If anyone's mislead, it's because Microsoft makes no sense. If you follow a few link through this page you arive at a PC Pro Article where M$'s confirmation is quoted:
Roz Ho, the general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, has confirmed that no future versions of Internet Explorer will be released for the Mac.
Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she explained.
Total Irony and Wimp. If access to the underlying code was all M$ cared about, they would have all of their software ported (non-free of course) to Linux and BSD. Mac OSX is as close as they would come, but because OSX is controled by Apple, M$ has to bow out. They are paranoid of the dirty tricks they play on others and can't stand to work with anything but their own garbage. People said that M$ was only working with Apple for the anti-trust trials. Now they seek to eliminate them.
I say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha!" M$ has as much a chance to eliminate Apple as they do to eliminate free software. People like it, use it and will pay for the services. It's more likely that people will continue to abandon the M$ rape. It was obvious to me that KDE had a better browser and interface and word processor and... anyway.
A "windoze only" policy written in 2000 was pure politics and one built on lazyness. Any admin not learning about free software by then was incompetent and just plain lazy. Anyone who's seen License 6, the XP EULA and the W2K EULA who still thinks a Windoze only environment is a good idea is demented. Use the best tool for the job, this other stuff is bullshit.
As for the support these machines will need, they only have to shoot a few windows boxes to make time for all the Macs. Nothing but nothing takes as much administration time as Windows. Macs take much less time, unless you insist on putting M$ Word on the poor thing. Turning down $43,000 in free hardware because you don't want to learn how to click and drool the Mac way instead of the M$ way is as pure lazy as a janitor who refuses to unlock the school bathrooms because he only has time to sweep floors. It may be true, but one thing is more important than the other.
These computers might be the best tool for the job as the grant was written? It might not be possible in the limited and cramped world Microsoft makes.
you must have missed this story:
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 4, Informative
Sun still has this magical "it's a sun, so it must be expandable, performant and reliable" thing floating around it.
No, it's a Sun and has much better hardware. The Intel world is catching up, but Sun's piece parts were designed better to begin with. There is an economy of scale that still fits well for medium sized companies.
Anyone know how to do the JRE on Debian? Their GUI installer would copy a bunch of files but it refused to see them. I ended up just pushing the "no java installed" button.
The article misses a few things as well.
on
Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sun is a victim of Microsoft and Baby Bells. It's unfair to blame Sun for much of the mess they are in. It would be stupid to write off such a good quality equipment maker.
The Baby Bells used their last mile monopoly to kill the "dot com" folks. The bandwith demands have grown, but not like they could have and they are concentrated in far fewer hands. This has made a glut of Sun equipment. A friend of mine bought and ultra spark, which once sold for $10,000, for less than the price of a high end home computer. There's no way he would have gotten his hands on a deal like that if a healthy and free internet market was working. Bad laws, such as those preventing me from buying California wine, and preventing me from running servers on my cable modem, have also played a part. Established interests are shining triumphant and we all suffer for it.
Microsoft has also harmed Sun's traditional scientific computing business. Microsoft has done much to blow up X compatibility and make communications with Unix difficult. One of the responses has been to move some of the calculations to M$/Intel platforms. This obviously does not work for all calcs, but consider the losses from 3D CAD and a perpetuation of the M$ as a client model. Linux can be a great aid there, so long as scientists and engineers revolt against the M$ Office lockin. They have only to realize that the pain is comming from one location and move on. Most have, but many are loath to move on yet. The support infrasturcture for free software is still growing.
In the end, Sun has much to offer. Their hardeare is first rate and they can embrace free software at any time.
Remeber now, sharing is stealing, never share your password, never try to understand how things work against the will of you masters and be grateful, very greatful all day long. Your letters will be read to eliminate the enemies of the United States. Your location will be known from the devices your carry and all of us will be much safer when we get the house of the future from Microsoft.
