NASA _is_ a military project. They don't say that, but back in the 50s/60s, NASA was around for one purpose, and one purpose only: to tell the Soviets that we can launch Nuclear Missiles at you with ICBMs.
BTW, surely 'there should be VERY few decisions made at the federal level that affect citizens' and 'The fed should only be there to provide for the nation defense' are in direct contradiction?
Personally, I feel that the US has devolution pretty well sorted. As a Brit, I'd prefer if universal healthcare was arranged, but that's highly unlikely. I think the US is going to have major problems if they don't make healthcare public for the most part. From my standing, it seems that without this, it's going to mean more and more Americans go without healthcare (which is a BAD thing) and the price just goes up and up. I don't mind so much the division of poor and rich, it's just when people can't afford to goto the hospital to have treatment then it makes you wonder if those that have got so rich off the system shouldn't help those who can't for whatever reason.
Just because Sweden is geographically close to Finland does not mean they think the same way in terms of politics and law enforcement.
For instance, Finland is part of the Euro currency, whereas Sweden still has the Swedish Kroner (and I believe that they are quite opposed to the Euro).
So Sweden could be very much a 'pirate heaven'. Their cities have a govt funded fibre optics everywhere, and I'm sure that the govt's wouldn't be happy if they weren't even being used - something that is a possibility if their was no BitTorrent.
It depends what you think government is there to do and what its goal is.
Is it to facilitate leaps in humankind (eg: NASA, the Internet, modern avionics) all started out as federal projects. If these were brought down to the local level, their simply wouldn't be enough resources to arrange the Apollo project for example.
If, however, you think it is to arrange healthcare, education, waste collection and similar, then your approach is probably better.
In my opinion, a strong federal government is probably best. Otherwise you get nowhere - local government by its nature will not provide huge sums of cash for big projects that make the big differences to humankind.
As for the UN, all it is basically a meeting house for others - it's a bit like blaming eBay because you got ripped off. eBay is partly responsible, but really the fault lies with the governments behind it.
Also comes with a free inkejet printer and 3 years warranty and 3 years 24/7 tech support. Also has a 80GB HDD, and the DVD burner is $80.
Sure, it doesn't have Firewire, but why do you need it? The only device I could think of that required it lately was the iPod, and now Apple ship both USB and FW connectors.
Well people are not paying attention very much to the styling of Apple's computer line as much as the price - Apple's desktop market share has slumped from 6% in 1997 to 1.6% in 2003. Probably be even worse in 2004 thanks to the total f-up with the new iMac G5 (not having your 'flagship computer' on sale for a month is not good business sense).
3 months ago from here is Sept. Considering SP2 was only released on the internet in 6th of August, how long do you think it took:
1) For Acer to rebuild their harddrive images and test them with every model they use. 2) For them to rebuild and press millions of new recovery CDs w/ SP2, tested and all. 3) For them to ship all the 'old' laptops that are too late to have the new HDD applied because they are in the warehouse and calling them back would be unfeasable. 4) For them to train their multiple call centres on how to troubleshoot SP2 and it's various changes.
It's probably much more than a month. Apple took longer than that to get a patched Apache install out to people one time.
Are Apple better with release dates? Not a chance. How long did it take Apple to get iPod Mini's from release date to peoples hands - it was around 3 months. Roughly the same with their 30" displays.
For most users SP2 is a huge help. It's not a magic bullet, but it fixes 90% of the security issues people have, leaving only spyware from exploits in IE, Windows and user-consented left. All of these are much harder to find and fix, but the new automatic updates feature does make it a lot harder to stop applying updates.
You are probably looking at the wrong line of Dells. Dells website is pretty poor unless you know what you are doing and you'll soon find you can build the exact same machine with the same specs for radically different prices just by going on different paths on the website.
Look at the 4200 I think. They are the cheapest, and sure, they have onboard video but the Radeon 9200 is shit anyway. And you can add whatever AGP graphics card, something I'd take over a built in 9200 card.
WTF? Seriously, just get some cheap dells with some LCD monitors. That's going to be your cheapest option. I've done your TCO report for you.
You can install Linux if you want or you could learn how to keep Windows secure (basically: ensure it's behind a NAT router with a firewall and use Thunderbird and Firefox).
I think they are getting way too many members to cope with at the moment (with TB and suprnova going down). They got about 15,000 in 12 hours (went from 140,000 last night to 155,000 this morning when I checked).
This is going to be a huge issue for all the new/small torrents sites - how do they work with the load that millions of new users demand?
