That's about what my thinking is. I don't have an MP3 player and I don't really want one (an Ogg player might tempt me a little more), but I will indeed be upgrading my cell phone in the next year (probably next 6 months) and getting rid of this piece of dog crap Nokia I got for free with the T-Mobile contract. T-Mobile is a decent carrier, but this phone sucks. Some of the buttons are starting to not work so well, and they've already replaced it once for that problem. This thing is less than a year old. The first one didn't even make it a month.
I'm not likely to buy an MP3 player in the next 6 months, probably not in the next year, either. But if a cell phone could play one of my favorite blues tunes when it rang, that could sway me to buy it.
Now, if they make voice control that really works - not "push some combination of keys first, then tell the phone "Call my brother" but just speak into the headset "call my brother" without even unlocking the keypad first - *and* it plays MP-3s, then they would have a phone that I'd camp outside the store in my sleeping bag for, to get one the first day they went on sale:-)
It would be difficult to do that to Novell or (especially) IBM because of all the patents they hold. IBM is one of the largest - perhaps the largest - patent holders in the world, and anyone - even Microsoft - who brought suit against IBM on patent infringement grounds would almost certainly be open to the same from IBM. This is the MAD approach to preventing infringement lawsuits which is discussed in the article.
Now, IBM and Novell both have so much invested in Linux that it would not be easy to extricate themselves. They have hitched their wagons very firmly to the Linux star, and if anyone tries to make them unhitch those wagons, they have no choice but to fight. IBM, as it has clearly shown in the SCO case, is ready, willing, and able to do so. IBM could easily have bought SCO and made this whole thing go away. It's obvious that Darl believed they would do exactly that. Instead, IBM told him "See you in court" and is going for case law instead. With a convincing win behind them and case law in hand, it is unlikely that anyone will ever dare try going after them again.
If someone - Microsoft or Sun, for instance - were to go after Linux on patent grounds, IBM would have little choice bet to step up and fight. They have bet to much of their future on Linux not to do so. Even if you believe that IBM is not in any way altruistic about FOSS (and it's quite possible they are not), they will still have to defend Linux out of narrow self-interest. IBM, Novell, and other companies that have committed themselves firmly to Linux as a linchpin of their business could simply not afford to let it be taken down, and would have to defend it.
To recall the bear Vs. bees analogy, it is true that bees have a difficult time keeping a bear out of the honey. However, not all the bears are hostile. There are some very large and powerful bears to whom the bees give free access to the honey. These bears have a strong vested interest in seeing that no hostile bear makes a successful attack on the hive. They have big teeth and long claws, and are quite willing to use them to ensure the safety and stability of their honey supply. Just ask Darl.
OT warning: the following will be interesting and/or informative to at least some of you, but if you're not particularly interested in Japan or why it is in no way a fascist country, you might want to skip it. -----
I lived in Japan a long time as well (8 years), and yeah, he was totally clueless to say that. Japan is a socialist-capitalist country, and even their conservatives are way to the left of our conservatives on economic issues. Heck, they're to the left of a lot of our liberals on economic issues. The Japan Communist Party has a (granted, small) percentage of the legislature and has held it for many years. Occasionally, the JCP pulls of a major upset like winning the governorship of a prefecture. Can you imagine a real, true card-carrying member of the American Communist Party getting elected governor of US state? Even a very left-leaning one like Massachusetts? I can't. Yet it happens once in a while in Japan. The JCP also wins mayoral elections from time to time. There are probably several communist sitting mayors in Japan right now.
Hardly the mark of a fascist society.
The only parts of Japanese society that one could describe as fascist are the boys with the big black trucks with the big hinomaru on the side and the big speakers on the top. While they probably enjoy as much or more support in society than the JCP, they're still a fringe group, although a fringe group with political clout grossly disproportionate to their numbers.
This is the one point on which right-wing Japanese politicians tend to look anything like the US definition of right wing: they are politically conservative on the issue of the war and national pride, and things like that. Many prominent conservative politicians privately believe (but few rarely publicly say it, and always wind up making some kind of retraction and mealy-mouthed apology) that much or all of the Rape of Nanking, the sexual slavery, Unit 731, and other war-time atrocities, are either mostly or wholly fabricated. More than a few ordinary Japanese also believe this; I was quite surprised to discover that a very close Japanese friend of mine from Osaka, someone with whom I went to college, absolutely and completely believes that both the Rape of Nanking and the "Comfort Women" are utter fabrications of the communists, intended to do nothing but discredit Japan. Politically conservative newspapers such as the Sankei Shimbun also espouse basically that view. Of greater interest, my friend came from a highly educated family (father is a judge), married a thoracic surgeon, and has a solid upper-middle class/borderline rich family background. I suspect that many other highly educated Japanese of similar background hold similar views. A minority to be sure, but a significant one. Still, they are not fascists. They believe, politically and economically, pretty much what the mainstream majority believes. It is just on issues like the war and its atrocities, national pride, national sovereignty, that they could be called right wing. Indeed, all of Japan's "conservative" parties look like socialists to me.
I'd like to make a brief OT comment on the JCP here. One of the reasons for their relative (to the rest of the non-communist world) popularity is that the JCP, unlike so many of its counterparts in other countries, does not and has not advocated the violent establishment of communism. They believe in communism and socialism like the others, but they are trying to establish what they believe in through the ballot box, not the ammo box. I don't agree with them politically or economically, but I respect their adherence to the rule of law.
Thank you! I was going to post just about exactly what you wrote, but you saved me the trouble:-)
Corporate income tax is just an all-around bad idea. Any amount of money that a corporation pays in taxes is only passed on to the buyers of its products or services anyway, so in reality, corporations don't pay income tax. Every time I go to the gas station, I pay some of Shell's or Chevron's income tax. If I buy a Radeon, I pay some of ATI's. If I buy a pair of Levi's (and for the punctuation hawks among us, yes, that is correct; it's not Levis), I pay some of Levi Strauss and Company's income tax. The price of corporate income tax for the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the retailer is included in the purchase price of every product we buy, just as is every other business expense.
If the United States abolished corporate income tax, it would not increase the real burden on individuals a great deal (the percentage of tax revenue paid by corporations shows us that), and whatever level of burden it did place would likely be offset by the resulting business boom that we would see. Offshoring would be a lot less attractive if there were no corporate income tax here. Plus, it would make the United States attractive as an offshoring destination. That wouldn't be permanent, as eventually all countries would have to follow suit as a means of keeping their businesses at home. However, the benefits of no corporate income tax would be permanent, even if everyone else followed suit. The economy would just run more efficiently than it does now.
