So what. I have to agree with the previous poster. Who needs an ipod when you can just email everything to your personal email? There's no new threat here.
Wrong. There are often records of an email, perhaps even copies, in other words evidence. Probably not for connecting an iPod.
I believe the poster's comments better relate wishing that hackers would act more like ex-criminals developing security systems. Ie, reformed bank robbers providing a service to make banks more secure; they obviously have the skills, they might as well use them for good.
I think your analogy doesn't really support your point and in fact supports the GP. Reformed bank robbers are not really security experts who can design new security systems, I think you your opinion is based more on movies than on reality. Similarly, hackers are romanticized, their skills exaggerated, in movies and in ill informed nerd mythology spread by sites like slashdot.
It really is that hackers outnumber developers and that developers have to be perfect all the time and one of the hackers just needs to get lucky once. Hackers are often more like specialized technicians that are skilled in a narrow range, not a skilled engineer that can design a system from scratch. And then there are the kiddies.
In other news, a carefully conducted study has revealed that the majority of retail stores are COMPLETELY UNSECURE as the majority of employees have full access to the stockrooms, and many are able to access the cash contained in cash registers!
"COMPLETELY UNSECURE"? With such a poor analogy the attempted joke falls flat. The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there, nothing to notice. Not so with the physical objects from the stockroom, they must simply be stolen and their absense noticed. Secondly, stockrooms, cash registers, etc often have have cameras trained on them.
I've worked in a warehouse that stocked department stores. We had a caged jewelry section, a caged firearms section, and a general caged section for other high price / small size items. Access required that keys be logged out.
Friends have worked cash registers and there is quite a bit of individual accounting taking place. Starting and ending balances are individualized, no sharing of a register, and these must balance with transactions.
In contrast data is often far less secure. Commands like "copy" are not logged at most companies, storage devices connecting are not logged at most companies,... We have millennia of experience handling inventory and cash, security is not perfect but it far more evolved than the handling of data, which is in it's infancy by comparison.
Yes, familiar huh. I'm curious to see if mods react differently when one doesn't insult an AC.
But the idea that employees who are treated with fairness and dignity are less likely to to damage to the workplace seems to be common sense. Rejecting this notion outright just seems like a crude justification to treat employees poorly since "some people are bad".
The statement I responed too: "Treat your employees well and they won't feel the need to screw you." That is quite different from your "less likely" point, I agree with "less likely".
"The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there."
I'd like to talk to you after class,...
I have office hours after class and I'll be happy to alleviate your confusion.
... I wonder if you could make a presentation of your idea that copying data from one place to another is not a crime...
Why would I do so? You did not misunderstand things and believe that was what I wrote? When data is copied the original is still there, how does the owner know it was stolen, as opposed to physical inventory.
...For your reference points, here is Steve Jobs' (please mod me up for that topical example) bank account number, and here is mine. Copy the contents of one to the other.
Financial transactions don't involve making "copies" of money, they involve transfering it from one place to another. What do you mean by "copy the contents", surely you realize that this is fundamentally different that copying a private data file from a server to an iPod?
I'm not after the money (tis Karma I crave) so feel free to copy in either direction.
Well fools get mod points too so perhaps your foolishness will get you something. Good luck.
Average quality of commercial code is quite low - it's not worth been stolen. And when you see clean, well made code, rest assured: people behind the code are connected to Open Source.
Your post seemed convincing until the above. Open Source has a lot of crap code too. Now your post seems like mere zealotry. Sure you can cherry pick some example and find good stuff, but there is good stuff in commercial environments too. On the other side I've had friends doing compiler research gag when looking at portions of gcc. I've seen poorly written and poorly implemented code in OSS also. OSS is not all that different from commercial in terms of quality. It is the programmer that makes code good, not the license, and many of those programmers writing good OSS code have day jobs where they write good commercial code. Many other programmers who write good commercial code have better things to do with their free time that contribute to OSS.
just as in normal life you would try to *NOT* show anybody you dirty undies?
So you are afraid of showing people whom you will never meet your dirty undies but you are willing to show people you work with every day your dirty undies? What a load of crap you are showing.;-)
Your employees will steal information if they want to. This has nothing to do with the iPod. I have walked out of work with harddisks before.
The problem is that given the iPod's popularity it does not draw any attention. Even if someone notices that it is plugged in the thief may be able to dodge suspicion with a simple "I need to charge it".
Treat your employees well and they won't feel the need to screw you.
