How else do you expect to get by the web and email scanners which either filter or STOP any executables from getting through?
In order for this JPEG virus to work the host must be previously infected with a standard executable virus (which should be caught by scanners/filters) which enables JPEGs to be executed as code. The JPEG isn't actually a virus at all. It's more like a script for the actual virus to execute, disguised as a JPEG.
McAfee is trying to make people believe that this is a new different kind of virus, and that they now have to fear previously-thought-innocuous non-executable files, which is simply not true. This virus still requires an executable component. For that reason I feel Perrun falls under the catagory of hoax, and this is aggravated by their placing it in the apparently newly created risk catagory of "Low On Watch", which is the same as saying "Well, it's not doing anything now, BUT IT COULD AT ANY MOMENT!" In other words, it's FUD. Since there is a high likelyhood that this is being done in order to increase sales/subscriptions, it is therefore unethical.
Let me add to this that this morning when I logged in there was a message which looked like a virus alert, but which directed me to a site encouraging me to purchase a for $29.95 1 year subscription to VirusScan Online, a program which is already installed on my machine with a current subscription.
I don't know about you, but I put this kind of behavior right up there with Verisign sending fake renewal notices to people who use other registrars.
In my experience, grandmothers prefer technology that is simple. Contrary to popular belief, the MS application GUI is not simple. It is quite complicated and extremely cluttered with icons whose meanings and functions are obscure to the uninitiated. People struggle with these 'basic' concepts and tools because they are overwhelmed by the clutter of the interface.
In truth, KWord is a much better choice for the grandmothers of the world. The interface is as simple as Notepad, and it actually supports some fonts.
It seems counter-intuitive, but most older users I've talked to who've encountered command line interfaces prefer them, even when that wasn't how they were introduced to computers. Why? Because the CLI is quiet. It doesn't overwhelm you with a clutter of options like a GUI does, it just sits there quietly blinking, waiting for you to tell it what to do.
For my grandmother I would recomend vi if she were to ask my opinion. She seems to have dificulty only with the concept of the mouse, and something entirely keyboard based would thus be much easier for her to understand. She's also quite fond of sticky notes, which vi certainly encourages;-)
Once written down in teh collective, they where suddenly looked as as authoratative, and people begane killing each other over them. The archiving of those stories has caused more grief, misguided decision, and war than anything else.
Every fabrication has a kernel of truth. Even fiction has historical value. While I agree that more suffering has been caused in the name of the Bible than any other written work, more good has been done as well. To say that the Bible advocates or encourages violence one would have to be totally ignorant of what it actually says. Jesus wasn't exactly vague on that point. To put it another way; many, many people have been killed by being hit with hammers. Would we be better off without hammer technology? No. It isn't the hammer that kills people, just as it isn't the Bible that starts wars. It all comes down to people twisting everything around them to serve their own ends. To blame the hammer, or the Bible, is to ignore the real problem.
Archiving without related, supporting data, and without explination of the archived documents by the authors can be a dangerous thing.
All the more reason why we should archive everything we can. Even the things which, on their face value, seem worthless or worse. Everythign anyone writes down gives an insight into their thoughts, state of mind, dreams, desires, etc. When all of these things are taken together, you have a society.
I hate white supremists. I think the world would be much better off without them. I think they spread ignorance and lies, and I'm ashamed to be a part of the same species, let alone race, as them. But, it would be impossible to understand the dynamics of the society I live in without knowing they exist and what they are about, or that there are people who oppose the beliefs they espouse.
I think you don't need to be a programmer to manage programmers, but you DO have to have a grounding the basic concept of programming.
A grounding in the basic concepts of management would suffice here. This guy isn't a manager, he's a control freak whose only concern is his authority, and who doesn't give a rats ass about the actual project.
Because it's the everyday stupid stuff that nobody thinks is important that gives true insight into a society.
Someone reading your post knows that:
You have a dog, and that it is probably a pet since you trust it enough for it to have the opportunity to crap on your lawn.
You have a lawn, an area around you residence which you care for enough to clean up when your dog takes a crap on it.
It can also be infered that you live in a society which has domesticated animals and a concept of individual property ownership, and that your society places a value on hygene, and most likely the appearance of cleanliness, not just of the person but of the area surrounding the person.
The loss to our society for not having this information is nothing, since pet dogs and lawns are common in our society and we all know that. The loss is to future societies trying to understand ours. Did the Egyptions keep pet dogs? Did they have lawns? Did they clean it up when their dogs crapped on their lawns? If they did, how would we know except that someone wrote "My dog crapped on my lawn and I had to clean it up" and that writing was somehow preserved?
Academic and philosophical writings, while arguably more worthy of preservation, generally give little or no insight into the life of the average person, and at this point in time the way the average Athenian lived and the everyday things they did, and took for granted, is of more intellectual interest to us than that Aristotle knew a few things about Geometry.
