Name similarity can be deadly - to innocent bystanders.
One of the last times I left a pint at the blood bank, the nurse checked the papers before preparing to stick a needle in my arm. "You are katman, born $date, blood group B?" "No, I'm catman, born $other_date, blood group A." It so happens that my name is unique[0] except for one letter, and the other guy lay on another couch being asked the same question. Both nurses paled and said they would henceforth take the questions much more seriously...
[0] yes, unique in the world. Better than an SSN:-)
A bit like me then, I'm 63 - a programmer and sysadmin and haven't a clue to the outside world... Asperger's, anyone? The diagnosis didn't exist when I was a kid .
The Swedish counterpart of GVU, Antipiratbyrån, did something similar last year when they infiltrated an ISP - Bahnhof Internet - and placed a server full of warez and movies on Bahnhof's premises, then notified the police who raided the server room and briefly shut down Bahnhof.
I just want to know - how does the RIAA know that those files were on her computer? They may have a civil case against her - but I wonder if she has a criminal case against whoever searched her computer?
I'm a little less certain about the mandate for open source.
What mandate for open source? open standard != open source. Microsoft could include support for the open document standard if they want to. Instead, they choose to play mind games and politics.
You show your boss that the data in the large spreadsheet belong in a database which works much faster than a spreadsheet. The bug you referenced was fixed in the previous release... several months ago
It's still legal for OpenOffice and other programs to open Microsoft Word documents, yes. It looks like that will change with Office 12. You are allowed (!) to open and read government documents in the new MS format, period,
Interesting. I followed the links to the govt web site, with a large number of hearing documents. In the response from Microsoft, this caught my eye:
Det bør derfor stilles krav til åpen og vederlagsfri dokumentasjon og lisensiering av leverandørenes formater for presentasjon av XML.
"Therefore, open and unremunerated documentation and licensing of the vendors' formats for the presentation of XML should be mandated".
Puzzling. Perhaps it boils down to what the meaning of "open" is, we already know that MA and MS disagree on this point.
Oh well. I guess they were just in a hurry, After all, such a glaring typo as dating the document in 2001 slipped through.
Arctic penguins are immune to all communicable diseases for the very good reason that they (the penguins) don't exist:-) The only penguin-like species in the Arctic in historic times was the Great Auk. Seriously, though, are the penguins really immune? Cite?
For fuck sake, it has ACLs whereas Linux does not.
What do you know that I don't?
man 5 acl
NAME
acl - Access Control Lists
DESCRIPTION
This manual page describes POSIX Access Control Lists, which are used to
define more fine-grained discretionary access rights for files and direc
tories.
It came with the vanilla install, no patching required. It's been a few years since I reconfigured and compiled a kernel, even.
I'll admit that I don't know about the design of Windows. But based on experience from my workplace, with a few interested Linux users and a few hundred uninterested Windows XP Pro users whose desktops are maintained by MS professionals, it sure looks like the Linuxes are a lot more secure.
I think it's very, very accurate to say that Running a Windows machine sans viruses, worms and other malware is trivial for technically adept users.
Running a Linux machine sans viruses, worms and other malware is trivial for even naive users, if the installation and setup was done by someone with a minimum of savvy.
The sudo/ptrace hole was closed a few years ago. There was another vulnerability that opened for a DOS attack, closed a month ago.
I'm no expert, but to me it looks like possible virus infection routes are closed too fast after discovery for the malware writers to exploit them. If you do know of any way to root a Linux system without local access, the Right Thing to do is publish on bugtraq, not gripe about it on/.
What if you buy a database, and put your own copyrighted work into it, but then your license expires and the DB locks you out using those access controls? Can you break the access controls to get your work back out? ... or any computer system stops working because the license hasn't been/can't be renewed, and you try to mount the disk under another system to recover your files...
Good points - but SUSE has come a long way since 1999 regarding ease of updates. YaST2 on SUSE, and corresponding systems for the other distros.
