The BBC is reporting what Mr Clover said. Not at all the same thing as "the BBC recommends".
Hmmm, that's an expert opinion and it was strong. The author, Mark Ward, quoted Mr. Clover as a computer expert, someone who knows what they are talking about. The overall opinion was that Windoze was an easy to take over piece of junk and IE should be avoided. Note the lack of comforting words from M$ shills and other whores who would simply blame the user. The article concludes:
Fears about adware and spyware are not just for privacy fetishists and cyber-libertarians. Much of this surreptitious software is badly written and can crash your computer, others simply slow down your machine and make web use a chore. But the real danger is the fact that many of the loopholes in Windows that these programs exploit are being increasingly used by virus writers. If you do nothing to close these holes then one day you may lose much more than information about your online habits.
Can there be a stronger general denunciation than that? It ammounts to, "keep using this slow painful junk with and you will lose your work." That's an amazing article to see in the mainstream press.
I swear the open source community is often it's own worse enemy.
Nah, no one wants free software to go away except vendors of crappy closed source software. Free and Open software folks can have their differences but the commonality is much greater.
Since (almost) noone is making money doing it, the primary form of compensation is ego gratification.
What a crock, lots of people are making a good living with free software. Even pioneers such as RMS got by. Now that free software is universally recognized as superior to other software, there is a much larger demand. Show me someone who does not get some ego gratification from their job and I'll show you someone who should be doing something else.
If someone doesn't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum and go off on their own.
This is unique to free software? -Bangs his fist and insults a federal judge- Have you ever seen the monkeyboy dance? If your eyes don't convince you, just read this article. I would never ever want to work at a place like that. It looks like they treat each other worse than they treat the rest of the world.
The end result is forked code trees, huge amounts of duplicated effort, and projects that never go anywhere.
Said another way, free software could never make a working operating system, an easy to use GUI, it's chaos, blah, blah, bull shit on a stick This message posted with Mozilla and Windowmaker on X11 under Debian, software so superior to comercial junk I can never ever go back.
SPI will survive this little tussle and free softare will survive SPI.
Is there a better way we can encourage people to commit their time to free software projects? Is there a way we can give these hard working people who do all of the non-glamorous -- but necessary -- work behind the scenes the recogition they deserve?
According to the article, this was the problem: Schulze asked Nils Lohner, president; Wichert Akkerman, secretary, and Ian Jackson of the B.O.D. to step down because he felt they weren't dedicating enough time and effort to their positions.
Shit, even if true! More is better. When someone is not getting work done, throw more people at it. Devide the tasks, appoint new people, get the work done. The secretary missed a few meetings? Get two. The president is unable to make enough decisions, get another vice president. What good is done by humiliating people? What good is done when you quit? None. If there really are people rearing to go, sign them on.
Sigh, I know, resources are finite and all that. Barf.
It's more disgusting that someone is charging her ten bucks a month to do it. Is there a free equivalent? I know there's a free Sim City.
You have to wonder if people will actually make decisions based on the model or if they will continue to escape forever. When the model becomes real enough, we hope people will get up and do something. I use the internet for conversation and ispiration, but the inspiration comes from other people's real accomplishments. It would be useful if it helps people get up the courage to do things for themselves, but even then it should be made free.
I suppose that should be the first charter of the Sim governance: to create free servers. I wonder if that would go over well. The first free servers will have names like Exile.
If bacteria can survive for millions of years in petrolium under ground, I'm sure they can survive for equal time scales in blobs of tar in space. Does this mean that Earth was colinized by life from somewhere else? No, after all that life had to come from someplace and that place might just have been Earth itslelf. It could however, make it possible for Earth to have been colinized and it does make it possible for Earth to continue to receive new life forms.
The greatest outrage of all is how poorly the political process is working to clean up what messes there are. While it's all fine and good to talk about cleaning up a paint factory site so that a child could eat a diet of dirt that would kill it by ruining their intestines, you have to realize that the money spent there is money that won't be spent cleaning up your coffee cans. How about the 17 billion dollars you have paid for Yucca mountian? Did we really need to know the numbers of every speciecs of bug on top of that rock?
Spening public money is not easy to do. The greatest threats must be fixed first, but there's a huge difference between public perception of threats and reality. Studies on waste sites have been made and there are priority lists. Then some loud mouth comes along and asks you if you want a glass of water. Uggg, the long chain of reasoning and risk assesment goes out the window.
Do me a favor and help the folks monitoring water quality. When you see an adverse trend then you can smugly say, "I told you so," and propose ways to fix the problem. Alamism hurts everyone.
Going critical is as bad as it gets when you don't intend to do that. It's called a criticality accident and that is always very bad. It shows that your processes are flawed to the point that you don't know how much of what you have where. The results can be fatal. Los Alamos put out an excellent Review of Criticality Accidents.
This has nothing to do with radioactive trees which may or may not require special protective measures for people who will be exposed if they work on them. Cutting, sanding and burning may create hazards that don't exist when you are simply standing next to these trees.
