The UK government has approved a 700 billion megabyte bailout to stop the Data Crunch causing the End of the Internet.
Rather than just giving the data to those who have it already, the government is distributing everyone's information free. "We feel that there is strong bipartisan support for a bottom-up data distribution initiative, such that everyone everywhere can share in the data generated and held by government," said a spokesman whose name was lost.
Reports that Neo-Nazi organisations are asking for "lost" data disks with the name and address of every immigrant in the country are as yet unconfirmed.
The problem is that the LHC has caused the production of strange moron particles, which seem to bump into normal people and turn them into more strange morons. The collective outgassing of stupidity causes a supernova brain implosion.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they spray Bose-Einstein condensate in all directions, in an explosive Bose supernova.... What?
The ineptitude in government at all levels in this country about data security is bloody jawdropping. Interesting news today is that the cabinet official who left some direly secret stuff on a trainis getting prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. This is hopefully more than security theatre itself.
Apple will be as displeased as usual
on
OS X On the MSI Wind
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· Score: 3, Interesting
OS X really does work fine on general hardware. If your hardware is something Apple has a driver for. So, a bit like Linux without anything like as broad a support base, then.
(I personally prefer FreeBSD, but Linux supports my laptop immaculately.)
The catch is that places like Germany, where ID cards aren't a big problem, happen to have strong Constitutional protection on personal rights, freedom and information. Britain doesn't have that.
Identity cards introduced for those foreign Johnnies, not you. "The card will be compulsory for foreign nationals. All terrorists and illegal immigrants will be required to obtain one and show it to policemen, council officials or dog catchers on request. LOOK! TERRORISTS!"
This is largely from (a) civil servants who think it'd be convenient to their jobs to have everyone filed and numbered (b) private contractors like EDS and Capita who have been promised CASH CASH CASH for consulting on such schemes, and certainly don't have a track record of employing ex-goverment ministers and senior civil servants at vast consulting fees 12 months after they leave the government. Well, maybe a bit of a track record.
The ridiculous thing is that this is a creature of the Labour government, who are vastly unpopular, and will likely be kicked out on their corrupt arses in the 2010 election. This scheme is set only to be fully implemented by 2011/2012. EDS and Crapita will, of course, still be paid in full.
User interests beat developer interests, assuming that the first doesn't utterly cripple the second. And it does have to utterly cripple them to cause a problem.
* Every Wikipedia story, Slashdot commenters bitch about their experiences of participation. However, the site's still #7 in the world, so what's it doing right? Focusing on the reader.
* GPL (a user-rights license) vs BSD. Compare the popularity of Linux versus FreeBSD.
* iPhone vs Android. The best mobile phone interface ever. In this case, Apple is going further than anyone before in trying to utterly cripple developer interest - but if you can work an SDK then that many users is going to be attractive.
Openness will get Android a fabulous ticky-box feature list... but, y'know, Windows Mobile has a fabulous ticky-box feature list, and no-one picks that instead of an iPhone if they have a choice.
They've redefined the word "beta." Have they also redefined the word "evil?" "Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. Really. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Muwaahahahaha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
"Fuck it, we're evil," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls. "But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like youâ(TM)ll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
It's foolish to have expected anything else. As Neal Stephenson put it in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:
THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.
Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).
It's as applicable now as it was in the late 1990s. That bit of Apple's corporate culture is straight from Steve Jobs.
It's obvious what we need: something that gives you the freedom you need, on an open platform, with full open hardware and free software, all the way down the stack, so that users can get the features they want, and innovative developers can create interfaces that let people take full advantage of them in the most intuitive and obvious way possible. The GNUPhone. Operated from the command line.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office 2007 is now part of WordPad and Paint! All hail!
Copyright works need protection! Just ask the disembodied computer-hosted soul of Walt Disney, who was decanted to a computer in 1966 to avoid being declared legally dead, so that copyright in his works would never, ever run out.
High definition video is a DRM-clogged thicket and statistically negligible. It's all in low-res these days - YouTube and so on. That's because convenience wins, every time.
Someone must be making a fortune telling executives that consumers will buy what the execs want instead of what the consumers want.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK government has approved a 700 billion megabyte bailout to stop the Data Crunch causing the End of the Internet.
Rather than just giving the data to those who have it already, the government is distributing everyone's information free. "We feel that there is strong bipartisan support for a bottom-up data distribution initiative, such that everyone everywhere can share in the data generated and held by government," said a spokesman whose name was lost.
Reports that Neo-Nazi organisations are asking for "lost" data disks with the name and address of every immigrant in the country are as yet unconfirmed.
The problem is that the LHC has caused the production of strange moron particles, which seem to bump into normal people and turn them into more strange morons. The collective outgassing of stupidity causes a supernova brain implosion.
