That's right: you _still_ cannot actually remove Internet Explorer, only the latest versions overlaid on toop of the older ones. So even a manufacturer or environment where IE is considered a major security problem (which it is, historically), is stuck with it on every machine.
And don't forget that Microsoft Update tools _only_ work with Internet Explorer. Not using IE makes keeping your Windows machine up to date with security patches particularly awkward, at least for people without the very expensive and awkward to maintain centralized patch management technologies.
The Matrix Online was _painful_. The information about what widgets were needed in what order to develop what new devices and abilities was far, far too complex and far, far too painful. You had to play it for at least six months, with a a very detailed notebook on hand, to work out enough detail to begin to survive Player versus Player with the people who refused to sleep and exchanged all their information offline or bought guides.
Excuse me, I remembered it as cancer: the autopsy report describes a recent brain aneurysm about which she allegedly felt ill and unable to recover. But it's still fascinating reading. *FOUR* gun wounds, all "through and through"?
And it takes several rounds from a shotgun, three to the chest, one to the head. Take a look at the death of Mary Florence Barnett, the mother of David Miscavige, the current head of Scientology. (http://www.badcult.info/watd/flo_barnett/coroner.html) Suicide? With multiple shotgun rounds? And _two_ suicide notes?
While the suicide of a cancer patient can be understandable, this does seem.... beyond the usual efforts of a cancer ridden person, threatening their church with lawsuits.
Earthlink's founder, Sky Dayton, and their first sys-admin were both deeply involved in the cult. Their early technical lead, Philip Gale, committed suicide on L. Ron's birthday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Gale) and had been raised in the cult.
I spent a fascinating afternoon years ago chatting with some critics of the cult as they protested outside one of the buildings, and was fascinated to learn several techniques for getting safely away from cult members who are recruiting with "free personality tests". Telling them you're a psychiatrist is apparently very successful at getting them to stop bothering you.
The scale and profound history of criminal behavior of the cult throughout its history and among its top leadership. This is coupled with the cult's dangerous and historically criminal attacks against critics to turn mere "astroturfing" into an affirmation of their fraudulent and criminal behavior.
So, no, the Mormons don't do the same thing. Those differences are what make Scientology a cult: the steps are pretty well described by Steve Hassn, and easily reviewed at his Wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan).
It's patented. You need to pay the patent holders, and get a license.
They provide _no_ licenses for Linux use, the last time I looked. The case is even worse for DVD encoding, which the DMCA protects, which is why the libraries to decode DVD's are easily accessible from overseas sites such as the Penguin Liberation Front at http://plf.zarb.org/, but not available directly on any distro built in the USA.
The intellectual property owners are _unwilling_ to sell licenses for Linux, which is why playing DVD's on Linux is such a delicate issue in selling Linux laptops.
Sir or madam, I have literally _no_ idea why you think the commandments of the Bible were so revolutionary for their time. They accumulated over thousands of years, with many different flavors of rule, ranging from the 10 commandments as general laws of behavior to very specific laws about land ownership, inheritance, and even cooking. They were written down: that's an important factor. But the existence of ancient laws such as the "Code of Hammurabi" indicates that their neighbors probably had the concept of wide-ranging moral laws. Why would you think the old Hebrew laws were better?
The catholic church _of course_ wanted to handle things in their own way. It's difficult to tell the difference between a desire for "reformation" of priests with "pretending nothing happened so we don't get embarassed and lose donations". The "Our Father" prayer says "lead us not into temptation": leaving those priests where they would remain so tempted was not a matter of "reformation" it was a matter of pretending nothing happened and trying to avoid looking guilty as an organization
OK, that's enough ranting about Catholicism for today. But if you'd like a look at what a really _loony_ cult says, go take a look at www.xenu.org for revelations about Scientology. You're quite right about the information control, and they meet all the standards of being a cult in their isolation of members from their own families, in their worship of a central and charismatic figure, and in the penalties for leaving the group or questioning their leadership.
Consistency and price beat quality by a landslide, when the quality difference isn't large enough. While firewire and USB are both serial, their example is illuminating. The less expensive, somewhat less capable USB has defeated firewire hands down in available devices and their cost. Similarly, while SAS is more capable than the current SATA, especially with hard drive transfer rates and the RPM's of hard drives to match that capability, SATA is far more widely deployed and the drives are _huge_.
