The point stands as I made it: if you're paying $25,000 in licensing fees and support every year to maintain your windows platform and it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate to a UNIX type system, it's going to take you 10 years just to break even on the migration vs. maintaining a Windows base and you're going to carry a deficit for nine of those years.
Where do you get support for a 1994 vintage MS Windows from? You appear to be missing the point that migrations are part and parcel of "sticking" with MS Windows.
heck, we run win2k because we don't want to deal with the potential problems of going to xp. we have a couple win98 machines because the software they use does not run right under win2k. Linux is right out. this is funny because the hp mainframe will be migrating to a unix-shaped OS in a year or two.
It's also "funny" because you probably could operate your 98 software using vmware (under Linux or WinXP) or win4lin (under Linux). It might even run better, because in such a case Windows is talking to a "Windows friendly" VM.
Thus things like IMAP, webdav and the likes. But mind you, what you gain in portability, you lose in performance. Things like photoshop might not be happy when you deal with multiple multi meg files. Well.. not unahppy..just slower.
IIRC network file systems started to outstrip local file systems with 100M switched ethernet. It's easier (and cheaper) to upgrade a few servers than to upgrade lots of workstations to have a disk system capable of a high I/O rate (or a lot of memory for cache).
No more workstation specific info, and no more passing 'crap' around to all the workstations.
As well as minimal stuff actually on the workstations. Yet this appears to be contrary to the Microsoft way...
See Netware and Pegasus Mail for an easy to follow implementation of this method.
Dating from before Microsoft even got into client-server networking. I always found it ammusing that Microsoft couldn't even manage to copy Novell very well...
This can also be done with roaming profiles on windows.
With Windows roaming profiles if your workstation goes bang then you might easily lose whatever you are working on. "Folder redirection" is probably better here. Though it appears to be far less well known...
Most of the problems talked about here are due to trying to fit a square peg (Linux) in a round hole (Windows workstation concept).
Which would be really ironic in cases where Windows machines are themselves a "square peg in a round hole". From the POV of the task which needs to be done. (Even more so if a unix style workstation was a better tool for the job in the first place.)
Yes, it can be done, but it is not really optimal.
Linux isn't Windows. But nor is Windows Linux, Unix, a mainframe, a glass teletype, an X-Term, etc.
Yes, we could use some more tools for allowing easy sharing of printers, for example.
There are also situations where you might want to make sharing of printers hard. e.g. a printer which prints on official stationary and automatically puts the result into an addressed envelope...
People here act like a platform migration of this scale is simple as flipping a switch, and I think that really highlights how little experience in practical technology the Slashdot collective really has. You can reformat your system at home and install Linux in an hour depending on options and system speed. It's not that simple when you're talking about a business with 20 locations and 5000 workstations to migrate. It's not that simple when you have internal customer service apps to migrate. When you have internal template and procedures to rewrite. When you have to audit your hardware to ensure compatibility and then repurchase anything that might be too much hassle to fiddle with.
The thing is that it dosn't really matter what the migration is. Many of these things related to there being a migration. Yet there are plenty of people, including those in the PHB catagory, who take the view that so long as both the before and after involve Microsoft then it should be trivial.
Migration to Linux isn't speading like wildfire for the same reason Windows shops don't jump ship to run to the superior UNIX systems even when that's cheaper: it's not as simple as you people think. It's not free.
This is also the reason you find plenty of commercial systems running on ancient versions of MS Windows, even MSDOS...
It's not even necessarily cheap. If it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate and you're only going to be saving an average of $25,000 in license fees and support each year, it will take you ten years just to break even.
As opposed to following the Microsoft prefered route of spending that $250,000 plus the licencing fees every 2-3 years.
Quit being a whiny little bitch and contribute some code, documentation, consultation, or just shut the hell up. Your whining isn't going to change the fact that Linux just plain isn't a good solution for a lot of shops,
The same applies to MS Windows. The difference is that Microsoft can pay lots of people to whine on their behalf...
well, its the same as people downloading music off the net. why cant people just respect the IP rights of artists?
Assuming these artists actually still have any IP rights...
how about warez sites?
Actually what is going on in these examples is non-commercial infringement. Whereas the company involved is enguaged in commercial infringement. Often the law provides stiffer penalties and stronger investigative/enforcement powers with respect to the latter.
