back in the MS-DOS and Windows 3.X era there was no good way to prevent users from administering their own PCs. It was a big mess, I know because I worked in IT back then.
Some users ran FDISK and deleted their hard drive partition, they found it in the C:\DOS directory and started with programs starting with A, and once they ran up to F they ran FDISK.EXE and it asked them 'Warning this will erase all data on your hard drive, do you want to continue? Y/N" and they hit "Y" and Enter and it destroyed everything they worked on.
We found that a pirated version of Johnny Castaway was installed as the default screen saver and passed around via floppy disks. It had a virus in it which got spread around a lot. Users were supposed to run regular virus scans, but they never did. I am others had to go around, update each antivirus program, and scan the PC to remove all of the viruses on them.
Somehow departments didn't tell us they wanted MS-Office 4.3 but somehow the users installed a copy of the software on their hard drive despite their department not paying for a copy of it. We had to buy bulk copies of MS-Office to cover the extra copies.
Some users paid for OS/2 2.0 and others used Windows 3.X and DOS, but somehow the OS/2 users decided to format their hard drive and install MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 on them without telling us and violated software licenses by not buying a copy of DOS or Windows on IBM PS/2 machines that came with OS/2 preinstalled. Not only that but by formatting their hard drive they lost data files that OS/2 had on the HPFS file system that they never bothered to back up or copy to our network drives (Novell network back then).
Others decided to just delete random system files to free up hard drive space. Then complained that they got a lot of file missing or invalid messages.
At least Windows 9X and NT added in admin and user access to protect users from themselves and allow IT or Super Users to manage the system and software.
I worked for a law firm that decided to give all partners administrative rights to every system on the network. It wasn't fun to find that partners had loaded our ASP programs into Frontpage and mangled the HTML formatting codes so they wouldn't work. Not only that but they checked out VB source code projects and overwrote them and bypassed the version control and sabotaged our work that forced us to work extra weeks and months to fix. Not only that but in Windows 2000 if a programmer doesn't have admin access some developer tools don't work right or are disabled. So us programmers got set with user access and then couldn't do anything unless we logged on locally without using a domain name to run our developer tools. But then we didn't have access to network drives and servers, etc.
From my experience giving users admin rights is almost always a disaster that forces IT to work harder to fix the messes that users cause by messing with their systems. Nine times out of ten they install games like Bejewled after getting admin access to their PC.
Oh yeah most of our servers and workstations got infected when a manager had admin access and opened up the wrong email or visited the wrong web page and then the virus spread via the network to infect everything else because the manager had admin access to all systems on the network. In fact I remember one of our manager's account sending out the Lovebug emails 12 times a day during one such infection.
Learn from Unix/Linux don't run everything as root, only give the IT people admin or root access.
because he is colorblind. That is why the original Macintosh and Lisa were in black and white with shades of gray. It wasn't that it was cheaper, it was that Steve Jobs is colorblind. 6-bit or 8-bit color, it all looks the same to Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, Windows and PCs are the way they are because Bill Gates has asperger syndrome.
Linux is the way it is because Linus Torvalds worked his way through college as a nude model for art students to paint or draw pictures of the human body. That is why Linux is open, totally naked.
That depends, after all I'm not the person who is hurting financially or is constantly unemployed for periods of time because I keep getting fired for goofing off by surfing the Internet. I guess that separates me from the 90% of Slashdot readers that surf the Internet at work and thus suffer for it. Most likely you'll just all blame Bush, but Bush didn't force you to surf the Internet at work instead of working, now did he? That was your decision not his.
So it really depends on how you define what a sucker is or isn't. Am I a sucker for not surfing the Internet on the company's time, or are you a sucker for surfing the Internet on company time and then suffering for it, if not now maybe eventually when they catch up to you and fire you for it?
I guess a code of ethics means nothing to the likes of you?
You also like to hide yourself while making snide remarks with profanity, most likely so your managers can't google your user name as it appears in their proxy server to see that you like to goof off by surfing the Internet at work, and thus fire you for it.
What you don't know is that eventually the proxy server will show you going to a web site often enough that your manager will investigate it and find comments you made about the job and company and that will be the real reason why you didn't get that pay raise and promotion that you wanted. Most likely you'll just blame Bush like the other 90% of Slashdot readers, and not your own actions and behaviors and Internet surfing.
Call me a goody two shoes if you want, but it will be people like me who get that promotion and pay raise that people like you keep getting passed over. In all honestly you only have yourself to blame for your problems.
ISO also has standards for quality control that tech sweat shops in China, India, etc have to follow and be qualified for to pass for help desks, customer support, software programming, engineering, etc. Yet do you notice a lack of quality control from tech sweat shops, despite the fact that the ISO certified them for quality control standards?
