A couple weeks is pretty slow, many other vendors and a lot of open source developers provide patches within a few days. And it is more like a couple weeks after exploit code is released, they have a track record of blowing off notifications as being "theoretical" unless they are backed up with a code example. That is pretty pathetic when you consider that Microsoft has more resources to put behind fixing bugs and security holes than anyone else if they were serious about the problem. You are right that they don't always successfully fix the problem the first time (and that they sometimes re-break old holes with patches - DOHH!). That only makes things worse, especially in that many people have become very skeptical of their patches and are often even slower to apply them than they should be. Your point about being able to check to make sure the patch really works by testing the exploit code example is an excellent one I hadn't thought of.
Dumber sysadmins? You mean for Windows? Less desktop market share and smarter sysadmins are indeed PARTIALLY responsible for less problems with worms and viruses on Linux, but it just doesn't explain the whole story. Linux tends to come more locked down by default than Windows traditionally has, which helps. Microsoft is FINALLY at least paying lip service to changing that. A few years late and a few million dollars short in my opinion, and we will see how that plays out in reality. Do you think they would have done it if they didn't have Linux and other *NIXes pushing them on that front? I don't. Do you think they would ever take security serious if they weren't beat over the head by all of the worm/virus outbreaks? I don't believe that either. Linux also doesn't have the legacy of totally insecure "every PC is an island" that Windows does. Windows security has been retrofitted onto an environment that originally didn't have even any concept of multiple users, whereas Linux comes from the *NIX tradition which is multi-user, and has been networked since the early 80's. I believe that this both explains why Microsoft has more problems with security -- it just isn't the first thing they think about, and why Windows sysadmins are more lax -- the concept is new to many of them. It also doesn't help that Microsoft likes to claim that any idiot can install and administer Windows, when in fact it typically takes more work to install and secure Windows than it does Linux or the other *NIXes.
And yes, it is a credit to Linux that it has fewer worms and viruses. The bottom line is that I can sleep better at night knowing my machines are running Linux than I could if they were running Windows. On that level I don't care why.
Perhaps you have never encountered a Linux worm. They DO exist.
But for some reason, they don't seem to cause problems on the scale of Nimda, Code Red, etc... Obviously it isn't the availability of source code for the OS, or for exploits that is the problem as Microsoft suggests. Perhaps lack of availability of source, and a slow and unresponsive vendor who caters to the least common denominator of the market and tells customers that any bozo can administer their product is the problem.
It is my opinion that if the security community didn't publicize exploit code samples, that Microsoft would take even longer to release patches for their security holes than they do, and despite the number and severity of problems they have, they are fairly slow to respond to them. Their complaints sound as if they'd like to be even more lazy. It is too much easier to blame others for their troubles.
Of course, if they built and tested for security in house before they released in the first place as you mention, then they'd be better off, but it doesn't seem like they want to do that either.
Windows NT (I assume that's what you're talking about since 9x is not worth even metioning) has a very good HAL
Actually it is a very poor HAL, in that it still makes or rather forces too many assumptions about the underlying hardware. Like 32 bits (NT for Alpha didn't run 64 bit), like little endianess (NT has never been successfully ported to and shipped on a big endian processor architecture -- NT on PPC, Sparc and MIPS was stillborn). Anyway you look at it, NT and its siblings are likely to be basically x86 only for the forseeable future. Linux on the other hand runs on quite a variety of processor architectures, and most software written for Linux is just a "./configure; make; make install" away from running on most of them. On the other hand due to the fact that 9x (and ME) which are 'not worth even mentioning' still are the bulk of Microsoft OS installations, you've got to be careful which subset of Win32 and Microsoft's other APIs you are using to write code that works on both 9x/ME and NT/W2K/XP.
What is hilarious about turning down jobs based on OS? I've told numerous recruiters, HR people, managers, etc. that I wasn't interested in a job because I would have to deal with Windows. Why? Because I can. And in my opinion, life is too short to deal with the frustrations of having to use Windows. Even in today's job market, which isn't like it was a year ago when anyone in a technical field could walk across the street and get a job it isn't so bad that people with a good resume and decent interviewing skills should have to take a job they won't be happy with. What is pathetic is people who think otherwise.
