Why? You aren't giving anyone else one. You apparently think "US bad, everyone else good".
The media is by far the worst problem in the US. They do such a lousy job at scrutinzing the government and corporations when compared to Europe, that it hurts.
Why, because they won't broadcast fake atrocity reports as in the "Jenin Massacre"? Because it won't point fingers at the US and Israel while totally ignoring the failings of the imploding economies and societies of Arab and Muslim culture which produced the terrorists bedevilling the world in dozens of conflicts?
I bet you can't point out a two non-opinion facts that you found in European news that you couldn't find in the US news if you read it. You are looking for spin, not facts.
Literally, I spent hours a day reading news, and even so I live in the US, I have to go to Europe to get the news that count.
Therein lies your problem. If you spend the hours reading the news you aren't gaining the type of life experience that you need to think for yourself.
And it matters what news you read -- obviously you are looking for news that is always critical and never complimentary of the U.S. You can certainly find that in Europe, so I guess that is where you belong.
To make the whole story short: The west has not found a way to stop corruption, but a way to integrate it into its government. It is now "acceptable" and lowers the need to have the "illegal" form of corruption, hence creating the appearance of a non-corrupt government.
If you think the Indian government is not subjet to business influence, then you are *really* off.
No, I think you are just of the usual "it's all a business conspiracy" bent caused by overconsumption of television.
You have demonized the U.S. in your mind. Business influence exists, as does influence by powerful lobbies like the NRA and Sierra Club. But there are most definite limits, as the intense media scrutiny in the U.S. means that there is risk to *any* type of improper actions, no matter who does them.
Re:Corruption...(mod parent down, not insightful)
on
India's Road To The Future
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You have no idea what corruption is if you think the U.S. is corrupt. In general, the U.S. is the least corrupt large country ever seen.
I have a friend who came from India, and when he got here I asked him the question I ask all new arrivals to the U.S. -- "What surprised you most about the U.S. when you got here?" His answer was, "The honesty and integrity of your government."
He offered this story:
I went to the Social Security office on my second day here. I
got in line, and right behind me walked in a businessman in
a fine suit. I automatically got out of his way to let him
go to the front of the line, but he said "No, of course not.
You were here first."
Then I started looking at the line in front of me. There were
about five people, and first in line there was an obvious wino.
When he got to the window, he had trouble stating his need and
the clerk patiently helped him fill out his form.
I got my documents in 15 minutes with no difficulty at
all, and I was treated kindly and respectfully.
I was thunderstruck. In India, to get official documents like
this without a month or more of wait, you must pay off the
local officials. The size of the baksheesh determines how much
priority you will get -- if you don't pay enough right away,
you will be sent away with another form to fill out.
Eventually, you will get your documents. A rich businessman
goes to the front of the line, pays his greater amount of
baksheesh, and gets the papers immediately with no question.
Later I found out that it would be foolish to even offer
baksheesh here. You might get worse service because you
had attempted to bribe the official, or even potentially
arrested for attempted bribery.
This attitude pervades your people and gives them a
confidence and power most of our people cannot have.
I will not make the blanket statement that there is no wrongdoing in our government, but our government is certainly not corrupt in the sense that almost all but a few Western European and Nort American governments are corrupt. Corruption pervades, wrongdoing is isolated. The U.S. is not corrupt.
A great deal of the research into the various components of the Internet was done by U.S. Universities, as often as not with grants provided by private industry. If you think that all research is paid for by government money, you have no idea of how the U.S. works.
As someone who designed, deployed and subsequently supported a 25,000 seat Exchange environment I can tell you must have installed Exchange poorly to get unreliable results.
I didn't install it. I replaced their MS network with Linux.
This design was on Exchange 2000, now 2003. I had also previous 5.5 environments with server uptimes of over a year. Admin is indeed very simple, most of the companies staff got to grips with administering Exchange after some brief time on level 1 callcentre helpdesk support.
My point is -- what admin should be required for an email/calendaring application? Virtually none, except for backup/recovery issues and the occasional bug hunt.
