9/11 happened because 4 guys with box-cutters could commandeer an airplane.
9/11 happened because:
...
b) because the entire plane of passengers just sat there and allowed it to happen.
Basically, that's it in a nutshell. The allowed continued existence of sheeple has caused great harm to full humans.
I wish I could find the link of one specific failed hijacking attempt. IIRC, it was in the 90's. Some idiots tried to hijack a plane carrying a wrestling team. The threat was over as soon as the would-be hijackers passed within arms reach of part of the team.
My first reaction is that it was shot down. The small amount of official data does not rule that out. Unfortunately the investigation was blocked by splitting it into two parts and canceling the last one. So it will be a while before we find out what did go on, if ever.
It's not like you would be going in to code the next Microsoft Useless Widget 2.0.
Right. You'll just be porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD.
Or, M$ is hoping enough NetBSD developers, or potential developers, are naive or weak enough to turn quisling. NetBSD is small enough that it is comparable in size to small companies, and taking out enough developers to sink the project is a realistic goal.
It happened to
Borland and others. Of the FOSS distros, NetBSD the lowest hanging fruit for such a tactic. Larger distros require other tactics.
Even if the offer is legit, which it probably, isn't, just wasting invaluable developer resources porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD is a human resources denial of service attack taking developer time away from something useful.
Fully agreed. What could be worth a warning to others is to watch how Negroponte got separated from reality and then into the Windows deal. Everyone knew it was DOA from the moment they signed on with Micro$oft.
No one has ever survived a deal. More to the point, it delayed the project greatly just on technical problems. That alone may have been enough to kill it. Adding extra RAM and other junk to accommodate outdated M$ technology just added further damage.
So a big question I have is how did an otherwise smart fellow like Negroponte go south so quickly and what were the early warning signs?
Make sure that they can't just issue another 10,000,000 shares subsequently, and dilute your holding to almost nothing.
It happened to friends of mine the day after they signed a deal for an equity stake.
It happened to someone I know. She was one of a bunch of engineers and not one of them did the math. Instead voting based on the warm-fuzzy blather from the CEO. They sold out and, those that are left, have gone from a dream job some held for decades to corporate cubicle-ville. There are now more than double the number of managers than engineers...
The company started out not-for profit and had almost no overhead. Did only really cool things for high pay, for decades. The CEO talked them into going for profit, claiming it would be employee-owned. Then when that was agreed to, more or less switched the papers. He claimed publicly traded with employees holding X amount of the stock was the same, and as soon as the chumps signed off, he promptly doled out 10X, each, to newly acquired "executives" and a dozen or so speculators.
My prolonged dance shouting "suckers", "haha", and "toldyouso,toldyouso,dontforgetItoldyouso" was not enjoyed. I can make the soundtrack available again if needed.
Then why don't they call it "Windows Netbooks"? If "Windows Starter" is supposed to be the netbook edition, then they've managed to give it a name that actively misleads you as to what it's intended for.
Sounds like it will be a repeat of Vista Capable. At this point, however, there can't be that many people left on the planet who don't know that it's just crap. The choke-hold on OEMs is starting to break, this time all at once instead of a manageable one or two at a time. Any remaining MS revenues are starting to be only from those locked in through formats, protocols or ideologies.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
I think it is a little unfair to blame Ubuntu and Fedora. Don't call a product 4.0 if it isn't ready for release. If KDE 4.0 were called Alpha-4.0 and KDE 4.1 were called Beta-4.0 there wouldn't have been the confusion. By calling the product 4.0 they were indicating a state of readiness. And yes I understand they said the opposite, so what? The conventions in software regarding version numbering are clear.
Ok. I'll begrude that, but only a eensy, weensy, itty, bitty, little unfair. But only that much. KDE 4.2 is mislabelled and should be more accurately called Pre-Alpha-KDE4-0.2. However, when selecting packages, and versions of packages, for inclusion in a distro, the team is supposed to look a little more closely than just the name and version.
CDs also only tend to last for a couple of months.
There, fixed that for you.
