What about OS and application security updates? It's kind of hard to patch a read-only CDROM:P
That shouldn't matter at all. If this is a banking only CD locked to a single website, and the CD allows no access to any storage devices, there is no vector** to introduce malware into the LiveCD environment even if (say) the browser has a remotely exploiable bug. In theory a even Live CD of Win XP with no SPs and IE6 unpatched would be safe if it was locked to a single safe website.
**Unless the actual bank website itself has been compromised, in which case you're stuffed anyhow.
however, health insurance doesn't affect me if you don't have it.
This is a common assertion which is easily disproved by examples. Here are a couple of specific cases:
1/ Your neighbour/friend/workmate/some guy in a bar you go to has a nasty rash. He doesn't go to the doctor as he has no health insurance. Instead he just gets on with his life until he gets *much* sicker. Turns out he had the first symtoms of a nasty infectious illness, and now he's infected you.
2/ You get a taxi to the airport. Turns out your taxi driver has a untreated dodgy knee due to no health insurance. His knee locks when approaching a red light at a junction and the taxi accelerates into the path of a lorry, killing both of you.
If you consider these to be pretty unlikely corner cases, then more generally, every person who can't work due to treatable conditions but no insurance costs you money. Because they don't work and pay taxes, your taxes are higher as a result.
OK, here's a simple example (which has actually happened several times to my company). a/ Buy/License proprietry product A from company X b/ Company Y buys company X. c/ Company Y has product B which is 'similar' to product A d/ Company Y discontinues support for product A and 'suggests' you move to product B, which has lots of extra functions you don't need, is missing some that you do, and costs twice as much. e/ Further alternatives from company Z etc. are even less attractive. f/ You are forced at some point to migrate to product B (e.g. to get it to run on supported OS) regardless of cost and functionality.
In the FOSS case, you have the option of employing someone to maintain product A (which may or may not be economic). In the non-FOSS case this option does not even exist (unless you have the money to buy company Y or you are the government or something).
As per above, this is not a theoretical problem; it has happened repeatedly to my company and I read of examples of this happening frequently to other companies.
The logical fix - the thing that would balance out a lack of a fine for not being insured - would be to turn away the uninsured people who show up at emergency rooms with broken limbs, heart attacks, strokes, etc. and let them die. nobody will support a decision that mandates responsibility and fiscal restraint with potential death as the penalty for non-compliance.
So are you implying you *would* you be happy to see people (say) screaming in agony as they die horribly by the roadside after an accident as their 'penalty for non-compliance'? Would you stand there and point at the dying person and say to the crowd - "There, see what happens if you don't get medical insurance"! If so, I guess you and the human race have pretty much parted company. As you say, it's all pretty logical, but only if you lack any sort of compassion or human feelings whatsoever. Maybe you could get an emotion chip fitted or something?
Ubuntu's upgrade approach is terrible. If your version is older than 6 months you have to do a double-upgrade. For every 6 months between your version and the current version you have to do an upgrade (if the intervening releases are still available).
Or, of course, you can stick to the Long Term Support versions and do one upgrade roughly every two years (the LTS version is supported for 3 years for the desktop version but the new LTS versions come out every two years, so you should upgrade when your current LTS version is between 2 and 3 years old). This is probably about on the level of the larger Windows Sevice Pack upgrades.
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
Have you by any chance been living in a cave for the last few years?
Basic EU competition law: *If* Opera was distributed along with 'Opera OS', *and* 'Opera OS' had a 90% market share, then Opera might well be required to include such a ballot screen or other equivalent requirement.
As 'Opera OS' does not even exist, they can do what they like. Same for Firefox etc.
Simple eh?
And (preemptively) don't bring Apple into it just because they *do* have an OS. It has less than 10% of the relevant market, so again they are free to do what they like.
NB US competition laws are very similar but don't seem to be enforced as much.
Just to humor yourself, the next time you go to a restaurant, ask for the nutritional menu. The recommended level of salt intake is 1000 to 1500mg (1g to 1.5g), though the USDA recommended amount is around 2400 or so.
