You don't have to "install" anything in Windows to run Mozilla Firebird. In fact as of version 0.7, Firebird doesn't even have an official Windows installer. Just download, unzip, and double-click!
The kind of place that's dumb enough to forbid installation of superior and no cost software is also too stupid to tell the distiguish between methods of install. As the concept of users is poorly implmented in Windoze, there's hardly a practical difference between the install method you mention and one an actual "install". In any canse, few people are willing to risk their jobs over a choice of a tool that the company looks down on using to begin with. It's all downhill in the land of the dumb, that's why they still use Windoze.
Does your keyboard also have a plastic membrane that keeps the grime and such from your oil-changing hands from getting in between the keys?
Chances are that the FuzzyFurB works as a cubicle drone in a Fortune 500 company or some other brain dead Microsoft "partner" where IT can only be done by the IT staff. They have all sorts of useless testing they do to insure configuration conformance. Microsoft's lack of modularity and real users makes it imposible to add software and be sure you have not changed non related system files. It makes no sense but that's the party line.
The effort, of course, is futile and counter productive. Microsoft junk is so full of holes that any old spam can own your system and many web sites download software for you. The corporate reaction to that is that you should not be browsing the web and to fire people who get suspicious emails. Still, the big dumb companies are always the fist and worst hit by any major worm. The monoculture is especially easy to kill and their suffering quickly becomes our own as poluted corporate machines spew their filth onto the rest of the world.
If the poor bastard had any choice of browsers, I'm sure he'd drop it onto something nice like Debian.
Microsoft actually crafts a search engine that is demonstrably better than Google.
They can't, that's why they tried to by it. It's just like everything else Microsoft. They wait for a "market" to mature and buy their way into it. The results are never first rate because they never have the same concerns that creators have. They only care about money, performance is not the goal.
Had they bought Google, it would go the way of Hotmail, full of adverts, slow and used for Microsoft's strange world domination plans.
Having failed to buy Google, they will go down the road of trying to destroy Google. This is generally how Microsoft competes. The case of DrDOS is the best documented, but the Windows world is littered with aps M$ broke. There are two ways to break Google. The first is to set up websites and engage in Google bombing. The second is to incorrectly render or time out on Google searches. I expect Microsoft to do both.
An AC that's managed to be labled troll a lot states:
twitter, do you really have to make your stupid point by offering yet-another-dollop-of-proof-that-M$-is-evil you seem to enjoy so much?
You know, if you weren't so pathetic in this regard and just stuck to the facts then maybe no one would follow you around repeating the most embarrassing bits of your, ahem, distinguished posting history for everyone to read.
I'm continually flattered by your attention, but here you raise an interesting question: why do people do what they do? The answer, of course, is because they want to. No one ever HAS to do anything. Think about that for a while.
Why would a "normal" company publicize in advance how they were going to combat the attack? Wouldn't that just give the virus writers a chance to modify their strategy? It would be like John Fox publishing his playbook right before the Super Bowl.
This is only true if the worm contains a bot, but even then it's risky to the virus author. Many windoze born diseases like this worm contain bots that give some control of the machine to the worm's author, but using that control with people watching will get you busted.
If SCO wanted to keep their plans to themselves they would. Their Sunday anouncement of their plans to anounce their plans the day after the attack is supposed to commence makes little sense.
"While we expect this attack to continue throughout the next few weeks, we have a series of contingency plans to deal with this problem and we will begin communicating those plans on Monday morning," Jeff Carlon, worldwide director of Information Technology infrastructure, The SCO Group, said in the statement.
Why wait till Monday to announce what you are going to do? Any normal company would have named it's contingency plan in advance and have executed it before the attack. You tested it in Wine, I'm sure that even SCO lawyers could have tested a Windoze machine by changing the clock. They should know what the virus is going to do to them and how to block it. Nothing from SCO ever makes sense.
Well, what do you expect from a company that cease and dissist extortion letters without telling you how you have infringed? Par for the SCO deal, they are sucking this for all that it's worth.
Chances are that they or Microsoft wrote the damn virus. No one else really cares.
DLoP still worse.
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Who needs a web site when you have earned a Distributed Lack of Purchasing attack?
If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
...many companies would rather do with a talented Indian who understands the work culture and how businesses are run rather than a foreigner.
I think "work culture" is a universal - get to work!
As for the software culture, you have to serve your market. You can bet your bottom dollar that an Indian firm that specializes in US software is going to be happy to have US culture on board.
