Unpopular as it is to say it -- NASA puts too much of a premium on human lives. This is an unfortunate system that has been produced by any fuckups from NASA reaching the press resulting in NASA losing funding.
So you get situations like the current one, with the Hubble not being taken care of. How many shuttle flights have been made *without* insulation falling off and causing the shuttle to crash? Lots. Pretty decent odds, when you consider the fact that it's pretty certain that there are all kinds of problems that *haven't* been addressed on each flight because they haven't become critical before. Don't get me wrong -- I think that NASA should keep looking for good solutions. But that doesn't mean that everything should be grounded. There's risk inherent in everything, and anyone who wants to be an astronaut has a pretty good idea that he's putting himself in a potentially fatal situation.
That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to start throwing people into shuttles and cover up known problems. But I think that it's a pretty far jump for NASA to start doing that. If an astronaut is willing to go along with a system that might potentially die, I think that should be his call. Heck, in orbit, you have no way of knowing whether you might get whacked by a micrometerorite that will take out your shuttle or your suit when on a spacewalk, and no way to really do anything about it.
I might get hit by a car when I walk across the street tomorrow. I'll do what I can to minimize the risk, but I'm going to take acceptable risks for gains.
I also find it funny that it's entirely acceptable for thousands of people to die in the Middle East to enrich a few rich men, but entirely unacceptable for ten men and women to take a risk that has *always* been present and do something significant for the sake of human knowledge like take care of the Hubble. I mean, where are our priorities?
The hardware firewall catches 99% of the crap as far as scans and such, and blackice catches server-attacks such as badly formatted HTTP requests, DNS hacks, FTP exploit attempts, and such.
I'd like to point out that the HTTP server that you're running is much more likely to be able to effectively and without false positives or negatives shrug off someone poking at it than a flaky general-purpose IDS.
I've seen studies that claim that IDSes aren't all that great even in corporate settings, where you might have an on-site security team. A home user is unlikely to do much of anything with the software. Plus, personal firewalls slow down their computer, have a tendancy to break other software, get users worked up over nothing to try to justify their existence, and generally make a pain of an ass of themselves.
You *can* shut off, I believe, every service that listens on a port in a vanilla Windows box.
However, Windows' netstat lacks the -p flag, for mapping a port to a process.
Windows does provide, out of box, an extremely complex couple of daemons running with full privileges, and listening on ports. While it's not as if these has never been done before (*cough* sendmail *cough*) this is a pretty bad idea. Nasty if a worm slips into your LAN and then spreads around like wildfire.
These services, like filesharing and RPC and whatnot, are important to many users. The problem is that on a secure system, any daemons should provide an absolutely minimal functionality set to any system that has not authenticated itself unless that daemon is specifically designed for anonymous access (like a web server). The more functionality you expose, the more potential vulnerabilities you expose to the world. Microsoft does not provide an easy way (I believe you can pull it off with, say, IPSec, though) to ensure that a connection is from a trusted computer. Compare this to, say, the configuration of a secure modern X11 system. One generally listens only on UNIX-domain sockets (rather than IP) and then tunnels everything through an simple authentication system that doesn't run as root -- ssh. Even that isn't perfect -- openssh has had a security history -- but it's a lot better than letting arbitrary people poke and prod at a vanilla system in all sorts of ways. IP-based blocking (Oh, *that* guy's on the Internet -- I'll ignore packets from him) may not be sufficient with the spread of Mobile IP (and the subsequent inability of people to block spoofed packets).
The problem is that firewalls have become *massively* oversold to idiots, and the "personal firewall" has seen a surge in interest.
Firewalls have a good, legitimate (if annoying) purpose. They provide a single point to deploy emergency protection -- you can't patch every box in a company in a production environment in a day, with the current state of computers, but you can get at the firewall quickly.
The problem is that, because firewalls are (a) cheap, (b) require only a minimal amount of technical competence to operate, and (c) sound sexy ("*firewall*"), they've become incredibly oversold.
