It has nothing to do with prosecutors being tech-ignorant.
It has to do with prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves by jumping on the "child porn" bandwagon - a guaranteed way to get re-election.
It's a career move, nothing more.
It's what you get when "law creates crime".
Look at the "Drug War" sometime. It's a way for the Feds to get money and power while suppressing minorities - nothing more. The Feds regularly arrest people for things that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, threaten them with massive jail time in exchange for ratting out all their relatives and friends with lies, then arresting everybody else and repeating the procedure ad nauseum. This is how they get their 98% conviction rate - and their budget money and career path in the DoJ.
This is why the US has the most incarcerated population in the world.
The entire system has utterly NOTHING to do with the vague abstract term "justice".
Did you bother to ask them WHY they don't have a home network?
Maybe they don't have more than one machine at home! Just because they're network administrators doesn't mean they have to OWN a network!
I have two machines. They're not connected any more because the connector (or the chip) on the old Compaq appears to have died (no link light). They used to be connected both on the Windows and Linux side. And no, I didn't ever get around to hardening either side network-wise - except of course for spyware and AV on the Windows side.
I think it would have been smarter to ask them HOW they configured a network IF they had one - and how they would do it in a corporate setting.
Network security is a whole different kettle of fish than just installing anti-virus and anti-spyware stuff on the host. It's a lot more than firewalls, too.
When I service my clients, I always tell them they need at least FOUR pieces of antispyware software on their machines. I install SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, Windows Defender, and Ad-Aware at least. All are free for home users.
Lately, since the trojan problem has surged, I also install either A-Squared Free or AVG Antispyware (which used to be Ewido now owned by Grisoft, the makers of AVG AV.)
I also tell them, if they're home users using Norton AV, to dump Norton and replace it with Avast, which is free for home users and does a good job without randomly conflicting with every other piece of software in the universe. Avast does on access scanning and email scanning like every other AV, but it also scans IM, P2P and Internet downloaded files. This isn't that much of an improvement over on-access, but every little bit helps.
The clearance rate of any of these tools is less than 60 percent (in some cases as low as 30 percent), so you definitely need more than one to do the job.
And the number one way to protect clients from spyware: tell them to stop using IE and install Firefox.
She's also on board with attacking Iran (see my sig) - which, by the way, is heating up as Bush sends another carrier group to the Gulf, and is activating a third to follow, as well as delivering attack aircraft to Incirlik in Turkey - and now attacking Iranian personnel in Iraq. It's on for this year - maybe soon.
Folks, if you thought Iraq was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. William Lind is predicting a possible loss of the US military forces in Iraq if Iran is attacked. That's not a "defeat" he's talking about - he's talking about a LOSS - as in tens of thousands of dead Americans and headlong evacuation of the remainder and the loss of every piece of US equipment left there. All it takes is for the Shia militias in Iraq to support Iran and cut the 600-mile supply lines from Kuwait. Within thirty days, no food, water, or ammo left for the US in Iraq.
Bush (and the rest of the stupid bitches in Congress supporting him including Feinstein) need to be stopped NOW by a Congressional resolution prohibiting Bush from launching ANY military action against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress and prohibiting him from using ANY nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation without authorization by Congress in advance.
I'm perfectly well aware that the incremental savings has to be larger than the interest on a bank account.
However, companies generally don't leave money lying in the bank earning interest alone. (And I used to do support for a Bank of America cash management package, so I know companies DO leave hundreds of millions in the bank and manage the accounts for their interest revenue, so don't bother making an argument about that.) They usually leave it there either as their emergency funds or until the funds can be deployed for a corporate purpose (or accounted for as profit, of course.)
It's not hard to realize savings greater than the meager interest banks pay over time by investing. Whereas an expense REMAINS an expense.
Look, the calculus is very simple: pay X bucks times X years for X ROI - or pay X bucks for one or two years for X ROI.
It's a no-brainer for most people.
The real argument you have with my argument is that I said "no matter what it costs". Obviously it DOES matter - but that cost is NEVER larger than paying X bucks to a software company for the rest of your company's existence.
