If it's actually sanctioned, then no, you want it secure and access to the code restricted so it only gets audited by those in the know.
I've never seen any NT Source that was restricted to that extent, but I've never really looked and I know that perforce can do it and doubt that any engineers would even notice.
It wasn't just 95, it was almost every application. The difference being that it wasn't a security flaw. It was simply a way of allowing large customers to install massive amounts of software without having to generate thousands of key that they weren't going to check anyway. Until the whole online key registration thing, Microsoft simply didn't have any way of keeping the customer honest because their main losses from piracy came from people burning look-alikes and selling them rather than from customers installing too many copies.
1) NT Win32 is a fresh implementation of the Win32. This doesn't share Win16 code. 2) NT, and especially Win32 is written almost entirely in C++. Ever try to do self modifying code in C++? 3) The security push from 2 years ago would have never let self modifying code pass. 4) Intel Procs aren't particularly suited to self modifying assembly. 5) Nobody on the Windows team would seriously consider using it, ever, even if it is joked about on beer Friday. Any attempt to use it in reality would start with a flogging and end with a firing.
Possibly, but I doubt it's a Microsoft sanctioned backdoor. Any "OFFICIAL" backdoor from MS would have a much more complex key to get in than "1".
I can see this being a programmer supplied backdoor, like a hook for easter eggs, but based on the other security work done in MS, anything that can be gotten into that is there on purpose is locked up pretty tight to any casual attempts.
I don't doubt it will be a very good, stable operating system. MS has done an excellent job of that recently (It's not 1995 anymore).
On the other hand, Vista will NOT be an operating system I can recommend to anyone but a casual user. For anything other than a toy OS, it fails miserably because it shuts itself off. I have tried administering these things in clusters that reimage frequently and they need constant babysitting because they are so afraid they might get used without a licence that often, just to be safe, the Windows machine shuts down to err on the side of saftey. Saftey being defined only on Microsoft's terms.
I CANNOT have production servers refusing to operate until I manually punch in some stupid key or call some 1-800 number. THat is rediculous and dangerous to business.
I don't dislike the OS, it has come a long way. I dislike that it is a toy. It is a toy because the authors treat it like a toy and expect people to use it as a toy. You can give it the greatest SMP and TCP stack and lateral scalability in the world, but it is still a toy because it refuses to act any different.
Let me get this straight. You are saying that a superiority of Windows over Linux is that in Windows, normal users don't need to be concerned with partitions?!? What planet are you from?
I have 2 desktop boxes in front of me right now... one is running Gentoo, the other Windows XP Pro. On my Gentoo box, I have no clue how my partitions are set up, and I'm the one who built the box! I have a single file system,/, that has everything on it. If I do ever run out of drive space, then I'll have to go look at the partition makeup and rearrange things, but I can do that simply by tarballing up a partition and remounting a bigger drive there. Outside of initial configuration, however, I don't care.
My Windows box on the other hand is constant partition madness. The damn machine is always throwing it into my face what partition holds what, so I am well aware of my partitions. C:\ is my OS, D:\ is my drive that used to be my main application drive until I ran out of room. E:\ is my RAID 0 drive that I put most of my apps on now, since I have to keep reinstalling them anyway everytime I change some configuration in the OS. F:\ is my CDR, G:\ is my DVD, H:\ is my big archive drive where I keep all of my mp3s and big data files. Documents and Settings is still on C:\ because I cringe even thinking about moving it, but I will have to soon. C:\ is running out of space and there is nothing I can do about it except reinstall the entire OS, followed up by a reinstall of every single application in the system. The letters used to identify the drives are inconsistent between Windows computers (on my last computer, E:\ was the CDR, now F:\ is.) I am *PAINFULLY* aware of my partitions on a daily basis, and if I run out of space, there is no option to just tarball up a partition and remount, in fact, if C:\ runs out, it's going to be far easier just to by a new machine and start over than try to fix it. At that point, this Windows box will become my Gentoo box, and have better performance than the new Windows box even though it will be an order of magnitude slower in hardware.
The complaint is, even though partitions are not only not transparent in Windows, but rather in your face, the tools for dealing with them are EXTREMELY primitive. Linux, where partitions matter much less and can generally be ignored, still has a large array of tools and options for configuring partions. You'd think Windows, who makes the casual user deal with their partition configuration daily would offer the better toolset.
