Of course, then someone developed the (gasp!) THREE layer perceptron/neural net and sure enough with the right formula it could learn much more complicated tasks.
Did he use Minky's math to prove it? Or did it take decades of work to extend the math to three levels? I don't know anything about AI, except that RMS left the lab over NDAs, but what you say does not add up.
Every day, The Road to Tycho looks less like fiction. Dare to share music and you get your network access cut. How many courses depend on that access? Oh, I see you start to fail your courses before they sue you for all your future earnings. Music today, books tomorrow. Public libraries will be eliminated. These cases are not about publishing they are about sharing and control.
I imagine the $50,000 or so just extorted from four students will just cover the costs associated with this. The salary of the temporary employee who took the blame, $24,000/year x 2 month career = $4,000.. Legal fees = $45,999. Cost of setlement offered = $1.
Pepsi products are the only soft drinks that are allowed to be sold on campus.
Pepsi? You are owned by the dark side. Just look at one of thiers did to Apple. I doubt a public university will have a charismatic leader who can come and save it at the last moment. I'd tell you to get out, but the job market sucks right now. Suck it up and take the Dolly Madison Anthopology courses or something.
Shit just wants to be free. Put it where you like hoard it and give it to your friends. Dude, I've got 500 giga liters of stuff all cracked and ready to go.
Warez. Songs and movies you can't get easily, I understand. Windoze and windoze software? That's like storing shit. Sharing such stuff is like shitting in your neighbor's yard or pissing on the street. The effort is better spent making free software. Yes, my subject spells twat.
"This iLoo release came out of the UK office and was not a Microsoft sanctioned communication and we apologize for any confusion or offense it may have caused," Microsoft spokeswoman Bridgitt Arnold said late Monday.
Is this what they call, "the vapors"? M$ seems to have a really bad case of them. Others have said they are simply full of shit. Nothing new here, who really trusts what M$ says anymore?
I wish the Next Generation they talk about was an equally bad joke, but it's right in line with EULAs that force updates and demand the right to inspect all your files to remove those that might infringe on copyright. The only thing more Big Brother about Microsoft's direction would be to put their goofey computers everywhere, including the public toilet so that none of your thoughts would be missed. Oh dear, they just might.
Competition makes the product better. MS learns, they are not stupid. They are stealing from Linux, they are stealing from Apple, Linux is stealing from both, etc.
It's only folks like M$ and Apple who call it stealing. Copying and including features is what I think you mean. What we really have is M$ using Apple code gained through violation of NDAs and Apple telling people they can't make Aqua themes for browsers. Pthththfit! Closed source comercial software is full of that kind of thing, the hypocrites. They give lip service to competition and then try to keep others, for doing anything like what they do.
Meanwhile, in the free world, there are literally dozens of window managers available that can all be made to look like anything you want from Mac OS1 to XP. I'm running Window Maker, which closely resmbles Nextstep, and a few other window managers. Yes, because they are modular you can have more than one installed. They can even share code, wow.
Both Microsoft and Apple will need to adjust their models soon. The world is realizing that closed source comercial code is inferior to code that's free. If they don't let the light of day in on their codebase it will become irrelevant and no one will bother to sue anyone over it's use or theft.
Did you flunk the CTBS tests because of reading comprehension? The feature of NeXTStep "offered" by Windows 95 is the appearance. No, it does not look like NeXTStep, but it looks more like it than it does MacOS, especially MacOS 7 which I believe was the version in effect at the time.
Wow, you ask about apepearance and then you talk about file systems and performance of the underlying operating system, price performance and "compatibility".
A quick look at a Mac OS 7 screenshot, convinces me more than the dissimilarity between Nextstep and windows 95 that you are full of shit. It's obvious that windoze 95 borrowed heavily from MacOS. Well, perphaps not from 7 as it came out in 1996, durring the deep darkness under the former Pepsi Lord. The tiny application bar at the bottom of the screen, combined with the tinny horizontal pannel at the top of the screen and bad taste make up the Windoze 95 GUI. That horizontal pannel has been a feature of the apple GUI at least since 1984 and the first Macs but is not found in Nextstep which simply puts the icons at the bottm of the screen, or wherever you want. Nextstep has a verticle docking station, which can be thought of as a pannel with much more flexibilty than Microsoft or Apple's. This page walks you through the evolution of the Mac GUI, a subject I'm not as familiar with as I am systems that run on x86.