Nobody has ever invested a hundred million dollars to retrain their people on Linux. Nobody would ever have to.
People HAVE invested a hundred million dollars to install Siegel Systems CRM software - and had to abandon the project at the last minute because of cost overruns that resulted in NO MONEY to train the employees. That's an actual case.
Training simply isn't a significant investment - IF it's done properly - in converting to Linux compared to the overall benefits of conversion, including the license savings.
No mattter WHAT it costs to transition your people, those costs can be amortized over time. Whereas paying proprietary software license fees is FOREVER. By definition, sooner or later OSS HAS to cost you less - not even taking the intangibles of avoiding lock-in, flexibility, etc. into account.
The only issue is whether you can afford the upfront costs - and that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And you solve that issue by doing your migration over time according to a PLAN.
Planning? A novel idea for most IT management who are usually locked in to a crisis management mode...
Besides, think about it. What does he care what happens to the money AFTER HE'S DEAD?
If he was really smart, he'd be spending the money to make sure he DOESN'T die...
Besides which, in 100 years things are likely to be sufficiently different technologically that the Foundation may prove to be irrelevant.
If Gates REALLY wanted to improve things, he could spend ten percent a year of the Foundation's money backing nanotechnology research, which could definitely cure most of the world's ills over the next 50 years. I don't see him doing that.
"the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs"
I've seen tons of articles saying the same thing for the last five years - running a mainframe is BRAINDEAD if you don't have at least 15 or 20 different applications running on it that can take advantage of the multiple virtual machines.
Years ago I read where a major oil company dumped a mainframe for a cluster of Intel boxes and got four or five times better performance on their apps while the cost of the whole thing equaled the MAINTENANCE charges alone for the mainframe.
In other words, you can run your apps on Intel servers with several times more performance for about 10-20% of the cost of a mainframe.
That is what I call a no-brainer in architecture decision making.
I did not know Bill Joy wrote vi
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
That explains a lot about his attitudes in many areas.
"Gift to mankind"? How about "curse to mankind"?
Send this man to a old folks home - with no Net access and no computers.
"scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems."
I have NEVER heard of ANY "botnets" on Linux OR MacIntosh.
"botnet-related"? Meaning somebody TRIED to create a botnet virus or trojan for Linux? Make that clear, please.
As far as I know, the number of viruses (almost none "in the wild") on Linux is something less than 20 (not counting variants). And almost all of them only infect the local user. Without being able to exploit a privileges-escalation loophole to gain root, Linux and Mac are nearly invulnerable to viruses.
Yes, it's bad that a virus can infect the local user. For a home user, that is VERY bad. For a business server, that is very good - which is why you see very few viruses on Linux and Mac.
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation is a STOCK-LAUNDERING SCAM, NOTHING MORE!
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation puts out BARELY enough money into actual charities to comply with Federal law?
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation drums up PR for Bill and Microsoft by announcing some multi-hundred million dollar "charity" that then SPREADS THE MONEY OUT OVER ELEVEN YEARS!
This is CLASSIC "rich guy philanthopy" - convert the stock to cash that he can't because of FCC rules, then dribble out the money, and in the meantime dump the cash into stock portfolios to influence and control other companies.
And you Microsoft shill SUCKERS buy into this crap!
Conceptual processing is the ONLY way to deal with these issues.
For example, what if I'm getting information sent to me from acquaintances about life extension - references to vitamins and nutrients would abound. But it wouldn't be spam.
An AI spam blocker has to know what I'm interested in, what material I've received before that was cleared, AND has to be able to, in some sense, UNDERSTAND the content rather than just correlating it to other terms atomically in terms of frequency of occurrence. Otherwise, how can it weed out material that correlates BOTH with spam and non-spam?
Without some decent implementation of conceptual processing, this just isn't possible.
Nope - no such thing anywhere on my system as firefoxrc. Neither a locate nor a full-fledged find can find any such file. My Firefox 2.0 was downloaded from the main Firefox page, not supplied by Synaptic from the Kubuntu repositories IIRC. It's installed in/usr/lib. That probably makes a difference.
