I'm in awe of this. I use Netflix on my laptop and on my Wii (as it has built in Wifi) but not on my original type XBox 360 so I didn't know that Netflix required XBox Gold to be able to use. That is just the epitome of stupid. I would be so angry if I had subscribed to Netflix thinking I'd stream through the XBox just to find out I had to pay Microsoft money for the privilege of doing it through their console.
The problem with what you are saying there is that I own a few games (Braid, Shadow Complex) that I bought from Live Arcade on my account. I can play these games on my XBox without any internet connection required at all at this point. In fact, for the longest time the only way I could even get net access on my XBox was to patch it through my laptop which was far too annoying to do for more than getting an update.
The only time I would need to have an internet connection would be if I moved the authorization for my account to another console with the original online. Then I would need the connection to move the account back over the original machine to be able to use it.
If I move the authorization over to a second console while the first console is unplugged from the internet so it never discovers that I've deauthorized it then I can use the games on both machines at the same time. I had actually done this at one point when I was running tests on a friends XBox that I had taken apart to repair and update.
I personally despise this idea of going to the store and buying a physical game disc for a single player offline game only to not be able to play it if I can not keep internet access up and working on my XBox. I'll accept that for any game that is online multiplayer only but I refuse to be online for a game that is single player.
I have no problem voting with my wallet on this either. I own copies of Warcraft 2 & 3 and their addons, Diablo 1 & Hellfire, Diablo 2 & Lord of Destruction, Starcraft 1 and Brood War and Starcraft 2: WOL. I also played WoW up through Lich King. I was looking forward to playing Diablo 3 when it came out until I discovered I could not play it when offline. Diablo 3 ended up being one of the only Blizzard games that I have not bought and it was entirely because of the always online requirement. I was fine with WoW needing a connection at all times because it's the nature of the game type. Diablo 2 might have been better with multiple players but it also worked just fine solo and I would imagine D3 is the same as you can play in a private game by yourself, albeit not in an offline mode.
So if Microsoft continues with this concept they have going on they will not be seeing another console purchase from me.
While some good things might coming of this in the long run it's not really helping in the short term for a lot of people.
One of the most basic rules of people running businesses is that they do not like adding new expenses unless they absolutely have to. The fees for not providing affordable insurance seem designed to force businesses into actually providing but there are too many companies who are taking a look at it and opting instead to do the opposite.
The rules say that a business only has to provide "affordable" insurance to people who are full time, which is shown in the bill as 30 hours or more on average over a six month consecutive stretch during the previous year. So with the fines starting next year companies are choosing to remove their full time workers and instead refuse to give them any hours over the 29 that keeps them in the zone of part time workers.
This means that the people who already were having the toughest time surviving without insurance now not only have to find another job to be able to bring their income back up, possibly at another company that will refuse to give them full time work. Let this run out one year from now and you've got people working two jobs, neither which provide this affordable insurance so they are forced to buy it on their own or pay their own version of the fine.
So long as the subsidies that are supposed to be in place work the fines might not be a major issue but people having to remove two jobs from the marketplace instead of just one in order to survive will not suddenly become fixed simply with an insurance subsidy.
One of the biggest problems I have with the act is that "Affordable" insurance is considered 9% or less of the employees gross Income. For jobs that pay the bare minimum this 9% value is going to be very small which means that it will be extra hard for an employer to find something that will fit the bill without them putting in a hefty amount of the premiums. This makes the idea of going to part time work only for their workers sound far better than actually incurring the extra expenses. A company that already pays a fair wage might not find this as difficult and may not choose to make the choice of doing only part time workers.
I'm really not looking forward to the next year of watching insurance companies complain about the new law while reporting record profits as the people who couldn't afford insurance before have their lives made even harder.
But that is not what RMS was complaining about. If they had been the greatest saints on earth, and if they had donated all the income from sales to some good cause, Stallman's criticism would have been exactly the same: Kazaa was evil because it wasn't so-called "free" software.
Actually, this is exactly what he was complaining about. Kazaa was a closed system and you had to use their software to connect to their network. Because of this they could make decisions like forcing installations of spyware onto your machine when you installed their software. If Kazaa were open-sourced they only could have done this for a short period of time before any number of people would get fed up with it and removed it from the source. It is much harder to change a binary (and keep changing it as new versions come out) but still by no means impossible.
