M$ COBOL will be a one way sink that won't last long. That's right, M$ I still remember how you waded into FORTRAN, added nifty little toy tools without getting the basics right and then sold it like a hot potato to Digital where it rested in peace. Another fine member of the Visual Studio. Pththth-fit!
Anyone tempted to migrate from their current platform and tools should look at the way things turned out in scientific computing. Efforts like f2c and g77, the GNU FORTRAN compiler, are far superior. Libraries available as Debian packages are also great. The differences are only getting larger as more people are attracted by the tools available. And yes, you can have a beowolf cluster of those. Microsoft had it's ass handed to them.
What's needed is a two pronged approach. One prong is legal and is being followed fairly well; pass laws that make spamming illegal. The other prong, which is still under development, is to make technical changes to email so that spammers can't hide their addresses.
First, I don't share your glee about current laws and the direction they are taking. I fear email will end up like broadcast radio and TV - only people who pay big bucks to the government will be alowed to run a mail server. The result will be as dismal as broadcast media is, but worse because mail is personal. Imagine licensed spam and every email service being like Hotmail - a spam in every can! Your email will always be searchable by government agencies and spammers if people like AOL and Microsoft have their way.
How do they get there from here? They are already half way there. Blacklists are a part of it. Any ISP that does not prevent their users from running mail servers gats on M$ and AOL blacklists, regardless of the actual volume of spam. Convienetly enough for them, this puts further pressure on smaller ISPs and eliminates competition, compliance or no. Another way to get there is by creating mechanisms "so that smappmers can't hide their addresses". This would create the kind of central authority that the internet was designed to avoid. Wanna bet who will run that central authority? The smarter you make the net, the dumber and less free it becomes.
Laws making spam illegal, with reasonable definitions of spam are the only way to kill spam.
The IP address of the spammer should leave a large enough trail for people who really want to bust spammers to follow, so it is indeed practical. Some recent turns are good, I just hope it applies to the big boys the same way it applies to the smaller ones. Somehow I doubt it, despite small charges against ATT. No spam is ever acceptable on a medium that was designed to work on pull and our laws should reflect it. If France can keep people from selling Nazi junk, the USA can halt spam if it wants to.
... people responsible for modern Internet spamming worms... consider themselves businessmen.
How's this different from Gator and other malware? How about some of Microsoft's practices, like keeping a database of all the movies and songs you use and selling space on "their" desktop to third parties that spam you later? All spam is evil, using proxies is just a new twist.
In any case, the evil would die out if Microsoft did not make a crapy OS that any 17 year old could break. Give credit where credit is due. All of these problems are Microsoft problems. Everyone told them not to do the things they do and everyone told them this would happen.
Follow the money ---> Microsoft is the virus writer. I've heard more than one computer vendor saying this last wave of computer viruses is great because it's forcing people to "upgrade". The old OS always gets broken when M$ wants to push another one.
The BBC jouranlist should have done a little more homework and written a story rather than quoting this Symantic employee straight. All the makings of a good story are there, a repeated pattern, many people harmed, a few benifit, and a money trail a mile wide. Blaming "hackers" is lame. Wondering "what kind of person does this kind of thing" is second rate next to finding out who did it. The truth is out there, it just has to be found.
It might take a year or two, but they could squash future bugs if they wanted to.
I doubt it. A complete rewrite is the only way to clean up the cobled together mess of intentionally spagetti coded junk they have purchased and stolen. The might be able to do that in a year or so, but it would not be Windblows it would be OSX1 or some other varient of BSD with an ugly and non-intuitive Redmond themed desktop.
They can complain all they want about it not being cost effective to fix bugs. I think they are going to find out the hard way that it's not cost effective to own crap.
The flaw in your argument comes when you realize that a company with the resources of Microsoft (money and personnel) should be able to realize that balance between usability and proper security in about one fiscal quarter.
