Don't worry it says it only reports the installed.NET framework versions so websites can decide what version of garbage they can spew to your browser.
After all, we all know here on/. that we can trust that description implicitly given Microsoft's past history of 20 years of good karma, open and friendly practice and just nice old fashioned values.
Gah, I find the mere concept of this nauseating. It further illustrates that even now the idea of a standard web experience across operating systems and browsers is a pipe dream, because nobody codes to the lowest common denominator and the standards are too fragmented.
His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.
Whilst I congratulate the man for subsidising research and giving to worthy causes I have to wonder if he would do so much if he was not one of the worlds richest man.
Remember in 1989 the Stacker disk compression fiaso?
I think that was one of the original examples of this kind of behavior, in this case Stac electronics were able to get some money from MS - but it was a sour victory as MS has effectively removed them from the market place in the process.
nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair, and as a business trying to please their shareholders it is very naive to expect them to do so. they have a monopoly and will abuse it to their benefit as long as they can get away with it.
By strange coincidence I just finished reading it.
I would of summarized it as "to be amazingly successful you need to be in the right place at the right time and be prepared to put 10,000 hours of your time into learning your profession before you are in your mid 20s".
Which is kind of common sense.
But it is a genuinely engaging and interested point.
And it goes without saying that a complete idiot in the right place and the right time will probably still make a hash of it.
This was happening years ago, back in 2005 in my last trip for example.
What is really behind this is a business that is not shackled by the same leg irons that cripple development in the west - for example accountability, itellectual property, patenting, copyright, health and safety, quality management and so on.
The gist of the problem is that you can either have development that is ethical, safe, manageable, legal, and controlled.... or you can development that is rapid, fluid and prone to appropiate and adapt any idea that fits the bill.
It is impossible to have both.
In China you see an emphasis on the latter and in the west you have the former, this is a culture clash of epic proportions. At the end of the day we are all to blame, we all like the idea of promoting western businesses and industry - but we all have a greater desire for cheap DVD players and iPhone clones.
Yes I can appreciate the rapid, innovative engineering this trend shows in China - but behind it is a clash of cultures and ethical and moral decisions that have decimated industy and development in the western world.
the key satillite designed to monitor global warming and CO2 pollution and hence get scientific data that might affect global business and industrial nations has just nose dived into Antartica?
lets make sure nobody tells the conspiracy theorists, they could have a ball with this one.
So how long before the **AA bury this is a mass of litigation?
Though the main advantage of this system is that you can limit the access to a selected list of identities so this to my mind becomes more like a private group.
But at some point you have to grant access to people or you will have no audience, and I have often thought that private groups are like encrypted networks - they only raise the suspicion you have something to hide.
we were discussing the debris problem at work over coffee the other day.
we were trying to find solutions to it in our non-expert fashion.
sadly the best we could come up with were:
(1) putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive. (2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed (3) vastly improved tracking capabilities so we could avoid the worst areas and steer around them (4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off (5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
there were probably other ideas that we came up with that I cannot remember, but this might get some comments/advice/derision.
but we all agreed, this problem will only get worse. and choosing different orbit altitudes only delays confronting the issue - but might be cheaper in the short term.
I can see it now, there you are taking a row boat down the river in elegant comfort......then some f**ker flies one of these things overhead fill your boat in seconds and sinks it!
but we have yet to see this tested in a court of law, and I rather think we will.
after all, the bank could change their TOS to allow them to remove as much money from your account as they wanted - but they would soon be challenged in court and more importantly face a mass exodus.
so at this time, I'll take this with a pinch of salt.
besides, they are welcome to my trivial rantings and boring posts - its not like I would put anything important up on there.
gah, I watched the youTube version as there was no way I was installing silverlight at work as it seems like hassle and at home there is no way I am installing Mono.
seems like a fairly nauseatingly sickening piece of tripe aimed at parents who want their children to be computer literate.
in my mind the true path to computer literacy lies in a challenge - not locking them into a propietary interface that does all the work. but maybe that is just me. when I began programming I found it was the challenges of what was hard that kept me going back - not the easy pickings.
reminds of my time making CDROM drives when we ere chasing 4x, then 8x, then 16x, then...
never mind the fact that the interface at the time could not handle the high speeds were were getting too so they were totally pointless, the effort was still to physically read some data off the outer edge of the disc at the quoted speed so we could sell the unit and keep up with the arms race.
