And do you think Mr Linux is a moron? Just let him understand what his needs are by himself, and then he will do what worths the effort to get them acomplished.
"Linux still needs to be made easier for the newbie"
Poor Mr Linux, ignorant about his own very needs.
"If linux is ready for YOUR desktop, fine"
It is. I've been using it as such for years.
"you're not asking much of it"
Your opinion.
"I, on the other hand, need more than Linux currently offers"
Your bad.
Anyway, I wouldn't say you are asking more from Microsoft than I; what you are asking for is merely *different*. On the other hand, I really can't see why different needs wouldn't or shouldn't be covered by different operative systems.
"Maybe there are OTHER reasons to switch besides the GUI"
Of course there are, so what?
We are not talking now about all these OTHER differences, but THIS ONE. Evidently you are not going to move (if at all) because the many things that are equal, but because the ones that are different. So if the GUI was different and now it's the same there's obviously one reason less to change, no matter how many OTHER reasons still stay.
"If it has the "same" UI as Windows, then the UI ceases to be a reason to switch?"
Yes, of course. Why somebody would change just to stay the same?
"I thought and felt that the UI differences were more of a challenge against my decision to switch than an incentive"
Then, the most you can say is that having the same GUI wouldn't be a deterrent for you to change but it's obvious it's not a decision maker either!
-Why do you use Magick Soap instead of Ultrawhite soap? -Uhhh... because Magick Soap cleans the same, costs the same and I can find it exactly in the same shops than Ultrawhite.
No: you make your decision (either to stay or to move) because of the *differences*.
"The solution I want will give me the layout control that Word and real desktop publishing systems have and the modularity, programmability, and equation features of LaTeX"
"Just imagine an incapacited captain in a 747, with this co-pilot only trained in a sim having to do a no visibility, one engine out go around in a bad african airport."
Do you really mind it would be better a rooky co-pilot with only few hours of CAVOK flying in the real thing and no simulator?
It would be a tough situation anyway, but I know for sure that under these circumnstances I'd prefer the simulator-trained guy 100 times out of 100.
"The good simulators cost far more than a small craft"
But the operation costs are much much lower and you can "take out" much much more "flying" hours from a given simulator than from a real plane (a simulator can "fly" almost 24x7 while a Cessna is far from it).
Of course your two points are *big* advantages too.
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either (not at least on a distinguishable manner from that on the simulator).
"You can't feel the resistance in the stick to know that you must trim the aircraft"
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either, unless using force-feedback in exactly the same manner a simulator would do.
"You can't look around out of the windows and scan for traffic"
You can hardly do it on a big Airbus or Boing either.
"Overall, it just isn't the same"
Overall, "flying" an Airbus 360 simulator is much much (as in orders of magnitud that much) "the real thing" than flying a real Cessna.
"IMHO the safest way to train a pilot to fly large planes is the tried and true method of having them start on the smaller stuff, and then work their way up a step at a time to flying the big stuff."
I don't think anybody thinks otherwise. Probably hiring the pilot that were through all the process *and* had war-time fighter experience is even better but, you know, not everytime you can get the best you'd ask for. The point is if you can use simulators *more* without critically compromising security and in a more cost-effective fashion.
"Why would you want to flip it on the fly? I thought the parent thread's point was to get the OS setup and secured, and then hardware jumper it to read only"
Yeah, that's quite easy on a publicly exposed machine where almost weekly some security-concerning bug is found... specially talking about Gentoo as the OS of choice!
"It's a nice theory that such documentation can be kept on paper..."
Of course it is.
"but it doesn't work in practice over the long term"
I can demonstrate it works: it works for me, so it's doable.
"unless it is audited constantly."
I don't think you understood it is not the whole wiki that needs to be bulked in paper, but only the process to get the wiki online (and the whole contingency plan, if you are serious about it). The wiki is expected to change daily, but that subsection of it (wiki online and contingency plans) is not.
Of course people may fail at doing their work even then, but of course too that can happen with *any* duty on a company. There's a point where you must confy on your people or fire them and hire one you can confy on.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to give you a solution for your whole company problems. There must be procedures to audit critical functional elements (it's not about IT, but about the company as a whole; if you are worried about people not doing an easily doable task like printing a web page that will only change rarely, what would you do about your company beancounters' work, for instance?). And technical and social aids can come to help you too: are you *really* worried about people not printing that page? Is the asset to be protected valuable enough? Well: program an event asociated to that page so it is automatically printed at a given remote location whenever it changes and/or make the fact of failing to print it and move to the proper place a seriously enough offense to fire the one that forgot about it *and* make sure such a fact is properly known by the people at the task...or, hey, think by yourself about a better procedure for *your* environment. The one I outlined do works on mine one, so I don't need anything else.
