Why is it so hard for these people to implement Write-Once Read-Many? Burn the vote(s) onto optical media and be done with it. When the media fills up, replace it and transport the media (you made three or more copies of the same disk, right?) by different routes accompanied by security officers. Look Ma! No network!
This business of sloshing this incredibly sensitive data around on networks is completely irresponsible.
Doesn't avoid the issue of having a "central tabulator" designed for manipulation, but you can easily design a tabulator (or better, multiple independent tabulators) that you can prove to be free of back doors, given that the source is available.
Hee hee hee... I find the following bit from Microsoft's instructions on how to clean the trojans funny:
Note If you have difficulty running the Download.Ject removal tool from this page, it may be due to your browser's security settings. You can also try downloading the removal tool... (emphasis added)
Basically, they're saying that you don't have IE in pants-down mode, so their ActiveX scripty-do can't run. Is that ironic, or just amusing?
It's a shame that you choose not to distinguish sardonic wit (even if it is in bad taste) from insanity. You must take those words out of the context in which they were written to ascribe malice to them.
She also did not accuse "half the country" of treason, but made a very specific inference against journalists and polititians who took public and extreme liberal views or who exhibited actual traitorous behavior (like the harboring of known Soviet spies). That does not include the general voting public.
It's fine to disagree with her political viewpoint, but be reasonable about it, please. For example, I'm confident that Michael Moore is sane, and I also hold the opinion that he knowingly attempts to mislead. This is a kind of overkill on his part to achieve persuasion. So he may be wrong, but he's not mentally ill.
Returning to Anne Coulter, she may knowingly attempt to mislead to achieve persuasion (which she certainly did do in Treason) but she is not insane, nor entirely incorrect.
As for Treason being meanspirited, well, that's irony for you.
Hopefully, IBM can sue on something to get Darl and his boys personally and not just SCO.
Unnecessary. If I remember correctly from previous newsclippings, the SEC is already sniffing around Darl and his boys for securities fraud (pump and dump of SCOX).
No. At the heart of communism is the notion that every person owns everything. The distinction is very important.
The distinction is artificial. If everyone "owns" everything, then no one person can own one thing in the sense that they bear sole responsibility for it and have the sole right to enjoy it. My premise of it being inhumane is based on the notion that communism attempts to do away with individual rights in favor of group rights, and that it makes basic assumption that people will not act for the common good. I will state this as an opinion: I believe a system of group rights to be inherently unstable as it inevitably leads to different rights for different groups. You end up with class distinctions and power differences, usually based on the assumptions about people I mention in my previous post.
Correlating communism with totalitarianism is quite reasonable given the evidence in the real world. Ideals aside, everywhere communism has been attempted it has degenerated into some form of totalitarianism.
Assigning of individual rights, including the right to earn and own, is more stable (it can still degenerate). It still lumps people into groups (citizen, foreign resident, visitor) but even so individual rights apply to these people.
Those who do understand communism and think it's bad do so because they want to be better/richer/more powerful than others, which is impossible in a communistic society.
Logical fallacy. You assign greed to someone because they hold an opinion, but this personality trait cannot be attributed solely on the basis of a post to SlashDot, or even the holding of an opinion that differs from yours. I will therefore hold it to be an opinion you are expressing and simply disagree with you.
Well... I did read the article, and it sounded to me that some web page author got overly enthusiastic about when people ought to buy a license for MySQL. Reading anything more into it would seem to be sensationalism to drive people to the clipping (IMHO).
People think communism is bad because it cannot work. At the heart of communism is the notion that no person owns anything, and this is fundamentally inhumane.
First, it leaps to the assumption that no person would ever share were they allowed to own. So, by default, a communist government must treat its subjects as criminals, people "whose nature it must be to steal from the common."
Second, it forces a distinction between people who may choose how others live and people who will be told how they must live. It enforces a class structure on the subject society and is hence biased toward totalitarianism. "Only I am smart enough / wise enough / good enough to determine how my people will live and who gets what."
How is that ideal? As a default condition it strips away human dignity. It mandates that you may not eat of the food you planted, you may not live in the house you built. Worse, it denies you the opportunity to be generous and charitable.
...I don't like Walmart anymore than anyone else...
So now we don't like Wal-Mart either? I get not liking SCO (may their camels have stinky breath) or Microsoft (may their cell phones run Windows), but what's wrong with Wal-Mart?
A large part of the communication problem is that these terms are open to interpretation. (Puts on grammar hat) You see, "open" is not a complete adjective. For it to have any real meaning, you must modify it to say what something is open to.
Solaris is at once open and closed, but to what is it open, and to what is it closed? That's what really matters, and that's why it does indeed depend on the user's preferences of interpretation.