That is naive. Industrial / Commercial espionage happens. Greedy, self-centered, immoral people exist at all levels of companies. "Good" companies get screwed just like "good" employees.
In other news, a carefully conducted study has revealed that the majority of retail stores are COMPLETELY UNSECURE as the majority of employees have full access to the stockrooms, and many are able to access the cash contained in cash registers!
"COMPLETELY UNSECURE"? The only intelligence you have shown in your post was to post as AC and save yourself the embarrassment. It's such a poor analogy the attempted joke falls flat. The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there. Not so with the physical objects from the stockroom, they must simply be stolen and their absense noticed. Secondly, there has been this invention called the camera, perhaps you have heard of it? Stockrooms, cash registers, etc often have have cameras trained on them.
I've worked in a warehouse that stocked department stores. We had a caged jewelry section, a caged firearms section, and a general caged section for other high price / small size items. Access required that keys be logged out.
Friends have worked cash registers and there is quite a bit of individual accounting taking place. Starting and ending balances are individualized, no sharing of a register, and these must balance with transactions.
In contrast data is often far less secure. Commands like "copy" are not logged at most companies, storage devices connecting are not logged at most companies,... We have millennia of experience handling inventory and cash, security is not perfect but it far more evolved than the handling of data, which is in it's infancy by comparison.
And if you want to run Windows on one, you're a retard with way too much money in the bank.
You are an idiot, however not a complete idiot since you had the good judgement to post AC and save yourself the embarrassment. You might want to consider the fact that some people work on both Mac OS X and Windows. Being able to run Windows on the Mac may mean they only need one machine, they would save the cost of a Windows box.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
What you are saying is you, personally, consider Mac OS X retail to be an upgrade, because it is installed on a computer that at one point had some other version of Mac OS on it.
Close, I'm saying it is an upgrade because it *requires* a computer that had Mac OS installed on it.
Nothing in Apple's EULA for the retail OS X (have you read it?) suggests that you need to own a copy of Mac OS. However, you do violate the EULA for OS X by installing on non-Apple hardware:
Why would the EULA discuss a non-existent situation? The current retail package is for PowerPC not Intel, and you don't have viable non-Apple hardware until Intel. So whether the machine now has a blank hard drive or not, the machine was sold with a Mac OS license.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
Do you really mean to say that I can't buy a computer from Apple and sell it at some point (which even Apple explicitly permits) without any OS whatsoever? And that whoever buys it from me can't buy a retail copy of Mac OS X and install it on his newly acquired computer?
No, I'm saying that from Apple's perspective anything that left their factory had an OS, so anything that gets installed later is an upgrade. That since they bundle hardware and software together they know for sure that a particular machine has a license. Wether the hard drive is blank or not is a moot point from a licensing perspective. Unlike a software only company like Microsoft where they don't know if the machine is a white box clone that never had an OS, something sold with Linux like the WalMart budget systems, something sold to specialized environment with OS/2,... basically where there is no assurance that a given PC ever had a Windows license whatsoever.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
100% false. The retail boxes are full installers that run on any supported Mac, whether or not that Mac has any OS installed.
Irrelevant. Every Mac shipped with a license to some version of Mac OS. For the current retail package there is no market other than the upgrade market.
The only "upgrade" CD's are those that are bundled with computers which have an earlier OS pre-installed because the new OS was recently released. Sometimes you have to pay them $19.95 to have them send it to you if it didn't come in the box. They say "upgrade" clearly on the CD label.
All you have demonstrated is that their are tiers of upgrades. The retail tier being the more expensive tier that installs on any G3 to G5. The non-retail and less expensive tier being limited to very recent OS version.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
"The retail boxes are technically upgrades."
What's your source for this? Go to the Apple's online store: they list hardware requirements, but no software requirements.
You are missing the obvious, again: "The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS." Mentioning the OS would be redundant, all G3 - G5 shipped with Mac OS.
The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 2, Informative
If they stopped selling retail versions of their new OS, it would be a huge loss of revenue.
The retail boxes are technically upgrades. The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS. The GP is correct, if you are not running on a Mac it technically is piracy, you are using an upgrade as a full product.
Hackers are irrelevant, OS X on a PC a novelty
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OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The hackers and a handful of tech savy users that want OS X on generic hardware are irrelevant. All Apple needs to do is prevent someone with the skills of an average user from being able to get Mac OS X working reliably on generic hardware. The generic PCs running Mac OS X will be novelties, more conversation pieces than serious work environments. There will not be a robust set of drivers, merely what ships on genuine Apple hardware. Apple can break the hack used to get it to work every system software update. It will be a somewhat unreliable machine, unavailable for days at a time while hackers reverse engineer and workaround the latest software update. Will they do so, sure, but it will be irrelevant to mainstream users.
