"If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers."
That's the line I found hilarious. Which material are they talking about? The email or the "infringing file"? p>You received this notice in error, so please delete the file we thought was a violation so that we don't send it to you again. Thanks!
Better be safe and delete all the material from all the computers:). This would have been funnier in a sewing-pattern infringement case:).
Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished.
That's the real problem here. Part of the system of Checks and Balances here is that the company alleging infringement must do so under penalty of perjory, which implies a need for due diligence on their part. Since the Attorneys General in question seem to refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories under this law, they see no need for due diligence and employ the automated techniques which result in scenarios like this article. Until that changes there will be more of the same. I think we should move to recall any attorney general who refuses to prosecute one of these cases.
You call $7.50/hr "great money" in the US? Let's see how long you live on minimum wage. Dork!
1) Minimum wage is much much less than that in most US States.
2) Just because McDonald's is a corporation does not mean it is one of the "many" mentioned. I doubt many of the corporations I have worked for pay minimum wage to anyone under their employ, and they do pay quite well to most of the workers I have direct contact with.
Well, the obvious solution is to get rid of all the Windows machines on the network. Presto, problem solved!
I know you are being funny, but really my reading of the article leads me to believe they needed to bring in someone who actually understands how smb browsing and windows permissions work and set up SAMBA correctly. The problems they describe would actually happen to a Windows box which was incorrectly set up, but frequently people blame the tool instead of learning to use it.
Windows smb browsing is not magic; it follows a very specific methodology. I also had a chuckle when they found it unaceptable, upon not getting permission to read and write to a directory, that they should have to change the permissions on that directory. The problem is probably more complex than they make it out to be and unfortunately we have no details, but I don't see how this could not have been overcome by having more competent windows and/or samba staff.
Do you think manufacturers just sit around waiting for your call to manufacture something?
Let's say MS manufactures 100,000 XBoxes at a cost of $300 per unit. That's $30 million MS spends to make their XBoxes. If you buy one and $200 goes to MS, that is $200 less money that MS loses.
They already spent the 30 mil whether you buy one or not. Plus your purchase lowers their inventory costs.
You could argue that if everyone buys an XBox and not the games, they will keep producing XBoxes and continue to lose money. But that doesn't wash because they will eventually stop if they continue to lose money, regardless of the revenue.
Not only that, but the more they manufacture the lower the cost of manufacturing more xboxes becomes.
It is clear, especially from the actions of Congresscritters and other politicians, as well as the RIAA/MPAA and CEOs that ties unduly constrict bloodflow to the brain. Now we have reseach which leads in that direction. Perhaps they should give people IQ tests before and after ties next?
Actually, people are assuming that SCO's new license agreement will violate the GPL. While this is most likely correct, they have not yet actually announced the terms of their "license" for linux, and therefore any discussion of lawsuits or prosecution is a bit premature...
No, their license agreement, by its very existence, violates the GPL. You cannot take GPL software and add additional license requirements. Likewise if any patented material is not released under a royalty-free license it cannot be released under the GPL. What SCO is doing is illegal and violates copyright law. Of course some slashdotter will pipe up and say that the GPL has not been tested in court; well, it is about to be very soon.
I think it is funny so many people on this website have this viewpoint. Unfortunately non eof them are prosecutors in the US. Evidence like this is far more than has previously been used to put people in the electric chair.
The fact of the matter is if the police find something like this they are going to make you the prime suspect and question you. If they never find any more evidence than the registration of the gun found on the scene you will be prosecuted. Since the prosecution's case will largely rest on the premise that the crime is so grisly it must not go unpunished you will probably be convicted. After all, they will spend days showing crime scene photos and lab reports to the jury and continually proclaim your guilt while pointing out it was your gun which shot the cashier. Yours and yours alone! they will overwhelm the jury with facts like the extremely scientific ballistics reports, your fingerprints found on the gun, etc, etc.
If you provide no defense under such circumstances you are an absolute fool. You only look more guilty because you have provided no alibi, no character witnesses, no alternative explanation. The jury will find you guilty because they have no other way to interpret the events than what the prosecutor is saying, which is that you are a brutal murderer of innocent cashiers and deserve to be barbequed.
