I would argue that infact many Linux users suffer from more cognative dissonance that a normal computer user (everyone suffers form it from time to time)....A good example is a guy... that switched and claimed it was great. Yet, he had to make so many concessions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a M$ box in the corner. I only have to boot it when I want to get pictures off my parallel scanner or an old digicam. If I were to actually use the pain in the ass like Bill says I can, it would break down in a few months just like all the other PC's I've got that now run real software. Free sofware does what I want better and easier than M$ crap ever did. Most of the "simple things" that take a little bit of time to accomplish under Linux are impossible under Windoze.
Twitter is a simple user and he hates a troll. There's more bullshit in the above post that I'm going to bother with.
His father was not drafted. The draft was illegal in that society. Instead, Rico's father understood his responsibility to society and enlisted. That's why Rico smiled. His father had come around to the same realization that Rico had.
Ah yes, a few points that have little to do with Heinlien's use of imperfect narative. I had forgoten the characters names and that there was no compulsory draft. The reason I'm hazy about details like that is that Rico's narative is less than perfect, we can not and are not supposed to trust what he says.
Now consider if the father's enlistment was portrayed in a positive manner, despite it being seen that way by Rico. Would you really consider it good for people who have run sucessful business to suddenly give it all up? One of the biggest reasons for the father's enlistment and the "big change" was that one of the alien worlds under Earth attack had managed a couter strike that killed Rico's mother along with a large chunk of the world population. Old men like Rico's father jumping onto rockets was portrayed even by Rico as a despiration measure.
The idea seems to be that a military society had evolved which made all decisions and ultimately used all resources to further its own aims. That they did this without repressing free speech and taking other liberties is unlikely. We never get a good view of why the earth was at war with all other inteligent life forms and that is the root of the nightmare. Rico presents us with a society that was prosperous and had recovered from a horrible nuclear war only to be plunged into endless galactic wars. Rico can't tell that his is an awful existence or that things could be any different.
I missed the joke because it's such a M$ troll thing to offer, "No one is interested in the mundane details of your life," as an excuse for poor security practices and privacy invasion. It's an insulting, selfish and contradictory statement designed to put the victim in a low self esteem sleep. I get tired of this "little people" argument and it affects my humor.
How realistic are super-proficient women, who just happen to dress provocatively and mouth his beliefs perfectly?
If Friday is an example that comes to mind, I suggest you re-read Friday and Star Ship Troopers with a more critical eye. Heinlien is NOT Friday or a Star Ship Trooper, he's used the character's to mouth a future he considers nighmarish. The characters are imperfect and unable to understand their situation as well as we do.
Our Star Ship trooper is happy to see the entire planet turned into a war machine. He even smiles when he sees his own father drafted. Would you want to live in a world like that?
Friday is not supposed to represent any living person either. She is a poorly educated sex slave with extraordinary strength and mental ability. Friday demonstrates both her mental power and lack of education by a nauseasingly detailed recitation of events that span years. She remembers every single meal she eats in every greasy spoon and tells us all about it years after the fact! Clearly, Heinlien wanted to paint a mind that was not trained to disregard extraneous details but strong enough to not need to. The average person who burdened themselves with all those kinds of details would run like M$ XP. What appears to be poor story telling is crucial to our understanding of the character! That Heinlien can pull it off without losing the reader is awsome. Yes, she was concieved and bred to be some adolescent man's dream toy. Sterile, with low self esteem and taught only those things that might sexually please before being recruited to other things. It is doubtful that any Libertarian would want anyone else treated that way.
In any case, both of these stories demonstrates what makes good science fiction: they take a few postulated technical inovations, understand how they might effect society and it's members, then create an entertaining story of entrapment or escape. Good science fiction, like any story telling, requires an understanding of both human nature and creation. I see a kind of triad, character insight, technology insight and storyline. Strengths in one area can make up for weakness in others, depending on the tastes and education of the reader. My favorites are short stories that have all the elments.
True, you need to go to Brazil
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
I suppose having your every move on the web tracked and monitored by some comercial company over windows is considered secure by some. Next time these folks want security and a faster connection software, might I recomend:
I don't know what you do around your computer, but I can guarantee that nobody is interested in paying $5.00/minute to hear what happens around my computer.
You get to pay $5.00/minute for phone sex when you get the bill for calls your phone made at 2AM with your voice. That's on top of whatever connect fee you get to pay for cell phone service. See how you might not want Outlook and clippy working your phone?
it sounded as if he tried to get in real close to make the most of the low resolution. Probably operator error, although they probably could have designed in a better minimum focusing distance.
