----- C) I am 100% certain that Microsoft will keep this new "support" to MS windows(tm) side of things ----- I agree and it saddens me. If MS Windows incorporates Linux administration into their management interface then companies will have an argument against switching the controlling portions of their IT department to Linux.
The argument will be similar to,"Fine, let the users have their Linux. Let the servers have their Linux. We can still keep MS for the managers, admins, and HR, right?"
Two years from now the managers, admins, and HR reps will complain that the Linux management plugin has too many problems and it will be easy to justify pulling everyone back to MS. As long as MS remains entrenched in the hearts of the people calling the shots they can play Linux like the unwanted foster child: give them a "chance" but guarantee the failure.
Re:I don't work for microsoft and I got the memo?
on
Microsoft's Strategy Memos
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you look at this long-term you'll see it as an absorption strategy.
Today they integrate Linux support into their management software. Tomorrow they expand and patent the API. Next week there isn't a single IT manager that knows anything about Linux administration unless it's done with MS management tools. Next month MS starts to price the Linux management plugin at a higher and higher level to "support the cost of integrating with Open source developers". If it works they'll profit and network administrators will continue to favor using MS OS because of "bugs and inconsistencies between Linux distros and the MS Linux management plugin". If they're aggressive and companies balk at the increased price then they'll switch back to MS in order to secure administration tasks.
----- We are working with partners to make it possible for Microsoft customers to manage UNIX, Linux and Mac computers in conjunction with Systems Management Server 2003, and to manage hardware devices such as desktops and servers through solutions that update hardware-based software components using the same familiar interfaces that an administrator would use to update software applications. ----- Look for MS sponsored Linux "remote administration tools" (aka trojans) and an effort by MS to absorb a major Linux distro into its business holdings. I see Linspire as the perfect target for a hostile financial takeover. If Linspire flops then MS will target whichever distro gains wide public acceptance.
At first glance the knee-jerk reaction is to cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys and feel that everything is working correctly. After a few moments reading the predictable posts on/. I have to wonder about a few things.
My first thought is,"What competent net-admin leaves their mail proxies wide open?" Then I happened across a post from a fellow who claimed that he was one of the victims of the spammers. The post indicated that the spammers had targeted spam-filters and anti-virus software running on his system to relay their material. Has he reported the vulnerabilities in this software? Is there a legitimate case for fraud against anti-virus and anti-spam software producers if their products open up just as many vulnerabilities as they fix? I'm not suggesting that we start feeding the lawyers like we feed trolls but perhaps, rather than laying off thousands of workers, upper management should start taking a more critical approach to the FUD they believe and the software that they buy to soothe their conscience while they're on the golf course.
Next I have to wonder about the 10,000 complaints received by the FTC. I find it hard to believe that most of the complaints were sent by private citizens. I don't know anyone that makes a practice out of e-mailing the FTC every time they receive an unwanted piece of mail. They're either hooked by the scam or they delete the spam. Some of the less educated will click the "remove me" link but I think most of us have learned better than to do that. The same fellow that claimed that he was part of one of the helplessly victimized corporations claimed that he had been sending some of the complaints to the FTC. If he was competent enough to track the spam and send complaints why could he have not simply closed the security holes in his system? Maybe there's no law defining it but this situation seems awfully similar to entrapment--the kind that catches a 12-year old that thinks they're getting away with the cookie jar.
Finally I have to wonder about the FTC and the types of spam you receive. I have a number of e-mail addresses and only one of them receives any spam on a regular basis. It's on hotmail and I've used it for more than seven years. That e-mail address saw my foolish college years and made its way to every mailing list possible when drinking commenced the Friday after final exams or in the extreme boredom of poverty embellished vacation time. Even after making it through those years, my hotmail address receives no kiddie porn, no animal porn, only select adult porn, and mostly just advertisements for home mortgages, debt reduction, escorts, or herbal medicines for weight loss or physical enhancement. So the question is: What mailing lists have people been getting involved in where they're plagued by all of the ultra-filthy, ultra-evil spam? Could the FTC use spam complaints as a method of profiling the alleged spam victim? It would be easy enough to correlate the type of spam that you receive with the places that you frequent on the 'net. Getting people hooked on finching on their neighbor may help them land themselves under surveillance or in hot water. While this is a Good Thing if we feel morally righteous enough to police each citizen as a potential criminal it doesn't help society as a whole to become a paranoid, frightened, distrustful police state. Well, maybe it helps some people. It helps to own the jail contract, the surveillance contract, or be the head of the Clerk of Court office.
While I'm glad to see that something is being done about spam it seems to me that the real solution to the problem lies not in catching the spam senders but rather in reforming the systems which aid them such as fraudulent or excessively marketed "catch-all" security programs, default holes in MS operating systems, less than qualified network administrators that leave their mail proxy open, and opportunistic federal agents that don't act until people band together to bait some dumb sucker and drop him in the lap of the prosecutor.
