Easier said than done. So much of the world has, for better or worse, a serious investment in pc hardware running microsoft software. Switching to anything else would cost a hefty fortune. Even for free software (training costs, lost time for relearning, etc....)
That's the thing that makes microsoft a monopoly. As uncomfortable as it is, it's cheaper and easier for these large corporations to swallow whatever microsoft shoves down their throats than to go find someone else.
I'm not really all that knowledgeable about how business work and all, and I realize that due to appeals and whatnot, this breakup could not happen for quite some time, but it seems to me that the sheer logistics involved in a dividing up a company as large as microsoft would be a monumental task, during which the company would have a hard time getting any real work done.
And the computer industry is one of those places where you can't stop working for even a few seconds without falling behind (or farther behind in microsoft's case). I'd think the actual break in progress that this is going to cause in microsoft's work, due to logistics, confusion, and morale issues, could be more harmful than intended.
A group of scientists have released data that they claim proves that the world is indeed flat, countering a theory that our planet is a sphere.
One of the scientists involved in developing the project explains how it worked: "We had this really big balloon...the damn thing was huge, and we let it go in antartica. It flew up and away exactly as predicted."
The scientists waited and waited, but the balloon never returned. "Yeah, if the world wasn't flat, the balloon would've gonna around it and come back by now. We've only been here 3 weeks, but that's because we're using a superclock, instead of a nondescript desktop clock, with which we would've had to wait 6 months." said the project leader.
Scientists are thorougly excited by this new data, because now they have the task of finding a suitible replacement for all of the "globes" that fill the world's schools and households. One excited professor exclaimed "We might even get to rewrite textbooks. Do you have any idea how fun it is to write textbooks?"
I think/. just posted the one to give all the apple bashers something to do. Like it or not, Apple is making serious money as well as making significant changes to the way computers are perceived and used by the world. After seeing the company that makes the computers I love so much on the brink of death, and having dealt with all the slander(much of it true) from apple bashers for a few years, it's kind of satisfying to see these people having nothing better to whine about than a lawsuit that they wish would happen, just so they could complain about how bad a really good company is.
To everyone who's complaining that they don't want their posts quoted, why does it scare you so much to be involved in this? This is something bigger and more important than any one of us, and our own little concerns of property or whatnot.
I've really only seen two types of angry arguments from the/. crowd over this book. Some people are upset that a whole sentence or two of what they posted in an already public forum is being spread into a more public forum. The rest of the people are complaining that/. is just selling out, trying to make money by exploiting the community it has. I'm pretty sure they've said numerous times that this book is not making them any profit.
What I haven't seen much of is criticism of the underlying idea, which is that the people publishing this book, and the posts and emails that were quoted in it are trying to fight a culture that has allowed a tradgedy to get far out of hand.
Why are you whining that Katz is trying to speak out on behalf of people who need a voice? In this case, it doesn't sound like he's really trying to speak for the geek community as a whole (which he sometimes seems to do), but rather just relaying a message that has found much discussion among us.
I guess the point is, most of you need to stop your petty selfish whining. Shut up and swallow the whole "information should be free" concept. If you don't believe that, well, fair enough, but/. is a community built on sharing information, and if you don't like it, then maybe you shouldn't post here.
ps. - There have been a few posts of people actually arguing the real issue, and while they have point some valid points across, I don't think they're significant enough that they should prevent a spreading of the views of thousands of others.
I find it interesting that the army recently switched their website from NT to Mac, because they were dissatisfied with Microsoft's software. http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/Sep1999/a1999090 1hacker.html Now say what you want about the macs, but it's odd that now they're going back to MS. Maybe soldiers are more expendible than their website?
Of course you can teach creativity. It's all about making people forget what they already think and know.
The whole concept of...well, new concepts is a little overrated at times though. While a drastic ripoff, or even a "clone" is kinda cheesy, there's nothing wrong with improving something someone else did.
