This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels.
Now, since when is it in the core competence of a hotel to provide IT services?
Never.
Sure, have it available, provide it as a service to guests, but the hotels themselves don't offer the service, they outsource. Just like they do with the water, telephones, power, and everything else. If you actually LOOK at the default home page that your average hotel provides, you'll find a logo in the corner someplace indicating who the real service provider is. Hint: it's never the hotel unless it's some ratty shathole where the owner tries to save a few bucks by buying a couple of routers at the local Best Buy and sneaking a consumer DSL line.
In any real sense, this will have almost no effect on hotels with 3 or more stars. It might have some impact on the cheap independents.
I've got my laptop set up so that anything important (EG: Email, file transfer) is set up with strong encryption. Websites, not so much, though I do have a squid proxy server so if it matters, it's a single command and three clicks to secure my web browsing.
PPS: AT&T waived almost all of that $1,000 when I tried to cancel my account with them. After they did so, I waited a month before canceling service. They overcharged me $20 on my very next bill!
Browsing the web on a geostationary satellite connection is OK. A phone call on one is pretty crappy.
I called my daughter who was a foreign exchange student in Germany. We talked for several hours. I did my research, I was signed up for a plan at $0.05/minute. AT&T (with whom I now refuse to transact) charged me almost $4.00 per minute. I spent hours going through their "customer support" speaking to numerous people with names like "Michael" and "Robert" who had strangely Indian accents. See, it turns out that it's CHEAPER to route my call to INDIA and save perhaps $3 of the $6 PER HOUR to have an Indian take that call than an American. Which means that, at maximum, the cost of getting my call to India is actually costing them, at most, $3 per hour. This number matches quite closely to the $0.05 per minute I expected to pay, which works out to $3/hour. This seems to support your point,doesn't it?
But on the flip side, after getting the almost $1,000 phone bill, I went to my cell phone provider (much love for Metro PCS!) and got an unlimited international calling (to most first world countries) for just $5/month! We spent the rest of the year my daughter was in Germany blabbing away monthly on my wife's cell phone, with decent call quality and NO HIDDEN COSTS for just $5.
So what's the actual cost of an International call? Certainly, AT&T has a very expensive way to do it, Metro-PCS can do a good job of it for prices too cheap to meter!
PS: I have no affiliation with MetroPCS other than being a satisfied customer. Don't expect super-friendly, great tech support from them, they are a discount cellular service provider. But their stuff works, it's cheap, and I'm happy. =)
I almost agree with you. As you increase the amount of bits, the value-per-bit drops, and I think that's what you are saying. But the value of the bits DOES increase linearly as the number of bits increases exponentially.
As a professional hosting provider, our upstream is 100 Mbps. NOT the consumer 100 Mbps, but the fully-redundant, backed up, monitored 24x7, 4-hops-from-MAEWest kind of 100 Mbps. For database-driven, graphics-poor applications such as what we provide, it's amazing just how much you can do with 100 Mbps!
But give it time. See, I remember when 56Kbps was "all that anybody would ever need" for the Internet. Needs change because expectations change as capability changes!
When I set up my first 1.5 Mbps DSL, the speed was stunningly quick, enough for many users. Now, 1.5 Mbps would leave me feeling deprived because I'm now used to watching multiple video streams in various rooms in my house, online, over the Internet. Anything less than about 5 Mbps or so would be weak!
The Internet has subsumed my Cable bill. I don't *have* a TV in the usual sense, we've gone 100% online for entertainment purposes. And surprisingly, it's worked very well for us! My bedroom TV is a Mac mini with a 24" wide screen monitor. Hulu + Netflix + network sites is our "channel" - the term means nothing to me anymore!
But the experience is FAR RICHER. I often leave comments on videos! I can watch a show in the background while reading the latest blog or Slashdot article!
This is what 3-10 Mbps gives me as a consumer. What will I get with 1 Gbit? I don't even know, yet.
It's obvious. It's also most likely what they are doing.
For most people, Android is a "new" O/S, not a flavor of Linux! China has their "Red Flag" Linux, which likely meets similar criterion. Seriously, Linux is taking over the computing world, showing up everywhere from your phone to your router to your DVR to your State-sanctioned O/S!
I can say first hand, with confidence, the $5 refunds they are "giving" are a joke, and pale in comparison to the problem.
I have a large family, and *had* a large family plan to match. Every single month I had "mystery charges" that they couldn't explain. No, it's not just one month, it's month after month of spending hours on the phone sorting out why the !@#$ I'm getting charges without decent explanation.
