Yeah: Anyone who can still rationalize working for this company is an asshole.
Sorry, but that is my belief. I've worked for companies before where people quit on principle even when the company's actions didn't affect them personally. And on those occasions the company had done far less than Microsoft has done to harm the community.
It is high time it became a badge of dishonor to be affiliated with Microsoft in any way.
Earlier Wednesday, Undersheriff Frank Bernard said searchers needed to hurry because the area where Morrow uncovered the items was expected to receive its first snowfall of the season this weekend. Mammoth Lakes is about 10,000 feet, or 30,400 meters, above sea level, and snow makes already difficult terrain largely impassable and could bury plane wreckage.
Two authors listed for this, and I would hope someone, besides me, proofread the thing.
Why would I trust anything coming from the mainstream media about politics, science, or anything else?
Maybe I'm projecting my thoughts too much on the rest of the populance, but I know very few people my age (~30 years old) who have even started building a family, and that's quite frankly, distressing. The economy isn't everything. We will survive. The crash will happen. Let it happen swiftly and let the recovery happen in the near term.
I don't know what this has to do with the subject at hand, but I agree with you to some extent. I don't agree that it has to do with people addicted to their jobs, although there are certainly people who are. There are also people addicted to the Internet, or addicted to TV viewing or going to those bars you mentioned. If the people who promote the abandonment of religion (and that would be the majority here on Slashdot) can't find a substitute better than just sitting all day hitting refresh on your browser, I don't think there is much hope for things improving.
I'm not saying necessarily that religion is the answer (although it certainly is an answer). But I see few alternatives presenting themselves. Marx said that The State would for a while become our religion, and I don't care what anyone here claims, we are going down the same path as the Soviet Union, only without a bloody revolution. Der Spiegel is today celebrating the death of capitalism and American dominance, except we haven't been practicing capitalism since the 1800s. Popular belief among American "intelligentsia" is that we now have the power to control every aspect of our society and I foresee that after the next election any failure of such control will simply engender a feeling that the controls weren't strict enough. That's what I'm seeing every day in the mainstream media.
That control, ever more sophisticated, will soon, even if it hasn't already, make anonymity impossible. The novel 1984 may have been a failure in terms of the timing, but I don't think it is far off the mark in terms of where we are going, and the direction as well as end-point to me seems fairly inevitable.
I think I have accidentally wandered back on-topic, my-bad.
Researchers are beginning to raise an alarm for what looks like a scary new browser exploit/threat affecting all the major desktop platforms -- Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Adobe Flash.
Obviously the word "platform" is hot in media circles these days.
I noticed Linux isn't in there. Does that mean Linux is not a platform? If I run Firefox on Linux am I safe? If I run Firefox on OS X am I safe?
This is one reason I don't follow the news on ZDnet any more.
What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?
The part of the system where you send them money every month is working just fine. I have inside information that they are not planning to disrupt that in any way.
Funny thing about this "test" is that failure rates went from 3.8 something percent to 4.6 something percent and they say that's good.... but hey that's a 20 percent increase or thereabouts isn't it? And both of those numbers are laughable compared to mainframe failure rates which I think have a decimal point in front of them.
They seem to be saying: "Forget the fact that PCs aren't very reliable, just consider that they are only 20 percent less reliable if you run them in adverse conditions."
Does this mean Debian can go back to using Mozilla/Firefox too?
Or would it still make more sense to implement an easily customized "installer" for Mozilla/Firefox that could be adapted to any distribution and let the distribution install the installer rather than the actual product?
The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email is that any email sent through those channels is archived for a Very Long Time as a matter of public record.
Oh, you mean like the White House e-mails?
Now, before I get anyone confused, let me point out that White House e-mails were lost during the Clinton administration too. (People just seem to have conveniently forgotten about that one).
Is the issue one of "Open Government"? Fine, I believe in that too.
Sorry, but I don't buy the idea that one party or the other is the essence of purity in this area.
Years ago they were able to pass "Government in the Sunshine" laws in Florida and as an expatriate of that state I decided to read up on how things had worked out (since I hadn't heard the concept bragged about recently).
