... many products that businesses are not willing to put on the net. It will also enable greater abuses by those who know how. I would not mind having one machine that is enabled, but it would be the only one, and only useful for certain things.
I would say relax. TC(Trusted Computing) will actually be a great thing for open source. When people start paying full price for all their "warez", they will start to find that the wish list is bigger than the piggy bank. This technology will enable a great many things, and it does not have to be used (AFAIK). It will also be great for OSS development. It helps to know that the correct TC is being used to submit the code. It will make John Q Public feel safer.
I am no expert on the ramifications of TC, but I do *much* work with companies that want to use the online world, and most of them limit their services due to the issues that TC will solve. Even in OSS, we have to make money. It is how the world goes 'round, puts food on the table. TC will make it easier in some ways to make money. It will also make it easier for the small guy to make money.
That said, there are serious potential abuses of this technology, and I am still hesitant to boldly go forward. It will probably go forward without me if I do not though, so, all things being as they are, I need to learn how to use it and give it to my clients. They will want it. They have been wanting something like it for a while now.
I simply have no TV or Radio connected that the kids can use. Seems ghastly to some, but for some strange reason, I do not have the problems with my kids that I routinely hear about from other kids' parents.
I absolutely agree that election issues have always been numerous. I believe that in the past decade they have been receiving more attention and more public discussion (hence more prevalent).
In large part, this problem can be placed squarely on the shoulders of American parents.
Or, as I prefer to put it, we the voters have a moral obligation to ensure that the people in power do what is right for our country, and our children.
Dang! One of the few posts I would give a +5 to and I don't have the point.
I come from a teaching family and I have worked in the schools. I have been able to see children grow from 0 to 30 in my life. The neat thing about that is I see patterns. Those children whose parents were passionate about education and were available to their children tended to be passionate about education themselves. Those parents who were not home, or did not spend time with their children on a daily basis (not 5 minutes, but hours per day) tended to have learning and life problems. Not a one size fits all thing, but certainly true enough most of the time. It is amazing how often the teachers can observe a child and then tell you exactly what the parents are like. No, you will not hear them do it in public. They value their jobs as well. But, the fact that they rarely miss the mark, says a lot about the connection between parents and children.
If you really want better schools, it starts with better parents. If you want better parents, then you have to let it be known what your standards are to the parents around you. If they do not like it. Tough! They are not good enough to put in charge of your child, and their child may prove to be not good enough to be around yours at that point. It is not their child's fault, but their child's parents. Still, do you want your child being influenced by the their lack of parenting?
If WE ALL demanded more from parents around us, and we all demanded more from our elected officials, we would get more. People are like water, they tend to sink as low as they can and do as little as possible to get where they are headed.
What does this have to do with nutcases like this one? If people demanded more from their media, the same thing would happen as well. It all begins with a proper education where you learn to hold yourself and the world around you to higher standards. Goes for software too.
.. one of the huge problems for software developers is that so much of the money in software development goes to people who have relatively little if anything to do with software development. OSS will actually (IMHO) do more to correct this than any other business model.
The step the state is taking will actually allow more money to be targeted at solutions and less money to be given to people who understood how to legally "appropriate" others ideas. Lets face it, with the IP world going the way it is going, if the government does not step in actively to fight the Copyright Law the fed has created, it will become fiscally dangerous to write and release code.
If the governing bodies develop their own code base by paying internal people to write what they need, sharing and building upon the efforts of other similar bodies, not only will they evolve better standards (happens easier when you share code development), but we will wind up with more "fill in your state here" based coders. I am sure that outsourcing will happen with much of the development eventually, but they will still need internal brain trust to make it all work, and the code will be available for others to build upon. So, instead of paying forever for marginally valuable software, they pay once for targeted solutions that can be expanded, replaced or enhanced as they see fit. Then they only pay to enhance or fix what they have. Since the code base is shared by other government programmers (or actually is OSS), they gain the benefits of OSS at least to a limited degree. In the end, it will be less expensive, a better use of tax dollars and more productive at the user end.
Maybe the states can use the savings to improve the education system. How many other professions can you attend school for 12 years of you life and only expect to make 50k to 60k per year? Heck, my wife worked at a cosmetics counter selling Cli**que and made more money than a teacher with less than a few years experience.
It's certainly front page news if there's a non-exploitable flaw in Windows for which a patch has been released.
Hmmm... I must not be reading the right pubs, or at least not enough of them. Never have seen many (if any) trivial issues on MS. They always get buried behind "fixes an exploit blah blah blah". If they published all the minor ones as well, they would need a monthly circ just for that. Come to think of it, MS does have one - you just have to a pay an additional fee, or visit the website daily.
FYI - I do believe the programmers at MS are capable of putting out much better code than what the corp climate allows them to. I know several, and I know their private life code is much better than their MS life code. They have to follow the work rules to.
