User Joe will with no problems be able to use e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. to do all his daily tasks that he wants to do. I can?t see why Linux in this case is harder than Windows. Now it?s a different story if he wants to install new programs use special programs.
If this is Joe or Jane using a computer provided by their employer (or school) then they have no business installing software on the machine in the first place. Indeed there is a whole industry selling third party addons to Windows to make it more difficult for end users to install software or alter settings.
or buy new games or hardware ? but for the average user doing what you state Linux is definitely easy to use.
Even the home user does not buy hardware or games that often. Also it wouldn't be impossible to design games which don't require installation in the first place.
People that say linux isn't user friendly are people that just gave up on their brains.
"user friendly" is probably the most abused term in computing. Usually what people mean by saying something like "Linux isn't user friendly" is that it dosn't work exactly like Windows. Regardless of if XYZ "feature" of Windows actually makes much sense to the "average user" in the first place.
Maybe the US should spend some amount of efforts in being good world citizens and stop meddling about just to get cheap oil?
Even though the US has plenty of its own oil.
The US have also been very efficient in alienating countries on account of other partner countries they like to protect.
Usually what the US is interested in protecting are the interests of US corporations operating abroad. From this POV the "best" government is something along the lines of a dictator friendly to the corporate interests in question.
If there are threats against the US its not only because muslims and other non wealthy countries are evil by nature. Something has brought them to this conclusion and its not just the koran or lack of money that is to blame here.
Lack of money is more likely to be an effect of US intereference. Maximising the profits of US corporates dosn't do much to help the economies of the countries they operate in.
The US is working hard to have a reason to fight Iraq when most other countries dont want war in that region.
The US wants a war for reasons more to do with domestic US politics. Virtually none of the rest of the planet is interested in a war with Iraq. Apart from the US only the UK and Israeli governments appear to think there is cause.
this is either blind prejudice or blind ignorance. But just in case someone doesn't know the facts, I'll bite:
size of India : 2,973,190 sq km
Area - comparative: slightly more than one-third the size of the US
# of citizens : 1,029,991,145 (July 2001 est.)
these data (unlike your prepostrous claim) are not blown out of my ass, but can be found here [cia.gov]
size of Israel : 20,330 sq km
Area - comparative: slightly smaller than New Jersey
# of israelly citizens : 5,938,093 (yes, that's six millions, not billions...)
again, this is from the same source [cia.gov]
The size of a country has little to do with how many enemies they have. The only country India is in conflict with is Pakistan, which is also a nuclear power. So MAD applies. Israel is currently in conflict with Lebanon and Syria, who have no nuclear deterance. Also Israel has effectivly been in a state of civil war for over half a century. Only one of these countries makes a habit of invading it's neighbours, ignoring UN resolutions and even tried to sink a US navy ship.
Personally, it's clear to me that a lot of the "little puke nations" are sick of the US telling them what to do, whilst simultaneously playing by its own set of rules when it wants to.
Also assuming that the nations the US chooses to attack will play by the expected rules. Sooner or later the US is going to want to go after a country capable of defending itself. (Or of initiating a preemptive attack against the US).
Right on, bro! We've got the biggest guns and all those other shitty nations, even the ones that we call friends, should be quaking in their boots. If we want something then we'll take it, simple as that. Why shouldn't we? We're the biggest and the best. Fucking, yeah!
History is littered with cases of the side with the biggest and best weapons failing to win. The US probably isn't big enough to fight more than a certain number of wars at once. Especially on it's own...
Have you ever wondered why it is that the US wants to regulate (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Saddam Hussein,
Thing is that Saddam Hussein is more of a secular socialist than a radical Moslem.
but hasn't tried to do the same to (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Musharraf? It's because Musharraf already has nuclear weapons, and Saddam doesn't.
More likely the real reason is that Hussein will no longer allow himself to be pushed around the US. The whole "terrorism" thing is a smokescreen. The US is quite happy to let all sorts of terrorists operate in the US, the British government is quite happy to let all sorts of terrorists operate in the UK. Both governments also give some of their tax payers money to supporting terrorists. So it would hardly be suprising if Iraq was prepared to harbourer any terrorists not considering attacking Iraq.
