"Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man." The second is from Karl von Clausewitz: "If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy seek a solution elsewhere." I think these speak volumes.
Blah, blah, blah, very wise. How about this:
Using a Windows on the internet is like being naked in a hailstorm.
or
Using Windows on a network is like visiting a whore house without a condom but can be more expensive.
I call BS on the survey and say it's a "we've already won" normalization propaganda campain. Telling "consumers" to shut up and be happy without the right to sample, share or even keep their music is what this is all about. The FUD and active warefare against file sharers will continue, but all of it is doomed to fail.
The whole DRM thing is going to backfire soon. People are not really going to be happy with these services when their devices start to fail. It's then they realize they have lost hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of music they thought they owned but were in fact renting. They will envious of people who took the time to translate the music they had to free formats on free systems. None of the FUD is true for music and media on these systems which lack both complicated, error proned DRM schemes and easy targets for the actively waged anti file scorched earth warfare. I've got my music, it's backed up, I can easily move it and I can play it on as many devices as I want. Apple may take care of people with ITunes but "Works for Sure" music boxes are sure to crap out and leave their users flat.
More importantly, there's still competition out there for the big three music publishers. Musicians don't like being screwed and know that's what they get from the cartels. The music industry killed mp3.com, but there are many other to take their place that will offer musicians and fans a much better deal. With Lessing creating an unambiguous legal framework, we can expect these services to be unassailable.
The concentration of power enjoyed by music publishers was a freak of history and will soon go away. People have been singing and dancing for each other throughout human history. I suspect someone will notice a chimp singing to it's young one day and that it sounds better than pop 40. Music copyrights and radio have only been around for 150 years or so. Government regulation of airwaves and music publication created the cartels in those 150 years. Many people have made money off the scheme, but the technology has been obsolete and the regulations overbearing for decades. Laws which keep Girl Scouts from singing around the fireplace are clearly out of line. Laws have gone from reasonable promotion of artistic work and sharing of public resources to blatant anti-competition tools, which thwart basic human desires. In ten years, we will look back on this madness and wonder how anyone dared keep people from singing to each other or sharing digital files.
Until then, visit places like Magnitune and sample the future.
$4.00 for a canned performance? You must be shitting me.
the kind of dominant player like MS just doesn't happen any more.... Tell that to Google.
Right, the company with a motto of "do no evil," and has earned it's patron's loyalty by excelence wants to act like Microsoft which has to use dirty tricks to keep customers. I'll believe that when I see:
Websites that say, "best viewed with Google,"
Dell and others gumming up computers with "Designed for Google" stickers on the case,
Google is dragged into federal court for anticompetitive practices, such as making sure companies that offer computers preloaded with M$ search have to pay more to look at Google.
Google calls my ISP and tells them to block port 25 because Google flaws result in massive spam crapfloods from residential computers and because alternate software provides mail service easily thereby reducing Google's competitive advantage.
Google manages to suppres a superior technology like firewire.
Google tells representatives to lie to School teachers about who they are.
Google creates the Web Software Alliance. The new Alliance establishes fink lines for disgruntled employees to snitch on employers about illegal searches and shakes major public schools systems down in court.
Google calls M$ Search an "unamerican" "cancer".
Google hires people to polute blog, BBS and other web space with pro M$ spam.
Google hires PR firms to spam lawmakers.
Google creates the M$ Search "switcher" from stock model photographs and a poorly written essay.
and on and on and on and on.
Linus Torvalds is only half right. Nothing can replace Microsoft but nothing should. The sooner they lose their ability to coerce [aka "dominance"] the better off we all are.
So, it's Slashdot's fault that the LA Times can't run an interactive editorial? The same Slashdot that has 800,000 users engaged in interactive editorials all day long via Slashcode, software anyone can copy and use? Brilliant.
Why not put the blame on the tools trolls use and their root cause? Botnets are the real tech savy tool used to crapflood and vandalize content. Without Microsoft operating systems open for all manner of abuse, there would be no botnet and the net would be a much quieter place. A Wikitorial might even work in a world like that, despite it being the wrong tool.
Old media is not stupid, it's malicious. More reason to not go through loops and hoops to read the NYT and LA Times.
What's the benefit of being able to edit someone else's opinion?
None, and it's a form of negligence depending on how they deploy it.
The whole point of an editorial page is that the newspaper filters interesting or informed opinion. If the newpaper is overwhelmed by the volume of input, they should try something like the Slashcode and let the public decide which opinions are best. Ultimately, the public does just this with the opinions they are presented with. Reporters for the paper and their editors, however, are supposed to have a good enough grasp on the world to be able to select which opinions are worth publishing.
Wiki is a great tool but it's not the tool for this job.
Actually, I'd blame Dan Lyons for inventing "linux for losers," because he titled his article that way. Only a Microturd could even think that way.
The whole article is flamebait by a known shill. You might also note he describes BSD as "a rival OS," and tries to build up as much animosity as possible. Linux and BSD are both free software and the whole notion of "rivalry" makes no sense. I'd suggest that no one ever talk to the loser again. It's like being interviewed by SCO, you can't win.
