hey! your user id # is an anagram of mine! how cool!!:) very interesting post btw, keep up your efforts.
So far i'm aware of one american site that appears to be similar in concept to yours. It's called Capitol Advantage.However I do not think they are as pre-occupied about ethical issues as your organization is, as they appear to make it easy for organizations such as "The Direct Marketer's Association" to set-up accounts with their site and offer users a form letter (capwiz is a service of Capitol Advantage) which they can submit "as-is" or choose to amend. If of course elected to do the latter, and ended-up writing an entirely different letter which offered consistent counterpoints to the original DMA arguments.
rather than using/etc/hosts you might consider running your own DNS/bind/named on your local box. granted it's prolly not an ideal solution to cache *the entire internet*, but as someone mentioned, the number of entries is far greater than the number of IPs as many, many, MANY host names are often associated to a single IP address. So extend that 260Gig figure to the terabytes.
Anyway, if you run your own name server on your local box, you'll get more control over how long you'll cache hosts for and most likely greatly reduce the number of outbound queries.
It's easy to do if you're on OS X, and most likely just as easy on linux. Sux to be windowz users tho. HEH. unless they hack something thru cygwin? heh.
XML is Great of Content Syndication and much more
on
DTD vs. XML Schema
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I notice that this topic is generating many comments from hard-core backend programmers who mainly focus on inter-application messaging and various equivalents of remote procedure calls.
In my experience, many benefits of XML come when dealing with the presentation layers of many application architectures, with the ability to repurpose syndicated data at wil, here are a few examples:
RSS which defines an easy standard for any site to provide "News" in a well-defined XML Format. This allows developers to write software to aggregate news from different sites into one convenient interface, sites to exchange news headlines with eachother.
Google Web APIs which allow developers to create their own custom google-powered search site with their own look and feel by simply proxying a user's search query to the google server which returns search results in XML data which can subsequently be transformed in HTML before being sent back to the user via various processes such as an XSLT transformation.
Amazon Web API, similar in principle to the above Google API, allows developers to enhance their sites by allowing their users to search for Amazon products without having to go the Amazon site itself. One interesting side-effect of such API is that an Amazon competitor, say Barnes and Noble, could offer a similar API to their own site. Now I could allow my users to use my service to search for books and offer them results and price comparisons from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Effective use of XML and XSLT allows you to easily aggregate informational data from one or multiple sources and "repurpose" for an infinite variety of business and technological goals.
One of the main benefits of XML is that it offers and effective, textual representation of "scructured data", that can be conveniently accessed and manipulated according to a slew of various surrounding standards such as XPath, DOM, XSLT, namespaces.
you're welcome to re-use elements of my letter but do try and come up with your arguments and counterpoints. One thing that comes to mind right now is that someone might want to put a stronger emphasis on the intrusive nature of telemarketing, as it requires you to drop whatever you may be doing at the time, potentially build up expectations as to who may be calling you, someone you may be expecting a call from, an important call, while occupying the lines and potentially preventing another important phone call from coming in (not everybody uses call waiting, though i do heh).
Contrast that with other forms of sollicitation such as snail mail and email (spam) which, while still intrusive, enable you to easily prioritize when you will be looking at mail, what you will be looking at, what you will dismiss, where a prospective customer makes the conscious decision to set some time aside to "check the mail" before moving-on to more pleasant things in our free time.
i submitted the below letter to my state's officials using the DMA site's template.
Be sure to use your own zip code in the above url, so your letter gets sent to the appropriate recipients.
Instead of using the text that comes up by default, i took time to write the above. A good chunk of my letter offers counterpoints to DMA's arguments.
-------
January 7, 2003
[recipient address was inserted here]
Dear [recipient name was inserted here],
I am entirely in favor of a national do-not-call list.
I find it obnoxiously intrusive to constantly receive solicitation from
telemarketers in my own home, which too often take too much of the
precious time i wish to spend with loved ones, while recovering from my
rigorous working hours.
