Slashdot has political opposition, just the kind of people this kind of thing is designed to catch. What, you think they are going to look at the referring site and know it's a prank if it comes from here? Ha!
I encourage people to look up your other posts and decide for themselves the degree of your idiocy.
I encourage the same, thanks. Start with the journal because lots of them have been accepted as stories worth reading. More on topic is the Vista Failure Log, where I've collected the whole sad story of Vista's failed development, bungled deployment, noted flaws and industry rejection.
One broken computer is too many when it's yours. The Windows way of doing things does not give you an "undo" button, so you are stuck with a wipe and reload and begging M$ for permission to be "genuine" again.
What you have to realize is that not everyone complains and mass production multiplies the woes. Each of the dozen or two complaints must be multiplied by the thousands of other people who have the same pieces of "incompatible" hardware and will have exactly the same problems. Then you have to consider the hundreds of other people who's computer is too broken to complain. Dozens of complaints on a M$ blog represents a significant fraction of the user base.
Really. How is it that something like a video card driver could impact the kernel? What an intentionally cluster fucked mess.
I also thought this was funny:
All told, Vista SP1 includes more than 300 hot fixes for the OS. Users will need to install three prerequisite files onto their computers before they can upgrade to Vista SP1. Those files are also available through Windows Update.
WTF? Why make the user drag around for three dinky packages?
Vaporizing the UK won't eliminate the rich and powerful people who promote this kind of thing. They are your neighbors who think they can get away with it. Their weapons are fear and economic punishment. They must be fought with ridicule and love.
There will never be another Nazi state but the same mistakes can be made in new forms and you won't be able to tell the difference. Surveillance societies are the mechanism of tyranny and that always leads to mass murder. The point of control is profit and it's directed to private companies. The same thing happened in the USSR with individuals who controlled state companies. Those who obey are rewarded. Those who do not are punished. Everyone wants to be the top dog so societies like that alternate between purge, aka reign of terror, civil war and war of aggression. Make no mistake, when opposition is impossible, the abuse goes lawless and things get ugly fast.
The DNA portion has lots of Nazi potential. The samples and studies on them will fuel all sorts of crackpot eugenics as well as cure disease. Insurance companies will start discriminate against those with incurable disseases right away, mirroring Hitler's euthanasia program. Yes, the same stupid studies can be used to justify mass murder too as ordinary ethic clashes are given a new false footing in science but real tyranny will use any excuse for murder if it makes a buck. The most awful use of DNA is the intended one, ID. The thing which most uniquely identifies each human being as an individual will be treated like any other dehumanizing prisoner ID number. A cheap, impossible to remove ID just like everyone else's that can only do you harm.
The important thing being taught to children is that is that they are all suspects and property of an infallible state. Stand up and be counted.
The founding fathers really did mean every kind of weapon should be held by free men to defend themselves against the state. Private militia were encouraged to have not only small arms but cannons, gun powder and to practice their use. These were radical things to allow when you consider the gunpowder plot and what it did to English law. The bill of rights is a direct response to centuries of state tyranny and oppression in England that included such gross injustices as a state religion, perpetual copyright and limits on speech and assembly enforced by execution. And so, private militias formed the bulk of the US military. They bought their own artillery and practiced independently and with each other right up to the early 20th. Such things are still legal today, if highly regulated and monitored. They are there because free men must have the ability to defend themselves against their government. The last 50 years have been a dark time of high cost arms and government sponsored monopoly media that have concentrated power in a way not seen since the fall of Rome. Further reductions of our rights are very dangerous as is the giant standing army we have.
The ACLU's wrong headed stance on personal arms does not make the rest of their work wrong.
No, it's pay for play, the way they want the internet to look. This is, of course, the opposite of net neutrality. Insultinly enough, it makes you use your equipment as part of their service. Only "secure" platforms will be allowed the privilege because it will require DRM. Expect P4P to look just like pay per view TV and P2P to see further interference. Without better regulatory oversight or a liberated spectrum, network freedom and software freedom are doomed.
M$ has a clause that makes it only good for current "versions":
New versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the list.
or, as the lawyers noted:
Microsoft reserves the right to cancel the promise
This is par for the non free course. You don't own the software on your computer and, even if they don't revoke your right to use it, new "versions" won't work with old versions. There are superficial arguments about "innovation" to justify the non free rip off, but non of them can be applied to a document standard. A standard that frequently changes, is "extensible", patent encumbered or is in some other way incomplete is not a standard at all. What this means is that M$ is trying to get an ISO stamp of approval for all of their usual practices, but that's been obvious all along.
If M$ wanted to embrace real standards, they would be using ODF, CSS, PDF, ogg vorbis, ogg theora and so on and so forth.
