Get serious dude, I remember driving from Graffenwhor to Mesau in 2 and a half hours doing 90 MPH in an army van and the BMW would pass us as streaks! 4 or 5 hours to cross an european country if your only on a moped.
Europe is much more planned than US or CA you can literaly fly into a major city, walk to the bus stop, go to the train station, jump on a bus to almost anywhere. Usualy you can do it all on one ticket.
For it to be widely used as a server front end, you would have to convince a lot of network types that its both effective and secure. Because right now they would view it as another piece of software to config and patch, in an area where they had no software before and no presidence to have any software. Also the legal types tend to worry about bogus claims like Email = free speach, and liability over mistakenly blocked Emails ect its easier for them to concider it a user problem.
About 80% of the spam to our domain get forwarded to user bitbucket anyways. This is because our domain name is poiuyt.com and a lot of people use it as a FAKE Email domain instead of using example.com; qwerty@poiuyt.com get tons of spam. Life would be a lot simpler for me if I got off my duff and learned enough about the pop3 protocal to write a script that just found out how many spam's to delete and delete them w/o downloading. Oh well such is the cost of laziness.
When we remodeled our dental office our software was on a SCO unix server to wyse 50 terminals using curses over serial lines. My solution was run two cat5 cables to 3 times as many locations as we would ever use all go to wall plates, the only thing I reget is that the telephone guy absolutly insisted on cat 3 to the telephone jacks.
Well now the software vender got bought out and killed, its customer base pressured to upgrade to a windows based solution (read this as replacing terminals with 'puters and serial with ethernet). Considering Digital Imaging, Digital Radiography, chairside charting ect is being added to the mix, I'm going to be glad I've got the extra cat 5 cables, and if there is any more that need to be run, they have 3X's as many as we think we'll need and have an unconnected fiber or two pulled along with them just to make sure. It's always good to be a generation or two past what you think you'll ever use.
lighten up guy, the economy is soft, and lots of guys are out of work from the dotBombs, so what wrong with showing management that even if they out-source some work, your still the one that they need to make it work?
I guess the big deal is what is an agent, The guy from the FBI with a badge, sworn to uphold the laws... protect and defend the constitution of the US is definatly an agent, when he kicks in my door its a big deal. Its big for me and its big for him. There are real people that are accountable, can testify in court and describe their actions and motivations.
Is an agent limited to a physical person acting in behalf of the FBI, or does it include a software entity acting in the behalf of the FBI also an agent? With Magic Latern there is no warm body to cross examine in court, ML isn't going to be able to testify if it was me or my spouse it'll just suck up some keystrokes when PGP is fired up. And speaking of spouses, I personaly consider the confidence between Me and my computer to be the same as the confidence between me and my spouse, clergy, accountant, and legal consellor.
I can tell just by your comment that you're guilty of to much thinking Inside the box your punishment is to watch The Matrix three times and actualy think about where Magic Lantern might take us 100 or a 1000 years from now.
If the distro's all stuck to the Linux File system standard, what difference would it make? My SuSE would install the Redhat rpm just as easily as a Redhat distro! sure maybe we'd have to be a little more carefull about which version of the distro we got the update from when doing cross-distro stuff because of library version differeneses but that should be about all.
If every one wasn't reinventing the wheel, who'd care whose wheel turned faster.
Ok I know it isn't quite that easy, My MySQL server doesn't autostart because SuSE names a script a little different, but its pretty close.
I get the impression that WuFTP isn't the default ftpd on most of the distro's that were caught flatfooted. SuSE ftp site has been over loaded all week at 5 am EST so a lot of people have been downloading something; I'll bet more people have got the patch before it was announced to the general public than we realise.
What everybody is ignoring is the these are software guys supporting biological research in biological science. For all of their work they are probably getting zip for credit.
The hot-shot prof directing the grunts in the lab is getting the credit, and doleing it out as he sees fit.
Maybe just maybe the Comp Sci people get mentioned somewhere in the article. We have no idea how many different fields the analysis could be applied to nor do we know if the software research might actualy be much greater than the bio research its supporting. Very probably the software is much more important the the data it analyses, or even the original research, and could represent many years of effort.