What a hack job. I'm sure Dan Lyons, who has a long history of Linux hatred, pumped Theo and then took everything out of context. It's possible he made most of the quotes up, as Microsoft lovers will. Still, people read Forbes, so I'll respond to what's published.
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
The bottom line is that it works better than commercial software. Anyone can look at the source code and see the comments, which are blunt about what needs fixing and how crappy the hardware is. Even commercial Linux rocks next to popular alternatives. For ease of installation, use, relative protection from mal and spyware, you can't beat a distribution like Mepis. Winners can step up to pure Debian, "losers" can fall all the way down to Caldera Open Linux and still do better than what 90% of the world uses.
There's also a difference in motivation. "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says. The irony, however, is that while noisy Linux fanatics make a great deal out of their hatred for Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), De Raadt says their beloved program is starting to look a lot like what Microsoft puts out. "They have the same rapid development cycle, which leads to crap," he says.
That's what Micrososoft would have everyone believe, and so Microsoft is worth hating. People use Linux for freedom and the superior performance it brings. Study after study show this. Why people like Dan Lyons don't get it is beyond me, except that he might be a Fanboy.
Dan Lyons, you are a shill. I dare you to make the entire tapes of your interview with Theo available. Anything less is second hand BS and the kind of thing the web makes obsolete.
Spyware is found in Bit Torrent. Microsoft Releases competitor to Bit Torrent. It only took them a couple of hours!
Yeah, it's worth looking back at the proclamation of bittorrent as the source of all evil that ails M$ platforms:
"This is the marketing campaign to end all marketing campaigns," said Boyd, the Microsoft Security MVP (most valuable professional) known throughout the security industry by the "Paperghost" moniker.
How fitting! He might as well have been called "barkto". There's more vapor flying out of M$'s ass now than ever.
Will it block access to MP3 files and a big list of other file-types/filename-extensions? Like MSN Messenger 7 does?
Of course it will.
It will also keep other programs from running. It will be a trusted program, like WMA is a "trusted" format. How else will something so suck crush something so much better?
My question is where does this Reg author buy his crack? You have to smoke some really good stuff to believe the "facts" about this vaporware. Let me quote and disassemble the nonsensical notion that a program that uses more cpu and transmits more bits is somehow faster than one that does not:
Microsoft Research's approach gets around this [a missing last piece problem I've never seen getting a torrent] by re-encoding all the pieces, so that each one that is shared is actually a linear combination of all the pieces, fed into a particular function.
So it will require active CPU processing for the error correction every byte transmitted where bit torrent does not, but maxes out my download speed anyway. Brilliant! But wait, there's more:
Once you have downloaded a few of these, you can generate new combinations from the ones you have, and send those out to your peers.
I'm doing this error correction on my uploads as well. So what will this take, four times the CPU time as simply sending the files I receive?
This means no one peer can become a bottle neck, since no piece is more important than any other. It also means overall network traffic is lower, since the same information doesn't have to travel back and forth multiple times.
Say what? When has redundant error correction ever produced less size? What's this "multiple travel" problem? When I get six people sending me the same packets, that's six times the likely hood that I get it and this is what makes bittorrent work, no?
Only Microsoft can spin 20 year old error correction concepts, and announce the "best p2p application ever" before they have a working demonstration. I can hardly wait till they put it out. The same dumb asses that verbatim repeated M$ marketing, "XP is stable because it's based on NT which is like, solid," will be clogging the networks trying to share top 40 WMA files bloated to six times their natural size.
Why oh why does anyone pay any attention to what Microsoft promisses?
Microsoft has been known to strongarm companies to carry a certian version of their Windows Operating Systems, with pricing or threats of removing licences...
Microsoft has also been known to make things buggy for anyone who's dumb enough to use their software in a way Microsoft does not want. They have promissed this will happen, and we can imagine they will follow up.
Why would any vendor install the version of M$ OS that M$ has promissed won't work? Their customers won't be happy and that makes the EU all the more correct in it's thought and action.
The EU finding of fact was correct. Their fines were simply a way to make Microsoft pay without violating trade agreements. Hopefully, they will use the money to transition themselves out of Microsoft's clutches.
The number one reason being that I am tired of waiting 30 seconds for Word to load just to spellcheck a blog entry.
Solution: Use any Linux distribution and Konqueror, a file and web browser with built in spell checking. Misspelled words are highlighted in red. Corrections are chosen from a right click pulldown operation. Bonus #1, it will install Open Office for you too and it's faster than it is on M$ junk. Bonus #2, you won't get malware and other crap slowing down your OS in time so you won't have to ever "check" you computer - or reload the OS - again unless you want to.
That was easy. The next problem will probably have the same answer.
It was a tough choice, but I doubt Apple moved to Intel for cheaper chips...
Kay, "expert" quoted, speculates:
[Apple] might actually pay more (than it would with IBM) for the processor, but Intel's total platform... is less expensive.
Reality is? Who knows. I speculate Intel will cut Apple's throat.