The personal firewall is a terrible example of this. The term "firewall" went around, and in order for people to feel secure and safe, now they have to have a "personal firewall". If you want to secure your own box, the answer is to yank off everything that's sitting there *listening* and waiting for crap to come in and screw it over. Unlike most vendors, Microsoft ships a system that keeps ports open by default and daemons running. And not only did they do that, but they leave gateways into the incredibly complex and undoubtedly difficult-for-developers-to-secure Windows filesharing and IPC mechanisms. Simple things like SSH have had masses of their own problems, but they pale compared to having a Windows box sitting and listening for data out of box. Sure enough, users, unaware of how to disable Microsoft's filesharing system WRT remote access (especially how to do so without breaking functionality) started buying these damned personal firewalls.
Personal firewalls bog down a machine, and make a complex, frequently-modified (and often not frequently updated, since Joe User isn't a rabid security admin) daemon sit and make itself available to exploits.
There's a great, free, high-performance, *almost* foolproof way to secure a system. Turn off the stuff that you don't want being accessed. Barring bugs in TCP stacks (and given the degree of pounding they get, I trust TCP stack code more than most code), you now have a nice, secure system.
I had to deal with someone not long ago who *very* much wanted to set up a firewall in front of a Linux box -- a single machine. It was a server of some importance, but I couldn't help but ask -- why? What possible benefit do you hope to derive from it? On such a server, you *have* to allow in inbound connections (or else you cannot communicate with the outside world) -- and on this box, it was connections to all listening ports. The only thing you can block is things that the TCP stack is going to ignore anyway. And, for that matter, the firewall was running an embedded Linux system. If there was a bug in the Linux TCP stack, that same bug is likely to affect both the firewall and the server.
I've been watching the rise of "personal firewalls" with some irritation, and I hope that the growing number of attacks on firewalls will help bring an end to them. Network-wide firewalls have *some* point -- personal firewalls do not.
Modern laptops cache the video image that was visible upon shutdown and restore it to give the image of instantly waking up. The idea is that you aren't going to *do* anything significant for a bit of time after you see the thing awake, and during that time the rest of the wakeup can be finished.
Not that that's a misfeature -- it seems to work reasonably well -- but there's no way to "instantly" wake up a laptop. You have to read much of the contents of RAM back from the disk, one way or another.
The license being used by the repository is explicitly not GPL-compatible. It prohibits any commercial use of the code. This is a primary reason for setting up the repository, as commonwealth-produced software cannot (under the current system) be used by entities to make money, according to the article.
His complaint is legitimate, even if not for this particular case. "Locking" a Windows or Linux box does nothing for security if someone happens to have a rescue disc handy (well, other than let you possibly know that the machine has rebooted).
Does YaST support running in the console as well as X?
I ask because this is important to many people -- and I remember that a good point of Red Hat's old Linuxconf was that it ran in both the console and X.
The difference between soldiers and terrorists is that the former don't go out of their way to increase civilian casualties.
Close. There is a very specific definition of terrorist -- it is someone that seeks to impose terror on a civilian population.
An assassin bent on killing a single political figure is not a terrorist.
A bunch of people that threaten to carbomb anyone supporting a political bill, but don't actually end up carbombing anyone, *are* terrorists.
A bunch of people crashing airplanes into skyscrapers are terrorists, if they do so with the intent of scaring the civilians that live and work in and around those skyscrapers.
A harsh dictator that seeks to keep his people in fear is a terrorist. Note that our current occupational government in Iraq, existing only through constant threat of military force, is probably a terrorist organization (not that the Hussein regime wasn't).
Of course, the United States has funded and supported terrorist groups themselves many times before -- in the case of Afghanistan, we've backed some of the exact same terrorist groups that we are now fighting. (It was okay before, because the Soviets were the ones that had to fight the terrorists.) Any time you hear the word "freedom fighter", you're quite possibly hearing about a terrorist -- one backed by your own government.
The problem is that Bush has managed to convince most people in the United States to go along with him on an impossible, and ill-defined quest -- blowing people up as long as they're "terrorists", which gives him a stunningly powerful blank check. Surprise -- he's chosen to use these powers in a way to benefit political friends and allies.
