Either does Fox News, but they claim to be "Fair and Balanced".
I don't understand this. Why is this barrier only placed for liberal opinion?
Moore has never claimed to be balanced, he wears his bias on his sleeve. He doesn't deny that, why is this a complaint of yours?
I mean come on, what does Moore have to worry about, if bush is as bad as he wants everyone to believe, he could have been fair and balanced and everyone would have reacted the same way? Right? Right?
We'll let the people decide. They've been subjected to one side of the story by the mainstream media. Now they can see the other side from indy film producer Michael Moore.
Moore is a yellow "journalist" that turns "the high drama of life into a cheap melodrama that leads to stories being twisted into the forms best suited for sales by the hollering newsboy."
So basically he's no different from any other journalist broadcasting in the media.
But it's not okay in Moore's case because he's pushing an agenda outside the Conventional Wisdom mainstream.
Just thought I'd clear that part of your point up.
The reason the war turned sour was not the cost of American lives.
It was Abu Ghraib.
Abu Ghraib negated the Bush reason for going to war, that we were better than Hussein. Without that reason, we were back to the immediate risk of WMDs, of which there has been no evidence.
From there the cost in blood and treasure weighed in. Had we been able to occupy Iraq without loss of American life, and had the costs been say $5-10 billion. We would have never noticed it. It'd be the forgotten conflict, like Kosovo.
Why is it that some people feel that the only way to argue is to build strawman arguments that can be easily torn down? Had Bush ran out of the school yelling "HOLY SHIT! WE'VE BEEN FUCKED!" waving his hands in the air. You bet, that would have terrified the children.
Had he instead said "I'm sorry kids, but some important Presidential business has come up and I have to go talk to people in Washington. I appreciate you allowing me to be here, and I hope you understand my sorrow at having to leave you so soon", he could have left and it would not have scared the kids. Rather, I think, it would have impressed the kids.
Moore's point in showing that footage is to contrast Bush's clear shock with the public persona of him being an able and sure leader.
Guilliani in New York didn't wave his arms around and yell "HOLY SHIT!!!!". I honestly don't know what he said, but chances are it was something like "Take me down there." Because he was on the scene with police and fire fighters when the buildings collapsed.
The problem is that so many liberals are failing to do that; they're simply praising the film as truth (which is what I said in my last post) despite that Moore has admitted that it is not all true.
Because it's not 100% pure, that there is 1% that we now find out was wrong.
We must condemn the whole film?
Do you apply the same standards to conservatives? Just curious.
Also, when Moore says the film is a documentary and it is not,
How is it not a documentary? Because he makes it entertaining? He should be bland and boring like those guys on PBS?
It sounds to me like you don't really have any complaints on substance you are resorting to nit picking it to death. Now that's typical of todays so-called "conservatives".
If you are spending your hard earned money looking for truth or fact, please look elsewhere.
Hmm. The documentary is chuck full of facts.
Just as a White House Press Conference is chuck full of facts.
What they both lack is truth. They are both facades, they are facts presented in a way to make an argument. The White House wants you to believe that the President is self-assured, and competent. Michael Moore wants to show you the other side... the vacant look on his face when he learns of the atacks, how he is very chummy with the House of Saud and oil companies.
Or are you claiming that Moore's movie lacks facts? That these things never happened? That the footage he has is also computer generated? That's a pretty bold claim.
If you ever took a course on philosophy, you'd know that the truth isn't so easy to find. It is up to the viewer to take the argument that Moore has composed, and place it in contrast to the facade that the White House Press Office puts forth, and decide... which one is closer to the truth.
I remember Roger & Me, and you're nit picking. Whether the plant closing took place 7 years later, or 1 year later, the fact is that Flint, Michigan was ignored. That's all Moore was trying to point out in that film.
There have been reports lately of democratic strategists insisting that dems lie in order to sway conservative opinion.
Are these reports coming from Ann Coulter?
