Fuck that. In the ghettos of new york, DJs started making mixtapes of their records and began to play them on ghetto blasters while their friends rapped about what was going on in the hood, and it was a means of communication, of comraderie and of gathering. Eventually this was called "Hip Hop" and if it weren't for unlicensed public performance of the music, the style of music would have never happened.
Sample culture is a huge part of the recording industry, and if they started cracking down on the sample culture like that, keeping DJs from playing the records to the crowds, they would very simply be out of business. It's partially the DJs playing the tracks in the clubs that cause people to go out and buy the albums, and the recording industry knows this.
And I would check where you got your information about clubs and raves paying royalties to recording companies. I've never heard of this practice before.
Once you've installed your system, go into synaptic and start unchecking what you don't want. Yes, this requires you to be able to find out what these packages are, but if you're enough of a security nut to be concerned about the appendix-like programs installed you'll never use, then you're smart enough to figure out how to do that yourself.
Something else the writer seems to ignore is the left-logged-in factor... One reason sudo becomes really smart is that if I'm logged in as my own user, but I don't log out (and don't lock the screen, so for instance my gf can watch some Farscape or something), people can't do undue damage.
Sudo's main advantage is that it makes security easy for the average user. Big lockout before doing any admin tasks and requiring a password. Makes it really simple for the user: Once you're logged in, don't give your password for anything unless you know what you're doing. Sure, using the su (root) password for it may be (slightly) more secure, but Granpa doesn't want to have to remember so many passwords so the only way he can keep track of them all is by putting them on a post-it note next to his screen.
He seems to approach Ubuntu from a sysadmin/*nix-geek standpoint, which is not the target market for Ubuntu at all.
Why I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu about 8 months ago. Installing my ATI (ATI!!!!) proprietary driver went through without a hitch (using the ubuntu guide). Fedora was a few pains to get working, I agree.
It broke programs, rewrote over files, broke the OS. It wasn't until about a year after SP2 came out that it was in its current "useful" state.
I'm not saying SP2 was a bad thing in any way shape or form - having a firewall made available through the OS explicitly was great, being able to reset the winsocks was great, popup blocker in IE6 ruled...
But it wasn't ready for a year after it was released.
- Microsoft Product & Support Services (they actually had a SP2 removal hotline going on) - Dell - HP/Compaq - MSN - IBM - Just about every other major home OEM
And they were pretty damn justified in doing it. Mainly because for the first year SP2 consistently broke stuff. Only real solution was to go back to SP1 until they had ironed out all the kinks.
Most hardware vendors are now making linux-compatible drivers. All the graphics heavyweights are (granted, ATI's aren't exactly that fantastic, but at least they're providing them). NDISwrapper works now with just about all major wireless cards. Bluetooth, sound drivers, USB block devices - check check and check. Apple's iPods don't have anything built by the vendors yet but the open-source alternatives seem to have ironed out most of the kinks.
Vista on the other hand is still playing catchup. And by the time Gutsy Gibson comes out, you think they'll have those problems licked? Christ, they're talking Service Pack now... remember what happened last time Microsoft tried to do one of those? Anybody with SP2 was being advised by just about every support department (I know because I was working with MSN support at the time) to downgrade back to SP1. For over a year after SP2 was released. A YEAR! I'll put money that Gutsy will have more hardware natively supported quicker than Vista. And its final release is still two months away!
I dunno. I think now that Dell and other major OEMs are starting to jump on the linux bandwagon, the commercial driver support is sure to follow, if it hasn't already (Big Blue, Novell, SGI, just to name a few).
And user interaction increasing between Linux and Windows? I dunno about you, but I've found the Ubuntu install process to be more intuitive and easier to deal with than Vista's billion-screen install. Not to mention you can browse the internet, chat on messenger, listen to music, etc. WHILE THE OS IS INSTALLING. The default settings are made so the transition from Windows is fairly easy.
Yeah, there's still a few kinks. But whereas Linux was for tinkerers and hobbyists in the late 90s, and around when RH8 came out it became simple for the experienced computer user, now I'd be willing to throw linux in for any intermediate computer user. That is to say, not ready for Grandma yet but a hell of a lot closer than it ever has been.