Apparently not so well.
Get this through your head: If people want to conspire they will find a way to do it, no matter what obstacles you put in their way. Having government archive e-mails (good in theory, bad in practice with the type of people who work in government) simply means they switch to Blackberries, monitor those they switch to text messages, monitor those they use use post-it notes, track those it will be mouth to ear whispers in a noisy disco somewhere.
The better apporach is to spot collusion from the outcomes and punish it.
Does the average Slashdot reader need to be shown an e-mail to convince them that Microsoft and Intel have worked together to lock up the PC industry? I don't, and I hope in the future, some Federal prosecutor has the brains and best interest of the county to follow the obvious tracks of collusion without the need of e-mail messages or post-it notes to guide him/her.
Selection of Yahoo for e-mail was stupid for no other reason that Yahoo is a lousy e-mail system.
But then again, I've watched Federal government people sign on to their e-mail at home and guess what?: It's web based. It has cookies, it's hackable, and of course, we have plenty of evidence that they lose things.
There are so many red herrings in this story it has gotten ridiculous. So far the only thing embarrassing about this story to come out is incompetence of some low-level Democratic operative, who at this point has actually committed a crime, and some equal incompetence (presumably) of some yet to be named assistant to the Governor who doesn't know how to do product selection.
If you think there needs to be transparency in government, fine. But you are going to have to do a lot more than the half hearted government archiving of e-mails that occurs now.
Start by mandating video of all government sponsored meetings that don't involve security clearance. Bug every room in Washington and post it all to You-tube. Make video Podcasts out of every meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus. I'm all for trying it.
Oh, but before you do, read up on the aftermath of previous open government efforts at the state level. It may open your eyes.
Hint: As advanced as modern medicine is, we still track the spread of disease by the spread of symptoms, not the travels of individual bacterium or bacteriophages.
It may not be an emulator, but this thing runs as slow as hell on my Debian system. I'm not sure an emulated version of Windows wouldn't be better... but I don't run such things.
I have seen a few things that probably run faster on WINE than they would on native Windows. This just happens to not be one of them. Picasa is so-so. Not great, but usable. This (Chrome) for me isn't usable as a regular browser, beyond just seeing what it looks like.
I'm glad they did this, because otherwise I'd have to convince a Windows user to install it (Chrome) just so I could try it out. Now I've tried it out. I'm not going to be using this port regularly because it drives my system to 100 percent just about the whole time its running. But now I know I like the interface (even without plug-ins) and I look forward to a true Linux implementation.
I've managed to stick with Debian stable this time, but I manually installed Firefox to get the latest version and I've manually installed Picasa, Google Earth, Gizmo, Skype, SecondLife, etc.
It makes zero sense to me for these applications to be firmly tied to the distro. Sure I have no problem with it coming with some known stable version of Firefox with a funny name... it's just that I'm only going to use that version until the next version of Firefox comes out and then I do whatever I have to do to switch.
So, my suggestion has been all along that they deal with Firefox the same way they deal with Microsoft Truetype fonts for the web. Make a dummy package that does nothing more than download the target package from wherever it lives and then unpack and copy some files around. there are some things that have to be integrated with the distro, but there are certainly other things that do not. That would certainly be easier than the re-banding thing they are doing now (although they could continue doing that too if it is important to somebody).
They're not interesting any more. I had some domains with them, but they raised their registrar rate to $35/yr for what costs them very little. They'll probably mention it to somebody one day, but I had to find out on a blog.
I had a similar experience. They outsourced almost all the things like this they did. I signed up thinking "I'm going to get top-notch service and support from Yahoo for my domain!" only to find out I was dealing with one California warehouse based ISP after another. Yes the changed vendors from time to time with little notice and when features you used stopped working you just had to deal with it. Now of course you can get a similar service for free from Google. Why would anyone want to still be using Yahoo?
Oh I was a glutton for punishment from Yahoo, I also got suckered into:
(1) A Yahoo branded dial-up ISP which mysteriously vanished one day (long ago).
