But there's a difference in the way people move to Apple and the way people move to Linux. With Apple, you're buying a completely new system (some would say, a completely new experience).... the way most Linux advocates talk about attracting Windows users is by starting them on a dual-boot system
That's not quite right and once you understand the best migration time you understand why the migration issue is Bullshit (TM). Windows users dump windows when their computer crashes and burns again. The dual boot thing is a comfort and money saving feature and are the reason Linux share has surpassed Mac share.
Migration is a red hearing. Windows users usually lose all of their settings when they buy a new computer. Programs like Mozilla, Konqueror, Kontact and Thunderbird taking preferences is an extra Microsoft does not provide. It's part of the impressive superiority of free software that free software can install right next to the hulking ruin that is the average user's Winblows install. If they don't go for Linux, what they go for is a new Winblows PC for which they have to buy a new everything. It's difficult for them to get so much as their old favorite software, like Word Perfect, Paint Shop Pro and so on, much less have it work the way it used to. Even Winblows itself confuses the user by rearranging all the configuration settings and obnoxiously changing preferences on "updates".
I thought based on its compression ratio this would just be the 1st anniversary for mp3.
This only happens for software patents, which travel near the speed of stupid. My hope is that 10 years old means only seven years left to public domain.
In the mean time, I'm using OGG and layer 2 for those cheap portable devices. It's strange makers of devices that retail for less than $100 would rather pay royalties on MP3 than have free players that use OGG. To make things "work for sure" for M$ users, they can include a CD with all the OGG tools needed, which are also free.
There really is very little reason to use floppy disks anymore. Devices such as USB drives are not only more convenient, faster, and more spacious than floppies, but they're also inexpensive.
The amazing thing is not that floppies are finally dying, but that they managed to live on so long thanks to Microsoft. The reason for this is simple, people at work do not trust their computer or their server because of poor quality software. The pathetic part is that the software has not improved but hat a new media of distrust has become cheaper. In fact, I'd say things have gotten even worse in the Windoze world. Floppies and now USB devices are used because people do not believe their computers will remember their work and don't have easy or reliable ways to move their work to their home computers.
I moved to Linux in 1998 and have not lost a file due to file corruption or hardware failure since. The ext2 file system is redundant enough for hardware failure to have always been gentle and recoverable. Journaling is even better. Having live CDs for boots instead of a central registry to prevent booting is also helpful. More importantly, free software makes running a "server" with secure access to the internet much easier so I can move data from home to work and from work to home anywhere in the world. I stopped using floppies almost immediately because it was easier to make a network backup and I knew data would be there later.
This is a tremendous contrast to places I work where M$ still rules. There, computers still come from big vendors like Dell with floppy drives, the "servers" still routinely lose data, it's difficult if not impossible to move data around. In places like that, conscientious employees still need portable storage. So we get articles like this, extolling the virtues of USB devices.
"IP" paranoia and viruses have made things even worse in the Microsoft world. Email was one way to move things around, but many companies and ISPs are routinely blocking attachments of useful size. Others have outlawed USB devices even cameras and cellphones. They do this because they are afraid of viruses infesting their networks and to keep their valuable IP from leaking out. If they had reasonable software, they would not have to worry about viruses. The other part is a futile substitute for trust. If you can't trust your employees, your information will walk out with them in one way or another, regardless of what you do. A lack of trust does not guard against gullibility and soon the same companies will be implementing Microsoft's new dissapearing ink Word Docs and other pointless lockdowns. Stupid is as stupid does, and it all makes things more difficult for those with a clue and a care.
London is one of the most surveillance heavy places in the world. Yet not once have I read of any talking head crowing about how all of those cameras are going to make catching the responsible parties any easier. Preventing terrorism is what the cameras are for, right?
... phoney Tony would use this as an excuse to get additional surveillance in, and railroad the ID scheme.
More useless junk that will defeat the whole point of mass transit. The direct cost of the new equipment will dwarf the total cost of manning the surveillance society and no one being able to get anything done.
There is no protection from terrorism. If somebody really wants to get you, they will.
Just look at Israel. People have been herded into concentration camps, presumed guilty from birth, issued ID cards which they have to present to get out of the ghetto, their trucks have no fenders so they can be searched, walls have been erected, people have even been kept from using roads. I don't even want to imagine the lists of controlled substances. Imagine a farm without fertilizers and diesel fuel. Citizens carry machine guns, and are well trained. Yet, horrible things still happen. As someone else in this tread pointed out, anyplace you have people waiting is a place you can bring 30 lbs of bomb and terrorize everyone. Brute force and paranoia don't work, especially in a place like London where there will be no "us" and "them".
That's a nice link. I did not know anyone was making and storing anti-protons. Positrons are common, happening anywhere you have lots of 1.2 MeV or greater photons interacting with matter. The problem is saving them up someplace before they get sucked up by a regular electron. You can easily see the energy of annihilation with room temperature NaI detectors and a gamma spec, like this.
Judges won't allow wages to be garnished if it'll make you or your family starve for instance...
That won't keep the judge from driving your residual income all the way down to minimum wage. You can lose your house, vehicle and many other things before you "starve". Sure, you won't die, but a life time of hard work and effort on your part can be turned into a lifestyle where you might as well have dropped out of high school and been a dishwasher. $your_current_income - $minimum_wage = $nice_income_stream_for_dirtbag, bigger than your phone, electric, vehicle and any other legitimate service is able to pull from you right now.
