So you're saying it would be more like Nokia poking Apple with a stick, Apple getting out their Super Stick of Doom (patent pending), followed by Nokia crushing Apple with their Patent Log of All Things Terrible and Marvelous (patented)?
Why don't you blame the people who are REALLY responsible? The voters.
You need to extend the blame a bit further, to citizens in general. The sad fact is "the voters" is just a small subset of the citizenry, and the apathy of those who don't vote is more to blame than the misguided ideals of those who do.
I remember the one time Bush actually attempted to reduce the automatic increase in the national budget one year (he did not, in fact, attempt to spend any less money, just not increase spending by as much as usual) and he was crucified for it on almost all sides. Ever since then he was spend spend spend. He'd cut taxes, sure, that would make him popular, but he realized cutting spending would be political suicide. It is very sad indeed, given the fantastic promises our current president makes along those same lines, and the fact that once an imperfect bill goes into law it is almost never fixed.
That's one thing I wish people would wake up about - just because something is "organic" doesn't mean it is good for you! There are a hell of a lot of deadly, toxic, nasty things out there that are organic.
It drives me nuts, all this "organic" nonsense these days.
You know what's REALLY funny is that I recently watched a documentary comparing modern life to that of peasants in the middle ages, and when you strip away the comforts we have because of modern technology (plentiful high calorie foods, great medical care, comfortable cheap living materials, etc), the average peasant spent less time working for his lord than we do working for the government (i.e. taxes). Most all peasants had their own plot of land to work and a house that was their own, and they were generally more free to do whatever they wanted compared to us today. They didn't have the comforts we have, but that is simply a technological difference.
We have far more distractions which help us ignore the fact that we are far more oppressed than those who lived in the fiefdoms of the past. That's sad, especially since we consider the average peasant of old to be a quite oppressed individual.
That's what I'm starting to think, and I'm finding it absolutely hilarious, given that this is exactly the sort of stunt "The Yes Men" stage all the time. This particular stunt would be peanuts compared to some of their others.
You know what would stop every hijacking that ever has or will ever occur?
Give every single passenger a knife with a 6" blade upon boarding the plane. Seriously, what terrorist would attempt to hijack a plane like that? You think he's actually going to make it into the captain's cabin when 200+ people have the exact same weapon he has? I seriously doubt it. If everyone on board were armed, 9/11 would not have happened. Even if the hijackers were fool enough to attempt it, we would have simply heard in the news about 19 hijackers killed in an attempt to hijack four planes.
You would still want to check for bomb threats, but current screening policies are terrible for discovering bombs anyway - pack some c-4 in the shape of a little toy and you're past security as it is. No more need for metal detectors, you may or may not want to allow guns, that's iffy, since random gunfire can cause more damage to an actual flying plane than knives can. Pre-9/11 measures were more than enough to find guns though.
That's more than Schneier talked about, but his point was we already have the tools to deal with terrorism without the ineffective security theater we have now. I've known airport security was a joke ever since a former coworker of mine accidentally left a box cutter in his carry on luggage and made it through at least six TSA screenings before he found it and removed it. If they can't even catch the weapon that started this whole mess, what's the frickin point? What we really need is good intelligence and swift response on the part of law enforcement, and a willingness to fight back on the part of the passengers. The fourth plane in the 9/11 attacks is a good example, but had the passengers acted sooner they might have prevented the plane going down at all. Everything we do at the airports is just playacting, trying to stop, as Schneier put it, "movie style" hijackings that never occur in real life. It doesn't stop anything.
The cost of a piece of software involves a great deal more than just whether or not it will still run on a new system. Things like whether or not it must be configured for each individual machine/user, or if everyone can use the same configuration, how often it breaks, when it breaks how easy it is to fix, etc. Things like that can add a great deal to the cost in support dollars, which are far more expensive than all but the most expensive pieces of software. If it takes more than an hour to tweak a free program versus an equivalent non-free program, you've almost certainly blown your savings by going with the free software.
This is why Linux is almost always more expensive than Windows, at least in my experience. When something breaks in Windows, a system restore or re-installing/repairing the application fixes it, whereas I have yet to come accross a fix for a problem in Linux that was simple and straightforward. It took me a week to fix a sound issue I was having once - had I been on the clock I could have put a sizeable chunk of cash aside for a new computer with the time it took to fix that one little issue - one I've never come accross while using Windows, I might add.