Say bye to the race to the Gigahertz. Say hello to the race to the core count.
Well at last year's Game Developer Conference AMD and Intel were both telling attendees that future performance improvements will be coming more from multiple cores and less from clockrate. Both were hammering on the importnce of making your code multithreaded, both were advocating OpenMP.
I'm thinking that whether you have a hole straight through you, or a bullet embedded in you, you're not gunna be particularly happy.
Happier no, but possibly healthier if it made a hole. Bullets that stop dliver all their energy into you, those that pass through do not. That energy, and the resulting shock waves, is part of the lethality of a bullet. Also, since we are talking near light speed it might be worthwhile to mention that the intense heat from friction may result in no bleeding.
Why the hell would we build near light speed weapons?
They would be more difficult to intercept.
They could be smaller, same kinetic energy yield for less mass.
You do realize we nearly have light speed weapons? Lasers. One of the benefits is that for practical purposes flight time from weapon to target is zero. No more having to lead the target. It makes interception of fast moving things far more practical.
The problem is that some employers fail to recognize that eight full hours of productivity isn't a realistic goal.
If you are paid to *work* for 8 hours, rather than just be present for 8 hours, then it is an entirely realistic goal. If you need extra breaks be prepared to stay longer.
I find your idea that a commodity operating system killed a high-end hardware vendor intruiging...
It's quite simple really, I'm not sure why you are having a hard time following it, but then again AC's are easily confused. Many Sun desktop customers did not need high end hardware. They just needed a decent unix box, they need the software not the hardware. When Linux became a viable alternative they ditched the expensive high end hardware they did not really want in the first place. So yes, a commodity OS can kill a high end hardware vendor.
They backed the wrong horse (Itanium) and don't appear to have a Plan B.
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium. I've always argued that Linux is a far greater threat to traditional unix vendors. like Sun and SGI, than to Microsoft. Sun and SGI sold many systems to users who did not really need anything Sun or SGI specific. For some they just needed a generic unix box and a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a Sun. With PC graphics cards getting decent 3D hardware, some found a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than SGI. I saw this at school where PCs replaced Suns unless you could state a need for something Sun specific, few did. I saw similar things in the chemical industry with PC doing day-to-day visualization and modeling, Sun and SGI boxes became rare.
Back to the school example, ironically, the switch from Sun to PC/Linux was also a win for Microsoft. Somewhere along the line they decided to have the PCs dual boot.
Interestingly, recently I've seen a slight shift away from Linux towards Mac OS X. Apple is doing some good outreach to unix developers, academics, etc.
Note the use of "non-believers", I do not think Christians and Jews fit into that category. The God of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism is the *same* God. IIRC Christians and Jews are classified as people of the book (old Testament?), and are allowed to live in Muslim lands subject to some conditions. Unarmed and paying taxes come to mind, but then they are allowed to enforce their own laws among their own people and the Islamic government is required to protect them.
But, of course, the war was always about controlling the oil.
You could make the same statement about World War II in the Pacific. The US turned off Imperial Japan's oil, Imperial Japan pulled out a map to find the closest source, drew a line and noticed that it passed right between rather large US and British naval bases, and so decided to attack the US and the British. Of course saying that either war was all about oil is grossly simplistic and naive, but like WMD, oil is something simple to focus on. A convenient catchword, allows use of large fonts so that a bumber sticker can be read at a distance,...
The first gulf war was more about oil than the second. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would have had a dramatic effect. The second gulf war was pretty much about removing Saadam, securing the oil was important with respect to reconstruction not with respect to invading in the first place. And that is why disrupting oil is so important to the insurgents. They do not fear US corporations getting their hands on it, hell they'd probably partner with them as they did in the past. They fear the Iraqi government getting their hands on it, using it for reconstruction, establing physical and economic security,... The insurgents need the instability, they need the US footing the bill for reconstruction, so that they can return to power.
Inspectors were few in number and monitored by the Iraqis, not allowed into certain locations, entry delayed to certain locations while equipment/documents were moved,... No one was sure one way or the other until there was large scale unfettered access, and that was done by boots. Whether the war was right or wrong does not change the fact that the war did definitively answer the WMD question.
Slashdot Mirror
... no firewire 800 for one thing ...
