This revelation would seem to be at least something of a nail in the coffin of Microsoft selling software to HM Government. I think that here in the UK there is a gradual awakening (both in national and regional government) that there *is* something better than MS's products.
It means no such thing. The policy does not mandate use of Open Source, it merely states that it should be considered. The actual decision is left to the department which can take into account the 'total cost of ownership'.
If a department has already purchased a Microsoft application it will have no difficulty justifying upgrades or additional licenses under this policy.
It isn't even a matter of the cost of retraining. The plain fact of the matter is that the average user of a computer would rather have their fingernails ripped out with pliers rather than learn something new. It isn't only Mac users who can refuse to change from their preferred platform. There are people who absolutely refused to move from JCL.
If a government department is paying its workers 30% less than they can get in the private sector it is a really bad idea for management to go telling them they have to stop using the computer system they are familliar with and use something different.
The significant passage in the policy document was the part where it states that code developed under public grants should by default be open source.
Again, speaking as an expert, Forgent Networks patent has NOTHING to do with JPEG [slashdot.org]. It is quite hard to find prior art for a patent claim that doesn't apply.
Well that may be true, however having had experience of this type of blood sucking weasel facts of that sort do not necessarily do you any good.
Entrust spent $2 million defeating an absolutely crap patent claim by surety. It was so bogus that the prior art for the claim existed in a 1978 MIT Masters Thesis that is extensively referenced (the thesis is credited with inventing the term digital certificate). However it cost Entrust something like $2 million to defend the claim (and Surety paid a similar amount).
The underlying problem here is that not only does the US have a corrupt patent system, but the legal system allows spurious claims to be made that cost imense amounts to defend without risk to the party making the claim.
Nodoby would litigate this type of claim in Europe because the most likely outcome would be that the plaintif would end up paying the costs of the case.
Fight what good fight? Forgent broke no laws. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts.
That remains to be seen.
It is far from clear that a party may legally make a demand for payment on the basis of a spurious IP claim.
The claim that a party has paid $15 million to buy a patent license sounds very fishy to me. It is considerably greater than would normally be paid in that situation.
There is certainly a claim to be fought in the courts. The various manufacturers who have been targetted by begging letters from Forgent are likely to have many legal defenses. It is highly unlikely that a case will be heard before the patent expires in 2004 however.
Huh? Except for the choice of OS? This goes too far. Who gives a crap if they don't use linux? It's not like it runs windows,
Actually since the device plays Microsoft.WMA files it probably does run a Microsoft embedded O/S.
But I really could not give a hoot whether it runs Linux or not, although it must be said that running Windows is a major plus when you want to tweak some Linux-bore droning on about how the fsck command in Linux is ten times better than anything Microsoft have got to offer in Windows XP and how he has it on good authority from a friend that Bill Gates is a gerbilling afficionado etc. etc.
Re:The fraud started before Bush (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 23:31 Sunday 21 July 2002 (#3928204)
If Enron stole tens of billions from California, why did they go bankrupt?
Fraud is very inefficient, to steal $500 million Ebbers and Lay destroyed companies with a Market Cap over $100 billion. The energy market manipulation cost California far more than the fraudsters gained.
p.s., surely you mean Secretary of the Army, not "secretary of state for the Army", which makes no sense whatsoever.
Yes the US title is Secretary of the Army, however the title 'Secretary of State' in British usage (and most former colonies) is the title for any senior member of the cabinet other than the four principal offices of state. The US Secretary of State would be called Foreign Secretary in most countries.
The tax cut hasn't taken effect yet. And if you're an American, you're getting a piece of that tax cut too. I guess that makes you a rich friend of Bush? Whoops.
No, as a member of the working wealthy I pay AMT rates, my taxes were not reduced at all, except for the $500 prepayment that the democrats pushed through.
The tax cut is phased and the drainon the deficit is scheduled to increase, but it is incorrect to say that revenue has not already been lost.
This matter has already been investigated several times, by both parties. It was even used, unsuccessfully, as a campaign issue against Bush. Career workers in the SEC, who just happen to also be Democrats, say there's nothing here.
Another paid GOP stooge putting out the line from the talking points verbatim. First the SEC did not clear Bush, they said they have insufficient evidence to prosecute in a very unusual letter that was written just before Bush ran for Texas govenor. The administration refuses to let the details of the investigation be released.
The issue of whether Bush did something illegal is not the same as whether he did something that was unethical. Bush's insider trades may have been legal because the price of the stock rebounded the day after the announcement, however that does not clear Bush on the character issue, it was still unethical to dump the stock when he did.
After the Repubicans investigtated Whitewater for eight years at a cost of $70 million it is pretty weak that they should be crying uncle this soon into Harkengate, before the congressional hearings have even started. What are they scared of?
The 'lockup agreement' is not the issue... Bush & friends were released from that when the plan to release additional shares was ended.
The real issue (regarding Bush's sale of stock) is whether he improperly acted on inside information when he sold the stock.
It is the combination of the two. Either Bush did not know the lockup agreement had been cancelled in which case he was in breach of the lockup. Or if he knew the lockup had been cancelled he knew that the company had a severe liquidity problem and was guilty of insider trading.