In the end, I agree with you. Microsoft never innovated anything outside a court room. I think, howver, that they were only able to rip off stuff that was thrust into their faces and doubt anyone on thier campus used Next, much less were able to convice the powers that be there to persue the neater features of it. Being so "market driven" they would only rip off things proven to have wide market acceptance, despite lip service to ease of use research.
The Win95 shell imitates NeXTStep in its appearance far more than it does MacOS,
Exacly what features of the Nextstep does win95 offer? "windowblinds"? Sure, if you download a serious modification. 95 shipped with the clumsy three button junk from win3.1 plus an extra button and a pannel. A root menue anywhere on the screen? Nope. The way it resizes windows? Nope. Menues that you can leave up on the screen? Nope. Can you name one feature that is not simply part of any GUI? I'm not going to go into the tremendous difference in the unerlying systems but just look at the apearances alone.
Nextstep was made from MacOS and was better. Windoze never did much more than follow along the GUI path, never evolving much from the first one they made. The evolution and lines of influence are clear when you look at screen shots from each.
For those of you not familiar with Next, check out this 1993 screen shot of the first web browser. The client was developed in 1990. There are many free implementations of the Nextstep such as Window Maker today. It still kicks any GUI Microsoft has ever made. After using a reasonable window manager on X, few people can go back to the M$ GUI confines.
For those of you fortunate enough to have missed Windoze 3.1, here is a little screen shot from 1993 or so when Netscape became one of the first available browsers for Windoze. 95 added the X button on the top right, so I suppose you could say it coppied Nextstep in one way. Here is a typical Win95/98 desktop. Windoze XP (screen shot to compare), is more of the same and annoying as all hell.
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as Nextstep or Sun's Common Desktop Environemnt, to junk from Microsoft. People might get the idea that one was better than it is or that the other sucks in ways it never did.
If you folks don't be quite, the post office might detect the thermo nuclear bomb I mailed Alan Ralsky, the FBI and Elanor Roosevelt. If we are all very very quiet, these packages will quietly make their way through the masses of mail the targets recieve.
Yes, I know old Elanor is dead, but others still talk to her and I just want to make my point to them. I would have mailed Santa Clause at North Pole, but that's where the nukes will go off in event of accedental firing. To take care of that, I'm emailing a nice computer called Wopper about a few games.
Back to my evil plans, such as a distributed timed arson attack using nothing more than an old truck, soda pop bottles, gasoline and a few hundred stollen watches. Oh wait, that plan could be implemented and does not have any place in the nuke/anthrax/killer ant fantasy presented above. I'll be quiet now before some moron gets ideas about the destructive uses of simple tools. No, I know that anyone with a modicrum of research and desire will continue making and executing such plans, I just don't want some moron thinking that I might and messing with me in unAmerican unconstitutional ways.
So many corporate apps that can be run on a variety of databases/servers, yet demand MS desktop OS's for their client app that is required. Many of these setups have no intention of moving to anything other than windows for the client side of things.
Get Suse and try crossover today. It works with M$ office junk. I imagine it will work with most plugins to Office and all those nasty little VB database front ends that are floating around. Chances are, those interfaces can be ported to Kbasic or some other free software cheaper than to the next VB.
Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users
If Microsoft would quit changing their interface you would have a legitimate point. Companies spent money teaching people how to use their computers, one way or another. Most left them to fend for themselves and that worked fine. The average Gnome or KDE desktop offers the user more, but does not take that much time to figure out. If you can mouse and push buttons you can run a Linux desktop. This inclueds Crossover and all your Windoze junk.
The only thing I see above is a knowledge of how to get things done under Microsoft. It seems to have blinded you to better tools available at no cost as free software. Yeah, yeah, it takes time to learn how to use those tools, but nothing takes more time to stay on top of than Microsoft. In the free software world, you learn it once and don't have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under you in the upgrade train.
An easy way to run a large Debian network would be to make your own mirror with meta packages. All your desktops and servers can point to the appropriate mirror to get the updates they need through chronned apt-get update and upgrade. There are other ways to do things, of course but none so woefully inefficent as to take 20 staff hours.
SMS, by the way sucks. Everytime the company upgrades, it breaks user shortcuts. Why? I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with deep seated flaws in the Microsoft platform that require version numbers or other unique names for SMS applications. The user experience is not smooth at all. I doubt the admistrative side is really much fun either. If inventory management was a breeze, thrid party software to do the same would not exist and Microsoft themselves would not have been hit by the SQL Slammer worm.