BTW: If you have an IRC client, you can join #bt, #bt-gm and #tvtorrents on efnet. #bt and #tvtorrents serves TV show torrents and #bt-gm serves torrents for games and movies.
Since it's IRC it stands a somewhat better chance of surviving.
But how long do we as an OSS community stop very new and exciting development in the premise of 'it doesn't work on 0.5% of systems'?!
Linux _desperately_ needs to have a working, easy to use RAD environment. Something as simple, or simpler than Visual Basic. I want to be able to create a simple Linux application by dragging and dropping some form elements onto a page and double clicking on a button and typing a few lines of simple code and have it all working.
Glade is good, but it's not easy enough.
Mono has the possibility of bringing this to fruition. I want to see sharpdevelop making good GTK# apps in a few hours.
All that would happen on Linux is that they'd type their root password and install Kazaa or whatever anyway.
Even if they didn't, the home directory is more than adequate for spyware to live. As long as it's executable, it can be ran from there.
As for your comment about deleting spyware, you can do the exact same one windows. Kill the process in the process list, delete the files on the filesystem and remove the various registry keys to stop it booting it up on startup. Just because the 'uninstaller' says that you need to reboot, doesn't mean you have to.
As I said, administrator accounts are mainly caused by the huge amount of software which isn't complying to Microsoft's standards (too much software still requires admin access to install, even on one users account). Microsoft has published specifications to stop this from happening before 1999 but people are still doing it the old and clunky way.
The runas dialog can be easily forged. Hell, you could probably do it on a webpage using Javascript.
What do you mean 'dont allow programs to get information they don't need?'
You are suggesting some sort of 'file access' layer inbetween the filesystem and the programs. Programs would have to be signed and authorised to access only specific files. This would require.. guess what.. trusted computing.
I don't really see Linux faring much better if users start typing 'sudo apt-get install kazaa' after adding a kazaa apt source to their sources.list, because that's basically what they are doing on Windows. They are authorizing installation programs to install spyware everywhere.
Lets say it was shut off over New York, a possible terrorist location. A radius of over 1000 miles would probably be affected - you'd have to shut off at least 2, most likely 3 satellites to stop them determining the position. Those 3 satellites would cover a huge area, considering there is only 26 to cover the entire planet.
Firstly, the US population is 250 million and not 350 million.
Secondly, using nuclear power with breeder reactors you can desalinisation billions of gallons of water and irrigate it over the land. Very little pollution from breeder reactors compared with today's reactors.
Are you seriously telling me that you would be using a mechanical computer at 3.8GHz with thousands of millions of bytes of RAM and nearly a terabyte of disk space in a mini-ITX sized motherboard using mechanical components? The answer is of course, no.
Do you complain about cavemen discovering fire - gee.. think of all the smoke being put in the atmosphere, we could of developed just as well without it!
You might want to see how most spyware gets onto the system.
The vast majority is either installed via 'yes' on spyware dialogs (XP SP2 declines this automatically so they are trying to prevent it) or via apps like Kazaa and 'Weather in your system tray!!!' programs. I suspect the majority will comes from the latter in future.
Please explain to me how you prevent spyware like this getting onto the system via an-administrator authorized account pressing 'next' and installing a bunch of spyware via an installer?
The only way I can see to prevent this is either not running as administrator, which is clumsy as most people want to install software, printers, games without having to log in and out, or by digitally signing every file that is allowed to be transfered onto the filesystem and executed. Gee, that sounds like Trusted Computing which the Slashdot crowd hated (rightly so, it is a horrible idea).
The fact remains that getting rid of spyware is very, very hard. It's like a car maker trying to prevent people flooring it and driving off a cliff - they are telling the machine to basically, jump off a cliff in terms of performance and security. There is very little that you can do without being very extreme in stopping people doing things that you want to do on the computer.
Why on earth would MS risk tarnishing their image by trying to make a few million dollars (this is a company that racks in trillions over years) by making spyware?
The entire worlds population could live with 100m^2 per person in the area the size of TEXAS. While obviously the area of Texas could not support the population, it's estimated that if farming was as efficent in the 'third world' as it is in N. America, Europe and Japan that it could easily feed 15 billion people plus. The earth's populations curves top out at 9billion maximum - it'll start declining after that as the rest of the world gets far more wealthy and starts living like American and European families (that is, only one or two children instead of ten).
