The Irvken Experience

Friday night in front of the computer Fun
New World Odour » Cheney denies responsibility
Cheney denies responsibility
News: Monday, February 20th, 2006
Little Dick Cheney

Last week, the New York Times, swiftly followed by other news outlets reported that US Vice President Dick Cheney “Takes Full Responsibility” for accidentally shooting fellow hunter Harry Whittington. This martyraic statement allegedly came from a Fox News interview with Cheney by top Fox dog Brit Hume.

While the news conglomterates kept using the phrase “full responsibility” the FoxNews.com transcript of the interview shows that Dick never used any form of the word “responsibility.” Further investigations shows Cheney also didn’t use the words “Takes”or “Full”. And in fact, has no capacity for responsibility of any kind, positive or negative.

Bayesian statistical analysis of the interview found that the vice president didn’t actually discuss the shooting at all. He didn’t even mention hunting, of quails or otherwise. In fact, during a short phone call with a member of the FoxNews team he revealed that Dick Cheney only agreed to the interview on the condition that he didn’t need to speak at all.

A later phone call with Brit Hume himself confirmed that not only did Fox News never actually interview Dick Cheney, there is no Dick Cheney. The post of “US Vice President” has historically only been symbolic.

Javien Forum: Message
“… a wide-open forum is a relic of the Cretaceous period of the Internet.
The size of the net has probably grown by 8 or 9 orders of magnitude
since the Early Days when the list was open. I’m grateful it was back then,
but it’s time to change.” Greg Burch, 2006

_________________

“I say: the List is dead! Long live the list!” Max More, 2006

About time too
NewsForge | KDE and GNOME collaborating on free desktop promotion
A quiet revolution is taking place on a young mailing list, one that overturns years of false enmity and makes perfect sense to most free software users. Having competed for the free desktop crown since 1997, collaborating on code but never on promotion, KDE and GNOME have launched an initiative to market and promote the free desktop together.

My phone finally reaches the market

For Sam

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption
By Jan Stafford
09 Feb 2006 | SearchOpenSource.com

Microsoft may not make flawless software, but its proprietary strategy is hard to fault. In particular, Microsoft has mastered desktop lock-in, undermining users’ confidence in any alternatives and creating a slew of minor difficulties that irritate those who do switch.

Two themes dominate the stories I hear about the tribulations of using and adopting non-Microsoft business desktops: the difficulty in finding compatible hardware and the stranglehold Microsoft Word has on users. In the last week, IT pros have shared their experiences with these two adoption inhibitors. They’re representative of other stories I’ve heard.

The table that killed a desktop migration

A failing OpenOffice rollout haunts Shaun Holt, technical director of Merchant Pagan (MP), a United Kingdom IT services group.

MP helped a business move from Windows NT4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux four years ago. Since then, the business has trebled in size, in revenues, facilities, data, transactions and users.

“This has been an unqualified success,” said Holt. “The Linux server has not flinched.” The business’ management has been delighted with the cost-performance gains.

The server migration was transparent to users, an important point to remember as the plot thickens.

With the Linux server win in hand, Holt successfully pitched to the same company a migration to OpenOffice 2.0 from WordPerfect and Microsoft Office, which were being used in a costly and fragmented way. Document compatibility tests showed no problems for the client, so the migration was green-lighted.

Holt created training materials for users. To get them on board, he emphasized OpenOffice’s virtues, including the following:

* cost savings in reduced licensing expenses; document compatibility;
* favorable reviews of OpenOffice 2.0;
* productivity and ease-of-use improvements over the patchwork of legacy office suites;
* the free importing facility to Adobe PDF for legal documents; and,
* its foundation on the Open Document Format, soon to be the de facto standard for European Commission and other supplier/client transactions.

MP installed OpenOffice 2.0 onto every workstation and made the install part of the new image for every subsequent new workstation deployment.

A date was set to migrate from the other office suites. A training session introduced everyone to OpenOffice 2.0 and the Gimp image- manipulation tool.

The power of MS brainwashing

Six months later,” 80% of users have and had no problem with OpenOffice,” Holt said.

Unfortunately,

the other 20% have fouled the nest.

One had some minor issues with a table inserted into a document and others reported number of everyday formatting issues. This vocal minority has rebelled against OpenOffice.

The OpenOffice migration is floundering, as, once again, some employees have returned to using MS Word.