A lot of software during the start of the spyware era came with spyware that would silently install and they were annoying but you could uninstall the spyware and keep using the software. Some pieces of software actually builts checks into it that if you had uninstalled the Spyware they would refuse to run, I do not remember anymore if Kazaa were one of these.
In an open source version of the same software people could bundle the software with spyware and they could even make it refuse to work the same way. However, all it would take would be one person who could change the software to no longer require the malware and share that with the others.
These days this same malware comes as options or "recommendations" when installing software and if you are on guard you can uncheck the box. I've personally stopped using programs like Yahoo Messenger and Azureus(Vuze) because they actually started to attempt to hide the opt-out checkboxes for the extra software downloads. Yahoo Messenger went so far as to ignore all the conventions as to what a check box is supposed to look like in order to make it harder to notice.
So I vote with my installations and considering I'm the person who tends to make all the recommendations to my friends about what is decent software to use I've also talked others out of using the same crap. In the Kazaa days I used to go out of my way to clean off friends computers and install something else that was not burdened in this way and help show them how to use the new stuff.
Actually thinking about it I'd trust the guy more for this.
Keeping his academic papers secret until he is ready to publish them is important but hardly worth putting extreme amounts of work into. To me that says that he's putting the effort into doing the research instead of simply protecting his research and has his priorities straight.
It's slightly scary more people saw it as informative than Funny.
I worked a liquor department and I saw this happen a few times with different things.
Once they managed to screw up the price on 24 pack cans of Bud Light when they priced it at the sale price for the 12 pack cans. The shelf had the correct price on it but the computer did not. Customers went nuts and after I tried to get the pricing department to fix it and got blown off I actively started to tell the customers about it. It was scary to see how customers loved "putting one over on the man".
Another time they took a $19.99 bottle of Jameson's Irish Whiskey and repriced it to $1.99. That day I took them all off of the shelf and did not put up the price sign until I got pricing to fix it, which was a few days. I figured the first customer to try to buy one would take the whole stock anyways.
I personally avoid Dora & Diego as much as I can. After having to live with kids who were addicted to the shows and seeing just how shallow the shows are I can't stand anything of that sort anymore. At first I appreciated how the show attempted to draw the kids into playing along with the show by making them stand up, jump, stretch and speak words along with the show but I've rarely seen kids actually do any of those things when watching it. I also came to resent Dora always asking what the childs favorite part was then saying "That was my favorite part too!". And don't get me started on the musical spots in the newer episodes that feel heavily tacked on and devoid of any real musical ability.
Personally, the kids show that stands out to me the most is The Backyardigans. While it follows the same basic script guidelines every time those guidelines leave amazing flexibility for the scripts to be different instead of just cookie cutouts of each other. The characters are very likable even though each has their own personality issues though they even take the time to fit those into the episodes as well. Certainly get me started on the music of the show as well. After having a single DVD episode on in the background one day I spent the next two days singing the music from it. They deal with various musical themes in each show and the characters are always dancing along the music. I even have my favorite episodes of the show, some for the fact that they are fun stories but mainly because I adore the music. It's so rare to see a kids show that actually deals with harmonies and various layers of music instead of things just being flat and dull. I'd suggest checking out "We are the Do-Gooders" from the "Special Delivery" song as it is by far my favorite of all the songs.
Most importantly while Dora tries to entice kids by making it seem she needs the kids help (and trust me, the kids find out fast she does not) the stuff that the Backyardigans get up to seems to be more fun, which gets kids going along with it. I've watched the same couch potato kids who won't move an inch during Dora sing and dance along with the Backyardigans. The show also normally has a lot more depth to what is going on than the standard shallow kid show which not only makes it tolerable for adults but also keeps the kids from getting bored later on.
About my only complaint is that they made a series of books that end up looking terribly shallow compared to the episodes themselves making me not want to bother to read them to my son. I'll just stick with reading Discworld & Dr Seuss for now.
It would not be very surprising to see a lot of dead code.
I maintain the code for MoreTerra, a Terraria map editor program and I'm pretty sure I've got dead code in there and that's a pretty small project.
With a large number of people working on the code it likely ends up slowly clogging up as no one quite knows what the others are doing.
Dare I ask what type of dead code exists in something extra huge, but closed source, like the Windows code base or for MS Office? But I'd bet for all MS's faults that the code for Norton Antivirus is 10x worse.
