So this is all just spin. What's really going to happen is delays, obfuscation, API churn... and as many other spanners in the works as possible while still "complying" with the letter of the law, but never the spirit. I think that's more accurate now.
1/10 the issues because it has 1/10th of the user base. Linux would face all the same issues if it were uses daily by the same semi competent to non competent users that Windows has to deal with. Prove it.
Linux is for the "non-conformists" who want to seem smart, or for those who don't want to pay for an OS. In which category do you place Microsoft's Hotmail servers & the Akamai servers that hold Windows Updates? Don't you wish now you had known what you were talking about then?
InformationWeek: Did you see the New York Times story yesterday with IBM saying that the mainframe's coming back?
Ballmer: I really don't think that's true. They may continue to sustain life and they may grow their revenue, that's a different story. But if you actually went to most of your readers and said the mainframe is actually coming back, I think you wouldn't find 25% who would agree with that statement. The NYT article referenced contained no survey. It was all about the technical merits of virtualization and mainframes. Considering their market share, the 25% Ballmer quoted looks like he's not very confident in the technical merits of what he's selling.
Although the Internet may be considered the greatest achievement of the past 50 years, the technology behind it has created a sanctuary for various types of computer criminals. DARPANET was clever, and valuable for its intended purpose. Making it publicly available may be considered the greatest error in judgement of the past 50 years. (That blunder, by the way, was "accomplished" with Al Gore's "help.") On the topic of combatting cyber-crime, the Internet is just no place to do business. Unencrypted web pages and e-mails are fine for information you're happy to broadcast to anybody and everybody on Earth. This should be taught in all intro to computing classes. A "second Internet!" Looks like somebody's looking for a major budget allocation and doesn't want to bother earning that budget from willing, informed, free market actors.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized My personal data, in any and all databases in which they are stored, are part of my "papers, and effects," and protected from search without a warrant, by anybody. The hired help at utility companies have no right to conduct searches of other citizen's records except in the performance of their job responsibilities. The entire "debate" about privacy rights is a travesty. The Constitution provides no legitimate interpretation other than that citizens have the right to absolute control over our data, and no right to anybody else's data. This is just total shit.
Loss of revenue vs. loss of nothing
I fail to see the difference. What's so special about the money part? Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit? What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits? If the work is re-sold by the person who copied it without permission, there is a factual loss to the original producer of the work, the payment which was rendered to the wrong person. If no sale ever occurs, the argument of a "loss" is much more tenuous, as there is no factual evidence of a willingness of the recipient to pay any amount for the copyrighted work. The recipient can still be said to violate copyright law, but some of the argument for damages suffered by the copyright holder are much clearer when the work is re-sold.
How exactly would you propose to turn a machine that acts out measured impulses into a mind control device? So of course, you all tell him exactly how to do it. Fantastic.
See where we are going with this? We have two programs: One barely usable with the required specifications, and a second that is usable but is not up to speed on the requirements. Huh, yep, "Of the programmers, by the programmers, for the programmers." Joe Sixpack can pay to let some Indian tech remote control his desktop to make his eye candy work if he wants. Let him get tired of it and start asking why even with 3 Billion cycles per second, [near-]light-speed electronics still can't respond as fast as his chemical, roughly-sonic-speed reflexes when it runs Microsoft, or let him keep putting up with the BS. I don't care, it's not my problem.
Not all government agencies have the same resources as the high profile ones. Many of them run on inadequate budgets and with a severe shortage of qualified staff. I didn't explain my comment very well. My premise was that since they all ultimate report to the same boss [you and me], a single shared non-military federal computing network, modeled after DARPANET but distinct from it, would be the most sensible general solution.
I see no reason why a bittorrent transfer of an encrypted file could not achieve adequate security. Anything's possible, but based on the news I've read in the past 10 years, and the billions that DDoS, fraud, and FUD have cost, I see no reason to assume that sharing one or more partitions or directories of a government employee's hard drive should be considered a reasonable idea. There are as many Internet ports as rows in Excel 2003, which adds up to too much complexity for the best trained professionals to ever declare, "There, I've thought of everything. Your computer is now 100% secure from all intrusions."
OK, I take exception to that, because I strive to pay independent artists directly. OK, I criticized you first, so I'll admit, that part is a principled choice. I meant only to be critical of your thieving, but your point is valid. I should have phrased that more narrowly.
Not only that, but your exxon example is disingenuous and misdirected, by confusing copyright infringement with commodity theft, and taxes with levies. Not if tax on the physical commodity, blank CD, is your justification.
