I don't like x86 either. I would love to find affordable UltrasparcT2-based hw, but one has to be practical.
Quite frankly, I also think that English language is quite primitive and sentences are assembled like lego pieces.
Still, I do use that language. It's a very useful one, no matter how I dislike it.
1. - Use this (Postfix):
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
2. - Use those black lists:
safe.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
zen.spamhaus.org,
bl.spamcop.net,
db.wpbl.info,
dnsbl.njabl.org,
psbl.surriel.com,
list.dsbl.org,
3. - Add manual filtering in order to block things like:
3.1 - Mail from HTTP client (MSN webmail, yahoo etc) from certain countries (in our specific case, several IP ranges from Africa).
3.2 - Mail from detected spam-servers (self-called advertising services).
3.3 - Etc you like.
4. - Create a bunch of scripts to generate statistics on connections-per-host etc. Check those stats from time to time (at least once a week). This way you may easily find offenders.
It works for our server, rarely we do have false positives.
Our server blocks >20.000 spams a day (> 500.000 a month).
The current Da Silva's government is supposed to do its work as promised (back when he and its folks were the opposition to the then current gov't) and do concrete pro-FOSS actions.
Everyone who works at the gov't knows that there's absolutely no incentive to use FOSS (except by its own benefits). -- Really, zero. All until now has been rethoric.
Things the gov't could do:
- Tag (let's say) 80% of money the IT expenses (hw & sw) for exclusive use by FOSS-based solutions.
- The money spent in proprietary software-based solutions should be fully justified (why FOSS wasn't suitable instead etc). That, naturally, checked afterwards in an audit.
Until a couple years ago, the city now know as Ciudad de Este was called "Puerto Stroessner", after the former dictator.
After being ousted that man lived in Brazil until his last days.
That sucker was a friend with the militars in Brazil and other right-wing dictatorships in South America during the 60s 70s 80s. And those dictatorships had direct support from the USA.
Funny how often bad things around the world had the US involved.
I've had bad experiences with Real (AMRO) back a couple of years ago, it was a sitty bank in many ways.
If that information is useful for you (or someone else): I know, by personal experience, that the websites of both HSBC and Banco do Brasil work without problems under Linux + Firefox.
That article is just retarded.
You want good examples of really interesting and obsolete connectors? Try these:
The Amiga video connector. It has analog RGB output, digital RGB output and input sync provisions, so you could build a genlock in a very simple circuit (instead of needing a TBC).
The Apple ADB bus. That thing was almost like an 80s USB equivalent.
PS/2 keyboard connector? The thing is electrically the AT connector from 1984 (what would be a better candidate of the obsolete technology btw) but it's not technologically interesting.
The Sun keyboard connector (from sun4m, older sun4u machines) is more interesting, it offered more elegance working with serial data with 0-5V levels. You can even plug such a keyboard to a RS232 port and use it under a PC Linux machine, provided you use a voltage adapter.
And calling SCSI obsolete is offensive when the list does not list the sad IDE standard, one which people used in home PCs simply because there wasn't an affordable alternative.
SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up,
I find it strange that certain people complain about SCSI termination and IDs. This stuff is very logic, you just repect that and the cable length and normally you won't have problems.
Sure, there are people who plug a single hard-disk in an unterminated bus, it happens to work, then the guy swears at, after adding a second device and everything stopped. Complaining about things do not work when you don't respect its requirements is just stupid.
If one wanted to complain about SCSI, I think that the variety of available connectors is a good reason. Also annoying was to deal with HVD vs LVD issues.
Anyways, complain what you want about SCSI, but hot-plug (SCSI) SCA HDs are way more mechanically viable compated to hot-plug SATA (direct connection, no intermediate connector).
Once (a couple of years ago) I heard from a Serbian on how things happened there. I don't remember the details, but it was something like this:
When the Ottomans came, they instituted a rule which opressed everyone who was not Muslim (well, the local population). Basically everyone else was a second-class person, lacking any rights what-so-ever. One could not work with commerce and other things, all you could do is to work in the fields and live as a peasant.