The companies should be liable as accessories to the crime. Aiding and abetting. What competent net-admin in a corporation leaves their mail proxies open? That's just dumb.
If the companies could be held liable as accessories maybe, just maybe, MS would put more time into securing its OS before it ships.
Like any other government watch system I'm all for it as long as all participating citizens have equal access to the database. Since a given citizen (ie. police officer) can access the database for any entry then I should be able to do the same.
If I drive through that town then I should have as much access to the database as anyone else in that town including the police officers that can pan and scan the list at will. It's not my problem how they provide it but the provisions should be in place before the law is enacted or else it should be a dead law. My 401k investments funded their.com scams just as their own "entreprenurial initiative" *snicker* did. If I pay the IRS then I should have as much access to their files as any IRS agent. ie. They should give me the interface and I should be able to conduct a few random searches to verify its integrity. If any of my tax dollars, in whole or in part, go to subsidize credit reporting agencies then I should have access to their lists. If my tax dollars support the FBI and CIA so that they can keep files on citizens then I should have full unimpeded access to those files and databases. I don't believe in the system of the government certifying who I can trust and who I can't. I didn't vote for those politicians. They haven't done anything to win my trust. If my bank at _all_ invests in Pizza Hut stock then I should have access to Pizza Hut's delivery list or else Pizza Hut shouldn't be able to say "I'm sorry, sir, we can't deliver unless you give a valid phone number for our database."
I'm not talking about red tape and rigamarole FOIA access, either. I'm talking unimpeded ready public access. The type that we _don't_ have.
If the access is restricted then eventually someone's going to figure out a way to abuse it. Even if it's nothing more than using the system to time someone coming home from the grocery store on their 40th birthday in order to cover their car in whipping cream--it's all fun and games until that whipping cream causes them to drive headlong into a cafe full of casual diners.
Until I get full access then I'm going to keep saying "No. It's a load of horse dung." I'm looking out for the whipping cream covered SUV that goes headlong into a tree. I'm looking out for the bored billionaire wife who's blowing the police captain for kicks and wants to get a juicy dig on the immigrant landscaper that rebuffed her because he wanted to stay loyal to his wife.
As for the $400k in lost jewelry. Pfffft. It's more likely that gossip and insurance fraud are bigger players than actual crime. "Oh, come now dear... You didn't lose that much. Me and Betrand lost _TWICE_ that much just a week ago. We have the police report and insurance claim right here and it's been approved by our insurance agent (*under breath* who lives two miles down and is married to my cousin's daughter). Quit whining so much and go back to taking care of your poodle."
Mozilla/Firefox/Konqueror are becoming larger and larger. More users are switching to Linux to try it out. More users are staying with Linux because they like it. More users are demanding more features from their web browser.
Apparently the point of,"Webapps are a step away from being rooted, mmmmmm'kay?" never sank in with anyone.
It doesn't even have to be a permanent change to the system outside of the web browser environment. Since the majority of users spend 99% of their free time in a web-browser a compromisable browser plug-in is a perfect vector.
Right now it's not much of a problem due to the large width and breadth of kernel, glibc, gtk, and Xf86, and other important component versions that are running. As Linux distros become more standardized, the general populance begins to settle in with one distro over another, and the browsers become more featureful, it'll start to be a problem for us, too. Extremely clever rootkits know how to cover their tracks--hide processes from ps, hide network connections from netstat--and the average user isn't monitoring this sort of stuff anyways. As KDE and Gnome take hold there will be plenty of opportunity for even the sharp security minded user to think,"Oh... just another KDE process helping to keep my desktop friendly and integrated."
----- Well, that's just your opinion, and to prove it you'll need to find documentary evidence suggesting that is what they really did. ----- We'll find out when we hear Linspire's reaction. If Linspire offers to make amends now, after the fact, we'll know that they didn't act in good faith to begin with.
If interviews with Linspire reps return the answer of,"This story is utter and complete hogwash. We personally e-mailed the original artist and obtained permission to use his work without including his name or contact info months before we put that Flash presentation together."
To be perfectly honest it's easy enough to backdate an e-mail. "How long has the ink been dry on that?"
I don't care if this ever gets pursued in a court of law. These sorts of actions will determine how I campaign for or against Linspire when I talk with my colleagues. As of right now, if anyone asks me about Linspire or mentions hardware manufacturers which use Linspire, my general comment will be...
"Linux is great but I wouldn't trust Linspire as a corporate entity. Use Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo."
----- that's simply not the case now so has no real bearing on this situation ----- What does have bearing on this situation is that Linspire made good on the common corporate practice of "take first and offer to credit/compensate the author if and only if the author ever notices".