Did you happen to note that Microsoft offshores a lot of IT work to India, and that the tech sweat shops that Microsoft pays writes the MSOXML standards and if the ISO certifies the MSOXML standard that India stands to gain a lot of money from the work that Microsoft offshores there as well as hired H1B Visa workers to work in the USA (an wire money back home) if the ISO standard is improved?
ISO standards don't really mean anything any more than some rubber stamp that a politician can use to get everyone to use their standards instead of someone else's. First it was Sun/IBM trying to get ODT approved and get the MSOXML voted down, now it is Microsoft trying to get MSOXML approved. ISO votes must go to the highest bidder or something.
I think it means she thinks that you are weird and most likely gross and messy if you got cheeto clumps on her keyboard. The guys at Best Buy, Geek Squad, look more like Billy Baldwin to her when compared to you.:)
For most of you four hours of work a day is true. Four hours spent working, four more on Slashdot, two more gossiping by the water cooler, and a few more to schmooze up with management so you won't get fired.
I work all my hours except for breaks, and I read Slashdot at home not at work and I don't gossip or schmooze.
Not only that but BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS, GEM/TOS, Plan9, *BSD Unix, and others had been 100% secure, and immune to viruses. All released before Mac OSX as well.
That and IBM and Motorola couldn't make PowerPC chips as fast in Ghz as Intel made theirs, plus IBM and Motorola caused PowerPC shortages by supplying them to game console makers first before Apple. I think that had something to do with it. G4 and G5 chips couldn't match the clock speed that PIII and P4 chips had, and then when Intel made dual core chips Apple switched.
True that they did a code audit and removed anything that looked like Microsoft code.
But I can't help but notice if it isn't made by Apple, it gets attacked. ReactOS isn't Microsoft but at least when it is finished it will give PC owners another choice to keep them old PCs by running ReactOS instead of Windows or Linux.
No we hated Apple, Google for the "Apple Doomsday Clock" some time.
Apple is slowly becoming another Microsoft, which was the point of the parent article. Microsoft was once loved like Apple was back in the 1980's when IBM was the villain.
I have owned Macs before, my Amiga 1000 and 500 was a much better computer than the 68K Macs. The PowerMacs didn't really get good until the G4 and G5 were used, but then OSX got so bloated and Macs so expensive that Apple went the Intel route. Even 1G or 2G of RAM and Leopard still runs slow, too slow for my tastes. Now I look towards ReactOS replacing Windows XP or even using AROS or Haiku or Linux rather than Windows or OSX.
I'm not paranoid because that really happened to me and forced me to change my phone number as they kept calling at 2am 3am at night every night and waking me up. Maybe you find that sort of thing as normal and if a person gets upset over it you call them paranoid. But what if it happened to you night after night? They spoofed caller ID using an Internet connection to make the calls, so the Police couldn't trace the harassing calls. I have evidence to back it up as well as police reports.
It is when the videos have DRM that only iTunes and Quicktime can play it, and it locks out the other media players. Try watching DRM Quicktime videos under Linux some time and see what happens, or see what happens when you try to play Quicktime DRM videos under VLC for Windows. I have, and I got locked out of watching those videos.
Yeah but it seems that Slashdot, CNet, Wired, and many other "technology" news sites often report on a lot of stories via a political opinion that is very left-wing and very unbalanced and has quite a bit of a spin on it. Even worse are Digg and Reddit websites in which most of the links voted to the first few pages are ultra-liberal in their opinions and anything not ultra-liberal gets dumped or moved to last on the list.
The Internet in general has a ultra-liberal bias with a few exceptions like Red State, Little Green Footballs, Conservapedia, etc that have an ultra-right-wing bias. Just for once I'd like to see a moderate or neutral point of view or opinion. One that sticks to facts and the truth instead of hearsay, rumors, gossip, and opinions disguised as facts. This trend has happened after 9/11 and only has gotten worse. Yet the trend did start about 1998 when Bill Clinton was being impeached and MoveOn.Org was formed to get the public to move on away from the fact that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and start attacking Conservative Republicans on the Internet via blogs they formed which would one day replace news sites. So Slashdot has become a liberal blog of sorts that replaces a true news site. No longer news for nerds, it is more like news for liberal nerds. Slashdot sold its soul to the Democratic party of America a few years ago just like CNet, Wired, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Kuro5hin, Wikipedia, etc have done as well.
I am one of those few people who uses critical thinking to find the biases and flaws in stories on Slashdot, etc and can point out the logical fallacies as well. This story is a straw man fallacy used to attack the Bush Administration for the Patriot Act that allows domestic spying to capture terrorist suspects. The passport files of Presidential candidates are being viewed by their political opponents and the press and media, and not the government, but the bias and spin on this story makes people think that Bush and company are spying on Obama and Clinton by viewing their passport files. They turn a blind eye to the fact that a lot of information is public records and most Internet Detective companies charge $35 to access public records to turn up info on people, and those companies also use social engineering to get access to cell phone records, passport files, medical history, and other things. There exists a Big Brother all right, but it is not the government, it is a series of companies that either sell the information over the Internet, or media companies collect it for stories, or political candidates spy on each other to get information on their opponents.
