I grew up under communist policies, and then moved here...
In the last 15 to 20 years I've seen the following VERY disturbing trend here in the USA.
People here do not leave their work at work. We work EXCESSIVE hours and are expected to kill ourselves, damage our health and wound our minds to "be more productive" or "increase productivity". (Ever since I left IT, I sleep more, I have more restful sleep, and I'm not at the edge of becoming homicidal.)
In Europe, even the eastern side, people left their work at work. I recall my mother telling me stories when I started hating the working world I encountered here. "Yep, I remember how we used to have it back home, it wasn't as bad as it seemed, now that I think about it. At least we had assured work, nobody got laid off, everyone had assured (and delivered, without need for lawsuits) pensions and retirement, and when they walked out the door at the end of the day, and off the premises, the coat of "labor" wore off, and it was time to enjoy life.
(Nevermind that she left for work at 0700, came back around 1600 in the afternoon, that would be, 4 o'clock for those who cannot read 24 hr clocks.)
I don't know, but now that I look back at it, the commies weren't nearly as abusive in the work place (corruption was rampant, but at LEAST one could actually get ahead based on their skills, if those skills were formidable, here, its very hard because your healthcare is assured by massive expenses, and the healthcare is rarely there when needed, because most people do not want to "get into expenses", I should know, I've been there... or perhaps "they can't find the time" (I've spent weeks trying to plot a day off to go get a filling for a tooth...)
~D
PS - I'm not praising communism, but I am saying that there are some merits to limiting the amount of power CEO's and CoB's have. Perhaps even making them "the people"... it wouldn't hurt to make those dirty bastards have to EARN a living. They bleed the same as we do, perhaps they should put something back into society before they see another dime.
Sata has extremely fast sustained throughput... scsi, as I recall can perform more drive intensive tasks while keeping them OFF the cpu mix. When many requests for files come in, either of these will do, but personally I'd put money in SCSI unless you're really a badass geek, have some 3ware hardware, and as in "badass geek" you eat, drink and sleep HDD troubleshooting. (I'm still using parallel drives for mass storage, but they're mirrored on a pair of RAID cards. About 400 gigs, redundant, or almost 1 TB if the drives were separate)... if any of mine fail, its a quick trip to the store for another 160 GB seagate:)
Keep in mind that some of the best security minds are actually working on the other side of the fence. The guys that you hire to protect you are the ones that cannot make enough money as blackhats/criminals, or have a conscience (aka wife and kids), and couldn't possibly bring themselves to do harm.
Yep, whether under fascism communism, or corporatism, the best and most powerful individuals in history were always undergrounders, whether mafia bosses, lone shadowy figures cloaked in fear and confusion or simple psychotic priestly presidential usurpers www.whitehouse.gov:)
If you have never seen The Lord of War (Nicholas Cage movie, VERY VERY good and to the point, very surprising he'd have the nuts to say the shit he did in the movie)... GO SEE IT. I don't support the RIAA/MPAA, but that movie is a worthwhile deviance to buy (or download, as the case may be ]:)
Linux (Red Hat to be specific) reported AND HAD ALREADY fixed similar JPG/GIF/PNG flaws more than 2 years before microsoft ACKNOWLEDGED that they had similar flaws. It may have been the same bug, or not, but still, similar bugs, FAR different timetables. And these are both companies right? One did base itself on code that it didn't try to lynch you for viewing, modifying or making your own. Hint: it wasn't microsoft.
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What does it take for open source (being open to all) to report a flaw?
Finding it of course.
What does it take for a huge software house with stock to shill... errrr.. sell (since product sales do not a stock value raise anymore).
Reporting few security flaws. "Proving" successful implementations are the norm... (via bought studies of course, and occasional true stories, if they ever are unbiased).
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And of course, having worked inside an IT house, I'm quite familiar with how they work... especially M$ partners. I've never seen a SINGLE one ever report a vulnerability... whether our fault or the customer's or anyone's. Until it was fixed, or exploited, we NEVER EVER reported them... standard policy.
Actually that is the hilarious thing, I have a pair of 450 mhz machines that I recently retired, that were running a Fedora Core 3 and 4 server (upgraded to 4) and with the GUI off, that machine hosted ALL of my patching, updating, and downloading needs plus internal email. Funnier still, it has 700 megs of ram, and rarely ever, even when RUNNING X (which I use to log into remotely) with several open sessions with active proggies in them, it STILL ran relatively well, and this is an overclocked celeron 300 A running at 450 (66 mhz bus to 100 mhz bus, engineering sample from early days of celeron A)
I know what you mean... the only downside was that the machine was dying of old age... hard drives finally blew up, and I never had the patience to rebuild them (instead i have two athlon palominos running a gentoo compile farm paired up to a lovely little amd64 dual core... which reduces a full gentoo install to about 3 hours (talking about a stage1 install of the amd64 or x86 via distcc with about 12 to 30 flags depending on what I'm building that distro for...) this of course gets stored on a ftp storage unit with about 600 gigs free:)
Anyways, I'm off to shower and take a new year's food feast at my parents place... love you all and to all a great evening and morning... don't drive if you guys drink... and let the party times roll!!!!
Akamai TOOK OVER the windows update hosting for a hefty sum from MS because MS couldn't handle the massive server loads. Akamai does handle, supposedly, about 25% of the web's traffic... for businesses... I'll have to dig up the article someday.
Either way, IIS5 and 6 couldn't handle it, and I'm a bit keen on stable codebase (anyone remember playing counterstrike? its a game, but a flawless example that a GOOD codebase remains a popular one even when new games with better eye candy come out, I can still fire up a counterstrike game even now, and find more servers than I'll ever be able to get booted off of for winning too much:) Counterstrike much like apache has NOT evolved codewise... it is patched, solid, stable, and people love the damn thing.
~D (only change to CT is the inclusion of Steam Auth to prevent hacked copies of CT/Halflife from being on the network)
Actually, the amazing thing is that most of the windows update is handled by Akamai, not by MS... and akamai runs linux:) I seem to recall windows update went under grossly when the autoupdate for SP2 came out... and people had issues ever since the massive sp downloads became standard... contrast this with systems of updating like gentoo's network or even the mainstream Suse, Red Hat and Mandrake... it is quite amazing (well redhat has been dropping the ball, because RHN is not a true community project, it is a corporate project, it is done for business purposes, and unfortunately business is in the business of making cash at anyone's expense.
Looks like you guys are a true cut and dry M$ partner (resemblant of the one I worked for... I presume you are running the action pack or partner pack, instead of paying cold hard cash for M$ stuff. You're the coordinator, which means you'd be more on the business side? Perhaps you can answer that question for me. I do admire you for not accepting resumes... it'll be nice once they start outsourcing everything up there too, I can't wait until they close more plants and call centres, labor unrest is certainly beautiful to behold. And then you'll know how all the guys who graduated comp sci feel here in the USA. Especially those of us that graduated hoping we'd be writing code till we fell into a grave, for the love of the damn thing, not the "six figures", yet had to end up support monkeys because all the intro lvl dev jobs are either security clearance military stuff, or somewhere in India, Ukraine or Romania.)