I've been Ubuntu-cheerleading a lot here, but it's nice to see that over the last 5 years of linux (the time I've been a user of it) it's improved tremendously in the user-interface department. And it's only going up from here. And a lot of that has to do with some of the more recent distros, namely Knoppix and Ubuntu.
If they want metrics, give 'em metrics. And let them know that metrics will only encourage you to be more of an a$$hole.
Management, particularly bean counters, will not care that you have become more of an asshole unless it somehow negatively affects morale. So if you implement a bunch of stuff, then you'll be forced to do lots of pointless asshole things rather than do your job, because otherwise your metrics go down and then you're in trouble.
Best not to be judged by a system you specifically set up for failure. Especially if management doesn't see it as such.
Otherwise all those driver issues that they had on launch would have been non-existent.
The number of issues for things that were stable in XP is far too great for me to believe they used the same codebase.
If anything, it's an XP skin on a far inferior operating system, IMO. And just about every single feature that's new for Vista - Already exists in Linux - Exists in third-party apps in XP
Why anybody would even bother with Vista in it's current state is completely beyond me. Shadow copies (ie file versioning), drive encryption... Heck, Beryl has an Aero theme that does all the things Glass was touting as new and innovation, and had it working before Vista was even released. Flip and Flip-3D are already available as Beryl plugins as well. UAC is just a very poorly implemented version of sudo.
Really, only reason people should be selecting Windows for home use would be gaming support. And Vista's performance metrics are so abysmal that you'd probably just want to stick to XP anyways.
They kept touting the reworking of the codebase as for security reasons, and I'll almost believe that because it SURE as hell wasn't to increase its performance. And even the super-high-end computers are running it.
I hear SP1 for Vista is going to be a supreme performance upgrade. Good, though it would have been nicer if they used the opportunity of rewriting the codebase to actually have slick and efficient code, though apparently Microsoft isn't in the business in designing anything slick from the ground up. Instead they'll apply patches and fixes to make it look like it runs slickly. Makes sense, considering they're a little more invested in the covering-your-ass part of the software engineering process than actually producing good code.
One of the nicest advantages of GNU/linux is that it rarely breaks things with stable upgrades. The only things that get broken in upgrades are usually new features, at least in my experience. Which is nice, it means that the projects involved are constantly moving forward, unlike Microsoft which keeps having to tackle the same types of problems over and over again.
I actually think that file versioning has finally been introduced in Windows Vista. Though it irks me it was written into NTFS this whole time and we only find out about it now. =(
You can back Excel with a database, just use ODBC or suchlike. And connecting to files is dirt simple. Excel isn't being the database though, it's just the frontend. ODBC is providing you with the database (isn't that SQL?).
I've never done that trick, I'll have to check it out before I comment on that functionality. But I'm still skeptical, it kind of sounds like an expanded version of opening a cell with the equal sign. Again, that's not programming access to a database, that's just applying more complex math to it. I still get the feeling you wouldn't be able to produce a query through it. And not to mention, how many of the people who are using excel to track data as if it were a database actually use that?
And "Excel experts" get paid about way less than "Programmers".
I expect a VP to call the IT department, and then IT can fix it. If it's really that important, make it a top-priority ticket and get it fixed within the hour. But still, that's just ONE CASE. The whole point of testing is to make sure that the don't become completely unusable because of a patch/update. There are various levels of how critical an issue is. Being unable to connect to the internet is a big one. Being unable to open an obscure document type is not. Incidentally, checking internet connectivity is easy. Checking compatibility with all previous versions of Word is not. Now if the upgrade was, say, from Word 97 to Office 2003, then maybe yeah, you should test to see if 97 documents open properly. But that's kind of dependant on what is entailed in the upgrade. And if you don't know what's being upgraded, then you really shouldn't be in the sysadmin business.
All I'm really saying here is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You won't be able to catch 100% of the small bugs that come through a patch, but at least you can avoid system-wide meltdowns that could have been prevented with a simple test box.