Eventually, the Bosniaks realised that instead of fighting against the invaders, it would be a good idea to turn themselves into Muslims. And so they did, they kicked out their previous beliefs and decided to become someone else. They upgraded their status by doing so, gained privileges accordingly and became part of the oppressing force.
Well, one day the Russians came and expelled the Ottomans.
The Bosniaks, being native people, stayed and became part of the Muslim island of Europe we know nowadays.
Accurate or not, it's an interesting history and makes one think about.
This is a very interesting software for mobile web.
At work, we do use that as a HTTP WAN accelerator (dedicated city-city links, quite expensive ones) and it's a life saver.
PS, I bet you've never been to a 3rd world catholic country - lots of angry violent mobs in those places too. It has more to do with being a 3rd world country - or living in 3rd world conditions - than it does with being catholic, or muslim. We've got a few million muslims in the US and you don't see them forming up violent mobs - certainly nothing like we get here after some big sporting events...
Muslims do not rebel in the US only because, being a minority, they know very well what would come next.
This argument of yours on 3rd world country is a slap in the face for anyone living in a country called as such.
I do live in a so-called 3rd world country, a latin american one (call it "christian" if you like).
People hate the US and blame that country for this and that, but I've _never_ heard anyone, even semi-seriously, talking about being a suicide bomber.
We were never involved in those wars against muslims nor anything led by the US. Still, I can perceive muslims are not exactly well seen here.
In sum: fuck you, and do not use the "3rd world" (which happens to include my country) as an excuse for your religious crap -- most of we have nothing to do with muslim matters, neither we're interested.
Brazilian home PCs are infested with all the kinds of stuff simply because the users do not care at all.. This alone is not enough, though, since pretty much everyone around the world behave like that.
The problem is that ISPs simply don't care.
I work at the Brazilian Gov't and even security reports from me are bluntly ignored by those ISPs.
You may try to report to CAIS (which is supposed to be "the" security network center in Brazil for the national academic network) and you know what? You'll receive and acknowledge response and that's it, nothing else will happen.
The only time they do something were in cases such as fake Paypal pages, I believe because there was money involved.
An example on how things work here:
Once we complained to CAIS about this scum from this university which were deliberately sending their spam (not an infected machine sending random viagra messages) and guess what CAIS did.. Exactly, nothing.
I suppose that junk is related to some project they've managed to get public money from, because we complained so many times and nothing were done (there's _always_ something fishy involved).
Until I picked up the phone called that university directly and told them I would block them completely unless they stopped that spam.
The guy who answered me simply started to say he would talk to the Rector, to politicians XYZ and who knows else, and implied that I could get into trouble.
To shorten the history.. In the end we've managed to stop that junk. But see how much did it cost.
I know so many rotten histories on Brazilian Internet, from the gov't side, from the private companies... A book could be written about that.
Here where I work, we replaced pretty much all the conventional applications (the ones which are required globally within the organization) for web-based ones. No, it didn't happen from a day to another.
We have pretty much everything centralized, except cases when you simply cannot escape from.doc/.xls/etc documents and stuff like that. Such cases are processed locally and only the relevant files are sent (either through FTPS or e-mail), SMB shares are not transported through WAN at all.
It helps our structure reflects (most of the time) the physical segmentation of our organization.
Currently most of our (typical) traffic is HTTP (~80%) and e-mail (>10%).
We do have quite tight WAN links (1Mbps in most cases, slower in other places) so we apply a fairly elaborate QoS and, for HTTP besides the obvious local HTTP cache we also compress that with Ziproxy (what renders it less than half its size, in our case).
it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me
The Pope said that torturing scientists whose research deviates from holy writ is okey-dokey. Well, he said that when they did it in the past it was okey-dokey. I'm not sure if he said, "but we shouldn't do that NOW, mind you..." but Galileo is one of the first dramatic examples of science trying to slowly freeing itself from the shackles of religion. Galileo is a sort of rubicon, where people started saying, "maybe letting religion run everything isn't really a great idea..." And when scientists protest that this apologist for torture is going to speak at their school, you invoke bigotry, the word used in reference to Nazis and the KKK?
