Even if the exploit is successful on IE8 on Vista or Win7, the reduced security mode that it runs in will prevent it from actually doing anything.
...this time. It's the same excuse folks (wrongly) use to claim that *nix-based machinery is 100% invulnerable - true to an extent, but not perfectly so, on any OS. The problem is a little something called privilege escalation. This will likely be the next big thing that the folks at Microsoft will begin to discover, much to their horror.
Microsoft has come a long way in securing their OS, but they still have a long way to go before claiming that their product is as secure as, say, FreeBSD or OSX.
True, DEP is enabled by default on the Win 7 / IE8 combo. OTOH, neither will run (very well, anyway) a horde of old enterprise services and suites that still linger about the industry, compatibility modes be damned.
There are fixes and workarounds, but they can get rather expensive (and usually involve an XP Mode server of sorts, or Terminal Services seat licenses, etc).
Long story short, there's either gonna be a lot of code that will get re-written, or a lot of businesses that will hang on to IE6 until then.
That does bring up a good question - given the huge numbers of IE 6 installs that persist (due to hordes of crap.NET programmers*), Microsoft not supporting IE6 is likely what would help drive Firefox (or Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc) adoption.
After all, if one cannot have IE6 and IE8 existing on the same machine at the same time, but IE6 on the Internet is the next best thing to suicide, then why not modify IT policy and the prebuilds so that IE6 is internal-only, while Firefox (or whatever else) becomes the browser of choice for public Internet use?
* note that this isn't a knock against the language itself, but against the fact that while it was widely adopted, it was widely implemented by a lot of programmers who had no business being programmers (at least w/ lower-level languages, bad code tends to die off or get re-written much quicker). Also, there's the fact that Microsoft has a lot of old baggage around that it can ill afford to simply stop supporting.
TBH, if it takes all of that precaution just to run your web browser, maybe it's time to use a different one?
By default, Windows 7 w/ IE8 is supposed to already have those bits in place - DEP, permissions isolation, all that rot. But damn... now you're talking about checking that all 3rd-party plugins being off before going online, etc? There comes a point where it's just easier (not only safer but EASIER) to run Firefox, or take the next step and get Linux. It's certainly orders of magnitude easier to just get a Mac and use that instead.
I know, I know, marketshare, 'just a matter of time', whatever... but think about this: Most folks don't give a flying frig about the subtleties of defense-in-depth, they don't care about vuln counts (no matter how contrived), nor do they really care about what happens 3-5 years from now, when they'll have likely replaced their computer anyway. What most folks DO care about is how safe it is out there right now, and w/ a near-perfect record (of not becoming some 13-year-old script kiddie's bitch), Linux and Apple products make more and more sense to the individual once they realize that you don't even have to bother with running A/V on the things, or worry as much about malware, or etc. For those who don't want to make that big of a jump, it's a hell of a lot easier for them to just download and use Firefox, Chrome, whatever... and leave IE alone entirely.
Err, women can masturbate all the time, 24/7, and it wouldn't make much difference... eggs will still release on their own set schedule (see also the menstrual cycle).
Guys OTOH, through either masturbation or sex, have to generate more. Frequent orgasms will over time put the testes into overdrive, generating a higher production rate if I remember right.
It's not just that, but look at the engineering here...
Testicles sit outside of the body (because sperm can't handle internal body temperatures for too long), so they get exposed to all kinds of fun stuff: radical temperature extremes, physical abuse, etc. Males generate new sperm all the time from scratch, and in huge frickin' numbers. Sperm cells are built to compete and operate at high energy, requiring high sugars just to survive (after all, they're literally shot into the vagina - or in most/.'ers cases, into something else).
Women OTOH have all of their eggs tucked inside, deep in the abdomen, where they stay in a nice, consistent environment. IIRC, they also have all of their eggs present in their body when they are born. Women only drop like one egg a month (excepting twins, fertility drugs, etc), so there's no competition or rush for the egg cell as it drifts slowly down the uterus - either into oblivion or fertilization.
Even IIS doesn't really take all that much looking after once you've got it configured properly and it's probably one of the crappiest web servers around.
I cropped it to this to make a point: Even a basic IIS vs. a basic Apache site can show the differences: w/ even a busy Apache site, I rarely have to shut down the entire server (that is, reboot) for a server patch... only a kernel patch requires that. An IIS-based website OTOH has to be shut down at least every other month, just for patching.
