Not my apps. Not my locales. Those examples you're reacting to are not locations I run. I just happen talk to tech staff when I can. The apps that broke were done by the book. MS' book.
If they'd used a better toolkit, say Qt or GTK+, they could have ported to Linux like others suggest and have done with the whole thing. But management at the vendors are ideologically opposed to that.
Way to intentionally misunderstand the statement. Read it again: the same intentionally false statments and themes get posted again and again by shills.
Sure those articles are from two years ago. So, what? The apps are already bought and paid for. They're older than two years. They didn't change. They don't need to change. Why should businesses and everyone else keep chasing MS' moving goals posts?
I'm glad you pointed out that Linux distros are a secure option and now easy to use. However, you miss the point that these organiszations and businesses are locked into NT 5 and 5.1 (pre SP2). If they can't make the transition easily to SP2, it'll be more of a transition to move to BSD, Linux or whatever else. However, in the medium and long term it may be very well worth it.
The only truely secure computer is one that is turned off.
Again, so what? The fact that no system is perfect doesn't not mean that all systems are equal. The heart of the issue there is about mitigating risks. Some architectures are designed with a multi-user, networked environment in mind, others are designed for no network and one app/user at a time.
Please run a copy of Linux from 2002, and only install the vendor released patches for that version without updating to a new version. How long will your box be free from critical security flaws?
I've done that before -- in 2002, since you mention the year. It was free of critical security flaws for over six months. Just to re-iterate, patches are not the same as updates. Yes, updating to a different version will cause trouble and if you do that in a production environment without first testing, you can end up having you ass handed to you. However, patches are not updates. Patches fix a problem with an existing version. Period.
How often does updating one thing in a Linux environment start causing problems with other things?
Who knows? That's irrelevant. The posts above are about patching not updating. Don't get confused about the two. If you want to start a new thread about updating, go ahead. But the original point is that instead of issuing a clean patch that fixes a specific problem, MS lumps several together and then piggybacks unrelated changes in functionality to essential patches in order to force the acceptance of the changes to functionality. That makes hell for MS' customers.
I don't believe I saw an example of one of "several of their mission critical apps".
And you won't. What those locations do, and what's wrong with them, is between them and their vendors, not for your leader in Redmond to interfere with. If they worked with XP SP1, why change? A security patch, if that's what it really is, shouldn't affect functionality. If it's not a security patch, but a functionality upgrade, then it's fraudulent to call it a security patch. If undesireable changes in configuration and functionality are pushed out by bundling them with security patches deemd essential, then that's illegal and unethical, though you'll have to ask a lawyer what that's actually called.
However, a quick check of any non-MSN search engine will bring up lots of articles about the troubles caused by XP SP2.
Given the problems SP2 has had with third party (and even MS' own) apps as well as falling on its face security-wise, it would appear that SP2 is more about rolling out unpopular configuration and functionality changes under the guise of "security". After most customers, politicians and even courts will simply roll over and close their eyes when the magic word, "security", is mentioned.
Like I said, get over it. And while you're at it, get out of the way. Like one of the reviewers says, "Unfortunately, Windows remains a quite dangerous system to connect to the Internet, and users are still very much on their own in terms of security solutions."
They also happen to be "Rapture Ready Administration", and what better way to be ready for the Rapture than to bring it about yourself.
Wouldn't that ensure that they go to the hot place instead? Working to bring about a collapse seems to me as working for the forces of evil. (Assuming that type of cosmos).
I recall that the Bush/Reagan administration was fingered for allegedly paying Iran to hold onto the hostages until after the US election, but do not recall;) the specifics. I don't know that you can pin that on Big Bush, but it certainly was part of the administration he was in. Given that Reagan's brain died years before the rest of his body, it would not be surprising that he was part of the decision.
Even if we are going to gradually phase out, he will block the decision to do so. And it won't work, since most will continue to use MS Office (some because they don't want to use anything else, others out of convenience).
Eventually, MS will try to shoehorn your boss's company into MSO 2007 or later. The differences there will kill any of the argument about him using the "same" program. Bosses like safety nets, especially those that don't have licensing fees. OOo gives him that safety net.
Looking ahead, if MS rolls out new product activation or DRM that checks with a home sever every time an application or document is opened, then he'll be SOL with any unlicensed copies of MS Office. The DRM, and maybe the product activation, have been rolled out so far as inexctable parts of "security" upgrades. Turning on those functions could easily come the same way.
The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.