I could care less about anything on MS or linux that impacts neither productivity nor security. The problem has been that most of the stuff I have read about impacts one or the other. There are many many more patches for MS and linux than what makes any "story line".
Now, the recent vulnerability in linux that had been sitting around since early versions of 2, that was news that needed coverage. And the almost weekly news of major MS exploits (let alone the daily waste of dollars on MS crashes) is incredibly persistent news.
However, I will probably patch this as well on the next patch day, after I have tested it on a safe system and made sure it breaks nothing I have running.
Voting issues have been becoming more and more prevalent in the past decade. In the past election (2000), many issues came into the open about voter registration fraud that for one reason or another the current administration has snuffed. Florida removing people from the ballots was a huge one. When watching the flow of money with these issues, they tend to resolve to the same small group of elites, thought not necessarily the same person, company or political alignment.
Now, I don't want to say they are trying to rig elections, but they all seem to be benefitting from the same shoddy practices. It does tend to make the paranoid in one come out, but I like to believe that net profit is the real reason behind the issues. It is cheaper up front to do less testing and coding. It is cheaper up front to not make certain that all things work as they should, or to not spend to much time thinking about the issues. Then again, maybe I am experiencing optimistic ignorance.;-)
When you look at Apple vs anything, it is Apple vs Windows. The hardware is important as well, but that is what the end user really sees. Since Apple has gone to the BSD kernel and snazzed up the interface for the joe user, I have talked to plenty of sysadmins and pointy haired bosses who are making or looking at making a test run with an Apple in the office. The primary reason is not the speed of the machine or the hardware, but the OS. I even know of ISPs quietly switching over to Apple's OS. My understanding is the up time is as good as line, the support is better and the systems out perform. That seems contrary to the specs I have read online, but that is what I have been hearing from most of the people I have talked to using the system.
I have not used a Mac in years. I wound up working in the financial programming world using PCs and Unix boxes. Now, the same people who were telling us to use Windows (pointy haired bosses) are starting to switch to Macs. I do not know if this is a trend that will have momentum, but I do know that the way several have talked/bragged about them, it is like listening to them talk about the Porsche or BMW they have also.
So, for what it is worth, I think the market for Apple is growing stronger. I do not think it is growing stronger in the area this analyst understands. I am not going to knock the author for not having a complete market view. Very few people do, and most of the smart analysts will tell you they themselves do not have a complete market view.
If I saw the high end car lines going out of business, I might worry about Apple, but I do not. What I think we are more likely to see is Apple at some point being gobbled up by bigger fish as has happened with most high end auto lines, and I am not even sure that might happen. After all, they are making money, have no debt outside of stock and are known for high quality and innovation and now are the premier desktop for *nix. Not a bad package to add to any corporate holding.
If Bush wants a reason to build a space station solely on US funding, this would be it. I can not think of a more secure place to do this research than a space station. Surrounded by vacuum and very high doses of incredibly lethal radiation. A leak up there would definitely be limited. Big worry would be a potential reentry of the facility or something from the facility. But, you deal with that on a daily basis now.
If he were smart, he would put the two together, make his buddies in the defense industry happy many times over - contracts for rockets (or shuttles), station building and materials, bio weapons research. Oh, yeah, the military would love it, as it would be very secure. Talk about low risk of espionage. No one's going to just drop a suitcase out the window here. Then, after some time has passed, build a new stations somewhere else and sell tourist tickets to visit the original bio weapons research space station.
Why would Microsoft want to operate outside the law?
Profit!?
MS has been outside the law for so long, they may not remember what inside the law is. Many crime organizations or businessmen performing illegal activities simply become so arrogant that they run up against someone who will deal with them, or they do something so blatant that it can no longer be ignored. Look how long the PC industry has ignored MS's illegal activities all in the name of profit. Look how many businesses outside of MS have done illegal things all in the name of profit (WorldComm, Martha Stewart, AT&T (Ma Bell), Standard Oil, etc.) - lying to investors, employees, illegal toxin dumping, price dumping (selling a product below cost), child/slave labor, and much more.
Making a profit for a business is a very compelling reason to do anything. Making a much bigger profit can drive many people to do all kinds of illegal activities (business people, gamblers, and drug dealers all work on the same or similar motives -profit! The big difference is some activities are much more publicly defined as illegal, and many businesses are actually run from within the law.). The jails are full of the petty criminals who tried to profit outside the law. A corporation is run by individuals and all of their morals (or lack thereof). People rarely steal or break the law just for the heck of it (even petty crimes). They almost always have something to gain. MS has billions to gain or loose. Since the fees for breaking these laws is only in the millions and is not normally applied (in the US), it is easy to see why breaking the law is profitable for them. After all, no jail time is risked, and even if it is, 3 years in the country club and come home to many millions in your account. That is not a hard decision for some people.