DOS-based Win95 (DOS Ain't Dead, just hiding), which was followed by DOS-based Win98 (DOS Ain't Dead, just sleeping), which was followed by DOS-based Win ME (DOS Ain't Dead, just comatose). I guess with the home version of XP they really do mean it this time?
It was more like a long progression of lost functionality and control:
Win3.1 - we give you gui sys32_enhanced and sysedit.
Win95 - we give you better file browser and change a few integer types so that you can see more than 16M of RAM but hide M$ Dos directory.
Win95 revB - we force registry on you, hide what it does.
Win98 - we force IE on you and hide even more. Forget your manual config files, binary non specified or documented registry is now it.
WinME - we not sure, but it looks beter more hidden for no good reason. Your desktop contains your computer, no?
Win2k - we move a few things around to hide more, this is not your big brother's NT. Command prompt moved from prominent position in start menue tree, must run command.com or make shortcut to see it.
WinXP - "Smart Update" is mandatory. We don't care what you see but won't let you anyway. All your base are belong to us. You have no control give up your windoze tax and praise Gates.
I saw voice over IP worked as well as any new DOS implementation run on Windoze 3.1. No new functionality has been added, all control has been removed. IE phone home!
Ah yes, it's still useful. There's lots of software that was written to run custom machines with 286s and what not. When that computer poops out and your old M$ DOS disks won't work on new hardware, freeDOS might just save your day. Makd CDs of that old software if you don't have source code or time to rewrite it. FreeDOS is alive.
In the tradition of all free software, we will soon see that freeDOS surpasses M$DOS in all ways. Bugs will be fixed, it will take up less space, it will run better. Thanks for the reminder about freeDOS, there's been worlds of improvement since I looked at it a year ago or so.
It started taking too long to sync Outlook to my Palm which sucked since I used to do it at the end of the workday and waiting 10 - 30 minutes for it to finish syncing wore on my patience.
Looks like you abandoned the useful end of that connection. Where I worked they put in pop up screen that said, "Another application is attmpting to look at Outlook's contact information. allow this?" Yes it was a pain but it was worth it because Outlook never did a thing for me but my Handspring was very useful.
I imagine this pop up headache did not happen with WinCE crap, but I could be wrong. Microsoft would never use it's monopoly position to favor their own projects and programs, would they? When did it start taking ten freaking minutes? Because NT did not have USB support, I did all my transfers over a normal serial cable and it never took that long, unless I missed the stupid popup then the whole computer hung.
As a system engineer assigned to a system that had few computer points for data, I used my visor for walkdowns. I made a walkdown template with mark numbers, point description and units as a memo. When I walkded down a system, I'd just cut and paste the memo into a daily journal. It was very handy to have a few months worth of trend data in my pocket and easy enough to put all of it into a spread sheet (use commas between mark number, description, value). I imagine any palm device could do the same.
The visor's improvements to Palm software were substantial and I completely replaced my paper planner. I had been using calendar creator plus to print a weekly view on 8.5x11 with hours between six in the morning and ten at night. I also kept a rolling do list on the back of the weeks. Visor's "floating events" with attached note pages took the place of the rolling do list very well. The contact list and calculator were also nice to have in the back pocket. It was also nice to have a word search, though it was not as good as grep.
The thing that convinced me to buy one in the first place was a conversation with a spacey peer. As we were talking, his little palm peeped and told him it was time to go to a stupid meeting. It worked better than paper. I was never late to a meeting.
Charity begins in the home, so do what's right for everyone. The hours I spend fixing some broken PC that did not come with a full Windoze install disk for someone I hardly know that insists on having a Windoze PC are hours I won't spend with my wife and baby girl. It's wrong for me, it's wrong for my family and it's wrong for the aquantiance. I don't know how to fix it and I'd be wasting their time too. A few minutes of general conversation, find out what they use it for, if they have any personal information worth saving, telling them how to protect that information is OK. Other stuff is better left to a shop that deals with it all the time, they can take all the credit and blame for non free failure.
I will take the time to install a free OS for them and teach them a little about how to keep it going and where they can get more information. In fact, I've got three or four older computers I'm willing to give away for such people. It takes less time and I know that it will work. If someone is really interested, great, otherwise they undersand that I just don't do windoze.
For those of you who actually do windoze all day as your job and everyone knows it, I am sorry. The troubles you eXPerience at work might just haunt your family too. I got a headache just thinking of that. It's time to go to bed.
-1 troll: Users of free software are an interesting bunch. They knowingly accept and embrace and are even attracted to the fact that it's traditionally much harder to use than everyday Windows software. then describes a host of problems most people never encounter. I run Debian because it's easier to keep going than Windoze. My wife sees no difference in ease of use between M$, Debian or Red Hat. She uses Red Hat on her dual boot PC and rarely boots M$.
-1 flamebait: Thanks for calling me an elitist. I'm not. I use Linux because I'm lazy and it makes my life easier. I don't abuse users of other operating systems, because I have an M$ box in the corner to deal with ancient hardware and other hastles that Bill Gates works to give me. To abuse others for caving into Billy G's Convicted Abusive Monopoly Practices would be hypocritical. I can imagine someone like you being abusive, in fact I can see it right here. I hope you got your jollies and that M$ pays more than five francs an hour for astroturfing.