Yeah... I heard that the real reason XP SP2 is delayed is because they couldn't figure out how to keep that "installing Gecko engine" message from popping up during setup.
A colleague of mine said there was one feature on his wish-list for Internet Explorer: INActiveX. It would download all those whiz-bang controls and do nothing.
1 a : a source of diversion : RECREATION b : sexual play c (1) : physical activity engaged in for pleasure (2) : a particular activity (as an athletic game) so engaged in
So hunting, fishing, poker, and (yuck) math, if they're done for fun or competition can be considered sport. Granted that's not usually what's thought of when one hear's sport.
According to the dictionary, a sport is any activity used as a diversion, or recreation. A bit further down among the definitions it mentions athletics. So, letting my software geekness show, AthleticSport is a specialization of Sport, and so mathematics as a diversion could technically qualify as a sport.
I can't imagine watching it with a beer and a hotdog, however.
If you wait long enough, you will be using a UNIX variant. In fact, the bits you're relying on to read Slashdot, assuming you read it from your WinXP PC, originated in a UNIX distribution.
Personally, I get along fine with Windows (writing to you using XP Pro at the moment). But I don't like Microsoft's attitude toward its customer base. Specifically, customers are "revenue streams" that must be encouraged vigorously to stay on the never-ending upgrade carousel. Why do you think Longhorn will have such a completely different API / programming system? Primarily, in spite of all the claims of productivity and security, it's so that users will have to buy the newest versions of software packages they already have.
For a small company providing significant enhancements and consistently delivering value, that sort of practice isn't necessarily bad. But I don't need a web services interface to my word processor (*cough* intentional strawman). Microsoft is experiencing a problem typical of any publicly traded company that dominates its market. They can't grow. And it's this artificial need to grow that causes them to look for new ways to milk revenue streams from their existing customers. It's not about profit, it's about the stock price.
So, yeah, Windows is OK if you keep it patched and turn off or strap down the whiz-bang features. I just hope that Microsoft outgrows (in the maturity sense) their focus on leasing you their software and gets back to the business of selling competitive products.
Please don't take this the wrong way as I mean it sincerely. I just love that you write with an accent.
A big part of the problem in American government, insofar as OSS software adoption goes, is that middle managers and "higher-ups" still equate "secure" with "secret" even though this is demonstrably untrue.
Microsoft will surely offer some spiffy new version of Office, and just as surely, Microsoft will charge you licensing fees for the privilege of running it (it only makes sound business sense for them to do this). The whole purpose of Longhorn is to create future revenue streams.
So setting up another strawman... Your existing Windows NT / XP / 9x-hangers-on architecture is aging and you're forced to replace it. You never upgraded to Active Directory because of the severe CAL pricing (which Microsoft later relaxed), and because it was way too intrusive to your network infrastructure. So where do you go? You need to set up some new front-line servers to crunch your business databases, serve your files, serve your intranet... etc. Going to Longhorn puts you smack in the middle of a new programming architecture (.NET APIs make the world work in Longhorn). So which "new" programming architecture do you choose?
Let's say Longhorn does debut in 2006 (they could push very hard, and accept a certain level of bugs for 1.0--SOP for current commercial software development practice). By 2006 you'll have Novell offering a very mature version of SuSE, and all of that whiz-bang UI stuff will be possible with Java (JDNC / XUL) or Mono, with Mozilla in the mix. OOo is a viable Office alternative, but you get Star Office also with SuSE. Oh, and there's this small company called RedHat... And let's not forget that IBM's still pouring millions of dollars into Linux.
You'll have a very healthy market of dozens of vendors competing on value! Or... You can go with Longhorn.
The caveat is, when under the gun, Microsoft has proven themselves competitive on value. But given their size and market share it requires very significant market pressure to arm-wrestle them into competing on content.
When Longhorn debuts, you will have alternatives, and they'll probably be better.
All the article really says is that Microsoft expects all those myriads of people still running Win 95/98/ME/NT workstation to upgrade. Basically, they're counting in much the same way McDonald's counts, in this case, by number of licenses sold. This number is not a measure of active users.
Linux has an opportunity to beat Microsoft to the punch with Longhorn. Application learning curve? Given that few of your existing applications will work in Longhorn, why not learn Linux? Fully developed suite of utilities and applications, you say? Buy a distribution from SuSE, Redhat or Mandrake [insert your distro here]. With Longhorn, Microsoft is giving up the one advantage they really had, the Win32 APIs (a position elaborated very well by Joel Spolsky in his Joel On Software column--sorry I don't have the link handy).
