I keep wanting to like Hillary because I actually think it's an important phase for the US to have a non-white-male president. That may seem stupid and even racist/sexist, but there's surely some non-white-male person who would be good for the job and it would be an important symbolic bit of progress. But this makes her look like an idiot. I'll see what else she comes up with.
Americans are not the obedient kind of lemmings that the Germans were under Hitler.
As a proud American who knows many others who are not lemmings, I can still say quite surely that the majority of our population is no better than the people who supported Hitler. That is, they are easily manipulated and able to ignore things they don't like. Of course, jumping to Hitler isn't usually considered a good tactic in debates these days, but since you brought it up.
What makes you think that most of the people in the US army won't follow orders if they are told that a particular portion of our society is undermining America's security? All that has to be done is to tell a couple stories about how group X is unpatriotic and inhuman, and that the leader rapes women and kills children. WIth enough repeated assertions like this, lacking any proof, it would be very likely that enough of our armed forces, police, and various security agents would fall in line and do whatever they were told to stop the enemy... whoever the enemy was.
I don't think we're anywhere near this happening, but I just wanted to call into question your assertion that Americans are somehow immune to this type of manipulation. We are not. Nobody is. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Against all threats; internal and external. Internal probably being the more important.
Being that macs have already switched architectures before and there was support for a long, long time, we can be pretty sure it's not nearly as dire as you imply. Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. PPC software will be available for a long, long, time.
Cheers.
I don't have a copy of XCode in front of me,but...
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Isn't the "not checked by default" box the one that says to compile for x86? So by default it compiles for PowerPC, and you can turn on x86 compilation if you want?
PowerPC systems will work for a long, long time. At least as long as the usable life of anything you can buy in the next year.
I don't know if they still do, but the certainly did in 97/98! I would try to get in touch with them directly and find out. If you think about it, they can't really sell two year old sized hard drives in stores any more, so running such a replacement program only costs them physical storage and shipping/administration costs. And it can have a pretty positive impact on customer loyalty. It certainly can't hurt to ask...
Early in my dotcom career (97) I was still fairly poor and excited about computers. A nearby office had just shut down and they had just thrown a whole pile of PC hardware into a rental dumpster right in front of our office. Me and a buddy went crazy dumpster diving after work -- most of it was old 386's and other stuff we weren't excited about, but there were some good SCSI controllers, network cards, and hard drives. I scooped up several hard drives -- Western Digital, but only a tiny 500MB or so. Most drives at the time were 4GB or so, and even my lousy home PC had a 2GB drive. You couldn't even buy anything smaller than that. Still, free 500MB was cool.
At some point after playing with some of the stuff at home, I found that Western Digial covered all their hard drives for 5 years no matter what, even if you didn't have a receipt. And though this drive was a smaller one, it was actually only a couple years old. So I decided that I'd send it in for a replacement, which would undoubtedly be bigger as well. The only problem was that the drive still worked perfectly.
So I hooked it up to a power supply that was _not_ connected to my computer and let it spin up. Then I dragged a screwdriver across the circuit board and visible sparks leapt out. It caused the power supply to safety shutdown. Then I tried hooking it up to my computer again and the drive still worked! So I went back to making it spark some more until the motor actually stopped spinning.
Successfully destroyed, I packed it up and shipped it off to Western Digital and awaited my replacement. A few weeks later it arrived. And it was another 500GB drive. I couldn't believe they still had a warehouse of them around, just for idiots like me:)
Anyways, I've since become financially successful enough to buy hard drives normally, and I've bought a ton of Western Digitals (only the Caviar line) to make up for it. Never had one fail, and I know they provide an excellent warranty;) Hopefully they won't track me down now, but it's past the statute of limitations anyways:)
Just like it's "okay" to punish people with fines and imprisonment who do things society doesn't like. Or it's "okay" to go to war and start killing people in another country if those people are trying to kill you. Justice is usually just a form of sanctioned revenge.
Of course there's all this fear talk about vigalantism or "becoming just like them"... but frankly I don't care in this case. Pardon the drama, but as far as spam goes in the online world, we're at war, and a little retalliation is probably quite appropriate. In fact it is probably the only thing that will work.
As people are so happy to point out around here, none of the commonly proposed methods of dealing with spam will work. But perhaps that's just because we're not willing to use our greatest power. Nearly every spam advertises a site. If these sites were DDOS'd as soon as the spam went out, it might help.