Business is not about doing what is right for the world, nor does business have to conform to any moral standard. We the consumer must hold them responsible, and we normally do not. Besides in the end, you are only guilty and in trouble if they can prove it.
From what I am reading in the articles on the net, 100 feet can still create some serious, albeit localized damage. If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction. Anyone out there serious about their astronomy?
The Tunguska Blast over Siberia was an object about 100 meters in diameter. Sure it burned up in the atmosphere, but it was devastating to the ground anyway. This article also mentions that at about 50 meters, these rocks make it through the atmosphere and can do serious localized damage. So, since 100 feet converts to is 30.48 meters, this rock would more than likely to have an effect that we will notice on the ground.
For further reading, here is a site that has already compiled links and information
And, of course, the Yahoo listings on Earth Impact information online.
Maybe in your experiences, but where I worked, that behaviour would have gotten that unfamiliar face shot. Noone messed with the rules. The SPs carried live loaded ammo. They did shoot one person while I was there. He lived, but went to jail.
They were so wrong to give you a free email service
That would be like free tv... We may not pay for it at the time of viewing, but we pay for the ads when we buy the products advertised, so yeah, complain away.
Would this early release program be similar to the one in the early 90s where only certain career fields could participate and only if your CO or first shirt authorized it. It was really a way to get rid of people who were not what they wanted in. Not nescesarily bad people, but people who do not fit the military cutter.
If it is like the one then, try getting out if you are in a hard to fill career field, or are a favorite of the squadron leadership. If they like you, but your field is not hurting, then they will try to keep you in. When I was in, my first shirt told me that this program was a great way to get rid of people who were not right for the military. And there are a lot of them.
I know people in right now who want out, but are not being let out. And everyone is letting computer people out early, some just hand them a pink slip.;-)
I would love to be able to agree with you, but I can not. Problem is that marketing is a nescesary cost of business. If people do not know about your product, they can not buy it. So, until we all can know about all products all the time, there is not a chance that marketing will go away or get cheaper. Even then, I doubt marketing will go away since the companies need spin control on the products they sell.
You read too much into what was is not said. I only said that the whole country was racist, and it really still is racist. How you read that I said it was ok into that makes me wonder about you.
His sayings are recorded by eye witnesses. I am sure if Jesus wrote any manuscripts, they would be in there. But to date, no-one knows of any.
Learn some religious history. Try checking out the formation of the modern Bible in the 400 ADs. Another one of those history writing by committee things. The Bible is a powerful book with many great messages. But the average person has no idea what it is all about. I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but I have spent more time than most around me studying it's history (third sourced) and its individual books (original forms before the 400AD meetings).
I guess it just like asking you "Why are there no number one best selling books written by Innerweb?".
No number one best selling books - I have written for companies, not mass markets. The publications are internal and are for some of the companies required reading and in all cases considered private to the company.
Dude? Hello? Does _any_ software vendor anywhere guarantee anything regarding their products?
Uhh, yeah... We do. In writing
But, we do not promise the moon. We stick to engineering s solution instead of promising vaporware. If it does not work, we put work into it until it does. If for some reason we can not make it work, we refund the client. If it causes damage to the client, they can easily take their refund and go somewhere else. And, if it causes a problem with their stuff, we fix that as well. This has happened once in the early 90s, which is why we took a different path for development.
We are not a billion dollar corp, and we work on Linux, MS, and Mac. I am not a linux zealot, I program more for MS systems than anything else. It is where most of the money is at the moment.
So, it's better, more secure when the said bug was sitting in plain sight, in publicly accessible source code, for 5 years, than locked tight, somewhere in Microsofts fallout shelter, and available only in binary? Crackers have a better chance of reverse engineering binaries, than simply reading the source?
Uh, know any crackers? I do. They are the most brilliant programmers I have ever met. Either that says very little about the rest of us, or a whole lot about them. The guys I know (as far as I know) work inside companies at the request of the companies in a security auditing frame. And, they never need source and they always find many ways to crack. And I have watched them break into Linux/Unix/MS/Mac. None of them use MS products based on their experiences. That is why I choose to support the Linux model, because the people in the trenches who do the work that I know do that very thing.
Facts are facts though. This has been a bug since 2.x. It has been in the open (wild) where anyone with the proper itch can hit it. It has not been hit. That is why I mentioned the targeted reward. OSS is not perfect, but it is a far better model IMHO than the current commercial one. I believe that a hybrid model is the next model that we will wind up using, as it has the best benefits of both worlds. Yes and some of the biggest drawbacks from both worlds.
