Surrender your code and a new world awaits you. We demand it. -tick tick - Nuclear fireball envelopes Redmond.
Really. Every day Microsoft's codebase falls further behind the geometrically expanding and evolving free code base. There's already little reason to use their stuff. If they wait much longer, that same stuff will be hopelessly obsolete and impossible to salvage anything useful from.
The most important reason to ignore the survey is that Microsoft never delivers on their promisses. They are just looking for marketing buzwords to tempt would be free software users to stay in software slavery.
The next reason has to do with "Michael Surkan". Do a google search on the name and you will find it synonymous with FUD, insult and cluelessnes. The most damning quotes atributed to him are:
While the storries are good, can we be sure we are getting the whole storry from an author who says:
But dozens of America's biggest investors in India -- don't worry, I won't name names -- simply refused to talk.
Why the cop out? He needs to tell us what he learns. The little wink wink, nod nod to his advertisers and the people he interviewed satisfies neither them nor us.
It only has power and force, however, if free software is defeated. Free software users welcome developers in other countries. Only closed source shops have to worry about the rest of it. With free software, everyone can know as much as they need to and anyone can compete. Those that don't adopt free software will soon find themselves at a great competitive disadvantage.
That said, the shift in basic industry and research is much more serious than people think. When the heavy idustry knowledge is moved, it's gone and has to be rebuilt from scratch. There's no substitute for doing things. Anyone can sit down at a computer, study souce code and fix IT problems. Only people who have run a steel factory, for example, can look at PIDs, proceedures and the like and judge them competently.
You missed the big picture. It's true that the majority of graduate students at most US universities are foreign. It's also true that graduate school is grueling, low paid work that most US graduates would rather not do. Most of those students are working on masters degrees by doing some company's specific technical research grunt work. What you have to ask yourself then is why and what can you do. Why is it that there are no reasonable scholarships for basic research at US Universities? How is it that forgein students are able to fly in by the plane load to the US while MacDonalds is able to offer a US graduate better hours and pay? The answer is that you have been betrayed and must fight those who have screwed you.
It's been planned a long time ago. Those forgein students are flying in here on scholarships funded in part by US companies looking to move their operations offshore. They are doing it because dumb asses in Armani suits think it will be cheaper that way. It's why US manufacturing has been contracting for the last 30 years and why big companies have had no major technical hires for the last 20 years. Management seeks to thwart rising competition by owning it. That might sound good if you while you sit, retired, in your company owned New York condo or private plane with your billions of dollars worth of golden parachute comming in every year. It sound really stupid if you have any common sense.
It's suicide. The big dogs are turning off the lights here in the US and they think that they can keep the rest of the world paying them. It's not going to happen. When the industry and brainpower that makes it work have moved, the rest of the world will turn it's back on us because we won't have anything left to offer. OK, we will still have food, and that's a noble export, but the rest of the world will be able to match and surpass our productivity in time.
The answer it to compete. There's still enough of us who know how to get things done and those willing to learn to turn things around. The big consolidated companies are stupid and inefficient. This is why companies like Honda and Sony can dominate US markets, despite paying their own emplyees more than US companies do. The big dogs are relying on anti-competive laws, public ignorance and apathy to have their way. They can be defeated. Make things! Sell them! If the big dogs come to buy you out, make sure that it's a good deal for every one of your employees and stick it to them. It's not easy and it's getting harder all the time.
Lamer, I'm not sure what that is, but it sounds like an operator error. Can you be more specific? I'd really like to know what a "stupid fracture" is.
switched to the PC
Hmmm, good quality there. Well, good enough, but have you ever heard of bad capacitors on a Mac? All a google search turned up for me was an air station example where Apple admitted to the problem and replaced the thing out of warranty in less than two days. No PC maker I've heard of was spared the bad capacitor problem and some big dumb ones still get burnt.