There is no such thing as a US Government, the USG is mearly a collection of individuals acting in behalf of the collective.
These individuals need search warrants to conduct physical searches, or be willing and able to convince a Judge of extreme circumstances like evidence being destroyed by delay.
the standards for collecting evidense is different for a Government agent entering a private place, than it is for the same agent to enter a public place to collect.
Sooner or later some judge is going to decide that there is no difference between a physical person type gov agent hiding in your closet watching throught the key hole and a software type agent hiding in your computer and require both to meet the same standards.
When this happens it probably is going to be presidense setting and allow a kinds of dirt-bags out an conviction reversals. In short this is just a bad idea no matter which side of the fence you sit on.
The USG would be better served by good old-fashioned investigation rather than high-tech tricks. The legal standards are not enplace yet and are sure to be revised over time.
and realy InfoWorld gets a lot of ad revenue for microsoft and others with MS compatable software.
Their benchmarks have not been universaly reproduced by other testers, maybe what they are realy saying isn't so much that its slower, but that it could have something like this in it.
Honest your Honor, Its a role-planning game, We just named it PGP, there is no Micro$oft Licensure Enforcement Legion with plasma rifles and anti-matter harddisk erasure devices.
No the we don't know how an fbi keylogger got emailed to Tony Blair, and I realy didn't know that there actualy was goatse.cx web sites.
I agree this is stuff that looks workable and a good idea for about 3 seconds. The first thing I thought about is what happens when I set up my old 486 or P90 with bios password on boot and no network connection at all. Tripwire would easily tell if anything has been physically added even if they got past the bios. Then its a simple matter to encrypt on the isolated machine, sneaker net a floppy to the connected machine to send.
Actualy you could use the connected machine to send encrypted messages, that are misinformation for them to decrypt, how anyone going to know if goatsex.jpg is an image that got grabbled in xmission, a real encrypted image, a real encrypted message, a bogus encrypted message or 50K dump of/dev/random?
Imagine terrorists or the mafia hexediting the Magic lantern and shooting it back at the FBI to monitor them? If I was of nefarious intent, and suspected that I was being survaled I being send every virus and worm in the book back and forth to any of my coconsperators, all encrypted of course on the honeypot machine, let'em decrypt those and see if their virus defs are up to date.
Remeber JINTACCS? I doubt it, it was a messageing system, actualy kinda like XML. It allow an Army soldier to do things like call it Naval gunfire. On the lowest level it was a fill in the blank paper, then read over voice radios, at the higher levels a computerized intercomunications protocol.
Actualy it was a good system, not perfect but good, but it was murdered. They did this by teaching it. They didn't start with the easiest and work to the hardest, they tought the hardest first so the average pvt Joe Snuffy got hopelessly lost.
They actualy tought me how to report the laying of a naval mine field, I was in an light infantry organisation at the time, that report was for Naval ships Captains. This happened because the middle management types realy didn't want to lose their turf. I think the same thing is going to happen here.
To us its easy, blow some fiber, install some routers between facilities, gateway to some secure sattalites and maybe change the networking code enough to make the civilian stuff incompatable. Add in an armor plated authetication, distr the software to authorized users and your done right? Well the Army won't like working with the Marines, DOD won't like working with DOJ, and Intell won't even like working with themselves.
The only good thing I see from this is sonner or later some of the reasearch is going to trickle down to us and be usefull.
The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us No I don't think so, but a lot of Lusers think they are. It's probably more like welder-spark + disposable-butane-lighter = 15,000 lbs air-fuel bomb.
There are enough dumb people out there that actually buy crap from the spammers. Lusers who are dumb enough to buy the crap are also dumb enough to believe that their CC data is more likely to be stolen off a SSL connection to the transaction house than they are to be muggged in the mall parking lot.
Just quietly delete all of you spam I actualy take some time once in a while, read it and compain to the person who benefits and CC the host, if it involves a regualated profession I also complain to the states board of professional liciensure or if it looks like fraud, to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
I'd like to see a law prohibiting falsified header info, punishing broken opt-out links, and perhaps giving recipients a more convienint way of sueing spammers for dammages.