It does not take much effort to make this happen. The only people immune to it are those with absolutely nothing who are willing to live on a cash basis. Remember that 12 year old girl in the housing project sued by the RIAA? They took her family's life savings of $2,000 as a settlement to avoid the crushing burden of payments on the hundreds of thousands of dollars they claimed she owed. A similar story is the end of most RIAA suits, variable only by life savings amount.
Will this happen over $12? Well, they sent the letter and that's intimidation enough. An uncollected bill is a threat to your credit record, something that can cost you lots and lots of money.
cc: your (dis)approving employer.
Dear Alien Being,
Thank you for your kind and cosiderape and amusing letter. We needed a lift after the shock of losing a suit yesterday and having to pay the maximum fine of $1,000. Your letter more than makes up for our loss of office cash for our weekly Hawian Friday Pigout.
Please find enclosed a duplicate copy of your bill and the contract stating your everlasting obesience to WIRED (TM). This proves your debt and we expect payment shortly.
Your existing business relation to WIRED will be used to sell all personal information gained from persistent phone spam and a pliant ISP.
Also, we have partnered with MalMart and are planning a new office park where your house currently is to serve you better. The fair value of your house, taken under immanent domain, will be more than enough to pay your debt.
Your boss said you are fired. We are sorry for this inconvenience as we did not know he would not approve of your contract violation and dead beat ways.
Know your rights, and don't be afraid to push back. Even if a collection agency is after you for legit debt, there are limits to what they are allowed to do.
His rights have already been violated because the debt is bogus.
How, exactly, do you think he's going to push back? He can complain here but the credit agency can lose a maximum of $500,000 for this fraud. Is he going to hire a lawyer over this? What lawyer is going to want work that will pay them a maximum of $1,000 for an individual's case? I'd really like to know how to fight back, but it looks like the odds are firmly in favor of the hired weasels.
First, some pleasant words from your Government. They sound so soothing, don't they? Your tax dollars at work protecting you from harassment. yah, right. What kind of employer would approve of you being called for a bill you supposedly did not pay? Oh, but if you send them a written letter saying you don't owe any money they have to knock it off until they send you a copy of a bill saying you do.
Continuous Customer Contact, by phone, e-commerce, even their very own US Post office.
A whole team of specialists with 65,000 square feet of office space!
"Art of the Collection Letter," for maximum intimidation.
Total Data Processing - I'm afraid to ask, but they got computers, perhaps their very own line to credit agencies.
The limits of liability are galling:
What can you do if you believe a debt collector violated the law?
You have the right to sue a collector in a state or federal court within one year from the date from the date the law was violated. If you win, you may recover money for the damages you suffered plus an additional amount up to $1000. Court costs and attorneys fees also can be recovered. A group of people also may sue a debt collector and recover money for damages up to $500,000, or one percent of the collectors net worth, whichever is less.
So how many thousands of dollars can be made by abusing thousands of people? Yet the limit is $500,000. Disgusting.
I'm sure I've only scraped the tip of the iceburg here. I've never been served one of these letters and am unaware of anything on my own credit record. Be aware however that bad credit will cost you dearly when you try to buy a car, house or anything else you can't buy outright. Is that teeth enough for you?
If this story is true, it's deplorable. Wired is not, I hope, so stupid as to burn the world's good will $12 at a time.
The PV cells don't look as though they're going to provide enough power except when it's very bright out and you have them pointed directly at the sun.
The idea behind PV cells on a backpack is to store the energy in a battery, not to use it all the time. It would be nice if you could get that kind of power out of something the size of your back, but there's hardly enough sunlight hitting your back for that.
This is very clunky and expensive looking.
Expensive? Yes. Clunky? No. The whole setup looks like it weighs less than the average laptop and takes up little space in your backpack. I was impressed, though I think you'd be better off using your laptop as your router.
That article rocks, but it would be cheaper still to use your laptop as the router and skip the extra box. The software that makes the box run should do just fine on the average Linux laptop.
The solar cells are nifty but there are cheaper and more rugged ways to generate power. If you are mountian biking, use a cheap headlight generator set. Your body can put out a good 250 watts, almost 10 times the power needs of a good low power laptop.
how does this half page article buy some guy represent any kind of real news?
It's news because the author is a "mainstream" user/developer who's noticed how sad Winblows is. Other interfaces are blowing Microsoft's stale facade away by implementing a handfull of tricks that have been available on free platforms for eight years or more. This guy noticed. He's not a Zealot ranting about the virtues of being free, he's just made an obvious quality comparison. About the best thing he could find for Winblows was Stardock, a $50 add-on that won't even give you multiple desktops or virtual workspaces but will bring your computer to a crawl.
Mac has brought some nifty interface ideas to a mass audience and I have to admire some of their features. Dynamic desktop zooming, multiple desktops, transparency and so on. Still, the styles are limited next to the choices available on Linux.
With Linux you have your choice of fantastic interfaces that work with hardware Winblows stifles:
KDE
Gnome
Enlightenment, my current favorite.