Many men far wiser than us have pondered the human mind, and we have discovered its complexity and depth are pretty much beyond comprehension. I know PhDs in cognitive science, AI and psychology who all say the same thing so dont even argue the point unless you fall into that category
Logically, yes, in that an intelligent being cannot fully comprehend itself (due to having to store all the data that is contained in itself), and that humans are roughly equivalent -- enough so that overhead implies that one person probably cannot fully understand another. So from one point of view, your statement is trivial. From another, it isn't true -- we clearly *can* predict human behavior to some extent. We know roughly what might happen when you smack someone in the face. If we couldn't, we wouldn't be able to function very well around other people.
YOU CANNOT WIN A WAR ON TERRORISM
I don't necessarily agree. I think that there *are* ways to fight a specific group of terrorists and win. If you have an extremely isolated, extremist group with views that differ from the general populace, and you can kill everyone in the group, you've "won", since no one takes up their cause.
I don't think that Bush's "war on terror" can be successful. First, it's open-ended, and "terrorism" is a fuzzy definition. He's taking on a huge number of people (including some that probably aren't really terrorists). Second of all, the way Bush is fighting his war (brute force, more brute force, and damn the consequences, and leverage every bit of influence that his predecessors have built up) just isn't a feasible approach. If you kill two thousand non-terrorists (and we've killed a lot more than that), you have maybe four thousand kids growing up knowing that you've killed their parents. It's a hydra situation -- if for each person you kill, you enrage and offend two people, you're losing, not winning.
The lousy thing is that we have to live with the international consequences, the view of Americans, that "Bush's War" will have for a long time to come. It's easy to apply force. It's really hard to build up trust, and takes a lot longer. I hope, for all of our sakes, that we don't get another "war President" after the next election.
Due to the numerous problems that the industry has brought upon itself with too many companies trying to control the "standard" format, DVD recording is probably a no-starter, other than for archival use. There are a ton of incompatible formats, there are media compatibility problems that splinter the market more, and hard drives are cheap enough that many people may not care about burning DVDs of their data, given reliability issues and usability issues (a hard drive is always there). Plus, the capacity isn't all that much greater than CD-ROMs -- a CD-ROM was over 400 times larger than the next largest universal format -- the floppy.
Kind of depressing, but perhaps the storage industry will learn that fragmentation doesn't pay when the next storage media comes out.
There is a reason why iPods are so popular: they are relatively inexpensive
Apple's strong point is eye candy. Value is not a strong point. I'm not sure what you're comparing the iPod to to come up with "relatively inexpensive".
Well, in their defense, and a very minor defense, they did bring out the optical mouse.
The optical mouse that Microsoft built relies almost entirely on a single chip put out by Agilent that does all the heavy lifting. It has the camera, comes with the lens, illuminating LED, and the LED housing, does the image recognition, and just spits out signals for how the mouse has moved to the rest of the mouse's electronics. It even handles sleeping the mouse's LED automatically. It's not very hard to build a device based on it -- a little bit of circuitry (probably mostly from a stock USB controller chip), and providing some plastic molding. It was not a Microsoft invention.
I dunno how many people use PLD (I used to use RPMs from it back when it had more packages and was more up-to-date than Red Hat), but it's European (Polish).
Dunno who the folks were that made Acorn, but that (was) another, IIRC Britain.
Microsoft spends a lot on research, but their *products* are not technically advanced. They are a *heavy* recruiter of researchers...but somehow, that new research usually doesn't show up in the products they're selling.
It confuses me too. How can they blow so damn much money on research and yet fail to actually apply the work?
I was going to go to Microsoft Research's home page, but their server appears to be busy throwing up on itself at the moment ("Server Error in '/' Application.")
A monopoly does not mean the nonexistence of competitors. It means that nobody can seriously mount a challenge to the monopolist.
The problem is twofold:
* Business: Microsoft has a tremendous amount of leverage on OEMs and large corporations because they must obtain their OS from Microsoft and usually their office suite. This means that Microsoft can place restrictions on what OEMs can use -- if you get a $20 price increase on Windows if you sell Linux...you aren't going to sell Linux boxes.
