The ribbon is not my favorite thing in the world either. What I don't hear about though is where Office 2007 has made changes for the better that OpenOffice will eventually have to catch up with...theming.
Theming is what styles should be for the non-power user. Here are 6 colors that look good together in a document. Use these 6 and you get a nice document. Then you have the ability to rapidly switch between a list of 20 or so themes, each using a different set of 6 colors that complement each other. As Morris Moss would say, "Brilliant!" I can even show a novice or non-power user how to use the feature and why to use it in less than 5 minutes.
Every place where Microsoft has done this in office has been an improvement. With text colors for a document or layout and color styles for spreadsheets. The thing is you can do this without a ribbon. To bad all we here is "teh ribbion is bad I don't get it", or "teh ribbion is the dogs bollocks"
Microsoft makes money, so obviously they would use this as a competitive advantage.
The problem is not that Microsoft would compete with OpenOffice. The problem is that Microsoft will unethically leverage its position as Monopoly to destroy OpenOffice. Many commercial companies will ethically compete with each other. As a corporate culture Microsoft does not want to compete in a market. They want to have 90%+ share of a market and will do whatever is necessary to shrink or kill all other competitors. This is not typical nor ethical behavior.
Microsoft does not care if its competition is another commercial venture, a non-profit corporation, a hobbyist or a government. If it competes with Microsoft in any market where Microsoft does not hold at least 90% of the market then their goal is to minimize, marginalize and even torpedo, and kill the competition. Without regard for ethical behavior or what means are necessary to do so.
Some would say "Microsoft has changed, the now want to work with the FOSS community." To see if that statement is accurate, or if as a corporate culture they are still up to their old tricks, we need to analyze their motives. In this instance, this would be to analyze their motives in regard to OpenOffice AND to glean from it how seriously they take OpenOffice as a competitor in the market. The fact that they have a position entitled "Linux and Open Office Compete Lead" is an indicator of how serious they are about both Linux and OpenOffice.
Traditionally being in Microsoft's sniper scope has not worked out well for other companies. On the other hand as someone once said:
Q. What's the difference between Batman and Bill Gates? A. When Batman fought the Penguin, he won.
Some stuff makes sense, all the food is catered for those that work on a film? Why? Lets say we all eat at the various restaurants around town, and a major actor, a director and a few others get food sickness. That shuts the production down for 3 or 4 day. You still have to pay EVERYBODY on the set for those 4 days. It is just cheaper to have the food catered. Plus the caterers insurance is on the hook for lost wages if anything goes wrong.
Another cost is union stuff. We could talk about all the good the unions do in the Movie business, but lets not, here is my cheap shot.
The are about to shoot a bar scene, but the neon tavern sign is not plugged in. So they call a Union Electrician to come plug it in. It will take him 90 minutes to get there (the nearest town with a union Electrician is 60 minutes away on some remote shoots). So an extra walks over and plugs the sign in. Then a gaffer walks over and unplugs it. Now everyone goes back to waiting (and being paid) for 90 minutes of waiting for the electrician to show up
No union in Hollywood will step on another unions feet. Some of it is really stupid, A directory who is not a member of the camera mans union can not look through the camera lens to set up a shot, he has to shoot and then look at the dailies. (shooting to video has helped with that).
Lets mention a dirty little secret of the film industry. George Lucas does not shoot any film in the United States. He goes to far way places where the Union rules don't bother him.
He may be scanning books to pirate them. However, I am a college student as well but trying to save money by pirating the books is not my objective.
I am in my 40's and my eyesight is not what it used to be. Here is why I would buy the books and scan them.
1. To be legal and comply with the law. I may very well by the books used, to get them as cheaply as possible. But I will buy them. 2. It is much lighter for me to carry one laptop around on campus, perhaps with copies of all the books I have used for all terms up to the current term. 3. I can zoom the pages to a comfortable size to read the text. 4. I now have the ability to search through the text. 5. I can use a text-to-speech reader to listen to the book, I can even make an mp3 of the book if I so desired.
Besides being half the price of the other setup, there is a larger consideration. It is the size. I have no place to store the scanner they use in this article. I am hard pressed to find a place I could set it up other than in the middle of my living room. The smaller scanner for half the price I could find a place to store it when I am not using it.
But De Icaza has said that mono is implementing bits of.net stuff not covered under the patent covenant. That leaves the mono project open to trouble. If they write Gnome 3.0 is C# it will rely on so many of those proprietary bits they will have to stop distributing it while they fix the mess.
Who will be screwed is anyone trying to get Linux accepted as mainstream. Try convincing a CIO that the OS you want to install has 40% that must be compiled from scratch to have the appearance of not violating a Microsoft patent.
You can argue all you want about how good of idea it is or is not for Gnome 3.0 to go to C#. What you can't argue is that IF Microsoft goes for the patent infringement route, that Gnome will not be usable in North America or Western Europe.