While I feel the GPL is strict on a lot of thing that it shouldn't be but just blatantly releasing a product that is based off an Open Source project with a different license is just wrong.
It dosn't really matter what you think about strictness of the GPL. Current copyright law allows copyright holders to apply whatever licencing terms they consider appropriate to their work(s). >BR> I think there should be more education for the public that Free Software is not Public Domain and ripping off Open Source Work is just as bad a Pirating Closed Source Software.
It's not so much "as bad as", rather "exactly the same as". The wrongdoing in both cases is copyright infringement. N.B. Probably the closest thing to this in the proprietary software world would be counterfeit copies.
It is too bad that Commercial Enterprise doesn't respect IP Rights.
Proprietary software companies have been caught pirating other proprietary software. Sometimes such a company may activly persue people "pirating" software which they themselves pirated in the first place:)
However, as far as I can see, by far the largest problem on the internet is the way Microsoft has built powerful programming capabilities into a number of their products, and the way things just happen automatically by default.
Even though the majority of people may have no use at all for various of these "features". Resulting in many people never even having heard of certain things in Windows, until they are used for malware...
I think that another reason the free software is usually better designed falls out from the fact that free software is usually the work of small teams. Microsoft can write big specs and then have large teams go to work on them; if the teams aren't careful, their work can be a tangled mess.
Assuming they don't set out to write a "tangled mess" deliberatly.
The free software projects tend to have clean, modular interfaces; this is partly because so often different pieces are coded up by people who don't even know each other.
Modular code also makes it relativly easy to subsitute modules. So long as the bits which interface are the same it will work.
The user registry is kept in seperate files, one per user, stored in the user's home directory (their profile).
Which means any application can alter USER.DAT in any way. If this file gets corrupted in certain ways a user may be either completly unable to log in or never get anywhere near having a usable desktop.
The system registry is certainly not writeable or even readable by users - there are, rather, system calls which will retrieve the value of a key on your behalf, after checking the access control list associated with the registry key you are trying to read. Registry keys are protected by the same ACL system as the filesystem.
This appears to be a horribly complex way of doing what having multiple configuration files would do by default.
Even the user registry has entries which are not writeable by the user, only by system components - just because the user can write to the file doesn't mean it will actually work if they try - it's permanently opened and locked by at least one system process if the user is logged on (Winlogon) and thus cannot be opened directly, only accessed via the appropriate API.
Which makes the whole thing vulnerable to the machine being reset, especially a hard reset.
Combine this with legacy code and an expectation that it will run, and everybody runs as admin so their apps will run.
Not even legacy code. Some new software has exactly this problem. Ironically some old Windows software can be less trouble to get working with Windows XP compared with some new Windows software...
The Windows (NT - since that's the heritage of all modern Windows versions, and which inherits ideas from VMS) has supported access control lists from the start.
The problem is with the mentality of Windows application writers. The ability to set a file "Read Only" has been around since DOS. Similarly RO media, such as CDROMs, have been around for a long time. Yet it is perfectly possible to find Windows applications which refuse to open Read Only data files. (In extreme cases there are applications which refuse to run without write access to the program directory itself.)
Access to system objects is fine-grained, and can be selectively granted to users or groups.
The problem with ACLs is that it is quite easy to end up with a set of highly complex access permissions.
Contrast this with UNIX where users are either mortals (access to no system objects, or course-grained access via groups) or root (access to all system objects).
VAX/VMS also supported an access control model similar to UNIX. As well as automatic file versioning, which AFAIK no version of NT supports.
The problems with Windows NT started when performance became more of a priority than security, and when people started running as Administrator all of the time
The reason for this is more likely to be able to get a "mission critical" application to run at all.
This only works where there is one thing to choose on the ballot. It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA.
If several elections are taking place at the same time then all that is needed is for each voter to be given an appropriate set of ballot papers. Then the different elections can either be counted in parallel according to which is most important/time critical. In the USA most public elections are not time critical at all.
The same way we decide about a recount in any other situation. Whether electronic voting machines are involved has nothing to do with it. If (we need a recount) { do a recount; } The type of vote tabulation system doesn't enter into the equation, unless the system doesn't allow for recounts, which is a Bad Thing(TM).