Calling it one thing while delivering another is fraud. Forcing new feature additions and changes as a prerequisite getting security repairs can be viewed as extortion. Both are illegal. RICO could be invoked for the latter, maybe. Either one could be brought up as a class action suit. Probably the majority of MS customers (and former customers) have been inconvienced or harmed by those practices.
Most of the feature changes in MS Windows seem to cause harm in some way or another, especially to the free market. However, it's probably not necessary to show, it should be enough to show that they are unnecessary and/or unwanted.
They should be forced to strictly separate the two.
That would be interesting to see. It would certainly hinder or prevent the ability to leverage the desktop monopoly to gain and maintain monopolies in other areas. That would in turn necessitate a major change in the company's business models. That change would benefit the market by loosening the grip on its existing monopolies and reducing the ability to use them to make new ones. Or, it might break the company, in which case the market would probably soar as competition is restored.
A lot. Twice. MS makes a profit on Windows, somewhere about 70%-80% profit in fact. Then you pay again when you have to re-tool your whole shop for the differences found in XP SP2. That is, if you are still running out-dated architectures like MS Windows. Many of us don't pay a thing.
So, dude, just lay off with the faboi stuff and get over it:
XP SP2 breaks a lot of software that worked under XP SP1 -- even today, in October of 2006.
I realize some of the MS fabois just don't know better (or don't want to), but many simply get paid to cruise blogs and websites and put in the good word for their masters and throw out the same canards again and again. However, because there are many more among those that read and don't post that haven't figured that tactic out it's necessary address them again and again:
The places that notice little or no effect between XP SP1 and XP SP2 are few. Even the reviews compared the effort of deploying SP2 to more like an OS upgrade than to anything else, let alone a "patch". Several sites I witnessed, could not deploy SP2 because it broke several of their mission critical apps, even on the desktop. In those cases, none of the vendors were quick about getting their over-priced cruft to work with SP2 for MS' over-priced cruft. One even tried to demand payment for development work.
In contrast, look how Debian (and some other systems) still does it. Patches address only specific problems and do not change the functionality of the software. In a production environment, it is essential that nothing changes until you yourself make it change. People pay the money for getting a known item. It will have advantages and disadvantages, but since they are known they can be planned around. Changing the specs means a lot of readjustment, which translates into lower return on investment.
Look at it this way. What if the gear ratio on your car changed occasionally and without advanced warning? Or if, after two years of using it daily, it suddenly turns into a diesel while the tank is full of gasoline? Or if the tires changed from summer, winter, or all-weather while driving? You get the idea. If you buy something to perform in a certain way, you expect it to continue performing that way for the life cycle of the product. It used to be that way even in IT. I guess it still is, with the exeception of MS and its products. I guess that's because so much of the MS business model is based on keeping customers on the treadmill and too busy to look around, let alone hop off.
Businesses like stability and predictability. Debian has those in spades and is attracting more users that way. As a result, the visibility of Debian is increasing and as that happens, an re-awakening of the knowledge that even IT can be reliable and predictable. Reliable and predictable == money.
This isn't 1900. The landscape isn't still wide open with empty, up-for-grabs farmland or mining opportunities.
It wasn't back then either. It had to be wrested from the First Nations, often with the help of the military.
It would often happen either of two ways. One way, squatters would settle across treaty boundaries, then get rousted / slaughtered for the violation. The press would neglect to mention the treaty violation and the military would go in for retribution. Another way, young officers needing combat experience would kickstart the process by raiding and then waiting for the counter raid.
Nowadays, it's politicians and wannabe turbocapitalists spouting off about illegal labor being the "grease on the gears of the economy" that are actively encouraging today's problems. Also, most EU countries have outdated immigration policies (often upheld by those wannabes) designed during times when there actually were immigrants and the numbers where so small that they actually could assimilate. These days you get very few immigrants and mostly transmigrants. The latter have no intention of adopting new language, culture, values, mores, and so on. They're basically starting a new colony on foreign soil.
But we didn't have a lot of Poles, or Russians (to use your examples) pushing to have US schools start teaching in Russian or Polish.
That's an example. Previously, people moved and became part of a new culture. Now, most seem to be squatters or, to say it more nicely, transmigrants.
Don't let your boss's dad bullshit you. There's no need to "rip and replace" like his hero Ballmer talks about. Any smart business phases in new technology. The way to do that with OOo is to get it installed along side all the illegal MS Office licenses. At the beginning make sure it is set to save in the same format as everyon esle is using. That way, those that wish to can try it out. It's also a useful tool to recover corrupted MS Office files.
