A wonderfull response, MS Access certainly has its place. Though as a small niggly response to your post I might suggest that the nirvana of using MS Access as a replacement to a well thought out datamart/datawarehouse is just as a terribly annoying as the use of MS Access when the corporate needs outgrow the casual data structure that most whip up.
The number of reports that are presented at senior level, having been hacked for days and weeks on ms access and ms excel, THAT DON'T match, is a serious problem for data warehouseing on ms access/excel.
that said its great to finally see a better replacement to ms access on linux than the open office / star office front end.
MS Access's greatest use, IMHO, is as a quick front end to a decent back end. Forms , reports, queries can all be deposited in one nice front end container, with intelligence, and the backend can be any decent RDBMS you can think of. If its well designed you can use a small backend like mysql or jet and then upgrade to a real RDBMS when the need arises, voila instant upgrade/growth part.
Now, when you can drag and drop RAD style buttons onto your web based forms/ OR / convert your thick client forms to web basd thin client forms like OMNIS, then I will truley think i have died and gone to heaven!
Someone please upgrade the score of the parent post, its not a troll,... most coders that respond to the open source model do so because coding is not primarily an engineering skill at present, despite the desire of the software methodologists.
That leaves us to the obvious conclusion that most open source advocates to this stuff for free because they derive other pleasures rather than just a desire for remuneration from the work, in other words its a hobby, much like an artist will paint regardless of the customer, hence its "art".
And the average coder does not appreciate the philistines (employers/customers) whom just want a simple job done quickly for cash, that is/may be slightly distasteful to the coder (i.e. like all paid work).
Therefore the artist needs a business focused person to bridge the gap between art and business, i.e. the sales man / the marketer / the project manager etc etc etc. All of whom are focused at the business end of things. Customers want what they want, usually boring coding done to make the company profitable, AND usually they do not want to share their profitable model with their competitors. Thus open source / GPL is an anathema to the business, they don't want to share with everyone else. And they frequently pay to ensure that reason alone.
Why is it that geeks in general just don't get the fact that their view of the world is frequently wrong when it doesn't involve technology alone????
There is already a successful model to bring together coders and customers, its called "entrepreneurship" and it works because business people can gather together programmers and market their skills, despite their poor presentation, and make profit. This model won't change. However a clever person may be able to turn this business model from the crap-shoot it currently is to a "McDonald" systematised business that it needs to become to impart some kind of assurance to the end customers whom desperately want guarantees in a world where precious few are to be had.
What do you mean exactly by "uses"???? Runs bog standard software installed by daddy? uses apt-get by herself? understands that f**k awful piece of software called dselect???
My daughter is seven, can read the newspaper happily and understands way more than I did at seven, but she would be limited to following screen prompts and the standard child friendly software that is on bog standard cds such as the reader rabbit cds or the cartoon network home page games.
please elaborate as "uses" is a very ambiguous term.....
To be honest I have real trouble considering any electronic good to be a long life durable good from a cheap consumable, yet when I think of all the valve t.v.s out there, and I found an old valve radio in the garage the other day, severally battered, plugged it in and it worked first time.
You are right, there is a subtle shift to get consumers to accept cheap crap over quality goods. Pity as we will pay the price, not only from a landfill / recycling point of view, but economically and job wise as well.
Just look at the jap import throw-away car, more and more these are a real concern to our NZ government that is worried that they can't be got rid of and are rapidly filling up our landfills......
see a pattern??
jech
This reminds me of an interesting thought I had the other day, things are definatly built today with a lifetime of 5~10 years in them before they break down. The MTBF rate of new hardware from home electronics to whiteware to automobiles, is slowly slipping into the industrial electronics which used to be imune from these efects.
Is this just the manufacturers way of generating replacement income for the future or are we getting sloppy in our standards that our parents and grandparents would never have stood for?
Surely there is no economic benifit in replacing something that otherwise works correctly. My father sent me a photo the other day with my grandfather standing in his kitchen in the picture. There was nothing in the picture made later than 1960!
The fridge was still going, the cooker still worked and the kettle looked like the cord violated several electricity standards today, all still working fine 40+ years later. I have replaced all my whiteware twice and i've only had use for my personal whiteware for ten years!!!!
The biggest dream that the financial world has ever had with an XML concept has been the concept of standardised financial reports.
