I doubt it MS would support this if it's released under GPL. Otherwise, they'll be forced to show their own code if they decided to use the code for themselves.
...unless, of course, they use the code without telling anyone which [baseless attack] has probably been happening for years.[/baseless attack]
Since I've never contracted a virus on my operating system and I've never ran any AV software on it I suppose there are quite a few things I'd rather see *included* with my operating system. I'd prefer nothing be forcibly integrated with it though.
Since I've never contracted a virus on my operating system and I've never ran any AV software on it I suppose there are quite a few things I'd rather see *included* with my operating system. I'd prefer nothing be forcibly integrated with it though.
NYTimes article excerpt: FOREIGN DESK | November 6, 2003, Thursday THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: DIPLOMACY; Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avert War
By JAMES RISEN (NYT) 2649 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 1
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 2649 WORDS - As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a... Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman...
Well, we took a stable (albeit ruled by a ruthless dictator) country with a viable economy and some semblance of order and ripped it to hell under the guise of protecting America. The goal wasn't to remove a bad man... There are plenty of bad men running countries, many of which we put there. The goal was to protect Americans.
Nukes? None... WMDs? None... Terrorism? Well, there wasn't terrorism until we wiped Iraq clean of any and all army or police. Now the infamous Al Queda is flooding into the country killing scores of Iraqis almost daily. And those 'small skirmishes' have killed more American soldiers than the pre-"Mission Accomplished" war. We'll end up spending a few hundred billion by the time we're done. The rest of the world hates us to the point where the UN is going to ask us to get the hell out. And two weeks before we started dropping bombs on this wanker who we swore up and down had WMDs and was desperately trying to kill Americans, he offered to let our own FBI come in and perform inspections... unfortunately, he had no proof of having weapons he really didn't have so that was obviously insufficient.
What the fuck you ask? The administration lied to Americans playing off their fears and sympathies to fight a war of preemption drastically changing America's position in the world and squandering any good-will towards us. Hundreds of Americans have died. Thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Iraq is now a hotbed for terrorism so bad in fact the UN is having meetings behind our back looking for ways to get us the hell out. And our federal coffers are draining to the tune of 500b a year. Oh yeah, and Osama... a real threat to national security, no idea where he's at. What the FUCK?
Because there are more eyes (any more intelligent eyes) spying Linux code to fix and improve it than there are trying to exploit it. This can't be said of MS's source as there is no hope of any of these eyes improving it.
if you're the kind of person who feels Apple hardware is overpriced because you can't assemble it yourself and run Linux on it
I don't understand this statement. Because it's proprietary it's not overpriced? I agree with you statements about Macs being engineered toward the high-end, everything in the box type of people but I don't see where that means they aren't expensive. They ARE overpriced... but people buy Cadillac Escalades all the time as well.
On a seperate note, I DO feel price is a barrier to entry. My mom wanted a new computer, for $400 she got name-brand everything (no KVM, which she already had). If I would've told her she could've got a really nice, easy to use computer with kick-arse monitor and a ton of software in the $2500-$3000 price range, she would've laughed while writing me a $400 check.
If your response is "Apple doesn't want us as a customer because we don't want to spend 3gs on a machine" then screw Apple. You may not be making your statements in a snob context but they are. It's their business model? Then their business model is pretentious.
One thing many slashdotters and Linux users do understand is companies mantaining strict paranoid control over their product to force and/or keep prices high. Apple may be doing it to make a name as a high-end, fashionable, smart-person's computer or whatnot but the behavior is the same and I bet many Linux users would tell Apple they don't want THEM for a customer.
And I like Apple... I think they're design geniuses and the dualie G5s smoke. I don't carry the Apple suxors baggage (anymore, they actually did suck back in the day). The only problem I have is that not only did they not choose to enter the low-end market, they walled it off and I can't justify the cost of admission.
You know... that next thing that all the unemployed tech people are supposed to do when they lose their jobs. Thanks Rob, now I know that when my job gets shipped off to India, all I have to is slap some shiny stickers, paint, and assorted other crap on top of real technology and sell it to troglodytes like yourself. Then us Americans can make our livings off selling gusseyed up crap to those who think the perfomance of a computer is directly related to its appearance. Again... outsource management, not programmers.
