"CSU, which has just won the European elections, said they won't support Linux since its Feierabendprogrammierer ('leisure-time coders') would destroy Munich's IT-landscape (Microsoft Germany and other big companies are located in and around Munich) and they also fear that the personnel would have problems with learning how to use OpenOffice and other migrated systems."
IIRC StarOffice was originally written by a German company. Are they really saything they think that the average German is more able to use a foreign piece of software than a German one?
and it does tend to be more expensive, when it is required, than Windows maintenance, but that is to be expected.
I doubt the cost of cleaning up after Windows malware is exactly "cheap".
Linux doesn't go wrong very often; and when it does go wrong, it usually goes wrong for a reason. Windows is inherently unreliable. Sorry to upset the MS fanboys, but it is. The reason is that it is closed source.
Part of the problem is the closed source nature of Windows, which means there is a temptation for bad code and hacks to wind up in there. Because "no one is going to see this anyway". But there have also been cases of Microsoft deliberatly choosing to write bad code in the name of "integration".
What if the response is signed with a private key?
Then key management becomes a big issue. Either you have keys which are fixed or you require require reliable network access for any device.
Sure, you'd possibly be able to hack it. But if your DVD player's BIOS has non-changable firmware and talks to the systme BIOS over an encrypted channel - what chance would you have?
You have much the same cryptoanalysis problem as the people at Station X in WWII.
This is about having secure communication between everything. DVD -> Soundcard -> Speakers. All requiring authentication before they'll do anything.
You don't even need to break any encryption to "pirate" content with such a system in the first place. A system is only as secure as it's weakest part.
The part that makes me scratch my head is, people actually express a mix of indignation and boredom over the original sources. What they seem to want to watch instead is talking heads -- "pundits" -- spewing nonsense.
Hardly confined to this piece of history. You can see the same thing going on related to much more recent events. Including "reporting" which is a mixture of spin and conspiracy theory. Together with so called "experts" who don't know that much.
Imagine the difference with something like this balloon story. You could interview the Japanese policy makers and have them describe why they chose to do it when they did.
About as likely as interviewing the average Iraqi about what is going on in their country...
But no, we'd put lots of bilious fools on TV to remind us that the Japanese hated America, or some such stupidity.
Are these the same people who go on about Arabs hating America?
It also seems that part of the reason for opposing same-sex marriage is that this would lead to the legalization of polygamy, which would open a can of worms in the eyes of some people.
IMHO the first can of worms legalisation of same sex marriage would open would be that of sexism related to marriage, marital status and (especially) divorce. The polygamy issue is more of a "slippery" slope argument.
You would be well advised to know that polygamy was abandoned by the Mormons when Utah was admitted to the U.S. as a state in 1895.
Was this not a condition made by the US on Utah? In which case you can push the US Government attacking the fist ammendment to the US Constitution back to at least 1895...
Counting time isn't a problem. It would only be a problem if there was less than 1 day between the voting and installing the successful candidate as the representative.
In quite a few countries which use such a system things can take effect less than 24 hours from the close of polling.
Except that even pencil and paper voting seems to be too complex for much of the UK electorate - 500,000 London mayoral election ballot papers were incorrectly filled in.
All you had to do was put two crosses for *different* candidates (first+second preference), and still 500,000 people can't cope with it.
Maybe these people did not have a second preference. Was there a "no second candidate" box? Even if there was it's possible that people would interpret this as throwing away one of their two votes.
The original suggestion was a simple piece of paper, where you put an X next to the name which is what Canada, Britain and lots of other places do. You can't get any simpler and the KISS principal applies here. If you screw up and mis-vote then yes, you get disenfranchised but its YOUR FAULT.
One situation specific to the US appears to be the number of ballots which take place at once. Even to the point of having multiple elections on the same ballot paper, which greatly complicates recounts and makes for interesting data mining possibilities.
Anyone can audit an election with paper ballots and I like that, so do all the little old ladies and gents who like to work at polling stations.
It's quite possible to count paper ballots by machine. With advantage that this can be a general purpose machine which sorts pieces of paper according to size, colour and what is on them. If doing the count quickly is important. For many US elections the count could take a month without there being problems.