The pressed CDs, if using high quality materials and at least good storage might last that long. Home-made CD-R and DVD+-R will last a small handful of years, at best. The life span of the organic chemicals in the dyes used in CD-R, DVD+-R is close to five years. The clock starts ticking from the date of manufacture. It ticks faster while in sub-optimal storage and while in use. Bad storage means, too hot, too cold, temperature variations, too moist, too dry, humidity variations, and of course polluted air.
Anyway, it's mostly stupid to worry about the physical media, when it is the filesystem format that determines the ability migrate to new media or even new types of media. The file formats, however, have the ultimate, final say in whether or not the data is accessible.
KDE 4 is not a year late, it's just being pushed out by the distros before it is ready instead of working with KDE 3.5.
KDE 3.5 still works great. KDE 4 is not yet in alpha stage, which is fine for those that like the bleeding edge. The side effect is that it is still really is slow, awkward, buggy and incomplete.
So, I'm not sure why Torvalds feels compelled to highlight this. The fault is not necessarily for KDE 4 using a long time to take form. The real mistake, perhaps an intentional one, is for distros like Ubuntu to roll out a clearly unready desktop. One really could question the intent there.
If Ubuntu, and others, were serious about helping rather than harming, they'd set up a nice KDE 3.5 as a default for options like Kubuntu or KDE-Fedora. Remember, years ago, Red Hat had tricked out both leading desktop environments with common themes, bells and whistles. I'd like to see a return to those brief moments of common sense.
A side effect of the unreadiness of KDE4, hiding of KDE 3.5 and the turds that M$-Novell is dropping in the GNOME punch bowl, is that users are discovering Xfce, Fluxbox, FVWM-crystal and many others. (Ubuntu URLS there) Speaking of running window managers without a desktop environment, Compiz can be run like that, too.
I don't expect anyone who defends or supports MS Exchange to fess up to wrongdoing. Just like I don't expect it to work: Every last MS Exchange site I have investigated has been plagued by mail lost and down time. The only question is whether the users find that acceptable.
It'd be too easy then to force them to pay for the damage they cause if MS Exchange boosters admitted they knew they were f*king their employers to further the M$ agenda. As far as suckage of MS products go, brand recognition does cut both ways. If a company does great work for many years, they get a good reputation. If they make crap for years, they get a bad one. M$ appears to work very hard to cultivate the worst possible reputation. Don't like it? Then improve the technology, start with standards support. Or behave better in the market,start by unbundling the formats and protocols.
MS Exchange == loss of mail; and in a hospital lost mail or even delayed mail means damaged or lost lives.
So yeah, I don't doubt that the losers who get paid to babysit Exchange aren't going to fess up to any wrong doing. Nor would the uber-losers who made the choice fess up and risk going to club Fed. In *every* case I've encountered, they all sing the same tune: oh, praise be to Bill, it is perfect.
Leave the basement and the tune changes. The servers are unavailable frequently and mail is so frequently lost or delayed that it becomes expected. The only use case I can see for MS Exchange is when the top management is up to no good and actually wants the plausible deniability that it will grant when auditors come around or courts subpoena records. Over the last 10 years, I've never seen a working instance of MS Exchange -- unless one redefines "working".
I've seen >10% data loss in (no chronological order) units/businesses/institutions with users numbering in
dozens
hundreds
hundreds
dozens
hundreds
hundreds
hundreds
dozens
thousands
thousands
thousands
hundreds
thousands
So if you say you think MS Exchange works, either you have a funny definition of works, or are paid to lie on behalf of Bill, or haven't ever spoken with the users.
When mail goes missing, only a fool or a shill is content to shrug and bleat the M$ talking point "only old people use e-mail" When you track down the cause, it is the defective design M$ is famous for. I don't use or condone the use of MS Exchange. The last field test I supervised, which which was in Decemeber, MS Exchange lost 28% of the mail in Exchange-to-Exchange sendings on the same server.
A) Nobody has "no health care". There's always the emergency room -- in the US they can't turn you away for lack of ability to pay....
They do. Ask any doctor on hospital staff about the "billfold biopsy", especially those working emergency services. People get turned away all the time.
