He's not the only one who should have his nads in a vise about now for bad judgment. Several other parties were actively involved in setting it up so he could get in:
He was able to get into the government computers because someone else saw fit to deploy unsound technology proven to be unfit for a networked environment. The individuals involved in making the decision to roll MS Windows into the production environment there functionally enabled McKinnon and others to get in and root around, need to be sharing his cell.
Let's not pretend that there was only one crime committed.
If the door was wide open and you could get in without moving it then it might be unlawful entry. But as it was explained to me by cops and military police in several states, if you move the door or window even an inch to facilitate entry, then it is breaking and entry, not just unlawful entry. IANAL.
Using an LCD monitor instead of a CRT will drastically cut your power usage. Turning off the monitor while not at your computer will help as well, instead of just letting the screensaver run. The monitor can consume more power than the PC itself.
Not all the monitors are equally good about drawing zero power when switched "off". You may consider having a switch between the wall and the power brick.
Any advice or let it go? - how amusing is that final sentence!
I hope you have a photo or other copy of the license, and stay focused. You will get people trying to run you around in circles so keep a log of who you talk with, when and about what - that will make it easier to escalate. Anyway, here are some examples:
So this leaves IBM/Lenovo, for I cannot find a single Toshiba without Windows preinstalled.
Not necessarily. Some years back I got burned for a large sum by IBM. Previously I had very good experience with their service, but that time when I discovered a hardware defect, their service center refused to honor the support contract due to the fact that I was not running M$ cruft on it. Nor would they honor the return policy which was very clear in the law. They eventually won by dragging everything out.
I would have added "All applications must run in Wine under BSD or Linux", or have a version in BSD or Linux, to the requirements to prevent lock-in
But that defeats the purpose of mandating that no MS Vista application can be sold to federal agencies if the application does not run on the "secure" {sic} version of MS Vista. "Secure" there is probably just an euphamism for DRM'd out the wazzoo. Having the order read that the apps must be available on more secure platforms / other platforms means that the vendor lock is gone.
You don't think this is actually about preserving the privacy, availability and integrity of government data, do you?
Agreed. However, many of his backers do appear to be working to create such a scenario. I'm weak on mythology, but it seems that by doing so, they may be guaranteeing their place in slightly warmer afterlife than their rhetoric seems to seek. But none of that is what I had in mind.
I was thinking more along the lines of smoke and noise to distract from the fact that "deflation is no longer a threat", unemployment, and other domestic policy catastrophies. You also need to distract from the foreign policy disaster that Cheney / Rumsfeld / Haliburton created by screwing up the attack plans for Iraq to create a little profitable chaos (which got out of hand like a wildfire). Invading Iran would probably be a fatal over extension of the US remaining power, even after a draft. Even then, a draft would not be feasible until after the 2008 elections.
... even they are not stupid enough to invade Iran. Even they can picture what a huge fucking disaster that would be...
Unless a "huge fucking disaster" is what they have in mind...
Why isn't the software that manages your medical history public domain, given that the public healthcare system funded it....
Actually it already is public domain (warning for PDF). Or which countries where you talking about? If you don't have it, you can download it and set it up.
Well, Phill Zimmerman not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:
29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;
30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;
31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;
32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;
33. Calls on the Community institutions and the public administrations of the Member States to provide training for their staff and make their staff familiar with new encryption technologies and techniques by means of the necessary practical training and courses;
— from European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI))
Here's a hint: use any editor that edits and saves as RTF. Save your resumé, then change the file extension from.RTF to.DOC. MS Word will open it transparently. I've been doing this for years.
I think the big question is: did Microsoft consider dropping it merely because it wasn't generating enough revenue, or mostly because they wanted to hurt Apple.
I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.
Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.
There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.
That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.
...People spend time and resources in developing those results and then another amount of time and resrouces to write them, then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings and then some money to publish them.... This is stupid.