The backup / restore PST issues are real, but thats because the users don't do POP and either keep all the data locally or on file servers. Either way, if users save attachments the space is being used "somewhere" whether thats file and print, or on their desktops (and the risks of that being lost apply)
They don't do POP with Communigate either -- it is MAPI connector / IMAP. All messages are stored on the server. But because it uses maildir and not a huge bloated monolithic storage system with virtually no utilities for manipulating individual messages, you can find and do something about individual messages. You can write utilities which automatically age off "Sent Items" folders into years, or force people to expire messages in their Inbox after a certain period of time.
Most large deployments are going for software like KVS for archiving and sucking out PSTs. I have just deployed KVS for 1500 seat Exchange environment, the team of 3 server guys barely touch Exchange on a daily basis, it just works, its low maintenance and its extremely reliable.
No one at Microsoft or the Exchange server consulting company mentioned this to them, and they tried to find things that would do what they want. The best they could accomplish was setting up a complete server whose only job was to restore messages and PSTs for Exchange. That, me boy, is baroque and obtuse.
We now have a rotating rsync-based backup now, where we can literally pull messages from any point in the past week, month, and year, incrementally. It is indexed in the background, and searches of multi- gig mailbox collections for old messages take milliseconds.
When they tried to do the same thing -- no I take that back, something even remotely searchable -- with Exchange, they would spend an hour restoring a file only to find that they had to spend another hour opening the mailbox in Outlook before they could search for a message! And you say that is not bloated and obscene.
Its got one of the best web interfaces around and the scheduling is fantastic. Outlook is not bloated, in the same way that neither is Excel compared to its OpenOffice alternatives. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, HP are all 100,000 seat plus environments running Exchange. That would not be possible with an unstable piece of software, fact.
When you have a 100,000 seat environment you undoubtedly have plenty of high-powered talent running things, and plenty of attention from Microsoft. It may surprise you to find out that the typical SMB is not blessed with these things.
My client is so happy with Linux and to be rid of Microsoft Windows on the server, they are beside themselves. Their admin costs have been halved, and their formerly frequent downtime is nearly non-existent.
After spending multiple hours mucking with different (poorly documented) configuration formats, multiple different daemons, mucking with the DB - it's really clear that Linux just isn't there. Exchange is easier to install, easier to configure, and easier to manage.
Easier to manage? Have you ever actually managed even a medium-sized Exchange installation?
Try backing up and restoring your data system-wide when employees have gigabytes of mail. Try managing PST files and backing up Exchange religiously.
It may be possible to do if you have an in-house Exchange expert, but the two medium-size installations I have worked with didn't have the resources for that. They hired the leading Exchange consultant for their city, and he couldn't get their systems stable -- it was always "try rebooting the AD server first, then the the Exchange cluster -- oh that didnt' work? Do it in the opposite order."
This supposed genius had them purchase enough computing power -- dual quad-Xeon cluster with 4G RAM, SCSI RAID arrays, and two front-end servers -- to handle the email for a small country. All for a couple of hundred users using Exchange.
In July, I replaced a Microsoft Exchange Server on Windows Server 2003 with Communigate on Linux. Some growing pains, to be sure, but 6 months later the IT staff actually has time to do proactive work again -- they aren't spending all their time keeping unstable servers going. Next month, we replace the last Windows server (the VPN) with a Linux one, and the only Windows machines in the 250-machine network will be desktops. Not a single Windows machine will be on the network segment where the servers are, which will be a very comforting thing security-wise.
This installation runs at typically a 0.10 load average on one of those servers. In other words, we could replace the cluster with a consumer PC if we had to.
And by the way -- their clients are all still Outlook, and they are still using public calendars, and it all just works. The backup problems? With maildir, we can restore one small file to fetch an inadvertently-deleted email -- not do a hundred-gigabyte restore and backup.
Outlook is bloated and obscene. It does indeed work well -- if you constantly tune it, baby it, and don't ask too much of it. But if it starts falling apart, heaven help you.
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
The grocery business is recession-proof and regulation-proof. And you *don't* see small companies starting many groceries (save convenience stores, a completely different profit level), because the profit margin does not justify the risk.
No, companies would not make pharmaceuticals if the margin were slimmer. There would be no point to engage in such a risky, feast-or-famine business for lousy profit margins.
