The current minimum level of tech is a fixed-width font (effectively) unlimited line length editor such as gedit, kwrite or notepad.
This is a reasonable level for an introductory programming student to write their code in. It offers the user the opportunity
to validate grammar, speling and style.
A more advanced student will humor you and tell you he used the prescribed program to edit the text.
I hate to confess this, but the days spent looking for those missing commas, close parens, close braces and semicolons was in hindsight time well spent.
vi is over doing it. No modern programmer would use such an antiquated editor.
You are missing the point that if they could do security, they would. They're not making horrid software on purpose -- this really is the best they can do. It's sad, really. There are ten new viruses a day. Millions of zombie bots wreak havoc on the internet. Botmaster spamkings brazenly demand ransom and shut down opponents with traffic storms. Absolutely no other OS from any source provides a fertile ground for this menace to grow. The only possible cure for this absurdity would be to ban Microsoft products entirely.
If Microsoft products were not so easily exploited (or were banned from the 'net), the Internet would be a much more pleasant place for the common person.
So no, they're not able to make secure software for the purpose of putting Symantec out of business. If I had points today I would have modded you funny.
Whenever they ship XP SP3 (Vista) it will have inadequate security. The first security hole in IE is going to be a raging vector for spyware because the default firewall config doesn't block outbound connections. Naturally if spyware doesn't have to overcome a firewall to deliver its reports that's helpful to whom?
I'm in the trade, so dealing with this stuff is my bread and butter -- I've installed more of their product than anybody I know, but really this is truly pathetic. It saddens me to know that my fellow humans reason so poorly as to keep this vendor a monopoly.
All of SGI's existing common stock and the unsecured subordinated debentures will be cancelled upon confirmation of the plan by the court and receive no recovery. Accordingly, the Company believes that SGI's currently outstanding common stock and unsecured subordinated debentures have no value.
It's a mistake to think that the circumlocutions Best Box, Circuit Max and all of the other big box stores put you through are efficient. Clip the coupon, time the trip, gather the receipts, prosecute a deliberate mail and phone tag campaign for six months to save $20 on a flash drive? That's not sales, it's marketeering. When I'm looking for a hard drive, I don't need a three cornered deal with conditional execution of optional term relationship components. I'll take a square deal for cash on the counter, no questions, when I can get it. That they stand behind their products is just a bonus about which I had suffered some nostalgia after chatting up the sales drones at the CalcUSA over some planned purchases [notebook, camera, PDA]. Do you that remember that innocent era when if you bought something and it didn't work you could take it back to the store without paying a ton of money and/or hiring a lawyer? Apparently that sort of thing still goes in Wally World, but almost nowhere else.
I've read the comments about knowlegeability of the salesforce, as if Wal-Mart could be worse than the pimply kid at Fray's. This is laughable.
No, I don't work there.
People get emotional about Wal-Mart, but the fact is if they didn't have great prices, execute perfectly and treat customers with respect, people would shop somewhere else and they wouldn't be the world's largest retailer any more.
If I suggest they turn of that firewall and try it, everything is suddenly happy again.
I want to take a moment here to thank you for your valuable service. Without your guidance to these customers I might never have heard the plight of Mr Crawford Leeds of Natwest Bank London, who is currently partnering with me in regards to the disposition of some inheritance monies held in trust by his bank.
Looking at the doc... Wires the same as version 2. Just the clock speed bump. 16 Command/address data links, 2 clocks, one control, two system (PWROK and RESET). Clocks to 2.6GHz for bandwidth of 20.8GB/S. It doesn't say how many ground wires in the wire. Another slide says up to 32 signal wires and up to 41.6GB/S.
All these articles are dupes. See it again the evening of June 30, as that's when the next semi-annual 0-day festival kicks off in time for the major holiday weekend. It's almost as if these hackers are tormenting you on your holidays for a purpose. Oh, wait...