India is a more sophisticated and advanced society than large parts of North America, with one of the most educated populations in the world. To call it third world is insulting, to refer to it as unstable and undeveloped is offensive.
"Third world" orginally ment not alligned with either the "first world", NATO or the "second world", USSR and Warsaw Pact. IIRC the term originally came from India as a way of indicating their non alignment. Only later did it come to mean "poor".
Are you suggesting that the US has the right or responsibility of regulating space research? What goes on in another country shouldn't be up to the US, unless it directly affects them.
The US government certainly does not accept this principle. As has frequently been the top story in TV news programmes for the last few months and weeks.
The US could just have easily have placed nuclear weapons in space as India could have, as it is only speculation that India has done.
The US could have done so a lot more easily, simply by virtue of having put far more stuff up there.
I have to wonder if this story doesn't have a more sinister side to it. Recall that India shocked the global community recently when satellite data indicated that they had developed nuclear weapons, despite treaties against such activities. If they can put a weather satellite up this cheaply, then they can probably get nuclear missiles up there for not much more.
What country, other than Pakistan, would India target with nuclear weapons? Attacking Pakistan from India would not require techniques such as FRactional Orbit Bombardment.
If the US had been more proactive about limiting space research by unstable and undeveloped nations,
The attempts by the US, and other Western nations, to manipulate third world countries provide plenty of motivation for most of the world to consider the USA a danger to their national security. As for danger to rest of the world India is far less of an issue than Israel.
India has not signed any treaties including
the big one; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT). Other countries that have not signed
the NPT are Pakistan and Israel.
Israel is rumoured to have nuclear missiles capable of hitting anywhere on the planet and they have made themselves a lot more enemies than India.
The reality of the situation is that Microsoft has got to keep growing their business or their stock price is going to head even further south, and they are going to have to do so without being able to grow their market share.
Which is something they cannot do indefinitly anyway. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft falls over, unless they radically change their business model.
Unlike grammar school, you aren't rewarded for effort. You are rewarded for success -- for providing a good or service at a price someone else is willing to pay. If you can't add value using your business model, then too bad... you don't deserve some handout to enable you to follow your model.
There is absolutly no guarentee that anyone will want to pay anything for whatever goods or services you might be offering. Or that a specific business model will turn a profit, even if it has done so in the past. The point of the American model of copyright law was to give the creator of a work first refusal on any profits, if such happened to exist.
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free.
Quite a few actually creators of IP do work for "free" or at least without the assumption of making a substatial profit.
People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do.
Currently most of the people deriving revenue from IP appear to be middlemen in the publishing and distribution business.
The nature of the work is irrelevant. Someone who creates IP has just as much right to be paid as your odd example of someone driving heavy equipment -- who creates a hole in the ground.
The difference is that the hole digger is paid to dig a hole. Once the hole has been dug they don't continue to get paid for digging it.
I guess they must be assuming journalists are not engineers, as otherwise they could just cut the headphone wires and them connect them to their favourite input.
The advisory at Symantec advises the reader to update their virus definitions and run a full system scan. Presumably they are talking about Symantec anti-virus products, but if they make such a product for Linux/x86, I could not detect it on their website.
Typically anti-virus companies do offer ports of their products to Linux. But they only serve such purposes as scanning when used as a file server for windows or checking for email viruses. Rather than doing anything for the Linux system.
The system may be broken in a way which changing the mechanics of voting might not do much to help. e.g. people connected to the candidates being involved in the operation of the election. In several parts of the US there are different rules for candidates standing depending if they are Democrat/Republican or not.
The advantage to the pencil-and-paper system is that to my knowledge, nobody has developed paper that can cause a mark on its surface to be erased and another mark drawn while the paper is in the ballot box.
Also if you have ballot papers with serial numbers and counterfoils, as well as keeping a count of the number of people who voted, it's not that easy for someone to put in some extra ballot papers without it being rather obvious.
People can watch the ballot go into the box, they can watch it come out, and be sure that nothing has occurred to change the vote thereupon.
Also people can watch the process of counting the ballots...
