No one is blaming these stupid worms for all their woes. Well, maybe a few airlines can gripe because their ticketing system is completely disabled. The worms are, however, exasperating the blackout's impact, and some have even implicated it as the blackout's root cause. Statements in the New York Times about non fuctioning alarm display sceens being the root cause of the blackout give those rumors weight. In any case, you are missing the point.
lots of people are (hopefully) going to be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate for patches which will also add to the bandwidth being consumed.
The God damn worm is consuming bandwith in just that manner. Thanks to Microsoft's brain dead distribution system, that bandwith consumption is nationwide. You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude. I've only got six machines or so, but my bandwith usage is down dramatically thanks to a local mirror. The same benifits can be had, but to a much larger extent, in an organization with hundreds or thousands of machines. Train wreck, yeah, that's about right. One track, all blocked up by broken shit. Hopefully, people are going to be scrambling to replace that M$ junk. How many times do you have to be burnt to learn?
Statements about lower TCO for M$ junk are equally flawed and embarassing when you factor in the costs of worms like this and weeks of lost business.
So the networks are brought to a crawl due to the large amount of traffic necessary to patch systems because incompetent MSCEs are too incompetent to do the job themselves?
That's a little harsh, don't you think? People did apply patches, they just did not work. The only incompetent thing it to use or recomend Microsoft in the first place. It should be obvious by now that M$ has no place on a network. More than a year after Bill Gates made security job one, M$ still blows and it always will.
I would have considered a disk formatting worm to be fully justified.
Well, it would require fewer network services and people could get on with the rebuild job they need anyway. Face it, you can't trust a worm to do your job. If you get either of these, it's time to break out the CDs and rebuild the machine because you can't trust a worm to not be trojaned. That would be nicer than making it so no computer can use a network because these broken boxes are spewing their guts out trying to get M$ patches.
The answer is to dump Microsoft all together. Free software is obviously superior by now and no one need to spend good money on bad Microsoft software anymore. Disasters like this just go to show the real TCO of that junk. The colatoral damage to people who don't run M$ at all is unaceptable as well.
You have to wonder if businesses that don't use M$ anymore but were unable to use networks because of it can sue M$ and the dummies that still use them. Sounds like another billion dollar classaction lawsuit followed by thousands of individual suits to chip at the rapidly diminishing M$ pile of ill gotten cash.
To have mass public acceptance, it has to be pretty cheap to buy. And by being cheap to buy, it may also be cheap material, or sub-par, so it may have more chances to leak.
Does your fridge make ice for you? Behind it is a 1/4 hose with fittings to your house plumbing. It's cheap, flexible, and generally does not leak. Fittings for low pressure water are everywhere, cheap and work just fine. It should not take lots of effort to move them into mass produced PC cases. The thing does not have to be beautiful, it just has to dissipate 100 watts or so.
100 watts is considerable, but by no means does it require loads of equipment. To keep the temperture rise of your cooling water equivalent to 1 degree C, you will need a flow of about 0.5 m/s through that tube. If you can live with 2 or 3 degree temperature rises, you can get away with 1/2 and 1/3 that flow. Not much pumping power would be needed to get the 8 to 25 cc/s needed. Larger diamiter tubing makes pumping easier. Dissipating the heat from there to the air is a different story, but it's not that hard. We are not talking about a 100 kW car engine, we are talking about the equivalent of a 100 watt lightbulb, something you could generate with your own hands for a short time.
My pappy said, "Son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin'
If you don't stop moddin' that Hot-Rod Lincoln!"
Nope, just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
RIAA with a $100,000,000,000 court order for your son.
Feel like having a drink yet? Me neither, but the law is obviously shitfaced. I'd try to rhyme it out and sing it to you, but some RIAA dirt bag thinks they own it already. You will have to come up with something catchy on your own, sorry.
It's funny how many people post here saying they are imune to the thing, yet everyone is getting them in their mailbox. The web is slow here today and DNS seems shakey. No one is imune to Microsoft polution.
How is this bug more of a bummer than how gnuftp was compromised and potentially more damaging? Oh, don't hear people moaning about that on here now do you...?
The record continues to speak for itself. Free software runs without being rooted, Microsoft continues to be an impossible mess. I have full confidence that the diversity, the ease of updating and sound security models of free software will continue and the situation will remain unchanged. That leaves little to moan about.
I don't know why I feed trolls like you. There's just something about a stupid lie that makes me cry out.
