I have installed several machines with recent versions of the SuSE distribution, and similar ones with W2k and XP.
I've also installed Debian 3 on one similar machine.
SuSE is a distribution I've become used to, since 7.0.
Debian, OTOH, is on the one machine that I could get no stable installation of NT4, SuSE 8 or 9, W2k or XP on, and seems reliable on it.
DEbian seemed hard to me, similar to DOS/Windows 3 in complication.
SuSE 8.0 became easier than NT4, 8.2 was no harder than W2k and 9.0 and XP are on a par.
I now strip all attachments at the perimeter of the network.
The interesting thing is how seldom anyone feels a need to read the attachment, even, or especially when the body of the email contains only "please see attached Word document".
Holding the attachments at the perimeter (just dropped into a directory) wil usually avoid the race condition between virus creation/liberation and antivirus creation and distribution.
This is one of the areas where US culture seems quite different from European (UK) culture.
I have no doubt that the European approach is superior, unfortunately you seem to be exporting the US one to us.
Given that aggregation of personal data and widespread use of it is increasing I proposed a rule a while ago - specifically with regard to medical records and the NHS but it may be generally usable.
Whenever anyone who asserts the right to access personal information does so, this should produce an entry in what will eventually be a statement (like a telephone statement- an itemised "bill") the data subject receives.
Identifiying the person who accessed the data, what data they accessed, and what their assertion was as to their rights, along with the purpose for which they stated the use of data was necessary acts as a reasonable check on the legitimacy of those accesses and uses.
The underlying assertion here in the NHS is that poeple would not mind if they knew, so there is no need to tell them, which I think is highly suspect. In the US you seem to have more of an assertion that people holding the data have the right to sell it, and in fact that makes an evenhanded rule seem quite sensible.
Looking at my notes form a while back, from an Economist article and from Slashdot and other coverage, I see there is some variation in teh description fo Mr Ballmer's trip to Munich.
Was it a holiday he happened to be on, with his family, in Switzerland, previously planned and booked, or was it a special trip from America to Germany for a big piece of business?
Notes: "Ernst Wolowicz is Mayor Ude's chief of staff. According to Wolowicz, who attended the meeting, Ballmer told Ude he came from a skiing trip to pay his respects. Microsoft now says Ballmer was on a scheduled business trip in Germany."
This isn't the biggest of things, but I would like to see it cleared up - which is the true description of his attendance upon Munich?
Microsoft will attempt to justify that without looking like a monopoly doing market segmentation by declaring they are providing different products to different people, at different prices.
Observe this in Thailand, where after teh announcement that MS would provide XP + Office at a much reduced price (about 30 Euros as I recall) came an announcement that thre would be a special edition of XP + Office lacking some features (as yet unspecified AFAIK) - a Thai cheap edition.
Observe it in the UK with the National Health Service New programme IT suprremo Richard Granger muttering about the level of discount we get on (say) half a million copies (I feel ill) of Office on Windows OS and the placement of a contract for a trial of the SUN Java desktop/Linux/OpenOffice by SUN being followed by the suggestion that MS will customise a version for healthcare.
There are few more stupid ideas than that from a healthcare IT point of view, si it has to be a smokescreen for segmentation.
When I first saw the news from Thailand I thought this was a clear indication of another tipping point that MS has gone over in the infelction of its fortunes, but as the rise has been long, so will be the fall.
The Today program I regret to say seems to have swallowed the story.
I think this is part of the Microsoft programme of advertising and attacks on OSS which started last week.
Plus a sort of effort to excuse the huge security hole revealsed after 7 months earlier this week.
It would be worth making contact in a thoughtful and polite way with your local media, and offering to give a reaction on the next MS press release or "new" revelation.
Don't anyone take it too harshly, but a very large proportion of the spam that wastes the time and effort of the EU is pollution escaping from America and drifting over their neighbours.