It's been more than a year since M$ delcared Security "Job #1" and had their big group meetings. Oh yeah, I remember all that Bullshit about it being just like when M$ decided it needed to take the inernete seriously and all that for Windoze 95. Internet seriously for Windoze 95? Those jokers have yet to take the responsiblility of hooking up to networks seriously.
People told and Microsoft must have known that their single user mode nonsense was not an adequate model for a computer on a network. They did not care, it's that simple. The rise of internet destabilizing viruses is the result of more Microsoft users connecting to the internet, nothing more. Everyone knew it was comming.
They got plenty of warnings. I Love You happened years ago. It's no surprise that people don't want to buy their stuff. It's been broken for a long time and everyone knows it. It's no wonder that people are looking for something that works.
People don't hate Microsoft because they made software that sucks. People hate Microsoft because Microsoft thought so much of their sucky software that they put all sorts of stupid restrictions on user behavior and wanted to expend into everything and make competition impossible. Remeber them telling people who used Frontpage that they could not say bad things about Microsoft. The whole DRM thing was the pinacle of thier lunacy. It was Bill Gates' greedy dream to control all digital content, music, movies, books and even email, then charge the customer for everything AND sell each customer advertising. XP is the sum of such efforts. It's looking like it will only work with WM files, it takes popup adverts all day long, many of them pornographic and, of course, it crashes and gets viruses. Using M$ is a miserable experience and Microsoft wants to make it impossible for you to use anything else. Longhorn promisses to be worse and I predict it's sales will be worse than XPs were, even worse than the currently tanking XBox.
Tank? Yep, that's the ultimate incentive. It's been comming for a long, long time. M$ has exhausted the public's credibility. Bye, bye, assholes.
We are talking about an organization that uses proxies, BSA to sue public schools, forge letters to lawmakers from dead and living peopleand is happy to sue people out of their livelyhoods at the drop of a hat. Now they put this silly SCO dupes up to this monkey business of copyright and trade secret lawsuits and you think Microsoft will be able to turn it into a "Free Software is owned by litegeous people" campaign?
Well, I suppose Astroturfing, magazine arm twisting and a huge advertising budget might convice a few clueless people that is true. But as someone once said, "You can fool some people all the time and you can fool everyone some times but you can't fool all the people all the time." Fanboys live in their own little M$ universe.
"When you see a complex virus," she said, "it's come out of the hacking community."
In her experience many malicious hackers have a borderline criminal view of the world and do not share mainstream ethical norms.
That's what I'd expect someone from Symantic to say. Because Symantic makes it's money protecting and promoting Microsoft junk, this lady is far from impartial. Good virus writers may be hackers, but blaming hackers for viruses is like blaming people for murder.
Her view of script kiddies is also simplistic and patronizing. I'd wager that most script kiddies' outside the "mainstream ethical" norm's thought process has more coherence and depth to it than her blather.
While I don't write viruses and I don't think they are a reasonable form of protest - the moral standpoint is correct. Microsoft is an evil company that produces and forces shoddy, invasive software on the world. They have screwed their business partners, employees, shareholders and customers. Their vision of computing makes TIAA look small and well behaved. Virus writers realize thses things and point them out to people . They exploit holes in Microsoft software to mail out personal information, drive people nuts with adverts and do other things that Microsoft does themselves. They seek to make the public aware of these practices and flaws and have to shout out and make the user notice. They, as most of us here, believe that the world would be better off without Microsoft. People are better off with free software that protects their privacy and control of their machine than they are with Microsoft. Virus writers are pointing out the flaws directly. In deed, these people go out of their way to do it and have no prospect of rewared other than a job well done. Criminal? Perhaps, but so is Microsoft, the convicted anti-trust and IP violator. Condeming the virus writer as criminal and unethical shows a poor understanding of the class.
Who wants tired arms from searching on the computer or back pain from moving files? I'd prefer to do this stuff with a click of a mouse button.
