That's simply not true and you've fallen for the anti-US propaganda.
I lived in the US for 7 years. I had plenty of exposure to the US authorities from the FAA (mainly obtaining new ratings on my pilot's license) to the police (the latter usually because I was driving too fast). I was never badly treated. The one time I did end up in a US court (for...well, driving too fast) I wasn't treated any differently to the group of Americans in the court with me. I did find the US government bureaucracy very inefficient, but that's hardly a surprise. As for treatment, most Government departments gave better service than private companies (the worst was GTE now Verizon, and Texas-New Mexico Power)
The people who seem to come off badly with the police are the people who were belligerent and aggressive towards them. Treat an officer who stops you like a fellow human being and they will often exercise their discretion not to give you a ticket (in 5 stops for speeding, I only ever got one ticket). What's the bets your friends started acting belligerently towards whoever they were dealing with? Every single person I met in the US who claimed that they were badly treated by the police had acted in an uncivil manner towards the police. Politeness and civility will get you a long way, not with just the police, but most people in society.
Like the Soviets, China is going to be rational and are not going to want to go to war with the United States because the consequences will be unacceptable. I don't see the US giving up enough of their nuclear forces to lose the deterrant; the US is always likely to have enough to annihilate any would-be enemy that tried to conquer the US.
Do you think the Chinese in their right minds would go to war against the US? No - because they know the consequences - they will be annihilated.
I always wondered why it was called "selective service" - there doesn't seem to be anything selective about it.
I'm not American, but I did live there from 1996-2002 (and if I was a US citizen, I'd have been draftable age through most of it). It still worries me a bit because I have friends over there who are still of draft age and who'd just end up as cannon fodder. Selective service. Right-o, whatever you say...
I remote backup with rsync to a machine that's over 4,000 miles away. I guess that means I should have a reasonable expectation my data will survive:-)
Damned if you do and damned if you don't
on
Gnome 2.8 RC1 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, from the screenshots, I don't think it looks anything like Windows (other than having the features that all GUIs have, so there will always be some similarity).
But part of the problem with Free desktop critics is you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you make your interface look like Windows, these critics will have a go because it looks like Windows. If you make it look unlike Windows, they will criticise you because it's "unfamiliar".
It should not take me 30-60 minutes post installation to get most of the features I've listed above.
OK, let's compare installing Windows XP with Fedora Core 2 here (I choose FC2, because I installed it over my XP partition last night).
Installing Windows XP: 0. Insert disk. Wait for it to churn. Let it reboot (automatically). Enter language and network settings.
So now it's installed. This is what has to be done next. 1. Install service packs/security fixes (3 hours, but unattended). 2. Log in when it's done. Download and install latest NVidia drivers (10 minutes). 3. Download and install drivers for my HP printer (10 minutes). 4. Install sound drivers. 5. Install commercial DVD playing software (10 minutes, including fiddling to make it see the DVD drive which for some reason it didn't by default).
So Windows has already taken 3 hrs 20 minutes after installation. It WON'T sync with iPods/iPaqs by default until I: 6. Install some software to do so (depending on the device) - probably 10-15 minutes.
With Fedora Core 2. 0. Install FC2. One reboot. 1. Double click on the little red exclamation mark to fetch updates (45 minutes but unattended). 2. Install NVidia drivers. (10 minutes - no reboot required). 3. Discover I don't have to worry about the printer because the FC2 installer picked it up. 4. Install two RPMs (one for Xine and one for libdvdcss) to play DVDs (10 minutes). 5. Copy (no, not re-install) - just copy because there's no registry madness - the game I was playing on RedHat 8 (Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory).
The thing is OSS gets held to a higher standard. Most people never install Windows or the drivers because it all comes pre-installed. If you actually install Windows XP from scratch, it really is no easier than a recent desktop Linux distro, and takes considerably longer due to the size of the security updates - which only cover the base OS.
On Windows, I would now have had to install all the other things (an office suite for example) that just come by default with a good desktop oriented Linux distro.
