As the entire world is now learning, this plan works great when there is an increasing birth rate, or high immigration rate of very young people, but since birth rates in developed countries are falling these plans, well, aren't so good...
Not quite. The system should work no matter what. Really you have people contributing to the system, then the government sits on the money. If you include interest and modest management by investing, social security would have a never ending pool of money.
But here's what happened. People are now forced to contribute to social security, and the politicians can't stand just having all that money sitting around and not "doing something" with it, so they gutted social security. What they did is essentially turned social security into a pyramid scheme based on population where I pay for my grandfathers social security. Which as you say only works if you have an expanding population. The system CAN work, but it's critical that you don't fuck with the money and don't use it for other things - and what greedy polititian can keep their fingers out of a treasure chest that big? Well, that's the real problem right there.
As an aside, I would like to say this is what really pisses me off about the U.S. They claim lower taxes, but when you add on social security it's really outragous for what we get out of it - and social security is just that: another tax.
Lets not get into the potential of users based off of the earth's population. Especially when you consider that over 50% of the earths population has never made or recieved a phone call. Plus the 4+ percent who are under the age to be capable of using a computer. The number of computers where there is one per household, but multiple users. Then users who have a computer at home and at work. etc.
There are simply too many variables to make population any sort of factor in windows installs. But as you say, the growth will happen in the less wealthy parts of the world since the majority of the current installs are where computers a reaching a saturation point.
Holy Fuck. You know, I try to make my info private since I just saw the link and noticed that they want $27 to make my info private. Man that's about as wrong as it gets. I think it's time for another registrar for me.
Speaking of spying, I noticed that they finally give you an option of hiding your personal information. My ex-girlfriend always used to say they should just include links to mapquest so that crazy psychos could just print off the map directons, drive to her house and kill her. Bad enough that she's actually gotten CALLS from creepy people.
So at least that's one step in the right direction for Network solutions, even if they're going the wrong direction in so many other instances.
It's a very windows-centric attitude. If you really think about it, you start to understand that computer OS's tend to differentiate the way their users think. Windows users tend to think on the terms of "I can use this PROGRAM or that PROGRAM" reguardless of what it does, they tie their thinking to a specific application. Mac OS users tend to think on terms of what they can DO with their computer, and not so much what app does it. They can edit photos, or make movies - many aren't aware of what programs really do that. Unix users tend to think on terms of a solution. Using programs to get something done whatever way they choose - perhaps by doing things themselves.
And thus you have people switching... Mac users are used to being able to do things, and easily without complications - this often makes Unix and Windows unfriendly to them. Windows users get fustrated when they can't use their specific apps on other operating systems, despite the fact that there are often alternatives that do the same things and sometimes better. Unix users tend to get fustrated in windows by being confined by what they can do. By contrast Unix users move easily to MacOSX not neccesarily because it's easy to use, but because they can use lots of tools to do things the way they want them done.
That depends. While what you say is true, and it does not execute it also shows a lot about the thinking at MS. Mozilla hands off protocols to windows in a simplistic way because it is not a part of the OS - just as any other program does. IE by contrast has the concept of zones, and each zone has certain things which may be allowed or disallowed depending upon various security levels. This makes the IE security model much more complicated than it should be, and for most people hard to understand. And there has been more than enough problems with IE being confused as to which zone it's in, and enough exploits taking advantage of it.
Mozilla's fix is simple because what it does is simple. I'm not apologizing for the mozilla team here, and in fact I think it's sort of pathetc they just let this problem lay around for 2 years instead of just disabling the shell protocol to begin with. But if IE does anything right, it certainly is NOT the concept of security zones.
Well around half of what you learn on BSD applies to Linux anyway. Much of hardening comes from sockstat -l , and you'll notice most of what's listed runs on Linux as well. But at least you'll have a sane firewall, which is something iptables/chains just isn't =P
I have to say one thing about MS: they use their own stuff and it actually works. It seems like demo after demo works fine for them, and every rep I've seen has his stuff working flawlessly.
