Simply, the enterprise software vendors themselves. At this point, they'd all have to be wheelchair bound given how much they shoot themselves in the foot.
Over the years their prices have risen out of sync with target client business revenue, activity, and need not to mention the changing economic scene.
Their software often seems written explicitly to confound the most experienced users and administrators and effectively prevent any ease in enterprise-wide roll-out, installation, upgrading, and administration.
Their licensing models bear no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the usage of the target businesses, and frequently are outright hostile to newer technology usage such as multiprocessor workstations and thin clients.
For instance, I have yet to have a single installation of any Computer Associates offering go smoothly, or anything that might be mistaken for semi-smoothly. A demo copy of Unicenter once hosed a workstation I tried it on. Given the models, methods, and practices currently standard in the world of Windows programming, and the prodigious resources of CA, that takes Herculean effort to do.
Remedy ARS anyone? I'm sure this can't be the only software with an interface that would make a sadomasochistic OS/2 2.1 adherent's blood curdle.
Siebel? I worked for a company that tried their code. We lost 500% productivity almost overnight. Everyone rebelled by continuing to use Remedy ARS. You have to write some horrendously bad stuff to make people prefer RARS to your offering.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution. Any corporation that isn't run by some weird eccentrics is going to avoid paying a code cowboy team to customize apps of all kinds, in all places in the business, and then pay their legal people overtime to make sure they are in compliance with three or six different open source-ish licensing models. As it is, there are major corporations shovelling massive greenbacks into Redmond to get Windows source access to get custom builds for their desktops. Or were when 95 was the standard. Now they might just put up with the comparatively less quirky WinXP Pro and pay a few junior desktop nerds a whole lot less.
Many companies today, trying to cut costs everywhere, are removing a lot of very useful software that their people got very comfortable with and were very proficient with, further eroding productivity. How sad is it that the vendor of the gui has overpriced it to the point that their client would rather do without and simply make use of the command prompt interface of the routers and switches instead?
All in all, things are not in the same way they used to be seven years ago. That does not mean however that Open Source is going to be the magic solution. OS still costs money. Programmers and support personnel and trainers do not work for free. I think neglect of taking that into account is the single biggest blindspot of the OSS boosters and if they don't stop acting as though the fruits of others' labors should be free on a silver platter and come with no cost, they will blow a golden opportunity to expand the usage of software in big business and simply hand it back to Microsoft, Siebel, etc.
Fast forward to 2005: The cost of hardware has dropped substantially, and Linux has matured enough to be useable for the average person.
What color is the sky in this alternative universe you speak of and how can one get there?
Knoppix LiveCDs may work for the average person, but beyond that, nope. Not happening. Getting Real Player installed and working, Windows Media and Quicktime compatibility, Java and Flash to work work, etc. are more often than not things not for the average person.
This is why Windows still leads the pack for the average person:ease of use. Double-click, check boxes, click some more, it's installed. No./config, no yum search vlc, no any nonsense.
Compare the installation of nVidia drivers on FC3 versus Windows. Try from Gnome or KDe and oops, you can't do it with X running. Okay, where exactly is it documented on how to kill X and go to straight command prompt? Better Google and hope you don't ask the wrong people who will belittle and bully you because you aren't as l33t as they are.
Easy enough for entry-level natural-born-techies, maybe. Not for average middle of the road users who can't even manage to stop asking where the "any" key is.
Government which is already notorious for being censorial and worse would then be their cable, Internet, and telephony service provider. Why not just make this a subdivision of the public safety department which covers the state police?
My eyes cannot roll enough to express how stupid letting the government be your utility company is and how much it smacks of Soviet-style living where the state was in charge of and owned everything prior to glasnost. The logical outcome of this is invasion of privacy, dicking around with your service by political factions in charge who don't view you favorably, corruption, and in the end re-privatization after massive political battles.
The other thought is that this would be run about as competently as the Burlington Health Department has been vigilant in keeping such places as the local Burger King from giving people food poisining. (locals know what I mean)
You may have nothing to hide, but it is still your nothing. Hiding your car under a tarp doesn't mean it was stolen, putting your family jewels in a safe doesn't mean they were ill-gotten, having intestines in your body and condoms in your pocket doesn't mean you're a drug mule. Are you hiding something because you don't report it to all and sundry 24/7/365 just in case they missed the news, as if their not knowing == you are doing something wrong?
The notion that selective use of encryption implies something to hide from the state is like saying not putting your beat up pick-up truck under a tarp while putting your Trans Am in a garage implies grand theft auto. Utter horsecr*p.
Windows is not the chief issue. USER STUPIDITY is and like hydrogen in the universe, we on Earth have an inexhaustible supply of it.
We in support know that the single biggest flaw on the Windows platform is that Outlook and Outlook Express display all messages in the preview pane by default and display all messages in full HTML with Javascript, Active X, etc. all ready to run.