I tend to be that way, too. I'm at my mental peak when most others are sleeping. I used to be a mainframe operator, and worked third shift. Unlike almost everyone else on my shift, I was there as a volunteer. I did it for years and I loved it! I could leave work between 8:30 and 9:00 AM after starting at midnight (what a great commute!) go somewhere and do something, or just go home and do whatever.
Then I'd go to bed at 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, in my very dark bedroom (I taped aluminum foil over the window and had a blackout shade besides) and set my alarm for 10:00 PM. I'd wake up refreshed, eat dinner, and go to work.
I have a day-shift job now, but wish I still worked nights. I'm also married now, and my wife wouldn't want me on third shift (all the married guys I knew on the night shift always had problems with their wives over it, I'd be no exception).
If you can find a third-shift sysadmin job, NOC staff, something that requires 24 x 7 work (I'm assuming you're in IT, of course, but there are other fields that have some night workers as well), you might want to try it. It worked very well for me. Bear in mind, though, that you really have to live the night shift all the time to be successful at it. Keep to those hours even on your days off, or something pretty near those hours, and you'll be fine. I was a night person even as a little kid (I remember being about four years old and always wanting to stay up and watch the late news, and I usually did; even after that, I never wanted to sleep).
Now, one of my kids is like that. She's still an infant, but won't sleep before midnight. A chip off the old block:-)
While a disproportionate number of the poor are minorities, it is not true that most minorities are poor, nor is it even true that most of the poor are minorities (a little over half are white). However, at some point in the future it is likely that most of the poor will be minorities, but only because whites are steadily declining in number, as a result of a lower birthrate and of non-whites as the primary source of new immigrants. Within most of our lifetimes, whites will no longer make up the majority of the US population. They will still be the largest single skin color, but will no longer be an absolute majority.
Excuse me, but as a the holder of a degree in Linguistics, I can tell you that those are the numbers for *native* speakers.
However, it is correct that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken native language on earth. However, it's also worth noting that nearly all of those native speakers live in one country, and most of the rest live in countries are adjacent or very nearby.
Native English speakers, on the other hand, live in many countries all over the world. The largest geographically contiguous block are in the United States and Canada, but they are also in many other countries.
The numbers on native speakers of English and Spanish are also accurate if outdated; they are roughly equal.
However, it's when you bring in all of the non-native speakers that English shows its international dominance. English is by far the most widely spoken second language in the world. Nearly all speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi are natives, but there are more non-native than native English speakers in the world.
With regard to the language of Diplomacy, you're wrong there, too. French *was* the language of diplomacy for many years, but is so no longer and has not been for decades. It was replaced by English. If French is in fact the official language of the UN (you don't cite a source, but I'll take your word for it; I'm too lazy to cite sources tonight myself), that's the only place left in diplomacy where that is still true. Go to any embassy or consulate in the world and you can probably find someone on the staff who speaks English; you'd be hard put to find someone on the staff who speaks French, unless:
A) It's located in a Francophone country;
or
B) It's a French embassy or consulate.
I know a number of people who speak Japanese as a second language, a few who speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese as a second language, a couple who speak German as a second language and a few who speak Spanish as a second language, but the only French speakers I know are all natives. French just is not a terribly important international language anymore. That's not a criticism, just an observation; French is only important in Francophone countries.
I'll probably be modded troll, but (now watch, that will make me get modded up:-)...
In Soviet Russia, the trolls mod you. Wait, they do that here on Slashdot, too. OK, in Soviet Russia the mods troll you. Wait, that happens right here on Slashdot, too. Guess I better give up:-)
In my former life as a postmaster, I got a good look at what catch-all accounts do for people. It wasn't pretty.
Picture the scenario of a dictionary-attack spam: the catch-all box will accept *every* one of them. If the attack covers 50,000 potential addresses, well, you'd better have a large mailbox:-)
Also, WRT important accounts like postmaster, that should never go to a catch-all account. See RFC 821/2821: the postmaster address must work, must accept all mail, and must be read by a human. You should explicitly activate postmaster and either read as postmaster or alias it to your real address. Don't let it get caught up in a catchall mess.
For other "important" accounts, they should exist only if you have that role. For example, if there is no website, don't have a webmaster account. It will just be a spam magnet. Ditto for admin, and any other common role accounts. The only one you are required by RFC to have is postmaster. Dispense with the rest. Anyone who wants to contact a role account and can't figure out to try postmaster is someone you don't really want to hear from anyway.
At the enterprise level, it's true that not many operations have migrated from Windows to Linux (although I'm sure some have, and it's certain that more will), but at the level of the departmental LAN server and SOHO server, something for which no decent stats probably exist, Linux has gained a lot of market share. Since this is a market segment in which proprietary UNIX has market share of zero or so near to zero that the difference doesn't matter, that market share increase can come only at the expense of Microsoft and Novell. Mostly Microsoft, since the shops that are still running Novell these days mostly keep running Novell.
Market share of certain server components such as Apache also needs to be considered. If you look at the market share graph here:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_sur ve y.html
You will notice two things:
1) That Apache completely dominates the market;
2) A rise in Apache market share at the right side of the graph, with a mirror-image drop in IIS market share.
Whether point 2 also reflects an increase of Linux/*BSD market share or whether it represents a move from IIS to Apache on Windows, I don't know. It does, however, clearly show one of Microsoft's flagship products losing market share to an open source product. This could be caused by one or more of Linux taking market share from Windows, and people ditching IIS for Apache, probably over security concerns. Cost may also be a factor, but performance probably is not; IIS is pretty fast when it's working.
I don't have time right now to google around for stats on Linux server market share Vs. Windows, but if you have time to find any that support your statement that relative market share between Linux and Windows is staying even, with Linux gains coming mostly at the expense of UNIX, I'd appreciate it if you could post them. I know that is the conventional wisdom, but I haven't seen stats to either prove or disprove it, so I'd be very interested in them. Especially in light of those Apache numbers, which may indicate a counter-argument to the conventional wisdom.
Oh, I understand that some people may have a different opinion and believe in laissez-fair parenting. I also understand that those people are wrong. That is not being narrow-minded, that is being correct-minded.
I also understand that, lacking any solid argument of my own, you are putting words in my mouth that I never said. This makes you a liar, in addition to someone who is clueless about parenting.
Actually, no, I wouldn't be "hooting and hollering." I like to see Microsoft get its ass kicked, sure. Who doesn't? But I like to see Microsoft get its ass kicked about the things for which it *deserves* it. Such as, in no particular order:
- Security - or the lack thereof - in IE, Outlook, Exchange, and Outlook Express.
- Clippy and his dolphin kin in Japan.