There is a also a slight contradiction in your arguments about problems with installation of apps, it's quite right that it's hard for the end user to reconcile the packaging systems of the various distros. (But I don't think it's very hard to read a file named README and do the standard incantations:-)
You then say, With Windows I just download whatever, doubleclick it, and if it works in my Windows version it just installs.
If it works, indeed. You are most probably capable of making it work, as well as defending your system, but for the new naive user, the desktop-oriented Linux distros of today are much, much better than they were six years ago.
And please, drop the usual blurb about spyware, virus, etc. It's getting tiresome.
I, for one, am very tired of it. Our corporate mail system is only delivering mail local to the regional servers in the UK right now and we got a message that the whole system is under virus attack. ~ 80 000 mailboxes at risk.
Oh, and the laser printer worked out of the box, printing the annual report my friend had written in OpenOfficeorg for her club:-)
I'm off to assist a friend who is going to install new hardware on her SUSE system, she's been using it for 3 months and says it's very easy. (previous OS was Windows95..)
Hmm - 5 alerts for Debian, my home desktop. 4 are for programs I don't use and the fifth already patched. Two alerts for SUSE, my laptop - for software I don't have and don't need. Yawn.
Real world: Some road warrior brought his XP Pro laptop to the office and brought down the entire Windows domain. Linux and Mac users barely noticed.
The corporate WAN has got a worm, again. Why, oh why do we put up with it?
Politics sucks as much as it does because the good people of this country have given up and opted out leaving it to the powerhungry, inept and corrupt. Show up, speak out with conviction, and don't let them fool you with the idea that the general elections are where the action is, the policy and candidates are selected *within* the two major parties by a tiny minority of voters. I think something like 9% of eligible voters vote in primaries.
Google Impress templates. AFAIK you can buy stencils for Kivio/Dia. (How about contributing some templates/stencils?) My company supplies PP templates that work fine with Impress - no problem at work-
Slashdot Mirror
Name similarity can be deadly - to innocent bystanders.
...
:-)
One of the last times I left a pint at the blood bank, the nurse checked the papers before preparing to stick a needle in my arm. "You are katman, born $date, blood group B?" "No, I'm catman, born $other_date, blood group A." It so happens that my name is unique[0] except for one letter, and the other guy lay on another couch being asked the same question. Both nurses paled and said they would henceforth take the questions much more seriously
[0] yes, unique in the world. Better than an SSN
A bit like me then, I'm 63 - a programmer and sysadmin and haven't a clue to the outside world ... Asperger's, anyone? The diagnosis didn't exist when I was a kid .
Link here
I just want to know - how does the RIAA know that those files were on her computer?
They may have a civil case against her - but I wonder if she has a criminal case against whoever searched her computer?
I'm a little less certain about the mandate for open source.
What mandate for open source? open standard != open source.
Microsoft could include support for the open document standard if they want to. Instead, they choose to play mind games and politics.
You show your boss that the data in the large spreadsheet belong in a database which works much faster than a spreadsheet. The bug you referenced was fixed in the previous release ... several months ago
It's still legal for OpenOffice and other programs to open Microsoft Word documents, yes. It looks like that will change with Office 12. You are allowed (!) to open and read government documents in the new MS format, period,
Interesting. I followed the links to the govt web site, with a large number of hearing documents. In the response from Microsoft, this caught my eye: Det bør derfor stilles krav til åpen og vederlagsfri dokumentasjon og lisensiering av leverandørenes formater for presentasjon av XML. "Therefore, open and unremunerated documentation and licensing of the vendors' formats for the presentation of XML should be mandated". Puzzling. Perhaps it boils down to what the meaning of "open" is, we already know that MA and MS disagree on this point. Oh well. I guess they were just in a hurry, After all, such a glaring typo as dating the document in 2001 slipped through.
Arctic penguins are immune to all communicable diseases for the very good reason that they (the penguins) don't exist :-) The only penguin-like species in the Arctic in historic times was the Great Auk. Seriously, though, are the penguins really immune? Cite?
The other saying is "Given enough time, Microsoft will invent Unix". And then saying #1 takes effect :-)
What do you know that I don't?