The man is a little out of touch to have such wishful thoughts as this:
The switch to exclusively 64-bit would clean up all the legacy viruses and spyware programs that have been plaguing us for years. The requirement for much more system memory cannot be an excuse, because most owners of 64-bit processors have at least 1 GB of system memory installed.
The sweet spot for vista is supposed to be 4 GB, the only thing more lacking in hardware support than Vista is 64 bit Vista and I can't imagine how changing memory pointer sizes would magically cure Windows of all it's problems. It's true that consoles are a better deal than a decked out Vista platform, but the world of PC gaming should be much better than it is.
Three years ago, you could run the Unreal Tournament that came with Xandros on very modest equipment. It looked great and worked well. More realism would be nice but it's not needed for good gaming.
Those who brought lawsuits obviously felt like the system could be abused. The stealth nature of the program highlights the risk.
It would be better if they put this baby ChoicePoint to sleep before it grows up. That kind of information should not be trusted with anyone, no matter how honorable, because it's no one's business. Japan might also request their data purged from ChoicePoint and other TIA children.
Physical experiments have their limits too. What's practical about drivers running around in circles? Real roads have fluctuating traffic loads, blind turns, merging and diverging traffic and a host of other obstacles. The point of an experiment is controlled conditions to gain fundamental constants and other descriptors. What you might get from this experiment is better statistics on driver reaction time and a few other constants to refine you models.
When you really want to know how a road is going to perform, you take it to some kind of Monte Carlo simulation.
I do have another account but you don't know which one it is and it's received very well. I say the same things the same way as often as I like, but you morons have yet to find and demolish it. Ha ha, you losers can't do anything right.
He's probably talking about this, this or all of this. Part of the M$ excuse for all of their problems is that older drivers had to be changed for copy protection and security. It's not surprising a NYT writer would miss those details and they might not be appropriate - the news is that M$ broke XP drivers at the last minute and screwed device makers and users alike. Traditional newspapers left it up to readers to connect the dots because they did not have hyper links to older stories.
Despite these foibles and excuses, it should be obvious that the changes were not really needed. Vista worked better before they were made and free software continues to be able to use the same hardware without security issues. The least they could have done is provide a wrapper for older drivers. Really though, the evidence is pointing to the usual upgrade train story: intentional waste.
The NYT coverage and their analysis are both news from the Vista capable dissaster. With a jerk around like that, it's no wonder that the whole industry has revolted and it's nice to see the word getting out to a wider audience via papers like the NYT. Their analysis is also interesting, though I'd love to see where "Otter" beat them to the punch. Didn't happen did it?
Here are some older examples of the same kinds of behavior:
The list goes on and on. On the chopping block today are ODF, Linux distros, AV makers and a host of competitors that just won't die like iPod, Play Station and Mozilla. The only way out is to avoid Windows and stay away from M$ and other non free software vendors. The further away you are, the better off you are.
I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...
With all due respect to the cleverness of the algorithm, your employer and yourself, software patents suck. A general method was patented which means that no other algorithm can do the same thing, no matter how clever. That's why software and business method patents suck life - they claim methods not real inventions. Because no method is ever really an invention, neither is an algorithm which is just a formal statement of methods.
This lawsuit cost Limelight $45 million bucks and it will cost us all much more as a monopoly has been granted on one of the few practical ways to move media around the internet from a central site. There are countless services that use this kind of method to share load out to a pool of participating machines, preferably close to the user. Hopefully the bastards won't be able to get Debian's NTP pool of the DNS system. What's left for media distribution is Alkamai and the much demonized and harassed P2P networks. How shitty.
what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.
That's got to be one of the worst analogies ever but I can make it better. A person who's completely ignorant of music history and guided only by some sort of reptilian imprinted taste might think that way about music. Bigotry and science are polar opposites so we should not be bound by these thoughts any more than we are bound by 1970 era machines but the old saw, "those who don't know Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly," is still true. For all that, music and software have on fundamental thing in common: both are particular expressions based on mathematical and machine rules.
Software patents are more like business method or math patents (which don't exist outside of software yet!), they steal fundamental and common ideas and are discoveries at best. Like music, these methods are really just expressions of underlying natural patterns and are better covered by copyright. People can express the same things without stepping on each others toes with copyrights. Also like music the basic structures and techniques based on math have been understood for a long time, and have "golden ages" associated with them. Software patents take away the fundamentals and that's just wrong. Music patents, if they existed, would cover such basics as 4 4 tempo, syncopation or the use of strings to produce notes. When you get down to it, software patents are just a silly as that. As End Software Patents points out, programmers never asked for such things. Neither have musicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot has political opposition, just the kind of people this kind of thing is designed to catch. What, you think they are going to look at the referring site and know it's a prank if it comes from here? Ha!