What exactly does MS Office 2003 offer that is so necessary? (Besides mandatory updates that cost a regular consumer 299.99 or more in order to read.docs and.xls made by the "latest" M$ offers.
None have become zombied boxes like you describe, despite the fact that they all have modems. And none have been subjected to a virus. Most of these conditions are caused by poor administration. Or in the case of a crash, a combination of second rate or worse hardware combined with shitty drivers.
Strange, I've worked at an IT company and despite the well administered boxes in a high traffic environment (accounting offices) the servers got put on the ORBL frequently. Virus hits werent the problem, getting used as a relay was... yes that is a configuration thing, but I, as a newcomer should not have had to be the one figuring it out. And strangely, that company's IBM servers running AIX never had an issue.
You call apache a mess of code... what exactly does that make your beloved IIS 6?
I was sarcastic about speaking Hindi or Punjab, but if you say "slight" accent, you are a lot luckier than I was for the nearly 2 years I had to do windows server and client support, besides the fact that M$ got so cheap that getting one's MCP/MCSE no longer even affords those 2 free support calls we used to get when I got mine.. our new techs had to pay the full rate, which IMHO was crap. I never once got a british sounding indian guy, it was indian sounding indian guys, and the sadddest part is that they almost always required schooling. (Both myself, our lead engineer and one of the new guys always ended up solving our own problems while inadvertedly teaching those guys a thing or two. Not that the US guys were too much better, but language fluidity and understanding the local slang can be VERY useful, besides the generic "five oh six" being interpreted as 5 O 6 instead of 5 ZERO 6....)
I recall adding 2 gigs to a Dell power edge needing to serve 25 to 30 users, and using small business server on there... it certainly cried mama even after the ram upgrade. This being a dual processor beast with backplane and the works. Not a home built system that some geek uses as a server.
On the other hand, a single processor, running that tangled mess, as you call apache" can also run concurrent with vsftpd, samba, and a few other apps of choice (list is long) and never go down or bog down (crashing is overrated, slowdowns are issues).
Speaking of modems... so your servers dial out, or dial in, to get their mail? Do they have a live mailexchange record pointed at them or do they pop mail from a global acct? I betcha if you actually get a domain and point the MX record to your server, and admin a business or other popular site, your M$ favorite of quotes will come true... "I got hacked cuz I'm not obscure..." I notice your entire website is HTML, I haven't looked at the code but I didn't see any ASPX or ASP extensions, my my.
Yes indeed... most of the cross platform apps I've used have plenty of uptake, and I will present you with two that you've surely heard of before... Apache webserver and Open Office... both of which work admirably (except apache+modssl on windows) However, given that apache runs on everything from AIX to BSD to all the Linux based OS's out there, complaining that it doesn't run on an OS made for gaming and porn watching is like saying that your high powered Detroit diesel motor is a piece of shit because it only runs in your Peterbilt or Freightliner truck instead of running in your mom's toyota... granted most moms shop in toyotas and other small cars of that class, but if you're going to pull 50000 lbs of freight with a toyota, then you'd best go neuter yourself with a wooden ladle (less painful).
I migrated my folks, friends and anyone that asked me to linux or bsd, depending on their needs... (a scant few clueless sods were put on Macs instead) but generally I've never heard them complain of instability, or machine growing slower as it aged.. Also, they were no longer allowed to connect to that "wonderful" piece of utter trash, Microsoft Exchange 2003... oddly enough, the mailservers I admined for them (free of charge, because I find it fun) did not have to constantly be repatched due to being hacked by automated wardialling scripts, constantly turning windows machines into spam zombies (its gorgeous when a windows 2003 exchange box becomes a spam relay, and gets your email domain blocked on one of the ORBLs out there... deservingly so:)
Anyways, I worked for a microsoft shop, and almost went nuts trying to reconcile what I knew to be true from my own work with Unix/Linux/BSD based systems and that of my closest friends and family (all of whom are or were programmers for fun or profit at some point in their lives), add to that being a linuxite since my days in computer science (where I preferred having a system I could CONTROL at levels lower than just the GUI and a dumbed down CLI that windows offered).
Stil, it is all much like the Chinese outsourcing of US jobs... shittier products at cheap prices... but is it WORTH replacing every year or more often? A few ppl luck out without having products burn out, break, fray, or fall apart... but quite often, I would rather get a free product and know it will continue to improve and that when a "patch is issued' it FIXES the issue (personally prefer freebsd for max uptime servers, but linux hasn't failed me either).
Speaking of security, you're a microsoft fanboy, care to explain why "shatter" attacks STILL work on windows 2003 even after the service pack?? I'm curious to hear your explanation, since MS supposedly fixed it repeatedly over the past 6 years (and yet, Win2k, 2003, XP are all still vulnerable to the same old shatter attacks)... How about the Windows 95 ICMP nuke patch? Anyone remember what they really did? YES, they port blocked 139. You could actually test this, by downloading a copy of winnuke and setting it loose after binding it to a local area network host (non routeable IP on same subnet), they didn't block 139 against localhost attacks until later... with another "patch" heh... Irony at its best... they claim that OSS is a "cheap solution" but the chrome painted tin car is the one labelled Microsoft, with their new and improved INDIAN IT support group... please learn Hindi or Punjabi or you won't get much help.
~D
PPS = These folks already have the AIX infrastructure in place, both in terms of manpower and software... if they are AIX friendly they can adapt to any other UNIX fairly fast. I've worked with AIX systems as well, one was a financial database sitting side by side with two windows servers used for groupware (2003 + exchange, failover cluster of 2, professionaly administered) Oddly, whenever that AIX box went down, their database would cleanly reload without losing any data.... heh... when the windows servers crashed, and often they did... especially when the pros dec
you didn't make the mistake of presuming me a liberal... which is a wonderful thing for you, because then I'd raise even more hell:)
HINT: I like neither side because as we've all seen lately, they are just two faces of the same rotten coinlike entity.
And rotten they are, all rich, all completely out of touch with any form of intelligent life, preaching to either a bible thumping chorus of idiots (or bible thumping chorus of rich assholes), or a welfare loving chorus of illegal immigrants... neither side seems to remember that they once STOOD for something MORE than taking bribes and representing the minority (rich fucks) that now run our country.
A couple that ARE in touch are simply incapable of swaying public opinion, because the only thing that sways public opinion is catchy sound bites, not facts (as proof I recall to your memory the use of "flip flupper" (or however bush pronounced flipflopper), where the idiots of the nation favoured bush's rhetoric only because for some odd reason, a lie to get us into a war is a lot "better and honorable" than a guy trying to win votes... hmmm... one guy goes all out to violate every international law that WE in the US put forth to "punish" "war criminals" at Nuremburg, and all of a sudden we are the violators, so we just plain ignore the very courts and laws WE set up... hmmm... talk about honour and honesty... oh and the rule of law of course.