Heck someone did that to me the past few months ago, and called my house at 2am in the morning asking to speak to me about my medical and work history, and they got the information on me by entering my email address into an Internet Detective database and paying $35 (it emailed me that someone has accessing my personal files but didn't give me an option to opt-out or prevent it) and a few weeks later I start getting harassing calls early in the morning. Most likely because someone doesn't like my opinions on Slashdot or some other web site and decided to give me a hard time about it.
Agreed, plus Apple has Safari pre-installed with OSX. I would like to see Safari optional for Windows like Firefox is, and not forced to install with an iTunes update. You need iTunes/Quicktime to see any movie trailer preview and that in itself is already a monopoly in Windows software.
They have hard drives, DVD drives, USB ports, can use flash memory sticks, and install the program to the internal hard drive for faster loading.
Indrema had it right the first time when they tried to build a Linux gaming console, but they blew their VC and didn't have a good business plan. I would like to see development on a Linux based game console to compete with the other game consoles out there, and then see different hardware companies following the same Linux open source standards for developing a Linux game console. Just use PC technology to build an under $300 Linux game console and the OS will be free and open sourced. You can even port the PSX, etc emulation software to the Linux game console to run legacy console software on it.
The big difference is that I put quality into my work and make sure that I do it correctly and in a way that is easier to use for the average user. Most computer jobs are defined by what college courses are taken, but college fails to teach people how to do a quality job and how to write programs that are easy to use for the average user. I have a ton of experience that cannot be gotten from college. College only teaches the theories, which don't work in the real world. By experience people like me learn what works in the real world. But apparently that isn't what employers want, they want a person that can do the job that is "good enough" to solve a problem even if it is done sloppily and crashes the system a dozen times a day or more. My code is optimized, it runs fast, I make sure that memory is managed so the system does not crash, plus I verify my variable inputs so exploits cannot be used to bypass security. But the typical H1B Visa worker and Offshore worker does none of these things and writes sloppy code, sometimes they put in backdoors and trojans so they can get back into the system after they are let go or fired. People like me do none of those things, but one thing is true, you get what you pay for. If a company doesn't pay $50,000USD a year for a good quality programmer, they will get a bad programmer that will work cheap and cause more messes and system crashes and security problems than they solve.
When you want a steak dinner cooked properly do you hire a burger flipper at minimum wage or a chef that went to school and knows how to follow the health codes? The same goes for writing programs, you want a programmer with a good degree with lots of real work experience and earns a decent salary instead of some programmer just out of college who barely passed but works as cheaply as possible.
Would that apply to business and organizations and web sites? All of them collect information on us, so it is only fair that we see what they are doing as well.
Would Cowboy Neil like it if everyone could see what happens behind the scenes at Slashdot? Because he holds our personal info when we register with Slashdot.
At what point do we cite privacy? Does privacy even exist?
Keep in mind that the Clintons have access to our personal info, but refuse to release their tax records and campaign funding records. Are all politicians like that?
So much of the CS market is flooded with wantabes and posers that barely know how to use a computer, much less program or troubleshoot one. I recall working for a community college in 1990 in one of their computer labs, and people with BS, MBS, and PHDs in Computer Science went to the community college to learn what they missed in Four year college and I worked as a tutor and educational assistant for some of them. I also subbed for the debugger as she didn't know C, Pascal, BASIC, Assembly as well as I did and I got the hard to debug programs.
Businesses went from hiring programmers like me who do quality control built into design, towards hiring kids right out of college with no experience who can write programs "good enough" to work and get the job done even if it crashes their servers a dozen times a day. Microsoft certification doesn't work either as they earn it and learned the answers on the Internet and got certified anyway.
While I earned A's and B's, and eventually earned all A's and graduated with honors, a lot of these other CS majors barely graduated but know how to schmooze their way up the corporate ladder and bullshit their way into high paying jobs that they don't deserve.
I went back to college and took up Business Management, because I don't think there is a future in Computer Science anymore, most graduates don't take Computer Science seriously and are in it only for the money, plus a lot of computer jobs got offshored to India and China, and the government keeps increasing the cap on H1B Visa applications and foreigners can come to the USA and work for minimum wage in computer jobs, legally. Hard to compete with that.
I suppose you are right. But I wanted to show them that there was an alternative to Windows out there, and they wanted to try it. So I did install Linux for them, but they made me put Linux back on their PC.
Linux, BSD Unix, Mac OSX doesn't always work for most people, they need the ability to run native Windows programs and an emulator or virtual machine only slows them down or confuses them. Dual-Booting also confuses them as they try to run or install Windows programs under Linux, Mac OSX, etc. The only real choice for them is ReactOS when it is finally finished and out of alpha and beta testing. At least it can run native Windows programs and use native Windows drivers.