Umm no, that looks like any shitty quality 640x480 picture and it's just soooo M$ of you to blame the user. There is no focus in the background either. The overall balance/contrast failed and the sky is whited out. The color saturation is poor too, just look at those white cheeks. It looks like they bought the cheapest camera they could get and failed to help it out by using the computer that runs the phone. What on earth is that phone thinking about between the shutter noise and the actual image capture if it's not correcting all of the above faults? Is it generating a thumbnail for Bill?
The camera's poor image quality is the least of your problems with this puppy. Can you imagine what an Outlook virus could do to your phone bill?
Besides... who wants some script kiddie hacking into their phone and delivering an Outlook virus?;-) I can see it now... "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try agai... Fatal Exception 0F in module mscphone.dll"
What you should worry about is a smart virus. One that listens to the microphone to capture your voice, and plays it back on $5.00/minute phone sex calls at 2AM. IEEEE! It makes SirCam look like child's play and we can be sure that this buggy version of Outlook that can't place a phone call will have even more holes than the big one.
Has anyone realized that if you allow the device to run unsigned code, you can effectively steal their access, cause them large phone bills, etc. It's VERY dangerous, much more than your typical virus.
Holy Shit, Batman, that's true! Who would ever let Outlook have access to a pay by the minute service?! Sign me out!
In the future, your 802.11M$ smartphone connects to any and all local computers with 802.11M$ running. Can you imagine a Beowolf Cluster of "I Love You" placing calls to XXX-hot-grits?
Thanks for the warning. It's best to never ever alow anything M$ near a phone. Signed code, you make me laugh, AC. Must be a test bed for Paladium like Hotmail was a collector of Passports. SirCam didn't need any stinking passport or signature!
OK, I lied. I have thought it would be a really bad idea to have an M$ phone. Funny they don't just promote voice over IP isn't it?
I expect good stuff from Sodenberg.
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Did I really just rant like an idiot about one line of text in a bad movie?:(
Yes, Seth, you did.
Event Horison was a fun movie, which tried to touch on the themes Solaris covers; fear, loss, lack of communication, regret, and perception versus reality. The science is hokey but Solaris was no better and Event Horizon moved at a good pace, had plenty of great lines and excellent effects. How could you forget other lines like, "You don't need eyes to see where we are going."? Awsome. To make things really good, it had gotten dark, and the sky was full of heat lightning when we came out. God has the best shows.
Please do rent Event Horizon and record the lines you like and post them.
In any case, I expect great things from Sodenberg. His insight is penetrating and he's not afraid to amuse his audience with it.
objects, properties, methods, what a bunch of marketriod crap for modular programing. You say,
All iexplore.exe does... is call mshtml.dll... All excel.exe does is call the Excel COM... The... difference between scripting on UNIX and scripting on Win32 is that on UNIX, you're manipulating text files and calling programs with CL arguments. On Win32, you're invoking objects, setting properties, then calling methods.
Flatulent nonsense. All you are doing in the Win32 world is using the toys M$ gives you. You can call that manipulation whatever you like but you can never understand the toy, nor change it to do what you want nor distribute your changed code. Sooner than later, M$ will break your method. Thanks for the VB propaganda talk, but learning those terms and how to use the toys takes time away from learning useful code and so furthers your enslavement. It's a dead end.
I've seen that M$ is depreciating C in their Visual Studio, thanks to the use of C#. Would you think it good for M$ to take away the programer's ability to make custom code? Is the new M$ modularity, where you can only "creativly call" their toys what you want? Would it not be better to really be able to program?
So, it may be true. Waste makes .... waste.
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 1, Troll
What makes you think they won't want to Borg everything into the kernel? With the current level of modularity an average M$ install only takes up 2 to 10 GB of disk space. If everything had to be part of the new kernel.32, but you could only access it by paying your M$ tax, Longhorn could "creativly waste" even a 1,000 GB hard disk. Just read the article:
Enderle said the new file system will also function efficiently with hard drives holding at least one terabyte of data. That's 1,000 gigabytes, or well over 1,000 compressed movies, or more than 700,000 novels the size of "War and Peace." Such drives are expected to hit the market by 2004.
See? You thought a 1GB M$IE footpring was bloat, ha ha ha. I'm sure that the extravagent waste will be very efficient.