Fact is that Operating Systems are the new highways. Unless a good model is created to update, create and add onto this infrastructure without stranding current users or breaking old vehicles, governments will at some point have to step in to make it all work together. This is not unlike the early problems with electric power being delivered at different specs, thereby making it hard to get appliances that would work in many different locations. Dataflow is the root of the economy for the forseeable future. Just as the highway systems built the economy of the past 50 years. Mr. Gates got one thing right, the world needs to be able to use data without any worry about what data it is or where it is from. But, his company has never even come close to making it happen, and more often than not stands in the way of that happening. Information must flow. If it does not , it looses much of its value. Even the secret information is useless if it can not flow to those who need it.
Is that it allows complete computer illiterates to do little things so that they feel like they can do great big things. Kind of like the kid who rides a tri-cycle thinking he can drive a formula 1 race car.
People like to believe they are empowered. Most people do not use the best product, they use the product that makes them feel the best. So what if Excel is not a database. The last place I worked full time for had so many excel spreadsheet databases that two people sitting beside each other could not agree on what a property's address was.
MS has the market for dumb users at the moment. Unskilled users can be brilliant at other things (like marketing, real estate, contracts, etc.) but they have no clue (or worse, little clue) how to work with data. They use MS products though and can get a small thing going, so they think the next step is just another click and drag away. Linux lacks this fundamental smoke screen.
The reason this race analogy is so beautiful is that Linux is slowly creeping up on MS's GUI ease of use and unskilled user empowerment. The key really is to allow people to do damage to themselves easily, then it is their choice. As Linux develops the ease of use, and ease of getting stuck that Windows currently has, then the rest of the world will start to flock to it. After all, these are most of the same people who download music, games and movies without paying. Then, they will not have to pay for the OS or the Office software.
Microsoft might be able to compete with that, but I doubt they can through legitimate means. After all, GNU applications and Linux development do not have any of the marketing, h/r, accounting or other costs associated with running a company. Pure development without the taint of beancounters or marketers.
And there are probably more. How will this mesh with the DB laws being pushed? If you are storing "deep web" pages that are parts of someone else's database, is that not flying in the face of what these new laws are going to be all about? Or am I misunderstanding what these laws are trying to accomplish?
It seems to me that the future will be a search on Yahoo (or google) will wind up pointing you to many results that are themselves current active sub-searches of a websites localized database. Anything else would seem to violate what they are trying to protect now.
Umm, in case you forgot, the entire country was racist, with some sections of it being much more so than others. The Mormon church was made of Americans and Americans at that time in history were very racist. Or, maybe Maritn Luther King did not really have his marches, and get shot. Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons... All of the "religions" were racist in one way or another. Maybe some of the people in the churh were black, but they sat in the back there as well as the back of the bus.
Anyone who takes issue with the Mormons had better check to see how estranged their own church's vision of reality is first. The Mormons have many good points (and many daffy ones), but in the Bible, the Clergy are not to be paid. This is the reference to the other religions' clergy. There are many other points that I will leave to a knowledgable Mormon to post. They are all correct, they are all in the Bible, and are all ignored by almost all if not all other Christian religions.
As far as McBride. I am now to the point where I wonder why the judge in the case has allowed this charade to continue as long as it has. But, then again, I also wonder why the MS anti-trust suit got dropped so fast when the current adminsitration came in. Coincidence?
If this had been a bug in MS, we may might not have heard about it for months or years unless someone on the outside published it. The crackers would have still had a good chance to have known about it.
What winds up happening is I pay MS to produce a product that I have very little input on. I buy the off the shelf solution to then develop 50% of the solution anyway. And, then it crashes, the documents are incorrect (updates might be available on their web sites), and I have no way of figuring out what the issues are without paying more $s for something I paid for already. If I tried to pull the same trick, I would loose my client.
Linux side is someone spots the issue, makes us aware of it in most cases. People have something more important than a paycheck at stake get to work on a fix for the problem. A, or multiple, potential fix(es) is(are) put up. Sometimes a fix goes straight in with minimal review (it works, most liked it), sometimes the fix gets kicked around to hash out any potential problems (in the full light of day, normally my apps do not break when the fix is rolled out.)
I like the public knowledge aspect of OSS. Yep, hackers have access to it also, but closed source never seemed to stop them, it just stop me from protecting myself.
Maybe we need to look at the next step for OSS? Maybe there is a better model for building OSS? Maybe companies might start providing more donations (like cheap lic fees) to a foundation that rewards freelance OSS programmers with cash for tackling certain problems (and does not pay until the code is peer reviewed and bug checked to a reasonable extent.) Maybe that would work better... Are certain organizations not starting to do that?
Given how much OSS has accomplished in the past decade with its relative lack of fees and "structure", imagine what might happen if more companies started using their proprietary source software budget to put bounties out on features they needed in OSS. True, not all features would they want to make public, but enough they would wat to so as to dramatically cut everyone's costs (GNU lic is important because of this). Most companies actually have very close to the same needs. But, their money goes to legal and marketing fees more than it seems to go to actual development fees with off the sheld software. What an economic waste! Check out John Nash for a rather different rather OSS view of the world.