Imagine a world where any finacial (excel based or otherwise) report from any public company can be compared with any other company report and we can all be sure of how the figures were calculated and what they mean.
AND they are fully comparable. And fully importable into any financial package. No longer is any one company dependant on one financial package. Come to think of it there is no way the vendors of such products will ever allow this to happen!!!
I think someone should do a site on the funniest newbie searches.
My father tells a story of one of the chaps in his workshop, being a big ford motor racing fan putting in the word "escort" into a search engine.
But by far the funniest was when my mother was first introduced to the internet, she was studying dentistry at the time, and typed the word "oral" into the portal.
I lept across the room shouting "Noooooooo" much like the slow mo scene from an action movie.........
I'm amazed that this device is being touted as ground breaking.
the Kyocera 1735 http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/7100_phone/7 100_ph one_series.htm (disclaimer i have one!) is a fully featured palm pda and cell (cdma) and beats it on quite a few points.
1) great battery life 160 hours standby (though talk time isn't as good) 2) colour screen 65k colours 3) no crappy keyboard 4) aimed at real business people, can't do daft photos. 5) looks like a real phone, clamshell, not flaming large geeky hunk of computer in your hand.
the treo and its earlier predecessors are all ugly.
and why must they insist on the keyboard thingy? the best thing about the palm is grafitti. we don't need no stenkin keyboard!
it still looks way to wide, my hands don't like holding a brick for a meeting length conversation.
I'm very religous in a traditional sense, subscribe to the fact that the bible is the authorised worf of God, its true etc etc etc , full on born again christian etc etc , preached two sermons this year myself etc etc,
and this is funny, i can just see nelson saying that.
its funny man, don't stress over the little details.
Good point, and I have no reason to assume he is telling the truth.
But, and this is an important "But", death threats and other serious threats are often made towards spammers (as reported in the media), even on slashdot.
I have a strong suspicion that the spammer in question probably did receive a threat or two of an unlawful nature, even if made by a few teenage boys that don't know any better.
The level of rhetoric and pseudo - violence seems to be rising against what is merely an anoying form of marketing.
And I'm sick of paying for my adsl bandwidth to download spam shite, and i'm quite afraid of the viruses and crap that are propogated via email, both of which have a dollar cost to my business, neither of which justify the lengths people seem to be willing to go to, just to stop this level of anoying marketing.
Unfortunatly acording to the NZ herald that published an article a few weeks ago on the NZ spammer that had his name and telephone number published on an on-line forum (maybee just like this one...) he received death threats and telephone abuse that even his young daughter received.
The trouble is that most of society do not take their email abuse as serious as some netizens.
This activity is unlawful and imoral. Sending spam is not unlawful. A death threat is punishible by jail terms and is a very serious crime.
Spam is no where near as important as most geeks make it out to be, certainly not to the level that death threats are justified.
(I just sent this letter to the writter and thought I would share it with you all)
Dear Sir,
I have just read your article "robotic freedom" and felt I ought to reply.
I couldn't help but notice the similarities between your article and the beliefs espoused by a New Zealand (and global) political group known as "Social Credit"
The theories of Social Credit are almost 100 years old and here in NZ there hasn't been an active Social Credit political party for some time in government.
The interesting thing is that they espouse the idea of a "national income" much as you do in your article. They arive at the same conclusion as you do but by different means.
I would like to suggest to you two point that my personal observation of human society has led me to beleive,
1) that the current social welfare system enjoyed in New Zealand and other common wealth nations, is in fact an active "national income" scheme.
2) because of greed inherant in all humans, the national income will always be a extreme modest amount.
History teaches us that the serfs and common men of society always end up living on extremely low means. Those at the top willingly take from all the rest. And Greed ensures that those at the botom would trade places with those at the top and continue the same crime in an instant.
How do you propose to solve the problem of Greed and actually make your robotic system work? So that every man, women and child receives a fair income that is above substience level? And for whatever answer you give, what makes you think that it will be enough to hold the greed of people in check? and then to ask yourself, why doesn't your system work in third-world nations? (it wasn't so long ago that the western nations had extreme poverty in their lands, due to the same causes , the have's keep from the have-nots)
This is my question, as it is becoming more obvious today that the kings of old are simply being replaced by the merchants of new.
The power changes hands but the crimes remain the same.
I Can't believe that no-one has noticed the obvious thing here, its not just a white-cell type thing, it's microsofts answer to apt-get.