You can't be guaranteed an excuse from a speeding ticket just because you slowed down. You won't be given a free pass from theft if you offer to pay after your caught. Your record won't be cleared even after you've paid the ticket or done the community service work.
I've a strong suspicion that there are thousands of cases like this carefully safeguarded by MS lawyers as well. They take and take and take and take, and once in a while offer a few shares of stock to anyone that can prove that they took, and take and take and take...
----- Lindows, Inc. is all about ----- I've seen enough to know that I don't like where it's headed.
----- I'd be sure that this issue will get settled to the two parties satisfaction ----- Mike Rowe was "satisfied" but he didn't really have much choice. He couldn't afford the type of legal team that the corporate entity could. This situation is different technically but it's the same in principle. Would Linspire ever have offered to satisfy the artist if he didn't have a friend who would notify him?
Corporations have a habit of "take first and offer to settle later--if and only if the person that was taken from notices" but they take an aggressive stance on customers that do the same in the field of software sharing. I'm not going to give Linspire a free pass because they're going to make like a good social citizen and offer to compensate or credit the author now. My opinion remains that, unless they obtained permission beforehand, their pictures should have had the original author's name and/or contact info clearly visible on the screen.
I'd still like Linux even if Linspire didn't promote it. Honestly speaking, I don't want every MS user out there to migrate to Linux and whine for the developers to work on features. I like Linux for functionality without having useless features crammed onto my desktop and opening security holes in my memory space whether I like them or not.
I value efficiency and the longer Linux stays clean of the public's demand for features and virtual kisses from their OS the happier I'll be. It's either a testament to the business scam or a symptom of a seriously dysfunctional society that everyone wants friendly and attractive computers but no one does much more than write e-mail and complain about spam.
Professional chefs have functional kitchens. Professional construction workers have functional trucks. Professional scientists have functional labs. Professional artists have functional studios.
Let the home users keep Microsoft. Maybe they'll eventually get MS to tighten up all the code holes and secure their OS. Maybe we'll get pushed to bigger and bigger hardware locks like Trusted Computing and DRM. Getting the masses to switch to Linux isn't going to stop corporate greed. Corporate greed will never stop Linux users from using Linux. Trusted computing is just another hardware algorithm. Eventually someone will figure out a way around it and then we'll have the same cycle as network admin tools: who's good and who's bad?
Even if promotion is the excuse greed is not acceptable.
----- (b) Linspire may be acting within the law, but we need to know more information ----- I think the law should be simplified.
If you're sharing without charging then everything's a-okay. If you're charging $60/each by bundling together a conglomeration of others' works then there should be problems.
If the laws were this simple, though, the lawyers wouldn't have jobs chasing down 12 year olds sharing music between classes.
----- How many people do YOU know, who totally understand IP and Copyright laws? ----- Nobody, which conveniently works out in favor of the lawyers, which a company can afford and good-hearted open source/GPL/CC people can't.
I'd have no problems with sharing if Linspire weren't charging $60/download for it. I'm confident that the author wouldn't mind if Debian asked to incorporate his art into their distro.
----- FWIW, I've seen the same artwork in other Live CD's (Slax comes to mind) so Linspire aren't the only people who grabbed it ----- The "FWIW" is the important part. Slax doesn't charge $60 for a download.
Copyright is GOOD when shared freely (GPL and music).
Copyright is BAD when violated to make money (corporate pirates, pirates charging money, Lindows).
Copyright is BAD when wrongfully used to attack those who share freely.
These concepts were presented in the copyright laws prior to the 80s which allowed duplicates to be created under the condition that no fee was charged for the duplicate. Then corporations got greedy and lobbied to have the laws rewritten so that they had control over anything even resembling the original art with the acceptable level of resemblance being left open to the entity with the largest legal fund.
If Debian were using this guy's art I doubt there'd be much of a problem. He might even be honored.
Re:Excuse me? You do get repetitive marks in Word.
on
The War Of The Word
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· Score: 1
MS Word, no matter how much you turn on, won't ever show you a symbolic entry for font or style changes. They'll just appear as part of the text.
That said, however, formatting a document is like formatting program code. It should be elegant, neat and concise. It tells you something about a person's intellectual processes when you open their document and see:
"*font1**size18* *move the left margin in one inch here**font2**size10* *move the left carriage return point 1/2" left of the left margin here* *tab**tab* *tab**font3**size14* *tab**tab *tab**tab* *center justification* *tab**tab**tab**start underlining* *font1**size16*This is the title of my docuemnt *tab**tab**tab* *move the left margin and the carriage return point to 1" here**font2**size8* *move the carriage return point to 1/2" here* *move the left margin to 1/4" here**end underlining here* *font4**size12*This is the first line of the first paragraph of my document "
Come on. I have to laugh at something, and the fact that these people are on crack when they work in Word is just the outlet for me. The only logical explanation is "the author of the document is a dumbass that has no attention for formatting detail". The documents that I write? They're all neat, concise, and without all the extra useless style/mode/tab/font changes.
