XP Home does give a countdown, though I got it as well on an unpatched Server 2003 Enterprise box... heh, I believe your comments parent post was referring to the fact that at least with Sasser you get a 60 second warning before your computer crashes instead of just blue-screening like windows does when its NOT infected;-)
If you can't find or build a PC without Windows installed, you probably aren't the kind of user who can keep a computer running without Windows' hand-holding in the first place.
How about that Word document that has lots of section breaks, headers and footers, excel and PowerPoint embedded objects, and is about 100 pages long? That darn thing always locks up Word. The solution from Microsoft is to break up the document into smaller documents.
I could have told you that solution without waiting on the help line forever!
Tons of things do not work correctly in Microsoft Office. More things are very counter-intuitive... <SNIP>
I'm not a MS flag-waver, have used OO.o off and on for quite awhile, and can quite confidently state that the points you made about MS Office can also be said for OO.o. Given the choice between the two with cost not being a factor, I'd pick MS Office any old day of the week. I realize the context of TFA is all about $$, but still... c'mon... OO.o is still crap. If its aspiring to be like MS Office, its doing a good job in that regard... ugh..
And so would it be fair to say to assume they've just changed the username / pass in the new firmware update?
How do we know the backdoor has been removed without seeing the source.
Hmmmm...
Wow, wierd. My girlfriend recently introduced me to Neil Gaiman's writings, just finished American Gods. If you haven't read it, give it a try. Pretty fun read.
I've been using OO periodically for quite a while now (the pre 1.0 days I'd say, but can't really remember) and its made some fabulous progress, but as much as I'd like to, I cannot recommend it for my business or my employees just yet. The main feature that I use OO for these days is its PDF export function -- you don't get that with office unless you've got a full copy of Acrobat.
However, I feel that the OO interface has something to be desired. Its just not as simple to navigate as Office 2003... I'm not one to give MS undue credit, but MSO2K3 is pretty nice.
I don't expect OO to be of the same caliber as MSO2K3, and hopefully the next few releases to OO will make some inroads.
At least it starts up a little faster now;-)
I respectfully disagree. SCOX (pronounced suk'koks, btw hehe) sucks. Slashdot's attention to the ongoing SCOX farce does not lend implicit credibility to the case to anyone except to other Slashdotters. SCOX can and will fuel their FUD machine with or without the attention of slashdot, regardless of what anyone here thinks.
Personally I get a kick out of the whole thing and can't wait to hear what twisted idiocy they come up with next.
On the other hand, google does archive slashdot posts, so the more posts linking SCOX and Linux/IBM/Google/RedHat/SuSE/Novell that actually have some rational reasoning for why SCOX is full of crap, the better.
In any case, I would liken SCOX to genital herpes or public lice. Ignoring them DEFINATELY does not mean they will go away;-)
Depends on the specific business line of WF that you work for. I am at WF Home Mortgage... no there is no software that 'calls home' specifically, but some of the software my business line uses must connect to central mainframe at specific IP / port combinations... of course the firewall does not allow connections from outside the intranet, but it DOES log those attempts;-)
connections from ourside are red-flagged for further investigation
SuSE has been my preferred distro for a few years now... I really really really hope Novell doesn't screw things up. I'm not so optimistic about that:-(
Ummm no.
Sure you can argue that BB (heh) is the only company around poised to profit from Linux. IMHO I disagree but for conversation's sake lets say so.
I don't much care if a company profits from Linux. IBM has donated much resources toward open-source development, and that benefits anyone who chooses to use it.
If the code is GPL'd, then the code is as good as worthless to IBM, because everyone else has it too.
IBM is an investor in the open-source community.
IBM will never own the kernel proper unless all kernel developers assign righrs to them. I think its doubtful that that will happen. Even then, it won't be retroactive, so a new group will just fork the kernel and keep rolling.
So, with that in mind I call your bluff. You sir, either have a gross misunderstanding of how things work, or you are a troll.
P.S - Companies are not people. They are not good or bad. The goal of every corporation is to further benefit its board of directors and shareholders. IBM, Sun, et al have contributed to the open source community. It is reasonable for them to want something out of the deal as well.
I appreciate your insight and agree with you insofar as the same argument can be made that anything is sometimes "bad". I've not been wronged by the church myself in any way, and I am a Christian. Its just my belief that one's relationship with God and Christ is a personal one, and that I don't need to congregate with a bunch of others in order to express that belief. On Sundays I often donate my time to helping people instead.
