What I was trying to say is: "ROMs can not be written to (at least not in normal daily use), and yet are used to store executable programs." But rereading your original statement it seems that I misinterpreted it a bit. My mistake.
So let me try again to say what I actually meant:
I agree that the von Neumann architecture was the key component. I also doubt that Zuse had ever considered something like it (he may have come up with the idea and immediately have rejected it as non-practical, given the material he was uning to build his machines). But you stated:
But when executable code is stored in memory it can be written too, enabling useful things like compilers...
Conceptually, the Z3 could also compile code. The fact that the program memory was of a physically different nature than its 64 word data memory does not prevent it from running a compiler. After all, it has been proven (not so long ago) that Z3 was a Turing machine.
Who says that an unpatched system has be definition to be in the hands of an ignorant or incompetent sysadmin?
What about those who just bought a new PC that was shipped at tha factory (just) prior to this patch becoming available? Who even guarantees that HP or Dell ship their boxes with the patch on it already?
Or what about someone like me, who is about to reinstall the entire Winblows mess from scratch after a disk crash? Yes, this system had the patch installed within a day of the latter becoming available. But now it will (briefly) have to go onto the net without it.
In any case, I have collegues that are also (in some cases close) friends (and that nowadays actually work for me, due to me having been promoted 6 months ago). These people count as much as family. To me at least.
Also, someone from my team is at present out of action for something like 6 months. As this happened quite suddenly, the rest of us have just had first hand real life experience in how much this kind of thing can mess up one's plans, inclusing holidays and all that. Once you've been there, esp. in my position as a team leader, you want everybody in the team to care about "what happens if". Those who don't, will be judged accordingly.
1) To know that you should search for TweakUI, you.. have to know that it exists.
2) A minimised window is useles for clicking into.
3) Yes, I know where X is getting the CTRL-C and CTRL-V stuff from. My point is that X does not force you to use it but lets you choose. As in "Windows forces you to use what it thinks is best, X allows you to use what you think is best". THAT is my entire point, after all. If you want CTRL-C and CTRL-V on X, then by all means: have and use it. The X standard explicitly allows you to. I don't mind CTRL-C/CTRL-V support in X at all.
4) Yes there is the right click menu. But my idea of cut+paste usability also does not involve popping up that menu every time either. Just select&click-to-paste should be sufficient. That's the absolute minimum that can be achieved anyway.
By the way, you're "standards are easy" argument applies to any system, including X. So you basically give X the right to define a standard of its own. But I don't want to exploit that weakness in your argument, because my entire point is that X is NOT a platform that imposes things, in contrast to what the grandparent post claimed, whereas Windows IS such a platform.
Finally, I'm not "most people". I'm "me". I don't care what your OS allows you to use, but I do care what my OS allows me to use. Again: my point is that... (reread the preceeding paragraph)
Because, in windows, you don't HAVE to use the keyboard and mouse to copy n' paste. You can simply highlight, right
click, choose copy, right click in another location, choose paste. The keyboard need never be involved. I usually use
CTRL-C and CTRL-V because its faster and it works universally (some lame applications choose not to implement the
right click menu standard - I shun those apps whenever possible).
So... Windows is inconsistent as well? Good to know... Never mind that it's not an OS problem but an application one. After all, exactly that kind of reasoning is being applied to X and Linux all over this discussion as well: X supports both styles, but not all applications do and therefore Linux (not X, mind you (and certainly not the application at hand)) is inconistent and must be all bad. Sure.
his is one of the problems with Linux in general, the attitude of "YOU must bend to the almighty OS!!". Sorry, but Windows
has proven that a usuable (or at least popular) OS must be convienent for the user, not the OS writer.
That must be the joke of the year! Windows, the OS where you cannot use focus-follows-mouse unless you install additional software that MS doesn't tell you about except if you already know where to get it. Windows, the OS where you cannot click in a window without the bloody thing popping up. Windows, the OS where you cannot move the Help function to another key than F1. Windows, the OS that does not allow you to redefine the window manager. Windows, the OS that does not allow you to use X style cut+paste. Windows, the OS... I guess I better stop, because the list of similar sillyness that Windows simply emposes on me is endless.
