"...like an MCSE, no-one bothers to get it, no employer ever demands it. Then its nothing like the MCSE. Well I don't know what its like in Britain, but here it is demanded by employers, often times a candidate will not even be considered if they don't have it. On top of that, everyone and their dog gets it and the only people that recognize it has no actual value past the line on a resume, are the ones who know what they're doing."
Haha.
Indeed, nothing like Britain.
We have an MCSE at our office, and occasionally laugh at him for being as utterly cynical as the rest of us about MS products.
If i interviewed someone with an MCSE, I'd probably have to leave the room to laugh. If someone chose an MCSE over me at an interview, you just know I'd be wanting to leave within the first year.
Face it, you work for the MCSE program, and just write opportune crap like that with the hope that it will become "accepted wisdom" by slashdotters who "saw it somewhere", and forgot that it was just another inane comment on the web.
"He talks about that in excruciating detail. The point is, if you don't charge enough, people get very suspicious. You know, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true?" Consider a great example: Linux."
Better example: StarOffice.
What the hell are Sun playing at with a $30 pricetag?
If they want to compete with microsoft office, then sell the damned thing at $400 just like MS office.
People who care about money are using OpenOffice anyway, so the £30 pricetag is useless.
People who buy a shitload of office suites don't want to spend $30 because their manager will think they're buying shareware.
At least if you price it at $400, you can still give it away free to schools and students (just like MS-Office), not only getting it into the hands of people who wouldn't spend a dime anyway, but giving the schools a chance to brag about supplying "$400-worth of office software for free"
It's a pity that people still associate price with value, but when you're neither taking advantage of the situation ($400 price-tag), nor educating the people buying (big advertising campaign), you have to wonder what Sun are playing at...
"Software pricing = (DC + RC + P)/EUS...where DC = Development Costs, RC = Residual Costs (support, maintenance, etc), P = Profit, and EUS = Expected Unit Sales."
And we should probably remember this even when we're writing Free Software... although in many cases, it will be G = DC * EUS, where G = our gift to the community, DC = development costs, and EUS = expected unit sales...
"the higher the volume of sales the more need for customer support"
Yeah, but you can fob those people off. Howabout "the higher the price, the greater the expectation for customer support"?
We buy Free Software all the time, and if the people who wrote it reply to emails or bug-reports occasionally, all well and good, it's nice of them to do stuff for us.
Sometimes we pay a bit more, maybe $50 for hardware. Then we'd quite like questions answered, but are happy to dump any suppliers who can't get their stuff to work.
At our high-end, when you pay more than $8K for something, you're almost expecting them to send a guru to sit at your workstation and integrate it at that price, and better believe that people (them and us) get really pissy when someone with expensive software doesn't handhold customers through the details of using it...
I suppose it all comes back to costs again... bad customer-service means (a) no repeat purchases, and (b) bad word-of-mouth reccomendations, but it all depends on whether it's a $50 customer or a $50K customer who is deciding whether to reccomend you or not...
(And no, I can't spell "rec{1,2}om{1,2}end".../me holds out a marshmallow to take advantage of the spelling flames...)
"Purposefully insecure? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. And I've heard it often.:)"
Maybe some things need to be insecure in order to work? Wikis, and anonymous email are two obvious examples. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing a scientist would find useful, compared to a system which prevents some people using it. Kind of the attitude of the original hackers (railroad club etc.) with blank passwords on ITS, the attitude of John Gilmore with email, of RMS with passwords, and of hackers everywhere who give out shell accounts on computers as a public service.
Ok, these systems can have cumbersome practical problems in a malicious environment [such as an internet populated by non-scientists] but you can easily see why people like the idea of insecure systems.
"Nice try at a comparison, but not quite. You can't exactly get a "reconnaissance plan" for the Prudential Building at your local Wal-Mart."
Yeah, it didn't come out so well in that story, but when it was first news a few days ago, the front-page newspaper stories reported that two men had been arrested because they had, and I quote, "been in posession of a map and a video camera", although perhaps the newspapers didn't realise quite how odd it sounded describing those two everyday objects as terrorist weapons...