I now purposely buy technology a few years old, just so they can work the bugs out and I can ensure it is fully supported under all operating systems, it is rare indeed that I adopt early.
any technology arms race will promote one specific feature above all others and rarely end up with a device that is fit for market and a well rounded balance of features - though I grant that there are some exceptions.
But it will take a hell of a lot to make me forget the last two decades of monopolistic and agressive business tactics.
And it will take an awful lot more to make me use their SW when there are free alternatives that suit my needs.
This is only being done to save their tanking reputation and sales, do not imagine for a moment MS would be doing this if Vista had performed better.
And lets be plain, they are not allowing people to play with it out of the goodness of their kindly heart - they want people to test it and find the bugs for them on one hand whilst they try and seduce corporate business with the other.
And a sensible move - the best way for any technology to become a standard (defacto or otherwise) is for it to be freely available and demonstrably good.
Now this is both we can predict swift adoption of it. Some firms may view Linux as a hobby, but even that is changing - my new job I started last week has two Ubuntu PCs in this very room I am typing from.
MS to scrap the OEM tax and instead install an OS that is free for 30 days and then asks you to did into your wallet and type in a credit card number.
MS will never allow this to continue without a fight, they drop the prices or allowed older operating systems anywhere they can to ensure machines are shipped with their OS.
It seems clear that threatening OEMS with more a expensive windows tax if they do not cooperate is becoming less effective these days.
They might even give the OS away free if they have no choice at all and get money back on cloud, upgrades, applications and web services. But I cannot see them ever willingly accepting PCs sold in large numbers without windows.
A visionary leader that understand technology and gets its user base is like hens teeth.
Without it decisions will once again be table by people with MBAs who base their decisions on the basis of finance and personal opinion. I am not saying there is no use in a firm for them (before I get flamed) but I think all genuinely innovative and successful firms need balanced representation in the boardroom.
I see time and again the wrong decision taken by those who have the power and responsibility but none of the technical insight and forward thinking. In some cases the people deciding on future product lines do not even use the current one.
I know this might be an inflammatory post (no insult is intended here), but it is really what I think.
That does not sound practical. I mean obviously they will try it and sometimes it will work - but a company cannot just write away all liability for their goods in a contract, life does not work that way. And it rather depends on the local laws at point of use surely?
I am pretty sure that some risks cannot be written off in a contract and you are always liable.
But, INAL and I am sure that most of the people who browse this will know more than I do - so whats the real angle here?
Can MS simply add #17 to their EULA and expect all liability to vanish or are they being optimistic?
really what choice did they have? I can see a class action from *lots* of angry people who's computers have been hosed and bank accounts hoovered would cost far more then not acting. Not to mention the loss of faith.
Now all we need is a certain percentage of people who try the fox being either to taken with it or too lazy to change it back.
Poor MS, what with Vista they have been having a bad time of it recently.
Slashdot Mirror
did we try holy water and a stake yet?
I used to loathe IE6 - I used Opera until FF rescued me with an ad free alternative.
Don't worry it says it only reports the installed .NET framework versions so websites can decide what version of garbage they can spew to your browser.
After all, we all know here on /. that we can trust that description implicitly given Microsoft's past history of 20 years of good karma, open and friendly practice and just nice old fashioned values.
Gah, I find the mere concept of this nauseating. It further illustrates that even now the idea of a standard web experience across operating systems and browsers is a pipe dream, because nobody codes to the lowest common denominator and the standards are too fragmented.
His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.