I'll see if I can find some documentation somewhere that will explain all this.
While SOME of your points ARE "more or less" (mostly less) true, none of them is significant to explain why Linux is not progressing faster on the desktop - not even the game issue, since I'm mostly talking about corporate desktops, not home users. And guess what, gamers are not the biggest users of PCs in the world - ordinary people. (Not to mention that gamers are even worse than Linux geeks at being geeks.)
And most of your complaints boil down to inertia, since a very small amount of Linux training can handle every one of your complaints - except the lack of games. But if nobody wants to spend a week or two (over time) playing with a distro to learn it, they won't.
There have plenty of use cases where Linux did better than Windows - new installations have been tested between the two, ad hoc, with the nod invariably going to Linux. There have also been plenty of corporate test cases - mostly in small business, but there have been a couple larger cases - where Linux has been foisted on corporate workers - and they survived intact.
So, Microsoft shill, your score 2 status should be modded down to 0, troll.
The so-called "educational system" needs to be destroyed completely - at least below the college level - and replaced by an "educational industry" that provides learning technology to people. This would more be more like the way, in the early years of the US. education was provided by freelance tutors, rather than an institution noted both for its decades-old incompetence leading to the general lack of education in the US (and elsewhere, but especially the US) and its malevolent deforming of human children.
Doesn't matter if you do have the latest Flash for Linux - most of the time any Flash video I try to see in Kubuntu bombs out after a minute or so and stutters maniacally. YouTube is completely worthless now.
Why people release this crap to the public is beyond me.
Here's Rule 1: Don't release shit that doesn't work in the slightest. Fix it FIRST!
I guess that's too hard for developers to comprehend.
"In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldn't find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.
It's as if Toyota decided to switch the position of choices on the automobile shift lever, or Motorola decided to rearrange the buttons on the cellphone key pad. Even if the companies could conclusively show that the changes made life easier, many people would be annoyed at best, and furious at worst."
The above quote says it all.
Microsoft has done a GOOD thing - this will demonstrate that people simply do NOT want to learn a new way of doing things on their computer once they have painfully learned the previous way. This is the SOLE reason Linux hasn't taken over the desktop - inertia (with some help from lack of hardware drivers courtesy of the harfdware manufacturers.)
If you're going to have to relearn all of Office, you might as well switch to OpenOffice and learn that - and save the money on the new Microsoft Office. One hopes corporations will make the no brainer decision to do so.
Next up - Microsoft changes all its documentation into Esperanto.
Why? Just to prove it has a monopoly and Bill Gates can make you do what he says.
Which means it was unsafe for the last 365 days of last year.
I just did another five hour spyware cleaning last night (which still isn't complete). A fifteen-year-old kid managed to bring a Dell PC to its knees over just a few days of browsing the wrong sites.
The kid was visiting the client. The kid has an Apple at home - so he didn't know what he was doing was death to Windows...:-)
The fact that Ford is even doing this movie proves that.
I'd like to see him do the stunts Daniel Craig did for the latest Bond. We'd not see any more of Ford subsequent to that effort, I can guarantee you.
That said, I'll undoubtedly go see it, 'cause I'm a sucker for action/adventure movies. I just wish Vinn Diesel would do another "Triple X" - the stunts in that movie were absolutely awesome.
"nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word."
In other news, four out of five employees lie - because their boss is too stupid to hear the truth. (The fifth employee is on unemployment right now and couldn't be questioned since he has no fixed address.)
Welcome to the human race.
Next study: humans really dislike each other when they kill each other. Peer-reviewed.
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with prosecutors being tech-ignorant.
It has to do with prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves by jumping on the "child porn" bandwagon - a guaranteed way to get re-election.
It's a career move, nothing more.
It's what you get when "law creates crime".
Look at the "Drug War" sometime. It's a way for the Feds to get money and power while suppressing minorities - nothing more. The Feds regularly arrest people for things that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, threaten them with massive jail time in exchange for ratting out all their relatives and friends with lies, then arresting everybody else and repeating the procedure ad nauseum. This is how they get their 98% conviction rate - and their budget money and career path in the DoJ.
