In addition, extensive testing by non-affiliated parties should be required and published to prove the accuracy of the device (such as having persons take the test, and at the same time have blood drawn and tested to show accuracy).
Expensive, sure. But is it worth imprisoning innocent people because someone wanted to make a buck?
As a college student found in a similar situation where not prosecuted so harshly, I have a few things to say about this.
Firstly, for anyone who says "he should have asked the IT department first" clearly does not understand how these things work. If you approach a systems administrator who runs a very poorly secured network (and clearly should not be employed in such a position), and ask for permission to try to find security issues on the network, for the sake of their pride they will NEVER agree to it.
Secondly, the situation really shouldn't be taken out of context like main-stream media likes their stories. When I got in trouble for harmless digging around and trying to circumvent an issue which actually harms the students' ability to learn, I was faced with the "you may be expelled" threat.
In my situation, a system administrator for a department on campus has done a horrendous job in administrating and configuring almost all services which he is responsible for. Not to mention, the network is incredibly badly designed, and every individual is an administrator (and thus a BUILTIN\SYSTEM level user) on the lab machines. The real problem is not that the setup is poor, nothing is secured correctly, etc.. but rather that some professors in this department prefer to religiously use the local network to store homework documents and lecture notes, which are inaccessible anywhere else in campus but these few labs, let alone off campus. As a result, you must come to one of the labs on campus, and for students who commute or need to access these documents on days when this particular department's labs are closed, this presents a serious problem.
There have been instances where professors have changed parts of assignments, those documents stored on the network, and students who do not come to the campus every day cannot access such changes (such as: professor sends out e-mail saying "I made a change...", students must go to campus, go to one of the designated labs, and access the documents to see what has changed).
The second part of this problem is that all of these professors REQUIRE that you submit your homework on the local network as well, the same one which is inaccessible anywhere else in the world, except in a few designated lab rooms (well 1 public one, the others are classrooms). If you can't make it to class on one day, or up to the campus to submit your homework.. as say there's a real issue but it's not known about beforehand, the school's homework policy allows professors to ignore such issues unless they are extremely serious (i got in a car crash and nearly died, for example), and detract from the students grade for that assignment or even disallow them to turn it in late.
As a result, many students HATE this department for such incredibly bad network policies. They are in place because this bad sys admin has incredibly restrictive firewall policies in place (to the extent that you can't even remote into your home computer from one of the lab machines). My goal was to show that through clever engineering that you could bypass DeepFreeze and other measures taken on the lab machines and situate software that keeps the firewall open for a student to access local documents using his/her own credentials (not causing any damage, not accessing documents that he/she has no access to, but simply to gain access to upload and download these local files).
This would have been presented along with complete documentation on how it was done with a message saying "please, please open this network up and give students web-based tools to upload their homework or access these local documents from home". Something like this could be easily achieved with something like Xythos, and any competent sys admin could setup something like that in a few days. I was discovered due to my own incompetence, and I was even told by the department chair that something was being worked on to let students access the local network from off campus. After some 6-7 months
Don't forget that OSX is developed for a small subset of all available hardware. End users installing linux will likely have wildly varying hardware configurations making the process of providing an equal experience to all users incredibly more complex than such a task would be in Apple's situation.
Let's stick probes on something and say that we understand it because it produces semi-predictable pattern of electrical signals. Woohoo, we're so heading towards neural interfaces like The Matrix!
"To catch a predator" -- clear violation of this "precedent" being set. Will this show be shut down for posing as other people online?
It's all so confusing. Let's charge a woman with a felony because an emo teenage girl doesn't know when to stop taking things so seriously. But what about all of those people posing as girls in MMORPGs and scamming people out of thousands of dollars of work? There's a lot more of this posing as someone else to get someone to do something going on than this.
I say: welcome to the internet. You failed to RTFM, so goodbye.
I predict 20 years from now that there will be 10+ layers of virtualization to "safely" run "web applications" and plenty of viruses running around causing trouble.
I have to completely agree with the author, but I take a more ground up approach to the entire problem.
From a very young age, I picked up, as my first language, basic by reading a book I found on a bookshelf at school. It had been untouched for years as nobody had an interest in it but me, and the title appealed to me. The book was a very basic introduction to the language and showed how it could be used to write simple textual input/output games. After completing it, I wanted more so I found my father's copy of visual basic 3 and proceeded to teach myself how to write applications in that.
