And I have to report that everything works together (instead of everything works apart which is a natural consequence in Linux where 10 developpers come up with 11 ways of implementing something and let you pick on technical merit.)
As for Microsoft... Don't ever go there.
At least Apple, like Linux, lets you buy and own things, unlike Microsoft which only lets you have access to their shit as long as you pay, and pay, and pay.
Microsoft would have registration keys for their mice and keyboards if they could figure out a way to make them disappear, without involving explosives.
next they'll figure out how to apply it to humans as retrofittable 'coloration'.
That would make the whole black/yellow/white thing seem prety tame.
Imagine if there were people walking around shaded with a 'Tiggy Winky' purple hue.
The religious right would go red in the face.
Oor maybe you could color voters persistantly according to their registered political party affiliation. Red state, blue state would really mean something then.
I can see riding a bus and being confronted with some kids colored 'gang green' to mark their turf.
What if we evolve this into an involuntary or, better yet, a wilfull coloration/camouflage scheme?
Would it lead to new sexual mores, like blushing but instead of turning a bit red in the cheeks, it could flash in animated patterns?
It could lead to entirely new forms of 'flashing'. It would certainly lead to better, or at least more inventive, uses for nude beaches, (arranging butt cheeks in rainbow colours if you line up a certain way.:-)
Would somebody be able to exercise such fine control that s/he'd be able to create his own tatoo designs? (Think of the camo'ed chick X-Men but with color only.)
What choices we do make is what will define us as a people.
Some people are making bad choices and hurting and killing other people by the tens of thousands, some people are hurting far many more but killing far fewer.
I resent the fact that the president just couldn't be bothered to go and get the legal authorization 'post-facto'; perhaps because there was no authorization or justification to be granted; in which case he is a more paranoid bastard than Nixon ever was and doesn't deserve to finish his term in office (but the alternative is the veep? Would we really trust him?)
The alternative would be worse unless we would watch him like hawks.
Go 'Software Update' and you'll get it
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
along with OS X 10.4.4 (which works great,) and QuickTime (which I didn't want so didn't get, because I'd need (have to buy) a new "QuickTime Pro" key.)
Personally I'm going through my collection seeing how often its stumped by my, uh, rather strange collection.
I get stuff 'sugested' to me from Amazon
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
and what's supposed to be wrong with that?
Fact is they'll never see my face. Forget about 'building a personal relationship.'
And Apple, with 'bout 45 million iPods sold, isn't likely to see every customer either.
So they're mining their customer's music preferences. As long as they don't stop me (like Wal*Mart's censored music) from importing my 800+ CDs and 400+ vynil records, I don't care.
Get a couple of cell phones, one with a Brooklyn address, one with a Manhattan address, a credit card with a different Manhattan address, a bank with a Staten Island address, and she squats in New Jersey.
She's either a hooker or a cock-sucker for Al Qaeda.
The problem is not that every time you stick your head above the ground somebody's watching, that's now a given unless you're a Ted Kasinki living in a shack somewhere, but, what oversight recourse you have on the recorded info?
As for doing shit you're ashamed of... Don't. Either don't do it or don't be ashamed of doing it.
The mess the mass media pimps are making of the intrigity of the content or even, in this case, of access to it in the first place, just shows the failure of mass media in an internet world.
Since WE, the now no longer passive consumers, control the means of production and reproduction of IP we are breaking up the hegemony of the oligopoly (we're 'sticking it to "the man"') and the powers that were are trying to interfere with our constitutionally protected right to property (in the 'States.)
In the process, they're stepping on their own dicks and making themselves look:
vicious (RIAA),
venal (MPAA),
greedy (podsafe music versus ASCAP/BMI and the reporting agencies) or
just stupid (FCC vs Howard Stern).
I think that we have always had control, in the truest Marxist sense of the word.
We just got conned into not exercising it by the distribution channels who were making a great deal of money off the scarcety of distribution.
They weren't interested in having more than one media 'outlet' (one TV station or newspaper per area) because that meant that they were creating scarcity.