* Techical: Microsoft can create very high barriers to entry through closed protocols and file formats, meaning that there *is* no drop-in replacement for Office or Windows. Heavy, impressive, and often volunteer efforts have helped a good deal here, giving us Samba, WINE, and Open Office.
Finally, there is the (more minor, but still nasty) issue that Microsoft has accumulated a good deal of money over the past two decades, and plays very aggressively with this money with anyone that attempts to enter their market space.
There is way too much money in Europe. That will never happen. Microsoft has a *lot* of levels to lobby and bribe at. There are a lot of concessions they could make. Even in the most extreme hypothetical situation -- Microsoft gets banned from putting out Windows in Europe (which won't happen), they'd just put out a Linux distribution or something.
X.org is the more conventional fork (and Xserver is the fancy one with transparency, drop shadows, etc), both at freedesktop.org.
Keith Packard is, I believe, the freedesktop.org guy -- he's the guy that's pushed forward most of the new XFree86 functionality for the last few years, until his falling out with Dawes.
This is an annoyance for packagers. It will also mean that transitions to Xserver or features coming across from Xserver are more likely, which is good all around for Linux folks.
It would be a nice demonstration of the claim that opensource software can adapt quickly to 'breaks' in incompatable licenses (and unwanted behaviour).
This is not all (directly) about licenses. Keith Packard has done most of the new, interesting functionality in XFree86 for some time. By going with him, they are aiming for more modern functionality in their X server. XFree86 is very conservative about new functionality.
And there are few *American* characters. There are lots of Japanese, but no *American* ones -- none of this blue and red hair anime business. What's wrong with apple pies can chocolate-chip cookies?
If only we had American, homosexual protagonists of color.
Considering gamers still use the words 'fag', 'gay' and 'homo' in order to insult each other online, it'll be a while until homosexual characters are implemented more into games.
Yes, they should be using "lame" or "retard" or "bastard".
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Unpopular as it is to say it -- NASA puts too much of a premium on human lives. This is an unfortunate system that has been produced by any fuckups from NASA reaching the press resulting in NASA losing funding.
So you get situations like the current one, with the Hubble not being taken care of. How many shuttle flights have been made *without* insulation falling off and causing the shuttle to crash? Lots. Pretty decent odds, when you consider the fact that it's pretty certain that there are all kinds of problems that *haven't* been addressed on each flight because they haven't become critical before. Don't get me wrong -- I think that NASA should keep looking for good solutions. But that doesn't mean that everything should be grounded. There's risk inherent in everything, and anyone who wants to be an astronaut has a pretty good idea that he's putting himself in a potentially fatal situation.
That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to start throwing people into shuttles and cover up known problems. But I think that it's a pretty far jump for NASA to start doing that. If an astronaut is willing to go along with a system that might potentially die, I think that should be his call. Heck, in orbit, you have no way of knowing whether you might get whacked by a micrometerorite that will take out your shuttle or your suit when on a spacewalk, and no way to really do anything about it.
I might get hit by a car when I walk across the street tomorrow. I'll do what I can to minimize the risk, but I'm going to take acceptable risks for gains.
I also find it funny that it's entirely acceptable for thousands of people to die in the Middle East to enrich a few rich men, but entirely unacceptable for ten men and women to take a risk that has *always* been present and do something significant for the sake of human knowledge like take care of the Hubble. I mean, where are our priorities?
The hardware firewall catches 99% of the crap as far as scans and such, and blackice catches server-attacks such as badly formatted HTTP requests, DNS hacks, FTP exploit attempts, and such.
I'd like to point out that the HTTP server that you're running is much more likely to be able to effectively and without false positives or negatives shrug off someone poking at it than a flaky general-purpose IDS.
I've seen studies that claim that IDSes aren't all that great even in corporate settings, where you might have an on-site security team. A home user is unlikely to do much of anything with the software. Plus, personal firewalls slow down their computer, have a tendancy to break other software, get users worked up over nothing to try to justify their existence, and generally make a pain of an ass of themselves.
This isn't strictly true.
You *can* shut off, I believe, every service that listens on a port in a vanilla Windows box.
However, Windows' netstat lacks the -p flag, for mapping a port to a process.