That's the way it used to be in most of the US. That system was largely abandoned because it was more susceptible to human error in vote counting and (in particular) a lot more susceptible to fraud. I'll admit that some of the machine voting systems are too confusing, but machine voting is still more accurate and harder to influence than good old handwritten paper ballots.
There are two obvious ways to make fraud more diffcult with a paper and pencil ballot.
a) The count is watched by candidates' representatives and any other interested party. (Which isn't possible with a mechanised system.)
b) each ballot paper carries a serial number and comes attached to a counterfoil. Reconciling ballot papers with counterfoils is a task which lends itself well to mechanisation.
Look, all you need is a paper ballot. The type where you take a pencil and complete the arrow to point to the name of the candidate you wish to vote for.
Part of the problem in the US is that they appear to go in for multiple elections at the same time and want to minimise the number of ballot papers.
Its extremely easy to print them. It is extremely easy to fill them out. It is extremely simple to hand count them or two design an optical scanner to read them.
So long as you have one election per ballot paper. You can even use a different machine to collate and count.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
The open/closed source bit is only part of the issue. The more voting is automated the harder it is to verify and the easier it is to rig. It's a lot harder to change parts of a database than it is to change physical ballot papers.
Er, no, it didn't. There were several inherent design and safety flaws in the Titanic. The "water-tight" compartments were not water-tight, and the bulkheads for them only extended 10 feet above the water line. Also, the sheer lack of lifeboats was done because they were not "aesthetically pleasing" to have them crowding the decks.
Also there was no legal requirment to have lifeboat places for all passengers and crew. It would have been perfectly possible for the ship to have carried sufficent boats, some of the original plans indicate this. IIRC the Titanic actually carried more boats than the law (at the time) required.
In a like manner, how many MS products have had inherent design flaws and safety features which merely add to the aesthetics but offer no real security?
Wonder how many of these might be, or at one time have been, fairly easy to fix.
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User Joe will with no problems be able to use e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. to do all his daily tasks that he wants to do. I can?t see why Linux in this case is harder than Windows. Now it?s a different story if he wants to install new programs use special programs.
If this is Joe or Jane using a computer provided by their employer (or school) then they have no business installing software on the machine in the first place. Indeed there is a whole industry selling third party addons to Windows to make it more difficult for end users to install software or alter settings.
or buy new games or hardware ? but for the average user doing what you state Linux is definitely easy to use.
Even the home user does not buy hardware or games that often. Also it wouldn't be impossible to design games which don't require installation in the first place.
People that say linux isn't user friendly are people that just gave up on their brains.
"user friendly" is probably the most abused term in computing. Usually what people mean by saying something like "Linux isn't user friendly" is that it dosn't work exactly like Windows. Regardless of if XYZ "feature" of Windows actually makes much sense to the "average user" in the first place.
Maybe the US should spend some amount of efforts in being good world citizens and stop meddling about just to get cheap oil?
Even though the US has plenty of its own oil.
The US have also been very efficient in alienating countries on account of other partner countries they like to protect.
Usually what the US is interested in protecting are the interests of US corporations operating abroad. From this POV the "best" government is something along the lines of a dictator friendly to the corporate interests in question.
If there are threats against the US its not only because muslims and other non wealthy countries are evil by nature. Something has brought them to this conclusion and its not just the koran or lack of money that is to blame here.
Lack of money is more likely to be an effect of US intereference. Maximising the profits of US corporates dosn't do much to help the economies of the countries they operate in.
The US is working hard to have a reason to fight Iraq when most other countries dont want war in that region.
The US wants a war for reasons more to do with domestic US politics. Virtually none of the rest of the planet is interested in a war with Iraq. Apart from the US only the UK and Israeli governments appear to think there is cause.
this is either blind prejudice or blind ignorance. But just in case someone doesn't know the facts, I'll bite: ...)
again, this is from the same source [cia.gov]
size of India : 2,973,190 sq km Area - comparative: slightly more than one-third the size of the US # of citizens : 1,029,991,145 (July 2001 est.) these data (unlike your prepostrous claim) are not blown out of my ass, but can be found here [cia.gov]
size of Israel : 20,330 sq km Area - comparative: slightly smaller than New Jersey # of israelly citizens : 5,938,093 (yes, that's six millions, not billions
The size of a country has little to do with how many enemies they have. The only country India is in conflict with is Pakistan, which is also a nuclear power. So MAD applies.