You, the people stupid enough to reply to a phish message, have just made my life more complicated because you are too stupid to be allowed to use the Internet.
Even after incredible amounts of publicity, you are still stupid enough to pass out your mother's maiden name and your bank card PIN in reply to an email message.
You are really, really, stupid. Yes, you should be ashamed that you are the bottom of the barrel, the lowest of common denominators.
Your brains could be held in a thimble, nay pureed and spread thinly on the head of a pin.
Your elevator fails far short of the top floor, and even if it got there no one would be home. You are as sharp as a marble, as bright as mud, a few shades beyond blonde.
This is precisely where Wikipedia is better than most other encyclopaedias: it gives you the complete range of opinions, even the "whacko" ones, given in a NPOV fashion, letting you decide which one is which.
Then you would be wanting a discussion forum, not an encyclopedia.
To give borderline cases equal space with accepted authority does no one a service. If you want to explore all opinions on a subject, you can investigate it. Wikipedia could even link to a discussion area which was provided for giving space to all points of view.
The accepted role of an encyclopedia is to be authoritative and concise. If too much space is given to borderline issues, it doesn't achieve that.
the main reason the US government doesn't bother to censor Korean/Iranian etc. websites is that realistically speaking those countries/ideologies don't really pose any realistic threat at all. If any power ever rose to truly challenge the US, or any foreign ideology ever appeared to be taking widespread hold in the US and threatening the power base of the leaders, I don't doubt for a minute that we would start seeing government-mandated censorship of foreign sites (under the guise of "protecting US national security", or "blocking hate-speech", or "protecting children from terrorist propaganda" and whatever other excuse is cooked up).
You must be from somewhere outside the US.
Can you show me examples of this happening in the US? No, you can't. You know why? Because it simply does not happen. The US doesn't censor, because it is simply impossible here -- no one would pay attention. You would get 1000 people taking the info and publishing it on the net. The censorship would make the newspapers and TV, and it would become a cause celebre.
You will get people who say that the US does censor things, but when you ask them what has been censored it is inevitably something that is so bogus and so off that you find that the only reason no one is heard of it is because it is off the wall.
I can't believe what I just received when I sent in a comment as this guy suggested.....
We have received an email from you regarding the proposed rulemaking on electronic-only preregistration. The comments you submitted cannot be considered because they were in the form of email. As the instructions in the Copyright Office's Federal Register notice state, comments can be delivered to the Copyright Office by the following means:
If hand delivered by a private party, an original and five copies of any comment should be brought to Room LM-401 of the James Madison Memorial Building between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. and the envelope should be addressed as follows: Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Copyright Office, James Madison Memorial Building, Room LM-401, 101 Independence Avenue, SE., Washington, DC 20559-6000. If hand delivered by a commercial courier, an original and five copies of any comment must be delivered to the Congressional Courier Acceptance Site located at Second and D Streets, NE., Washington, DC, between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. The envelope should be addressed as follows: Copyright Office General Counsel, Room LM-403, James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Avenue, SE., Washington, DC. If sent by mail, an original and five copies of any comment should be addressed to: Copyright GC/ I&R, P.O. Box 70400, Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024-0400. Comments may not be delivered by means of overnight delivery services such as Federal Express, United Parcel Service, etc., due to delays in processing receipt of such deliveries.
As for your crack on the middle east; America, Europe, China, and Russia are all directly responsible for the problems over there. Ever since oil was discovered, we have all been overtly and covertly fighting for the control of the resource. So yes, it was relatively an "oasis of happiness" and yes we did fuck it up.
I love it when the latte-slurping liberals of today try to judge the actions of people decades and centuries ago ago with the PC hindsight of today.
It has been a dog-eat-dog world for a lot of years. If the US and England hadn't grabbed the first shot at oil in the Middle East, the next strong country who came along would have. Russia, China, Turkey, Germany? Who knows.
I suggest you go to the most pertinent monument to the sensibilities and practicality of the liberals -- the Africa of today. They have been left to rule themselves. Isn't it uplifting?
The US created the the Internet, and there is no question about
that. It has been at the core of it from the very beginning.
