Lets look at worse case / catostrophic failure. Say the beam is mis-aligned to aim at a school playground, and can't be shutdown for 8 hours. Lets also assume it was Field Day, and all these kids were outside. Lets assume it was a nice day, and they were in shorts and shirts.
Damages? Well if these kids are pasty little white boys from South Bend, Indiana we could have some mild sunburn. But guess what, chances are they would be sunburn ANYHOW for being outside 8 hours.
My point is this is no more dangerous than a Miami beach, and that's including the dangers the Brazilian She-Males bring to South Beach.
I know, I know.. it's slashdot. 99% don't read the articles. But come on...
Each terrestrial receiver can accept power directly from the Moon or indirectly, via relay satellites, when the receiver cannot view the Moon. The intensity of each power beam is restricted to 20%, or less, of the intensity of noontime sunlight. Each power beam can be safely received, for example, in an industrially zoned area.
Even if a bird HOVERED over the area for hours it wouldn't be harmed.
Hell, they can probably put out chase lounge chairs and sell seats to rich bitches that want a quick tan.
Build a Club Med under one of the transmission reception areas. Rain or shine, you'd get the UV exposure for 20% noon-time all the time.
While I agree with you that this could be done 'safe enough' I will point out one observation.
What's the delay (speed of light) between moon transmission and earth reception? What is the fastest this beam could change angles, and give that delay/amount of time before it could be shut off (ie, realize via speed of light that it's out of alignment) what is the maximum arc it can traverse.
I think the wider the arc it moved, the less damage it would do (note, i'm thinking of the microwaves as quanta/packets to guesstimate that). I'm curious of others thoughts, if you have a machine gun and you moved it 1 arc/degree (or some measurement) the spread some distances away would have gaps between it. What happens when you do that with a microwave 'beam' (or a laser light for that matter). Does the light skip sections? Does it avg out over the spread pattern? Is it less powerfull then?
I'm sure this is all answered by Feynman in QED, but hell if I can figure out how.
Disappearing would only raise suspicion, not abate it. And it doesn't change the fact that this code gets reviewed a lot by a lot of different people. It would get noticed pretty quickly, methinks.
Ha ha ha hah. yeah, right, because in the opensource world people _rarely_ are given CVS access, do some work, and then dissapear into the void.
While linux kernel may be more guarded, 98% of projects on sourceforge probably has people with CVS write access that are no longer active in the project. This is a huge nightmare for larger opensource projects. FreeNet, CrystalSource, other with lists of developers often time don't keep day-to-day tabs on developers.
I think this is from Ian Clarke over on Freenet devel 10/30/2003:
There are about 63 people currently with developer access to CVS, and
most of these people, to the best of my knowledge, are not currently active in the project. This is a security risk.
So while opensource gives you the ability to have peer level code review, it doesn't force it. Which means, on particularly large systems, code can creep in without being scrutized to much (unless it doesn't work). Especially if the code is technical and few people understand the jist of it.
People always say "well, review the code yourself then". That's great if you know wtf your doing, that doesn't help Joe noobie.
Seriously, who do I have to kill for this network to get funding and put on the air.
Re:NTFS + SQL + XML + buzzword compliance?
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
NTFS and SQL are Buzzwords? Is this 1991?
And how exactly is this FUD. Where is the Fear? Where is the doubt? Where's the Uncertainty?
You also say
Meanwhile, support people and PHBs have committed to it, so its Too Important To Let Fail
Wouldn't you mean 'developers' and PHB have committed to it? Support people are always the last to change, and hate it the most.
Look, WinFS is a document repository. It's a good thing if you work with or build document management systems. Because right now, Document Management systems are all over the place. You can use native file systems, with some sort of indexer running, and keep meta-data in a back en relational database, or you can keep meta-data hidden in a non-visible stream (if it's NTFS, and it won't move to another FS), or some people have document management systems where you have "file.doc" and "file.xml". The point is, we're grafting technology together that don't work too well.
WinFS will give us an area where we can dumb BLOB data into it as easily as moving around files, and yet extended that data with specific meta-data to solve business problems.