After key people have tried OOo, and you have some feedback, then make a migration plan. The boss's dad can keep using his copy of MS Office for the forseeable future. But keep in mind that he can lose the business lots of money that way. Going to OOo can reduce the company's liability there. Given all the phone home features in MS Windows, does he feel like continuing to take the risk?
Amazing that this hasn't happened yet, though, isn't it? Europe's entire IT economy dependent on a single corporation somewhere in the US, and they don't seem to mind.
What does that have to do with the IT sector? Or do you mean that the entire economy is based on IT?
If it's the former, then that's wrong. IT is (or shoud be) just a tool that you use to get your work done. That's the same whether it's coordinating a fleet of taxis or running a governement or anything else. "making" and "selling" software is such a miniscule part of the economy that it's truly bizarre that it is such a focus of attention.
Pretty much every aspect of society and the economy nowadays is depended in someway on using ICT for most basic activities.
That's pretty scary when you consider that nearly each and every board room, meeting room and government office has a system that is exposed to the net with what amount to standardized backdoors into the system. Yes standardized, the same exploit working on 90% of the desktops can be called standard. In many cases there are even microphones built into or attached to the systems which can be activated.
That's really scary when you realize that no one outside of the original vendor can do code audits. It's the only one with access to or use of the source code. So in principle anything could be hidden there on purpose or by accident, by the vendor or by intruders. So called Anti-virus programs detect massproduced intrusion tools, but only after they've been collected and analysed. Custom or targeted intrusions using code that is not wide spread have a much lower chance of detection.
So making a backdoor for the one brand/model of system gives you a backdoor into not just part of the IT sector, but really a majority of the rest of the EU economy. France's move is a good one. Moving to open standards for government documents, will enable at the least diversification. Who knows how big the final gain will be. Few if any really predicted how (pre-spam) e-mail (aka SMTP + ISO-8859-x) would take off and drive advancement. Few if any really predicted that the WWW (aka HTTP + HTML) would take off and drive all kinds of improvement. However, everyone, even Chairman Gates' fanbois and catamites, is experiencing a need for document interoperability. Interoperability is something which we have seen can only be provided by open standards, in this case OpenDocument.
Was the ISP throttling all audio/video broadcasting or just Norwegian sources or just NRK? It'd be an easy way to steer what information people get by limiting access to certain sources or views.
That's probably the whole point of "shared" source, which is basically a plain old NDA wrapped in a shitload of marketing hype. The bottom line is it makes it easy to go after projects and people who reverse engineer MS' protocols and other problems from MS licensing and/or lack of documentation. The better job these people and teams do, the better show MS can make to the uninformed that their secret sauce was stolen. That sounds a lot better to shareholders than the product was so crappy that it was cracked in short order from the binaries alone.
Sounds almost as if those at Microsoft pursuing this case do not even know what their own library routines may be capapble of.
That's not unprecedented. The Samba team regularly has contact from MS developers asking for help with MS' own junk. In this case they're probably itching to get hold of the guy. First, because he's showing that even MS' patches are junk. Second, because he probably has insight into who to do it correctly and maybe they can entice or force it out of him. Getting hold of him in a court setting would allow MS to set the conditions of "employment".
I think you're mistaken about which companies pay taxes. MS may have payed Senators. It may have payed off Representatives. It may have contributed heavily to campaigns, but it appears not to pay taxes, not at all. So all that money it's bleeding from the government is just going down the tubes.
It's not a problem limited to the US. MS has tax shelters for it's EU units. But tax is a separate discussion.
The discussion is about EU law, MS broke it. MS has been able to continue breaking the law while delaying the punishment.
Two of the themes in the original (1975) Rollerball are really relevant. One is the power of corporations over the individual. The other is more subtle and probably missed: freedom of information. The whole mystery could have been solved if Johnathon could have had access to the data, but through technological obsolescence (probably planned) not even the archivist could get at it. That's this whole WMV/WMA codec + DRM thing in a nutshell.
I expect that the 2002 version would be a complete waste of time, but am curious if that whole pursuit of information plot was cut out of the film. I bet it was sanitized by the big money and lacks any allusion to of loss of codecs or loss of data.
