But yes, this is pretty much exactly what I was going to say and pretty well articulated too. When I read your summary the first thoughts I had were "what are your circumstances?".
There's a lot of good discussion on this story about quality of life issues -- enjoying your job, etc. I do agree...but here's the rub. Say you have very specific desires -- you want a nice car, you want to buy a house, you really enjoy travelling, whatever. The higher paying job, even if not as fulfilling during the work week, will enable you to more easily achieve those desires. You say the benefits are roughly equivalent, so assume that means you get the same vacation time, for example. Perhaps you'd love to be able to spend two weeks every year for the next few years travelling across Europe and spending time in Italy or Russia or England. Much easier to achieve that end with 66% more money in your budget.
Only you can really decide what your priorities are, however. If you don't care about, e.g., travelling all over the world, but instead want to spend all your free time windsurfing, then maybe the quality of job satisfaction is going to be the deciding factor.
Final comment: if you're thinking about long-term prospects (which you mentioned), someone else has pointed out that the bigger company will give you more insight into how companies and projects and so forth work. That can be very beneficial, especially if you are willing to push yourself forwards and make sure you get involved in project decisions.
when i compare a cost of pc versus the cost of all of its parts, the pc always costs more
Yeah, really? I'd like to see that...the cost of buying components in massive bulk versus me buying them one off. Mind you, I gave up comparing a couple of years ago, for two reasons:
I could never make it cheaper than going to Dell
The next bit just below
who in the hell would want a ready-built computer for him/herself?
Me. It easily will take two hours to sort through the myriad of options on-line, and then, once the stuff arrives, put it all together. And I've done it so many times over so many years, going back to the days when I had to set jumpers to pick the IRQ and remember which IRQ was LPT 1 and COM 1/3 and COM 2/4, it's just not fun any more.
It's definitely not fun enough given that I don't want the latest screaming hard core game machine...99% of what I use them for at home is web browsing and Office. I don't play games, I don't code in my spare time, so a cheap Dell is plenty of power for me, as cheap as anything I can piece together from parts on-line, and I can take the two or three hours I've just saved and play with my three year old daughter instead. For me, that's a win.
In almost every case it comes down to visas and border controls that stop humans freely moving around their planet. On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's absolutely ridiculous that a human shouldn't be able to freely roam the public spaces of their own planet!
Actually, by and large if you have a passport you can "freely roam". You just can't arbitrarily decide you're going to move there permanently, taking up residence and enjoying the good fortune of benefits attached to that country.
Last year they did walk-by visual inspections and sent out notices of what you had to fix. For us it was things like reseeding the front lawn. They sent out letters after a couple of weeks threatening to charge people penalties if they didn't follow the notices. I responded by asking when were they going to reseed the common areas which were down to mud and gravel in a lot of places, and when were they going to fix the sidewalks which were so dilapidated as to be dangerous? Lots of evasive mumblings...
Now we're trying to sell our house. One couple who came through recently loved our house but picked another one a few miles away. They said the Homeowner's Association didn't take sufficient care of the common areas.
Security people, customs, etc. Not here. The worst I can say is they're sometimes harried when trying to get hundreds of impatient people through checkpoints in as expeditious a manner as possible while still trying to do their jobs effectively. And my experience is the majority of them still maintain a friendly demeanour even when faced with angry and upset travellers.
Doctors I think you're confusing arrogant and aloof with confident and assured. Almost every time I've been to a doctor, I've been happily assured they know what they're doing and at least give the impression they know me and care about me.
But perhaps I'm like a lot of the other people replying to your post...I start off treating people like human beings with dignity and respect. If you expect the best, you'll be surprised how often you get it. And vice versa.
Which, of course, doesn't make the subject story any better. But I think it's a particularly rotten aberration.
Yeah, I think he's a bit more than a fanboy. FWIW, I actually love my Yahoo! Mail account (and I promise you I'm not affiliated with them), but...going to the link above the first heading I see is Yahoo! Tech gets a facelift. That article starts with this text:
We changed the face of Yahoo! Tech front page today
That's a wee bit more than a fanboy speaking. Or you could just do the google thing and find this bio as the first link.
Yeah, thanks for mentioning this. I'm on Comcast and I can't send mail to some of my friends and family overseas; Comcast is such a known source of spam that several ISPs block anything from their network.
