They did something similar for a review of a new LCD monitor a couple of days ago. In the summary, they quoted the praise Tom's had for the design of the thing, citing this as an example of how favourable the review was. The review itself was actually rather less than flattering; the upshot of it was that the monitor, while looking gorgeous, was actually mediocre at best when you took performance into account.
Not only that, but the vast majority of that fibre and copper is laid through public land. I say that if the telecoms companies start charging content providers like this, you guys should start charging them for use of your land.
I take it you missed the recent story on how Vista's firewall is going to be "crippled" because the default config won't block outgoing connections - just like XP's, just like Mandrake's and RedHat's the last time I set up firewalls on them, just like my hardware firewall in fact.
Slashdot has long had a strong anti-MS bias. Fine, they've never made a secret of it. Recently however, they've started to allow it to warp the facts, which is not fine.
Sure, this may well make dual-booting more difficult, in that you won't be able to get at your data. Ever tried getting at data on an NTFS partition with Fedora? ZOMG! Fedora is trying to lock out Windows!
I've been here a long time, and it's sad to see how the site has declined from a site you could trust, to one that will print almost anything as long as it bashes MS or praises FOSS.
once you get the big issues resolved, then you can work on others including symbolic ones.
Unfortunately, while that sounds good in theory, in practice it means that you get as far as banning murder, rape, robbery, etc and then spend the rest of time trying to stamp them out before moving on to the lesser issues.
As another poster points out, banning foie gras doesn't take a lot of effort. Sure, it doesn't make a huge difference to the world either, but it's worth doing the little things as well as the big things, imho.
The theory is that the easier it is to get away with a crime and the less it feels like a crime to the general public, the harsher the sentence needs to be to add in the otherwise missing deterrant.
Taking your example, rape is clearly harmful to the person involved. You have to be pretty seriously twisted to believe that your victim is actually enjoying it, even if you believe that there's no long-term damage done. It's also relatively less likely that you'll get away with it (extremely low conviciton rates notwithstanding) - there's a much higher chance of being caught in the act, the victim can id you, you're extremely likely to leave forensic evidence at the scene (and in/on the victim), etc.
Copyright infringement is a different story. There's no-one right there in front of you suffering because of your actions, so it's very easy to rationalise it away (indeed, it's not entirely clear-cut that low- to moderate levels of copyright infringement *are* harmful, but that's beside the point). It's very unlikely that you'll get caught, unless you start bragging about it, or distributing stuff widely. Finally, a high percentage of the population simply don't see it as being particularly wrong.
As I said, the disparity in sentencing is to try to redress this imbalance, and make an otherwise potentially attractive act much less attractive. Yes, the punishment is out of all proportion to the crime, but that's rather the point.
Note that I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or even that it necessarily works, just that that's the theory behind it, as I understand it.
You already have the link in your homepage URL, there's no need to append it to every message you post as well. (And if you feel you must, making it your signature would be easier for you and more considerate to those who disable signatures in order to avoid that sort of thing)
That's something you'll notice about slashdot if you pay attention. On stories like this, there are lots of comments along the lines of "those specs suck!". On stories about the latest and greatest PC kit, there are lots of comments along the lines of "no-one needs that much power!"
But can they buy them in sufficient quantities? You quote $10 for a Pentium 3, but they no longer manufacture them; how long before the supply dries up? How long before that before people realise that they're suddenly worth something to someone, and jack the price up?
I normally would realise just that, but in this case the article isn't about BSG, it's about a planned spin-off. I actually wasn't aware that you guys had already seen the season we're watching now; why would I be? I've not been seeking out information on it on the internet precisely because I've not finished watching it and didn't want to encounter any spoilers!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry, and I don't expect the OP to know that it's still being shown here; I just felt the need to vent at the time. Rest assured that it's already been modded down as overrated (from its default rating, which always makes me smile).
Irregardless of whether children should or should not be able to access such materials, this law does not prevent the SUPPLY of games to underage children. Compare it to the situation with alcohol in the UK - if you are under 18, it is an offence to buy alcohol, to be sold alcohol or to have alcohol procured for you.
Do you have any idea how little effect that law has? It's a speed bump, nothing more; I had no trouble getting served in pubs, clubs and off licences from age 15, and nor did many of my friends. As long as you more or less look old enough and the proprietor hasn't been warned off recently, most places simply don't care.
I'm not entirely sure what point you were trying to make there, but I'm not sure that the UK's attitude towards alcohol and general degree of maturity regarding it is really a shining example...
As a parent who allows a child to play games in moderation, how would it affect you if a game you had forbidden your daughter to play and which she was not legally able to buy had been given it as a gift by a relative? Or had another adult go into the store and buy it for her?
Same with anything else we've told her not to do that she then goes ahead and does anyway - explain to her what she's done wrong, why it's wrong, and dish out a suitable punishment. For what it's worth though, my daughter's only 6, and while she does sometimes watch me playing games, hers are mostly Barbie, Disney and similar. Apart from a brief daliance with Quake 3* she's not really shown any interest in playing any of my games.
(* with the gore switched off, as at the time I played on a rails-only server and the near-constant clouds of blood were a right pain in the arse)
I always come to slashdot with the broad, and sometimes naive assumption that the articles provided will be neutral.
