Hopefully this might provide more public incentive in terms of supporting conservation efforts.
This raises some interesting possibilities. According to some of the local tribes, Thylacines supposedly still exist in some of the high mountain valleys of New Guinea. It would be really nice if a viable population was found and this sounds like just the place where that might happen. If that was the case the I bet the Australians will be interested.
Except for a few crackpots I don't think that Mac users in general have ever claimed immunity from malware. We do, however, justifiably claim to have a more secure out-of-the-box operating system than Microsoft and so do the Linux geeks. That being said there have also been a few crackpots who made and continue to make the virus immunity claim for Linux. I don't think that most Linux user take them seriously either.
... for the US. Govt.? They could recoupe some of the development and deployment costs of their spy technology. Sell a complete Software/Hardware package for small operators and call it: Echelon (TM), Corporate edition.
.... Uhummmmm...... Now where did I leave that copy of 1984?????
You're right, it was likely a foreign intelligence service. Greece's main geopolitical rival is Turkey, I would suspect it was people working for the Turkish intelligence services.
I sure hope not, the last thing we need more sabre rattling in the Balkans.
I know... like, how the hell does she pirate music and have meaningless arguments with strangers?
You join either the Democrat or Republican parties and attend the party congress. You will get into plenty of meaningless arguments although some say the the patriotic music offered at these events tends to be a bit cheesy. If you want to get serious about meaningless arguments you can also run for the Senate. Be warned it is an expensive hobby and you have to have your moral backbone and conscience surgically removed.
... the white stuff lying around all over the place is not manna from heaven (do not try to sniff it) and the critters, in the water, the ones with the triangular fins, those are Microsoft salesmen, they bite!!!
... the detailed reproduction of another manufacturers product following detailed study of it's function and composition.
That sentence came from the Oxford American Dictionary. To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is. All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals. Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow. You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now. Instead Intel has now adopted the AMD64 instruction set that AMD came up with which is basically just x86 extended to 64 bit. The 'Mono' implementation of the Microsoft.NET architecture would be another example of somebody coming up with an alternative implementation without it being reverse engineering. The components of Mono may actually work more efficiently or also much less efficiently than their.NET counterparts but they behave the same and have an identical interface but very different internals.
You did raise an interesting point about limited reverse engineering which is probably true. In order to clear up inconsistencies and undocumented features in the Windows API the Wine team probably did some analysis of Windows. Surprisingly enough I recenty found out that this is actually permissable under copyright laws, at least in my own country, if the manufacturer is reluctant to issue full and comprehensive documentation and it is vital to the success of your project and you are not attempting to replicate the internals of the undocumented product just determine how it works to fill in patchy documentation which is the case with Microsoft and the Wine team in this case, they are not making a bolt for bolt replica of Windows. From what I can tell Wine is not doing anything illegal or unethical if they were producing line for line copies of Windows system binaries by reverse engineering Windows source code that would be another matter.
1. Torvalds decides he hates the GPL, revokes it and switches to closed source. In this instance, everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
2. Someone sues Linus for copyright infringement. While the case is bogus, Torvalds settles out of court, agreeing to no longer distribute Linux. Everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
3. Someone sneaks code into the operating system that they didn't own the copyright to in the first place, and sues Torvalds. This is exactly the same scenario as would happen anyway (eg if IBM lost its lawsuit to SCO.)
While you raised a series of interesting points you also forgot some important scenarios:
4. Linus is kinapped by a group of highly trained SCO lawyer-commandos and brainwashed into becoming a fierce proponet of SCO-Unix.
5. The Bush administration abandons the war on terrorism as unwinnable, declares Linux an un-American actvity and carries Linus off to an internment camp at the bottom of a crater on the frigid plains of Vastitas Borealis on Mars.
6. Linux systems all over the world become self aware, form a huge super cluster and merge into a collosal artificial lifeform that decides expunge to all carbon based lifeforms from the face of the galaxy, starting with Humans.