Claim that he has broken ties with your views without giving real examples and while relying on sketchy facts at best.
You know what, why don't you check out the American Conservative magazine sometime... http://www.amconmag.com/
Go back through some of the past issues and articles that our online. The magazine is published by Pat Buchanan(former Nixon/Reagan speech writer) and Taki Theodoracopulos.
They despise President Bush.
Like this particular article from early June, comparing President Bush to an Edsel... "brilliant presentation followed by total failure" is what Taki says.
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_07/taki.html
Its hard to trust a party that advises its members to lie in order to win elections.
I've been watching politics for 20 years. I've seen Democrats lie, cheat and steal. I've seen Republicans lie, cheat and steal. But the only part which has institionalized the way by which you lie, cheat and steal in order to win elections is the Republican party.
My father told me several weeks ago. "I realized something the other day. I'm a conservative. That's why I can't vote for President Bush, because he's no conservative."
You should read what Pat and Taki have to say. Like Moore, I don't always agree with their politics, but in many cases I can see the substance of their complaints and understand their thinking.
I watched this movie, and while I do not always agree with Moore's politics he most certainly does not hate America. He's clearly advocating that America should be stronger, better.
The primary accusations that Moore makes in his film:
- Bush has received millions of dollars from the Saud family, this has resulted in unprecendented access. - In August of 2001, Bush took a vacation when the threat was building. - The morning of 9/11, Bush made a photo-op appearance at a school. There is footage showing Bush sitting in shock with a stupid look on his face after he is notified of the attacks. - There is a very moving interview with a mother from Flint, Michigan... She talks about opportunities, Flint, America... then later she talks about her feelings following the death of her son in Iraq.
So what Moore is saying... Bush doesn't give a shit about Americans, and he's a uncertain leader in a time of crisis.
The accuastions Moore's critics make is nit picking about some petty details. But not once do they ever address the substance of Moore's claims. That video showing Bush is pretty damning, and maybe that's why they want you to avoid looking at it.
Actually, the risk is much greater than a simple desktop install being trashed. A significnat number of computers are home-installations, where personal data is kept all in one place, including personal programming projects that took months to develop.
You obviously haven't thought this through.
Whether or not you have admin rights, if you get a crunchy munchy virus that eats files... your personal data is shot. I was simply pointing out that admin rights on a desktop just give you the additional risk of blowing away your OS install. But while that can be signifigant, it's not the end of the world.
But if you can stop the viruses from spreading in the first place.... that's a good thing.
In fact, I have seen some such projects terminate permanently because of a hard-drive crash.
To get the XP certified logo, your app has to be able to run as a non-Admin. The requirement is there, and in my experience most apps meet this.
So I'm not sure where you are coming from. The only applications I encounter that "require" admin are primarily developer tools.
Unless there are some games I'm unfamiliar with...
Although beyond overstating the need, you are also overstating the risk. Being logged on as local admin to a desktop really isn't that big of a security risk. You risk destroying your desktop install, but that's it, the impact is contained. The changes in SP2 are there to prevent problems from spreading from other machines.
One of our tests that we give a candidate is presenting them with a PC that has it's cover off.
Wow, that's a really low bar to set for employment. I'm not sure I want to work for someone who attracts people that totally clueless for interviews that they need to test whether or not a person can run Winmsd.
If your primary goal is to make lots of money, look into business, not technology.
Oh, that explains it. You pay shit for wages. No wonder you can't find quality candidates.
So I had the same goals in mind. I wanted to store a fair amount of data, be protected from a drive failure. In addition, I didn't just want to rebuild the server, I want to be able to upgrade it as needed without having to go through a lot of work.
This is my solution...
Intel SE7210 motherboard 2.4 Ghz P4 2 Gigs PC3200 ECC RAM 1 60 Gig system drive Promise Fasttrak SX4000 RAID-5 controller 4 80 Gig drives Enhance Technology QuadraPack Q34 enclosure VMWare Workstation 1 160 Gig drive in a USB 2.0 external case
The 60 Gig system drive houses a installation of Windows Server 2003, and the install of VMWare.