We also know that should the malware pushers not be brilliant enough to code a web format e-mail that will do their dirty work automatically, all they need to do is craft the e-mail with just the slightest enticing subject and content and the avergage user will double-click the.pif,.exe,.scr,.bat, etc., file without even thinking about it and no antivirus package in the world can stop an executable program from running which is not coded like known viruses but nevertheless does bad things. It's trivial to write an app that wipes a hard drive and to the system, it looks like the user is installing just another program.
We also know that the average user cannot resist going to places they shouldn't, and want everything for nothing. Pay porn sites are remarkably spyware free. Danni's Hard Drive doesn't hose your machine. You get decent content. You pay. But the average user wants their jollies for free and malware pushers know this all too well and so they craft ten million sites promising free nude shots of Brittney Spears and sure enough, machines are hosed.
On top of this users cannot seem to resist going to places they are pointedly told they should not, such as sites which are known and documented to be traps. Like the kids in House of a 1000 Corpses, they want to go see the dangerous evil spooky place and so off they surf to the wrong side of the Internet tracks.
As users adopt Macintosh OSX and varieties of Linux, there will be more malware and especially rootkits set out and about waiting for users to go after them and defeat any amount of inherent system stability and security.
The response of the anti-Microsoft camp has been that their OSes CANNOT run the malware code in the first place. Neither can their OSes run a lot of fun stuff at Yahoo and ten dozen game sites either without a lot of techie contortions.
Pathetic inability to do what Windows and Internet Explorer can do easily is not a security method any more than obscurity in documentation and coding is. The same vulnerabilities inherent in Windows that make these awful malware packages easy to get infested with also in the right hands allow great fun and games and web-based everything.
Notice I said "in the right hands". I administer my wife's machine very carefully. She's a Yahoo True Believer. She's also learning to be more careful in what she does because I am teaching her to. People who don't view their e-mails in glorious HTML everything, don't click attachments in their mail, don't download and install stuff from sites they don't know or trust, don't visit known malware sites or sites that should be assumed to be malware a priori are people with far fewer issues.
Firefox and Kubuntu is not a true solution. The true solution is user education, proper system administration, and a lack of laziness in action and thought. Of course, given how many people install Linux and always work on their machines as root, put their administrator account in the sudoer file right from go with zero restrictions, give privileged access to any and all apps from the word go, disable every security precaution every chance they get, etc.... well, it would seem laziness in thought and action isn't limited to the Windows world at all.
"Hey (insert user here), why not visit our repo site and get all the Linux hotness you can stand? We'll give you full directions on how to configure your system to use our repository to automatically get all the goodies you really want on Linux!" The day is coming, people.
From TFA:
"Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy -- the people who labor to produce these copyrighted materials," said John Richter, acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.
Absolutely. We all know people like George Lucas, Ben Stiller, Tom Sizemore, etc. are just dying of starvation. Why just the other day, I heard someone was going to sue this bum they tripped over on Ventura Boulevard, but they decided it would be a waste of time when they saw it was Jim Carrey. Supposedly Robert DeNiro is down to his last penny thanks to torrents.
That's our government, ready to execute multi-state raids to keep the rich as they are. But do basic detective work to track down household burglars and recover your stolen property? Fark no...
...today, I learned that I am not alone in every so often having the urge to publicly post nothing of any value in case one out of six billion people on this planet care to read it.
I suddenly don't feel so bad anymore.
Of course, this merely confirms my long-standing belief that the Internet has become the fastest way for more people than ever before to say less than ever before.
Will they teach idiot dead-panning for the cameras for an IBM commercial or will they teach basics?
The majority of kids coming out of schools these days no zip about *nix. / is says "web site" to them and they only tend to think of \ and "dos" and "ick".
Despite their intentions in this, they should have an entire chapter of the course dedicated as "Google: How to Find People Who Know More Than You". No matter what else they teach in the course, they need to teach the most basic skill needed in *nix and that's how to pick the brains of others who've already blazed the trails and learn what they know.
Infinitely more valuable than any course's limited coverage. Although, teaching them not to take lightly the considerable power of rm would be a nice one. On behalf of support people official and unofficial tired of explaining where their entire disk went.
Enormous external energies trying to shut it... check.
Instability... check.
Yup, every single thing about wormholes said so far in the pop-sci world looks to be largely a lot of the same. Big energy to make it work, and then it doesn't for very long. Did the BBC report just summarize what's already been written by Kaku, Pournelle, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam?
I think we have another instance of a not-so-new formula for getting something on Slashdot: collect what's already gone before, write the same conclusion in new words and sentences, put a new author's name on it, proclaim it sensationally.