I agree that Exchange is damned complex - but Microsoft goes out of its way to make it even more complex than it should be. If I were to replace it wholesale with OpenXchange or Zimbra, I could cut my downtimes in half (at least), without sacrificing the featureset. (...and if only the IT management hadn't drank the koolaid, I could at least get up a trial server and prove it to them). For example, patching exchange requires (in 2007) that ALL exchange servers get the same patch level, or OWA is broken. To my knowledge, no other product requires that.
Laugh all you want, but there's a kernel of truth in that. All the *nix servers in my care mostly run on autopilot, and I pop in only once in awhile to check up on them, change/enter something in BIND, occasionally patch the ESX machinery, or put in the occasional patch that yum or ports can't get out of a repo (e.g. our custom help desk site software).
OTOH, a huge chunk of time is spent in Exchange and SharePoint - mostly chasing down errant mails, or fixing bugs and glitches. To be fair, those two bits are customer-facing, thus more open to calls - but even still, so is our help desk site (which runs on Linux), and I rarely have to bother with that on the back-end. Also, I've run pure *nix email setups before, and it never ate as much time percentage-wise as Exchange does now - even when chasing bounces.
On average, the 'doze servers eat about 95% of my time, but they comprise only 60% of the population.
Nota Bene: One thing I've found to be awesome - get up a script that sends a copy of your Exchange logs to another box... that way you're not fighting store.exe for RAM when you want to parse through them, and you can use a real text editor (vi or EMACS - you pick) to read them.
Gates isn't CEO anymore. Ray Ozzie doesn't come across as quite so evil. Ballmer is still there. And I don't assume every division and team at Microsoft is staffed by evil people.
Given the developments in Exchange, SharePoint, et al (and the utter locked-down/proprietary nature of their standards, with time proving that they're only being more locked-down than ever, and becoming more convoluted to boot), I'm not holding out much hope that Gates' proteges are any less evil than Gates. Maybe not as blatant or obvious about it, but certainly no lesser.
As for Apple, sure they do something evil now and again - though to be fair, their impact is rather limited at best, mostly to the consumer realm and only to the small percentage of market that they do have. That said, they have proven themselves to be fairly non-evil: They'll go after Psystar for making Hackintoshes commercially, but they leave the hobbyist OSXx86 community alone. OSX' very core is open source, as is a sizeable chunk of the rest of OSX and even a lot of the iPhone's bits. Their motives are not always altruistic, but no one forced them to release Darwin, and no one is stopping them from going after the folks who contribute code and knowledge to insanelymac.com
Hell, if I was to pick a company that I would call evil to its very black-hearted acid-dripping core, I'd pick Oracle / Larry Ellison as the contender. His moves in the DB markets make Gates look like a rank amateur. Fortunately, SQL isn't the end-all be-all of IT, so Oracle can only do so much damage at any one time, and the existence of Postgres and MS SQL Server keeps the bastard at least halfway honest.
Microsoft has done plenty of evil things. Yet when they do something nice, such as opening tons of documentation to the Samba team, people spin it as part of some evil scheme. In reality, it is a nice move largely predicated by the EU judgement against them.
Thus you've answered your own question - they did something nice not out of altruism or community, but in an effort to avoid punishment for something. Would they have done it if the specter of EU punishment for other anti-competitive actions hadn't been looming? I'm thinking not. I won't even have to bring up the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" ethic they provably have.
TBH, Microsoft kind of earns it... unless called out publicly, they do have a habit of regularly doing things that seem designed from the start to squash innovation, destroy computing freedoms, and in general make tech a raging PITA for anyone who isn't them.
Also, Microsoft tends to get a pass far more often than other corps... take the whole Danger data loss affair. About a week of techie outrage, a couple days of MSM mentions, and that was it. If it was Oracle, IBM, or one of the other big boys who borked customer's data, you can bet hard money that the mainstream media would have called for some CEO's head on a platter. You could also bet hard money that the whole 'cloud' hype would have come to a crashing halt... instead of carrying on like nothing happened. Hell, if that happened to a smaller player, that small player would've been Chapter 11 within a month.
...and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer), had anti-phishing, and in general was once light and fast.