This is considering only stuff that you have intentionally given to them. There is a lot of stuff that they get through using things the Like button widgets on other webpages, whether you click them or not.
I started using MSE because of a story here on Slashdot talking about a review of a large number of antivirus products and I was amazed to see people on Slashdot putting their trust in a Microsoft product.
I've been a hater of Microsoft for a long time now thanks to all the anti-competitive and backstabbing stories I've heard but also because of using their various products. And yet now that I've been using MSE I've turned a corner and started to recommend it to friends and family.
I casually help fix computers for people that know me, sometimes going so far as to do it all over the phone when someone lives too far to visit. At first I tended to browse through their machine looking for the troublemakers and then after finding everything I could I would install and run MSE only to watch it detect and clean 100% of the things I had found and even some I had not, like a trojan hiding in the MBR. I've watched it catch different varieties of the TDSS rootkits, clean up all manner of other nasties and only once have I seen it make a mistake, with Chrome being reported as a virus. Yet, even with that flaw Microsoft had detected the issue and it was on the "More Information" page and had been fixed later that night. Since then I've come to trust MSE to do it's job well and I've started to run it first then clean up afterwords and it hasn't let me down yet.
If Microsoft wants to provide a built in antivirus with Win8 but allows it to be disabled to run other things, just like Windows Firewall, then I am all for it. I would do almost anything to keep people from installing the nightmares that are Norton & McAffee (and these days sadly Zone Alarm Antivirus). I've watched both those powerhouse antivirus programs completely miss fake antivirus programs that sneak through Facebook and in Nortons case it turned a simple "Safe Mode/Delete/Remove Registry Startup Command" into a three day slog that only worked when I finally got mad an uninstalled Norton from the machine.
Microsoft might still make some majorly boneheaded decisions but providing a built in antivirus does not seem to be one of them.
I can see someone's loving his OS just a little too much. Have a bit of an open mind.
I run both Windows and Linux on my machines and the only major advantage to running Linux in this type of situation is the fact that these infections are mainly designed to infect windows machines. I keep my Windows machine running cleanly, with regular virus scanning and full disclosure on my software firewall (aka, asks about everything) and I haven't unintentionally gotten a virus or spyware at all in the last few years. I have set up a separate hard drive where I installed some viruses so I could watch them play and learn how to clean them off of someone else's machine.
The problem with this is that I understand computers so when I see a new process I'm not recognizing I'll look up info on it, which is something very few people do. Most people just fire off the normal "Click OK" and keep going.
I've seen two ways that the people I do support for handle these things. Either they are like my roommate who manages to regularly infect his machine with mass quantities of stuff in his search for pr0n or they're like one client I have who is so worried about anything getting in that they've heavily overdone it on programs to keep themselves clean and their machine runs just as poorly as one infested with crap. Granted, that second category doesn't attempt to infect other machines so that is a step up.
If as you say all of these Windows people who aren't interested in learning how to protect their machines leave and go to a Mac OS or Linux OS then the people who are writing all of this stuff will start to work on targeting that platform. Even with the faster patching that goes on to fix issues that assumes these already lazy people will likely not install the patch, or install it but not clean off their infection, which they probably aren't aware of.
dedazo makes some great points and you come off sounding like a pretty sad fanboy when you bash him and say he's just trying to make Microsoft look good. Even so at the very end you say that when people have knowledge and choices things will get better but the whole point Dedazo is making is that people don't want to get that knowledge, or see that they have choices.
Stuff like this doesn't happen based on what any of the kids think, and it's really sad. This is more about making sure that no one gets sue happy and goes after the school, which as public schools go have way too little money to begin with
It's bad enough having to live in a padded room once you've gone crazy but to have the world decide to pad the walls of your cage from the very start is enough to drive a person crazy in the first place.
In learning to walk, I failed many times.
In learning to ride a bike, I failed many times.
In learning to program, I failed many times.
In learning to socialize, I failed many times.
In learning to love, I failed many times.
But guess what? I didn't let the pain stop me and kept going and became a stronger person because of all of it, and I'd be very surprised if there isn't another person on Slashdot who can't say the same.
Pr0n Industry gets Tibet online....
on
Tibet's Mesh
·
· Score: 1
Admins reluctantly installed a content filter at one site because so many adults were visiting porn sites that the network's limited bandwidth became choked.
"They found it a bit awkward to tell people to stop, because apparently some of the people doing this surfing were quite high in the organization," says Ben-David. "So we put in a porn filter, and suddenly traffic usage dropped a lot."