These electronic machines are not voter tabulating machines. They are the only record of the ballots in a way which can both easily altered and hard to detect if they have been altered. If you have actual ballots (in a tamper resistant form) then you can use different tabulator systems if there is any question about the results
Big deal... I can watch the guy count. I can understand what he's doing. Without actually recounting it myself, I can't make sure he's actually counting it correctly. The fact that it's simpler to understand doesn't make it simpler to verify.
So you can't recognise when someone puts a ballot paper clearly marked with candidate A on the pile of candidate B or C's votes. That is hardly rocket science. If happened to be working for either candidate B or C you might choose to ignore this. But this is exactly the sort of thing someone working for candidate A will be ready to cry foul on.
I don't want industry standard QC procedures applied to my voting. I don't want any automatic machines used to count my votes at all. I want a transparent, public count process easily understood by the layman with as near as possible to zero potential for any candidate or interest to interfere with the vote.
In order for this to happen you'd also need things like a voter registration system which records only the minimum of information to identify you as a voter. e.g. name, address and citizenship. Electoral boundries drawn up in a nonpartisan way. People who have as little interest as possible in any specific result. All parts of transportation and counting of ballots to take place in public. (A count being transparent is not much use unless it can also be verified that the ballot boxes actually came from the polling stations and have not been tampered with on their journey. N.B. Loading bags of ballot papers onto a truck with a sticker for one of the candidates in the window is the sort of thing which should probably disqualify that candidate.
What do you mean paper failed in Florida ? I think the combination of the machines and people's non-understanding of how they can be appropriately used had a lot more to do with it. If people can't do that how do you expect them to operate an electronic machine correctly ?
Also the ballots here were intended to be counted by machine.
When I say "paper" voting I mean a piece of paper which the voter marks using a pencil in some discernable way next to the candidate of his/her choice. You can't get any simpler than that.
Thus the ballots are easily human readable. You could use a machine to help count them, but it dosn't have to be an especially complex machine or one which contains knowlage of what the marks on the paper actually mean.
Obviously votes are rejected if the mark hasn't been made properly, but you're not going to get too far in life if you can't use a pencil...
Even illiterate people can manage to use such a system.
Personally I don't think that electronic voiting is reliable enough. No matter how hardened the system is there will be potential for tampering.
There is a more fundermental problem. Such a system lacks any "transparancy" it cannot be seen to be fair. The ability for members of the public to see the workings of government is an important part of the modern definition of "democracy". Whilst "hardening" may protect a system from external attack the greatest risk here is internal.
Voting is one of the more important things American citizens do. I think we should keep the paper ballots. If we mangaed the polling places a little better and design the paper ballots a little better there should be any problems.
You could also try the (radical) idea of having people who are as independent as possible of any of the candidates (and any associated political parties) involved in conducting elections:)
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases.
Paper based ballot systems are actually quite quick to count. Certainly quick enough for governments where the results of the election take effect within hours of the polls closing. It is also perfectly possible to operate paper ballot systems in ways which make fraud very hard. (To the point where any kind of "vote rigging" would require hundreds of people to conspire in ways against their own interests). Why should speed be considered more important than accuracy. Especially somewhere like the US where there is actually several months to count the votes.
What's wrong with a pencil, a piece of paper, and a count process to which the candidates (and their lawyers) can be invited to ?
In the case of the US the "Not Invented Here" syndrome is probably a big issue. Anyway there are all sorts of issues surrounding elections in the US fail any "seen to be fair" tests.
The first international data transaction occured when morse code was sent by undersea cable (oh I don't know, probably about 100 years ago or so).
The first cable was completed in 1858, though it only worked for 3 weeks. It wasn't until 1866 that a reliable transatlantic cable was layed between Ireland and Canada. Before the end of the 19th century there was an extensive network of undersea cables...
Most lawyers hold themselves to the highest of ethical standards. If they didn't, they'd get a swift kick in the groin by the bar.
However these ethics are those decided by lawyers and their professional associations. These may or may not be the same ethics that a member of the public would accept.
But our users really don't know how to use Windows -- we still wind up teaching them that yes, you can move windows around; you can minimize/maximize them; tab goes between controls; you can drag icons; no, "my documents" is not the only place on your hard drive; no, you shouldn't open any and all files, ever, by first opening Word and then going to "file", "open"
The worst I've seen along this line is users who insist on attempting the MS Office "open file" dialogue box for all file management.
