No, he could be a frackin' genius with a grudge! You do not want to frack with him. Perhaps they are trying to paint him as a Dr. Evil SysAdmin simply because he knows too much dirt about the City. If he really did read all the confidential email concerning his own personnel situation, he was probably able to read lots of other confidential files as well. If he knows where the bodies are buried, and is using that knowledge to blackmail the people in power, they will do whatever is necessary to silence him. The encryption password(s) he controls could be the only bargaining chip he has keeping him alive right now.
Good point. Take a look at some of the comments left on the SFGate story about Kamala Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney who is prosecuting this case (who used to sleep with former mayor Willie Brown) and Ron Vinson, the Department of Information Technology's Chief Administrative Officer (who probably hired this guy) and you can see what kind of ethical standard is employed by the City Government of San Francisco. And even Mayor Gavin Newsome, the Democratic Party's golden boy who is now organizing an exploratory committee to run for Governor after Schwarzenegger is termed out of office, has his own ethics problems (e.g., porking the wife of his campaign manager on his office desk in City Hall before his last re-election campaign). Is it any wonder why his super-model wife left him to go work as a reporter for Court TV?
That should be standard policy in any HR office. The chief sysadmin should have begun restricting his permissions as soon as the personnel action began weeks (or perhaps months) earlier. I'm appalled (though not entirely surprised) that San Francisco has such lax standards. Also surprised at how much they pay their Techs. This guy must have been pretty high up in the heirarchy to be making so much money. I do a lot of this stuff myself, but I don't make >$100K (much less $150K like Mr. Childs.
It's a lot like the "old days" of PGP. When Phil Zimmerman was facing a prison sentence for releasing PGP freely, he said simply that regular unencrypted email is like sending everything on postcards through snailmail. The mailman, and anyone else, could read whatever you'd written. If you want your private correspondence to remain private, you seal it in an envelope. If you seal everything you mail in an envelope, all your correspondence is secure. He advised PGP users to simply encrypt everything, regardless of its sensitivity, so your electronic mail would be just as secure and safe as sending paper mail in a sealed envelope through the U.S. Postal Service. Just as it is a felony to open any mail not addressed to you, it should be against the law to crack the encryption of an electronic message that is not directly addressed to the recipient. Just as, until earlier this week, it used to be against the law to listen in on the private telephone conversations of American citizens who are not under suspicion of criminal acts without a warrant to justify the spying.
Interesting Wikipedia entry. Why is it that police officers are not listed among the top five or ten dangerous occupations? Don't most communities pay their law enforcement "public servants" pretty extravagantly because there is a percpetion that they put their lives on the line every day they report to work? In my town, a scandal recently erupted when the police officers' salaries and overtime pay were published in the local paper, and it was revealed that they were the highest paid employees in the city government, most veteran officers making over $130,000 per year and even rookies starting out at $75,000/yr. The controversy was sparked by the Police Officer's Union demanding that the police be given an extra 15-20 minutes of overtime pay for the time they spent getting into and out of their uniforms at the beginning and ending of each shift. With a projected budget deficit of over $4 million, the city council was looking at all the areas where they might try to save money, but the union warned that any cuts to the police department budget would put the public in grave danger.
The Doug McClure film you are referencing is an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At the Earth's Core" not Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." "At the Earth's Core" was the first book in Burrough's Pellucidar series about an advanced civilization that lives inside the "Hollow Earth" which launched any number of conspiracy theories, as well as a cross-over book, "Tarzan At the Earth's Core."
I'm sure someone else in this thread may have already mentioned this one, but since I haven't read the entire discussion, I will recommend Alexei Panshin's first novel "Rite of Passage." Fantastic story about a pre-teen that doesn't talk down to the reader. Almost a tribute to Heinlein's juveniles, but written in such a way that both adults and young readers can enjoy it. I read it in college and it still holds up today.
Cory Doctorow's new novel "Little Brother" is also written for this audience, and is available online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother. I haven't read the full book yet, but heard him do a reading recently and this one could be just what your children would enjoy. My own son read Doctorow's first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" when he was sixteen, and became an instant fan.
