Well, our thoughts are with Novell's staffers, surely. Losing your job is horrible.
That said, there have been articles about Novell's financial outlook for a long while now and they've all pointed in the same direction: cash out greater than cash in, result misery. It's Mr Micawber all over.
Hard to feel much sympathy for the major stockholders, though. Novell's strategy has always been a real gamble: growing a Linux base fast enough to offset the declining Netware and other bases. In essence, a race against time that the stockholders would have known was a real gamble. Even so, the recovery strategy outlined doesn't really add up. If you return the cash pile to the stockholders and sell off non-core and non-performing assets, you aren't left with much. And if you decimate R&D then Netware (which still has a lot of customers) could start to decline very fast indeed as users decide en masse that they are dealing with a husk or shell. That means Novell would be left standing with little more than Linux and therefore a juicy morsel for a takeover.
Hmmn, I wonder if the Wall Street sharks are busy circling, sensing rich pickings from a squabble because damage to SUSE would be a tremendous embarrassment to a lender of last resort, namely IBM.
Either way, in SUSE Linux Novell has one of the real jewels of the f/oss world, imho. They've put a lot of funds into SUSE and into other aspects of open source that benefit us all.
Hmnn, this article is thin on facts and figures. And like so much "news" coming from the security industry, you're never really sure how much of it is fud and puffery in order to sell new products. Still, I guess things will continue to get worse so long as much of the IT industry plays pass the parcel, a shuffling process that always ends with the hit landing up on the poor old end-user, the person who is usually least qualified to deal with it.
I guess Bruce Schneier is right when he suggests that the way to improve some aspects of security, anyway, is by placing responsibility firmly on outfits like banks and ISPs who'll get smacked mightly hard in the wallet - by law, this time - unless they raise their game. That might put some pressure on OS-makers and their pals to design products that don't also need AV checkers that are dependent on signature libraries and prey to zero-day exploits.
Love the quote from a researcher saying that the alleged sale of rookits means that "there is a criminalisation of the virus world going on." As if it hasn't been criminal till now, just good clean fun ho ho.
Hmmn, advertising is being touted as some kind of miracle cure-all for IT industry troubles these days, much as medieval peasants waved religious relics around and bought and sold saint's bones (or what they claimed were saint's bones) to ward off plagues and famines. It didn't work then and in any case there weren't enough credible relics to go round, so you had, say, 14 different churches all claiming to contain Christ's right arm or whatever.
It won't work now, either. There isn't enough advertising money in the world to underwrite the number of allegedly clever ideas all based entirely on advertising revenue. Advertising coarsens and corrupts everything it touches. Perhaps we all need a human rights and privacy law which is the freedom to be let alone from advertising. By law, a telephone carrier for example would be obliged to offer an advert-free service to those who willing to pay for it.
Besides, this might help some companies to formulate credible business plans that are based on charging for your products instead of giving them away and then wondering why you go bankrupt shortly afterwards.
The US is spending billions of dollars to try to persuade the Muslim world to be a little more Western in its outlook. A little less bombing. A little more democracy and capitalism.
So an Arab TV channel shows willing and adapts the Simpsons show. Amdittedly a slightly eccentric choice, as it's hardly the peak of Western Art. But perhaps it's a start.
American slashdotters then roundly criticize them for doing so and claim they've ruined it (not that too many slashdotters will be watching the show from Oman or Abu Dhabi, one imagines, so what the makers have done with it doesn't matter at all).
Do you actually want the Muslim world to modernize?
Its the enterprise that's likely to sort this out in the long run. Companies aren't going to invest in a program or DE that's dependent on a few college kids who wouldn't know user-friendly if they fell over it, or which relies for bugfixes on a freelancer who's gone away for two weeks. Look round the f/oss world and/or some of the big Linux planet feeds and you see plenty of that going on.
That in turn will filter down to the distros and the big support outfits who'll start to pay less and less attention to the dodgy stuff. If you put on a professional show we can rely on, great; but if you fool around babbling about hacking cool stuff while failing to deliver then bye bye and you're not getting put on our CDs or support list. Slowly but surely, the enterprise will invest in one of the main DEs (Gnome or KDE) to the point where the other becomes distinctly second string. The same will happen with programs and other bits and pieces. And having been road-tested in the enterprise, eventually these changes will find their way to Joe Sixpack's PC.