It is a question of character. Some people will argue that a president's character should not be an issue. For my part, I have always considered it an issue. And Bush's actions in that instance do not speak well of his character.
You mean the 'do as I say, not as I do' attitude and the belief that spending 30 minutes talking about character issues means that Bush has character?
There do seem to be a lot of Anonymous Cowards out tonight. Couldn't be that the GOP Internet damage control squad that was boasted about during the election is operating again?
Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Xerox, all started cooking their books when Clinton was President.
They got caught at it when Bush was President.
They may have started to cook the books at Enron while Clinton was President, but there can be little doubt that the largest frauds were carried out during the manipulation of the California energy markets which the Bush administration did nothing to stop, even though the state of California was being defrauded of tens of billions.
So now you want to blame Bush for criminals that started their crimes during the Clinton administration, but were not indicted or prosecuted by the Clinton administration?
I think we can and should blame him for the ones he made VP and secretary of state for the Army,
I think we can and should call him to account for his involvement in an identical scam at Harken Oil.
I can't stand how many people claim that the political blame behind the Enron, WorldCom, and other fradulent companies' downfalls is solely that of President George W. Bush. I find that charge to be along the lines of claiming that Bush's foreign policy failures were the chief reason for last September's terrorist attacks.
You are putting up a straw man here. Nobody is saying that the people with most responsibility for the collapse of Enron, Worldcom and the rest were not the people who ran the companies and their accountant, Arthur Andersen.
However you do expect a President to be able to give a good speech. You do expect a President to make sound proposals for fixing problems. You do expect a President to not have been involved in the same type of corrupt accounting himself.
The problem with Bush is that he has failed on every count. His speech was excrutiating, hypocritical and contained only one concrete policy proposal. He failed to convince the audience that he understood the problem, let alone the solution.
So after Bush gets into the Whitehouse by promising to run the country like a business we suddenly discover how many of the businesses are being run. So how is this a negative, the corporations didn't start cooking the books on election day.
You asked 'how is this a negative' when really what you are trying to ask is 'how is this his fault'.
The worldcom affair is not Bush's fault, however it is a negative because:
1. Make Bush CEO of USA Inc was his principal campaign theme
2. Bush is implicated in corrupt share deallings the full details of the SEC enquiry have yet to be released, but it is already apparent that Bush had signed a lockup agreement promising not to sell the shares at the time he sold. If Bush knew that the share sale that had caused the lockup had had to be cancelled because of the state of the company he was trading on insider information.
3. Chenney and White The VP and the secretary of state for the army are implicated in major corruption scandals.
4. Bush's hypocrisy a day after failling to accept responsibility for his own actions the president takes it upon himself to call on CEOs to do just that.
5. Fuzzy math was used to justify the Tax cut. The books at Enron and Worldcom were not cooked to half the extent that Bush and Co cooked the budget to get the Tax Cut for his rich friends through.
6. The corrupt corporations were run by Republicans with strong links to senior republicans Kenneth Lay was famously a friend of GWB and lent his corporate jet for his campaign. Worldcom was run by Bernie Ebbers who was one of Trent Lott's principal campaign contributors.
So yes, while Worldcom is not the fault of the President it makes people a lot more aware of his shortcommings and is therefore quite justifiably a negative for him.
You can't blame this on Bush. Or the government. Or the Democrats or the Republicans.Or anybody really but the morons at Worldcom and they're auditing firm who thought this would be a good idea.
The WorldCom bankrupcy is the fault of Bernie Ebbers and his crew. It was the insane greed of the CEO that is the root cause of the problem. I mean who honestly needs more than $10 million a year in salary?
The knock on effect on the rest of the markets however is due to Bush. People have no faith in the markets because of a lack of leadership. Bush is not a leader, he is a sock puppet for the corporate interests that paid to elect him.
The reason why the markets fell in real time while Bush prattled about corporate responsibility is because nobody had any faith in either his commitment to make real changes or his ability to do so. Not only was Bush great pals with 'Kenney Boy' Lay and the Enron crooks, he refuses to sack White who personally looted Enron of $50 million while posting $500 million in phony profits for a division that made a huge loss. Bush got rich by precisely the type of Enron style accounting gimmics that are now discredited.
Worldcom may not be Bush's fault, but it highlights Bush's faults. During the election we were told it was OK to have a Boob as President because the real power would be exercised by his appointees. That claim does not look so hot now that Chenney is under SEC investigation for corrupt accounting at Haliburton while the head of the SEC has had to recuse himself from every major investigation that has taken place under his watch.
The political polls are very interesting. When asked 'do you support the President' the results are statospheric, when asked 'do you support George W Bush' his rating is ten to 15 points lower. When the question is 'who would you vote for in 2004' Bush is actually at only 45%. People are not endorsing Bush, they are endorsing the Presidency.
It is not too suprising that advisers like Karl Rove have been pushing to do anything to distract public opinion. What is suprising is that the media failed to report two terrorist alerts that went out last week except in passing. That tactic at least has worn somewhat thin.