- Fundamental design choices that make decent security apparently effectively impossible in Windows
- Integrating the browser into the OS (partly covered by those design choices)
- Monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. If I were an independent developer selling a Windows app, or a small company doing the same, I'd be really scared, especially if MS made a buyout offer and I didn't want to sell. Time and again, their next move has been to do everything possible to destroy potential competitors through underhanded means. Even when I was a Microsoft supporter and though Bill Gates was a genius (up to 1997, when I tried Linux for the first time), I found a lot of MS' business practices to be pretty distasteful.
- Having to reboot if I change the netmask. This would be more understandable if I also had to reboot if I changed the IP address, but I don't. Just if I change the netmask.
- The way every version of Windows tries to be more helpful and thereby becomes more of a hindrance. The one Windows box I still run uses Windows 2000 and I have no intention at all of "upgrading" to XP.
- Failing to innovate IE to the point where it is now the least capable major browser in the market.
- Spreading FUD and lies rather than even thinking about competing on merit.
- Being unable to compete on merit.
- Losing tons of server market share, and even a little desktop market share, to Linux b/c it can't compete on merit.
*However* - I do NOT want to see even Microsoft being ripped off by a bunch of ambulance chasers filing a bogus class action lawsuit because they restated how their earnings are calculated - and that, if you RTFA, is all Red Hat has done: restate how their earnings are calculated. Their earnings have not changed.
I want to see Microsoft beaten, crushed, and generally humiliated in the marketplace, sure. But I want to see it happen fair and square, not through the kind of tactics MS itself routinely uses on others.
And yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe MS is behind this suit somewhere, just as they were behind the SCO suit, and it will come out eventually.
I used to be a network engineer at a large co-lo company which was acquired by Cable and Wireless after going through Chapter 11.
The data center in which I worked had a different take on man traps. They looked very much like a Star Trek transporter, and like the transporters, were temperamental and at least one of them was frequently out of order entirely. This was bad because they were made by an Italian company and every time one of them broke, a service tech would have to fly out *from Italy* to fix the piece of crap. One of them was once down for almost two weeks because they didn't have the part it needed. It was quite common for people to get stuck in them and have to be let out by the guards. It happened to me several times.
They worked by having a convex sliding door on each side of a floor to ceiling Plexiglas cylinder. Inside it a card reader for your badge and a biometric reader that you put your hand on. If both match up (and the fscking thing doesn't break!) the door on the other side opens. Both doors cannot be open at once, so you have to wait for the first door to close before it even lets you wave your badge at it and have your palm read.
You couldn't steal anything much via one of those, since even getting a 2U server through the tiny things required holding it between your legs. Otherwise it would think two people were in there at once and refuse to open the other door. Anytime it doesn't open, whether by design or all-too-common breakdown, it sets off an alarm at the guard station and the guards have to come and let you out.
If the things are broken, the guards can open an alarmed door (also used to take large piles of gear into the data center and go up the freight elevator), and no one could steal anything that way either because they can see anything you've got. You have to fill out paperwork on anything equipment your are bringing in or taking out, with description and serial number. There's an audit trail on anything anyone does - even employees - in the colo space.
After you get out of the transporter, if your atoms haven't been scattered halfway across the universe, you go to a secure elevator which again requires your badge to operate. It will go only to the floor your badge is authorized for, and after you get out of the elevator you have to use your badge to also open a door.
Then, you finally get to your cage, which you can open with the key your signed out from the guard station when you checked in. At the guard station, you need to be on the authorized list for your company, and you need photo ID or you don't get in.
It was pretty safe and pretty secure.
I have also been inside one of the data centers of a large, well-known investment bank. It was far less secure than the colo data center where I worked. For starters, all I had to do to get in was be in the company of a senior sysadmin who worked there and had 24 x 7 building access. He signed me in at the door to the building (which was not a dedicated data center; it was a regional headquarters in which the data center was housed), and I didn't even have to show ID. And it was on a *weekend* when the place was deserted. There were no security checks after that. None. He just swiped his badge at the computer room door and took me in for a tour. I never should have been allowed in there at all, let alone with no one even checking to see who I was or anything.
Granted, this regional headquarters was not in the United States, nor is it a US bank, so they may have different regulations, but I'd be surprised indeed if there were any regulations stating that a bank cannot use a colo facility. I also used to work for an American bank, in its main data center. The security was a lot better than what I just described above, but not as good (not even close!) as at the security at the colo data center where I worked. The network connections to that place also went by not one, not two, but *five* different carriers. It wou
You obviously do not have children (at least, not to whom you are actually filling the role of a father), and I sincerely hope that you will straighten out your thinking before you even consider having any. Or go out and get yourself snipped this week.
If you do not involve yourself in your children's lives, specifically including knowing where they are going, with whom they are associating, and what they are doing, they will turn out exactly as you describe. And/or kidnapped and sexually assaulted, maybe even killed, by some weirdo. Or on drugs. Or in juvie, and prison after that.
Not only do children not have a right to privacy, parents have a moral obligation to make sure they know the things described above.
While I don't agree with you, I will defend you as not being a troll.
I lived in Japan for many years, speak the language well, and a couple of my best friends are Japanese. I've taken beautiful photos of the A-Bomb Dome in rare snowfall at dusk. In grade school, I had a close friend whose mother was a little girl in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped (forunately, she was not near the hypocenter, and is still alive and healthy today). I agree with you that tactics such as the firebombing of all the major Japanese cities other than Kyoto (which was spared all bombing, by order), and the use of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would certainly have been prosecuted as ar crimes if Japan had won the war.
In a slight aside, no one (not even in Japan) seems to talk so much about the firebombing campaign as they do about Hiroshima and Nagasaki,even though the firebombing killed more people and destroyed more cities than the A-bombs did. Substantial parts of Tokyo didn't look all that different from Hiroshima, in 1945.
John Dower has an excellent book, "War without Mercy." I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the topic of the great cruelty with which both Japan and the United States prosecuted the war.
A few years before reading it, I visited Hiroshima for the first time, and while going through the A-Bomb Museum at the peace park, it struck me that the only reason this museum wasn't in Honolulu or San Francisco or San Diego was that we developed the bomb first. Only there would have been no museum. If Japan had won and annexed Hawaii and/or the US west coast as the terms of peace, no museum would have ever been permitted.
There is no doubt that they would have done it to us, and they did have a nuclear program for that very purpose, although it wasn't far enough along to give any hope.
Is that a good reason? Not terribly so. In August of 1945, Japan had no significant air power remaining, and nearly every ship in the Japanese navy was either sunk or out of commission. Any ship that left its port would never return. Any ship that stayed there would likely be sunk anyway. The army was still forceful and would have resisted for quite a while before surrendering, if we had invaded the main islands, but would have been defeated.