-1 offtopic: This conversation is about where to send distant realatives and other aquantances who know you as a "computer guy". The NYT article mentions several help services which are useful when you don't know the answer. I really don't know about Windoze problems because Windoze stuff is poorly documented and I don't use it because it was a horrible pain in the ass. I appreciate the advice in the article. This post does nothing but crow about nonextent benifits of Windoze, insult the readers of this site and FUD on user support for free software and got in my way.
This post has a great deal of short sighted thinking and it's author has "/DRM (corporate whore)" writtten on his user bio, so this is a good place to point out some of the problems with this "seems reasonable" crap.
First, that another big stupid music publisher is doing something similar is no evidence that this is reasonable. All big stupid music publishers are working towards making sure no one else can publish music and this is bad. Specifically, that every music publisher makes it's own crappy player that only runs on Windoze is really bad. What makes you think that one won't break the others in DLL hell?
Second, how is the diminised functionality reasonable? What exactly is reasonable about them making it imposible for normal people to make a copy of their CDs? Don't you think it's a terrible pain to have to buy a key for every PC you want to listen to your music on? You ARE going to pay the same price or more for this Music Disk as you used to pay for a normal CD. Who else is going to foot the bill for the "research" that's required to make this work and keep it working while M$ extorts money from them to not break it with a "smart update"? Oh yeah, it also has to be a Windoze PC. That's really specific, have you paid your Windoze tax lately? What makes you think this will still play in your normal CD player? One of the reasons they are removing the CD mark is because this is NOT a CD anymore and won't work like you expect it. Pay more, get less. Sounds reasonable if you work for Sony.
Do you think this will reasonably accomplish the stated goal? I don't. People can and will exploit the analog hole if all else fails and then put the result up for everyone else.
So what is the goal here? One good guess is that big stupid music publishers want to kill the CD format. Sony, by it's own admission, is no longer going to sell CDs. End of format. You can imgine that they will stop making CD players soon, if they have not already. A company like Sony thinks they will win twice when everyone has to purchase their music collection again in a new pay per play media format such as DVD. If you consider having to buy things you own again and again reasonable... well the other thing in your bio is "/win2k (seriously)".
I could be reading your bio wrong, but what the big fat music publishers are tying to do is most unreasonable.
Pilots like me will continue to fly older and cheaper airplanes, and if there's an emergency, we will just land the airplane. Structural failures are rare...
Older aircraft are where you have structural failure. Aluminum has an endurance limit, at some point it will fail, unlike steel which can be designed to last forever. Steel aircraft don't fly very well, chuckle.
In any case, structural failure is not the only situation you might consider deploying a parachute. You might have failed control surfaces. No control = no glide. It happened to my step father about five minutes after a flight once. The hydraulic system failed.
Don't count on anyone to do this for you and don't count on support from MPV. Even if you could get the companies on the OSTA's members list to agree on anything more than screwing their customers, you know they will continue to thwart each other in the future as they have in the past. Just look at all the different propriatory film formats and processes. Every few years one company or another makes a completely new thingy, such as 110 mm or advantix, which reduces negative size and adds cost. All of the photo album software I've ever seen has been awful propriatory junk. MPV is a step in the right direction but it does not get you there, as you have noticed because you are working independently. This is a DIY if ever there was one because royalty free and open is not free and therefore you WILL be at the mercy of the media companies if you follow. Morover, MPV itself does not specify storage formats and therfore is subject to DRM abuse.
Here's a practical start. Check out igal, which generates and publishs an entire online picture show (HTML slides, thumbnails and index page included) with just one command line invocation. HTML is open and easy to parse, not to mention edit by hand to add those custom touches. You can build your classes of relationships external to the archive itself to merge things as you wish or simply make new indexes to the images.
I'm crurrently building html indexes of my files. It's easy enough to put friends and family into seperate directories then family names in seperate directories under family then link events by hand elsewhere. Such segmentation helps at archive time and adding to it is as easy as dropping a new directory. Good organization makes itself felt in any media, paper or digital.
... the solution is generally free. You say: How about, instead of throttling network access, we move to more reliable code, better access controls at the kernel level, and a hardware platform that makes buffer overruns and stack smashing a thing of the past. While I am anti-MS, Palladium does actually have some good ideas on the hardware level. Is the DRM level that stinks to high heaven.
I've got good news for you. The average free *nix already has more reliable code with better access controls at the kernel level. You can check it out for yourself because the software is free, unlike that other silly stuff you mentioned from a particular abusive and convicted vendor, caugh, MicroSoft. Heck, you could even just use a mail client that does not run as root and does not automatically execute commands sent from strangers, like most free software. Way to go!
I've also got bad news for you. Buffer overflows can not be defeated at the hardware level in a general purpose computer. Why is left as an exercise for the reader, but a shortcut is that Microsoft says it will work.
