It makes much more sense for these people to pick a company that they blindly trust (e.g. Microsoft) and let them do the work.
How much time would they need to spend before they could trust OSS as much?
It takes about 5 minutes to boot Mepis and 15 to install it. Most high paying professionals will have an IT staff or company. A 30 minute demo is all it takes to cinch the bid and get the work. The free price will always be lower and the product will always be better.
Which means that the hub of the software industry may end up moving out of the US into probably Asia - maybe China or India. And then the job losses we see in the US IT industry now would be nothing compared to what would happen then...
Your analysis does not take free software into account. The dismal scenerio you predict has already happened to commercial software. The jobs are gone and they won't be back. Nor can that offshore work really compete with Microsoft because they are offshoring too. Free software is blissfully free of all that nonsense, has already out innovated Microsoft and will supplant them entirely. The "Netscape Effect" won't do anything bad to KDE or Mozilla.
There will always be jobs making software work for people and money will be made. The difference is that you won't be able to screw your customers with silly EULAs, product lock-ins and all that other badness. The money will be right where it belongs, meeting individual company and private needs.
This post is brought to you by Konqueror 3.2. Assides from tabbed browsing, vastly improved CSS rendering, and sftp drag and drop file browsing, it offers spell checking for web forms such as this one. Even Twitter can spell on Slashdot now. IE might have something to compare in 2006... pththfit.
It's quite possible security sells more products ( == more revenue) from Microsoft and their partners than good security.
It's also possible that the world is flat. Then you take your head out of your ass.
Ignorance is not strength. The original poster is only wrong about versions. XP's security failures have already nailed Microsoft. It's taking time for people to notice the plethora of free and superior alternatives, but the examples have been made and the rush away from M$ crap is on. Microsoft can milk a few more contracts from big dumb companies and government agencies, but even that will fail them soon. Longhorn is all vapor and it will be cheaper for companies to use free software AND finish paying M$ contracts than it will for them to continue on with M$ software. Companies that have already dumped M$ will enjoy a considerable IT cost advantage over those blowing money on M$ band-aids. As Microsoft's money dries up, they will no longer be able to pressure ISPs into stupid port block policies nor will they be required. Microsoft has already killed itself, they are just too stupid to know it.
... you can't blame them. You walk into any department store and you see a wall of windows applications.
Ignorance is poverty. Everything on the wall costs money, might not work with a particular version of winblows, and is available without cost in free software. Show them kpackage, deselect or aptitude. People who have used music sharing programs shrug and ask, "so what". Then you tell them that all that software is free and intended to be so by the authors. Boom, the ignorance is over. You then tell your client that you can make anything on the list work for them for a small fee anytime they have a problem doing it themselves and you have business.
It works for you and it can work for them and make you money too. Free software is like that. Offshore that jog, Balmer baby!
That is what you were getting at, right? The personal attack suggests you're pissed by my post. So, you take it personally that a bad guy was caught by the good guys?
Not quite, I was simply pointing out that some things are private and you might want to limit monitoring to protect that privacy. I'm sorry that you take the notion of your sister having herpes as a "personal attack". Herpese is a disease that can be inherited but is always embarassing. Giving the state powers to read drug perscription records may indeed prevent mistaken medication, but it also gives clerks access to information you might want to keep to yourself. What clerks can do with that is well demonstrated today.
it's not aout whether the cop should be more sensitive about what he puts on the web, it's that he shouldn't be allowed to put anything from a surveilance camera on the web, or he should be able to put all of it on the web. Either the unfortunate Mr. Lane committed suicide in public, or he didn't.
Let's get the whole issue out in the open, public places belong to the public, not the government, and private places belong to their owners. If the place is not public, there should be no public surveilance. If the place is public and there is public surveilance, ALL of it should be published. There should be equal access for all people to all public information. I don't need police censors dolling out the nasty bits with offensive comentary, I need all of it. I paid for it, it's my space, I own it and the technology exists to index and share it.
Video capture equipment is already pervasive and it's going to get better. Eventually, you will be able to carry hours of recording capability in a shirt button. You should use such devices. Private surveilance is the only counter to the abuse of public surveilance and the abuse of that information by those who control it. If the same information becomes available privately, the government will be ashamed of not making the public records available. "Why did we spend all of this public money?" people will be able to ask when public surveilance systems are made redundant. Existing slander and publication laws are sufficient to prevent abuse of private footage, such as cads will make of their aquantances' sex lives.
Unions are many things, but above all, they are a reaction to bad management.