The Press essentially gave the Bush administration a free ride for the first six months and after 9/11 became as subservient as Pravda. Now having built him up they will do their favorite trick of breaking him down.
As a participant in this thread, let me say that it's even more amazing how much of a self-righteous dickhead you are, especially considering the fact that you posted a method absolutely void of any useful facts, nor even relating to the conversation that was being had.
I thought it was fairly relevant to the conversation to point out that on a Windows box the ability to compress X-Windows sessions was not going to be the first feature most users would be demanding. Equally if you are going to flame Microsoft over PPTP then you should also point out that many non-Microsoft protocols have come out with serious problems.
So after Bush gets into the Whitehouse by promising to run the country like a business we suddenly discover how many of the businesses are being run.
While there will be a lot of folk pointing out that WorldCom had massive debts, that is not the primary reason for the chapter 11 filing. The banks would have been happy to go on lending if they could trust the books. The company was actually operating profitably - if the 3.8 billion was the limit of the fraud.
So why does a profitable company cook the books? The timing of the fraud makes it look like it was done to save Bernie Ebbers from going bankrupt personaly. He had taken out a massive loan from the company and used it to buy stock. When the market went south Bernie was left owing a third of a billion he could not repay.
The thing I find personally illuminating about all this business is that it turns out that a lot of high powered accountancy turns out to be incomprehensible for the same reason new age psychobabble is incomprehensible - it is complete bullshit.
The problem we now have is that nobody can trust any accounts, even those not audited by Arthur Andersen. While the accounting tricks were clearly being used to mislead in the Enron/Harken cases there are cases where a company might legitimately use a captive company. Equally it is not necessarily fraud when two companies buy from each other (a related party transaction) but how do you tell the difference between a genuine transaction and a fake one?
The problem that the US now faces is that foreign capital is rushing to get out as fast as it can. That may well cause interest rates to rise as the government is forced to fund the budget deficit with loans at higher and higher rates.
Whichever way you look at it this is the end of the line for corporate deregulation. Regulation is now going to be considered pensioner friendly and stockholder friendly. At the very least we will see the sweatheart deals arranged by Enron and the Gramms to exclude energy derivatives from oversight being swept away. But at the deeper level I think that politicians are not going to be able to score easy votes by dennouncing regulation.
It is very curious the way that the second Bush administration is shaping up so much like the first. Stratospheric popularity after an initially successful war in the middle east, then being mired in financial scandal (savings and loans) and a recession while the budget deficit ballooned.
It is amazing how the clue density in this thread appears to be minimal.
IPSEC is an IETF standard, always has been. The standard has some problems, requiring servers that become bottlenecks is not on of them. IPSEC is peer to peer, always has been.
SSH began as an attempt to run Telnet over SSL, back in the very early days. Then they discovered that there were problems with that approach and the SSH protocol is now an application level security protocol while SSL is transport layer and IPSeC packet layer.
The big problem with IPSEC is that it is designed to be peer to peer and is not designed to support the VPN application as its priary objective. As a result it is sub-optimal as a VPN, but hardly sub-optimal enough to go to the hassle of installing something else. Certainly there is not going to be much advantage in running compressed X-Windows sessions off a Windows box...
PPTP is a legacy protocolbuilt in the days when the export controls limited crypto to 40 bits. in those days a lot of broken protocols got developed, there was little point in paying someone competent huge bucks ($5K a day) to design the protocol if you knew it was going to be broken by law. The early versions of SSL were not much better. Ever heard of SSLv1? It was broken at MIT before Marc Andressen had finished explaining it, he spent the rest of the meeting trying to call up his security guru on his cell phone.
The big problem with EFS, as with many Microsoft crypto products is that they don't give enough info on what it does and does not secure. Most people who use it don't even know that they have to export the master escrow certificate keys off the machine in order to get any security from it.
While you are partly right in saying that the capacity grew faster than demand this was not the reason for the bankrupcy and not due to bad planning. The principal cause of the overcapacity is that when you lay fibre the cost of the fibre itself is pretty much lost in the noise. It costs little more to lay 10 strands than it does one. If you are going to dig up a street etc you might as well lay as much fibre as you think you might need.
The reason WorldCom is in the crapper is FRAUD. They basically borrowed money on the basis of false accounts. They were charging the amounts they spent renting bandwidth from other companies as a capital expense. At least at Harken and Enron they only deliberately produced misleading accounts, the Worldcom accounts were fraudulent. As a result of the fraud the banks and bondholders have the right to call in their debt immediately.
The failure of regulation in this case brings to mind George Sorros' book 'The Alchemy of Finance'. Essentially he puts forward a Hegelian theory of government regulation which leads to the prediction of a regulatory cycle. Regulations are gradually relaxed allowing greater and greater productivity until there is a msssive fraud that causes confidence in the markets to be lost and a reintroduction of regulation.
The US fetish for avoiding regulation is pretty odd to europeans. Most businessmen would much prefer to have EU style government regulation than the arbitrary jury awards that have substituted for regulation in the US. Equally regulations that require honest accounting can hardly be called 'anti-business', they are pro business. What it really comes down to is whether the Congress and the whitehouse going to be pro-Shareholder or pro-company insiders.