What kind of performance do you get out of Windows on a modem these days? The average M$ computer is loaded with spyware, scumware and other stuff that bogs performance down even over a fast connection. I imagine the crap would be impossible by dial up.
You can contrast that with the performance I got out of a $10/month dial up service and free software. I fowarded it to a local net via ipchains and my wife and I were able to use it at the same time. She slowed it up more than I did because she refused to use any of Mozilla's pop-up or image blockers. By loading browser tabs with interesting stuff while reading other interesting stuff, I hardly noticed the difference. Of course mail worked just fine. The only difficulty I had was missing inbound phone calls and software updates.
The software update problem would not bother me as much today. I built a debian mirror using a script from debian.math.lsu.edu, rsync and debmirror. It's very efficient and the interactive nature of the script would keep it from being hung up on by my ISP, if for some reason it took that long to get everything in US stable i386. All my local machines use it for updates already to spare everyone bandwith.
What a contrast! I did not even mention the trust aspect of software updates and how Microsoft update break stuff while free software does not. Ah the Windoze concophony, the product is much greater than the sum of it's parts.
This is the internet equivilent of white blood cells! First there was white-hat hackers. Now white-hat virus writers? Makes a damn good change!
How can you tell the difference? What makes you think your worm is a white hat and not just another trojan with a friendly name? If you trust worms, you might as well smash your network with a hammer and save the rest of us our bandwith.
Got windoze and got infected? Rebuild the box. Costs too much to do that? Get rid of windblows.
Better find a new security hole then as this is closing the door to msblaster's hosts. So basically the "next" worm would have to find another vulnerabilty in Windoze to get to the W32/Nachi worm
What, that takes longer than a week?
The "cure" may turn out to be no better then msblaster if it generates massive network traffic looking for new hosts.
No, this cure is no better than the dissease. When a machine is comprimised, it must be rebuilt. What makes you think your particular copy of Nachi is doing your work for you? There's no telling what the damn thing has done and the box is screwed.
The real cure it to get rid of insecure software like Microsoft makes. Companies that don't start moving toward secure platforms deserve to die.
If you can't get rid of it because you are enslaved by AutoDesk or similar, blind Microsoft to the network and dual boot it or VMware Windblows. Free software network tools are obviously superior and should be used for moving information around. Hell, ProE on Mac OSX is better for both purposes than AutoCAD on windblows. Similar solutions can be found where free software does not exist yet.
Why should musicians compete for radio air time when they could just put their music up on a music sharing site? Is this why the RIAA wants to kill all internet music distribution except the ones they can control?
Add to this the aging power grid facilities and cables in the US -- you don't stop using anything until it stops working, so modernising isn't the top priority. All in all, a recipe for failure.
The main problem, though, as others have pointed out, is the lack of regulation and profit maximising. If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
The wrong kind of automation can do you harm. Did you miss the NYT assertion of failed monitoring equipment?
"FirstEnergy released a statement last night saying that "its computerized system for monitoring and controlling its transmission and generation system was operating, but the alarm screen function was not." A company official confirmed that this meant that an alarm system that was supposed to alert controllers did not do so. It was not clear whether the system, besides flashing messages on control-room computer screens, also included an audible alarm. The official would not provide additional details, and no one from the Midwest energy consortium could be reached for comment."
Wanna bet a nickel that some kind of NT based mointoring system that costs loads of money is at fault? It's hard to believe the operators were so screwed. No annuciators? A screen not working? What were these folks smoking besides their grid? The poor sorry official who leaked that is going to be fired, if caught.
All said though, I put the blame on NIMBY and byzantine regulations. New York and Ohio can point fingers at each other all day long but neither would have a problem if both had adequate generating capacity. When you think it's OK to put your dirty work somewhere else and thereby screw others to meet your needs, this is what you get. When you demand things but are not willing to bear the full cost, you get less than you want.
you would be crazy to site it in any research paper or anything of that sort.
Yeah, you might look dumb calling Sony's custom hardware technically inferior while prasing Microsoft's DRM gimped 700 MHz Celery machine.
Oh wait, I just put more thought into that silly article than the author did in 27 hours. His lack of productivity must have something to do with his dick size.
