IANAL, but as I understand it, all of the US states have laws that make dangerous or reckless driving a punishable violation. If you are driving while texting, or using the phone but speak with both of your hands, that is both dangerous and reckless... problem solved, no new laws are required. The CTIA can rest easy knowing that mobile phones and devices do cause accidents, but no special laws are required. Law enforcement officers don't really need new laws, just permission to press existing laws into action when they see dangerous or reckless driving!
FTFS: " Set to open in mid-2008, the new National Computer Forensic Institute will be able to train over 900 law enforcement officers per year. 'It will initially be staffed by 18 Secret Service agents and will feature classrooms, a forensic laboratory, an evidence vault, and server rooms. "
Holy fsck! A full year from now? In a year computers will have changed enough to cause this to falter badly from the start! It will take only one worm of the right design, one change to hard drive technology, one of any number of things to change the virtual face of computer forensics. That change could happen next week. This taking over a year to put in production doesn't sound even close to flexible enough to accomplish the stated goals!
Don't be offended here, but let me tell you what is really ignorant about what you have said.
>Here's why. Very few Dell customers actually want Linux. Because relatively few people know about Linux and what it can mean to them. They only know windows because Apple and MS are the ones with $$$ television advertisements.
>Legions of Dell customers want Windows. Because relatively few people know about Linux and what it can mean to them. They only know windows because Apple and MS are the ones with $$$ television advertisements.
>Legions of Dell customers using Windows want MS Office because it does what they want, while >OpenOffice "isn't quite there yet" (I'm mostly talking Excel users, actually.) You have NO CLUE what normal users use MS Office products for. You may want Excel, but I'm guessing you haven't even really tried OOo products.
NORMAL people do things like use MS Excel because they don't know how to make nice columns in Word or notepad. They use Excel instead of a database. They use MS Word when they should have used notepad because it lets you change the fonts, but then spend 45 minutes trying to figure out how the bullets work!!
My mom has been an editor for over 20 years. During that time she has had a great deal of exposure to the applications available from Microsoft, and apps available on both Windows and Mac. She is now using OOo and is quite happy with it. For you to have said what you did shows that you have no knowledge of what OOo is or can do. You sir, speak like a fool.
For a billion dollars, it's much cheaper to just buy Viacom.... Makes it sound like Viacom just shot themselves in the foot, but it makes sense. If it's going to cost a billion to stay in business, just by them out!
Whatever happens, this will raise public awareness of OOo by some measure. If only 15% of the public suddenly finds out that there is free software available that does all they need to do, it's a good thing for all. It will also help point out the situation that makes it cheaper for Dell to preload windows than to give away free software. Hopefully consumers will begin to question that and bring to light what MS is still doing to hamstring an entire industry.
Additionally, it seems that if you type 'firefox xxxxx' in the address bar, if there is anything indexed at the Mozilla site matching that, it will open that page rather than revert to the default search engine. Try 'firefox help' 'firefox keyboard' 'firefox backup' etc.
This is IMO, a problem that is custom made for the open source community. No, I'm not suggesting that people put together a hardware company to build their own. I'm suggesting that Dell give away a few of each PC they want to offer Linux on to any Linux distro group that wants to be supported.
In the end, they won't have to do the image build nor support it. Just let the Linux distro folks support it.
Example: The Ubuntu group could build the image for Dell to put on each line of machines they want to sell with Ubuntu Linux. The Ubuntu group provides software/configuration support, and Dell supports the hardware. Once the Ubuntu group provides a pre-built image, Dell doesn't have much left to do but burn it on the machine and ship.
Sure, there is a bit more to it, but that's it in a nutshell, and it is about open source support. Dell gets to sell the hardware, the OSS community supports the software, and everyone is happy. Current support for Linux comes from the OSS community anyway. Dell is just trying to limit their exposure when they shouldn't even try to expose themselves to support issues. Simply sell the machine as OSS supported software.
When it comes down to hardware issues, I'm certain that each Linux distro group will support tools to determine that it is hardware vs. software. Once that is done there is no reason not to ship boxes with Linux installed. Dell doesn't have to choose which distro to suppport. Let each distro sign up and if they don't, don't sell boxes with that distro installed.