Yes. It is stupid. Let's look at why it is so stupid, point by point:
People spend time and resources in developing those results - and that's paid for by research grants, maybe with a handful of change from the researcher's institution, publishers are not financially involved.
then another amount of time and resrouces to write them - that's usually also covered in the research grant, reports are part of the deliverables. Followup papers or re-writes may be funded by the researcher's institution because part of salaried staff's job is to "publish or perish". Again, publishers are not financially involved.
then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings - and there the other researchers institutions pay the bill, as it is their staff, the peers of the author, who must do the reviewing. Again, publishers are not financially involved.
and then some money to publish them - it is here the publishers shell out, but it is chump change compared to the gross income. Again, the researcher and his peers must review even the galley proofs, and it is their institutions which cover those hours.
In short, the publisher deals with distribution and branding.
So. What the current paper-based publishers offer is brand recognition, through the reputation of the journal's past publications. That's something which can be easily duplicated with Open Access. The difficulty is in bootstrapping the process, and that difficulty is fortunately being overcome in several fields.
Thise "closed" journals are not closed, they are abailable, for a fee.
They are in effect closed for most people and even many institutions: Take a look at those fees. The realize that for many institutions, these journals are often only available as part of "packages" which are set up worse than cable TV packages. The only way to get all the journals you want for a given field would be to buy all of the packages from all of the publishers, even if you don't want or don't use 80% - 90% of the others in the package.
However, most places don't have that kind of money to throw around and must choose, some times just one. So one package gets chosen and the journals in those packages, good or not, get promoted and the journals in the other package are invisible. With a little bit of planning, the MBAs choosing the titles to go into the packages and prices for the packages could, if they had incentive, marginalize specific research topics.
Why, yes. I have worked closely for many years with libraries, librarians, researchers and reviewers.
Some people like ammonia and salt. If it's good as a candy, then it's probably seasoning. (Actually that's ammoniumchloride in the candy, not ammonia). Ammonia is a gas and would dissipate quickly after a few minutes in a pan with hot oil...
That would have probably happened if I wasn't using AutoCAD / MS Office @ work & home back then as well.
AutoCad probably runs under WINE if you try on a spare machine. Otherwise, things have come quite far with virtualization. VMware is just one of many options which can host legacy operating systems like Windows inside a virtual machine.
Touchscreens do seem to make a lot of sense in that context. Mice would not only be inappropriate but hopeless and trackballs would only fare a bit better.
...
Cheap desktops get you cheap support. Real servers get you real support. You get what you pay for.
Hmm. Everyone has anecdotes.
It's been ages since I have dealt with Dell. For the lap top, they took many weeks (IIRC 1.5 months) to fix a RAM problem. It was that a bad SIMM needed to be swapped out, but it was not allowed for the customer to do it. I could hear the techs backtalking me in the background over the phone. When they did finally return it, they sent it to the wrong address, though I had painstakingly dealt with many managers to confirm that they had the new address. The best part was that the delivery service just left the box on the doorstep. Someone who happened to know me spotted the box lying outside, saw my name on it and brought it in. Even if it had arrived at the right address it wouldn't have done much good: it arrived a day after I started a one month trip.
Another site I was at had a shitload of Dell servers all under some super-expensive 4hr-guarantee onsite service. About half had hardware malfunctions early one, even though many were different models and purchased at different times. Usually the hardware itself diagnosed the problem, other times it was quite apparent anyway. i.e. dead fan. So the techs at Dell would get informed of hardware problem X, Y, or Z and then come later the same day of the call. Fine. They would then get ushered down to the server room, look at the machine and then scratch themselves and say the part needed for X, Y, or Z was not in there car and it would take a few weeks...
That was a while back though, just over 7 years. But all those machines ran Linux, either Red Hat or Debian.
I hope they have improved, but not bundling compatible hardware with the linux requests is not a promising sign.
Why the touch screen? I can think of several advantages and several disadvantages but it's not anything I had thought to want in a notebook. Why is it an important feature to you?