Simple ethics and morality. Forget the pretentious nonsense and the lecturing about the immoral RIAA for a moment...
If you're being charged for a CD and the music's not being offered for free download on the band's web site in the format you desire, then that means that everyone involved with that production -- musicians, session musicians, recording engineers, graphic artists, marketers, etc., etc. -- put their time in to an effort that they knowingly expected would be sold.
If you disagree with that philosophy then at least have the courage of your convictions to just not buy it and say "I object to this premise on moral grounds, therefore I will forgo the pleasure of listening of that song". Anything else is hypocritical self-serving nonsense.
Yep. These are some of the same problems that present themselves in the document management / knowledge management / ECM market. What I want is a taxonomy. That way I can drill down when I search for horn and see the results categorized appropriately.
But how do you present a taxonomy? It's not easy, and you really need to know the context. Example: what is a generator? Enter that word into Google and the first page is entirely links for products to generate ASCII art or banners for your church. Interestingly, the entire list of links consists of electrical generators.
What I'm thinking about, however, has many different contexts in the electrical industry. If I'm an engineer, then a generator is something that produces electricty. If I'm in customer service, however, a generator is a company that generates power and connects to the interconnection grid.
This also presents a problem when discussing searching on raw text or paragraphs. Again, you need to understand the context of the industry that you're working inside. You need a combination of good Natural Language Processing (NLP) and something like an expert system for your particular industry. This could be particularly important in any industry with a highly technical verbiage, such as IT, legal, medical, musical...well, you get the point.
Yep, you've got it. By the way, the/. article summary was ever so slightly misleadingly out of context as well.
Slashdot headline:Vista Beta 2 has Major Problems Slashdot summary: for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered.
Actual article headline: Windows Vista Beta 2: The key word is 'Beta' Actual article text taken out of context:Installing Vista Beta 2, for me was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered.
P.S. note to "journalist": learn how to punctuate. And review properly. And be accurate (pre-beta 2 does not equal beta 2). Actually, you know what? Give up your day job, because you can't do it.
Sure you are, it's called a document management system.
Theory: rather than navigating somewhat arbitrary and capricious folder hierarchies, categorize or index your documents. You can then search based on categories at the simplest, or if you're a more advanced user you can use Boolean search logic.
Problem in practise: most DMS implementations are necessarily installed and configured by experts based on consulting with business sponsors. People find it really hard to abstract away from the well-known file folder system and end up implementing something that's an unconscious copy of that very system they're trying to replace.
But to return to the larger question...most answers on this thread are whimsical pedantry on the part of whining egomaniacal geeks. Here's the thing: it's context sensitive. Computer literacy means something different to an employer looking for a receptionist versus a university wanting to ensure a minimum standard for incoming first year computer science students. Are you attempting to answer the original poster's question, or the larger debate at hand?
In the middle of this increasingly divergent thread...is it true the BBC plans to introduce a new Doctor every season? Or, another way of putting it -- is there a new actor playing the Doctor in the second series?
As in the whole migration. Seriously. You don't list a reason, so it could be anything from saving money (in which case you've already failed with the amount of time and effort you're expending and the commensurate costs, including lost productivity, not even beginning to think about ongoing support costs, because you know the OS licensing costs saved have already been way exceeded by the migration costs) to idealism.
But everything you've described is "we're trying to find a way to emulate this Windows functionality on Linux, and it's really hard". You're taking huge amounts of time, you can't get anything to work properly, and in the process I imagine you're causing your users a lot of aggravation.
I don't even want to know how big the office is, what sort of packages you're trying to migrate, etcetera, but presumably either you're in charge of a very small office, your manager is a Linux idealist or the majority of your office colleagues are Linux idealists, or you made it sound really appealing to your manager. If the first two reasons, I'd be guessing sheer stubbornness is making you carry this on through. If the last, I'd be guessing your manager will be asking some questions sometime soon.
So why are you doing this? Heck, just read the last few sentences...
I've tried using...{blah blah blah}... but it's not close to the usability of the Windows setup.
It's either mounted per user, which requires a lot of work, or by root, in which case local root users bypass any remote permissions.
How do you set up mounting directories that is easy to use like Windows?
Mate...again, why, precisely, are you doing this? Now I really do want to know out of sheer curiosity...
