So now to play a game, rather than clicking on an icon (or whatever), I'm going to have to find the CD, and I'm going to have to find the dongle, and I'm going to have to reboot? And for the priviledge of doing this I'm going to have to pay more (the company will have to make back the cost of the dongle somehow)?
After a good deal of hunting, the only solution my brother could find was to give mom's account full administrative privileges.
Your brother not knowing how to deal with this is not the same as the OS being insecure. He should have given the account write access to the one section of the registry it wanted to touch (you can put an ACL on any regkey), rather than making the account admin. Someone could just as easily try to deal with a problem on a unix system by always running as root or unnecessarily making lots of files mode 777.
I can't imagine having something that important in my life being tied to some crappy '70s TV show or some board game played by sweaty, greasy teenagers.
If you have those sorts of opinions of star trek or of whatever (I don't like star trek), then obviously it shouldn't be part of your wedding. No one is saying that star trek should be involved in everyone's wedding. But there are people for whom these are important. They are large parts of their lives and their identities. So they would rather have them as parts of one of the most important days of their lives than just something that is foreign and meaningless to them, like a "promise to God". Just because people want to incorporate things they care about into their wedding doesn't mean that they care less about their vows than you or that marriage isn't important to them.
If you view this as solemn, maybe you shouldn't be getting married. It's not a death sentence, it's a day of celebration about something that should make you very excited and happy.
I don't think your employer will be happy about you going to these lengths to browse sites at work that they have chosen to block. It's hard to claim that you ended up on a site accidentally when you've created a back door specifically to circumvent their policies.
If you're going to have a Windows core, unless you want to do *serious* modification work on the system, you're going to still have Explorer and friends lying around on your system.
This is why Windows Embedded exists. You can pick which components you want and don't have to include stuff that is unnecessary or dangerous.
This is a good point. I think it's interesting for this discussion that such a system could easily work as either with GUI (choose something from a drop-down menu or enter it in a text field, and then click next) or with a TUI (a series of questions asked on the console). Either one would be better than the current system where you have to click the buttons in the right order, but it doesn't indicate what the order is, or than the grandparent's (your parent's) theoretical text interface that makes you remember what order to give the commands in (and what the commands are). IOW, you can design a good or a bad interface as a TUI or a GUI.
As a matter of fact, I think that the recent debacle on Slashdot about National City's CMU ATM is a great example. It used to be an old but reliable TUI system. Apparently, it didn't look new and sexy enough
This sounds to me like more of an issue of moving from an old, well-tested system to a new system that needed to have its kinks ironed out. I don't think there's an inherent GUI issue here. If they moved from a GUI system to a text system or from one GUI system to another, they easily could have had the same problems-- that the new system had some bugs because it was new and hadn't been fully worked out yet.
Meanwhile, what's ignored is that paying for software gives financial incentive for programmers to spend all day ironing out that interface, making that sound card work, etc. and generally working on the non-fun areas in which Linux is sorely behind
This is the flipside of what he is saying. He said that linux uses a different paradigm from microsoft. You have just described what the Microsoft paradigm is, how it differs from the linux paradigm and what its advantages are. Thank you, this is a much better job than I could of done of demonstrating the silliness of his original argument that "linux developers and microsoft are competing with each other and each uses a different paradigm to develop software. Therefore, clearly linux will win".
GUI's that use the 3D-rendering powers built into your video card to make very pretty looking desktops without putting too much strain on your cpu are right around the corner (e.g., longhorn). I would imagine this is what he is referring to, although I agree that this is not really a "3D interface", just a much prettier 2D interface (not that that's bad, of course).
I think we don't hear much about the others because they're not currently being very heavily enforced. If the owners of those patents started trying to sue everyone whose site uses a shopping cart or hyperlinks (which, of course, can happen at any time), we'd hear a lot more about them.
Yes, but the original doesn't indicate in any way that it has been modified (I guess changing your.sig to point to it is a partial solution; putting the correction itself in your.sig is another, if it will fit).
If your correction is many replies down, you now get people replying to the original who haven't seen the correction yet, causing more noise and confusion.
it's what i am, so that's what i assume any stranger over the internet is...
Do you really think that's why? If you were a half-Chinese, half-Mexican hermaphrodite, is that what you would assume everyone on the internet is? Or, more relevantly, do you think that all women playing metroid assumed the protagonist was female before they found out?
I think we assume the main character in a video game is male because they ususally are.
For a long time people will continue to refer to their product as Lindows and they've gotten a lot of press!