Linux will lose a great deal of fun and sense of excitement as a result, but it's probably the only way it will grow up enough to become really widely used.
Just my 2 cents.
It's the British contribution to the space race.
on
Broadband from Airships
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· Score: 3, Funny
It's the British contribution to the space race.
I don't image the broadband bit will work for very long. As soon as the thing gets to any altitude, a UK space expert who looks like Worzel Gummidge will appear on TV and announce that the experiment has proved a world-beating success and one in the eye for the ambitions of America, China, Russia, etc., to explore the solar system.
We will be assured that the crew have an ample supply of Eccles cake and liquorice allsorts. Presumably an airship is needed because only something that size can hoist aloft a passenger cabin containing an Aga and a flush lavatory, thus allowing unlimited quantities of tea and toast to be consumed. There is talk of a Nobel Prize for the mission designer.
At this stage the truth will emerge - having sent the airship aloft a mysterious technical error prevents the controllers from ever getting it down again. The airship will probably last be heard of careering around somewhere over the Indian Ocean, beaming down the Des O'Connor Show and the racing results from Epsom to a baffled audience in Tamil Nadu.
I guess that clocks are literally "future proof" since they can only tell the time today, right now. Bit of a limitation really.
Maybe some billionaire will end up with it. Good luck to the makers! But I suspect the builders of Stonehenge might have scoffed a little. Their clock is still going and it has no moving parts.
Yeah, prolly not a good idea to tell anyone about "Gentoo Linux with a hardened 2.6 kernel" if that is what floats your boat. Keep it in a cupboard and take it out at night,
The constant use of the term "Linux" is a misnomer and the sign of an immature market.
No one goes into a store and asks whether they stock "cola-based drinks", They ask for Coke, Pepsi, whatever. We'll know when Linux has really hit the highway when folks stop asking for "Linux", if they ever do, and start asking soley about a brand - Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, whatever. As yet I guess the main Linux outfits haven't really extended beyond IT industry workers and enthusiasts but their challenge is to ensure that they do.
Imho, it's no bad thing for the games industry to have some shots put across its bow. A great deal of exploitation goes on, a great many sharp practices happen since vast sums of money are involved, and anyway no industry is above scrutiny and criticism. There are genuine and valid concerns about the impact of some games on kids, too. Indeed, on games generally if they are played to the point of being a substitute for growing up into a real life. Left to its own devices, could the games industry be trusted to behave for one moment? I doubt it - no other industry can be. Just check out fast food, pharma and smokes.
I don't know anything about Jack Thompson and maybe he is a nutter - but anyone who is subject to this kind of vilification has usually scored a bull's-eye somewhere and, besides, it takes more guts than most of us have to stand up to the plate and say what you believe in when these are the consequences. Try it sometime before scoring cheap laughs off the guy.
Kaptain Kitsch, the artistic scoundrel, strikes again. This time he's relieving New Yorkers of $5000 for a bunch of wool! Only Captain America can save the world by wrapping the Weasel of Wool in his own twine and sticking those needles where it hurts!
Besides, a woolly Bat suit can make a chap darn wiffy in high summer, er, Robin.
Next episode: Captain America hunts down the Wool Bandit who leaves innocent sheep to freeze in winter!
Re:From a newer Linux user's POV
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 2
You have a strong point. But even if you never need vi/vim or emacs it is still a really good idea to have a text editor available on Linux that you can use from the console. You can use it to edit configuration files and, more important, you can use it if you suffer a foobar and lose your graphical display (x-server), for example. So in that sense, a basic text editor is rather like keeping a fire extinguisher around. You may only use it once a year but boy you will be glad you have one.
A very simple one is nano/pico. A good intermediate one (does more than nano/pico but a lot less than vim/emacs) is joe. Being able to use joe has got me out of fixes on quite a few occasions now.