I think most home heating oil is still petroleum based, but I'm not really sure. It would be my guess that there is some, if not alot of biodeisel in it though.
And as to your first question... no. Lowest price always wins. Biodeisel manufactures DO try to take advantage by marketing, but when your product costs 33% more than the competition for the same performance, the low cost advantage is going to win except in the most die-hard consumers. It is my opinion that Biodeisel will come into it's own and have a golden age in the not so distant future because fossil fuels are non-renewable, of course, and biodeisel is a very convenient drop-in replacement for the current breed of engines and generators, but currently fossil oil is so unbelievably plentiful that it's price is on par with sand.
The big holdup with biodesiel is that it's hard to justify growing crops to make fuel out of when free fuel is squirting out of the ground at you wherever you look. When the price of fossil oil outstrips the price of vegatable oil, then biodeisel will be everywhere. A few months ago, when gas prices were topping $3.00, there were 3 gas stations in the local Seattle area supplying biodeisel. If gas topped $4.00, then we'd see it everywhere.
THe whole "Energy Sink" argument is stupid anyway. We aren't in a closed system, so we can afford all the energy sinks we want, as we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to feul our civilization for the next 1000 years. It's about packaging the energy into useable forms.
I'm not going to stop charging my cell phone battery simply because it's a "net energy loss". The fact that I have transformed the energy into a nice chemical bundle is well worth the loss of energy in the process.
The problem is that those are unsupported OS's that will never recieve a security patch. I'd hate to think what might happen to win311 attached to the internet in this age, since many of the flaws exploited in the last 10 years still exist on that system.
Linux on the other hand can runn fully supported current apps on the same hardware and take advantage of patches. The reason being that you can cut out everything "modern" from linux (KDE, etc) and be left with the capabilities you had in the win311 days, but without the bugs and security holes.
It depends on the purpose of the machine. If the FS is utilizing CPU and RAM to build an L1 Cache, align writes, do simple defragmentation during idle, etc, it might chew up quite a bit more CPU than a more conventional FS, which would be really bad if your using the machine as a PHP server or something... but if you are running the machine as a simple file server, say a remote/usr partion for your network, as you mention, a conventional file system will use at most only 5% of the proc, which means 95% of your machine is IO bound and laying idle during the most stressed times. A FS that utilizes more of that proc to take load off the disk is going to be wonderful for a machine that doesn't do anything but play with it's disk.
Yep. My primary Apache and Subversion server is a 500Mhz AMD K6II with 300Gigs of HD. Got it sans hard drive for free, along with 2 other machines for helping a friend move.
Heck, my main dev box is a dual 1 Ghz PIII coppermine with 1 Gig of ram, and the only issue I have with it is when it chokes on extremely large eclipse projects. I'm sure it can't play games worth a damn, but I don't need it to. I think I sunk a total of about $30 for this monstrosity.
Thinking about it, my entire business' network of about 10 machines cost a cash outlay of about $400, and most of that is for the gigabit switch and the archiving HD.
Why would this plan be only for the employed? The unemployed pay taxes too, in fact, the unemployed generally pay a negative income tax. Even the chronicly unemployed. Certainly, the bottom 1% would never repay the program, and the IRS would end up eating the cost, but SOMEONE is going to eat the cost, no matter what you do, and right now the people eating the cost are the Doctors. This even solves catastrophic cases. It's not an IDEAL situation to be in, having a $100,000 IRS debt instead of being insured, but the person's life is saved, and well, they are the ones deserving the debt, as they are the ones who didn't get insured against it. Again, someone eats those catastrophic medical costs, and right now it's insurance companies and myself in higher premiums.
I'm not seeing the weakness in this plan yet, even for catastrophic cases and the chronically unemployed, and actually, Cobra is a better plan than this one for short term unemployment.
I used your exact argument on a Rabbi once, however, and I recall him eating my lunch. He had some very good arguments as to why Atheism is the fervent belief against the existence of God, everything else being Agnosticism. Unfortunately, I do not recall his exact argument, only the conclusion. I think he settled on calling me an "Atheistic Agnostic" after breaking Agnosticism into about 6 very different categories.
