I can't tell if that's the next version of the Vibraphone, or a previously unknown book by L. Ron Hubbard.
You use that word, but I don't think you know what it means. A vibraphone is a musical instrument. They've been around for 80 years. Think "NBC Chimes" sound.
I can see numerous reasons not to post the photos, at least not immediately:
Why provide further material for you enemies to use to help recruit even more people to their cause?
The burial at sea could be used to identify the vessel (or at least type/class) - from there, knowing the class, and which ships of that class are in the area, identify the crew. Again, any photos or video would have to be sanitized - and then the tinfoil brigade would shout "fake"!
He wasn't living in any cave or backwoods area - he was living in a million-dollar house, and apparently had just come from another such place 3 days before he was killed. "Hide where they least expect you."
If al queda has any proof that bin Laden has been dead all these years, now it would serve their purpose to release it, to discredit the US and Obama. Instead, there've been calls for retaliation - which means they also believe and confirm that the US killed bin Laden Sunday.
bin Laden knew that debate about his continued existence would weaken US resolve to go after him - better to leave some doubt all these years.
bin Laden also knew that it would be possible to analyze pictures for details that could be overlooked - so much so that it's safer to release old photos with tapes. Especially if he wasn't living in caves, which we now know to be the case.
We don't know if bin Laden had only temporary kidney problems, or chronic kidney disease. Even with CKD, people have been known to live 25 years or more.
Even people who would not support bin Laden would tend to look poorly on having pictures of him dead being paraded around as a way of "boasting".
Add all these up, and there's no reasonable doubt - they got bin Laden on May 1st.
Members of an elite Navy Seals team dropped by helicopter to the compound were under orders to kill not capture bin Laden, who had eluded U.S. forces for 13 years, a senior U.S. security official told Reuters.
"This was a kill operation," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
... part of the problem is that most people are stuck having to buy a "package" from either a cable or satellite provider. If HD TV stations increased their OTA (over-the-airwaves) presence (better antenna positioning, more repeaters), people would have more free (as in it doesn't cost more than a pair of bunny ears) HD TV.
... and that would help them compete, because many streaming Internet services will run up against their ISP's bandwidth caps if heavily used.
Well, if you do, remember the advice from the article - wash your tires It's called "getting rid of the evidence.".
And if you;re in the US, run them over a few times to make sure they're really dead, and not just faking it. Your insurance rates won't go up as much if they have to pay for a funeral instead of 50 years of medical expenses.
If an armadillo's blood 'got on my tires of my car from running [the animal] over, I would wash it down,' advises one expert. 'And I would not dig in soil that has a lot of armadillo excrement.'"
So, someone needs an expert to tell them not to play in poop? Don't mothers teach their kids not to play with the "clay" in the sandbox any more?
You mean you didn't suspect anything after reading this:
"Them two knuckleheads from that TV show American Pickers (Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz) stopped by here trying to steal from me. Offering me $200 for my old still. Said I had no use for it since making moonshine was illegal. After that smart-mouthed remark, I shot at em," declared Nilsson.
Since when does anyone in Kentucky care about moonshine being illegal?
The "I shot them", on the other hand, while believable, just makes you wish he was a better shot, or less into sampling the wares.
I agree, the playbook stats are meaningless without context, and the context in this case is applications. Any computing device without applications is a brick.
For the stat-enthused: Put one foot in a bucket of boiling water, and the other in a bucket of ice. On average, you should find the temperature quite comfortable.
The patent was filed in 1997, but databases have used chained linked lists, overflow buckets, and hash tables for long before that to locate (and obviously delete items that were no longer valid) records.
Ref: Database Systems Concepts, Korth, Henry F., and Silberschatz, Abraham, University of Texas At Austin (McGraw-Hill) 1991.
The above book describes such methods as were already current at least a decade prior to publication.
And if you consider directory indexes to the multiple parts of a file as an external chained linked list, disk compression and disk caching software was doing the same thing since at least 4 years before the first filing date.
The only stalking being done is by you. You're up to what - 200 posts in the last week, all about me? You keep on avoiding the real issue - what is it about me personally that is so important to you that you have to cyber-stalk me? Obviously, I've been on your mind since I first replied to you forum spam about your stupid hosts file a year ago and said that it's not only ineffective, but a waste of time in today's environment. But that doesn't explain it.