That poor dude needs to get over himself. A complete humiliation combined with completion of mundane but challenging tasks might build up his self esteeem. An enlistment might work, though earning a living of any kind for a decade could substitute. Then he might not be afraid to sing in public, carry his wife's purse (you will do this when you have kids), or do anything he damn well pleases, including Nintendo. He might also be less inclined to slap tities on an Xbox because people who are not afraid to do what they want are atractive enough to have real girlfriends. In short, and I do mean his dick, the author needs to get a life.
Debian is in my mind a scrupulous free-software-only distribution.
It's a great distribution and RMS uses it. The thing is that if a distribution comes out that's more free, RMS is going to recomend it. Why not?
If they include any non-free software, it's basically in the form of, "Okay, here's a directory of packages people have made to allow easy installation of non-free software under Debian."
Ah yes, but why not put the effort into making your own free package? I understand that it can seem practical to use a non-free package like xanim to play movies from your digital camera. It's impractical to make such a thing because M$ will have simply changed the format before you finish writing the free code. Yet RMS is right to say that everyone would be better off if no-one bought into AVI to begin with. It's caving in to little things like this that puts you firmly in the hands of people who would take all your rights away. You should not be comfortable with junk like that and RMS is right. Freedom is not easy because there's always someone who would like to screw you with something silly like, "If you use this camera, you must do as I say or I'll take it away from you."
Macintosh sales, in absolute terms, have declined since the peak under Michael Spindler. Apple was selling 4 million units a year in 1994/1995/1996; since then it's been selling roughly 3 million units a year, with one outlier in the maximum year of the Internet bubble (2000).
Don't forget to add ipod sales, close to 4 million units in 2002. It's the thing that has Apple revenues higher than anytime in the last 4 years or so.. If sales units are down and revenue is up, great. Me oh my, revenue up in a stagnant IT market more than it was in the "buble" market? Yep, this is the Apple rebound.
Expect it to eat M$'s lunch. Between free software for routine office work and xterminals, Apple for digital media and xterm work, where is Microsoft's nitch? The M$ damb was breached years ago, there's little to hold it up besides DRM and no one wants that. Where you going to go when the levee breaks? Flush goes M$.
Riight. You don't like it, so everyone doing it is a lemming. If everyone we buying macs on the other hand, they would definitely not be lemmings.
Who did Haddad describe as a lemming? Let me refresh you:
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."
Someone who does not care about price or performance for a given application but wants "a single platform" defined as single vendor, because that's what everone else has, is a lemming. The only advantage M$ has is that it acts like M$ and M$ does not play normal communication standards. That's not a real advantage and it fills no real needs, like getting real work done.
Haddad has noticed a national trend where dumb central planners in public education are ignoring their teacher's needs and requestes in order to make sure everyone uses Microsoft shit. It's a good article with only a few minor flaws eminating from M$.
The reporter has done a good job describing some institutional problems, but has missed a big chunk of recent history that can account for some of Apple's "loss of market". While describing the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field that seems to have gripped know nothings in the upper echelons of public school administration, he seems to have caught a little of it himself. Reality favors Apple and free software.
The author has done a great job of describing the mindset of upper administrators. It's instructive to read about dummies who want "a single platform" regardless of price or performance. It's also good to know that they have hired people who are ignoring actual teacher needs. He's presented their reasoning as flawed and it is. Great stuff, crap begets crap, but he's missed some interveening history.
People are not chucking their Macs, the pie has grown in the last five years. Schools, like everyone else, had a spending binge over the last five years. Busineses donated all their old boxes for tax credits and many districts decided that they had to have PCs in every classroom. PC's for most of this period were cheaper and won out for the "internet access" need. I know schools that begged their students to take home old donated 486s and what not that they had no place for, but I don't know of any shcool that ever did the same for Macs. So, what you have in schools is a surpluss of PCs that no one asked for in the first place eating up resources schools no longer have. Missing this history is the author's first big mistake.
The author's next mistakes are to assume that parents have really bought into it all and that the supposed trend is irreversible. Both are wrong.
The public at large is just learning the joys of Microsoft "upgrading" for themselves and it's doubtful they will really want to spend PC money in their schools sytems that they don't want to spend at home. Sure, there are a few vocal dupes out there that did not live through the dissapointment of the win3.1 to win95 transition, and Microsoft will be sure to pay others, but that does not make a majority of parents. For every vocal M$ supporter, I can show you a free software advocate AND a Mac advocate. The vast majoryty of parents don't care about computers at all.