The point of trademarks is to protect a company name and to protect the rest of us from confusion.
This move on M$'s part will dilute the trade marks of all the other companies involved and confuse each and every one of us. Take the "Windows Commander" example. Christian worked for years building up a name and reputation. Can you tell me what he's changing his name to without scrolling up the page? Christian just got ripped off and his new program is indistiguishable from many other utilities that do the same thing.
Nothing new really. Do business with or have anything to do with M$ and you will be burnt.
You say: We don't live in an Orwellian time where you could be forced to watch the commercials.... I do think an ethical argument could be made that you should watch the ads, perhaps just occasionally as a compromise.
Double Plus Good, brother! The government of Air Strip One saw to it that every individual had onminpresnt security, entertainment and news. This service was provided free of charge! Also, the Earthly Pardise existed WITHOUT LAWS. None were needed because everyone just knew that they should be respectful! That's all Big Brother asks for, respect. He knows that we all need a break from improving ourselves occasionally and provided fine beer halls and gin bars to help you forget your troubles. INGSOC! values your opinion and ideas on how to make things better for everyone!
Agent 948-48-2008 drops post #4771927 in memory hole and sends memo to supervisor on MacAndrew crimethought.
2003 is going to be a very exciting year for Linux. Someone get up and whack the turntable... this record is stuck.
OK, that's fair, every year someone will delcare it the next year the year Linux "reaches the mainstream." For some people it was 97, for others it was '93. That's because different people understand at different times. Most people understand that M$ is an illegal monoply and uses their position to crush other makers of software. Sooner or later they understand about free software and realize that no one needs traditional closed source software vendors. It usually happens when the user gets aquainted with free software then understands it's better than the stuff they have been paying for. Every year that passes when free software does not become universal is amazing to them.
Yet, every year has been exciting. Each year new projects are born, improve and mature. Each year brings amazing new tools. More organizations see the benifits and convert, Schools, Banks, Government Offices. The word is moving slowly, but surely.
It's always fun to play with you, Sheldon. You are always so offensive, yet harmlessly clueless.
If I had more brains and fewer ethical concerns, I'd be like Bill Gates.
If by "mainstream" he means dominant and common, Uncle Sam gave us the answer, illegal monopoly. Yep, if free software came installed on PCs right out of the box and enjoyed it's obvious price advantage, it would be dominant by now. There's nothing more difficult about maintaining a Linux box than an M$ infected computer that the end of anti-competitive practices would not prevent. New M$ junk won't even run on some of my computers. As someone else pointed out Apple has taken Open software and sold and supported it without any technical problems. We can also point to the fact that there are just as many, if not more happy Linux users as there are happy Mac users.
It's happening anyway. Despite the best efforts of the "entertainment" industry to push DRM, people are turning from M$. They are willing to put up with the possible inability to listen to new music formats (WMA) and watch digital movies for the sake of ownership of their computers and their information. That is mainstream! Joe sixpacks is not going to go for the $1,000 stereo that breaks every two years that is WinXP. If that's all Joe is interested in, he may abandon computers alltogether for set top boxes. The rest of the computer using population will continue to move towards free software for it's superior tool sets. It's so simple even a dumbass like me can see it.
What kind of graduate student would be asking questions like this and holding forth such eleitist attitutdes? Let's look at the page. Hint one, name of course, " New Product Development." Product? Oh Lord! He's a Mechanical Engineer like me. Here's some help, Prabhu,
Front page does not comply with W3C or IEEE specs, so I can't read the buttons on your page. Try Bluefish.
The differences between Open and Free software are a source of contention, but you can find a good opinion here.
When you need software for your Mechanical Engineering Project, hire someone with a BS in CS, or find a reputable consultant. If they mention M$, keep looking.
It says, "Sleep now, forget the hype everything is OK you don't need more." It's the same thing we have been hearing since "You don't need more than 640k RAM," in a different form. If you view it from that perspective, how they get to the conclusion that "Broadband doesn't do what it says on the tin" is evident: they don't mention what broadband could do, though they are good at wasing it with 53 page PDF files instead of simple HTML alternates. Unmentioned are Voice over IP, which means unmetered long distance communications, video services to match, free music on demand without wait, the implications for news publishing, use and sharing of computational resources, remote monitoring and control. Most of these demonstrated and proven but undeployed services threaten the existance of large corporate and governmental interests. Either this group is very shallow or it's a shill.
