So it's perfectly fair to subject my ability to provide labor to global market pressures, while at the same time preventing me from access to that same global market for the things I buy (region encoding, pharmaceuticals, etc.)?
It turns out that only a small percentage of medical expenses can be attributed to lawsuit settlements. And the only reason such lawsuits exist is because the AMA is not self-policing. They don't get rid of incompetent doctors.
The biggest reason for high medical costs in the US is profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies. Supply side market control also plays a factor. A recently planned hospital was shut down where I live by the other hospitals in town. They didn't want the competition and leveraged politicians to axe the project.
Dude, I agree with your politics, but advocating the murder of Bush and/or republicans is a felony. Have a coke and a smile and shut up before they really do come to get you.
If you ask a building design engineer to tell you the most important part of a building, they'll say the foundation. If you ask a historian to tell you the most important part of the U.S. government, they'll say the Constitution. Aircraft - airframe. Car - chassis. And so on.
When you build anything, you make certain fundamental underlying decisions that affect how the rest of the system works - forever. If something is fundamentally broken about any of these core decisions, the structure will be irreparably and irrecoverably broken. It is universally understood that you can't really fix a building with a flawed foundation or a ship with a broken keel. If those parts aren't right, nothing else matters.
In the 1990s, the world decided to base virtually all computer systems upon an operating system designed by Microsoft. Systems were changing radically over the span of months. Millions of dollars in computer investment could be rendered completely useless if the computer world changed direction. The panic led to sort of a terrified groupthink - we had to make sure we were on the garden path to computer goodness as soon as possible. We didn't choose Microsoft because it was better, or because it was secure, but because in 1992, it looked like the only thing that would work. Now, in 2006, we know (as will be attested by the numerous Microsoft astroturfers who will undoubtedly respond to this posting) that you really can use any operating system to get the job done. The fear of total obsolescence has turned out to be unfounded. We had more of a choice in 1992 than we really thought.
The question is not whether or not we made the right choice. It is rather how far the fragments of the ship have to sink before we decide to abandon it. How much of the building has to collapse before we evacuate it? How many wheels have to fall off of the car before we pull over and call for a tow truck? The thing we most feared back in the 90s - total system failure for making the wrong crucial underlying choices, is happening every single day. When will we wake up and respond accordingly?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone troll another conversation because theirs isn't going well. That's actually quite fascinating, in a morbid sort of way.
Here are the simple solutions all the windows experts are missing:
Set yourself up as the owner of all files on the drive.
Set full permissions to all files to the "user" group.
Oh gosh gee. I don't know how we could have been so stupid. Please forgive us for doubting the security, power, and flexibility of Microsoft operating systems.
Dear Microsoft "experts": You just permanently lost the user privilege security argument, and you probably don't even know why.
Microsoft is very easily distracted, aren't they? A few years ago the big enemy was Linux. Now it's Google. I bet you could drive the price of shit through the roof by putting a Wired magazine in front of Bill Gates with a nice 4 page article on organic fertilizers.
As someone's joke goes "You could potentially take out an art school or a small advertising agency".
So now the fact that Windows viruses take down hospitals and defense industries is a smug joke? Are we seriously reduced, in 2006, to looking at the destructiveness of Windows viruses in terms of relative penis size? Has the tragedy of the business world sucking the Micro$oft teat for 20 years really reached this level of absurdity?
Perhaps the reason that the US is experiencing a decline in producing computer scientists has to do with the decline in employing them? It's a little difficult to believe that the "concerns (of losing your job to outsourcing) are overblown" when those of us in the industry saw almost every single one of our peers lose their job in the last 5 years.
Even the article qualifies the security of tech jobs:
Programmers with leadership and business skills will do just fine.
Translation: You can be a programming manager, but you can't make a living doing the technical work.
Dear American Business(tm): You want technical people? Take legislative steps to protect their employment prospects. Otherwise, stop whining about how nobody wants to go into a technical field.