Anyone want to join me at the bridge? I'll be smashing my car and throwing my old M$ software into the cold waters. The hope for US software is the hope for all software, freedom. If the software in my cell phone and car were free, I might feel like I owned them.
Oh, they manage. They financial statements show that they spend just over $1.1bn per quarter on R&D.
Those Yahoo expense numbers are devided into two catagories, R+D and adverts. There are no operating or other expenses. No mention is made of aquisitions of property or software. If their research budget contains operating expenses as well as aquisitions as well as the salary of the guy who flies around China picking out the next X-box case, well, it's easy to see how that might all add up to a billion bucks a quarter. It's not, however, the kind or research most of us think of as innovative, creative or useful.
Parasitic is what you would expect from a company that admits it only enters a market when there's a substantial amount of money to be made. They don't really develop anything until the "loss leaders" have drummed up interest in their inventions. They then offer to buy the victim out for $500,000 or to treat them like Netscape by purchasing a competitor for $500,000. In either case, M$ is not going to spend much more than $500,000 to own anything.
It shows in their product line. They are only innovative if you call sticking your label on a cheap DRM'd PC innovative, and inventive if you consider a phone application for your embeded system that someone else made inventive. Really, the only thing Microsoft has invented lately is the "Digital Rights Management Operating System", a simple dongle in BIOS, they obtained an absurd patent on. Name one useful thing Microsoft has made, ever. You can't because they have levered and expoited other people's ideas since Bill Gates dumpster dived someone else's BASIC and then complained when it was "stolen" through unauthorized copy.
You say the article was about, "How to defend yourself when you have already lost, and are for all practical purposes as good as dead." I agree, the artilce is very defeatist. What really bothers me, though, is a missatribution of the cause of defeat.
This piece of balance was less than objective:
Chances are significantly higher that in most organizations a hacker will have a much easier time finding an un-patched Windows or *nix system to exploit than they will an un-patched and/or misconfigured piece of perimeter networking/security equipment.
Why do people equate M$ security and code quality with what is available in the free software world? There are far fewer means to break into a machine running free software than there are ways to break into a M$ box. In fact, there's hardly a Microsoft box out there that's not already owned by Gator or some other perverse spyware. I've never heard of a free software based DDoS attack, and it's not because there are not enough Linux boxes in the world to muster a few hundred if indeed the Linux boxes were as fragile as their M$ counterparts.
The defeatist attitude the article is really dealing with is, "My desktops are insecure and there is nothing I can do about it." It's not true and it's a disservice to perpetuate the attitude. As you note, the cures they offer are worse than the dissease.
In order to open any door, you have to remember your 17-character (mixed case with at least 3 numbers and two symbols) password; for security's sake, of course, the passwords are different for each door.
I prefer pass phrases, with some letter from each word of the sentence being a character in the password. Speech recognition would simplify this, and give something your could tell others to open the door, but I prefer a normal key that can't be deactivated by internet hack.
Instead of lights that come on, you have sparks flying from the bare wires. Insulation will be added in Linux House 0.18.
Hmmm, like users will be a part of the M$ kernel and file system one day. The free software lighting system will be an embeded device that only takes high level commands from voice or an authenticated network connection and as trouble free as my Debian machines are.
Your mail gets read, but it sounds like Don Ho after a couple of pan-galactic gargleblasters. You still have 137 messages about penis enlargers, because the spam filter craps out with some unintelligible error message when you try to turn it on.
I don't have a spam problem now. In the future, I still don't want email read out loud. People who need voice communications with me will be able to get me through an 802.11 decendent community built ad-hoc network and yet another device running embeded free software.
You can get lots of media for free, but all you can get are garage bands. Lots and lots of bad garage bands.
Most of my music collection is ported to ogg. It will play into the future as long as hardware runs free software. I also maintain a piano, which plays in the living room instead of the garage. My wife can play it just loud enough.
Your house still listens to you - it just listens for swear words directed at Supreme Leader Richard Stallman and Adjutant Diety Linus Torvalds.