You are a great parent. Years from now, your smart kids will thank you for encouraging them to read mind-expanding books.
Now wait a minute. LegalTorrents has been around for years. I first read about it in Wired Magazine when they included a CD filled with free, CC-licensed music as an insert in each copy. The CD had a link to the LegalTorrents site. It was also discussed extensively in the accompanying article. That was in the November 2004 issue, almost four years ago. See http://creativecommons.org/wired
Not all of the telecommunications companies complied with the demand. Qwest, for one, refused to cooperate. They didn't seem to suffer any ill effects, but then again, they aren't one of the big players in the market. AT&T and Verizon ought to be hung out to dry, just as an example to other spineless CEOs.
Hey, if we were able to get Netflix to change their profile policy just by getting enough customers to complain, don't you think we can get the telecom immunity provision stripped from this bill by persuading more people to object to it?
Nah, I guess I'm just dreaming. But I'm not the only one...
Well, Libertarians on principle refuse to accept taxpayer money (money stolen from the citizens) to fund their campaigns, so even when they have qualified for federal election funding (in 1992, 1996 and 2000), they didn't take it. They still were refused entrance in the debates, even though they achieved ballot status in all 50 states (plus Guam and the District of Columbia). The Commission on Presidential Debates just decided to change their own rules when the Libertarians otherwise met all the previously published criteria for inclusion in the debates. They even had the Green and Libertarian Presidential candidates arrested in 2004 when they tried to get into the debates held in St. Louis. The success of those campaigns (and the Ross Perot and Ralph Nader campaigns) scared the shit out of the Democrats and Republicans, and several states then changed their ballot access laws to prevent that from ever happening again. Since the passage of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, no minor party has ever been able to repeat that achievement, and it is unlikely that any third party will ever again get that golden 50 state ballot status. Even this year, the Libertarian Party doesn't expect to get on the ballot in more than 46 states (Oklahoma will never see another Libertarian on the ballot until their laws change dramatically).
You can have a clean conscience by voting Barr-Root in November, but unless a few million of your closest friends do the same, they won't likely get much attention from the media.
My wife is an oncology nurse, and has vast experience with this. Bone Marrow transplants have shown some promise, but are by no means always effective with multiple myeloma; they're more appropriate for other malignancies (leukemia, etc.). While we've made tremendous progress in this field and lots of cancer processes can be cured these days, multiple myeloma is one of the varieties with a very poor survival rate. The fact that Stan kept working for seven years after his initial diagnosis suggests he had a fantastic oncology team working on his case. That's a remarkable course of treatment for a diagnosis like that. Now, I want to know who is doctor was so I can call him in the event that I, or someone I know falls ill with this one.
Another good documentary on this topic (which also features input from the folks at Black Box Voting) is Invisible Ballots (see http://www.invisibleballots.com/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437258) directed by William Gazecki, a former CNN reporter who turned into an investigative documentary producer after covering the Waco, Texas massacre in 1993 and became jaded at how the media dealt with politically sensitive stories. His first documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement, grew out of his experience covering the siege for CNN and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
I was a very happy WebVan customer and really thought the company would succeed. I hate shopping for groceries, but WebVan made it easy and painless. They had a great business model that could have been highly profitable, but I think they tried to expand too fast. They should have stayed localized in the SF Bay Area until they became profitable, and then expanded to Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle. A West Coast base of operations would have permitted a sustainable growth curve.
But they decided to go nation-wide and spend a fortune building more automated warehouses in Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, GA and Washington DC before they ever began to recoup the start-up costs of their west coast operation. I suspect that was their fatal mistake. Their smaller competitors, like http://www.peapod.com/ (a subsidiary of the Andronico's Market chain) are still in business and doing fine. I seem to recall that my wife was impressed by how much cheaper the products were priced on WebVan when compared to the brick and mortar supermarket chains like Lucky and Safeway (she actually pulled out grocery receipts to compare the prices of items we purchased regularly). For the convenience of their service, WebVan could have charged more for their products and still been successful, but they chose to undercut the big chains to develop a loyal customer base. We were loyal customers, and many of our friends were as well. That's why we mourn the loss of WebVan, because it really was a new, exciting and groundbreaking business model.
