So people who are newbiesque enough to run old versions of IE are likely to look at the status bar and mentally parse the URL before clicking on a link?
Are you suggesting that this guy today may have only been "moderately crazy"?
Guns have a place in society; what that place is is open for debate. But to suggest that psychopathic killers (especially of the suicidal variety!) would be deterred by a heavily armed citizenry is pretty disingenuous. Like you said: someone with most of their wits about them who was planning on going on a shooting spree might possibly be discouraged. However, I tend to think that those folks are few and far between.
Well, you're doing pretty good spotting grammar problems, but you're pretty ignorant when it comes to the content of the story.
RSS is a spec that was created and promoted by Netscape. For proper validation, this remote (Netscape-hosted) file is needed and was supplied by Netscape to facilitate implementation of RSS. Removing it breaks a standard that they promoted. That is, they encouraged people to use this file that they hosted as part of the RSS spec. To reiterate, they told people to use this file and then (presumably accidentally) removed it, thereby breaking some RSS feeds and readers. Got it?
Maybe you should stick to the grammar nazi stuff on stories you actually understand, or at least leave out the technically ignorant comments and only complain about syntax problems in the story.
Regardless of the validity of the guy's point (and it has some validity), is anyone else struck by how inured we've become to borderline-irrational rants from whiny little bitches?
First of all, how ridiculous is it to get emotionally engaged in some website's browser support policies? They may be stupid, counterproductive, outdated, or arbitrary and inane... but this guy acts like they're some kind of religious dogma and he's from an opposing sect.
Second, whatever happened to voting with one's wallet, or eyeballs in this case? I mean, he acts like they are obligated to make their content available to him, and that their apparent refusal to support his browser somehow impinges on his human rights. What the hell?
Finally, you have to wonder if this guy has ever gotten his way in any dispute. Because no matter how right he might be, he comes across like an 8 year old whose parents won't buy him the vibrating Harry Potter broom.
All of which is unremarkable in itself, but what *is* remarkable to me is that this seems to be par for the course these days. It's like people have lost interest in actually getting what they want (better browser support in this case), and are enjoying masturbatory tirades instead.
-b
And yeah, you can call me kettle, but I'm coming at this from sadness, not anger, so that's got to be worth something.
Phew! If Windows Server 2003 had gone away, we would really have been stuck, forced to run SQL Server on XP rather than the latest-and-greatest desktop OS.
Seriously, this is the most breathless non-drama I've seen in a while. Very, very few people need to run SQL server on their workstations. Those very, very few people are so deep in development that they aren't going to sweat missing out on Aero, because they're too busy working.
Geeks love technology; that's a given. Microsoft is a technology company. And yet, Microsoft doesn't give a damn about having the best technology, or about doing the most technologically impressive things -- they care about market share and revenue.
No matter what people say, the general dislike for MS is not about their history of anti-competitive and unethical business practices; if a company with demonstrably superior technology did the same stuff, the geek crowd would line up behind them. What pisses people off is that all of that underhanded and dodgy behavior is in the service of foisting off second-rate (or at least late-to-market) technology on consumers.
And yet, to the layman, Microsoft and Gates are as gods. They get credit for everything from the light bulb to the discovery of Pi, when dyed-in-the-wool geeks can cite verse and scripture about how most of their "innovations" were merely aggressive marketing (and theft, sometimes) of someone else's ideas.
It's a bunch of classic battles of idealism versus pragmatism, sincerity versus scheming, and entrepreneurship versus embrace-extend-extinguish. Why *wouldn't* geeks hate Microsoft?
The "unthinkable" is that these morons are apparently disassembling $1500 bluray players rather than $150 OEM PC HD-DVD players, thereby increasing the cost of their product by $1350. Either that, or they're not being entirely honest. Oh, and the beam wouldn't really be visible anyway. So I guess the bottom line is that "unthinkable" comes into this from several different angles, especially on the context of "is this worth spending money on?"