That's a rather tired cliche, and rather corporate too. It's the little guy's fault, of course, for being human. Not every country in the world is soft on spam and allows torrents of it, unlike the USA and a few others. A equally effective remedy is to put enforcement in place that makes the spammer realize that he has a high risk of being caught and if caught will get the book thrown at him. It's not as if we don't know who a lot of these people are, and in many cases we've known who they are for years. The issue is just as much to do with political will as anything else. Indeed a foreign observer might wonder whether some of the spam kings enjoy political protection (in the Russian Federation, SE Asia and elsewhere, as well as the US), since so many apparently operate with impunity.
This news has been around for a few days now. And the chances are that if the H5N1 virus has only just been detected in Romania and Turkey then it's been around for a while and can be expected to have spread much more widely than that already. It's just that no one has yet noticed it. Well they'll starting looking now.
More worrying news is that if the virus mutates into a killer flu, then there are real doubts as to whether the only and standard-issue anti-viral drug (Tamiflu) will actually prove effective. In addition, even modest stockpiles are not expected to be available in some places till 2006 at the earliest.
Culling the vast majority of poultry (90 per cent or more) in Europe may be an idea, though governments are so in thrall to farming lobbies this will likely never happen. Considering the conditions in which most birds are kept and the disgusting products they are turned into (chicken McNuggetts, etc.) this would hardly be a great loss.
This is all a little hypocritical. People may say they want to know what's in their food, but very often they don't. If they did, chances are they'd never eat fast food or a ready-meal again. What they want is the convenience of mass-produced food while also feeling that it's good for you. Unfortunately the two are often contradictory. So we enter a little game in which supermarkets are told to reduce the salt and/or sugar and fat in their products, for example, but on the whole fail to do so because if they did the stuff would be shown up for the denatured sludge that it is and their customers would start complaining.
If you want good food, don't use supermarkets. Buy from local stores, which the supermarkets will put out of business if no one uses them, and prepare it all yourself. Four slices of brown bread from one of the supermarkets where I live contain more fat than a Mars Bar. Tagging the product chain makes no difference at all. On the whole the food industry is quite likely to give you cancer or heart disease after 10-20 years of chomping through microwave dinners, sugar-soaked cookies et al and quite unlikely to bring you to a sudden end with poisoned baked beans or stewed steak that turns out to have been sourced from a garbage dump in in Azerbajan.
Hmmn, could be tough news trying to sell a second-hand gun belonging to a Russian roulette player, then: "Only works when pointed at your own head."
Q:"How can you tell whether your cellphone was owned by a redneck?"
A:"It only works when you're humping your sister"
As for wallets, well I guess folks tend to steal them for what's inside them. How many successful muggers grab your wallet, empty the contents on the floor and flee with the wallet, leaving you with all your cash and cards still intact.
Well, having already been incinerated once, at least Scotty will be able to consider himself an old hand at these things if the rocket explodes on launch.
It's hard not to roar with laughter. The United States is the worst spam offender in the world, and the nabobs of spam can even enjoy promotional photos of themselves on places like Spamhaus. Such a high-pressure life style, knocking out a few million spams in betwen ambling down to the auto showroon to play around with another Mercedes or Porsche. Compared to drug-dealing and extortion, which is probably what these guys would be doing otherwise, it must be a no-brainer.
I guess tacking the problem closer to home might be, err, a little too much work. Those poor souls at Microsoft. Sigh, a meagre $12 billion a year in clear profit clearly just isn't enough to cover much more than issuing a few self-aggrandising press releases about the evils of spam and phishing provided they're taking place thousands of miles away.
A reasonable guess is that Microsoft's involvement in Nigeria will increase not lessen the problem. Folks in Nigeria itself may well likely conclude, quite sensibly, that if a rich foreign company is sufficiently concerned to start chucking money around, the 419er-game must yield fabulous profits and they should join in as soon as possible. No doubt in Nigeria the "usual suspects" - probably poor farmers who've never seen a computer but are behind with their bribes to the local powers - will be hauled in for questioning. Meanwhile the other 419er tsars will continue as normal from their comfortable lairs in Europe and elsewhere.
So Windows is twenty. Really, it's ten. It was the release of Windows 95 that brought the dismal tide over the levees and submerged us all. By coincidence or not, Apple just announced its best shipments since the days of the crazy Dr Gil Amelio, not far off the same time. Maybe that tells us something about the future, too.
