how stupid is it for the same folks yelling "Microsoft sucks!" on a daily basis, to turn around and ask for access to some of that suckage for themselves?
That would be stupid, which is why few people really do what you say. Some people foolishly believe they can work with M$ and effortlessly exchange data with their users. M$ tells them this is so, and some people still believe it. Their problems are similar to mine, but their surprise is all their own.
I reject M$ outright. I don't want their shit, I want them to leave me alone. But they don't because they want everyone to pay the M$ tax and shove that agenda every way they can. I tell people exactly how M$ screws them and recommend they use free software instead. The tighter they squeeze their honest customers, the more justified I am.
In this case M$ sucks because they do non free software in the most abusive way possible and pretend to be all the good things free software is. This is what they always do to their competitors and anyone who's followed them long enough will recognize the infantile reasoning they push: Our stuff is everything everyone else claims for their stuff and Everyone else has our problems and worse. You might remember these tactics from kindergarden and remember why they don't really work in a company/customer relationship.
Customers don't the expect abuse which inevitably comes from M$. When people use M$, their data is trapped into the one or two hardware platforms M$ "supports" and M$ regularly breaks that data to sell them an "upgrade". This approach would fail if there were any easy alternatives.
To support the upgrade train, M$ purposefully uses their coercive monopoly power to break alternate implementations, from bios to file formats. If that were not enough, they service providers to make life hard too. ISPs block ports and crimp upload speed to make up for M$ shortfalls. They even try to make it hard to work with business and government without their crappy software. No, I don't really need them and I consider gnu/linux use far easier, despite the roadblocks they have put in place. Their booby traps ultimately harm their customers more than anyone else.
I'd love to just sit back and watch M$ fade away, but they won't unless people who know computing reject them tell others about it. They are out to screw all of us, so tell them to go to hell.
A software product/framework can be portable, cross platform without being Free.
It's not portable if you can't move it to a platform of YOUR choice. Something that's not free may have SDKs for more than one platform, but that does not really make it portable. Being "open" does not help either. They could publish their entire source code but it would not be free if it was patent and copyright restrictions that keep you from doing what you want with it.
These days, that lack of freedom is a distinct disadvantage that will cost M$. It's always been a disadvantage to non free code, but the saving grace was a lack working alternative and someone might pay you for it. Because there are now entire free software systems, non free code has run out of saving graces. It won't even make money. Control is a loser.
Is there anyone, anywhere who thinks Microsoft will ever do anything that's really free, and therefore portable, cross platform and all that other stuff they would like to say about.NET? The more they hype it, the more obvious the shortfall.
I wrote a little ROT13 decoder and passed their statement through it and it came out, "09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0" before it segfaulted. My code might not be the best.
My assumption is that, one way or another, this case isn't winnable under the DMCA.
What, are you crazy? Censorship is impossible when people decide they've had enough. The rebellion has spread so far, it won't be long before people are spraypainting, "09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0 is the key," on bridges or hosting DeCSS in the open. What's the MAFIAA going to do then, sue spray paint makers? Right, the crackdown has failed and it's going to break them. The MAFIAA has officially screwed the pooch. Honest people deserve to live in an upright manner - the DMCA was wrong from the beginning and it's going to be torn down.
This is about your freedom to do what you want to the bits on your computer. If you don't have that, it's not your computer.
Not to mention the fact that Xstroke is designed to recognize mouse gestures and single characters, not whole words, which makes it really bad at actually recognizing handwriting!
It does graffiti excellently and you've obviously never used it.
I was (and still am) complaining about lack of APPLICATIONS, not libraries or hardware support.... there's a grand total of about four note-taking applications (Xournal, Gournal, Jarnal, NoteLab) for non-Windows systems. They all suck.... (compared to Windows Journal or OneNote). They're uniformly completely unusable.... There's nothing even slightly comparable to all the other tablet applications for Windows (e.g. ink-based games, music notation programs, sticky notes, calculators/equation editors, etc.).
Suck, completely unusable, slightly comparable and anger... now I'm starting to feel like I'm talking to some kind of hyperbolic M$ troll.
