It's also an article that fails to call out Windows. Directors Desk is run on Windows, so the violation is not so much a case of NASDAQ not being able to "secure their network" as it is a case of no one being able to secure Windows. Most people know by now that sane stock exchanges use GNU/Linux, so they might think this was a GNU/Linux problem.
NASDAQ, being very Microsoft/Madoff/crook friendly, did not mention the OS of the failed application either. Perhaps they were belatedly ashamed of being dumb enough to use IIS.
BP got the rewards but everyone else is stuck with the cost of their screw up. BP is paying pennies on the dollar to gulf coast residents for loss of business. They will pay nothing in long term health costs.
As a gulf coast resident and free software advocate who's worked for Fortune 100 companies, the role of Microsoft in Deepwater Horizon was not that surprising. I helped write this report about the problems BP had with Microsoft and other non free software and this follow up report when more details were revealed. I'll be looking closely at NOV. Their lack of cooperation is probably concealing more trouble with the system that's largely responsible for the disaster. Industry needs to dump Microsoft to avoid future calamities. BP technicians thought they were doing as much as they can to fix the problems but they were clearly taking risks they should not have been taking and their solution clearly would have lead to more of the same.
No thanks to yet another way to drive up the cost of free software. How else can Microsoft make distribution on shiny disks competitive again? Patent extortions? That's a whole other issue that strangely has help from ATT in Texas.
Thank you, hairyfeet, for pointing out the obvious anti-competitive nature of pay by the minute internet service. You might want to mention that cable companies already have all the bandwith anyone could want but they use 99% for pay per view movies and other rip off services.
Now, let's look at some possible solutions. Municiple networks and Open Spectrum are winners that make entertainment and telcos very nervous.
Municiple wires work well in Tacoma, Washington which only has 250,000 people, so it should work just about anywhere and it should. Almost all US cable networks were built with monopoly protection and have that obligation to the public.
Open Specturm and free software are really the only way to insure free speech in the future. If you haven't figured it out yet, non free software and network control are two sides of the same coin. It's about the power to shove adverts in your face and control public opinion about issues, just like the good old days of broadcast and switched networks. Only free software gives you control of your computer and only free networks let you share news and opinions with your neighbors. The rest resembles the old USSR more than anything else, the publisher's paradise. We already own what we need to stay free, all we lack is the collective knowledge and will to take it.
The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't. However we arrive at it, Network Neutrality is simply not negotiable.
Thank you for your partial quote of the document and your insightful commentary. If anything, "specialized services" are the things that might be granted an exception to rule by a liberal government. Neutral networks are what should be mandated but, as pointed out above, only a tiny fraction of available bandwith is given to customers as "open internet" if the likes of Comcast can be described that way. The rest of it is utilized as wasteful push services. Media companies simply won't give up their lucrative and powerful position as information gatekeepers unless forced by real competition in physical media (hint - giving a movie company ownership of a monopoly cable service is the opposite of a free market) or we are finally granted open spectrum. The FCC should keep itself busy busting spammers rather than upholding 110 year old spectrum laws that no longer make sense.
Now, would someone be kind enough to paste the actual text of the article, "On Advancing the Open Internet by Distinguishing it from Specialized Services"? Scribd wants me to have a Facebook page to download the document and I can't read it through whatever nasty software they serve it with.
Geocities may have proved online collaboration of a sort, the torrent proves the glaring inadequacy of US networks. Anyone could author a website and that many of those were worth reading. Wikipedia, Facebook and others follow naturally from Geocities and much better things are on the horizon. With tiny copper lines, nasty bandwith caps and even nastier download caps, the average user will take about 15 years to download the collection. That's assuming Time Warner's 5GB/month plan. At the average download speed of half a MB/s, you might see it in a month.
The collection is very much worth archiving and indexing. Real knowledge and social history like this should be preserved for anyone who'd like to look. Let's hope libraries make archives and independent indexes to help people research.