~D
PS - and just in case you think I hold with clinton, I think he should've been impeached for the REAL offense, signing NAFTA... not for getting a blowjob... given that he's in what seems to be a marriage of convenience, waiting for Hilary to put out is like pulling teeth without anesthesia, I would rather give him props for getting a mere blowjob... at least SOME ppl in the white house are still men instead of bible thumping eunuchs or plain hypocrites.
How in blazes would I be from China and be THIS articulate?? You mustve had a very SMALL selection of extremely English proficient chinese individuals to sample from.
Also, in China they practiced brutal mass suppression, we never really had much of that, ours was more individual based. China is a very populous country, ours was relatively small, being that Russia (at the slightest nod of the oh so benevolent US gov't (the people we aided by turning guns on the Nazis)) divided what was ours to all their bootlicking comrades, I lost relatives I have never even gotten a chance to know in that bloodbath, the place is populated with Russians now, properly transplanted by Stalin to create a loyalist state (and well achieved). What had been a country the size of Texas, is in modern day, slightly larger than the size of North Carolina.
Its adjacent to the Black sea (which I've mentioned before)... look up pre WW2 invasions by the russians and check the map, I won't say more, I prefer using riddles... but it makes sense you'd ask if I am from China... after all, you're native to someplace in the US eh? Only native US'ies would assume that China is in Europe... since that IS where the Black Sea is. I live here, I see that sort of ignorance from anyone that isn't foreign educated or foreign born. (I give no credit to foreigners either, but I find most of them are far more aware of "them" not just "us".)
Okay, you're talking about Semper Fidelis... I was referring to their... hmm... what would one call them... pride points? guidelines? secondary mottos?
Either way, I used to work with ex marines, and have a friend who worked FOR one... (I think he became a pilot, said it was far less risky than working IT:)
Nonetheless, they ALL said the same thing... that the one thing they learned in USMC was "nothing given, always earned"... i.e. they would earn everything they got.
It just took time... but look at Rome... it took Rome a lot longer than 300 years to get as corrupted as we have become in our measly history. And look at them now, a slum, mostly known for the Mafia, the Vatican and the Coloseum (not Colisseum):)
Oh well... all great empires have their time, and all things have an end.
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WROTE IN MY JOURNAL A FEW MONTHS BACK!!!
YES YOU ARE THE MAN!!! THANK THE FUCKING GODS ABOVE AND DEMONS BELOW!!!
yes... decentralization, indeed... taking power from the central "authority" and making it a mere arbitrator, as it SHOULD BE and AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN!!!
Taking those that gain too much by doing too little, and destroying their way of life... making them EARN what they get... so that the marine motto actually has MEANING... and they actually uphold it "never given, always earned"
The truest state of an ENLIGHTENED society is anarchy... not chaos, but self ruled men, coexisting with other self ruled men, aiding each other out of the understanding that if all succeed, and in succeed in helping one another they will advance together.
Unfortunately, the current elderly generation must die, as must ours, to allow for an untainted one to rise to power. We have been tainted by fanatical religions and greed entirely too much to be worth saving, IMHO.
Only the weak minded require leaders... those with strong minds lead themselves and are often known as "self starters".
We now have the technology to make a government by the people, FOR the people feasible. As Marx and Engels put it, if it were not for the excesses of the few, everyone could prosper, but the greed of the power mongers is nearly insatiable... they can never have enough.
Bush, Cheney, the bin ladin's in Arabia... Saddam... they all couldn't and can't get enough of power and money...
In the end, it will take a revolution, I just hope the geeks wanting a reform are strong enough to do it, and of course the old world will not go quietly, but as it was put by that oh so forgotten patriot / founding father, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants..."
Bush & his corporate buddies are the new tyrants... where are the patriots?! Or have they already been bled dry in Iraq, "protecting" our freedoms from those EVIL starving Iraqis.
Oddly enough my anonymous coward friend... you missed this very odd point...
The usa is CONSISTENTLY ranking POORLY in all the natural sciences, maths, comp sci, etc.
I grew up in the eastern block, in a country near the black sea (you're a canuck, unlike the locals here you MIGHT be able to find that on a map and guess correctly)... and I seem to recall that even nowadays, that particular country STILL outranks (math, science, comp sci, etc) everyone but the Ukraine... and on occasion Germany and S.Korea... The USA is somewhere in the number 22 to 26 spot. I am an american, but that doesn't mean I choose to be ignorant of the way this place is turning.
For the record, groundbreaking treatment != treatment available to everyone that NEEDS it (citizenship required of course). I got sick plenty of times back home, but my family didn't go broke buying meds or keeping me at the hospital. My father had ONE lousy health issue here stateside and we nearly had to sell the house just to pay the damn meds, he was self employed and couldn't afford the level of healthcare someone of his age had to keep on paying... Marxist Hacker made a VERY good point that here "the government punishes businesses UNTIL they fail" (and trust me MH42, they punish you AFTERwards too)
The place I grew up, wasn't a workers paradise, but it wasn't the shithole slum it is nowadays... unless you lived there in those days, you'd best shut the fuck up you apathetic canuck fuck!
When you work 60+ hours a week (most people assume a 40 hour week includes transit time, and plenty commute 30 min to an hour to work and then the same back... not accounting for traffic jams, the lunch "break" and such other things that end up with one leaving at 6:30 AM and returning at 5:30 PM Have you tried "growing" food when you live in an appartment? When you also work your ass off? Or perhaps work 2 jobs so you can pay for rent, utilities AND some form of entertainment to make life seem a bit less bleak than it seems when you only see the sun on the tapestry on the side of your cubicle? I drive a truck, so I have it much easier than some who are stuck only seeing the sun briefly and can't even sit and enjoy it.
Did you forget that most communist dictatorships, save for russia had at least SOME form of agricultural area which provided all foodstuffs locally? We did not import food, and most people had HOUSES (hell the apartment my folks had was bigger than our first house in the USA). My grandparents had a farm where the only thing lacking were cows... we never did without bread, water, wine, eggs, grapes, apples, tomatoes, potatoes, etc... (had to buy corn, oh well) had everything else. I had one hell of a childhood learning how it all worked. I never became much of a farmer, because my interests didn't lie there, but I saw the process, and never had to microwave a frozen dinner my entire childhood. (I also didn't get overweight eating those "primitive" foods).
I am quite familiar with "your canada" and its flaws. Even so, it has a few charming qualities, but it is too close to the USA to be worth moving to. Canucks are too busy thumbing their noses at the US... when they might as well join up and become part of the USA... its not as if they value "freedom" any more than USies do. In the words of the Three Dead Trolls "And if I want to protest, I had best know that I will risk a face full of pepperspray and a criminal record."
Bush is on his second term... but he has 3 years left. How easy do you think it would be to stage an attack on his own people, preferably nukular (remember, NUCLEAR is no longer "proper" bushglish...) The people will scream SAFETY, and give bush whatever he and cheney want... Who knows, maybe George Lucas was a prophet:) "When this crisis has abated, I will cede my emergency powers and return them to the senate." (we all know how THAT worked in SW, eh?) As long as he can start and propagate a state of emergency, or another war, it'd take a lot to get him vot
Doesn't matter which one you follow, both are "evil" in the eyes of the ignorant.