They probably see that IBMs fabs will probably be under pressure to crank out chips for the XBox and Playstation.
I'm glad that IBM will have some business left, though Xbox is not a very good bet. Perhaps IBM will create a new PC based on Linux and finish off their Microsoft mistake once and for all. At that point I'll be happy someone is buying Intel so they don't go under.
KOrgainzer it the calendar for the Kontact PIM. It is a very good calendar on it's own and it's ability for access from ftp or sftp and html export make it easy to share. For the whole nine yards of Personal Information Management, however, you need all of Kontact and device sync.
The Kontact suite on KDesktop is what's really killer. Sure, it will remind you to do things, but it also delivers on promises that Outlook never kept by actually working together and with devices. The address book has everything Outlook does and LDAP lookup and cryptography and a few other useful things. The mail client is very fast and has two or three forms of file format, none of which is a stupid monolithic database that breaks when it gets too big. The on the fly spell check works without being obtrusive and overbearing. Just right click to get chose the right spelling. Filtering by recipient, sender or list is as easy as right clicking too. The Kontact container brings it all together, where you can check out your RSS feeds, see your most important inboxes mail, who's having a birthday or anniversary, what's next in your todos and what's next in your appointments.
Syncing all of that between several computers is not too difficult, but Kpilot is easier. Kpilot syncs well with palm. It stuffs most of the information it can into the device. I use a visor and the USB cradle works using the visor kernel module. I've been using unstable, so there have been a few hickups, which mostly result in duplicate entries, but I've never lost data. Someone using Sarge and nothing but Sarge would be very happy with Kontact.
I've been told by many that Outlook was so buggy and so prone to spy/mal ware attack that the majority of people have turned their backs on PIMs in general. That's too bad. The KDE people have what they wanted and it works now with equipment they already own.
This page covered by Slashdot on May 28th, has screen shots of Outlook, KDE and Evolution that do a nice job of showing how everything stacks up to Outlook. What it does not show are all the cool extras you get with KDE and how well it works. For that, you need to run it yourself. Spam filtering can be a little slow, but that's as easy to turn on and off as running a wizard and apt-get installing one of four packages.
You may laugh, but to me it's absolutely incredible that a foreign Government has been forced to pay a private company for alleged copyright violation and promise to be a good consumer in the future. How the hell did they prove that 50,000 figure? What were they going to do if Indonesia decided to give Microsoft the finger for each alleged copy violation? Someone got bribed and this is a mindless PR stunt by a country that should be using free software in the first place.
Free software has these advantages for Indonesia:
Much better performance. Why waste government money of software that turns new computers to garbage when you can have software that tuns garbage into new computers?
Better language support from Gnome and KDE and most major distributions.
Ability to add said language support to any program at any time. (Freedom to modify)
Freedom to make as many copies as desired. (Freedom to share)
Auditability to insure you own your computers not Microsoft or some random hacker. (Freedom to study)
And of course, Freedom to use for any purpose.
It's the lack of freedoms which has gained them the $50,000 fee, which could have paid five good salaries for a year. Why they would PAY MORE TO HAVE LESS is a mystery. The future cost of supplying their workers with Winblows will be much more if the officials who agreed to this humiliation stay bought.
If you have the presentation separately then it is much easier to for instance standardize a look a feel within a company.
It's Microsoft, don't expect to be able to do anything outside of their tools. Others have pointed to the ongoing use of DRM to tie the format to their "Servers". I further imagine they will have some oddball and patented method to "zip" the file and will promote copyrighted fonts. Despite being called "open" it's all the usual nightmare that makes it so a Word DOC looks different as soon as you move it to another computer. In short, no change should be anticipated. Your work goes in and it won't come out the way you thought it would.
Microsoft will never be the best way to standardize the look and feel of your company's information. Word has never worked with Word and it won't now. Real open standard's, such as Adobe's PDF, work much better and always will.
One of the reasons Microsoft is making such inroads into the server market is that they've really improved their operating system.
True, Microsoft has improved their operations. They are now charging more than ever for less than ever. This guy's got the numbers
If this really represents an increase in the number of unit's shipped and a greater reliance on M$ by big dumb companies, big dumb companies are doomed and we will all get to pay for it.
The struggle isn't just about running the cooler OS, or using the command line vs. a GUI. It's about freedom and choice.
The real struggle is convincing the PHB that M$ has not cleaned up and should be replaced as fast as possible. In business, it's a matter of survival. Companies hamstrung with servers that lose information, export it to the competition and generally don't do what they are supposed to are not going to make it.
It is cheap to poke your security knife at microsoft.
Words of pisdom for sure. No mention of Microsoft was made in the article I read, but you and I both know that was what caused the problem. Just the same, I feel all dirty and cheap when I make fun of a $30,000,000,000 company that can't get it's act together but has such good intentions for everyone else's money.
As you probably know, Linux has its own security issues... [and more bullshit about how hard Linux security is].