Of course I have yet to see any other corperation actually get MS's stuff to work half as well for them - which says a lot.
Wheither XP is more expensive than OSX is up to debate because it varies depending upon the situation. XP home is around, what $99? If you want better conictivitiy, XP pro is $199. Next upgrade is due a long time from now. Most of the time people are expected to have antivirus on a Windows machine: that's $50+ each year. An upgrade in windows can actually require an upgrade in the hardware as well.
Mac OSX costs $125. For a 5 computer licence it's $199. Upgrades happen once per year, but you are not REQUIRED neccesarily to get them. Each upgrade of OSX (thus far) has made speed improvments on the same hardware - if you're okay with the speed now, then an upgrade will only make things better. Of course the hardware is usually[1] more expensive as well.
Which is actually cheaper? As I said, that depends.
[1] An iBook often works out to be cheaper than an equivelant PC laptop.
you know, that's what I like about Microsoft; everything is so easy. I mean stoping sites from accessing my hard drive by entering HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{00000566-0000-0010-8000-00AA006D2EA 4}
is totally intuitive. Hell I'm surprized at some point I didn't open regedit and enter all that by accident =P
If you are using MS Outlook (not express) then I am assuming you are going to use MS Exchange. So then all you do is set the policy to block 'dangerous attachments'. It actually works pretty well. People can't even download them. The main problem is that zip files still slip through.
Even if you don't use exchange and use Outlook, you can manually set up the attachment security (although more of a pain, but a win in the long run).
At least email is something you can control things. You can set up a BSD/Linux box with postfix as a mail relay server and filter stuff out if you want MS Exchange. You can control authentication. You can filter content. With web browsing all that goes out the window using IE - you are at the mercy of the Internet, so your department made a good choice going with firefox. Using Outlook is going to be a big pain, don't get me wrong, but it's not the end of the world.
Maybe. I recall an old IE flaw where you basically stuff a program into a cab archive and then rename it to '.gif' . IE then would extract and run the program. I don't know about the new flaw, but I'm assuming that if the old hole was able to work with a cab file named '.gif' then IE has some other way of figuring out what it's supposed to do with a file. I wouldn't be surprized if this was similar to the Outlook exploit where you named something to a sound file then set the mime encoding to executable.
Another nice side effect that many people miss is that you can take GPL code and do pretty much anything you want with it if you do not distribute the program - that is, use it in house. Many people seem to think if you take the time to modify GPL software that you MUST give it out to everybody. If your company has a special project that stays in the company then it's acceptable to make the program work for you and never give out the changes.
I certainly agree. I think if employers are going to want certs, then they STILL need to look at the employee and try to gage their skills regardless of their papers.
The Vice Pres at my company needed an office assistant and hired a lady who had actual PAPERS that said she knew how to use MS Excel. Within a week I ended up showing her how to minimize windows and change the font in Word. Eventually she had heart problems from working with the VP's nightmarishly complex spreadsheets (yeah, seriously) so she left and it all worked out in the end. But really, how hard is it to test basic knowledge? If they say their a Photoshop expert, ask them to describe 5 image formats. They say they can program, then ask them to compare the weaknesses of 3 languages. If they say they can admin MS Exchange, ask them how fast they can reboot *rimshot* -- Seems to me if you really need to hire someone, then you could at least take the time to understand WHY you are going to pay them to work.
Ah, that's way too much work. Mine is "~/todo", so I don't need to hit shift twice;)
alias todo='vim + ~/todo'
So there =P You also might want to look at the "+/{pat}" command line option for vim. Then you could search for the '[ ]' which would autoskip to the first task you don't have done.
You know, if they make a separate callendar, chat client, etc. I'm getting this bad vision of some sort of Voltron episode where Firefox, Thunderbird, Snowcat, and Crazyweasel all merge to become the Ultra-Netasour: Mozilla.
To be honest, the people who don't know about most of these things don't really care either.
