He has eventually been held accountable for much of what he did, however he avoided it to the best of his ability, even to the point of lying under oath. There are things Clinton did very well as President, but he's also a slimy sleezeball.
You've pointed aout things in Bush's life where he wasn't the most responsible person. He didn't come out and lie about his past. He din't come out with details about his past drug use, but he also didn't try to deny it. He admitted that he had made mistakes. He also changed the way he acted since then. You notice that the reports of his drug and alcohol abuse are from the not so recent past. I do agree that he definately had advantages in life that shielded him from the full consequences of his mistakes, so to some extent he also wasn't held accountable. He seems willing to admit to his past mistakes now and be held accountable for his current actions.
It seems that George Bush eventually grew out of not being held accountable, while Bill Clinton still wants to rationalize everything. How George Bush's presidency will be looked upon will be based on his successes and failures. Clinton's presidency is marred by a series of scandals where the people arund him were convicted of crimes, but there was never proof that he was directly involved. At best, he's a very bad judge of character. Of course the Republican's did a good job of embarassing themselves in the ways they fought him, regardless of the policies involved.
If people want to come forward and talk to her she can reach them. There are several public message boards on which she could post his character's names and leave a way that she could be contacted.
Sony should not give out the identities of those he dealt with online unless she can provide Sony with a supponea. They have a right to their privacy unless there are good, legal reasons for Sony to provide that information. Even then if seems more appropriate to turn that information over to law enforcment, rather that his mother.
It wasn't a whole point off of my GPA, and I did remain married. But I did waste most of a quarter in grad school, and put my new marriage through some rough times. I eventually realized I was screwing up my life over a text based game, and got myself a full time job and quit playing.
Of course 6 years later I'm spending way to much time playing Asheron's Call. The difference is that my wife also plays now, and I don't stay up playing all nigh and skip work.
The problem existed before Clinton, though I do agree that Clinton is an excellent example of avoiding accountability and responsibility for his actions.
A sensational soundbyte from a Reuters doesn't have much credibility to begin with. In this case it's a clip about the prosecution claiming that Microsoft pressured to stop selling Linux on some systems. I'm not sure how you take that to mean that Dell no longer sells Linux on systems.
You do have a point. It would be nice to be able to set up my mail reader to not download large attachments when I'm accessing my mail from a laptop in a hotel room. However, most business people who you would want to send a 5 MB file to aren't going to be accessing their email over a modem. I wouldn't send out an email with a huge attachment to my friends at their home account, or someone who I know is traveling, but I still think that sending a proof to a printer is a reasonable application for email.
In order to make Interstellar travel a reality, we need to make a revolutionary jump in technology. Since examining the known laws of physics isn't producing the answers we need, NASA is looking at the prospect that we may not understand the nature of the universe as well as we like to think we do. We need to remember that the "Laws" of physics are theorys that have merely been proposed based on experimentation and observation. Throughout scientific history there have been some discoveries that some things we though were proven absolute, were only true for the many different situations in which they had been tested. The ability to shield an object from the effects of gravity is pretty far fetched, but so is interstellar travel. NASA is going to have to spend a lot of money checking out some radical theories. In the end most of the research won't turn up anything useful. In some cases it will turn up usefull information but not prove what they are trying to prove. One of the important things to note here is that this kind of research needs to be funded by the government because private industries just aren't likely to invest money on concepts that are such longshots, and would take far too long to produce a return on investment. It's true that most of these ideas won't pan out, but through NASA, our government is making a long term investment in our futures. Maybe this isn't as important as some more short term needs like Welfare and Defense budgets, but that's why we spend billions on those things, and millions over years on ideas like this one.
File transfer by email doesn't make sense when the files start to get bigger than a couple megs...
Why? As long as people clean out their outbaskets, why is email not appropriate. I've sent many 5 to 10 meg emails. As long as the receiver's mail system allows attachments that large, it works very well. What's the compelling reason not to do this other than IS people trying to manage space on the mail server. Managing space on the mail server is a serious issue, but a uneversal ban on large attachments may not be the best approach is some situations, such as Time's.