Microsoft’s mindshare with some employees has been harder to overcome than the problems with the table and formatting. Holt now knows that the success of an OpenOffice migration can depend on early identification and deprogramming of employees who are fiercely loyal to MS Office. “Just one person like this may upset the whole project,” he said.

How to succeed

Learning from his own mistakes, Holt offers this advice to IT shops who want to dump MS Office for non-Microsoft desktops:

* Remove the outgoing office suite and enforce usage of OpenOffice. “Once someone is used to it, they don’t go back,” Holt said. There has to be a “no-going-back policy.”
* Talk about success stories to show that others have been able to make the change and like it.
* Relate the cost savings to company profitability and potential salary/benefit increases.

“OpenOffice is now ready for the workstation, as is The GIMP,” Holt said. He firmly believes that Linux should not be relegated to the back room.

Troubles don’t end after migration

In Andy Canfield’s opinion, lack of confidence in hardware support is the top Linux desktop adoption inhibitor. Hardware support issues plague his company, Arakka Limited of Thailand, which uses Linux desktops internally and helps other companies port and migrate applications to Linux.

Canfield gave me an example of the hardware support problem, based on a recent purchase of a Fujitsu laptop for an Arakka employee. He used Partition Magic to shrink the pre-installed Windows XP and added Red Hat Linux. This is a common practice at Arakka.

Linux on the laptop won’t recognize the built-in touchpad. Also, the laptop’s Linux can’t detect wired versus battery power. Finally, there’s not a Linux driver for the PC’s built-in modem.

A PCMCIA card was used to replace the unsupported modem problem. “Nobody expects..built-in ‘winmodems’ to work anymore,” Canfield said.

Workarounds can’t make the touchpad work with Linux, however, so an external mouse must be used.

As for the power problem, Canfield said that “Linux is infamously lacking in drivers for USB devices.” Unlike older protocols like RS-232, USB requires an exact driver for an exact PC model. Of course, almost all drivers are only written for Windows.

Confidence killers

Most peripheral hardware and chipsets are made for Windows, so the list of hardware gaps faced by Linux desktop users is long. Hardware vendors find it hard to buck the dominant paradigm. In an interview, Linux evangelist John H. Terpstra told me: “Microsoft has used its market dominance to coerce OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and resellers not to sell competing products and services.”

Canfield is committed to Linux, but many people and companies are not. It’s tough to evangelize Linux desktops, he said, when a random set of features on many PCs just won’t play well with Linux.

After hearing Holt’s and Canfield’s stories and many others like theirs, I have to admire Microsoft’s handling of users and OEMs. The company has convinced users that a switch to a competing office suite would require too many sacrifices. That’s powerful propagandizing. It’s also truthful, because Linux and open source desktop application adopters do have to find ways to workaround the barriers Microsoft has built.

Holt said: “It is the brave individual who will migrate their organization’s desktops to Linux.”

Despite the difficulties they’ve encountered, both Canfield and Holt will continue using and evangelizing Linux desktops. They firmly believe, as do I, that the business that plans, trains and implements Linux and OpenOffice desktops well can overcome the short-term hassles and get long-term cost and productivity benefits.

Needs the wider audience of at least my 5 readers.

Guardian daily comment | Iraqi voices are drowned out in a blizzard of occupiers’ spin
Iraqi voices are drowned out in a blizzard of occupiers’ spin

The deception that launched the invasion of Iraq now increasingly shapes media coverage of the occupation

Sami Ramadani
Wednesday February 8, 2006
The Guardian

Three years after invading Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair are still dipping into the trough of deception and disinformation that launched the war: hailing non-existent progress, declaring sanctimonious satisfaction with sectarian elections and holding out the mirage of early withdrawal. In reality, the occupation and divide-and-rule tactics have spawned death squads, torture, kidnappings, chemical attacks, polluted water, depleted uranium, bombardment of civilians, probably more than 100,000 people dead and a relentless deterioration in Iraqis’ daily lives.

Article continues
Much of this goes unreported in the British and American media, stripped of context or consigned to the small print. The headlines are reserved for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorism, Saddam Hussein’s farcical trial and the perennial “exit strategy”. We are fed the occupiers’ spin, while words of scepticism are deemed jarring. Invited to join a popular BBC radio programme for Iraq’s recent elections, I quoted George Bush’s accidental brush with reality when he declared: “You can’t have free and fair elections in Lebanon under Syrian occupation.” An editor politely said: “Sorry Sami, but we are sticking to a positive spin on this one. I am sure we will invite you on other occasions.”