Like it or not, that hurts Linux overall. So even us mostly non-gnome using folks are quite interested in this debate.
It means that when the big "spotted owl" controversy of the early 90's happened and the temporary injunctions on logging went into place, logging stopped and mills shut down.
If the mills had not shut down and went out of business due to the lack of trees and those mills were still in place, we would have an unemployment rate down below 5%.
I am going to college to improve my skills. Almost everyone else there over the age of 30 is someone who has lost their job due to layoffs in the logging industry due to reductions in logging OR are people who were loggers, lost their jobs 10, 15 or 20 years ago, were retrained in some other professions and lost those jobs due to the market.
I am not going to spend an hour googling out reports, old articles, etc. When I make a statement like "most users I have introduced to linux like it better than windows", it is a statement of personal experience and may not apply elsewhere or is a good indicator that Microsoft will die overnight.
However, when I say back in 1989 the town I lived in had 4 mills, and between 1989 and 1994 that number dropped to 1 mill and that it was related directly to the ban on logging related to the "spotted owl" nonsense. That is a different story. I don't feel compelled to prove there were 4 mills.
There are more than 8000 workers in the logging industry. It is not just people cutting down trees (loggers). The trukers who haul those trees. It is all the mill workers who cut the wood, the workers who keep the equipment going, etc. It is why we refer to it as "The Timber Industry"
I did not say it was a good thing, I was merely siting it as a factor in why we have more trees.
I believe the longer we go not cutting down trees, and clearing underbrush and just letting forests grow and grow doing everything we can to keep from letting them burn. We should be able to log and remove old dead growth. We are just making sure that eventually we will have a forest fire so big we won't be able to stop it.
People in the timber industry want to cut down trees now (and remove the old dead ones) AND make sure there are healthy forests later so they can continue to cut down trees. It is not the timber industry that is for NOT removing that deadwood. It is the environmentalists.
We have more trees here in Oregon now than were here 100 years ago or even 200 years ago. (Unlike nature, we don't let forest fires burn them down.)
We plant them all over the place and take care of them. Every time we cut one tree down, we plant 3 to 10 more of them.
We really are not deforested to the west of the Mississippi. Now east of the Mississippi is a different story. But no one is talking about deforestation on the east coast. They only talk about it out west where we have plenty of trees to go around.
School kids went out 30 years ago on filed trips here in Oregon to plant trees. Why? As a reminder that most of the income in this state came from logging, and that timber was a renewable resource. If we plant trees today, then in 20 years when you are old enough to work a timber job, there will be plenty of trees to cut down.
I live in a county that has been devastated by the loss of 80% of the logging industry. We have as many trees now as we had 30 years ago. The only difference is we have 15% unemployment and we can't cut and replant trees to actually make a living.
Earth first -- we will log the rest of the planets later
I have been programming since the early 80's. Recently lost my job and found a training program that will let me attend college to get a degree to help me find better paying work.
There are 3 terms of programming. Term 1: Intro to Programming with Visual Basic 2008, we cover chapters 1 to 4 in 10 weeks. Term 2: Visual Basic, where we spend 10 weeks to cover the next 10 chapters. Term 3: Automating MS Office with Macros.
I kid you not, it took 4 weeks to get to variables. Took to week 8 to get to using an IF statement. The first program that actually involved performing any real calculations was a little program that you could enter grades with and it would track the totals for the class. We lost 10 students, 1/3rd of the class over that assignment.
I am not sure the college could find a worse text to teach from.
No I merely state a fact. That currently there is a "fad" in the U.S. Government. They are handing out big bucks to those who are researching man made global warming. If you want to do a study to disprove that such an effect exists, you will find funding it tight.
And what does how much the U.S. spends on the military, or chocolate bars or anything else have to do with this. The government has a 90 billion dollar tit hanging out. If you want to suck on it, get in line and say "I want to research some facet of how our production of green house gases are causing global warming"
Shoot I wish I had a chance to collect on $500 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats. However at the moment I have not found a way to massively bilk to government nor a way to create an industry like global warming research.
Trust me, if the U.S. Government was willing to hand out 5 billion a year to research the mating habits of the spotted owl, you would not be able to walk 5 feet in Oregon without tripping over a researcher.
I am just saying that government can for good or bad, skewer the results. In the case of a problem that needs research, will cause more research into an area. In the case of someplace where research is not needed, it will draw research there as well preventing those involved from making advances in other areas.
90 billion and counting to prove man-made global warming is a bit much. Considering we don't even know if things are getting warmer, how much warmer they are going to get, if this is a natural cycle. Once dinosaurs roamed the earth in a tropical paradise where Canada is. After several million years of that being an average temperature, what we have now may very not be the norm and things are just getting back to normal.
Meanwhile we have decided on one view to research, and until all evidence points another direction we are just going to blindly go this way.
