If anyone hosts anything more important than their grocery list on someone else's servers, then they deserve the inevitable security breaches that will follow. The entire nature of Google Docs (hosting your data on someone else's servers) is a security concern.
The only way Google Docs isn't the dumbest thing your business can do is if your business uses the software on your own LAN/VPN, and hosts your own data on the same.
There should be a Darwin Award for businesses, if there isn't already.
The Little Ice Age to which you refer was caused by changes in ocean currents which normally bring warm water from the south to the north. When those currents changed, North America froze. When those currents resumed, the ice melted.
Global warming, unlike the Little Ice Age, is not a localized event. It is a global average over time. The impact of global warming is going to be vastly different than the impact of the Little Ice, as they are two totally different things with totally different causes.
This is obviously a fake. If you look closely, you can see the wires holding up the space station! The only rational conclusion is that the space station was filmed in front of a live studio audience under strict NDA. Quick! Somebody notify Fox News! They'll do one of their award winning exposes. They'll probably even be able to get Geraldo to unmask the perpetrators!
> Millions of Ubuntu users question the relevance of Red Hat on the desktop.
That's the key point. Though Red Hat's server systems are exceptionally good, its desktop operating systems are of very low quality. Add to that Red Hat's schizophrenic commitment (or lack thereof) to a desktop system, and there's little wonder Red Hat can't do a damn thing in the desktop space.
In came Canonical with a focus on the desktop and increasingly high quality with every release, and Red Hat became completely irrelevant as a desktop player. At this point, most of the barriers to widespread Linux desktop adoption are more imagined than real.
From my non-lawyer perspective, my advice is to either get a lawyer and prepare to spend a lot of money on legal battles, or take it down and move on with your life. There are possibly lots of legal maneuvers you and your lawyer could employ, but is it worth a good chunk of your life and/or life savings?
At face value, the amount you've posted seems like a significant amount of the whole. My suspicion is that you would lose any court battle over it, barring some fantastic lawyering.
I just finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and misread the title as, "Robotic Fish to Hunt Down Population." I seem to be somewhat suggestible.
> How many people who think they are information literate produce incomprehensible spreadsheets and graphs that conceal reality?
And that is why this "technology" won't displace any current business methods. Producing business data in 3D won't tell you anything more interesting than it will in 2D (with the exception of a few specialized fields which already represent their data in 3D). Anyone unethical enough to intentionally hide business reality in 2D will still unethically hide business reality in 3D. This is not magic pixie dust that will eliminate white collar deceit and crime. It is just another way to show the same data we've been showing since the invention of business graphics.
There will be no additional business specialty that doesn't already exist. This is a neat tinker toy, and nothing more. The author is just very easily impressed.
> During the first quarter of fiscal 2009, we did not sign any large deals, many of which have been historically fulfilled by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ("SLES") certificates delivered through Microsoft.
And things like this are why I can't believe Novell still exists as a company. This is just the most recent of many Novell decisions that are so stupid, an appropriately strong derogatory term does not exist in any known language. Here's how Novell management operated:
1) We pinned our hopes on our biggest direct competitor, a convicted monopolist most well known for the way it infects its competitors and tears them apart, giving us free money.
2) While Microsoft was under scrutiny, it gave us some money from fictitious customers. They were real enough companies, but they were only doing Microsoft a short term favor for what is sure to involve future (or present) Microsoft kickbacks to these companies.
3) Yay! We're profitable! See, we told you Microsoft wasn't a bad company.
4) People are now distracted by bigger things, and our direct competitor is no longer propping us up with fake customers.
To increase the probability of accurately identifying the hard of hearing, all theater patrons must submit to the point-blank air horn test. If you writhe on the floor in agony with your hands over your ears, you obviously weren't deaf and therefore were obviously not a pirate. Please be seated.
On the bright side, the excessively loud speaker systems in the theater won't be nearly as annoying to you any more. Have a nice day.
> You can't get on the stand at your own trial to testify in your own defense, and then start invoking the 5th when the prosecutor asks questions you don't like.
You most certainly can. That's the whole point behind the amendment. If you couldn't pick and choose, then all that the prosecutor would have to do is ask you your name in order to revoke your right against self-incrimination.
The reason the 5th didn't apply in this instance is because the guy had already provided the border patrol with the information they were after -- that he had child porn on the laptop. At that point, he had already waived his protection under the amendment (unless he can prove that the confession was coerced in violation of some treaty or other law).