Payola and rest of the scandals were an inevitable consequence and revealed the limits of power (essentially none,) which are exercised at every funnel or constriction point in a capitalist society.
Now with the internet the IP world is indeed flat and there are no local maxima to be exploited (unless you're Apple and thrive just selling the people what they want, you're Google and thrive just telling the people what they want or Wall*Mart and thrive just selling everything.)
Note how I did not include Microsoft or SonyBMG or most of the corporations in the western world.
You can't be nimble enough if you're trying to impose, or to cope with, the rules and regulations of closed systems. Hence, you're left behind.
(The real lesson of BetaMax versus VHS is that VHS was open while BetaMax was Sony's double edged sword with no haft. They were able to wield it long enough to slit their own throats.)
running Win2K for a brand spanking new AMD64 with more RAM.
I ran the old thing behind a firewall and got my wife used to OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird so it was pretty safe.
Performance was pathetic but since the box originally cost me nothing (a 'freebie' with tuition) I figured I was ahead of the game.
It was XMas, her iTunes had stopped working because of a DLL hell problem, so I bought the new box. (I actually bought 2 boxes, and one is slicing and dicing on slackware Linux and its noticably faster than the old 32bit AMD I had my old Linux box.)
I noticed that the default install for WinXP come with so much AV & Spyware cruft that I suspect that I'm running 1:3 in CPU cycles: 1 for the app versus 3 for the cruft.
Its actually running __slower__ at some tasks that the old Win2K box.
You obviously don't understand corporate culture and how a poisoned athmosphere can perpertuate long after the original source has gone.
How can a company behave any differently than its employees? Its NOT a living thing. It is a creation of the legal system and its demise is strictly a feature of the economics of the times. They can merge, meld, divest, split and otherwise morph in ways that human beings can't. (A large corporation can sell off a transportation services division and sometinmes, that even mares sense. Try doing that with your legs.)
Some companies in Europe can date their origin back hundreds of years, longer than any of the individuals working for them. I believe that part of ELF-Aquitaine goes back longer than that.
led to a few CEOs watching in a kind of horror struck awe as they watched their businesses vanish under the heel of Microsoft's jack boots.
But look on the bright side... Uh... No wait...
On the bright side, he bankrupted everybody who was trying to make a living by commoditing the hardware.
I now own two eMachines with Athlon 64 CPUs, GIGs of RAM and 1/2 a TB of HD and they cost me about a grand. (One's running slackware...) But I still like my two Macs better.
Bill Gates may have employed strategies better suited to a school yard bully and other pathologicaly violent no-goodnicks, all to enrich himself, make the 'other fellah' poorer, (its not enough to win, you have to make the other guy become a looser,) but ultimately, very few people got killed.
Some software pirates got snuffed in China and so on, but, as criminal as Microsoft's diregard of security might be, people don't actually use it in mission-critical machines. Its okay for 'desktop' computing but you'd never 'bet the farm' on it, or your life, or even your car.
And they deserve it. C-Net used to be honest, back when they had their TV show, but they turned into a Microsoft mouthpiece and everything was 'great, just great.'
I don't mind when things DON'T get reviewed. There are understandable limitations of time, space and money.
I DO mind when things are reviewed and it just reads like the press release from the company, and the reality is vastly different.
That's when I stop reading.
If you've nothing good to say, then say that you've got nothing good to say. Don't just blather on with the press release in one hand and the tatters of your integrity oozing through the fingers of the other hand.
And if you play something and it SUCKED, I expect to hear about why you thought it sucked and what could be done so it didn't suck so hard.
Sorry but lazy journalism is just PR work and payola.
He's never been in the same playground that Microsoft's in.
Apple's business has always been more about the consumer market. By design! When Stevev Jobs was (and as he is again,) in charge anyway.
The creation of a platform which supported VisiCalc, which propelled sales of the original Apple][, was a happy accident but it was just that, an accident. Then the creation of the DTP market with Adobe (originally called Aldus) was another happy accident. Their subsequent ability to retain market share in that market is due to the fact that creative people appreciate elegance.