I'm waiting for the reports on whether wormholes can even be used for transport regarding effects on space-time geometery and how that relates to basic particle stability, ie, can the conditions in and around wormholes cause proton decay, or undo weak or strong nuclear forces? We have no idea what would happen to matter going into any wormhole that would actually be possible as opposed to ideal cases on paper. What we use for conjecture on paper bears little relationship to the real physical world frequently. What if we're totally wrong about quantum electrodynamics inside a wormhole?
This makes you wonder if pizza and coke lead to gamers but Jolt and Fritos lead to coders. So then Twinkies lead to stoners? "Dude, why are you trying to compile and frag at the same time?"
"My mother had a real junk food habit when she was pregnant. Twinkie?"
I heard this story about the "unsolvable" problem mistakenly done as homework from my junior year algebra teacher in high school and wished I could get something like that to happen but all he ever put on the board was a series of quadratic equations that no one in class noticed were linked by variables and values. We ended up piecemeal solving a problem for him for his brush-up night course at university. RIP...
We saw such things in Minority Report. I'd become a Cereal Killer if I had to walk through a supermarket with live animations playing on the surface of every box of cereal, never mind all the other packages.
(in fifty-four part harmony in the appliance section) "I'm George Forman and this is my lean mean fat reducing grilling machine."
Wander over to the macaroni aisle and really cheese Italian accented pitchmen are waiting, vying for your attention, and thanks to the AI of the times, arguing with each other. "Your pasta is sh*t! They need to try my macaroni." "Your noodle is limp you bastard!"
And then you wander next door to the news agent where a nice selection of adult magazines await. So maybe animated video everything isn't that bad after all...
It's all leading up to the climactic finish where the prequels allow us to better appreciate the scope of the triumph: the Sith destroyed, republican government reinstated, and Anakin redeemed.
I thought the Empire was a Republican government...
Oh, you meant they went back to being a republic which is entirely different. And you meant that fictional world and not ours...
"So Dave, any idea if you can knock your cpu down a few cycles? The tremors are rattling my windows and keeping my kids up at night and the pyroclastic flow last week incinerated the fence, my garage, and my fishing boat. I know that building a Doom 3 terminal server capable of hosting five million players in real time is important to you, but..."
Speaking of which, go read Eric K. Drexler's Engines of Creation regarding the kind of cooling that some nanocomputers would require. Pipes with flows of many gallons per minute, superheated high pressure steam being output...
Between SeaLab 2021 and Harvey Birdman I get all the sick adult animated humor I need. Getting them on DVD would be even better. Hey, I actually have the first one's first season on DVD. Cool, now I just gotta wait until every other ep of both are out and by that time, we might see Futurama ready to roll. Now where did I put my Best Buy gift cards from Xmas?
Does NASA know that the IRS and divorce attorneys already have projects regarding the extraction of blood from a stone or is this another case of the left hand not knowing what the right foot is doing?
BTW, the answer is in biomechanics/technorganics/nanotech so why worry now? I'm sure not too long from now and in semi-unrelated work, someoneone will create a method involving chemical dissolution of the rocks into a liquid that can be passed through microchannel crackers run efficiently on solar energy and the chemical mix reprocessed at the tail end of the closed system to be used over and over again.
$250K versus what this is truly worth, becoming the largest purveyor of oxygen generators for colonization in this system? Not like some companies haven't already forseen the vast riches in coming up with this stuff. We just haven't been given the cool write-up in SciAm yet.
Of course it will. Archimedes' mirrors and light to cause burning of ships during sieges idea has defense application for SDF2 and-
Terminal Session Ended
UNLAWFUL CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ACCESSED
Please stay where you are for apprehension
PUT DOWN THE NACHOS AND STEP AWAY FROM THE OVERCLOCKED PC
Your friends, Department of Homeland Security
And how will AOL afford all the mail clogging CDs without siphoning off funds from Time Warner?
AOL is being pushed back out the door to live on its own (like a middle-aged chronically unemployed geek being kicked out by mom finally). Oracle is still living under Darth Ellison. Netscape is using Microsoft's engine as an option (in an amazing display of tacit acknowledgement of defeat) even as Firefox continues to batter MSIE market share. If only they'd gotten together years ago...
"You've got queries!"
Oh well.
At least they've still got legions of lusers to rely on... until they finally close their checking accounts to keep AOL from charging them for service they cancelled in writing six times over the course of a year.
As a friend once said, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you can't hide it. It is still your nothing, not theirs.
Do I have to wear an ID tag at the mall with a uniform that never changes so I am always identifiable? Do I have to file an itinerary ahead of time and stick to it? No. In whatever street clothes I'm in for the day, wherever I go and whenever, I'm anonymous unless I tell someone who I am. None of their business.
