Random security is better than predictable security. However, terrorists also watch for security, and move when the security has moved on. As Richard Marcinko and his Red Cell SEAL Team proved, terrorists don't operate by checklists. They hit targets of opportunity. So this isn't going to be all that much better.
Also, as others have pointed out, you just change your targeting to a softer but equally valuable target.
As Wulfgar said in "Nighthawks", "Remember - there is no security!"
There are only two ways to defeat terrorists:
1) Kill them all - this is only feasible when the group is small, localized and does not have the support of the local population. Che Guevara in Boliva is the classic example. Al Qaeda - not even Al Qaeda in Iraq - is not (although the fact that AQI does not have much local support is why they are having difficulties now - however they are not gone and probably never will be.)
2) Change your policies so that you are no longer a terrorist target.
Linux will be a consumer desktop when and only when it is a corporate desktop.
And that will come when two things happen:
1) Corporations decide that making Bill Gates the richest guy in the world is not a productive use of their capital. As corporations are increasingly turning to open source software, Linux as a beneficiary of this is inevitable - especially if corporations like Red Hat continue to concentrate on the server side and let the rest of the community deal with the desktop.
2) Corporations discover that the use of Linux on the servers is accentuated by the use of Linux on the desktop. This is the reverse situation that happened with Windows. There, corporations started using Windows on the desktop, and subsequently accepted Windows server editions on their servers. However, those servers generally suck compared to UNIX/Linux. Therefore Linux will turn Windows (and older versions of UNIX) out of the data center. When that happens, corporations will perceive that the use of standard protocols and APIs are enhanced by both server and desktop running the same OS.
When that happens, corporations will demand Linux from their suppliers. Those suppliers will in turn demand certified drivers from their peripheral manufacturers. That will be the end of the driver problem.
And once corporate users are using Linux on their workstations, they will use it at home as well.
With Microsoft fumbling the release of every new OS they put out since Windows 2000 (it took XP three years or more to start displacing Windows 98 and 2000, and Vista looks like it's a failure), it's unlikely that they can withstand the tide of technological development that OSS represents.
No time table, however, can be put on this, as it is affected by other factors such as the general economy, ups and downs in Windows and Linux releases, etc. But a good guess is that within five to ten years, Linux will displace Windows in the data center, and subsequently over the next ten, on the desktop. That is, assuming some new OS doesn't come out and kill both of them - which appears to be unlikely.
This is true in every industry. It's human nature that produces crappy management in every enterprise. The rest follows naturally.
How many hospitals have problems retaining their best nurses and doctors? Probably the same effect there, worsened by the fact that you're dealing with sick people, not just computers.
Until people own up to and learn to deal with the basic issues of primate hierarchical social behavior issues, or better, adopt different models of social interaction, nothing will change.
"The pen/tablet functionality of Vista is noticeably better than XP Tablet Edition."
For the five people who use tablets...Nobody else cares.
"If you get a corporate class machine with good drivers, and enough power"
That's the whole point - nobody's going to go out and buy a whole new laptop just to get Vista. For what? UAC - that annoying crap that bugs people and has no value because it doesn't actually ask you to enter an Admin password? All that other stuff you list that ninety percent of the users don't even understand?
"In fact, by your own story, if re-loading the same drivers fixed it, then the problem wasnt with the drivers, it was something else."
Yeah - Windows fucked up again. Nothing new there. Reinstalling drivers is ridiculous - it's almost never done in Linux. Nobody talks about "corrupt drivers" in Linux because there is no such thing. You either have a buggy driver from the get-go or the thing works. When people talk "corrupt drivers" in Windows, they really mean Windows Registry or some other component of Windows has fucked up. And it's next to impossible to find out what actually fucked up so that it can be fixed.
The reality is this guy's machine worked for a while, then it didn't, and reloading the drivers appears to have solved the problem. The real problem is and will remain unknown. This rarely happens with Linux and when it does, it's usually something in the KDE desktop rather than the main kernel or services or hardware drivers.