To find malware-distribution sites, Google uses a huge number of virtual machines running completely unpatched versions of Windows and Internet Explorer that they point at potentially malicious URLs. The company then ties this in with the data that it gathers from its automated crawlers that are tasked with looking for malicious code on legitimate Web sites.
It would be nice if people would call this stuff Windows malware if it does not do anything to normal computers. Please Call out Windows, people.
Replacing the correct words in the original statement makes the idea probably false. Try:
"If free software is dependent on the OSS community, users are screwed."
The OSS community includes OpenBSD, for example.
More important than that, comments on the developer's page indicate the security minded developer is not familiar with Rails and that many of the attacks are handled by Rails itself. I am not familiar enough with Rails to judge the merits of these claims but can say that the developer in question is an ass.
Ubuntu and several other distributions are commercial successes, despite all of the FUD, hardware, retail and legal sabotage the once mighty Microsoft could muster. That's good, but it's not what free software is about.
Free software is about freedom and it has been successful for a long time. Today, as many people are pointing out below, you can get just about any hardware to work with nothing but free software. There are some lingering problems in ACPI bios land, where hardware makers can mess with you but those are going away as fast as Microsoft acquires debt. All of us are better off socially and economically because of this success.
Kmail has an excellent.pst converter that will pull out your old Outlook mail. Once you have it in Kmail, you can drag and drop it into any of the supported formats, mbox, mdir etc. If you have already established filters, you can let them sort things out. If not you can use a manual search for to, from, mail list, subject, etc. From there you can run your imap.
I carry everything around on my laptop and use kmail instead of using imap. With full drive encryption and xscreensaver, I don't have any worry about losing private information and know that my ISPs have better collections of my email anyway, despite what they say about size limits. I could use Gmail's imap instead of my own but prefer to suck my gmail out with kmail's imap support. Until US networks get more reasonable, I want my mail with me instead of on my own server and I would not advise anyone to leave their mail on someone else's server without having a copy yourself.
Because your question is all about search, I have to plug Kmail again. With proper organization of your mail into subfolders for friends, family, lists, companies and projects, mail searches are quick, even on modest hardware like my ancient PIII laptop. Searching everything takes a little longer, but it is not such a burden. Evolution may do as well but something about Gnome turns me off. The only downside is that the 3.5 branch does not seem to be able to search through encrypted mail but I imagine there's some gpg-agent fix for that I'm not aware of.
Making people "responsible for the costs of their actions" is not always the best way to fix a problem. Sometimes society has to protect itself by outlawing otherwise profitable behaviors such as fraud or armed robbery.
Perhaps it would be better to simply ban or regulate things like high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid and other garbage that soda makers find cheaper than real food. It can be argued that these ingredients are responsible for the obesity epidemic. Fat people get cancer more frequently than "normal" people and we now see even children with acquired diabetes. Real foods like sugar are not that much more expensive but without laws to protect food makers, economics forces them to all use crap. If you think food bans violate your liberty, remember that lead oxides were once as a cheap sweetener before people really understood heavy metal poisoning.
Finally, "sin taxes" make the state a partner in crime. Tobacco taxes, for example, have not come close to eliminating smoking or paying for the medical costs. I doubt it is possible to strip the hundreds of thousands of dollars cancer treatment alone costs from the average slob who smoke even if you assume the smoker survives forty years of their addiction. Prevention programs, the tobacco companies know, often backfire by normalizing smoking in a way that direct advertising has a hard time conveying. It would be a lot easier and cheaper to just ban the sale of tobacco. Taxing sodas is much the same. In the 20 year war between Iran and Iraq a causeway was literally built out of the bodies of dead soldiers. Do we want to pave our streets with the blood of smokers and soda drinkers, or do we want to outlaw profit from the sale of addictive, factory made poisons?
I'm not sold. Your browser and set up might be painful but mine are not.
Sort of like this Google News and decent clients do very nicely for me. Keyword search, maybe an image or two. You don't need a lot of fancy graphics to make that work, just a browser and OS that can handle the load. Three or four browsers with 40 or 50 tabs is a sweet spot of good research. Each browser has a topic or two that interest me. I don't have to read it all at once because my OS has months worth of uptime.