So, what's worse than a bad manager? Two bad managers!
Just look at the US auto industry. Between big dogs pushing planned obsolescence and unions resisting any and all changes, Honda makes the best selling car in the US. Shame, shame, shame all around shame.
... I logged into the mail server and showed them what they had written to each other.
Ah, but the internet is supposed to be a world of ends and your acceptance of something different is sad. Your services and your "server" are not really needed with excellent quality MTAs packeged with reasonable default values in free software and with always on networks. It is possible for everyone to run their own email server and for those email servers to use encryption by default. All that would then be possible is brute force attacks and traffic analysis. It is outrageous and stupid that the government would spend money pouring over innocent people's correspondence. You should not accept this state of affairs nor should you teach people that sending email is equivalent to publishing a classified ad. If you accept it as so, you will never help make things better.
Ichthus, there's a recall on your sister's herpes medication. Her favorite phamacy recieved a bad lot and it may not be effective against her recent outbreak.
The worker who mislabled the equine testosterone your sister recieved will be humiliated at this weeks 15 minute hate. Emma Potter was caught making that mistake by company closed circuit monitoring. The mistake will be broadcast before her punishment.
I certainly won't be moving TO the US any time soon.
You must have missed all those films of suspected terrorists beaing blown to pink mist outside of the US. All your base are indeed belong to US. Here, unlce sam seems to be content sucking tax money from you.
No? Ask the people who developed M$ Office for Mac. The layoffs will come, if they are not already here. Asside from standard abuse, forcing you to surrenderyour ideas and promise to not help anyone else ever again, Microsoft has abused it's "non-core" workforce relentlessly. Read up some about perma-temps, a practice Microsoft helped to invent. These are people who make things work for Microsoft, and they get to live off unemployment for a good part of the year. A company that would create a whole subclass of employees rather than simply grow and hire more people is abusive enough to fire current employees the second they realize it's cheaper to get the work done abroad.
Outsourcing and free software have nothing to do with each other.
I agree. "Outsourcing" where you ship the work someplace else and tell others that they can't do what you do is a closed source thing. It's the logical extension of the NDA mindset but it is meaningless in the free software world.
It may shock you to learn however that Linux was developped by a European! Maybe we should all stop using it, we wouldn't want them to be succesful.
No, you'd have to live in a cave to not know that Linux is from Finland. That's great, as are contributions from everywhere else.
What's not so great and what's very unAmerican is the business model that some US software makers have adopted. They promoted themselves by promissing money in exchange for software rights. "Work for me, promise not to help anyone else, sign this NDA and I'll pay you like no one else will," they told developers. It was a lie and outsourcing of those jobs shows how big a lie it was. Where's the money now? More importantly, the secrecy and assinine attitude of "you can't do what I can and must do as I say," is very unAmerican. The USA is supposed to be about limitless opportunity and the liberation that brings. Ousourcing will not bring sucess abroad, it will bring control and slavery. Anyone who signs up with Microsoft and other NDA pushers, loses.
The innovators have spoken, and they like what they saw.
Innovators? This is your next door neighbor, joe six packs, talking. Free and open software are not just cheaper and better, they are now easier to get. What you are seeing is the water flooding down stream. The innovators cracked the damb, comerical softoware companies slipped through the cracks and the Microsoft monopoly damb broke. Big companies and private contractors have been making big $$$ with free software. Now it's hitting the desktop and you ain't seen nothing yet.
Then come the hordes that are the mainstream users and late adopters. Oh how I hope the Linux community is actually ready for this.
The people who need to be ready for this are the VARs and others who service them. Microsoft fanboys have been so busy keeping up with anti-virus tools that don't work and crap like Norton Ghost they have some catching up to do. Don't worry, they did the same thing when Windoze hit the big time too. It's going to work better and make more money this time.
We get to listen to the developers? Hopefully, we will get to listen to the guys who are really writing the software these days. That means my classmates will be able to talk to their classmates in Hyderabad, India, who are busy replacing workers in Redmond. Five years and growning. Use Microsoft and help Bill make money for these guys, but mostly himself. It's the American thing to do!
Or you could do the evil commie thing and keep your money to yourself and help people all around the world by using free software. Hire that uneployed IT guy on your block and help a programmer make a living. You won't be sorry you did.
Yep, that business about closed source helping programmers make money WAS A LIE. If 70 billion dollars in the bank, pema-temps and H1B slaves were not evidence enough of where this "Intelectual Property" BS was going, Hyperbad should be.