Don't like it? Don't port it to linux and keep away from it.
My company writes software like this atleast 5 times a year. Normally for lawfirms, generally dealing with a frew hundred thousand files. I for one can't wait for support at an OS level more so than "Use NTFS with MS Indexing Service and a custom Index filter written in C++".
And what is with your FUD:
Ultimately, it becomes a time and resource sink the likes of which is only matched by/dev/null... All of this won't help the average user find files easier... massively more bloated and complex
At some future point, when human existence is long forgotten, some entity will find this plaque long since buried in the martian dust, and think to themselves "My god, what shitty artist they were".
Seriously, i'm not a big fan of UI design, what being a programmer and all, but come on, shell out five grand for something better than squiggly "see jane run" pictures of people. Or hell, at least use better stick figures. I'm sure the whole development team has access to MS products and can grab the annoying clip-art stick figures we see in every fookin slide at a conference. I swear if I see another image of a stick figure guy scratching his head on the slide entitiled "Any Questions?" I'm going to start shooting people...
Didn't Fenyman have experiments done with two holes in a divider between a photon emmiter and detector? Every attempt to measure which hole a photon went through on it's way to a detector collapsed the system such that the photon took only one path. No Interference.
Sounds to me like nature has code to see if a debugger is attached to her processes, and if so, she ain't going to show you what she really does when you aren't looking.
Which is why many people didn't like the ctrl-alt-del sequence, and why Win2000 and XP drop it by default (you can regedit it back).
ctrl-alt-del causes a hardware interrupt. This allows the operating system first chance at it before your code has a chance. This is circumnavigated by switching modes on the processor.
I'm not a fan of it, but I've done it for the past 10 years multiple times a day to log on or off (winnt 3.1 beta '93 to now, jesus thats a long time). It's a zen thing, i have to do it, with my coffee, or something isn't right the rest of the day.
It was not a memorable event," said Bradley, a longtime IBM employee, speaking of that day in 1980 or '81 when he discovered control-alt-delete.
...
He's much too modest. Would Alexander Fleming have said, "It wasn't a memorable event," when he discovered penicillin? Would Albert Einstein have said, "I really can't recall when I discovered E=MC squared?"
uh huh...
Bradley chose the control and alt keys because he needed two shift keys to make the operation work, and he chose the delete key because it was on the opposite side of the keyboard. He didn't want people to hit control-alt-delete by accident.
It's more complicated than that, of course, but most people don't have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University, as Bradley does
oh please. He picked a key sequence that's difficult to accidentally set off. So what? It could have been shift-esc-break. If this is what a Ph.D. in electrical engineering is good for, I'm glad I don't have mine.
And the reason MS used it for login in NT 3.1 was for security. It negated the possibility of a impersonation client that displayed an image which looked like the NT 3.1 login, but just stole Passwords instead. If such a client was written to DOS or Windows it would simple reboot. So it was a sanity check, at the time.
Which is why I no longer practice a religion (and don't understand why I ever did). Tithing is one of those archaic principles that benefits the Corportion of Relgions too well to deprecate it. Animal sacrifices? pass se. Tithing? Oh well, we'll keep that one. We need it.
You want to help your community? Start a company, aggressively persue clients, work your ass off, and grow it. Grow it by hiring people. Want to 'give' something to the community, give people a reason to better themselves, to study, to read, to learn. Do not give jobs to the pathetic guy who you feel sorry for. That is rewarding the weak. Give the job to the person who most deserves it, and give everyone else a reason for self improvement.
You think your donations make more of a difference than my companies employment? I find it laughable you held on to your jalopy, and then blindly gave your money to someone else to help yet another person.
Let me be honest. I don't care about you, or anyone else. I'm going to work for myself. I want to better myself. I want my company to be the best company. I will not donate money to a church. I will give money to the Arts though. By caring only about myself, and worrying only about making the best products I can make, I have a succesfull company. How does this help society as a whole? I don't care. But in fact, it helps it immensely. I hire people, I give them paychecks. I make business more efficent, they are more profitable, they expand and hire more people, and their stockholders gain more wealth. It's a cycle. It works damn well.
