In Alaska they make various things out of moose dropings. Mainly sell them to the tourists. They shellac it to seal it and make it hard. Pretty funny.:)
Actually the more delay and reduction in features to Longhorn the longer Linux has to get a desktop system that is easy for the typical user to use. Linux already has most of the applications available that can replace all of the Microsoft based applications. Noteable excpetion is tax prepration software. (and I don't consider a web based application as a suitable replacement).
Mirosoft knows that their current business model will not continue to be viable. That is why they started the process a couple of years ago to change over from a purchase once license to a an annual license scheme. Companies will no longer buy 10,000 copies of an OS and applications and use them for 5 years or more. Microsoft wants those companies to pay every year for those 10,000 seats. Linux and Open Source applications can provide a zero cost up front as well as updates and fixes in subsequent years. In addition they can choose from several different options in most categories which in most cases use open file formats and API's so they can interchange applications as needed. Very different from Microsofts current scheme of keeping the file formats and API's hidden so people can not develop alternative applications.
Microsoft knows their time is limited, hence the huge dividend they payed out this year. They will continue to drain as much money out of the company as they can in the next several years. And during that time they will try to re-invent the company so they are not dependent on releasing new OSes every few years. Such a model is not sustainable in the long run ( I mean just how many new inovative items can you add to an OS?).
The real danger is when Microsoft starts their legal campaign to maintain and prop up their current business model. The lawsuits may devistate the industry making it illegal to write and use alternative OSes and applications. Of course this could finally bring to a head the issues with patenting software.
I see that someone finally updated their virus software. Security experts have been telling everyone for years to keep their virus software updated. But does anyone listen? NOOOOOOOOOO!
So lets make sure I understand this correctly. They correctly identified places that might have a 5+ magnitude quake over a ten period.
Gee, lets get a map of the fault lines out there. I think there will be several 5+ quakes here, here, over there, and here over the next 5 years.
Kind of like pointing at Mount St. Helens and saying there is going to be an eruption there in the next 5 years. Opps, that ones already come true.
Now if they provide a date and time for each quake and hit it within a week or even a month, now that would be something. But to point out active fault lines and say there be quakes happen around here sometime in the next decade does not sound that good or even that useful.
I think we are saying the same thing. Microsoft is now starting a phase where they will extract as much money as they can from the company, ala the huge dividend they are paying out this year. Yes they don't have anywhere to go but down. And given that their next big OS release is at least a year away linux may have a chance to displace a significant portion of MS installations. As you say, the application is what is important, the OS is really secondary. Most applications people use on a regular basis have very good equivalants that run natively under linux. Given another year or two of development and virtually no one will complain about using a linux based system for normal use. And as corporations find that they can deploy a very inexpensive (or free) OS Microsoft will find they will start loosing their big corporate customers. Oh there will be a lot of lawsuits filed and a tremendous amount of FUD but they are starting the spiral down. They will be around for many years as a company but once the corporate world rejects them their stock will plumet and the major players in the company will slowly start to step aside, but not until they have extracted all the money the can. There is not a whole lot of inovation that they can do. About all they do now is try to arrange things that force people to be locked in to their offerings. And the current security issues require a complete rewrite of the OS and applications which in Microsofts case is virtually impossible since they have such a monolithic set of applications.
So baring some drastic change in the way the Internet operates or Microsoft adopting the open source/GPL practices (which I doubt will happen).
No that was the word I meant. It seems that when the tree huggers find some poor endangered species they want to put a bubble around to keep anything from changing. They don't realize that change is the way things work. Species die off to make room for other species. Has happened over and over and will continue to happen. Climate change is just one way that this change continues to happen.
Good example is here in Florida. They have laws that prevent someone from making use of their land if someone happens to find a gopher tortoise on it. The idea being that you can't disturb their habitat. If they had their way no new development would be permitted. But things will change regardless of what they do. You can't protect all these endangered species. It is the natural order of things. If they were meant to survive then they would adapt. If they are not meant to then say hello to the dodo when they get their. The way natural selection works. At some point it will happen to people also. Probably due to a virus of some kind. Some of us may survive then again we may make way for the next attempt. The dinosaurs made room for us after all.
If you believe in God then you must believe that God gave people free will. And if he gave people free will why would he do anything to affect what happens to people?
The storm missed Miami because the various high and low pressure systems, and other environmental factors, steered the storm away. Nothing else, nothing less.
I am glad you were not affected by the this series of hurricanes. But to ascribe it to God (any God) means you want to blame things that happen in your life on others.
So some publicly recongnized figures signed a letter. Did they stop driving cars, flying in planes, or convert their million dollar houses to solar power? I don't think so.
I think those signatures would carry more "weight" if the signers turned the A/C off in their houses and stopped driving the SUVs that are most likely parked in their garages.
Weather patterns in the world change. They changed in the past and they will change in the future. The evidence trying to link human action to climate change is debatable. We would be better off spending our energy finding ways to establish self sustaining colonies off world. But then the tree huggers are against that also.