Guess what: X-based platforms allow all that. And quess what: I actually use all this.
My idea of cut+paste usability does not involve using both a keyboard and a mouse. Not in a million years. But if you absolutely want it that way, X lets you. Windows, on the other hand...
Why worry about the middle button on a two button mouse? Just re-program both the middle and right button to do the paste action. I've been using that setup for ages. Works like a charm whatever mouse you (have to) use.
But what in case I use one computer to download it and then want to install the software on a network file server? Or what if I use my computer to download the file to my network file server (imagine that/tmp is filled up or something) and then want to install it on the very same computer that I used to do the downloading? Even the latter involves me electronically moving the program to a "different" computer.
Or suppose that I'm a sysadmin preparing an OS image for distribution across the company and want to include this thing? I can't. Yet I can reimage every machine under my control and then walk over to each and every one and download the player manually (assuming that simply downloading it is allowed after all).
This is a typical example of what happens when lawyers define laws or contracts that involve that magical thing called real life: they have no clue and it shows..
Have you personally reviewed the 2.9M messages which were filtered out... if you have then i'd question the value of your filtering.
The key is when you deal with the spam. I use a custom filter as well. While it does not achieve 90% filtering for the real spam, it so far caused just 3 false positives over an 8 months timeframe (I get about 60 mails per day at work and about 120 at home (mainly because my home address is on LKML and the fetchmail-fiends list)).
I know these statistics because I quickly scan the spam once per day at a moment when I have 2 minutes of spare time in between meetings or some such. Whereas manually evaluating and deleting each spam separately as it comes takes a lot of time, processing them in bundles of several tens that are very likely to be nothing but spam can be done rather quickly.
For starters, in my case at least, my personal digital files are different than my paper ones because they are stored on a Linux box. Yes, I *do* know about bootdisks, bootable CD's etc. My point is that most people don't.
When I die, all my belongings - Linux files included - are at present destined for someone who will have no trouble at all (by)passing the security measures and reading the files. But if this person dies before I do, none of the fallback people will have even the smallest clue how to get to the data. One of them does know DOS inside out and can get to any byte on a DOS floppy not matter how damaged DOS considers the floppy to be, but will be utterly lost when facing several tens of gigabytes of ext2 and ext3 partitions (and will more than likely die way before I do anyway). The others have no clue at all as far as computers are concerned.
But I have no problem with that situation. All the stuff that needs to remain accessible in any case is available on paper. The digital stuff is either only of (limited) use to that one other person, or simply is intended to only ever be seen by her/him.
And just to tweak the nose of a few people here even further, I like to compound the GIMP's "many open windows" interface with focus-follows-mouse, which allows me to be MUCH more productive in GIMP
Hey, I'm a follows-mouse person too. Neat tricks can be done with that if many windows are open, and I sure use them. But I despise programs that open up windows that I do not need. Gimp is extremely bad at this. Just consider the following extremely simple scenario: you want to make a screenshot and maybe edit it a tiny little bit. So you start Gimp. It proceeds with plastering your display with tons of separate windows that you have no use for in the context the specific task you want to accomplish and that you must all hide before getting any real work done.
To me this behaviour shows a severe lack of understanding of what good UI design is all about. And, sadly, this initialization bit is by far not the only thing the Gimp UI gets badly wrong.
Indeed. Whereas at home I run full-custom stuff, at work we're still at RH 7.2 and 7.3 because RH7 is what most commercial Linux software was tested/certified on back in its day. But RH7 does suffer from some bad choices as well (g++ 2.96 comes to mind), so we're about to ditch it for something new. After looking around at what is available and supported by commercial Linux softare, looking at what the various distributions cost (sorry RedHat, but AS & Co are too expensive for us, especially considering that we don't need most of your support), and thinking long and hard about the impact of switching to a non-RH based distribution, we ended up choosing RH9, knowing full well that support would end at about the time we'd be ready for roll-out. The advantage? We get to soldier on one or two more years with a stable-as-rock basis at a minimal switching effort and no extra cost whatsoever. And we get to observe the market impact of RH's new strategy for some time before comitting resources to switching to an alternative distribution that might well be dead one or two years from now.