I myself have been turned away from a major US hospital's emergency room, despite having insurance at the time. I was too sick/delirious with fever to dig out the insurance card from my wallet in response to their badgering about the name of the insurance company. By the time my ride had parked her car, I had been ejected for being uninsured. "If you don't have insurance, you can't be here." I had her drive me home. A few days later, I found the card still in my wallet, but by then I was busy juggling jobs and swapping shifts in return for those I had missed.
Anyway, the State Department's problem is only the tip of the iceberg. MS Exchange has been infecting US hospitals and that means downtime, lost messages and vastly decreased productivity. In healthcare, that means lost lives. In the State Department that means lost money and lost accountability. The latter is probably the main reason the outgoing administration chose to deploy it: no records == no trials.
It's really not that hard. Granted, Exchange is a bit of a beast to install and manage initially, but once everything is set up and the other servers know each other it works pretty poorly
. Exchange 2007 has some pretty unfortunate mis-
features...
There fixed that for you.
You shills never get tired of fiddling with the definition of "works".
Sure if you ask the embedded sales team pushing the M$ junk in your organization, they'll say it works great, has wonderful uptime, is low maintenance, etc. Then if you ask the afraid-for-their-jobs non-management staffers that are stuck using it the same questions, they'll agree -- until you change the questions. Q: How often is the Exchange server down? A1: several times a day for both scheduled and "unscheduled" rebooting. A2: once or twice a month for extended period while the server is rebuilt. Q: How much mail is lost? A: Double digit percentages, at least. Q: Does turning off the spam filter help reduce the lost messages as the MSFT boosters claim? A: No. Q: Can you connect to the server with other browsers or other clients? A: No.
So really, what level of failure is acceptable?
C'mon it's 2009 and no one is gullible enough to fall for that same old line about "knowing" how to set up MS Exchange: it simply can't happen. You can send people to training, hire "experts", rent consultants, buy extra servers and pay for expensive upgrades but at the end of the day it, like all other M$ products, fails to deliver.
Anyone who has ever actually honestly tried to use or maintain the crap that is MS Exchange, can see that. It's testable, repeatable, and consistent -- year after year.
Individuals have almost infinite capacity to accept and put up with awful conditions. Unfortunately institutions and businesses quickly reach a threshold, that once crossed, brings collapse. To MSFTers, lost mail may be funny ("only old people use e-mail") and useful by putting the staff into the easily manipulated crisis management mode. However, to real staff, lost messages mean delay (cost overruns), lost opportunities (lost income), decreased productivity (potential vicious circle of decreased productivity and stress) and, last but not least, wasted effort (unnecessary cost increase, demoralization).
The Bush administrated created this current economic depression, but MS products are making it worse than it needed to be.
Thus, I've also tagged this article windows. Though perhaps the pejorative microsoft has also been earned.
Seriously, this is largely a problem with a single product line. If you work with the various Linuces, BSDs (including OS X) or Solaris, then the job is mostly fun and productive. One of the things that has always rocked in IT has been doing cool things and finding cool ways to automate uncool things or at least do them faster, better and cheaper. But that means do you own evaluation and under no circumstances for any reason ever ever ever accept crap products, no matter what. The M-word products are not, in my book, "IT" for me they are politics and bullshit that block IT. put the fun back into computing. Avoid them and your stress level will be fine.
Also, suckers for MS products bring it on themselves: think about it. MS products are marketed as so simple even and untrained monkey can use them. Then when said products don't work (because they can't) as advertised or even as needed, who do you think gets the blame, the product or the monkey?
"One BIG carrot for Universities and Labs that use google (gmail, docs, etc)"
Those universities should lose their access to the Internet if they are using Google apps. In the past year, I have seen several leaks of student information (SSN, financial, etc.) caused JUST by the use of Google docs. Maybe if their students are using Google, they will reap some benefit, but even that is a bad idea -- a recent leak at Columbia was caused by a student using Google docs for a research project involving Columbia undergraduates, and thousands of SSNs and financial records were exposed to the world.
And just why is it ok to ignore the other universities which willingly provide illegal access to third parties via the licenses (and illegally via holes) for the M$ components their administration uses?