After a few months of playing with it, it got to the point at which I felt I had no real control over the computer and often was left wondering how people wrote software I commonly used, as I perceived it to be an impossible task in such a language as VB. So in light, I picked up C and read a book called "C by dissection." Soon thereafter, I learned C++ and was given a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 6 by my was-then uncle. But still, though I could do much more in C, I felt that I still did not really understand what was happening as a result of the code I was typing. At this point, I started reading about assembly and purchased an assembly book to learn it. After a while, it explained so much in the way of what was happening on the machine at the lowest level and why things such as pointers in C and C++ are so useful (and relevant). From there, research into how compilers generated assembly and how operating systems used special features of processors to carry out their necessary operations gave a completely new insight into computing.
From the approach, I found that I preferred starting with assembly and moving up to a language like C, then to C++ for object oriented programming. When in highschool I was first introduced to Java, I found its syntax to be very similar to C++ with which I was very experienced, and thus it was easy to pick up and use. I found the dizzying array of redundant packages that Java provided to perform such simple and mundane tasks for the programmer to be confusing. It made it almost "too easy" or "too stupid" to just google a problem with 'java' attached to it and out comes the name of a class which will perform the desired operation, turning what was to be originally called "computer science" or even what we were doing, "programming", into a game of fetch-and-copy style of piecing together a working program. I found it insulting to me and to everyone who has studied and written software with a strong understanding of what he/she was doing. I had to often times explain things that were not easily doable with an existing class to my classmates for the simple fact that this introductory "computer science" course did not cover underlying principles in computing, rather it delved right into using classes, types, flow control, conditional expressions, and functions, the implementation of which were completely lost on the student.
In no means am I trying to say that people who prefer Java as a normal programming language are inept, rather I simply dislike it due to how easy it makes to write software by giving, as the author stated, the programmer a big barn shed full of tools with which he/she can use to perform an operation with no real understanding of the theory of software development or programming. I do see Java as a useful tool when I need to write quickly a cross-platform utility, and some of its packages useful as writing them in C or C++ would be extremely time consuming, but without a fundamental understanding of how things work and are carried out on the host machine, the true beauty of what is being done is completely lost. It just appears to me that what is happening now is a huge army of mindless drones capable of writing software instead of a core set of people who excel in using and manipulating computers regardless of what language in which they're asked to do so and without concern for what machine the development is to be on.
"What, competing?"
Not competing exactly, just the near 100% replication of competition products. If nothing else it's unethical but nobody seems to care? And what happened to copyrights?
"Nevermind the fact that the features were announced before they had them."
What were announced? Mac OS had many things over 5 years ago that Vista is just now incorporating, that was before Windows Server 2003 was even out, and before the "longhorn" project was ever announced.
"What's keeping you from telling us those 'obvious' security holes?"
What's keeping you from realizing that the sheer fact that there are thousands of unique viruses on windows that will still take over even if you're running in the guest account shows how poor the security in windows is? I'm not talking about 'exploits' here as those are a completely different matter and of critical importance, but actual OS and usermode library code is horribly put together on windows.
"I don't think there are too many vendors that support their older products for that long."
Really? Hm.. some choose to release it open source and let the OSC take over maintaining it ( ex: quake3 ), some discontinue technical support for a product but do not force users to upgrade and discontinue completely any support whatsoever for older products. What if I run Server 2003? 3-4 years go by and then I have to pay $600+ to upgrade, and then what.. another 2 years and I'll have to pay $1,500 for Windows Enviro or something? There's nothing wrong with moving to new levels of a product but forcing people to upgrade and in the process pay a hefty price for something they don't *need* to do, that's borderline extortion. "Don't upgrade and we won't let you have DirectX 10 or security updates even though the API for Vista and XP are almost identical, so update and pay us $$." What's next, they're going to have a Microsoft representative go home to home holding a gun to a person's head until they agree to upgrade to Vista? For Christ sake man..
"Like no new Java on older MacOSX versions? Will I get support for my 5 year old RedHat or Suse or whatever?"
Who's developing the java client on MacOS, Sun or Apple?