With all of the innovations that the online porn industry has created thanks to the large demand I can almost see the porn industry helping finance meshes such as this so they can reach a larger market worldwide.
True, but even though I liked President Clinton way more than President Bush it still felt to me like he was forced into apologizing. It would have been so much easier had he either told the truth to begin with or said it was none of the nations business.
This whole thing could have been resolved months ago if the administration were willing to just say, "Oh, yeah, you're right, we should be getting warrants for this sort of thing. We'll start doing so immediately."
Can you please tell me when the President or the administion has admitted to doing the wrong thing? Of course, I mean besides small gaffes such as poking fun at a person who was legally blind for wearing shades that would help extend the eyesight he was.
Our country would be a lot different if we had a president of either party who would admit to a mistake without being forced into it.
It's such a small article but with all of the talk that has been going on about the "alleged" illegal wiretapping this simple story headline was more then enough to make my jaw drop open in awe.
However, how long will it take before Judge Taylor becomes just another of then "activist" judges?
Small towns used to be this way (and still are) where every small little thing get talked about and blown out of proportion.
In the town I grew up in merely having a young males car parked outside a young females house while he goes and visits another young male across the street will spawn all kinds of rumors and anger.
Television has been doing this for quite a while, just take the recent developments in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. I can't even remember at this point why everyone threw so much anger at the parents.
Until people stop hating at first site this won't go away.
I personally think Google is fine just the way it is when it comes to the home Google page. I can't help but thinking back to the old Altavista portal slag that used to be my search engine. Dial-up users would sit there waiting for it to load for way to long for someone to just pop in an search for something. Having such a clean and fast loading page was always a major draw for me and it's a great page to use if you are not sure if you have internet problems.
The only thing I can see Google doing to make things a little more exposed would be to replace the *new* "Even more" link with a flat link under the search box saying something like "Come play around with the rest of our toys."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in awe of this. I use Netflix on my laptop and on my Wii (as it has built in Wifi) but not on my original type XBox 360 so I didn't know that Netflix required XBox Gold to be able to use. That is just the epitome of stupid. I would be so angry if I had subscribed to Netflix thinking I'd stream through the XBox just to find out I had to pay Microsoft money for the privilege of doing it through their console.
The problem with what you are saying there is that I own a few games (Braid, Shadow Complex) that I bought from Live Arcade on my account. I can play these games on my XBox without any internet connection required at all at this point. In fact, for the longest time the only way I could even get net access on my XBox was to patch it through my laptop which was far too annoying to do for more than getting an update.
The only time I would need to have an internet connection would be if I moved the authorization for my account to another console with the original online. Then I would need the connection to move the account back over the original machine to be able to use it.
If I move the authorization over to a second console while the first console is unplugged from the internet so it never discovers that I've deauthorized it then I can use the games on both machines at the same time. I had actually done this at one point when I was running tests on a friends XBox that I had taken apart to repair and update.
I personally despise this idea of going to the store and buying a physical game disc for a single player offline game only to not be able to play it if I can not keep internet access up and working on my XBox. I'll accept that for any game that is online multiplayer only but I refuse to be online for a game that is single player.
I have no problem voting with my wallet on this either. I own copies of Warcraft 2 & 3 and their addons, Diablo 1 & Hellfire, Diablo 2 & Lord of Destruction, Starcraft 1 and Brood War and Starcraft 2: WOL. I also played WoW up through Lich King. I was looking forward to playing Diablo 3 when it came out until I discovered I could not play it when offline. Diablo 3 ended up being one of the only Blizzard games that I have not bought and it was entirely because of the always online requirement. I was fine with WoW needing a connection at all times because it's the nature of the game type. Diablo 2 might have been better with multiple players but it also worked just fine solo and I would imagine D3 is the same as you can play in a private game by yourself, albeit not in an offline mode.
So if Microsoft continues with this concept they have going on they will not be seeing another console purchase from me.
While some good things might coming of this in the long run it's not really helping in the short term for a lot of people.
One of the most basic rules of people running businesses is that they do not like adding new expenses unless they absolutely have to. The fees for not providing affordable insurance seem designed to force businesses into actually providing but there are too many companies who are taking a look at it and opting instead to do the opposite.
