I use Openfire/Spark where I'm at - Openfire itself is an absolute godsend. It integrates cleanly with AD, can be used as a gateway for just about any protocol you can think of, you name it.
Spark, on the other hand... well, it works well enough as long as you don't care about fonts or colors, which Spark won't let you change. For free, it's hard to argue with it, especially since it's the only client that works via Openfire's Disco feature autodiscovery protocol. That said, nobody is going to confuse Spark with a better, more mature internal IM client; by itself, it is a complete dog. Also, as others have pointed out, Spark tends to hang from time to time, even with the latest version of Java (at least in my experience).
At the same time, it is multiplatform, it is open source, and it even plays nicely with proprietary technologies (using AD and an MS SQL 2005 backend here - works great!). Plus, it has full archiving and all kinds of other good stuff.
Nah - it was BOCHS, back when they were trying to faithfully emulate the 586 chipset. Unfortunately, when they did their versioning, they decided to eat their own dog food and let their own VM handle the version numbering for them; consequently, when it came time for version 1.0, the VM spat out version "0.99989389" instead.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
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· Score: 1
I'm aware of the difference - however, at least in the Windows world, there is a very clear relationship between the two, in that viruses will frequently install rootkits after infection, and rootkits will frequently download and install viruses that, in turn, download and install more rootkits, etc.
Plus, I was trying to be kind of cheeky.:-)
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
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· Score: 1
The problem, at least in NT to XP, was that you didn't have to 'sudo' - there was no password required to escalate your permissions. Consequently, any process running under your account could trivially escalate their permissions to SYSTEM, which made it impossible for the Administrator to kill the offending process (Can you kill a process owned by root without being root?). Even worse than that, though, was that SYSTEM processes could hijack user profiles, provided they were run "interactively", leading to key loggers, numerous pop-up ads, and so on... all without any means for the user to do anything about it, short of wiping and reformatting.
Vista fixed that by breaking "interactive" mode - now, SYSTEM processes are no longer allowed to listen in on user profiles or display information on user consoles. This means fewer keyloggers, less pop-ups, and so forth. Of course, this doesn't mean no keyloggers, etc.; malicious processes are still free to run under user accounts.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I know this is going to get modded as "off topic", but let's cover this...
SYSTEM and Local System are basically one and the same, and are almost perfectly synonymous with root. Network Service would be the equivalent of the "nobody" user - i.e. an account that you can use to run low-privilege services. Administrator would be the same as a user with administrative privileges in Linux (perhaps someone in the sudoers list). The trouble, of course, was that, until Vista/2008 came along, it was trivially easy for an Administrator to escalate to SYSTEM - you just had to run a scheduled job in interactive mode (think of a cron job with no password required) and you'd not only have root access, you'd also have access to the current user's console. For an administrator, this came in handy - of course, what was handy and convenient for an administrator was just as handy and convenient for someone else.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If viruses were unique to Windows, we wouldn't have "root"kits. Instead, they'd be "Administrator"kits or perhaps "SYSTEM"kits.
Actually, the reason we can't reprocess nuclear fuel has little to do with cost - Japan, France, and countless other nuclear nations do that all the time, which is why they don't need Yucca Mountain-equivalents. Due to proliferation concerns, the US government has had a wary-to-schizophrenic relationship with nuclear fuel reprocessing. This nice little fact sheet (note - it's a PDF) helps illustrate that.
Oh, and this nuclear waste is being transported by... fairy magic? Or, are we just going to use the railways and ship the waste through a bunch of urban areas? Either way, this should be fun.
If only we actually could recycle the waste instead of throwing it away or something...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason we're talking about putting CO2 underground is because we have too much CO2 in the air to begin with. In other words, there's still plenty of oxygen to free up.
That said, if we ever start to run low, we can either release some of that sequestered CO2 or create a giant ship that turns into a metal maid-shaped being that can suck all of the oxygen off of some other planet. Y'know, whatever is cheaper or keeps the lobbyists employed.
I have no beef with 64 bit operating systems - you're absolutely right, there are some applications where being able to address serious quantities of RAM can really come in handy. That said, I do find it a little strange that most 64 bit distros don't just come pre-packaged with 32-bit libraries for little things like web browsers and the like that don't actually need full 64-bit support.