UK news, 2 days ago: "It was said that, between 19 February, 2001, and 4 August, 2004, he was in possession of a "reconnaissance plan" [a map] for the Prudential Building, in New Jersey, and the document was "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"." - Example
"I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I'd refuse to take DRM music even if it were free"
I'll join you in the minority, and say that I'd refuse to take DRM music even if it were free, not only because I want to copy music (preferably beyond that which is allowed by the home recording act, for those of us with MP3 jukeboxes), but also because I want to be able to play it using Free Software. What's the point of having to have a windows computer to play your music on? Why can't I play the music on the same computer that I'm working at?
Many people won't have experienced this, but if you do ever get your hands on some good music which you can copy (I mean proper copying, without legal restriction or underhandedness), it's a totally different experience to having a CD that you can only play yourself, in your home, in one place at once, not in public, you can't send it to anyone, can't point your friends to a download of the music you're listening to, can't put it on your website to say "great music isn't it?"...
You've been told for too long that an artist would never make any money from such music, convincing evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Don't believe it.
"You should really try Real 10. It's a whole lot nicer than previous versions, and not "in your face" at all. They even have a pretty good Linux client."
So I hear, by unsolicited email, about ten times per day...
"So yeah blow away her software and replace her OS with Linux and then spend HOW much time installing products that might do what she needs?"
Remember that installing GNOME is the second-choice here. The first choice would be buying a computer capable of running MacOsX. If they've spent hundreds of pounds fixing the computer, if they use it for working from home, and if they're so worried about downtime when it breaks, they ought to at least consider whether a replacement computer might cost less money than keeping the current one.
If you do choose to install GNOME, then most of the apps will be there. If there's a piece of software that she can't use, then it's normally a compatibility thing ("this doesn't integrate with windows application x"), in which case you have to decide if that application is worth the extra hassle of remaining on a Windows platform. But if the requirement is "a publishing program", "an AOL client", or "a word-processor", then they should have no trouble finding software to fit their needs.
"Then teaching her how to use them? Remember - this was someone who wasn't bright enough to know how to stop this crap in the first place."
Teaching applications should not be a problem -- GNOME is easier to learn than Windows especially for someone who is, as you put it, a bit clueless when it comes to Windows. The advanced users may have trouble switching, people who use Visual Basic and know where the control panel is, but home users should have no trouble finding their way around GNOME.
"Reinstalling the OS is also not always an option. Computers are much like people's homes in that they become heavily customized over time."
In this case, and many others, an OS reinstall was needed anyway and pronto. Do you really think an intelligent teenager and a journalist would have any trouble configuring their GNOME applications? Would they have any trouble at all displaying their favourite wallpapers in GNOME? If anything, they might be pleasantly surprised at the amount of customisation which is available -- it can be quite a "new shiny toy" to someone used to the options available in Windows.
"Do you level your home and start over everytime the faucet leaks?"
I was expecting an automobile analogy. I suppose a bathroom one will have to do. Why do people never talk about computers, they always go off on some analagous tangent? It's as if when you start your car, you... nevermind...
"Does everyone keep track of ALL of their registration keys? All of their passwords stored in cookies?"
Yes, home users do write down everything -- my family all have big notebooks with all their passwords, account names, etc. They seem quite surprised that I can remember passwords without a book. But there does always seem to be a printout of webshop account details, dial-up passwords, online receipts, etc.
"All those tweaks to the interface and 3rd party products that do little things?"
Little things like redirecting your browser and sending spam from your computer, like the 3rd party products the woman in the article was running? She mentioned that she was fed-up with such software, and wanted to get rid of it.
"All those funky drivers for oddball hardware from manufacturers no longer in business?"
That is a problem with Linux -- hardware manufacturers just don't give a belgium about drivers in general, and non-Windows drivers in particular. To be fair, I've got as much hardware with Windows98-only drivers as I have hardware that doens't work on Linux. But yeah, hardware manufacturers are sloppy, computer-illiterate, and disinterested in providing the software tools you need to get their stuff working.
"Telling someone you have to trash their machine and that they have to reinstall from scratch will put many users in tears."
Again, the computer was trashed and the user in tears anyway, and this was jus
"I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but if more ppl would read things like this: Dispelling the myths of Gentoo Linux, an honest review: more ppl would know what they were talking about in regards to Gentoo."