The rules say that a business only has to provide "affordable" insurance to people who are full time, which is shown in the bill as 30 hours or more on average over a six month consecutive stretch during the previous year. So with the fines starting next year companies are choosing to remove their full time workers and instead refuse to give them any hours over the 29 that keeps them in the zone of part time workers.
This means that the people who already were having the toughest time surviving without insurance now not only have to find another job to be able to bring their income back up, possibly at another company that will refuse to give them full time work. Let this run out one year from now and you've got people working two jobs, neither which provide this affordable insurance so they are forced to buy it on their own or pay their own version of the fine.
So long as the subsidies that are supposed to be in place work the fines might not be a major issue but people having to remove two jobs from the marketplace instead of just one in order to survive will not suddenly become fixed simply with an insurance subsidy.
One of the biggest problems I have with the act is that "Affordable" insurance is considered 9% or less of the employees gross Income. For jobs that pay the bare minimum this 9% value is going to be very small which means that it will be extra hard for an employer to find something that will fit the bill without them putting in a hefty amount of the premiums. This makes the idea of going to part time work only for their workers sound far better than actually incurring the extra expenses. A company that already pays a fair wage might not find this as difficult and may not choose to make the choice of doing only part time workers.
I'm really not looking forward to the next year of watching insurance companies complain about the new law while reporting record profits as the people who couldn't afford insurance before have their lives made even harder.
This for certain. I own a copy of this book and read it quite a few times.
The other one that holds that honor is http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-Special/dp/1576101746
I learned a tremendous amount from this book on how to optimize code. It's say it's shaped my whole programming viewpoint.
But that is not what RMS was complaining about. If they had been the greatest saints on earth, and if they had donated all the income from sales to some good cause, Stallman's criticism would have been exactly the same: Kazaa was evil because it wasn't so-called "free" software.
Actually, this is exactly what he was complaining about. Kazaa was a closed system and you had to use their software to connect to their network. Because of this they could make decisions like forcing installations of spyware onto your machine when you installed their software. If Kazaa were open-sourced they only could have done this for a short period of time before any number of people would get fed up with it and removed it from the source. It is much harder to change a binary (and keep changing it as new versions come out) but still by no means impossible.
I'll bite at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Bundled_malware
A lot of software during the start of the spyware era came with spyware that would silently install and they were annoying but you could uninstall the spyware and keep using the software. Some pieces of software actually builts checks into it that if you had uninstalled the Spyware they would refuse to run, I do not remember anymore if Kazaa were one of these.
In an open source version of the same software people could bundle the software with spyware and they could even make it refuse to work the same way. However, all it would take would be one person who could change the software to no longer require the malware and share that with the others.
These days this same malware comes as options or "recommendations" when installing software and if you are on guard you can uncheck the box. I've personally stopped using programs like Yahoo Messenger and Azureus(Vuze) because they actually started to attempt to hide the opt-out checkboxes for the extra software downloads. Yahoo Messenger went so far as to ignore all the conventions as to what a check box is supposed to look like in order to make it harder to notice.
So I vote with my installations and considering I'm the person who tends to make all the recommendations to my friends about what is decent software to use I've also talked others out of using the same crap. In the Kazaa days I used to go out of my way to clean off friends computers and install something else that was not burdened in this way and help show them how to use the new stuff.
I gave up my mod points on this article to put this +1 Informative in this response. It's too bad I couldn't push it up to 6 instead.
When this research gets verified I'm very curious to see what other surprises are found using this new technique.
Actually thinking about it I'd trust the guy more for this.
Keeping his academic papers secret until he is ready to publish them is important but hardly worth putting extreme amounts of work into. To me that says that he's putting the effort into doing the research instead of simply protecting his research and has his priorities straight.
It's slightly scary more people saw it as informative than Funny.
I worked a liquor department and I saw this happen a few times with different things.
Once they managed to screw up the price on 24 pack cans of Bud Light when they priced it at the sale price for the 12 pack cans. The shelf had the correct price on it but the computer did not. Customers went nuts and after I tried to get the pricing department to fix it and got blown off I actively started to tell the customers about it. It was scary to see how customers loved "putting one over on the man".
Another time they took a $19.99 bottle of Jameson's Irish Whiskey and repriced it to $1.99. That day I took them all off of the shelf and did not put up the price sign until I got pricing to fix it, which was a few days. I figured the first customer to try to buy one would take the whole stock anyways.