... is that he has managed to cause the most serious rift between the USA and some of her oldest allies since the Nato alliance was founded after the Second World War and then had his cronies demonize those nations among the American people and all of this over a retaliatory campaign against a potatohead dictator in the the Middle East which into the bargain was based on some of the crappiest intelligence gathering in human history. You would think that if a US president would present his allies political leaders with the twin choices of doing what he wants and commit political suicide in the process of assisting him or face the de facto severance of political ties between his administration and their nations it would be over something truly important.
I'd think that it would be easier to get *nix running on the new iMacs than Windows, if only because one has the ability to modify the well-documented OS, rather than suffering through messy patches and hacks.
I would bet on Linux simply because there is a mere Cohort or two of developers working on Windows development while there are entire Legions of Developers/Nerds (Is there difference?) working on Linux development. That plus the Linux geeks are motivated by the prospect of humiliating Microsoft by beating them to it, the Microsoft developers, however, are motivated by mere money. It must be rather embarrassing for Microsoft to have to live through the shame that the Macs are so cutting edge that even Vista won't boot on he InteMacs at the moment and having Linux of all OS'es beat their flagship product to the punch would be even worse.
That said, I have a greater interest in seeing Windows on an iMac (for gaming and such). Perhaps Redhat's efforts would help this happen?
At first I was going to say no but now that I think about it the humiliation of having Linux beat them to it might actually result in some asses getting kicked at Microsoft.
Which ties back into the original subject rather neatly, I think. If your employer pays for you to learn new stuff, good for you - take advantage of it. If not, oh well. Either way, you'd be well advised to take every opportunity to learn new things, even stupid things like Windows administration, and if that means doing it on your own time, so be it. The alternative is to risk waking up some morning and finding yourself out of work and unemployable because nobody wants the sorts of skills you have any more.
From my point of view the thing that really matters when deciding which job to go after or which offer to take is how marketable will your skills be when you have to change jobs in a few years? I would rather take a low paying job that say, gives me Oracle or Java development skills than a very high paying job that offers knowledge few companies want. I have always followed this principle and have yet to live to regret it unlike some of my classmates from university who followed the money and are now stuck in difficult to get out of niches in the job market.
The thing that really burns about training is that alot of companies don't do it any more because the people that they do take the trouble to train are frequently poached by other organizations right after they are fully trained and be cause there are no legal safeguards against such poaching. To a certain extent I can understand this, your company sinks a significant sum into training somebody say as an MCSE (or the even more expensive Oracle and Cisco certificates) and then has to watch the guy go to some other company the day he gets his qualifications. Why isn't it possible, for example, to allow companies to make training contracts, stipulating for example lower pay during the training period when the worker is only of limited value, followed by a suitable pay rise when he is finished and then binding him/her to the job for a period afterwards so the employer is insured against poachers? Possibly not the best solution but surely something can be done. It sucks that there really are companies out there whose training policy is simply to leech off (what they doubtless regard as) the 'morons', ie. firms and companies that are still socially responsible enough to offer their employees training programs. Another thing I often hear corporate types whine about is that it should really be the employees and not the companies who pay for things like MCSE, Cisco or Oracle certifications which is a nice thought and I would probably do so if the well stocked portfolio of such certificates that these same corporate slimers then argue I should pay for out of my own pocket didn't cost an arm and a leg. I don't suppose they have taken a look at what those training courses complete with lectures actually cost?
I have several devices and applications which only support Internet Explorer 6 as a web client.
While a majority of the functionality is there when I connect with Firefox or Safari, I cannot complete all the tasks I need to get the job done. In addition, the vendor typically refuses to provide me with any support unless I'm using IE6 on a Windows computer (no virtual pc, either).
I have the same problem. I still don't understand why somebody would bother to create a webapp that will only function properly on IE6 on Windows? I have seen several such monstrosities and they completely defeat the idea of a well designed webapp which, for me at least, has always been complete independence of browser type and the undrelying OS.