Punnishing affiate programms that pay for click-throughs from Email would help a lot
when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop. Your implying that the spammers are making money, posibly the only ones that are on the internet perhaps?
More likely they are dreamming of make one big hit that'll come from the next scam
Actualy when you move that many people to an alien enviroment, some are going to catch some vague, chronic infection, and the cause isn't going to be detected.
They were also given a drug that is in they same family as nerve gas, physiostygine I think, along with the attidote at the same time,(atropine). Plus Oil well fires, local parasites ect. to many variables to determine a cause.
Also I thought the main problem at the vaccine lab relate to them being bought out and the new owners don't realy know what to do with them. They aren't getting funded and don't have a renewed permit to transport the vaccine that they have stored on site. The workers at the lab don't have a problem taking the vaccine, and they take it a lot more frequently than the general public would
My manuals have always stated US policy as no use for biological weapons, chemical weapons no first use, only for response in kind, and nuclear only for responding to overwhelming force or response in kind,(like the Soviet's rolling over Europe).
The vast majority of US BW research was defense related, even befor the above policy. What I'm not sure of policy wise is whether a Nuclear response to a Biological attack is permissable. This may be a case where the historic policies are out of sync with todays realities.
The biggest reason Biological weapons are not used is that there is no BW that is militarily useful. These weapons are only appropriate for genocide, not warefare, and invaribly they'll backfire on you. On the other hand a big draw back to invading an other country has always been have your soldiers coming into contact with natural indiginous diseases. In warfare historicaly, 75% of your casualties are due to disease, only about 4-5% are due to enemy direct fire.
Actualy there is much worse out there. Bacteria with an ID50(Infective Dose for 50% of the healthy adult population) of one organism, and untreated fatality rates approaching 95%. But the things that scare me the most are predominatly non-fatal, there are things that can happen to you that make dieing seem like a relief. More I won't say.
While i realy don't know jack about networking and security, I can't remember an exploit that made big headlines that ran over a port higher than 1024. The ports lower than 1025 have to be opened by a process that at least initialy has root privs, force a buffer overflow and you've got instant root privs and a wide open system.
if the port is greater than 1024 then any UID can open it, overflow it and you only get the privs of the opening UID. This will usualy stop the kiddies dead in there tracks, you're not going to stop a hardcore hacker that realy wants in anyways, usualy around the firewall through some salesweenies modem and telephone extention.
Another thing is what about outgoing connections? Don't they establish a dialog, you know two way, as in talking also involve listening.
I guess what I'm realy pointing out is security is an illusion, the best you can hope for is to make the effort to hack your system greater than the rewards gained. A computer encased in concrete sitting on the bottom of the ocean is as secure as they get, but not very usefull. Force everybody to go around your security policies, and you've got no security.
<obigatoryRant>
Beside I'll bet that you don't block SMTP, and Email read on one of the Microsoft virus launchers is about as insecure as you can get.</obigatoryRant>
I like to use Netscape 4.77 for weg dev because its NOT as forgiving as some other browsers, and not supporting transpency in PNG just kills it for a lot of web stuff.
The new KDE looks good, keep the monkey boys feet to the fire and we'll all gain, nothing like competion to keep everybody sharp
do the math:
15 % for fica,
18% for fed income taxes,
5% state income taxes,
6% or so for state sales tax,
$180 for so for taxes on telephone (each line)
not to mention taxes on heating fuel and electricity,
33% or so of your gasoline cost is taxes
how much in local property taxes?
if this doesn't reach a third of our income I'll be suprised, then factor in how much more your paycheck or stock dividends would be except for fed and state business taxes and its probably over half.
remember we are a very young country, only 200+ years old, actualy i've gotten drunk in bars that were twice as old as the US was while in Germany. It could be argued that our country was a beta test for the French revolution, let'em see what worked and what didn't before they commited to themselves.
Sure there is problems, we are learning, the US is starting to "play nice" with others. Our version of capitalism keeps trying to slip back to a form of political-industrial fuedalism. We are an evolving system and the pressures on us aren't realy that much different than on others just the form is different, here its money=power other countries its gun=power, in others it's who've married or know that counts.
at least if we don't like the way a company acts we can buy stock and vote against the dirtbags at the stock-holders meeting.