Is there anything amazing in my e-mails to my family that I need to hide? Nope. Does this mean I don't have the right to hide them? Nope. My yard is boring and I have nothing to hide there. Do I tear down my fence? Nope. Do I sleep under the stars when camping instead of a tent just in case some agency wants to train their satellites on me? Do I stop wearing baseball caps and sunglasses? Nope.
Do I invite the public into my home and on my journeys to peruse everything I have and do? Nope. None of their business.
You may have nothing to hide, but it is still your nothing and if you allow the very ability to keep your own business private then you might as well move to the next step and keep a detailed by the second journal of everything you do, see, say, etc. and hand it over to the authorities, the news media, and the reality entertainment slime so you can report on yourself.
If we allow our fear of what criminals might do with a thing to instantly overpower any rational thoughts considering what we might do positively with the thing, then we might as well adopt a police state right here, right now because that is what we're asking for when we reject our own naturally existing human freedoms based on FUD.
If you'll excuse me, I have to IM and e-mail some people you don't know about subjects I'm not divulging to you through channels I don't feel like disclosing. I'm sure you'll probably be doing the same. If you don't tell me, that's just as anonymous and secretive as this system.
I already see men using electric shavers, women putting on makeup using their rear view mirror, people cocking their head 45 degrees to the side with their cells (if you're holding it, why do you need to cock your head like you're cradling a home phone handset and using both hands for other things when you're not???) and of course the usual wanna-be g-whizzes leaning so far to their right that they're practically laying across the passenger seat (probably due to excessive bling-bling dragging them down by way of gravity). Bleah.
Now this. Years ago I started saying that the FCC wanted to free up spectrum so people could have high speed wireless services advanced beyond what we have now and for no better reason really than full motion streaming video on their cell phones. I was not very far off it would seem and can see this coming here. Of course, Sprint already has video-over-cell, albiet not very useable.
So now we can have no-handed driving while people watch video pr0n on their handsets, network access clogged as people use up the availible spectrum and bandwidth with watching reruns of Survivor, and every other permutation relating to this usage.
Meanwhile, various state governments can't get together on defining what adequately hands-free usage is, regulating standard voice cell usage while driving for the public safety's sake, and we add this. Since some of the abusers are state legislators here, I can only imagine them driving into the state capitol watching the rushes of their campaign video tapings as they careen wildly back and forth across the highway while also trying to shove an arm into a suit jacket and shave off their five o'clock shadow.
And here I was working feverishly on adapting the "bat signal" concept to projecting adverts on the surface of the moon from a series of geosynchronous satellites.
Too bad, because I'm guessing everyone's favorite corporation would relish that sort of obtrusive advertising even more than they do their animated ads here on/.
Oh well, back to the drawing board... Hmmm... I wonder if white styrofoam cups have to be plain white... (Prior art! Back off you thieving philistines!) : )
If this is what is coming going forward in American business law, then we are well and truly farked in the head to do this as a country.
Some of you, heck, most of you, may well be knee-jerk thinking that anything that farks corporations is good but this is setting a really bad precedent in the way of requiring you to keep and be ready to produce evidence against you on a legal moment's notice. Essentially, they are requiring these e-mails to be kept strictly on the theory that something might be done and rather than the old method of actually doing detective work, and proving a case in a court of law, and achieving a conviction on merits and works done by law enforcement, YOU are a company owner will now be liable for doing their work for them in advance.
How long until the politicians get the idea that it would be good to extend this to everyone? School teachers, librarians, your pharmacist's e-mail... YOUR e-mail...
I don't think this line of thinking is entirely paranoid given the history of the thinking of politicians in this nation. Our nation is naively obsessed with the idea that you can simply write laws that people must essentially collect evidence of everything they do on the pretext that they might do something and we can't be bothered to detect and catch them at it so they must report on themselves.
While that may be a little far off what is not is the institutionalization of every e-mail and instant message to compose at work and send across the company network to the Internet or within the LAN being read later on by a bloated legal department there to do nothing more than play Big Brother to the proles running around cubicle land. How much more are those company lawyers going to cost a company and how many productive workers doing real useful things are going to be laid off to cover the cost?
Ever since the idea came about of corporate e-mail being fair game for federal and state law enforcement to use, not to mention litigation-happy civil trial lawyers, I've by default said zip, zero, nada in e-mails or on IM that would be of any use regarding anything I do at work. Most of my IM and e-mail use at work is therefore, non work related or work-related fluff and idol nonsense. Real business communication is still by mouth, carried through sneakernet.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply, the enterprise software vendors themselves. At this point, they'd all have to be wheelchair bound given how much they shoot themselves in the foot.
Over the years their prices have risen out of sync with target client business revenue, activity, and need not to mention the changing economic scene.
Their software often seems written explicitly to confound the most experienced users and administrators and effectively prevent any ease in enterprise-wide roll-out, installation, upgrading, and administration.