I really can't understand who could say that the development of Nuclear theory by Einstein et al is 'bad'. There is so many advancements of technology (hint: you wouldn't be using your computer without it) both directly and indirectly from it that it is simply stupid to suggest that we'd be better off without it.
If you are at sea then yes, it's most definitely the primary means of navigation. Obviously the majority of the American populace isn't going to be at sea but the goods coming from China and various other exports all use huge ships which rely on GPS. I doubt the manual method of navigation has been tested for a good few years now that GPS is so damn accurate and easy to use.
The amount of systems which use GPS in some way nowadays is mindboggling and if it was shutdown entirely I'm sure that a hell of a lot of problems would arise.
Actually, no it's not. In the UK you can use other brands name in your advert for comparision purposes, but I believe it's quite a new law.
However, most advertising agencies have realized that 'any publicity is good publicity' and don't want to pay to advertise their competiors. Pepsi learned this the hard way in the early 90s by running a lot of adverts comparing it to Coca-Cola and got their hands burnt by building much more mindshare for Coca-Cola - it was getting advertised by Pepsi aswell as Coca-Cola.
That, and 10.2.7 and 10.3 which you know, wiped people's firewire drives which isn't anywhere as bad as a few broken applications, is it?
SP2 really doesn't cause any problems whatsoever. The only problems you'll have is most likely highly specialized Win32 or ASM apps that have been broken by the NX support.
I don't really like Microsoft (I hate IE, but the rest of their products are usually quite decent nowadays - still prefer Linux though for most tasks), but I don't like Apple either. I'd actually rather have MS in charge of the computer monopoly than Apple.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but seriously, I'd much rather have a few broken applications that don't support NX and have to download a patch of them rather than having my Firewire disk deleted along with tens or hundreds of GB of really important stuff.
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NASA _is_ a military project. They don't say that, but back in the 50s/60s, NASA was around for one purpose, and one purpose only: to tell the Soviets that we can launch Nuclear Missiles at you with ICBMs.
BTW, surely 'there should be VERY few decisions made at the federal level that affect citizens' and 'The fed should only be there to provide for the nation defense' are in direct contradiction?
Personally, I feel that the US has devolution pretty well sorted. As a Brit, I'd prefer if universal healthcare was arranged, but that's highly unlikely. I think the US is going to have major problems if they don't make healthcare public for the most part. From my standing, it seems that without this, it's going to mean more and more Americans go without healthcare (which is a BAD thing) and the price just goes up and up. I don't mind so much the division of poor and rich, it's just when people can't afford to goto the hospital to have treatment then it makes you wonder if those that have got so rich off the system shouldn't help those who can't for whatever reason.
Anyway, I'm way off topic.
Just because Sweden is geographically close to Finland does not mean they think the same way in terms of politics and law enforcement.
For instance, Finland is part of the Euro currency, whereas Sweden still has the Swedish Kroner (and I believe that they are quite opposed to the Euro).
So Sweden could be very much a 'pirate heaven'. Their cities have a govt funded fibre optics everywhere, and I'm sure that the govt's wouldn't be happy if they weren't even being used - something that is a possibility if their was no BitTorrent.
It depends what you think government is there to do and what its goal is.
Is it to facilitate leaps in humankind (eg: NASA, the Internet, modern avionics) all started out as federal projects. If these were brought down to the local level, their simply wouldn't be enough resources to arrange the Apollo project for example.
If, however, you think it is to arrange healthcare, education, waste collection and similar, then your approach is probably better.
In my opinion, a strong federal government is probably best. Otherwise you get nowhere - local government by its nature will not provide huge sums of cash for big projects that make the big differences to humankind.
As for the UN, all it is basically a meeting house for others - it's a bit like blaming eBay because you got ripped off. eBay is partly responsible, but really the fault lies with the governments behind it.
Also comes with a free inkejet printer and 3 years warranty and 3 years 24/7 tech support. Also has a 80GB HDD, and the DVD burner is $80.
Sure, it doesn't have Firewire, but why do you need it? The only device I could think of that required it lately was the iPod, and now Apple ship both USB and FW connectors.
Well that's odd, because I found this one here:
. aspx/featured_dp_dotw_dimen1?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/features
For $619, with a 15" flat panel and 512MB RAM.
Well people are not paying attention very much to the styling of Apple's computer line as much as the price - Apple's desktop market share has slumped from 6% in 1997 to 1.6% in 2003. Probably be even worse in 2004 thanks to the total f-up with the new iMac G5 (not having your 'flagship computer' on sale for a month is not good business sense).
No shit sherlock.