This story isn't informative nor newsworthy and I'm ashamed that I read the whole damn thing.
But it is about outsourcing in general. Any company with a good amount of highly sensitive data should maintain a chain of trust across their IT personel. Everyone working on the data should have at least some idea of how sensitive it is and what has to be done to protect it. You don't get that from shoving the work off on the lowest bidder. There's a reason they ARE the lowest bidder...
And Rent-a-coder? Come on... it's looking for trouble when there are thousands of out of work programmers of varying quality and you're asking for the cheapest? Crikey! Programmers working on crap data are getting slammed with soul-stealing NDAs and these wankers are forking off kid's names to some shmuck on a glorified web-board? Again I say outsource the management, keep the programmers.
I totally agree that cheaters do in fact suck and cheat only to supplement poor skill. However, Punkbuster has its own problems, namely false positives and complete dicks for admins. Check out their forums... tons of stories about people getting kicked for all sorts of stupid crap (ie: can't connect to punkbuster's servers... wtf?) and the admin pretty much saying 'too bad, f'n cheater.' While I haven't had a problem with PunkBuster I know personally 2 people who have.
There are other operations in town to detect and eliminate cheaters and it's unfortunate that PunkBuster was chosen to lead the pack.
The underhanded thing is charging him past the possible refund date. I don't understand why you people are defending this. Even if you reviewed your CC statement every day and called the minute the charge was posted, you'd still be too late. They guy was careless maybe, but stupid is just being rude. How often does the average slashdotter check their statements?
Correct, he agreed to the TOS. Corrent, he is in the wrong but that charging proceedure, designed to screw over people who 'forgot' to cancel immediately out of another months service, is underhanded. Not illegal... no legal recourse possible... just plain mean.
On another note, have any of you people read what you agreed to in your XBox/PS2/Windows/Garage Door Opener EULA? The EULAs/TOS themselves are underhanded... not illegal (err, maybe) but mean. This is just a guy who got slightly screwed by a rude company and is trying to get his money back.
Last time I wanted to try Linux, it took several distros before I found one that would even install and boot without errors.
A lot's changed since you've used it apparently. I played around with RedHat 6, 7, and 8 and I agree, they had enough shortcomings to honestly make the 'easy of use' claim. Finally with 9 I installed it permanently on one of my machines. Now I'm running Fedora or Knoppix on every machine I own. The little lady is even using it without any problems. I just finished setting up my mythtv box and I had to compile nothing from source (barring the NVidia drivers, but they compile themselves). Granted, you'll want to install synaptic before handing the PC over to granny but I'd rather see her picking from a list of software than sending her to the Best Buy vultures. In that vein, that Linux install that took about the same time as the Windows install also gives you a complete office package, a number of games, photo editing, and all that geeky crap Joe User doesn't really care about.
Everyone who doesn't just gets it off their favourite warez network
OK, well if ripping off software is your thing, you can pirate a copy of Crossover Office and run just about any decent Windows program. IIRC Photoshop 7 even runs under naked Wine now.
so I'm "forced" to deal with it on a daily basis
Judging by your comments and opinions, your university Linux installations must be dated. That's understandable though. The university I attended had miles of red tape to cut through when upgrading a machine's OS. I, however, am stuck developing on Windows machines 8 hours a day. I get full reign over my machine (within the walls of Windows XP of course) and I'm pretty confident when I say security on linux... better. There are only a select few that would even claim otherwise.
Almost any time I hear people criticizing Linux a good portion of their opinion is based on outdated "I used it once upon a time" information. It does have it's shortcomings... but unless these people are claiming 'games', 'AOL', or 'Visual Studio' (WooHoo, Gideon is here) one can guess they're probably opinions formed on bad data.