So far it has worked on Mandrake 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, Mandrake 8.0 and Red Hat 7.1. I will be installing it on SuSE 7.2 as well, but I expect it will work...
Score 2 interesting? And it isn't even right!?! The box Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold was a "Blue Box", and they didn't invent it, they just designed one particular implementation of it. Others such as John Draper (Capn Crunch) knew about it before them.
Why are you offering condolences? 40k in GBP is about $56k USD, and since the UK has obscene tax rates, if it is after tax as he says, then he must be making nearly six figures before taxes, if not into six figures. So you are trying to tell me that Iowa State pays better than that? I seriously doubt it. I worked there over 10 years ago, and basically doubled my pay when I went elsewhere. They, like most universities pay poorly. A friend of mine who worked there when I did and is still working up there probably makes less than 1/2 what I do now, dispite the fact that he graduated from ISU with a 3.9something GPA and I never bothered to finish my degree.
As for spelling, I know a whole lot of well paid people in the business who can't spell worth a damn. Yes, it can be annoying, but it doesn't seem to hurt them as much as all the anal retentive english teachers in school told us it would...
OpenLook has been effectively dead for a long time. Sun switched to CDE when they ditched OpenLook in favor of Motif, which had basically won the battle at that point.
As for open sourcing it, Sun did that before they gave up on it... it was kind of their last ditch attempt to outmaneuver Motif. Unfortunately it was too late. Had they done it about a year sooner it might have made a difference.
I used to use olvwm on Linux back in the 1993 to 1995 time period... I imagine the source code is still out there for it, but I don't think it ships standard with many distros these days, let alone is part of the normal installations.
Wasn't Wackenhut basically a front organization for the CIA back in the 60's and 70's? Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or they were just 'contractors' or 'consultants' to the CIA or something like that...
Maybe we need to make the open source browsers be more configurable to lie about their browser/OS string? Its not completely without precendent, since IE at least used to have "Mozilla" in their string to fool site recognition. A really cool ability might be to let a user specify browser strings on a per-URL basis and remember the setting for future visits... If web developers found out that a large percentage of their visitors were lying with their browser string then maybe they'd be more incentified to build sites that work for more people? On the other hand, they might take it that there were less people using other platforms because fewer people would be turned away... Hmm...
Stupid anti-productive acts
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 3
Burning an SUV dealer to help the environment? The supposed "eco-terrorists" probably caused more pollution during that act than all of the SUV's on that lot would have caused during their operating lifetime. Think burning rubber, think burning seat material (usually has Poly Vynyl Chloride in it), etc. Not to mention that all of those vehicles will just be replaced, so they've done nothing but increase the SUV manufacturer's profits. And it will take more energy and more materials to build the replacement vehicles and rebuild the dealership, which is also counterproductive. The SUV dealer will file an insurance claim, so they won't be out that much. People who want an SUV will just buy one from another dealer until the dealership is back up and running again.
Eco-moronism is more an accurate term to describe this kind of stupidity than eco-terrorism. In order to be terrorism it would have to frighten people into changing their behavior. This kind of arson is more along the lines of senseless vandalism. It is not going to convince anyone to change their behavior. It is more likely to damage this kind of cause, because people will not be sympathetic to it if this kind of behavior is associated with it.
I imagine that article was written by a reporter for the BBC, not by the web team. While I wouldn't have any reason to malign the BBC's web team, the general computer knowledge level of most reporters is a tad on the weak side.
Actually, if memory serves, Google multinode Linux clusters in three different colo facilities for redundancy, one at Exodus in the bay area, one somewhere in Virginia with some other colo provider, and I don't remember where the 3rd was.
So the BBC seems to be thinking 'cluster'='large server' perhaps. Of course we know that isn't quite right, but nontechnical people might not understand the difference.