In the end, you are left with a decision. The programmers at MS are very bright. The programmers in OSS are very bright. The real difference is the perceived safety of being able to blame MS (who you can not hold responsible yet - name one successful law suit against MS for the failure of their software to function as advertised) versus the cost effectiveness of not paying for huge legal and marketing fees (as well as other corporate overhead having very little to do with getting better or more code). I am not against programmers getting paid. I am against sloth and leeches in a corporate setting destroying the market in which programmers get paid.
Slashdot Mirror
InnerWeb
I would say relax. TC(Trusted Computing) will actually be a great thing for open source. When people start paying full price for all their "warez", they will start to find that the wish list is bigger than the piggy bank. This technology will enable a great many things, and it does not have to be used (AFAIK). It will also be great for OSS development. It helps to know that the correct TC is being used to submit the code. It will make John Q Public feel safer.
I am no expert on the ramifications of TC, but I do *much* work with companies that want to use the online world, and most of them limit their services due to the issues that TC will solve. Even in OSS, we have to make money. It is how the world goes 'round, puts food on the table. TC will make it easier in some ways to make money. It will also make it easier for the small guy to make money.
That said, there are serious potential abuses of this technology, and I am still hesitant to boldly go forward. It will probably go forward without me if I do not though, so, all things being as they are, I need to learn how to use it and give it to my clients. They will want it. They have been wanting something like it for a while now.
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
Perhaps I did not say that very well. ;-)
InnerWeb
In large part, this problem can be placed squarely on the shoulders of American parents.
Or, as I prefer to put it, we the voters have a moral obligation to ensure that the people in power do what is right for our country, and our children.
Dang! One of the few posts I would give a +5 to and I don't have the point.
I come from a teaching family and I have worked in the schools. I have been able to see children grow from 0 to 30 in my life. The neat thing about that is I see patterns. Those children whose parents were passionate about education and were available to their children tended to be passionate about education themselves. Those parents who were not home, or did not spend time with their children on a daily basis (not 5 minutes, but hours per day) tended to have learning and life problems. Not a one size fits all thing, but certainly true enough most of the time. It is amazing how often the teachers can observe a child and then tell you exactly what the parents are like. No, you will not hear them do it in public. They value their jobs as well. But, the fact that they rarely miss the mark, says a lot about the connection between parents and children.
If you really want better schools, it starts with better parents. If you want better parents, then you have to let it be known what your standards are to the parents around you. If they do not like it. Tough! They are not good enough to put in charge of your child, and their child may prove to be not good enough to be around yours at that point. It is not their child's fault, but their child's parents. Still, do you want your child being influenced by the their lack of parenting?
If WE ALL demanded more from parents around us, and we all demanded more from our elected officials, we would get more. People are like water, they tend to sink as low as they can and do as little as possible to get where they are headed.
What does this have to do with nutcases like this one? If people demanded more from their media, the same thing would happen as well. It all begins with a proper education where you learn to hold yourself and the world around you to higher standards. Goes for software too.
InnerWeb
.. one of the huge problems for software developers is that so much of the money in software development goes to people who have relatively little if anything to do with software development. OSS will actually (IMHO) do more to correct this than any other business model.
The step the state is taking will actually allow more money to be targeted at solutions and less money to be given to people who understood how to legally "appropriate" others ideas. Lets face it, with the IP world going the way it is going, if the government does not step in actively to fight the Copyright Law the fed has created, it will become fiscally dangerous to write and release code.
If the governing bodies develop their own code base by paying internal people to write what they need, sharing and building upon the efforts of other similar bodies, not only will they evolve better standards (happens easier when you share code development), but we will wind up with more "fill in your state here" based coders. I am sure that outsourcing will happen with much of the development eventually, but they will still need internal brain trust to make it all work, and the code will be available for others to build upon. So, instead of paying forever for marginally valuable software, they pay once for targeted solutions that can be expanded, replaced or enhanced as they see fit. Then they only pay to enhance or fix what they have. Since the code base is shared by other government programmers (or actually is OSS), they gain the benefits of OSS at least to a limited degree. In the end, it will be less expensive, a better use of tax dollars and more productive at the user end.
Maybe the states can use the savings to improve the education system. How many other professions can you attend school for 12 years of you life and only expect to make 50k to 60k per year? Heck, my wife worked at a cosmetics counter selling Cli**que and made more money than a teacher with less than a few years experience.
InnerWeb
It's certainly front page news if there's a non-exploitable flaw in Windows for which a patch has been released.
Hmmm... I must not be reading the right pubs, or at least not enough of them. Never have seen many (if any) trivial issues on MS. They always get buried behind "fixes an exploit blah blah blah". If they published all the minor ones as well, they would need a monthly circ just for that. Come to think of it, MS does have one - you just have to a pay an additional fee, or visit the website daily.