Company politics can play a role too and can be used as a quick quality guide. A company writing really bad code for Microsft will probaly not want any US programmers on. Why import a lack of talent when there's plenty everywhere? When you don't care, you just don't bother. Free software companies will take input from anywhere without moving boddies because they have adequate colaboration tools. A company that goes to the trouble of importing talent is likely to make a good piece of software. Indians hired at Netscape were not there simply because they were willing to slave away like everyone else, they were GOOD and so was Netscape.
HyperText Markup Language was created in part to *link* documents quickly (i.e. so the user doesn't have to type in the document location manually). If we're supposed to just give up hyperlinks, why not just kiss the World Wide Web goodbye?
That's exactly what Microsoft has done. They have admitted that their browser is not useful as a browser. Nothing new here.
It must have something to do with their recent change from Linux to BSD. Namely, finding anyone at SCO who has any technical competence outside of extortion at SCO these days. Funny that they don't use their own OS to run their site. It's because Linux and BSD stole it, I suppose. They could get such "insane uptimes" (Steve Balmer's description of 30 and 60 day uptime) from M$ junk.
As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell.
They are already there. Get you some Mepis today. Mepis is a Debian based distro, much like KDE. It autoconfigures itself in a way that M$ with it's goofey propriatory reboot required drivers can only dream of. More interestingly, it has a graphical install that sticks the working and configured OS onto your hard drive. Click and drool has arived in free software and it comes clean, without security problems, and with all the goodies that larder M$ - office productivity suits.
DRM, embeded in hardware, is Microsoft's last ditch attempt to stop the comming avalanch of free software use. Rather than being forced to throw away your old computer so that you can get XP, people are going to save themselves loads of money and trouble with CDs like Mepis. Once you discover free software you don't go back because you discover how badly you have been lied to about free software by comercial software companies. Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything.
I quit reading the Economist article after the first paragraph gushed about how Bill Gates, "combines knightly philanthropy on an unprecedented scale with a long and impressive combat record." It's hard to admire someone who's broken the law so many times to rob everyone. The best article on Bill's charity was done by Salon years ago. Since then, much of his giving has been suspiciously close to countries considering free software. There have been and are today much better examples of philanthropy than Bill Gates. The hero worship sickens me.
You are right, gamming is not going to help but not for the reason you think. The problem is not the additional complications of gamming, the problem is a lack of interest on her part. She's not going to go for this because she's not interested in OTHER computer based forms of communications. They are not emailing and instant messaging, why whould she want a far more complicated interface?
It's not easy to maintain a relationship like that. It took me years to get the woman I married interested in email. Moving to a different state was tough. All she would do is mail, even though she was a draftsman and her dad maintained a computer with email on it and gave her an account with her ISP. It was very frustrating to read week old letters when we had much faster mailing set up. I put up with it and simply snail mailed her back or phoned if anything was urgent. She did not like that her dad could read her mail and considered my email nagging a drag and a put off. Don't go there with games.
If she was interested in a particular game, that could be a common interest and great. Of course, if that were the case, he would be asking her not Slashdot.
My wife now likes email and IM. She's root on her own machine in her own house and that works for her. We keep up a lively conversation when I go to work. One day, I'm going to find a game that we might like to play together.
If the USPO hears you, paper mail service will halt! Imagine post that can be carried by anyone with a standard box, that sorts itself and leaps out of the box on it's own as you drive by. Terrorism? Ha! try to spread anthrax or send letter bombs by email. No, my friend, now that you know how much better and easier this is than regualar paper mail, you can not live.
Yes indeed, I think he did stand up. He spent a good chunk of his youth in Phnom Penh as a jounalist before it was wrecked. Anyplace you spend time footlose and fancy free is wonderful and he compairs the place to Paris! It's no small wonder he would feel an attachment to the place, want to live there and do what he thinks is best.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have learned some of the wonderful things that cheaper communications do for people. We're talking about doctors colaborating, vilages being given a greater voice in govenment and all people having better access to information that really matters to their daily lives. It's no surprise that someone who spends their time being a first rate smart ass would think of it as spam delivery mechianism.
Other candidates for work like this include Cambodians lucky enough to have gotten a US education and US $ from work here, and Cambodians looking to make a buck. Now that the system is in place, anyone who travels can get a box and be a mail man. There's money in that.
Is she going to ignore advice from her doctor to stop screwing Haitian man-whores? Not listen to her investment manager when he says, 'That Nigerian email is a scam'? How about the recommendation of her video store clerk that 'Caligula' is not a movie to bring over to her niece's slumber party?