USB is an electrical interface, with some standard logical extensions. There are these things called "drivers" that are needed to get devices to work, if those drivers aren't built into the underlying OS. A USB plug in itself does not mean compatibility -- if you have any doubt of this, run down to a local computer store and look at all of the USB peripherals that specify what platforms and operating systems they will work with.
A "hack" is generally accepted to mean a clever approach to achieving something by bending the rules; by using things in ways they weren't intended; or by coming up with a more clever approach than what was previously accepted.
Now that you know all of that, I'm you'll agree that getting an HD-DVD drive that was intended for use on an xbox 360 to work on Windows does indeed qualify as a "hack." I hope this clears things up for you!
You're exactly right, but you missed the part where the technology really isn't all that advanced, and that any halfway organized state (and Iran is way more than halfway organized) could easily do it on their own.
Do you have mind reading credentials? Because it seems a little disingenuous to claim that his answers are incomplete because *you* somehow know what he was told to do in the past. If you want to assert that it *seems likely to you* that management was involved in prioritization, sure that's a reasonable position. But to accuse the guy of lying because of your own totally speculative opinion seems a little much, doesn't it?
Also, FWIW, this guy is *in* management. So maybe you want to blame him directly?
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but my read was that he was saying that MS has no obligation to *produce* office; that it's a new line of business. But fixing the fundamental security problems in Windows is indeed part of MS's responsibility to its customers, and anti-virus companies who complain about it are being disingenuous. If the words I've put in his mouth are accurate, I totally agree with him.
And you clearly have no experience working with Symantec or McAfee anti-virus products. They *do* unspeakable things to the OS, like hooking all sorts of the OS that they have no business touching (the IP stack, for instance). They also don't uninstall cleanly, so once someone reaslizes how screwed up their computer is after using the crappy products, only a total reinstall can get things back to normal.
Both Symantec and McAfee seem to engage in the "perception of security by constant annoyance" school of thought (much like TSA). Other anti-virus vendors (Trend Micro, NOD32, etc) manage to work just as well without making the OS unstable and generally annoying to use. The sooner Microsoft fixes the underlying problems and gets those incompetents out of the security space, the better it will be for consumers and product-driven (rather than marketing-driven) security companies.
Intelligent, creative people are far less likely to pay attention to personal appearance, where beautiful people are far less likely to pay attention to mental pursuits.
Do you have any evidence to support that claim? I know that's a common perception, but I'm kind of doubting it. In my experience, there's little correlation between beauty and intelligence; all permutations of pretty/ugly and smart/dumb are about equally common.
I know it's not a popular opinion to express (especially on slashdot), but as far as I can tell, people seek partners of about their own intelligence and attractiveness level. That's a sweeping generalization, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions. Based on my own experience, intelligent, creative, attractive people are just as likely to pay attention to personal appearance as less-intelligent, non-creative, attractive people. Lots of them feel some guilt about that, of course.
At the end of the day, if you put a lot of work into your appearance (and very few people are blessed with no-maintenance attractiveness), you're probably more likely to be interested in a partner who does the same. Likewise if you enjoy sitting on the couch and eating pizza all day.
So, to the extent I buy into the selective evolution idea at all, it seems more likely to me that bloodlines will incidentally perpetuate their own traits (intelligence, attractiveness, etc), and merge with similar ones. Hey, wait, that's exactly what we have today! Of course, all of this is very general, and can't be used as a predictor of any particular person's behavior or offspring's traits, but in general, across large populations, sure.
To get a better understanding of *why* adult sites push the technology envelope, don't think of it as the "selling" of sex, because that's not what drives innovation. What's pushing the technology envelope is the *demand* for sexual content. People, no matter what they claim, simply can't get enough of it. As always, demand drives supply, and smart people know that you make more money when you better serve your customers' needs.
Hello. Look at my site name to get some idea of my credibility.
First, this issue has been around since long before 2004. The tidbit that the OP seized on to write this remarkably clueless post is about Zango in particular, not the practice in general. Hello? Adult innovated affiliate programs, and is still far ahead of mainstream when it comes to combating fraud. Affiliate code rewriting is a huge issue, not just for adult, but for companies like Amazon (who Zango also targets).