To me it seems just too simple to be this difficult.
I was thinking about this last night. When will such litigation end? Even though the fashion industry has its share of IP warriors, nobody ever seems to be in court for years over the stitching on the seams of a bra or underwear. Why is that? Is it just because nobody cares enough to report that, or is it because the media likes the hi-tech IP wars better, or is it because other industries are not so hell bent on destroying each other?
I'd venture to say that people own roughly the same value or more worth of clothes compared to home computing equipment. Surely the value of sales is roughly similar?
Is it because hi-tech companies are more involved in the political arena? OR is it just because the patent system is woefully unable to deal with hi-tech IP issues?
I think its the latter, and the industry as a whole should begin to focus on that problem to avoid all these other litigation based problems.
I empathize with your rant, but ideally, I would want the government to justify the need for every dollar they want in taxes, not just have my money silently slip into government coffers with ease. I would like the government to have to send me a bill detailing every costs, where my taxes will go, and why I should have to pay it.
Before anyone mods me down, or comments that I'm stupid or some such, think about it. Most people have no clue where their tax money goes, what it pays for, or exactly why they have to pay taxes. Sure, there are things that you can search out on the internet, but IANAL so it doesn't help me much.
When Federal government has to justify their taxation, perhaps we will see more responsible tax dollar spending?
Clearly, the government that the US has now is not the one that we thought we were electing. Okay, some might have predicted this, but the majority did not. I had never thought of myself as a libertarian until the current Bush administration worked so hard to belittle citizens by taking our rights, squeezing our liberties, and invading our lives all in the name of stopping child pornography and terrorists. I think there is enough information on the internet to show that neither were a big problem until the Bush administration told the world that it was.
Ruin the rights of hundreds of millions of people to incarcerate a handful. They could have caught them without the patriot act. Anything that looks similar in other countries is nothing more than the same thing with a different signiture. Orwell was more of a prophet than science fiction writer as far as I can tell.
Governments all over the world (with the help of the US government and DRM supporters) are succumbing to the false ideology that security is only achieved when all citizens are imprisoned and cannot possibly get together to plan terrorist acts, or download illegal music.
I'm personally waiting for the big backlash to start. My guess, a not-well-thought-out civil rebellion in some EU country that fails, but news of it starts others around the world until all governments are starting to believe its a good idea to trip all over themselves to show they are protecting civil rights and privacy of their citizens.
This is exactly why I don't keep my.pst file on a work server. I use a laptop from work, and by keeping that huge.pst file on my local drive, I can choose to back it up when and where I like. No matter how good the guys in corporate IT might be, I just don't trust them. With most of my backup processes, it would take 2 disastrous events to happen at the same (or near enough) time to cause total loss of data. It would only take one careless IT person, or software update to cause complete loss if I trusted them.
As annoying as spam is, I agree with you. It doesn't matter how the stock info is spread about the community, there should be no reaction to it, especially because it is deemed bad because someone is sending emails about it.
If traders wanted to setup technological means, they could entice investors to play a part in what would amount to a botnet interacting with the stock exchange, except that it would be perfectly legal. Just one text message and 500Million in trades is made in the next 20 minutes. Spam is not the kind of problem that the stock exchange needs to be worrying about. period.
Ahhh, that is the simplistic view. Mine is probably just as bad, but if unions were not the rule, it would be possible to give merit pay increases to those teachers that do raise the quality of teaching in the school system. For those that are not teaching math and sciences, they should also be able to participate in merit increases. If the merit payments were done on a tiered level, one for qualified certifications, and one for quality of student learning. If the English/language test scores go up, those teachers should see a merit increase etc.
That, of course, always brings in the difficulties; how to judge the quality of learning. From what I can tell with experience and the media, the current methods (NCLB included) are insufficient/ineffective on the best of days.
Yes, government records, or records of government actions/meetings/debates etc. should be public and free. If C-SPAN spends time and resources to do the recording, why shouldn't they be afforded the attribution?
It could be worse than that. What if the Canadian government is outsourcing the data processing to a private company, and Application Service Provider (ASP) of sorts that collects the tax data, pre-processes it and pushes it off to the tax collection agency for final processing. This sort of thing can/is done for billing systems regularly. If the fault is outside the government, _and_ outside the country the problem will become even more interesting.