Did you even read Ratzinger's text?
By reading I mean reading with a neutral mind instead of starting that with an already made mind.
If scientists capture the Pope and threaten to torture him to death unless he recants all religious positions that don't match modern science, then it would be bigotry. It's not "just like" something if it's different. Sorry.
You should be sorry indeed.
If you had readen the text you would notice that Ratzinger is very ambiguous. Those apologising words you mention are quotes.
The only clearer thing you can get from the text is that he suggests that science should not be taken as an absolute value because it's always changing, so what is true today is not necessarily true tomorrow.
I don't think that even those protesting academics spent 10 minutes properly reading that, thus doing an idependent research themselves.
How ironic a scientist unable to do proper research and jumping into an emotional overreation.
Now you've got nazis and KKK from nowhere and put them here. This is such a cheap strategy in a discussion, it just helps to erode your credibility.
The guy was a professor at a university. Why don't you spend 5 seconds with Google or Wikipedia before asking dumb questions? However, even at university, he was a theologian and (quoting Wikipedia): "his inaugural lecture was on "The God of Faith and the God of Philosophy." " - he already was at odds with philosophy, not to even mention any science.
I'm really sorry that my English skills are of a non-native speaker who doesn't live in an English-speaking country. While you, obviously, lack the capacity to perceive the intended meaning of that sentence.
I'm happy for you, that you master wikipedian research skills though.
Perhaps you could learn there on how to present arguments instead of just barfing the things you've decided are written on stone.
Read up on the guy. He's as fundamentalist as any muslim leader we call a terrorist, except that he has the "right" faith and has enough political know-how to understand that calling for another crusade isn't exactly going to help his cause.
Everybody has an agenda, such a surprise.
You can make the devil from anyone. I just find it pathetic how people like to beat a sick old horse, posing as some sort illuminated humans, while behaving pretty much like the Catholic Church 500yrs ago -- the only thing preventing them to burn heretics on fire being the laws and the fact it's no longer accepted by the society.
Tell me about hypocrisy.
Anyways, about the Catholic Church what matters? Why do you even care? In practice most catholics don't care at all.
I'm way more worried about the things a certain country between Canada and Mexico, filled with a majority of less-than-bright non-Catholic-but-yet-Creationism-believing people, can do and how will affect my life.
What one would expect from a religious leader? To behave like an scientist? To promote that the truth is only verifiable by scientific methodology?
What if the guy went to the University? Even the fierstest atheist may find interesting what the man has to say, being that either as a filosofical exercise or simply to get the knowledge on how the Catholic Church thinks.
Now this academic hysteria is completely ridiculous, it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me.
And, quite frankly, the academic world (I'm not talking about Science itself) is not in a good position to point any fingers.
A huge number of academics are simply and only interested in self-promotion, stealing someone else research, professors taking a hike on his/her students' work, busy formalizing bad-science in a flowered paper and... Treating anyone else outside their circle as inferiors.
You want to meet bigotry, power hunger, deceit and elitism? Politics and religion are not the only options, nor Shakespeare, one would find plenty of such crap inside the Universities.
Does your bank allow online transactions only with iTunes? Depending where you live and which company (or the gov't) you work for, you have no choice on which bank to use.
Granted, they aren't as prominent, but there are plenty of companies that use Linux and/or Open Office (the company that I work for being one of them) And once again, is Microsoft holding guns to folks head's? Because if they aren't, those companies CHOSE to use Microsoft, just like the companies that they work with CHOSE to use it.
There are companies who were able to do such a thing but, from what I've seen, things went either to the limited lowest common denominator, or they defaulted to something more comfortable to Unix-alike OSes.
