Come on - anybody can code up a BSOD if they really want to.
Sure, but your friends at the former KGB, and Communist China have an inside perspective. But hey, if you can sell crap like that to places that safeguard your countries most important secrets, why not share it with your enemies? You know they in turn are sharing it with their friends in North Korea, Pakistan and elsewhere. Terrorists indeed. No need to worry about that stuff proliferating because it's already gone. Given such an irresponsible sales record, it's hard to imagine them calling the source code a trade secret.
What could be more important than making a buck? Certainly not the freedom of some poor dope who thought he had something of value in his hands. Why, if he could do it anyone could and M$ would dissapear and the terrorists would win, right?
I can't believe they would try to trot out the terrorist bogey man.
Anyone doing any kind of scientific computing, which is a large portion of their customer base. They have been losing that customer base to Linux, which hurts their sales in more ways than one.
You might also care about Solaris if you want to use any of their excellent hardware. If they GPL'd Solaris, no only could you use it without practical and moral problems, you could also do a much better job of porting other free software.
GPL'd Solaris would be a great gift. Don't look it too hard in the mouth.
GPL Java, for crying out loud.
The magic of cross licensing may prevent that. If Sun GPL's Solaris, you can be sure they will do everything in their power to get a free Java out.
Does this mean that lawyers will be required to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help them God?
Why stop at the lawyers? Are the jurors lying? I'd love to see them stick the whole court into an MRI machine, but then who'd interpret the results besides another person in an MRI machine being watched by yet another person in an MRI machine ad infinitum. Recursion detected, halt.
Should make Court TV more interesting.
I don't think the cameras will work in the magnetic field of an MRI machine, so we must reject the whole concept.
I suppose I should blame myself for trying to ask a sensible question on Slashdot. Is it me, or is this place being dumbed down to an idiots guide these days?
You want to use non free software and you want it to be easy. Ultimately, you must do as the owners say. If there really was an answer, you would have found it already. If you want things to be easy, give your customers Mepis, it's not entirely free but none of the owners are as dumb as M$.
While there is an element of truth in that, Netscape was more responsible for its downfall than Microsoft was. They made a lot of poor decisions, and failed to make the browser experience better, instead preferring to get into a feature war with IE, one they were ultimately to lose.
You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?
IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience. Others, having failed to learn from Netscape's demise that it's not possible to do business on M$, have improved IE with pop-up blocking "toolbars" but IE itself is about three generations behind every other major browser. Compare it to KDE's excellent desktop integration, and you realize that M$ is never going to catch up.
I've used hibernation with W2K, XP and 2003 and interestingly I've never observed these side effects you talk about (except that pre-SP2 Windows 2000 sometimes would fail to wake up, though that was fixed), but then I don't know what would be the point of leaving a machine in that state for 40 days.
You failed to observe anything because you don't understand the purpose of hibernation. Well, that and your choice of an OS that forces a reboot every 14 days and flakes out much sooner. You are so used to the workarounds to your system's reliability and usability problems that you just don't get it.
Hibernation and suspend on laptops are for portability and place keeping. You take your work with you, open the lid and there it is for you to do what you need. When you are done, you close the lid and move on. My laptops never hibernate for more than a few days but the two or three projects I'm working on are always there when I'm ready to get back to work.
Place keeping works much better with a decent window manager with virtual desktops, and a session manager which the software you describe lacks. You could almost get away with flaky performance if only your work would appear as you left it after a reboot but none of my Windoze using friends has ever told me about a M$ session manager that works. When you try to work on more than one project, you have to hunt through a crappy icon bar for your work. When I open my laptop's lid my projects are right where I left them, spread out over several virtual desktops.
Yeah, I've seen the new M$ "Power Tools" that finally give the user virtual desktops. It has a kind of KDE look to it, but is not nearly as nice. The ability to display more than one desktop at a time on the screen almost makes up for the lack of a pager, but all of it is useless without system stability. If you can't keep your machine up for more than a day, there's not much point in trying to keep open more than one project's worth of work, is there? Might as well keep single tasking, the way Bill intended. Yeah, keep on keeping on until Bill does it, then suddenly it's going to be the bestest most hypest thing in the world.