The tools are there in the free software world. Free your mind from that M$ junk and have a look. You will like what you see.
She's still crying for Word Perfect, which let her see codes in her documents and correct them the few times the program made mistakes or did not understand what she wanted. Chances are she will like being able to fix things under Linux better than pushing the reset button under Windoze. Oh yeah, she can get version 8 of Word Perfect as a native Linux binary. It works well, though I'd prefer they make a newer version.
You should have more respect for the secretary and let her make up her own mind. Tell her she can have Word Perfect back and see if you can stop her from figuring it out. Ha!
By the way, the next time your CD get's stuck try right clicking the little picture of a CD on your desktop and chose "unmount" or "eject". If that does not work try using the command, "umount" or making an alias for "unmount".
At a reasonable company the secretary would not need a CD drive. She should be able to ftp her pictures from home to the company picture share or get her music from the company music share. Under those cirumstances, I can imagine someone forgetting how to unmount a CD. There should be someone around who would sooth your furry and panic. Next time, just ask the secretary.
Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.
It's an indicator. A company that wastes money on bad softare is probably wasting it elswhere too. The only places that will be running M$ junk soon are those so emeshed in red tape that they can't change a lightbulb without having a meeing, publishing a report and getting the proceedure authorized by upper management. It all adds up.
The turning point is here. Savour the moment and celebrate, but remember the mistakes others have made. This is a wonderful thing to see, equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crowd is running at the wall now and it will be demolished before the makers of propriatory software know what hit them. You should be careful of your own attitude and be kind to those still suffering under non free software.
Everyone should use free software, free software should be used for everything and no one should write software that is not free. Only free software truely respects the user in one very important sense: Free software understands that if you hide the source from the user, the user will do it themselves. All other software is built on the assummption that the author is so clever that no one else can do what they do. The users have rewritten everything and the day of propriatory closed source software is over. It was not easy for the authors or the users of free software to get here, but now it seems obvious that it's the easiest way to go.
This does not mean that people will not make a living coding. Free software is just as valuable as the closed source stuff it's replacing. Society has and will continue to find ways to support people who know how to make and use it. In fact, free software lowers the barriers of entry so that more people than ever will be able to use their tallents. The losers in this transition will be those who have made lots of money screwing people around with upgrade trains, broken file formats, broken 3rd party software and other forms of intentional waste built on dissrespect.
There are many people unfortunate enough to have started with non free software. The comercial software world was created along with the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reasonable reaction to that was the creation of free software movements, BSD and GNU being prominent. It has taken a long time to get from there to here and in the mean time, M$ provided a path of least resistance that many followed. It was a false path because of the core values of the comercial software world, but once emeshed in that trap it's difficult to get out. A friend gave me his 1987 copy of the Emacs manual. There is no doubt in my mind that had I installed emacs on the XT clone I bought in 1987 and learned it instead of Word Perfect 4.1, I would be better off today. As it is, I took a long trip down the M$ path through Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and through work 2000 and countless applications on top of those platforms. The effort put into learning the differences between those versions of software is much greater than the effort I've had to put into the free software I've learned since because free software does not impose useless changes on it's users. Those of you who are just comming into the world of computing are very lucky.
You can keep free software alive and give something better to the next generation of users if you remember to have respect for them. Those of you who lack respect for your neighbors will only repeat the mistakes others have made since the 1980s. All it takes is the wrong attitude for the walls to start going up again.
Umm, did you read the article you linked to? All it says is that prisoners will be taught to use computers to run simple accounting packages, so they have a chance at a job when they're let out. You think cars were made in prisons just because prisoners were taught to be car mechanics? You're just scaremongering.
Ah, I wish that I was just scaremongering. I don't know that they convicts will be taught programing, but I do know that they have been used for mapping for some time now. The other month, I had a nice chat with a fellow who runs a Air Data company that makes maps from photographs. He told me that he was getting beat up by folks who could do the work in India with pirated software and cheap, even forced prison labor. It's not a great streach to imagine convicts being forced into programming.
It'a a PETa watt laser. Those are designed for pet sharks. What else would you put on your pet shark's head, an amonia based MASER? It's the 1990's, get with the program.
I wish this nutcase had found a better way to probe the various flaws of standardized testing than to pull this sit in stunt. The questions he asks are valid but can be asked without the stunt. We all remember taking the test and can proctor one if we wish to have that out of body experience. He might even interest a shrink who could do some statistically valid and objective testing of voluteer subjects state of mind. All of this could be done without disturbing legitimate test takers.