If you serve in the US armed forces, you have fingerprints, photos, vital statistics (height/weight/eye color/hair color/blood type) and DNA on file even though the collection has nothing to do with criminal suspicion. Fortunately, safeguards are extremely tight on use of DOD DNA samples to prevent fishing expeditions or other abuse.
Any security is only as strong as its weakest part.
Does "publicly known" exclude bugs that were known to some but MS refused to acknowledge?
Remembering also that proprietary software companies have been known to play "It's a feature, not a bug!". Which is something which just dosn't work with open sourcei software. Since not even the original author has a monopoly on changing such programs.
After collecting a year's worth of vulnerability data, Forrester analyzed Windows and four key Linux distributors on key metrics of responsiveness to vulnerabilities, severity of vulnerabilities, and thoroughness in fixing flaws.
* Responsiveness: On average, Microsoft had a fix available 25 days after a security issue was publicly disclosed.
Is this "average" a mode, media or mean? What was the level of variation? Most importantly, how does this compare with others...
* Thoroughness: Microsoft was the only vendor to have corrected 100% of the publicly known flaws during the study's time period.
So howcome there are still plenty of publically known flaws in Windows? Some of which have been around for years.
Forcing users to send mail through their ISP's SMTP server forces a single point of logging & authentication, what's the problem with that?
You can do logging far better by looking at all the traffic related to an IP. Some suitable traffic analysis will be far quicker and more transparent at spotting spammers. With less risk of false positives from mailing lists.
And the next generation of zombie programs will do a simple DNS lookup for the mailserver of the current domain and start sending spam through the ISP's mailserver.
Or more likely look at whatever settings OE is using...
Lets look at facts: Janet won't bare her breasts at the superbowl anymore. Nor will anyone for the foreseeable future.
Considering all the fuss made over Ms Jackson there are probably more than a few women who'd consider that amount of publicity "worth it".
I fail to see how the FCC is or should be part of this process.
Should the FCC fine Janet Jackson? Why? Are they in charge of public morals? Does broadcasting something give such awesome power that all other rights are trumped by the need to regulate this speech?
Did the FCC book Janet Jackson in the first place? Did the NFL, who probably did book her, explicitally place restrictions on what she could and couldn't do as part of her stage show? Most importantly was this a deliberate action in the first place?
Decency is not a measurable thing, but a concept. It is a judgement that is entirely qualitative in nature. What, objectively, is indecent about Janet Jackson's breast? Is it more or less indecent than showing the towers in New York falling live on CNN?
Many news channels repeatedly showed footable of this happening.
Is it more or less indecent than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan? Is it more or less indecent than simulated rape on a TV drama?
How about an interview with a politican who is blatently lying through his or her teeth. Without the interviewer being especially hard on them?
Things like Janet Jackson at the super bowl don't make me feel sorry for the guilty parties at all. National tv with children watching and people feel the need to "push the envenlope."
It says quite a bit about a society that there is more concern about the possibility of children seeing a couple of seconds of some celebrity's bare breast than of watching a "sport" where the players have to wear body armour to reduce the risk of being carted away in an ambulance or hearse...
When it comes to budget, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules the day. Companies would prefer to keep using the same computer systems forever, if they did the job. And I cannot say that's really a wrong attitude.
Of course, at many companies, the attitude is "even if it is broke, don't fix it unless it's stopping production outright".
It's perfectly possible for attempts to "fix it" (or even "upgrade it") to break things. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is as much an engineer's rule of thumb as an a accountant's...
A *lot* of businesses - including major corporations in the Forbes 500 - still run NT4. What other option do they have if they're a windows shop?
Businesses generally do not spend money on their infrastructure unless there is a good reason to. Once software is set up to work it generally keeps doing so. Software dosn't rust; it dosn't have people walking on it; dosn't carry potentially corrosive fluids; etc. No company would expect to have to replace all their floor coverings or all their plumbing after a couple of years.
Looks like the moderators were unkind to you. Your post is relative and not a troll. The original poster states that he upgraded hundreds of PC's to XP. While the upgrade could have taken roughly that amount of time, the real issue is all the additional planning involved as well as the post upgrade support.