Now what I really wanted to know is the magic formula to operate Windows OSes and "the rest" at the same level, making things like partial migration possible.
Really, let's take the Windows network sharing for example. You can use Samba, which is a great project. But the Samba cannot simply change the SMB/CIFS modus operandi because, well, it's defined by MS. It is implemented such way to allow compatibility with Windows, that's the very point of Samba.
Because of that you have horrible things like, when using Samba with LDAP, the Windows passwords are stored in a parallel field (requires read-access and all, a kludge) because Windows authenticates its own very way and cannot use LDAP's mechanism for that. And because of that you cannot (safely) allow Samba authentication for servers not maintained directly by your department since all the users' hashes must the exposed to that external server.
Compatibility problems go well beyond Word and IE. MS made Windows systematically incompatible with everything else, and is comfortable keeping things that way.
Right. That's why Blu-Ray should play in my Wii, my cell phone should be able to use the same memory card as my digital camera (which, admittingly, some do) and my gas-guzzling car should be able to be filled with diesel. Right?
There's no huge majority in any of those formats, there's not monopoly, just inconvenience (although it would be preferable to have a single standard for any commonly used technology such as memory cards).
It would be nice to fill your car with anything from gas to sewer water, but the nature of this problem is distinct and does not involve exchange of information.
Slashdot Mirror
As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.
Actually, Hotmail behaves better than Gmail. At least they provide the mail's sender IP, like any semi-civilised server.
GMail does not. They claim it's so in order to protect their users' privacy (believe it or not).
It doesn't help Gmail's cause they never reply mails sent to abuse@google.com.
I don't like x86 either. I would love to find affordable UltrasparcT2-based hw, but one has to be practical.
Quite frankly, I also think that English language is quite primitive and sentences are assembled like lego pieces.
Still, I do use that language. It's a very useful one, no matter how I dislike it.
Parts.
1. - Use this (Postfix):
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
2. - Use those black lists:
safe.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
zen.spamhaus.org,
bl.spamcop.net,
db.wpbl.info,
dnsbl.njabl.org,
psbl.surriel.com,
list.dsbl.org,
3. - Add manual filtering in order to block things like:
3.1 - Mail from HTTP client (MSN webmail, yahoo etc) from certain countries (in our specific case, several IP ranges from Africa).
3.2 - Mail from detected spam-servers (self-called advertising services).
3.3 - Etc you like.
4. - Create a bunch of scripts to generate statistics on connections-per-host etc.
Check those stats from time to time (at least once a week).
This way you may easily find offenders.
It works for our server, rarely we do have false positives.
Our server blocks >20.000 spams a day (> 500.000 a month).
The current Da Silva's government is supposed to do its work as promised (back when he and its folks were the opposition to the then current gov't) and do concrete pro-FOSS actions.
Everyone who works at the gov't knows that there's absolutely no incentive to use FOSS (except by its own benefits). -- Really, zero. All until now has been rethoric.
Things the gov't could do:
- Tag (let's say) 80% of money the IT expenses (hw & sw) for exclusive use by FOSS-based solutions.
- The money spent in proprietary software-based solutions should be fully justified (why FOSS wasn't suitable instead etc). That, naturally, checked afterwards in an audit.
Those two, alone, would do wonders.
Until a couple years ago, the city now know as Ciudad de Este was called "Puerto Stroessner", after the former dictator.
After being ousted that man lived in Brazil until his last days.
That sucker was a friend with the militars in Brazil and other right-wing dictatorships in South America during the 60s 70s 80s. And those dictatorships had direct support from the USA.
Funny how often bad things around the world had the US involved.
I've had bad experiences with Real (AMRO) back a couple of years ago, it was a sitty bank in many ways.
If that information is useful for you (or someone else): I know, by personal experience, that the websites of both HSBC and Banco do Brasil work without problems under Linux + Firefox.
That article is just retarded.