That being said, I run crappy x86 hardware myself. If all I was had was one computer, like most normal people who hate computers in general, I'd have a Mac. But I don't, I pull PeeeCeees from the trash because even crappier software made them useless to their owners. Ha ha ha ha. Free software makes them sing again.
If the Open Source community begins patching Windows before Microsoft, not only does it help consumers deal with problems they can't solve, but it bring honor and respect to the Open Source community.
Fixing Microsoft problems is a no-win thing to do. Either you escape Micorosft's notice or you are broken by them. In the first case, you simply help make people comfortable in Microsoft's clutches. This, perversly, makes them happy with Microsoft. In the second, you make them angry at you for trying.
Microsoft routinely discredits the work of all non-Microsoft programmers and this will be no different. All they have to do is detect the alien code and break their own code in response. Just look at all the nasty appologist posting here with their stupid, "this is no substitute for a Official Microsoft patch" Bull Shit.
There are many better things to do with your time than work on legacy Microsoft junk. It's impossible to secure due to it's flawed networking and kernel models. You can try and try, but the user is going to get burt by the new version of Outlook, which undoes all of your repairs, or some RIAA virus will come cugging out of Kazaa at them. Working for Microsoft is a futile, pointless and ultimately harmful exercise.
True enough, better just get Mozilla. If you want really clean code, better get off M$ all together. It's their stupid hole that requires this
"patch" in the first place and it's just one of dozens that have been demostrated since XP was unveiled as "secure by default". Pthththfit!
Where have we come as a nation, as culture when a P4 1.7Ghz is classified as a "not all that great" machine.
Fucking rich? Cool, I like being here.
A P4 can look like real shit if it's got a 100MHz FSB and sdram to match it. In that case, an Athlon 1600 with DDR can run circles around it. When top of the line is 800MHz FSB the 100s are over anyway.
That being said, Quake 2 is playable on a 650MHz slot 1 with crummy old pc133 sdram. Playable, but "not that great"
To defend Power Point, you pretend to be an expert and then exhort us to:
stop using transparencies,
A perfect Steve Barkto! Blame the user, denigrate the competition and pump up the Microsoft way. The only problem in this instance is that you inadvertenly and completely defeat yourself.
Transparacy presentations prove that Power Point sucks. Why is it that these problems were not problems with hand made transpariancies? Because there's no mindless rule set restricting the hand of an artist hand painting a transparency. For years, hand made transparencies were a mark of profesionalism. This is why slide making programs were invented. Microsoft's constricting rules, combined with the ease of type setting an image, create bad presentations that look good, the worste possible case. The amazing thing is that Power Point's building process, like most Microsoft junk, has remained exaclty as it was hastily flung together ten years ago. All Microsoft has done is add "features" for onramenting the poorly done job. It is true that effective presentations can be made though Microsoft's tool, it just requires too much effort and that's why it makes you dumb. Microsoft has concentrated on the wrong things and won't be able to make a reasonable tool to compete against free alternatives from Sun, KDE and Gnome, which also can use a fancy and expensive projector.
yet Open Office Impress copies all these flaws faithfully.
The problems come from Microsoft limitations. No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing. It's Microsoft's rule set for generating the slides that's at fault, not the means of communication itself. There's nothing wrong with software that gives you a slide and notes layout to design a presentation. There is something wrong with Microsoft's rule set.
Impress does copy some of that rule set, but not all and offers other ways to do things and is free to grow. One important difference is the ease or reuse. Things that go into Microsoft's Power Point don't come back out very well. Try cutting and pasting an image out of Power Point to anything but power point and you will find the image qaulity significantly reduced. This degradation of information eliminates information reuse and waste's the user's time. Exporting to html and other recognized information sharing formats is also clunkier with Microsoft. Sun's underlying file system is much better organized and well thought out. Thier cut and paste tools work much better and the overall rule set for constructing slides is a little easier. The user community can recognize the flaws and correct them much quicker than Microsoft's beleagured programmers who strugle with all of Power Point's 10 year old legacy code and poor underlying structure.