Israel is currently in conflict with Lebanon and Syria, who have no nuclear deterance. Also Israel has effectivly been in a state of civil war for over half a century.
Only one of these countries makes a habit of invading it's neighbours, ignoring UN resolutions and even tried to sink a US navy ship.
Personally, it's clear to me that a lot of the "little puke nations" are sick of the US telling them what to do, whilst simultaneously playing by its own set of rules when it wants to.
Also assuming that the nations the US chooses to attack will play by the expected rules. Sooner or later the US is going to want to go after a country capable of defending itself. (Or of initiating a preemptive attack against the US).
Right on, bro! We've got the biggest guns and all those other shitty nations, even the ones that we call friends, should be quaking in their boots. If we want something then we'll take it, simple as that. Why shouldn't we? We're the biggest and the best. Fucking, yeah!
History is littered with cases of the side with the biggest and best weapons failing to win.
The US probably isn't big enough to fight more than a certain number of wars at once. Especially on it's own...
Have you ever wondered why it is that the US wants to regulate (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Saddam Hussein,
Thing is that Saddam Hussein is more of a secular socialist than a radical Moslem.
but hasn't tried to do the same to (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Musharraf? It's because Musharraf already has nuclear weapons, and Saddam doesn't.
More likely the real reason is that Hussein will no longer allow himself to be pushed around the US. The whole "terrorism" thing is a smokescreen. The US is quite happy to let all sorts of terrorists operate in the US, the British government is quite happy to let all sorts of terrorists operate in the UK. Both governments also give some of their tax payers money to supporting terrorists. So it would hardly be suprising if Iraq was prepared to harbourer any terrorists not considering attacking Iraq.
India is a more sophisticated and advanced society than large parts of North America, with one of the most educated populations in the world. To call it third world is insulting, to refer to it as unstable and undeveloped is offensive.
"Third world" orginally ment not alligned with either the "first world", NATO or the "second world", USSR and Warsaw Pact. IIRC the term originally came from India as a way of indicating their non alignment. Only later did it come to mean "poor".
Are you suggesting that the US has the right or responsibility of regulating space research? What goes on in another country shouldn't be up to the US, unless it directly affects them.
The US government certainly does not accept this principle. As has frequently been the top story in TV news programmes for the last few months and weeks.
The US could just have easily have placed nuclear weapons in space as India could have, as it is only speculation that India has done.
The US could have done so a lot more easily, simply by virtue of having put far more stuff up there.
I have to wonder if this story doesn't have a more sinister side to it. Recall that India shocked the global community recently when satellite data indicated that they had developed nuclear weapons, despite treaties against such activities. If they can put a weather satellite up this cheaply, then they can probably get nuclear missiles up there for not much more.
What country, other than Pakistan, would India target with nuclear weapons? Attacking Pakistan from India would not require techniques such as FRactional Orbit Bombardment.
If the US had been more proactive about limiting space research by unstable and undeveloped nations,
The attempts by the US, and other Western nations, to manipulate third world countries provide plenty of motivation for most of the world to consider the USA a danger to their national security.
As for danger to rest of the world India is far less of an issue than Israel.
India has not signed any treaties including the big one; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Other countries that have not signed the NPT are Pakistan and Israel.
Israel is rumoured to have nuclear missiles capable of hitting anywhere on the planet and they have made themselves a lot more enemies than India.
The reality of the situation is that Microsoft has got to keep growing their business or their stock price is going to head even further south, and they are going to have to do so without being able to grow their market share.
Which is something they cannot do indefinitly anyway. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft falls over, unless they radically change their business model.
Unlike grammar school, you aren't rewarded for effort. You are rewarded for success -- for providing a good or service at a price someone else is willing to pay. If you can't add value using your business model, then too bad... you don't deserve some handout to enable you to follow your model.
There is absolutly no guarentee that anyone will want to pay anything for whatever goods or services you might be offering. Or that a specific business model will turn a profit, even if it has done so in the past.
The point of the American model of copyright law was to give the creator of a work first refusal on any profits, if such happened to exist.
