I work for one of the enterprise spam filtering services, and while it may be true that only 1/3 of the mail sent in the US is spam (I don't buy it, and the article doesn't state the methodology by which they derived that figure), I can tell you that the percentage of mail sent to *businesses* is way, way over 50% spam. I'm sure our competitors would all say the same. I guess that's what the spammers mean by "targeted email":-/
While I can mostly agree with most of what you've said (how's that for being non-committal?:-) I do have to question one point.
You say that/.ers are "socially very liberal in the 'government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner. Unless you are using "liberal" in a way that most people (IMO) don't, that is wrong.
Liberals (most Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Greens, etc.) seem to favor *more* government control over *more* of society as a whole and your life in particular, and consistently back big government that gets bigger. That's how we got in the financial mess out here in California. It wasn't libertarians or conservatives who put us here, it was liberal Democrats and the people who kept voting for them.
It is not liberals - social, political, or any ther kind - who say that government shouldn't interfere with us in any manner. It is first conservatives (they say government shouldn't interfere very much) and then libertarians (who go more towards the "in any matter" end of the spectrum).
WRT Bush, while it's true probably true that he isn't as popular as Clinton was throughout his presidency (I don't believe Clinton was any better of a president, but he was a more charismatic one, and played sax), the opinion of him on/. seems to me to be out of step with the average. Anyone who says anything bad about Bush - even if it's an outright lie - is likely to be modded up, while anyone who either defends him or criticizes the original post is likely to be modded down. My pulled-from-my-butt guess is that/. is at least 75% anti-Bush, which is nowhere near the national average.
Yes, this is OT. Go ahead and mod me down. At least it's intelligent OT.
Umm, Osama bin Laden is a millionaire. You don't see the heads of the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist organization out there begging on the street, either.
There's a reason for this: terrorism is not fundmentally fueled by either poverty or hunger. The components of terrorism are hatred, bigotry, and racism. "But the world is filled with those things!" you may say, "But terrorism is not universal. We have some hatred, bigotry, and racism right here in the USA, and way too much poverty for a rich country, too. Yet domestic terrorism is almost completely unknown here. Why?"
Why, indeed? It's because terrorism needs a catalyst. That catalyst is the wealthy men with radical agendas and no regard for the rule of law who head the terrorist organizations, among whom bin Laden is the richest. Besides being pretty good at terror, Al Qaeda is a heck of a good fund-raising and money-laundering organization, too. One that would probably make most political parties and some drug cartels look on with envy.
You can educate people all you want. It won't stop terrorism. You can feed them all you want. it won't stop terrorism. Indeed, Hamas feeds lots of people, and the Islamic world is filled with Islamic schools that educate people. The radical ones educate people in terrorist ideology, and they later graduate from ideology to techniques. So what we see is that feeding and "educating" people is an integral part of recruiting new terrorists. After all, somebody has to go out and be the suicide bomber, and it sure isn't going to be the guy in charge, or anyone from his family. They'll advocate suicide bombing but they have no taste for it themselves. It's pretty plain from that just how much they really care about the people they recruit.
So, what will end terrorism? First of all, there is no quick fix. I'm in my forties and I believe we will be at war against terrorism for the rest of my life. I don't know if even my very young children will see an end to it in their old age.
To end terrorism, we need to do a lot of things. Kill terrorists, firstly. Especially those on top. Make it clear that any country that harbors or aids terrorists is putting its collective neck on the block. You don't think Qaddafi's playing ball all of a sudden is a coincidence, do you? He was what happened to Saddam Hussein, and decided he wanted no part of that. Any dictator cares first and foremost about himself, and it was clear to him that the way to retain power was to play ball with the international community and dump his WMD programs before someone came along and dumped him. Qaddafi is no fool. Hussein was a fool to continue following the course he did after Sept. 11.
Secondly, we need to encourage democracy and freedom in the Mid East. Sometimes, that can only be achieved through forcible regime change. Other times, a carrot and a stick will be enough.
Finally, getting a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians is key. No one had a right to gripe about Israel holding the west bank and Gaza, and no one would have a right to gripe if they kept them forever. The only reason they are in those places is the 1967 war, a war of aggression waged against Israel by its neighbors. The Israelis won, and took that land to buffer them against future attacks. That's how they got the Golan Heights, too.
Despite the fact that it would be fair if Israel kept that land, they won't have peace unless they give it back and let the Palestinians make a state on it.
An end to terrorism and achievement of peace is possible, but it cannot be achieved through appeasement now any more than it could against Hitler in the 1930s. We all know what appeasement of Hitler led to. It led to waiting to fight him after he was too strong to beat easily. It led to countless millions of deaths that wouldn't have happened if they had taken him down years earlier when he had n
This has, IMO, more merit than just having the CDs in the library because:
1) Anybody who can't follow written instructions to burn a CD probably isn't able to install the software on their own anyway, even if you provide them with a ready-burned CD;
2) Keeping physical CDs will, after a while, result in the library having a big stock of obsolete software which should not be installed. People will doubtless check it out, install it anyway, and promptly get owned. At least if it's kept on a PC, the free software library is a little more likely to be updated regularly and the people who access it are probably a little more clueful and might have a better chance of recognizing that something is out of date.
For several years I was the materials librarian of the Tokyo Linux Users Group (yes, it's written without an apostrophe:-p) and I periodically went through our CD collection and threw out anything old enough to be considered dangerously out of date. If someone doesn't do that at the library, they'll wind up with a town full of zombies, and the town's healthy computers will all have to flee to the shopping mall and make a last stand there.
I don't share your opinion of Bush, but I have an embarrassment story that (to me, anyway) trumps yours: my brother's wife is a relative of Martha Stewart. That means Martha Stewart (another MS. Coincidence? I think not!) is one of my in-laws.
Everybody knows how to do each of the individual steps you list to install a Windows program. Most would perceive that as easier than learning how to bring up an xterm, type in su, update the package database, guess what the package name is (or dig through thousands of choices), and type in apt-get or whatever.
Then use Synaptic. It's graphical, well laid out, organizes the packages into functional groups, handles all dependencies through apt, and does all those things with a few clicks of the mouse. The 12,000 or so packages available to Debian users are all right there.