I do agree with you... well, I guess its a difference in practice of the religion, which is what I meant by church. I was taught that God gives us the free will to do whatever the hell we want, even sin. I was also taught that no one can tell me what my relationship with God should be, because because of our free-will nature that relationship is different for everyone. So, the ultimate responsibility in life depends on one's self, but I certainly do agree that alot of people would rather leave it up to God to run their lives instead of taking ownership of your own life in Gods name. Heh.
Yeah, its kind of ironic, unless you understand there is a difference between "religion" and "church". Religion == good, church == bad. Think about it. Christ's teachings on its own is really meant to free the mind of man. This is evident if you study the teachings on your own using some text that you trust as not being terribly corrupted. Churches, on the other hand, tend to use the same teachings to instill fear or increase the power of the church collective, at the price of individual piece of mind.
So, I guess with that in mind, Jefferson knew what he was talking about.
Well, I wont play partisan desktop politics, but I remember starting off trying out both KDE 1.x and early versions of Gnome from the old Redhat 5.0 distro. Before that I had used WindowMaker, and I liked both KDE and Gnome much better as it was fairly easy to get things working without hacking too many configs.... I've used KDE almost exclusively since 1.1x, though I do look into Gnome from time to time. I must say I think that Gnome has actually gotten worse... why the hell does Nautilus suck so F'in bad?! Maybe SuSE (my preferred distro) just doesn't configure it right or something, that would be disappointing. Anyway, Congratulations to the KDE team, here's to hoping the healthy competition between KDE and Gnome continues for a very long time!
First of all, I can't wait to see TTT for myself. I really liked FOTR, and actuallly hadn't read LOTR before I saw it. I've read the book a couple of time since, and ditto on Silmarillion. Speaking of which, in retrospect, I found the Silmarillion to be even more interesting than LOTR. Maybe its just me, but I sure would love to see another trilogy based off of the Silmarillion. Maybe I just have a deep fascination with the elves and the elvish languages, but I thought the Silmarillion was enthralling in a whole different way than LOTR.
To be fair, I had to read LOTR first to appreciate the Silmarillion, which I would suspect is a common statement for those who have read both. I think it would be incredibly cool to have even more advanced CG re-enact the music of the ainur and the days of the 2 trees in Valinor. Hell, if the movie makers wanted to get really greedy they could split the Silmarillion up into probably 10 - 16 episodes, which would be just fine by me, provided of course that each episode was released every 4 months or so...;-)
I work at a fairly largish lending institution, with roughly 2000 workstations in one of our buildings alone, with more being added weekly.
The current setup is a reconfigured image of Win95. Even the new desktops that just arrived had XP wiped in favor of 95. Guess why? Yep, DOS based mainframe clients. Also, the win95 image they use works just fine, and is not very error prone. Haven't had a BSOD yet.
Anyway, I could see my employer using a system like RH's except for a few things. First of all, we mostly make use of excel spreadsheets, word docs, Outlook/Exchage, web browser, and those old DOS client programs. Assuming open-source Office suites have improved since the last time I checked, the only reason we couldn't use Linux as a drop-in replacement are the client programs. How does wine hold up while running old DOS/Win95 era programs? Will those programs be able to talk to windows network printers? Is there a X program that can emulate the MSOffice Bar?
Those are about the only issues that would need to be addressed for the IT dept to consider using Linux, much less RH's new marketing plan. I don't see my current employer hurrying to upgrade, since like I said, they dumped XP on the new machines in favor of 95, which they know 'just works' (most of the time). However, I would think that they will be foreced to upgrade in the next 5 years or so.
Will linux be able to address normal corporate workstation issues by then?
Jesus Christ! How old are you? It is incredibly naive to think you can know anything with any certainty. And especially with reduced sexual experience, it would certainly make it all the more difficult to find out 5 years from now that your wife is a closet dyke for example. Never assume you know or are in control of anything that involves anyone besides yourself.
Doing the same thing as your parents does not necessarily make it a foregone conclusion that things will turn out the same for you. We live in a different society than our parents did at our age, and that makes all the difference in the world. People continue to grow throughout thier lives, but at different rates. Its this shift of paradigm that can cause a rift between those who at one time were bound as tightly as can be.
On the other hand, things might work out exactly as you expect, but if you were that lucky, I'd suggest playing the lottery.
Just a heads-up.
I live around the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro, one newspaper for each city. They keep each other in check, so both are pretty decent quality. Most of the state's bills are pretty boring, but at least you can read about them. Its nice to have a good idea of what 'those idiots at the capital' are actually up to. Unfortunately, neither newspaper keeps nearly as close tabs on federal government, but then, they be two different beasts. Both papers are pretty good about red-flaging bullshit bills like those usually proprosed by Sen. Hollings, and the fascist doings of Ashcroft and his pet Shrub.