Let's use our imagination just a little. First, imagine that screen tech gets cheap enough so that anyone can have a 4x8 foot screen. Make a desktop of that screen and you will wonder how anyone ever made themselves stare at a tiny monitor all day. Papers could be laid out so that you can stare at all of the material needed at once and virtual desktops would really rock. A simple window manager like Window Maker would be nice, especially if you could substitute a mouse for one of these block devices. All of the reasonable windowm managers and desktop managers have menues available all over the screen so you don't have to go scrolling all the way to the "start" button. Who wants to scroll a mouse on a goofey little 6x6 inch pad to move around a real desktop? Gone for good will be Microsoft's hideous and non intuitive forest of tabs, right clicks on ugly icons and popup adverts.
Free your mind and you will see where others are going.
You have to put on a display and tell them the moon is dying or angry as anyone can see from it's blood red color. Yes, that's been creeping people out forever. It even bothers animals. The blood red moon might just as well be used to agitate the first world as a sign of golbal warning, "Look how red it is! Our indexes show that this is not normal, do as we say and all will be well."
The problem in the third world is that someone is likely to smack your silly head with their BBC shortwave radio. They might then burn you as the witch you pretend to be. It takes real skill and close attention to local culture to convince people you have special power AND their best interest at heart. Fear is just one component of respect.
The problem in the first world is that you might be taken seriously. Here, have another E-slap.
Knoppix 3.3 has a nice little star plotter, Kstars. I don't know if it does lunar, but it does star plots from any place and time on Earth and you can't beat the price. Kstars has also been included in Debian's Astronomy Education Pacage, which has many other goodies, one of which might have your lunar info.
If all of this leaves you and your Mac cold, I'm sorry. Debian does have a Mac port, but I'm unfamiliar with it. Knoppix is on the way for you if it's not already here.
Thermal Bit Flipping starts to set in a densities required for 100G and above. This can cause losses and errors in as little as a year's time. Making coppies strenthens the field on the disk and helps prevent such losses. So, seemingly bone-headed stratagies of moving files from one disk to another or from one area on a disk to another are a good idea with larger disks.
Publication and sharing are the best data storage solution and have been since before written language.
I'm a Senior in IST (Information Sciences & Technology) with a 3.9 QPA at Penn State.
Must be a mislabled marketing major.
I also have been using Linux since 1995, that would be 8 years... since I could only be a "number cruncher."
Anyone using any free GUI for half a year would know better than you seem to. I'm not sure how you can think of Windoze install well but poorly of Knoppix. Non of it really matters to me, though, if you want non free you deserve it.
in Knoppix puh-lease... How about just getting my damn thumb button on my mouse to perform the "Back" function in any browser?!? Oh, wait that requires changes in EACH configuration file for EACH browser,
Hmmm, sounds like you should just use IE, maybe get yourself a Mac with one mouse button. I don't know, but I doubt setting up your funny mouse buttons in IE would translate to Mozilla. You sound like someone who'd like to have their choices made for them.
I'd like to be able to use the tools I need to graduate... and amazingly some of them are Windows only,
From what I've read about Penn State, I'd be surprised if they did not have search and destroy teams armed with spears for anything that's not Microsoft. I'm not sure why you'd bother with and bitch about WINE when you have a working Windoze installation you seem to prefer. Be a good boy for your teachers and forget all about this free software stuff.
I'll take the dll hell of Windows over the dependency and library hell of Linux anyday on a desktop PC
You've made your preference obvious. You'd take shit on a stick if it had M$ on it. Free software has been much easier for me to do things with than M$ ever was. Keep on keeping on, you make yourself misserable and there's nothing more anyone can ask of you than that.
What, would that be too small a fraud for him after all the bigger ones? Sorry, if he's done something wrong in Miami and it can be proven he will be nailed.
I have not heard and can't find anything about it and have no idea if it's real or not. That does not make it funny either.
Go ahead, use all the Linux and free software you want. This is the NOT using Linux payment, kind of like the not raising hogs subsidies offered by the Federal Government. Chances are, you will be able to run free software and get your not using free software bonus. That's why they call it a "server farm".