How is it that the other Anglo-Saxon countries are all WORSE than the US when it comes to digital rights and freedoms? Canada's version of the DMCA is worse, NZ has this, Australia has its wonderful new Great Barrier Firewall planned, and don't even get me started on Britain and encryption. Seriously?
Because they're all running a different kernel than you expect, despite the nice UI
None of those coountries have a tradition or legal framework for freedom of information. The former colonies, including the US, take their leglisative heritage directly from the UK. The UK there is the Thirty Year Rule, which mandates that even the most mundane material from public agencies is by default secret for thirty years. Further, all that is needed to extend the secrecy beyond the original thirty is a request from even the most petty bureaucrat.
Vellum, paper, microfilm all survive more or less for 30 years even with mediocre storage conditions. Maybe the information contained on those storage mediums will no longer be of use, but it will be there. Throw digital storage media into the mix and you have data-deletion-by-default: backup tapes last up to 15 year depending on quality and optimal storage and handling, including not just humidity and temperature control but also periodic respooling. CD-R, DVD+R,DVD-R, etc, use dyes which oxidize over a few short years. CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RW use layers of polarizing chemicals, but aren't much better. Compact flash? who knows. Those problems are easily solved through period migration. The real problem has been and still is one of the data formats.
Contrast the Thirty Years Rule with the (former) Nordic countries where material from public agencies is by default not just publicly available but also published. That's not just a law, it's part of the constitution in Sweden, Finland and Norway. It's not new either, it originates from 1766 -- a decade before the US was founded -- as a result of ousting an administration that used control of information to lock out opposition, run up debt and ruin the economy, engage in graft, start unpopular wars, and generally avoid accountability. Hmmm. Dejavu...
I'm just waiting for Microsoft to go to Washington for a bailout.
Party Leader Gates already showed up in DC
holding his hat out. However, banning Windows -- even without punitive action -- would be a major economic boost to the US. Letting it fail and die the free-market death it has earned would allow private debtors to take care of the punitive part, saving federal money for other things.
The damage M$ products cause, in just malware alone, in just the US alone, has been double digit billions per year -- not counting spam from Windows botnets. There is also the lost productivity due to severe usability, stability, reliability and interoperability problems.
Also, Obama is in the Whitehouse next term by several factors, not the least of which is the removal of Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) Windows/Access/VBA botnets from enough key districts. Hope he has the sense to see Gates' movement for what it is and find a way to deal with him as the sovereign threat he is.
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.
Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.
If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.
However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...
... A hole will get full of water, bugs, or whatever. It may get filled by small children falling into it accidentally. A built up hole would be a better choice....
Yes, building a berm might have a similar effect on the sound. However, being able to put pungi sticks in it during the rest of the year has a lot of advantages.;)
However, any self-respecting wood stove is not going to need any electricity at all. Convection should take care of the heat transfer unless the stove's design is a failure. I've even seen old fashioned radiators with wood-heated liquid. Often the only improvements that can be made to an old-fashion design of kakelungn is to use modern ceramics.
...
The things get pretty darned LOUD tho....but, I've heard that the Honda ones...at a premium price, and very, very quiet....
If you put the generator in a hole in the yard, you'll have a night-and-day difference in noise levels. Just make sure that it is well-drained and set up so that no one will fall into it. Under the deck or patio is often good.
Here. I admit. I'm part of the so-called "whitehat guys" who profit from stoping the botnets. But since I have no ethics or morals, I dont really stop them, I just give them kickbacks to make it look like I'm stopping them.
...
Don't try to squirm out of your responsibility by casting aspersions or weaseling. If any part of your so-called clean up involves letting clients continue to run MS Windows, the you *are* effectively helping to spread the botnets you claim to be cleaning up.
Responsible employers don't let staff install MS crap on a server or anything else plugged into the LAN or Wifi.
Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server: [1] [2]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Further, not only do the Google crawlers obey the robots.txt described above (or other standards for robot exclusion), they also use HTTP's if-modified-since to make a conditional request. The file is only returned to the crawler if it has been changed. That saves a lot of time and bandwidth.
PC World will also lose out if double-dipping is allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
9/11 happened because 4 guys with box-cutters could commandeer an airplane.
9/11 happened because:
... b) because the entire plane of passengers just sat there and allowed it to happen.