Second, the idiotic "pornographers like adware except when it hurts them" is, well, idiotic. It's like saying "programmers write viruses but also complain about them; what hypocrites!" The fact is, there are tens of thousands of adult businesses on the internet, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Some of 'em (both businesses and people) are unethical. That doesn't make the rest of us hypocritical for disliking unethical business practices, nor does it in any way diminish the injury that legit businesses suffer from scammers.
It's easy to pick on the adult industry. There *are* scammers, spammers, and other losers who give the industry a bad name -- just like there are unethical stockbrokers, lawyers, programmers, doctors, etc. Plus, people are just uncomfortable with sex, which makes it that much more tempting to go on the attack rather than be seen as "soft on porn" (har).
But please, the takeway from this OP should be "when people have an ax to grind and don't care much about facts, legitimate issues come out seriously twisted."
If you read the actual patent, you would see that it is a patent on a specific implementation of using dynamic access lists at upstream routers to block multicast content from particular subscribers or subnetworks.
It is not a business process patent. It is not a patent on triple play, though it clearly covers one particular implementation of triple play using multicast and upstream filtering. But there are plenty of other ways to skin this cat.
If I get hit with a keylogger, I am a *lot* more concerned with my online banking, SSN and other identity theft fodder, and confidential biz emails than I am with someone making off with a couple of my games.
The site seems to be performing fine. Maybe someone's just taking the opportunity to get their company in the news. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
By this way of thinking, as more and more people get HDTV's, HDTV production studios will become obsolete because people will just watch HDTV wherever they are.
There are some really weird people out there, you know?
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
You have violated a number of important slashdot rules.
There is no "blame" in your post. This is clearly against the slashdot AUP ("all posts shall contain angry, bitter, and/or whiny assertions, accusations, and/or innuendos that blame lies squarly upon the party of your choice").
Worse, you are also clearly violating the certainty clause of the AUP ("all posts shall express absolute certainty of position; any acknowledgement that the facts are ambiguous shall result in the immediate revocation of your slashdor posting license."
And, finally, you have not expressed smug superiority, used excessive jargon to support an incomprehensible point, or displayed a willful ignorance of the context of the situation -- also violating the AUP ("All posts shall express smug superiority, use excessive jargon, and/or display a willful ignorance of the context of the situation").
Slashdot cannot tolerate posts like this. If word got out, people might think that some of the users were over 20 years old, or (worse!) had some actual life experience and knowledge of what they're talking about.
-b
PS: Yes, I was careful to stay within the AUP myself.
Are you really saying that it's unreasonable to expect firefox to be stable for more than a couple of days? I've been told it's my fault for visiting the "wrong" websites, or clicking links while it's still loading, or for using the back button, or even for pointing it at a web server running on localhost (!). But a built-in time limit is a new one.
In your opinion, how often should one expect to restart a browser, given its apparenty unique level of complexity? And, just out of curioisity, why does this apply to browsers but not operating systems, databases, or kitchen-sink bloatware like MS Word? All of which crash sometimes, of course, but nobody's ever told me it was unreasonable to expect more than a day or to of usage out of any of them.
I have a stock firefox install with no extensions, and it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory (on a 4GB system) before I notice things grinding to a halt, and I kill the process and start a new browser. A day or two later, it's back up to 2GB of memory usage, with maybe 4-6 tabs going.
But I suppose my experience isn't valid, since I'm just "trying to make firefox look bad" because I've got nothing better to do with my time, eh?
Thing is, one of the reasons I (like so many other people) was so anxious to switch off of IE was Microsoft's arrogance and disdain for their users. Unfortunately for all of us, the "you become what you fight" principle seems to be in effect here. I still use firefox because it's the best overall browser, when it works. But the fanboys who engage in personal attacks on anyone who runs into difficulty sure don't help the browser's image.
Slashdot Mirror
So people who are newbiesque enough to run old versions of IE are likely to look at the status bar and mentally parse the URL before clicking on a link?
-b
Are you suggesting that this guy today may have only been "moderately crazy"?