Furthermore, while telemarketers are supposed to be trained to respect
people's right to say "no", it has been my personal experience to find it
often challenging to exercise that right, faced with somewhat resilient
telemarketers who just would not take "NO" for an answer.
Current laws already give me the right to request from the caller that
they no-longer call me. When getting 3 to 5 different telemarketing calls
in a same evening, this already represents more time than i am willing to
spend to protect a peaceful existence.
The Direct Marketing Association does have an opt-out list. No business is
*required* to become part of the DMA. While they provide strict rules for
their members to abide by, enforcing those rules and punishing offenders
strictly relies on *potential* complaints from residents, which requires a
significant amount of work from the resident to determine whether or not
the telemarketer belongs to the DMA, and for the DMA to follow-up on those
issues. While the system appears to be beneficial on the surface, I truly
believe it provides no *significant* protection to victims of telemarketer
calls.
While i understand the DMA's concerns that an opt-out list would
significantly reduce the number of potential residents telemarketing
businesses may call, thereby potentially reducing the telemarketing work
force, I would like to point out such list should dramatically increase
the quality of the telemarketing business by reducing frustration among
the telemarketing staff and the prospective customers, leading to more
productive and successful business transactions. The multi-billion-dollar
figures touted in parallel to purportedly dramatic potential losses by the
DMA, should, in my opinion, be mitigated by the many beneficial aspects of
a national "do-not-call" list.
In my view, it is the Federal Government's responsibility to protect the
privacy of citizens who make the conscious decision to not ever be
sollicited by telemarketers while at home. I believe a federally-regulated
do-not-call list with provisions for strong sanctions against offenders is
the single, true, effective answer to a problem that has been plaguing our
society for far too many decades.
I am entirely in favor of a national do-not-call list.
I find it obnoxiously intrusive to constantly receive solicitation from telemarketers in my own home, which too often take too much of the precious time i wish to spend with loved ones, while recovering from my rigorous working hours.
Furthermore, while telemarketers are supposed to be trained to respect people's right to say "no", it has been my personal experience to find it often challenging to exercise that right, faced with somewhat resilient telemarketers who just would not take "NO" for an answer.
Current laws already give me the right to request from the caller that they no-longer call me. When getting 3 to 5 different telemarketing calls in a same evening, this already represents more time than i am willing to spend to protect a peaceful existence.
The Direct Marketing Association does have an opt-out list. No business is *required* to become part of the DMA. While they provide strict rules for their members to abide by, enforcing those rules and punishing offenders strictly relies on *potential* complaints from residents, which requires a significant amount of work from the resident to determine whether or not the telemarketer belongs to the DMA, and for the DMA to follow-up on those issues. While the system appears to be beneficial on the surface, I truly believe it provides no *significant* protection to victims of telemarketer calls.
In my view, it is the Federal Government's responsibility to protect the privacy of citizens who make the conscious decision to not ever be sollicited by telemarketers while at home. I believe a federally-regulated do-not-call list with provisions for strong sanctions against offenders is the single, true, effective answer to a problem that has been plaguing our society for far too many decades.
you clearly demonstrated your inability to read my fucking mind. i meant to say "does not mean exclusively" play video games, and in the context of academia, it most likely does not. The parent comment to my reply quoted the article arguing that since it stated "play with" it would necessarily mean students were entitled to be able to play videogames. My post was merely emphasizing that there are many things you can do with your computer that can be referred to as "playing with", without that "play" having anything to do with video games. And never did i say anything about playing with the guts of the OS, yes it's the beauty of OS X, you don't have to worry about the guts of the OS. the whole point is that those iBooks are superior learning tools and an ideal platform for academia, and that academia should not and does not give a well-digger's shit about their students' ability to play video games, outside of what their curriculum would warrant.
you clearly demonstrate you don't have a clue. "something they would play with" does not mean playing video games. you can "play" while educating yourself, chatting with friends, discovering the internet, heck even going to yahoo games. Oh yeah one thing iBook users won't have to "play" with is a bunch of stupid worms and viruses just because they felt like opening that nifty ".vbs thingy", or just because they decided to surf the web with IE5 or IE6 and got subsequently infected by some lame-ass script kiddie's web page exploiting the latest and greatest security holes found in those browsers.