1. There is no 'next big thing.' The farmers saw their jobs moving to the factories. The service industry was blossoming when the manufacturing industry began to falter. There is no booming industry now. There is no next step. You can tell the programmers to retrain and get new skills but what skills should they get? Unemployment is about 6%. There currently isn't an industry in need of workers. The Wired article suggests that programmers should move toward some designer/process-problem-solver type of conglomeration... thanks captain obvious but a good programmer is a designer/process-problem-solver. They tell us to becoming inventors and innovators which, apart from being ambiguous and, well, hard, begins to lose it's meaning when the jobs that support innovation are moved off in just a couple years.
2. Unskilled vs. Skilled labor. Farmers, while skilled in their own right, didn't require expensive formal education to practice their craft. It was learned from the generations before them. Textile workers didn't go to college and sometimes didn't even graduate high school. Skilled programmers now-days often attend prestigious 4 year universities with high and ever increasing tuitions. It hard to tell someone who spent $18,000 per year (the current cost of my alma-madre) to 'just retrain.'
3. Trimming the wrong corners. Look at the stats in the article. Top 400 wealthiest Americas, y2k average salary $174 million. Yes... One hundred seventy four million! Many of these top 400 are CEOs of the very companies moving their IT workforce overseas. Let's see... at 50 grand a programmer per year that's 3480 programmers per CEO. Let's speculate and say 100 of these top 400 are IT oursourcing CEOs... that's the equivalent of 348,000 programmer jobs. By the way, their incoming is growing about 15% faster than the average Americans and this number is sure to increase as unemployment stays high.
Ok, these points being stated, I agree that IT is on an irreversible decline in the US. That's unfortunate as the reason I got into computers wasn't because that's where the money was; it was because I really like computers. Luckily, the company I work for is stable enough and my job is such that outsourcing would be between difficult if not pointless. Regardless, the plight of the IT worker must be addressed. Companies are moving their workforce like ants marching.
Unfortunately, you can't place a tariff on a service like you can a good. I'm not sure that would even be the best answer as most people seem to thing that 'protectionism' is a very bad thing. It just seems odd that a company can reap all of the benefits of being and doing business in America while still getting all of the benefits of international cheap labor all the while, American jobs are dropping like flies and the rich are getting richer.
According to the State of the Union address the Patriot Act is essential to the fight against terrorism! What are Americans to do?! We had all better start stocking up on plastic sheets and duct tape again. Good thing none of them stinking Democrats have been able to successfully attack the 2nd amendment under Bush's watch. I'd hate to lose those vital rights. How else could we defend ourselves?</angry sarcasm>
In all seriousness, this won't have much of an effect on personal privacy for average Joe and I imagine the powers that be will do everything in their power to keep the steamroller running, but a good swift kick in the nuts to the Patriot Act can only be a good thing for those of us that appreciate civil liberties.
Some people have disabilities and some are just plain dumb.
Chances are, if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, allowed to run daddy's companies in the ground, do coke, drive drunk, discard worldwide sympathy and solidarity for a poorly concieved (and even more poorly implemented) preemtive stike policy, and just generally make an ass out of yourself every time your mouth opens... most likely plain old dumb.
Granted, the 'bug' is in the user. However Firebird/Thunderbird (for Windows) will not let you run executables directly from the client. They make you save to disk and run it your own damn self. Tis' not a solution but the extra step would weed out the stupid AND lazy leaving just the plain stupid to propogate the virii.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it MS would support this if it's released under GPL. Otherwise, they'll be forced to show their own code if they decided to use the code for themselves.
...unless, of course, they use the code without telling anyone which [baseless attack] has probably been happening for years.[/baseless attack]
Do you take any other measures against viruses? (Like not using a vulnerable OS like one of M$'s attempts?)
Yes, that's the point I was trying to make.
Bleading patents...
Innocent misspelling or Freudian evidence of a deeply rooted hatred?
Since I've never contracted a virus on my operating system and I've never ran any AV software on it I suppose there are quite a few things I'd rather see *included* with my operating system. I'd prefer nothing be forcibly integrated with it though.
Since I've never contracted a virus on my operating system and I've never ran any AV software on it I suppose there are quite a few things I'd rather see *included* with my operating system. I'd prefer nothing be forcibly integrated with it though.