The right is not all-encompassing, though. If it were, nobody would ever answer a question in court.
Considering that this is the same judge who agreed Microsoft was abiding by the terms of its reward for losing in court, when it clearly wasn't, I don't hold out a lot of hope that anything will change from the last 8 years of U.S. court-endorsed monopoly abuse.
> No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
You have just described the PC experience over the last two decades (before FOSS developers got their acts together). The PC was liberating for less than ten years, then it got closed off into a proprietary wasteland, and is just now regaining the liberation that drove its initial popularity.
> Please, just read the article. This isn't about running random scripts received through e-mail attachments....
Did you read the article? The entire article is exactly about running random scripts received through email attachments. The article writer spent several paragraphs talking about exploiting user stupidity by sending these rigged files through email, then goes into a spate of hand-waving about the desktops doing what desktops are supposed to do: execute programs that users launch.
He's revised the article several times to tone down the sensationalism a hair, but is still tap dancing around the fact that this is not a virus. He tries justifying the nonsense by claiming that since the computer-ignorant mainstream press calls these things email viruses, he's not doing anything wrong.
The simple fact remains that this is a user-stupidity attack, and there is no technological solution to it. No widely used Linux email program will execute these things unless explicitly configured to do so by the end-user, so the user has to take several unusual steps to voluntarily open himself up to this "problem". I just double checked KMail and Thunderbird (the two I use), and neither will open ANY class of attachment unless explicitly configured to do so, and even then the user, not the sender, dictates how the class is to be opened -- regardless of what the Exec line says.
There's no doubt that some ignorant users can be made to go through all the steps necessary to save and execute desktop files that contain malicious scripts, but that is not a system vulnerability. That is a human vulnerability. The KDE and GNOME desktops make every reasonable effort to protect users from unintentionally running software received through email, as do all the Linux email programs I've used over the last 16 years, but the operating system and desktop cannot protect a user from doing stupid things while still being useful.
To summarize: this is not a KDE/GNOME desktop vulnerability. This is a simple educational issue, and it applies equally to all desktop operating systems. Not even Windows, which I despise with a burning passion, is to blame when its users intentionally run arbitrary programs received through email that end up doing something harmful.
> There is no way to see in advance that the file is unsafe....
Right-click, open-with...kwrite. Or the operating system-independent method of, "Hmmm..some random, unexpected file appeared in my email. Maybe I shouldn't run it."
1) This is not a virus vector. This is barely classifiable as even a trojan (a program which advertises itself as performing X, but actually performs Y; with Y being something malicious), though can meet the definition under certain tortured logic.
2) This has everything to do with user stupidity. This is not like Windows, where merely clicking the email attachment from within the email program launches the attachment (hell, Outlook has code to automatically execute attachments at the time they're received). This requires the user to manually save the file, then manually execute it. There is no operating system protection that will prevent users from doing something as stupid as explicitly saving and running some random attachment received in email. And before someone starts the, "If this were about Windows..." nonsense, Windows gets a bad wrap because it automatically compromises machines (and does so to the entire system at once) in many, many different ways.
> but if the system does not provide users with the information needed to make an informed choice, then the system is at fault.
Is your blender at fault when you stick your hand inside and turn it on? This has nothing to do with any form of system vulnerability. This mountain-from-a-proton "issue" is the desktop carrying out the user's explicit instructions. I certainly don't want my desktop asking me two or three times whether I'm sure I want to run the application I just told it to run.
There is nothing to see here. This is, and always has been, a user-education issue: don't save and run unexpected attachments you receive in email. On Linux, at least, this kind of stupid user trick can be fixed by erasing the user account and going on with business as usual.
"Capitalism can only work because it thrives on and creates the poor."
Capitalism works great most of the time, but can easily be abused to bring about situations like this. We hear about the fraction of a percent of abusive companies because it's news that sells. We don't hear so much about the greater than 99% of capitalist companies and individuals that provide good, sustainable products and services (for whatever reason).
Seriously, do you think that anybody gives even a tiny little rat's ass that I created a small company's data entry and reporting infrastructure for a reasonable price and included full source code so they wouldn't be locked into me as a sole service provider? Does that sound like news that people will care to spend time or money knowing?
The various news media have long since relied on sensationalism to make money. If you base your world view on what you hear/read from media outlets, it's almost impossible to view the world as anything other than corrupt and beyond redemption. There's a whole other world that doesn't get reported.
> Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between [well water] and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.
This is off topic, but interesting nonetheless. I lived in the country for twelve years, and drank mostly well water for that era. Rest assured that after living on well water for years, tap water tastes like it came from a heavily trafficked swimming pool, and is as obvious as a kick in the head. The heavy stench of chlorine in even good tap water is abusive to taste buds that haven't become acclimated to it. Even now, three years later, I still use a commercial filter on my tap to make the water taste almost as good as that from the country well.
Incidentally, I never noticed how bad tap water is until I moved out into the country. It took a little while for me to realize why the well water tasted so...odd. It's because that was the first time I'd tasted unpolluted water. Up until that point, I had always lived in various suburbs that had city-managed water, and cities always pollute the water with chemicals in order to kill toxins. It may be necessary, but it tastes bad. Since I had grown up with it, I didn't notice it until I'd had untainted water for a few years.
As an aside, for those who don't know, a country well isn't usually a deep hole in the ground with water at the bottom. It's usually a long pipe dug into the ground that taps into an large underground river or water table.
> My favorite piece of eye candy was the "static" when opening the photo...
That is the NVIDIA driver. I run Kubuntu on physical hardware and virtual hardware (VirtualBox). I sometimes see the initial static on the physical machine, but never on the virtual machine.
"There is no deception here. The computers labeled as "Vista Capable" were, in fact, able of running Vista Basic."
If Microsoft's stickers said something to the effect of "Vista Basic Capable", then Microsoft would probably have been okay. But Microsoft wanted to eat at both ends of the trough, owners of low end machines, and owners of high end machines, knowing full well that customers would see a huge difference between Vista Basic and "The Vista That Does Stuff". Microsoft also realized that their customers would revolt if they knew ahead of time that "The Vista That Does Stuff" required a major computer upgrade.
Hence, Microsoft came up with a deceptive campaign that took advantage of people's natural tendency to automatically fill ambiguous information gaps with whatever conclusion is subtly suggested to them. It was therefore intended by Microsoft that "Vista Capable" would be interpreted by the masses as meaning "able to run the advertised features of 'The Vista That Does Stuff.'"
While Microsoft deserves every bit of the potential $8B settlement costs (and more), hardware sellers were very willingly complicit in the whole charade, and should also bare a commensurate legal sanction.
"This is not a design flaw for XP, it's a limitation if the 32 bit architecture."
All modern 32-bit x86 processors are capable a PAE, which extends 32-bit system memory support to 64GB. Because Windows must retain binary compatibility with old drivers, which must be written with PAE in mind, but aren't, the desktop versions of XP don't enable PAE. This is a consequence of having closed source system binaries. Changes in operating architecture cannot be freely made because drivers cannot be recompiled to match, unless the driver vendor does it.
32-bit Linux/*BSD/etc. Open Source systems are at a much greater liberty in this regard, as the Open Source drivers and/or open portions of the driver stubs, can be recompiled and redistributed to match the operating architecture change. My 32-bit Kubuntu systems now have PAE enabled, and can use the full 8GB I have in them. I had to install the 32-bit server kernel packages to replace the non-server kernel packages, but that was it.
The 4GB memory limit has been an operating system limit, rather than a hardware architecture limit, for a number of years. Most of us didn't care until recently because RAM prices were so high that we didn't have a reason to care.
1999 was the year of Linux on my desktop. And 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, to infinity and beyond.
You got modded as funny because people who were raised on Microsoft desktops just can't imagine anything else. But remember that Linux doesn't have to destroy Microsoft to win. Linux just has to even the playing field, something that is occurring slowly but steadily. The moment that Microsoft loses its ability to dictate something because Linux provides an alternative, Microsoft has lost something. Over time, those little losses add up.
"I've never understood all the broohaha over browsers."
The browser is the gateway to all modern on-line consumer activity. If Microsoft controlled the browser, web sites would be forced to run Microsoft's IIS web server (because Internet Explorer would not behave, at all, with anything else). That would give Microsoft total control over all online commerce. Web sites would then have to pay Microsoft whatever it wanted, or cease doing business.
Microsoft would then tie it's browser and/or server into its other products. If you want to stay in business online, you have to run IIS. IIS, by the way, requires a Microsoft Office license pack. This is because Internet Explorer uses Microsoft Word to interact with IIS, but Microsoft only sells the Office License Pack For IIS in bundles of 100, and each remote connection uses one license. The Office License Pack For IIS also requires a functional X-Box Live account for each visitor to your web site. Next year, Microsoft will raise the bundle floor to 200. Why? Because they can.
