It's a smart strategy. Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen after they stopped seeding educational institutions. There's no reason, except possibly greed, why RedHat couldn't get some mileage out of its nice, hefty large market cap and do the same thing.
The author seemed pleasant enough, although the promotion of his own personal agenda was fairly annoying. The worst part was that whole learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes actually rolled when I read that.
Since someone said that it was a redux of an old article, I'm curious whether Linux made its appearance in the original, or if they just added Linux as a shameless attempt to catch a ride on the bandwagon. Throwing Linux into the mix seems to make some of his paper contradictory, something better explained later when I'm not screaming at this football game. TTFN.
What incidents are you referring to with regards to missile accuracy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and Bosnia? As for what happened with the Chinese embassy in Serbia, your snide comment is off-base -- the missile accurately did what it was supposed to do, which was to hit that specific building.
Also, your comments relating Communism with the U.S. killing of Indians are unwarranted, and you know it. Every country has some dark moments in its history, whether it's the U.S. killing Indians, England's treatment of the Irish, or slavery, that enlightened people today find hard to imagine a mindset that would make such things completely acceptable back then. The fact is, though, that during the time of the Cold War, the United States government was no longer engaged in policies of killing Indians, while Communist countries throughout the world were still actively engaged in oppressing their own people and killing or jailing those who dare speak up against such policies.
While I do think that your post is wrong-headed, I disagree with the lazy moderator who, instead of taking the effort to explain why he obviously didn't agree with you, simply and wrongly marked your post as "flamebait."
Encarta isn't being given away with every box of cereal.
The product in question isn't an even an encyclopedia, but something called Encarta Virtual Globe.
To get the Virtual Globe product for free, you have to sign up for a month of MSN access.
So basically, it's just like AOL's offer to get a free trial month of their service, except that instead of waiving the cost of the free month, they're sending you a software product.
As to your ranting about "GIVING AWAY PRODUCTS AND HOPEFULLY KILLING LINUX BY SHUTTING NETSCAPE OUT OF THE MARKET":
Microsoft doesn't have a browser for Linux.
Netscape for Linux is free, as will be Mozilla.
Please tell me again how they can shut Netscape out of a market in which Microsoft itself doesn't even have a presence -- and when, even if they did have a presence, couldn't make it any cheaper than Netscape/Mozilla unless they actually started paying Linux users to use it? Oh yeah, and how will this kill Linux?
Even if, as you predict, Netscape/AOL decided to yank the Netscape browser from the market, it doesn't change the fact that Mozilla (with source code) will probably be released within the next 12 months. If, after pulling out, Netscape/AOL decides to close up their flavor of an Open Source license (which still wouldn't have any effect on the code which has already been written), you would only have Netscape/AOL to blame for that decision, not Microsoft. If people then decided to quit updating Mozilla, you would only have the Open Source community to blame, not Microsoft.
And now we turn to your statement about some ZDnet editor joking two years ago about Microsoft giving away IE in cereal boxes.
That statement sounds a little hard to believe considering that over two years ago Netscape announced their "Netscape Everywhere" initiative, whereby they planned to use an AOL-like "carpet-bombing" (Netscape's words, not mine) to deploy 100 million browsers in the following 12 months.
So Microsoft (according to you) is planning to stick their browser in boxes of cereal, while Netscape had been planning to stick their browser in books and magazines. Where were you and your ranting back then?
I think you've got some "issues" that you need to deal with, because it seems like your virulence is causing your perception of reality to greatly differ from the actuality of the situation. And I'm not talking about your opinions and predictions of what will happen, I'm talking about simple facts, known quantities, that your mind has distorted.
Yeah, and about every politician I know thinks "nuclear" is pronounced "nuke-ya-lur," and every Linux zealot I know that calls himself 31337 still can't figure out how to download only the patches to their latest kernel. Doesn't mean it's correct. Further, seeing as so many people here bristle whenever a journalist uses "hacker" when he could've used "cracker," I would think that they'd be in favor of choosing one's words more carefully.
