OS X running Windows apps in ugly gray, thats what he is onto. Its coming.
Already there. It's called Virtual PC. And yes - Windows does look absolutely horrid in comparison to OS X.
Even better, when I use Expose, to lay out all of my windows, and see the VPC window smoothly slide down to it's mosaic spot on the screen alongside all the spiffy OS X app windows.
And then, in the end, I realize WHY I'm even running Windows in VPC and suffering the terrible performance hit: My company's VPN software doesn't have a Mac OS X version.
Q: How bad would Windows have to look before I'd choose not to run it? A: No matter how ugly or slow or insecure or buggy it is - I *have* to run it, so I can use my company's VPN.
Dual boot Macs, and even virtual machine macs, will not solve this fundamental problem that ISV's are fucking assholes and write Windows-only software.
Isn't it just possible that, on the whole, Walmart's contribution to society has been good?
Actually, that's TRUE. Although Walmart is nowhere near complete with it's task. But on the whole, once all the mom-and-pop retailers are forced out of business, and once all the mom-and-pops are earning $8/hr as Walmart greeters, and the government is subsidizing Walmart by paying for their employee's health care and food stamps, and borrowing the money to do so from China because there's no significant tax revenue to be gained from $8/hr Walmart employees, and so the American government is bankrupted and it's assets sold off to pay Chinese lenders, and thus Chinese manufacturing laborers salaries go up because their economy skyrockets from this infusion of wealth, then manufacturers will have no choice but to start building factories in the US and hiring it's workers, because average US wages will be like $1/week.
Only THEN will we see that overall, Walmart's contribution to society has been good. By equalizing the economic imbalance that caused all the manufacturing to flee to China, they'll flee right back to the US.
Oh, and my advice to you all is: Learn to speak Mandarin.
I both buy albums, and download music (illegally), and to tell you the truth, from a moral standpoint I feel worse about paying for it.
You need to take a step back and re-appraise your ethics, re-align your moral compass. I mean, paying RIAA companies for music is what scum does. Don't be scum. It's like paying for sex.
Heh, I went through the EXACT same experience regarding Windows File Protection - was working a customer support case for a backup software company.
Customer was reporting some odd behavior when they were restoring "damaged" system files, and I confirmed that the same thing happened in our test environment, but that the behavior ran counter to Microsoft's documentation of how WFP worked.
Thank god for Sysinternal's Filemon. I basically had to reverse engineer it myself. Because I had called Microsoft support to see if something may have been out of configuration on my machine to explain the weird behavior. They couldn't locate the original WFP programmer, nor could they confirm their documentation was correct. They told me to give the customer our support incident number, and they told the customer that their documentation was incorrect, and that WFP did what I said it did, and that's how it works.
This somewhat reminds me of a Slashdot post from about two months ago, about a device some (Darpa?) people were building, which beamed microwaves (or ultrasound?) at people, and caused them to lose their balance and feel as if they had to step to the left or the right (depending on the side where the beamed energy was) to compensate. . .
Oh, c'mon. The "People being held without trial for indefinate periods of time" were captured in a WAR ZONE fighting against our troops.
That's a bunch of bull.
What about individuals, Iraqis, picked up in random sweeps in Iraq? Their neighborhood where they grew up is a war zone? They didn't declare it to be a war zone, we did. And many of the people in Abu Ghraib were found to have no connections with terrorists or insurgents or any damn thing.
And the same goes for Guantanamo. Folks rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (and having the wrong skin-color). A huge chunk of Guantanamo detainees are being released because there's absolutely no evidence (even obtained under torture) of connection to terror or enemy combatant activities.
However, because all the evidence, their names, and even the fact that they're there, is secret, we'll never really know how many were wrongfully detained. It's really shitty, and not at all American to condone such activities.
well, to be fair, it is the gifted students who typically HAVE their own devices. Perhaps the best thing to do for them is to leave them to their own devices, and in this way, they'll be exercising the skills that are most relevant to their own future success.
Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done./i.
Those people are the worst, because in the process of killing time, they end up wasting everyone else's time as well. At least the guy who spends 2 hours a day on slashdot isn't wasting my time asking me questions he could look up himself, or dropping the ball on tasks and not telling anyone.
I'd rather have power spread out amongst the members of Congress than putting it all in one man.