As for features today? AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, NoScript... those three alone are more than worth the weight, not to mention the tons of multimedia add-ons.
Also, FWIW, Firefox isn't the only big boy on the bloat scale, at least in Windows. IE only appears light because it has a habit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "svchost.exe", with additional chunks hidden in the OS itself.
As a sysadmin, I love the fact that I get far better diagnostic info from Firefox when something isn't working right (especially in troubleshooting certificate errors).
Safari and Chrome aren't bad, in fact they're pretty good. OTOH, I stick with Firefox because it's nearly universal - from Linux, to Mac, to Windows, to FreeBSD... Most of the others go a good distance in cross-platform as well, but not as far. IE I only bother with for work and work-related sites (boss drank the koolaid and asked for seconds).
So insofar as the 'bloat' goes, I don't mind that as much, given the featureset.
Incorporate yourself, your belongings, etc. as an LLC.
Yes, it would suck that you have to become a one-man(woman) corporation just to get some privacy, but on the plus side, you can enjoy the same rights as the mega-corps, pay lower taxes (what is it, 15% as opposed to the 28% that higher-end individual earners make?), and enjoy the same skewed laws, but this time in your favor.
On the down side, if a larger corp decides to buy your corp, do you become their slave? (I know, I know... but I can't get the thought out of my head for some reason).
...and if you think Exchange 2007 is evil now (what with store.exe arrogantly sucking down 95% of your available RAM, no matter how much RAM you have, whether it needs to or not), I simply cannot wait until someone gets the idea that hey, maybe they should sandbox services too!
You can always fit a small refrigerator inside of a std. rack (lay a couple of 2x4's across the bottom to hold it up, and make sure the rack doors are on it, front and back). Put your own coffee maker on top of it, and you're set. Tape a few Dell server front panels to the inside of the rack door while you're at it. If you're really into disguises, wire up a few LED's to those panels.
Now if only there was a way to squeeze a big-screen TV in there... and no, not sideways.
Agreed, though his comparison is silly for one other reason: you don't have to spend real money to "buy" a tractor - you can do it with coins you earn in the thing.
...now gas OTOH? That's a mother to get hold of (it requires those farmbucks, though you can get those just by leveling up).
I sincerely doubt there would be anything gradual about it, if 2008 is any indication. I actually believe that such price bumps and hikes are exactly what will jump-start investment and building-out of alternate energy infrastructures, just like the oil bubble of 2007-2008 jump-started solar and wind power, and gave a huge boost to hybrid cars.
The most commercial fertilizer in US' midwest region is Anhydrous Ammonia, which is produced nowadays from natural gas, not oil (you can distill it from LPG, but I suspect that would cost more to do). You can also produce it from rotting plants and dung (of all things).
Otherwise, sure, oil has weaseled its way into most of modern products, but few would disappear entirely if we stopped using oil to make them.
a return to subsistence-style living and community-driven societies
We have over 6bn people on this planet. If we all went back to subsistence farming, 3/4 or the world will begin to starve in very short order. Starving people tend to do weird things, like start wars, skirmishes, riots and things like that - over suddenly scarce resources (oh like, I dunno... food supplies , arable land, things like that?)
...with countries like Poland, who have just absolutely amazing self-reliant and vibrant communities...
...and a low enough population density to pull it off. I'm not seeing how Mumbai, Los Angeles or Tokyo can do this with any success, unless we offload the extra people - who still have to live somewhere. I also suspect that a suddenly starving German population would happily 'liberate' Poland's food production for their own use - and guess who would have the bigger guns and more desperate incentive with which to do it?
It's not a question of being lazy - it's a simple question of logistics that don't fit the paradigm, no matter how utopian and pretty it seems on the surface. There's also the the fact that a subsistence population tends to have astronomically higher birthrates, which tends to increase the pressures instead of alleviating them (but then with the return of disease and a higher child mortality rate, coupled with a lower life expectancy, who knows?)
...are you ready for that change...
I suggest extra ammunition and a rather large stockpile of MRE's until the excess population either dies of starvation or kills each other off. Defensible modifications to your house would help as well. May want to move to a sparsely-populated area as well and ride it out there.