He doesn't want to play in the business arena. He never did. Its too cut-throat to charge the margins he could possibly chage by staying in the home market.
The thing to remember about Apple is 'style.' He wanted a company with some style and which produced products that had style. Style derives from elegance. Elegance derives from two Latin roots, 'e' (meaning 'out') and 'legare' (meaning 'to choose'.) Elegant designs are those which have all the 'cruft' out-chosen from them. Apple hardware designs are definitely elegant and OS X's Aqua GUI interface is also elegant.
The business market doesn't give a crap about style or elegance.
It all about the Benjamins. The one who can deliver the most bang for the buck wins the contracts. Its made Dell what it is today. Its also what has unmade a host of companies, like IBM PC hardware. Not even their line of laptops, which can charge a premium for design, survived.
Dell was possible because Microsoft was never in the hardware market so they were able to commoditize it all without getting hurt. In a kind of symbiotic relationship, Dell exists because they were able to get control of the supply chain and leave the software R&D to Microsoft.
That's just a fact.
Microsoft could have played 'by the rules of law' and still have emerged on top. Now they're tainted by their past and they are no further ahead in the other markets because they have to depend on their hardware makers.
The hardware makers are locked in cut-throat competition and don't have the cash reserves to do any R&D.
They can't even change chassis because it costs money that nobody's willing to pony up. Hence you're stuck with ugly boxes and that's all you can get. That's all you're ever going to get because its not worth it for chassis manufacturers; the two big remaining are Chinese, all too well versed in the costs of change, and NOT about to change how they manufacture chassis. The're making money now and they don't have a culture which responds, swiftly to change.
You're stuck with the same box as ten years ago while in that time Apple came up with three generations of award winning designs for their iMacs, their PowerBooks, their iBooks and their PowerMacs.
The iPod and subsequent entry into audio and video blogs (and the distibution of RSS content,) ARE what Apple is about.
The PC will forever rule the 32-bit business desktop market.
My 2 new AMD64 Athlons are runing crappy 32 bit implementations of WindowsXP and most of the CPU cycles are devoted to keeping viri, worms and other creepy-crawlies at bay. (One of them is actually dual boot; running slackware Linux 99% of the time; then it runs flat out.)
I wouldn't WANT to move the business machines into my living room.
There I've got a wireless network, a 400GB NAS server, an older G4 PowerBook and a G5 iMac taking care of 'business' without 'looking' like business machines. With the addition of a digital tuner, my home entertainment center is my iMac.
And I've got OS X 10.4.2, some A/V components, a podcasting set-up, the software, and iTunes (running on all of them and sharing my library on the NAS server).
Apple customers are capitalist in that they place a value on content. It is an asset to be protected. It may only 99 cents a song but considering the nearly 10,000 songs that barely fit on my 60 gig iPod 5G, that amounts to something.
Rhapsody customers are communist in that they place no value on the content. Their subscription fees get them nothing but access. The day its over, for whatever reason, they're left with a ringing in their ears, but nothing to listen to.
The analogies can be extended further, but I think I'll do that on my blog and in my podcast.
Maybe if they developed an operating system that wasn't full of holes and ran over networks and allowed people to interoperate. Oh, that's Unix...
What Microsoft was really good at was strong-arming OEMs into selling their OS. That's it. Microsoft's a school yard bully.
They're aren't innovative. They're aren't into quality. (They're products are always crap until version 3.1 anything. If they hadn't been able to strong-arm enough OEMs and build up a huge cash reserve, they would have been history back in the '90s.)
Last time they tried to rail-road some book store owner, he got the statistics video rental stores and from some pron websites and won his case for "community standards" because most of the video rentals and pron downloads came from some ISP in Utah.
Basically, it exposed the entire system (because it had no idea of root and user accounts) to any two part malware.
One part delivered the.exe from somewhere somehow (any method could do since the 'payload' would be made to lie dormant) and the other part could be something which could pass underected through the filters since it was purposefully flawed but not malformed.