In a corporate environment, Linux makes sense when you need expensive support personnel anyway, and going Linux can save you thousands of dollars in initial costs. That's why there are so many Linux web servers and mainframes and the like. For the desktop though, it doesn't make a lick of sense to use Linux, it's just way too expensive.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, has made a dozen stable releases since 2005, most of which have been fairly painless upgrades.
I completely disagree. If you did not make every incrimental upgrade in order before the next small upgrade came out, the upgrade process was a nightmare. Nothing like installing Windows SP2 on a plain jane Windows OS, skipping SP1, or doing the same with SP3 skipping 1 and 2 both. MS hotfixes generally took care of themselves with auto-update, even if you were missing a lot of updates. With Ubuntu, if you didn't dilligently fix each small error as they showed up in an upgrade cycle you'd end up with dozens of problems, even hundreds if you waited more than a few months. It was frustrating to no end, you're locked into the upgrade cycle even tighter than you are with Windows updates, it's ridiculous.
I admit I didn't stick to the LTS releases, but Linux changes so fast you end up with an even worse experience if you do use only the LTS anyway.
That only caused MS to continue SELLING it and create odd programs like their free downgrade option; their EOL terms are practically set in stone - XP's terms are a few years beyond the norm because of the late release of Windows Vista (5 years after XP, instead of the usual 2-3).
Don't get me wrong, corporate employees are just as bad as average joe customers, you just don't often get the same control over average joe's computer initially, allowing you to make things like standard images or have all the software your customers will need on a restore available for install. Without that control things start to get hairy.
By this and your previous remark, it looks like you've never done tech support. If so, then you've no idea how broken Automatic Updates can be (and make things).
Based on this and your previous remark, you've obviously never used WSUS. If so, then you've no idea how easy it is to avoid unnecessary or ill advised updates that can interfere with your current operating environment.
And if it's the Automatic Updates itself that is broken, shit man, System Restore! Or just re-image the drive. You do use imaging in your environment, right*?
* I am, of course, assuming you are in a corporate environtment. If you are dealing with consumers and not employees, god help you. You simply cannot blame the stupid shit people do on the OS. "I deleted the Windows directory, to save some space, but now my computer doesn't work!" *facepalm*
I don't know, if the drive fails, the support contract will supply a new HDD, they're all the same right?... not.
Except that that particular problem will be easy to avoid, since XP compatible hard drives up to 1.5tb will not be going anywhere for the next decade or so. Just look at PATA drives, you can still buy those if you need to, and up until a few years ago a lot of business machines still shipped with them.
Hardware manufacturers know how to play the game, they will make sure they keep their customers happy.
Not really, most business machines come with a smaller than 200gb hard drive. It will be a long, long time before they begin coming with anything greater than 1.5tb, and all of the current drives up to that level will still be available when that happens, just like PATA drives are still available today. By then, I'm sure the lumbering behemoths will have switched to Windows 7, especially since the business edition will be a far less painful switch than the Vista switch was.
You realize that's less than 1/3 of Microsoft's standard support cycle? Windows 2000 is only just going out of support this year, and XP will have another 5 years or more of hotfixes left on it, due to Vista's late (and horrible) release. That puts an Ubuntu LTS support term at less than 1/4 of Windows XP's. Microsoft doesn't sell XP any more, but they are a long way from stopping support for it.
What about when networking doesn't work? I can tell you from personal experience, it's a bitch. The man pages in Ubuntu suck, and having all your good documentation online is not necessarily a good thing. I had to rely on a windows machine to figure out how to fix it.
Also, Linux is not one operating system the same way Windows is not one operating system (there are ten major variations of Windows). In fact, Windows fits the distinction better than Linux, as each new version of Windows far more different than the various flavors of Linux. For Linux distros using the same kernel, the differences are generally similar to the differences between Windows Home, Professional, and Ultimate editions. Yeah, not as many flavors, but they all interact with each other quite well.
I've played with Linux off and on over the years, but my primary experience is recent - I switched to Ubuntu from Vista after Vista hardware issues pissed me off. I eventually switched back to Vista after about a year due to the exact same problems the GP was talking about.
