If this stealth tracking technology is troubling people in the more-or-less democratic countries, it can be used to really devastating effects in countries where authoritarian regimes oppress their own people, or their invaded neighbors. Especially if the people are totally unaware that their printed media may, for practical purposes, be as good as RFID-tagged. Picture some Chinese peasant, whose lands have been stolen by corrupt official, writing an "anonymous" complaint to the corrupt police and the next thing he knows he's being introduced to another imported gadget: an electric cattle-prod. Any Tibetan found with a printed picture of their exiled spiritual leader may now also lead the Chinese military police to the place where the image was printed, causing others to be cattle-prodded as well.
Is the US and their allies in the "war of terror" providing this kind of written-expression-tracking technology to countries where human rights are routinely and systematically violated? Or are all the worst human rights violators now part of America's inner circle of best buddies and therefore free to oppress and invade anyone they wish, as long as they refrain from criticizing or opposing the "pre-emptive" neo-con wars?
And why aren't there any companies offering alternative products that do not intrude customers' privacy and using that as a sales argument? If there were four different models on a store shelf and one had a sign saying "Unlike most or all printer models by Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon etc., our products will not print any stealthy tracking code on our customers' printed material", people might well give some business to that privacy-friendly brand. Most of us will never print anything even remotely sensitive, but do sympathize with the right and freedom of expressing oneself without government tagging (potentially leading to gagging, implicitly or explicitly).
Corel used to love Linux and their WordPerfect Office and sheer consumer-level name recognition was potentially huge threat to Microsoft until Redmond bought their way into Corel three years ago and within months a Microsoft-friendly consultancy, McKinsey & Partners, helped Corel commit a strategic U-turn to support the non-existing.NET 100%.
Fast forward to late 2002 when Corel "mistakenly" launched a somewhat successful EOM drive to get WPO preloaded and in December that year MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture capital firm Vector, operated by former MS (and McKinsey) executives, snapped up the MS-owned 20% of Corel shares at absolute giveaway prices and immediately began bullying Corel's management to sell the whole shop...
Corel's CEO Derek Burney was a spineless lackey and their chairman Jim Baillie was a lawyer who's law firm in fact represented the Microsoft's friends Vector in the takeover bid (!!) and by blatantly manipulating the shareholder informing and voting procedure they narrowly won the "vote" and pulled Corel out of the public view and scrutiny during the 2003 summer holidays.
Groklaw folks with their investigative abilities could well have a field day reopening the Microsoft-orchestrated Corel undertaking manoeuvre, especially as Novell is suing Microsoft over their anticompetitive manipulation of the cash-cow segment Office suites market. As most people here know, it was Corel who bought WordPerfect Office from Novell in 1996, inheriting the MS-enemy #1 status along with it.
FWIW, the above-mentioned Jim Baillie was instrumental in Corel's decision not to sue MS after the US government won the closely-related Netscape antitrust trial, as the owners of the then #1 competitor to MS-Office, over unfair antitrust manipulation.
Godspeed Novell. I only hope Corel's kneecapping will help you prove you case and take MS to the cleaners.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this piece read more than a little as if it was written by a professional industry lobbyist? While some unflattering facts about GM were thrown in for the sake of appearing balanced, the overall tone and language was strongly anti-anti-GM zealot.
I'll wait for the "Swiss" version of Gmail
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Gmail Adds Features
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· Score: 1
Features are all fine and dandy, but although most of my email travels across the world "barenaked" anyway I'd still feel a bit uncomfortable allowing a US-based publically-traded (investors über alles!) corporation (which also kow-tows to the Chinese dictatorship) to sift through all my mail. I'm actually surprised by the lemming-like eagerness of many otherwise so privacy-conscious geeks in signing up.
A cool and innovative "messaging service" (email, IP calls etc.) but without the (potential) darker side would be welcome by me.
The other day I met a friend of mine who looked unusually exasperated and distressed and knowing that I fiddle with 'puters he asked for my help (or anyone's to that matter, he was ready to dig deep to get his problems sorted) in solving issues with his brand new 2-week old system.
I haven't done (ms-)windows since the beginning of time and since he doesn't know *anything* about computers it was hard trying to figure out what might've been the problem, but it sounded like the typical standard unprotected ms-windows setup that was probably also loaded with spam and ad-ware, bogging down even his simple efforts at browsing the web.
Knowing that quite a few people here have experience with cleaning up the standard MS-install mess, I would like to ask what needs to be done to plug the major holes and deficiencies in a new MS setup?
Firefox is an obvious rescue tool to replace MSIE so are there any issues when installing it or does it automatically and painlessly migrate all necessary MSIE data?
And what about utilities to remove the spyware his machine may already be infested with? Any suggestions?
I'm hoping to be able to burn all these goodies on a CD to give him so I also wonder whether they're easy enough to operate by a total non-techie?