Let's examine the shill angle. Their mission statement says in part, "we aim to make our workplaces more effective, more successful and more fulfilling." Sound familiar, like "Everything you do will be easier and more fun."? Hmmmm, who sponsors these effeciency experts who can make my job more fulfilling? Their Executive Summary (which they claim requires Adobe, but works just fine with xpdf), does not say. It has more highly abstracted stuff that ends up calling for "smarter" regulation. They congratulate themselves in their Anual Report for "-have ensured that the Society 's name has appeared in print or been heard on television or radio almost every day..." and BINGO, "...The launch of our three-to-five-year iSociety project, with the support of Microsoft Limited..." I knew it! Strange Darwinian language about competition and the need for efficiency, while claiming to represent and care for the squezed, it just smelled like M$.
Still, it's hard to tell. The member list, contained in their 50 page anual report (50% white space, 10% photos, 25% adjective, 5% adverb, 5% hyperbole, 5% news), did not look suspicious. Members of the House of Lords, Bank of Scotland, and various Civil Servants might be forgiven for being taken in by the beast from Redmond. They seem to have some reasonable ideas about employee dignity etc, but all abstractions sound as good. Surely, the "members only web pages," are a strange way to share information. Freedom is required for dignity, folks. This paper and the iSociety makes you look like indusry shills. If I can't read your papers online, I won't be reading them and you look shallow.
I'm not willing to pay $99 for beta-open-source-software [especially considering the high quality of many other distros]
M$ knew this would make a stir but did not want to advertise any of those other distros. How many people do you know who even know what a distro is, much less can name several. M$ is pointing toward what it gathers is the least attractive alternative as a making themselves look better. They would never point them toward Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Caldera, Mandrake, Net/Free/OpenBSD. What they are pointing them to is a "discount" distro sold at Walmart that's doing everything it can to look and act like windows.
It does not matter. The cat's out of the bag and Microsoft is gonna get it. They really have pushed people too far and been, well, evil. They, not the government nor Slashdot nor the mass media, proved their nature with EULAs and pricing. Good riddiance M$.
Does anyone know exactly how much a 3yr SA license for XP Home costs?
Nothing new here. Bill Gates will take as much money as you are dumb enough to give him. Of course, you should give to Microsoft. It's kind of like a charity that benifits people in India with aids. Bill Gates and mother Therisa were good friends you know. Also benifited are the children of the USA! Previous previous licensing deals and last summer's anouncement to end accademic discounts tell the whole story of the gift that keeps giving.
The "backup" network should look different from the first so that it is not suceptible to common mode failure. It should be simpler, learing from the last accident, backing up the most important and difficult to replace segments. The Boston article mentions lab results. One way to back up the network is to have a simplified link from the lab to several key locations. "Non essential" functions and other less heavy stuff might just have to do without the backup. It might be inconvenient to walk down a hall or a flight of steps to get info, but that beats everyone having to go to a different building.
The above is specious. I know nothing about the network or campus in question. I'm sure the folks on hand know what to do. Good luck.
You can get city approval with the use of codes like this . Just don't tell them you are going to live in it and all will be well. =;>
There are technical solutions to all the other problems. You can insulate or even heat your walls to avoid moisture problems. If you put a moiture barrier and insulation between your walls and the the air inside you should not have condensation. Who wants to look at concrete walls anyway? Fire, flood and proper ventilation and lighting are real design concerns, but they are balanced by thermal insulation safety from storms and man made hazards. The author's design had large windows or doors on every large room.
I'll admit, I want to live in a bomb shelter. The author's design was not roomy or sturdy enough for me. Culvert is not cheap either. Still, it's a nice effort.
It's true that I wanted normal copyright laws enforced rather than the creation of newer more restrictive laws. This represents neither. According to the Register Article, this FreeBooter group is charging people for having downloaded the files reather than uploading them. Mark the difference. Publishing is what violates copyright, owning it does not. Just where the line between sharing and publishing is is another matter. Is this where our new laws is taking us?
Let's take a trip down memory lane. Me making a copy of a CD for a friend technically violates the copyright, but only the dumbest and most opperesive states would bother to enforce it. What monetary damage was done by my "perfect" seleveless, artless copy for my friend? Generally zero as my friend would never have bought the thing in the first place but has an inferior copy which might lead him to buy the "real" thing. We could walk further down that road to tapes where courts upheld your right to do just that. We could go even further back before acid paper and comercial pulp printing and find much weaker copyright laws. We could go back even further and find that for the majority of human history writers expected no finicial reward for their efforts and considered it an honor when others would publish their work.