Whenever I have mod points and read a post that starts 'don't mod this down' in bold font I can be certain it is offtopic, flamebait and a troll.
Sounds somewhat derranged to boot. There is a loony old woman callend Helen Pick who writes letters to everyone who gets a letter publshed in the London Times calling herself the new adam smith and einstein combined...
Perhaps the reason the demand for bandwidth dropped off is that the minute the Internet started every derranged loon on the planet raced to get access and started sending out loonygrams. WE are running out of loonies and so worldcom goes in the crapper.
Or maybe they just had Arthur Andersen audit their accounts.
At one point, the chip was like $5 and the licensing of the name was $1.25 a unit. So, $6.25 for a function that most companies charge an extra $200 for sounds entirely reasonable to me.
It took a long time to insert clues into Apple but it did eventually happen. And please no "oh Apple is allowed to screw arround and be grasping, the rules don't apply to them'. I have had enough of that type of talk throwing up each time Dufus tries to tell CEOs to be more responsible while telling the press that his corrupt deals at Harken Oil don't count, like his DUI didn't count, draft dogging didn't count etc. There are no special rules for Apple just because only 5% of the population (10% if you count Apple users twice because it takes them twice as long to earn the money for a new machine), does not mean there are special rules for them.
Back to apple. What happened is that Apple offered some fairly reasonable terms on price but the contracts were utterly stupid. Basically they only lasted a short time and allowed Apple to increase the royalties to anything they wanted after that.
The other thing was that the contracts had bizare restrictions on what you could sell firewire stuff for which changed from week to week depending on what the Apple strategy of the month happened to be.
The result was that the hardware vendors told Apple to take a hike and went off to Intel to talk about USB2. After the suits at Apple realized that Firewire was not going to succeed they came up with a bunch of sane contract terms and folk started to do firewire.
During the middle of all this an Adaptec guy I spoke to at lunch moaned to me that they had done a Firewire card 'an nobody wanted to buy it' - reason in that case being they wanted eight hundred bucks for it and it was obvious that the thing would cost about thirty within a year.
For glaring hypocracy, cosider the good that was done by declaring war against a tyrant for his invasion of Polland. Surely the tyrant was driven out of Polland and power alltogether and innocent people all through Europe were freed from horrible oppresion and even death camps. Oh wait, Poland was given to another tyrant and the victims of the death camps now run their own in Palestine! All brought to you by English Socialism, the government in power durring and espcially after the destruction of Europe, aka World War II
Hate to break it to you but Winston Churchill was never a socialist (although he did change parties twice from conservative to liberal and back).
The National government was only formed after Churchill took over. The Tories signed the Munich agreement.
The withdrawal from Palestine was forced by the Zionist terrorists, including Yitshak Shamir who according to reports spent the war trying to form an alliance with the NAZIs. Read about the bombing of the King David hotel sometime.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII the UK did not have the military force to liberate Poland or keep the sides apart in Palestine. So they agreed to a partition.
In other words, "I'm not attacking my pet theory on how society should be, I'm attacking the way is currently being implemented". The problem is that people are people,
No, Orwell knew the difference between Socialism and Communism
Republicans don't really like it when they are called facists, even though many of the GOP establishment are hard core racists (Thurmond, Helms) and several are at the least fellow travellers (Barr, De Lay, Lott have all spoken to racist organizations in the past 10 years).
However even though they think that equating the Republican party which tollerates racists with fascism is considered gutter politics, they do not think it wrong to equate socialism and communism. This even though of the only two remaining allies that the US has left under Bush, one (the UK) is governed by a socialist party and the other by a national government where the socialist party is the second largest group.
But then again such hypocrisy is what we have come to expect from a party that spent eight years investigating Clinton and then nominated a candidate who was known at the time to have had shady share dealings and was involved in an even shadier stadium deal.
So if you don't want use to call libertarians and Republicans fascists, don't call socialists communists. It is a cheap smear.
Reportedly Orwell just switched the last two numbers of the year of its writing. It wasn't meant to be a warning of the future, but a critique of the present (Stalinism, etc.)
It is somewhat disappointing that a UC Prof. can write an essay on Orwell without apparently knowing this elementary fact.
Orwell was not making a prophecy, he thought that the USSR would eventually be beaten the same way the NAZI party was. The point of the book was to make people aware that 'Uncle Joe' as he was then called was not the nice guy who saved Britain from Hitler but a monster.
Other facts US authors commonly miss out when they write about Orwell is that he was a socialist, he wrote the 1945 Labor party manifesto. Endless fun can be had at parties getting a libertarian twit to go off on a rant and then tell him that.
If you're foolish enough to make decisions like this without knowing anything about the context, there's a good reason you aren't the one making these decisions (just a guess)
If a decision of that type was made I would be one of the people who made it. In practice there are very few projects where we begin from a completely new code base. For our new applications we generally use Java, but that is largely because we hired a group of folk out of JavaSoft.
