Wait, whose fault is it that the person took a mortgage they couldn't afford? Is it the billionaire's fault? My fault? Or the person with the mortgage? I promise you, I haven't ever held a gun to someone's head and forced them to take a mortgage.
Fuck yeah, personal responsibility! If you can't afford an army of accountants that it takes to analyze loans, you deserve to become enslaved!
As I have said in the previous message, I am all for protecting Microsoft from "pirates" who are now the driving force behind its popularity AND are a major source of continuing idiotic demands to make all software mimic Microsoft.
Just don't pick and choose -- if Microsoft wants to protect itself from "piracy", we will make sure that it's protected from all piracy, including repair shops and home users who spread Microsoft disease.
The savings rate fell off a cliff around 1982, which is just about the time that the bull market leading up to the 2000 meltdown, then slid back downwards, then jumped back up again at the end of 2008.
Ever heard of income disparity?
That nearly 20 year bull market was a time of general prosperity, when people COULD have been saving up money for the inevitable downturn that cyclical markets will bring. They didn't. The data clearly shows that people SAVE MORE when times are hard.
This doesn't show, who saves what, and what amount of debt is taken by the same people. A person who spends all income on current expenses and paying for mortgage that is an equivalent of two years of his salary (and one year more than he would get if he sold the house) would have saving rate of 0 (instead of negative), while a billionaire who pays himself $1 a year while living off carefully near-zeroed for tax purposes income, has saving rate of 100 billion. Sure, billionaires benefited from bull market. And then benefited from Bush tax cuts. And then benefited from messing up the economy. And then benefited from bailout.
To violate GPL, you have to at very least distribute software in a manner that GPL prohibits. Until you start distributing it, you can do whatever the Hell you want.
Shut up! Seriously, shut up. Gimp functionality is on par with everything useful that is in Photoshop, and was for quite a while. If you see it as an equivalent of Paint.NET, it means that you have not done with it anything other than clicking on big buttons in tools menu.
Because Elop serves Microsoft in the same way as Rick Belluzzo did.
It may be that those people were paid by Microsoft to destroy companies that used and developed technology that competed with Microsoft. It may be that they expect to get well-paid but meaningless positions at Microsoft later, as a reward (as Rick Belluzzi did). It may be that they are true believers that Microsoft is the company destined to rule the world, so everyone else has to be enslaved and sacrificed to it.
One thing is certain, decisions they make serve Microsoft and only Microsoft.
1. A large organization has problems -- not serious enough to destroy it immediately but requiring some significant changes to avoid, that also happen to be the changes plenty of people demanded.
2. Someone starts improving things, occasionally making mistakes, and taking more time than initially expected. Initially enthusiastic support goes back to average popularity of the leaders.
3. Some outsider "smart guys" (USSR: Reagan and his "Libertarian" friends, Nokia: Microsoft) proclaim that current direction is no better than the original problem but THEY know how to fix things by following some massively successful example (USSR: USA, Nokia: Microsoft Windows CE).
4. Outsider "smart guys" start massive propaganda campaign to scare the shit out of management.
5. Management gives in, and appoints followers of "smart guys" ideology as their saviors (USSR: 1992, Nokia: now).
6. The above mentioned followers run the organization into the ground, all the while claiming that things are going to get better once their plan is completed.
7. Organization is destroyed the "plan" is revealed to be "destroy the organization, pillage everything valuable and deliver it to the foreign masters".
8. "Smart guys" leave, ruins of the organization are being run by a bunch of local clowns who still spout the ideology of "smart guys" with various distortions (ex-USSR: 1998, MSNokia: in about five years).
No. Commercial Qt (identical to Free Edition otherwise) is distributed under non-free license already. Stopping the development of free-licensed Qt would mean that either no new versions are produced at all (but over what time? and would "fake" releases that contain no meaningful changes qualify?) or new versions will not available under those licenses. I guess, forking the development within Nokia and only offering old or sabotaged versions would qualify as stopping the development, but there may be plenty of lawyer-food in either scenario.
Because they expect it to become much more useful later when oil production will drop -- and their neighbors Russia and China are likely to pay more for it then?
Because they plan to build their own nuclear power plants later, and would rather not lose the material that can be easily processed locally?
Because most of the country is a massive desert, and would be the safest place to handle such material as far as possibility of disasters and contamination is concerned?
Because they already sell more Uranium abroad than what is considered healthy for an industrialized nation?
Still, I basically agree that getting it out of the country would have made it even harder to steal. Kazakhstan does not seem to me to be the safest or most stable of places.