Finally the death-knell for linux may have just been sounded.
If one of the biggest benifits of open source is that the bugs and holes are patched quickly, imagine how quickly they can be patched by a closed source company and its collection of worm programmers.
Shit this thing whips the pants off apt-get and windows-update, this thing does the bloody update for you and then logs off.
Its almost like having your own security administrator working for you. You simply connect to the net and with a bit of luck the office ms-patches install themselves on your pc.
Talk about a fantastic marketing gimmick, i can picture it now......
[regular joe in a store] so your telling me i don't need to worry about the hackers on the interweb thingy 'cos microsoft will simply fix up any holes on my pc as soon as they find em, and i don't have to do a thing??
[sales chap] yup, and there is no charge for this service sir, and it all happens whilst you are asleep.
who else sees this as a serious threat?? or a fantastic opportunity if we could somehow use this in the open source community......
Is that people still think the issue is one of the following problems:
1) script kiddies 2) lack of a good virus scanner 3) bugs or security holes 4) poor software
Ever notice that all of the above problems won't ever go away? no mater how hard you patch your box you will never catch up.
And as one wise poster said, "i don't patch too soon because the patch often introduces more problems than it fixes".
The reason that unix and mainframe environments are more secure than windows pc's is for one reason and one reason only......
Good design.
When i install postgress i install it under the postegress user. When i install Oracle i install it under the Oracle user. When i browse the web i run the browser as myself. When i read email i read email as myself.
NONE of the above users have root priviledges. Yet when i run the above software on my windows server, more often than not it does have full admin rights and is/ or is equivilent to the admin user.
EVEN if i attempt good security measures i can't get around the fact that so many ms products want to run as root, or use services that run as root, or depend on infrastructures that run as root, etc etc etc.
So no matter how quickly you patch, human error and bugs in software will undoubtedly introduce new security problems.
In a multi user secured environment each user space is protected from every other user space by the inherant security model.
In a windows environment, most processes are all the same user, or for certain parts of their operations become the same user, or have the same user....... WHICH IS ADMINISTRATOR.
And you can never stop the adminstrator from doing whatever it wants to do to your sysem because it is God.
and that is why virus manufacturers will never go out of business no matter how good ms-update becomes.
I know this sounds like a troll but consider the following:
1) Americans probably get more t.v. advertising than anybody else on the planet, yet slashdoters (apart from tivio style conversations) rarely complain about t.v. adds
2) If you saw 10 advertisments per ad-break and had an ad-break per 10 minutes of viewing time, thats 60 ads per hour.
3) I read recently that the average american watches between 4-8 hours of t.v. a day. (thats increadible, where do they get time to crap and eat and work etc?) which translates to 8*60 which is 480 adverts per day.
The solution isn't to complain or to sue or to punish any advertisers (whilst there are purchasers willing there is always an incentive to spam)
In fact maybee like the bafta awards for commercials immediate future
where tv shows case the best advertisements (funny, sexiest, shockingest etc etc) perhaps spam will mature into stuff we tolerate and maybe even laugh at.
People say that the spammers should be made to pay, or that we should charge for email so that spammers would stop or slow down. Well last time i checked they do pay for email. Sure fat pipes with pre-paid gig bandwidth's is v cheap, but its still bought and paid for.
People say that everyone hates spammers, yet that simply isn't true. No matter how much geeks hate spammers, there are more customers out there willing to buy dick extenders, boob enhancers and the staying power of a donkey!
The correct thing to do with spam is to wait for the market to mature, and silently use technology to strip it out whilst we can.
Whilst we are on the subject of unsolicited advertising, consider junk-mail, bill boards, video previews, movie theater advertising, sports brand promotions, corporate sponsorships etc etc etc.
Advertising and spam is here to stay. Stop whining, and accept it. The vast majority of the world simply does not hate spam as much as the average slashdotter.
Interesting that you use the term "allotment", most of your international readers probably won't know what you mean, but my father used to have one so I know where you are going with that statement:
"Allotment : small section of ground reserved for the purpose of growing plants / veggies etc, popular due to the fact that so many british people don't have large enough spaces of ground to grow items on their own properties".
Interesting to think that the concept of having a small space of land to grow your own food on sounds so fuedual, and yet we live in the 21st century.
Perhaps thats most don't bother growing their own food any more?
The parent says it nicely, its a question of manners, or to use an older word, MORALS.