Having lived through the recent series of storms here in Florida I can say first hand it is not any fun. This is the worst set of storms that central Florida area has had in the 30 years I have been here. I am not looking forward to more hurricane seasons like this one. This season I fared fairly well. I had a generator and transfer switch installed to power the house. Did that back in February, great timing for me. Went many days without commercial power during the storms this year.
Global warming may be a major factor. It is debatable if humans are responsible for global warming or not. (I expect this to get me modded down by the tree huggers.) What people need to realize is that change in the environment is constant. The last couple of thousand years things have been mild enough for humans to not only remember how things have been in the past but allowed us to develop the scientific processes that have allowed us to understand a lot of what is going on. We don't understand it all but we are working on it.
The big thing is to recognize that the earth is not a static diorama that never changes. It has gone through major weather cycles in the past and will continue to do so until the ultimate when the Sun goes nova. I personally doubt that people have as big an effect on the climate as some would like us to believe.
As things change people will adapt or find ways to adapt the environment to them. It is the way it has always been. If people survive for the next 10,000 years then we might figure out how to control the weather patterns. But hopefully we will be smart enough by then to know that we should leave well enough alone. And by that time we should have established self sustaining colonies off planet. So if the Earth becomes less than hospitable for us we can continue else where.
Another thing to remember, is if and when we try to control the weather, and that includes trying to fix global warming, we are more than likely going to cause more problems than what we had to start with. Remember, the job will go to the lowest bidder. And I expect the weather control stations will have the normal set of defects and shoddy workmanship which will lead to break downs and control problems.
Playing tax evasion games is just another way for Microsoft to maximize the money they can collect before their bubble bursts. The $75 billion stock divided is the start of Microsofts decline. They realized that in the next few years their monopoly on the desk top will start to slip away. So they are now starting the process of pulling as much money out of the company as they can. By the time they deliver the next version of their OS there will be a lot of companies that will decide to move to something other than Microsoft. Then the real decline will start. It will take many years but it will happen.
The only thing they can do with older cars that do not have the technology to drive on the smart highways is to bar them from such highways. Face it, they can not let smart cars and self piloted cars drive the same roads. The benefits of the smart highway would be lost. As a matter of fact it would be a common occurance for some one driving their old heap to purposely get in front of a line of smart cars and slowly reduce speed to a crawl. The system would not be usable. The people in the smart cars would switch to self drive mode to get around the jerk in front of them. End result very few people would use the auto pilot feature.
So when this goes into effect older vehicles will first be barred from interstates that implement smart car technology. From there it will move to major state roads then to busy cross town roads until finally you can only drive your vintage antique 2004 BMW up and down the street in front of your house.
There will be no grandfathering these into the system since equiping an existing car with the technology will only be an option to the very rich. It will not be something a shade tree mechnanic will be able to do over the weekend. Even if they could it would have to be certified by some special division of motor vehicles as safe to operate.
The most likely place for such technology to show up will be special lanes on the interstates first. Which will cause more traffic jams for those without the technology.
Actually CEO's and CIO's and especially government officials rarely if ever understand the details of the technology that their decisions cause to be implemented. Their decisions normally come down to some numbers in a spread sheet along with a few paragraphs saying that this stuff will do what they need to have done. The PHB's (pointy hared bosses) can't be bothered with the details of how something was developed or even if it is a great product. They just want to know that if they spend money on it that it will return more money in the end.
I really suspect the main reason Munich is switching is purely for cost reasons. They can substitute Linux, mozilla, and openoffice and get the jobs done that they used to do using Microsoft products. And the reason they will do the switch is that they do not have to pay Microsoft millions of dollars for all the copies that they need to run the city. A cost/risk analysis can show that this is a good thing and they won't loose any capabilities doing so.
Now you personally may appreciate how something was developed and the fact that it is a great product but if the PHB's don't see how it either makes them money or saves them money (actually kind of the same thing as making money) they will not deploy that product.
So if you are trying to convince a PHB to use something other than Microsoft you need to work out the cost savings and show that they will not loose any capabilites or productivity doing so. And even then 8 times out of 10 they will still do business with Microsoft since they are probably getting a kickback directly into their own pockets.
Email was never intended to be "near real time" particularly for people that have never communicated before. If you want instant messaging then use instant messaging. Any sales person that throws an email out there on an important deal that can cost money and does not follow up with a phone call is a bad sales person. Once you have talked with someone sent an introductory email and added them to your white list then communications flow very smoothly. Until they track down the spammers and jail them along with the companies hawking unwanted goods greylisting is one of the better tools out there to block spam. One company I worked for was just about ready to disable email completely since it cost so much time to sort through the spam. Implementing spamassassin helped a lot, implementing greylisting for them made email a usable tool again. It was really that bad.