I think you're confusing salt levels and sodium levels here (i.e. quoting sodium levels but labelling the figures as salt levels). This is a pretty important disctinction. To quote from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Recommended_intake
"In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration itself does not make a recommendation,[64] but refers readers to Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005. These suggest that US citizens should consume less than 2,300 mg of sodium (= 2.3 g sodium = 5.8 g salt) per day.[65]"
If they did re-master, people could legally copy or other publishers could take the mastered work and sell it at rock bottom prices.
No, they couldn't.
Or would a new copyright exist on the mastering itself?
Sort of. There is no real concept of copyright on the 'mastering itself' (whatever that might mean) but the remastered recording is a new recording for copyright purposes and the copyright clock starts again from zero for that new version.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now.
Ho hum. Yet another person who doesn't understand (or, quite often, doesn't *want* to understand) the *legal* definition of 'monopoly'.
It's not about 100% of the market. It's not about having no competition.
It's whether you have a dominant position, capable of distorting free competition. You can have 30% of a market and still fall under monopoly-related competition laws, e.g if you and two other companies with 30% erect barriers to new entrants.
In MS's case they have about 90% of the PC OS market and are legally a monopoly under competition laws in most major markets, and so are potentially restrained from certain types of behaviour, in this particular case using their PC OS monopoly to increase their browser market share.
You just can't steal something that is *freely given* (in the hope that you might look at the adverts). I guess you've just redefined the word steal to mean whatever you like, but you'll have trouble communicating with people if you use words in a way that only about 1% of the population recognize.
Find your own word for that kind of abomination; this word is taken.
The use of this kind of term clearly shows where you are coming from, and makes you the *real* hate-filled abomination.
So you apparently think you can define the word 'marriage' for everyone else do you? The sheer arrogance of 'this word is taken' is mind-boggling. And you then dare to say "The reason is the same reason people worked to control language in 1984: to try to control people's thoughts." when it's *you* who are saying that *other people* have no right to use a word in a particular way.
Well, here's the news: marriage has meant, does mean and always will mean more than your exclusive definition, and in your case the more that offends you the better.
Homosexuality is a choice, not biology, regardless of what crank science says.
I suppose you characterize evolution as 'crank science' as well, do you?
There have been many studies which show trans and gay people typically have some brain structures/patterns which vary from the 'norm' for their genetic sex and correspond in varying degrees to those of the opposite genetic sex, and strong evidence that this relates to things like the hormonal environment in the womb. Dismissing these as 'crank science' when they are the mainstream view in the relevant fields these days points to either ignorance or bigotry on your part.
The BBC should tell Murdoch and others to go jump. Unless something has changed recently, the BBC is funded largely by the license holders and has no obligation to Murdoch/News or any other "news" organization.
It would be nice if they could. But the Tories - still fairly likely to form the next government in a few months - are now Murdoch's big pals, and have detested the very idea of the BBC since the patrician old guard (Tories and BBC bigwigs) went. They already have a policy of 'distributing the license fee more widely' (i.e. giving some of it to commercial stations). They are very keen that the BBC should not produce anything 'populist', the overt reason being that the commercial sector can do this just fine, but it's also an excellent strategy for later saying 'not enough people watch the BBC anymore, cut the license fee further/switch BBC to subcription model'. The only constraint is how much they can cut the BBC without becoming too unpopular.
Labour have often had (very) serious rows with the BBC and have big issues with particular programs, managers and presenters etc. but they are not fundamentally opposed to the basis of its existence.
The BBC presumably is trying to preempt worse cuts by proposing its own more modest ones, but this could backfire and just fuel the Tories'/Mudoch's appetite for even more.
ZFS will probably have to be reimplemented somehow to go on Linux. We'll have to wait for ext5 or 6 to get a reasonable subset of ZFS feature list.
Sort of. There will probably never be an ext5, ext4 will be stabilised at some point. The future 'standard Linux filesystem' with ZFS features is intended to be BTRFS and it's well on the way (in the mainline Linux kernel but not ready for general use just yet).
However, the fact that Oracle is the priciple driver behind BTRFS, but now owns Sun and thus could GPL ZFS does obviously cast some doubt on the future of both - although they can both carry on with non-Oracle devlopers, it will obviously be very important which one Oracle throws its weight behind (they're surely unlikely to give them both equal resources).