See "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf
Whilst I congratulate the man for subsidising research and giving to worthy causes I have to wonder if he would do so much if he was not one of the worlds richest man.
oops, did I say 1989? I meant early 1990s - my bad.
Ok, I'm showing some age here.
Remember in 1989 the Stacker disk compression fiaso?
I think that was one of the original examples of this kind of behavior, in this case Stac electronics were able to get some money from MS - but it was a sour victory as MS has effectively removed them from the market place in the process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair, and as a business trying to please their shareholders it is very naive to expect them to do so. they have a monopoly and will abuse it to their benefit as long as they can get away with it.
By strange coincidence I just finished reading it.
I would of summarized it as "to be amazingly successful you need to be in the right place at the right time and be prepared to put 10,000 hours of your time into learning your profession before you are in your mid 20s".
Which is kind of common sense.
But it is a genuinely engaging and interested point.
And it goes without saying that a complete idiot in the right place and the right time will probably still make a hash of it.
This was happening years ago, back in 2005 in my last trip for example.
What is really behind this is a business that is not shackled by the same leg irons that cripple development in the west - for example accountability, itellectual property, patenting, copyright, health and safety, quality management and so on.
The gist of the problem is that you can either have development that is ethical, safe, manageable, legal, and controlled.... or you can development that is rapid, fluid and prone to appropiate and adapt any idea that fits the bill.
It is impossible to have both.
In China you see an emphasis on the latter and in the west you have the former, this is a culture clash of epic proportions. At the end of the day we are all to blame, we all like the idea of promoting western businesses and industry - but we all have a greater desire for cheap DVD players and iPhone clones.
Yes I can appreciate the rapid, innovative engineering this trend shows in China - but behind it is a clash of cultures and ethical and moral decisions that have decimated industy and development in the western world.
the key satillite designed to monitor global warming and CO2 pollution and hence get scientific data that might affect global business and industrial nations has just nose dived into Antartica?
lets make sure nobody tells the conspiracy theorists, they could have a ball with this one.
Hmmm.
So how long before the **AA bury this is a mass of litigation?
Though the main advantage of this system is that you can limit the access to a selected list of identities so this to my mind becomes more like a private group.
But at some point you have to grant access to people or you will have no audience, and I have often thought that private groups are like encrypted networks - they only raise the suspicion you have something to hide.
we were discussing the debris problem at work over coffee the other day.
we were trying to find solutions to it in our non-expert fashion.
sadly the best we could come up with were:
(1) putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
(2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
(3) vastly improved tracking capabilities so we could avoid the worst areas and steer around them
(4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
there were probably other ideas that we came up with that I cannot remember, but this might get some comments/advice/derision.
but we all agreed, this problem will only get worse. and choosing different orbit altitudes only delays confronting the issue - but might be cheaper in the short term.
doh! fair cop.... damn me for being too lazy to proof read. :(
my *personal* viewpoint is that KZ2 is one I am really waiting for.
I was mildly unimpressed by the Resistance2 multiplay mode (though the single player is amazing) and I am really looking forward to KZ2.
I think we are beginning to see the effect of the better capabilities of the PS2 in terms of performance, visuals and disc storage (BD vs DVD).
I can see it now, there you are taking a row boat down the river in elegant comfort.... ..then some f**ker flies one of these things overhead fill your boat in seconds and sinks it!
Am I the only one who thought of that?
well.. thats was FB says anyhow.
but we have yet to see this tested in a court of law, and I rather think we will.
after all, the bank could change their TOS to allow them to remove as much money from your account as they wanted - but they would soon be challenged in court and more importantly face a mass exodus.
so at this time, I'll take this with a pinch of salt.
besides, they are welcome to my trivial rantings and boring posts - its not like I would put anything important up on there.
gah, I watched the youTube version as there was no way I was installing silverlight at work as it seems like hassle and at home there is no way I am installing Mono.
seems like a fairly nauseatingly sickening piece of tripe aimed at parents who want their children to be computer literate.
in my mind the true path to computer literacy lies in a challenge - not locking them into a propietary interface that does all the work. but maybe that is just me. when I began programming I found it was the challenges of what was hard that kept me going back - not the easy pickings.
reminds of my time making CDROM drives when we ere chasing 4x, then 8x, then 16x, then...
never mind the fact that the interface at the time could not handle the high speeds were were getting too so they were totally pointless, the effort was still to physically read some data off the outer edge of the disc at the quoted speed so we could sell the unit and keep up with the arms race.