I seem to recall that lots of their infrastructure was sold off in the bankruptcy process, and Safeway re-painted most of their delivery vans and they are still in use today.
Deep in the comments on this article, one poster asks why CNET's own dead subsidiary Snap!com wasn't on the list. At last visit, CNET has not responded.
Remember, Bill didn't "steal" MS-DOS, he bought it fair and square. Well, he purchased QDOS (the Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from Tim Patterson, who had simply reverse-engineered Digital Research's CP/M OS and called his version QDOS, because it was quick and dirty (he claims to have coded the kernel in only six weeks).
You don't "steal" a product from someone by paying them $50,000 for the rights to re-name it and re-license it to IBM. Had Patterson been more astute, he would have gone directly to IBM and asked for a lot more money.
A few years ago, my XP partition managed to get corrupted, so I just booted up to my SuSE 9.1 Linux partition and continued working on my merry way. This went along for over a month before my boss found out and required me to re-install WindowsXP on the other partition. He said I could keep the dual-boot setup, but he only wanted me using XP during working hours. I mentioned that I'd been successfully performing all my normal work using SuSE for over a month without incident, but he insisted that if the Information Security Officer found out I was using an "unsupported" desktop OS, they would have his neck in a sling, and he'd have to answer to them or fire his "rogue" or "unmutual" SysAdmin.
That's another consideration, but not just from the user-side of the keyboard. In a network staffed with MCSAs, MCSEs and MCTS-certified support folks, it's going to be as hard as pulling teeth (and almost as painful) to re-train your IT support team who have become comfortable in a Windows-only shop. My organization experienced this with an ill-advised migration off of Novell NetWare 4.11/5.1 to Windows NT 4 way back in the 20th Century (most of us were CNA/CNE certified and had extensive Windows desktop experience, but nothing at all from the server side). Our programs had spent thousands of dollars on our Novell training, and then spent even more thousands (perhaps $millions) on re-training all of us to be Microsoft Server Administrators/Systems Engineers and licensing all the new Windows NT servers, then upgrading to Win2K when that came along, and then Win2K3 a few years later. We haven't yet upgraded to Windows Server 2008, and are now in the process of virtualizing a portion of our server farm with VMWare as a cost-saving measure (long overdue, in my opinion).
If management could be convinced that it's worth the money to convert to Open Source in the server room, they might be better able to understand a migration to Open Source on the desktop, but right now, our major focus is on persuading them to take a baby step and consider using thin clients on the desktop instead of full tower Intel PC boxes as a way of cutting down our hardware and support costs. This promises a much greater financial savings than the server virtualization proposal, but both of them together would be a fantastic way to stretch our limited budget. You'd think the bean counters would be forcing this on us, but they only seem to want to renew all of our Microsoft Premier Support contracts every time they expire, and upper management is apparently committed to remaining an All-Microsoft All The Time partner, regardless of the costs.
Hey! Guess what? Vista no longer requires IE to update. It has an update feature integrated into the OS! And the experience with Service Pack 1 was quite an interesting example of how Microsoft has improved their update model. My Vista desktop install checks for updates every 24 hours. When SP1 was released to the public, my system did not update automatically. The Update Manager checked my system's hardware and found that drivers for my video card weren't current. It therefore cancelled the update. After a few weeks, while I was doing some regular system maintenance, I found that my video card had new drivers available from the vendor's website, so I downloaded the package and updated them. The next day, Update Manager found that my system was now ready for SP1 and prompted me to download it. I could have declined the offer and never updated to Vista SP1, but I decided to give it a shot (I could always roll back to the pre-SP1 snapshot anyway).
Vista SP1 worked just fine, and I'm now using it without problems. I must say that Vista has been much more stable for me than XP ever was (on an AMD Duron x64 CPU with 2Gb RAM), and I'm a pretty happy camper.
To keep this post relevant to the discussion, I also dual-boot this machine with Ubuntu 8.04 (upgraded from 7.10) and I use Ubuntu about 48% of the time and Vista 52% of the time. Just like being bi-lingual, I have no problem switching between OS environments when my situation warrants it.