I don't think that walmart adding lindows to computers they sell is bad.
1.The average person that would by a buy a walmart computer is not going to be very computer savvy. They probably wont know the difference between windows and linux. What happens when that person buys windows software and assumes that it will run on his or her new computer?
True enough, but that also can be said of the next version of Windows(C)(R)(TM). I've got certified built for Win98 software that doesn't work for shit in XP, compatibility mode or no.
I think the fact that a company like Walmart is considering doing this at all is great for open-source in general, at least in the long-term. Yes, there will be some people who can't handle a change from Windows. Microsoft knows this all too well, and thats why Windows has had the same basic GUI since Win95. Whats more, this is the real first step to unveiling Linux to the masses, make no mistake about it. Sure, it won't be all roses, but it wasn't for Microsoft either, and look where they are these days - antitrust suits aside, I mean.
Perhaps you should start reading a different newspaper. Both of the major newspapers around here are very good about reporting what is going on in state legislature. Though I do have to empathize with your sentiment. Before 9/11, the biggest news was the whole Condit/Levy thing, which in the big scheme of things is not really that big of a deal. Sorry. But at least someone pointed about potential corruption on government (like we don't already know its an ongoing thing). You allude to it yourself: The problem here is not with the media itself. Like any other industry, it tries to cater to the lowest-common-denominator, thus your unintelligent fluff stories instead of stuff that (supposedly) matters. The real problem, at least in the U.S, is that the populous as a whole is incredibly apathetic to things that don't directly affect it. I know I sure don't really give a rat's ass whats happening in the middle east. So far as I can tell its really just business as usual. Now if nukes start going of there, THAT will be news. I'd be surprised if anyone is really that nuts. But anyway, thats kind of what I'm trying to get at. Really, a lot of stuff is same shit, different day(TM) if you will. The rest is just details.
I haven't noticed this at all. I'm using the Win32 Mozilla 1.0 binary release. As far as I can tell, Mozilla renders a bit faster than my copy of IE6. I've also not noticed any config files getting thrashed. Are you sure its the coding itself, and perhaps maybe not just that the binary you're running was built with incorrect compiler options or something?
Slashdot Mirror
XP Home does give a countdown, though I got it as well on an unpatched Server 2003 Enterprise box... heh, I believe your comments parent post was referring to the fact that at least with Sasser you get a 60 second warning before your computer crashes instead of just blue-screening like windows does when its NOT infected ;-)
If you can't find or build a PC without Windows installed, you probably aren't the kind of user who can keep a computer running without Windows' hand-holding in the first place.
Bullshit.
How about that Word document that has lots of section breaks, headers and footers, excel and PowerPoint embedded objects, and is about 100 pages long? That darn thing always locks up Word. The solution from Microsoft is to break up the document into smaller documents.
I could have told you that solution without waiting on the help line forever!
Tons of things do not work correctly in Microsoft Office. More things are very counter-intuitive...
<SNIP>
I'm not a MS flag-waver, have used OO.o off and on for quite awhile, and can quite confidently state that the points you made about MS Office can also be said for OO.o. Given the choice between the two with cost not being a factor, I'd pick MS Office any old day of the week. I realize the context of TFA is all about $$, but still... c'mon... OO.o is still crap. If its aspiring to be like MS Office, its doing a good job in that regard... ugh..
And so would it be fair to say to assume they've just changed the username / pass in the new firmware update? How do we know the backdoor has been removed without seeing the source. Hmmmm...
Wow, wierd. My girlfriend recently introduced me to Neil Gaiman's writings, just finished American Gods. If you haven't read it, give it a try. Pretty fun read.
I've been using OO periodically for quite a while now (the pre 1.0 days I'd say, but can't really remember) and its made some fabulous progress, but as much as I'd like to, I cannot recommend it for my business or my employees just yet. The main feature that I use OO for these days is its PDF export function -- you don't get that with office unless you've got a full copy of Acrobat. However, I feel that the OO interface has something to be desired. Its just not as simple to navigate as Office 2003... I'm not one to give MS undue credit, but MSO2K3 is pretty nice. I don't expect OO to be of the same caliber as MSO2K3, and hopefully the next few releases to OO will make some inroads. At least it starts up a little faster now ;-)
Coleman is nothing more than a yes man for the white house. He sure as hell hasn't done much to improve the quaility of life for Minnesotans..
I respectfully disagree. SCOX (pronounced suk'koks, btw hehe) sucks. Slashdot's attention to the ongoing SCOX farce does not lend implicit credibility to the case to anyone except to other Slashdotters. SCOX can and will fuel their FUD machine with or without the attention of slashdot, regardless of what anyone here thinks.