I don't trust M$ to browse, I'd never ever trust it with running my house. The wired story, with a little imagination, is an awful nightmare.
nstead of traditional locks, there's an electronic kiosk with a touchscreen...
It's blue with a message for you "Explorer has caused an exception fault..." This might be because your taxes or some other bill was late or deemed incorrect.
The lights and heat automatically fine-tune to your preference the moment you cross the threshold.
A cross licensing agreement with your power company insures maximum profits for them rather than comfort for you.
A screen on the wall in the foyer reads your email aloud as you hang your coat.
It's hotmail telling you about penis enlargers over and over again. You have 137 new messages since leaving work.
Run a chicken pot pie beneath the barcode reader on the microwave and it sets the time and temperature. Break out the food processor and some baking material; your home recognizes RFID tags in the bag of flour and offers to help. "How about...
The next sentence is a paid comercial advertisment for food you don't want to buy. What you eat is sold to the highest bidder by Microsoft and they irritate you out loud trying to get you to buy something different. You also had to repeat the word "delete" several times for this while you were hanging your coat and walking to the kitchen before you gave up in disgust and told the computer to "shut up". The computer asked if you were sure.
And digital media is everywhere. "Suspicious Minds" greets you in full-home surround sound. The family's collective music library is accessible from any room, on every device.
True, any "trusted" device will be able to talk to the media server and it will be able to display exactly what M$, RIAA and the MPAA want you to see. Once the hardware lock in is achieved, the eHome experiment will be obsolete. You will only be able to run one version of Word that you pay for by the minute. Options like search and replace costs extra. No material deemed "copyright infringing", including your own media, will work. All your old movies, songs and pictures are now "obsolete" and unnecessary because you can rent anything you want that the media cartels feel it's profitable to make available. It will look very much like cable TV and broadcast radio. Equipment that records music that can be played on such a system will be tightly controled through patenets, copyrights and laws like the DMCA.
Oh yeah, your house will be listening to you. The listening devices can cancel the noises the system creates so that your voices can be recorded loud and clear. Carnivore was just the beginning, though it will still be searching your email, search fees added to your taxes, of course.
If you think Slashdot sucks in all those ways, grab the Slashcode and make your own site to fill up with trolls. It's like people are getting paid to be disruptive. Oh wait, that's the topic. Sorry, my bad.
Please don't project Microsoft's poor practices five years into the development of free software. The development model and motives are different and I expect the results to be different. Based on your precition of Linux chaos in five years, people tell themselves, "Oh, when free software is easy to use, it will be full of holes just like Microsoft." It's not true but it keeps people from enjoying the clear benifits of free software today.
I'm no more ready to eat my words than I am ready or able to go back to M$ crap. Free software is vastly better today and the differences will only become more astonishing in the future.
blah blah blah, more FUD.
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not having the benefit of seeing the code I'll have to assumme these comments are fairly overwhelming evidence wise.
I'll assume nuthing. Given Information Week "evidence", I'm more likely to believe the opposite.
Let's have a look at some other opinions from Information Week's "primary beat reporter for Microsoft coverage", John Foley. Here he tries to see things through Bill Gates eyes, a very silly thing to do when dealing with a liar. He ends up thinking that better things are comming again. Typical, with M$ the best is always yet to come. The rest of Foley's opinions and articles are the kind of no statement made blither only a CIO could love. It's buzzword filled, comercial oriented junk that wastes time and is the primary reason I quit reading Informationweek years ago.
It's not surprising that he would take this analyst's opinion at face value after a single night of study. Indeed, it almost looks planned. It's predictable shill type FUD.
I'll believe it when it's presented in court or published openly. If it's true, the rewrite of those 15 lines of code and comments will be out the next day.
