Microsoft needs to expand into the video game market. They buy the one game company with heavy support for macintoshes (which then ends). Microsoft needs to expand into the virtualization market. They buy the one virtualization company with heavy support for macintoshes (which then suffers). Microsoft needs to expand into the antivirus email filter market. They buy one of the antivirus companies with support for linux/unix (which then ends).
"Here is an interesting link that shows how to convert your laptop into something called as walltop"
Book Reviews: Data Crunching
"Ever wondered how they put a mainboard together? HEXUS.net has taken a tour of ECS's production facilities, following a mainboard from PCB creation, right through to burn-in testing"
Firefox Extension for Applied Social Networking
Kazaa and Skype Co-founder Interviewed
"Open Source Molecules"
Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper
An article about a country about twice the size of Kansas City
...did you only just start reading this site today or something? This is like writing in to the Dairy Farming Industry Bulletin expressing concern they have too many articles about dairy farming.
The Nintendo DS is a device which lots of people already own. I have one.
It happens, incidentally, to have an 802.11 chip built in, as well as enough power to potentially be turned to non-game uses.
Can you really not see why some people might consider it potentially useful to have the ability to run general applications, such as a web browser, ssh client, IM client, etc, on a device which you might frequently have in your pocket anyhow?
If not, well, I do, and I intend to do exactly this once the flash card situation gets a bit better, so fuck off, it isn't your problem and it isn't hurting you.
Looking at your post the conclusion I come to is something more like "if you set up and stick to a rigorous backup plan and schedule, you can save yourself days of hassle and/or hundreds of dollars later on."
Observing people on a message board who feel some way about A, then observing people on same message board who feel some way about B, then going "AHA! This message board has hypocritical views on A!", is never anything but stupid. You want to complain about some hypothetical opinion? Fine. Find someone expressing it first,then explain why it's hypocritical. Don't just set up a big box labeled "HYPOCRITE" in a public space, then try to back random people into it.
The fact that you're buying an Apple box with an Intel chip inside instead of an Apple box with an IBM chip inside is going to mean that all of a sudden OS X will be competing with Linux where it wasn't before. People use processors, not computers or operating systems.
Frankly, I see OS X and linux as more complimentary than anything. Almost all of the OS X "switchers" I've personally encountered in the last few years have been not desktop users, but UNIX-centered power users who found themselves suddenly very interested by the idea of being a machine that can be simple and effortless for day to day desktop activities yet mostly-seamlessly also run anything and everything that they have been doing on their UNIX boxes. Granted most of the people I talk to are computer-saavy, so I don't really have much of a handle on what the proverbial "end user" is doing, but the point is it's possible for things to turn out well for both OS X and Linux. They can mix very well.
This would make more sense if you weren't comparing making an unauthorized copy of something for personal use, to taking someone else's product, repackaging it, and reselling it as a commercial venture.
But even then trying to reduce the views of the millions of people who read slashdot down to a single viewpoint is asinine.
Ah yes, the great libertarian fantasy that money can buy happiness for everyone, including the people who don't have any money.
Anyhow though:
In this case, "capitalism" DOES care about privacy because marketer's lack of caring has started to affect their bottom line. Their loss of money is the "privacy issue's" way of hitting them over the head in a capitalist economy.
It seems to me like marketing is inherently invasive-- its entire goal and purpose is to insert products into the lives of people who otherwise would not have considered them necessary. If "privacy issues" mattered then marketers wouldn't be able to exist at all.
At absolute best what capitalism can give us is a compromise level where the economic needs of the marketers and the marketers' clients is balanced with the privacy needs of the individual. This can be in many valid ways be considered to be a positive thing, but it certainly isn't going to be a win for privacy in specific or really anything except economic efficiency. It also offers no guarantee that the compromise level eventually reached will be acceptable to the interests of the individual.
But, like any "good" capitalist, they are trying to solve their problems with privacy by the cheapest means possible. Instead of actually implementing some sort of robust privacy protections, they are trying to brainwash people into thinking it doesn't matter.
Could brainwashing be said to be against the public's interest?
This sounds like they are just dealing with repurcussions for acting against peoples interests' by just acting against their interests in an entirely different way.