So it is getting time for, and reasonable to expect, a solution to be found within the society responsible.
microsoft has a habit of offering a reduction in wholesale cost of Windows to OEMs that agree not to turn out any PCs without an operating system. (I suspect that if they tried to make it specific to Windows on all machiens even the US consumer protection laws would be triggered)
So the value of adding FreeDOS to the package (last time it was, I understand, just a disk included in the box) is that it maintains the discount, and keeps the agreement they made. I'm in favour of keeping agreements, although not necessarily of making that one in the first place on those terms.
So use the FreeDOS, or not.
Add your own version of Linux - most companies would I think, most/. ers whoulc as well, I expect - or pay Dell to install what you want if they have it to hand - probably Red Hat.
This is a good change, and of course allows those of us in countries where it is clearly illegal to try to restrain us from moving an OEM copy of WIndows onto a new piece of hardware to avoid paying another slice of Microsoft tax just to upgrade a WIndows workstation.
I set our MTA up to remove all incoming attachments.
They go into a directory which our (notional) librarian looks after.
Given a small organisation, or one that can be segmented into small working groups that don't mind sharing attachments, this has some benefits.
A local hacker wrote a mod_delay for Apache, which provides some protection against the race condition of virus writing inevitably preceding antidote distribution, at least for the end-user.
mod_delay presents any file requested as plain text, unless it is older than the set delay, 24 hours in the first instance, after whcih it serves the RTF or PDF or whatever file up through the webserver.
Is the perhaps apocryphal headline from a local paper - in Aberdeen.
The accident was the Titanic sinking.
Slashdot's locality is more nebulous, but its interests are still specilalised.
Much of the spam I get appears to come from the US, but clearly the spammers can buy hosting in other areas as life is made harder for them in the US.
What is as relevant is that no legitimate email comes to me from (for instance) the Chinas, and little from the rest of Asia, whereas there are people I want to hear from in the US.
So I can easily block large IP ranges but I cannot easily do that against the US spammers.
I think there was an elevation in risk when Bush took over - not becuase of his winning personality but becuase of the actions of his administration, for instance on the Kyoto treaty.
The perceptible attitude of the US suddenly changed, and not for the better.
None of that justifies anything, but given that the guerilla or terrorist swims in the population as the fish swims in the sea, that sea suddenly got less hostile than it had been and things that may have been too hard to plan successfully may have become less likely to fail.
So yes, a very sudden alteration in risk could be produced by a very new president, even though the conditions in which that risk was experienced had been set up by the previous administration.
The startup I want to see succeed is something that if things go badly we are going to need - open hardware.
So interesting though the Chinese processor is, a SPARC based on one of the open specifications, is what I'd like to see turn into a viable business.
I don't see programmable gate arrays getting the sort of speed we want, at the sort of cost, in the near future, but again, knowing that processors can be built in those devices is reassuring.
I had a similar exchange with a lawyer in our Office of Government Commerce.
In the two years since though they have made noticeable progress.
So yes, it really was difficult for lawyers (and editors and accountants and parliamentarians and others) to grasp, and partly this was becuase of the effort to keep it obscure by the PR of the closed source suppliers.
THe latter continues, and needs to be countered on an individual basis with each journalist one meets or gets to know. Carefully.
I think at present the picture phone falls way below the standard of acuity and convenience that Vannevar Bush postulated when he wrote "As We May Think".
But it is heading toward it.
A device that stroes a picture in our personal files whenever we see something that is worth recording could come from a phone, which already has the network and needs the camera and bandwidth, or from our PDAs, or from adding the relevant bits to camreas.
Thanks. That is clearly a good attempt to improve security. I hope it never gets tested, since such tests always reflect real or potential disasters and anguish.
I'd suggest that it is quite hard to define "support going away" What is the point at which failure has occurred?
Similarly, I would be wary about the definition of takeover. One needs to make sure there is no way an acquiring comapny could camouflage their takeover, thus blocking the escrow.
Realistically, I suppose, the point at which support has gone away is the one at whcih one iss told it is necessary to migrate to a new application, and clearly this escrow is potentially useful then, and strengthens the purchaser's hand before that.
