As a parent of two, I agree with the essence of your post. Many parents today just fuck it up and blame society, the "times", the Internet, whatever for their fuckup. People act as if it was immoral or something to act authorative towards you children. It's the opposite, authority is essential. But authority doesn't mean dictatorship, it means being the person your children will listen to.
The point is, however, that you have to acknowlegde that children are unique individuals which must not be denied their right to develop themselves to the persons they are. This doesn't and shouldn't stop me or anyone from teaching them behaviour and manners 101, hovever.
People should stop listening to "experts" and learn to trust their parenting instincts instead. After all, you are the one who knows your child best, and if *you* don't know how to raise your kid, how can you expect a total stranger, possibly not even a parent herself, how to do it? It's ridiculous, and it's the cause for *many* problems we are seeing today.
I'm not trolling, just curious - is this really a "cool new" feature in the US? Here in Europe, most new cars from middle-class upwards have this. Just carry your keycard in your wallet and press the Start button.
Then actually you and me pursue different strategies of dealing with multiple mail accounts. I really *hate* setting up multiple accounts (partly because of the hassle you mention), so I redirect mail from all the other accounts to my main account and sort them into separate folders on arrival. Maybe this can save you lots of time, I know it does for me.
(Yeah, I know that it's a single point of failure, but I haven't had *any* mail outages in seven or eight years, and if the main mail server fails, there's still two failbacks on different networks, so what the fuck.;) )
As for the mod points - if you moderate in a discussion and post afterwards, your mod point will be lost, that was what I was referring to. My reply cost me three points, but if my post helped just one slashbot, it's well worth it, and I regularly get mod points anyway.
I guess you haven't noticed that you can just copy the mailbox and index files of the old installation into the mail directory of the new installation, no? This works since the Moz 0.x days and also between Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird, even cross-platform between Windows, Linux and OSX.
While I avoid the stand-alone apps under Linux for exactly the reasons you're giving. OTOH, I'm posting this from my OSX box and there clicking on links from Thunderbird mail automatically opens a new tab in Firefox, so I wonder why this isn't the default in the Linux versions.
Yeah, and while we're at it - which women were there for Adam's and Eve's offspring? All I can say is "Wow Mom, you're HOT". I must say the creationists are always god for some laughs.
Why is this flamebait? IIRC, dir in DOS 6.x had options to show only files of a certain age or file size, which leaves only contents aside, for which search tools also were available in the 'basic distro'.
Actually, there are lots of people who believe that this is a "brand new way of downloading". Of course, those are of the kind who came on the net when DSL was available and who have their machines on 24/7 just to download movies and music they'll never get to watch and listen to in their lifetimes.
I've given up on downloading years ago. I just don't care enough to wait days for downloads to complete and find out how to a) uncompress the shitty, obscure compression format du jour and b) how to convert the shitty, obscure codec du jour junk to something usable (or even just *play* it). Plus, if you factor in all associated cost like DSL and flat rate fees and electricity, that makes for a whole bunch of DVDs you can rent or CDs you can buy.
We are still talking about corporate machines. It's common practice to have the profiles on the network, not on the workstations, and if someone somehow manages to store stuff locally, I couldn't care less about deleting it. That's what network storage is for, and people have no business storing private stuff on corporate machines.
I agree on educating users, however. Unfortunately I feel that people
a) don't want to hear about this "strange computer stuff" b) don't follow *any* advice c) think that it's IT's fault they got infected anyway
(One could argue that c) is true to a degree if you're using Windows, but there often is no choice of OS, so let's leave that alone. *g*)
I'm with you that certification is bullshit. It's just something to make HR work easy, because otherwise they'd have to really find out whether someone can do a job, the horror. *gasp* Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic on this one.
However, the "Freak Squad" simply is correct. Simply restoring the standard installation from the disk image on the central server is the only way to go.
1. Most spyware opens back doors. Even if you uninstall the spyware, there can always be other malware on the machine already. 2. Hunting for spyware takes a lot of time if done properly. It takes especially long if you consider point 1 and check every nook and cranny of the system, and you have a high probability of you overlooking something tiny and obscure. 3. Restoring the system image usually is a netboot away. It takes about 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of your standard installation.