Here's my 2 cents.
As I recall even in the manifesto... an economy is there to better the people. It is not there to crush the people under the heel of the rich (aka the burgeoise) The economy is a "tool" to make sure everyone has "enough" to live well... but not to excess.
Unfortunately in the USA, and soon to be "in america" as Canada is heading that way too, the rich are crushing everyone under their heel and taking payoffs to provide tax relief to huge megacorps to offshore jobs and put mom and pop shops out. A few mom and pop outlets survive on the poor customer service that their clients receive at the megacorps, but just you watch. It takes awhile to kill all the "ones that slipped through".
I live in VA (and NC at times), and we had record unemployment here (VA), but suddenly it dropped off, despite Capital One laying off 10000 peeps over the last 2 years. How so you wonder? Easy! Their unemployment ran out... so they can no longer claim it. The figures are done as such... if they can't claim it, they must no longer be unemployed. (Been there, done that... unemployment DOES run out, you only get whats been put into it on your behalf.)
And in all honesty, people underestimate how things happen. I grew up to my teens under a dictator.
What we had: Better healthcare, better education, near ZERO unemployment, no sweatshops (our particular lord and master HATED dealing with the west because, as Hussein also put it "they lie so much, even they don't know where they stand" this being a VERY accurate assessment of the USA/Western business model, in AD&D terms, we'd call the west Lawful Evil (or soulless bureaucracy for pure material gain)... oh and we had VERY GOOD public transit... there was a bus to ANYWHERE in any town of significant size (pop. wise)... or trolley or metro or any combo of the 3. Cabs too. Most people were taxed at an even level, taxes were drawn out before pay, so what you were paid is what you got. Did I mention that people were allowed to grow their own food and did so admirably? I saw very FEW fat people until I came to the USA. Must be something in the food, air or water cuz I'm rather chubby now too:( (and this is AFTER losing over 30 lbs this past year)
What we did not have: Freedom to freely gather for whatever cause we wished to support. Freedom of religion (churches were watched, people going in or out were harassed and deprived of social boons (grades lowered, etc)). Having a second job or business was considered a crime, as was the act of abortion without a permit (same with marriage and having kids). Kept overpopulation down quite well.
His major flaws were the stifling of ideas... if the man had been less brutal and less greedy, he'd still be in power, instead of leaving a double to die on TV so he could retire with the missus. Needless to say, I presume the same will happen to Saddam, and to George Bush / Cheney when they are overthrown (I'm still waiting for the idiot in chief to declare martial law, the day he does is the day I'm a Canuck:)
if you were on the wrong side of our master there, he'd never hear of you... the job was delegated to his version of the NSA (and after a thorough investigation, usually taking a few seconds with a silencer or knife, nobody would hear of you again)... we had a saying "the walls have eyes and ears, say nothing and live long"... the only place people could talk was in the country in homes their grandparents had built in the times of the king before the "modernization" of the big cities.
You must be feeling ill, speaking such... malcontent.
Remain where you are, a team of highly trained members of the Ministry of Truth have been dispatched to your location to rectify the issue of you believing in this "freedom" nonsense. The Party has seen to it that Bushism is the way, and will be given further terms. Conservatism is irrelevant, it is only one of our tools to help you see the Truth.
Your brothers in Truth, ~The Party
PS - Sounds like it wouldn't happen... heh. yeah right, we who are geeks and READ the words of our wiser ancestors, know better:) 451 and 1984 great books... read "We" and "Brave New World" sometime:)
its the same in every job field, when employees are only in it for the money and take no cares about their work, because the company they work for is run by a bunch of assholes that will shitcan them at the drop of a pin... the employees do not care, and to them it is just a job.
You hit it on the head... "motivated and involved"... what buzzwords those would be.
Corporations need to sell stock though, not produce quality goods, and we all know quality takes time, and stocks sell better if you sell on buzzwords, vaporware and crap items with quick time to market (of course in Microsoft terms, quick time to market means only 1 or 2 years of delay with significant reductions in feature set, security and quality, but hey, they're the epitome of the corporate american dream... sell shit, make moolah, repeat.)
You're still living in the 20's when people actually WANTED to buy american cars, and respected americans a lot more than they do now because we had quality in our products, and we took pride in a job well done. Something most of us aren't ALLOWED anymore at work, especially in the high tech sector where everything is about "buy the cheapest shit you can, because it'll be outdated before the 1 month it takes to blow up, that high quality stuff won't offer us the *wasteful company tax cut* from the republicans". I've sold plenty of execs when I was a tech, on "new microsoft technologies" and they swallowed it up hook line and sinker.
~D
I'm not asking you to migrate, I'm simply curious
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I just want to know why your family is so against migration, (and I'm still curious about the apps you can't get replaced in *nix, I know there's a couple that are hell to get working and some that don't exist, but the number is getting extremely small as of late).
And I might have either drop in alternatives or something that does the job... A lot of your apps will run absolutely fine in Wine. Even internet explorer runs in wine (it actually runs better because spyware you will invariably incur using that Piece of Crap (tm)(c)(R) will not bork up the entire system, just the fake windows install that your apps think they're using.
~D
PS - "why" does your family refuse to use linux? It isn't as if the "my computer" button can't be created to point to/home/familymemberinquestion directory:) I'm not being mean here, I'm simply curious what makes for such vehement denial (my mom's not a geek but she prefers solaris at work, linux at home, and hates being stuck on "such a slow system" (her 2.2 ghz windows box, vs the Solaris Ultrasparcs she occasionally logs onto at work, if she can adapt, heh heh, my father made the excuse that he doesn't know anything except windows, but since all he does is surf the web and check email/orders he has little reason to complain once I put a firefox/evolution link on his desktop, I run a fully patched version of Xine with the matroska codec pack on his rig as well, he likes to rip movies to the file server and then watch them on his comp... all doable).
And yes, VERY easy... and at least I didn't have to hunt for drivers to have my brand new, Athlon X2 board running on Linux... I spent a whole day troubleshooting the issue with my nvidia motherboard drivers in XP (the gaming side for this rig, I have a few games that DONT run in linux... and as I've said many times before, the only reason I keep XP on this rig is to game, Starcraft, all the Warcraft games, Doom 1 2 3, Quake 1 2 3 4, Unreal, UT, Half Life, Hexen 1 2, Heretic 1 2, all run in Linux without issues using Wine or native clients (Q4 and D3). I haven't checked Half life 2.
Overall I'd say that since I do NOT trust Windows with my business and only do my banking and important email from my linux box.
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I grew up under communist policies, and then moved here...
In the last 15 to 20 years I've seen the following VERY disturbing trend here in the USA.
People here do not leave their work at work. We work EXCESSIVE hours and are expected to kill ourselves, damage our health and wound our minds to "be more productive" or "increase productivity". (Ever since I left IT, I sleep more, I have more restful sleep, and I'm not at the edge of becoming homicidal.)