TigerDirect has great prices? Are you insane, or just unaware of pricewatch? I used to get their sale emails all the time (until a few months ago), and I was generally unimpressed with even their "super-duper low" sale prices.
Personally, I like pricewatch, which has already been mentioned several times. You won't find a single vendor that has good prices on everything, though. I usually end up ordering parts from 3 or 4 vendors every time I build a PC. Some vendors I like:
googlegear - If you really want to do the one-stop thing, this is who I suggest. They don't have the best prices, but they're usually close and they have a huge selection.
teamexcess - They have a great clearance section if you don't mind stuff with cosmetic blemishes. I've bought several "B-Grade" 20" and 21" monitors from them and have always been happy, especially since they've cost me under $200 each, including shipping.
There are more whose names I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll post them in a reply to this when I get home.
I've seen TigerDirect mentioned, but I'd avoid them since you're concerned about price. They carry just about everything, but even their super sale prices are pretty high.
I definately recomend building your own. After shipping and tax you really won't save that much, but you will know exactly what you have since you picked it yourself, hopefully with compatability in mind, which can be very valuable if you run anything other than Windows.
I have to disagree with opt-in for archiving, simply on the grounds that to much would be lost simply due to laziness. Chances are I wouldn't go out of my way to opt-in to an archiving program, and I'm willing to bet that 99% of webmasters wouldn't either. If I were running the archive I probably wouldn't offer an opt-out either, but then I also probably wouldn't put my archive up on the web. It makes more sense to me to make such an archive available on some physical media such as CD or DVD.
I could see making republishing on the web opt-in, but not the archiving itself. If you take that step, you're opening the whole browser cache can of worms, and before you know it some idiot is suing people for using caching web-proxies.
By the very act of posting your site on the web you have given permission to make copies of it. Otherwise, how would anyone view it? And if no one is supposed to view it, why have you published it in a publicly accessible space?
If I went to your website 2 years ago and never closed or refreshed that browser window, would I now be violating your copyright? What if I saved the page so I could view it later offline? What if I never erased that file, would that mean that I'm violating your copyright? I have several floppies of web sites I saved at school for viewing at home from the days when I was stuck on a crappy dial-up service. Does that make me a pirate? What about all the copies of sites held in my browsers cache?
Don't get me wrong, I understand where the sentiment is coming from, even if I disagree with it. I'm just trying to point out how incongruous it is with the basic nature of computers and the internet and how they work.
These questions aside, though, I have to come down in favor of the historians. People here are always whining about old movies/books/music being lost because their owners refuse to let them go, even if they aren't using them, why should the web suffer the same fate? The rate of destruction is far faster on the internet, and since it isn't a physical media, the information has to be actively archived if it is to be preserved.
Correction: Competition = Free Market. Fascism does not preclude Capitalism, in fact they often go hand in hand. Everyones favorite Fascist regime, Nazi Germany, was a veritable utopia for Capitalists (as long as the weren't Jewish).
The goal of Capitalism is to maximise capital, generally by maximizing profit. Profit is limited by competition. Therefore: Capitalism and Competition are at odds. The goal of any true Capitalist is to establish a monopoly, putting them in a position to maximize profit, and thus amass capital.
Aside from that semantic point, however, I totally agree with you. I think it is critical to the survival of our society that we make it easier to pierce the corporate veil, and thus hold the people responsible for their actions. Only then will we see a change for the better.
Just imagine when they pick up their new PC, then walk over to the software aisle and pick up a few things....
I must not go PC shopping with people often enough, because I've never seen anyone do that without a salesperson leading them to it. If a WalMart salesperson is doing that, well, WalMart deserves the fallout that comes from that.
The real question is; how does Apple deal with this situation? They seem to have dealt with this problem just fine for many years now. Perhaps it isn't as much of a problem as everyone is making it out to be?
One thing you seem to be ignoring is the fact that it's preinstalled. That removes most of the barrier of entry for the Linux newbie. I expect that the Lindows folks have chosen apps that are easy to use, and they do exist, believe it or not. As for managing the OS, the sad truth is the vast majority of people buying prebuilt PCs from Walmart aren't going to do any OS management, regardless of the OS installed, and I don't mean that in an "only dumb hicks shop at WalMart" kind of way. Most people in general don't manage their OS, they use and abuse it until it gets so cluttered up that it can no longer support its own bloat. That said, though, as far as updates and such, there are Linux distros whos update tools far surpass anything MS has offered so far. SuSEs YOU comes to mind here, and I hope Lindows has taken a hint from them.
I see it as a 50/50 thing. About 50% will only care about surfing the web and getting their email, and so will probably never care that they aren't running Windows. The other 50% will be perfectly happy until they discover that their new Hallmark Greeting Card Maker won't work. On the hardware end, I think printers will be the sticking point, as Linux support for cheap printers is still pretty sketchy. This could be averted, though, if these PCs come with printers. Does anyone know?