The basis on which the decision would be made is programmer productivity, the quality of the end result and the cost of ongoing maintenance.
There are applications where I would not want to use Java. There are not very many and even fewer where I would not use C#. The remaining ones are cases where I would not want to use C++ either.
It is actually quite easy to override the automatic garbage collection, you simply call the dispose method explicitly when you have finished with an object. If you forget you might end up with the garbage collection getting triggered, but that is a much smaller penalty than a memory leak. You can even replace the standard stop and collect garbage collector with an incremental one if your application demands.
Having the syntax the same makes it easier to forget the differences and your responsibilities as far as cleanup, etc...
Which is handled by garnage collection.
I would much rather pay 10% extra for faster processing hardware than 20% extra on my programming budget to have people's memory allocation bugs discovered and fixed.
But why throw out the entire PC when all you need to replace is the graphics card? Or sound card or even processor? Surely one of the key things about having modular PC's on a tight budget(or even a reasonably generous one at that) is that you can do incremental upgrades to various system components - which although being more expensive in the longer term, allows you to see the benefits of upgrading in the shorter term.
What the guy is saying is that the premium you pay for the system being upgradable is much greater than the cost of considering the computer to be upgradeable.
Two years ago I spent $5K on a home PC. Today the only part of the system that is not obsolete is the video card which I replaced about 6 months ago because the old one was not supported by Windows XP (Vendor went out of business)
The nVidia chipset being discussed is targetted at what are likely to be low end machines, but with much better graphics than are ususal for that sector. OK so the graphics are not cutting edge for gamers, but they are probably better than the cards that ship with 90% of PCs today.
The real advantage to me of a system like that is that you could have a complete system in a slimline case without clunky riser cards, something that I might want to have in the living room next to my HiFi.
Now such a system might not be what I would buy for myself as a primary system but I am certain that my 17 month old son is not going to complain about the lack of performance.
If all you need to add is a processor, a case, memory and some disk you could have a complete system for $500 that you could trust to run unattended without fearing it would burn the house down.
Slashdot Mirror
It means no such thing. The policy does not mandate use of Open Source, it merely states that it should be considered. The actual decision is left to the department which can take into account the 'total cost of ownership'.
If a department has already purchased a Microsoft application it will have no difficulty justifying upgrades or additional licenses under this policy.
It isn't even a matter of the cost of retraining. The plain fact of the matter is that the average user of a computer would rather have their fingernails ripped out with pliers rather than learn something new. It isn't only Mac users who can refuse to change from their preferred platform. There are people who absolutely refused to move from JCL.
If a government department is paying its workers 30% less than they can get in the private sector it is a really bad idea for management to go telling them they have to stop using the computer system they are familliar with and use something different.
The significant passage in the policy document was the part where it states that code developed under public grants should by default be open source.
Well that may be true, however having had experience of this type of blood sucking weasel facts of that sort do not necessarily do you any good.
Entrust spent $2 million defeating an absolutely crap patent claim by surety. It was so bogus that the prior art for the claim existed in a 1978 MIT Masters Thesis that is extensively referenced (the thesis is credited with inventing the term digital certificate). However it cost Entrust something like $2 million to defend the claim (and Surety paid a similar amount).
The underlying problem here is that not only does the US have a corrupt patent system, but the legal system allows spurious claims to be made that cost imense amounts to defend without risk to the party making the claim.
Nodoby would litigate this type of claim in Europe because the most likely outcome would be that the plaintif would end up paying the costs of the case.
That remains to be seen.
It is far from clear that a party may legally make a demand for payment on the basis of a spurious IP claim.
The claim that a party has paid $15 million to buy a patent license sounds very fishy to me. It is considerably greater than would normally be paid in that situation.
There is certainly a claim to be fought in the courts. The various manufacturers who have been targetted by begging letters from Forgent are likely to have many legal defenses. It is highly unlikely that a case will be heard before the patent expires in 2004 however.
Actually since the device plays Microsoft .WMA files it probably does run a Microsoft embedded O/S.
But I really could not give a hoot whether it runs Linux or not, although it must be said that running Windows is a major plus when you want to tweak some Linux-bore droning on about how the fsck command in Linux is ten times better than anything Microsoft have got to offer in Windows XP and how he has it on good authority from a friend that Bill Gates is a gerbilling afficionado etc. etc.
Fraud is very inefficient, to steal $500 million Ebbers and Lay destroyed companies with a Market Cap over $100 billion. The energy market manipulation cost California far more than the fraudsters gained.
Yes the US title is Secretary of the Army, however the title 'Secretary of State' in British usage (and most former colonies) is the title for any senior member of the cabinet other than the four principal offices of state. The US Secretary of State would be called Foreign Secretary in most countries.
No, as a member of the working wealthy I pay AMT rates, my taxes were not reduced at all, except for the $500 prepayment that the democrats pushed through.
The tax cut is phased and the drainon the deficit is scheduled to increase, but it is incorrect to say that revenue has not already been lost.
This matter has already been investigated several times, by both parties. It was even used, unsuccessfully, as a campaign issue against Bush. Career workers in the SEC, who just happen to also be Democrats, say there's nothing here.
