Okay okay if I'm reading this correctly, file sharing is a threat to national security because it's getting installed on government computers that hold sensitive information ? Does that mean that photocopiers, faxes, mailing envelopes and even cameras are all threats to national security because they have the potential to be misused by dumb government employees ?
#1 - File sharing is only as dangerous as the person running the software. If the user's a twit, don't blame the software, just replace them with a better user.
#2 - File sharing's risk can be controlled at the firewall, either keep an eye on it or shut it out completely. We're talking about offices here, places that have no legitimate reason to be using Limewire et al. in the first place.
#3 - Gov't employees have always had ways to leak information. Sometimes they toss stuff in the garbage without properly shredding confidential documents. Sometimes they get their notebook stolen. Sometimes they leave their passwords written on post-it notes stuck to their monitor. And sometimes they're just would-be spies taking bribes.
#4 - The more stuff gets legislated "out of existence", the more ways people will find to get around the law. They shut down Napster, so people started using decentralized networks. They could try to shut down P2P, we'll find a sneakier way to do it (already happening with encrypted VPN tunnels). How's the saying go ? If [thing] is outlawed, only outlaws will do [thing].
#5 - This is our goddamned government. This ain't a dictatorship or monarchy, it's a democracy. If these officials aren't acting in accordance with the people's needs, we need to fire the bastards!
The "evidence" supporting these bylaws is narrow and circumstantial. I come from an idiot nation with mostly idiot citizens who drink and drive like the idiots they are. We're not exactly Scottish, but the same label of "inbred alcoholics" applies. Drunk driving is one of those things where 50% are strongly against it, and the other half think it's their god-given right (that and skanky divorcee pussy at the karaoke bar). Depending on which opinionated group's leader is in power at the time, we'll either see a flurry of drunk driving ads and police roadblocks every single weekend, or if the guy in the big fluffy chair is one of the boozers we'll have beer-sponsored festivals on government property and then they jack up the price of public transit "because those smart people don't buy enough heavily taxed booze to fund the province".
Me.. well I'm a fence-sitter. On one side, drunk people tend to irritate me because people just don't know when to stop. On the other hand, we live is a ridiculously stressed world and if a little booze can lighten people up, I'm all for it. Drunk drivers are not a great thing, but I don't think the current laws and enforcement methods are helping anyone. People drive drunk all the time, the cops only "catch" a small number, and all they do is give them a slap on the wrist and suspend their license for a few months. Let me tell you something: if you arrest a 45 year old alcoholic asshat and take away his little piece of plastic, he's going to get back into his car and drive anyway! Until he actually kills someone and gets tossed in jail (which isn't any improvement), he's going to keep driving drunk. Counseling can help some people, but lots of em are just too old and too dumb to change their ways.
I recall a few years ago, we had one highly publicized incident where a driver killed two teenage girls "who had done the right thing and took a cab after partying". The cab was parked on the shoulder while the girls puked their little booze-intolerant guts out, when a dumb construction-type dude with a big truck just plowed right into it all. Well the guy never went to jail as far as I remember, he just paid a fine, gave an apology, quit his job and probably went right back home to drink his sorrow away. Sad broken world this is.
You hit some often-ignored but obvious points there, but I'm afraid it's a near-miss. The #1 reason why Dell will not supply OpenOffice isn't the cost of shipping media, nor the support nightmare that would inevitably ensue. The #1 reason is because OpenOffice would compete with MS Office.
If the average joe's computer came with a free word processor and spreadsheet, they no longer need to spend $250 and up on MS Office. Not only would Dell lose money from those lost software sales (which are far more profitable than the PC sales), but they would be hurting their #1 partner: Microsoft.
If people want to use OO.o, they can get it freely on the net without Dell getting involved. The "large number of customers" who want this are just a small fraction of the residential crowd, which itself accounts for maybe 10% of Dell's business. Their big fish is the corporate sector, where one sales pitch can net thousands of system orders. If one of those big guys wants OO.o, they will have a sysadmin to load it into the Ghost image, or they can pay Dell's solution integrators lots of money to do it for them. Either way, the home user doesn't get squat.
On a more general tune, I get irritated whenever some free software project whines about big-business partnerships. Those big partnerships exist because there's big money going back and forth. You have to pay to play, that's how it works in corporate america. The free software loudmouths are like a poor family with a retarded son, bitching because Mensa won't let them join. The reality is we don't need Dell, HP and friends to bundle Linux, OpenOffice, or any other free software, it's a losing battle. If/when free software truly exceeds Microsoft in functionality, ease of use and installation, and enterprise support, that's when the big guys will COME to us. We're not there yet.
Piracy is what helped Microsoft get so big in the first place. Everyone had Dos and Windows on their 386/486 back in the day. Disk copying and BBS file trading was fairly common, but the biggest vehicle for unlicensed software was the indie computer shop. They would sell copied floppies with a legit-looking printed label, something ridiculously easy to make even in the 80's and 90's because even the authentic products didn't have fancy artwork to set them apart. Unknowingly, those small time retailers built Microsoft into a monopoly, by preinstalling unlicensed copies of Dos and Windows onto every single PC. Not every shop did this, but it was much more common back then than it is today, at least in North America.
In a sense, maybe this is Microsoft admitting that they've done enough (or even too much) to slow down piracy. It's one thing when someone slips you an illegal copy without your knowledge, it's another when someone willfully pirates software. You want to protect #1 (and put his scamming salesman in a small cell with a guy named 'Tiny'), but #2 is usually a techy type, or a kid, or maybe just a broke student who couldn't afford the $300 OS but needs it for his/her/its work. Like the MS rep said: at least they're using our software instead of someone else's. MS may not make any money from that bootleg copy, but they're still glad no one else is making a buck off that user. Better to let a cracked XP run free than to watch that user defect to Apple or Linux.
The lovely part is that Microsoft is absolutely right!
DST is kind of dumb, yes, but what's even dumber is how twice a year around the clock shift date, a bunch of cocky little dorks write the same uncreative garbage about the evils of DST. Next year they might throw in a twist and say "DST causes homosexuality" or some southern retarded puke.
In the world, there are three driving forces: money, control, and religion. DST is driven by money. By having "more" sunny time, we have more spending time. Drive around, or drop by a terrace for a drink... things people are much less likely to do after darkness falls.