Are you checking the Windows Update site intended for Admins, or the site intended for home users? There has not been a single IE security update on the user site since before the first IE6 uberpatch. There are far too many Windows boxen being used in a non-admin environment for this to be forgivable. If the average person can't click on the Windows Update icon in the start menu of their home/small business PC and download all the security patches for software integrated with the OS from the default update site, all Microsofts lip service about "Trustworthy Computing" amounts to jack shit.
When you get linux, you get a car in a box you have to assemble yourself. Some parts aren't right, don't function, or are currently unsupported. By the time you're done you have something that looks like a cross between a yugo and pinto and runs like colt vista.
I'm not sure what sort of Linux you're using, but I find this comment fairly amusing since you also advocate BSD. Personally, I haven't noticed any of these problems in the last year or two. I use SuSE. I buy the new version, throw the DVD in the drive (from which it boots cleanly, in your face MS!), spend about 30 seconds modifying the partition recomendations to my liking, 20 minutes or so modifying the default package install, and let it go. No fuss, no muss. No CD shuffle or endless reboots as I install the drivers for my hardware and the apps I need to make my machine useful.
Every Linux install I've done since SuSE 7.1 has been smooth like butter, and I've done a few. I've also done more installs of the various Windows flavors than I care to think about. Judging from my experience, your comment describes Windows perfectly, but doesn't apply to Linux at all.
Perhaps you should try a modern distro one of these days?
I've got the origional SB Live! and a pair of crappy multimedia speakers with subwoofer and I'm perfectly happy with it. I like the 3d positioning for games, but otherwise I don't do anything with it that I couldn't do just as well with an SB16. It was the card I put into the first box I built myself, and I paid way too much for it. Now you could get it and the speakers for about $30. I plan to keep using it until they stop making mobos with PCI slots, though onboard audio with 3d positioning could convince me to abandon it.
I'm a musician, also, and my hearing is good enough that I find mp3s irritating. When I want good sound, well, that's why I own a Bose Wavestation and over 200 CDs.
Well, MS might not have been there on the network, but they certainly were on the desktop, and that's where I think the familiarity was created. For whatever reason, and I'm honestly to young to know, MS beat out the competition. I remember AmigaDOS being much more usable, easier than MacOS IMHO, and I've heard a lot of good things about OS/2. I can only assume it was application support that did it.
When NT came along, folks said "hey, I'm already using MS on my desktops, why not on my server, too? 2 MS products will surely work well together...". Sure, it was nowhere near as powerful as Unix or Novell, but it was good enough and a hell of a lot cheaper.
I recently took a class on Network OSs and the book we used for Windows was published right before NT4 was released (I have no idea why such an antequated book would be used in a college course, but that's the way it is I guess). From the generally optomistic tone of the book, I can easily see how so many got sucked into the NT trap. It's easy to look back and laugh at them now, but these people really believed that MS was going to fix all their problems!
Congrats on your long and successful history with Linux. I think a lot of the reason more people aren't doing that is a lack of concrete, publicly available case studies of successful and well known companies using Linux. There are plenty "Anonymous Fortune 500 company uses Linux in an unspecified way" and "Random small business uses Linux for everything except making coffee" kind of testimonials floating around, but there's precious little I can show to my manager and say "Look, Linux works well enough for Company-You-Respect to trust it with their mission critical data". I've managed to sell Linux only with "We're big enough now that we need a dedicated file server. We could pay $2500 for Novell Small Business and the necissary hardware, $2000 for Windows and necissary hardware, or we could spend $100 for a new harddrive for this box we already have and install Linux for nothing." Perhaps money isn't a consideration for larger companies, but for those grossing less than 7 figures it's certainly compelling, and that's really the market I think Linux evangelists should be focusing on. It would still be really nice to have some real examples from well known companies to point to, since that's what is invariably asked for.
There are tons of small businesses out there with 2-10 windows boxes and a hub all hooked up as a workgroup. Around 8-10 users is where they will start to run into the simultaneous connection limits on their shared folders, and that's the best time to sell them on a Linux file server. Really, the hard part is convincing them to switch to a domain security model, but if you don't mind a little extra work on the admin side setting up Samba user access, it's pretty easy to drop a Linux server onto their network. I keep thinking I'm going to start up my own company to do exactly this, but I keep not getting around to it. But hey, I invite anyone reading this to steal my idea.
If Linux can gain momentum in the small business market, more small business apps will show up for it. Eventually some of these small businesses will grow into large ones, and hopefully Linux will grow with them.
I hit the Windows Update page fairly regularly, and unfortunately Microsoft doesn't see fit to include such things as the IE6 security patches there. I have to know they exist, which I only know from reading/., and go searching for them. I thought IE was part of the OS? I can download IE6 Punjabi menu support from Windows Update, why can't I get a fscking security patch there? Perhaps I could just reinstall IE? No dice, Windows has detected that I already have IE6 installed.