For ease of installation and management, give me SATA and PATA over SCSI anyday. Stringing those drives together was a nightmare of termination, of setting device ID's, and of buying 3 external devices, all "SCSI 2", and discovering that they had 3 different types of connectors and I had to buy enough expensive cables or adapters, and terminators, to deal with all of them to be able to swap around equipment. And my goodness, the sad joke that is "auto-termination" was its own nightmare.
Give me the far less expensive and far more stable SATA internally and USB externally for hard drives, anyday, over SCSI and firewire.
And the OP is, frankly, unaware of the history of SCSI and PATA. Those big wide cables are deprecated for many reasons: one is their expense, another is their fragility, and another is the incredible variety of vaguely distinct, and often stupidly different, specifications for such broad interfaces. I had to deal with that debris, for decades, and it was extremely painful.
The amount of time saved in consistent, small interfaces having fewer things to screw up is enough, by itself, to make up for the expense of any drives lost from the fragility of the SATA connector. I remember the amazing crap shoot it used to be to design a SCSI chain of devices, the awful incompatibility and expense of the cables even for what were nominally the same type of SCSI, and tendency of those connectors to bend pins or fail under stress.
Give me SATA (and its low cost peer for external devices, USB), any day over the technically superior but less consistent SCSI and firewire.
Yes, and the Bible also says "You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land." Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 45. And then there's Exodus, chapter 2, verse 8: "When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are." And do Catholic priests do circumcision?
You cannot claim Old Testament law as a legal imperative in Catholicism, they discard far too much of it to try and nail them down on even the 10 Commandments.
I certainly have. Usually, that's what "libraries" were invented for, to allow you to factor code into usable functions. If you're stuffing that much code all into one file, you're usually doing something very, very, very wrong.
But it happens, usually in legacy code written by one of theose "creative wizards" who was very brilliant and kept all that mess in their head, but was never taught to write in modular fashion, or who was never taught that "small operations make small mistakes". And then, Emacs is my savior, with the splittable windows so I can reference different parts of the same file in the same environment and make parallel changes to multiple parts of the code.
And it takes noticeable resources, but one heck of a lot less resources than a big old local editing and compilation environment when the machine I want to actually compile and test on is in another state. Let's hear it for terminal based toolkits to keep that Bittorrent downloader down the hall from interfering with real work!
I like and use muck of your toolchain. However, I like Emacs for helping keep my code layout legible, its support of displaying closing parentheses, and its support for running shell commands in one window and viewing the code in the other. I also find the Emacs shell helpful for recording all the input and output of a test sequence, rather than having it scroll entirely off the normal text display, and occasionally I find handy that it displays passwords as I type them so I can remember what the heck I did at the login ptompts of a test setup.
gcc is my friend. It actually works, follows standards, and can support writing portable code in ways that most commercial compilers have never even thought about trying.
autoconf is handy, but has proven problematic for compatibility reasons as different OS's update different components of that toolchain at different times.
And, oh dear, yes, git. I've worked extensively with many open source and some closed source source control systems, and the darned thing Just Works(tm). Being able to branch and record and merge changes from your branches, locally, and then merge them to the primary upstream repository gracefully, and actually caring more than a fig about security, is what Subversion _should_ have done. I'm delighted to have recently added it to my toolkit.
Well, as near as I can tell, neither let you walk away owing money. The curlt is just far worse about lying about what the money is for. It's a pyramid scheme: the lower level members are promised amazing benefits and success, and what they really get is a lot of hypnosis and lie-detector time. And yes, it _is_ hypnosis. Hop over to Wikipedia for some good references on this, and on how the fancy "e-meter" works.
There have been plenty of cults that make equally silly claims about past lives and ancient spiritual practices, mostly invented by their founders and copied wholesale from exciting sounding but usually far more recent works. The modern Wiccans are wonderfully funny for how much "ancient Druid practice" they crib wholesale from Aleister Crowley, for example. But they don't do the rigid thought-control over members that the Scientologists do: that part is really scarey.
And they have killed people: check out www.lisamcpherson.org for a particularly spectacular case, one where the standard, handwritten daily logs of their imprisonment of Lisa were replaced by typewritten notes for the last few days of her life and the witnesses were transferred to Germany to avoid being forced to testify.