The best protection against trojan'ed machines sending spam is greylisting. Why? Because the trojan'ed machines do not try to resend messasges. They dump and run. And when/if the spammers modify their programs to queue the message and resend you combine greylisting with several of the rbls out there. By the time you accept the spam message that machine is probably on a block list so you reject the message. I have seen grey listing reduce spam from 3000 to 6000 messages a day down to 5 to 10 a day. And those are caught by spamassassin. And by forcing the spammers to resend the messages you eat up more of their resources making it much more expensive for them to send spam. Ultimately that is the real fix. Make it so costly for spammers to send messages that they will choose not to do it. To that end going after the products is an excellent way to discourage spamming. Obviously they make money doing this. So someone has to be able to connect back to a an actual buisness. Take those buisnesses to court, make them pay huge fines, and they will not engage the spammers services anymore.
Seriously, the combination of greylisting and spamassassin has worked wonders. All isp's should implement both immediately. But they don't because the ISPs are making money by hosting the spammers and selling email address lists to the spammers.
But you see this is all part of the master plan. Microsoft has seen the hand writing on the wall. They only have another couple of years before Linux starts capturing a large percentage of the desktop market. Windows has lost the server part already. This past year Microsoft disbursed millions of dollars to the share holders. This was the start of the process to squeeze as much money out of the company as they could before it goes completely belly up. Next year they will do something else to get more money out of the company into stockholders pockets.
The end is getting near. Oh they have several more years but you can only put off delivery of your next OS for so long. And when it comes out people are not going to flock to it like before. There will be real alternatives available such as Linux. And it is getting easier and easier to make the move. Now that they are going to stop provding patches for just any XP system out there and they are going to block people from using outlook for hotmail and most if not all security companies recommend using firefox instead of IE they only have a few more applications left. Openoffice is doing a great job of taking on Microsofts bread and butter packages so those to are trapped in the great swirlly water.
There needs to be a pool started on just when Microsoft will implode.
No, everyone has missed what really happened. They raised the limit from 2MB to 250MB on all the accounts. They did the planning ahead of time and figured it would take time for people to use the new limit. But what they did not count on was that all 250MB was almost instantly filled with spam messages for every account. Previously it had been limited to 2MB so most of the spam was dropped since most accounts were already filled. Now everyone has 250MB of spam to process.
Of course they forgot the number one rule, data expands to fill all available disk space regardless of how much disk space is made available.
I also suspect that if you did find a bug in the code you would be prevented from telling anyone about it. And since you probably can't compile it anyways you won't be able to fix it yourself.
Sounds like a semi-clever move by MS to taint as many organizations as possible to make sure they are locked into buying MS products. Pure and simple.
This is a trick to taint as many programmers as possible. By releasing the source code MS will then be able to go after open source software in a year or two claiming that proprietary code has been used getting the courts to grant them huge sums against various firms using open source products.
This includes those products that were reverse engineered since similar code has to be found in the open source programs to make them compatible with MS programs.
The problem is when individuals write letters or call their congress critters the message is filtered through a series of congressional aides. By the time such information reaches the congress critters the message has been transformed to be what ever the aides and paying lobbyests want it to say.
The over riding problem is that congress critters respond to one thing only, money. If you don't have money then you have zero influence in what the congress critters do. Why do you think that election after election they come out and promise the masses exactly what they want to hear so they vote them back into office but rarely if ever deliver what they promised? It is because the lobbyiests own them not the electorate. The people voting for them rarely if ever contribute money and when they do it never comes close to the amounts the lobbiests throw at them. As a result the congress critters vote things the way the lobbiests want them to vote.
The only real way to combat this is to get enough people together that can actually buy a congress critter or two out right. The big problem is that they don't come cheap. You either need lots of money (millions) or you need to have verified dirt on them that could cost them millions if it comes out.
So what it comes down to is that Microsoft has the money to buy every congress critter in site, or at least a majority, to get what ever they want voted into legislation. I fully expect to hear in the next couple of years Microsoft backed legislation that in essance will outlaw open source software. It may be difficult to connect Microsoft with it but they will be behind it. The money will flow from them to the congress critters and they will vote just the way they are paid to.
So the reality is that the system is broken and will remain broken until it collapses. The collapse is not to far away. As Microsoft and others get the software patent rules written the way the want no one will be able to write any kind of software unless the owners of all the patents say they can. As a result inovation will come to a stand still. All we will get are slightly modified new versions of the same old thing which make running the old versions impossible making it manditory that everyone buy new versions, or should I say, sign up for perpetual maintance which entitles you to lease the newest version. If you are caught running illegal open source software there will be a new branch of the justice department show up at your door to confiscate all your equipment and lock you up for several years.
There will be a good fight for awhile as various people try to clone the new technology to mask the fact that they are not running sanctioned versions of software. But in the end the vast majority of people will give in since it is easier than going to jail.
At some point every combination of each programing language will be under perpetual patents and will prevent anyone from developing anything new. This will take many years but it is coming. And there is no way short of a revolution to change it. But that will never happen.
So welcome the new overlord, Microsoft. And morn the passing of freedom and inovation.
I did not say that spam does not cost ISPs money, I said that it does not cost them that much.