Oh please. Do we even need to remind people that the US took their sweet time in getting to the wars? (Quick test: ask the average American when WWI and WWII started, and watch a shocking number of them get it wrong because they date it from when the US got involved.)
Especially WWII. The UK (along with other members of the empire like Australia and New Zealand) pretty much held off the opposing forces singlehanded until they were at breaking point before the US finally deigned to get involved. Because they'd been going it alone for the last several years, England was broke by then and, yes, desperately needed an infusion of funds.
But it was by no means a one way street. Example: one of the conditions from the US was that England had to turn over all the enriched nuclear material they'd been generating in their own plants, so that the US was now the only one with sufficient quantities to build more bombs.
Please don't cheapen the massive sacrifices made in terms of lives lost by England, Australia, and New Zealand in both world wars. It's not a great stretch to say that those countries did much more than their fair share in the first half of the 20th century to ensure a world in which all free nations could prosper, and that they were the leading defenders of freedom at those times. We still remember Gallipolli...
I also submitted this story, and included a quote on the part I found funniest (from the Yahoo! story in my submission).
RIM said it has filed applications for a patent for its workaround, part of a software update called BlackBerry Multi-Mode Edition.
To answer a couple of other posted questions:
RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it has developed and tested software workaround designs for all BlackBerry handsets operating in the United States.
And...
The company said it will soon begin shipping handsets with the software update in a dormant mode. It will make the update available at www.blackberry.com/workaround at a later, but as yet unspecified, date.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
1. What HardCase said down below. 2. Yes, but usually (at least for the past several hundred years) because they had patronage from royalty or a member of the elite classes. Patronage implied strong social and economic incentives.
Not to disparage your good eyesight, but 20/20 is not perfect vision. It's the traditional "normal" acuity mark. As an example, 20/15 means you can read a line on a chart from 20 feet away that someone with 20/20 vision would have to read from 15 feet away.
But acuity is only one part of vision. You can very easily have 20/20 vision or better, but have double vision, poor contrast, etc. And that can only be discerned by a qualified optometrist.
Which brings me back to the point -- question asker, go to an optometrist and get an eye exam. Oh wait, apparently you did, as you know you have a specific degree of astigmatism. So get some specific professional advice, and, you know, maybe a doctor will tell you that you're getting older and need more rest.
Really, this Ask Slashdot stuff is interesting and makes for some lively discussion, but it's at best diversionary and at worst dangerous to seek open and thoroughly unqualified anecdotal advice on health matters, legal matters, etc. As long as you keep that in mind, and get the proper level of advice and treat this forum as simply entertainment, you should be good.
...this breach was due to poor server administration in that they didn't keep their software patched up to the latest version.
Yep, agreed.
Same as the majority * of Microsoft hacks. People not changing their SQL Server sa password from the default, or not applying the patch that blocks that particulary vulnerability that was released by Microsoft six months ago, or...
* Note: I fully expect someone to come up and say "but what about...". That's why I chose that phrasing. I'm not arguing Microsoft is perfect, and you can certainly argue whether open-source means you get the advantage of transparency **, or whatever your retort may be. But my contention is that the majority of hacks of Microsoft products come down to poor server administration.
** Which advantage is also extended to the hackers, of course.
even if a person is a bachelor having no dependents, one has to pay education tax. And the amount of tax one pays depends on the locality one is living in. He is paying $6000/year as education tax. Oh, just you wait...
You pay school taxes which go to support the local school. Okay, I have a two year old daughter, she needs to go to school one day, whatever.
But the quality of local school education is rubbish. So we're looking at whether we can possibly afford to send her to a private school. At $15,000 to $20,000 per year. Big sacrifice, but for our daughter's future well-being, it's worth it if we can do it.
And we still will have to pay every penny of those school taxes.
I agree with what ScentCone wrote in reply, so I won't repeat it. My own comments, however...
I see a lot of replies from people who talk about their five server network, or 15 server network. We have 385 Windows servers, mostly Windows 2000, a handful of legacy NT 4, and several Windows 2003, including Itanium. One old NT 4 box is formally rebooted on a regular basis because of shockingly bad custom-written code. That's it. We are in a 24 x 7 x 365 environment where things just have to work. So we have redundant farms, clusters, etc., but our servers don't BSOD, they don't crash, they just work. Yes, even the ones which are overloaded and constantly pegging CPU, memory, network traffic, etc.