You cannot do a proper spyware hunt in 5 to 20 minutes and even if you could, there would still be some good chance you are left with a zombied machine. The image, on the other hand, is well known to be clean. So it's quicker and it's safe to restore from the clean image, while hunting stuff down basically is a waste of productive time.
Then again, what keeps people from a distributed spidering effort? Full text of the articles is still available, it's just a bit more work in constructing the URLs you pass on to wget.
Sheesh, that fucking filter. The toolbar link should read
ftp:// user : password @ server . tld
It'll login just fine with one click, without having to enter a PW, which from my experience is very important. Instant One-Click file dump.
And while we're at it, I'm not using Windows for two years now, maybe she could even just extract the link to the file by right-clicking it and selecting "Copy link location" or whatever it's called. This implies knowledge of Copy and Paste, but most people who don't know of it appreciate it very quickly.
Huh? Just setup an FTP server to drop her files into a directory that is accessible via HTTP and tell her the link to the file is always http://foo.bar/files/ + the file name. Then place a link to ftp://server.tld/ in her toolbar favourites in IE or whatever she uses and tell her to simply drop the file into the window.
She can then mail the link to the people who want the file.
(And, turn off accessing the directory listing to prevent snooping. Might be obvious to you and me, but I've seen stupid web server admins leave directory listings accessible a *lot*, and even some lawsuits because of it, so it might not be obvious to all.)
+5, Insightful? Geezus. Mods obviously don't have kids.
It depends on their age. I imagine the OT has rather young kids you can't leave unattended. Of course your teenagers can stay at home without a sitter, but my 3 and 1 year old certainly can't.
Of course objects 'stick around between page loads' - just store them in your session and restore them as the first action on the loaded page. If you don't use sessions because you dislike cookies, just configure your PHP to use server-side sessions by default or cast the unholy INI set rune to override the unfavoured default.
The thing you're looking for is called 'courier service'. Call the store to depose the wanted good for you, send courier to pay and retrieve, pay courier. I work in advertising, this is done there for *decades*.
Actually buying stuff like this is a minor portion of all those couriers we call each day (most deliver proofs or hard disks with data that would be impractical to transfer via the net), but we get our 'emergency' hardware like this and it's usually faster than what most vendors hardware support contracts offer to you. You call the deliverer, courier picks it up. Takes around 20 minutes until I hold the hardware in my hands.
And it's not particularly expensive, either. Said hardware delivery would usually be around 7 EUR, but it depends on distance.
While we're at it, if we're talking stuff like getting the munchies at 3 in the morning and wanting some whoppers or something, you can always call a taxi and have it deliver the food or whatever you need. They might require getting the money for the food up front to get rid of prank calls, but if you call the same cab company always, they will know they can trust you and have the nearest driver pick up your stuff. Then getting your quarter pounder costs you around 5-7 EUR. I'd say this is a fine price for not having to drive around to buy stuff.
You are SO right. I vented off through games a lot in my youth. I have fond memories of a C64 game called "Teacher Busters" in which you could enter the names of your teachers and hunt them down in a forest with a tank. It had several weapons for the tank, from grenades to flamethrowers and whatnot and, what I liked very much, you could run over the teachers too. It cost you a fee for cleaning up the tank though.
I think games are *great* for venting off and my kids for sure will grow up with video and computer games so that they can learn the difference between games and reality. It only takes a bit of parenting if you teach them a healthy portion of 'question everything'.
Or, rather increasing sales makes hardware vendors simply put their BSD drivers with a nice OSX installer on the disc because it will help them sell more stuff without much effort. (Applies only to companies *having* BSD drivers, but who hasn't CUPS support, for example? OSX runs CUPS, so including it on the disc is almost painless.)
I'm in advertising, and I can tell you hardware companies use *any* opportunity to sell more stuff, as long as it's profitable somehow. So something that costs a four-digit amount total to sell even only 10.000 units (a joke really for major hardware vendors) will usually make up on it.
They have to figure this out, however. I make a good living telling them things like that. If you ever get tired of working in the IT field, change into advertising. It's good fun and pays better. (It's also very unpredictable and a lot of stress, much of it not positive, so YMMV.)
Actually, I think you haven't looked into FreeBSD very deeply. I post this from a Mandrake 10.1 box, but we have FreeBSD servers at work so I read quite a bit of the docs and always have some FreeBSD box around to play with from time to time. I cannot observe what you're saying.