At the risk of stepping on toes, why, precisely, does your browser need more than 4 GB of RAM? Why, while we're at it, does Flash need more than 4 GB of RAM? With that in mind, why, exactly, do we need native 64-bit versions of either app?
But, if you use dedicated purpose-built hardware, all the bugs disappear, for, you see, bugs are impossible to have in hardware. Just ask the makers of the original Pentium.
Actually, you nailed it right on the head - it's possible for evolution to be proven "right" or "wrong" via testing. We can ask questions ("If I give bacteria some penicillin and don't kill off the entire colony, will the remaining bacteria evolve to have a greater resistance to that bacteria on the next go-around?") and receive answer ("Yup."). Creationism, on the other hand, is unprovable. There's no question we can ask it that it will answer usefully (i.e. The answer to the preceding question becomes, "Well, how complicated is the bacteria? We better ask The Creator, PBUH."). There's no way to prove or disprove it (For any organism that we can prove evolves, there will be a 'more complicated' one that will be considered 'impossible to evolve to').
That's why evolution is science - we can observe it, test it, apply it, and correct it or overturn it if we receive new data. Creationism does none of these things, which is why it's not science.
Now, as for Palin's stance on the subject, she did what I would expect any reasonable politician to do - she ran with what she knew, got corrected, and changed her position after receiving new data. Sounds pretty... scientific. I mean, hypothesis ("We should teach creationism!"), testing (Everyone else: "Creationism isn't science!"), conclusion ("Maybe we shouldn't teach creationism.").
I wouldn't invite 60 people into my house, either, but that's because it's 1000 square feet. There would be people gaming from the bathtub and/or the toilet or something.
Ah - my boss just mentioned this today. He referred to it as the "Chinese System", in which the doctor doesn't get paid when you're sick - he/she gets paid when you're well.
The trouble with government non-profit corporations is they frequently combine the worst aspects of government and corporations - think about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the US, for example. It would just degenerate into a giant slush fund for lobbyists and the like. Plus, as long as the non-profit insurance is available for anyone, why would anybody bother getting the much more expensive for-profit insurance?
The bigger problem is the whole concept of health insurance - it would be like trying to keep a warranty going on your car until it dies, all while putting money into it monthly. At some point, the car gets old and worn out, so repair bills start to skyrocket. Consequently, the cost to keep the warranty going would skyrocket as well, presumably to cover the costs of the repairs and make a tidy profit. In the end, the goal of the provider of the warranty would be to charge you enough to cover every repair you submit under warranty with a nice, healthy bit of margin on top to make up the difference. The same holds true for health insurance, which is where the problem lies - no matter how you slice it, you're going to pay skyrocketing medical costs as you get older/sicker, and whomever your insurance provider is will want to make enough money off of you when that happens to pay for those costs and still make a significant profit.
So, what do you do about it? Well, insurance is useful - it helps you manage risks that you can't afford to tackle yourself, which is why it's very useful when you get suddenly sick. Trouble is, we use health insurance for everything medically related, so they're no longer really health insurance anymore - they're more like a medical group checking account that everybody loses money on. What would definitely help would be if we found some way to turn our idea of "health insurance" into what we treat it like - a group health savings plan, sort of like a co-op. The plan could then make profit off of reinvesting the savings into other ventures instead of extracting profit from patients.
Another alternative, of course, is government funded public health care - of course, the trouble there is that, at that point, you're betting your ability to see a doctor against the munificence of a government elected by people who are promised the world and told they'll never have to pay for it.
Ugh... never mind. I did throw in that "in China", didn't I? Oops. Of course, there is the question of how many people in China are allowed to be anything other than Communists, but that can be saved for another time.
The reason you can't get electric power from different companies than your local utility is because, in order for another company to provide power to your house, they'd have to run a wire to your house or lease the line going to your house from whomever the rightful owner of that line is. For various practical reasons (i.e. limited amount of property available for easements for power lines, the desire to not have our neighborhoods look like this, etc.), it was decided that it would be much better to tolerate well regulated monopolies that provided basic services (water, power, etc.) instead of letting anybody and everybody run water lines under everybody's property, run electrical lines all over the place, and so on. It's not a perfect system, but it beats the heck out of the alternatives.