Another paid GOP stooge putting out the line from the talking points verbatim. First the SEC did not clear Bush, they said they have insufficient evidence to prosecute in a very unusual letter that was written just before Bush ran for Texas govenor. The administration refuses to let the details of the investigation be released.
The issue of whether Bush did something illegal is not the same as whether he did something that was unethical. Bush's insider trades may have been legal because the price of the stock rebounded the day after the announcement, however that does not clear Bush on the character issue, it was still unethical to dump the stock when he did.
After the Repubicans investigtated Whitewater for eight years at a cost of $70 million it is pretty weak that they should be crying uncle this soon into Harkengate, before the congressional hearings have even started. What are they scared of?
It is the combination of the two. Either Bush did not know the lockup agreement had been cancelled in which case he was in breach of the lockup. Or if he knew the lockup had been cancelled he knew that the company had a severe liquidity problem and was guilty of insider trading.
It is a question of character. Some people will argue that a president's character should not be an issue. For my part, I have always considered it an issue. And Bush's actions in that instance do not speak well of his character.
You mean the 'do as I say, not as I do' attitude and the belief that spending 30 minutes talking about character issues means that Bush has character?
Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Xerox, all started cooking their books when Clinton was President. They got caught at it when Bush was President.
They may have started to cook the books at Enron while Clinton was President, but there can be little doubt that the largest frauds were carried out during the manipulation of the California energy markets which the Bush administration did nothing to stop, even though the state of California was being defrauded of tens of billions.
So now you want to blame Bush for criminals that started their crimes during the Clinton administration, but were not indicted or prosecuted by the Clinton administration?
I think we can and should blame him for the ones he made VP and secretary of state for the Army,
I think we can and should call him to account for his involvement in an identical scam at Harken Oil.
You are putting up a straw man here. Nobody is saying that the people with most responsibility for the collapse of Enron, Worldcom and the rest were not the people who ran the companies and their accountant, Arthur Andersen.
However you do expect a President to be able to give a good speech. You do expect a President to make sound proposals for fixing problems. You do expect a President to not have been involved in the same type of corrupt accounting himself.
The problem with Bush is that he has failed on every count. His speech was excrutiating, hypocritical and contained only one concrete policy proposal. He failed to convince the audience that he understood the problem, let alone the solution.
You asked 'how is this a negative' when really what you are trying to ask is 'how is this his fault'.
The worldcom affair is not Bush's fault, however it is a negative because:
1. Make Bush CEO of USA Inc was his principal campaign theme
2. Bush is implicated in corrupt share deallings the full details of the SEC enquiry have yet to be released, but it is already apparent that Bush had signed a lockup agreement promising not to sell the shares at the time he sold. If Bush knew that the share sale that had caused the lockup had had to be cancelled because of the state of the company he was trading on insider information.
3. Chenney and White The VP and the secretary of state for the army are implicated in major corruption scandals.
4. Bush's hypocrisy a day after failling to accept responsibility for his own actions the president takes it upon himself to call on CEOs to do just that.
5. Fuzzy math was used to justify the Tax cut. The books at Enron and Worldcom were not cooked to half the extent that Bush and Co cooked the budget to get the Tax Cut for his rich friends through.
6. The corrupt corporations were run by Republicans with strong links to senior republicans Kenneth Lay was famously a friend of GWB and lent his corporate jet for his campaign. Worldcom was run by Bernie Ebbers who was one of Trent Lott's principal campaign contributors.
So yes, while Worldcom is not the fault of the President it makes people a lot more aware of his shortcommings and is therefore quite justifiably a negative for him.
The WorldCom bankrupcy is the fault of Bernie Ebbers and his crew. It was the insane greed of the CEO that is the root cause of the problem. I mean who honestly needs more than $10 million a year in salary?
The knock on effect on the rest of the markets however is due to Bush. People have no faith in the markets because of a lack of leadership. Bush is not a leader, he is a sock puppet for the corporate interests that paid to elect him.
The reason why the markets fell in real time while Bush prattled about corporate responsibility is because nobody had any faith in either his commitment to make real changes or his ability to do so. Not only was Bush great pals with 'Kenney Boy' Lay and the Enron crooks, he refuses to sack White who personally looted Enron of $50 million while posting $500 million in phony profits for a division that made a huge loss. Bush got rich by precisely the type of Enron style accounting gimmics that are now discredited.
Worldcom may not be Bush's fault, but it highlights Bush's faults. During the election we were told it was OK to have a Boob as President because the real power would be exercised by his appointees. That claim does not look so hot now that Chenney is under SEC investigation for corrupt accounting at Haliburton while the head of the SEC has had to recuse himself from every major investigation that has taken place under his watch.
The political polls are very interesting. When asked 'do you support the President' the results are statospheric, when asked 'do you support George W Bush' his rating is ten to 15 points lower. When the question is 'who would you vote for in 2004' Bush is actually at only 45%. People are not endorsing Bush, they are endorsing the Presidency.
It is not too suprising that advisers like Karl Rove have been pushing to do anything to distract public opinion. What is suprising is that the media failed to report two terrorist alerts that went out last week except in passing. That tactic at least has worn somewhat thin.