I'll believe that Microsoft is actually fixing stuff when they start including IE security patches on the main Windows Update download page. I'll believe that they have a commitment to trustworthy computing when they give me an update tool as simple to use as SuSE's YOU. That's right; when a company with $40 billion in the bank can keep up with a company that's had to lay off 90% of their US work force, I might start giving them some respect. Until then "trustworthy computing" is a bunch of marketing hot air.
Yes, I was refering to the earliest complete work. The 300CE copy was in greek, though, and so I would hardly consider it to be without errors, even just those stemming from translation. The earliest complete Hebrew copy is from, IIRC, around 800CE. There are certainly fragments which predate both of those, including the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is all from the World Religions class I took about 7 years ago. There may have been some new findings since then, but nothing I've heard about.
While I would not have any doubts about fragments written in Hebrew, I certainly have doubts about fragments, or even complete copies, in any other languages, as they would have been translated by other people for their own purposes.
The destruction of old, unreadable copies may be the systematic destruction I'm talking about, I'm not really sure. I'm no theologist, I'm just regurgitating what I was told by someone I respect as an expert in the field.
The rest of the paragraph addressed that: momentum and familiarity.
Really, 5-10 years ago, what were you going to use? Linux is only now getting to the point where it's a viable solution, and any Unix-based solutions were prohibitively expensive. Basically, you had Mac and PC, and the Mac cost twice as much, so unless you had a specific need for the Macs capabilities it was really no contest. If you had a PC, you had MS, and thus it became entrenched. People stick with what they know. If you don't believe me, try convincing someone to eat sushi for the first time.
MS gets these contracts because they got them last time. It's kind of a "I did crank today because I did crank yesterday" kind of thing. Silly and self-destructive, but humans tend to be creatures of habit.
It is the government's duty, in the case of anti-trust violations, to take action which will restore competition to the effected market. The easiest way to do this is to support companies that compete with the monopolist. Personally, I don't care if they pick Apple, Sun, Linux, BSD, or even FreeDOS, as long as they don't pick Microsoft, a convicted monopolist. That is, after all, exactly what the law states, and any of those choices would acheive the desired result of increasing/enabling competition in those markets which Microsoft currently dominates.
Also, technical merits? Are you honestly contending that there is a situation where you would choose a Microsoft solution over everything else based solely on technical merits? What technical merits would you base that decision on? In this situation (government IT) having an open document standard accesible in perpetuity has much more technical merit than being able to edit the current flavor of MS Word document format without breaking obscure and seldom used formatting, to counter the most common example. Hell, just accesible in perpetuity would be fine, but Microsoft has proven unwilling to provide even that. It is not the governments responsibility to accept information in whatever form the public wants to give it to them, it is the publics responsibility to shoehorn that information into the form the government accepts. That is why I have to use a form 1040 instead of just jotting down my income and number of dependents on any old scrap of paper, or just sending them a copy of the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my finances.
Regardless, technical merits are NEVER the sole basis of such a decision, and often they are not even a particularly important part. Costs are a big part of it, as are, especially in a government situation, political considerations such as supporting local businesses and thus maintaining the local economy. Momentum also plays a part, as organizations are more likely to simply upgrade what they have, for better or worse, than start over from scratch, or if they are starting from scratch they will generally choose a technology which an important member of the organization is most familiar with, whether or not that person is actually qualified to be making such a recomendation.
I feel that there are any number of vendors, both open and closed source, who are better suited to the requirements of government IT than Microsoft; namely security and long term information access. This law is simply the kick in the pants necessary to force this particular body to consider those other solutions. Naturally, I would prefer that my government choose open source solutions, as I believe that investment in open source maximizes the value of my tax dollars, but other choices would certainly be acceptable.
Drunk drivers should not drive busses, embezzlers should not be appointed to the treasury, child pornographers should not work at schools, and abusive monopolists should not be rewarded with government contracts.
Someone just HAS to make funny karma-whoring quotes from that Simpson's episode every single [slashdot.org] freaking time there is any monorail-related article on slashdot.
As I said, the comparisons I've seen tell a different story; that Linux is better able to keep running in the face of hardware failure than WinNT. I'm one of those lucky few who never seem to have hardware fail, though, so I don't have any personal experience in that regard. All the bad hardware I've had was bad when I got it, and that one stick of RAM is the only one I haven't sent back (because it was sitting on my shelf for to long before I tested it. D'oh!)
I agree with your points about my badram example, but the only reason I included it was to illustrate the fact that with Linux it is sometimes possible to add kernel patches, etc, in order to work around hardware faults, while that option isn't available in Win2k (or any other Windows, to my knowledge). I see your AGP issue as being different, since that was a hardware conflict inherent to that particular combination of hardware, not a piece of hardware that failed.
Slashdot Mirror
How else do you expect to get by the web and email scanners which either filter or STOP any executables from getting through?