Guns have a place in society; what that place is is open for debate. But to suggest that psychopathic killers (especially of the suicidal variety!) would be deterred by a heavily armed citizenry is pretty disingenuous. Like you said: someone with most of their wits about them who was planning on going on a shooting spree might possibly be discouraged. However, I tend to think that those folks are few and far between.
-b
Well, you're doing pretty good spotting grammar problems, but you're pretty ignorant when it comes to the content of the story.
RSS is a spec that was created and promoted by Netscape. For proper validation, this remote (Netscape-hosted) file is needed and was supplied by Netscape to facilitate implementation of RSS. Removing it breaks a standard that they promoted. That is, they encouraged people to use this file that they hosted as part of the RSS spec. To reiterate, they told people to use this file and then (presumably accidentally) removed it, thereby breaking some RSS feeds and readers. Got it?
Maybe you should stick to the grammar nazi stuff on stories you actually understand, or at least leave out the technically ignorant comments and only complain about syntax problems in the story.
Regardless of the validity of the guy's point (and it has some validity), is anyone else struck by how inured we've become to borderline-irrational rants from whiny little bitches?
First of all, how ridiculous is it to get emotionally engaged in some website's browser support policies? They may be stupid, counterproductive, outdated, or arbitrary and inane... but this guy acts like they're some kind of religious dogma and he's from an opposing sect.
Second, whatever happened to voting with one's wallet, or eyeballs in this case? I mean, he acts like they are obligated to make their content available to him, and that their apparent refusal to support his browser somehow impinges on his human rights. What the hell?
Finally, you have to wonder if this guy has ever gotten his way in any dispute. Because no matter how right he might be, he comes across like an 8 year old whose parents won't buy him the vibrating Harry Potter broom.
All of which is unremarkable in itself, but what *is* remarkable to me is that this seems to be par for the course these days. It's like people have lost interest in actually getting what they want (better browser support in this case), and are enjoying masturbatory tirades instead.
-b
And yeah, you can call me kettle, but I'm coming at this from sadness, not anger, so that's got to be worth something.
Phew! If Windows Server 2003 had gone away, we would really have been stuck, forced to run SQL Server on XP rather than the latest-and-greatest desktop OS.
Seriously, this is the most breathless non-drama I've seen in a while. Very, very few people need to run SQL server on their workstations. Those very, very few people are so deep in development that they aren't going to sweat missing out on Aero, because they're too busy working.
-b
Geeks love technology; that's a given. Microsoft is a technology company. And yet, Microsoft doesn't give a damn about having the best technology, or about doing the most technologically impressive things -- they care about market share and revenue.
No matter what people say, the general dislike for MS is not about their history of anti-competitive and unethical business practices; if a company with demonstrably superior technology did the same stuff, the geek crowd would line up behind them. What pisses people off is that all of that underhanded and dodgy behavior is in the service of foisting off second-rate (or at least late-to-market) technology on consumers.
And yet, to the layman, Microsoft and Gates are as gods. They get credit for everything from the light bulb to the discovery of Pi, when dyed-in-the-wool geeks can cite verse and scripture about how most of their "innovations" were merely aggressive marketing (and theft, sometimes) of someone else's ideas.
It's a bunch of classic battles of idealism versus pragmatism, sincerity versus scheming, and entrepreneurship versus embrace-extend-extinguish. Why *wouldn't* geeks hate Microsoft?
-b
The "unthinkable" is that these morons are apparently disassembling $1500 bluray players rather than $150 OEM PC HD-DVD players, thereby increasing the cost of their product by $1350. Either that, or they're not being entirely honest. Oh, and the beam wouldn't really be visible anyway. So I guess the bottom line is that "unthinkable" comes into this from several different angles, especially on the context of "is this worth spending money on?"
USB is an electrical interface, with some standard logical extensions. There are these things called "drivers" that are needed to get devices to work, if those drivers aren't built into the underlying OS. A USB plug in itself does not mean compatibility -- if you have any doubt of this, run down to a local computer store and look at all of the USB peripherals that specify what platforms and operating systems they will work with.