Since his "computing needs" appear to be very simple I'm also giving him a Linux liveCD (perhaps Ubuntu-based Gnoppix would be a good starter with its simplified GUI and it also comes with Firefox) to try out and play with but before completing his conversion I'd need to evaluate how well e.g. OpenOffice.org fulfills his needs at this point.
How is the US invasion and the current military occupation of the already fully contained and militarily weak Iraq supposed to be such a morally wonderful idea when e.g. totalitarian China -- which has a massive army and plentiful WMDs, which has sold nuclear and missile technology to undemocratic countries, which continues their oppressive occupation of neighboring Tibet, which has one-party rule denying their subjects of lack basic political rights and which is constantly threatening the democrating Taiwan with war -- is considered simply a trading partner and a fine destination for western capital and manufacturing jobs?
Do you, dear candidates for the post of self-appointed leader of the free world, find any discrepancy or possible double standards in the United States' foreign policy wrt. the above-mentioned setting?
The similarities between the two dictatorships are bizarre indeed, and far more numerous than the four main issues I mentioned earlier, but you should also note that I did not blame the majority populations for the crimes committed by their authoritarian leaders and their henchmen. Like the germans, who having learnt about their grave mistakes reformed their nation and again became a nation of enlightened and peace-loving people, I am fully hoping that the chinese people would soon see through the fog of Party propaganda and do likewise.
Since you appeared to take the somewhat defensive approach not uncommon with the (priviledged?) younger people who were educated under China's strictly controlled state education system but later had the opportunity to move overseas to study or work and now feel it to be your duty to defend the honor of your motherland, I would like to point out that besides knowing my european history pretty well, I have also lived and travelled extensively in China (including the occupied parts) over three decades, I have studied China's (and her neighbors') history and political developments and I also have many close friends who're ethnic chinese. The point being that I am neither poorly informed nor biased against the chinese people (after all, most victims of the communist party rule have been ethnic chinese themselves), but at the same time the chinese do have a duty towards their own people, and especially towards those neighboring people who remain under their occupation, to do away with totalitarianism and to restore rule of law and basic human rights within their own country.
It should be your duty to promote justice and freedom as well, instead of feeling protective of your ethnic heritage when someone makes valid albeit unflattering comparisons between your dictatorship and another in 1930s. All totalitarian regimes have great many similarities, and none were ever overthrown by indifference. If you only care about getting personally wealthy while your army occupies your neighboring nation and people disappear without having committed no crime, you're no different from the Nazi-era german who looked the other way and simply "supported the troops".
The "man in the street" in China can spill their own blood if they want to live in another way. They should not rely on Google, USA inc or any other outside force to do thier dirty work for them. If they want a revolution they can have it. If not, then they have to live in the system that they have inherited.
What hope do the people in China have to change their oppressive system when even the supposedly freedom-loving (but factually corporate-driven) "West" assists their dictatorial regime in maintaining control?
And if it was just the ethnic chinese who were left to deal with the consequences of their own government, but the Chinese Communist Party's army - the so-called "People's Liberation Army - is also occupying the lands and destroying the cultures and national identities of China's historical neighbors in Tibet and East Turkestan. Ironically, China's propaganda machine is using these occupied neighbors as ultra-nationalistic fodder in various ways to keep their population under the impression that the "evil splittists", manipulated by evil foreign meddlers, are threatening their own country's (China) "unity" and that China is under constant war against those who question the Communist Party's status que.
It is in this "information warfare" that Google et al now helps the ruling regime by playing their game and providing a supposedly free and unbiased internet search service which however only expresses the Party's propaganda about contentious issues that chinese people need to be able to discuss about in order to mature as a modern and unhostile nation.
China is in many ways like the Nazi Germany in 1930s after the Nazis grabbed power from the elected government.
Both dictatorial regimes were/are extremely xenophobic and populations were/are made to believe that they're under constant threat.
The Party in China also indoctrinates their ethnic (Han chinese) population to believe in their racial superiority, albeit discreetly.
Germany invaded and annexed their eastern neighbors (well, the threat from Stalinist Russia was actually genuine) while China has invaded its western neighbors, including large parts of Mongolia (which the communist in their twisted logic now call "Inner Mongolia").
Both Nazi Germany and One-Party China insist(ed) on total control of state propaganda.
The chinese people or their invaded neighbors have no means to force change, even if the wanted. The Han chinese themselves also have no incentive to become machine gun fodder for the Party's army when the "evil West" is in cahoots with their communist dictators (who realized that business can be used to both placate the West and destroy their manufacturing base at the same time) and the Party is clearly helping China both grow larger geographically and stronger in terms of military power and global influence.
The single remaining if feeble moral argument supporting the massive foreign investment in totalitarian China has been that rising living standards will eventually lead the population to demand greater political freedom. But this will bring us back to Google et al (the corporate-driven West) helping the Party to keep its iron grip on information and only providing the people with Party propaganda, thereby helping the Party (which makes China stronger and its greedy foreign enemies economically weaker) prevent any political change.