Actually horsepower is an example of a jargon word that is still obvious to the uninitiated. Most people know what horses do, that they are powerful, and the meaning of the word power. If I tell you a car has the power of 300 horses, you will basically understand what I told you.
However, since mega and hertz are not really used outside of the scientific community (nevermind the fact every middle school and high school science course, for each year of those levels of education, includes a refresher on the meaning of these two words) most people do not understand. And when you remind people that a hertz is one cycle per second and mega means one million you just confuse them because most people do not realize the electricity is cycling through their computer (nevermind that everything electrical uses a circuit...).
Perhaps we need easier-to-understand terms. Bluetooth does not tell me what it is, but FireWire does. IEEE1394? Damnit pay Apple the licensing fee for crying out loud so Joe SixPack can understand you better!
My girlfriend does not watch variety shows, being more interested in education than television. TV rots your brain, man. Even the educational channels like History Channel, Discovery, etc are seriously dumbed down and often highly innacurate (though I do watch them from time to time).
Is anyone else reminded of that stupid architect from Matrix Reloaded? As though using more syllables implies hyper-intelligence.
You are right about this, but essentially a good vocabulary goes a long way. It is a lot like the towel in _The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_To_The_Galaxy, really. If you take time to improve vocabulary, diction, grammar, and spelling, people will generally assume you are otherwise very well educated and intelligent. It is a smart thing to do, anyway, and is certainly educational.
Usually someone speaking or writing Ebonics, "Redneck" or some "gutter slang" will give the impression of someone who does not care to learn anything and may not be all that smart. After all, they did not bother to learn their native tongue, which everyone should have learned before even entering school. It is a prejudice, to be sure, and a common one; it is certainly not a truism (there are highly intelligent people who regularly express themselves in one of the aforementioned modes of communication or something similar).
At any rate, knowing this to be the case, it is nevertheless clear that improvement in this area, being simpler than almost any other, is a cheap way to get ahead. It has certainly worked for a number of currently highly successful people.
SearchKing? Accurate? They were basically trying to spam (heh) Google's ranking algorithm by various tricks and Google adjusted the algorithm to prevent abuse.
Hmm I think my post was unclear to you. What I meant (and What Actually Happened) was that SearchKing was indeed spamming google as you say, then google modified their algorithm so that google's searches would be more accurate, which meant that searchking's trick no longer worked, so searchking sued google. (BASTARDS!):)
No, this was not filmed and shown on the internation news. You have your timeline wrong.
Actually it was, or at least it was on CNN. The footage was repeated for the discovery channel's recent recap of the first Gulf war, footage of HINDs chasing kurds and shia through the countryside and Saddam's troops rounding them up for execution.
They are a waste of time, stupid, and indicative of a badly designed system. They also mean you have to start all over again rather than continuing your appointed task. Every time you reboot you have to navigate back to whatever install application you are dealing iwth (like windows update) and then to the next thing in the series. Of course the poster left out the thrilling steps involved in a reboot (reboot, choose os from boot loader, choose os again from second boot loader, log in, wait, wait some more, etc).
Notice in Mandrake the user was able to completely configure the system in one go and the install takes 30 minutes. This is how installers hsoudl work. Also Mandrake's installer give you far more tools and power than any windows installer ever will. You can make any kind of partition and split the os install over multiple partitions spanning multiple disks. You can easily configure the system to deal with as many other OS's as your heart desires. etc, etc. The rebooting and updating and having to install the 5000 applications that do not come with a windows install but do come for free with Mandrake are why XP is harder to get running right.
Maybe if you had more time left from not having to reboot windows frequently, you would have more time to learn abot Linux. Maybe you should install Linux in a dual boot scenario on your machine and next time you are trying to get some useful work done on your computer and windows makes you reboot instead, you should boot into Linux instead an dcontinue your task, continuing to work in Linux until it makes you reboot, then go to windows, switching each boot. I think you will find you won't actually end up going back to Windows and if you do you will be back in Linux again 15 minutes later.
1.5 inches? Crikey! They're less than one inch diameter you fool!