-OR-
I suggest that you've spent way too many evenings watching Life After People re-runs, and fantasizing about some sort of post-armageddon future where you get to re-populate a shattered Earth with a gaggle of cute chicks who look to you as some sort of leader... or similar. May not want to close on that farmhouse in Idaho just yet, though.
It is my contention that:
1) The whole "Peak Oil" thing is somewhat of a sham, given that technology is emerging beyond a dependence on petroleum (we should be there completely within a couple of decades under normal market conditions, and if oil does start to become scarce, I'm certain that we'll get there even sooner due to simple market pressures). That said, it does have its uses in getting people to move to cleaner tech sooner (and no, you don't necessarily need Chinese rare earth metals to do it - see also hydroelectricity, monocrystal photovoltaics, etc).
2) China isn't the one and only repository of rare earth metals on this planet - if sufficiently motivated, I suspect that other sources will be found and/or synthesized if need be. Also, there are alternate means of creating clean tech w/o using rare metals to do it - it's all a question of economics and need.
3) People have been constructing and selling apocalyptic vision ever since St. John wrote his version on the Isle of Patmos. May not want to hold your breath just yet.
All it would really take for China's government to collapse is for the businessmen to get uncomfortable enough with them. The Chinese at large have a nice taste of freedom/consumerism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and they are connected very well (there's a huge snitch/wiretap infrastructure, but I'm seriously doubting that the Chinese government can catch even a sizable portion of the traffic, let alone all of it).
One good, hard economic crisis (not this recession creature, but something hard, something that widely affects the population of China itself), coupled with a concerted effort by enough business leaders? China's government would collapse in very short order.
Like sibling, I don't envy you either. There's nothing worse than having to clean up after contractors, and then try and waste time teasing out WTF they did (because they obviously won't let you in on all of it, if for no other reason than to insure future contracts).
* Remote desktop and VPN are your best friends. Learn them, live them, love them.
* No need to forget the former client. Instead, tell them that your consulting rates are $150/hr at a 10 hour minimum fee per incident, with a 150% premium on weekends and holidays. That usually shuts them up in very short order. If you actually prefer to get some scratch/business off of them, drop the 10-hour minimum to 2 or 3, and only budge on the rates if you know that the going rates locally are lower.
* Your employer had better be paying for gas and travel time, plus wear+tear on your vehicle (if they haven't already supplied you with one of their own), and don't forget the tax write-off on the car if you're using yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the exploit is successful on IE8 on Vista or Win7, the reduced security mode that it runs in will prevent it from actually doing anything.
Microsoft has come a long way in securing their OS, but they still have a long way to go before claiming that their product is as secure as, say, FreeBSD or OSX.
True, DEP is enabled by default on the Win 7 / IE8 combo. OTOH, neither will run (very well, anyway) a horde of old enterprise services and suites that still linger about the industry, compatibility modes be damned.
There are fixes and workarounds, but they can get rather expensive (and usually involve an XP Mode server of sorts, or Terminal Services seat licenses, etc).
Long story short, there's either gonna be a lot of code that will get re-written, or a lot of businesses that will hang on to IE6 until then.
That does bring up a good question - given the huge numbers of IE 6 installs that persist (due to hordes of crap .NET programmers*), Microsoft not supporting IE6 is likely what would help drive Firefox (or Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc) adoption.
After all, if one cannot have IE6 and IE8 existing on the same machine at the same time, but IE6 on the Internet is the next best thing to suicide, then why not modify IT policy and the prebuilds so that IE6 is internal-only, while Firefox (or whatever else) becomes the browser of choice for public Internet use?
* note that this isn't a knock against the language itself, but against the fact that while it was widely adopted, it was widely implemented by a lot of programmers who had no business being programmers (at least w/ lower-level languages, bad code tends to die off or get re-written much quicker). Also, there's the fact that Microsoft has a lot of old baggage around that it can ill afford to simply stop supporting.
TBH, if it takes all of that precaution just to run your web browser, maybe it's time to use a different one?
By default, Windows 7 w/ IE8 is supposed to already have those bits in place - DEP, permissions isolation, all that rot. But damn... now you're talking about checking that all 3rd-party plugins being off before going online, etc? There comes a point where it's just easier (not only safer but EASIER) to run Firefox, or take the next step and get Linux. It's certainly orders of magnitude easier to just get a Mac and use that instead.