After Step
Window Maker
XFCE
Fluxbox
The list goes on and on. Each of the above is extremely flexible and all of it can exist side by side and concurrently without problem. Programs written for each work in all and many have very easy to use development kits. All have features you will not find on Winblows or Mac.
The author must never have used any of the above to still be considering goofey stuff like Window blinds on the pathetic single screen interface that comes from Microsoft. That's why I consider him "mainstream." What he needs is a nice little Mepis disk and a few weeks of playing with really cool interfaces. His audience might not recognize him after that.
Saying half the unprotected machines are exploited within 12 minutes is NOT the same as saying unprotected Windows systems have a 12-minute half-life.
That's true but saying that Windows machines have a 50% chance of being owned in 12 minutes is a half life. I'll quote the article, in case you forgot what was actually said while you were busy spouting sophestry about small numbers of machines:
There is a 50 percent chance your unprotected Windows PC will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online, says security vendor Sophos.
Now I'll answer this question you had, which you phrased as a statement of misdirection:
All we know from the article is that 12 out of 24 such machines are infected by the 12-minute mark. We do not know about the other 12 - are they infected by 13 mintues? by 13 months? never?
We can't distinguish one machine from the other, and one machine being owned only marginally effects the others. So, if you had 1,000 Winblows machines about 500 would be owned within 12 minutes of being placed on the network. Of the remainder about 250 would be owned in the next 12 minutes. If you can tell me what the difference between one Windoze computer and another is and one 12 minute period and another is, we can say the odds have changed. Otherwise, every 12 minutes online is like any other 12 minutes online for any Windoze machine and the odds are 1 in 2 of being owned in that time. As I pointed out, the odds of not being owned over a longer period of time get small fast.
With a modern calculator, this is easy to compute for arbitrary times. Just raise 1/2 to the number of 12 minute intervals you have. 13 minutes, for example is about 1.08 half lives. 1/2 to the 1.08 power is.472, so you have just a little less than a 50% chance of not being owned in 13 minutes. If you have been lucky, your chance of being owned in 12 minutes does not change from 1/2, but you have to be very lucky indeed to last for any length of time. Your odds of surviving for one hour are only 3 in one hundred. Would you put your data in a box with such low odds of maintaining it's integrity?
It's the attack against GPL via FUD and software patents that make people nervous.
That FUD would also include talk about how scary the GPL and Freedom are. The OSS people have been using this line for a long time in their attempts to "sell" free software. Understanding your audience is good but the underlying principle here is condescending and ultimately harmful. The enemies of free software have been happy to use the same rhetoric.
The GPL and software freedom were never incompatible with the corporate mindset. While it's true that a Navy man, for example, might be put off by a talk about the four software freedoms, the things gained are very impressive to him. Configuration control, ownership, reliability and peer review are things any corporate man can understand and appreciate. Only a small segment of the business world, which relies on an obsolete development model for their only product should really afraid of software freedom. The GPL represents freedom from vendors and better control for everyone else.
The GPL is a very successful means of providing the four software freedoms and all the good things that flow from them. All other licenses can be compared to the GPL through the lens of the four freedoms to decide if they are useful or not. It's teeth, by design, come from the strength copy right itself has. All software licenses depend on this same strength. The GPL has indeed been tested, and so far has been so strong no one has dared go to court. Every case has been settled out of court on very favorable terms. That's a good track record and it speaks for itself.
Here's all it takes to keep your Windows box safe: a router (or SP2) and Firefox.
That's good advice, but you left out the Thunderbird mail client. The router (not SP2) will block many automated worms before they can seize your Winblows computer through something silly like a Plug and Play deamon that listens to the network. Firefox will protect you from many drive by malware sites, unless you load it up with crappy plugins like Macromedia flash. Thunderbird will protect you from many email born problems.
Because the commonality above seems to be, something non M$ will protect you, why not just run something like Mepis in the first place? The router is still a good idea, and a bonus is wifi.
This isn't news. There have been reports out for months showing unprotected Windows machines being compromised within a few minutes on cable or dsl connections.
Sure, and anyone working retail knows that Winblows has been getting creamed for years, cable or no. This puts a number on that you can use, and the number has gotten smaller.
"But wait," you might plead, "I remember just a few months ago reading about a minimum time to exploit of four minutes. This is twelve, how can things be getting worse and how do you know?"
Well, Sophos knows because they have the thankless and hopless task of "protecting" hundreds of thousands of Winblows computers around the world. They came up with their figure by studying what their little clients fold them for the last six months. With so many clients, it's easy to watch them pop and extrapolate rates of infection, just like you can with radioactive material.
What they have told you is a Winblows computer now has a HALF LIFE of twelve minutes. That's much worse than a four minute minimum because half lives have a way of adding up quickly. In 24 minutes, a given machine has only a 25% chance of not being owned. In 36 minutes, the chances of being "factory new" are down to just 12.5%. After an hour, oh my, you have less than a one in fifty chance of being virus free. Needless to say, after a few hours on line, YOU WILL BE OWNED. This is why even dial up users are suffering quickly.
Notice that Sophos can be off by an order of magnitude and the results will be about the same. If the half life were really 120 minutes instead of 12 minutes, you would still be owned after a few days on line. There's little practical difference to the average user between 10 hours on line and 10 days. It's doubtful they are off by that much, given ammount of data they have available.