3 months ago from here is Sept. Considering SP2 was only released on the internet in 6th of August, how long do you think it took:
1) For Acer to rebuild their harddrive images and test them with every model they use.
2) For them to rebuild and press millions of new recovery CDs w/ SP2, tested and all.
3) For them to ship all the 'old' laptops that are too late to have the new HDD applied because they are in the warehouse and calling them back would be unfeasable.
4) For them to train their multiple call centres on how to troubleshoot SP2 and it's various changes.
It's probably much more than a month. Apple took longer than that to get a patched Apache install out to people one time.
Are Apple better with release dates? Not a chance. How long did it take Apple to get iPod Mini's from release date to peoples hands - it was around 3 months. Roughly the same with their 30" displays.
For most users SP2 is a huge help. It's not a magic bullet, but it fixes 90% of the security issues people have, leaving only spyware from exploits in IE, Windows and user-consented left. All of these are much harder to find and fix, but the new automatic updates feature does make it a lot harder to stop applying updates.
You are probably looking at the wrong line of Dells. Dells website is pretty poor unless you know what you are doing and you'll soon find you can build the exact same machine with the same specs for radically different prices just by going on different paths on the website.
Look at the 4200 I think. They are the cheapest, and sure, they have onboard video but the Radeon 9200 is shit anyway. And you can add whatever AGP graphics card, something I'd take over a built in 9200 card.
But it's an extra $100 for that!
Am I the only one that thinks paying $999 for a computer that Dell does with a flatpanel and twice the RAM for $699 is absolutely stupid?!
The eMac needs a real update. I'd be more than happy to pay $699 or even $799 for a G5-based 'pizza box' with which I can use my own monitor.
WTF? Seriously, just get some cheap dells with some LCD monitors. That's going to be your cheapest option. I've done your TCO report for you.
You can install Linux if you want or you could learn how to keep Windows secure (basically: ensure it's behind a NAT router with a firewall and use Thunderbird and Firefox).
No need for some stupid TCO study
I think they are getting way too many members to cope with at the moment (with TB and suprnova going down). They got about 15,000 in 12 hours (went from 140,000 last night to 155,000 this morning when I checked).
This is going to be a huge issue for all the new/small torrents sites - how do they work with the load that millions of new users demand?
BTW: If you have an IRC client, you can join #bt, #bt-gm and #tvtorrents on efnet. #bt and #tvtorrents serves TV show torrents and #bt-gm serves torrents for games and movies.
Since it's IRC it stands a somewhat better chance of surviving.
I can think of a good few ways round that.
Run multiple proceses, watch if another is deleted and rewrite the file and respawn it. It would be an absolute nightmare to stop.
Not to mention if it was running as root it could stop you from issuing rm commands, perhaps altering the rm command itself?
But how long do we as an OSS community stop very new and exciting development in the premise of 'it doesn't work on 0.5% of systems'?!
Linux _desperately_ needs to have a working, easy to use RAD environment. Something as simple, or simpler than Visual Basic. I want to be able to create a simple Linux application by dragging and dropping some form elements onto a page and double clicking on a button and typing a few lines of simple code and have it all working.
Glade is good, but it's not easy enough.
Mono has the possibility of bringing this to fruition. I want to see sharpdevelop making good GTK# apps in a few hours.
All that would happen on Linux is that they'd type their root password and install Kazaa or whatever anyway.
Even if they didn't, the home directory is more than adequate for spyware to live. As long as it's executable, it can be ran from there.
As for your comment about deleting spyware, you can do the exact same one windows. Kill the process in the process list, delete the files on the filesystem and remove the various registry keys to stop it booting it up on startup. Just because the 'uninstaller' says that you need to reboot, doesn't mean you have to.
As I said, administrator accounts are mainly caused by the huge amount of software which isn't complying to Microsoft's standards (too much software still requires admin access to install, even on one users account). Microsoft has published specifications to stop this from happening before 1999 but people are still doing it the old and clunky way.
The runas dialog can be easily forged. Hell, you could probably do it on a webpage using Javascript.
What do you mean 'dont allow programs to get information they don't need?'
You are suggesting some sort of 'file access' layer inbetween the filesystem and the programs. Programs would have to be signed and authorised to access only specific files. This would require.. guess what.. trusted computing.
I don't really see Linux faring much better if users start typing 'sudo apt-get install kazaa' after adding a kazaa apt source to their sources.list, because that's basically what they are doing on Windows. They are authorizing installation programs to install spyware everywhere.