I personally wish we could leave our clocks alone and just have people get up one hour earlier if they need to. It's easier to have a billion people show up to work one hour early (with a few tardy folks), than to spend ages reprogramming every single electronic device on the planet to hopefully copy with this artificial rift in time. Linux does a semi-decent job by trying to keep everything in UTC, then cooking the timezone for display, but it's still a pain in the ass.
Windows might not be super easy, but Linux can be about as user friendly as manually writing 64-bit opcodes using nothing but Debug.com
The big difference from Dell's perspective is that Windows is supported by their hardware suppliers. Linux distros are supported by a bunch of 12 year olds with A.D.D. As much as I love Linux for server stuff, I still can't bear to use it for a desktop. Every few months I'll get all giddy and try a distro, but every single time I hit the same brick wall: X. X sucks. X works half the time. X struggles with hardware acceleration. X can't even figure out what resolution it should drive my LCD. X segfaults if it doesn't like my configs, or my kernel, or the sum of the square root of the 2's complement of gettime(). At least Windows' GUI loads up 9 times out of 10, and when it doesn't it at least has the decency to tell you "Unmountable_boot_volume". Right now, X is unprofessional and until someone comes up with a stable, reliable and used-friendly modern graphical desktop for the masses, Linux will remain a hacker's toy. Hell, even Apple can do Unix better than Linux.. how sad is that ?
Linux could be a killer OS, but no one wants to step up to the plate. I look at the amount of work that goes into the mainstream distros, all the package maintenance and testing... if we could cull some of these distros and apply the developers' time toward improving the code instead of designing yet another shiny tarball metadata format, we might actually see more indie shops offering Linux preinstallation. Ubuntu has come a long way, but it stands alone, and only because of the tremendous effort put into that specific distro, but guess what: it still relies on pokey binary-only graphics drivers, and the often tempermental kernel. I still don't understand why we have version-sensitive kernel modules in this day and age, when Microsoft has had a well-defined driver model for well over a decade. Heck, Windows 2000 and XP can use many of the same device drivers thanks to WDM.... so why don't we have that ? We, the brilliant hackers who dream in code and feel at one with the compiler ? These are all reasons why Linux isn't a household name, so when are we going to do something about it ?
Ahh the old adage: it's not personal, it's just business! Bill is just trying to do what's best for the company. Business doesn't have morals, it only has a bottom line and its sole purpose is to improve that bottom line by any means available. If M$ can do better with overseas talent, that just means the homeboys suck rocks. It's sad but true. Colleges churn out CS grads like there's no tomorrow, because colleges get paid to do so. They don't care whether you're any good, they just want your tuition, and maybe they'll suck your dick for donations if you make it big. That's all it is.
I'd say for every thousand CS grads, maybe 2-3 are worth the money, the others are just monkeys with typewriters. Math says if 99.7% of the CS people are junk, but you can't tell the good ones apart until it's too late.... well you pay them all a crappy low salary, treat them like the retards that they are and that's the end of it. Back when software developers were a scarce resource, we were making five times the money, and things were getting done a lot faster and a lot better. What's happening now is the CS grads from India tend to be more skilled than the local scum, and yet they come with modest salary expectations. If you're the guy doing the interviews, and Jock A wants 150k for his fly-by-the-seat-of-your-GC Java code, but Indian Kid B wants only 60k, is willing to relocate anywhere and can debug threaded C++ for 16 hours a day without cocaine, it's a pretty easy decision to make. You may think Kid B is an ass kisser, but he's the one driving an Audi while you're sitting at home trying to milk more Adwords revenue from your Warcraft fansite.
So if you don't want foreigners to "steal your jobs", just be better than they are. The fact that you live here doesn't matter anymore in the era of global business. It costs a few thousand to fly a good candidate over and get their paperwork done, but it costs hundreds of thousands to pay some idiot's salary for nothing.
I'm actually impressed this sort of crap doesn't happen more often with the hordes of code imbeciles that have flooded the market in the last decade, a lot of them ending up in government roles or other big businesses, anywhere a lousy coder/admin can easily hide among the crowds. They don't hire many good IT staff because, well, it's hard to tell a good coder from a bad one until they've ruined a few of your projects (or pushed them to a level of greatness that brings tears to your eyes - riiiight).
I would have expected something like this to be thoroughly tested long before tax season to iron out the kinks, certainly not something to be done at a time when the rate of incoming reports is steadily increasing.. a few days of downtime could backlog them by several weeks, and every Canadian knows how good the gov't is at working through backlogs:P How will this affect those who are expecting some cash back ? The ones who get money back are usually the ones who need it the most, students and low-income families.
While the 60mb drive might be ridiculously small by today's standards, the fact that most drives die within a few years is scary for your data. If my old 40gb Maxtors hadn't blown up a gazillion times, I still probably would be using them today, in favor of the 750gb monsters I have now, but at least I'd still have the data.
Make a drive that can die while still being able to pull data off (without paying some smartass a ton of money) and I'll be just as happy. The device is cheap, what's stored on it is priceless.
I am now your new biggest fan. You have no idea how many hours I've wasted looking for solid documentation on NT's batch scripting. Microsoft's knowledge base is a maze of conflicting, redundant and largely incomplete information. It also doesn't help me that I've been writing kinky batch files since the late 80's, long before these neat enhancements were ever hatched.
All issues that could be trivially resolved with a bit of effort. Worst case just buy new licenses. If you're already running 100+ desktops, a few hundred bucks won't bankrupt the operation, and that's the dumb easy way out.
As much as I'd want to root for Linux being the superior solution, it's still a matter of how much you trust the kernel. Over the years we've been trained to not trust the Windows kernel (and it's long dangly DLL appendages), but a glitch in any part of the system, whether it's Linux or Windows, will compromise the firewall's operation. The isolation exists purely in software, and a breach becomes impossible to contain. When you have a dedicated firewall machine, if it goes loopy you can just pull the plug and fix the problem. If the firewall and client are the same machine, you just lost both in one blow.
It's kind of like asking people who've already entered a building, to check with the security guard to see if they are allowed on the premises, rather than posting the guard at the door to prevent unwanteds from ever stepping inside at all.
That VM solution is so kludgey I can't even believe you just rebutted with it. If the VM can reach the network, then so can the host. Just because you "disable" TCP-IP doesn't guarantee it's going to be dropped. Hell, disable anything in Windows and it's likely to not do quite as you expect, because the system is designed as a whole, with nasty dependencies spread out like a spider web. I wouldn't be surprised if a carefully mangled packet could break through and bypass the VM entirely, thanks to one of the hundreds of suspicious DLL libraries peppered all over the place.