The two keys to recovering from malware / a botched patch / user error are: 1. Have an image that's known to be clean without doubt. A fresh install with no network connection will usually suffice, Novell historical trivia notwithstanding. A system with absolutely anything installed and then uninstalled, no matter how carefully, just won't work. One that's touched a LAN, even behind a NAT router, isn't "known to be clean". 2. When you blow out your system image, don't corrupt your data files. Obviously if your data is on a drive that's been removed, it's safe. Not everyone is willing to go that far -- all data stored somewhere besides on your system (C:\) drive is a must.
You will need "Drive Image" software. Examples include PowerQuest DriveImage, Altiris RapidDeploy, Norton Ghost. This software list is not a recommendation -- do your own homework on what suits your needs. Maybe someone will reply with suggestions. This software takes a point-in-time snapshot of the data on your system drive, called an "image". You're going to need access to a drive to store your system images. A basic XP image is about 1.5GB compressed, with applications will vary. I've seen with Office and Photoshop with common options go to 6GB, multiple massive games go as high as 30GB. Plan ahead, especially if you want to take periodic backup images or application rollback images. Some people take drive images of their data file drives now and then for backups also.
You're going to need to move your data files someplace safe, like a server or a separate partition. A dedicated drive works well. You're going to need installation CD's for the OS and all your applications, and all of the patches you can get on convenient media. Pendrive or cd work well usually.
Before installing Windows, disconnect from the network. If you're imaging to a network drive, know what you're doing. If your system starts to boot to Windows while connected before your working image is taken, start over.
Install Windows. During install, do not connect to the network. Use the telephone activation option. Get all your updates from the technet executables on local media as previously mentioned. Get the firewall up and running. Don't connect to the network. Point your My Documents folder to the place your datafiles are. Do your base security configuration --firewall settings, replace all the pages in Explorer with about:blank, etc. Do NOT connect to the network.
Take a system image. This is what you recover to if you need a major application overhaul, the "Base" image. If you are storing the image on the network you must make great care while doing this that the system does not boot to the installed OS with the network connected. Your OS install is in a very vulnerable state. If you have to restore to this image, you won't have to re-validate Windows.
If you connected the network during the previous step for network imaging, disconnect it before rebooting.
If you have other applications that require activation and allow telephone activation, you might want to install them now and take an "activated but still network clean" image.
All the software that will install without the network, install and update it. Install Spybot Search & Destroy, with the Tea Timer option. Don't connect to the network. Install Ad-aware or whatever else you're using. Don't connect to the network. Take a system image. This is your "Working" image.
Now you can connect to the network. Immediately go to Windows update and get the latest patches, and their patches, and the patches for those patches. If any of the patched patches' patches have updates, get those too. During this step you'll probably reboot over and over. In Spybot Search & Destroy ge
Russian biologists, some of whom are known to have worked at Biopreparat, have reportedly trained molecular-biology students at the Pasteur Institute in Tehran.
This is just another cobblestone in the Road to War.
You're going to need your datafiles someplace safe, like a server or a separate partition. You're going to need access to a drive to store your system images.
Before installing Windows, disconnect from the network.
Install Windows. During install, do not connect to the network. Get all your updates from the technet executables. Use the telephone activation option. Do not connect to the network. Get the firewall up and running. Don't connect to the network. Point your My Documents folder to the place your datafiles are. Do your base security configuration (firewall settings, replace all the pages in Explorer with about:blank, etc.) Do NOT connect to the network.
Take a system image. This is what you recover to if you need a major application overhaul, the "Base" image. If you are storing the image on the network you must make great care while doing this that the system does not boot to the installed OS with the network connected. Your OS install is in a very vulnerable state.
If you connected the network during the previous step, disconnect it before rebooting.
All the software that will install without the network, install and update it. Install Spybot Search & Destroy, with the Tea Timer option. Don't connect to the network. Install Ad-aware or whatever else you're using. Don't connect to the network. Take a system image. This is your "Working" image.