FYI - I do believe the programmers at MS are capable of putting out much better code than what the corp climate allows them to. I know several, and I know their private life code is much better than their MS life code. They have to follow the work rules to.
I could care less about anything on MS or linux that impacts neither productivity nor security. The problem has been that most of the stuff I have read about impacts one or the other. There are many many more patches for MS and linux than what makes any "story line".
Now, the recent vulnerability in linux that had been sitting around since early versions of 2, that was news that needed coverage. And the almost weekly news of major MS exploits (let alone the daily waste of dollars on MS crashes) is incredibly persistent news.
However, I will probably patch this as well on the next patch day, after I have tested it on a safe system and made sure it breaks nothing I have running.
InnerWeb
Voting issues have been becoming more and more prevalent in the past decade. In the past election (2000), many issues came into the open about voter registration fraud that for one reason or another the current administration has snuffed. Florida removing people from the ballots was a huge one. When watching the flow of money with these issues, they tend to resolve to the same small group of elites, thought not necessarily the same person, company or political alignment.
Now, I don't want to say they are trying to rig elections, but they all seem to be benefitting from the same shoddy practices. It does tend to make the paranoid in one come out, but I like to believe that net profit is the real reason behind the issues. It is cheaper up front to do less testing and coding. It is cheaper up front to not make certain that all things work as they should, or to not spend to much time thinking about the issues. Then again, maybe I am experiencing optimistic ignorance. ;-)
InnerWeb
When you look at Apple vs anything, it is Apple vs Windows. The hardware is important as well, but that is what the end user really sees. Since Apple has gone to the BSD kernel and snazzed up the interface for the joe user, I have talked to plenty of sysadmins and pointy haired bosses who are making or looking at making a test run with an Apple in the office. The primary reason is not the speed of the machine or the hardware, but the OS. I even know of ISPs quietly switching over to Apple's OS. My understanding is the up time is as good as line, the support is better and the systems out perform. That seems contrary to the specs I have read online, but that is what I have been hearing from most of the people I have talked to using the system.
I have not used a Mac in years. I wound up working in the financial programming world using PCs and Unix boxes. Now, the same people who were telling us to use Windows (pointy haired bosses) are starting to switch to Macs. I do not know if this is a trend that will have momentum, but I do know that the way several have talked/bragged about them, it is like listening to them talk about the Porsche or BMW they have also.
So, for what it is worth, I think the market for Apple is growing stronger. I do not think it is growing stronger in the area this analyst understands. I am not going to knock the author for not having a complete market view. Very few people do, and most of the smart analysts will tell you they themselves do not have a complete market view.
If I saw the high end car lines going out of business, I might worry about Apple, but I do not. What I think we are more likely to see is Apple at some point being gobbled up by bigger fish as has happened with most high end auto lines, and I am not even sure that might happen. After all, they are making money, have no debt outside of stock and are known for high quality and innovation and now are the premier desktop for *nix. Not a bad package to add to any corporate holding.
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
If Bush wants a reason to build a space station solely on US funding, this would be it. I can not think of a more secure place to do this research than a space station. Surrounded by vacuum and very high doses of incredibly lethal radiation. A leak up there would definitely be limited. Big worry would be a potential reentry of the facility or something from the facility. But, you deal with that on a daily basis now.
If he were smart, he would put the two together, make his buddies in the defense industry happy many times over - contracts for rockets (or shuttles), station building and materials, bio weapons research. Oh, yeah, the military would love it, as it would be very secure. Talk about low risk of espionage. No one's going to just drop a suitcase out the window here. Then, after some time has passed, build a new stations somewhere else and sell tourist tickets to visit the original bio weapons research space station.
InnerWeb
Why would Microsoft want to operate outside the law?
Profit!?
MS has been outside the law for so long, they may not remember what inside the law is. Many crime organizations or businessmen performing illegal activities simply become so arrogant that they run up against someone who will deal with them, or they do something so blatant that it can no longer be ignored. Look how long the PC industry has ignored MS's illegal activities all in the name of profit. Look how many businesses outside of MS have done illegal things all in the name of profit (WorldComm, Martha Stewart, AT&T (Ma Bell), Standard Oil, etc.) - lying to investors, employees, illegal toxin dumping, price dumping (selling a product below cost), child/slave labor, and much more.Making a profit for a business is a very compelling reason to do anything. Making a much bigger profit can drive many people to do all kinds of illegal activities (business people, gamblers, and drug dealers all work on the same or similar motives -profit! The big difference is some activities are much more publicly defined as illegal, and many businesses are actually run from within the law.). The jails are full of the petty criminals who tried to profit outside the law. A corporation is run by individuals and all of their morals (or lack thereof). People rarely steal or break the law just for the heck of it (even petty crimes). They almost always have something to gain. MS has billions to gain or loose. Since the fees for breaking these laws is only in the millions and is not normally applied (in the US), it is easy to see why breaking the law is profitable for them. After all, no jail time is risked, and even if it is, 3 years in the country club and come home to many millions in your account. That is not a hard decision for some people.