While it will have incredible performance for gaming and signal processing, the Cell is an utterly crap CPU for general purpose computing. Using a Cell in a normal desktop machine is like trying to cut a tree trunk with a cordless electric drill rather than a reciprocating saw.
I like what you have worked on much better than I like your analogies. Do you think a handheld cell device would do well with something like VOIP or CU30? It it could do that, play music, browse the web and text edit / email, I'd say it was a very nice general purpose device. General purpose does not take much. Would I notice all that you say the cell lacks any more than I would notice delays on a 150 MHz Pentium?
Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected. This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems.
Critical_ sees a typical Wintel bug and thinks Apple has a problem. It's an interesting thought, but not one to publish without checking.
APM and ACPI, designed in part by Microsoft, have always been secretive and buggy. Tricky hardware that constantly varies like Winmodems is the rule and I'm amazed the Linux works so well with any of it.
The only thing worse than the hardware has been Microsoft's software on top of it. While I'm able to keep laptops up for more then 40 days by using APM and hibernation or ACPI and suspend, my Microsoft using friends have to reboot. They tell me that their Word documents get corrupted on resume if the machine resumes at all. Cluster on cluster, all of their complex nasties designed to thwart competitors only bite them in the rear despite the fact they wrote the specs themselves and have hardware details no one else does. This is what to expect from non-free.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
This specific issue involves 2 private parties (him & the airline). The airline as a private party can deny him travel
As if the airline has a choice. It would be nice to see what happened if an airline decided it no longer needed to check ID, a de facto passport, or baggage on domestic flights.
So, when will we see one of these as a Google "o"? Now that Google is helping to crush human rights, Bill Gates welcomes them to the club with a VeriTest seal of approval. "Welcome to the big time, boys." a cheerful Gates quipped, "Next year I'll teach you how to sue public school systems so you can grasp the true earning potential locked within."
I can't wait until one of these is widespread AND badly written. Once several thousand computers stop booting and are potential ruined (umm... you need a new motherboard... this is not covered under warranty). God help whoever wrote and distributed it. He will hang.
No one wants to hang Bill Gates, though he has done what you worry about. Fines and jail, yes, hanging no.
Their definition of suspicious people to be put under the "terrorist surveillance program" seems to include vegan demonstrators. What a waste of time and resources.
That list of yours makes Debian look easy and I'm talking about Potato or Woody. The only problem I had with that was devices, which I could live without. These days, I don't have to live without much. Give me simple text files for configuration over registry tweaking any day. Once a machine is configured, it stays that way. Rebuilds, ala M$, have been a thing of the past for me since 1998. The lengths people will go to use M$'s "easy" and obviously second rate OS never cease to amaze me.
Here is a live CD that configures without user intention and has a GUI install process that takes less than half an hour without a single reboot. It contains Macromedia Flash and other commercial stuff which might be considered spyware, but you will never have to do the eight tool search and destroy topped off by the M$ upgrade train coup de grace. In their favor, they manage to configure these tools well so that you can turn them off. You also get cool stuff like open office 2.
Debian proper is not that much more difficult. When used in combination with auto configuring live CDs, even a novice can figure things out.
Red Hat, Fedora and all derivatives are similarly easy.
one of the most unfortunate side effects of file sharing as a meaningful debate on the future of music in Canada as well as the best path for copyright reform is lost amid the cries of sharing, stealing, and private copying. We need a real discussion of music in Canada that goes beyond file sharing to include private copying, fair use, the limits on the use of DRM, the transparency of collectives, canadian content requirements in the Internet era, and support for the artists.
The pigopolists have been loud, but the rest of us are quietly not using our wallets. Perpetual copyrights and DRM are out of bounds and no one is going to support them.