"It screams Wiki to me to... until the Wiki server is offline."
Scream "paper" for that ocassions.
"How do you handle documentation that is stored on a centralized bit of storage that may be inaccessible when the documentation is needed?"
Think about it for a moment. Do you really need the "Operations manual for the Hooly Pahula branch office" when your wiki comes off-line? What for? (I won't accept as an answer "but my tech doc wiki is at our Hooly Pahula branch office", you dork). If you are serious about your documentation (and so it seems if you indeed develop a "hard to sustain under PHB practices tool" like a seemingly unproffesional -front typical PHB's point of view, wiki) all that you need is start the wiki page about coming back your wiki online with something like "There's a paper copy of this page here (on site location) and here (off site location). Whenever you modify this page, you should print fresh copies and put them on said locations ASAP (or prefirably evean sooner)", and a big "README FIRST" link on the wiki's frontpage to the online wiki recovery page to be sure all related people knows about it. This is of course valid for the general backup/recovery practices manual too.
"a business making money off destroying currency (and costing the government money) might be [a crime]"
Yes, it should be a punishable crime... and some public workers should pay for it.
How is it possible to have things so upwards?
It is *not* "costing the government money"; it is costing the *taxpayers'* money. It is the government the one that is using something to guarantee something of less value. It is the government's fault and it is the government the one that should pay for such a deep arrogance about thrashing away tax-payers' money.
Well, the government declares owing me a cent by means of an item called "a cent". OK, that's the government side of the deal; it had all the powers to choose a piece of paper or a Ferrari to stablish its debt against me. But then, someone else offers me 1.73 cents for such a token. Why shouldn't I accept it? Despite what the government says, the *thruth* is that I'm liberating the government of a "contract" with me. In what crazy world is the debtor able to punish the one that wanted to condom the debt?
"A parasite must be alive, and a virus has no function at all, until inside something else."
Thus making the paramount example of a parasite: it relays on the organnels and metabolic activity of its hosts to the extreme a virus is only alive when within its host.
That ignores *a* definition of parasite (a medical one, not a biological one, by the way).
Virus are certainly not autotrophian, nor predators, nor mutualists nor a few more kinds I don't know their English translations. What else but parasites?
"and the first species that needs to exhibit self-control because we actually have the ability to really screw things up globally"
No, we are not "the first species to have the ability to really screw things up globally" but the first *society*. Unless, of course, you take, say, ancient greeks to be a different species from current humankind. They felt too that there were "bad" things and "good" things, while they certainly were not so powerful. The different is not on our ability to screw things up, but the fact that we are selfconcious and with moral perception of our facts and thoughts.
And yes, what we are doing with our world and with ourselves is mainly and basically evil.
"but the holocaust was a targeted, conscious effort to kill"
So what?
I mean, if we are to accept the grand-grandparent arguments the fact was that some died so the reproduction chances for their genetic pool were reduced and the killers made that way some more space for them and their gen pool. The fact that it was through "a targeted, conscious effort to kill" means nothing in that regard.
"Ahh, so respecting your mother, a single solitary person, is more important than respecting an entire species?"
Well, I won't opinate about the parent's poster assertion about some slashdotter's ethics, but I must say that regarding what he said about average IQ he must be plainly wrong if you understand such a simple assertion suuuuuuch upwards.
Now, I'll explain for the youngsters listening: If you'd find rude a joke about your mother over your mother's grave *even* if she is only "a single solitary person" why don't you find the same -or worse, about an *entire* species' grave?
"I'd hope that he has a bit more knowledge about the issue than the journalists at CNN do."
Yes. Or else how is it possible for somebody to say about such a dolphin "For the first time in nearly fifty years another mammal [...] has been extinct" when it's publicly known that 'Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica' also known as "bucardo" was declared extinct on Jan. the 5th of 2000? Six years doesn't count as "nearly fifty years" on my recon. And we are not talking about a species living in some unknown third world corner; that's from old Europe, you know...