;-)
Personally I get a kick out of the whole thing and can't wait to hear what twisted idiocy they come up with next.
On the other hand, google does archive slashdot posts, so the more posts linking SCOX and Linux/IBM/Google/RedHat/SuSE/Novell that actually have some rational reasoning for why SCOX is full of crap, the better.
In any case, I would liken SCOX to genital herpes or public lice. Ignoring them DEFINATELY does not mean they will go away
Depends on the specific business line of WF that you work for. I am at WF Home Mortgage... no there is no software that 'calls home' specifically, but some of the software my business line uses must connect to central mainframe at specific IP / port combinations... of course the firewall does not allow connections from outside the intranet, but it DOES log those attempts ;-)
connections from ourside are red-flagged for further investigation
I suppose the irony that you are posting and reading opinions on slashdot fails to occur to you.. heh.
SuSE has been my preferred distro for a few years now... I really really really hope Novell doesn't screw things up. I'm not so optimistic about that :-(
Ummm no. Sure you can argue that BB (heh) is the only company around poised to profit from Linux. IMHO I disagree but for conversation's sake lets say so. I don't much care if a company profits from Linux. IBM has donated much resources toward open-source development, and that benefits anyone who chooses to use it. If the code is GPL'd, then the code is as good as worthless to IBM, because everyone else has it too. IBM is an investor in the open-source community. IBM will never own the kernel proper unless all kernel developers assign righrs to them. I think its doubtful that that will happen. Even then, it won't be retroactive, so a new group will just fork the kernel and keep rolling. So, with that in mind I call your bluff. You sir, either have a gross misunderstanding of how things work, or you are a troll. P.S - Companies are not people. They are not good or bad. The goal of every corporation is to further benefit its board of directors and shareholders. IBM, Sun, et al have contributed to the open source community. It is reasonable for them to want something out of the deal as well.
Okay I understand the importance and value of deep-sea exploration, but how about fiber to my curb first?
I appreciate your insight and agree with you insofar as the same argument can be made that anything is sometimes "bad". I've not been wronged by the church myself in any way, and I am a Christian. Its just my belief that one's relationship with God and Christ is a personal one, and that I don't need to congregate with a bunch of others in order to express that belief. On Sundays I often donate my time to helping people instead.
I do agree with you... well, I guess its a difference in practice of the religion, which is what I meant by church. I was taught that God gives us the free will to do whatever the hell we want, even sin. I was also taught that no one can tell me what my relationship with God should be, because because of our free-will nature that relationship is different for everyone. So, the ultimate responsibility in life depends on one's self, but I certainly do agree that alot of people would rather leave it up to God to run their lives instead of taking ownership of your own life in Gods name. Heh.
Yeah, its kind of ironic, unless you understand there is a difference between "religion" and "church". Religion == good, church == bad. Think about it. Christ's teachings on its own is really meant to free the mind of man. This is evident if you study the teachings on your own using some text that you trust as not being terribly corrupted. Churches, on the other hand, tend to use the same teachings to instill fear or increase the power of the church collective, at the price of individual piece of mind. So, I guess with that in mind, Jefferson knew what he was talking about.
Well, I wont play partisan desktop politics, but I remember starting off trying out both KDE 1.x and early versions of Gnome from the old Redhat 5.0 distro. Before that I had used WindowMaker, and I liked both KDE and Gnome much better as it was fairly easy to get things working without hacking too many configs.... I've used KDE almost exclusively since 1.1x, though I do look into Gnome from time to time. I must say I think that Gnome has actually gotten worse... why the hell does Nautilus suck so F'in bad?! Maybe SuSE (my preferred distro) just doesn't configure it right or something, that would be disappointing. Anyway, Congratulations to the KDE team, here's to hoping the healthy competition between KDE and Gnome continues for a very long time!