From his description of his sit in, he was a huge anoyance. The simple presence of someone twice your age is enough to disturb some people, but one who's obviously distressed? Judge what he looked like from his own writing:
I almost laughed out loud at various times during the test
I definitely passed through some kind of mental barrier as a result of this experience.... I have been conditioned to try very hard to determine correct answers.
So... when I worked very hard to determine the correct answer for each question, and then proceeded to pick...the most RIDICULOUS answer, I had a very strong emotional reaction. For a while I worried that this new peculiar feeling of freedom was in fact insanity; I was finally making the transition to madness.
But after a few minutes of settling in to the routine of NOT filling in the correct answers, and beginning to crave this new sense of accomplishment, [the passage you quote]... I was confronting silliness. The difference in perspective seemed so extreme that there were moments when I shook with desperately suppressed laughter. I did not laugh aloud or smile conspicuously, but the instinct to laugh was as powerful and as involuntary as a case of hiccups.
...humor draws its strength from fear, and the kind of anxiety surrounding the SAT is so familiar, and yet so meaniningless, that one can only laugh or become depressed.
From the very beginning of the test to the very end I felt euphoric. I was having complex emotions I couldn't describe. This experience was far more rewarding than I had imagined.
I can only imagine sitting next to this self admitted lunatic in that test. Looking over at some old fart who is convulsing with efforts to control manical laughter and depression. I'd be concerned that he's about to come unglued and hurt people. The distraction would be extreem. I might just walk out and try again another day.
Where does the article mention that the prisoners are writing code in jail? Does it even say that they're learning how to code?
Where does it say they will not be learing to code?
Stop FUDing, guy.
How was it said? Though I were confined to a nutshell, I would consider myself Lord of infinite space if only I did not have bad dreams?
Therefore a computer in jail must be forced to run Microsoft to better confine the inmates and insure the machine does not make them free. The Blue Screen of Death is a very bad dream and it breaks anything you would do for the poor machine. As no one can really program for a closed source platform, the convicts can't really be programmers. Nothing they do is really a threat is it? Nor would it be a threat if they and their machines were free.
There is no fear without a threat, so there was and is no FUD. Unless you care about comercial software. Are you afraid of the demise of comercial software? Would you care if convicted fellons were forced to write code they don't care about instead of sweat shop victims? The results are the same. Without change, nothing is lost. Without percieved loss there was no threat.
BBC shows us that your competition is worse than you could ever imagine. Your next comercial code might be written in an Indain jail. I wonder if the Chinese do this. Uhg, slave labor at it's purest. Comercial code writing is dead, long live free software!
Write code becasue you enjoy it or have a problem to solve. Don't go to school because you think your going to get rich coding. The software world is moving away from the closed source model faster than you can imagine. Those dummies in jail won't have a clue and the crap they make, even if guided by those who do know something, will never measure up in quality to free software. Being able to use free software to solve real problems will be useful and valuable. The source is alive. A CD full of binary crap is just a coaster and might as well be written by convicts.
Bill Gates would be the RIAA of software. He did not count on free software eating his lunch. I wonder if he funded this Indian programming effort. Here, he's going the other way. Instead of trying to get convicts ready for life outside of jail by teaching them progrmming, he's trying to get programmers ready for jail by changing the law. Screw you Billy!
There's a huge difference between a pop up and rooting someone's box. You request pop ups, you don't go out and find a cracker to break your computer and have their way with it.
Your browser is configured to request that pop-up. It might not be nice and you might not like it, but you turned over the rock the pop up was sitting under.
The rooted Red Hat box did not go out and request a rooting. The user, if they followed the install, made a difficult to guese password for root to prevent people from doing this. A cracker must seek out and trick such a computer to take it over.
The case of someone using the flaws in a browser to do nasty things is just the same as cracking the computer and should be distinguished from a "legitimate" unrequested popup window full of advertising shit. Gator and other crap like that does indeed fit the unauthorized use model. It's installed by trick, it's a fruadulent, unrequested and abusive use of a computer and should be condemed as one. Someone said it was like helping youself to the bathroom in your host's house. No, it and regular old cracking, is more like entering without permission and then pissing on your host's bed.
...auditing code for errors, open review of algorithm, and awareness of security issues to begin with. OSS allows the first two, but the trick is not whether it is allowed, but whether it happens.... Whether or not it's OSS doesn't have much impact.
Nonsense! The fact that software is free makes a huge difference.