You want good examples of really interesting and obsolete connectors? Try these:
The Amiga video connector. It has analog RGB output, digital RGB output and input sync provisions, so you could build a genlock in a very simple circuit (instead of needing a TBC).
The Apple ADB bus. That thing was almost like an 80s USB equivalent.
PS/2 keyboard connector? The thing is electrically the AT connector from 1984 (what would be a better candidate of the obsolete technology btw) but it's not technologically interesting.
The Sun keyboard connector (from sun4m, older sun4u machines) is more interesting, it offered more elegance working with serial data with 0-5V levels. You can even plug such a keyboard to a RS232 port and use it under a PC Linux machine, provided you use a voltage adapter.
And calling SCSI obsolete is offensive when the list does not list the sad IDE standard, one which people used in home PCs simply because there wasn't an affordable alternative.
SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up,
I find it strange that certain people complain about SCSI termination and IDs. This stuff is very logic, you just repect that and the cable length and normally you won't have problems.
Sure, there are people who plug a single hard-disk in an unterminated bus, it happens to work, then the guy swears at, after adding a second device and everything stopped. Complaining about things do not work when you don't respect its requirements is just stupid.
If one wanted to complain about SCSI, I think that the variety of available connectors is a good reason. Also annoying was to deal with HVD vs LVD issues.
Anyways, complain what you want about SCSI, but hot-plug (SCSI) SCA HDs are way more mechanically viable compated to hot-plug SATA (direct connection, no intermediate connector).
Once (a couple of years ago) I heard from a Serbian on how things happened there. I don't remember the details, but it was something like this:
When the Ottomans came, they instituted a rule which opressed everyone who was not Muslim (well, the local population). Basically everyone else was a second-class person, lacking any rights what-so-ever. One could not work with commerce and other things, all you could do is to work in the fields and live as a peasant.
Eventually, the Bosniaks realised that instead of fighting against the invaders, it would be a good idea to turn themselves into Muslims. And so they did, they kicked out their previous beliefs and decided to become someone else. They upgraded their status by doing so, gained privileges accordingly and became part of the oppressing force.
Well, one day the Russians came and expelled the Ottomans.
The Bosniaks, being native people, stayed and became part of the Muslim island of Europe we know nowadays.
Accurate or not, it's an interesting history and makes one think about.
Try Ziproxy then. It compresses all your data and you may use any browser you want.
and Ziproxy (compresses the rest).
This is a very interesting software for mobile web.
At work, we do use that as a HTTP WAN accelerator (dedicated city-city links, quite expensive ones) and it's a life saver.
PS, I bet you've never been to a 3rd world catholic country - lots of angry violent mobs in those places too. It has more to do with being a 3rd world country - or living in 3rd world conditions - than it does with being catholic, or muslim. We've got a few million muslims in the US and you don't see them forming up violent mobs - certainly nothing like we get here after some big sporting events...
Muslims do not rebel in the US only because, being a minority, they know very well what would come next.
This argument of yours on 3rd world country is a slap in the face for anyone living in a country called as such.
I do live in a so-called 3rd world country, a latin american one (call it "christian" if you like).
People hate the US and blame that country for this and that, but I've _never_ heard anyone, even semi-seriously, talking about being a suicide bomber.
We were never involved in those wars against muslims nor anything led by the US. Still, I can perceive muslims are not exactly well seen here.
In sum: fuck you, and do not use the "3rd world" (which happens to include my country) as an excuse for your religious crap -- most of we have nothing to do with muslim matters, neither we're interested.
What's this? The "Corpse Fish"?
Brazilian home PCs are infested with all the kinds of stuff simply because the users do not care at all.. This alone is not enough, though, since pretty much everyone around the world behave like that.
The problem is that ISPs simply don't care.
I work at the Brazilian Gov't and even security reports from me are bluntly ignored by those ISPs.
You may try to report to CAIS (which is supposed to be "the" security network center in Brazil for the national academic network) and you know what? You'll receive and acknowledge response and that's it, nothing else will happen.