This is why the US has the most incarcerated population in the world.
The entire system has utterly NOTHING to do with the vague abstract term "justice".
Did you bother to ask them WHY they don't have a home network?
Maybe they don't have more than one machine at home! Just because they're network administrators doesn't mean they have to OWN a network!
I have two machines. They're not connected any more because the connector (or the chip) on the old Compaq appears to have died (no link light). They used to be connected both on the Windows and Linux side. And no, I didn't ever get around to hardening either side network-wise - except of course for spyware and AV on the Windows side.
I think it would have been smarter to ask them HOW they configured a network IF they had one - and how they would do it in a corporate setting.
Network security is a whole different kettle of fish than just installing anti-virus and anti-spyware stuff on the host. It's a lot more than firewalls, too.
When I service my clients, I always tell them they need at least FOUR pieces of antispyware software on their machines. I install SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, Windows Defender, and Ad-Aware at least. All are free for home users.
Lately, since the trojan problem has surged, I also install either A-Squared Free or AVG Antispyware (which used to be Ewido now owned by Grisoft, the makers of AVG AV.)
I also tell them, if they're home users using Norton AV, to dump Norton and replace it with Avast, which is free for home users and does a good job without randomly conflicting with every other piece of software in the universe. Avast does on access scanning and email scanning like every other AV, but it also scans IM, P2P and Internet downloaded files. This isn't that much of an improvement over on-access, but every little bit helps.
The clearance rate of any of these tools is less than 60 percent (in some cases as low as 30 percent), so you definitely need more than one to do the job.
And the number one way to protect clients from spyware: tell them to stop using IE and install Firefox.
Please!
This bitch is more corrupt than Hermann Goering.
She's also on board with attacking Iran (see my sig) - which, by the way, is heating up as Bush sends another carrier group to the Gulf, and is activating a third to follow, as well as delivering attack aircraft to Incirlik in Turkey - and now attacking Iranian personnel in Iraq. It's on for this year - maybe soon.
Folks, if you thought Iraq was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. William Lind is predicting a possible loss of the US military forces in Iraq if Iran is attacked. That's not a "defeat" he's talking about - he's talking about a LOSS - as in tens of thousands of dead Americans and headlong evacuation of the remainder and the loss of every piece of US equipment left there. All it takes is for the Shia militias in Iraq to support Iran and cut the 600-mile supply lines from Kuwait. Within thirty days, no food, water, or ammo left for the US in Iraq.
Bush (and the rest of the stupid bitches in Congress supporting him including Feinstein) need to be stopped NOW by a Congressional resolution prohibiting Bush from launching ANY military action against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress and prohibiting him from using ANY nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation without authorization by Congress in advance.
I'm perfectly well aware that the incremental savings has to be larger than the interest on a bank account.
However, companies generally don't leave money lying in the bank earning interest alone. (And I used to do support for a Bank of America cash management package, so I know companies DO leave hundreds of millions in the bank and manage the accounts for their interest revenue, so don't bother making an argument about that.) They usually leave it there either as their emergency funds or until the funds can be deployed for a corporate purpose (or accounted for as profit, of course.)
It's not hard to realize savings greater than the meager interest banks pay over time by investing. Whereas an expense REMAINS an expense.
Look, the calculus is very simple: pay X bucks times X years for X ROI - or pay X bucks for one or two years for X ROI.
It's a no-brainer for most people.
The real argument you have with my argument is that I said "no matter what it costs". Obviously it DOES matter - but that cost is NEVER larger than paying X bucks to a software company for the rest of your company's existence.
Nobody has ever invested a hundred million dollars to retrain their people on Linux. Nobody would ever have to.
People HAVE invested a hundred million dollars to install Siegel Systems CRM software - and had to abandon the project at the last minute because of cost overruns that resulted in NO MONEY to train the employees. That's an actual case.
Training simply isn't a significant investment - IF it's done properly - in converting to Linux compared to the overall benefits of conversion, including the license savings.
Obviously somebody at the Foundation decided to say they would change their policy to make the Foundation look better.