Legitimate companies getting DDOS'd...? Well, we should be careful. But casualties of war are unavoidable sometimes.
Cheers.
(PS - I use a trained bayesian filter and only about 1 or 2 of the 500+ spam per day I get get through. But I still find the ever increasing spam epidemic outrageous).
Personally I don't think there's much wrong with killing animals. But I do think we should be as kind as possible about it. This means, among other things, putting the lobster into the pot of already boiling water head first. It dies very quickly in this case, with little suffering. It bugs the heck out of me when people either throw it in cold water and then turn on the heat, or if they throw it in tail first, letting it struggle for minutes as it gets cooked alive from the ass up.
I also buy cage-free eggs and natural grazing animal meats.
I hate to just appeal to my own authority here, but even a medium level understanding of technology seems to indicate two things:
1. Real criminals will always be able to get around DRM 2. Regular people will always bump into it in some innocent situation
Let me connect the dots from there: DRM sucks. And it always will. That won't necessarily stop it from becoming mainstream and accepted, just like copyright extention and the stagnation of the public domain, but that doesn't make it right or good.
Well I guess I can see that matters in some cases:) But even if Chrysler used the same bolts as Lexus, I'd expect the Lexus to cost more, and not just because it's a fancy brand name, but because they are actually known for better engineering.
It's not about the components, it's about the integration of the components. Who buys a car based on the type of bolts?
I have no desire to pay more and pat myself on the back. I always start with the cheapest thing that does the job and move up only as required. But I own a powerbook and use OSX despite the expense because it makes my life easier. Yes, I used PC's for many years, both Windows and Linux.
Please, someone sue SCO and their board and Darl for filing a frivolous lawsuit, perjury, and whatever else they can. As long as there is no personal risk people and companies will continue to abuse the legal system like this. There needs to be some punishment, some behavioral conditioning.
IBM is probably the only one who can really do it... or maybe the EFF. I don't know... I just think it's dumb that everyone involved will make out fine (even as SCO goes out of business) and it was all just fun and games to try ruining public property and causing several other companies to have to spend a ton of money.
Where is the evidence that a leak like this is going to have any notable impact on the book's sales? The level of secrecy these companies try to maintain would make you think that a leaked copy was as bad for a book as having JLo in a movie.
I think that the secrecy doesn't actually matter at all to the publisher, but the idea that it has to be secret is what's actually important. They could care less if a thousand copies got out, as long as the public believes it's a secret, as long as they believe the publisher would kill to keep it that way... then it must be really important! I must get my copy first! So I know the secret before everyone else!!!
That's all well and good as a marketing tactic, but it's a little childish. And here we are with two stories on Slashdot in two days about this super-secret book.
Having reluctantly allowed my wife to keep cockatiels for the past 8 years or so, I must say, I'm impressed with their intelligence.
Intelligence is such a vague term -- but here I mean the ability to adapt to new situations and learn. I had a dog growing up, and I would say (without any scientific study) that the cockatiels are at least as intelligent. I've seen them learn to deal with all sorts of new challenges and become comfortable with them. It is amazing given the tiny size of their brain.
For context, I'm not naive enough to think they understand the meanings of the words we've taught them... I've got them calling out "I'm hungry" whenever they hear us getting their food. They're just associating a sound pattern with an experience -- I'm confident they're not understanding symbolic constructs like "I" and "hungry".
Still, they're impressive little things. I've seen them overcome instinctual fears, like learning that a clear glass table was safe to walk on. I've seen them recognize complex imprecise actions, like knowing that any container we lift to our mouth has something to drink in it (despite the anatomical differences).
I've read somewhere that birds' brains have a different structure than mammals' brains. It may be more size efficient somehow. Anyways, I don't know if this bird really gets "zero", but I don't think it's impossible. Birds can be pretty darn smart. Certainly smarter than I would have thought.
Oh, and since I actually wanted a counter for myself and FastCounter sucked, I wrote a simple one later. Completely unrelated code -- just a minimalist counter. Some might find it useful.
Yeah, it went through several more rewrites after I left. I'm not actually sure if any of my code for it ever launched. It was written in mod_perl, using FreeBSD, Apache, and Oracle, actually, and I'm sure they've tossed all that stuff since then.