You correctly point out that you have bought and own the digital music and are not damaging anyone's property but your own, if that:
Since I bought the music, it does not belong to the public. If I choose to remove the DRM that keeps me from doing what I want with my private property, that's not vandalism
I agree.
Goombah, a loud old troll, would try to convince you that the song belongs to the artist who wrote it, the company that owns the artist and the software firm who thinks they own your player. If you accept this slavish reasoning, you own nothing and anything you do to the things you posses is vandalism.
The greedheads all argree that you should be raped. They only fight over who ge's to keep your money.
Is Linux more secure and stable BECAUSE it is more difficult to set up?
No, and it's an order of magnitude easier to set up something like Mepis than it is to make a windoze box. Windoze simply blows becase Bill Gates wants to sell you to people who want to shove shit down your throat all day. It's an issue of control, when you don't have it you are insecure.
Mepis can be installed from a single CD in less than 15 minutes. It comes with firewalls, two office suits, and all sorts of other goodies that would cost you thousands of dollars in the M$ world and take hours and reboots to install from many CDs and floppys. Mepis is Debian based and the defaults are reasonable and secure. It uses KDE and is very easy to use. It also runs from the CD, so you can try it out before you dedicate 15 minutes and 4 gigs of hard drive space to it. Nothing in the Microsoft world comes close.
The continuing Microsoft security disaster is quickly being proven gross negligence. Try out Mepis and see for yourself.
Easy there tiger, a browser can be "integrated" into a desktop without screwing security. The fault does not lie in M$'s nasty kludges and the way they spagetti coded everything, though that does make things worse. The bigest problem is a kernel that is not really in control of hardware and has poor user based permision control. KDE has done a fine job of integrating their browser, so it can be done. The real fixes only come about when you give the end user control of their machine, and that is unacceptable to Microsoft.
Getting rid of ActiveX and splitting the MS HTML control into a separate modules so programs can display local HTML without worrying about it kicking off a local exploit or downloading untrusted material from the Internet... not just defining zones
Sure enough, Active X is an ugly thing. Designed to crush OpenGL and then mixed up with all sorts of stupid stuff like their window manager. A hardware interface should be independent of its window manager, duh.
The whole zones thing is stupid and unneeded. HTML code should simply be secure. Why create a whole seperate and inferior code base? Microsoft has taken good code from BSD and elswhere and crapped it up. Where do you draw the line, anyway? Is my local web page with a link to a hacker site safe for the local code? The very nature of HTML makes zones senseless.
A browser that is "integrated" in that you can drag and drop files and recognize modules accross the internet is a great idea. KDE has accomplished this with Konqueror. It recognizes all the useful protocals, html, ftp, sftp and makes no artificial distinction between forgeign systems and the local host. All that matters is permission. Split screen views and tabs make file compairison and moving easy. This is what Microsoft was promissing back in 1995 and has yet to deliver. At the same time, I don't see people rooting KDE. Show me a remote root exploit on KDE and I'll show you a bug fix. That's just the way free software works. The non "integrated" browsers work just fine too, so I've got a choice of service if something bad happens to KDE.
Microsoft won't ever be secure because they demand the ability to push stuff on the user. This requires denying the user control of their machine. The concept has been enshrined in their EULA which you must agree to if you use their software. They create files on your system than you can not, even as "administrator", move, change or delete and they demand to be able to do this remotely. 70 billion dollars is not enough money to clean up all of Microsoft's bugs, but it does not matter. Even if they could clean up all the bugs the back door will be exploitable. Microsoft will remain buggy and easy to break because they are stupid control freaks.
Because they are trying to come up with a very usable OS. 'Easy to use' and 'Secure' are to some extent mutually exclusive.
Tried Mepis lately? Debian based, live CD that runs on just about anything without user intervention. It has Open Office, KOffice and just about every other goody that you could ask for and uses KDE 3, which has been proven just as easy to use as Windoze XP. A GUI install will put the working configuration onto your hard drive, create users and all that in about 15 minutes.
Assides the obviously superior ease of installation, I'd argue that the interface is easier to deal with than winblows. The menus are rational and easy to follow with headings like "system", "internet", "graphics", "Office", etc that make far more sense than software brand names typically found on windoze menus. File types are proper by default and there is little incentive for free software to try to co-opt them as comercial software vendors did in the past. Quite simply, it works and it works well.