The U.S. Government has funded over 90 billion dollars of studies since 1989. Collages and Universities in the U.S. receive over 4 billion a year. It's where the money is. If you want to run an experiment and it has a "bias" towards proving global warming...you are much more likely to get money for it. If your experiment does not include a "global warming" component, you are a lot less likely to get funding.
That right there is enough to drive things the wrong way. There is money to be made on this gravy train. This is no money to be made by telling everyone this train needs to be stopped. There is plenty of money for both good and bad science that says "hey lets see how much global warming is man made." Which is the wrong ax to grind in this argument.
The pursuit of truth has been left for the pursuit of funding dollars.
From what I understand there are such goodies in there as intentionally getting rid of data that appears to be collected properly but the results were not what they wanted to be (as in they did not support global warming). Also when scientists who were NOT pro global warming asked for data, even via the Freedom of Information Act. They talk of stonewalling for as long as possible.
Sure it will kill google. We will just all go to a better search engine to search for things. Hey, wait a minute.....there is not a better search enigne.
I guess we will all just keep using google after all.
Right now changing the port number is getting the job done.
The average attack is just trying to connect to port 22 across an IP range. Once it connects it then trys to brute force the password. If you have a weak password you are sunk. If you have a 14 digit password like !))%L0553r-boy they are not getting in.
Any of the following will make it more difficult.
1) Denying hosts of there are to many log in attempts from an IP address.
2) Moving to a non-standard port.
3) Port knocking.
If you implement port knocking with a non-standard port and have a complex password are you safe?
Yes and No.
Yes, no one over the Internet randomly looking for hosts is going to find you let alone attempt to crack you.
No, because at that point anyone who wants into your network is going switch to more physical methods or social engineering. What is the cost of cracking a 9 digit password? 50,000? You could hire a decent thief for $50,000 who could disable an alarm, get past the cameras and guards, and mirror a hard drive. How much work would it be to find out where all your IT staff lives, and if any of them bring a laptop home from work. What would it take to break into their house and get access to the laptop? The possibility that you could have them "win" a set of tickets to a show and then "vist" there place while they are at a show. Or pay some chick to hit up on one of the techs. Be creative for $50,000 it would cost to use the cloud to break a password if you could even find an ssh port to attack, there are lots of "outside of the box" ways to get the password from the inside of the company.
A con artist once said "I have never coned an honest man." Most scams take advantage of greed. The old "I have this watch worth 10,000 I am going to sell at the pawn shop for $1,000." Then the mark offers the guy "$2,000" for it figuring they can sell it for $4,000 or more. Taking advantage of the persons greed.
and they stand to gain substantial contracts from other businesses who see how GPL can ruin their business
GPL will not ruin your business. Being unethical will ruin your business.
If a business used a 3rd party library and did not pay for it, well the terms of the license agreement for the code they stole give the right for monetary enumeration. Every business knows that. "If I steal this code and somehow get caught I will owe money and may have an injunction against selling my software till it is straightened out."
If a business uses GPL code and decides to not make their source code available, well the terms of the license agreement will force them to pull the product or make the code available. GPL is not a cancer. Every business should know if they steal code or higher a 3rd party to write code for them. then they need to not use GPLed code.
1. Pay for closed source code and save time and keep your code private
2. Use open sourced code that is GPLed and save time and expose your code.
3. Spend your time and keep your code private and write the libraries yourself.
No matter which route you go, respect the license agreement. Don't pirate closed source libraries, don't try to hide open-sourced code in your closed source project. No one is forced to use closed source or open source libraries. You can always just roll your own. If you don't want to do that. Then you are forced to live by someone eleses terms.
Your president is being pretty crappy putting you in this situation. This is much like how accountants have ethical guidelines they are to follow. Management often "leans" on them tell "little white lies". In the case of accountants they are held legally liable for the documents they sign, no matter WHY they actually did it.
In your case the only group you are likely to run afoul of is the BSA. When it comes to making an example of someone, fining them and then getting them to license the software they are after your president, not you.
It's your call on how you handle it. Call the BSA and report them. Do a memo to the president and keep a copy. Explain to him that he will be held liable for fines and jail time if any disgruntled employee or competitor called the BSA. That the BSA is the FINAL arbitrator of what is legit and what is not. That your current setup will net you a perp walk on TV, the company shut down and millions in fines. (Yes, I know they will settle but that it how it starts).
You can try offering alternatives such as freeware. Moving to hosted things like google docs (look a built in backup plan). Ultimately I would look for another job. You WILL not be happy there in the long run. If the president won't pay for software, I promise you that they will fire you when they can find someone who will do your job for less. You have just been hit with a cluestick. You are going to have to find a new job. Your president lied to you when YOU told them that the software was not legit and they said they were sure it was. They have NO ethics and no problem doing something illegal to save a buck. Firing you to replace you with someone cheaper is not nice but is is leagal, why wont they do that? The only questions is do you get to do it while you are still working and can ask for MORE money from a new employer or after you are fired and can only ask for less money.