Ah, there's no troll like an old troll, "Free software does not get worms because no one uses it and no one hates it." As you phrased it,
Just wait until:
a.) Everybody decides to hate Linus.
b.) Linux machines can be counted in the millions.
a. is unlikely. How can anyone hate free software? Oh yeah, it's putting you out of business. Microsoft does an admirable job of astroturfing congressmen and Slashdot, but they have yet to put out a good free software worm. The intersection of people with the skill to write free software worms and the number of people who hate free software is vanishinly small. Competent people like free software, get used to it. Windoze on the other hand is just about universally hated and just as easy to break.
b. Linux machines can be counted in the millions. Desktop machines. If you figure 10% of US desktops are running some form of free software, you get millions of computers. The rest of the world has plenty of free computers as well. Yet I don't see anything breaking down mutt, pine, balsa or even Mozilla's email client. AOL's windowze messenger once had a problem but only on Microsoft platforms. GAIM and others had no peoblems at all.
To sum it all up for you, nothing is as bad as the Microsoft monoculture of poor quality software. Free software is more diverse, of better quality and is universally loved.
those of us who know how to configure our windows systems and aren't stupid enough to (a) have open network shares with no passwords and (b) open random email attachments are safe.
Stupid was your word. I'd prefer to call people like that ignorant. Of course it's not true that the user has to do anything to be the victim of one of these worms. They take advantage of flaws in M$ apps, like an email clinet that loads sound files automatically. The user never knows what hit them. You knew that because you are so smart, right?
People who trust Microsoft agian and again, now that's stupid.
``Any license that you may believe you acquired with the software is void, revoked and terminated.''
As you noticed, that's really funny. Waste was released GPL, no? They only hope it does not take off without comercial backing. Soon they shall learn how unimportant they really are. Music, software and all other forms of innovation have no need for big dumb middle men like TIME. So long, greedy grabbers, you sucked while you could.
It's big enough, but they embedded it according to comments above. You might do better looking for an old 1G IBM CF microdrive.
The news is that they are selling them on their own for under $65. Sure, you can run Linux off of that! I'm hoping to see reasonably priced CF microdrives soon. CF fits my camera, zaurus and laptop and is the next best thing to networking them.
Forget the long chords and just buy an old amp. I'm using a system that my grandparents left that no one else wanted. It sits under the phono in my office next to a computer I use for sound stuff. It's nice to have a better amp and keep the heat out of my computers too. There are plenty of these types of amps in thrift stores and any system with a working amp has a working phono in.
We all know how well Microsoft security works. All this mechanism does is give a cracker a new tool to hose a system that's insecure by design and incompetence. Between Excell playing sound files linked in from the web (hypothetical flaw based on Outlook's doing the same) and Windoze updater, there is no security on M$. Paladium is simply going to be another set of inconveniences to the user that do little else than get in the way of working and enjoying media files and running free software.
You do realize the absurdity of the conspiracy theory.
It's a joke, silly. Microsoft's efforts to co-opt "influential" users, however, is a well known and sucessful marketing ploy. Another good joke is an MBA program that requires M$ laptops and teaches users how to operate powerpoint and what not.
Slashdot Mirror
Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she explained.
Total Irony and Wimp. If access to the underlying code was all M$ cared about, they would have all of their software ported (non-free of course) to Linux and BSD. Mac OSX is as close as they would come, but because OSX is controled by Apple, M$ has to bow out. They are paranoid of the dirty tricks they play on others and can't stand to work with anything but their own garbage. People said that M$ was only working with Apple for the anti-trust trials. Now they seek to eliminate them.
I say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha!" M$ has as much a chance to eliminate Apple as they do to eliminate free software. People like it, use it and will pay for the services. It's more likely that people will continue to abandon the M$ rape. It was obvious to me that KDE had a better browser and interface and word processor and ... anyway.
As for the support these machines will need, they only have to shoot a few windows boxes to make time for all the Macs. Nothing but nothing takes as much administration time as Windows. Macs take much less time, unless you insist on putting M$ Word on the poor thing. Turning down $43,000 in free hardware because you don't want to learn how to click and drool the Mac way instead of the M$ way is as pure lazy as a janitor who refuses to unlock the school bathrooms because he only has time to sweep floors. It may be true, but one thing is more important than the other.