You're obviously angry that I had the nerve to suggest that people should do to you what you do to them - post anonymously when replying to you, because otherwise you stalk them. And now you're mad that some of them do it? You know what? You had it coming. It's your own fault, nothing more, nothing less. But that's not it either. It;s just a pretext.
You continue to try to divert attention away from the real question - why are you so obsessed with me? I know why, and it has nothing to do with the hosts file issue. But why don't you give your version of why getting my attention is so important to you that you looked for any pretext to follow me around and do everything you can to get my attention when I had forgotten you even existed?
This is the obvious question, and one you've refused to answer over and over. I mean really, answer why you came barging into my journal out of the blue, for no reason at all, crap-flooding, calling me a b*tch and a c*unt and an ugly cyclops because I temporarily lost the sight in one eye? That's not normal...
Anyone who had read my journals in December and January knew that I certainly had neither the time nor the energy to waste following around a nobody like you, never mind that you don't even have an account, so it's not like I could do what you do - just look at my profile and see my recent posts, which is how you stalk me in the various discussion threads.
And you certainly did read those journal entries - otherwise you wouldn't have known about how I temporarily went blind in one eye and still continued to work. And you also knew the crazy hours I was putting in.
So you knew I had neither the time, nor the inclination, to bother looking for any of your posts. You were last year's trash, long gone to the recycling center, forgotten.
So why not answer the question.... what is it that's different? You've had run-ins with others, and you didn't go anywhere near as close to totally losing it like you've done here. Is it because I fight back? No, that can't be it - at least not all of it, because so do others, and after a day or two, it dies off.
Is it because my points really struck home a year ago? No, you've demonstrated that you're quite capable of being selective in your "facts", so that's not it either.
is it because I told people a year ago that they should do to you what you do to them? No, that doesn't hold water either. After all, a whole year has gone by, and this being slashdot, I'm sure that there have been plenty of anonymous replies to your spam posts. So that's not it either.
No, it's definitely something else...;-p
You still have a chance to put your spin on events before others put the pieces together. They will, you know - they're not dummies.
So, you want to take 2 people who are out of work, and give them part-time jobs that they are less than optimally suited for.
You have just destroyed a full-time job that someone else would be optimal for.
And... those first two people are not going to be as efficient over the long term, since for them it's hopefully a temporary situation. BUT, you're getting lower production, higher error rates, etc. So, to compensate, you have to subsidize those jobs, often by a lot.
Other businesses will have no choice but to do the same if they want to remain cost-competitive with the subsidized labour.
Then you have whole sectors that have such a mis-match of people vs jobs, and such a dependence on subsidies, that you've wrecked your economy.
Rinse, lather, repeat, and you can destroy every job in the country, as more people get replaced with subsidized part-timers.
Now if you think this is just speculation, it's not. A lot of the "job retraining" programs are this sort of stupidity. Here, the government has been putting unemployed welfare recipients through job retraining consisting of, among other things, an 8-month course in how to be a web monkey.
They then go to work for a local employer for 3 months, and it doesn't cost the employer a penny, except for the coffee they drink. Of course, they're not exactly productive, but they're free, so any productivity is a bonus.
Then, after the 3 months, they don't get a job offer, and a month later, in comes the next batch of free workers.
This is despite the government being so anxious to justify the program that they're willing to pay up to 75% of a new hire's salary. But even 25% is more than free... and the quality of people is low enough that the average kid at her mom's kitchen table can do just as good, if not better. After all, the young woman working at the kitchen table is doing it because she has a passion for it, not to get off welfare...
And of course, this ignores the long-term trend of secretaries and receptionists and clerks being given responsibility for many of the web sites out there. The tools to do it have been available for years. Small businesses with 5 to 50 employees have that option now - web sites are part of career training for secretaries and administrative assistants. And there's always someone who already knows someone's daughter working at mom's kitchen table who just loves doing that sort of thing.
In the meantime, the first batch of free web monkeys can't find jobs, so they think "Well, I'll just freelance making web sites." After a month, desperate to get anything to show off, they start offering to do them for free, or as close to it as possible, because they need something to start with.
Go look at sites like kijiji - you'll see thousands of them.
Now considering that our local area lost 6,000 permanent IT jobs last year, and who knows how many this year so far (we're on track to lose another 250,000 jobs this year), this is not a solution. But thanks to 15 years of these policies, directed at the IT field, wages are down across the board. 50% in the last 5 years alone. Why? because with so much flotsam entering the system year after year, companies simply moved all the good jobs elsewhere, where they didn't have to go through 100 crappy applicants to find one who can do the job. Even "free" workers are too expensive when they continually waste your time and resources.