Every now and again I read something on slashdot which makes quite certain the world is doomed. Not because of the news item, but the responses from the slashdot crowd.
And then i see all the little green and blue bubbles wake up, come out of the woodwork, and post. We might yet have a chance.
I swear. The opensource "movement" is plagued by villians straight out of Ayn Rand novels.
I like opensource like a hobby. But the group as a whole is way to anti-capitalism.
Wealthy isn't about distribution. It's about creating wealth. The US was one of the first countries that actually called it what it was "Wealth Creation". Before that, the peasants used to say things like "Give us your wealth" or "Share the wealth". Capitalism said, "It's your right to MAKE your own wealth".
I know schools have removed Fountainhead and Atlas Shurgged from the required reading list since the cold war is over, but I never thought I would _see_ the difference because of such a move.
It's a plea to socialize the software industry. Don't work on what you want to work on, work on what society NEEDS you to work on. But do it for SOCIETY, that is, do it for FREE. This will allegedly help a struggling 'cutting-edge' business grow. Give them free software, and all will work out.
This is hogwash. And the article goes all over the place. It starts off with blaming "financial scandals, wars, tax cuts, stagnation" on why people have lost jobs "or had to accept menial ones". But then concludes "there is little doubt that a large contributor to rising unemployment is rising productivity". We see this every new age. This guy is bordering on a Luddite. He's also overly dramatic which makes me dislike him even more "I can no longer avert my eyes from the consequences of the field I have chosen" so noble. "... and no one else who programs, administers, or promotes the use of computers can morally avert their eyes either" oh jeez.
It gets worse, "The gigantic combine of capitalism has always obsessively pursued effiencey..." yeah, that's the point. That's why it works.
"Capitalism has succeeded in sowing a cornucopia of innovation up and down society. But capitalism is atrocious at
distributing the fruits of innovation"
No, Capitalism is atrocious at GIVING AWAY the fruits of innovation. It doesn't reward people who don't partake in it. That is why it's so efficient. Add _YOUR_ efficiency to the overall efficiency and you will be paid for its value.
This really frightens me:
"People who work with computers remain fixated on efficiency. Every week I hear the debates over whether businesses should use Linux or Windows, the commentators always wrangling over which systems will save the most money. I find this battle increasingly tiresome. I'm more interested in finding the systems that will put more people to work."
Great, lets all make inefficient processes and software to run those processes so that costs will skyrockets, and we'll be beat by someone with a more efficient process. You can't do that in a free market. It's the whole point of the free market. The market balances between efficiency, cost, and quality. If you artificially try to create more jobs by making it take 5x as many more people to assemble a car, you will collapse that business.
"I have a sinking feeling that we can't wait for the next upturn in the employment cycle, as optimists would have us do"
gut instinct huh? Thanks for sharing that. I'm sure we can all base decisions on your gut instincts.
So his solution boils down to three ideas:
1. Write free software for individual industries (ie, give custom built small business software away for free). His thinking is this will help the small business get started and they will in turn hire more people. But damn the person who wrote the software, he's SOL. But it was for the 'good' of the 'people'.
2. "Make devices more responsive and easy to customize", he request: "I would like a computer to plan ahead for me, track things that are too much trouble for me to remember, and combine inputs to suggest efficient courses of action" OK so he wants smart agents. What this has to do with this article is beyond me. I think he just threw it in there because he wanted to.
3. "Create a truly public key infrastructure" I don't understand why he feels the need for a 'truly PKI is so important. It seems to go along with his socialist viewpoint. I guess it would make on line filing of unemployment that much easier when he plans leads to the failing of a nations economy.
He ends it with more FUD: "We don't have all the time in the world. And meanwhile governments, businesses, venture capitalists (what are you doing with all that money your pets in Congress and the White House brought you, tails all awagging?), universities, and NGOs seem paralyzed in the face of this economic disaster"
Occasional relief came in the form of some old toys lying around the office. A boxing nun became their "integration token." Staff could submit source code changes, but only if they had the nun.