What will the mediocre population demand next from MS to try and keep up? I envision a "Word format compiler" in your future.
Add this: ----- And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure. ----- To this: ----- Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer ----- And it all makes perfect sense.
----- but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted ----- Take for example the rush to beat OS/2 to market. "Good enough" was, at that time, any GUI OS that would be next on market shelves.
Is America so repressed that easy access to pr0n drove the whole WWW boom? I mean, really, if they're not technologically oriented, what are the majority of people doing with a GUI OS? Did we really need to supply the MS empire just to give Americans solitaire?
Windows isn't X. Windows is KDE or Gnome. Why wasn't some sort of WinX with a small window manager the next step above DOS? For the billions of dollars that have poured into Microsoft through direct sales or investing, and for all the pain of squelched competition, what did Microsoft really give us?
95% of people do six things with a computer: Browse the web, e-mail (often through an HTTP interface), (new) store camera photos, listen to music, maybe print a document, maybe type a letter. Firefox, pine, usb, mplayer, lpd, and easyedit. Those six core functionalities are worth a $50+ billion dollar empire?
Like most Americans, I'm barely hanging on... Where did I go wrong?
----- two words: Reveal Codes ----- I always have my Word set up to show all hidden characters but it still doesn't show all codes.
I use it mostly for amusement to look at the documents that I receive from other people and see the inane and repetitious page formatting marks that they set, unset, reset, and move. It gives me a sense of how much extra trouble everyone else has constructing a document when their problems could be solved if they would plan their page formatting ahead of time.
mozilla, adaware, winamp, acrobat... I actively avoid using messaging clients on a Windows system. IMHO, it's just asking for trouble. My Windows install is mainly out of habit. I haven't actually used it in months.
----- from stockpiles of nerve agent ----- Oh, right, that industrial waste that you could find in the backyard of any coking or smelting plant or, imagine these in SW Asia, an oil refinery.
----- 200 tons of uranium and a cyclotron ----- Which was legally sold to them by a US company operating a stock-market subsidiary in the now defunct USSR.
Chemists are just as protective about their area even with people of their own profession. I don't have a PhD but I know my business when it comes to synthetic organic chemistry, techniques, and methods.
I was synthesizing batch amounts of a material and the accepted route for purification was column chromatography. The column chromatography for this material was a PITA and the band broadening resulted in separations which were 75% at best. This meant that the tailing material had to recollected and columned again resulting in collection of 75% of that material. On a 25 gram scale the 25% loss was enough to guarantee that the procedure required at least two if not three purifications.
I developed a procedure wherein I recrystallized the impurity, not the product, from a solution of hot hexane. Normal recrystallization involves cooling the mother liquor slowly but I found this produced a coalesced blob of material at the bottom of the flask resulting in significant amounts of product being trapped in with the impurity. I found that if I cooled the mother liquor by rolling it in a roundbottom flask over a bed of dry ice the impurity would plate out of the solution on the walls of the flask and leave enough surface area that the product would readily redissolve into the solution. Recovery of the product by pouring off the mother liquor and removing the solvent in vacuo was better than 95% with better than 99% purity (1H-NMR).
My manager, being a PhD, was infuriated that I was not following the established purification method. He even went so far to complain to the department head and have me sacked with disciplinary action and a safety review because I was "insubordinate" and using "non-standard methods". He and the department head even named my procedure against me by dubbing it "shock cooling".
Nonetheless I caught my manager, on more than one occasion, rolling a roundbottom flask over a bed of dry ice in the corner of his lab bench when he thought everyone else was in a meeting or out at lunch.
----- Chemists understand this, but most physicists do not ----- As an addendum, managers in the pharmaceutical industry understand this when they need to explain their own failed experiments and neglect it when they want to browbeat their reports.
----- Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of garbage touted as interesting results ----- Most of it makes it through the FDA and patent office and ends up in presecription bottles.
Even with an ideal procedure it can take months for a skilled chemist to replicate the findings of another. That's why peer reviewed journals don't actually replicate experiments but only make judgement calls on plausibility. Given the exacting nature of loading the palladium and the nature of the palladium itself I'm not surprised that every lab around the world that tried it and couldn't reproduce it.
It was a classic case of,"We don't like those two upstarts so we're going to do a half-baked job at making a half-hearted attempt to replicate their experiment. When we fail we'll just blame them. There are hundreds of us and only two of them."
You left out the most important part: the terrorists that are happy to sink Exxon and Ford as American capitalist pig organizations while propping up the profits of OPEC who we all know funds terrorist cells.
Slashdot Mirror
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C) I am 100% certain that Microsoft will keep this new "support" to MS windows(tm) side of things
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I agree and it saddens me. If MS Windows incorporates Linux administration into their management interface then companies will have an argument against switching the controlling portions of their IT department to Linux.