The truth of the matter is everything is easier in Windows than in Linux. Linux was made by developers for developers, and that simply results in a poor non-developer experience. I've never had to edit an install script in Windows to install a program properly, I definitely can't say that for Linux.
Oh, and the term "hacker" has been used (incorrectly) in place of cracker for at least a decade now. They even call script-kiddies hackers. Hax0r is just leet speak for hacker. So, of course hax0r implies cracker, because hacker implies cracker even though there were originally distinct differences between the two.
Case in point, the very large company I work for spent millions of dollars just determining how much it would cost to upgrade to Vista from XP. Given the fact that volume licensing costs are in the neighborhood of $30-50 per license, I can tell you that the cost of the software itself was insignificant. The real cost was in upgrading all of the custom software that would not work with Vista. Given the scope of a global upgrade project, I imagine this cost was in the billions of dollars range to be large enough to cancel the project. The licensing itself would have only been in the millions of dollars range.
What free software advocates often neglect to consider the costs incurred by the free upgrade. A change in one system sometimes necessarily makes another system incompatible. Managing the changes to the system to ensure compatibility within upgrade cycles cost time and effort. Time and effort both cost significantly more money than the upfront price of a piece of software. Linux and Windows are both expensive in this way, it is the nature of software, but Linux tends to be much more expensive than Windows. Often the difference is more than enough to make up for the cost of the paid software. To expand my previoius example, a move from Windows to Linux has no hope of being cheaper than a move to Vista, and the move to Vista was far too expensive.
Because of the enhanced XP compatibility mode, a move to Windows 7 would likely be significantly cheaper than a move to Vista, which is exactly why Microsoft put it in the business and ultimate editions.
XP can't natively format anything larger than 32gb, but that's just a limitation of their formatting tool. Third party tools (HP has one that is very good) don't have this limitation and XP reads the disks just fine, obviously.
More than likely these new drives would just need an XP driver, just like the old days. It isn't common now, since most hard drives operate almost identically and so a few drivers cover almost every manufacturer, but it used to be that you got a driver disk included whenever you bought a new hard drive. We'll just start to see that popping back up since XP still makes up a large portion of the market.
... and that furthermore just about every imaging software out there will misalign and screw things up in 4Kb sector schemes.
That's why I'm in love with ImageX, it basically gives you high-tech zip files at a fraction of the size of sector-imaging software. It doesn't matter what format the original and new drives are, and by the same token sector size is also a non-issue - it has completely eliminated that problem. Unfortunately, because it is file based and a Microsoft tool, you can't use it on a filesystem that MS can't read or write to natively. I'm not sure if you can get around that limitation with the various filesystem drivers and disk imaging tools or not. That is one area in which sector copying always works no matter what. New versions of Ghost are similar to ImageX and are capable of handling at least ext2.
Also, although the planet supposedly had lighter gravity and appeared to be a binary system which would have wrecked havoc with the gravity, I still don't understand what kept the mountains floating in the air... unobtainium = anti-gravity???
Apparently the original screen-play describes Unobtainium a little better - it is supposed to be a super-conductor at ambient temperatures. That would indeed make it obscenely valuable, and the fact that it could be had in massive quantities on a distant planet would make the trip worth it.
Also, super-conductor + high magnetism = floaty. This is a well known feature of super-conductors, and while they didn't describe it in the movie, you can assume that the "vortex" where the floaty mountains were was an area of abnormally high magnetism - enough do screw with the sensors on the helicoptor things (there are even rock formations that look like magnetic lines of force). So the high magnetism would be levitating the super-conducting unobtainium inside the mountains.
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I imagine a patent battle playing out like one of those weird anime card battles:
Apple: I summon... Multitouchscreen patent level three!
Multitouchscreen patent level three does 50 damage!
Nokia: I summon... Wirelessaudiotransmitionoverradio patent level five!
Wirelessaudotransmitionoverradio patent level five does 120 damage!
I mean I don't know what the actual patents are, but that seems to be the way it works.
So you're saying it would be more like Nokia poking Apple with a stick, Apple getting out their Super Stick of Doom (patent pending), followed by Nokia crushing Apple with their Patent Log of All Things Terrible and Marvelous (patented)?