Smart companies should see that farting around with the intermediate options is a bigger money loser than just going directly to implementing better privacy, dumb ones will have to exhaust the other options and be lead by money like a bull with a ring in its nose to the same end result.
This assumes that implementing better privacy is more beneficial than the alternatives. You have not demonstrated this. This is very unlikely to be the case. The only basis for your assertion that it will be is the "capitalism always does the best thing for everybody in the long run" precept, and this is an assumption exactly as shaky as "everything will work out all right in the end because God is benevolent".
Conversely, all signs I have seen so far have been that the most successful marketers always have been and always will be the ones with the least respect for privacy. Economic forces working against the interests of the marketers exist, but these are external to the marketers and do not change the fact that the economic forces driving the marketers are dead-set against privacy.
In the meantime, your idea that "farting around with intermediate options" rather than addressing problems is less advantageous in terms of money lost is the most suspect at all. The idea that spending money on PR can be a complete and cheaper substitute for spending money on conforming to the public's interests is a well-tested one, and has been shown to work for many other industries. Why not marketing? PR is, after all, their core competency.
Not to say, of course, that the marketers can convince consumers to keep tracking data on their own computers which they don't want there. Insofar as the specific goal this cookies article is about goes the marketing industry is kind of pushing a lost cause.
Force ISPs by law to log all internet traffic for six months.
Wait until one of these traffic logs containing six months of customer email-- due to a security breach, a malicious employee, or a simple break-in and hard drive theft-- gets stolen and eventually made publicly available.
Repeat (2) as many times as is necessary for one such incident to be widely covered by the media.
Watch as, now that people have an actual incentive to start PGPing their emails and know it, they start PGPing their emails.
Awesome! Man, who would have thought it would be the GOVERNMENT, out of everyone, who would finally lead to the widespread use of encryption that privacy advocates have been hoping for for years?
The scary bad thing here, that the article doesn't mention, is if the SpyWare community can pull this off, it should be just as easy for a Virus writer to do it.
My thought is, if it's illegal for a Virus writer to pull this off, it should also be illegal for the SpyWare community to do it.
We should stop acting like spyware deserves some kind of special, dignified status, different from "viruses", just because they're created by companies and not by some guy in his basement. They aren't different. They're trojan horses. Proscecute them like they are.
Either these people are stuffing their trojan horses into legitimate, legal-to-distribute programs and releasing them on bittorrent misleadingly, and should be hit under whatever law you'd get hit under if you were doing exactly that with a virus, or they're stuffing their trojan horses into warez, and they should be hit for the above plus copyright infringement.
Government[s] become upset at Microsoft for tying their web browser [MSIE] to the OS.
Microsoft buries the web browser deep inside the OS and its DLLs, purposefully glomming the two together [as Windows 98] so that they cannot be extricated.
Microsoft and its apologists announce that it is impossible, unfair and unreasonable to debundle their web browser from their OS, because the web browser is a part of the operating system.
Government[s] become upset at Microsoft for tying their media player [WMP] to the OS.
Microsoft buries the media player deep inside the OS, purposefully glomming the two together [as Windows Media Center Edition] so that they cannot be extricated.
Microsoft and its apologists announce that it is impossible, unfair and unreasonable to debundle their media player from their OS, because the media player is a part of the operating system.
If vietnam had occurred today, the viet kong would have fallen as a government, and shifted to just being a floating guerilla army. At which point they'd do... exactly what they did before. And nearly exactly what the "insurgents" are doing in Iraq today.
But they wouldn't be able to function as a government anymore! Behold the wonders of modern military technology!
That's absolutely beautiful! The only problem is I can't decide whether it ought to be the name of a marketing buzzword from a 10-year-old video game console, or the name of a band.
AND NOW LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR... CORE ENABLING. [epic guitar solo]
You are confusing the name of the thing with the thing itself.
The Japanese don't call themselves that; "Japan" is a term made up by English speakers. But Japan still exists. And there's nothing wrong with calling it "Japan", even though that is not technically its name.
Similarly, the organization founded by Osama Bin Laden and popularly known by the name "Al Qaeda" didn't call itself that previous to september 11, 2001, but they existed before that.