As long as an Empire continues to expand and its power increases vs "competitors", the core populace (except the invaded people of course) has little incentive to rock the boat. The people in all empires, past and current (China, Russia, USA) are prisoners to this sad policy and it takes either massively resource-sapping war (Britain), inner revolution or unusually enlightened and well-informed population (not yet evident in human history) to reverse imperialist colonialism.
If the Free World cannot bring itself to address China's totalitarianism in a united way but instead feeds its growth, the (money-driven) Free World of today deserves whatever that state-planned totalitarian regime of China throws in its way.
Now the Chinese Communist Party can finally be confident that their Soviet-era space capsule can be launched at the moon, with one or two "People's Liberation" Army's faithful inside.
Like Deng Xiao Ping's 50-year plan towards (real) World Domination by using the capitalists' greed against their own long-term interests, this space-conquering plan began over 50 years ago when the "People's Liberation" Army invaded their peaceful neighbour Tibet, to be used as a back-up landing area. Well, Tibet can also be looted for their natural resources (oil, gas, uranium) and subjugation the hapless Tibetan people has been used as a great propaganda victory for Party jingoism, but clearly one of the main reasons to invade was to use the Tibetan territory as a back-up landing site.
Apollo On Board Emulator, running on Red Flag Linux and locally-built Dragon CPU... even Evil Invading Dictatorships can be pretty geeky when it suits their World Domination Plans...;-)
As long as OSS remains "un-incorporated" MS can only attack individuals via generic legal threats, or they can try hiring them to work for the mob. However listed companies' finances can be targeted by MS and their very large network of greedy money managers and ex-microsofties through all kind of financial manipulation which in the total absence of the SEC's interest is difficult to notice and even more difficult to prove.
Competitors without deep pockets can easily have their share prices shoved into a terminal downwspiral through skilful manipulation and with the Bush regime regulators whistling happily with their backs turned the perpetrators may even rub insult to injury and take over the victim at a massive discount, like when MS handed Corel to Paul Allen's investment joint to be brought back in line under new private owners.
Unless someone like the NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer gets to kick the campaign-contribution-friendly Ashcroft out of DOJ and starts looking into the manipulation of competition via financial markets, the robber baron era is far from over.
Luckily OSS doesn't absolutely depend on corporate "ownership" of development and it can therefore withstand financial attacks without irreparable damage. Red Hat's recent restating of books showcased yet another way OSS companies can be attacked en masse by eager legal firms. But surely no god-fearing MS affiliate would be associated with those people...?
If one of those 35 is an improved version of the classic 8810/8850-style metallic slider, then this move by Nokia might make sense to me. Slimmer, yet lighter and with a low-power oled display for improved battery life..., and of course tri-band too, that's all I need. Just the phone, but one that is an ergonomic piece of modern art. Sometimes evolution is more attractive (and practical) than revolution.
I suppose they also need to offer clam-shells as those seem to suit the video/camera-phones which require larger display sizes, but I reckon the majority of people aren't really into candid snapshots.
Starting at about $575, the systems will be targeted at businesses, schools and consumers.
The Dell OptiPlex systems loaded with Linspire are available only through Questar. Dell was not offering any Linspire-based systems on its Web site.
Dell spokesman Jeremy Bolen said Questar purchases the computers from the PC giant and then resells them to its customers. He said Questar is a direct customer of Dell and not a partner. "That's the extent of their relationship with us," he said.
The basic Questar system ships with an Intel Celeron processor, 256 megabytes of memory and a 40- gigabyte hard drive.
No similar configurations are shown at Dell's U.S. Web site, though a low-end OptiPlex PC running a Pentium 4 with Windows starts at about $400.
Executive summary:
Dell isn't offering any Linux preloads.
Some Dell customer (Questar) buys boxes from Dell, installs Linspire and charges hefty premium.
These boxes would appear to be at least $150 more expensive than Dell's own low-end MS boxes.
Dell wants to distance themselves from this outrageous Linux offering.
The Redmond Overlords most probably get their usual cut as it is nigh impossible to get Dell to ship anything without a pre-paid Microsoft licence.
Linux customers should consider patronizing vendors with bona fide Linux support instead.
F5 doesn't do it for me in Mozilla, and Ctrl-R is a bit of a stretch. Anyways I think a "reload/refresh key" would be kinda useful as a systemwide and OS-independent standard. A bit like the famous "Anykey".
But you're still correct of course, F5 is my friend nevertheless.
Post scriptum. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. There.:-)
Re:Start Your Betting!
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Gmail in the News
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Emails are considered to be private and personal correspondence. Some people who mailed you might not appreciate the posting of that image of your gmail inbox. Just a friendly reminder.