Now you can connect to the network. Immediately go to Windows update and get the latest patches, and their patches, and the patches for those patches. If any of the patched patches' patches have updates, get those too. During this step you'll probably reboot over and over.
You're done. If you have multiple PC's with identical hardware (and a license for each!) then the one image should do for all -- but check! Now on the Fourth of July weekend and New Year's Eve when you would normally be installing Windows on all of your PC's, you can take the evening off for fireworks and friends because you only need about 20 minutes per PC to restore them to working condition.
To get the whole day off, well, you know what everyone else here would say...
Immune to vibration and high-G stress, low power. Perfect media for carcompy and a UAV.
I'll take two when they get to be affordable. 16Gb flash chips are selling for $41, this thing would use 16 of them. That's $656 just for the minimum amount of NAND. I think I'll wait 'till Christmas.
Is there a SATA version? IDE is so last millenium.
A considerable treatment has been done in SF about the leverage afforded by being in possession of large amounts of mass at the top of a gravity well. It's a superior negotiating position.
For all practial purposes, any 50 ton asteroid is equivalent to a nuclear weapon if it were tipped into an earth-intersecting orbit. There are many many asteroids. Altering the trajectory of an asteroid of that size in that way is trivial if you're on the spot and have water and power.
Challenging an established population in a region so vast, up such a steep hill, would be difficult at best. I don't think it could be done.
Which is not to say that experts are no different from you and me. They're very different. For example, they're much more confident in their predictions than nonexperts are, though they obviously have no reason to be.
Deliberately contaminating the environments of our neighboring celestial objects with our mutagenic biomatter might be considered an unfriendly greeting by the local populations.
But we'll keep doing it anyway. It seems unlikely that human spacefaring will be found in the long term to be a significant vector for the spread of life -- not because we don't do it but because life has been littering the solar system for much longer than we've been exploring it.
In addition to the rocks that smote the dinosaurs which might have spread life to other planets there are:
Rocks that bounce off our contaminated atmosphere billions of times an year, each of which could become tainted with at least bacteria or mold spores.
The original source of life, which might not have been Earth after all but a different planet around a sun that died cosmic ages ago, blessing us with it polluting progeny.
Solar radiation. During a number of magnetic pole-swapping events in geologic time the protection of the magnetosphere was absent. In addition to promoting mass mutation, the solar winds were strong enough to strip off much of our once-much-larger atmosphere and take with it our genetic contribution to everything downwind.
And of course, FSM may animate any matter he chooses with his noodly appendage.
The better question is not "does life exist elsewhere?" but rather "if not, why?" We just have to probe around as best we can to get some preliminary results on the first question before we explore the second.
The question I want answered involves the asteroids -- who will be the 49'er to figure out how to capitalize on that unimaginable wealth? The investment is significant, but if you could get a reasonable amount of water, a nuclear power plant and about 50 people to the asteroids, in thirty years you could own everything outside the moon's orbit. Of course at that point closing the deal on the rest of _everything_ would be trivial.
Recommended 1KW power supply is not the same thing as consumes 1KW of power. The motherboard itself almost certainly consumes less than 100. It's the other stuff you might choose to plug into it that starts burning the watts. Four of this http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/opteron/details.as px?opn=OSA850AVWOF, for example, would max out at 356W TDP. By the time you add VR efficiency and PSU efficiency into that equation you're pegging >550W of wall power just for the processors.
If you actually built a rack full of 22-24 1KW 1U servers you should probably apply some forethought to how you're going to get rid of more heat than is generated by four of these:http://www.paragonweb.com/TNF1613.cfm. Also, you should probably have the power company increase the multiplier on your meter, lest it spin like an AOL CD on an angle grinder: http://homepages.newnet.co.uk/martynarnold/aol.htm
Lots of people here will say that Novell is a nice nostalgic name to hang a linux distro on.