Again, please RTFA Coward. The torrents on Revision3's servers were their own content, but one R3 member found a torrent named something like RAMBO_axxo on their tracker on May 25 and reported it to the admins. They immediately took it down and then found the backdoor that MediaDefender had been using to post fake torrent hashes on their servers. Once the backdoor was closed, MediaDefender's servers began the DOS attack as an automatic response. Louderback says that the FBI is already investigating. I expect the EFF will get involved as well as this story develops.
Yeah, this thought occurred to me as I was browsing through the comments of folks questioning where the platform's garbage would be dumped. I suspect the whole system is going to have to develop a huge recycling project to deal with it, but if the colony ends up being located on or near the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I think they might be able to make use of the raw materials available there. It's certainly worth studying.
I have always liked T. Boone Pickens, ever since I met him when I was just a teenager. He was only a mere millionnaire back then, but he treated everyone as an equal, regardless of our economic status. I was working as an upholsterer in Amarillo, Texas (my home town) just after I graduated High School, and my boss (an interior designer) won the contract to re-design Pickens' Mesa Petroleum offices in downtown. We worked on the weekends so as not to disrupt business during the week, but one Saturday, Pickens himself came into the office and watched us work. He was very cordial, wanted to know the names of the whole crew and what we did for the interior design firm. He's a good ol' boy Texas oilman, so he didn't "put on any airs" as they say, but was friendly and approachable.
Within a few years, he would attempt a failed hostile takeover of Gulf Oil and then Exxon, but in doing so, he pointed out how poorly both companies were managed, and he ended up getting several members of the boards of directors of these companies removed, improved their profits, and enjoyed a windfall as the stock he owned in them soared. He didn't take over either of them, but his actions increased his own personal fortune by billions. He is one very smart businessman.
And now that he is investing so aggressively in wind technology, he's proving himself to be even more brilliant than I imagined.
I have served as a precinct inspector for every election in my county since 1996, so I've witnessed the transition from punchcard ballots to the Diebold "AccuVote" touch screen machines to the newest Sequoia scanning machines, and my experience has been much like yours. I work with computers for a living, so I tend to be the only person in the precinct with the knowledge to understand why these machines are so bad for democracy. I recall a primary election in 2004 where the Diebold card activator crashed (as well as two of our six touchscreen voting machines). I was on the tech support line when I was advised to remove the tamper-resistant seal from the device, which revealed a small red hole on the side, and re-boot it with a special stylus. Upon re-booting, I was greeted with a Windows CE desktop (no password required). Once I was in the system, the tech walked me through troubleshooting the problem and re-booting into the election screens.
The advantage of the Open Voting Consortium system is that it doesn't take a SysAdmin to set it up. You just boot from a CD that automatically loads the Linux kernel and the voting software. The system automatically saves votes when they are cast, so if in the unlikely event that you have to re-boot during the day, you don't lose any data, and all votes cast on the computer can be double-checked and audited with the paper ballots that are printed out for each voter. Yes, the systems should be bulletproof, but none of the expensive commercial systems meet that criteria. Fer Crying Out Loud, they're all built on Microsoft Windows code, which is the primary target for hackers and malware! Their source code is closed and proprietary, but even so, these systems have already been hacked multiple times by university professors and their students.
The OVC model is so much less expensive and makes a lot more sense than trusting our elections to unscrupulous corporations like Diebold and ES&S. The primary advantage is that it is OPEN, and anyone can examine the source code and check it for vulnerabilities. It is a standalone system running from a ROM environment so it can't be hacked remotely. The problem is that the politicians who make these decisions have no incentive to use simple solutions, and every incentive to game the system for their own advantage, especially when corporations can spend millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures to favor their product over some simpler, more transparent voting system. Remember that the CEO of Diebold was a heavy financial contributor to George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, and promised to deliver Ohio to the Republicans before the election. He later had to resign in 2005, after fulfilling that fateful promise.
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No, he could be a frackin' genius with a grudge! You do not want to frack with him. Perhaps they are trying to paint him as a Dr. Evil SysAdmin simply because he knows too much dirt about the City. If he really did read all the confidential email concerning his own personnel situation, he was probably able to read lots of other confidential files as well. If he knows where the bodies are buried, and is using that knowledge to blackmail the people in power, they will do whatever is necessary to silence him. The encryption password(s) he controls could be the only bargaining chip he has keeping him alive right now.