Oh, dear. While it's true they're not acting in accord with the teachings of the Church when they bugger children, they are acting in accord when they _silence_ the affair and interfere with prosecution. That's what the Irish lawsuits are partly focused on, and what that mess in Boston with Cardinal Law years ago focused on. (The man was likely to become the next pope until he was found to have been playing "hide the pedophile" with the police, transferring John Geoghan from parish to parish as the extent of Father Geoghan's behavior became clear.)
So, yes, historically, hiding such crimes, protecting the priests who commit them, and allowing them to continue for decades _is_ the teaching of the Church.
_GOOD_. I had some horrid, horrid discussions with developers who couldn't be bothered to move off of some really ancient Perl modules, because it just worked on _their_ system.
Having it as an option so many years after it was deprectated just encouraged developers to leave their tools in an impossible to resolve, unstable state with dependencies.
I did say "of particular foolishness _was_" the various issues.
Are the new Mac and Linux players Flash based, as their original Mac and Linux offerings were? Are they so DRM burdened as the originals were? And do they still silently run a Bittorrent protocol, even when they are turned off, sucking up your bandwidth unannounced even if you only ever watched five minutes of Dr. Who and forgot to uninstall it?
If it interferes with normal use, it's a bug. Most users simply _do not care_ about having high quality randomness sources for their keys.
The lack of good quality randomness _is_ a longstanding problem. Frankly, I wish tha tthe "Trusted Computing Platform" circuitry and development had been thrown out much sooner, and the circuitry instead invested in a thermal diode to provide truly random encryption keys.
That's a good question, but not quite the right question. What the heck is it doing in _Debian_, which is the codebase for Ubuntu? Debian publishes a lot of fundamentally poor quality, badly merged and mutually incompatible versions of tools which one person or another finds of interest. If the product gets some interest, then people work with it and develop it into something more usable. But many of them are completely outmoded and dangerous to other component operations. (Apache 1.3, which is nominally installed in parallel with HTTPD 2, is a prime example of this.)
It's a fair way to do things, since it makes the tools available to developers and interested users. But the resulting tool quality is often poor or poorly integrated.
> Unfortunately, as we can see now, the [world has] some serious issues with their politicians flagrantly abusing the system.
Here, I fixed that for you. But the UK does have a spectacular example of such a disaster: Iplayer. The Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iplayer is enlightening on how exactly to screw up a major technology project with bad "initiatives". Of particular foolishness was the Windows-only DRM preventing it from working with anything but Windows Media Player, and it sucking your bandwidth even after you turned it off to effectively bittorrent the material while refusing to admit that it was bittorrent.
Oh, my, they _resemble_ the old languages. But I've been involved in recovering 5 year old data, repairing and recovering the media, finding readers that can access old tapes, getting the code recompiled even though C standards have changed since then enough to stop compilation, etc.
That sort of necessary stability is one reason I _love_ C, though. The code remains legible, and within reach of modern compilers with backwards compatible changes.
I'm sorry to have confused you, but you missed something vital. I didn't say it "uses one clock signal". I said "synchronize to _one_ clock signal".
It's certainly true that various components will divide down from the primary clock to get a locally useful frequency. (serial communications are prime examples of this: installing another clock chip for a serial frequency is expensive in board space and components.) And others will multiply up from the same system clock. (RAM, ahhh, RAM and its configuration manipulations through the BIOS is a nightmare of such refactoring.)
But they normally _synchronize_ to the same master clock or two. This helps prevent a plethora of difficult to debug interface timing issues, especially related to ground bounce and asynchronous power supply ripples, that can make people throw out the whole board layout because it _just doesn't work_. You don't always get to do this: power supplies, for example, tend to have their own clocks. So do external signal sources. But internally? It's very handy to synchronize those clocks.
I am sorry to confuse you with the 'synchronization" comment. Perhaps in your environment they'd call it "phase locking?"
No, the problem is that they don't have enough money to donate to the school to have the records revised much more quietly, or to hire an editor who's a friend. It's much easier to get such material trimmed via "editoral trimming" by a friend on staff than via an outright request.