(2) Yahoo domain registration and web hosting. I got both of these and soon discovered that the only involvement Yahoo had was the distinctive purple logo on the web pages used to sign up for or administer the service (why hadn't learned from my first experience?). Fortunately I was able to get Network Solutions to rescue my domain names from third party hell. Google makes it clear that you are getting your domain name from a third party, and they tell you who it is, and they make it easy to use someone else. What a concept!
(3) An expensive RIM pager that only worked with a "special" Yahoo service, except it really didn't work at all, was discontinued after a year, leaving you with an expensive conversation piece (or in my case, several of them). I vowed never to do business with Yahoo or RIM again over this. But why did it take me three attempts to learn that as a supplier of services Yahoo was a shit-hole of a company?
By being the market leader for so long and with the help of suckers like me, Yahoo provided an excellent launching ramp for Google, who only had to pay a bit of attention to its customers to seem like something revolutionary. My only question is: Why is Yahoo taking so long to crash and burn?
I think Yahoo and Microsoft would make excellent partners. I hope the merger talks are re-awakened and succeed this time. then I have one less company to hate.
If Linux were to power a nifty device that caught the attention of the masses, that'd certainly be a good first step towards gaining mass acceptance.
That has happened already to some extent. The Asus EEE PC flew off the shelves and now several companies (including HP) are coming out with similar machines, many of which at least have a Linux option.
Linux cut Windows off at many top end server spheres and has now started being very competitive at that lowest end for people who primarily use a computer as a web browser and little else. It will probably be a long time before Linux eats into those machines in the mid-range, but on the other hand Google is giving MS fits in other ways independent of which OS people are running.
The question remains: how will MS adapt to a world in which they no longer call the shots for everyone else but instead have to "play nicely with some of the competition"? Personally I don't think they are going to adjust well to much thinner profit margins that they will experience in advertising, and that consulting work they keep saying they are going after. But we shall see.
Add to what you said that if the debris is traveling at a high speed WRT the ISS, even if it could be detected by radar there wouldn't be a whole lot of time to do anything about it.
The first thing an assembler program had to do on that IBM mainframe (a 3090 if you're interested) was save the registers. I never did find out exactly what would happen if this part was not done, or was bungled, but was warned of dire consequences along the lines of "mainframe crashes" and "perp could be expelled". Just stunning that the OS left a crucial step like that to the applications. The higher level languages covered for the OS by making sure all compiled programs did that step, but in assembler the coders were on their own. An innocent mistake could easily trash the system, no need for malicious intent. Then there was the authentication program, leaving clear text copies of all the passwords in memory. Was child's play to allocate a bunch of uninitialized memory and search it for your own password.
Unless you can provide some specifics (name of some subsystem I've never heard about etc.) I call BS on this.
There is nothing magical about saving registers on a mainframe any more so than on a PC. If you put something in a register and intend to turn control over to some other entity, subroutine, OS call, etc. then you were well advised to save those registers. Other than that, the only "crash" that could occur having to do with registers would be if you were working on code that was actually a part of the operating system. Mainframes were far more resilient in terms of preventing application malfunctions from crashing the OS. Even in the 80s is wasn't uncommon for mainframes to stay up and running for months at a time. No memory leaks, no memory fragmentation, no viruses.
Now I DO remember from a shot time working with CICS in the early 70s that it seemed to operate as one big application that managed it's own memory, multitasking and so on in the same sort of way that early versions of Windows "multitasked" with components cooperatively releasing control and following various conventions or "the whole system" could get hosed. But in that case "the whole system" was CICS, not the OS or the hardware itself. For CICS shops there were always production and various test instances of the system running at the same time in order to allow for separate development and production activities.
By the way, I wrote system level code and violated the "save all registers" convention (and that's all it ever was) all the time. Chances were the registers would come back just how you left them (not that I ever depended on this) because in many cases both the calling program and called programs were saving registers (just in case).
Oh, one more thing I remember is that some system used standardized register saving conventions as a way to trace back program errors. All the major languages used this same convention so that when some deeply buried application routine acted up you could get a nicely formatted dump that showed the calling sequence that led to the error. Writing in assembler though, nothing prevented you from inventing your own convention and I worked with code vended by IBM that did just such things. Maybe something in whatever course you were taking confused you about these conventions.