uhm frankly, who gives a shit about student's choice *and*, most especially, their ability to fucking do gaming. All the laptop is guna cost them is an extra $100/year in tuition, it's basically *free*. SO, given that the university picks-up most of the tab, frankly it is not up to the students to make any fucking decision as to what they're guna use for a laptop. It is up to the university to make a choice as to what will benefit their students' education, at reasonable costs, and many, many, many other factors that *I* cannot think of. You may agree or disagree with their choice of an iBook as an academic tool and it's up to you to choose to go to another school. In any case, i can make a fairly strong case as to why an iBook would be a superior academic tool to PC counterparts.
Cost is one thing. There's also support. If you're giving away laptops, the vast majority of students will try to tinker with them and will also need support for them. With only one platform, you can cost-effictively train your tech staff to one consistent set of hardware and software. Plus, Apple is known for building very nicely integrated software and hardware. That'll make support far easier.
Also, as everyone knows, iBooks come with OS X. I can see tremendous advantages for distributing preconfigured, UNIX laptops: you can lock students out of their system: Only allow them to write within their home directory. Give them zero administrative privileges to their system. Oh poor baby can't install some games or an MP3 peer-to-peer file swapper? Tough shit. This is supposed to be a learning tool. You're a smartass and chose to re-install the operating system from scratch? Very well, don't come asking for support. And have fun re-installing all the college-sanctioned applications for your classwork. University tech staff will gladly re-install those applications for you from their master copies for a small $100 fee and re-whiping your drive and re-installing the appropriate pre-set system configuration relevant to your major.
There are a slew of things that could be easily done with unix / OS X that could be completely transparent to the students to both render them more productive and protect them from themselves. server-hosted roaming home directories. Remote ssh administration for troubleshooting or sporadic help. Standardized built-in firewall settings on all laptops to supplement on-campus firewalls, using BSD's built-in ipfw utility. Create custom default Dock Application icons for various kinds of students, to appropriately immediately surface the applications and utilities that are the most relevant to their course work, and all that stuff is specified in XML Configuration files in OS X: Art students would get Photoshop and Illustrator in their Dock, while Computer Science students would get the Terminal Icon as well as maybe XDarwin, Vim for OS X, BBEdit, CodeWarrior, or any of the apps that come in the Apple Developer CD-ROM. And as far as any student working in just about any science/engineering field, but let's just say computer science for sure, OS X is definitely *the* tool of choice.
Between XML configuration files, shell scripts, network file sharing backed by the strength of UNIX, which was, at its core designed to be a strong, secure multi-user environment, to allow users of a system to perform certain specific tasks while not being able to break the system, OS X seems to me like the absolute perfect operating system for academia. Combine that with Apple's beautiful yet rock-solid industrial design in the form of the iBook, and you've got yourself the perfect platform for the hyperactive lifestyle of a college student.
Regardless of platform, i would keep those built-in hard drives as small as their major and planned coursework allows, and put a greater emphasis on network-based storage.
heh have you guys ever seen "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". At the end of the money they both get a lotta cash which they use to fly planes all over the country to "beat-up all those fucks who talk shit about us on the internet".
... we, in America, are not the only ones with retarded monopoly-nurturing copyright laws. as King Tut said to Anna: "thank you, for humble validation". this is good. this is very good.
what is new at an os level isn't the only source of value of a full package. it is, well, the full package, indeed: a slew of revamped and enhanced iApps, with new ones too. That takes time and resources to develop. all worth paying for.
and, unlike you, i did find the os-level enhancements significant, especially the sped-up graphics layer and overall improved responsiveness of the OS.
Likewise, Microsoft's latest update for Windows XP is free.
They're basically comparing the latest m$ UPDATE with the latest OS X UPGRADE. It's like comparing apple and oranges.