Charges with names like "account restoral fee" (on a line that had been in continuous use for years) and "recovery surcharge". (what's being recovered? And why am I being charged for it!?) Charges that, when enquired about, nobody could justify. Charges so egregious that it sometimes doubled my total bill.
I wrote letters, I complained, I got stonewalled and nobody said much. I switched providers to Metro PCS, where the deal is simple: prepaid, unlimited calling, no contract. Wow, what a difference! I pay my bill, I get service. I don't, the service quits. The bill is always the same - no surprises, and they don't even have a shutoff/restoral fee so if I'm late paying the bill, I go online and pay, and within a few minutes, service is active.
Verizon, I was one of your best customers, but now, you've lost me for good. And I don't hesitate to talk about it.
Some of us Slashdot old-timers have been waiting for the "Linux desktop" to arrive for a decade or more. And it's been a decade, and I'm typing this note on my Fedora Core 13/64 Laptop. Linux has been "good enough" for me for a very, very long time.
But Windows had a lock, a hegemony, on the desktop. Windows had developed strong market forces that enforced its position. And so long as the Desktop computer remained the desktop computer, this was never to be challenged. People needed perfect compatibility with MS Windows because that's what they knew. And Linux, despite its numerous technical advantages, didn't have this one. It was "inferior" because it wasn't Windows.
But times have changed.
Just a few weeks ago, I purchased my very first natively Linux-based computer.* My Motorola Droid II smart phone is just simply amazing! I've already found that I do a majority of my browsing on it. (typing is still a bit slow, though) It's always with me. I play games on it. I listen to my music with it. I've watched shows on it with my son. (TED.com, I love you!) It gives me turn-by-turn directions when I need them. I'm never out of touch with my email, nor my network monitor. The interface is slick, clean, smooth. The phone is fast. The user Interface is so good I was able to use it within minutes, and I've already purchased several apps that interest me. It was painless!
It's not just me. My non-tech business partners also have Android phones and they LOVE THEM! Google's Android (Linux-based) O/S gained an astonishing 41% growth in market share in a single quarter in this most recent quarter, growing from 12 to 17% market share. And all signs are pointing towards increased growth in the Android market, even as every other platform faces market share losses, even the Apple iPhone just after a major release.
The Linux "desktop" has arrived, in my phone. This is it!
* Technically, it's my second Linux based computer. My dish DVR was Linux based as well, but I didn't own it. And while I've had many Linux computers over the years, NONE of them came preloaded with Linux - I've always loaded it on myself - even the several dozen servers I've purchased in my various roles in tech
Somehow, your post manages to sound informant without saying anything meaningful. The point was that all the "getting started" time lag for torrents make them infeasible for smaller files (under 100 MB or so) such as are typical of Linux distro package files. The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
It would be trivial to do something with javascript - put an onclick handler that does an xmlHttpRequest to save the "needed" information without even needing to worry about header redirects and the like. The link can be something like
There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
Certainly, but you wouldn't expect Microsoft to not proudly proclaim that $someBigNumber people downloaded their $crapSoftware, would you? Of course they will, and that's what this is: a fluff piece pandering to Microsoft's marketing team.
At the end of the day it's going to be the FCC settling this debate. Limiting consumer choice is never a good idea when you have a strong market position (like Apple's with mobile devices). The US government tends to frown on that in the long run.
Imply much, say little. That's often a cheap trick to appearing insightful while being difficult to prove wrong. A common strategy to appease the slashbots and win cheap karma points. Unfortunately, your implications are just simply wrong.
1) Why would the FCC get involved? What possible business would they have in deciding whether or not Apple supports Flash? You know that the FCC is the Federal Communications Commission - they oversee Telecom and radio/TV, mostly. Did you mean the FTC?
2) Why would the FTC get involved? There's nowhere NEAR a monopoly - Android devices currently outsell iPhones, and iPhones aren't likely to explode and kill little babies, nor is there any particular misrepresentation about what the iPhone is and does. It's a smart phone that looks nice, and that's what Apple is selling.
3) Apple doesn't have a particularly commanding lead on mobile devices, see previous point - iPhones are only about 35% of the market depending on what survey you look at and when it was taken.
4) Since when does the gubbmint frown on limiting choice? Perhaps if there's a monopoly, (which there isn't) and even then, it's not limiting choice, even as a monopoly, but using your ability to distort the marketplace to prevent competition, a process called "dumping".