All real trends favor Apple and free software. Purchasing has ground to a halt. Attrition favors machines that last and have a real use. PCs, which no one asked for will simply rot in disuse. Local administrators will discover the joys of free software for the PC's they actually need before they get money to replace win9X. I expect peopole with real needs will get what works best. Microsoft's only advantage is that it talks to Microsoft and other DRM gimped junk that dissapears in 2 years. Students have no such needs, and faculty's needs extend only to reading central dirctives that make no sense anyway. When it comes to programming, science, internet access and running a network, free software rules without question. When it comes to out of the box video editing, Mac rules. I predict these M$ central planners will soon find themselves without a budget and nothing to do. Schools don't need the tools they would push.
Did you read the article? It was clear that this was a top-down action by superintendents. They have hired a bunch of dumbasses called "info-tech manager" based on their own ignorant demand for a "single platform" regardless of price or performance. They are ignoring the teacher's needs, teacher demands, studdies that say that PCs are more expensive and everyone's advice but MicroSoft's. Nuts.
If they [Apple] focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
That's what they did, but the purchasing decisions have been moved up the chain into know nothing land. That's what's responsible for the shift.
It's by no means permanent and this article has a load of Windoze reality distortion in it. The shift is, like you say, a hang over from Apple's dark days under the Pepsi Lord. It was then that public schools started purchasing computers like never before, and that's mostly responsible for the "loss is share". The pool has been diluted with computers that no one really needed in the first place. Wintel PCs only last about 3 years before M$ declares them obsolete. To say that the game is over is to buy into the usual M$ line, "we have already won." The high cost of running these dinky PCs that no one asked for will embarass the dummies at the top and they will soon be ousted. Like other places, they will be the first to go in budget cuts. Bullshit, like M$ PCs really does not last.
The problem is getting spammers to honor the law. First of all, I assume (the article did not say) that the law can only affect spammers who are based in Louisiana.
What? Why not everyone? Speed in LA, get a ticket. Thumb you nose at that ticket, go to jail. I don't see how spammers sending email to LA that breaks this law would be any different than violating a local speed limit. Spam me, get fined. Scofflaw the fine, go to jail. Seems easy enough, even if the vast majority of spammers get away with it, punishing a few will be sweet.
The implication that spam has a place in the world, if only it anounces itself, is one I don't like. It's kind of like saying, "It's OK to screw people if only you let them know it first."
I hope no new state laws are introduced, these are making it really tough to stay profitable.
I hope all 50 states adopt different laws so that your subject must contain 50 different spellings of advertisment in English, Spanish and French. Then I hope the Federal government simply outlaws the practice so that you have to go get a job.
It's not a step in the right direction at all. It's a step toward what the spammers want - a legal backdrop to claim that what they're doing is ok. A step in the right direction would be to stop spamming, not to label their spam so they can then claim it's legal for them to steal.
Right on. Some people are whining about "free speech" problems of other methods and slippery slopes. Others see a "thinning out" of advertisers and easy filtering in some kind of utopian administration of laws like this. All of it avoids the fundamental fact that no one has the right to abuse a public network with adverts in the first place, and it's positivly perverse to use push in a pull network. Span is simply anti-social and should be banned.
Louisiana more than likely sees this new law as a new revenue gnerator. They can treaten spammers and in the future sell licenses and rig the system so that's it's imposible to filter the crap out. Trust Tauzin to fix this all wrong.
If they catch the perp, the punishment should be something really heinous like locking them up with a computer that has Microsoft "Bob" installed and have continuous "Barney" tunes piped into their cell. That'll teach 'em.
But they ALREADY work for Microsoft's "research" department.
They've gone from seeming credible and aggressive to humorous and generally a giant joke
What part of this bullshit has ever been credible? The whole idea of accusing people who open their code up for public review theives was utter bullshit from day one. Only someone completely imersed in closed source nonsense would have given any of this a second thought. People who write their code from scratch and give it away as free have no need whatsoever to "steal" anyone else's code. That's what losers like Microsoft do. Anything that anyone might have maliciously put into the kernel can be removed and replaced in a mater of days if only SCO had any to point to. SCO's losses from 80 lines of code are as imposible to prove as the code is impossible to point at. It's never been funny, it's always been a huge insult. I'm not laughing about it.
I'm happy Microsoft put these idiots up to this. Anyone in the technical world with the slightest clue hates SCO and Microsoft with a virulent hatred by now. It takes about 2 seconds to explain what free software it to a complete neophyte, and another 2 seconds for them to understand how stupid this SCO shit is. The backlash will have more people than ever bailing out of Microsoft.