This is one of those things that sounds great when you're disillusioned with your job, but isn't all it's cracked up to be:
As your own boss, there is no one sitting between you and irate clients (and clients will get irate regardless of how well you perform, especially if they don't understand how your industry works). I wrote an entire custom business management package in one year, replacing an old DOS-based package that hadn't been supported for over 15 years, and my client was furious. He thought that since modern software was created by drawing simple pictures on a screen, I was must have been extremely incompetent to have taken an entire year.
Since you will become personally responsible for EVERYTHING, the stress you face will usually exceed that of your regular job. There is no longer a manager to stand between you and the constant badgering of your customers. I think most people with the, "become your own boss!" advice greatly underestimate how much crap they don't see when their manager runs interference.
With rare exceptions, you will work more hours than you ever have in the past; especially when you are dealing with your first couple projects. The project I mentioned above was done after work and on weekends. I went from working steady 40-hour weeks to working 80-100 hour weeks during some weeks.
Depending on your industry, you may run into a "feast or famine" situation. When I was working this project, I was making 4 times my normal salary. But in the post-project era, the software works so well that I rarely hear back from them. When I call them periodically for routine customer relations, they tell me that the software works flawlessly (Linux, PostgreSQL, Qt, Cygwin for those interested) and covers all their current needs. They expect to need additions at some indeterminate future point (which recently came to pass), but for now (four years after the initial delivery), the software is more than they had hoped for.
Being your own boss has a number of pros and cons, and is certainly not a cure-all for job dissatisfaction. I highly recommend that people try it for at least a year in order to gain a greater appreciation for the benefits of letting someone else be the boss. Despite all that, I love the sense of accomplishment that comes from having done things my way, the right way.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone hosts anything more important than their grocery list on someone else's servers, then they deserve the inevitable security breaches that will follow. The entire nature of Google Docs (hosting your data on someone else's servers) is a security concern.
The only way Google Docs isn't the dumbest thing your business can do is if your business uses the software on your own LAN/VPN, and hosts your own data on the same.
There should be a Darwin Award for businesses, if there isn't already.
The Little Ice Age to which you refer was caused by changes in ocean currents which normally bring warm water from the south to the north. When those currents changed, North America froze. When those currents resumed, the ice melted.
Global warming, unlike the Little Ice Age, is not a localized event. It is a global average over time. The impact of global warming is going to be vastly different than the impact of the Little Ice, as they are two totally different things with totally different causes.
This is obviously a fake. If you look closely, you can see the wires holding up the space station! The only rational conclusion is that the space station was filmed in front of a live studio audience under strict NDA. Quick! Somebody notify Fox News! They'll do one of their award winning exposes. They'll probably even be able to get Geraldo to unmask the perpetrators!
> Millions of Ubuntu users question the relevance of Red Hat on the desktop.
That's the key point. Though Red Hat's server systems are exceptionally good, its desktop operating systems are of very low quality. Add to that Red Hat's schizophrenic commitment (or lack thereof) to a desktop system, and there's little wonder Red Hat can't do a damn thing in the desktop space.
In came Canonical with a focus on the desktop and increasingly high quality with every release, and Red Hat became completely irrelevant as a desktop player. At this point, most of the barriers to widespread Linux desktop adoption are more imagined than real.
From my non-lawyer perspective, my advice is to either get a lawyer and prepare to spend a lot of money on legal battles, or take it down and move on with your life. There are possibly lots of legal maneuvers you and your lawyer could employ, but is it worth a good chunk of your life and/or life savings?
At face value, the amount you've posted seems like a significant amount of the whole. My suspicion is that you would lose any court battle over it, barring some fantastic lawyering.
I just finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and misread the title as, "Robotic Fish to Hunt Down Population." I seem to be somewhat suggestible.
Oracle can't even give quality support for its own software. Why on Earth would it think it can give quality support for someone else's software?
> How many people who think they are information literate produce incomprehensible spreadsheets and graphs that conceal reality?