It's the concept of using a full computer operating system for things as simple as ATMs. Using Windows for those is horrible, but using Mac, Linux or BSD is still pretty bad.
Linux (and I assume BSD) are in practice more modular than the proprietry systems**. Linux can be stripped down to virtually nothing with all unnecessary packages/kernel modules/drivers removed (or built up from the kernel source), so you could get pretty close to the same attack surface of a specialist OS. You could probably even modify (and if necessary maintain) a kernel *fairly* easily with entire unwanted APIs disabled.
**If you are MS or Apple or work with them closely (and expensively) you can probably strip a lot of stuff out of Windows or Mac OS but otherwise you're reduced to guesswork plus the fruits of other people's guesswork (NTLite etc.) which may get you a long way but will definitely leave you with more unwanted code you're not aware of or don't dare remove.
If you have an in house you only have to distribute your sources in house, something that should not be a problem in most organizations.
Internal use within a single organization is just that, use, not distribution, and you don't need to supply source to anyone (this would make no sense anyhow, your organization as a whole already possesses the source (if modified) or has a valid offer to supply it from the orginal source (if unmodified)).
To simplify, 'internal distribution' is not 'distribution' for the purposes of the GPL so you can do what you please.
So if Confiker owns Windows boxen it's because Windows is awful and shoddy. But if CN owns Linux boxen it's because they are "misconfigured".
Given that confiker exploited actual bugs in windows which MS had to patch, and that 'Chuck Norris' is exploiting the fact that certain appliance suppliers deliberately 'configured' Linux with a fixed and known id and password, the statement above that you deride is *in this particular case* clearly accurate.
You do understand the difference between an actual bug causing a security problem and a deliberate choice to 'leave the front door open' don't you?
Exactly - tyre manufacturers no longer cater for customers with iron-tyred wooden-spoked cart wheels, why should anyone cater for IE6 users?
If 12% of the 'tyre market' was still for cart wheels, then they or other companies *would* cater for it (and presumably did, during the transition from cart wheels to tyres).
It's fairly simple; you stop catering for IE6 when the cost of maintaining the extra code exceeds the revenue from the customers who insist on using it. If you are still seeing 10%+ of your revenue generating traffic from IE6 you probably haven't reached that point just yet. (Obviously if your site is not commercial then you can cut off support whenever you like, subject to any special requirements like it being a government site).
Of all the OS's out there, Linux is nowhere near the top of the list as far as idiot-proofing goes
My wife had never used any sort of computer until about 5 years ago. I was totally confident I could give her a non-admin account on Fedora, and subsequently Ubuntu, with virtually no risk. I would *not* have the same confidence in Windows. She spends 99% of the time using the web browser so her experience is virtually identical with Linux as it would be with Mac OS or Windows.
The Ubuntu forums are pretty well trashed now, since there are *way* too many people asking questions, and all the people who could answer them got tired out a few years ago.
I have a reasonable amount of basic Linux competence and enjoy answering 'simple' questions on the Ubuntu Forums, and seem to get positive feedback from my answers. I get the impression there are still quite a number of people like myself on these forums who just want to help new Linux users make the most of their system, and get satisfaction from this.
Have a look at preload [sourceforge.net] (project registered in 2005). I believe it's installed by default on Ubuntu.
Not installed by default (on 9.04 anyhow) but I've found it pretty useful with its default settings. Frequently used applications seem to load in about half the time the first time they're used after a reboot.
There are many people, myself included, with a broadband connection of >10Mbps that do not use YouTube for the simple fact that there is rarely anything of intellectual interest to be found within its pages.
Just a couple of examples of 'intellectual interest':
Youtube is a priceless archive of thousands of hours of rare video footage of quality musicians performing (blues, folk, acoustic etc.). Many of the videos are not obtainable by any other means and record television appearances etc. from across the world going back fifty years.
It also has considerable footage of historical interest from abandoned buildings etc. which have often been subsequently demolished.
Slashdot Mirror
What about OS and application security updates? It's kind of hard to patch a read-only CDROM :P
That shouldn't matter at all. If this is a banking only CD locked to a single website, and the CD allows no access to any storage devices, there is no vector** to introduce malware into the LiveCD environment even if (say) the browser has a remotely exploiable bug.