Thank you Apple. I prefer not paying for things I do not need, SCSI in the old days, FW800 today. The few pros who need it can add it.
So what. I have to agree with the previous poster. Who needs an ipod when you can just email everything to your personal email? There's no new threat here.
Wrong. There are often records of an email, perhaps even copies, in other words evidence. Probably not for connecting an iPod.
I believe the poster's comments better relate wishing that hackers would act more like ex-criminals developing security systems. Ie, reformed bank robbers providing a service to make banks more secure; they obviously have the skills, they might as well use them for good.
I think your analogy doesn't really support your point and in fact supports the GP. Reformed bank robbers are not really security experts who can design new security systems, I think you your opinion is based more on movies than on reality. Similarly, hackers are romanticized, their skills exaggerated, in movies and in ill informed nerd mythology spread by sites like slashdot.
It really is that hackers outnumber developers and that developers have to be perfect all the time and one of the hackers just needs to get lucky once. Hackers are often more like specialized technicians that are skilled in a narrow range, not a skilled engineer that can design a system from scratch. And then there are the kiddies.
In other news, a carefully conducted study has revealed that the majority of retail stores are COMPLETELY UNSECURE as the majority of employees have full access to the stockrooms, and many are able to access the cash contained in cash registers!
... We have millennia of experience handling inventory and cash, security is not perfect but it far more evolved than the handling of data, which is in it's infancy by comparison.
"COMPLETELY UNSECURE"? With such a poor analogy the attempted joke falls flat. The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there, nothing to notice. Not so with the physical objects from the stockroom, they must simply be stolen and their absense noticed. Secondly, stockrooms, cash registers, etc often have have cameras trained on them.
I've worked in a warehouse that stocked department stores. We had a caged jewelry section, a caged firearms section, and a general caged section for other high price / small size items. Access required that keys be logged out.
Friends have worked cash registers and there is quite a bit of individual accounting taking place. Starting and ending balances are individualized, no sharing of a register, and these must balance with transactions.
In contrast data is often far less secure. Commands like "copy" are not logged at most companies, storage devices connecting are not logged at most companies,
Yes, familiar huh. I'm curious to see if mods react differently when one doesn't insult an AC.
But the idea that employees who are treated with fairness and dignity are less likely to to damage to the workplace seems to be common sense. Rejecting this notion outright just seems like a crude justification to treat employees poorly since "some people are bad".
The statement I responed too: "Treat your employees well and they won't feel the need to screw you." That is quite different from your "less likely" point, I agree with "less likely".
"The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there."
...
... I wonder if you could make a presentation of your idea that copying data from one place to another is not a crime ...
...For your reference points, here is Steve Jobs' (please mod me up for that topical example) bank account number, and here is mine. Copy the contents of one to the other.
I'd like to talk to you after class,
I have office hours after class and I'll be happy to alleviate your confusion.
Why would I do so? You did not misunderstand things and believe that was what I wrote? When data is copied the original is still there, how does the owner know it was stolen, as opposed to physical inventory.
Financial transactions don't involve making "copies" of money, they involve transfering it from one place to another. What do you mean by "copy the contents", surely you realize that this is fundamentally different that copying a private data file from a server to an iPod?
I'm not after the money (tis Karma I crave) so feel free to copy in either direction.
Well fools get mod points too so perhaps your foolishness will get you something. Good luck.
Average quality of commercial code is quite low - it's not worth been stolen. And when you see clean, well made code, rest assured: people behind the code are connected to Open Source.
;-)
Your post seemed convincing until the above. Open Source has a lot of crap code too. Now your post seems like mere zealotry. Sure you can cherry pick some example and find good stuff, but there is good stuff in commercial environments too. On the other side I've had friends doing compiler research gag when looking at portions of gcc. I've seen poorly written and poorly implemented code in OSS also. OSS is not all that different from commercial in terms of quality. It is the programmer that makes code good, not the license, and many of those programmers writing good OSS code have day jobs where they write good commercial code. Many other programmers who write good commercial code have better things to do with their free time that contribute to OSS.
just as in normal life you would try to *NOT* show anybody you dirty undies?
So you are afraid of showing people whom you will never meet your dirty undies but you are willing to show people you work with every day your dirty undies? What a load of crap you are showing.
Your employees will steal information if they want to. This has nothing to do with the iPod. I have walked out of work with harddisks before.
The problem is that given the iPod's popularity it does not draw any attention. Even if someone notices that it is plugged in the thief may be able to dodge suspicion with a simple "I need to charge it".
