no cyberwar...more like a vicious beating
on
There Is No Cyberwar
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
C'mon. The jackass is hired to be Microsoft's number on apologist. If he admitted to the cyberwar that has been going for two years at least, then he'd open the door to an investigation of the situation the US finds itself in and how it got there. He and the other Microsoft party members would find themselves in very hot water, fast.
Besides, with all the Microsoft products permeating even military bases, it's not a war it's nasty beating. The US is permeated with Windows, which are systems designed to be taken over back door or hole. There's no reason why any Microsofter, from your average asshole MCSE on up to the party chairman Bill Gates should be walking free. It's one thing for them to be racketeering and destroying the US' ability to compete in research or industry. It's an entirely additional problem once it affects national defense and standing. From Bill's party, we've already had a sampler of navy ships dead in the water, power blackouts, disaster recovery clusterfucks, air traffic outages, and many hundreds of billions of malware damage.
When you get away from Windows, you can not only choose the UI (bash, ksh, zsh, etc) or GUI, but also change it. Before Microsoft became such a problem, it was the norm for people to not just tweak but show off their customizations. I know that most people really piss and moan about tweaking the defaults, but it is possible. The knowledge is gone from the mainstream, but the functionality is still there.
Whether you use KDE, CDE, Xfce, or GNOME you can choose not just the theme (appearance) but also the behavior. That goes especially for the window manager. You can do more with the window manager than deciding to have jiggly jello effects or not.
When you talk about the GUI on a Linux, Solaris or BSD distro you're usually conflating about three things : the desktop environment, the window manager, and the settings for those two. It's not even necessary to run a full desktop, you can get by quite handily with just a window manager.
Check out Enlightenment, OpenBox, Scrotwm,
Of course the desktop environment and window manager will come with default settings but those can be changed. If an in-your-face example is needed for just how much these can be configure to meet your needs install plain vanilla FVWM and give it a try. Then after that, install FVWM-crystal theme. Night and day different is there.
LCD displays are flat panel, but flat panel displays are not necessarily LCD. I've had several very nice flat panel CRTs both at home and at work. I have to say that for most activities, the LCD still causes less eyestrain.
Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
Same with most anything else during the last twenty years. I once investigated a 2.50 increase in a 16.00 phone bill due to a 'tax'. It turned out the tax was 0.03 and that 2.47 was the maximum sum the phone company was allowed to charge for 'handling' the tax. They do that because too many let them get away with it. It's even easier now that feedback mechanisms have been removed from most activities whether airport security theater or a simple, but broken, web shop.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. --Heinlein.
Yeah Heinlein was a crank but he is spot on in that quote.
Since when is it the obligation of the taxpayers to support Murdoch if he can't even provide himself with a viable business model? Corporate welfare beggars like Murdoch posing as businessmen really waste a lot of our resources and just seem to have no other purpose than to try to make things suck as much as they can.
I bet the fight against open standards may be at the bottom and that the real goal is getting at and stopping Dirac. It's a good codec and royalty-free.
FAST died on the vine a long time ago. It was a dot-com that just missed the tail of the dot-com mania. So they sold their hype to Microsoft and then disappeared off the face of the planet until this week. Track down the marketeers that stired up the FAST mud again.
Next time I go to the New England area of the US for example, there's 4 or 5 people there who I'll be able to tell in advance that I'm coming and see if they want to meet up for a drink or two. Much better than knowing no-one there.
There used to be this thing called e-mail for that, back in the old days.
Has the current Cybersecurity Czar even made a statement about the recent hacking invasion from the Chinese government?
Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:
Has the current Cybersecurity Czar even made a statement about the recent hacking invasion from the Chinese government?
Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:
You know your product's reputation is in trouble when a government advises the public to dump it.
Dude, that was the case back ten years ago, too. Facts and technical data don't play a role in situations where Microsoft products get deployed.
You know you have a cult-like following when governments, research universities and a handful of computer magazines advise the public to dump your product and it still retains market share. Having EULAs that prohibit benchmarking doesn't hurt either. Nor does it hurt to have insiders paid for by the victim's own budget.