Free software is further ahead than comercial code and there is little chance of comercial code catching up. What kind of reviews do you think M$ Money got in Microsoft's big security hug. How about any of the other code that Microsoft has bought and rebranded? Do you think any of it was written in a way that even aproaches the Unix standard that free software is built on? Do you think people using pirated M$ visual C in Indian sweat shops are going to do any better? The very fact that a pudknocker like me is having this conversation shows the power of free software. We are more than eyeballs. We start from a better postition we care and we get good advice. People making comercial code start with nothing and bang out code someone else, generally clueless, tells them to write.
The massive imbalence shows up in patching. When flaws are discovered, free software is much faster at fixing the problem. The people who cared about the software to begin and dozens of helpers swing into action and a fix is out in a few hours. In the comercial software world, you are lucky if the person who wrote the code even works there. If the poor devil does not get canned, he will have to refresh his memory because the company will have kept him busy with other stuff he may or may not care about. The result is that it takes the company days, weeks months or never to fix the problem.
This all adds up. The comercial software writer is handicapped in the software he starts with and is outmaned and poorly motivated. This is why free software has such good uptimes and does so much more with your hardware. My silly little P90 laptop with 24 MB of RAM and 1 MB of video RAM has multiple desktops, ethernet, 802.11 and a 56.6k modem and supports a 5 Gig hard drive the bios never invisioned. Windoze won't even run on it anymore and the version it came with would never see the networking equipment, the hard drive or give me more than one desktop or accept x-forwarding. Sure, it can be broken into, but it takes more effort and skill than the average script kiddie's got.
Slashdot Mirror
Did he use Minky's math to prove it? Or did it take decades of work to extend the math to three levels? I don't know anything about AI, except that RMS left the lab over NDAs, but what you say does not add up.
Every day, The Road to Tycho looks less like fiction. Dare to share music and you get your network access cut. How many courses depend on that access? Oh, I see you start to fail your courses before they sue you for all your future earnings. Music today, books tomorrow. Public libraries will be eliminated. These cases are not about publishing they are about sharing and control.
I imagine the $50,000 or so just extorted from four students will just cover the costs associated with this. The salary of the temporary employee who took the blame, $24,000/year x 2 month career = $4,000.. Legal fees = $45,999. Cost of setlement offered = $1.
Pepsi? You are owned by the dark side. Just look at one of thiers did to Apple. I doubt a public university will have a charismatic leader who can come and save it at the last moment. I'd tell you to get out, but the job market sucks right now. Suck it up and take the Dolly Madison Anthopology courses or something.
Warez. Songs and movies you can't get easily, I understand. Windoze and windoze software? That's like storing shit. Sharing such stuff is like shitting in your neighbor's yard or pissing on the street. The effort is better spent making free software. Yes, my subject spells twat.
Is this what they call, "the vapors"? M$ seems to have a really bad case of them. Others have said they are simply full of shit. Nothing new here, who really trusts what M$ says anymore?
I wish the Next Generation they talk about was an equally bad joke, but it's right in line with EULAs that force updates and demand the right to inspect all your files to remove those that might infringe on copyright. The only thing more Big Brother about Microsoft's direction would be to put their goofey computers everywhere, including the public toilet so that none of your thoughts would be missed. Oh dear, they just might.
It's only folks like M$ and Apple who call it stealing. Copying and including features is what I think you mean. What we really have is M$ using Apple code gained through violation of NDAs and Apple telling people they can't make Aqua themes for browsers. Pthththfit! Closed source comercial software is full of that kind of thing, the hypocrites. They give lip service to competition and then try to keep others, for doing anything like what they do.
Meanwhile, in the free world, there are literally dozens of window managers available that can all be made to look like anything you want from Mac OS1 to XP. I'm running Window Maker, which closely resmbles Nextstep, and a few other window managers. Yes, because they are modular you can have more than one installed. They can even share code, wow.
Both Microsoft and Apple will need to adjust their models soon. The world is realizing that closed source comercial code is inferior to code that's free. If they don't let the light of day in on their codebase it will become irrelevant and no one will bother to sue anyone over it's use or theft.
Wow, you ask about apepearance and then you talk about file systems and performance of the underlying operating system, price performance and "compatibility".