Business is not about doing what is right for the world, nor does business have to conform to any moral standard. We the consumer must hold them responsible, and we normally do not. Besides in the end, you are only guilty and in trouble if they can prove it.
InnerWeb
From what I am reading in the articles on the net, 100 feet can still create some serious, albeit localized damage. If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction. Anyone out there serious about their astronomy?
The Tunguska Blast over Siberia was an object about 100 meters in diameter. Sure it burned up in the atmosphere, but it was devastating to the ground anyway. This article also mentions that at about 50 meters, these rocks make it through the atmosphere and can do serious localized damage. So, since 100 feet converts to is 30.48 meters, this rock would more than likely to have an effect that we will notice on the ground.
For further reading, here is a site that has already compiled links and information And, of course, the Yahoo listings on Earth Impact information online.
InnerWeb
workers get used to unfamiliar faces
Maybe in your experiences, but where I worked, that behaviour would have gotten that unfamiliar face shot. Noone messed with the rules. The SPs carried live loaded ammo. They did shoot one person while I was there. He lived, but went to jail.
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
They were so wrong to give you a free email service
That would be like free tv... We may not pay for it at the time of viewing, but we pay for the ads when we buy the products advertised, so yeah, complain away.
InnerWeb
If it is like the one then, try getting out if you are in a hard to fill career field, or are a favorite of the squadron leadership. If they like you, but your field is not hurting, then they will try to keep you in. When I was in, my first shirt told me that this program was a great way to get rid of people who were not right for the military. And there are a lot of them.
I know people in right now who want out, but are not being let out. And everyone is letting computer people out early, some just hand them a pink slip. ;-)
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
You read too much into what was is not said. I only said that the whole country was racist, and it really still is racist. How you read that I said it was ok into that makes me wonder about you.
His sayings are recorded by eye witnesses. I am sure if Jesus wrote any manuscripts, they would be in there. But to date, no-one knows of any.
Learn some religious history. Try checking out the formation of the modern Bible in the 400 ADs. Another one of those history writing by committee things. The Bible is a powerful book with many great messages. But the average person has no idea what it is all about. I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but I have spent more time than most around me studying it's history (third sourced) and its individual books (original forms before the 400AD meetings).
I guess it just like asking you "Why are there no number one best selling books written by Innerweb?".
No number one best selling books - I have written for companies, not mass markets. The publications are internal and are for some of the companies required reading and in all cases considered private to the company.
InnerWeb
And I would add a bunch of other things We Americans are on top of that.
InnerWeb
Uhh, yeah... We do. In writing
But, we do not promise the moon. We stick to engineering s solution instead of promising vaporware. If it does not work, we put work into it until it does. If for some reason we can not make it work, we refund the client. If it causes damage to the client, they can easily take their refund and go somewhere else. And, if it causes a problem with their stuff, we fix that as well. This has happened once in the early 90s, which is why we took a different path for development.
We are not a billion dollar corp, and we work on Linux, MS, and Mac. I am not a linux zealot, I program more for MS systems than anything else. It is where most of the money is at the moment.
So, it's better, more secure when the said bug was sitting in plain sight, in publicly accessible source code, for 5 years, than locked tight, somewhere in Microsofts fallout shelter, and available only in binary? Crackers have a better chance of reverse engineering binaries, than simply reading the source?
Uh, know any crackers? I do. They are the most brilliant programmers I have ever met. Either that says very little about the rest of us, or a whole lot about them. The guys I know (as far as I know) work inside companies at the request of the companies in a security auditing frame. And, they never need source and they always find many ways to crack. And I have watched them break into Linux/Unix/MS/Mac. None of them use MS products based on their experiences. That is why I choose to support the Linux model, because the people in the trenches who do the work that I know do that very thing.
Facts are facts though. This has been a bug since 2.x. It has been in the open (wild) where anyone with the proper itch can hit it. It has not been hit. That is why I mentioned the targeted reward. OSS is not perfect, but it is a far better model IMHO than the current commercial one. I believe that a hybrid model is the next model that we will wind up using, as it has the best benefits of both worlds. Yes and some of the biggest drawbacks from both worlds.Fact is that Operating Systems are the new highways. Unless a good model is created to update, create and add onto this infrastructure without stranding current users or breaking old vehicles, governments will at some point have to step in to make it all work together. This is not unlike the early problems with electric power being delivered at different specs, thereby making it hard to get appliances that would work in many different locations. Dataflow is the root of the economy for the forseeable future. Just as the highway systems built the economy of the past 50 years. Mr. Gates got one thing right, the world needs to be able to use data without any worry about what data it is or where it is from. But, his company has never even come close to making it happen, and more often than not stands in the way of that happening. Information must flow. If it does not , it looses much of its value. Even the secret information is useless if it can not flow to those who need it.