I now purposely buy technology a few years old, just so they can work the bugs out and I can ensure it is fully supported under all operating systems, it is rare indeed that I adopt early.
any technology arms race will promote one specific feature above all others and rarely end up with a device that is fit for market and a well rounded balance of features - though I grant that there are some exceptions.
The author might have a point.
But it will take a hell of a lot to make me forget the last two decades of monopolistic and agressive business tactics.
And it will take an awful lot more to make me use their SW when there are free alternatives that suit my needs.
This is only being done to save their tanking reputation and sales, do not imagine for a moment MS would be doing this if Vista had performed better.
And lets be plain, they are not allowing people to play with it out of the goodness of their kindly heart - they want people to test it and find the bugs for them on one hand whilst they try and seduce corporate business with the other.
.. because everybody loves a good curry, it will hide the taste (but not the texture)...
hmmmmmmm!
Excellent news!
And a sensible move - the best way for any technology to become a standard (defacto or otherwise) is for it to be freely available and demonstrably good.
Now this is both we can predict swift adoption of it. Some firms may view Linux as a hobby, but even that is changing - my new job I started last week has two Ubuntu PCs in this very room I am typing from.
the next obvious move?
MS to scrap the OEM tax and instead install an OS that is free for 30 days and then asks you to did into your wallet and type in a credit card number.
MS will never allow this to continue without a fight, they drop the prices or allowed older operating systems anywhere they can to ensure machines are shipped with their OS.
It seems clear that threatening OEMS with more a expensive windows tax if they do not cooperate is becoming less effective these days.
They might even give the OS away free if they have no choice at all and get money back on cloud, upgrades, applications and web services. But I cannot see them ever willingly accepting PCs sold in large numbers without windows.
A visionary leader that understand technology and gets its user base is like hens teeth.
Without it decisions will once again be table by people with MBAs who base their decisions on the basis of finance and personal opinion. I am not saying there is no use in a firm for them (before I get flamed) but I think all genuinely innovative and successful firms need balanced representation in the boardroom.
I see time and again the wrong decision taken by those who have the power and responsibility but none of the technical insight and forward thinking. In some cases the people deciding on future product lines do not even use the current one.
I know this might be an inflammatory post (no insult is intended here), but it is really what I think.
ADA has me head scratching here.
A religion that enforces how you pray and stops followers talking to each other?
And what about assembler?
A direct line to god that bypasses religion, only for minor deities?
That does not sound practical. I mean obviously they will try it and sometimes it will work - but a company cannot just write away all liability for their goods in a contract, life does not work that way. And it rather depends on the local laws at point of use surely?
I am pretty sure that some risks cannot be written off in a contract and you are always liable.
But, INAL and I am sure that most of the people who browse this will know more than I do - so whats the real angle here?
Can MS simply add #17 to their EULA and expect all liability to vanish or are they being optimistic?
Hmmm, sarcasm is hard to get online. I apologize! As a Linux only user for >8 years at home, I assure you I am not a fan of MS.
In this case they reap what they sow - and this is nice illustration of the problems of security by obfuscation.
really what choice did they have? I can see a class action from *lots* of angry people who's computers have been hosed and bank accounts hoovered would cost far more then not acting. Not to mention the loss of faith.
Now all we need is a certain percentage of people who try the fox being either to taken with it or too lazy to change it back.
Poor MS, what with Vista they have been having a bad time of it recently.