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it so hard for these people to implement Write-Once Read-Many? Burn the vote(s) onto optical media and be done with it. When the media fills up, replace it and transport the media (you made three or more copies of the same disk, right?) by different routes accompanied by security officers. Look Ma! No network!
This business of sloshing this incredibly sensitive data around on networks is completely irresponsible.
Doesn't avoid the issue of having a "central tabulator" designed for manipulation, but you can easily design a tabulator (or better, multiple independent tabulators) that you can prove to be free of back doors, given that the source is available.
Hee hee hee... I find the following bit from Microsoft's instructions on how to clean the trojans funny:
Basically, they're saying that you don't have IE in pants-down mode, so their ActiveX scripty-do can't run. Is that ironic, or just amusing?
And you, sir, have been reading too many made-up stories in the New York Times.
It's a shame that you choose not to distinguish sardonic wit (even if it is in bad taste) from insanity. You must take those words out of the context in which they were written to ascribe malice to them.
She also did not accuse "half the country" of treason, but made a very specific inference against journalists and polititians who took public and extreme liberal views or who exhibited actual traitorous behavior (like the harboring of known Soviet spies). That does not include the general voting public.
It's fine to disagree with her political viewpoint, but be reasonable about it, please. For example, I'm confident that Michael Moore is sane, and I also hold the opinion that he knowingly attempts to mislead. This is a kind of overkill on his part to achieve persuasion. So he may be wrong, but he's not mentally ill.
Returning to Anne Coulter, she may knowingly attempt to mislead to achieve persuasion (which she certainly did do in Treason) but she is not insane, nor entirely incorrect.
As for Treason being meanspirited, well, that's irony for you.
Unnecessary. If I remember correctly from previous newsclippings, the SEC is already sniffing around Darl and his boys for securities fraud (pump and dump of SCOX).
The distinction is artificial. If everyone "owns" everything, then no one person can own one thing in the sense that they bear sole responsibility for it and have the sole right to enjoy it. My premise of it being inhumane is based on the notion that communism attempts to do away with individual rights in favor of group rights, and that it makes basic assumption that people will not act for the common good. I will state this as an opinion: I believe a system of group rights to be inherently unstable as it inevitably leads to different rights for different groups. You end up with class distinctions and power differences, usually based on the assumptions about people I mention in my previous post.
Correlating communism with totalitarianism is quite reasonable given the evidence in the real world. Ideals aside, everywhere communism has been attempted it has degenerated into some form of totalitarianism.
Assigning of individual rights, including the right to earn and own, is more stable (it can still degenerate). It still lumps people into groups (citizen, foreign resident, visitor) but even so individual rights apply to these people.
Logical fallacy. You assign greed to someone because they hold an opinion, but this personality trait cannot be attributed solely on the basis of a post to SlashDot, or even the holding of an opinion that differs from yours. I will therefore hold it to be an opinion you are expressing and simply disagree with you.
Well... I did read the article, and it sounded to me that some web page author got overly enthusiastic about when people ought to buy a license for MySQL. Reading anything more into it would seem to be sensationalism to drive people to the clipping (IMHO).
People think communism is bad because it cannot work. At the heart of communism is the notion that no person owns anything, and this is fundamentally inhumane.
First, it leaps to the assumption that no person would ever share were they allowed to own. So, by default, a communist government must treat its subjects as criminals, people "whose nature it must be to steal from the common."
Second, it forces a distinction between people who may choose how others live and people who will be told how they must live. It enforces a class structure on the subject society and is hence biased toward totalitarianism. "Only I am smart enough / wise enough / good enough to determine how my people will live and who gets what."
How is that ideal? As a default condition it strips away human dignity. It mandates that you may not eat of the food you planted, you may not live in the house you built. Worse, it denies you the opportunity to be generous and charitable.
People think communism is bad because it is bad.
Acknowledged, thanks.
So now we don't like Wal-Mart either? I get not liking SCO (may their camels have stinky breath) or Microsoft (may their cell phones run Windows), but what's wrong with Wal-Mart?
A large part of the communication problem is that these terms are open to interpretation. (Puts on grammar hat) You see, "open" is not a complete adjective. For it to have any real meaning, you must modify it to say what something is open to.
Solaris is at once open and closed, but to what is it open, and to what is it closed? That's what really matters, and that's why it does indeed depend on the user's preferences of interpretation.
Yeah... I heard that the real reason XP SP2 is delayed is because they couldn't figure out how to keep that "installing Gecko engine" message from popping up during setup.
A colleague of mine said there was one feature on his wish-list for Internet Explorer: INActiveX. It would download all those whiz-bang controls and do nothing.
You're not a gamer, are you?
