This is very scary. It's vendors taking out UCITA in advance. They have all made up their minds that they can do this, and they are going ahead full steam. Grass roots, people - beat the fields, flush the snakes out now.
You wanna talk about nano stuff, you gotta get the word from Steve Gibson. He's the only guy what knows about Micromolecular Prophylactic Filter Technology and stuff like that.
It would be great if you brainiacs could at least keep the names straight. The spy company is RadLight, not radsoft. One wonders how much, if any, of the Salon interview you were able to read and understand. Thank heavens it is others that govern the planet.
What amazes me is that so few people even watch what they are doing. There are a myriad of good applications out there that can help, such as Neil Rubenking's excellent Install Control (InCtrl5), freely available at both ZD and DOWNLOAD.COM. It's one thing to consciously opt for Windows - that's bad enough - and another to cast one's fate to the wind in such an irresponsible manner. It is not right to destroy things on someone else's personal computer - that computer is the user's personal property and any untoward actions are trespassing first and foremost and perhaps criminal in retrospect - but it is quite another to be so clueless as to invite these burglars in. Anyone practicing as little caution as this almost deserves what they get - and hats off to Lava for still protecting people. Bra gjort Nicke!
The most frightening alternative to this idea of liability is UCITA. It is one thing to debate who takes the rap for a catastrophe; it is quite another to prohibit the debate at all. For the US, UCITA will spell the end of consumer rights when it comes to computer software. If you haven't been by the Affect site, do it now and sign up - then get back to the debate you're now helping to keep alive.
"Seems that politicians still don't have a clue, despite indications that video games don't cause violence."
Right. We're going to base our society on indications. We're going to invest a lot of money in producing high quality, highly attractive and very violent games which we know will sell like hotcakes - and then we're going to have research projects and university studies that try to prove there is no correlation between Little Billy cutting someone's head off onscreen and in real life.
Ask yourself this - are there any indications that "games" that actually provoke thought and have no vestige of violence cause it?
What would I do with it? Barring the occasional exception or driver secret, absolutely nothing. Microsoft can't code for shite. This is no prejudiced opinion. And maybe they are capable of creating good code. But barring Cutler's Tribe, they have never produced good code and they never will. Someone needs a reality check here.
We have buffer overflows all over the place. We have wonderful ActiveX blowing the Internet up. We need this code? Really? We do? For what?
I think the judge is doing a good thing here though. She's putting MS down a long dark corridor and increasing the odds they'll never make it back up to daylight again.
Personally I find this stuff immensely boring. There's a suspicion of a needed symbiosis here. And there is no way in heaven anyone with a brain can expect Microsoft to ever get better or want to get better. All this pussy-footing around that this guy and others do is just such a waste of time and space.
Weird - same thing happened to us when going back to see LOTR the second time. We didn't stay, we took our money back. What a bummer to have that happen on opening night.
The difficulty here is - UCITA. Microsoft is one of the only pushers of UCITA, and so far their effort has been very successful. UCITA basically exonerates the vendor from all liability and gives them incredible leverage against customers. You never buy a product, you license it - and at least in the US, that means you cannot find help in consumer legislation. It's the one against the other. But yes, Microsoft stinks from a light year away - but then, where's the news flash?
Check out both the site and the book The Software Conspiracy. Good read - especially about UCITA.
What you use to get your job done is probably going to be fastest for you. GUI IDEs can quickly take you to a line in your code where the compiler jumped ship. That's about it. Point and drool has always been point and drool. Case in point: MS builds their OS with command line tools, and not GUIs.
But as soon as you leave the command line and the "garden hose" you revert back to the Multics way of thinking, with GUIDs and all that junk, as opposed to the Unix way of thinking with "tools", and look where that has got us - in a mess that's absolutely no fun to romp around in.
GUIs are fun, but they also consume about 60% of the code. And when you need to get the job done, command lines are the way to go.
Rick Downes
Yes, I know the details. All the cc info everywhere will be collated by Bill Gates and Microsoft with their Passport authentication system. This choice was arrived at when an independent organ studying the various alternatives reached the unanimous conclusion that Microsoft technology is the most secure technology in the whole wide world. So there is absolutely no risk of leakage or other system compromise. Please remain calm.
We refused this article - and several rewrites of it - over a year ago. The author had not researched anything at that point, claiming Steve Jobs had invented the GUI and other such nonsense based only on hearsay or whatever you want to call it. After trying to get him to look in the general direction of proper research, we gave up. All we got back were our own quotes. From the looks of it, with the Ugh and Glugh and whatever else is still in there, the author evidently hasn't made much progress - at least not on his own. This is not what journalism is supposed to be about.
I'm surprised the contributor didn't mention Rob Rosenberger who more or less coined the phrase and whose site has been devoted to fighting it for ten years now. Or maybe someone farther down the line has already mentioned this? Whatever. Check out http://vmyths.com for a look at FAS at the source.
Slashdot Mirror
This is very scary. It's vendors taking out UCITA in advance. They have all made up their minds that they can do this, and they are going ahead full steam. Grass roots, people - beat the fields, flush the snakes out now.
ET was made PG in Sweden because Spielberg made the adults look like morons. Go figure.
You wanna talk about nano stuff, you gotta get the word from Steve Gibson. He's the only guy what knows about Micromolecular Prophylactic Filter Technology and stuff like that.
Improvement on the Uncertainty Theorem? I'm not sure about this...
Coffee in US restaurants is water. If the EPA wants to investigate water, fine by me.