What Synaptic gives you is a single unified interface/installer for installing all of your software, including downloading it for you from the right place. As long as it's a Debian package, you don't have to have the slightest clue in the world where it downloads from. Synaptic (or apt, from the CLI) will take care of all those messy details. Windows has at least three interfaces for doing that:
Add/Remove programs, for installing and removing applications and system components
A Windows install CD, for installing system components
For installing applications, you have to get the software yourself, either by buying it on CD or finding the download site, manually downloading it, and then double-clicking it to start the installer. The only part of Windows that works like Synaptic is Windows Update. Oh, hey, that's a fourth interface:-)
I don't mean to imply that Debian does not also have other interfaces (Aptitude, Synaptic, apt from the command line, and dpkg, or you can forget all that and just use tarballs, or compile from source), but Synaptic presents a single unified interface; such a thing does not exist on the Windows platform.
Furthermore, if you install Apt for RPM, you can use Synaptic on RPM-based systems as well. My dad uses it on SuSE and says it works quite well. He is a total CLI-phobe who usually goes nowhere near a shell, so if it works well for him, it must be pretty good indeed.
Linux is a lot closer to being a serious contender on the desktop than many - even in the Linux camp - realize. For the corporate desktop, it's basically ready. Users don't need any particular Linux expertise, that's what you have the IT department for. After all, how many users around your office have any Windows expertise. Very few, if your office is like most. The Xpde desktop even makes Linux look and behave amazingly like Windows if they need a transitional crutch.
What isn't ready for Linux on the corporate desktop is not primarily Linux, but the managers who need to OK pilot projects and approve a general changeover. They just don't know how far it's come. The other day I was telling a senior manager at my company about Star Office and OpenOffice.org and how I've never had a problem with Word or Excel documents and that OO.org is free and Star Office is only about 70 bucks for a boxed set at retail, maybe less. He was interested, so I will follow that up at a later time with demo on my Thinkpad running Debian Sid. If I really want to jazz him, maybe I'll put xpde on it:-)
What interested him the most (and me as well) is that he had never heard of either Star Office or OO.org. We are a technology company. We had 500% growth last year and look to repeat that performance this year. Our managers are not computer- or technology-illiterate. If a technical manager at a company like ours can have so little information about open source, think what it must be like in places that aren't technology companies. Places where the only computer-literate people in the company might be the IT staff who keep the Windows boxes and the W2K PDC running.
We have to educate them.
Let your boss see you running Linux. Show her how you can mount SMB shares, print to Windows printers, edit Excel spreadsheets and Word docs a
I live in LA. Every day (really!) on every freeway in LA, there is an accident. Often on some of the major surface streets, too. There was a multi-car, multi-injury accident along my route to work just a few days ago.
All of the drivers in all of those vehicles, insured or not, all have two things in common: they all never really thought they'd get into an accident, and they all did.
Completely ignoring the law and the fact that you could, in theory, get shot by an irate motorist who just learned that you are uninsured, you have a moral obligation to carry insurance. Yes, a moral obligation. You don't have to carry collision, you don't have to carry comprehensive. You don't have to carry uninsured motorist. You can take your chances on all those things, figuring your car won't be hit or stolen, or if it is, the other driver will be insured. That is your right.
However, unless you are independently wealthy, you have a moral obligation to carry insurance because it pays the bills you can't pay if you are in an accident and it's your fault. No one ever thinks they will be in an accident; that's why they are called accidents. But you don't *know* you won't be. None of the 30,000 or 40,000 or so Americans who die in traffic accidents every year left the house that day thinking they were going to be in an accident, let alone be killed. You just never know when it will happen. Get insured.
And no, I'm not in the insurance business:-)
Re:How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Somebody needs to mod you up. I had mod points today, but they're gone already or I'd do it myself.
I've worked in computers pretty much my whole life, except for a brief foray into another career, but after about 3 years I came back to IT. Computers seem like the most natural thing in the world to me. Not to my wife. She's a very hard worker, she's smart (IQ over 150), an excellent entrepreneur (she started what became her family business when she was in her early twenties) and really good at mechanical things, too. But computers?! Uh-uh. She doesn't even want to be bothered with them. She just wants them to work, and if they have a problem, she doesn't even really want to know what I did to fix it. Computers are a tool of business and communication for her, but they'll never be a hobby or even at all interesting in themselves.
My wife is a brilliant woman, and (in at least my opinion and probably hers too:-) far smarter than her husband in every area except one: computers. I'm counting my blessings for that one area that makes me look good:-)
There are several things wrong with your thinking. So many it's hard to know where to start.
1) I don't know how much your car is worth, but for the sake of argument let's say it's five years old and worth about $7500. Now, let's say that someone who thinks just like you do hits your car. It's totalled, you're pretty badly hurt and spend a couple weeks in the hospital and a couple months after that seeing a physical therapist, and your injuries are such that you can no longer do your job. You have no car, a lot of health care debt, and no source of income anymore. Remember, the other guy thinks just like you and even though he was found to be completely at fault for the accident, you're screwed because he had no insurance and no money.
2) You screw up and hit someone. The other vehicle is heavily damaged and all occupants of the vehicle require hospitalization. One requires long-term care. You are found to be at fault, and you are responsible for several hundred thousand dollars worth of expenses. The other people had uninsured motorist coverage and health insurance, so they are mostly taken care of. You are taken care of too, by their insurance companies' lawyers, who strip you of everything you own in the world and have a judgement against you that will take most of the rest of your life to pay off.
3) Your car is stolen. No insurance? Oops.
4) If you don't live in LA this might not apply as much, but a lot of people carry guns in their vehicles. Hitting somebody's car and spouting your shortsighted philosophy on insurance could get you nominated for a (well-deserved) Darwin Award.
I'm sure people could think of a lot more.
BTW, do you have health insurance? If you're married and have kids, do you have it for them? What about life insurance in case you get shot for hitting somebody and not having insurance, or any other unforeseen events happen to you (this kind of assumes being married; single people have far less need for life insurance). If you are being true to your insurance philosophy, the answers to those questions should all be "no." After all, you're not likely to have a catastrophic illness or injury on any given day and not likely to die on any given day, either. Right?