The 4 80 Gig drives are configured with 3 in a RAID-5 and 1 as a hot-spare. They are in the Quadrapack, which actually allows hot-swap. Onto this 160 Gig volume I have the images for five virtual servers. (Web, SQL, Exchange, File/Print, Build/Source Repository)
I have the 160 Gig external drive mounted within VMWare as a VMWare Shared Folder, each virtual install has it's own directory. Then I run some backup scripts within the virtuals to backup the critical data files there. Just in case... it was cheap insurance anyway, and it gives me plenty of additional temp storage when I reconfig my workstation or something.
Doing the VMWare thing is nice, because I have all this custom configuration done to those environments, and I don't have to worry about it if I want to say reconfigure the server in some way. This machine has actually been through three motherboard upgrades, a few harddrive upgrades and such since I first started doing this. The RAID-5 is fairly new, it used to just be a single 80 gig drive. Downside is since I have VMWare workstation, rather than their GSX/ESX server, I have to logon to the box to start up the virtual sessions.
Anyway, it works well. Were I doing it today I would use SATA drives. I have a RAID-1 SATA set on my main workstation. The SE7210 server board supports same, and I considered replacing the single 60 gig drive with a mirrored set of two cheap Seagate 80 gig drives or something.
The Promise RAID controller has been pretty good, I don't have any complaints. The PAM controller software kind of sucks, though not as bad as the problems I've had with the Intel server software that came with the SE7210 motherboard.
Oh yeah, I learned the SE7210 uses a special ATX power supply called ATX-12V... Didn't figure that out until I was trying to install it into the Antec SX1040BX case I already had.:(
The really important stuff, like my Microsoft money file... I have copies stored on the file server, my desktop, and a 32 Meg compact flash card.... It's not going anywhere unless the house burns down.
In which case I guess I really should have offsite backup, and I really should handle that by ftping up an encrypted copy of some of these important files to my website which is hosted at an ISP somewhere far away. I'm going to work on that this weekend now that I think of it.
Ok, I have to admit the PC is considerably harder to accomplish this.
I have an Intel D865PERLL board, and this past weekend I switched over to dual SATA drives(Seagate 80Gig) in RAID-1.
This is with Windows XP...
1. Go into the BIOS and Enable RAID. 2. Install Intel RAID driver software 3. Run RAID configuration, select source drive, select target 4. Wait 50 minutes while drives sync up
Even with a large body of evidence to the contrary, this is something Linux is missing - the financial warchest to use the media and "war buses" to convince people to the contrary.
Actually what's missing is the large body of evidence supporting the claim that Linux is better.
LOL! Yeah I went to Iowa State, but the facts speak for themselves.
There was a massive court battle, and the judge ruled with Atanasoff. At issue was patents, and also the claim by Mauchly and Eckert that they had originated the ideas when in fact they stole them from Atanasoff.
Problem is the ruling came out the same day as the Saturday Night Massacre... when Robert Bork fired the independent counsel investigating the Watergate scandal. So it really didn't get much coverage in the newspapers at the time.
Actually I thought the biggest problem was that nobody had invoked the Patriot Act, they were just asking and you're right it's easier to just answer the questions if you're innocent.
However let me ask you... what do you do when you are innocent and they won't believe you? Throw you in prison for a few months while they "sort things out"?
As for having the funds... That is why we have the ACLU, to protect those who have their liberty deprived who can't afford to defend against the Govt.
But I forgot, that I'm not allowed to cite the events of September 11th, because doing so makes me a Jingoist. Curse our surly, greedy, unrefined society!
It's one thing to invoke September 11th as justification for going after those who were behind the attack.
It's quite another to invoke it as part of a campaign of calculated fear.
Americans aren't the weak-willed cowards that the Bush administration thinks we are. We will not hide in fear.