My main experience in the "re-use" of ideas is in the field of architecture. In studying to be an architect, I spend large amounts of time looking at other people's work. The point is, when you really get down to it, at least little pieces of anything you do have been done before.
It's sad to see a company clamping down on such broad ideas. It's more of the big companies wanting control just for the sake of control. Don't they know that all they're doing is upsetting people? Hrmm...that's a lot of mumbling...the architecture I mentioned earlier is having more of a negative effect on my brain that I thought.
Intel has made a pretty significant investment and commitment to rambus. They didn't get to be the giant of a company that they are by being stupid, but lately their decisions haven't seemed to be all that well thought out. I wouldn't be too suprised to see them stick with rambus just out of a unwillingness to admit they're wrong. Intel could be up for some really rough roads in the future. AMD is looking like a really good investment right now.
The book really goes fast, thanks to all the little stories that accompany the technical things. The little adventures that it presents cryptography as being are rather engaging, at least as much so as the actual concepts and ideas the book expresses. As my first real introduction into cryptography, I enjoyed it, and since reading it have felt compelled to research more.
No, not just random people from the list. What would really work would be to submit everyone...every name you can find. A list that's supposed to identify a specific type of student isn't going to be very specific if everfyone is on it.
You might notice that the majority of the highly moderated posts in the star trek threads are funny, not the typical geeky star trek captain debate thing you're trying to imply.
Star Trek is a cultural icon (even if it is a little tired), like it or not. I think it'd take even more of a "geek" to have an informed opinion, or anything at all to say for that matter, on the paid open source hacking story.
and for the record, I just plain don't get the whole hot grits thing.
So they're going to punish all their happy users for a little while because someone else is dos'ing websites? And why exactly would the trouble makers care about this? I wouldn't exactly call the dos'ing terrorism in the normal sense, but it's a similar thing. And protesting doesn't stop terrorists, it gives them the attention they want. It's going to do the same thing for the people messing with the web.
I guess I'm maybe a little too attached to my regular mac interface, cause a lot of the little changes in netscape6 bother me. I guess since this is just like a preview release, maybe it'll be changed, but little things like the scroll bars looking different than I'm used to (as well as not working with the scroll wheel on my mouse) are a bit bothersome too me. I was also suprised by the defualt font size being original set to 16, same thing was the case for the recently released mac IE5. I wonder what the thinking about that is?
I'm not done complaining yet though, The sidebar is fairly useful, but I don't think it's really necessary for it to take up a large part of each and every window I open up. I haven't had time to go through all of the options yet, so maybe you can turn that off, but I think a seperate news bar on just the first window is enough, especially when they all show the same thing.
I really appreciate the removal of a fair number of those buttons at the top, I certainly never used most of them.
Anyways, nice work by the people involved, thanks for it all.
Ya know, every day, I run into at least a few incredibly ignorant people who secretly make me hope I'll be the one who invents sentient machines that destroy the human race. That probably means there's something wrong with me, but I doubt I'm the only one.
BTW, am I the only one who's seeing all of the articles on./ today coming up entirely in italics? Makes my eyes hurt.
See, right here, you're talking about one of the extremes. I didn't say slashdot is all about the little boxes. The little boxes aren't what make slashdot so successful, they just help organize stuff. And sure, you can customize it so the boxes disappear, but then you lose certain information. If that information isn't relevant to you, then ok, get rid of it.
As for the whole world living off of 2400 baud no graphics terminals, no. The reason the internet has gotten the hype and growth(for better or for worse, that's a whole different discussion) is because of things like the web and its mixture of graphics and text. And like it or not, that's how things are now, and they won't just go back to the past. You personally may like just pages and pages of plain text, but the average person definately does not. I'm not a big fan of flashing animations, or whole page image maps any more than you are.
Although it's a cliche, a picture can be worth a thousand words. We live in a very visually based society. Most people access their comptuer through a gui interface. Why? Because it's easier, and it's nice, and they like it, why shouldn't the web be the same way?
And I'll say it again, it's all about the happy medium.