Making ActiveX components from VB ensured that the payload would run correctly when activated. It might be self destructive or it might be spyware. Either way, you're screwed.
which was hooked up to a 300 baud BellNorthern modem (that puppy CO$T big time but the university could afford it.)
It wasn't being used as much more than a glass teletype and emails were the only distribution method (this was way before the web) but it was still possible to trash someone's computer with a virus.
Microsoft definitely does not get a pass on this.
The problems and the solutions existed before Microsoft ever ripped off Dartmouth for their BASIC interpreter.
Microsoft has always been just bad. Bad for everything. Bad for every body.
Wake up!
Bill Gates took $100,000,000,000 out of YOUR pockets with illegal, anti-trust double dealing. Flat out theft of YOUR money.
And you're wondering why you're stuck with crap? God! How naive.
I was on a contracting job for the Department of Supply & Services and I had a problem that needed management of four dimensional arrays, in COBOL which can only handle up to three dimensions. The answer was to use BLL cells. They has always done it by sorting and tallying.
What's the difference? The jobs ran a few hundred times faster and involved a one step JCL to go from input to output instead of three steps, including an intermediate, totally useless and computationally very expensive sort.
But the technique of using BLL cells was not an immediately evident one, so they ended up tossing out my code the next time it got revisited (okay it took a couple of YEARS,) and going back to the old 'cookie cutter' solution ands the old cookie cutter performance.
The job went from one pass, running flat out and making the maximum read/write time, to running into three passes with the middle pass running in n*log(n) time.
"Oh well, it's just a gig, I won't have to stick around and maintain this stuff" Damn straight.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
And I have to report that everything works together (instead of everything works apart which is a natural consequence in Linux where 10 developpers come up with 11 ways of implementing something and let you pick on technical merit.)
As for Microsoft... Don't ever go there.
At least Apple, like Linux, lets you buy and own things, unlike Microsoft which only lets you have access to their shit as long as you pay, and pay, and pay.
Microsoft would have registration keys for their mice and keyboards if they could figure out a way to make them disappear, without involving explosives.
and his sidekick 'Spot' the wonder dog.
No wonder Microsoft gets no respect...
next they'll figure out how to apply it to humans as retrofittable 'coloration'.
:-)
That would make the whole black/yellow/white thing seem prety tame.
Imagine if there were people walking around shaded with a 'Tiggy Winky' purple hue.
The religious right would go red in the face.
Oor maybe you could color voters persistantly according to their registered political party affiliation. Red state, blue state would really mean something then.
I can see riding a bus and being confronted with some kids colored 'gang green' to mark their turf.
What if we evolve this into an involuntary or, better yet, a wilfull coloration/camouflage scheme?
Would it lead to new sexual mores, like blushing but instead of turning a bit red in the cheeks, it could flash in animated patterns?
It could lead to entirely new forms of 'flashing'. It would certainly lead to better, or at least more inventive, uses for nude beaches, (arranging butt cheeks in rainbow colours if you line up a certain way.
Would somebody be able to exercise such fine control that s/he'd be able to create his own tatoo designs? (Think of the camo'ed chick X-Men but with color only.)
matter of choice.
What choices we do make is what will define us as a people.
Some people are making bad choices and hurting and killing other people by the tens of thousands, some people are hurting far many more but killing far fewer.
I resent the fact that the president just couldn't be bothered to go and get the legal authorization 'post-facto'; perhaps because there was no authorization or justification to be granted; in which case he is a more paranoid bastard than Nixon ever was and doesn't deserve to finish his term in office (but the alternative is the veep? Would we really trust him?)
The alternative would be worse unless we would watch him like hawks.
along with OS X 10.4.4 (which works great,) and QuickTime (which I didn't want so didn't get, because I'd need (have to buy) a new "QuickTime Pro" key.)
Personally I'm going through my collection seeing how often its stumped by my, uh, rather strange collection.
and what's supposed to be wrong with that?
Fact is they'll never see my face. Forget about 'building a personal relationship.'
And Apple, with 'bout 45 million iPods sold, isn't likely to see every customer either.