It's very simple, really, people want their freedom. If you don't want me to share the music you publish, I don't want to buy it. I won't go for technological restrictions either. I'm not giving my money to people who would make sharing a crime. Music is supposed to be shared and it's supposed to be unifying.
oh, guess i better take the music I'VE made (which is free and legally distributable) out of there too, because i guess I (the owner of said music) have broken the law, too.
That's exactly the conclusion the RIAA wants you to draw. P2P is dirty, they tell you, because so many people use it to steal bread from the mouths of artists children. Because all material is copyright and there's no easy way to tell the publisher's intentions, ALL SHARING MUST INVOLVE SAID "PIRACY". So give up, only the pigopolists can legally distribute music and keep all the bread from ever reaching an artist.
Share music? Why would I want to do that? Next thing you know, I'll be playing it to my friends and singing it without permission. Dirty me.
Go to concerts, buy music and share it. As you have noticed, not everyone is a pig and there's more than enough to go around without choke points in Holywood. I don't have to give my money to a pig when I could give it to an artist.
Please... if the only link in the story is broken, don't post the story.
Right... Didn't your mom teach you to keep quiet unless you had something nice to say?
Just bookmark it and move on. The DDoS from people who hate Slashdot only lasts a day or two. The "Slashdot Effect" has dissipated, for instance, on the macro len, and the scanner camera sites that were trashed a few days ago.
Well, I guess your resume clearly validates your opinions about the industry.
Oh, hurt me AC. Ha, ha, ha.
Morons who spend their time harassing people on Slashdot have never done so much as worked for a large company, much less done IT for them or any other company. People like you will be lucky to work their way up from dishwasher to bartender before you piss someone off and have to start all over again.
Of course, with the Internet, all the other warez sites on the planet can easily fill the void left by the ones that were just shut down.
Dare I say that free content is making warez redundant, even second rate? Free software works better than commercial software. Free media, such as can be found at places like the internet archive or http://magnatune.com/">Magnatune is better than RIAA/MPAA crap. Give your money and mind share to those who deserve it!
Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information.
You:
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether?... At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered.... All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly.
It would have been better to do exactly the opposite of what they are doing. They should have provided mail and blogging and not admitted that the Chinese government could do anything good or bad to them. Blocking access to information is evil so Google should not cooperate with or be dependent on those that do it. Every penny they earn doing this is power the Chinese government will have over them. Every tool they deny the people of China themselves makes the people less able to help themselves.
As you say, smart and curious people know what's going on and can find out about it. Those same smart and curious people can find an uncensored Google, which leads them to better information. Indeed, you point to a valid reason for the Chinese government to leave access to Google open: technical efficiency. It is better for you strive to reach a news source you trust than to have another one you can't trust.
Google may even be helping China censor the news. M$ and Yahoo's search capability is not as good as Google's, as you have noticed paging through hundreds of their results for technical answers. If Google's technology is used to determine what articles are to be censored, they will have done you and everyone else a disservice. The more money they earn through such disservice, the worse off they will be. At the very least, the company is leanding credibility to censorship by saying that it's worth it.
They should leave the dirty work to all the bullshitters and continue to do what they do well. Google's success is based on simplicity. This censorship gig will be anything but simple and will end up sucking more resources then it gains. Google should also remember that hard core communists view the US as an enemy and will do everthing possible to cause harm to and reduce the technical efficiency of the US and everyone else that's not a member of the Chinese Communist party. Every man hour Google dedicates to censorship is a man hour that did not go towards improving real services. It really is that black and white.
If this makes you angry, and it should, you need to direct your anger at the people who make things difficult for you, your government. It is your own government that blocks access to technical information Google provides because they are afraid of what else you might see. They are the ones who are sacrificing efficiency for control and ability to matian their privilege.
I'm afraid the real answer is to drink and smoke. Raise a glass to the man of the year while you are at it. The "training" never ends because the upgrade train never ends. The trouble never ends either, if the system works you would not upgrade.
On a Unix system, you have man pages and volumes of great advice on the web for software that works reliably. In your position, there's not much you can really do.