Now Bill Gates might say something stupid like, "with all that running, it must be insecure." He should know better because Linux and Mepis have already done in software what he would propose in software. Mepis already comes with a working firewall, in case the user is not sitting behind a dedicated firewall, such as Smoothwall or a comercial box. Linux already has a "no execute" bit, the execute permisions embeded in Unix file systems since the dawn of time. Your email attachment is not auto executed so your business productivity is not threatened by the work of every 16 year old Philipine prankster.
Complex software does not have to be insecure anymore than computers have to be unstable. Free software drives most of the world wide web and open software takes care of most of the world's email. It's all working just fine without Bill Gates' lock-out bits. This excuse is getting very old.
Currently I am having a course in the use of Excel for prediction purposes. We do a lot of different case studies. We use Monte Carlo simulations, statistical tests, Markov chains and so on. We always discuss risk (variance, value-at-risk and so on). Excel is our basic tool and it is fine. We use different tools for specific purposes: Best-Fit for distribution fitting.
I suggest you seek another university. A spread sheet is not even an adequate tool for teaching Monte Carlo (MC).
MC simulations typically have value only when used in large runs. Without a reasonable number of simulations, you usually end up with very poor statistics for your outcome. A single shoot of the roulet wheel tells you nothing. Ten million shots can come close to simulating an acutal event.
Spreadheets are absolutely the worst tool imaginable for such a task. Spreadsheets are good for simple calculations with well know quantities where you can check the intermediate results and make sure you have not made a bonehead mistake. They are best for back of the envelope, simplified model sanity checks. What you want for MC are any of the premade specialty packages, usually written in FORTRAN, that run as a batch process and have been extensively peer reviewed. I can imagine a dinky spreadheet MC tool with inputs for numbers of runs and odds, but with the underlying math hidden. UGH, you can't tell what it's doing! Anyone trying to cowboy a spreadsheet "solution" to this kind of problem is wasting their time.
I can only demand that people without proper education are not allowed to deliver multi-million business forcasts.
Of course this is actually an advertisement for a specific software package. But whats funny is that the story undercuts itself: It explains that people are wasting their time doing detailed future predictions with spreadsheets. Then it goes on to push this particular product
Here's a brave prediction. This is what ZDnet does best. This is probably a two part advert. The first part bemoans an insoluable problem most people don't have a good grip on. The solution is hinted at in the first part. The second part will come from Micro$oft in the form of real adverts that promise to fix the problem in vauge terms that resemble the first part. I've seen it before. It makes you think that ZDNet is independent and honest because they told you what you were doing is wrong. For some reason, people accept this at face value and then transfer that mistaken trust to the printed ads in the same magazine.
The problem described is real: big dogs at big dumb companies who don't have enough to do day dream themselves into some very bad decisions. Theses are the kinds of morons who follow management fashions such as outsourcing without understanding the workings of their own companies. You know, they pass around silly books with names like "OZ" or "Speed of Business" and that kind of thing. Sure thing, they usually have little spreadsheets and diagrams with absurd logic and glaring errors to convince themselves. Just as surely, snake oil salesmen, like outsourcing Microsoft will come and take their money away as they drive the company into the dirt.
There's no substitute for good judgement. Diagrams and other tools can help, but statistical packages are no substitute for a good understanding of your busines. You get that understanding by having been in many positions and by taking regular feedback and honest criticism. Micromanagement is one of the more obvious symtoms of cluelessness. Diagrams and spreadsheets that make no sense are an advanced sign of corporate senility.
The problem raised is intractability and that has no solution. The problem bemoans the fact that people use spreadsheets without understanding error propagation! Duh, in math terms it's been described:
The limit of Engineering as GPA goes to zero is MBA.
Typically, math is the skill that drives that GPA down. OK, the bad joke is starting to look like a flame, and it's true that clueless big dogs with their sensless five year plans make me angry, but please - this is a joke. Everyone has got their skill set.
The simplest example of a bad problem for a spreadsheet is billiards. Momentum transfer is easy but predicting a billiards game is impossible. Yet businessmen make this kind of mistake all the time. There is no cure for this kind of bad judgement and it's good that the people at ZDnet have pointed it out. I just wish they were not trying to promote statistical packages that people are not likely to understand as a substitute for good judgement.
Yes, filesharing probably does have some negative effect on disc sales, but the recording industry have brought that on themselves by overstating their case to the extent that nobody actually believes them any more.
The article clearly makes the case that file sharing is a giant free promotion for record companies. The ARIA had it's best year ever, having nearly doubled album sales, from 40 million units to 65 million units, since the birth of easy file sharing in 1998.