Find me a free software mail client that you can 0wn the way Outlook (also not mentioned) was 0wned. As you saw, there's a market for such skill, worth about $4,000 per infection. You'll either make up pictures and documents to send to the dumb-ass who hires you, or you will go hungry. Oh dear, so much experience and so little learned.
Just think this time next year we will be griping about things like 'hijacked tabs' and such.
Your Windoze using friends might, if you are lucky. Right now, tabs in IE are add-ons and vapor. I'm afraid they will still be concerned with regular popups they can't turn off, as will regular spammers, even if old Bill comes through with this years old feature of other browsers.
In the free world, I've already seen tabs that can steal focus. They won't open unless I tell them too, but they do manage to override my open in background preference. Sites that do that get fewer views from me as a result. It's annoying, but not near as bad as being rooted.
... will IE's incorporation of common features lead to bugs (or flaws) being found in other browsers[?]
No it won't. First, Microsoft sucks. Second, free Browsers don't suck. Third, the same problem has yet to emerge for "normal" popups.
Microsoft is nice enough to leave annoying pop up behavior on for the victim. You might recall the article summary:
We are working on balancing the default behavior for whether a window opened from script opens as in a new frame or a tab. Currently, windows that have been customized, such as hiding a toolbar or making the window non-resizable, will default to opening in their own standalone frame, whereas ordinary pop-up windows will open in a new foreground tab. CTRL-clicking and middle-clicking links will open those links in a background tab.
Why would anyone bother to subvert tabs when they can insert a dozen controlless, blinking adverts before the user of this mindlessly trusting browser?
Free browsers are not as trusting. Konqueror has a check box that turns off scripts by default and a white list of sites that you can selectively trust. I've got about two or three sites on my whitelist. Mozilla is similarly non trusting. Pushing buttons, of course, will make things happen but only as a non privileged user so one user's mistake will not compromise other users or the system itself. This will protect most users but diversity will protect the rest even if everyone used free browsers. It will take individual hacks to overcome Mozilla and Konqueror and what works on one probably won't work on the other. Being able to lie about your user agent or use other tabbed browsers, such as Galleon, or Dillo eliminates the need to worry about anything M$ doing to their victims.
Finally, abuse of Microsoft junk has yet to bother free browser users. The widespread, but declining, use of IE has yet to create annoying popups for free software users. If anyone does manage to abuse free browsers, you can be sure they will all be fixed in a day or so.
I'm mad as hell and i'm not going to RTFA anymore.
No problem, the guy is not the best writer. Here's a usefull summary.
After 22 years in computer security and 7 advising normal users, "ma, pa and the corporate clueless," on Windows, Winn Schwartau has decided that Windows does not work. He was unable to secure it himself and realized that his clients are less able than himself. Because his Windows experience is so bad, he's unfairly blamed PC hardware and decided to leave all of it behind for the Mac world. The Mac world has been more pleasant than he, as a Windows user, could have imagined and he's started a blog to tell everyone about it. He admits to being "obstinate" and "a PC bigot" and that this contributed to his long suffering under Windoze.
While I'm glad the scales have fallen out of his eyes, it would be nice if he had given free software a chance to do something useful with his hardware. It is too bad that he did not pick up and try something like Knoppix or Mepis and realize there was nothing wrong with his BIOS, memory, motherboard or even the complexity he blames along with Microsoft for poor security. Still, it's not too late. He could easily set up his old computers for file storage and other useful services. It's good to hear yet another person escaping the Microsoft Mindwash.
Welcome back to reality, Mr. Schwartau. The recovery process takes a surprisingly long time. Fits of anger and other well earned emotional release up may occur at inappropriate times. You may even have nightmares years later. Things you have said and done under the influence my come back to haunt you. It's OK, we understand. There's no need to overcompensate now. In time, you will realize that the people who misslead and lied to you are also working hard to make avoiding their "products" impossible. This too will make you very angry, but you won't need to be. Evil things are best combated with the clear vision of a level head.
One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?
Gee, let's rephrase that to something closer to the truth:
One problem with boxed software is that you're giving the customer crap. How else are you going to sell them another box?
People are always going to need training, they will not always need a new program when they have one that works. The whole idea of copy protection and treating bits like paper is stupid. As a former customer of Winblows software, I'm really pissed that I could not just add on to the software I used to own but was forced to buy new coppies to get the same functionality without improvement. It did not work for me and it really does not work for anyone but people who are greedy. That's why free software works and boxed software vendors are going out of business.
"The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you?"
How am I going to make a living? That's the big question all of us has to answer every day. You have to provide something of value. If other people can do what you do and give it away, you had better have something else up your sleeves. Sitting around flaming people who are doing well with other models won't help.
Oh man, what wishful thinking: Nothing here but a missquote. Ha, ha, ha, nice little dream.
Big story: Two big Wintel people are fed up with M$ shit. Mossberg, a big Wintel fan, got Otellini to whine about his daughter's infested Wintel box that eats all of his weekend time. That Mossberg would even go there means the M$ world is screwed. That Otellini would say anything approaching don't buy a Wintel box means the M$ world is screwed. Those of us outside the M$ world have a tendency to forget how bad it is. Unfortunately, Windoze is so common that it's hard to avoid but so screwed up that the rare use always sucks and what you hear is always bad. Face it, what you are hearing is people who loved M$ who now hate it because it simply blows.