Just last week when Microsoft announced at WinHEC that modern computers will very likely have a terabyte of harddrive space... everybody here was saying "WHAT THE F!? Longhorn is going to take a terabyte to install? Are they crazy?"
No... they were talking about things like this box from Sony.
The margins on the consumer networking margin have got to be slim, considering so many entrants. Microsoft's entry wasn't particularly low cost to make, as they used slicker packaging and such than even Linksys.
It's to bad, though. I have mostly Linksys gear, but I have a Microsoft PCI 801.11g card and it works pretty well and the software was considerably easier to install and configure than my Linksys PCMCIA 801.11g card. I've been told their router was also this way. The linksys router config page, while powerful, is convoluted and I spend a lot of time helping others to set it up.
This "typical computer" point being made is not recommended minimums, but what they anticipate the average computer will have.
Hmm, let's see... I have a 2.4Ghz processor now, 1 Gig of RAM, 160 Gigs of drive space, an 802.11g wireless card, 1Gigabit ethernet. And this isn't even a very high end system
Looks to me like I'm halfway to meeting those specs.
You're right though, this article was written by some nerds who just like to spread FUD about Microsoft.
1) I started running Linux on a 386SX16 with 5 megs of RAM... even tried X11 on that beast. Guess what? Didn't happen, but it ran Windows 3.1 fine.
2) I was referring to the Tanenbaum - Torvalds debate. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensource s/book/ap pa.html
3) ZZZZZZzzzzzz
bottom line: Yep, grade school... definately.
I was a Linux user from 1992-1997, haven't touched it since. If anything you could argue that I have no recent knowledge of Linux, but you want to talk the past your claim lacks substance.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore made no attempt at being balanced
Either does Fox News, but they claim to be "Fair and Balanced".
I don't understand this. Why is this barrier only placed for liberal opinion?
Moore has never claimed to be balanced, he wears his bias on his sleeve. He doesn't deny that, why is this a complaint of yours?
I mean come on, what does Moore have to worry about, if bush is as bad as he wants everyone to believe, he could have been fair and balanced and everyone would have reacted the same way? Right? Right?
We'll let the people decide. They've been subjected to one side of the story by the mainstream media. Now they can see the other side from indy film producer Michael Moore.
They get their choice in November.
Facts cannot be proven false, dummo.
The presentation of what claims to be facts cane be proven false.
I just did such to your statement.
Moore is a yellow "journalist" that turns "the high drama of life into a cheap melodrama that leads to stories being twisted into the forms best suited for sales by the hollering newsboy."
So basically he's no different from any other journalist broadcasting in the media.
But it's not okay in Moore's case because he's pushing an agenda outside the Conventional Wisdom mainstream.
Just thought I'd clear that part of your point up.
The reason the war turned sour was not the cost of American lives.
It was Abu Ghraib.
Abu Ghraib negated the Bush reason for going to war, that we were better than Hussein. Without that reason, we were back to the immediate risk of WMDs, of which there has been no evidence.
From there the cost in blood and treasure weighed in. Had we been able to occupy Iraq without loss of American life, and had the costs been say $5-10 billion. We would have never noticed it. It'd be the forgotten conflict, like Kosovo.
I see what you are saying.
Really we don't need a President.
Man that would sure save the Government a lot of money!
Why is it that some people feel that the only way to argue is to build strawman arguments that can be easily torn down? Had Bush ran out of the school yelling "HOLY SHIT! WE'VE BEEN FUCKED!" waving his hands in the air. You bet, that would have terrified the children.
Had he instead said "I'm sorry kids, but some important Presidential business has come up and I have to go talk to people in Washington. I appreciate you allowing me to be here, and I hope you understand my sorrow at having to leave you so soon", he could have left and it would not have scared the kids. Rather, I think, it would have impressed the kids.
Moore's point in showing that footage is to contrast Bush's clear shock with the public persona of him being an able and sure leader.