Here's a good example of how much resentment exists out there, and something that did make me laugh. Today, I talked to a young lady who was so agrivated by Microsoft's licensing that she cursed out a service representative over the phone from her place of work. She mentioned something about "hacked code". She was amazed to learn that free software was not some kind of backroom conspiracy to steal code, that it was all legal, legitimate and intended to be shared, not some "cracked junk from Cairo that phones home to share porn or God knows what." I cracked up when realized that Microsoft's service department had been cursed out by a young lady studying at a seminary of the same denomination that gave us Mr. Rodgers.
They were sensitive to heat. I bought two as an undergrad and used them for simple FORTRAN CFD. They ran much better under Red Hat 6 than they did under Windblows, but excesive heat and humidity could bring them down.
I still have one configured as a simple dialout box. It works well and shares dialup service with an ethernet card.
The other, I may have fried. The new XFree86-4 stuff pumped it's video to 90 Hz! This is far in excess of the orignial specs. I put in antoher cooling fan for the second chipset, but shorted 12 while it was running. I have not fooled with it since, but it did not come back. It may be that I fried the board, it may be that I fried the power supply. One day, I'll check it out again. Today, I don't really need it.
Slashdot Mirror
No one is blaming these stupid worms for all their woes. Well, maybe a few airlines can gripe because their ticketing system is completely disabled. The worms are, however, exasperating the blackout's impact, and some have even implicated it as the blackout's root cause. Statements in the New York Times about non fuctioning alarm display sceens being the root cause of the blackout give those rumors weight. In any case, you are missing the point.
lots of people are (hopefully) going to be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate for patches which will also add to the bandwidth being consumed.
The God damn worm is consuming bandwith in just that manner. Thanks to Microsoft's brain dead distribution system, that bandwith consumption is nationwide. You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude. I've only got six machines or so, but my bandwith usage is down dramatically thanks to a local mirror. The same benifits can be had, but to a much larger extent, in an organization with hundreds or thousands of machines. Train wreck, yeah, that's about right. One track, all blocked up by broken shit. Hopefully, people are going to be scrambling to replace that M$ junk. How many times do you have to be burnt to learn?
Statements about lower TCO for M$ junk are equally flawed and embarassing when you factor in the costs of worms like this and weeks of lost business.
That's a little harsh, don't you think? People did apply patches, they just did not work. The only incompetent thing it to use or recomend Microsoft in the first place. It should be obvious by now that M$ has no place on a network. More than a year after Bill Gates made security job one, M$ still blows and it always will.
I would have considered a disk formatting worm to be fully justified.
Well, it would require fewer network services and people could get on with the rebuild job they need anyway. Face it, you can't trust a worm to do your job. If you get either of these, it's time to break out the CDs and rebuild the machine because you can't trust a worm to not be trojaned. That would be nicer than making it so no computer can use a network because these broken boxes are spewing their guts out trying to get M$ patches.
The answer is to dump Microsoft all together. Free software is obviously superior by now and no one need to spend good money on bad Microsoft software anymore. Disasters like this just go to show the real TCO of that junk. The colatoral damage to people who don't run M$ at all is unaceptable as well.
You have to wonder if businesses that don't use M$ anymore but were unable to use networks because of it can sue M$ and the dummies that still use them. Sounds like another billion dollar classaction lawsuit followed by thousands of individual suits to chip at the rapidly diminishing M$ pile of ill gotten cash.
Also shining was my helioscope, but it always does that.
Does your fridge make ice for you? Behind it is a 1/4 hose with fittings to your house plumbing. It's cheap, flexible, and generally does not leak. Fittings for low pressure water are everywhere, cheap and work just fine. It should not take lots of effort to move them into mass produced PC cases. The thing does not have to be beautiful, it just has to dissipate 100 watts or so.
100 watts is considerable, but by no means does it require loads of equipment. To keep the temperture rise of your cooling water equivalent to 1 degree C, you will need a flow of about 0.5 m/s through that tube. If you can live with 2 or 3 degree temperature rises, you can get away with 1/2 and 1/3 that flow. Not much pumping power would be needed to get the 8 to 25 cc/s needed. Larger diamiter tubing makes pumping easier. Dissipating the heat from there to the air is a different story, but it's not that hard. We are not talking about a 100 kW car engine, we are talking about the equivalent of a 100 watt lightbulb, something you could generate with your own hands for a short time.
