I don't think that works with the Asian transsexuals...
Not saying that from experience (since I'm not a foot fetishist), however some of those "ladies" you literally cannot tell from "real" females.
Drop by the PowerExchange sex club sometime and check them out - always a few hanging out there (I've only been down there once, but according to the Web forum, there's plenty of TS action - some of the ones hanging out when I was there looked pretty damn good.)
I use SBC's Usenet service. I get tons of ebooks from there, I get tons of babe pictures from there, I get tons of tech info from there (less so recently due to time pressures).
The only problem with Usenet is that unless the newsgroup is a niche group like alt.comp.freeware or a thoroughly technical group, or a moderated newsgroup, it will be inundated with porn and other spam shortly. But even some of the babe newsgroups are easily usable. If somebody bothered to put a spam filter on newsgroups, most of the spam could be eliminated, but that'll never happen.
Viruses? Never seen one in three years. I've seen a handful of posts from people who have said, "Don't download this, it's a virus." That's it.
Other problems? Same as in real life - morons are everywhere. Deal with it (we Transhumans are going to in due time.)
The ISP is simply lying and trying to save a couple bucks. I would expect SBC to follow suit, since their Usenet service is crappy to begin with - their retention sucks. I'm convinced they deliberately damage the binary newsgroups because their completion rate is hideous in almost all of them - virtually NO multipart binary - at least if it's an MP3 or other media - gets through. Fortunately a lot of ebooks do get through. I've been meaning to get a subscription to a real Usenet service for some time.
In short, there's nothing seriously wrong with Usenet that a spam filter wouldn't solve, but using your ISP to access it is not the best idea.
Unless you were trying to be funny, the Tenderloin is a district in San Francisco (and perhaps other cities) with, shall we say, a somewhat seedy reputation.
I agree. But my point is that Access shouldn't be allowed to be a trap by the Linux consultant confronted with it. It can be dealt with, but one is going to have to convince the client that the same facilities that be provided by other tools - and perhaps even more easily (since Access isn't all that easy to work with even for RAD.)
This might be a tough sell, so it would be advisable to have some evidence to back it up. Grab some moderately large Access system from somewhere and reverse-engineer it using more powerful and flexible OSS tools and make a demo.
Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack Sorry for any inconvenience./. will no doubt be under investigation by the FBI for this DoS attack...Cmdr Taco is said to be heading for the Mexican border at this hour...
Microsoft is really going out of their way to antagonize small business with the hardware requirements of Vista and now their server upgrade policy.
A lot of these companies just upgraded from Windows NT - after stretching it out for years past its obsolescence - to Windows 2000 or 2003 Server - usually just to run a better version of Exchange. Now they have to do it again.
The question of Access is one about the cost of conversion, not whether Access is competitive with other databases - it isn't.
The cost of conversion depends on who you hire to do the conversion and how you do it (as well as, of course, how MUCH conversion you have to do - a couple systems versus everything being used in-house.)
Converting Access should not be a show-stopper if you're not paying someone $200-400/hour to do it.
As for "taking the emulation route", that's not the same as running Windows by a long shot. If Access is being used mostly as a front end, there's no reason it can't be stuck on a machine with remote access and used to access OSS databases while conversion to something else is being done over time. It just requires a little imagination on the part of the conversion people - a quality sadly lacking in most IT consultants and CIOs, unfortunately.
Also, what most people use Access for are systems that could easily be redone using cheap or no cost report generators and HTML-JavaScript data entry forms connected to an OSS database. Rather than mucking about with VBA scripts, Access forms and the like, the logic and GUI could easily be replicated using more advanced tools.
I'm doing work with Oracle Forms at the moment, and when I think of how much easier it is to do things in other tools (unless you are ALREADY an Oracle Forms wizard), it's ridiculous to use a huge, complicated tool that locks you in to that one tool - no matter how "easy" it's supposed to be (it never is, anyway.)