There's a good reason real firewalls are closed-box, independent affairs. What... do you run your corporate web and mail servers alongside your iptables, not worrying that a mail glitch could open up access to the firewall (or vice versa)... do you believe in magic too ?
Yep it's ironic. I'd sooner trust a guy who's had a rough past but lived through it and has grown from it, than some snarky upper-class buzz poet with a narrow view of reality.
Example: How can a leader be against drugs if they don't know the first thing about them ? How can a leader fight organized crime if all they know comes from TV and police documents (which are biased by definition) ? The one thing they do know is how to make a fast buck, and that's usually their main drive.
I would best define government as a cooperative group that offers common services: healthcare, waterworks, road maintenance, snow plowing, travel documentation and a base legal system so everyone can get along. Ideally this system would be run like any other non-profit coop, with fair prices and lean, efficient operations. If someone's doing a poor job or trying to game the system, they get dealt with. We don't need supreme leaders with layers of subordinates whose job function is essntially the telephone game.. take some bullshit, mix it up and pass it around. Do they have any positive impact on the quality of life of the citizens ? Nope.
Do you really thing G.W. Bush adds value to the USA in his role ? Is he making people's lives happier across the board from his direct actions ? Hell no. He doesn't even work in the USA, his eyes are focused elsewhere in the world.
You didn't quite catch my message there, I'm afraid. My point is the current government model is broken, and we should completely bypass the system if we want things to change. Government is a tool of the people, not the other way around. We need to find the right tool for the job and voting ain't it.
Hehehe well I'll keep my icecube over anything else, thank you:)
The "USA vs The World" dynamic is a daily topic in my life, probably because I'm engaged to a psychologist whose daily affairs involve people of all walks of life, young and old, brilliant and stupid. She describes the USA as a melting pot, and Canada as a mixing bowl. Assimilate vs accomodate, I guess. The truth is that you can find terminally ignorant people everywhere. Hell we've got a few Canadians that we keep stashed away in the woods because frankly, they don't play well with others.
I think the main difference is in the effort applied. It's easy to be a closed-minded center-of-the-universe type who thinks everyone and everything else is wrong. Just toss everyone into a bucket that's easy and convenient to hate. It's exponentially harder to look past appearances and stereotypes and give everyone an equal chance to earn your trust and respect.
It may actually be easier to just put every "ugly american" and "ugly canadian" on a no-fly list;) Or maybe just lead them to a dark room and have a blunt object accidentally strike their skull with great force. I don't think anyone is born with intolerance preloaded onto the brain.
I have to agree with you, the first thing most decently smart people do when their computer acts wonky is update their malware scanner(s) and OS. It is trivial for any malware to finagle with the HOSTS file on a Windows system, which is hidden in such a dumb obscure place (C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc), a far cry from the self-explanatory/etc/hosts of every other goddamned OS on the planet.
Anyway as I was saying, once a virus takes over the HOSTS file, it could fool the common user into downloading malicious "updates". If someone put a little effort into it, they could use McAfee/Symantec's auto-update feature to replace the scanner with a 100% evil application that merely simulates the scanner's interface. The user points it to his/her/its sensitive files and lets the dumb app chug away for hours.. rather than scanning for viruses, it could be compressing and shipping off confidential data over the net.
While it may seem like just another entry vector to vulnerable machines, it's actually far more dangerous than most security holes because it has the potential to impersonate trusted hosts and exploit that trust to full effect.
This reminds me of the (mythical) NASA space pen, which says the government spent 1.5 million to invent a pen that would work in zero gravity while the russian solution was a common lead pencil. The story isn't quite accurate but I see it as analogous to the Pentagon wanting to see everything. There are at least two solutions here, one is very costly, the other is cheap as dirt.
1. They can spend a gazillion dollars of money YOU don't have (as a country) to rewind car bomb events, but that means the bomb still has to blow up and kill people before the process even begins, and then you just storm in and shoot a few wackos.. big whoop:P
2. They can figure out why everyone on the planet hates the USA and fix the problem at the source. Heck many of your own citizens hate the system they live in, and I don't mean "I hate the IRS" kind of hate, I mean "I'm gonna kill everything" kind of hate. That's pretty damned sad. I don't see Al-Qaeda blowing up the Eiffel tower or Tokyo Disney... does that mean the arrogant french and the repressive japanese are less hated than the warmongering americans ? Why is that ? Every nation has its cultural frictions, so figure out what makes yours more abrasive and sand it down 'til it's nice and smooth! Or maybe it's because the USA is so huge that the rest of the world sees you as a threat. That's wouldn't be a good thing.
I don't know about you guys, but I have yet to hear someone yell "I hate you canadians and your easygoing attitude". I live within a mile of several dozen embassies, including yours. I have yet to hear of any bombing attempt in my neighborhood, and while the embassies do cause some local tension, it's more about their lousy driving and diplomatic immunity plates, than their ethnicity and political views. There's nothing scarier (within canada) than watching a Lexus with red plates casually drift into your front fender, oblivious to the laws of physics (and the cost of insurance). Sure, our government likes to squander money like there's no tomorrow, but at least they're not throwing darts a world map to choose their next bitch.
The problem is that no matter how much you pester a legislator, they have a high likelihood of still doing the wrong thing when it's decision time. In this government, we're forced to support people rather than ideas, under the premise that those people will ideally have similar ideals to ours. It doesn't, because they have power and we don't... that changes everything!
So if we REALLY don't want some crap-suit-wearing asshat to do things like this, there are two ways to stop them: prevent them from getting that deciding power, or punting them out of their seat after they've gotten it. Either way, there needs to be a major redefinition of government's purpose and powers. I may have a very nice view of Parliament Hill from my high-rise apartment, but last I heard, caffeine and sniping don't mix well. Plan B: start acting like a true democrat, putting forth ideas and trying to get others to join the cause. One vote don't mean shit, a thousand is a statistical error, but a million can get someone fired!
There's a big difference between a drive failure and a drive replacement.
Just because Seagate/Western replace a drige doesn't mean that drive is toast. It means someone has a problem with it. Sometimes the problem is bad cabling. Sometimes the problem is bad cooling. Sometimes the problem is outside the box, sitting at a keyboard.