A "hack" is generally accepted to mean a clever approach to achieving something by bending the rules; by using things in ways they weren't intended; or by coming up with a more clever approach than what was previously accepted.
Now that you know all of that, I'm you'll agree that getting an HD-DVD drive that was intended for use on an xbox 360 to work on Windows does indeed qualify as a "hack." I hope this clears things up for you!
-b
You're exactly right, but you missed the part where the technology really isn't all that advanced, and that any halfway organized state (and Iran is way more than halfway organized) could easily do it on their own.
Silly stuff for people to get worked up over.
-b
Do you have mind reading credentials? Because it seems a little disingenuous to claim that his answers are incomplete because *you* somehow know what he was told to do in the past. If you want to assert that it *seems likely to you* that management was involved in prioritization, sure that's a reasonable position. But to accuse the guy of lying because of your own totally speculative opinion seems a little much, doesn't it?
Also, FWIW, this guy is *in* management. So maybe you want to blame him directly?
-b
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but my read was that he was saying that MS has no obligation to *produce* office; that it's a new line of business. But fixing the fundamental security problems in Windows is indeed part of MS's responsibility to its customers, and anti-virus companies who complain about it are being disingenuous. If the words I've put in his mouth are accurate, I totally agree with him.
And you clearly have no experience working with Symantec or McAfee anti-virus products. They *do* unspeakable things to the OS, like hooking all sorts of the OS that they have no business touching (the IP stack, for instance). They also don't uninstall cleanly, so once someone reaslizes how screwed up their computer is after using the crappy products, only a total reinstall can get things back to normal.
Both Symantec and McAfee seem to engage in the "perception of security by constant annoyance" school of thought (much like TSA). Other anti-virus vendors (Trend Micro, NOD32, etc) manage to work just as well without making the OS unstable and generally annoying to use. The sooner Microsoft fixes the underlying problems and gets those incompetents out of the security space, the better it will be for consumers and product-driven (rather than marketing-driven) security companies.
-b
I know it's not a popular opinion to express (especially on slashdot), but as far as I can tell, people seek partners of about their own intelligence and attractiveness level. That's a sweeping generalization, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions. Based on my own experience, intelligent, creative, attractive people are just as likely to pay attention to personal appearance as less-intelligent, non-creative, attractive people. Lots of them feel some guilt about that, of course.
At the end of the day, if you put a lot of work into your appearance (and very few people are blessed with no-maintenance attractiveness), you're probably more likely to be interested in a partner who does the same. Likewise if you enjoy sitting on the couch and eating pizza all day.
So, to the extent I buy into the selective evolution idea at all, it seems more likely to me that bloodlines will incidentally perpetuate their own traits (intelligence, attractiveness, etc), and merge with similar ones. Hey, wait, that's exactly what we have today! Of course, all of this is very general, and can't be used as a predictor of any particular person's behavior or offspring's traits, but in general, across large populations, sure.
-b
How about if they promised to only start work on the next version six months before its release? Would that fill you with confidence?
These things take many, many years to develop. Getting on them for early R&D work is really very clueless.
-b
To get a better understanding of *why* adult sites push the technology envelope, don't think of it as the "selling" of sex, because that's not what drives innovation. What's pushing the technology envelope is the *demand* for sexual content. People, no matter what they claim, simply can't get enough of it. As always, demand drives supply, and smart people know that you make more money when you better serve your customers' needs.
-b
Hello. Look at my site name to get some idea of my credibility.
First, this issue has been around since long before 2004. The tidbit that the OP seized on to write this remarkably clueless post is about Zango in particular, not the practice in general. Hello? Adult innovated affiliate programs, and is still far ahead of mainstream when it comes to combating fraud. Affiliate code rewriting is a huge issue, not just for adult, but for companies like Amazon (who Zango also targets).