Basically, that's it in a nutshell. The allowed continued existence of sheeple has caused great harm to full humans.
I wish I could find the link of one specific failed hijacking attempt. IIRC, it was in the 90's. Some idiots tried to hijack a plane carrying a wrestling team. The threat was over as soon as the would-be hijackers passed within arms reach of part of the team.
My first reaction is that it was shot down. The small amount of official data does not rule that out. Unfortunately the investigation was blocked by splitting it into two parts and canceling the last one. So it will be a while before we find out what did go on, if ever.
It's not like you would be going in to code the next Microsoft Useless Widget 2.0.
Right. You'll just be porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD.
Or, M$ is hoping enough NetBSD developers, or potential developers, are naive or weak enough to turn quisling. NetBSD is small enough that it is comparable in size to small companies, and taking out enough developers to sink the project is a realistic goal.
It happened to Borland and others. Of the FOSS distros, NetBSD the lowest hanging fruit for such a tactic. Larger distros require other tactics.
Even if the offer is legit, which it probably, isn't, just wasting invaluable developer resources porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD is a human resources denial of service attack taking developer time away from something useful.
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy.
Can you provide a link to that? I can't seem to find it. The cheapest one on BestBuy.com is $329.99.
I can't find a link for his eee 900, but I was shown one last week by someone who paid 99 EUR. That's about $200 USD today ;)
Fully agreed. What could be worth a warning to others is to watch how Negroponte got separated from reality and then into the Windows deal. Everyone knew it was DOA from the moment they signed on with Micro$oft.
No one has ever survived a deal. More to the point, it delayed the project greatly just on technical problems. That alone may have been enough to kill it. Adding extra RAM and other junk to accommodate outdated M$ technology just added further damage.
So a big question I have is how did an otherwise smart fellow like Negroponte go south so quickly and what were the early warning signs?
Make sure that they can't just issue another 10,000,000 shares subsequently, and dilute your holding to almost nothing.
It happened to friends of mine the day after they signed a deal for an equity stake.
It happened to someone I know. She was one of a bunch of engineers and not one of them did the math. Instead voting based on the warm-fuzzy blather from the CEO. They sold out and, those that are left, have gone from a dream job some held for decades to corporate cubicle-ville. There are now more than double the number of managers than engineers...
The company started out not-for profit and had almost no overhead. Did only really cool things for high pay, for decades. The CEO talked them into going for profit, claiming it would be employee-owned. Then when that was agreed to, more or less switched the papers. He claimed publicly traded with employees holding X amount of the stock was the same, and as soon as the chumps signed off, he promptly doled out 10X, each, to newly acquired "executives" and a dozen or so speculators.
My prolonged dance shouting "suckers", "haha", and "toldyouso,toldyouso,dontforgetItoldyouso" was not enjoyed. I can make the soundtrack available again if needed.
Then why don't they call it "Windows Netbooks"? If "Windows Starter" is supposed to be the netbook edition, then they've managed to give it a name that actively misleads you as to what it's intended for.
Sounds like it will be a repeat of Vista Capable. At this point, however, there can't be that many people left on the planet who don't know that it's just crap. The choke-hold on OEMs is starting to break, this time all at once instead of a manageable one or two at a time. Any remaining MS revenues are starting to be only from those locked in through formats, protocols or ideologies.
#2 = yet another reason why They Live is the best movie ever.
That is the single toughest fight scene in any movie I've seen todate.
I think it is a little unfair to blame Ubuntu and Fedora. Don't call a product 4.0 if it isn't ready for release. If KDE 4.0 were called Alpha-4.0 and KDE 4.1 were called Beta-4.0 there wouldn't have been the confusion. By calling the product 4.0 they were indicating a state of readiness. And yes I understand they said the opposite, so what? The conventions in software regarding version numbering are clear.
Ok. I'll begrude that, but only a eensy, weensy, itty, bitty, little unfair. But only that much. KDE 4.2 is mislabelled and should be more accurately called Pre-Alpha-KDE4-0.2. However, when selecting packages, and versions of packages, for inclusion in a distro, the team is supposed to look a little more closely than just the name and version.