There are only two problems with this scheme, SCO does not have enough money and the Federal Government hates competition.
If you are going to pretend to be the Feds, you need money like you had your own printing press. SCO has less than $20,000,000 of M$ whore money and we can all be sure that will be pocketed by the people running it. So, what it really amounts to, is I pretend to not run free software for SCO and they pretend to pay me. It won't take the Feds long to shut down SCO now.
Pretend is so much fun. Now I'm pretending I see SCO executives in jail. I've got a gavvel. "Stock fraud, 20 years" -bang- "anti-trust, all of your money" - bang- "prostitution, 30 days" -bang- "copyright violation, forced labor with all proceeds going to copyright holders" -bang- "competing with the Federal Government not-doing-this-or-that franchise, life institutionalization" -bang- "all sentences to be carried out consedutively" -bang- "balif, remove this garbage. Cout adjurned" -bang-bang-bang- Ahh, that's nice.
so, what's the cost of an Ultrasparc IIe based sytem equivalent to $2,000 AMD 64bit system? Both seem to use a crummy PCI buss, though the UltraSparc system looks like it eats less power. Someone help me understand the price performance gap mentioned please.
The only gap I see is Sun not being co-operative with free software writers. That's dumb, because they will be comming up with alternate uses of their hardware. I know someone who bought a surpluss Ultrasparc based system and and I'd be jealous if it ran Debian.
I've got a lot of respect for Sun and want to see them grow. They make awsome hardware and decent software. I wish they would jump harder and faster onto the free software bandwagon. Hell, I'd be happy if they would sell to Apple. They should pull off a home computing coupe.
I'm looking forward to to car that randomly turns left when you turn the steering wheel to the right.
How about a truck full of hazmat that turns off when the driver turns left when he should have turned right. That's just the kind of thing I want stalled on my street. As we learned just yesterday, it's already in CA. I wonder if the system makes the drivers look at adverts for drivers ed when that happens.
Sound of motor dying and down shifting.. BBUUUuuurrrrrrr.. chunk-a-chunk, ppeeeeeep clunk.
Driver - WTF? oh, no.
Sound of locks activating and bulletproof screens descending over windows - chunk-chunk, whirrrrr!
What kind of a weenie needs to have their ears plugged for more than 6 hours? On any flight that long I've ever taken, chatting with other people on the plane or taking a nap was far more uselful than listening to canned music. The only situation I can imagine music being an issue for such a long time is a long car ride, but then you rig it to your stereo and get a 12 adaptor like any other player.
This dude must have gotten a spiff from M$ to write trash like that. WMA a necessity? What BS. Microsoft's failure in TV and web hosting markets gives lie to the "We've already won" line.
Oh well, it's no skin off my nose. I use an ogg playing Zaurus for my music. It still pains me to see M$ continuing to shuffle people from technically superior stuff to their overpriced garbage. Most people would be much happier with a Mac and an ipod than they are with a pile of M$ junk.
As much as it pains me to say it I think WMA would be more useful to the masses that Ogg.
Sure it pains you, but so must research of any kind. If you don't bother to read anything, I'm sure it really pains you to write.
Would you mind telling me how WMA is better for "the masses" or anyone than ogg? WMA is one of the lowest quality formats out there, ogg kicks it's ass in every way. Because ogg is patent and royalty free, there's no reason for it not to be adopted by everyone and be everywhere.
1. Battery life. Can you believe that you can only run your headlights for an hour or so? With other MP3 players giving 5 hours or more playtime, your Ferrari's battery life will leave you disspointed on those long stops at lover's lane.
2. Jogging with a Ferrari is not cool. It's really heavy, and does not do well at such low speeds. Either you go nuts driving it or die pushing it. You can get much better tunes with a Walkman.