I know for a fact I rarely use anti-spyware software on my Windows machine now because I haven't had problems. *shrug*
If you don't have problems on a Windoze machine, it's because one of the following apply:
It has no network drivers and sits behind a non Microsoft firewall that blocks all ports.
It's not turned on.
Being part of a botnet is not a problem for you, nor the inevitable BSoD and virus crap out.
Your Windows machine is a Win4Lin partition you can wipe and reload with a shell script daily.
If people didn't click on random links in spam and download the latest new files without thinking, we'd have far less spyware.
Ah yes, blame the user. While technically true, what you say has some obvious holes. Like, I'm not afraid to run Windoze Media Files from ANY SITE because Xine does not run the executable crap-ola. I'm not really afraid to visit sites with Konqueror, though really nasty thing should only be touched with Dillo. I don't follow links in my email and neither does any free mail client. Outlook does not follow random links and load untrusted content either, it follows EVERY link and will burn you behind the best of firewalls. Nice differences, eh?
Like the Italians say, you've got horns. Your computer has a ton of nasties and you are the only person who can't see it.
Moreover, an attacker not connected with the companies would not have known to create a hit list for a relatively uncommon flaw that could be exploited through UDP,
You say:
Whoever wrote the worm had to know in advance about the military base and others in the hitlist.
I'm not sure about either. How rare is an exploit that grew to 12,000 hosts in 75 hours? How much inside knowledge do you have to have to know what services any military base is running? Don't they all run the same stuff? Can't you get the IPs from a ping? Couldn't anyone do the same thing for any number of big dumb organizations or companies? As everyone concludes, there's no real proof here.
Slashdot Mirror
Blah, blah, blah, very wise. How about this:
Using a Windows on the internet is like being naked in a hailstorm.
or
Using Windows on a network is like visiting a whore house without a condom but can be more expensive.
I call BS on the survey and say it's a "we've already won" normalization propaganda campain. Telling "consumers" to shut up and be happy without the right to sample, share or even keep their music is what this is all about. The FUD and active warefare against file sharers will continue, but all of it is doomed to fail.
The whole DRM thing is going to backfire soon. People are not really going to be happy with these services when their devices start to fail. It's then they realize they have lost hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of music they thought they owned but were in fact renting. They will envious of people who took the time to translate the music they had to free formats on free systems. None of the FUD is true for music and media on these systems which lack both complicated, error proned DRM schemes and easy targets for the actively waged anti file scorched earth warfare. I've got my music, it's backed up, I can easily move it and I can play it on as many devices as I want. Apple may take care of people with ITunes but "Works for Sure" music boxes are sure to crap out and leave their users flat.
More importantly, there's still competition out there for the big three music publishers. Musicians don't like being screwed and know that's what they get from the cartels. The music industry killed mp3.com, but there are many other to take their place that will offer musicians and fans a much better deal. With Lessing creating an unambiguous legal framework, we can expect these services to be unassailable.
The concentration of power enjoyed by music publishers was a freak of history and will soon go away. People have been singing and dancing for each other throughout human history. I suspect someone will notice a chimp singing to it's young one day and that it sounds better than pop 40. Music copyrights and radio have only been around for 150 years or so. Government regulation of airwaves and music publication created the cartels in those 150 years. Many people have made money off the scheme, but the technology has been obsolete and the regulations overbearing for decades. Laws which keep Girl Scouts from singing around the fireplace are clearly out of line. Laws have gone from reasonable promotion of artistic work and sharing of public resources to blatant anti-competition tools, which thwart basic human desires. In ten years, we will look back on this madness and wonder how anyone dared keep people from singing to each other or sharing digital files.
Until then, visit places like Magnitune and sample the future.
$4.00 for a canned performance? You must be shitting me.
Right, the company with a motto of "do no evil," and has earned it's patron's loyalty by excelence wants to act like Microsoft which has to use dirty tricks to keep customers. I'll believe that when I see:
Linus Torvalds is only half right. Nothing can replace Microsoft but nothing should. The sooner they lose their ability to coerce [aka "dominance"] the better off we all are.
Why not put the blame on the tools trolls use and their root cause? Botnets are the real tech savy tool used to crapflood and vandalize content. Without Microsoft operating systems open for all manner of abuse, there would be no botnet and the net would be a much quieter place. A Wikitorial might even work in a world like that, despite it being the wrong tool.
Old media is not stupid, it's malicious. More reason to not go through loops and hoops to read the NYT and LA Times.
None, and it's a form of negligence depending on how they deploy it.
The whole point of an editorial page is that the newspaper filters interesting or informed opinion. If the newpaper is overwhelmed by the volume of input, they should try something like the Slashcode and let the public decide which opinions are best. Ultimately, the public does just this with the opinions they are presented with. Reporters for the paper and their editors, however, are supposed to have a good enough grasp on the world to be able to select which opinions are worth publishing.