The argument will be similar to,"Fine, let the users have their Linux. Let the servers have their Linux. We can still keep MS for the managers, admins, and HR, right?"
Two years from now the managers, admins, and HR reps will complain that the Linux management plugin has too many problems and it will be easy to justify pulling everyone back to MS. As long as MS remains entrenched in the hearts of the people calling the shots they can play Linux like the unwanted foster child: give them a "chance" but guarantee the failure.
If you look at this long-term you'll see it as an absorption strategy.
Today they integrate Linux support into their management software. Tomorrow they expand and patent the API. Next week there isn't a single IT manager that knows anything about Linux administration unless it's done with MS management tools. Next month MS starts to price the Linux management plugin at a higher and higher level to "support the cost of integrating with Open source developers". If it works they'll profit and network administrators will continue to favor using MS OS because of "bugs and inconsistencies between Linux distros and the MS Linux management plugin". If they're aggressive and companies balk at the increased price then they'll switch back to MS in order to secure administration tasks.
Simple.
From the microsoft.com memo:
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We are working with partners to make it possible for Microsoft customers to manage UNIX, Linux and Mac computers in conjunction with Systems Management Server 2003, and to manage hardware devices such as desktops and servers through solutions that update hardware-based software components using the same familiar interfaces that an administrator would use to update software applications.
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Look for MS sponsored Linux "remote administration tools" (aka trojans) and an effort by MS to absorb a major Linux distro into its business holdings. I see Linspire as the perfect target for a hostile financial takeover. If Linspire flops then MS will target whichever distro gains wide public acceptance.
At first glance the knee-jerk reaction is to cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys and feel that everything is working correctly. After a few moments reading the predictable posts on /. I have to wonder about a few things.
My first thought is,"What competent net-admin leaves their mail proxies wide open?" Then I happened across a post from a fellow who claimed that he was one of the victims of the spammers. The post indicated that the spammers had targeted spam-filters and anti-virus software running on his system to relay their material. Has he reported the vulnerabilities in this software? Is there a legitimate case for fraud against anti-virus and anti-spam software producers if their products open up just as many vulnerabilities as they fix? I'm not suggesting that we start feeding the lawyers like we feed trolls but perhaps, rather than laying off thousands of workers, upper management should start taking a more critical approach to the FUD they believe and the software that they buy to soothe their conscience while they're on the golf course.
Next I have to wonder about the 10,000 complaints received by the FTC. I find it hard to believe that most of the complaints were sent by private citizens. I don't know anyone that makes a practice out of e-mailing the FTC every time they receive an unwanted piece of mail. They're either hooked by the scam or they delete the spam. Some of the less educated will click the "remove me" link but I think most of us have learned better than to do that. The same fellow that claimed that he was part of one of the helplessly victimized corporations claimed that he had been sending some of the complaints to the FTC. If he was competent enough to track the spam and send complaints why could he have not simply closed the security holes in his system? Maybe there's no law defining it but this situation seems awfully similar to entrapment--the kind that catches a 12-year old that thinks they're getting away with the cookie jar.
Finally I have to wonder about the FTC and the types of spam you receive. I have a number of e-mail addresses and only one of them receives any spam on a regular basis. It's on hotmail and I've used it for more than seven years. That e-mail address saw my foolish college years and made its way to every mailing list possible when drinking commenced the Friday after final exams or in the extreme boredom of poverty embellished vacation time. Even after making it through those years, my hotmail address receives no kiddie porn, no animal porn, only select adult porn, and mostly just advertisements for home mortgages, debt reduction, escorts, or herbal medicines for weight loss or physical enhancement. So the question is: What mailing lists have people been getting involved in where they're plagued by all of the ultra-filthy, ultra-evil spam? Could the FTC use spam complaints as a method of profiling the alleged spam victim? It would be easy enough to correlate the type of spam that you receive with the places that you frequent on the 'net. Getting people hooked on finching on their neighbor may help them land themselves under surveillance or in hot water. While this is a Good Thing if we feel morally righteous enough to police each citizen as a potential criminal it doesn't help society as a whole to become a paranoid, frightened, distrustful police state. Well, maybe it helps some people. It helps to own the jail contract, the surveillance contract, or be the head of the Clerk of Court office.
While I'm glad to see that something is being done about spam it seems to me that the real solution to the problem lies not in catching the spam senders but rather in reforming the systems which aid them such as fraudulent or excessively marketed "catch-all" security programs, default holes in MS operating systems, less than qualified network administrators that leave their mail proxy open, and opportunistic federal agents that don't act until people band together to bait some dumb sucker and drop him in the lap of the prosecutor.
The companies should be liable as accessories to the crime. Aiding and abetting. What competent net-admin in a corporation leaves their mail proxies open? That's just dumb.