Slashdot Mirror
The point stands as I made it: if you're paying $25,000 in licensing fees and support every year to maintain your windows platform and it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate to a UNIX type system, it's going to take you 10 years just to break even on the migration vs. maintaining a Windows base and you're going to carry a deficit for nine of those years.
Where do you get support for a 1994 vintage MS Windows from? You appear to be missing the point that migrations are part and parcel of "sticking" with MS Windows.
heck, we run win2k because we don't want to deal with the potential problems of going to xp. we have a couple win98 machines because the software they use does not run right under win2k. Linux is right out. this is funny because the hp mainframe will be migrating to a unix-shaped OS in a year or two.
It's also "funny" because you probably could operate your 98 software using vmware (under Linux or WinXP) or win4lin (under Linux). It might even run better, because in such a case Windows is talking to a "Windows friendly" VM.
Thus things like IMAP, webdav and the likes. But mind you, what you gain in portability, you lose in performance. Things like photoshop might not be happy when you deal with multiple multi meg files. Well.. not unahppy. .just slower.
IIRC network file systems started to outstrip local file systems with 100M switched ethernet. It's easier (and cheaper) to upgrade a few servers than to upgrade lots of workstations to have a disk system capable of a high I/O rate (or a lot of memory for cache).
Home directories mount from the file server.
No more workstation specific info, and no more passing 'crap' around to all the workstations.
As well as minimal stuff actually on the workstations. Yet this appears to be contrary to the Microsoft way...
See Netware and Pegasus Mail for an easy to follow implementation of this method.
Dating from before Microsoft even got into client-server networking. I always found it ammusing that Microsoft couldn't even manage to copy Novell very well...
This can also be done with roaming profiles on windows.
With Windows roaming profiles if your workstation goes bang then you might easily lose whatever you are working on. "Folder redirection" is probably better here. Though it appears to be far less well known...
Most of the problems talked about here are due to trying to fit a square peg (Linux) in a round hole (Windows workstation concept).
Which would be really ironic in cases where Windows machines are themselves a "square peg in a round hole". From the POV of the task which needs to be done. (Even more so if a unix style workstation was a better tool for the job in the first place.)
Yes, it can be done, but it is not really optimal.
Linux isn't Windows. But nor is Windows Linux, Unix, a mainframe, a glass teletype, an X-Term, etc.
Yes, we could use some more tools for allowing easy sharing of printers, for example.
There are also situations where you might want to make sharing of printers hard. e.g. a printer which prints on official stationary and automatically puts the result into an addressed envelope...
People here act like a platform migration of this scale is simple as flipping a switch, and I think that really highlights how little experience in practical technology the Slashdot collective really has. You can reformat your system at home and install Linux in an hour depending on options and system speed. It's not that simple when you're talking about a business with 20 locations and 5000 workstations to migrate. It's not that simple when you have internal customer service apps to migrate. When you have internal template and procedures to rewrite. When you have to audit your hardware to ensure compatibility and then repurchase anything that might be too much hassle to fiddle with.
The thing is that it dosn't really matter what the migration is. Many of these things related to there being a migration. Yet there are plenty of people, including those in the PHB catagory, who take the view that so long as both the before and after involve Microsoft then it should be trivial.
Migration to Linux isn't speading like wildfire for the same reason Windows shops don't jump ship to run to the superior UNIX systems even when that's cheaper: it's not as simple as you people think. It's not free.
This is also the reason you find plenty of commercial systems running on ancient versions of MS Windows, even MSDOS...
It's not even necessarily cheap. If it's going to cost you $250,000 to migrate and you're only going to be saving an average of $25,000 in license fees and support each year, it will take you ten years just to break even.
As opposed to following the Microsoft prefered route of spending that $250,000 plus the licencing fees every 2-3 years.
Quit being a whiny little bitch and contribute some code, documentation, consultation, or just shut the hell up. Your whining isn't going to change the fact that Linux just plain isn't a good solution for a lot of shops,
The same applies to MS Windows. The difference is that Microsoft can pay lots of people to whine on their behalf...
well, its the same as people downloading music off the net. why cant people just respect the IP rights of artists?
Assuming these artists actually still have any IP rights...
how about warez sites?
Actually what is going on in these examples is non-commercial infringement. Whereas the company involved is enguaged in commercial infringement. Often the law provides stiffer penalties and stronger investigative/enforcement powers with respect to the latter.