I fail to see how being unable to open a Word 97 document is really that production-critical. In this day and age there are thousands of alternatives.
The point is, run a basic test run and make sure there are no major crashes occurring, that the software generally does what it's supposed to, and no major bumps along the road are going to cause you great headaches the next morning. Being unable to do something as obscure as opening a Word 97 document in Office (download OpenOffice/e-mail yourself in Google/fuck, if it's that crucial open it up in WordPad) is minor compared to a system-wide failure because the update decided to break the system's bootloader. That is easy to catch on a blackbox system.
MSN wasn't to compete with google, or yahoo, or any of the search engines. It was originally a pointless little frontend for dialup connectivity and eventually became a full-fledged browser to compete with AOL. The browser also combined with the Hotmail interface for e-mail when MS acquired that. Later versions it became an actual e-mail client using a microsoft-based protocol. The search engine feature was common for just about any browser-based Dialup ISP (like AOL). Notice how similar MSN Messenger is similar to AIM? Wonder where they got that idea from.
It wasn't until Microsoft began the MSN AdCenter project which launched last year and had been in development for maybe a year or two prior, that they were actually directly competing with Google's adSense business model.
At any rate, around '02-04 Microsoft did a lot of kicking and screaming about operating systems. This was when the Longhorn propaganda machine was in effect. Lots of shouting about how they were actually paying attention to security, overhauling the whole Windows project from scratch, releasing Server 2003... Oh, and this was about when they gave SCO a whole bunch of money, and soon after SCO sues IBM for putting nonexistant proprietary code into linux, thus casting FUD upon all the linux community. I remember back then, Ballmer was throwing chairs around the office when someone would mention linux rather than Google. Microsoft's shift of competition focus in recent years is probably one of the main reasons rumours spawned up a couple years back about Google putting out its own OS.
You can't program your own interface would be my best guess.
Spreadsheets you're limited to raw data and charts to display the information. No way for you to plug into it with some kind of external application. You can import the data into another member of Office, but even then the only way to program your results by any means other than an equation is through Access, their databasing software.
Sorry, man. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everybody.
Believe me. I've been doing tech support over-the-phone for the past 2 years. Vista is far from in perfect working order. Half our calls are people who installed Vista looking for the latest & greatest and they can't get sweet-fuck-all installed because of compatibility problems. Including, but not limited to: - Drivers that don't work - Apps that don't work (including Antivirus and Antispyware software - and before you say it, Windows Defender misses A LOT) - Permissions Errors (despite use of Admin accounts and disabling UAC) - OS reboots on startup, and the WinRE (Vista's new recovery environment) doesn't catch it like it should and a host of others.
Troubleshooting doesn't fix it. Formatting and reinstalling the OS doesn't fix it.
Alcan Aluminium works out of British Columbia, and is one of Canada's major Aluminium manufacturers. BC's electricity is provided via hydroelectric dams - very common amongst the west coast of Canada. I don't see why this cannot be a cheap, reliable and reusable source of energy for it.
Operational Pause: A boring theory is that the terrorists are in an operational pause, needing to regroup after the recent spate of roundups. There are very few persons we have met who subscribe to this.
The one realistic (albeit pessimistic) option gets sluffed off. Every (EVERY) other plausible explanation was given entire paragraphs to back them up. This one gets dispelled in two lines without any real cause.
The whole document is a bunch of shoulder-patting a la "Mission Accomplished!" and doesn't really serve for much except for a false sense of hope.
Best part is the one that got the least attention and evaluation was the one that was actually right. The writer assumes that because the majority of people don't ascribe to it then he shouldn't either. And when you assume.....
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck that. In the ghettos of new york, DJs started making mixtapes of their records and began to play them on ghetto blasters while their friends rapped about what was going on in the hood, and it was a means of communication, of comraderie and of gathering. Eventually this was called "Hip Hop" and if it weren't for unlicensed public performance of the music, the style of music would have never happened.
Sample culture is a huge part of the recording industry, and if they started cracking down on the sample culture like that, keeping DJs from playing the records to the crowds, they would very simply be out of business. It's partially the DJs playing the tracks in the clubs that cause people to go out and buy the albums, and the recording industry knows this.