Maybe the poster was speaing of the new Freedom Quarters, minty fresh to fight Terrorism!:)
Hmm actually if we mad a gratuitously violent arcade game about slaughtering middle eastern terrorists that only too Freedom Quarters, we owuld be in business... [ considers consulting some VC's.. ]
Linux is not for everyone; neither by intent nor by design nor by implementation.
Actually, whereas current implementations are not for everyone, a very important part of its design (the fact it is Free [Libre] Software) means it *can* be for everyone, and gradually it is maturing so that it is. This is an advantage which cannot be matched by any proprietary software. If teh software does not do what you want it to do, you can change it. If you want it to work different, you can change it. And people are changing it. A lot.
The other important thing to remember is that as long as there is one righteous coder left Linux cannot die. Whereas previous superior systems like OS/2 and BeOs could be killed by corporate malfeasance/fiat Linux can never die. Heck it could even die and then be unearthed 1000 years later like some artifact and brought back into exeistence.
"Every PC manufacturer has to pay the MS tax (maybe it's time to let manufacturers decide what they install on their machines)."
Bullshit. This wasn't true fifteen years ago and it isn't true today. It's always been possilbe to buy machines from manufacturers who haven't paid a dime to Microsoft.
You are right that not "every PC Manufacturer" has to pay the MS Tax. But all the big ones did (Compaq, HP, Dell, IBM, etc) and they still do now, despite MS agreeing as long ago as 1996 that they would no longer charge this tax. This is one of many reasons Dell's attempt at starting a line of linux desktops and laptops failed (the linux boxes in fact were priced so high it seemed one was paying *twice* for Windows on these machines which did not even come with Windows, and some within Dell said you actually were). It is also one of many reasons OS/2 had trouble (IBM machines that came with OS/2 came with windows installed and OS/2 in a box, so you paid for Windows *and* OS/2. At least in this case you actually got what you paid for.)
When you make people pay more for a computer that is incompatable with everyone else, you automatically make it a no-brainer not to buy your computer. Ask Apple about that. Linux has only been able to make the inroads it has because you can download it for free or buy it without having to be told you can do so by your almighty OEM.
not just any bash shell, but a bash shell well-integrated with some sort of database server...
IANADBA, however, here are some Observations:
First off, it is possible to get bash to do queries like this, though not directly afaik. Bash does run on win32. Secondly, decent RDBMS clients will allow one to enter code not unlike what is pictured above. I don't know that you can do such things to MSSQL, at least with included software (one could write it I suppose) but then I did say decent RDBMS, and you may require some stored procedures here.
Since this is Microsoft, those who said you probably can't do this are probably right. I would think they would have to go through some kind of Big GUI Wizard that lets you select one name at a time, clicking "next" roughly 15 times per name, andwhich asks whether you are sure, then "are you really sure?", then "are you absolutely certain?" for each name. After you have gotten through the wizard to the part where you have confirmed 6-7 times that yes, you are happy with the final list of users (which can only be viewed in a small window that you have to use scrollbars to read the names from, cannot copy in text and which cuts the names off anyway) the whole thing either crashes (15% chance) or gives a random error which basically either translates to "Nah I can't let you do that, actually" (50% chance) or "You can't really be serious, so I am going to close now (35% chance).
Note From netcraft: Microsoft Windows has a significantly higher share of the web when one counts by computer, rather than by host, as in the conventional Web Server Survey.
That's because it takes more computers to run a site on MS Windows than it does on Linux. Additionally, IIS virtual domain capabilities are laughable compared to those of Apache, thus one Linux box can run many more sites than any Windows box ever will simultaneously.
Others have linked to strongbad, none linked to the email mentioned, which is this one. There is more in this one on the subject. And this one. Ok, so there are a lot of them...
Slashdot Mirror
"If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers."
That's the line I found hilarious. Which material are they talking about? The email or the "infringing file"?
p>You received this notice in error, so please delete the file we thought was a violation so that we don't send it to you again. Thanks!
Better be safe and delete all the material from all the computers :). This would have been funnier in a sewing-pattern infringement case :).
Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished.