I agree that Iraq has probably changed those numbers somewhat, but I'm also pretty sure that Iraq will be over soon, in fact it hardly ever qualified as a true war, but surely now is more accurately characterized as an occupation.
I'm all for reducing our military spending (even further) and especially making Europe, Japan, etc. more responsible for their own defense, but you also have to consider that such a move may actually make the world a more volatile place, not less. Even so, I'm tired of our always having to pay the cost of pacification.
Ironic that you consider the CBO partisan (of course one party or another always controls congress. But up against that you suggest an organization composed of avowed socialists and anarchists?...
Sorry, to me that goes beyond simple partisanship. Some of these organizations have direct ties to foreign interests.
While I often think many of the ideas expressed by Democrats are socialist in nature, I at least am fairly confident that they have the long term well-being of this country at heart. This is not rue of many organizations on all parts of the political spectrum. I always look to what the people who run these things have done in their lives (other than run sch organizations) and what the linkages between the organizations are. What you find by dong a simple "whois" can be downright scary.
All I know is that when I worked with mainframes there was no such job classification as "security professional" unless you count the people in charge of guarding the building.
When one mainframe needed to communicate with another we did so over leased lines, and the notion of receiving an executable from another mainframe and running it automatically I don't think would have ever occurred to anyone.
While you might conclude that having a powerful computer on everyone's desktop makes the security exposures we have today inevitable, I don't think it necessarily follows from that that enterprise computing should be as vulnerable as it has gotten. Obviously the "PC revolution" has not resulted in economies of scale, quite the opposite. How many orders of magnitude has growth in enterprise IT gone through? I guarantee you right here an Slashdot there are people who see no problem in downloading large chunks of sensitive data to a machine (even a laptop) outside the data center, for either temporary fiddling, local cache, or whatever and then (if the machine hasn't gotten lost or broken) uploading it to the corporate database overlaying intermediate transactions.
I talk to people working in these environments quite frequently who just don't have a clue. Someone in your job has to not only constantly try and stay a jump ahead of crackers (not hackers!) but also fight with people who are supposed to be on your side about how rules you impose keep them from getting their job done (or so they think). Our profession has been considerably dumbed down in my opinion by the advent of desktop computing. There is no solution in sight. That's why I would find a job like yours unappealing.
If you really want to reduce government spending, decrease the DoD budget.
The only way I've seen anyone support such a claim is to game the numbers so that all DoD (including things that might be questionable as such) are compared with individual programs such as NASA, AIDS research, school lunch programs, etc.
As it shows a steadily declining outlay for defense and a rapid increase in "social spending" (since the 50s!). What's really interesting are the projections for the future, for which defense and everything else are lumped together into one steadily decreasing pool, but note, that in order to not have this forecast seem totally laughable they halt the decrease in "everything else" sometime during the next few years.
At the founding of the country "defense" spending was the one thing the federal government was supposed to do. Obviously a lot has changed since then. People seem to forget that prior to 9/11 and during the former BUSH administration a bipartisan commission decided on the closure a lot of military bases around the country, saving billions of dollars. Those closures didn't actually complete until sometime during the Clinton administration though and he takes delight in claiming to have single handedly reduced the size of government. I don't know of anything else done during that administration to reduce the size of government. Bush II hasn't done much either but again, people forget that before 9/11 they were planning further cuts to the military, even to the point of merging the four major branches in some way to save duplication of efforts. Rumsfeld was far from popular with military brass at the time.
The left has painted a distorted picture of these events. While it may be possible to have a rational argument regarding the distribution of wealth in this country (as you mentioned) such an argument can only be rational if people are using actual facts, and not hyperbole from the Daily Kos.
In any event, the issue raised by the title to your original post can be answered by reviewing the moderator guidelines. Things can get modded up based on the fact that they are interesting, even if you don't happen to agree with them (and with your user number I'm shocked that you don't know this). If you want a pure popularity contest, go visit Digg. Slashdot's moderation system is far from perfect but for a semi-automated system it is about as good as you can get. Some of us aren't only interested in reading things we agree with, again there are well established political blogs where you can do that.