This looks more like Carnivore than anti-virus software, quoth the article: The idea, then, is to limit the rate at which a computer can connect to new computers, where "new" means those that are not on a recent history list. Dr Williamson's "throttle" (so called because it is both a kind of valve and a way of strangling viruses at birth) restricts such connections to one a second.
Given the large institution focus of the article, I assumed the control would be external at the network level. The only way to really stop a computer from connecting to "new" machines is to keep a record of connections and stop "new" ones external to the machine. If you can't secure the computer secure the network the author seems to be saying.
The author wonders why no one had thought of this before and I can tell him that the reason is that it's contrary to the founding priciples of the internet and it won't work. The whole idea behind the internet is to have a network without central control or intelligence. Putting this kind of invasive intelligence into the net adds complications useful only for censorship and control. How, pray tell, can you do this for a mail server? Mail servers contact new machines all day, that's their job! The virus mentioned as an example happened because of poor software from a certian vendor, Microsoft. The same trick can be had again if the virus shifts its mailing burden to the stupid IIS server.
Attention has been focused on the root cause of the problem: mail clients that run as root and automatically execute commands sent by strangers. Everyone said it was a bad idea when M$ did it, and everyone should continue to point the finger of blame in the right direction. Adding hacks like this elswhere is a waste of time and has serious implications for the internet as a medium for imformation exchange.
Compare the cancels/month directly related to bandwidth concerns before, during, and after these offenders were uncapping. If they are no different, there is no loses.
With all the publicity this case is getting, I'm sure there will be thousands of people all accross the country droping their cable modems. Most of the "providers" ban servers and charge between 50 and 75 bucks a month for the silly boxes. How many people are really going to pay that kind of money for that? To surf the great corporate billboard faster and better than ever? Nope, the local cable company not only blocks your ports so you can't serve, now they are capping your line so you get DSL speed if you are lucky. Pththth-fit. Can you say content death? How many of you are willing to risk going to jail to run servers?
Don't even thing of running a server, you will be depriving your ISP of valuable "hosting" fees, like $10/month or so. If you run a server and it get's slashdotted, oh my, that 30kbit/second uplink crimp will cost them so much bandwidth you might even hit your five gig cap. Monetary loss of hitting your cap = $0. I'll give the cable company that amount next month. How about you?
The biggest losses are the trust these fools threw away about two years ago. A bad reputation leads directly to bankruptcy.
The people who create some laws seem to have little understanding of the technologies that we use and their lack of knowledge is leading to some sort of irrational fear of any individual who commits any sort of crime using technology that they don't seem to understand.
It's protectionism, pure and simple. Yes it eliminates your first amendment rights but the constitution never stood in the way of a dishonest buck or thought control. It's not "cybercrime" they are after, it's "thoughtcrime" in the long run. Where do I get off saying that? Just go read my other post.
The prosecutors of this case had this to say about the folks who modified their cable modem in a maner which may have violated their contract with their ISPs:
John Weglian, chief of the special units division of the prosecutor's office, offers no apologies for Buckeye's unusually harsh treatment of the uncappers. "Cyber crime is potentially very damaging to society. We are taking a firm position on that type of criminal activity. We hope these cases will have a deterrent value, given the cost factors for the defendants in successful prosecutions."
The cable operators claim a loss of $11,000 for each of the 23 offenders and absurdity at best as the operators had the power to kill service at anytime, if indeed such losses were occuring. The uncpping was detected and the ISP could have terminated the contract with the individuals in question and fined them the cost of the modified equipment.
Now why is this a bother to Orwell and the authors of the US Constitution? Because it is a great step towards the end of free publishing in the US and towards the thought control of 1984. Violating a "service contract" with a monopoly ISP has been equated with serious law breaking. The same service contract includes prohibitions on running "servers" or electronic publications. Prohibiting electronic publications on a monopoly service ammounts to denial of first amendment rights to free speach. The internet is a public place, built largely from public networks on public land and supported by monopoly structures. The implication is that US citizens in the future will be felons if they attempt to express themselves in the electronic commons by runing their own news servers, email, or web servers.
Some people can't stand any competition, but the Founding Fathers knew that that's what a free press is all about. These services are against the wishes of their monopoly ISP wich also happens to be the monopoly telco or carrier of CableTV and all other significant electronic publications in the area. From the publisher's perspective, this is a nice step towards criminalizing competing with them. Not being able to run a free press is something the Founding Fathers would not find funny at all. The first amendment to the constitution puts free speach and press in the same class as religion and free assembly - inviolate. They also debated extensivly on the evils of exclusive franchise that copyright grants and how to balance that with the good that it can do to promote the useful arts - 14 years only, thank you. They could never have imagined a world of only one large press organization, AP, five music publishers, three broadcast networks and the technological steps those entrenched intersts would take to preserve and extend their power.
Orwell precicted such control through technology and it's ultimate results. These "untaper" federal cases combined with Paladium, are a great step towards 1984. Paladium, with its concept of "trusted computing" will assure that personal computers will spy on their owners, who can only use them to recieve official propaganda. Orwell saw it comming.