And, by the way, we also have installations of Linux and Unix servers. I currently know of six Unix servers which are formally rebooted every week for exactly the same reason you give -- prevention of a crash. There could be more than those six for all I know; I'm a dedicated Windows admin, so am not too familiar with the Unix side of the house.
I have plenty of other anecdotes, but eventually it just gets down to he-said, she-said. The only benefits I have are many years of experience in integrated networks with hundreds of Windows servers, in multiple industries, across multiple countries...and, even though I'm a Windows admin, I take pride in my work and am diligent about making sure I know how my servers work.
And that's why you apply a few simple security measures, such as denying LocalSystem access to CMD.EXE and other powerful utilities via NTFS permissions. You can do this to bring LocalSystem down to a level lower than Administrator, and virtually nothing breaks if you do it with a little bit of forethought. Yes, it takes a little bit of work to do the initial planning, but once it's done you script it and bingo. And there are plenty of examples on websites of sample lockdowns plus the scripts (using XCACLS.EXE, typically). Take those examples and customize them to your environment as needed -- you've saved yourself a whole load of the initial work.
You can open up these permissions on a system-by-system basis if really necessary, or even better just set applications that support it to use named service accounts. Cuts out a huge number of vulnerabilities.
You can secure a Windows system, and it's really pretty easy to do a lot of these things. You just have to know a bit of what you're doing and be prepared to put in the work. That's the biggest flaw in most MS administration shops: people who shouldn't be admins get lulled into a false sense of security because there's a pretty GUI and they don't understand what's going on behind the scenes.
Slashdot Mirror
I would've replied to but as we all know replies are in the ether at the moment...
But yes, this is pretty much exactly what I was going to say and pretty well articulated too. When I read your summary the first thoughts I had were "what are your circumstances?".
There's a lot of good discussion on this story about quality of life issues -- enjoying your job, etc. I do agree...but here's the rub. Say you have very specific desires -- you want a nice car, you want to buy a house, you really enjoy travelling, whatever. The higher paying job, even if not as fulfilling during the work week, will enable you to more easily achieve those desires. You say the benefits are roughly equivalent, so assume that means you get the same vacation time, for example. Perhaps you'd love to be able to spend two weeks every year for the next few years travelling across Europe and spending time in Italy or Russia or England. Much easier to achieve that end with 66% more money in your budget.
Only you can really decide what your priorities are, however. If you don't care about, e.g., travelling all over the world, but instead want to spend all your free time windsurfing, then maybe the quality of job satisfaction is going to be the deciding factor.
Final comment: if you're thinking about long-term prospects (which you mentioned), someone else has pointed out that the bigger company will give you more insight into how companies and projects and so forth work. That can be very beneficial, especially if you are willing to push yourself forwards and make sure you get involved in project decisions.
Yeah, really? I'd like to see that...the cost of buying components in massive bulk versus me buying them one off. Mind you, I gave up comparing a couple of years ago, for two reasons:
who in the hell would want a ready-built computer for him/herself?
Me. It easily will take two hours to sort through the myriad of options on-line, and then, once the stuff arrives, put it all together. And I've done it so many times over so many years, going back to the days when I had to set jumpers to pick the IRQ and remember which IRQ was LPT 1 and COM 1/3 and COM 2/4, it's just not fun any more.
It's definitely not fun enough given that I don't want the latest screaming hard core game machine...99% of what I use them for at home is web browsing and Office. I don't play games, I don't code in my spare time, so a cheap Dell is plenty of power for me, as cheap as anything I can piece together from parts on-line, and I can take the two or three hours I've just saved and play with my three year old daughter instead. For me, that's a win.
In almost every case it comes down to visas and border controls that stop humans freely moving around their planet. On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's absolutely ridiculous that a human shouldn't be able to freely roam the public spaces of their own planet!
Actually, by and large if you have a passport you can "freely roam". You just can't arbitrarily decide you're going to move there permanently, taking up residence and enjoying the good fortune of benefits attached to that country.