All the crap you talk about as being better in Vista is almost irrelevant to the average corporate user. Improved stability is only useful if the fucking OS is actually functioning - which, as I and numerous people have pointed out, it doesn't in many cases.
Tests with the latest service pack shows XP can still outperform Vista under several scenarios. And where it doesn't, the improvement is in the low double digits or single digits. Not worth it to get all new hardware and spend another $200 for what is going to be a dog slow system.
This isn't just my opinion. At least thirty percent of corporations polled have said they simply will never upgrade to Vista because they don't see the benefits overcoming the costs. They just aren't there.
"More so in fact, since the driver situation changed so dramatically between XP and Vista. Add to that the fiasco with the 'Vista Capable' nonsense, and its taking a while to stabilize."
Yeah - more than a year. And even with Service Pack 1 doubling the number of certified drivers, people still have problems. And some newer devices will never have XP drivers so some people can't even go back if the Vista drivers are buggy.
"Large corporates not moving to Vista has very little to do with Vista, and more to do with the dynamcis of change in large corporates."
No, it does not. Corporations have not changed their attitudes since XP. It took XP a long time to replace 2000 and 98. that's true. But Vista has been roundly rejected by at least thirty percent of corporations COMPLETELY and another X percent decided to wait for Service Pack 1 - always a good idea, except that in this case Service Pack 1, despite tons of bug fixes and supposed enhancements, by all accounts does not materially change the perception that Vista is slow and bloated.
I agree that most software written is crap - and that includes OSS as well as proprietary. QuickBooks is a prime example - it was never even certified to run on Windows XP because of their crappy software development policies.
But the fact remains that Vista is a major failed OS. It simply doesn't do enough to make its increased cost and complexity worth the upgrade. This is the consensus of corporate America, and the consensus of the IT trade press. If you don't like it, well, convince them otherwise.
I'm still telling my clients to skip this dog and wait for Windows 7 and stick to XP until then - or, if they can, switch to Linux.
I just spent two hours on the phone this morning with a
"The result was a pretty vanilla 3-year development cycle resulting in Vista, after the reset."
Yeah, if you ignore the "reset" - which corporate America certainly didn't. They had contracts saying a new OS every three years - they didn't get it. And what they got when Vista came out was something they couldn't use.
"In other words, given stable quality drivers and enough hardware power, and Vista is noticeably better than XP. Particularly on laptops and tablets/convertibles."
In other words, right now XP is better. Companies don't like upgrading hardware before their time. I have a client who has an employee who got a new laptop with Vista Business on it. They didn't like some crap that came with it, so they dumped that and put Vista Ultimate on it, despite the fact that the machine wasn't certified for Ultimate, only Business. So the employee ended up with mouse freezes that drove him crazy. I reloaded some of the drivers and the problem appears to have gone away. But this demonstrates that installing Vista on existing machines not certified for even that particular version is a crapshoot.
Like I said, Vista isn't useful for anybody who hasn't bought a current machine certified for it at this time. In another two or three years when everybody replaces their hardware, we'll have Windows 7. So why bother upgrading to Vista? As numerous analysts have said, there's really no great reason to do so, since much of the Vista changes can either be obtained with third party XP software (cheaper than buying a new copy of Vista) or aren't that important in any event.
Business have enough trouble with XP right now. They don't need more trouble by trying to install Vista on XP machines. As you say, Vista will creep in - but only because Microsoft is going to cut off XP sales. If they didn't do that, Vista would stay a dog and go nowhere except on pre-installed machines, many of which would have Vista wiped and XP reinstalled.
The correct consensus is that Vista is a marketing and technological failure comparable to Windows ME. Forget it and wait for Windows 7 - and hope Microsoft doesn't screw that up as badly, which would not surprise me in the least. Actually, I hope they do screw it up - that will really put Linux in the corporation.