In theory a even Live CD of Win XP with no SPs and IE6 unpatched would be safe if it was locked to a single safe website.
**Unless the actual bank website itself has been compromised, in which case you're stuffed anyhow.
however, health insurance doesn't affect me if you don't have it.
This is a common assertion which is easily disproved by examples. Here are a couple of specific cases:
1/ Your neighbour/friend/workmate/some guy in a bar you go to has a nasty rash. He doesn't go to the doctor as he has no health insurance. Instead he just gets on with his life until he gets *much* sicker.
Turns out he had the first symtoms of a nasty infectious illness, and now he's infected you.
2/ You get a taxi to the airport. Turns out your taxi driver has a untreated dodgy knee due to no health insurance. His knee locks when approaching a red light at a junction and the taxi accelerates into the path of a lorry, killing both of you.
If you consider these to be pretty unlikely corner cases, then more generally, every person who can't work due to treatable conditions but no insurance costs you money. Because they don't work and pay taxes, your taxes are higher as a result.
OK, here's a simple example (which has actually happened several times to my company).
a/ Buy/License proprietry product A from company X
b/ Company Y buys company X.
c/ Company Y has product B which is 'similar' to product A
d/ Company Y discontinues support for product A and 'suggests' you move to product B, which has lots of extra functions you don't need, is missing some that you do, and costs twice as much.
e/ Further alternatives from company Z etc. are even less attractive.
f/ You are forced at some point to migrate to product B (e.g. to get it to run on supported OS) regardless of cost and functionality.
In the FOSS case, you have the option of employing someone to maintain product A (which may or may not be economic). In the non-FOSS case this option does not even exist (unless you have the money to buy company Y or you are the government or something).
As per above, this is not a theoretical problem; it has happened repeatedly to my company and I read of examples of this happening frequently to other companies.
The logical fix - the thing that would balance out a lack of a fine for not being insured - would be to turn away the uninsured people who show up at emergency rooms with broken limbs, heart attacks, strokes, etc. and let them die.
nobody will support a decision that mandates responsibility and fiscal restraint with potential death as the penalty for non-compliance.
So are you implying you *would* you be happy to see people (say) screaming in agony as they die horribly by the roadside after an accident as their 'penalty for non-compliance'? Would you stand there and point at the dying person and say to the crowd - "There, see what happens if you don't get medical insurance"! If so, I guess you and the human race have pretty much parted company.
As you say, it's all pretty logical, but only if you lack any sort of compassion or human feelings whatsoever. Maybe you could get an emotion chip fitted or something?
Ubuntu's upgrade approach is terrible. If your version is older than 6 months you have to do a double-upgrade. For every 6 months between your version and the current version you have to do an upgrade (if the intervening releases are still available).
Or, of course, you can stick to the Long Term Support versions and do one upgrade roughly every two years (the LTS version is supported for 3 years for the desktop version but the new LTS versions come out every two years, so you should upgrade when your current LTS version is between 2 and 3 years old). This is probably about on the level of the larger Windows Sevice Pack upgrades.
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
Have you by any chance been living in a cave for the last few years?
Basic EU competition law: *If* Opera was distributed along with 'Opera OS', *and* 'Opera OS' had a 90% market share, then Opera might well be required to include such a ballot screen or other equivalent requirement.
As 'Opera OS' does not even exist, they can do what they like. Same for Firefox etc.
Simple eh?
And (preemptively) don't bring Apple into it just because they *do* have an OS. It has less than 10% of the relevant market, so again they are free to do what they like.
NB US competition laws are very similar but don't seem to be enforced as much.
Just to humor yourself, the next time you go to a restaurant, ask for the nutritional menu. The recommended level of salt intake is 1000 to 1500mg (1g to 1.5g), though the USDA recommended amount is around 2400 or so.
I think you're confusing salt levels and sodium levels here (i.e. quoting sodium levels but labelling the figures as salt levels). This is a pretty important disctinction. To quote from this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Recommended_intake
"In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration itself does not make a recommendation,[64] but refers readers to Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005. These suggest that US citizens should consume less than 2,300 mg of sodium (= 2.3 g sodium = 5.8 g salt) per day.[65]"
(emphasis added)
If they did re-master, people could legally copy or other publishers could take the mastered work and sell it at rock bottom prices.