What I see comming is some awful invasive world where others think they have a right to search my personal effects at will. They have screen shots of the victim's computers? They must have been windoze users, but the precident is disturbing. Suppose my ISP is pressured to not allow connection from "insecure" platforms that do not allow such spying? Well, screw that. I don't go places where people treat me like a criminal. I'm not intersted in RIAA music, I never ran Napster, nor have I ever fooled around with newer music sharing junk. I want to share my own work, not that of others. These jackasses seek to prevent others from publishing their own music. If they get away with it, soon other forms of publishing will be prevented. We are on the road to Tycho.
It would be nice to have a "sandbox browser setting" for people who don't trust themselves to practice safe browsing.
It's not that origninal a wish but it's competing with other wishes. I'm sure that you, like M$, know about the java "sandbox" concept and unprivalidged user accounts and all that. The problem is that M$ intends not follow good design practices so that they can sell your desktop as advertising real estate. That's why IE and Outlook run as root and the new M$ EULAs all demand that M$ be alowed to view the contents of your computer and put whatever they please there. That's why M$ worms are so easy to write and cost the rest of us so much money in workarounds, "security" patches, and what not that never works. That's why the BBC author recomends avoiding IE and hints at all of the above.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a M$ box in the corner. I only have to boot it when I want to get pictures off my parallel scanner or an old digicam. If I were to actually use the pain in the ass like Bill says I can, it would break down in a few months just like all the other PC's I've got that now run real software. Free sofware does what I want better and easier than M$ crap ever did. Most of the "simple things" that take a little bit of time to accomplish under Linux are impossible under Windoze.
Twitter is a simple user and he hates a troll. There's more bullshit in the above post that I'm going to bother with.
Ah yes, a few points that have little to do with Heinlien's use of imperfect narative. I had forgoten the characters names and that there was no compulsory draft. The reason I'm hazy about details like that is that Rico's narative is less than perfect, we can not and are not supposed to trust what he says.
Now consider if the father's enlistment was portrayed in a positive manner, despite it being seen that way by Rico. Would you really consider it good for people who have run sucessful business to suddenly give it all up? One of the biggest reasons for the father's enlistment and the "big change" was that one of the alien worlds under Earth attack had managed a couter strike that killed Rico's mother along with a large chunk of the world population. Old men like Rico's father jumping onto rockets was portrayed even by Rico as a despiration measure.
The idea seems to be that a military society had evolved which made all decisions and ultimately used all resources to further its own aims. That they did this without repressing free speech and taking other liberties is unlikely. We never get a good view of why the earth was at war with all other inteligent life forms and that is the root of the nightmare. Rico presents us with a society that was prosperous and had recovered from a horrible nuclear war only to be plunged into endless galactic wars. Rico can't tell that his is an awful existence or that things could be any different.
I missed the joke because it's such a M$ troll thing to offer, "No one is interested in the mundane details of your life," as an excuse for poor security practices and privacy invasion. It's an insulting, selfish and contradictory statement designed to put the victim in a low self esteem sleep. I get tired of this "little people" argument and it affects my humor.
How realistic are super-proficient women, who just happen to dress provocatively and mouth his beliefs perfectly?
If Friday is an example that comes to mind, I suggest you re-read Friday and Star Ship Troopers with a more critical eye. Heinlien is NOT Friday or a Star Ship Trooper, he's used the character's to mouth a future he considers nighmarish. The characters are imperfect and unable to understand their situation as well as we do.
Our Star Ship trooper is happy to see the entire planet turned into a war machine. He even smiles when he sees his own father drafted. Would you want to live in a world like that?
Friday is not supposed to represent any living person either. She is a poorly educated sex slave with extraordinary strength and mental ability. Friday demonstrates both her mental power and lack of education by a nauseasingly detailed recitation of events that span years. She remembers every single meal she eats in every greasy spoon and tells us all about it years after the fact! Clearly, Heinlien wanted to paint a mind that was not trained to disregard extraneous details but strong enough to not need to. The average person who burdened themselves with all those kinds of details would run like M$ XP. What appears to be poor story telling is crucial to our understanding of the character! That Heinlien can pull it off without losing the reader is awsome. Yes, she was concieved and bred to be some adolescent man's dream toy. Sterile, with low self esteem and taught only those things that might sexually please before being recruited to other things. It is doubtful that any Libertarian would want anyone else treated that way.
