There is no consumer market for an OS distribution that doesn't support DRM'd media play out of the box.
Cracked un-DRM-encumbered versions of * are available through BitTorrent, etc, just as easily as buying through iTMS or your favorite service. If media companies choose to encumber their products, there are easy (though not legal most places) alternatives that can work with any OS and platform. Feeling pangs of conscience? Go see a few of your favorite bands in concert. Maybe buy an extra ticket or two and give it away. The experience is better anyway.
Fuck the Demoquaks and Repigs both. Vote Libertarian or Independent if you want decent candidates. A lot of Repubs want a theocracy and security state. Demos want a pseudo-socialist politically correct can't-say-anything-that-offends-anyone nanny state, with a healthy shot of security paranoia thrown in by the East Coast Demos. No thanks to either vision!
We tried that once back when we believed the nation was a coalition of individual states bound together for a common good. It didn't go so well when the president declared the right of secession didn't exist, and statehood was a one way trip.
Naw, it won't be like that the second time around. Outright secession won't happen. The federal government will just get weaker and poorer as it spends more on adventures abroad, and the states or maybe regional confederations will gradually take over. There won't be any outright declarations of independence - it'll be more like the Federales trying to shout to a crowd in a vacuum and not being heard or listened to.
Low levels of thyroid hormone can cause obesity. People who are hypothyroid are also sluggish in thought and action. More obese people will be hypothyroid than skinny people. No real surprise here!
While it is bloat ware after using Vista Ultimate it has a lot of prompts for running programs and windows defender is very good.
Windows Defender is inherently poor. Why? Because it's a monoculture. A 0-day exploit designed to target Vista machines will be able to target all machines running Defender until the Defender and/or Vista software is updated. With a heterogeneity of antivirus apps as now, some percentage of the antivirus apps will probably be smart enough to block the exploit. 5 out of 10 is better than 0 out of 10.
My question is: why don't you just put a NAS in there (selfmade or off the shelf) and mount their "My Documents" on that? You could even do a nightly backup on a second NAS!
The cheaper dedicated NAS boxes are slow as b@lls. Far better to do as you're doing and use an older computer with new hard drives. Also, if you run SME Server 7.0 on the NAS box, it's free and has full Samba (NT domain hosting) capabilities as well as even the ability to host e-mail and run groupware products (I have eGroupware running under SME).
Explain to me how you "control" an lethally armed public with non lethal weaponry? Sure you bet you can irritate them, and discourage them from doing things, but when push comes to shove the 2nd Ammendment is still there and you can bet people will start shooting, its happened in the past and it will happen again.
Hopefully, my friend, hopefully. Hopefully the public won't be such sheep that they forget that they *do* in fact have power if they're willing to use it.
Knowing the government can use lethal force tends to...well...stop and prevent protests a little more effectively...
Not really. As it stands right now, chances are that if you protest in the US, no force whatsoever will be used against you. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but they're not the norm. If even small infractions of official rules at protests are followed by 'non lethal' force, then people would be less inclined to protest.
And, yes, cops will be more likely to use non lethal weapons. A large number are control freaks, but don't necessarily want to be murderers. This lets them have the best of both worlds, unfortunately!
We never tested the Atomic bomb on Americans, so why is this acceptable?
Sure we did. The original Alamogordo explosion was in the US! As were the few hundred blasts at the Nevada Testing Site (which spread fallout over a lot of Utah and Arizona and created local "hot spots" as far as Upstate NY). And during some nuke tests, soldiers were placed as close as a mile or two from the explosions, so they got their share of rads.
God forbid the military use non lethal weapons on the populace! I mean hell...without using lethal weapons we can't wind up with another Kent state incident!
And guess what? The Kent State Incident caused a *huge* public uproar and resulted in changes to policy. Had the students been deprived of their right to protest with "non lethal" means, would there have been such an outcry. Nonlethal weapons allow governments to use force without being held to account for it, since the consequences are smaller.
Perhaps it's time we test our old weapons on governments who have forgotten that they work for us.
Better yet, don't kill them at all. Bring back tarring and feathering and run them out of DC on the back of a pickup truck.
How dare we use non-lethal methods on our own citizens. Instead we should stick to lethal ones, right?
Yep. Seriously, I agree with that statement except in some very limited cases.
Why? Because "non lethal" weapons lower the bar to the use of force. Things that were previously dealt with with words from a cop would be dealt with by a "zap" from a taser or a "clap" from a sonic weapon. We don't want the use of force by the authorities to become easy or ubiquitous. At least if you shoot someone or nail them with a nightstick without good reason, there are consequences like lawsuits and possibly even criminal sanctions. With "non lethal" weapons, juries might end up more accepting of police abuse since it causes no physical damage.
But the damage to society from loss of freedoms will remain.
