Staggeringly Amazing Church of Lego

rcharbon writes: "This link brings you to yet another of the web's compulsive personalities. Almost 18 months in the making, the lego church is astonishing. Christened as a monument to dead cats, no less." I know we post Lego things often, but this is an amazing project from Groundbreaking ceremony to completion. I was especially impressed with the mosaic works. The artist also has a number of other Lego works to check out while you're at it.

Comments

More Misery From Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the e-mail Bill Gates sent to every full-time employee at Microsoft, in which he describes the company's new strategy emphasizing security in its products. From: Bill Gates Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 5:22 PM To: Microsoft and Subsidiaries: All FTE Subject: Trustworthy computing Every few years I have sent out a memo talking about the highest priority for Microsoft. Two years ago, it was the kickoff of our .NET strategy. Before that, it was several memos about the importance of the Internet to our future and the ways we could make the Internet truly useful for people. Over the last year it has become clear that ensuring .NET is a platform for Trustworthy Computing is more important than any other part of our work. If we don't do this, people simply won't be willing -- or able -- to take advantage of all the other great work we do. Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing. We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing. When we started work on Microsoft .NET more than two years ago, we set a new direction for the company -- and articulated a new way to think about our software. Rather than developing standalone applications and Web sites, today we're moving towards smart clients with rich user interfaces interacting with Web services. We're driving the XML Web services standards so that systems from all vendors can share information, while working to make Windows the best client and server for this new era. There is a lot of excitement about what this architecture makes possible. It allows the dreams about e-business that have been hyped over the last few years to become a reality. It enables people to collaborate in new ways, including how they read, communicate, share annotations, analyze information and meet. However, even more important than any of these new capabilities is the fact that it is designed from the ground up to deliver Trustworthy Computing. What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony. Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available. With telephony, we rely both on its availability and its security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying that information about who we call or what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this, ranging from the individual user who isn't willing to add a new application because it might destabilize their system, to a corporation that moves slowly to embrace e-business because today's platforms don't make the grade. The events of last year -- from September's terrorist attacks to a number of malicious and highly publicized computer viruses -- reminded every one of us how important it is to ensure the integrity and security of our critical infrastructure, whether it's the airlines or computer systems. Computing is already an important part of many people's lives. Within 10 years, it will be an integral and indispensable part of almost everything we do. Microsoft and the computer industry will only succeed in that world if CIOs, consumers and everyone else sees that Microsoft has created a platform for Trustworthy Computing. Every week there are reports of newly discovered security problems in all kinds of software, from individual applications and services to Windows, Linux, Unix and other platforms. We have done a great job of having teams work around the clock to deliver security fixes for any problems that arise. Our responsiveness has been unmatched -- but as an industry leader we can and must do better. Our new design approaches need to dramatically reduce the number of such issues that come up in the software that Microsoft, its partners and its customers create. We need to make it automatic for customers to get the benefits of these fixes. Eventually, our software should be so fundamentally secure that customers never even worry about it. No Trustworthy Computing platform exists today. It is only in the context of the basic redesign we have done around .NET that we can achieve this. The key design decisions we made around .NET include the advances we need to deliver on this vision. Visual Studio .NET is the first multi-language tool that is optimized for the creation of secure code, so it is a key foundation element. I've spent the past few months working with Craig Mundie's group and others across the company to define what achieving