As for the rest of your points, yes, government-backed corporate power is insidious. However, there's a big difference between "government recognized entity" and "government recognized entity that can do things like take tax money from private citizens and get them redistributed to corporate entities under ridiculous premises like, say, turning food into fuel" - it's the latter sort of thing that people get upset about. That said, competing against corporations is fairly easy - take your example of Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, Canonical was able to repackage something that was swimming around (Linux) into something a little more desirable to the masses (Ubuntu) and sell support for it. Microsoft cannot shut down Canonical, as much as they might want to, nor can Microsoft legally prevent OEMs from pre-installing Ubuntu if they feel there's a market for it (Dell, among others). Microsoft cannot prevent you from acquiring Ubuntu using any method you choose to acquire it.
Competing against government, on the other hand, is a little more difficult - take drugs, for example. The government has decided to ban drugs. If you choose to "compete" against this ban and provide the market what it desires, you run the risk of jail time, no-knock raids by SWAT teams, and the confiscation of all of your private property. Using Ubuntu, conversely, does not run the risk that Microsoft will put you in jail, throw a paramilitary at you, nor seize all of your assets.
Most importantly, corporations are not just subject to upper management - they're also subject to their customers. IBM's market share used to be near 100%. It's not anymore. Microsoft's market share used to be nearly 100% - it's not anymore, and it's decreasing by the day. GM's market share in cars was nearly 60% after World War 2 - now they're near the verge of bankruptcy because they failed to take into account the needs of the markets they sold in. Meanwhile, governments don't always gain their power by the consent of the governed - sometimes it just takes some well applied firepower and the fear of the governed.
Slashdot Mirror
Might I suggest "Advanced->SSO" and checking that little checkbox? Works great.
I use Openfire/Spark where I'm at - Openfire itself is an absolute godsend. It integrates cleanly with AD, can be used as a gateway for just about any protocol you can think of, you name it.
Spark, on the other hand... well, it works well enough as long as you don't care about fonts or colors, which Spark won't let you change. For free, it's hard to argue with it, especially since it's the only client that works via Openfire's Disco feature autodiscovery protocol. That said, nobody is going to confuse Spark with a better, more mature internal IM client; by itself, it is a complete dog. Also, as others have pointed out, Spark tends to hang from time to time, even with the latest version of Java (at least in my experience).
At the same time, it is multiplatform, it is open source, and it even plays nicely with proprietary technologies (using AD and an MS SQL 2005 backend here - works great!). Plus, it has full archiving and all kinds of other good stuff.
I strongly recommend taking a look at it.
Nah - it was BOCHS, back when they were trying to faithfully emulate the 586 chipset. Unfortunately, when they did their versioning, they decided to eat their own dog food and let their own VM handle the version numbering for them; consequently, when it came time for version 1.0, the VM spat out version "0.99989389" instead.
I'm aware of the difference - however, at least in the Windows world, there is a very clear relationship between the two, in that viruses will frequently install rootkits after infection, and rootkits will frequently download and install viruses that, in turn, download and install more rootkits, etc.
:-)
Plus, I was trying to be kind of cheeky.
The problem, at least in NT to XP, was that you didn't have to 'sudo' - there was no password required to escalate your permissions. Consequently, any process running under your account could trivially escalate their permissions to SYSTEM, which made it impossible for the Administrator to kill the offending process (Can you kill a process owned by root without being root?). Even worse than that, though, was that SYSTEM processes could hijack user profiles, provided they were run "interactively", leading to key loggers, numerous pop-up ads, and so on... all without any means for the user to do anything about it, short of wiping and reformatting.
Vista fixed that by breaking "interactive" mode - now, SYSTEM processes are no longer allowed to listen in on user profiles or display information on user consoles. This means fewer keyloggers, less pop-ups, and so forth. Of course, this doesn't mean no keyloggers, etc.; malicious processes are still free to run under user accounts.
I know this is going to get modded as "off topic", but let's cover this...