Thus stated there is now no longer a need to debate this crap any longer on slashdot.
The definition is no longer required. "it really is a question of morals"
Now we only need to debate whose morals (read laws) should apply to these situations,
(i) personal laws, every man for himself
(ii) the corporate laws, every institution for itself
(iii) the governmental laws, they get to set 'em.
(iv) some higher authority
seems to me the founding fathers already made that decision for you Americans.
so quit arguing about it.
Its true, you really can heat your rooms with your gear.
Its currently winter in NZ and i keep long hours in my office at night-time and my wife often joins me in the room to watch t.v. on the old p300 i've got, just so she can keep warm (and also because the gas heater gives her headaches!)
nothing wrong with computer heat, its summer i'm worried about....
Damn, I should have used the preview function just like the warning said, it looks like I used vi to type that dribble out!
Sorry about the lack of paragraphs, that's what happens when you paste from ms-word.
Talking of pasting, does it work yet in the linux world????
I scanned down the list to read other peoples experiences with Debian, as they were more interesting to me than the statement, that old saw, "The King is Dead, long live the King!".
The average user experience says everything about Debian, and overwhelmingly people say the same thing, "Using Debian has caused me issues, no more or less than other Linux variants, but I feel its worth it because of xyz (usually related to some perceived stability perception)".
I have been using Debian for three years now, as a result of a friend installing it for me when I wanted to install Linux. I had tried a slackware installation in the early 90's but it didn't work well compared to what I was used to.
Baring in mind my background (I started of as a DG Unix admin, in a time when SCO was the PC Unix distribution, and slackware was just a medium for distributing shareware). I have found the experience somewhat enlightening, and yet unduly frustrating also.
I have around 14 years of experience with PC architecture, and have spent the last 10 years as a DBA and sysop of most of the major UNICES and RDBM's, yet Linux has proved to be a pain in the butt to get even the most minor of things working for me.
And I'm a geek, with decent experience with Unix and PC's that most people simply don't have, even in the PC world.
Yet my latest attempt to install debian on an old Compaq, with updated kernel, and dual nics, as a gateway with shorewall, has taken me over two months of dicking with it every other evening for an hour or two, WHAT CHANCE DOES THE AVERAGE JOE HAVE??? I only wanted my own firewall for my ADSL line.
Now I appreciate that I'm doing some unusual non-standard things with my installation that most users wouldn't care about, BUT I'M NOT A USER!
If I, with two kids, mortgage and other hassles of early 30's life, don't have the time to get Debian working to do what I want, how on earth is my mum or grandma ever going to have Debian working to do emails and look at the web and tap out a letter or two to relatives around the globe???
The dist with the "pop the cd in and away you go" attitude will be the one that makes it to the masses. That has already happened, its called "MS Windows". In fact pre-installed takes away installation fears entirly. My mother has never installed an o/s and never will. Why should she? she has never installed a car engine either, yet she has driven for years.
Debian is difficult for geeks to get working just the way they want, let alone for average joes.
So this has led me to my conclusion, why do I stick with debian? is it for stability? no I use mature *nix's for that at the places where I work, TRUE64, AIX, HPUX, SCO, these are what have always dominated the market place (no prizes for guessing which UNIX will win!). LINUX??? nope, sorry, we install windows for cheap servers and desktops.
So it must be because I like being elitist and lump these experiences in with my ability to use vi, proud of it simply cos others can't.
how pathetic.
at stereo rough mp3 compression giving 1mb per min (doing this from v poor memory) thats (365+320) 685 days or 16,440 hours or 986,400 minutes or 986 gig. That is a serious album, where exactly are you going to get a cd / dvd that big?
On the other hand in a few years ide drives will have that kind of capacity real cheap. perhaps this would be a neat investment earner for the FSF or similar?
This is like complaining that on google the words "escort" (as in ford escort motor car) and "oral" (as in dental hygine) are being misused by the pron industry!
Slashdot Mirror
but can it allow case insensative searches to postgres? just like default ms access or ms sql??? please???
jech
A wonderfull response, MS Access certainly has its place. Though as a small niggly response to your post I might suggest that the nirvana of using MS Access as a replacement to a well thought out datamart/datawarehouse is just as a terribly annoying as the use of MS Access when the corporate needs outgrow the casual data structure that most whip up.