Yes it could be done with an internet page and an ftp site, and of course you'd still have to email the person the password and account name.
I think your missing the point. Why go to the expense of developing and maintaining that solution. Why reduce yourself to a system with 3 points of failure (intranet, ftp, email). An attachment in email does the job just as well, and it's simpler and less time consuming for everyone. An ftp server is a good way to distribute the same file to many people. If you're going to send different large files to different individuals, it's not the right solution.
Instead of developing a CGI script that will only work between the users and customers you set up to use it, why let them attach the files in email and have a more universal solution.
Ok, I'll ask the stupid question. Why should they even bother to try and train the users on both ends to use ftp? Why not just let those users that have a need to send large files to each other do it with email. I email large files to our customers all the time. If I want to put it on the ftp server, I have to get the customer access to the server with a directory that they have access to, which means dealing with our very busy IS staff. I then end up emailing the customer a link to the file they need so thy can ftp it using IE. This all has to be cleaned up after the fact, wasting several man hours by the time it's done. Email is easier for both the customer and me. When Time sends out page proofs, they can't just put them in pub/outgoing. They need to go to the correct people, and only the correct people. Maintaining seperate accounts on the ftp server for their customers is possible, but really not that practical. Email is a better solution.
While you're right that you should have enough confidence in your products to use them yourself, there are some differences between the email needs of a home user, and Time. Unfortunately, the Suits at AOL didn't realize this before they implemented the plan. If the 2% of email becomming lost was a real problem, rather than user mistakes, then AOL isn't even suitable for home use in my opinion, but I honestly doubt 2% of the email was really being eaten by the system.
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
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USB was available on PCs before Macs. Apple waited a bit until it became a more accepted standard and then pushed it along by using it as the only option for the mouse and keyboard. The first all-in-one may have been the Apple Macintosh (not the iMac). PC vendors such as Compaq tried to compete in this market, but it never really took off for PC. Expandability seemed to be more important to PC customers. The iMac was definately a great success due to exellent marketing efforts by Apple. PC manufactures definitely tried to copy this with limited success at best. I must be missing the push to sell Dual Processors systems to consumers rather than just Geeks. I agree that Dual Processor MACs are nice machines, we have one here at work running LINUX. I just really don't see them being marketed to home users, or dual processor PCs for that matter. SCSI has always been a higher end technology. The advantages make more of a difference to high end users, and issues like termination and SCSI IDs confuse casual users. I think the arrival of a larger number of Firewire devices is more attributable to it's use on digital camcorders which are getting much more popular, than it's use on MACs, but it is definately a technology that Apple developed. I'd actually have to say that both USB and Firewire have their roots in the good old Apple Desktop Bus, which though extremely slow, was way ahead of it's time compared to the PS/2 ports on a PC. Apple has developed some interesting technology over the years. But that technology usually takes a long time to catch on in the PC community. Apple also seems to take it's time to adopt many things that are accepted as standard in the PC community, other than trying to cash in on some of Steve Jobs marketing sucesses.
Re:FAQ from the SerialATA.org website
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Ok, I got my facts strait and realized that Serial ATA is supposd to support hot plug devices. My next guess is that they're worried about FCC Class B and CE certification. The copper cables they are going to use probably won't pass the EMI limitations unless enclosed with in a computer case. I'm not sure why they couldn't propose a shielded cable for use outside the case, probably one of those product positioning, marketing decisions.
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
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Just wait until apple replaces all their ATA stuff with firewire, with no backward compatability built in (see iMacs and USB circa 1998). Then the PC manufacturers will begin including firewire faster than you can say "http:///..org"
Since when have PC manufacturers followed what Apple has done, other than cosmeticly. There are also royalties to be paid on Firewire, but not on Serial ATA. Of course since Apple is one of the developers of Firewire, they're paying most of that royalty to themselves. If i remember correctly it was a pretty small royalty though, maybe a little under $1 a device, might even be less.
Personaly, I'd rather see SCSI drives than a new version of ATA.
If you want the benefits of SCSI, you're welcome to pay the extra that it costs. Most people won't notice any difference in their system from going from IDE to SCSI, why should they pay for SCSI.