Too many IT people have no clue when it comes to basics like stacking equipment, safely handling heavy loads, threading cables, or airflow. Worse, they're positively dangerous with screwdrivers, wrenches, or wire cutters. And basic mechanical skills lend awareness for programmers to the concepts of "big bulky modules that you have to leave space for", "leave enough slack in the interfaces for you to be able to put things where you need them", "leave in accessible test points where you can check your signals". And I'd vastly recommend basic electronics classes in "why clock signals lie" and "why you use _one_ voltage, _one_ data format, and synchronize to _one_ clock signal throughout your system". The lessons of "why would I do this as a bulky, parallel transfer rather than a serial transfer" are also illuminated by having to run your own wires.
Like system security, such physical constraints are best learned early, rather than brought into the design after the fact when you've already laid out your circuits or your data flow.
Linux and UNIX are not immune: the Morris Worm proved that in 1988, and many of the flaws it revealed about people using bad passwords and not doing security updates remain true today in most personal and corporate environments. I just had a lot of fun explaining to a corporate partner that they _will not_ run VMware ESX in the exposed network network because it is RHEL 3 based, and VMWare basically refuses to provide access to RedHat registration to get updates or install necessary tools to manage the system as a member of a managed environment. So kiss realistic security on any ESX server goodbye. Tripwire? nmap? What do you need those for? You paid VMware good money for this, yo udon't need to manage these systems!
But the ridiculous joke that is providing security for the HR and purchasing departments of any serious bureaucracy (and believe me, the FBI has a _massive_ bureaucracy) is itself a nightmare. Couple that with slapping civil servants in the head to stop having their secretaries with the boss's personal passwords, and the bosses having to have everyone's passwords as a matter of policy, and you have a nightmare waiting to happen. The FBI may have the "FBI Computer Security Center", but have you ever tried to deal with those bozos to actually report a computer crime? They're like a Delhi call center but with American caccents. They have neither the competence nor the authority to actually do anything about day to day crimes: they are a giant, expensive department to soak up federal money and absorb complaints and do _nothing_ about crime.
Has anyone, ever, actually had the FBI provide anything resembling help with a computer crime? Hands up, please, anyone who's actually gotten help from those red-nosed Bozo the clowns with badges in actually securing a system or convicting anyone of a theft of data or a breakin?
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That's right: you _still_ cannot actually remove Internet Explorer, only the latest versions overlaid on toop of the older ones. So even a manufacturer or environment where IE is considered a major security problem (which it is, historically), is stuck with it on every machine.
And don't forget that Microsoft Update tools _only_ work with Internet Explorer. Not using IE makes keeping your Windows machine up to date with security patches particularly awkward, at least for people without the very expensive and awkward to maintain centralized patch management technologies.
The Matrix Online was _painful_. The information about what widgets were needed in what order to develop what new devices and abilities was far, far too complex and far, far too painful. You had to play it for at least six months, with a a very detailed notebook on hand, to work out enough detail to begin to survive Player versus Player with the people who refused to sleep and exchanged all their information offline or bought guides.
You may enjoy that, but I found it painful.
Excuse me, I remembered it as cancer: the autopsy report describes a recent brain aneurysm about which she allegedly felt ill and unable to recover. But it's still fascinating reading. *FOUR* gun wounds, all "through and through"?
And it takes several rounds from a shotgun, three to the chest, one to the head. Take a look at the death of Mary Florence Barnett, the mother of David Miscavige, the current head of Scientology. (http://www.badcult.info/watd/flo_barnett/coroner.html) Suicide? With multiple shotgun rounds? And _two_ suicide notes? While the suicide of a cancer patient can be understandable, this does seem.... beyond the usual efforts of a cancer ridden person, threatening their church with lawsuits.
Earthlink's founder, Sky Dayton, and their first sys-admin were both deeply involved in the cult. Their early technical lead, Philip Gale, committed suicide on L. Ron's birthday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Gale) and had been raised in the cult.
I spent a fascinating afternoon years ago chatting with some critics of the cult as they protested outside one of the buildings, and was fascinated to learn several techniques for getting safely away from cult members who are recruiting with "free personality tests". Telling them you're a psychiatrist is apparently very successful at getting them to stop bothering you.
The scale and profound history of criminal behavior of the cult throughout its history and among its top leadership. This is coupled with the cult's dangerous and historically criminal attacks against critics to turn mere "astroturfing" into an affirmation of their fraudulent and criminal behavior.