A review from somebody who "examinined the output of dmesg to discover that the new SATA drives are accessible by/dev/sda instead of/dev/hda", then "checked his kernel source-code to find whether SATA is part of the SCSI system"
Which myth was this dispelling? He was going through the linux kernel source-code, just to try and get his hard-disk recognised!!!
"He should also be smacked in the head for not getting her off Windows 98. Windows 98 is 6+ years old. How many people here recommend 6 year old Linux distros?"
I sometimes use and sometimes reccommend Windows 98. It doesn't have the security problems of XP/2000 (no Windows Messenger, no LDASS or whatever that was, no remote assistance, no product activation, no media player with evil crap in it, you can update it without revealing the software you use to Microsoft, the EULA doesn't allow Microsoft to impose new terms on you in the future, nor does it allow them to remotely install software on your machine. It's not as stable, but it only needs to run for long enough to play a game; nobody would be using Windows for any real work anyway, and you can dual-boot back to a proper operating system when you've finished playing the game.
Oh yeah, and "flamebait" is the button you want to press. Reccomending windows98 indeed! Don't I know that the moderators are all MS guys, with their "if you administered a billion computers for a fortune-500 company like I do, you'd know..." attitude.
"To be fair, they should only add the levy to the phone bills of people who are being wiretapped."
The interesting question is, will policemen's phone-lines include the wire-tap cost? Howabout the phone lines supplied to government offices, or to a police station? Presumably there's no need to exclude these people from being wiretapped?
"I'd highly recommend anyone out there who is looking to improve their presentations to check out "Presenting to Win", by Jerry Weissman. Excellent book on giving presentations."
While we're on the essay reccomendations, Perl now has a page up on giving presentations, geared towards the shorter presentations
"I am certain there will be office techs who have to install SP2 on more than one machine in a day who will leave the machine unattended while they start the install on others. That means that am office drone could see the reboot dialog, click OK, and wind up being presented with a dialog that changes an administrative setting."
Install nearly any type of linux, but let's say Mandrake...
(1) Do all the configuration stuff
(2) Choose the software you want
(3) Get several cups of coffee while it spends an hour and a half copying stuff from CDs (or downloading from the web, or compiling...)
(4) Return to find that it's finished, and is prompting you to set your administrator password
"Arthur. The worst move ever. To sum it up it was the biggest waste of my money ever."
You didn't figure that out when you first saw the posters for the movie? The combination of 1450s armour with modern neat-trimmed beard and clean face, combined with a woman who'd have made jeanne the peasant look rather prim... How could it be anything other than another "connecticut yankee in king arthur's court"? Yet another director with "wouldn't it be cool if someone time-travelled and had superpowers" ideas that film-financiers think is going to be ever so popular...
I'd actually quite like to see a 'proper' arthur film... 600AD, cornish borders, the king living in a saxon mud-hut on the clifftops... alas it won't be yet...
"I recommend everyone look into it, install it, and use it. All emails go plain text without encryption, so it's the least you can do to enhance your privacy."
The sad thing is how easy it is to defeat this sort of encryption. Template: "$SENDER dear, I can't seem to read your email. Can you send it again normally? Love, $RECIPIENT"
"As for VoIP, I don't know."
I bet Phil Zimmerman is kicking himself now for not releasing PGP as Free Software, but one of his projects which is still gathering proprietary dust is PGP-Fone, a rather secure, if low-voice-quality, VoIP program. See the PGPi page for details (pgpi.org)
"GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds."
That does seem to be the case. I've never received a PGP communication where I didn't personally guide the sender through key-creation. I don't think that should be an accepted limit though -- it's still useful to get through to people that if they don't use GPG, their emails will be read.
In some cases it can be very easy. For example if you work someplace with a nasty "email isn't private" policy, it can be quite easy to convince your friends and family to encrypt when they hear that your boss and the IT department will be reading their emails. For some reason people don't bother because they don't believe it'll really "happen to them", and they become quite different when they realise that an actual person is reading the email that they just sent.. they just assume it's as secure as postal mail, and if anybody doesn't encrypt, it's because they have no idea whatsoever of what's actually happening to the email.