Why does my computer keep writing "It's just a flesh wound" across the screen?
That'd be the operating system version, I'm more of an applications kind of guy (grin).
I like the name...
This PC can screen save no more.This PC kicked the bit bucket...
It has bought the server farm...
It is pushing up daisy-wheels...
This... is an XPC!
Aww... Come on, you know you were thinking it.
Try Webster's dictionary though. 2nd definition (noun):
So hunting, fishing, poker, and (yuck) math, if they're done for fun or competition can be considered sport. Granted that's not usually what's thought of when one hear's sport.
According to the dictionary, a sport is any activity used as a diversion, or recreation. A bit further down among the definitions it mentions athletics. So, letting my software geekness show, AthleticSport is a specialization of Sport, and so mathematics as a diversion could technically qualify as a sport.
I can't imagine watching it with a beer and a hotdog, however.
If you wait long enough, you will be using a UNIX variant. In fact, the bits you're relying on to read Slashdot, assuming you read it from your WinXP PC, originated in a UNIX distribution.
Personally, I get along fine with Windows (writing to you using XP Pro at the moment). But I don't like Microsoft's attitude toward its customer base. Specifically, customers are "revenue streams" that must be encouraged vigorously to stay on the never-ending upgrade carousel. Why do you think Longhorn will have such a completely different API / programming system? Primarily, in spite of all the claims of productivity and security, it's so that users will have to buy the newest versions of software packages they already have.
For a small company providing significant enhancements and consistently delivering value, that sort of practice isn't necessarily bad. But I don't need a web services interface to my word processor (*cough* intentional strawman). Microsoft is experiencing a problem typical of any publicly traded company that dominates its market. They can't grow. And it's this artificial need to grow that causes them to look for new ways to milk revenue streams from their existing customers. It's not about profit, it's about the stock price.
So, yeah, Windows is OK if you keep it patched and turn off or strap down the whiz-bang features. I just hope that Microsoft outgrows (in the maturity sense) their focus on leasing you their software and gets back to the business of selling competitive products.
Please don't take this the wrong way as I mean it sincerely. I just love that you write with an accent.
A big part of the problem in American government, insofar as OSS software adoption goes, is that middle managers and "higher-ups" still equate "secure" with "secret" even though this is demonstrably untrue.
Old CW: Ha ha! I use Mozilla as my browser!
New CW: Ha ha! I use EMACS as my browser!
Thank you very much.
Microsoft will surely offer some spiffy new version of Office, and just as surely, Microsoft will charge you licensing fees for the privilege of running it (it only makes sound business sense for them to do this). The whole purpose of Longhorn is to create future revenue streams.
So setting up another strawman... Your existing Windows NT / XP / 9x-hangers-on architecture is aging and you're forced to replace it. You never upgraded to Active Directory because of the severe CAL pricing (which Microsoft later relaxed), and because it was way too intrusive to your network infrastructure. So where do you go? You need to set up some new front-line servers to crunch your business databases, serve your files, serve your intranet... etc. Going to Longhorn puts you smack in the middle of a new programming architecture (.NET APIs make the world work in Longhorn). So which "new" programming architecture do you choose?
Let's say Longhorn does debut in 2006 (they could push very hard, and accept a certain level of bugs for 1.0--SOP for current commercial software development practice). By 2006 you'll have Novell offering a very mature version of SuSE, and all of that whiz-bang UI stuff will be possible with Java (JDNC / XUL) or Mono, with Mozilla in the mix. OOo is a viable Office alternative, but you get Star Office also with SuSE. Oh, and there's this small company called RedHat... And let's not forget that IBM's still pouring millions of dollars into Linux.
You'll have a very healthy market of dozens of vendors competing on value! Or... You can go with Longhorn.
The caveat is, when under the gun, Microsoft has proven themselves competitive on value. But given their size and market share it requires very significant market pressure to arm-wrestle them into competing on content.
When Longhorn debuts, you will have alternatives, and they'll probably be better.
All the article really says is that Microsoft expects all those myriads of people still running Win 95/98/ME/NT workstation to upgrade. Basically, they're counting in much the same way McDonald's counts, in this case, by number of licenses sold. This number is not a measure of active users.
Linux has an opportunity to beat Microsoft to the punch with Longhorn. Application learning curve? Given that few of your existing applications will work in Longhorn, why not learn Linux? Fully developed suite of utilities and applications, you say? Buy a distribution from SuSE, Redhat or Mandrake [insert your distro here]. With Longhorn, Microsoft is giving up the one advantage they really had, the Win32 APIs (a position elaborated very well by Joel Spolsky in his Joel On Software column--sorry I don't have the link handy).