I do think that Russell's statement is very accurate: I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. In fact, IIRC this has been logically proved beyond a doubt multiple times by multiple philosophers, and makes perfect sense. Anyone who falls into this category cannot be a true Athiest, and anyone who does not, has either a logically unfounded belief in the existence or non-existence of God. Atheism is the belief in an unprovable, and only a subsect of Agnosticism is truely without unfounded belief.
Having the government pay the money for any non-cosmetic health care, but demanding payment in return, with non-trivial interest, a payment plan and a credit ping, and enforcing that repayment plan under penalty of tax evasion, solves the problem also. It has a great incentive to insure yourself, as you really don't want the IRS on your ass or a credit ping. It doesn't overburden the patient, as a reasonable payment plan is enacted based on their willingness to pay, but it DOES inflict a burden on the patient as a real debt and a real garnishment which gives it a large negative incentive. Best of all, the infrastructure is already intact with the IRS to perform the collection and payment plans.
To implement, just add a "tax debit" to the tax code which is equal to the cost of medical services rendered and is subtracted from the taxpayers tax credit. Doctors, who are already licenced, would add a form, similar to a w2, that they would send the taxpayer and the IRS at the end of the year if the government paid, and the doctor would take the loss as a direct tax credit. Any underpayment of the new income tax is delinquent and subject to interest and penalties, and payment arrangements equitable to the IRS must be made. Basically, uninsured low income people's EIC would handle most minor health care issues, and they would go into debt on major ones.
Currently, the IRS is one agency who's kindness is rarely abused:) I think they have a very good mechanism for dealing with incentivised payment for government services rendered.
I actually just thought of all this off the top of my head, and it looks so good I'm wondering what glaring hole in my logic I'm missing, because I couldn't have just solved the US's health care issue with a single paragraph that could be implemented tomorrow with no added infrastructure, no pain to any agency, no additional taxpayer burden, and that reduces health care costs by eliminating unpaid services, could I?
*ACK* Please don't suggest modeling Health insurance on Auto Insurance... ugh.
Actually, I don't see a problem with uninsured health care being similar to IRS debt. I have a debt to the IRS (I got services, ie. money when I actually shouldn't have. I make payments to the IRS monthly based on what I can afford. If I don't make my payments, and don't communicate with them, things go badly for me. Very badly. As long as I do what I can, based on what I can afford, then everything is good. I cannot get out of this debt except by dying. Why wouldn't this work for Government backed health insurance? If someone needs life saving care, give it to them and apply to the government for compensation. That person WILL either die, go to jail, or pay their debt plus interest, and in addition take a credit hit. It would probably be alot cheaper than the current medicare/medicade/social security monoliths.
Campaigning against the collecting of stamps would indeed be a hobby. I think you mean "Agnosticism", which is the lack of a belief. Athiesm is the fervent belief in the non-existence of God.
There is no addendum. The writers of the document wrote these words purposefully in the context of a society that rejected the idea in the hopes that the society, by accepting the principle for it's own benefit, would later have to defend those rights for all men lest they betray the very foundation for their institution. That's exactly what happened; the pressure of the foundations of all law caused mounting tension between the status quo and the ideal philosophy, which ultimately erupted in civil war.
If the writers had meant for there to be a distinction, they would have written in a distinction. THe fact that they didn't is very telling, even though it was very contemptuous towards the powers that be. Just because it took time to overthrow those powers, through legislation and arms, doesn't mean the intent wasn't evident.
The very fact that you feel the need to modify the wording of the document to suit your arguement shows that it's a complete strawman. The accompanying writings of the authors shows meticulously worded arguments even in non-official writings. For you to say that they made a glaring mistake in the one document that their lives and fortunes would be measured by shows extreme ignorance.
In addition, at the time (and even in modern times) "men", when referring to a society or populous, is always synonymous with "humankind".
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Agreed... *IF* it is put in there by a developer.
If it's actually sanctioned, then no, you want it secure and access to the code restricted so it only gets audited by those in the know.
I've never seen any NT Source that was restricted to that extent, but I've never really looked and I know that perforce can do it and doubt that any engineers would even notice.