Which is most likely to be more of an issue with applications and their data.
Unless this guy is working with a single hardware configuration, the research for pushing the upgrade out must be done to make sure the systems can support the upgrade (minimum CPU, memory, etc... for the supported OS).
There is also the difference between the hardware being supported by drivers on the installation media, supported by automagic download or supported by drivers which need to be explicitally referenced.
You also should take into account that users could have personal data and/or applications on their PC (maybe the managers have a management application the other systems don't, the engineers have CAD, etc...).
Some applications insist on having personal/configuration data on the machine itself. If that isn't there the application can give some strange error messages.
Applications must be tested on the new OS (you'd be in trouble if you upgraded only to find out that a critical application is incompatible).
Applications may also need to be tested in combination...
So after encountering this problem I cannot, as a normal user with an OEM Product ID actually get the fix from Microsoft. I jumped through all their hoops (Contact Microsoft, get a.NET Passport, etc.) but since the letters OEM are in my Product ID I'm screwed.
Microsoft have been doing this kind of thing for years. Being selective about what patches they make easily available. I'm not sure the fixed version of MSNP32.DLL for 9x ever make it onto Windows Update...
If you haven't patched after two months, you're just the same as all those people who got hit with Blaster, which was also already patched beforehand. Linux distros issue security patches for their vulnerabilities weekly and nobody complains, but when Microsoft releases a patch, suddenly it's this huge issue to run a tiny executable that plugs security flaws, and then people bitch at Windows two months later when a virus comes out to exploit it...
Windows is basically (deliberate) "sphagetti code", attempting to patch such a system can have all sorts of unforseen consequences. Let alone that the patch may not exactly be what Microsoft claims it is.
Slashdot Mirror
"CSU, which has just won the European elections, said they won't support Linux since its Feierabendprogrammierer ('leisure-time coders') would destroy Munich's IT-landscape (Microsoft Germany and other big companies are located in and around Munich) and they also fear that the personnel would have problems with learning how to use OpenOffice and other migrated systems."
IIRC StarOffice was originally written by a German company. Are they really saything they think that the average German is more able to use a foreign piece of software than a German one?
Linux maintenance is an ongoing cost
Maintanance is an ongoing cost, regardless of OS.
and it does tend to be more expensive, when it is required, than Windows maintenance, but that is to be expected.
I doubt the cost of cleaning up after Windows malware is exactly "cheap".
Linux doesn't go wrong very often; and when it does go wrong, it usually goes wrong for a reason. Windows is inherently unreliable. Sorry to upset the MS fanboys, but it is. The reason is that it is closed source.
Part of the problem is the closed source nature of Windows, which means there is a temptation for bad code and hacks to wind up in there. Because "no one is going to see this anyway". But there have also been cases of Microsoft deliberatly choosing to write bad code in the name of "integration".
What if the response is signed with a private key?
Then key management becomes a big issue. Either you have keys which are fixed or you require require reliable network access for any device.
Sure, you'd possibly be able to hack it. But if your DVD player's BIOS has non-changable firmware and talks to the systme BIOS over an encrypted channel - what chance would you have?
You have much the same cryptoanalysis problem as the people at Station X in WWII.
This is about having secure communication between everything. DVD -> Soundcard -> Speakers. All requiring authentication before they'll do anything.
You don't even need to break any encryption to "pirate" content with such a system in the first place. A system is only as secure as it's weakest part.
The part that makes me scratch my head is, people actually express a mix of indignation and boredom over the original sources. What they seem to want to watch instead is talking heads -- "pundits" -- spewing nonsense.
Hardly confined to this piece of history. You can see the same thing going on related to much more recent events. Including "reporting" which is a mixture of spin and conspiracy theory. Together with so called "experts" who don't know that much.
Imagine the difference with something like this balloon story. You could interview the Japanese policy makers and have them describe why they chose to do it when they did.
About as likely as interviewing the average Iraqi about what is going on in their country...
But no, we'd put lots of bilious fools on TV to remind us that the Japanese hated America, or some such stupidity.
Are these the same people who go on about Arabs hating America?