Maybe, just maybe, because this is not about the amount of money he gets, but the amount of money the company gets. Like in: "If we do not get a lot of cash quickly and if we do not get rid of this very expensive fight with Bill, we'll soon be heading down a every slippery slope indeed. Hell, even if we do we probably will. But at least than we have a chance of long term survival."
I, for one, know that I've personally let go a nice opportunity to get paid more, simply out of loyalty to people that I work with/for (as their boss, mind you). And I'm not as rich as Scott & Co who don't need any more money. Not all bosses are egoistic, you know. Some are just idiots like me.:-)
Please define "incredibly good". I have a strong suspicion that your definition and mine do not match.
What if it were Darl's call to Linus apologizing for the lawsuit that was blocked?
If he really wants to do this, Darl Mc Idiot will not change his mind simply because he has to wait till Linus is finished celibrating his wedding anniversary, or whatever else he's doing that's vastly more important to him than to listen to Darl finally admit what the world and especially Linus have known for ages.
I will never ever be caught owning a mobile phone. When I want to be reachable in person, I'm near a phone that is guaranteed to work (i.e. not a mobile one). When I'm not near a phone, I do not want to be reachable on the spot. People shouldn't be slaves to their handhelds. And certainly not to those of others.
I know ahat whitelists are, thank you very much. I use them.
My problem is that at home I can do what ever I like, at work I cannot. Telling my sysadmins that this mail "they" just mutilated was yet another that really is perfectly fine and that the sender should be added to their whitelist(s) would be a serious nuisance. It takes time (while I regularly work at 1 AM, they don't); they cannot listen to every single of our 1500 employees who has a similar request (htough, admittedly, they will listen to me, given my position in the company (but that's baside the point)); and it doesn't retroactively address the issue of the mail that triggers the complaint.
We do a lot of filtering too. At company level and at personal level. But even so, some HTML mails get through (guess what: because their senders are whitelisted!). These are the ones that I use my specially adapted e-mail client for (I *despise* HTML mail).
I basically don't want any HTML mail. So I deliberately read my mail with a mail client that is not able to process HTML (the original version can, but I disabled it in the source). But every now and then, I get a valid mail that has been formatted in HTML by some misguided soul, company, or program. Most of these I read "as source", but sometimes the HTML really needs to be rendered properly.
I don't want to get any bullsh*t spam, but I *do* want to get all the bits that person X or company Y, whom I trust, wants to - or has to - send to me. The mail admins should please keep their dirty fingers away from what I consider to be my "private" property. I'm perfectly able to do my own filtering based on criteria that fit my situation. As, in fact, I do.
I for one, will be taking my tourist dollars elsewhere.
So will I. And my business Euros as well.
Just to make the above absolutely 1000% crystal clear to any US security official od ultra-right wing nationalist that is scanning these pages looking for left-wing terrorists and blatant signs of anti-americanism:
I work in IT research in one of the affected Europe countries. Recently, the results of 10 years of hard work of me and the people on my team were licensed to a US startup for comercialisation. Yes, you read that right: we Europeans invented the technology, the US firm (headed by a European, by the way) is simply buying it. I had no problem whatsoever with letting someone else in another country earn the fruits of my work (and from a purely humanitarian point of view still don't have one). But there is no way I will silently let the US government treat me like a criminal after this. Next time we have something to sell, we'll be looking at the far-east.
I actually hold a NATO security clearance. Again, there is no way I will silently let the US government treat me like a criminal.
America would do well to remember its history and to analyse why it became the economical and military superpower that it (for the time being) still is today. Fingerprinting every visitor was not part of it. Welcoming those who fled the fingerprinting maffia in other parts of the world, on the other hand, definitely was.
Microsoft has some really cool research going on at MSR - see their projects.
You mean like this:
Server Error in '/' Application.