And that is why this "technology" won't displace any current business methods. Producing business data in 3D won't tell you anything more interesting than it will in 2D (with the exception of a few specialized fields which already represent their data in 3D). Anyone unethical enough to intentionally hide business reality in 2D will still unethically hide business reality in 3D. This is not magic pixie dust that will eliminate white collar deceit and crime. It is just another way to show the same data we've been showing since the invention of business graphics.
There will be no additional business specialty that doesn't already exist. This is a neat tinker toy, and nothing more. The author is just very easily impressed.
> During the first quarter of fiscal 2009, we did not sign any large deals, many of which have been historically fulfilled by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ("SLES") certificates delivered through Microsoft.
And things like this are why I can't believe Novell still exists as a company. This is just the most recent of many Novell decisions that are so stupid, an appropriately strong derogatory term does not exist in any known language. Here's how Novell management operated:
1) We pinned our hopes on our biggest direct competitor, a convicted monopolist most well known for the way it infects its competitors and tears them apart, giving us free money.
2) While Microsoft was under scrutiny, it gave us some money from fictitious customers. They were real enough companies, but they were only doing Microsoft a short term favor for what is sure to involve future (or present) Microsoft kickbacks to these companies.
3) Yay! We're profitable! See, we told you Microsoft wasn't a bad company.
4) People are now distracted by bigger things, and our direct competitor is no longer propping us up with fake customers.
5) Oh, shit...
To increase the probability of accurately identifying the hard of hearing, all theater patrons must submit to the point-blank air horn test. If you writhe on the floor in agony with your hands over your ears, you obviously weren't deaf and therefore were obviously not a pirate. Please be seated.
On the bright side, the excessively loud speaker systems in the theater won't be nearly as annoying to you any more. Have a nice day.
#include
> The 5th is not an on-and-off right.
It most certainly is.
> You can't get on the stand at your own trial to testify in your own defense, and then start invoking the 5th when the prosecutor asks questions you don't like.
You most certainly can. That's the whole point behind the amendment. If you couldn't pick and choose, then all that the prosecutor would have to do is ask you your name in order to revoke your right against self-incrimination.
The reason the 5th didn't apply in this instance is because the guy had already provided the border patrol with the information they were after -- that he had child porn on the laptop. At that point, he had already waived his protection under the amendment (unless he can prove that the confession was coerced in violation of some treaty or other law).
The right is not all-encompassing, though. If it were, nobody would ever answer a question in court.
Considering that this is the same judge who agreed Microsoft was abiding by the terms of its reward for losing in court, when it clearly wasn't, I don't hold out a lot of hope that anything will change from the last 8 years of U.S. court-endorsed monopoly abuse.
> No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
You have just described the PC experience over the last two decades (before FOSS developers got their acts together). The PC was liberating for less than ten years, then it got closed off into a proprietary wasteland, and is just now regaining the liberation that drove its initial popularity.
> Please, just read the article. This isn't about running random scripts received through e-mail attachments....
Did you read the article? The entire article is exactly about running random scripts received through email attachments. The article writer spent several paragraphs talking about exploiting user stupidity by sending these rigged files through email, then goes into a spate of hand-waving about the desktops doing what desktops are supposed to do: execute programs that users launch.
He's revised the article several times to tone down the sensationalism a hair, but is still tap dancing around the fact that this is not a virus. He tries justifying the nonsense by claiming that since the computer-ignorant mainstream press calls these things email viruses, he's not doing anything wrong.
The simple fact remains that this is a user-stupidity attack, and there is no technological solution to it. No widely used Linux email program will execute these things unless explicitly configured to do so by the end-user, so the user has to take several unusual steps to voluntarily open himself up to this "problem". I just double checked KMail and Thunderbird (the two I use), and neither will open ANY class of attachment unless
explicitly configured to do so, and even then the user, not the sender, dictates how the class is to be opened -- regardless of what the Exec line says.
There's no doubt that some ignorant users can be made to go through all the steps necessary to save and execute desktop files that contain malicious scripts, but that is not a system vulnerability. That is a human vulnerability. The KDE and GNOME desktops make every reasonable effort to protect users from unintentionally running software received through email, as do all the Linux email programs I've used over the last 16 years, but the operating system and desktop cannot protect a user from doing stupid things while still being useful.
To summarize: this is not a KDE/GNOME desktop vulnerability. This is a simple educational issue, and it applies equally to all desktop operating systems. Not even Windows, which I despise with a burning passion, is to blame when its users intentionally run arbitrary programs received through email that end up doing something harmful.
> There is no way to see in advance that the file is unsafe....