I know, I know, marketshare, 'just a matter of time', whatever... but think about this: Most folks don't give a flying frig about the subtleties of defense-in-depth, they don't care about vuln counts (no matter how contrived), nor do they really care about what happens 3-5 years from now, when they'll have likely replaced their computer anyway. What most folks DO care about is how safe it is out there right now, and w/ a near-perfect record (of not becoming some 13-year-old script kiddie's bitch), Linux and Apple products make more and more sense to the individual once they realize that you don't even have to bother with running A/V on the things, or worry as much about malware, or etc. For those who don't want to make that big of a jump, it's a hell of a lot easier for them to just download and use Firefox, Chrome, whatever... and leave IE alone entirely.
Err, women can masturbate all the time, 24/7, and it wouldn't make much difference... eggs will still release on their own set schedule (see also the menstrual cycle).
Guys OTOH, through either masturbation or sex, have to generate more. Frequent orgasms will over time put the testes into overdrive, generating a higher production rate if I remember right.
Thousands of years of wars fought because of skin tone or beliefs when really we could have done it over +/- 1/2 tsp.
Err, Trojan War? That one has to count
(no, not the pun damnit, the historical one... :) )
It's not just that, but look at the engineering here...
Testicles sit outside of the body (because sperm can't handle internal body temperatures for too long), so they get exposed to all kinds of fun stuff: radical temperature extremes, physical abuse, etc. Males generate new sperm all the time from scratch, and in huge frickin' numbers. Sperm cells are built to compete and operate at high energy, requiring high sugars just to survive (after all, they're literally shot into the vagina - or in most /.'ers cases, into something else).
Women OTOH have all of their eggs tucked inside, deep in the abdomen, where they stay in a nice, consistent environment. IIRC, they also have all of their eggs present in their body when they are born. Women only drop like one egg a month (excepting twins, fertility drugs, etc), so there's no competition or rush for the egg cell as it drifts slowly down the uterus - either into oblivion or fertilization.
Woah! Are you saying you invented syslog for Windows.
Most Exchange admins I know tend to do it the hard way for some reason. *shrug*
Even IIS doesn't really take all that much looking after once you've got it configured properly and it's probably one of the crappiest web servers around.
I cropped it to this to make a point: Even a basic IIS vs. a basic Apache site can show the differences: w/ even a busy Apache site, I rarely have to shut down the entire server (that is, reboot) for a server patch... only a kernel patch requires that. An IIS-based website OTOH has to be shut down at least every other month, just for patching.
I agree that Exchange is damned complex - but Microsoft goes out of its way to make it even more complex than it should be. If I were to replace it wholesale with OpenXchange or Zimbra, I could cut my downtimes in half (at least), without sacrificing the featureset. (...and if only the IT management hadn't drank the koolaid, I could at least get up a trial server and prove it to them). For example, patching exchange requires (in 2007) that ALL exchange servers get the same patch level, or OWA is broken. To my knowledge, no other product requires that.
Laugh all you want, but there's a kernel of truth in that. All the *nix servers in my care mostly run on autopilot, and I pop in only once in awhile to check up on them, change/enter something in BIND, occasionally patch the ESX machinery, or put in the occasional patch that yum or ports can't get out of a repo (e.g. our custom help desk site software).
OTOH, a huge chunk of time is spent in Exchange and SharePoint - mostly chasing down errant mails, or fixing bugs and glitches. To be fair, those two bits are customer-facing, thus more open to calls - but even still, so is our help desk site (which runs on Linux), and I rarely have to bother with that on the back-end. Also, I've run pure *nix email setups before, and it never ate as much time percentage-wise as Exchange does now - even when chasing bounces.
On average, the 'doze servers eat about 95% of my time, but they comprise only 60% of the population.
Nota Bene: One thing I've found to be awesome - get up a script that sends a copy of your Exchange logs to another box... that way you're not fighting store.exe for RAM when you want to parse through them, and you can use a real text editor (vi or EMACS - you pick) to read them.
Gates isn't CEO anymore. Ray Ozzie doesn't come across as quite so evil. Ballmer is still there. And I don't assume every division and team at Microsoft is staffed by evil people.