These computers might be the best tool for the job as the grant was written? It might not be possible in the limited and cramped world Microsoft makes.
It's not a technical problem.
No, it's a Sun and has much better hardware. The Intel world is catching up, but Sun's piece parts were designed better to begin with. There is an economy of scale that still fits well for medium sized companies.
Anyone know how to do the JRE on Debian? Their GUI installer would copy a bunch of files but it refused to see them. I ended up just pushing the "no java installed" button.
The Baby Bells used their last mile monopoly to kill the "dot com" folks. The bandwith demands have grown, but not like they could have and they are concentrated in far fewer hands. This has made a glut of Sun equipment. A friend of mine bought and ultra spark, which once sold for $10,000, for less than the price of a high end home computer. There's no way he would have gotten his hands on a deal like that if a healthy and free internet market was working. Bad laws, such as those preventing me from buying California wine, and preventing me from running servers on my cable modem, have also played a part. Established interests are shining triumphant and we all suffer for it.
Microsoft has also harmed Sun's traditional scientific computing business. Microsoft has done much to blow up X compatibility and make communications with Unix difficult. One of the responses has been to move some of the calculations to M$/Intel platforms. This obviously does not work for all calcs, but consider the losses from 3D CAD and a perpetuation of the M$ as a client model. Linux can be a great aid there, so long as scientists and engineers revolt against the M$ Office lockin. They have only to realize that the pain is comming from one location and move on. Most have, but many are loath to move on yet. The support infrasturcture for free software is still growing.
In the end, Sun has much to offer. Their hardeare is first rate and they can embrace free software at any time.
Let the non free software companies continue to screw each other. The solution is to reject them all.
Remeber now, sharing is stealing, never share your password, never try to understand how things work against the will of you masters and be grateful, very greatful all day long. Your letters will be read to eliminate the enemies of the United States. Your location will be known from the devices your carry and all of us will be much safer when we get the house of the future from Microsoft.
Anyone want to join me at the bridge? I'll be smashing my car and throwing my old M$ software into the cold waters. The hope for US software is the hope for all software, freedom. If the software in my cell phone and car were free, I might feel like I owned them.
Those Yahoo expense numbers are devided into two catagories, R+D and adverts. There are no operating or other expenses. No mention is made of aquisitions of property or software. If their research budget contains operating expenses as well as aquisitions as well as the salary of the guy who flies around China picking out the next X-box case, well, it's easy to see how that might all add up to a billion bucks a quarter. It's not, however, the kind or research most of us think of as innovative, creative or useful.
Parasitic is what you would expect from a company that admits it only enters a market when there's a substantial amount of money to be made. They don't really develop anything until the "loss leaders" have drummed up interest in their inventions. They then offer to buy the victim out for $500,000 or to treat them like Netscape by purchasing a competitor for $500,000. In either case, M$ is not going to spend much more than $500,000 to own anything.
It shows in their product line. They are only innovative if you call sticking your label on a cheap DRM'd PC innovative, and inventive if you consider a phone application for your embeded system that someone else made inventive. Really, the only thing Microsoft has invented lately is the "Digital Rights Management Operating System", a simple dongle in BIOS, they obtained an absurd patent on. Name one useful thing Microsoft has made, ever. You can't because they have levered and expoited other people's ideas since Bill Gates dumpster dived someone else's BASIC and then complained when it was "stolen" through unauthorized copy.
This piece of balance was less than objective:
Chances are significantly higher that in most organizations a hacker will have a much easier time finding an un-patched Windows or *nix system to exploit than they will an un-patched and/or misconfigured piece of perimeter networking/security equipment.
Why do people equate M$ security and code quality with what is available in the free software world? There are far fewer means to break into a machine running free software than there are ways to break into a M$ box. In fact, there's hardly a Microsoft box out there that's not already owned by Gator or some other perverse spyware. I've never heard of a free software based DDoS attack, and it's not because there are not enough Linux boxes in the world to muster a few hundred if indeed the Linux boxes were as fragile as their M$ counterparts.