Did this guy cry about floppies five years ago? People did the same thing with them then as they are doing with USB devices now. They made coppies of their work because they DID NOT TRUST THEIR DESKTOP COMPUTER TO KEEP IT FOR THEM. They trusted their network shares even less because Microsoft makes shitty software. It's rare that a person will write as much text as can fill a floppy. The only reason they need UBS fobs now is because of bloated file formats like Power Point's. The same number of hours of work will be carried around on USB as was carried on floppies and the loss will represent the same loss it did five years ago.
The same issues were hashed around then and the floppy carriers won. The USB carriers might not be so lucky. If you are working in a Microsoft shop, your luck is already bad and you should expect more of the same.
$120 million is peanuts to a company with a capitalization of $250 billion and is deceptive in it's own way. They spent more than a billion promoting XP, a billion on MSN, etc. While not mom and pop, a much smaller company might spend that kind of money. Very few companies have the ability to spend billions in advertising. At the same time, few companies have reputations so poor that they need to spend that much either.
drop its current overseas advertising slogan "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." after a successful trademark infringement suit filed by The Borg
It will be replaced by, "You are our passion, Let us help you reach your potential," which means the same thing but the Borg forgot to trademark it.
An impressed human Borg lawyer said, "Microsoft lawyers have taken trade mark, copyright and patent law to the next level. We can't wait to add them to the collective. In trademark they claim entire concepts and individual preexisting words. In patents, they claim whole ideas instead of implementations which vastly simplifies everything. Their copyrights are forever though they discard they make subtle changes to their code which breaks old versions every two years or so."
The same lawyer, in the form of an IMP, continued, "We are also very impressed by their small is beautiful work and will seriously consider deception as an alternative to honestly portraying ourselves to potential clients."
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but your friends at the former KGB, and Communist China have an inside perspective. But hey, if you can sell crap like that to places that safeguard your countries most important secrets, why not share it with your enemies? You know they in turn are sharing it with their friends in North Korea, Pakistan and elsewhere. Terrorists indeed. No need to worry about that stuff proliferating because it's already gone. Given such an irresponsible sales record, it's hard to imagine them calling the source code a trade secret.
What could be more important than making a buck? Certainly not the freedom of some poor dope who thought he had something of value in his hands. Why, if he could do it anyone could and M$ would dissapear and the terrorists would win, right?
I can't believe they would try to trot out the terrorist bogey man.
Probably as well or better than the kind of sharing that puts OpenSSH into every Linux distro.
Imagine Debian on UltraSparc with a Solaris kernel.
Imagine Sun Linux kernel modules. You don't really think a practical person like Torvalds would turn any of that down do you?
User name, "confusion", is way too obvious. Try "silly" or "wrong" for greater stealth.
Anyone doing any kind of scientific computing, which is a large portion of their customer base. They have been losing that customer base to Linux, which hurts their sales in more ways than one.
You might also care about Solaris if you want to use any of their excellent hardware. If they GPL'd Solaris, no only could you use it without practical and moral problems, you could also do a much better job of porting other free software.
GPL'd Solaris would be a great gift. Don't look it too hard in the mouth.
GPL Java, for crying out loud.
The magic of cross licensing may prevent that. If Sun GPL's Solaris, you can be sure they will do everything in their power to get a free Java out.
Take what it gives and make what it won't.
Why stop at the lawyers? Are the jurors lying? I'd love to see them stick the whole court into an MRI machine, but then who'd interpret the results besides another person in an MRI machine being watched by yet another person in an MRI machine ad infinitum. Recursion detected, halt.
Should make Court TV more interesting.
I don't think the cameras will work in the magnetic field of an MRI machine, so we must reject the whole concept.
You want to use non free software and you want it to be easy. Ultimately, you must do as the owners say. If there really was an answer, you would have found it already. If you want things to be easy, give your customers Mepis, it's not entirely free but none of the owners are as dumb as M$.
You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?
IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience. Others, having failed to learn from Netscape's demise that it's not possible to do business on M$, have improved IE with pop-up blocking "toolbars" but IE itself is about three generations behind every other major browser. Compare it to KDE's excellent desktop integration, and you realize that M$ is never going to catch up.