Unable to load overridden shell configuration file/Configuration.xml.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web
request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it
originated in the code.
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the
current web request. Information regarding the origin and location
of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace
below.
Stack Trace:
[Exception: Unable to load overridden shell configuration file/Configuration.xml.]
Microsoft.MSCOM.MNP.Framework.Page.OnInit(EventArg s e) +6497
System.Web.UI.Control.InitRecursive(Control namingContainer) +241
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +174
Version Information: Microsoft.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET
Version:1.1.4322.573
Very impressive project indeed... I can only stand in awe!:-)
Yeah, how could I forget about the Micro$oft tax... Silly me.
Regarding the "give the code back Linus" bit: yes, they may come up with binary-only components. That's why I wrote "chances are". But chances are that they will also have to fix code that does not give them the option to work purely with binary only modules and then we all get to profit.
Also, with some luck, this binary only module of theirs can be copied to certain other distros as well. Actually, we once did something like that when facing a soundcard problem. The driver in question was not binary only, but copying the module from one distro to another did save us the hassle of having to get the source and compile it ourselves.
Our Compaq (i.e. HP) PCs come with Windows. Yet we install Linux on (at present) roughly 10% of them. We don't care if that means "no support" (they have to replace defective hardware in any case), because we're large enough to survive on our own. We're not a multimational, mind you, but we're not a 10 person DIY operation either: we have about 1500 employees.
If HP decides to offer the same box with Linux from the start, that is good news, even if we decide to put another Linux distro on there. That's because:
They now provide a certification that Linux can be installed on this particular model. This makes our purchasing decision earier. It also makes it more likely that we'll continue to buy from them in the future.
If it just so happens that some hardware that they desperately want to use is not properly supported by Linux yet, chances are that they will (and have to) submit the fix to Linus. So again we gain, even if we eventually were to end up buying this piece of hardware from another vendor.
I agree with what others are saying here - there are certain people who want for Linux to take over - on the desktop, and elsewhere. I don't care if it does, as long as I can continue to use it, and no one can tell me I can't, I'm happy with it.
Guess what: I have TWO desktops. One at home, where I can do as I please, one at work where I cannot. It's the latter one that I use most of the day.
Now, fortunately for me, I'm rather influential in what we have on the desktops over here and so was able to make Linux an allowed option. But that did take a lot of lobbying, because I am not part of our IT department. As it so happens, one of our UNIX sysadmins (an very competemnt person with roughly 12 years of experience in her current position and several more before that in other companies) is on the point of rolling out CUPS over here as well. She recently told me a very sorry tale of the amount of trouble she had encountered getting CUPS to work properly on/with all our hardware. Now, it's her boss who in the end decides whether or not Linux and other open source solutions are an option that they want to offer to the users. If he gets to hear a lot of such misery tales...
So? Are people without indebt knowledge of unix worth more or something? You see the problem is that you don't have the time to learn linux BUT we don't have the time to teach you or to write tools that we don't need just to hold your hand.
I'm not the original poster, but I do agree about his time argument. And before you call me someone who does not want to learn Linux, READ MY F*CKING SIGNATURE
AND THE EXPLANATION BEHIND IT. There is no reason whatsoever for lack of time to imply lack of willingness to know or learn. I work 12 hours a day (on Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris machines) and have to eat, sleep, wash my slothes, and take care of my house and social life as well, besides toying with my home computers.
My "old" Linux box at home (running a self-patched 2.6.2 kernel on dual CPUs, by the way, so not just an average Joe SixPack beige box) does not have a single binary that I did not compile from the source on it other than the X server (and the only reason for that exception is lack of disk space). It also does not have a single configuration script that I did not re-write from scratch. It does not have a single binary that I do not know the purpose of. But it took me a lot of time to get it to that state, back when I still had said time, and it DID start out as a Slackware installation just to get the box going. Now that I need to get my new portable into a usable state ASAP, I want to get it all set up within one evening at most. Later on, finetuning similar to what I did in the past will surely occur again, but right now (read that as: over the coming 8-12 months) I simply DO NOT have the time for that. And yet I STILL should be able to get things working.