Windows does provide, out of box, an extremely complex couple of daemons running with full privileges, and listening on ports. While it's not as if these has never been done before (*cough* sendmail *cough*) this is a pretty bad idea. Nasty if a worm slips into your LAN and then spreads around like wildfire.
These services, like filesharing and RPC and whatnot, are important to many users. The problem is that on a secure system, any daemons should provide an absolutely minimal functionality set to any system that has not authenticated itself unless that daemon is specifically designed for anonymous access (like a web server). The more functionality you expose, the more potential vulnerabilities you expose to the world. Microsoft does not provide an easy way (I believe you can pull it off with, say, IPSec, though) to ensure that a connection is from a trusted computer. Compare this to, say, the configuration of a secure modern X11 system. One generally listens only on UNIX-domain sockets (rather than IP) and then tunnels everything through an simple authentication system that doesn't run as root -- ssh. Even that isn't perfect -- openssh has had a security history -- but it's a lot better than letting arbitrary people poke and prod at a vanilla system in all sorts of ways. IP-based blocking (Oh, *that* guy's on the Internet -- I'll ignore packets from him) may not be sufficient with the spread of Mobile IP (and the subsequent inability of people to block spoofed packets).
The problem is that firewalls have become *massively* oversold to idiots, and the "personal firewall" has seen a surge in interest.
Firewalls have a good, legitimate (if annoying) purpose. They provide a single point to deploy emergency protection -- you can't patch every box in a company in a production environment in a day, with the current state of computers, but you can get at the firewall quickly.
The problem is that, because firewalls are (a) cheap, (b) require only a minimal amount of technical competence to operate, and (c) sound sexy ("*firewall*"), they've become incredibly oversold.
The personal firewall is a terrible example of this. The term "firewall" went around, and in order for people to feel secure and safe, now they have to have a "personal firewall". If you want to secure your own box, the answer is to yank off everything that's sitting there *listening* and waiting for crap to come in and screw it over. Unlike most vendors, Microsoft ships a system that keeps ports open by default and daemons running. And not only did they do that, but they leave gateways into the incredibly complex and undoubtedly difficult-for-developers-to-secure Windows filesharing and IPC mechanisms. Simple things like SSH have had masses of their own problems, but they pale compared to having a Windows box sitting and listening for data out of box. Sure enough, users, unaware of how to disable Microsoft's filesharing system WRT remote access (especially how to do so without breaking functionality) started buying these damned personal firewalls.
Personal firewalls bog down a machine, and make a complex, frequently-modified (and often not frequently updated, since Joe User isn't a rabid security admin) daemon sit and make itself available to exploits.
There's a great, free, high-performance, *almost* foolproof way to secure a system. Turn off the stuff that you don't want being accessed. Barring bugs in TCP stacks (and given the degree of pounding they get, I trust TCP stack code more than most code), you now have a nice, secure system.
I had to deal with someone not long ago who *very* much wanted to set up a firewall in front of a Linux box -- a single machine. It was a server of some importance, but I couldn't help but ask -- why? What possible benefit do you hope to derive from it? On such a server, you *have* to allow in inbound connections (or else you cannot communicate with the outside world) -- and on this box, it was connections to all listening ports. The only thing you can block is things that the TCP stack is going to ignore anyway. And, for that matter, the firewall was running an embedded Linux system. If there was a bug in the Linux TCP stack, that same bug is likely to affect both the firewall and the server.
I've been watching the rise of "personal firewalls" with some irritation, and I hope that the growing number of attacks on firewalls will help bring an end to them. Network-wide firewalls have *some* point -- personal firewalls do not.
Modern laptops cache the video image that was visible upon shutdown and restore it to give the image of instantly waking up. The idea is that you aren't going to *do* anything significant for a bit of time after you see the thing awake, and during that time the rest of the wakeup can be finished.
Not that that's a misfeature -- it seems to work reasonably well -- but there's no way to "instantly" wake up a laptop. You have to read much of the contents of RAM back from the disk, one way or another.
The license being used by the repository is explicitly not GPL-compatible. It prohibits any commercial use of the code. This is a primary reason for setting up the repository, as commonwealth-produced software cannot (under the current system) be used by entities to make money, according to the article.