What lies in the future, apparently, is keeping your data in the "cloud" - on giant servers somewhere - and being able to plug into it via a usb fob or similar device which carries your identity and the system settings just the way you like them. Fine, I'm up for that, though if I had really important data I doubt I'd entrust it to the tender care of megacorp inc.
It's rather unfortunate that the Microsofties use "rich" the whole time to describe things. It's pretty rich being told you have to impoverish yourself in order to enjoy a rich user experience that's usually on a par with a nasty hamburger.
Likely by the time Vista comes out folks will be so sick and tired of hearing about it that they'll be desperate for any other news. As for the "interview" with Mr Gates. Hmmn, stilted. Are these things ever done live, or is the interview cut and pasted from questions emailed over and droided answers emailed back? It is, after all, the Borg we're dealing with here.
Looking forward to the next Washington State Unix and Open Systems Users Group which will be keynoted by Dame Edna Everidge (mistakenly hired by Microsoft as an f/oss advocate after Eric S. Raymond turned down the job offer).
Hey, maybe they do things differently down under. Take folks as you find them. Whoever this guy is, he could well have some very interesting and useful things to say. Claiming that the guy couldn't have anything worthwhile to say because he works for Microsoft is pretty dumb as well as rude to the local Australian group.
You have to sympathize with policitians everywhere, forced to lead demeaning lives on the margins of society because such a high proportion of the meagre funds they need to survive have to be concealed and cannot be admitted to. Why, a decent family man cannot even invite his friends to a cocaine and call-girl party without having to pretend that he's paying for it out of his own life savings.
It would be much more dignified if US politicians were allowed to nail a simple "Bill of Fare" to the front door of their office suites. This would itemize the services on offer - "Have your business rivals arrested - $10 million", "Pollute a wilderness area - $67 million", "Hunt and Shoot Wetbacks for Sport - $39 million", etc. - but the quid pro quo is that it would no longer be legal in any way to accept undocumented contributions.
We'd then all know where we stand, and politicians would be given back the one thing they crave above all else - respect.
Can't help feeling Bill Clinton would have handled this better. He'd have seen it coming. He'd have worked out some compromise or agreement that would have saved face all round and kept the show on the road even if, in practice, it meant recasting the administration of the internet in the way of the general postal union and other intergovernmental things that work perfectly well and sensibly. He'd even have smiled winningly for the cameras with some of the EU's more repulsive political operators like Jack Straw.
The Bush administration seems to have only one negotiating tactic in any situation. They say "We are bigshots. Who are you, Mr Nobodaddy?" expecting instant submission. Instead the whole thing blows up into an intractable mess six months down the line. Well, here's this one. The next one will probably follow the exact same script.
Mac and Linux appeal to completely different markets, I would guess. Apple is about West Coast uber-cool ("Made in California", etc.) with a price to match. Linux is nothing of the kind. So I doubt the Mac Mini will ever be a threat to Linux.
But your core point is a strong one: "Desktop Linux needs to grow up in a hurry. That means it needs to be as easy for the average user to use as Windows XP is by the time Vista comes out." Realistically it's not attainable in just a year, but that is the place Linux must get to in a hurry, imho.
Part of the difficulty, though, is that the Linux market is still very immature. All its players are total minnows and have no significant investment funds worth the name. But if, for example, a major corporation arrived in the Linux sphere with several hundred million to back up its new Linux distro, things could change rapidly. Arguably, however, things won't happen like that except in places like China or India where MS doesn't have much of a grip. There is a lot of money around, but it will go first to the enterprise and only after that find its way down to the consumer desktop.
In addition, Linux sorely lacks good leadership. Like Bill Gates or not, he had an extremely focused vision - "A computer on every desktop" - and he stuck to it with great tenacity. I don't know whether any Linux gurus have a comparable ambition but if so they are keeping very quiet about it. Too many give the impression that they'd wouldn't recognize an end-user if they fell over one and are more at home discussing whether aptitude is a better frontend than dselect (both are awful, natch). The one exception is Mark Shuttleworth but he can't do it all alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, our thoughts are with Novell's staffers, surely. Losing your job is horrible.