Yes, you are very right. You can bet this is an IT project that will end up in another/. story about IT projects gone wrong. It might be of interest to know that they are not the only group with problems lately? Rogers wireless also has problems. I paid a phone bill (from the US) and when I looked to ensure the payment was registered, it displayed July 3rd as the payment date rather than March 7th. I didn't type in the date value either, it was entered for me.
It might be coincidence, but seems like data validation is not a big deal in Canada?
FTFA: "Windows Vista, Office 2007, and IE7 are widely recognized by independent analysts to offer dramatic improvements in security, management features, new collaboration capabilities and productivity enhancements. Ultimately we think we can help DOT understand how these products can help its enterprise organization.
Q: When did MS start using truly independent analysts? Would that part of the statement be necessary if they had no reputation for using paid shills?
FTFA: "As DOT goes through the natural process of exploring the new capabilities of these products we expect they will continue to embrace Windows and Office as the departmental standard of DOT.
Q: Doesn't she mean that "they will eventually be forced to once again drink the koolaid?"
FTFA: "Overall our government customers are excited about the technology as well as our product pipeline.
Q: Does anyone else remember that old Chinese curse? "May your life be exciting!"
FTFA: Just last week more than 500 Public Sector CIOs from across the country joined us for our annual US Public Sector CIO Summit.
- 500 guests for free food and drink and hopefully cheaper software != 500 new customers.
FTFA: The Summit offered these CIOs to see firsthand how Microsoft is working to be a strategic partner to government and educational institutions of every size."
- They obviously didn't spend much time on all the govt. agencies, schools, even countries that are not interested in using MS products anymore. A sales pitch is a sales pitch. I hope they got some good swag!
Slashdot Mirror
Is this another Apple viral marketing campaign?
IANAL, but as I understand it, all of the US states have laws that make dangerous or reckless driving a punishable violation. If you are driving while texting, or using the phone but speak with both of your hands, that is both dangerous and reckless... problem solved, no new laws are required. The CTIA can rest easy knowing that mobile phones and devices do cause accidents, but no special laws are required. Law enforcement officers don't really need new laws, just permission to press existing laws into action when they see dangerous or reckless driving!
FTFS: " Set to open in mid-2008, the new National Computer Forensic Institute will be able to train over 900 law enforcement officers per year. 'It will initially be staffed by 18 Secret Service agents and will feature classrooms, a forensic laboratory, an evidence vault, and server rooms. "
Holy fsck! A full year from now? In a year computers will have changed enough to cause this to falter badly from the start! It will take only one worm of the right design, one change to hard drive technology, one of any number of things to change the virtual face of computer forensics. That change could happen next week. This taking over a year to put in production doesn't sound even close to flexible enough to accomplish the stated goals!
Don't be offended here, but let me tell you what is really ignorant about what you have said.
>Here's why. Very few Dell customers actually want Linux.
Because relatively few people know about Linux and what it can mean to them. They only know windows because Apple and MS are the ones with $$$ television advertisements.
>Legions of Dell customers want Windows.
Because relatively few people know about Linux and what it can mean to them. They only know windows because Apple and MS are the ones with $$$ television advertisements.
>Legions of Dell customers using Windows want MS Office because it does what they want, while >OpenOffice "isn't quite there yet" (I'm mostly talking Excel users, actually.)
You have NO CLUE what normal users use MS Office products for. You may want Excel, but I'm guessing you haven't even really tried OOo products.
NORMAL people do things like use MS Excel because they don't know how to make nice columns in Word or notepad. They use Excel instead of a database. They use MS Word when they should have used notepad because it lets you change the fonts, but then spend 45 minutes trying to figure out how the bullets work!!
My mom has been an editor for over 20 years. During that time she has had a great deal of exposure to the applications available from Microsoft, and apps available on both Windows and Mac. She is now using OOo and is quite happy with it. For you to have said what you did shows that you have no knowledge of what OOo is or can do. You sir, speak like a fool.
For a billion dollars, it's much cheaper to just buy Viacom....
Makes it sound like Viacom just shot themselves in the foot, but it makes sense. If it's going to cost a billion to stay in business, just by them out!