The stage has been well set by the large publishers and you are discredited. They have issued a long string of kiddie porn arrests and news storries about the demise of music publishers. These storries have convinced the public that the free internet is responsible for the demise of popular music and an increase in child molestation. "Hackers" have been equated with child molesters, warez losers and other "pirates" and parisites. this wired story does a good job of demolishing the connection between child molestation and the internet, but the readership of Wired is nothing compared to MSNBC/Time-Warner/AOL/McDonalds/AP/Conglomoram/GE. Your neighbors may not pitty you when the FBI coyly knocks on your door. "Why esle would anyone want to have all that bandwith or run a server?" a clueless populance will ask. You have been painted as some kind of pervert that treatens the great public circus, home, harth and the whole "entertainment ifrastruture" without which the US economy would obviously colapse.
I invite one and all to see exactly what I want to do with my internet connection. It's simple, I want to share my life with relatives that live in different states and my interests with anyone who cares. There's nothing Earth shattering here, not even bad music.
On December 1st, my modest site will go black when my contract with Cox Cable expires. The nose has tightened slowly, every six months brought some new loss of service and increase in costs, and it is now intollerable. I'm not willing to pay $75/month to simply surf the great corporate billboard nor am I willing to give money to a company with the same contract terms and philosophy as Buckeye.
Don't worry, I'll keep posting here on Slashdot. Now you know who twitter is.
Goes to show that Microsoft has some competent people working for them...
It's an old paper. We might assume the author was fired long ago. After all, who needs talent when you think you can just extort and lie? A guy like that is about as much use to Microsoft as BSD was. Honest people don't last long in a place like that nor should they want to work there.
The level of duplicity is shocking. They obviously care nothing for effeciency, even their own and are willing to take anyone who trusts them down with them. They know that what they promote is vastly inferior and impractical, yet such is their love of money and power that they would inflict it on everyone everywhere. This proves that Microsoft will never care. They will never improve, inovate or make anything useful. Never trust dishonest people because they are insane. Those that deny the truth are bound to be crushed by it. No one trusts a liar and everyone remembers what you say.
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Hmmm, that's an expert opinion and it was strong. The author, Mark Ward, quoted Mr. Clover as a computer expert, someone who knows what they are talking about. The overall opinion was that Windoze was an easy to take over piece of junk and IE should be avoided. Note the lack of comforting words from M$ shills and other whores who would simply blame the user. The article concludes:
Fears about adware and spyware are not just for privacy fetishists and cyber-libertarians. Much of this surreptitious software is badly written and can crash your computer, others simply slow down your machine and make web use a chore. But the real danger is the fact that many of the loopholes in Windows that these programs exploit are being increasingly used by virus writers. If you do nothing to close these holes then one day you may lose much more than information about your online habits.
Can there be a stronger general denunciation than that? It ammounts to, "keep using this slow painful junk with and you will lose your work." That's an amazing article to see in the mainstream press.
Nah, no one wants free software to go away except vendors of crappy closed source software. Free and Open software folks can have their differences but the commonality is much greater.
Since (almost) noone is making money doing it, the primary form of compensation is ego gratification.
What a crock, lots of people are making a good living with free software. Even pioneers such as RMS got by. Now that free software is universally recognized as superior to other software, there is a much larger demand. Show me someone who does not get some ego gratification from their job and I'll show you someone who should be doing something else.
If someone doesn't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum and go off on their own.
This is unique to free software? -Bangs his fist and insults a federal judge- Have you ever seen the monkeyboy dance? If your eyes don't convince you, just read this article. I would never ever want to work at a place like that. It looks like they treat each other worse than they treat the rest of the world.
The end result is forked code trees, huge amounts of duplicated effort, and projects that never go anywhere.
Said another way, free software could never make a working operating system, an easy to use GUI, it's chaos, blah, blah, bull shit on a stick This message posted with Mozilla and Windowmaker on X11 under Debian, software so superior to comercial junk I can never ever go back.
SPI will survive this little tussle and free softare will survive SPI.
Is there a better way we can encourage people to commit their time to free software projects? Is there a way we can give these hard working people who do all of the non-glamorous -- but necessary -- work behind the scenes the recogition they deserve?
According to the article, this was the problem:
Schulze asked Nils Lohner, president; Wichert Akkerman, secretary, and Ian Jackson of the B.O.D. to step down because he felt they weren't dedicating enough time and effort to their positions.
Shit, even if true! More is better. When someone is not getting work done, throw more people at it. Devide the tasks, appoint new people, get the work done. The secretary missed a few meetings? Get two. The president is unable to make enough decisions, get another vice president. What good is done by humiliating people? What good is done when you quit? None. If there really are people rearing to go, sign them on.
Sigh, I know, resources are finite and all that. Barf.
You have to wonder if people will actually make decisions based on the model or if they will continue to escape forever. When the model becomes real enough, we hope people will get up and do something. I use the internet for conversation and ispiration, but the inspiration comes from other people's real accomplishments. It would be useful if it helps people get up the courage to do things for themselves, but even then it should be made free.