Wait! you can claim that it doesn't count, since "bucardo" is not an species but a subspecies, and there still remain other subspecies ('C. pyrenaica hispanica' and 'C. pyrenaica victoriae'; 'C. pyrenaica lusitanica', the other known subspecies became extinct by 1892), but then so do is the white dolphin (provided we are talking indeed about 'Sousa chinensis chinensis', since this is not told neither on Slashdot's article nor in the one referenced from cnn.com).
So what we have here is: 1) CNN is quite a miserable news agency since in a 'scientific' news was not able to provide relevant information about what they were really talking about. 2) Slashdot's editors seem to be nothing better since they are unable to provide missing relevant information. 3) Not surprisingly (cf. 1) they are even more than miserably since they are plainly wrong because they are either... 3.a) Not talking about an extinct species since 'Sousa chinensis plumbea' doesn't seem to be (currently) endangered or... 3.b) Is far from 50 years that the world loses a mammal at the taxonomy level of the one currently at stake, if we take "species" in the sense assumed in this news (6 years at most, and remember 'C. pyrenaica pyrenaica' is not "functionally extinct" but even beyond miracle, *absolutly* extincted).
No; it's never smart to limit yourself to whatever nuisances a third party might inflict to you.
It might be smart to have systems that won't allow but *your* signed boot CDs, but this move (if true, I really doubt it) can only be smart... if you are Dell Corp.
"Because of all of these problems, biometrics should only be used in two scenarios"
What about the old addaggio? "Something you have, something you know, something you are". This triplet is equally valid for low, mid and high level security. It doesn't seem so hard to get even within a PHB skull. Then, why things are *so* badly broken by design? (remember the article: there were a *single* hole within a *single* app, and somebody got *full* access to a mid privacy level database. Multilayer security someone?).
Can you explain then, please, how is it that this kind of problem is *exclusive* to the USA in the whole world?
Can you please explain me how all european countries (to name some you might find liminary civilized) have no problems *at all* with your "dificult to manage" unique-ID issue?
Slashdot Mirror
"Linux still needs commercial apps"
And do you think Mr Linux is a moron? Just let him understand what his needs are by himself, and then he will do what worths the effort to get them acomplished.
"Linux still needs to be made easier for the newbie"
Poor Mr Linux, ignorant about his own very needs.
"If linux is ready for YOUR desktop, fine"
It is. I've been using it as such for years.
"you're not asking much of it"
Your opinion.
"I, on the other hand, need more than Linux currently offers"
Your bad.
Anyway, I wouldn't say you are asking more from Microsoft than I; what you are asking for is merely *different*.
On the other hand, I really can't see why different needs wouldn't or shouldn't be covered by different operative systems.
"Maybe there are OTHER reasons to switch besides the GUI"
Of course there are, so what?
We are not talking now about all these OTHER differences, but THIS ONE. Evidently you are not going to move (if at all) because the many things that are equal, but because the ones that are different. So if the GUI was different and now it's the same there's obviously one reason less to change, no matter how many OTHER reasons still stay.
"If it has the "same" UI as Windows, then the UI ceases to be a reason to switch?"
Yes, of course. Why somebody would change just to stay the same?
"I thought and felt that the UI differences were more of a challenge against my decision to switch than an incentive"
Then, the most you can say is that having the same GUI wouldn't be a deterrent for you to change but it's obvious it's not a decision maker either!
-Why do you use Magick Soap instead of Ultrawhite soap?
-Uhhh... because Magick Soap cleans the same, costs the same and I can find it exactly in the same shops than Ultrawhite.
No: you make your decision (either to stay or to move) because of the *differences*.
"The GUI is one of the reasons they stick with windows."
So it were, they would never migrate from Windows 3.1 GUI to Windows 95, nor from Windows 95 to Windows XP.
The two reasons I hear the most about sticking on windows are:
1) Windows-only apps
2) Windows-only apps
"The issue is with a file locking option which fails on NFS shares."
So you disable file locking as a solution? I'd bet an NFS share is the one environment you would want file locking the most!
"The solution I want will give me the layout control that Word and real desktop publishing systems have and the modularity, programmability, and equation features of LaTeX"
Did you try LyX, then?
"Just imagine an incapacited captain in a 747, with this co-pilot only trained in a sim having to do a no visibility, one engine out go around in a bad african airport."
Do you really mind it would be better a rooky co-pilot with only few hours of CAVOK flying in the real thing and no simulator?
It would be a tough situation anyway, but I know for sure that under these circumnstances I'd prefer the simulator-trained guy 100 times out of 100.
"The good simulators cost far more than a small craft"
But the operation costs are much much lower and you can "take out" much much more "flying" hours from a given simulator than from a real plane (a simulator can "fly" almost 24x7 while a Cessna is far from it).