The rhetoric under question is that of Alberto Gonzales. Alberto Gonzales is the Attorney General of the United States and reports directly to the executive branch. So, yes, we actually can blame Bush for Gonzales publicly making the absurd connection between copyright circumvention and terrorism.
BTW, it is a minor point, but MS is not really 'evil'. Lets assume that all of MS's bad behavior was planned from the start to destroy their rivals in the most expedient method available. It still isn't evil. The bolshevik communist party was evil. The Khimir Rouge was evil. The Nazi party was evil. Microsoft was at worst, unethical. Please don't confuse organizations that purvey true evil and misery on the world with a bunch of greedy executives.
No, it's a major point. Microsoft is evil. Their practices have resulted in the destruction of not just careers, but industries, and their brutal predatory monopolistic practices have held back the development of information technology by as much as a decade. We are standing at the crossroads of what could be the next Library of Alexandria or Italian Renaissance, and Microsoft is standing in the way, turning this tide of history into nothing more than a cash cow for them. Already people have begun to lose faith in the idea of electronic information because things like malware and viruses are considered (tragically and incorrectly) to be inevitable. In short, people don't know what computers can be because most people have only seen computers with Microsoft operating systems and software on them. Computers have come to mean bugs, punitive software licensing, and vendor lock-in. That is a crime. That is evil. They've destroyed people's lives and have caused historically significant harm against the very posterity of humankind. It doesn't get much more evil than that.
Ah - a feel-good story about someone who has had a good experience working there and hasn't seen any nefarious activities during his or her time there.
Of what value is it to place any confidence in such accounts? It is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer. If the activities of the organization in question are well documented and proven beyond a reasonable doubt to -in fact- be evil, then such "insider" accounts to the contrary have absolutely no relevance.
and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic.
I walked TFA and TFA's TFA looking for the exact quote, but the TFA's parent seems to say the exact opposite.
If she really said this, I am prepared to express outrage to anyone who will listen, but would like to make sure this is what it is purported to be. Does anyone have more information on this?
Indeed. I wonder how much thought is being given to the alternative in this discussion. I wonder how many people bemoaning the quality of community support in the Linux world have ever actually called Microsoft tech support. I have. It's like talking to a car tag registration clerk except that you have to pay $350 an hour to hear them say things like "turn off capslock and try again" or "reboot and try again".
And then there's the burgeoning and helpful Microsoft support community. Why, just the other day I was on the Microsoft SQL IRC channel talking to the developers about... wait a minute - no I wasn't. There isn't any such thing. Sure, there is the odd "tips and tricks" website with helpful gems such as "defrag your hard drive regularly", but there is nowhere near the depth and breadth of community support in the Microsoft world as there is for Linux. They don't even begin to compare.
I am not saying that there are no RTFM snobs. There most certainly are a large group of people who see using Linux as a badge of engorged dickdom that they flaunt at every opportunity. I have seen more than my fair share of assholes on forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels. But what if this is simply a side effect of the fact that someone is actually there at all?
There is a difference between relevance and survival. Chevrolet, for example, is a surviving, but irrelevant company who will be around a long time because they are huge and have a huge customer base.
oh, and on an unrelated note: why on earth is the Win32 HOSTS file buried away under C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\? I mean.... 'drivers'?!!? Bizarre.
Because Microsoft is easy to use and manage - not like that nasty obfuscated *nix stuff. It's no wonder that *nix isn't ready for the desktop.
And btw, you can make it read only to normal users, but again, this would accomplish nothing.
Horse shit.
The idea would be that one would not USE the system as root. You can do that on a *nix box. If you get malwared while logged in as bob, the malware can't get access to the hosts file.
That's the way security is thought of in a system designed with security in mind from the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's perfectly fair to subject my ability to provide labor to global market pressures, while at the same time preventing me from access to that same global market for the things I buy (region encoding, pharmaceuticals, etc.)?
Horse shit.
It turns out that only a small percentage of medical expenses can be attributed to lawsuit settlements. And the only reason such lawsuits exist is because the AMA is not self-policing. They don't get rid of incompetent doctors.