Maybe it was up and running in a month but more likely it was something vaguely similar out of the box and didn't realy fit the same specs that the linux box was supposed to do. In short how do we know that we are not comparing apples and oranges?
We don't do we, my crystal ball tells me that if the first CIO crashes and burns on a project, the new CIO gets all the specs downgraded he/she can. Downgrade enough and maybe the project is already done.
If it takes 50% more Win2K boxes to do the job, so much the better, that means more admins to supervise, more hardware and budget to manage, more leverage at the next eval for a pay raise because you have more responsibility!
yeah people like to install things...
Boss "fix my 'puter, the cusors blinks an hour-glass." Get to his house he's got morpheous running full time dumping god only knows what on to the internet, weather-bug updating the weather every 15 seconds and 5 or 6 other trashy shareware/spyware programs running. The system tray streches 90% across an 1280 display and a cable modem with no firewall and no virus protection running! So I throw in a floppy boot of it and format C: and reload.
ME "you backed up your data before you called me didn't you?"
BOSS "no, did you?"
ME "backup would probably have the Virus too(supressed giggle)"
well after that the 'puter was responsive again, at least for a while. I guess that goes to show you easy to install isn't always a good feature, at least in Widows ME(that was a typo but now I think it appropriate).
And as for hardware almost invariably Linux just picks it up, except for some whacko winmodems and windows only sound cards, most of which don't work on my windows machine either. The rest that do work on my Linux machine about half don't work in Windows 95A P90 machine.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to breed and they especialy shouldn't be allowed to install software on their computers. Often in Windows the difference between a virus and a program is that the virus is self-installing, but the program requires the user to specificaly engage in self-destructive behaviour.
I agree, my little bro is a pro sys admin, and he was helping me on my Linux box, He pure Unix.
He was slinging find|greps and man pages commands faster than I could follow, kept TOP up in the 50% range for an hour!
In after an hour of listening to "God I hate Linux, nothing is where its suposed to be" he started running gdb on programs he'd never seen before without the source to reference, and explaining what the programs did based on the system calls they made.
My first computer used 256X4 bit static ram (2 of them!), 500nS, real 'puter geeks wirewrap their motherboards!
Think we could be in for some serious I/O bandwidth problems here? I guess this is good for upward expandablity, but not worth much more than bragging rights in practice; unless you are porting Carnivore to Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Get serious dude, I remember driving from Graffenwhor to Mesau in 2 and a half hours doing 90 MPH in an army van and the BMW would pass us as streaks! 4 or 5 hours to cross an european country if your only on a moped.
Europe is much more planned than US or CA you can literaly fly into a major city, walk to the bus stop, go to the train station, jump on a bus to almost anywhere. Usualy you can do it all on one ticket.
About 80% of the spam to our domain get forwarded to user bitbucket anyways. This is because our domain name is poiuyt.com and a lot of people use it as a FAKE Email domain instead of using example.com; qwerty@poiuyt.com get tons of spam. Life would be a lot simpler for me if I got off my duff and learned enough about the pop3 protocal to write a script that just found out how many spam's to delete and delete them w/o downloading. Oh well such is the cost of laziness.
When we remodeled our dental office our software was on a SCO unix server to wyse 50 terminals using curses over serial lines. My solution was run two cat5 cables to 3 times as many locations as we would ever use all go to wall plates, the only thing I reget is that the telephone guy absolutly insisted on cat 3 to the telephone jacks.
Well now the software vender got bought out and killed, its customer base pressured to upgrade to a windows based solution (read this as replacing terminals with 'puters and serial with ethernet). Considering Digital Imaging, Digital Radiography, chairside charting ect is being added to the mix, I'm going to be glad I've got the extra cat 5 cables, and if there is any more that need to be run, they have 3X's as many as we think we'll need and have an unconnected fiber or two pulled along with them just to make sure. It's always good to be a generation or two past what you think you'll ever use.
lighten up guy, the economy is soft, and lots of guys are out of work from the dotBombs, so what wrong with showing management that even if they out-source some work, your still the one that they need to make it work?