Wiki is a great tool but it's not the tool for this job.
Debian has a magical solution to this problem: they don't distribute Macromedia Flash.
What? Not enough games for you? Go download the quake deb or any of the other dozens of great game packages.
Actually, I'd blame Dan Lyons for inventing "linux for losers," because he titled his article that way. Only a Microturd could even think that way.
The whole article is flamebait by a known shill. You might also note he describes BSD as "a rival OS," and tries to build up as much animosity as possible. Linux and BSD are both free software and the whole notion of "rivalry" makes no sense. I'd suggest that no one ever talk to the loser again. It's like being interviewed by SCO, you can't win.
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
The bottom line is that it works better than commercial software. Anyone can look at the source code and see the comments, which are blunt about what needs fixing and how crappy the hardware is. Even commercial Linux rocks next to popular alternatives. For ease of installation, use, relative protection from mal and spyware, you can't beat a distribution like Mepis. Winners can step up to pure Debian, "losers" can fall all the way down to Caldera Open Linux and still do better than what 90% of the world uses.
There's also a difference in motivation. "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says. The irony, however, is that while noisy Linux fanatics make a great deal out of their hatred for Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), De Raadt says their beloved program is starting to look a lot like what Microsoft puts out. "They have the same rapid development cycle, which leads to crap," he says.
That's what Micrososoft would have everyone believe, and so Microsoft is worth hating. People use Linux for freedom and the superior performance it brings. Study after study show this. Why people like Dan Lyons don't get it is beyond me, except that he might be a Fanboy.
Let's look back at other nasty junk he's written:
Dan Lyons, you are a shill. I dare you to make the entire tapes of your interview with Theo available. Anything less is second hand BS and the kind of thing the web makes obsolete.
Yeah, it's worth looking back at the proclamation of bittorrent as the source of all evil that ails M$ platforms:
"This is the marketing campaign to end all marketing campaigns," said Boyd, the Microsoft Security MVP (most valuable professional) known throughout the security industry by the "Paperghost" moniker.
How fitting! He might as well have been called "barkto". There's more vapor flying out of M$'s ass now than ever.
Of course it will.
It will also keep other programs from running. It will be a trusted program, like WMA is a "trusted" format. How else will something so suck crush something so much better?
My question is where does this Reg author buy his crack? You have to smoke some really good stuff to believe the "facts" about this vaporware. Let me quote and disassemble the nonsensical notion that a program that uses more cpu and transmits more bits is somehow faster than one that does not:
Microsoft Research's approach gets around this [a missing last piece problem I've never seen getting a torrent] by re-encoding all the pieces, so that each one that is shared is actually a linear combination of all the pieces, fed into a particular function.
So it will require active CPU processing for the error correction every byte transmitted where bit torrent does not, but maxes out my download speed anyway. Brilliant! But wait, there's more:
Once you have downloaded a few of these, you can generate new combinations from the ones you have, and send those out to your peers.
I'm doing this error correction on my uploads as well. So what will this take, four times the CPU time as simply sending the files I receive?
This means no one peer can become a bottle neck, since no piece is more important than any other. It also means overall network traffic is lower, since the same information doesn't have to travel back and forth multiple times.
Say what? When has redundant error correction ever produced less size? What's this "multiple travel" problem? When I get six people sending me the same packets, that's six times the likely hood that I get it and this is what makes bittorrent work, no?
Only Microsoft can spin 20 year old error correction concepts, and announce the "best p2p application ever" before they have a working demonstration. I can hardly wait till they put it out. The same dumb asses that verbatim repeated M$ marketing, "XP is stable because it's based on NT which is like, solid," will be clogging the networks trying to share top 40 WMA files bloated to six times their natural size.
Why oh why does anyone pay any attention to what Microsoft promisses?
Microsoft has also been known to make things buggy for anyone who's dumb enough to use their software in a way Microsoft does not want. They have promissed this will happen, and we can imagine they will follow up.
Why would any vendor install the version of M$ OS that M$ has promissed won't work? Their customers won't be happy and that makes the EU all the more correct in it's thought and action.
The EU finding of fact was correct. Their fines were simply a way to make Microsoft pay without violating trade agreements. Hopefully, they will use the money to transition themselves out of Microsoft's clutches.
The number one reason being that I am tired of waiting 30 seconds for Word to load just to spellcheck a blog entry.
Solution: Use any Linux distribution and Konqueror, a file and web browser with built in spell checking. Misspelled words are highlighted in red. Corrections are chosen from a right click pulldown operation. Bonus #1, it will install Open Office for you too and it's faster than it is on M$ junk. Bonus #2, you won't get malware and other crap slowing down your OS in time so you won't have to ever "check" you computer - or reload the OS - again unless you want to.
That was easy. The next problem will probably have the same answer.
It was a tough choice, but I doubt Apple moved to Intel for cheaper chips ...
Kay, "expert" quoted, speculates:
[Apple] might actually pay more (than it would with IBM) for the processor, but Intel's total platform ... is less expensive.