Would the general civilian populace really have fought with bamboo spears and such? I doubt it. A few maybe, but not most. Even if they had, that wasn't much of a threat. Spears don't do very well against a rifle company with M-1s and BARs, and in that war, people with spears would most certainly have been shot by people with rifles.
So, while the facts are that the bombings did end the war sooner and did save American lives, I'm not persuaded by the numbers commonly cited, and those who say it prevented the invasion of Kyushu were nuts if they were even thinking of it.
Kyushu is very mountainous, and fighting across it would have been tough going. In contrast, the land north of Tokyo is a flat plain. If I were commanding an invasion, I would have put Marine and Army divisions ashore on the excellent beaches north of the Boso Peninsula of Chiba prefecture, and swept inland through what is now Narita airport and down into Tokyo. There are a few rivers to cross in between, but with the air support that would have been available and with PT boats operating in the rivers (they are wide and deep; a destroyer escort might even be able to navigate them) that wouldn't have been hard. That area is paddy land, so an invasion would have been best done in the late fall or winter of 1945 - 1946, when the paddies are empty and dry. Tanks and trucks could move across them with ease, and a massive invasion force would have been in Tokyo in a few weeks.
I'm not persuaded that the bombings were justified, but I am fairly persuaded that they were unavoidable given the brutality and merciless character of the Pacific War, and the political realities Truman would have faced if he hadn't authorized them. Of the two
XP is not a merge of the forks. It may contain the feature set of the DOS line, but contains little or none of the code.
Why did it take so long?
Because creating the One Windows to Rule Them All was *hard* Originally, it was supposed to be Windows 2000 that put an end to the DOS line. When it became obvious that there was no way that was going to happen, it was postponed to version, XP. Even then, there was a price to pay in stability. I don't mean that XP is totally unstable, but it doesn't compare well to my Windows 2000-SP4 box. Granted, the W2K box lives in a sheltered environment and is kept around just for a couple of particular apps), so it's not breaking a sweat, but I get better uptime and performance than I did with XP on the same hardware (yes, I "downgraded" from XP Pro back to W2K, but don't see it as a downgrade). If it weren't for the fscking reboots after so many MS patches, it's uptime would be fully equal to the Linux boxen on which I do my actual work.
Cost of cleaning up the mess after the next zero-day IE 'sploit or mail worm sweeps through your Windows network for the 74th time this year? Priceless.
>I decided to try it... It is as bad as you heard.
Heh, I've got an even better one than that.
I run Sid on my desktop machine. Very basic, fairly vanilla machine. Athlon XP 2200+ ECS mobo with Promse RAID onboard (not used), two disks (software RAID 1), a floppy, a DVD+RW drive, whitebox Radeon 9000, 3c905 NIC. Works fine with SID and Sarge. No trouble at all.
A couple months ago I bought a British Linux magazine that had a free copy of Lindows 4.5 (still called that at the time) in a box stuck to the cover. Never did anything with it, but recently I was upgrading to two larger disks, and before I put Sid on them, decided I'd try out Lindows, basically just to see, like you, if it sucked as much as I'd heard.
I hook up a disk (Western Digital 120 gB), boot the CD, start the install. It only gets a few minutes into the install before it hardlocks the machine. Repeatable every time.
I gave up on that, put in the disk, intalled Sid, built my new arrays, and did a dselect upgrade to get my old package selections back. No muss, no fuss.
Why Sid and Sarge both work perfectly on this platform and Linspire doesn't is anybody's guess. It sure wasn't important enough to look for the cause of the problem.
Now, in addition to all the already known good reasons to not use or recommend Linspire, a good number of which you list, I have one all my own: it's finicky about hardware. Using Linspire might be kind of like the early days of Solaris x86 (or even Linux itself), when if you were building a machine on which you planned to run it, you went shopping with a hardware compatibility list in your hand.
Linux is not at the point where the HCL is basically "Don't buy stuff that's super bleeding-edge, there might not be a driver." Other than that, the hardware support is as good, or sometimes better than, Windows XP and blows away Windows 2000 and any other earlier version of Windows. (For example, I was dual-booting XP and Debian on a machine that had a NIC I'd bought when I lived in Japan; XP had no support for the NIC and I had no driver disk and no dial-up connection, either. I downloaded the XP driver using Linux; without Linux I would have been SOL for a driver). Perhaps Linspire aims to reverse this disturbing trend towards "Just pour it in and it works" Linux as a means of somehow making people more dependent on them for (paid) support:-p
The last time I was in an on-call job (net eng) I had a company-paid *leased line* in my house. And your new CIO wants you to pay for your own DSL?
If your resume isn't up-to-date, do it now. Get a new job. Seriously. If he would pull that kind of "you should pay for it yourself out of company loyalty/go-getter spirit" line on you, believe it when I say this is just the first of many indignities that will be heaped upon you. If you don't start looking now, you'll be sorry,
Heck, if you're in the LA area, reply and post the URL to your resume here. I just filled all the open positions on my team, but you never know when something might come up.
If your company was a good place to work, it's a shame this happened to you. I hope you find something good soon. If it wasn't a good place to work anyway, well, no harm done in heading for new pastures now.
I found this article and all the comments really interesting.
Last fall, I needed a new refrigerator and saw one in a Best Buy ad that was at a decent price and was really just what I was looking for. I like it pretty well and had made up my mind to buy it, but then the Best Buy sales staff entered. I didn't *even* get to the arguing about the extended warranty part before their general rudeness had so thoroughly alienated me that I told them "I changed my mind; your bad service and attitude just blew the sale for you" and walked out.
I then drove a few miles to Sears, where I found a fridge with all the same features, and free delivery (which made it the same price as the one at Best Buy), and the sales people were great.
Best Buy's staff is the best advertisement their competitors could wish for. That would have been my first time to buy at a Best Buy store, and now I will not set foot in one again. I wouldn't care if they were beating Fry's, Circuit City, and everyone else on the price of every item, I'd rather pay more somewhere else than buy from Best Buy.
My experience with Fry's has been the same as yours, in both San Diego and LA. If I have question (really rare), I can get somebody to answer it. Otherwise, I won't have sales vultures swooping down on me.
BTW, for anyone who *is* looking for a date at Fry's, there are some seriously fine looking babes at the one in Manhattan Beach (LA beach cities). If I wasn't already married...
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That's about what my thinking is. I don't have an MP3 player and I don't really want one (an Ogg player might tempt me a little more), but I will indeed be upgrading my cell phone in the next year (probably next 6 months) and getting rid of this piece of dog crap Nokia I got for free with the T-Mobile contract. T-Mobile is a decent carrier, but this phone sucks. Some of the buttons are starting to not work so well, and they've already replaced it once for that problem. This thing is less than a year old. The first one didn't even make it a month.