Now, it does seem quite plausible that this network no longer exists, and that the persons currently going by that name are independent actors attempting to gain notoreity from the name ("I am Sparticus!"), but that's a separate question altogether.
That's three data points. How many do we need before it's a trend? I can keep looking if you like.
Furthermore, while we removed Saddam from power, it's hard to see any "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq at this time.
But we beat the state. We beat the state definitively, unambiguously, and in a matter of weeks. We haven't won the war. But that isn't the same thing.
The thing about the perception we didn't "win" in Iraq is that we mostly, as a nation, still have no idea exactly what it was we were trying to do there. It is very hard to get a "Mission Accomplished" on a war which was executed with no apparent goals whatsoever. If you don't know what you want, then how can you get it? If you don't know why you're playing the game, then how can you win? If we don't know why on earth we invaded Iraq in the first place, then how can we say our mission there was accomplished, ever?
So what was the goal of the war in Iraq? Well, in my opinion, the goal of the war was to get Bush re-elected. So I'd say yes. Mission Accomplished. Mission Very Much Accomplished Indeed.
I would still be highly concerned about the fact that the data protection act, nice as it sounds (I had not heard of it), was created by the government. This means that the government can take it away.
Incidentally, does the data protection act apply to private entities, or only state entities? I am curious.
Just to clarify: since in fact no Afghan soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed
Here's an idea: How about America privatize its army. Just spin it off into its own independent corporation.
After that, oh, what? It's invading other countries purely at random? Well, what they choose to do in their own time is their own business.
Pentagon Inc troops are marching on France? Paris in ruins, the government overthrown? The U.N. a little upset about this act of war? Oh now hold on a fucking second there. I'll not hear you slandering the U.S. like that. Since no American soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed.
---
Every single goddamn thing in your post after the sentence I quoted above has not one thing whatsoever to do with the Afghanistan invasion. They are entirely, entirely separate issues.
The problem with the Bush administration is that they abandoned the "war on terror" after a few weeks blowing random things up in Afghanistan, ignored crucial issues with Pakistan, ignored crucial issues with Saudi Arabia, ignored root causes and in fact exacerbated root causes. The problem is not that in their brief, feeble attempts at combatting terrorism instead of just using Terrorism as an excuse for other things they want, they started with going after the groups in Afghanistan. The fact the Reagan clan helped the Taliban to power is extremely important, and the persons responsible (such as, for example, much of the current Bush Administration...) need to be held accountable, but this does not rob America of the right or need to react when groups which are literally a guest of the Taliban are launching attacks on the U.S.. And those of you who just plain denounce things the Republicans did because the Republicans did them are making things very difficult for those of us who are trying to get America to denounce the Republicans have been doing because they are wrong.
In the meantime, if you seriously think that substate entities can't commit acts of war, then you are in for some rude awakenings. States are effectively no longer able to wage war, at least not against the U.S.. Iraq proved that. This means that states are no longer going to try. That does not mean no one will. It just means it's nothing but privatized armies from here on out.
The september 11 hijackings were coordinated, funded and carried out by members of an international nonstate entity called "Al Qaeda". Not only can Al Qaeda and its support network be considered responsible for the attack, this demonstrated that the Al Qaeda support network was capable of producing the resources for further, similar attacks. Crucial portions of Al Qaeda's infrastructure, including the central leadership and training camps on a very large scale, were being purposefully offered shelter in Afghanistan by Afghanistan's state. Upon the United States demanding that Afghanistan either bring Al Qaeda accountable for this or be held accountable themselves, the state leaders in Afghanistan refused to open direct diplomatic contact with the U.S., demonstrated indifference to their complicity in hosting this group, and made passing, vague pronouncements as if trying to negotiate some kind of minor response on their part to these acts-- acts which, had those acts been committed by their own agents rather than those of Al Qaeda, would have been literally an act of war. The U.S. national leaders chose to respond accordingly. This all makes perfect sense and seems rather direct to me. Also, you have misspelled "Afghanistan" and "peripherally".
Other than this one sentence I have no objections to your post.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use windows. What's a "Microsoft Genuine Advantage"?
The article says it's an "anti-piracy program". That isn't very specific.
How these acquisitions are chosen.