P.S. The memo that you sent to the president. Is a get out of jail free card when you refuse to install pirate software. Because if you are let go, all you have to do is claim you were terminated in retaliation for NOT committing an illegal act. And yes, the BSA is actually right on this point. It is illegal to pirate software.
Also it bothers me when someone wearing a $500 suit and lives in a mansion want ME to pirate a copy of a $500 program when they spend more than that each month on their favorite hobby.
It is a greasemonkey userscript for firefox. But you can also bookmark their page and use it in IE or Opera.
They have a bash script. There are lots of improvements as well. With zenity you can make a gui for it in linux. There is a Visual Basic program so you can keep it on a memory stick as well.
In a pinch you can even use MD5 and do it yourself take the first 8 chars of md5("password:url")
I live in Oregon and we are working on becoming a CRT free state. You can't buy a CRT anyplace other than a yard sale. You are not allowed to sell CRT monitors. Not at a used store, not at Comp-U-Hut, Staples, Comp-USA or Wal-Mart.
So you cant buy a crt and $140 from amazon gets you a 19" flat panel. Right or wrong. Good or Bad CRTs are gone and LCDs are in.
Why is the purchase price of wisdom in the hand of a fool seeing he has no heart for it? - Proverbs
I have spent the last 26 years immersed in computers. Computers I know about. Cars, even though I drive one, I do not know about.
I can re-gap a spark plug, do a tune-up on an older model car, change my oil and change a flat. However, I am vastly ignorant about troubleshooting and doing most work on a car. Am I stupid? No. But I have no skill, no knowledge and no real inclination to learn everything I would need to know about a car to be an expert and be able to do most of my own repairs. Yet I can still drive a car just fine, even if I can't fix it. I know the difference between a computer and a car. There are people actively trying to hack into my computer or tempting me to run software that will let them hack me. The same is not true for cars. There is no one tempting me to drive to the bad side of town to be mugged. Tempting me to pour water in my gas tank or running around and cutting my break lines.
There are plenty of other domains that holds true for as well. Medical, fine arts, producing music, how to perform stand up comedy, etc.... I go to the doctor and take advice, I appreciate some sculptures, music and paintings. I listen to CDs and MP3's. I enjoy watching stand up comedy. Just because I have not learned how to do these things does not mean I do not have them in my life. It just means I am not an expert at understanding them, their ins and outs. Nor am I willing to invest the time to learn. I may pick up a fact here or there, but for the most part if you shoot to much information at me about these things it will just bounce off my head and I won't absorb it.
Sadly, this is the way it is for "Joe Sixpack" and most other average computer users. They can use a computer to some degree, may know an interesting fact or two about them. However they lack the knowledge to properly be able to secure a computer or tell if it has been compromised.
The average user is just not going to allow themselves to be educated about computers. As I said I have been doing this stuff for 26 years. I have one adult child and 2 kids still in high school. None of them remember a world before the Internet. They can all touch type. But none of them ever had the desire to learn how to program or how a computer works at a deep down level. They are more computer savvy than most of their friends and that frightens me. To them a computer is an office suite and a web browser with adobe flash player. We have lost the battle. Most users won't learn how to find files they have saved when working with said office suite or something downloaded with their web browser. They also will not learn enough about computer security to be safe. Microsoft does not help either. Every 3 years we hear "This is the most secure version of Windows Ever" and people think it must be safer. Education will not get the job done...people have for the most part decided NOT learn about computers.
All a bank would need to do is set up their own live CD. All ACPI type stuff disabled and a boot menu that makes it easy to try normal video or framebuffer. Use a lite desktop like xfce, icewm or lxde and configure it to look as much like XP as possible. They could even use a custom firefox skin, have firefox autorun and the banking site set as the homepage. They can set custom DNS servers. Have a 2nd tab on the browser set up for "Help, with videos that show how to log into the bank, how to set up a printer if they want to print. How to save a printout as a pdf and save it to a drive or email it. The bank can keep them behind the counter where folks can't put altered CD's. Run a few Ads on the radio, have a few banners hung up in the bank. The CD should make note that there is NO SUPPORT if it works for you it is safer than windows and use it, if it does not work for you then don't use it. The CD jacket should also recommend a few CURRENT usb wireless adapters that will just plug-and-play with the LiveCD.
Slashdot Mirror
The ribbon is not my favorite thing in the world either. What I don't hear about though is where Office 2007 has made changes for the better that OpenOffice will eventually have to catch up with...theming.
Theming is what styles should be for the non-power user. Here are 6 colors that look good together in a document. Use these 6 and you get a nice document. Then you have the ability to rapidly switch between a list of 20 or so themes, each using a different set of 6 colors that complement each other. As Morris Moss would say, "Brilliant!" I can even show a novice or non-power user how to use the feature and why to use it in less than 5 minutes.