:-)
I'm not likely to buy an MP3 player in the next 6 months, probably not in the next year, either. But if a cell phone could play one of my favorite blues tunes when it rang, that could sway me to buy it.
Now, if they make voice control that really works - not "push some combination of keys first, then tell the phone "Call my brother" but just speak into the headset "call my brother" without even unlocking the keypad first - *and* it plays MP-3s, then they would have a phone that I'd camp outside the store in my sleeping bag for, to get one the first day they went on sale
It would be difficult to do that to Novell or (especially) IBM because of all the patents they hold. IBM is one of the largest - perhaps the largest - patent holders in the world, and anyone - even Microsoft - who brought suit against IBM on patent infringement grounds would almost certainly be open to the same from IBM. This is the MAD approach to preventing infringement lawsuits which is discussed in the article.
Now, IBM and Novell both have so much invested in Linux that it would not be easy to extricate themselves. They have hitched their wagons very firmly to the Linux star, and if anyone tries to make them unhitch those wagons, they have no choice but to fight. IBM, as it has clearly shown in the SCO case, is ready, willing, and able to do so. IBM could easily have bought SCO and made this whole thing go away. It's obvious that Darl believed they would do exactly that. Instead, IBM told him "See you in court" and is going for case law instead. With a convincing win behind them and case law in hand, it is unlikely that anyone will ever dare try going after them again.
If someone - Microsoft or Sun, for instance - were to go after Linux on patent grounds, IBM would have little choice bet to step up and fight. They have bet to much of their future on Linux not to do so. Even if you believe that IBM is not in any way altruistic about FOSS (and it's quite possible they are not), they will still have to defend Linux out of narrow self-interest. IBM, Novell, and other companies that have committed themselves firmly to Linux as a linchpin of their business could simply not afford to let it be taken down, and would have to defend it.
To recall the bear Vs. bees analogy, it is true that bees have a difficult time keeping a bear out of the honey. However, not all the bears are hostile. There are some very large and powerful bears to whom the bees give free access to the honey. These bears have a strong vested interest in seeing that no hostile bear makes a successful attack on the hive. They have big teeth and long claws, and are quite willing to use them to ensure the safety and stability of their honey supply. Just ask Darl.
I really wish I had mod points today instead of a few days ago, yours is the best post in this thread, and by far the most insightful.
:-)
In conclusion, "Yeah, what he said."
OT warning: the following will be interesting and/or informative to at least some of you, but if you're not particularly interested in Japan or why it is in no way a fascist country, you might want to skip it.
-----
I lived in Japan a long time as well (8 years), and yeah, he was totally clueless to say that. Japan is a socialist-capitalist country, and even their conservatives are way to the left of our conservatives on economic issues. Heck, they're to the left of a lot of our liberals on economic issues. The Japan Communist Party has a (granted, small) percentage of the legislature and has held it for many years. Occasionally, the JCP pulls of a major upset like winning the governorship of a prefecture. Can you imagine a real, true card-carrying member of the American Communist Party getting elected governor of US state? Even a very left-leaning one like Massachusetts? I can't. Yet it happens once in a while in Japan. The JCP also wins mayoral elections from time to time. There are probably several communist sitting mayors in Japan right now.
Hardly the mark of a fascist society.
The only parts of Japanese society that one could describe as fascist are the boys with the big black trucks with the big hinomaru on the side and the big speakers on the top. While they probably enjoy as much or more support in society than the JCP, they're still a fringe group, although a fringe group with political clout grossly disproportionate to their numbers.
This is the one point on which right-wing Japanese politicians tend to look anything like the US definition of right wing: they are politically conservative on the issue of the war and national pride, and things like that. Many prominent conservative politicians privately believe (but few rarely publicly say it, and always wind up making some kind of retraction and mealy-mouthed apology) that much or all of the Rape of Nanking, the sexual slavery, Unit 731, and other war-time atrocities, are either mostly or wholly fabricated. More than a few ordinary Japanese also believe this; I was quite surprised to discover that a very close Japanese friend of mine from Osaka, someone with whom I went to college, absolutely and completely believes that both the Rape of Nanking and the "Comfort Women" are utter fabrications of the communists, intended to do nothing but discredit Japan. Politically conservative newspapers such as the Sankei Shimbun also espouse basically that view. Of greater interest, my friend came from a highly educated family (father is a judge), married a thoracic surgeon, and has a solid upper-middle class/borderline rich family background. I suspect that many other highly educated Japanese of similar background hold similar views. A minority to be sure, but a significant one. Still, they are not fascists. They believe, politically and economically, pretty much what the mainstream majority believes. It is just on issues like the war and its atrocities, national pride, national sovereignty, that they could be called right wing. Indeed, all of Japan's "conservative" parties look like socialists to me.
I'd like to make a brief OT comment on the JCP here. One of the reasons for their relative (to the rest of the non-communist world) popularity is that the JCP, unlike so many of its counterparts in other countries, does not and has not advocated the violent establishment of communism. They believe in communism and socialism like the others, but they are trying to establish what they believe in through the ballot box, not the ammo box. I don't agree with them politically or economically, but I respect their adherence to the rule of law.
Thank you! I was going to post just about exactly what you wrote, but you saved me the trouble :-)
Corporate income tax is just an all-around bad idea. Any amount of money that a corporation pays in taxes is only passed on to the buyers of its products or services anyway, so in reality, corporations don't pay income tax. Every time I go to the gas station, I pay some of Shell's or Chevron's income tax. If I buy a Radeon, I pay some of ATI's. If I buy a pair of Levi's (and for the punctuation hawks among us, yes, that is correct; it's not Levis), I pay some of Levi Strauss and Company's income tax. The price of corporate income tax for the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the retailer is included in the purchase price of every product we buy, just as is every other business expense.
If the United States abolished corporate income tax, it would not increase the real burden on individuals a great deal (the percentage of tax revenue paid by corporations shows us that), and whatever level of burden it did place would likely be offset by the resulting business boom that we would see. Offshoring would be a lot less attractive if there were no corporate income tax here. Plus, it would make the United States attractive as an offshoring destination. That wouldn't be permanent, as eventually all countries would have to follow suit as a means of keeping their businesses at home. However, the benefits of no corporate income tax would be permanent, even if everyone else followed suit. The economy would just run more efficiently than it does now.
I tend to be that way, too. I'm at my mental peak when most others are sleeping. I used to be a mainframe operator, and worked third shift. Unlike almost everyone else on my shift, I was there as a volunteer. I did it for years and I loved it! I could leave work between 8:30 and 9:00 AM after starting at midnight (what a great commute!) go somewhere and do something, or just go home and do whatever.