You'd do well to look up dumping, because even what you are implying is simply dead wrong.
Take my girlfriend for instance: she basically uses a lot of online services of one kind or another, although she prefers Thunderbird for her email, doesn't really care for Chrome so I leave her on Firefox. So far she's been through Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Mepis, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu... and barely even noticed it. "Dear, did you upgrade my computer again?
Good god, man! You've had a girlfriend through Windows 98, 2000, XP, etc. to present? And she's still your girlfriend?!?1!?
I think you need to pull the trigger: Marry that poor girl!
As for clarification, 120 DB of sound is about like standing next to a jet engine at full power, or near the speakers at a rock concert. It's not "quite loud", it's painfully so.
Nontactile keyboards - making 100 wpm touch typists into 20 wpm hunt-n-peck typists since 1981!
BTW: The Time Sinclair 1000 was my first computer! I learned BASIC on that sucker, and even programmed a working game of Monopoly into it! (It ran out of memory, only having 16k, so I took out all the user inputs. ("Do you want to... ?" questions took up much text) It was also non-graphical. You'd start by stating the # of players, their names, and then it would just.... go until it told you who won.
Assumptions: always buy property when you have money. No "horse trading" and no "cheating".
It was easy to track how much money had been returned on each property, and with these rules, the best property to own is the orange, followed closely by the light blue, the yellow, and the red. Boardwalk/Park Place didn't fare that well, I think the numerous "advance token to go" chance cards make it much less likely for you to land there.
BTW LED lighting is my job so prepare for a MASSIVE smackdown if you wanna go toe to toe.
Sensitive much, methinks. Therefore, I conclude that either A) You are really an idiot with just enough knowledge to think he's "in", or B) You are really somebody I don't want to know too well.
In either event, I'm guessing that you probably don't get invited to many parties.
Just because you are legally permitted to travel at up to 30mph on a street, doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
Here in California, when the weather's not lousy, that's not true. If you drive the speed limit, it's pretty much always safe. Speed limits decline around corners (with clear, well-placed signs) and areas where visibility is diminished. The lines in the middle of the road go from dots to solids to double solids near intersections, etc. etc.
Unless there is an OBVIOUS reason, (such as traffic or extreme weather EG: snow) it's pretty much OK to drive the speed limit anywhere in California.
Gimp IS native widgets! The Gnome desktop comes from the Gimp, they are intertwined. You could make the case that Gimp doesn't use native widgets of the host OS, but that's just an artifact of the fact that Gimp/Gnome is its own implementation of such in a Desktop environment - it's more a case of "reinventing the wheel" if it decided to use local OS native widgets!
Well, a newton is about 0.53 grams (30 Newtons per 16 oz package) so 686 Newtons would be (686 * 0.53)/16 ~ 23 pounds? It's kinda light, but doable for a small child...
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
This is all 100% correct if you don't have a sane replication strategy. If your devs don't have access to copies of recent production data, they are hamstrung. If there isn't a well managed release process that allows for timely testing and release of needed updates, they are hamstrung. If your backup, rollout, and update processes aren't almost automatic, your organization is paying serious overhead and losing money every day.
Devs should not be hamstrung. They should be free to to access the tools they need to get their job done, and hampering that in any way costs serious money. But they should basically *never* be touching production environments - instead the focus should be on replicating the problem trivially in a development environment so that devs are free to develop without risking crashing the production environment with a spurious die() statement!
If any of these capabilities aren't present, and you have more than 1 developer, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
All one would have to do is replace key Windows boot files with a script that tells them that their Windows installation is hopelessly infected by viruses and has been disabled, telling them to take it to somebody who actually knows how to properly configure a Windows machine.
We're talking about a network of MILLIONS of computers, you know? And it's not like the good old days of Code Red where you could write an automated shutdown script with a PHP script and a telnet session - today's botnets are relatively secured against counter-attacks by security researchers and/or other infective agents. Today's worms have countermeasures, from dynamic, rolling controller hosts to DNS cross-checks and even SSL in order to prevent network counter-measures.
The technology to keep the CIA at bay is not only freely available, it's open source. Why wouldn't the bad guys use it, too?
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels.
Now, since when is it in the core competence of a hotel to provide IT services?
Never.
Sure, have it available, provide it as a service to guests, but the hotels themselves don't offer the service, they outsource. Just like they do with the water, telephones, power, and everything else. If you actually LOOK at the default home page that your average hotel provides, you'll find a logo in the corner someplace indicating who the real service provider is. Hint: it's never the hotel unless it's some ratty shathole where the owner tries to save a few bucks by buying a couple of routers at the local Best Buy and sneaking a consumer DSL line.