I encourage people to look up your other posts and decide for themselves the degree of your idiocy.
I encourage the same, thanks. Start with the journal because lots of them have been accepted as stories worth reading. More on topic is the Vista Failure Log, where I've collected the whole sad story of Vista's failed development, bungled deployment, noted flaws and industry rejection.
The 2 minute Vista install shows you how. Obviates the need for service packs and is sure to work.
One broken computer is too many when it's yours. The Windows way of doing things does not give you an "undo" button, so you are stuck with a wipe and reload and begging M$ for permission to be "genuine" again.
What you have to realize is that not everyone complains and mass production multiplies the woes. Each of the dozen or two complaints must be multiplied by the thousands of other people who have the same pieces of "incompatible" hardware and will have exactly the same problems. Then you have to consider the hundreds of other people who's computer is too broken to complain. Dozens of complaints on a M$ blog represents a significant fraction of the user base.
Really. How is it that something like a video card driver could impact the kernel? What an intentionally cluster fucked mess.
I also thought this was funny:
WTF? Why make the user drag around for three dinky packages?
Windoze package management is terminally broken.
Getting caught will make it look like you have nothing good to offer. A worthwhile thing sells itself.
Why fix flaws when you can buy voters?
But big seed has been buying laws which lead to just that.
Vaporizing the UK won't eliminate the rich and powerful people who promote this kind of thing. They are your neighbors who think they can get away with it. Their weapons are fear and economic punishment. They must be fought with ridicule and love.
There will never be another Nazi state but the same mistakes can be made in new forms and you won't be able to tell the difference. Surveillance societies are the mechanism of tyranny and that always leads to mass murder. The point of control is profit and it's directed to private companies. The same thing happened in the USSR with individuals who controlled state companies. Those who obey are rewarded. Those who do not are punished. Everyone wants to be the top dog so societies like that alternate between purge, aka reign of terror, civil war and war of aggression. Make no mistake, when opposition is impossible, the abuse goes lawless and things get ugly fast.
The DNA portion has lots of Nazi potential. The samples and studies on them will fuel all sorts of crackpot eugenics as well as cure disease. Insurance companies will start discriminate against those with incurable disseases right away, mirroring Hitler's euthanasia program. Yes, the same stupid studies can be used to justify mass murder too as ordinary ethic clashes are given a new false footing in science but real tyranny will use any excuse for murder if it makes a buck. The most awful use of DNA is the intended one, ID. The thing which most uniquely identifies each human being as an individual will be treated like any other dehumanizing prisoner ID number. A cheap, impossible to remove ID just like everyone else's that can only do you harm.
The important thing being taught to children is that is that they are all suspects and property of an infallible state. Stand up and be counted.
The founding fathers really did mean every kind of weapon should be held by free men to defend themselves against the state. Private militia were encouraged to have not only small arms but cannons, gun powder and to practice their use. These were radical things to allow when you consider the gunpowder plot and what it did to English law. The bill of rights is a direct response to centuries of state tyranny and oppression in England that included such gross injustices as a state religion, perpetual copyright and limits on speech and assembly enforced by execution. And so, private militias formed the bulk of the US military. They bought their own artillery and practiced independently and with each other right up to the early 20th. Such things are still legal today, if highly regulated and monitored. They are there because free men must have the ability to defend themselves against their government. The last 50 years have been a dark time of high cost arms and government sponsored monopoly media that have concentrated power in a way not seen since the fall of Rome. Further reductions of our rights are very dangerous as is the giant standing army we have.
The ACLU's wrong headed stance on personal arms does not make the rest of their work wrong.
No, it's pay for play, the way they want the internet to look. This is, of course, the opposite of net neutrality. Insultinly enough, it makes you use your equipment as part of their service. Only "secure" platforms will be allowed the privilege because it will require DRM. Expect P4P to look just like pay per view TV and P2P to see further interference. Without better regulatory oversight or a liberated spectrum, network freedom and software freedom are doomed.
They are also going to decide to prosecute or not. This is not nearly good enough and it stinks of cover up. Check out what the Wall Street Journal and ACLU have to say about this.
I wonder if they consider cell phones a listening device.
until someone points a gun at you.
Ever heard of that happening over a DVD? The man is an ass.
M$ has a clause that makes it only good for current "versions":
or, as the lawyers noted:
This is par for the non free course. You don't own the software on your computer and, even if they don't revoke your right to use it, new "versions" won't work with old versions. There are superficial arguments about "innovation" to justify the non free rip off, but non of them can be applied to a document standard. A standard that frequently changes, is "extensible", patent encumbered or is in some other way incomplete is not a standard at all. What this means is that M$ is trying to get an ISO stamp of approval for all of their usual practices, but that's been obvious all along.