And I surely hope the support you paid for in RedHat that was a contract for 5 years of support for RedHat or its predecessors clarifies what your support package covers, honestly, RTFM.
"Yes, and 2007 will be the year of Linux on the desktop."
Linux is already on the desktop. It's just as easy to use as Windows, it just doesn't have as much device coverage as windows ( obviously, it doesn't have 40,000 programmers and $100,000,000 anually to get such support ).
"So?" (java)
So, they weren't trying to "compete" as you say. They tried to completely demolish Sun's Java by introducing "Microsoft's perfect godly unbeatable perfect solution to multi platform high level OOP based programming platform." It's nothing more than a fucking copy and a very annoying one at that, it has nothing over Java that I can see from using both. Why not innovate, offer a product that's better instead of using your clout and monopoly to run smaller companies out just so you can maintain your monopoly? Competition breeds innovation ( necessity is the mother of invention and it's necessary to beat the other guy ), stomping them out brings a dead halt to innovation. Good job microsoft, you want the BUCK to stop with you once again.
"So?" (directx)
It's developed using internal API that isn't published to competitors, violation of the United States vs. Microsoft anti-trust ruling.
"High trees catch the wind."
Lmao. MIT computer science Ph.D.'s can't produce viable viruses on Linux and Unix systems, the dumbest most half-assed attempt by any child who just learned some basic C can prove to be a system crippling virus on Windows. It has nothing to do with the status of Windows being so wide spread.
"Yes and I hope they bring fucking flowers too!!!1!
I know I go overboard on some of the issues, but it is more the combination of all this in one single post that set me off."
Flowers are nice, but you shouldn't get angry when people bring up points that are true.
Hello Troll. Please reverse and read the disassembly's of hundreds of microsoft applications as I have then search for the API they call ( which is found very easily within projects such as ReactOS and/or Wine ) on MSDN or Google only to find it completely undocumented. I've seen it so many times I'm surprised they're just now being brought back to trial for breaking the previous anti-trust ruling in 2002 made against them. I would make assumptions about you and attempt to ridicule you as you do others but that would make me just as pathetic as you are so I'll leave that one to you and let everyone see what a child you are being.
Who said they would collapse? The best thing would be for the supreme court to require that they split into smaller companies and equally distribute resources which would introduce competition and foster innovation and better business and programming practices. We might actually see windows patches and updates that actually make it more secure against malware instead of a patch that just covers up 1 hole and leaves the other 10 billion wide open ( because they're undocumented ).
It would be wise not to forget the Xerox incident with Microsoft entering the arena with Windows 3.1 stealing technology from Apple. It just appears that they're at it again. I wish our government would get around to making things like this illegal. Many *nix distributions have supported so many features that Windows is now trying to "re-create" ( re-inventing the wheel seems like something Microsoft is fond of doing, even when the wheel is created and packaged with millions of vehicles already ), and Mac OS X has some very nice features to add to its BSD base which are now appearing in Windows.
How does our government allow a company that is so obviously entrenched in maintaining their monopoly over the Operating System market to make moves such as the ones shown with the coming Vista? Not to mention all of the enormous flaws with the system and the obvious security holes that are just waiting to be shown as the world "migrates" to Vista as Microsoft hopes. Forcing users to upgrade by removing support for previous versions of windows and announcing no support for DX10 on XP is the worst move that microsoft has ever made, or one of them. Not to mention nearly everything Microsoft has done in the past few years has been in violation of anti-trust laws even though they've been ruled with oversight by the Supreme Court for just such practices. When is the damn government going to get around to breaking Microsoft like it should have done years ago?
Every day Microsoft comes closer and closer to its demise. You may not believe so but they are constantly and continually enacting in anti-trust schemes to break competition and maintain their cash flow which they do not need..NET was made to beat Java, Microsoft forces people to use their "stuff" or else they risk losing their distribution licenses, Microsoft applications use internal Windows API that aren't published for other developers to use giving them an advantage, Microsoft actively entices every game development company to use DirectX with some means to an end.. trying to destroy OpenGL, OpenAL and other OSS initiatives, and the list goes on and on and on. Constantly, every move they make is to break their competition and they do so by undermining them, and what do we have as a result: a dominance by Microsoft with very poor quality software and *MILLIONS* of viruses/trojans leading to serious problems. The government should simply break microsoft up and hopefully all of the developers will join the Linux dev team and other OSS projects to make the computing world what it could be instead of what it shouldn't be.