SYSTEM and Local System are basically one and the same, and are almost perfectly synonymous with root. Network Service would be the equivalent of the "nobody" user - i.e. an account that you can use to run low-privilege services. Administrator would be the same as a user with administrative privileges in Linux (perhaps someone in the sudoers list). The trouble, of course, was that, until Vista/2008 came along, it was trivially easy for an Administrator to escalate to SYSTEM - you just had to run a scheduled job in interactive mode (think of a cron job with no password required) and you'd not only have root access, you'd also have access to the current user's console. For an administrator, this came in handy - of course, what was handy and convenient for an administrator was just as handy and convenient for someone else.
If viruses were unique to Windows, we wouldn't have "root"kits. Instead, they'd be "Administrator"kits or perhaps "SYSTEM"kits.
Actually, the reason we can't reprocess nuclear fuel has little to do with cost - Japan, France, and countless other nuclear nations do that all the time, which is why they don't need Yucca Mountain-equivalents. Due to proliferation concerns, the US government has had a wary-to-schizophrenic relationship with nuclear fuel reprocessing. This nice little fact sheet (note - it's a PDF) helps illustrate that.
No seismic activity meaning, of course, that it's located in a dormant volcano in one of the most geologically active states in the United States.
Nowhere near civilization, of course, meaning within 100 miles of an urban area containing over 1,000,000 people.
Oh, and this nuclear waste is being transported by... fairy magic? Or, are we just going to use the railways and ship the waste through a bunch of urban areas? Either way, this should be fun.
If only we actually could recycle the waste instead of throwing it away or something...
All right, but that plant better be green!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason we're talking about putting CO2 underground is because we have too much CO2 in the air to begin with. In other words, there's still plenty of oxygen to free up.
That said, if we ever start to run low, we can either release some of that sequestered CO2 or create a giant ship that turns into a metal maid-shaped being that can suck all of the oxygen off of some other planet. Y'know, whatever is cheaper or keeps the lobbyists employed.
Actually, they have 18 MS distributors.
The more you know.
I have no beef with 64 bit operating systems - you're absolutely right, there are some applications where being able to address serious quantities of RAM can really come in handy. That said, I do find it a little strange that most 64 bit distros don't just come pre-packaged with 32-bit libraries for little things like web browsers and the like that don't actually need full 64-bit support.
At the risk of stepping on toes, why, precisely, does your browser need more than 4 GB of RAM? Why, while we're at it, does Flash need more than 4 GB of RAM? With that in mind, why, exactly, do we need native 64-bit versions of either app?
But, if you use dedicated purpose-built hardware, all the bugs disappear, for, you see, bugs are impossible to have in hardware. Just ask the makers of the original Pentium.
So, then, .NET coders from India programming on Intel whiteboxes FTW?
Actually, you nailed it right on the head - it's possible for evolution to be proven "right" or "wrong" via testing. We can ask questions ("If I give bacteria some penicillin and don't kill off the entire colony, will the remaining bacteria evolve to have a greater resistance to that bacteria on the next go-around?") and receive answer ("Yup."). Creationism, on the other hand, is unprovable. There's no question we can ask it that it will answer usefully (i.e. The answer to the preceding question becomes, "Well, how complicated is the bacteria? We better ask The Creator, PBUH."). There's no way to prove or disprove it (For any organism that we can prove evolves, there will be a 'more complicated' one that will be considered 'impossible to evolve to').
That's why evolution is science - we can observe it, test it, apply it, and correct it or overturn it if we receive new data. Creationism does none of these things, which is why it's not science.
Now, as for Palin's stance on the subject, she did what I would expect any reasonable politician to do - she ran with what she knew, got corrected, and changed her position after receiving new data. Sounds pretty... scientific. I mean, hypothesis ("We should teach creationism!"), testing (Everyone else: "Creationism isn't science!"), conclusion ("Maybe we shouldn't teach creationism.").
I wouldn't invite 60 people into my house, either, but that's because it's 1000 square feet. There would be people gaming from the bathtub and/or the toilet or something.
THIS IS SLASHDOT!!!
Ah - my boss just mentioned this today. He referred to it as the "Chinese System", in which the doctor doesn't get paid when you're sick - he/she gets paid when you're well.