Re:FAQ from the SerialATA.org website
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Why the arbitrary distinction between internally and externally connected devices. Why target one and not the other? SCSI works fine for both, why not design SerialATA to do the same?
One meter cable length doesn't work real well for external devices, and for external devices you want to be able to hot plug the device like you can with Firewire or USB. Those interfaces are better designed for most external storage devices. It is a lot easier to design an interface that doesn't have to worry about drives disappearing and reappearing.
Will I still be able to use a serial ATA device 10 years from now? I can (and do) use 10 year old SCSI devices. Will the SerialATA consortium guarantee backward compatibility, or is this yet another lock in to a perpetual upgrade cycle?
I'm not sure how the people writing the standards can guarantee forward compatibility. You're asking them to say it will work with something that hasn't been invented yet. A more reasonable comparison is to ask if old ATA dirves will work with SerialATA, and they will with an adapter card.
This is true, but it's because fibre channel controllers are much more expensive than and IDE controller, and for good reason. Fibre Channel drives themselves are available, and aren't priced significantly more than their SCSI counterparts.
Serial IDE drives will require a new interface logic and hardware. However, this has been comming for a long time. I doubt it's going to be a long delay before hard drive manufacturers can roll out drives with this interface.
USB 2.0 just isn't fast enough. It will be good enough to connect a single drive, or an external CD-RW, but single IDE drives are already getting close to the total bandwidth of USB 2.0.
Firewire can be fast enough, depending on which version you're talking about. However, firewire is a more complicated interface with many more features than are needed by IDE drives. When Intel decided not to include Firewire in the BX chipset like was originally proposed, it lost a lot of steam. I don't know the implementation and licensing cost issues, but since it hasn't been integrated into a chipset yet, I guess they're significant enough that it's just not going to happen.
They like everyone else always have more to do than time to do it, but they deal with a tremendous amount of email volume from all over the world. This means that they often get these viruses before the security alerts go out, and don't get the advanced warning that many small companies get the benefit of.
You can make it so Outlook won't run.scr files. I agree that this should be the default case, but this is something you can fix.
Your company has probably standardized on Outlook because they need Calander and a Mail CLient, and Outlook is a powerful, integrated tool for these tasks,..... and it comes with Office. Outlook is very insecure in it's default install, but if can be made much better with a little effort. You trade sume functionality for the increased security, but that's uaually a tradeoff you have to make for increased security.
You definately don't like Outlook, but what do you reccomend? What do you think is a good replacement for the functionality that Outlook provides, including features such as calander software and such?
Because security is only one of the issues they have to deal with.
I worked as a contractor in computer support for the Air Force years ago. This was before they used Exchange. They were using DEC Teamlinks where I was at. Teamlinks wasn't very easy to use. The client interface was cludgey and didn't have all the nice integrated features you get with Outlook today. The server which was a DEC Alpha crashed a lot. I think the server was simply a very expensive lemmon. The DEC staff on site, as well as outside support people spent a lot of time replacing parts and tweaking software, but couldn't get it to remain stable.
Exchange and Outlook were a much better choice even with the risk of a virus taking down the system because the system they had was taking itself down on a regular basis.
Training is also a serious issue. There was a full time person who's job was to train users to use Teamlinks. One thing many people don't realize is that the majority of the people using this software on an Air Force base aren't military. They're civil servants and contractors. Military people follow orders pretty well, and contractors do as their told, or find themselves without a job. Civil servants are a different story. Contractors come and go, militry people get transferred after about 4 years or so, but the civil servants will still be there when the others are gone. If they aren't interested in learning something, they just make a few excuses and put it off until there's a new Deputy DIrector, or whoever's making the decisions. We had a chief scientist that refused to use the email or calandar software. He had his secretary print all his email and put it in his inbox. She would respond to his email as he directed her to, and handle all the scheduling in the calander software. She had been around for a very long time, and wasn't very computer friendly herself. Every time she got confused or made a mistake, it was the computer's fault, and whoever got the support call was in for a bad day. One contractor didn't seem to realize that she was always right and got himself banned from her office which led to his eventual dismissal. These people don't like to learn new things. If it isn't easy to learn, they pretty much have the ability to make everyone's life a living hell, and sooner or later the people making the decisions realize that any solution has to take that into account.