We'll see what comes of all this but the last thing I want to do is go back to a newspaper format. Perhaps Google can make something cool, but I like minimal with good search.
M$ is never going to play nice, the sooner you realize this the less time you will waste. They screwed the IBM develop team with an inferior API that their own developers hated. They bastardized Java to screw Sun. They "contributed to" WISE many moons ago to screw all of Unix. How many times to you have to see other "partners" get treated like pawns and one night stands before you get the picture? To quote an internal memo,
all through this presentation previously I talked about how youre using the pawns [developers] youre going to screw them if they dont do what they want, and da-da-dah. You cant let them feel like that. If they feel like that, youve lost from the beginning. Its like youre going out with a girl; forgive me... it goes the other way also. Youre going out with a girl, what you really want to do is have a deep, close and intimate relationship, at least for one night. And, you know, you just cant let her feel like that, because if you do, it aint going to happen, right. So you have to talk long term and white picket fence and all these other wonderful things, or else youre never going to get what youre really looking for.
Welcome to the back seat of Bill Gate's limo, Apple. NotNet is the flimsiest of condoms, I hope you've got better protection than that, but you really should not be in this situation to begin with.
Use gnash and multiple tabs. You would be surprised at how fast the web is when you ignore the most obnoxious spam and let page 2, 3, 4, and 5 load while you read page1. Fast flip is firmly aimed at people with browsers that suck. Google would do better to encourage people to leave the Windows world.
Please contribute to efforts to eliminate software patents, they are a threat to software and business freedom.
Anyone who thinks patents can ever protect gnu/linux, you have been sorely mislead. Where was OIN when M$ was stomping on TomTom and that NAS company? Sitting on their hands, that's where. Patents, as they exist, will always harm small companies who are at the mercy of giant like M$, IBM and other hoarders. Having to beg big companies not to sue you is not software freedom. Even the giants are threatened by patent trolls now.
Business method patents are not capitalism, it's government protected business monopolies. This is something the US founding fathers hated with a passion. Things are even worse than the king's fiat because government has been less than competent about establishing the winners and losers besides themselves. 20 years ago, people would have called it Communism and pointed to failures in the USSR. Biski can not eliminate softare and business method patents soon enough.
Yes, this article is a troll, typical of the Slog Against Google [2]. I'd prefer them to have switched to Kontact on GNU/Linux, but I would not expect the transition to that or Google in less than a year.
M$ people have a lot of never to complain, considering how difficult it is to "upgrade" any of their junk. Vista Failure springs to mind, but so do the number of companies still using IE 6, ancient versions of Outlook and Office. Given the slow speed of transition to any new M$ program, we can and should conclude that they are all failures before we judge Google Docs and Gmail a failure because one highly political institution has not made the transition overnight.
In many cultures, showing someone your foot is a grave insult and we can be sure that no one wants to put their thumbs where someone else has put their bare feet. It's an inconvenient undignified mark of servility to take your shoes off as anyone who's flown in the land of the free and home of the brave knows. So, the man should have offered his penis. I think that would get the point across. Fingerprint scanners are an easy to fool waste of everyone's time and dignity.
Windows, like usual, and at least one of the callers would have to be infected.
The odds of two Windows users being clean are vanishingly small.
While Windows has unique security problems, all non free software is suspect. On Star and cell phones have been used by law enforcement to listen in on people. Both have the computational power to record and do voice recognition for keywords. Centralized control of software and bandwith is bad for society because the same techniques can be used to supres dissidence as well as fight crime. Software that's not free should always be treated like a spy by community activists.
My battery life is great and better than I would get under XP. The root of the problem is ACPI, an intentional free software sabotage (link contains email from Bill Gates, quotes from Linus Torvalds and Intel engineers). XP has very poor power management and gnu/linux can only be worse on the worst of hardware where ACPI is not working at all and APM is not an option. The efficiency of gnu/linux, when it works, should be obvious from the choices Google and IBM make. These things can be obvious on gnu/linux desktops though programs like KPowerSave, which should tell you how well ACPI is working for you. It works for me. If it does not work for you, you now know why.