Well, in web design, as in almost everything else, there's a happy medium. You're right, alot of the graphics and scripting and whatnot that are put into websites are fluff. But they aren't all bad. Imagine trying to navigate Slashdot without any images or tables or little boxes to organize everything. You'd very quickly go insane, or at least stop visiting.
It's all about moderation. And compatibility, which is really the hard part, even though it's not really the fault of the web designers...once again, just look at microsoft
I think all this complaining about Slashdot being a bit behind on some of their stories is a little childish.
Although their little slogan says "News for Nerds," I don't think it should be thought of as a traditional news site. It's far more a community for discussion and sharing of information, rather than a breaking story, first with the news place. And honestly, how many of the stories you see here are significantly less relevant even if they get posted 2 or 3 days after they could've been? The technology moves fast in this era, but not that fast.
The economic realities of it are very relevant. But from reading the article, that's not what these people are all excited about. They seem to just be annoyed by the advertisements to the point where they felt necessary to make fun of it. I really don't think they're making any sort of political or economic statement.
This is fairly amusing, but don't you all think there are significantly more important issues that need attention. Sure, a lot of the people who read/post/submit to/. care about those things, and that's great, but this anti-dot-com thing, with all its bumper stickers and whatnot is going to get way more public attention than any of the stuff that really matters. Sure, anti-IP patent bumperstickers aren't going to be as interesting, and probalby are not the best idea, but it's far more relevant.
I guess this is just showing me that all the discussion and arguments and thoughts that take place on/. are hampered by the fact that/. is one of the few places they can take place. So how can we spread the word about more prevelant issues than the dot-com sillyness to the mostly ignorant public? The deCSS t-shirts would seem to be a start, except I doubt they make much sense to most people, and line upon line of seemingly random characters isn't all that appealling.
The anti-dot-com fanfare is ok, but it's only really going against something that's not all that important, and will die out soon enough anyways. I'm not sure how serious the people running it actually are, but if they really want to change the future of the internet, they should focus on something relevant.
I don't think apple could port the Mac as we know it over to pc hardware even if they wanted to. The Macintosh advantage in areas like ease of use, and plug and play are directly tied to the fact that Apple has such a firm control on the hardware that runs their OS. The pc hardware world is a huge swirl of products and drivers and confusion that has to be a complete nightmare for an OS.
This is just a minor offense for the students, I can't imagine it ever being a big deal for them in the future. Who this is really bad for is the University. Here's a little free publicity telling the world that your school doesn't offer standard internet access, which is quickly becoming a commodity, especially on college campuses. It just speaks very poorly for this school, especially to prospective students that are growing up in a completely technologically soaked world. Even the nongeeks want to be able to check their email from their dorm room. A school that won't put out the money for a little information infrasturcture is going to quickly fall behind.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL2 31&cid=134
IIRC
Just look at the earlier thread on MP3.com
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/04/28/1411
It's started already, and we're all to blame.
That's the thing that makes microsoft a monopoly. As uncomfortable as it is, it's cheaper and easier for these large corporations to swallow whatever microsoft shoves down their throats than to go find someone else.
And the computer industry is one of those places where you can't stop working for even a few seconds without falling behind (or farther behind in microsoft's case). I'd think the actual break in progress that this is going to cause in microsoft's work, due to logistics, confusion, and morale issues, could be more harmful than intended.
One of the scientists involved in developing the project explains how it worked: "We had this really big balloon...the damn thing was huge, and we let it go in antartica. It flew up and away exactly as predicted."
The scientists waited and waited, but the balloon never returned. "Yeah, if the world wasn't flat, the balloon would've gonna around it and come back by now. We've only been here 3 weeks, but that's because we're using a superclock, instead of a nondescript desktop clock, with which we would've had to wait 6 months." said the project leader.
Scientists are thorougly excited by this new data, because now they have the task of finding a suitible replacement for all of the "globes" that fill the world's schools and households. One excited professor exclaimed "We might even get to rewrite textbooks. Do you have any idea how fun it is to write textbooks?"