I don't know when the original definition was coined, but it's an NT-only thing -- when you get a blue screen in Win9x, it doesn't mean death is certain; in NT, you have no other choice but to reboot. Just because they're both blue doesn't mean that they're the same thing, no more than I'd confuse a computer running DOS 3.2 with my Linux box just because on my screen I get a prompt and white text on a black background.
As to your other questions, yes, Microsoft employees occasionally use the term, but I don't remember any official documenation referring to it as anything other than a "Stop Error" or a "Blue Screen." Some of their publications, like MSDN stuff, will use "BSOD" from time to time.
It's not just for natural disaster. If they need to revoke the original key for any reason (like say it got cracked), then the backup key could be used to verify the replacement key for the original.
Actually, I was referring more to the user experience as way of broadening its use, rather than the programming tools, since users are the people who actually drive development. For a lot of people, when they think of Java apps, their mind associates them with "those programs that crash my Netscape." So, most people are happy to avoid Java; this lack of demand means that companies don't put a huge effort into improving their JVMs, since a great JVM isn't much of a selling point for most users; and the less than ideal quality of the current JVMs means that a lot of users see performance and stability problems. Rinse. Repeat.
I have a hard time believing that you've used many of the different JVMs out there. I think Java would have much greater acceptance on all platforms if every platform had a JVM that was as stable and had near the performance as Microsoft's JVM for Win32.
I imagine you know the difference and just had a brain cramp when you typed that. Addressing something else you said, though, it's interesting that the "bastard version" (your words) of JavaScript produced by Microsoft supports the actual JavaScript standard (formally known as ECMAscript) better than Netscape, the company that created JavaScript. Cheers,ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The day that software becomes nearly truly valuable to people will be the day when they don't need support and books, etc. to be able to use it. How is the open source developer supposed to make money in this situation? Will they have to purposely design some unnecessary complexity into their software so that people will want support, need to buy books on it, etc.?
Sure, and if StarOffice becomes THE office suite to use by Unix heads, most of the people currently working on Unix office suites will move to other projects where they might have a chance of having their work recognized. Sun sees that they're in a great position and jacks the price up, and now the users are left with a lot less choice than they had before.
Sorry, but I believe the current code checks to see if "username == 'Bruce Perens'". If false, then the "Interesting," "Funny," etc. (if different than who it's currently tagged), will still be tagged on to your post, but the score will remain the same. Hope this helps.:)
You need a backup (and I believe that the NSA requires it by law) so that if the first key ("key #1") needs to be revoked, you use the backup key to verify the new "key #1" that you receive.
Frankly, I'm seeing a lot of paranoid posts in this thread without a lot of thinking being done. If Microsoft wanted the NSA to have a backdoor, they could just give them a copy of their own private key -- they wouldn't need to write a special new one.
To put a compromised key on someone's system, you need to get administrator/root access. If someone gets administrator/root access on your box, they could do anything they damn well wanted to anyway, so what's the big deal?
Maybe I don't frequent the same places that you do, but I don't see this stuff at most places. Well, I see some of it, but in not nearly the quantity that I do here.
It's not a matter of quality that I'm talking about, but the pure venom on display and the glee taken in other people's suffering: losing their jobs, dying, whatever. Again, I see it other places sometimes, but I don't really count on seeing it regularly except when I'm here. I realize that it almost gets to be contagious, as there've been times that I've gone down into the gutter myself here.
Well, it should, anyway.:-) The problem is that some people are living off of automatic 2 scores that they earned ages ago. So now there are just a huge number of posts at 2 that, while there's certainly nothing wrong with those comments, there nothing worthy of getting a 2. Plus, once you do reach that plateau where everything you say starts out as a 2, it's next to impossible to ever go back down to the level of the normal poster -- it's a self-sustaining feature, because as long as they don't suddenly turn into trolls for an extended period of time, most people aren't going to bother to knock down a so-so 2 comment that really deserves a 1.
What I suggest is to completely clear everyone's karma from time to time, say once every 2 or 3 weeks, so that when I want to use thresholds, I have some slight assurance that those with 2s will have said something interesting recently (not because they happened to have a good week back in 1998).