Once I upgrade to a Windows-friendly Mac, I can get rid of that extra case under my desk. Also, with the possibility of multiple concurrent OSes running in their own virutal hardware partitions, I can run a test environment with a server and a client on the same machine.
Now I can get rid of three CPUs under my desk, along with the KVM switch and the Ethernet hub.
I thought the whole point of getting OS X to Intel hardware was to propogate OS X?
Assuming that by 'propogate' you mean sell OS.X to run on generic PC's from bulk vendors like DELL,
The short answer is: NO
The long answer is: The move to Intel was done to enable Apple to market competitive, powerful, well designed and highly compact laptops. They still won't tolerate OS.X being run on non Apple computers.
Why are we so concerned about getting the iMac to run Windows?
So we can dual boot it with OS.X and use Windows to get maximum performance and stability out of Windows only PC games. Why else?????
Seriously, if you "brickify" your iMac while trying to Windoze-it, good... I laugh at you from a far... you deserve to own a $1300 paperweight.
You are new to this whole Nerd thing aren't you? The whole point of being a Nerd is to try to do tings to see if they can be done. Nerds never have, do not now and never will need a reason to do nerdy things and the same goes for stopping to think about the consequences. If we did stop to think about what we are doing so many of mankind's greatest discoveries and achievements would never have happened, the Manhattan project for example would never have been sucessfully concluded.
There are really only two other Enterprise solutions for wireless e-mail. One is a Good Link server and a compatible mobile device running a Good Link client (PPC, Palm or a BB). The other is an Exchange 2003 SP2 server and Windows Mobile 5 device.
Does either of them offer the same ' always-up-to-date' push feature for E-Mail that RIM+Blackberry does? The last time I looked Exchange didn't offer push service but even so Exchange+WindowsMobile still doesa an admirable job at keeping me connected, even on VPN connections over GPRS. Push e-mail is the main attraction of the RIM setup. Not that I want to trash start a flamewar by trashing RIM, Blackberry seems to have gathered a religious following in some quarters, but a determined and innovative competitor could do alot better.
The specualtion about super bugs seems misplaced. So far antibiotics work quite well, albeit with limited lifespans of usefulness before resistance is induced...
True enough, but the problem is that this induction of resistance is being seriously accelerated by massive abuse and oversubscription of antibiotics. Using anti biotics on a large scale in agriculture for example may be profitable but it has also ruined several drugs that could otherwise still be used to treat humans. Similarly massive 'convenience subscription' of antibiotics in cases that were not all that serious, just to get somebody to work a couple of days earlyer or save them a bit of discomfort, has also contributed to creating resistant bacteria. And this does not just go for anti bacterial drugs. The Chinese managed to wreck several antiviral drugs in the sense that they are probably useless for treating bird flu by using them on chickens. Trying to argue that human abuse of these drugs has not contributed to the on the emergance of superbugs is silly.
Yeah, weird that they might want a machine running Windows XP to be updated. You might have Linux on the machine, but you also had Windows XP, and it sounds like it was missing security patches.
The fact that he hadn't noticed the loginscripts for over a week indicates to me that the didn't use his XP installation at work alot and even then how can you assert it wasn't patched? He may even have had to wait until a patch becaeme available to qualify for a connection because his XP installation was already fully patches! Off hand I am guessing this guy probably got issued a laptop from his employer and used installed Linux on it for day to day for home as well as for work use dual booted with XP for mostly for gaming and perhaps for that once-in-a-blue-moon that he couldn't get something done at work with Wine+[Random M$ application] and for Gaming.
I fail to see how this was stupid of the network admins. Draconian maybe, but it got you to apply the security patches.