That said, there have been articles about Novell's financial outlook for a long while now and they've all pointed in the same direction: cash out greater than cash in, result misery. It's Mr Micawber all over.
Hard to feel much sympathy for the major stockholders, though. Novell's strategy has always been a real gamble: growing a Linux base fast enough to offset the declining Netware and other bases. In essence, a race against time that the stockholders would have known was a real gamble. Even so, the recovery strategy outlined doesn't really add up. If you return the cash pile to the stockholders and sell off non-core and non-performing assets, you aren't left with much. And if you decimate R&D then Netware (which still has a lot of customers) could start to decline very fast indeed as users decide en masse that they are dealing with a husk or shell. That means Novell would be left standing with little more than Linux and therefore a juicy morsel for a takeover.
Hmmn, I wonder if the Wall Street sharks are busy circling, sensing rich pickings from a squabble because damage to SUSE would be a tremendous embarrassment to a lender of last resort, namely IBM.
Either way, in SUSE Linux Novell has one of the real jewels of the f/oss world, imho. They've put a lot of funds into SUSE and into other aspects of open source that benefit us all.
Hmnn, this article is thin on facts and figures. And like so much "news" coming from the security industry, you're never really sure how much of it is fud and puffery in order to sell new products. Still, I guess things will continue to get worse so long as much of the IT industry plays pass the parcel, a shuffling process that always ends with the hit landing up on the poor old end-user, the person who is usually least qualified to deal with it.
I guess Bruce Schneier is right when he suggests that the way to improve some aspects of security, anyway, is by placing responsibility firmly on outfits like banks and ISPs who'll get smacked mightly hard in the wallet - by law, this time - unless they raise their game. That might put some pressure on OS-makers and their pals to design products that don't also need AV checkers that are dependent on signature libraries and prey to zero-day exploits.
Love the quote from a researcher saying that the alleged sale of rookits means that "there is a criminalisation of the virus world going on." As if it hasn't been criminal till now, just good clean fun ho ho.
Hmmn, advertising is being touted as some kind of miracle cure-all for IT industry troubles these days, much as medieval peasants waved religious relics around and bought and sold saint's bones (or what they claimed were saint's bones) to ward off plagues and famines. It didn't work then and in any case there weren't enough credible relics to go round, so you had, say, 14 different churches all claiming to contain Christ's right arm or whatever.
It won't work now, either. There isn't enough advertising money in the world to underwrite the number of allegedly clever ideas all based entirely on advertising revenue. Advertising coarsens and corrupts everything it touches. Perhaps we all need a human rights and privacy law which is the freedom to be let alone from advertising. By law, a telephone carrier for example would be obliged to offer an advert-free service to those who willing to pay for it.
Besides, this might help some companies to formulate credible business plans that are based on charging for your products instead of giving them away and then wondering why you go bankrupt shortly afterwards.
Er, something here doesn't add up.
The US is spending billions of dollars to try to persuade the Muslim world to be a little more Western in its outlook. A little less bombing. A little more democracy and capitalism.
So an Arab TV channel shows willing and adapts the Simpsons show. Amdittedly a slightly eccentric choice, as it's hardly the peak of Western Art. But perhaps it's a start.
American slashdotters then roundly criticize them for doing so and claim they've ruined it (not that too many slashdotters will be watching the show from Oman or Abu Dhabi, one imagines, so what the makers have done with it doesn't matter at all).
Do you actually want the Muslim world to modernize?
Its the enterprise that's likely to sort this out in the long run. Companies aren't going to invest in a program or DE that's dependent on a few college kids who wouldn't know user-friendly if they fell over it, or which relies for bugfixes on a freelancer who's gone away for two weeks. Look round the f/oss world and/or some of the big Linux planet feeds and you see plenty of that going on.
That in turn will filter down to the distros and the big support outfits who'll start to pay less and less attention to the dodgy stuff. If you put on a professional show we can rely on, great; but if you fool around babbling about hacking cool stuff while failing to deliver then bye bye and you're not getting put on our CDs or support list. Slowly but surely, the enterprise will invest in one of the main DEs (Gnome or KDE) to the point where the other becomes distinctly second string. The same will happen with programs and other bits and pieces. And having been road-tested in the enterprise, eventually these changes will find their way to Joe Sixpack's PC.