Of course your two points are *big* advantages too.
"You can't feel the wind bouncing you around"
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either (not at least on a distinguishable manner from that on the simulator).
"You can't feel the resistance in the stick to know that you must trim the aircraft"
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either, unless using force-feedback in exactly the same manner a simulator would do.
"You can't look around out of the windows and scan for traffic"
You can hardly do it on a big Airbus or Boing either.
"Overall, it just isn't the same"
Overall, "flying" an Airbus 360 simulator is much much (as in orders of magnitud that much) "the real thing" than flying a real Cessna.
"IMHO the safest way to train a pilot to fly large planes is the tried and true method of having them start on the smaller stuff, and then work their way up a step at a time to flying the big stuff."
I don't think anybody thinks otherwise. Probably hiring the pilot that were through all the process *and* had war-time fighter experience is even better but, you know, not everytime you can get the best you'd ask for. The point is if you can use simulators *more* without critically compromising security and in a more cost-effective fashion.
"Why would you want to flip it on the fly? I thought the parent thread's point was to get the OS setup and secured, and then hardware jumper it to read only"
Yeah, that's quite easy on a publicly exposed machine where almost weekly some security-concerning bug is found... specially talking about Gentoo as the OS of choice!
"It's a nice theory that such documentation can be kept on paper..."
..or, hey, think by yourself about a better procedure for *your* environment. The one I outlined do works on mine one, so I don't need anything else.
Of course it is.
"but it doesn't work in practice over the long term"
I can demonstrate it works: it works for me, so it's doable.
"unless it is audited constantly."
I don't think you understood it is not the whole wiki that needs to be bulked in paper, but only the process to get the wiki online (and the whole contingency plan, if you are serious about it). The wiki is expected to change daily, but that subsection of it (wiki online and contingency plans) is not.
Of course people may fail at doing their work even then, but of course too that can happen with *any* duty on a company. There's a point where you must confy on your people or fire them and hire one you can confy on.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to give you a solution for your whole company problems. There must be procedures to audit critical functional elements (it's not about IT, but about the company as a whole; if you are worried about people not doing an easily doable task like printing a web page that will only change rarely, what would you do about your company beancounters' work, for instance?). And technical and social aids can come to help you too: are you *really* worried about people not printing that page? Is the asset to be protected valuable enough? Well: program an event asociated to that page so it is automatically printed at a given remote location whenever it changes and/or make the fact of failing to print it and move to the proper place a seriously enough offense to fire the one that forgot about it *and* make sure such a fact is properly known by the people at the task.
"It screams Wiki to me to... until the Wiki server is offline."
Scream "paper" for that ocassions.
"How do you handle documentation that is stored on a centralized bit of storage that may be inaccessible when the documentation is needed?"
Think about it for a moment. Do you really need the "Operations manual for the Hooly Pahula branch office" when your wiki comes off-line? What for? (I won't accept as an answer "but my tech doc wiki is at our Hooly Pahula branch office", you dork). If you are serious about your documentation (and so it seems if you indeed develop a "hard to sustain under PHB practices tool" like a seemingly unproffesional -front typical PHB's point of view, wiki) all that you need is start the wiki page about coming back your wiki online with something like "There's a paper copy of this page here (on site location) and here (off site location). Whenever you modify this page, you should print fresh copies and put them on said locations ASAP (or prefirably evean sooner)", and a big "README FIRST" link on the wiki's frontpage to the online wiki recovery page to be sure all related people knows about it. This is of course valid for the general backup/recovery practices manual too.
"a business making money off destroying currency (and costing the government money) might be [a crime]"
Yes, it should be a punishable crime... and some public workers should pay for it.
How is it possible to have things so upwards?
It is *not* "costing the government money"; it is costing the *taxpayers'* money. It is the government the one that is using something to guarantee something of less value. It is the government's fault and it is the government the one that should pay for such a deep arrogance about thrashing away tax-payers' money.
Well, the government declares owing me a cent by means of an item called "a cent". OK, that's the government side of the deal; it had all the powers to choose a piece of paper or a Ferrari to stablish its debt against me. But then, someone else offers me 1.73 cents for such a token. Why shouldn't I accept it? Despite what the government says, the *thruth* is that I'm liberating the government of a "contract" with me. In what crazy world is the debtor able to punish the one that wanted to condom the debt?
