Locking the PCs down so tight they can't install anything might help - but that's just not practical.
I think you just undermined your own argument there. It is precisely because people can and do install things that they get infected. If you made them run as non-root/administrator and didn't allow them to install anything themselves (which they really shouldn't need to do on a work machine) would they really still get so regularly infected?
Now imagine that non-technical user on a different OS. Probably would get the same results....it's a user problem, not an OS problem.
While that's true to an extent, most of them aren't installing 'Nigerian Kitty Screen Savers', they're just browsing the web and ending up infected through some remote Windows exploit.
No, most people who get infected do so by agreeing to instal something. It's a user problem. Pretty much all Linux users are computer savvy and won't agree to install random crap from websites they know nothing about.
Linux is also massively more widely-used on servers than Windows, but remains far more secure.
And people running Linux (on servers or desktops) tend to be fairly clued-up technologically, so they don't click on "free smileys" links on dodgy websites.
Oh, that's right--weren't they too busy trying to create and hype up their own proprietary "Internet" at the time or something? The Microsoft Network? That damn passing fad... it just won't go away!
Hindsight is always 20/20 isn't it? At the time, the Compuserve and AOL models of the internet were the dominant ones, i.e. walled gardens where you didn't really ever venture out into the wild internet. It would have been natural for Microsoft to think they could provide an alternative version of this, and it would have been a real money spinner (imagine if every Windows user had to pay MS $20 a month or whatever).
If you're still running 16bit DOS, your machines are highly malware resistant today. I know of no virus or malware circulating currently that will infect your machine.
If you're running DOS you're not going to be connected to the internet, so unless a Russian cybermastermind sends you a free floppy disk full of ASCII porn in the post, how are you going to get infected anyway?
Rarely do I need to know that it's 5:13:23pm, but seeing that it's 'quarter after five' is awesome."
Perhaps not in seconds, but I rather like to know how many minutes I've left to catch the bus since three and eight are quite different. I guess I really only look at the seconds if I'm trying to time something, which is rare but unless it's spoken I'd rather have it with numbers... how often do people really write "quarter past three" instead of 3:15 pm (or actually 15:15 around here)?
I've never lived anywhere where you could time buses down to the nearest minute, do you live in Switzerland or somewhere?
The first fuzzy clock I saw was in the late 1980s on an Acorn Archimedes. The wording was pretty good anyway, but you could also edit the text file it was taken from. The look on people's faces when they saw "It's just gone quarter past three" was priceless.
Yeah that was pretty cool. You could even adjust the level of fuzziness. I loved setting it high and have it tell me "late afternoon" or at the highest level "the middle of the week".
Alternatively, you could stop taking so many drugs and you'd know things like what year it is without having to ask a computer.
Like most people, I rely on my phone telling me the time. However its a right hassle getting it out just to glance at it.
Why, apart from fashion, don't you wear a watch then?
What would be awesome is a slimmed down device which just tells me the time (and maybe day of month), which I could wear on my wrist.
If you can't be bothered to wear a wristwatch now, why would you bother wearing a "smartwatch" just to tell you the time and do a few other things, when to do those things comfortably you're going to need to have your smartphone with you anyway?
Watch, I've stopped wearing one for most of the time and I am finding quite surprising how uncomfortable they truly are.
Well aren't you the precious little snowflake? I don't even notice mine (until I want to quickly find out the time without fishing around for my phone in my pocket).
I've been a houseowner and the rest for a while, and the amount of stuff you actually need to keep is not that great. I mean, who keeps old bank statements, credit card bills, invoices and receipts for more than a couple of months, unless they're business- or tax-related?
I know it's probably different here in the UK where most people don't even need to do a tax return, but basically the really important stuff like house deeds (and wills) are in the hands of a solicitor anyway, and I simply don't need to keep copies of 2 year old bank statements or 3 year old electricity bills on the off chance I might need to refer to them.
If you have a business, fair enough, you legally need to keep financial stuff for 6 years, but then off-site archiving is just an insignificant business cost.