It should be possible to set up a Linux box just as easily as it is to set up a Windows box. That has nothing to do with lack of knowledge. Or actually it does: I know almost nothing about Windows. I bought my new portable partly because I need to find out a lot more about Windows (sad but true). After 1 hour (mostly dominated by waiting for a slow phone line), everything was working and I could dive into experimenting with those bits that I need to find out more about most urgently. With Linux, I will first have to fight for days with various pieces of equipment that I simply need to work, but have no immediate interest to understand. The printer configuration is one of those.
Oh, and vi is indeed best:-). The original vi, that is, not that vim thing that needs to be extensively configured before behaving like vi should.
I personally see no special problem in an OS coming without a browser, without a mediaplayer, mail reader etc.
I do. Some PC's nowadays get sold with Windows included but without MS Office (yes, even by big names like Compaq). This means that the buyer either has some brains and is going to replace the OS, thus having payed for one (s)he does not need/want, or is going to buy additional software. In this sad world we live in, the most likely additional sofware that the average unknowledgeable person will buy is... the non-OEM version of MS Office, which costs about 33% more than the OEM one. Guess who gains most from this...
Actually, I think (warning heretic opinion coming up!:-) that MS should bundle at least MS Word with their OS. At no extra cost, obviously, as they already make more than enough money as things stand now. And of course buying a PC without any M$ software should be a lot easier (especially as far as laptops are concerned), but that's an other story.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me try again to say what I actually meant:
I agree that the von Neumann architecture was the key component. I also doubt that Zuse had ever considered something like it (he may have come up with the idea and immediately have rejected it as non-practical, given the material he was uning to build his machines). But you stated:
But when executable code is stored in memory it can be written too, enabling useful things like compilers...
Conceptually, the Z3 could also compile code. The fact that the program memory was of a physically different nature than its 64 word data memory does not prevent it from running a compiler. After all, it has been proven (not so long ago) that Z3 was a Turing machine.
Ever heard of ROMs? They do exist, you know...
What about those who just bought a new PC that was shipped at tha factory (just) prior to this patch becoming available? Who even guarantees that HP or Dell ship their boxes with the patch on it already?
Or what about someone like me, who is about to reinstall the entire Winblows mess from scratch after a disk crash? Yes, this system had the patch installed within a day of the latter becoming available. But now it will (briefly) have to go onto the net without it.
In any case, I have collegues that are also (in some cases close) friends (and that nowadays actually work for me, due to me having been promoted 6 months ago). These people count as much as family. To me at least.
Also, someone from my team is at present out of action for something like 6 months. As this happened quite suddenly, the rest of us have just had first hand real life experience in how much this kind of thing can mess up one's plans, inclusing holidays and all that. Once you've been there, esp. in my position as a team leader, you want everybody in the team to care about "what happens if". Those who don't, will be judged accordingly.
2) A minimised window is useles for clicking into.
3) Yes, I know where X is getting the CTRL-C and CTRL-V stuff from. My point is that X does not force you to use it but lets you choose. As in "Windows forces you to use what it thinks is best, X allows you to use what you think is best". THAT is my entire point, after all. If you want CTRL-C and CTRL-V on X, then by all means: have and use it. The X standard explicitly allows you to. I don't mind CTRL-C/CTRL-V support in X at all.
4) Yes there is the right click menu. But my idea of cut+paste usability also does not involve popping up that menu every time either. Just select&click-to-paste should be sufficient. That's the absolute minimum that can be achieved anyway.
By the way, you're "standards are easy" argument applies to any system, including X. So you basically give X the right to define a standard of its own. But I don't want to exploit that weakness in your argument, because my entire point is that X is NOT a platform that imposes things, in contrast to what the grandparent post claimed, whereas Windows IS such a platform.