In Europe, even the eastern side, people left their work at work. I recall my mother telling me stories when I started hating the working world I encountered here. "Yep, I remember how we used to have it back home, it wasn't as bad as it seemed, now that I think about it. At least we had assured work, nobody got laid off, everyone had assured (and delivered, without need for lawsuits) pensions and retirement, and when they walked out the door at the end of the day, and off the premises, the coat of "labor" wore off, and it was time to enjoy life.
(Nevermind that she left for work at 0700, came back around 1600 in the afternoon, that would be, 4 o'clock for those who cannot read 24 hr clocks.)
I don't know, but now that I look back at it, the commies weren't nearly as abusive in the work place (corruption was rampant, but at LEAST one could actually get ahead based on their skills, if those skills were formidable, here, its very hard because your healthcare is assured by massive expenses, and the healthcare is rarely there when needed, because most people do not want to "get into expenses", I should know, I've been there... or perhaps "they can't find the time" (I've spent weeks trying to plot a day off to go get a filling for a tooth...)
~D
PS - I'm not praising communism, but I am saying that there are some merits to limiting the amount of power CEO's and CoB's have. Perhaps even making them "the people"... it wouldn't hurt to make those dirty bastards have to EARN a living. They bleed the same as we do, perhaps they should put something back into society before they see another dime.
Sata has extremely fast sustained throughput... scsi, as I recall can perform more drive intensive tasks while keeping them OFF the cpu mix. When many requests for files come in, either of these will do, but personally I'd put money in SCSI unless you're really a badass geek, have some 3ware hardware, and as in "badass geek" you eat, drink and sleep HDD troubleshooting. (I'm still using parallel drives for mass storage, but they're mirrored on a pair of RAID cards. About 400 gigs, redundant, or almost 1 TB if the drives were separate)... if any of mine fail, its a quick trip to the store for another 160 GB seagate :)
~D
Keep in mind that some of the best security minds are actually working on the other side of the fence. The guys that you hire to protect you are the ones that cannot make enough money as blackhats/criminals, or have a conscience (aka wife and kids), and couldn't possibly bring themselves to do harm.
:)
Yep, whether under fascism communism, or corporatism, the best and most powerful individuals in history were always undergrounders, whether mafia bosses, lone shadowy figures cloaked in fear and confusion or simple psychotic priestly presidential usurpers www.whitehouse.gov
If you have never seen The Lord of War (Nicholas Cage movie, VERY VERY good and to the point, very surprising he'd have the nuts to say the shit he did in the movie)... GO SEE IT. I don't support the RIAA/MPAA, but that movie is a worthwhile deviance to buy (or download, as the case may be ]:)
~D
What does it take for open source (being open to all) to report a flaw?
***Finding it of course.
What does it take for a huge software house with stock to shill... errrr.. sell?
***Exploits running about in the wild do not a good reason make, as we can see from this latest XP exploit this last week.
Let me put this into context.
Linux (Red Hat to be specific) reported AND HAD ALREADY fixed similar JPG/GIF/PNG flaws more than 2 years before microsoft ACKNOWLEDGED that they had similar flaws. It may have been the same bug, or not, but still, similar bugs, FAR different timetables. And these are both companies right? One did base itself on code that it didn't try to lynch you for viewing, modifying or making your own. Hint: it wasn't microsoft.
--------------
What does it take for open source (being open to all) to report a flaw?
Finding it of course.
What does it take for a huge software house with stock to shill... errrr.. sell (since product sales do not a stock value raise anymore).
Reporting few security flaws. "Proving" successful implementations are the norm... (via bought studies of course, and occasional true stories, if they ever are unbiased).
--------------
And of course, having worked inside an IT house, I'm quite familiar with how they work... especially M$ partners. I've never seen a SINGLE one ever report a vulnerability... whether our fault or the customer's or anyone's. Until it was fixed, or exploited, we NEVER EVER reported them... standard policy.
~D
Actually that is the hilarious thing, I have a pair of 450 mhz machines that I recently retired, that were running a Fedora Core 3 and 4 server (upgraded to 4) and with the GUI off, that machine hosted ALL of my patching, updating, and downloading needs plus internal email. Funnier still, it has 700 megs of ram, and rarely ever, even when RUNNING X (which I use to log into remotely) with several open sessions with active proggies in them, it STILL ran relatively well, and this is an overclocked celeron 300 A running at 450 (66 mhz bus to 100 mhz bus, engineering sample from early days of celeron A)
:)
I know what you mean... the only downside was that the machine was dying of old age... hard drives finally blew up, and I never had the patience to rebuild them (instead i have two athlon palominos running a gentoo compile farm paired up to a lovely little amd64 dual core... which reduces a full gentoo install to about 3 hours (talking about a stage1 install of the amd64 or x86 via distcc with about 12 to 30 flags depending on what I'm building that distro for...) this of course gets stored on a ftp storage unit with about 600 gigs free
Anyways, I'm off to shower and take a new year's food feast at my parents place... love you all and to all a great evening and morning... don't drive if you guys drink... and let the party times roll!!!!
~D
Akamai TOOK OVER the windows update hosting for a hefty sum from MS because MS couldn't handle the massive server loads. Akamai does handle, supposedly, about 25% of the web's traffic... for businesses... I'll have to dig up the article someday.
:) Counterstrike much like apache has NOT evolved codewise... it is patched, solid, stable, and people love the damn thing.
Either way, IIS5 and 6 couldn't handle it, and I'm a bit keen on stable codebase (anyone remember playing counterstrike? its a game, but a flawless example that a GOOD codebase remains a popular one even when new games with better eye candy come out, I can still fire up a counterstrike game even now, and find more servers than I'll ever be able to get booted off of for winning too much
~D (only change to CT is the inclusion of Steam Auth to prevent hacked copies of CT/Halflife from being on the network)
Actually, the amazing thing is that most of the windows update is handled by Akamai, not by MS... and akamai runs linux :) I seem to recall windows update went under grossly when the autoupdate for SP2 came out... and people had issues ever since the massive sp downloads became standard... contrast this with systems of updating like gentoo's network or even the mainstream Suse, Red Hat and Mandrake... it is quite amazing (well redhat has been dropping the ball, because RHN is not a true community project, it is a corporate project, it is done for business purposes, and unfortunately business is in the business of making cash at anyone's expense.
Hence why I prefer the community efforts.
~D
Happy new year's indeed.
Looks like you guys are a true cut and dry M$ partner (resemblant of the one I worked for... I presume you are running the action pack or partner pack, instead of paying cold hard cash for M$ stuff. You're the coordinator, which means you'd be more on the business side? Perhaps you can answer that question for me. I do admire you for not accepting resumes... it'll be nice once they start outsourcing everything up there too, I can't wait until they close more plants and call centres, labor unrest is certainly beautiful to behold. And then you'll know how all the guys who graduated comp sci feel here in the USA. Especially those of us that graduated hoping we'd be writing code till we fell into a grave, for the love of the damn thing, not the "six figures", yet had to end up support monkeys because all the intro lvl dev jobs are either security clearance military stuff, or somewhere in India, Ukraine or Romania.)