The fact is that Novell knows networking. Novell knows reliability. Novell's reputation on those two factors is legendary for a good reason. Historically their stuff works so well that Novell servers have been mistakenly bricked up into a closet and forgotten for --years--.
Yes, it can be a little cludgy, a little arcane. Compare them, though, to a company that measures the uptime of their server software only when _not_ connected to the Internet, and I think you'll see why a company with that kind of history is attractive.
.... what can only be assumed to be the some of the worst of US management - who then bring over their friends to feast on the corpse of what was once a successful company.
That's Management By Ashification. Almost all American companies bring in that kind of outside MBA eventually. Those aren't some of the worst -- they're the cream of the crop!
Back despite popular demand, the company who's motto is "We don't have to care. We're the Phone Company.": AT&T!
For those whose memory is blissfully temporary, the company was broken up in the early 80's after a series of financial suits from it's customers, including -- wait for it -- Jimmy Carter (future president), and more than a decade of antitrust actions by a series of federal administrations.
Deathstar: Worldcom II -- The Sequel. Coming soon to a twisted pair of wires near you!
Reprising the infamously successful strategy Worldcom, a southern Louisiana water district cooperative began a series of leveraged diversification investments which ultimately find its creative accountants and management in control of what is soon to be the nation's fourth largest corporation in EBITDA (Earnings Before IRS Transcolonic Detailed Audit), for a period of no more than four months. Following the audit corporate executives will be making guest appearances on a series of evening news programs, followed by a prolonged involuntary semi-retirement as guests of the government.
But that's not all! You can play the home game! Quick -- get online and buy stock in this hot rocket and you too can enjoy the roller coaster ride, only getting on near the top! What an opportunity to lose what little retirement you've saved up since the last time you saw an opportunity like this! This is an opportunity already enjoyed by many millions whose retirement funds are managed by incompetent buffoons and there's no reason why you with your IRA can't join in the fun!
Look for a series of marketing tie-ins including Caviar stuffed Brie balls (Menu meal #17) at your local fast food restaraunt -- it comes with a free disposable cell phone! Also, Co-branded designer shower curtains at BigBox brand home improvement warelet for the lo-lo bargain price of $80,000 the matched set!
(disclaimer) -- This is not an offer to buy or sell securities. Before you take investment advice from random slashdot posters you should see your therapist, your tax adviser, your lawyer, your regular broker and the guy you usually get your advice from -- cousin Ted the barber. All of the facts in this posting are made up. Any similarity to actual persons, places or things is a figment of your imagination. Buy a clue. Get a grip. Keep it simple. No anchovies unless specifically requested. Forward looking statements are dependent upon contingencies certain to not occur.
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You would naturally want to use the emacs bootloader, and run VMWare and it's guest OS's as macros.
The current minimum level of tech is a fixed-width font (effectively) unlimited line length editor such as gedit, kwrite or notepad.
This is a reasonable level for an introductory programming student to write their code in. It offers the user the opportunity to validate grammar, speling and style.
A more advanced student will humor you and tell you he used the prescribed program to edit the text.
I hate to confess this, but the days spent looking for those missing commas, close parens, close braces and semicolons was in hindsight time well spent.
vi is over doing it. No modern programmer would use such an antiquated editor.
:q!
You are missing the point that if they could do security, they would. They're not making horrid software on purpose -- this really is the best they can do. It's sad, really. There are ten new viruses a day. Millions of zombie bots wreak havoc on the internet. Botmaster spamkings brazenly demand ransom and shut down opponents with traffic storms. Absolutely no other OS from any source provides a fertile ground for this menace to grow. The only possible cure for this absurdity would be to ban Microsoft products entirely.
If Microsoft products were not so easily exploited (or were banned from the 'net), the Internet would be a much more pleasant place for the common person.
So no, they're not able to make secure software for the purpose of putting Symantec out of business. If I had points today I would have modded you funny.