Of course there are plenty of games available, as well as sticky notes and all that jazz in the Debian repositories if you care for that sort of thing. KDE's PIM blows everything else away, so I'm not sure what applications you are after and where you get your quality standards. The little drawing program from GPE and KDE protable are both good. Inkscape, which ports from Debian, is better. I imagine you've tried those note taking applications about as much as you have xstroke. All of these applications work with xstroke because xstroke just take the place of a keyboard and mouse when you want it to (yes, you can turn it off) I've watched people try to use one note don't think very much of it, but to each his own. I still think it's easier to use paper and pencil for lecture notes and then to take a picture to get it onto the computer then mark it up with a keyboard. Given the adoption rate of tablets with your favortie software loaded onto it, I think most people agree with me - those tools are inadequate and the task is a fools errand.
Symantec security researcher Yazan Gable has put forward an explanation as to why the number of denial of service attacks has been declining (coincident with the rise of spam). His theory is that DoS attacks are no longer profitable to attackers.
Surely he meant it was because their super efficient Windoze clients had secured the world and saved us all from this and other dastardly threats! No? Oh well.
How's a bunch of software designed for PDAs going to help people who have full-size Tablet PCs, which need full-size yet stylus-friendly applications?
Xstroke is a very good handwriting recognition tool. It works full screen over X and all of the software modified for PDA's can also run with larger screens. Try it some time.
Why shouldn't M$ market to dead people? Just look at all the nice things dead people have done for M$. Believe it or not, they have updated things for Zune with less success than they had convincing GWB not to dismantle them. For all the services rendered, dead people will be rewarded with one non refundable, non transferable, surplus Zune. Jokes about "squirting" Uncle Fester here are beneath even my low standards of humor.
I've noticed Balmer appearing/interview on a number of media outlets recently.... Why do they feel the need for publicity now?
No one can get enough Fester! This time he even mentioned an old uncle. Cue those terrible Canadians, "Shut your f-----g face uncle f----r!...." Now go buy Vista, lots of it is sitting on shelves. Please go buy vista, I'll put a lightbulb in my mouth for you if you do.
I now understand that you know nothing about Windows on the desktop and wish you would shut up about it. I've been using Windows since 1993, exclusively at home since 1996 or so, and could tell you things if you were not so busy FUDing up the place.
Hmmm, telling people about Windows on a free software site dedicated to advancing gnu/linux is... flambait.
Just the same, there's not much about Windoze you can tell me. I got my first computer in the 1980s and started my long waste of time with DOS in 1988. I'm still forced to use various incarnations of the monster at work, thank you. While Vista is not on anyone's menu yet, I've seen it attempt to work more than once. Really, the things I tell you about Windoze come from distasteful experience.
That stuff about smoking sounds personal, but keep it up. It matches your computer use. Smoking:Lungs, Windows:Computer.
Notice Stevie B. said he hoped to make his 84 year old uncle Fester (NSFW) a Zune owner not a user. One is clearly easier to achieve than the other. Low expectations are a key ingredient of the M$ success formula.
I don't have Linux as my primary home desktop because Windows works better for me. Do you understand that? I. Prefer. Windows. To. Linux.
I now understand that you know nothing about GNU/Linux on the desktop and wish you would shut up about it. I've been using gnu/linux since 1999, exclusively at home since 2001 or so, and could tell you things if you were not so busy FUDing up the place.
When I search for 'Ubuntu installing new nVidia drivers' I get this doozy as a result: [some sorry story]
If you had asked, I'd have told you that Mepis or Xandros are easier and more vetted than a student script run as root. Of course, I'd also ask why you thought you needed such a thing and probably learned that you did not.
Ignorance and malice are often linked. Thanks for the update, Macthorpe. Oh yeah, do you smoke?
Don't confuse the slashdot population versus the general population. The general population never even got enough of a whiff of vista to stop buying PCs with it on it.
You are right, but that's because people here have not seen anything to justify the cost of Vista. At the very least, "everyone" knows to avoid Vista till M$ cleans it up, drivers are written for it and there are enough applications that work to make it worth while. At worst for M$, the free software message of freedom has convinced many that digital restrictions are costly and unacceptable.
I have nothing against Linux but the fanboism is really starting to stink up the place.
That's nothing next to Microsoft spam posts and astroturf.
Really though, if you don't have GNU/Linux as your primary home desktop right now, you have something against Linux. The only thing M$ has over GNU/Linux is accelerated video drivers, but Nvidia and ATI have those for you and the overall effort is no more or less than that required to set up and keep running a Windoze box. Dell's move into the scene might even eliminate that difference, because they will take the time to get all that non free shit to work. Outside that, gnu/linux networking, applications and window management rule for cost, ease of use and upkeep effort. Technical excellence is in favor of free software and has been for a long time.