Linux will lose a great deal of fun and sense of excitement as a result, but it's probably the only way it will grow up enough to become really widely used.
Just my 2 cents.
It's the British contribution to the space race.
I don't image the broadband bit will work for very long. As soon as the thing gets to any altitude, a UK space expert who looks like Worzel Gummidge will appear on TV and announce that the experiment has proved a world-beating success and one in the eye for the ambitions of America, China, Russia, etc., to explore the solar system.
We will be assured that the crew have an ample supply of Eccles cake and liquorice allsorts. Presumably an airship is needed because only something that size can hoist aloft a passenger cabin containing an Aga and a flush lavatory, thus allowing unlimited quantities of tea and toast to be consumed. There is talk of a Nobel Prize for the mission designer.
At this stage the truth will emerge - having sent the airship aloft a mysterious technical error prevents the controllers from ever getting it down again. The airship will probably last be heard of careering around somewhere over the Indian Ocean, beaming down the Des O'Connor Show and the racing results from Epsom to a baffled audience in Tamil Nadu.
Ah yes, a code word.
Prosecuting counsel: "Moreover he is, Your Honor, a player of the pink oboe."
(Judge faints, courtroom erupts in uproar)
I guess that clocks are literally "future proof" since they can only tell the time today, right now. Bit of a limitation really.
Maybe some billionaire will end up with it. Good luck to the makers! But I suspect the builders of Stonehenge might have scoffed a little. Their clock is still going and it has no moving parts.
Yeah, prolly not a good idea to tell anyone about "Gentoo Linux with a hardened 2.6 kernel" if that is what floats your boat. Keep it in a cupboard and take it out at night,
The constant use of the term "Linux" is a misnomer and the sign of an immature market.
No one goes into a store and asks whether they stock "cola-based drinks", They ask for Coke, Pepsi, whatever. We'll know when Linux has really hit the highway when folks stop asking for "Linux", if they ever do, and start asking soley about a brand - Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, whatever. As yet I guess the main Linux outfits haven't really extended beyond IT industry workers and enthusiasts but their challenge is to ensure that they do.
Imho, it's no bad thing for the games industry to have some shots put across its bow. A great deal of exploitation goes on, a great many sharp practices happen since vast sums of money are involved, and anyway no industry is above scrutiny and criticism. There are genuine and valid concerns about the impact of some games on kids, too. Indeed, on games generally if they are played to the point of being a substitute for growing up into a real life. Left to its own devices, could the games industry be trusted to behave for one moment? I doubt it - no other industry can be. Just check out fast food, pharma and smokes.
I don't know anything about Jack Thompson and maybe he is a nutter - but anyone who is subject to this kind of vilification has usually scored a bull's-eye somewhere and, besides, it takes more guts than most of us have to stand up to the plate and say what you believe in when these are the consequences. Try it sometime before scoring cheap laughs off the guy.
Kaptain Kitsch, the artistic scoundrel, strikes again. This time he's relieving New Yorkers of $5000 for a bunch of wool! Only Captain America can save the world by wrapping the Weasel of Wool in his own twine and sticking those needles where it hurts!
Besides, a woolly Bat suit can make a chap darn wiffy in high summer, er, Robin.
Next episode: Captain America hunts down the Wool Bandit who leaves innocent sheep to freeze in winter!
You have a strong point. But even if you never need vi/vim or emacs it is still a really good idea to have a text editor available on Linux that you can use from the console. You can use it to edit configuration files and, more important, you can use it if you suffer a foobar and lose your graphical display (x-server), for example. So in that sense, a basic text editor is rather like keeping a fire extinguisher around. You may only use it once a year but boy you will be glad you have one.
A very simple one is nano/pico. A good intermediate one (does more than nano/pico but a lot less than vim/emacs) is joe. Being able to use joe has got me out of fixes on quite a few occasions now.