Buying a laptop with Windows on it is not that bad is it?
To avoid this terrible fate, do buisiness with an AOpen dealer who will happily sell you a laptop without an operating system and really not charge you for it. Ask them about free software, the more they hear it the more they will get into it. AOpen will do what it takes to get your business.
Go ahead, make that secure messaging system, just make it a new service and leave normal email alone. It will quickly be abused by the people who own it and will suffer from single point of failure a centeral authority requires.
In short, there's nothing but practical issues keeping you from doing this right now. If you can overcome those issues, more power to you. If you want to keep me from running a mail server with well configured free software, go away.
You call for two "very simple" solutions:
The problem of hijacked home computers can be reasonably solved through the use of firewalls (hardware and/or software), virus scanners, mal-ware checkers, etc.
This has been done and it is not working. Significant design flaws in Microsoft's OS continue to defeat band-aids like this as the myDumb worm proves. Insuficient control of execution by the continued use of filename extentions and insuficient privilidge seperation make continued explotation a reality. Even my ISP's draconian solution, blocking inbound and outbound port 25, has only created single point of failure for the whole network's email - the ISP's own MTA. Either Microsoft fixes their problems or it should be banned from internet connections.
The problem of open-relay mail servers (IMHO) is most appropriatly solved by convincing admins that proper configuaration of their mail servers is critical (or by not accepting mail from servers which allow inappropriate relaying).
At least this one looks simple. Every free distro I'm familiar with ships with it's MTA in a reasonable shape. good user manuals and well explained configuration files. Do you know of MTA's that don't ship this way?
The first problem's "solution" is the thing that's killing me. I can't run a mail server of any sort because someone else's software is so easy to exploit.
I prefer the victim's perspective, rather than the perpetuator's. You present us with an MSNBC article full of appologies and doges. It was more like Microsoft employee fired for violating groupthink.
You are worried about an employee's actions, but you fail to accomodate the environment the poor bastard works in. Right up front was the clue you needed:
People sometimes stare when Microsoft Corp. executive Tim McDonough opens his laptop in meetings. But that's probably to be expected when someone uses a Mac PowerBook in the center of the Windows world.
"I can get challenged to see my employee badge," he says.
That's a sick place to work. So much for all the BS posts I've read around here from M$ apologists about how open and free the Microsoft campus is. "They let you use whatever tool you want, as long as you get the job done," they sang out as if centrally directed. Right. No he was not joking and yes, it can get you fired. That's really fucked up. In an environment of horrid group think like that, what can you expect?
Can someone tell me the difference between an internet with open relays and one of peer machines where everyone is free to run mail transport agents. ? If my open MTA records your IP address, don't I know who hijacked me to spam? Isn't that the same as being spammed in the first place? Is this just another step towards an internet of legaly privileged "servers" broadcasting emsil and the rest of us "clients" soaking up whatever Corporate America decides we should? What's the practical benifit of cracking down on open relays when the world is full of hijacked Windoze boxes on cable modems that are serving kiddie porn while blasting us all with DDoS and spam attacks?
Throw in the fact that Lindows looks SUSPICIOUSLY like Windows XP, and I think Lindows doesn't really have a leg to stand on.
Someone tell Apple that there is popular support for the GUI dumbness. Everyone knows that Microsoft has just been riding Apple's GUI coat-tails for years. It's time to launch another lawsuit, this time in Scandinavia where wakdy and respectable looking Intelectual Property judgements can be bought on the cheap.
Have you ever thought that the name Lindows is a legitimate expression for a Linux distribution that looks and works like wINDOWS? What would you call such a distro? M$ Shadow Linux, Free Windows Linux, Bill Gates Nightmare Linux, Cheap WIMP?
Slashdot Mirror
The kind of place that's dumb enough to forbid installation of superior and no cost software is also too stupid to tell the distiguish between methods of install. As the concept of users is poorly implmented in Windoze, there's hardly a practical difference between the install method you mention and one an actual "install". In any canse, few people are willing to risk their jobs over a choice of a tool that the company looks down on using to begin with. It's all downhill in the land of the dumb, that's why they still use Windoze.
Does your keyboard also have a plastic membrane that keeps the grime and such from your oil-changing hands from getting in between the keys?
Chances are that the FuzzyFurB works as a cubicle drone in a Fortune 500 company or some other brain dead Microsoft "partner" where IT can only be done by the IT staff. They have all sorts of useless testing they do to insure configuration conformance. Microsoft's lack of modularity and real users makes it imposible to add software and be sure you have not changed non related system files. It makes no sense but that's the party line.