You failed to observe anything because you don't understand the purpose of hibernation. Well, that and your choice of an OS that forces a reboot every 14 days and flakes out much sooner. You are so used to the workarounds to your system's reliability and usability problems that you just don't get it.
Hibernation and suspend on laptops are for portability and place keeping. You take your work with you, open the lid and there it is for you to do what you need. When you are done, you close the lid and move on. My laptops never hibernate for more than a few days but the two or three projects I'm working on are always there when I'm ready to get back to work.
Place keeping works much better with a decent window manager with virtual desktops, and a session manager which the software you describe lacks. You could almost get away with flaky performance if only your work would appear as you left it after a reboot but none of my Windoze using friends has ever told me about a M$ session manager that works. When you try to work on more than one project, you have to hunt through a crappy icon bar for your work. When I open my laptop's lid my projects are right where I left them, spread out over several virtual desktops.
Yeah, I've seen the new M$ "Power Tools" that finally give the user virtual desktops. It has a kind of KDE look to it, but is not nearly as nice. The ability to display more than one desktop at a time on the screen almost makes up for the lack of a pager, but all of it is useless without system stability. If you can't keep your machine up for more than a day, there's not much point in trying to keep open more than one project's worth of work, is there? Might as well keep single tasking, the way Bill intended. Yeah, keep on keeping on until Bill does it, then suddenly it's going to be the bestest most hypest thing in the world.
I like what you have worked on much better than I like your analogies. Do you think a handheld cell device would do well with something like VOIP or CU30? It it could do that, play music, browse the web and text edit / email, I'd say it was a very nice general purpose device. General purpose does not take much. Would I notice all that you say the cell lacks any more than I would notice delays on a 150 MHz Pentium?
Critical_ sees a typical Wintel bug and thinks Apple has a problem. It's an interesting thought, but not one to publish without checking.
APM and ACPI, designed in part by Microsoft, have always been secretive and buggy. Tricky hardware that constantly varies like Winmodems is the rule and I'm amazed the Linux works so well with any of it.
The only thing worse than the hardware has been Microsoft's software on top of it. While I'm able to keep laptops up for more then 40 days by using APM and hibernation or ACPI and suspend, my Microsoft using friends have to reboot. They tell me that their Word documents get corrupted on resume if the machine resumes at all. Cluster on cluster, all of their complex nasties designed to thwart competitors only bite them in the rear despite the fact they wrote the specs themselves and have hardware details no one else does. This is what to expect from non-free.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
As if the airline has a choice. It would be nice to see what happened if an airline decided it no longer needed to check ID, a de facto passport, or baggage on domestic flights.
M$ Certified Evil. Works for Sure.
No one wants to hang Bill Gates, though he has done what you worry about. Fines and jail, yes, hanging no.
Here is a live CD that configures without user intention and has a GUI install process that takes less than half an hour without a single reboot. It contains Macromedia Flash and other commercial stuff which might be considered spyware, but you will never have to do the eight tool search and destroy topped off by the M$ upgrade train coup de grace. In their favor, they manage to configure these tools well so that you can turn them off. You also get cool stuff like open office 2.
Debian proper is not that much more difficult. When used in combination with auto configuring live CDs, even a novice can figure things out.
Red Hat, Fedora and all derivatives are similarly easy.
The pigopolists have been loud, but the rest of us are quietly not using our wallets. Perpetual copyrights and DRM are out of bounds and no one is going to support them.
It's very simple, really, people want their freedom. If you don't want me to share the music you publish, I don't want to buy it. I won't go for technological restrictions either. I'm not giving my money to people who would make sharing a crime. Music is supposed to be shared and it's supposed to be unifying.
That's exactly the conclusion the RIAA wants you to draw. P2P is dirty, they tell you, because so many people use it to steal bread from the mouths of artists children. Because all material is copyright and there's no easy way to tell the publisher's intentions, ALL SHARING MUST INVOLVE SAID "PIRACY". So give up, only the pigopolists can legally distribute music and keep all the bread from ever reaching an artist.