Microsoft needs to expand into the video game market. They buy the one game company with heavy support for macintoshes (which then ends).
Microsoft needs to expand into the virtualization market. They buy the one virtualization company with heavy support for macintoshes (which then suffers).
Microsoft needs to expand into the antivirus email filter market. They buy one of the antivirus companies with support for linux/unix (which then ends).
Funny how these coincidences work.
- IT: Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card?
- OpenUsability and KDE: Cooperating on KPDF
- "Here is an interesting link that shows how to convert your laptop into something called as walltop"
- Book Reviews: Data Crunching
- "Ever wondered how they put a mainboard together? HEXUS.net has taken a tour of ECS's production facilities, following a mainboard from PCB creation, right through to burn-in testing"
- Firefox Extension for Applied Social Networking
- Kazaa and Skype Co-founder Interviewed
- "Open Source Molecules"
- Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper
- An article about a country about twice the size of Kansas City
...did you only just start reading this site today or something? This is like writing in to the Dairy Farming Industry Bulletin expressing concern they have too many articles about dairy farming.The Nintendo DS is a device which lots of people already own. I have one.
It happens, incidentally, to have an 802.11 chip built in, as well as enough power to potentially be turned to non-game uses.
Can you really not see why some people might consider it potentially useful to have the ability to run general applications, such as a web browser, ssh client, IM client, etc, on a device which you might frequently have in your pocket anyhow?
If not, well, I do, and I intend to do exactly this once the flash card situation gets a bit better, so fuck off, it isn't your problem and it isn't hurting you.
How can Canadians help to prevent the "introduced a new bill" from becoming a "passed a new bill"?
Looking at your post the conclusion I come to is something more like "if you set up and stick to a rigorous backup plan and schedule, you can save yourself days of hassle and/or hundreds of dollars later on."
Just a thought.
Straw man arguments are never okay.
Observing people on a message board who feel some way about A,
then observing people on same message board who feel some way about B,
then going "AHA! This message board has hypocritical views on A!",
is never anything but stupid. You want to complain about some hypothetical opinion? Fine. Find someone expressing it first, then explain why it's hypocritical. Don't just set up a big box labeled "HYPOCRITE" in a public space, then try to back random people into it.
The fact that you're buying an Apple box with an Intel chip inside instead of an Apple box with an IBM chip inside is going to mean that all of a sudden OS X will be competing with Linux where it wasn't before. People use processors, not computers or operating systems.
Frankly, I see OS X and linux as more complimentary than anything. Almost all of the OS X "switchers" I've personally encountered in the last few years have been not desktop users, but UNIX-centered power users who found themselves suddenly very interested by the idea of being a machine that can be simple and effortless for day to day desktop activities yet mostly-seamlessly also run anything and everything that they have been doing on their UNIX boxes. Granted most of the people I talk to are computer-saavy, so I don't really have much of a handle on what the proverbial "end user" is doing, but the point is it's possible for things to turn out well for both OS X and Linux. They can mix very well.
This would make more sense if you weren't comparing making an unauthorized copy of something for personal use,
to taking someone else's product, repackaging it, and reselling it as a commercial venture.
But even then trying to reduce the views of the millions of people who read slashdot down to a single viewpoint is asinine.
Instead of building scrips through Perl or Python or whatever you use this is going to be centered around building "scripts" in .NET.
Aha.
"Scripts".
Well this changes everything.
I've read up on monad, thanks.
Here
Ah yes, the great libertarian fantasy that money can buy happiness for everyone, including the people who don't have any money.
Anyhow though:
In this case, "capitalism" DOES care about privacy because marketer's lack of caring has started to affect their bottom line. Their loss of money is the "privacy issue's" way of hitting them over the head in a capitalist economy.
It seems to me like marketing is inherently invasive-- its entire goal and purpose is to insert products into the lives of people who otherwise would not have considered them necessary. If "privacy issues" mattered then marketers wouldn't be able to exist at all.
At absolute best what capitalism can give us is a compromise level where the economic needs of the marketers and the marketers' clients is balanced with the privacy needs of the individual. This can be in many valid ways be considered to be a positive thing, but it certainly isn't going to be a win for privacy in specific or really anything except economic efficiency. It also offers no guarantee that the compromise level eventually reached will be acceptable to the interests of the individual.