If the companies could be held liable as accessories maybe, just maybe, MS would put more time into securing its OS before it ships.
Like any other government watch system I'm all for it as long as all participating citizens have equal access to the database. Since a given citizen (ie. police officer) can access the database for any entry then I should be able to do the same.
.com scams just as their own "entreprenurial initiative" *snicker* did. If I pay the IRS then I should have as much access to their files as any IRS agent. ie. They should give me the interface and I should be able to conduct a few random searches to verify its integrity. If any of my tax dollars, in whole or in part, go to subsidize credit reporting agencies then I should have access to their lists. If my tax dollars support the FBI and CIA so that they can keep files on citizens then I should have full unimpeded access to those files and databases. I don't believe in the system of the government certifying who I can trust and who I can't. I didn't vote for those politicians. They haven't done anything to win my trust. If my bank at _all_ invests in Pizza Hut stock then I should have access to Pizza Hut's delivery list or else Pizza Hut shouldn't be able to say "I'm sorry, sir, we can't deliver unless you give a valid phone number for our database."
If I drive through that town then I should have as much access to the database as anyone else in that town including the police officers that can pan and scan the list at will. It's not my problem how they provide it but the provisions should be in place before the law is enacted or else it should be a dead law. My 401k investments funded their
I'm not talking about red tape and rigamarole FOIA access, either. I'm talking unimpeded ready public access. The type that we _don't_ have.
If the access is restricted then eventually someone's going to figure out a way to abuse it. Even if it's nothing more than using the system to time someone coming home from the grocery store on their 40th birthday in order to cover their car in whipping cream--it's all fun and games until that whipping cream causes them to drive headlong into a cafe full of casual diners.
Until I get full access then I'm going to keep saying "No. It's a load of horse dung." I'm looking out for the whipping cream covered SUV that goes headlong into a tree. I'm looking out for the bored billionaire wife who's blowing the police captain for kicks and wants to get a juicy dig on the immigrant landscaper that rebuffed her because he wanted to stay loyal to his wife.
As for the $400k in lost jewelry. Pfffft. It's more likely that gossip and insurance fraud are bigger players than actual crime. "Oh, come now dear... You didn't lose that much. Me and Betrand lost _TWICE_ that much just a week ago. We have the police report and insurance claim right here and it's been approved by our insurance agent (*under breath* who lives two miles down and is married to my cousin's daughter). Quit whining so much and go back to taking care of your poodle."
Mozilla/Firefox/Konqueror are becoming larger and larger. More users are switching to Linux to try it out. More users are staying with Linux because they like it. More users are demanding more features from their web browser.
Apparently the point of,"Webapps are a step away from being rooted, mmmmmm'kay?" never sank in with anyone.
It doesn't even have to be a permanent change to the system outside of the web browser environment. Since the majority of users spend 99% of their free time in a web-browser a compromisable browser plug-in is a perfect vector.
Right now it's not much of a problem due to the large width and breadth of kernel, glibc, gtk, and Xf86, and other important component versions that are running. As Linux distros become more standardized, the general populance begins to settle in with one distro over another, and the browsers become more featureful, it'll start to be a problem for us, too. Extremely clever rootkits know how to cover their tracks--hide processes from ps, hide network connections from netstat--and the average user isn't monitoring this sort of stuff anyways. As KDE and Gnome take hold there will be plenty of opportunity for even the sharp security minded user to think,"Oh... just another KDE process helping to keep my desktop friendly and integrated."
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Well, that's just your opinion, and to prove it you'll need to find documentary evidence suggesting that is what they really did.
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We'll find out when we hear Linspire's reaction. If Linspire offers to make amends now, after the fact, we'll know that they didn't act in good faith to begin with.
If interviews with Linspire reps return the answer of,"This story is utter and complete hogwash. We personally e-mailed the original artist and obtained permission to use his work without including his name or contact info months before we put that Flash presentation together."
To be perfectly honest it's easy enough to backdate an e-mail. "How long has the ink been dry on that?"
I don't care if this ever gets pursued in a court of law. These sorts of actions will determine how I campaign for or against Linspire when I talk with my colleagues. As of right now, if anyone asks me about Linspire or mentions hardware manufacturers which use Linspire, my general comment will be...
"Linux is great but I wouldn't trust Linspire as a corporate entity. Use Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo."
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that's simply not the case now so has no real bearing on this situation
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What does have bearing on this situation is that Linspire made good on the common corporate practice of "take first and offer to credit/compensate the author if and only if the author ever notices".
You can't be guaranteed an excuse from a speeding ticket just because you slowed down. You won't be given a free pass from theft if you offer to pay after your caught. Your record won't be cleared even after you've paid the ticket or done the community service work.
I've a strong suspicion that there are thousands of cases like this carefully safeguarded by MS lawyers as well. They take and take and take and take, and once in a while offer a few shares of stock to anyone that can prove that they took, and take and take and take...