My kids both have normal names with normal spellings, and neither my wife nor I ever considered anything else. To give your kid a normal name that won't get him or her picked on is an important gift to your child. I also have a normal name, but my brother's name, while normal, has an alternative spelling. My parents will argue that there is precedent, but I don't care. I've never met anyone else with his name who spelled it that way, or even heard of one, and almost no one spells his name right (or everyone does, depending on your point of view, because they go for the normal spelling), and some mispronounce it based on the way it's spelled.
My name is normal and uses the most common spelling, but on the other hand, so many Americans are such poor spellers these days that as often as not it comes out misspelled anyway. They should have picked something shorter.
In the early days, when Mao was still a revolutionary fighting an uphill battle, real communism, or something very near to it, was practiced in the areas of China under the control of the communist revolutionaries.
The same was true in Viet Nam. Ho Chi Minh, in fact, was a good man, a far better one than those who came after him. If you go to Viet Nam, people who trust you will tell you, even if they are not themselves communists and don't believe in it at all, that this is so. Bac Ho, as they call him there, is universally revered in Viet Nam. If he had lived another 10 or 15 years, his country would have been much the better for it.
I don't think we have any left, could you Aussies maybe outsource a few up here? While you're at it, send me a case or two of Cooper's, but keep all the Foster's (Australian for 'roo piss, no matter what a certain actor says about it in TV commercials) for yourselves:-)
Linux does not have the same capacity yet as a windows machine
You're right, we just don't have that BSOD trick down like Windows does, probably never will:-)
Seriously, though, that statement needs some qualification and narrowing. The question "Same capacity for what?" will help.
Yes, there are some areas where Linux lags quite a bit behind Windows. The most significant of these are, in my opinion:
Multimedia, including sound, video, and graphics editing (yes, I know about The GIMP and use it, but it's still not Photoshop)
Gaming
Easy discovery of other resources on the LAN
CRM (yes, I know about Compiere, but those who have used it have told me it's not yet as good as what's available on Windows, and there is more choice of software on Windows)
Of these three areas, which ones are of importance to business? Only the last two, unless your business is multimedia, and if it is you're probably using a Linux render farm and have a lot of custom software that runs on Linux workstations, too. If you're not that big, you probably do all of your work on Win or Mac. However, multimedia businesses are a small segment of the market.
The general business sector is where people will care about easy discovery of LAN resources. Now, I confess to not having looked very closely at this, to see what is being done in the Linux world. Probably some progress has been made of which I am totally unaware, but speaking in general terms, I think it's easier for an average user to find network shares and printers on a Windows LAN (including ones that actually have a Samba PDC) than to do the equivalent work on a LINUX LAN. One answer to this might be to implement Rendezvous on Linux. Another would be to make up some user-oriented graphical tools for Samba that would make it easy for users to create shares and browse for printers (I believe there are some of those, but don't know how good they are) and tightly integrate those tools with Gnome and KDE. Vendor-specific tools are not the solution to this problem (coiughMandrakecoughSuSEcough).
So, what areas that are important to business does Linux cover well?
Web browsing
Email
Instant Messaging
Groupware mostly (Kolab and Kontact are decent, but more work probably needs to be done, and there are various web-based groupware solutions that may have issues for people who need to work out of the office)
Office suite (for most business, OpenOffice.Org or Star Office will meet their needs)
Security and Stability. I don't think I even need to say more about this:-)
So, we have most of the business core areas covered and are making progress in the ones where we still need to do some work. And as you said, Linux is coming from all angles, which gives it the potential to be a total vertical solution from the staff PDAs and cell phones all the way up to the server farm. Microsoft is the only other vendor who sells software at all those levels. At some of those levels, Linux is already better, and it's improving rapidly at the others. And it's [Ff]ree.
Yes, MS is scared. Linux is doing to them what they did to the big iron software vendors, or doing it a lower price point and with more freedom.
Yes, I was looking for a non-AC response. I even got a reasonable one, thank you.
However, I think you prove my case rather than disprove it: like me, you do both of those things, and I got into building computers after already being involved with muscle cars for years. OK, I don't hotrod anymore, b/c I simply don't have either the time or the money for it. Keeping far enough ahead of the IT rat race to remain gainfully employed is quite enough challenge in itself. While I have done so, my salary is down more than 25% from two years ago. Still, I have a job at decent, rapidly growing company, so I can't complain, but it certainly doesn't leave room in my budget for fast cars.
I suspect that at an awful lot of overclockers would, if they could afford it, get into the street machine scene, too. If they could avoid the evil of riced-up Hondas and such, they would probably turn out some pretty fine cars. I'm sure you've seen what the really good case modders can do, and they'd be terrific if they got into auto bodies. I think case modders, in particular, have a lot in common with custom body people.
However, affording it is harder than ever. A classic muscle car is so pricy these days, and you uwouldn't want to hack one up anyway. Modifying a new car is guaranteed to make it smog-illegal, at least here in California, and building a custom like your '31 (that's gonna be a sweet machine!) makes starting with a sixties ride look downright cheap.
A lot of people are priced out of the hot-rodding game, many even before they start. Computers make a substitute outlet for that for some, myself included.
Why is it that all of the denial of the commonality between car geeks and computer geeks comes from (some of) the car geeks? Could it be that they are simply in denial? I think so.
I had an experience like that in junior high school.
This was in the 1970s, and we had a soda machine that gave you soda in a paper cup, along with ice that felt remarkably like cardboard.
Well, one day in summer school, word is spreading like wildfire that the soda machine is just pumping out free soda. So, anybody who can get any container was running over to the lunch area to get some. I had a cup from before and got several free fillups of the Seven-Up like mixture it was continuously pumping. One of my very best days in junior high:-)
I bank with Washington Mutual (don't work there or anything, just a happy customer) and their ATMs don't do any of that crap, have no transaction fee - and here's the head turner - they have no transaction free for anyone, even if you're not a Washington Mutual customer. So it says on the WaMu ATM near my office.
See if they're near you: http://www.wamu.com/
They also have a very nice online banking system, and it works well with Konqueror (at least if you have Konq lie and say it's Mozilla).
Insightful?! You, moderators! Yeah, you! Put down those crack pipes and come out with your hands on top of your head!
The fact is, the kinds of viruses that routinely affect Outlook and Outlook Express are simply impossible on Linux or any other flavor of Unix. The architecture doesn't work that way. There have been viruses and worms written for *nix, and with the exception of the Morris worm, which actually exploited a feature of Sendmail rather than of Unix and was a cross-platform worm thereby, none of them have been particularly widespread.