I'd like to see some links supporting your claims, that at least would make your posts more interesting to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah: Anyone who can still rationalize working for this company is an asshole.
Sorry, but that is my belief. I've worked for companies before where people quit on principle even when the company's actions didn't affect them personally. And on those occasions the company had done far less than Microsoft has done to harm the community.
It is high time it became a badge of dishonor to be affiliated with Microsoft in any way.
About damned time!
FTA:
Two authors listed for this, and I would hope someone, besides me, proofread the thing.
Why would I trust anything coming from the mainstream media about politics, science, or anything else?
I don't know what this has to do with the subject at hand, but I agree with you to some extent. I don't agree that it has to do with people addicted to their jobs, although there are certainly people who are. There are also people addicted to the Internet, or addicted to TV viewing or going to those bars you mentioned. If the people who promote the abandonment of religion (and that would be the majority here on Slashdot) can't find a substitute better than just sitting all day hitting refresh on your browser, I don't think there is much hope for things improving.
I'm not saying necessarily that religion is the answer (although it certainly is an answer). But I see few alternatives presenting themselves. Marx said that The State would for a while become our religion, and I don't care what anyone here claims, we are going down the same path as the Soviet Union, only without a bloody revolution. Der Spiegel is today celebrating the death of capitalism and American dominance, except we haven't been practicing capitalism since the 1800s. Popular belief among American "intelligentsia" is that we now have the power to control every aspect of our society and I foresee that after the next election any failure of such control will simply engender a feeling that the controls weren't strict enough. That's what I'm seeing every day in the mainstream media.
That control, ever more sophisticated, will soon, even if it hasn't already, make anonymity impossible. The novel 1984 may have been a failure in terms of the timing, but I don't think it is far off the mark in terms of where we are going, and the direction as well as end-point to me seems fairly inevitable.
I think I have accidentally wandered back on-topic, my-bad.
Like making it only work for Windows? Yeah, that pretty much sucks the life out of it for me.
It runs on a fairly low-end box. I don't own one nor have I tried Myth TV so I can't compare.
But I've got three of the older Roku audio players and I suspect there is a lot of common code.
These never crash, hang, or act-up like PC devices often do (at least in my experience) and behave more like you would associate with an appliance.
+3 (null data type)
ROTFLMAO!!
Mods: don't mess up the chain!
The part of the system where you send them money every month is working just fine. I have inside information that they are not planning to disrupt that in any way.
Funny thing about this "test" is that failure rates went from 3.8 something percent to 4.6 something percent and they say that's good.... but hey that's a 20 percent increase or thereabouts isn't it? And both of those numbers are laughable compared to mainframe failure rates which I think have a decimal point in front of them.
They seem to be saying: "Forget the fact that PCs aren't very reliable, just consider that they are only 20 percent less reliable if you run them in adverse conditions."
WhopDeeDooo!!
Does this mean Debian can go back to using Mozilla/Firefox too?
Or would it still make more sense to implement an easily customized "installer" for Mozilla/Firefox that could be adapted to any distribution and let the distribution install the installer rather than the actual product?
Will the reaction to such devices be to strengthen the security of our cellular networks, or to simply outlaw such devices?
Hmmmm, ponder, ponder, ponder.
My money is on the latter.
Oh, you mean like the White House e-mails?
Now, before I get anyone confused, let me point out that White House e-mails were lost during the Clinton administration too. (People just seem to have conveniently forgotten about that one).
Is the issue one of "Open Government"? Fine, I believe in that too.
Sorry, but I don't buy the idea that one party or the other is the essence of purity in this area.
Years ago they were able to pass "Government in the Sunshine" laws in Florida and as an expatriate of that state I decided to read up on how things had worked out (since I hadn't heard the concept bragged about recently).
Apparently not so well.