Pentium 200 with 64Mb of RAM... I'll upgrade those machines when RedHat (or someone else) gets their act together, supports the still functional Office 97 standard, and does it for less than $60/machine/year. All we need are bug and security patches!
Your ship has arived. P200s with 64MB of ram are not bad xterminals. An easy upgrade path is to Debian and Open Office, with a few new machine purchases. Open Office does Microsoft's formats well, and gives you pdf print out. Debian has free security updates, but would be happy to have your $60/year. You can run Open Office from a few fast central servers accessed by your employees from their current desktops running all running Debian.
Don't take my word for it, try it out today with Knoppix. Knoppix comes with Open Office and will probably work on your hardware without tweaking, and without any risk to your current work. To try out the xterminal stuff, just boot up your best box as the server and add a few users. Boot up your desktop machines with Window Maker, or your choice of lighter duty window manager. You can then log into the server from other knoppix machines with "ssh -X username@server", start a "kdesktop", "kicker" and then whatever you want. Resposne time will, of course, not be as good as a system that is not running off CDs, but it should be snappy enough. Web browsing should be as fast or better than your current M$ set up.
If you like what you see, Installing Debian is not that hard. You can essentially copy the Knoppix configuration if you don't get it right yourself. Then, presto, you have the best software available. There should be dozens of people near you who can do the work if you and your usual techs can't. Check out rentageek or even the phone book. It's a job any Linux dude would love to do.
Imagine you are walking down Burbon Street in New Orleans. The usual carnival of whores, drunks and normal bon-vivants surrounds you. It is bright and festive this cool and clear night.
Motion in the gloom of a side street catches your eye. You turn to see what it is. There, in the vomit and urine stench of a gutter, you see a form rising. You see the whites of someone'e eyes. The stench and filth turn your stomach but you stare transfixed. You think of calling an ambulance for the poor trashed bastard. There, it's a man! It's Bill Gates!
He points a finger and thunders with all of his might, "You are no better than I am!"
Oh, my gosh. Someone who already has access to your network can put a malicious machine on it that will lead to your Mac being owned when it reboots.
Sounds like a good reason to keep M$ boxes off your network. That steaming pile of dung is easily owned and then used as a base of attack. Think about it, in a properly constructed network there's nothing to fear even when using obsolete protocals like telnet and ftp. You only have to hide your passwords when someone you don't trust might be listening and a well constructed gateway would keep that from happening. All is well till you put a machine in that runs an email client as root that automatically loads music, images, scripts and other stuff.
So, everyone using Mac and Linux are free to use chrome?
Sure, so long as you use a text based browser that can't call another x-window for a trusted jvscript popup advert without any deactivating buttons and less "security" than IE, you don't owe anything to SCO^H^H^HMicfosoft.
In short, HTAs pack all the power of Microsoft Internet Explorer--its object model, performance, rendering power, protocol support, and channel-download technology--without enforcing the strict security model and user interface of the browser.
Anyone want to offer a explaination of that means and why any of it deserves a patent? From hear it looks like a standard web browser with "channel-download" with even lower security than IE. What, besides the buzzword jargon, is non obvious?
job losses were never blamed on communism (since socialist entites are "inefficient" and keep people around). Now it seems job losses are fair game.
inefficient == less than full capacity. Central planning wastes resources that people would otherwise exploit as they pleased. The net result is a lower standard of living and under-employment. It's generally for the benefit of those in power under both systems too.
Music is a good example of market consolidation resemeling a socialist state. The FCC decides who can broadcast and collects lots of money. The big music companies decide who they will promote and collect lots of money. People who could promote alternate acts are locked out and musicians end up doing anything else for a living because music does not pay, even for best selling artists. So the whole structure of restrictions is really supporting the FCC and RIAA. It can be argued that musicians would be better off, ie employed, in a system that was free.
I'm more concerned about the way they use their tools then the quality of the tools themselves. It's great that they have developed operating systems, chips and all. That they use these things to intimidate themselves and their neighbors is not great.