If you're installing both OSes from scratch - and therefore comparing like with like - you'll find it's considerably more effort to get a useful Windows install - I wager to get all those features you're after, even ignoring the time to patch the OS so it won't get owned in minutes, you'll spend at least half an hour installing drivers and rebooting. The last Windows XP install I did (for work - build an image for a fairly standard PC, with no unusual hardware) was well over half an hour installing drivers just to make the basic hardware - the ethernet card (not detected by Windows XP), the video card (a common as muck Intel chipset that comes with most business desktops - not detected by XP), the sound hardware (again, very common sound hardware - but not detected by XP) and mainboard chipset (a standard Intel chipset - not detected by XP!). The Knoppix disk I use to run our "factory" disk ghost imaging of the 70-odd machines we're deoploying on the other hand recognises all of this hardware. Linux has supported the hardware in these boxes (with the exception of the Broadcom ethernet hardware) for years. Of course, the normal user doesn't see this because they buy the machine with Windows XP pre-installed from Hewlett-Packard.
The irony is the fact that Linux supports so much hardware out of the box and Windows doesn't is partly because manufacturers don't support Linux, therfore the community has to write OSS tools for syncing with Palms and phones and printer drivers - and as these are OSS too, they get put on the Linux distro install disks so they are there ready for you on a default install, whereas with a fresh Windows install you're having to go through a pile of driver CDs to make your devices work because Microsoft doesn't have the freedom to put this on their XP installation disk.
Well, my student car was one I saved from going to the scrap yard. It was older than me. It was rather unreliable and I did have to call for tow service once or twice. However, the cost of tow cover was less than the cost of the annual depreciation (let alone interest payments) of even an $8000 car.
The $500 car is something you'll find from a private seller, not from a lot. On a lot, that $500 car will be sold for $2000.
Today's $500 car is often pretty reliable - in the US it'll probably be an older V8 barge-on-wheels which are pretty much indestructable. These days, 100K miles isn't that much. My Dad's last car (admittedly a diesel) went for over 300K miles. The other thing about an old banger bought for cash is that you can insure it liability only which saves quite a bit of money too. A car bought on credit has to have full cover which can add a lot to the annual insurance bill.
I have to ask why she bought a $8000 car on credit instead of a $500 car with cash. An $8000 car is a luxury (especially on credit - I make it a point NOT to borrow money to buy a car because the depreciation + interest rate almost always makes it a lousy deal). When I couldn't afford a nice car, I bought a cheap one. Even if you have to spend $500 a year buying a "new" run-out once a year 'cos the old one breaks, it's cheaper than the debt. Then save up for a better car with the money you'd have otherwise spent on interest, and have the better car without ending up in the situation where you've paid $14000 for a depreciating asset that's now only worth $3000.
Of course it's a free country and you can borrow money for a car if you like, but don't whine about it when you find it's a crappy deal - basic junior school arithmetic can be used to tell it's a crappy deal before even entering it. I do have some sympathy for many in this trap because they've often fallen for high-pressure sales, but it still doesn't change the fact that they did it to themselves.
Well, they DO call after 6pm. A friend of mine got in debt trouble after his son crashed his motorcycle (without wearing a helmet I may add) and suffered serious brain damage. All the stuff he had on credit became secondary to paying medical bills.
They called him at 11pm, 1am etc. He changed his phone number. So they called his family and found his new phone number and started again. Someone who can't even pay off their debts probably can't pay a lawyer to stop the harrassment.
The main problem with Moller's SkyCar is none of these. Moller's Skycar has been '6 months away from flight' for almost as long as I've been alive. Periodically, some sensational article about Moller comes out in the press, but only one thing is clear: Moller is a bullshit artist.
Even just a cursory glance at BSFC numbers demonstrates that Moller's economy numbers are so far off reality it's funny. He's claiming efficiency numbers that cannot be met even by diesel engines - despite the fact he's proposing Wankel engines which are one of the least efficient internal combustion engines invented.
I think you're missing his point. Of course it costs something to support. But with Microsoft software, you are spending $BIGNUM_LICENSING acquiring + $BIGNUM_SUPPORT supporting. With Free software you're only spending $BIGNUM_SUPPORT and not sending the equivalent of $BIGNUM_LICENSING overseas.
Even if $FREE_SOFTWARE_SUPPORT costs as much as $BIGNUM_SUPPORT + $BIGNUM_LICENSING (which is unlikely), all that money is staying *within your country* instead of leaving it because the people doing the extra support are all part of your local economy.