In any real sense, this will have almost no effect on hotels with 3 or more stars. It might have some impact on the cheap independents.
I've got my laptop set up so that anything important (EG: Email, file transfer) is set up with strong encryption. Websites, not so much, though I do have a squid proxy server so if it matters, it's a single command and three clicks to secure my web browsing.
PPS: AT&T waived almost all of that $1,000 when I tried to cancel my account with them. After they did so, I waited a month before canceling service. They overcharged me $20 on my very next bill!
Friends don't let friends use AT&T!
Browsing the web on a geostationary satellite connection is OK. A phone call on one is pretty crappy.
I called my daughter who was a foreign exchange student in Germany. We talked for several hours. I did my research, I was signed up for a plan at $0.05/minute. AT&T (with whom I now refuse to transact) charged me almost $4.00 per minute. I spent hours going through their "customer support" speaking to numerous people with names like "Michael" and "Robert" who had strangely Indian accents. See, it turns out that it's CHEAPER to route my call to INDIA and save perhaps $3 of the $6 PER HOUR to have an Indian take that call than an American. Which means that, at maximum, the cost of getting my call to India is actually costing them, at most, $3 per hour. This number matches quite closely to the $0.05 per minute I expected to pay, which works out to $3/hour. This seems to support your point,doesn't it?
But on the flip side, after getting the almost $1,000 phone bill, I went to my cell phone provider (much love for Metro PCS!) and got an unlimited international calling (to most first world countries) for just $5/month! We spent the rest of the year my daughter was in Germany blabbing away monthly on my wife's cell phone, with decent call quality and NO HIDDEN COSTS for just $5.
So what's the actual cost of an International call? Certainly, AT&T has a very expensive way to do it, Metro-PCS can do a good job of it for prices too cheap to meter!
PS: I have no affiliation with MetroPCS other than being a satisfied customer. Don't expect super-friendly, great tech support from them, they are a discount cellular service provider. But their stuff works, it's cheap, and I'm happy. =)
I almost agree with you. As you increase the amount of bits, the value-per-bit drops, and I think that's what you are saying. But the value of the bits DOES increase linearly as the number of bits increases exponentially.
As a professional hosting provider, our upstream is 100 Mbps. NOT the consumer 100 Mbps, but the fully-redundant, backed up, monitored 24x7, 4-hops-from-MAEWest kind of 100 Mbps. For database-driven, graphics-poor applications such as what we provide, it's amazing just how much you can do with 100 Mbps!
But give it time. See, I remember when 56Kbps was "all that anybody would ever need" for the Internet. Needs change because expectations change as capability changes!
When I set up my first 1.5 Mbps DSL, the speed was stunningly quick, enough for many users. Now, 1.5 Mbps would leave me feeling deprived because I'm now used to watching multiple video streams in various rooms in my house, online, over the Internet. Anything less than about 5 Mbps or so would be weak!
The Internet has subsumed my Cable bill. I don't *have* a TV in the usual sense, we've gone 100% online for entertainment purposes. And surprisingly, it's worked very well for us! My bedroom TV is a Mac mini with a 24" wide screen monitor. Hulu + Netflix + network sites is our "channel" - the term means nothing to me anymore!
But the experience is FAR RICHER. I often leave comments on videos! I can watch a show in the background while reading the latest blog or Slashdot article!
This is what 3-10 Mbps gives me as a consumer. What will I get with 1 Gbit? I don't even know, yet.
It's obvious. It's also most likely what they are doing.
For most people, Android is a "new" O/S, not a flavor of Linux! China has their "Red Flag" Linux, which likely meets similar criterion. Seriously, Linux is taking over the computing world, showing up everywhere from your phone to your router to your DVR to your State-sanctioned O/S!
I can say first hand, with confidence, the $5 refunds they are "giving" are a joke, and pale in comparison to the problem.
I have a large family, and *had* a large family plan to match. Every single month I had "mystery charges" that they couldn't explain. No, it's not just one month, it's month after month of spending hours on the phone sorting out why the !@#$ I'm getting charges without decent explanation.
Charges with names like "account restoral fee" (on a line that had been in continuous use for years) and "recovery surcharge". (what's being recovered? And why am I being charged for it!?) Charges that, when enquired about, nobody could justify. Charges so egregious that it sometimes doubled my total bill.