You mean, few top percents of super-rich, who are gobbling massive tax cuts given them by Bush and kept by current Congress/Obama/...? Yeah, those are the only people in US who still have savings.
The rest lost their savings long ago, and had to take massive debt just to support themselves. Losing a job means that in a month they can be homeless.
IPod works just fine with anything Linux-based, and there are plenty of iTunes-like players (Amarok was mentioned, but Clementine seems to be better than current Amarok, so this is what I use).
That said, I still just don't see Ubuntu as a viable option for the archetypical lay-person (a receptionist in this case).
This is nonsense -- Ubuntu is perfectly usable as it is. The only "problems" you will find, are for the users who insist on using specific branded hardware or software that is known not to work with Linux, and has equivalent, or superior, replacements. Games and CAD are two areas where you may encounter serious incompatibility, and neither is necessary for "archetypical lay-person". I may be even wrong about games, as I don't play them and therefore can't evaluate recent improvements in Wine.
You CAN cram uClinux into 2M, but you have to know what you're doing to yank ore stuff out of the kernel so it's not for beginners.
You can use dynamic RAM (and even the smallest configuration available will be larger than anything uClinux would be able to fill). It can be a painful experience on Xilinx FPGA with soft MPMC (usable but takes disproportionally large amount of resources), however Spartan-6 has hard MCB, so it should be possible to stuff MicroBlaze and DDR2/DDR3 controller into a relatively cheap development board configuration. Not sure about tools licensing -- MicroBlaze is included free of charge with full (but expensive) license but as far as I know, not in Webpack, and Xilinx provides MicroBlaze development kits at less-than-insane (few hundreds to a thousand dollars) prices, however you have to choose the kit wisely, as smaller FPGA will be almost completely filled up with a minimal system, thus defeating the purpose of using an FPGA.
I work with Virtex-5 (so the above mentioned MPMC eats a considerable amount of resources), and was able to stuff a perfectly usable uClinux-based system into XC5VLX50T (see https://github.com/jdkoftinoff/mb-linux-msli and https://github.com/jdkoftinoff/mb-gcc4-msli ) No idea which development board would be the closest equivalent of my current configuration, and how much it would be justified for electronics amateur, but it is great when you want plenty of custom hardware and network-accessible Linux-based system all implemented in one FPGA.
1. Because manufacturers don't bother documenting hardware of providing drivers for more than one OS. (Ex: how Linux did run on iPAQ). 2. Because (1) will remain true for proprietary phone control stack even if it won't for the rest of hardware.
Nokia's implementation of Meego was supposed to have the first completely open cellular interface. Good luck getting that with Microsoft lackey at the helm.
What's "ironic" is people believing that the "free market" means you have to eat whatever shit corporations put on your plate.
This is exactly what "free market" means -- you can't consume something that producers refuse to produce, so unless you have some influence on them (and you don't), you are at their mercy. If they had to sell to well-informed consuers, things would be different, however this is what advertisement and mis-education is for -- to develop and attract uninformed consumers, and the problem is unfixable. The only solution is to ignore the stupid idea of "free market" and find a way to prevent producers from freely producing crap, and conspiring with each other (such as with crapware kickbacks) to sell it.
* Open, modify, save, and email a recipe sent in.docx format
OO.o supports that just fine.
* Sync an iPod/iPad to an installation of iTunes
How and why did you install iTunes without Windows or OSX? Or is it another one of "I have just bought a moutain of stuff from worst enemies of Linux -- make it all work with Linux or I will complain about it loudly!" pseudo-questions?
* Play music through a home stereo system (ala Apple AirPort Express)
Everything EXCEPT AirPort Express works just fine. AirPort Express works, but if you want convenience, it's a bad choice.
My password is not "on" anything I administer. A salted hash that can not be used to regenerate my password may be on there, and I may submit my password on there, but at this point in time, my password is not "on" anything I administer.
The important part is, anyone who compromised the server, either already has access sufficient to impersonate you, or can capture something suitable for authentication next time you will try to do anything there -- man in the middle attack will be undetectable because attacker already has access to everything on the host. It's never safe to log in to a compromised server, and no amount of voodoo security will help against that.
You had some good points in the beginning, but seem hell bent on being 100% correct 100% of the time and not having a discussion, but lecturing everyone else like they are beneath you (and incorrectly at that),
Actually I am 100% correct when it comes to my evaluation of pseudo-security features in networked devices. Most of them are there to imress stupid people who think, an equivalent of desktop antivirus functionality has any place on a public-accessible network.