Given the developments in Exchange, SharePoint, et al (and the utter locked-down/proprietary nature of their standards, with time proving that they're only being more locked-down than ever, and becoming more convoluted to boot), I'm not holding out much hope that Gates' proteges are any less evil than Gates. Maybe not as blatant or obvious about it, but certainly no lesser.
As for Apple, sure they do something evil now and again - though to be fair, their impact is rather limited at best, mostly to the consumer realm and only to the small percentage of market that they do have. That said, they have proven themselves to be fairly non-evil: They'll go after Psystar for making Hackintoshes commercially, but they leave the hobbyist OSXx86 community alone. OSX' very core is open source, as is a sizeable chunk of the rest of OSX and even a lot of the iPhone's bits. Their motives are not always altruistic, but no one forced them to release Darwin, and no one is stopping them from going after the folks who contribute code and knowledge to insanelymac.com
Hell, if I was to pick a company that I would call evil to its very black-hearted acid-dripping core, I'd pick Oracle / Larry Ellison as the contender. His moves in the DB markets make Gates look like a rank amateur. Fortunately, SQL isn't the end-all be-all of IT, so Oracle can only do so much damage at any one time, and the existence of Postgres and MS SQL Server keeps the bastard at least halfway honest.
Microsoft has done plenty of evil things. Yet when they do something nice, such as opening tons of documentation to the Samba team, people spin it as part of some evil scheme. In reality, it is a nice move largely predicated by the EU judgement against them.
Thus you've answered your own question - they did something nice not out of altruism or community, but in an effort to avoid punishment for something. Would they have done it if the specter of EU punishment for other anti-competitive actions hadn't been looming? I'm thinking not. I won't even have to bring up the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" ethic they provably have.
TBH, Microsoft kind of earns it... unless called out publicly, they do have a habit of regularly doing things that seem designed from the start to squash innovation, destroy computing freedoms, and in general make tech a raging PITA for anyone who isn't them.
Also, Microsoft tends to get a pass far more often than other corps... take the whole Danger data loss affair. About a week of techie outrage, a couple days of MSM mentions, and that was it. If it was Oracle, IBM, or one of the other big boys who borked customer's data, you can bet hard money that the mainstream media would have called for some CEO's head on a platter. You could also bet hard money that the whole 'cloud' hype would have come to a crashing halt... instead of carrying on like nothing happened. Hell, if that happened to a smaller player, that small player would've been Chapter 11 within a month.
...and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer), had anti-phishing, and in general was once light and fast.
As for features today? AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, NoScript... those three alone are more than worth the weight, not to mention the tons of multimedia add-ons.
Also, FWIW, Firefox isn't the only big boy on the bloat scale, at least in Windows. IE only appears light because it has a habit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "svchost.exe", with additional chunks hidden in the OS itself.
As a sysadmin, I love the fact that I get far better diagnostic info from Firefox when something isn't working right (especially in troubleshooting certificate errors).
Safari and Chrome aren't bad, in fact they're pretty good. OTOH, I stick with Firefox because it's nearly universal - from Linux, to Mac, to Windows, to FreeBSD... Most of the others go a good distance in cross-platform as well, but not as far. IE I only bother with for work and work-related sites (boss drank the koolaid and asked for seconds).
So insofar as the 'bloat' goes, I don't mind that as much, given the featureset.
...at least the meetings would be short. ;)
Incorporate yourself, your belongings, etc. as an LLC.
Yes, it would suck that you have to become a one-man(woman) corporation just to get some privacy, but on the plus side, you can enjoy the same rights as the mega-corps, pay lower taxes (what is it, 15% as opposed to the 28% that higher-end individual earners make?), and enjoy the same skewed laws, but this time in your favor.
On the down side, if a larger corp decides to buy your corp, do you become their slave? (I know, I know... but I can't get the thought out of my head for some reason).
...and if you think Exchange 2007 is evil now (what with store.exe arrogantly sucking down 95% of your available RAM, no matter how much RAM you have, whether it needs to or not), I simply cannot wait until someone gets the idea that hey, maybe they should sandbox services too!
/P
You can always fit a small refrigerator inside of a std. rack (lay a couple of 2x4's across the bottom to hold it up, and make sure the rack doors are on it, front and back). Put your own coffee maker on top of it, and you're set. Tape a few Dell server front panels to the inside of the rack door while you're at it. If you're really into disguises, wire up a few LED's to those panels.