The number of reports that are presented at senior level, having been hacked for days and weeks on ms access and ms excel, THAT DON'T match, is a serious problem for data warehouseing on ms access/excel.
that said its great to finally see a better replacement to ms access on linux than the open office / star office front end.
MS Access's greatest use, IMHO, is as a quick front end to a decent back end. Forms , reports, queries can all be deposited in one nice front end container, with intelligence, and the backend can be any decent RDBMS you can think of. If its well designed you can use a small backend like mysql or jet and then upgrade to a real RDBMS when the need arises, voila instant upgrade/growth part.
Now, when you can drag and drop RAD style buttons onto your web based forms/ OR / convert your thick client forms to web basd thin client forms like OMNIS, then I will truley think i have died and gone to heaven!
jech
Someone please upgrade the score of the parent post, its not a troll, ... most coders that respond to the open source model do so because coding is not primarily an engineering skill at present, despite the desire of the software methodologists.
That leaves us to the obvious conclusion that most open source advocates to this stuff for free because they derive other pleasures rather than just a desire for remuneration from the work, in other words its a hobby, much like an artist will paint regardless of the customer, hence its "art".
And the average coder does not appreciate the philistines (employers/customers) whom just want a simple job done quickly for cash, that is/may be slightly distasteful to the coder (i.e. like all paid work).
Therefore the artist needs a business focused person to bridge the gap between art and business, i.e. the sales man / the marketer / the project manager etc etc etc. All of whom are focused at the business end of things. Customers want what they want, usually boring coding done to make the company profitable, AND usually they do not want to share their profitable model with their competitors. Thus open source / GPL is an anathema to the business, they don't want to share with everyone else. And they frequently pay to ensure that reason alone.
Why is it that geeks in general just don't get the fact that their view of the world is frequently wrong when it doesn't involve technology alone????
There is already a successful model to bring together coders and customers, its called "entrepreneurship" and it works because business people can gather together programmers and market their skills, despite their poor presentation, and make profit. This model won't change. However a clever person may be able to turn this business model from the crap-shoot it currently is to a "McDonald" systematised business that it needs to become to impart some kind of assurance to the end customers whom desperately want guarantees in a world where precious few are to be had.
jech
You're eight year old child "uses" debian????
What do you mean exactly by "uses"???? Runs bog standard software installed by daddy? uses apt-get by herself? understands that f**k awful piece of software called dselect???
My daughter is seven, can read the newspaper happily and understands way more than I did at seven, but she would be limited to following screen prompts and the standard child friendly software that is on bog standard cds such as the reader rabbit cds or the cartoon network home page games.
please elaborate as "uses" is a very ambiguous term.....
ta
jech
To be honest I have real trouble considering any electronic good to be a long life durable good from a cheap consumable, yet when I think of all the valve t.v.s out there, and I found an old valve radio in the garage the other day, severally battered, plugged it in and it worked first time. You are right, there is a subtle shift to get consumers to accept cheap crap over quality goods. Pity as we will pay the price, not only from a landfill / recycling point of view, but economically and job wise as well. Just look at the jap import throw-away car, more and more these are a real concern to our NZ government that is worried that they can't be got rid of and are rapidly filling up our landfills...... see a pattern?? jech
This reminds me of an interesting thought I had the other day, things are definatly built today with a lifetime of 5~10 years in them before they break down. The MTBF rate of new hardware from home electronics to whiteware to automobiles, is slowly slipping into the industrial electronics which used to be imune from these efects.
Is this just the manufacturers way of generating replacement income for the future or are we getting sloppy in our standards that our parents and grandparents would never have stood for?
Surely there is no economic benifit in replacing something that otherwise works correctly. My father sent me a photo the other day with my grandfather standing in his kitchen in the picture. There was nothing in the picture made later than 1960!
The fridge was still going, the cooker still worked and the kettle looked like the cord violated several electricity standards today, all still working fine 40+ years later. I have replaced all my whiteware twice and i've only had use for my personal whiteware for ten years!!!!
jech
The biggest dream that the financial world has ever had with an XML concept has been the concept of standardised financial reports.
Imagine a world where any finacial (excel based or otherwise) report from any public company can be compared with any other company report and we can all be sure of how the figures were calculated and what they mean.
AND they are fully comparable. And fully importable into any financial package. No longer is any one company dependant on one financial package. Come to think of it there is no way the vendors of such products will ever allow this to happen!!!
http://www.xbrl.org/
jech
I think someone should do a site on the funniest newbie searches.