Then Bill (or his father) stepped in.
So much for that.
Big surprise...
I keep telling you - the Foundation is a SCAM - nothing more.
No mattter WHAT it costs to transition your people, those costs can be amortized over time. Whereas paying proprietary software license fees is FOREVER. By definition, sooner or later OSS HAS to cost you less - not even taking the intangibles of avoiding lock-in, flexibility, etc. into account.
The only issue is whether you can afford the upfront costs - and that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And you solve that issue by doing your migration over time according to a PLAN.
Planning? A novel idea for most IT management who are usually locked in to a crisis management mode...
Like we didn't know...
People who deal with Microsoft aren't "pawns".
They're suckers.
Bill Gates and company - and the shills who support them - are assholes. It's that simple.
And they're on the way out.
As Jack Nicholson said in a recent movie, "Act accordingly."
Besides, think about it. What does he care what happens to the money AFTER HE'S DEAD?
If he was really smart, he'd be spending the money to make sure he DOESN'T die...
Besides which, in 100 years things are likely to be sufficiently different technologically that the Foundation may prove to be irrelevant.
If Gates REALLY wanted to improve things, he could spend ten percent a year of the Foundation's money backing nanotechnology research, which could definitely cure most of the world's ills over the next 50 years. I don't see him doing that.
Email me when it happens.
Until then, it's Bill Gates TALK - and you know how reliable that is.
The man is a born liar.
And you ignored everything I said, like most suckers. You just looked at the supposed total figures and dismissed everything else.
Sucker.
"the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs"
I've seen tons of articles saying the same thing for the last five years - running a mainframe is BRAINDEAD if you don't have at least 15 or 20 different applications running on it that can take advantage of the multiple virtual machines.
Years ago I read where a major oil company dumped a mainframe for a cluster of Intel boxes and got four or five times better performance on their apps while the cost of the whole thing equaled the MAINTENANCE charges alone for the mainframe.
In other words, you can run your apps on Intel servers with several times more performance for about 10-20% of the cost of a mainframe.
That is what I call a no-brainer in architecture decision making.
That explains a lot about his attitudes in many areas.
"Gift to mankind"? How about "curse to mankind"?
Send this man to a old folks home - with no Net access and no computers.
"scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems."
I have NEVER heard of ANY "botnets" on Linux OR MacIntosh.
"botnet-related"? Meaning somebody TRIED to create a botnet virus or trojan for Linux? Make that clear, please.
As far as I know, the number of viruses (almost none "in the wild") on Linux is something less than 20 (not counting variants). And almost all of them only infect the local user. Without being able to exploit a privileges-escalation loophole to gain root, Linux and Mac are nearly invulnerable to viruses.
Yes, it's bad that a virus can infect the local user. For a home user, that is VERY bad. For a business server, that is very good - which is why you see very few viruses on Linux and Mac.
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation is a STOCK-LAUNDERING SCAM, NOTHING MORE!
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation puts out BARELY enough money into actual charities to comply with Federal law?
How many times have I SAID here that the Gates Foundation drums up PR for Bill and Microsoft by announcing some multi-hundred million dollar "charity" that then SPREADS THE MONEY OUT OVER ELEVEN YEARS!
This is CLASSIC "rich guy philanthopy" - convert the stock to cash that he can't because of FCC rules, then dribble out the money, and in the meantime dump the cash into stock portfolios to influence and control other companies.
And you Microsoft shill SUCKERS buy into this crap!
Morons.
Conceptual processing is the ONLY way to deal with these issues.
For example, what if I'm getting information sent to me from acquaintances about life extension - references to vitamins and nutrients would abound. But it wouldn't be spam.
An AI spam blocker has to know what I'm interested in, what material I've received before that was cleared, AND has to be able to, in some sense, UNDERSTAND the content rather than just correlating it to other terms atomically in terms of frequency of occurrence. Otherwise, how can it weed out material that correlates BOTH with spam and non-spam?
Without some decent implementation of conceptual processing, this just isn't possible.