I suppose it's a whole different world of there.
On #3: My bad... it was the CIA they invited in:
... Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman...
NYTimes article excerpt:
FOREIGN DESK | November 6, 2003, Thursday
THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: DIPLOMACY; Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avert War
By JAMES RISEN (NYT) 2649 words Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 1 DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 2649 WORDS - As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a
The Modern Tribune Article
Salon Coverage
USA Today Coverage
Google Search to more information
Yes, that's unfortunate. I figured I'd keep it up until an offical statement is made. And it's a png, damn you!
Well, we took a stable (albeit ruled by a ruthless dictator) country with a viable economy and some semblance of order and ripped it to hell under the guise of protecting America. The goal wasn't to remove a bad man... There are plenty of bad men running countries, many of which we put there. The goal was to protect Americans.
Nukes? None... WMDs? None... Terrorism? Well, there wasn't terrorism until we wiped Iraq clean of any and all army or police. Now the infamous Al Queda is flooding into the country killing scores of Iraqis almost daily. And those 'small skirmishes' have killed more American soldiers than the pre-"Mission Accomplished" war. We'll end up spending a few hundred billion by the time we're done. The rest of the world hates us to the point where the UN is going to ask us to get the hell out. And two weeks before we started dropping bombs on this wanker who we swore up and down had WMDs and was desperately trying to kill Americans, he offered to let our own FBI come in and perform inspections... unfortunately, he had no proof of having weapons he really didn't have so that was obviously insufficient.
What the fuck you ask? The administration lied to Americans playing off their fears and sympathies to fight a war of preemption drastically changing America's position in the world and squandering any good-will towards us. Hundreds of Americans have died. Thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Iraq is now a hotbed for terrorism so bad in fact the UN is having meetings behind our back looking for ways to get us the hell out. And our federal coffers are draining to the tune of 500b a year. Oh yeah, and Osama... a real threat to national security, no idea where he's at. What the FUCK?
Because there are more eyes (any more intelligent eyes) spying Linux code to fix and improve it than there are trying to exploit it. This can't be said of MS's source as there is no hope of any of these eyes improving it.
twice as much and 1/2 as fast with 1/4 as much memory and 1/2 the hard drive. Thanks!
But it does come with a nice flat panel. Unfortunately, that panel is built into the case...
Seriously, that's getting closer to reasonable but that is definetly not what I would consider a smart purchase.
if you're the kind of person who feels Apple hardware is overpriced because you can't assemble it yourself and run Linux on it
I don't understand this statement. Because it's proprietary it's not overpriced? I agree with you statements about Macs being engineered toward the high-end, everything in the box type of people but I don't see where that means they aren't expensive. They ARE overpriced... but people buy Cadillac Escalades all the time as well.
On a seperate note, I DO feel price is a barrier to entry. My mom wanted a new computer, for $400 she got name-brand everything (no KVM, which she already had). If I would've told her she could've got a really nice, easy to use computer with kick-arse monitor and a ton of software in the $2500-$3000 price range, she would've laughed while writing me a $400 check.
If your response is "Apple doesn't want us as a customer because we don't want to spend 3gs on a machine" then screw Apple. You may not be making your statements in a snob context but they are. It's their business model? Then their business model is pretentious.
One thing many slashdotters and Linux users do understand is companies mantaining strict paranoid control over their product to force and/or keep prices high. Apple may be doing it to make a name as a high-end, fashionable, smart-person's computer or whatnot but the behavior is the same and I bet many Linux users would tell Apple they don't want THEM for a customer.
And I like Apple... I think they're design geniuses and the dualie G5s smoke. I don't carry the Apple suxors baggage (anymore, they actually did suck back in the day). The only problem I have is that not only did they not choose to enter the low-end market, they walled it off and I can't justify the cost of admission.
You know... that next thing that all the unemployed tech people are supposed to do when they lose their jobs. Thanks Rob, now I know that when my job gets shipped off to India, all I have to is slap some shiny stickers, paint, and assorted other crap on top of real technology and sell it to troglodytes like yourself. Then us Americans can make our livings off selling gusseyed up crap to those who think the perfomance of a computer is directly related to its appearance. Again... outsource management, not programmers.