In any case, both of these stories demonstrates what makes good science fiction: they take a few postulated technical inovations, understand how they might effect society and it's members, then create an entertaining story of entrapment or escape. Good science fiction, like any story telling, requires an understanding of both human nature and creation. I see a kind of triad, character insight, technology insight and storyline. Strengths in one area can make up for weakness in others, depending on the tastes and education of the reader. My favorites are short stories that have all the elments.
Car in Brazil
VW Concept Car
Grin, I always thought that car in Brazil was cool. We're all in it together.
Congratulations to VW, this is a very cool thing, despite the smart-ass remarks above.
This would make the world a better place, even if it could not be used to forcast the next great depresion.
You get to pay $5.00/minute for phone sex when you get the bill for calls your phone made at 2AM with your voice. That's on top of whatever connect fee you get to pay for cell phone service. See how you might not want Outlook and clippy working your phone?
Umm no, that looks like any shitty quality 640x480 picture and it's just soooo M$ of you to blame the user. There is no focus in the background either. The overall balance/contrast failed and the sky is whited out. The color saturation is poor too, just look at those white cheeks. It looks like they bought the cheapest camera they could get and failed to help it out by using the computer that runs the phone. What on earth is that phone thinking about between the shutter noise and the actual image capture if it's not correcting all of the above faults? Is it generating a thumbnail for Bill?
The camera's poor image quality is the least of your problems with this puppy. Can you imagine what an Outlook virus could do to your phone bill?
Besides... who wants some script kiddie hacking into their phone and delivering an Outlook virus? ;-) I can see it now... "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try agai... Fatal Exception 0F in module mscphone.dll"
What you should worry about is a smart virus. One that listens to the microphone to capture your voice, and plays it back on $5.00/minute phone sex calls at 2AM. IEEEE! It makes SirCam look like child's play and we can be sure that this buggy version of Outlook that can't place a phone call will have even more holes than the big one.
Go MicroSoft! Away, that is.
Holy Shit, Batman, that's true! Who would ever let Outlook have access to a pay by the minute service?! Sign me out!
In the future, your 802.11M$ smartphone connects to any and all local computers with 802.11M$ running. Can you imagine a Beowolf Cluster of "I Love You" placing calls to XXX-hot-grits?
Thanks for the warning. It's best to never ever alow anything M$ near a phone. Signed code, you make me laugh, AC. Must be a test bed for Paladium like Hotmail was a collector of Passports. SirCam didn't need any stinking passport or signature!
OK, I lied. I have thought it would be a really bad idea to have an M$ phone. Funny they don't just promote voice over IP isn't it?
Yes, Seth, you did.
Event Horison was a fun movie, which tried to touch on the themes Solaris covers; fear, loss, lack of communication, regret, and perception versus reality. The science is hokey but Solaris was no better and Event Horizon moved at a good pace, had plenty of great lines and excellent effects. How could you forget other lines like, "You don't need eyes to see where we are going."? Awsome. To make things really good, it had gotten dark, and the sky was full of heat lightning when we came out. God has the best shows.
Please do rent Event Horizon and record the lines you like and post them.
In any case, I expect great things from Sodenberg. His insight is penetrating and he's not afraid to amuse his audience with it.
All iexplore.exe does ... is call mshtml.dll ... All excel.exe does is call the Excel COM ... The ... difference between scripting on UNIX and scripting on Win32 is that on UNIX, you're manipulating text files and calling programs with CL arguments. On Win32, you're invoking objects, setting properties, then calling methods.
Flatulent nonsense. All you are doing in the Win32 world is using the toys M$ gives you. You can call that manipulation whatever you like but you can never understand the toy, nor change it to do what you want nor distribute your changed code. Sooner than later, M$ will break your method. Thanks for the VB propaganda talk, but learning those terms and how to use the toys takes time away from learning useful code and so furthers your enslavement. It's a dead end.
I've seen that M$ is depreciating C in their Visual Studio, thanks to the use of C#. Would you think it good for M$ to take away the programer's ability to make custom code? Is the new M$ modularity, where you can only "creativly call" their toys what you want? Would it not be better to really be able to program?