How long must this go on? Put a dollar value on the damage and then put out warrants for Microsoft executives and interns, past and present.
Cool. Thanks for the clarification and for the work on PFsense. Where can we read about the build process? How is it done, if not crunchgen? The "extra functionality" and, more importantly the extra field testing are useful. However, I myself am a minimalist, when I can get away with it.
You are aware that PFsense is 'just' a crunchgen binary. It's a great distro and even has a packaging system, but the routing question could be answered with putting PF, an sftp subsystem like from dropbear, and BGP into a crunchgen binary using NetBSD or OpenBSD rather than FreeBSD. It's only hard the first time, if you keep notes. Even then its not so daunting.
That is a larger percentage then I expected. I wonder if the statistics were collected by asking people if they used it, and the percentages were more the amount of people who knew they should be.
It probably is directly proportional to the percentage of businesses leaving Windows behind.
The number is growing rapidly, but to avoid harassment of all kinds, including pesky sales drones, they try not to be visible about it.
the management demanding it because that's what they want to beleive that everyone else uses
There fixed that for you. Either way, fixed or unfixed, the statement points out the problem: Windows is there because the software is not selected or even evaluated on technical merit.
Being able to give away, bogart, lend or to borrow, pass as inheritance, or roll up and smoke a book is possible because the book is yours because you own it and the Doctrine of First Sale formalizes these possibilities.
One of the many things wrong with digital restrictions management (drm) technologies is that it tries to do an end run around the democratic process and eliminate these rights, some of which are codified in the Constitution. Some would assert that not only is the constitution the foundation upon which the country has been built, but also that it represents freedom and democracy itself. So these affronts by Bill Gatesists and the other 'freedom-hating' (tm) digital taliban, can be considered as affronts to the US itself if not also to higher ideals.
It may sound harsh to some fanbois, but step back and take off that 'with a computer' clause and see if what they are doing is acceptable. If not, then you know what to do.
While you might have no problem hitting ctrl with your girly hands, us guys with big hands will have to move and twist our wrist in order to get down to ctrl, key, which is a fairly uncomfortable thing to do, and doing it lots of times every hour is going to kill my wrist - having big hands means escape is in a natural position for me while alt and ctrl are far away from my fingers.
It's probably yet another problem that can be traced back to Bill. I started seeing the mutant keyboards bundled with his "OS". The ctrl key, which gets used a lot, used to be where it could actually be reached, but that position defaults to the useless capslock key. Probably until 2003 or 2004, one of the first things for me to do on a new account with such a keyboard was to remap the position of the control keys.
I get too much pain in the wrists to try it your way, by contorting the wrists, to reach the out of the way locations. If I am sloppy I can crease my hand to get at the ctrl key but that quickly causes very sharp pains there too. I hadn't thought about it for a while, now that I have I see that I usually slide my fingers a row down from the home keys (typing home not 'HOME') and do it that way, transferring the pain to the elbows...
It's not so much a problem of what shapes the paint has on the damned keys but the problem that Linux distros now seem to follow the asinine, MBA-designed, One Microsoft Way of key mapping. Before all that stupidity there used to be a whole field called ergonomics and other fields and specialists streamlining tasks through time and motion studies. I bet I can get through a month, or longer, without hitting the capslock key on purpose.
'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment.
That, I must admit, is an excruciatingly lame definition of 'journalism'.
Yes, lets blame the people who are REALLY responsible, and it's not the voters (at least here south of the Canadian border). The corporate owned media convinces the voter that a vote for any "third party" candidate is wasted, and the corporations give campaign bribes to both "major" parties. No matter which candidate loses, the corporation wins.
In a climate like this it's simply one corporate entity against the other. The voters are meaningless (yet for some stupid reason I still vote).
You might still vote but apparently you still can't do math. The way the elections are counted in the US, the third party votes split the vote for one of the other parties. If you want more than two parties, the simple majority rule has to be abandoned in favor of proportional representation or other similar methods.
On the teams I worked for or with, imaging worked, but Windows was still and unstable piece of shit. The worst of the driver problems occurred at sites I had contact with via project members that suffered there.