With the "arrow", we have invented the weapon that makes war too terrible to wage!
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they spray Bose-Einstein condensate in all directions, in an explosive Bose supernova. ... What?
Americans fear that private companies will steal all their data. The British prefer the approach of giving it all away to everyone, in a variety of useful formats!
The ineptitude in government at all levels in this country about data security is bloody jawdropping. Interesting news today is that the cabinet official who left some direly secret stuff on a train is getting prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. This is hopefully more than security theatre itself.
I can't see Apple being well pleased with this. They have a reputation to sustain!
In any case, OS X on netbooks is old hat. You can put it on an original Eee, for instance.
OS X really does work fine on general hardware. If your hardware is something Apple has a driver for. So, a bit like Linux without anything like as broad a support base, then.
(I personally prefer FreeBSD, but Linux supports my laptop immaculately.)
I understand that WinCE started life as a cut-down NT.
Google vs Yahoo. Evil ... or stupid?
Incidents like this, as well as the general pain in the backside factor, mean that customers loathe and despise DRM.
But the marketers know their major label affiliated clients insist on DRM.
So what do they do? Lie. Sony and Nokia, MySpace - all advertised as "DRM-free" and never mind the little detail of being nothing of the sort!
Don't you have truth in advertising laws there or something?
Customers hate, loathe and despise DRM. The customer knows there's a DRM and they're not bloody happy. What's a marketer to do? Lie.
I look forward to them trying this one in the UK - there's Trading Standards to contend with if they do.
The catch is that places like Germany, where ID cards aren't a big problem, happen to have strong Constitutional protection on personal rights, freedom and information. Britain doesn't have that.
Identity cards introduced for those foreign Johnnies, not you. "The card will be compulsory for foreign nationals. All terrorists and illegal immigrants will be required to obtain one and show it to policemen, council officials or dog catchers on request. LOOK! TERRORISTS!"
This is largely from (a) civil servants who think it'd be convenient to their jobs to have everyone filed and numbered (b) private contractors like EDS and Capita who have been promised CASH CASH CASH for consulting on such schemes, and certainly don't have a track record of employing ex-goverment ministers and senior civil servants at vast consulting fees 12 months after they leave the government. Well, maybe a bit of a track record.
The ridiculous thing is that this is a creature of the Labour government, who are vastly unpopular, and will likely be kicked out on their corrupt arses in the 2010 election. This scheme is set only to be fully implemented by 2011/2012. EDS and Crapita will, of course, still be paid in full.
o_0 Credited! Reality outdoes satire once again ...
User interests beat developer interests, assuming that the first doesn't utterly cripple the second. And it does have to utterly cripple them to cause a problem.
* Every Wikipedia story, Slashdot commenters bitch about their experiences of participation. However, the site's still #7 in the world, so what's it doing right? Focusing on the reader.
* GPL (a user-rights license) vs BSD. Compare the popularity of Linux versus FreeBSD.
* iPhone vs Android. The best mobile phone interface ever. In this case, Apple is going further than anyone before in trying to utterly cripple developer interest - but if you can work an SDK then that many users is going to be attractive.
Openness will get Android a fabulous ticky-box feature list ... but, y'know, Windows Mobile has a fabulous ticky-box feature list, and no-one picks that instead of an iPhone if they have a choice.
They've redefined the word "beta." Have they also redefined the word "evil?" "Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. Really. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Muwaahahahaha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
"Fuck it, we're evil," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls. "But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like youâ(TM)ll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
It's foolish to have expected anything else. As Neal Stephenson put it in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:
It's as applicable now as it was in the late 1990s. That bit of Apple's corporate culture is straight from Steve Jobs.
I must say, that's one of the best selections of moderation a comment of mine has ever received.
It's obvious what we need: something that gives you the freedom you need, on an open platform, with full open hardware and free software, all the way down the stack, so that users can get the features they want, and innovative developers can create interfaces that let people take full advantage of them in the most intuitive and obvious way possible. The GNUPhone. Operated from the command line.
It's a clean break for their marketing. A completely object-oriented marketing paradigm! With a database marketing system!
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office 2007 is now part of WordPad and Paint! All hail!
Don't Copy That Floppy!
Copyright works need protection! Just ask the disembodied computer-hosted soul of Walt Disney, who was decanted to a computer in 1966 to avoid being declared legally dead, so that copyright in his works would never, ever run out.
That's what the headline should have been.
(I'd write the story myself but Fake News Nightly got there first.)
This title begs for a notnews. I just can't think of any ideas for it. Although WordPad for Windows 7 is probably vulnerable.
High definition video is a DRM-clogged thicket and statistically negligible. It's all in low-res these days - YouTube and so on. That's because convenience wins, every time.
Someone must be making a fortune telling executives that consumers will buy what the execs want instead of what the consumers want.