One of the law enforcement agencies around here (midwest) actually uses black helicopters (only markings a small round white seal with red letters on the side and the N-numbers are smaller than normal and in dark grey on the black background). They are not easily confused with the National Guard's similar sized helicopters which are dark green and clearly marked with visible white normal sized N numbers. They are neither much quieter than a UH60 and certainly not invisible as some of the conspiracy theorists claim. They do, however, fly slowly, at low altitudes and in sweeping arcs, and have a large electronics pod mounted on one of the skids. What they appear to be looking for is electromagnetic signatures of large amounts of flourescent tubes and other such equipment used in grow houses and clandestine drug labs.
Sometimes there is tiny grain of truth in conspiracy theories if you dig far enough.
If the mozilla group came up with this you'd love it.
If the Mozilla group was doing it, it wouldn't be motivated by a company trying to suck the advertising dollars away from every other site on the web. It wouldn't be motivated by a company trying to build a huge database of browsing habits of users in order to be able to make more money from them.
If it can be switched on/off in the browser (and can be switched off by those pages that really don't want to allow it - even if their reader does) then where's the issue?
The issue it should be opt-in for the web designer, not opt-out. It should be off by default in the browser, and should display a warning to the user that it will alter the content of pages for the commercial interest of the browser vendor, and that it has privacy implications to the user because it will be used to gather data from them for marketing purposes. And the user should be allowed, if the feature is enabled, to pick an alternate source for the "smart tag" references other than the browser vendor.
Your argument against Junkbuster doesn't really fly, because it is something the user has to choose to implement and it isn't something that is being done for commercial gain of another content publisher. It is the user choosing to opt-out of seeing banner ads, etc. Saying user's can't do that is like saying they can't fast-forward through commercials on a video tape -- oh wait. The people that make copy-protected DVDs are already doing that. Make no mistake, Microsoft isn't implementing this feature because they want to make life easier for users as much as they are doing it because they can redirect user's to their content to see their advertising, and so they can do clickstream analysis of people's browsing habits even when they aren't on Microsoft's pages. The idea of a hyperlink generator might be more palatable to me if the user had control over who they were going to be sent to whenever they went to one of those links, but not much. I think complaints about improper hyperlinking are still valid, and I don't think that this "smart tag" system represents proper linking.
If a vendor is going to do something like this, and I don't personally think it is a good thing, then it should be opt-in, not opt-out. Web developers shouldn't have to insert a meta-tag to tell Microsoft not to rewrite their site, they should have to insert a tag to tell Microsoft it is O.K. for them to rewrite their site. Also, such a feature, if present, should be off by default, and should issue a warning to the user that it is going to alter site content for probably financial gain of the browser vendor before it lets them turn the feature on. Such a feature can also potentially infringe on the privacy of careless users. Many people strongly suspect that Microsoft is busy building a huge customer database through click analysis, and this sort of tool, where they get to put links to their site is a tremendously powerful one for that, because they can look at the referrer from sites that wouldn't normally link to them and be able to more closely track the browsing patterns of people even when they aren't on Microsoft's site or one that Microsoft already has their teeth into, such as LinkExchange member sites.
I personally am hoping that negative public reaction to this feature will get it removed, but I don't think it is something that Microsoft will give up on easily. It is features like this that really tend to make the arguments that Microsoft is trying to take over and proprietarize the Internet not look so much like conspiracy theories.
If a new hard drive costs "a couple hundred bucks" you are buying them in the wrong place. You can easily get a new drive for under $100 if you know where to look. Of course we are talking about the government, so they probably pay way too much, but still... They could just remove the drives and ship the schools the machines and the schools could buy the new drives themselves. Still cheaper than buying a whole new computer.
Wrong answer. The guy who designed the Amiga (Jay Minor) has been dead for five years. Chuckie Cheese is owned by Nolan Bushnel, the founder of Atari, who was once Jay Minor's boss (Jay also designed the Atari 400/800). Nolan Bushnel left Atari well before Amiga was founded, and he founded Chuckie Cheese with the money that Time Warner paid him for Atari (a disasterous purchase on their part, but Bushnel got his $$$).
Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs.