However, one where I was actually located at, had an XP machine that the manager had ordered set up (not by me, my Windows days were long over). Many hours were spent screwing around to get the Very Expensive digital camera working and allowing imports into Photoshop. He almost insisted that I use that machine, but since it was our coffee break and because I had my work Macbook with Photoshop within arms reach, I said "let's see what happens". Guess what? Plug a camera or a chip with pictures into the mac, and it works out of the box. Nowadays KDE-based linux distros are the same.
That's a valid point about getting the hardware that supports disk cloning. However, if a shop is so expertise-deficient that they have deployed Windows, then they almost as a rule lack expertise to get even remotely accessible hardware. They usually end up getting whatever the sales unit at the supplier has an overstock of, even if the specs are uniquely inappropriate for the task. Saw that in person this spring.
Working in a hospital, I know that there are many examples of this.
That wasn't the case 10 years ago. However, if it looks like it might be the case now. If you can prove it you might be able to prosecute and make criminal charges of it.
I know of one hospital where MS Exchange was not only shoe-horned into the infrastructure, but even tied into the voice mail / pbx. Neither use case has a legitimate place for Windows.
It comes down to the fact that if there are claims that some activities depends on Windows product, then someone is doing something very wrong, perhaps criminally wrong.
I have worked in help desk environments in the past for a Windows / Macintosh / Solaris computing environment. The Solaris users largely took care of themselves, but contacted us for some settings information, like establishing the right settings for Kerberos, LDAP, AFS, or SMTP. The Mac users outnumbered everyone else by at least 4 to 1. However, it was the Windows users that wasted about 80% of our time for drop in help. Even cloned setups on identical hardware had different problems. Drivers were a big one. For phone calls, it was a bit higher in number of Windows user contacts but a bit shorter in duration for each one.
I did family tech support for years until I had enough and bought anyone who was willing new Apples. Only my mom took me up, but her support calls dropped off to nothing within days and now we can talk about other things for a change.
I've visited and toured libraries and schools using LTSP. One of those was stuck with some windows machines. The effort to keep the few Windows machines going was about, from their statistics, about 14:1 compared to LTSP. That ratio would probably been higher if they had even higher ration of Linux stations. The others cited even more favorable rates.
Getting rid of Windows is mostly a psychological problem. First, users have to become familiar enough with computers to be able to do their daily tasks. Having knowlegeable staff on the spot to nudge in the right direction is essential, as is encouraging peer support. Then they need to keep access to the Windows machines and try to do on Windows what they can do on computers. Then they eventually decide on their own, 'fuck it' regarding the Windows use and drop it without looking back.
The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.
Setting the 'right' staffing levels, then depends on how much you can clean up the computing environment. I for one am offended that so much money and time is wasted just trying get the M$ stuff to work as well as its competitors. I would much rather see the same number of staff hours used not for support but for improvement and making things faster, easier, more productive. Before Windows, IT used to save effort rather than a live demo of the Red Queen's Race!
Thousands of people dying cannot reasonably be described as a "minor annoyance."
Said the one who pooh-poohed the frequent computer{sic} outages in health centers and hospitals. Just for the sake of argument, we'll pick some small numbers: 3000 hospitals with at least one mission critical service tied to MS products and one computer{sic} outage per hospital per year. That'll add up to thousands of deaths quickly even with those low numbers. And you know the real numbers are much, much higher.
The Patriot Act was all ready to go and just needed a situation where it could be pushed through without a single congressman actually reading it. It was the most convoluted, obfuscated patchwork imaginable. Reading raw diff output is easy by comparison. Keeping legislation in XML (say Docbook or OpenDocument Format) and then using a version control system like SVN, GIT or Mercurial would have made the planned end result more clear.
Ok. This wealthy Nigerian who tried to light his farts for Yemen makes a point that it's dangerous to fly to the US. Now can the rest of the world go back to a more civilized way of managing air passenger traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon. The jackass is hired to be Microsoft's number on apologist. If he admitted to the cyberwar that has been going for two years at least, then he'd open the door to an investigation of the situation the US finds itself in and how it got there. He and the other Microsoft party members would find themselves in very hot water, fast.