I don't see this as penalizing those with automatic 2s, just something to make the system better for the reader.
It's not just the blatant trolls that get under your skin. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
"I hope TrollTech goes out of business because they won't release QT under the GPL."
"Yay, NT support for the Alpha is being dropped and more than 100 programmers are losing their jobs."
In this thread on Mr. Stevens's death, the announcement that all of his books have been scanned/ripped and will be posted on some IRC warez channel.
"I wish someone would kill Bill Gates."
The continuous venom and hoping by KDE and GNOME fanatics that the other side will end up as a complete failure. Plenty of people seem to care more that KDE turns out to be a failure than they do that GNOME actually succeeds, and vice versa.
"Now that BSD has changed their licensing terms, let's GPL it! HAHAHAHA!"
"You use platform X, so you're an idiot!"
Keep in mind that here I'm not talking about people who are just saying that to get everyone riled up (i.e., "real trolls"), but people who say it with true spite for other people behind it.
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
Cheers, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
P.S. Sorry if you've read some of this before, but I thought that this was a more appropriate thread for it.
It's not just the need to inject Linux into every single topic that's annoying. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
"I hope TrollTech goes out of business because they won't release QT under the GPL."
"Yay, NT support for the Alpha is being dropped and more than 100 programmers are losing their jobs."
In this thread on Mr. Stevens's death, the announcement that all of his books have been scanned/ripped and will be posted on some IRC warez channel.
"I wish someone would kill Bill Gates."
The continuous venom and hoping by KDE and GNOME fanatics that the other side will end up as a complete failure. Plenty of people seem to care more that KDE turns out to be a failure than they do that GNOME actually succeeds, and vice versa.
"Now that BSD has changed their licensing terms, let's GPL it! HAHAHAHA!"
"You use platform X, so you're an idiot!"
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
If they did that, the Slashdot owners would leave themselves wide open to charges of hypocracy when they not only allow, but actually moderate up the many posts from the typical Slashdot zealot celebrating the death of, say, Bill Gates or the CEO of SCO.
Information wants to be free and anything decent that you put up is fair game to be ripped off. I hope you have a lot of bandwidth so my fellow Slashdotters and I can easily mirror your site and store it on our servers along with all our traded MP3s, bootlegged movies, and k-rad 0-day w4r3z. 3y3 0wn j00 4nD a11 y3R 1Nf0rMa5huN!
But they already have programmers who know the Mac, and they still almost shut that division down to move those customers to Quicken.com. It would be nuts to spend the resources to port it to Linux, which has less of a desktop share, when they're grappling with all those other problems that I mentioned previously. I'm talking Quicken here, not QuickBooks or their other small business products, which they don't make for the Mac anymore.
As far as Intuit's products go, TurboTax is pretty vital to me, and potential integration issues with it are the only reason why I might end up not going with Money 2K instead of Quicken 2K. As to the biz products, I don't use them myself (although I do have first-hand experience with the nightmare that is PeachTree), but my accounting babe seems to be satisfied with QuickBooks instead of the competition.
BTW, the thing that irked me about the post to which I replied was attributing Quicken's absence of Linux products to some lack of backbone. That's ludicrous.
They have no backbone because they don't want to waste their money porting their software to support less than 1 percent of the desktop market? Jesus, some of you guys have really lost all sense of reality. Forget Linux, Intuit was thiiiis close to not even supporting Macs just a short while ago, before reversing their decision at the last minute. Add to the mix the major fight they have on their hands going up against Money 2000 (which looks pretty damn good -- c|net, for one, picked it over Quicken 2000, and we all know how much they love Microsoft.) Plus, can't Linux users access a lot of Quicken features over the web at Quicken.com? Add all those factors together and they'd have to be screwed in the head to port their apps to Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a smart strategy. Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen after they stopped seeding educational institutions. There's no reason, except possibly greed, why RedHat couldn't get some mileage out of its nice, hefty large market cap and do the same thing.
The author seemed pleasant enough, although the promotion of his own personal agenda was fairly annoying. The worst part was that whole learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes actually rolled when I read that.