Heck some people will get a new hard drive because they don't know how to reload the OS... very very often! Let's say someone unenlightened gets a boot-time error message, so they call tech support and the techie has them run a diagnostic tool... but they can't get it to run because the thing won't boot. The kid sets up an RMA, the customer gets a new blank drive, pops it in, and since there's nothing on the drive, it tries to boot off the CD-Rom. Windows Setup loads and the machine is magically "fixed". It would have been better fixed by changing the boot order in the BIOS, and doing a repair install, but the average user doesn't know all that "nerdy hacker stuff", and the average tech support drone is quite happy with the bad, easy solution. After all, India doesn't pay for the hard drive, Dell/HP/Toshiba do. Another problem is that stupid users think they're smarter than the tech they called (they're often right, but let's not go there). If they're staring at a blue screen, and you give them a 5 minute fix that brings it all back, a lot of idiots will say "You didn't fix it. It's gonna break again. I still want a new hard drive!". Personally I'd ship them a box of TNT but that usually doesn't show up as an option in the RMA part list. So you send the idiot a new hard drive, even when you know it's perfectly fine. Worst case, the guys in receiving will test the returned drive and put it back on the shelf.
Now hard drives do actually fail from time to time, but not nearly as often as people seem to think. I learned the hard way about hard drive reliability. I used to be the alpha geek teenager who crammed a half dozen hard drives with handmade rounded ATA cables and a sparkomatic power supply, the one that comes with the $20 cheapo chassis at your local asian importer. Oh yeah, the CPU was an overclocked Athlon T-Bird, often mistaken for an industrial heating unit. Fastest ghetto RAID array in town only I had dead drives every six months.
Then one day I started putting those same drives in a well ventilated chassis with top-quality cables, power supplies and lots of big efficient fans right up against the drive rails. I crack the case open every now and then to clean out any dust buildup, perhaps every 6 to 8 weeks or so.. doesn't even require a shutdown. I haven't had a drive fail in four years, seriously! And I'm talking about 20 drives here across my 3 main rigs, they get the living tar beat out of them on a daily basis. Random luck certainly has a play in all of this, but my point is a lot of failures can be prevented. I'd like to think a lot of physical failures could also be avoided if the damned manufacturers would spend a little more time and money on reliability. Sell me a drive that costs up to 30% more, but has subtle improvements that lead to a noticeably longer lifetime. Most people won't get it, they'd rather get a drive that dies twice as often but costs 30% LESS... just look at all the Nova DVD players Wal-Mart sold over the holidays... humans are cheap ignorant reptiles, that's just nature.
For the other 10% whose time and data are actually worth something, there is a market for disaster-proof drives. Heck, just sandwich two disks with mirroring and have it tell me when one of them's on the fritz. That's what I end up doing anyway, only my current method involves buying an overpriced RAID controller. Well if I considered my data so important that I chose to spend $400 on a controller to RAID up a pair of $75 hard drives, I don't think I'd have a problem spending even $200 on a single unit that does it all in one neat package, I'd still be about 300 bucks ahead, and instead of me giving all that cash to Adaptec/
Well now don't go overboard bashing the gamers, the main difference between a good work PC and a gaming PC is the graphics card... maybe the sound card if you love Creative Inc that much (I don't). I've got a mostly work PC with a Geforce 7900 thrown in for kicks. But then I also have 4 gigs of ram and a dual core 2.6ghz AMD64. I didn't get all that gear to play Doom, in fact I'd say only 7% of the cost was due to gaming functionality. Every now and then I get a developer who tells me my PC is overkill. Then I flick on the other three monitors, load up the ram disk with my data set and get cracking. By the time the other guy's compiler puked its first error message, I've already gone through 4-5 profiling runs and managed a 400% speed increase. The other guy gets through his 8 hour shift, hasn't written any unit tests, and blames his problems on Java's garbage collection.
It's only overkill if you can't handle that much machine.
The british are coming!! The british are coming!!
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Is Vista a Trap?
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The big problem with the author is he's british... well that and he's trying to install a brand new OS on obsolete hardware. His machine was hot stuff about six years ago. He's on the same page as people who loaded Windows XP on a K6 333, or Windows 95 on a 25mhz 386SX. Yeah it's gonna suck, because the machine sucks! There's no sense in supporting ancient hardware, at least not from a business standpoint.
There's also the brands involved.. He doesn't say what his graphics card was, but anyone who's had the misfortune of owning a Sound Blaster in the last decade has dealt with the homicidal wrath of Creative Inc. They're really good at selling overpriced DACs, but they equally suck at writing stable drivers for the damned things. What's even better is this guy has a Dell OEM Sound Blaster... anyone who's ever touched those things knows they're different. They have exactly one difference: the device ID. Why'd they change it ? Some retarded form of lock-in I guess, because it's a nightmare getting them to work anywhere else. Anywhere except Linux that is:) It would be a trivial matter of adding the Dell ID to the standard drivers, literally a one-line fix, but they don't.
Performance-wise, his PC even after upgrades is still puny. A Willamette P4, 768mb of PC-133, and a hard drive that probably sucked the day it was born. I could also write a horrible review of Vista if I tried hard enough to find an ancient PC like his. Or I could run it on a well-specced year-old system like an Athlon 64 or an Intel Core and get rather excellent results.
Don't read me wrong, I don't use Vista because... well... I don't care about the eye-candy! Really there's not much more about it. Vista is to XP what Beryl is to kwin. But if I wanted Vista, I would have no problems running it on my current machine (I've tried the MSDN betas, they ran fine). The problems are all these broke-ass tinkerers who like to "play" with computers. They don't have any real use for a PC other than downloading music and lounge on Myspace and Lavalife. They don't have a budget so their machines are a patchwork of whatever they bought off of Craigslist. I don't call that a serious computer user.
You could also post on slashdot pulling half-baked ideas out of your ass. For the virtual machine to be able to reach the internet, its host needs to have internet access as well. You could firewall the crap out of the VM, it won't do squat for the host no matter how you try to route your traffic, since your front line is wide-open.
It's kind of like putting the keyhole on the INSIDE of your door. Anyone can just turn the knob from the outside and waltz in, but YOU need keys to get out of your own damn home.
Virtual Machines, like any other technical innovation, are only as good as the administrator running the show.