Besides, with all the Microsoft products permeating even military bases, it's not a war it's nasty beating. The US is permeated with Windows, which are systems designed to be taken over back door or hole. There's no reason why any Microsofter, from your average asshole MCSE on up to the party chairman Bill Gates should be walking free. It's one thing for them to be racketeering and destroying the US' ability to compete in research or industry. It's an entirely additional problem once it affects national defense and standing. From Bill's party, we've already had a sampler of navy ships dead in the water, power blackouts, disaster recovery clusterfucks, air traffic outages, and many hundreds of billions of malware damage.
Go dig up an old advertisement. Both are called flat panel.
When you get away from Windows, you can not only choose the UI (bash, ksh, zsh, etc) or GUI, but also change it. Before Microsoft became such a problem, it was the norm for people to not just tweak but show off their customizations. I know that most people really piss and moan about tweaking the defaults, but it is possible. The knowledge is gone from the mainstream, but the functionality is still there.
Whether you use KDE, CDE, Xfce, or GNOME you can choose not just the theme (appearance) but also the behavior. That goes especially for the window manager. You can do more with the window manager than deciding to have jiggly jello effects or not. When you talk about the GUI on a Linux, Solaris or BSD distro you're usually conflating about three things : the desktop environment, the window manager, and the settings for those two. It's not even necessary to run a full desktop, you can get by quite handily with just a window manager. Check out Enlightenment, OpenBox, Scrotwm,
Of course the desktop environment and window manager will come with default settings but those can be changed. If an in-your-face example is needed for just how much these can be configure to meet your needs install plain vanilla FVWM and give it a try. Then after that, install FVWM-crystal theme. Night and day different is there.
Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
Same with most anything else during the last twenty years. I once investigated a 2.50 increase in a 16.00 phone bill due to a 'tax'. It turned out the tax was 0.03 and that 2.47 was the maximum sum the phone company was allowed to charge for 'handling' the tax. They do that because too many let them get away with it. It's even easier now that feedback mechanisms have been removed from most activities whether airport security theater or a simple, but broken, web shop.
Yeah Heinlein was a crank but he is spot on in that quote.
Since when is it the obligation of the taxpayers to support Murdoch if he can't even provide himself with a viable business model? Corporate welfare beggars like Murdoch posing as businessmen really waste a lot of our resources and just seem to have no other purpose than to try to make things suck as much as they can.
I bet the fight against open standards may be at the bottom and that the real goal is getting at and stopping Dirac. It's a good codec and royalty-free.
FAST died on the vine a long time ago. It was a dot-com that just missed the tail of the dot-com mania. So they sold their hype to Microsoft and then disappeared off the face of the planet until this week. Track down the marketeers that stired up the FAST mud again.
The batshit doesn't lie. MBA's have a big effect on our economy: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-22/ http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-20/
Next time I go to the New England area of the US for example, there's 4 or 5 people there who I'll be able to tell in advance that I'm coming and see if they want to meet up for a drink or two. Much better than knowing no-one there.
There used to be this thing called e-mail for that, back in the old days.
(Let's try that again with the correct link.) http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-cyber-czar23-2009dec23,0,6636463.story
Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:
"Find and Lean on your insider friend, 'the fox' Having a trusted MSfriend in the account is critical...they are true believers"Comes v Microsoft, Plaintiff's Exhibit 9346, p63
Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:
"Find and Lean on your insider friend, 'the fox' Having a trusted MSfriend in the account is critical...they are true believers"Comes v Microsoft, Plaintiff's Exhibit 9346, p63
You know your product's reputation is in trouble when a government advises the public to dump it.
Dude, that was the case back ten years ago, too. Facts and technical data don't play a role in situations where Microsoft products get deployed.
You know you have a cult-like following when governments, research universities and a handful of computer magazines advise the public to dump your product and it still retains market share. Having EULAs that prohibit benchmarking doesn't hurt either. Nor does it hurt to have insiders paid for by the victim's own budget.
How long must this go on? Put a dollar value on the damage and then put out warrants for Microsoft executives and interns, past and present.