Maybe thats because a bunch of us frequent Slashdot while we are at work, where they mandate IE use :-)
First of all, I can't wait to see TTT for myself. I really liked FOTR, and actuallly hadn't read LOTR before I saw it. I've read the book a couple of time since, and ditto on Silmarillion. Speaking of which, in retrospect, I found the Silmarillion to be even more interesting than LOTR. Maybe its just me, but I sure would love to see another trilogy based off of the Silmarillion. Maybe I just have a deep fascination with the elves and the elvish languages, but I thought the Silmarillion was enthralling in a whole different way than LOTR. To be fair, I had to read LOTR first to appreciate the Silmarillion, which I would suspect is a common statement for those who have read both. I think it would be incredibly cool to have even more advanced CG re-enact the music of the ainur and the days of the 2 trees in Valinor. Hell, if the movie makers wanted to get really greedy they could split the Silmarillion up into probably 10 - 16 episodes, which would be just fine by me, provided of course that each episode was released every 4 months or so... ;-)
I work at a fairly largish lending institution, with roughly 2000 workstations in one of our buildings alone, with more being added weekly. The current setup is a reconfigured image of Win95. Even the new desktops that just arrived had XP wiped in favor of 95. Guess why? Yep, DOS based mainframe clients. Also, the win95 image they use works just fine, and is not very error prone. Haven't had a BSOD yet. Anyway, I could see my employer using a system like RH's except for a few things. First of all, we mostly make use of excel spreadsheets, word docs, Outlook/Exchage, web browser, and those old DOS client programs. Assuming open-source Office suites have improved since the last time I checked, the only reason we couldn't use Linux as a drop-in replacement are the client programs. How does wine hold up while running old DOS/Win95 era programs? Will those programs be able to talk to windows network printers? Is there a X program that can emulate the MSOffice Bar? Those are about the only issues that would need to be addressed for the IT dept to consider using Linux, much less RH's new marketing plan. I don't see my current employer hurrying to upgrade, since like I said, they dumped XP on the new machines in favor of 95, which they know 'just works' (most of the time). However, I would think that they will be foreced to upgrade in the next 5 years or so. Will linux be able to address normal corporate workstation issues by then?
Jesus Christ! How old are you? It is incredibly naive to think you can know anything with any certainty. And especially with reduced sexual experience, it would certainly make it all the more difficult to find out 5 years from now that your wife is a closet dyke for example. Never assume you know or are in control of anything that involves anyone besides yourself. Doing the same thing as your parents does not necessarily make it a foregone conclusion that things will turn out the same for you. We live in a different society than our parents did at our age, and that makes all the difference in the world. People continue to grow throughout thier lives, but at different rates. Its this shift of paradigm that can cause a rift between those who at one time were bound as tightly as can be. On the other hand, things might work out exactly as you expect, but if you were that lucky, I'd suggest playing the lottery. Just a heads-up.
I live around the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro, one newspaper for each city. They keep each other in check, so both are pretty decent quality. Most of the state's bills are pretty boring, but at least you can read about them. Its nice to have a good idea of what 'those idiots at the capital' are actually up to. Unfortunately, neither newspaper keeps nearly as close tabs on federal government, but then, they be two different beasts. Both papers are pretty good about red-flaging bullshit bills like those usually proprosed by Sen. Hollings, and the fascist doings of Ashcroft and his pet Shrub.
I don't think that walmart adding lindows to computers they sell is bad.
1.The average person that would by a buy a walmart computer is not going to be very computer savvy. They probably wont know the difference between windows and linux. What happens when that person buys windows software and assumes that it will run on his or her new computer?
True enough, but that also can be said of the next version of Windows(C)(R)(TM). I've got certified built for Win98 software that doesn't work for shit in XP, compatibility mode or no.
I think the fact that a company like Walmart is considering doing this at all is great for open-source in general, at least in the long-term. Yes, there will be some people who can't handle a change from Windows. Microsoft knows this all too well, and thats why Windows has had the same basic GUI since Win95. Whats more, this is the real first step to unveiling Linux to the masses, make no mistake about it. Sure, it won't be all roses, but it wasn't for Microsoft either, and look where they are these days - antitrust suits aside, I mean.
Perhaps you should start reading a different newspaper. Both of the major newspapers around here are very good about reporting what is going on in state legislature. Though I do have to empathize with your sentiment. Before 9/11, the biggest news was the whole Condit/Levy thing, which in the big scheme of things is not really that big of a deal. Sorry. But at least someone pointed about potential corruption on government (like we don't already know its an ongoing thing). You allude to it yourself: The problem here is not with the media itself. Like any other industry, it tries to cater to the lowest-common-denominator, thus your unintelligent fluff stories instead of stuff that (supposedly) matters. The real problem, at least in the U.S, is that the populous as a whole is incredibly apathetic to things that don't directly affect it. I know I sure don't really give a rat's ass whats happening in the middle east. So far as I can tell its really just business as usual. Now if nukes start going of there, THAT will be news. I'd be surprised if anyone is really that nuts. But anyway, thats kind of what I'm trying to get at. Really, a lot of stuff is same shit, different day(TM) if you will. The rest is just details.
I haven't noticed this at all. I'm using the Win32 Mozilla 1.0 binary release. As far as I can tell, Mozilla renders a bit faster than my copy of IE6. I've also not noticed any config files getting thrashed. Are you sure its the coding itself, and perhaps maybe not just that the binary you're running was built with incorrect compiler options or something?