Their licensing models bear no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the usage of the target businesses, and frequently are outright hostile to newer technology usage such as multiprocessor workstations and thin clients.
For instance, I have yet to have a single installation of any Computer Associates offering go smoothly, or anything that might be mistaken for semi-smoothly. A demo copy of Unicenter once hosed a workstation I tried it on. Given the models, methods, and practices currently standard in the world of Windows programming, and the prodigious resources of CA, that takes Herculean effort to do.
Remedy ARS anyone? I'm sure this can't be the only software with an interface that would make a sadomasochistic OS/2 2.1 adherent's blood curdle.
Siebel? I worked for a company that tried their code. We lost 500% productivity almost overnight. Everyone rebelled by continuing to use Remedy ARS. You have to write some horrendously bad stuff to make people prefer RARS to your offering.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution. Any corporation that isn't run by some weird eccentrics is going to avoid paying a code cowboy team to customize apps of all kinds, in all places in the business, and then pay their legal people overtime to make sure they are in compliance with three or six different open source-ish licensing models. As it is, there are major corporations shovelling massive greenbacks into Redmond to get Windows source access to get custom builds for their desktops. Or were when 95 was the standard. Now they might just put up with the comparatively less quirky WinXP Pro and pay a few junior desktop nerds a whole lot less.
Many companies today, trying to cut costs everywhere, are removing a lot of very useful software that their people got very comfortable with and were very proficient with, further eroding productivity. How sad is it that the vendor of the gui has overpriced it to the point that their client would rather do without and simply make use of the command prompt interface of the routers and switches instead?
All in all, things are not in the same way they used to be seven years ago. That does not mean however that Open Source is going to be the magic solution. OS still costs money. Programmers and support personnel and trainers do not work for free. I think neglect of taking that into account is the single biggest blindspot of the OSS boosters and if they don't stop acting as though the fruits of others' labors should be free on a silver platter and come with no cost, they will blow a golden opportunity to expand the usage of software in big business and simply hand it back to Microsoft, Siebel, etc.
Fast forward to 2005: The cost of hardware has dropped substantially, and Linux has matured enough to be useable for the average person.
./config, no yum search vlc, no any nonsense.
What color is the sky in this alternative universe you speak of and how can one get there?
Knoppix LiveCDs may work for the average person, but beyond that, nope. Not happening. Getting Real Player installed and working, Windows Media and Quicktime compatibility, Java and Flash to work work, etc. are more often than not things not for the average person.
This is why Windows still leads the pack for the average person:ease of use. Double-click, check boxes, click some more, it's installed. No
Compare the installation of nVidia drivers on FC3 versus Windows. Try from Gnome or KDe and oops, you can't do it with X running. Okay, where exactly is it documented on how to kill X and go to straight command prompt? Better Google and hope you don't ask the wrong people who will belittle and bully you because you aren't as l33t as they are.
Easy enough for entry-level natural-born-techies, maybe. Not for average middle of the road users who can't even manage to stop asking where the "any" key is.
Usually, this means that the govenernment should have some control or ownership.
I bet if the government of Burlington, VT were right of George W. Bush, you'd not sing the same tune. I bet not one person on this board would.
Government which is already notorious for being censorial and worse would then be their cable, Internet, and telephony service provider. Why not just make this a subdivision of the public safety department which covers the state police?
My eyes cannot roll enough to express how stupid letting the government be your utility company is and how much it smacks of Soviet-style living where the state was in charge of and owned everything prior to glasnost. The logical outcome of this is invasion of privacy, dicking around with your service by political factions in charge who don't view you favorably, corruption, and in the end re-privatization after massive political battles.
The other thought is that this would be run about as competently as the Burlington Health Department has been vigilant in keeping such places as the local Burger King from giving people food poisining. (locals know what I mean)
You may have nothing to hide, but it is still your nothing. Hiding your car under a tarp doesn't mean it was stolen, putting your family jewels in a safe doesn't mean they were ill-gotten, having intestines in your body and condoms in your pocket doesn't mean you're a drug mule. Are you hiding something because you don't report it to all and sundry 24/7/365 just in case they missed the news, as if their not knowing == you are doing something wrong?
The notion that selective use of encryption implies something to hide from the state is like saying not putting your beat up pick-up truck under a tarp while putting your Trans Am in a garage implies grand theft auto. Utter horsecr*p.
Windows is not the chief issue. USER STUPIDITY is and like hydrogen in the universe, we on Earth have an inexhaustible supply of it.
.pif, .exe, .scr, .bat, etc., file without even thinking about it and no antivirus package in the world can stop an executable program from running which is not coded like known viruses but nevertheless does bad things. It's trivial to write an app that wipes a hard drive and to the system, it looks like the user is installing just another program.