While email is a security issue in that poor security can result in lost productivity, it shouldn't be an issue of national security. Confidential and secret information should never end up on the email system.
In my experience with the AIr Force, the people making the decisions were not technically incompetent. They also requested and received input from many different highly skilled technical people, and they had a lot of experienced people with backgrounds in Unix, VMS, and NT to draw upon. They were trying to get a product that best met all their needs. Security was obviously a consideration in their decision, but it didn't outweigh their need for a usable system.
The real issue is that the ease of use that they desire is somewhat in opposition to a high level of security. This means that an alternative to Exchange/Outlook may not provide them with greatly increased security. For them to change and eat the rather high costs or retraining their employees, there needs to be a product that does a considerably better better job of meeting their needs, with security only being part of those needs.
Republicans help big business! Democrats help the common man! Perhaps we should re-evaluate their views.
Another way of looking at it is that is that Democrats and Republicans take different approaches to helping the common man. If a Democrat sees a group of homeless people, he tries to get them direct aid, such as food and shelter. If a republican sees the same group. He tries to get a business to open up in the area and provide them with jobs so that they can get their own food and shelter. In reality, a combination of both approaches usually meets the needs best, and Republicans and Democrats are usually arguing about which type of aid has more priority.
Of course there are Republicans that abuse the power their influence gives them with big business, and there are Democrats that just want to buy votes with taxpayer money even if it doesn't solve any problems long term and just makes people dependent on the govenment.
What makes this case different is that the media is involved. Democrats' power is with the common man, and you can't sway the opinion of the common man without the media on your side.
What always get to me is that both the Democrats and the Media seem to have a really low opinion of the common man. They provide bogus statistics and propoganda to sway opinion. It seems like many of them do it because they honestly believe that the common man can be relied upon to make a good decision on their own. This is why I'm a republican and have a low opinion of the media. I don't believe everything I'm told by either party, and try and look at both sides of things before I make up my own mind on issues. The democrats claim to be for the common man, but it's usually the republican's that show more faith in the common man.
There's Republicans who abuse the power this gives them with business
Okay, assume that statement is fully true, and major labels pay radio stations big bucks to play their manufactured hitmaker of the week. This is keeping the interesting artists off the air?
Wrong.
Somebody listens to it. Someone buys the albums. N'Sync didn't get big because of major label payola, they got big because some clown looked at a shelf in a record store, and said, 'I want THIS one!'
Yes and no. These groups are selling albums because people do like their music. I have no problem with that. If I don't like the music, I just don't listen to it.
If the record companies are actually bribeing radio stations to only play artists represented by them, then there's a serious problem. People buy albums because they heard songs on the radio, not because the went to the record store and though the album cover looked interesting. If the RIAA can control what gets on the air, they can force artists to sign with them. This means that they get a huge cut and have the ability to control how most all music is distributed. They're using that power to maintain their monopoly. They aren't willing to allow the market to evolve, because it would mean that artists don't need them and they wouldn't get to take their huge cut of the revenues to pay for out dated distribution methods and promotion fees that are used to maintain the status quo. The methods they use appear to be agains a wide variety of laws, but the media is such a strong backer of the Dems that they aren't willing to push the issue, and it appears that most Republicans aren't willing to step up and point fingers at these big businesses either. Maybe most of these politicians are actually blind to what the RIAA is doing, and believe that they are only protecting themselves against piracy. If they are that stupid, they need to be replaced, if they aren't stupid, they're corrupt and need replaced. The problem is finding replacements that aren't just as bad.
I'm a republican, and I have to agree that this article is leaning pretty hard to the right. The bill is co-sponsored by a Republican, which was completely left out. FOX News has to feel the view has some merit, or they wouldn't post it, at least not without an opposing view to balance it. In my opinion, FOX News usually only leans a little to the right, and some articles even lean a little left. I do however think this article is accurate. It just leaves out that there are some Republicans who are also vulnerable on this issue.