I suppose that should be the first charter of the Sim governance: to create free servers. I wonder if that would go over well. The first free servers will have names like Exile.
You can tell people what they can't do and be paid for it. It's called taxation. Cool eh? Beats flipping virtual burgers or, worse, eating them.
If bacteria can survive for millions of years in petrolium under ground, I'm sure they can survive for equal time scales in blobs of tar in space. Does this mean that Earth was colinized by life from somewhere else? No, after all that life had to come from someplace and that place might just have been Earth itslelf. It could however, make it possible for Earth to have been colinized and it does make it possible for Earth to continue to receive new life forms.
Spening public money is not easy to do. The greatest threats must be fixed first, but there's a huge difference between public perception of threats and reality. Studies on waste sites have been made and there are priority lists. Then some loud mouth comes along and asks you if you want a glass of water. Uggg, the long chain of reasoning and risk assesment goes out the window.
Do me a favor and help the folks monitoring water quality. When you see an adverse trend then you can smugly say, "I told you so," and propose ways to fix the problem. Alamism hurts everyone.
This has nothing to do with radioactive trees which may or may not require special protective measures for people who will be exposed if they work on them. Cutting, sanding and burning may create hazards that don't exist when you are simply standing next to these trees.
I guess with the home version of XP they really do mean it this time?
It was more like a long progression of lost functionality and control:
Win3.1 - we give you gui sys32_enhanced and sysedit.
Win95 - we give you better file browser and change a few integer types so that you can see more than 16M of RAM but hide M$ Dos directory.
Win95 revB - we force registry on you, hide what it does.
Win98 - we force IE on you and hide even more. Forget your manual config files, binary non specified or documented registry is now it.
WinME - we not sure, but it looks beter more hidden for no good reason. Your desktop contains your computer, no?
Win2k - we move a few things around to hide more, this is not your big brother's NT. Command prompt moved from prominent position in start menue tree, must run command.com or make shortcut to see it.
WinXP - "Smart Update" is mandatory. We don't care what you see but won't let you anyway. All your base are belong to us. You have no control give up your windoze tax and praise Gates.
I saw voice over IP worked as well as any new DOS implementation run on Windoze 3.1. No new functionality has been added, all control has been removed. IE phone home!
In the tradition of all free software, we will soon see that freeDOS surpasses M$DOS in all ways. Bugs will be fixed, it will take up less space, it will run better. Thanks for the reminder about freeDOS, there's been worlds of improvement since I looked at it a year ago or so.
Ha ha ha
Looks like you abandoned the useful end of that connection. Where I worked they put in pop up screen that said, "Another application is attmpting to look at Outlook's contact information. allow this?" Yes it was a pain but it was worth it because Outlook never did a thing for me but my Handspring was very useful.
I imagine this pop up headache did not happen with WinCE crap, but I could be wrong. Microsoft would never use it's monopoly position to favor their own projects and programs, would they? When did it start taking ten freaking minutes? Because NT did not have USB support, I did all my transfers over a normal serial cable and it never took that long, unless I missed the stupid popup then the whole computer hung.
The visor's improvements to Palm software were substantial and I completely replaced my paper planner. I had been using calendar creator plus to print a weekly view on 8.5x11 with hours between six in the morning and ten at night. I also kept a rolling do list on the back of the weeks. Visor's "floating events" with attached note pages took the place of the rolling do list very well. The contact list and calculator were also nice to have in the back pocket. It was also nice to have a word search, though it was not as good as grep.
The thing that convinced me to buy one in the first place was a conversation with a spacey peer. As we were talking, his little palm peeped and told him it was time to go to a stupid meeting. It worked better than paper. I was never late to a meeting.
I got fired anyway, but that's another story.
I will take the time to install a free OS for them and teach them a little about how to keep it going and where they can get more information. In fact, I've got three or four older computers I'm willing to give away for such people. It takes less time and I know that it will work. If someone is really interested, great, otherwise they undersand that I just don't do windoze.
For those of you who actually do windoze all day as your job and everyone knows it, I am sorry. The troubles you eXPerience at work might just haunt your family too. I got a headache just thinking of that. It's time to go to bed.
-1 flamebait: Thanks for calling me an elitist. I'm not. I use Linux because I'm lazy and it makes my life easier. I don't abuse users of other operating systems, because I have an M$ box in the corner to deal with ancient hardware and other hastles that Bill Gates works to give me. To abuse others for caving into Billy G's Convicted Abusive Monopoly Practices would be hypocritical. I can imagine someone like you being abusive, in fact I can see it right here. I hope you got your jollies and that M$ pays more than five francs an hour for astroturfing.
-1 offtopic: This conversation is about where to send distant realatives and other aquantances who know you as a "computer guy". The NYT article mentions several help services which are useful when you don't know the answer. I really don't know about Windoze problems because Windoze stuff is poorly documented and I don't use it because it was a horrible pain in the ass. I appreciate the advice in the article. This post does nothing but crow about nonextent benifits of Windoze, insult the readers of this site and FUD on user support for free software and got in my way.