:-)
Then I'd go to bed at 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, in my very dark bedroom (I taped aluminum foil over the window and had a blackout shade besides) and set my alarm for 10:00 PM. I'd wake up refreshed, eat dinner, and go to work.
I have a day-shift job now, but wish I still worked nights. I'm also married now, and my wife wouldn't want me on third shift (all the married guys I knew on the night shift always had problems with their wives over it, I'd be no exception).
If you can find a third-shift sysadmin job, NOC staff, something that requires 24 x 7 work (I'm assuming you're in IT, of course, but there are other fields that have some night workers as well), you might want to try it. It worked very well for me. Bear in mind, though, that you really have to live the night shift all the time to be successful at it. Keep to those hours even on your days off, or something pretty near those hours, and you'll be fine. I was a night person even as a little kid (I remember being about four years old and always wanting to stay up and watch the late news, and I usually did; even after that, I never wanted to sleep).
Now, one of my kids is like that. She's still an infant, but won't sleep before midnight. A chip off the old block
While a disproportionate number of the poor are minorities, it is not true that most minorities are poor, nor is it even true that most of the poor are minorities (a little over half are white). However, at some point in the future it is likely that most of the poor will be minorities, but only because whites are steadily declining in number, as a result of a lower birthrate and of non-whites as the primary source of new immigrants. Within most of our lifetimes, whites will no longer make up the majority of the US population. They will still be the largest single skin color, but will no longer be an absolute majority.
Excuse me, but as a the holder of a degree in Linguistics, I can tell you that those are the numbers for *native* speakers.
However, it is correct that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken native language on earth. However, it's also worth noting that nearly all of those native speakers live in one country, and most of the rest live in countries are adjacent or very nearby.
Native English speakers, on the other hand, live in many countries all over the world. The largest geographically contiguous block are in the United States and Canada, but they are also in many other countries.
The numbers on native speakers of English and Spanish are also accurate if outdated; they are roughly equal.
However, it's when you bring in all of the non-native speakers that English shows its international dominance. English is by far the most widely spoken second language in the world. Nearly all speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi are natives, but there are more non-native than native English speakers in the world.
With regard to the language of Diplomacy, you're wrong there, too. French *was* the language of diplomacy for many years, but is so no longer and has not been for decades. It was replaced by English. If French is in fact the official language of the UN (you don't cite a source, but I'll take your word for it; I'm too lazy to cite sources tonight myself), that's the only place left in diplomacy where that is still true. Go to any embassy or consulate in the world and you can probably find someone on the staff who speaks English; you'd be hard put to find someone on the staff who speaks French, unless:
A) It's located in a Francophone country;
or
B) It's a French embassy or consulate.
I know a number of people who speak Japanese as a second language, a few who speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese as a second language, a couple who speak German as a second language and a few who speak Spanish as a second language, but the only French speakers I know are all natives. French just is not a terribly important international language anymore. That's not a criticism, just an observation; French is only important in Francophone countries.
Good thing you didn't have money on that bet.
:-) ...
:-)
I'll probably be modded troll, but (now watch, that will make me get modded up
In Soviet Russia, the trolls mod you. Wait, they do that here on Slashdot, too. OK, in Soviet Russia the mods troll you. Wait, that happens right here on Slashdot, too. Guess I better give up
And look! I even used my karma bonus!.
In my former life as a postmaster, I got a good look at what catch-all accounts do for people. It wasn't pretty.
:-)
Picture the scenario of a dictionary-attack spam: the catch-all box will accept *every* one of them. If the attack covers 50,000 potential addresses, well, you'd better have a large mailbox
Also, WRT important accounts like postmaster, that should never go to a catch-all account. See RFC 821/2821: the postmaster address must work, must accept all mail, and must be read by a human. You should explicitly activate postmaster and either read as postmaster or alias it to your real address. Don't let it get caught up in a catchall mess.
For other "important" accounts, they should exist only if you have that role. For example, if there is no website, don't have a webmaster account. It will just be a spam magnet. Ditto for admin, and any other common role accounts. The only one you are required by RFC to have is postmaster. Dispense with the rest. Anyone who wants to contact a role account and can't figure out to try postmaster is someone you don't really want to hear from anyway.
In Soviet Russia, the dead serious you.
:-p
There, I did it! After years of resistance, I finally gave in and made a "Soviet Russia" post
OK, "tons" was probably an overstatement.
r ve y.html
At the enterprise level, it's true that not many operations have migrated from Windows to Linux (although I'm sure some have, and it's certain that more will), but at the level of the departmental LAN server and SOHO server, something for which no decent stats probably exist, Linux has gained a lot of market share. Since this is a market segment in which proprietary UNIX has market share of zero or so near to zero that the difference doesn't matter, that market share increase can come only at the expense of Microsoft and Novell. Mostly Microsoft, since the shops that are still running Novell these days mostly keep running Novell.
Market share of certain server components such as Apache also needs to be considered. If you look at the market share graph here:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_su
You will notice two things:
1) That Apache completely dominates the market;
2) A rise in Apache market share at the right side of the graph, with a mirror-image drop in IIS market share.
Whether point 2 also reflects an increase of Linux/*BSD market share or whether it represents a move from IIS to Apache on Windows, I don't know. It does, however, clearly show one of Microsoft's flagship products losing market share to an open source product. This could be caused by one or more of Linux taking market share from Windows, and people ditching IIS for Apache, probably over security concerns. Cost may also be a factor, but performance probably is not; IIS is pretty fast when it's working.
I don't have time right now to google around for stats on Linux server market share Vs. Windows, but if you have time to find any that support your statement that relative market share between Linux and Windows is staying even, with Linux gains coming mostly at the expense of UNIX, I'd appreciate it if you could post them. I know that is the conventional wisdom, but I haven't seen stats to either prove or disprove it, so I'd be very interested in them. Especially in light of those Apache numbers, which may indicate a counter-argument to the conventional wisdom.
Correction, "Any solid argument of your own." Haven't had a day off in three weeks.
Oh, I understand that some people may have a different opinion and believe in laissez-fair parenting. I also understand that those people are wrong. That is not being narrow-minded, that is being correct-minded.
I also understand that, lacking any solid argument of my own, you are putting words in my mouth that I never said. This makes you a liar, in addition to someone who is clueless about parenting.
Actually, no, I wouldn't be "hooting and hollering." I like to see Microsoft get its ass kicked, sure. Who doesn't? But I like to see Microsoft get its ass kicked about the things for which it *deserves* it. Such as, in no particular order:
- Security - or the lack thereof - in IE, Outlook, Exchange, and Outlook Express.