3. Ferraris are expensive!
4. High quality recordings are an add-on. Don't expect your Ferrari to be useful at a Greatful Dead concert.
5. Microsoft does not endorse Ferraris! Until they do and pay me more money, I'm not recomending it.
The only real difference I can see here is that the radio is "free", whereas the Napster deal costs the school money.
Another difference is that radio adds are less intrusive than the pop-ups that will surely jump out of the new Napster. I can imagine trying to write term papers while popups cover my screen. I'd first turn the music service off. Nope, still comming. Then I'd unplug the network. Nope still there from a 200MB spool you can't erase. Then I'd drop a knoppix CD in and listen to my oggs in peace. When I got the time, I'd reinstall Windoze without the Napster service for those poor pathetic teachers who have just grasped their Microsoft shit and are pushing it in ignornace. I'd also learn how to put Debinan on it and run it as my main OS.
Oh wait, I've already done that, so I would not be tempted by the new fake Napster rip off. Take the above scenerio as advice for how to get out of the pit when you realize you are at the bottom. It's getting easier all the time.
Another poster pointed out that the current RIAA friendly administration has been taking Historic Bites Out of his Student's Life Savings. $500 surcharges? AND tuition increases. But hey, top 40 muzack is available on the windoze only intranet, woo hoo!
What difference does it make if the university provides "proper" software like XP to students at no cost? If your computer did not come with that bug ridden trash, it won't be able to run it. There are very few places where you can get hardware without an OS that's really cheaper than the same hardware with an OS.
If you have not gone through the "hell" of desktop configuration, how can you be a long time linux user? If you knew much about free software, you would know that a distro like Knoppix configures itself on just about any computer and that you can coppy the config files it makes into a shiny new Debian install, pain free. OK, there's some possibility of you being a long term linux number cruncher with no time for fooling with XF86Config. In that case, Merry Christmas, go get Knoppix 3.3 and quit using "proper" software today.
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Anyone tempted to migrate from their current platform and tools should look at the way things turned out in scientific computing. Efforts like f2c and g77, the GNU FORTRAN compiler, are far superior. Libraries available as Debian packages are also great. The differences are only getting larger as more people are attracted by the tools available. And yes, you can have a beowolf cluster of those. Microsoft had it's ass handed to them.
What's needed is a two pronged approach. One prong is legal and is being followed fairly well; pass laws that make spamming illegal. The other prong, which is still under development, is to make technical changes to email so that spammers can't hide their addresses.
First, I don't share your glee about current laws and the direction they are taking. I fear email will end up like broadcast radio and TV - only people who pay big bucks to the government will be alowed to run a mail server. The result will be as dismal as broadcast media is, but worse because mail is personal. Imagine licensed spam and every email service being like Hotmail - a spam in every can! Your email will always be searchable by government agencies and spammers if people like AOL and Microsoft have their way.
How do they get there from here? They are already half way there. Blacklists are a part of it. Any ISP that does not prevent their users from running mail servers gats on M$ and AOL blacklists, regardless of the actual volume of spam. Convienetly enough for them, this puts further pressure on smaller ISPs and eliminates competition, compliance or no. Another way to get there is by creating mechanisms "so that smappmers can't hide their addresses". This would create the kind of central authority that the internet was designed to avoid. Wanna bet who will run that central authority? The smarter you make the net, the dumber and less free it becomes.
Laws making spam illegal, with reasonable definitions of spam are the only way to kill spam. The IP address of the spammer should leave a large enough trail for people who really want to bust spammers to follow, so it is indeed practical. Some recent turns are good, I just hope it applies to the big boys the same way it applies to the smaller ones. Somehow I doubt it, despite small charges against ATT. No spam is ever acceptable on a medium that was designed to work on pull and our laws should reflect it. If France can keep people from selling Nazi junk, the USA can halt spam if it wants to.
How's this different from Gator and other malware? How about some of Microsoft's practices, like keeping a database of all the movies and songs you use and selling space on "their" desktop to third parties that spam you later? All spam is evil, using proxies is just a new twist.