Since someone said that it was a redux of an old article, I'm curious whether Linux made its appearance in the original, or if they just added Linux as a shameless attempt to catch a ride on the bandwagon. Throwing Linux into the mix seems to make some of his paper contradictory, something better explained later when I'm not screaming at this football game. TTFN.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
What incidents are you referring to with regards to missile accuracy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and Bosnia? As for what happened with the Chinese embassy in Serbia, your snide comment is off-base -- the missile accurately did what it was supposed to do, which was to hit that specific building.
Also, your comments relating Communism with the U.S. killing of Indians are unwarranted, and you know it. Every country has some dark moments in its history, whether it's the U.S. killing Indians, England's treatment of the Irish, or slavery, that enlightened people today find hard to imagine a mindset that would make such things completely acceptable back then. The fact is, though, that during the time of the Cold War, the United States government was no longer engaged in policies of killing Indians, while Communist countries throughout the world were still actively engaged in oppressing their own people and killing or jailing those who dare speak up against such policies.
While I do think that your post is wrong-headed, I disagree with the lazy moderator who, instead of taking the effort to explain why he obviously didn't agree with you, simply and wrongly marked your post as "flamebait."
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yeah, and about every politician I know thinks "nuclear" is pronounced "nuke-ya-lur," and every Linux zealot I know that calls himself 31337 still can't figure out how to download only the patches to their latest kernel. Doesn't mean it's correct. Further, seeing as so many people here bristle whenever a journalist uses "hacker" when he could've used "cracker," I would think that they'd be in favor of choosing one's words more carefully.
I don't know when the original definition was coined, but it's an NT-only thing -- when you get a blue screen in Win9x, it doesn't mean death is certain; in NT, you have no other choice but to reboot. Just because they're both blue doesn't mean that they're the same thing, no more than I'd confuse a computer running DOS 3.2 with my Linux box just because on my screen I get a prompt and white text on a black background.
As to your other questions, yes, Microsoft employees occasionally use the term, but I don't remember any official documenation referring to it as anything other than a "Stop Error" or a "Blue Screen." Some of their publications, like MSDN stuff, will use "BSOD" from time to time.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Hey, don't blame me for your reading this, I said "no text." :P
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It's not just for natural disaster. If they need to revoke the original key for any reason (like say it got cracked), then the backup key could be used to verify the replacement key for the original.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Actually, I was referring more to the user experience as way of broadening its use, rather than the programming tools, since users are the people who actually drive development. For a lot of people, when they think of Java apps, their mind associates them with "those programs that crash my Netscape." So, most people are happy to avoid Java; this lack of demand means that companies don't put a huge effort into improving their JVMs, since a great JVM isn't much of a selling point for most users; and the less than ideal quality of the current JVMs means that a lot of users see performance and stability problems. Rinse. Repeat.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I have a hard time believing that you've used many of the different JVMs out there. I think Java would have much greater acceptance on all platforms if every platform had a JVM that was as stable and had near the performance as Microsoft's JVM for Win32.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I imagine you know the difference and just had a brain cramp when you typed that. Addressing something else you said, though, it's interesting that the "bastard version" (your words) of JavaScript produced by Microsoft supports the actual JavaScript standard (formally known as ECMAscript) better than Netscape, the company that created JavaScript. Cheers,ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
IE has around 74 or 75 percent (and rising) of the browser market, while Netscape has around 23 or 24 percent (and falling).
Sorry if I misunderstood you, but it really seemed like you were saying the opposite was the case.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Silly rabbit, didn't you know that according to Apple Corp. internal documents, RGB will heretofore stand for "Raspberry-GeminiGreen-BondiBlue"?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've got my very own stalker! I finally hit the big-time, ma!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The day that software becomes nearly truly valuable to people will be the day when they don't need support and books, etc. to be able to use it. How is the open source developer supposed to make money in this situation? Will they have to purposely design some unnecessary complexity into their software so that people will want support, need to buy books on it, etc.?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sure, and if StarOffice becomes THE office suite to use by Unix heads, most of the people currently working on Unix office suites will move to other projects where they might have a chance of having their work recognized. Sun sees that they're in a great position and jacks the price up, and now the users are left with a lot less choice than they had before.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sorry, but I believe the current code checks to see if "username == 'Bruce Perens'". If false, then the "Interesting," "Funny," etc. (if different than who it's currently tagged), will still be tagged on to your post, but the score will remain the same. Hope this helps. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
You need a backup (and I believe that the NSA requires it by law) so that if the first key ("key #1") needs to be revoked, you use the backup key to verify the new "key #1" that you receive.