It wasn't just 95, it was almost every application. The difference being that it wasn't a security flaw. It was simply a way of allowing large customers to install massive amounts of software without having to generate thousands of key that they weren't going to check anyway. Until the whole online key registration thing, Microsoft simply didn't have any way of keeping the customer honest because their main losses from piracy came from people burning look-alikes and selling them rather than from customers installing too many copies.
This is *SEVERELY* doubtful.
1) NT Win32 is a fresh implementation of the Win32. This doesn't share Win16 code.
2) NT, and especially Win32 is written almost entirely in C++. Ever try to do self modifying code in C++?
3) The security push from 2 years ago would have never let self modifying code pass.
4) Intel Procs aren't particularly suited to self modifying assembly.
5) Nobody on the Windows team would seriously consider using it, ever, even if it is joked about on beer Friday. Any attempt to use it in reality would start with a flogging and end with a firing.
I've used 2003 in a cluster, and I am assuming that it will have the same licencing issues and automatic shutdown "features".
Funny, that's the same combination I have on my luggage....
Easter Egg hook
Possibly, but I doubt it's a Microsoft sanctioned backdoor. Any "OFFICIAL" backdoor from MS would have a much more complex key to get in than "1".
I can see this being a programmer supplied backdoor, like a hook for easter eggs, but based on the other security work done in MS, anything that can be gotten into that is there on purpose is locked up pretty tight to any casual attempts.
Except that the etc-update problem isn't solved yet. You do NOT want a casual user to get stuck with etc-update.
I don't doubt it will be a very good, stable operating system. MS has done an excellent job of that recently (It's not 1995 anymore).
On the other hand, Vista will NOT be an operating system I can recommend to anyone but a casual user. For anything other than a toy OS, it fails miserably because it shuts itself off. I have tried administering these things in clusters that reimage frequently and they need constant babysitting because they are so afraid they might get used without a licence that often, just to be safe, the Windows machine shuts down to err on the side of saftey. Saftey being defined only on Microsoft's terms.
I CANNOT have production servers refusing to operate until I manually punch in some stupid key or call some 1-800 number. THat is rediculous and dangerous to business.
I don't dislike the OS, it has come a long way. I dislike that it is a toy. It is a toy because the authors treat it like a toy and expect people to use it as a toy. You can give it the greatest SMP and TCP stack and lateral scalability in the world, but it is still a toy because it refuses to act any different.
I so envy you. My favorite car ever was a '77 300SD inline 5. That car made it from Seattle to Sacramento on 1 tank and could spin around in an alley.
Let me get this straight. You are saying that a superiority of Windows over Linux is that in Windows, normal users don't need to be concerned with partitions?!? What planet are you from?
/, that has everything on it. If I do ever run out of drive space, then I'll have to go look at the partition makeup and rearrange things, but I can do that simply by tarballing up a partition and remounting a bigger drive there. Outside of initial configuration, however, I don't care.
I have 2 desktop boxes in front of me right now... one is running Gentoo, the other Windows XP Pro. On my Gentoo box, I have no clue how my partitions are set up, and I'm the one who built the box! I have a single file system,
My Windows box on the other hand is constant partition madness. The damn machine is always throwing it into my face what partition holds what, so I am well aware of my partitions. C:\ is my OS, D:\ is my drive that used to be my main application drive until I ran out of room. E:\ is my RAID 0 drive that I put most of my apps on now, since I have to keep reinstalling them anyway everytime I change some configuration in the OS. F:\ is my CDR, G:\ is my DVD, H:\ is my big archive drive where I keep all of my mp3s and big data files. Documents and Settings is still on C:\ because I cringe even thinking about moving it, but I will have to soon. C:\ is running out of space and there is nothing I can do about it except reinstall the entire OS, followed up by a reinstall of every single application in the system. The letters used to identify the drives are inconsistent between Windows computers (on my last computer, E:\ was the CDR, now F:\ is.) I am *PAINFULLY* aware of my partitions on a daily basis, and if I run out of space, there is no option to just tarball up a partition and remount, in fact, if C:\ runs out, it's going to be far easier just to by a new machine and start over than try to fix it. At that point, this Windows box will become my Gentoo box, and have better performance than the new Windows box even though it will be an order of magnitude slower in hardware.