It has already been explained by someone else, but in Linux - no matter what mail client you use - there is simply no concept of an excutable attachment. Binary attachments may be viewable, but they cannot be executed. So until someone comes up with a way to embed something in an attachment which can cause the viewer to do something bad, such as take the attachment and execute it as its own code, Linux and all other *nix platforms are pretty safe from email viruses. Moreover, not only is such a thing very hard to do (if it's even possible), it's further limited by the fact that you just don't know what somebody is using as a viewer for a given file type. There are so many choices. There are dozens of things that could be my.jpg viewer, for example. Maybe you found a way to make Kuickshow take code embedded in a.jpg and execute it, but if I'm not using Kuickshow, you're SOL.
A worm that does not depend on email has a little better chance on *nix, such as the Lion worm (IIRC) that could infect certain versions of lpd a few years ago. Still, that one was never really widespread either, because:
A) Not all machines are running any kind of lpd; B) If they are, it may be firewalled off and/or not listening on an external interface and/or not accepting connections from non-local IPs; C) It might not be an affected version anyway; D) It might be CUPS or lprng, and those wouldn't be affected at all, unless you took all three of them into account when writing the worm (the lion worm didn't). Even then, you'd have to hit the right version on the right platform for each variant.
A worm or virus that tried to exploit features of an MTA or database or something within X would also face a tough time because they might not (read "probably won't") work on all distros, glibc versions, KDE versions, Gnome versions, Fluxbox versions, IceWM versions, WindowMaker verions, etc. If it depends on an MTA or database to spread, then you have to account for Sendmail (lot of versions), Postfix, qmail, Exim (v. 3.x and 4.x), some proprietary MTAs, and who knows what else. If it's a database, could be Oracle, MySQL, Postgresql, or who knows what else. And of course it has to be unfirewalled. Most people running an SQL server on *nix are also running a firewall. Maybe multiple layers of firewalling, if they're properly paranoid.
These are issues faced by anyone who wants to write a virus or worm for Linux or Unix.
The fact is, writing worms and viruses for Linux, *BSD, or a proprietary UNIX platform is a lot harder than writing them for Windows, and they spread a lot more slowly and don't get nearly as far. Yes, as Linux continues to grow in popularity you will see more attempts at viruses and worms for Linux. Most of them will be abject failures, and even the ones that aren't will never have the impact that Viruses and worms have had on Windows. Not only for the reasons outline above, but for one more big one, which is a product of the reasons above: SPEED. There are simply too many different distros on different hardware platforms, with different configurations, and different versions of key items on which a worm will depend, for it to be able to spread quickly.
That is why, even if Linux should someday utterly dislodge Windows from the desktop and command a 90% market share, with the rest mostly held by Mac, it will NEVER have the kind of virus and worm problems Windows has. On Windows, the problems are designed in. On *nix, they are designed *out*.
Cool, I was hoping at least one person who read that would know where I was talking about:-) I live in LA now (gotta go where the jobs are, and they weren't in SD) but still love San Diego best.
Is Ecology still there? I lived abroad for a long time and just came back to the States last year, and things have really changed. I bet most of those old junkyards are probably houses and industrial parks now. When I was in high school, there was still a junkyard in Mission Valley, and one in Tierrasanta, too, but those are now long gone.
And your balls are so big that you have to post as an AC?
Explain to me if you can (and I'm certain you can't), why I meet so many people who overclock, don't buy over-the-counter PCs because they prefer to choose the parts and build their own, and indeed who run Linux, are former hot rodders and street racers like me?
All you've proven is that you understand neither hotrodding nor overclocking. What drew (and still draws, I'm sure) people to hotrodding was taking a car and making it better. Making it perform better, making it handle better, making it look better. The technical aspects of it - at least for the people who weren't wannabes - were the greatest part of it.
So what happened to so many of those former hotrodders like me? We grew up and started families, and like generations of hotrodders before us, have no money for that stuff any more. We still hotrod our computers, though, and do still work on our own cars (well, sometimes; I usually have better things to do with my time, and I can afford to pay someone else to work on my car while I'm doing those things).
I'm sure you are neither a hotrodder nor a hardware tinkerer, or you'd know that what I'm saying is the truth.
I'm an ex-street racer/hot rodder (my two favorite cars were a '70 Challenger whose 383 I replaced with a 440, and my factory 340 '69 Dart Swinger).
I can tell you that very few of the guys in the street racing and cruising scene came out there with girls, or even had girlfriends. A few of them were married, but they typically only came out for the cruise portions. The racing, which happened later in the evening on dark roads around the city, was attended by young, unattached males.
Think about it: if you have a girlfriend, how content is she going to be that you spend most of your time and money on your street machine, and your idea of a good time on Saturday night is going to the parking lot cruise at Mervyn's, then heading out to Kearny VIlla for racing? Most of the very few girls I met back then who thought that was fun actually had their own cars, and the cars were better than most of the guys' rides. Their owners could drive, too. The proof of this was that if a guy did get a girlfriend, he would usually become pretty scarce in the street scene after that.
Even in the seventies at Ruffin Road, where people sometimes even trailered in cars, and ones brought on a tow bar were not at all unusual, those hot summer nights were still almost exclusively male summer nights. I'd guesstimate that no more - and probably less - then ten percent of those guys had girlfriends. That's probably even worse than the Slashdot percentage:-)
I don't know how things are now, because I'm married and have kids and that just takes precedence over fast cars and makes racing absolutely out of the question, but back in the late eighties/early nineties when I was last involved in the scene, it had mostly been taken over by riced-up Japanese cars and (far worse) lifted mini-trucks whose height above the ground was far higher than the IQs of their drivers. I bet most of those guys didn't have girlfriends either.