The only time they do something were in cases such as fake Paypal pages, I believe because there was money involved.
An example on how things work here:
Once we complained to CAIS about this scum from this university which were deliberately sending their spam (not an infected machine sending random viagra messages) and guess what CAIS did.. Exactly, nothing.
I suppose that junk is related to some project they've managed to get public money from, because we complained so many times and nothing were done (there's _always_ something fishy involved).
Until I picked up the phone called that university directly and told them I would block them completely unless they stopped that spam.
The guy who answered me simply started to say he would talk to the Rector, to politicians XYZ and who knows else, and implied that I could get into trouble.
To shorten the history.. In the end we've managed to stop that junk. But see how much did it cost.
I know so many rotten histories on Brazilian Internet, from the gov't side, from the private companies... A book could be written about that.
because /^Received: .*dsl.brasiltelecom.net.br.*$/ REJECT
By using such "kill'em all" rule, you're either incompetent, or your e-mail server is irrelevant.
Look at this:
/8 for them (3.x.x.x).
003/8 May 94 General Electric Company
So GE has a whole
And now, look at this:
www.ge.com has address 216.74.131.56
Please feel free to learn more about this issue.
Here where I work, we replaced pretty much all the conventional applications (the ones which are required globally within the organization) for web-based ones. No, it didn't happen from a day to another.
.doc/.xls/etc documents and stuff like that. Such cases are processed locally and only the relevant files are sent (either through FTPS or e-mail), SMB shares are not transported through WAN at all.
We have pretty much everything centralized, except cases when you simply cannot escape from
It helps our structure reflects (most of the time) the physical segmentation of our organization.
Currently most of our (typical) traffic is HTTP (~80%) and e-mail (>10%).
We do have quite tight WAN links (1Mbps in most cases, slower in other places) so we apply a fairly elaborate QoS and, for HTTP besides the obvious local HTTP cache we also compress that with Ziproxy (what renders it less than half its size, in our case).
it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me
The Pope said that torturing scientists whose research deviates from holy writ is okey-dokey. Well, he said that when they did it in the past it was okey-dokey. I'm not sure if he said, "but we shouldn't do that NOW, mind you..." but Galileo is one of the first dramatic examples of science trying to slowly freeing itself from the shackles of religion. Galileo is a sort of rubicon, where people started saying, "maybe letting religion run everything isn't really a great idea..." And when scientists protest that this apologist for torture is going to speak at their school, you invoke bigotry, the word used in reference to Nazis and the KKK?
Did you even read Ratzinger's text?
By reading I mean reading with a neutral mind instead of starting that with an already made mind.
If scientists capture the Pope and threaten to torture him to death unless he recants all religious positions that don't match modern science, then it would be bigotry. It's not "just like" something if it's different. Sorry.
You should be sorry indeed.
If you had readen the text you would notice that Ratzinger is very ambiguous. Those apologising words you mention are quotes.
The only clearer thing you can get from the text is that he suggests that science should not be taken as an absolute value because it's always changing, so what is true today is not necessarily true tomorrow.
I don't think that even those protesting academics spent 10 minutes properly reading that, thus doing an idependent research themselves.
How ironic a scientist unable to do proper research and jumping into an emotional overreation.
Now you've got nazis and KKK from nowhere and put them here. This is such a cheap strategy in a discussion, it just helps to erode your credibility.
What if the guy went to the University?
The guy was a professor at a university. Why don't you spend 5 seconds with Google or Wikipedia before asking dumb questions? However, even at university, he was a theologian and (quoting Wikipedia): "his inaugural lecture was on "The God of Faith and the God of Philosophy." " - he already was at odds with philosophy, not to even mention any science.
I'm really sorry that my English skills are of a non-native speaker who doesn't live in an English-speaking country. While you, obviously, lack the capacity to perceive the intended meaning of that sentence.