I'd be happy to have a Cuba style trade embargo in place with China till they have something aproaching free speach and many of the other provisions of the much abused US Bill of Rights. The idea that we will destabilize their governemt by pouring wealth into China is false.
I am still yet to find a situation where encrypted wireless signals make sense for home or even business situations.
How about in a doctor's office? Don't tell me that wireless is of no use to doctors, that's short sighted. Wirelessly checking your mail with anthing other than a ssh connection on a university campus is a bad idea. Web browsing with passwords might is a bad idea unless you are 100% sure the website in question encrypts identifying information and anything else you might consider sensitive. Visiting, http://www.herpesrelief.com, on a campus or company wifi might also be a bad idea. While you might trust your company or your university, you should not trust that people are not data mining their network or just laughing at you. At home, the situation is much as you describe it - you are less likely to be embarassed by your neighbors or Osama in da Bushes than you are by Microsoft remote exploit.
Your chief concern, the overhead of encryption, is misplaced, but your dislike of ecryption at routers is not. The problems are mostly user control, quality control, updates and segregation of function. Like you say, it makes sense to encrypt sensitive information at the source. My idea of the source is the originating computer.
I use ssh internally for all my networking and don't see any difference over ftp and telnet. It may be paranoid, but it does not hurt. So I don't need hardware encryption, regardless of merit.
Lesser quality and rootable encryption at the router level is a waste. Even if China's standard has merit and is reasonably secure and free implementations are made, there are problems of updates and user control. How do you apt-get upgrade your network card? All I want my network cards and access points to do is transmit information. I'm not going to trust it and I'm going to keep using OpenSSH which I do trust.
I have to point out that it's CAPITALIST propaganda. They're doing it for the money.
So did Stalin.
Industrial consolidation of the kind we are seeing is not capitalist, it's the result of excesive regulations and predatory practices. Where those regulations are most restrictive, you have the greatest consolidation. Music and media, FCC, RIAA, MPAA. Telecomunications, FCC. Electric power, too numerous to mention, though there are reasonable justifications that have been abused. Medicine is being socialized. The end result is functionally equivalent to communism - you are not alowed to compete or even complain about it and poorly informed drones make decisions for you.
Over at the Four Seasons, events of some significance are on the menu along with the white truffle risotto ($130 for an appetizer portion) and grilled dorade. On Nov. 20, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Roger Ames spent a good long while chatting amiably with heads bent toward each other while other captains of industry, including Ronald O. Perelman, Steven Rattner and Ronald S. Lauder, casually took in the significance of the pairing. A few days later, Warner Music, of which Mr. Ames is chairman, was sold to a group headed by Mr. Bronfman for $2.6 billion, which sort of puts the price of risotto in perspective.
Oh yeah, that's real good perspective. People who think a $1,000 lunch is a reasonable business expesnse think shit - canning programmers is a good idea. The article goes on to predict good economic times. Ugh.
"2%", "we're large/bloated" that's how the big dogs at Time/Warner spin this to themselves. You might as well add something really stupid like, "Who needs anything but Internet Explorer anyway."
Get a brain, will you. That's 450 Netscape people, probably the best programmers Time/Warner has. They, like you, don't think they need programmers because you can turn some magic box Offshore and get what you want. It's bad news for Time, but they are too stupid to understand the future. It's bad news for unemployed programmers because that kind of missery does not like company. It's worse news for every one of those 450 people and I hope YOU lose your job to a merger one day so you can understand that. Time bought AOL to stifle it and internet service as much as possible. If you did not notice that at the time, or when they took over "leadership", it's apparent now as they start to dismantle the parts that get work done.
Oh well, it can be worse. You could get ranked and yanked, like I did. When that happens, they paper your file, rake you over the coals for a few months and fire you individually. It looks great. In my case, my supervisor made sure he nailed me on my birthday. Another great and integral part of rank and yank is bonus incentives for those not fired. The company was talking about bonuses as high as 15%, knowing they could split the salaries of the people they planned to fire. It's strange how no one but supervisors were excited about that.