Somehow I doubt the more vocal fanbois in this cause are going to take up the banner of actually shelling out the bucks. Mouthpieces normally stop when their toe touches the waters, so to speak.
How many coppies of Vista have you bought? Funny how M$'s revenue uptick did nothing for Dell, now isn't it?
The general population goes where the "experts" tell them. I've got no need for a new computer because my six year old hardware does what I need it to do. People with virused out computers now have a less expensive option that's going to get a lot of recommendations. Think about it. Is the houshold IT guy going to replace his mom's broken XP machine with more of the same or is he going to spare himself all that pain and trobout by getting her a nice little Ubuntu machine that does everything needed out of the box? Hell, I might even be tempted to get something a smaller, quieter in the next year or so and Dell just got on my radar.
The corporate market may move even faster. M$ and Dell expended a lot of effort getting exclusive contracts with government agencies and big companies. Dell offering those people computers that work with anything but M$ has given M$ nightmares since 2002. Good on them! Ha ha.
Surely, these large companies could block outgoing port 25 traffic, except for their own email servers. Then the traffic can easily be monitored and spam zombies detected.
Surely, the bot net operators have already gotten around that on cable networks and those companies that do this. All they have to do is make the bot mail through the company smtp.
Your idea is a variation on the "blame the user" theme. The problem is M$ on the desktop. Big dumb companies fork over all sorts of money, do what they are told and get slammed anyway. What will be funny is when M$ themselves end up on this list. Who will they blame then?
The Register reported this about a month ago and I'm glad the issue is getting the attention it deserves. Having done some "upgrades" for a major bank and worked at a fortune 500 company, I can say that many supposedly secure corporate networks are owned by spammers. It's a big deal because it's hard to filter out.
the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks.
You would think that, seeing how much money these companies have to throw into manpower and software, but it's not always so. I'd really like to know what kind of Voodoo the few successful companies are employing.
Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc
At some companies, this is no more than an inconvenience to the user. Just think about companies that ban cell phones with cameras while allowing actual cameras. The dumber the company, the less effective and more annoying their "security" measures will be.
The problem with a bot net infection at a major company is filtering the email downstream. What ISP is going to blacklist Bank of America IP address? ISP's have to take and filter each and every mail from major companies or risk shafting mail from a real mail server they don't know about in the same IP range. By contrast, mail from home PCs gets little to no respect. ISPs feel free to reject, block and limit it all at the same time, so the home user can only send some piddling number of mails each day and only through the ISP's smtp. The botnet people can and do compensate for this by owning more machines but corporate networks are much better for them.
The root cause, of course, is M$'s easy to abuse desktop.
If you are going to laugh at future improvements, you need to go with CFL. It may be difficult to get people to recycle, but it will also be difficult to make coal plants reduce their emissions by 70%. The coal plant emission reductions have been on the books for years but they keep getting pushed back. Environmental groups back CFL because it reduces mercury now.
It would be best to have both reduced emissions and recycling. Mercury pollution is so bad that it's dangerous to eat fish. Reducing the need for electricity is a good idea, unless you like to waste your money on things you could have for cheaper. Reducing the amount of poisons released to enjoy your life style is also a good idea.
I've replaced all of my low occupancy lighting with CFL. Bathroom utility lights, hallway lights, garage and porch lights are easy targets. It's not the money it saves me it's the legwork of constantly replacing ever crappier incandescent lights that made it worth while. I'm hardly there anyway, so why not? High occupancy and quality lighting areas get incandescent, halogen where possible. Bathroom vanity, bedroom, den, kitchen and office space are going to stay incandescent for quality of life reasons. There are better ways to reduce your electric use, but CFLs the path of least resistance.
OLPC hasn't changed the XO's design to support Windows, and has no formal partnership with Microsoft, he says.
What you know: RAM was stepped up from 64MB to 256MB, some kind of Windoze will run on it and real price is almost double the target price.
How much of that price increase is due to the RAM increase is speculation, but some of it is. The price of memory is always falling and we always see more memory in cheaper devices. At the same time Windoze always hogs up some expensive amount of it so it will always be hard to run Windoze on cheap devices. They suck like that and will pay the price sooner or later.