According to articles I've seen, 7 is supposed to be more modular and be sold in a subscription format.
My guess is they're taking bits and pieces from XP and Vista, reworking them as modular sections. Basically, "Windows 7" is going to be Windows XP Service Pack 4 with backports of some of the Vista stuff that wasn't a total disaster.
That's the only way Microsoft can get a new OS out the door in another year or so. A complete rewrite would take them another five years like it did Vista. I'm not even expecting 7 to be out before end of 2010.
I'm telling my clients to forget Vista, unless it comes on a certified new machine, and make sure they have enough XP licenses on hand for new OEM machines to last until 7 comes out.
Most businesses, especially small business, really have utterly no use for Vista - XP is fine for most of them, despite the pathetic quality of the OS. As long as they do image backups of fresh installs, so they can quickly recover from XP downtime, they could use XP for several more years easily. Hell, I've got a client still running Windows 95 on a couple machines because of software they don't want to change (finally, they've decided to do so over the next little while.)
Windows 7 is designed to be "modular" - that is, you can add and subtract components.
What this means is: Microsoft will CHARGE you EXTRA for stuff you now get free (even if you don't want said stuff).
In other words, although now you'll have more price variance for versions of Windows, basically Microsoft's answer to a free OS like Linux is to CHARGE YOU MORE and make it LOOK like you're not being charged more.
If this isn't the perfect expression of Bill Gates, I don't know what is.
I agree. The interesting part of the article is where it mentions Intel is putting another $10 million in fresh capital into SpikeSource. That clearly shows both that Intel has some faith in the company and in open source. And Kim's a pretty smart babe.
I personally can't stand Microsoft and its software (although I make a living supporting it). but I don't mind if SpikeSource gets to spread OSS on Windows with Microsoft's help. In the end, Microsoft won't benefit from it as much as OSS will.
They should be forced by law to have "ombudsmen" embedded in every office who can tell the real story without any risk of being disciplined because they're outside the chain of command. The same should apply to every other government office. Of course, the next problem is how to get the "ombudsmen" to tell the truth...
I start my day with Google News, then check my email for more news from a guy who sends me stuff regularly. I also send him and others news articles daily. I also send articles on foreign policy topics to guys like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall at TPM.
I read things he doesn't read and he reads stuff I don't read. Net win. Most of the stuff he sends I'm not that interested in, based on the sources, but I get enough useful stuff that I wouldn't turn off the flow.
"It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state."
Yeah - if you're using fucking Outhouse - and/or Exchange - that hordes its emails like it's fucking gold.
You have to spend money or do a lot of futzing around to get email out of Outhouse into some sort of standard format.
The article is about whether Wi-Max - a technology - is worth a shit.
The entire first page is taken up by a flame war over free speech because the "first poster" made a comment about spectrum regulation (which might or might not have been relevant to the article as well.)
I suggest Slashdot pare its readers back to those who can establish some connection with technology, rather than just Microsoft shills and Republicans.
This might also ease the "my network was Slashdotted" problem.
The consensus appears to be developing that Windows Vista is the latest version of Windows ME.
I'm advising my clients to skip Vista and wait for Windows 7 - since by that time, you'll have no choice but to upgrade to it - or switch to Linux (which may still not be an option for some people by 2009 or whenever "7" comes out.)
Just make sure you can access enough Windows XP licenses to cover new purchases of machines for the next couple of years. This PC World article shows you how.
Some local stores will bundle software on their white box PCs.
Fortunately it's usually something relatively useful, such as the free version of AVG AV or a DVD burner/media package.
The brand names use these loads of bloatware to reduce the price of their systems, in addition to their larger purchasing power, so they can compete with the local white box stores who otherwise would be cheaper in many cases.
After all the problems removing the bloatware - try uninstalling McAfee and having it hose your network connection for example - you're better off buying a white box from a local store without the crap. Plus instead of some "recovery partition" - which is useless when the hard drive crashes - you get a real OEM install CD that you can definitely recover XP with - if you don't lose it, which most people do unfortunately.