The complaint is, even though partitions are not only not transparent in Windows, but rather in your face, the tools for dealing with them are EXTREMELY primitive. Linux, where partitions matter much less and can generally be ignored, still has a large array of tools and options for configuring partions. You'd think Windows, who makes the casual user deal with their partition configuration daily would offer the better toolset.
I think most home heating oil is still petroleum based, but I'm not really sure. It would be my guess that there is some, if not alot of biodeisel in it though.
And as to your first question... no. Lowest price always wins. Biodeisel manufactures DO try to take advantage by marketing, but when your product costs 33% more than the competition for the same performance, the low cost advantage is going to win except in the most die-hard consumers. It is my opinion that Biodeisel will come into it's own and have a golden age in the not so distant future because fossil fuels are non-renewable, of course, and biodeisel is a very convenient drop-in replacement for the current breed of engines and generators, but currently fossil oil is so unbelievably plentiful that it's price is on par with sand.
Who cares. Companies aren't misbehaving children you are helping grow up. You are allowed to kill them with impunity for being bad.
The big holdup with biodesiel is that it's hard to justify growing crops to make fuel out of when free fuel is squirting out of the ground at you wherever you look. When the price of fossil oil outstrips the price of vegatable oil, then biodeisel will be everywhere. A few months ago, when gas prices were topping $3.00, there were 3 gas stations in the local Seattle area supplying biodeisel. If gas topped $4.00, then we'd see it everywhere.
THe whole "Energy Sink" argument is stupid anyway. We aren't in a closed system, so we can afford all the energy sinks we want, as we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to feul our civilization for the next 1000 years. It's about packaging the energy into useable forms.
I'm not going to stop charging my cell phone battery simply because it's a "net energy loss". The fact that I have transformed the energy into a nice chemical bundle is well worth the loss of energy in the process.
The problem is that those are unsupported OS's that will never recieve a security patch. I'd hate to think what might happen to win311 attached to the internet in this age, since many of the flaws exploited in the last 10 years still exist on that system.
Linux on the other hand can runn fully supported current apps on the same hardware and take advantage of patches. The reason being that you can cut out everything "modern" from linux (KDE, etc) and be left with the capabilities you had in the win311 days, but without the bugs and security holes.
It depends on the purpose of the machine. If the FS is utilizing CPU and RAM to build an L1 Cache, align writes, do simple defragmentation during idle, etc, it might chew up quite a bit more CPU than a more conventional FS, which would be really bad if your using the machine as a PHP server or something... but if you are running the machine as a simple file server, say a remote /usr partion for your network, as you mention, a conventional file system will use at most only 5% of the proc, which means 95% of your machine is IO bound and laying idle during the most stressed times. A FS that utilizes more of that proc to take load off the disk is going to be wonderful for a machine that doesn't do anything but play with it's disk.
Yep. My primary Apache and Subversion server is a 500Mhz AMD K6II with 300Gigs of HD. Got it sans hard drive for free, along with 2 other machines for helping a friend move.
Heck, my main dev box is a dual 1 Ghz PIII coppermine with 1 Gig of ram, and the only issue I have with it is when it chokes on extremely large eclipse projects. I'm sure it can't play games worth a damn, but I don't need it to. I think I sunk a total of about $30 for this monstrosity.
Thinking about it, my entire business' network of about 10 machines cost a cash outlay of about $400, and most of that is for the gigabit switch and the archiving HD.
Why would this plan be only for the employed? The unemployed pay taxes too, in fact, the unemployed generally pay a negative income tax. Even the chronicly unemployed. Certainly, the bottom 1% would never repay the program, and the IRS would end up eating the cost, but SOMEONE is going to eat the cost, no matter what you do, and right now the people eating the cost are the Doctors. This even solves catastrophic cases. It's not an IDEAL situation to be in, having a $100,000 IRS debt instead of being insured, but the person's life is saved, and well, they are the ones deserving the debt, as they are the ones who didn't get insured against it. Again, someone eats those catastrophic medical costs, and right now it's insurance companies and myself in higher premiums.
I'm not seeing the weakness in this plan yet, even for catastrophic cases and the chronically unemployed, and actually, Cobra is a better plan than this one for short term unemployment.
:) I definatelly think Russell stated it well.