Whenever they ship XP SP3 (Vista) it will have inadequate security. The first security hole in IE is going to be a raging vector for spyware because the default firewall config doesn't block outbound connections. Naturally if spyware doesn't have to overcome a firewall to deliver its reports that's helpful to whom?
I'm in the trade, so dealing with this stuff is my bread and butter -- I've installed more of their product than anybody I know, but really this is truly pathetic. It saddens me to know that my fellow humans reason so poorly as to keep this vendor a monopoly.
From the article at sgi.com http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html/
It's a mistake to think that the circumlocutions Best Box, Circuit Max and all of the other big box stores put you through are efficient. Clip the coupon, time the trip, gather the receipts, prosecute a deliberate mail and phone tag campaign for six months to save $20 on a flash drive? That's not sales, it's marketeering. When I'm looking for a hard drive, I don't need a three cornered deal with conditional execution of optional term relationship components. I'll take a square deal for cash on the counter, no questions, when I can get it. That they stand behind their products is just a bonus about which I had suffered some nostalgia after chatting up the sales drones at the CalcUSA over some planned purchases [notebook, camera, PDA]. Do you that remember that innocent era when if you bought something and it didn't work you could take it back to the store without paying a ton of money and/or hiring a lawyer? Apparently that sort of thing still goes in Wally World, but almost nowhere else.
I've read the comments about knowlegeability of the salesforce, as if Wal-Mart could be worse than the pimply kid at Fray's. This is laughable.
No, I don't work there.
People get emotional about Wal-Mart, but the fact is if they didn't have great prices, execute perfectly and treat customers with respect, people would shop somewhere else and they wouldn't be the world's largest retailer any more.
I tried it, but it didn't work for me. Maybe you'll have better luck.
IE7 is supposed to have a similar feature, but I wouldn't trust it.
I want to take a moment here to thank you for your valuable service. Without your guidance to these customers I might never have heard the plight of Mr Crawford Leeds of Natwest Bank London, who is currently partnering with me in regards to the disposition of some inheritance monies held in trust by his bank.
Here's the pdf from another post: http://www.hypertransport.org/docs/tech/ht30pres.p df
The two keys to recovering from malware / a botched patch / user error are: 1. Have an image that's known to be clean without doubt. A fresh install with no network connection will usually suffice, Novell historical trivia notwithstanding. A system with absolutely anything installed and then uninstalled, no matter how carefully, just won't work. One that's touched a LAN, even behind a NAT router, isn't "known to be clean". 2. When you blow out your system image, don't corrupt your data files. Obviously if your data is on a drive that's been removed, it's safe. Not everyone is willing to go that far -- all data stored somewhere besides on your system (C:\) drive is a must.
You will need "Drive Image" software. Examples include PowerQuest DriveImage, Altiris RapidDeploy, Norton Ghost. This software list is not a recommendation -- do your own homework on what suits your needs. Maybe someone will reply with suggestions. This software takes a point-in-time snapshot of the data on your system drive, called an "image". You're going to need access to a drive to store your system images. A basic XP image is about 1.5GB compressed, with applications will vary. I've seen with Office and Photoshop with common options go to 6GB, multiple massive games go as high as 30GB. Plan ahead, especially if you want to take periodic backup images or application rollback images. Some people take drive images of their data file drives now and then for backups also.
You're going to need to move your data files someplace safe, like a server or a separate partition. A dedicated drive works well. You're going to need installation CD's for the OS and all your applications, and all of the patches you can get on convenient media. Pendrive or cd work well usually.
Before installing Windows, disconnect from the network. If you're imaging to a network drive, know what you're doing. If your system starts to boot to Windows while connected before your working image is taken, start over.
Install Windows. During install, do not connect to the network. Use the telephone activation option. Get all your updates from the technet executables on local media as previously mentioned. Get the firewall up and running. Don't connect to the network. Point your My Documents folder to the place your datafiles are. Do your base security configuration --firewall settings, replace all the pages in Explorer with about:blank, etc. Do NOT connect to the network.