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Okay okay if I'm reading this correctly, file sharing is a threat to national security because it's getting installed on government computers that hold sensitive information ? Does that mean that photocopiers, faxes, mailing envelopes and even cameras are all threats to national security because they have the potential to be misused by dumb government employees ?
#1 - File sharing is only as dangerous as the person running the software. If the user's a twit, don't blame the software, just replace them with a better user.
#2 - File sharing's risk can be controlled at the firewall, either keep an eye on it or shut it out completely. We're talking about offices here, places that have no legitimate reason to be using Limewire et al. in the first place.
#3 - Gov't employees have always had ways to leak information. Sometimes they toss stuff in the garbage without properly shredding confidential documents. Sometimes they get their notebook stolen. Sometimes they leave their passwords written on post-it notes stuck to their monitor. And sometimes they're just would-be spies taking bribes.
#4 - The more stuff gets legislated "out of existence", the more ways people will find to get around the law. They shut down Napster, so people started using decentralized networks. They could try to shut down P2P, we'll find a sneakier way to do it (already happening with encrypted VPN tunnels). How's the saying go ? If [thing] is outlawed, only outlaws will do [thing].
#5 - This is our goddamned government. This ain't a dictatorship or monarchy, it's a democracy. If these officials aren't acting in accordance with the people's needs, we need to fire the bastards!
The "evidence" supporting these bylaws is narrow and circumstantial. I come from an idiot nation with mostly idiot citizens who drink and drive like the idiots they are. We're not exactly Scottish, but the same label of "inbred alcoholics" applies. Drunk driving is one of those things where 50% are strongly against it, and the other half think it's their god-given right (that and skanky divorcee pussy at the karaoke bar). Depending on which opinionated group's leader is in power at the time, we'll either see a flurry of drunk driving ads and police roadblocks every single weekend, or if the guy in the big fluffy chair is one of the boozers we'll have beer-sponsored festivals on government property and then they jack up the price of public transit "because those smart people don't buy enough heavily taxed booze to fund the province".
Me.. well I'm a fence-sitter. On one side, drunk people tend to irritate me because people just don't know when to stop. On the other hand, we live is a ridiculously stressed world and if a little booze can lighten people up, I'm all for it. Drunk drivers are not a great thing, but I don't think the current laws and enforcement methods are helping anyone. People drive drunk all the time, the cops only "catch" a small number, and all they do is give them a slap on the wrist and suspend their license for a few months. Let me tell you something: if you arrest a 45 year old alcoholic asshat and take away his little piece of plastic, he's going to get back into his car and drive anyway! Until he actually kills someone and gets tossed in jail (which isn't any improvement), he's going to keep driving drunk. Counseling can help some people, but lots of em are just too old and too dumb to change their ways.
I recall a few years ago, we had one highly publicized incident where a driver killed two teenage girls "who had done the right thing and took a cab after partying". The cab was parked on the shoulder while the girls puked their little booze-intolerant guts out, when a dumb construction-type dude with a big truck just plowed right into it all. Well the guy never went to jail as far as I remember, he just paid a fine, gave an apology, quit his job and probably went right back home to drink his sorrow away. Sad broken world this is.
You hit some often-ignored but obvious points there, but I'm afraid it's a near-miss. The #1 reason why Dell will not supply OpenOffice isn't the cost of shipping media, nor the support nightmare that would inevitably ensue. The #1 reason is because OpenOffice would compete with MS Office.
If the average joe's computer came with a free word processor and spreadsheet, they no longer need to spend $250 and up on MS Office. Not only would Dell lose money from those lost software sales (which are far more profitable than the PC sales), but they would be hurting their #1 partner: Microsoft.
If people want to use OO.o, they can get it freely on the net without Dell getting involved. The "large number of customers" who want this are just a small fraction of the residential crowd, which itself accounts for maybe 10% of Dell's business. Their big fish is the corporate sector, where one sales pitch can net thousands of system orders. If one of those big guys wants OO.o, they will have a sysadmin to load it into the Ghost image, or they can pay Dell's solution integrators lots of money to do it for them. Either way, the home user doesn't get squat.
On a more general tune, I get irritated whenever some free software project whines about big-business partnerships. Those big partnerships exist because there's big money going back and forth. You have to pay to play, that's how it works in corporate america. The free software loudmouths are like a poor family with a retarded son, bitching because Mensa won't let them join. The reality is we don't need Dell, HP and friends to bundle Linux, OpenOffice, or any other free software, it's a losing battle. If/when free software truly exceeds Microsoft in functionality, ease of use and installation, and enterprise support, that's when the big guys will COME to us. We're not there yet.
Piracy is what helped Microsoft get so big in the first place. Everyone had Dos and Windows on their 386/486 back in the day. Disk copying and BBS file trading was fairly common, but the biggest vehicle for unlicensed software was the indie computer shop. They would sell copied floppies with a legit-looking printed label, something ridiculously easy to make even in the 80's and 90's because even the authentic products didn't have fancy artwork to set them apart. Unknowingly, those small time retailers built Microsoft into a monopoly, by preinstalling unlicensed copies of Dos and Windows onto every single PC. Not every shop did this, but it was much more common back then than it is today, at least in North America.
In a sense, maybe this is Microsoft admitting that they've done enough (or even too much) to slow down piracy. It's one thing when someone slips you an illegal copy without your knowledge, it's another when someone willfully pirates software. You want to protect #1 (and put his scamming salesman in a small cell with a guy named 'Tiny'), but #2 is usually a techy type, or a kid, or maybe just a broke student who couldn't afford the $300 OS but needs it for his/her/its work. Like the MS rep said: at least they're using our software instead of someone else's. MS may not make any money from that bootleg copy, but they're still glad no one else is making a buck off that user. Better to let a cracked XP run free than to watch that user defect to Apple or Linux.
The lovely part is that Microsoft is absolutely right!
DST is kind of dumb, yes, but what's even dumber is how twice a year around the clock shift date, a bunch of cocky little dorks write the same uncreative garbage about the evils of DST. Next year they might throw in a twist and say "DST causes homosexuality" or some southern retarded puke.
In the world, there are three driving forces: money, control, and religion. DST is driven by money. By having "more" sunny time, we have more spending time. Drive around, or drop by a terrace for a drink... things people are much less likely to do after darkness falls.