It would be great if you brainiacs could at least keep the names straight. The spy company is RadLight, not radsoft. One wonders how much, if any, of the Salon interview you were able to read and understand. Thank heavens it is others that govern the planet.
What amazes me is that so few people even watch what they are doing. There are a myriad of good applications out there that can help, such as Neil Rubenking's excellent Install Control (InCtrl5), freely available at both ZD and DOWNLOAD.COM. It's one thing to consciously opt for Windows - that's bad enough - and another to cast one's fate to the wind in such an irresponsible manner. It is not right to destroy things on someone else's personal computer - that computer is the user's personal property and any untoward actions are trespassing first and foremost and perhaps criminal in retrospect - but it is quite another to be so clueless as to invite these burglars in. Anyone practicing as little caution as this almost deserves what they get - and hats off to Lava for still protecting people. Bra gjort Nicke!
The most frightening alternative to this idea of liability is UCITA. It is one thing to debate who takes the rap for a catastrophe; it is quite another to prohibit the debate at all. For the US, UCITA will spell the end of consumer rights when it comes to computer software. If you haven't been by the Affect site, do it now and sign up - then get back to the debate you're now helping to keep alive.
... and a bloat monster.
"Seems that politicians still don't have a clue, despite indications that video games don't cause violence."
Right. We're going to base our society on indications. We're going to invest a lot of money in producing high quality, highly attractive and very violent games which we know will sell like hotcakes - and then we're going to have research projects and university studies that try to prove there is no correlation between Little Billy cutting someone's head off onscreen and in real life.
Ask yourself this - are there any indications that "games" that actually provoke thought and have no vestige of violence cause it?
Get a clue yourself.
Rickster/
What would I do with it? Barring the occasional exception or driver secret, absolutely nothing. Microsoft can't code for shite. This is no prejudiced opinion. And maybe they are capable of creating good code. But barring Cutler's Tribe, they have never produced good code and they never will. Someone needs a reality check here.
We have buffer overflows all over the place. We have wonderful ActiveX blowing the Internet up. We need this code? Really? We do? For what?
I think the judge is doing a good thing here though. She's putting MS down a long dark corridor and increasing the odds they'll never make it back up to daylight again.
Rickster/
"most modern distributions seem to assume that the user has a brand-new machine with processor and RAM to spare"
In other words, open sourcers are getting just as piss-poor as the Microsofties.
It was bound to happen.
Rickster/
... And farther down the line, in the most perfect of all worlds, it will be really cool to have around.
Unfortunately it all depends on the quality of the work that goes into it, and here the track record is not good.
Rickster/
... And guess what? You're already doing your "pennance"!
Rickster/
Personally I find this stuff immensely boring. There's a suspicion of a needed symbiosis here. And there is no way in heaven anyone with a brain can expect Microsoft to ever get better or want to get better. All this pussy-footing around that this guy and others do is just such a waste of time and space.
Rickster/
"itwales.com: How can Linux overcome Microsoft's dominance at the desktop? Will you have to come up with radical new technology?"
Radical new technology to compete with Microsoft on the desktop? What have Microsoft ever had that was radical or new?
Too much!
Rickster/
Weird - same thing happened to us when going back to see LOTR the second time. We didn't stay, we took our money back. What a bummer to have that happen on opening night.
Rickster/
Protecting oneself against Media Player with Zone Alarm is like - how did David Bowie put it? Putting out the fire with gasoline?
The difficulty here is - UCITA. Microsoft is one of the only pushers of UCITA, and so far their effort has been very successful. UCITA basically exonerates the vendor from all liability and gives them incredible leverage against customers. You never buy a product, you license it - and at least in the US, that means you cannot find help in consumer legislation. It's the one against the other. But yes, Microsoft stinks from a light year away - but then, where's the news flash?
Check out both the site and the book The Software Conspiracy. Good read - especially about UCITA.
http://www.softwareconspiracy.com
Rickster
Seems /. is getting hard up for newsworthy stuff to lure its kiddies back.
This is a non-event, almost more hype than XP.
What you use to get your job done is probably going to be fastest for you. GUI IDEs can quickly take you to a line in your code where the compiler jumped ship. That's about it. Point and drool has always been point and drool. Case in point: MS builds their OS with command line tools, and not GUIs.
But as soon as you leave the command line and the "garden hose" you revert back to the Multics way of thinking, with GUIDs and all that junk, as opposed to the Unix way of thinking with "tools", and look where that has got us - in a mess that's absolutely no fun to romp around in.
GUIs are fun, but they also consume about 60% of the code. And when you need to get the job done, command lines are the way to go.
Rick Downes
Yes, I know the details. All the cc info everywhere will be collated by Bill Gates and Microsoft with their Passport authentication system. This choice was arrived at when an independent organ studying the various alternatives reached the unanimous conclusion that Microsoft technology is the most secure technology in the whole wide world. So there is absolutely no risk of leakage or other system compromise. Please remain calm.
We refused this article - and several rewrites of it - over a year ago. The author had not researched anything at that point, claiming Steve Jobs had invented the GUI and other such nonsense based only on hearsay or whatever you want to call it. After trying to get him to look in the general direction of proper research, we gave up. All we got back were our own quotes. From the looks of it, with the Ugh and Glugh and whatever else is still in there, the author evidently hasn't made much progress - at least not on his own. This is not what journalism is supposed to be about.
I'm surprised the contributor didn't mention Rob Rosenberger who more or less coined the phrase and whose site has been devoted to fighting it for ten years now. Or maybe someone farther down the line has already mentioned this? Whatever. Check out http://vmyths.com for a look at FAS at the source.