We in support know that the single biggest flaw on the Windows platform is that Outlook and Outlook Express display all messages in the preview pane by default and display all messages in full HTML with Javascript, Active X, etc. all ready to run.
We also know that should the malware pushers not be brilliant enough to code a web format e-mail that will do their dirty work automatically, all they need to do is craft the e-mail with just the slightest enticing subject and content and the avergage user will double-click the
We also know that the average user cannot resist going to places they shouldn't, and want everything for nothing. Pay porn sites are remarkably spyware free. Danni's Hard Drive doesn't hose your machine. You get decent content. You pay. But the average user wants their jollies for free and malware pushers know this all too well and so they craft ten million sites promising free nude shots of Brittney Spears and sure enough, machines are hosed.
On top of this users cannot seem to resist going to places they are pointedly told they should not, such as sites which are known and documented to be traps. Like the kids in House of a 1000 Corpses, they want to go see the dangerous evil spooky place and so off they surf to the wrong side of the Internet tracks.
As users adopt Macintosh OSX and varieties of Linux, there will be more malware and especially rootkits set out and about waiting for users to go after them and defeat any amount of inherent system stability and security.
The response of the anti-Microsoft camp has been that their OSes CANNOT run the malware code in the first place. Neither can their OSes run a lot of fun stuff at Yahoo and ten dozen game sites either without a lot of techie contortions.
Pathetic inability to do what Windows and Internet Explorer can do easily is not a security method any more than obscurity in documentation and coding is. The same vulnerabilities inherent in Windows that make these awful malware packages easy to get infested with also in the right hands allow great fun and games and web-based everything.
Notice I said "in the right hands". I administer my wife's machine very carefully. She's a Yahoo True Believer. She's also learning to be more careful in what she does because I am teaching her to. People who don't view their e-mails in glorious HTML everything, don't click attachments in their mail, don't download and install stuff from sites they don't know or trust, don't visit known malware sites or sites that should be assumed to be malware a priori are people with far fewer issues.
Firefox and Kubuntu is not a true solution. The true solution is user education, proper system administration, and a lack of laziness in action and thought. Of course, given how many people install Linux and always work on their machines as root, put their administrator account in the sudoer file right from go with zero restrictions, give privileged access to any and all apps from the word go, disable every security precaution every chance they get, etc.... well, it would seem laziness in thought and action isn't limited to the Windows world at all.
"Hey (insert user here), why not visit our repo site and get all the Linux hotness you can stand? We'll give you full directions on how to configure your system to use our repository to automatically get all the goodies you really want on Linux!" The day is coming, people.
From TFA:
"Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy -- the people who labor to produce these copyrighted materials," said John Richter, acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.
Absolutely. We all know people like George Lucas, Ben Stiller, Tom Sizemore, etc. are just dying of starvation. Why just the other day, I heard someone was going to sue this bum they tripped over on Ventura Boulevard, but they decided it would be a waste of time when they saw it was Jim Carrey. Supposedly Robert DeNiro is down to his last penny thanks to torrents.
That's our government, ready to execute multi-state raids to keep the rich as they are. But do basic detective work to track down household burglars and recover your stolen property? Fark no...
...today, I learned that I am not alone in every so often having the urge to publicly post nothing of any value in case one out of six billion people on this planet care to read it.
I suddenly don't feel so bad anymore.
Of course, this merely confirms my long-standing belief that the Internet has become the fastest way for more people than ever before to say less than ever before.
(insert pointless rambling here)
Will they teach idiot dead-panning for the cameras for an IBM commercial or will they teach basics?
The majority of kids coming out of schools these days no zip about *nix. / is says "web site" to them and they only tend to think of \ and "dos" and "ick".
Despite their intentions in this, they should have an entire chapter of the course dedicated as "Google: How to Find People Who Know More Than You". No matter what else they teach in the course, they need to teach the most basic skill needed in *nix and that's how to pick the brains of others who've already blazed the trails and learn what they know.
Infinitely more valuable than any course's limited coverage. Although, teaching them not to take lightly the considerable power of rm would be a nice one. On behalf of support people official and unofficial tired of explaining where their entire disk went.
Enormous energies to open... check.
Enormous energies to keep open... check.
Enormous external energies trying to shut it... check.
Instability... check.
Yup, every single thing about wormholes said so far in the pop-sci world looks to be largely a lot of the same. Big energy to make it work, and then it doesn't for very long. Did the BBC report just summarize what's already been written by Kaku, Pournelle, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam?
I think we have another instance of a not-so-new formula for getting something on Slashdot: collect what's already gone before, write the same conclusion in new words and sentences, put a new author's name on it, proclaim it sensationally.
