First of all, the point of mine that you're attacking was simply a lead-in to the crux of the post.
Let me restate the important point: Taxes are what drive a country, and how social structures are formed. Without taxes there would be no infrastructure in a country (no roads, no public schools, no public healthcare--OOPS! The US doesn't really have that...)
When people whine about taxes--ESPECIALLY when Americans whine about taxes--it makes me think they don't have an understanding of how a country works. Furthermore, how can you arbitrarily say you pay "overly high taxes?" How much should you pay? How much should the guy next door pay?
The social infrastructure in the US is so rudimentary and privatised as compared to most of the rest of the industrialised world, that I would be tempted to say the US needs to crank their taxes up substantially.
I recall from WAY back that Star Wars was originally going to be a nine-movie series, released in the order: 4,5,6,1,2,3,7,8,9. In other words, three mini-series, so to speak.
However, Lucas is getting older. Is he going to be around to film another three star wars movies after 2005, at the rate they've been going?
I hope you realise that you pay SHIT for taxes in the US. Most of the rest of the world pays higher taxes than you, and many of us appreciate what our governments do with most of it.
At any rate, "Me first" attitudes invariably end up costing more money and doing more damage. Maybe we should limit the technology offshoot benefits from a manned Mars mission to those who supported it. That might eliminate this sort of myopia.
Simple. White collare crime DOES still pay. I work for GE, the company that made "INTEGRITY" the buzzword of the business world. Our execs are making so much money off of morally bankrupt policies and actions (while freezing all raises to staff again) that it's clear the legal system doesn't affect them.
Any Canadians who don't understand irony to at least a decent level get hyped up and exported to the US. That's why the whole Alanis affair ended the way it did.
It sounds harsh, but we can't afford to let them ruin our reputation as cynical but good-natured socialist intellectuals.
Re:I've never seen it used right.
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 1
A friend of mine made some chainmail gloves for herself that were rather irony. Last I heard, she was also working on a chain breastplate.
"Land them in jail." Michael said it, and my god--I actually agree with the twerp for once! The world must be ending...
Creating and releasing the exploit in and of itself is on somewhat shaky legal ground right now. Look at DeCSS and the hell that the authors are getting in, despite the fact that it's not NEARLY as dangerous as this hack.
But the clearly illegal part comes of threatening/blackmailing Microsoft. There's not a court in the civilised world that would consider this ultimatum to be anything less than implicit blackmail, and that's illegal!
What the FUCK does being a communist have to do with anything?
I'm a very hard democratic socialist (one step away from communism) and I agree 100% that Microsoft has every right and responsibility to protect their investment fairly. On this occasion, they don't deserve to be held hostage by a bunch of blackmailers.
Great. And then we'll go back to the OLD method, of recreating faces from pictures of people. Visual or at least optical biometrics are a disaster. Anyone (including government agencies) who think otherwise will end up getting in trouble by it.
Lifting fingerprints from a fingerprint scanner? I'm afraid that they're not quite the clear smooth glasslike surface that would make such an idea feasible.
If a system lets something like this by, then it's a broken system. That's all.
First of all, 2005 is five years from release for Win2k, regardless of the fact that it's 2.5 years from right now.
Secondly as I read it, MS will make any patches they create available to the end of the 'self-help support' period, which is eight years. One comment on Win98SE has said that "Online self-help support will continue to be available until at least 30-Jun-2006."
Thirdly, any security patches/hotfixes will be free, available, and supported to EVERYONE using a product which has an extended support life, during that extended life. (i.e. commercial OSes)
Then we look at RedHat. Their consumer OSes get something like a year or 18 months of support, and then are cut off completely. Their commercial OSes get exactly five years of support, no more whatsoever. Sun? They offer support and bugfixes for contract customers two years after last ship date. (and general availability of those patches after they've been developed).
The point is that Microsoft is running along with something that's pretty industry standard, if not a bit above it. There's nothing reprehensible or wrong or devious in this _particular_ behaviour of theirs, and yet because they're Microsoft they get abused for it. There are so many other, better reasons to trash Microsoft that we should give them credit for the few things they get right.
3.1 and 95 got "abandoned" on a reasonable schedule. 98 is still supported for another year, but MS has been very clear about what their support structure is on existing products.