Cool. Thanks for the clarification and for the work on PFsense. Where can we read about the build process? How is it done, if not crunchgen? The "extra functionality" and, more importantly the extra field testing are useful. However, I myself am a minimalist, when I can get away with it.
You are aware that PFsense is 'just' a crunchgen binary. It's a great distro and even has a packaging system, but the routing question could be answered with putting PF, an sftp subsystem like from dropbear, and BGP into a crunchgen binary using NetBSD or OpenBSD rather than FreeBSD. It's only hard the first time, if you keep notes. Even then its not so daunting.
That is a larger percentage then I expected. I wonder if the statistics were collected by asking people if they used it, and the percentages were more the amount of people who knew they should be.
It probably is directly proportional to the percentage of businesses leaving Windows behind. The number is growing rapidly, but to avoid harassment of all kinds, including pesky sales drones, they try not to be visible about it.
the management demanding it because that's what they want to beleive that everyone else uses
There fixed that for you. Either way, fixed or unfixed, the statement points out the problem: Windows is there because the software is not selected or even evaluated on technical merit.
Being able to give away, bogart, lend or to borrow, pass as inheritance, or roll up and smoke a book is possible because the book is yours because you own it and the Doctrine of First Sale formalizes these possibilities.
One of the many things wrong with digital restrictions management (drm) technologies is that it tries to do an end run around the democratic process and eliminate these rights, some of which are codified in the Constitution. Some would assert that not only is the constitution the foundation upon which the country has been built, but also that it represents freedom and democracy itself. So these affronts by Bill Gatesists and the other 'freedom-hating' (tm) digital taliban, can be considered as affronts to the US itself if not also to higher ideals.
It may sound harsh to some fanbois, but step back and take off that 'with a computer' clause and see if what they are doing is acceptable. If not, then you know what to do.
While you might have no problem hitting ctrl with your girly hands, us guys with big hands will have to move and twist our wrist in order to get down to ctrl, key, which is a fairly uncomfortable thing to do, and doing it lots of times every hour is going to kill my wrist - having big hands means escape is in a natural position for me while alt and ctrl are far away from my fingers.
It's probably yet another problem that can be traced back to Bill. I started seeing the mutant keyboards bundled with his "OS". The ctrl key, which gets used a lot, used to be where it could actually be reached, but that position defaults to the useless capslock key. Probably until 2003 or 2004, one of the first things for me to do on a new account with such a keyboard was to remap the position of the control keys.
I get too much pain in the wrists to try it your way, by contorting the wrists, to reach the out of the way locations. If I am sloppy I can crease my hand to get at the ctrl key but that quickly causes very sharp pains there too. I hadn't thought about it for a while, now that I have I see that I usually slide my fingers a row down from the home keys (typing home not 'HOME') and do it that way, transferring the pain to the elbows...
It's not so much a problem of what shapes the paint has on the damned keys but the problem that Linux distros now seem to follow the asinine, MBA-designed, One Microsoft Way of key mapping. Before all that stupidity there used to be a whole field called ergonomics and other fields and specialists streamlining tasks through time and motion studies. I bet I can get through a month, or longer, without hitting the capslock key on purpose.
'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment.
That, I must admit, is an excruciatingly lame definition of 'journalism'.
Yes, lets blame the people who are REALLY responsible, and it's not the voters (at least here south of the Canadian border). The corporate owned media convinces the voter that a vote for any "third party" candidate is wasted, and the corporations give campaign bribes to both "major" parties. No matter which candidate loses, the corporation wins.
In a climate like this it's simply one corporate entity against the other. The voters are meaningless (yet for some stupid reason I still vote).
You might still vote but apparently you still can't do math. The way the elections are counted in the US, the third party votes split the vote for one of the other parties. If you want more than two parties, the simple majority rule has to be abandoned in favor of proportional representation or other similar methods.
Do the math.
On the teams I worked for or with, imaging worked, but Windows was still and unstable piece of shit. The worst of the driver problems occurred at sites I had contact with via project members that suffered there.