I'm waiting for the reports on whether wormholes can even be used for transport regarding effects on space-time geometery and how that relates to basic particle stability, ie, can the conditions in and around wormholes cause proton decay, or undo weak or strong nuclear forces? We have no idea what would happen to matter going into any wormhole that would actually be possible as opposed to ideal cases on paper. What we use for conjecture on paper bears little relationship to the real physical world frequently. What if we're totally wrong about quantum electrodynamics inside a wormhole?
This makes you wonder if pizza and coke lead to gamers but Jolt and Fritos lead to coders. So then Twinkies lead to stoners? "Dude, why are you trying to compile and frag at the same time?"
"My mother had a real junk food habit when she was pregnant. Twinkie?"
I heard this story about the "unsolvable" problem mistakenly done as homework from my junior year algebra teacher in high school and wished I could get something like that to happen but all he ever put on the board was a series of quadratic equations that no one in class noticed were linked by variables and values. We ended up piecemeal solving a problem for him for his brush-up night course at university. RIP...
Everyone and his cat can register a sourceforge project...
Funny you should say that, because my cat has this wonderful idea for an automated cat box with environmental sensors and controls based on Debian...
We saw such things in Minority Report. I'd become a Cereal Killer if I had to walk through a supermarket with live animations playing on the surface of every box of cereal, never mind all the other packages.
(in fifty-four part harmony in the appliance section) "I'm George Forman and this is my lean mean fat reducing grilling machine."
Wander over to the macaroni aisle and really cheese Italian accented pitchmen are waiting, vying for your attention, and thanks to the AI of the times, arguing with each other. "Your pasta is sh*t! They need to try my macaroni." "Your noodle is limp you bastard!"
And then you wander next door to the news agent where a nice selection of adult magazines await. So maybe animated video everything isn't that bad after all...
It's all leading up to the climactic finish where the prequels allow us to better appreciate the scope of the triumph: the Sith destroyed, republican government reinstated, and Anakin redeemed.
I thought the Empire was a Republican government...
Oh, you meant they went back to being a republic which is entirely different. And you meant that fictional world and not ours...
Nevermind.
Overclocked PCs as lava lamps using real lava...
"So Dave, any idea if you can knock your cpu down a few cycles? The tremors are rattling my windows and keeping my kids up at night and the pyroclastic flow last week incinerated the fence, my garage, and my fishing boat. I know that building a Doom 3 terminal server capable of hosting five million players in real time is important to you, but..."
Speaking of which, go read Eric K. Drexler's Engines of Creation regarding the kind of cooling that some nanocomputers would require. Pipes with flows of many gallons per minute, superheated high pressure steam being output...
Between SeaLab 2021 and Harvey Birdman I get all the sick adult animated humor I need. Getting them on DVD would be even better. Hey, I actually have the first one's first season on DVD. Cool, now I just gotta wait until every other ep of both are out and by that time, we might see Futurama ready to roll. Now where did I put my Best Buy gift cards from Xmas?
Does NASA know that the IRS and divorce attorneys already have projects regarding the extraction of blood from a stone or is this another case of the left hand not knowing what the right foot is doing?
BTW, the answer is in biomechanics/technorganics/nanotech so why worry now? I'm sure not too long from now and in semi-unrelated work, someoneone will create a method involving chemical dissolution of the rocks into a liquid that can be passed through microchannel crackers run efficiently on solar energy and the chemical mix reprocessed at the tail end of the closed system to be used over and over again.
$250K versus what this is truly worth, becoming the largest purveyor of oxygen generators for colonization in this system? Not like some companies haven't already forseen the vast riches in coming up with this stuff. We just haven't been given the cool write-up in SciAm yet.
Of course it will. Archimedes' mirrors and light to cause burning of ships during sieges idea has defense application for SDF2 and-
Terminal Session Ended UNLAWFUL CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ACCESSED Please stay where you are for apprehension PUT DOWN THE NACHOS AND STEP AWAY FROM THE OVERCLOCKED PC Your friends, Department of Homeland Security
CARRIER LOST
...who didn't see this coming?
And how will AOL afford all the mail clogging CDs without siphoning off funds from Time Warner?
AOL is being pushed back out the door to live on its own (like a middle-aged chronically unemployed geek being kicked out by mom finally). Oracle is still living under Darth Ellison. Netscape is using Microsoft's engine as an option (in an amazing display of tacit acknowledgement of defeat) even as Firefox continues to batter MSIE market share. If only they'd gotten together years ago...
"You've got queries!"
Oh well.
At least they've still got legions of lusers to rely on... until they finally close their checking accounts to keep AOL from charging them for service they cancelled in writing six times over the course of a year.
Preserving your right to privacy.
As a friend once said, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you can't hide it. It is still your nothing, not theirs.