I think /. just posted the one to give all the apple bashers something to do. Like it or not, Apple is making serious money as well as making significant changes to the way computers are perceived and used by the world. After seeing the company that makes the computers I love so much on the brink of death, and having dealt with all the slander(much of it true) from apple bashers for a few years, it's kind of satisfying to see these people having nothing better to whine about than a lawsuit that they wish would happen, just so they could complain about how bad a really good company is.
I've really only seen two types of angry arguments from the /. crowd over this book. Some people are upset that a whole sentence or two of what they posted in an already public forum is being spread into a more public forum. The rest of the people are complaining that /. is just selling out, trying to make money by exploiting the community it has. I'm pretty sure they've said numerous times that this book is not making them any profit.
What I haven't seen much of is criticism of the underlying idea, which is that the people publishing this book, and the posts and emails that were quoted in it are trying to fight a culture that has allowed a tradgedy to get far out of hand.
Why are you whining that Katz is trying to speak out on behalf of people who need a voice? In this case, it doesn't sound like he's really trying to speak for the geek community as a whole (which he sometimes seems to do), but rather just relaying a message that has found much discussion among us.
I guess the point is, most of you need to stop your petty selfish whining. Shut up and swallow the whole "information should be free" concept. If you don't believe that, well, fair enough, but /. is a community built on sharing information, and if you don't like it, then maybe you shouldn't post here.
ps. - There have been a few posts of people actually arguing the real issue, and while they have point some valid points across, I don't think they're significant enough that they should prevent a spreading of the views of thousands of others.
I find it interesting that the army recently switched their website from NT to Mac, because they were dissatisfied with Microsoft's software. http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/Sep1999/a1999090 1hacker.html Now say what you want about the macs, but it's odd that now they're going back to MS. Maybe soldiers are more expendible than their website?
The whole concept of...well, new concepts is a little overrated at times though. While a drastic ripoff, or even a "clone" is kinda cheesy, there's nothing wrong with improving something someone else did.
My main experience in the "re-use" of ideas is in the field of architecture. In studying to be an architect, I spend large amounts of time looking at other people's work. The point is, when you really get down to it, at least little pieces of anything you do have been done before.
It's sad to see a company clamping down on such broad ideas. It's more of the big companies wanting control just for the sake of control. Don't they know that all they're doing is upsetting people? Hrmm...that's a lot of mumbling...the architecture I mentioned earlier is having more of a negative effect on my brain that I thought.
Intel has made a pretty significant investment and commitment to rambus. They didn't get to be the giant of a company that they are by being stupid, but lately their decisions haven't seemed to be all that well thought out. I wouldn't be too suprised to see them stick with rambus just out of a unwillingness to admit they're wrong. Intel could be up for some really rough roads in the future. AMD is looking like a really good investment right now.
The book really goes fast, thanks to all the little stories that accompany the technical things. The little adventures that it presents cryptography as being are rather engaging, at least as much so as the actual concepts and ideas the book expresses. As my first real introduction into cryptography, I enjoyed it, and since reading it have felt compelled to research more.
No, not just random people from the list. What would really work would be to submit everyone...every name you can find. A list that's supposed to identify a specific type of student isn't going to be very specific if everfyone is on it.
Star Trek is a cultural icon (even if it is a little tired), like it or not. I think it'd take even more of a "geek" to have an informed opinion, or anything at all to say for that matter, on the paid open source hacking story.
and for the record, I just plain don't get the whole hot grits thing.
I wish they'd just admit that the Star Trek series is pretty much obsolete, and release the source code for their Starships' OS.
It's a bummer I inhabit EFnet instead of IRCnet. This might have actually made me go outside or something.
So they're going to punish all their happy users for a little while because someone else is dos'ing websites? And why exactly would the trouble makers care about this? I wouldn't exactly call the dos'ing terrorism in the normal sense, but it's a similar thing. And protesting doesn't stop terrorists, it gives them the attention they want. It's going to do the same thing for the people messing with the web.