A quick look at a Mac OS 7 screenshot, convinces me more than the dissimilarity between Nextstep and windows 95 that you are full of shit. It's obvious that windoze 95 borrowed heavily from MacOS. Well, perphaps not from 7 as it came out in 1996, durring the deep darkness under the former Pepsi Lord. The tiny application bar at the bottom of the screen, combined with the tinny horizontal pannel at the top of the screen and bad taste make up the Windoze 95 GUI. That horizontal pannel has been a feature of the apple GUI at least since 1984 and the first Macs but is not found in Nextstep which simply puts the icons at the bottm of the screen, or wherever you want. Nextstep has a verticle docking station, which can be thought of as a pannel with much more flexibilty than Microsoft or Apple's. This page walks you through the evolution of the Mac GUI, a subject I'm not as familiar with as I am systems that run on x86.
In the end, I agree with you. Microsoft never innovated anything outside a court room. I think, howver, that they were only able to rip off stuff that was thrust into their faces and doubt anyone on thier campus used Next, much less were able to convice the powers that be there to persue the neater features of it. Being so "market driven" they would only rip off things proven to have wide market acceptance, despite lip service to ease of use research.
Exacly what features of the Nextstep does win95 offer? "windowblinds"? Sure, if you download a serious modification. 95 shipped with the clumsy three button junk from win3.1 plus an extra button and a pannel. A root menue anywhere on the screen? Nope. The way it resizes windows? Nope. Menues that you can leave up on the screen? Nope. Can you name one feature that is not simply part of any GUI? I'm not going to go into the tremendous difference in the unerlying systems but just look at the apearances alone.
Nextstep was made from MacOS and was better. Windoze never did much more than follow along the GUI path, never evolving much from the first one they made. The evolution and lines of influence are clear when you look at screen shots from each.
For those of you not familiar with Next, check out this 1993 screen shot of the first web browser. The client was developed in 1990. There are many free implementations of the Nextstep such as Window Maker today. It still kicks any GUI Microsoft has ever made. After using a reasonable window manager on X, few people can go back to the M$ GUI confines.
For those of you fortunate enough to have missed Windoze 3.1, here is a little screen shot from 1993 or so when Netscape became one of the first available browsers for Windoze. 95 added the X button on the top right, so I suppose you could say it coppied Nextstep in one way. Here is a typical Win95/98 desktop. Windoze XP (screen shot to compare), is more of the same and annoying as all hell.
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as Nextstep or Sun's Common Desktop Environemnt, to junk from Microsoft. People might get the idea that one was better than it is or that the other sucks in ways it never did.
It's more like "forced to ship". Oh wait, that's a joke. OK, that's funny.
Yes, I know old Elanor is dead, but others still talk to her and I just want to make my point to them. I would have mailed Santa Clause at North Pole, but that's where the nukes will go off in event of accedental firing. To take care of that, I'm emailing a nice computer called Wopper about a few games.
Back to my evil plans, such as a distributed timed arson attack using nothing more than an old truck, soda pop bottles, gasoline and a few hundred stollen watches. Oh wait, that plan could be implemented and does not have any place in the nuke/anthrax/killer ant fantasy presented above. I'll be quiet now before some moron gets ideas about the destructive uses of simple tools. No, I know that anyone with a modicrum of research and desire will continue making and executing such plans, I just don't want some moron thinking that I might and messing with me in unAmerican unconstitutional ways.
Get Suse and try crossover today. It works with M$ office junk. I imagine it will work with most plugins to Office and all those nasty little VB database front ends that are floating around. Chances are, those interfaces can be ported to Kbasic or some other free software cheaper than to the next VB.
Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users
If Microsoft would quit changing their interface you would have a legitimate point. Companies spent money teaching people how to use their computers, one way or another. Most left them to fend for themselves and that worked fine. The average Gnome or KDE desktop offers the user more, but does not take that much time to figure out. If you can mouse and push buttons you can run a Linux desktop. This inclueds Crossover and all your Windoze junk.
An easy way to run a large Debian network would be to make your own mirror with meta packages. All your desktops and servers can point to the appropriate mirror to get the updates they need through chronned apt-get update and upgrade. There are other ways to do things, of course but none so woefully inefficent as to take 20 staff hours.
SMS, by the way sucks. Everytime the company upgrades, it breaks user shortcuts. Why? I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with deep seated flaws in the Microsoft platform that require version numbers or other unique names for SMS applications. The user experience is not smooth at all. I doubt the admistrative side is really much fun either. If inventory management was a breeze, thrid party software to do the same would not exist and Microsoft themselves would not have been hit by the SQL Slammer worm.