In order for this JPEG virus to work the host must be previously infected with a standard executable virus (which should be caught by scanners/filters) which enables JPEGs to be executed as code. The JPEG isn't actually a virus at all. It's more like a script for the actual virus to execute, disguised as a JPEG.
McAfee is trying to make people believe that this is a new different kind of virus, and that they now have to fear previously-thought-innocuous non-executable files, which is simply not true. This virus still requires an executable component. For that reason I feel Perrun falls under the catagory of hoax, and this is aggravated by their placing it in the apparently newly created risk catagory of "Low On Watch", which is the same as saying "Well, it's not doing anything now, BUT IT COULD AT ANY MOMENT!" In other words, it's FUD. Since there is a high likelyhood that this is being done in order to increase sales/subscriptions, it is therefore unethical.
Let me add to this that this morning when I logged in there was a message which looked like a virus alert, but which directed me to a site encouraging me to purchase a for $29.95 1 year subscription to VirusScan Online, a program which is already installed on my machine with a current subscription.
I don't know about you, but I put this kind of behavior right up there with Verisign sending fake renewal notices to people who use other registrars.
In my experience, grandmothers prefer technology that is simple. Contrary to popular belief, the MS application GUI is not simple. It is quite complicated and extremely cluttered with icons whose meanings and functions are obscure to the uninitiated. People struggle with these 'basic' concepts and tools because they are overwhelmed by the clutter of the interface.
;-)
In truth, KWord is a much better choice for the grandmothers of the world. The interface is as simple as Notepad, and it actually supports some fonts.
It seems counter-intuitive, but most older users I've talked to who've encountered command line interfaces prefer them, even when that wasn't how they were introduced to computers. Why? Because the CLI is quiet. It doesn't overwhelm you with a clutter of options like a GUI does, it just sits there quietly blinking, waiting for you to tell it what to do.
For my grandmother I would recomend vi if she were to ask my opinion. She seems to have dificulty only with the concept of the mouse, and something entirely keyboard based would thus be much easier for her to understand. She's also quite fond of sticky notes, which vi certainly encourages
Once written down in teh collective, they where suddenly looked as as authoratative, and people begane killing each other over them. The archiving of those stories has caused more grief, misguided decision, and war than anything else.
Every fabrication has a kernel of truth. Even fiction has historical value. While I agree that more suffering has been caused in the name of the Bible than any other written work, more good has been done as well. To say that the Bible advocates or encourages violence one would have to be totally ignorant of what it actually says. Jesus wasn't exactly vague on that point. To put it another way; many, many people have been killed by being hit with hammers. Would we be better off without hammer technology? No. It isn't the hammer that kills people, just as it isn't the Bible that starts wars. It all comes down to people twisting everything around them to serve their own ends. To blame the hammer, or the Bible, is to ignore the real problem.
Archiving without related, supporting data, and without explination of the archived documents by the authors can be a dangerous thing.
All the more reason why we should archive everything we can. Even the things which, on their face value, seem worthless or worse. Everythign anyone writes down gives an insight into their thoughts, state of mind, dreams, desires, etc. When all of these things are taken together, you have a society.
I hate white supremists. I think the world would be much better off without them. I think they spread ignorance and lies, and I'm ashamed to be a part of the same species, let alone race, as them. But, it would be impossible to understand the dynamics of the society I live in without knowing they exist and what they are about, or that there are people who oppose the beliefs they espouse.
I think you don't need to be a programmer to manage programmers, but you DO have to have a grounding the basic concept of programming.
A grounding in the basic concepts of management would suffice here. This guy isn't a manager, he's a control freak whose only concern is his authority, and who doesn't give a rats ass about the actual project.
Because it's the everyday stupid stuff that nobody thinks is important that gives true insight into a society.
Someone reading your post knows that:
You have a dog, and that it is probably a pet since you trust it enough for it to have the opportunity to crap on your lawn.
You have a lawn, an area around you residence which you care for enough to clean up when your dog takes a crap on it.
It can also be infered that you live in a society which has domesticated animals and a concept of individual property ownership, and that your society places a value on hygene, and most likely the appearance of cleanliness, not just of the person but of the area surrounding the person.
The loss to our society for not having this information is nothing, since pet dogs and lawns are common in our society and we all know that. The loss is to future societies trying to understand ours. Did the Egyptions keep pet dogs? Did they have lawns? Did they clean it up when their dogs crapped on their lawns? If they did, how would we know except that someone wrote "My dog crapped on my lawn and I had to clean it up" and that writing was somehow preserved?
Academic and philosophical writings, while arguably more worthy of preservation, generally give little or no insight into the life of the average person, and at this point in time the way the average Athenian lived and the everyday things they did, and took for granted, is of more intellectual interest to us than that Aristotle knew a few things about Geometry.
TigerDirect has great prices? Are you insane, or just unaware of pricewatch? I used to get their sale emails all the time (until a few months ago), and I was generally unimpressed with even their "super-duper low" sale prices.