The real issue in all these cases is the simple fact that paying for vendor licenses - and more importantly, vendor lock-in - is INEVITABLY going to cost more AT SOME POINT than converting to more open standards, and it is ALWAYS cheaper to bite the bullet sooner than later. Any management that doesn't understand this is - well, typical management, apparently.
You KNOW it's going to hose itself, you KNOW it's going to be slow, you KNOW it's going to be insecure, you KNOW it's going to be complicated to manage...
Copyright and other IP law is an attempt to extend the principle of contract over the more basic principle of property.
It's nothing but coercion masquerading as "agreement". That's why it's frequently hidden in EULAs and other "contracts" that nobody is likely to read and which depend on "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" such as actually having to sign a real contract and exchange value.
And if you weren't black, 6'3" and 230 lbs, you'd be a punk, right?
I saw plenty of your fellows in the Federal prison system. When a C.O. told them what to do, they shut up.
I'm 5'8", weigh 200 pounds, am out of shape, wear glasses, and I'd still tell you to fuck yourself in the ass. In prison, I'd get my ass kicked, so I shut up. Out here, after you kick my ass, I'll show up at your house - six months later -with a.45 after dark and leave you bleeding on the carpet - and the rest of the world will wonder how an asshole like you lasted that long.
Alpha males, my ass. An alpha male is a cheap punk who only survives because the rest of the world are beta followers. But he gets his sooner or later because the bottom line of primate behavior is that NOBODY is allowed to be above anybody else for long.
Show me a FUCKING PRODUCT I can respect, and I'll respect their engineers!
You think their engineers are brilliant, but it's only their marketing managers that prevent all thet "brilliance" from showing up in a Microsoft product?
Get a clue.
Microsoft people are Geek Morons(tm) hired for their ability to turn out crap fast to make Bill money.
Period.
Myhrvold is off playing with his Gulfstream - the last smart guy they had up there.
You did not give me an example that did not fit my statement, you gave me an example that did not fit the definition of freedom which was under discussion from the first post - which means you're an idiot who can't read English, or a troll who merely wants to show how stupid he is by deliberately ignoring the topic under discussion.
I did not "overstate" my position, I stated a position that anybody with a higher than first grade education should have immediately discerned was concerned with political freedom and not the freedom to do random acts with no consequences or in violation of the laws of physics.
My statement stands as I made it: if you are not free to do what you want, you are not free. Nothing in that statement implies that there are no consequences to your actions or that you can violate the laws of physics. It states quite clearly that if you are prevented from doing something by somebody else, you are not free.
The ENTIRE discussion from the first post had to do with "liberties" and "restrictions." What part of any of that are you too stupid to comprehend?
And I did not need to qualify my statement, because, as I state above, anybody with an IQ greater than a bonobo chimpanzee should have been able to comprehend the context of the discussion.
Lastly, I do not give a shit about my dead mother's - or your - opinion of me in any regard whatsover.
"Actual" conservatives have spoken out against Iraq, too. Other than Justin Raimondo - and maybe Pat Buchanan - I'm not sure who else qualifies as an "actual conservative." It seems to be a self-bestowed title.
Being an "actual conservative" is like being an "actual Christian" as opposed to being a fundamentalist nutcase - unless one is a fundamentalist nutcase in which case one considers oneself to be an "actual Christian."
Which doesn't matter since Bush isn't one - and he's President, and most of the "actual conservatives" and "actual Christians" probably voted for him in both elections.
Bottom line: who cares? Damage is done. Either "actual" or "fake" conservatives and Christians are wrong in either case. That a few of them complain about the consequences that were predictable beforehand doesn't help their position much, since their overall position is incorrect to begin with.
It's like the "War Party" Democrats like Diane Feinstein voting for the Iraq war, and who are now complaining that they were "misled." Yeah, right.
Look, stupid, when I talk about political freedom, I'm talking about coercion.
No, you are not free to use coercion on somebody. I'll amend that: you ARE free to TRY, but as I said, the consequences are I kick your fucking ass (notwithstanding the fact that my mother is dead for nearly twenty years and therefore couldn't care less if you kicked her ass.)