This is a story that's reapeated everywhere and reversed only when recording industry morons get their way. The same thing happened in the US. It's easy to show that recent reverses in album sales were due to the death of Napster and a coincidental decrease in new releases. With the new music sharing networks booming, I'll bet record sales are again up despite declines in earning power.
P2P is grassroots and free marketing. It is less controled than radio, so the dumb asses running the "recording industry" and the world's five music companies don't like it. What they are afraid of is not being able to rip off artists themselves anymore. Record sales go up with P2P, it's just not the crap that will earn big companies the most money nor set the world's mood the same way they desire.
That article is about how to learn Linux, not how to convert your shop to Linux. A conversion guide would have more info about how to convert data, which is the real problem.
Ah, but once you realize that LINUX IS NOT HARD, you might try it out and not be afraid. Once you try it out and learn to get around you realize how many tools there are and how all of the ISSUES WERE PURE BULLSHIT. It is impossible to detail each and every solution in nine points. Each vendor will find the solutions they are looking for on their own. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when and that time comes closer each time a M$ partner realizes how dishonest their parnter has been.
The trickle has become a flood. The developers have long gone. Dell, HP, Intel and IBM have all openly thumbed their noses at M$. The monoploly power is really broken and the move is on because it makes such finacial sense to everyone but Microsoft. IBM will finish its internal conversion by 2005. With all the corporate support, VARs are comming and they will bring the majority of users with them.
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It takes about 5 minutes to boot Mepis and 15 to install it. Most high paying professionals will have an IT staff or company. A 30 minute demo is all it takes to cinch the bid and get the work. The free price will always be lower and the product will always be better.
Your analysis does not take free software into account. The dismal scenerio you predict has already happened to commercial software. The jobs are gone and they won't be back. Nor can that offshore work really compete with Microsoft because they are offshoring too. Free software is blissfully free of all that nonsense, has already out innovated Microsoft and will supplant them entirely. The "Netscape Effect" won't do anything bad to KDE or Mozilla.
There will always be jobs making software work for people and money will be made. The difference is that you won't be able to screw your customers with silly EULAs, product lock-ins and all that other badness. The money will be right where it belongs, meeting individual company and private needs.
This post is brought to you by Konqueror 3.2. Assides from tabbed browsing, vastly improved CSS rendering, and sftp drag and drop file browsing, it offers spell checking for web forms such as this one. Even Twitter can spell on Slashdot now. IE might have something to compare in 2006 ... pththfit.
It's also possible that the world is flat. Then you take your head out of your ass.
Ignorance is not strength. The original poster is only wrong about versions. XP's security failures have already nailed Microsoft. It's taking time for people to notice the plethora of free and superior alternatives, but the examples have been made and the rush away from M$ crap is on. Microsoft can milk a few more contracts from big dumb companies and government agencies, but even that will fail them soon. Longhorn is all vapor and it will be cheaper for companies to use free software AND finish paying M$ contracts than it will for them to continue on with M$ software. Companies that have already dumped M$ will enjoy a considerable IT cost advantage over those blowing money on M$ band-aids. As Microsoft's money dries up, they will no longer be able to pressure ISPs into stupid port block policies nor will they be required. Microsoft has already killed itself, they are just too stupid to know it.
That is one search. The correct answer is 42.
Ignorance is poverty. Everything on the wall costs money, might not work with a particular version of winblows, and is available without cost in free software. Show them kpackage, deselect or aptitude. People who have used music sharing programs shrug and ask, "so what". Then you tell them that all that software is free and intended to be so by the authors. Boom, the ignorance is over. You then tell your client that you can make anything on the list work for them for a small fee anytime they have a problem doing it themselves and you have business.
It works for you and it can work for them and make you money too. Free software is like that. Offshore that jog, Balmer baby!
That makes you a troll.
That is what you were getting at, right? The personal attack suggests you're pissed by my post. So, you take it personally that a bad guy was caught by the good guys?
Not quite, I was simply pointing out that some things are private and you might want to limit monitoring to protect that privacy. I'm sorry that you take the notion of your sister having herpes as a "personal attack". Herpese is a disease that can be inherited but is always embarassing. Giving the state powers to read drug perscription records may indeed prevent mistaken medication, but it also gives clerks access to information you might want to keep to yourself. What clerks can do with that is well demonstrated today.
Kiss my ass, troll.
it's not aout whether the cop should be more sensitive about what he puts on the web, it's that he shouldn't be allowed to put anything from a surveilance camera on the web, or he should be able to put all of it on the web. Either the unfortunate Mr. Lane committed suicide in public, or he didn't.