Not if you are comparing people of similar skill levels, and you should. If you hire a "dummy" to run your systems... then the problem is you have a "dummy" running your system, and you get what you pay for. If you hire a highly skilled UNIX or OSS engineer and a highly skilled MCSE, chances are the cost is not going to be that much different. If the rewards for building skills aren't there, why would anyone want to pay all that money to become an MCSE? Microsoft must be lying to someone -- they tell workers "become and MCSE and make buttloads of money" and they tell bosses "hire MCSE's, they don't make jack squat compared to real engineers".
While there may be a lot more MSCE's than UNIX or OSS engineers out there that are "dummies" because of the effort that has been made by Microsoft and their partners to push a lot of people through training classes and whatnot, I have to say "Who cares?". I don't know why you'd want that sort of person in your employ. And if you have to pay about the same amount per person, then UNIX or OSS typically wins because most people find that they need fewer people to support UNIX and OSS systems than they do Microsoft based systems because they break less often.
One of the big myths about Microsoft's stuff is that it is "easier" to administer or somehow less complex than *nix. I don't think that is true at all. It merely hides its complexity under a GUI that lulls people into a false sense of understanding. But when things break, the complexity underneath can rear its ugly head, and since so many things inside the black box are secrets people often find themselves unable to solve problems without help. *nix on the other hand puts everything right out there in the open, which can be daunting for a newbie, but by forcing people to do their homework up front, they build real understanding more quickly, and get to use and build on that knowledge faster.
U.S. English does indeed specify "color" rather than "colour", but no copy editor would let "nite" get printed in a respectable publication.
There really isn't a legal definition of what 'U.S. English' is, as far as I know. The generally agreed spelling is 'color', but there certainly is nothing legally stopping people from using 'colour' should they choose. Certainly a 'british english' publication or web site would be permitted in the U.S. without having to publish a 'U.S. english' edition/site. Similarly a french, german, chinese, japanese, korean, norwegian, spanish, etc. publication or web site would not be required to also have an english version.
Unfortunately businesspeople are known for taking normal words and bastardizing them, as in Kwik Kleen and the like.
Trademark laws actually tend to encourage that. You probably couldn't successfully trademark and defend "Quick Clean", but "Kwik Kleen" you probably could.
Anyway, I agree with your points, I just didn't want you to think that our USAian language skills had degenerated *that* far:-)
Most of us U.S. citizens love to bastardize the language by borrowing words from other languages and haphazardly coining new words or changing the meaning of existing ones... One only has to think of the horrors of, for example, 'ebonics' to figure that one out. 'Wuz up wid dat?' Need I say more?
"Safe" in what way? While there are a few states where I've seen "official english" laws (those that specify that state business will be conducted in english -- primarily to try to avoid having to deal with employees who unilaterally decide to do all their work in another language or something), as far as I know none of them have been very succesfull, most of them as far as I know have never passed. And that is all on a state level, on a national level something like that would stand even less of a chance. As far as trying to 'keep english pure', there is no U.S. centric movement like that with any power. On the contrary, Americans delight in bastardizing the language by coining new terms at the drop of a hat, slang, subdialects (ebonics anyone?), large scale borrowing of terms from other languages... Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese... All of them have been borrowed for words and phrases in common usage.
As for your suggestion of a spanish-only site... In certain parts of the U.S. there are tons of spanish speaking radio stations, a few spanish speaking television stations, and spanish newspapers. I don't hear much call for them to be shut down or fined. If you don't speak spanish you just turn the channel or read something else.
Nobody in the U.S. would think of imposing fines to keep spanish from coexisting with english, let alone 'kill to keep english safe'.
On the other hand, very few people in the U.S. are in favor of forcing multi-lingualism either... And frankly it wouldn't be fair, for example to require everything to be in both english and spanish, for example... What about the people who's native language is Korean, or Vietnamese or German or Norwegian? If you required multilingualism, there are places in the U.S. where in a certain area, people of those ethnic backgrounds are large minorities, if not occasionally the majority. There are just too many different languages spoken in the U.S. to choose some specific set.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple weeks is pretty slow, many other vendors and a lot of open source developers provide patches within a few days. And it is more like a couple weeks after exploit code is released, they have a track record of blowing off notifications as being "theoretical" unless they are backed up with a code example. That is pretty pathetic when you consider that Microsoft has more resources to put behind fixing bugs and security holes than anyone else if they were serious about the problem. You are right that they don't always successfully fix the problem the first time (and that they sometimes re-break old holes with patches - DOHH!). That only makes things worse, especially in that many people have become very skeptical of their patches and are often even slower to apply them than they should be. Your point about being able to check to make sure the patch really works by testing the exploit code example is an excellent one I hadn't thought of.