In any case, the evil would die out if Microsoft did not make a crapy OS that any 17 year old could break. Give credit where credit is due. All of these problems are Microsoft problems. Everyone told them not to do the things they do and everyone told them this would happen.
The BBC jouranlist should have done a little more homework and written a story rather than quoting this Symantic employee straight. All the makings of a good story are there, a repeated pattern, many people harmed, a few benifit, and a money trail a mile wide. Blaming "hackers" is lame. Wondering "what kind of person does this kind of thing" is second rate next to finding out who did it. The truth is out there, it just has to be found.
I doubt it. A complete rewrite is the only way to clean up the cobled together mess of intentionally spagetti coded junk they have purchased and stolen. The might be able to do that in a year or so, but it would not be Windblows it would be OSX1 or some other varient of BSD with an ugly and non-intuitive Redmond themed desktop.
They can complain all they want about it not being cost effective to fix bugs. I think they are going to find out the hard way that it's not cost effective to own crap.
It's been more than a year since M$ delcared Security "Job #1" and had their big group meetings. Oh yeah, I remember all that Bullshit about it being just like when M$ decided it needed to take the inernete seriously and all that for Windoze 95. Internet seriously for Windoze 95? Those jokers have yet to take the responsiblility of hooking up to networks seriously.
People told and Microsoft must have known that their single user mode nonsense was not an adequate model for a computer on a network. They did not care, it's that simple. The rise of internet destabilizing viruses is the result of more Microsoft users connecting to the internet, nothing more. Everyone knew it was comming.
They got plenty of warnings. I Love You happened years ago. It's no surprise that people don't want to buy their stuff. It's been broken for a long time and everyone knows it. It's no wonder that people are looking for something that works.
People don't hate Microsoft because they made software that sucks. People hate Microsoft because Microsoft thought so much of their sucky software that they put all sorts of stupid restrictions on user behavior and wanted to expend into everything and make competition impossible. Remeber them telling people who used Frontpage that they could not say bad things about Microsoft. The whole DRM thing was the pinacle of thier lunacy. It was Bill Gates' greedy dream to control all digital content, music, movies, books and even email, then charge the customer for everything AND sell each customer advertising. XP is the sum of such efforts. It's looking like it will only work with WM files, it takes popup adverts all day long, many of them pornographic and, of course, it crashes and gets viruses. Using M$ is a miserable experience and Microsoft wants to make it impossible for you to use anything else. Longhorn promisses to be worse and I predict it's sales will be worse than XPs were, even worse than the currently tanking XBox.
Tank? Yep, that's the ultimate incentive. It's been comming for a long, long time. M$ has exhausted the public's credibility. Bye, bye, assholes.
Well, I suppose Astroturfing, magazine arm twisting and a huge advertising budget might convice a few clueless people that is true. But as someone once said, "You can fool some people all the time and you can fool everyone some times but you can't fool all the people all the time." Fanboys live in their own little M$ universe.
In her experience many malicious hackers have a borderline criminal view of the world and do not share mainstream ethical norms.
That's what I'd expect someone from Symantic to say. Because Symantic makes it's money protecting and promoting Microsoft junk, this lady is far from impartial. Good virus writers may be hackers, but blaming hackers for viruses is like blaming people for murder.
Her view of script kiddies is also simplistic and patronizing. I'd wager that most script kiddies' outside the "mainstream ethical" norm's thought process has more coherence and depth to it than her blather.
While I don't write viruses and I don't think they are a reasonable form of protest - the moral standpoint is correct. Microsoft is an evil company that produces and forces shoddy, invasive software on the world. They have screwed their business partners, employees, shareholders and customers. Their vision of computing makes TIAA look small and well behaved. Virus writers realize thses things and point them out to people . They exploit holes in Microsoft software to mail out personal information, drive people nuts with adverts and do other things that Microsoft does themselves. They seek to make the public aware of these practices and flaws and have to shout out and make the user notice. They, as most of us here, believe that the world would be better off without Microsoft. People are better off with free software that protects their privacy and control of their machine than they are with Microsoft. Virus writers are pointing out the flaws directly. In deed, these people go out of their way to do it and have no prospect of rewared other than a job well done. Criminal? Perhaps, but so is Microsoft, the convicted anti-trust and IP violator. Condeming the virus writer as criminal and unethical shows a poor understanding of the class.