Desktop antivirus vendors have a perfect model for producing their products forever. The goal they are supposed to achieve is impossible because attacker always wins as long as new vulnerabilities or ways to exploit them are found. Windows software is being developed with complete disregard for security, and anyone who will try to produce anything secure, will be out-featured by competitors (or Microsoft) long before the users will notice any improvement. However virus/worm writers are just lazy enough to make it possible to detect majority of their software's activity. It's like an arm race between a country inhabited entirely by blind and a country inhabited entirely on paralyzed -- it can go forever. Few healthy people would conquer them both, but there is no point doing this.
Servers do not fit into that model -- if they are vulnerable to the extent desktop software is, they are already compromised. If they are not, they only need reasonable policy that completely blocks backends from being accessed from outside (as backends may be both vulnerable to various exploits and can DoS'ed easily), and rejects invalid packets early (thus contributing to "traditional" DoS resistance). What happens to be done by each and every router already!
So unles "security" vendor can do something useful but unrelated to "protecting" port 80 from requests to port 80 (like, spam filters that are actually full-blown mail servers, or VPN appliances that don't mangle SSL key exchange) they just add things a desktop user is familiar with, and pretend that it's an "enterpise" product.
it's obviously not worth my time to respond further to some Internet Fuckwad. Which is sad, because if you'd been even 10% as willing to listen as you are to lecture with lies, you'd have learned something. And maybe we'd have learned something from you, rather than just contempt.
So far everything you said can be gathered from reading marketing brochures. That are written for idiots, and amount to "we have magic rock that will keep tigers away".
The alleged studies of adopted children who supposedly inherited their biological parents' religiosity (what would be, if was true, the first evidence of "religious genes"), not the link from the article (that is bullshit in its own right, but it doesn't claim to have performed any actual experiments and therefore amounts to speculation).
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, whose fault is it that the person took a mortgage they couldn't afford? Is it the billionaire's fault? My fault? Or the person with the mortgage? I promise you, I haven't ever held a gun to someone's head and forced them to take a mortgage.
Fuck yeah, personal responsibility! If you can't afford an army of accountants that it takes to analyze loans, you deserve to become enslaved!
As I have said in the previous message, I am all for protecting Microsoft from "pirates" who are now the driving force behind its popularity AND are a major source of continuing idiotic demands to make all software mimic Microsoft.
Just don't pick and choose -- if Microsoft wants to protect itself from "piracy", we will make sure that it's protected from all piracy, including repair shops and home users who spread Microsoft disease.
It's AWWRIGHT!
The savings rate fell off a cliff around 1982, which is just about the time that the bull market leading up to the 2000 meltdown, then slid back downwards, then jumped back up again at the end of 2008.
Ever heard of income disparity?
That nearly 20 year bull market was a time of general prosperity, when people COULD have been saving up money for the inevitable downturn that cyclical markets will bring. They didn't. The data clearly shows that people SAVE MORE when times are hard.
This doesn't show, who saves what, and what amount of debt is taken by the same people. A person who spends all income on current expenses and paying for mortgage that is an equivalent of two years of his salary (and one year more than he would get if he sold the house) would have saving rate of 0 (instead of negative), while a billionaire who pays himself $1 a year while living off carefully near-zeroed for tax purposes income, has saving rate of 100 billion. Sure, billionaires benefited from bull market. And then benefited from Bush tax cuts. And then benefited from messing up the economy. And then benefited from bailout.
Probably because it has "-stan" in its name and, as far as gross generalizations go, its not completely unwarranted.
Kazakhstan is pretty far from anything in this stereotype, as far as politics and economy are concerned.
More Microsoft astroturfers.
To violate GPL, you have to at very least distribute software in a manner that GPL prohibits. Until you start distributing it, you can do whatever the Hell you want.
I would be more concerned that he works only for the companies that can be snitched on, rather than about anything else in his career.
Shut up! Seriously, shut up. Gimp functionality is on par with everything useful that is in Photoshop, and was for quite a while. If you see it as an equivalent of Paint.NET, it means that you have not done with it anything other than clicking on big buttons in tools menu.
Oh wow, Microsoft astroturfer doesn't know what to do with the article and posts generic insults about GIMP not supporting CMYK or something.
Fuck you and fuck your employers. We will defend Microsoft from piracy until no one will dare to use Microsoft software, pirated or otherwise.
Because Elop serves Microsoft in the same way as Rick Belluzzo did.
It may be that those people were paid by Microsoft to destroy companies that used and developed technology that competed with Microsoft.
It may be that they expect to get well-paid but meaningless positions at Microsoft later, as a reward (as Rick Belluzzi did).