If you don't stop moddin' that Hot-Rod Lincoln!"
Nope, just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
RIAA with a $100,000,000,000 court order for your son.
Feel like having a drink yet? Me neither, but the law is obviously shitfaced. I'd try to rhyme it out and sing it to you, but some RIAA dirt bag thinks they own it already. You will have to come up with something catchy on your own, sorry.
The record continues to speak for itself. Free software runs without being rooted, Microsoft continues to be an impossible mess. I have full confidence that the diversity, the ease of updating and sound security models of free software will continue and the situation will remain unchanged. That leaves little to moan about.
I don't know why I feed trolls like you. There's just something about a stupid lie that makes me cry out.
You can contrast that with the performance I got out of a $10/month dial up service and free software. I fowarded it to a local net via ipchains and my wife and I were able to use it at the same time. She slowed it up more than I did because she refused to use any of Mozilla's pop-up or image blockers. By loading browser tabs with interesting stuff while reading other interesting stuff, I hardly noticed the difference. Of course mail worked just fine. The only difficulty I had was missing inbound phone calls and software updates.
The software update problem would not bother me as much today. I built a debian mirror using a script from debian.math.lsu.edu, rsync and debmirror. It's very efficient and the interactive nature of the script would keep it from being hung up on by my ISP, if for some reason it took that long to get everything in US stable i386. All my local machines use it for updates already to spare everyone bandwith.
What a contrast! I did not even mention the trust aspect of software updates and how Microsoft update break stuff while free software does not. Ah the Windoze concophony, the product is much greater than the sum of it's parts.
How can you tell the difference? What makes you think your worm is a white hat and not just another trojan with a friendly name? If you trust worms, you might as well smash your network with a hammer and save the rest of us our bandwith.
Got windoze and got infected? Rebuild the box. Costs too much to do that? Get rid of windblows.
What, that takes longer than a week? The "cure" may turn out to be no better then msblaster if it generates massive network traffic looking for new hosts.
No, this cure is no better than the dissease. When a machine is comprimised, it must be rebuilt. What makes you think your particular copy of Nachi is doing your work for you? There's no telling what the damn thing has done and the box is screwed.
The real cure it to get rid of insecure software like Microsoft makes. Companies that don't start moving toward secure platforms deserve to die.
If you can't get rid of it because you are enslaved by AutoDesk or similar, blind Microsoft to the network and dual boot it or VMware Windblows. Free software network tools are obviously superior and should be used for moving information around. Hell, ProE on Mac OSX is better for both purposes than AutoCAD on windblows. Similar solutions can be found where free software does not exist yet.
The main problem, though, as others have pointed out, is the lack of regulation and profit maximising. If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
The wrong kind of automation can do you harm. Did you miss the NYT assertion of failed monitoring equipment?
"FirstEnergy released a statement last night saying that "its computerized system for monitoring and controlling its transmission and generation system was operating, but the alarm screen function was not." A company official confirmed that this meant that an alarm system that was supposed to alert controllers did not do so. It was not clear whether the system, besides flashing messages on control-room computer screens, also included an audible alarm. The official would not provide additional details, and no one from the Midwest energy consortium could be reached for comment."
Wanna bet a nickel that some kind of NT based mointoring system that costs loads of money is at fault? It's hard to believe the operators were so screwed. No annuciators? A screen not working? What were these folks smoking besides their grid? The poor sorry official who leaked that is going to be fired, if caught.
All said though, I put the blame on NIMBY and byzantine regulations. New York and Ohio can point fingers at each other all day long but neither would have a problem if both had adequate generating capacity. When you think it's OK to put your dirty work somewhere else and thereby screw others to meet your needs, this is what you get. When you demand things but are not willing to bear the full cost, you get less than you want.
Yeah, you might look dumb calling Sony's custom hardware technically inferior while prasing Microsoft's DRM gimped 700 MHz Celery machine.
Oh wait, I just put more thought into that silly article than the author did in 27 hours. His lack of productivity must have something to do with his dick size.