M$ dies when enough people don't need them. They want to have their hooks in the developing world but it's more important for them to make sure that no viable alternative exists in developed markets. They exist by making it hard for people to get away from them not by making their shit easier. They sabotage BIOS, forbid music formats and do everything in their power to make sure nothing but M$ works anywhere. Devices like Palm, Blackberry, smartphones etc, that don't run Windoze give them fits because it shows people they can get along without M$. OLPC is just the first of the free hardware projects, so M$'s strategy can't work forever. Sooner or later good enough devices are going to be cheap enough to not be able to support M$ licensing fees, and that will be the end of them. The "network effect" will be broken and both hardware and software will have to compete on merit rather than "yeah but will it run Word."
Ummm, no. You seem to have a serious misconception about what exactly an operating system is.... Vista is NT 6.0. No-one at Microsoft has ever claimed otherwise; no Wikipedia editor has ever claimed otherwise.
You can dance around with that nonsense all you want, we're talking about Windoze, which has more to do with marketing than CS definitions. The Wikipedia article and M$'s Vista page both talk about what Vista is, not an OS. Both of them lead the reader to believe that Vista, has replaced everything of importance to the user. I could really care less because, despite all hype and intentions, no one wants it.
When did Microsoft ever claim to have rewritten Windows from scratch?
They used to do it regularly. NT stood for "New Technology." I can't tell you how many times they declared the "death of DOS" even while they were using the same old 16 bit functions. ME, W2K and XP were all billed as radically new but were all more of the same rehashes.
Vista is more of the same. The wikipedia entry, which they pay people to write, claims, "hundreds of new features; some of the most significant include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems." In short new everything, which clearly is not true. They go on to boast about security improvements that, once again, do nothing real for the user.
Slashdot Mirror
how stupid is it for the same folks yelling "Microsoft sucks!" on a daily basis, to turn around and ask for access to some of that suckage for themselves?
That would be stupid, which is why few people really do what you say. Some people foolishly believe they can work with M$ and effortlessly exchange data with their users. M$ tells them this is so, and some people still believe it. Their problems are similar to mine, but their surprise is all their own.
I reject M$ outright. I don't want their shit, I want them to leave me alone. But they don't because they want everyone to pay the M$ tax and shove that agenda every way they can. I tell people exactly how M$ screws them and recommend they use free software instead. The tighter they squeeze their honest customers, the more justified I am.
In this case M$ sucks because they do non free software in the most abusive way possible and pretend to be all the good things free software is. This is what they always do to their competitors and anyone who's followed them long enough will recognize the infantile reasoning they push: Our stuff is everything everyone else claims for their stuff and Everyone else has our problems and worse. You might remember these tactics from kindergarden and remember why they don't really work in a company/customer relationship.
Customers don't the expect abuse which inevitably comes from M$. When people use M$, their data is trapped into the one or two hardware platforms M$ "supports" and M$ regularly breaks that data to sell them an "upgrade". This approach would fail if there were any easy alternatives.
To support the upgrade train, M$ purposefully uses their coercive monopoly power to break alternate implementations, from bios to file formats. If that were not enough, they service providers to make life hard too. ISPs block ports and crimp upload speed to make up for M$ shortfalls. They even try to make it hard to work with business and government without their crappy software. No, I don't really need them and I consider gnu/linux use far easier, despite the roadblocks they have put in place. Their booby traps ultimately harm their customers more than anyone else.
I'd love to just sit back and watch M$ fade away, but they won't unless people who know computing reject them tell others about it. They are out to screw all of us, so tell them to go to hell.
A software product/framework can be portable, cross platform without being Free.
It's not portable if you can't move it to a platform of YOUR choice. Something that's not free may have SDKs for more than one platform, but that does not really make it portable. Being "open" does not help either. They could publish their entire source code but it would not be free if it was patent and copyright restrictions that keep you from doing what you want with it.
These days, that lack of freedom is a distinct disadvantage that will cost M$. It's always been a disadvantage to non free code, but the saving grace was a lack working alternative and someone might pay you for it. Because there are now entire free software systems, non free code has run out of saving graces. It won't even make money. Control is a loser.
Is there anyone, anywhere who thinks Microsoft will ever do anything that's really free, and therefore portable, cross platform and all that other stuff they would like to say about .NET? The more they hype it, the more obvious the shortfall.
If you can find me a single definition of "censor" as a verb that refers exclusively to the government, I'd be shocked.
Try the bill of rights, amendment 1. OK, OK, they don't use the word censor they use the word "freedom" to get their point across.
I wrote a little ROT13 decoder and passed their statement through it and it came out, "09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0" before it segfaulted. My code might not be the best.
My assumption is that, one way or another, this case isn't winnable under the DMCA.
What, are you crazy? Censorship is impossible when people decide they've had enough. The rebellion has spread so far, it won't be long before people are spraypainting, "09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0 is the key," on bridges or hosting DeCSS in the open. What's the MAFIAA going to do then, sue spray paint makers? Right, the crackdown has failed and it's going to break them. The MAFIAA has officially screwed the pooch. Honest people deserve to live in an upright manner - the DMCA was wrong from the beginning and it's going to be torn down.
This is about your freedom to do what you want to the bits on your computer. If you don't have that, it's not your computer.
Not to mention the fact that Xstroke is designed to recognize mouse gestures and single characters, not whole words, which makes it really bad at actually recognizing handwriting!
It does graffiti excellently and you've obviously never used it.
I was (and still am) complaining about lack of APPLICATIONS, not libraries or hardware support. ... there's a grand total of about four note-taking applications (Xournal, Gournal, Jarnal, NoteLab) for non-Windows systems. They all suck. ... (compared to Windows Journal or OneNote). They're uniformly completely unusable. ... There's nothing even slightly comparable to all the other tablet applications for Windows (e.g. ink-based games, music notation programs, sticky notes, calculators/equation editors, etc.).
Suck, completely unusable, slightly comparable and anger... now I'm starting to feel like I'm talking to some kind of hyperbolic M$ troll.
Of course there are plenty of games available, as well as sticky notes and all that jazz in the Debian repositories if you care for that sort of thing. KDE's PIM blows everything else away, so I'm not sure what applications you are after and where you get your quality standards. The little drawing program from GPE and KDE protable are both good. Inkscape, which ports from Debian, is better. I imagine you've tried those note taking applications about as much as you have xstroke. All of these applications work with xstroke because xstroke just take the place of a keyboard and mouse when you want it to (yes, you can turn it off) I've watched people try to use one note don't think very much of it, but to each his own. I still think it's easier to use paper and pencil for lecture notes and then to take a picture to get it onto the computer then mark it up with a keyboard. Given the adoption rate of tablets with your favortie software loaded onto it, I think most people agree with me - those tools are inadequate and the task is a fools errand.
Believe me when I say, Yazan doesn't care whether or not people are running Norton's products.
Oh, I can believe that and I'm sure Yazan is good at what he does. That's not what amused me.
Symantec security researcher Yazan Gable has put forward an explanation as to why the number of denial of service attacks has been declining (coincident with the rise of spam). His theory is that DoS attacks are no longer profitable to attackers.
Surely he meant it was because their super efficient Windoze clients had secured the world and saved us all from this and other dastardly threats! No? Oh well.
How's a bunch of software designed for PDAs going to help people who have full-size Tablet PCs, which need full-size yet stylus-friendly applications?
Xstroke is a very good handwriting recognition tool. It works full screen over X and all of the software modified for PDA's can also run with larger screens. Try it some time.
I can only assume the person you were watching was a ham-fisted recovering cocaine addict with Parkinson's in a cold room.
I have nothing to do with Steve Ballmer or any other person who recommends Vista.
Why shouldn't M$ market to dead people? Just look at all the nice things dead people have done for M$. Believe it or not, they have updated things for Zune with less success than they had convincing GWB not to dismantle them. For all the services rendered, dead people will be rewarded with one non refundable, non transferable, surplus Zune. Jokes about "squirting" Uncle Fester here are beneath even my low standards of humor.
I've noticed Balmer appearing/interview on a number of media outlets recently. ... Why do they feel the need for publicity now?
No one can get enough Fester! This time he even mentioned an old uncle. Cue those terrible Canadians, "Shut your f-----g face uncle f----r!...." Now go buy Vista, lots of it is sitting on shelves. Please go buy vista, I'll put a lightbulb in my mouth for you if you do.
On second thought, please don't.
[M$ has] Tablet PC applications.
OpenZaurus
I now understand that you know nothing about Windows on the desktop and wish you would shut up about it. I've been using Windows since 1993, exclusively at home since 1996 or so, and could tell you things if you were not so busy FUDing up the place.