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Lindows, Inc. is all about
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I've seen enough to know that I don't like where it's headed.
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I'd be sure that this issue will get settled to the two parties satisfaction
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Mike Rowe was "satisfied" but he didn't really have much choice. He couldn't afford the type of legal team that the corporate entity could. This situation is different technically but it's the same in principle. Would Linspire ever have offered to satisfy the artist if he didn't have a friend who would notify him?
Corporations have a habit of "take first and offer to settle later--if and only if the person that was taken from notices" but they take an aggressive stance on customers that do the same in the field of software sharing. I'm not going to give Linspire a free pass because they're going to make like a good social citizen and offer to compensate or credit the author now. My opinion remains that, unless they obtained permission beforehand, their pictures should have had the original author's name and/or contact info clearly visible on the screen.
I'd still like Linux even if Linspire didn't promote it. Honestly speaking, I don't want every MS user out there to migrate to Linux and whine for the developers to work on features. I like Linux for functionality without having useless features crammed onto my desktop and opening security holes in my memory space whether I like them or not.
I value efficiency and the longer Linux stays clean of the public's demand for features and virtual kisses from their OS the happier I'll be. It's either a testament to the business scam or a symptom of a seriously dysfunctional society that everyone wants friendly and attractive computers but no one does much more than write e-mail and complain about spam.
Professional chefs have functional kitchens. Professional construction workers have functional trucks. Professional scientists have functional labs. Professional artists have functional studios.
Let the home users keep Microsoft. Maybe they'll eventually get MS to tighten up all the code holes and secure their OS. Maybe we'll get pushed to bigger and bigger hardware locks like Trusted Computing and DRM. Getting the masses to switch to Linux isn't going to stop corporate greed. Corporate greed will never stop Linux users from using Linux. Trusted computing is just another hardware algorithm. Eventually someone will figure out a way around it and then we'll have the same cycle as network admin tools: who's good and who's bad?
Even if promotion is the excuse greed is not acceptable.
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(b) Linspire may be acting within the law, but we need to know more information
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I think the law should be simplified.
If you're sharing without charging then everything's a-okay. If you're charging $60/each by bundling together a conglomeration of others' works then there should be problems.
If the laws were this simple, though, the lawyers wouldn't have jobs chasing down 12 year olds sharing music between classes.
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How many people do YOU know, who totally understand IP and Copyright laws?
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Nobody, which conveniently works out in favor of the lawyers, which a company can afford and good-hearted open source/GPL/CC people can't.
I'd have no problems with sharing if Linspire weren't charging $60/download for it. I'm confident that the author wouldn't mind if Debian asked to incorporate his art into their distro.
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FWIW, I've seen the same artwork in other Live CD's (Slax comes to mind) so Linspire aren't the only people who grabbed it
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The "FWIW" is the important part. Slax doesn't charge $60 for a download.
Copyright is GOOD when shared freely (GPL and music).
Copyright is BAD when violated to make money (corporate pirates, pirates charging money, Lindows).
Copyright is BAD when wrongfully used to attack those who share freely.
These concepts were presented in the copyright laws prior to the 80s which allowed duplicates to be created under the condition that no fee was charged for the duplicate. Then corporations got greedy and lobbied to have the laws rewritten so that they had control over anything even resembling the original art with the acceptable level of resemblance being left open to the entity with the largest legal fund.
If Debian were using this guy's art I doubt there'd be much of a problem. He might even be honored.
MS Word, no matter how much you turn on, won't ever show you a symbolic entry for font or style changes. They'll just appear as part of the text.
b *tab**tab*
That said, however, formatting a document is like formatting program code. It should be elegant, neat and concise. It tells you something about a person's intellectual processes when you open their document and see:
"*font1**size18*
*move the left margin in one inch here**font2**size10*
*move the left carriage return point 1/2" left of the left margin here*
*tab**tab*
*tab**font3**size14*
*tab**ta
*center justification*
*tab**tab**tab**start underlining*
*font1**size16*This is the title of my docuemnt
*tab**tab**tab*
*move the left margin and the carriage return point to 1" here**font2**size8*
*move the carriage return point to 1/2" here*
*move the left margin to 1/4" here**end underlining here*
*font4**size12*This is the first line of the first paragraph of my document
"
Come on. I have to laugh at something, and the fact that these people are on crack when they work in Word is just the outlet for me. The only logical explanation is "the author of the document is a dumbass that has no attention for formatting detail". The documents that I write? They're all neat, concise, and without all the extra useless style/mode/tab/font changes.
What will the mediocre population demand next from MS to try and keep up? I envision a "Word format compiler" in your future.
It's no trouble for me. I don't even think about it. It's plenty of fun to laugh at my coworkers. One has to find humor in life somewhere.