This was some time ago, and was indeed the impetus for me to move to Firefox on Windows (the other problem is I just don't use Windows much - my main workstation is a dual boot system and I've not booted Windows in 3 months, so I'm not always following the issues with software on Windows).
Buy your own phone instead of using the telco's one and you can do that. I bought a nice Nokia 6820 (because it has the qwerty keyboard when you open it - hard to irc with a number pad only). It plays standard MIDI files. I just stuck the MIDI files I wanted on my website, and just used the phone's web browser to fetch them.
I personally use the introduction to a fairly obscure game because it more or less guarantees my ring tone is unique (so no hunting for my phone when someone else with the same tone has their phone ring). With my last phone (a cheap Nokia, the type usually bought for kids for PAYG service), I simply composed my own ring tone with the phone's composer (for the same reasons). When I bought the 6820, I gave away the cheap Nokia to a friend who needed a phone, I think they probably still use my ring tone:-)
I needed to get a single file (a made for TV movie that isn't very common on any p2p network). A friend said he got it on eDonkey, so I downloaded the client and ran it.
Big mistake. It installed some interstitial adware which meant you could no longer use IE without viewing an ad between *each page view*. The adware could not be easily removed - Add/Remove programs in the control panel couldn't get rid of it - instead you had to download several programs from the adware vendor's site to get rid of it (it was plainly obvious that the adware company was making it deliberately difficult to remove). I won't be shedding any tears if eDonkey gets nailed - whatever any slashdotter says they are facilitating piracy, and doing it with adware/spyware too.
The basic problem - the reason why tech support in general (especially from a large company) is almost certain to suck whether it's in India, Wales, the United States or even Texas - is that people who are clueful don't want to do technical support.
Tech support is generally a low-paid entry level job. Many people in tech support aren't there to make a career, they are there simply because they need some kind of job. (It always amused me when I was a teenager looking for entry-level jobs how it always said 'Why are you applying for a job at company X?' and you had to write some BS-filled 'go forward' corporate speak response on how the company is so wonderful, and how it'll be the start of a long career etc. when the genuine answer is simply 'because I need the money'.)
Generally, the people in tech support will not have a clue and don't care to have a clue; they just want to collect their paycheck. Those with a clue would never do tech support even if you doubled their salary because the job is utterly stultifying.
I have worked in a small call centre (12 positions). Fortunately, it *was not* tech support, but railway information. But even there we had the same problem: the job really demanded someone who knew geography well and had an interest in the railways, and the majority of people there just wanted a paycheck. Turnover was fast - it was rare that anyone stayed in the call centre for more than 6 months before leaving the company or finding a job somewhere else in the company. The trouble is there was quite a bit of knowledge you needed to do the job well thanks to the byzantine fare structure and the complex geography of the national railway network, and usually at 6 months the person was just getting competent and fast at doing the job - and they'd go and leave. I would imagine tech support isn't much different.
I was going to mod you down, but just in case you really are ill-informed and not just a troll, in the interest of enlightenment I'll reply instead.
I don't know what Unix you're using (perhaps Version 7 on the Interdata 7/32 or some other forgotten vintage system), but modern Unix-like operating systems, such as *BSD, Linux and Solaris, by default create user's home directories with permissions user: read/write, group: no permissions at all, world: no permissions at all, and no special ACLs. Filesystems for these operating systems support ACLs (much like NTFS ACLs. Personally, I've found the user/group/world permissions have covered every case I've encountered, but that may not be true for everyone hence POSIX ACLs were created).
Certainly in the Linux world, major distributions turn the firewall on by default (RedHat since at least 7.x, and continuing into Fedora Core) during the install process. It's been a proper stateful inspection filter since before XP was even out. Also in a Redhat or Fedora install, you are asked to create a non-root user. The Windows XP install also asks you about what users you want to create, but by default creates them all with root privileges.
I keep hearing about these issues with sound and Linux, and it makes me boggle a bit.
I've been using Linux since January 1992 (when it didn't have sound support at all, or even init/getty/login for that matter). Indeed, the vast majority of PCs didn't even have sound cards. When Linux did get sound support for the few soundcards that existed, I never had a problem getting sound to work. In fact, it was one of the easiest things to get working - this was in 1993 or thereabouts.