Could the SpecOpS Labs also be experimenting with the leaked MS-Windows code by any chance? Considering their intentions of keeping the use of WINE code secret and their apparently ambitious plans to attract vulture (venture) capital, perhaps they thought they found a shortcut to profits but now find themselves between the GPL and a hard place.
One also wonders what kind of "validation" the potential investors, such as PriceWaterhouse Coopers, actually performed before wanting to inject cash into or even buy this SpecOpS outfit.
And how does the WINE project authenticate their contributors? There might also exist an industry behemoth which would like to see the WINE project facing claims or even only suspicions of containing "illegally stolen" code.
Finally, Microsoft used a third party (if Paul Allen can be called such) venture capital company to turn Corel (a Linux and WINE contributor before Microsoft's involvement) from a publically-held competitor into a private and submissive unit. They, and their network of friends in the financial circles, have a mountain of cash but apart from that purchasing power rather few ideas about combatting the open source method to protect their lucrative monopolies. WINE should become extra vigilant about the code contributions they accept. Perhaps OSDL or some neutral third party should start performing "blind" code comparisons between WINE and known (leaked?) code from Microsoft or other proprietary parties?
how is it easier to type 'apt-get install gnome' (as an example) over 'urpmi gnome'?
Well typing-wise urpmi clearly wins (by about a second), but I'm afraid you picked somewhat poor example in Gnome since 1) Mandrake ships with Gnome so there's no need to go urpmi'ing it, and 2) I can not ever recall Mandrake releasing an upgrade for the Gnome they ship. My last info is that at Mandrake Gnome is still a one-man operation.
Debian unstable/testing OTOH gets a lot of up-to-date Gnome pumped around the network...;-)
And the Chinese Communist Party leadership would consider that a negative thing? Foreign firms located in China would still churn out "made in China" products for the foreign market, and probably adopted China's own standards as well. After all, everyone's flocking to the Chinese market exactly to "tap into" that massive market of 1.3B consumers.
Secondly, China remains a totalitarian country which has only adopted capitalistic market as a stepping stone on its way back to pure communism. That remains the ultimate goal and doctrine of the CCP. Isolation from foreign "control" allows them to better insulate their own population, selectively, from expected evil foreign manipulation and "interference in China's internal affairs". Becoming a "standards-setter" might also give the CCP more leverage over Taiwan's extremely powerful business lobby in preparation of the "re-unification" of that island with communist China.
On a related note, all this foreign investment feeding the growth of totalitarian China is somewhat akin to helping Hitler build up the Nazi German industry, after Hitler had already begun invading its neighbours. China's nationalist propaganda aside, they are holding Tibet under very harsh foreign occupation, and the turkic Uighur people of East Turkestan (which the Chinese call Xinjiang, or "New Frontier") are not too happy under Chinese control and massive influx of ethnic Chinese on their lands either. But yet China is a great business buddy while the fully contained and de facto harmless Iraq had to be invaded... Maybe I just don't get the true meaning of this "liberation of people" stuff.
Several academic and corporate friends of Linux have legal access to source code from hostile parties (e.g. MS), or simply access to other comparative/competitive code that is either proprietary or semi-open under incompatible license. Someone could probably even "handle" proprietary code that has been leaked illegally
These friendly parties should establish automated processes for line-by-line comparison between all Linux code (and as much major GPL'd code as feasible) and potentially illegal code.
On the other hand FSF and pro-Linux parties should begin lobbying the-powers-that-be for corporate responsibility on the part of the developers of proprietary software. Say, upon releasing a new version of a product, a vendor of proprietary product should be encouraged to perform a line comparison between their application and FSF's bank of GPL'd software. Such certification could be conducted by the vendor itself, FSF or a trusted 3rd party. Heck, the proprietary vendors should establish a neutral bank for their proprietary code for similar purposes; to prevent industrial theft by an unscrupulous competitor or insider.
Such monitoring of proprietary code combined with stricter accountability monitoring on Linux' behalf should help both prevent licensing and illegality issues and help solve them quicker if any should arise.
Source code is the major if not only asset a software vendor has, and yet it seems only OSS developers treat it with the respect their customers/users deserve, i.e. with openness and especially accountability (which should further improve with the suggested measures).
Would such a source bank for proprietary vendors ever be accepted? Could its confidentiality, neutrality and security be guaranteed? Hmmm, maybe proprietary vendors would still prefer to keep their (dark?) secrets to themselves but all available (through licensing or leakage) non-GPL-compatible code should still be compared.
Actually, your own parent post, with some modifications, could work as a "review" on Amazon and other internet book sites. People who might be inclined buy Brown's book are generally of the tech-savvy type who might also value the benefits of peer review.
Of course the publishers and bookstore chains could also be informed that this particular book is simply ill-informed and ill-intended propaganda with nothing to do with bona fide Information Technology.