I used your exact argument on a Rabbi once, however, and I recall him eating my lunch. He had some very good arguments as to why Atheism is the fervent belief against the existence of God, everything else being Agnosticism. Unfortunately, I do not recall his exact argument, only the conclusion. I think he settled on calling me an "Atheistic Agnostic" after breaking Agnosticism into about 6 very different categories.
I do think that Russell's statement is very accurate: I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. In fact, IIRC this has been logically proved beyond a doubt multiple times by multiple philosophers, and makes perfect sense. Anyone who falls into this category cannot be a true Athiest, and anyone who does not, has either a logically unfounded belief in the existence or non-existence of God. Atheism is the belief in an unprovable, and only a subsect of Agnosticism is truely without unfounded belief.
Having the government pay the money for any non-cosmetic health care, but demanding payment in return, with non-trivial interest, a payment plan and a credit ping, and enforcing that repayment plan under penalty of tax evasion, solves the problem also. It has a great incentive to insure yourself, as you really don't want the IRS on your ass or a credit ping. It doesn't overburden the patient, as a reasonable payment plan is enacted based on their willingness to pay, but it DOES inflict a burden on the patient as a real debt and a real garnishment which gives it a large negative incentive. Best of all, the infrastructure is already intact with the IRS to perform the collection and payment plans.
:) I think they have a very good mechanism for dealing with incentivised payment for government services rendered.
To implement, just add a "tax debit" to the tax code which is equal to the cost of medical services rendered and is subtracted from the taxpayers tax credit. Doctors, who are already licenced, would add a form, similar to a w2, that they would send the taxpayer and the IRS at the end of the year if the government paid, and the doctor would take the loss as a direct tax credit. Any underpayment of the new income tax is delinquent and subject to interest and penalties, and payment arrangements equitable to the IRS must be made. Basically, uninsured low income people's EIC would handle most minor health care issues, and they would go into debt on major ones.
Currently, the IRS is one agency who's kindness is rarely abused
I actually just thought of all this off the top of my head, and it looks so good I'm wondering what glaring hole in my logic I'm missing, because I couldn't have just solved the US's health care issue with a single paragraph that could be implemented tomorrow with no added infrastructure, no pain to any agency, no additional taxpayer burden, and that reduces health care costs by eliminating unpaid services, could I?
*ACK* Please don't suggest modeling Health insurance on Auto Insurance... ugh.
Actually, I don't see a problem with uninsured health care being similar to IRS debt. I have a debt to the IRS (I got services, ie. money when I actually shouldn't have. I make payments to the IRS monthly based on what I can afford. If I don't make my payments, and don't communicate with them, things go badly for me. Very badly. As long as I do what I can, based on what I can afford, then everything is good. I cannot get out of this debt except by dying. Why wouldn't this work for Government backed health insurance? If someone needs life saving care, give it to them and apply to the government for compensation. That person WILL either die, go to jail, or pay their debt plus interest, and in addition take a credit hit. It would probably be alot cheaper than the current medicare/medicade/social security monoliths.
Campaigning against the collecting of stamps would indeed be a hobby. I think you mean "Agnosticism", which is the lack of a belief. Athiesm is the fervent belief in the non-existence of God.
Just look at the Athiest fundamentalists boycotting "Narnia" because of their objections to "Christian Themes".
Athiestism is one of the most evangelical religions there is. I think the GGP meant "Agnosticism".
There is no addendum. The writers of the document wrote these words purposefully in the context of a society that rejected the idea in the hopes that the society, by accepting the principle for it's own benefit, would later have to defend those rights for all men lest they betray the very foundation for their institution. That's exactly what happened; the pressure of the foundations of all law caused mounting tension between the status quo and the ideal philosophy, which ultimately erupted in civil war.
If the writers had meant for there to be a distinction, they would have written in a distinction. THe fact that they didn't is very telling, even though it was very contemptuous towards the powers that be. Just because it took time to overthrow those powers, through legislation and arms, doesn't mean the intent wasn't evident.
The very fact that you feel the need to modify the wording of the document to suit your arguement shows that it's a complete strawman. The accompanying writings of the authors shows meticulously worded arguments even in non-official writings. For you to say that they made a glaring mistake in the one document that their lives and fortunes would be measured by shows extreme ignorance.
In addition, at the time (and even in modern times) "men", when referring to a society or populous, is always synonymous with "humankind".