I'd rather have the power myself, and with all of my fellow citizens. But since we all can't be congressmen (who has the time?) we select representatives to do it for us. The problem is - these fuckers won't do their jobs.
Do I necessarily want to mess with the balance of powers between congress and the white house? No, not really - but the alternative seems to be letting them borrow and spend amounts with as many zeroes as they can cram onto a sheet of paper. How can we reign them in? They seem immune to any voter feedback, and they seem to only answer to those who get them elected: ie. large corporate donors.
Surely you wouldn't suggest campaign finance limits?
Back in the Gingrich days, they tried to stop riders to big appropriations bills, but I guess either the initiative failed or people found a loophole.
It's called (or WAS called) the "Line Item Veto".
Clinton never exercised it - but the fact that he HAD that power apparently had a tremendous impact.
Then the Supreme Court tossed it out as unconstitutional, in 2000.
GWB is on record as sharing that view, (that the LIV was unconstitutional), and applauded the decision.
GWB is also on record (within the past 6 months or so IIRC) of making statements to the effect that he'd like to see that power restored. (gee - unshackled congressional porkfest got yer deficit problems up?). See? He's a flip-flopper.
It sounds to me as if we need a balanced-budget amendment, with a rider that the president also gets the LIV. Fuck the SCOTUS.
And the rediculous thing is - for any lame riders, if the measure really needs to get passed, it can always be resubmitted as a separate bill. But then that would force Congress to actually read and vote on the item separately. So basically, the whole necessity for the LIV is based on the fact that congressfolk won't do their fucking jobs and show some spine.
USA PATRIOT has a clause that limits it's use to Terrorism only (which is a fairly elastic term to begin with) - and yet it has been used for many other purposes in several documented cases.
Last January, when the congress hemmed and hawed over modifications of the USA PATRIOT act (to supposedly protect our civil liberties) - and finally agreed on a watered down suite of protections; Bush signed it with a "signing statement" that basically says he (and the enforcement agencies under his office) intend to ignore it and act as if it does not apply to them (arguing that it does not, in fact, apply, in light of the constitutional war powers held by the president) - again, bogus argument afger bogus argument. End result: we live in a police state, and we paid these bastards to argue and fight to protect our rights, and they only pretend to do so.
Does Rockbox let an iRiver function as an external USB hard drive?
I sort of wanted to get an iRiver a while back, because it seemed to be the best bank-for-buck (compared to iPod) but it seemed to be 'doze-only. If by changing the firmware, I can interact with my Mac, then that would make iRiver more attractive.
The NSA has a publicly available set of documents on securing and hardening various popular commercial computer operating systems. (hardening WIndows NT, hardening Mac OS X, etc.)
The Windows 2000 document specifically instructs security engineers on disabling USB storage drivers.
Sure, if someone can gain physical access, and attach an external drive with a bootable OS, it's owned. But casual insertion of a USB thumb drive on a secured system won't work if it's been properly secured.
I got a TiVo for use with my 5000, but because EchoStar obfuscated their IR codes, the TiVO could not change it's channels (was therefore useless) so I traded the 5000 and TiVo for a 7100. Which was a steaming pile of poo, as you say. But for all of TiVO's features, bottom line was, it just plain didn't work. And the reason was not entirely TiVo's fault, it was really EchoStar's fault, for not supporting the IR interoperability.
If you think about it, commercials are sort of like progressive taxation.
If a person's time is worth x-dollars per hour (based on what he or she makes), then sitting through an hour's worth of commercials COSTS a minimum-wage burger-flipper a lot less than it would cost, say, the CEO of Exxon, (who makes about $45,000/hour). Yet the product received is exactly the same.
Tell ya what - Back in, oh, 2000-ish, I bought me a TiVo, to record my EchoStar satellite TV shows.
I felt that having to pay monthly for guide-downloads, ON TOP OF my monthly satellite bill (my satellite box has the damn guide on it), was a scam.
But the real scam was that Echo Star had obfuscated it's IR remote codes so that the TiVo IR-blaster would not work, and thus TiVo could not change my Satellite channels properly to record shows. When I called EchoStar to complain, I did the WRONG thing, and signed up for their recorder box. Then I returned my TiVo and lifetime subscription. (to be fair, the EchoStar box had a 30-second-skip, TiVo only had a ffwd function).
I still think it's bullshit that a program guide should be a piece of information that costs me, a consumer $10/month.