CDs also only tend to last for a couple of months.
There, fixed that for you.
The pressed CDs, if using high quality materials and at least good storage might last that long. Home-made CD-R and DVD+-R will last a small handful of years, at best. The life span of the organic chemicals in the dyes used in CD-R, DVD+-R is close to five years. The clock starts ticking from the date of manufacture. It ticks faster while in sub-optimal storage and while in use. Bad storage means, too hot, too cold, temperature variations, too moist, too dry, humidity variations, and of course polluted air.
Anyway, it's mostly stupid to worry about the physical media, when it is the filesystem format that determines the ability migrate to new media or even new types of media. The file formats, however, have the ultimate, final say in whether or not the data is accessible.
KDE 4 is not a year late, it's just being pushed out by the distros before it is ready instead of working with KDE 3.5.
KDE 3.5 still works great. KDE 4 is not yet in alpha stage, which is fine for those that like the bleeding edge. The side effect is that it is still really is slow, awkward, buggy and incomplete.
So, I'm not sure why Torvalds feels compelled to highlight this. The fault is not necessarily for KDE 4 using a long time to take form. The real mistake, perhaps an intentional one, is for distros like Ubuntu to roll out a clearly unready desktop. One really could question the intent there.
If Ubuntu, and others, were serious about helping rather than harming, they'd set up a nice KDE 3.5 as a default for options like Kubuntu or KDE-Fedora. Remember, years ago, Red Hat had tricked out both leading desktop environments with common themes, bells and whistles. I'd like to see a return to those brief moments of common sense.
A side effect of the unreadiness of KDE4, hiding of KDE 3.5 and the turds that M$-Novell is dropping in the GNOME punch bowl, is that users are discovering Xfce, Fluxbox, FVWM-crystal and many others. (Ubuntu URLS there) Speaking of running window managers without a desktop environment, Compiz can be run like that, too.
All the hallmarks of a shill.
I don't expect anyone who defends or supports MS Exchange to fess up to wrongdoing. Just like I don't expect it to work: Every last MS Exchange site I have investigated has been plagued by mail lost and down time. The only question is whether the users find that acceptable.
It'd be too easy then to force them to pay for the damage they cause if MS Exchange boosters admitted they knew they were f*king their employers to further the M$ agenda. As far as suckage of MS products go, brand recognition does cut both ways. If a company does great work for many years, they get a good reputation. If they make crap for years, they get a bad one. M$ appears to work very hard to cultivate the worst possible reputation. Don't like it? Then improve the technology, start with standards support. Or behave better in the market,start by unbundling the formats and protocols.
MS Exchange == loss of mail; and in a hospital lost mail or even delayed mail means damaged or lost lives.
So yeah, I don't doubt that the losers who get paid to babysit Exchange aren't going to fess up to any wrong doing. Nor would the uber-losers who made the choice fess up and risk going to club Fed. In *every* case I've encountered, they all sing the same tune: oh, praise be to Bill, it is perfect.
Leave the basement and the tune changes. The servers are unavailable frequently and mail is so frequently lost or delayed that it becomes expected. The only use case I can see for MS Exchange is when the top management is up to no good and actually wants the plausible deniability that it will grant when auditors come around or courts subpoena records. Over the last 10 years, I've never seen a working instance of MS Exchange -- unless one redefines "working".
I've seen >10% data loss in (no chronological order) units/businesses/institutions with users numbering in
dozens
hundreds
hundreds
dozens
hundreds
hundreds
hundreds
dozens
thousands
thousands
thousands
hundreds
thousands
So if you say you think MS Exchange works, either you have a funny definition of works, or are paid to lie on behalf of Bill, or haven't ever spoken with the users.
When mail goes missing, only a fool or a shill is content to shrug and bleat the M$ talking point "only old people use e-mail" When you track down the cause, it is the defective design M$ is famous for. I don't use or condone the use of MS Exchange. The last field test I supervised, which which was in Decemeber, MS Exchange lost 28% of the mail in Exchange-to-Exchange sendings on the same server.
A) Nobody has "no health care". There's always the emergency room -- in the US they can't turn you away for lack of ability to pay....