Just for fun, try this fun little half life game. It's a little fast and the lables are elements, but you can imagine different Winblows versions getting oowned and spewing out their toxic spam and trojans onto the rest of the world. Radioactivity, cancer and Microsoft, what great analogies. Given real world M$ performance and it's results, the cancer shoe fits much better on Steve Balmer than it does on any GPL'd project.
Don't blame the victim. The whole anti-trust case was that M$ made it insanely hard to compete much less be free. Freedom seems to be overcoming M$, but we should not blame the victims of constant advertising barages, lack of choice at the vendor level and coercive force at the manufacturing level.
Are you using Windows every day?
No, but I might if that's what my job required. I don't have an OS choice on hardware I don't own and other people sometimes make stupid/lazy choices.
Did you set up a Windows computer for your parents, grandparents, or other friends because FreeBSD/Linux/NetBSD/MacOS is "too complicated"?
Hell no. I show them free software and let them bear the full cost of ignoring my advice. I'm not part of the problem, but I know better than to blame my mom for using M$ because AOL has no Linux access client and refuses to use normal.
Microsoft is the problem, period, end of story. The reason things are so complicated is largely a matter of M$ being able to force NDAs based on their market position. If you owned a video card company, would you dare release specs if you knew that M$ would turn around and break your Windoze drivers with their next "update"? I might, because a free world is better than the one that exists now, but I know that it would cost me market share. Microsoft also uses stupid file formats, DRM, and every other kind of incompatibility to make being free a difficult thing. The result is that their product does not work, but even that they use to their advantage by arguing for ISP restrictions and other stupid crap that again makes it hard to be free.
The world will be a much better place when M$ goes away.
Oh puh-lease. There are plenty of companies with that kind of clout
Please yourself.
It's not "clout" it's ability to break the law and get away with it through bribes and fast talking. Oil and defense companies may have their influence but they have not been flaunting anti-trust law and getting away with it after conviction. That other corruption may exist is no reason to look the other way, especially with something as important as software is to your rights to free speech, privacy and financial security. Murder may be more "important" than rape, but rapists should be put away.
There are also important differences in industry to consider economies of scale and product. It takes a single computer and one person to make high quality software. Developing a new battle tank and finding the fuel to drive are at least five orders of magnitude more expensive. Also, I'm not aware of a free fuel or free arms movement who have the ability to make infinite coppies of their vastly superior product but can't find a vendor.
That M$ continues to push it's crap onto hardware makers, vendors and the general public is inexcusable. The end result will be a world without privacy and continued news/entertainment monopolies of the 1920s. The US government had it's chance to stop it.
Now it's up to each of us to put a stop to the idiocy. Don't buy or use or recommend M$. It's that easy. Not for your wife, neighbor or relatives. Free software is easier and better. M$ can't live forever without customers and their platform merits few of those.
Why not just release tons of Talcum powder in orbit around the Earth?
How about blotting out the sky with something black and stormy in the atmosphere? We can't have sunlight, oh no, we have to scorch the sky. That will fix everything.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
Dr. Edgar Villanueva, Congress, Peru did indeed visit København, Danmark for Guadec last summer, where he received top billing. The conference also featured:
Bdale Garbee, CTO Linux HP
Eva Hildrum, Director General, Ministry of Transport and Communications, Norway
Bruce Perens, Acting Exec Director, Desktop Linux Consortium
Bob Stack, CTO Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Sun
Red Hat
IBM
ORiely
Developers from around the world co - operating to make GNOME kick ass.
Top billing in that crowd is impressive. So it seems Norway has more in common with Peru than meets the money blinded eyes.
Download W2K3 Service Pack 1 from Microsoft, they have the same firewall as XPSP2 plus some bonus features.
There's a small chance that Sushant does not know that. The persistent popups advertising the "upgrade" may have been disabled. But then he'd have had to have ignored the countless articles on configuring it that appear if you google "w2k firewall."
The more likely scenerios are that it does not work or that he can't apply it because it would break one of the programs the lab is supposed to provide.
Then you have the practical side of things. Do you really think Sushant wants to download and configure 10 or 20 service packs? That could take him weeks.
The easiest thing to do is set up a Smoothwall from someone's throw away. Universities are full of old computers just waiting for a second life like that. One CD, two network cards, 40 minutes and he's done. It would probably take less time than it would to fill out the paper work to buy a $40 "router."
He also calls for all parts of government to have a plan ready by 2006 for use of open source solutions.
If that's not a chance to sell hardware, I don't know what is. In many cases it will be cheaper to bring in a Linux or BSD box than it will be to configure an aging system. People who realize that will be earning a living while you bitch and complain.
What are the Norwegians going to do when US or British governments... send them a.doc?
What the do you think? Diplomats in English speaking countries already go through the trouble of translating their work to Norwegian. Translating to Open Office would be easy next to that. It's probably easier to do the Norwegian write up on OO than it is on Word anyway. Microsoft Locals are notoriously bad.
Norway isn't really a big enough country for other countries to worry about conforming to its standards.
Spoken like a real Softie. That's why M$ language support sucks.
I don't have to read 55 pages of opinion to be disturbed by the direction the first paragraph takes. It reads like Pigopolist propaganda and is absurd in it's expectations and presumptions. The most blatant absurdities are a surprise that nothing but "copyrighted" work flowed through the networks and that it's possible for general purpose software to filter such works.