The biggest reason for high medical costs in the US is profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies. Supply side market control also plays a factor. A recently planned hospital was shut down where I live by the other hospitals in town. They didn't want the competition and leveraged politicians to axe the project.
If you live in the US, you must live in the northern half. Anything associated with construction in the southern half is done by Mexicans.
Dude, I agree with your politics, but advocating the murder of Bush and/or republicans is a felony. Have a coke and a smile and shut up before they really do come to get you.
So much for turning to commercially licensed closed source software as a way to reduce your exposure to IP legal threats.
If you ask a building design engineer to tell you the most important part of a building, they'll say the foundation. If you ask a historian to tell you the most important part of the U.S. government, they'll say the Constitution. Aircraft - airframe. Car - chassis. And so on.
When you build anything, you make certain fundamental underlying decisions that affect how the rest of the system works - forever. If something is fundamentally broken about any of these core decisions, the structure will be irreparably and irrecoverably broken. It is universally understood that you can't really fix a building with a flawed foundation or a ship with a broken keel. If those parts aren't right, nothing else matters.
In the 1990s, the world decided to base virtually all computer systems upon an operating system designed by Microsoft. Systems were changing radically over the span of months. Millions of dollars in computer investment could be rendered completely useless if the computer world changed direction. The panic led to sort of a terrified groupthink - we had to make sure we were on the garden path to computer goodness as soon as possible. We didn't choose Microsoft because it was better, or because it was secure, but because in 1992, it looked like the only thing that would work. Now, in 2006, we know (as will be attested by the numerous Microsoft astroturfers who will undoubtedly respond to this posting) that you really can use any operating system to get the job done. The fear of total obsolescence has turned out to be unfounded. We had more of a choice in 1992 than we really thought.
The question is not whether or not we made the right choice. It is rather how far the fragments of the ship have to sink before we decide to abandon it. How much of the building has to collapse before we evacuate it? How many wheels have to fall off of the car before we pull over and call for a tow truck? The thing we most feared back in the 90s - total system failure for making the wrong crucial underlying choices, is happening every single day. When will we wake up and respond accordingly?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone troll another conversation because theirs isn't going well. That's actually quite fascinating, in a morbid sort of way.
Giving the "BUILTIN\users" security principal full controll is all that's neccessary.
I was right. You don't know why.
It's called sarcasm, jackass. My point is that it is most certainly not simple.
Here are the simple solutions all the windows experts are missing:
Set yourself up as the owner of all files on the drive.
Set full permissions to all files to the "user" group.
Oh gosh gee. I don't know how we could have been so stupid. Please forgive us for doubting the security, power, and flexibility of Microsoft operating systems.
Dear Microsoft "experts": You just permanently lost the user privilege security argument, and you probably don't even know why.
Let's try this again. There seems to be considerable confusion on this point.
money != relevance
Microsoft is very easily distracted, aren't they? A few years ago the big enemy was Linux. Now it's Google. I bet you could drive the price of shit through the roof by putting a Wired magazine in front of Bill Gates with a nice 4 page article on organic fertilizers.
Why don't we do something less invasive, like snmpwalk every address on the Internet?
As someone's joke goes "You could potentially take out an art school or a small advertising agency".
So now the fact that Windows viruses take down hospitals and defense industries is a smug joke? Are we seriously reduced, in 2006, to looking at the destructiveness of Windows viruses in terms of relative penis size? Has the tragedy of the business world sucking the Micro$oft teat for 20 years really reached this level of absurdity?
Yes, because that is the only other alternative. It is state sponsored monopolistic labor market control or communism. There is no middle ground.
Perhaps the reason that the US is experiencing a decline in producing computer scientists has to do with the decline in employing them? It's a little difficult to believe that the "concerns (of losing your job to outsourcing) are overblown" when those of us in the industry saw almost every single one of our peers lose their job in the last 5 years.
Even the article qualifies the security of tech jobs:
Programmers with leadership and business skills will do just fine.
Translation: You can be a programming manager, but you can't make a living doing the technical work.