The fact is, most of the hot rodders and street racers have a great deal in common with overclockers (which is probably why I occassionally dabble in overclocking myself): they're technology nerds. Most of them were far more interested in cams, pistons, and going on junkyard crawls looking for cool rare parts than they were in cruising for girls. It was pretty common to turn out early Saturday morning at the Ecology yard in Otay Mesa, toolbox in hand and cash in pocket, and run into people you knew from Saturday night.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for one of the enterprise spam filtering services, and while it may be true that only 1/3 of the mail sent in the US is spam (I don't buy it, and the article doesn't state the methodology by which they derived that figure), I can tell you that the percentage of mail sent to *businesses* is way, way over 50% spam. I'm sure our competitors would all say the same. I guess that's what the spammers mean by "targeted email" :-/
While I can mostly agree with most of what you've said (how's that for being non-committal? :-) I do have to question one point.
/.ers are "socially very liberal in the 'government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner. Unless you are using "liberal" in a way that most people (IMO) don't, that is wrong.
/. seems to me to be out of step with the average. Anyone who says anything bad about Bush - even if it's an outright lie - is likely to be modded up, while anyone who either defends him or criticizes the original post is likely to be modded down. My pulled-from-my-butt guess is that /. is at least 75% anti-Bush, which is nowhere near the national average.
:-)
You say that
Liberals (most Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Greens, etc.) seem to favor *more* government control over *more* of society as a whole and your life in particular, and consistently back big government that gets bigger. That's how we got in the financial mess out here in California. It wasn't libertarians or conservatives who put us here, it was liberal Democrats and the people who kept voting for them.
It is not liberals - social, political, or any ther kind - who say that government shouldn't interfere with us in any manner. It is first conservatives (they say government shouldn't interfere very much) and then libertarians (who go more towards the "in any matter" end of the spectrum).
WRT Bush, while it's true probably true that he isn't as popular as Clinton was throughout his presidency (I don't believe Clinton was any better of a president, but he was a more charismatic one, and played sax), the opinion of him on
OK, that was two points
Yes, this is OT. Go ahead and mod me down. At least it's intelligent OT.
Umm, Osama bin Laden is a millionaire. You don't see the heads of the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist organization out there begging on the street, either.
There's a reason for this: terrorism is not fundmentally fueled by either poverty or hunger. The components of terrorism are hatred, bigotry, and racism. "But the world is filled with those things!" you may say, "But terrorism is not universal. We have some hatred, bigotry, and racism right here in the USA, and way too much poverty for a rich country, too. Yet domestic terrorism is almost completely unknown here. Why?"
Why, indeed? It's because terrorism needs a catalyst. That catalyst is the wealthy men with radical agendas and no regard for the rule of law who head the terrorist organizations, among whom bin Laden is the richest. Besides being pretty good at terror, Al Qaeda is a heck of a good fund-raising and money-laundering organization, too. One that would probably make most political parties and some drug cartels look on with envy.
You can educate people all you want. It won't stop terrorism. You can feed them all you want. it won't stop terrorism. Indeed, Hamas feeds lots of people, and the Islamic world is filled with Islamic schools that educate people. The radical ones educate people in terrorist ideology, and they later graduate from ideology to techniques. So what we see is that feeding and "educating" people is an integral part of recruiting new terrorists. After all, somebody has to go out and be the suicide bomber, and it sure isn't going to be the guy in charge, or anyone from his family. They'll advocate suicide bombing but they have no taste for it themselves. It's pretty plain from that just how much they really care about the people they recruit.
So, what will end terrorism? First of all, there is no quick fix. I'm in my forties and I believe we will be at war against terrorism for the rest of my life. I don't know if even my very young children will see an end to it in their old age.
To end terrorism, we need to do a lot of things. Kill terrorists, firstly. Especially those on top. Make it clear that any country that harbors or aids terrorists is putting its collective neck on the block. You don't think Qaddafi's playing ball all of a sudden is a coincidence, do you? He was what happened to Saddam Hussein, and decided he wanted no part of that. Any dictator cares first and foremost about himself, and it was clear to him that the way to retain power was to play ball with the international community and dump his WMD programs before someone came along and dumped him. Qaddafi is no fool. Hussein was a fool to continue following the course he did after Sept. 11.
Secondly, we need to encourage democracy and freedom in the Mid East. Sometimes, that can only be achieved through forcible regime change. Other times, a carrot and a stick will be enough.
Finally, getting a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians is key. No one had a right to gripe about Israel holding the west bank and Gaza, and no one would have a right to gripe if they kept them forever. The only reason they are in those places is the 1967 war, a war of aggression waged against Israel by its neighbors. The Israelis won, and took that land to buffer them against future attacks. That's how they got the Golan Heights, too.
Despite the fact that it would be fair if Israel kept that land, they won't have peace unless they give it back and let the Palestinians make a state on it.
An end to terrorism and achievement of peace is possible, but it cannot be achieved through appeasement now any more than it could against Hitler in the 1930s. We all know what appeasement of Hitler led to. It led to waiting to fight him after he was too strong to beat easily. It led to countless millions of deaths that wouldn't have happened if they had taken him down years earlier when he had n
This has, IMO, more merit than just having the CDs in the library because:
:-p) and I periodically went through our CD collection and threw out anything old enough to be considered dangerously out of date. If someone doesn't do that at the library, they'll wind up with a town full of zombies, and the town's healthy computers will all have to flee to the shopping mall and make a last stand there.
1) Anybody who can't follow written instructions to burn a CD probably isn't able to install the software on their own anyway, even if you provide them with a ready-burned CD;
2) Keeping physical CDs will, after a while, result in the library having a big stock of obsolete software which should not be installed. People will doubtless check it out, install it anyway, and promptly get owned. At least if it's kept on a PC, the free software library is a little more likely to be updated regularly and the people who access it are probably a little more clueful and might have a better chance of recognizing that something is out of date.
For several years I was the materials librarian of the Tokyo Linux Users Group (yes, it's written without an apostrophe
it's already toast. They must really be running it on XP :-)
I don't share your opinion of Bush, but I have an embarrassment story that (to me, anyway) trumps yours: my brother's wife is a relative of Martha Stewart. That means Martha Stewart (another MS. Coincidence? I think not!) is one of my in-laws.
The horror! The horror!
You can run a Porsche on electricity now? Wow!
Everybody knows how to do each of the individual steps you list to install a Windows program. Most would perceive that as easier than learning how to bring up an xterm, type in su, update the package database, guess what the package name is (or dig through thousands of choices), and type in apt-get or whatever.
Then use Synaptic. It's graphical, well laid out, organizes the packages into functional groups, handles all dependencies through apt, and does all those things with a few clicks of the mouse. The 12,000 or so packages available to Debian users are all right there.