First, that another big stupid music publisher is doing something similar is no evidence that this is reasonable. All big stupid music publishers are working towards making sure no one else can publish music and this is bad. Specifically, that every music publisher makes it's own crappy player that only runs on Windoze is really bad. What makes you think that one won't break the others in DLL hell?
Second, how is the diminised functionality reasonable? What exactly is reasonable about them making it imposible for normal people to make a copy of their CDs? Don't you think it's a terrible pain to have to buy a key for every PC you want to listen to your music on? You ARE going to pay the same price or more for this Music Disk as you used to pay for a normal CD. Who else is going to foot the bill for the "research" that's required to make this work and keep it working while M$ extorts money from them to not break it with a "smart update"? Oh yeah, it also has to be a Windoze PC. That's really specific, have you paid your Windoze tax lately? What makes you think this will still play in your normal CD player? One of the reasons they are removing the CD mark is because this is NOT a CD anymore and won't work like you expect it. Pay more, get less. Sounds reasonable if you work for Sony.
Do you think this will reasonably accomplish the stated goal? I don't. People can and will exploit the analog hole if all else fails and then put the result up for everyone else.
So what is the goal here? One good guess is that big stupid music publishers want to kill the CD format. Sony, by it's own admission, is no longer going to sell CDs. End of format. You can imgine that they will stop making CD players soon, if they have not already. A company like Sony thinks they will win twice when everyone has to purchase their music collection again in a new pay per play media format such as DVD. If you consider having to buy things you own again and again reasonable ... well the other thing in your bio is "/win2k (seriously)".
I could be reading your bio wrong, but what the big fat music publishers are tying to do is most unreasonable.
Or you would need one with 24 times the diameter.
Older aircraft are where you have structural failure. Aluminum has an endurance limit, at some point it will fail, unlike steel which can be designed to last forever. Steel aircraft don't fly very well, chuckle.
In any case, structural failure is not the only situation you might consider deploying a parachute. You might have failed control surfaces. No control = no glide. It happened to my step father about five minutes after a flight once. The hydraulic system failed.
Here's a practical start. Check out igal, which generates and publishs an entire online picture show (HTML slides, thumbnails and index page included) with just one command line invocation. HTML is open and easy to parse, not to mention edit by hand to add those custom touches. You can build your classes of relationships external to the archive itself to merge things as you wish or simply make new indexes to the images.
I'm crurrently building html indexes of my files. It's easy enough to put friends and family into seperate directories then family names in seperate directories under family then link events by hand elsewhere. Such segmentation helps at archive time and adding to it is as easy as dropping a new directory. Good organization makes itself felt in any media, paper or digital.
How about, instead of throttling network access, we move to more reliable code, better access controls at the kernel level, and a hardware platform that makes buffer overruns and stack smashing a thing of the past. While I am anti-MS, Palladium does actually have some good ideas on the hardware level. Is the DRM level that stinks to high heaven.
I've got good news for you. The average free *nix already has more reliable code with better access controls at the kernel level. You can check it out for yourself because the software is free, unlike that other silly stuff you mentioned from a particular abusive and convicted vendor, caugh, MicroSoft. Heck, you could even just use a mail client that does not run as root and does not automatically execute commands sent from strangers, like most free software. Way to go!
I've also got bad news for you. Buffer overflows can not be defeated at the hardware level in a general purpose computer. Why is left as an exercise for the reader, but a shortcut is that Microsoft says it will work.
The idea, then, is to limit the rate at which a computer can connect to new computers, where "new" means those that are not on a recent history list. Dr Williamson's "throttle" (so called because it is both a kind of valve and a way of strangling viruses at birth) restricts such connections to one a second.
Given the large institution focus of the article, I assumed the control would be external at the network level. The only way to really stop a computer from connecting to "new" machines is to keep a record of connections and stop "new" ones external to the machine. If you can't secure the computer secure the network the author seems to be saying.
The author wonders why no one had thought of this before and I can tell him that the reason is that it's contrary to the founding priciples of the internet and it won't work. The whole idea behind the internet is to have a network without central control or intelligence. Putting this kind of invasive intelligence into the net adds complications useful only for censorship and control. How, pray tell, can you do this for a mail server? Mail servers contact new machines all day, that's their job! The virus mentioned as an example happened because of poor software from a certian vendor, Microsoft. The same trick can be had again if the virus shifts its mailing burden to the stupid IIS server.
Attention has been focused on the root cause of the problem: mail clients that run as root and automatically execute commands sent by strangers. Everyone said it was a bad idea when M$ did it, and everyone should continue to point the finger of blame in the right direction. Adding hacks like this elswhere is a waste of time and has serious implications for the internet as a medium for imformation exchange.
With all the publicity this case is getting, I'm sure there will be thousands of people all accross the country droping their cable modems. Most of the "providers" ban servers and charge between 50 and 75 bucks a month for the silly boxes. How many people are really going to pay that kind of money for that? To surf the great corporate billboard faster and better than ever? Nope, the local cable company not only blocks your ports so you can't serve, now they are capping your line so you get DSL speed if you are lucky. Pththth-fit. Can you say content death? How many of you are willing to risk going to jail to run servers?