Still they are my family members and friends and need me help to fix Windows when it gets broken, so it is hard to tell them NO even if they keep messing up their Windows by making bad choices/actions.
First there is a lot of hardware that don't have Linux native drivers, mostly wireless network cards and Winmodems. NDISWrapper allows people to use Windows drivers under Linux for when there isn't a native Linux driver available for Linux.
That is the Achilles heel of Linux, lack of third party driver support. Heck that's the Achilles Heel of any Non-Windows operating system be it OS/2, BeOS, AmigaOS, even Mac OSX. One OS, ReactOS, is trying to implement Windows' WDM driver model in GPLed software so that ReactOS can use Windows drivers. I would like to see Linux have the ability to use Windows drivers via some GPLed software, so Linus can borrow that from ReactOS, or write it from scratch, or maybe the WINE team can make a Linux module that loads Windows drivers for Linux that uses the WINE libraries.
I have myself gone through several different wireless cards to get a Linux desktop working and eventually I gave up because I couldn't find a Linux native driver that wasn't flaky or lost the connection, and the only success I had was with NDISWrapper, but as soon as the Linux kernel is updated it breaks NDISWrapper forcing me to recompile the code and reinstall the Windows drivers.
In fact, I have a Linux desktop near my wireless router that uses a CAT5 cable to hook into it and then use VNC from a Windows desktop in another part of the house to log into the Linux system that way. It would be nice if I was able to get good wireless networking support from a Linux native driver without losing the connection or going flaky on me. But I suppose I'll always have a VMWare Virtual Machine to use as well if I wanted to run Linux from any part of my house and not just where the router is located.
That is the way that a majority of people on this planet are. They don't learn from their own choices/actions and keep making the same choices/actions over and over again, and people like me have to clean up after them. That is the way my jobs have been for the past thirty years, each computer job I had to clean up after someone else's mess. I had to debug code that makes no sense much less won't compile without errors, into something that actually works and doesn't crash systems within a week or two. No flowcharts, no documentation, hardly any help from anyone, no support from management. Either do it or get fired. Management usually had no idea how programs work, and mostly hire the people they like instead of those qualified for the job. Then the other programmers take smoke breaks to light up a joint, write sloppy code as a result, and then the managers hand it over to me to fix it and make it work. But the stoners get the pay raises and promotions and work with new projects while I get stuck on the "legacy" work. When I worked as a technician, before I was a programmer, people would mess up their own computers mostly by not shutting them down before powering them off, or installing some software neither the company nor employee owns but it damages the system in some way.
I ran two computer companies, and you'd think that people always having problems by using their computers improperly would make more money than a Ghostbusters business in getting rid of ghosts would. But people tend not to pay their bills after you fix their systems, and make the same bad choices/actions as they did before and get infected again. My fault for not having a credit card machine and being nice and offering credit and no terms and pay when you have the money, etc.
Life is like that, a majority of the people in the USA make bad choices/actions. They don't save money for retirement, have unprotected sex with multiple partners and get STDs and AIDS as a result, eat fast food like there is no tomorrow and wonder why they are overweight, do more drugs than Cheech and Chong and wonder why they are so sick as a result, ignore their children and don't raise them right and wonder why they grow up to be sociopaths and do school shootings or end up in a gang, but someone has to fix all of that. The rest of the world is no different. People just don't take responsibility for their choices and actions anymore, and just blame someone else. They act as if George W. Bush ruined their career, made them sick, etc but ignore that it was their own choices/actions that made them the way they are and George W. Bush had nothing to do with 20, 30, 40, years of their own stupidity. In fact we elected a scape-goat instead of a President every four years anyway. Someone to blame for when things go wrong.
For the shock and awe value, to fool a majority of the people into thinking that their Myspace and Facebook accounts got hacked and they might be a possible target of identity theft.
What they don't know is that it is a remote exploit that a hacker can use in an email or web page by giving an embedded link to Facebook or MySpace that contains URL data that will exploit the ActiveX control used for image uploading by those web sites so that it runs code on their Internet Explorer to steal information, install a trojan, whatever the exploit code does.
Cert says to turn off ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer until the problem is fixed. But I guess the best advice is to use Firefox instead, and don't click on any emails or web forms unless you know it is not a scam email (Thunderbird knows how to check for those scam emails, BTW) or phishing web site (Firefox and IE both have phishing toolbars now to check for that as well).
It doesn't take much intelligence to spot a fake email or phishing web site, most of the time they spell words wrong, or the images don't look right, or the HTML code is messed up, or they put in a "word salad" to try to get past spam filters.
Slashdot Mirror
back in the MS-DOS and Windows 3.X era there was no good way to prevent users from administering their own PCs. It was a big mess, I know because I worked in IT back then.