That's the real problem here. Part of the system of Checks and Balances here is that the company alleging infringement must do so under penalty of perjory, which implies a need for due diligence on their part. Since the Attorneys General in question seem to refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories under this law, they see no need for due diligence and employ the automated techniques which result in scenarios like this article. Until that changes there will be more of the same. I think we should move to recall any attorney general who refuses to prosecute one of these cases.
You call $7.50/hr "great money" in the US? Let's see how long you live on minimum wage. Dork!
1) Minimum wage is much much less than that in most US States.
2) Just because McDonald's is a corporation does not mean it is one of the "many" mentioned. I doubt many of the corporations I have worked for pay minimum wage to anyone under their employ, and they do pay quite well to most of the workers I have direct contact with.
Well, the obvious solution is to get rid of all the Windows machines on the network. Presto, problem solved!
I know you are being funny, but really my reading of the article leads me to believe they needed to bring in someone who actually understands how smb browsing and windows permissions work and set up SAMBA correctly. The problems they describe would actually happen to a Windows box which was incorrectly set up, but frequently people blame the tool instead of learning to use it.
Windows smb browsing is not magic; it follows a very specific methodology. I also had a chuckle when they found it unaceptable, upon not getting permission to read and write to a directory, that they should have to change the permissions on that directory. The problem is probably more complex than they make it out to be and unfortunately we have no details, but I don't see how this could not have been overcome by having more competent windows and/or samba staff.
Do you think manufacturers just sit around waiting for your call to manufacture something?
Let's say MS manufactures 100,000 XBoxes at a cost of $300 per unit. That's $30 million MS spends to make their XBoxes. If you buy one and $200 goes to MS, that is $200 less money that MS loses.
They already spent the 30 mil whether you buy one or not. Plus your purchase lowers their inventory costs.
You could argue that if everyone buys an XBox and not the games, they will keep producing XBoxes and continue to lose money. But that doesn't wash because they will eventually stop if they continue to lose money, regardless of the revenue.
Not only that, but the more they manufacture the lower the cost of manufacturing more xboxes becomes.
It is clear, especially from the actions of Congresscritters and other politicians, as well as the RIAA/MPAA and CEOs that ties unduly constrict bloodflow to the brain. Now we have reseach which leads in that direction. Perhaps they should give people IQ tests before and after ties next?
Actually, people are assuming that SCO's new license agreement will violate the GPL. While this is most likely correct, they have not yet actually announced the terms of their "license" for linux, and therefore any discussion of lawsuits or prosecution is a bit premature...
No, their license agreement, by its very existence, violates the GPL. You cannot take GPL software and add additional license requirements. Likewise if any patented material is not released under a royalty-free license it cannot be released under the GPL. What SCO is doing is illegal and violates copyright law. Of course some slashdotter will pipe up and say that the GPL has not been tested in court; well, it is about to be very soon.
I think it is funny so many people on this website have this viewpoint. Unfortunately non eof them are prosecutors in the US. Evidence like this is far more than has previously been used to put people in the electric chair.
The fact of the matter is if the police find something like this they are going to make you the prime suspect and question you. If they never find any more evidence than the registration of the gun found on the scene you will be prosecuted. Since the prosecution's case will largely rest on the premise that the crime is so grisly it must not go unpunished you will probably be convicted. After all, they will spend days showing crime scene photos and lab reports to the jury and continually proclaim your guilt while pointing out it was your gun which shot the cashier. Yours and yours alone! they will overwhelm the jury with facts like the extremely scientific ballistics reports, your fingerprints found on the gun, etc, etc.
If you provide no defense under such circumstances you are an absolute fool. You only look more guilty because you have provided no alibi, no character witnesses, no alternative explanation. The jury will find you guilty because they have no other way to interpret the events than what the prosecutor is saying, which is that you are a brutal murderer of innocent cashiers and deserve to be barbequed.
Amiga? You can't still buy those, can you? Or are you talking about Amiga users that still happen to have a working machine? :)
As a matter of fact you can buy a brand new G3-based Amiga right now, and the Amiga OS is being developed and sold. Have fun! :)
Actually horsepower is an example of a jargon word that is still obvious to the uninitiated. Most people know what horses do, that they are powerful, and the meaning of the word power. If I tell you a car has the power of 300 horses, you will basically understand what I told you.