I'm not done complaining yet though, The sidebar is fairly useful, but I don't think it's really necessary for it to take up a large part of each and every window I open up. I haven't had time to go through all of the options yet, so maybe you can turn that off, but I think a seperate news bar on just the first window is enough, especially when they all show the same thing.
I really appreciate the removal of a fair number of those buttons at the top, I certainly never used most of them.
Anyways, nice work by the people involved, thanks for it all.
Ya know, every day, I run into at least a few incredibly ignorant people who secretly make me hope I'll be the one who invents sentient machines that destroy the human race. That probably means there's something wrong with me, but I doubt I'm the only one.
BTW, am I the only one who's seeing all of the articles on ./ today coming up entirely in italics? Makes my eyes hurt.
As for the whole world living off of 2400 baud no graphics terminals, no. The reason the internet has gotten the hype and growth(for better or for worse, that's a whole different discussion) is because of things like the web and its mixture of graphics and text. And like it or not, that's how things are now, and they won't just go back to the past. You personally may like just pages and pages of plain text, but the average person definately does not. I'm not a big fan of flashing animations, or whole page image maps any more than you are.
Although it's a cliche, a picture can be worth a thousand words. We live in a very visually based society. Most people access their comptuer through a gui interface. Why? Because it's easier, and it's nice, and they like it, why shouldn't the web be the same way?
And I'll say it again, it's all about the happy medium.
It's all about moderation. And compatibility, which is really the hard part, even though it's not really the fault of the web designers...once again, just look at microsoft
Yeah, and in the computer industry no less...I for one am shocked.
Although their little slogan says "News for Nerds," I don't think it should be thought of as a traditional news site. It's far more a community for discussion and sharing of information, rather than a breaking story, first with the news place. And honestly, how many of the stories you see here are significantly less relevant even if they get posted 2 or 3 days after they could've been? The technology moves fast in this era, but not that fast.
The economic realities of it are very relevant. But from reading the article, that's not what these people are all excited about. They seem to just be annoyed by the advertisements to the point where they felt necessary to make fun of it. I really don't think they're making any sort of political or economic statement.
This is fairly amusing, but don't you all think there are significantly more important issues that need attention. Sure, a lot of the people who read/post/submit to /. care about those things, and that's great, but this anti-dot-com thing, with all its bumper stickers and whatnot is going to get way more public attention than any of the stuff that really matters. Sure, anti-IP patent bumperstickers aren't going to be as interesting, and probalby are not the best idea, but it's far more relevant.
I guess this is just showing me that all the discussion and arguments and thoughts that take place on /. are hampered by the fact that /. is one of the few places they can take place. So how can we spread the word about more prevelant issues than the dot-com sillyness to the mostly ignorant public? The deCSS t-shirts would seem to be a start, except I doubt they make much sense to most people, and line upon line of seemingly random characters isn't all that appealling.
The anti-dot-com fanfare is ok, but it's only really going against something that's not all that important, and will die out soon enough anyways. I'm not sure how serious the people running it actually are, but if they really want to change the future of the internet, they should focus on something relevant.
I don't think apple could port the Mac as we know it over to pc hardware even if they wanted to. The Macintosh advantage in areas like ease of use, and plug and play are directly tied to the fact that Apple has such a firm control on the hardware that runs their OS. The pc hardware world is a huge swirl of products and drivers and confusion that has to be a complete nightmare for an OS.
This is just a minor offense for the students, I can't imagine it ever being a big deal for them in the future. Who this is really bad for is the University. Here's a little free publicity telling the world that your school doesn't offer standard internet access, which is quickly becoming a commodity, especially on college campuses. It just speaks very poorly for this school, especially to prospective students that are growing up in a completely technologically soaked world. Even the nongeeks want to be able to check their email from their dorm room. A school that won't put out the money for a little information infrasturcture is going to quickly fall behind.