That's a rather tired cliche, and rather corporate too. It's the little guy's fault, of course, for being human. Not every country in the world is soft on spam and allows torrents of it, unlike the USA and a few others. A equally effective remedy is to put enforcement in place that makes the spammer realize that he has a high risk of being caught and if caught will get the book thrown at him. It's not as if we don't know who a lot of these people are, and in many cases we've known who they are for years. The issue is just as much to do with political will as anything else. Indeed a foreign observer might wonder whether some of the spam kings enjoy political protection (in the Russian Federation, SE Asia and elsewhere, as well as the US), since so many apparently operate with impunity.
This news has been around for a few days now. And the chances are that if the H5N1 virus has only just been detected in Romania and Turkey then it's been around for a while and can be expected to have spread much more widely than that already. It's just that no one has yet noticed it. Well they'll starting looking now.
More worrying news is that if the virus mutates into a killer flu, then there are real doubts as to whether the only and standard-issue anti-viral drug (Tamiflu) will actually prove effective. In addition, even modest stockpiles are not expected to be available in some places till 2006 at the earliest.
Culling the vast majority of poultry (90 per cent or more) in Europe may be an idea, though governments are so in thrall to farming lobbies this will likely never happen. Considering the conditions in which most birds are kept and the disgusting products they are turned into (chicken McNuggetts, etc.) this would hardly be a great loss.
This is all a little hypocritical. People may say they want to know what's in their food, but very often they don't. If they did, chances are they'd never eat fast food or a ready-meal again. What they want is the convenience of mass-produced food while also feeling that it's good for you. Unfortunately the two are often contradictory. So we enter a little game in which supermarkets are told to reduce the salt and/or sugar and fat in their products, for example, but on the whole fail to do so because if they did the stuff would be shown up for the denatured sludge that it is and their customers would start complaining.
If you want good food, don't use supermarkets. Buy from local stores, which the supermarkets will put out of business if no one uses them, and prepare it all yourself. Four slices of brown bread from one of the supermarkets where I live contain more fat than a Mars Bar. Tagging the product chain makes no difference at all. On the whole the food industry is quite likely to give you cancer or heart disease after 10-20 years of chomping through microwave dinners, sugar-soaked cookies et al and quite unlikely to bring you to a sudden end with poisoned baked beans or stewed steak that turns out to have been sourced from a garbage dump in in Azerbajan.
Hmmn, could be tough news trying to sell a second-hand gun belonging to a Russian roulette player, then: "Only works when pointed at your own head."
Q:"How can you tell whether your cellphone was owned by a redneck?" A:"It only works when you're humping your sister"
As for wallets, well I guess folks tend to steal them for what's inside them. How many successful muggers grab your wallet, empty the contents on the floor and flee with the wallet, leaving you with all your cash and cards still intact.
Well, having already been incinerated once, at least Scotty will be able to consider himself an old hand at these things if the rocket explodes on launch.
It's hard not to roar with laughter. The United States is the worst spam offender in the world, and the nabobs of spam can even enjoy promotional photos of themselves on places like Spamhaus. Such a high-pressure life style, knocking out a few million spams in betwen ambling down to the auto showroon to play around with another Mercedes or Porsche. Compared to drug-dealing and extortion, which is probably what these guys would be doing otherwise, it must be a no-brainer.
I guess tacking the problem closer to home might be, err, a little too much work. Those poor souls at Microsoft. Sigh, a meagre $12 billion a year in clear profit clearly just isn't enough to cover much more than issuing a few self-aggrandising press releases about the evils of spam and phishing provided they're taking place thousands of miles away.
A reasonable guess is that Microsoft's involvement in Nigeria will increase not lessen the problem. Folks in Nigeria itself may well likely conclude, quite sensibly, that if a rich foreign company is sufficiently concerned to start chucking money around, the 419er-game must yield fabulous profits and they should join in as soon as possible. No doubt in Nigeria the "usual suspects" - probably poor farmers who've never seen a computer but are behind with their bribes to the local powers - will be hauled in for questioning. Meanwhile the other 419er tsars will continue as normal from their comfortable lairs in Europe and elsewhere.
So Windows is twenty. Really, it's ten. It was the release of Windows 95 that brought the dismal tide over the levees and submerged us all. By coincidence or not, Apple just announced its best shipments since the days of the crazy Dr Gil Amelio, not far off the same time. Maybe that tells us something about the future, too.