However, since mega and hertz are not really used outside of the scientific community (nevermind the fact every middle school and high school science course, for each year of those levels of education, includes a refresher on the meaning of these two words) most people do not understand. And when you remind people that a hertz is one cycle per second and mega means one million you just confuse them because most people do not realize the electricity is cycling through their computer (nevermind that everything electrical uses a circuit...).
Perhaps we need easier-to-understand terms. Bluetooth does not tell me what it is, but FireWire does. IEEE1394? Damnit pay Apple the licensing fee for crying out loud so Joe SixPack can understand you better!
My girlfriend does not watch variety shows, being more interested in education than television. TV rots your brain, man. Even the educational channels like History Channel, Discovery, etc are seriously dumbed down and often highly innacurate (though I do watch them from time to time).
It is available in Merriam-Webster. Essentially, it means "boastful."
Is anyone else reminded of that stupid architect from Matrix Reloaded? As though using more syllables implies hyper-intelligence.
You are right about this, but essentially a good vocabulary goes a long way. It is a lot like the towel in _The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_To_The_Galaxy, really. If you take time to improve vocabulary, diction, grammar, and spelling, people will generally assume you are otherwise very well educated and intelligent. It is a smart thing to do, anyway, and is certainly educational.
Usually someone speaking or writing Ebonics, "Redneck" or some "gutter slang" will give the impression of someone who does not care to learn anything and may not be all that smart. After all, they did not bother to learn their native tongue, which everyone should have learned before even entering school. It is a prejudice, to be sure, and a common one; it is certainly not a truism (there are highly intelligent people who regularly express themselves in one of the aforementioned modes of communication or something similar).
At any rate, knowing this to be the case, it is nevertheless clear that improvement in this area, being simpler than almost any other, is a cheap way to get ahead. It has certainly worked for a number of currently highly successful people.
But if one uses "they" one does not use it in a sentence referring to the same subject as "one." In other words, use either:
"One must consider one's audience when speaking."
or
"They must consider their audience when speaking."
but do not mix the two, it just doesn't work that way.
Avoid an unusual and unfamiliar word just as you would a reef.
It is always best to remember your ABC's as well: Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity. Part of clarity, as you said, is considering your audience.
SearchKing? Accurate? They were basically trying to spam (heh) Google's ranking algorithm by various tricks and Google adjusted the algorithm to prevent abuse.
Hmm I think my post was unclear to you. What I meant (and What Actually Happened) was that SearchKing was indeed spamming google as you say, then google modified their algorithm so that google's searches would be more accurate, which meant that searchking's trick no longer worked, so searchking sued google. (BASTARDS!) :)
No, this was not filmed and shown on the internation news. You have your timeline wrong.
Actually it was, or at least it was on CNN. The footage was repeated for the discovery channel's recent recap of the first Gulf war, footage of HINDs chasing kurds and shia through the countryside and Saddam's troops rounding them up for execution.
And what's so "hard" about reboots?
They are a waste of time, stupid, and indicative of a badly designed system. They also mean you have to start all over again rather than continuing your appointed task. Every time you reboot you have to navigate back to whatever install application you are dealing iwth (like windows update) and then to the next thing in the series. Of course the poster left out the thrilling steps involved in a reboot (reboot, choose os from boot loader, choose os again from second boot loader, log in, wait, wait some more, etc).
Notice in Mandrake the user was able to completely configure the system in one go and the install takes 30 minutes. This is how installers hsoudl work. Also Mandrake's installer give you far more tools and power than any windows installer ever will. You can make any kind of partition and split the os install over multiple partitions spanning multiple disks. You can easily configure the system to deal with as many other OS's as your heart desires. etc, etc. The rebooting and updating and having to install the 5000 applications that do not come with a windows install but do come for free with Mandrake are why XP is harder to get running right.
Maybe if you had more time left from not having to reboot windows frequently, you would have more time to learn abot Linux. Maybe you should install Linux in a dual boot scenario on your machine and next time you are trying to get some useful work done on your computer and windows makes you reboot instead, you should boot into Linux instead an dcontinue your task, continuing to work in Linux until it makes you reboot, then go to windows, switching each boot. I think you will find you won't actually end up going back to Windows and if you do you will be back in Linux again 15 minutes later.