I respectfully disagree. And unlike your completely empty claim, mine actually contains information. The WWW (remember, that stuff with HTML) was invented at CERN (*). Where's that? Switserland.
If you think the WWW is the Internet, think again.
The network which was extended to create the Internet was US-based from the very beginning. The first TCP/IP transfers over distance were done there; the first internetworking software; the first extension to non-defense and non-academic concerns; a huge host of firsts. While there was certainly activity other places, the amount of it was a pittance compared to what went on in the US.
The US was from the very beginning the driving force behind the creation and development of the Internet, and anyone who seriously disputes this is guilty of attempting to rewrite history.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
Because the Japanese had shown that they weren't giving up easily despite the chance that they had ZERO chance of winning the war or affecting the US demand for unconditional surrender.
With what had happened to their infrastructure, another winter would have left their civilian population starving, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of deaths that would have occurred in an invasion.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
Nice hindsight -- another person expecting the people of generations ago to behave as we would today.
Compared to the opposition in the war the U.S. behaved in a fairly civilized fashion.
Presuming you have enough language skill to know that "create" is not equal to "develop, nurture, and improve", which country did create it?
The US created the the Internet, and there is no question about that. It has been at the core of it from the very beginning.
That being said, it doesn't mean it owns it. But considering the US's 20-year stewardship of the net which has provided an incredibly fertile ground for growth, with plenty of opportunities for all countries, I think they are a better choice than the UN for this.
The UN is a case of the inmates running the asylum. Any organization which can put a Syrian delegate as the chair of its human rights commission has shown what it is made of.
And now we enter hip wader territory--the BS is getting that deep. A web server that crashes by merely being accessed is defective.
Are you mentally deficient?
Depending on the definition of "crash", it is easy for a web server to be crashed by excessive accesses. If a robot generates hundreds of thousands of accesses to attempt to harvest a database, it is making inappropriate accesses.
If a lock is on the door, i.e. prevention of single IP addresses from generating those accesses, certainly the use of proxies constitutes breaking that lock and comprises illegal access to the site.
Re:arrogance of free software developers
on
Researching Open Source
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Who's the arrogant one here?
that was a _very_ interesting and defining moment, because it told me that everyone in that room...[snip]
Everyone? Come on now, a few people clapped. You are arrogantly assuming no one else is as "enlightened" as you.
if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.
I have the ability to do about 50% of the jobs in the world, if not more. Should I accept the responsibility for them? Obviously not. Even if I were Superman and could do half of them, I would force half of the world's people into unemployment.
You may think I am being facetious there, but the point is that we sometimes have to wait for someone else to do something before they *will* do it. Similarly, we sometimes have to wait for consensus if we want to move an idea forward. Not everyone is going to come around right away -- they have their own hot buttons and their own agendas.
We do the best we can with what we are given. And those of us who *can* do, know that sometimes the best thing is to *not* do.
In a big company that has a lot of enemies, somewithin its own gates no doubt, this could happen to any system that is not set up perfectly, a rootkit could be introduced on a *nix system the same way 99% of trojen horses get into win boxes, social engenering.
It is true that you could gull an individual and have them mail out their own documents. You could put in a cron job that runs on their workstation, and have it execute a script.
To do anything more far-reaching, perhaps something that sets the network interface to promiscuous, you would have to take in someone with root permissions. They aren't as easy a target.
With a Windows box running as Administrator, you can do most anything.
Every system is vulnerable, but some are more vulnerable than others.
I don't get it. Administering Windows XP in a corporate environment isn't that hard. There is no reason why a company that hires a competent sys admin (or multiple sys admins) cant configure and administer Windows XP so they are nearly virus-free, spyware-free and spam-free.
At least you are smart enough to say "nearly". That is the problem, with Windows you can only get nearly (for some value of nearly).
My partner is now mostly a Linux user, and since he has been using Mozilla he has had few problems with Windows when he does use it. But I asked him how his Windows box had been doing, he said "I haven't had problem with spyware or viruses for a long time".
I asked him what a long time was, and he said "oh, at least six or seven months".
We as a company run one Windows machine -- his -- and about 18 Linux boxes. We have had one Linux failure in 3 years, a bad network card. There have been zero security breaches. This is over all 18 boxes.