Is that obvious enough for you, pea-brain?
It's amazing how many stupid monkeys WANT to be NOT free. You just haven't the balls to admit that you're a weak, gutless lame who can't function without somebody telling you where you are in the monkey hierarchy. God forbid anybody be higher than you in that hierarchy (but if they are, you'll bend over and take it in the ass), but at the same time you just love to know somebody is below you.
when somebody posted a story about how pharmaceutical patents were chilling research.
The usual/. morons - including an actual patent attorney who argued FOR this shit - duh! - came out of the woodwork - er, bit bucket - and I suppose they'll be out in force this time, too, saying "Gee! How can anybody invest without being guaranteed a monopoly?"
They ripped off the INSLAW company two decades ago for the PROMIS software which was supposedly then modified by the NSA or other triple-letter agencies to do exactly what this thing is supposed to do - penetrate ANY database and extract or manipulate its data without being detected.
The Federal judge who sentenced me to nine years in the joint was in fact an Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ at the time and was involved in the scandal. He got a Federal judgeship for his part in it.
Google for the story - it's everywhere.
Of course, like the billionaire said in the movie "Contact", "Why buy one when you can buy two?"
Maybe the State Department wants to use THEIR software against the DOD, the CIA, the FBI, etc. to detect whether the DOD, CIA or FBI is infiltrating State's databases. That's probably even more likely than their use of it against Arabs or even/.
Slashdot Mirror
And you couldn't take out a Big Mac and fries (line courtesy of Kris Kristofferson.)
I don't think that works with the Asian transsexuals...
Not saying that from experience (since I'm not a foot fetishist), however some of those "ladies" you literally cannot tell from "real" females.
Drop by the PowerExchange sex club sometime and check them out - always a few hanging out there (I've only been down there once, but according to the Web forum, there's plenty of TS action - some of the ones hanging out when I was there looked pretty damn good.)
I use SBC's Usenet service. I get tons of ebooks from there, I get tons of babe pictures from there, I get tons of tech info from there (less so recently due to time pressures).
The only problem with Usenet is that unless the newsgroup is a niche group like alt.comp.freeware or a thoroughly technical group, or a moderated newsgroup, it will be inundated with porn and other spam shortly. But even some of the babe newsgroups are easily usable. If somebody bothered to put a spam filter on newsgroups, most of the spam could be eliminated, but that'll never happen.
Viruses? Never seen one in three years. I've seen a handful of posts from people who have said, "Don't download this, it's a virus." That's it.
Other problems? Same as in real life - morons are everywhere. Deal with it (we Transhumans are going to in due time.)
The ISP is simply lying and trying to save a couple bucks. I would expect SBC to follow suit, since their Usenet service is crappy to begin with - their retention sucks. I'm convinced they deliberately damage the binary newsgroups because their completion rate is hideous in almost all of them - virtually NO multipart binary - at least if it's an MP3 or other media - gets through. Fortunately a lot of ebooks do get through. I've been meaning to get a subscription to a real Usenet service for some time.
In short, there's nothing seriously wrong with Usenet that a spam filter wouldn't solve, but using your ISP to access it is not the best idea.
Unless you were trying to be funny, the Tenderloin is a district in San Francisco (and perhaps other cities) with, shall we say, a somewhat seedy reputation.
If you WERE trying to be funny - don't.
I agree. But my point is that Access shouldn't be allowed to be a trap by the Linux consultant confronted with it. It can be dealt with, but one is going to have to convince the client that the same facilities that be provided by other tools - and perhaps even more easily (since Access isn't all that easy to work with even for RAD.)
This might be a tough sell, so it would be advisable to have some evidence to back it up. Grab some moderately large Access system from somewhere and reverse-engineer it using more powerful and flexible OSS tools and make a demo.
Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack /. will no doubt be under investigation by the FBI for this DoS attack...Cmdr Taco is said to be heading for the Mexican border at this hour...
Sorry for any inconvenience.
their entire infrastructure is obsolete.