That's your problem, BF 2142 corrupts the mind and has subliminal messages going on and on about an aryan race and instructing you to take over the world and kill as many people as possible, some german coder put it in there ( oops, yeah just had to say it:s ).
Every gamer in america can vouch for this: games do NOT CAUSE VIOLENCE.
What does cause violence: violent movies shown to underage viewers who aren't mature enough to fully grasp the consequences of what is being shown on the big screen.
What also causes violence: brutal dictatorship and invasion of other countries and gassing/burning of 6 million jews. At least I know if I was brought up in this kind of country I'd be killing as many of my classmates as possible, wtf?
Video games are for ENJOYMENT. When you shoot someone in the head in real life, you didn't kill them, you didn't hurt them ( maybe their ego ), and anyone with a brain older than 5 years will understand it's just vertices, pixels, and shaders imitating blood and gore, not to mention 1 minutes or less later that person is alive again!
People like this guy make me sick, there have been no studies that prove conclusively a trend between playing, OR CREATING for that matter, violent games and violent behaviour. There's a great saying that's been going around.. for a long time, and from time to time we have to remind the sunless vampires in counter-strike of this rule of thumb, "It is just a game, it is not real." The only thing a video game might do is exercise your mind, give you entertainmen, and help you unwind. If you're competitive, however, you might be addicted to headshotting noobs, but that's another story.
This guy is a joke. Here's my prediction:
He decides to bomb USA because of all of the professional gaming and game development going on in america, not to mention the two gpu giants ATI/NVIDIA ( ati being in canada, but close enough ). This will begin WWIII and once again, germany will be blamed for the world war, forced to pay for it, and, if they're lucky, not completely evaporated from the earth by nuclear warfare.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, extensive testing by non-affiliated parties should be required and published to prove the accuracy of the device (such as having persons take the test, and at the same time have blood drawn and tested to show accuracy).
Expensive, sure. But is it worth imprisoning innocent people because someone wanted to make a buck?
As a college student found in a similar situation where not prosecuted so harshly, I have a few things to say about this.
Firstly, for anyone who says "he should have asked the IT department first" clearly does not understand how these things work. If you approach a systems administrator who runs a very poorly secured network (and clearly should not be employed in such a position), and ask for permission to try to find security issues on the network, for the sake of their pride they will NEVER agree to it.
Secondly, the situation really shouldn't be taken out of context like main-stream media likes their stories. When I got in trouble for harmless digging around and trying to circumvent an issue which actually harms the students' ability to learn, I was faced with the "you may be expelled" threat.
In my situation, a system administrator for a department on campus has done a horrendous job in administrating and configuring almost all services which he is responsible for. Not to mention, the network is incredibly badly designed, and every individual is an administrator (and thus a BUILTIN\SYSTEM level user) on the lab machines. The real problem is not that the setup is poor, nothing is secured correctly, etc.. but rather that some professors in this department prefer to religiously use the local network to store homework documents and lecture notes, which are inaccessible anywhere else in campus but these few labs, let alone off campus. As a result, you must come to one of the labs on campus, and for students who commute or need to access these documents on days when this particular department's labs are closed, this presents a serious problem.
There have been instances where professors have changed parts of assignments, those documents stored on the network, and students who do not come to the campus every day cannot access such changes (such as: professor sends out e-mail saying "I made a change...", students must go to campus, go to one of the designated labs, and access the documents to see what has changed).
The second part of this problem is that all of these professors REQUIRE that you submit your homework on the local network as well, the same one which is inaccessible anywhere else in the world, except in a few designated lab rooms (well 1 public one, the others are classrooms). If you can't make it to class on one day, or up to the campus to submit your homework.. as say there's a real issue but it's not known about beforehand, the school's homework policy allows professors to ignore such issues unless they are extremely serious (i got in a car crash and nearly died, for example), and detract from the students grade for that assignment or even disallow them to turn it in late.