Of course, for laptops, you're still screwed. For laptops you kinda need to buy from a brand because they're the only companies big enough to buy large enough quantities to reduce the cost of developing and supporting a decent laptop. Even so, the more I see and work on laptops, the less I like them. Too proprietary, too fragile, too expensive, to hard to expand, to hard to work on. Companies who use laptops for corporate desktop replacements are shooting themselves in the foot. Their support costs will triple for laptops.
Or whoever just changed the/. interface AGAIN to some weird layout that looks even worse than the last one.
Go ahead! Rate me troll!
What, is that all you've got? Are you nuts? Come at me!
The reason the White House won't give up the email
on
White House Email Follies
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
is because they DON'T KNOW what's in them.
With the morons they have on staff up there - and that includes Bush - they can't be sure all sorts of incriminating stuff isn't in them. In fact, they probably assume there is.
So they stonewall.
Read TFA. They're making estimates of the cost of recovery of the PST files as wildly off the mark. They're claiming it would cost $50K just to recover ONE PST file! And half a million bucks to recover 5,000 PST files!
Face it, folks. This country is being run by criminals now - just like in Warren Ellis' comic, "Reload". Look up Sibel Edmonds on Google and see just how bad it is.
As usual, you're engaging in the exact sort of hand waving you accuse me of. Worse, you are engaged in "mind reading", which is insulting - or would be if I cared what some unknown/. reader with a handle thought.
I am merely retaining a reasonable amount of scientific skepticism. Don't even think about including me with creationists or any other group of neo-Luddites. I'm not interested in how those morons "reason" or don't.
And I didn't "dismiss" any evidence. Nor did I say anything about science not having progressed.
I'm merely saying that, absent an analysis of the data myself (which I can't do because I don't have the background - and I suspect you don't either, unless you're one of the researchers involved) or overwhelming if not one hundred percent agreement with that data analysis by those competent to make it, it is not wise to make broad pronouncements WITH CERTAINTY about anything involving the entire universe.
That's simple scientific prudence. Especially when the issue is not immediately relevant to anything going on anyway. If the figures hold up over time, fine, prudence doesn't hurt. If not, they don't and prudence was justified.
And I've been around since 1949, so my statement stands. They've only gotten accurate - we think - in the last 20-odd years.
You've missed the point entirely, however. I'm not saying the science is crap - I'm saying there's too much we do NOT know to be sure of what we think we DO know.
I'm simply advising the scientific view of being questioning about everything - particularly those things we can't directly convert into technology and thus prove by actually using the science that it's accurate.
The universe is clearly very big - and the unknown facts outnumber the known facts probably by orders of magnitude. That doesn't make for confidence in such statements.
I just have a hard time accepting that from the vantage point of one planet, given our present state of (crap) technology, and given the size and (apparent) age of the universe, that some scientist can tell me a broad fact about the universe "to within a 2% error margin." Or be this precise: "And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe's total."
Sorry - I expect such figures will continue to be "revised" - i.e., doubled or halved repeatedly - in what's left of my lifetime as they have been repeatedly to this point in my life.
Slashdot Mirror
Your typical "let's all get together and..." - do fuck all...
After the shitty job the two morons did on the debate the other night, somebody needs to take ABC offline.
In fact, I wouldn't complain much if they took ALL the broadcast news operations - especially Fox - offline.
Bunch of fucking incompetent, biased, Establishment-protecting morons.
Random security is better than predictable security. However, terrorists also watch for security, and move when the security has moved on. As Richard Marcinko and his Red Cell SEAL Team proved, terrorists don't operate by checklists. They hit targets of opportunity. So this isn't going to be all that much better.
Also, as others have pointed out, you just change your targeting to a softer but equally valuable target.