His complaint is legitimate, even if not for this particular case. "Locking" a Windows or Linux box does nothing for security if someone happens to have a rescue disc handy (well, other than let you possibly know that the machine has rebooted).
Does YaST support running in the console as well as X?
I ask because this is important to many people -- and I remember that a good point of Red Hat's old Linuxconf was that it ran in both the console and X.
The difference between soldiers and terrorists is that the former don't go out of their way to increase civilian casualties.
Close. There is a very specific definition of terrorist -- it is someone that seeks to impose terror on a civilian population.
An assassin bent on killing a single political figure is not a terrorist.
A bunch of people that threaten to carbomb anyone supporting a political bill, but don't actually end up carbombing anyone, *are* terrorists.
A bunch of people crashing airplanes into skyscrapers are terrorists, if they do so with the intent of scaring the civilians that live and work in and around those skyscrapers.
A harsh dictator that seeks to keep his people in fear is a terrorist. Note that our current occupational government in Iraq, existing only through constant threat of military force, is probably a terrorist organization (not that the Hussein regime wasn't).
Of course, the United States has funded and supported terrorist groups themselves many times before -- in the case of Afghanistan, we've backed some of the exact same terrorist groups that we are now fighting. (It was okay before, because the Soviets were the ones that had to fight the terrorists.) Any time you hear the word "freedom fighter", you're quite possibly hearing about a terrorist -- one backed by your own government.
The problem is that Bush has managed to convince most people in the United States to go along with him on an impossible, and ill-defined quest -- blowing people up as long as they're "terrorists", which gives him a stunningly powerful blank check. Surprise -- he's chosen to use these powers in a way to benefit political friends and allies.
Many men far wiser than us have pondered the human mind, and we have discovered its complexity and depth are pretty much beyond comprehension. I know PhDs in cognitive science, AI and psychology who all say the same thing so dont even argue the point unless you fall into that category
Logically, yes, in that an intelligent being cannot fully comprehend itself (due to having to store all the data that is contained in itself), and that humans are roughly equivalent -- enough so that overhead implies that one person probably cannot fully understand another. So from one point of view, your statement is trivial. From another, it isn't true -- we clearly *can* predict human behavior to some extent. We know roughly what might happen when you smack someone in the face. If we couldn't, we wouldn't be able to function very well around other people.
YOU CANNOT WIN A WAR ON TERRORISM
I don't necessarily agree. I think that there *are* ways to fight a specific group of terrorists and win. If you have an extremely isolated, extremist group with views that differ from the general populace, and you can kill everyone in the group, you've "won", since no one takes up their cause.
I don't think that Bush's "war on terror" can be successful. First, it's open-ended, and "terrorism" is a fuzzy definition. He's taking on a huge number of people (including some that probably aren't really terrorists). Second of all, the way Bush is fighting his war (brute force, more brute force, and damn the consequences, and leverage every bit of influence that his predecessors have built up) just isn't a feasible approach. If you kill two thousand non-terrorists (and we've killed a lot more than that), you have maybe four thousand kids growing up knowing that you've killed their parents. It's a hydra situation -- if for each person you kill, you enrage and offend two people, you're losing, not winning.
The lousy thing is that we have to live with the international consequences, the view of Americans, that "Bush's War" will have for a long time to come. It's easy to apply force. It's really hard to build up trust, and takes a lot longer. I hope, for all of our sakes, that we don't get another "war President" after the next election.
To be fair, the Total Information Awareness campaign was shot down.
The cynic in me thinks that that had more to do with the scary logo than what was actually being done, though.
Due to the numerous problems that the industry has brought upon itself with too many companies trying to control the "standard" format, DVD recording is probably a no-starter, other than for archival use. There are a ton of incompatible formats, there are media compatibility problems that splinter the market more, and hard drives are cheap enough that many people may not care about burning DVDs of their data, given reliability issues and usability issues (a hard drive is always there). Plus, the capacity isn't all that much greater than CD-ROMs -- a CD-ROM was over 400 times larger than the next largest universal format -- the floppy.