Enderle said the new file system will also function efficiently with hard drives holding at least one terabyte of data. That's 1,000 gigabytes, or well over 1,000 compressed movies, or more than 700,000 novels the size of "War and Peace." Such drives are expected to hit the market by 2004.
See? You thought a 1GB M$IE footpring was bloat, ha ha ha. I'm sure that the extravagent waste will be very efficient.
Big Brother is watching. All your posts are belong to US (TM).
This move on M$'s part will dilute the trade marks of all the other companies involved and confuse each and every one of us. Take the "Windows Commander" example. Christian worked for years building up a name and reputation. Can you tell me what he's changing his name to without scrolling up the page? Christian just got ripped off and his new program is indistiguishable from many other utilities that do the same thing.
Nothing new really. Do business with or have anything to do with M$ and you will be burnt.
We don't live in an Orwellian time where you could be forced to watch the commercials.... I do think an ethical argument could be made that you should watch the ads, perhaps just occasionally as a compromise.
Double Plus Good, brother! The government of Air Strip One saw to it that every individual had onminpresnt security, entertainment and news. This service was provided free of charge! Also, the Earthly Pardise existed WITHOUT LAWS. None were needed because everyone just knew that they should be respectful! That's all Big Brother asks for, respect. He knows that we all need a break from improving ourselves occasionally and provided fine beer halls and gin bars to help you forget your troubles. INGSOC! values your opinion and ideas on how to make things better for everyone!
Agent 948-48-2008 drops post #4771927 in memory hole and sends memo to supervisor on MacAndrew crimethought.
2003 is going to be a very exciting year for Linux. Someone get up and whack the turntable... this record is stuck.
OK, that's fair, every year someone will delcare it the next year the year Linux "reaches the mainstream." For some people it was 97, for others it was '93. That's because different people understand at different times. Most people understand that M$ is an illegal monoply and uses their position to crush other makers of software. Sooner or later they understand about free software and realize that no one needs traditional closed source software vendors. It usually happens when the user gets aquainted with free software then understands it's better than the stuff they have been paying for. Every year that passes when free software does not become universal is amazing to them.
Yet, every year has been exciting. Each year new projects are born, improve and mature. Each year brings amazing new tools. More organizations see the benifits and convert, Schools, Banks, Government Offices. The word is moving slowly, but surely.
It's always fun to play with you, Sheldon. You are always so offensive, yet harmlessly clueless.
If by "mainstream" he means dominant and common, Uncle Sam gave us the answer, illegal monopoly. Yep, if free software came installed on PCs right out of the box and enjoyed it's obvious price advantage, it would be dominant by now. There's nothing more difficult about maintaining a Linux box than an M$ infected computer that the end of anti-competitive practices would not prevent. New M$ junk won't even run on some of my computers. As someone else pointed out Apple has taken Open software and sold and supported it without any technical problems. We can also point to the fact that there are just as many, if not more happy Linux users as there are happy Mac users.
It's happening anyway. Despite the best efforts of the "entertainment" industry to push DRM, people are turning from M$. They are willing to put up with the possible inability to listen to new music formats (WMA) and watch digital movies for the sake of ownership of their computers and their information. That is mainstream! Joe sixpacks is not going to go for the $1,000 stereo that breaks every two years that is WinXP. If that's all Joe is interested in, he may abandon computers alltogether for set top boxes. The rest of the computer using population will continue to move towards free software for it's superior tool sets. It's so simple even a dumbass like me can see it.
What kind of graduate student would be asking questions like this and holding forth such eleitist attitutdes? Let's look at the page. Hint one, name of course, " New Product Development." Product? Oh Lord! He's a Mechanical Engineer like me. Here's some help, Prabhu,
Good luck with your paper.
Let's examine the shill angle. Their mission statement says in part, "we aim to make our workplaces more effective, more successful and more fulfilling." Sound familiar, like "Everything you do will be easier and more fun."? Hmmmm, who sponsors these effeciency experts who can make my job more fulfilling? Their Executive Summary (which they claim requires Adobe, but works just fine with xpdf), does not say. It has more highly abstracted stuff that ends up calling for "smarter" regulation. They congratulate themselves in their Anual Report for "-have ensured that the Society 's name has appeared in print or been heard on television or radio almost every day..." and BINGO, "...The launch of our three-to-five-year iSociety project, with the support of Microsoft Limited..." I knew it! Strange Darwinian language about competition and the need for efficiency, while claiming to represent and care for the squezed, it just smelled like M$.