Let's get the whole issue out in the open, public places belong to the public, not the government, and private places belong to their owners. If the place is not public, there should be no public surveilance. If the place is public and there is public surveilance, ALL of it should be published. There should be equal access for all people to all public information. I don't need police censors dolling out the nasty bits with offensive comentary, I need all of it. I paid for it, it's my space, I own it and the technology exists to index and share it.
Video capture equipment is already pervasive and it's going to get better. Eventually, you will be able to carry hours of recording capability in a shirt button. You should use such devices. Private surveilance is the only counter to the abuse of public surveilance and the abuse of that information by those who control it. If the same information becomes available privately, the government will be ashamed of not making the public records available. "Why did we spend all of this public money?" people will be able to ask when public surveilance systems are made redundant. Existing slander and publication laws are sufficient to prevent abuse of private footage, such as cads will make of their aquantances' sex lives.
So, what's worse than a bad manager? Two bad managers!
Just look at the US auto industry. Between big dogs pushing planned obsolescence and unions resisting any and all changes, Honda makes the best selling car in the US. Shame, shame, shame all around shame.
Ah, but the internet is supposed to be a world of ends and your acceptance of something different is sad. Your services and your "server" are not really needed with excellent quality MTAs packeged with reasonable default values in free software and with always on networks. It is possible for everyone to run their own email server and for those email servers to use encryption by default. All that would then be possible is brute force attacks and traffic analysis. It is outrageous and stupid that the government would spend money pouring over innocent people's correspondence. You should not accept this state of affairs nor should you teach people that sending email is equivalent to publishing a classified ad. If you accept it as so, you will never help make things better.
The worker who mislabled the equine testosterone your sister recieved will be humiliated at this weeks 15 minute hate. Emma Potter was caught making that mistake by company closed circuit monitoring. The mistake will be broadcast before her punishment.
Don't forget to report all your income this year.
-=Big Brother Loves You=-
You must have missed all those films of suspected terrorists beaing blown to pink mist outside of the US. All your base are indeed belong to US. Here, unlce sam seems to be content sucking tax money from you.
In the end, I expect Microsoft to look like SCO.
Outsourcing and free software have nothing to do with each other.
I agree. "Outsourcing" where you ship the work someplace else and tell others that they can't do what you do is a closed source thing. It's the logical extension of the NDA mindset but it is meaningless in the free software world.
It may shock you to learn however that Linux was developped by a European! Maybe we should all stop using it, we wouldn't want them to be succesful.
No, you'd have to live in a cave to not know that Linux is from Finland. That's great, as are contributions from everywhere else.
What's not so great and what's very unAmerican is the business model that some US software makers have adopted. They promoted themselves by promissing money in exchange for software rights. "Work for me, promise not to help anyone else, sign this NDA and I'll pay you like no one else will," they told developers. It was a lie and outsourcing of those jobs shows how big a lie it was. Where's the money now? More importantly, the secrecy and assinine attitude of "you can't do what I can and must do as I say," is very unAmerican. The USA is supposed to be about limitless opportunity and the liberation that brings. Ousourcing will not bring sucess abroad, it will bring control and slavery. Anyone who signs up with Microsoft and other NDA pushers, loses.
Innovators? This is your next door neighbor, joe six packs, talking. Free and open software are not just cheaper and better, they are now easier to get. What you are seeing is the water flooding down stream. The innovators cracked the damb, comerical softoware companies slipped through the cracks and the Microsoft monopoly damb broke. Big companies and private contractors have been making big $$$ with free software. Now it's hitting the desktop and you ain't seen nothing yet.
Then come the hordes that are the mainstream users and late adopters. Oh how I hope the Linux community is actually ready for this.
The people who need to be ready for this are the VARs and others who service them. Microsoft fanboys have been so busy keeping up with anti-virus tools that don't work and crap like Norton Ghost they have some catching up to do. Don't worry, they did the same thing when Windoze hit the big time too. It's going to work better and make more money this time.
Or you could do the evil commie thing and keep your money to yourself and help people all around the world by using free software. Hire that uneployed IT guy on your block and help a programmer make a living. You won't be sorry you did.
Yep, that business about closed source helping programmers make money WAS A LIE. If 70 billion dollars in the bank, pema-temps and H1B slaves were not evidence enough of where this "Intelectual Property" BS was going, Hyperbad should be.