Get this through your head: If people want to conspire they will find a way to do it, no matter what obstacles you put in their way. Having government archive e-mails (good in theory, bad in practice with the type of people who work in government) simply means they switch to Blackberries, monitor those they switch to text messages, monitor those they use use post-it notes, track those it will be mouth to ear whispers in a noisy disco somewhere.
The better apporach is to spot collusion from the outcomes and punish it.
Does the average Slashdot reader need to be shown an e-mail to convince them that Microsoft and Intel have worked together to lock up the PC industry? I don't, and I hope in the future, some Federal prosecutor has the brains and best interest of the county to follow the obvious tracks of collusion without the need of e-mail messages or post-it notes to guide him/her.
Selection of Yahoo for e-mail was stupid for no other reason that Yahoo is a lousy e-mail system.
But then again, I've watched Federal government people sign on to their e-mail at home and guess what?: It's web based. It has cookies, it's hackable, and of course, we have plenty of evidence that they lose things.
There are so many red herrings in this story it has gotten ridiculous. So far the only thing embarrassing about this story to come out is incompetence of some low-level Democratic operative, who at this point has actually committed a crime, and some equal incompetence (presumably) of some yet to be named assistant to the Governor who doesn't know how to do product selection.
If you think there needs to be transparency in government, fine. But you are going to have to do a lot more than the half hearted government archiving of e-mails that occurs now.
Start by mandating video of all government sponsored meetings that don't involve security clearance. Bug every room in Washington and post it all to You-tube. Make video Podcasts out of every meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus. I'm all for trying it.
Oh, but before you do, read up on the aftermath of previous open government efforts at the state level. It may open your eyes.
Hint: As advanced as modern medicine is, we still track the spread of disease by the spread of symptoms, not the travels of individual bacterium or bacteriophages.
It may not be an emulator, but this thing runs as slow as hell on my Debian system. I'm not sure an emulated version of Windows wouldn't be better... but I don't run such things.
I have seen a few things that probably run faster on WINE than they would on native Windows. This just happens to not be one of them. Picasa is so-so. Not great, but usable. This (Chrome) for me isn't usable as a regular browser, beyond just seeing what it looks like.
I'm glad they did this, because otherwise I'd have to convince a Windows user to install it (Chrome) just so I could try it out. Now I've tried it out. I'm not going to be using this port regularly because it drives my system to 100 percent just about the whole time its running. But now I know I like the interface (even without plug-ins) and I look forward to a true Linux implementation.
I've managed to stick with Debian stable this time, but I manually installed Firefox to get the latest version and I've manually installed Picasa, Google Earth, Gizmo, Skype, SecondLife, etc.
It makes zero sense to me for these applications to be firmly tied to the distro. Sure I have no problem with it coming with some known stable version of Firefox with a funny name... it's just that I'm only going to use that version until the next version of Firefox comes out and then I do whatever I have to do to switch.
So, my suggestion has been all along that they deal with Firefox the same way they deal with Microsoft Truetype fonts for the web. Make a dummy package that does nothing more than download the target package from wherever it lives and then unpack and copy some files around. there are some things that have to be integrated with the distro, but there are certainly other things that do not. That would certainly be easier than the re-banding thing they are doing now (although they could continue doing that too if it is important to somebody).
I had a similar experience. They outsourced almost all the things like this they did. I signed up thinking "I'm going to get top-notch service and support from Yahoo for my domain!" only to find out I was dealing with one California warehouse based ISP after another. Yes the changed vendors from time to time with little notice and when features you used stopped working you just had to deal with it. Now of course you can get a similar service for free from Google. Why would anyone want to still be using Yahoo?
Oh I was a glutton for punishment from Yahoo, I also got suckered into:
(1) A Yahoo branded dial-up ISP which mysteriously vanished one day (long ago).
(2) Yahoo domain registration and web hosting. I got both of these and soon discovered that the only involvement Yahoo had was the distinctive purple logo on the web pages used to sign up for or administer the service (why hadn't learned from my first experience?). Fortunately I was able to get Network Solutions to rescue my domain names from third party hell. Google makes it clear that you are getting your domain name from a third party, and they tell you who it is, and they make it easy to use someone else. What a concept!