Some users ran FDISK and deleted their hard drive partition, they found it in the C:\DOS directory and started with programs starting with A, and once they ran up to F they ran FDISK.EXE and it asked them 'Warning this will erase all data on your hard drive, do you want to continue? Y/N" and they hit "Y" and Enter and it destroyed everything they worked on.
We found that a pirated version of Johnny Castaway was installed as the default screen saver and passed around via floppy disks. It had a virus in it which got spread around a lot. Users were supposed to run regular virus scans, but they never did. I am others had to go around, update each antivirus program, and scan the PC to remove all of the viruses on them.
Somehow departments didn't tell us they wanted MS-Office 4.3 but somehow the users installed a copy of the software on their hard drive despite their department not paying for a copy of it. We had to buy bulk copies of MS-Office to cover the extra copies.
Some users paid for OS/2 2.0 and others used Windows 3.X and DOS, but somehow the OS/2 users decided to format their hard drive and install MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 on them without telling us and violated software licenses by not buying a copy of DOS or Windows on IBM PS/2 machines that came with OS/2 preinstalled. Not only that but by formatting their hard drive they lost data files that OS/2 had on the HPFS file system that they never bothered to back up or copy to our network drives (Novell network back then).
Others decided to just delete random system files to free up hard drive space. Then complained that they got a lot of file missing or invalid messages.
At least Windows 9X and NT added in admin and user access to protect users from themselves and allow IT or Super Users to manage the system and software.
I worked for a law firm that decided to give all partners administrative rights to every system on the network. It wasn't fun to find that partners had loaded our ASP programs into Frontpage and mangled the HTML formatting codes so they wouldn't work. Not only that but they checked out VB source code projects and overwrote them and bypassed the version control and sabotaged our work that forced us to work extra weeks and months to fix. Not only that but in Windows 2000 if a programmer doesn't have admin access some developer tools don't work right or are disabled. So us programmers got set with user access and then couldn't do anything unless we logged on locally without using a domain name to run our developer tools. But then we didn't have access to network drives and servers, etc.
From my experience giving users admin rights is almost always a disaster that forces IT to work harder to fix the messes that users cause by messing with their systems. Nine times out of ten they install games like Bejewled after getting admin access to their PC.
Oh yeah most of our servers and workstations got infected when a manager had admin access and opened up the wrong email or visited the wrong web page and then the virus spread via the network to infect everything else because the manager had admin access to all systems on the network. In fact I remember one of our manager's account sending out the Lovebug emails 12 times a day during one such infection.
Learn from Unix/Linux don't run everything as root, only give the IT people admin or root access.
because he is colorblind. That is why the original Macintosh and Lisa were in black and white with shades of gray. It wasn't that it was cheaper, it was that Steve Jobs is colorblind. 6-bit or 8-bit color, it all looks the same to Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, Windows and PCs are the way they are because Bill Gates has asperger syndrome.
Linux is the way it is because Linus Torvalds worked his way through college as a nude model for art students to paint or draw pictures of the human body. That is why Linux is open, totally naked.
That depends, after all I'm not the person who is hurting financially or is constantly unemployed for periods of time because I keep getting fired for goofing off by surfing the Internet. I guess that separates me from the 90% of Slashdot readers that surf the Internet at work and thus suffer for it. Most likely you'll just all blame Bush, but Bush didn't force you to surf the Internet at work instead of working, now did he? That was your decision not his.
So it really depends on how you define what a sucker is or isn't. Am I a sucker for not surfing the Internet on the company's time, or are you a sucker for surfing the Internet on company time and then suffering for it, if not now maybe eventually when they catch up to you and fire you for it?
I guess a code of ethics means nothing to the likes of you?
You also like to hide yourself while making snide remarks with profanity, most likely so your managers can't google your user name as it appears in their proxy server to see that you like to goof off by surfing the Internet at work, and thus fire you for it.
What you don't know is that eventually the proxy server will show you going to a web site often enough that your manager will investigate it and find comments you made about the job and company and that will be the real reason why you didn't get that pay raise and promotion that you wanted. Most likely you'll just blame Bush like the other 90% of Slashdot readers, and not your own actions and behaviors and Internet surfing.
Call me a goody two shoes if you want, but it will be people like me who get that promotion and pay raise that people like you keep getting passed over. In all honestly you only have yourself to blame for your problems.
ISO also has standards for quality control that tech sweat shops in China, India, etc have to follow and be qualified for to pass for help desks, customer support, software programming, engineering, etc. Yet do you notice a lack of quality control from tech sweat shops, despite the fact that the ISO certified them for quality control standards?
Did you happen to note that Microsoft offshores a lot of IT work to India, and that the tech sweat shops that Microsoft pays writes the MSOXML standards and if the ISO certifies the MSOXML standard that India stands to gain a lot of money from the work that Microsoft offshores there as well as hired H1B Visa workers to work in the USA (an wire money back home) if the ISO standard is improved?