Slashdot Mirror
hang on, it'll be along soon...
I have installed several machines with recent versions of the SuSE distribution, and similar ones with W2k and XP. I've also installed Debian 3 on one similar machine. SuSE is a distribution I've become used to, since 7.0. Debian, OTOH, is on the one machine that I could get no stable installation of NT4, SuSE 8 or 9, W2k or XP on, and seems reliable on it. DEbian seemed hard to me, similar to DOS/Windows 3 in complication. SuSE 8.0 became easier than NT4, 8.2 was no harder than W2k and 9.0 and XP are on a par.
from Emperor Computers. I expect IBM will get round to it, they got a nudge from the UK (mother of) Parliament recently...
The interesting thing is how seldom anyone feels a need to read the attachment, even, or especially when the body of the email contains only "please see attached Word document".
Holding the attachments at the perimeter (just dropped into a directory) wil usually avoid the race condition between virus creation/liberation and antivirus creation and distribution.
and the same can be said of everyone who has been deliberately or randomly Joe-jobbed, and hence their friends.
I have no doubt that the European approach is superior, unfortunately you seem to be exporting the US one to us.
Given that aggregation of personal data and widespread use of it is increasing I proposed a rule a while ago - specifically with regard to medical records and the NHS but it may be generally usable.
Whenever anyone who asserts the right to access personal information does so, this should produce an entry in what will eventually be a statement (like a telephone statement- an itemised "bill") the data subject receives.
Identifiying the person who accessed the data, what data they accessed, and what their assertion was as to their rights, along with the purpose for which they stated the use of data was necessary acts as a reasonable check on the legitimacy of those accesses and uses.
The underlying assertion here in the NHS is that poeple would not mind if they knew, so there is no need to tell them, which I think is highly suspect. In the US you seem to have more of an assertion that people holding the data have the right to sell it, and in fact that makes an evenhanded rule seem quite sensible.
Every printer I have set up on an XP box has involved downloading the current driver from teh internet site of the printer manufacturer, thus far.
I have old printers, but so does my Mum.
SuSE has been easier.
Looking at my notes form a while back, from an Economist article and from Slashdot and other coverage, I see there is some variation in teh description fo Mr Ballmer's trip to Munich.
Was it a holiday he happened to be on, with his family, in Switzerland, previously planned and booked, or was it a special trip from America to Germany for a big piece of business?
Notes: "Ernst Wolowicz is Mayor Ude's chief of staff.
According to Wolowicz, who attended the meeting, Ballmer told Ude he came from a skiing trip to pay his respects. Microsoft now says Ballmer was on a scheduled business trip in Germany."
This isn't the biggest of things, but I would like to see it cleared up - which is the true description of his attendance upon Munich?
Microsoft will attempt to justify that without looking like a monopoly doing market segmentation by declaring they are providing different products to different people, at different prices.
Observe this in Thailand, where after teh announcement that MS would provide XP + Office at a much reduced price (about 30 Euros as I recall) came an announcement that thre would be a special edition of XP + Office lacking some features (as yet unspecified AFAIK) - a Thai cheap edition.
Observe it in the UK with the National Health Service New programme IT suprremo Richard Granger muttering about the level of discount we get on (say) half a million copies (I feel ill) of Office on Windows OS and the placement of a contract for a trial of the SUN Java desktop/Linux/OpenOffice by SUN being followed by the suggestion that MS will customise a version for healthcare.
There are few more stupid ideas than that from a healthcare IT point of view, si it has to be a smokescreen for segmentation.
When I first saw the news from Thailand I thought this was a clear indication of another tipping point that MS has gone over in the infelction of its fortunes, but as the rise has been long, so will be the fall.
The effective enforcement is when their neighbours cease to sell them groceries.
The Today program I regret to say seems to have swallowed the story.
I think this is part of the Microsoft programme of advertising and attacks on OSS which started last week.
Plus a sort of effort to excuse the huge security hole revealsed after 7 months earlier this week.
It would be worth making contact in a thoughtful and polite way with your local media, and offering to give a reaction on the next MS press release or "new" revelation.