While I feel the GPL is strict on a lot of thing that it shouldn't be but just blatantly releasing a product that is based off an Open Source project with a different license is just wrong.
:)
It dosn't really matter what you think about strictness of the GPL. Current copyright law allows copyright holders to apply whatever licencing terms they consider appropriate to their work(s).
>BR> I think there should be more education for the public that Free Software is not Public Domain and ripping off Open Source Work is just as bad a Pirating Closed Source Software.
It's not so much "as bad as", rather "exactly the same as". The wrongdoing in both cases is copyright infringement. N.B. Probably the closest thing to this in the proprietary software world would be counterfeit copies.
It is too bad that Commercial Enterprise doesn't respect IP Rights.
Proprietary software companies have been caught pirating other proprietary software. Sometimes such a company may activly persue people "pirating" software which they themselves pirated in the first place
However, as far as I can see, by far the largest problem on the internet is the way Microsoft has built powerful programming capabilities into a number of their products, and the way things just happen automatically by default.
Even though the majority of people may have no use at all for various of these "features". Resulting in many people never even having heard of certain things in Windows, until they are used for malware...
I think that another reason the free software is usually better designed falls out from the fact that free software is usually the work of small teams. Microsoft can write big specs and then have large teams go to work on them; if the teams aren't careful, their work can be a tangled mess.
Assuming they don't set out to write a "tangled mess" deliberatly.
The free software projects tend to have clean, modular interfaces; this is partly because so often different pieces are coded up by people who don't even know each other.
Modular code also makes it relativly easy to subsitute modules. So long as the bits which interface are the same it will work.
The user registry is kept in seperate files, one per user, stored in the user's home directory (their profile).
Which means any application can alter USER.DAT in any way. If this file gets corrupted in certain ways a user may be either completly unable to log in or never get anywhere near having a usable desktop.
The system registry is certainly not writeable or even readable by users - there are, rather, system calls which will retrieve the value of a key on your behalf, after checking the access control list associated with the registry key you are trying to read. Registry keys are protected by the same ACL system as the filesystem.
This appears to be a horribly complex way of doing what having multiple configuration files would do by default.
Even the user registry has entries which are not writeable by the user, only by system components - just because the user can write to the file doesn't mean it will actually work if they try - it's permanently opened and locked by at least one system process if the user is logged on (Winlogon) and thus cannot be opened directly, only accessed via the appropriate API.
Which makes the whole thing vulnerable to the machine being reset, especially a hard reset.
Combine this with legacy code and an expectation that it will run, and everybody runs as admin so their apps will run.
Not even legacy code. Some new software has exactly this problem. Ironically some old Windows software can be less trouble to get working with Windows XP compared with some new Windows software...
The Windows (NT - since that's the heritage of all modern Windows versions, and which inherits ideas from VMS) has supported access control lists from the start.
The problem is with the mentality of Windows application writers. The ability to set a file "Read Only" has been around since DOS. Similarly RO media, such as CDROMs, have been around for a long time. Yet it is perfectly possible to find Windows applications which refuse to open Read Only data files. (In extreme cases there are applications which refuse to run without write access to the program directory itself.)
Access to system objects is fine-grained, and can be selectively granted to users or groups.
The problem with ACLs is that it is quite easy to end up with a set of highly complex access permissions.
Contrast this with UNIX where users are either mortals (access to no system objects, or course-grained access via groups) or root (access to all system objects).
VAX/VMS also supported an access control model similar to UNIX. As well as automatic file versioning, which AFAIK no version of NT supports.
The problems with Windows NT started when performance became more of a priority than security, and when people started running as Administrator all of the time
The reason for this is more likely to be able to get a "mission critical" application to run at all.
This only works where there is one thing to choose on the ballot. It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA.
If several elections are taking place at the same time then all that is needed is for each voter to be given an appropriate set of ballot papers. Then the different elections can either be counted in parallel according to which is most important/time critical. In the USA most public elections are not time critical at all.
The same way we decide about a recount in any other situation. Whether electronic voting machines are involved has nothing to do with it. If (we need a recount) { do a recount; } The type of vote tabulation system doesn't enter into the equation, unless the system doesn't allow for recounts, which is a Bad Thing(TM).
These electronic machines are not voter tabulating machines. They are the only record of the ballots in a way which can both easily altered and hard to detect if they have been altered.