I personally wish we could leave our clocks alone and just have people get up one hour earlier if they need to. It's easier to have a billion people show up to work one hour early (with a few tardy folks), than to spend ages reprogramming every single electronic device on the planet to hopefully copy with this artificial rift in time. Linux does a semi-decent job by trying to keep everything in UTC, then cooking the timezone for display, but it's still a pain in the ass.
Windows might not be super easy, but Linux can be about as user friendly as manually writing 64-bit opcodes using nothing but Debug.com
The big difference from Dell's perspective is that Windows is supported by their hardware suppliers. Linux distros are supported by a bunch of 12 year olds with A.D.D. As much as I love Linux for server stuff, I still can't bear to use it for a desktop. Every few months I'll get all giddy and try a distro, but every single time I hit the same brick wall: X. X sucks. X works half the time. X struggles with hardware acceleration. X can't even figure out what resolution it should drive my LCD. X segfaults if it doesn't like my configs, or my kernel, or the sum of the square root of the 2's complement of gettime(). At least Windows' GUI loads up 9 times out of 10, and when it doesn't it at least has the decency to tell you "Unmountable_boot_volume". Right now, X is unprofessional and until someone comes up with a stable, reliable and used-friendly modern graphical desktop for the masses, Linux will remain a hacker's toy. Hell, even Apple can do Unix better than Linux.. how sad is that ?
Linux could be a killer OS, but no one wants to step up to the plate. I look at the amount of work that goes into the mainstream distros, all the package maintenance and testing... if we could cull some of these distros and apply the developers' time toward improving the code instead of designing yet another shiny tarball metadata format, we might actually see more indie shops offering Linux preinstallation. Ubuntu has come a long way, but it stands alone, and only because of the tremendous effort put into that specific distro, but guess what: it still relies on pokey binary-only graphics drivers, and the often tempermental kernel. I still don't understand why we have version-sensitive kernel modules in this day and age, when Microsoft has had a well-defined driver model for well over a decade. Heck, Windows 2000 and XP can use many of the same device drivers thanks to WDM.... so why don't we have that ? We, the brilliant hackers who dream in code and feel at one with the compiler ? These are all reasons why Linux isn't a household name, so when are we going to do something about it ?
Ahh the old adage: it's not personal, it's just business! Bill is just trying to do what's best for the company. Business doesn't have morals, it only has a bottom line and its sole purpose is to improve that bottom line by any means available. If M$ can do better with overseas talent, that just means the homeboys suck rocks. It's sad but true. Colleges churn out CS grads like there's no tomorrow, because colleges get paid to do so. They don't care whether you're any good, they just want your tuition, and maybe they'll suck your dick for donations if you make it big. That's all it is.
I'd say for every thousand CS grads, maybe 2-3 are worth the money, the others are just monkeys with typewriters. Math says if 99.7% of the CS people are junk, but you can't tell the good ones apart until it's too late.... well you pay them all a crappy low salary, treat them like the retards that they are and that's the end of it. Back when software developers were a scarce resource, we were making five times the money, and things were getting done a lot faster and a lot better. What's happening now is the CS grads from India tend to be more skilled than the local scum, and yet they come with modest salary expectations. If you're the guy doing the interviews, and Jock A wants 150k for his fly-by-the-seat-of-your-GC Java code, but Indian Kid B wants only 60k, is willing to relocate anywhere and can debug threaded C++ for 16 hours a day without cocaine, it's a pretty easy decision to make. You may think Kid B is an ass kisser, but he's the one driving an Audi while you're sitting at home trying to milk more Adwords revenue from your Warcraft fansite.
So if you don't want foreigners to "steal your jobs", just be better than they are. The fact that you live here doesn't matter anymore in the era of global business. It costs a few thousand to fly a good candidate over and get their paperwork done, but it costs hundreds of thousands to pay some idiot's salary for nothing.
I'm actually impressed this sort of crap doesn't happen more often with the hordes of code imbeciles that have flooded the market in the last decade, a lot of them ending up in government roles or other big businesses, anywhere a lousy coder/admin can easily hide among the crowds. They don't hire many good IT staff because, well, it's hard to tell a good coder from a bad one until they've ruined a few of your projects (or pushed them to a level of greatness that brings tears to your eyes - riiiight).
:P How will this affect those who are expecting some cash back ? The ones who get money back are usually the ones who need it the most, students and low-income families.
I would have expected something like this to be thoroughly tested long before tax season to iron out the kinks, certainly not something to be done at a time when the rate of incoming reports is steadily increasing.. a few days of downtime could backlog them by several weeks, and every Canadian knows how good the gov't is at working through backlogs
While the 60mb drive might be ridiculously small by today's standards, the fact that most drives die within a few years is scary for your data. If my old 40gb Maxtors hadn't blown up a gazillion times, I still probably would be using them today, in favor of the 750gb monsters I have now, but at least I'd still have the data.
Make a drive that can die while still being able to pull data off (without paying some smartass a ton of money) and I'll be just as happy. The device is cheap, what's stored on it is priceless.
Clearly... the Californians didn't eat them, so why should we ? I think they're exporting lemons (*rimshot*)
and that REname Multiple command is a godsend! ;)
I am now your new biggest fan. You have no idea how many hours I've wasted looking for solid documentation on NT's batch scripting. Microsoft's knowledge base is a maze of conflicting, redundant and largely incomplete information. It also doesn't help me that I've been writing kinky batch files since the late 80's, long before these neat enhancements were ever hatched.
All issues that could be trivially resolved with a bit of effort. Worst case just buy new licenses. If you're already running 100+ desktops, a few hundred bucks won't bankrupt the operation, and that's the dumb easy way out.
As much as I'd want to root for Linux being the superior solution, it's still a matter of how much you trust the kernel. Over the years we've been trained to not trust the Windows kernel (and it's long dangly DLL appendages), but a glitch in any part of the system, whether it's Linux or Windows, will compromise the firewall's operation. The isolation exists purely in software, and a breach becomes impossible to contain. When you have a dedicated firewall machine, if it goes loopy you can just pull the plug and fix the problem. If the firewall and client are the same machine, you just lost both in one blow.
It's kind of like asking people who've already entered a building, to check with the security guard to see if they are allowed on the premises, rather than posting the guard at the door to prevent unwanteds from ever stepping inside at all.