Dumber sysadmins? You mean for Windows? Less desktop market share and smarter sysadmins are indeed PARTIALLY responsible for less problems with worms and viruses on Linux, but it just doesn't explain the whole story. Linux tends to come more locked down by default than Windows traditionally has, which helps. Microsoft is FINALLY at least paying lip service to changing that. A few years late and a few million dollars short in my opinion, and we will see how that plays out in reality. Do you think they would have done it if they didn't have Linux and other *NIXes pushing them on that front? I don't. Do you think they would ever take security serious if they weren't beat over the head by all of the worm/virus outbreaks? I don't believe that either. Linux also doesn't have the legacy of totally insecure "every PC is an island" that Windows does. Windows security has been retrofitted onto an environment that originally didn't have even any concept of multiple users, whereas Linux comes from the *NIX tradition which is multi-user, and has been networked since the early 80's. I believe that this both explains why Microsoft has more problems with security -- it just isn't the first thing they think about, and why Windows sysadmins are more lax -- the concept is new to many of them. It also doesn't help that Microsoft likes to claim that any idiot can install and administer Windows, when in fact it typically takes more work to install and secure Windows than it does Linux or the other *NIXes.
And yes, it is a credit to Linux that it has fewer worms and viruses. The bottom line is that I can sleep better at night knowing my machines are running Linux than I could if they were running Windows. On that level I don't care why.
Perhaps you have never encountered a Linux worm. They DO exist.
But for some reason, they don't seem to cause problems on the scale of Nimda, Code Red, etc... Obviously it isn't the availability of source code for the OS, or for exploits that is the problem as Microsoft suggests. Perhaps lack of availability of source, and a slow and unresponsive vendor who caters to the least common denominator of the market and tells customers that any bozo can administer their product is the problem.
It is my opinion that if the security community didn't publicize exploit code samples, that Microsoft would take even longer to release patches for their security holes than they do, and despite the number and severity of problems they have, they are fairly slow to respond to them. Their complaints sound as if they'd like to be even more lazy. It is too much easier to blame others for their troubles.
Of course, if they built and tested for security in house before they released in the first place as you mention, then they'd be better off, but it doesn't seem like they want to do that either.
Windows NT (I assume that's what you're talking about since 9x is not worth even metioning) has a very good HAL
Actually it is a very poor HAL, in that it still makes or rather forces too many assumptions about the underlying hardware. Like 32 bits (NT for Alpha didn't run 64 bit), like little endianess (NT has never been successfully ported to and shipped on a big endian processor architecture -- NT on PPC, Sparc and MIPS was stillborn). Anyway you look at it, NT and its siblings are likely to be basically x86 only for the forseeable future. Linux on the other hand runs on quite a variety of processor architectures, and most software written for Linux is just a "./configure; make; make install" away from running on most of them. On the other hand due to the fact that 9x (and ME) which are 'not worth even mentioning' still are the bulk of Microsoft OS installations, you've got to be careful which subset of Win32 and Microsoft's other APIs you are using to write code that works on both 9x/ME and NT/W2K/XP.
What is hilarious about turning down jobs based on OS? I've told numerous recruiters, HR people, managers, etc. that I wasn't interested in a job because I would have to deal with Windows. Why? Because I can. And in my opinion, life is too short to deal with the frustrations of having to use Windows. Even in today's job market, which isn't like it was a year ago when anyone in a technical field could walk across the street and get a job it isn't so bad that people with a good resume and decent interviewing skills should have to take a job they won't be happy with. What is pathetic is people who think otherwise.
So far it has worked on Mandrake 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, Mandrake 8.0 and Red Hat 7.1. I will be installing it on SuSE 7.2 as well, but I expect it will work...