How is it that the Supreme Court is surprised that pigopolist works passed through the networks? Large publishers spend billions promoting their garbage and have government protection in the form of public airwave ownership. Works from smaller publishers are impossible to find on public airwaves or cable stations. Is it any surprise that few people know about it or demand it, even if they could download it at now cost or leagal trouble? HTTP, FTP and even SMTP would surely fail similar tests.
More sinister, the notion taken for granted is that software makers should somehow "filter" "copyrighted" material. This is absurd on two counts:
All work, by international standards, is copyrighted. As soon as you create it, the Berne convention says, it's yours.
It is impossible to tell who owns work, much less their intentions to public copy. Unfortunately, there is no list of ownership as the recent brew-ha over Woody Guthry's "This Land is Your Land" makes clear. There's no central repository of copyrighted books, or recordings, much less an easy way to compare files that would not violate your rights to publish your own material.
These two things make the foregone notion impossible and casts great doubt on the wisdom of the court.
What follows from this decision will not be good. If it's reasoning is followed it effectively cements the position of the world's three large music publishers and all other pigopolists by forcing DRM. Anything else said after that is just ignorant psycho-babble and reading it will merely serve to familiarize yourself with pigopolist propaganda. The closest thing to clear copy intentions is the Creative Commons licensing scheme, which seeks to overcome these basic problems of current copy right law. Creative Commons content is dead in the water without a means of distribution and if used by DRM software would simply be a finely graded Broadcast Flag. New companies are going to be locked out of the internet content distribution business by insane burdens of proof and I'm not proud to be an American right now.
Slashdot Mirror
But there's a difference in the way people move to Apple and the way people move to Linux. With Apple, you're buying a completely new system (some would say, a completely new experience). ... the way most Linux advocates talk about attracting Windows users is by starting them on a dual-boot system
That's not quite right and once you understand the best migration time you understand why the migration issue is Bullshit (TM). Windows users dump windows when their computer crashes and burns again. The dual boot thing is a comfort and money saving feature and are the reason Linux share has surpassed Mac share.
Migration is a red hearing. Windows users usually lose all of their settings when they buy a new computer. Programs like Mozilla, Konqueror, Kontact and Thunderbird taking preferences is an extra Microsoft does not provide. It's part of the impressive superiority of free software that free software can install right next to the hulking ruin that is the average user's Winblows install. If they don't go for Linux, what they go for is a new Winblows PC for which they have to buy a new everything. It's difficult for them to get so much as their old favorite software, like Word Perfect, Paint Shop Pro and so on, much less have it work the way it used to. Even Winblows itself confuses the user by rearranging all the configuration settings and obnoxiously changing preferences on "updates".
This only happens for software patents, which travel near the speed of stupid. My hope is that 10 years old means only seven years left to public domain.
In the mean time, I'm using OGG and layer 2 for those cheap portable devices. It's strange makers of devices that retail for less than $100 would rather pay royalties on MP3 than have free players that use OGG. To make things "work for sure" for M$ users, they can include a CD with all the OGG tools needed, which are also free.
The amazing thing is not that floppies are finally dying, but that they managed to live on so long thanks to Microsoft. The reason for this is simple, people at work do not trust their computer or their server because of poor quality software. The pathetic part is that the software has not improved but hat a new media of distrust has become cheaper. In fact, I'd say things have gotten even worse in the Windoze world. Floppies and now USB devices are used because people do not believe their computers will remember their work and don't have easy or reliable ways to move their work to their home computers.
I moved to Linux in 1998 and have not lost a file due to file corruption or hardware failure since. The ext2 file system is redundant enough for hardware failure to have always been gentle and recoverable. Journaling is even better. Having live CDs for boots instead of a central registry to prevent booting is also helpful. More importantly, free software makes running a "server" with secure access to the internet much easier so I can move data from home to work and from work to home anywhere in the world. I stopped using floppies almost immediately because it was easier to make a network backup and I knew data would be there later.
This is a tremendous contrast to places I work where M$ still rules. There, computers still come from big vendors like Dell with floppy drives, the "servers" still routinely lose data, it's difficult if not impossible to move data around. In places like that, conscientious employees still need portable storage. So we get articles like this, extolling the virtues of USB devices.
"IP" paranoia and viruses have made things even worse in the Microsoft world. Email was one way to move things around, but many companies and ISPs are routinely blocking attachments of useful size. Others have outlawed USB devices even cameras and cellphones. They do this because they are afraid of viruses infesting their networks and to keep their valuable IP from leaking out. If they had reasonable software, they would not have to worry about viruses. The other part is a futile substitute for trust. If you can't trust your employees, your information will walk out with them in one way or another, regardless of what you do. A lack of trust does not guard against gullibility and soon the same companies will be implementing Microsoft's new dissapearing ink Word Docs and other pointless lockdowns. Stupid is as stupid does, and it all makes things more difficult for those with a clue and a care.
More useless junk that will defeat the whole point of mass transit. The direct cost of the new equipment will dwarf the total cost of manning the surveillance society and no one being able to get anything done.
There is no protection from terrorism. If somebody really wants to get you, they will.