I'd consider it a job security aid
I guess the big deal is what is an agent, The guy from the FBI with a badge, sworn to uphold the laws ... protect and defend the constitution of the US is definatly an agent, when he kicks in my door its a big deal. Its big for me and its big for him. There are real people that are accountable, can testify in court and describe their actions and motivations.
Is an agent limited to a physical person acting in behalf of the FBI, or does it include a software entity acting in the behalf of the FBI also an agent? With Magic Latern there is no warm body to cross examine in court, ML isn't going to be able to testify if it was me or my spouse it'll just suck up some keystrokes when PGP is fired up. And speaking of spouses, I personaly consider the confidence between Me and my computer to be the same as the confidence between me and my spouse, clergy, accountant, and legal consellor.
I can tell just by your comment that you're guilty of to much thinking Inside the box your punishment is to watch The Matrix three times and actualy think about where Magic Lantern might take us 100 or a 1000 years from now.
If the distro's all stuck to the Linux File system standard, what difference would it make? My SuSE would install the Redhat rpm just as easily as a Redhat distro! sure maybe we'd have to be a little more carefull about which version of the distro we got the update from when doing cross-distro stuff because of library version differeneses but that should be about all.
If every one wasn't reinventing the wheel, who'd care whose wheel turned faster. Ok I know it isn't quite that easy, My MySQL server doesn't autostart because SuSE names a script a little different, but its pretty close.
I get the impression that WuFTP isn't the default ftpd on most of the distro's that were caught flatfooted. SuSE ftp site has been over loaded all week at 5 am EST so a lot of people have been downloading something; I'll bet more people have got the patch before it was announced to the general public than we realise.
What everybody is ignoring is the these are software guys supporting biological research in biological science. For all of their work they are probably getting zip for credit.
The hot-shot prof directing the grunts in the lab is getting the credit, and doleing it out as he sees fit.
Maybe just maybe the Comp Sci people get mentioned somewhere in the article. We have no idea how many different fields the analysis could be applied to nor do we know if the software research might actualy be much greater than the bio research its supporting. Very probably the software is much more important the the data it analyses, or even the original research, and could represent many years of effort.
Sooner or later some judge is going to decide that there is no difference between a physical person type gov agent hiding in your closet watching throught the key hole and a software type agent hiding in your computer and require both to meet the same standards. When this happens it probably is going to be presidense setting and allow a kinds of dirt-bags out an conviction reversals. In short this is just a bad idea no matter which side of the fence you sit on.
The USG would be better served by good old-fashioned investigation rather than high-tech tricks. The legal standards are not enplace yet and are sure to be revised over time.
and realy InfoWorld gets a lot of ad revenue for microsoft and others with MS compatable software.
Their benchmarks have not been universaly reproduced by other testers, maybe what they are realy saying isn't so much that its slower, but that it could have something like this in it.
Honest your Honor, Its a role-planning game, We just named it PGP, there is no Micro$oft Licensure Enforcement Legion with plasma rifles and anti-matter harddisk erasure devices.
No the we don't know how an fbi keylogger got emailed to Tony Blair, and I realy didn't know that there actualy was goatse.cx web sites.
I agree this is stuff that looks workable and a good idea for about 3 seconds. The first thing I thought about is what happens when I set up my old 486 or P90 with bios password on boot and no network connection at all. Tripwire would easily tell if anything has been physically added even if they got past the bios. Then its a simple matter to encrypt on the isolated machine, sneaker net a floppy to the connected machine to send.
/dev/random?
Actualy you could use the connected machine to send encrypted messages, that are misinformation for them to decrypt, how anyone going to know if goatsex.jpg is an image that got grabbled in xmission, a real encrypted image, a real encrypted message, a bogus encrypted message or 50K dump of
Imagine terrorists or the mafia hexediting the Magic lantern and shooting it back at the FBI to monitor them? If I was of nefarious intent, and suspected that I was being survaled I being send every virus and worm in the book back and forth to any of my coconsperators, all encrypted of course on the honeypot machine, let'em decrypt those and see if their virus defs are up to date.
Remeber JINTACCS? I doubt it, it was a messageing system, actualy kinda like XML. It allow an Army soldier to do things like call it Naval gunfire. On the lowest level it was a fill in the blank paper, then read over voice radios, at the higher levels a computerized intercomunications protocol.