The tools are there in the free software world. Free your mind from that M$ junk and have a look. You will like what you see.
You should have more respect for the secretary and let her make up her own mind. Tell her she can have Word Perfect back and see if you can stop her from figuring it out. Ha!
By the way, the next time your CD get's stuck try right clicking the little picture of a CD on your desktop and chose "unmount" or "eject". If that does not work try using the command, "umount" or making an alias for "unmount".
At a reasonable company the secretary would not need a CD drive. She should be able to ftp her pictures from home to the company picture share or get her music from the company music share. Under those cirumstances, I can imagine someone forgetting how to unmount a CD. There should be someone around who would sooth your furry and panic. Next time, just ask the secretary.
It's an indicator. A company that wastes money on bad softare is probably wasting it elswhere too. The only places that will be running M$ junk soon are those so emeshed in red tape that they can't change a lightbulb without having a meeing, publishing a report and getting the proceedure authorized by upper management. It all adds up.
Everyone should use free software, free software should be used for everything and no one should write software that is not free. Only free software truely respects the user in one very important sense: Free software understands that if you hide the source from the user, the user will do it themselves. All other software is built on the assummption that the author is so clever that no one else can do what they do. The users have rewritten everything and the day of propriatory closed source software is over. It was not easy for the authors or the users of free software to get here, but now it seems obvious that it's the easiest way to go.
This does not mean that people will not make a living coding. Free software is just as valuable as the closed source stuff it's replacing. Society has and will continue to find ways to support people who know how to make and use it. In fact, free software lowers the barriers of entry so that more people than ever will be able to use their tallents. The losers in this transition will be those who have made lots of money screwing people around with upgrade trains, broken file formats, broken 3rd party software and other forms of intentional waste built on dissrespect.
There are many people unfortunate enough to have started with non free software. The comercial software world was created along with the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reasonable reaction to that was the creation of free software movements, BSD and GNU being prominent. It has taken a long time to get from there to here and in the mean time, M$ provided a path of least resistance that many followed. It was a false path because of the core values of the comercial software world, but once emeshed in that trap it's difficult to get out. A friend gave me his 1987 copy of the Emacs manual. There is no doubt in my mind that had I installed emacs on the XT clone I bought in 1987 and learned it instead of Word Perfect 4.1, I would be better off today. As it is, I took a long trip down the M$ path through Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and through work 2000 and countless applications on top of those platforms. The effort put into learning the differences between those versions of software is much greater than the effort I've had to put into the free software I've learned since because free software does not impose useless changes on it's users. Those of you who are just comming into the world of computing are very lucky.
You can keep free software alive and give something better to the next generation of users if you remember to have respect for them. Those of you who lack respect for your neighbors will only repeat the mistakes others have made since the 1980s. All it takes is the wrong attitude for the walls to start going up again.
Ah, I wish that I was just scaremongering. I don't know that they convicts will be taught programing, but I do know that they have been used for mapping for some time now. The other month, I had a nice chat with a fellow who runs a Air Data company that makes maps from photographs. He told me that he was getting beat up by folks who could do the work in India with pirated software and cheap, even forced prison labor. It's not a great streach to imagine convicts being forced into programming.
It'a a PETa watt laser. Those are designed for pet sharks. What else would you put on your pet shark's head, an amonia based MASER? It's the 1990's, get with the program.
From his description of his sit in, he was a huge anoyance. The simple presence of someone twice your age is enough to disturb some people, but one who's obviously distressed? Judge what he looked like from his own writing:
I almost laughed out loud at various times during the test
I definitely passed through some kind of mental barrier as a result of this experience. ... I have been conditioned to try very hard to determine correct answers.
So ... when I worked very hard to determine the correct answer for each question, and then proceeded to pick ...the most RIDICULOUS answer, I had a very strong emotional reaction. For a while I worried that this new peculiar feeling of freedom was in fact insanity; I was finally making the transition to madness.
But after a few minutes of settling in to the routine of NOT filling in the correct answers, and beginning to crave this new sense of accomplishment, [the passage you quote]... I was confronting silliness. The difference in perspective seemed so extreme that there were moments when I shook with desperately suppressed
laughter. I did not laugh aloud or smile conspicuously, but the instinct to laugh was as powerful and as involuntary as a case of hiccups.
...humor draws its strength from fear, and the kind of anxiety surrounding the SAT is so familiar, and yet so meaniningless, that one can only laugh or become depressed.
