did I mention how/.'s new discussion system now reminds me of my wife, like, we're having a discussion and there is no way for me to successfully launch a reply.
oh wait, this is/. after all. A wife is, ehmm,... well, - just forget it.
I'm running w2k here with 6 years history of not a single trojan, worm, virus etc. infection. (Before that it was NT4, w95, w31, DOS, cpm+, together 21 years of computing w/o malware infections). I scan my system for malware about once/quarter, with a number of different scanners. But no "protective shield" scanner running all the time. Oh, and I don't do windows update, I ran w2kSP2 until iTunes forced me to update to SP4. SP3 had an evil EULA, that's why.
I let my kids run their boxen under a similar setup, w/o problems, and I believe almost anyone could do the same.
All it takes is - no outlook - no MSIE - a linux firewall/gateway protecting the lan - wlan connects to the foreign side of the firewall and tunnels in via openVPN - clamAV/Amavis and postgrey on the mail server with some basic restrictions about file types of attachments
First, this was meant as a reply to another post asking for comparison. But/. now allows for discussions that need no more replies.
Ok, here are the key data about my current broadband account in Germany, I'm a hansenet customer (alice-dsl.de)
At ~40 (50USD) I get dsl (ADSL2+) and ISDN phone service. I have nominal 16000KBit/s down, 1000KBit/s up, in fact it is 17800/1150 as my home is close to an access point. Taking losses at the dsl-modem in account, this translates to ~1,8 MB/s down, 110KB/s up. Included with that price is a flat rate for all traffic I might generate, a flat rate for domestic land line telephone connections.
This is about the max of what is available for private households at the moment, VDSL2 lines are in preparation but there is some fighting about the question whether the former telco monopolist which currently suffers hard from competion in the dsl field should be allowed to set up a new monopoly in this field. VDSL2 lines, when available, may offer 25 to 50 mBit/s up.
Not sure if this was a hardware problem. Watching it from abroard I felt like there was an surprising lack of chuzpe occurring among some of the deciders. From an entertainment angle this election was somewhat disappointing.
Imagine: billions of people sitting in front of their telly, popcorn&beer, watching the news magazine. Expecting just another scandalous event with brothers helping each other etc. Papers in every cow village all over the globe reporting about election computer malfunctions on the front page - and? suddenly they don't dare to push the buttons...
What an anti-climax!
Of course, flexibility is usefull if you want to have fun, so we all switched from cynic mode to emotional and just celebrated the defeat of the most despised figures in the current universe.
But is there anything to celebrate at all? Mr. Donald "torture-for-democracy" Rumsfeld is finally out of office. After 6 bloody years, literally bloody.
What about the war crimes? Will he face a trial? What about the nest of hornets he kept stirring, finally creating iraq as the terrorist stronghold which he pictured that country when it was _not_. What about the loss of civil rights world wide that his reign resulted in? What about the deads in Baghdad, London, Madrid his petrocentric adventurism provoced? He bears the responibility, what's the price he has to pay for it?
He'll cash even more now, consulting and holding lectures.
I guess you have a valid point here. Then again, there may be some of us who feel a value calculation like yours is less impressive than the joy of finding a way.
The optimist looks at the glass and decides it is half full. The pessimist knows it is half empty instead. The business consultant takes the glass and hits it against the table, thus breaking it in two, with the remark: You've got twice the amount of glass than what you really need.
have turned the US into a paper tiger on the economic front.
you picked a fine metapher here, given the current role of the Bank of China wrt the nominal worth of the USD.
(describing the USoA as a "paper tiger" is a quote from the Mao Bible, I read it in it's time)
you remind of the man driving an autobahn on the wrong lane and when he hears a radio traffic warning about some guy driving in the wrong direction he mumbles: one - huh. thousands!
but the very term of "self-healing minefield", which makes "oxymoron" sound like an soviet propaganda euphemism, makes me want to vomit onto the pectoral decorations of Mr. Donald "SelfHealing" Rumsfeld with such an urge that I feel I lack the capability to eat enough to supply the stream, so to say.
I strongly doubt there is a god as they tell us but if anyone ever had any doubt about satan being well alive and walking amongst us: look here.
with that evil color scheme and having to disable the foolish css after every reload or link I quit my fav pretense of being busy entirely. Which in fact raised my productivity but looking at the number of comments I feel I wasnt the only one to do so. What about taking/. offline next year? April fooling the DNS or something?
The really funny thing - for the rest of the world - is to watch the selfproclaimed rulers of the world/universe/galaxy getting hot about this creationism folie whenever there is a chance. Some new scientific data - astronomical, geologist, biological, archaeologist, linguistic, genetic, you name it - and after 3 or 4 sensible posts the slashdot crowd turns to debating how this new factoid shines in the light of a 15th century mindset. Pages and pages. And most of you folks just state the obvious - that creationism etc is utter nonsense - but why mention it at all?