Frankly, I'm seeing a lot of paranoid posts in this thread without a lot of thinking being done. If Microsoft wanted the NSA to have a backdoor, they could just give them a copy of their own private key -- they wouldn't need to write a special new one.
To put a compromised key on someone's system, you need to get administrator/root access. If someone gets administrator/root access on your box, they could do anything they damn well wanted to anyway, so what's the big deal?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Check out the recent article (or don't, if you're not in the mood for getting annoyed) about W. Richard Stevens's untimely death.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Maybe I don't frequent the same places that you do, but I don't see this stuff at most places. Well, I see some of it, but in not nearly the quantity that I do here.
It's not a matter of quality that I'm talking about, but the pure venom on display and the glee taken in other people's suffering: losing their jobs, dying, whatever. Again, I see it other places sometimes, but I don't really count on seeing it regularly except when I'm here. I realize that it almost gets to be contagious, as there've been times that I've gone down into the gutter myself here.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Well, it should, anyway. :-) The problem is that some people are living off of automatic 2 scores that they earned ages ago. So now there are just a huge number of posts at 2 that, while there's certainly nothing wrong with those comments, there nothing worthy of getting a 2. Plus, once you do reach that plateau where everything you say starts out as a 2, it's next to impossible to ever go back down to the level of the normal poster -- it's a self-sustaining feature, because as long as they don't suddenly turn into trolls for an extended period of time, most people aren't going to bother to knock down a so-so 2 comment that really deserves a 1.
What I suggest is to completely clear everyone's karma from time to time, say once every 2 or 3 weeks, so that when I want to use thresholds, I have some slight assurance that those with 2s will have said something interesting recently (not because they happened to have a good week back in 1998).
I don't see this as penalizing those with automatic 2s, just something to make the system better for the reader.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It's not just the blatant trolls that get under your skin. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
Keep in mind that here I'm not talking about people who are just saying that to get everyone riled up (i.e., "real trolls"), but people who say it with true spite for other people behind it.
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
P.S. Sorry if you've read some of this before, but I thought that this was a more appropriate thread for it.
It's not just the need to inject Linux into every single topic that's annoying. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If they did that, the Slashdot owners would leave themselves wide open to charges of hypocracy when they not only allow, but actually moderate up the many posts from the typical Slashdot zealot celebrating the death of, say, Bill Gates or the CEO of SCO.
Rest in peace, and thank you, Mr. Stevens.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows
Information wants to be free and anything decent that you put up is fair game to be ripped off. I hope you have a lot of bandwidth so my fellow Slashdotters and I can easily mirror your site and store it on our servers along with all our traded MP3s, bootlegged movies, and k-rad 0-day w4r3z. 3y3 0wn j00 4nD a11 y3R 1Nf0rMa5huN!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
But they already have programmers who know the Mac, and they still almost shut that division down to move those customers to Quicken.com. It would be nuts to spend the resources to port it to Linux, which has less of a desktop share, when they're grappling with all those other problems that I mentioned previously. I'm talking Quicken here, not QuickBooks or their other small business products, which they don't make for the Mac anymore.
As far as Intuit's products go, TurboTax is pretty vital to me, and potential integration issues with it are the only reason why I might end up not going with Money 2K instead of Quicken 2K. As to the biz products, I don't use them myself (although I do have first-hand experience with the nightmare that is PeachTree), but my accounting babe seems to be satisfied with QuickBooks instead of the competition.
BTW, the thing that irked me about the post to which I replied was attributing Quicken's absence of Linux products to some lack of backbone. That's ludicrous.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com