Second, the idiotic "pornographers like adware except when it hurts them" is, well, idiotic. It's like saying "programmers write viruses but also complain about them; what hypocrites!" The fact is, there are tens of thousands of adult businesses on the internet, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Some of 'em (both businesses and people) are unethical. That doesn't make the rest of us hypocritical for disliking unethical business practices, nor does it in any way diminish the injury that legit businesses suffer from scammers.
It's easy to pick on the adult industry. There *are* scammers, spammers, and other losers who give the industry a bad name -- just like there are unethical stockbrokers, lawyers, programmers, doctors, etc. Plus, people are just uncomfortable with sex, which makes it that much more tempting to go on the attack rather than be seen as "soft on porn" (har).
But please, the takeway from this OP should be "when people have an ax to grind and don't care much about facts, legitimate issues come out seriously twisted."
-b
Indeed, a warning to us all.
If you read the actual patent, you would see that it is a patent on a specific implementation of using dynamic access lists at upstream routers to block multicast content from particular subscribers or subnetworks.
It is not a business process patent. It is not a patent on triple play, though it clearly covers one particular implementation of triple play using multicast and upstream filtering. But there are plenty of other ways to skin this cat.
-b
If I get hit with a keylogger, I am a *lot* more concerned with my online banking, SSN and other identity theft fodder, and confidential biz emails than I am with someone making off with a couple of my games.
-b
The site seems to be performing fine. Maybe someone's just taking the opportunity to get their company in the news. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
-b
Hate to break it to you, but you are probably in the minority there. Many people still use actual DVD's.
Also, most cars don't use hydrogen fuel cells yet. Shocking, I know.
-b
By this way of thinking, as more and more people get HDTV's, HDTV production studios will become obsolete because people will just watch HDTV wherever they are.
There are some really weird people out there, you know?
-b
So is a post with no content other than complaints about the other posts more or less socially worthy than a lame joke?
Seems to me you could have lead by example here.
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
-b
You have violated a number of important slashdot rules.
There is no "blame" in your post. This is clearly against the slashdot AUP ("all posts shall contain angry, bitter, and/or whiny assertions, accusations, and/or innuendos that blame lies squarly upon the party of your choice").
Worse, you are also clearly violating the certainty clause of the AUP ("all posts shall express absolute certainty of position; any acknowledgement that the facts are ambiguous shall result in the immediate revocation of your slashdor posting license."
And, finally, you have not expressed smug superiority, used excessive jargon to support an incomprehensible point, or displayed a willful ignorance of the context of the situation -- also violating the AUP ("All posts shall express smug superiority, use excessive jargon, and/or display a willful ignorance of the context of the situation").
Slashdot cannot tolerate posts like this. If word got out, people might think that some of the users were over 20 years old, or (worse!) had some actual life experience and knowledge of what they're talking about.
-b
PS: Yes, I was careful to stay within the AUP myself.
Are you really saying that it's unreasonable to expect firefox to be stable for more than a couple of days? I've been told it's my fault for visiting the "wrong" websites, or clicking links while it's still loading, or for using the back button, or even for pointing it at a web server running on localhost (!). But a built-in time limit is a new one.
In your opinion, how often should one expect to restart a browser, given its apparenty unique level of complexity? And, just out of curioisity, why does this apply to browsers but not operating systems, databases, or kitchen-sink bloatware like MS Word? All of which crash sometimes, of course, but nobody's ever told me it was unreasonable to expect more than a day or to of usage out of any of them.
-b
I have a stock firefox install with no extensions, and it routinely consumes up to 2GB of memory (on a 4GB system) before I notice things grinding to a halt, and I kill the process and start a new browser. A day or two later, it's back up to 2GB of memory usage, with maybe 4-6 tabs going.
But I suppose my experience isn't valid, since I'm just "trying to make firefox look bad" because I've got nothing better to do with my time, eh?
Thing is, one of the reasons I (like so many other people) was so anxious to switch off of IE was Microsoft's arrogance and disdain for their users. Unfortunately for all of us, the "you become what you fight" principle seems to be in effect here. I still use firefox because it's the best overall browser, when it works. But the fanboys who engage in personal attacks on anyone who runs into difficulty sure don't help the browser's image.
-b