Yeah, at this point, I'm starting to wonder if their plan is just to change their name every week until it stops getting them a front page slashdot article every time.
There's not really any point in a widescale distributed email delivery system OTHER than delivering spam that I can think of
This is the same argument as "there's no point to kazaa other than piracy", "there's no point to encryption unless you have something to hide", "there's no point to hacking tools unless you want to break into a system illegally", etc.
Those arguments are derided hear because they take away our rights in order to protect the profits or convenience of others. But suddenly when we have the chance to take away someone else's rights (for example, someone trying to distribute a large mailing list in a distributed way) for our convenience (stopping some spam), no one objects. You're not all so different from those you hate as you think you are.
So what you're really saying is "hey, you didn't have to pay for it, so just sit there and shut up about how bad it is. We don't care about your problems with it and we're not going to fix it. If you think you know so much, why don't you go fix it?"
And you know what, this attitude isn't even that bad. It's just that people can't expect to have it both ways. When an article like this mentions problems with linux, people respond by saying "who cares if you don't like it, it's not designed for you; we're not here to give you stuff for free, so if you want it to suit your needs, you should expect to pay for that". But when an article comes out about that some businesses/ governments aren't using linux for exactly these reasons, suddenly everyone there who would choose windows is a stupid coprorate drone PHB loser who knows less about business than the high school kids posting on slashdot and doesn't understand that linux is better for free.
He is advocating sending out encrypted versions of a patch, get everyone who is always-connected to the internet to automatically download the encrypted version, and once the downloads per second curve decreases by a certain amount (say 95% or so), then you send out the decryption key.
This doesn't seem to avoid the problem. You'll have some people who've downloaded and used the encryption key before others, just like you would now with the patch itself. You could have everyone automatically download the key at the same time, but that doesn't seem better than just having them all download the patch at the same time in the first place (except maybe for very large patches where the time to download it is a factor).
If you are going to automatically provide hints, I think it's important to give a way to turn them off (or make it easy to ignore them, for example by not talking to people who offer you help). Some people feel it's cheating to beat a game using hints and would be upset by being given them without asking, even when stuck.
This is inevitable. When someone switches to Linux, they stop upgrading MS. So their last memories refer to the last version they used.
Yes, this is understandable. As is the other response that says that people don't upgrade because they continue using older versions since that's all that will run on their hardware. My point was just that if you aren't familiar with current versions of windows, you shouldn't make blanket statements about windows. When someone who hasn't used windows server 2003 says "windows is insecure because by default it has all services turned on" or someone who hasn't used windows since 98 says it has no equivalent of sudo without qualifying their statment to not be true for all versions of windows, they mislead others regardless of what their reasons are for not having used windows recently.
Slashdot Mirror
So now to play a game, rather than clicking on an icon (or whatever), I'm going to have to find the CD, and I'm going to have to find the dongle, and I'm going to have to reboot? And for the priviledge of doing this I'm going to have to pay more (the company will have to make back the cost of the dongle somehow)?
Yes, this is why everyone switched over to OS/2 Warp when every other commercial on television was for that product.
Whatever it's writing should be under {HKLM,HKCU}\software\[manufacturer name]\[product name]
Your brother not knowing how to deal with this is not the same as the OS being insecure. He should have given the account write access to the one section of the registry it wanted to touch (you can put an ACL on any regkey), rather than making the account admin. Someone could just as easily try to deal with a problem on a unix system by always running as root or unnecessarily making lots of files mode 777.
If you have those sorts of opinions of star trek or of whatever (I don't like star trek), then obviously it shouldn't be part of your wedding. No one is saying that star trek should be involved in everyone's wedding. But there are people for whom these are important. They are large parts of their lives and their identities. So they would rather have them as parts of one of the most important days of their lives than just something that is foreign and meaningless to them, like a "promise to God". Just because people want to incorporate things they care about into their wedding doesn't mean that they care less about their vows than you or that marriage isn't important to them.
If you view this as solemn, maybe you shouldn't be getting married. It's not a death sentence, it's a day of celebration about something that should make you very excited and happy.
I don't think your employer will be happy about you going to these lengths to browse sites at work that they have chosen to block. It's hard to claim that you ended up on a site accidentally when you've created a back door specifically to circumvent their policies.
This is why Windows Embedded exists. You can pick which components you want and don't have to include stuff that is unnecessary or dangerous.