But, like any "good" capitalist, they are trying to solve their problems with privacy by the cheapest means possible. Instead of actually implementing some sort of robust privacy protections, they are trying to brainwash people into thinking it doesn't matter.
Could brainwashing be said to be against the public's interest?
This sounds like they are just dealing with repurcussions for acting against peoples interests' by just acting against their interests in an entirely different way.
Smart companies should see that farting around with the intermediate options is a bigger money loser than just going directly to implementing better privacy, dumb ones will have to exhaust the other options and be lead by money like a bull with a ring in its nose to the same end result.
This assumes that implementing better privacy is more beneficial than the alternatives. You have not demonstrated this. This is very unlikely to be the case. The only basis for your assertion that it will be is the "capitalism always does the best thing for everybody in the long run" precept, and this is an assumption exactly as shaky as "everything will work out all right in the end because God is benevolent".
Conversely, all signs I have seen so far have been that the most successful marketers always have been and always will be the ones with the least respect for privacy. Economic forces working against the interests of the marketers exist, but these are external to the marketers and do not change the fact that the economic forces driving the marketers are dead-set against privacy.
In the meantime, your idea that "farting around with intermediate options" rather than addressing problems is less advantageous in terms of money lost is the most suspect at all. The idea that spending money on PR can be a complete and cheaper substitute for spending money on conforming to the public's interests is a well-tested one, and has been shown to work for many other industries. Why not marketing? PR is, after all, their core competency.
Not to say, of course, that the marketers can convince consumers to keep tracking data on their own computers which they don't want there. Insofar as the specific goal this cookies article is about goes the marketing industry is kind of pushing a lost cause.
- Force ISPs by law to log all internet traffic for six months.
- Wait until one of these traffic logs containing six months of customer email-- due to a security breach, a malicious employee, or a simple break-in and hard drive theft-- gets stolen and eventually made publicly available.
- Repeat (2) as many times as is necessary for one such incident to be widely covered by the media.
- Watch as, now that people have an actual incentive to start PGPing their emails and know it, they start PGPing their emails.
Awesome! Man, who would have thought it would be the GOVERNMENT, out of everyone, who would finally lead to the widespread use of encryption that privacy advocates have been hoping for for years?The scary bad thing here, that the article doesn't mention, is if the SpyWare community can pull this off, it should be just as easy for a Virus writer to do it.
My thought is, if it's illegal for a Virus writer to pull this off, it should also be illegal for the SpyWare community to do it.
We should stop acting like spyware deserves some kind of special, dignified status, different from "viruses", just because they're created by companies and not by some guy in his basement. They aren't different. They're trojan horses. Proscecute them like they are.
Either these people are stuffing their trojan horses into legitimate, legal-to-distribute programs and releasing them on bittorrent misleadingly, and should be hit under whatever law you'd get hit under if you were doing exactly that with a virus, or they're stuffing their trojan horses into warez, and they should be hit for the above plus copyright infringement.
Our technology has gotten better since then.
If vietnam had occurred today, the viet kong would have fallen as a government, and shifted to just being a floating guerilla army. At which point they'd do... exactly what they did before. And nearly exactly what the "insurgents" are doing in Iraq today.
But they wouldn't be able to function as a government anymore! Behold the wonders of modern military technology!
It works better than CiteSeer, with its poor overloaded little webserver, ever has.
And a version of CiteSeer that isn't going down all the time is basically all I need.
So I'm satisfied.
Core Enabling!
Core Enabling!
That's absolutely beautiful! The only problem is I can't decide whether it ought to be the name of a marketing buzzword from a 10-year-old video game console, or the name of a band.
AND NOW LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR...
CORE ENABLING.
[epic guitar solo]
- 802.16
- Old news?
Is the "news" here that Nokia has joined with Intel in promoting WiMax?al qaeda dont exist, its a term made up by the US
You are confusing the name of the thing with the thing itself.
The Japanese don't call themselves that; "Japan" is a term made up by English speakers. But Japan still exists. And there's nothing wrong with calling it "Japan", even though that is not technically its name.