In all the Linux installations I've done in the last 4 years, sound has always worked out of the box, and I've installed on pretty disparate hardware. I just installed Fedora Core 2 on a laptop yesterday (laptops being generally the hardest machines to install Linux on due to the amount of proprietary oddball hardware nothing else uses), and sound worked perfectly out the box.
You think you had it bad? Our local exchange where I lived as a kid was still a Strowger exchange in the early 1990s (i.e. filled with racks of rotary mechanical switches). Some days even a 1200 baud modem through that was painful. When it did go digital, there was so little copper going out to where we lived we had to have a DACS (a line splitter that meant on one of the lines a modem was all but useless) to get the extra line.
I must admit I do find the old Strowger exchanges cool - they make great noises - but I'd rather not actually use one for my phone service, and they were obsolete in the 1960s let alone early 1990s.
It's npt "these days" at all - it has always been like that - sometimes much worse - for example, take the factories during the early industrial revolution where children had to work 12 hour days so the family could make ends meet.
1/25000 is significantly better than a human being. If you use no automatic spam filtering at all, and you get a typical geek's email load (about 100 spam a day with 10 legitimate emails a day), you will still delete mail as spam when it wasn't spam.
That's why I use SpamAssassin - it does a good job, and is no worse at making false positives than I am. If I'm just as liable to make a false positive than an automatic filter, I'm better off saving my time.
On a point of pedantry, sodium discharge lamps do not have a filament - they are discharge tubes. The sodium vaporizes in the inner translucent ceramic tube (in high pressure sodium lamps) or in the glass inner tube in low pressure sodium lamps. The light is from a flourescent discharge through the tube. (HP lamps are much 'whiter' because they also include mercury - the mercury vaporizes first, heating the inner tube and raising the pressure in this inner tube until the sodium begins to evaporate. The reason this inner tube is ceramic is that sodium vapour at high pressure would very rapidly corrode through a glass inner tube). Low pressure sodium lamps (which have a monochromatic orange colour) are the most efficient lamps that we've ever made.
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That's simply not true and you've fallen for the anti-US propaganda.
I lived in the US for 7 years. I had plenty of exposure to the US authorities from the FAA (mainly obtaining new ratings on my pilot's license) to the police (the latter usually because I was driving too fast). I was never badly treated. The one time I did end up in a US court (for...well, driving too fast) I wasn't treated any differently to the group of Americans in the court with me. I did find the US government bureaucracy very inefficient, but that's hardly a surprise. As for treatment, most Government departments gave better service than private companies (the worst was GTE now Verizon, and Texas-New Mexico Power)
The people who seem to come off badly with the police are the people who were belligerent and aggressive towards them. Treat an officer who stops you like a fellow human being and they will often exercise their discretion not to give you a ticket (in 5 stops for speeding, I only ever got one ticket). What's the bets your friends started acting belligerently towards whoever they were dealing with? Every single person I met in the US who claimed that they were badly treated by the police had acted in an uncivil manner towards the police. Politeness and civility will get you a long way, not with just the police, but most people in society.
And us against them.
Like the Soviets, China is going to be rational and are not going to want to go to war with the United States because the consequences will be unacceptable. I don't see the US giving up enough of their nuclear forces to lose the deterrant; the US is always likely to have enough to annihilate any would-be enemy that tried to conquer the US.
Do you think the Chinese in their right minds would go to war against the US? No - because they know the consequences - they will be annihilated.
I always wondered why it was called "selective service" - there doesn't seem to be anything selective about it.
I'm not American, but I did live there from 1996-2002 (and if I was a US citizen, I'd have been draftable age through most of it). It still worries me a bit because I have friends over there who are still of draft age and who'd just end up as cannon fodder. Selective service. Right-o, whatever you say...
I'm sure in 50 years time we'll still have enough nuclear weapons to turn all the important bits of China into glass if they should try anything.
I remote backup with rsync to a machine that's over 4,000 miles away. I guess that means I should have a reasonable expectation my data will survive :-)
Well, from the screenshots, I don't think it looks anything like Windows (other than having the features that all GUIs have, so there will always be some similarity).
But part of the problem with Free desktop critics is you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you make your interface look like Windows, these critics will have a go because it looks like Windows. If you make it look unlike Windows, they will criticise you because it's "unfamiliar".