As Wulfgar said in "Nighthawks", "Remember - there is no security!"
There are only two ways to defeat terrorists:
1) Kill them all - this is only feasible when the group is small, localized and does not have the support of the local population. Che Guevara in Boliva is the classic example. Al Qaeda - not even Al Qaeda in Iraq - is not (although the fact that AQI does not have much local support is why they are having difficulties now - however they are not gone and probably never will be.)
2) Change your policies so that you are no longer a terrorist target.
Linux will be a consumer desktop when and only when it is a corporate desktop.
And that will come when two things happen:
1) Corporations decide that making Bill Gates the richest guy in the world is not a productive use of their capital. As corporations are increasingly turning to open source software, Linux as a beneficiary of this is inevitable - especially if corporations like Red Hat continue to concentrate on the server side and let the rest of the community deal with the desktop.
2) Corporations discover that the use of Linux on the servers is accentuated by the use of Linux on the desktop. This is the reverse situation that happened with Windows. There, corporations started using Windows on the desktop, and subsequently accepted Windows server editions on their servers. However, those servers generally suck compared to UNIX/Linux. Therefore Linux will turn Windows (and older versions of UNIX) out of the data center. When that happens, corporations will perceive that the use of standard protocols and APIs are enhanced by both server and desktop running the same OS.
When that happens, corporations will demand Linux from their suppliers. Those suppliers will in turn demand certified drivers from their peripheral manufacturers. That will be the end of the driver problem.
And once corporate users are using Linux on their workstations, they will use it at home as well.
With Microsoft fumbling the release of every new OS they put out since Windows 2000 (it took XP three years or more to start displacing Windows 98 and 2000, and Vista looks like it's a failure), it's unlikely that they can withstand the tide of technological development that OSS represents.
No time table, however, can be put on this, as it is affected by other factors such as the general economy, ups and downs in Windows and Linux releases, etc. But a good guess is that within five to ten years, Linux will displace Windows in the data center, and subsequently over the next ten, on the desktop. That is, assuming some new OS doesn't come out and kill both of them - which appears to be unlikely.
The picture in the article is much better than the first article - you can see the whole thing.
I still prefer to see THIS whole thing:
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/scc_hq/fox2_03-summer-moody_0489r.jpg
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/HQ/newHQ.jpg
This is true in every industry. It's human nature that produces crappy management in every enterprise. The rest follows naturally.
How many hospitals have problems retaining their best nurses and doctors? Probably the same effect there, worsened by the fact that you're dealing with sick people, not just computers.
Until people own up to and learn to deal with the basic issues of primate hierarchical social behavior issues, or better, adopt different models of social interaction, nothing will change.
This: http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/04/swordsss.jpg
Or this: http://img45.imagevenue.com/aAfkjfp01fo1i-9024/loc72/39069_Summer-G001_122_72lo.jpg http://www.sexygirlsdepot.com/wp-content/assets/2008/03/summer-glau-7.png
"The pen/tablet functionality of Vista is noticeably better than XP Tablet Edition."
For the five people who use tablets...Nobody else cares.
"If you get a corporate class machine with good drivers, and enough power"
That's the whole point - nobody's going to go out and buy a whole new laptop just to get Vista. For what? UAC - that annoying crap that bugs people and has no value because it doesn't actually ask you to enter an Admin password? All that other stuff you list that ninety percent of the users don't even understand?
"In fact, by your own story, if re-loading the same drivers fixed it, then the problem wasnt with the drivers, it was something else."
Yeah - Windows fucked up again. Nothing new there. Reinstalling drivers is ridiculous - it's almost never done in Linux. Nobody talks about "corrupt drivers" in Linux because there is no such thing. You either have a buggy driver from the get-go or the thing works. When people talk "corrupt drivers" in Windows, they really mean Windows Registry or some other component of Windows has fucked up. And it's next to impossible to find out what actually fucked up so that it can be fixed.