The point of that statement was that the american public went straight into the "massive vengeange" mode, instead of taking even a moment to ask why those terrorists hated America so much. Iraq? Believe or not, according to British press reports many, if not most, US fighters there still hate the Iraqis as if they were terrorists and were in fact responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Hell, astonishing percentage of the US population continues to believe those claims by the administration, despite all the credible evidence, even before the invasion, proving otherwise. The US media, with very few exceptions, cheerily supported the "we'll hunt 'em down" and "you're either with us or against us" doctrine "until we've got every last one of 'em". Because of all the misinformation and state/media indoctrination I've seen disturbingly many calls by vengeful Americans to actually "just nuke 'em all"!
Okay, as the US media has finally started exploring, albeit very carefully, the issues with America's "war on terror", the level of blind vengefulness has began dropping as well. Your point is taken and I admit that the above statement is now thankfully becoming increasingly outdated. Maybe some day the US will even face the harsh reality that in the non-terror-related (diversionary) war against Iraq not only did some 700 (or whatever the eventual tally will be) American troops die, but also tens of thousands Iraqis, with far greater number injured and disabled. When Americans are asked how many died in the Vietnam war, many give a confident answer "60,000". The 2-3 million Vietnamese who died remain part of the anonymous collateral damage which isn't worth considering. The value of foreign casualties, incl. foreign civilians, in US wars remains unnecessarily cheap.
I tried to concentrate on the main task at hand without delving deeper into the various factors and nuances, also taking into account the post I was replying to. Islam and the Arab nationalism are subjects worthy of a whole library by themselves, but the key issues why muslims in general and arabs in particular became especially upset with the US have to do with the level and manner of US interference and the fact that arabs, unlike many other colonized peoples (without oil and almost all already independent), are exceptionally proud of their now-faded past glory days of the islamic civilization. But that didn't create Al-Qaeda; that militant arm of the muslim rebellion was created by the US betrayal of the "Afghan freedom fighters" after the Soviet withdrawal. Ironically the Islamic Republic in the neighbouring Iran was also caused by first UK and soon afterwards the US overthrowing a legitimate government and taking control of the oil. The Iranian revolution was really just an extreme reaction to an extreme situation in a fiercely proud and independent nation.
You're right on the money saying that the islamic radicals are slowing progress there, just like religious fanatics everywhere tend to put their holy scripts before science (Bush Jr. being no exception). However demonizing and attacking islam and specific countries only strengthens the hand of the mullahs, just like otherwise reasonable and generally far better educated Americans threw their support behind their Leader when this "war on terror" campaign was launched, with those asking tough questions getting labelled as unpatriotic. It is exactly this political and economic domination by the US that feeds the anger, with the unquestioning backing of Israel's policies causing the already tender feelings to boil over into violence. Only the US, an unusually religious nation in the western world, allows its adopted judeo-christian religious vision and ideology to guide its foreign policy to such an extent, just witness innumerable UN resolutions universally condemning Israel's actions, only to be vetoed by a single opponent, the USA.
Finally, the religious intolerance you mention is genuinely one of the issues islamic countries must tackle before finding their true place in the global family of nations, but it too can be overcome by addressing the root causes of the islamic world's unhappiness towards the US. In the more developed islamic countries religious intolerance might even be a lesser issue than in some strictly religious western states. Or in the constitutionally atheist China, or in Russia with its Orthodox revival and distaste for missionaries.
The written ideals of the US (constitution) are very respectable but as its power has grown towards absolute, so has the execution (by the political and corporate elite) of its ideals been allowed to become increasingly corrupt. It ought to be decided by the US electorate whether their nation should continue supporting and installing dictators in foreign countries (for "subsidized" cheap gas and other resources) while criminalizing the freedom movements of people under occupation, or whether to again put moral high ground above material exploitation and profit, as would befit the US constitution and UN declarations.
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Is the US and their allies in the "war of terror" providing this kind of written-expression-tracking technology to countries where human rights are routinely and systematically violated? Or are all the worst human rights violators now part of America's inner circle of best buddies and therefore free to oppress and invade anyone they wish, as long as they refrain from criticizing or opposing the "pre-emptive" neo-con wars?
And why aren't there any companies offering alternative products that do not intrude customers' privacy and using that as a sales argument? If there were four different models on a store shelf and one had a sign saying "Unlike most or all printer models by Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon etc., our products will not print any stealthy tracking code on our customers' printed material", people might well give some business to that privacy-friendly brand. Most of us will never print anything even remotely sensitive, but do sympathize with the right and freedom of expressing oneself without government tagging (potentially leading to gagging, implicitly or explicitly).
Fast forward to late 2002 when Corel "mistakenly" launched a somewhat successful EOM drive to get WPO preloaded and in December that year MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture capital firm Vector, operated by former MS (and McKinsey) executives, snapped up the MS-owned 20% of Corel shares at absolute giveaway prices and immediately began bullying Corel's management to sell the whole shop...