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He has eventually been held accountable for much of what he did, however he avoided it to the best of his ability, even to the point of lying under oath. There are things Clinton did very well as President, but he's also a slimy sleezeball.
You've pointed aout things in Bush's life where he wasn't the most responsible person. He didn't come out and lie about his past. He din't come out with details about his past drug use, but he also didn't try to deny it. He admitted that he had made mistakes. He also changed the way he acted since then. You notice that the reports of his drug and alcohol abuse are from the not so recent past. I do agree that he definately had advantages in life that shielded him from the full consequences of his mistakes, so to some extent he also wasn't held accountable. He seems willing to admit to his past mistakes now and be held accountable for his current actions.
It seems that George Bush eventually grew out of not being held accountable, while Bill Clinton still wants to rationalize everything. How George Bush's presidency will be looked upon will be based on his successes and failures. Clinton's presidency is marred by a series of scandals where the people arund him were convicted of crimes, but there was never proof that he was directly involved. At best, he's a very bad judge of character. Of course the Republican's did a good job of embarassing themselves in the ways they fought him, regardless of the policies involved.
If people want to come forward and talk to her she can reach them. There are several public message boards on which she could post his character's names and leave a way that she could be contacted.
Sony should not give out the identities of those he dealt with online unless she can provide Sony with a supponea. They have a right to their privacy unless there are good, legal reasons for Sony to provide that information. Even then if seems more appropriate to turn that information over to law enforcment, rather that his mother.
It wasn't a whole point off of my GPA, and I did remain married. But I did waste most of a quarter in grad school, and put my new marriage through some rough times. I eventually realized I was screwing up my life over a text based game, and got myself a full time job and quit playing.
Of course 6 years later I'm spending way to much time playing Asheron's Call. The difference is that my wife also plays now, and I don't stay up playing all nigh and skip work.
The problem existed before Clinton, though I do agree that Clinton is an excellent example of avoiding accountability and responsibility for his actions.
Tried it. Page did not exist on dell's site.
A sensational soundbyte from a Reuters doesn't have much credibility to begin with. In this case it's a clip about the prosecution claiming that Microsoft pressured to stop selling Linux on some systems. I'm not sure how you take that to mean that Dell no longer sells Linux on systems.
You do have a point. It would be nice to be able to set up my mail reader to not download large attachments when I'm accessing my mail from a laptop in a hotel room. However, most business people who you would want to send a 5 MB file to aren't going to be accessing their email over a modem. I wouldn't send out an email with a huge attachment to my friends at their home account, or someone who I know is traveling, but I still think that sending a proof to a printer is a reasonable application for email.
In order to make Interstellar travel a reality, we need to make a revolutionary jump in technology. Since examining the known laws of physics isn't producing the answers we need, NASA is looking at the prospect that we may not understand the nature of the universe as well as we like to think we do. We need to remember that the "Laws" of physics are theorys that have merely been proposed based on experimentation and observation. Throughout scientific history there have been some discoveries that some things we though were proven absolute, were only true for the many different situations in which they had been tested. The ability to shield an object from the effects of gravity is pretty far fetched, but so is interstellar travel. NASA is going to have to spend a lot of money checking out some radical theories. In the end most of the research won't turn up anything useful. In some cases it will turn up usefull information but not prove what they are trying to prove. One of the important things to note here is that this kind of research needs to be funded by the government because private industries just aren't likely to invest money on concepts that are such longshots, and would take far too long to produce a return on investment. It's true that most of these ideas won't pan out, but through NASA, our government is making a long term investment in our futures. Maybe this isn't as important as some more short term needs like Welfare and Defense budgets, but that's why we spend billions on those things, and millions over years on ideas like this one.
File transfer by email doesn't make sense when the files start to get bigger than a couple megs...
Why? As long as people clean out their outbaskets, why is email not appropriate. I've sent many 5 to 10 meg emails. As long as the receiver's mail system allows attachments that large, it works very well. What's the compelling reason not to do this other than IS people trying to manage space on the mail server. Managing space on the mail server is a serious issue, but a uneversal ban on large attachments may not be the best approach is some situations, such as Time's.