Guilliani in New York didn't wave his arms around and yell "HOLY SHIT!!!!". I honestly don't know what he said, but chances are it was something like "Take me down there." Because he was on the scene with police and fire fighters when the buildings collapsed.
The problem is that so many liberals are failing to do that; they're simply praising the film as truth (which is what I said in my last post) despite that Moore has admitted that it is not all true.
Because it's not 100% pure, that there is 1% that we now find out was wrong.
We must condemn the whole film?
Do you apply the same standards to conservatives? Just curious.
Also, when Moore says the film is a documentary and it is not,
How is it not a documentary? Because he makes it entertaining? He should be bland and boring like those guys on PBS?
It sounds to me like you don't really have any complaints on substance you are resorting to nit picking it to death. Now that's typical of todays so-called "conservatives".
If you are spending your hard earned money looking for truth or fact, please look elsewhere.
Hmm. The documentary is chuck full of facts.
Just as a White House Press Conference is chuck full of facts.
What they both lack is truth. They are both facades, they are facts presented in a way to make an argument. The White House wants you to believe that the President is self-assured, and competent. Michael Moore wants to show you the other side... the vacant look on his face when he learns of the atacks, how he is very chummy with the House of Saud and oil companies.
Or are you claiming that Moore's movie lacks facts? That these things never happened? That the footage he has is also computer generated? That's a pretty bold claim.
If you ever took a course on philosophy, you'd know that the truth isn't so easy to find. It is up to the viewer to take the argument that Moore has composed, and place it in contrast to the facade that the White House Press Office puts forth, and decide... which one is closer to the truth.
I remember Roger & Me, and you're nit picking. Whether the plant closing took place 7 years later, or 1 year later, the fact is that Flint, Michigan was ignored. That's all Moore was trying to point out in that film.
There have been reports lately of democratic strategists insisting that dems lie in order to sway conservative opinion.
Are these reports coming from Ann Coulter?
Claim that he has broken ties with your views without giving real examples and while relying on sketchy facts at best.
You know what, why don't you check out the American Conservative magazine sometime...
http://www.amconmag.com/
Go back through some of the past issues and articles that our online. The magazine is published by Pat Buchanan(former Nixon/Reagan speech writer) and Taki Theodoracopulos.
They despise President Bush.
Like this particular article from early June, comparing President Bush to an Edsel... "brilliant presentation followed by total failure" is what Taki says.
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_07/taki.html
Its hard to trust a party that advises its members to lie in order to win elections.
I've been watching politics for 20 years. I've seen Democrats lie, cheat and steal. I've seen Republicans lie, cheat and steal. But the only part which has institionalized the way by which you lie, cheat and steal in order to win elections is the Republican party.
My father told me several weeks ago. "I realized something the other day. I'm a conservative. That's why I can't vote for President Bush, because he's no conservative."
You should read what Pat and Taki have to say. Like Moore, I don't always agree with their politics, but in many cases I can see the substance of their complaints and understand their thinking.
I watched this movie, and while I do not always agree with Moore's politics he most certainly does not hate America. He's clearly advocating that America should be stronger, better.
The primary accusations that Moore makes in his film:
- Bush has received millions of dollars from the Saud family, this has resulted in unprecendented access.
- In August of 2001, Bush took a vacation when the threat was building.
- The morning of 9/11, Bush made a photo-op appearance at a school. There is footage showing Bush sitting in shock with a stupid look on his face after he is notified of the attacks.
- There is a very moving interview with a mother from Flint, Michigan... She talks about opportunities, Flint, America... then later she talks about her feelings following the death of her son in Iraq.
So what Moore is saying... Bush doesn't give a shit about Americans, and he's a uncertain leader in a time of crisis.
The accuastions Moore's critics make is nit picking about some petty details. But not once do they ever address the substance of Moore's claims. That video showing Bush is pretty damning, and maybe that's why they want you to avoid looking at it.
Actually, the risk is much greater than a simple desktop install being trashed. A significnat number of computers are home-installations, where personal data is kept all in one place, including personal programming projects that took months to develop.