Score 2 interesting? And it isn't even right!?! The box Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold was a "Blue Box", and they didn't invent it, they just designed one particular implementation of it. Others such as John Draper (Capn Crunch) knew about it before them.
Why are you offering condolences? 40k in GBP is about $56k USD, and since the UK has obscene tax rates, if it is after tax as he says, then he must be making nearly six figures before taxes, if not into six figures. So you are trying to tell me that Iowa State pays better than that? I seriously doubt it. I worked there over 10 years ago, and basically doubled my pay when I went elsewhere. They, like most universities pay poorly. A friend of mine who worked there when I did and is still working up there probably makes less than 1/2 what I do now, dispite the fact that he graduated from ISU with a 3.9something GPA and I never bothered to finish my degree.
As for spelling, I know a whole lot of well paid people in the business who can't spell worth a damn. Yes, it can be annoying, but it doesn't seem to hurt them as much as all the anal retentive english teachers in school told us it would...
OpenLook has been effectively dead for a long time. Sun switched to CDE when they ditched OpenLook in favor of Motif, which had basically won the battle at that point.
As for open sourcing it, Sun did that before they gave up on it... it was kind of their last ditch attempt to outmaneuver Motif. Unfortunately it was too late. Had they done it about a year sooner it might have made a difference.
I used to use olvwm on Linux back in the 1993 to 1995 time period... I imagine the source code is still out there for it, but I don't think it ships standard with many distros these days, let alone is part of the normal installations.
Here is the hall of shame of IP's from my Apache logs:
:-)
66.80.40.178
202.30.107.77
134.155.40.49
195.65.218.213
206.153.53.106
66.121.57.63
132.178.148.167
131.174.228.6
24.91.116.188
200.202.120.59
62.48.11.31
24.214.66.226
208.11.51.150
63.194.235.102
208.139.198.171
62.17.151.141
195.85.182.18
211.53.214.76
If your IP is on that list, you might want to patch it... Or better yet, switch to Linux and Apache...
Wasn't Wackenhut basically a front organization for the CIA back in the 60's and 70's? Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or they were just 'contractors' or 'consultants' to the CIA or something like that...
Maybe we need to make the open source browsers be more configurable to lie about their browser/OS string? Its not completely without precendent, since IE at least used to have "Mozilla" in their string to fool site recognition. A really cool ability might be to let a user specify browser strings on a per-URL basis and remember the setting for future visits... If web developers found out that a large percentage of their visitors were lying with their browser string then maybe they'd be more incentified to build sites that work for more people? On the other hand, they might take it that there were less people using other platforms because fewer people would be turned away... Hmm...
Burning an SUV dealer to help the environment? The supposed "eco-terrorists" probably caused more pollution during that act than all of the SUV's on that lot would have caused during their operating lifetime. Think burning rubber, think burning seat material (usually has Poly Vynyl Chloride in it), etc. Not to mention that all of those vehicles will just be replaced, so they've done nothing but increase the SUV manufacturer's profits. And it will take more energy and more materials to build the replacement vehicles and rebuild the dealership, which is also counterproductive. The SUV dealer will file an insurance claim, so they won't be out that much. People who want an SUV will just buy one from another dealer until the dealership is back up and running again.
Eco-moronism is more an accurate term to describe this kind of stupidity than eco-terrorism. In order to be terrorism it would have to frighten people into changing their behavior. This kind of arson is more along the lines of senseless vandalism. It is not going to convince anyone to change their behavior. It is more likely to damage this kind of cause, because people will not be sympathetic to it if this kind of behavior is associated with it.
I imagine that article was written by a reporter for the BBC, not by the web team. While I wouldn't have any reason to malign the BBC's web team, the general computer knowledge level of most reporters is a tad on the weak side.
Actually, if memory serves, Google multinode Linux clusters in three different colo facilities for redundancy, one at Exodus in the bay area, one somewhere in Virginia with some other colo provider, and I don't remember where the 3rd was.
So the BBC seems to be thinking 'cluster'='large server' perhaps. Of course we know that isn't quite right, but nontechnical people might not understand the difference.