The effort, of course, is futile and counter productive. Microsoft junk is so full of holes that any old spam can own your system and many web sites download software for you. The corporate reaction to that is that you should not be browsing the web and to fire people who get suspicious emails. Still, the big dumb companies are always the fist and worst hit by any major worm. The monoculture is especially easy to kill and their suffering quickly becomes our own as poluted corporate machines spew their filth onto the rest of the world.
If the poor bastard had any choice of browsers, I'm sure he'd drop it onto something nice like Debian.
They can't, that's why they tried to by it. It's just like everything else Microsoft. They wait for a "market" to mature and buy their way into it. The results are never first rate because they never have the same concerns that creators have. They only care about money, performance is not the goal.
Had they bought Google, it would go the way of Hotmail, full of adverts, slow and used for Microsoft's strange world domination plans.
Having failed to buy Google, they will go down the road of trying to destroy Google. This is generally how Microsoft competes. The case of DrDOS is the best documented, but the Windows world is littered with aps M$ broke. There are two ways to break Google. The first is to set up websites and engage in Google bombing. The second is to incorrectly render or time out on Google searches. I expect Microsoft to do both.
twitter, do you really have to make your stupid point by offering yet-another-dollop-of-proof-that-M$-is-evil you seem to enjoy so much?
You know, if you weren't so pathetic in this regard and just stuck to the facts then maybe no one would follow you around repeating the most embarrassing bits of your, ahem, distinguished posting history for everyone to read.
I'm continually flattered by your attention, but here you raise an interesting question: why do people do what they do? The answer, of course, is because they want to. No one ever HAS to do anything. Think about that for a while.
Why would a "normal" company publicize in advance how they were going to combat the attack? Wouldn't that just give the virus writers a chance to modify their strategy? It would be like John Fox publishing his playbook right before the Super Bowl.
This is only true if the worm contains a bot, but even then it's risky to the virus author. Many windoze born diseases like this worm contain bots that give some control of the machine to the worm's author, but using that control with people watching will get you busted.
If SCO wanted to keep their plans to themselves they would. Their Sunday anouncement of their plans to anounce their plans the day after the attack is supposed to commence makes little sense.
"While we expect this attack to continue throughout the next few weeks, we have a series of contingency plans to deal with this problem and we will begin communicating those plans on Monday morning," Jeff Carlon, worldwide director of Information Technology infrastructure, The SCO Group, said in the statement.
Why wait till Monday to announce what you are going to do? Any normal company would have named it's contingency plan in advance and have executed it before the attack. You tested it in Wine, I'm sure that even SCO lawyers could have tested a Windoze machine by changing the clock. They should know what the virus is going to do to them and how to block it. Nothing from SCO ever makes sense.
Well, what do you expect from a company that cease and dissist extortion letters without telling you how you have infringed? Par for the SCO deal, they are sucking this for all that it's worth.
Chances are that they or Microsoft wrote the damn virus. No one else really cares.
If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
Also quoted are Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond.
Not mentioned, however, are The Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project.
I think "work culture" is a universal - get to work!
As for the software culture, you have to serve your market. You can bet your bottom dollar that an Indian firm that specializes in US software is going to be happy to have US culture on board.
Company politics can play a role too and can be used as a quick quality guide. A company writing really bad code for Microsft will probaly not want any US programmers on. Why import a lack of talent when there's plenty everywhere? When you don't care, you just don't bother. Free software companies will take input from anywhere without moving boddies because they have adequate colaboration tools. A company that goes to the trouble of importing talent is likely to make a good piece of software. Indians hired at Netscape were not there simply because they were willing to slave away like everyone else, they were GOOD and so was Netscape.
HyperText Markup Language was created in part to *link* documents quickly (i.e. so the user doesn't have to type in the document location manually). If we're supposed to just give up hyperlinks, why not just kiss the World Wide Web goodbye?
That's exactly what Microsoft has done. They have admitted that their browser is not useful as a browser. Nothing new here.
The choice really is:
The correct answer is 3.
They are already there. Get you some Mepis today. Mepis is a Debian based distro, much like KDE. It autoconfigures itself in a way that M$ with it's goofey propriatory reboot required drivers can only dream of. More interestingly, it has a graphical install that sticks the working and configured OS onto your hard drive. Click and drool has arived in free software and it comes clean, without security problems, and with all the goodies that larder M$ - office productivity suits.