Whatever happens, this will raise public awareness of OOo by some measure. If only 15% of the public suddenly finds out that there is free software available that does all they need to do, it's a good thing for all. It will also help point out the situation that makes it cheaper for Dell to preload windows than to give away free software. Hopefully consumers will begin to question that and bring to light what MS is still doing to hamstring an entire industry.
Additionally, it seems that if you type 'firefox xxxxx' in the address bar, if there is anything indexed at the Mozilla site matching that, it will open that page rather than revert to the default search engine. Try 'firefox help' 'firefox keyboard' 'firefox backup' etc.
This is IMO, a problem that is custom made for the open source community. No, I'm not suggesting that people put together a hardware company to build their own. I'm suggesting that Dell give away a few of each PC they want to offer Linux on to any Linux distro group that wants to be supported.
In the end, they won't have to do the image build nor support it. Just let the Linux distro folks support it.
Example: The Ubuntu group could build the image for Dell to put on each line of machines they want to sell with Ubuntu Linux. The Ubuntu group provides software/configuration support, and Dell supports the hardware. Once the Ubuntu group provides a pre-built image, Dell doesn't have much left to do but burn it on the machine and ship.
Sure, there is a bit more to it, but that's it in a nutshell, and it is about open source support. Dell gets to sell the hardware, the OSS community supports the software, and everyone is happy. Current support for Linux comes from the OSS community anyway. Dell is just trying to limit their exposure when they shouldn't even try to expose themselves to support issues. Simply sell the machine as OSS supported software.
When it comes down to hardware issues, I'm certain that each Linux distro group will support tools to determine that it is hardware vs. software. Once that is done there is no reason not to ship boxes with Linux installed. Dell doesn't have to choose which distro to suppport. Let each distro sign up and if they don't, don't sell boxes with that distro installed.
To me it seems just too simple to be this difficult.
so we can take turns strolling it through the marketing department to detect if life was ever there... oh wait, that would be 'intelligent life'
never mind
I was thinking about this last night. When will such litigation end? Even though the fashion industry has its share of IP warriors, nobody ever seems to be in court for years over the stitching on the seams of a bra or underwear. Why is that? Is it just because nobody cares enough to report that, or is it because the media likes the hi-tech IP wars better, or is it because other industries are not so hell bent on destroying each other?
I'd venture to say that people own roughly the same value or more worth of clothes compared to home computing equipment. Surely the value of sales is roughly similar?
Is it because hi-tech companies are more involved in the political arena? OR is it just because the patent system is woefully unable to deal with hi-tech IP issues?
I think its the latter, and the industry as a whole should begin to focus on that problem to avoid all these other litigation based problems.
Just a though
Probably the other way around....
I empathize with your rant, but ideally, I would want the government to justify the need for every dollar they want in taxes, not just have my money silently slip into government coffers with ease. I would like the government to have to send me a bill detailing every costs, where my taxes will go, and why I should have to pay it.
Before anyone mods me down, or comments that I'm stupid or some such, think about it. Most people have no clue where their tax money goes, what it pays for, or exactly why they have to pay taxes. Sure, there are things that you can search out on the internet, but IANAL so it doesn't help me much.
When Federal government has to justify their taxation, perhaps we will see more responsible tax dollar spending?
Well, its a thought
Clearly, the government that the US has now is not the one that we thought we were electing. Okay, some might have predicted this, but the majority did not. I had never thought of myself as a libertarian until the current Bush administration worked so hard to belittle citizens by taking our rights, squeezing our liberties, and invading our lives all in the name of stopping child pornography and terrorists. I think there is enough information on the internet to show that neither were a big problem until the Bush administration told the world that it was.
Ruin the rights of hundreds of millions of people to incarcerate a handful. They could have caught them without the patriot act. Anything that looks similar in other countries is nothing more than the same thing with a different signiture. Orwell was more of a prophet than science fiction writer as far as I can tell.
Governments all over the world (with the help of the US government and DRM supporters) are succumbing to the false ideology that security is only achieved when all citizens are imprisoned and cannot possibly get together to plan terrorist acts, or download illegal music.