No, they couldn't.
Or would a new copyright exist on the mastering itself?
Sort of. There is no real concept of copyright on the 'mastering itself' (whatever that might mean) but the remastered recording is a new recording for copyright purposes and the copyright clock starts again from zero for that new version.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now.
Ho hum. Yet another person who doesn't understand (or, quite often, doesn't *want* to understand) the *legal* definition of 'monopoly'.
It's not about 100% of the market. It's not about having no competition.
It's whether you have a dominant position, capable of distorting free competition. You can have 30% of a market and still fall under monopoly-related competition laws, e.g if you and two other companies with 30% erect barriers to new entrants.
In MS's case they have about 90% of the PC OS market and are legally a monopoly under competition laws in most major markets, and so are potentially restrained from certain types of behaviour, in this particular case using their PC OS monopoly to increase their browser market share.
Like I said, you are stealing.
You just can't steal something that is *freely given* (in the hope that you might look at the adverts). I guess you've just redefined the word steal to mean whatever you like, but you'll have trouble communicating with people if you use words in a way that only about 1% of the population recognize.
Find your own word for that kind of abomination; this word is taken.
The use of this kind of term clearly shows where you are coming from, and makes you the *real* hate-filled abomination.
So you apparently think you can define the word 'marriage' for everyone else do you? The sheer arrogance of 'this word is taken' is mind-boggling. And you then dare to say "The reason is the same reason people worked to control language in 1984: to try to control people's thoughts." when it's *you* who are saying that *other people* have no right to use a word in a particular way.
Well, here's the news: marriage has meant, does mean and always will mean more than your exclusive definition, and in your case the more that offends you the better.
Homosexuality is a choice, not biology, regardless of what crank science says.
I suppose you characterize evolution as 'crank science' as well, do you?
There have been many studies which show trans and gay people typically have some brain structures/patterns which vary from the 'norm' for their genetic sex and correspond in varying degrees to those of the opposite genetic sex, and strong evidence that this relates to things like the hormonal environment in the womb. Dismissing these as 'crank science' when they are the mainstream view in the relevant fields these days points to either ignorance or bigotry on your part.
The BBC should tell Murdoch and others to go jump. Unless something has changed recently, the BBC is funded largely by the license holders and has no obligation to Murdoch/News or any other "news" organization.
It would be nice if they could. But the Tories - still fairly likely to form the next government in a few months - are now Murdoch's big pals, and have detested the very idea of the BBC since the patrician old guard (Tories and BBC bigwigs) went. They already have a policy of 'distributing the license fee more widely' (i.e. giving some of it to commercial stations). They are very keen that the BBC should not produce anything 'populist', the overt reason being that the commercial sector can do this just fine, but it's also an excellent strategy for later saying 'not enough people watch the BBC anymore, cut the license fee further/switch BBC to subcription model'. The only constraint is how much they can cut the BBC without becoming too unpopular.
Labour have often had (very) serious rows with the BBC and have big issues with particular programs, managers and presenters etc. but they are not fundamentally opposed to the basis of its existence.
The BBC presumably is trying to preempt worse cuts by proposing its own more modest ones, but this could backfire and just fuel the Tories'/Mudoch's appetite for even more.
s/Max/Mac/ obviously...
To be fair, Firefox comes with a very aggressive, annoying (IMHO) update mechanism built in and enabled by default.
On Windows (?and Max OS I guess).
Linux repository versions update in the usual well-behaved manner through your package management tools and Fifefox's own update mechanism turned off.
ZFS will probably have to be reimplemented somehow to go on Linux. We'll have to wait for ext5 or 6 to get a reasonable subset of ZFS feature list.
Sort of. There will probably never be an ext5, ext4 will be stabilised at some point. The future 'standard Linux filesystem' with ZFS features is intended to be BTRFS and it's well on the way (in the mainline Linux kernel but not ready for general use just yet).
http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
However, the fact that Oracle is the priciple driver behind BTRFS, but now owns Sun and thus could GPL ZFS does obviously cast some doubt on the future of both - although they can both carry on with non-Oracle devlopers, it will obviously be very important which one Oracle throws its weight behind (they're surely unlikely to give them both equal resources).