Reality is? Who knows. I speculate Intel will cut Apple's throat.
They probably see that IBMs fabs will probably be under pressure to crank out chips for the XBox and Playstation.
I'm glad that IBM will have some business left, though Xbox is not a very good bet. Perhaps IBM will create a new PC based on Linux and finish off their Microsoft mistake once and for all. At that point I'll be happy someone is buying Intel so they don't go under.
The Kontact suite on KDesktop is what's really killer. Sure, it will remind you to do things, but it also delivers on promises that Outlook never kept by actually working together and with devices. The address book has everything Outlook does and LDAP lookup and cryptography and a few other useful things. The mail client is very fast and has two or three forms of file format, none of which is a stupid monolithic database that breaks when it gets too big. The on the fly spell check works without being obtrusive and overbearing. Just right click to get chose the right spelling. Filtering by recipient, sender or list is as easy as right clicking too. The Kontact container brings it all together, where you can check out your RSS feeds, see your most important inboxes mail, who's having a birthday or anniversary, what's next in your todos and what's next in your appointments.
Syncing all of that between several computers is not too difficult, but Kpilot is easier. Kpilot syncs well with palm. It stuffs most of the information it can into the device. I use a visor and the USB cradle works using the visor kernel module. I've been using unstable, so there have been a few hickups, which mostly result in duplicate entries, but I've never lost data. Someone using Sarge and nothing but Sarge would be very happy with Kontact.
I've been told by many that Outlook was so buggy and so prone to spy/mal ware attack that the majority of people have turned their backs on PIMs in general. That's too bad. The KDE people have what they wanted and it works now with equipment they already own.
This page covered by Slashdot on May 28th, has screen shots of Outlook, KDE and Evolution that do a nice job of showing how everything stacks up to Outlook. What it does not show are all the cool extras you get with KDE and how well it works. For that, you need to run it yourself. Spam filtering can be a little slow, but that's as easy to turn on and off as running a wizard and apt-get installing one of four packages.
Free software has these advantages for Indonesia:
It's the lack of freedoms which has gained them the $50,000 fee, which could have paid five good salaries for a year. Why they would PAY MORE TO HAVE LESS is a mystery. The future cost of supplying their workers with Winblows will be much more if the officials who agreed to this humiliation stay bought.
It's Microsoft, don't expect to be able to do anything outside of their tools. Others have pointed to the ongoing use of DRM to tie the format to their "Servers". I further imagine they will have some oddball and patented method to "zip" the file and will promote copyrighted fonts. Despite being called "open" it's all the usual nightmare that makes it so a Word DOC looks different as soon as you move it to another computer. In short, no change should be anticipated. Your work goes in and it won't come out the way you thought it would.
Microsoft will never be the best way to standardize the look and feel of your company's information. Word has never worked with Word and it won't now. Real open standard's, such as Adobe's PDF, work much better and always will.
True, Microsoft has improved their operations. They are now charging more than ever for less than ever. This guy's got the numbers
If this really represents an increase in the number of unit's shipped and a greater reliance on M$ by big dumb companies, big dumb companies are doomed and we will all get to pay for it.
The struggle isn't just about running the cooler OS, or using the command line vs. a GUI. It's about freedom and choice.
The real struggle is convincing the PHB that M$ has not cleaned up and should be replaced as fast as possible. In business, it's a matter of survival. Companies hamstrung with servers that lose information, export it to the competition and generally don't do what they are supposed to are not going to make it.
Words of pisdom for sure. No mention of Microsoft was made in the article I read, but you and I both know that was what caused the problem. Just the same, I feel all dirty and cheap when I make fun of a $30,000,000,000 company that can't get it's act together but has such good intentions for everyone else's money.
As you probably know, Linux has its own security issues ... [and more bullshit about how hard Linux security is].
Find me a free software mail client that you can 0wn the way Outlook (also not mentioned) was 0wned. As you saw, there's a market for such skill, worth about $4,000 per infection. You'll either make up pictures and documents to send to the dumb-ass who hires you, or you will go hungry. Oh dear, so much experience and so little learned.
Your Windoze using friends might, if you are lucky. Right now, tabs in IE are add-ons and vapor. I'm afraid they will still be concerned with regular popups they can't turn off, as will regular spammers, even if old Bill comes through with this years old feature of other browsers.
In the free world, I've already seen tabs that can steal focus. They won't open unless I tell them too, but they do manage to override my open in background preference. Sites that do that get fewer views from me as a result. It's annoying, but not near as bad as being rooted.
No it won't. First, Microsoft sucks. Second, free Browsers don't suck. Third, the same problem has yet to emerge for "normal" popups.
Microsoft is nice enough to leave annoying pop up behavior on for the victim. You might recall the article summary:
We are working on balancing the default behavior for whether a window opened from script opens as in a new frame or a tab. Currently, windows that have been customized, such as hiding a toolbar or making the window non-resizable, will default to opening in their own standalone frame, whereas ordinary pop-up windows will open in a new foreground tab. CTRL-clicking and middle-clicking links will open those links in a background tab.