Every place where Microsoft has done this in office has been an improvement. With text colors for a document or layout and color styles for spreadsheets. The thing is you can do this without a ribbon. To bad all we here is "teh ribbion is bad I don't get it", or "teh ribbion is the dogs bollocks"
Microsoft makes money, so obviously they would use this as a competitive advantage.
The problem is not that Microsoft would compete with OpenOffice. The problem is that Microsoft will unethically leverage its position as Monopoly to destroy OpenOffice. Many commercial companies will ethically compete with each other. As a corporate culture Microsoft does not want to compete in a market. They want to have 90%+ share of a market and will do whatever is necessary to shrink or kill all other competitors. This is not typical nor ethical behavior.
So you want to love those conferences to death. I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. James Plamondon, Microsoft
Microsoft does not care if its competition is another commercial venture, a non-profit corporation, a hobbyist or a government. If it competes with Microsoft in any market where Microsoft does not hold at least 90% of the market then their goal is to minimize, marginalize and even torpedo, and kill the competition. Without regard for ethical behavior or what means are necessary to do so.
Some would say "Microsoft has changed, the now want to work with the FOSS community." To see if that statement is accurate, or if as a corporate culture they are still up to their old tricks, we need to analyze their motives. In this instance, this would be to analyze their motives in regard to OpenOffice AND to glean from it how seriously they take OpenOffice as a competitor in the market. The fact that they have a position entitled "Linux and Open Office Compete Lead" is an indicator of how serious they are about both Linux and OpenOffice.
Traditionally being in Microsoft's sniper scope has not worked out well for other companies. On the other hand as someone once said:
Q. What's the difference between Batman and Bill Gates?
A. When Batman fought the Penguin, he won.
Lots of other costs as well.
Some stuff makes sense, all the food is catered for those that work on a film? Why? Lets say we all eat at the various restaurants around town, and a major actor, a director and a few others get food sickness. That shuts the production down for 3 or 4 day. You still have to pay EVERYBODY on the set for those 4 days. It is just cheaper to have the food catered. Plus the caterers insurance is on the hook for lost wages if anything goes wrong.
Another cost is union stuff. We could talk about all the good the unions do in the Movie business, but lets not, here is my cheap shot.
The are about to shoot a bar scene, but the neon tavern sign is not plugged in. So they call a Union Electrician to come plug it in. It will take him 90 minutes to get there (the nearest town with a union Electrician is 60 minutes away on some remote shoots). So an extra walks over and plugs the sign in. Then a gaffer walks over and unplugs it. Now everyone goes back to waiting (and being paid) for 90 minutes of waiting for the electrician to show up
No union in Hollywood will step on another unions feet. Some of it is really stupid, A directory who is not a member of the camera mans union can not look through the camera lens to set up a shot, he has to shoot and then look at the dailies. (shooting to video has helped with that).
Lets mention a dirty little secret of the film industry. George Lucas does not shoot any film in the United States. He goes to far way places where the Union rules don't bother him.
He may be scanning books to pirate them. However, I am a college student as well but trying to save money by pirating the books is not my objective.
I am in my 40's and my eyesight is not what it used to be. Here is why I would buy the books and scan them.
1. To be legal and comply with the law. I may very well by the books used, to get them as cheaply as possible. But I will buy them.
2. It is much lighter for me to carry one laptop around on campus, perhaps with copies of all the books I have used for all terms up to the current term.
3. I can zoom the pages to a comfortable size to read the text.
4. I now have the ability to search through the text.
5. I can use a text-to-speech reader to listen to the book, I can even make an mp3 of the book if I so desired.
To me it sounds like a bargain
Besides being half the price of the other setup, there is a larger consideration. It is the size. I have no place to store the scanner they use in this article. I am hard pressed to find a place I could set it up other than in the middle of my living room. The smaller scanner for half the price I could find a place to store it when I am not using it.
But De Icaza has said that mono is implementing bits of .net stuff not covered under the patent covenant. That leaves the mono project open to trouble. If they write Gnome 3.0 is C# it will rely on so many of those proprietary bits they will have to stop distributing it while they fix the mess.
Who will be screwed is anyone trying to get Linux accepted as mainstream. Try convincing a CIO that the OS you want to install has 40% that must be compiled from scratch to have the appearance of not violating a Microsoft patent.
You can argue all you want about how good of idea it is or is not for Gnome 3.0 to go to C#. What you can't argue is that IF Microsoft goes for the patent infringement route, that Gnome will not be usable in North America or Western Europe.
Like it or not, that hurts Linux overall. So even us mostly non-gnome using folks are quite interested in this debate.
What does it mean?