So they're mining their customer's music preferences. As long as they don't stop me (like Wal*Mart's censored music) from importing my 800+ CDs and 400+ vynil records, I don't care.
Get a couple of cell phones, one with a Brooklyn address, one with a Manhattan address, a credit card with a different Manhattan address, a bank with a Staten Island address, and she squats in New Jersey.
She's either a hooker or a cock-sucker for Al Qaeda.
The problem is not that every time you stick your head above the ground somebody's watching, that's now a given unless you're a Ted Kasinki living in a shack somewhere, but, what oversight recourse you have on the recorded info?
As for doing shit you're ashamed of... Don't. Either don't do it or don't be ashamed of doing it.
The mess the mass media pimps are making of the intrigity of the content or even, in this case, of access to it in the first place, just shows the failure of mass media in an internet world.
Since WE, the now no longer passive consumers, control the means of production and reproduction of IP we are breaking up the hegemony of the oligopoly (we're 'sticking it to "the man"') and the powers that were are trying to interfere with our constitutionally protected right to property (in the 'States.)
In the process, they're stepping on their own dicks and making themselves look:
vicious (RIAA),
venal (MPAA),
greedy (podsafe music versus ASCAP/BMI and the reporting agencies) or
just stupid (FCC vs Howard Stern).
I think that we have always had control, in the truest Marxist sense of the word.
We just got conned into not exercising it by the distribution channels who were making a great deal of money off the scarcety of distribution.
They weren't interested in having more than one media 'outlet' (one TV station or newspaper per area) because that meant that they were creating scarcity.
Payola and rest of the scandals were an inevitable consequence and revealed the limits of power (essentially none,) which are exercised at every funnel or constriction point in a capitalist society.
Now with the internet the IP world is indeed flat and there are no local maxima to be exploited (unless you're Apple and thrive just selling the people what they want, you're Google and thrive just telling the people what they want or Wall*Mart and thrive just selling everything.)
Note how I did not include Microsoft or SonyBMG or most of the corporations in the western world.
You can't be nimble enough if you're trying to impose, or to cope with, the rules and regulations of closed systems. Hence, you're left behind.
(The real lesson of BetaMax versus VHS is that VHS was open while BetaMax was Sony's double edged sword with no haft. They were able to wield it long enough to slit their own throats.)
precisely because of the difference between density properties of ice and water.
Otherwise every bit of liquid water would have stopped being liquid and that's all she wrote 'cause we wouldn't be here.
running Win2K for a brand spanking new AMD64 with more RAM.
I ran the old thing behind a firewall and got my wife used to OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird so it was pretty safe.
Performance was pathetic but since the box originally cost me nothing (a 'freebie' with tuition) I figured I was ahead of the game.
It was XMas, her iTunes had stopped working because of a DLL hell problem, so I bought the new box. (I actually bought 2 boxes, and one is slicing and dicing on slackware Linux and its noticably faster than the old 32bit AMD I had my old Linux box.)
I noticed that the default install for WinXP come with so much AV & Spyware cruft that I suspect that I'm running 1:3 in CPU cycles: 1 for the app versus 3 for the cruft.
Its actually running __slower__ at some tasks that the old Win2K box.
Windows sux donkey balls.
You obviously don't understand corporate culture and how a poisoned athmosphere can perpertuate long after the original source has gone.
How can a company behave any differently than its employees? Its NOT a living thing. It is a creation of the legal system and its demise is strictly a feature of the economics of the times. They can merge, meld, divest, split and otherwise morph in ways that human beings can't. (A large corporation can sell off a transportation services division and sometinmes, that even mares sense. Try doing that with your legs.)
Some companies in Europe can date their origin back hundreds of years, longer than any of the individuals working for them. I believe that part of ELF-Aquitaine goes back longer than that.
You're land-fill without a heart or a mind.
If $1,200 is all you want for 'em, I wouldn't want 'em.
led to a few CEOs watching in a kind of horror struck awe as they watched their businesses vanish under the heel of Microsoft's jack boots.
But look on the bright side... Uh... No wait...
On the bright side, he bankrupted everybody who was trying to make a living by commoditing the hardware.
