Am I safe just running Microsoft stuff?
on
Indemnification Roundup
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Indemnification is just a rouse to rise the total cost of ownership of Linux. Do I need to buy or worry about this kind of stuff when I buy Microsoft software? If not, why not? Is Microsoft not capable of accidently stealing someone else's work?
Here we have an allegedly pro-Linux site promoting the same false statement. That if you run Linux, you have an increased legal risk and hence should shop around for a vendor that indemnifies its users or buy insurance to do so.
If you're going to do an article like this, at least remove the distinction between FOSS (free and open source software) and proprietary software. For example, have a section that lists Microsoft, and then has a statement that says Microsoft does not indemnify their customers.
All these risks people are throwing out about FOSS play right into the hands of proprietary software vendors trying to figure out ways to up the TCO of Linux. Shame on LinuxDevCenter for playing along.
Thanks for taking the time to post that. I'm going to keep an eye on his site from now on. It's hard to know what to believe from all the rhetoric going on.
I agree. That they left is very fishy, but I think there may be more to that story too. Not sure. Heard someone claiming in an argument that the Saudis offered to answer questions and they were told it wasn't needed. I haven't seen that claim in print anywhere yet though.
I was just addressing the "planes in the air" spin. The reason they left so early is another issue!:)
Moore spin: Highest levels of government made arrangements to get the Saudis out of the country on 9/13 when no other regularly scheduled flights were in the air.
Conservative spin: Moore is lying, the airspace was re-opened on 9/13.
Truth: The airspace was opened on 9/13. No airlines were able to get regularly scheduled flights into service that day because they were all grounded in "the wrong places". That day was spent shuffling empty planes back and forth between airports to get ready to start back up. That process took a few days. On 9/14 most flights were still canceled (I had a flight canceled that day too). The U.S. government most likely assisted the Saudis to charter planes to get them out the moment airspace was opened, and could have been the subject of that meeting Bush had with the Saudi ambassador that day, but that's just speculation.
Moore didn't lie, but he could be accused of deceiving trying to make people think the Saudis were in the air when airspace was closed. The conservative response deceives as well, trying to paint a picture that everything was back to normal on 9/13. It wasn't.
People need to learn to read between the lines and think for themselves. If you're conservative and you think only liberals spin to deceive and not conservatives, you're a fool -- and visa-versa.
Thanks for your insightful post. I only have one beef with one bullet, that Iraq was hell before we got there. You must consider that that could be part of the propoganda machine too. Take any country, even the U.S., and find horror stories.
I do believe if anyone crossed Saddam, they got brutally tourtured. I do believe he gassed the Kurds and was brutal. But life was not a living hell for *all* Iraqis. They did have a comfortable middle class, good education system, reliable infrastructure, etc. Women did have equal rights as men there, held jobs, didn't have to wear burkas or whatever, etc...
Therefore, playgrounds of smiling Iraqi children are not hard for me to believe at all. It's also not hard to believe that a lot of those children got injured and/or killed by our attacks.
War absolultely sucks and the wrong people are the ones who usually suffer the most. It should be a tool of absolute last resort.
I do believe we've been fighting the wrong war too. Al Queda was not in Iraq before or had a very limited presence. Under Bush's justifications, we should have attacked Saudi Arabia first.
The biggest value I get from.Mac is it being the central logistical point for syncing my devices. I have three Macs, iPod, and two GSM-based bluetooth phones. All sync seemlessly to each other via various contact points. You don't get this kind of level of sync with Active Sync. Trust me, I tried and tried to get that all to work a few years ago. The fact that things like bookmarks sync as well is just very nice icing on the cake as well.
As an IT manager, I know that enterprise-level disk storage is nowhere near as cheap as consumer level hard drives. It has to be in some sort of storage array, be redundent, fault tolerant, and backed up. This adds to the cost of storage tremendously.
I'm not going to trust my enterprise to hundreds of Maxtor IDE drives that like to fail every year or so.