Just look at Israel. People have been herded into concentration camps, presumed guilty from birth, issued ID cards which they have to present to get out of the ghetto, their trucks have no fenders so they can be searched, walls have been erected, people have even been kept from using roads. I don't even want to imagine the lists of controlled substances. Imagine a farm without fertilizers and diesel fuel. Citizens carry machine guns, and are well trained. Yet, horrible things still happen. As someone else in this tread pointed out, anyplace you have people waiting is a place you can bring 30 lbs of bomb and terrorize everyone. Brute force and paranoia don't work, especially in a place like London where there will be no "us" and "them".
That's a nice link. I did not know anyone was making and storing anti-protons. Positrons are common, happening anywhere you have lots of 1.2 MeV or greater photons interacting with matter. The problem is saving them up someplace before they get sucked up by a regular electron. You can easily see the energy of annihilation with room temperature NaI detectors and a gamma spec, like this.
Simple instructions, pop the bottom, press it in. Watch for the pink spot to turn white.
You don't want to try it, I promise.
That won't keep the judge from driving your residual income all the way down to minimum wage. You can lose your house, vehicle and many other things before you "starve". Sure, you won't die, but a life time of hard work and effort on your part can be turned into a lifestyle where you might as well have dropped out of high school and been a dishwasher. $your_current_income - $minimum_wage = $nice_income_stream_for_dirtbag, bigger than your phone, electric, vehicle and any other legitimate service is able to pull from you right now.
It does not take much effort to make this happen. The only people immune to it are those with absolutely nothing who are willing to live on a cash basis. Remember that 12 year old girl in the housing project sued by the RIAA? They took her family's life savings of $2,000 as a settlement to avoid the crushing burden of payments on the hundreds of thousands of dollars they claimed she owed. A similar story is the end of most RIAA suits, variable only by life savings amount.
Will this happen over $12? Well, they sent the letter and that's intimidation enough. An uncollected bill is a threat to your credit record, something that can cost you lots and lots of money.
cc: your (dis)approving employer. Dear Alien Being,
Thank you for your kind and cosiderape and amusing letter. We needed a lift after the shock of losing a suit yesterday and having to pay the maximum fine of $1,000. Your letter more than makes up for our loss of office cash for our weekly Hawian Friday Pigout.
Please find enclosed a duplicate copy of your bill and the contract stating your everlasting obesience to WIRED (TM). This proves your debt and we expect payment shortly.
Your existing business relation to WIRED will be used to sell all personal information gained from persistent phone spam and a pliant ISP.
Also, we have partnered with MalMart and are planning a new office park where your house currently is to serve you better. The fair value of your house, taken under immanent domain, will be more than enough to pay your debt.
Your boss said you are fired. We are sorry for this inconvenience as we did not know he would not approve of your contract violation and dead beat ways.
Have a nice day.
Emmet A. Weasel.
H.E. BITME.
His rights have already been violated because the debt is bogus.
How, exactly, do you think he's going to push back? He can complain here but the credit agency can lose a maximum of $500,000 for this fraud. Is he going to hire a lawyer over this? What lawyer is going to want work that will pay them a maximum of $1,000 for an individual's case? I'd really like to know how to fight back, but it looks like the odds are firmly in favor of the hired weasels.
Now check out what North Shore Agency promisses their customers,
The limits of liability are galling:
What can you do if you believe a debt collector violated the law? You have the right to sue a collector in a state or federal court within one year from the date from the date the law was violated. If you win, you may recover money for the damages you suffered plus an additional amount up to $1000. Court costs and attorneys fees also can be recovered. A group of people also may sue a debt collector and recover money for damages up to $500,000, or one percent of the collectors net worth, whichever is less.
So how many thousands of dollars can be made by abusing thousands of people? Yet the limit is $500,000. Disgusting.
I'm sure I've only scraped the tip of the iceburg here. I've never been served one of these letters and am unaware of anything on my own credit record. Be aware however that bad credit will cost you dearly when you try to buy a car, house or anything else you can't buy outright. Is that teeth enough for you?
If this story is true, it's deplorable. Wired is not, I hope, so stupid as to burn the world's good will $12 at a time.
The idea behind PV cells on a backpack is to store the energy in a battery, not to use it all the time. It would be nice if you could get that kind of power out of something the size of your back, but there's hardly enough sunlight hitting your back for that.
This is very clunky and expensive looking.
Expensive? Yes. Clunky? No. The whole setup looks like it weighs less than the average laptop and takes up little space in your backpack. I was impressed, though I think you'd be better off using your laptop as your router.
The solar cells are nifty but there are cheaper and more rugged ways to generate power. If you are mountian biking, use a cheap headlight generator set. Your body can put out a good 250 watts, almost 10 times the power needs of a good low power laptop.
It's news because the author is a "mainstream" user/developer who's noticed how sad Winblows is. Other interfaces are blowing Microsoft's stale facade away by implementing a handfull of tricks that have been available on free platforms for eight years or more. This guy noticed. He's not a Zealot ranting about the virtues of being free, he's just made an obvious quality comparison. About the best thing he could find for Winblows was Stardock, a $50 add-on that won't even give you multiple desktops or virtual workspaces but will bring your computer to a crawl.
