RIAA would not exist. If the airwaves were cleaned of commercial smut and music were treated like tobacco, alcohol or the porn that it is, the RIAA would shrivel and die.
The music industry does not need Federal protection, it needs to be set free. P2P is not the problem, the industry is. Most independent music publishers have enough confidence in their product to ignore the kind of "theft" they consider advertising. Excessive regulation of the airwaves, created by a temporary technological need, has not given the public educational and entertaining programming, it's created an immoral monster that now threatens freedom of the press.
It's a M$ problem, my hair won't turn grey over it or any of those other more serious problems with privacy, security, functionality, feature set, reliability and all those other things that make M$ fanboys, like yourself, so snippy.
Poor Stevie Balmer's hair, what's left of it, is turning grey over the number of his developers who have joined Linux User Groups. Cities turning to free software are another problem he has. Oh well, he could be making money off free software like everyone else if he had a clue.
Then there was that Munich thing.
What's left on that head is grey, for sure.
I'd just get another hard drive. If the system does not have a CD, do the install on another machine, move it and tweak it as required. Mepis and other Knoppix based distributions should work without much or any modification. Moreover, they should work very well on that hardware. For what it's worth, my 90MHz P1 Thinkpad is jealous of your memory and processor but happy with it's five gig hard drive and Woody. Save the HD caddy, if the yours has one! They are easy to work with, but hard to find.
Clubs are what every shopper needs to carry. When a saleman tries to do his sworn duty and extract extended warranty or some other fraud, Whump, smash them with the stick! Expired rebates for overpriced merchandise? Wack! Bait and switch, Blammo! All from one simple device.
Yes, I've been a retail sales dude. I hated the sleazy sales guys who followed along with the company's greed. They were such sheep, earning their crappy five bucks an hour. The most they could hope for, was 20k/year if they are lucky enough to have any form of profit sharing. Places that think the customer is wrong generally have punishment plans in place for employees too. They need the clue bat!
I fail to see how this guy's insertion of the ever-quippy "M$" thing has anything to do with the topic at hand.
M$'s idiotic networking and desktop security models make "stealing" data easy. You don't even have to walk into a building to get data from a company that uses IE and Outlook. Other problems, such as network storage being unreliable, force people to use floppies and pen drives to do their job. Companies that use software like that are usually too stupid to have determined what data is important and what is not. What a nightmare. All of their security precautions are nothing more than an inconvenience to legitimate users.
You can actually do some of the proper work even if you are encumbered by M$. It is possible to keep real sensitive information on non networked PCs that are locked up and guarded by specific people. It's sort of in between paper systems and reasonable digital systems, but it can work. Thin clients with terminal services can help too, but you still have to worry about your servers working and not being rooted by the latest "I Love You" auto root.
If a company has not identified, segregated and locked up what it considers sensitive data, none of the other steps will work. If they have, none of the other steps are needed. This is the first step to be taken in real security.
Most of the stories I'm reading here sound like big dumb company M$ hell. Network storage that does not work and networks designed around M$ flaws by idiots. There are so many superior alternatives available with free software. When you are root, not MickeySoft, you can secure your desktops and your networks and not have to worry about people doing things they should not.
You list should include:
The ideal uniform for employees would look like this.
Sanitation presents special problems because janitors must carry large amounts of material around. The trash should be searched daily by trained and trusted ninja weasles.
Or, you could determine what information is important and make safeguarding it a specific responsibility of a specific person who is trained in how to protect the information. That training used to say that the information should be kept under lock and key. Today, that training should include keeping that information of networked M$ PCs and keeping PCs with sensitive information on them under lock and key. If other people have to work on those PCs, they should be supervised by a person with a clue. That way, anyone can bring anything into your building and you don't have to perform strip searches and the like.
I'm tired of seeing this argument when the big advantage of Microsoft, and the excuse for M$'s poor security, is supposed to be EASE OF USE. That is the raison d'etre for an OS with a GUI that can't be turned off, right?
A diligent operator would rule out Microsoft for all but legacy applications. Besides security, cost and feature sets rule every deployment from web servers and databases to desktops. If you have not concluded this yet, you have not done your homework. If you don't believe this, ask yourself why so many diligent system administrators at well funded Fortune 100 companies continue to have their servers rooted and other companies do just fine with Apache and others.
This particular study seems to make the critical mistake of comparing an operating system to a software distribution. "Suse" with it's thousands of programs should be compared to ALL M$ and everything you could possibly put on it, not simply the $300 OS itself. How many of those Suse exploits came from running something silly like eterm for logs? There's a huge difference between M$ exploits on services that can't be turned off and an exploit in an optional program for which there are several secure alternatives. That this distinction was not clearly stated throws the article's conclusions into question.
Sorry bud, I set things up for other people too. My wife is very happy with Debian and has been for years. Last week I set up my next door neighbor with Mepis. She's an Interior design professor at LSU, and is also happy to leave the world of Windoze behind.
The flood of user conversions is on.
Too much trust in Paladium? Microsoft has placed far too much stock in it's monopoly position. With auto-updating able to break Mozilla and every other competitor on their platform, they have not taken competition seriously. Any program can be made to perform worse than the M$ equivalent. As all of this "signed" code is equated with "security", M$'s ability to keep competition off their platform will increase. When they put it into the BIOS they think they will be able to keep everyone else away forever. A year ago, they thought they had things so wrapped up they could shove down licensing plans that made the old mainframes look cheap.
It's not happening the way they wanted it. Corporate users balked at the new licensing. Hardware makers don't like the idea of hardware being "free" as in cost and fail to share M$'s vision. Microsoft's users are going to keep jumping ship because Microsoft did not put their resources where they should have. All of their anti-competitive activities have been a huge waste of resources and their products are showing it off. Their competitors have continued to improve and now have obviously superior products that people want. It's all over for them.