OK, let's compare installing Windows XP with Fedora Core 2 here (I choose FC2, because I installed it over my XP partition last night).
Installing Windows XP:
0. Insert disk. Wait for it to churn. Let it reboot (automatically). Enter language and network settings.
So now it's installed. This is what has to be done next.
1. Install service packs/security fixes (3 hours, but unattended).
2. Log in when it's done. Download and install latest NVidia drivers (10 minutes).
3. Download and install drivers for my HP printer (10 minutes).
4. Install sound drivers.
5. Install commercial DVD playing software (10 minutes, including fiddling to make it see the DVD drive which for some reason it didn't by default).
So Windows has already taken 3 hrs 20 minutes after installation. It WON'T sync with iPods/iPaqs by default until I:
6. Install some software to do so (depending on the device) - probably 10-15 minutes.
With Fedora Core 2.
0. Install FC2. One reboot.
1. Double click on the little red exclamation mark to fetch updates (45 minutes but unattended).
2. Install NVidia drivers. (10 minutes - no reboot required).
3. Discover I don't have to worry about the printer because the FC2 installer picked it up.
4. Install two RPMs (one for Xine and one for libdvdcss) to play DVDs (10 minutes).
5. Copy (no, not re-install) - just copy because there's no registry madness - the game I was playing on RedHat 8 (Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory).
The thing is OSS gets held to a higher standard. Most people never install Windows or the drivers because it all comes pre-installed. If you actually install Windows XP from scratch, it really is no easier than a recent desktop Linux distro, and takes considerably longer due to the size of the security updates - which only cover the base OS.
On Windows, I would now have had to install all the other things (an office suite for example) that just come by default with a good desktop oriented Linux distro.
If you're installing both OSes from scratch - and therefore comparing like with like - you'll find it's considerably more effort to get a useful Windows install - I wager to get all those features you're after, even ignoring the time to patch the OS so it won't get owned in minutes, you'll spend at least half an hour installing drivers and rebooting. The last Windows XP install I did (for work - build an image for a fairly standard PC, with no unusual hardware) was well over half an hour installing drivers just to make the basic hardware - the ethernet card (not detected by Windows XP), the video card (a common as muck Intel chipset that comes with most business desktops - not detected by XP), the sound hardware (again, very common sound hardware - but not detected by XP) and mainboard chipset (a standard Intel chipset - not detected by XP!). The Knoppix disk I use to run our "factory" disk ghost imaging of the 70-odd machines we're deoploying on the other hand recognises all of this hardware. Linux has supported the hardware in these boxes (with the exception of the Broadcom ethernet hardware) for years. Of course, the normal user doesn't see this because they buy the machine with Windows XP pre-installed from Hewlett-Packard.
The irony is the fact that Linux supports so much hardware out of the box and Windows doesn't is partly because manufacturers don't support Linux, therfore the community has to write OSS tools for syncing with Palms and phones and printer drivers - and as these are OSS too, they get put on the Linux distro install disks so they are there ready for you on a default install, whereas with a fresh Windows install you're having to go through a pile of driver CDs to make your devices work because Microsoft doesn't have the freedom to put this on their XP installation disk.
There are many criticisms that can be
Well, my student car was one I saved from going to the scrap yard. It was older than me. It was rather unreliable and I did have to call for tow service once or twice. However, the cost of tow cover was less than the cost of the annual depreciation (let alone interest payments) of even an $8000 car.
The $500 car is something you'll find from a private seller, not from a lot. On a lot, that $500 car will be sold for $2000.
Today's $500 car is often pretty reliable - in the US it'll probably be an older V8 barge-on-wheels which are pretty much indestructable. These days, 100K miles isn't that much. My Dad's last car (admittedly a diesel) went for over 300K miles. The other thing about an old banger bought for cash is that you can insure it liability only which saves quite a bit of money too. A car bought on credit has to have full cover which can add a lot to the annual insurance bill.
I have to ask why she bought a $8000 car on credit instead of a $500 car with cash. An $8000 car is a luxury (especially on credit - I make it a point NOT to borrow money to buy a car because the depreciation + interest rate almost always makes it a lousy deal). When I couldn't afford a nice car, I bought a cheap one. Even if you have to spend $500 a year buying a "new" run-out once a year 'cos the old one breaks, it's cheaper than the debt. Then save up for a better car with the money you'd have otherwise spent on interest, and have the better car without ending up in the situation where you've paid $14000 for a depreciating asset that's now only worth $3000.