Last year they did walk-by visual inspections and sent out notices of what you had to fix. For us it was things like reseeding the front lawn. They sent out letters after a couple of weeks threatening to charge people penalties if they didn't follow the notices. I responded by asking when were they going to reseed the common areas which were down to mud and gravel in a lot of places, and when were they going to fix the sidewalks which were so dilapidated as to be dangerous? Lots of evasive mumblings...
Now we're trying to sell our house. One couple who came through recently loved our house but picked another one a few miles away. They said the Homeowner's Association didn't take sufficient care of the common areas.
I loathe our HOA.
Security people, customs, etc. Not here. The worst I can say is they're sometimes harried when trying to get hundreds of impatient people through checkpoints in as expeditious a manner as possible while still trying to do their jobs effectively. And my experience is the majority of them still maintain a friendly demeanour even when faced with angry and upset travellers.
Doctors I think you're confusing arrogant and aloof with confident and assured. Almost every time I've been to a doctor, I've been happily assured they know what they're doing and at least give the impression they know me and care about me.
But perhaps I'm like a lot of the other people replying to your post...I start off treating people like human beings with dignity and respect. If you expect the best, you'll be surprised how often you get it. And vice versa.
Which, of course, doesn't make the subject story any better. But I think it's a particularly rotten aberration.
Yeah, I think he's a bit more than a fanboy. FWIW, I actually love my Yahoo! Mail account (and I promise you I'm not affiliated with them), but...going to the link above the first heading I see is Yahoo! Tech gets a facelift. That article starts with this text:
We changed the face of Yahoo! Tech front page today
That's a wee bit more than a fanboy speaking. Or you could just do the google thing and find this bio as the first link.
Alex Moskalyuk is a full-time Technical Yahoo!...
Yeah, thanks for mentioning this. I'm on Comcast and I can't send mail to some of my friends and family overseas; Comcast is such a known source of spam that several ISPs block anything from their network.
Well I'm not. Funnily enough my confidence in my own technical abilities doesn't depend on being able to sneer at someone else's misfortune.
And by the way, for a community that loves to smack down MySpace, AOL, Microsoft, etc., there are an awful lot of stories about those companies.
Simple ethics and morality. Forget the pretentious nonsense and the lecturing about the immoral RIAA for a moment...
If you're being charged for a CD and the music's not being offered for free download on the band's web site in the format you desire, then that means that everyone involved with that production -- musicians, session musicians, recording engineers, graphic artists, marketers, etc., etc. -- put their time in to an effort that they knowingly expected would be sold.
If you disagree with that philosophy then at least have the courage of your convictions to just not buy it and say "I object to this premise on moral grounds, therefore I will forgo the pleasure of listening of that song". Anything else is hypocritical self-serving nonsense.
Fine, go ahead and argue whatever quibbling semantics make you feel sufficiently self-righteous to ignore the inconvenient fact that it's still wrong.
Very good post, my congratulations.
Yep. These are some of the same problems that present themselves in the document management / knowledge management / ECM market. What I want is a taxonomy. That way I can drill down when I search for horn and see the results categorized appropriately.
But how do you present a taxonomy? It's not easy, and you really need to know the context. Example: what is a generator? Enter that word into Google and the first page is entirely links for products to generate ASCII art or banners for your church. Interestingly, the entire list of links consists of electrical generators.
What I'm thinking about, however, has many different contexts in the electrical industry. If I'm an engineer, then a generator is something that produces electricty. If I'm in customer service, however, a generator is a company that generates power and connects to the interconnection grid.
This also presents a problem when discussing searching on raw text or paragraphs. Again, you need to understand the context of the industry that you're working inside. You need a combination of good Natural Language Processing (NLP) and something like an expert system for your particular industry. This could be particularly important in any industry with a highly technical verbiage, such as IT, legal, medical, musical...well, you get the point.
Yep, you've got it. By the way, the /. article summary was ever so slightly misleadingly out of context as well.
Slashdot headline: Vista Beta 2 has Major Problems
Slashdot summary: for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered.
Actual article headline: Windows Vista Beta 2: The key word is 'Beta'
Actual article text taken out of context: Installing Vista Beta 2, for me was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered.
P.S. note to "journalist": learn how to punctuate. And review properly. And be accurate (pre-beta 2 does not equal beta 2). Actually, you know what? Give up your day job, because you can't do it.
Sure you are, it's called a document management system.