My father tells a story of one of the chaps in his workshop, being a big ford motor racing fan putting in the word "escort" into a search engine.
But by far the funniest was when my mother was first introduced to the internet, she was studying dentistry at the time, and typed the word "oral" into the portal.
I lept across the room shouting "Noooooooo" much like the slow mo scene from an action movie.........
jech
I'm amazed that this device is being touted as ground breaking.
7 100_ph one_series.htm
the Kyocera 1735
http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/7100_phone/
(disclaimer i have one!) is a fully featured palm pda and cell (cdma) and beats it on quite a few points.
1) great battery life 160 hours standby (though talk time isn't as good)
2) colour screen 65k colours
3) no crappy keyboard
4) aimed at real business people, can't do daft photos.
5) looks like a real phone, clamshell, not flaming large geeky hunk of computer in your hand.
the treo and its earlier predecessors are all ugly.
and why must they insist on the keyboard thingy? the best thing about the palm is grafitti. we don't need no stenkin keyboard!
it still looks way to wide, my hands don't like holding a brick for a meeting length conversation.
jech.
I'm very religous in a traditional sense, subscribe to the fact that the bible is the authorised worf of God, its true etc etc etc , full on born again christian etc etc , preached two sermons this year myself etc etc,
and this is funny, i can just see nelson saying that.
its funny man, don't stress over the little details.
jech
Good point, and I have no reason to assume he is telling the truth.
But, and this is an important "But", death threats and other serious threats are often made towards spammers (as reported in the media), even on slashdot.
I have a strong suspicion that the spammer in question probably did receive a threat or two of an unlawful nature, even if made by a few teenage boys that don't know any better.
The level of rhetoric and pseudo - violence seems to be rising against what is merely an anoying form of marketing.
And I'm sick of paying for my adsl bandwidth to download spam shite, and i'm quite afraid of the viruses and crap that are propogated via email, both of which have a dollar cost to my business, neither of which justify the lengths people seem to be willing to go to, just to stop this level of anoying marketing.
jech.
Unfortunatly acording to the NZ herald that published an article a few weeks ago on the NZ spammer that had his name and telephone number published on an on-line forum (maybee just like this one...) he received death threats and telephone abuse that even his young daughter received.
The trouble is that most of society do not take their email abuse as serious as some netizens.
This activity is unlawful and imoral. Sending spam is not unlawful. A death threat is punishible by jail terms and is a very serious crime.
Spam is no where near as important as most geeks make it out to be, certainly not to the level that death threats are justified.
jech
The car was built by a new zealander, but its way too expensive.
Check out some of our cheaper atv's which second hand retail for about $6000 NZD.
http://www.argo-atv.co.nz/
jech.
(I just sent this letter to the writter and thought I would share it with you all)
Dear Sir,
I have just read your article "robotic freedom" and felt I ought to reply.
I couldn't help but notice the similarities between your article and the beliefs espoused by a New Zealand (and global) political group known as "Social Credit"
The theories of Social Credit are almost 100 years old and here in NZ there hasn't been an active Social Credit political party for some time in government.
The interesting thing is that they espouse the idea of a "national income" much as you do in your article. They arive at the same conclusion as you do but by different means.
I would like to suggest to you two point that my personal observation of human society has led me to beleive,
1) that the current social welfare system enjoyed in New Zealand and other common wealth nations, is in fact an active "national income" scheme.
2) because of greed inherant in all humans, the national income will always be a extreme modest amount.
History teaches us that the serfs and common men of society always end up living on extremely low means. Those at the top willingly take from all the rest. And Greed ensures that those at the botom would trade places with those at the top and continue the same crime in an instant.
How do you propose to solve the problem of Greed and actually make your robotic system work? So that every man, women and child receives a fair income that is above substience level? And for whatever answer you give, what makes you think that it will be enough to hold the greed of people in check? and then to ask yourself, why doesn't your system work in third-world nations? (it wasn't so long ago that the western nations had extreme poverty in their lands, due to the same causes , the have's keep from the have-nots)
This is my question, as it is becoming more obvious today that the kings of old are simply being replaced by the merchants of new.
The power changes hands but the crimes remain the same.
Sorry for the "soap boxing"!!
I Can't believe that no-one has noticed the obvious thing here, its not just a white-cell type thing, it's microsofts answer to apt-get.