We don't discuss this US phenomenon much over here in Europe. It's like someone dear to you turns lunatic. It's embarrassing, you try to keep the topic under the table, when you have to mention it, you use euphemisms and code words while hoping all the time the crazy brother finally gets back into his right mind.
Please! Stretch! Yawn! Rubb your eyes - and get back to normal. TIA
Hm, my Lan server is an Epia C3-800, running SuSE 8.2 (still). It runs VMware-2.0.4 and in it another SuSE which handles the (mostly harmless, unless I link my pr0n collection) http, ftp, ssh I get here. Both host and guest OS had their uptime wrap around last summer, so I'd argue it is an not entirely unstable setup.
Oh yes, and it doesnt overheat, either, in spite of me taking all the included fans out. It has a Morex Cubid 2677 case standing on its left side, thus having convection cooling.
Well, I doubt this, strongly. A public outcry in Europe to back an US monopolist trying to strongarm a European institution? You must be dreaming!
As soon as this issue comes to the headlines and frontpages, MS would draw all the widespread critique of US hegemonialism and cowboy politics on itself. And this is not limited to single nations or leftwing circles at all but is a view shared by many in the upper ranks of corporate Europe as well. And there are lots of anti-US sentiments in latency which would tend to manifest themselves if such an issue was driven to a confrontation. To become a symbol of "typical American" is a pr disaster and I do not think MS will offer themselves as a scapegoat like that. In fact, one of the factors that allowed MS to grow strong here was the emphasis they put on localisation. And this was not invented in Redmond, Wash., it was an issue put forward by European branches, and Redmond listened, and took the advice. Of course this is only speculation on my part but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they still know to listen to the locals and know better than to risk a full scale open confrontation.
In essence you're right.
That said, I have to highlight that the option to open the CLI on my w2k desktop, when I rightclick a folder icon, is named "DOS prompt here".
And everyone understands what this option means. So, while DOS as in Disk Operating System is dead as can be, DOS as in Dat Ogly Systemwindow lives on happily.
Slashdot Mirror
did I mention how
oh wait, this is
Sure thing, where is the news?
I'm running w2k here with 6 years history of not a single trojan, worm, virus etc. infection. (Before that it was NT4, w95, w31, DOS, cpm+, together 21 years of computing w/o malware infections).
I scan my system for malware about once/quarter, with a number of different scanners. But no "protective shield" scanner running all the time.
Oh, and I don't do windows update, I ran w2kSP2 until iTunes forced me to update to SP4. SP3 had an evil EULA, that's why.
I let my kids run their boxen under a similar setup, w/o problems, and I believe almost anyone could do the same.
All it takes is
- no outlook
- no MSIE
- a linux firewall/gateway protecting the lan
- wlan connects to the foreign side of the firewall and tunnels in via openVPN
- clamAV/Amavis and postgrey on the mail server with some basic restrictions about file types of attachments
First, this was meant as a reply to another post asking for comparison. /. now allows for discussions that need no more replies.
But
Ok, here are the key data about my current broadband account in Germany, I'm a hansenet customer (alice-dsl.de)
At ~40 (50USD) I get dsl (ADSL2+) and ISDN phone service. I have nominal 16000KBit/s down, 1000KBit/s up, in fact it is 17800/1150 as my home is close to an access point. Taking losses at the dsl-modem in account, this translates to ~1,8 MB/s down, 110KB/s up. Included with that price is a flat rate for all traffic I might generate, a flat rate for domestic land line telephone connections.
This is about the max of what is available for private households at the moment, VDSL2 lines are in preparation but there is some fighting about the question whether the former telco monopolist which currently suffers hard from competion in the dsl field should be allowed to set up a new monopoly in this field. VDSL2 lines, when available, may offer 25 to 50 mBit/s up.
Not sure if this was a hardware problem. Watching it from abroard I felt like there was an surprising lack of chuzpe occurring among some of the deciders.
From an entertainment angle this election was somewhat disappointing.
Imagine: billions of people sitting in front of their telly, popcorn&beer, watching the news magazine. Expecting just another scandalous event with brothers helping each other etc.
Papers in every cow village all over the globe reporting about election computer malfunctions on the front page - and? suddenly they don't dare to push the buttons...
What an anti-climax!
Of course, flexibility is usefull if you want to have fun, so we all switched from cynic mode to emotional and just celebrated the defeat of the most despised figures in the current universe.
But is there anything to celebrate at all? Mr. Donald "torture-for-democracy" Rumsfeld is finally out of office. After 6 bloody years, literally bloody.
What about the war crimes?
Will he face a trial?
What about the nest of hornets he kept stirring, finally creating iraq as the terrorist stronghold which he pictured that country when it was _not_.