Similarly, the organization founded by Osama Bin Laden and popularly known by the name "Al Qaeda" didn't call itself that previous to september 11, 2001, but they existed before that.
Now, it does seem quite plausible that this network no longer exists, and that the persons currently going by that name are independent actors attempting to gain notoreity from the name ("I am Sparticus!"), but that's a separate question altogether.
The regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
That's three data points. How many do we need before it's a trend? I can keep looking if you like.
Furthermore, while we removed Saddam from power, it's hard to see any "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq at this time.
But we beat the state. We beat the state definitively, unambiguously, and in a matter of weeks. We haven't won the war. But that isn't the same thing.
The thing about the perception we didn't "win" in Iraq is that we mostly, as a nation, still have no idea exactly what it was we were trying to do there. It is very hard to get a "Mission Accomplished" on a war which was executed with no apparent goals whatsoever. If you don't know what you want, then how can you get it? If you don't know why you're playing the game, then how can you win? If we don't know why on earth we invaded Iraq in the first place, then how can we say our mission there was accomplished, ever?
So what was the goal of the war in Iraq? Well, in my opinion, the goal of the war was to get Bush re-elected. So I'd say yes. Mission Accomplished. Mission Very Much Accomplished Indeed.
I would still be highly concerned about the fact that the data protection act, nice as it sounds (I had not heard of it), was created by the government. This means that the government can take it away.
Incidentally, does the data protection act apply to private entities, or only state entities? I am curious.
Just to clarify: since in fact no Afghan soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed
Here's an idea: How about America privatize its army. Just spin it off into its own independent corporation.
After that, oh, what? It's invading other countries purely at random? Well, what they choose to do in their own time is their own business.
Pentagon Inc troops are marching on France? Paris in ruins, the government overthrown? The U.N. a little upset about this act of war? Oh now hold on a fucking second there. I'll not hear you slandering the U.S. like that. Since no American soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed.
---
Every single goddamn thing in your post after the sentence I quoted above has not one thing whatsoever to do with the Afghanistan invasion. They are entirely, entirely separate issues.
The problem with the Bush administration is that they abandoned the "war on terror" after a few weeks blowing random things up in Afghanistan, ignored crucial issues with Pakistan, ignored crucial issues with Saudi Arabia, ignored root causes and in fact exacerbated root causes. The problem is not that in their brief, feeble attempts at combatting terrorism instead of just using Terrorism as an excuse for other things they want, they started with going after the groups in Afghanistan. The fact the Reagan clan helped the Taliban to power is extremely important, and the persons responsible (such as, for example, much of the current Bush Administration...) need to be held accountable, but this does not rob America of the right or need to react when groups which are literally a guest of the Taliban are launching attacks on the U.S.. And those of you who just plain denounce things the Republicans did because the Republicans did them are making things very difficult for those of us who are trying to get America to denounce the Republicans have been doing because they are wrong.
In the meantime, if you seriously think that substate entities can't commit acts of war, then you are in for some rude awakenings. States are effectively no longer able to wage war, at least not against the U.S.. Iraq proved that. This means that states are no longer going to try. That does not mean no one will. It just means it's nothing but privatized armies from here on out.
Afganistan was only periferally related
The september 11 hijackings were coordinated, funded and carried out by members of an international nonstate entity called "Al Qaeda". Not only can Al Qaeda and its support network be considered responsible for the attack, this demonstrated that the Al Qaeda support network was capable of producing the resources for further, similar attacks. Crucial portions of Al Qaeda's infrastructure, including the central leadership and training camps on a very large scale, were being purposefully offered shelter in Afghanistan by Afghanistan's state. Upon the United States demanding that Afghanistan either bring Al Qaeda accountable for this or be held accountable themselves, the state leaders in Afghanistan refused to open direct diplomatic contact with the U.S., demonstrated indifference to their complicity in hosting this group, and made passing, vague pronouncements as if trying to negotiate some kind of minor response on their part to these acts-- acts which, had those acts been committed by their own agents rather than those of Al Qaeda, would have been literally an act of war. The U.S. national leaders chose to respond accordingly. This all makes perfect sense and seems rather direct to me. Also, you have misspelled "Afghanistan" and "peripherally".
Other than this one sentence I have no objections to your post.