Much of the damage from plutonium comes from it being a heavy metal. Being radioactive just makes it extra nasty. Look at the low concentrations of non-radioactive isotopes of cadmium, mercury, lead, arsenic, and so on needed to cause severe organ or neurological damage:
Plutonium is in the same league. But it would be much harder to work with because of the radioctivity. Odds are that the mules used to transport, process into something water soluable, or deliver to target would suffer and die in a what that does not go unnoticed. Kind of like that East European fellow found dying a few years ago along a W European motorway with the radioactive cargo that killed him still in the trunk. Or the empty trucks returning to Russia with very hot cargo beds...
Someone wants to build a bridge across the Bering Strait, to re-link Asia and North America. Building that bridge is hard enough, but the real problem is that for it to be useful, we'd have to build a highway -- on both sides
Close, with the vast distances to be covered and the high volume of freight, rail would be about the only choice. Even that would have difficulties some seasons and may not be practical year round. Though in the summer solar electric stations along the line could probably provide the power. Rails are more efficient than highways and able to route higher volumes of freight. They're also presumably easier for customs to monitor.
That said, passenger transport is an easy addon once the freight line is there. Personal vehicles can be stowed in car carriers. Passengers can then spend time in their cabins or the restaurant, pub, etc. Roll your car, loaded with gear, on in Portland or Vancouver and off in Anchorage, Anadyr, Magadan, Jakutsk, Wuhan or Seoul.
A highway would be a waste of resources at this point both to build, maintain and use. Just Portland to Anchorage is about 1500 miles, or about 25hrs of driving at an average speed of 60mph -- and that looks to be only about the halfway point.
Like those above have said, check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) or a derivative like k12ltsp or Skolelinux. You can then keep using those old machines till they drop and then phase them out as they die. Many distros, like Ubuntu for example, already have LTSP client support.
EdTechLive has some excellent interviews on LTSP with staff that have rolled it out at their schools or, in some cases, districts. The sound quality in some of them is not so good, but the material is worth straining your ears for.
The schools in Portland, Oregon have been thriving on LTSP for some years now.
They don't know what Common Carriage is either, but benefit greatly from it. Net Neutrality is basically trying to re-frame Common Carriage as something new, unnecessary and unproven rather than old, essential to business, and time tested. It was what allowed all the small ISPs and software companies to flourish in the last two decades: it prevented newer business and services from being locked out by more established ones, it prevented ISPs and hosting companies for being liable for the content produced by their customers.
Now that a handful of megacorps have crushed or absorbed all of the small ones, and it's really hard for these to crush or absorb each other using the same methods. Going back to the pathetic crumbly, balkanized patchwork of non-interoperable, 1960-style proprietary networks seems to be what these want to try again. It gives exponential advantage to larger market share. Common Carriage is preventing these megacorps from balkanizing the net. So far...
How about a poll phrasing it this way:
"Are you in favor of equal access to the net or would you prefer to allow groups and businesses to be closed out by the big players and to allow ISPs to give you slower service unless you pay extra?"
Shop equipment like saws, sanders and such have mounts for an exhaust to take away dust.
You'd think that more photocopiers would have similar mounts to vent the ozone and gases from the inks.
What really bothered me about this in the movie was that they could very well have had Aragorn give the swords to the hobbits and in passing give mention to their origin (or someone else could have noticed the odd weapons and told them later if time was an issue) replacing the similar book scene with Tom.
Indeed. In the cultures and mythologies that Tolkien drew from to create his six books (it's not a trilogy), seven including The Hobbit, the lineage of a weapon was very important and always relayed when granting them. Cutting Bombadil from the film weakened the forshadowing quite a bit, perhaps necessary when trying to squeeze six books into three films, but at least Aragorn could have mentioned the lineage of the weapons when handing them out in the film verion.
At the end of the story, Gandalf left the hobbits on their own to deal with the scourging of the Shire while he himself set of to talk with Bombadil who was "also a steward".
... money is being passed around like crazy, spent on little more than flushing wealth down the toilet, not to mention far too much of my irreplacable time...
The concept of the potlatch (conspicuous destruction of wealth to humiliate an opponent) has been around for ages and ages.
It's not a new phenomenon as far as society goes, and not limited to any single culture.
Though prior to 1999, people used IT as a tool to get work done and chose things other than IT costs for their pissing contests. e.g. lighting cigars that cost half an average slob's day's wage with hundred dollar bills
Things haven't gone back to normal fully yet: people are still talking about IT costs / per capita IT expenditures / etc. rather than about how effective those expenditures are.