I probably should have stuck with the TiVo, because the EchoStar box was a bug-ridden piece of shit - and later became the subject of a class-action lawsuit (software by Microsoft, of course). Ah well, live and learn.
Eventually, I got sick of paying $60/month for programming that was approximately 30% commercials, 69% crap, and 1% worthwhile programming. So I yanked the dish, and didnt replace it with cable. The kids initially complained. But we now do a DVD-rental service (we've used netflix, and blockbuster, the latter is more convenient, but less selection). Don't miss the force-fed crap one bit, and we spend a LOT less time in front of the boob-toob. The time we DO spend, we enjoy. The only downside is waiting 6 months to see BSG episodes. That's really the only show I feel a desire to see immediately. Everything else I'd like to see, I can wait for. (My son got Mythbusters Season 1 on DVD).
. . . because the telecom monopolies are blocking VOIP traffic, thus rendering IP phones useless?
A monopoly in an industry with low barriers to entry is great for consumers, because the monopolist has to try really hard to keep it, and they have the resources to continously improve the product.
Yeah, that's until the monopolist makes the barrier to entry artificially high. Then those resources typically get devoted to improving executive compensation, rather than product.
Monopolies in industries with high barriers to entry usually are harmful.
So, how is a national telecommunications network not considered a high barrier to entry?
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OS X running Windows apps in ugly gray, thats what he is onto. Its coming.
Already there. It's called Virtual PC.
And yes - Windows does look absolutely horrid in comparison to OS X.
Even better, when I use Expose, to lay out all of my windows, and see the VPC window smoothly slide down to it's mosaic spot on the screen alongside all the spiffy OS X app windows.
And then, in the end, I realize WHY I'm even running Windows in VPC and suffering the terrible performance hit: My company's VPN software doesn't have a Mac OS X version.
Q: How bad would Windows have to look before I'd choose not to run it?
A: No matter how ugly or slow or insecure or buggy it is - I *have* to run it, so I can use my company's VPN.
Dual boot Macs, and even virtual machine macs, will not solve this fundamental problem that ISV's are fucking assholes and write Windows-only software.
Unfortunately, there are a significant amount of telcom-financed Dems who will just as happily whore out your rights to the highest bidder.
This is NOT a Republican/Democrat issue. This is a campaign-finance/bribery issue.
Remember; Clinton enthusiastically supported and signed the DMCA.
Isn't it just possible that, on the whole, Walmart's contribution to society has been good?
Actually, that's TRUE. Although Walmart is nowhere near complete with it's task. But on the whole, once all the mom-and-pop retailers are forced out of business, and once all the mom-and-pops are earning $8/hr as Walmart greeters, and the government is subsidizing Walmart by paying for their employee's health care and food stamps, and borrowing the money to do so from China because there's no significant tax revenue to be gained from $8/hr Walmart employees, and so the American government is bankrupted and it's assets sold off to pay Chinese lenders, and thus Chinese manufacturing laborers salaries go up because their economy skyrockets from this infusion of wealth, then manufacturers will have no choice but to start building factories in the US and hiring it's workers, because average US wages will be like $1/week.
Only THEN will we see that overall, Walmart's contribution to society has been good. By equalizing the economic imbalance that caused all the manufacturing to flee to China, they'll flee right back to the US.
Oh, and my advice to you all is: Learn to speak Mandarin.
I both buy albums, and download music (illegally), and to tell you the truth, from a moral standpoint I feel worse about paying for it.
You need to take a step back and re-appraise your ethics, re-align your moral compass.
I mean, paying RIAA companies for music is what scum does. Don't be scum. It's like paying for sex.
Heh, I went through the EXACT same experience regarding Windows File Protection - was working a customer support case for a backup software company.
Customer was reporting some odd behavior when they were restoring "damaged" system files, and I confirmed that the same thing happened in our test environment, but that the behavior ran counter to Microsoft's documentation of how WFP worked.
Thank god for Sysinternal's Filemon. I basically had to reverse engineer it myself. Because I had called Microsoft support to see if something may have been out of configuration on my machine to explain the weird behavior. They couldn't locate the original WFP programmer, nor could they confirm their documentation was correct. They told me to give the customer our support incident number, and they told the customer that their documentation was incorrect, and that WFP did what I said it did, and that's how it works.