Actualy it was a good system, not perfect but good, but it was murdered. They did this by teaching it. They didn't start with the easiest and work to the hardest, they tought the hardest first so the average pvt Joe Snuffy got hopelessly lost. They actualy tought me how to report the laying of a naval mine field, I was in an light infantry organisation at the time, that report was for Naval ships Captains. This happened because the middle management types realy didn't want to lose their turf. I think the same thing is going to happen here.
To us its easy, blow some fiber, install some routers between facilities, gateway to some secure sattalites and maybe change the networking code enough to make the civilian stuff incompatable. Add in an armor plated authetication, distr the software to authorized users and your done right? Well the Army won't like working with the Marines, DOD won't like working with DOJ, and Intell won't even like working with themselves.
The only good thing I see from this is sonner or later some of the reasearch is going to trickle down to us and be usefull.
The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us
No I don't think so, but a lot of Lusers think they are. It's probably more like welder-spark + disposable-butane-lighter = 15,000 lbs air-fuel bomb.
There are enough dumb people out there that actually buy crap from the spammers. Lusers who are dumb enough to buy the crap are also dumb enough to believe that their CC data is more likely to be stolen off a SSL connection to the transaction house than they are to be muggged in the mall parking lot.
Just quietly delete all of you spam I actualy take some time once in a while, read it and compain to the person who benefits and CC the host, if it involves a regualated profession I also complain to the states board of professional liciensure or if it looks like fraud, to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
I'd like to see a law prohibiting falsified header info, punishing broken opt-out links, and perhaps giving recipients a more convienint way of sueing spammers for dammages. Punnishing affiate programms that pay for click-throughs from Email would help a lot
when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop.
Your implying that the spammers are making money, posibly the only ones that are on the internet perhaps? More likely they are dreamming of make one big hit that'll come from the next scam
Actualy when you move that many people to an alien enviroment, some are going to catch some vague, chronic infection, and the cause isn't going to be detected.
They were also given a drug that is in they same family as nerve gas, physiostygine I think, along with the attidote at the same time,(atropine). Plus Oil well fires, local parasites ect. to many variables to determine a cause.
Also I thought the main problem at the vaccine lab relate to them being bought out and the new owners don't realy know what to do with them. They aren't getting funded and don't have a renewed permit to transport the vaccine that they have stored on site. The workers at the lab don't have a problem taking the vaccine, and they take it a lot more frequently than the general public would
My manuals have always stated US policy as no use for biological weapons, chemical weapons no first use, only for response in kind, and nuclear only for responding to overwhelming force or response in kind,(like the Soviet's rolling over Europe).
The vast majority of US BW research was defense related, even befor the above policy. What I'm not sure of policy wise is whether a Nuclear response to a Biological attack is permissable. This may be a case where the historic policies are out of sync with todays realities.
The biggest reason Biological weapons are not used is that there is no BW that is militarily useful. These weapons are only appropriate for genocide, not warefare, and invaribly they'll backfire on you. On the other hand a big draw back to invading an other country has always been have your soldiers coming into contact with natural indiginous diseases. In warfare historicaly, 75% of your casualties are due to disease, only about 4-5% are due to enemy direct fire.
Actualy there is much worse out there. Bacteria with an ID50(Infective Dose for 50% of the healthy adult population) of one organism, and untreated fatality rates approaching 95%. But the things that scare me the most are predominatly non-fatal, there are things that can happen to you that make dieing seem like a relief. More I won't say.
While i realy don't know jack about networking and security, I can't remember an exploit that made big headlines that ran over a port higher than 1024. The ports lower than 1025 have to be opened by a process that at least initialy has root privs, force a buffer overflow and you've got instant root privs and a wide open system.
if the port is greater than 1024 then any UID can open it, overflow it and you only get the privs of the opening UID. This will usualy stop the kiddies dead in there tracks, you're not going to stop a hardcore hacker that realy wants in anyways, usualy around the firewall through some salesweenies modem and telephone extention.
Another thing is what about outgoing connections? Don't they establish a dialog, you know two way, as in talking also involve listening.