You obviously haven't thought this through.
Whether or not you have admin rights, if you get a crunchy munchy virus that eats files... your personal data is shot. I was simply pointing out that admin rights on a desktop just give you the additional risk of blowing away your OS install. But while that can be signifigant, it's not the end of the world.
But if you can stop the viruses from spreading in the first place.... that's a good thing.
In fact, I have seen some such projects terminate permanently because of a hard-drive crash.
This is why god invented backups.
To get the XP certified logo, your app has to be able to run as a non-Admin. The requirement is there, and in my experience most apps meet this.
So I'm not sure where you are coming from. The only applications I encounter that "require" admin are primarily developer tools.
Unless there are some games I'm unfamiliar with...
Although beyond overstating the need, you are also overstating the risk. Being logged on as local admin to a desktop really isn't that big of a security risk. You risk destroying your desktop install, but that's it, the impact is contained. The changes in SP2 are there to prevent problems from spreading from other machines.
One of our tests that we give a candidate is presenting them with a PC that has it's cover off.
Wow, that's a really low bar to set for employment. I'm not sure I want to work for someone who attracts people that totally clueless for interviews that they need to test whether or not a person can run Winmsd.
If your primary goal is to make lots of money, look into business, not technology.
Oh, that explains it. You pay shit for wages. No wonder you can't find quality candidates.
So I had the same goals in mind. I wanted to store a fair amount of data, be protected from a drive failure. In addition, I didn't just want to rebuild the server, I want to be able to upgrade it as needed without having to go through a lot of work.
:(
This is my solution...
Intel SE7210 motherboard
2.4 Ghz P4
2 Gigs PC3200 ECC RAM
1 60 Gig system drive
Promise Fasttrak SX4000 RAID-5 controller
4 80 Gig drives
Enhance Technology QuadraPack Q34 enclosure
VMWare Workstation
1 160 Gig drive in a USB 2.0 external case
The 60 Gig system drive houses a installation of Windows Server 2003, and the install of VMWare.
The 4 80 Gig drives are configured with 3 in a RAID-5 and 1 as a hot-spare. They are in the Quadrapack, which actually allows hot-swap. Onto this 160 Gig volume I have the images for five virtual servers. (Web, SQL, Exchange, File/Print, Build/Source Repository)
I have the 160 Gig external drive mounted within VMWare as a VMWare Shared Folder, each virtual install has it's own directory. Then I run some backup scripts within the virtuals to backup the critical data files there. Just in case... it was cheap insurance anyway, and it gives me plenty of additional temp storage when I reconfig my workstation or something.
Doing the VMWare thing is nice, because I have all this custom configuration done to those environments, and I don't have to worry about it if I want to say reconfigure the server in some way. This machine has actually been through three motherboard upgrades, a few harddrive upgrades and such since I first started doing this. The RAID-5 is fairly new, it used to just be a single 80 gig drive. Downside is since I have VMWare workstation, rather than their GSX/ESX server, I have to logon to the box to start up the virtual sessions.
Anyway, it works well. Were I doing it today I would use SATA drives. I have a RAID-1 SATA set on my main workstation. The SE7210 server board supports same, and I considered replacing the single 60 gig drive with a mirrored set of two cheap Seagate 80 gig drives or something.
The Promise RAID controller has been pretty good, I don't have any complaints. The PAM controller software kind of sucks, though not as bad as the problems I've had with the Intel server software that came with the SE7210 motherboard.
Oh yeah, I learned the SE7210 uses a special ATX power supply called ATX-12V... Didn't figure that out until I was trying to install it into the Antec SX1040BX case I already had.
The really important stuff, like my Microsoft money file... I have copies stored on the file server, my desktop, and a 32 Meg compact flash card.... It's not going anywhere unless the house burns down.