His Windows box has crashed umpteen times and had many spyware and virus incidents. (The only attachment clicking he did was twice in the first wave of "returned mail" viruses.)
He is much more sophisticated than my wife, who with her Linux workstation has never had a crash, a piece of spyware, a worm, or a virus.
There is a huge, huge, difference. An orders of magnitude difference.
Objection 0.1 adds a 'Local Shared Objects' line to Firefox's Options > Privacy panel, allowing you to delete them as easily as you'd delete cookies. It's still pretty rudimentary - all or nothing deletion, working on Windows only - but Slashdotters are more than welcome to improve it. Since Local Shared Objects have the same functionality as cookies, we need the same amount of control over them as we do over cookies - and built into the browser, not tucked away in some obscure Macromedia page."
I find it easier just to use the Flashblock extension. In the (very rare) event I need to run a Flash display, I just click the play button.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a break here.
Why? You aren't giving anyone else one. You apparently think "US bad, everyone
else good".
The media is by far the worst problem in the US. They do such a lousy job at scrutinzing the government and corporations when compared to Europe, that it hurts.
Why, because they won't broadcast fake atrocity reports as in the "Jenin
Massacre"? Because it won't point fingers at the US and Israel while
totally ignoring the failings of the imploding economies and societies
of Arab and Muslim culture which produced the terrorists bedevilling the
world in dozens of conflicts?
I bet you can't point out a two non-opinion facts that you found in
European news that you couldn't find in the US news if you read it. You
are looking for spin, not facts.
Literally, I spent hours a day reading news, and even so I live in the US, I have to go to Europe to get the news that count.
Therein lies your problem. If you spend the hours reading the news
you aren't gaining the type of life experience that you need to think
for yourself.
And it matters what news you read -- obviously you are looking for news
that is always critical and never complimentary of the U.S. You can
certainly find that in Europe, so I guess that is where you belong.
To make the whole story short: The west has not found a way to stop corruption, but a way to integrate it into its government. It is now "acceptable" and lowers the need to have the "illegal" form of corruption, hence creating the appearance of a non-corrupt government.
If you think the Indian government is not subjet to business influence,
then you are *really* off.
No, I think you are just of the usual "it's all a business conspiracy"
bent caused by overconsumption of television.
You have demonized the U.S. in your mind. Business influence exists, as
does influence by powerful lobbies like the NRA and Sierra Club. But
there are most definite limits, as the intense media scrutiny in the
U.S. means that there is risk to *any* type of improper actions, no
matter who does them.
You have no idea what corruption is if you think the U.S. is corrupt. In general, the U.S. is the least corrupt large country ever seen.
I have a friend who came from India, and when he got here I asked him the question I ask all new arrivals to the U.S. -- "What surprised you most about the U.S. when you got here?" His answer was, "The honesty and integrity of your government."
He offered this story:
I went to the Social Security office on my second day here. I
got in line, and right behind me walked in a businessman in
a fine suit. I automatically got out of his way to let him
go to the front of the line, but he said "No, of course not.
You were here first."
Then I started looking at the line in front of me. There were
about five people, and first in line there was an obvious wino.
When he got to the window, he had trouble stating his need and
the clerk patiently helped him fill out his form.
I got my documents in 15 minutes with no difficulty at
all, and I was treated kindly and respectfully.
I was thunderstruck. In India, to get official documents like
this without a month or more of wait, you must pay off the
local officials. The size of the baksheesh determines how much
priority you will get -- if you don't pay enough right away,
you will be sent away with another form to fill out.
Eventually, you will get your documents. A rich businessman
goes to the front of the line, pays his greater amount of
baksheesh, and gets the papers immediately with no question.
Later I found out that it would be foolish to even offer
baksheesh here. You might get worse service because you
had attempted to bribe the official, or even potentially
arrested for attempted bribery.
This attitude pervades your people and gives them a
confidence and power most of our people cannot have.
I will not make the blanket statement that there is no wrongdoing in
our government, but our government is certainly not corrupt in the
sense that almost all but a few Western European and Nort American
governments are corrupt. Corruption pervades, wrongdoing is isolated.