Microsoft is a company with, what, 30,000 employees? Not a single one of them 'gives a hoot?' That's right. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing problems such as IE being "integrated" with the OS.
Having worked at MS in 98/99, I can say that "giving a hoot" doesn't amount to much. I was part of several projects where the majority of the team wanted to do something great, but red tape and politics got in the way.
At one point, after months of upper management arguing about how to do it, I rewrote the FastCounter interface over a weekend. I presented it, the team loved it. Yet it sat on the shelf. Too many people wanted to prove they were in control. Eventually I left. But a lot of good people stayed on.
Anyways, corporations are a group, not an individual. There are many great individuals at Microsoft. But as a group, as a corporation, their greatness can get lost.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
It's already sufficiently easy to pirate.
What this could do, if they play it right, is to provide service and convenience that is worth paying for. Like iTunes. Though they could do even better.
I'm currently a pretty happy OSX user (progression: C64, Mac (System 7), Amiga, Windows, Linux, Mac (OSX)). I am always interested in how technology sometimes goes sideways instead of forward. Care to give your opinions on NeXT vs. OSX? What are the main things you think were lost in the transition?
From the article:"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on 'Lord of the Rings,' " this lawyer said. "But there's a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it's still not enough for him."
Wow, that statement demonstrates astonishing hypocrisy. He's essentially arguing that as long as someone gets a lot of money, they aren't owed anything more, regardless of contract. As if the contract really said "20%, or as much as we feel is enough".
Well, I am happy to apply this logic across the board. Newline got enough money in my opinion. So I feel it's a bit piggish for them to suggest anyone in the whole world should fork over more money to watch any of the films they've released.
You heard it straight from the Newline lawyer: ignore the law and download at wi ll.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep wanting to like Hillary because I actually think it's an important phase for the US to have a non-white-male president. That may seem stupid and even racist/sexist, but there's surely some non-white-male person who would be good for the job and it would be an important symbolic bit of progress. But this makes her look like an idiot. I'll see what else she comes up with.
Bah.
Americans are not the obedient kind of lemmings that the Germans were under Hitler.
As a proud American who knows many others who are not lemmings, I can still say quite surely that the majority of our population is no better than the people who supported Hitler. That is, they are easily manipulated and able to ignore things they don't like. Of course, jumping to Hitler isn't usually considered a good tactic in debates these days, but since you brought it up.
What makes you think that most of the people in the US army won't follow orders if they are told that a particular portion of our society is undermining America's security? All that has to be done is to tell a couple stories about how group X is unpatriotic and inhuman, and that the leader rapes women and kills children. WIth enough repeated assertions like this, lacking any proof, it would be very likely that enough of our armed forces, police, and various security agents would fall in line and do whatever they were told to stop the enemy... whoever the enemy was.
I don't think we're anywhere near this happening, but I just wanted to call into question your assertion that Americans are somehow immune to this type of manipulation. We are not. Nobody is. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Against all threats; internal and external. Internal probably being the more important.
Cheers.
Being that macs have already switched architectures before and there was support for a long, long time, we can be pretty sure it's not nearly as dire as you imply. Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. PPC software will be available for a long, long, time.
Cheers.
Isn't the "not checked by default" box the one that says to compile for x86? So by default it compiles for PowerPC, and you can turn on x86 compilation if you want?
PowerPC systems will work for a long, long time. At least as long as the usable life of anything you can buy in the next year.
Cheers.
If you're looking for a crap movie with "Vendetta" in the title, look no further:
Vendetta: A Christmas Story
I lose money on it, so it's okay to plug, right?
I don't know if they still do, but the certainly did in 97/98! I would try to get in touch with them directly and find out. If you think about it, they can't really sell two year old sized hard drives in stores any more, so running such a replacement program only costs them physical storage and shipping/administration costs. And it can have a pretty positive impact on customer loyalty. It certainly can't hurt to ask...
:)
Great sig, btw
I'll relate a mildly shameful story:
:)
;) Hopefully they won't track me down now, but it's past the statute of limitations anyways :)
Early in my dotcom career (97) I was still fairly poor and excited about computers. A nearby office had just shut down and they had just thrown a whole pile of PC hardware into a rental dumpster right in front of our office. Me and a buddy went crazy dumpster diving after work -- most of it was old 386's and other stuff we weren't excited about, but there were some good SCSI controllers, network cards, and hard drives. I scooped up several hard drives -- Western Digital, but only a tiny 500MB or so. Most drives at the time were 4GB or so, and even my lousy home PC had a 2GB drive. You couldn't even buy anything smaller than that. Still, free 500MB was cool.