The Press essentially gave the Bush administration a free ride for the first six months and after 9/11 became as subservient as Pravda. Now having built him up they will do their favorite trick of breaking him down.
I thought it was fairly relevant to the conversation to point out that on a Windows box the ability to compress X-Windows sessions was not going to be the first feature most users would be demanding. Equally if you are going to flame Microsoft over PPTP then you should also point out that many non-Microsoft protocols have come out with serious problems.
While there will be a lot of folk pointing out that WorldCom had massive debts, that is not the primary reason for the chapter 11 filing. The banks would have been happy to go on lending if they could trust the books. The company was actually operating profitably - if the 3.8 billion was the limit of the fraud.
So why does a profitable company cook the books? The timing of the fraud makes it look like it was done to save Bernie Ebbers from going bankrupt personaly. He had taken out a massive loan from the company and used it to buy stock. When the market went south Bernie was left owing a third of a billion he could not repay.
The thing I find personally illuminating about all this business is that it turns out that a lot of high powered accountancy turns out to be incomprehensible for the same reason new age psychobabble is incomprehensible - it is complete bullshit.
The problem we now have is that nobody can trust any accounts, even those not audited by Arthur Andersen. While the accounting tricks were clearly being used to mislead in the Enron/Harken cases there are cases where a company might legitimately use a captive company. Equally it is not necessarily fraud when two companies buy from each other (a related party transaction) but how do you tell the difference between a genuine transaction and a fake one?
The problem that the US now faces is that foreign capital is rushing to get out as fast as it can. That may well cause interest rates to rise as the government is forced to fund the budget deficit with loans at higher and higher rates.
Whichever way you look at it this is the end of the line for corporate deregulation. Regulation is now going to be considered pensioner friendly and stockholder friendly. At the very least we will see the sweatheart deals arranged by Enron and the Gramms to exclude energy derivatives from oversight being swept away. But at the deeper level I think that politicians are not going to be able to score easy votes by dennouncing regulation.
It is very curious the way that the second Bush administration is shaping up so much like the first. Stratospheric popularity after an initially successful war in the middle east, then being mired in financial scandal (savings and loans) and a recession while the budget deficit ballooned.
IPSEC is an IETF standard, always has been. The standard has some problems, requiring servers that become bottlenecks is not on of them. IPSEC is peer to peer, always has been.
SSH began as an attempt to run Telnet over SSL, back in the very early days. Then they discovered that there were problems with that approach and the SSH protocol is now an application level security protocol while SSL is transport layer and IPSeC packet layer.
The big problem with IPSEC is that it is designed to be peer to peer and is not designed to support the VPN application as its priary objective. As a result it is sub-optimal as a VPN, but hardly sub-optimal enough to go to the hassle of installing something else. Certainly there is not going to be much advantage in running compressed X-Windows sessions off a Windows box...
PPTP is a legacy protocolbuilt in the days when the export controls limited crypto to 40 bits. in those days a lot of broken protocols got developed, there was little point in paying someone competent huge bucks ($5K a day) to design the protocol if you knew it was going to be broken by law. The early versions of SSL were not much better. Ever heard of SSLv1? It was broken at MIT before Marc Andressen had finished explaining it, he spent the rest of the meeting trying to call up his security guru on his cell phone.
The big problem with EFS, as with many Microsoft crypto products is that they don't give enough info on what it does and does not secure. Most people who use it don't even know that they have to export the master escrow certificate keys off the machine in order to get any security from it.
The reason WorldCom is in the crapper is FRAUD. They basically borrowed money on the basis of false accounts. They were charging the amounts they spent renting bandwidth from other companies as a capital expense. At least at Harken and Enron they only deliberately produced misleading accounts, the Worldcom accounts were fraudulent. As a result of the fraud the banks and bondholders have the right to call in their debt immediately.
The failure of regulation in this case brings to mind George Sorros' book 'The Alchemy of Finance'. Essentially he puts forward a Hegelian theory of government regulation which leads to the prediction of a regulatory cycle. Regulations are gradually relaxed allowing greater and greater productivity until there is a msssive fraud that causes confidence in the markets to be lost and a reintroduction of regulation.
The US fetish for avoiding regulation is pretty odd to europeans. Most businessmen would much prefer to have EU style government regulation than the arbitrary jury awards that have substituted for regulation in the US. Equally regulations that require honest accounting can hardly be called 'anti-business', they are pro business. What it really comes down to is whether the Congress and the whitehouse going to be pro-Shareholder or pro-company insiders.
Sounds somewhat derranged to boot. There is a loony old woman callend Helen Pick who writes letters to everyone who gets a letter publshed in the London Times calling herself the new adam smith and einstein combined...
Perhaps the reason the demand for bandwidth dropped off is that the minute the Internet started every derranged loon on the planet raced to get access and started sending out loonygrams. WE are running out of loonies and so worldcom goes in the crapper.
Or maybe they just had Arthur Andersen audit their accounts.