They never mentioned what platform/language this is written in, but the id of having to pass around a token to be able to communicate is so... so... Token Ring.
The worst that would happen is the users home directory being deleted. This is why MS Windows security is so bad IMO. Every user runs as Administrator out-of-the-box
Your opinion quite frankly is not very worthwhile. First, losing a home directory under any OS is a _Very_ bad thing. You can't reinstall your home directory from a CD.
Second, every user does not run as Administrator out of the box in 'MS Windows Security'.
In XP this isn't true, in Server 2003 this isn't true, in Windows 2000 this isn't truee, in Windows NT this isn't true.
In MS-Dos this is true, in Windows 95 this is true. In windows 98 this is true, and in Windows ME this is true.
See a distinction? Ok, so lets consider you meant "in Windows ME". Fine, yes users run with full permission in ME. And those same users, if they were in Linux would not be using Linux. Because they couldn't figure out how to install it. If they did manage to get Linux on their box, and setup their mail client, I doubt they'd be much more secure. Why? Because _they_ are still the risk. They will execute the ".sh" file attached to the mail message. The script will alias some worthwhile commands and wait for the user to give it the root password. Or, it may just ask them, after all, the users ARE the WEAK link. So why not just pop up an important looking window (or console prompt) and say something like "fsck detected faulty partition data on ext2/blah/bah/bah at offest 00345678 code word DELTA. Please enter root password so that kernel.bot may correct this problem".
Get my point? It _IS_ the "dumb" user. Switching them to a different operating system won't protect them (unless of course you _Don't_ give them root access or password, and then that would be a trusted environment and they wouldn't be running Windows ME, they'dbe running win2k or XP or 2003 or Linux or BSD or some other securable operating system).
... but according to your journal you won't play on my team.
According your your entry "The truth about Microsoft" the MS business model is flawed. Flawed or not, I have more business from their model than I have competent developers. When you read 20 weeks of unemployment and your ready to port your j2ee skills to C#, send me a message.
If you like the article why not support the NY Times? They aren't publicly funded, they do have expenses and someone has to pay the journalist.
If everyone were to think like you, and withold support to companies that provide legitimate well liked services, capitalism would fail. You are essentially stealing any potential ad revenue the NYT would have received when parties interested in this article went over to read it.
Their patches come with SpyWare? Are you kidding me?
Are you sure these 'patches' you are applying weren't annoymously sent to you in an e-mail message? You know the mail message, where every sentance has a gramatical error in it ("I give you these patches in hopes that we protect your system together"), and the From line simply says "Microsoft Support People".
Then I could believe you got spyware from a patch. But otherwise, you're just full of FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
... who cares.
Lets look at worse case / catostrophic failure. Say the beam is mis-aligned to aim at a school playground, and can't be shutdown for 8 hours. Lets also assume it was Field Day, and all these kids were outside. Lets assume it was a nice day, and they were in shorts and shirts.
Damages? Well if these kids are pasty little white boys from South Bend, Indiana we could have some mild sunburn. But guess what, chances are they would be sunburn ANYHOW for being outside 8 hours.
My point is this is no more dangerous than a Miami beach, and that's including the dangers the Brazilian She-Males bring to South Beach.
Even if a bird HOVERED over the area for hours it wouldn't be harmed.
Hell, they can probably put out chase lounge chairs and sell seats to rich bitches that want a quick tan.
Build a Club Med under one of the transmission reception areas. Rain or shine, you'd get the UV exposure for 20% noon-time all the time.
While I agree with you that this could be done 'safe enough' I will point out one observation.
What's the delay (speed of light) between moon transmission and earth reception? What is the fastest this beam could change angles, and give that delay/amount of time before it could be shut off (ie, realize via speed of light that it's out of alignment) what is the maximum arc it can traverse.