Computer Modern makes your documents look like 1950s academic papers. Which is fine if you're writing an academic paper, but laughably inappropriate for anything else.
People didn't know what to think of my beautiful LaTeX documents.
Get over yourself. As a student, no one gives a toss about how "professional" your document looks. It's the content that matters (unless, I suppose, you are studying book design or something). As long as you follow the department's style guidelines, professors and lecturers couldn't care less if you knocked it off on an old manual typewriter.
For papers in physics and maths, LaTeX is a winner.
Fair enough, but that is a small niche market. All the mathematicians and Computer Science people here seem to forget that most people never need to write a formula in their lives, and that therefore the time and effort to learn LaTeX in addition to Word (or whatever) isn't really worth it.
As for "philosophically" being opposed to copyright, I'm not, I'm only opposed to the way the laws are currently structured and from what I've seen most people on this side of the argument are in the same boat. I write as a hobby, if I struck gold and had a book published, I should be able to keep other people from copying and redistributing that book for profit for a few years. But, my children's children should not be able to sue people for using my characters forty years after I die. Reasonable people support reasonable copyright laws.
Reasonable people obey the law, and if they don't like a particular law they try to get it changed. You don't get to choose which laws you obey, that's anarchy.
Frankly, I'd be more impressed if someone objected to the idea of copyright completely, rather than using the specific terms as an excuse to flout the law.
Which fuck-knuckles modded this as a troll? A troll is not someone who says something you don't agree with. Just because most people on slashdot seem to view copyright as a worse thing than child abuse or genocide doesn't mean that there aren't arguments to be made in favour of it.
There really are some spectacularly stupid children given mod points.
Venezuela and Hugo Chavez might not be perfect, but they're a fuck of a lot better than they were before. Unless you were working for an oil company, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
Locking the PCs down so tight they can't install anything might help - but that's just not practical.
I think you just undermined your own argument there. It is precisely because people can and do install things that they get infected. If you made them run as non-root/administrator and didn't allow them to install anything themselves (which they really shouldn't need to do on a work machine) would they really still get so regularly infected?
Now imagine that non-technical user on a different OS. Probably would get the same results....it's a user problem, not an OS problem.
While that's true to an extent, most of them aren't installing 'Nigerian Kitty Screen Savers', they're just browsing the web and ending up infected through some remote Windows exploit.
No, most people who get infected do so by agreeing to instal something. It's a user problem. Pretty much all Linux users are computer savvy and won't agree to install random crap from websites they know nothing about.
Linux is also massively more widely-used on servers than Windows, but remains far more secure.
And people running Linux (on servers or desktops) tend to be fairly clued-up technologically, so they don't click on "free smileys" links on dodgy websites.
Oh, that's right--weren't they too busy trying to create and hype up their own proprietary "Internet" at the time or something? The Microsoft Network? That damn passing fad... it just won't go away!
Hindsight is always 20/20 isn't it? At the time, the Compuserve and AOL models of the internet were the dominant ones, i.e. walled gardens where you didn't really ever venture out into the wild internet. It would have been natural for Microsoft to think they could provide an alternative version of this, and it would have been a real money spinner (imagine if every Windows user had to pay MS $20 a month or whatever).
^^this.
If you're still running 16bit DOS, your machines are highly malware resistant today. I know of no virus or malware circulating currently that will infect your machine.
If you're running DOS you're not going to be connected to the internet, so unless a Russian cybermastermind sends you a free floppy disk full of ASCII porn in the post, how are you going to get infected anyway?
Let's say I want to seep my tea for five minutes.
Then you use the stopwatch function on your watch, if it has one, or else just switch to exact instead of fuzzy time for that one particular act.
Rarely do I need to know that it's 5:13:23pm, but seeing that it's 'quarter after five' is awesome."
Perhaps not in seconds, but I rather like to know how many minutes I've left to catch the bus since three and eight are quite different. I guess I really only look at the seconds if I'm trying to time something, which is rare but unless it's spoken I'd rather have it with numbers... how often do people really write "quarter past three" instead of 3:15 pm (or actually 15:15 around here)?