Kind of depressing, but perhaps the storage industry will learn that fragmentation doesn't pay when the next storage media comes out.
There is a reason why iPods are so popular: they are relatively inexpensive
Apple's strong point is eye candy. Value is not a strong point. I'm not sure what you're comparing the iPod to to come up with "relatively inexpensive".
Well, in their defense, and a very minor defense, they did bring out the optical mouse.
The optical mouse that Microsoft built relies almost entirely on a single chip put out by Agilent that does all the heavy lifting. It has the camera, comes with the lens, illuminating LED, and the LED housing, does the image recognition, and just spits out signals for how the mouse has moved to the rest of the mouse's electronics. It even handles sleeping the mouse's LED automatically. It's not very hard to build a device based on it -- a little bit of circuitry (probably mostly from a stock USB controller chip), and providing some plastic molding. It was not a Microsoft invention.
SuSE is European (German).
I dunno how many people use PLD (I used to use RPMs from it back when it had more packages and was more up-to-date than Red Hat), but it's European (Polish).
Dunno who the folks were that made Acorn, but that (was) another, IIRC Britain.
Microsoft spends a lot on research, but their *products* are not technically advanced. They are a *heavy* recruiter of researchers...but somehow, that new research usually doesn't show up in the products they're selling.
It confuses me too. How can they blow so damn much money on research and yet fail to actually apply the work?
I was going to go to Microsoft Research's home page, but their server appears to be busy throwing up on itself at the moment ("Server Error in '/' Application.")
A monopoly does not mean the nonexistence of competitors. It means that nobody can seriously mount a challenge to the monopolist.
The problem is twofold:
* Business: Microsoft has a tremendous amount of leverage on OEMs and large corporations because they must obtain their OS from Microsoft and usually their office suite. This means that Microsoft can place restrictions on what OEMs can use -- if you get a $20 price increase on Windows if you sell Linux...you aren't going to sell Linux boxes.
* Techical: Microsoft can create very high barriers to entry through closed protocols and file formats, meaning that there *is* no drop-in replacement for Office or Windows. Heavy, impressive, and often volunteer efforts have helped a good deal here, giving us Samba, WINE, and Open Office.
Finally, there is the (more minor, but still nasty) issue that Microsoft has accumulated a good deal of money over the past two decades, and plays very aggressively with this money with anyone that attempts to enter their market space.
There is way too much money in Europe. That will never happen. Microsoft has a *lot* of levels to lobby and bribe at. There are a lot of concessions they could make. Even in the most extreme hypothetical situation -- Microsoft gets banned from putting out Windows in Europe (which won't happen), they'd just put out a Linux distribution or something.
I've heard that the British dental health system is exceptionally poor, which could be correlated with "British people have bad teeth".
So the GNAA will be mailbombing the FBI? This should be interesting.
X.org is the more conventional fork (and Xserver is the fancy one with transparency, drop shadows, etc), both at freedesktop.org.
Keith Packard is, I believe, the freedesktop.org guy -- he's the guy that's pushed forward most of the new XFree86 functionality for the last few years, until his falling out with Dawes.
This is an annoyance for packagers. It will also mean that transitions to Xserver or features coming across from Xserver are more likely, which is good all around for Linux folks.
It would be a nice demonstration of the claim that opensource software can adapt quickly to 'breaks' in incompatable licenses (and unwanted behaviour).
This is not all (directly) about licenses. Keith Packard has done most of the new, interesting functionality in XFree86 for some time. By going with him, they are aiming for more modern functionality in their X server. XFree86 is very conservative about new functionality.
Authentication is a necessary component of usefulness of certification. And I disagree -- he *was* talking about authentication.
one white male avatar
And there are few *American* characters. There are lots of Japanese, but no *American* ones -- none of this blue and red hair anime business. What's wrong with apple pies can chocolate-chip cookies?
If only we had American, homosexual protagonists of color.
Considering gamers still use the words 'fag', 'gay' and 'homo' in order to insult each other online, it'll be a while until homosexual characters are implemented more into games.
Yes, they should be using "lame" or "retard" or "bastard".