Trustworthy Computing will entail, and to focus our efforts on building trust into every one of our products and services. Key aspects include: Availability: Our products should always be available when our customers need them. System outages should become a thing of the past because of a software architecture that supports redundancy and automatic recovery. Self-management should allow for service resumption without user intervention in almost every case. Security: The data our software and services store on behalf of our customers should be protected from harm and used or modified only in appropriate ways. Security models should be easy for developers to understand and build into their applications. Privacy: Users should be in control of how their data is used. Policies for information use should be clear to the user. Users should be in control of when and if they receive information to make best use of their time. It should be easy for users to specify appropriate use of their information including controlling the use of email they send. Trustworthiness is a much broader concept than security, and winning our customers' trust involves more than just fixing bugs and achieving "five-nines" availability. It's a fundamental challenge that spans the entire computing ecosystem, from individual chips all the way to global Internet services. It's about smart software, services and industry-wide cooperation. There are many changes Microsoft needs to make as a company to ensure and keep our customers' trust at every level -- from the way we develop software, to our support efforts, to our operational and business practices. As software has become ever more complex, interdependent and interconnected, our reputation as a company has in turn become more vulnerable. Flaws in a single Microsoft product, service or policy not only affect the quality of our platform and services overall, but also our customers' view of us as a company. In recent months, we've stepped up programs and services that help us create better software and increase security for our customers. Last fall, we launched the Strategic Technology Protection Program, making software like IIS and Windows .NET Server secure by default, and educating our customers on how to get -- and stay -- secure. The error-reporting features built into Office XP and Windows XP are giving us a clear view of how to raise the level of reliability. The Office team is focused on training and processes that will anticipate and prevent security problems. In December, the Visual Studio .NET team conducted a comprehensive review of every aspect of their product for potential security issues. We will be conducting similarly intensive reviews in the Windows division and throughout the company in the coming months. At the same time, we're in the process of training all our developers in the latest secure coding techniques. We've also published books like Writing Secure Code, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc, which gives all developers the tools they need to build secure software from the ground up. In addition, we must have even more highly trained sales, service and support people, along with offerings such as security assessments and broad security solutions. I encourage everyone at Microsoft to look at what we've done so far and think about how they can contribute. But we need to go much further. In the past, we've made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible. We've done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won't matter unless customers trust our software. So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve. A good example of this is the changes we made in Outlook to avoid e-mail-borne viruses. If we discover a risk that a feature could compromise someone's privacy, that problem gets solved first. If there is any way we can better protect important data and minimize downtime, we should focus on this. These principles should apply at every stage of the development cycle of every kind of software we create, from operating systems and desktop applications to global Web services. Going forward, we must develop technologies and policies that help businesses better manage ever larger networks of PCs, servers and other intelligent devices, knowing that their critical business systems are safe from harm. Systems will have to become self-managing and inherently resilient. We need to prepare now for the kind of software that will make this happen, and we must be the kind of company that people can rely on to deliver it. This priority touches on all the software work we do. By delivering on Trustworthy Computing, customers will get dramatically more value out of our advances than they have in the past. The challenge here is one that Microsoft is uniquely suited to solve. More discussion of our vision for Trustworthy Computing is in the internal white paper. Bill