Finally the death-knell for linux may have just been sounded.
If one of the biggest benifits of open source is that the bugs and holes are patched quickly, imagine how quickly they can be patched by a closed source company and its collection of worm programmers.
Shit this thing whips the pants off apt-get and windows-update, this thing does the bloody update for you and then logs off.
Its almost like having your own security administrator working for you. You simply connect to the net and with a bit of luck the office ms-patches install themselves on your pc.
Talk about a fantastic marketing gimmick, i can picture it now......
[regular joe in a store] so your telling me i don't need to worry about the hackers on the interweb thingy 'cos microsoft will simply fix up any holes on my pc as soon as they find em, and i don't have to do a thing??
[sales chap] yup, and there is no charge for this service sir, and it all happens whilst you are asleep.
who else sees this as a serious threat?? or a fantastic opportunity if we could somehow use this in the open source community......
Is that people still think the issue is one of the following problems:
....... WHICH IS ADMINISTRATOR.
1) script kiddies
2) lack of a good virus scanner
3) bugs or security holes
4) poor software
Ever notice that all of the above problems won't ever go away? no mater how hard you patch your box you will never catch up.
And as one wise poster said, "i don't patch too soon because the patch often introduces more problems than it fixes".
The reason that unix and mainframe environments are more secure than windows pc's is for one reason and one reason only......
Good design.
When i install postgress i install it under the postegress user. When i install Oracle i install it under the Oracle user. When i browse the web i run the browser as myself. When i read email i read email as myself.
NONE of the above users have root priviledges. Yet when i run the above software on my windows server, more often than not it does have full admin rights and is/ or is equivilent to the admin user.
EVEN if i attempt good security measures i can't get around the fact that so many ms products want to run as root, or use services that run as root, or depend on infrastructures that run as root, etc etc etc.
So no matter how quickly you patch, human error and bugs in software will undoubtedly introduce new security problems.
In a multi user secured environment each user space is protected from every other user space by the inherant security model.
In a windows environment, most processes are all the same user, or for certain parts of their operations become the same user, or have the same user
And you can never stop the adminstrator from doing whatever it wants to do to your sysem because it is God.
and that is why virus manufacturers will never go out of business no matter how good ms-update becomes.
jech.
I know this sounds like a troll but consider the following:
1) Americans probably get more t.v. advertising than anybody else on the planet, yet slashdoters (apart from tivio style conversations) rarely complain about t.v. adds
2) If you saw 10 advertisments per ad-break and had an ad-break per 10 minutes of viewing time, thats 60 ads per hour.
3) I read recently that the average american watches between 4-8 hours of t.v. a day. (thats increadible, where do they get time to crap and eat and work etc?) which translates to 8*60 which is 480 adverts per day.
thepaytons and msnbc
4) very few of us get 480 spams per day.
The solution isn't to complain or to sue or to punish any advertisers (whilst there are purchasers willing there is always an incentive to spam)
In fact maybee like the bafta awards for commercials immediate future
where tv shows case the best advertisements (funny, sexiest, shockingest etc etc) perhaps spam will mature into stuff we tolerate and maybe even laugh at.
People say that the spammers should be made to pay, or that we should charge for email so that spammers would stop or slow down. Well last time i checked they do pay for email. Sure fat pipes with pre-paid gig bandwidth's is v cheap, but its still bought and paid for.
People say that everyone hates spammers, yet that simply isn't true. No matter how much geeks hate spammers, there are more customers out there willing to buy dick extenders, boob enhancers and the staying power of a donkey!
The correct thing to do with spam is to wait for the market to mature, and silently use technology to strip it out whilst we can.
Whilst we are on the subject of unsolicited advertising, consider junk-mail, bill boards, video previews, movie theater advertising, sports brand promotions, corporate sponsorships etc etc etc.
Advertising and spam is here to stay. Stop whining, and accept it. The vast majority of the world simply does not hate spam as much as the average slashdotter.
Jech.
And it doesn't involve unions. Simply get everyone whom is concerned about this, IBM employees, IBM suppliers etc etc, to buy IBM shares.
IBM's corporate charter (constitution) will dictate what is a minimum amount of shares to vote, and how many makes a majority.
If enough people do it then swinging the opinions of the major instutions won't be that hard.
Don't forget CEO's / board of directors have hundreds of Bosses, whilst most of you only have one.