Right-click, open-with...kwrite. Or the operating system-independent method of, "Hmmm..some random, unexpected file appeared in my email. Maybe I shouldn't run it."
1) This is not a virus vector. This is barely classifiable as even a trojan (a program which advertises itself as performing X, but actually performs Y; with Y being something malicious), though can meet the definition under certain tortured logic.
2) This has everything to do with user stupidity. This is not like Windows, where merely clicking the email attachment from within the email program launches the attachment (hell, Outlook has code to automatically execute attachments at the time they're received). This requires the user to manually save the file, then manually execute it. There is no operating system protection that will prevent users from doing something as stupid as explicitly saving and running some random attachment received in email. And before someone starts the, "If this were about Windows..." nonsense, Windows gets a bad wrap because it automatically compromises machines (and does so to the entire system at once) in many, many different ways.
> but if the system does not provide users with the information needed to make an informed choice, then the system is at fault.
Is your blender at fault when you stick your hand inside and turn it on? This has nothing to do with any form of system vulnerability. This mountain-from-a-proton "issue" is the desktop carrying out the user's explicit instructions. I certainly don't want my desktop asking me two or three times whether I'm sure I want to run the application I just told it to run.
There is nothing to see here. This is, and always has been, a user-education issue: don't save and run unexpected attachments you receive in email. On Linux, at least, this kind of stupid user trick can be fixed by erasing the user account and going on with business as usual.
"Capitalism can only work because it thrives on and creates the poor."
Capitalism works great most of the time, but can easily be abused to bring about situations like this. We hear about the fraction of a percent of abusive companies because it's news that sells. We don't hear so much about the greater than 99% of capitalist companies and individuals that provide good, sustainable products and services (for whatever reason).
Seriously, do you think that anybody gives even a tiny little rat's ass that I created a small company's data entry and reporting infrastructure for a reasonable price and included full source code so they wouldn't be locked into me as a sole service provider? Does that sound like news that people will care to spend time or money knowing?
The various news media have long since relied on sensationalism to make money. If you base your world view on what you hear/read from media outlets, it's almost impossible to view the world as anything other than corrupt and beyond redemption. There's a whole other world that doesn't get reported.
> Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between [well water] and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.
This is off topic, but interesting nonetheless. I lived in the country for twelve years, and drank mostly well water for that era. Rest assured that after living on well water for years, tap water tastes like it came from a heavily trafficked swimming pool, and is as obvious as a kick in the head. The heavy stench of chlorine in even good tap water is abusive to taste buds that haven't become acclimated to it. Even now, three years later, I still use a commercial filter on my tap to make the water taste almost as good as that from the country well.
Incidentally, I never noticed how bad tap water is until I moved out into the country. It took a little while for me to realize why the well water tasted so...odd. It's because that was the first time I'd tasted unpolluted water. Up until that point, I had always lived in various suburbs that had city-managed water, and cities always pollute the water with chemicals in order to kill toxins. It may be necessary, but it tastes bad. Since I had grown up with it, I didn't notice it until I'd had untainted water for a few years.
As an aside, for those who don't know, a country well isn't usually a deep hole in the ground with water at the bottom. It's usually a long pipe dug into the ground that taps into an large underground river or water table.
> My favorite piece of eye candy was the "static" when opening the photo...
That is the NVIDIA driver. I run Kubuntu on physical hardware and virtual hardware (VirtualBox). I sometimes see the initial static on the physical machine, but never on the virtual machine.
"There is no deception here. The computers labeled as "Vista Capable" were, in fact, able of running Vista Basic."
If Microsoft's stickers said something to the effect of "Vista Basic Capable", then Microsoft would probably have been okay. But Microsoft wanted to eat at both ends of the trough, owners of low end machines, and owners of high end machines, knowing full well that customers would see a huge difference between Vista Basic and "The Vista That Does Stuff". Microsoft also realized that their customers would revolt if they knew ahead of time that "The Vista That Does Stuff" required a major computer upgrade.
Hence, Microsoft came up with a deceptive campaign that took advantage of people's natural tendency to automatically fill ambiguous information gaps with whatever conclusion is subtly suggested to them. It was therefore intended by Microsoft that "Vista Capable" would be interpreted by the masses as meaning "able to run the advertised features of 'The Vista That Does Stuff.'"