What Synaptic gives you is a single unified interface/installer for installing all of your software, including downloading it for you from the right place. As long as it's a Debian package, you don't have to have the slightest clue in the world where it downloads from. Synaptic (or apt, from the CLI) will take care of all those messy details. Windows has at least three interfaces for doing that:
I don't mean to imply that Debian does not also have other interfaces (Aptitude, Synaptic, apt from the command line, and dpkg, or you can forget all that and just use tarballs, or compile from source), but Synaptic presents a single unified interface; such a thing does not exist on the Windows platform.
Furthermore, if you install Apt for RPM, you can use Synaptic on RPM-based systems as well. My dad uses it on SuSE and says it works quite well. He is a total CLI-phobe who usually goes nowhere near a shell, so if it works well for him, it must be pretty good indeed.
Linux is a lot closer to being a serious contender on the desktop than many - even in the Linux camp - realize. For the corporate desktop, it's basically ready. Users don't need any particular Linux expertise, that's what you have the IT department for. After all, how many users around your office have any Windows expertise. Very few, if your office is like most. The Xpde desktop even makes Linux look and behave amazingly like Windows if they need a transitional crutch.
What isn't ready for Linux on the corporate desktop is not primarily Linux, but the managers who need to OK pilot projects and approve a general changeover. They just don't know how far it's come. The other day I was telling a senior manager at my company about Star Office and OpenOffice.org and how I've never had a problem with Word or Excel documents and that OO.org is free and Star Office is only about 70 bucks for a boxed set at retail, maybe less. He was interested, so I will follow that up at a later time with demo on my Thinkpad running Debian Sid. If I really want to jazz him, maybe I'll put xpde on it :-)
What interested him the most (and me as well) is that he had never heard of either Star Office or OO.org. We are a technology company. We had 500% growth last year and look to repeat that performance this year. Our managers are not computer- or technology-illiterate. If a technical manager at a company like ours can have so little information about open source, think what it must be like in places that aren't technology companies. Places where the only computer-literate people in the company might be the IT staff who keep the Windows boxes and the W2K PDC running.
We have to educate them.
Let your boss see you running Linux. Show her how you can mount SMB shares, print to Windows printers, edit Excel spreadsheets and Word docs a
And you assume you won't get into an accident.
:-)
I live in LA. Every day (really!) on every freeway in LA, there is an accident. Often on some of the major surface streets, too. There was a multi-car, multi-injury accident along my route to work just a few days ago.
All of the drivers in all of those vehicles, insured or not, all have two things in common: they all never really thought they'd get into an accident, and they all did.
Completely ignoring the law and the fact that you could, in theory, get shot by an irate motorist who just learned that you are uninsured, you have a moral obligation to carry insurance. Yes, a moral obligation. You don't have to carry collision, you don't have to carry comprehensive. You don't have to carry uninsured motorist. You can take your chances on all those things, figuring your car won't be hit or stolen, or if it is, the other driver will be insured. That is your right.
However, unless you are independently wealthy, you have a moral obligation to carry insurance because it pays the bills you can't pay if you are in an accident and it's your fault. No one ever thinks they will be in an accident; that's why they are called accidents. But you don't *know* you won't be. None of the 30,000 or 40,000 or so Americans who die in traffic accidents every year left the house that day thinking they were going to be in an accident, let alone be killed. You just never know when it will happen. Get insured.
And no, I'm not in the insurance business
Somebody needs to mod you up. I had mod points today, but they're gone already or I'd do it myself.
:-) far smarter than her husband in every area except one: computers. I'm counting my blessings for that one area that makes me look good :-)
I've worked in computers pretty much my whole life, except for a brief foray into another career, but after about 3 years I came back to IT. Computers seem like the most natural thing in the world to me. Not to my wife. She's a very hard worker, she's smart (IQ over 150), an excellent entrepreneur (she started what became her family business when she was in her early twenties) and really good at mechanical things, too. But computers?! Uh-uh. She doesn't even want to be bothered with them. She just wants them to work, and if they have a problem, she doesn't even really want to know what I did to fix it. Computers are a tool of business and communication for her, but they'll never be a hobby or even at all interesting in themselves.
My wife is a brilliant woman, and (in at least my opinion and probably hers too
There are several things wrong with your thinking. So many it's hard to know where to start.
1) I don't know how much your car is worth, but for the sake of argument let's say it's five years old and worth about $7500. Now, let's say that someone who thinks just like you do hits your car. It's totalled, you're pretty badly hurt and spend a couple weeks in the hospital and a couple months after that seeing a physical therapist, and your injuries are such that you can no longer do your job. You have no car, a lot of health care debt, and no source of income anymore. Remember, the other guy thinks just like you and even though he was found to be completely at fault for the accident, you're screwed because he had no insurance and no money.
2) You screw up and hit someone. The other vehicle is heavily damaged and all occupants of the vehicle require hospitalization. One requires long-term care. You are found to be at fault, and you are responsible for several hundred thousand dollars worth of expenses. The other people had uninsured motorist coverage and health insurance, so they are mostly taken care of. You are taken care of too, by their insurance companies' lawyers, who strip you of everything you own in the world and have a judgement against you that will take most of the rest of your life to pay off.
3) Your car is stolen. No insurance? Oops.
4) If you don't live in LA this might not apply as much, but a lot of people carry guns in their vehicles. Hitting somebody's car and spouting your shortsighted philosophy on insurance could get you nominated for a (well-deserved) Darwin Award.
I'm sure people could think of a lot more.
BTW, do you have health insurance? If you're married and have kids, do you have it for them? What about life insurance in case you get shot for hitting somebody and not having insurance, or any other unforeseen events happen to you (this kind of assumes being married; single people have far less need for life insurance). If you are being true to your insurance philosophy, the answers to those questions should all be "no." After all, you're not likely to have a catastrophic illness or injury on any given day and not likely to die on any given day, either. Right?
Absolutely!
My kids both have normal names with normal spellings, and neither my wife nor I ever considered anything else. To give your kid a normal name that won't get him or her picked on is an important gift to your child. I also have a normal name, but my brother's name, while normal, has an alternative spelling. My parents will argue that there is precedent, but I don't care. I've never met anyone else with his name who spelled it that way, or even heard of one, and almost no one spells his name right (or everyone does, depending on your point of view, because they go for the normal spelling), and some mispronounce it based on the way it's spelled.