At some point after playing with some of the stuff at home, I found that Western Digial covered all their hard drives for 5 years no matter what, even if you didn't have a receipt. And though this drive was a smaller one, it was actually only a couple years old. So I decided that I'd send it in for a replacement, which would undoubtedly be bigger as well. The only problem was that the drive still worked perfectly.
So I hooked it up to a power supply that was _not_ connected to my computer and let it spin up. Then I dragged a screwdriver across the circuit board and visible sparks leapt out. It caused the power supply to safety shutdown. Then I tried hooking it up to my computer again and the drive still worked! So I went back to making it spark some more until the motor actually stopped spinning.
Successfully destroyed, I packed it up and shipped it off to Western Digital and awaited my replacement. A few weeks later it arrived. And it was another 500GB drive. I couldn't believe they still had a warehouse of them around, just for idiots like me
Anyways, I've since become financially successful enough to buy hard drives normally, and I've bought a ton of Western Digitals (only the Caviar line) to make up for it. Never had one fail, and I know they provide an excellent warranty
Cheers.
Just like it's "okay" to punish people with fines and imprisonment who do things society doesn't like. Or it's "okay" to go to war and start killing people in another country if those people are trying to kill you. Justice is usually just a form of sanctioned revenge.
Of course there's all this fear talk about vigalantism or "becoming just like them"... but frankly I don't care in this case. Pardon the drama, but as far as spam goes in the online world, we're at war, and a little retalliation is probably quite appropriate. In fact it is probably the only thing that will work.
As people are so happy to point out around here, none of the commonly proposed methods of dealing with spam will work. But perhaps that's just because we're not willing to use our greatest power. Nearly every spam advertises a site. If these sites were DDOS'd as soon as the spam went out, it might help.
Legitimate companies getting DDOS'd...? Well, we should be careful. But casualties of war are unavoidable sometimes.
Cheers.
(PS - I use a trained bayesian filter and only about 1 or 2 of the 500+ spam per day I get get through. But I still find the ever increasing spam epidemic outrageous).
Personally I don't think there's much wrong with killing animals. But I do think we should be as kind as possible about it. This means, among other things, putting the lobster into the pot of already boiling water head first. It dies very quickly in this case, with little suffering. It bugs the heck out of me when people either throw it in cold water and then turn on the heat, or if they throw it in tail first, letting it struggle for minutes as it gets cooked alive from the ass up.
I also buy cage-free eggs and natural grazing animal meats.
Cheers.
I hate to just appeal to my own authority here, but even a medium level understanding of technology seems to indicate two things:
1. Real criminals will always be able to get around DRM
2. Regular people will always bump into it in some innocent situation
Let me connect the dots from there: DRM sucks. And it always will. That won't necessarily stop it from becoming mainstream and accepted, just like copyright extention and the stagnation of the public domain, but that doesn't make it right or good.
Cheers.
Well I guess I can see that matters in some cases :) But even if Chrysler used the same bolts as Lexus, I'd expect the Lexus to cost more, and not just because it's a fancy brand name, but because they are actually known for better engineering.
Cheers.
It's not about the components, it's about the integration of the components. Who buys a car based on the type of bolts?
I have no desire to pay more and pat myself on the back. I always start with the cheapest thing that does the job and move up only as required. But I own a powerbook and use OSX despite the expense because it makes my life easier. Yes, I used PC's for many years, both Windows and Linux.
Cheers.
Please, someone sue SCO and their board and Darl for filing a frivolous lawsuit, perjury, and whatever else they can. As long as there is no personal risk people and companies will continue to abuse the legal system like this. There needs to be some punishment, some behavioral conditioning.
IBM is probably the only one who can really do it... or maybe the EFF. I don't know... I just think it's dumb that everyone involved will make out fine (even as SCO goes out of business) and it was all just fun and games to try ruining public property and causing several other companies to have to spend a ton of money.
Cheers.
I think it's really cool that (a) reading and (b) fantasy are popular among kids
Agreed -- that's very cool. I was just commenting on the idea that these books, indeed any book, is really worthy of such a secrecy.