Think about this: Win98 came out in (surprise!) 1998, half a decade ago, as a consumer-level OS. It's only now approaching being dropped from the support list. Is that really so bad? (especially since they announced those terms ages ago)
MS is just about to EOSL Win98SE. Currently it's still actively supported.
Also, when is a company like MS going to REALLY get serious about spam? Forget about bloody filters and traps--hunt down these spammers and get them thrown in jail for a century, for fraud and wrongful impersonation! Also, since it's a virus, you could easily throw in a libel (or the corporate equivalent) suit. THAT might instill some spammers with the fear of God.
First of all, what's addictive about having to pay for something? I really seriously doubt that if you kept giving people MS Windows/Office but took away their chance to pay for it, that they'd be upset. It's the product, it's NOT the model.
Secondly, take some biochemistry, and learn what addiction is really about before you start tossing the term around so easily. Despite the opinions of some therapists, sex is not addictive. Nicotine is. THC is not. Heroin is.
Can you get hooked on pot, or sex, or minesweeper? Sure--but that's entirely a mental/emotional longing, and your body isn't going to try to destroy itself from the lack of those things.
As a random aside, I saw Metropolis in the theatre last year. Now my wife and I own two rather different copies of it, that tell slightly different stories with differing quality and moods throughout. Neither of them (or both together) prepared us even remotely for the experience brought to us.
We saw the single most complete version of the film (more complete than what most of Germany saw in 1927, in fact), painstakingly (and beautifully!) restored to a degree I didn't think was possible, with the original German intertitles. English translation was done live by a woman sitting in the theatre. The soundtrack was performed live on portable pipe organ, synthesiser, and theremin!
It looks like this restored version is now available. Get it! Even better though, see it with a live organist if you can. It's an amazing experience.
This is very true, except there's one question that no one has satisfactorily answered for me.
Does the GPL (which I believe is what declares the copyright on said software) actually stand much of a chance of holding up in court? Never--NEVER--has it been tested as far as I know, and there seems to be a fairly strong case for the requirements being ruled as "tortuous and unenforceable."
I've bantered this one back and forth several times. Ultimately there is a problem here: If you have a communal model (like the OSS world) and one person with some depth in it delegates themself as a spokesman for it, then two things happen:
1) No one can stop him, other than by speaking louder. Without a formal structure in place, it's volume that creates "leadership."
2) The Rest Of The World(tm) will actually take him as a spokesperson or formal representative. The idea of RMS having no more authority or importance than anyone else in the OSS community doesn't sit well within a democratic/capitalist society. Leaders will be found, whether they exist or not!
So the end result is that RMS (who has done great things for open source) opens his mouth, the lay population listens and believes him to be a representative spokesman, which he ain't.
I would call RMS a fanatic. He's utterly incapable of seeing more than HIS side of any issue. Being published in a communist newspaper is entirely irrelevant--communism wouldn't be a bad system, if people didn't suck so badly.
"Bill Gates donations of computers to Indian schools is really aimed at getting children hooked on to licensed software. It is a bit like selling cigarettes to children."
OK, tell me that's not the voice of a fanatic. Note firstly that he doesn't make any distinction between good and bad software, or MS and non-MS, just 'licensed' and umm...unlicensed? I thought that the GPL was a license too. Also consider the parallels between being comfortable with a given user interface and application set, and a physiological addiction to nicotine. Yeah, GREAT comparison Richard!
The guy truly is a fanatic. Even if he's sometimes right, he's a fanatic.
IT must be analysed, certainly--ALL parts of a business must be examined, or the business dies.
But as far as fragmenting IT, bear with me here for a minute.
IT or more precisely computers and computing 'stuff,' is ubiquitous--there's hardly a piece of business that doesn't use it either directly or indirectly.
Like phones. Like electricity. Like paper.
Yeah, it's more complex and harder to manage than any of the above. There's still a question in my mind about whether it's better to glue all of this stuff together because it's thematically similar, even if the different parts are entirely unrelated from a business unit perspective.
Fundamentally, I see one difference between your position and your opponent's: What support do you want?
On the one hand is very carefully regulated, guaranteed, and finite support from closed-source vendors. We will provide guaranteed support for a certainl period, and then you're SOL. On the other hand is infinite support of no particular quality There's no guarantee of fixes or patches, but of course you're free to find or write them yourself for all eternity if you want.