My name is normal and uses the most common spelling, but on the other hand, so many Americans are such poor spellers these days that as often as not it comes out misspelled anyway. They should have picked something shorter.
In light of that name being immortalized in the joke in Porky's, no, I wouldn't. If my name was Mike Hunt I'd wear it with pride :-)
In the early days, when Mao was still a revolutionary fighting an uphill battle, real communism, or something very near to it, was practiced in the areas of China under the control of the communist revolutionaries.
The same was true in Viet Nam. Ho Chi Minh, in fact, was a good man, a far better one than those who came after him. If you go to Viet Nam, people who trust you will tell you, even if they are not themselves communists and don't believe in it at all, that this is so. Bac Ho, as they call him there, is universally revered in Viet Nam. If he had lived another 10 or 15 years, his country would have been much the better for it.
I don't think we have any left, could you Aussies maybe outsource a few up here? While you're at it, send me a case or two of Cooper's, but keep all the Foster's (Australian for 'roo piss, no matter what a certain actor says about it in TV commercials) for yourselves :-)
You're right, we just don't have that BSOD trick down like Windows does, probably never will :-)
Seriously, though, that statement needs some qualification and narrowing. The question "Same capacity for what?" will help.
Yes, there are some areas where Linux lags quite a bit behind Windows. The most significant of these are, in my opinion:
- Multimedia, including sound, video, and graphics editing (yes, I know about The GIMP and use it, but it's still not Photoshop)
- Gaming
- Easy discovery of other resources on the LAN
- CRM (yes, I know about Compiere, but those who have used it have told me it's not yet as good as what's available on Windows, and there is more choice of software on Windows)
Of these three areas, which ones are of importance to business? Only the last two, unless your business is multimedia, and if it is you're probably using a Linux render farm and have a lot of custom software that runs on Linux workstations, too. If you're not that big, you probably do all of your work on Win or Mac. However, multimedia businesses are a small segment of the market.The general business sector is where people will care about easy discovery of LAN resources. Now, I confess to not having looked very closely at this, to see what is being done in the Linux world. Probably some progress has been made of which I am totally unaware, but speaking in general terms, I think it's easier for an average user to find network shares and printers on a Windows LAN (including ones that actually have a Samba PDC) than to do the equivalent work on a LINUX LAN. One answer to this might be to implement Rendezvous on Linux. Another would be to make up some user-oriented graphical tools for Samba that would make it easy for users to create shares and browse for printers (I believe there are some of those, but don't know how good they are) and tightly integrate those tools with Gnome and KDE. Vendor-specific tools are not the solution to this problem (coiughMandrakecoughSuSEcough).
So, what areas that are important to business does Linux cover well?
So, we have most of the business core areas covered and are making progress in the ones where we still need to do some work. And as you said, Linux is coming from all angles, which gives it the potential to be a total vertical solution from the staff PDAs and cell phones all the way up to the server farm. Microsoft is the only other vendor who sells software at all those levels. At some of those levels, Linux is already better, and it's improving rapidly at the others. And it's [Ff]ree.
Yes, MS is scared. Linux is doing to them what they did to the big iron software vendors, or doing it a lower price point and with more freedom.
KDE camp: But, but, the best feature of KDE is that it's not Gnome!
:-)
Gnome camp: But, but, the best feature of Gnome is that it's not KDE!
Just how do they propose to reconcile this into a unified desktop? I'm pretty sure no compile-time option can override that
Yes, I was looking for a non-AC response. I even got a reasonable one, thank you.
However, I think you prove my case rather than disprove it: like me, you do both of those things, and I got into building computers after already being involved with muscle cars for years. OK, I don't hotrod anymore, b/c I simply don't have either the time or the money for it. Keeping far enough ahead of the IT rat race to remain gainfully employed is quite enough challenge in itself. While I have done so, my salary is down more than 25% from two years ago. Still, I have a job at decent, rapidly growing company, so I can't complain, but it certainly doesn't leave room in my budget for fast cars.
I suspect that at an awful lot of overclockers would, if they could afford it, get into the street machine scene, too. If they could avoid the evil of riced-up Hondas and such, they would probably turn out some pretty fine cars. I'm sure you've seen what the really good case modders can do, and they'd be terrific if they got into auto bodies. I think case modders, in particular, have a lot in common with custom body people.
However, affording it is harder than ever. A classic muscle car is so pricy these days, and you uwouldn't want to hack one up anyway. Modifying a new car is guaranteed to make it smog-illegal, at least here in California, and building a custom like your '31 (that's gonna be a sweet machine!) makes starting with a sixties ride look downright cheap.
A lot of people are priced out of the hot-rodding game, many even before they start. Computers make a substitute outlet for that for some, myself included.
Why is it that all of the denial of the commonality between car geeks and computer geeks comes from (some of) the car geeks? Could it be that they are simply in denial? I think so.
I had an experience like that in junior high school.
:-)
This was in the 1970s, and we had a soda machine that gave you soda in a paper cup, along with ice that felt remarkably like cardboard.
Well, one day in summer school, word is spreading like wildfire that the soda machine is just pumping out free soda. So, anybody who can get any container was running over to the lunch area to get some. I had a cup from before and got several free fillups of the Seven-Up like mixture it was continuously pumping. One of my very best days in junior high
I bank with Washington Mutual (don't work there or anything, just a happy customer) and their ATMs don't do any of that crap, have no transaction fee - and here's the head turner - they have no transaction free for anyone, even if you're not a Washington Mutual customer. So it says on the WaMu ATM near my office.
See if they're near you: http://www.wamu.com/
They also have a very nice online banking system, and it works well with Konqueror (at least if you have Konq lie and say it's Mozilla).
Insightful?! You, moderators! Yeah, you! Put down those crack pipes and come out with your hands on top of your head!
.jpg viewer, for example. Maybe you found a way to make Kuickshow take code embedded in a .jpg and execute it, but if I'm not using Kuickshow, you're SOL.