Of course it's a free country and you can borrow money for a car if you like, but don't whine about it when you find it's a crappy deal - basic junior school arithmetic can be used to tell it's a crappy deal before even entering it. I do have some sympathy for many in this trap because they've often fallen for high-pressure sales, but it still doesn't change the fact that they did it to themselves.
Well, they DO call after 6pm. A friend of mine got in debt trouble after his son crashed his motorcycle (without wearing a helmet I may add) and suffered serious brain damage. All the stuff he had on credit became secondary to paying medical bills.
They called him at 11pm, 1am etc. He changed his phone number. So they called his family and found his new phone number and started again. Someone who can't even pay off their debts probably can't pay a lawyer to stop the harrassment.
The main problem with Moller's SkyCar is none of these. Moller's Skycar has been '6 months away from flight' for almost as long as I've been alive. Periodically, some sensational article about Moller comes out in the press, but only one thing is clear: Moller is a bullshit artist.
Even just a cursory glance at BSFC numbers demonstrates that Moller's economy numbers are so far off reality it's funny. He's claiming efficiency numbers that cannot be met even by diesel engines - despite the fact he's proposing Wankel engines which are one of the least efficient internal combustion engines invented.
I think you're missing his point. Of course it costs something to support. But with Microsoft software, you are spending $BIGNUM_LICENSING acquiring + $BIGNUM_SUPPORT supporting. With Free software you're only spending $BIGNUM_SUPPORT and not sending the equivalent of $BIGNUM_LICENSING overseas.
Even if $FREE_SOFTWARE_SUPPORT costs as much as $BIGNUM_SUPPORT + $BIGNUM_LICENSING (which is unlikely), all that money is staying *within your country* instead of leaving it because the people doing the extra support are all part of your local economy.
No, Frontier: First Encounters.
This was some time ago, and was indeed the impetus for me to move to Firefox on Windows (the other problem is I just don't use Windows much - my main workstation is a dual boot system and I've not booted Windows in 3 months, so I'm not always following the issues with software on Windows).
Buy your own phone instead of using the telco's one and you can do that. I bought a nice Nokia 6820 (because it has the qwerty keyboard when you open it - hard to irc with a number pad only). It plays standard MIDI files. I just stuck the MIDI files I wanted on my website, and just used the phone's web browser to fetch them.
:-)
I personally use the introduction to a fairly obscure game because it more or less guarantees my ring tone is unique (so no hunting for my phone when someone else with the same tone has their phone ring). With my last phone (a cheap Nokia, the type usually bought for kids for PAYG service), I simply composed my own ring tone with the phone's composer (for the same reasons). When I bought the 6820, I gave away the cheap Nokia to a friend who needed a phone, I think they probably still use my ring tone
I needed to get a single file (a made for TV movie that isn't very common on any p2p network). A friend said he got it on eDonkey, so I downloaded the client and ran it.
Big mistake. It installed some interstitial adware which meant you could no longer use IE without viewing an ad between *each page view*. The adware could not be easily removed - Add/Remove programs in the control panel couldn't get rid of it - instead you had to download several programs from the adware vendor's site to get rid of it (it was plainly obvious that the adware company was making it deliberately difficult to remove). I won't be shedding any tears if eDonkey gets nailed - whatever any slashdotter says they are facilitating piracy, and doing it with adware/spyware too.
The basic problem - the reason why tech support in general (especially from a large company) is almost certain to suck whether it's in India, Wales, the United States or even Texas - is that people who are clueful don't want to do technical support.
Tech support is generally a low-paid entry level job. Many people in tech support aren't there to make a career, they are there simply because they need some kind of job. (It always amused me when I was a teenager looking for entry-level jobs how it always said 'Why are you applying for a job at company X?' and you had to write some BS-filled 'go forward' corporate speak response on how the company is so wonderful, and how it'll be the start of a long career etc. when the genuine answer is simply 'because I need the money'.)
Generally, the people in tech support will not have a clue and don't care to have a clue; they just want to collect their paycheck. Those with a clue would never do tech support even if you doubled their salary because the job is utterly stultifying.