The U.S. is not corrupt.
"Whoa there Trigger, quit tuggin' on them reins so hard!"
A great deal of the research into the various components of the Internet was done by U.S. Universities, as often as not with grants provided by private industry. If you think that all research is paid for by government money, you have no idea of how the U.S. works.
As someone who designed, deployed and subsequently supported a 25,000
seat Exchange environment I can tell you must have installed Exchange
poorly to get unreliable results.
I didn't install it. I replaced their MS network with Linux.
This design was on Exchange 2000, now 2003. I had also previous 5.5
environments with server uptimes of over a year. Admin is indeed very
simple, most of the companies staff got to grips with administering
Exchange after some brief time on level 1 callcentre helpdesk
support.
My point is -- what admin should be required for an email/calendaring
application? Virtually none, except for backup/recovery issues and the
occasional bug hunt.
The backup / restore PST issues are real, but thats because the users
don't do POP and either keep all the data locally or on file servers.
Either way, if users save attachments the space is being used
"somewhere" whether thats file and print, or on their desktops (and
the risks of that being lost apply)
They don't do POP with Communigate either -- it is MAPI connector /
IMAP. All messages are stored on the server. But because it uses maildir
and not a huge bloated monolithic storage system with virtually no
utilities for manipulating individual messages, you can find and do
something about individual messages. You can write utilities which
automatically age off "Sent Items" folders into years, or force people
to expire messages in their Inbox after a certain period of time.
Most large deployments are going for software like KVS for archiving
and sucking out PSTs. I have just deployed KVS for 1500 seat Exchange
environment, the team of 3 server guys barely touch Exchange on a
daily basis, it just works, its low maintenance and its extremely
reliable.
No one at Microsoft or the Exchange server consulting company mentioned
this to them, and they tried to find things that would do what they
want. The best they could accomplish was setting up a complete server
whose only job was to restore messages and PSTs for Exchange. That, me
boy, is baroque and obtuse.
We now have a rotating rsync-based backup now, where we can literally
pull messages from any point in the past week, month, and year,
incrementally. It is indexed in the background, and searches of multi-
gig mailbox collections for old messages take milliseconds.
When they tried to do the same thing -- no I take that back, something
even remotely searchable -- with Exchange, they would spend an hour
restoring a file only to find that they had to spend another hour
opening the mailbox in Outlook before they could search for a message!
And you say that is not bloated and obscene.
Its got one of the best web interfaces around and the scheduling
is fantastic. Outlook is not bloated, in the same way that neither
is Excel compared to its OpenOffice alternatives. Boeing, Lockheed
Martin, HP are all 100,000 seat plus environments running
Exchange. That would not be possible with an unstable piece of
software, fact.
When you have a 100,000 seat environment you undoubtedly have plenty of
high-powered talent running things, and plenty of attention from
Microsoft. It may surprise you to find out that the typical SMB is not
blessed with these things.
My client is so happy with Linux and to be rid of Microsoft Windows on the
server, they are beside themselves. Their admin costs have been halved, and
their formerly frequent downtime is nearly non-existent.
After spending multiple hours mucking with different (poorly documented) configuration formats, multiple different daemons, mucking with the DB - it's really clear that Linux just isn't there. Exchange is easier to install, easier to configure, and easier to manage.
Easier to manage? Have you ever actually managed even a medium-sized
Exchange installation?
Try backing up and restoring your data system-wide when employees
have gigabytes of mail. Try managing PST files and backing up Exchange
religiously.
It may be possible to do if you have an in-house Exchange expert, but
the two medium-size installations I have worked with didn't have the
resources for that. They hired the leading Exchange consultant for their
city, and he couldn't get their systems stable -- it was always "try
rebooting the AD server first, then the the Exchange cluster -- oh that
didnt' work? Do it in the opposite order."
This supposed genius had them purchase enough computing power -- dual
quad-Xeon cluster with 4G RAM, SCSI RAID arrays, and two front-end
servers -- to handle the email for a small country. All for a couple of
hundred users using Exchange.