A few days ago, a large-scale opinion poll conducted by Maryland University showed that 87% of Iraqis (including 64% of Kurds) endorsed a demand for a timetabled withdrawal of the occupiers. The findings were mostly ignored by the British media.

Admittedly, reports on the ground are difficult and dangerous. But while western media are not averse to revealing deceptions around the WMD scare and pre-war lies, occupier-generated news still takes pride of place, and anti-occupation Iraqi voices of all sects – particularly Shia clergy such as Ayatollahs Hassani, Baghdadi and Khalisi – are ignored.

A few months before US soldiers boasted of using white phosphorus, the BBC’s Paul Wood defended his reporting from Falluja in the November 2004 siege, telling Medialens: “I repeat the point made by my editors, over weeks of total access to the military operation, at all levels: we did not see banned weapons being used … or even discussed. We cannot therefore report their use.” Doctors and refugees fleeing US bombardment talked of “chemical attacks” and people “melting to death”. But for the BBC, eyewitness testimony from Iraqis is way down the pecking order of objectivity.

It would clearly be wrong to portray victims’ claims as uncontested facts, but there is a duty to publish and investigate them. Had, for example, Iraqi families’ claims been highlighted shortly after the occupation began, the world would not have waited over a year to learn of torture at US-run jails. It was not until US soldiers gleefully circulated sickening pictures of tortured Iraqis that the media paid attention.

Many Iraqis have persistently accused US-led forces of “controlling” an assortment of death squads or private militias and “turning a blind eye” to many terrorist attacks. Almost every week, handcuffed and blindfolded men are found lying next to one another, each killed by a single bullet to the head. Who is methodically torturing and killing these people? Who has so far assassinated more than 200 academics and scientists? Iraqis not linked to the Green Zone regime are convinced that US forces and US-backed mercenaries are involved.

Support for some Iraqi claims, however, comes from unexpected sources: two US generals have admitted the presence of targeted killing squads, and last February the Wall Street Journal let slip the presence of six US-trained secret militias. In the same month, Lt General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, told the New York Times: “I think we’re doing what the Phoenix programme was designed to do, without all the secrecy.” US death squads assassinated about 40,000 people in Vietnam before Congress halted “Operation Phoenix”.

A retired general, Wayne Downing, the former head of special operations forces, affirmed that US-led killing squads started operating immediately after the March 2003 invasion. He told a bemused NBC interviewer: “Katie, it’s a nasty situation in Iraq right now, and this may help it get better.”

But the occupiers’ “Sunni v Shia” mantra dictates the agenda and clouds the issues. The daily news intake is moulded by senior occupation forces’ PR officers and embassy officials camped in the Green Zone – once Saddam’s fortress, now a vast monstrosity housing the occupation authorities and their competing and corrupt Iraqi proteges of all sects.

The lie of WMD embroiled Britain in an immoral, illegal war. Disinformation about the war is the pretext for keeping troops and bases in Iraq. Cosmetic sovereignty and partial withdrawal will not convince Iraqis witnessing the completion of permanent US bases, and US advisers controlling “sovereign” ministries and planning back-door oil privatisation.

Only complete withdrawal will satisfy most Iraqis. And if genuine liberty and independence are not forthcoming, the spiral of violence will intensify from Afghanistan to Palestine.

Hee Hee Hee, M.I.5 IT services!

“Laptops supplied to Parliament members have both wireless and Bluetooth disabled, and the report warned that this “significantly limited” the extent to which a member without an office could work within the parliamentary estate.

“I can work anywhere in the country…if there is a coffee shop next door with a wireless LAN. The only place I was unable to work is here,” new Parliament member Adam Afriyie told the committee. “I used to spend afternoons sitting on the steps outside Portcullis House so that I could get a signal from what I think is Caffe Nero next door.”

Former members also complained that their e-mail is switched off too early with no automatic-reply option to warn constituents of the change. “An e-mail automatic-response service for former members should be provided as a matter of course in (the) future for a period of several months after a general election,” the report said. ”
British Parliament members demand Wi-Fi access | Tech News on ZDNet

BBC SPORT | Football | My Club | Arsenal | Wenger admits to Campbell worries

Image:Google-sensorship-China-TienAnMen.png – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia