Interesting. I might disagree entirely with it, but I'd like to see some of the arguments.
For instance: Does he differentiate between graffiti on public structures (bridges) and private ones (peoples' houses)? Or between vandalism of manmade vs. natural items?
Ultimately though, I still say that studying the causes is counterproductive. By trying to differentiate between little shits who like destroying and "souls in anguish, trying to establish themselves," we are giving credence to one form of vandalism, whatever the medium used is. Studying and trying to ascribe causal connections to abberant behaviour does implicitly validate their actions to some extent.
Let's swing back to the example of script kiddies and (black hat) hackers here. We can study them in an attempt to understand their motivation, but all we're doing at the end of the day is suggesting that their motivation might be legitimate, which is (as I said) counterproductive. What leads to script kiddies? The same old things: Bad parenting, bullying, a sick mind, overactive hormones, etc., etc.. The same things that have lead to criminal behaviour for centuries. There's nothing new here! There's no great insight to discover! Bad behaviour should be punished, and if there's a valid need to study it, then study it by visiting a jail, like they do with serial killers.
Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics actually had an EXCELLENT example of this, now that I think of it. (I'm not a comic fan generally, but Gaiman is a brilliant writer) The series called, "The Doll's House," was about the self-glorification of serial killer culture. Damned scary, and thoughtful.
Your post is, so far, the only coherent reply I've seen (with the exception of a rather funny comment about NAMBLA).
I don't have a problem per se with the distinction between a formal and/or macro culture, vs. an informal microculture. The problem I see, though, boils down to this: You say,
"Most people would agree that there definately are some cases where one [fine-grained] culture is clearly inferior to another, so by calling the script kiddies a "culture" doesn't logically imply that there is a claim that their actions are OK because all cultures are equal."
This makes perfect sense for rational people. However, the existence of a culture implies some sort of internal structure and value system. Script kiddies, for instance, may have an unwritten code of how to behave towards each other. Any value system like this, unfortunately starts to look rational from a certain perspective; we can easily start to question if their values ARE legitimate, and if we should embrace them as different-but-equal.
It sounds ludicrous, but it happens not infrequently. And of course, once that door has been opened even slightly, there's a whole world of "unfair persecution" for the members to hide behind.
I would say that there comes a point where instead of trying to understand a 'culture,' we start arresting the criminals for their crimes, instead. We can't let society's mores go unquestioned, but it should be pretty easy to see that one person (or group) violating the property of someone else for fun and entertainment (and knowledge too!) is a very straightforward crime.
Wonderful. Now the vandals have a culture. Charming. Let's next do an article on the graffiti "artists" who spraypainted my brother's garage. How about the spamming "free speech activists?" Or the good souls at NAMBLA?
Vandalism is vandalism, and crime is crime, no matter how you dress it up. Criminals have a long history of pretending to walk to the beat of a different drummer, being misunderstood, put-down, trod on, etc.; but at the end of the day, they're just fucking criminals looking for a scapegoat instead of taking responsibility for their crimes.
New games cost new-game prices. I don't have a problem with that.
What bugs me is that I can't find UT2003 anywhere. I figure THAT should be floating around $25cdn now. Instead, they pull it from the shelves and only sell one game at a time.
I don't think that the proposed actions can really prevent a monopolist from marketing a good product. Given that MS has a monopoly on the desktop market, then preventing them from bundling apps is effectively the same as putting them in the same category as every other apps developer out there--a third party developer!
How can that hurt them, other than preventing them from misusing their monopolistic position?
You've got it right: Just explain it directly to them. Keep it simple, concise, and don't pass any blame. Circumstances just happen sometimes.
I've had the same question asked of me in the past. Turns out that I had moved from a one-year contract to a permanent job, which I left when I moved to a foreign country, where I stayed for two years, etc. etc.
What they're looking for is flightiness, or chronic long-term-unemployability. If you have good reasons for your shorter stints (as you do), then they'll understand that that's how the market goes.
It's been clear to me for over a year that organised crime has had its fingers in spamming, and mostly in the back-end products being advertised through spam. Who else can get hundreds of tons of Xanax or whatever other drug you want, and sell it to you online without a legitimate prescription?
And as we've seen, both spammers and virus writers have deeper and stronger resources than we usually give them credit for. Has anyone successfully DOSed Alan Ralsky? Nope--he's got too much hardware, and is too sophisticated. That expertise and money is coming from somewhere, and I can promise that it's not the poor suckers willing to buy from spammers.
I would like to offer a rather offended correction.
You describe Michael as a "leftist lunatic anti-american activist." I am a leftist lunatic anti-american activist. Michael is just a wingnut! (Well, OK. He's a wingnut with no ability to string two thoughts together coherently)
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'll disagree.
First of all, Bill Gates got started as a programmer. From most accounts, probably a fairly good programmer.
Then he went to the business world, and became really good at that. Frighteningly good.
BUT, there's nothing either hack-ish or particularly innovative for that matter, in his behaviour. Actually, there was one thing he did: Copyright, patent, and charge through the nose for the basic software needed for a machine to work.
Desktop computing was well on its way before he started to make things user friendly. Atari and Commodore had their 16-bit machines out with plug-and-play hardware, a mouse, and a GUI, when Microsoft was still pushing DOS. Of course, the Mac predated them both, and was VERY popular.
Bill Gates happened to be the right guy at the right time in the right place to capitalise on this stuff. Without him, the market would be different but no less advanced than it is now.
Interesting poings. When you say that you work in SAN troubleshooting, are you working in deployed environments or something closer to hardware design?
The latter I'll agree, won't go away. Designing hardware (and the stuff that goes with it--designing the protocols and the infrastructure that goes along with it) will be an ongoing issues for the forseeable future.
But I'm currently working at a client with a really well planned server room, from design through implementation and standards. We've got roughly 50 Unix servers (2-8 processors per), and maybe 90 WIntel servers. A month ago we needed to add two new fibre switches to our Hitachi storage and rebalance the load across it and our old switches, and I discovered that a brain-damaged chimp could have done it. Keep in mind that the Hitachi is one of the most convoluted pieces of gear to administer made these days.
You're right that troubleshooting skills are massively important, but my real question is how necessary is it to have a Network Engineering degree (or any other degree) to learn to troubleshoot properly?
I think that between the huge interest in CS (and the resulting large numbers of degrees that will be coming out for the next several years), and the realisation by IT consuming companies that they don't need degrees to design and run their infrastructure, that there will be a glut of degrees on the market. Furthermore, I think too many people are going into those degree programs to get jobs like this.
Fundamentally though, we agree: "The real innovation, and fun, happens at the companies that make all those building blocks, and they aren't going to need an appreciably different mix of engineers in the future." I couldn't have said it better, and THOSE companies will be hiring for a long time.
Hmm. You're starting college/university presumably this fall. Four years at school, a bit of time looking for an 'experience' job, and it'll be about 2010 by the time you're ready to start your career.
By then, I expect IT will be a wasteland of mostly automated systems. The only part of computing that won't be automated will be user admin, and nobody will be any more inclined to do that sort of work then than they are now.
I hate to say it (especially since it's my own field!), but computing in any aspect other than the core stuff--circuit design, hardware topology, and in a very small segment, OS coding--will be dead before I retire. Networking in some aspects is already there. Are you sure this is a field you want to be starting out in?
Perhaps you should do some digging into the terms then.
An editorial is an opinion piece. The author may be full of shit, but he's entitled to his own opinion on the issue, and it doesn't matter what facts (or nonfacts) he uses to back up his opinion.
You just got $7000, and you want to spend it on networking shite? My advice is DON'T BOTHER!!!!!!!
Consider that $7000 spent now is $700 worth of junk next year. You could buy a nice new computer, maybe some other toys, and give $5000 to the bums in the street; and in a year, you'd be no further ahead or behind than if you spent it all.
If you don't want to toss it into the gutter, you could buy yourself some mutual funds for retirement planning, put it towards a down-payment on a house, buy some power tools, or....christ--ANYTHING except flushing it down the technology drain.
Step awawy from the computer. Go outside. Breathe.
The OP was talking about tone creation--taking a signal from a guitar that he created, distorting it through non-square-wave clipping (further adding to the creative process), and then eventually passing it on to the listener as he intended. Tube amps for reproduction will at best, do something that solid state can manage easily; and at worst, will distort the creator's intent.
If, as a consumer of music, you decide that you want to _change_ the sound of the music, then you'd be better off getting an equaliser, a mixer, or buying some over-the-top test equipment to induce distortion into the reproduction chain, rather than suffering the whims of a misguided tube amp designer.
The ONLY people who might lump guitar tube amps together with stereo reproduction tube amps are the hardcore audiophiles, and nobody takes them seriously except themselves.
Vacuum tubes as a tone source are notoriously difficult to duplicate, and very distinctive. We're getting there, but it's not quite a done deal. Vacuum tubes as a tone reproducer are relatively difficult to do well, and the very best attempts approach...good solid state design.
There are those of us--even some fairly serious audiophiles--who can't be bothered with tubes, except when we're creating a sound (i.e. with a guitar). My advice to you is to thank the tube-o-philes for keeping alive a market for replacement tubes.:-)
Viruses are turning computers into spam relays. Other viruses are DoSing various anti-spam blackholes. Yeah, this one happened to hit SCO and Microsoft, but the payload is easily changed, now that the virus framework is out there.
Viruses are being PROFESSIONALLY written to HELP SPAMMERS! Go read some recent comments from Symmantec folks, and you'll see the same conclusion: Spam and viruses are being funded and run by organised crime.
Will Microsoft stop them? Nope! The US government? Not a chance. AOL? Laughable.
I quite believe that the author (whether Andy or not) was doing exactly what he said--his job, that he was no doubt being paid very well for.
Your point is somewhat confusing, but well taken. However, it fails to address one issue: This isn't a governmental claim, it's an Amnesty International claim.
Microsoft, as a US company, doesn't have any requirement to do what's good for the US people--it merely has to avoid breaking the laws about what they can't produce. If they write software which is legal, and sell it to a country which also considers it legal, without violating any US sanctions, then they're legally in the clear to exactly the same degree as free software developers.
Then we bring the moral question into play, and find that both commercial and OSS software are staring at a fairly level playing field, and both are promoting (either directly or indirectly) their software for questionable purposes as well as noble ones.
Re:usability vs. time
on
KISS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So good of you to spare some free time to correct the flaws of someone who studies and researches usability professionally.
Gimmicks do NOT exist to meet market demand. They are added to CREATE market demand. Cell phones didn't add games because people demanded them; the manufacturers added games and then marketed them as an essential reason to throw away your old phone.
Companies used the gimmicks as a tool for the marketers to create an artificial market demand. Sooner or later, the gimmicks become so silly that even good marketing can't sell them. That's when the crap features disappear, and the market becomes more-or-less stable. That's also the death of a growth-based company, and so manufacturers will do ANYTHING to avoid the natural evolution down the back slope of the bell curve.
Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!
Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.
"At an investment conference in January, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson explains his company's recent layoffs: "There are 15 to 20 percent of the people that really add 80 percent of the value. Although we have a lot of good people, you can cut a fair amount... and still be well positioned for the upturn." Paulson later apologizes in a voice-mail message sent to every Goldman employee."
Y'know, this is no different than just about any CEO speech I've heard in any of a dozen companies in the last five years. How STUPID do you need to get a job that pays millions like this?
Thanks--this post answered my questions about Linux philosophy fairly nicely. If Linus himself isn't that much of a zealot, then I can continue using Linux with a clear conscience.
"Now I know the argument you get from Mac-crazies--that if the PC had better account management this wouldn't happen. NONSENSE! A user-level program with no special "root" access can easily scan through YOUR mailbox and pick of email addresses and send out email. ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM, even a properly adminstered Un*x system."
Not a Mac-crazy, but how the hell do you figure this???
A non-root account can't read any other users' mailboxes unless a system is set up incorrectly.
Slashdot Mirror
" I blame the fragmentation of flash memory standards for this..."
There now! You just answered your own question!
You're right on pretty much all counts. It would make sense, it would be slick, and it hasn't happened for reasons of fragmentation. More's the pity.
Interesting. I might disagree entirely with it, but I'd like to see some of the arguments.
For instance: Does he differentiate between graffiti on public structures (bridges) and private ones (peoples' houses)? Or between vandalism of manmade vs. natural items?
Ultimately though, I still say that studying the causes is counterproductive. By trying to differentiate between little shits who like destroying and "souls in anguish, trying to establish themselves," we are giving credence to one form of vandalism, whatever the medium used is. Studying and trying to ascribe causal connections to abberant behaviour does implicitly validate their actions to some extent.
Let's swing back to the example of script kiddies and (black hat) hackers here. We can study them in an attempt to understand their motivation, but all we're doing at the end of the day is suggesting that their motivation might be legitimate, which is (as I said) counterproductive. What leads to script kiddies? The same old things: Bad parenting, bullying, a sick mind, overactive hormones, etc., etc.. The same things that have lead to criminal behaviour for centuries. There's nothing new here! There's no great insight to discover! Bad behaviour should be punished, and if there's a valid need to study it, then study it by visiting a jail, like they do with serial killers.
Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics actually had an EXCELLENT example of this, now that I think of it. (I'm not a comic fan generally, but Gaiman is a brilliant writer) The series called, "The Doll's House," was about the self-glorification of serial killer culture. Damned scary, and thoughtful.
Your post is, so far, the only coherent reply I've seen (with the exception of a rather funny comment about NAMBLA).
I don't have a problem per se with the distinction between a formal and/or macro culture, vs. an informal microculture. The problem I see, though, boils down to this: You say,
"Most people would agree that there definately are some cases where one [fine-grained] culture is clearly inferior to another, so by calling the script kiddies a "culture" doesn't logically imply that there is a claim that their actions are OK because all cultures are equal."
This makes perfect sense for rational people. However, the existence of a culture implies some sort of internal structure and value system. Script kiddies, for instance, may have an unwritten code of how to behave towards each other. Any value system like this, unfortunately starts to look rational from a certain perspective; we can easily start to question if their values ARE legitimate, and if we should embrace them as different-but-equal.
It sounds ludicrous, but it happens not infrequently. And of course, once that door has been opened even slightly, there's a whole world of "unfair persecution" for the members to hide behind.
I would say that there comes a point where instead of trying to understand a 'culture,' we start arresting the criminals for their crimes, instead. We can't let society's mores go unquestioned, but it should be pretty easy to see that one person (or group) violating the property of someone else for fun and entertainment (and knowledge too!) is a very straightforward crime.
Wonderful. Now the vandals have a culture. Charming. Let's next do an article on the graffiti "artists" who spraypainted my brother's garage. How about the spamming "free speech activists?" Or the good souls at NAMBLA?
Vandalism is vandalism, and crime is crime, no matter how you dress it up. Criminals have a long history of pretending to walk to the beat of a different drummer, being misunderstood, put-down, trod on, etc.; but at the end of the day, they're just fucking criminals looking for a scapegoat instead of taking responsibility for their crimes.
New games cost new-game prices. I don't have a problem with that.
What bugs me is that I can't find UT2003 anywhere. I figure THAT should be floating around $25cdn now. Instead, they pull it from the shelves and only sell one game at a time.
I don't think that the proposed actions can really prevent a monopolist from marketing a good product. Given that MS has a monopoly on the desktop market, then preventing them from bundling apps is effectively the same as putting them in the same category as every other apps developer out there--a third party developer!
How can that hurt them, other than preventing them from misusing their monopolistic position?
You've got it right: Just explain it directly to them. Keep it simple, concise, and don't pass any blame. Circumstances just happen sometimes.
I've had the same question asked of me in the past. Turns out that I had moved from a one-year contract to a permanent job, which I left when I moved to a foreign country, where I stayed for two years, etc. etc.
What they're looking for is flightiness, or chronic long-term-unemployability. If you have good reasons for your shorter stints (as you do), then they'll understand that that's how the market goes.
Damn straight!
It's been clear to me for over a year that organised crime has had its fingers in spamming, and mostly in the back-end products being advertised through spam. Who else can get hundreds of tons of Xanax or whatever other drug you want, and sell it to you online without a legitimate prescription?
And as we've seen, both spammers and virus writers have deeper and stronger resources than we usually give them credit for. Has anyone successfully DOSed Alan Ralsky? Nope--he's got too much hardware, and is too sophisticated. That expertise and money is coming from somewhere, and I can promise that it's not the poor suckers willing to buy from spammers.
I would like to offer a rather offended correction.
You describe Michael as a "leftist lunatic anti-american activist." I am a leftist lunatic anti-american activist. Michael is just a wingnut! (Well, OK. He's a wingnut with no ability to string two thoughts together coherently)
OK, I'll disagree.
First of all, Bill Gates got started as a programmer. From most accounts, probably a fairly good programmer.
Then he went to the business world, and became really good at that. Frighteningly good.
BUT, there's nothing either hack-ish or particularly innovative for that matter, in his behaviour. Actually, there was one thing he did: Copyright, patent, and charge through the nose for the basic software needed for a machine to work.
Desktop computing was well on its way before he started to make things user friendly. Atari and Commodore had their 16-bit machines out with plug-and-play hardware, a mouse, and a GUI, when Microsoft was still pushing DOS. Of course, the Mac predated them both, and was VERY popular.
Bill Gates happened to be the right guy at the right time in the right place to capitalise on this stuff. Without him, the market would be different but no less advanced than it is now.
Damn skippy! And unlike some on the list (ESR comes to mind), Kibo at least DID something. Hell, he rewrote network history.
Interesting poings. When you say that you work in SAN troubleshooting, are you working in deployed environments or something closer to hardware design?
The latter I'll agree, won't go away. Designing hardware (and the stuff that goes with it--designing the protocols and the infrastructure that goes along with it) will be an ongoing issues for the forseeable future.
But I'm currently working at a client with a really well planned server room, from design through implementation and standards. We've got roughly 50 Unix servers (2-8 processors per), and maybe 90 WIntel servers. A month ago we needed to add two new fibre switches to our Hitachi storage and rebalance the load across it and our old switches, and I discovered that a brain-damaged chimp could have done it. Keep in mind that the Hitachi is one of the most convoluted pieces of gear to administer made these days.
You're right that troubleshooting skills are massively important, but my real question is how necessary is it to have a Network Engineering degree (or any other degree) to learn to troubleshoot properly?
I think that between the huge interest in CS (and the resulting large numbers of degrees that will be coming out for the next several years), and the realisation by IT consuming companies that they don't need degrees to design and run their infrastructure, that there will be a glut of degrees on the market. Furthermore, I think too many people are going into those degree programs to get jobs like this.
Fundamentally though, we agree: "The real innovation, and fun, happens at the companies that make all those building blocks, and they aren't going to need an appreciably different mix of engineers in the future." I couldn't have said it better, and THOSE companies will be hiring for a long time.
Hmm. You're starting college/university presumably this fall. Four years at school, a bit of time looking for an 'experience' job, and it'll be about 2010 by the time you're ready to start your career.
By then, I expect IT will be a wasteland of mostly automated systems. The only part of computing that won't be automated will be user admin, and nobody will be any more inclined to do that sort of work then than they are now.
I hate to say it (especially since it's my own field!), but computing in any aspect other than the core stuff--circuit design, hardware topology, and in a very small segment, OS coding--will be dead before I retire. Networking in some aspects is already there. Are you sure this is a field you want to be starting out in?
Perhaps you should do some digging into the terms then.
An editorial is an opinion piece. The author may be full of shit, but he's entitled to his own opinion on the issue, and it doesn't matter what facts (or nonfacts) he uses to back up his opinion.
Nonetheless, he IS full of shit.
This IS a serious post.
You just got $7000, and you want to spend it on networking shite? My advice is DON'T BOTHER!!!!!!!
Consider that $7000 spent now is $700 worth of junk next year. You could buy a nice new computer, maybe some other toys, and give $5000 to the bums in the street; and in a year, you'd be no further ahead or behind than if you spent it all.
If you don't want to toss it into the gutter, you could buy yourself some mutual funds for retirement planning, put it towards a down-payment on a house, buy some power tools, or....christ--ANYTHING except flushing it down the technology drain.