I personally avoid Dora & Diego as much as I can. After having to live with kids who were addicted to the shows and seeing just how shallow the shows are I can't stand anything of that sort anymore. At first I appreciated how the show attempted to draw the kids into playing along with the show by making them stand up, jump, stretch and speak words along with the show but I've rarely seen kids actually do any of those things when watching it. I also came to resent Dora always asking what the childs favorite part was then saying "That was my favorite part too!". And don't get me started on the musical spots in the newer episodes that feel heavily tacked on and devoid of any real musical ability.
Personally, the kids show that stands out to me the most is The Backyardigans. While it follows the same basic script guidelines every time those guidelines leave amazing flexibility for the scripts to be different instead of just cookie cutouts of each other. The characters are very likable even though each has their own personality issues though they even take the time to fit those into the episodes as well. Certainly get me started on the music of the show as well. After having a single DVD episode on in the background one day I spent the next two days singing the music from it. They deal with various musical themes in each show and the characters are always dancing along the music. I even have my favorite episodes of the show, some for the fact that they are fun stories but mainly because I adore the music. It's so rare to see a kids show that actually deals with harmonies and various layers of music instead of things just being flat and dull. I'd suggest checking out "We are the Do-Gooders" from the "Special Delivery" song as it is by far my favorite of all the songs.
Most importantly while Dora tries to entice kids by making it seem she needs the kids help (and trust me, the kids find out fast she does not) the stuff that the Backyardigans get up to seems to be more fun, which gets kids going along with it. I've watched the same couch potato kids who won't move an inch during Dora sing and dance along with the Backyardigans. The show also normally has a lot more depth to what is going on than the standard shallow kid show which not only makes it tolerable for adults but also keeps the kids from getting bored later on.
About my only complaint is that they made a series of books that end up looking terribly shallow compared to the episodes themselves making me not want to bother to read them to my son. I'll just stick with reading Discworld & Dr Seuss for now.
It would not be very surprising to see a lot of dead code.
I maintain the code for MoreTerra, a Terraria map editor program and I'm pretty sure I've got dead code in there and that's a pretty small project.
With a large number of people working on the code it likely ends up slowly clogging up as no one quite knows what the others are doing.
Dare I ask what type of dead code exists in something extra huge, but closed source, like the Windows code base or for MS Office? But I'd
bet for all MS's faults that the code for Norton Antivirus is 10x worse.
It's from the Onion but the thing is just because it's satire does not mean it's completely false.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0
This is considering only stuff that you have intentionally given to them. There is a lot of stuff that they get through using things the Like button widgets on other webpages, whether you click them or not.
I started using MSE because of a story here on Slashdot talking about a review of a large number of antivirus products and I was amazed to see people on Slashdot putting their trust in a Microsoft product.
I've been a hater of Microsoft for a long time now thanks to all the anti-competitive and backstabbing stories I've heard but also because of using their various products. And yet now that I've been using MSE I've turned a corner and started to recommend it to friends and family.
I casually help fix computers for people that know me, sometimes going so far as to do it all over the phone when someone lives too far to visit. At first I tended to browse through their machine looking for the troublemakers and then after finding everything I could I would install and run MSE only to watch it detect and clean 100% of the things I had found and even some I had not, like a trojan hiding in the MBR. I've watched it catch different varieties of the TDSS rootkits, clean up all manner of other nasties and only once have I seen it make a mistake, with Chrome being reported as a virus. Yet, even with that flaw Microsoft had detected the issue and it was on the "More Information" page and had been fixed later that night. Since then I've come to trust MSE to do it's job well and I've started to run it first then clean up afterwords and it hasn't let me down yet.
If Microsoft wants to provide a built in antivirus with Win8 but allows it to be disabled to run other things, just like Windows Firewall, then I am all for it. I would do almost anything to keep people from installing the nightmares that are Norton & McAffee (and these days sadly Zone Alarm Antivirus). I've watched both those powerhouse antivirus programs completely miss fake antivirus programs that sneak through Facebook and in Nortons case it turned a simple "Safe Mode/Delete/Remove Registry Startup Command" into a three day slog that only worked when I finally got mad an uninstalled Norton from the machine.
Microsoft might still make some majorly boneheaded decisions but providing a built in antivirus does not seem to be one of them.
I can see someone's loving his OS just a little too much. Have a bit of an open mind.