I think the wider the arc it moved, the less damage it would do (note, i'm thinking of the microwaves as quanta/packets to guesstimate that). I'm curious of others thoughts, if you have a machine gun and you moved it 1 arc/degree (or some measurement) the spread some distances away would have gaps between it. What happens when you do that with a microwave 'beam' (or a laser light for that matter). Does the light skip sections? Does it avg out over the spread pattern? Is it less powerfull then?
I'm sure this is all answered by Feynman in QED, but hell if I can figure out how.
Ha ha ha hah. yeah, right, because in the opensource world people _rarely_ are given CVS access, do some work, and then dissapear into the void.
While linux kernel may be more guarded, 98% of projects on sourceforge probably has people with CVS write access that are no longer active in the project. This is a huge nightmare for larger opensource projects. FreeNet, CrystalSource, other with lists of developers often time don't keep day-to-day tabs on developers.
I think this is from Ian Clarke over on Freenet devel 10/30/2003:
So while opensource gives you the ability to have peer level code review, it doesn't force it. Which means, on particularly large systems, code can creep in without being scrutized to much (unless it doesn't work). Especially if the code is technical and few people understand the jist of it.
People always say "well, review the code yourself then". That's great if you know wtf your doing, that doesn't help Joe noobie.
Seriously, who do I have to kill for this network to get funding and put on the air.
And how exactly is this FUD. Where is the Fear? Where is the doubt? Where's the Uncertainty?
You also say
Wouldn't you mean 'developers' and PHB have committed to it? Support people are always the last to change, and hate it the most.
Look, WinFS is a document repository. It's a good thing if you work with or build document management systems. Because right now, Document Management systems are all over the place. You can use native file systems, with some sort of indexer running, and keep meta-data in a back en relational database, or you can keep meta-data hidden in a non-visible stream (if it's NTFS, and it won't move to another FS), or some people have document management systems where you have "file.doc" and "file.xml". The point is, we're grafting technology together that don't work too well.
WinFS will give us an area where we can dumb BLOB data into it as easily as moving around files, and yet extended that data with specific meta-data to solve business problems.
Don't like it? Don't port it to linux and keep away from it.
My company writes software like this atleast 5 times a year. Normally for lawfirms, generally dealing with a frew hundred thousand files. I for one can't wait for support at an OS level more so than "Use NTFS with MS Indexing Service and a custom Index filter written in C++".
And what is with your FUD:
Jeez. That's some serious FUD.
At some future point, when human existence is long forgotten, some entity will find this plaque long since buried in the martian dust, and think to themselves "My god, what shitty artist they were".
Seriously, i'm not a big fan of UI design, what being a programmer and all, but come on, shell out five grand for something better than squiggly "see jane run" pictures of people. Or hell, at least use better stick figures. I'm sure the whole development team has access to MS products and can grab the annoying clip-art stick figures we see in every fookin slide at a conference. I swear if I see another image of a stick figure guy scratching his head on the slide entitiled "Any Questions?" I'm going to start shooting people...
Didn't Fenyman have experiments done with two holes in a divider between a photon emmiter and detector? Every attempt to measure which hole a photon went through on it's way to a detector collapsed the system such that the photon took only one path. No Interference.
Sounds to me like nature has code to see if a debugger is attached to her processes, and if so, she ain't going to show you what she really does when you aren't looking.
No, not impossible. But slightly more difficult.
Which is why many people didn't like the ctrl-alt-del sequence, and why Win2000 and XP drop it by default (you can regedit it back).
ctrl-alt-del causes a hardware interrupt. This allows the operating system first chance at it before your code has a chance. This is circumnavigated by switching modes on the processor.
I'm not a fan of it, but I've done it for the past 10 years multiple times a day to log on or off (winnt 3.1 beta '93 to now, jesus thats a long time). It's a zen thing, i have to do it, with my coffee, or something isn't right the rest of the day.
I'm addicted to ctrl-alt-del.
uh huh...
oh please. He picked a key sequence that's difficult to accidentally set off. So what? It could have been shift-esc-break. If this is what a Ph.D. in electrical engineering is good for, I'm glad I don't have mine.
And the reason MS used it for login in NT 3.1 was for security. It negated the possibility of a impersonation client that displayed an image which looked like the NT 3.1 login, but just stole Passwords instead. If such a client was written to DOS or Windows it would simple reboot. So it was a sanity check, at the time.
I don't think you appreciate the surface area of LEO. Are you worried about overcrowding the sea with wine corks?
Which is why I no longer practice a religion (and don't understand why I ever did). Tithing is one of those archaic principles that benefits the Corportion of Relgions too well to deprecate it. Animal sacrifices? pass se. Tithing? Oh well, we'll keep that one. We need it.
You want to help your community? Start a company, aggressively persue clients, work your ass off, and grow it. Grow it by hiring people. Want to 'give' something to the community, give people a reason to better themselves, to study, to read, to learn. Do not give jobs to the pathetic guy who you feel sorry for. That is rewarding the weak. Give the job to the person who most deserves it, and give everyone else a reason for self improvement.
You think your donations make more of a difference than my companies employment? I find it laughable you held on to your jalopy, and then blindly gave your money to someone else to help yet another person.
Let me be honest. I don't care about you, or anyone else. I'm going to work for myself. I want to better myself. I want my company to be the best company. I will not donate money to a church. I will give money to the Arts though. By caring only about myself, and worrying only about making the best products I can make, I have a succesfull company. How does this help society as a whole? I don't care. But in fact, it helps it immensely. I hire people, I give them paychecks. I make business more efficent, they are more profitable, they expand and hire more people, and their stockholders gain more wealth. It's a cycle. It works damn well.
-malakai
Exactly. +5, you have a brain. Next time post with a logged in name so I can +friend you.
-malakai
one of these excess Americans was the guy that figured out how to feed the population of India (dwarf wheat).
I dare say I think we can handle our own population.
-malalkai
The article goes AGAINST what you just said.
Read it.
-malakai
mine too.
Every now and again I read something on slashdot which makes quite certain the world is doomed. Not because of the news item, but the responses from the slashdot crowd.
And then i see all the little green and blue bubbles wake up, come out of the woodwork, and post. We might yet have a chance.
-malakai
I swear. The opensource "movement" is plagued by villians straight out of Ayn Rand novels.
I like opensource like a hobby. But the group as a whole is way to anti-capitalism.
Wealthy isn't about distribution. It's about creating wealth. The US was one of the first countries that actually called it what it was "Wealth Creation". Before that, the peasants used to say things like "Give us your wealth" or "Share the wealth". Capitalism said, "It's your right to MAKE your own wealth".
I know schools have removed Fountainhead and Atlas Shurgged from the required reading list since the cold war is over, but I never thought I would _see_ the difference because of such a move.
-malakai
It's a plea to socialize the software industry. Don't work on what you want to work on, work on what society NEEDS you to work on. But do it for SOCIETY, that is, do it for FREE. This will allegedly help a struggling 'cutting-edge' business grow. Give them free software, and all will work out.
This is hogwash. And the article goes all over the place. It starts off with blaming "financial scandals, wars, tax cuts, stagnation" on why people have lost jobs "or had to accept menial ones". But then concludes "there is little doubt that a large contributor to rising unemployment is rising productivity". We see this every new age. This guy is bordering on a Luddite. He's also overly dramatic which makes me dislike him even more "I can no longer avert my eyes from the consequences of the field I have chosen" so noble. "... and no one else who programs, administers, or promotes the use of computers can morally avert their eyes either" oh jeez.
It gets worse, "The gigantic combine of capitalism has always obsessively pursued effiencey..." yeah, that's the point. That's why it works. No, Capitalism is atrocious at GIVING AWAY the fruits of innovation. It doesn't reward people who don't partake in it. That is why it's so efficient. Add _YOUR_ efficiency to the overall efficiency and you will be paid for its value.
This really frightens me: Great, lets all make inefficient processes and software to run those processes so that costs will skyrockets, and we'll be beat by someone with a more efficient process. You can't do that in a free market. It's the whole point of the free market. The market balances between efficiency, cost, and quality. If you artificially try to create more jobs by making it take 5x as many more people to assemble a car, you will collapse that business.
gut instinct huh? Thanks for sharing that. I'm sure we can all base decisions on your gut instincts.