Corel's CEO Derek Burney was a spineless lackey and their chairman Jim Baillie was a lawyer who's law firm in fact represented the Microsoft's friends Vector in the takeover bid (!!) and by blatantly manipulating the shareholder informing and voting procedure they narrowly won the "vote" and pulled Corel out of the public view and scrutiny during the 2003 summer holidays.
Groklaw folks with their investigative abilities could well have a field day reopening the Microsoft-orchestrated Corel undertaking manoeuvre, especially as Novell is suing Microsoft over their anticompetitive manipulation of the cash-cow segment Office suites market. As most people here know, it was Corel who bought WordPerfect Office from Novell in 1996, inheriting the MS-enemy #1 status along with it.
FWIW, the above-mentioned Jim Baillie was instrumental in Corel's decision not to sue MS after the US government won the closely-related Netscape antitrust trial, as the owners of the then #1 competitor to MS-Office, over unfair antitrust manipulation.
Godspeed Novell. I only hope Corel's kneecapping will help you prove you case and take MS to the cleaners.
A cool and innovative "messaging service" (email, IP calls etc.) but without the (potential) darker side would be welcome by me.
Money's no obstacle! ;-)
I haven't done (ms-)windows since the beginning of time and since he doesn't know *anything* about computers it was hard trying to figure out what might've been the problem, but it sounded like the typical standard unprotected ms-windows setup that was probably also loaded with spam and ad-ware, bogging down even his simple efforts at browsing the web.
Knowing that quite a few people here have experience with cleaning up the standard MS-install mess, I would like to ask what needs to be done to plug the major holes and deficiencies in a new MS setup?
Firefox is an obvious rescue tool to replace MSIE so are there any issues when installing it or does it automatically and painlessly migrate all necessary MSIE data?
And what about utilities to remove the spyware his machine may already be infested with? Any suggestions?
I'm hoping to be able to burn all these goodies on a CD to give him so I also wonder whether they're easy enough to operate by a total non-techie?
Since his "computing needs" appear to be very simple I'm also giving him a Linux liveCD (perhaps Ubuntu-based Gnoppix would be a good starter with its simplified GUI and it also comes with Firefox) to try out and play with but before completing his conversion I'd need to evaluate how well e.g. OpenOffice.org fulfills his needs at this point.
Do you, dear candidates for the post of self-appointed leader of the free world, find any discrepancy or possible double standards in the United States' foreign policy wrt. the above-mentioned setting?
Since you appeared to take the somewhat defensive approach not uncommon with the (priviledged?) younger people who were educated under China's strictly controlled state education system but later had the opportunity to move overseas to study or work and now feel it to be your duty to defend the honor of your motherland, I would like to point out that besides knowing my european history pretty well, I have also lived and travelled extensively in China (including the occupied parts) over three decades, I have studied China's (and her neighbors') history and political developments and I also have many close friends who're ethnic chinese. The point being that I am neither poorly informed nor biased against the chinese people (after all, most victims of the communist party rule have been ethnic chinese themselves), but at the same time the chinese do have a duty towards their own people, and especially towards those neighboring people who remain under their occupation, to do away with totalitarianism and to restore rule of law and basic human rights within their own country.
It should be your duty to promote justice and freedom as well, instead of feeling protective of your ethnic heritage when someone makes valid albeit unflattering comparisons between your dictatorship and another in 1930s. All totalitarian regimes have great many similarities, and none were ever overthrown by indifference. If you only care about getting personally wealthy while your army occupies your neighboring nation and people disappear without having committed no crime, you're no different from the Nazi-era german who looked the other way and simply "supported the troops".
What hope do the people in China have to change their oppressive system when even the supposedly freedom-loving (but factually corporate-driven) "West" assists their dictatorial regime in maintaining control?
And if it was just the ethnic chinese who were left to deal with the consequences of their own government, but the Chinese Communist Party's army - the so-called "People's Liberation Army - is also occupying the lands and destroying the cultures and national identities of China's historical neighbors in Tibet and East Turkestan. Ironically, China's propaganda machine is using these occupied neighbors as ultra-nationalistic fodder in various ways to keep their population under the impression that the "evil splittists", manipulated by evil foreign meddlers, are threatening their own country's (China) "unity" and that China is under constant war against those who question the Communist Party's status que.
It is in this "information warfare" that Google et al now helps the ruling regime by playing their game and providing a supposedly free and unbiased internet search service which however only expresses the Party's propaganda about contentious issues that chinese people need to be able to discuss about in order to mature as a modern and unhostile nation.
China is in many ways like the Nazi Germany in 1930s after the Nazis grabbed power from the elected government.