Treat your employees well and they won't feel the need to screw you.
That is naive. Industrial / Commercial espionage happens. Greedy, self-centered, immoral people exist at all levels of companies. "Good" companies get screwed just like "good" employees.
In other news, a carefully conducted study has revealed that the majority of retail stores are COMPLETELY UNSECURE as the majority of employees have full access to the stockrooms, and many are able to access the cash contained in cash registers!
... We have millennia of experience handling inventory and cash, security is not perfect but it far more evolved than the handling of data, which is in it's infancy by comparison.
"COMPLETELY UNSECURE"? The only intelligence you have shown in your post was to post as AC and save yourself the embarrassment. It's such a poor analogy the attempted joke falls flat. The most obvious glaring problem with your analogy is that data can be copied and the originals are still there. Not so with the physical objects from the stockroom, they must simply be stolen and their absense noticed. Secondly, there has been this invention called the camera, perhaps you have heard of it? Stockrooms, cash registers, etc often have have cameras trained on them.
I've worked in a warehouse that stocked department stores. We had a caged jewelry section, a caged firearms section, and a general caged section for other high price / small size items. Access required that keys be logged out.
Friends have worked cash registers and there is quite a bit of individual accounting taking place. Starting and ending balances are individualized, no sharing of a register, and these must balance with transactions.
In contrast data is often far less secure. Commands like "copy" are not logged at most companies, storage devices connecting are not logged at most companies,
And if you want to run Windows on one, you're a retard with way too much money in the bank.
You are an idiot, however not a complete idiot since you had the good judgement to post AC and save yourself the embarrassment. You might want to consider the fact that some people work on both Mac OS X and Windows. Being able to run Windows on the Mac may mean they only need one machine, they would save the cost of a Windows box.
What you are saying is you, personally, consider Mac OS X retail to be an upgrade, because it is installed on a computer that at one point had some other version of Mac OS on it.
Close, I'm saying it is an upgrade because it *requires* a computer that had Mac OS installed on it.
Nothing in Apple's EULA for the retail OS X (have you read it?) suggests that you need to own a copy of Mac OS. However, you do violate the EULA for OS X by installing on non-Apple hardware:
Why would the EULA discuss a non-existent situation? The current retail package is for PowerPC not Intel, and you don't have viable non-Apple hardware until Intel. So whether the machine now has a blank hard drive or not, the machine was sold with a Mac OS license.
Do you really mean to say that I can't buy a computer from Apple and sell it at some point (which even Apple explicitly permits) without any OS whatsoever? And that whoever buys it from me can't buy a retail copy of Mac OS X and install it on his newly acquired computer?
... basically where there is no assurance that a given PC ever had a Windows license whatsoever.
No, I'm saying that from Apple's perspective anything that left their factory had an OS, so anything that gets installed later is an upgrade. That since they bundle hardware and software together they know for sure that a particular machine has a license. Wether the hard drive is blank or not is a moot point from a licensing perspective. Unlike a software only company like Microsoft where they don't know if the machine is a white box clone that never had an OS, something sold with Linux like the WalMart budget systems, something sold to specialized environment with OS/2,
100% false. The retail boxes are full installers that run on any supported Mac, whether or not that Mac has any OS installed.
Irrelevant. Every Mac shipped with a license to some version of Mac OS. For the current retail package there is no market other than the upgrade market.
The only "upgrade" CD's are those that are bundled with computers which have an earlier OS pre-installed because the new OS was recently released. Sometimes you have to pay them $19.95 to have them send it to you if it didn't come in the box. They say "upgrade" clearly on the CD label.
All you have demonstrated is that their are tiers of upgrades. The retail tier being the more expensive tier that installs on any G3 to G5. The non-retail and less expensive tier being limited to very recent OS version.
"The retail boxes are technically upgrades."
What's your source for this? Go to the Apple's online store: they list hardware requirements, but no software requirements.
You are missing the obvious, again: "The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS." Mentioning the OS would be redundant, all G3 - G5 shipped with Mac OS.
If they stopped selling retail versions of their new OS, it would be a huge loss of revenue.
The retail boxes are technically upgrades. The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS. The GP is correct, if you are not running on a Mac it technically is piracy, you are using an upgrade as a full product.
The hackers and a handful of tech savy users that want OS X on generic hardware are irrelevant. All Apple needs to do is prevent someone with the skills of an average user from being able to get Mac OS X working reliably on generic hardware. The generic PCs running Mac OS X will be novelties, more conversation pieces than serious work environments. There will not be a robust set of drivers, merely what ships on genuine Apple hardware. Apple can break the hack used to get it to work every system software update. It will be a somewhat unreliable machine, unavailable for days at a time while hackers reverse engineer and workaround the latest software update. Will they do so, sure, but it will be irrelevant to mainstream users.