Mac has brought some nifty interface ideas to a mass audience and I have to admire some of their features. Dynamic desktop zooming, multiple desktops, transparency and so on. Still, the styles are limited next to the choices available on Linux.
With Linux you have your choice of fantastic interfaces that work with hardware Winblows stifles:
The list goes on and on. Each of the above is extremely flexible and all of it can exist side by side and concurrently without problem. Programs written for each work in all and many have very easy to use development kits. All have features you will not find on Winblows or Mac.
The author must never have used any of the above to still be considering goofey stuff like Window blinds on the pathetic single screen interface that comes from Microsoft. That's why I consider him "mainstream." What he needs is a nice little Mepis disk and a few weeks of playing with really cool interfaces. His audience might not recognize him after that.
That's true but saying that Windows machines have a 50% chance of being owned in 12 minutes is a half life. I'll quote the article, in case you forgot what was actually said while you were busy spouting sophestry about small numbers of machines:
There is a 50 percent chance your unprotected Windows PC will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online, says security vendor Sophos.
Now I'll answer this question you had, which you phrased as a statement of misdirection:
All we know from the article is that 12 out of 24 such machines are infected by the 12-minute mark. We do not know about the other 12 - are they infected by 13 mintues? by 13 months? never?
We can't distinguish one machine from the other, and one machine being owned only marginally effects the others. So, if you had 1,000 Winblows machines about 500 would be owned within 12 minutes of being placed on the network. Of the remainder about 250 would be owned in the next 12 minutes. If you can tell me what the difference between one Windoze computer and another is and one 12 minute period and another is, we can say the odds have changed. Otherwise, every 12 minutes online is like any other 12 minutes online for any Windoze machine and the odds are 1 in 2 of being owned in that time. As I pointed out, the odds of not being owned over a longer period of time get small fast.
With a modern calculator, this is easy to compute for arbitrary times. Just raise 1/2 to the number of 12 minute intervals you have. 13 minutes, for example is about 1.08 half lives. 1/2 to the 1.08 power is .472, so you have just a little less than a 50% chance of not being owned in 13 minutes. If you have been lucky, your chance of being owned in 12 minutes does not change from 1/2, but you have to be very lucky indeed to last for any length of time. Your odds of surviving for one hour are only 3 in one hundred. Would you put your data in a box with such low odds of maintaining it's integrity?
That FUD would also include talk about how scary the GPL and Freedom are. The OSS people have been using this line for a long time in their attempts to "sell" free software. Understanding your audience is good but the underlying principle here is condescending and ultimately harmful. The enemies of free software have been happy to use the same rhetoric.
The GPL and software freedom were never incompatible with the corporate mindset. While it's true that a Navy man, for example, might be put off by a talk about the four software freedoms, the things gained are very impressive to him. Configuration control, ownership, reliability and peer review are things any corporate man can understand and appreciate. Only a small segment of the business world, which relies on an obsolete development model for their only product should really afraid of software freedom. The GPL represents freedom from vendors and better control for everyone else.
The GPL is a very successful means of providing the four software freedoms and all the good things that flow from them. All other licenses can be compared to the GPL through the lens of the four freedoms to decide if they are useful or not. It's teeth, by design, come from the strength copy right itself has. All software licenses depend on this same strength. The GPL has indeed been tested, and so far has been so strong no one has dared go to court. Every case has been settled out of court on very favorable terms. That's a good track record and it speaks for itself.
That's good advice, but you left out the Thunderbird mail client. The router (not SP2) will block many automated worms before they can seize your Winblows computer through something silly like a Plug and Play deamon that listens to the network. Firefox will protect you from many drive by malware sites, unless you load it up with crappy plugins like Macromedia flash. Thunderbird will protect you from many email born problems.
Because the commonality above seems to be, something non M$ will protect you, why not just run something like Mepis in the first place? The router is still a good idea, and a bonus is wifi.
Sure, and anyone working retail knows that Winblows has been getting creamed for years, cable or no. This puts a number on that you can use, and the number has gotten smaller.
"But wait," you might plead, "I remember just a few months ago reading about a minimum time to exploit of four minutes. This is twelve, how can things be getting worse and how do you know?"
Well, Sophos knows because they have the thankless and hopless task of "protecting" hundreds of thousands of Winblows computers around the world. They came up with their figure by studying what their little clients fold them for the last six months. With so many clients, it's easy to watch them pop and extrapolate rates of infection, just like you can with radioactive material.
What they have told you is a Winblows computer now has a HALF LIFE of twelve minutes. That's much worse than a four minute minimum because half lives have a way of adding up quickly. In 24 minutes, a given machine has only a 25% chance of not being owned. In 36 minutes, the chances of being "factory new" are down to just 12.5%. After an hour, oh my, you have less than a one in fifty chance of being virus free. Needless to say, after a few hours on line, YOU WILL BE OWNED. This is why even dial up users are suffering quickly.
Notice that Sophos can be off by an order of magnitude and the results will be about the same. If the half life were really 120 minutes instead of 12 minutes, you would still be owned after a few days on line. There's little practical difference to the average user between 10 hours on line and 10 days. It's doubtful they are off by that much, given ammount of data they have available.