"Granted, I'd consider it a bit fishy that they only now bothered to trademark it (unless they were concerned that Google would force them to change"
Perhaps we can finally setup a gmail.webservices.tm.us domain name, so these people can stop squabbling over the "US trademark means you get the.com name" fallacy, which conveniently ignores the sheer number of people who can all have the same trademark and end up fighting over domains...
Not that it matters in google's case, because gmail.google.com is in their own domain anyway and it seems quite smart that gmail.com redirects there, rather than trying to use gmail.com as it's own "recognisable brand".
"And please don't go hiking where you might wind up owing your life to someone who has an SUV."
I might need a Humvee to get to hospital from choking on coffee after reading that...
Rescues of hikers are done by helicopter, or on foot. Occasionally using a land-rover. The very idea of using a fashionable road-car for rescue work is just too awful to think about. "Mountain rescue just called, they're trying to dig their mercedes out of the mud..."
"I've got a little piece of information for all of you tree huggers who are too busy worrying about Hummers, Excursions, and Suburbans. There are even BIGGER vehicles on the road! Semi-trailers, buses, dump trucks, garbage trucks... all of these vehicles are even LARGER THAN A HUMMER!!!!"
[*] Semi-trailers - deliver enough food to feed a whole district.
[*] Busses - carry 30 people to work or school
[*] Dump trucks - allow you to build houses and such-like
[*] Garbage trucks - Collect the rubbish for a whole town
[*] Hummers - take one woman to work
Okay, so you've "proved" that the danger is larger. Now how about the "danger to usefulness ratio"?
Slashdot Mirror
"...like an MCSE, no-one bothers to get it, no employer ever demands it.
Then its nothing like the MCSE. Well I don't know what its like in Britain, but here it is demanded by employers, often times a candidate will not even be considered if they don't have it. On top of that, everyone and their dog gets it and the only people that recognize it has no actual value past the line on a resume, are the ones who know what they're doing."
Haha.
Indeed, nothing like Britain.
We have an MCSE at our office, and occasionally laugh at him for being as utterly cynical as the rest of us about MS products.
If i interviewed someone with an MCSE, I'd probably have to leave the room to laugh. If someone chose an MCSE over me at an interview, you just know I'd be wanting to leave within the first year.
Face it, you work for the MCSE program, and just write opportune crap like that with the hope that it will become "accepted wisdom" by slashdotters who "saw it somewhere", and forgot that it was just another inane comment on the web.
The MCSE... it has no clothes...
Good luck selling your "certification".
"He talks about that in excruciating detail. The point is, if you don't charge enough, people get very suspicious. You know, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true?" Consider a great example: Linux."
Better example: StarOffice.
What the hell are Sun playing at with a $30 pricetag?
If they want to compete with microsoft office, then sell the damned thing at $400 just like MS office.
People who care about money are using OpenOffice anyway, so the £30 pricetag is useless.
People who buy a shitload of office suites don't want to spend $30 because their manager will think they're buying shareware.
At least if you price it at $400, you can still give it away free to schools and students (just like MS-Office), not only getting it into the hands of people who wouldn't spend a dime anyway, but giving the schools a chance to brag about supplying "$400-worth of office software for free"
It's a pity that people still associate price with value, but when you're neither taking advantage of the situation ($400 price-tag), nor educating the people buying (big advertising campaign), you have to wonder what Sun are playing at...
"Software pricing = (DC + RC + P)/EUS ...where DC = Development Costs, RC = Residual Costs (support, maintenance, etc), P = Profit, and EUS = Expected Unit Sales."
And we should probably remember this even when we're writing Free Software... although in many cases, it will be G = DC * EUS, where G = our gift to the community, DC = development costs, and EUS = expected unit sales...
"the higher the volume of sales the more need for customer support"
/me holds out a marshmallow to take advantage of the spelling flames...)
Yeah, but you can fob those people off. Howabout "the higher the price, the greater the expectation for customer support"?
We buy Free Software all the time, and if the people who wrote it reply to emails or bug-reports occasionally, all well and good, it's nice of them to do stuff for us.