The chinese people or their invaded neighbors have no means to force change, even if the wanted. The Han chinese themselves also have no incentive to become machine gun fodder for the Party's army when the "evil West" is in cahoots with their communist dictators (who realized that business can be used to both placate the West and destroy their manufacturing base at the same time) and the Party is clearly helping China both grow larger geographically and stronger in terms of military power and global influence. The single remaining if feeble moral argument supporting the massive foreign investment in totalitarian China has been that rising living standards will eventually lead the population to demand greater political freedom. But this will bring us back to Google et al (the corporate-driven West) helping the Party to keep its iron grip on information and only providing the people with Party propaganda, thereby helping the Party (which makes China stronger and its greedy foreign enemies economically weaker) prevent any political change.
As long as an Empire continues to expand and its power increases vs "competitors", the core populace (except the invaded people of course) has little incentive to rock the boat. The people in all empires, past and current (China, Russia, USA) are prisoners to this sad policy and it takes either massively resource-sapping war (Britain), inner revolution or unusually enlightened and well-informed population (not yet evident in human history) to reverse imperialist colonialism.
If the Free World cannot bring itself to address China's totalitarianism in a united way but instead feeds its growth, the (money-driven) Free World of today deserves whatever that state-planned totalitarian regime of China throws in its way.
Like Deng Xiao Ping's 50-year plan towards (real) World Domination by using the capitalists' greed against their own long-term interests, this space-conquering plan began over 50 years ago when the "People's Liberation" Army invaded their peaceful neighbour Tibet, to be used as a back-up landing area. Well, Tibet can also be looted for their natural resources (oil, gas, uranium) and subjugation the hapless Tibetan people has been used as a great propaganda victory for Party jingoism, but clearly one of the main reasons to invade was to use the Tibetan territory as a back-up landing site.
Apollo On Board Emulator, running on Red Flag Linux and locally-built Dragon CPU... even Evil Invading Dictatorships can be pretty geeky when it suits their World Domination Plans... ;-)
PS. Do not to stray into Soviet Russian airspace, because... in Soviet Russia air-rage attacks YOU!
Competitors without deep pockets can easily have their share prices shoved into a terminal downwspiral through skilful manipulation and with the Bush regime regulators whistling happily with their backs turned the perpetrators may even rub insult to injury and take over the victim at a massive discount, like when MS handed Corel to Paul Allen's investment joint to be brought back in line under new private owners.
Unless someone like the NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer gets to kick the campaign-contribution-friendly Ashcroft out of DOJ and starts looking into the manipulation of competition via financial markets, the robber baron era is far from over.
Luckily OSS doesn't absolutely depend on corporate "ownership" of development and it can therefore withstand financial attacks without irreparable damage. Red Hat's recent restating of books showcased yet another way OSS companies can be attacked en masse by eager legal firms. But surely no god-fearing MS affiliate would be associated with those people...?
I suppose they also need to offer clam-shells as those seem to suit the video/camera-phones which require larger display sizes, but I reckon the majority of people aren't really into candid snapshots.
From another news article:
Executive summary:
But you're still correct of course, F5 is my friend nevertheless.
Post scriptum. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. There. :-)
Emails are considered to be private and personal correspondence. Some people who mailed you might not appreciate the posting of that image of your gmail inbox. Just a friendly reminder.
Some people may associate that current logo with "rebooting" but that may only serve as a mnemonic...
Why, of course I am also reloading that Gmail Machine lottery page with Pavlovian efficiency but one must always thrive for excellency...
Look carefully.
So has the US ultra-pro-business lobby decreeth on this merciful year of the Lord 2004.
(*)Unless it has been processed and approved by the glorious Patent Office of the United States of America. $insert waving flags$
One also wonders what kind of "validation" the potential investors, such as PriceWaterhouse Coopers, actually performed before wanting to inject cash into or even buy this SpecOpS outfit.
And how does the WINE project authenticate their contributors? There might also exist an industry behemoth which would like to see the WINE project facing claims or even only suspicions of containing "illegally stolen" code.
Finally, Microsoft used a third party (if Paul Allen can be called such) venture capital company to turn Corel (a Linux and WINE contributor before Microsoft's involvement) from a publically-held competitor into a private and submissive unit. They, and their network of friends in the financial circles, have a mountain of cash but apart from that purchasing power rather few ideas about combatting the open source method to protect their lucrative monopolies. WINE should become extra vigilant about the code contributions they accept. Perhaps OSDL or some neutral third party should start performing "blind" code comparisons between WINE and known (leaked?) code from Microsoft or other proprietary parties?
Well typing-wise urpmi clearly wins (by about a second), but I'm afraid you picked somewhat poor example in Gnome since 1) Mandrake ships with Gnome so there's no need to go urpmi'ing it, and 2) I can not ever recall Mandrake releasing an upgrade for the Gnome they ship. My last info is that at Mandrake Gnome is still a one-man operation.