I run both Windows and Linux on my machines and the only major advantage to running Linux in this type of situation is the fact that these infections are mainly designed to infect windows machines. I keep my Windows machine running cleanly, with regular virus scanning and full disclosure on my software firewall (aka, asks about everything) and I haven't unintentionally gotten a virus or spyware at all in the last few years. I have set up a separate hard drive where I installed some viruses so I could watch them play and learn how to clean them off of someone else's machine.
The problem with this is that I understand computers so when I see a new process I'm not recognizing I'll look up info on it, which is something very few people do. Most people just fire off the normal "Click OK" and keep going.
I've seen two ways that the people I do support for handle these things. Either they are like my roommate who manages to regularly infect his machine with mass quantities of stuff in his search for pr0n or they're like one client I have who is so worried about anything getting in that they've heavily overdone it on programs to keep themselves clean and their machine runs just as poorly as one infested with crap. Granted, that second category doesn't attempt to infect other machines so that is a step up.
If as you say all of these Windows people who aren't interested in learning how to protect their machines leave and go to a Mac OS or Linux OS then the people who are writing all of this stuff will start to work on targeting that platform. Even with the faster patching that goes on to fix issues that assumes these already lazy people will likely not install the patch, or install it but not clean off their infection, which they probably aren't aware of.
dedazo makes some great points and you come off sounding like a pretty sad fanboy when you bash him and say he's just trying to make Microsoft look good. Even so at the very end you say that when people have knowledge and choices things will get better but the whole point Dedazo is making is that people don't want to get that knowledge, or see that they have choices.
Stuff like this doesn't happen based on what any of the kids think, and it's really sad. This is more about making sure that no one gets sue happy and goes after the school, which as public schools go have way too little money to begin with
It's bad enough having to live in a padded room once you've gone crazy but to have the world decide to pad the walls of your cage from the very start is enough to drive a person crazy in the first place.
In learning to walk, I failed many times.In learning to ride a bike, I failed many times.
In learning to program, I failed many times.
In learning to socialize, I failed many times.
In learning to love, I failed many times.
But guess what? I didn't let the pain stop me and kept going and became a stronger person because of all of it, and I'd be very surprised if there isn't another person on Slashdot who can't say the same.
With all of the innovations that the online porn industry has created thanks to the large demand I can almost see the porn industry helping finance meshes such as this so they can reach a larger market worldwide.
All I hear around my college is stuff about World of Warcraft as the students talk to each other.
Too bad people still can't understand half the words they are saying....
True, but even though I liked President Clinton way more than President Bush it still felt to me like he was forced into apologizing. It would have been so much easier had he either told the truth to begin with or said it was none of the nations business.
I almost expect to see a Beowulf cluster comment coming on.......
I understand the breakthrough in terms of quantum computing but how about in long range data transfer?
Can't we use this to finally test the idea of entangled electrons sharing the same spin?
Please read this as "How long will it take before Judge Taylor is branded just another of the "activist" judges?
It was meant to be poking fun at the current administrations attempts to use labels to make people who oppose their view seem less credible.
I just really wish I could honestly say futile attempts....
Of course, I mean besides small gaffes such as poking fun at a person who was legally blind for wearing shades that would help extend the eyesight he was.
Our country would be a lot different if we had a president of either party who would admit to a mistake without being forced into it.
It's such a small article but with all of the talk that has been going on about the "alleged" illegal wiretapping this simple story headline was more then enough to make my jaw drop open in awe.
However, how long will it take before Judge Taylor becomes just another of then "activist" judges?
Bravo, Judge Taylor, Bravo.
It's just a larger scope than it used to be.
Small towns used to be this way (and still are) where every small little thing get talked about and blown out of proportion.
In the town I grew up in merely having a young males car parked outside a young females house while he goes and visits another young male across the street will spawn all kinds of rumors and anger.
Television has been doing this for quite a while, just take the recent developments in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. I can't even remember at this point why everyone threw so much anger at the parents.
Until people stop hating at first site this won't go away.
I personally think Google is fine just the way it is when it comes to the home Google page. I can't help but thinking back to the old Altavista portal slag that used to be my search engine. Dial-up users would sit there waiting for it to load for way to long for someone to just pop in an search for something. Having such a clean and fast loading page was always a major draw for me and it's a great page to use if you are not sure if you have internet problems.
The only thing I can see Google doing to make things a little more exposed would be to replace the *new* "Even more" link with a flat link under the search box saying something like "Come play around with the rest of our toys."