Let's use our imagination just a little. First, imagine that screen tech gets cheap enough so that anyone can have a 4x8 foot screen. Make a desktop of that screen and you will wonder how anyone ever made themselves stare at a tiny monitor all day. Papers could be laid out so that you can stare at all of the material needed at once and virtual desktops would really rock. A simple window manager like Window Maker would be nice, especially if you could substitute a mouse for one of these block devices. All of the reasonable windowm managers and desktop managers have menues available all over the screen so you don't have to go scrolling all the way to the "start" button. Who wants to scroll a mouse on a goofey little 6x6 inch pad to move around a real desktop? Gone for good will be Microsoft's hideous and non intuitive forest of tabs, right clicks on ugly icons and popup adverts.
Free your mind and you will see where others are going.
The problem in the third world is that someone is likely to smack your silly head with their BBC shortwave radio. They might then burn you as the witch you pretend to be. It takes real skill and close attention to local culture to convince people you have special power AND their best interest at heart. Fear is just one component of respect.
The problem in the first world is that you might be taken seriously. Here, have another E-slap.
-SMACK-
Now behave.
You are a troll in real life too!
If all of this leaves you and your Mac cold, I'm sorry. Debian does have a Mac port, but I'm unfamiliar with it. Knoppix is on the way for you if it's not already here.
Free software for everyone!
Publication and sharing are the best data storage solution and have been since before written language.
Must be a mislabled marketing major.
I also have been using Linux since 1995, that would be 8 years... since I could only be a "number cruncher."
Anyone using any free GUI for half a year would know better than you seem to. I'm not sure how you can think of Windoze install well but poorly of Knoppix. Non of it really matters to me, though, if you want non free you deserve it.
in Knoppix puh-lease ... How about just getting my damn thumb button on my mouse to perform the "Back" function in any browser?!? Oh, wait that requires changes in EACH configuration file for EACH browser,
Hmmm, sounds like you should just use IE, maybe get yourself a Mac with one mouse button. I don't know, but I doubt setting up your funny mouse buttons in IE would translate to Mozilla. You sound like someone who'd like to have their choices made for them.
I'd like to be able to use the tools I need to graduate... and amazingly some of them are Windows only,
From what I've read about Penn State, I'd be surprised if they did not have search and destroy teams armed with spears for anything that's not Microsoft. I'm not sure why you'd bother with and bitch about WINE when you have a working Windoze installation you seem to prefer. Be a good boy for your teachers and forget all about this free software stuff.
I'll take the dll hell of Windows over the dependency and library hell of Linux anyday on a desktop PC
You've made your preference obvious. You'd take shit on a stick if it had M$ on it. Free software has been much easier for me to do things with than M$ ever was. Keep on keeping on, you make yourself misserable and there's nothing more anyone can ask of you than that.
I have not heard and can't find anything about it and have no idea if it's real or not. That does not make it funny either.
There are only two problems with this scheme, SCO does not have enough money and the Federal Government hates competition.
If you are going to pretend to be the Feds, you need money like you had your own printing press. SCO has less than $20,000,000 of M$ whore money and we can all be sure that will be pocketed by the people running it. So, what it really amounts to, is I pretend to not run free software for SCO and they pretend to pay me. It won't take the Feds long to shut down SCO now.
Pretend is so much fun. Now I'm pretending I see SCO executives in jail. I've got a gavvel. "Stock fraud, 20 years" -bang- "anti-trust, all of your money" - bang- "prostitution, 30 days" -bang- "copyright violation, forced labor with all proceeds going to copyright holders" -bang- "competing with the Federal Government not-doing-this-or-that franchise, life institutionalization" -bang- "all sentences to be carried out consedutively" -bang- "balif, remove this garbage. Cout adjurned" -bang-bang-bang- Ahh, that's nice.