Take a system image. This is what you recover to if you need a major application overhaul, the "Base" image. If you are storing the image on the network you must make great care while doing this that the system does not boot to the installed OS with the network connected. Your OS install is in a very vulnerable state. If you have to restore to this image, you won't have to re-validate Windows.
If you connected the network during the previous step for network imaging, disconnect it before rebooting.
If you have other applications that require activation and allow telephone activation, you might want to install them now and take an "activated but still network clean" image.
All the software that will install without the network, install and update it. Install Spybot Search & Destroy, with the Tea Timer option. Don't connect to the network. Install Ad-aware or whatever else you're using. Don't connect to the network. Take a system image. This is your "Working" image.
Now you can connect to the network. Immediately go to Windows update and get the latest patches, and their patches, and the patches for those patches. If any of the patched patches' patches have updates, get those too. During this step you'll probably reboot over and over. In Spybot Search & Destroy ge
Probably landing it somewhere else we're unlikely to visit soon, like Venus, or Iran, would be better.
Then ship it to Kolkata and hire somebody else sit at it for you.
This is just another cobblestone in the Road to War.
Seriously, somebody needs to lead these people out of the desert.
You're going to need your datafiles someplace safe, like a server or a separate partition. You're going to need access to a drive to store your system images.
Before installing Windows, disconnect from the network.
Install Windows. During install, do not connect to the network. Get all your updates from the technet executables. Use the telephone activation option. Do not connect to the network. Get the firewall up and running. Don't connect to the network. Point your My Documents folder to the place your datafiles are. Do your base security configuration (firewall settings, replace all the pages in Explorer with about:blank, etc.) Do NOT connect to the network.
Take a system image. This is what you recover to if you need a major application overhaul, the "Base" image. If you are storing the image on the network you must make great care while doing this that the system does not boot to the installed OS with the network connected. Your OS install is in a very vulnerable state.
If you connected the network during the previous step, disconnect it before rebooting.
All the software that will install without the network, install and update it. Install Spybot Search & Destroy, with the Tea Timer option. Don't connect to the network. Install Ad-aware or whatever else you're using. Don't connect to the network. Take a system image. This is your "Working" image.
Now you can connect to the network. Immediately go to Windows update and get the latest patches, and their patches, and the patches for those patches. If any of the patched patches' patches have updates, get those too. During this step you'll probably reboot over and over.
You're done. If you have multiple PC's with identical hardware (and a license for each!) then the one image should do for all -- but check! Now on the Fourth of July weekend and New Year's Eve when you would normally be installing Windows on all of your PC's, you can take the evening off for fireworks and friends because you only need about 20 minutes per PC to restore them to working condition.
To get the whole day off, well, you know what everyone else here would say...
Congratulations. You've invented precrime.
I'll take two when they get to be affordable. 16Gb flash chips are selling for $41, this thing would use 16 of them. That's $656 just for the minimum amount of NAND. I think I'll wait 'till Christmas.
Is there a SATA version? IDE is so last millenium.
For all practial purposes, any 50 ton asteroid is equivalent to a nuclear weapon if it were tipped into an earth-intersecting orbit. There are many many asteroids. Altering the trajectory of an asteroid of that size in that way is trivial if you're on the spot and have water and power.
Challenging an established population in a region so vast, up such a steep hill, would be difficult at best. I don't think it could be done.
I, for one, welcome our rock-tipping overlords!
Ditch the Experts: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_arc hive/2006/02/06/8367977/index.htm
Pretty clear, eh?
Deliberately contaminating the environments of our neighboring celestial objects with our mutagenic biomatter might be considered an unfriendly greeting by the local populations.
But we'll keep doing it anyway. It seems unlikely that human spacefaring will be found in the long term to be a significant vector for the spread of life -- not because we don't do it but because life has been littering the solar system for much longer than we've been exploring it.