Add this:
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And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure.
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To this:
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Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer
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And it all makes perfect sense.
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but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted
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Take for example the rush to beat OS/2 to market. "Good enough" was, at that time, any GUI OS that would be next on market shelves.
Is America so repressed that easy access to pr0n drove the whole WWW boom? I mean, really, if they're not technologically oriented, what are the majority of people doing with a GUI OS? Did we really need to supply the MS empire just to give Americans solitaire?
Windows isn't X. Windows is KDE or Gnome. Why wasn't some sort of WinX with a small window manager the next step above DOS? For the billions of dollars that have poured into Microsoft through direct sales or investing, and for all the pain of squelched competition, what did Microsoft really give us?
95% of people do six things with a computer: Browse the web, e-mail (often through an HTTP interface), (new) store camera photos, listen to music, maybe print a document, maybe type a letter. Firefox, pine, usb, mplayer, lpd, and easyedit. Those six core functionalities are worth a $50+ billion dollar empire?
Like most Americans, I'm barely hanging on... Where did I go wrong?
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two words: Reveal Codes
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I always have my Word set up to show all hidden characters but it still doesn't show all codes.
I use it mostly for amusement to look at the documents that I receive from other people and see the inane and repetitious page formatting marks that they set, unset, reset, and move. It gives me a sense of how much extra trouble everyone else has constructing a document when their problems could be solved if they would plan their page formatting ahead of time.
I dunno? Where do we actually start? Binutils, glibc, gcc, bash. Okay, after the system has reached a minimally usable state?
... I actively avoid using messaging clients on a Windows system. IMHO, it's just asking for trouble. My Windows install is mainly out of habit. I haven't actually used it in months.
cvs, iptables, Xfree86, UDE, xchat, qiv, firefox, aterm, ncftp, samba, ftpd, xmms, lame, mplayer, ripperX, gaim, acroread
On Windows
mozilla, adaware, winamp, acrobat
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from stockpiles of nerve agent
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Oh, right, that industrial waste that you could find in the backyard of any coking or smelting plant or, imagine these in SW Asia, an oil refinery.
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200 tons of uranium and a cyclotron
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Which was legally sold to them by a US company operating a stock-market subsidiary in the now defunct USSR.
Chemists are just as protective about their area even with people of their own profession. I don't have a PhD but I know my business when it comes to synthetic organic chemistry, techniques, and methods.
I was synthesizing batch amounts of a material and the accepted route for purification was column chromatography. The column chromatography for this material was a PITA and the band broadening resulted in separations which were 75% at best. This meant that the tailing material had to recollected and columned again resulting in collection of 75% of that material. On a 25 gram scale the 25% loss was enough to guarantee that the procedure required at least two if not three purifications.
I developed a procedure wherein I recrystallized the impurity, not the product, from a solution of hot hexane. Normal recrystallization involves cooling the mother liquor slowly but I found this produced a coalesced blob of material at the bottom of the flask resulting in significant amounts of product being trapped in with the impurity. I found that if I cooled the mother liquor by rolling it in a roundbottom flask over a bed of dry ice the impurity would plate out of the solution on the walls of the flask and leave enough surface area that the product would readily redissolve into the solution. Recovery of the product by pouring off the mother liquor and removing the solvent in vacuo was better than 95% with better than 99% purity (1H-NMR).
My manager, being a PhD, was infuriated that I was not following the established purification method. He even went so far to complain to the department head and have me sacked with disciplinary action and a safety review because I was "insubordinate" and using "non-standard methods". He and the department head even named my procedure against me by dubbing it "shock cooling".
Nonetheless I caught my manager, on more than one occasion, rolling a roundbottom flask over a bed of dry ice in the corner of his lab bench when he thought everyone else was in a meeting or out at lunch.
Things got worse from there. I left that job.
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Chemists understand this, but most physicists do not
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As an addendum, managers in the pharmaceutical industry understand this when they need to explain their own failed experiments and neglect it when they want to browbeat their reports.
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Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of garbage touted as interesting results
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Most of it makes it through the FDA and patent office and ends up in presecription bottles.
Even with an ideal procedure it can take months for a skilled chemist to replicate the findings of another. That's why peer reviewed journals don't actually replicate experiments but only make judgement calls on plausibility. Given the exacting nature of loading the palladium and the nature of the palladium itself I'm not surprised that every lab around the world that tried it and couldn't reproduce it.
It was a classic case of,"We don't like those two upstarts so we're going to do a half-baked job at making a half-hearted attempt to replicate their experiment. When we fail we'll just blame them. There are hundreds of us and only two of them."
You left out the most important part: the terrorists that are happy to sink Exxon and Ford as American capitalist pig organizations while propping up the profits of OPEC who we all know funds terrorist cells.
Ahhh... Ahhhh! Which scenario is more likely now?