Debian unstable/testing OTOH gets a lot of up-to-date Gnome pumped around the network... ;-)
Secondly, China remains a totalitarian country which has only adopted capitalistic market as a stepping stone on its way back to pure communism. That remains the ultimate goal and doctrine of the CCP. Isolation from foreign "control" allows them to better insulate their own population, selectively, from expected evil foreign manipulation and "interference in China's internal affairs". Becoming a "standards-setter" might also give the CCP more leverage over Taiwan's extremely powerful business lobby in preparation of the "re-unification" of that island with communist China.
On a related note, all this foreign investment feeding the growth of totalitarian China is somewhat akin to helping Hitler build up the Nazi German industry, after Hitler had already begun invading its neighbours. China's nationalist propaganda aside, they are holding Tibet under very harsh foreign occupation, and the turkic Uighur people of East Turkestan (which the Chinese call Xinjiang, or "New Frontier") are not too happy under Chinese control and massive influx of ethnic Chinese on their lands either. But yet China is a great business buddy while the fully contained and de facto harmless Iraq had to be invaded... Maybe I just don't get the true meaning of this "liberation of people" stuff.
These friendly parties should establish automated processes for line-by-line comparison between all Linux code (and as much major GPL'd code as feasible) and potentially illegal code.
On the other hand FSF and pro-Linux parties should begin lobbying the-powers-that-be for corporate responsibility on the part of the developers of proprietary software. Say, upon releasing a new version of a product, a vendor of proprietary product should be encouraged to perform a line comparison between their application and FSF's bank of GPL'd software. Such certification could be conducted by the vendor itself, FSF or a trusted 3rd party. Heck, the proprietary vendors should establish a neutral bank for their proprietary code for similar purposes; to prevent industrial theft by an unscrupulous competitor or insider.
Such monitoring of proprietary code combined with stricter accountability monitoring on Linux' behalf should help both prevent licensing and illegality issues and help solve them quicker if any should arise.
Source code is the major if not only asset a software vendor has, and yet it seems only OSS developers treat it with the respect their customers/users deserve, i.e. with openness and especially accountability (which should further improve with the suggested measures).
Would such a source bank for proprietary vendors ever be accepted? Could its confidentiality, neutrality and security be guaranteed? Hmmm, maybe proprietary vendors would still prefer to keep their (dark?) secrets to themselves but all available (through licensing or leakage) non-GPL-compatible code should still be compared.
Of course the publishers and bookstore chains could also be informed that this particular book is simply ill-informed and ill-intended propaganda with nothing to do with bona fide Information Technology.
Okay, as the US media has finally started exploring, albeit very carefully, the issues with America's "war on terror", the level of blind vengefulness has began dropping as well. Your point is taken and I admit that the above statement is now thankfully becoming increasingly outdated. Maybe some day the US will even face the harsh reality that in the non-terror-related (diversionary) war against Iraq not only did some 700 (or whatever the eventual tally will be) American troops die, but also tens of thousands Iraqis, with far greater number injured and disabled. When Americans are asked how many died in the Vietnam war, many give a confident answer "60,000". The 2-3 million Vietnamese who died remain part of the anonymous collateral damage which isn't worth considering. The value of foreign casualties, incl. foreign civilians, in US wars remains unnecessarily cheap.
You're right on the money saying that the islamic radicals are slowing progress there, just like religious fanatics everywhere tend to put their holy scripts before science (Bush Jr. being no exception). However demonizing and attacking islam and specific countries only strengthens the hand of the mullahs, just like otherwise reasonable and generally far better educated Americans threw their support behind their Leader when this "war on terror" campaign was launched, with those asking tough questions getting labelled as unpatriotic. It is exactly this political and economic domination by the US that feeds the anger, with the unquestioning backing of Israel's policies causing the already tender feelings to boil over into violence. Only the US, an unusually religious nation in the western world, allows its adopted judeo-christian religious vision and ideology to guide its foreign policy to such an extent, just witness innumerable UN resolutions universally condemning Israel's actions, only to be vetoed by a single opponent, the USA.
Finally, the religious intolerance you mention is genuinely one of the issues islamic countries must tackle before finding their true place in the global family of nations, but it too can be overcome by addressing the root causes of the islamic world's unhappiness towards the US. In the more developed islamic countries religious intolerance might even be a lesser issue than in some strictly religious western states. Or in the constitutionally atheist China, or in Russia with its Orthodox revival and distaste for missionaries.
The written ideals of the US (constitution) are very respectable but as its power has grown towards absolute, so has the execution (by the political and corporate elite) of its ideals been allowed to become increasingly corrupt. It ought to be decided by the US electorate whether their nation should continue supporting and installing dictators in foreign countries (for "subsidized" cheap gas and other resources) while criminalizing the freedom movements of people under occupation, or whether to again put moral high ground above material exploitation and profit, as would befit the US constitution and UN declarations.