While many people barked loudly at the price tag on jaguar, it was truly an operating system upgrade Not only speed and reliability were dramatically improved, but many new applications and pieces of functionality were added.
Saying that the latest bug fix service pack for windows xp is free should be compared to the fact that every sub-dot release of OS X have also been free, such as 10.2.1 and 10.2.2.
you are missing the point here. It works this way:
user accidentally finds bug in OS
user talks about it on open-source forums and other places on the internet
Apple gets notified as well as open-source community at large
within minutes of its discovery, some geeks manage to find the root of the problem
apple developers are notified of geeks' findings, confirm, fix, and thoroughly test the fix.
within days apple users get a software update notification if bug is important, or fix is rolled into the next major sub-dot release if fairly inconsequential for the broader user base, as it might be the case for this one
You see, apple users don't need to do shit. All i know is that some bug that is fairly inconsequential to me was found, and that it's guna get fixed, fast, and my next OS X release will be all the stronger, and all i'll have to do is click the "install" button when prompted, and i will feel warm and fuzzy all over. I don't even need to what a fucking kernel is.
now that's just me. Yes, many geeks out there will gladly hunt-down the bug in the source code and recompile their kernel.
The point is, you know problems are addressed in an appropriate matter.
So yes, open-source, is, indeed, so much better than anything else, especially if you're dealing with what i consider in my little world, the mission-critical piece of software that is my tibook's operating system.
Such process shows me that a product that relies heavily on mature open-source components is less likely to cause productivity-killing crashes and loss of data such as the ones i've experienced with my previous dell laptop running win2k, as described in one of my journal entries.
And if was to direct an IT department, gee, i just may consider putting a flat-panel iMac on every employee's desktop. Shit i could mount user directories from a central location, enabling employees to switch work stations, i would uniformely configure all machines, prevent users from writing files or installing applications outside of their home directories, i could ssh in each box for sporadic debug work, i could create automated processes to create development environments based on users' needs, wether they're graphic artists or J2EE application developers.
OS X owns you.
this is it people. we are well on our way to reach the nirvana of computing, with symbiotic collaboration between a major hardware and software vendor and the open source community at large, market share gains in each camp benefits the other.
convenience does *not* provide an excuse for, nor does it supplant strong security design at the core of your operating system.
Just take a little look at security focus archives, you'll see that most of the security flaws in windows come from the tight integration of web-related scripting technologies with the core of the operating system.
Read my journal. Look at Code Red and Nimda. How do you think they spread so FAST? The best-known component of those viruses is the one triggered in an email attachment. But it doesn't stop there. The virus modifies every single html document that lives in IIS's web root, including HTTP 404, 403 *and* 500 documents, by appending a javascript window.open call to a "readme.eml" document which exploits Internet Explorer flaw with handling mime types and gets it to execute some code to further infect the machine of a user who browses an infected site.
Did you read the latest security holes? The one that leverages the help dialog box "functionality". Pretty evil.
All those components are tightly integrated within microsoft's flagship operating system, and ZERO thought was put into easily enabling or disabling those features to temporarily protect users while not impairing core functionality.
As far as i'm concerned, you've gotta be a fucking suicidal retard to be using the windows operating system for anything but playing games. Granted it does, at times, serve its purpose of a mildly friendly/convenient operating system on cheap hardware, but those security holes are just too fucking evil, and you sure as fuck get what you pay for.
Oh yeah and now Palladium. So not only are we looking at an OS featuring piss-poor security, we're also looking at a totalitarian privacy-invading roadmap. i weep for computing.
Slashdot Mirror
So far i'm aware of one american site that appears to be similar in concept to yours. It's called Capitol Advantage.However I do not think they are as pre-occupied about ethical issues as your organization is, as they appear to make it easy for organizations such as "The Direct Marketer's Association" to set-up accounts with their site and offer users a form letter (capwiz is a service of Capitol Advantage) which they can submit "as-is" or choose to amend. If of course elected to do the latter, and ended-up writing an entirely different letter which offered consistent counterpoints to the original DMA arguments.