Myself, I'd go for a 12" notebook, since that for me seems to be the optimum size for a travel computer. Though I recall that the 14" iBook had the better battery life / cost ratio.
Having looked into both formats, I realized that they're both trash. ... OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
So (assuming any legitimacy to the complaint) then use a different tool to convert OpenDocument to HTML. Geez. It's XML and there are quite a few ways to make the transition, many of which are quite good.
You do realize that the article is about the format and not the applications which use them, don't you ? Yeah. I thought so. There are something close to three dozen applications which support OpenDocument, of which OpenOffice is only one.
MS shills seem to be working over time to try to confuse the issues regarding OOXML vs ISO/23600 aka OpenDocument. Two of the main themes are here.
The old one has been OpenDocument == OpenOffice;
the new one joining the FUD storm is the claim that it is IBM and only IBM backing the OpenDocument format.
Crissakes, even the government of China is trying to harmonize with OpenDocument. You also have the 5000 or so participants in OASIS representing 600 or so organizations, companies, agencies and universities participating in OASIS, which is responsible for OpenDocument. You also have about 2 billion MS Office users tired of being forced into a new office suite and/or operating system purchase every the vendor decides to change its undocumented, binary formats.
The whole thing seems to be MS doing the only thing they're good at, waging a PR war, to try to 1) bring focus away from the technical issues being discussed at ISO, and 2) try to hide the groundswell of support for a universal file format.
... If you're in the USA, Gates makes a lot of tax revenue, and keeps the govt happy. Now, what's happening software-wise in all those versions of Windows? The key: Do you trust your computer systems running a foreign countries OS?...
Wishful thinking there. MS is just as big a tax dodger in the US as it is in Europe. Just because you pay your taxes and your company pays it's taxes doesn't mean that either Big Bill or his company do so.
... The key: Do you trust your computer systems running a foreign countries OS?...
It gets even simpler. You can't trust any closed source code. Now, there is still some quality stuff out there that MS hasn't run out of business or bought out, but the bottom line is regardless of whether it's from the MS movement or from a normal company, if you don't have access to the code for the entire tool chain, it could contain just about anything.
However, you don't have to be technically oriented to know that MS presents a problem here. Just read the EULA for 2000 SP3, XP SP1, and 2003 and later. It says flat out that you grant admin rights to Big Bill or his designated representatives.
The bottom line is that the school and the teacher were asking for trouble when they risked it with MS Windows.
MS has tried the same thing in many other school districts, sometimes with success and other times driving the whole district to more appropriate technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The InformationWeek article you cite, If You're Going To Steal Software, Steal From Us: Microsoft Exec, is from this year, 2007. However, it's been about a decade since Chairman Gates admitted encouraging piracy to gain market share. Hey, it works. Spread their proprietary file formats, protocols and digital restrictions technology. That's where the real lock is.
Whatever. I guess someone will have to update this image to reflect the look of the new desktop and his physical decline.
He's not the only one who should have his nads in a vise about now for bad judgment. Several other parties were actively involved in setting it up so he could get in:
He was able to get into the government computers because someone else saw fit to deploy unsound technology proven to be unfit for a networked environment. The individuals involved in making the decision to roll MS Windows into the production environment there functionally enabled McKinnon and others to get in and root around, need to be sharing his cell.
Let's not pretend that there was only one crime committed.
If the door was wide open and you could get in without moving it then it might be unlawful entry. But as it was explained to me by cops and military police in several states, if you move the door or window even an inch to facilitate entry, then it is breaking and entry, not just unlawful entry. IANAL.
So if you were going to engineer a soldier caste, you'd want them to run on AB+ as much as possible.
Not all the monitors are equally good about drawing zero power when switched "off". You may consider having a switch between the wall and the power brick.
I hope you have a photo or other copy of the license, and stay focused. You will get people trying to run you around in circles so keep a log of who you talk with, when and about what - that will make it easier to escalate. Anyway, here are some examples:
So this leaves IBM/Lenovo, for I cannot find a single Toshiba without Windows preinstalled.