Why not ask for a product recall the next time a single businesses product causes your online banking to go tits up for a day and a half? Or when air traffic is shut down for hours over the most populace state in the country? Or when you and no one else in the airport can get a boarding pass printed?
Those are rhetorical questions. The answer to "why not?" is that what's pawned off as IT these days *cough*MS*cough* is not about getting work done but about budgetary and staffing level pissing contests, and occasionally plain ideology: voting with their wallet for the legend of Bill.
Aren't Thailand and Korea getting "Free" Trade Agreements rammed their {down|up} $ORIFICE ?
IIRC, the Thai one was subject to a lot of protests, so the venue was moved to the US where there are "Free Speech Zones" to handle any Thai with the money and time to fly to the US for a protest.
But once their machines start swinging votes for the other side, they'll soon start adding security.
They can't.
The main reason being that security start in the design phase and cannot be added after the fact. Among other problems, the current systems are based on MS Access and MS Windows, neither of which can be made secure. What are you going to do? Huh? Maybe a code audit and then clean room compilation of the tool chain and then the system. MS doesn't allow the latter, even with the "Shared" source NDAs. It certainly won't or, more likely, can't allow the former.
Face it. It's the end for Diebold's voting machines, they're just trying to pull an SCO now and hang on for as long as possible. The more noise Diebold makes about defending it's voting machines the longer it will take people to look into their ATMs and other devices.
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Not my apps. Not my locales. Those examples you're reacting to are not locations I run. I just happen talk to tech staff when I can. The apps that broke were done by the book. MS' book.
If they'd used a better toolkit, say Qt or GTK+, they could have ported to Linux like others suggest and have done with the whole thing. But management at the vendors are ideologically opposed to that.
Way to intentionally misunderstand the statement. Read it again: the same intentionally false statments and themes get posted again and again by shills.
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Sure those articles are from two years ago. So, what? The apps are already bought and paid for. They're older than two years. They didn't change. They don't need to change. Why should businesses and everyone else keep chasing MS' moving goals posts?
I'm glad you pointed out that Linux distros are a secure option and now easy to use. However, you miss the point that these organiszations and businesses are locked into NT 5 and 5.1 (pre SP2). If they can't make the transition easily to SP2, it'll be more of a transition to move to BSD, Linux or whatever else. However, in the medium and long term it may be very well worth it.
Again, so what? The fact that no system is perfect doesn't not mean that all systems are equal. The heart of the issue there is about mitigating risks. Some architectures are designed with a multi-user, networked environment in mind, others are designed for no network and one app/user at a time.
I've done that before -- in 2002, since you mention the year. It was free of critical security flaws for over six months. Just to re-iterate, patches are not the same as updates. Yes, updating to a different version will cause trouble and if you do that in a production environment without first testing, you can end up having you ass handed to you. However, patches are not updates. Patches fix a problem with an existing version. Period. Who knows? That's irrelevant. The posts above are about patching not updating. Don't get confused about the two. If you want to start a new thread about updating, go ahead. But the original point is that instead of issuing a clean patch that fixes a specific problem, MS lumps several together and then piggybacks unrelated changes in functionality to essential patches in order to force the acceptance of the changes to functionality. That makes hell for MS' customers.Correct second link: Windows XP Service Pack 2: Install With Care
And you won't. What those locations do, and what's wrong with them, is between them and their vendors, not for your leader in Redmond to interfere with. If they worked with XP SP1, why change? A security patch, if that's what it really is, shouldn't affect functionality. If it's not a security patch, but a functionality upgrade, then it's fraudulent to call it a security patch. If undesireable changes in configuration and functionality are pushed out by bundling them with security patches deemd essential, then that's illegal and unethical, though you'll have to ask a lawyer what that's actually called.
However, a quick check of any non-MSN search engine will bring up lots of articles about the troubles caused by XP SP2.
Given the problems SP2 has had with third party (and even MS' own) apps as well as falling on its face security-wise, it would appear that SP2 is more about rolling out unpopular configuration and functionality changes under the guise of "security". After most customers, politicians and even courts will simply roll over and close their eyes when the magic word, "security", is mentioned.
Like I said, get over it. And while you're at it, get out of the way. Like one of the reviewers says, "Unfortunately, Windows remains a quite dangerous system to connect to the Internet, and users are still very much on their own in terms of security solutions."