Nope - no such thing anywhere on my system as firefoxrc. Neither a locate nor a full-fledged find can find any such file. My Firefox 2.0 was downloaded from the main Firefox page, not supplied by Synaptic from the Kubuntu repositories IIRC. It's installed in
I'll see if I can find some documentation somewhere that will explain all this.
While SOME of your points ARE "more or less" (mostly less) true, none of them is significant to explain why Linux is not progressing faster on the desktop - not even the game issue, since I'm mostly talking about corporate desktops, not home users. And guess what, gamers are not the biggest users of PCs in the world - ordinary people. (Not to mention that gamers are even worse than Linux geeks at being geeks.)
And most of your complaints boil down to inertia, since a very small amount of Linux training can handle every one of your complaints - except the lack of games. But if nobody wants to spend a week or two (over time) playing with a distro to learn it, they won't.
There have plenty of use cases where Linux did better than Windows - new installations have been tested between the two, ad hoc, with the nod invariably going to Linux. There have also been plenty of corporate test cases - mostly in small business, but there have been a couple larger cases - where Linux has been foisted on corporate workers - and they survived intact.
So, Microsoft shill, your score 2 status should be modded down to 0, troll.
Teachers are not "educators" or "trainers".
They are cops for kids.
Period.
The so-called "educational system" needs to be destroyed completely - at least below the college level - and replaced by an "educational industry" that provides learning technology to people. This would more be more like the way, in the early years of the US. education was provided by freelance tutors, rather than an institution noted both for its decades-old incompetence leading to the general lack of education in the US (and elsewhere, but especially the US) and its malevolent deforming of human children.
It's worthless.
On Kubuntu all Flash videos bomb out after a minute or so and stutter maniacally.
It's a joke.
Wait for an official release that actually works - if it ever does.
Doesn't matter if you do have the latest Flash for Linux - most of the time any Flash video I try to see in Kubuntu bombs out after a minute or so and stutters maniacally. YouTube is completely worthless now.
Why people release this crap to the public is beyond me.
Here's Rule 1: Don't release shit that doesn't work in the slightest. Fix it FIRST!
I guess that's too hard for developers to comprehend.
"In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldn't find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.
It's as if Toyota decided to switch the position of choices on the automobile shift lever, or Motorola decided to rearrange the buttons on the cellphone key pad. Even if the companies could conclusively show that the changes made life easier, many people would be annoyed at best, and furious at worst."
The above quote says it all.
Microsoft has done a GOOD thing - this will demonstrate that people simply do NOT want to learn a new way of doing things on their computer once they have painfully learned the previous way. This is the SOLE reason Linux hasn't taken over the desktop - inertia (with some help from lack of hardware drivers courtesy of the harfdware manufacturers.)
If you're going to have to relearn all of Office, you might as well switch to OpenOffice and learn that - and save the money on the new Microsoft Office. One hopes corporations will make the no brainer decision to do so.
Next up - Microsoft changes all its documentation into Esperanto.
Why? Just to prove it has a monopoly and Bill Gates can make you do what he says.
Suckers.
it's unsafe.
Which means it was unsafe for the last 365 days of last year.
I just did another five hour spyware cleaning last night (which still isn't complete). A fifteen-year-old kid managed to bring a Dell PC to its knees over just a few days of browsing the wrong sites.
The kid was visiting the client. The kid has an Apple at home - so he didn't know what he was doing was death to Windows...:-)
An actor's ego increases greatly with age.
The fact that Ford is even doing this movie proves that.
I'd like to see him do the stunts Daniel Craig did for the latest Bond. We'd not see any more of Ford subsequent to that effort, I can guarantee you.
That said, I'll undoubtedly go see it, 'cause I'm a sucker for action/adventure movies. I just wish Vinn Diesel would do another "Triple X" - the stunts in that movie were absolutely awesome.
"nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word."
In other news, four out of five employees lie - because their boss is too stupid to hear the truth. (The fifth employee is on unemployment right now and couldn't be questioned since he has no fixed address.)
Welcome to the human race.
Next study: humans really dislike each other when they kill each other. Peer-reviewed.