Yes it could be done with an internet page and an ftp site, and of course you'd still have to email the person the password and account name.
I think your missing the point. Why go to the expense of developing and maintaining that solution. Why reduce yourself to a system with 3 points of failure (intranet, ftp, email). An attachment in email does the job just as well, and it's simpler and less time consuming for everyone. An ftp server is a good way to distribute the same file to many people. If you're going to send different large files to different individuals, it's not the right solution.
Instead of developing a CGI script that will only work between the users and customers you set up to use it, why let them attach the files in email and have a more universal solution.
Ok, I'll ask the stupid question. Why should they even bother to try and train the users on both ends to use ftp? Why not just let those users that have a need to send large files to each other do it with email. I email large files to our customers all the time. If I want to put it on the ftp server, I have to get the customer access to the server with a directory that they have access to, which means dealing with our very busy IS staff. I then end up emailing the customer a link to the file they need so thy can ftp it using IE. This all has to be cleaned up after the fact, wasting several man hours by the time it's done. Email is easier for both the customer and me.
When Time sends out page proofs, they can't just put them in pub/outgoing. They need to go to the correct people, and only the correct people. Maintaining seperate accounts on the ftp server for their customers is possible, but really not that practical. Email is a better solution.
While you're right that you should have enough confidence in your products to use them yourself, there are some differences between the email needs of a home user, and Time. Unfortunately, the Suits at AOL didn't realize this before they implemented the plan. If the 2% of email becomming lost was a real problem, rather than user mistakes, then AOL isn't even suitable for home use in my opinion, but I honestly doubt 2% of the email was really being eaten by the system.
USB was available on PCs before Macs. Apple waited a bit until it became a more accepted standard and then pushed it along by using it as the only option for the mouse and keyboard. The first all-in-one may have been the Apple Macintosh (not the iMac). PC vendors such as Compaq tried to compete in this market, but it never really took off for PC. Expandability seemed to be more important to PC customers. The iMac was definately a great success due to exellent marketing efforts by Apple. PC manufactures definitely tried to copy this with limited success at best.
I must be missing the push to sell Dual Processors systems to consumers rather than just Geeks. I agree that Dual Processor MACs are nice machines, we have one here at work running LINUX. I just really don't see them being marketed to home users, or dual processor PCs for that matter.
SCSI has always been a higher end technology. The advantages make more of a difference to high end users, and issues like termination and SCSI IDs confuse casual users.
I think the arrival of a larger number of Firewire devices is more attributable to it's use on digital camcorders which are getting much more popular, than it's use on MACs, but it is definately a technology that Apple developed. I'd actually have to say that both USB and Firewire have their roots in the good old Apple Desktop Bus, which though extremely slow, was way ahead of it's time compared to the PS/2 ports on a PC.
Apple has developed some interesting technology over the years. But that technology usually takes a long time to catch on in the PC community. Apple also seems to take it's time to adopt many things that are accepted as standard in the PC community, other than trying to cash in on some of Steve Jobs marketing sucesses.
Ok, I got my facts strait and realized that Serial ATA is supposd to support hot plug devices. My next guess is that they're worried about FCC Class B and CE certification. The copper cables they are going to use probably won't pass the EMI limitations unless enclosed with in a computer case. I'm not sure why they couldn't propose a shielded cable for use outside the case, probably one of those product positioning, marketing decisions.
Just wait until apple replaces all their ATA stuff with firewire, with no backward compatability built in (see iMacs and USB circa 1998). Then the PC manufacturers will begin including firewire faster than you can say "http:///..org"
Since when have PC manufacturers followed what Apple has done, other than cosmeticly. There are also royalties to be paid on Firewire, but not on Serial ATA. Of course since Apple is one of the developers of Firewire, they're paying most of that royalty to themselves. If i remember correctly it was a pretty small royalty though, maybe a little under $1 a device, might even be less.
Personaly, I'd rather see SCSI drives than a new version of ATA.
If you want the benefits of SCSI, you're welcome to pay the extra that it costs. Most people won't notice any difference in their system from going from IDE to SCSI, why should they pay for SCSI.