(3) An expensive RIM pager that only worked with a "special" Yahoo service, except it really didn't work at all, was discontinued after a year, leaving you with an expensive conversation piece (or in my case, several of them). I vowed never to do business with Yahoo or RIM again over this. But why did it take me three attempts to learn that as a supplier of services Yahoo was a shit-hole of a company?
By being the market leader for so long and with the help of suckers like me, Yahoo provided an excellent launching ramp for Google, who only had to pay a bit of attention to its customers to seem like something revolutionary. My only question is: Why is Yahoo taking so long to crash and burn?
I think Yahoo and Microsoft would make excellent partners. I hope the merger talks are re-awakened and succeed this time. then I have one less company to hate.
Or Picasa, Gadgets, Lively, some toolbar functionality, and I'm sure there is more.
It would be nice tho at least know when they say that support for other platforms are planned do they mean:
(a) Code is mostly ready and will be released after a couple bugs are squashed (or installer finished etc.)
(b) We've STARTED on a port but it can get tricky with these other OSes.
(c) Staff is selected to begin work on this next week.
(d) We've done squat, but if we told you that a lot of users would be really really mad at us.
That has happened already to some extent. The Asus EEE PC flew off the shelves and now several companies (including HP) are coming out with similar machines, many of which at least have a Linux option.
Linux cut Windows off at many top end server spheres and has now started being very competitive at that lowest end for people who primarily use a computer as a web browser and little else. It will probably be a long time before Linux eats into those machines in the mid-range, but on the other hand Google is giving MS fits in other ways independent of which OS people are running.
The question remains: how will MS adapt to a world in which they no longer call the shots for everyone else but instead have to "play nicely with some of the competition"? Personally I don't think they are going to adjust well to much thinner profit margins that they will experience in advertising, and that consulting work they keep saying they are going after. But we shall see.
Add to what you said that if the debris is traveling at a high speed WRT the ISS, even if it could be detected by radar there wouldn't be a whole lot of time to do anything about it.
Unless you can provide some specifics (name of some subsystem I've never heard about etc.) I call BS on this.
There is nothing magical about saving registers on a mainframe any more so than on a PC. If you put something in a register and intend to turn control over to some other entity, subroutine, OS call, etc. then you were well advised to save those registers. Other than that, the only "crash" that could occur having to do with registers would be if you were working on code that was actually a part of the operating system. Mainframes were far more resilient in terms of preventing application malfunctions from crashing the OS. Even in the 80s is wasn't uncommon for mainframes to stay up and running for months at a time. No memory leaks, no memory fragmentation, no viruses.
Now I DO remember from a shot time working with CICS in the early 70s that it seemed to operate as one big application that managed it's own memory, multitasking and so on in the same sort of way that early versions of Windows "multitasked" with components cooperatively releasing control and following various conventions or "the whole system" could get hosed. But in that case "the whole system" was CICS, not the OS or the hardware itself. For CICS shops there were always production and various test instances of the system running at the same time in order to allow for separate development and production activities.
By the way, I wrote system level code and violated the "save all registers" convention (and that's all it ever was) all the time. Chances were the registers would come back just how you left them (not that I ever depended on this) because in many cases both the calling program and called programs were saving registers (just in case).
Oh, one more thing I remember is that some system used standardized register saving conventions as a way to trace back program errors. All the major languages used this same convention so that when some deeply buried application routine acted up you could get a nicely formatted dump that showed the calling sequence that led to the error. Writing in assembler though, nothing prevented you from inventing your own convention and I worked with code vended by IBM that did just such things. Maybe something in whatever course you were taking confused you about these conventions.
Sorry about blaming you for the title.
I agree that Iraq has probably changed those numbers somewhat, but I'm also pretty sure that Iraq will be over soon, in fact it hardly ever qualified as a true war, but surely now is more accurately characterized as an occupation.
I'm all for reducing our military spending (even further) and especially making Europe, Japan, etc. more responsible for their own defense, but you also have to consider that such a move may actually make the world a more volatile place, not less. Even so, I'm tired of our always having to pay the cost of pacification.