This story isn't informative nor newsworthy and I'm ashamed that I read the whole damn thing.
I started speaking gibberish, and I was connected to an operator within seconds.
How much you wanna bet they were speaking gibberish back to this person.
SAMBA Is Not An Emulator...
err, that's not right.
But it is about outsourcing in general. Any company with a good amount of highly sensitive data should maintain a chain of trust across their IT personel. Everyone working on the data should have at least some idea of how sensitive it is and what has to be done to protect it. You don't get that from shoving the work off on the lowest bidder. There's a reason they ARE the lowest bidder...
And Rent-a-coder? Come on... it's looking for trouble when there are thousands of out of work programmers of varying quality and you're asking for the cheapest? Crikey! Programmers working on crap data are getting slammed with soul-stealing NDAs and these wankers are forking off kid's names to some shmuck on a glorified web-board? Again I say outsource the management, keep the programmers.
I totally agree that cheaters do in fact suck and cheat only to supplement poor skill. However, Punkbuster has its own problems, namely false positives and complete dicks for admins. Check out their forums... tons of stories about people getting kicked for all sorts of stupid crap (ie: can't connect to punkbuster's servers... wtf?) and the admin pretty much saying 'too bad, f'n cheater.' While I haven't had a problem with PunkBuster I know personally 2 people who have.
There are other operations in town to detect and eliminate cheaters and it's unfortunate that PunkBuster was chosen to lead the pack.
What military threat is Australia facing which is beyond the ability of the Australian military to cope with?
Ummm... the USA. Apparently, we'll blow the hell out of anybody. Got any anthrax or nukes over there in Aus, do ya? Screw it, doesn't matter.
You're not supposed to like work... that's why it's called 'work'.
Besides, if everyone liked what they do, there would be noone posting on Slashdot.
The underhanded thing is charging him past the possible refund date. I don't understand why you people are defending this. Even if you reviewed your CC statement every day and called the minute the charge was posted, you'd still be too late. They guy was careless maybe, but stupid is just being rude. How often does the average slashdotter check their statements?
Correct, he agreed to the TOS. Corrent, he is in the wrong but that charging proceedure, designed to screw over people who 'forgot' to cancel immediately out of another months service, is underhanded. Not illegal... no legal recourse possible... just plain mean.
On another note, have any of you people read what you agreed to in your XBox/PS2/Windows/Garage Door Opener EULA? The EULAs/TOS themselves are underhanded... not illegal (err, maybe) but mean. This is just a guy who got slightly screwed by a rude company and is trying to get his money back.
Last time I wanted to try Linux, it took several distros before I found one that would even install and boot without errors.
A lot's changed since you've used it apparently. I played around with RedHat 6, 7, and 8 and I agree, they had enough shortcomings to honestly make the 'easy of use' claim. Finally with 9 I installed it permanently on one of my machines. Now I'm running Fedora or Knoppix on every machine I own. The little lady is even using it without any problems. I just finished setting up my mythtv box and I had to compile nothing from source (barring the NVidia drivers, but they compile themselves). Granted, you'll want to install synaptic before handing the PC over to granny but I'd rather see her picking from a list of software than sending her to the Best Buy vultures. In that vein, that Linux install that took about the same time as the Windows install also gives you a complete office package, a number of games, photo editing, and all that geeky crap Joe User doesn't really care about.
Everyone who doesn't just gets it off their favourite warez network
OK, well if ripping off software is your thing, you can pirate a copy of Crossover Office and run just about any decent Windows program. IIRC Photoshop 7 even runs under naked Wine now.
so I'm "forced" to deal with it on a daily basis
Judging by your comments and opinions, your university Linux installations must be dated. That's understandable though. The university I attended had miles of red tape to cut through when upgrading a machine's OS. I, however, am stuck developing on Windows machines 8 hours a day. I get full reign over my machine (within the walls of Windows XP of course) and I'm pretty confident when I say security on linux... better. There are only a select few that would even claim otherwise.