.docs and .xls made by the "latest" M$ offers.
What exactly does MS Office 2003 offer that is so necessary? (Besides mandatory updates that cost a regular consumer 299.99 or more in order to read
None have become zombied boxes like you describe, despite the fact that they all have modems. And none have been subjected to a virus. Most of these conditions are caused by poor administration. Or in the case of a crash, a combination of second rate or worse hardware combined with shitty drivers.
Strange, I've worked at an IT company and despite the well administered boxes in a high traffic environment (accounting offices) the servers got put on the ORBL frequently. Virus hits werent the problem, getting used as a relay was... yes that is a configuration thing, but I, as a newcomer should not have had to be the one figuring it out. And strangely, that company's IBM servers running AIX never had an issue.
You call apache a mess of code... what exactly does that make your beloved IIS 6?
I was sarcastic about speaking Hindi or Punjab, but if you say "slight" accent, you are a lot luckier than I was for the nearly 2 years I had to do windows server and client support, besides the fact that M$ got so cheap that getting one's MCP/MCSE no longer even affords those 2 free support calls we used to get when I got mine.. our new techs had to pay the full rate, which IMHO was crap. I never once got a british sounding indian guy, it was indian sounding indian guys, and the sadddest part is that they almost always required schooling. (Both myself, our lead engineer and one of the new guys always ended up solving our own problems while inadvertedly teaching those guys a thing or two. Not that the US guys were too much better, but language fluidity and understanding the local slang can be VERY useful, besides the generic "five oh six" being interpreted as 5 O 6 instead of 5 ZERO 6....)
I recall adding 2 gigs to a Dell power edge needing to serve 25 to 30 users, and using small business server on there... it certainly cried mama even after the ram upgrade. This being a dual processor beast with backplane and the works. Not a home built system that some geek uses as a server.
On the other hand, a single processor, running that tangled mess, as you call apache" can also run concurrent with vsftpd, samba, and a few other apps of choice (list is long) and never go down or bog down (crashing is overrated, slowdowns are issues).
Speaking of modems... so your servers dial out, or dial in, to get their mail? Do they have a live mailexchange record pointed at them or do they pop mail from a global acct? I betcha if you actually get a domain and point the MX record to your server, and admin a business or other popular site, your M$ favorite of quotes will come true... "I got hacked cuz I'm not obscure..." I notice your entire website is HTML, I haven't looked at the code but I didn't see any ASPX or ASP extensions, my my.
~D
PS - happy new year...
Yes indeed... most of the cross platform apps I've used have plenty of uptake, and I will present you with two that you've surely heard of before... Apache webserver and Open Office... both of which work admirably (except apache+modssl on windows) However, given that apache runs on everything from AIX to BSD to all the Linux based OS's out there, complaining that it doesn't run on an OS made for gaming and porn watching is like saying that your high powered Detroit diesel motor is a piece of shit because it only runs in your Peterbilt or Freightliner truck instead of running in your mom's toyota... granted most moms shop in toyotas and other small cars of that class, but if you're going to pull 50000 lbs of freight with a toyota, then you'd best go neuter yourself with a wooden ladle (less painful).
:)
I migrated my folks, friends and anyone that asked me to linux or bsd, depending on their needs... (a scant few clueless sods were put on Macs instead) but generally I've never heard them complain of instability, or machine growing slower as it aged.. Also, they were no longer allowed to connect to that "wonderful" piece of utter trash, Microsoft Exchange 2003... oddly enough, the mailservers I admined for them (free of charge, because I find it fun) did not have to constantly be repatched due to being hacked by automated wardialling scripts, constantly turning windows machines into spam zombies (its gorgeous when a windows 2003 exchange box becomes a spam relay, and gets your email domain blocked on one of the ORBLs out there... deservingly so
Anyways, I worked for a microsoft shop, and almost went nuts trying to reconcile what I knew to be true from my own work with Unix/Linux/BSD based systems and that of my closest friends and family (all of whom are or were programmers for fun or profit at some point in their lives), add to that being a linuxite since my days in computer science (where I preferred having a system I could CONTROL at levels lower than just the GUI and a dumbed down CLI that windows offered).
Stil, it is all much like the Chinese outsourcing of US jobs... shittier products at cheap prices... but is it WORTH replacing every year or more often? A few ppl luck out without having products burn out, break, fray, or fall apart... but quite often, I would rather get a free product and know it will continue to improve and that when a "patch is issued' it FIXES the issue (personally prefer freebsd for max uptime servers, but linux hasn't failed me either).
Speaking of security, you're a microsoft fanboy, care to explain why "shatter" attacks STILL work on windows 2003 even after the service pack?? I'm curious to hear your explanation, since MS supposedly fixed it repeatedly over the past 6 years (and yet, Win2k, 2003, XP are all still vulnerable to the same old shatter attacks)... How about the Windows 95 ICMP nuke patch? Anyone remember what they really did? YES, they port blocked 139. You could actually test this, by downloading a copy of winnuke and setting it loose after binding it to a local area network host (non routeable IP on same subnet), they didn't block 139 against localhost attacks until later... with another "patch" heh... Irony at its best... they claim that OSS is a "cheap solution" but the chrome painted tin car is the one labelled Microsoft, with their new and improved INDIAN IT support group... please learn Hindi or Punjabi or you won't get much help.
~D
PPS = These folks already have the AIX infrastructure in place, both in terms of manpower and software... if they are AIX friendly they can adapt to any other UNIX fairly fast. I've worked with AIX systems as well, one was a financial database sitting side by side with two windows servers used for groupware (2003 + exchange, failover cluster of 2, professionaly administered) Oddly, whenever that AIX box went down, their database would cleanly reload without losing any data.... heh... when the windows servers crashed, and often they did... especially when the pros dec
you didn't make the mistake of presuming me a liberal... which is a wonderful thing for you, because then I'd raise even more hell :)
HINT: I like neither side because as we've all seen lately, they are just two faces of the same rotten coinlike entity.
And rotten they are, all rich, all completely out of touch with any form of intelligent life, preaching to either a bible thumping chorus of idiots (or bible thumping chorus of rich assholes), or a welfare loving chorus of illegal immigrants... neither side seems to remember that they once STOOD for something MORE than taking bribes and representing the minority (rich fucks) that now run our country.
A couple that ARE in touch are simply incapable of swaying public opinion, because the only thing that sways public opinion is catchy sound bites, not facts (as proof I recall to your memory the use of "flip flupper" (or however bush pronounced flipflopper), where the idiots of the nation favoured bush's rhetoric only because for some odd reason, a lie to get us into a war is a lot "better and honorable" than a guy trying to win votes... hmmm... one guy goes all out to violate every international law that WE in the US put forth to "punish" "war criminals" at Nuremburg, and all of a sudden we are the violators, so we just plain ignore the very courts and laws WE set up... hmmm... talk about honour and honesty... oh and the rule of law of course.