The only gap I see is Sun not being co-operative with free software writers. That's dumb, because they will be comming up with alternate uses of their hardware. I know someone who bought a surpluss Ultrasparc based system and and I'd be jealous if it ran Debian.
I've got a lot of respect for Sun and want to see them grow. They make awsome hardware and decent software. I wish they would jump harder and faster onto the free software bandwagon. Hell, I'd be happy if they would sell to Apple. They should pull off a home computing coupe.
SCO has demonstrated they care nothing for laws, the public, their employees or their investors. Dayrl, I hope you go to jail.
How about a truck full of hazmat that turns off when the driver turns left when he should have turned right. That's just the kind of thing I want stalled on my street. As we learned just yesterday, it's already in CA. I wonder if the system makes the drivers look at adverts for drivers ed when that happens.
Sound of motor dying and down shifting .. BBUUUuuurrrrrrr.. chunk-a-chunk, ppeeeeeep clunk.
Driver - WTF? oh, no.
Sound of locks activating and bulletproof screens descending over windows - chunk-chunk, whirrrrr!
Driver, now captive - sob.
This dude must have gotten a spiff from M$ to write trash like that. WMA a necessity? What BS. Microsoft's failure in TV and web hosting markets gives lie to the "We've already won" line.
Oh well, it's no skin off my nose. I use an ogg playing Zaurus for my music. It still pains me to see M$ continuing to shuffle people from technically superior stuff to their overpriced garbage. Most people would be much happier with a Mac and an ipod than they are with a pile of M$ junk.
Sure it pains you, but so must research of any kind. If you don't bother to read anything, I'm sure it really pains you to write.
Would you mind telling me how WMA is better for "the masses" or anyone than ogg? WMA is one of the lowest quality formats out there, ogg kicks it's ass in every way. Because ogg is patent and royalty free, there's no reason for it not to be adopted by everyone and be everywhere.
2. Jogging with a Ferrari is not cool. It's really heavy, and does not do well at such low speeds. Either you go nuts driving it or die pushing it. You can get much better tunes with a Walkman.
3. Ferraris are expensive!
4. High quality recordings are an add-on. Don't expect your Ferrari to be useful at a Greatful Dead concert.
5. Microsoft does not endorse Ferraris! Until they do and pay me more money, I'm not recomending it.
Another difference is that radio adds are less intrusive than the pop-ups that will surely jump out of the new Napster. I can imagine trying to write term papers while popups cover my screen. I'd first turn the music service off. Nope, still comming. Then I'd unplug the network. Nope still there from a 200MB spool you can't erase. Then I'd drop a knoppix CD in and listen to my oggs in peace. When I got the time, I'd reinstall Windoze without the Napster service for those poor pathetic teachers who have just grasped their Microsoft shit and are pushing it in ignornace. I'd also learn how to put Debinan on it and run it as my main OS.
Oh wait, I've already done that, so I would not be tempted by the new fake Napster rip off. Take the above scenerio as advice for how to get out of the pit when you realize you are at the bottom. It's getting easier all the time.
Reduccing piracty? The pirates are in charge!
What difference does it make if the university provides "proper" software like XP to students at no cost? If your computer did not come with that bug ridden trash, it won't be able to run it. There are very few places where you can get hardware without an OS that's really cheaper than the same hardware with an OS.
If you have not gone through the "hell" of desktop configuration, how can you be a long time linux user? If you knew much about free software, you would know that a distro like Knoppix configures itself on just about any computer and that you can coppy the config files it makes into a shiny new Debian install, pain free. OK, there's some possibility of you being a long term linux number cruncher with no time for fooling with XF86Config. In that case, Merry Christmas, go get Knoppix 3.3 and quit using "proper" software today.