Theory: rather than navigating somewhat arbitrary and capricious folder hierarchies, categorize or index your documents. You can then search based on categories at the simplest, or if you're a more advanced user you can use Boolean search logic.
Problem in practise: most DMS implementations are necessarily installed and configured by experts based on consulting with business sponsors. People find it really hard to abstract away from the well-known file folder system and end up implementing something that's an unconscious copy of that very system they're trying to replace.
But to return to the larger question...most answers on this thread are whimsical pedantry on the part of whining egomaniacal geeks. Here's the thing: it's context sensitive. Computer literacy means something different to an employer looking for a receptionist versus a university wanting to ensure a minimum standard for incoming first year computer science students. Are you attempting to answer the original poster's question, or the larger debate at hand?
In the middle of this increasingly divergent thread...is it true the BBC plans to introduce a new Doctor every season? Or, another way of putting it -- is there a new actor playing the Doctor in the second series?
As in the whole migration. Seriously. You don't list a reason, so it could be anything from saving money (in which case you've already failed with the amount of time and effort you're expending and the commensurate costs, including lost productivity, not even beginning to think about ongoing support costs, because you know the OS licensing costs saved have already been way exceeded by the migration costs) to idealism.
...{blah blah blah}... but it's not close to the usability of the Windows setup.
But everything you've described is "we're trying to find a way to emulate this Windows functionality on Linux, and it's really hard". You're taking huge amounts of time, you can't get anything to work properly, and in the process I imagine you're causing your users a lot of aggravation.
I don't even want to know how big the office is, what sort of packages you're trying to migrate, etcetera, but presumably either you're in charge of a very small office, your manager is a Linux idealist or the majority of your office colleagues are Linux idealists, or you made it sound really appealing to your manager. If the first two reasons, I'd be guessing sheer stubbornness is making you carry this on through. If the last, I'd be guessing your manager will be asking some questions sometime soon.
So why are you doing this? Heck, just read the last few sentences...
I've tried using
It's either mounted per user, which requires a lot of work, or by root, in which case local root users bypass any remote permissions.
How do you set up mounting directories that is easy to use like Windows?
Mate...again, why, precisely, are you doing this? Now I really do want to know out of sheer curiosity...
Oh please. Do we even need to remind people that the US took their sweet time in getting to the wars? (Quick test: ask the average American when WWI and WWII started, and watch a shocking number of them get it wrong because they date it from when the US got involved.)
Especially WWII. The UK (along with other members of the empire like Australia and New Zealand) pretty much held off the opposing forces singlehanded until they were at breaking point before the US finally deigned to get involved. Because they'd been going it alone for the last several years, England was broke by then and, yes, desperately needed an infusion of funds.
But it was by no means a one way street. Example: one of the conditions from the US was that England had to turn over all the enriched nuclear material they'd been generating in their own plants, so that the US was now the only one with sufficient quantities to build more bombs.
Please don't cheapen the massive sacrifices made in terms of lives lost by England, Australia, and New Zealand in both world wars. It's not a great stretch to say that those countries did much more than their fair share in the first half of the 20th century to ensure a world in which all free nations could prosper, and that they were the leading defenders of freedom at those times. We still remember Gallipolli...
Mozilla is not Microsoft, they shouldn't spend money in an attempt to gain marketshare.
Why not?
This is not a case for old school marketing, this is a new way of thinking; let the software speak for itself.
If no-one's ever heard of it, it can speak for itself with an eloquence befitting Tolstoy, and it'll still sink into oblivion.
I also submitted this story, and included a quote on the part I found funniest (from the Yahoo! story in my submission).
RIM said it has filed applications for a patent for its workaround, part of a software update called BlackBerry Multi-Mode Edition.
To answer a couple of other posted questions:
RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it has developed and tested software workaround designs for all BlackBerry handsets operating in the United States.
And...
The company said it will soon begin shipping handsets with the software update in a dormant mode. It will make the update available at www.blackberry.com/workaround at a later, but as yet unspecified, date.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
1. What HardCase said down below.
2. Yes, but usually (at least for the past several hundred years) because they had patronage from royalty or a member of the elite classes. Patronage implied strong social and economic incentives.