A 4-day, 32-hour workweek makes sense. Not only would it save resources, but it would drastically lower unemployment.
To take something like this up the chain is usually synonymous with sacking. He just put a rouge unit on the network, one that IT did not have the chance to audit and certify clean and fit to connect beforehand. Regardless of the OS, he might as well put a virus on the network, opened it up for intrusion, or worse, be the intrusion himself. A rouge entity is every admin's/security officer's nightmare: it's there, but you don't know what's in it, or what it's doing.
So, this rouge server, does it make people blush, or what?
All kidding aside, I agree, it's their network, their rules - and besides, let them have the headaches/ability to fix it if some hardware dies on a weekend. That's a win/win scenario.
I've never claimed to run a botnet - and if I *did*, I certainly wouldn't give it to a stupid dummy like you.
And your latest cut-and-paste crapflood in various threads just goes to show how much I really do p0wn you!
Now, why is that? What are you so afraid of my debunking your hosts file for? Is it because anyone using it is open to certain attacks, and that it's easy to fingerprint which machines are using it by running a simple javascript on any server?
After all, you've put a lot of time and energy into spamming all sorts of web sites trying to encourage people to use it... and certainly a lot of time into trying to shut me up when I refused your "offer" to stop crap-flooding my journal if I would stop pointing out your lies.
For the record (since google doesn't index journals, index this, google!:-), Alexander Peter Kowalski's hosts file does not protect you from viruses and other malware. It didn't back in 1995, and it certainly doesn't today.
No, the link says thanks for suggestions - not code. Quit trying to make yourself out to be bigger than you are.
Keep jumping, fat boy
For those wondering why APK (alexander Peter Kowalski - the "hosts file guy" is so angry, it's because he's not happy that I pointed out that his hosts file does not protect people from viruses and malware, and I warned everyone that if they tried to rebut him without protecting themselves by posting anonymously, he'd do like he always does - threaten to sue them for libel (he always backs down when called on it), and stalk them on the Internet, as he's doing here, with multiple posts pretending to be various "different" anonymous posters..
Now, why would anyone do that? Well, think about it - anyone depending on a broken "solution" is ripe for exploitation. So, anyone who downloads his "solution" is advertising "Here's the IP of a machine - p0wn me!" Additionally, anyone interested can run a bit of javascript on their site to fingerprint whether his "hosts file" is being used or not.
Makes you wonder why he continues to falsely accuse me of running a botnet, doesn't it? It's typical of liars to accuse others of what they're guilty of.
BTW - he offered to stop if I would agree not to continue to debunk his stupid hosts file. After calling me a stupid c*nt? You have to be kidding...
Ubuntu managed to get Dell to dance with them for a bit, but extremely high return rates killed that, and the netbook market has since been eaten by a grue. The predictions of sales going through the roof were replaced by the reality of them dropping to the single digits - and then continuing to fall.
The "other mobile devices" would be smartphones and tablets - the same devices that spelled the end for netbooks. Apple and Android are the only real contenders right now. QNX (RIM's Playbook) is pretty much a disappointment for now, and HPs WebOS is MIA for another 8 months, an eternity in consumer electronics. The MickeyNokia phones won't be out until 2012, and Microsoft still doesn't have a tablet solution, and Microsoft's other WP7 partners are making their money with their Android offerings, not WP7 (Windows Phone market share, already in the single digits, dropped by half after WP7 was released).
So just where does Unity fit in? The only other devices are regular laptops and the desktop PC, and these usability tests show that it's without a doubt not ready at all. 6 out of 11 (not 5, if you read the actual test data) - including an experienced Ubuntu user - ended up crashing it during the 1-hour test. And this is something that they want to release in 2 weeks?
The truth is simple:
1. Their own limited testing shows it is clearly not ready for release, if more than half crash it in less than an hour;
2. There is no interest, (or room, for that matter) in the tablet or smartphone market for a Unity-based device, and if there were, this would not be the Unity they're looking for.
We see this in business all the time - a company pins their hopes on a particular project, and can't bring themselves to admit that the market has simply moved on, so they continue to throw good money and resources after bad.