Microsoft is really going out of their way to antagonize small business with the hardware requirements of Vista and now their server upgrade policy.
A lot of these companies just upgraded from Windows NT - after stretching it out for years past its obsolescence - to Windows 2000 or 2003 Server - usually just to run a better version of Exchange. Now they have to do it again.
They are not going to be happy.
The question of Access is one about the cost of conversion, not whether Access is competitive with other databases - it isn't.
The cost of conversion depends on who you hire to do the conversion and how you do it (as well as, of course, how MUCH conversion you have to do - a couple systems versus everything being used in-house.)
Converting Access should not be a show-stopper if you're not paying someone $200-400/hour to do it.
As for "taking the emulation route", that's not the same as running Windows by a long shot. If Access is being used mostly as a front end, there's no reason it can't be stuck on a machine with remote access and used to access OSS databases while conversion to something else is being done over time. It just requires a little imagination on the part of the conversion people - a quality sadly lacking in most IT consultants and CIOs, unfortunately.
Also, what most people use Access for are systems that could easily be redone using cheap or no cost report generators and HTML-JavaScript data entry forms connected to an OSS database. Rather than mucking about with VBA scripts, Access forms and the like, the logic and GUI could easily be replicated using more advanced tools.
I'm doing work with Oracle Forms at the moment, and when I think of how much easier it is to do things in other tools (unless you are ALREADY an Oracle Forms wizard), it's ridiculous to use a huge, complicated tool that locks you in to that one tool - no matter how "easy" it's supposed to be (it never is, anyway.)
The real issue in all these cases is the simple fact that paying for vendor licenses - and more importantly, vendor lock-in - is INEVITABLY going to cost more AT SOME POINT than converting to more open standards, and it is ALWAYS cheaper to bite the bullet sooner than later. Any management that doesn't understand this is - well, typical management, apparently.
"Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts."
When you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to implement new business requirements.
What's hard is repairing them later - as in vendor lock-in, expensive upgrades, security breaches, ever-rising costs, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Windows is "more consistent, predictable"...
You KNOW it's going to hose itself, you KNOW it's going to be slow, you KNOW it's going to be insecure, you KNOW it's going to be complicated to manage...
Not much we don't KNOW about Windows.
Copyright and other IP law is an attempt to extend the principle of contract over the more basic principle of property.
It's nothing but coercion masquerading as "agreement". That's why it's frequently hidden in EULAs and other "contracts" that nobody is likely to read and which depend on "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" such as actually having to sign a real contract and exchange value.
Three more /. punks weigh in...
How about being modded "Redundant" since someone said the same thing a little ways above you?
Okay, I give you the benefit of the doubt - since it's in the first few posts, the other poster probably hadn't shown up yet.
I'll go find the one-hundred-fiftieth post that will say the same thing...
And if you weren't black, 6'3" and 230 lbs, you'd be a punk, right?
I saw plenty of your fellows in the Federal prison system. When a C.O. told them what to do, they shut up.
I'm 5'8", weigh 200 pounds, am out of shape, wear glasses, and I'd still tell you to fuck yourself in the ass. In prison, I'd get my ass kicked, so I shut up. Out here, after you kick my ass, I'll show up at your house - six months later -with a
Alpha males, my ass. An alpha male is a cheap punk who only survives because the rest of the world are beta followers. But he gets his sooner or later because the bottom line of primate behavior is that NOBODY is allowed to be above anybody else for long.
"We" invented the Simpsons?
Who is "we"? George Bush?
Take your patriotic pompous tool ass back to the toilet and dump your shit where it belongs.
The poster was quite correct - most Americans have the sense of humor of a Puritan. Otherwise we wouldn't be discussing Linus's comments at all.
Wow! I feel so lost!
Nitwit.
But (according to Bill) it won't benefit Bill.
So fergeddaboutit.
Show me a FUCKING PRODUCT I can respect, and I'll respect their engineers!
You think their engineers are brilliant, but it's only their marketing managers that prevent all thet "brilliance" from showing up in a Microsoft product?
Get a clue.