If M$ wanted to embrace real standards, they would be using ODF, CSS, PDF, ogg vorbis, ogg theora and so on and so forth.
To perpetuate their late 80's file and OS monopolies. There is nothing subtle or difficult to understand about this.
The man is a little out of touch to have such wishful thoughts as this:
The sweet spot for vista is supposed to be 4 GB, the only thing more lacking in hardware support than Vista is 64 bit Vista and I can't imagine how changing memory pointer sizes would magically cure Windows of all it's problems. It's true that consoles are a better deal than a decked out Vista platform, but the world of PC gaming should be much better than it is.
Three years ago, you could run the Unreal Tournament that came with Xandros on very modest equipment. It looked great and worked well. More realism would be nice but it's not needed for good gaming.
Those who brought lawsuits obviously felt like the system could be abused. The stealth nature of the program highlights the risk.
It would be better if they put this baby ChoicePoint to sleep before it grows up. That kind of information should not be trusted with anyone, no matter how honorable, because it's no one's business. Japan might also request their data purged from ChoicePoint and other TIA children.
What projects are not under GPLv3 and will they work without the GNU toolchain? Novell can no more go it alone than M$ can.
Physical experiments have their limits too. What's practical about drivers running around in circles? Real roads have fluctuating traffic loads, blind turns, merging and diverging traffic and a host of other obstacles. The point of an experiment is controlled conditions to gain fundamental constants and other descriptors. What you might get from this experiment is better statistics on driver reaction time and a few other constants to refine you models.
When you really want to know how a road is going to perform, you take it to some kind of Monte Carlo simulation.
I do have another account but you don't know which one it is and it's received very well. I say the same things the same way as often as I like, but you morons have yet to find and demolish it. Ha ha, you losers can't do anything right.
He's probably talking about this, this or all of this. Part of the M$ excuse for all of their problems is that older drivers had to be changed for copy protection and security. It's not surprising a NYT writer would miss those details and they might not be appropriate - the news is that M$ broke XP drivers at the last minute and screwed device makers and users alike. Traditional newspapers left it up to readers to connect the dots because they did not have hyper links to older stories.
Despite these foibles and excuses, it should be obvious that the changes were not really needed. Vista worked better before they were made and free software continues to be able to use the same hardware without security issues. The least they could have done is provide a wrapper for older drivers. Really though, the evidence is pointing to the usual upgrade train story: intentional waste.
The NYT coverage and their analysis are both news from the Vista capable dissaster. With a jerk around like that, it's no wonder that the whole industry has revolted and it's nice to see the word getting out to a wider audience via papers like the NYT. Their analysis is also interesting, though I'd love to see where "Otter" beat them to the punch. Didn't happen did it?
Here are some older examples of the same kinds of behavior:
The list goes on and on. On the chopping block today are ODF, Linux distros, AV makers and a host of competitors that just won't die like iPod, Play Station and Mozilla. The only way out is to avoid Windows and stay away from M$ and other non free software vendors. The further away you are, the better off you are.
I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...
With all due respect to the cleverness of the algorithm, your employer and yourself, software patents suck. A general method was patented which means that no other algorithm can do the same thing, no matter how clever. That's why software and business method patents suck life - they claim methods not real inventions. Because no method is ever really an invention, neither is an algorithm which is just a formal statement of methods.
This lawsuit cost Limelight $45 million bucks and it will cost us all much more as a monopoly has been granted on one of the few practical ways to move media around the internet from a central site. There are countless services that use this kind of method to share load out to a pool of participating machines, preferably close to the user. Hopefully the bastards won't be able to get Debian's NTP pool of the DNS system. What's left for media distribution is Alkamai and the much demonized and harassed P2P networks. How shitty.
what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.
That's got to be one of the worst analogies ever but I can make it better. A person who's completely ignorant of music history and guided only by some sort of reptilian imprinted taste might think that way about music. Bigotry and science are polar opposites so we should not be bound by these thoughts any more than we are bound by 1970 era machines but the old saw, "those who don't know Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly," is still true. For all that, music and software have on fundamental thing in common: both are particular expressions based on mathematical and machine rules.
Software patents are more like business method or math patents (which don't exist outside of software yet!), they steal fundamental and common ideas and are discoveries at best. Like music, these methods are really just expressions of underlying natural patterns and are better covered by copyright. People can express the same things without stepping on each others toes with copyrights. Also like music the basic structures and techniques based on math have been understood for a long time, and have "golden ages" associated with them. Software patents take away the fundamentals and that's just wrong. Music patents, if they existed, would cover such basics as 4 4 tempo, syncopation or the use of strings to produce notes. When you get down to it, software patents are just a silly as that. As End Software Patents points out, programmers never asked for such things. Neither have musicians.