As a result, many students HATE this department for such incredibly bad network policies. They are in place because this bad sys admin has incredibly restrictive firewall policies in place (to the extent that you can't even remote into your home computer from one of the lab machines). My goal was to show that through clever engineering that you could bypass DeepFreeze and other measures taken on the lab machines and situate software that keeps the firewall open for a student to access local documents using his/her own credentials (not causing any damage, not accessing documents that he/she has no access to, but simply to gain access to upload and download these local files).
This would have been presented along with complete documentation on how it was done with a message saying "please, please open this network up and give students web-based tools to upload their homework or access these local documents from home". Something like this could be easily achieved with something like Xythos, and any competent sys admin could setup something like that in a few days. I was discovered due to my own incompetence, and I was even told by the department chair that something was being worked on to let students access the local network from off campus. After some 6-7 months
Don't forget that OSX is developed for a small subset of all available hardware. End users installing linux will likely have wildly varying hardware configurations making the process of providing an equal experience to all users incredibly more complex than such a task would be in Apple's situation.
Let's stick probes on something and say that we understand it because it produces semi-predictable pattern of electrical signals. Woohoo, we're so heading towards neural interfaces like The Matrix!
"To catch a predator" -- clear violation of this "precedent" being set. Will this show be shut down for posing as other people online?
It's all so confusing. Let's charge a woman with a felony because an emo teenage girl doesn't know when to stop taking things so seriously. But what about all of those people posing as girls in MMORPGs and scamming people out of thousands of dollars of work? There's a lot more of this posing as someone else to get someone to do something going on than this.
I say: welcome to the internet. You failed to RTFM, so goodbye.
I predict 20 years from now that there will be 10+ layers of virtualization to "safely" run "web applications" and plenty of viruses running around causing trouble.
Surely, uptime and bandwidth.
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Maximum concurrency limit of 10 exceeded.Currently serving the following requests:
If you are the owner of this website, you may need to upgrade to a more advanced plan.
It's hard for me to take such an article seriously if the guy can't even host a website properly.
I have to completely agree with the author, but I take a more ground up approach to the entire problem.
From a very young age, I picked up, as my first language, basic by reading a book I found on a bookshelf at school. It had been untouched for years as nobody had an interest in it but me, and the title appealed to me. The book was a very basic introduction to the language and showed how it could be used to write simple textual input/output games. After completing it, I wanted more so I found my father's copy of visual basic 3 and proceeded to teach myself how to write applications in that.
After a few months of playing with it, it got to the point at which I felt I had no real control over the computer and often was left wondering how people wrote software I commonly used, as I perceived it to be an impossible task in such a language as VB. So in light, I picked up C and read a book called "C by dissection." Soon thereafter, I learned C++ and was given a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 6 by my was-then uncle. But still, though I could do much more in C, I felt that I still did not really understand what was happening as a result of the code I was typing. At this point, I started reading about assembly and purchased an assembly book to learn it. After a while, it explained so much in the way of what was happening on the machine at the lowest level and why things such as pointers in C and C++ are so useful (and relevant). From there, research into how compilers generated assembly and how operating systems used special features of processors to carry out their necessary operations gave a completely new insight into computing.
From the approach, I found that I preferred starting with assembly and moving up to a language like C, then to C++ for object oriented programming. When in highschool I was first introduced to Java, I found its syntax to be very similar to C++ with which I was very experienced, and thus it was easy to pick up and use. I found the dizzying array of redundant packages that Java provided to perform such simple and mundane tasks for the programmer to be confusing. It made it almost "too easy" or "too stupid" to just google a problem with 'java' attached to it and out comes the name of a class which will perform the desired operation, turning what was to be originally called "computer science" or even what we were doing, "programming", into a game of fetch-and-copy style of piecing together a working program. I found it insulting to me and to everyone who has studied and written software with a strong understanding of what he/she was doing. I had to often times explain things that were not easily doable with an existing class to my classmates for the simple fact that this introductory "computer science" course did not cover underlying principles in computing, rather it delved right into using classes, types, flow control, conditional expressions, and functions, the implementation of which were completely lost on the student.