Microsoft people are Geek Morons(tm) hired for their ability to turn out crap fast to make Bill money.
Period.
Myhrvold is off playing with his Gulfstream - the last smart guy they had up there.
Bwahahahahahah!!!
Mod Parent +5, Funny!
I read this a couple days ago from one of the sidebar articles.
Slow news day?
You did not give me an example that did not fit my statement, you gave me an example that did not fit the definition of freedom which was under discussion from the first post - which means you're an idiot who can't read English, or a troll who merely wants to show how stupid he is by deliberately ignoring the topic under discussion.
I did not "overstate" my position, I stated a position that anybody with a higher than first grade education should have immediately discerned was concerned with political freedom and not the freedom to do random acts with no consequences or in violation of the laws of physics.
My statement stands as I made it: if you are not free to do what you want, you are not free. Nothing in that statement implies that there are no consequences to your actions or that you can violate the laws of physics. It states quite clearly that if you are prevented from doing something by somebody else, you are not free.
The ENTIRE discussion from the first post had to do with "liberties" and "restrictions." What part of any of that are you too stupid to comprehend?
And I did not need to qualify my statement, because, as I state above, anybody with an IQ greater than a bonobo chimpanzee should have been able to comprehend the context of the discussion.
Lastly, I do not give a shit about my dead mother's - or your - opinion of me in any regard whatsover.
Have a nice day, monkey boy.
"Actual" conservatives have spoken out against Iraq, too. Other than Justin Raimondo - and maybe Pat Buchanan - I'm not sure who else qualifies as an "actual conservative." It seems to be a self-bestowed title.
Being an "actual conservative" is like being an "actual Christian" as opposed to being a fundamentalist nutcase - unless one is a fundamentalist nutcase in which case one considers oneself to be an "actual Christian."
Which doesn't matter since Bush isn't one - and he's President, and most of the "actual conservatives" and "actual Christians" probably voted for him in both elections.
Bottom line: who cares? Damage is done. Either "actual" or "fake" conservatives and Christians are wrong in either case. That a few of them complain about the consequences that were predictable beforehand doesn't help their position much, since their overall position is incorrect to begin with.
It's like the "War Party" Democrats like Diane Feinstein voting for the Iraq war, and who are now complaining that they were "misled." Yeah, right.
Look, stupid, when I talk about political freedom, I'm talking about coercion.
No, you are not free to use coercion on somebody. I'll amend that: you ARE free to TRY, but as I said, the consequences are I kick your fucking ass (notwithstanding the fact that my mother is dead for nearly twenty years and therefore couldn't care less if you kicked her ass.)
Is that obvious enough for you, pea-brain?
It's amazing how many stupid monkeys WANT to be NOT free. You just haven't the balls to admit that you're a weak, gutless lame who can't function without somebody telling you where you are in the monkey hierarchy. God forbid anybody be higher than you in that hierarchy (but if they are, you'll bend over and take it in the ass), but at the same time you just love to know somebody is below you.
Moron.
when somebody posted a story about how pharmaceutical patents were chilling research.
/. morons - including an actual patent attorney who argued FOR this shit - duh! - came out of the woodwork - er, bit bucket - and I suppose they'll be out in force this time, too, saying "Gee! How can anybody invest without being guaranteed a monopoly?"
The usual
Morons.
They ripped off the INSLAW company two decades ago for the PROMIS software which was supposedly then modified by the NSA or other triple-letter agencies to do exactly what this thing is supposed to do - penetrate ANY database and extract or manipulate its data without being detected.
The Federal judge who sentenced me to nine years in the joint was in fact an Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ at the time and was involved in the scandal. He got a Federal judgeship for his part in it.
Google for the story - it's everywhere.
Of course, like the billionaire said in the movie "Contact", "Why buy one when you can buy two?"
Maybe the State Department wants to use THEIR software against the DOD, the CIA, the FBI, etc. to detect whether the DOD, CIA or FBI is infiltrating State's databases. That's probably even more likely than their use of it against Arabs or even