So, no, the Mormons don't do the same thing. Those differences are what make Scientology a cult: the steps are pretty well described by Steve Hassn, and easily reviewed at his Wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan).
It's patented. You need to pay the patent holders, and get a license.
They provide _no_ licenses for Linux use, the last time I looked. The case is even worse for DVD encoding, which the DMCA protects, which is why the libraries to decode DVD's are easily accessible from overseas sites such as the Penguin Liberation Front at http://plf.zarb.org/, but not available directly on any distro built in the USA.
The intellectual property owners are _unwilling_ to sell licenses for Linux, which is why playing DVD's on Linux is such a delicate issue in selling Linux laptops.
Sir or madam, I have literally _no_ idea why you think the commandments of the Bible were so revolutionary for their time. They accumulated over thousands of years, with many different flavors of rule, ranging from the 10 commandments as general laws of behavior to very specific laws about land ownership, inheritance, and even cooking. They were written down: that's an important factor. But the existence of ancient laws such as the "Code of Hammurabi" indicates that their neighbors probably had the concept of wide-ranging moral laws. Why would you think the old Hebrew laws were better?
The catholic church _of course_ wanted to handle things in their own way. It's difficult to tell the difference between a desire for "reformation" of priests with "pretending nothing happened so we don't get embarassed and lose donations". The "Our Father" prayer says "lead us not into temptation": leaving those priests where they would remain so tempted was not a matter of "reformation" it was a matter of pretending nothing happened and trying to avoid looking guilty as an organization
OK, that's enough ranting about Catholicism for today. But if you'd like a look at what a really _loony_ cult says, go take a look at www.xenu.org for revelations about Scientology. You're quite right about the information control, and they meet all the standards of being a cult in their isolation of members from their own families, in their worship of a central and charismatic figure, and in the penalties for leaving the group or questioning their leadership.
Consistency and price beat quality by a landslide, when the quality difference isn't large enough. While firewire and USB are both serial, their example is illuminating. The less expensive, somewhat less capable USB has defeated firewire hands down in available devices and their cost. Similarly, while SAS is more capable than the current SATA, especially with hard drive transfer rates and the RPM's of hard drives to match that capability, SATA is far more widely deployed and the drives are _huge_.
For ease of installation and management, give me SATA and PATA over SCSI anyday. Stringing those drives together was a nightmare of termination, of setting device ID's, and of buying 3 external devices, all "SCSI 2", and discovering that they had 3 different types of connectors and I had to buy enough expensive cables or adapters, and terminators, to deal with all of them to be able to swap around equipment. And my goodness, the sad joke that is "auto-termination" was its own nightmare.
Give me the far less expensive and far more stable SATA internally and USB externally for hard drives, anyday, over SCSI and firewire.
And the OP is, frankly, unaware of the history of SCSI and PATA. Those big wide cables are deprecated for many reasons: one is their expense, another is their fragility, and another is the incredible variety of vaguely distinct, and often stupidly different, specifications for such broad interfaces. I had to deal with that debris, for decades, and it was extremely painful.
The amount of time saved in consistent, small interfaces having fewer things to screw up is enough, by itself, to make up for the expense of any drives lost from the fragility of the SATA connector. I remember the amazing crap shoot it used to be to design a SCSI chain of devices, the awful incompatibility and expense of the cables even for what were nominally the same type of SCSI, and tendency of those connectors to bend pins or fail under stress.
Give me SATA (and its low cost peer for external devices, USB), any day over the technically superior but less consistent SCSI and firewire.
Yes, and the Bible also says "You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land." Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 45. And then there's Exodus, chapter 2, verse 8: "When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are." And do Catholic priests do circumcision?
You cannot claim Old Testament law as a legal imperative in Catholicism, they discard far too much of it to try and nail them down on even the 10 Commandments.
I certainly have. Usually, that's what "libraries" were invented for, to allow you to factor code into usable functions. If you're stuffing that much code all into one file, you're usually doing something very, very, very wrong.
But it happens, usually in legacy code written by one of theose "creative wizards" who was very brilliant and kept all that mess in their head, but was never taught to write in modular fashion, or who was never taught that "small operations make small mistakes". And then, Emacs is my savior, with the splittable windows so I can reference different parts of the same file in the same environment and make parallel changes to multiple parts of the code.