Good point. Take a look at some of the comments left on the SFGate story about Kamala Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney who is prosecuting this case (who used to sleep with former mayor Willie Brown) and Ron Vinson, the Department of Information Technology's Chief Administrative Officer (who probably hired this guy) and you can see what kind of ethical standard is employed by the City Government of San Francisco. And even Mayor Gavin Newsome, the Democratic Party's golden boy who is now organizing an exploratory committee to run for Governor after Schwarzenegger is termed out of office, has his own ethics problems (e.g., porking the wife of his campaign manager on his office desk in City Hall before his last re-election campaign). Is it any wonder why his super-model wife left him to go work as a reporter for Court TV?
That should be standard policy in any HR office. The chief sysadmin should have begun restricting his permissions as soon as the personnel action began weeks (or perhaps months) earlier. I'm appalled (though not entirely surprised) that San Francisco has such lax standards. Also surprised at how much they pay their Techs. This guy must have been pretty high up in the heirarchy to be making so much money. I do a lot of this stuff myself, but I don't make >$100K (much less $150K like Mr. Childs.
It's a lot like the "old days" of PGP. When Phil Zimmerman was facing a prison sentence for releasing PGP freely, he said simply that regular unencrypted email is like sending everything on postcards through snailmail. The mailman, and anyone else, could read whatever you'd written. If you want your private correspondence to remain private, you seal it in an envelope. If you seal everything you mail in an envelope, all your correspondence is secure. He advised PGP users to simply encrypt everything, regardless of its sensitivity, so your electronic mail would be just as secure and safe as sending paper mail in a sealed envelope through the U.S. Postal Service. Just as it is a felony to open any mail not addressed to you, it should be against the law to crack the encryption of an electronic message that is not directly addressed to the recipient. Just as, until earlier this week, it used to be against the law to listen in on the private telephone conversations of American citizens who are not under suspicion of criminal acts without a warrant to justify the spying.
Interesting Wikipedia entry. Why is it that police officers are not listed among the top five or ten dangerous occupations? Don't most communities pay their law enforcement "public servants" pretty extravagantly because there is a percpetion that they put their lives on the line every day they report to work? In my town, a scandal recently erupted when the police officers' salaries and overtime pay were published in the local paper, and it was revealed that they were the highest paid employees in the city government, most veteran officers making over $130,000 per year and even rookies starting out at $75,000/yr. The controversy was sparked by the Police Officer's Union demanding that the police be given an extra 15-20 minutes of overtime pay for the time they spent getting into and out of their uniforms at the beginning and ending of each shift. With a projected budget deficit of over $4 million, the city council was looking at all the areas where they might try to save money, but the union warned that any cuts to the police department budget would put the public in grave danger.
The Doug McClure film you are referencing is an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At the Earth's Core" not Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." "At the Earth's Core" was the first book in Burrough's Pellucidar series about an advanced civilization that lives inside the "Hollow Earth" which launched any number of conspiracy theories, as well as a cross-over book, "Tarzan At the Earth's Core."
I'm sure someone else in this thread may have already mentioned this one, but since I haven't read the entire discussion, I will recommend Alexei Panshin's first novel "Rite of Passage." Fantastic story about a pre-teen that doesn't talk down to the reader. Almost a tribute to Heinlein's juveniles, but written in such a way that both adults and young readers can enjoy it. I read it in college and it still holds up today.
Cory Doctorow's new novel "Little Brother" is also written for this audience, and is available online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother. I haven't read the full book yet, but heard him do a reading recently and this one could be just what your children would enjoy. My own son read Doctorow's first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" when he was sixteen, and became an instant fan.
You are a great parent. Years from now, your smart kids will thank you for encouraging them to read mind-expanding books.