Step awawy from the computer. Go outside. Breathe.
I love "politely snotty" comments like this.
The OP was talking about tone creation--taking a signal from a guitar that he created, distorting it through non-square-wave clipping (further adding to the creative process), and then eventually passing it on to the listener as he intended. Tube amps for reproduction will at best, do something that solid state can manage easily; and at worst, will distort the creator's intent.
If, as a consumer of music, you decide that you want to _change_ the sound of the music, then you'd be better off getting an equaliser, a mixer, or buying some over-the-top test equipment to induce distortion into the reproduction chain, rather than suffering the whims of a misguided tube amp designer.
To you, I say bravo and don't worry.
:-)
The ONLY people who might lump guitar tube amps together with stereo reproduction tube amps are the hardcore audiophiles, and nobody takes them seriously except themselves.
Vacuum tubes as a tone source are notoriously difficult to duplicate, and very distinctive. We're getting there, but it's not quite a done deal. Vacuum tubes as a tone reproducer are relatively difficult to do well, and the very best attempts approach...good solid state design.
There are those of us--even some fairly serious audiophiles--who can't be bothered with tubes, except when we're creating a sound (i.e. with a guitar). My advice to you is to thank the tube-o-philes for keeping alive a market for replacement tubes.
Doesn't anyone see the writing on the wall yet?
Viruses are turning computers into spam relays. Other viruses are DoSing various anti-spam blackholes. Yeah, this one happened to hit SCO and Microsoft, but the payload is easily changed, now that the virus framework is out there.
Viruses are being PROFESSIONALLY written to HELP SPAMMERS! Go read some recent comments from Symmantec folks, and you'll see the same conclusion: Spam and viruses are being funded and run by organised crime.
Will Microsoft stop them? Nope! The US government? Not a chance. AOL? Laughable.
I quite believe that the author (whether Andy or not) was doing exactly what he said--his job, that he was no doubt being paid very well for.
Your point is somewhat confusing, but well taken. However, it fails to address one issue: This isn't a governmental claim, it's an Amnesty International claim.
Microsoft, as a US company, doesn't have any requirement to do what's good for the US people--it merely has to avoid breaking the laws about what they can't produce. If they write software which is legal, and sell it to a country which also considers it legal, without violating any US sanctions, then they're legally in the clear to exactly the same degree as free software developers.
Then we bring the moral question into play, and find that both commercial and OSS software are staring at a fairly level playing field, and both are promoting (either directly or indirectly) their software for questionable purposes as well as noble ones.
No no no! Women suck! Men lick.
So good of you to spare some free time to correct the flaws of someone who studies and researches usability professionally.
Gimmicks do NOT exist to meet market demand. They are added to CREATE market demand. Cell phones didn't add games because people demanded them; the manufacturers added games and then marketed them as an essential reason to throw away your old phone.
Companies used the gimmicks as a tool for the marketers to create an artificial market demand. Sooner or later, the gimmicks become so silly that even good marketing can't sell them. That's when the crap features disappear, and the market becomes more-or-less stable. That's also the death of a growth-based company, and so manufacturers will do ANYTHING to avoid the natural evolution down the back slope of the bell curve.
Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!
Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.
"At an investment conference in January, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson explains his company's recent layoffs: "There are 15 to 20 percent of the people that really add 80 percent of the value. Although we have a lot of good people, you can cut a fair amount ... and still be well positioned for the upturn." Paulson later apologizes in a voice-mail message sent to every Goldman employee."
Y'know, this is no different than just about any CEO speech I've heard in any of a dozen companies in the last five years. How STUPID do you need to get a job that pays millions like this?
Thanks--this post answered my questions about Linux philosophy fairly nicely. If Linus himself isn't that much of a zealot, then I can continue using Linux with a clear conscience.
"Now I know the argument you get from Mac-crazies--that if the PC had better account management this wouldn't happen. NONSENSE! A user-level program with no special "root" access can easily scan through YOUR mailbox and pick of email addresses and send out email. ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM, even a properly adminstered Un*x system."
Not a Mac-crazy, but how the hell do you figure this???
A non-root account can't read any other users' mailboxes unless a system is set up incorrectly.