FreeBSD is rather high-end. I don't care for drivers, I don't game and I have no cheap or weird hardware so I can't bitch about that. My machine is five years old and runs FreeBSD just fine without having to tweak *anything*. YMMV, obviously some hardware is difficult to get to work, but I have never experienced it.
The ports collection rocks. You can auto-update it via cvsup and it's usually *much* more current than most Linux distros I've used for long enough to make claims about (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, and those are *quite* up to date if you autoupdate frequently). If you don't like compile times, just use binary packages they happily provide you with.
So it's up to date and it's much more secure by default, and you can turn it into a reall fortress with all those nice details like ACL, chrooted jails etc. etc. so Linux is no match here.
Still, I use Linux on my desktop as I feel more comfortable with it. My inner geek knows that technically FreeBSD might be superior, but Linux is just more fun. But FreeBSD definitely has a strong identity. It makes a nice alternative between OpenBSD for the technical perfectionists and Linux with it's huge mass of software. (And FreeBSD runs Linux binaries just fine through the Linux Compatibility Thingamabob. So I heard. I just never had to as all software is availably instantly for FreeBSD.)
The point you're missing is that a computer which runs all the time costs money and the bandwidth costs money even if you have a flat rate, there's still cost associated with it. I know I am amongst a minority by not having several boxen running and on the net all the time, but here in Germany (in fact, almost anywhere outside the U.S.) electricity isn't exactly cheap. A regular desktop machine (not something fanless and energy-saving) running 24/365 using some 100W adds up to a nice electricity bill. (I know it well.) Add in all associated cost as DSL and ISP fees, and you're well into a four-digit amount per year. This buys a lot of CD's and DVD's.
And I know your pain concerning finding music in my collection. That's why I have that nice 200 GB drive in my box containing MP3s of my complete CD collection. It took quite some time to rip it all, but if you make a habit out of ripping anything on the spot you want to listen to, it adds up until there's only the obscure stuff left, and that can be ripped in one or two days in the background while doing your usual work.
Last time I installed Windows Media Player on a Mac was around Mac OS 9.2, shortly before leaving the Mac for a FreeBSD box. Media Player was a huge mess back then, although it was advertised as one of the greatest things since sliced bread. I must say I haven't even considered Media Player even still existed for the Mac, as really NOBODY used it back then......and then again, installing DRM-laden MS software to my Mac just to play a crappy proprietary file format seems at least at bit odd. If people don't want to use standard formats (read: plain MPEG or something similarly compatible), they don't want me to watch their content, obviously..RM went away as a mainstream format because it was crappy, and hopefully WMA will do so, too. At least one can dream.
(Yes, I'll look at MP anyways, thanks for the hint - Quicktime is just as ugly and incapable as WMP, so I can as well try it.)
Only so many people refused to use Media Player, refused to convert to WMA, refused to thus buy WMA supported portable media players, that Microsoft had to rethink and rethink fast.
Which would be nice if it were true. Sadly, it isn't. Most of the 'funny videos' I get sent or see on web sites are WMA today, which both my Mac OS X 10.3 PowerBook and my linux box won't run. Not that I'd bother, I've got better things to do with my time, but average Joe, who watches lots of those videos, sees WMA everywhere. Guess how my Dad would like not being able to watch his huge 'funny clip' archive. Guess how that would influence his inclination to switch to Linux or a Mac.
I agree with you on the issue, but I guess if Longhorn comes with DRM-only WMA, people will have a hard time porting the codec to Linux and OSX. If the use of WMA increases as much as it does at the moment for a year, WMA will be the dominant file format for MANY things video (from an average Joe's perspective). So it is actually quite smart from MS to do this. It's a great opportunity and they know there won't be many more. They lose momentum, and they lose it fast. If Longhorn doesn't cut it, they're toast in the long run and will have to diversify, concentrate on their media business. Which is fine for me because it will weaken Windows further.
The market is changing and they know it. They're not stupid. I don't like them like most people here, but you must admit they're actually rather smart. Luck had only had a bit to do with it. It was lots of good business decisions that put them into today's position in the market.
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As a parent of two, I agree with the essence of your post. Many parents today just fuck it up and blame society, the "times", the Internet, whatever for their fuckup. People act as if it was immoral or something to act authorative towards you children. It's the opposite, authority is essential. But authority doesn't mean dictatorship, it means being the person your children will listen to.