First lets look at the "bandwidth" cost. ISPs have purchased up front the bandwidth they are providing to their customers. The ISPs are going to be paying for this bandwidth regardless of how much spam is sent over it. It is in effect a cost of doing business. ISPs would not reduce their available bandwidth tomorrow if some how spam went away. And if the ISPs really saw this as costing them money you can bet they would find effective ways to block spam so they could reduce costs. Obviously ISPs don't see spam as costing them that much so they don't do anything about it.
Of course the other option is that the ISPs are making money off the spammers. If that is the case then they don't want to do anything to interrupt that revenue stream. It is either one way or the other.
A proper MTA WILL resend messages. That has been a staple of message servers since almost the beginning of email. If a MTA does not resend the message then it is not operating correctly or per RFC. And if greylisting was widely implemented by all ISPs you can bet that any non-compliant MTAs would quickly be upgraded to bring them into compliance. The greet-pause process simply delays the completion of handshake between MTAs for a very short period of time. I think such a delay for large volume senders of email would have little impact. A little inconvience to block spam is what is going to have to happen. And I don't understand your statement about spammers using CC/BCC for serveral people to get past greet-pause. Most spammers do not use compliant MTA programs. They simply run down a list and send email out without even waiting for the reply from the receiving MTA. Greet-pause works because the spammer does not even look at the reply messages of the MTA they are sending to. They dump and run as many messages as they can. By inserting a delay in the hand shake a non-compliant MTA will send responses to messages that have not been sent yet. The receiving MTA looks at this and drops the connection since it is recieving data from the sender in an incorrect sequence. This is similar to the way greylisting works. A real MTA WILL resend a message when given a 451 error. A bogus MTA typically won't since the spammer is more interested in dumping and pumping as many messages as possible and won't take the time or resources needed to queue and resend messages that failed the first time.
Greylisting and greet-pause are just two tool of many that should be implemented. A layered defense is what is needed. Spamassassin with bayes and surbl do an exellent job of tagging spam that gets through greylisting and greet-pause. Actively tracking spammers back to the source and blocking those sites as well as tracking down the vendor that is advertising via spam. Impose heavy fines on such vendors directly and the spammers will loose their customers. Ultimately that is the way to get rid of spam. Take away the money and there is no reason to send millions of messages that most people don't want.
Of course I still think we need to take away the computers of people that buy via spam messages and steralize them to keep them from reproducing.
The reality is that the earth is constantly changing. The short period of time we have been here and able to remember things from the past is a blink of an eye in the time of the earth. Some of the change may be due to our influence but nothing we do is going to really change the overall environment, aside from total thermo nuclear war. In the long run the earth goes through various geologic ages. Our development happend to coincide with a realtively mild period in the earths history. Eventually this will change and if we have not created self sustaining colonies on other worlds we will pass into history. Maybe the next speciecs that develops intelligence will find some of our remains and wonder why we let the SCO lawsuit drag us to our demise since that will be the last item on the news services when it all ends.
It really amazes me that the "greenies" don't really understand that the environment is in constant change. Species rise and species die. Natural order of things. But they all seem to want to freeze everything as they happened to stumble on it as if that is the way it has been since the dawn of time. The fact that we might be going through a slight warming cycle is not cause for alarm. Yes some species will go extict but eventually others will fill the void. We are in a unique position since we can to some degree modify our own environment for our survival but we can also modify and adapt ourselves. In the long run it really depends on what we decide to do as a species. I personally would like to see us establish self sustaining colonies on the varous palnets and moons of this system. And even that eventually will not be far enough as the sun will go nova and wipe out this system. So we will need to spread to the stars to survive.
I just wonder if SCO can get a change of venu for their on going case against IBM?
The ISP's are not really serious about fighting spam. It does not cost them that much and they are probalby making money due to spam. So the only incentive they have to do anything about it is when the level of spaming gets to the point they are about to be blacklisted then they take action.
If they were really serious about curbing spam they would implement greylisting and greet_pause features in their MTAs. Both of these would block 99% of the spam being sent. The remaining spammers would then be much easier to track down since they would have to be running full blown MTAs which could then be blocked.
So why don't they do this? Because it does not make them any money and would cost them a little money to implement and maintain such features.
Ultimately the only way to eliminate spam is to make is unprofitable to the spammer. One option that I have never seen discussed is to track down the idiots that actually buy from spam and take their machines away and sterilize them so they don't reproduce.
So lets say Microsoft gets this standard in place and makes USB unusable by any OS except for the latest version of Windows.
So how hard would it be to design and build a USB card to put into those shiny new computers that would work just fine using any OS you want (except for maybe Windows)? I think this would be a nice sized market for a small company to get into if and when this becomes a problem.
As for the trusted computing thing, I some how think that someone will come up with a way to simulate a trusted computing device in software. At which point it won't mean a whole lot. Just another encumberance get around.