However, one where I was actually located at, had an XP machine that the manager had ordered set up (not by me, my Windows days were long over). Many hours were spent screwing around to get the Very Expensive digital camera working and allowing imports into Photoshop. He almost insisted that I use that machine, but since it was our coffee break and because I had my work Macbook with Photoshop within arms reach, I said "let's see what happens". Guess what? Plug a camera or a chip with pictures into the mac, and it works out of the box. Nowadays KDE-based linux distros are the same.
That's a valid point about getting the hardware that supports disk cloning. However, if a shop is so expertise-deficient that they have deployed Windows, then they almost as a rule lack expertise to get even remotely accessible hardware. They usually end up getting whatever the sales unit at the supplier has an overstock of, even if the specs are uniquely inappropriate for the task. Saw that in person this spring.
Working in a hospital, I know that there are many examples of this.
That wasn't the case 10 years ago. However, if it looks like it might be the case now. If you can prove it you might be able to prosecute and make criminal charges of it.
I know of one hospital where MS Exchange was not only shoe-horned into the infrastructure, but even tied into the voice mail / pbx. Neither use case has a legitimate place for Windows.
It comes down to the fact that if there are claims that some activities depends on Windows product, then someone is doing something very wrong, perhaps criminally wrong.
It depends on how many Windows desktops you are able to replace with Macintosh OS X, Solaris or Linux. Seriously. Windows isn't around because of it's technical merits.
I have worked in help desk environments in the past for a Windows / Macintosh / Solaris computing environment. The Solaris users largely took care of themselves, but contacted us for some settings information, like establishing the right settings for Kerberos, LDAP, AFS, or SMTP. The Mac users outnumbered everyone else by at least 4 to 1. However, it was the Windows users that wasted about 80% of our time for drop in help. Even cloned setups on identical hardware had different problems. Drivers were a big one. For phone calls, it was a bit higher in number of Windows user contacts but a bit shorter in duration for each one.
I did family tech support for years until I had enough and bought anyone who was willing new Apples. Only my mom took me up, but her support calls dropped off to nothing within days and now we can talk about other things for a change.
I've visited and toured libraries and schools using LTSP. One of those was stuck with some windows machines. The effort to keep the few Windows machines going was about, from their statistics, about 14:1 compared to LTSP. That ratio would probably been higher if they had even higher ration of Linux stations. The others cited even more favorable rates.
Getting rid of Windows is mostly a psychological problem. First, users have to become familiar enough with computers to be able to do their daily tasks. Having knowlegeable staff on the spot to nudge in the right direction is essential, as is encouraging peer support. Then they need to keep access to the Windows machines and try to do on Windows what they can do on computers. Then they eventually decide on their own, 'fuck it' regarding the Windows use and drop it without looking back.
The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.
Setting the 'right' staffing levels, then depends on how much you can clean up the computing environment. I for one am offended that so much money and time is wasted just trying get the M$ stuff to work as well as its competitors. I would much rather see the same number of staff hours used not for support but for improvement and making things faster, easier, more productive. Before Windows, IT used to save effort rather than a live demo of the Red Queen's Race!
cannot count past five ... oh look shiny
seven syllables not six
no
G S M secure
All your financial passwords
Are belong to us
Half-assed system
Authenticates one side
Spoofing cash transfer
Thousands of people dying cannot reasonably be described as a "minor annoyance."
Said the one who pooh-poohed the frequent computer{sic} outages in health centers and hospitals. Just for the sake of argument, we'll pick some small numbers: 3000 hospitals with at least one mission critical service tied to MS products and one computer{sic} outage per hospital per year. That'll add up to thousands of deaths quickly even with those low numbers. And you know the real numbers are much, much higher.
The Patriot Act was all ready to go and just needed a situation where it could be pushed through without a single congressman actually reading it. It was the most convoluted, obfuscated patchwork imaginable. Reading raw diff output is easy by comparison. Keeping legislation in XML (say Docbook or OpenDocument Format) and then using a version control system like SVN, GIT or Mercurial would have made the planned end result more clear.
Ok. This wealthy Nigerian who tried to light his farts for Yemen makes a point that it's dangerous to fly to the US. Now can the rest of the world go back to a more civilized way of managing air passenger traffic.