Say bye to the race to the Gigahertz. Say hello to the race to the core count.
Well at last year's Game Developer Conference AMD and Intel were both telling attendees that future performance improvements will be coming more from multiple cores and less from clockrate. Both were hammering on the importnce of making your code multithreaded, both were advocating OpenMP.
I'm thinking that whether you have a hole straight through you, or a bullet embedded in you, you're not gunna be particularly happy.
Happier no, but possibly healthier if it made a hole. Bullets that stop dliver all their energy into you, those that pass through do not. That energy, and the resulting shock waves, is part of the lethality of a bullet. Also, since we are talking near light speed it might be worthwhile to mention that the intense heat from friction may result in no bleeding.
Why the hell would we build near light speed weapons?
They would be more difficult to intercept.
They could be smaller, same kinetic energy yield for less mass.
You do realize we nearly have light speed weapons? Lasers. One of the benefits is that for practical purposes flight time from weapon to target is zero. No more having to lead the target. It makes interception of fast moving things far more practical.
The problem is that some employers fail to recognize that eight full hours of productivity isn't a realistic goal.
If you are paid to *work* for 8 hours, rather than just be present for 8 hours, then it is an entirely realistic goal. If you need extra breaks be prepared to stay longer.
I find your idea that a commodity operating system killed a high-end hardware vendor intruiging ...
It's quite simple really, I'm not sure why you are having a hard time following it, but then again AC's are easily confused. Many Sun desktop customers did not need high end hardware. They just needed a decent unix box, they need the software not the hardware. When Linux became a viable alternative they ditched the expensive high end hardware they did not really want in the first place. So yes, a commodity OS can kill a high end hardware vendor.
They backed the wrong horse (Itanium) and don't appear to have a Plan B.
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium. I've always argued that Linux is a far greater threat to traditional unix vendors. like Sun and SGI, than to Microsoft. Sun and SGI sold many systems to users who did not really need anything Sun or SGI specific. For some they just needed a generic unix box and a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a Sun. With PC graphics cards getting decent 3D hardware, some found a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than SGI. I saw this at school where PCs replaced Suns unless you could state a need for something Sun specific, few did. I saw similar things in the chemical industry with PC doing day-to-day visualization and modeling, Sun and SGI boxes became rare.
Back to the school example, ironically, the switch from Sun to PC/Linux was also a win for Microsoft. Somewhere along the line they decided to have the PCs dual boot.
Interestingly, recently I've seen a slight shift away from Linux towards Mac OS X. Apple is doing some good outreach to unix developers, academics, etc.
Note the use of "non-believers", I do not think Christians and Jews fit into that category. The God of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism is the *same* God. IIRC Christians and Jews are classified as people of the book (old Testament?), and are allowed to live in Muslim lands subject to some conditions. Unarmed and paying taxes come to mind, but then they are allowed to enforce their own laws among their own people and the Islamic government is required to protect them.
But, of course, the war was always about controlling the oil.
...
... The insurgents need the instability, they need the US footing the bill for reconstruction, so that they can return to power.
You could make the same statement about World War II in the Pacific. The US turned off Imperial Japan's oil, Imperial Japan pulled out a map to find the closest source, drew a line and noticed that it passed right between rather large US and British naval bases, and so decided to attack the US and the British. Of course saying that either war was all about oil is grossly simplistic and naive, but like WMD, oil is something simple to focus on. A convenient catchword, allows use of large fonts so that a bumber sticker can be read at a distance,
The first gulf war was more about oil than the second. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would have had a dramatic effect. The second gulf war was pretty much about removing Saadam, securing the oil was important with respect to reconstruction not with respect to invading in the first place. And that is why disrupting oil is so important to the insurgents. They do not fear US corporations getting their hands on it, hell they'd probably partner with them as they did in the past. They fear the Iraqi government getting their hands on it, using it for reconstruction, establing physical and economic security,
Correction, not boots, but rather inspectors.
... No one was sure one way or the other until there was large scale unfettered access, and that was done by boots. Whether the war was right or wrong does not change the fact that the war did definitively answer the WMD question.
Inspectors were few in number and monitored by the Iraqis, not allowed into certain locations, entry delayed to certain locations while equipment/documents were moved,