1.5 inches? Crikey! They're less than one inch diameter you fool!
Maybe the poster was speaing of the new Freedom Quarters, minty fresh to fight Terrorism! :)
Hmm actually if we mad a gratuitously violent arcade game about slaughtering middle eastern terrorists that only too Freedom Quarters, we owuld be in business... [ considers consulting some VC's.. ]
Linux is not for everyone; neither by intent nor by design nor by implementation.
Actually, whereas current implementations are not for everyone, a very important part of its design (the fact it is Free [Libre] Software) means it *can* be for everyone, and gradually it is maturing so that it is. This is an advantage which cannot be matched by any proprietary software. If teh software does not do what you want it to do, you can change it. If you want it to work different, you can change it. And people are changing it. A lot.
The other important thing to remember is that as long as there is one righteous coder left Linux cannot die. Whereas previous superior systems like OS/2 and BeOs could be killed by corporate malfeasance/fiat Linux can never die. Heck it could even die and then be unearthed 1000 years later like some artifact and brought back into exeistence.
"Every PC manufacturer has to pay the MS tax (maybe it's time to let manufacturers decide what they install on their machines)."
Bullshit. This wasn't true fifteen years ago and it isn't true today. It's always been possilbe to buy machines from manufacturers who haven't paid a dime to Microsoft.
You are right that not "every PC Manufacturer" has to pay the MS Tax. But all the big ones did (Compaq, HP, Dell, IBM, etc) and they still do now, despite MS agreeing as long ago as 1996 that they would no longer charge this tax. This is one of many reasons Dell's attempt at starting a line of linux desktops and laptops failed (the linux boxes in fact were priced so high it seemed one was paying *twice* for Windows on these machines which did not even come with Windows, and some within Dell said you actually were). It is also one of many reasons OS/2 had trouble (IBM machines that came with OS/2 came with windows installed and OS/2 in a box, so you paid for Windows *and* OS/2. At least in this case you actually got what you paid for.)
When you make people pay more for a computer that is incompatable with everyone else, you automatically make it a no-brainer not to buy your computer. Ask Apple about that. Linux has only been able to make the inroads it has because you can download it for free or buy it without having to be told you can do so by your almighty OEM.
I don't think admitting to being able to discern coral and salmon from pink is going to help protect you from homophobes... :)
not just any bash shell, but a bash shell well-integrated with some sort of database server...
IANADBA, however, here are some Observations:
First off, it is possible to get bash to do queries like this, though not directly afaik. Bash does run on win32. Secondly, decent RDBMS clients will allow one to enter code not unlike what is pictured above. I don't know that you can do such things to MSSQL, at least with included software (one could write it I suppose) but then I did say decent RDBMS, and you may require some stored procedures here.
Since this is Microsoft, those who said you probably can't do this are probably right. I would think they would have to go through some kind of Big GUI Wizard that lets you select one name at a time, clicking "next" roughly 15 times per name, andwhich asks whether you are sure, then "are you really sure?", then "are you absolutely certain?" for each name. After you have gotten through the wizard to the part where you have confirmed 6-7 times that yes, you are happy with the final list of users (which can only be viewed in a small window that you have to use scrollbars to read the names from, cannot copy in text and which cuts the names off anyway) the whole thing either crashes (15% chance) or gives a random error which basically either translates to "Nah I can't let you do that, actually" (50% chance) or "You can't really be serious, so I am going to close now (35% chance).
Note From netcraft: Microsoft Windows has a significantly higher share of the web when one counts by computer, rather than by host, as in the conventional Web Server Survey.
That's because it takes more computers to run a site on MS Windows than it does on Linux. Additionally, IIS virtual domain capabilities are laughable compared to those of Apache, thus one Linux box can run many more sites than any Windows box ever will simultaneously.
Others have linked to strongbad, none linked to the email mentioned, which is this one. There is more in this one on the subject. And this one. Ok, so there are a lot of them...