If you have actual ballots (in a tamper resistant form) then you can use different tabulator systems if there is any question about the results
Big deal... I can watch the guy count. I can understand what he's doing. Without actually recounting it myself, I can't make sure he's actually counting it correctly. The fact that it's simpler to understand doesn't make it simpler to verify.
So you can't recognise when someone puts a ballot paper clearly marked with candidate A on the pile of candidate B or C's votes. That is hardly rocket science. If happened to be working for either candidate B or C you might choose to ignore this. But this is exactly the sort of thing someone working for candidate A will be ready to cry foul on.
I don't want industry standard QC procedures applied to my voting. I don't want any automatic machines used to count my votes at all. I want a transparent, public count process easily understood by the layman with as near as possible to zero potential for any candidate or interest to interfere with the vote.
In order for this to happen you'd also need things like a voter registration system which records only the minimum of information to identify you as a voter. e.g. name, address and citizenship. Electoral boundries drawn up in a nonpartisan way. People who have as little interest as possible in any specific result. All parts of transportation and counting of ballots to take place in public. (A count being transparent is not much use unless it can also be verified that the ballot boxes actually came from the polling stations and have not been tampered with on their journey. N.B. Loading bags of ballot papers onto a truck with a sticker for one of the candidates in the window is the sort of thing which should probably disqualify that candidate.
What do you mean paper failed in Florida ? I think the combination of the machines and people's non-understanding of how they can be appropriately used had a lot more to do with it. If people can't do that how do you expect them to operate an electronic machine correctly ?
Also the ballots here were intended to be counted by machine.
When I say "paper" voting I mean a piece of paper which the voter marks using a pencil in some discernable way next to the candidate of his/her choice. You can't get any simpler than that.
Thus the ballots are easily human readable. You could use a machine to help count them, but it dosn't have to be an especially complex machine or one which contains knowlage of what the marks on the paper actually mean.
Obviously votes are rejected if the mark hasn't been made properly, but you're not going to get too far in life if you can't use a pencil...
Even illiterate people can manage to use such a system.
Personally I don't think that electronic voiting is reliable enough. No matter how hardened the system is there will be potential for tampering.
:)
There is a more fundermental problem. Such a system lacks any "transparancy" it cannot be seen to be fair. The ability for members of the public to see the workings of government is an important part of the modern definition of "democracy".
Whilst "hardening" may protect a system from external attack the greatest risk here is internal.
Voting is one of the more important things American citizens do. I think we should keep the paper ballots. If we mangaed the polling places a little better and design the paper ballots a little better there should be any problems.
You could also try the (radical) idea of having people who are as independent as possible of any of the candidates (and any associated political parties) involved in conducting elections
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases.
Paper based ballot systems are actually quite quick to count. Certainly quick enough for governments where the results of the election take effect within hours of the polls closing. It is also perfectly possible to operate paper ballot systems in ways which make fraud very hard. (To the point where any kind of "vote rigging" would require hundreds of people to conspire in ways against their own interests).
Why should speed be considered more important than accuracy. Especially somewhere like the US where there is actually several months to count the votes.
What's wrong with a pencil, a piece of paper, and a count process to which the candidates (and their lawyers) can be invited to ?
In the case of the US the "Not Invented Here" syndrome is probably a big issue. Anyway there are all sorts of issues surrounding elections in the US fail any "seen to be fair" tests.
The first international data transaction occured when morse code was sent by undersea cable (oh I don't know, probably about 100 years ago or so).
The first cable was completed in 1858, though it only worked for 3 weeks. It wasn't until 1866 that a reliable transatlantic cable was layed between Ireland and Canada. Before the end of the 19th century there was an extensive network of undersea cables...
Most lawyers hold themselves to the highest of ethical standards. If they didn't, they'd get a swift kick in the groin by the bar.
However these ethics are those decided by lawyers and their professional associations. These may or may not be the same ethics that a member of the public would accept.
But our users really don't know how to use Windows -- we still wind up teaching them that yes, you can move windows around; you can minimize/maximize them; tab goes between controls; you can drag icons; no, "my documents" is not the only place on your hard drive; no, you shouldn't open any and all files, ever, by first opening Word and then going to "file", "open"
The worst I've seen along this line is users who insist on attempting the MS Office "open file" dialogue box for all file management.