One of the law enforcement agencies around here (midwest) actually uses black helicopters (only markings a small round white seal with red letters on the side and the N-numbers are smaller than normal and in dark grey on the black background). They are not easily confused with the National Guard's similar sized helicopters which are dark green and clearly marked with visible white normal sized N numbers. They are neither much quieter than a UH60 and certainly not invisible as some of the conspiracy theorists claim. They do, however, fly slowly, at low altitudes and in sweeping arcs, and have a large electronics pod mounted on one of the skids. What they appear to be looking for is electromagnetic signatures of large amounts of flourescent tubes and other such equipment used in grow houses and clandestine drug labs.
Sometimes there is tiny grain of truth in conspiracy theories if you dig far enough.
If the mozilla group came up with this you'd love it.
If the Mozilla group was doing it, it wouldn't be motivated by a company trying to suck the advertising dollars away from every other site on the web. It wouldn't be motivated by a company trying to build a huge database of browsing habits of users in order to be able to make more money from them.
If it can be switched on/off in the browser (and can be switched off by those pages that really don't want to allow it - even if their reader does) then where's the issue?
The issue it should be opt-in for the web designer, not opt-out. It should be off by default in the browser, and should display a warning to the user that it will alter the content of pages for the commercial interest of the browser vendor, and that it has privacy implications to the user because it will be used to gather data from them for marketing purposes. And the user should be allowed, if the feature is enabled, to pick an alternate source for the "smart tag" references other than the browser vendor.
Your argument against Junkbuster doesn't really fly, because it is something the user has to choose to implement and it isn't something that is being done for commercial gain of another content publisher. It is the user choosing to opt-out of seeing banner ads, etc. Saying user's can't do that is like saying they can't fast-forward through commercials on a video tape -- oh wait. The people that make copy-protected DVDs are already doing that. Make no mistake, Microsoft isn't implementing this feature because they want to make life easier for users as much as they are doing it because they can redirect user's to their content to see their advertising, and so they can do clickstream analysis of people's browsing habits even when they aren't on Microsoft's pages. The idea of a hyperlink generator might be more palatable to me if the user had control over who they were going to be sent to whenever they went to one of those links, but not much. I think complaints about improper hyperlinking are still valid, and I don't think that this "smart tag" system represents proper linking.
If a vendor is going to do something like this, and I don't personally think it is a good thing, then it should be opt-in, not opt-out. Web developers shouldn't have to insert a meta-tag to tell Microsoft not to rewrite their site, they should have to insert a tag to tell Microsoft it is O.K. for them to rewrite their site. Also, such a feature, if present, should be off by default, and should issue a warning to the user that it is going to alter site content for probably financial gain of the browser vendor before it lets them turn the feature on. Such a feature can also potentially infringe on the privacy of careless users. Many people strongly suspect that Microsoft is busy building a huge customer database through click analysis, and this sort of tool, where they get to put links to their site is a tremendously powerful one for that, because they can look at the referrer from sites that wouldn't normally link to them and be able to more closely track the browsing patterns of people even when they aren't on Microsoft's site or one that Microsoft already has their teeth into, such as LinkExchange member sites.
I personally am hoping that negative public reaction to this feature will get it removed, but I don't think it is something that Microsoft will give up on easily. It is features like this that really tend to make the arguments that Microsoft is trying to take over and proprietarize the Internet not look so much like conspiracy theories.
If a new hard drive costs "a couple hundred bucks" you are buying them in the wrong place. You can easily get a new drive for under $100 if you know where to look. Of course we are talking about the government, so they probably pay way too much, but still... They could just remove the drives and ship the schools the machines and the schools could buy the new drives themselves. Still cheaper than buying a whole new computer.
Wrong answer. The guy who designed the Amiga (Jay Minor) has been dead for five years. Chuckie Cheese is owned by Nolan Bushnel, the founder of Atari, who was once Jay Minor's boss (Jay also designed the Atari 400/800). Nolan Bushnel left Atari well before Amiga was founded, and he founded Chuckie Cheese with the money that Time Warner paid him for Atari (a disasterous purchase on their part, but Bushnel got his $$$).
Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs.