That poor dude needs to get over himself. A complete humiliation combined with completion of mundane but challenging tasks might build up his self esteeem. An enlistment might work, though earning a living of any kind for a decade could substitute. Then he might not be afraid to sing in public, carry his wife's purse (you will do this when you have kids), or do anything he damn well pleases, including Nintendo. He might also be less inclined to slap tities on an Xbox because people who are not afraid to do what they want are atractive enough to have real girlfriends. In short, and I do mean his dick, the author needs to get a life.
It's a great distribution and RMS uses it. The thing is that if a distribution comes out that's more free, RMS is going to recomend it. Why not?
If they include any non-free software, it's basically in the form of, "Okay, here's a directory of packages people have made to allow easy installation of non-free software under Debian."
Ah yes, but why not put the effort into making your own free package? I understand that it can seem practical to use a non-free package like xanim to play movies from your digital camera. It's impractical to make such a thing because M$ will have simply changed the format before you finish writing the free code. Yet RMS is right to say that everyone would be better off if no-one bought into AVI to begin with. It's caving in to little things like this that puts you firmly in the hands of people who would take all your rights away. You should not be comfortable with junk like that and RMS is right. Freedom is not easy because there's always someone who would like to screw you with something silly like, "If you use this camera, you must do as I say or I'll take it away from you."
Macintosh sales, in absolute terms, have declined since the peak under Michael Spindler. Apple was selling 4 million units a year in 1994/1995/1996; since then it's been selling roughly 3 million units a year, with one outlier in the maximum year of the Internet bubble (2000).
Don't forget to add ipod sales, close to 4 million units in 2002. It's the thing that has Apple revenues higher than anytime in the last 4 years or so.. If sales units are down and revenue is up, great. Me oh my, revenue up in a stagnant IT market more than it was in the "buble" market? Yep, this is the Apple rebound.
Expect it to eat M$'s lunch. Between free software for routine office work and xterminals, Apple for digital media and xterm work, where is Microsoft's nitch? The M$ damb was breached years ago, there's little to hold it up besides DRM and no one wants that. Where you going to go when the levee breaks? Flush goes M$.
Who did Haddad describe as a lemming? Let me refresh you:
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."
Someone who does not care about price or performance for a given application but wants "a single platform" defined as single vendor, because that's what everone else has, is a lemming. The only advantage M$ has is that it acts like M$ and M$ does not play normal communication standards. That's not a real advantage and it fills no real needs, like getting real work done.
Haddad has noticed a national trend where dumb central planners in public education are ignoring their teacher's needs and requestes in order to make sure everyone uses Microsoft shit. It's a good article with only a few minor flaws eminating from M$.
The author has done a great job of describing the mindset of upper administrators. It's instructive to read about dummies who want "a single platform" regardless of price or performance. It's also good to know that they have hired people who are ignoring actual teacher needs. He's presented their reasoning as flawed and it is. Great stuff, crap begets crap, but he's missed some interveening history.
People are not chucking their Macs, the pie has grown in the last five years. Schools, like everyone else, had a spending binge over the last five years. Busineses donated all their old boxes for tax credits and many districts decided that they had to have PCs in every classroom. PC's for most of this period were cheaper and won out for the "internet access" need. I know schools that begged their students to take home old donated 486s and what not that they had no place for, but I don't know of any shcool that ever did the same for Macs. So, what you have in schools is a surpluss of PCs that no one asked for in the first place eating up resources schools no longer have. Missing this history is the author's first big mistake.
The author's next mistakes are to assume that parents have really bought into it all and that the supposed trend is irreversible. Both are wrong.
The public at large is just learning the joys of Microsoft "upgrading" for themselves and it's doubtful they will really want to spend PC money in their schools sytems that they don't want to spend at home. Sure, there are a few vocal dupes out there that did not live through the dissapointment of the win3.1 to win95 transition, and Microsoft will be sure to pay others, but that does not make a majority of parents. For every vocal M$ supporter, I can show you a free software advocate AND a Mac advocate. The vast majoryty of parents don't care about computers at all.
All real trends favor Apple and free software. Purchasing has ground to a halt. Attrition favors machines that last and have a real use. PCs, which no one asked for will simply rot in disuse. Local administrators will discover the joys of free software for the PC's they actually need before they get money to replace win9X. I expect peopole with real needs will get what works best. Microsoft's only advantage is that it talks to Microsoft and other DRM gimped junk that dissapears in 2 years. Students have no such needs, and faculty's needs extend only to reading central dirctives that make no sense anyway. When it comes to programming, science, internet access and running a network, free software rules without question. When it comes to out of the box video editing, Mac rules. I predict these M$ central planners will soon find themselves without a budget and nothing to do. Schools don't need the tools they would push.