It may be that they are true believers that Microsoft is the company destined to rule the world, so everyone else has to be enslaved and sacrificed to it.
One thing is certain, decisions they make serve Microsoft and only Microsoft.
This reminds me the end of Soviet Union.
1. A large organization has problems -- not serious enough to destroy it immediately but requiring some significant changes to avoid, that also happen to be the changes plenty of people demanded.
2. Someone starts improving things, occasionally making mistakes, and taking more time than initially expected. Initially enthusiastic support goes back to average popularity of the leaders.
3. Some outsider "smart guys" (USSR: Reagan and his "Libertarian" friends, Nokia: Microsoft) proclaim that current direction is no better than the original problem but THEY know how to fix things by following some massively successful example (USSR: USA, Nokia: Microsoft Windows CE).
4. Outsider "smart guys" start massive propaganda campaign to scare the shit out of management.
5. Management gives in, and appoints followers of "smart guys" ideology as their saviors (USSR: 1992, Nokia: now).
6. The above mentioned followers run the organization into the ground, all the while claiming that things are going to get better once their plan is completed.
7. Organization is destroyed the "plan" is revealed to be "destroy the organization, pillage everything valuable and deliver it to the foreign masters".
8. "Smart guys" leave, ruins of the organization are being run by a bunch of local clowns who still spout the ideology of "smart guys" with various distortions (ex-USSR: 1998, MSNokia: in about five years).
No. Commercial Qt (identical to Free Edition otherwise) is distributed under non-free license already. Stopping the development of free-licensed Qt would mean that either no new versions are produced at all (but over what time? and would "fake" releases that contain no meaningful changes qualify?) or new versions will not available under those licenses. I guess, forking the development within Nokia and only offering old or sabotaged versions would qualify as stopping the development, but there may be plenty of lawyer-food in either scenario.
It takes a true master of bullshit to write a post with nothing but false statements, without turning it into obvious gibberish.
Because they expect it to become much more useful later when oil production will drop -- and their neighbors Russia and China are likely to pay more for it then?
Because they plan to build their own nuclear power plants later, and would rather not lose the material that can be easily processed locally?
Because most of the country is a massive desert, and would be the safest place to handle such material as far as possibility of disasters and contamination is concerned?
Because they already sell more Uranium abroad than what is considered healthy for an industrialized nation?
Still, I basically agree that getting it out of the country would have made it even harder to steal.
Kazakhstan does not seem to me to be the safest or most stable of places.
Based on what, exactly?
You mean, few top percents of super-rich, who are gobbling massive tax cuts given them by Bush and kept by current Congress/Obama/...? Yeah, those are the only people in US who still have savings.
The rest lost their savings long ago, and had to take massive debt just to support themselves. Losing a job means that in a month they can be homeless.
IPod works just fine with anything Linux-based, and there are plenty of iTunes-like players (Amarok was mentioned, but Clementine seems to be better than current Amarok, so this is what I use).
That said, I still just don't see Ubuntu as a viable option for the archetypical lay-person (a receptionist in this case).
This is nonsense -- Ubuntu is perfectly usable as it is. The only "problems" you will find, are for the users who insist on using specific branded hardware or software that is known not to work with Linux, and has equivalent, or superior, replacements. Games and CAD are two areas where you may encounter serious incompatibility, and neither is necessary for "archetypical lay-person". I may be even wrong about games, as I don't play them and therefore can't evaluate recent improvements in Wine.
You CAN cram uClinux into 2M, but you have to know what you're doing to yank ore stuff out of the kernel so it's not for beginners.
You can use dynamic RAM (and even the smallest configuration available will be larger than anything uClinux would be able to fill). It can be a painful experience on Xilinx FPGA with soft MPMC (usable but takes disproportionally large amount of resources), however Spartan-6 has hard MCB, so it should be possible to stuff MicroBlaze and DDR2/DDR3 controller into a relatively cheap development board configuration. Not sure about tools licensing -- MicroBlaze is included free of charge with full (but expensive) license but as far as I know, not in Webpack, and Xilinx provides MicroBlaze development kits at less-than-insane (few hundreds to a thousand dollars) prices, however you have to choose the kit wisely, as smaller FPGA will be almost completely filled up with a minimal system, thus defeating the purpose of using an FPGA.