ISO standards don't really mean anything any more than some rubber stamp that a politician can use to get everyone to use their standards instead of someone else's. First it was Sun/IBM trying to get ODT approved and get the MSOXML voted down, now it is Microsoft trying to get MSOXML approved. ISO votes must go to the highest bidder or something.
I think it means she thinks that you are weird and most likely gross and messy if you got cheeto clumps on her keyboard. The guys at Best Buy, Geek Squad, look more like Billy Baldwin to her when compared to you. :)
In those phone calls they mentioned the web sites by name.
so we still need mainframes. IBM JCL lives forever as well.
For most of you four hours of work a day is true. Four hours spent working, four more on Slashdot, two more gossiping by the water cooler, and a few more to schmooze up with management so you won't get fired.
I work all my hours except for breaks, and I read Slashdot at home not at work and I don't gossip or schmooze.
Not only that but BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS, GEM/TOS, Plan9, *BSD Unix, and others had been 100% secure, and immune to viruses. All released before Mac OSX as well.
That and IBM and Motorola couldn't make PowerPC chips as fast in Ghz as Intel made theirs, plus IBM and Motorola caused PowerPC shortages by supplying them to game console makers first before Apple. I think that had something to do with it. G4 and G5 chips couldn't match the clock speed that PIII and P4 chips had, and then when Intel made dual core chips Apple switched.
True that they did a code audit and removed anything that looked like Microsoft code.
But I can't help but notice if it isn't made by Apple, it gets attacked. ReactOS isn't Microsoft but at least when it is finished it will give PC owners another choice to keep them old PCs by running ReactOS instead of Windows or Linux.
No we hated Apple, Google for the "Apple Doomsday Clock" some time.
Apple is slowly becoming another Microsoft, which was the point of the parent article. Microsoft was once loved like Apple was back in the 1980's when IBM was the villain.
I have owned Macs before, my Amiga 1000 and 500 was a much better computer than the 68K Macs. The PowerMacs didn't really get good until the G4 and G5 were used, but then OSX got so bloated and Macs so expensive that Apple went the Intel route. Even 1G or 2G of RAM and Leopard still runs slow, too slow for my tastes. Now I look towards ReactOS replacing Windows XP or even using AROS or Haiku or Linux rather than Windows or OSX.
I'm not paranoid because that really happened to me and forced me to change my phone number as they kept calling at 2am 3am at night every night and waking me up. Maybe you find that sort of thing as normal and if a person gets upset over it you call them paranoid. But what if it happened to you night after night? They spoofed caller ID using an Internet connection to make the calls, so the Police couldn't trace the harassing calls. I have evidence to back it up as well as police reports.
It is when the videos have DRM that only iTunes and Quicktime can play it, and it locks out the other media players. Try watching DRM Quicktime videos under Linux some time and see what happens, or see what happens when you try to play Quicktime DRM videos under VLC for Windows. I have, and I got locked out of watching those videos.
Yeah but it seems that Slashdot, CNet, Wired, and many other "technology" news sites often report on a lot of stories via a political opinion that is very left-wing and very unbalanced and has quite a bit of a spin on it. Even worse are Digg and Reddit websites in which most of the links voted to the first few pages are ultra-liberal in their opinions and anything not ultra-liberal gets dumped or moved to last on the list.
The Internet in general has a ultra-liberal bias with a few exceptions like Red State, Little Green Footballs, Conservapedia, etc that have an ultra-right-wing bias. Just for once I'd like to see a moderate or neutral point of view or opinion. One that sticks to facts and the truth instead of hearsay, rumors, gossip, and opinions disguised as facts. This trend has happened after 9/11 and only has gotten worse. Yet the trend did start about 1998 when Bill Clinton was being impeached and MoveOn.Org was formed to get the public to move on away from the fact that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and start attacking Conservative Republicans on the Internet via blogs they formed which would one day replace news sites. So Slashdot has become a liberal blog of sorts that replaces a true news site. No longer news for nerds, it is more like news for liberal nerds. Slashdot sold its soul to the Democratic party of America a few years ago just like CNet, Wired, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Kuro5hin, Wikipedia, etc have done as well.
I am one of those few people who uses critical thinking to find the biases and flaws in stories on Slashdot, etc and can point out the logical fallacies as well. This story is a straw man fallacy used to attack the Bush Administration for the Patriot Act that allows domestic spying to capture terrorist suspects. The passport files of Presidential candidates are being viewed by their political opponents and the press and media, and not the government, but the bias and spin on this story makes people think that Bush and company are spying on Obama and Clinton by viewing their passport files. They turn a blind eye to the fact that a lot of information is public records and most Internet Detective companies charge $35 to access public records to turn up info on people, and those companies also use social engineering to get access to cell phone records, passport files, medical history, and other things. There exists a Big Brother all right, but it is not the government, it is a series of companies that either sell the information over the Internet, or media companies collect it for stories, or political candidates spy on each other to get information on their opponents.