Dear American Business(tm): You want technical people? Take legislative steps to protect their employment prospects. Otherwise, stop whining about how nobody wants to go into a technical field.
The rhetoric under question is that of Alberto Gonzales. Alberto Gonzales is the Attorney General of the United States and reports directly to the executive branch. So, yes, we actually can blame Bush for Gonzales publicly making the absurd connection between copyright circumvention and terrorism.
BTW, it is a minor point, but MS is not really 'evil'. Lets assume that all of MS's bad behavior was planned from the start to destroy their rivals in the most expedient method available. It still isn't evil. The bolshevik communist party was evil. The Khimir Rouge was evil. The Nazi party was evil. Microsoft was at worst, unethical. Please don't confuse organizations that purvey true evil and misery on the world with a bunch of greedy executives.
No, it's a major point. Microsoft is evil. Their practices have resulted in the destruction of not just careers, but industries, and their brutal predatory monopolistic practices have held back the development of information technology by as much as a decade. We are standing at the crossroads of what could be the next Library of Alexandria or Italian Renaissance, and Microsoft is standing in the way, turning this tide of history into nothing more than a cash cow for them. Already people have begun to lose faith in the idea of electronic information because things like malware and viruses are considered (tragically and incorrectly) to be inevitable. In short, people don't know what computers can be because most people have only seen computers with Microsoft operating systems and software on them. Computers have come to mean bugs, punitive software licensing, and vendor lock-in. That is a crime. That is evil. They've destroyed people's lives and have caused historically significant harm against the very posterity of humankind. It doesn't get much more evil than that.
Ah - a feel-good story about someone who has had a good experience working there and hasn't seen any nefarious activities during his or her time there.
Of what value is it to place any confidence in such accounts? It is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer. If the activities of the organization in question are well documented and proven beyond a reasonable doubt to -in fact- be evil, then such "insider" accounts to the contrary have absolutely no relevance.
and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic.
I walked TFA and TFA's TFA looking for the exact quote, but the TFA's parent seems to say the exact opposite.
If she really said this, I am prepared to express outrage to anyone who will listen, but would like to make sure this is what it is purported to be. Does anyone have more information on this?
Indeed. I wonder how much thought is being given to the alternative in this discussion. I wonder how many people bemoaning the quality of community support in the Linux world have ever actually called Microsoft tech support. I have. It's like talking to a car tag registration clerk except that you have to pay $350 an hour to hear them say things like "turn off capslock and try again" or "reboot and try again".
And then there's the burgeoning and helpful Microsoft support community. Why, just the other day I was on the Microsoft SQL IRC channel talking to the developers about... wait a minute - no I wasn't. There isn't any such thing. Sure, there is the odd "tips and tricks" website with helpful gems such as "defrag your hard drive regularly", but there is nowhere near the depth and breadth of community support in the Microsoft world as there is for Linux. They don't even begin to compare.
I am not saying that there are no RTFM snobs. There most certainly are a large group of people who see using Linux as a badge of engorged dickdom that they flaunt at every opportunity. I have seen more than my fair share of assholes on forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels. But what if this is simply a side effect of the fact that someone is actually there at all?
I am glad we're finally doing something about this. We've had scientific consesus for some time now.
MS is huge, they have a HUGE customer base.
There is a difference between relevance and survival. Chevrolet, for example, is a surviving, but irrelevant company who will be around a long time because they are huge and have a huge customer base.
oh, and on an unrelated note: why on earth is the Win32 HOSTS file buried away under C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\? I mean.... 'drivers'?!!? Bizarre.
Because Microsoft is easy to use and manage - not like that nasty obfuscated *nix stuff. It's no wonder that *nix isn't ready for the desktop.
-Warning - the above comment contains sarcasm.
And btw, you can make it read only to normal users, but again, this would accomplish nothing.
Horse shit.
The idea would be that one would not USE the system as root. You can do that on a *nix box. If you get malwared while logged in as bob, the malware can't get access to the hosts file.
That's the way security is thought of in a system designed with security in mind from the beginning.