Sometimes we pay a bit more, maybe $50 for hardware. Then we'd quite like questions answered, but are happy to dump any suppliers who can't get their stuff to work.
At our high-end, when you pay more than $8K for something, you're almost expecting them to send a guru to sit at your workstation and integrate it at that price, and better believe that people (them and us) get really pissy when someone with expensive software doesn't handhold customers through the details of using it...
I suppose it all comes back to costs again... bad customer-service means (a) no repeat purchases, and (b) bad word-of-mouth reccomendations, but it all depends on whether it's a $50 customer or a $50K customer who is deciding whether to reccomend you or not...
(And no, I can't spell "rec{1,2}om{1,2}end"...
"I thought the colors were in support of our troops in Iraq?"
As in, camouflaged against the background? Mighty useful, when it comes to choosing a text-colour for your web-page...
Can't we be a bit racist here, and get some good old black'n'white colours for slashdot? I'm sure we could find some US troops wearing those colours.
Err, "colors"...
"Purposefully insecure? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. And I've heard it often. :)"
Maybe some things need to be insecure in order to work? Wikis, and anonymous email are two obvious examples. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing a scientist would find useful, compared to a system which prevents some people using it. Kind of the attitude of the original hackers (railroad club etc.) with blank passwords on ITS, the attitude of John Gilmore with email, of RMS with passwords, and of hackers everywhere who give out shell accounts on computers as a public service.
Ok, these systems can have cumbersome practical problems in a malicious environment [such as an internet populated by non-scientists] but you can easily see why people like the idea of insecure systems.
"Increase your mailbox size by 100%!!!"
"Nice try at a comparison, but not quite. You can't exactly get a "reconnaissance plan" for the Prudential Building at your local Wal-Mart."
Yeah, it didn't come out so well in that story, but when it was first news a few days ago, the front-page newspaper stories reported that two men had been arrested because they had, and I quote, "been in posession of a map and a video camera", although perhaps the newspapers didn't realise quite how odd it sounded describing those two everyday objects as terrorist weapons...
"ARREST foreigners for READING A MAP"
UK news, 2 days ago: "It was said that, between 19 February, 2001, and 4 August, 2004, he was in possession of a "reconnaissance plan" [a map] for the Prudential Building, in New Jersey, and the document was "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"." - Example
"I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I'd refuse to take DRM music even if it were free"
I'll join you in the minority, and say that I'd refuse to take DRM music even if it were free, not only because I want to copy music (preferably beyond that which is allowed by the home recording act, for those of us with MP3 jukeboxes), but also because I want to be able to play it using Free Software. What's the point of having to have a windows computer to play your music on? Why can't I play the music on the same computer that I'm working at?
Many people won't have experienced this, but if you do ever get your hands on some good music which you can copy (I mean proper copying, without legal restriction or underhandedness), it's a totally different experience to having a CD that you can only play yourself, in your home, in one place at once, not in public, you can't send it to anyone, can't point your friends to a download of the music you're listening to, can't put it on your website to say "great music isn't it?"...
You've been told for too long that an artist would never make any money from such music, convincing evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Don't believe it.
"You should really try Real 10. It's a whole lot nicer than previous versions, and not "in your face" at all. They even have a pretty good Linux client."
So I hear, by unsolicited email, about ten times per day...
"So yeah blow away her software and replace her OS with Linux and then spend HOW much time installing products that might do what she needs?"
Remember that installing GNOME is the second-choice here. The first choice would be buying a computer capable of running MacOsX. If they've spent hundreds of pounds fixing the computer, if they use it for working from home, and if they're so worried about downtime when it breaks, they ought to at least consider whether a replacement computer might cost less money than keeping the current one.
If you do choose to install GNOME, then most of the apps will be there. If there's a piece of software that she can't use, then it's normally a compatibility thing ("this doesn't integrate with windows application x"), in which case you have to decide if that application is worth the extra hassle of remaining on a Windows platform. But if the requirement is "a publishing program", "an AOL client", or "a word-processor", then they should have no trouble finding software to fit their needs.
"Then teaching her how to use them? Remember - this was someone who wasn't bright enough to know how to stop this crap in the first place."