The next generation of ARM netbooks and tablets will be running GNU/Linux and they are going to have 10 hour battery life, aka better than your iPhone. The sooner makers drop ACPI and other poisoned specs for free software, the sooner we will all enjoy consistent and reliable computing.
The Open Book Alliance is a distinct organization from the Open Content Alliance, a group with similar goals created by Yahoo, the Internet Archive, and many universities.
It's just like M$ to make a confusing name this way. OOXML != Open Office XML, for example.
Boycott Novell has some interesting insight about this deal. The big picture here is that people at M$, with big egos and even bigger bank accounts, want to "Fucking kill Google." Yahoo is also advocating IE instead of Firefox and getting up to other obnoxious stuff.
The best way to create a good public library is to eliminate copyright and let people share. Napster proved the principle by creating the world's best music library and expanding music sales to their all time high. GNU/Linux has proved the way with software that's first class in every category. Journals, books and other information should be created and shared the same way. Do not expect Amazon, Yahoo and M$ to deliver anything but an Orwellianfuture of paranoid greed.
Oh poor little bankers and telcom monopolists, cry me a river because they might be expected to do the public a service and keep their word. We can only imagine what the world would look like if $23 trillion dollars were spent on education, parks, housing, medicine, and reasonable regulation of the predatory industries that have left the US fat, cancer prone, broke and ignorant. Telco companies are in a position to refuse this money and it is in their best interest to leave customers paying per byte of third world service. It is in every one else's best interest to regulate the piss out of these theives.
It is instructive to study what happened to the last broadband stimulus. Had these vultures carried through with their promisses, the US would already have the best network service in the world. Instead, they pocketed the $200 billion dollars that we all gave them and have done trillions of dollars in damages to the US economy. The tide was so turned in the 90's, that by the time the Clinton administration was over, the US government was overseeing corrupt auctions of spectrum for cell phones to the highest bidder. Yes, we now have cheap, 3rd world grade cell phone service as well as copper lines but we could have had much more. The greedy people responsible for this fraud deserve jailtime, not more money.
The public has a right to regulate these companies because they make use of public assets. You own public servitude and the public should put it's regulatory foot down on the Bells with it. More importantly, we own the spectrum which can and should be liberated. All of our communications goals can be met this way. Let the telcos refuse the money, we don't need them.
Slashdot Mirror
I am twitter and I agree with this post.
I wonder why Slashdot does not tag stories about Windows malware with "Windows". I know why ComputerWorld and other publishers that deal with WE and take Microsoft advertising money are cowed and don't Call Out Windows. Slashdot should be better than that.
I wonder why Slashdot does not tag stories about Windows malware with "Windows". I know why ComputerWorld and other publishers that deal with WE and take Microsoft advertising money are cowed and don't Call Out Windows. Slashdot should be better than that.
It's also an article that fails to call out Windows. Directors Desk is run on Windows, so the violation is not so much a case of NASDAQ not being able to "secure their network" as it is a case of no one being able to secure Windows. Most people know by now that sane stock exchanges use GNU/Linux, so they might think this was a GNU/Linux problem. NASDAQ, being very Microsoft/Madoff/crook friendly, did not mention the OS of the failed application either. Perhaps they were belatedly ashamed of being dumb enough to use IIS.
BP got the rewards but everyone else is stuck with the cost of their screw up. BP is paying pennies on the dollar to gulf coast residents for loss of business. They will pay nothing in long term health costs.
As a gulf coast resident and free software advocate who's worked for Fortune 100 companies, the role of Microsoft in Deepwater Horizon was not that surprising. I helped write this report about the problems BP had with Microsoft and other non free software and this follow up report when more details were revealed. I'll be looking closely at NOV. Their lack of cooperation is probably concealing more trouble with the system that's largely responsible for the disaster. Industry needs to dump Microsoft to avoid future calamities. BP technicians thought they were doing as much as they can to fix the problems but they were clearly taking risks they should not have been taking and their solution clearly would have lead to more of the same.