The trouble with government non-profit corporations is they frequently combine the worst aspects of government and corporations - think about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the US, for example. It would just degenerate into a giant slush fund for lobbyists and the like. Plus, as long as the non-profit insurance is available for anyone, why would anybody bother getting the much more expensive for-profit insurance?
The bigger problem is the whole concept of health insurance - it would be like trying to keep a warranty going on your car until it dies, all while putting money into it monthly. At some point, the car gets old and worn out, so repair bills start to skyrocket. Consequently, the cost to keep the warranty going would skyrocket as well, presumably to cover the costs of the repairs and make a tidy profit. In the end, the goal of the provider of the warranty would be to charge you enough to cover every repair you submit under warranty with a nice, healthy bit of margin on top to make up the difference. The same holds true for health insurance, which is where the problem lies - no matter how you slice it, you're going to pay skyrocketing medical costs as you get older/sicker, and whomever your insurance provider is will want to make enough money off of you when that happens to pay for those costs and still make a significant profit.
So, what do you do about it? Well, insurance is useful - it helps you manage risks that you can't afford to tackle yourself, which is why it's very useful when you get suddenly sick. Trouble is, we use health insurance for everything medically related, so they're no longer really health insurance anymore - they're more like a medical group checking account that everybody loses money on. What would definitely help would be if we found some way to turn our idea of "health insurance" into what we treat it like - a group health savings plan, sort of like a co-op. The plan could then make profit off of reinvesting the savings into other ventures instead of extracting profit from patients.
Another alternative, of course, is government funded public health care - of course, the trouble there is that, at that point, you're betting your ability to see a doctor against the munificence of a government elected by people who are promised the world and told they'll never have to pay for it.
Hey now - when was the last time an FM radio gave you a condom?
Ugh... never mind. I did throw in that "in China", didn't I? Oops. Of course, there is the question of how many people in China are allowed to be anything other than Communists, but that can be saved for another time.
Yes. (I kid.)
It is possible to have a billion Communists and have only some of them be Chinese. I'm just saying.
The reason you can't get electric power from different companies than your local utility is because, in order for another company to provide power to your house, they'd have to run a wire to your house or lease the line going to your house from whomever the rightful owner of that line is. For various practical reasons (i.e. limited amount of property available for easements for power lines, the desire to not have our neighborhoods look like this, etc.), it was decided that it would be much better to tolerate well regulated monopolies that provided basic services (water, power, etc.) instead of letting anybody and everybody run water lines under everybody's property, run electrical lines all over the place, and so on. It's not a perfect system, but it beats the heck out of the alternatives.
As for the rest of your points, yes, government-backed corporate power is insidious. However, there's a big difference between "government recognized entity" and "government recognized entity that can do things like take tax money from private citizens and get them redistributed to corporate entities under ridiculous premises like, say, turning food into fuel" - it's the latter sort of thing that people get upset about. That said, competing against corporations is fairly easy - take your example of Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, Canonical was able to repackage something that was swimming around (Linux) into something a little more desirable to the masses (Ubuntu) and sell support for it. Microsoft cannot shut down Canonical, as much as they might want to, nor can Microsoft legally prevent OEMs from pre-installing Ubuntu if they feel there's a market for it (Dell, among others). Microsoft cannot prevent you from acquiring Ubuntu using any method you choose to acquire it.
Competing against government, on the other hand, is a little more difficult - take drugs, for example. The government has decided to ban drugs. If you choose to "compete" against this ban and provide the market what it desires, you run the risk of jail time, no-knock raids by SWAT teams, and the confiscation of all of your private property. Using Ubuntu, conversely, does not run the risk that Microsoft will put you in jail, throw a paramilitary at you, nor seize all of your assets.
Most importantly, corporations are not just subject to upper management - they're also subject to their customers. IBM's market share used to be near 100%. It's not anymore. Microsoft's market share used to be nearly 100% - it's not anymore, and it's decreasing by the day. GM's market share in cars was nearly 60% after World War 2 - now they're near the verge of bankruptcy because they failed to take into account the needs of the markets they sold in. Meanwhile, governments don't always gain their power by the consent of the governed - sometimes it just takes some well applied firepower and the fear of the governed.