DRM, embeded in hardware, is Microsoft's last ditch attempt to stop the comming avalanch of free software use. Rather than being forced to throw away your old computer so that you can get XP, people are going to save themselves loads of money and trouble with CDs like Mepis. Once you discover free software you don't go back because you discover how badly you have been lied to about free software by comercial software companies. Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything.
I quit reading the Economist article after the first paragraph gushed about how Bill Gates, "combines knightly philanthropy on an unprecedented scale with a long and impressive combat record." It's hard to admire someone who's broken the law so many times to rob everyone. The best article on Bill's charity was done by Salon years ago. Since then, much of his giving has been suspiciously close to countries considering free software. There have been and are today much better examples of philanthropy than Bill Gates. The hero worship sickens me.
It's not easy to maintain a relationship like that. It took me years to get the woman I married interested in email. Moving to a different state was tough. All she would do is mail, even though she was a draftsman and her dad maintained a computer with email on it and gave her an account with her ISP. It was very frustrating to read week old letters when we had much faster mailing set up. I put up with it and simply snail mailed her back or phoned if anything was urgent. She did not like that her dad could read her mail and considered my email nagging a drag and a put off. Don't go there with games.
If she was interested in a particular game, that could be a common interest and great. Of course, if that were the case, he would be asking her not Slashdot.
My wife now likes email and IM. She's root on her own machine in her own house and that works for her. We keep up a lively conversation when I go to work. One day, I'm going to find a game that we might like to play together.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have learned some of the wonderful things that cheaper communications do for people. We're talking about doctors colaborating, vilages being given a greater voice in govenment and all people having better access to information that really matters to their daily lives. It's no surprise that someone who spends their time being a first rate smart ass would think of it as spam delivery mechianism.
Other candidates for work like this include Cambodians lucky enough to have gotten a US education and US $ from work here, and Cambodians looking to make a buck. Now that the system is in place, anyone who travels can get a box and be a mail man. There's money in that.
Ah, now that is a blessing. In general, outside of Wintel, "support" is dedicated to adding new things. Enjoy.
Buying a laptop with Windows on it is not that bad is it?
To avoid this terrible fate, do buisiness with an AOpen dealer who will happily sell you a laptop without an operating system and really not charge you for it. Ask them about free software, the more they hear it the more they will get into it. AOpen will do what it takes to get your business.
Disclaimer - I work for a place like that now.
In short, there's nothing but practical issues keeping you from doing this right now. If you can overcome those issues, more power to you. If you want to keep me from running a mail server with well configured free software, go away.
This has been done and it is not working. Significant design flaws in Microsoft's OS continue to defeat band-aids like this as the myDumb worm proves. Insuficient control of execution by the continued use of filename extentions and insuficient privilidge seperation make continued explotation a reality. Even my ISP's draconian solution, blocking inbound and outbound port 25, has only created single point of failure for the whole network's email - the ISP's own MTA. Either Microsoft fixes their problems or it should be banned from internet connections.
The problem of open-relay mail servers (IMHO) is most appropriatly solved by convincing admins that proper configuaration of their mail servers is critical (or by not accepting mail from servers which allow inappropriate relaying).
At least this one looks simple. Every free distro I'm familiar with ships with it's MTA in a reasonable shape. good user manuals and well explained configuration files. Do you know of MTA's that don't ship this way?
The first problem's "solution" is the thing that's killing me. I can't run a mail server of any sort because someone else's software is so easy to exploit.
People sometimes stare when Microsoft Corp. executive Tim McDonough opens his laptop in meetings. But that's probably to be expected when someone uses a Mac PowerBook in the center of the Windows world.
"I can get challenged to see my employee badge," he says.
That's a sick place to work. So much for all the BS posts I've read around here from M$ apologists about how open and free the Microsoft campus is. "They let you use whatever tool you want, as long as you get the job done," they sang out as if centrally directed. Right. No he was not joking and yes, it can get you fired. That's really fucked up. In an environment of horrid group think like that, what can you expect?
Someone tell Apple that there is popular support for the GUI dumbness. Everyone knows that Microsoft has just been riding Apple's GUI coat-tails for years. It's time to launch another lawsuit, this time in Scandinavia where wakdy and respectable looking Intelectual Property judgements can be bought on the cheap.
Have you ever thought that the name Lindows is a legitimate expression for a Linux distribution that looks and works like wINDOWS? What would you call such a distro? M$ Shadow Linux, Free Windows Linux, Bill Gates Nightmare Linux, Cheap WIMP?