Why the arbitrary distinction between internally and externally connected devices. Why target one and not the other? SCSI works fine for both, why not design SerialATA to do the same?
One meter cable length doesn't work real well for external devices, and for external devices you want to be able to hot plug the device like you can with Firewire or USB. Those interfaces are better designed for most external storage devices. It is a lot easier to design an interface that doesn't have to worry about drives disappearing and reappearing.
Will I still be able to use a serial ATA device 10 years from now? I can (and do) use 10 year old SCSI devices. Will the SerialATA consortium guarantee backward compatibility, or is this yet another lock in to a perpetual upgrade cycle?
I'm not sure how the people writing the standards can guarantee forward compatibility. You're asking them to say it will work with something that hasn't been invented yet. A more reasonable comparison is to ask if old ATA dirves will work with SerialATA, and they will with an adapter card.
This is true, but it's because fibre channel controllers are much more expensive than and IDE controller, and for good reason. Fibre Channel drives themselves are available, and aren't priced significantly more than their SCSI counterparts.
Serial IDE drives will require a new interface logic and hardware. However, this has been comming for a long time. I doubt it's going to be a long delay before hard drive manufacturers can roll out drives with this interface.
USB 2.0 just isn't fast enough. It will be good enough to connect a single drive, or an external CD-RW, but single IDE drives are already getting close to the total bandwidth of USB 2.0.
Firewire can be fast enough, depending on which version you're talking about. However, firewire is a more complicated interface with many more features than are needed by IDE drives. When Intel decided not to include Firewire in the BX chipset like was originally proposed, it lost a lot of steam. I don't know the implementation and licensing cost issues, but since it hasn't been integrated into a chipset yet, I guess they're significant enough that it's just not going to happen.
They like everyone else always have more to do than time to do it, but they deal with a tremendous amount of email volume from all over the world. This means that they often get these viruses before the security alerts go out, and don't get the advanced warning that many small companies get the benefit of.
You can make it so Outlook won't run .scr files. I agree that this should be the default case, but this is something you can fix.
..... and it comes with Office. Outlook is very insecure in it's default install, but if can be made much better with a little effort. You trade sume functionality for the increased security, but that's uaually a tradeoff you have to make for increased security.
Your company has probably standardized on Outlook because they need Calander and a Mail CLient, and Outlook is a powerful, integrated tool for these tasks,
You definately don't like Outlook, but what do you reccomend? What do you think is a good replacement for the functionality that Outlook provides, including features such as calander software and such?
Because security is only one of the issues they have to deal with.
I worked as a contractor in computer support for the Air Force years ago. This was before they used Exchange. They were using DEC Teamlinks where I was at. Teamlinks wasn't very easy to use. The client interface was cludgey and didn't have all the nice integrated features you get with Outlook today. The server which was a DEC Alpha crashed a lot. I think the server was simply a very expensive lemmon. The DEC staff on site, as well as outside support people spent a lot of time replacing parts and tweaking software, but couldn't get it to remain stable.
Exchange and Outlook were a much better choice even with the risk of a virus taking down the system because the system they had was taking itself down on a regular basis.
Training is also a serious issue. There was a full time person who's job was to train users to use Teamlinks. One thing many people don't realize is that the majority of the people using this software on an Air Force base aren't military. They're civil servants and contractors. Military people follow orders pretty well, and contractors do as their told, or find themselves without a job. Civil servants are a different story. Contractors come and go, militry people get transferred after about 4 years or so, but the civil servants will still be there when the others are gone. If they aren't interested in learning something, they just make a few excuses and put it off until there's a new Deputy DIrector, or whoever's making the decisions. We had a chief scientist that refused to use the email or calandar software. He had his secretary print all his email and put it in his inbox. She would respond to his email as he directed her to, and handle all the scheduling in the calander software. She had been around for a very long time, and wasn't very computer friendly herself. Every time she got confused or made a mistake, it was the computer's fault, and whoever got the support call was in for a bad day. One contractor didn't seem to realize that she was always right and got himself banned from her office which led to his eventual dismissal. These people don't like to learn new things. If it isn't easy to learn, they pretty much have the ability to make everyone's life a living hell, and sooner or later the people making the decisions realize that any solution has to take that into account.