It means that when the big "spotted owl" controversy of the early 90's happened and the temporary injunctions on logging went into place, logging stopped and mills shut down.
If the mills had not shut down and went out of business due to the lack of trees and those mills were still in place, we would have an unemployment rate down below 5%.
I am going to college to improve my skills. Almost everyone else there over the age of 30 is someone who has lost their job due to layoffs in the logging industry due to reductions in logging OR are people who were loggers, lost their jobs 10, 15 or 20 years ago, were retrained in some other professions and lost those jobs due to the market.
I am not going to spend an hour googling out reports, old articles, etc. When I make a statement like "most users I have introduced to linux like it better than windows", it is a statement of personal experience and may not apply elsewhere or is a good indicator that Microsoft will die overnight.
However, when I say back in 1989 the town I lived in had 4 mills, and between 1989 and 1994 that number dropped to 1 mill and that it was related directly to the ban on logging related to the "spotted owl" nonsense. That is a different story. I don't feel compelled to prove there were 4 mills.
There are more than 8000 workers in the logging industry. It is not just people cutting down trees (loggers). The trukers who haul those trees. It is all the mill workers who cut the wood, the workers who keep the equipment going, etc. It is why we refer to it as "The Timber Industry"
I did not say it was a good thing, I was merely siting it as a factor in why we have more trees.
I believe the longer we go not cutting down trees, and clearing underbrush and just letting forests grow and grow doing everything we can to keep from letting them burn. We should be able to log and remove old dead growth. We are just making sure that eventually we will have a forest fire so big we won't be able to stop it.
People in the timber industry want to cut down trees now (and remove the old dead ones) AND make sure there are healthy forests later so they can continue to cut down trees. It is not the timber industry that is for NOT removing that deadwood. It is the environmentalists.
We have more trees here in Oregon now than were here 100 years ago or even 200 years ago. (Unlike nature, we don't let forest fires burn them down.)
We plant them all over the place and take care of them. Every time we cut one tree down, we plant 3 to 10 more of them.
We really are not deforested to the west of the Mississippi. Now east of the Mississippi is a different story. But no one is talking about deforestation on the east coast. They only talk about it out west where we have plenty of trees to go around.
School kids went out 30 years ago on filed trips here in Oregon to plant trees. Why? As a reminder that most of the income in this state came from logging, and that timber was a renewable resource. If we plant trees today, then in 20 years when you are old enough to work a timber job, there will be plenty of trees to cut down.
I live in a county that has been devastated by the loss of 80% of the logging industry. We have as many trees now as we had 30 years ago. The only difference is we have 15% unemployment and we can't cut and replant trees to actually make a living.
Earth first -- we will log the rest of the planets later
Amen!
I have been programming since the early 80's. Recently lost my job and found a training program that will let me attend college to get a degree to help me find better paying work.
There are 3 terms of programming. Term 1: Intro to Programming with Visual Basic 2008, we cover chapters 1 to 4 in 10 weeks. Term 2: Visual Basic, where we spend 10 weeks to cover the next 10 chapters. Term 3: Automating MS Office with Macros.
I kid you not, it took 4 weeks to get to variables. Took to week 8 to get to using an IF statement. The first program that actually involved performing any real calculations was a little program that you could enter grades with and it would track the totals for the class. We lost 10 students, 1/3rd of the class over that assignment.
I am not sure the college could find a worse text to teach from.
No I merely state a fact. That currently there is a "fad" in the U.S. Government. They are handing out big bucks to those who are researching man made global warming. If you want to do a study to disprove that such an effect exists, you will find funding it tight.
And what does how much the U.S. spends on the military, or chocolate bars or anything else have to do with this. The government has a 90 billion dollar tit hanging out. If you want to suck on it, get in line and say "I want to research some facet of how our production of green house gases are causing global warming"
Shoot I wish I had a chance to collect on $500 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats. However at the moment I have not found a way to massively bilk to government nor a way to create an industry like global warming research.
Trust me, if the U.S. Government was willing to hand out 5 billion a year to research the mating habits of the spotted owl, you would not be able to walk 5 feet in Oregon without tripping over a researcher.
I am just saying that government can for good or bad, skewer the results. In the case of a problem that needs research, will cause more research into an area. In the case of someplace where research is not needed, it will draw research there as well preventing those involved from making advances in other areas.
90 billion and counting to prove man-made global warming is a bit much. Considering we don't even know if things are getting warmer, how much warmer they are going to get, if this is a natural cycle. Once dinosaurs roamed the earth in a tropical paradise where Canada is. After several million years of that being an average temperature, what we have now may very not be the norm and things are just getting back to normal.
Meanwhile we have decided on one view to research, and until all evidence points another direction we are just going to blindly go this way.