I'm personally waiting for the big backlash to start. My guess, a not-well-thought-out civil rebellion in some EU country that fails, but news of it starts others around the world until all governments are starting to believe its a good idea to trip all over themselves to show they are protecting civil rights and privacy of their citizens.
This is exactly why I don't keep my .pst file on a work server. I use a laptop from work, and by keeping that huge .pst file on my local drive, I can choose to back it up when and where I like. No matter how good the guys in corporate IT might be, I just don't trust them. With most of my backup processes, it would take 2 disastrous events to happen at the same (or near enough) time to cause total loss of data. It would only take one careless IT person, or software update to cause complete loss if I trusted them.
but if it were compared to a nail, I'd ask "just how many nails does it take to seal the lid of a coffin?"
While I don't want the refund check dependent on a beta, I am going to run both Tax Cut and TaxGeek06d to see how they compare....
As annoying as spam is, I agree with you. It doesn't matter how the stock info is spread about the community, there should be no reaction to it, especially because it is deemed bad because someone is sending emails about it.
If traders wanted to setup technological means, they could entice investors to play a part in what would amount to a botnet interacting with the stock exchange, except that it would be perfectly legal. Just one text message and 500Million in trades is made in the next 20 minutes. Spam is not the kind of problem that the stock exchange needs to be worrying about. period.
Ahhh, that is the simplistic view. Mine is probably just as bad, but if unions were not the rule, it would be possible to give merit pay increases to those teachers that do raise the quality of teaching in the school system. For those that are not teaching math and sciences, they should also be able to participate in merit increases. If the merit payments were done on a tiered level, one for qualified certifications, and one for quality of student learning. If the English/language test scores go up, those teachers should see a merit increase etc.
That, of course, always brings in the difficulties; how to judge the quality of learning. From what I can tell with experience and the media, the current methods (NCLB included) are insufficient/ineffective on the best of days.
http://cpan.org/ CPAN is for PERL, C-SPAN is for swine.... had to be said
IBM is sure getting word of mouth advertising out of this for their 'tuned search engine' services.
Conflict of Interest....
There is no way he could be seen as anything other than conflicted over what software government branches use. It just wouldn't work.
Yes, government records, or records of government actions/meetings/debates etc. should be public and free. If C-SPAN spends time and resources to do the recording, why shouldn't they be afforded the attribution?
It could be worse than that. What if the Canadian government is outsourcing the data processing to a private company, and Application Service Provider (ASP) of sorts that collects the tax data, pre-processes it and pushes it off to the tax collection agency for final processing. This sort of thing can/is done for billing systems regularly. If the fault is outside the government, _and_ outside the country the problem will become even more interesting.
Yes, you are very right. You can bet this is an IT project that will end up in another /. story about IT projects gone wrong. It might be of interest to know that they are not the only group with problems lately? Rogers wireless also has problems. I paid a phone bill (from the US) and when I looked to ensure the payment was registered, it displayed July 3rd as the payment date rather than March 7th. I didn't type in the date value either, it was entered for me.
It might be coincidence, but seems like data validation is not a big deal in Canada?
FTFA: "Windows Vista, Office 2007, and IE7 are widely recognized by independent analysts to offer dramatic improvements in security, management features, new collaboration capabilities and productivity enhancements. Ultimately we think we can help DOT understand how these products can help its enterprise organization.
Q: When did MS start using truly independent analysts? Would that part of the statement be necessary if they had no reputation for using paid shills?
FTFA: "As DOT goes through the natural process of exploring the new capabilities of these products we expect they will continue to embrace Windows and Office as the departmental standard of DOT.
Q: Doesn't she mean that "they will eventually be forced to once again drink the koolaid?"
FTFA: "Overall our government customers are excited about the technology as well as our product pipeline.
Q: Does anyone else remember that old Chinese curse? "May your life be exciting!"
FTFA: Just last week more than 500 Public Sector CIOs from across the country joined us for our annual US Public Sector CIO Summit.
- 500 guests for free food and drink and hopefully cheaper software != 500 new customers.
FTFA: The Summit offered these CIOs to see firsthand how Microsoft is working to be a strategic partner to government and educational institutions of every size."
- They obviously didn't spend much time on all the govt. agencies, schools, even countries that are not interested in using MS products anymore. A sales pitch is a sales pitch. I hope they got some good swag!