I recall that the Bush/Reagan administration was fingered for allegedly paying Iran to hold onto the hostages until after the US election, but do not recall ;) the specifics. I don't know that you can pin that on Big Bush, but it certainly was part of the administration he was in. Given that Reagan's brain died years before the rest of his body, it would not be surprising that he was part of the decision.
Eventually, MS will try to shoehorn your boss's company into MSO 2007 or later. The differences there will kill any of the argument about him using the "same" program. Bosses like safety nets, especially those that don't have licensing fees. OOo gives him that safety net.
Looking ahead, if MS rolls out new product activation or DRM that checks with a home sever every time an application or document is opened, then he'll be SOL with any unlicensed copies of MS Office. The DRM, and maybe the product activation, have been rolled out so far as inexctable parts of "security" upgrades. Turning on those functions could easily come the same way.
Most of the feature changes in MS Windows seem to cause harm in some way or another, especially to the free market. However, it's probably not necessary to show, it should be enough to show that they are unnecessary and/or unwanted.
That would be interesting to see. It would certainly hinder or prevent the ability to leverage the desktop monopoly to gain and maintain monopolies in other areas. That would in turn necessitate a major change in the company's business models. That change would benefit the market by loosening the grip on its existing monopolies and reducing the ability to use them to make new ones. Or, it might break the company, in which case the market would probably soar as competition is restored.
A lot. Twice. MS makes a profit on Windows, somewhere about 70%-80% profit in fact. Then you pay again when you have to re-tool your whole shop for the differences found in XP SP2. That is, if you are still running out-dated architectures like MS Windows. Many of us don't pay a thing.
So, dude, just lay off with the faboi stuff and get over it: XP SP2 breaks a lot of software that worked under XP SP1 -- even today, in October of 2006.
I realize some of the MS fabois just don't know better (or don't want to), but many simply get paid to cruise blogs and websites and put in the good word for their masters and throw out the same canards again and again. However, because there are many more among those that read and don't post that haven't figured that tactic out it's necessary address them again and again:
The places that notice little or no effect between XP SP1 and XP SP2 are few. Even the reviews compared the effort of deploying SP2 to more like an OS upgrade than to anything else, let alone a "patch". Several sites I witnessed, could not deploy SP2 because it broke several of their mission critical apps, even on the desktop. In those cases, none of the vendors were quick about getting their over-priced cruft to work with SP2 for MS' over-priced cruft. One even tried to demand payment for development work.
In contrast, look how Debian (and some other systems) still does it. Patches address only specific problems and do not change the functionality of the software. In a production environment, it is essential that nothing changes until you yourself make it change. People pay the money for getting a known item. It will have advantages and disadvantages, but since they are known they can be planned around. Changing the specs means a lot of readjustment, which translates into lower return on investment.
Look at it this way. What if the gear ratio on your car changed occasionally and without advanced warning? Or if, after two years of using it daily, it suddenly turns into a diesel while the tank is full of gasoline? Or if the tires changed from summer, winter, or all-weather while driving? You get the idea. If you buy something to perform in a certain way, you expect it to continue performing that way for the life cycle of the product. It used to be that way even in IT. I guess it still is, with the exeception of MS and its products. I guess that's because so much of the MS business model is based on keeping customers on the treadmill and too busy to look around, let alone hop off.
Businesses like stability and predictability. Debian has those in spades and is attracting more users that way. As a result, the visibility of Debian is increasing and as that happens, an re-awakening of the knowledge that even IT can be reliable and predictable. Reliable and predictable == money.
It wasn't back then either. It had to be wrested from the First Nations, often with the help of the military.
It would often happen either of two ways. One way, squatters would settle across treaty boundaries, then get rousted / slaughtered for the violation. The press would neglect to mention the treaty violation and the military would go in for retribution. Another way, young officers needing combat experience would kickstart the process by raiding and then waiting for the counter raid.
Nowadays, it's politicians and wannabe turbocapitalists spouting off about illegal labor being the "grease on the gears of the economy" that are actively encouraging today's problems. Also, most EU countries have outdated immigration policies (often upheld by those wannabes) designed during times when there actually were immigrants and the numbers where so small that they actually could assimilate. These days you get very few immigrants and mostly transmigrants. The latter have no intention of adopting new language, culture, values, mores, and so on. They're basically starting a new colony on foreign soil.
That's an example. Previously, people moved and became part of a new culture. Now, most seem to be squatters or, to say it more nicely, transmigrants.