The defeatist attitude the article is really dealing with is, "My desktops are insecure and there is nothing I can do about it." It's not true and it's a disservice to perpetuate the attitude. As you note, the cures they offer are worse than the dissease.
Do they own "JrBoss"? Drat, someone does.
I prefer pass phrases, with some letter from each word of the sentence being a character in the password. Speech recognition would simplify this, and give something your could tell others to open the door, but I prefer a normal key that can't be deactivated by internet hack.
Instead of lights that come on, you have sparks flying from the bare wires. Insulation will be added in Linux House 0.18.
Hmmm, like users will be a part of the M$ kernel and file system one day. The free software lighting system will be an embeded device that only takes high level commands from voice or an authenticated network connection and as trouble free as my Debian machines are.
Your mail gets read, but it sounds like Don Ho after a couple of pan-galactic gargleblasters. You still have 137 messages about penis enlargers, because the spam filter craps out with some unintelligible error message when you try to turn it on.
I don't have a spam problem now. In the future, I still don't want email read out loud. People who need voice communications with me will be able to get me through an 802.11 decendent community built ad-hoc network and yet another device running embeded free software.
You can get lots of media for free, but all you can get are garage bands. Lots and lots of bad garage bands.
Most of my music collection is ported to ogg. It will play into the future as long as hardware runs free software. I also maintain a piano, which plays in the living room instead of the garage. My wife can play it just loud enough.
Your house still listens to you - it just listens for swear words directed at Supreme Leader Richard Stallman and Adjutant Diety Linus Torvalds.
Funny, I've never seen anything in the GPL about remote root access/a>.
nstead of traditional locks, there's an electronic kiosk with a touchscreen...
It's blue with a message for you "Explorer has caused an exception fault ..." This might be because your taxes or some other bill was late or deemed incorrect.
The lights and heat automatically fine-tune to your preference the moment you cross the threshold.
A cross licensing agreement with your power company insures maximum profits for them rather than comfort for you.
A screen on the wall in the foyer reads your email aloud as you hang your coat.
It's hotmail telling you about penis enlargers over and over again. You have 137 new messages since leaving work.
Run a chicken pot pie beneath the barcode reader on the microwave and it sets the time and temperature. Break out the food processor and some baking material; your home recognizes RFID tags in the bag of flour and offers to help. "How about ...
The next sentence is a paid comercial advertisment for food you don't want to buy. What you eat is sold to the highest bidder by Microsoft and they irritate you out loud trying to get you to buy something different. You also had to repeat the word "delete" several times for this while you were hanging your coat and walking to the kitchen before you gave up in disgust and told the computer to "shut up". The computer asked if you were sure.
And digital media is everywhere. "Suspicious Minds" greets you in full-home surround sound. The family's collective music library is accessible from any room, on every device.
True, any "trusted" device will be able to talk to the media server and it will be able to display exactly what M$, RIAA and the MPAA want you to see. Once the hardware lock in is achieved, the eHome experiment will be obsolete. You will only be able to run one version of Word that you pay for by the minute. Options like search and replace costs extra. No material deemed "copyright infringing", including your own media, will work. All your old movies, songs and pictures are now "obsolete" and unnecessary because you can rent anything you want that the media cartels feel it's profitable to make available. It will look very much like cable TV and broadcast radio. Equipment that records music that can be played on such a system will be tightly controled through patenets, copyrights and laws like the DMCA.
Oh yeah, your house will be listening to you. The listening devices can cancel the noises the system creates so that your voices can be recorded loud and clear. Carnivore was just the beginning, though it will still be searching your email, search fees added to your taxes, of course.
Your are supposed to be bitching and moaning about mod points, karma, story selection, slashcode or poor response times.