Look forward to getting the usual communist propaganda from the company by mail for a while. The idiots in HR sent me a big fat glossy book, personalized with my own numbers, about what great benefits the company has for it's employees. The only thing they missed in the personalization was the fact that I was fired. How sofisticated, the company really loves me.
My company was big, but Time/Warner is much bigger. I wonder if the Netscape people are going to have it that much worse than I did. Nah, it's hard to get worse than fired, no matter how the jack-asses dress it up.
Welcome to the great suck that is the "recovery". I've been out of real work for more than a year. I'm not really happy to have lots of company.
Shooting at women and children, killing people when not threatened, getting your agents killed in the process, then faking evidence and lying to cover your ass, all to get some dude who missed a court date, that shit's not funny.
Look at what your government has come to and fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Surrender your code and a new world awaits you. We demand it. -tick tick - Nuclear fireball envelopes Redmond.
Really. Every day Microsoft's codebase falls further behind the geometrically expanding and evolving free code base. There's already little reason to use their stuff. If they wait much longer, that same stuff will be hopelessly obsolete and impossible to salvage anything useful from.
The next reason has to do with "Michael Surkan". Do a google search on the name and you will find it synonymous with FUD, insult and cluelessnes. The most damning quotes atributed to him are:
Additionally, he denied official backing from Microsoft in his letter to the gslug list maintainers, "P.S. This report is a skunkworks project of mine, and really doesn't have anything to do with my "day job". As if any Microsoft employee were free say what they think. Such typical Microsoft.
I have yet to look for Frank, but I imagine another blast of BS awaits anyone who does. Oh, hell, I'll look.
Don't waste much time on the survey. The answer is sure to be, "Remember to eat our dog food".
But dozens of America's biggest investors in India -- don't worry, I won't name names -- simply refused to talk.
Why the cop out? He needs to tell us what he learns. The little wink wink, nod nod to his advertisers and the people he interviewed satisfies neither them nor us.
It only has power and force, however, if free software is defeated. Free software users welcome developers in other countries. Only closed source shops have to worry about the rest of it. With free software, everyone can know as much as they need to and anyone can compete. Those that don't adopt free software will soon find themselves at a great competitive disadvantage.
That said, the shift in basic industry and research is much more serious than people think. When the heavy idustry knowledge is moved, it's gone and has to be rebuilt from scratch. There's no substitute for doing things. Anyone can sit down at a computer, study souce code and fix IT problems. Only people who have run a steel factory, for example, can look at PIDs, proceedures and the like and judge them competently.
It's been planned a long time ago. Those forgein students are flying in here on scholarships funded in part by US companies looking to move their operations offshore. They are doing it because dumb asses in Armani suits think it will be cheaper that way. It's why US manufacturing has been contracting for the last 30 years and why big companies have had no major technical hires for the last 20 years. Management seeks to thwart rising competition by owning it. That might sound good if you while you sit, retired, in your company owned New York condo or private plane with your billions of dollars worth of golden parachute comming in every year. It sound really stupid if you have any common sense.
It's suicide. The big dogs are turning off the lights here in the US and they think that they can keep the rest of the world paying them. It's not going to happen. When the industry and brainpower that makes it work have moved, the rest of the world will turn it's back on us because we won't have anything left to offer. OK, we will still have food, and that's a noble export, but the rest of the world will be able to match and surpass our productivity in time.
The answer it to compete. There's still enough of us who know how to get things done and those willing to learn to turn things around. The big consolidated companies are stupid and inefficient. This is why companies like Honda and Sony can dominate US markets, despite paying their own emplyees more than US companies do. The big dogs are relying on anti-competive laws, public ignorance and apathy to have their way. They can be defeated. Make things! Sell them! If the big dogs come to buy you out, make sure that it's a good deal for every one of your employees and stick it to them. It's not easy and it's getting harder all the time.