That VM solution is so kludgey I can't even believe you just rebutted with it. If the VM can reach the network, then so can the host. Just because you "disable" TCP-IP doesn't guarantee it's going to be dropped. Hell, disable anything in Windows and it's likely to not do quite as you expect, because the system is designed as a whole, with nasty dependencies spread out like a spider web. I wouldn't be surprised if a carefully mangled packet could break through and bypass the VM entirely, thanks to one of the hundreds of suspicious DLL libraries peppered all over the place.
There's a good reason real firewalls are closed-box, independent affairs. What... do you run your corporate web and mail servers alongside your iptables, not worrying that a mail glitch could open up access to the firewall (or vice versa)... do you believe in magic too ?
Yep it's ironic. I'd sooner trust a guy who's had a rough past but lived through it and has grown from it, than some snarky upper-class buzz poet with a narrow view of reality.
Example: How can a leader be against drugs if they don't know the first thing about them ? How can a leader fight organized crime if all they know comes from TV and police documents (which are biased by definition) ? The one thing they do know is how to make a fast buck, and that's usually their main drive.
I would best define government as a cooperative group that offers common services: healthcare, waterworks, road maintenance, snow plowing, travel documentation and a base legal system so everyone can get along. Ideally this system would be run like any other non-profit coop, with fair prices and lean, efficient operations. If someone's doing a poor job or trying to game the system, they get dealt with. We don't need supreme leaders with layers of subordinates whose job function is essntially the telephone game.. take some bullshit, mix it up and pass it around. Do they have any positive impact on the quality of life of the citizens ? Nope.
Do you really thing G.W. Bush adds value to the USA in his role ? Is he making people's lives happier across the board from his direct actions ? Hell no. He doesn't even work in the USA, his eyes are focused elsewhere in the world.
You didn't quite catch my message there, I'm afraid. My point is the current government model is broken, and we should completely bypass the system if we want things to change. Government is a tool of the people, not the other way around. We need to find the right tool for the job and voting ain't it.
Hehehe well I'll keep my icecube over anything else, thank you :)
;) Or maybe just lead them to a dark room and have a blunt object accidentally strike their skull with great force. I don't think anyone is born with intolerance preloaded onto the brain.
The "USA vs The World" dynamic is a daily topic in my life, probably because I'm engaged to a psychologist whose daily affairs involve people of all walks of life, young and old, brilliant and stupid. She describes the USA as a melting pot, and Canada as a mixing bowl. Assimilate vs accomodate, I guess. The truth is that you can find terminally ignorant people everywhere. Hell we've got a few Canadians that we keep stashed away in the woods because frankly, they don't play well with others.
I think the main difference is in the effort applied. It's easy to be a closed-minded center-of-the-universe type who thinks everyone and everything else is wrong. Just toss everyone into a bucket that's easy and convenient to hate. It's exponentially harder to look past appearances and stereotypes and give everyone an equal chance to earn your trust and respect.
It may actually be easier to just put every "ugly american" and "ugly canadian" on a no-fly list
I have to agree with you, the first thing most decently smart people do when their computer acts wonky is update their malware scanner(s) and OS. It is trivial for any malware to finagle with the HOSTS file on a Windows system, which is hidden in such a dumb obscure place (C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc), a far cry from the self-explanatory /etc/hosts of every other goddamned OS on the planet.
Anyway as I was saying, once a virus takes over the HOSTS file, it could fool the common user into downloading malicious "updates". If someone put a little effort into it, they could use McAfee/Symantec's auto-update feature to replace the scanner with a 100% evil application that merely simulates the scanner's interface. The user points it to his/her/its sensitive files and lets the dumb app chug away for hours.. rather than scanning for viruses, it could be compressing and shipping off confidential data over the net.
While it may seem like just another entry vector to vulnerable machines, it's actually far more dangerous than most security holes because it has the potential to impersonate trusted hosts and exploit that trust to full effect.
This reminds me of the (mythical) NASA space pen, which says the government spent 1.5 million to invent a pen that would work in zero gravity while the russian solution was a common lead pencil. The story isn't quite accurate but I see it as analogous to the Pentagon wanting to see everything. There are at least two solutions here, one is very costly, the other is cheap as dirt.
:P
1. They can spend a gazillion dollars of money YOU don't have (as a country) to rewind car bomb events, but that means the bomb still has to blow up and kill people before the process even begins, and then you just storm in and shoot a few wackos.. big whoop
2. They can figure out why everyone on the planet hates the USA and fix the problem at the source. Heck many of your own citizens hate the system they live in, and I don't mean "I hate the IRS" kind of hate, I mean "I'm gonna kill everything" kind of hate. That's pretty damned sad. I don't see Al-Qaeda blowing up the Eiffel tower or Tokyo Disney... does that mean the arrogant french and the repressive japanese are less hated than the warmongering americans ? Why is that ? Every nation has its cultural frictions, so figure out what makes yours more abrasive and sand it down 'til it's nice and smooth! Or maybe it's because the USA is so huge that the rest of the world sees you as a threat. That's wouldn't be a good thing.
I don't know about you guys, but I have yet to hear someone yell "I hate you canadians and your easygoing attitude". I live within a mile of several dozen embassies, including yours. I have yet to hear of any bombing attempt in my neighborhood, and while the embassies do cause some local tension, it's more about their lousy driving and diplomatic immunity plates, than their ethnicity and political views. There's nothing scarier (within canada) than watching a Lexus with red plates casually drift into your front fender, oblivious to the laws of physics (and the cost of insurance). Sure, our government likes to squander money like there's no tomorrow, but at least they're not throwing darts a world map to choose their next bitch.
The problem is that no matter how much you pester a legislator, they have a high likelihood of still doing the wrong thing when it's decision time. In this government, we're forced to support people rather than ideas, under the premise that those people will ideally have similar ideals to ours. It doesn't, because they have power and we don't... that changes everything!
So if we REALLY don't want some crap-suit-wearing asshat to do things like this, there are two ways to stop them: prevent them from getting that deciding power, or punting them out of their seat after they've gotten it. Either way, there needs to be a major redefinition of government's purpose and powers. I may have a very nice view of Parliament Hill from my high-rise apartment, but last I heard, caffeine and sniping don't mix well. Plan B: start acting like a true democrat, putting forth ideas and trying to get others to join the cause. One vote don't mean shit, a thousand is a statistical error, but a million can get someone fired!
There's a big difference between a drive failure and a drive replacement.