My 'petrol taxes' are misapplied by the government for general revenue, when they should go directly into subsidizing the transportation systems, but that is a local political issue as it's entirely government run, not a redistribution to the industry that assumes I'm a gas thief. I think the rationales for both those types of taxes, and many others, boil down to Imaginary Guilt: whatever convinces enough law-abiding citizens to pretend to believe we owe more to 'the system' than we really do. I also think the entertainment industry is one of the easiest to boycott, and the tax on CD-R's is not enough to change dissuade me from that opinion, so I really don't grok what all the fuss is about. I do enjoy the meticulous, cogent arguments that I frequently read against Imaginary Property, though. Please keep up the good work.
I never downloaded music until I realized I had been paying a levy for CDR's for years, totaling hundreds of dollars paid--for backing up data and recording original tracks. I felt like a chump. How much do you get taxed for petrol? What do you steal from Exxon? See, you're not acting on principle, you're just making excuses to be a leech, which is just another type of sucker.
My favorite part of the article was the hyperlink text at the bottom of page one leading to page two, which suggests two interpretations of the situation that are both completely wrong.
CONTINUED: Blame P2P users or software makers?... BS. Blame sysadmins who give their end-[L]users Administrator privileges. Not rights, privileges. Government employees don't own those computers, or those data. I do, along with the rest of the taxpayers. Administrator privileges to a government laptop by its daily user are completely inappropriate. Every software package on every government computer should be approved through a bureaucratic process as time-consuming as the worst urban myth about the Motor Vehicle Department and building permits put together. And, this is not uniquely a government problem, it's one of many symptoms of a cultural problem, specifically entitlement mentality. There is no good reason to have administrator access to a computer you have not personally purchased, but I hear a cacophony of pseudo-populist whining whenever I say that to semi-literate, entry-level keyboard operators.
Evidence that sensitive information is accessible through peer-to-peer networks illustrates "the importance of strengthening the laws and rules protecting personal information held by federal agencies" and other organizations, said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the committee's ranking member, who has sponsored a bill that would impose new requirements on government agencies that discover security breaches. "We need to do this quickly." You need to do it right, and be sure to include a few clear, simple guidelines preventing -- not just prohibiting -- the installation of software by the end user, by limiting them to Limited User status.
Speaking as the IT director of a private company, we have a machine that runs a bittorrent client in order to download updates for several pieces of software where we have found torrents the fastest and most reliable way of getting updates.
We have also considered using bittorrent with a private tracker as the easiest way of getting large chunks of data to clients. That's very efficient and probably adequately responsible of you. But, if you had the federal government's resources at your disposal, I would hope you would have the competence to achieve adequate coverage using ssl and an array of government-managed mirror sites, which I think is the sort of redundancy originally seen as DARPANET's strength. P2P is more like redundant vulnerability.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't be much of a challenge to institute a randomized delay between receiving commands, executing them, and reporting back to the C&C. The C&C could even change the randomization factor depending on how many bots are in that specific subnet of IPs. More bots = more time delay to thwart the sniffer. That's why I think these kinds of reports should be available only in pay-per-view journals and university CS/engineering departments.
The ability of a new hire to "hit the ground running" could save U.S. embedded systems companies millions of dollars each year. This is money that could be reinvested in additional research and development to make them more competitive in the world market, or simply yield a higher return to their investors. Regardless of what is done with the "savings," the incoming engineer would make U.S. companies more productive. Sorry, "millions of dollars each year" is not a national crisis. It looks like the total projected cost savings are too little to justify even one university adding to its CS curriculum topics that are already covered in physics & engineering, which are offered in many, but not all, institutions that teach CS. From the article, it looks like the ideal embedded developer is a double major, or major/minor in CS, and physics or engineering. I call BS on the claim that this is a problem deserving more gov't funding, and suggest that instead the same corporate interests get together and fund their own embedded systems graduate school, or night school in the neighborhood of their favorite engineering & CS departments. Whatever. Quit begging for tax money and invest in your own Training, Research & Development, you Welfare Queens. College is not meant to be a trade school for high-tech industry, it's meant to provide a general background, so new hires can "hit the ground running" with a reasonable amount of on-the-job training. The IEEE is such a bunch of whiny charity cases!
What might be needed here is a summit of all of the interested parties. Let's get some dialog going and elevate it to a national priority. Perhaps someone in the U.S. Senate, such as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) or Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who are both significant opponents of H-1Bs, could be champions of such a meeting. For that matter, maybe we need a national "mission," a la the Apollo space missions, to get things back on track and regain momentum. Perhaps a project that focuses on eco-friendly technologies, which tend to rely on embedded systems, is the right way to go. Who knows, we might be able to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create a generation of engineering innovators at the same time.