No thanks to yet another way to drive up the cost of free software. How else can Microsoft make distribution on shiny disks competitive again? Patent extortions? That's a whole other issue that strangely has help from ATT in Texas.
Thank you, hairyfeet, for pointing out the obvious anti-competitive nature of pay by the minute internet service. You might want to mention that cable companies already have all the bandwith anyone could want but they use 99% for pay per view movies and other rip off services.
Now, let's look at some possible solutions. Municiple networks and Open Spectrum are winners that make entertainment and telcos very nervous.
Municiple wires work well in Tacoma, Washington which only has 250,000 people, so it should work just about anywhere and it should. Almost all US cable networks were built with monopoly protection and have that obligation to the public.
Open Specturm and free software are really the only way to insure free speech in the future. If you haven't figured it out yet, non free software and network control are two sides of the same coin. It's about the power to shove adverts in your face and control public opinion about issues, just like the good old days of broadcast and switched networks. Only free software gives you control of your computer and only free networks let you share news and opinions with your neighbors. The rest resembles the old USSR more than anything else, the publisher's paradise. We already own what we need to stay free, all we lack is the collective knowledge and will to take it.
Thank you for your partial quote of the document and your insightful commentary. If anything, "specialized services" are the things that might be granted an exception to rule by a liberal government. Neutral networks are what should be mandated but, as pointed out above, only a tiny fraction of available bandwith is given to customers as "open internet" if the likes of Comcast can be described that way. The rest of it is utilized as wasteful push services. Media companies simply won't give up their lucrative and powerful position as information gatekeepers unless forced by real competition in physical media (hint - giving a movie company ownership of a monopoly cable service is the opposite of a free market) or we are finally granted open spectrum. The FCC should keep itself busy busting spammers rather than upholding 110 year old spectrum laws that no longer make sense. Now, would someone be kind enough to paste the actual text of the article, "On Advancing the Open Internet by Distinguishing it from Specialized Services"? Scribd wants me to have a Facebook page to download the document and I can't read it through whatever nasty software they serve it with.
Geocities may have proved online collaboration of a sort, the torrent proves the glaring inadequacy of US networks. Anyone could author a website and that many of those were worth reading. Wikipedia, Facebook and others follow naturally from Geocities and much better things are on the horizon. With tiny copper lines, nasty bandwith caps and even nastier download caps, the average user will take about 15 years to download the collection. That's assuming Time Warner's 5GB/month plan. At the average download speed of half a MB/s, you might see it in a month. The collection is very much worth archiving and indexing. Real knowledge and social history like this should be preserved for anyone who'd like to look. Let's hope libraries make archives and independent indexes to help people research.
From the article:
It would be nice if people would call this stuff Windows malware if it does not do anything to normal computers. Please Call out Windows, people.
Replacing the correct words in the original statement makes the idea probably false. Try:
The OSS community includes OpenBSD, for example.
More important than that, comments on the developer's page indicate the security minded developer is not familiar with Rails and that many of the attacks are handled by Rails itself. I am not familiar enough with Rails to judge the merits of these claims but can say that the developer in question is an ass.
Free software is about freedom and it has been successful for a long time. Today, as many people are pointing out below, you can get just about any hardware to work with nothing but free software. There are some lingering problems in ACPI bios land, where hardware makers can mess with you but those are going away as fast as Microsoft acquires debt. All of us are better off socially and economically because of this success.
Kmail has an excellent .pst converter that will pull out your old Outlook mail. Once you have it in Kmail, you can drag and drop it into any of the supported formats, mbox, mdir etc. If you have already established filters, you can let them sort things out. If not you can use a manual search for to, from, mail list, subject, etc. From there you can run your imap.
I carry everything around on my laptop and use kmail instead of using imap. With full drive encryption and xscreensaver, I don't have any worry about losing private information and know that my ISPs have better collections of my email anyway, despite what they say about size limits. I could use Gmail's imap instead of my own but prefer to suck my gmail out with kmail's imap support. Until US networks get more reasonable, I want my mail with me instead of on my own server and I would not advise anyone to leave their mail on someone else's server without having a copy yourself.