Lamer, I'm not sure what that is, but it sounds like an operator error. Can you be more specific? I'd really like to know what a "stupid fracture" is.
switched to the PC
Hmmm, good quality there. Well, good enough, but have you ever heard of bad capacitors on a Mac? All a google search turned up for me was an air station example where Apple admitted to the problem and replaced the thing out of warranty in less than two days. No PC maker I've heard of was spared the bad capacitor problem and some big dumb ones still get burnt.
That being said, I run crappy x86 hardware myself. If all I was had was one computer, like most normal people who hate computers in general, I'd have a Mac. But I don't, I pull PeeeCeees from the trash because even crappier software made them useless to their owners. Ha ha ha ha. Free software makes them sing again.
Fixing Microsoft problems is a no-win thing to do. Either you escape Micorosft's notice or you are broken by them. In the first case, you simply help make people comfortable in Microsoft's clutches. This, perversly, makes them happy with Microsoft. In the second, you make them angry at you for trying.
Microsoft routinely discredits the work of all non-Microsoft programmers and this will be no different. All they have to do is detect the alien code and break their own code in response. Just look at all the nasty appologist posting here with their stupid, "this is no substitute for a Official Microsoft patch" Bull Shit.
There are many better things to do with your time than work on legacy Microsoft junk. It's impossible to secure due to it's flawed networking and kernel models. You can try and try, but the user is going to get burt by the new version of Outlook, which undoes all of your repairs, or some RIAA virus will come cugging out of Kazaa at them. Working for Microsoft is a futile, pointless and ultimately harmful exercise.
True enough, better just get Mozilla. If you want really clean code, better get off M$ all together. It's their stupid hole that requires this "patch" in the first place and it's just one of dozens that have been demostrated since XP was unveiled as "secure by default". Pthththfit!
No, bad analogy. SCO is afraid other closed source idiots will take their code and not tell anyone. SCO should know, they did this to BSD!
Fucking rich? Cool, I like being here.
A P4 can look like real shit if it's got a 100MHz FSB and sdram to match it. In that case, an Athlon 1600 with DDR can run circles around it. When top of the line is 800MHz FSB the 100s are over anyway.
That being said, Quake 2 is playable on a 650MHz slot 1 with crummy old pc133 sdram. Playable, but "not that great"
stop using transparencies,
A perfect Steve Barkto! Blame the user, denigrate the competition and pump up the Microsoft way. The only problem in this instance is that you inadvertenly and completely defeat yourself.
Transparacy presentations prove that Power Point sucks. Why is it that these problems were not problems with hand made transpariancies? Because there's no mindless rule set restricting the hand of an artist hand painting a transparency. For years, hand made transparencies were a mark of profesionalism. This is why slide making programs were invented. Microsoft's constricting rules, combined with the ease of type setting an image, create bad presentations that look good, the worste possible case. The amazing thing is that Power Point's building process, like most Microsoft junk, has remained exaclty as it was hastily flung together ten years ago. All Microsoft has done is add "features" for onramenting the poorly done job. It is true that effective presentations can be made though Microsoft's tool, it just requires too much effort and that's why it makes you dumb. Microsoft has concentrated on the wrong things and won't be able to make a reasonable tool to compete against free alternatives from Sun, KDE and Gnome, which also can use a fancy and expensive projector.
The problems come from Microsoft limitations. No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing. It's Microsoft's rule set for generating the slides that's at fault, not the means of communication itself. There's nothing wrong with software that gives you a slide and notes layout to design a presentation. There is something wrong with Microsoft's rule set.