You know, it's true and it's scary. I remember thinking when I was in highschool about all these wacko's preaching about how your liberties are being taken away. But if they were being taken away, why wasn't I hearing about it? Now it comes to the time when I can look on the internet and SEE what is happening. Now I am the one who knows our freedoms are being taken away.
And no one cares.
The media has let us down. The newspapers don't report anything, the TV and radio networks are silent on these issues. They've become corperate whores for ratings, and forgoten the fundamental base that they need to inform the public. But it's not all their fault either. People don't want to hear about things. They don't care if freedom is flushed down the toilet as long as they can see a movie and drive their SUV. The people have lost touch with the roots of their country. A nation where people fought and died for freedom, only to have later generations become lazy and complacent while taking freedom for granted and watching it slip away.
Well theres more to kock safety then that. I know when I knock the wrong port on my girlfriend she gets pretty pissed. Remember, this is about protecting the ports too =P
I used to have the same problem with a 2D Linux laptop until I installed Gentoo. I had so much time on my hands waiting for KDE to compile that I learned origami and now it's not flat anymore - it's sort of... crane shaped.
If Microsoft thinks Antivirus is so important that they themselves are getting into the market, then I wonder if they are going to include this information in the TCO arguments against Linux.
I'm running 0.9 on OSX with no real problems - aside from the fact that they took the wonderfully elegent pinstripe theme and f'ed it up with this Winstripe THING. If Firefox hangs, you are probably better off using ForceQuit (on the system menu). Typically I've found that you don't have to mess with the doc either, just overwrite the old firefox with the new and it updates the icon and such on the doc automatically.
I've had problems on and off with Firefox pegging the CPU but that seems to have been fixed for me in the last month or so with nightly builds. If Firefox doesn't work already, then maybe try wacking the installation with some of the older nightly builds.
Slashdot Mirror
As the entire world is now learning, this plan works great when there is an increasing birth rate, or high immigration rate of very young people, but since birth rates in developed countries are falling these plans, well, aren't so good...
Not quite. The system should work no matter what. Really you have people contributing to the system, then the government sits on the money. If you include interest and modest management by investing, social security would have a never ending pool of money.
But here's what happened. People are now forced to contribute to social security, and the politicians can't stand just having all that money sitting around and not "doing something" with it, so they gutted social security. What they did is essentially turned social security into a pyramid scheme based on population where I pay for my grandfathers social security. Which as you say only works if you have an expanding population. The system CAN work, but it's critical that you don't fuck with the money and don't use it for other things - and what greedy polititian can keep their fingers out of a treasure chest that big? Well, that's the real problem right there.
As an aside, I would like to say this is what really pisses me off about the U.S. They claim lower taxes, but when you add on social security it's really outragous for what we get out of it - and social security is just that: another tax.
Brigadier Genral? Pfft. Call me when the give McGyver 5 stars. =P
Lets not get into the potential of users based off of the earth's population. Especially when you consider that over 50% of the earths population has never made or recieved a phone call. Plus the 4+ percent who are under the age to be capable of using a computer. The number of computers where there is one per household, but multiple users. Then users who have a computer at home and at work. etc.
There are simply too many variables to make population any sort of factor in windows installs. But as you say, the growth will happen in the less wealthy parts of the world since the majority of the current installs are where computers a reaching a saturation point.
Holy Fuck. You know, I try to make my info private since I just saw the link and noticed that they want $27 to make my info private. Man that's about as wrong as it gets. I think it's time for another registrar for me.
Speaking of spying, I noticed that they finally give you an option of hiding your personal information. My ex-girlfriend always used to say they should just include links to mapquest so that crazy psychos could just print off the map directons, drive to her house and kill her. Bad enough that she's actually gotten CALLS from creepy people.
So at least that's one step in the right direction for Network solutions, even if they're going the wrong direction in so many other instances.