Yo Apple, how about boosting the space us.mac PAYING subscribers get? They charge like $350 a year EXTRA for a gig of space. For $100/year you get 15 megs for mail and 100 megs for storage.
Granted,.mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost!:)
I'm sure google isn't stupid, but I'd hate for them to reveal anything that the search engine "optomizers" will leverage to further spam the search results.
I just got a Nokia 6600 and after going through several iterations of Pocket PCs (casio E110, E115, Dell Axim) and just ending up tossing them into the drawer never to be used, I settled with the 6600 and love it -- for what it's designed to do. Occasional browsing the web and doing light email.
The Dell Axim was my latest PDA attempt and I got a bluetooth card for it and connected to the net via my Sony t610. Pocket Outlook still just sucks for use with a regular ole imap server (I'm sure it's great with Exchange of course). It'd do braindead things like want to download all headers even though I'm just interested in last few of them. Syncing was a pain too, since it requires outlook on the desktop and active sync to sync contacts, calendar entries, etc.
I settled on the 6600 and a Mac powerbook using isync and bluetooth and couldn't be happier. For one thing, the 6600's mail app is quick and efficient for what it does, browsing latest messages. I have mine set to just download the headers of the last 30 messages (quick), then only the body if I set it. Since GPRS is built into the phone, it doesn't require anything else. And it's small. The syncing of contacts and calendar is a breeze over bluetooth and isync.
Opera web browser (paid for it extra, since it doesn't come with U.S. 6600s) works remarkably well, reformatting pages to better appear on a small screen device.
The mail has some pleasant surprises, like if you try to send a mail message and it fails due to lack of signal or whatever, it'll drop it in a mail outbox and automatically retry it every 15 minutes.
I installed putty, and while it works, I can't imagine it being useful for anything but maybe an emergency login to restart a failed service or something.
And accessing the net from the powerbook over bluetooth thru the 6600 is a real easy affair.
The only quirk I've seen with the 6600 is that file transfers TO the device over bluetooth only occur at about 3KB/sec -- which is way below the bluetooth spec.
Only a Mac user would assume an update or upgrade will make their computer run faster. Us Windows users are just resigned to the fact that each improvement comes at the cost of performance, but we can always run out and buy a faster box to compensate.
Whatssamatterwithyall?!
I have a blast with mine...
on
Camera Phone Tips
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· Score: 3, Informative
I went out to buy a new digital camera last October with two big features in mind. Bluetooth and GSM so it could roam in Europe and picked a carrier based on cheapest European roaming rates (T-mobile).
The phone happened to have a camera in it, which I dismissed for a while until I found mobog.com.
I just have a real blast posting pics of my boring life and writing comments and interacting with the trolls who flame them. It's like a weblog but with a lot less writing required (pic worth a thousand words you know).
One of the nice charms of that site is that there is no censorship of content or comments by the site's owner (the infamous Pud of fuckedcompany). It does make it hard to share with some people though, even though I don't get into shoot pics of my dick like some people do...)
My point, yeah, they suck as cameras, but I'm having fun and that's all I care about right now...
So what countries will allow just any ole US citizen to immigrate there? I know I read a story about some laid off coder who tried to move to India where his job went, and they wouldn't grant him the working papers he needed there.
No, you misunderstand, and I agree with you completely. The fun is getting lost and trying to get back. I'd throw the GPS in the glove box, not use it during the ride, and only pull it out after the trip to retrace my steps for curiousity sake.
You ever come across something real neat, like a covered bridge in the middle of some great mountainess terrain, and have never been able to find it again?!
I can see a lot of benefit of using this on motorcycle trips. I often go riding with no destination in mind, taking randon turns, getting lost, then finding a familar main road and working way back again. I often wish I could retrace my route on a map later to find out exactly where I went.
The lawsuit is all about how IBM has allegedly caused great harm to SCO's Unix business, so they sue to recover damages. But Baystar tells them they have no real Unix business left anyway and should shut it down, but continue to sue anyway.