Interesting that you use the term "allotment", most of your international readers probably won't know what you mean, but my father used to have one so I know where you are going with that statement:
"Allotment : small section of ground reserved for the purpose of growing plants / veggies etc, popular due to the fact that so many british people don't have large enough spaces of ground to grow items on their own properties".
Interesting to think that the concept of having a small space of land to grow your own food on sounds so fuedual, and yet we live in the 21st century.
Perhaps thats most don't bother growing their own food any more?
The parent says it nicely, its a question of manners, or to use an older word, MORALS. Thus stated there is now no longer a need to debate this crap any longer on slashdot. The definition is no longer required. "it really is a question of morals" Now we only need to debate whose morals (read laws) should apply to these situations, (i) personal laws, every man for himself (ii) the corporate laws, every institution for itself (iii) the governmental laws, they get to set 'em. (iv) some higher authority seems to me the founding fathers already made that decision for you Americans. so quit arguing about it.
Its true, you really can heat your rooms with your gear. Its currently winter in NZ and i keep long hours in my office at night-time and my wife often joins me in the room to watch t.v. on the old p300 i've got, just so she can keep warm (and also because the gas heater gives her headaches!) nothing wrong with computer heat, its summer i'm worried about....
Damn, I should have used the preview function just like the warning said, it looks like I used vi to type that dribble out! Sorry about the lack of paragraphs, that's what happens when you paste from ms-word. Talking of pasting, does it work yet in the linux world????
I scanned down the list to read other peoples experiences with Debian, as they were more interesting to me than the statement, that old saw, "The King is Dead, long live the King!". The average user experience says everything about Debian, and overwhelmingly people say the same thing, "Using Debian has caused me issues, no more or less than other Linux variants, but I feel its worth it because of xyz (usually related to some perceived stability perception)". I have been using Debian for three years now, as a result of a friend installing it for me when I wanted to install Linux. I had tried a slackware installation in the early 90's but it didn't work well compared to what I was used to. Baring in mind my background (I started of as a DG Unix admin, in a time when SCO was the PC Unix distribution, and slackware was just a medium for distributing shareware). I have found the experience somewhat enlightening, and yet unduly frustrating also. I have around 14 years of experience with PC architecture, and have spent the last 10 years as a DBA and sysop of most of the major UNICES and RDBM's, yet Linux has proved to be a pain in the butt to get even the most minor of things working for me. And I'm a geek, with decent experience with Unix and PC's that most people simply don't have, even in the PC world. Yet my latest attempt to install debian on an old Compaq, with updated kernel, and dual nics, as a gateway with shorewall, has taken me over two months of dicking with it every other evening for an hour or two, WHAT CHANCE DOES THE AVERAGE JOE HAVE??? I only wanted my own firewall for my ADSL line. Now I appreciate that I'm doing some unusual non-standard things with my installation that most users wouldn't care about, BUT I'M NOT A USER! If I, with two kids, mortgage and other hassles of early 30's life, don't have the time to get Debian working to do what I want, how on earth is my mum or grandma ever going to have Debian working to do emails and look at the web and tap out a letter or two to relatives around the globe??? The dist with the "pop the cd in and away you go" attitude will be the one that makes it to the masses. That has already happened, its called "MS Windows". In fact pre-installed takes away installation fears entirly. My mother has never installed an o/s and never will. Why should she? she has never installed a car engine either, yet she has driven for years. Debian is difficult for geeks to get working just the way they want, let alone for average joes. So this has led me to my conclusion, why do I stick with debian? is it for stability? no I use mature *nix's for that at the places where I work, TRUE64, AIX, HPUX, SCO, these are what have always dominated the market place (no prizes for guessing which UNIX will win!). LINUX??? nope, sorry, we install windows for cheap servers and desktops. So it must be because I like being elitist and lump these experiences in with my ability to use vi, proud of it simply cos others can't. how pathetic.
at stereo rough mp3 compression giving 1mb per min (doing this from v poor memory) thats (365+320) 685 days or 16,440 hours or 986,400 minutes or 986 gig. That is a serious album, where exactly are you going to get a cd / dvd that big? On the other hand in a few years ide drives will have that kind of capacity real cheap. perhaps this would be a neat investment earner for the FSF or similar?
This is like complaining that on google the words "escort" (as in ford escort motor car) and "oral" (as in dental hygine) are being misused by the pron industry!