Now wait a minute. LegalTorrents has been around for years. I first read about it in Wired Magazine when they included a CD filled with free, CC-licensed music as an insert in each copy. The CD had a link to the LegalTorrents site. It was also discussed extensively in the accompanying article. That was in the November 2004 issue, almost four years ago. See http://creativecommons.org/wired
Not all of the telecommunications companies complied with the demand. Qwest, for one, refused to cooperate. They didn't seem to suffer any ill effects, but then again, they aren't one of the big players in the market. AT&T and Verizon ought to be hung out to dry, just as an example to other spineless CEOs.
Hey, if we were able to get Netflix to change their profile policy just by getting enough customers to complain, don't you think we can get the telecom immunity provision stripped from this bill by persuading more people to object to it?
Nah, I guess I'm just dreaming. But I'm not the only one...
Well, Libertarians on principle refuse to accept taxpayer money (money stolen from the citizens) to fund their campaigns, so even when they have qualified for federal election funding (in 1992, 1996 and 2000), they didn't take it. They still were refused entrance in the debates, even though they achieved ballot status in all 50 states (plus Guam and the District of Columbia). The Commission on Presidential Debates just decided to change their own rules when the Libertarians otherwise met all the previously published criteria for inclusion in the debates. They even had the Green and Libertarian Presidential candidates arrested in 2004 when they tried to get into the debates held in St. Louis. The success of those campaigns (and the Ross Perot and Ralph Nader campaigns) scared the shit out of the Democrats and Republicans, and several states then changed their ballot access laws to prevent that from ever happening again. Since the passage of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, no minor party has ever been able to repeat that achievement, and it is unlikely that any third party will ever again get that golden 50 state ballot status. Even this year, the Libertarian Party doesn't expect to get on the ballot in more than 46 states (Oklahoma will never see another Libertarian on the ballot until their laws change dramatically).
You can have a clean conscience by voting Barr-Root in November, but unless a few million of your closest friends do the same, they won't likely get much attention from the media.
Ray Harryhausen is still very much alive. He will celebrate his 88th birthday in a couple of weeks (June 29). Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Harryhausen.
My wife is an oncology nurse, and has vast experience with this. Bone Marrow transplants have shown some promise, but are by no means always effective with multiple myeloma; they're more appropriate for other malignancies (leukemia, etc.). While we've made tremendous progress in this field and lots of cancer processes can be cured these days, multiple myeloma is one of the varieties with a very poor survival rate. The fact that Stan kept working for seven years after his initial diagnosis suggests he had a fantastic oncology team working on his case. That's a remarkable course of treatment for a diagnosis like that. Now, I want to know who is doctor was so I can call him in the event that I, or someone I know falls ill with this one.
Another good documentary on this topic (which also features input from the folks at Black Box Voting) is Invisible Ballots (see http://www.invisibleballots.com/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437258) directed by William Gazecki, a former CNN reporter who turned into an investigative documentary producer after covering the Waco, Texas massacre in 1993 and became jaded at how the media dealt with politically sensitive stories. His first documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement, grew out of his experience covering the siege for CNN and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
I was a very happy WebVan customer and really thought the company would succeed. I hate shopping for groceries, but WebVan made it easy and painless. They had a great business model that could have been highly profitable, but I think they tried to expand too fast. They should have stayed localized in the SF Bay Area until they became profitable, and then expanded to Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle. A West Coast base of operations would have permitted a sustainable growth curve.
But they decided to go nation-wide and spend a fortune building more automated warehouses in Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, GA and Washington DC before they ever began to recoup the start-up costs of their west coast operation. I suspect that was their fatal mistake. Their smaller competitors, like http://www.peapod.com/ (a subsidiary of the Andronico's Market chain) are still in business and doing fine. I seem to recall that my wife was impressed by how much cheaper the products were priced on WebVan when compared to the brick and mortar supermarket chains like Lucky and Safeway (she actually pulled out grocery receipts to compare the prices of items we purchased regularly). For the convenience of their service, WebVan could have charged more for their products and still been successful, but they chose to undercut the big chains to develop a loyal customer base. We were loyal customers, and many of our friends were as well. That's why we mourn the loss of WebVan, because it really was a new, exciting and groundbreaking business model.
I seem to recall that lots of their infrastructure was sold off in the bankruptcy process, and Safeway re-painted most of their delivery vans and they are still in use today.