Hmmm, telling people about Windows on a free software site dedicated to advancing gnu/linux is ... flambait.
Just the same, there's not much about Windoze you can tell me. I got my first computer in the 1980s and started my long waste of time with DOS in 1988. I'm still forced to use various incarnations of the monster at work, thank you. While Vista is not on anyone's menu yet, I've seen it attempt to work more than once. Really, the things I tell you about Windoze come from distasteful experience.
That stuff about smoking sounds personal, but keep it up. It matches your computer use. Smoking:Lungs, Windows:Computer.
Notice Stevie B. said he hoped to make his 84 year old uncle Fester (NSFW) a Zune owner not a user. One is clearly easier to achieve than the other. Low expectations are a key ingredient of the M$ success formula.
I don't have Linux as my primary home desktop because Windows works better for me. Do you understand that? I. Prefer. Windows. To. Linux.
I now understand that you know nothing about GNU/Linux on the desktop and wish you would shut up about it. I've been using gnu/linux since 1999, exclusively at home since 2001 or so, and could tell you things if you were not so busy FUDing up the place.
When I search for 'Ubuntu installing new nVidia drivers' I get this doozy as a result: [some sorry story]
If you had asked, I'd have told you that Mepis or Xandros are easier and more vetted than a student script run as root. Of course, I'd also ask why you thought you needed such a thing and probably learned that you did not.
Ignorance and malice are often linked. Thanks for the update, Macthorpe. Oh yeah, do you smoke?
Don't confuse the slashdot population versus the general population. The general population never even got enough of a whiff of vista to stop buying PCs with it on it.
You are right, but that's because people here have not seen anything to justify the cost of Vista. At the very least, "everyone" knows to avoid Vista till M$ cleans it up, drivers are written for it and there are enough applications that work to make it worth while. At worst for M$, the free software message of freedom has convinced many that digital restrictions are costly and unacceptable.
I have nothing against Linux but the fanboism is really starting to stink up the place.
That's nothing next to Microsoft spam posts and astroturf.
Really though, if you don't have GNU/Linux as your primary home desktop right now, you have something against Linux. The only thing M$ has over GNU/Linux is accelerated video drivers, but Nvidia and ATI have those for you and the overall effort is no more or less than that required to set up and keep running a Windoze box. Dell's move into the scene might even eliminate that difference, because they will take the time to get all that non free shit to work. Outside that, gnu/linux networking, applications and window management rule for cost, ease of use and upkeep effort. Technical excellence is in favor of free software and has been for a long time.
Somehow I doubt the more vocal fanbois in this cause are going to take up the banner of actually shelling out the bucks. Mouthpieces normally stop when their toe touches the waters, so to speak.
How many coppies of Vista have you bought? Funny how M$'s revenue uptick did nothing for Dell, now isn't it?
The general population goes where the "experts" tell them. I've got no need for a new computer because my six year old hardware does what I need it to do. People with virused out computers now have a less expensive option that's going to get a lot of recommendations. Think about it. Is the houshold IT guy going to replace his mom's broken XP machine with more of the same or is he going to spare himself all that pain and trobout by getting her a nice little Ubuntu machine that does everything needed out of the box? Hell, I might even be tempted to get something a smaller, quieter in the next year or so and Dell just got on my radar.
The corporate market may move even faster. M$ and Dell expended a lot of effort getting exclusive contracts with government agencies and big companies. Dell offering those people computers that work with anything but M$ has given M$ nightmares since 2002. Good on them! Ha ha.
2007 is the year of GNU/Linux.
Surely, these large companies could block outgoing port 25 traffic, except for their own email servers. Then the traffic can easily be monitored and spam zombies detected.
Surely, the bot net operators have already gotten around that on cable networks and those companies that do this. All they have to do is make the bot mail through the company smtp.
Your idea is a variation on the "blame the user" theme. The problem is M$ on the desktop. Big dumb companies fork over all sorts of money, do what they are told and get slammed anyway. What will be funny is when M$ themselves end up on this list. Who will they blame then?
The Register reported this about a month ago and I'm glad the issue is getting the attention it deserves. Having done some "upgrades" for a major bank and worked at a fortune 500 company, I can say that many supposedly secure corporate networks are owned by spammers. It's a big deal because it's hard to filter out.
the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks.