All very interesting but who is going to pay to convert hundres of millions of bussiness PC's to Linux
Who is going to pay to convert these hundreds of millions of computers from Win 98 to Win XP as well as from Win XP to Windows Cattle?
It also seems that part of the reason for opposing same-sex marriage is that this would lead to the legalization of polygamy, which would open a can of worms in the eyes of some people.
IMHO the first can of worms legalisation of same sex marriage would open would be that of sexism related to marriage, marital status and (especially) divorce.
The polygamy issue is more of a "slippery" slope argument.
You would be well advised to know that polygamy was abandoned by the Mormons when Utah was admitted to the U.S. as a state in 1895.
Was this not a condition made by the US on Utah? In which case you can push the US Government attacking the fist ammendment to the US Constitution back to at least 1895...
Counting time isn't a problem. It would only be a problem if there was less than 1 day between the voting and installing the successful candidate as the representative.
In quite a few countries which use such a system things can take effect less than 24 hours from the close of polling.
Except that even pencil and paper voting seems to be too complex for much of the UK electorate - 500,000 London mayoral election ballot papers were incorrectly filled in.
All you had to do was put two crosses for *different* candidates (first+second preference), and still 500,000 people can't cope with it.
Maybe these people did not have a second preference. Was there a "no second candidate" box? Even if there was it's possible that people would interpret this as throwing away one of their two votes.
The original suggestion was a simple piece of paper, where you put an X next to the name which is what Canada, Britain and lots of other places do. You can't get any simpler and the KISS principal applies here. If you screw up and mis-vote then yes, you get disenfranchised but its YOUR FAULT.
One situation specific to the US appears to be the number of ballots which take place at once. Even to the point of having multiple elections on the same ballot paper, which greatly complicates recounts and makes for interesting data mining possibilities.
Anyone can audit an election with paper ballots and I like that, so do all the little old ladies and gents who like to work at polling stations.
It's quite possible to count paper ballots by machine. With advantage that this can be a general purpose machine which sorts pieces of paper according to size, colour and what is on them. If doing the count quickly is important. For many US elections the count could take a month without there being problems.
If you serve in the US armed forces, you have fingerprints, photos, vital statistics (height/weight/eye color/hair color/blood type) and DNA on file even though the collection has nothing to do with criminal suspicion. Fortunately, safeguards are extremely tight on use of DOD DNA samples to prevent fishing expeditions or other abuse.
Any security is only as strong as its weakest part.
Does "publicly known" exclude bugs that were known to some but MS refused to acknowledge?
Remembering also that proprietary software companies have been known to play "It's a feature, not a bug!".
Which is something which just dosn't work with open sourcei software. Since not even the original author has a monopoly on changing such programs.
After collecting a year's worth of vulnerability data, Forrester analyzed Windows and four key Linux distributors on key metrics of responsiveness to vulnerabilities, severity of vulnerabilities, and thoroughness in fixing flaws.
* Responsiveness: On average, Microsoft had a fix available 25 days after a security issue was publicly disclosed.
Is this "average" a mode, media or mean? What was the level of variation? Most importantly, how does this compare with others...
* Thoroughness: Microsoft was the only vendor to have corrected 100% of the publicly known flaws during the study's time period.
So howcome there are still plenty of publically known flaws in Windows? Some of which have been around for years.
Forcing users to send mail through their ISP's SMTP server forces a single point of logging & authentication, what's the problem with that?
You can do logging far better by looking at all the traffic related to an IP. Some suitable traffic analysis will be far quicker and more transparent at spotting spammers. With less risk of false positives from mailing lists.
And the next generation of zombie programs will do a simple DNS lookup for the mailserver of the current domain and start sending spam through the ISP's mailserver.
Or more likely look at whatever settings OE is using...
Lets look at facts: Janet won't bare her breasts at the superbowl anymore. Nor will anyone for the foreseeable future.
Considering all the fuss made over Ms Jackson there are probably more than a few women who'd consider that amount of publicity "worth it".
I fail to see how the FCC is or should be part of this process.
Should the FCC fine Janet Jackson? Why? Are they in charge of public morals? Does broadcasting something give such awesome power that all other rights are trumped by the need to regulate this speech?