And I would check where you got your information about clubs and raves paying royalties to recording companies. I've never heard of this practice before.
Once you've installed your system, go into synaptic and start unchecking what you don't want. Yes, this requires you to be able to find out what these packages are, but if you're enough of a security nut to be concerned about the appendix-like programs installed you'll never use, then you're smart enough to figure out how to do that yourself.
Something else the writer seems to ignore is the left-logged-in factor... One reason sudo becomes really smart is that if I'm logged in as my own user, but I don't log out (and don't lock the screen, so for instance my gf can watch some Farscape or something), people can't do undue damage.
Sudo's main advantage is that it makes security easy for the average user. Big lockout before doing any admin tasks and requiring a password. Makes it really simple for the user: Once you're logged in, don't give your password for anything unless you know what you're doing. Sure, using the su (root) password for it may be (slightly) more secure, but Granpa doesn't want to have to remember so many passwords so the only way he can keep track of them all is by putting them on a post-it note next to his screen.
He seems to approach Ubuntu from a sysadmin/*nix-geek standpoint, which is not the target market for Ubuntu at all.
Just be sure to have plenty of these handy:
Why I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu about 8 months ago. Installing my ATI (ATI!!!!) proprietary driver went through without a hitch (using the ubuntu guide). Fedora was a few pains to get working, I agree.
It broke programs, rewrote over files, broke the OS. It wasn't until about a year after SP2 came out that it was in its current "useful" state.
I'm not saying SP2 was a bad thing in any way shape or form - having a firewall made available through the OS explicitly was great, being able to reset the winsocks was great, popup blocker in IE6 ruled...
But it wasn't ready for a year after it was released.
I'm aware of the following:
- Microsoft Product & Support Services (they actually had a SP2 removal hotline going on)
- Dell
- HP/Compaq
- MSN
- IBM
- Just about every other major home OEM
And they were pretty damn justified in doing it. Mainly because for the first year SP2 consistently broke stuff. Only real solution was to go back to SP1 until they had ironed out all the kinks.
Most hardware vendors are now making linux-compatible drivers. All the graphics heavyweights are (granted, ATI's aren't exactly that fantastic, but at least they're providing them). NDISwrapper works now with just about all major wireless cards. Bluetooth, sound drivers, USB block devices - check check and check. Apple's iPods don't have anything built by the vendors yet but the open-source alternatives seem to have ironed out most of the kinks.
Vista on the other hand is still playing catchup. And by the time Gutsy Gibson comes out, you think they'll have those problems licked? Christ, they're talking Service Pack now... remember what happened last time Microsoft tried to do one of those? Anybody with SP2 was being advised by just about every support department (I know because I was working with MSN support at the time) to downgrade back to SP1. For over a year after SP2 was released. A YEAR! I'll put money that Gutsy will have more hardware natively supported quicker than Vista. And its final release is still two months away!
I dunno. I think now that Dell and other major OEMs are starting to jump on the linux bandwagon, the commercial driver support is sure to follow, if it hasn't already (Big Blue, Novell, SGI, just to name a few).
And user interaction increasing between Linux and Windows? I dunno about you, but I've found the Ubuntu install process to be more intuitive and easier to deal with than Vista's billion-screen install. Not to mention you can browse the internet, chat on messenger, listen to music, etc. WHILE THE OS IS INSTALLING. The default settings are made so the transition from Windows is fairly easy.
Yeah, there's still a few kinks. But whereas Linux was for tinkerers and hobbyists in the late 90s, and around when RH8 came out it became simple for the experienced computer user, now I'd be willing to throw linux in for any intermediate computer user. That is to say, not ready for Grandma yet but a hell of a lot closer than it ever has been.
I've been Ubuntu-cheerleading a lot here, but it's nice to see that over the last 5 years of linux (the time I've been a user of it) it's improved tremendously in the user-interface department. And it's only going up from here. And a lot of that has to do with some of the more recent distros, namely Knoppix and Ubuntu.