What lies in the future, apparently, is keeping your data in the "cloud" - on giant servers somewhere - and being able to plug into it via a usb fob or similar device which carries your identity and the system settings just the way you like them. Fine, I'm up for that, though if I had really important data I doubt I'd entrust it to the tender care of megacorp inc.
It's rather unfortunate that the Microsofties use "rich" the whole time to describe things. It's pretty rich being told you have to impoverish yourself in order to enjoy a rich user experience that's usually on a par with a nasty hamburger.
Likely by the time Vista comes out folks will be so sick and tired of hearing about it that they'll be desperate for any other news. As for the "interview" with Mr Gates. Hmmn, stilted. Are these things ever done live, or is the interview cut and pasted from questions emailed over and droided answers emailed back? It is, after all, the Borg we're dealing with here.
Looking forward to the next Washington State Unix and Open Systems Users Group which will be keynoted by Dame Edna Everidge (mistakenly hired by Microsoft as an f/oss advocate after Eric S. Raymond turned down the job offer).
Hey, maybe they do things differently down under. Take folks as you find them. Whoever this guy is, he could well have some very interesting and useful things to say. Claiming that the guy couldn't have anything worthwhile to say because he works for Microsoft is pretty dumb as well as rude to the local Australian group.
You have to sympathize with policitians everywhere, forced to lead demeaning lives on the margins of society because such a high proportion of the meagre funds they need to survive have to be concealed and cannot be admitted to. Why, a decent family man cannot even invite his friends to a cocaine and call-girl party without having to pretend that he's paying for it out of his own life savings.
It would be much more dignified if US politicians were allowed to nail a simple "Bill of Fare" to the front door of their office suites. This would itemize the services on offer - "Have your business rivals arrested - $10 million", "Pollute a wilderness area - $67 million", "Hunt and Shoot Wetbacks for Sport - $39 million", etc. - but the quid pro quo is that it would no longer be legal in any way to accept undocumented contributions.
We'd then all know where we stand, and politicians would be given back the one thing they crave above all else - respect.
Can't help feeling Bill Clinton would have handled this better. He'd have seen it coming. He'd have worked out some compromise or agreement that would have saved face all round and kept the show on the road even if, in practice, it meant recasting the administration of the internet in the way of the general postal union and other intergovernmental things that work perfectly well and sensibly. He'd even have smiled winningly for the cameras with some of the EU's more repulsive political operators like Jack Straw.
The Bush administration seems to have only one negotiating tactic in any situation. They say "We are bigshots. Who are you, Mr Nobodaddy?" expecting instant submission. Instead the whole thing blows up into an intractable mess six months down the line. Well, here's this one. The next one will probably follow the exact same script.
I think it's sheep-power in New Zealand. And hey, after that, Hollywood can reuse them to fleece movie-goers.
Mac and Linux appeal to completely different markets, I would guess. Apple is about West Coast uber-cool ("Made in California", etc.) with a price to match. Linux is nothing of the kind. So I doubt the Mac Mini will ever be a threat to Linux.
But your core point is a strong one: "Desktop Linux needs to grow up in a hurry. That means it needs to be as easy for the average user to use as Windows XP is by the time Vista comes out." Realistically it's not attainable in just a year, but that is the place Linux must get to in a hurry, imho.
Part of the difficulty, though, is that the Linux market is still very immature. All its players are total minnows and have no significant investment funds worth the name. But if, for example, a major corporation arrived in the Linux sphere with several hundred million to back up its new Linux distro, things could change rapidly. Arguably, however, things won't happen like that except in places like China or India where MS doesn't have much of a grip. There is a lot of money around, but it will go first to the enterprise and only after that find its way down to the consumer desktop.
In addition, Linux sorely lacks good leadership. Like Bill Gates or not, he had an extremely focused vision - "A computer on every desktop" - and he stuck to it with great tenacity. I don't know whether any Linux gurus have a comparable ambition but if so they are keeping very quiet about it. Too many give the impression that they'd wouldn't recognize an end-user if they fell over one and are more at home discussing whether aptitude is a better frontend than dselect (both are awful, natch). The one exception is Mark Shuttleworth but he can't do it all alone.