It came with the vanilla install, no patching required. It's been a few years since I reconfigured and compiled a kernel, even.
I'll admit that I don't know about the design of Windows. But based on experience from my workplace, with a few interested Linux users and a few hundred uninterested Windows XP Pro users whose desktops are maintained by MS professionals, it sure looks like the Linuxes are a lot more secure.
I think it's very, very accurate to say that Running a Windows machine sans viruses, worms and other malware is trivial for technically adept users.
Running a Linux machine sans viruses, worms and other malware is trivial for even naive users, if the installation and setup was done by someone with a minimum of savvy.
The sudo/ptrace hole was closed a few years ago. There was another vulnerability that opened for a DOS attack, closed a month ago.
/.
I'm no expert, but to me it looks like possible virus infection routes are closed too fast after discovery for the malware writers to exploit them. If you do know of any way to root a Linux system without local access, the Right Thing to do is publish on bugtraq, not gripe about it on
What if you buy a database, and put your own copyrighted work into it, but then your license expires and the DB locks you out using those access controls? Can you break the access controls to get your work back out?
... or any computer system stops working because the license hasn't been/can't be renewed, and you try to mount the disk under another system to recover your files ...
Good points - but SUSE has come a long way since 1999 regarding ease of updates. YaST2 on SUSE, and corresponding systems for the other distros.
:-)
:-)
There is a also a slight contradiction in your arguments about problems with installation of apps, it's quite right that it's hard for the end user to reconcile the packaging systems of the various distros. (But I don't think it's very hard to read a file named README and do the standard incantations
You then say, With Windows I just download whatever, doubleclick it, and if it works in my Windows version it just installs.
If it works, indeed. You are most probably capable of making it work, as well as defending your system, but for the new naive user, the desktop-oriented Linux distros of today are much, much better than they were six years ago.
And please, drop the usual blurb about spyware, virus, etc. It's getting tiresome.
I, for one, am very tired of it. Our corporate mail system is only delivering mail local to the regional servers in the UK right now and we got a message that the whole system is under virus attack. ~ 80 000 mailboxes at risk.
Oh, and the laser printer worked out of the box, printing the annual report my friend had written in OpenOfficeorg for her club
Of course games written to secret APIs and hardware specs don't work in Linux or *BSD, how do you expect them to?
n ing_curve.individual/
Unfortunately "steep learning curve" does not mean what you think it does. It really means that it is easy to learn - have you even tried? Since 1995, that is?
http://www.wordpirates.com/index.cgi/S/steep_lear
I'm off to assist a friend who is going to install new hardware on her SUSE system, she's been using it for 3 months and says it's very easy. (previous OS was Windows95..)
Hmm - 5 alerts for Debian, my home desktop. 4 are for programs I don't use and the fifth already patched. Two alerts for SUSE, my laptop - for software I don't have and don't need. Yawn.
Real world: Some road warrior brought his XP Pro laptop to the office and brought down the entire Windows domain. Linux and Mac users barely noticed.
The corporate WAN has got a worm, again. Why, oh why do we put up with it?
Oh come on - this is 2005, not 1995. Besides - it does have a steep learning curve, meaning that you learn it very quickly!
Politics sucks as much as it does because the good people of this country have given up and opted out leaving it to the powerhungry, inept and corrupt. Show up, speak out with conviction, and don't let them fool you with the idea that the general elections are where the action is, the policy and candidates are selected *within* the two major parties by a tiny minority of voters. I think something like 9% of eligible voters vote in primaries.
You know, if that really was their best, I'm glad I don't do Windows ...
n/t
ITYM you seem to believe that windows does what the salesman says. its so cute to see the naive.
Somehow I'm not sure that word means what you think it means ... but ICBW
What platforms does Visual C++ support, again?
It's a critical to the operation of their business, and they just want the damn thing to *work*!
...
That's a great argument for switching to FOSS, actually
Google Impress templates. AFAIK you can buy stencils for Kivio/Dia.
(How about contributing some templates/stencils?)
My company supplies PP templates that work fine with Impress - no problem at work-
Which shill modded this as flamebait?