At that point that politician should be publicly humiliated, thrown out of Congress, and stoned in the street.
No, hanged from the nearest lamppost.
"Stoned" might be taken to mean giving the politician marijuana, and we want to avoid any such politicians having a pleasurable experience. Maybe if the marijuana was laced with PCP and then a crowd dressed in demon suits started dancing around the politician with flaming torches to give them that extra-special eerie glow...
That's not NEARLY as cool as the car crash sound Macs used to make when they really, really, REALLY blew up fierce. Get a good pair of speakers, and that sound would scare the tar out of everybody in the area!
I thought the old ones played "funeral chimes" when they crashed.
I think you're a little high (not as in on drugs, but your Liux/UNIX numbers). Of the annual $50 billion server market, UNIX (not including Linux) is like $17 billion, or 34%, Linux is about $5 billion, or 10%, and Windows is $17 billion, or 34%. So, combined Linux/UNIX would be 44%, you're right on for Windows at 34% and the remaining 22% is "other"
Given that Solaris 10 and various Linux distros are free assuming you don't need vendor support, does money spent correlate with installed base? For example, the secondary student-run e-mail and Web systems (ultimately, basically all of the student web sites) of the school that I graduated from in 2002 are run strictly with Debian.
he wonders whether he's "slowly cooking the motherboard", even given the hardware safeties built in
Hardware safeties will prevent immediate motherboard damage. Running hot might still reduce the lives of components over the long term. Kind of like a car that's running at the edge of the red zone with a quart or two less of oil than it should have. It won't seize up today or tomorrow, but it probably won't last 250,000 miles.
even if Linux grows to 40% of the server OS market, and MS has 50, and everyone else 10, how awesome would that be?
Given servers that are either public web servers, e-mail servers, application servers, DB servers, etc (i.e. simple file servers like you see in every other office don't count), what is the breakdown of UNIX-type (including Linux OSs) vs. Windows vs. Something Else (Netware, OS/2, etc) machines? My feeling is that it'd be around 60% UNIX, 35% Windows, and 5% Something Else, at least in the US.
Yes, there are many, many people who simply think of credit cards as "free" money and never have any clear idea of how to pay them off in the first place
Well, they *are* free money - for a month. Get a card, put all of your expenses on it, and pay the bills in full when they come. Credit card company makes no interest as long as the bills are paid in full, and there's usually a month or 3 weeks between the end of the billing cycle and the due date.
Everybody is assuming that companies are looking for people with GOOD credit ratings.....
Very true, sadly. If you need the employer, you're more likely to stay, like a peasant that's tied to the land. On the flipside, though, if I were an employer, I wouldn't want employees just tied to me through economic exigency. Boxed-in employees make for angry people, and angry people will gank you one way or another.
Have you ever tried to get private/individual health insurance?
It's hard, but...
In NYC, there's the Freelancers' Union, which gives workers that don't work for traditional employers insurance, among other benefits. Other states have artists' and designers' groups that often get better rates for insurance for their members. It *can* be done if you look in the right places.
Personally, though, I think that we should move to a single-payer system like Britain's, where doctors are still allowed to have private practices for those that can afford to pay more. It may not be perfect, but at least it guarantees a minimum level of care for all citizens.
Is it your, and your company's, responsibility to try and make poor people's lives happier? What about the responsibility to the owners, shareholders, to make money?
It's not a legal responsibility, but this country would be a better place if business owners (who, ultimately, are *people*) practiced good citizenship. And a lot of businesses don't have shareholders as such, so their owners can choose to run them the way they wish. The OP seemed to be a business owner since he talked about giving "his" entire HR department the boot if they did certain things.
Slashdot Mirror
Cracked un-DRM-encumbered versions of * are available through BitTorrent, etc, just as easily as buying through iTMS or your favorite service. If media companies choose to encumber their products, there are easy (though not legal most places) alternatives that can work with any OS and platform. Feeling pangs of conscience? Go see a few of your favorite bands in concert. Maybe buy an extra ticket or two and give it away. The experience is better anyway.
-b.
Replacing the 'run' option is as easy as selecting a checkbox.
-b.
-b.
Naw, it won't be like that the second time around. Outright secession won't happen. The federal government will just get weaker and poorer as it spends more on adventures abroad, and the states or maybe regional confederations will gradually take over. There won't be any outright declarations of independence - it'll be more like the Federales trying to shout to a crowd in a vacuum and not being heard or listened to.
-b.
-b.
Windows Defender is inherently poor. Why? Because it's a monoculture. A 0-day exploit designed to target Vista machines will be able to target all machines running Defender until the Defender and/or Vista software is updated. With a heterogeneity of antivirus apps as now, some percentage of the antivirus apps will probably be smart enough to block the exploit. 5 out of 10 is better than 0 out of 10.