Finally, I'm not "most people". I'm "me". I don't care what your OS allows you to use, but I do care what my OS allows me to use. Again: my point is that ... (reread the preceeding paragraph)
So... Windows is inconsistent as well? Good to know... Never mind that it's not an OS problem but an application one. After all, exactly that kind of reasoning is being applied to X and Linux all over this discussion as well: X supports both styles, but not all applications do and therefore Linux (not X, mind you (and certainly not the application at hand)) is inconistent and must be all bad. Sure.
his is one of the problems with Linux in general, the attitude of "YOU must bend to the almighty OS!!". Sorry, but Windows has proven that a usuable (or at least popular) OS must be convienent for the user, not the OS writer.
That must be the joke of the year! Windows, the OS where you cannot use focus-follows-mouse unless you install additional software that MS doesn't tell you about except if you already know where to get it. Windows, the OS where you cannot click in a window without the bloody thing popping up. Windows, the OS where you cannot move the Help function to another key than F1. Windows, the OS that does not allow you to redefine the window manager. Windows, the OS that does not allow you to use X style cut+paste. Windows, the OS ... I guess I better stop, because the list of similar sillyness that Windows simply emposes on me is endless.
Guess what: X-based platforms allow all that. And quess what: I actually use all this.
My idea of cut+paste usability does not involve using both a keyboard and a mouse. Not in a million years. But if you absolutely want it that way, X lets you. Windows, on the other hand...
Why worry about the middle button on a two button mouse? Just re-program both the middle and right button to do the paste action. I've been using that setup for ages. Works like a charm whatever mouse you (have to) use.
Or suppose that I'm a sysadmin preparing an OS image for distribution across the company and want to include this thing? I can't. Yet I can reimage every machine under my control and then walk over to each and every one and download the player manually (assuming that simply downloading it is allowed after all).
This is a typical example of what happens when lawyers define laws or contracts that involve that magical thing called real life: they have no clue and it shows..
Have you personally reviewed the 2.9M messages which were filtered out... if you have then i'd question the value of your filtering.
The key is when you deal with the spam. I use a custom filter as well. While it does not achieve 90% filtering for the real spam, it so far caused just 3 false positives over an 8 months timeframe (I get about 60 mails per day at work and about 120 at home (mainly because my home address is on LKML and the fetchmail-fiends list)).
I know these statistics because I quickly scan the spam once per day at a moment when I have 2 minutes of spare time in between meetings or some such. Whereas manually evaluating and deleting each spam separately as it comes takes a lot of time, processing them in bundles of several tens that are very likely to be nothing but spam can be done rather quickly.
When I die, all my belongings - Linux files included - are at present destined for someone who will have no trouble at all (by)passing the security measures and reading the files. But if this person dies before I do, none of the fallback people will have even the smallest clue how to get to the data. One of them does know DOS inside out and can get to any byte on a DOS floppy not matter how damaged DOS considers the floppy to be, but will be utterly lost when facing several tens of gigabytes of ext2 and ext3 partitions (and will more than likely die way before I do anyway). The others have no clue at all as far as computers are concerned.
But I have no problem with that situation. All the stuff that needs to remain accessible in any case is available on paper. The digital stuff is either only of (limited) use to that one other person, or simply is intended to only ever be seen by her/him.
Hey, I'm a follows-mouse person too. Neat tricks can be done with that if many windows are open, and I sure use them. But I despise programs that open up windows that I do not need. Gimp is extremely bad at this. Just consider the following extremely simple scenario: you want to make a screenshot and maybe edit it a tiny little bit. So you start Gimp. It proceeds with plastering your display with tons of separate windows that you have no use for in the context the specific task you want to accomplish and that you must all hide before getting any real work done.
To me this behaviour shows a severe lack of understanding of what good UI design is all about. And, sadly, this initialization bit is by far not the only thing the Gimp UI gets badly wrong.
Indeed. Whereas at home I run full-custom stuff, at work we're still at RH 7.2 and 7.3 because RH7 is what most commercial Linux software was tested/certified on back in its day. But RH7 does suffer from some bad choices as well (g++ 2.96 comes to mind), so we're about to ditch it for something new. After looking around at what is available and supported by commercial Linux softare, looking at what the various distributions cost (sorry RedHat, but AS & Co are too expensive for us, especially considering that we don't need most of your support), and thinking long and hard about the impact of switching to a non-RH based distribution, we ended up choosing RH9, knowing full well that support would end at about the time we'd be ready for roll-out. The advantage? We get to soldier on one or two more years with a stable-as-rock basis at a minimal switching effort and no extra cost whatsoever. And we get to observe the market impact of RH's new strategy for some time before comitting resources to switching to an alternative distribution that might well be dead one or two years from now.