"A parasite must be alive, and a virus has no function at all, until inside something else."
Thus making the paramount example of a parasite: it relays on the organnels and metabolic activity of its hosts to the extreme a virus is only alive when within its host.
"That ignores the definition of parasite."
That ignores *a* definition of parasite (a medical one, not a biological one, by the way).
Virus are certainly not autotrophian, nor predators, nor mutualists nor a few more kinds I don't know their English translations. What else but parasites?
"and the first species that needs to exhibit self-control because we actually have the ability to really screw things up globally"
No, we are not "the first species to have the ability to really screw things up globally" but the first *society*. Unless, of course, you take, say, ancient greeks to be a different species from current humankind. They felt too that there were "bad" things and "good" things, while they certainly were not so powerful. The different is not on our ability to screw things up, but the fact that we are selfconcious and with moral perception of our facts and thoughts.
And yes, what we are doing with our world and with ourselves is mainly and basically evil.
"but the holocaust was a targeted, conscious effort to kill"
So what?
I mean, if we are to accept the grand-grandparent arguments the fact was that some died so the reproduction chances for their genetic pool were reduced and the killers made that way some more space for them and their gen pool. The fact that it was through "a targeted, conscious effort to kill" means nothing in that regard.
I for one... yadda, yadda... overlords... yadda, yadda...
"Ahh, so respecting your mother, a single solitary person, is more important than respecting an entire species?"
Well, I won't opinate about the parent's poster assertion about some slashdotter's ethics, but I must say that regarding what he said about average IQ he must be plainly wrong if you understand such a simple assertion suuuuuuch upwards.
Now, I'll explain for the youngsters listening:
If you'd find rude a joke about your mother over your mother's grave *even* if she is only "a single solitary person" why don't you find the same -or worse, about an *entire* species' grave?
"I'd hope that he has a bit more knowledge about the issue than the journalists at CNN do."
Yes. Or else how is it possible for somebody to say about such a dolphin "For the first time in nearly fifty years another mammal [...] has been extinct" when it's publicly known that 'Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica' also known as "bucardo" was declared extinct on Jan. the 5th of 2000? Six years doesn't count as "nearly fifty years" on my recon. And we are not talking about a species living in some unknown third world corner; that's from old Europe, you know...
Wait! you can claim that it doesn't count, since "bucardo" is not an species but a subspecies, and there still remain other subspecies ('C. pyrenaica hispanica' and 'C. pyrenaica victoriae'; 'C. pyrenaica lusitanica', the other known subspecies became extinct by 1892), but then so do is the white dolphin (provided we are talking indeed about 'Sousa chinensis chinensis', since this is not told neither on Slashdot's article nor in the one referenced from cnn.com).
So what we have here is:
1) CNN is quite a miserable news agency since in a 'scientific' news was not able to provide relevant information about what they were really talking about.
2) Slashdot's editors seem to be nothing better since they are unable to provide missing relevant information.
3) Not surprisingly (cf. 1) they are even more than miserably since they are plainly wrong because they are either...
3.a) Not talking about an extinct species since 'Sousa chinensis plumbea' doesn't seem to be (currently) endangered or...
3.b) Is far from 50 years that the world loses a mammal at the taxonomy level of the one currently at stake, if we take "species" in the sense assumed in this news (6 years at most, and remember 'C. pyrenaica pyrenaica' is not "functionally extinct" but even beyond miracle, *absolutly* extincted).
"No, in some facilities it's smart"
No; it's never smart to limit yourself to whatever nuisances a third party might inflict to you.
It might be smart to have systems that won't allow but *your* signed boot CDs, but this move (if true, I really doubt it) can only be smart... if you are Dell Corp.
"Because of all of these problems, biometrics should only be used in two scenarios"
What about the old addaggio? "Something you have, something you know, something you are". This triplet is equally valid for low, mid and high level security. It doesn't seem so hard to get even within a PHB skull. Then, why things are *so* badly broken by design? (remember the article: there were a *single* hole within a *single* app, and somebody got *full* access to a mid privacy level database. Multilayer security someone?).
"Unfortunately, there's no easy answer."
Can you explain then, please, how is it that this kind of problem is *exclusive* to the USA in the whole world?
Can you please explain me how all european countries (to name some you might find liminary civilized) have no problems *at all* with your "dificult to manage" unique-ID issue?
"Why is this comment rated informative ?"
Because it gave *gasp* _information_ to the one who asked for it?
"Answer: Windows."
Answer#2: BIOS.