It took a long time to insert clues into Apple but it did eventually happen. And please no "oh Apple is allowed to screw arround and be grasping, the rules don't apply to them'. I have had enough of that type of talk throwing up each time Dufus tries to tell CEOs to be more responsible while telling the press that his corrupt deals at Harken Oil don't count, like his DUI didn't count, draft dogging didn't count etc. There are no special rules for Apple just because only 5% of the population (10% if you count Apple users twice because it takes them twice as long to earn the money for a new machine), does not mean there are special rules for them.
Back to apple. What happened is that Apple offered some fairly reasonable terms on price but the contracts were utterly stupid. Basically they only lasted a short time and allowed Apple to increase the royalties to anything they wanted after that.
The other thing was that the contracts had bizare restrictions on what you could sell firewire stuff for which changed from week to week depending on what the Apple strategy of the month happened to be.
The result was that the hardware vendors told Apple to take a hike and went off to Intel to talk about USB2. After the suits at Apple realized that Firewire was not going to succeed they came up with a bunch of sane contract terms and folk started to do firewire.
During the middle of all this an Adaptec guy I spoke to at lunch moaned to me that they had done a Firewire card 'an nobody wanted to buy it' - reason in that case being they wanted eight hundred bucks for it and it was obvious that the thing would cost about thirty within a year.
Hate to break it to you but Winston Churchill was never a socialist (although he did change parties twice from conservative to liberal and back).
The National government was only formed after Churchill took over. The Tories signed the Munich agreement.
The withdrawal from Palestine was forced by the Zionist terrorists, including Yitshak Shamir who according to reports spent the war trying to form an alliance with the NAZIs. Read about the bombing of the King David hotel sometime.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII the UK did not have the military force to liberate Poland or keep the sides apart in Palestine. So they agreed to a partition.
No, Orwell knew the difference between Socialism and Communism
Republicans don't really like it when they are called facists, even though many of the GOP establishment are hard core racists (Thurmond, Helms) and several are at the least fellow travellers (Barr, De Lay, Lott have all spoken to racist organizations in the past 10 years).
However even though they think that equating the Republican party which tollerates racists with fascism is considered gutter politics, they do not think it wrong to equate socialism and communism. This even though of the only two remaining allies that the US has left under Bush, one (the UK) is governed by a socialist party and the other by a national government where the socialist party is the second largest group.
But then again such hypocrisy is what we have come to expect from a party that spent eight years investigating Clinton and then nominated a candidate who was known at the time to have had shady share dealings and was involved in an even shadier stadium deal.
So if you don't want use to call libertarians and Republicans fascists, don't call socialists communists. It is a cheap smear.
It is somewhat disappointing that a UC Prof. can write an essay on Orwell without apparently knowing this elementary fact.
Orwell was not making a prophecy, he thought that the USSR would eventually be beaten the same way the NAZI party was. The point of the book was to make people aware that 'Uncle Joe' as he was then called was not the nice guy who saved Britain from Hitler but a monster.
Other facts US authors commonly miss out when they write about Orwell is that he was a socialist, he wrote the 1945 Labor party manifesto. Endless fun can be had at parties getting a libertarian twit to go off on a rant and then tell him that.
Actually buffer overrun bugs would be a bigger worry.
I didn't have those problems when I wrote C because I had a bunch of macros that handled it all for me. But other folk seemed to have difficulties...
If a decision of that type was made I would be one of the people who made it. In practice there are very few projects where we begin from a completely new code base. For our new applications we generally use Java, but that is largely because we hired a group of folk out of JavaSoft.
The basis on which the decision would be made is programmer productivity, the quality of the end result and the cost of ongoing maintenance.
There are applications where I would not want to use Java. There are not very many and even fewer where I would not use C#. The remaining ones are cases where I would not want to use C++ either.
It is actually quite easy to override the automatic garbage collection, you simply call the dispose method explicitly when you have finished with an object. If you forget you might end up with the garbage collection getting triggered, but that is a much smaller penalty than a memory leak. You can even replace the standard stop and collect garbage collector with an incremental one if your application demands.
Which is handled by garnage collection.
I would much rather pay 10% extra for faster processing hardware than 20% extra on my programming budget to have people's memory allocation bugs discovered and fixed.
What the guy is saying is that the premium you pay for the system being upgradable is much greater than the cost of considering the computer to be upgradeable.
Two years ago I spent $5K on a home PC. Today the only part of the system that is not obsolete is the video card which I replaced about 6 months ago because the old one was not supported by Windows XP (Vendor went out of business)
The nVidia chipset being discussed is targetted at what are likely to be low end machines, but with much better graphics than are ususal for that sector. OK so the graphics are not cutting edge for gamers, but they are probably better than the cards that ship with 90% of PCs today.
The real advantage to me of a system like that is that you could have a complete system in a slimline case without clunky riser cards, something that I might want to have in the living room next to my HiFi.
Now such a system might not be what I would buy for myself as a primary system but I am certain that my 17 month old son is not going to complain about the lack of performance.
If all you need to add is a processor, a case, memory and some disk you could have a complete system for $500 that you could trust to run unattended without fearing it would burn the house down.