Deep in the comments on this article, one poster asks why CNET's own dead subsidiary Snap!com wasn't on the list. At last visit, CNET has not responded.
Remember, Bill didn't "steal" MS-DOS, he bought it fair and square. Well, he purchased QDOS (the Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from Tim Patterson, who had simply reverse-engineered Digital Research's CP/M OS and called his version QDOS, because it was quick and dirty (he claims to have coded the kernel in only six weeks).
You don't "steal" a product from someone by paying them $50,000 for the rights to re-name it and re-license it to IBM. Had Patterson been more astute, he would have gone directly to IBM and asked for a lot more money.
See the whole story in Tracy Kidder's book "The Soul of a New Machine" or read the short version at http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm.
A few years ago, my XP partition managed to get corrupted, so I just booted up to my SuSE 9.1 Linux partition and continued working on my merry way. This went along for over a month before my boss found out and required me to re-install WindowsXP on the other partition. He said I could keep the dual-boot setup, but he only wanted me using XP during working hours. I mentioned that I'd been successfully performing all my normal work using SuSE for over a month without incident, but he insisted that if the Information Security Officer found out I was using an "unsupported" desktop OS, they would have his neck in a sling, and he'd have to answer to them or fire his "rogue" or "unmutual" SysAdmin.
That's another consideration, but not just from the user-side of the keyboard. In a network staffed with MCSAs, MCSEs and MCTS-certified support folks, it's going to be as hard as pulling teeth (and almost as painful) to re-train your IT support team who have become comfortable in a Windows-only shop. My organization experienced this with an ill-advised migration off of Novell NetWare 4.11/5.1 to Windows NT 4 way back in the 20th Century (most of us were CNA/CNE certified and had extensive Windows desktop experience, but nothing at all from the server side). Our programs had spent thousands of dollars on our Novell training, and then spent even more thousands (perhaps $millions) on re-training all of us to be Microsoft Server Administrators/Systems Engineers and licensing all the new Windows NT servers, then upgrading to Win2K when that came along, and then Win2K3 a few years later. We haven't yet upgraded to Windows Server 2008, and are now in the process of virtualizing a portion of our server farm with VMWare as a cost-saving measure (long overdue, in my opinion).
If management could be convinced that it's worth the money to convert to Open Source in the server room, they might be better able to understand a migration to Open Source on the desktop, but right now, our major focus is on persuading them to take a baby step and consider using thin clients on the desktop instead of full tower Intel PC boxes as a way of cutting down our hardware and support costs. This promises a much greater financial savings than the server virtualization proposal, but both of them together would be a fantastic way to stretch our limited budget. You'd think the bean counters would be forcing this on us, but they only seem to want to renew all of our Microsoft Premier Support contracts every time they expire, and upper management is apparently committed to remaining an All-Microsoft All The Time partner, regardless of the costs.
Hey! Guess what? Vista no longer requires IE to update. It has an update feature integrated into the OS! And the experience with Service Pack 1 was quite an interesting example of how Microsoft has improved their update model. My Vista desktop install checks for updates every 24 hours. When SP1 was released to the public, my system did not update automatically. The Update Manager checked my system's hardware and found that drivers for my video card weren't current. It therefore cancelled the update. After a few weeks, while I was doing some regular system maintenance, I found that my video card had new drivers available from the vendor's website, so I downloaded the package and updated them. The next day, Update Manager found that my system was now ready for SP1 and prompted me to download it. I could have declined the offer and never updated to Vista SP1, but I decided to give it a shot (I could always roll back to the pre-SP1 snapshot anyway).
Vista SP1 worked just fine, and I'm now using it without problems. I must say that Vista has been much more stable for me than XP ever was (on an AMD Duron x64 CPU with 2Gb RAM), and I'm a pretty happy camper.
To keep this post relevant to the discussion, I also dual-boot this machine with Ubuntu 8.04 (upgraded from 7.10) and I use Ubuntu about 48% of the time and Vista 52% of the time. Just like being bi-lingual, I have no problem switching between OS environments when my situation warrants it.
End the OS wars! Can't we all just get along?