They do. Ask any doctor on hospital staff about the "billfold biopsy", especially those working emergency services. People get turned away all the time.
I myself have been turned away from a major US hospital's emergency room, despite having insurance at the time. I was too sick/delirious with fever to dig out the insurance card from my wallet in response to their badgering about the name of the insurance company. By the time my ride had parked her car, I had been ejected for being uninsured. "If you don't have insurance, you can't be here." I had her drive me home. A few days later, I found the card still in my wallet, but by then I was busy juggling jobs and swapping shifts in return for those I had missed.
Anyway, the State Department's problem is only the tip of the iceberg. MS Exchange has been infecting US hospitals and that means downtime, lost messages and vastly decreased productivity. In healthcare, that means lost lives. In the State Department that means lost money and lost accountability. The latter is probably the main reason the outgoing administration chose to deploy it: no records == no trials.
It's really not that hard. Granted, Exchange is a bit of a beast to install and manage initially, but once everything is set up and the other servers know each other it works pretty poorly
. Exchange 2007 has some pretty unfortunate mis-
features ...
There fixed that for you.
You shills never get tired of fiddling with the definition of "works". Sure if you ask the embedded sales team pushing the M$ junk in your organization, they'll say it works great, has wonderful uptime, is low maintenance, etc. Then if you ask the afraid-for-their-jobs non-management staffers that are stuck using it the same questions, they'll agree -- until you change the questions. Q: How often is the Exchange server down? A1: several times a day for both scheduled and "unscheduled" rebooting. A2: once or twice a month for extended period while the server is rebuilt. Q: How much mail is lost? A: Double digit percentages, at least. Q: Does turning off the spam filter help reduce the lost messages as the MSFT boosters claim? A: No. Q: Can you connect to the server with other browsers or other clients? A: No.
So really, what level of failure is acceptable?
C'mon it's 2009 and no one is gullible enough to fall for that same old line about "knowing" how to set up MS Exchange: it simply can't happen. You can send people to training, hire "experts", rent consultants, buy extra servers and pay for expensive upgrades but at the end of the day it, like all other M$ products, fails to deliver. Anyone who has ever actually honestly tried to use or maintain the crap that is MS Exchange, can see that. It's testable, repeatable, and consistent -- year after year.
Individuals have almost infinite capacity to accept and put up with awful conditions. Unfortunately institutions and businesses quickly reach a threshold, that once crossed, brings collapse. To MSFTers, lost mail may be funny ("only old people use e-mail") and useful by putting the staff into the easily manipulated crisis management mode. However, to real staff, lost messages mean delay (cost overruns), lost opportunities (lost income), decreased productivity (potential vicious circle of decreased productivity and stress) and, last but not least, wasted effort (unnecessary cost increase, demoralization).
The Bush administrated created this current economic depression, but MS products are making it worse than it needed to be.
Thus, I've also tagged this article windows. Though perhaps the pejorative microsoft has also been earned.
Seriously, this is largely a problem with a single product line. If you work with the various Linuces, BSDs (including OS X) or Solaris, then the job is mostly fun and productive. One of the things that has always rocked in IT has been doing cool things and finding cool ways to automate uncool things or at least do them faster, better and cheaper. But that means do you own evaluation and under no circumstances for any reason ever ever ever accept crap products, no matter what. The M-word products are not, in my book, "IT" for me they are politics and bullshit that block IT. put the fun back into computing. Avoid them and your stress level will be fine.
Also, suckers for MS products bring it on themselves: think about it. MS products are marketed as so simple even and untrained monkey can use them. Then when said products don't work (because they can't) as advertised or even as needed, who do you think gets the blame, the product or the monkey?
"One BIG carrot for Universities and Labs that use google (gmail, docs, etc)" Those universities should lose their access to the Internet if they are using Google apps. In the past year, I have seen several leaks of student information (SSN, financial, etc.) caused JUST by the use of Google docs. Maybe if their students are using Google, they will reap some benefit, but even that is a bad idea -- a recent leak at Columbia was caused by a student using Google docs for a research project involving Columbia undergraduates, and thousands of SSNs and financial records were exposed to the world.