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In Alaska they make various things out of moose dropings. Mainly sell them to the tourists. They shellac it to seal it and make it hard. Pretty funny. :)
That's not an ape, it is Jimmy Joe Bob from across town. He went on vacation down there and has not come back yet.
Actually the more delay and reduction in features to Longhorn the longer Linux has to get a desktop system that is easy for the typical user to use. Linux already has most of the applications available that can replace all of the Microsoft based applications. Noteable excpetion is tax prepration software. (and I don't consider a web based application as a suitable replacement).
Mirosoft knows that their current business model will not continue to be viable. That is why they started the process a couple of years ago to change over from a purchase once license to a an annual license scheme. Companies will no longer buy 10,000 copies of an OS and applications and use them for 5 years or more. Microsoft wants those companies to pay every year for those 10,000 seats. Linux and Open Source applications can provide a zero cost up front as well as updates and fixes in subsequent years. In addition they can choose from several different options in most categories which in most cases use open file formats and API's so they can interchange applications as needed. Very different from Microsofts current scheme of keeping the file formats and API's hidden so people can not develop alternative applications.
Microsoft knows their time is limited, hence the huge dividend they payed out this year. They will continue to drain as much money out of the company as they can in the next several years. And during that time they will try to re-invent the company so they are not dependent on releasing new OSes every few years. Such a model is not sustainable in the long run ( I mean just how many new inovative items can you add to an OS?).
The real danger is when Microsoft starts their legal campaign to maintain and prop up their current business model. The lawsuits may devistate the industry making it illegal to write and use alternative OSes and applications. Of course this could finally bring to a head the issues with patenting software.
You just knew something called ASP would have to come back and bite them in the butt some day. Didn't you? :)
I see that someone finally updated their virus software. Security experts have been telling everyone for years to keep their virus software updated. But does anyone listen? NOOOOOOOOOO!
So lets make sure I understand this correctly. They correctly identified places that might have a 5+ magnitude quake over a ten period.
Gee, lets get a map of the fault lines out there. I think there will be several 5+ quakes here, here, over there, and here over the next 5 years.
Kind of like pointing at Mount St. Helens and saying there is going to be an eruption there in the next 5 years. Opps, that ones already come true.
Now if they provide a date and time for each quake and hit it within a week or even a month, now that would be something. But to point out active fault lines and say there be quakes happen around here sometime in the next decade does not sound that good or even that useful.
I think we are saying the same thing. Microsoft is now starting a phase where they will extract as much money as they can from the company, ala the huge dividend they are paying out this year. Yes they don't have anywhere to go but down. And given that their next big OS release is at least a year away linux may have a chance to displace a significant portion of MS installations. As you say, the application is what is important, the OS is really secondary. Most applications people use on a regular basis have very good equivalants that run natively under linux. Given another year or two of development and virtually no one will complain about using a linux based system for normal use. And as corporations find that they can deploy a very inexpensive (or free) OS Microsoft will find they will start loosing their big corporate customers. Oh there will be a lot of lawsuits filed and a tremendous amount of FUD but they are starting the spiral down. They will be around for many years as a company but once the corporate world rejects them their stock will plumet and the major players in the company will slowly start to step aside, but not until they have extracted all the money the can. There is not a whole lot of inovation that they can do. About all they do now is try to arrange things that force people to be locked in to their offerings. And the current security issues require a complete rewrite of the OS and applications which in Microsofts case is virtually impossible since they have such a monolithic set of applications.
So baring some drastic change in the way the Internet operates or Microsoft adopting the open source/GPL practices (which I doubt will happen).
No that was the word I meant. It seems that when the tree huggers find some poor endangered species they want to put a bubble around to keep anything from changing. They don't realize that change is the way things work. Species die off to make room for other species. Has happened over and over and will continue to happen. Climate change is just one way that this change continues to happen.
Good example is here in Florida. They have laws that prevent someone from making use of their land if someone happens to find a gopher tortoise on it. The idea being that you can't disturb their habitat. If they had their way no new development would be permitted. But things will change regardless of what they do. You can't protect all these endangered species. It is the natural order of things. If they were meant to survive then they would adapt. If they are not meant to then say hello to the dodo when they get their. The way natural selection works. At some point it will happen to people also. Probably due to a virus of some kind. Some of us may survive then again we may make way for the next attempt. The dinosaurs made room for us after all.
If you believe in God then you must believe that God gave people free will. And if he gave people free will why would he do anything to affect what happens to people?
The storm missed Miami because the various high and low pressure systems, and other environmental factors, steered the storm away. Nothing else, nothing less.
I am glad you were not affected by the this series of hurricanes. But to ascribe it to God (any God) means you want to blame things that happen in your life on others.
So some publicly recongnized figures signed a letter. Did they stop driving cars, flying in planes, or convert their million dollar houses to solar power? I don't think so.
I think those signatures would carry more "weight" if the signers turned the A/C off in their houses and stopped driving the SUVs that are most likely parked in their garages.
Weather patterns in the world change. They changed in the past and they will change in the future. The evidence trying to link human action to climate change is debatable. We would be better off spending our energy finding ways to establish self sustaining colonies off world. But then the tree huggers are against that also.