That's some scary shit.
This somewhat reminds me of a Slashdot post from about two months ago, about a device some (Darpa?) people were building, which beamed microwaves (or ultrasound?) at people, and caused them to lose their balance and feel as if they had to step to the left or the right (depending on the side where the beamed energy was) to compensate. . .
eh? my bad.
My barber has a new iMac in his office, and I didn't see the LED, I guess he didn't demonstrate the camera in all that.
I still run a dual G5 PM off an old CRT, with no camera.
This practice continues to this day at Apple, putting in hardwired signal LEDs to indicate when a camera is active.
Jokes on you.
Seen the latest iMac?
Camera.
Microphone.
No LED.
Actually, I heard Samsung decided not to go ahead with the Combo player due to some hidden licensing issues.
But LG Electric is going to produce a combo, and they decided to challenge those licensing terms in court.
As for Matsushita, fuck them. in both eye sockets.
If you dont like the US, move. Its a big world.
That's my suggestion to the anti-gay-marriage folks.
Homosexuality is banned in Saudi Arabia, and Iran, so if you want to live in a land that respects the laws of God, then move there.
It's a big world.
So why isn't there room enough for one place with Freedom?
Oh, c'mon. The "People being held without trial for indefinate periods of time" were captured in a WAR ZONE fighting against our troops.
That's a bunch of bull.
What about individuals, Iraqis, picked up in random sweeps in Iraq? Their neighborhood where they grew up is a war zone? They didn't declare it to be a war zone, we did. And many of the people in Abu Ghraib were found to have no connections with terrorists or insurgents or any damn thing.
And the same goes for Guantanamo. Folks rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (and having the wrong skin-color). A huge chunk of Guantanamo detainees are being released because there's absolutely no evidence (even obtained under torture) of connection to terror or enemy combatant activities.
However, because all the evidence, their names, and even the fact that they're there, is secret, we'll never really know how many were wrongfully detained. It's really shitty, and not at all American to condone such activities.
well, to be fair, it is the gifted students who typically HAVE their own devices. Perhaps the best thing to do for them is to leave them to their own devices, and in this way, they'll be exercising the skills that are most relevant to their own future success.
Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done./i.
Those people are the worst, because in the process of killing time, they end up wasting everyone else's time as well. At least the guy who spends 2 hours a day on slashdot isn't wasting my time asking me questions he could look up himself, or dropping the ball on tasks and not telling anyone.
I'd rather have power spread out amongst the members of Congress than putting it all in one man.
I'd rather have the power myself, and with all of my fellow citizens. But since we all can't be congressmen (who has the time?) we select representatives to do it for us. The problem is - these fuckers won't do their jobs.
Do I necessarily want to mess with the balance of powers between congress and the white house? No, not really - but the alternative seems to be letting them borrow and spend amounts with as many zeroes as they can cram onto a sheet of paper. How can we reign them in? They seem immune to any voter feedback, and they seem to only answer to those who get them elected: ie. large corporate donors.
Surely you wouldn't suggest campaign finance limits?
Back in the Gingrich days, they tried to stop riders to big appropriations bills, but I guess either the initiative failed or people found a loophole.
It's called (or WAS called) the "Line Item Veto".
Clinton never exercised it - but the fact that he HAD that power apparently had a tremendous impact.
Then the Supreme Court tossed it out as unconstitutional, in 2000.
GWB is on record as sharing that view, (that the LIV was unconstitutional), and applauded the decision.
GWB is also on record (within the past 6 months or so IIRC) of making statements to the effect that he'd like to see that power restored. (gee - unshackled congressional porkfest got yer deficit problems up?). See? He's a flip-flopper.
It sounds to me as if we need a balanced-budget amendment, with a rider that the president also gets the LIV. Fuck the SCOTUS.
And the rediculous thing is - for any lame riders, if the measure really needs to get passed, it can always be resubmitted as a separate bill. But then that would force Congress to actually read and vote on the item separately. So basically, the whole necessity for the LIV is based on the fact that congressfolk won't do their fucking jobs and show some spine.
Religious Fundamentalist Psychos is a thricely-redundant term.
Slashdot's editorial quality has degraded in the last few years so much that I am thinking about deleting it from my bookmarks.
Take it from an old-timer. Slashdot's editorial quality has remained pretty much consistent for about its entire existence.