I've never lived anywhere where you could time buses down to the nearest minute, do you live in Switzerland or somewhere?
..watches ran on a battery lasting several years without recharging. That was awesome.
They still do.
In the last ten years I have replaced watch batteries 4 times over 3 watches
I'd set the alarm for 4:25pm & play it over the PA at work when it went off - "Attention please! It's almost four thirty PM".
Why?
The first fuzzy clock I saw was in the late 1980s on an Acorn Archimedes. The wording was pretty good anyway, but you could also edit the text file it was taken from. The look on people's faces when they saw "It's just gone quarter past three" was priceless.
Some people are really easily impressed.
Yeah that was pretty cool. You could even adjust the level of fuzziness. I loved setting it high and have it tell me "late afternoon" or at the highest level "the middle of the week".
Alternatively, you could stop taking so many drugs and you'd know things like what year it is without having to ask a computer.
Like most people, I rely on my phone telling me the time. However its a right hassle getting it out just to glance at it.
Why, apart from fashion, don't you wear a watch then?
What would be awesome is a slimmed down device which just tells me the time (and maybe day of month), which I could wear on my wrist.
If you can't be bothered to wear a wristwatch now, why would you bother wearing a "smartwatch" just to tell you the time and do a few other things, when to do those things comfortably you're going to need to have your smartphone with you anyway?
I agree about the web 2.0 thing.
Watch, I've stopped wearing one for most of the time and I am finding quite surprising how uncomfortable they truly are.
Well aren't you the precious little snowflake? I don't even notice mine (until I want to quickly find out the time without fishing around for my phone in my pocket).
I know it's probably different here in the UK where most people don't even need to do a tax return, but basically the really important stuff like house deeds (and wills) are in the hands of a solicitor anyway, and I simply don't need to keep copies of 2 year old bank statements or 3 year old electricity bills on the off chance I might need to refer to them.
If you have a business, fair enough, you legally need to keep financial stuff for 6 years, but then off-site archiving is just an insignificant business cost.
And yes, I know you can use different fonts.
Don't. Put. Periods (or spaces) in filenames for anything to be read by TeX. Stick to [0-9a-zA-Z_].
Why should a fucking typesetting program determine how I name my files? Fuck that, just fuck that. It's like going back to MS-DOS in the 1980s.
People didn't know what to think of my beautiful LaTeX documents.
Get over yourself. As a student, no one gives a toss about how "professional" your document looks. It's the content that matters (unless, I suppose, you are studying book design or something). As long as you follow the department's style guidelines, professors and lecturers couldn't care less if you knocked it off on an old manual typewriter.
For papers in physics and maths, LaTeX is a winner.
Fair enough, but that is a small niche market. All the mathematicians and Computer Science people here seem to forget that most people never need to write a formula in their lives, and that therefore the time and effort to learn LaTeX in addition to Word (or whatever) isn't really worth it.
Clinton was the seminal power
I see what you did there.
As for "philosophically" being opposed to copyright, I'm not, I'm only opposed to the way the laws are currently structured and from what I've seen most people on this side of the argument are in the same boat. I write as a hobby, if I struck gold and had a book published, I should be able to keep other people from copying and redistributing that book for profit for a few years. But, my children's children should not be able to sue people for using my characters forty years after I die. Reasonable people support reasonable copyright laws.
Reasonable people obey the law, and if they don't like a particular law they try to get it changed. You don't get to choose which laws you obey, that's anarchy.
Frankly, I'd be more impressed if someone objected to the idea of copyright completely, rather than using the specific terms as an excuse to flout the law.
There really are some spectacularly stupid children given mod points.
I doubt anyone was ever conceived by a donkey dick up their arse.
Venezuela and Hugo Chavez might not be perfect, but they're a fuck of a lot better than they were before. Unless you were working for an oil company, I suppose.
For someone who makes over $100,000,000 a year. A job that pays $100,000 a day, but only pays for 4 days a year is a pittance
Are there really that many people who earn over $100m a year? Seriously?