Now consider that Sun just EOL'd Solaris 2.6 support, meaning that you can 'only' get best-effort support for another five years. In 2008, there will be no source-code support whatsoever for Solaris 2.6, which came out in 1997. Eleven years of support, the last five of which are at a bare minimum as good as you ever get with Linux. There's also a guarantee of a very predictable upgrade path--in 'x' years from some initial release, you will be able to move up two versions of the OS and there will be little change in day-to-day operations.
For the most part, this is what companies pay for. A reliable, predictable support life; and a reliable, predictable upgrade path. I don't want my firewall OS to change from ipchains to iptables overnight. I don't want to have to find and hire some coder to repair a bug I found--I want a VENDOR to do that legwork for me, and that's why I'll buy Solaris/Sparc.
In many circumstances Linux is a good idea, but in this sense it's too unpredictable to qualify as an Enterprise OS.
As soon as I see a reviewer or a book talk about 'overcoming old-world ideas,' it enters the garbage pile.
Businesses need to change, yes. They need to grow and adapt, undoubtedly. HOWEVER, it seems like every quack who can string two sentences together is writing a book on somehow integrating or embracing IT into your company, in a way that damages the long term outlook for the company. In fact, business "management" for the past three years seems to have been nothing more than destroying companies for the sake of bumping up the short-term stock value.
But I digress.
Trying, as this book and this reviewer do, to place IT as either a special division or a profit centre without looking at the individual company is silly. It's very simple:
1) If you're an IT-based company, then IT is (part of) your core business. 2) If you're not an IT-based business, then IT is infrastructure.
Maybe what we REALLY need to do is stop looking at IT as a single department, and slice the appropriate IT roles into the existing departments when they fit. For a car company, web development has a whole hell of a lot more to do with the advertising department than it does with the internal service call tracking group. Why are we sticking them together, then?
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, the point of mine that you're attacking was simply a lead-in to the crux of the post.
Let me restate the important point: Taxes are what drive a country, and how social structures are formed. Without taxes there would be no infrastructure in a country (no roads, no public schools, no public healthcare--OOPS! The US doesn't really have that...)
When people whine about taxes--ESPECIALLY when Americans whine about taxes--it makes me think they don't have an understanding of how a country works. Furthermore, how can you arbitrarily say you pay "overly high taxes?" How much should you pay? How much should the guy next door pay?
The social infrastructure in the US is so rudimentary and privatised as compared to most of the rest of the industrialised world, that I would be tempted to say the US needs to crank their taxes up substantially.
Hmm. I saw "Hermione," "ripping her," and "showing" in the same sentence and came up with an image of her pleated little school uniform...
Um, nevermind. Forget you read this.
I recall from WAY back that Star Wars was originally going to be a nine-movie series, released in the order: 4,5,6,1,2,3,7,8,9. In other words, three mini-series, so to speak.
However, Lucas is getting older. Is he going to be around to film another three star wars movies after 2005, at the rate they've been going?
"And honestly, who among us isn't interested in using the obviously superior Linux Distribution against which there can be no other contenders?"
Man Taco, you have to stop pushing your obnoxious opinion onto slashdot, even in jest. It's not professional, it's not appropriate, it's not....
Oh, wait a minute. You're talking about Debian! Carry on, my apologies for the interruption.
I hope you realise that you pay SHIT for taxes in the US. Most of the rest of the world pays higher taxes than you, and many of us appreciate what our governments do with most of it.
At any rate, "Me first" attitudes invariably end up costing more money and doing more damage. Maybe we should limit the technology offshoot benefits from a manned Mars mission to those who supported it. That might eliminate this sort of myopia.
Simple. White collare crime DOES still pay. I work for GE, the company that made "INTEGRITY" the buzzword of the business world. Our execs are making so much money off of morally bankrupt policies and actions (while freezing all raises to staff again) that it's clear the legal system doesn't affect them.
Any Canadians who don't understand irony to at least a decent level get hyped up and exported to the US. That's why the whole Alanis affair ended the way it did.
It sounds harsh, but we can't afford to let them ruin our reputation as cynical but good-natured socialist intellectuals.
A friend of mine made some chainmail gloves for herself that were rather irony. Last I heard, she was also working on a chain breastplate.
Thanks for the info, it was a great post. Now I have more of a clue how the whole xBox threat makes sense.
"Land them in jail." Michael said it, and my god--I actually agree with the twerp for once! The world must be ending...