I, for one, know that I've personally let go a nice opportunity to get paid more, simply out of loyalty to people that I work with/for (as their boss, mind you). And I'm not as rich as Scott & Co who don't need any more money. Not all bosses are egoistic, you know. Some are just idiots like me. :-)
Please define "incredibly good". I have a strong suspicion that your definition and mine do not match.
What if it were Darl's call to Linus apologizing for the lawsuit that was blocked?
If he really wants to do this, Darl Mc Idiot will not change his mind simply because he has to wait till Linus is finished celibrating his wedding anniversary, or whatever else he's doing that's vastly more important to him than to listen to Darl finally admit what the world and especially Linus have known for ages.
I will never ever be caught owning a mobile phone. When I want to be reachable in person, I'm near a phone that is guaranteed to work (i.e. not a mobile one). When I'm not near a phone, I do not want to be reachable on the spot. People shouldn't be slaves to their handhelds. And certainly not to those of others.
My problem is that at home I can do what ever I like, at work I cannot. Telling my sysadmins that this mail "they" just mutilated was yet another that really is perfectly fine and that the sender should be added to their whitelist(s) would be a serious nuisance. It takes time (while I regularly work at 1 AM, they don't); they cannot listen to every single of our 1500 employees who has a similar request (htough, admittedly, they will listen to me, given my position in the company (but that's baside the point)); and it doesn't retroactively address the issue of the mail that triggers the complaint.
We do a lot of filtering too. At company level and at personal level. But even so, some HTML mails get through (guess what: because their senders are whitelisted!). These are the ones that I use my specially adapted e-mail client for (I *despise* HTML mail).
I basically don't want any HTML mail. So I deliberately read my mail with a mail client that is not able to process HTML (the original version can, but I disabled it in the source). But every now and then, I get a valid mail that has been formatted in HTML by some misguided soul, company, or program. Most of these I read "as source", but sometimes the HTML really needs to be rendered properly.
I don't want to get any bullsh*t spam, but I *do* want to get all the bits that person X or company Y, whom I trust, wants to - or has to - send to me. The mail admins should please keep their dirty fingers away from what I consider to be my "private" property. I'm perfectly able to do my own filtering based on criteria that fit my situation. As, in fact, I do.
So will I. And my business Euros as well.
Just to make the above absolutely 1000% crystal clear to any US security official od ultra-right wing nationalist that is scanning these pages looking for left-wing terrorists and blatant signs of anti-americanism:
I work in IT research in one of the affected Europe countries. Recently, the results of 10 years of hard work of me and the people on my team were licensed to a US startup for comercialisation. Yes, you read that right: we Europeans invented the technology, the US firm (headed by a European, by the way) is simply buying it. I had no problem whatsoever with letting someone else in another country earn the fruits of my work (and from a purely humanitarian point of view still don't have one). But there is no way I will silently let the US government treat me like a criminal after this. Next time we have something to sell, we'll be looking at the far-east.
I actually hold a NATO security clearance. Again, there is no way I will silently let the US government treat me like a criminal.
America would do well to remember its history and to analyse why it became the economical and military superpower that it (for the time being) still is today. Fingerprinting every visitor was not part of it. Welcoming those who fled the fingerprinting maffia in other parts of the world, on the other hand, definitely was.
Microsoft has some really cool research going on at MSR - see their projects.
You mean like this:
Server Error in '/' Application.
/Configuration.xml.
/Configuration.xml.
/Configuration.xml.]g s e) +6497
.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET
Unable to load overridden shell configuration file
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web
request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it
originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Exception: Unable to load overridden shell configuration file
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the
current web request. Information regarding the origin and location
of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace
below.