Almost every legal analyst says SCO chances to win are slim to none, yet for some reason, people are still investing in this stock. They'd have equal risk but higher payoff potential if they'd sink their money into the Powerball lottery.
Brings up an interesting point. Because Internet2 is not a public net, can RIAA and MPAA's hired goons get into the net to look for file sharing activity?
I bet they probably hit their undocumented bandwidth usage limit and will be getting a nasty letter from their service provider telling them to knock it off!:)
I was hoping they'd at least allow people who already have google accounts in their other services to use the same name. At one point they said that name would work across all google services. (I say that because I have a nice google username already!:)
Interesting. My tech staff have been telling me that people who have Palm Pilots must have admin rights, else the sync software won't run correctly. That's hardly ancient software.
So, who is the chump? They or you? (No, I'm not placing any bets on this one!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Here we have an allegedly pro-Linux site promoting the same false statement. That if you run Linux, you have an increased legal risk and hence should shop around for a vendor that indemnifies its users or buy insurance to do so.
If you're going to do an article like this, at least remove the distinction between FOSS (free and open source software) and proprietary software. For example, have a section that lists Microsoft, and then has a statement that says Microsoft does not indemnify their customers.
All these risks people are throwing out about FOSS play right into the hands of proprietary software vendors trying to figure out ways to up the TCO of Linux. Shame on LinuxDevCenter for playing along.
Thanks for taking the time to post that. I'm going to keep an eye on his site from now on. It's hard to know what to believe from all the rhetoric going on.
Maybe I should take my video cam in there and tape it for accuracy sake! ;-)
Note to Ashcroft and friends, JUST KIDDING
I was just addressing the "planes in the air" spin. The reason they left so early is another issue! :)
Conservative spin: Moore is lying, the airspace was re-opened on 9/13.
Truth: The airspace was opened on 9/13. No airlines were able to get regularly scheduled flights into service that day because they were all grounded in "the wrong places". That day was spent shuffling empty planes back and forth between airports to get ready to start back up. That process took a few days. On 9/14 most flights were still canceled (I had a flight canceled that day too). The U.S. government most likely assisted the Saudis to charter planes to get them out the moment airspace was opened, and could have been the subject of that meeting Bush had with the Saudi ambassador that day, but that's just speculation.
Moore didn't lie, but he could be accused of deceiving trying to make people think the Saudis were in the air when airspace was closed. The conservative response deceives as well, trying to paint a picture that everything was back to normal on 9/13. It wasn't.
People need to learn to read between the lines and think for themselves. If you're conservative and you think only liberals spin to deceive and not conservatives, you're a fool -- and visa-versa.
I do believe if anyone crossed Saddam, they got brutally tourtured. I do believe he gassed the Kurds and was brutal. But life was not a living hell for *all* Iraqis. They did have a comfortable middle class, good education system, reliable infrastructure, etc. Women did have equal rights as men there, held jobs, didn't have to wear burkas or whatever, etc...
Therefore, playgrounds of smiling Iraqi children are not hard for me to believe at all. It's also not hard to believe that a lot of those children got injured and/or killed by our attacks.
War absolultely sucks and the wrong people are the ones who usually suffer the most. It should be a tool of absolute last resort.
I do believe we've been fighting the wrong war too. Al Queda was not in Iraq before or had a very limited presence. Under Bush's justifications, we should have attacked Saudi Arabia first.
Crimes against corporations are to be punished far more severely than crimes against people.
The biggest value I get from .Mac is it being the central logistical point for syncing my devices. I have three Macs, iPod, and two GSM-based bluetooth phones. All sync seemlessly to each other via various contact points. You don't get this kind of level of sync with Active Sync. Trust me, I tried and tried to get that all to work a few years ago. The fact that things like bookmarks sync as well is just very nice icing on the cake as well.