Of course the site had to be down...

[MadFarmAnimalz]

There really wasn't any need to start subscriptions here on /. now was there, Taco, when you could simply have charged hapless siteadmins in exchange for rejecting submissions linking to their machines...

Gah, do I have to do all the thinking round here?

What I learned at AMD's FAB 25 in Dresden

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire premise that linux is 'revolutionary', and that it will someday supplant the Beast of Redmond as the desktop OS of choice is entirely flawed. The linux craze was a creation by stock market speculators, brokerage houses, and venture capitalists. Their purpose was to pump up the valuations of certain linux-oriented corporations. When their valuations were sufficiently high they dumped their shares and made obscene profits.

The sad thing was the number of highly intelligent people who were swept up in this fraud. I have several friends, respected and published scientists, who put a lot of money in these stocks, and subsequently lost a lot of money. Now that H. Blodgett is being investigated for his role in some of these pump and dump schemes, I wonder how long it will be before the investigation reaches to the upper echelon's of today's linux-biz powerhouses.

Many of you are slow to wake up to this fact, wishing that it wasn't true only proves your culpability. The truth is obvious in light of these facts. Linux is a fraud. If we look back with an objective eye, it's quite plainly so. The moral high-ground linux once held has subsided beneath a festering swamp of corruption. Now that we can all agree that we should never again use linux, there are some alternatives available. Namely:

-GNU/Hurd
-Beos
-Qnx
-Solaris X86

If you know someone who is still a linux advocate, and they have been made aware of these disheartening facts, please bitch slap them, because they should know better.

about YOSHINOYA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey 1, listen to me beside that, although this might have nothing
to do with
the theme thrown to this thread.
The other day, I went eat my neighbor YOSHINOYA, yes beef bowl
house, YOSHINOYA,
to find s-o-o crowded I couldn't get seated first.
And close look at the ad flag hung up, it appealed "now discount
by 150yen offered!!"
Come on, you all s-o-o stupid or s-o-o foolish? How get you
rarely coming in to
YOSHINOYA by just \150 discount, you ass? Just 150, 150yen!
Somebodys been there by family, whole family of 4 together to
YOSHINOYA congratulation!
Hoop me DADY is oredering special bowl, my dear. So embarresed I
can't look..
Hey guys all, get out the seat for my 150yen.
YOSHINOYA should get more bloody, boys. It's no strange whenever
happen a fight
against the guy seated your oppsite side over the U table, I stab
you, or you stab me,
YOSHINOYA should be in such atomosphere. Get away, kids and
Mammys!
Then I got seated, and the guy next to me ordered "Omori bowl,
with Tsuyudaku
more soup" That moment I got fucking fury again. How could you
say
Tsuyudaku, with a proud face, baby! Tsuyudaku is no fashon today!

I wanna inquire him if you really wish to have with Tsuyudaku.
Wanna
question close to him, wanna question for an hour. Isn't it just
that
you wanna say "Tsuyudaku"?
If I, YOSHINOYA specialized, could put you opinion, the latest
fashion
among YOSHINOYA freak is Negidaku-welsh-onion-full, that's it.
Omori-bowl with Negidaku and Gyoku-egg, that the way the freak
do.
Negidaku is a bowl with more welsh onion for less beef and Omori,
Gyoku.
That's the strongest.
However I note that way is with the danger of being marked by the
shop boy.
the sword of both side edge.
I can't recommend this way to the newby.
It's just that You 1, Gyu-Shake beef and salmon Table d'hote is
enough for you.

Re:/. effect solution?

[-=OmegaMan=-]

This should be pretty easy to implement, especially with all the subscription revenue rolling in. ;)

A modest proposal

[Codex The Sloth]

Great idea. Even better, slashdot (which needs the money) could charge the sites for this service. The conversation might go like this:

Hapless Victim: Hello?
Cmdr Taco: Hey, I about to post a link to your site which will cause it to get blitzed, causing your ISP to charge you big bucks for bandwidth usage. Howz about you pay me to cache it instead...

Ya get the idea...

Re:/. effect solution?

[Kwil]

He answered that..
The ability to cache a certain URL is given to the editor. They look at the site, decide if it can handle a slashdotting, and if not, enable the Squid-suit.

Re:/. effect solution?

[rherbert]

So why can Google do it? Why force /. users to haphazardly mirror (potentially copyrighted) things rather than doing it in an orderly and controlled fashion? The sites that would be concerned about copyright issues would probably be able to handle the load - CNN, NY Times, etc... so you just don't enable caching for them. (And if someone complains about copyright violations... Disable it for that site!)

Re:/. effect solution?

[swillden]

In the last Q&A CmdrTaco and Hemos held, this question brought up, and the simple answer is, they cant, because of copyright issues

Would a caching proxy really constitute a copyright infringement? Does the one in my house, or the one at the office? What about the ones that many ISPs set up to cut down on their upstream bandwidth costs? How about the browser cache on every computer? For that matter, what about the Google cache?

My theory is that /. doesn't want to increase their own bandwidth consumption when they can let others handle part of the load they generate.

Hahahha

[AyeRoxor!]

The entire domain is *totally* /.ed heheheh

:P