I DO!. ;]
Anyway, if you run your own name server on your local box, you'll get more control over how long you'll cache hosts for and most likely greatly reduce the number of outbound queries.
It's easy to do if you're on OS X, and most likely just as easy on linux. Sux to be windowz users tho. HEH. unless they hack something thru cygwin? heh.
In my experience, many benefits of XML come when dealing with the presentation layers of many application architectures, with the ability to repurpose syndicated data at wil, here are a few examples:
Effective use of XML and XSLT allows you to easily aggregate informational data from one or multiple sources and "repurpose" for an infinite variety of business and technological goals.
One of the main benefits of XML is that it offers and effective, textual representation of "scructured data", that can be conveniently accessed and manipulated according to a slew of various surrounding standards such as XPath, DOM, XSLT, namespaces.
OpenExr
damn girl, i really love your definition of a geek, it rings so true.
someone please mod parent way the fuck up. also someone should post a link to the USA equivalent of those levy charges. it's insane.
and this proggie is different from Gnutella
you're welcome to re-use elements of my letter but do try and come up with your arguments and counterpoints. One thing that comes to mind right now is that someone might want to put a stronger emphasis on the intrusive nature of telemarketing, as it requires you to drop whatever you may be doing at the time, potentially build up expectations as to who may be calling you, someone you may be expecting a call from, an important call, while occupying the lines and potentially preventing another important phone call from coming in (not everybody uses call waiting, though i do heh).
Contrast that with other forms of sollicitation such as snail mail and email (spam) which, while still intrusive, enable you to easily prioritize when you will be looking at mail, what you will be looking at, what you will dismiss, where a prospective customer makes the conscious decision to set some time aside to "check the mail" before moving-on to more pleasant things in our free time.
blech.
Be sure to use your own zip code in the above url, so your letter gets sent to the appropriate recipients.
Instead of using the text that comes up by default, i took time to write the above. A good chunk of my letter offers counterpoints to DMA's arguments.
-------
January 7, 2003
[recipient address was inserted here]
Dear [recipient name was inserted here],
I am entirely in favor of a national do-not-call list.
I find it obnoxiously intrusive to constantly receive solicitation from telemarketers in my own home, which too often take too much of the precious time i wish to spend with loved ones, while recovering from my rigorous working hours.
Furthermore, while telemarketers are supposed to be trained to respect people's right to say "no", it has been my personal experience to find it often challenging to exercise that right, faced with somewhat resilient telemarketers who just would not take "NO" for an answer.
Current laws already give me the right to request from the caller that they no-longer call me. When getting 3 to 5 different telemarketing calls in a same evening, this already represents more time than i am willing to spend to protect a peaceful existence.
The Direct Marketing Association does have an opt-out list. No business is *required* to become part of the DMA. While they provide strict rules for their members to abide by, enforcing those rules and punishing offenders strictly relies on *potential* complaints from residents, which requires a significant amount of work from the resident to determine whether or not the telemarketer belongs to the DMA, and for the DMA to follow-up on those issues. While the system appears to be beneficial on the surface, I truly believe it provides no *significant* protection to victims of telemarketer calls.
While i understand the DMA's concerns that an opt-out list would significantly reduce the number of potential residents telemarketing businesses may call, thereby potentially reducing the telemarketing work force, I would like to point out such list should dramatically increase the quality of the telemarketing business by reducing frustration among the telemarketing staff and the prospective customers, leading to more productive and successful business transactions. The multi-billion-dollar figures touted in parallel to purportedly dramatic potential losses by the DMA, should, in my opinion, be mitigated by the many beneficial aspects of a national "do-not-call" list.
In my view, it is the Federal Government's responsibility to protect the privacy of citizens who make the conscious decision to not ever be sollicited by telemarketers while at home. I believe a federally-regulated do-not-call list with provisions for strong sanctions against offenders is the single, true, effective answer to a problem that has been plaguing our society for far too many decades.