It is stupid because they could have exempted him from their Windows specific policy quite easily. It is stupid because they may even have given him a hard time because they didn't even know how to exempt a non Windows boxen from their MS specific setup. All it would have taken was to send somebody up stairs to check out his setup for security and if it was OK adapt the policy. If you are an IT tech that works alot around Engineers, non-MS admins or Programmers you are going to have to get used to cases like this (ie. escaped mental patients who use Linux or OS.X in a corporate environment) and unless you find out how to cater to people running non-MS Operating systems you will quickly find out that you haven't got any friends willing to do you a favor when you really need it (ie. when you have screwed up and need a quick fix from the local nerds).
"Being a Microsoft proponent in an argument about operating systems is like being a white male in a discussion on discrimination."
Hmmmm... nice analogy but why choose such a complicated topic??? I have found that in order to trigger the unwinnable argument effect it is usually enough (assuming you are a human male) to get into a discussion with a human female as to whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. This argument is actually much more venomous than the one you cited since it tends to go on forever and can furthermore result in a permanent damage to your sex life unless you resort to subterfuge and allow the female to believe she won.
...How many people know the new macs actually ARE pc's? Of course they aren't, cuz there are macs and pcs right?... Fortunately, porting OS X to standard PC will maybe awaken some puzzling among the general audience.
Abstracting the Mac from the concept of a PC to the point where the consumers don't realize that the only really significant difference between the MacPC and the WinPC is that the former has (or used to have) a PPC processor and the latter has a crappy OS has to be one of the greater triumphs of Apple's marketing department. I suppose that even though one is sometimes tempted to think so not all marketing people are morons.
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Hopefully this might provide more public incentive in terms of supporting conservation efforts.
This raises some interesting possibilities. According to some of the local tribes, Thylacines supposedly still exist in some of the high mountain valleys of New Guinea. It would be really nice if a viable population was found and this sounds like just the place where that might happen. If that was the case the I bet the Australians will be interested.
I don't think anyone but Mac users claim that.
Except for a few crackpots I don't think that Mac users in general have ever claimed immunity from malware. We do, however, justifiably claim to have a more secure out-of-the-box operating system than Microsoft and so do the Linux geeks. That being said there have also been a few crackpots who made and continue to make the virus immunity claim for Linux. I don't think that most Linux user take them seriously either.
...but for complete safety wrap your mobile phone (and preferably also your entire head) in Aluminium foil.
... for the US. Govt.? They could recoupe some of the development and deployment costs of their spy technology. Sell a complete Software/Hardware package for small operators and call it: Echelon (TM), Corporate edition.
.... Uhummmmm...... Now where did I leave that copy of 1984?????
You're right, it was likely a foreign intelligence service. Greece's main geopolitical rival is Turkey, I would suspect it was people working for the Turkish intelligence services.
I sure hope not, the last thing we need more sabre rattling in the Balkans.
I know... like, how the hell does she pirate music and have meaningless arguments with strangers?
You join either the Democrat or Republican parties and attend the party congress. You will get into plenty of meaningless arguments although some say the the patriotic music offered at these events tends to be a bit cheesy. If you want to get serious about meaningless arguments you can also run for the Senate. Be warned it is an expensive hobby and you have to have your moral backbone and conscience surgically removed.
... the white stuff lying around all over the place is not manna from heaven (do not try to sniff it) and the critters, in the water, the ones with the triangular fins, those are Microsoft salesmen, they bite!!!
Do I get mod points now?
... you don't get the mod points until you explain what exactly it is that Microsoft is sucking on?
... Bill need more than a staple for that partickular EULA. A 10mm steel bolt perhaps?
... the detailed reproduction of another manufacturers product following detailed study of it's function and composition.
.NET architecture would be another example of somebody coming up with an alternative implementation without it being reverse engineering. The components of Mono may actually work more efficiently or also much less efficiently than their .NET counterparts but they behave the same and have an identical interface but very different internals.