The limited test proves the UI is confusing to the user, which kind of defeats the purpose of a UI. forget the bugs - Unity needs to be re-thought. Also, how did they come up with a process that lets a project get this close to release date (2 weeks to go) without discovering such basic issues? It looks like a case of "we don't need to test the concepts behind this stuff, we know what we're doing, users will see our brilliance and bow down to us". Sounds like they got the GNOME disease...
Then again, this is the same Canonical that brought in Matt Assay with all sorts of fan-fare (the same Matt Assay who then went on to say here that he's started using Ubuntu after he found out he had the job and he thinks it's great - instead of hiring someone who was a user before his wallet motivated him), and who didn't say much of anything when he (predictably) abandoned ship later that year.
It's the same decision process, and Shuttleworth has to accept responsibility for it. So far, I don't think he has. He should look less to those who agree with him, and more to his critics, and then take a long hard look in the mirror. I'm not questioning that he's dedicated to what he's doing, but clearly, the process is broken right at the top.
Why does he do it? Because it's all he can do. Spam and more spam. And BTW, the stories about linux serving up malware from the London Stock Exchange were put out by Microsoft shills - who failed to point out that the cut-over to linux hadn't happened - it was supposed to happen on Valentine's day, and the story you quote is from 3 days prior. The compromised machines were running Windows.
Now you might be wondering why Alexander Peter Kowalski is so adamant about people using his hosts file to "protect" themselves. One simple explanation - anyone depending on it is open to attack, and if you download it, you've now advertised the IP address of a machine that's probably open to p0wnage.
It's also easy to fingerprint which machines visiting a site are using it with a bit of javascript.
So maybe he's just not too happy that pointing this out threatens his "business model". It makes sense, just like him accusing me of being a botnet operator when calling me a c*nt and a b*tch, and making fun of my temporary loss of sight in one eye (calling me an ugly cyclops) didn't work. Anything to keep people from continuing to question his BS.
Microsoft is doing everything they can to force businesses to upgrade before April 8th, 2014. That's when they finally pull the plug - again - on XP. Not that the magic bits on disk will suddenly stop working, but they know their market-sheeple.
They want you to upgrade asap, because the longer businesses delay, the more likely that other devices - tablets in particular - will replace an increasing share of desktops.
Desktop sales are down in absolute numbers, and this has Microsoft scared. Every seat that discards a Windows license for an iPad, for example, is one more MS-Office license lost as well, not just this round, but probably forever.
Given that next year, there will be more devices shipped with linux variants (eg, Android) than either iOS, OSX, or Windows, it might not be the year of the linux desktop, but it WILL be the year linux. Anyone they don't lock in over the next year or two is a lost cause.
Slashdot Mirror
The i5 spanked the X4, for only $10 more. This actually should be an ad for Intel (disclaimer - posted from my AMD laptop).
I'll take that for $200, Alex.
"What (1) is the stupidest 'invention' you've heard of so far today on slashdot?"
"Oozing so massive a quantity of stupidity the captions practically write themselves! Photoshop not required!"
"Pinocchio!"
"Got a kleenex?"
See - only one 4-letter word.
You use that word, but I don't think you know what it means. A vibraphone is a musical instrument. They've been around for 80 years. Think "NBC Chimes" sound.
or play UNIX Navy Seal ... "cat Pb > /bin/laden" and fill him with lead.
The real way to spread malware in this case would be a headline like "Donald Trump obtains Osama bin Laden video" ...
I can see numerous reasons not to post the photos, at least not immediately:
Add all these up, and there's no reasonable doubt - they got bin Laden on May 1st.
He was the one who said that bin Laden should be killed, not taken into custody. As Truman said, "The buck stops here." He made the call.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE74107920110502?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
Members of an elite Navy Seals team dropped by helicopter to the compound were under orders to kill not capture bin Laden, who had eluded U.S. forces for 13 years, a senior U.S. security official told Reuters.
"This was a kill operation," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
I suspect Windows 98 would boot up pretty fast on a 2ghz cpu (provided it didn't freak out at the hardware).
Even acupuncturists are better. And there's no such thing as a subluxation.
And having to eat lunch when you're trying to lose a couple of pounds because summer is coming is just wrong!
Seriously, "only" 10% are at risk? 10% is HUGE!
And on the not-so-serious side ...
Q. Why do lepers make such lousy poker players?
A. They have to quit after they've thrown in their hands.
Q. What's small and green and sheds it's skin?
A. A leper-chaun.
Q. What do you call 10 lepers in a hot tub?
A. Oatmeal.
Thank you, thank you ... try the fish.
Well, if you do, remember the advice from the article - wash your tires It's called "getting rid of the evidence.".
And if you;re in the US, run them over a few times to make sure they're really dead, and not just faking it. Your insurance rates won't go up as much if they have to pay for a funeral instead of 50 years of medical expenses.
So, someone needs an expert to tell them not to play in poop? Don't mothers teach their kids not to play with the "clay" in the sandbox any more?
You mean you didn't suspect anything after reading this:
Since when does anyone in Kentucky care about moonshine being illegal?
The "I shot them", on the other hand, while believable, just makes you wish he was a better shot, or less into sampling the wares.
Moohshine?
You'll never be able to watch that Top Gun disk ...
... bzzzt disk ejected.
"EJECT EJECT EJECT"
And you'll never be able to finish Casablanca: ... player loops back to scene 1
"Play it again"
And no police action dramas. ..
"Police! Stop!" click
And Ah-nold will just endlessly loop ...
"I'll be back" loops to previous scene
And forget about "Spaceballs" ... wrong password - device locked!
"password is 1 2 3 4 5"
And all those westerns ...
... paused
Hold it right there
And all your porn will be reduced to 20 seconds .. 2x
.. 4x
.. 8x
.. 16x
.. 32x
.. 64x .
.. plaid .
Faster!
Faster!
Faster!
Faster!
Faster!
Faster!
Faster!
2nd Wii, second game disk, and a wifi connection.
I agree, the playbook stats are meaningless without context, and the context in this case is applications. Any computing device without applications is a brick.
For the stat-enthused: Put one foot in a bucket of boiling water, and the other in a bucket of ice. On average, you should find the temperature quite comfortable.
The patent was filed in 1997, but databases have used chained linked lists, overflow buckets, and hash tables for long before that to locate (and obviously delete items that were no longer valid) records.
Ref: Database Systems Concepts, Korth, Henry F., and Silberschatz, Abraham, University of Texas At Austin (McGraw-Hill) 1991.
The above book describes such methods as were already current at least a decade prior to publication.
And if you consider directory indexes to the multiple parts of a file as an external chained linked list, disk compression and disk caching software was doing the same thing since at least 4 years before the first filing date.
You're obviously angry that I had the nerve to suggest that people should do to you what you do to them - post anonymously when replying to you, because otherwise you stalk them. And now you're mad that some of them do it? You know what? You had it coming. It's your own fault, nothing more, nothing less. But that's not it either. It;s just a pretext.
You continue to try to divert attention away from the real question - why are you so obsessed with me? I know why, and it has nothing to do with the hosts file issue. But why don't you give your version of why getting my attention is so important to you that you looked for any pretext to follow me around and do everything you can to get my attention when I had forgotten you even existed?
This is the obvious question, and one you've refused to answer over and over. I mean really, answer why you came barging into my journal out of the blue, for no reason at all, crap-flooding, calling me a b*tch and a c*unt and an ugly cyclops because I temporarily lost the sight in one eye? That's not normal ...
Anyone who had read my journals in December and January knew that I certainly had neither the time nor the energy to waste following around a nobody like you, never mind that you don't even have an account, so it's not like I could do what you do - just look at my profile and see my recent posts, which is how you stalk me in the various discussion threads.
And you certainly did read those journal entries - otherwise you wouldn't have known about how I temporarily went blind in one eye and still continued to work. And you also knew the crazy hours I was putting in.
So you knew I had neither the time, nor the inclination, to bother looking for any of your posts. You were last year's trash, long gone to the recycling center, forgotten.
So why not answer the question .... what is it that's different? You've had run-ins with others, and you didn't go anywhere near as close to totally losing it like you've done here. Is it because I fight back? No, that can't be it - at least not all of it, because so do others, and after a day or two, it dies off.
Is it because my points really struck home a year ago? No, you've demonstrated that you're quite capable of being selective in your "facts", so that's not it either.
is it because I told people a year ago that they should do to you what you do to them? No, that doesn't hold water either. After all, a whole year has gone by, and this being slashdot, I'm sure that there have been plenty of anonymous replies to your spam posts. So that's not it either.
No, it's definitely something else ... ;-p
You still have a chance to put your spin on events before others put the pieces together. They will, you know - they're not dummies.
So, you want to take 2 people who are out of work, and give them part-time jobs that they are less than optimally suited for.
You have just destroyed a full-time job that someone else would be optimal for.
And ... those first two people are not going to be as efficient over the long term, since for them it's hopefully a temporary situation. BUT, you're getting lower production, higher error rates, etc. So, to compensate, you have to subsidize those jobs, often by a lot.
Other businesses will have no choice but to do the same if they want to remain cost-competitive with the subsidized labour.
Then you have whole sectors that have such a mis-match of people vs jobs, and such a dependence on subsidies, that you've wrecked your economy.
Rinse, lather, repeat, and you can destroy every job in the country, as more people get replaced with subsidized part-timers.
Now if you think this is just speculation, it's not. A lot of the "job retraining" programs are this sort of stupidity. Here, the government has been putting unemployed welfare recipients through job retraining consisting of, among other things, an 8-month course in how to be a web monkey.
They then go to work for a local employer for 3 months, and it doesn't cost the employer a penny, except for the coffee they drink. Of course, they're not exactly productive, but they're free, so any productivity is a bonus.
Then, after the 3 months, they don't get a job offer, and a month later, in comes the next batch of free workers.
This is despite the government being so anxious to justify the program that they're willing to pay up to 75% of a new hire's salary. But even 25% is more than free ... and the quality of people is low enough that the average kid at her mom's kitchen table can do just as good, if not better. After all, the young woman working at the kitchen table is doing it because she has a passion for it, not to get off welfare ...
And of course, this ignores the long-term trend of secretaries and receptionists and clerks being given responsibility for many of the web sites out there. The tools to do it have been available for years. Small businesses with 5 to 50 employees have that option now - web sites are part of career training for secretaries and administrative assistants. And there's always someone who already knows someone's daughter working at mom's kitchen table who just loves doing that sort of thing.
In the meantime, the first batch of free web monkeys can't find jobs, so they think "Well, I'll just freelance making web sites." After a month, desperate to get anything to show off, they start offering to do them for free, or as close to it as possible, because they need something to start with.
Go look at sites like kijiji - you'll see thousands of them.
Now considering that our local area lost 6,000 permanent IT jobs last year, and who knows how many this year so far (we're on track to lose another 250,000 jobs this year), this is not a solution. But thanks to 15 years of these policies, directed at the IT field, wages are down across the board. 50% in the last 5 years alone. Why? because with so much flotsam entering the system year after year, companies simply moved all the good jobs elsewhere, where they didn't have to go through 100 crappy applicants to find one who can do the job. Even "free" workers are too expensive when they continually waste your time and resources.
A 4-day, 32-hour workweek makes sense. Not only would it save resources, but it would drastically lower unemployment.
So, this rouge server, does it make people blush, or what?
All kidding aside, I agree, it's their network, their rules - and besides, let them have the headaches/ability to fix it if some hardware dies on a weekend. That's a win/win scenario.
And your latest cut-and-paste crapflood in various threads just goes to show how much I really do p0wn you!
Now, why is that? What are you so afraid of my debunking your hosts file for? Is it because anyone using it is open to certain attacks, and that it's easy to fingerprint which machines are using it by running a simple javascript on any server?
After all, you've put a lot of time and energy into spamming all sorts of web sites trying to encourage people to use it ... and certainly a lot of time into trying to shut me up when I refused your "offer" to stop crap-flooding my journal if I would stop pointing out your lies.
jump, fat boy, jump
For the record (since google doesn't index journals, index this, google! :-), Alexander Peter Kowalski's hosts file does not protect you from viruses and other malware. It didn't back in 1995, and it certainly doesn't today.
Keep jumping, fat boy
For those wondering why APK (alexander Peter Kowalski - the "hosts file guy" is so angry, it's because he's not happy that I pointed out that his hosts file does not protect people from viruses and malware, and I warned everyone that if they tried to rebut him without protecting themselves by posting anonymously, he'd do like he always does - threaten to sue them for libel (he always backs down when called on it), and stalk them on the Internet, as he's doing here, with multiple posts pretending to be various "different" anonymous posters..
Now, why would anyone do that? Well, think about it - anyone depending on a broken "solution" is ripe for exploitation. So, anyone who downloads his "solution" is advertising "Here's the IP of a machine - p0wn me!" Additionally, anyone interested can run a bit of javascript on their site to fingerprint whether his "hosts file" is being used or not.