-b.
The cheaper dedicated NAS boxes are slow as b@lls. Far better to do as you're doing and use an older computer with new hard drives. Also, if you run SME Server 7.0 on the NAS box, it's free and has full Samba (NT domain hosting) capabilities as well as even the ability to host e-mail and run groupware products (I have eGroupware running under SME).
-b.
DRM?
-b.
Hopefully, my friend, hopefully. Hopefully the public won't be such sheep that they forget that they *do* in fact have power if they're willing to use it.
-b.
Not really. As it stands right now, chances are that if you protest in the US, no force whatsoever will be used against you. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but they're not the norm. If even small infractions of official rules at protests are followed by 'non lethal' force, then people would be less inclined to protest.
And, yes, cops will be more likely to use non lethal weapons. A large number are control freaks, but don't necessarily want to be murderers. This lets them have the best of both worlds, unfortunately!
-b.
Sure we did. The original Alamogordo explosion was in the US! As were the few hundred blasts at the Nevada Testing Site (which spread fallout over a lot of Utah and Arizona and created local "hot spots" as far as Upstate NY). And during some nuke tests, soldiers were placed as close as a mile or two from the explosions, so they got their share of rads.
-b.
And guess what? The Kent State Incident caused a *huge* public uproar and resulted in changes to policy. Had the students been deprived of their right to protest with "non lethal" means, would there have been such an outcry. Nonlethal weapons allow governments to use force without being held to account for it, since the consequences are smaller.
-b.
Mod parent up insightful.
-b.
Yep. Seriously, I agree with that statement except in some very limited cases.
Why? Because "non lethal" weapons lower the bar to the use of force. Things that were previously dealt with with words from a cop would be dealt with by a "zap" from a taser or a "clap" from a sonic weapon. We don't want the use of force by the authorities to become easy or ubiquitous. At least if you shoot someone or nail them with a nightstick without good reason, there are consequences like lawsuits and possibly even criminal sanctions. With "non lethal" weapons, juries might end up more accepting of police abuse since it causes no physical damage.
But the damage to society from loss of freedoms will remain.
-b.
-b.
Information extracted under pain has limited value. A lot of people will say/confess to anything just to stop the pain.
-b.
No, hanged from the nearest lamppost.
"Stoned" might be taken to mean giving the politician marijuana, and we want to avoid any such politicians having a pleasurable experience. Maybe if the marijuana was laced with PCP and then a crowd dressed in demon suits started dancing around the politician with flaming torches to give them that extra-special eerie glow...
-b.
I thought the old ones played "funeral chimes" when they crashed.
-b.
Given that Solaris 10 and various Linux distros are free assuming you don't need vendor support, does money spent correlate with installed base? For example, the secondary student-run e-mail and Web systems (ultimately, basically all of the student web sites) of the school that I graduated from in 2002 are run strictly with Debian.
-b.
Hardware safeties will prevent immediate motherboard damage. Running hot might still reduce the lives of components over the long term. Kind of like a car that's running at the edge of the red zone with a quart or two less of oil than it should have. It won't seize up today or tomorrow, but it probably won't last 250,000 miles.
-b.
Given servers that are either public web servers, e-mail servers, application servers, DB servers, etc (i.e. simple file servers like you see in every other office don't count), what is the breakdown of UNIX-type (including Linux OSs) vs. Windows vs. Something Else (Netware, OS/2, etc) machines? My feeling is that it'd be around 60% UNIX, 35% Windows, and 5% Something Else, at least in the US.
-b.
Well, they *are* free money - for a month. Get a card, put all of your expenses on it, and pay the bills in full when they come. Credit card company makes no interest as long as the bills are paid in full, and there's usually a month or 3 weeks between the end of the billing cycle and the due date.
-b.
Very true, sadly. If you need the employer, you're more likely to stay, like a peasant that's tied to the land. On the flipside, though, if I were an employer, I wouldn't want employees just tied to me through economic exigency. Boxed-in employees make for angry people, and angry people will gank you one way or another.
Anyway, mod parent up insightful.
-b.
It's hard, but...
In NYC, there's the Freelancers' Union, which gives workers that don't work for traditional employers insurance, among other benefits. Other states have artists' and designers' groups that often get better rates for insurance for their members. It *can* be done if you look in the right places.
Personally, though, I think that we should move to a single-payer system like Britain's, where doctors are still allowed to have private practices for those that can afford to pay more. It may not be perfect, but at least it guarantees a minimum level of care for all citizens.
-b.
It's not a legal responsibility, but this country would be a better place if business owners (who, ultimately, are *people*) practiced good citizenship. And a lot of businesses don't have shareholders as such, so their owners can choose to run them the way they wish. The OP seemed to be a business owner since he talked about giving "his" entire HR department the boot if they did certain things.
-b.