Heck someone did that to me the past few months ago, and called my house at 2am in the morning asking to speak to me about my medical and work history, and they got the information on me by entering my email address into an Internet Detective database and paying $35 (it emailed me that someone has accessing my personal files but didn't give me an option to opt-out or prevent it) and a few weeks later I start getting harassing calls early in the morning. Most likely because someone doesn't like my opinions on Slashdot or some other web site and decided to give me a hard time about it.
Agreed, plus Apple has Safari pre-installed with OSX. I would like to see Safari optional for Windows like Firefox is, and not forced to install with an iTunes update. You need iTunes/Quicktime to see any movie trailer preview and that in itself is already a monopoly in Windows software.
connected up to a television set.
They have hard drives, DVD drives, USB ports, can use flash memory sticks, and install the program to the internal hard drive for faster loading.
Indrema had it right the first time when they tried to build a Linux gaming console, but they blew their VC and didn't have a good business plan. I would like to see development on a Linux based game console to compete with the other game consoles out there, and then see different hardware companies following the same Linux open source standards for developing a Linux game console. Just use PC technology to build an under $300 Linux game console and the OS will be free and open sourced. You can even port the PSX, etc emulation software to the Linux game console to run legacy console software on it.
The big difference is that I put quality into my work and make sure that I do it correctly and in a way that is easier to use for the average user. Most computer jobs are defined by what college courses are taken, but college fails to teach people how to do a quality job and how to write programs that are easy to use for the average user. I have a ton of experience that cannot be gotten from college. College only teaches the theories, which don't work in the real world. By experience people like me learn what works in the real world. But apparently that isn't what employers want, they want a person that can do the job that is "good enough" to solve a problem even if it is done sloppily and crashes the system a dozen times a day or more. My code is optimized, it runs fast, I make sure that memory is managed so the system does not crash, plus I verify my variable inputs so exploits cannot be used to bypass security. But the typical H1B Visa worker and Offshore worker does none of these things and writes sloppy code, sometimes they put in backdoors and trojans so they can get back into the system after they are let go or fired. People like me do none of those things, but one thing is true, you get what you pay for. If a company doesn't pay $50,000USD a year for a good quality programmer, they will get a bad programmer that will work cheap and cause more messes and system crashes and security problems than they solve.
When you want a steak dinner cooked properly do you hire a burger flipper at minimum wage or a chef that went to school and knows how to follow the health codes? The same goes for writing programs, you want a programmer with a good degree with lots of real work experience and earns a decent salary instead of some programmer just out of college who barely passed but works as cheaply as possible.
Would that apply to business and organizations and web sites? All of them collect information on us, so it is only fair that we see what they are doing as well.
Would Cowboy Neil like it if everyone could see what happens behind the scenes at Slashdot? Because he holds our personal info when we register with Slashdot.
At what point do we cite privacy? Does privacy even exist?
Keep in mind that the Clintons have access to our personal info, but refuse to release their tax records and campaign funding records. Are all politicians like that?
I started Computer Science in 1986 myself.
So much of the CS market is flooded with wantabes and posers that barely know how to use a computer, much less program or troubleshoot one. I recall working for a community college in 1990 in one of their computer labs, and people with BS, MBS, and PHDs in Computer Science went to the community college to learn what they missed in Four year college and I worked as a tutor and educational assistant for some of them. I also subbed for the debugger as she didn't know C, Pascal, BASIC, Assembly as well as I did and I got the hard to debug programs.
Businesses went from hiring programmers like me who do quality control built into design, towards hiring kids right out of college with no experience who can write programs "good enough" to work and get the job done even if it crashes their servers a dozen times a day. Microsoft certification doesn't work either as they earn it and learned the answers on the Internet and got certified anyway.
While I earned A's and B's, and eventually earned all A's and graduated with honors, a lot of these other CS majors barely graduated but know how to schmooze their way up the corporate ladder and bullshit their way into high paying jobs that they don't deserve.
I went back to college and took up Business Management, because I don't think there is a future in Computer Science anymore, most graduates don't take Computer Science seriously and are in it only for the money, plus a lot of computer jobs got offshored to India and China, and the government keeps increasing the cap on H1B Visa applications and foreigners can come to the USA and work for minimum wage in computer jobs, legally. Hard to compete with that.
I suppose you are right. But I wanted to show them that there was an alternative to Windows out there, and they wanted to try it. So I did install Linux for them, but they made me put Linux back on their PC.