Because your question is all about search, I have to plug Kmail again. With proper organization of your mail into subfolders for friends, family, lists, companies and projects, mail searches are quick, even on modest hardware like my ancient PIII laptop. Searching everything takes a little longer, but it is not such a burden. Evolution may do as well but something about Gnome turns me off. The only downside is that the 3.5 branch does not seem to be able to search through encrypted mail but I imagine there's some gpg-agent fix for that I'm not aware of.
Making people "responsible for the costs of their actions" is not always the best way to fix a problem. Sometimes society has to protect itself by outlawing otherwise profitable behaviors such as fraud or armed robbery.
Perhaps it would be better to simply ban or regulate things like high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid and other garbage that soda makers find cheaper than real food. It can be argued that these ingredients are responsible for the obesity epidemic. Fat people get cancer more frequently than "normal" people and we now see even children with acquired diabetes. Real foods like sugar are not that much more expensive but without laws to protect food makers, economics forces them to all use crap. If you think food bans violate your liberty, remember that lead oxides were once as a cheap sweetener before people really understood heavy metal poisoning.
Finally, "sin taxes" make the state a partner in crime. Tobacco taxes, for example, have not come close to eliminating smoking or paying for the medical costs. I doubt it is possible to strip the hundreds of thousands of dollars cancer treatment alone costs from the average slob who smoke even if you assume the smoker survives forty years of their addiction. Prevention programs, the tobacco companies know, often backfire by normalizing smoking in a way that direct advertising has a hard time conveying. It would be a lot easier and cheaper to just ban the sale of tobacco. Taxing sodas is much the same. In the 20 year war between Iran and Iraq a causeway was literally built out of the bodies of dead soldiers. Do we want to pave our streets with the blood of smokers and soda drinkers, or do we want to outlaw profit from the sale of addictive, factory made poisons?
I'm not sold. Your browser and set up might be painful but mine are not.
Sort of like this Google News and decent clients do very nicely for me. Keyword search, maybe an image or two. You don't need a lot of fancy graphics to make that work, just a browser and OS that can handle the load. Three or four browsers with 40 or 50 tabs is a sweet spot of good research. Each browser has a topic or two that interest me. I don't have to read it all at once because my OS has months worth of uptime.
We'll see what comes of all this but the last thing I want to do is go back to a newspaper format. Perhaps Google can make something cool, but I like minimal with good search.
M$ is never going to play nice, the sooner you realize this the less time you will waste. They screwed the IBM develop team with an inferior API that their own developers hated. They bastardized Java to screw Sun. They "contributed to" WISE many moons ago to screw all of Unix. How many times to you have to see other "partners" get treated like pawns and one night stands before you get the picture? To quote an internal memo,
Welcome to the back seat of Bill Gate's limo, Apple. NotNet is the flimsiest of condoms, I hope you've got better protection than that, but you really should not be in this situation to begin with.
Use gnash and multiple tabs. You would be surprised at how fast the web is when you ignore the most obnoxious spam and let page 2, 3, 4, and 5 load while you read page1. Fast flip is firmly aimed at people with browsers that suck. Google would do better to encourage people to leave the Windows world.
Please contribute to efforts to eliminate software patents, they are a threat to software and business freedom.
Anyone who thinks patents can ever protect gnu/linux, you have been sorely mislead. Where was OIN when M$ was stomping on TomTom and that NAS company? Sitting on their hands, that's where. Patents, as they exist, will always harm small companies who are at the mercy of giant like M$, IBM and other hoarders. Having to beg big companies not to sue you is not software freedom. Even the giants are threatened by patent trolls now.
Business method patents are not capitalism, it's government protected business monopolies. This is something the US founding fathers hated with a passion. Things are even worse than the king's fiat because government has been less than competent about establishing the winners and losers besides themselves. 20 years ago, people would have called it Communism and pointed to failures in the USSR. Biski can not eliminate softare and business method patents soon enough.