The point is, however, that you have to acknowlegde that children are unique individuals which must not be denied their right to develop themselves to the persons they are. This doesn't and shouldn't stop me or anyone from teaching them behaviour and manners 101, hovever.
People should stop listening to "experts" and learn to trust their parenting instincts instead. After all, you are the one who knows your child best, and if *you* don't know how to raise your kid, how can you expect a total stranger, possibly not even a parent herself, how to do it? It's ridiculous, and it's the cause for *many* problems we are seeing today.
Huh? How is this special?
I'm not trolling, just curious - is this really a "cool new" feature in the US? Here in Europe, most new cars from middle-class upwards have this. Just carry your keycard in your wallet and press the Start button.
Then actually you and me pursue different strategies of dealing with multiple mail accounts. I really *hate* setting up multiple accounts (partly because of the hassle you mention), so I redirect mail from all the other accounts to my main account and sort them into separate folders on arrival. Maybe this can save you lots of time, I know it does for me.
;) )
(Yeah, I know that it's a single point of failure, but I haven't had *any* mail outages in seven or eight years, and if the main mail server fails, there's still two failbacks on different networks, so what the fuck.
As for the mod points - if you moderate in a discussion and post afterwards, your mod point will be lost, that was what I was referring to. My reply cost me three points, but if my post helped just one slashbot, it's well worth it, and I regularly get mod points anyway.
There go my mod points, but whatever.
I guess you haven't noticed that you can just copy the mailbox and index files of the old installation into the mail directory of the new installation, no? This works since the Moz 0.x days and also between Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird, even cross-platform between Windows, Linux and OSX.
While I avoid the stand-alone apps under Linux for exactly the reasons you're giving. OTOH, I'm posting this from my OSX box and there clicking on links from Thunderbird mail automatically opens a new tab in Firefox, so I wonder why this isn't the default in the Linux versions.
Yeah, what a nice Freudian. I noticed it the second I clicked 'Submit' but then thought I'd leave it as an exercise to the AC. ;)
Yeah, and while we're at it - which women were there for Adam's and Eve's offspring? All I can say is "Wow Mom, you're HOT". I must say the creationists are always god for some laughs.
Why is this flamebait? IIRC, dir in DOS 6.x had options to show only files of a certain age or file size, which leaves only contents aside, for which search tools also were available in the 'basic distro'.
Actually, there are lots of people who believe that this is a "brand new way of downloading". Of course, those are of the kind who came on the net when DSL was available and who have their machines on 24/7 just to download movies and music they'll never get to watch and listen to in their lifetimes.
I've given up on downloading years ago. I just don't care enough to wait days for downloads to complete and find out how to a) uncompress the shitty, obscure compression format du jour and b) how to convert the shitty, obscure codec du jour junk to something usable (or even just *play* it). Plus, if you factor in all associated cost like DSL and flat rate fees and electricity, that makes for a whole bunch of DVDs you can rent or CDs you can buy.
FWIW, we have such a law here in Germany too, but it's already been weakened and will probably go away.
We are still talking about corporate machines. It's common practice to have the profiles on the network, not on the workstations, and if someone somehow manages to store stuff locally, I couldn't care less about deleting it. That's what network storage is for, and people have no business storing private stuff on corporate machines.
I agree on educating users, however. Unfortunately I feel that people
a) don't want to hear about this "strange computer stuff"
b) don't follow *any* advice
c) think that it's IT's fault they got infected anyway
(One could argue that c) is true to a degree if you're using Windows, but there often is no choice of OS, so let's leave that alone. *g*)
I'm with you that certification is bullshit. It's just something to make HR work easy, because otherwise they'd have to really find out whether someone can do a job, the horror. *gasp* Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic on this one.
However, the "Freak Squad" simply is correct. Simply restoring the standard installation from the disk image on the central server is the only way to go.
1. Most spyware opens back doors. Even if you uninstall the spyware, there can always be other malware on the machine already.
2. Hunting for spyware takes a lot of time if done properly. It takes especially long if you consider point 1 and check every nook and cranny of the system, and you have a high probability of you overlooking something tiny and obscure.