You would think that, seeing how much money these companies have to throw into manpower and software, but it's not always so. I'd really like to know what kind of Voodoo the few successful companies are employing.
Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc
At some companies, this is no more than an inconvenience to the user. Just think about companies that ban cell phones with cameras while allowing actual cameras. The dumber the company, the less effective and more annoying their "security" measures will be.
The problem with a bot net infection at a major company is filtering the email downstream. What ISP is going to blacklist Bank of America IP address? ISP's have to take and filter each and every mail from major companies or risk shafting mail from a real mail server they don't know about in the same IP range. By contrast, mail from home PCs gets little to no respect. ISPs feel free to reject, block and limit it all at the same time, so the home user can only send some piddling number of mails each day and only through the ISP's smtp. The botnet people can and do compensate for this by owning more machines but corporate networks are much better for them.
The root cause, of course, is M$'s easy to abuse desktop.
If you are going to laugh at future improvements, you need to go with CFL. It may be difficult to get people to recycle, but it will also be difficult to make coal plants reduce their emissions by 70%. The coal plant emission reductions have been on the books for years but they keep getting pushed back. Environmental groups back CFL because it reduces mercury now.
It would be best to have both reduced emissions and recycling. Mercury pollution is so bad that it's dangerous to eat fish. Reducing the need for electricity is a good idea, unless you like to waste your money on things you could have for cheaper. Reducing the amount of poisons released to enjoy your life style is also a good idea.
I've replaced all of my low occupancy lighting with CFL. Bathroom utility lights, hallway lights, garage and porch lights are easy targets. It's not the money it saves me it's the legwork of constantly replacing ever crappier incandescent lights that made it worth while. I'm hardly there anyway, so why not? High occupancy and quality lighting areas get incandescent, halogen where possible. Bathroom vanity, bedroom, den, kitchen and office space are going to stay incandescent for quality of life reasons. There are better ways to reduce your electric use, but CFLs the path of least resistance.
What was said:
OLPC hasn't changed the XO's design to support Windows, and has no formal partnership with Microsoft, he says.
What you know: RAM was stepped up from 64MB to 256MB, some kind of Windoze will run on it and real price is almost double the target price.
How much of that price increase is due to the RAM increase is speculation, but some of it is. The price of memory is always falling and we always see more memory in cheaper devices. At the same time Windoze always hogs up some expensive amount of it so it will always be hard to run Windoze on cheap devices. They suck like that and will pay the price sooner or later.
M$ dies when enough people don't need them. They want to have their hooks in the developing world but it's more important for them to make sure that no viable alternative exists in developed markets. They exist by making it hard for people to get away from them not by making their shit easier. They sabotage BIOS, forbid music formats and do everything in their power to make sure nothing but M$ works anywhere. Devices like Palm, Blackberry, smartphones etc, that don't run Windoze give them fits because it shows people they can get along without M$. OLPC is just the first of the free hardware projects, so M$'s strategy can't work forever. Sooner or later good enough devices are going to be cheap enough to not be able to support M$ licensing fees, and that will be the end of them. The "network effect" will be broken and both hardware and software will have to compete on merit rather than "yeah but will it run Word."
I thought I remembered a specific Solaris telnet exploit not too long ago that was incredible oversight by Sun.
You win! I give up and admit the equality of Solaris and Windoze security models. Swarms of Sun powered bots will soon take down the internet.
Ummm, no. You seem to have a serious misconception about what exactly an operating system is. ... Vista is NT 6.0. No-one at Microsoft has ever claimed otherwise; no Wikipedia editor has ever claimed otherwise.
You can dance around with that nonsense all you want, we're talking about Windoze, which has more to do with marketing than CS definitions. The Wikipedia article and M$'s Vista page both talk about what Vista is, not an OS. Both of them lead the reader to believe that Vista, has replaced everything of importance to the user. I could really care less because, despite all hype and intentions, no one wants it.
When did Microsoft ever claim to have rewritten Windows from scratch?
They used to do it regularly. NT stood for "New Technology." I can't tell you how many times they declared the "death of DOS" even while they were using the same old 16 bit functions. ME, W2K and XP were all billed as radically new but were all more of the same rehashes.
Vista is more of the same. The wikipedia entry, which they pay people to write, claims, "hundreds of new features; some of the most significant include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems." In short new everything, which clearly is not true. They go on to boast about security improvements that, once again, do nothing real for the user.