And it takes noticeable resources, but one heck of a lot less resources than a big old local editing and compilation environment when the machine I want to actually compile and test on is in another state. Let's hear it for terminal based toolkits to keep that Bittorrent downloader down the hall from interfering with real work!
I like and use muck of your toolchain. However, I like Emacs for helping keep my code layout legible, its support of displaying closing parentheses, and its support for running shell commands in one window and viewing the code in the other. I also find the Emacs shell helpful for recording all the input and output of a test sequence, rather than having it scroll entirely off the normal text display, and occasionally I find handy that it displays passwords as I type them so I can remember what the heck I did at the login ptompts of a test setup.
gcc is my friend. It actually works, follows standards, and can support writing portable code in ways that most commercial compilers have never even thought about trying.
autoconf is handy, but has proven problematic for compatibility reasons as different OS's update different components of that toolchain at different times.
And, oh dear, yes, git. I've worked extensively with many open source and some closed source source control systems, and the darned thing Just Works(tm). Being able to branch and record and merge changes from your branches, locally, and then merge them to the primary upstream repository gracefully, and actually caring more than a fig about security, is what Subversion _should_ have done. I'm delighted to have recently added it to my toolkit.
Well, as near as I can tell, neither let you walk away owing money. The curlt is just far worse about lying about what the money is for. It's a pyramid scheme: the lower level members are promised amazing benefits and success, and what they really get is a lot of hypnosis and lie-detector time. And yes, it _is_ hypnosis. Hop over to Wikipedia for some good references on this, and on how the fancy "e-meter" works.
There have been plenty of cults that make equally silly claims about past lives and ancient spiritual practices, mostly invented by their founders and copied wholesale from exciting sounding but usually far more recent works. The modern Wiccans are wonderfully funny for how much "ancient Druid practice" they crib wholesale from Aleister Crowley, for example. But they don't do the rigid thought-control over members that the Scientologists do: that part is really scarey.
And they have killed people: check out www.lisamcpherson.org for a particularly spectacular case, one where the standard, handwritten daily logs of their imprisonment of Lisa were replaced by typewritten notes for the last few days of her life and the witnesses were transferred to Germany to avoid being forced to testify.
Oh, dear. While it's true they're not acting in accord with the teachings of the Church when they bugger children, they are acting in accord when they _silence_ the affair and interfere with prosecution. That's what the Irish lawsuits are partly focused on, and what that mess in Boston with Cardinal Law years ago focused on. (The man was likely to become the next pope until he was found to have been playing "hide the pedophile" with the police, transferring John Geoghan from parish to parish as the extent of Father Geoghan's behavior became clear.)
So, yes, historically, hiding such crimes, protecting the priests who commit them, and allowing them to continue for decades _is_ the teaching of the Church.
_GOOD_. I had some horrid, horrid discussions with developers who couldn't be bothered to move off of some really ancient Perl modules, because it just worked on _their_ system.
Having it as an option so many years after it was deprectated just encouraged developers to leave their tools in an impossible to resolve, unstable state with dependencies.
I did say "of particular foolishness _was_" the various issues. Are the new Mac and Linux players Flash based, as their original Mac and Linux offerings were? Are they so DRM burdened as the originals were? And do they still silently run a Bittorrent protocol, even when they are turned off, sucking up your bandwidth unannounced even if you only ever watched five minutes of Dr. Who and forgot to uninstall it?
If it interferes with normal use, it's a bug. Most users simply _do not care_ about having high quality randomness sources for their keys.
The lack of good quality randomness _is_ a longstanding problem. Frankly, I wish tha tthe "Trusted Computing Platform" circuitry and development had been thrown out much sooner, and the circuitry instead invested in a thermal diode to provide truly random encryption keys.
That's a good question, but not quite the right question. What the heck is it doing in _Debian_, which is the codebase for Ubuntu? Debian publishes a lot of fundamentally poor quality, badly merged and mutually incompatible versions of tools which one person or another finds of interest. If the product gets some interest, then people work with it and develop it into something more usable. But many of them are completely outmoded and dangerous to other component operations. (Apache 1.3, which is nominally installed in parallel with HTTPD 2, is a prime example of this.)
It's a fair way to do things, since it makes the tools available to developers and interested users. But the resulting tool quality is often poor or poorly integrated.