Why would anyone bother to subvert tabs when they can insert a dozen controlless, blinking adverts before the user of this mindlessly trusting browser?
Free browsers are not as trusting. Konqueror has a check box that turns off scripts by default and a white list of sites that you can selectively trust. I've got about two or three sites on my whitelist. Mozilla is similarly non trusting. Pushing buttons, of course, will make things happen but only as a non privileged user so one user's mistake will not compromise other users or the system itself. This will protect most users but diversity will protect the rest even if everyone used free browsers. It will take individual hacks to overcome Mozilla and Konqueror and what works on one probably won't work on the other. Being able to lie about your user agent or use other tabbed browsers, such as Galleon, or Dillo eliminates the need to worry about anything M$ doing to their victims.
Finally, abuse of Microsoft junk has yet to bother free browser users. The widespread, but declining, use of IE has yet to create annoying popups for free software users. If anyone does manage to abuse free browsers, you can be sure they will all be fixed in a day or so.
No problem, the guy is not the best writer. Here's a usefull summary.
After 22 years in computer security and 7 advising normal users, "ma, pa and the corporate clueless," on Windows, Winn Schwartau has decided that Windows does not work. He was unable to secure it himself and realized that his clients are less able than himself. Because his Windows experience is so bad, he's unfairly blamed PC hardware and decided to leave all of it behind for the Mac world. The Mac world has been more pleasant than he, as a Windows user, could have imagined and he's started a blog to tell everyone about it. He admits to being "obstinate" and "a PC bigot" and that this contributed to his long suffering under Windoze.
While I'm glad the scales have fallen out of his eyes, it would be nice if he had given free software a chance to do something useful with his hardware. It is too bad that he did not pick up and try something like Knoppix or Mepis and realize there was nothing wrong with his BIOS, memory, motherboard or even the complexity he blames along with Microsoft for poor security. Still, it's not too late. He could easily set up his old computers for file storage and other useful services. It's good to hear yet another person escaping the Microsoft Mindwash.
Welcome back to reality, Mr. Schwartau. The recovery process takes a surprisingly long time. Fits of anger and other well earned emotional release up may occur at inappropriate times. You may even have nightmares years later. Things you have said and done under the influence my come back to haunt you. It's OK, we understand. There's no need to overcompensate now. In time, you will realize that the people who misslead and lied to you are also working hard to make avoiding their "products" impossible. This too will make you very angry, but you won't need to be. Evil things are best combated with the clear vision of a level head.
Gee, let's rephrase that to something closer to the truth:
One problem with boxed software is that you're giving the customer crap. How else are you going to sell them another box?
People are always going to need training, they will not always need a new program when they have one that works. The whole idea of copy protection and treating bits like paper is stupid. As a former customer of Winblows software, I'm really pissed that I could not just add on to the software I used to own but was forced to buy new coppies to get the same functionality without improvement. It did not work for me and it really does not work for anyone but people who are greedy. That's why free software works and boxed software vendors are going out of business.
"The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you?"
How am I going to make a living? That's the big question all of us has to answer every day. You have to provide something of value. If other people can do what you do and give it away, you had better have something else up your sleeves. Sitting around flaming people who are doing well with other models won't help.
Big story: Two big Wintel people are fed up with M$ shit. Mossberg, a big Wintel fan, got Otellini to whine about his daughter's infested Wintel box that eats all of his weekend time. That Mossberg would even go there means the M$ world is screwed. That Otellini would say anything approaching don't buy a Wintel box means the M$ world is screwed. Those of us outside the M$ world have a tendency to forget how bad it is. Unfortunately, Windoze is so common that it's hard to avoid but so screwed up that the rare use always sucks and what you hear is always bad. Face it, what you are hearing is people who loved M$ who now hate it because it simply blows.
If you don't have problems on a Windoze machine, it's because one of the following apply:
If people didn't click on random links in spam and download the latest new files without thinking, we'd have far less spyware.
Ah yes, blame the user. While technically true, what you say has some obvious holes. Like, I'm not afraid to run Windoze Media Files from ANY SITE because Xine does not run the executable crap-ola. I'm not really afraid to visit sites with Konqueror, though really nasty thing should only be touched with Dillo. I don't follow links in my email and neither does any free mail client. Outlook does not follow random links and load untrusted content either, it follows EVERY link and will burn you behind the best of firewalls. Nice differences, eh?
Like the Italians say, you've got horns. Your computer has a ton of nasties and you are the only person who can't see it.
Moreover, an attacker not connected with the companies would not have known to create a hit list for a relatively uncommon flaw that could be exploited through UDP,
You say:
Whoever wrote the worm had to know in advance about the military base and others in the hitlist.
I'm not sure about either. How rare is an exploit that grew to 12,000 hosts in 75 hours? How much inside knowledge do you have to have to know what services any military base is running? Don't they all run the same stuff? Can't you get the IPs from a ping? Couldn't anyone do the same thing for any number of big dumb organizations or companies? As everyone concludes, there's no real proof here.