It's the concept of using a full computer operating system for things as simple as ATMs. Using Windows for those is horrible, but using Mac, Linux or BSD is still pretty bad.
Linux (and I assume BSD) are in practice more modular than the proprietry systems**. Linux can be stripped down to virtually nothing with all unnecessary packages/kernel modules/drivers removed (or built up from the kernel source), so you could get pretty close to the same attack surface of a specialist OS. You could probably even modify (and if necessary maintain) a kernel *fairly* easily with entire unwanted APIs disabled.
**If you are MS or Apple or work with them closely (and expensively) you can probably strip a lot of stuff out of Windows or Mac OS but otherwise you're reduced to guesswork plus the fruits of other people's guesswork (NTLite etc.) which may get you a long way but will definitely leave you with more unwanted code you're not aware of or don't dare remove.
If you have an in house you only have to distribute your sources in house, something that should not be a problem in most organizations.
Internal use within a single organization is just that, use, not distribution, and you don't need to supply source to anyone (this would make no sense anyhow, your organization as a whole already possesses the source (if modified) or has a valid offer to supply it from the orginal source (if unmodified)).
To simplify, 'internal distribution' is not 'distribution' for the purposes of the GPL so you can do what you please.
So if Confiker owns Windows boxen it's because Windows is awful and shoddy. But if CN owns Linux boxen it's because they are "misconfigured".
Given that confiker exploited actual bugs in windows which MS had to patch, and that 'Chuck Norris' is exploiting the fact that certain appliance suppliers deliberately 'configured' Linux with a fixed and known id and password, the statement above that you deride is *in this particular case* clearly accurate.
You do understand the difference between an actual bug causing a security problem and a deliberate choice to 'leave the front door open' don't you?
Exactly - tyre manufacturers no longer cater for customers with iron-tyred wooden-spoked cart wheels, why should anyone cater for IE6 users?
If 12% of the 'tyre market' was still for cart wheels, then they or other companies *would* cater for it (and presumably did, during the transition from cart wheels to tyres).
It's fairly simple; you stop catering for IE6 when the cost of maintaining the extra code exceeds the revenue from the customers who insist on using it. If you are still seeing 10%+ of your revenue generating traffic from IE6 you probably haven't reached that point just yet.
(Obviously if your site is not commercial then you can cut off support whenever you like, subject to any special requirements like it being a government site).
Of all the OS's out there, Linux is nowhere near the top of the list as far as idiot-proofing goes
My wife had never used any sort of computer until about 5 years ago. I was totally confident I could give her a non-admin account on Fedora, and subsequently Ubuntu, with virtually no risk. I would *not* have the same confidence in Windows. She spends 99% of the time using the web browser so her experience is virtually identical with Linux as it would be with Mac OS or Windows.
The Ubuntu forums are pretty well trashed now, since there are *way* too many people asking questions, and all the people who could answer them got tired out a few years ago.
I have a reasonable amount of basic Linux competence and enjoy answering 'simple' questions on the Ubuntu Forums, and seem to get positive feedback from my answers. I get the impression there are still quite a number of people like myself on these forums who just want to help new Linux users make the most of their system, and get satisfaction from this.
Have a look at preload [sourceforge.net] (project registered in 2005). I believe it's installed by default on Ubuntu.
Not installed by default (on 9.04 anyhow) but I've found it pretty useful with its default settings. Frequently used applications seem to load in about half the time the first time they're used after a reboot.
There are many people, myself included, with a broadband connection of >10Mbps that do not use YouTube for the simple fact that there is rarely anything of intellectual interest to be found within its pages.
Just a couple of examples of 'intellectual interest':
Youtube is a priceless archive of thousands of hours of rare video footage of quality musicians performing (blues, folk, acoustic etc.). Many of the videos are not obtainable by any other means and record television appearances etc. from across the world going back fifty years.
It also has considerable footage of historical interest from abandoned buildings etc. which have often been subsequently demolished.
People working in places with 'blocked' web access should try that- just turn off the proxy in the browser setting and see what happens.
They get fired for a 'serious and deliberate breach of corporate security policy'?