3. Restoring the system image usually is a netboot away. It takes about 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of your standard installation.
You cannot do a proper spyware hunt in 5 to 20 minutes and even if you could, there would still be some good chance you are left with a zombied machine. The image, on the other hand, is well known to be clean. So it's quicker and it's safe to restore from the clean image, while hunting stuff down basically is a waste of productive time.
Then again, what keeps people from a distributed spidering effort? Full text of the articles is still available, it's just a bit more work in constructing the URLs you pass on to wget.
Sheesh, that fucking filter. The toolbar link should read
// user : password @ server . tld
ftp:
It'll login just fine with one click, without having to enter a PW, which from my experience is very important. Instant One-Click file dump.
And while we're at it, I'm not using Windows for two years now, maybe she could even just extract the link to the file by right-clicking it and selecting "Copy link location" or whatever it's called. This implies knowledge of Copy and Paste, but most people who don't know of it appreciate it very quickly.
Huh? Just setup an FTP server to drop her files into a directory that is accessible via HTTP and tell her the link to the file is always http://foo.bar/files/ + the file name. Then place a link to ftp://server.tld/ in her toolbar favourites in IE or whatever she uses and tell her to simply drop the file into the window.
She can then mail the link to the people who want the file.
(And, turn off accessing the directory listing to prevent snooping. Might be obvious to you and me, but I've seen stupid web server admins leave directory listings accessible a *lot*, and even some lawsuits because of it, so it might not be obvious to all.)
+5, Insightful? Geezus. Mods obviously don't have kids.
It depends on their age. I imagine the OT has rather young kids you can't leave unattended. Of course your teenagers can stay at home without a sitter, but my 3 and 1 year old certainly can't.
Of course objects 'stick around between page loads' - just store them in your session and restore them as the first action on the loaded page. If you don't use sessions because you dislike cookies, just configure your PHP to use server-side sessions by default or cast the unholy INI set rune to override the unfavoured default.
Dear fellow assmaster,
GEEZUS, stop it already!
Or rather, don't. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Props to Tom for mentioning this golden nugget of slashdottery in his journal.
The thing you're looking for is called 'courier service'. Call the store to depose the wanted good for you, send courier to pay and retrieve, pay courier. I work in advertising, this is done there for *decades*.
Actually buying stuff like this is a minor portion of all those couriers we call each day (most deliver proofs or hard disks with data that would be impractical to transfer via the net), but we get our 'emergency' hardware like this and it's usually faster than what most vendors hardware support contracts offer to you. You call the deliverer, courier picks it up. Takes around 20 minutes until I hold the hardware in my hands.
And it's not particularly expensive, either. Said hardware delivery would usually be around 7 EUR, but it depends on distance.
While we're at it, if we're talking stuff like getting the munchies at 3 in the morning and wanting some whoppers or something, you can always call a taxi and have it deliver the food or whatever you need. They might require getting the money for the food up front to get rid of prank calls, but if you call the same cab company always, they will know they can trust you and have the nearest driver pick up your stuff. Then getting your quarter pounder costs you around 5-7 EUR. I'd say this is a fine price for not having to drive around to buy stuff.
You are SO right. I vented off through games a lot in my youth. I have fond memories of a C64 game called "Teacher Busters" in which you could enter the names of your teachers and hunt them down in a forest with a tank. It had several weapons for the tank, from grenades to flamethrowers and whatnot and, what I liked very much, you could run over the teachers too. It cost you a fee for cleaning up the tank though.
I think games are *great* for venting off and my kids for sure will grow up with video and computer games so that they can learn the difference between games and reality. It only takes a bit of parenting if you teach them a healthy portion of 'question everything'.
Or, rather increasing sales makes hardware vendors simply put their BSD drivers with a nice OSX installer on the disc because it will help them sell more stuff without much effort. (Applies only to companies *having* BSD drivers, but who hasn't CUPS support, for example? OSX runs CUPS, so including it on the disc is almost painless.)
I'm in advertising, and I can tell you hardware companies use *any* opportunity to sell more stuff, as long as it's profitable somehow. So something that costs a four-digit amount total to sell even only 10.000 units (a joke really for major hardware vendors) will usually make up on it.
They have to figure this out, however. I make a good living telling them things like that. If you ever get tired of working in the IT field, change into advertising. It's good fun and pays better. (It's also very unpredictable and a lot of stress, much of it not positive, so YMMV.)