Why don't you blame the people who are REALLY responsible? The voters.
You need to extend the blame a bit further, to citizens in general. The sad fact is "the voters" is just a small subset of the citizenry, and the apathy of those who don't vote is more to blame than the misguided ideals of those who do.
I remember the one time Bush actually attempted to reduce the automatic increase in the national budget one year (he did not, in fact, attempt to spend any less money, just not increase spending by as much as usual) and he was crucified for it on almost all sides. Ever since then he was spend spend spend. He'd cut taxes, sure, that would make him popular, but he realized cutting spending would be political suicide. It is very sad indeed, given the fantastic promises our current president makes along those same lines, and the fact that once an imperfect bill goes into law it is almost never fixed.
That's one thing I wish people would wake up about - just because something is "organic" doesn't mean it is good for you! There are a hell of a lot of deadly, toxic, nasty things out there that are organic.
It drives me nuts, all this "organic" nonsense these days.
It was Bush for 8 years, and his replacement happens to have a virtually identical domestic policy, which means we are essentially screwed.
Or maybe they would just make the whole thing up, since their bread and butter is fooling dumbasses who don't check their facts?
I'm pretty sure the OP, the editor, and 90% of the commentors on this post have been duped. No doubt The Yes Men find it absolutely hilarious.
Incidentally, so do I. :)
You know what's REALLY funny is that I recently watched a documentary comparing modern life to that of peasants in the middle ages, and when you strip away the comforts we have because of modern technology (plentiful high calorie foods, great medical care, comfortable cheap living materials, etc), the average peasant spent less time working for his lord than we do working for the government (i.e. taxes). Most all peasants had their own plot of land to work and a house that was their own, and they were generally more free to do whatever they wanted compared to us today. They didn't have the comforts we have, but that is simply a technological difference.
We have far more distractions which help us ignore the fact that we are far more oppressed than those who lived in the fiefdoms of the past. That's sad, especially since we consider the average peasant of old to be a quite oppressed individual.
That's what I'm starting to think, and I'm finding it absolutely hilarious, given that this is exactly the sort of stunt "The Yes Men" stage all the time. This particular stunt would be peanuts compared to some of their others.
You know what would stop every hijacking that ever has or will ever occur?
Give every single passenger a knife with a 6" blade upon boarding the plane. Seriously, what terrorist would attempt to hijack a plane like that? You think he's actually going to make it into the captain's cabin when 200+ people have the exact same weapon he has? I seriously doubt it. If everyone on board were armed, 9/11 would not have happened. Even if the hijackers were fool enough to attempt it, we would have simply heard in the news about 19 hijackers killed in an attempt to hijack four planes.
You would still want to check for bomb threats, but current screening policies are terrible for discovering bombs anyway - pack some c-4 in the shape of a little toy and you're past security as it is. No more need for metal detectors, you may or may not want to allow guns, that's iffy, since random gunfire can cause more damage to an actual flying plane than knives can. Pre-9/11 measures were more than enough to find guns though.
That's more than Schneier talked about, but his point was we already have the tools to deal with terrorism without the ineffective security theater we have now. I've known airport security was a joke ever since a former coworker of mine accidentally left a box cutter in his carry on luggage and made it through at least six TSA screenings before he found it and removed it. If they can't even catch the weapon that started this whole mess, what's the frickin point? What we really need is good intelligence and swift response on the part of law enforcement, and a willingness to fight back on the part of the passengers. The fourth plane in the 9/11 attacks is a good example, but had the passengers acted sooner they might have prevented the plane going down at all. Everything we do at the airports is just playacting, trying to stop, as Schneier put it, "movie style" hijackings that never occur in real life. It doesn't stop anything.
The cost of a piece of software involves a great deal more than just whether or not it will still run on a new system. Things like whether or not it must be configured for each individual machine/user, or if everyone can use the same configuration, how often it breaks, when it breaks how easy it is to fix, etc. Things like that can add a great deal to the cost in support dollars, which are far more expensive than all but the most expensive pieces of software. If it takes more than an hour to tweak a free program versus an equivalent non-free program, you've almost certainly blown your savings by going with the free software.