Personally, I like pricewatch, which has already been mentioned several times. You won't find a single vendor that has good prices on everything, though. I usually end up ordering parts from 3 or 4 vendors every time I build a PC. Some vendors I like:
googlegear - If you really want to do the one-stop thing, this is who I suggest. They don't have the best prices, but they're usually close and they have a huge selection.
teamexcess - They have a great clearance section if you don't mind stuff with cosmetic blemishes. I've bought several "B-Grade" 20" and 21" monitors from them and have always been happy, especially since they've cost me under $200 each, including shipping.
There are more whose names I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll post them in a reply to this when I get home.
I've seen TigerDirect mentioned, but I'd avoid them since you're concerned about price. They carry just about everything, but even their super sale prices are pretty high.
I definately recomend building your own. After shipping and tax you really won't save that much, but you will know exactly what you have since you picked it yourself, hopefully with compatability in mind, which can be very valuable if you run anything other than Windows.
I have to disagree with opt-in for archiving, simply on the grounds that to much would be lost simply due to laziness. Chances are I wouldn't go out of my way to opt-in to an archiving program, and I'm willing to bet that 99% of webmasters wouldn't either. If I were running the archive I probably wouldn't offer an opt-out either, but then I also probably wouldn't put my archive up on the web. It makes more sense to me to make such an archive available on some physical media such as CD or DVD.
I could see making republishing on the web opt-in, but not the archiving itself. If you take that step, you're opening the whole browser cache can of worms, and before you know it some idiot is suing people for using caching web-proxies.
By the very act of posting your site on the web you have given permission to make copies of it. Otherwise, how would anyone view it? And if no one is supposed to view it, why have you published it in a publicly accessible space?
If I went to your website 2 years ago and never closed or refreshed that browser window, would I now be violating your copyright? What if I saved the page so I could view it later offline? What if I never erased that file, would that mean that I'm violating your copyright? I have several floppies of web sites I saved at school for viewing at home from the days when I was stuck on a crappy dial-up service. Does that make me a pirate? What about all the copies of sites held in my browsers cache?
Don't get me wrong, I understand where the sentiment is coming from, even if I disagree with it. I'm just trying to point out how incongruous it is with the basic nature of computers and the internet and how they work.
These questions aside, though, I have to come down in favor of the historians. People here are always whining about old movies/books/music being lost because their owners refuse to let them go, even if they aren't using them, why should the web suffer the same fate? The rate of destruction is far faster on the internet, and since it isn't a physical media, the information has to be actively archived if it is to be preserved.
Correction: Competition = Free Market. Fascism does not preclude Capitalism, in fact they often go hand in hand. Everyones favorite Fascist regime, Nazi Germany, was a veritable utopia for Capitalists (as long as the weren't Jewish).
The goal of Capitalism is to maximise capital, generally by maximizing profit. Profit is limited by competition. Therefore: Capitalism and Competition are at odds. The goal of any true Capitalist is to establish a monopoly, putting them in a position to maximize profit, and thus amass capital.
Aside from that semantic point, however, I totally agree with you. I think it is critical to the survival of our society that we make it easier to pierce the corporate veil, and thus hold the people responsible for their actions. Only then will we see a change for the better.
Just imagine when they pick up their new PC, then walk over to the software aisle and pick up a few things....
I must not go PC shopping with people often enough, because I've never seen anyone do that without a salesperson leading them to it. If a WalMart salesperson is doing that, well, WalMart deserves the fallout that comes from that.
The real question is; how does Apple deal with this situation? They seem to have dealt with this problem just fine for many years now. Perhaps it isn't as much of a problem as everyone is making it out to be?
One thing you seem to be ignoring is the fact that it's preinstalled. That removes most of the barrier of entry for the Linux newbie. I expect that the Lindows folks have chosen apps that are easy to use, and they do exist, believe it or not. As for managing the OS, the sad truth is the vast majority of people buying prebuilt PCs from Walmart aren't going to do any OS management, regardless of the OS installed, and I don't mean that in an "only dumb hicks shop at WalMart" kind of way. Most people in general don't manage their OS, they use and abuse it until it gets so cluttered up that it can no longer support its own bloat. That said, though, as far as updates and such, there are Linux distros whos update tools far surpass anything MS has offered so far. SuSEs YOU comes to mind here, and I hope Lindows has taken a hint from them.
I see it as a 50/50 thing. About 50% will only care about surfing the web and getting their email, and so will probably never care that they aren't running Windows. The other 50% will be perfectly happy until they discover that their new Hallmark Greeting Card Maker won't work. On the hardware end, I think printers will be the sticking point, as Linux support for cheap printers is still pretty sketchy. This could be averted, though, if these PCs come with printers. Does anyone know?
When are you slashdot kids going to learn that lying about Linux, doesn't actually make it better?
Perhaps when we actually have to start lying?