> Unfortunately, as we can see now, the [world has] some serious issues with their politicians flagrantly abusing the system.
Here, I fixed that for you. But the UK does have a spectacular example of such a disaster: Iplayer. The Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iplayer is enlightening on how exactly to screw up a major technology project with bad "initiatives". Of particular foolishness was the Windows-only DRM preventing it from working with anything but Windows Media Player, and it sucking your bandwidth even after you turned it off to effectively bittorrent the material while refusing to admit that it was bittorrent.
Oh, my, they _resemble_ the old languages. But I've been involved in recovering 5 year old data, repairing and recovering the media, finding readers that can access old tapes, getting the code recompiled even though C standards have changed since then enough to stop compilation, etc.
That sort of necessary stability is one reason I _love_ C, though. The code remains legible, and within reach of modern compilers with backwards compatible changes.
I'm sorry to have confused you, but you missed something vital. I didn't say it "uses one clock signal". I said "synchronize to _one_ clock signal".
It's certainly true that various components will divide down from the primary clock to get a locally useful frequency. (serial communications are prime examples of this: installing another clock chip for a serial frequency is expensive in board space and components.) And others will multiply up from the same system clock. (RAM, ahhh, RAM and its configuration manipulations through the BIOS is a nightmare of such refactoring.)
But they normally _synchronize_ to the same master clock or two. This helps prevent a plethora of difficult to debug interface timing issues, especially related to ground bounce and asynchronous power supply ripples, that can make people throw out the whole board layout because it _just doesn't work_. You don't always get to do this: power supplies, for example, tend to have their own clocks. So do external signal sources. But internally? It's very handy to synchronize those clocks.
I am sorry to confuse you with the 'synchronization" comment. Perhaps in your environment they'd call it "phase locking?"
No, the problem is that they don't have enough money to donate to the school to have the records revised much more quietly, or to hire an editor who's a friend. It's much easier to get such material trimmed via "editoral trimming" by a friend on staff than via an outright request.
Too many IT people have no clue when it comes to basics like stacking equipment, safely handling heavy loads, threading cables, or airflow. Worse, they're positively dangerous with screwdrivers, wrenches, or wire cutters. And basic mechanical skills lend awareness for programmers to the concepts of "big bulky modules that you have to leave space for", "leave enough slack in the interfaces for you to be able to put things where you need them", "leave in accessible test points where you can check your signals". And I'd vastly recommend basic electronics classes in "why clock signals lie" and "why you use _one_ voltage, _one_ data format, and synchronize to _one_ clock signal throughout your system". The lessons of "why would I do this as a bulky, parallel transfer rather than a serial transfer" are also illuminated by having to run your own wires.
Like system security, such physical constraints are best learned early, rather than brought into the design after the fact when you've already laid out your circuits or your data flow.
Oh, my, yes.
Linux and UNIX are not immune: the Morris Worm proved that in 1988, and many of the flaws it revealed about people using bad passwords and not doing security updates remain true today in most personal and corporate environments. I just had a lot of fun explaining to a corporate partner that they _will not_ run VMware ESX in the exposed network network because it is RHEL 3 based, and VMWare basically refuses to provide access to RedHat registration to get updates or install necessary tools to manage the system as a member of a managed environment. So kiss realistic security on any ESX server goodbye. Tripwire? nmap? What do you need those for? You paid VMware good money for this, yo udon't need to manage these systems!
But the ridiculous joke that is providing security for the HR and purchasing departments of any serious bureaucracy (and believe me, the FBI has a _massive_ bureaucracy) is itself a nightmare. Couple that with slapping civil servants in the head to stop having their secretaries with the boss's personal passwords, and the bosses having to have everyone's passwords as a matter of policy, and you have a nightmare waiting to happen. The FBI may have the "FBI Computer Security Center", but have you ever tried to deal with those bozos to actually report a computer crime? They're like a Delhi call center but with American caccents. They have neither the competence nor the authority to actually do anything about day to day crimes: they are a giant, expensive department to soak up federal money and absorb complaints and do _nothing_ about crime.
Has anyone, ever, actually had the FBI provide anything resembling help with a computer crime? Hands up, please, anyone who's actually gotten help from those red-nosed Bozo the clowns with badges in actually securing a system or convicting anyone of a theft of data or a breakin?