Now if only there was a way to squeeze a big-screen TV in there... and no, not sideways.
Agreed, though his comparison is silly for one other reason: you don't have to spend real money to "buy" a tractor - you can do it with coins you earn in the thing.
I sincerely doubt there would be anything gradual about it, if 2008 is any indication. I actually believe that such price bumps and hikes are exactly what will jump-start investment and building-out of alternate energy infrastructures, just like the oil bubble of 2007-2008 jump-started solar and wind power, and gave a huge boost to hybrid cars.
The most commercial fertilizer in US' midwest region is Anhydrous Ammonia, which is produced nowadays from natural gas, not oil (you can distill it from LPG, but I suspect that would cost more to do). You can also produce it from rotting plants and dung (of all things).
Otherwise, sure, oil has weaseled its way into most of modern products, but few would disappear entirely if we stopped using oil to make them.
a return to subsistence-style living and community-driven societies
We have over 6bn people on this planet. If we all went back to subsistence farming, 3/4 or the world will begin to starve in very short order. Starving people tend to do weird things, like start wars, skirmishes, riots and things like that - over suddenly scarce resources (oh like, I dunno... food supplies , arable land, things like that?)
...with countries like Poland, who have just absolutely amazing self-reliant and vibrant communities...
It's not a question of being lazy - it's a simple question of logistics that don't fit the paradigm, no matter how utopian and pretty it seems on the surface. There's also the the fact that a subsistence population tends to have astronomically higher birthrates, which tends to increase the pressures instead of alleviating them (but then with the return of disease and a higher child mortality rate, coupled with a lower life expectancy, who knows?)
...are you ready for that change...
I suggest extra ammunition and a rather large stockpile of MRE's until the excess population either dies of starvation or kills each other off. Defensible modifications to your house would help as well. May want to move to a sparsely-populated area as well and ride it out there.
-OR-
I suggest that you've spent way too many evenings watching Life After People re-runs, and fantasizing about some sort of post-armageddon future where you get to re-populate a shattered Earth with a gaggle of cute chicks who look to you as some sort of leader... or similar. May not want to close on that farmhouse in Idaho just yet, though.
It is my contention that:
1) The whole "Peak Oil" thing is somewhat of a sham, given that technology is emerging beyond a dependence on petroleum (we should be there completely within a couple of decades under normal market conditions, and if oil does start to become scarce, I'm certain that we'll get there even sooner due to simple market pressures). That said, it does have its uses in getting people to move to cleaner tech sooner (and no, you don't necessarily need Chinese rare earth metals to do it - see also hydroelectricity, monocrystal photovoltaics, etc).
2) China isn't the one and only repository of rare earth metals on this planet - if sufficiently motivated, I suspect that other sources will be found and/or synthesized if need be. Also, there are alternate means of creating clean tech w/o using rare metals to do it - it's all a question of economics and need.
3) People have been constructing and selling apocalyptic vision ever since St. John wrote his version on the Isle of Patmos. May not want to hold your breath just yet.
...who said you have to invade?
All it would really take for China's government to collapse is for the businessmen to get uncomfortable enough with them. The Chinese at large have a nice taste of freedom/consumerism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and they are connected very well (there's a huge snitch/wiretap infrastructure, but I'm seriously doubting that the Chinese government can catch even a sizable portion of the traffic, let alone all of it).
One good, hard economic crisis (not this recession creature, but something hard, something that widely affects the population of China itself), coupled with a concerted effort by enough business leaders? China's government would collapse in very short order.
Like sibling, I don't envy you either. There's nothing worse than having to clean up after contractors, and then try and waste time teasing out WTF they did (because they obviously won't let you in on all of it, if for no other reason than to insure future contracts).
* Remote desktop and VPN are your best friends. Learn them, live them, love them.
* No need to forget the former client. Instead, tell them that your consulting rates are $150/hr at a 10 hour minimum fee per incident, with a 150% premium on weekends and holidays. That usually shuts them up in very short order. If you actually prefer to get some scratch/business off of them, drop the 10-hour minimum to 2 or 3, and only budge on the rates if you know that the going rates locally are lower.
* Your employer had better be paying for gas and travel time, plus wear+tear on your vehicle (if they haven't already supplied you with one of their own), and don't forget the tax write-off on the car if you're using yours.