Almost any time I hear people criticizing Linux a good portion of their opinion is based on outdated "I used it once upon a time" information. It does have it's shortcomings... but unless these people are claiming 'games', 'AOL', or 'Visual Studio' (WooHoo, Gideon is here) one can guess they're probably opinions formed on bad data.
1. There is no 'next big thing.' The farmers saw their jobs moving to the factories. The service industry was blossoming when the manufacturing industry began to falter. There is no booming industry now. There is no next step. You can tell the programmers to retrain and get new skills but what skills should they get? Unemployment is about 6%. There currently isn't an industry in need of workers. The Wired article suggests that programmers should move toward some designer/process-problem-solver type of conglomeration... thanks captain obvious but a good programmer is a designer/process-problem-solver. They tell us to becoming inventors and innovators which, apart from being ambiguous and, well, hard, begins to lose it's meaning when the jobs that support innovation are moved off in just a couple years.
2. Unskilled vs. Skilled labor. Farmers, while skilled in their own right, didn't require expensive formal education to practice their craft. It was learned from the generations before them. Textile workers didn't go to college and sometimes didn't even graduate high school. Skilled programmers now-days often attend prestigious 4 year universities with high and ever increasing tuitions. It hard to tell someone who spent $18,000 per year (the current cost of my alma-madre) to 'just retrain.'
3. Trimming the wrong corners. Look at the stats in the article. Top 400 wealthiest Americas, y2k average salary $174 million. Yes... One hundred seventy four million! Many of these top 400 are CEOs of the very companies moving their IT workforce overseas. Let's see... at 50 grand a programmer per year that's 3480 programmers per CEO. Let's speculate and say 100 of these top 400 are IT oursourcing CEOs... that's the equivalent of 348,000 programmer jobs. By the way, their incoming is growing about 15% faster than the average Americans and this number is sure to increase as unemployment stays high.
Ok, these points being stated, I agree that IT is on an irreversible decline in the US. That's unfortunate as the reason I got into computers wasn't because that's where the money was; it was because I really like computers. Luckily, the company I work for is stable enough and my job is such that outsourcing would be between difficult if not pointless. Regardless, the plight of the IT worker must be addressed. Companies are moving their workforce like ants marching.
Unfortunately, you can't place a tariff on a service like you can a good. I'm not sure that would even be the best answer as most people seem to thing that 'protectionism' is a very bad thing. It just seems odd that a company can reap all of the benefits of being and doing business in America while still getting all of the benefits of international cheap labor all the while, American jobs are dropping like flies and the rich are getting richer.
Woo-hoo ! I DoSed the SCO server with only one finger !
Guess what SCO's doing with their finger.
According to the State of the Union address the Patriot Act is essential to the fight against terrorism! What are Americans to do?! We had all better start stocking up on plastic sheets and duct tape again. Good thing none of them stinking Democrats have been able to successfully attack the 2nd amendment under Bush's watch. I'd hate to lose those vital rights. How else could we defend ourselves?</angry sarcasm>
In all seriousness, this won't have much of an effect on personal privacy for average Joe and I imagine the powers that be will do everything in their power to keep the steamroller running, but a good swift kick in the nuts to the Patriot Act can only be a good thing for those of us that appreciate civil liberties.
They said foster his interest in technology...
Xbox is definitely the piece of equipment to have. Linux, MythTV, emulators, media players... screw games.
Some people have disabilities and some are just plain dumb.
Chances are, if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, allowed to run daddy's companies in the ground, do coke, drive drunk, discard worldwide sympathy and solidarity for a poorly concieved (and even more poorly implemented) preemtive stike policy, and just generally make an ass out of yourself every time your mouth opens... most likely plain old dumb.
Granted, the 'bug' is in the user. However Firebird/Thunderbird (for Windows) will not let you run executables directly from the client. They make you save to disk and run it your own damn self. Tis' not a solution but the extra step would weed out the stupid AND lazy leaving just the plain stupid to propogate the virii. :)