BS.
They'll agree, and simply ignore it.
USA PATRIOT has a clause that limits it's use to Terrorism only (which is a fairly elastic term to begin with) - and yet it has been used for many other purposes in several documented cases.
Last January, when the congress hemmed and hawed over modifications of the USA PATRIOT act (to supposedly protect our civil liberties) - and finally agreed on a watered down suite of protections; Bush signed it with a "signing statement" that basically says he (and the enforcement agencies under his office) intend to ignore it and act as if it does not apply to them (arguing that it does not, in fact, apply, in light of the constitutional war powers held by the president) - again, bogus argument afger bogus argument. End result: we live in a police state, and we paid these bastards to argue and fight to protect our rights, and they only pretend to do so.
Does Rockbox let an iRiver function as an external USB hard drive?
I sort of wanted to get an iRiver a while back, because it seemed to be the best bank-for-buck (compared to iPod) but it seemed to be 'doze-only. If by changing the firmware, I can interact with my Mac, then that would make iRiver more attractive.
The NSA has a publicly available set of documents on securing and hardening various popular commercial computer operating systems. (hardening WIndows NT, hardening Mac OS X, etc.)
The Windows 2000 document specifically instructs security engineers on disabling USB storage drivers.
Sure, if someone can gain physical access, and attach an external drive with a bootable OS, it's owned. But casual insertion of a USB thumb drive on a secured system won't work if it's been properly secured.
I got a TiVo for use with my 5000, but because EchoStar obfuscated their IR codes, the TiVO could not change it's channels (was therefore useless) so I traded the 5000 and TiVo for a 7100. Which was a steaming pile of poo, as you say. But for all of TiVO's features, bottom line was, it just plain didn't work. And the reason was not entirely TiVo's fault, it was really EchoStar's fault, for not supporting the IR interoperability.
Does this fix the plugin problems that intel/mac users have been experiencing?
If you think about it, commercials are sort of like progressive taxation.
If a person's time is worth x-dollars per hour (based on what he or she makes), then sitting through an hour's worth of commercials COSTS a minimum-wage burger-flipper a lot less than it would cost, say, the CEO of Exxon, (who makes about $45,000/hour). Yet the product received is exactly the same.
Isn't that strange?
Tell ya what -
Back in, oh, 2000-ish, I bought me a TiVo, to record my EchoStar satellite TV shows.
I felt that having to pay monthly for guide-downloads, ON TOP OF my monthly satellite bill (my satellite box has the damn guide on it), was a scam.
But the real scam was that Echo Star had obfuscated it's IR remote codes so that the TiVo IR-blaster would not work, and thus TiVo could not change my Satellite channels properly to record shows.
When I called EchoStar to complain, I did the WRONG thing, and signed up for their recorder box. Then I returned my TiVo and lifetime subscription. (to be fair, the EchoStar box had a 30-second-skip, TiVo only had a ffwd function).
I still think it's bullshit that a program guide should be a piece of information that costs me, a consumer $10/month.
I probably should have stuck with the TiVo, because the EchoStar box was a bug-ridden piece of shit - and later became the subject of a class-action lawsuit (software by Microsoft, of course). Ah well, live and learn.
Eventually, I got sick of paying $60/month for programming that was approximately 30% commercials, 69% crap, and 1% worthwhile programming. So I yanked the dish, and didnt replace it with cable. The kids initially complained. But we now do a DVD-rental service (we've used netflix, and blockbuster, the latter is more convenient, but less selection). Don't miss the force-fed crap one bit, and we spend a LOT less time in front of the boob-toob. The time we DO spend, we enjoy. The only downside is waiting 6 months to see BSG episodes. That's really the only show I feel a desire to see immediately. Everything else I'd like to see, I can wait for. (My son got Mythbusters Season 1 on DVD).
This is why we get IP phones for next to nothing,
. . . because the telecom monopolies are blocking VOIP traffic, thus rendering IP phones useless?
A monopoly in an industry with low barriers to entry is great for consumers, because the monopolist has to try really hard to keep it, and they have the resources to continously improve the product.
Yeah, that's until the monopolist makes the barrier to entry artificially high. Then those resources typically get devoted to improving executive compensation, rather than product.
Monopolies in industries with high barriers to entry usually are harmful.
So, how is a national telecommunications network not considered a high barrier to entry?