Did you read the article? It was clear that this was a top-down action by superintendents. They have hired a bunch of dumbasses called "info-tech manager" based on their own ignorant demand for a "single platform" regardless of price or performance. They are ignoring the teacher's needs, teacher demands, studdies that say that PCs are more expensive and everyone's advice but MicroSoft's. Nuts.
If they [Apple] focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
That's what they did, but the purchasing decisions have been moved up the chain into know nothing land. That's what's responsible for the shift.
It's by no means permanent and this article has a load of Windoze reality distortion in it. The shift is, like you say, a hang over from Apple's dark days under the Pepsi Lord. It was then that public schools started purchasing computers like never before, and that's mostly responsible for the "loss is share". The pool has been diluted with computers that no one really needed in the first place. Wintel PCs only last about 3 years before M$ declares them obsolete. To say that the game is over is to buy into the usual M$ line, "we have already won." The high cost of running these dinky PCs that no one asked for will embarass the dummies at the top and they will soon be ousted. Like other places, they will be the first to go in budget cuts. Bullshit, like M$ PCs really does not last.
What? Why not everyone? Speed in LA, get a ticket. Thumb you nose at that ticket, go to jail. I don't see how spammers sending email to LA that breaks this law would be any different than violating a local speed limit. Spam me, get fined. Scofflaw the fine, go to jail. Seems easy enough, even if the vast majority of spammers get away with it, punishing a few will be sweet.
The implication that spam has a place in the world, if only it anounces itself, is one I don't like. It's kind of like saying, "It's OK to screw people if only you let them know it first."
I hope all 50 states adopt different laws so that your subject must contain 50 different spellings of advertisment in English, Spanish and French. Then I hope the Federal government simply outlaws the practice so that you have to go get a job.
Right on. Some people are whining about "free speech" problems of other methods and slippery slopes. Others see a "thinning out" of advertisers and easy filtering in some kind of utopian administration of laws like this. All of it avoids the fundamental fact that no one has the right to abuse a public network with adverts in the first place, and it's positivly perverse to use push in a pull network. Span is simply anti-social and should be banned.
Louisiana more than likely sees this new law as a new revenue gnerator. They can treaten spammers and in the future sell licenses and rig the system so that's it's imposible to filter the crap out. Trust Tauzin to fix this all wrong.
But they ALREADY work for Microsoft's "research" department.
The submit button is binding everywhere!
What part of this bullshit has ever been credible? The whole idea of accusing people who open their code up for public review theives was utter bullshit from day one. Only someone completely imersed in closed source nonsense would have given any of this a second thought. People who write their code from scratch and give it away as free have no need whatsoever to "steal" anyone else's code. That's what losers like Microsoft do. Anything that anyone might have maliciously put into the kernel can be removed and replaced in a mater of days if only SCO had any to point to. SCO's losses from 80 lines of code are as imposible to prove as the code is impossible to point at. It's never been funny, it's always been a huge insult. I'm not laughing about it.
I'm happy Microsoft put these idiots up to this. Anyone in the technical world with the slightest clue hates SCO and Microsoft with a virulent hatred by now. It takes about 2 seconds to explain what free software it to a complete neophyte, and another 2 seconds for them to understand how stupid this SCO shit is. The backlash will have more people than ever bailing out of Microsoft.
Here's a good example of how much resentment exists out there, and something that did make me laugh. Today, I talked to a young lady who was so agrivated by Microsoft's licensing that she cursed out a service representative over the phone from her place of work. She mentioned something about "hacked code". She was amazed to learn that free software was not some kind of backroom conspiracy to steal code, that it was all legal, legitimate and intended to be shared, not some "cracked junk from Cairo that phones home to share porn or God knows what." I cracked up when realized that Microsoft's service department had been cursed out by a young lady studying at a seminary of the same denomination that gave us Mr. Rodgers.
I still have one configured as a simple dialout box. It works well and shares dialup service with an ethernet card.
The other, I may have fried. The new XFree86-4 stuff pumped it's video to 90 Hz! This is far in excess of the orignial specs. I put in antoher cooling fan for the second chipset, but shorted 12 while it was running. I have not fooled with it since, but it did not come back. It may be that I fried the board, it may be that I fried the power supply. One day, I'll check it out again. Today, I don't really need it.