~D
PS - and just in case you think I hold with clinton, I think he should've been impeached for the REAL offense, signing NAFTA... not for getting a blowjob... given that he's in what seems to be a marriage of convenience, waiting for Hilary to put out is like pulling teeth without anesthesia, I would rather give him props for getting a mere blowjob... at least SOME ppl in the white house are still men instead of bible thumping eunuchs or plain hypocrites.
How in blazes would I be from China and be THIS articulate?? You mustve had a very SMALL selection of extremely English proficient chinese individuals to sample from.
Also, in China they practiced brutal mass suppression, we never really had much of that, ours was more individual based. China is a very populous country, ours was relatively small, being that Russia (at the slightest nod of the oh so benevolent US gov't (the people we aided by turning guns on the Nazis)) divided what was ours to all their bootlicking comrades, I lost relatives I have never even gotten a chance to know in that bloodbath, the place is populated with Russians now, properly transplanted by Stalin to create a loyalist state (and well achieved). What had been a country the size of Texas, is in modern day, slightly larger than the size of North Carolina.
Its adjacent to the Black sea (which I've mentioned before)... look up pre WW2 invasions by the russians and check the map, I won't say more, I prefer using riddles... but it makes sense you'd ask if I am from China... after all, you're native to someplace in the US eh? Only native US'ies would assume that China is in Europe... since that IS where the Black Sea is. I live here, I see that sort of ignorance from anyone that isn't foreign educated or foreign born. (I give no credit to foreigners either, but I find most of them are far more aware of "them" not just "us".)
~D
Okay, you're talking about Semper Fidelis... I was referring to their ... hmm... what would one call them... pride points? guidelines? secondary mottos?
:)
Either way, I used to work with ex marines, and have a friend who worked FOR one... (I think he became a pilot, said it was far less risky than working IT
Nonetheless, they ALL said the same thing... that the one thing they learned in USMC was "nothing given, always earned"... i.e. they would earn everything they got.
~D
And obviously they FAILED!
:)
It just took time... but look at Rome... it took Rome a lot longer than 300 years to get as corrupted as we have become in our measly history. And look at them now, a slum, mostly known for the Mafia, the Vatican and the Coloseum (not Colisseum)
Oh well... all great empires have their time, and all things have an end.
~D
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WROTE IN MY JOURNAL A FEW MONTHS BACK!!!
YES YOU ARE THE MAN!!! THANK THE FUCKING GODS ABOVE AND DEMONS BELOW!!!
yes... decentralization, indeed... taking power from the central "authority" and making it a mere arbitrator, as it SHOULD BE and AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN!!!
Taking those that gain too much by doing too little, and destroying their way of life... making them EARN what they get... so that the marine motto actually has MEANING... and they actually uphold it "never given, always earned"
~D
I never said anything about ruling.
The truest state of an ENLIGHTENED society is anarchy... not chaos, but self ruled men, coexisting with other self ruled men, aiding each other out of the understanding that if all succeed, and in succeed in helping one another they will advance together.
Unfortunately, the current elderly generation must die, as must ours, to allow for an untainted one to rise to power. We have been tainted by fanatical religions and greed entirely too much to be worth saving, IMHO.
Only the weak minded require leaders... those with strong minds lead themselves and are often known as "self starters".
~D
We now have the technology to make a government by the people, FOR the people feasible. As Marx and Engels put it, if it were not for the excesses of the few, everyone could prosper, but the greed of the power mongers is nearly insatiable... they can never have enough.
Bush, Cheney, the bin ladin's in Arabia... Saddam... they all couldn't and can't get enough of power and money...
In the end, it will take a revolution, I just hope the geeks wanting a reform are strong enough to do it, and of course the old world will not go quietly, but as it was put by that oh so forgotten patriot / founding father, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants..."
Bush & his corporate buddies are the new tyrants... where are the patriots?! Or have they already been bled dry in Iraq, "protecting" our freedoms from those EVIL starving Iraqis.
~D
Oddly enough my anonymous coward friend... you missed this very odd point...
:) "When this crisis has abated, I will cede my emergency powers and return them to the senate." (we all know how THAT worked in SW, eh?) As long as he can start and propagate a state of emergency, or another war, it'd take a lot to get him vot
The usa is CONSISTENTLY ranking POORLY in all the natural sciences, maths, comp sci, etc.
I grew up in the eastern block, in a country near the black sea (you're a canuck, unlike the locals here you MIGHT be able to find that on a map and guess correctly)... and I seem to recall that even nowadays, that particular country STILL outranks (math, science, comp sci, etc) everyone but the Ukraine... and on occasion Germany and S.Korea... The USA is somewhere in the number 22 to 26 spot. I am an american, but that doesn't mean I choose to be ignorant of the way this place is turning.
For the record, groundbreaking treatment != treatment available to everyone that NEEDS it (citizenship required of course). I got sick plenty of times back home, but my family didn't go broke buying meds or keeping me at the hospital. My father had ONE lousy health issue here stateside and we nearly had to sell the house just to pay the damn meds, he was self employed and couldn't afford the level of healthcare someone of his age had to keep on paying... Marxist Hacker made a VERY good point that here "the government punishes businesses UNTIL they fail" (and trust me MH42, they punish you AFTERwards too)
The place I grew up, wasn't a workers paradise, but it wasn't the shithole slum it is nowadays... unless you lived there in those days, you'd best shut the fuck up you apathetic canuck fuck!
When you work 60+ hours a week (most people assume a 40 hour week includes transit time, and plenty commute 30 min to an hour to work and then the same back... not accounting for traffic jams, the lunch "break" and such other things that end up with one leaving at 6:30 AM and returning at 5:30 PM Have you tried "growing" food when you live in an appartment? When you also work your ass off? Or perhaps work 2 jobs so you can pay for rent, utilities AND some form of entertainment to make life seem a bit less bleak than it seems when you only see the sun on the tapestry on the side of your cubicle? I drive a truck, so I have it much easier than some who are stuck only seeing the sun briefly and can't even sit and enjoy it.
Did you forget that most communist dictatorships, save for russia had at least SOME form of agricultural area which provided all foodstuffs locally? We did not import food, and most people had HOUSES (hell the apartment my folks had was bigger than our first house in the USA). My grandparents had a farm where the only thing lacking were cows... we never did without bread, water, wine, eggs, grapes, apples, tomatoes, potatoes, etc... (had to buy corn, oh well) had everything else. I had one hell of a childhood learning how it all worked. I never became much of a farmer, because my interests didn't lie there, but I saw the process, and never had to microwave a frozen dinner my entire childhood. (I also didn't get overweight eating those "primitive" foods).
I am quite familiar with "your canada" and its flaws. Even so, it has a few charming qualities, but it is too close to the USA to be worth moving to. Canucks are too busy thumbing their noses at the US... when they might as well join up and become part of the USA... its not as if they value "freedom" any more than USies do. In the words of the Three Dead Trolls "And if I want to protest, I had best know that I will risk a face full of pepperspray and a criminal record."