Not necessarily. Some years back I got burned for a large sum by IBM. Previously I had very good experience with their service, but that time when I discovered a hardware defect, their service center refused to honor the support contract due to the fact that I was not running M$ cruft on it. Nor would they honor the return policy which was very clear in the law. They eventually won by dragging everything out.
But that defeats the purpose of mandating that no MS Vista application can be sold to federal agencies if the application does not run on the "secure" {sic} version of MS Vista. "Secure" there is probably just an euphamism for DRM'd out the wazzoo. Having the order read that the apps must be available on more secure platforms / other platforms means that the vendor lock is gone.
You don't think this is actually about preserving the privacy, availability and integrity of government data, do you?
Agreed. However, many of his backers do appear to be working to create such a scenario. I'm weak on mythology, but it seems that by doing so, they may be guaranteeing their place in slightly warmer afterlife than their rhetoric seems to seek. But none of that is what I had in mind.
I was thinking more along the lines of smoke and noise to distract from the fact that "deflation is no longer a threat", unemployment, and other domestic policy catastrophies. You also need to distract from the foreign policy disaster that Cheney / Rumsfeld / Haliburton created by screwing up the attack plans for Iraq to create a little profitable chaos (which got out of hand like a wildfire). Invading Iran would probably be a fatal over extension of the US remaining power, even after a draft. Even then, a draft would not be feasible until after the 2008 elections.
... even they are not stupid enough to invade Iran. Even they can picture what a huge fucking disaster that would beActually it already is public domain (warning for PDF). Or which countries where you talking about? If you don't have it, you can download it and set it up.
Well, Phill Zimmerman not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:
29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software; 30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes; 31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category; 32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm; 33. Calls on the Community institutions and the public administrations of the Member States to provide training for their staff and make their staff familiar with new encryption technologies and techniques by means of the necessary practical training and courses; — from European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI))M$ will fix that eventually.
I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.
Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.
There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.
That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.
...People spend time and resources in developing those results and then another amount of time and resrouces to write them, then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings and then some money to publish them.Yes. It is stupid. Let's look at why it is so stupid, point by point:
In short, the publisher deals with distribution and branding.
So. What the current paper-based publishers offer is brand recognition, through the reputation of the journal's past publications. That's something which can be easily duplicated with Open Access. The difficulty is in bootstrapping the process, and that difficulty is fortunately being overcome in several fields.
Thise "closed" journals are not closed, they are abailable, for a fee.They are in effect closed for most people and even many institutions: Take a look at those fees. The realize that for many institutions, these journals are often only available as part of "packages" which are set up worse than cable TV packages. The only way to get all the journals you want for a given field would be to buy all of the packages from all of the publishers, even if you don't want or don't use 80% - 90% of the others in the package.
However, most places don't have that kind of money to throw around and must choose, some times just one. So one package gets chosen and the journals in those packages, good or not, get promoted and the journals in the other package are invisible. With a little bit of planning, the MBAs choosing the titles to go into the packages and prices for the packages could, if they had incentive, marginalize specific research topics.
Why, yes. I have worked closely for many years with libraries, librarians, researchers and reviewers.
Some people like ammonia and salt. If it's good as a candy, then it's probably seasoning. (Actually that's ammoniumchloride in the candy, not ammonia). Ammonia is a gas and would dissipate quickly after a few minutes in a pan with hot oil...
AutoCad probably runs under WINE if you try on a spare machine. Otherwise, things have come quite far with virtualization. VMware is just one of many options which can host legacy operating systems like Windows inside a virtual machine.
Touchscreens do seem to make a lot of sense in that context. Mice would not only be inappropriate but hopeless and trackballs would only fare a bit better.
... Cheap desktops get you cheap support. Real servers get you real support. You get what you pay for.Hmm. Everyone has anecdotes.