Makes you wonder why he continues to falsely accuse me of running a botnet, doesn't it? It's typical of liars to accuse others of what they're guilty of.
BTW - he offered to stop if I would agree not to continue to debunk his stupid hosts file. After calling me a stupid c*nt? You have to be kidding ...
Ubuntu managed to get Dell to dance with them for a bit, but extremely high return rates killed that, and the netbook market has since been eaten by a grue. The predictions of sales going through the roof were replaced by the reality of them dropping to the single digits - and then continuing to fall.
The "other mobile devices" would be smartphones and tablets - the same devices that spelled the end for netbooks. Apple and Android are the only real contenders right now. QNX (RIM's Playbook) is pretty much a disappointment for now, and HPs WebOS is MIA for another 8 months, an eternity in consumer electronics. The MickeyNokia phones won't be out until 2012, and Microsoft still doesn't have a tablet solution, and Microsoft's other WP7 partners are making their money with their Android offerings, not WP7 (Windows Phone market share, already in the single digits, dropped by half after WP7 was released).
So just where does Unity fit in? The only other devices are regular laptops and the desktop PC, and these usability tests show that it's without a doubt not ready at all. 6 out of 11 (not 5, if you read the actual test data) - including an experienced Ubuntu user - ended up crashing it during the 1-hour test. And this is something that they want to release in 2 weeks?
The truth is simple:
1. Their own limited testing shows it is clearly not ready for release, if more than half crash it in less than an hour;
2. There is no interest, (or room, for that matter) in the tablet or smartphone market for a Unity-based device, and if there were, this would not be the Unity they're looking for.
We see this in business all the time - a company pins their hopes on a particular project, and can't bring themselves to admit that the market has simply moved on, so they continue to throw good money and resources after bad.
The limited test proves the UI is confusing to the user, which kind of defeats the purpose of a UI. forget the bugs - Unity needs to be re-thought. Also, how did they come up with a process that lets a project get this close to release date (2 weeks to go) without discovering such basic issues? It looks like a case of "we don't need to test the concepts behind this stuff, we know what we're doing, users will see our brilliance and bow down to us". Sounds like they got the GNOME disease ...
Then again, this is the same Canonical that brought in Matt Assay with all sorts of fan-fare (the same Matt Assay who then went on to say here that he's started using Ubuntu after he found out he had the job and he thinks it's great - instead of hiring someone who was a user before his wallet motivated him), and who didn't say much of anything when he (predictably) abandoned ship later that year.
It's the same decision process, and Shuttleworth has to accept responsibility for it. So far, I don't think he has. He should look less to those who agree with him, and more to his critics, and then take a long hard look in the mirror. I'm not questioning that he's dedicated to what he's doing, but clearly, the process is broken right at the top.
Why does he do it? Because it's all he can do. Spam and more spam. And BTW, the stories about linux serving up malware from the London Stock Exchange were put out by Microsoft shills - who failed to point out that the cut-over to linux hadn't happened - it was supposed to happen on Valentine's day, and the story you quote is from 3 days prior. The compromised machines were running Windows.
Now you might be wondering why Alexander Peter Kowalski is so adamant about people using his hosts file to "protect" themselves. One simple explanation - anyone depending on it is open to attack, and if you download it, you've now advertised the IP address of a machine that's probably open to p0wnage.
It's also easy to fingerprint which machines visiting a site are using it with a bit of javascript.
So maybe he's just not too happy that pointing this out threatens his "business model". It makes sense, just like him accusing me of being a botnet operator when calling me a c*nt and a b*tch, and making fun of my temporary loss of sight in one eye (calling me an ugly cyclops) didn't work. Anything to keep people from continuing to question his BS.
No wonder slashdot banned his account.
Oh, almost forgot ... JUMP, FAT BOY, JUMP. Oops, too fat.
They want you to upgrade asap, because the longer businesses delay, the more likely that other devices - tablets in particular - will replace an increasing share of desktops.
Desktop sales are down in absolute numbers, and this has Microsoft scared. Every seat that discards a Windows license for an iPad, for example, is one more MS-Office license lost as well, not just this round, but probably forever.
Given that next year, there will be more devices shipped with linux variants (eg, Android) than either iOS, OSX, or Windows, it might not be the year of the linux desktop, but it WILL be the year linux. Anyone they don't lock in over the next year or two is a lost cause.