Impress does copy some of that rule set, but not all and offers other ways to do things and is free to grow. One important difference is the ease or reuse. Things that go into Microsoft's Power Point don't come back out very well. Try cutting and pasting an image out of Power Point to anything but power point and you will find the image qaulity significantly reduced. This degradation of information eliminates information reuse and waste's the user's time. Exporting to html and other recognized information sharing formats is also clunkier with Microsoft. Sun's underlying file system is much better organized and well thought out. Thier cut and paste tools work much better and the overall rule set for constructing slides is a little easier. The user community can recognize the flaws and correct them much quicker than Microsoft's beleagured programmers who strugle with all of Power Point's 10 year old legacy code and poor underlying structure.
Your ship has arived. P200s with 64MB of ram are not bad xterminals. An easy upgrade path is to Debian and Open Office, with a few new machine purchases. Open Office does Microsoft's formats well, and gives you pdf print out. Debian has free security updates, but would be happy to have your $60/year. You can run Open Office from a few fast central servers accessed by your employees from their current desktops running all running Debian.
Don't take my word for it, try it out today with Knoppix. Knoppix comes with Open Office and will probably work on your hardware without tweaking, and without any risk to your current work. To try out the xterminal stuff, just boot up your best box as the server and add a few users. Boot up your desktop machines with Window Maker, or your choice of lighter duty window manager. You can then log into the server from other knoppix machines with "ssh -X username@server", start a "kdesktop", "kicker" and then whatever you want. Resposne time will, of course, not be as good as a system that is not running off CDs, but it should be snappy enough. Web browsing should be as fast or better than your current M$ set up.
If you like what you see, Installing Debian is not that hard. You can essentially copy the Knoppix configuration if you don't get it right yourself. Then, presto, you have the best software available. There should be dozens of people near you who can do the work if you and your usual techs can't. Check out rentageek or even the phone book. It's a job any Linux dude would love to do.
Motion in the gloom of a side street catches your eye. You turn to see what it is. There, in the vomit and urine stench of a gutter, you see a form rising. You see the whites of someone'e eyes. The stench and filth turn your stomach but you stare transfixed. You think of calling an ambulance for the poor trashed bastard. There, it's a man! It's Bill Gates!
He points a finger and thunders with all of his might, "You are no better than I am!"
Sounds like a good reason to keep M$ boxes off your network. That steaming pile of dung is easily owned and then used as a base of attack. Think about it, in a properly constructed network there's nothing to fear even when using obsolete protocals like telnet and ftp. You only have to hide your passwords when someone you don't trust might be listening and a well constructed gateway would keep that from happening. All is well till you put a machine in that runs an email client as root that automatically loads music, images, scripts and other stuff.
Sure, so long as you use a text based browser that can't call another x-window for a trusted jvscript popup advert without any deactivating buttons and less "security" than IE, you don't owe anything to SCO^H^H^HMicfosoft.
In short, HTAs pack all the power of Microsoft Internet Explorer--its object model, performance, rendering power, protocol support, and channel-download technology--without enforcing the strict security model and user interface of the browser.
Anyone want to offer a explaination of that means and why any of it deserves a patent? From hear it looks like a standard web browser with "channel-download" with even lower security than IE. What, besides the buzzword jargon, is non obvious?
inefficient == less than full capacity. Central planning wastes resources that people would otherwise exploit as they pleased. The net result is a lower standard of living and under-employment. It's generally for the benefit of those in power under both systems too.
Music is a good example of market consolidation resemeling a socialist state. The FCC decides who can broadcast and collects lots of money. The big music companies decide who they will promote and collect lots of money. People who could promote alternate acts are locked out and musicians end up doing anything else for a living because music does not pay, even for best selling artists. So the whole structure of restrictions is really supporting the FCC and RIAA. It can be argued that musicians would be better off, ie employed, in a system that was free.
Don't worry, I was fired.
I'd be happy to have a Cuba style trade embargo in place with China till they have something aproaching free speach and many of the other provisions of the much abused US Bill of Rights. The idea that we will destabilize their governemt by pouring wealth into China is false.