I work with Virtex-5 (so the above mentioned MPMC eats a considerable amount of resources), and was able to stuff a perfectly usable uClinux-based system into XC5VLX50T (see https://github.com/jdkoftinoff/mb-linux-msli and https://github.com/jdkoftinoff/mb-gcc4-msli ) No idea which development board would be the closest equivalent of my current configuration, and how much it would be justified for electronics amateur, but it is great when you want plenty of custom hardware and network-accessible Linux-based system all implemented in one FPGA.
"I hate anything M$" is hardly a meaningful or valid reason.
Oh yes, it is!
I find it immoral to give any additional mindshare to Microsoft, no matter what it is about.
What savings?
1. Because manufacturers don't bother documenting hardware of providing drivers for more than one OS. (Ex: how Linux did run on iPAQ).
2. Because (1) will remain true for proprietary phone control stack even if it won't for the rest of hardware.
Nokia's implementation of Meego was supposed to have the first completely open cellular interface. Good luck getting that with Microsoft lackey at the helm.
What's "ironic" is people believing that the "free market" means you have to eat whatever shit corporations put on your plate.
This is exactly what "free market" means -- you can't consume something that producers refuse to produce, so unless you have some influence on them (and you don't), you are at their mercy. If they had to sell to well-informed consuers, things would be different, however this is what advertisement and mis-education is for -- to develop and attract uninformed consumers, and the problem is unfixable. The only solution is to ignore the stupid idea of "free market" and find a way to prevent producers from freely producing crap, and conspiring with each other (such as with crapware kickbacks) to sell it.
* Purchase + install a webcam and use skype
Works with anything modern I have seen.
* Open, modify, save, and email a recipe sent in .docx format
OO.o supports that just fine.
* Sync an iPod/iPad to an installation of iTunes
How and why did you install iTunes without Windows or OSX? Or is it another one of "I have just bought a moutain of stuff from worst enemies of Linux -- make it all work with Linux or I will complain about it loudly!" pseudo-questions?
* Play music through a home stereo system (ala Apple AirPort Express)
Everything EXCEPT AirPort Express works just fine. AirPort Express works, but if you want convenience, it's a bad choice.
My password is not "on" anything I administer. A salted hash that can not be used to regenerate my password may be on there, and I may submit my password on there, but at this point in time, my password is not "on" anything I administer.
The important part is, anyone who compromised the server, either already has access sufficient to impersonate you, or can capture something suitable for authentication next time you will try to do anything there -- man in the middle attack will be undetectable because attacker already has access to everything on the host. It's never safe to log in to a compromised server, and no amount of voodoo security will help against that.
You had some good points in the beginning, but seem hell bent on being 100% correct 100% of the time and not having a discussion, but lecturing everyone else like they are beneath you (and incorrectly at that),
Actually I am 100% correct when it comes to my evaluation of pseudo-security features in networked devices. Most of them are there to imress stupid people who think, an equivalent of desktop antivirus functionality has any place on a public-accessible network.
Desktop antivirus vendors have a perfect model for producing their products forever. The goal they are supposed to achieve is impossible because attacker always wins as long as new vulnerabilities or ways to exploit them are found. Windows software is being developed with complete disregard for security, and anyone who will try to produce anything secure, will be out-featured by competitors (or Microsoft) long before the users will notice any improvement. However virus/worm writers are just lazy enough to make it possible to detect majority of their software's activity. It's like an arm race between a country inhabited entirely by blind and a country inhabited entirely on paralyzed -- it can go forever. Few healthy people would conquer them both, but there is no point doing this.
Servers do not fit into that model -- if they are vulnerable to the extent desktop software is, they are already compromised. If they are not, they only need reasonable policy that completely blocks backends from being accessed from outside (as backends may be both vulnerable to various exploits and can DoS'ed easily), and rejects invalid packets early (thus contributing to "traditional" DoS resistance). What happens to be done by each and every router already!
So unles "security" vendor can do something useful but unrelated to "protecting" port 80 from requests to port 80 (like, spam filters that are actually full-blown mail servers, or VPN appliances that don't mangle SSL key exchange) they just add things a desktop user is familiar with, and pretend that it's an "enterpise" product.
it's obviously not worth my time to respond further to some Internet Fuckwad. Which is sad, because if you'd been even 10% as willing to listen as you are to lecture with lies, you'd have learned something. And maybe we'd have learned something from you, rather than just contempt.
So far everything you said can be gathered from reading marketing brochures. That are written for idiots, and amount to "we have magic rock that will keep tigers away".
The alleged studies of adopted children who supposedly inherited their biological parents' religiosity (what would be, if was true, the first evidence of "religious genes"), not the link from the article (that is bullshit in its own right, but it doesn't claim to have performed any actual experiments and therefore amounts to speculation).