This is a good point. I think it's interesting for this discussion that such a system could easily work as either with GUI (choose something from a drop-down menu or enter it in a text field, and then click next) or with a TUI (a series of questions asked on the console). Either one would be better than the current system where you have to click the buttons in the right order, but it doesn't indicate what the order is, or than the grandparent's (your parent's) theoretical text interface that makes you remember what order to give the commands in (and what the commands are). IOW, you can design a good or a bad interface as a TUI or a GUI.
This sounds to me like more of an issue of moving from an old, well-tested system to a new system that needed to have its kinks ironed out. I don't think there's an inherent GUI issue here. If they moved from a GUI system to a text system or from one GUI system to another, they easily could have had the same problems-- that the new system had some bugs because it was new and hadn't been fully worked out yet.
This is the flipside of what he is saying. He said that linux uses a different paradigm from microsoft. You have just described what the Microsoft paradigm is, how it differs from the linux paradigm and what its advantages are. Thank you, this is a much better job than I could of done of demonstrating the silliness of his original argument that "linux developers and microsoft are competing with each other and each uses a different paradigm to develop software. Therefore, clearly linux will win".
GUI's that use the 3D-rendering powers built into your video card to make very pretty looking desktops without putting too much strain on your cpu are right around the corner (e.g., longhorn). I would imagine this is what he is referring to, although I agree that this is not really a "3D interface", just a much prettier 2D interface (not that that's bad, of course).
I think we don't hear much about the others because they're not currently being very heavily enforced. If the owners of those patents started trying to sue everyone whose site uses a shopping cart or hyperlinks (which, of course, can happen at any time), we'd hear a lot more about them.
It probably has to do with how many other worthwhile stories they have. If it's a slow "news" day, they run things like this.
Yes, but the original doesn't indicate in any way that it has been modified (I guess changing your .sig to point to it is a partial solution; putting the correction itself in your .sig is another, if it will fit).
If your correction is many replies down, you now get people replying to the original who haven't seen the correction yet, causing more noise and confusion.
This is traditionally known as a "free market". He's the CEO of the company, so he gets to dictate how things work.
Do you really think that's why? If you were a half-Chinese, half-Mexican hermaphrodite, is that what you would assume everyone on the internet is? Or, more relevantly, do you think that all women playing metroid assumed the protagonist was female before they found out?
I think we assume the main character in a video game is male because they ususally are.
Yeah, at this point, I'm starting to wonder if their plan is just to change their name every week until it stops getting them a front page slashdot article every time.
This is the same argument as "there's no point to kazaa other than piracy", "there's no point to encryption unless you have something to hide", "there's no point to hacking tools unless you want to break into a system illegally", etc.
Those arguments are derided hear because they take away our rights in order to protect the profits or convenience of others. But suddenly when we have the chance to take away someone else's rights (for example, someone trying to distribute a large mailing list in a distributed way) for our convenience (stopping some spam), no one objects. You're not all so different from those you hate as you think you are.
And you know what, this attitude isn't even that bad. It's just that people can't expect to have it both ways. When an article like this mentions problems with linux, people respond by saying "who cares if you don't like it, it's not designed for you; we're not here to give you stuff for free, so if you want it to suit your needs, you should expect to pay for that". But when an article comes out about that some businesses/ governments aren't using linux for exactly these reasons, suddenly everyone there who would choose windows is a stupid coprorate drone PHB loser who knows less about business than the high school kids posting on slashdot and doesn't understand that linux is better for free.
This doesn't seem to avoid the problem. You'll have some people who've downloaded and used the encryption key before others, just like you would now with the patch itself. You could have everyone automatically download the key at the same time, but that doesn't seem better than just having them all download the patch at the same time in the first place (except maybe for very large patches where the time to download it is a factor).
Better stated as: If it bleeds, we can kill it.
If you are going to automatically provide hints, I think it's important to give a way to turn them off (or make it easy to ignore them, for example by not talking to people who offer you help). Some people feel it's cheating to beat a game using hints and would be upset by being given them without asking, even when stuck.
You really like that better than "that's like comparing oxen to libraries of congress"?
Yes, this is understandable. As is the other response that says that people don't upgrade because they continue using older versions since that's all that will run on their hardware. My point was just that if you aren't familiar with current versions of windows, you shouldn't make blanket statements about windows. When someone who hasn't used windows server 2003 says "windows is insecure because by default it has all services turned on" or someone who hasn't used windows since 98 says it has no equivalent of sudo without qualifying their statment to not be true for all versions of windows, they mislead others regardless of what their reasons are for not having used windows recently.