You correctly point out that you have bought and own the digital music and are not damaging anyone's property but your own, if that:
Since I bought the music, it does not belong to the public. If I choose to remove the DRM that keeps me from doing what I want with my private property, that's not vandalism
I agree.
Goombah, a loud old troll, would try to convince you that the song belongs to the artist who wrote it, the company that owns the artist and the software firm who thinks they own your player. If you accept this slavish reasoning, you own nothing and anything you do to the things you posses is vandalism.
The greedheads all argree that you should be raped. They only fight over who ge's to keep your money.
No, and it's an order of magnitude easier to set up something like Mepis than it is to make a windoze box. Windoze simply blows becase Bill Gates wants to sell you to people who want to shove shit down your throat all day. It's an issue of control, when you don't have it you are insecure.
Mepis can be installed from a single CD in less than 15 minutes. It comes with firewalls, two office suits, and all sorts of other goodies that would cost you thousands of dollars in the M$ world and take hours and reboots to install from many CDs and floppys. Mepis is Debian based and the defaults are reasonable and secure. It uses KDE and is very easy to use. It also runs from the CD, so you can try it out before you dedicate 15 minutes and 4 gigs of hard drive space to it. Nothing in the Microsoft world comes close.
The continuing Microsoft security disaster is quickly being proven gross negligence. Try out Mepis and see for yourself.
Getting rid of ActiveX and splitting the MS HTML control into a separate modules so programs can display local HTML without worrying about it kicking off a local exploit or downloading untrusted material from the Internet... not just defining zones
Sure enough, Active X is an ugly thing. Designed to crush OpenGL and then mixed up with all sorts of stupid stuff like their window manager. A hardware interface should be independent of its window manager, duh.
The whole zones thing is stupid and unneeded. HTML code should simply be secure. Why create a whole seperate and inferior code base? Microsoft has taken good code from BSD and elswhere and crapped it up. Where do you draw the line, anyway? Is my local web page with a link to a hacker site safe for the local code? The very nature of HTML makes zones senseless.
A browser that is "integrated" in that you can drag and drop files and recognize modules accross the internet is a great idea. KDE has accomplished this with Konqueror. It recognizes all the useful protocals, html, ftp, sftp and makes no artificial distinction between forgeign systems and the local host. All that matters is permission. Split screen views and tabs make file compairison and moving easy. This is what Microsoft was promissing back in 1995 and has yet to deliver. At the same time, I don't see people rooting KDE. Show me a remote root exploit on KDE and I'll show you a bug fix. That's just the way free software works. The non "integrated" browsers work just fine too, so I've got a choice of service if something bad happens to KDE.
Microsoft won't ever be secure because they demand the ability to push stuff on the user. This requires denying the user control of their machine. The concept has been enshrined in their EULA which you must agree to if you use their software. They create files on your system than you can not, even as "administrator", move, change or delete and they demand to be able to do this remotely. 70 billion dollars is not enough money to clean up all of Microsoft's bugs, but it does not matter. Even if they could clean up all the bugs the back door will be exploitable. Microsoft will remain buggy and easy to break because they are stupid control freaks.
Tried Mepis lately? Debian based, live CD that runs on just about anything without user intervention. It has Open Office, KOffice and just about every other goody that you could ask for and uses KDE 3, which has been proven just as easy to use as Windoze XP. A GUI install will put the working configuration onto your hard drive, create users and all that in about 15 minutes.
Assides the obviously superior ease of installation, I'd argue that the interface is easier to deal with than winblows. The menus are rational and easy to follow with headings like "system", "internet", "graphics", "Office", etc that make far more sense than software brand names typically found on windoze menus. File types are proper by default and there is little incentive for free software to try to co-opt them as comercial software vendors did in the past. Quite simply, it works and it works well.
Now Bill Gates might say something stupid like, "with all that running, it must be insecure." He should know better because Linux and Mepis have already done in software what he would propose in software. Mepis already comes with a working firewall, in case the user is not sitting behind a dedicated firewall, such as Smoothwall or a comercial box. Linux already has a "no execute" bit, the execute permisions embeded in Unix file systems since the dawn of time. Your email attachment is not auto executed so your business productivity is not threatened by the work of every 16 year old Philipine prankster.
Complex software does not have to be insecure anymore than computers have to be unstable. Free software drives most of the world wide web and open software takes care of most of the world's email. It's all working just fine without Bill Gates' lock-out bits. This excuse is getting very old.
I suggest you seek another university. A spread sheet is not even an adequate tool for teaching Monte Carlo (MC).