Are you checking the Windows Update site intended for Admins, or the site intended for home users? There has not been a single IE security update on the user site since before the first IE6 uberpatch. There are far too many Windows boxen being used in a non-admin environment for this to be forgivable. If the average person can't click on the Windows Update icon in the start menu of their home/small business PC and download all the security patches for software integrated with the OS from the default update site, all Microsofts lip service about "Trustworthy Computing" amounts to jack shit.
When you get linux, you get a car in a box you have to assemble yourself. Some parts aren't right, don't function, or are currently unsupported. By the time you're done you have something that looks like a cross between a yugo and pinto and runs like colt vista.
I'm not sure what sort of Linux you're using, but I find this comment fairly amusing since you also advocate BSD. Personally, I haven't noticed any of these problems in the last year or two. I use SuSE. I buy the new version, throw the DVD in the drive (from which it boots cleanly, in your face MS!), spend about 30 seconds modifying the partition recomendations to my liking, 20 minutes or so modifying the default package install, and let it go. No fuss, no muss. No CD shuffle or endless reboots as I install the drivers for my hardware and the apps I need to make my machine useful.
Every Linux install I've done since SuSE 7.1 has been smooth like butter, and I've done a few. I've also done more installs of the various Windows flavors than I care to think about. Judging from my experience, your comment describes Windows perfectly, but doesn't apply to Linux at all.
Perhaps you should try a modern distro one of these days?
I've got the origional SB Live! and a pair of crappy multimedia speakers with subwoofer and I'm perfectly happy with it. I like the 3d positioning for games, but otherwise I don't do anything with it that I couldn't do just as well with an SB16. It was the card I put into the first box I built myself, and I paid way too much for it. Now you could get it and the speakers for about $30. I plan to keep using it until they stop making mobos with PCI slots, though onboard audio with 3d positioning could convince me to abandon it.
I'm a musician, also, and my hearing is good enough that I find mp3s irritating. When I want good sound, well, that's why I own a Bose Wavestation and over 200 CDs.
Well, MS might not have been there on the network, but they certainly were on the desktop, and that's where I think the familiarity was created. For whatever reason, and I'm honestly to young to know, MS beat out the competition. I remember AmigaDOS being much more usable, easier than MacOS IMHO, and I've heard a lot of good things about OS/2. I can only assume it was application support that did it.
When NT came along, folks said "hey, I'm already using MS on my desktops, why not on my server, too? 2 MS products will surely work well together...". Sure, it was nowhere near as powerful as Unix or Novell, but it was good enough and a hell of a lot cheaper.
I recently took a class on Network OSs and the book we used for Windows was published right before NT4 was released (I have no idea why such an antequated book would be used in a college course, but that's the way it is I guess). From the generally optomistic tone of the book, I can easily see how so many got sucked into the NT trap. It's easy to look back and laugh at them now, but these people really believed that MS was going to fix all their problems!
Congrats on your long and successful history with Linux. I think a lot of the reason more people aren't doing that is a lack of concrete, publicly available case studies of successful and well known companies using Linux. There are plenty "Anonymous Fortune 500 company uses Linux in an unspecified way" and "Random small business uses Linux for everything except making coffee" kind of testimonials floating around, but there's precious little I can show to my manager and say "Look, Linux works well enough for Company-You-Respect to trust it with their mission critical data". I've managed to sell Linux only with "We're big enough now that we need a dedicated file server. We could pay $2500 for Novell Small Business and the necissary hardware, $2000 for Windows and necissary hardware, or we could spend $100 for a new harddrive for this box we already have and install Linux for nothing." Perhaps money isn't a consideration for larger companies, but for those grossing less than 7 figures it's certainly compelling, and that's really the market I think Linux evangelists should be focusing on. It would still be really nice to have some real examples from well known companies to point to, since that's what is invariably asked for.
There are tons of small businesses out there with 2-10 windows boxes and a hub all hooked up as a workgroup. Around 8-10 users is where they will start to run into the simultaneous connection limits on their shared folders, and that's the best time to sell them on a Linux file server. Really, the hard part is convincing them to switch to a domain security model, but if you don't mind a little extra work on the admin side setting up Samba user access, it's pretty easy to drop a Linux server onto their network. I keep thinking I'm going to start up my own company to do exactly this, but I keep not getting around to it. But hey, I invite anyone reading this to steal my idea.
If Linux can gain momentum in the small business market, more small business apps will show up for it. Eventually some of these small businesses will grow into large ones, and hopefully Linux will grow with them.
Wouldn't that be ISDN?
I hit the Windows Update page fairly regularly, and unfortunately Microsoft doesn't see fit to include such things as the IE6 security patches there. I have to know they exist, which I only know from reading /., and go searching for them. I thought IE was part of the OS? I can download IE6 Punjabi menu support from Windows Update, why can't I get a fscking security patch there? Perhaps I could just reinstall IE? No dice, Windows has detected that I already have IE6 installed.