While email is a security issue in that poor security can result in lost productivity, it shouldn't be an issue of national security. Confidential and secret information should never end up on the email system.
In my experience with the AIr Force, the people making the decisions were not technically incompetent. They also requested and received input from many different highly skilled technical people, and they had a lot of experienced people with backgrounds in Unix, VMS, and NT to draw upon. They were trying to get a product that best met all their needs. Security was obviously a consideration in their decision, but it didn't outweigh their need for a usable system.
The real issue is that the ease of use that they desire is somewhat in opposition to a high level of security. This means that an alternative to Exchange/Outlook may not provide them with greatly increased security. For them to change and eat the rather high costs or retraining their employees, there needs to be a product that does a considerably better better job of meeting their needs, with security only being part of those needs.
Republicans help big business! Democrats help the common man! Perhaps we should re-evaluate their views.
Another way of looking at it is that is that Democrats and Republicans take different approaches to helping the common man. If a Democrat sees a group of homeless people, he tries to get them direct aid, such as food and shelter. If a republican sees the same group. He tries to get a business to open up in the area and provide them with jobs so that they can get their own food and shelter. In reality, a combination of both approaches usually meets the needs best, and Republicans and Democrats are usually arguing about which type of aid has more priority.
Of course there are Republicans that abuse the power their influence gives them with big business, and there are Democrats that just want to buy votes with taxpayer money even if it doesn't solve any problems long term and just makes people dependent on the govenment.
What makes this case different is that the media is involved. Democrats' power is with the common man, and you can't sway the opinion of the common man without the media on your side.
What always get to me is that both the Democrats and the Media seem to have a really low opinion of the common man. They provide bogus statistics and propoganda to sway opinion. It seems like many of them do it because they honestly believe that the common man can be relied upon to make a good decision on their own. This is why I'm a republican and have a low opinion of the media. I don't believe everything I'm told by either party, and try and look at both sides of things before I make up my own mind on issues. The democrats claim to be for the common man, but it's usually the republican's that show more faith in the common man.
There's Republicans who abuse the power this gives them with business
Okay, assume that statement is fully true, and major labels pay radio stations big bucks to play their manufactured hitmaker of the week. This is keeping the interesting artists off the air?
Wrong.
Somebody listens to it. Someone buys the albums. N'Sync didn't get big because of major label payola, they got big because some clown looked at a shelf in a record store, and said, 'I want THIS one!'
Yes and no. These groups are selling albums because people do like their music. I have no problem with that. If I don't like the music, I just don't listen to it.
If the record companies are actually bribeing radio stations to only play artists represented by them, then there's a serious problem. People buy albums because they heard songs on the radio, not because the went to the record store and though the album cover looked interesting. If the RIAA can control what gets on the air, they can force artists to sign with them. This means that they get a huge cut and have the ability to control how most all music is distributed. They're using that power to maintain their monopoly. They aren't willing to allow the market to evolve, because it would mean that artists don't need them and they wouldn't get to take their huge cut of the revenues to pay for out dated distribution methods and promotion fees that are used to maintain the status quo. The methods they use appear to be agains a wide variety of laws, but the media is such a strong backer of the Dems that they aren't willing to push the issue, and it appears that most Republicans aren't willing to step up and point fingers at these big businesses either. Maybe most of these politicians are actually blind to what the RIAA is doing, and believe that they are only protecting themselves against piracy. If they are that stupid, they need to be replaced, if they aren't stupid, they're corrupt and need replaced. The problem is finding replacements that aren't just as bad.
I'm a republican, and I have to agree that this article is leaning pretty hard to the right. The bill is co-sponsored by a Republican, which was completely left out. FOX News has to feel the view has some merit, or they wouldn't post it, at least not without an opposing view to balance it. In my opinion, FOX News usually only leans a little to the right, and some articles even lean a little left. I do however think this article is accurate. It just leaves out that there are some Republicans who are also vulnerable on this issue.