Bush is on his second term... but he has 3 years left. How easy do you think it would be to stage an attack on his own people, preferably nukular (remember, NUCLEAR is no longer "proper" bushglish...) The people will scream SAFETY, and give bush whatever he and cheney want... Who knows, maybe George Lucas was a prophet
I agree here.
Doesn't matter which one you follow, both are "evil" in the eyes of the ignorant.
Here's my 2 cents.
As I recall even in the manifesto... an economy is there to better the people. It is not there to crush the people under the heel of the rich (aka the burgeoise) The economy is a "tool" to make sure everyone has "enough" to live well... but not to excess.
Unfortunately in the USA, and soon to be "in america" as Canada is heading that way too, the rich are crushing everyone under their heel and taking payoffs to provide tax relief to huge megacorps to offshore jobs and put mom and pop shops out. A few mom and pop outlets survive on the poor customer service that their clients receive at the megacorps, but just you watch. It takes awhile to kill all the "ones that slipped through".
I live in VA (and NC at times), and we had record unemployment here (VA), but suddenly it dropped off, despite Capital One laying off 10000 peeps over the last 2 years. How so you wonder? Easy! Their unemployment ran out... so they can no longer claim it. The figures are done as such... if they can't claim it, they must no longer be unemployed. (Been there, done that... unemployment DOES run out, you only get whats been put into it on your behalf.)
~D
And in all honesty, people underestimate how things happen. I grew up to my teens under a dictator.
:( (and this is AFTER losing over 30 lbs this past year)
:)
What we had:
Better healthcare, better education, near ZERO unemployment, no sweatshops (our particular lord and master HATED dealing with the west because, as Hussein also put it "they lie so much, even they don't know where they stand" this being a VERY accurate assessment of the USA/Western business model, in AD&D terms, we'd call the west Lawful Evil (or soulless bureaucracy for pure material gain)... oh and we had VERY GOOD public transit... there was a bus to ANYWHERE in any town of significant size (pop. wise)... or trolley or metro or any combo of the 3. Cabs too. Most people were taxed at an even level, taxes were drawn out before pay, so what you were paid is what you got. Did I mention that people were allowed to grow their own food and did so admirably? I saw very FEW fat people until I came to the USA. Must be something in the food, air or water cuz I'm rather chubby now too
What we did not have:
Freedom to freely gather for whatever cause we wished to support. Freedom of religion (churches were watched, people going in or out were harassed and deprived of social boons (grades lowered, etc)). Having a second job or business was considered a crime, as was the act of abortion without a permit (same with marriage and having kids). Kept overpopulation down quite well.
His major flaws were the stifling of ideas... if the man had been less brutal and less greedy, he'd still be in power, instead of leaving a double to die on TV so he could retire with the missus. Needless to say, I presume the same will happen to Saddam, and to George Bush / Cheney when they are overthrown (I'm still waiting for the idiot in chief to declare martial law, the day he does is the day I'm a Canuck
if you were on the wrong side of our master there, he'd never hear of you... the job was delegated to his version of the NSA (and after a thorough investigation, usually taking a few seconds with a silencer or knife, nobody would hear of you again)... we had a saying "the walls have eyes and ears, say nothing and live long"... the only place people could talk was in the country in homes their grandparents had built in the times of the king before the "modernization" of the big cities.
~Daedalus
You must be feeling ill, speaking such... malcontent.
:) 451 and 1984 great books... read "We" and "Brave New World" sometime :)
Remain where you are, a team of highly trained members of the Ministry of Truth have been dispatched to your location to rectify the issue of you believing in this "freedom" nonsense. The Party has seen to it that Bushism is the way, and will be given further terms. Conservatism is irrelevant, it is only one of our tools to help you see the Truth.
Your brothers in Truth,
~The Party
PS - Sounds like it wouldn't happen... heh. yeah right, we who are geeks and READ the words of our wiser ancestors, know better
its the same in every job field, when employees are only in it for the money and take no cares about their work, because the company they work for is run by a bunch of assholes that will shitcan them at the drop of a pin... the employees do not care, and to them it is just a job.
You hit it on the head... "motivated and involved"... what buzzwords those would be.
Corporations need to sell stock though, not produce quality goods, and we all know quality takes time, and stocks sell better if you sell on buzzwords, vaporware and crap items with quick time to market (of course in Microsoft terms, quick time to market means only 1 or 2 years of delay with significant reductions in feature set, security and quality, but hey, they're the epitome of the corporate american dream... sell shit, make moolah, repeat.)
You're still living in the 20's when people actually WANTED to buy american cars, and respected americans a lot more than they do now because we had quality in our products, and we took pride in a job well done. Something most of us aren't ALLOWED anymore at work, especially in the high tech sector where everything is about "buy the cheapest shit you can, because it'll be outdated before the 1 month it takes to blow up, that high quality stuff won't offer us the *wasteful company tax cut* from the republicans". I've sold plenty of execs when I was a tech, on "new microsoft technologies" and they swallowed it up hook line and sinker.
~D
I just want to know why your family is so against migration, (and I'm still curious about the apps you can't get replaced in *nix, I know there's a couple that are hell to get working and some that don't exist, but the number is getting extremely small as of late).
~D
And I might have either drop in alternatives or something that does the job... A lot of your apps will run absolutely fine in Wine. Even internet explorer runs in wine (it actually runs better because spyware you will invariably incur using that Piece of Crap (tm)(c)(R) will not bork up the entire system, just the fake windows install that your apps think they're using.
/home/familymemberinquestion directory :) I'm not being mean here, I'm simply curious what makes for such vehement denial (my mom's not a geek but she prefers solaris at work, linux at home, and hates being stuck on "such a slow system" (her 2.2 ghz windows box, vs the Solaris Ultrasparcs she occasionally logs onto at work, if she can adapt, heh heh, my father made the excuse that he doesn't know anything except windows, but since all he does is surf the web and check email/orders he has little reason to complain once I put a firefox/evolution link on his desktop, I run a fully patched version of Xine with the matroska codec pack on his rig as well, he likes to rip movies to the file server and then watch them on his comp... all doable).
~D
PS - "why" does your family refuse to use linux? It isn't as if the "my computer" button can't be created to point to
And yes, VERY easy... and at least I didn't have to hunt for drivers to have my brand new, Athlon X2 board running on Linux... I spent a whole day troubleshooting the issue with my nvidia motherboard drivers in XP (the gaming side for this rig, I have a few games that DONT run in linux... and as I've said many times before, the only reason I keep XP on this rig is to game, Starcraft, all the Warcraft games, Doom 1 2 3, Quake 1 2 3 4, Unreal, UT, Half Life, Hexen 1 2, Heretic 1 2, all run in Linux without issues using Wine or native clients (Q4 and D3). I haven't checked Half life 2.
Overall I'd say that since I do NOT trust Windows with my business and only do my banking and important email from my linux box.
~D