Linux, BSD Unix, Mac OSX doesn't always work for most people, they need the ability to run native Windows programs and an emulator or virtual machine only slows them down or confuses them. Dual-Booting also confuses them as they try to run or install Windows programs under Linux, Mac OSX, etc. The only real choice for them is ReactOS when it is finally finished and out of alpha and beta testing. At least it can run native Windows programs and use native Windows drivers.
Still they are my family members and friends and need me help to fix Windows when it gets broken, so it is hard to tell them NO even if they keep messing up their Windows by making bad choices/actions.
First there is a lot of hardware that don't have Linux native drivers, mostly wireless network cards and Winmodems. NDISWrapper allows people to use Windows drivers under Linux for when there isn't a native Linux driver available for Linux.
That is the Achilles heel of Linux, lack of third party driver support. Heck that's the Achilles Heel of any Non-Windows operating system be it OS/2, BeOS, AmigaOS, even Mac OSX. One OS, ReactOS, is trying to implement Windows' WDM driver model in GPLed software so that ReactOS can use Windows drivers. I would like to see Linux have the ability to use Windows drivers via some GPLed software, so Linus can borrow that from ReactOS, or write it from scratch, or maybe the WINE team can make a Linux module that loads Windows drivers for Linux that uses the WINE libraries.
I have myself gone through several different wireless cards to get a Linux desktop working and eventually I gave up because I couldn't find a Linux native driver that wasn't flaky or lost the connection, and the only success I had was with NDISWrapper, but as soon as the Linux kernel is updated it breaks NDISWrapper forcing me to recompile the code and reinstall the Windows drivers.
In fact, I have a Linux desktop near my wireless router that uses a CAT5 cable to hook into it and then use VNC from a Windows desktop in another part of the house to log into the Linux system that way. It would be nice if I was able to get good wireless networking support from a Linux native driver without losing the connection or going flaky on me. But I suppose I'll always have a VMWare Virtual Machine to use as well if I wanted to run Linux from any part of my house and not just where the router is located.
That is the way that a majority of people on this planet are. They don't learn from their own choices/actions and keep making the same choices/actions over and over again, and people like me have to clean up after them. That is the way my jobs have been for the past thirty years, each computer job I had to clean up after someone else's mess. I had to debug code that makes no sense much less won't compile without errors, into something that actually works and doesn't crash systems within a week or two. No flowcharts, no documentation, hardly any help from anyone, no support from management. Either do it or get fired. Management usually had no idea how programs work, and mostly hire the people they like instead of those qualified for the job. Then the other programmers take smoke breaks to light up a joint, write sloppy code as a result, and then the managers hand it over to me to fix it and make it work. But the stoners get the pay raises and promotions and work with new projects while I get stuck on the "legacy" work. When I worked as a technician, before I was a programmer, people would mess up their own computers mostly by not shutting them down before powering them off, or installing some software neither the company nor employee owns but it damages the system in some way.
I ran two computer companies, and you'd think that people always having problems by using their computers improperly would make more money than a Ghostbusters business in getting rid of ghosts would. But people tend not to pay their bills after you fix their systems, and make the same bad choices/actions as they did before and get infected again. My fault for not having a credit card machine and being nice and offering credit and no terms and pay when you have the money, etc.
Life is like that, a majority of the people in the USA make bad choices/actions. They don't save money for retirement, have unprotected sex with multiple partners and get STDs and AIDS as a result, eat fast food like there is no tomorrow and wonder why they are overweight, do more drugs than Cheech and Chong and wonder why they are so sick as a result, ignore their children and don't raise them right and wonder why they grow up to be sociopaths and do school shootings or end up in a gang, but someone has to fix all of that. The rest of the world is no different. People just don't take responsibility for their choices and actions anymore, and just blame someone else. They act as if George W. Bush ruined their career, made them sick, etc but ignore that it was their own choices/actions that made them the way they are and George W. Bush had nothing to do with 20, 30, 40, years of their own stupidity. In fact we elected a scape-goat instead of a President every four years anyway. Someone to blame for when things go wrong.
For the shock and awe value, to fool a majority of the people into thinking that their Myspace and Facebook accounts got hacked and they might be a possible target of identity theft.
What they don't know is that it is a remote exploit that a hacker can use in an email or web page by giving an embedded link to Facebook or MySpace that contains URL data that will exploit the ActiveX control used for image uploading by those web sites so that it runs code on their Internet Explorer to steal information, install a trojan, whatever the exploit code does.
Cert says to turn off ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer until the problem is fixed. But I guess the best advice is to use Firefox instead, and don't click on any emails or web forms unless you know it is not a scam email (Thunderbird knows how to check for those scam emails, BTW) or phishing web site (Firefox and IE both have phishing toolbars now to check for that as well).
It doesn't take much intelligence to spot a fake email or phishing web site, most of the time they spell words wrong, or the images don't look right, or the HTML code is messed up, or they put in a "word salad" to try to get past spam filters.