Teaching applications should not be a problem -- GNOME is easier to learn than Windows especially for someone who is, as you put it, a bit clueless when it comes to Windows. The advanced users may have trouble switching, people who use Visual Basic and know where the control panel is, but home users should have no trouble finding their way around GNOME.
"Reinstalling the OS is also not always an option. Computers are much like people's homes in that they become heavily customized over time."
In this case, and many others, an OS reinstall was needed anyway and pronto. Do you really think an intelligent teenager and a journalist would have any trouble configuring their GNOME applications? Would they have any trouble at all displaying their favourite wallpapers in GNOME? If anything, they might be pleasantly surprised at the amount of customisation which is available -- it can be quite a "new shiny toy" to someone used to the options available in Windows.
"Do you level your home and start over everytime the faucet leaks?"
I was expecting an automobile analogy. I suppose a bathroom one will have to do. Why do people never talk about computers, they always go off on some analagous tangent? It's as if when you start your car, you... nevermind...
"Does everyone keep track of ALL of their registration keys? All of their passwords stored in cookies?"
Yes, home users do write down everything -- my family all have big notebooks with all their passwords, account names, etc. They seem quite surprised that I can remember passwords without a book. But there does always seem to be a printout of webshop account details, dial-up passwords, online receipts, etc.
"All those tweaks to the interface and 3rd party products that do little things?"
Little things like redirecting your browser and sending spam from your computer, like the 3rd party products the woman in the article was running? She mentioned that she was fed-up with such software, and wanted to get rid of it.
"All those funky drivers for oddball hardware from manufacturers no longer in business?"
That is a problem with Linux -- hardware manufacturers just don't give a belgium about drivers in general, and non-Windows drivers in particular. To be fair, I've got as much hardware with Windows98-only drivers as I have hardware that doens't work on Linux. But yeah, hardware manufacturers are sloppy, computer-illiterate, and disinterested in providing the software tools you need to get their stuff working.
"Telling someone you have to trash their machine and that they have to reinstall from scratch will put many users in tears."
Again, the computer was trashed and the user in tears anyway, and this was jus
"I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but if more ppl would read things like this: Dispelling the myths of Gentoo Linux, an honest review: more ppl would know what they were talking about in regards to Gentoo."
/dev/sda instead of /dev/hda", then "checked his kernel source-code to find whether SATA is part of the SCSI system"
A review from somebody who "examinined the output of dmesg to discover that the new SATA drives are accessible by
Which myth was this dispelling? He was going through the linux kernel source-code, just to try and get his hard-disk recognised!!!
"He should also be smacked in the head for not getting her off Windows 98. Windows 98 is 6+ years old. How many people here recommend 6 year old Linux distros?"
I sometimes use and sometimes reccommend Windows 98. It doesn't have the security problems of XP/2000 (no Windows Messenger, no LDASS or whatever that was, no remote assistance, no product activation, no media player with evil crap in it, you can update it without revealing the software you use to Microsoft, the EULA doesn't allow Microsoft to impose new terms on you in the future, nor does it allow them to remotely install software on your machine. It's not as stable, but it only needs to run for long enough to play a game; nobody would be using Windows for any real work anyway, and you can dual-boot back to a proper operating system when you've finished playing the game.
Oh yeah, and "flamebait" is the button you want to press. Reccomending windows98 indeed! Don't I know that the moderators are all MS guys, with their "if you administered a billion computers for a fortune-500 company like I do, you'd know..." attitude.
"To be fair, they should only add the levy to the phone bills of people who are being wiretapped."
The interesting question is, will policemen's phone-lines include the wire-tap cost? Howabout the phone lines supplied to government offices, or to a police station? Presumably there's no need to exclude these people from being wiretapped?
"I'd highly recommend anyone out there who is looking to improve their presentations to check out "Presenting to Win", by Jerry Weissman. Excellent book on giving presentations."
While we're on the essay reccomendations, Perl now has a page up on giving presentations, geared towards the shorter presentations
"I am certain there will be office techs who have to install SP2 on more than one machine in a day who will leave the machine unattended while they start the install on others. That means that am office drone could see the reboot dialog, click OK, and wind up being presented with a dialog that changes an administrative setting."
Install nearly any type of linux, but let's say Mandrake...