In no means am I trying to say that people who prefer Java as a normal programming language are inept, rather I simply dislike it due to how easy it makes to write software by giving, as the author stated, the programmer a big barn shed full of tools with which he/she can use to perform an operation with no real understanding of the theory of software development or programming. I do see Java as a useful tool when I need to write quickly a cross-platform utility, and some of its packages useful as writing them in C or C++ would be extremely time consuming, but without a fundamental understanding of how things work and are carried out on the host machine, the true beauty of what is being done is completely lost. It just appears to me that what is happening now is a huge army of mindless drones capable of writing software instead of a core set of people who excel in using and manipulating computers regardless of what language in which they're asked to do so and without concern for what machine the development is to be on.
"What, competing?"
Not competing exactly, just the near 100% replication of competition products. If nothing else it's unethical but nobody seems to care? And what happened to copyrights?
"Nevermind the fact that the features were announced before they had them."
What were announced? Mac OS had many things over 5 years ago that Vista is just now incorporating, that was before Windows Server 2003 was even out, and before the "longhorn" project was ever announced.
"What's keeping you from telling us those 'obvious' security holes?"
What's keeping you from realizing that the sheer fact that there are thousands of unique viruses on windows that will still take over even if you're running in the guest account shows how poor the security in windows is? I'm not talking about 'exploits' here as those are a completely different matter and of critical importance, but actual OS and usermode library code is horribly put together on windows.
"I don't think there are too many vendors that support their older products for that long."
Really? Hm.. some choose to release it open source and let the OSC take over maintaining it ( ex: quake3 ), some discontinue technical support for a product but do not force users to upgrade and discontinue completely any support whatsoever for older products. What if I run Server 2003? 3-4 years go by and then I have to pay $600+ to upgrade, and then what.. another 2 years and I'll have to pay $1,500 for Windows Enviro or something? There's nothing wrong with moving to new levels of a product but forcing people to upgrade and in the process pay a hefty price for something they don't *need* to do, that's borderline extortion. "Don't upgrade and we won't let you have DirectX 10 or security updates even though the API for Vista and XP are almost identical, so update and pay us $$." What's next, they're going to have a Microsoft representative go home to home holding a gun to a person's head until they agree to upgrade to Vista? For Christ sake man..
"Like no new Java on older MacOSX versions? Will I get support for my 5 year old RedHat or Suse or whatever?"
Who's developing the java client on MacOS, Sun or Apple?
And I surely hope the support you paid for in RedHat that was a contract for 5 years of support for RedHat or its predecessors clarifies what your support package covers, honestly, RTFM.
"Yes, and 2007 will be the year of Linux on the desktop."
Linux is already on the desktop. It's just as easy to use as Windows, it just doesn't have as much device coverage as windows ( obviously, it doesn't have 40,000 programmers and $100,000,000 anually to get such support ).
"So?" (java) So, they weren't trying to "compete" as you say. They tried to completely demolish Sun's Java by introducing "Microsoft's perfect godly unbeatable perfect solution to multi platform high level OOP based programming platform." It's nothing more than a fucking copy and a very annoying one at that, it has nothing over Java that I can see from using both. Why not innovate, offer a product that's better instead of using your clout and monopoly to run smaller companies out just so you can maintain your monopoly? Competition breeds innovation ( necessity is the mother of invention and it's necessary to beat the other guy ), stomping them out brings a dead halt to innovation. Good job microsoft, you want the BUCK to stop with you once again.
"So?" (directx)
It's developed using internal API that isn't published to competitors, violation of the United States vs. Microsoft anti-trust ruling.
"High trees catch the wind."
Lmao. MIT computer science Ph.D.'s can't produce viable viruses on Linux and Unix systems, the dumbest most half-assed attempt by any child who just learned some basic C can prove to be a system crippling virus on Windows. It has nothing to do with the status of Windows being so wide spread.
"Yes and I hope they bring fucking flowers too!!!1! I know I go overboard on some of the issues, but it is more the combination of all this in one single post that set me off."
Flowers are nice, but you shouldn't get angry when people bring up points that are true.
Hello Troll. Please reverse and read the disassembly's of hundreds of microsoft applications as I have then search for the API they call ( which is found very easily within projects such as ReactOS and/or Wine ) on MSDN or Google only to find it completely undocumented. I've seen it so many times I'm surprised they're just now being brought back to trial for breaking the previous anti-trust ruling in 2002 made against them. I would make assumptions about you and attempt to ridicule you as you do others but that would make me just as pathetic as you are so I'll leave that one to you and let everyone see what a child you are being.