I wrote letters, I complained, I got stonewalled and nobody said much. I switched providers to Metro PCS, where the deal is simple: prepaid, unlimited calling, no contract. Wow, what a difference! I pay my bill, I get service. I don't, the service quits. The bill is always the same - no surprises, and they don't even have a shutoff/restoral fee so if I'm late paying the bill, I go online and pay, and within a few minutes, service is active.
Verizon, I was one of your best customers, but now, you've lost me for good. And I don't hesitate to talk about it.
Some of us Slashdot old-timers have been waiting for the "Linux desktop" to arrive for a decade or more. And it's been a decade, and I'm typing this note on my Fedora Core 13/64 Laptop. Linux has been "good enough" for me for a very, very long time.
But Windows had a lock, a hegemony, on the desktop. Windows had developed strong market forces that enforced its position. And so long as the Desktop computer remained the desktop computer, this was never to be challenged. People needed perfect compatibility with MS Windows because that's what they knew. And Linux, despite its numerous technical advantages, didn't have this one. It was "inferior" because it wasn't Windows.
But times have changed.
Just a few weeks ago, I purchased my very first natively Linux-based computer.* My Motorola Droid II smart phone is just simply amazing! I've already found that I do a majority of my browsing on it. (typing is still a bit slow, though) It's always with me. I play games on it. I listen to my music with it. I've watched shows on it with my son. (TED.com, I love you!) It gives me turn-by-turn directions when I need them. I'm never out of touch with my email, nor my network monitor. The interface is slick, clean, smooth. The phone is fast. The user Interface is so good I was able to use it within minutes, and I've already purchased several apps that interest me. It was painless!
It's not just me. My non-tech business partners also have Android phones and they LOVE THEM! Google's Android (Linux-based) O/S gained an astonishing 41% growth in market share in a single quarter in this most recent quarter, growing from 12 to 17% market share. And all signs are pointing towards increased growth in the Android market, even as every other platform faces market share losses, even the Apple iPhone just after a major release.
The Linux "desktop" has arrived, in my phone. This is it!
* Technically, it's my second Linux based computer. My dish DVR was Linux based as well, but I didn't own it. And while I've had many Linux computers over the years, NONE of them came preloaded with Linux - I've always loaded it on myself - even the several dozen servers I've purchased in my various roles in tech
Somehow, your post manages to sound informant without saying anything meaningful. The point was that all the "getting started" time lag for torrents make them infeasible for smaller files (under 100 MB or so) such as are typical of Linux distro package files. The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
It would be trivial to do something with javascript - put an onclick handler that does an xmlHttpRequest to save the "needed" information without even needing to worry about header redirects and the like. The link can be something like
<a href="http://www.thesite.com/path/to/page.html" onclick="return notifyBigBrother(this);">
where notifyBigBrother() is a function that sends the click info to the search engine site. Why isn't this done?
There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
Certainly, but you wouldn't expect Microsoft to not proudly proclaim that $someBigNumber people downloaded their $crapSoftware, would you? Of course they will, and that's what this is: a fluff piece pandering to Microsoft's marketing team.
At the end of the day it's going to be the FCC settling this debate. Limiting consumer choice is never a good idea when you have a strong market position (like Apple's with mobile devices). The US government tends to frown on that in the long run.
Imply much, say little. That's often a cheap trick to appearing insightful while being difficult to prove wrong. A common strategy to appease the slashbots and win cheap karma points. Unfortunately, your implications are just simply wrong.
1) Why would the FCC get involved? What possible business would they have in deciding whether or not Apple supports Flash? You know that the FCC is the Federal Communications Commission - they oversee Telecom and radio/TV, mostly. Did you mean the FTC?
2) Why would the FTC get involved? There's nowhere NEAR a monopoly - Android devices currently outsell iPhones, and iPhones aren't likely to explode and kill little babies, nor is there any particular misrepresentation about what the iPhone is and does. It's a smart phone that looks nice, and that's what Apple is selling.
3) Apple doesn't have a particularly commanding lead on mobile devices, see previous point - iPhones are only about 35% of the market depending on what survey you look at and when it was taken.
4) Since when does the gubbmint frown on limiting choice? Perhaps if there's a monopoly, (which there isn't) and even then, it's not limiting choice, even as a monopoly, but using your ability to distort the marketplace to prevent competition, a process called "dumping".
You'd do well to look up dumping, because even what you are implying is simply dead wrong.
Why does this thread bring to mind this commentary?