The story is all over the place now. You can read about it at CNET at http://news.cnet.com/coops-corner/?tag=cnetfd.blogs
as well as Valleywag http://valleywag.com/393955/revision3-ceo-antipiracy-group-attacked-our-network
Again, please RTFA Coward. The torrents on Revision3's servers were their own content, but one R3 member found a torrent named something like RAMBO_axxo on their tracker on May 25 and reported it to the admins. They immediately took it down and then found the backdoor that MediaDefender had been using to post fake torrent hashes on their servers. Once the backdoor was closed, MediaDefender's servers began the DOS attack as an automatic response. Louderback says that the FBI is already investigating. I expect the EFF will get involved as well as this story develops.
Yeah, this thought occurred to me as I was browsing through the comments of folks questioning where the platform's garbage would be dumped. I suspect the whole system is going to have to develop a huge recycling project to deal with it, but if the colony ends up being located on or near the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I think they might be able to make use of the raw materials available there. It's certainly worth studying.
I have always liked T. Boone Pickens, ever since I met him when I was just a teenager. He was only a mere millionnaire back then, but he treated everyone as an equal, regardless of our economic status. I was working as an upholsterer in Amarillo, Texas (my home town) just after I graduated High School, and my boss (an interior designer) won the contract to re-design Pickens' Mesa Petroleum offices in downtown. We worked on the weekends so as not to disrupt business during the week, but one Saturday, Pickens himself came into the office and watched us work. He was very cordial, wanted to know the names of the whole crew and what we did for the interior design firm. He's a good ol' boy Texas oilman, so he didn't "put on any airs" as they say, but was friendly and approachable.
Within a few years, he would attempt a failed hostile takeover of Gulf Oil and then Exxon, but in doing so, he pointed out how poorly both companies were managed, and he ended up getting several members of the boards of directors of these companies removed, improved their profits, and enjoyed a windfall as the stock he owned in them soared. He didn't take over either of them, but his actions increased his own personal fortune by billions. He is one very smart businessman.
And now that he is investing so aggressively in wind technology, he's proving himself to be even more brilliant than I imagined.
I have served as a precinct inspector for every election in my county since 1996, so I've witnessed the transition from punchcard ballots to the Diebold "AccuVote" touch screen machines to the newest Sequoia scanning machines, and my experience has been much like yours. I work with computers for a living, so I tend to be the only person in the precinct with the knowledge to understand why these machines are so bad for democracy. I recall a primary election in 2004 where the Diebold card activator crashed (as well as two of our six touchscreen voting machines). I was on the tech support line when I was advised to remove the tamper-resistant seal from the device, which revealed a small red hole on the side, and re-boot it with a special stylus. Upon re-booting, I was greeted with a Windows CE desktop (no password required). Once I was in the system, the tech walked me through troubleshooting the problem and re-booting into the election screens.
The advantage of the Open Voting Consortium system is that it doesn't take a SysAdmin to set it up. You just boot from a CD that automatically loads the Linux kernel and the voting software. The system automatically saves votes when they are cast, so if in the unlikely event that you have to re-boot during the day, you don't lose any data, and all votes cast on the computer can be double-checked and audited with the paper ballots that are printed out for each voter. Yes, the systems should be bulletproof, but none of the expensive commercial systems meet that criteria. Fer Crying Out Loud, they're all built on Microsoft Windows code, which is the primary target for hackers and malware! Their source code is closed and proprietary, but even so, these systems have already been hacked multiple times by university professors and their students.
The OVC model is so much less expensive and makes a lot more sense than trusting our elections to unscrupulous corporations like Diebold and ES&S. The primary advantage is that it is OPEN, and anyone can examine the source code and check it for vulnerabilities. It is a standalone system running from a ROM environment so it can't be hacked remotely. The problem is that the politicians who make these decisions have no incentive to use simple solutions, and every incentive to game the system for their own advantage, especially when corporations can spend millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures to favor their product over some simpler, more transparent voting system. Remember that the CEO of Diebold was a heavy financial contributor to George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, and promised to deliver Ohio to the Republicans before the election. He later had to resign in 2005, after fulfilling that fateful promise.