Don't even thing of running a server, you will be depriving your ISP of valuable "hosting" fees, like $10/month or so. If you run a server and it get's slashdotted, oh my, that 30kbit/second uplink crimp will cost them so much bandwidth you might even hit your five gig cap. Monetary loss of hitting your cap = $0. I'll give the cable company that amount next month. How about you?
The biggest losses are the trust these fools threw away about two years ago. A bad reputation leads directly to bankruptcy.
It's protectionism, pure and simple. Yes it eliminates your first amendment rights but the constitution never stood in the way of a dishonest buck or thought control. It's not "cybercrime" they are after, it's "thoughtcrime" in the long run. Where do I get off saying that? Just go read my other post.
John Weglian, chief of the special units division of the prosecutor's office, offers no apologies for Buckeye's unusually harsh treatment of the uncappers. "Cyber crime is potentially very damaging to society. We are taking a firm position on that type of criminal activity. We hope these cases will have a deterrent value, given the cost factors for the defendants in successful prosecutions."
The cable operators claim a loss of $11,000 for each of the 23 offenders and absurdity at best as the operators had the power to kill service at anytime, if indeed such losses were occuring. The uncpping was detected and the ISP could have terminated the contract with the individuals in question and fined them the cost of the modified equipment.
Now why is this a bother to Orwell and the authors of the US Constitution? Because it is a great step towards the end of free publishing in the US and towards the thought control of 1984. Violating a "service contract" with a monopoly ISP has been equated with serious law breaking. The same service contract includes prohibitions on running "servers" or electronic publications. Prohibiting electronic publications on a monopoly service ammounts to denial of first amendment rights to free speach. The internet is a public place, built largely from public networks on public land and supported by monopoly structures. The implication is that US citizens in the future will be felons if they attempt to express themselves in the electronic commons by runing their own news servers, email, or web servers.
Some people can't stand any competition, but the Founding Fathers knew that that's what a free press is all about. These services are against the wishes of their monopoly ISP wich also happens to be the monopoly telco or carrier of CableTV and all other significant electronic publications in the area. From the publisher's perspective, this is a nice step towards criminalizing competing with them. Not being able to run a free press is something the Founding Fathers would not find funny at all. The first amendment to the constitution puts free speach and press in the same class as religion and free assembly - inviolate. They also debated extensivly on the evils of exclusive franchise that copyright grants and how to balance that with the good that it can do to promote the useful arts - 14 years only, thank you. They could never have imagined a world of only one large press organization, AP, five music publishers, three broadcast networks and the technological steps those entrenched intersts would take to preserve and extend their power.
Orwell precicted such control through technology and it's ultimate results. These "untaper" federal cases combined with Paladium, are a great step towards 1984. Paladium, with its concept of "trusted computing" will assure that personal computers will spy on their owners, who can only use them to recieve official propaganda. Orwell saw it comming.
The stage has been well set by the large publishers and you are discredited. They have issued a long string of kiddie porn arrests and news storries about the demise of music publishers. These storries have convinced the public that the free internet is responsible for the demise of popular music and an increase in child molestation. "Hackers" have been equated with child molesters, warez losers and other "pirates" and parisites. this wired story does a good job of demolishing the connection between child molestation and the internet, but the readership of Wired is nothing compared to MSNBC/Time-Warner/AOL/McDonalds/AP/Conglomoram/GE. Your neighbors may not pitty you when the FBI coyly knocks on your door. "Why esle would anyone want to have all that bandwith or run a server?" a clueless populance will ask. You have been painted as some kind of pervert that treatens the great public circus, home, harth and the whole "entertainment ifrastruture" without which the US economy would obviously colapse.
I invite one and all to see exactly what I want to do with my internet connection. It's simple, I want to share my life with relatives that live in different states and my interests with anyone who cares. There's nothing Earth shattering here, not even bad music.
On December 1st, my modest site will go black when my contract with Cox Cable expires. The nose has tightened slowly, every six months brought some new loss of service and increase in costs, and it is now intollerable. I'm not willing to pay $75/month to simply surf the great corporate billboard nor am I willing to give money to a company with the same contract terms and philosophy as Buckeye.
Don't worry, I'll keep posting here on Slashdot. Now you know who twitter is.
It's an old paper. We might assume the author was fired long ago. After all, who needs talent when you think you can just extort and lie? A guy like that is about as much use to Microsoft as BSD was. Honest people don't last long in a place like that nor should they want to work there.
The level of duplicity is shocking. They obviously care nothing for effeciency, even their own and are willing to take anyone who trusts them down with them. They know that what they promote is vastly inferior and impractical, yet such is their love of money and power that they would inflict it on everyone everywhere. This proves that Microsoft will never care. They will never improve, inovate or make anything useful. Never trust dishonest people because they are insane. Those that deny the truth are bound to be crushed by it. No one trusts a liar and everyone remembers what you say.