If you think Slashdot sucks in all those ways, grab the Slashcode and make your own site to fill up with trolls. It's like people are getting paid to be disruptive. Oh wait, that's the topic. Sorry, my bad.
I'm no more ready to eat my words than I am ready or able to go back to M$ crap. Free software is vastly better today and the differences will only become more astonishing in the future.
I'll assume nuthing. Given Information Week "evidence", I'm more likely to believe the opposite.
Let's have a look at some other opinions from Information Week's "primary beat reporter for Microsoft coverage", John Foley. Here he tries to see things through Bill Gates eyes, a very silly thing to do when dealing with a liar. He ends up thinking that better things are comming again. Typical, with M$ the best is always yet to come. The rest of Foley's opinions and articles are the kind of no statement made blither only a CIO could love. It's buzzword filled, comercial oriented junk that wastes time and is the primary reason I quit reading Informationweek years ago.
It's not surprising that he would take this analyst's opinion at face value after a single night of study. Indeed, it almost looks planned. It's predictable shill type FUD.
I'll believe it when it's presented in court or published openly. If it's true, the rewrite of those 15 lines of code and comments will be out the next day.
Just wait until:
a.) Everybody decides to hate Linus.
b.) Linux machines can be counted in the millions.
a. is unlikely. How can anyone hate free software? Oh yeah, it's putting you out of business. Microsoft does an admirable job of astroturfing congressmen and Slashdot, but they have yet to put out a good free software worm. The intersection of people with the skill to write free software worms and the number of people who hate free software is vanishinly small. Competent people like free software, get used to it. Windoze on the other hand is just about universally hated and just as easy to break.
b. Linux machines can be counted in the millions. Desktop machines. If you figure 10% of US desktops are running some form of free software, you get millions of computers. The rest of the world has plenty of free computers as well. Yet I don't see anything breaking down mutt, pine, balsa or even Mozilla's email client. AOL's windowze messenger once had a problem but only on Microsoft platforms. GAIM and others had no peoblems at all.
To sum it all up for you, nothing is as bad as the Microsoft monoculture of poor quality software. Free software is more diverse, of better quality and is universally loved.
Stupid was your word. I'd prefer to call people like that ignorant. Of course it's not true that the user has to do anything to be the victim of one of these worms. They take advantage of flaws in M$ apps, like an email clinet that loads sound files automatically. The user never knows what hit them. You knew that because you are so smart, right?
People who trust Microsoft agian and again, now that's stupid.
I'd better take down my web pages that have thumbnails linked to avi files from my digital cameras.
As you noticed, that's really funny. Waste was released GPL, no? They only hope it does not take off without comercial backing. Soon they shall learn how unimportant they really are. Music, software and all other forms of innovation have no need for big dumb middle men like TIME. So long, greedy grabbers, you sucked while you could.
It's big enough, but they embedded it according to comments above. You might do better looking for an old 1G IBM CF microdrive.
The news is that they are selling them on their own for under $65. Sure, you can run Linux off of that! I'm hoping to see reasonably priced CF microdrives soon. CF fits my camera, zaurus and laptop and is the next best thing to networking them.
Forget the long chords and just buy an old amp. I'm using a system that my grandparents left that no one else wanted. It sits under the phono in my office next to a computer I use for sound stuff. It's nice to have a better amp and keep the heat out of my computers too. There are plenty of these types of amps in thrift stores and any system with a working amp has a working phono in.
We all know how well Microsoft security works. All this mechanism does is give a cracker a new tool to hose a system that's insecure by design and incompetence. Between Excell playing sound files linked in from the web (hypothetical flaw based on Outlook's doing the same) and Windoze updater, there is no security on M$. Paladium is simply going to be another set of inconveniences to the user that do little else than get in the way of working and enjoying media files and running free software.
It's a joke, silly. Microsoft's efforts to co-opt "influential" users, however, is a well known and sucessful marketing ploy. Another good joke is an MBA program that requires M$ laptops and teaches users how to operate powerpoint and what not.