Actually, I think you haven't looked into FreeBSD very deeply. I post this from a Mandrake 10.1 box, but we have FreeBSD servers at work so I read quite a bit of the docs and always have some FreeBSD box around to play with from time to time. I cannot observe what you're saying.
FreeBSD is rather high-end. I don't care for drivers, I don't game and I have no cheap or weird hardware so I can't bitch about that. My machine is five years old and runs FreeBSD just fine without having to tweak *anything*. YMMV, obviously some hardware is difficult to get to work, but I have never experienced it.
The ports collection rocks. You can auto-update it via cvsup and it's usually *much* more current than most Linux distros I've used for long enough to make claims about (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, and those are *quite* up to date if you autoupdate frequently). If you don't like compile times, just use binary packages they happily provide you with.
So it's up to date and it's much more secure by default, and you can turn it into a reall fortress with all those nice details like ACL, chrooted jails etc. etc. so Linux is no match here.
Still, I use Linux on my desktop as I feel more comfortable with it. My inner geek knows that technically FreeBSD might be superior, but Linux is just more fun. But FreeBSD definitely has a strong identity. It makes a nice alternative between OpenBSD for the technical perfectionists and Linux with it's huge mass of software. (And FreeBSD runs Linux binaries just fine through the Linux Compatibility Thingamabob. So I heard. I just never had to as all software is availably instantly for FreeBSD.)
The point you're missing is that a computer which runs all the time costs money and the bandwidth costs money even if you have a flat rate, there's still cost associated with it. I know I am amongst a minority by not having several boxen running and on the net all the time, but here in Germany (in fact, almost anywhere outside the U.S.) electricity isn't exactly cheap. A regular desktop machine (not something fanless and energy-saving) running 24/365 using some 100W adds up to a nice electricity bill. (I know it well.) Add in all associated cost as DSL and ISP fees, and you're well into a four-digit amount per year. This buys a lot of CD's and DVD's.
And I know your pain concerning finding music in my collection. That's why I have that nice 200 GB drive in my box containing MP3s of my complete CD collection. It took quite some time to rip it all, but if you make a habit out of ripping anything on the spot you want to listen to, it adds up until there's only the obscure stuff left, and that can be ripped in one or two days in the background while doing your usual work.
Last time I installed Windows Media Player on a Mac was around Mac OS 9.2, shortly before leaving the Mac for a FreeBSD box. Media Player was a huge mess back then, although it was advertised as one of the greatest things since sliced bread. I must say I haven't even considered Media Player even still existed for the Mac, as really NOBODY used it back then... ...and then again, installing DRM-laden MS software to my Mac just to play a crappy proprietary file format seems at least at bit odd. If people don't want to use standard formats (read: plain MPEG or something similarly compatible), they don't want me to watch their content, obviously. .RM went away as a mainstream format because it was crappy, and hopefully WMA will do so, too. At least one can dream.
(Yes, I'll look at MP anyways, thanks for the hint - Quicktime is just as ugly and incapable as WMP, so I can as well try it.)
Which would be nice if it were true. Sadly, it isn't. Most of the 'funny videos' I get sent or see on web sites are WMA today, which both my Mac OS X 10.3 PowerBook and my linux box won't run. Not that I'd bother, I've got better things to do with my time, but average Joe, who watches lots of those videos, sees WMA everywhere. Guess how my Dad would like not being able to watch his huge 'funny clip' archive. Guess how that would influence his inclination to switch to Linux or a Mac.
I agree with you on the issue, but I guess if Longhorn comes with DRM-only WMA, people will have a hard time porting the codec to Linux and OSX. If the use of WMA increases as much as it does at the moment for a year, WMA will be the dominant file format for MANY things video (from an average Joe's perspective). So it is actually quite smart from MS to do this. It's a great opportunity and they know there won't be many more. They lose momentum, and they lose it fast. If Longhorn doesn't cut it, they're toast in the long run and will have to diversify, concentrate on their media business. Which is fine for me because it will weaken Windows further.
The market is changing and they know it. They're not stupid. I don't like them like most people here, but you must admit they're actually rather smart. Luck had only had a bit to do with it. It was lots of good business decisions that put them into today's position in the market.