How many beers is this worth? I have not seen Windows 7 and don't think I will. Some people like "more beer". I prefer "less beer".
M$ people have a lot of never to complain, considering how difficult it is to "upgrade" any of their junk. Vista Failure springs to mind, but so do the number of companies still using IE 6, ancient versions of Outlook and Office. Given the slow speed of transition to any new M$ program, we can and should conclude that they are all failures before we judge Google Docs and Gmail a failure because one highly political institution has not made the transition overnight.
In many cultures, showing someone your foot is a grave insult and we can be sure that no one wants to put their thumbs where someone else has put their bare feet. It's an inconvenient undignified mark of servility to take your shoes off as anyone who's flown in the land of the free and home of the brave knows. So, the man should have offered his penis. I think that would get the point across. Fingerprint scanners are an easy to fool waste of everyone's time and dignity.
The odds of two Windows users being clean are vanishingly small.
While Windows has unique security problems, all non free software is suspect. On Star and cell phones have been used by law enforcement to listen in on people. Both have the computational power to record and do voice recognition for keywords. Centralized control of software and bandwith is bad for society because the same techniques can be used to supres dissidence as well as fight crime. Software that's not free should always be treated like a spy by community activists.
My battery life is great and better than I would get under XP. The root of the problem is ACPI, an intentional free software sabotage (link contains email from Bill Gates, quotes from Linus Torvalds and Intel engineers). XP has very poor power management and gnu/linux can only be worse on the worst of hardware where ACPI is not working at all and APM is not an option. The efficiency of gnu/linux, when it works, should be obvious from the choices Google and IBM make. These things can be obvious on gnu/linux desktops though programs like KPowerSave, which should tell you how well ACPI is working for you. It works for me. If it does not work for you, you now know why.
The next generation of ARM netbooks and tablets will be running GNU/Linux and they are going to have 10 hour battery life, aka better than your iPhone. The sooner makers drop ACPI and other poisoned specs for free software, the sooner we will all enjoy consistent and reliable computing.
It's just like M$ to make a confusing name this way. OOXML != Open Office XML, for example.
Boycott Novell has some interesting insight about this deal. The big picture here is that people at M$, with big egos and even bigger bank accounts, want to "Fucking kill Google." Yahoo is also advocating IE instead of Firefox and getting up to other obnoxious stuff.
The best way to create a good public library is to eliminate copyright and let people share. Napster proved the principle by creating the world's best music library and expanding music sales to their all time high. GNU/Linux has proved the way with software that's first class in every category. Journals, books and other information should be created and shared the same way. Do not expect Amazon, Yahoo and M$ to deliver anything but an Orwellian future of paranoid greed.
Oh poor little bankers and telcom monopolists, cry me a river because they might be expected to do the public a service and keep their word. We can only imagine what the world would look like if $23 trillion dollars were spent on education, parks, housing, medicine, and reasonable regulation of the predatory industries that have left the US fat, cancer prone, broke and ignorant. Telco companies are in a position to refuse this money and it is in their best interest to leave customers paying per byte of third world service. It is in every one else's best interest to regulate the piss out of these theives.
It is instructive to study what happened to the last broadband stimulus. Had these vultures carried through with their promisses, the US would already have the best network service in the world. Instead, they pocketed the $200 billion dollars that we all gave them and have done trillions of dollars in damages to the US economy. The tide was so turned in the 90's, that by the time the Clinton administration was over, the US government was overseeing corrupt auctions of spectrum for cell phones to the highest bidder. Yes, we now have cheap, 3rd world grade cell phone service as well as copper lines but we could have had much more. The greedy people responsible for this fraud deserve jailtime, not more money.
The public has a right to regulate these companies because they make use of public assets. You own public servitude and the public should put it's regulatory foot down on the Bells with it. More importantly, we own the spectrum which can and should be liberated. All of our communications goals can be met this way. Let the telcos refuse the money, we don't need them.