If they want metrics, give 'em metrics. And let them know that metrics will only encourage you to be more of an a$$hole.
Management, particularly bean counters, will not care that you have become more of an asshole unless it somehow negatively affects morale. So if you implement a bunch of stuff, then you'll be forced to do lots of pointless asshole things rather than do your job, because otherwise your metrics go down and then you're in trouble.
Best not to be judged by a system you specifically set up for failure. Especially if management doesn't see it as such.
Otherwise all those driver issues that they had on launch would have been non-existent.
The number of issues for things that were stable in XP is far too great for me to believe they used the same codebase.
If anything, it's an XP skin on a far inferior operating system, IMO. And just about every single feature that's new for Vista
- Already exists in Linux
- Exists in third-party apps in XP
Why anybody would even bother with Vista in it's current state is completely beyond me. Shadow copies (ie file versioning), drive encryption... Heck, Beryl has an Aero theme that does all the things Glass was touting as new and innovation, and had it working before Vista was even released. Flip and Flip-3D are already available as Beryl plugins as well. UAC is just a very poorly implemented version of sudo.
Really, only reason people should be selecting Windows for home use would be gaming support. And Vista's performance metrics are so abysmal that you'd probably just want to stick to XP anyways.
They kept touting the reworking of the codebase as for security reasons, and I'll almost believe that because it SURE as hell wasn't to increase its performance. And even the super-high-end computers are running it.
I hear SP1 for Vista is going to be a supreme performance upgrade. Good, though it would have been nicer if they used the opportunity of rewriting the codebase to actually have slick and efficient code, though apparently Microsoft isn't in the business in designing anything slick from the ground up. Instead they'll apply patches and fixes to make it look like it runs slickly. Makes sense, considering they're a little more invested in the covering-your-ass part of the software engineering process than actually producing good code.
One of the nicest advantages of GNU/linux is that it rarely breaks things with stable upgrades. The only things that get broken in upgrades are usually new features, at least in my experience. Which is nice, it means that the projects involved are constantly moving forward, unlike Microsoft which keeps having to tackle the same types of problems over and over again.
IMHO,YMMV
I actually think that file versioning has finally been introduced in Windows Vista. Though it irks me it was written into NTFS this whole time and we only find out about it now. =(
You can back Excel with a database, just use ODBC or suchlike. And connecting to files is dirt simple.
Excel isn't being the database though, it's just the frontend. ODBC is providing you with the database (isn't that SQL?).
I've never done that trick, I'll have to check it out before I comment on that functionality. But I'm still skeptical, it kind of sounds like an expanded version of opening a cell with the equal sign. Again, that's not programming access to a database, that's just applying more complex math to it. I still get the feeling you wouldn't be able to produce a query through it. And not to mention, how many of the people who are using excel to track data as if it were a database actually use that?
And "Excel experts" get paid about way less than "Programmers".
The whole point of testing is to make sure that the don't become completely unusable
should read:
The whole point of testing is to make sure that the system doesn't become completely unusable
I expect a VP to call the IT department, and then IT can fix it. If it's really that important, make it a top-priority ticket and get it fixed within the hour. But still, that's just ONE CASE. The whole point of testing is to make sure that the don't become completely unusable because of a patch/update. There are various levels of how critical an issue is. Being unable to connect to the internet is a big one. Being unable to open an obscure document type is not. Incidentally, checking internet connectivity is easy. Checking compatibility with all previous versions of Word is not. Now if the upgrade was, say, from Word 97 to Office 2003, then maybe yeah, you should test to see if 97 documents open properly. But that's kind of dependant on what is entailed in the upgrade. And if you don't know what's being upgraded, then you really shouldn't be in the sysadmin business.
All I'm really saying here is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You won't be able to catch 100% of the small bugs that come through a patch, but at least you can avoid system-wide meltdowns that could have been prevented with a simple test box.
I fail to see how being unable to open a Word 97 document is really that production-critical. In this day and age there are thousands of alternatives.