I now own two eMachines with Athlon 64 CPUs, GIGs of RAM and 1/2 a TB of HD and they cost me about a grand. (One's running slackware...) But I still like my two Macs better.
Bill Gates may have employed strategies better suited to a school yard bully and other pathologicaly violent no-goodnicks, all to enrich himself, make the 'other fellah' poorer, (its not enough to win, you have to make the other guy become a looser,) but ultimately, very few people got killed.
Some software pirates got snuffed in China and so on, but, as criminal as Microsoft's diregard of security might be, people don't actually use it in mission-critical machines. Its okay for 'desktop' computing but you'd never 'bet the farm' on it, or your life, or even your car.
If you treat ALL your customers like they are criminals, and damage their shit in the process, YOU are acting criminally.
They deserve to die and have their back catalog turned over to the podsafe music network.
FUCK 'EM...
And they deserve it. C-Net used to be honest, back when they had their TV show, but they turned into a Microsoft mouthpiece and everything was 'great, just great.'
I don't mind when things DON'T get reviewed. There are understandable limitations of time, space and money.
I DO mind when things are reviewed and it just reads like the press release from the company, and the reality is vastly different.
That's when I stop reading.
If you've nothing good to say, then say that you've got nothing good to say. Don't just blather on with the press release in one hand and the tatters of your integrity oozing through the fingers of the other hand.
And if you play something and it SUCKED, I expect to hear about why you thought it sucked and what could be done so it didn't suck so hard.
Sorry but lazy journalism is just PR work and payola.
the business market.
He's never been in the same playground that Microsoft's in.
Apple's business has always been more about the consumer market. By design! When Stevev Jobs was (and as he is again,) in charge anyway.
The creation of a platform which supported VisiCalc, which propelled sales of the original Apple][, was a happy accident but it was just that, an accident. Then the creation of the DTP market with Adobe (originally called Aldus) was another happy accident. Their subsequent ability to retain market share in that market is due to the fact that creative people appreciate elegance.
He doesn't want to play in the business arena. He never did. Its too cut-throat to charge the margins he could possibly chage by staying in the home market.
The thing to remember about Apple is 'style.' He wanted a company with some style and which produced products that had style. Style derives from elegance. Elegance derives from two Latin roots, 'e' (meaning 'out') and 'legare' (meaning 'to choose'.) Elegant designs are those which have all the 'cruft' out-chosen from them. Apple hardware designs are definitely elegant and OS X's Aqua GUI interface is also elegant.
The business market doesn't give a crap about style or elegance.
It all about the Benjamins. The one who can deliver the most bang for the buck wins the contracts. Its made Dell what it is today. Its also what has unmade a host of companies, like IBM PC hardware. Not even their line of laptops, which can charge a premium for design, survived.
Dell was possible because Microsoft was never in the hardware market so they were able to commoditize it all without getting hurt. In a kind of symbiotic relationship, Dell exists because they were able to get control of the supply chain and leave the software R&D to Microsoft.
That's just a fact.
Microsoft could have played 'by the rules of law' and still have emerged on top. Now they're tainted by their past and they are no further ahead in the other markets because they have to depend on their hardware makers.
The hardware makers are locked in cut-throat competition and don't have the cash reserves to do any R&D.
They can't even change chassis because it costs money that nobody's willing to pony up. Hence you're stuck with ugly boxes and that's all you can get. That's all you're ever going to get because its not worth it for chassis manufacturers; the two big remaining are Chinese, all too well versed in the costs of change, and NOT about to change how they manufacture chassis. The're making money now and they don't have a culture which responds, swiftly to change.
You're stuck with the same box as ten years ago while in that time Apple came up with three generations of award winning designs for their iMacs, their PowerBooks, their iBooks and their PowerMacs.
The iPod and subsequent entry into audio and video blogs (and the distibution of RSS content,) ARE what Apple is about.
The PC will forever rule the 32-bit business desktop market.