Having lived through the recent series of storms here in Florida I can say first hand it is not any fun. This is the worst set of storms that central Florida area has had in the 30 years I have been here. I am not looking forward to more hurricane seasons like this one. This season I fared fairly well. I had a generator and transfer switch installed to power the house. Did that back in February, great timing for me. Went many days without commercial power during the storms this year.
Global warming may be a major factor. It is debatable if humans are responsible for global warming or not. (I expect this to get me modded down by the tree huggers.) What people need to realize is that change in the environment is constant. The last couple of thousand years things have been mild enough for humans to not only remember how things have been in the past but allowed us to develop the scientific processes that have allowed us to understand a lot of what is going on. We don't understand it all but we are working on it.
The big thing is to recognize that the earth is not a static diorama that never changes. It has gone through major weather cycles in the past and will continue to do so until the ultimate when the Sun goes nova. I personally doubt that people have as big an effect on the climate as some would like us to believe.
As things change people will adapt or find ways to adapt the environment to them. It is the way it has always been. If people survive for the next 10,000 years then we might figure out how to control the weather patterns. But hopefully we will be smart enough by then to know that we should leave well enough alone. And by that time we should have established self sustaining colonies off planet. So if the Earth becomes less than hospitable for us we can continue else where.
Another thing to remember, is if and when we try to control the weather, and that includes trying to fix global warming, we are more than likely going to cause more problems than what we had to start with. Remember, the job will go to the lowest bidder. And I expect the weather control stations will have the normal set of defects and shoddy workmanship which will lead to break downs and control problems.
Playing tax evasion games is just another way for Microsoft to maximize the money they can collect before their bubble bursts. The $75 billion stock divided is the start of Microsofts decline. They realized that in the next few years their monopoly on the desk top will start to slip away. So they are now starting the process of pulling as much money out of the company as they can. By the time they deliver the next version of their OS there will be a lot of companies that will decide to move to something other than Microsoft. Then the real decline will start. It will take many years but it will happen.
The only thing they can do with older cars that do not have the technology to drive on the smart highways is to bar them from such highways. Face it, they can not let smart cars and self piloted cars drive the same roads. The benefits of the smart highway would be lost. As a matter of fact it would be a common occurance for some one driving their old heap to purposely get in front of a line of smart cars and slowly reduce speed to a crawl. The system would not be usable. The people in the smart cars would switch to self drive mode to get around the jerk in front of them. End result very few people would use the auto pilot feature.
So when this goes into effect older vehicles will first be barred from interstates that implement smart car technology. From there it will move to major state roads then to busy cross town roads until finally you can only drive your vintage antique 2004 BMW up and down the street in front of your house.
There will be no grandfathering these into the system since equiping an existing car with the technology will only be an option to the very rich. It will not be something a shade tree mechnanic will be able to do over the weekend. Even if they could it would have to be certified by some special division of motor vehicles as safe to operate.
The most likely place for such technology to show up will be special lanes on the interstates first. Which will cause more traffic jams for those without the technology.
Actually CEO's and CIO's and especially government officials rarely if ever understand the details of the technology that their decisions cause to be implemented. Their decisions normally come down to some numbers in a spread sheet along with a few paragraphs saying that this stuff will do what they need to have done. The PHB's (pointy hared bosses) can't be bothered with the details of how something was developed or even if it is a great product. They just want to know that if they spend money on it that it will return more money in the end.
I really suspect the main reason Munich is switching is purely for cost reasons. They can substitute Linux, mozilla, and openoffice and get the jobs done that they used to do using Microsoft products. And the reason they will do the switch is that they do not have to pay Microsoft millions of dollars for all the copies that they need to run the city. A cost/risk analysis can show that this is a good thing and they won't loose any capabilities doing so.
Now you personally may appreciate how something was developed and the fact that it is a great product but if the PHB's don't see how it either makes them money or saves them money (actually kind of the same thing as making money) they will not deploy that product.
So if you are trying to convince a PHB to use something other than Microsoft you need to work out the cost savings and show that they will not loose any capabilites or productivity doing so. And even then 8 times out of 10 they will still do business with Microsoft since they are probably getting a kickback directly into their own pockets.
Email was never intended to be "near real time" particularly for people that have never communicated before. If you want instant messaging then use instant messaging. Any sales person that throws an email out there on an important deal that can cost money and does not follow up with a phone call is a bad sales person. Once you have talked with someone sent an introductory email and added them to your white list then communications flow very smoothly. Until they track down the spammers and jail them along with the companies hawking unwanted goods greylisting is one of the better tools out there to block spam. One company I worked for was just about ready to disable email completely since it cost so much time to sort through the spam. Implementing spamassassin helped a lot, implementing greylisting for them made email a usable tool again. It was really that bad.