Sincerely,
[MUH LAME ASS] ---------
January 7, 2003
[recipient address was inserted here]
Dear [recipient name was inserted here],
I am entirely in favor of a national do-not-call list.
I find it obnoxiously intrusive to constantly receive solicitation from
telemarketers in my own home, which too often take too much of the
precious time i wish to spend with loved ones, while recovering from my
rigorous working hours.
Furthermore, while telemarketers are supposed to be trained to respect
people's right to say "no", it has been my personal experience to find it
often challenging to exercise that right, faced with somewhat resilient
telemarketers who just would not take "NO" for an answer.
Current laws already give me the right to request from the caller that
they no-longer call me. When getting 3 to 5 different telemarketing calls
in a same evening, this already represents more time than i am willing to
spend to protect a peaceful existence.
The Direct Marketing Association does have an opt-out list. No business is
*required* to become part of the DMA. While they provide strict rules for
their members to abide by, enforcing those rules and punishing offenders
strictly relies on *potential* complaints from residents, which requires a
significant amount of work from the resident to determine whether or not
the telemarketer belongs to the DMA, and for the DMA to follow-up on those
issues. While the system appears to be beneficial on the surface, I truly
believe it provides no *significant* protection to victims of telemarketer
calls.
In my view, it is the Federal Government's responsibility to protect the
privacy of citizens who make the conscious decision to not ever be
sollicited by telemarketers while at home. I believe a federally-regulated
do-not-call list with provisions for strong sanctions against offenders is
the single, true, effective answer to a problem that has been plaguing our
society for far too many decades.
Sincerely,
[ME. HEH]
Take a look at my other post on the subject.
Cost is one thing. There's also support. If you're giving away laptops, the vast majority of students will try to tinker with them and will also need support for them. With only one platform, you can cost-effictively train your tech staff to one consistent set of hardware and software. Plus, Apple is known for building very nicely integrated software and hardware. That'll make support far easier.
Also, as everyone knows, iBooks come with OS X. I can see tremendous advantages for distributing preconfigured, UNIX laptops: you can lock students out of their system: Only allow them to write within their home directory. Give them zero administrative privileges to their system. Oh poor baby can't install some games or an MP3 peer-to-peer file swapper? Tough shit. This is supposed to be a learning tool. You're a smartass and chose to re-install the operating system from scratch? Very well, don't come asking for support. And have fun re-installing all the college-sanctioned applications for your classwork. University tech staff will gladly re-install those applications for you from their master copies for a small $100 fee and re-whiping your drive and re-installing the appropriate pre-set system configuration relevant to your major.
There are a slew of things that could be easily done with unix / OS X that could be completely transparent to the students to both render them more productive and protect them from themselves. server-hosted roaming home directories. Remote ssh administration for troubleshooting or sporadic help. Standardized built-in firewall settings on all laptops to supplement on-campus firewalls, using BSD's built-in ipfw utility. Create custom default Dock Application icons for various kinds of students, to appropriately immediately surface the applications and utilities that are the most relevant to their course work, and all that stuff is specified in XML Configuration files in OS X: Art students would get Photoshop and Illustrator in their Dock, while Computer Science students would get the Terminal Icon as well as maybe XDarwin, Vim for OS X, BBEdit, CodeWarrior, or any of the apps that come in the Apple Developer CD-ROM. And as far as any student working in just about any science/engineering field, but let's just say computer science for sure, OS X is definitely *the* tool of choice.
Between XML configuration files, shell scripts, network file sharing backed by the strength of UNIX, which was, at its core designed to be a strong, secure multi-user environment, to allow users of a system to perform certain specific tasks while not being able to break the system, OS X seems to me like the absolute perfect operating system for academia. Combine that with Apple's beautiful yet rock-solid industrial design in the form of the iBook, and you've got yourself the perfect platform for the hyperactive lifestyle of a college student.