(1) Do all the configuration stuff
(2) Choose the software you want
(3) Get several cups of coffee while it spends an hour and a half copying stuff from CDs (or downloading from the web, or compiling...)
(4) Return to find that it's finished, and is prompting you to set your administrator password
"Feel free now, to include by reference the entire "color" vs. "colour" flamefest from lkml."
"Colour" every time... not only is it correct, but it's guaranteed to avoid reserved-words and functions from other peoples' APIs....
"Arthur. The worst move ever. To sum it up it was the biggest waste of my money ever."
You didn't figure that out when you first saw the posters for the movie? The combination of 1450s armour with modern neat-trimmed beard and clean face, combined with a woman who'd have made jeanne the peasant look rather prim... How could it be anything other than another "connecticut yankee in king arthur's court"? Yet another director with "wouldn't it be cool if someone time-travelled and had superpowers" ideas that film-financiers think is going to be ever so popular...
I'd actually quite like to see a 'proper' arthur film... 600AD, cornish borders, the king living in a saxon mud-hut on the clifftops... alas it won't be yet...
"Ol fclvat ba zl rznvy lbh unir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN, lbh onfgneqf!"
Gung jna'g na rznvy, naq gur QZPN bayl nccyvrf jura n pbzcnal hfrf rapelcgvba, vg'f abg qrfvtarq gb cebgrpg vaqvivqhnyf...
"I recommend everyone look into it, install it, and use it. All emails go plain text without encryption, so it's the least you can do to enhance your privacy."
The sad thing is how easy it is to defeat this sort of encryption. Template: "$SENDER dear, I can't seem to read your email. Can you send it again normally? Love, $RECIPIENT"
"As for VoIP, I don't know."
I bet Phil Zimmerman is kicking himself now for not releasing PGP as Free Software, but one of his projects which is still gathering proprietary dust is PGP-Fone, a rather secure, if low-voice-quality, VoIP program. See the PGPi page for details (pgpi.org)
"GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds."
That does seem to be the case. I've never received a PGP communication where I didn't personally guide the sender through key-creation. I don't think that should be an accepted limit though -- it's still useful to get through to people that if they don't use GPG, their emails will be read.
In some cases it can be very easy. For example if you work someplace with a nasty "email isn't private" policy, it can be quite easy to convince your friends and family to encrypt when they hear that your boss and the IT department will be reading their emails. For some reason people don't bother because they don't believe it'll really "happen to them", and they become quite different when they realise that an actual person is reading the email that they just sent.. they just assume it's as secure as postal mail, and if anybody doesn't encrypt, it's because they have no idea whatsoever of what's actually happening to the email.
"Granted, I'd consider it a bit fishy that they only now bothered to trademark it (unless they were concerned that Google would force them to change"
.com name" fallacy, which conveniently ignores the sheer number of people who can all have the same trademark and end up fighting over domains...
Perhaps we can finally setup a gmail.webservices.tm.us domain name, so these people can stop squabbling over the "US trademark means you get the
Not that it matters in google's case, because gmail.google.com is in their own domain anyway and it seems quite smart that gmail.com redirects there, rather than trying to use gmail.com as it's own "recognisable brand".
"And please don't go hiking where you might wind up owing your life to someone who has an SUV."
I might need a Humvee to get to hospital from choking on coffee after reading that...
Rescues of hikers are done by helicopter, or on foot. Occasionally using a land-rover. The very idea of using a fashionable road-car for rescue work is just too awful to think about. "Mountain rescue just called, they're trying to dig their mercedes out of the mud..."
"I've got a little piece of information for all of you tree huggers who are too busy worrying about Hummers, Excursions, and Suburbans. There are even BIGGER vehicles on the road! Semi-trailers, buses, dump trucks, garbage trucks... all of these vehicles are even LARGER THAN A HUMMER!!!!"
[*] Semi-trailers - deliver enough food to feed a whole district.
[*] Busses - carry 30 people to work or school
[*] Dump trucks - allow you to build houses and such-like
[*] Garbage trucks - Collect the rubbish for a whole town
[*] Hummers - take one woman to work
Okay, so you've "proved" that the danger is larger. Now how about the "danger to usefulness ratio"?