The reality is this guy's machine worked for a while, then it didn't, and reloading the drivers appears to have solved the problem. The real problem is and will remain unknown. This rarely happens with Linux and when it does, it's usually something in the KDE desktop rather than the main kernel or services or hardware drivers.
All the crap you talk about as being better in Vista is almost irrelevant to the average corporate user. Improved stability is only useful if the fucking OS is actually functioning - which, as I and numerous people have pointed out, it doesn't in many cases.
Tests with the latest service pack shows XP can still outperform Vista under several scenarios. And where it doesn't, the improvement is in the low double digits or single digits. Not worth it to get all new hardware and spend another $200 for what is going to be a dog slow system.
This isn't just my opinion. At least thirty percent of corporations polled have said they simply will never upgrade to Vista because they don't see the benefits overcoming the costs. They just aren't there.
"More so in fact, since the driver situation changed so dramatically between XP and Vista. Add to that the fiasco with the 'Vista Capable' nonsense, and its taking a while to stabilize."
Yeah - more than a year. And even with Service Pack 1 doubling the number of certified drivers, people still have problems. And some newer devices will never have XP drivers so some people can't even go back if the Vista drivers are buggy.
"Large corporates not moving to Vista has very little to do with Vista, and more to do with the dynamcis of change in large corporates."
No, it does not. Corporations have not changed their attitudes since XP. It took XP a long time to replace 2000 and 98. that's true. But Vista has been roundly rejected by at least thirty percent of corporations COMPLETELY and another X percent decided to wait for Service Pack 1 - always a good idea, except that in this case Service Pack 1, despite tons of bug fixes and supposed enhancements, by all accounts does not materially change the perception that Vista is slow and bloated.
I agree that most software written is crap - and that includes OSS as well as proprietary. QuickBooks is a prime example - it was never even certified to run on Windows XP because of their crappy software development policies.
But the fact remains that Vista is a major failed OS. It simply doesn't do enough to make its increased cost and complexity worth the upgrade. This is the consensus of corporate America, and the consensus of the IT trade press. If you don't like it, well, convince them otherwise.
I'm still telling my clients to skip this dog and wait for Windows 7 and stick to XP until then - or, if they can, switch to Linux.
I just spent two hours on the phone this morning with a
"The result was a pretty vanilla 3-year development cycle resulting in Vista, after the reset."
Yeah, if you ignore the "reset" - which corporate America certainly didn't. They had contracts saying a new OS every three years - they didn't get it. And what they got when Vista came out was something they couldn't use.
"In other words, given stable quality drivers and enough hardware power, and Vista is noticeably better than XP. Particularly on laptops and tablets/convertibles."
In other words, right now XP is better. Companies don't like upgrading hardware before their time. I have a client who has an employee who got a new laptop with Vista Business on it. They didn't like some crap that came with it, so they dumped that and put Vista Ultimate on it, despite the fact that the machine wasn't certified for Ultimate, only Business. So the employee ended up with mouse freezes that drove him crazy. I reloaded some of the drivers and the problem appears to have gone away. But this demonstrates that installing Vista on existing machines not certified for even that particular version is a crapshoot.
Like I said, Vista isn't useful for anybody who hasn't bought a current machine certified for it at this time. In another two or three years when everybody replaces their hardware, we'll have Windows 7. So why bother upgrading to Vista? As numerous analysts have said, there's really no great reason to do so, since much of the Vista changes can either be obtained with third party XP software (cheaper than buying a new copy of Vista) or aren't that important in any event.
Business have enough trouble with XP right now. They don't need more trouble by trying to install Vista on XP machines. As you say, Vista will creep in - but only because Microsoft is going to cut off XP sales. If they didn't do that, Vista would stay a dog and go nowhere except on pre-installed machines, many of which would have Vista wiped and XP reinstalled.