Share music? Why would I want to do that? Next thing you know, I'll be playing it to my friends and singing it without permission. Dirty me.
That old story is so over:
Go to concerts, buy music and share it. As you have noticed, not everyone is a pig and there's more than enough to go around without choke points in Holywood. I don't have to give my money to a pig when I could give it to an artist.
Right ... Didn't your mom teach you to keep quiet unless you had something nice to say?
Just bookmark it and move on. The DDoS from people who hate Slashdot only lasts a day or two. The "Slashdot Effect" has dissipated, for instance, on the macro len, and the scanner camera sites that were trashed a few days ago.
Oh, hurt me AC. Ha, ha, ha.
Morons who spend their time harassing people on Slashdot have never done so much as worked for a large company, much less done IT for them or any other company. People like you will be lucky to work their way up from dishwasher to bartender before you piss someone off and have to start all over again.
Dare I say that free content is making warez redundant, even second rate? Free software works better than commercial software. Free media, such as can be found at places like the internet archive or http://magnatune.com/">Magnatune is better than RIAA/MPAA crap. Give your money and mind share to those who deserve it!
Allow me to pimp the Radiators, one of the best jam bands to come out of New Orleans. There are hundreds of hours of their concerts available that you can share with your friends without charge or greed.
Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information.
You:
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether? ... At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered. ... All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly.
It would have been better to do exactly the opposite of what they are doing. They should have provided mail and blogging and not admitted that the Chinese government could do anything good or bad to them. Blocking access to information is evil so Google should not cooperate with or be dependent on those that do it. Every penny they earn doing this is power the Chinese government will have over them. Every tool they deny the people of China themselves makes the people less able to help themselves.
As you say, smart and curious people know what's going on and can find out about it. Those same smart and curious people can find an uncensored Google, which leads them to better information. Indeed, you point to a valid reason for the Chinese government to leave access to Google open: technical efficiency. It is better for you strive to reach a news source you trust than to have another one you can't trust.
Google may even be helping China censor the news. M$ and Yahoo's search capability is not as good as Google's, as you have noticed paging through hundreds of their results for technical answers. If Google's technology is used to determine what articles are to be censored, they will have done you and everyone else a disservice. The more money they earn through such disservice, the worse off they will be. At the very least, the company is leanding credibility to censorship by saying that it's worth it.
They should leave the dirty work to all the bullshitters and continue to do what they do well. Google's success is based on simplicity. This censorship gig will be anything but simple and will end up sucking more resources then it gains. Google should also remember that hard core communists view the US as an enemy and will do everthing possible to cause harm to and reduce the technical efficiency of the US and everyone else that's not a member of the Chinese Communist party. Every man hour Google dedicates to censorship is a man hour that did not go towards improving real services. It really is that black and white.
If this makes you angry, and it should, you need to direct your anger at the people who make things difficult for you, your government. It is your own government that blocks access to technical information Google provides because they are afraid of what else you might see. They are the ones who are sacrificing efficiency for control and ability to matian their privilege.
On a Unix system, you have man pages and volumes of great advice on the web for software that works reliably. In your position, there's not much you can really do.
The same issues were hashed around then and the floppy carriers won. The USB carriers might not be so lucky. If you are working in a Microsoft shop, your luck is already bad and you should expect more of the same.
It will be replaced by, "You are our passion, Let us help you reach your potential," which means the same thing but the Borg forgot to trademark it.
An impressed human Borg lawyer said, "Microsoft lawyers have taken trade mark, copyright and patent law to the next level. We can't wait to add them to the collective. In trademark they claim entire concepts and individual preexisting words. In patents, they claim whole ideas instead of implementations which vastly simplifies everything. Their copyrights are forever though they discard they make subtle changes to their code which breaks old versions every two years or so."
The same lawyer, in the form of an IMP, continued, "We are also very impressed by their small is beautiful work and will seriously consider deception as an alternative to honestly portraying ourselves to potential clients."