Don't let your boss's dad bullshit you. There's no need to "rip and replace" like his hero Ballmer talks about. Any smart business phases in new technology. The way to do that with OOo is to get it installed along side all the illegal MS Office licenses. At the beginning make sure it is set to save in the same format as everyon esle is using. That way, those that wish to can try it out. It's also a useful tool to recover corrupted MS Office files.
After key people have tried OOo, and you have some feedback, then make a migration plan. The boss's dad can keep using his copy of MS Office for the forseeable future. But keep in mind that he can lose the business lots of money that way. Going to OOo can reduce the company's liability there. Given all the phone home features in MS Windows, does he feel like continuing to take the risk?
What does that have to do with the IT sector? Or do you mean that the entire economy is based on IT?
If it's the former, then that's wrong. IT is (or shoud be) just a tool that you use to get your work done. That's the same whether it's coordinating a fleet of taxis or running a governement or anything else. "making" and "selling" software is such a miniscule part of the economy that it's truly bizarre that it is such a focus of attention.
Pretty much every aspect of society and the economy nowadays is depended in someway on using ICT for most basic activities.
That's pretty scary when you consider that nearly each and every board room, meeting room and government office has a system that is exposed to the net with what amount to standardized backdoors into the system. Yes standardized, the same exploit working on 90% of the desktops can be called standard. In many cases there are even microphones built into or attached to the systems which can be activated.
That's really scary when you realize that no one outside of the original vendor can do code audits. It's the only one with access to or use of the source code. So in principle anything could be hidden there on purpose or by accident, by the vendor or by intruders. So called Anti-virus programs detect massproduced intrusion tools, but only after they've been collected and analysed. Custom or targeted intrusions using code that is not wide spread have a much lower chance of detection.
So making a backdoor for the one brand /model of system gives you a backdoor into not just part of the IT sector, but really a majority of the rest of the EU economy. France's move is a good one. Moving to open standards for government documents, will enable at the least diversification. Who knows how big the final gain will be. Few if any really predicted how (pre-spam) e-mail (aka SMTP + ISO-8859-x) would take off and drive advancement. Few if any really predicted that the WWW (aka HTTP + HTML) would take off and drive all kinds of improvement. However, everyone, even Chairman Gates' fanbois and catamites, is experiencing a need for document interoperability. Interoperability is something which we have seen can only be provided by open standards, in this case OpenDocument.
Was the ISP throttling all audio/video broadcasting or just Norwegian sources or just NRK? It'd be an easy way to steer what information people get by limiting access to certain sources or views.
That's probably the whole point of "shared" source, which is basically a plain old NDA wrapped in a shitload of marketing hype. The bottom line is it makes it easy to go after projects and people who reverse engineer MS' protocols and other problems from MS licensing and/or lack of documentation. The better job these people and teams do, the better show MS can make to the uninformed that their secret sauce was stolen. That sounds a lot better to shareholders than the product was so crappy that it was cracked in short order from the binaries alone.
That's not unprecedented. The Samba team regularly has contact from MS developers asking for help with MS' own junk. In this case they're probably itching to get hold of the guy. First, because he's showing that even MS' patches are junk. Second, because he probably has insight into who to do it correctly and maybe they can entice or force it out of him. Getting hold of him in a court setting would allow MS to set the conditions of "employment".
I think you're mistaken about which companies pay taxes. MS may have payed Senators. It may have payed off Representatives. It may have contributed heavily to campaigns, but it appears not to pay taxes, not at all. So all that money it's bleeding from the government is just going down the tubes.
It's not a problem limited to the US. MS has tax shelters for it's EU units. But tax is a separate discussion.
The discussion is about EU law, MS broke it. MS has been able to continue breaking the law while delaying the punishment.
Two of the themes in the original (1975) Rollerball are really relevant. One is the power of corporations over the individual. The other is more subtle and probably missed: freedom of information. The whole mystery could have been solved if Johnathon could have had access to the data, but through technological obsolescence (probably planned) not even the archivist could get at it. That's this whole WMV/WMA codec + DRM thing in a nutshell.
I expect that the 2002 version would be a complete waste of time, but am curious if that whole pursuit of information plot was cut out of the film. I bet it was sanitized by the big money and lacks any allusion to of loss of codecs or loss of data.