MC simulations typically have value only when used in large runs. Without a reasonable number of simulations, you usually end up with very poor statistics for your outcome. A single shoot of the roulet wheel tells you nothing. Ten million shots can come close to simulating an acutal event.
Spreadheets are absolutely the worst tool imaginable for such a task. Spreadsheets are good for simple calculations with well know quantities where you can check the intermediate results and make sure you have not made a bonehead mistake. They are best for back of the envelope, simplified model sanity checks. What you want for MC are any of the premade specialty packages, usually written in FORTRAN, that run as a batch process and have been extensively peer reviewed. I can imagine a dinky spreadheet MC tool with inputs for numbers of runs and odds, but with the underlying math hidden. UGH, you can't tell what it's doing! Anyone trying to cowboy a spreadsheet "solution" to this kind of problem is wasting their time.
I can only demand that people without proper education are not allowed to deliver multi-million business forcasts.
I second that demand.
Here's a brave prediction. This is what ZDnet does best. This is probably a two part advert. The first part bemoans an insoluable problem most people don't have a good grip on. The solution is hinted at in the first part. The second part will come from Micro$oft in the form of real adverts that promise to fix the problem in vauge terms that resemble the first part. I've seen it before. It makes you think that ZDNet is independent and honest because they told you what you were doing is wrong. For some reason, people accept this at face value and then transfer that mistaken trust to the printed ads in the same magazine.
The problem described is real: big dogs at big dumb companies who don't have enough to do day dream themselves into some very bad decisions. Theses are the kinds of morons who follow management fashions such as outsourcing without understanding the workings of their own companies. You know, they pass around silly books with names like "OZ" or "Speed of Business" and that kind of thing. Sure thing, they usually have little spreadsheets and diagrams with absurd logic and glaring errors to convince themselves. Just as surely, snake oil salesmen, like outsourcing Microsoft will come and take their money away as they drive the company into the dirt.
There's no substitute for good judgement. Diagrams and other tools can help, but statistical packages are no substitute for a good understanding of your busines. You get that understanding by having been in many positions and by taking regular feedback and honest criticism. Micromanagement is one of the more obvious symtoms of cluelessness. Diagrams and spreadsheets that make no sense are an advanced sign of corporate senility.
The limit of Engineering as GPA goes to zero is MBA.
Typically, math is the skill that drives that GPA down. OK, the bad joke is starting to look like a flame, and it's true that clueless big dogs with their sensless five year plans make me angry, but please - this is a joke. Everyone has got their skill set.
The simplest example of a bad problem for a spreadsheet is billiards. Momentum transfer is easy but predicting a billiards game is impossible. Yet businessmen make this kind of mistake all the time. There is no cure for this kind of bad judgement and it's good that the people at ZDnet have pointed it out. I just wish they were not trying to promote statistical packages that people are not likely to understand as a substitute for good judgement.
Yes, filesharing probably does have some negative effect on disc sales, but the recording industry have brought that on themselves by overstating their case to the extent that nobody actually believes them any more.
The article clearly makes the case that file sharing is a giant free promotion for record companies. The ARIA had it's best year ever, having nearly doubled album sales, from 40 million units to 65 million units, since the birth of easy file sharing in 1998.
This is a story that's reapeated everywhere and reversed only when recording industry morons get their way. The same thing happened in the US. It's easy to show that recent reverses in album sales were due to the death of Napster and a coincidental decrease in new releases. With the new music sharing networks booming, I'll bet record sales are again up despite declines in earning power.
P2P is grassroots and free marketing. It is less controled than radio, so the dumb asses running the "recording industry" and the world's five music companies don't like it. What they are afraid of is not being able to rip off artists themselves anymore. Record sales go up with P2P, it's just not the crap that will earn big companies the most money nor set the world's mood the same way they desire.
Ah, but once you realize that LINUX IS NOT HARD, you might try it out and not be afraid. Once you try it out and learn to get around you realize how many tools there are and how all of the ISSUES WERE PURE BULLSHIT. It is impossible to detail each and every solution in nine points. Each vendor will find the solutions they are looking for on their own. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when and that time comes closer each time a M$ partner realizes how dishonest their parnter has been.
The trickle has become a flood. The developers have long gone. Dell, HP, Intel and IBM have all openly thumbed their noses at M$. The monoploly power is really broken and the move is on because it makes such finacial sense to everyone but Microsoft. IBM will finish its internal conversion by 2005. With all the corporate support, VARs are comming and they will bring the majority of users with them.