The best protection against trojan'ed machines sending spam is greylisting. Why? Because the trojan'ed machines do not try to resend messasges. They dump and run. And when/if the spammers modify their programs to queue the message and resend you combine greylisting with several of the rbls out there. By the time you accept the spam message that machine is probably on a block list so you reject the message. I have seen grey listing reduce spam from 3000 to 6000 messages a day down to 5 to 10 a day. And those are caught by spamassassin. And by forcing the spammers to resend the messages you eat up more of their resources making it much more expensive for them to send spam. Ultimately that is the real fix. Make it so costly for spammers to send messages that they will choose not to do it. To that end going after the products is an excellent way to discourage spamming. Obviously they make money doing this. So someone has to be able to connect back to a an actual buisness. Take those buisnesses to court, make them pay huge fines, and they will not engage the spammers services anymore.
Seriously, the combination of greylisting and spamassassin has worked wonders. All isp's should implement both immediately. But they don't because the ISPs are making money by hosting the spammers and selling email address lists to the spammers.
But you see this is all part of the master plan. Microsoft has seen the hand writing on the wall. They only have another couple of years before Linux starts capturing a large percentage of the desktop market. Windows has lost the server part already. This past year Microsoft disbursed millions of dollars to the share holders. This was the start of the process to squeeze as much money out of the company as they could before it goes completely belly up. Next year they will do something else to get more money out of the company into stockholders pockets.
The end is getting near. Oh they have several more years but you can only put off delivery of your next OS for so long. And when it comes out people are not going to flock to it like before. There will be real alternatives available such as Linux. And it is getting easier and easier to make the move. Now that they are going to stop provding patches for just any XP system out there and they are going to block people from using outlook for hotmail and most if not all security companies recommend using firefox instead of IE they only have a few more applications left. Openoffice is doing a great job of taking on Microsofts bread and butter packages so those to are trapped in the great swirlly water.
There needs to be a pool started on just when Microsoft will implode.
No, everyone has missed what really happened. They raised the limit from 2MB to 250MB on all the accounts. They did the planning ahead of time and figured it would take time for people to use the new limit. But what they did not count on was that all 250MB was almost instantly filled with spam messages for every account. Previously it had been limited to 2MB so most of the spam was dropped since most accounts were already filled. Now everyone has 250MB of spam to process.
Of course they forgot the number one rule, data expands to fill all available disk space regardless of how much disk space is made available.
I also suspect that if you did find a bug in the code you would be prevented from telling anyone about it. And since you probably can't compile it anyways you won't be able to fix it yourself.
Sounds like a semi-clever move by MS to taint as many organizations as possible to make sure they are locked into buying MS products. Pure and simple.
This is a trick to taint as many programmers as possible. By releasing the source code MS will then be able to go after open source software in a year or two claiming that proprietary code has been used getting the courts to grant them huge sums against various firms using open source products.
This includes those products that were reverse engineered since similar code has to be found in the open source programs to make them compatible with MS programs.
WARNING WARNING Will Robinson!
The problem is when individuals write letters or call their congress critters the message is filtered through a series of congressional aides. By the time such information reaches the congress critters the message has been transformed to be what ever the aides and paying lobbyests want it to say.
The over riding problem is that congress critters respond to one thing only, money. If you don't have money then you have zero influence in what the congress critters do. Why do you think that election after election they come out and promise the masses exactly what they want to hear so they vote them back into office but rarely if ever deliver what they promised? It is because the lobbyiests own them not the electorate. The people voting for them rarely if ever contribute money and when they do it never comes close to the amounts the lobbiests throw at them. As a result the congress critters vote things the way the lobbiests want them to vote.
The only real way to combat this is to get enough people together that can actually buy a congress critter or two out right. The big problem is that they don't come cheap. You either need lots of money (millions) or you need to have verified dirt on them that could cost them millions if it comes out.
So what it comes down to is that Microsoft has the money to buy every congress critter in site, or at least a majority, to get what ever they want voted into legislation. I fully expect to hear in the next couple of years Microsoft backed legislation that in essance will outlaw open source software. It may be difficult to connect Microsoft with it but they will be behind it. The money will flow from them to the congress critters and they will vote just the way they are paid to.
So the reality is that the system is broken and will remain broken until it collapses. The collapse is not to far away. As Microsoft and others get the software patent rules written the way the want no one will be able to write any kind of software unless the owners of all the patents say they can. As a result inovation will come to a stand still. All we will get are slightly modified new versions of the same old thing which make running the old versions impossible making it manditory that everyone buy new versions, or should I say, sign up for perpetual maintance which entitles you to lease the newest version. If you are caught running illegal open source software there will be a new branch of the justice department show up at your door to confiscate all your equipment and lock you up for several years.
There will be a good fight for awhile as various people try to clone the new technology to mask the fact that they are not running sanctioned versions of software. But in the end the vast majority of people will give in since it is easier than going to jail.
At some point every combination of each programing language will be under perpetual patents and will prevent anyone from developing anything new. This will take many years but it is coming. And there is no way short of a revolution to change it. But that will never happen.