Don't anyone take it too harshly, but a very large proportion of the spam that wastes the time and effort of the EU is pollution escaping from America and drifting over their neighbours.
So it is getting time for, and reasonable to expect, a solution to be found within the society responsible.
So the value of adding FreeDOS to the package (last time it was, I understand, just a disk included in the box) is that it maintains the discount, and keeps the agreement they made. I'm in favour of keeping agreements, although not necessarily of making that one in the first place on those terms.
So use the FreeDOS, or not.
Add your own version of Linux - most companies would I think, most /. ers whoulc as well, I expect - or pay Dell to install what you want if they have it to hand - probably Red Hat.
This is a good change, and of course allows those of us in countries where it is clearly illegal to try to restrain us from moving an OEM copy of WIndows onto a new piece of hardware to avoid paying another slice of Microsoft tax just to upgrade a WIndows workstation.
They go into a directory which our (notional) librarian looks after.
Given a small organisation, or one that can be segmented into small working groups that don't mind sharing attachments, this has some benefits.
A local hacker wrote a mod_delay for Apache, which provides some protection against the race condition of virus writing inevitably preceding antidote distribution, at least for the end-user.
mod_delay presents any file requested as plain text, unless it is older than the set delay, 24 hours in the first instance, after whcih it serves the RTF or PDF or whatever file up through the webserver.
I don't use it yet, but it looks good.
rather than Beagle, timely though the lament for Beagle is.
Clever chap, but what does it sound like?
Is the perhaps apocryphal headline from a local paper - in Aberdeen. The accident was the Titanic sinking. Slashdot's locality is more nebulous, but its interests are still specilalised.
Much of the spam I get appears to come from the US, but clearly the spammers can buy hosting in other areas as life is made harder for them in the US.
What is as relevant is that no legitimate email comes to me from (for instance) the Chinas, and little from the rest of Asia, whereas there are people I want to hear from in the US.
So I can easily block large IP ranges but I cannot easily do that against the US spammers.
The perceptible attitude of the US suddenly changed, and not for the better.
None of that justifies anything, but given that the guerilla or terrorist swims in the population as the fish swims in the sea, that sea suddenly got less hostile than it had been and things that may have been too hard to plan successfully may have become less likely to fail.
So yes, a very sudden alteration in risk could be produced by a very new president, even though the conditions in which that risk was experienced had been set up by the previous administration.
... the science.. in investment
I had the entertainment of doing some business in the dot.com boom and meeting a temporarily very famous City investment firm.
There is lots of accumulated experience, but it has far greater elements of chance and fashion than the physical sciences.
I think the SCO bubble is a fashion-driven one.
So interesting though the Chinese processor is, a SPARC based on one of the open specifications, is what I'd like to see turn into a viable business.
I don't see programmable gate arrays getting the sort of speed we want, at the sort of cost, in the near future, but again, knowing that processors can be built in those devices is reassuring.
In the two years since though they have made noticeable progress.
So yes, it really was difficult for lawyers (and editors and accountants and parliamentarians and others) to grasp, and partly this was becuase of the effort to keep it obscure by the PR of the closed source suppliers.
THe latter continues, and needs to be countered on an individual basis with each journalist one meets or gets to know. Carefully.
Mobilix got a forced namechange a while back, and that name was a far cry from the main characters.
But it is heading toward it.
A device that stroes a picture in our personal files whenever we see something that is worth recording could come from a phone, which already has the network and needs the camera and bandwidth, or from our PDAs, or from adding the relevant bits to camreas.
That suggests convergence to me.
I'd suggest that it is quite hard to define "support going away" What is the point at which failure has occurred?
Similarly, I would be wary about the definition of takeover. One needs to make sure there is no way an acquiring comapny could camouflage their takeover, thus blocking the escrow.
Realistically, I suppose, the point at which support has gone away is the one at whcih one iss told it is necessary to migrate to a new application, and clearly this escrow is potentially useful then, and strengthens the purchaser's hand before that.