Just for fun, try this fun little half life game. It's a little fast and the lables are elements, but you can imagine different Winblows versions getting oowned and spewing out their toxic spam and trojans onto the rest of the world. Radioactivity, cancer and Microsoft, what great analogies. Given real world M$ performance and it's results, the cancer shoe fits much better on Steve Balmer than it does on any GPL'd project.
Don't blame the victim. The whole anti-trust case was that M$ made it insanely hard to compete much less be free. Freedom seems to be overcoming M$, but we should not blame the victims of constant advertising barages, lack of choice at the vendor level and coercive force at the manufacturing level.
Are you using Windows every day?
No, but I might if that's what my job required. I don't have an OS choice on hardware I don't own and other people sometimes make stupid/lazy choices.
Did you set up a Windows computer for your parents, grandparents, or other friends because FreeBSD/Linux/NetBSD/MacOS is "too complicated"?
Hell no. I show them free software and let them bear the full cost of ignoring my advice. I'm not part of the problem, but I know better than to blame my mom for using M$ because AOL has no Linux access client and refuses to use normal.
Microsoft is the problem, period, end of story. The reason things are so complicated is largely a matter of M$ being able to force NDAs based on their market position. If you owned a video card company, would you dare release specs if you knew that M$ would turn around and break your Windoze drivers with their next "update"? I might, because a free world is better than the one that exists now, but I know that it would cost me market share. Microsoft also uses stupid file formats, DRM, and every other kind of incompatibility to make being free a difficult thing. The result is that their product does not work, but even that they use to their advantage by arguing for ISP restrictions and other stupid crap that again makes it hard to be free.
The world will be a much better place when M$ goes away.
Please yourself.
It's not "clout" it's ability to break the law and get away with it through bribes and fast talking. Oil and defense companies may have their influence but they have not been flaunting anti-trust law and getting away with it after conviction. That other corruption may exist is no reason to look the other way, especially with something as important as software is to your rights to free speech, privacy and financial security. Murder may be more "important" than rape, but rapists should be put away.
There are also important differences in industry to consider economies of scale and product. It takes a single computer and one person to make high quality software. Developing a new battle tank and finding the fuel to drive are at least five orders of magnitude more expensive. Also, I'm not aware of a free fuel or free arms movement who have the ability to make infinite coppies of their vastly superior product but can't find a vendor.
That M$ continues to push it's crap onto hardware makers, vendors and the general public is inexcusable. The end result will be a world without privacy and continued news/entertainment monopolies of the 1920s. The US government had it's chance to stop it.
Now it's up to each of us to put a stop to the idiocy. Don't buy or use or recommend M$. It's that easy. Not for your wife, neighbor or relatives. Free software is easier and better. M$ can't live forever without customers and their platform merits few of those.
How about blotting out the sky with something black and stormy in the atmosphere? We can't have sunlight, oh no, we have to scorch the sky. That will fix everything.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
Top billing in that crowd is impressive. So it seems Norway has more in common with Peru than meets the money blinded eyes.
There's a small chance that Sushant does not know that. The persistent popups advertising the "upgrade" may have been disabled. But then he'd have had to have ignored the countless articles on configuring it that appear if you google "w2k firewall."
The more likely scenerios are that it does not work or that he can't apply it because it would break one of the programs the lab is supposed to provide.
Then you have the practical side of things. Do you really think Sushant wants to download and configure 10 or 20 service packs? That could take him weeks.
The easiest thing to do is set up a Smoothwall from someone's throw away. Universities are full of old computers just waiting for a second life like that. One CD, two network cards, 40 minutes and he's done. It would probably take less time than it would to fill out the paper work to buy a $40 "router."
If that's not a chance to sell hardware, I don't know what is. In many cases it will be cheaper to bring in a Linux or BSD box than it will be to configure an aging system. People who realize that will be earning a living while you bitch and complain.
What the do you think? Diplomats in English speaking countries already go through the trouble of translating their work to Norwegian. Translating to Open Office would be easy next to that. It's probably easier to do the Norwegian write up on OO than it is on Word anyway. Microsoft Locals are notoriously bad.
Norway isn't really a big enough country for other countries to worry about conforming to its standards.
Spoken like a real Softie. That's why M$ language support sucks.
How is it that the Supreme Court is surprised that pigopolist works passed through the networks? Large publishers spend billions promoting their garbage and have government protection in the form of public airwave ownership. Works from smaller publishers are impossible to find on public airwaves or cable stations. Is it any surprise that few people know about it or demand it, even if they could download it at now cost or leagal trouble? HTTP, FTP and even SMTP would surely fail similar tests.
More sinister, the notion taken for granted is that software makers should somehow "filter" "copyrighted" material. This is absurd on two counts:
These two things make the foregone notion impossible and casts great doubt on the wisdom of the court.
What follows from this decision will not be good. If it's reasoning is followed it effectively cements the position of the world's three large music publishers and all other pigopolists by forcing DRM. Anything else said after that is just ignorant psycho-babble and reading it will merely serve to familiarize yourself with pigopolist propaganda. The closest thing to clear copy intentions is the Creative Commons licensing scheme, which seeks to overcome these basic problems of current copy right law. Creative Commons content is dead in the water without a means of distribution and if used by DRM software would simply be a finely graded Broadcast Flag. New companies are going to be locked out of the internet content distribution business by insane burdens of proof and I'm not proud to be an American right now.