From the very beginning of the test to the very end I felt euphoric. I was having complex emotions I couldn't describe. This experience was far more rewarding than I had imagined.
I can only imagine sitting next to this self admitted lunatic in that test. Looking over at some old fart who is convulsing with efforts to control manical laughter and depression. I'd be concerned that he's about to come unglued and hurt people. The distraction would be extreem. I might just walk out and try again another day.
Your reward for self sacrifice and obenience? More of the same, you obviously like it.
Where does it say they will not be learing to code?
Stop FUDing, guy.
How was it said? Though I were confined to a nutshell, I would consider myself Lord of infinite space if only I did not have bad dreams?
Therefore a computer in jail must be forced to run Microsoft to better confine the inmates and insure the machine does not make them free. The Blue Screen of Death is a very bad dream and it breaks anything you would do for the poor machine. As no one can really program for a closed source platform, the convicts can't really be programmers. Nothing they do is really a threat is it? Nor would it be a threat if they and their machines were free.
There is no fear without a threat, so there was and is no FUD. Unless you care about comercial software. Are you afraid of the demise of comercial software? Would you care if convicted fellons were forced to write code they don't care about instead of sweat shop victims? The results are the same. Without change, nothing is lost. Without percieved loss there was no threat.
They are coming for you! Bwa-ha-ha-haaaa!
Write code becasue you enjoy it or have a problem to solve. Don't go to school because you think your going to get rich coding. The software world is moving away from the closed source model faster than you can imagine. Those dummies in jail won't have a clue and the crap they make, even if guided by those who do know something, will never measure up in quality to free software. Being able to use free software to solve real problems will be useful and valuable. The source is alive. A CD full of binary crap is just a coaster and might as well be written by convicts.
Bill Gates would be the RIAA of software. He did not count on free software eating his lunch. I wonder if he funded this Indian programming effort. Here, he's going the other way. Instead of trying to get convicts ready for life outside of jail by teaching them progrmming, he's trying to get programmers ready for jail by changing the law. Screw you Billy!
Is that where Redmond is?
You must be talking about comercial Mexican code. Gnome works well, though I'm not sure how "Mexican" it is.
Your browser is configured to request that pop-up. It might not be nice and you might not like it, but you turned over the rock the pop up was sitting under.
The rooted Red Hat box did not go out and request a rooting. The user, if they followed the install, made a difficult to guese password for root to prevent people from doing this. A cracker must seek out and trick such a computer to take it over.
The case of someone using the flaws in a browser to do nasty things is just the same as cracking the computer and should be distinguished from a "legitimate" unrequested popup window full of advertising shit. Gator and other crap like that does indeed fit the unauthorized use model. It's installed by trick, it's a fruadulent, unrequested and abusive use of a computer and should be condemed as one. Someone said it was like helping youself to the bathroom in your host's house. No, it and regular old cracking, is more like entering without permission and then pissing on your host's bed.
Nonsense! The fact that software is free makes a huge difference.
Free software is further ahead than comercial code and there is little chance of comercial code catching up. What kind of reviews do you think M$ Money got in Microsoft's big security hug. How about any of the other code that Microsoft has bought and rebranded? Do you think any of it was written in a way that even aproaches the Unix standard that free software is built on? Do you think people using pirated M$ visual C in Indian sweat shops are going to do any better? The very fact that a pudknocker like me is having this conversation shows the power of free software. We are more than eyeballs. We start from a better postition we care and we get good advice. People making comercial code start with nothing and bang out code someone else, generally clueless, tells them to write.
The massive imbalence shows up in patching. When flaws are discovered, free software is much faster at fixing the problem. The people who cared about the software to begin and dozens of helpers swing into action and a fix is out in a few hours. In the comercial software world, you are lucky if the person who wrote the code even works there. If the poor devil does not get canned, he will have to refresh his memory because the company will have kept him busy with other stuff he may or may not care about. The result is that it takes the company days, weeks months or never to fix the problem.
This all adds up. The comercial software writer is handicapped in the software he starts with and is outmaned and poorly motivated. This is why free software has such good uptimes and does so much more with your hardware. My silly little P90 laptop with 24 MB of RAM and 1 MB of video RAM has multiple desktops, ethernet, 802.11 and a 56.6k modem and supports a 5 Gig hard drive the bios never invisioned. Windoze won't even run on it anymore and the version it came with would never see the networking equipment, the hard drive or give me more than one desktop or accept x-forwarding. Sure, it can be broken into, but it takes more effort and skill than the average script kiddie's got.