What about the loss of civil rights world wide that his reign resulted in?
What about the deads in Baghdad, London, Madrid his petrocentric adventurism provoced?
He bears the responibility, what's the price he has to pay for it?
He'll cash even more now, consulting and holding lectures.
(I have none left myself)
I guess you have a valid point here. Then again, there may be some of us who feel a value calculation like yours is less impressive than the joy of finding a way.
The optimist looks at the glass and decides it is half full.
The pessimist knows it is half empty instead.
The business consultant takes the glass and hits it against the table, thus breaking it in two, with the remark:
You've got twice the amount of glass than what you really need.
and another
bourgeoisie.org
you picked a fine metapher here, given the current role of the Bank of China wrt the nominal worth of the USD.
(describing the USoA as a "paper tiger" is a quote from the Mao Bible, I read it in it's time)
until they decide to bomb it into the stone age.
as in 'frenchize'
you remind of the man driving an autobahn on the wrong lane and when he hears a radio traffic warning about some guy driving in the wrong direction he mumbles: one - huh. thousands!
but the very term of "self-healing minefield", which makes "oxymoron" sound like an soviet propaganda euphemism, makes me want to vomit onto the pectoral decorations of Mr. Donald "SelfHealing" Rumsfeld with such an urge that I feel I lack the capability to eat enough to supply the stream, so to say.
I strongly doubt there is a god as they tell us but if anyone ever had any doubt about satan being well alive and walking amongst us: look here.
I knew it for all my life, can't say I'm surprised it has been prooven now.
Quite ineffective, given that there are no ads on Cringely's page.
Ouch, that hurt, Andrzej.
They make themself believe they have to. And this is one of the reasons for the mess they brought themselves into.
But this is so last century.
Virtualisation. Obsoletes. This.
with that evil color scheme and having to disable the foolish css after every reload or link I quit my fav pretense of being busy entirely.
Which in fact raised my productivity but looking at the number of comments I feel I wasnt the only one to do so.
What about taking
Nada brahma - everything is sound.
thanks for this post, it gave me an insight
I wasted my modpoints on some balmer bashing and now I know why I should have saved the last one
The really funny thing - for the rest of the world - is to watch the selfproclaimed rulers of the world/universe/galaxy getting hot about this creationism folie whenever there is a chance. Some new scientific data - astronomical, geologist, biological, archaeologist, linguistic, genetic, you name it - and after 3 or 4 sensible posts the slashdot crowd turns to debating how this new factoid shines in the light of a 15th century mindset.
Pages and pages.
And most of you folks just state the obvious - that creationism etc is utter nonsense - but why mention it at all?
We don't discuss this US phenomenon much over here in Europe. It's like someone dear to you turns lunatic. It's embarrassing, you try to keep the topic under the table, when you have to mention it, you use euphemisms and code words while hoping all the time the crazy brother finally gets back into his right mind.
Please! Stretch! Yawn! Rubb your eyes - and get back to normal. TIA
Hm, my Lan server is an Epia C3-800, running SuSE 8.2 (still). It runs VMware-2.0.4 and in it another SuSE which handles the (mostly harmless, unless I link my pr0n collection) http, ftp, ssh I get here. Both host and guest OS had their uptime wrap around last summer, so I'd argue it is an not entirely unstable setup.
Oh yes, and it doesnt overheat, either, in spite of me taking all the included fans out. It has a Morex Cubid 2677 case standing on its left side, thus having convection cooling.
Well, I doubt this, strongly.
A public outcry in Europe to back an US monopolist trying to strongarm a European institution? You must be dreaming!
As soon as this issue comes to the headlines and frontpages, MS would draw all the widespread critique of US hegemonialism and cowboy politics on itself. And this is not limited to single nations or leftwing circles at all but is a view shared by many in the upper ranks of corporate Europe as well.
And there are lots of anti-US sentiments in latency which would tend to manifest themselves if such an issue was driven to a confrontation.
To become a symbol of "typical American" is a pr disaster and I do not think MS will offer themselves as a scapegoat like that.
In fact, one of the factors that allowed MS to grow strong here was the emphasis they put on localisation. And this was not invented in Redmond, Wash., it was an issue put forward by European branches, and Redmond listened, and took the advice.
Of course this is only speculation on my part but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they still know to listen to the locals and know better than to risk a full scale open confrontation.
ahh, I wasted my mod points on some other topics so you wont get the 5+ insightful I would like to give you here, regards
In essence you're right.
That said, I have to highlight that the option to open the CLI on my w2k desktop, when I rightclick a folder icon, is named "DOS prompt here".
And everyone understands what this option means. So, while DOS as in Disk Operating System is dead as can be, DOS as in Dat Ogly Systemwindow lives on happily.