Not if you are comparing people of similar skill levels, and you should. If you hire a "dummy" to run your systems... then the problem is you have a "dummy" running your system, and you get what you pay for. If you hire a highly skilled UNIX or OSS engineer and a highly skilled MCSE, chances are the cost is not going to be that much different. If the rewards for building skills aren't there, why would anyone want to pay all that money to become an MCSE? Microsoft must be lying to someone -- they tell workers "become and MCSE and make buttloads of money" and they tell bosses "hire MCSE's, they don't make jack squat compared to real engineers".
While there may be a lot more MSCE's than UNIX or OSS engineers out there that are "dummies" because of the effort that has been made by Microsoft and their partners to push a lot of people through training classes and whatnot, I have to say "Who cares?". I don't know why you'd want that sort of person in your employ. And if you have to pay about the same amount per person, then UNIX or OSS typically wins because most people find that they need fewer people to support UNIX and OSS systems than they do Microsoft based systems because they break less often.
One of the big myths about Microsoft's stuff is that it is "easier" to administer or somehow less complex than *nix. I don't think that is true at all. It merely hides its complexity under a GUI that lulls people into a false sense of understanding. But when things break, the complexity underneath can rear its ugly head, and since so many things inside the black box are secrets people often find themselves unable to solve problems without help. *nix on the other hand puts everything right out there in the open, which can be daunting for a newbie, but by forcing people to do their homework up front, they build real understanding more quickly, and get to use and build on that knowledge faster.
U.S. English does indeed specify "color" rather than "colour", but no copy editor would let "nite" get printed in a respectable publication.
:-)
There really isn't a legal definition of what 'U.S. English' is, as far as I know. The generally agreed spelling is 'color', but there certainly is nothing legally stopping people from using 'colour' should they choose. Certainly a 'british english' publication or web site would be permitted in the U.S. without having to publish a 'U.S. english' edition/site. Similarly a french, german, chinese, japanese, korean, norwegian, spanish, etc. publication or web site would not be required to also have an english version.
Unfortunately businesspeople are known for taking normal words and bastardizing them, as in Kwik Kleen and the like.
Trademark laws actually tend to encourage that. You probably couldn't successfully trademark and defend "Quick Clean", but "Kwik Kleen" you probably could.
Anyway, I agree with your points, I just didn't want you to think that our USAian language skills had degenerated *that* far
Most of us U.S. citizens love to bastardize the language by borrowing words from other languages and haphazardly coining new words or changing the meaning of existing ones... One only has to think of the horrors of, for example, 'ebonics' to figure that one out. 'Wuz up wid dat?' Need I say more?
The U.S. would kill to keep english safe.
"Safe" in what way? While there are a few states where I've seen "official english" laws (those that specify that state business will be conducted in english -- primarily to try to avoid having to deal with employees who unilaterally decide to do all their work in another language or something), as far as I know none of them have been very succesfull, most of them as far as I know have never passed. And that is all on a state level, on a national level something like that would stand even less of a chance. As far as trying to 'keep english pure', there is no U.S. centric movement like that with any power. On the contrary, Americans delight in bastardizing the language by coining new terms at the drop of a hat, slang, subdialects (ebonics anyone?), large scale borrowing of terms from other languages... Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese... All of them have been borrowed for words and phrases in common usage.
As for your suggestion of a spanish-only site... In certain parts of the U.S. there are tons of spanish speaking radio stations, a few spanish speaking television stations, and spanish newspapers. I don't hear much call for them to be shut down or fined. If you don't speak spanish you just turn the channel or read something else.
Nobody in the U.S. would think of imposing fines to keep spanish from coexisting with english, let alone 'kill to keep english safe'.
On the other hand, very few people in the U.S. are in favor of forcing multi-lingualism either... And frankly it wouldn't be fair, for example to require everything to be in both english and spanish, for example... What about the people who's native language is Korean, or Vietnamese or German or Norwegian? If you required multilingualism, there are places in the U.S. where in a certain area, people of those ethnic backgrounds are large minorities, if not occasionally the majority. There are just too many different languages spoken in the U.S. to choose some specific set.