It's been ages since I have dealt with Dell. For the lap top, they took many weeks (IIRC 1.5 months) to fix a RAM problem. It was that a bad SIMM needed to be swapped out, but it was not allowed for the customer to do it. I could hear the techs backtalking me in the background over the phone. When they did finally return it, they sent it to the wrong address, though I had painstakingly dealt with many managers to confirm that they had the new address. The best part was that the delivery service just left the box on the doorstep. Someone who happened to know me spotted the box lying outside, saw my name on it and brought it in. Even if it had arrived at the right address it wouldn't have done much good: it arrived a day after I started a one month trip.
Another site I was at had a shitload of Dell servers all under some super-expensive 4hr-guarantee onsite service. About half had hardware malfunctions early one, even though many were different models and purchased at different times. Usually the hardware itself diagnosed the problem, other times it was quite apparent anyway. i.e. dead fan. So the techs at Dell would get informed of hardware problem X, Y, or Z and then come later the same day of the call. Fine. They would then get ushered down to the server room, look at the machine and then scratch themselves and say the part needed for X, Y, or Z was not in there car and it would take a few weeks...
That was a while back though, just over 7 years. But all those machines ran Linux, either Red Hat or Debian. I hope they have improved, but not bundling compatible hardware with the linux requests is not a promising sign.
Why the touch screen? I can think of several advantages and several disadvantages but it's not anything I had thought to want in a notebook. Why is it an important feature to you?
Myself, I'd go for a 12" notebook, since that for me seems to be the optimum size for a travel computer. Though I recall that the 14" iBook had the better battery life / cost ratio.
Having looked into both formats, I realized that they're both trash.
... OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
So (assuming any legitimacy to the complaint) then use a different tool to convert OpenDocument to HTML. Geez. It's XML and there are quite a few ways to make the transition, many of which are quite good.
You do realize that the article is about the format and not the applications which use them, don't you ? Yeah. I thought so. There are something close to three dozen applications which support OpenDocument, of which OpenOffice is only one.
MS shills seem to be working over time to try to confuse the issues regarding OOXML vs ISO/23600 aka OpenDocument. Two of the main themes are here.
Crissakes, even the government of China is trying to harmonize with OpenDocument. You also have the 5000 or so participants in OASIS representing 600 or so organizations, companies, agencies and universities participating in OASIS, which is responsible for OpenDocument. You also have about 2 billion MS Office users tired of being forced into a new office suite and/or operating system purchase every the vendor decides to change its undocumented, binary formats.
The whole thing seems to be MS doing the only thing they're good at, waging a PR war, to try to 1) bring focus away from the technical issues being discussed at ISO, and 2) try to hide the groundswell of support for a universal file format.
... If you're in the USA, Gates makes a lot of tax revenue, and keeps the govt happy. Now, what's happening software-wise in all those versions of Windows? The key: Do you trust your computer systems running a foreign countries OS?Wishful thinking there. MS is just as big a tax dodger in the US as it is in Europe. Just because you pay your taxes and your company pays it's taxes doesn't mean that either Big Bill or his company do so.
... The key: Do you trust your computer systems running a foreign countries OS?It gets even simpler. You can't trust any closed source code. Now, there is still some quality stuff out there that MS hasn't run out of business or bought out, but the bottom line is regardless of whether it's from the MS movement or from a normal company, if you don't have access to the code for the entire tool chain, it could contain just about anything.
However, you don't have to be technically oriented to know that MS presents a problem here. Just read the EULA for 2000 SP3, XP SP1, and 2003 and later. It says flat out that you grant admin rights to Big Bill or his designated representatives.
The bottom line is that the school and the teacher were asking for trouble when they risked it with MS Windows. MS has tried the same thing in many other school districts, sometimes with success and other times driving the whole district to more appropriate technology.
You need the wireless fence technology for when they outgrow the Skinner box. ;)
Or a less radical step in the right direction be for the iPod and iTunes to actually support Ogg Vorbis.
You mean besides wireless fences, right?