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free.
Quite a few actually creators of IP do work for "free" or at least without the assumption of making a substatial profit.
People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do.
Currently most of the people deriving revenue from IP appear to be middlemen in the publishing and distribution business.
The nature of the work is irrelevant. Someone who creates IP has just as much right to be paid as your odd example of someone driving heavy equipment -- who creates a hole in the ground.
The difference is that the hole digger is paid to dig a hole. Once the hole has been dug they don't continue to get paid for digging it.
I guess they must be assuming journalists are not engineers, as otherwise they could just cut the headphone wires and them connect them to their favourite input.
:)
Thus making wire cutters illegal under the DMCA
You are behind a firewall right?
Also make sure that the default is to block all ports and only open those you need.
The advisory at Symantec advises the reader to update their virus definitions and run a full system scan. Presumably they are talking about Symantec anti-virus products, but if they make such a product for Linux/x86, I could not detect it on their website.
Typically anti-virus companies do offer ports of their products to Linux. But they only serve such purposes as scanning when used as a file server for windows or checking for email viruses. Rather than doing anything for the Linux system.
the current system was chronically broken
The system may be broken in a way which changing the mechanics of voting might not do much to help. e.g. people connected to the candidates being involved in the operation of the election. In several parts of the US there are different rules for candidates standing depending if they are Democrat/Republican or not.
The advantage to the pencil-and-paper system is that to my knowledge, nobody has developed paper that can cause a mark on its surface to be erased and another mark drawn while the paper is in the ballot box.
Also if you have ballot papers with serial numbers and counterfoils, as well as keeping a count of the number of people who voted, it's not that easy for someone to put in some extra ballot papers without it being rather obvious.
People can watch the ballot go into the box, they can watch it come out, and be sure that nothing has occurred to change the vote thereupon.
Also people can watch the process of counting the ballots...
The one downside of hand-marked paper ballots is that they're hard to count electronically.>
If the mark must be in a clearly defined box then you just need an OMR... There is also the matter of good ballot paper design here.
Each punch card is the same, so there is no possible way to trace a vote back to a particular voter [Anonymity].
Unfortunatly this can make "ballot stuffing" easy.
don't forget that Brazil is almost the size of USA!
In area Brazil is considerably larger than the US.
That's the way it used to be in most of the US. That system was largely abandoned because it was more susceptible to human error in vote counting and (in particular) a lot more susceptible to fraud. I'll admit that some of the machine voting systems are too confusing, but machine voting is still more accurate and harder to influence than good old handwritten paper ballots.
There are two obvious ways to make fraud more diffcult with a paper and pencil ballot.
a) The count is watched by candidates' representatives and any other interested party. (Which isn't possible with a mechanised system.)
b) each ballot paper carries a serial number and comes attached to a counterfoil. Reconciling ballot papers with counterfoils is a task which lends itself well to mechanisation.
Look, all you need is a paper ballot. The type where you take a pencil and complete the arrow to point to the name of the candidate you wish to vote for.
Part of the problem in the US is that they appear to go in for multiple elections at the same time and want to minimise the number of ballot papers.
Its extremely easy to print them. It is extremely easy to fill them out. It is extremely simple to hand count them or two design an optical scanner to read them.
So long as you have one election per ballot paper. You can even use a different machine to collate and count.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
The open/closed source bit is only part of the issue. The more voting is automated the harder it is to verify and the easier it is to rig. It's a lot harder to change parts of a database than it is to change physical ballot papers.
Er, no, it didn't. There were several inherent design and safety flaws in the Titanic. The "water-tight" compartments were not water-tight, and the bulkheads for them only extended 10 feet above the water line. Also, the sheer lack of lifeboats was done because they were not "aesthetically pleasing" to have them crowding the decks.
Also there was no legal requirment to have lifeboat places for all passengers and crew. It would have been perfectly possible for the ship to have carried sufficent boats, some of the original plans indicate this. IIRC the Titanic actually carried more boats than the law (at the time) required.
In a like manner, how many MS products have had inherent design flaws and safety features which merely add to the aesthetics but offer no real security?
Wonder how many of these might be, or at one time have been, fairly easy to fix.