Do I have to wear an ID tag at the mall with a uniform that never changes so I am always identifiable? Do I have to file an itinerary ahead of time and stick to it? No. In whatever street clothes I'm in for the day, wherever I go and whenever, I'm anonymous unless I tell someone who I am. None of their business.
Is there anything amazing in my e-mails to my family that I need to hide? Nope. Does this mean I don't have the right to hide them? Nope. My yard is boring and I have nothing to hide there. Do I tear down my fence? Nope. Do I sleep under the stars when camping instead of a tent just in case some agency wants to train their satellites on me? Do I stop wearing baseball caps and sunglasses? Nope.
Do I invite the public into my home and on my journeys to peruse everything I have and do? Nope. None of their business.
You may have nothing to hide, but it is still your nothing and if you allow the very ability to keep your own business private then you might as well move to the next step and keep a detailed by the second journal of everything you do, see, say, etc. and hand it over to the authorities, the news media, and the reality entertainment slime so you can report on yourself.
If we allow our fear of what criminals might do with a thing to instantly overpower any rational thoughts considering what we might do positively with the thing, then we might as well adopt a police state right here, right now because that is what we're asking for when we reject our own naturally existing human freedoms based on FUD.
If you'll excuse me, I have to IM and e-mail some people you don't know about subjects I'm not divulging to you through channels I don't feel like disclosing. I'm sure you'll probably be doing the same. If you don't tell me, that's just as anonymous and secretive as this system.
I already see men using electric shavers, women putting on makeup using their rear view mirror, people cocking their head 45 degrees to the side with their cells (if you're holding it, why do you need to cock your head like you're cradling a home phone handset and using both hands for other things when you're not???) and of course the usual wanna-be g-whizzes leaning so far to their right that they're practically laying across the passenger seat (probably due to excessive bling-bling dragging them down by way of gravity). Bleah.
Now this. Years ago I started saying that the FCC wanted to free up spectrum so people could have high speed wireless services advanced beyond what we have now and for no better reason really than full motion streaming video on their cell phones. I was not very far off it would seem and can see this coming here. Of course, Sprint already has video-over-cell, albiet not very useable.
So now we can have no-handed driving while people watch video pr0n on their handsets, network access clogged as people use up the availible spectrum and bandwidth with watching reruns of Survivor, and every other permutation relating to this usage.
Meanwhile, various state governments can't get together on defining what adequately hands-free usage is, regulating standard voice cell usage while driving for the public safety's sake, and we add this. Since some of the abusers are state legislators here, I can only imagine them driving into the state capitol watching the rushes of their campaign video tapings as they careen wildly back and forth across the highway while also trying to shove an arm into a suit jacket and shave off their five o'clock shadow.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
And here I was working feverishly on adapting the "bat signal" concept to projecting adverts on the surface of the moon from a series of geosynchronous satellites.
/.
Too bad, because I'm guessing everyone's favorite corporation would relish that sort of obtrusive advertising even more than they do their animated ads here on
Oh well, back to the drawing board... Hmmm... I wonder if white styrofoam cups have to be plain white... (Prior art! Back off you thieving philistines!) : )
If this is what is coming going forward in American business law, then we are well and truly farked in the head to do this as a country.
Some of you, heck, most of you, may well be knee-jerk thinking that anything that farks corporations is good but this is setting a really bad precedent in the way of requiring you to keep and be ready to produce evidence against you on a legal moment's notice. Essentially, they are requiring these e-mails to be kept strictly on the theory that something might be done and rather than the old method of actually doing detective work, and proving a case in a court of law, and achieving a conviction on merits and works done by law enforcement, YOU are a company owner will now be liable for doing their work for them in advance.
How long until the politicians get the idea that it would be good to extend this to everyone? School teachers, librarians, your pharmacist's e-mail... YOUR e-mail...
I don't think this line of thinking is entirely paranoid given the history of the thinking of politicians in this nation. Our nation is naively obsessed with the idea that you can simply write laws that people must essentially collect evidence of everything they do on the pretext that they might do something and we can't be bothered to detect and catch them at it so they must report on themselves.
While that may be a little far off what is not is the institutionalization of every e-mail and instant message to compose at work and send across the company network to the Internet or within the LAN being read later on by a bloated legal department there to do nothing more than play Big Brother to the proles running around cubicle land. How much more are those company lawyers going to cost a company and how many productive workers doing real useful things are going to be laid off to cover the cost?
Ever since the idea came about of corporate e-mail being fair game for federal and state law enforcement to use, not to mention litigation-happy civil trial lawyers, I've by default said zip, zero, nada in e-mails or on IM that would be of any use regarding anything I do at work. Most of my IM and e-mail use at work is therefore, non work related or work-related fluff and idol nonsense. Real business communication is still by mouth, carried through sneakernet.
Worse yet, pre-HISTK Moranis thrown in as a bonus with "Take Off" Now that's some Strange Brew.