Regardless of platform, i would keep those built-in hard drives as small as their major and planned coursework allows, and put a greater emphasis on network-based storage.
heh
Wether
Weather
thanks.
and, unlike you, i did find the os-level enhancements significant, especially the sped-up graphics layer and overall improved responsiveness of the OS.
Likewise, Microsoft's latest update for Windows XP is free.
They're basically comparing the latest m$ UPDATE with the latest OS X UPGRADE. It's like comparing apple and oranges.
While many people barked loudly at the price tag on jaguar, it was truly an operating system upgrade Not only speed and reliability were dramatically improved, but many new applications and pieces of functionality were added.
Saying that the latest bug fix service pack for windows xp is free should be compared to the fact that every sub-dot release of OS X have also been free, such as 10.2.1 and 10.2.2.
- user accidentally finds bug in OS
- user talks about it on open-source forums and other places on the internet
- Apple gets notified as well as open-source community at large
- within minutes of its discovery, some geeks manage to find the root of the problem
- apple developers are notified of geeks' findings, confirm, fix, and thoroughly test the fix.
- within days apple users get a software update notification if bug is important, or fix is rolled into the next major sub-dot release if fairly inconsequential for the broader user base, as it might be the case for this one
You see, apple users don't need to do shit. All i know is that some bug that is fairly inconsequential to me was found, and that it's guna get fixed, fast, and my next OS X release will be all the stronger, and all i'll have to do is click the "install" button when prompted, and i will feel warm and fuzzy all over. I don't even need to what a fucking kernel is.now that's just me. Yes, many geeks out there will gladly hunt-down the bug in the source code and recompile their kernel.
The point is, you know problems are addressed in an appropriate matter.
So yes, open-source, is, indeed, so much better than anything else, especially if you're dealing with what i consider in my little world, the mission-critical piece of software that is my tibook's operating system.
Such process shows me that a product that relies heavily on mature open-source components is less likely to cause productivity-killing crashes and loss of data such as the ones i've experienced with my previous dell laptop running win2k, as described in one of my journal entries.
And if was to direct an IT department, gee, i just may consider putting a flat-panel iMac on every employee's desktop. Shit i could mount user directories from a central location, enabling employees to switch work stations, i would uniformely configure all machines, prevent users from writing files or installing applications outside of their home directories, i could ssh in each box for sporadic debug work, i could create automated processes to create development environments based on users' needs, wether they're graphic artists or J2EE application developers.
OS X owns you.
this is it people. we are well on our way to reach the nirvana of computing, with symbiotic collaboration between a major hardware and software vendor and the open source community at large, market share gains in each camp benefits the other.
Just take a little look at security focus archives, you'll see that most of the security flaws in windows come from the tight integration of web-related scripting technologies with the core of the operating system.
Read my journal. Look at Code Red and Nimda. How do you think they spread so FAST? The best-known component of those viruses is the one triggered in an email attachment. But it doesn't stop there. The virus modifies every single html document that lives in IIS's web root, including HTTP 404, 403 *and* 500 documents, by appending a javascript window.open call to a "readme.eml" document which exploits Internet Explorer flaw with handling mime types and gets it to execute some code to further infect the machine of a user who browses an infected site.
Did you read the latest security holes? The one that leverages the help dialog box "functionality". Pretty evil.
All those components are tightly integrated within microsoft's flagship operating system, and ZERO thought was put into easily enabling or disabling those features to temporarily protect users while not impairing core functionality.
As far as i'm concerned, you've gotta be a fucking suicidal retard to be using the windows operating system for anything but playing games. Granted it does, at times, serve its purpose of a mildly friendly/convenient operating system on cheap hardware, but those security holes are just too fucking evil, and you sure as fuck get what you pay for.
Oh yeah and now Palladium. So not only are we looking at an OS featuring piss-poor security, we're also looking at a totalitarian privacy-invading roadmap. i weep for computing.
heh.
fuck windows. fuck it right in the ass.
Go Apple.
now, could someone figure out what his e-mail address is *and* any and all ip addresses routed to the nice T1 connections going to his house?