Cheers.
Where is the evidence that a leak like this is going to have any notable impact on the book's sales? The level of secrecy these companies try to maintain would make you think that a leaked copy was as bad for a book as having JLo in a movie.
I think that the secrecy doesn't actually matter at all to the publisher, but the idea that it has to be secret is what's actually important. They could care less if a thousand copies got out, as long as the public believes it's a secret, as long as they believe the publisher would kill to keep it that way... then it must be really important! I must get my copy first! So I know the secret before everyone else!!!
That's all well and good as a marketing tactic, but it's a little childish. And here we are with two stories on Slashdot in two days about this super-secret book.
Cheers.
Having reluctantly allowed my wife to keep cockatiels for the past 8 years or so, I must say, I'm impressed with their intelligence.
Intelligence is such a vague term -- but here I mean the ability to adapt to new situations and learn. I had a dog growing up, and I would say (without any scientific study) that the cockatiels are at least as intelligent. I've seen them learn to deal with all sorts of new challenges and become comfortable with them. It is amazing given the tiny size of their brain.
For context, I'm not naive enough to think they understand the meanings of the words we've taught them... I've got them calling out "I'm hungry" whenever they hear us getting their food. They're just associating a sound pattern with an experience -- I'm confident they're not understanding symbolic constructs like "I" and "hungry".
Still, they're impressive little things. I've seen them overcome instinctual fears, like learning that a clear glass table was safe to walk on. I've seen them recognize complex imprecise actions, like knowing that any container we lift to our mouth has something to drink in it (despite the anatomical differences).
I've read somewhere that birds' brains have a different structure than mammals' brains. It may be more size efficient somehow. Anyways, I don't know if this bird really gets "zero", but I don't think it's impossible. Birds can be pretty darn smart. Certainly smarter than I would have thought.
Cheers.
Oh, and since I actually wanted a counter for myself and FastCounter sucked, I wrote a simple one later. Completely unrelated code -- just a minimalist counter. Some might find it useful.
Cheers.
Yeah, it went through several more rewrites after I left. I'm not actually sure if any of my code for it ever launched. It was written in mod_perl, using FreeBSD, Apache, and Oracle, actually, and I'm sure they've tossed all that stuff since then.
Cheers.
Microsoft is a company with, what, 30,000 employees? Not a single one of them 'gives a hoot?'
That's right. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing problems such as IE being "integrated" with the OS.
Having worked at MS in 98/99, I can say that "giving a hoot" doesn't amount to much. I was part of several projects where the majority of the team wanted to do something great, but red tape and politics got in the way.
At one point, after months of upper management arguing about how to do it, I rewrote the FastCounter interface over a weekend. I presented it, the team loved it. Yet it sat on the shelf. Too many people wanted to prove they were in control. Eventually I left. But a lot of good people stayed on.
Anyways, corporations are a group, not an individual. There are many great individuals at Microsoft. But as a group, as a corporation, their greatness can get lost.
Cheers.
Heh... er, that wasn't a typo, it was a touch of amazingly subtle humor ;)
pretend to satisfy the first demand while really satisfying the former
;)
I think you meant "latter". Typical sloppineess for a Microsoft employee.
( just kidding, I worked there too in 98/99
Cheers.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
It's already sufficiently easy to pirate.
What this could do, if they play it right, is to provide service and convenience that is worth paying for. Like iTunes. Though they could do even better.
Cheers.
Thanks for the thoughts!
I'm currently a pretty happy OSX user (progression: C64, Mac (System 7), Amiga, Windows, Linux, Mac (OSX)). I am always interested in how technology sometimes goes sideways instead of forward. Care to give your opinions on NeXT vs. OSX? What are the main things you think were lost in the transition?
Cheers.
From the article:"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on 'Lord of the Rings,' " this lawyer said. "But there's a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it's still not enough for him."
Wow, that statement demonstrates astonishing hypocrisy. He's essentially arguing that as long as someone gets a lot of money, they aren't owed anything more, regardless of contract. As if the contract really said "20%, or as much as we feel is enough".
Well, I am happy to apply this logic across the board. Newline got enough money in my opinion. So I feel it's a bit piggish for them to suggest anyone in the whole world should fork over more money to watch any of the films they've released.
You heard it straight from the Newline lawyer: ignore the law and download at wi
ll.
Cheers.