But at the CompUSA store, I saw Red Hat Enterprise and Suse on the shelf under a sign that said "Linux" . In boxes, with brand names on them, and pricey stickers.
It's OK by me whatever the squares want to believe. The one nightmare I have is for Linux to become as popular as Windows, because that would kill it.
Google may be the de-facto standrad among geeks and newbies alike, but pay attention. Google recently went "public" on the stock market, which means it's now bed-partners with Wall street, and that will lead to a three-some with Wall street's b**ch, the United States Government. Political control of your information needs, anyone?
Can anybody think of another time that a computer-related business had a 90% market share, got stockholders, and became Too Big for it's Own Good?
Nahhhh, the funniest Linux source code comment is the Pythonesque bridge-keeper/cheese-shop material at the beginning of "screenhack.h" The developer actually ties these references in with what it's like getting the X server to let your program run.
The question I don't see being asked is, HOW did the stem cells get contaminated? With _animal_ protein? What, was a lab assistent sloppy with eating a Big Mac on the job? Or were they deliberately (cue paranoia-meter) sabotaged?
I only consider the sabotage scenario too likely. After all, we have anti-choicers burning down abortion clinics and PETA raiding cosmetics factories - it's a logical extension to picture some hothead dumping a bucket of pig fat all over the lab equipment...
I'm even a programmer, blogger, and all-around geek, and I'm also so fed up with the garbage on the internet that I can barely stand it. The solution in our house:
The "Village Idiot" model. Of all the computers in the house, only ONE is connected to the internet. It is an old bear of a crufted-together bitty-box, running...guess what? Winduhs 98. After all, it's solely Microsoft's fault that we have such lax standards that internet criminals were allowed to gain such a foothold. So, Windows is the "Village Idiot" whose job it is to talk to the internet. The installation disks are ready at hand(acquired free like the machine was, of course! I'm too stinkin' proud to pay for a microsoft product!), just "format C:\" the drive and re-load it as necessary. There are about ten anti-virus/spam/adware/anti-stupidity-in-general programs on the machine, as a token gesture. No software protection will ever work. I also manually scrub the file system weekly, and the family knows better than to even attempt to save any file on this machine. That's what the other computers and the stack of floppy disks are for. The floppies get scanned on a Linux.
The other computers get to run the REAL operating systems and do the REAL work...this method isn't foolproof, but it's so good that I bet there's only 1% of the scumbags on the net that could figure out how to get around all that. And never mind what system is less vulnerable, more robust, etc. Just let the "Village Idiot" get raped by the mess it created, and protect the GOOD computers.
PS My wife also has WebTV. Surf the net that way, there's NO HARD DRIVE TO INFECT! I predict that in the future, using the internet will be more like cell phone usage or WebTV and will have less and less to do with computers. Thank God, maybe the September that never ended will at last go away!
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But at the CompUSA store, I saw Red Hat Enterprise and Suse on the shelf under a sign that said "Linux" . In boxes, with brand names on them, and pricey stickers. It's OK by me whatever the squares want to believe. The one nightmare I have is for Linux to become as popular as Windows, because that would kill it.
Google may be the de-facto standrad among geeks and newbies alike, but pay attention. Google recently went "public" on the stock market, which means it's now bed-partners with Wall street, and that will lead to a three-some with Wall street's b**ch, the United States Government. Political control of your information needs, anyone? Can anybody think of another time that a computer-related business had a 90% market share, got stockholders, and became Too Big for it's Own Good?
Nahhhh, the funniest Linux source code comment is the Pythonesque bridge-keeper/cheese-shop material at the beginning of "screenhack.h" The developer actually ties these references in with what it's like getting the X server to let your program run.
The question I don't see being asked is, HOW did the stem cells get contaminated? With _animal_ protein? What, was a lab assistent sloppy with eating a Big Mac on the job? Or were they deliberately (cue paranoia-meter) sabotaged? I only consider the sabotage scenario too likely. After all, we have anti-choicers burning down abortion clinics and PETA raiding cosmetics factories - it's a logical extension to picture some hothead dumping a bucket of pig fat all over the lab equipment...
I'm even a programmer, blogger, and all-around geek, and I'm also so fed up with the garbage on the internet that I can barely stand it. The solution in our house:
The "Village Idiot" model. Of all the computers in the house, only ONE is connected to the internet. It is an old bear of a crufted-together bitty-box, running...guess what? Winduhs 98. After all, it's solely Microsoft's fault that we have such lax standards that internet criminals were allowed to gain such a foothold. So, Windows is the "Village Idiot" whose job it is to talk to the internet. The installation disks are ready at hand(acquired free like the machine was, of course! I'm too stinkin' proud to pay for a microsoft product!), just "format C:\" the drive and re-load it as necessary. There are about ten anti-virus/spam/adware/anti-stupidity-in-general programs on the machine, as a token gesture. No software protection will ever work. I also manually scrub the file system weekly, and the family knows better than to even attempt to save any file on this machine. That's what the other computers and the stack of floppy disks are for. The floppies get scanned on a Linux.
The other computers get to run the REAL operating systems and do the REAL work...this method isn't foolproof, but it's so good that I bet there's only 1% of the scumbags on the net that could figure out how to get around all that. And never mind what system is less vulnerable, more robust, etc. Just let the "Village Idiot" get raped by the mess it created, and protect the GOOD computers.
PS My wife also has WebTV. Surf the net that way, there's NO HARD DRIVE TO INFECT! I predict that in the future, using the internet will be more like cell phone usage or WebTV and will have less and less to do with computers. Thank God, maybe the September that never ended will at last go away!