And just why is it ok to ignore the other universities which willingly provide illegal access to third parties via the licenses (and illegally via holes) for the M$ components their administration uses?
Illegal access is not alway also unauthorized...
How is it that the other Anglo-Saxon countries are all WORSE than the US when it comes to digital rights and freedoms? Canada's version of the DMCA is worse, NZ has this, Australia has its wonderful new Great Barrier Firewall planned, and don't even get me started on Britain and encryption. Seriously?
Because they're all running a different kernel than you expect, despite the nice UI
None of those coountries have a tradition or legal framework for freedom of information. The former colonies, including the US, take their leglisative heritage directly from the UK. The UK there is the Thirty Year Rule, which mandates that even the most mundane material from public agencies is by default secret for thirty years. Further, all that is needed to extend the secrecy beyond the original thirty is a request from even the most petty bureaucrat.
Vellum, paper, microfilm all survive more or less for 30 years even with mediocre storage conditions. Maybe the information contained on those storage mediums will no longer be of use, but it will be there. Throw digital storage media into the mix and you have data-deletion-by-default: backup tapes last up to 15 year depending on quality and optimal storage and handling, including not just humidity and temperature control but also periodic respooling. CD-R, DVD+R,DVD-R, etc, use dyes which oxidize over a few short years. CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RW use layers of polarizing chemicals, but aren't much better. Compact flash? who knows. Those problems are easily solved through period migration. The real problem has been and still is one of the data formats.
Contrast the Thirty Years Rule with the (former) Nordic countries where material from public agencies is by default not just publicly available but also published. That's not just a law, it's part of the constitution in Sweden, Finland and Norway. It's not new either, it originates from 1766 -- a decade before the US was founded -- as a result of ousting an administration that used control of information to lock out opposition, run up debt and ruin the economy, engage in graft, start unpopular wars, and generally avoid accountability. Hmmm. Dejavu...
I'm just waiting for Microsoft to go to Washington for a bailout.
Party Leader Gates already showed up in DC holding his hat out. However, banning Windows -- even without punitive action -- would be a major economic boost to the US. Letting it fail and die the free-market death it has earned would allow private debtors to take care of the punitive part, saving federal money for other things.
The damage M$ products cause, in just malware alone, in just the US alone, has been double digit billions per year -- not counting spam from Windows botnets. There is also the lost productivity due to severe usability, stability, reliability and interoperability problems.
Also, Obama is in the Whitehouse next term by several factors, not the least of which is the removal of Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) Windows/Access/VBA botnets from enough key districts. Hope he has the sense to see Gates' movement for what it is and find a way to deal with him as the sovereign threat he is.
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.
Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.
If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.
However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...
Yes, building a berm might have a similar effect on the sound. However, being able to put pungi sticks in it during the rest of the year has a lot of advantages. ;)
However, any self-respecting wood stove is not going to need any electricity at all. Convection should take care of the heat transfer unless the stove's design is a failure. I've even seen old fashioned radiators with wood-heated liquid. Often the only improvements that can be made to an old-fashion design of kakelungn is to use modern ceramics.
... The things get pretty darned LOUD tho....but, I've heard that the Honda ones...at a premium price, and very, very quiet....
If you put the generator in a hole in the yard, you'll have a night-and-day difference in noise levels. Just make sure that it is well-drained and set up so that no one will fall into it. Under the deck or patio is often good.
Here. I admit. I'm part of the so-called "whitehat guys" who profit from stoping the botnets. But since I have no ethics or morals, I dont really stop them, I just give them kickbacks to make it look like I'm stopping them.
...
Don't try to squirm out of your responsibility by casting aspersions or weaseling. If any part of your so-called clean up involves letting clients continue to run MS Windows, the you *are* effectively helping to spread the botnets you claim to be cleaning up.
Responsible employers don't let staff install MS crap on a server or anything else plugged into the LAN or Wifi.
Crawl-delay directive
Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server: [1] [2]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Further, not only do the Google crawlers obey the robots.txt described above (or other standards for robot exclusion), they also use HTTP's if-modified-since to make a conditional request. The file is only returned to the crawler if it has been changed. That saves a lot of time and bandwidth.
PC World will also lose out if double-dipping is allowed.