Did the FCC book Janet Jackson in the first place? Did the NFL, who probably did book her, explicitally place restrictions on what she could and couldn't do as part of her stage show? Most importantly was this a deliberate action in the first place?
Decency is not a measurable thing, but a concept. It is a judgement that is entirely qualitative in nature. What, objectively, is indecent about Janet Jackson's breast? Is it more or less indecent than showing the towers in New York falling live on CNN?
Many news channels repeatedly showed footable of this happening.
Is it more or less indecent than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan? Is it more or less indecent than simulated rape on a TV drama?
How about an interview with a politican who is blatently lying through his or her teeth. Without the interviewer being especially hard on them?
Things like Janet Jackson at the super bowl don't make me feel sorry for the guilty parties at all. National tv with children watching and people feel the need to "push the envenlope."
It says quite a bit about a society that there is more concern about the possibility of children seeing a couple of seconds of some celebrity's bare breast than of watching a "sport" where the players have to wear body armour to reduce the risk of being carted away in an ambulance or hearse...
Absolutely. CVN-77 is the current aircraft carrier that is being built and the entire boat runs off of Windows 2000.
:)
How long is that intended to last? Quite possibly until it has a captain who is younger than the ship
When it comes to budget, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules the day. Companies would prefer to keep using the same computer systems forever, if they did the job. And I cannot say that's really a wrong attitude.
Of course, at many companies, the attitude is "even if it is broke, don't fix it unless it's stopping production outright".
It's perfectly possible for attempts to "fix it" (or even "upgrade it") to break things. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is as much an engineer's rule of thumb as an a accountant's...
A *lot* of businesses - including major corporations in the Forbes 500 - still run NT4. What other option do they have if they're a windows shop?
Businesses generally do not spend money on their infrastructure unless there is a good reason to. Once software is set up to work it generally keeps doing so. Software dosn't rust; it dosn't have people walking on it; dosn't carry potentially corrosive fluids; etc. No company would expect to have to replace all their floor coverings or all their plumbing after a couple of years.
Looks like the moderators were unkind to you. Your post is relative and not a troll. The original poster states that he upgraded hundreds of PC's to XP. While the upgrade could have taken roughly that amount of time, the real issue is all the additional planning involved as well as the post upgrade support.
Which is most likely to be more of an issue with applications and their data.
Unless this guy is working with a single hardware configuration, the research for pushing the upgrade out must be done to make sure the systems can support the upgrade (minimum CPU, memory, etc... for the supported OS).
There is also the difference between the hardware being supported by drivers on the installation media, supported by automagic download or supported by drivers which need to be explicitally referenced.
You also should take into account that users could have personal data and/or applications on their PC (maybe the managers have a management application the other systems don't, the engineers have CAD, etc...).
Some applications insist on having personal/configuration data on the machine itself. If that isn't there the application can give some strange error messages.
Applications must be tested on the new OS (you'd be in trouble if you upgraded only to find out that a critical application is incompatible).
Applications may also need to be tested in combination...
It's interesting that now the EU wants to push problems with more and more counterfeiting money appearing on the market to graphics software makers...
Where is this idea comming from? European currencies are already more counterfit resistant than the likes of the US doller.
So after encountering this problem I cannot, as a normal user with an OEM Product ID actually get the fix from Microsoft. I jumped through all their hoops (Contact Microsoft, get a .NET Passport, etc.) but since the letters OEM are in my Product ID I'm screwed.
Microsoft have been doing this kind of thing for years. Being selective about what patches they make easily available. I'm not sure the fixed version of MSNP32.DLL for 9x ever make it onto Windows Update...
If you haven't patched after two months, you're just the same as all those people who got hit with Blaster, which was also already patched beforehand. Linux distros issue security patches for their vulnerabilities weekly and nobody complains, but when Microsoft releases a patch, suddenly it's this huge issue to run a tiny executable that plugs security flaws, and then people bitch at Windows two months later when a virus comes out to exploit it...
Windows is basically (deliberate) "sphagetti code", attempting to patch such a system can have all sorts of unforseen consequences. Let alone that the patch may not exactly be what Microsoft claims it is.