As an IT manager, I know that enterprise-level disk storage is nowhere near as cheap as consumer level hard drives. It has to be in some sort of storage array, be redundent, fault tolerant, and backed up. This adds to the cost of storage tremendously. I'm not going to trust my enterprise to hundreds of Maxtor IDE drives that like to fail every year or so.
Granted, .mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost! :)
I'm sure google isn't stupid, but I'd hate for them to reveal anything that the search engine "optomizers" will leverage to further spam the search results.
Now if the electricity would stay on for more than two hours at a time, they'll be set.
The Dell Axim was my latest PDA attempt and I got a bluetooth card for it and connected to the net via my Sony t610. Pocket Outlook still just sucks for use with a regular ole imap server (I'm sure it's great with Exchange of course). It'd do braindead things like want to download all headers even though I'm just interested in last few of them. Syncing was a pain too, since it requires outlook on the desktop and active sync to sync contacts, calendar entries, etc.
I settled on the 6600 and a Mac powerbook using isync and bluetooth and couldn't be happier. For one thing, the 6600's mail app is quick and efficient for what it does, browsing latest messages. I have mine set to just download the headers of the last 30 messages (quick), then only the body if I set it. Since GPRS is built into the phone, it doesn't require anything else. And it's small. The syncing of contacts and calendar is a breeze over bluetooth and isync.
Opera web browser (paid for it extra, since it doesn't come with U.S. 6600s) works remarkably well, reformatting pages to better appear on a small screen device.
The mail has some pleasant surprises, like if you try to send a mail message and it fails due to lack of signal or whatever, it'll drop it in a mail outbox and automatically retry it every 15 minutes.
The camera on the phone is incredible too. Compare this close up shot I took with the 6600 with the same subject matter and distance taken on my Sony t610.
I installed putty, and while it works, I can't imagine it being useful for anything but maybe an emergency login to restart a failed service or something.
And accessing the net from the powerbook over bluetooth thru the 6600 is a real easy affair.
The only quirk I've seen with the 6600 is that file transfers TO the device over bluetooth only occur at about 3KB/sec -- which is way below the bluetooth spec.
Only a Mac user would assume an update or upgrade will make their computer run faster. Us Windows users are just resigned to the fact that each improvement comes at the cost of performance, but we can always run out and buy a faster box to compensate. Whatssamatterwithyall?!
Anyway, it's at www.mobog.com/weave.
One of the nice charms of that site is that there is no censorship of content or comments by the site's owner (the infamous Pud of fuckedcompany). It does make it hard to share with some people though, even though I don't get into shoot pics of my dick like some people do...)
My point, yeah, they suck as cameras, but I'm having fun and that's all I care about right now...
So what countries will allow just any ole US citizen to immigrate there? I know I read a story about some laid off coder who tried to move to India where his job went, and they wouldn't grant him the working papers he needed there.
You ever come across something real neat, like a covered bridge in the middle of some great mountainess terrain, and have never been able to find it again?!
I can see a lot of benefit of using this on motorcycle trips. I often go riding with no destination in mind, taking randon turns, getting lost, then finding a familar main road and working way back again. I often wish I could retrace my route on a map later to find out exactly where I went.
Almost every legal analyst says SCO chances to win are slim to none, yet for some reason, people are still investing in this stock. They'd have equal risk but higher payoff potential if they'd sink their money into the Powerball lottery.
Brings up an interesting point. Because Internet2 is not a public net, can RIAA and MPAA's hired goons get into the net to look for file sharing activity?
I bet they probably hit their undocumented bandwidth usage limit and will be getting a nasty letter from their service provider telling them to knock it off! :)
I don't have to buy insurance to run Microsoft software, hence this plays into Microsoft's hands and says "Hey, Linux *is* risky."
(page safe, but rest of site not safe for work)
I was hoping they'd at least allow people who already have google accounts in their other services to use the same name. At one point they said that name would work across all google services. (I say that because I have a nice google username already! :)
So, who is the chump? They or you? (No, I'm not placing any bets on this one! :)