We must act soon. Many of the "greybeards" of embedded systems development are getting close to retirement age. We must try to capture their collective knowledge before it's lost and pass it on to the next generation of engineers. The U.S. embedded systems industry has a systemic problem that needs a holistic solution before we lose our technical edge. Even a "soft science" major knows you're required to quantify your claims to be taken seriously. Clown!
The other one is abortion. Liberals all want to say it's about a woman's choice with regard to when she should do with her own body. Never mind the personal responsibility the woman has to not get pregnant in the first place. Never mind the fact that by giving the woman the right to kill you're taking away the right of the baby to live. It's not a human until sometime after it has more brain cells than a fruit fly. Advocacy for the "rights of the unborn" is specious and I think you know it.
For example, the DeKalb shooting yesterday. Thanks to liberals that took place in a gun-free zone. They reduced the choices of manners of self-defense available to those who were there. Had someone been carrying their own firearm they could have taken out the shooter before eighteen people were hit. Because liberals believe in the goodness of all mankind or some such tripe (as someone pointed out above, a delusional thought when you look at history), they've run with the belief that criminals and nutjobs will obey "victim disarmament zones". That's a good point. Gun control laws just make us more dependent on somebody else for protection. Studies show that criminals know where concealed weapons are legal, and go elsewhere.
your logic is flawed, yes the current situation with the government and the RIAA is bad, however that does not exempt the RIAA from their actions. If you know a system is faulty and you use it for personal gain, both you and the system are at fault. The recording industry was all alone in 1999 in suffering wrongs that are not redressed. It is only justice that the DMCA was written especially to protect that one oppressed class of professional.
Even as a Free Software Maniac I hadn't realised how well the war was going, I thought we still had 10 years to run before we owned the playing field. Now it looks more like 5. The software is not the only front. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/12/1856240
With the right to be safe in one's person and possessions and the requirement of search warrants so close to being nullified, I wonder whether software choice will be permitted five years from now.
To put $100M back into SCO to keep it afloat, Microsoft and its supporters must be wetting themselves with fear. No-one in their right mind wastes $100M idly, people only do it out of irrational exuberance or extreme white-knuckle terror. Given SCO's performance lately I'm not minded to think it's exuberance. I don't know what else he has up his sleeve, but the liquid capital to "waste" $100M on a worthless property brings to mind the power to ignore the Constitution and do things like this. Do you play chess? Do you try to protect your pawns, or put them in your opponents' way? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/13/2331224
Slashdot Mirror
:D
If you can't beat 'em, just beat 'em up.
Ballmer: I really don't think that's true. They may continue to sustain life and they may grow their revenue, that's a different story. But if you actually went to most of your readers and said the mainframe is actually coming back, I think you wouldn't find 25% who would agree with that statement. The NYT article referenced contained no survey. It was all about the technical merits of virtualization and mainframes. Considering their market share, the 25% Ballmer quoted looks like he's not very confident in the technical merits of what he's selling.
We have also considered using bittorrent with a private tracker as the easiest way of getting large chunks of data to clients. That's very efficient and probably adequately responsible of you. But, if you had the federal government's resources at your disposal, I would hope you would have the competence to achieve adequate coverage using ssl and an array of government-managed mirror sites, which I think is the sort of redundancy originally seen as DARPANET's strength. P2P is more like redundant vulnerability.
Brilliant! Maybe that will be my signature soon.
I guess nobody in the entire porn industry understands how that works.
We must act soon. Many of the "greybeards" of embedded systems development are getting close to retirement age. We must try to capture their collective knowledge before it's lost and pass it on to the next generation of engineers. The U.S. embedded systems industry has a systemic problem that needs a holistic solution before we lose our technical edge. Even a "soft science" major knows you're required to quantify your claims to be taken seriously. Clown!
Then I would laugh. Do you also enjoy casinos or skydiving?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/12/1856240
With the right to be safe in one's person and possessions and the requirement of search warrants so close to being nullified, I wonder whether software choice will be permitted five years from now. To put $100M back into SCO to keep it afloat, Microsoft and its supporters must be wetting themselves with fear. No-one in their right mind wastes $100M idly, people only do it out of irrational exuberance or extreme white-knuckle terror. Given SCO's performance lately I'm not minded to think it's exuberance. I don't know what else he has up his sleeve, but the liquid capital to "waste" $100M on a worthless property brings to mind the power to ignore the Constitution and do things like this. Do you play chess? Do you try to protect your pawns, or put them in your opponents' way?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/13/2331224