Just because Seagate/Western replace a drige doesn't mean that drive is toast. It means someone has a problem with it. Sometimes the problem is bad cabling. Sometimes the problem is bad cooling. Sometimes the problem is outside the box, sitting at a keyboard.
Heck some people will get a new hard drive because they don't know how to reload the OS... very very often! Let's say someone unenlightened gets a boot-time error message, so they call tech support and the techie has them run a diagnostic tool... but they can't get it to run because the thing won't boot. The kid sets up an RMA, the customer gets a new blank drive, pops it in, and since there's nothing on the drive, it tries to boot off the CD-Rom. Windows Setup loads and the machine is magically "fixed". It would have been better fixed by changing the boot order in the BIOS, and doing a repair install, but the average user doesn't know all that "nerdy hacker stuff", and the average tech support drone is quite happy with the bad, easy solution. After all, India doesn't pay for the hard drive, Dell/HP/Toshiba do. Another problem is that stupid users think they're smarter than the tech they called (they're often right, but let's not go there). If they're staring at a blue screen, and you give them a 5 minute fix that brings it all back, a lot of idiots will say "You didn't fix it. It's gonna break again. I still want a new hard drive!". Personally I'd ship them a box of TNT but that usually doesn't show up as an option in the RMA part list. So you send the idiot a new hard drive, even when you know it's perfectly fine. Worst case, the guys in receiving will test the returned drive and put it back on the shelf.
Now hard drives do actually fail from time to time, but not nearly as often as people seem to think. I learned the hard way about hard drive reliability. I used to be the alpha geek teenager who crammed a half dozen hard drives with handmade rounded ATA cables and a sparkomatic power supply, the one that comes with the $20 cheapo chassis at your local asian importer. Oh yeah, the CPU was an overclocked Athlon T-Bird, often mistaken for an industrial heating unit. Fastest ghetto RAID array in town only I had dead drives every six months.
Then one day I started putting those same drives in a well ventilated chassis with top-quality cables, power supplies and lots of big efficient fans right up against the drive rails. I crack the case open every now and then to clean out any dust buildup, perhaps every 6 to 8 weeks or so.. doesn't even require a shutdown. I haven't had a drive fail in four years, seriously! And I'm talking about 20 drives here across my 3 main rigs, they get the living tar beat out of them on a daily basis. Random luck certainly has a play in all of this, but my point is a lot of failures can be prevented. I'd like to think a lot of physical failures could also be avoided if the damned manufacturers would spend a little more time and money on reliability. Sell me a drive that costs up to 30% more, but has subtle improvements that lead to a noticeably longer lifetime. Most people won't get it, they'd rather get a drive that dies twice as often but costs 30% LESS... just look at all the Nova DVD players Wal-Mart sold over the holidays... humans are cheap ignorant reptiles, that's just nature.
For the other 10% whose time and data are actually worth something, there is a market for disaster-proof drives. Heck, just sandwich two disks with mirroring and have it tell me when one of them's on the fritz. That's what I end up doing anyway, only my current method involves buying an overpriced RAID controller. Well if I considered my data so important that I chose to spend $400 on a controller to RAID up a pair of $75 hard drives, I don't think I'd have a problem spending even $200 on a single unit that does it all in one neat package, I'd still be about 300 bucks ahead, and instead of me giving all that cash to Adaptec/
Well now don't go overboard bashing the gamers, the main difference between a good work PC and a gaming PC is the graphics card... maybe the sound card if you love Creative Inc that much (I don't). I've got a mostly work PC with a Geforce 7900 thrown in for kicks. But then I also have 4 gigs of ram and a dual core 2.6ghz AMD64. I didn't get all that gear to play Doom, in fact I'd say only 7% of the cost was due to gaming functionality. Every now and then I get a developer who tells me my PC is overkill. Then I flick on the other three monitors, load up the ram disk with my data set and get cracking. By the time the other guy's compiler puked its first error message, I've already gone through 4-5 profiling runs and managed a 400% speed increase. The other guy gets through his 8 hour shift, hasn't written any unit tests, and blames his problems on Java's garbage collection.
It's only overkill if you can't handle that much machine.
The big problem with the author is he's british... well that and he's trying to install a brand new OS on obsolete hardware. His machine was hot stuff about six years ago. He's on the same page as people who loaded Windows XP on a K6 333, or Windows 95 on a 25mhz 386SX. Yeah it's gonna suck, because the machine sucks! There's no sense in supporting ancient hardware, at least not from a business standpoint.
:) It would be a trivial matter of adding the Dell ID to the standard drivers, literally a one-line fix, but they don't.
There's also the brands involved.. He doesn't say what his graphics card was, but anyone who's had the misfortune of owning a Sound Blaster in the last decade has dealt with the homicidal wrath of Creative Inc. They're really good at selling overpriced DACs, but they equally suck at writing stable drivers for the damned things. What's even better is this guy has a Dell OEM Sound Blaster... anyone who's ever touched those things knows they're different. They have exactly one difference: the device ID. Why'd they change it ? Some retarded form of lock-in I guess, because it's a nightmare getting them to work anywhere else. Anywhere except Linux that is
Performance-wise, his PC even after upgrades is still puny. A Willamette P4, 768mb of PC-133, and a hard drive that probably sucked the day it was born. I could also write a horrible review of Vista if I tried hard enough to find an ancient PC like his. Or I could run it on a well-specced year-old system like an Athlon 64 or an Intel Core and get rather excellent results.
Don't read me wrong, I don't use Vista because... well... I don't care about the eye-candy! Really there's not much more about it. Vista is to XP what Beryl is to kwin. But if I wanted Vista, I would have no problems running it on my current machine (I've tried the MSDN betas, they ran fine). The problems are all these broke-ass tinkerers who like to "play" with computers. They don't have any real use for a PC other than downloading music and lounge on Myspace and Lavalife. They don't have a budget so their machines are a patchwork of whatever they bought off of Craigslist. I don't call that a serious computer user.
You could also post on slashdot pulling half-baked ideas out of your ass. For the virtual machine to be able to reach the internet, its host needs to have internet access as well. You could firewall the crap out of the VM, it won't do squat for the host no matter how you try to route your traffic, since your front line is wide-open.
It's kind of like putting the keyhole on the INSIDE of your door. Anyone can just turn the knob from the outside and waltz in, but YOU need keys to get out of your own damn home.
Virtual Machines, like any other technical innovation, are only as good as the administrator running the show.