- Clippy and his dolphin kin in Japan.
- Fundamental design choices that make decent security apparently effectively impossible in Windows
- Integrating the browser into the OS (partly covered by those design choices)
- Monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. If I were an independent developer selling a Windows app, or a small company doing the same, I'd be really scared, especially if MS made a buyout offer and I didn't want to sell. Time and again, their next move has been to do everything possible to destroy potential competitors through underhanded means. Even when I was a Microsoft supporter and though Bill Gates was a genius (up to 1997, when I tried Linux for the first time), I found a lot of MS' business practices to be pretty distasteful.
- Having to reboot if I change the netmask. This would be more understandable if I also had to reboot if I changed the IP address, but I don't. Just if I change the netmask.
- The way every version of Windows tries to be more helpful and thereby becomes more of a hindrance. The one Windows box I still run uses Windows 2000 and I have no intention at all of "upgrading" to XP.
- Failing to innovate IE to the point where it is now the least capable major browser in the market.
- Spreading FUD and lies rather than even thinking about competing on merit.
- Being unable to compete on merit.
- Losing tons of server market share, and even a little desktop market share, to Linux b/c it can't compete on merit.
*However* - I do NOT want to see even Microsoft being ripped off by a bunch of ambulance chasers filing a bogus class action lawsuit because they restated how their earnings are calculated - and that, if you RTFA, is all Red Hat has done: restate how their earnings are calculated. Their earnings have not changed.
I want to see Microsoft beaten, crushed, and generally humiliated in the marketplace, sure. But I want to see it happen fair and square, not through the kind of tactics MS itself routinely uses on others.
And yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe MS is behind this suit somewhere, just as they were behind the SCO suit, and it will come out eventually.
Yeah, what he said.
I used to be a network engineer at a large co-lo company which was acquired by Cable and Wireless after going through Chapter 11.
The data center in which I worked had a different take on man traps. They looked very much like a Star Trek transporter, and like the transporters, were temperamental and at least one of them was frequently out of order entirely. This was bad because they were made by an Italian company and every time one of them broke, a service tech would have to fly out *from Italy* to fix the piece of crap. One of them was once down for almost two weeks because they didn't have the part it needed. It was quite common for people to get stuck in them and have to be let out by the guards. It happened to me several times.
They worked by having a convex sliding door on each side of a floor to ceiling Plexiglas cylinder. Inside it a card reader for your badge and a biometric reader that you put your hand on. If both match up (and the fscking thing doesn't break!) the door on the other side opens. Both doors cannot be open at once, so you have to wait for the first door to close before it even lets you wave your badge at it and have your palm read.
You couldn't steal anything much via one of those, since even getting a 2U server through the tiny things required holding it between your legs. Otherwise it would think two people were in there at once and refuse to open the other door. Anytime it doesn't open, whether by design or all-too-common breakdown, it sets off an alarm at the guard station and the guards have to come and let you out.
If the things are broken, the guards can open an alarmed door (also used to take large piles of gear into the data center and go up the freight elevator), and no one could steal anything that way either because they can see anything you've got. You have to fill out paperwork on anything equipment your are bringing in or taking out, with description and serial number. There's an audit trail on anything anyone does - even employees - in the colo space.
After you get out of the transporter, if your atoms haven't been scattered halfway across the universe, you go to a secure elevator which again requires your badge to operate. It will go only to the floor your badge is authorized for, and after you get out of the elevator you have to use your badge to also open a door.
Then, you finally get to your cage, which you can open with the key your signed out from the guard station when you checked in. At the guard station, you need to be on the authorized list for your company, and you need photo ID or you don't get in.
It was pretty safe and pretty secure.
I have also been inside one of the data centers of a large, well-known investment bank. It was far less secure than the colo data center where I worked. For starters, all I had to do to get in was be in the company of a senior sysadmin who worked there and had 24 x 7 building access. He signed me in at the door to the building (which was not a dedicated data center; it was a regional headquarters in which the data center was housed), and I didn't even have to show ID. And it was on a *weekend* when the place was deserted. There were no security checks after that. None. He just swiped his badge at the computer room door and took me in for a tour. I never should have been allowed in there at all, let alone with no one even checking to see who I was or anything.
Granted, this regional headquarters was not in the United States, nor is it a US bank, so they may have different regulations, but I'd be surprised indeed if there were any regulations stating that a bank cannot use a colo facility. I also used to work for an American bank, in its main data center. The security was a lot better than what I just described above, but not as good (not even close!) as at the security at the colo data center where I worked. The network connections to that place also went by not one, not two, but *five* different carriers. It wou
You obviously do not have children (at least, not to whom you are actually filling the role of a father), and I sincerely hope that you will straighten out your thinking before you even consider having any. Or go out and get yourself snipped this week.
If you do not involve yourself in your children's lives, specifically including knowing where they are going, with whom they are associating, and what they are doing, they will turn out exactly as you describe. And/or kidnapped and sexually assaulted, maybe even killed, by some weirdo. Or on drugs. Or in juvie, and prison after that.
Not only do children not have a right to privacy, parents have a moral obligation to make sure they know the things described above.
While I don't agree with you, I will defend you as not being a troll.
I lived in Japan for many years, speak the language well, and a couple of my best friends are Japanese. I've taken beautiful photos of the A-Bomb Dome in rare snowfall at dusk. In grade school, I had a close friend whose mother was a little girl in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped (forunately, she was not near the hypocenter, and is still alive and healthy today). I agree with you that tactics such as the firebombing of all the major Japanese cities other than Kyoto (which was spared all bombing, by order), and the use of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would certainly have been prosecuted as ar crimes if Japan had won the war.
In a slight aside, no one (not even in Japan) seems to talk so much about the firebombing campaign as they do about Hiroshima and Nagasaki,even though the firebombing killed more people and destroyed more cities than the A-bombs did. Substantial parts of Tokyo didn't look all that different from Hiroshima, in 1945.
John Dower has an excellent book, "War without Mercy." I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the topic of the great cruelty with which both Japan and the United States prosecuted the war.
A few years before reading it, I visited Hiroshima for the first time, and while going through the A-Bomb Museum at the peace park, it struck me that the only reason this museum wasn't in Honolulu or San Francisco or San Diego was that we developed the bomb first. Only there would have been no museum. If Japan had won and annexed Hawaii and/or the US west coast as the terms of peace, no museum would have ever been permitted.
There is no doubt that they would have done it to us, and they did have a nuclear program for that very purpose, although it wasn't far enough along to give any hope.