Ironic that you consider the CBO partisan (of course one party or another always controls congress. But up against that you suggest an organization composed of avowed socialists and anarchists?...
http://www.warresisters.org/nva/nva0101-5.htm
Sorry, to me that goes beyond simple partisanship. Some of these organizations have direct ties to foreign interests.
While I often think many of the ideas expressed by Democrats are socialist in nature, I at least am fairly confident that they have the long term well-being of this country at heart. This is not rue of many organizations on all parts of the political spectrum. I always look to what the people who run these things have done in their lives (other than run sch organizations) and what the linkages between the organizations are. What you find by dong a simple "whois" can be downright scary.
If you say you're happy, then why question that?
All I know is that when I worked with mainframes there was no such job classification as "security professional" unless you count the people in charge of guarding the building.
When one mainframe needed to communicate with another we did so over leased lines, and the notion of receiving an executable from another mainframe and running it automatically I don't think would have ever occurred to anyone.
While you might conclude that having a powerful computer on everyone's desktop makes the security exposures we have today inevitable, I don't think it necessarily follows from that that enterprise computing should be as vulnerable as it has gotten. Obviously the "PC revolution" has not resulted in economies of scale, quite the opposite. How many orders of magnitude has growth in enterprise IT gone through? I guarantee you right here an Slashdot there are people who see no problem in downloading large chunks of sensitive data to a machine (even a laptop) outside the data center, for either temporary fiddling, local cache, or whatever and then (if the machine hasn't gotten lost or broken) uploading it to the corporate database overlaying intermediate transactions.
I talk to people working in these environments quite frequently who just don't have a clue. Someone in your job has to not only constantly try and stay a jump ahead of crackers (not hackers!) but also fight with people who are supposed to be on your side about how rules you impose keep them from getting their job done (or so they think). Our profession has been considerably dumbed down in my opinion by the advent of desktop computing. There is no solution in sight. That's why I would find a job like yours unappealing.
The only way I've seen anyone support such a claim is to game the numbers so that all DoD (including things that might be questionable as such) are compared with individual programs such as NASA, AIDS research, school lunch programs, etc.
A fairer analysis in my opinion can be fund here:
http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/35xx/doc3521/352101.gif
As it shows a steadily declining outlay for defense and a rapid increase in "social spending" (since the 50s!). What's really interesting are the projections for the future, for which defense and everything else are lumped together into one steadily decreasing pool, but note, that in order to not have this forecast seem totally laughable they halt the decrease in "everything else" sometime during the next few years.
http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/35xx/doc3521/352102.gif
The above graphs can be seen in in context here:
http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=3521&type=0
You might also fnd these interesting:
http://perotcharts.com/
At the founding of the country "defense" spending was the one thing the federal government was supposed to do. Obviously a lot has changed since then. People seem to forget that prior to 9/11 and during the former BUSH administration a bipartisan commission decided on the closure a lot of military bases around the country, saving billions of dollars. Those closures didn't actually complete until sometime during the Clinton administration though and he takes delight in claiming to have single handedly reduced the size of government. I don't know of anything else done during that administration to reduce the size of government. Bush II hasn't done much either but again, people forget that before 9/11 they were planning further cuts to the military, even to the point of merging the four major branches in some way to save duplication of efforts. Rumsfeld was far from popular with military brass at the time.
The left has painted a distorted picture of these events. While it may be possible to have a rational argument regarding the distribution of wealth in this country (as you mentioned) such an argument can only be rational if people are using actual facts, and not hyperbole from the Daily Kos.
In any event, the issue raised by the title to your original post can be answered by reviewing the moderator guidelines. Things can get modded up based on the fact that they are interesting, even if you don't happen to agree with them (and with your user number I'm shocked that you don't know this). If you want a pure popularity contest, go visit Digg. Slashdot's moderation system is far from perfect but for a semi-automated system it is about as good as you can get. Some of us aren't only interested in reading things we agree with, again there are well established political blogs where you can do that.
I'd like to see some links supporting your claims, that at least would make your posts more interesting to me.
Or program the Windows OS in .net?