Who said they would collapse? The best thing would be for the supreme court to require that they split into smaller companies and equally distribute resources which would introduce competition and foster innovation and better business and programming practices. We might actually see windows patches and updates that actually make it more secure against malware instead of a patch that just covers up 1 hole and leaves the other 10 billion wide open ( because they're undocumented ).
It would be wise not to forget the Xerox incident with Microsoft entering the arena with Windows 3.1 stealing technology from Apple. It just appears that they're at it again. I wish our government would get around to making things like this illegal. Many *nix distributions have supported so many features that Windows is now trying to "re-create" ( re-inventing the wheel seems like something Microsoft is fond of doing, even when the wheel is created and packaged with millions of vehicles already ), and Mac OS X has some very nice features to add to its BSD base which are now appearing in Windows.
.NET was made to beat Java, Microsoft forces people to use their "stuff" or else they risk losing their distribution licenses, Microsoft applications use internal Windows API that aren't published for other developers to use giving them an advantage, Microsoft actively entices every game development company to use DirectX with some means to an end.. trying to destroy OpenGL, OpenAL and other OSS initiatives, and the list goes on and on and on. Constantly, every move they make is to break their competition and they do so by undermining them, and what do we have as a result: a dominance by Microsoft with very poor quality software and *MILLIONS* of viruses/trojans leading to serious problems. The government should simply break microsoft up and hopefully all of the developers will join the Linux dev team and other OSS projects to make the computing world what it could be instead of what it shouldn't be.
How does our government allow a company that is so obviously entrenched in maintaining their monopoly over the Operating System market to make moves such as the ones shown with the coming Vista? Not to mention all of the enormous flaws with the system and the obvious security holes that are just waiting to be shown as the world "migrates" to Vista as Microsoft hopes. Forcing users to upgrade by removing support for previous versions of windows and announcing no support for DX10 on XP is the worst move that microsoft has ever made, or one of them. Not to mention nearly everything Microsoft has done in the past few years has been in violation of anti-trust laws even though they've been ruled with oversight by the Supreme Court for just such practices. When is the damn government going to get around to breaking Microsoft like it should have done years ago?
Every day Microsoft comes closer and closer to its demise. You may not believe so but they are constantly and continually enacting in anti-trust schemes to break competition and maintain their cash flow which they do not need.
That's your problem, BF 2142 corrupts the mind and has subliminal messages going on and on about an aryan race and instructing you to take over the world and kill as many people as possible, some german coder put it in there ( oops, yeah just had to say it :s ).
Sorry:
"When you shoot someone in the head in real life, you didn't kill them, you didn't ",
'real life' should be 'cyber reality'
Every gamer in america can vouch for this: games do NOT CAUSE VIOLENCE. What does cause violence: violent movies shown to underage viewers who aren't mature enough to fully grasp the consequences of what is being shown on the big screen. What also causes violence: brutal dictatorship and invasion of other countries and gassing/burning of 6 million jews. At least I know if I was brought up in this kind of country I'd be killing as many of my classmates as possible, wtf? Video games are for ENJOYMENT. When you shoot someone in the head in real life, you didn't kill them, you didn't hurt them ( maybe their ego ), and anyone with a brain older than 5 years will understand it's just vertices, pixels, and shaders imitating blood and gore, not to mention 1 minutes or less later that person is alive again! People like this guy make me sick, there have been no studies that prove conclusively a trend between playing, OR CREATING for that matter, violent games and violent behaviour. There's a great saying that's been going around.. for a long time, and from time to time we have to remind the sunless vampires in counter-strike of this rule of thumb, "It is just a game, it is not real." The only thing a video game might do is exercise your mind, give you entertainmen, and help you unwind. If you're competitive, however, you might be addicted to headshotting noobs, but that's another story. This guy is a joke. Here's my prediction: He decides to bomb USA because of all of the professional gaming and game development going on in america, not to mention the two gpu giants ATI/NVIDIA ( ati being in canada, but close enough ). This will begin WWIII and once again, germany will be blamed for the world war, forced to pay for it, and, if they're lucky, not completely evaporated from the earth by nuclear warfare.