It's a very windows-centric attitude. If you really think about it, you start to understand that computer OS's tend to differentiate the way their users think. Windows users tend to think on the terms of "I can use this PROGRAM or that PROGRAM" reguardless of what it does, they tie their thinking to a specific application. Mac OS users tend to think on terms of what they can DO with their computer, and not so much what app does it. They can edit photos, or make movies - many aren't aware of what programs really do that. Unix users tend to think on terms of a solution. Using programs to get something done whatever way they choose - perhaps by doing things themselves.
And thus you have people switching... Mac users are used to being able to do things, and easily without complications - this often makes Unix and Windows unfriendly to them. Windows users get fustrated when they can't use their specific apps on other operating systems, despite the fact that there are often alternatives that do the same things and sometimes better. Unix users tend to get fustrated in windows by being confined by what they can do. By contrast Unix users move easily to MacOSX not neccesarily because it's easy to use, but because they can use lots of tools to do things the way they want them done.
Well that's my theory anyway.
Here's a fun example of how IE gets it right
That depends. While what you say is true, and it does not execute it also shows a lot about the thinking at MS. Mozilla hands off protocols to windows in a simplistic way because it is not a part of the OS - just as any other program does. IE by contrast has the concept of zones, and each zone has certain things which may be allowed or disallowed depending upon various security levels. This makes the IE security model much more complicated than it should be, and for most people hard to understand. And there has been more than enough problems with IE being confused as to which zone it's in, and enough exploits taking advantage of it.
Mozilla's fix is simple because what it does is simple. I'm not apologizing for the mozilla team here, and in fact I think it's sort of pathetc they just let this problem lay around for 2 years instead of just disabling the shell protocol to begin with. But if IE does anything right, it certainly is NOT the concept of security zones.
Well around half of what you learn on BSD applies to Linux anyway. Much of hardening comes from sockstat -l , and you'll notice most of what's listed runs on Linux as well. But at least you'll have a sane firewall, which is something iptables/chains just isn't =P
I have to say one thing about MS: they use their own stuff and it actually works. It seems like demo after demo works fine for them, and every rep I've seen has his stuff working flawlessly.
Of course I have yet to see any other corperation actually get MS's stuff to work half as well for them - which says a lot.
Wheither XP is more expensive than OSX is up to debate because it varies depending upon the situation. XP home is around, what $99? If you want better conictivitiy, XP pro is $199. Next upgrade is due a long time from now. Most of the time people are expected to have antivirus on a Windows machine: that's $50+ each year. An upgrade in windows can actually require an upgrade in the hardware as well.
Mac OSX costs $125. For a 5 computer licence it's $199. Upgrades happen once per year, but you are not REQUIRED neccesarily to get them. Each upgrade of OSX (thus far) has made speed improvments on the same hardware - if you're okay with the speed now, then an upgrade will only make things better. Of course the hardware is usually[1] more expensive as well.
Which is actually cheaper? As I said, that depends.
[1] An iBook often works out to be cheaper than an equivelant PC laptop.
one simple registry change
A 4}
you know, that's what I like about Microsoft; everything is so easy. I mean stoping sites from accessing my hard drive by entering
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{00000566-0000-0010-8000-00AA006D2E
is totally intuitive. Hell I'm surprized at some point I didn't open regedit and enter all that by accident =P
If you are using MS Outlook (not express) then I am assuming you are going to use MS Exchange. So then all you do is set the policy to block 'dangerous attachments'. It actually works pretty well. People can't even download them. The main problem is that zip files still slip through.
Even if you don't use exchange and use Outlook, you can manually set up the attachment security (although more of a pain, but a win in the long run).
At least email is something you can control things. You can set up a BSD/Linux box with postfix as a mail relay server and filter stuff out if you want MS Exchange. You can control authentication. You can filter content. With web browsing all that goes out the window using IE - you are at the mercy of the Internet, so your department made a good choice going with firefox. Using Outlook is going to be a big pain, don't get me wrong, but it's not the end of the world.
You know what else is a good filter: Put the computer in the living room. Then disable networking after say, around midnight.