That sentence came from the Oxford American Dictionary. To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is. All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals. Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow. You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now. Instead Intel has now adopted the AMD64 instruction set that AMD came up with which is basically just x86 extended to 64 bit. The 'Mono' implementation of the Microsoft
You did raise an interesting point about limited reverse engineering which is probably true. In order to clear up inconsistencies and undocumented features in the Windows API the Wine team probably did some analysis of Windows. Surprisingly enough I recenty found out that this is actually permissable under copyright laws, at least in my own country, if the manufacturer is reluctant to issue full and comprehensive documentation and it is vital to the success of your project and you are not attempting to replicate the internals of the undocumented product just determine how it works to fill in patchy documentation which is the case with Microsoft and the Wine team in this case, they are not making a bolt for bolt replica of Windows. From what I can tell Wine is not doing anything illegal or unethical if they were producing line for line copies of Windows system binaries by reverse engineering Windows source code that would be another matter.
... backing that claim up with hard evidence would have been easy (that's the legendary blood-thirsty rabbit of Caerbannog in case you are wondering)
The scenarios I'm reading into your comment are:
1. Torvalds decides he hates the GPL, revokes it and switches to closed source. In this instance, everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
2. Someone sues Linus for copyright infringement. While the case is bogus, Torvalds settles out of court, agreeing to no longer distribute Linux. Everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
3. Someone sneaks code into the operating system that they didn't own the copyright to in the first place, and sues Torvalds. This is exactly the same scenario as would happen anyway (eg if IBM lost its lawsuit to SCO.)
While you raised a series of interesting points you also forgot some important scenarios:
4. Linus is kinapped by a group of highly trained SCO lawyer-commandos and brainwashed into becoming a fierce proponet of SCO-Unix.
5. The Bush administration abandons the war on terrorism as unwinnable, declares Linux an un-American actvity and carries Linus off to an internment camp at the bottom of a crater on the frigid plains of Vastitas Borealis on Mars.
6. Linux systems all over the world become self aware, form a huge super cluster and merge into a collosal artificial lifeform that decides expunge to all carbon based lifeforms from the face of the galaxy, starting with Humans.
... is that he has managed to cause the most serious rift between the USA and some of her oldest allies since the Nato alliance was founded after the Second World War and then had his cronies demonize those nations among the American people and all of this over a retaliatory campaign against a potatohead dictator in the the Middle East which into the bargain was based on some of the crappiest intelligence gathering in human history. You would think that if a US president would present his allies political leaders with the twin choices of doing what he wants and commit political suicide in the process of assisting him or face the de facto severance of political ties between his administration and their nations it would be over something truly important.
I'd think that it would be easier to get *nix running on the new iMacs than Windows, if only because one has the ability to modify the well-documented OS, rather than suffering through messy patches and hacks.
I would bet on Linux simply because there is a mere Cohort or two of developers working on Windows development while there are entire Legions of Developers/Nerds (Is there difference?) working on Linux development. That plus the Linux geeks are motivated by the prospect of humiliating Microsoft by beating them to it, the Microsoft developers, however, are motivated by mere money. It must be rather embarrassing for Microsoft to have to live through the shame that the Macs are so cutting edge that even Vista won't boot on he InteMacs at the moment and having Linux of all OS'es beat their flagship product to the punch would be even worse.
That said, I have a greater interest in seeing Windows on an iMac (for gaming and such). Perhaps Redhat's efforts would help this happen?
At first I was going to say no but now that I think about it the humiliation of having Linux beat them to it might actually result in some asses getting kicked at Microsoft.
Which ties back into the original subject rather neatly, I think. If your employer pays for you to learn new stuff, good for you - take advantage of it. If not, oh well. Either way, you'd be well advised to take every opportunity to learn new things, even stupid things like Windows administration, and if that means doing it on your own time, so be it. The alternative is to risk waking up some morning and finding yourself out of work and unemployable because nobody wants the sorts of skills you have any more.