Lets say it was shut off over New York, a possible terrorist location. A radius of over 1000 miles would probably be affected - you'd have to shut off at least 2, most likely 3 satellites to stop them determining the position. Those 3 satellites would cover a huge area, considering there is only 26 to cover the entire planet.
Firstly, the US population is 250 million and not 350 million.
Secondly, using nuclear power with breeder reactors you can desalinisation billions of gallons of water and irrigate it over the land. Very little pollution from breeder reactors compared with today's reactors.
Are you seriously telling me that you would be using a mechanical computer at 3.8GHz with thousands of millions of bytes of RAM and nearly a terabyte of disk space in a mini-ITX sized motherboard using mechanical components? The answer is of course, no.
Do you complain about cavemen discovering fire - gee.. think of all the smoke being put in the atmosphere, we could of developed just as well without it!
Microsoft has made over $1 trillion in the last 5 years (in revenue).
In profit it's probably more like half a trillion, but either way, this is an immense company.
You might want to see how most spyware gets onto the system.
The vast majority is either installed via 'yes' on spyware dialogs (XP SP2 declines this automatically so they are trying to prevent it) or via apps like Kazaa and 'Weather in your system tray!!!' programs. I suspect the majority will comes from the latter in future.
Please explain to me how you prevent spyware like this getting onto the system via an-administrator authorized account pressing 'next' and installing a bunch of spyware via an installer?
The only way I can see to prevent this is either not running as administrator, which is clumsy as most people want to install software, printers, games without having to log in and out, or by digitally signing every file that is allowed to be transfered onto the filesystem and executed. Gee, that sounds like Trusted Computing which the Slashdot crowd hated (rightly so, it is a horrible idea).
The fact remains that getting rid of spyware is very, very hard. It's like a car maker trying to prevent people flooring it and driving off a cliff - they are telling the machine to basically, jump off a cliff in terms of performance and security. There is very little that you can do without being very extreme in stopping people doing things that you want to do on the computer.
Sorry, but that's utter insanity.
Why on earth would MS risk tarnishing their image by trying to make a few million dollars (this is a company that racks in trillions over years) by making spyware?
I love the old 'overpopulated' arguement.
The entire worlds population could live with 100m^2 per person in the area the size of TEXAS. While obviously the area of Texas could not support the population, it's estimated that if farming was as efficent in the 'third world' as it is in N. America, Europe and Japan that it could easily feed 15 billion people plus. The earth's populations curves top out at 9billion maximum - it'll start declining after that as the rest of the world gets far more wealthy and starts living like American and European families (that is, only one or two children instead of ten).
I really can't understand who could say that the development of Nuclear theory by Einstein et al is 'bad'. There is so many advancements of technology (hint: you wouldn't be using your computer without it) both directly and indirectly from it that it is simply stupid to suggest that we'd be better off without it.
If you are at sea then yes, it's most definitely the primary means of navigation. Obviously the majority of the American populace isn't going to be at sea but the goods coming from China and various other exports all use huge ships which rely on GPS. I doubt the manual method of navigation has been tested for a good few years now that GPS is so damn accurate and easy to use. The amount of systems which use GPS in some way nowadays is mindboggling and if it was shutdown entirely I'm sure that a hell of a lot of problems would arise.
Actually, no it's not. In the UK you can use other brands name in your advert for comparision purposes, but I believe it's quite a new law.
However, most advertising agencies have realized that 'any publicity is good publicity' and don't want to pay to advertise their competiors. Pepsi learned this the hard way in the early 90s by running a lot of adverts comparing it to Coca-Cola and got their hands burnt by building much more mindshare for Coca-Cola - it was getting advertised by Pepsi aswell as Coca-Cola.
That, and 10.2.7 and 10.3 which you know, wiped people's firewire drives which isn't anywhere as bad as a few broken applications, is it?
SP2 really doesn't cause any problems whatsoever. The only problems you'll have is most likely highly specialized Win32 or ASM apps that have been broken by the NX support.
I don't really like Microsoft (I hate IE, but the rest of their products are usually quite decent nowadays - still prefer Linux though for most tasks), but I don't like Apple either. I'd actually rather have MS in charge of the computer monopoly than Apple.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but seriously, I'd much rather have a few broken applications that don't support NX and have to download a patch of them rather than having my Firewire disk deleted along with tens or hundreds of GB of really important stuff.
I actually prefered the original Xbox controller. All others are too small and give my hands real crampiness.
Am I the only one that thought a controller thats actually bigger than your hand was a good idea?