Creating and releasing the exploit in and of itself is on somewhat shaky legal ground right now. Look at DeCSS and the hell that the authors are getting in, despite the fact that it's not NEARLY as dangerous as this hack.
But the clearly illegal part comes of threatening/blackmailing Microsoft. There's not a court in the civilised world that would consider this ultimatum to be anything less than implicit blackmail, and that's illegal!
What the FUCK does being a communist have to do with anything?
I'm a very hard democratic socialist (one step away from communism) and I agree 100% that Microsoft has every right and responsibility to protect their investment fairly. On this occasion, they don't deserve to be held hostage by a bunch of blackmailers.
Great. And then we'll go back to the OLD method, of recreating faces from pictures of people.
Visual or at least optical biometrics are a disaster. Anyone (including government agencies) who think otherwise will end up getting in trouble by it.
Lifting fingerprints from a fingerprint scanner? I'm afraid that they're not quite the clear smooth glasslike surface that would make such an idea feasible.
If a system lets something like this by, then it's a broken system. That's all.
First of all, 2005 is five years from release for Win2k, regardless of the fact that it's 2.5 years from right now.
Secondly as I read it, MS will make any patches they create available to the end of the 'self-help support' period, which is eight years. One comment on Win98SE has said that "Online self-help support will continue to be available until at least 30-Jun-2006."
Thirdly, any security patches/hotfixes will be free, available, and supported to EVERYONE using a product which has an extended support life, during that extended life. (i.e. commercial OSes)
Then we look at RedHat. Their consumer OSes get something like a year or 18 months of support, and then are cut off completely. Their commercial OSes get exactly five years of support, no more whatsoever. Sun? They offer support and bugfixes for contract customers two years after last ship date. (and general availability of those patches after they've been developed).
The point is that Microsoft is running along with something that's pretty industry standard, if not a bit above it. There's nothing reprehensible or wrong or devious in this _particular_ behaviour of theirs, and yet because they're Microsoft they get abused for it. There are so many other, better reasons to trash Microsoft that we should give them credit for the few things they get right.
What???
3.1 and 95 got "abandoned" on a reasonable schedule. 98 is still supported for another year, but MS has been very clear about what their support structure is on existing products.
Think about this: Win98 came out in (surprise!) 1998, half a decade ago, as a consumer-level OS. It's only now approaching being dropped from the support list. Is that really so bad? (especially since they announced those terms ages ago)
Win2k will be supported until 2007.
MS is just about to EOSL Win98SE. Currently it's still actively supported.
Also, when is a company like MS going to REALLY get serious about spam? Forget about bloody filters and traps--hunt down these spammers and get them thrown in jail for a century, for fraud and wrongful impersonation! Also, since it's a virus, you could easily throw in a libel (or the corporate equivalent) suit. THAT might instill some spammers with the fear of God.
First of all, what's addictive about having to pay for something? I really seriously doubt that if you kept giving people MS Windows/Office but took away their chance to pay for it, that they'd be upset. It's the product, it's NOT the model.
Secondly, take some biochemistry, and learn what addiction is really about before you start tossing the term around so easily. Despite the opinions of some therapists, sex is not addictive. Nicotine is. THC is not. Heroin is.
Can you get hooked on pot, or sex, or minesweeper? Sure--but that's entirely a mental/emotional longing, and your body isn't going to try to destroy itself from the lack of those things.
As a random aside, I saw Metropolis in the theatre last year. Now my wife and I own two rather different copies of it, that tell slightly different stories with differing quality and moods throughout. Neither of them (or both together) prepared us even remotely for the experience brought to us.
We saw the single most complete version of the film (more complete than what most of Germany saw in 1927, in fact), painstakingly (and beautifully!) restored to a degree I didn't think was possible, with the original German intertitles. English translation was done live by a woman sitting in the theatre. The soundtrack was performed live on portable pipe organ, synthesiser, and theremin!
It looks like this restored version is now available. Get it! Even better though, see it with a live organist if you can. It's an amazing experience.
This is very true, except there's one question that no one has satisfactorily answered for me.
Does the GPL (which I believe is what declares the copyright on said software) actually stand much of a chance of holding up in court? Never--NEVER--has it been tested as far as I know, and there seems to be a fairly strong case for the requirements being ruled as "tortuous and unenforceable."
Just curious.
A comment on the 'party line' issue...