In addition to the rocks that smote the dinosaurs which might have spread life to other planets there are:
The better question is not "does life exist elsewhere?" but rather "if not, why?" We just have to probe around as best we can to get some preliminary results on the first question before we explore the second.
The question I want answered involves the asteroids -- who will be the 49'er to figure out how to capitalize on that unimaginable wealth? The investment is significant, but if you could get a reasonable amount of water, a nuclear power plant and about 50 people to the asteroids, in thirty years you could own everything outside the moon's orbit. Of course at that point closing the deal on the rest of _everything_ would be trivial.
1 horsepower ~= 746W.
The horsepower of our computers has gone from figurative to literal.
One rack of these could theoretically consume more power than this: http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/coupe/112_0107 _2000_mini_cooper_sport/
Will noone think of the salmon? http://riversideca.apogee.net/foe/fgphe.asp
If you actually built a rack full of 22-24 1KW 1U servers you should probably apply some forethought to how you're going to get rid of more heat than is generated by four of these:http://www.paragonweb.com/TNF1613.cfm. Also, you should probably have the power company increase the multiplier on your meter, lest it spin like an AOL CD on an angle grinder: http://homepages.newnet.co.uk/martynarnold/aol.htm
The fact is that Novell knows networking. Novell knows reliability. Novell's reputation on those two factors is legendary for a good reason. Historically their stuff works so well that Novell servers have been mistakenly bricked up into a closet and forgotten for --years--. Yes, it can be a little cludgy, a little arcane. Compare them, though, to a company that measures the uptime of their server software only when _not_ connected to the Internet, and I think you'll see why a company with that kind of history is attractive.
That's Management By Ashification. Almost all American companies bring in that kind of outside MBA eventually. Those aren't some of the worst -- they're the cream of the crop!
You probably know this...
You can get Wordperfect here http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pid=1047025942277.
As far as I can tell they no longer make a linux version. I bought WP8/Linux and still have it.
Back despite popular demand, the company who's motto is "We don't have to care. We're the Phone Company.": AT&T!
For those whose memory is blissfully temporary, the company was broken up in the early 80's after a series of financial suits from it's customers, including -- wait for it -- Jimmy Carter (future president), and more than a decade of antitrust actions by a series of federal administrations.
Deathstar: Worldcom II -- The Sequel. Coming soon to a twisted pair of wires near you!
Reprising the infamously successful strategy Worldcom, a southern Louisiana water district cooperative began a series of leveraged diversification investments which ultimately find its creative accountants and management in control of what is soon to be the nation's fourth largest corporation in EBITDA (Earnings Before IRS Transcolonic Detailed Audit), for a period of no more than four months. Following the audit corporate executives will be making guest appearances on a series of evening news programs, followed by a prolonged involuntary semi-retirement as guests of the government.
But that's not all! You can play the home game! Quick -- get online and buy stock in this hot rocket and you too can enjoy the roller coaster ride, only getting on near the top! What an opportunity to lose what little retirement you've saved up since the last time you saw an opportunity like this! This is an opportunity already enjoyed by many millions whose retirement funds are managed by incompetent buffoons and there's no reason why you with your IRA can't join in the fun!
Look for a series of marketing tie-ins including Caviar stuffed Brie balls (Menu meal #17) at your local fast food restaraunt -- it comes with a free disposable cell phone! Also, Co-branded designer shower curtains at BigBox brand home improvement warelet for the lo-lo bargain price of $80,000 the matched set!
(disclaimer) -- This is not an offer to buy or sell securities. Before you take investment advice from random slashdot posters you should see your therapist, your tax adviser, your lawyer, your regular broker and the guy you usually get your advice from -- cousin Ted the barber. All of the facts in this posting are made up. Any similarity to actual persons, places or things is a figment of your imagination. Buy a clue. Get a grip. Keep it simple. No anchovies unless specifically requested. Forward looking statements are dependent upon contingencies certain to not occur.