The fact is, the kinds of viruses that routinely affect Outlook and Outlook Express are simply impossible on Linux or any other flavor of Unix. The architecture doesn't work that way. There have been viruses and worms written for *nix, and with the exception of the Morris worm, which actually exploited a feature of Sendmail rather than of Unix and was a cross-platform worm thereby, none of them have been particularly widespread.
It has already been explained by someone else, but in Linux - no matter what mail client you use - there is simply no concept of an excutable attachment. Binary attachments may be viewable, but they cannot be executed. So until someone comes up with a way to embed something in an attachment which can cause the viewer to do something bad, such as take the attachment and execute it as its own code, Linux and all other *nix platforms are pretty safe from email viruses. Moreover, not only is such a thing very hard to do (if it's even possible), it's further limited by the fact that you just don't know what somebody is using as a viewer for a given file type. There are so many choices. There are dozens of things that could be my
A worm that does not depend on email has a little better chance on *nix, such as the Lion worm (IIRC) that could infect certain versions of lpd a few years ago. Still, that one was never really widespread either, because:
A) Not all machines are running any kind of lpd;
B) If they are, it may be firewalled off and/or not listening on an external interface and/or not accepting connections from non-local IPs;
C) It might not be an affected version anyway;
D) It might be CUPS or lprng, and those wouldn't be affected at all, unless you took all three of them into account when writing the worm (the lion worm didn't). Even then, you'd have to hit the right version on the right platform for each variant.
A worm or virus that tried to exploit features of an MTA or database or something within X would also face a tough time because they might not (read "probably won't") work on all distros, glibc versions, KDE versions, Gnome versions, Fluxbox versions, IceWM versions, WindowMaker verions, etc. If it depends on an MTA or database to spread, then you have to account for Sendmail (lot of versions), Postfix, qmail, Exim (v. 3.x and 4.x), some proprietary MTAs, and who knows what else. If it's a database, could be Oracle, MySQL, Postgresql, or who knows what else. And of course it has to be unfirewalled. Most people running an SQL server on *nix are also running a firewall. Maybe multiple layers of firewalling, if they're properly paranoid.
These are issues faced by anyone who wants to write a virus or worm for Linux or Unix.
The fact is, writing worms and viruses for Linux, *BSD, or a proprietary UNIX platform is a lot harder than writing them for Windows, and they spread a lot more slowly and don't get nearly as far. Yes, as Linux continues to grow in popularity you will see more attempts at viruses and worms for Linux. Most of them will be abject failures, and even the ones that aren't will never have the impact that Viruses and worms have had on Windows. Not only for the reasons outline above, but for one more big one, which is a product of the reasons above: SPEED. There are simply too many different distros on different hardware platforms, with different configurations, and different versions of key items on which a worm will depend, for it to be able to spread quickly.
That is why, even if Linux should someday utterly dislodge Windows from the desktop and command a 90% market share, with the rest mostly held by Mac, it will NEVER have the kind of virus and worm problems Windows has. On Windows, the problems are designed in. On *nix, they are designed *out*.
Cool, I was hoping at least one person who read that would know where I was talking about :-) I live in LA now (gotta go where the jobs are, and they weren't in SD) but still love San Diego best.
Is Ecology still there? I lived abroad for a long time and just came back to the States last year, and things have really changed. I bet most of those old junkyards are probably houses and industrial parks now. When I was in high school, there was still a junkyard in Mission Valley, and one in Tierrasanta, too, but those are now long gone.
And your balls are so big that you have to post as an AC?
Explain to me if you can (and I'm certain you can't), why I meet so many people who overclock, don't buy over-the-counter PCs because they prefer to choose the parts and build their own, and indeed who run Linux, are former hot rodders and street racers like me?
All you've proven is that you understand neither hotrodding nor overclocking. What drew (and still draws, I'm sure) people to hotrodding was taking a car and making it better. Making it perform better, making it handle better, making it look better. The technical aspects of it - at least for the people who weren't wannabes - were the greatest part of it.
So what happened to so many of those former hotrodders like me? We grew up and started families, and like generations of hotrodders before us, have no money for that stuff any more. We still hotrod our computers, though, and do still work on our own cars (well, sometimes; I usually have better things to do with my time, and I can afford to pay someone else to work on my car while I'm doing those things).
I'm sure you are neither a hotrodder nor a hardware tinkerer, or you'd know that what I'm saying is the truth.
I'm an ex-street racer/hot rodder (my two favorite cars were a '70 Challenger whose 383 I replaced with a 440, and my factory 340 '69 Dart Swinger).
:-)
I can tell you that very few of the guys in the street racing and cruising scene came out there with girls, or even had girlfriends. A few of them were married, but they typically only came out for the cruise portions. The racing, which happened later in the evening on dark roads around the city, was attended by young, unattached males.
Think about it: if you have a girlfriend, how content is she going to be that you spend most of your time and money on your street machine, and your idea of a good time on Saturday night is going to the parking lot cruise at Mervyn's, then heading out to Kearny VIlla for racing? Most of the very few girls I met back then who thought that was fun actually had their own cars, and the cars were better than most of the guys' rides. Their owners could drive, too. The proof of this was that if a guy did get a girlfriend, he would usually become pretty scarce in the street scene after that.
Even in the seventies at Ruffin Road, where people sometimes even trailered in cars, and ones brought on a tow bar were not at all unusual, those hot summer nights were still almost exclusively male summer nights. I'd guesstimate that no more - and probably less - then ten percent of those guys had girlfriends. That's probably even worse than the Slashdot percentage
I don't know how things are now, because I'm married and have kids and that just takes precedence over fast cars and makes racing absolutely out of the question, but back in the late eighties/early nineties when I was last involved in the scene, it had mostly been taken over by riced-up Japanese cars and (far worse) lifted mini-trucks whose height above the ground was far higher than the IQs of their drivers. I bet most of those guys didn't have girlfriends either.
The fact is, most of the hot rodders and street racers have a great deal in common with overclockers (which is probably why I occassionally dabble in overclocking myself): they're technology nerds. Most of them were far more interested in cams, pistons, and going on junkyard crawls looking for cool rare parts than they were in cruising for girls. It was pretty common to turn out early Saturday morning at the Ecology yard in Otay Mesa, toolbox in hand and cash in pocket, and run into people you knew from Saturday night.
Overclockers are the new hotrodders.
If they are, by some horrible chance distant relatives of Darl, they just might try it.