This is why Linux is almost always more expensive than Windows, at least in my experience. When something breaks in Windows, a system restore or re-installing/repairing the application fixes it, whereas I have yet to come accross a fix for a problem in Linux that was simple and straightforward. It took me a week to fix a sound issue I was having once - had I been on the clock I could have put a sizeable chunk of cash aside for a new computer with the time it took to fix that one little issue - one I've never come accross while using Windows, I might add.
In a corporate environment, Linux makes sense when you need expensive support personnel anyway, and going Linux can save you thousands of dollars in initial costs. That's why there are so many Linux web servers and mainframes and the like. For the desktop though, it doesn't make a lick of sense to use Linux, it's just way too expensive.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, has made a dozen stable releases since 2005, most of which have been fairly painless upgrades.
I completely disagree. If you did not make every incrimental upgrade in order before the next small upgrade came out, the upgrade process was a nightmare. Nothing like installing Windows SP2 on a plain jane Windows OS, skipping SP1, or doing the same with SP3 skipping 1 and 2 both. MS hotfixes generally took care of themselves with auto-update, even if you were missing a lot of updates. With Ubuntu, if you didn't dilligently fix each small error as they showed up in an upgrade cycle you'd end up with dozens of problems, even hundreds if you waited more than a few months. It was frustrating to no end, you're locked into the upgrade cycle even tighter than you are with Windows updates, it's ridiculous.
I admit I didn't stick to the LTS releases, but Linux changes so fast you end up with an even worse experience if you do use only the LTS anyway.
Try four more years before end of life, and that means it will still be supported after the next Ubuntu LTS version is EOL.
That only caused MS to continue SELLING it and create odd programs like their free downgrade option; their EOL terms are practically set in stone - XP's terms are a few years beyond the norm because of the late release of Windows Vista (5 years after XP, instead of the usual 2-3).
Don't get me wrong, corporate employees are just as bad as average joe customers, you just don't often get the same control over average joe's computer initially, allowing you to make things like standard images or have all the software your customers will need on a restore available for install. Without that control things start to get hairy.
By this and your previous remark, it looks like you've never done tech support. If so, then you've no idea how broken Automatic Updates can be (and make things).
Based on this and your previous remark, you've obviously never used WSUS. If so, then you've no idea how easy it is to avoid unnecessary or ill advised updates that can interfere with your current operating environment.
And if it's the Automatic Updates itself that is broken, shit man, System Restore! Or just re-image the drive. You do use imaging in your environment, right*?
* I am, of course, assuming you are in a corporate environtment. If you are dealing with consumers and not employees, god help you. You simply cannot blame the stupid shit people do on the OS. "I deleted the Windows directory, to save some space, but now my computer doesn't work!" *facepalm*
I don't know, if the drive fails, the support contract will supply a new HDD, they're all the same right?... not.
Except that that particular problem will be easy to avoid, since XP compatible hard drives up to 1.5tb will not be going anywhere for the next decade or so. Just look at PATA drives, you can still buy those if you need to, and up until a few years ago a lot of business machines still shipped with them.
Hardware manufacturers know how to play the game, they will make sure they keep their customers happy.
Not really, most business machines come with a smaller than 200gb hard drive. It will be a long, long time before they begin coming with anything greater than 1.5tb, and all of the current drives up to that level will still be available when that happens, just like PATA drives are still available today. By then, I'm sure the lumbering behemoths will have switched to Windows 7, especially since the business edition will be a far less painful switch than the Vista switch was.
You realize that's less than 1/3 of Microsoft's standard support cycle? Windows 2000 is only just going out of support this year, and XP will have another 5 years or more of hotfixes left on it, due to Vista's late (and horrible) release. That puts an Ubuntu LTS support term at less than 1/4 of Windows XP's. Microsoft doesn't sell XP any more, but they are a long way from stopping support for it.
The server picture is about the same.
What about when networking doesn't work? I can tell you from personal experience, it's a bitch. The man pages in Ubuntu suck, and having all your good documentation online is not necessarily a good thing. I had to rely on a windows machine to figure out how to fix it.