Take my girlfriend for instance: she basically uses a lot of online services of one kind or another, although she prefers Thunderbird for her email, doesn't really care for Chrome so I leave her on Firefox. So far she's been through Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Mepis, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu ... and barely even noticed it. "Dear, did you upgrade my computer again?
Good god, man! You've had a girlfriend through Windows 98, 2000, XP, etc. to present? And she's still your girlfriend?!?1!?
I think you need to pull the trigger: Marry that poor girl!
As for clarification, 120 DB of sound is about like standing next to a jet engine at full power, or near the speakers at a rock concert. It's not "quite loud", it's painfully so.
Nontactile keyboards - making 100 wpm touch typists into 20 wpm hunt-n-peck typists since 1981!
BTW: The Time Sinclair 1000 was my first computer! I learned BASIC on that sucker, and even programmed a working game of Monopoly into it! (It ran out of memory, only having 16k, so I took out all the user inputs. ("Do you want to... ?" questions took up much text) It was also non-graphical. You'd start by stating the # of players, their names, and then it would just.... go until it told you who won.
Assumptions: always buy property when you have money. No "horse trading" and no "cheating".
It was easy to track how much money had been returned on each property, and with these rules, the best property to own is the orange, followed closely by the light blue, the yellow, and the red. Boardwalk/Park Place didn't fare that well, I think the numerous "advance token to go" chance cards make it much less likely for you to land there.
BTW LED lighting is my job so prepare for a MASSIVE smackdown if you wanna go toe to toe.
Sensitive much, methinks. Therefore, I conclude that either A) You are really an idiot with just enough knowledge to think he's "in", or B) You are really somebody I don't want to know too well.
In either event, I'm guessing that you probably don't get invited to many parties.
Just because you are legally permitted to travel at up to 30mph on a street, doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
Here in California, when the weather's not lousy, that's not true. If you drive the speed limit, it's pretty much always safe. Speed limits decline around corners (with clear, well-placed signs) and areas where visibility is diminished. The lines in the middle of the road go from dots to solids to double solids near intersections, etc. etc.
Unless there is an OBVIOUS reason, (such as traffic or extreme weather EG: snow) it's pretty much OK to drive the speed limit anywhere in California.
ALMOST Haiku...
Try this?
Norton retarded
And as for Snoop Doggy Dog
Don't get me started!
But apart from all of those blindly obvious holes, this is a grant plan.
Fruedian slip? Or just blindingly obvious?
Gimp? Really?
Gimp IS native widgets! The Gnome desktop comes from the Gimp, they are intertwined. You could make the case that Gimp doesn't use native widgets of the host OS, but that's just an artifact of the fact that Gimp/Gnome is its own implementation of such in a Desktop environment - it's more a case of "reinventing the wheel" if it decided to use local OS native widgets!
Why would they do that?
It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
Well, a newton is about 0.53 grams (30 Newtons per 16 oz package) so 686 Newtons would be (686 * 0.53)/16 ~ 23 pounds? It's kinda light, but doable for a small child...
What's that? You didn't mean Fig Newtons?
(sigh)
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
This is all 100% correct if you don't have a sane replication strategy. If your devs don't have access to copies of recent production data, they are hamstrung. If there isn't a well managed release process that allows for timely testing and release of needed updates, they are hamstrung. If your backup, rollout, and update processes aren't almost automatic, your organization is paying serious overhead and losing money every day.
Devs should not be hamstrung. They should be free to to access the tools they need to get their job done, and hampering that in any way costs serious money. But they should basically *never* be touching production environments - instead the focus should be on replicating the problem trivially in a development environment so that devs are free to develop without risking crashing the production environment with a spurious die() statement!
If any of these capabilities aren't present, and you have more than 1 developer, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
All one would have to do is replace key Windows boot files with a script that tells them that their Windows installation is hopelessly infected by viruses and has been disabled, telling them to take it to somebody who actually knows how to properly configure a Windows machine.
We're talking about a network of MILLIONS of computers, you know? And it's not like the good old days of Code Red where you could write an automated shutdown script with a PHP script and a telnet session - today's botnets are relatively secured against counter-attacks by security researchers and/or other infective agents. Today's worms have countermeasures, from dynamic, rolling controller hosts to DNS cross-checks and even SSL in order to prevent network counter-measures.
The technology to keep the CIA at bay is not only freely available, it's open source. Why wouldn't the bad guys use it, too?
Any linux ISO can be considered a pornographic file when paired with the appropriate one time pad