InnerWeb
People like to believe they are empowered. Most people do not use the best product, they use the product that makes them feel the best. So what if Excel is not a database. The last place I worked full time for had so many excel spreadsheet databases that two people sitting beside each other could not agree on what a property's address was.
MS has the market for dumb users at the moment. Unskilled users can be brilliant at other things (like marketing, real estate, contracts, etc.) but they have no clue (or worse, little clue) how to work with data. They use MS products though and can get a small thing going, so they think the next step is just another click and drag away. Linux lacks this fundamental smoke screen.
The reason this race analogy is so beautiful is that Linux is slowly creeping up on MS's GUI ease of use and unskilled user empowerment. The key really is to allow people to do damage to themselves easily, then it is their choice. As Linux develops the ease of use, and ease of getting stuck that Windows currently has, then the rest of the world will start to flock to it. After all, these are most of the same people who download music, games and movies without paying. Then, they will not have to pay for the OS or the Office software.
Microsoft might be able to compete with that, but I doubt they can through legitimate means. After all, GNU applications and Linux development do not have any of the marketing, h/r, accounting or other costs associated with running a company. Pure development without the taint of beancounters or marketers.
InnerWeb
It seems to me that the future will be a search on Yahoo (or google) will wind up pointing you to many results that are themselves current active sub-searches of a websites localized database. Anything else would seem to violate what they are trying to protect now.
InnerWeb
Umm, in case you forgot, the entire country was racist, with some sections of it being much more so than others. The Mormon church was made of Americans and Americans at that time in history were very racist. Or, maybe Maritn Luther King did not really have his marches, and get shot. Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons... All of the "religions" were racist in one way or another. Maybe some of the people in the churh were black, but they sat in the back there as well as the back of the bus.
Anyone who takes issue with the Mormons had better check to see how estranged their own church's vision of reality is first. The Mormons have many good points (and many daffy ones), but in the Bible, the Clergy are not to be paid. This is the reference to the other religions' clergy. There are many other points that I will leave to a knowledgable Mormon to post. They are all correct, they are all in the Bible, and are all ignored by almost all if not all other Christian religions.
As far as McBride. I am now to the point where I wonder why the judge in the case has allowed this charade to continue as long as it has. But, then again, I also wonder why the MS anti-trust suit got dropped so fast when the current adminsitration came in. Coincidence?
InnerWeb
What winds up happening is I pay MS to produce a product that I have very little input on. I buy the off the shelf solution to then develop 50% of the solution anyway. And, then it crashes, the documents are incorrect (updates might be available on their web sites), and I have no way of figuring out what the issues are without paying more $s for something I paid for already. If I tried to pull the same trick, I would loose my client.
Linux side is someone spots the issue, makes us aware of it in most cases. People have something more important than a paycheck at stake get to work on a fix for the problem. A, or multiple, potential fix(es) is(are) put up. Sometimes a fix goes straight in with minimal review (it works, most liked it), sometimes the fix gets kicked around to hash out any potential problems (in the full light of day, normally my apps do not break when the fix is rolled out.)
I like the public knowledge aspect of OSS. Yep, hackers have access to it also, but closed source never seemed to stop them, it just stop me from protecting myself.
Maybe we need to look at the next step for OSS? Maybe there is a better model for building OSS? Maybe companies might start providing more donations (like cheap lic fees) to a foundation that rewards freelance OSS programmers with cash for tackling certain problems (and does not pay until the code is peer reviewed and bug checked to a reasonable extent.) Maybe that would work better... Are certain organizations not starting to do that?
Given how much OSS has accomplished in the past decade with its relative lack of fees and "structure", imagine what might happen if more companies started using their proprietary source software budget to put bounties out on features they needed in OSS. True, not all features would they want to make public, but enough they would wat to so as to dramatically cut everyone's costs (GNU lic is important because of this). Most companies actually have very close to the same needs. But, their money goes to legal and marketing fees more than it seems to go to actual development fees with off the sheld software. What an economic waste! Check out John Nash for a rather different rather OSS view of the world.
In the end, you are left with a decision. The programmers at MS are very bright. The programmers in OSS are very bright. The real difference is the perceived safety of being able to blame MS (who you can not hold responsible yet - name one successful law suit against MS for the failure of their software to function as advertised) versus the cost effectiveness of not paying for huge legal and marketing fees (as well as other corporate overhead having very little to do with getting better or more code). I am not against programmers getting paid. I am against sloth and leeches in a corporate setting destroying the market in which programmers get paid.
InnerWeb