So his solution boils down to three ideas:
1. Write free software for individual industries (ie, give custom built small business software away for free). His thinking is this will help the small business get started and they will in turn hire more people. But damn the person who wrote the software, he's SOL. But it was for the 'good' of the 'people'.
2. "Make devices more responsive and easy to customize", he request: "I would like a computer to plan ahead for me, track things that are too much trouble for me to remember, and combine inputs to suggest efficient courses of action" OK so he wants smart agents. What this has to do with this article is beyond me. I think he just threw it in there because he wanted to.
3. "Create a truly public key infrastructure" I don't understand why he feels the need for a 'truly PKI is so important. It seems to go along with his socialist viewpoint. I guess it would make on line filing of unemployment that much easier when he plans leads to the failing of a nations economy.
He ends it with more FUD: "We don't have all the time in the world. And meanwhile governments, businesses, venture capitalists (what are you doing with all that money your pets in Congress and the White House brought you, tails all awagging?), universities, and NGOs seem paralyzed in the face of this economic disaster"
They never mentioned what platform/language this is written in, but the id of having to pass around a token to be able to communicate is so... so... Token Ring.
-malakai
No shitting:
http://www.libraryhotel.com/special/erotica.html
-malakai
Your opinion quite frankly is not very worthwhile. First, losing a home directory under any OS is a _Very_ bad thing. You can't reinstall your home directory from a CD.
Second, every user does not run as Administrator out of the box in 'MS Windows Security'.
In XP this isn't true, in Server 2003 this isn't true, in Windows 2000 this isn't truee, in Windows NT this isn't true.
In MS-Dos this is true, in Windows 95 this is true. In windows 98 this is true, and in Windows ME this is true.
See a distinction? Ok, so lets consider you meant "in Windows ME". Fine, yes users run with full permission in ME. And those same users, if they were in Linux would not be using Linux. Because they couldn't figure out how to install it. If they did manage to get Linux on their box, and setup their mail client, I doubt they'd be much more secure. Why? Because _they_ are still the risk. They will execute the ".sh" file attached to the mail message. The script will alias some worthwhile commands and wait for the user to give it the root password. Or, it may just ask them, after all, the users ARE the WEAK link. So why not just pop up an important looking window (or console prompt) and say something like "fsck detected faulty partition data on ext2/blah/bah/bah at offest 00345678 code word DELTA. Please enter root password so that kernel.bot may correct this problem".
Get my point? It _IS_ the "dumb" user. Switching them to a different operating system won't protect them (unless of course you _Don't_ give them root access or password, and then that would be a trusted environment and they wouldn't be running Windows ME, they'dbe running win2k or XP or 2003 or Linux or BSD or some other securable operating system).
hope that helps,
-malakai
... but according to your journal you won't play on my team.
According your your entry "The truth about Microsoft" the MS business model is flawed. Flawed or not, I have more business from their model than I have competent developers. When you read 20 weeks of unemployment and your ready to port your j2ee skills to C#, send me a message.
-malakai
If you like the article why not support the NY Times? They aren't publicly funded, they do have expenses and someone has to pay the journalist.
If everyone were to think like you, and withold support to companies that provide legitimate well liked services, capitalism would fail. You are essentially stealing any potential ad revenue the NYT would have received when parties interested in this article went over to read it.
-malakai
Their patches come with SpyWare? Are you kidding me?
Are you sure these 'patches' you are applying weren't annoymously sent to you in an e-mail message? You know the mail message, where every sentance has a gramatical error in it ("I give you these patches in hopes that we protect your system together"), and the From line simply says "Microsoft Support People".
Then I could believe you got spyware from a patch. But otherwise, you're just full of FUD.
-Malakai
You _THINK_ you deserve a raise so your going to call up a lawyer????
I don't understand this mindset. It's insanity. No wonder you can't throw a stone and not hit a lawyer these days (who will sue you).
-malakai