So welcome the new overlord, Microsoft. And morn the passing of freedom and inovation.
I did not say that spam does not cost ISPs money, I said that it does not cost them that much.
First lets look at the "bandwidth" cost. ISPs have purchased up front the bandwidth they are providing to their customers. The ISPs are going to be paying for this bandwidth regardless of how much spam is sent over it. It is in effect a cost of doing business. ISPs would not reduce their available bandwidth tomorrow if some how spam went away. And if the ISPs really saw this as costing them money you can bet they would find effective ways to block spam so they could reduce costs. Obviously ISPs don't see spam as costing them that much so they don't do anything about it.
Of course the other option is that the ISPs are making money off the spammers. If that is the case then they don't want to do anything to interrupt that revenue stream. It is either one way or the other.
A proper MTA WILL resend messages. That has been a staple of message servers since almost the beginning of email. If a MTA does not resend the message then it is not operating correctly or per RFC. And if greylisting was widely implemented by all ISPs you can bet that any non-compliant MTAs would quickly be upgraded to bring them into compliance. The greet-pause process simply delays the completion of handshake between MTAs for a very short period of time. I think such a delay for large volume senders of email would have little impact. A little inconvience to block spam is what is going to have to happen. And I don't understand your statement about spammers using CC/BCC for serveral people to get past greet-pause. Most spammers do not use compliant MTA programs. They simply run down a list and send email out without even waiting for the reply from the receiving MTA. Greet-pause works because the spammer does not even look at the reply messages of the MTA they are sending to. They dump and run as many messages as they can. By inserting a delay in the hand shake a non-compliant MTA will send responses to messages that have not been sent yet. The receiving MTA looks at this and drops the connection since it is recieving data from the sender in an incorrect sequence. This is similar to the way greylisting works. A real MTA WILL resend a message when given a 451 error. A bogus MTA typically won't since the spammer is more interested in dumping and pumping as many messages as possible and won't take the time or resources needed to queue and resend messages that failed the first time.
Greylisting and greet-pause are just two tool of many that should be implemented. A layered defense is what is needed. Spamassassin with bayes and surbl do an exellent job of tagging spam that gets through greylisting and greet-pause. Actively tracking spammers back to the source and blocking those sites as well as tracking down the vendor that is advertising via spam. Impose heavy fines on such vendors directly and the spammers will loose their customers. Ultimately that is the way to get rid of spam. Take away the money and there is no reason to send millions of messages that most people don't want.
Of course I still think we need to take away the computers of people that buy via spam messages and steralize them to keep them from reproducing.
The reality is that the earth is constantly changing. The short period of time we have been here and able to remember things from the past is a blink of an eye in the time of the earth. Some of the change may be due to our influence but nothing we do is going to really change the overall environment, aside from total thermo nuclear war. In the long run the earth goes through various geologic ages. Our development happend to coincide with a realtively mild period in the earths history. Eventually this will change and if we have not created self sustaining colonies on other worlds we will pass into history. Maybe the next speciecs that develops intelligence will find some of our remains and wonder why we let the SCO lawsuit drag us to our demise since that will be the last item on the news services when it all ends.
It really amazes me that the "greenies" don't really understand that the environment is in constant change. Species rise and species die. Natural order of things. But they all seem to want to freeze everything as they happened to stumble on it as if that is the way it has been since the dawn of time. The fact that we might be going through a slight warming cycle is not cause for alarm. Yes some species will go extict but eventually others will fill the void. We are in a unique position since we can to some degree modify our own environment for our survival but we can also modify and adapt ourselves. In the long run it really depends on what we decide to do as a species. I personally would like to see us establish self sustaining colonies on the varous palnets and moons of this system. And even that eventually will not be far enough as the sun will go nova and wipe out this system. So we will need to spread to the stars to survive.
I just wonder if SCO can get a change of venu for their on going case against IBM?
The ISP's are not really serious about fighting spam. It does not cost them that much and they are probalby making money due to spam. So the only incentive they have to do anything about it is when the level of spaming gets to the point they are about to be blacklisted then they take action.
If they were really serious about curbing spam they would implement greylisting and greet_pause features in their MTAs. Both of these would block 99% of the spam being sent. The remaining spammers would then be much easier to track down since they would have to be running full blown MTAs which could then be blocked.
So why don't they do this? Because it does not make them any money and would cost them a little money to implement and maintain such features.
Ultimately the only way to eliminate spam is to make is unprofitable to the spammer. One option that I have never seen discussed is to track down the idiots that actually buy from spam and take their machines away and sterilize them so they don't reproduce.
So lets say Microsoft gets this standard in place and makes USB unusable by any OS except for the latest version of Windows.
So how hard would it be to design and build a USB card to put into those shiny new computers that would work just fine using any OS you want (except for maybe Windows)? I think this would be a nice sized market for a small company to get into if and when this becomes a problem.
As for the trusted computing thing, I some how think that someone will come up with a way to simulate a trusted computing device in software. At which point it won't mean a whole lot. Just another encumberance get around.