Not to disparage your good eyesight, but 20/20 is not perfect vision. It's the traditional "normal" acuity mark. As an example, 20/15 means you can read a line on a chart from 20 feet away that someone with 20/20 vision would have to read from 15 feet away.
But acuity is only one part of vision. You can very easily have 20/20 vision or better, but have double vision, poor contrast, etc. And that can only be discerned by a qualified optometrist.
Which brings me back to the point -- question asker, go to an optometrist and get an eye exam. Oh wait, apparently you did, as you know you have a specific degree of astigmatism. So get some specific professional advice, and, you know, maybe a doctor will tell you that you're getting older and need more rest.
Really, this Ask Slashdot stuff is interesting and makes for some lively discussion, but it's at best diversionary and at worst dangerous to seek open and thoroughly unqualified anecdotal advice on health matters, legal matters, etc. As long as you keep that in mind, and get the proper level of advice and treat this forum as simply entertainment, you should be good.
...this breach was due to poor server administration in that they didn't keep their software patched up to the latest version.
Yep, agreed.
Same as the majority * of Microsoft hacks. People not changing their SQL Server sa password from the default, or not applying the patch that blocks that particulary vulnerability that was released by Microsoft six months ago, or...
* Note: I fully expect someone to come up and say "but what about...". That's why I chose that phrasing. I'm not arguing Microsoft is perfect, and you can certainly argue whether open-source means you get the advantage of transparency **, or whatever your retort may be. But my contention is that the majority of hacks of Microsoft products come down to poor server administration.
** Which advantage is also extended to the hackers, of course.
(I'd still LOVE to have a kill -9 for Windows.)
kill -f using kill.exe from the resource kit?
even if a person is a bachelor having no dependents, one has to pay education tax. And the amount of tax one pays depends on the locality one is living in. He is paying $6000/year as education tax. Oh, just you wait...
You pay school taxes which go to support the local school. Okay, I have a two year old daughter, she needs to go to school one day, whatever.
But the quality of local school education is rubbish. So we're looking at whether we can possibly afford to send her to a private school. At $15,000 to $20,000 per year. Big sacrifice, but for our daughter's future well-being, it's worth it if we can do it.
And we still will have to pay every penny of those school taxes.
I agree with what ScentCone wrote in reply, so I won't repeat it. My own comments, however...
I see a lot of replies from people who talk about their five server network, or 15 server network. We have 385 Windows servers, mostly Windows 2000, a handful of legacy NT 4, and several Windows 2003, including Itanium. One old NT 4 box is formally rebooted on a regular basis because of shockingly bad custom-written code. That's it. We are in a 24 x 7 x 365 environment where things just have to work. So we have redundant farms, clusters, etc., but our servers don't BSOD, they don't crash, they just work. Yes, even the ones which are overloaded and constantly pegging CPU, memory, network traffic, etc.
And, by the way, we also have installations of Linux and Unix servers. I currently know of six Unix servers which are formally rebooted every week for exactly the same reason you give -- prevention of a crash. There could be more than those six for all I know; I'm a dedicated Windows admin, so am not too familiar with the Unix side of the house.
I have plenty of other anecdotes, but eventually it just gets down to he-said, she-said. The only benefits I have are many years of experience in integrated networks with hundreds of Windows servers, in multiple industries, across multiple countries...and, even though I'm a Windows admin, I take pride in my work and am diligent about making sure I know how my servers work.
And that's why you apply a few simple security measures, such as denying LocalSystem access to CMD.EXE and other powerful utilities via NTFS permissions. You can do this to bring LocalSystem down to a level lower than Administrator, and virtually nothing breaks if you do it with a little bit of forethought. Yes, it takes a little bit of work to do the initial planning, but once it's done you script it and bingo. And there are plenty of examples on websites of sample lockdowns plus the scripts (using XCACLS.EXE, typically). Take those examples and customize them to your environment as needed -- you've saved yourself a whole load of the initial work.
You can open up these permissions on a system-by-system basis if really necessary, or even better just set applications that support it to use named service accounts. Cuts out a huge number of vulnerabilities.
You can secure a Windows system, and it's really pretty easy to do a lot of these things. You just have to know a bit of what you're doing and be prepared to put in the work. That's the biggest flaw in most MS administration shops: people who shouldn't be admins get lulled into a false sense of security because there's a pretty GUI and they don't understand what's going on behind the scenes.