- heavy metal poisoning
- heavy metal toxicity
Plutonium is in the same league. But it would be much harder to work with because of the radioctivity. Odds are that the mules used to transport, process into something water soluable, or deliver to target would suffer and die in a what that does not go unnoticed. Kind of like that East European fellow found dying a few years ago along a W European motorway with the radioactive cargo that killed him still in the trunk. Or the empty trucks returning to Russia with very hot cargo beds...Close, with the vast distances to be covered and the high volume of freight, rail would be about the only choice. Even that would have difficulties some seasons and may not be practical year round. Though in the summer solar electric stations along the line could probably provide the power. Rails are more efficient than highways and able to route higher volumes of freight. They're also presumably easier for customs to monitor.
That said, passenger transport is an easy addon once the freight line is there. Personal vehicles can be stowed in car carriers. Passengers can then spend time in their cabins or the restaurant, pub, etc. Roll your car, loaded with gear, on in Portland or Vancouver and off in Anchorage, Anadyr, Magadan, Jakutsk, Wuhan or Seoul.
A highway would be a waste of resources at this point both to build, maintain and use. Just Portland to Anchorage is about 1500 miles, or about 25hrs of driving at an average speed of 60mph -- and that looks to be only about the halfway point.
Like those above have said, check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) or a derivative like k12ltsp or Skolelinux. You can then keep using those old machines till they drop and then phase them out as they die. Many distros, like Ubuntu for example, already have LTSP client support.
EdTechLive has some excellent interviews on LTSP with staff that have rolled it out at their schools or, in some cases, districts. The sound quality in some of them is not so good, but the material is worth straining your ears for.
The schools in Portland, Oregon have been thriving on LTSP for some years now.They don't know what Common Carriage is either, but benefit greatly from it. Net Neutrality is basically trying to re-frame Common Carriage as something new, unnecessary and unproven rather than old, essential to business, and time tested. It was what allowed all the small ISPs and software companies to flourish in the last two decades: it prevented newer business and services from being locked out by more established ones, it prevented ISPs and hosting companies for being liable for the content produced by their customers.
Now that a handful of megacorps have crushed or absorbed all of the small ones, and it's really hard for these to crush or absorb each other using the same methods. Going back to the pathetic crumbly, balkanized patchwork of non-interoperable, 1960-style proprietary networks seems to be what these want to try again. It gives exponential advantage to larger market share. Common Carriage is preventing these megacorps from balkanizing the net. So far...
How about a poll phrasing it this way:
"Are you in favor of equal access to the net or would you prefer to allow groups and businesses to be closed out by the big players and to allow ISPs to give you slower service unless you pay extra?"
Shop equipment like saws, sanders and such have mounts for an exhaust to take away dust. You'd think that more photocopiers would have similar mounts to vent the ozone and gases from the inks.
At the end of the story, Gandalf left the hobbits on their own to deal with the scourging of the Shire while he himself set of to talk with Bombadil who was "also a steward".
The concept of the potlatch (conspicuous destruction of wealth to humiliate an opponent) has been around for ages and ages. It's not a new phenomenon as far as society goes, and not limited to any single culture. Though prior to 1999, people used IT as a tool to get work done and chose things other than IT costs for their pissing contests. e.g. lighting cigars that cost half an average slob's day's wage with hundred dollar bills
Things haven't gone back to normal fully yet: people are still talking about IT costs / per capita IT expenditures / etc. rather than about how effective those expenditures are.
Why not ask for a product recall the next time a single businesses product causes your online banking to go tits up for a day and a half? Or when air traffic is shut down for hours over the most populace state in the country? Or when you and no one else in the airport can get a boarding pass printed?
Those are rhetorical questions. The answer to "why not?" is that what's pawned off as IT these days *cough*MS*cough* is not about getting work done but about budgetary and staffing level pissing contests, and occasionally plain ideology: voting with their wallet for the legend of Bill.
Aren't Thailand and Korea getting "Free" Trade Agreements rammed their {down|up} $ORIFICE ?
IIRC, the Thai one was subject to a lot of protests, so the venue was moved to the US where there are "Free Speech Zones" to handle any Thai with the money and time to fly to the US for a protest.
They can't.
The main reason being that security start in the design phase and cannot be added after the fact. Among other problems, the current systems are based on MS Access and MS Windows, neither of which can be made secure. What are you going to do? Huh? Maybe a code audit and then clean room compilation of the tool chain and then the system. MS doesn't allow the latter, even with the "Shared" source NDAs. It certainly won't or, more likely, can't allow the former.
Face it. It's the end for Diebold's voting machines, they're just trying to pull an SCO now and hang on for as long as possible. The more noise Diebold makes about defending it's voting machines the longer it will take people to look into their ATMs and other devices.