I have worked in a small call centre (12 positions). Fortunately, it *was not* tech support, but railway information. But even there we had the same problem: the job really demanded someone who knew geography well and had an interest in the railways, and the majority of people there just wanted a paycheck. Turnover was fast - it was rare that anyone stayed in the call centre for more than 6 months before leaving the company or finding a job somewhere else in the company. The trouble is there was quite a bit of knowledge you needed to do the job well thanks to the byzantine fare structure and the complex geography of the national railway network, and usually at 6 months the person was just getting competent and fast at doing the job - and they'd go and leave. I would imagine tech support isn't much different.
That's still not the way the original poster was claiming it works - he was claiming that home dirs would be created with permissions drwxrwxrwx.
I was going to mod you down, but just in case you really are ill-informed and not just a troll, in the interest of enlightenment I'll reply instead.
I don't know what Unix you're using (perhaps Version 7 on the Interdata 7/32 or some other forgotten vintage system), but modern Unix-like operating systems, such as *BSD, Linux and Solaris, by default create user's home directories with permissions user: read/write, group: no permissions at all, world: no permissions at all, and no special ACLs. Filesystems for these operating systems support ACLs (much like NTFS ACLs. Personally, I've found the user/group/world permissions have covered every case I've encountered, but that may not be true for everyone hence POSIX ACLs were created).
Certainly in the Linux world, major distributions turn the firewall on by default (RedHat since at least 7.x, and continuing into Fedora Core) during the install process. It's been a proper stateful inspection filter since before XP was even out. Also in a Redhat or Fedora install, you are asked to create a non-root user. The Windows XP install also asks you about what users you want to create, but by default creates them all with root privileges.
I keep hearing about these issues with sound and Linux, and it makes me boggle a bit.
I've been using Linux since January 1992 (when it didn't have sound support at all, or even init/getty/login for that matter). Indeed, the vast majority of PCs didn't even have sound cards. When Linux did get sound support for the few soundcards that existed, I never had a problem getting sound to work. In fact, it was one of the easiest things to get working - this was in 1993 or thereabouts.
In all the Linux installations I've done in the last 4 years, sound has always worked out of the box, and I've installed on pretty disparate hardware. I just installed Fedora Core 2 on a laptop yesterday (laptops being generally the hardest machines to install Linux on due to the amount of proprietary oddball hardware nothing else uses), and sound worked perfectly out the box.
You think you had it bad? Our local exchange where I lived as a kid was still a Strowger exchange in the early 1990s (i.e. filled with racks of rotary mechanical switches). Some days even a 1200 baud modem through that was painful. When it did go digital, there was so little copper going out to where we lived we had to have a DACS (a line splitter that meant on one of the lines a modem was all but useless) to get the extra line.
I must admit I do find the old Strowger exchanges cool - they make great noises - but I'd rather not actually use one for my phone service, and they were obsolete in the 1960s let alone early 1990s.
It's npt "these days" at all - it has always been like that - sometimes much worse - for example, take the factories during the early industrial revolution where children had to work 12 hour days so the family could make ends meet.
1/25000 is significantly better than a human being. If you use no automatic spam filtering at all, and you get a typical geek's email load (about 100 spam a day with 10 legitimate emails a day), you will still delete mail as spam when it wasn't spam.
That's why I use SpamAssassin - it does a good job, and is no worse at making false positives than I am. If I'm just as liable to make a false positive than an automatic filter, I'm better off saving my time.
On a point of pedantry, sodium discharge lamps do not have a filament - they are discharge tubes. The sodium vaporizes in the inner translucent ceramic tube (in high pressure sodium lamps) or in the glass inner tube in low pressure sodium lamps. The light is from a flourescent discharge through the tube. (HP lamps are much 'whiter' because they also include mercury - the mercury vaporizes first, heating the inner tube and raising the pressure in this inner tube until the sodium begins to evaporate. The reason this inner tube is ceramic is that sodium vapour at high pressure would very rapidly corrode through a glass inner tube). Low pressure sodium lamps (which have a monochromatic orange colour) are the most efficient lamps that we've ever made.
The pilot doesn't need an Uzi. He already has a fire axe (which if used in a surprise attack is just as deadly as an Uzi) in the flight deck with him.