Stack Trace:
[Exception: Unable to load overridden shell configuration file
Microsoft.MSCOM.MNP.Framework.Page.OnInit(EventAr
System.Web.UI.Control.InitRecursive(Control namingContainer) +241
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +174
Version Information: Microsoft
Version:1.1.4322.573
Very impressive project indeed... I can only stand in awe! :-)
Regarding the "give the code back Linus" bit: yes, they may come up with binary-only components. That's why I wrote "chances are". But chances are that they will also have to fix code that does not give them the option to work purely with binary only modules and then we all get to profit.
Also, with some luck, this binary only module of theirs can be copied to certain other distros as well. Actually, we once did something like that when facing a soundcard problem. The driver in question was not binary only, but copying the module from one distro to another did save us the hassle of having to get the source and compile it ourselves.
If HP decides to offer the same box with Linux from the start, that is good news, even if we decide to put another Linux distro on there. That's because:
I just did. Even though I despise the thing.
Guess what: I have TWO desktops. One at home, where I can do as I please, one at work where I cannot. It's the latter one that I use most of the day.
Now, fortunately for me, I'm rather influential in what we have on the desktops over here and so was able to make Linux an allowed option. But that did take a lot of lobbying, because I am not part of our IT department. As it so happens, one of our UNIX sysadmins (an very competemnt person with roughly 12 years of experience in her current position and several more before that in other companies) is on the point of rolling out CUPS over here as well. She recently told me a very sorry tale of the amount of trouble she had encountered getting CUPS to work properly on/with all our hardware. Now, it's her boss who in the end decides whether or not Linux and other open source solutions are an option that they want to offer to the users. If he gets to hear a lot of such misery tales...
I'm not the original poster, but I do agree about his time argument. And before you call me someone who does not want to learn Linux, READ MY F*CKING SIGNATURE AND THE EXPLANATION BEHIND IT. There is no reason whatsoever for lack of time to imply lack of willingness to know or learn. I work 12 hours a day (on Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris machines) and have to eat, sleep, wash my slothes, and take care of my house and social life as well, besides toying with my home computers.
My "old" Linux box at home (running a self-patched 2.6.2 kernel on dual CPUs, by the way, so not just an average Joe SixPack beige box) does not have a single binary that I did not compile from the source on it other than the X server (and the only reason for that exception is lack of disk space). It also does not have a single configuration script that I did not re-write from scratch. It does not have a single binary that I do not know the purpose of. But it took me a lot of time to get it to that state, back when I still had said time, and it DID start out as a Slackware installation just to get the box going. Now that I need to get my new portable into a usable state ASAP, I want to get it all set up within one evening at most. Later on, finetuning similar to what I did in the past will surely occur again, but right now (read that as: over the coming 8-12 months) I simply DO NOT have the time for that. And yet I STILL should be able to get things working.
It should be possible to set up a Linux box just as easily as it is to set up a Windows box. That has nothing to do with lack of knowledge. Or actually it does: I know almost nothing about Windows. I bought my new portable partly because I need to find out a lot more about Windows (sad but true). After 1 hour (mostly dominated by waiting for a slow phone line), everything was working and I could dive into experimenting with those bits that I need to find out more about most urgently. With Linux, I will first have to fight for days with various pieces of equipment that I simply need to work, but have no immediate interest to understand. The printer configuration is one of those.
Oh, and vi is indeed best
I do. Some PC's nowadays get sold with Windows included but without MS Office (yes, even by big names like Compaq). This means that the buyer either has some brains and is going to replace the OS, thus having payed for one (s)he does not need/want, or is going to buy additional software. In this sad world we live in, the most likely additional sofware that the average unknowledgeable person will buy is ... the non-OEM version of MS Office, which costs about 33% more than the OEM one. Guess who gains most from this...
Actually, I think (warning heretic opinion coming up! :-) that MS should bundle at least MS Word with their OS. At no extra cost, obviously, as they already make more than enough money as things stand now. And of course buying a PC without any M$ software should be a lot easier (especially as far as laptops are concerned), but that's an other story.