I guess what I'm realy pointing out is security is an illusion, the best you can hope for is to make the effort to hack your system greater than the rewards gained. A computer encased in concrete sitting on the bottom of the ocean is as secure as they get, but not very usefull. Force everybody to go around your security policies, and you've got no security.
<obigatoryRant>
Beside I'll bet that you don't block SMTP, and Email read on one of the Microsoft virus launchers is about as insecure as you can get.</obigatoryRant>
I like to use Netscape 4.77 for weg dev because its NOT as forgiving as some other browsers, and not supporting transpency in PNG just kills it for a lot of web stuff.
The new KDE looks good, keep the monkey boys feet to the fire and we'll all gain, nothing like competion to keep everybody sharp
do the math:
15 % for fica,
18% for fed income taxes,
5% state income taxes,
6% or so for state sales tax,
$180 for so for taxes on telephone (each line)
not to mention taxes on heating fuel and electricity,
33% or so of your gasoline cost is taxes
how much in local property taxes?
if this doesn't reach a third of our income I'll be suprised, then factor in how much more your paycheck or stock dividends would be except for fed and state business taxes and its probably over half.
remember we are a very young country, only 200+ years old, actualy i've gotten drunk in bars that were twice as old as the US was while in Germany. It could be argued that our country was a beta test for the French revolution, let'em see what worked and what didn't before they commited to themselves.
Sure there is problems, we are learning, the US is starting to "play nice" with others. Our version of capitalism keeps trying to slip back to a form of political-industrial fuedalism. We are an evolving system and the pressures on us aren't realy that much different than on others just the form is different, here its money=power other countries its gun=power, in others it's who've married or know that counts.
at least if we don't like the way a company acts we can buy stock and vote against the dirtbags at the stock-holders meeting.
Maybe it was up and running in a month but more likely it was something vaguely similar out of the box and didn't realy fit the same specs that the linux box was supposed to do. In short how do we know that we are not comparing apples and oranges?
We don't do we, my crystal ball tells me that if the first CIO crashes and burns on a project, the new CIO gets all the specs downgraded he/she can. Downgrade enough and maybe the project is already done.
If it takes 50% more Win2K boxes to do the job, so much the better, that means more admins to supervise, more hardware and budget to manage, more leverage at the next eval for a pay raise because you have more responsibility!
yeah people like to install things...
Boss "fix my 'puter, the cusors blinks an hour-glass." Get to his house he's got morpheous running full time dumping god only knows what on to the internet, weather-bug updating the weather every 15 seconds and 5 or 6 other trashy shareware/spyware programs running. The system tray streches 90% across an 1280 display and a cable modem with no firewall and no virus protection running! So I throw in a floppy boot of it and format C: and reload.
ME "you backed up your data before you called me didn't you?"
BOSS "no, did you?"
ME "backup would probably have the Virus too(supressed giggle)"
well after that the 'puter was responsive again, at least for a while. I guess that goes to show you easy to install isn't always a good feature, at least in Widows ME(that was a typo but now I think it appropriate).
And as for hardware almost invariably Linux just picks it up, except for some whacko winmodems and windows only sound cards, most of which don't work on my windows machine either. The rest that do work on my Linux machine about half don't work in Windows 95A P90 machine.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to breed and they especialy shouldn't be allowed to install software on their computers. Often in Windows the difference between a virus and a program is that the virus is self-installing, but the program requires the user to specificaly engage in self-destructive behaviour.
I agree, my little bro is a pro sys admin, and he was helping me on my Linux box, He pure Unix.
He was slinging find|greps and man pages commands faster than I could follow, kept TOP up in the 50% range for an hour!
In after an hour of listening to "God I hate Linux, nothing is where its suposed to be" he started running gdb on programs he'd never seen before without the source to reference, and explaining what the programs did based on the system calls they made.
can't learn like that from a book or a braindump
no wonder you're so unhappy, the modern standard is parallel murder. The ultimate in parallel murder is the cluster bomb.
My first computer used 256X4 bit static ram (2 of them!), 500nS, real 'puter geeks wirewrap their motherboards!
Think we could be in for some serious I/O bandwidth problems here? I guess this is good for upward expandablity, but not worth much more than bragging rights in practice; unless you are porting Carnivore to Linux.