From my point of view the thing that really matters when deciding which job to go after or which offer to take is how marketable will your skills be when you have to change jobs in a few years? I would rather take a low paying job that say, gives me Oracle or Java development skills than a very high paying job that offers knowledge few companies want. I have always followed this principle and have yet to live to regret it unlike some of my classmates from university who followed the money and are now stuck in difficult to get out of niches in the job market.
The thing that really burns about training is that alot of companies don't do it any more because the people that they do take the trouble to train are frequently poached by other organizations right after they are fully trained and be cause there are no legal safeguards against such poaching. To a certain extent I can understand this, your company sinks a significant sum into training somebody say as an MCSE (or the even more expensive Oracle and Cisco certificates) and then has to watch the guy go to some other company the day he gets his qualifications. Why isn't it possible, for example, to allow companies to make training contracts, stipulating for example lower pay during the training period when the worker is only of limited value, followed by a suitable pay rise when he is finished and then binding him/her to the job for a period afterwards so the employer is insured against poachers? Possibly not the best solution but surely something can be done. It sucks that there really are companies out there whose training policy is simply to leech off (what they doubtless regard as) the 'morons', ie. firms and companies that are still socially responsible enough to offer their employees training programs. Another thing I often hear corporate types whine about is that it should really be the employees and not the companies who pay for things like MCSE, Cisco or Oracle certifications which is a nice thought and I would probably do so if the well stocked portfolio of such certificates that these same corporate slimers then argue I should pay for out of my own pocket didn't cost an arm and a leg. I don't suppose they have taken a look at what those training courses complete with lectures actually cost?
Wann hast du deine iMac emgebricken
My German is a bit rusty, I am not a native speaker, but I think that should be:
Du Arschloch ! Hast du meinen iMac Verziegelt?
If this post has offended your sentiments please accept my (complete lack of an) apology.
I have several devices and applications which only support Internet Explorer 6 as a web client.
While a majority of the functionality is there when I connect with Firefox or Safari, I cannot complete all the tasks I need to get the job done. In addition, the vendor typically refuses to provide me with any support unless I'm using IE6 on a Windows computer (no virtual pc, either).
I have the same problem. I still don't understand why somebody would bother to create a webapp that will only function properly on IE6 on Windows? I have seen several such monstrosities and they completely defeat the idea of a well designed webapp which, for me at least, has always been complete independence of browser type and the undrelying OS.
Once I upgrade to a Windows-friendly Mac, I can get rid of that extra case under my desk. Also, with the possibility of multiple concurrent OSes running in their own virutal hardware partitions, I can run a test environment with a server and a client on the same machine.
Now I can get rid of three CPUs under my desk, along with the KVM switch and the Ethernet hub.
I hear you brother.
I thought the whole point of getting OS X to Intel hardware was to propogate OS X?
Assuming that by 'propogate' you mean sell OS.X to run on generic PC's from bulk vendors like DELL,
The short answer is: NO
The long answer is: The move to Intel was done to enable Apple to market competitive, powerful, well designed and highly compact laptops. They still won't tolerate OS.X being run on non Apple computers.
Why are we so concerned about getting the iMac to run Windows?
So we can dual boot it with OS.X and use Windows to get maximum performance and stability out of Windows only PC games. Why else?????
Seriously, if you "brickify" your iMac while trying to Windoze-it, good... I laugh at you from a far... you deserve to own a $1300 paperweight.
You are new to this whole Nerd thing aren't you? The whole point of being a Nerd is to try to do tings to see if they can be done. Nerds never have, do not now and never will need a reason to do nerdy things and the same goes for stopping to think about the consequences. If we did stop to think about what we are doing so many of mankind's greatest discoveries and achievements would never have happened, the Manhattan project for example would never have been sucessfully concluded.
There are really only two other Enterprise solutions for wireless e-mail. One is a Good Link server and a compatible mobile device running a Good Link client (PPC, Palm or a BB). The other is an Exchange 2003 SP2 server and Windows Mobile 5 device.