In July, I replaced a Microsoft Exchange Server on Windows Server
2003 with Communigate on Linux. Some growing pains, to be sure, but 6
months later the IT staff actually has time to do proactive work
again -- they aren't spending all their time keeping unstable servers
going. Next month, we replace the last Windows server (the VPN) with
a Linux one, and the only Windows machines in the 250-machine network
will be desktops. Not a single Windows machine will be on the network
segment where the servers are, which will be a very comforting thing
security-wise.
This installation runs at typically a 0.10 load average on one of those
servers. In other words, we could replace the cluster with a consumer PC
if we had to.
And by the way -- their clients are all still Outlook, and they are
still using public calendars, and it all just works. The backup
problems? With maildir, we can restore one small file to fetch an
inadvertently-deleted email -- not do a hundred-gigabyte restore and backup.
Outlook is bloated and obscene. It does indeed work well -- if you
constantly tune it, baby it, and don't ask too much of it. But if it
starts falling apart, heaven help you.
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
The grocery business is recession-proof and regulation-proof. And you *don't*
see small companies starting many groceries (save convenience stores, a completely different profit level), because the profit margin does not justify the risk.
No, companies would not make pharmaceuticals if the margin were slimmer. There
would be no point to engage in such a risky, feast-or-famine business for
lousy profit margins.
You, the people stupid enough to reply to a phish message, have just made my life more complicated because you are too stupid to be allowed to use the Internet.
Even after incredible amounts of publicity, you are still stupid enough to pass out your mother's maiden name and your bank card PIN in reply to an email message.
You are really, really, stupid. Yes, you should be ashamed that you are the bottom of the barrel, the lowest of common denominators.
Your brains could be held in a thimble, nay pureed and spread thinly on the head of a pin.
Your elevator fails far short of the top floor, and even if it got there no one would be home. You are as sharp as a marble, as bright as mud, a few shades beyond blonde.
Did I mention that you weren't too smart?
This is precisely where Wikipedia is better than most other encyclopaedias: it gives you the complete range of opinions, even the "whacko" ones, given in a NPOV fashion, letting you decide which one is which.
Then you would be wanting a discussion forum, not an encyclopedia.
To give borderline cases equal space with accepted authority does no one a
service. If you want to explore all opinions on a subject, you can
investigate it. Wikipedia could even link to a discussion area which was
provided for giving space to all points of view.
The accepted role of an encyclopedia is to be authoritative and concise. If
too much space is given to borderline issues, it doesn't achieve that.
Let's be honest though,
No, let's be fanciful like you are being.
the main reason the US government doesn't bother to censor Korean/Iranian etc. websites is that realistically speaking those countries/ideologies don't really pose any realistic threat at all. If any power ever rose to truly challenge the US, or any foreign ideology ever appeared to be taking widespread hold in the US and threatening the power base of the leaders, I don't doubt for a minute that we would start seeing government-mandated censorship of foreign sites (under the guise of "protecting US national security", or "blocking hate-speech", or "protecting children from terrorist propaganda" and whatever other excuse is cooked up).
You must be from somewhere outside the US.
Can you show me examples of this happening in the US? No, you can't. You know why? Because it simply does not happen. The US doesn't censor, because it is simply impossible here -- no one would pay attention. You would get 1000 people taking the info and publishing it on the net. The censorship would make the newspapers and TV, and it would become a cause celebre.
You will get people who say that the US does censor things, but when you ask them what has been censored it is inevitably something that is so bogus and so off that you find that the only reason no one is heard of it is because it is off the wall.
Islam.
I can't believe what I just received when I sent in a comment as this guy
m l) asm l).
suggested.....
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I love it when the latte-slurping liberals of today try to judge the
actions of people decades and centuries ago ago with the PC hindsight
of today.
It has been a dog-eat-dog world for a lot of years. If the US and
England hadn't grabbed the first shot at oil in the Middle East, the
next strong country who came along would have. Russia, China, Turkey,
Germany? Who knows.
I suggest you go to the most pertinent monument to the sensibilities and
practicality of the liberals -- the Africa of today. They have been left
to rule themselves. Isn't it uplifting?
2031 MS software controls US
If you think the WWW is the Internet, think again.