Still, it's hard to tell. The member list, contained in their 50 page anual report (50% white space, 10% photos, 25% adjective, 5% adverb, 5% hyperbole, 5% news), did not look suspicious. Members of the House of Lords, Bank of Scotland, and various Civil Servants might be forgiven for being taken in by the beast from Redmond. They seem to have some reasonable ideas about employee dignity etc, but all abstractions sound as good. Surely, the "members only web pages," are a strange way to share information. Freedom is required for dignity, folks. This paper and the iSociety makes you look like indusry shills. If I can't read your papers online, I won't be reading them and you look shallow.
Wink, Mr. Wates your secretary must be using M$ word to write "My thanks and appreciation go to every member of staff and my colleagues on the Boar and on the management team ...". Yes, that like the pig or Dutch in South Africa. A wild ride, I'm sure. Auto correct or Imperial Dream? I don't spell check for Slashdot and no one is paying me for this.
I'm not willing to pay $99 for beta-open-source-software [especially considering the high quality of many other distros]
M$ knew this would make a stir but did not want to advertise any of those other distros. How many people do you know who even know what a distro is, much less can name several. M$ is pointing toward what it gathers is the least attractive alternative as a making themselves look better. They would never point them toward Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Caldera, Mandrake, Net/Free/OpenBSD. What they are pointing them to is a "discount" distro sold at Walmart that's doing everything it can to look and act like windows.
It does not matter. The cat's out of the bag and Microsoft is gonna get it. They really have pushed people too far and been, well, evil. They, not the government nor Slashdot nor the mass media, proved their nature with EULAs and pricing. Good riddiance M$.
Nothing new here. Bill Gates will take as much money as you are dumb enough to give him.
Of course, you should give to Microsoft. It's kind of like a charity that benifits people in India with aids. Bill Gates and mother Therisa were good friends you know. Also benifited are the children of the USA! Previous previous licensing deals and last summer's anouncement to end accademic discounts tell the whole story of the gift that keeps giving.
The above is specious. I know nothing about the network or campus in question. I'm sure the folks on hand know what to do. Good luck.
There are technical solutions to all the other problems. You can insulate or even heat your walls to avoid moisture problems. If you put a moiture barrier and insulation between your walls and the the air inside you should not have condensation. Who wants to look at concrete walls anyway? Fire, flood and proper ventilation and lighting are real design concerns, but they are balanced by thermal insulation safety from storms and man made hazards. The author's design had large windows or doors on every large room.
I'll admit, I want to live in a bomb shelter. The author's design was not roomy or sturdy enough for me. Culvert is not cheap either. Still, it's a nice effort.
Let's take a trip down memory lane. Me making a copy of a CD for a friend technically violates the copyright, but only the dumbest and most opperesive states would bother to enforce it. What monetary damage was done by my "perfect" seleveless, artless copy for my friend? Generally zero as my friend would never have bought the thing in the first place but has an inferior copy which might lead him to buy the "real" thing. We could walk further down that road to tapes where courts upheld your right to do just that. We could go even further back before acid paper and comercial pulp printing and find much weaker copyright laws. We could go back even further and find that for the majority of human history writers expected no finicial reward for their efforts and considered it an honor when others would publish their work.
What I see comming is some awful invasive world where others think they have a right to search my personal effects at will. They have screen shots of the victim's computers? They must have been windoze users, but the precident is disturbing. Suppose my ISP is pressured to not allow connection from "insecure" platforms that do not allow such spying? Well, screw that. I don't go places where people treat me like a criminal. I'm not intersted in RIAA music, I never ran Napster, nor have I ever fooled around with newer music sharing junk. I want to share my own work, not that of others. These jackasses seek to prevent others from publishing their own music. If they get away with it, soon other forms of publishing will be prevented. We are on the road to Tycho.
It would be nice to have a "sandbox browser setting" for people who don't trust themselves to practice safe browsing.
It's not that origninal a wish but it's competing with other wishes. I'm sure that you, like M$, know about the java "sandbox" concept and unprivalidged user accounts and all that. The problem is that M$ intends not follow good design practices so that they can sell your desktop as advertising real estate. That's why IE and Outlook run as root and the new M$ EULAs all demand that M$ be alowed to view the contents of your computer and put whatever they please there. That's why M$ worms are so easy to write and cost the rest of us so much money in workarounds, "security" patches, and what not that never works. That's why the BBC author recomends avoiding IE and hints at all of the above.