The correct consensus is that Vista is a marketing and technological failure comparable to Windows ME. Forget it and wait for Windows 7 - and hope Microsoft doesn't screw that up as badly, which would not surprise me in the least. Actually, I hope they do screw it up - that will really put Linux in the corporation.
According to articles I've seen, 7 is supposed to be more modular and be sold in a subscription format.
My guess is they're taking bits and pieces from XP and Vista, reworking them as modular sections. Basically, "Windows 7" is going to be Windows XP Service Pack 4 with backports of some of the Vista stuff that wasn't a total disaster.
That's the only way Microsoft can get a new OS out the door in another year or so. A complete rewrite would take them another five years like it did Vista. I'm not even expecting 7 to be out before end of 2010.
I'm telling my clients to forget Vista, unless it comes on a certified new machine, and make sure they have enough XP licenses on hand for new OEM machines to last until 7 comes out.
Most businesses, especially small business, really have utterly no use for Vista - XP is fine for most of them, despite the pathetic quality of the OS. As long as they do image backups of fresh installs, so they can quickly recover from XP downtime, they could use XP for several more years easily. Hell, I've got a client still running Windows 95 on a couple machines because of software they don't want to change (finally, they've decided to do so over the next little while.)
Windows 7 is designed to be "modular" - that is, you can add and subtract components.
What this means is: Microsoft will CHARGE you EXTRA for stuff you now get free (even if you don't want said stuff).
In other words, although now you'll have more price variance for versions of Windows, basically Microsoft's answer to a free OS like Linux is to CHARGE YOU MORE and make it LOOK like you're not being charged more.
If this isn't the perfect expression of Bill Gates, I don't know what is.
I agree. The interesting part of the article is where it mentions Intel is putting another $10 million in fresh capital into SpikeSource. That clearly shows both that Intel has some faith in the company and in open source. And Kim's a pretty smart babe.
I personally can't stand Microsoft and its software (although I make a living supporting it). but I don't mind if SpikeSource gets to spread OSS on Windows with Microsoft's help. In the end, Microsoft won't benefit from it as much as OSS will.
When they open their mouth, they lie.
It's that simple.
They should be forced by law to have "ombudsmen" embedded in every office who can tell the real story without any risk of being disciplined because they're outside the chain of command. The same should apply to every other government office. Of course, the next problem is how to get the "ombudsmen" to tell the truth...
I start my day with Google News, then check my email for more news from a guy who sends me stuff regularly. I also send him and others news articles daily. I also send articles on foreign policy topics to guys like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall at TPM.
I read things he doesn't read and he reads stuff I don't read. Net win. Most of the stuff he sends I'm not that interested in, based on the sources, but I get enough useful stuff that I wouldn't turn off the flow.
"It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state."
Yeah - if you're using fucking Outhouse - and/or Exchange - that hordes its emails like it's fucking gold.
You have to spend money or do a lot of futzing around to get email out of Outhouse into some sort of standard format.
Use any REAL email system and it's not a problem.
The article is about whether Wi-Max - a technology - is worth a shit.
The entire first page is taken up by a flame war over free speech because the "first poster" made a comment about spectrum regulation (which might or might not have been relevant to the article as well.)
I suggest Slashdot pare its readers back to those who can establish some connection with technology, rather than just Microsoft shills and Republicans.
This might also ease the "my network was Slashdotted" problem.
The consensus appears to be developing that Windows Vista is the latest version of Windows ME. I'm advising my clients to skip Vista and wait for Windows 7 - since by that time, you'll have no choice but to upgrade to it - or switch to Linux (which may still not be an option for some people by 2009 or whenever "7" comes out.) Just make sure you can access enough Windows XP licenses to cover new purchases of machines for the next couple of years. This PC World article shows you how.
Some local stores will bundle software on their white box PCs.
Fortunately it's usually something relatively useful, such as the free version of AVG AV or a DVD burner/media package.
The brand names use these loads of bloatware to reduce the price of their systems, in addition to their larger purchasing power, so they can compete with the local white box stores who otherwise would be cheaper in many cases.