Is that a good reason? Not terribly so. In August of 1945, Japan had no significant air power remaining, and nearly every ship in the Japanese navy was either sunk or out of commission. Any ship that left its port would never return. Any ship that stayed there would likely be sunk anyway. The army was still forceful and would have resisted for quite a while before surrendering, if we had invaded the main islands, but would have been defeated.
Would the general civilian populace really have fought with bamboo spears and such? I doubt it. A few maybe, but not most. Even if they had, that wasn't much of a threat. Spears don't do very well against a rifle company with M-1s and BARs, and in that war, people with spears would most certainly have been shot by people with rifles.
So, while the facts are that the bombings did end the war sooner and did save American lives, I'm not persuaded by the numbers commonly cited, and those who say it prevented the invasion of Kyushu were nuts if they were even thinking of it.
Kyushu is very mountainous, and fighting across it would have been tough going. In contrast, the land north of Tokyo is a flat plain. If I were commanding an invasion, I would have put Marine and Army divisions ashore on the excellent beaches north of the Boso Peninsula of Chiba prefecture, and swept inland through what is now Narita airport and down into Tokyo. There are a few rivers to cross in between, but with the air support that would have been available and with PT boats operating in the rivers (they are wide and deep; a destroyer escort might even be able to navigate them) that wouldn't have been hard. That area is paddy land, so an invasion would have been best done in the late fall or winter of 1945 - 1946, when the paddies are empty and dry. Tanks and trucks could move across them with ease, and a massive invasion force would have been in Tokyo in a few weeks.
I'm not persuaded that the bombings were justified, but I am fairly persuaded that they were unavoidable given the brutality and merciless character of the Pacific War, and the political realities Truman would have faced if he hadn't authorized them. Of the two
XP is not a merge of the forks. It may contain the feature set of the DOS line, but contains little or none of the code.
Why did it take so long?
Because creating the One Windows to Rule Them All was *hard* Originally, it was supposed to be Windows 2000 that put an end to the DOS line. When it became obvious that there was no way that was going to happen, it was postponed to version, XP. Even then, there was a price to pay in stability. I don't mean that XP is totally unstable, but it doesn't compare well to my Windows 2000-SP4 box. Granted, the W2K box lives in a sheltered environment and is kept around just for a couple of particular apps), so it's not breaking a sweat, but I get better uptime and performance than I did with XP on the same hardware (yes, I "downgraded" from XP Pro back to W2K, but don't see it as a downgrade). If it weren't for the fscking reboots after so many MS patches, it's uptime would be fully equal to the Linux boxen on which I do my actual work.
I may be a slightly fat dork, but I'm a slightly fat dork with a Glock. What was that you were saying about giving me your lunch money?
Cost of cleaning up the mess after the next zero-day IE 'sploit or mail worm sweeps through your Windows network for the 74th time this year? Priceless.
>I decided to try it... It is as bad as you heard.
:-p
Heh, I've got an even better one than that.
I run Sid on my desktop machine. Very basic, fairly vanilla machine. Athlon XP 2200+ ECS mobo with Promse RAID onboard (not used), two disks (software RAID 1), a floppy, a DVD+RW drive, whitebox Radeon 9000, 3c905 NIC. Works fine with SID and Sarge. No trouble at all.
A couple months ago I bought a British Linux magazine that had a free copy of Lindows 4.5 (still called that at the time) in a box stuck to the cover. Never did anything with it, but recently I was upgrading to two larger disks, and before I put Sid on them, decided I'd try out Lindows, basically just to see, like you, if it sucked as much as I'd heard.
I hook up a disk (Western Digital 120 gB), boot the CD, start the install. It only gets a few minutes into the install before it hardlocks the machine. Repeatable every time.
I gave up on that, put in the disk, intalled Sid, built my new arrays, and did a dselect upgrade to get my old package selections back. No muss, no fuss.
Why Sid and Sarge both work perfectly on this platform and Linspire doesn't is anybody's guess. It sure wasn't important enough to look for the cause of the problem.
Now, in addition to all the already known good reasons to not use or recommend Linspire, a good number of which you list, I have one all my own: it's finicky about hardware. Using Linspire might be kind of like the early days of Solaris x86 (or even Linux itself), when if you were building a machine on which you planned to run it, you went shopping with a hardware compatibility list in your hand.
Linux is not at the point where the HCL is basically "Don't buy stuff that's super bleeding-edge, there might not be a driver." Other than that, the hardware support is as good, or sometimes better than, Windows XP and blows away Windows 2000 and any other earlier version of Windows. (For example, I was dual-booting XP and Debian on a machine that had a NIC I'd bought when I lived in Japan; XP had no support for the NIC and I had no driver disk and no dial-up connection, either. I downloaded the XP driver using Linux; without Linux I would have been SOL for a driver). Perhaps Linspire aims to reverse this disturbing trend towards "Just pour it in and it works" Linux as a means of somehow making people more dependent on them for (paid) support
The last time I was in an on-call job (net eng) I had a company-paid *leased line* in my house. And your new CIO wants you to pay for your own DSL?
If your resume isn't up-to-date, do it now. Get a new job. Seriously. If he would pull that kind of "you should pay for it yourself out of company loyalty/go-getter spirit" line on you, believe it when I say this is just the first of many indignities that will be heaped upon you. If you don't start looking now, you'll be sorry,
Heck, if you're in the LA area, reply and post the URL to your resume here. I just filled all the open positions on my team, but you never know when something might come up.
If your company was a good place to work, it's a shame this happened to you. I hope you find something good soon. If it wasn't a good place to work anyway, well, no harm done in heading for new pastures now.
I found this article and all the comments really interesting.
Last fall, I needed a new refrigerator and saw one in a Best Buy ad that was at a decent price and was really just what I was looking for. I like it pretty well and had made up my mind to buy it, but then the Best Buy sales staff entered. I didn't *even* get to the arguing about the extended warranty part before their general rudeness had so thoroughly alienated me that I told them "I changed my mind; your bad service and attitude just blew the sale for you" and walked out.
I then drove a few miles to Sears, where I found a fridge with all the same features, and free delivery (which made it the same price as the one at Best Buy), and the sales people were great.
Best Buy's staff is the best advertisement their competitors could wish for. That would have been my first time to buy at a Best Buy store, and now I will not set foot in one again. I wouldn't care if they were beating Fry's, Circuit City, and everyone else on the price of every item, I'd rather pay more somewhere else than buy from Best Buy.
My experience with Fry's has been the same as yours, in both San Diego and LA. If I have question (really rare), I can get somebody to answer it. Otherwise, I won't have sales vultures swooping down on me.
BTW, for anyone who *is* looking for a date at Fry's, there are some seriously fine looking babes at the one in Manhattan Beach (LA beach cities). If I wasn't already married...