My 2 new AMD64 Athlons are runing crappy 32 bit implementations of WindowsXP and most of the CPU cycles are devoted to keeping viri, worms and other creepy-crawlies at bay. (One of them is actually dual boot; running slackware Linux 99% of the time; then it runs flat out.)
I wouldn't WANT to move the business machines into my living room.
There I've got a wireless network, a 400GB NAS server, an older G4 PowerBook and a G5 iMac taking care of 'business' without 'looking' like business machines. With the addition of a digital tuner, my home entertainment center is my iMac.
And I've got OS X 10.4.2, some A/V components, a podcasting set-up, the software, and iTunes (running on all of them and sharing my library on the NAS server).
And that's the way I LIKE it.
Apple customers are capitalist in that they place a value on content. It is an asset to be protected. It may only 99 cents a song but considering the nearly 10,000 songs that barely fit on my 60 gig iPod 5G, that amounts to something.
Rhapsody customers are communist in that they place no value on the content. Their subscription fees get them nothing but access. The day its over, for whatever reason, they're left with a ringing in their ears, but nothing to listen to.
The analogies can be extended further, but I think I'll do that on my blog and in my podcast.
Maybe if they developed an operating system that wasn't full of holes and ran over networks and allowed people to interoperate. Oh, that's Unix...
What Microsoft was really good at was strong-arming OEMs into selling their OS. That's it. Microsoft's a school yard bully.
They're aren't innovative.
They're aren't into quality. (They're products are always crap until version 3.1 anything. If they hadn't been able to strong-arm enough OEMs and build up a huge cash reserve, they would have been history back in the '90s.)
They watch more porn videos than NY.
Last time they tried to rail-road some book store owner, he got the statistics video rental stores and from some pron websites and won his case for "community standards" because most of the video rentals and pron downloads came from some ISP in Utah.
Case dismissed.
Basically, it exposed the entire system (because it had no idea of root and user accounts) to any two part malware.
.exe from somewhere somehow (any method could do since the 'payload' would be made to lie dormant) and the other part could be something which could pass underected through the filters since it was purposefully flawed but not malformed.
One part delivered the
Making ActiveX components from VB ensured that the payload would run correctly when activated. It might be self destructive or it might be spyware. Either way, you're screwed.
which was hooked up to a 300 baud BellNorthern modem (that puppy CO$T big time but the university could afford it.)
It wasn't being used as much more than a glass teletype and emails were the only distribution method (this was way before the web) but it was still possible to trash someone's computer with a virus.
Microsoft definitely does not get a pass on this.
The problems and the solutions existed before Microsoft ever ripped off Dartmouth for their BASIC interpreter.
Microsoft has always been just bad. Bad for everything. Bad for every body.
Wake up!
Bill Gates took $100,000,000,000 out of YOUR pockets with illegal, anti-trust double dealing. Flat out theft of YOUR money.
And you're wondering why you're stuck with crap? God! How naive.
welcomes our new green, hyper-allergenic overlords with open fronds.
The Bloomberg piece talks about it but doesn't show it.
That is lousy reporting.
Somebody was getting paid by the word when a picture would have done a much better job of it.
They're just guys who didn't flunk out of their correspondence school.
The **AAs are saddled with shills and dofusses just like the rest of us. Not to mention that they aren't going to attract the best and the brightest.
This is either some second stringer or some law firm intern.
I was on a contracting job for the Department of Supply & Services and I had a problem that needed management of four dimensional arrays, in COBOL which can only handle up to three dimensions. The answer was to use BLL cells. They has always done it by sorting and tallying.
:-)
What's the difference? The jobs ran a few hundred times faster and involved a one step JCL to go from input to output instead of three steps, including an intermediate, totally useless and computationally very expensive sort.
But the technique of using BLL cells was not an immediately evident one, so they ended up tossing out my code the next time it got revisited (okay it took a couple of YEARS,) and going back to the old 'cookie cutter' solution ands the old cookie cutter performance.
The job went from one pass, running flat out and making the maximum read/write time, to running into three passes with the middle pass running in n*log(n) time.
"Oh well, it's just a gig, I won't have to stick around and maintain this stuff" Damn straight.