I'm happy for you, that you master wikipedian research skills though.
Perhaps you could learn there on how to present arguments instead of just barfing the things you've decided are written on stone.
Read up on the guy. He's as fundamentalist as any muslim leader we call a terrorist, except that he has the "right" faith and has enough political know-how to understand that calling for another crusade isn't exactly going to help his cause.
Everybody has an agenda, such a surprise.
You can make the devil from anyone. I just find it pathetic how people like to beat a sick old horse, posing as some sort illuminated humans, while behaving pretty much like the Catholic Church 500yrs ago -- the only thing preventing them to burn heretics on fire being the laws and the fact it's no longer accepted by the society.
Tell me about hypocrisy.
Anyways, about the Catholic Church what matters? Why do you even care? In practice most catholics don't care at all.
I'm way more worried about the things a certain country between Canada and Mexico, filled with a majority of less-than-bright non-Catholic-but-yet-Creationism-believing people, can do and how will affect my life.
>> What one would expect from a religious leader? To behave like an scientist?
To not justify burning other scientists at the stake, perhaps?
The moment you say that a certain subject is permanently closed to discussion and nothing can be changed or added to it, you create a dogma.
What one would expect from a religious leader? To behave like an scientist? To promote that the truth is only verifiable by scientific methodology?
What if the guy went to the University? Even the fierstest atheist may find interesting what the man has to say, being that either as a filosofical exercise or simply to get the knowledge on how the Catholic Church thinks.
Now this academic hysteria is completely ridiculous, it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me.
And, quite frankly, the academic world (I'm not talking about Science itself) is not in a good position to point any fingers.
A huge number of academics are simply and only interested in self-promotion, stealing someone else research, professors taking a hike on his/her students' work, busy formalizing bad-science in a flowered paper and... Treating anyone else outside their circle as inferiors.
You want to meet bigotry, power hunger, deceit and elitism? Politics and religion are not the only options, nor Shakespeare, one would find plenty of such crap inside the Universities.
Look more carefully at the pictures at the bottom of that page.
Looks so real I'm speechless.
Can you legally install iTunes on Linux?
Does your bank allow online transactions only with iTunes? Depending where you live and which company (or the gov't) you work for, you have no choice on which bank to use.
Granted, they aren't as prominent, but there are plenty of companies that use Linux and/or Open Office (the company that I work for being one of them) And once again, is Microsoft holding guns to folks head's? Because if they aren't, those companies CHOSE to use Microsoft, just like the companies that they work with CHOSE to use it.
There are companies who were able to do such a thing but, from what I've seen, things went either to the limited lowest common denominator, or they defaulted to something more comfortable to Unix-alike OSes.
Now what I really wanted to know is the magic formula to operate Windows OSes and "the rest" at the same level, making things like partial migration possible.
Really, let's take the Windows network sharing for example. You can use Samba, which is a great project. But the Samba cannot simply change the SMB/CIFS modus operandi because, well, it's defined by MS. It is implemented such way to allow compatibility with Windows, that's the very point of Samba.
Because of that you have horrible things like, when using Samba with LDAP, the Windows passwords are stored in a parallel field (requires read-access and all, a kludge) because Windows authenticates its own very way and cannot use LDAP's mechanism for that. And because of that you cannot (safely) allow Samba authentication for servers not maintained directly by your department since all the users' hashes must the exposed to that external server.
Compatibility problems go well beyond Word and IE. MS made Windows systematically incompatible with everything else, and is comfortable keeping things that way.
Right. That's why Blu-Ray should play in my Wii, my cell phone should be able to use the same memory card as my digital camera (which, admittingly, some do) and my gas-guzzling car should be able to be filled with diesel. Right?
There's no huge majority in any of those formats, there's not monopoly, just inconvenience (although it would be preferable to have a single standard for any commonly used technology such as memory cards).
It would be nice to fill your car with anything from gas to sewer water, but the nature of this problem is distinct and does not involve exchange of information.