Also, Linux is not one operating system the same way Windows is not one operating system (there are ten major variations of Windows). In fact, Windows fits the distinction better than Linux, as each new version of Windows far more different than the various flavors of Linux. For Linux distros using the same kernel, the differences are generally similar to the differences between Windows Home, Professional, and Ultimate editions. Yeah, not as many flavors, but they all interact with each other quite well.
I've played with Linux off and on over the years, but my primary experience is recent - I switched to Ubuntu from Vista after Vista hardware issues pissed me off. I eventually switched back to Vista after about a year due to the exact same problems the GP was talking about.
The truth of the matter is everything is easier in Windows than in Linux. Linux was made by developers for developers, and that simply results in a poor non-developer experience. I've never had to edit an install script in Windows to install a program properly, I definitely can't say that for Linux.
Oh, and the term "hacker" has been used (incorrectly) in place of cracker for at least a decade now. They even call script-kiddies hackers. Hax0r is just leet speak for hacker. So, of course hax0r implies cracker, because hacker implies cracker even though there were originally distinct differences between the two.
Case in point, the very large company I work for spent millions of dollars just determining how much it would cost to upgrade to Vista from XP. Given the fact that volume licensing costs are in the neighborhood of $30-50 per license, I can tell you that the cost of the software itself was insignificant. The real cost was in upgrading all of the custom software that would not work with Vista. Given the scope of a global upgrade project, I imagine this cost was in the billions of dollars range to be large enough to cancel the project. The licensing itself would have only been in the millions of dollars range.
What free software advocates often neglect to consider the costs incurred by the free upgrade. A change in one system sometimes necessarily makes another system incompatible. Managing the changes to the system to ensure compatibility within upgrade cycles cost time and effort. Time and effort both cost significantly more money than the upfront price of a piece of software. Linux and Windows are both expensive in this way, it is the nature of software, but Linux tends to be much more expensive than Windows. Often the difference is more than enough to make up for the cost of the paid software. To expand my previoius example, a move from Windows to Linux has no hope of being cheaper than a move to Vista, and the move to Vista was far too expensive.
Because of the enhanced XP compatibility mode, a move to Windows 7 would likely be significantly cheaper than a move to Vista, which is exactly why Microsoft put it in the business and ultimate editions.
XP can't natively format anything larger than 32gb, but that's just a limitation of their formatting tool. Third party tools (HP has one that is very good) don't have this limitation and XP reads the disks just fine, obviously.
More than likely these new drives would just need an XP driver, just like the old days. It isn't common now, since most hard drives operate almost identically and so a few drivers cover almost every manufacturer, but it used to be that you got a driver disk included whenever you bought a new hard drive. We'll just start to see that popping back up since XP still makes up a large portion of the market.
... and that furthermore just about every imaging software out there will misalign and screw things up in 4Kb sector schemes.
That's why I'm in love with ImageX, it basically gives you high-tech zip files at a fraction of the size of sector-imaging software. It doesn't matter what format the original and new drives are, and by the same token sector size is also a non-issue - it has completely eliminated that problem. Unfortunately, because it is file based and a Microsoft tool, you can't use it on a filesystem that MS can't read or write to natively. I'm not sure if you can get around that limitation with the various filesystem drivers and disk imaging tools or not. That is one area in which sector copying always works no matter what. New versions of Ghost are similar to ImageX and are capable of handling at least ext2.
Just a wild guess, but I think his point was that "Characters were not always 8-bit".
Also, although the planet supposedly had lighter gravity and appeared to be a binary system which would have wrecked havoc with the gravity, I still don't understand what kept the mountains floating in the air... unobtainium = anti-gravity???
Apparently the original screen-play describes Unobtainium a little better - it is supposed to be a super-conductor at ambient temperatures. That would indeed make it obscenely valuable, and the fact that it could be had in massive quantities on a distant planet would make the trip worth it.
Also, super-conductor + high magnetism = floaty. This is a well known feature of super-conductors, and while they didn't describe it in the movie, you can assume that the "vortex" where the floaty mountains were was an area of abnormally high magnetism - enough do screw with the sensors on the helicoptor things (there are even rock formations that look like magnetic lines of force). So the high magnetism would be levitating the super-conducting unobtainium inside the mountains.
The avatars and their operators were eventually fully accepted and respected by the natives, as well.
Really it was just the typical anti-corporate story line that has been playing over and over for the last few years.