In which case I guess I really should have offsite backup, and I really should handle that by ftping up an encrypted copy of some of these important files to my website which is hosted at an ISP somewhere far away. I'm going to work on that this weekend now that I think of it.
Ok, I have to admit the PC is considerably harder to accomplish this.
I have an Intel D865PERLL board, and this past weekend I switched over to dual SATA drives(Seagate 80Gig) in RAID-1.
This is with Windows XP...
1. Go into the BIOS and Enable RAID.
2. Install Intel RAID driver software
3. Run RAID configuration, select source drive, select target
4. Wait 50 minutes while drives sync up
Oh wait, it wasn't that hard after all...
Even with a large body of evidence to the contrary, this is something Linux is missing - the financial warchest to use the media and "war buses" to convince people to the contrary.
Actually what's missing is the large body of evidence supporting the claim that Linux is better.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
LOL! Yeah I went to Iowa State, but the facts speak for themselves.
There was a massive court battle, and the judge ruled with Atanasoff. At issue was patents, and also the claim by Mauchly and Eckert that they had originated the ideas when in fact they stole them from Atanasoff.
Problem is the ruling came out the same day as the Saturday Night Massacre... when Robert Bork fired the independent counsel investigating the Watergate scandal. So it really didn't get much coverage in the newspapers at the time.
Actually I thought the biggest problem was that nobody had invoked the Patriot Act, they were just asking and you're right it's easier to just answer the questions if you're innocent.
However let me ask you... what do you do when you are innocent and they won't believe you? Throw you in prison for a few months while they "sort things out"?
As for having the funds... That is why we have the ACLU, to protect those who have their liberty deprived who can't afford to defend against the Govt.
But I forgot, that I'm not allowed to cite the events of September 11th, because doing so makes me a Jingoist. Curse our surly, greedy, unrefined society!
It's one thing to invoke September 11th as justification for going after those who were behind the attack.
It's quite another to invoke it as part of a campaign of calculated fear.
Americans aren't the weak-willed cowards that the Bush administration thinks we are. We will not hide in fear.
You mean these?
Microsoft Certified Professional Action Figures
[sarcasm]
This is yet another microsoft innovation being copied by others.[/sarcasm]
Or you could do an Abstract Factory Pattern and have a configurable database layer for multiple database implementations.
Just last week when Microsoft announced at WinHEC that modern computers will very likely have a terabyte of harddrive space... everybody here was saying "WHAT THE F!? Longhorn is going to take a terabyte to install? Are they crazy?"
No... they were talking about things like this box from Sony.
The margins on the consumer networking margin have got to be slim, considering so many entrants. Microsoft's entry wasn't particularly low cost to make, as they used slicker packaging and such than even Linksys.
It's to bad, though. I have mostly Linksys gear, but I have a Microsoft PCI 801.11g card and it works pretty well and the software was considerably easier to install and configure than my Linksys PCMCIA 801.11g card. I've been told their router was also this way. The linksys router config page, while powerful, is convoluted and I spend a lot of time helping others to set it up.
You forgot point three...
This "typical computer" point being made is not recommended minimums, but what they anticipate the average computer will have.
Hmm, let's see... I have a 2.4Ghz processor now, 1 Gig of RAM, 160 Gigs of drive space, an 802.11g wireless card, 1Gigabit ethernet. And this isn't even a very high end system
Looks to me like I'm halfway to meeting those specs.
You're right though, this article was written by some nerds who just like to spread FUD about Microsoft.
"wow. where do I start?"
e s/book/ap pa.html
I'd say grade school.
1) I started running Linux on a 386SX16 with 5 megs of RAM... even tried X11 on that beast. Guess what? Didn't happen, but it ran Windows 3.1 fine.
2) I was referring to the Tanenbaum - Torvalds debate.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensourc
3) ZZZZZZzzzzzz
bottom line: Yep, grade school... definately.
I was a Linux user from 1992-1997, haven't touched it since. If anything you could argue that I have no recent knowledge of Linux, but you want to talk the past your claim lacks substance.