Maybe. I recall an old IE flaw where you basically stuff a program into a cab archive and then rename it to '.gif' . IE then would extract and run the program. I don't know about the new flaw, but I'm assuming that if the old hole was able to work with a cab file named '.gif' then IE has some other way of figuring out what it's supposed to do with a file. I wouldn't be surprized if this was similar to the Outlook exploit where you named something to a sound file then set the mime encoding to executable.
Another nice side effect that many people miss is that you can take GPL code and do pretty much anything you want with it if you do not distribute the program - that is, use it in house. Many people seem to think if you take the time to modify GPL software that you MUST give it out to everybody. If your company has a special project that stays in the company then it's acceptable to make the program work for you and never give out the changes.
I certainly agree. I think if employers are going to want certs, then they STILL need to look at the employee and try to gage their skills regardless of their papers.
The Vice Pres at my company needed an office assistant and hired a lady who had actual PAPERS that said she knew how to use MS Excel. Within a week I ended up showing her how to minimize windows and change the font in Word. Eventually she had heart problems from working with the VP's nightmarishly complex spreadsheets (yeah, seriously) so she left and it all worked out in the end. But really, how hard is it to test basic knowledge? If they say their a Photoshop expert, ask them to describe 5 image formats. They say they can program, then ask them to compare the weaknesses of 3 languages. If they say they can admin MS Exchange, ask them how fast they can reboot *rimshot* -- Seems to me if you really need to hire someone, then you could at least take the time to understand WHY you are going to pay them to work.
Ah, that's way too much work. Mine is "~/todo", so I don't need to hit shift twice ;)
alias todo='vim + ~/todo'
So there =P You also might want to look at the "+/{pat}" command line option for vim. Then you could search for the '[ ]' which would autoskip to the first task you don't have done.
You know, if they make a separate callendar, chat client, etc. I'm getting this bad vision of some sort of Voltron episode where Firefox, Thunderbird, Snowcat, and Crazyweasel all merge to become the Ultra-Netasour: Mozilla.
To be honest, the people who don't know about most of these things don't really care either.
You know, it's true and it's scary. I remember thinking when I was in highschool about all these wacko's preaching about how your liberties are being taken away. But if they were being taken away, why wasn't I hearing about it? Now it comes to the time when I can look on the internet and SEE what is happening. Now I am the one who knows our freedoms are being taken away.
And no one cares.
The media has let us down. The newspapers don't report anything, the TV and radio networks are silent on these issues. They've become corperate whores for ratings, and forgoten the fundamental base that they need to inform the public. But it's not all their fault either. People don't want to hear about things. They don't care if freedom is flushed down the toilet as long as they can see a movie and drive their SUV. The people have lost touch with the roots of their country. A nation where people fought and died for freedom, only to have later generations become lazy and complacent while taking freedom for granted and watching it slip away.
Well theres more to kock safety then that. I know when I knock the wrong port on my girlfriend she gets pretty pissed. Remember, this is about protecting the ports too =P
I used to have the same problem with a 2D Linux laptop until I installed Gentoo. I had so much time on my hands waiting for KDE to compile that I learned origami and now it's not flat anymore - it's sort of... crane shaped.
Putty supports public key authentication using their key managment program, although in all honesty I haven't gotten it to work with openssl stuff.
If Microsoft thinks Antivirus is so important that they themselves are getting into the market, then I wonder if they are going to include this information in the TCO arguments against Linux.
I'm running 0.9 on OSX with no real problems - aside from the fact that they took the wonderfully elegent pinstripe theme and f'ed it up with this Winstripe THING. If Firefox hangs, you are probably better off using ForceQuit (on the system menu). Typically I've found that you don't have to mess with the doc either, just overwrite the old firefox with the new and it updates the icon and such on the doc automatically.
I've had problems on and off with Firefox pegging the CPU but that seems to have been fixed for me in the last month or so with nightly builds. If Firefox doesn't work already, then maybe try wacking the installation with some of the older nightly builds.
localhost still resolves for me! =P