While Microsoft deserves every bit of the potential $8B settlement costs (and more), hardware sellers were very willingly complicit in the whole charade, and should also bare a commensurate legal sanction.
"This is not a design flaw for XP, it's a limitation if the 32 bit architecture."
All modern 32-bit x86 processors are capable a PAE, which extends 32-bit system memory support to 64GB. Because Windows must retain binary compatibility with old drivers, which must be written with PAE in mind, but aren't, the desktop versions of XP don't enable PAE. This is a consequence of having closed source system binaries. Changes in operating architecture cannot be freely made because drivers cannot be recompiled to match, unless the driver vendor does it.
32-bit Linux/*BSD/etc. Open Source systems are at a much greater liberty in this regard, as the Open Source drivers and/or open portions of the driver stubs, can be recompiled and redistributed to match the operating architecture change. My 32-bit Kubuntu systems now have PAE enabled, and can use the full 8GB I have in them. I had to install the 32-bit server kernel packages to replace the non-server kernel packages, but that was it.
The 4GB memory limit has been an operating system limit, rather than a hardware architecture limit, for a number of years. Most of us didn't care until recently because RAM prices were so high that we didn't have a reason to care.
"Sailors are pissed"
You missed a prime opportunity to say that seamen are pissed. Such a waste..
1999 was the year of Linux on my desktop. And 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, to infinity and beyond.
You got modded as funny because people who were raised on Microsoft desktops just can't imagine anything else. But remember that Linux doesn't have to destroy Microsoft to win. Linux just has to even the playing field, something that is occurring slowly but steadily. The moment that Microsoft loses its ability to dictate something because Linux provides an alternative, Microsoft has lost something. Over time, those little losses add up.
"I've never understood all the broohaha over browsers."
The browser is the gateway to all modern on-line consumer activity. If Microsoft controlled the browser, web sites would be forced to run Microsoft's IIS web server (because Internet Explorer would not behave, at all, with anything else). That would give Microsoft total control over all online commerce. Web sites would then have to pay Microsoft whatever it wanted, or cease doing business.
Microsoft would then tie it's browser and/or server into its other products. If you want to stay in business online, you have to run IIS. IIS, by the way, requires a Microsoft Office license pack. This is because Internet Explorer uses Microsoft Word to interact with IIS, but Microsoft only sells the Office License Pack For IIS in bundles of 100, and each remote connection uses one license. The Office License Pack For IIS also requires a functional X-Box Live account for each visitor to your web site. Next year, Microsoft will raise the bundle floor to 200. Why? Because they can.
"Diskkeeper's contention seems to rely on the First Amendment to the Constitution"
The 1st Amendment applies to federal and local governments, not private businesses. In this case, Title VII applies rather than the Constitution.
"My answer? Be your own boss."
This is one of those things that sounds great when you're disillusioned with your job, but isn't all it's cracked up to be:
As your own boss, there is no one sitting between you and irate clients (and clients will get irate regardless of how well you perform, especially if they don't understand how your industry works). I wrote an entire custom business management package in one year, replacing an old DOS-based package that hadn't been supported for over 15 years, and my client was furious. He thought that since modern software was created by drawing simple pictures on a screen, I was must have been extremely incompetent to have taken an entire year.
Since you will become personally responsible for EVERYTHING, the stress you face will usually exceed that of your regular job. There is no longer a manager to stand between you and the constant badgering of your customers. I think most people with the, "become your own boss!" advice greatly underestimate how much crap they don't see when their manager runs interference.
With rare exceptions, you will work more hours than you ever have in the past; especially when you are dealing with your first couple projects. The project I mentioned above was done after work and on weekends. I went from working steady 40-hour weeks to working 80-100 hour weeks during some weeks.
Depending on your industry, you may run into a "feast or famine" situation. When I was working this project, I was making 4 times my normal salary. But in the post-project era, the software works so well that I rarely hear back from them. When I call them periodically for routine customer relations, they tell me that the software works flawlessly (Linux, PostgreSQL, Qt, Cygwin for those interested) and covers all their current needs. They expect to need additions at some indeterminate future point (which recently came to pass), but for now (four years after the initial delivery), the software is more than they had hoped for.
Being your own boss has a number of pros and cons, and is certainly not a cure-all for job dissatisfaction. I highly recommend that people try it for at least a year in order to gain a greater appreciation for the benefits of letting someone else be the boss. Despite all that, I love the sense of accomplishment that comes from having done things my way, the right way.