The U.S. Government has funded over 90 billion dollars of studies since 1989. Collages and Universities in the U.S. receive over 4 billion a year. It's where the money is. If you want to run an experiment and it has a "bias" towards proving global warming...you are much more likely to get money for it. If your experiment does not include a "global warming" component, you are a lot less likely to get funding.
That right there is enough to drive things the wrong way. There is money to be made on this gravy train. This is no money to be made by telling everyone this train needs to be stopped. There is plenty of money for both good and bad science that says "hey lets see how much global warming is man made." Which is the wrong ax to grind in this argument.
The pursuit of truth has been left for the pursuit of funding dollars.
From what I understand there are such goodies in there as intentionally getting rid of data that appears to be collected properly but the results were not what they wanted to be (as in they did not support global warming). Also when scientists who were NOT pro global warming asked for data, even via the Freedom of Information Act. They talk of stonewalling for as long as possible.
It does not sound like science at it's best.
Sure it will kill google. We will just all go to a better search engine to search for things. Hey, wait a minute.....there is not a better search enigne.
I guess we will all just keep using google after all.
Right now changing the port number is getting the job done.
The average attack is just trying to connect to port 22 across an IP range. Once it connects it then trys to brute force the password. If you have a weak password you are sunk. If you have a 14 digit password like !))%L0553r-boy they are not getting in.
Any of the following will make it more difficult.
1) Denying hosts of there are to many log in attempts from an IP address.
2) Moving to a non-standard port.
3) Port knocking.
If you implement port knocking with a non-standard port and have a complex password are you safe?
Yes and No.
Yes, no one over the Internet randomly looking for hosts is going to find you let alone attempt to crack you.
No, because at that point anyone who wants into your network is going switch to more physical methods or social engineering. What is the cost of cracking a 9 digit password? 50,000? You could hire a decent thief for $50,000 who could disable an alarm, get past the cameras and guards, and mirror a hard drive. How much work would it be to find out where all your IT staff lives, and if any of them bring a laptop home from work. What would it take to break into their house and get access to the laptop? The possibility that you could have them "win" a set of tickets to a show and then "vist" there place while they are at a show. Or pay some chick to hit up on one of the techs. Be creative for $50,000 it would cost to use the cloud to break a password if you could even find an ssh port to attack, there are lots of "outside of the box" ways to get the password from the inside of the company.
A con artist once said "I have never coned an honest man." Most scams take advantage of greed. The old "I have this watch worth 10,000 I am going to sell at the pawn shop for $1,000." Then the mark offers the guy "$2,000" for it figuring they can sell it for $4,000 or more. Taking advantage of the persons greed.
GPL will not ruin your business. Being unethical will ruin your business.
If a business used a 3rd party library and did not pay for it, well the terms of the license agreement for the code they stole give the right for monetary enumeration. Every business knows that. "If I steal this code and somehow get caught I will owe money and may have an injunction against selling my software till it is straightened out."
If a business uses GPL code and decides to not make their source code available, well the terms of the license agreement will force them to pull the product or make the code available. GPL is not a cancer. Every business should know if they steal code or higher a 3rd party to write code for them. then they need to not use GPLed code.
It is not hard.
1. Pay for closed source code and save time and keep your code private
2. Use open sourced code that is GPLed and save time and expose your code.
3. Spend your time and keep your code private and write the libraries yourself.
No matter which route you go, respect the license agreement. Don't pirate closed source libraries, don't try to hide open-sourced code in your closed source project. No one is forced to use closed source or open source libraries. You can always just roll your own. If you don't want to do that. Then you are forced to live by someone eleses terms.
Your president is being pretty crappy putting you in this situation. This is much like how accountants have ethical guidelines they are to follow. Management often "leans" on them tell "little white lies". In the case of accountants they are held legally liable for the documents they sign, no matter WHY they actually did it.
In your case the only group you are likely to run afoul of is the BSA. When it comes to making an example of someone, fining them and then getting them to license the software they are after your president, not you.
It's your call on how you handle it. Call the BSA and report them. Do a memo to the president and keep a copy. Explain to him that he will be held liable for fines and jail time if any disgruntled employee or competitor called the BSA. That the BSA is the FINAL arbitrator of what is legit and what is not. That your current setup will net you a perp walk on TV, the company shut down and millions in fines. (Yes, I know they will settle but that it how it starts).
You can try offering alternatives such as freeware. Moving to hosted things like google docs (look a built in backup plan). Ultimately I would look for another job. You WILL not be happy there in the long run. If the president won't pay for software, I promise you that they will fire you when they can find someone who will do your job for less. You have just been hit with a cluestick. You are going to have to find a new job. Your president lied to you when YOU told them that the software was not legit and they said they were sure it was. They have NO ethics and no problem doing something illegal to save a buck. Firing you to replace you with someone cheaper is not nice but is is leagal, why wont they do that? The only questions is do you get to do it while you are still working and can ask for MORE money from a new employer or after you are fired and can only ask for less money.