The point is, run a basic test run and make sure there are no major crashes occurring, that the software generally does what it's supposed to, and no major bumps along the road are going to cause you great headaches the next morning. Being unable to do something as obscure as opening a Word 97 document in Office (download OpenOffice/e-mail yourself in Google/fuck, if it's that crucial open it up in WordPad) is minor compared to a system-wide failure because the update decided to break the system's bootloader. That is easy to catch on a blackbox system.
MSN wasn't to compete with google, or yahoo, or any of the search engines. It was originally a pointless little frontend for dialup connectivity and eventually became a full-fledged browser to compete with AOL. The browser also combined with the Hotmail interface for e-mail when MS acquired that. Later versions it became an actual e-mail client using a microsoft-based protocol. The search engine feature was common for just about any browser-based Dialup ISP (like AOL). Notice how similar MSN Messenger is similar to AIM? Wonder where they got that idea from.
It wasn't until Microsoft began the MSN AdCenter project which launched last year and had been in development for maybe a year or two prior, that they were actually directly competing with Google's adSense business model.
At any rate, around '02-04 Microsoft did a lot of kicking and screaming about operating systems. This was when the Longhorn propaganda machine was in effect. Lots of shouting about how they were actually paying attention to security, overhauling the whole Windows project from scratch, releasing Server 2003... Oh, and this was about when they gave SCO a whole bunch of money, and soon after SCO sues IBM for putting nonexistant proprietary code into linux, thus casting FUD upon all the linux community. I remember back then, Ballmer was throwing chairs around the office when someone would mention linux rather than Google. Microsoft's shift of competition focus in recent years is probably one of the main reasons rumours spawned up a couple years back about Google putting out its own OS.
You can't program your own interface would be my best guess.
Spreadsheets you're limited to raw data and charts to display the information. No way for you to plug into it with some kind of external application. You can import the data into another member of Office, but even then the only way to program your results by any means other than an equation is through Access, their databasing software.
Because Security Through Obscurity totally worked for:
MPAA (DeCSS)
Nazis (Enigma)
Xerox (Robin Hood & Friar Tuck)
Microsoft (just about any form of security they've ever had)
and about a billion other examples
This city is like 75% immigrants.
Without trying?
Sorry, man. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everybody.
Believe me. I've been doing tech support over-the-phone for the past 2 years. Vista is far from in perfect working order. Half our calls are people who installed Vista looking for the latest & greatest and they can't get sweet-fuck-all installed because of compatibility problems. Including, but not limited to:
- Drivers that don't work
- Apps that don't work (including Antivirus and Antispyware software - and before you say it, Windows Defender misses A LOT)
- Permissions Errors (despite use of Admin accounts and disabling UAC)
- OS reboots on startup, and the WinRE (Vista's new recovery environment) doesn't catch it like it should
and a host of others.
Troubleshooting doesn't fix it. Formatting and reinstalling the OS doesn't fix it.
Take it from me:
Vista.
Is.
Broken.
Delivery in 30 minutes ago or less...
(apologies to my friend whose idea this was originally)
"Paradox Pizza, we delivered!"
I'm Canadian.
I know they don't apply here. From what I understood this is an American company, wherein American law does apply.
Alcan Aluminium works out of British Columbia, and is one of Canada's major Aluminium manufacturers. BC's electricity is provided via hydroelectric dams - very common amongst the west coast of Canada. I don't see why this cannot be a cheap, reliable and reusable source of energy for it.
But the DMCA has other ideas:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/
Operational Pause: A boring theory is that the terrorists are in an operational pause, needing to regroup after the recent spate of roundups. There are very few persons we have met who subscribe to this.
The one realistic (albeit pessimistic) option gets sluffed off. Every (EVERY) other plausible explanation was given entire paragraphs to back them up. This one gets dispelled in two lines without any real cause.
The whole document is a bunch of shoulder-patting a la "Mission Accomplished!" and doesn't really serve for much except for a false sense of hope.
Best part is the one that got the least attention and evaluation was the one that was actually right. The writer assumes that because the majority of people don't ascribe to it then he shouldn't either. And when you assume.....
If the offending member is removed from the gene pool.
Sadly technology has made it so that these people can live on and sue the technology manufacturers for something that's their own damn fault.