After all the problems removing the bloatware - try uninstalling McAfee and having it hose your network connection for example - you're better off buying a white box from a local store without the crap. Plus instead of some "recovery partition" - which is useless when the hard drive crashes - you get a real OEM install CD that you can definitely recover XP with - if you don't lose it, which most people do unfortunately.
Of course, for laptops, you're still screwed. For laptops you kinda need to buy from a brand because they're the only companies big enough to buy large enough quantities to reduce the cost of developing and supporting a decent laptop. Even so, the more I see and work on laptops, the less I like them. Too proprietary, too fragile, too expensive, to hard to expand, to hard to work on. Companies who use laptops for corporate desktop replacements are shooting themselves in the foot. Their support costs will triple for laptops.
PCs are commodities. Buy them that way.
Or whoever just changed the /. interface AGAIN to some weird layout that looks even worse than the last one.
Go ahead! Rate me troll!
What, is that all you've got? Are you nuts? Come at me!
With the morons they have on staff up there - and that includes Bush - they can't be sure all sorts of incriminating stuff isn't in them. In fact, they probably assume there is.
So they stonewall.
Read TFA. They're making estimates of the cost of recovery of the PST files as wildly off the mark. They're claiming it would cost $50K just to recover ONE PST file! And half a million bucks to recover 5,000 PST files!
That's deliberately false testimony - i.e., perjury.
Face it, folks. This country is being run by criminals now - just like in Warren Ellis' comic, "Reload". Look up Sibel Edmonds on Google and see just how bad it is.
Treasonous? Ever heard of Sibel Edmonds? She's got your treason in detail. Do a Google or go here. And here's the Wikipedia entry.
As usual, you're engaging in the exact sort of hand waving you accuse me of. Worse, you are engaged in "mind reading", which is insulting - or would be if I cared what some unknown /. reader with a handle thought.
I am merely retaining a reasonable amount of scientific skepticism. Don't even think about including me with creationists or any other group of neo-Luddites. I'm not interested in how those morons "reason" or don't.
And I didn't "dismiss" any evidence. Nor did I say anything about science not having progressed.
I'm merely saying that, absent an analysis of the data myself (which I can't do because I don't have the background - and I suspect you don't either, unless you're one of the researchers involved) or overwhelming if not one hundred percent agreement with that data analysis by those competent to make it, it is not wise to make broad pronouncements WITH CERTAINTY about anything involving the entire universe.
That's simple scientific prudence. Especially when the issue is not immediately relevant to anything going on anyway. If the figures hold up over time, fine, prudence doesn't hurt. If not, they don't and prudence was justified.
And I've been around since 1949, so my statement stands. They've only gotten accurate - we think - in the last 20-odd years.
You've missed the point entirely, however. I'm not saying the science is crap - I'm saying there's too much we do NOT know to be sure of what we think we DO know.
I'm simply advising the scientific view of being questioning about everything - particularly those things we can't directly convert into technology and thus prove by actually using the science that it's accurate.
The universe is clearly very big - and the unknown facts outnumber the known facts probably by orders of magnitude. That doesn't make for confidence in such statements.
Just saying.
I just have a hard time accepting that from the vantage point of one planet, given our present state of (crap) technology, and given the size and (apparent) age of the universe, that some scientist can tell me a broad fact about the universe "to within a 2% error margin." Or be this precise: "And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe's total."
Sorry - I expect such figures will continue to be "revised" - i.e., doubled or halved repeatedly - in what's left of my lifetime as they have been repeatedly to this point in my life.
Wait fifty years, modify some humans using nanotech so they're Transhuman, then go to Mars or anywhere else we want to go.
Why do we have to go next year or next decade? Mars isn't going anywhere that I know of.
If it's not immediately technically feasible, wait (and work on it) until it is. That's, uh, not rocket science, right?