P.S. The memo that you sent to the president. Is a get out of jail free card when you refuse to install pirate software. Because if you are let go, all you have to do is claim you were terminated in retaliation for NOT committing an illegal act. And yes, the BSA is actually right on this point. It is illegal to pirate software.
Also it bothers me when someone wearing a $500 suit and lives in a mansion want ME to pirate a copy of a $500 program when they spend more than that each month on their favorite hobby.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/PasswordComposer/
It is a greasemonkey userscript for firefox. But you can also bookmark their page and use it in IE or Opera.
They have a bash script. There are lots of improvements as well. With zenity you can make a gui for it in linux. There is a Visual Basic program so you can keep it on a memory stick as well.
In a pinch you can even use MD5 and do it yourself take the first 8 chars of md5("password:url")
I don't know, which of the six versions of windows 7 are you going to run?
I live in Oregon and we are working on becoming a CRT free state. You can't buy a CRT anyplace other than a yard sale. You are not allowed to sell CRT monitors. Not at a used store, not at Comp-U-Hut, Staples, Comp-USA or Wal-Mart.
So you cant buy a crt and $140 from amazon gets you a 19" flat panel. Right or wrong. Good or Bad CRTs are gone and LCDs are in.
Why is the purchase price of wisdom in the hand of a fool seeing he has no heart for it? - Proverbs
I have spent the last 26 years immersed in computers. Computers I know about. Cars, even though I drive one, I do not know about.
I can re-gap a spark plug, do a tune-up on an older model car, change my oil and change a flat. However, I am vastly ignorant about troubleshooting and doing most work on a car. Am I stupid? No. But I have no skill, no knowledge and no real inclination to learn everything I would need to know about a car to be an expert and be able to do most of my own repairs. Yet I can still drive a car just fine, even if I can't fix it. I know the difference between a computer and a car. There are people actively trying to hack into my computer or tempting me to run software that will let them hack me. The same is not true for cars. There is no one tempting me to drive to the bad side of town to be mugged. Tempting me to pour water in my gas tank or running around and cutting my break lines.
There are plenty of other domains that holds true for as well. Medical, fine arts, producing music, how to perform stand up comedy, etc.... I go to the doctor and take advice, I appreciate some sculptures, music and paintings. I listen to CDs and MP3's. I enjoy watching stand up comedy. Just because I have not learned how to do these things does not mean I do not have them in my life. It just means I am not an expert at understanding them, their ins and outs. Nor am I willing to invest the time to learn. I may pick up a fact here or there, but for the most part if you shoot to much information at me about these things it will just bounce off my head and I won't absorb it.
Sadly, this is the way it is for "Joe Sixpack" and most other average computer users. They can use a computer to some degree, may know an interesting fact or two about them. However they lack the knowledge to properly be able to secure a computer or tell if it has been compromised.
The average user is just not going to allow themselves to be educated about computers. As I said I have been doing this stuff for 26 years. I have one adult child and 2 kids still in high school. None of them remember a world before the Internet. They can all touch type. But none of them ever had the desire to learn how to program or how a computer works at a deep down level. They are more computer savvy than most of their friends and that frightens me. To them a computer is an office suite and a web browser with adobe flash player. We have lost the battle. Most users won't learn how to find files they have saved when working with said office suite or something downloaded with their web browser. They also will not learn enough about computer security to be safe. Microsoft does not help either. Every 3 years we hear "This is the most secure version of Windows Ever" and people think it must be safer. Education will not get the job done...people have for the most part decided NOT learn about computers.
All a bank would need to do is set up their own live CD. All ACPI type stuff disabled and a boot menu that makes it easy to try normal video or framebuffer. Use a lite desktop like xfce, icewm or lxde and configure it to look as much like XP as possible. They could even use a custom firefox skin, have firefox autorun and the banking site set as the homepage. They can set custom DNS servers. Have a 2nd tab on the browser set up for "Help, with videos that show how to log into the bank, how to set up a printer if they want to print. How to save a printout as a pdf and save it to a drive or email it. The bank can keep them behind the counter where folks can't put altered CD's. Run a few Ads on the radio, have a few banners hung up in the bank. The CD should make note that there is NO SUPPORT if it works for you it is safer than windows and use it, if it does not work for you then don't use it. The CD jacket should also recommend a few CURRENT usb wireless adapters that will just plug-and-play with the LiveCD.
Does it come on a live CD?
How much will it cost the Windows PC user to run it?
For someone with a CD burner in their computer the cost to download and burn a linux CD is anywhere from 30 cents to 2 dollars.
If you don't want to download and burn it, you can get a linux CD for anywhere from free to 13 bucks
Free https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
$3.80 http://www.osdisc.com/
$5.99 http://shop.cheapbytes.com/
$6.05 http://www.linuxcd.org/
$6.30 http://linboo.com/
$13.00 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3937514775