How about in a doctor's office? Don't tell me that wireless is of no use to doctors, that's short sighted. Wirelessly checking your mail with anthing other than a ssh connection on a university campus is a bad idea. Web browsing with passwords might is a bad idea unless you are 100% sure the website in question encrypts identifying information and anything else you might consider sensitive. Visiting, http://www.herpesrelief.com, on a campus or company wifi might also be a bad idea. While you might trust your company or your university, you should not trust that people are not data mining their network or just laughing at you. At home, the situation is much as you describe it - you are less likely to be embarassed by your neighbors or Osama in da Bushes than you are by Microsoft remote exploit.
Your chief concern, the overhead of encryption, is misplaced, but your dislike of ecryption at routers is not. The problems are mostly user control, quality control, updates and segregation of function. Like you say, it makes sense to encrypt sensitive information at the source. My idea of the source is the originating computer.
I use ssh internally for all my networking and don't see any difference over ftp and telnet. It may be paranoid, but it does not hurt. So I don't need hardware encryption, regardless of merit.
Lesser quality and rootable encryption at the router level is a waste. Even if China's standard has merit and is reasonably secure and free implementations are made, there are problems of updates and user control. How do you apt-get upgrade your network card? All I want my network cards and access points to do is transmit information. I'm not going to trust it and I'm going to keep using OpenSSH which I do trust.
So did Stalin.
Industrial consolidation of the kind we are seeing is not capitalist, it's the result of excesive regulations and predatory practices. Where those regulations are most restrictive, you have the greatest consolidation. Music and media, FCC, RIAA, MPAA. Telecomunications, FCC. Electric power, too numerous to mention, though there are reasonable justifications that have been abused. Medicine is being socialized. The end result is functionally equivalent to communism - you are not alowed to compete or even complain about it and poorly informed drones make decisions for you.
Over at the Four Seasons, events of some significance are on the menu along with the white truffle risotto ($130 for an appetizer portion) and grilled dorade. On Nov. 20, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Roger Ames spent a good long while chatting amiably with heads bent toward each other while other captains of industry, including Ronald O. Perelman, Steven Rattner and Ronald S. Lauder, casually took in the significance of the pairing. A few days later, Warner Music, of which Mr. Ames is chairman, was sold to a group headed by Mr. Bronfman for $2.6 billion, which sort of puts the price of risotto in perspective.
Oh yeah, that's real good perspective. People who think a $1,000 lunch is a reasonable business expesnse think shit - canning programmers is a good idea. The article goes on to predict good economic times. Ugh.
Get a brain, will you. That's 450 Netscape people, probably the best programmers Time/Warner has. They, like you, don't think they need programmers because you can turn some magic box Offshore and get what you want. It's bad news for Time, but they are too stupid to understand the future. It's bad news for unemployed programmers because that kind of missery does not like company. It's worse news for every one of those 450 people and I hope YOU lose your job to a merger one day so you can understand that. Time bought AOL to stifle it and internet service as much as possible. If you did not notice that at the time, or when they took over "leadership", it's apparent now as they start to dismantle the parts that get work done.
Oh well, it can be worse. You could get ranked and yanked, like I did. When that happens, they paper your file, rake you over the coals for a few months and fire you individually. It looks great. In my case, my supervisor made sure he nailed me on my birthday. Another great and integral part of rank and yank is bonus incentives for those not fired. The company was talking about bonuses as high as 15%, knowing they could split the salaries of the people they planned to fire. It's strange how no one but supervisors were excited about that.
Look forward to getting the usual communist propaganda from the company by mail for a while. The idiots in HR sent me a big fat glossy book, personalized with my own numbers, about what great benefits the company has for it's employees. The only thing they missed in the personalization was the fact that I was fired. How sofisticated, the company really loves me.
My company was big, but Time/Warner is much bigger. I wonder if the Netscape people are going to have it that much worse than I did. Nah, it's hard to get worse than fired, no matter how the jack-asses dress it up.
Welcome to the great suck that is the "recovery". I've been out of real work for more than a year. I'm not really happy to have lots of company.
Look at what your government has come to and fear.