Does either of them offer the same ' always-up-to-date' push feature for E-Mail that RIM+Blackberry does? The last time I looked Exchange didn't offer push service but even so Exchange+WindowsMobile still doesa an admirable job at keeping me connected, even on VPN connections over GPRS. Push e-mail is the main attraction of the RIM setup. Not that I want to trash start a flamewar by trashing RIM, Blackberry seems to have gathered a religious following in some quarters, but a determined and innovative competitor could do alot better.
A robot dog is a pile of parts running a program.
At least you won't feel guilty about vivisecting your robot dog... and it is alot less messy.
The specualtion about super bugs seems misplaced. So far antibiotics work quite well, albeit with limited lifespans of usefulness before resistance is induced...
True enough, but the problem is that this induction of resistance is being seriously accelerated by massive abuse and oversubscription of antibiotics. Using anti biotics on a large scale in agriculture for example may be profitable but it has also ruined several drugs that could otherwise still be used to treat humans. Similarly massive 'convenience subscription' of antibiotics in cases that were not all that serious, just to get somebody to work a couple of days earlyer or save them a bit of discomfort, has also contributed to creating resistant bacteria. And this does not just go for anti bacterial drugs. The Chinese managed to wreck several antiviral drugs in the sense that they are probably useless for treating bird flu by using them on chickens. Trying to argue that human abuse of these drugs has not contributed to the on the emergance of superbugs is silly.
AMD fanboy's logic
Intel loses market share to AMD
Apple moves to Intel
Therefore, Apple loses market share to AMD
You forgot to add: Hallelujah!
Yeah, weird that they might want a machine running Windows XP to be updated. You might have Linux on the machine, but you also had Windows XP, and it sounds like it was missing security patches.
The fact that he hadn't noticed the loginscripts for over a week indicates to me that the didn't use his XP installation at work alot and even then how can you assert it wasn't patched? He may even have had to wait until a patch becaeme available to qualify for a connection because his XP installation was already fully patches! Off hand I am guessing this guy probably got issued a laptop from his employer and used installed Linux on it for day to day for home as well as for work use dual booted with XP for mostly for gaming and perhaps for that once-in-a-blue-moon that he couldn't get something done at work with Wine+[Random M$ application] and for Gaming.
I fail to see how this was stupid of the network admins. Draconian maybe, but it got you to apply the security patches.
It is stupid because they could have exempted him from their Windows specific policy quite easily. It is stupid because they may even have given him a hard time because they didn't even know how to exempt a non Windows boxen from their MS specific setup. All it would have taken was to send somebody up stairs to check out his setup for security and if it was OK adapt the policy. If you are an IT tech that works alot around Engineers, non-MS admins or Programmers you are going to have to get used to cases like this (ie. escaped mental patients who use Linux or OS.X in a corporate environment) and unless you find out how to cater to people running non-MS Operating systems you will quickly find out that you haven't got any friends willing to do you a favor when you really need it (ie. when you have screwed up and need a quick fix from the local nerds).
"Being a Microsoft proponent in an argument about operating systems is like being a white male in a discussion on discrimination."
Hmmmm... nice analogy but why choose such a complicated topic??? I have found that in order to trigger the unwinnable argument effect it is usually enough (assuming you are a human male) to get into a discussion with a human female as to whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. This argument is actually much more venomous than the one you cited since it tends to go on forever and can furthermore result in a permanent damage to your sex life unless you resort to subterfuge and allow the female to believe she won.
...How many people know the new macs actually ARE pc's? Of course they aren't, cuz there are macs and pcs right? ... Fortunately, porting OS X to standard PC will maybe awaken some puzzling among the general audience.
Abstracting the Mac from the concept of a PC to the point where the consumers don't realize that the only really significant difference between the MacPC and the WinPC is that the former has (or used to have) a PPC processor and the latter has a crappy OS has to be one of the greater triumphs of Apple's marketing department. I suppose that even though one is sometimes tempted to think so not all marketing people are morons.