The network which was extended to create the Internet was US-based from the
very beginning. The first TCP/IP transfers over distance were done there; the
first internetworking software; the first extension to non-defense and
non-academic concerns; a huge host of firsts. While there was certainly
activity other places, the amount of it was a pittance compared to what went
on in the US.
The US was from the very beginning the driving force behind the creation and
development of the Internet, and anyone who seriously disputes this is guilty
of attempting to rewrite history.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
Because the Japanese had shown that they weren't giving up easily despite the
chance that they had ZERO chance of winning the war or affecting the US demand
for unconditional surrender.
With what had happened to their infrastructure, another winter would have left
their civilian population starving, not to mention the hundreds of thousands
of deaths that would have occurred in an invasion.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
Nice hindsight -- another person expecting the people of generations ago to
behave as we would today.
Compared to the opposition in the war the U.S. behaved in a fairly civilized
fashion.
The US did not create the Internet.
Presuming you have enough language skill to know that "create" is not equal to
"develop, nurture, and improve", which country did create it?
The US created the the Internet, and there is no question about
that. It has been at the core of it from the very beginning.
That being said, it doesn't mean it owns it. But considering the US's
20-year stewardship of the net which has provided an incredibly fertile
ground for growth, with plenty of opportunities for all countries, I think
they are a better choice than the UN for this.
The UN is a case of the inmates running the asylum. Any organization which can
put a Syrian delegate as the chair of its human rights commission has shown
what it is made of.
And now we enter hip wader territory--the BS is getting that deep. A web server that crashes by merely being accessed is defective.
Are you mentally deficient?
Depending on the definition of "crash", it is easy for a web server to be crashed by excessive accesses. If a robot generates hundreds of thousands of accesses to attempt to harvest a database, it is making inappropriate accesses.
If a lock is on the door, i.e. prevention of single IP addresses from generating those accesses, certainly the use of proxies constitutes breaking that lock and comprises illegal access to the site.
Who's the arrogant one here?
that was a _very_ interesting and defining moment, because it told me that
everyone in that room...[snip]
Everyone? Come on now, a few people clapped. You are arrogantly assuming no
one else is as "enlightened" as you.
if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.
I have the ability to do about 50% of the jobs in the world, if not
more. Should I accept the responsibility for them? Obviously not. Even
if I were Superman and could do half of them, I would force half of the
world's people into unemployment.
You may think I am being facetious there, but the point is that we
sometimes have to wait for someone else to do something before they
*will* do it. Similarly, we sometimes have to wait for consensus if we
want to move an idea forward. Not everyone is going to come around right
away -- they have their own hot buttons and their own agendas.
We do the best we can with what we are given. And those of us who *can* do,
know that sometimes the best thing is to *not* do.
Because it is the only OS I know of where people routinely get trojaned simply
by visiting a web page or opening an email.
It is true that you could gull an individual and have them mail out their own
documents. You could put in a cron job that runs on their workstation, and
have it execute a script.
To do anything more far-reaching, perhaps something that sets the network
interface to promiscuous, you would have to take in someone with root permissions.
They aren't as easy a target.
With a Windows box running as Administrator, you can do most anything.
Every system is vulnerable, but some are more vulnerable than others.
Right. Which year was that you switched to Thunderbird? Considering it hasn't been out for years, that is.....
with Windows you can only get nearly (for some value of nearly).
My partner is now mostly a Linux user, and since he has been using Mozilla
he has had few problems with Windows when he does use it. But I asked him
how his Windows box had been doing, he said "I haven't had problem with
spyware or viruses for a long time".
I asked him what a long time was, and he said "oh, at least six or seven
months".
We as a company run one Windows machine -- his -- and about 18 Linux boxes.
We have had one Linux failure in 3 years, a bad network card. There have been
zero security breaches. This is over all 18 boxes.
His Windows box has crashed umpteen times and had many spyware and
virus incidents. (The only attachment clicking he did was twice in
the first wave of "returned mail" viruses.)
He is much more sophisticated than my wife, who with her Linux workstation
has never had a crash, a piece of spyware, a worm, or a virus.
There is a huge, huge, difference. An orders of magnitude difference.
I find it easier just to use the Flashblock extension. In the (very rare) event I need to run a Flash display, I just click the play button.