I've bantered this one back and forth several times. Ultimately there is a problem here: If you have a communal model (like the OSS world) and one person with some depth in it delegates themself as a spokesman for it, then two things happen:
1) No one can stop him, other than by speaking louder. Without a formal structure in place, it's volume that creates "leadership."
2) The Rest Of The World(tm) will actually take him as a spokesperson or formal representative. The idea of RMS having no more authority or importance than anyone else in the OSS community doesn't sit well within a democratic/capitalist society. Leaders will be found, whether they exist or not!
So the end result is that RMS (who has done great things for open source) opens his mouth, the lay population listens and believes him to be a representative spokesman, which he ain't.
I would call RMS a fanatic. He's utterly incapable of seeing more than HIS side of any issue. Being published in a communist newspaper is entirely irrelevant--communism wouldn't be a bad system, if people didn't suck so badly.
"Bill Gates donations of computers to Indian schools is really aimed at getting children hooked on to licensed software. It is a bit like selling cigarettes to children."
OK, tell me that's not the voice of a fanatic. Note firstly that he doesn't make any distinction between good and bad software, or MS and non-MS, just 'licensed' and umm...unlicensed? I thought that the GPL was a license too. Also consider the parallels between being comfortable with a given user interface and application set, and a physiological addiction to nicotine. Yeah, GREAT comparison Richard!
The guy truly is a fanatic. Even if he's sometimes right, he's a fanatic.
Yep. We're clearly living in a Dilbert world.
IT must be analysed, certainly--ALL parts of a business must be examined, or the business dies.
But as far as fragmenting IT, bear with me here for a minute.
IT or more precisely computers and computing 'stuff,' is ubiquitous--there's hardly a piece of business that doesn't use it either directly or indirectly.
Like phones.
Like electricity.
Like paper.
Yeah, it's more complex and harder to manage than any of the above. There's still a question in my mind about whether it's better to glue all of this stuff together because it's thematically similar, even if the different parts are entirely unrelated from a business unit perspective.
Just some thinking.
Fundamentally, I see one difference between your position and your opponent's: What support do you want?
On the one hand is very carefully regulated, guaranteed, and finite support from closed-source vendors. We will provide guaranteed support for a certainl period, and then you're SOL. On the other hand is infinite support of no particular quality There's no guarantee of fixes or patches, but of course you're free to find or write them yourself for all eternity if you want.
Now consider that Sun just EOL'd Solaris 2.6 support, meaning that you can 'only' get best-effort support for another five years. In 2008, there will be no source-code support whatsoever for Solaris 2.6, which came out in 1997. Eleven years of support, the last five of which are at a bare minimum as good as you ever get with Linux. There's also a guarantee of a very predictable upgrade path--in 'x' years from some initial release, you will be able to move up two versions of the OS and there will be little change in day-to-day operations.
For the most part, this is what companies pay for. A reliable, predictable support life; and a reliable, predictable upgrade path. I don't want my firewall OS to change from ipchains to iptables overnight. I don't want to have to find and hire some coder to repair a bug I found--I want a VENDOR to do that legwork for me, and that's why I'll buy Solaris/Sparc.
In many circumstances Linux is a good idea, but in this sense it's too unpredictable to qualify as an Enterprise OS.
Odd. It seems like the RC2-->RC3 path was VERY short. RC2 came out what--a week ago?
Any guesses on why this is?
As soon as I see a reviewer or a book talk about 'overcoming old-world ideas,' it enters the garbage pile.
Businesses need to change, yes. They need to grow and adapt, undoubtedly. HOWEVER, it seems like every quack who can string two sentences together is writing a book on somehow integrating or embracing IT into your company, in a way that damages the long term outlook for the company. In fact, business "management" for the past three years seems to have been nothing more than destroying companies for the sake of bumping up the short-term stock value.
But I digress.
Trying, as this book and this reviewer do, to place IT as either a special division or a profit centre without looking at the individual company is silly. It's very simple:
1) If you're an IT-based company, then IT is (part of) your core business.
2) If you're not an IT-based business, then IT is infrastructure.
Maybe what we REALLY need to do is stop looking at IT as a single department, and slice the appropriate IT roles into the existing departments when they fit. For a car company, web development has a whole hell of a lot more to do with the advertising department than it does with the internal service call tracking group. Why are we sticking them together, then?