I'll believe that Microsoft is actually fixing stuff when they start including IE security patches on the main Windows Update download page. I'll believe that they have a commitment to trustworthy computing when they give me an update tool as simple to use as SuSE's YOU. That's right; when a company with $40 billion in the bank can keep up with a company that's had to lay off 90% of their US work force, I might start giving them some respect. Until then "trustworthy computing" is a bunch of marketing hot air.
Yes, I was refering to the earliest complete work. The 300CE copy was in greek, though, and so I would hardly consider it to be without errors, even just those stemming from translation. The earliest complete Hebrew copy is from, IIRC, around 800CE. There are certainly fragments which predate both of those, including the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is all from the World Religions class I took about 7 years ago. There may have been some new findings since then, but nothing I've heard about.
While I would not have any doubts about fragments written in Hebrew, I certainly have doubts about fragments, or even complete copies, in any other languages, as they would have been translated by other people for their own purposes.
The destruction of old, unreadable copies may be the systematic destruction I'm talking about, I'm not really sure. I'm no theologist, I'm just regurgitating what I was told by someone I respect as an expert in the field.
The rest of the paragraph addressed that: momentum and familiarity.
Really, 5-10 years ago, what were you going to use? Linux is only now getting to the point where it's a viable solution, and any Unix-based solutions were prohibitively expensive. Basically, you had Mac and PC, and the Mac cost twice as much, so unless you had a specific need for the Macs capabilities it was really no contest. If you had a PC, you had MS, and thus it became entrenched. People stick with what they know. If you don't believe me, try convincing someone to eat sushi for the first time.
MS gets these contracts because they got them last time. It's kind of a "I did crank today because I did crank yesterday" kind of thing. Silly and self-destructive, but humans tend to be creatures of habit.
It is the government's duty, in the case of anti-trust violations, to take action which will restore competition to the effected market. The easiest way to do this is to support companies that compete with the monopolist. Personally, I don't care if they pick Apple, Sun, Linux, BSD, or even FreeDOS, as long as they don't pick Microsoft, a convicted monopolist. That is, after all, exactly what the law states, and any of those choices would acheive the desired result of increasing/enabling competition in those markets which Microsoft currently dominates.
Also, technical merits? Are you honestly contending that there is a situation where you would choose a Microsoft solution over everything else based solely on technical merits? What technical merits would you base that decision on? In this situation (government IT) having an open document standard accesible in perpetuity has much more technical merit than being able to edit the current flavor of MS Word document format without breaking obscure and seldom used formatting, to counter the most common example. Hell, just accesible in perpetuity would be fine, but Microsoft has proven unwilling to provide even that. It is not the governments responsibility to accept information in whatever form the public wants to give it to them, it is the publics responsibility to shoehorn that information into the form the government accepts. That is why I have to use a form 1040 instead of just jotting down my income and number of dependents on any old scrap of paper, or just sending them a copy of the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my finances.
Regardless, technical merits are NEVER the sole basis of such a decision, and often they are not even a particularly important part. Costs are a big part of it, as are, especially in a government situation, political considerations such as supporting local businesses and thus maintaining the local economy. Momentum also plays a part, as organizations are more likely to simply upgrade what they have, for better or worse, than start over from scratch, or if they are starting from scratch they will generally choose a technology which an important member of the organization is most familiar with, whether or not that person is actually qualified to be making such a recomendation.
I feel that there are any number of vendors, both open and closed source, who are better suited to the requirements of government IT than Microsoft; namely security and long term information access. This law is simply the kick in the pants necessary to force this particular body to consider those other solutions. Naturally, I would prefer that my government choose open source solutions, as I believe that investment in open source maximizes the value of my tax dollars, but other choices would certainly be acceptable.
Drunk drivers should not drive busses, embezzlers should not be appointed to the treasury, child pornographers should not work at schools, and abusive monopolists should not be rewarded with government contracts.
Someone just HAS to make funny karma-whoring quotes from that Simpson's episode every single [slashdot.org] freaking time there is any monorail-related article on slashdot.
Yes, that's what 'obligatory' means.
I can't imagine what I would do with that much RAM, but I might be interested if the price is right. What type of RAM is it?
As I said, the comparisons I've seen tell a different story; that Linux is better able to keep running in the face of hardware failure than WinNT. I'm one of those lucky few who never seem to have hardware fail, though, so I don't have any personal experience in that regard. All the bad hardware I've had was bad when I got it, and that one stick of RAM is the only one I haven't sent back (because it was sitting on my shelf for to long before I tested it. D'oh!)
I agree with your points about my badram example, but the only reason I included it was to illustrate the fact that with Linux it is sometimes possible to add kernel patches, etc, in order to work around hardware faults, while that option isn't available in Win2k (or any other Windows, to my knowledge). I see your AGP issue as being different, since that was a hardware conflict inherent to that particular combination of hardware, not a piece of hardware that failed.