Assuming your uid accurately reflects how long you've been reading slashdot, then I guess you can be forgiven for that. However, slashdot has never been about balanced, objective reporting. It has always had a very heavy pro-OSS slant; check the FAQ and see for yourself. Not saying that that's a bad thing mind, just that if you're coming here for neutrality in the articles, you're deluding yourself.
(Mind you, people do tend to see agreement with their own views as neutrality...)
That said, I strongly detest the wording of this headline and the tagline below it. Especially from CmdrTaco.
Now, others have pointed out that Taco didn't write the article, but they're forgetting one important thing - he may not have written it, but he certainly chose it. We've been told time and again that slashdot can get literally hundreds of submissions about the same story if it's popular, and judging by recent months, anything at all to do with Vista is incredibly popular. I therefore find it extremely unlikely that this is the only submission that he received, or even the first.
So shame on you CmdrTaco for choosing such an inaccurate, biased and misrepresentative story merely because it's anti-MS, and shame on you UltimaGuy for spinning it that way.
Hell, I can't think of a single Linux distro I've used in the last 9 or so years that didn't configure its firewall in exactly the same way by default.
And btw, Vista's firewall will not be crippled, just configured differently.
That's "differently" as in "identically to the default config for my hardware firewall and the firewall of every single Linux distro I've used in the past 9 years".
(Ok, I'll grant you, the Win9x series was a joke, but it's dead now; *please* can we trash MS for things they're doing wrong now, rather than last decade?)
Speaking as a parent, I'd rather my daughter did it virtually (in moderation, of course), than in reality.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of being at school during play time, at the age of 5 or 6, running around with a bunch of other kids playing war. We divided into two teams, and ran around miming shooting, stabbing and otherwise killing each other, long before you could do the same on a computer. Great fun.
Violent video games don't make kids violent; being human makes kids violent. Some are worse than others, and need special care and attention; despite my favouring violent games, films, etc I've never actually been in a fight in my life.
With all due respect, the market for people who cannot have a camera phone is negligible compared to the market who either want one or simply don't care. The vast majority of people have no such restrictions, and as economies of scale help keep prices down and profits up, there simply isn't much incentive for the manufacturers to cater to people like you.
Besides which, you can't take a camera phone in? Luxury! I can't take *any* mobile phone into our secure room; thankfully, I rarely need to be in there.... (Ironically enough, there is of course a 'normal' phone on every desk)
They purposefully [for instance] use the wrong direction on the slashes to make things incompatible. That's the level of stupidity they stoop to.
When MS-DOS was first written, there was no such thing as directories. Everything lived in the root, and there was no need for path names or path separators. It quickly became necessary to pass arguments to commands, and the natural way to do this was to distinguish them from paramters by pre-pending a character. MS chose to use/.
Time passed, and directories were invented. People started to use / as a path separator, in similar fashion to how references are built up - eg major part/minor part/whatever/etc, say "57b/6". MS obviously had to support directory trees, but didn't want to break backward compatibility (something they are loathe to do to this day), and so could not use/. Thus, they went with the next nearest thing, \.
Alternatively, perhaps you're right, and they're petty and stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot by making themselves incompatible with every competing product at a time when they had little or no compelling advantage.
Incidentally, try using / in a path in the address bar of Windows Explorer in a modern Windows (eg >= 2k). You might be surprised.
There is no reason why they couldn't embed C# support [or generically.NET] within bash or tcsh or whatever. That way you could still use the familiar but then extend into.NET crap if you wanted to.
What familiar? This isn't aimed at Unix admins, this is aimed at Windows admins, and most of them are going to be much more familiar with cmd.exe than with bash, or ksh, or ash, or tsh, zsh or any other of the myriad, subtly-incompatible *nix shells.
Throwing more people at a problem gets it done quicker and better...
Others have pointed out that IE is a loss-leader and worked very well indeed in preventing Netscape and the Internet from making Windows irrelevant.
Why does slashdot persist in giving Dvorak air time (other than the obvious, that he's no fan of MS)? I wonder what worthwhile stories were rejected so this could be posted?
They're offering phone support. You have a problem with the browser, you can phone them about it (as long as you're in the US, Germany or Japan).
They're not supporting some phone or other *in* the browser, or supporting the browser *on* a phone, they're supporting the (beta of the) browser *by* phone.
If it really is company policy that you should take those breaks, then not doing so is in fact a violation of company policy. I can't see personnel taking too kindly to your manager trying to fire you for adhering to company policy, or to him trying to coerce you into breaking said policy.
If personnel lied in the interview, then you have an unreasonable manager coupled with a hostile personnel department; you're better off working somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
They did something similar for a review of a new LCD monitor a couple of days ago. In the summary, they quoted the praise Tom's had for the design of the thing, citing this as an example of how favourable the review was. The review itself was actually rather less than flattering; the upshot of it was that the monitor, while looking gorgeous, was actually mediocre at best when you took performance into account.
Not only that, but the vast majority of that fibre and copper is laid through public land. I say that if the telecoms companies start charging content providers like this, you guys should start charging them for use of your land.
On the bright side, it's nice to see MS money going to a good cause. I bet Bill Gates is rolling over in his coffin at the thought.
You do realise that the Gates Foundation has given grants worth $10.2 billion since its inception, right?
Bash MS and Gates all you like, but at least bash them for legitimate reasons, and Gates' lack of caring about good causes isn't one of them.
I take it you missed the recent story on how Vista's firewall is going to be "crippled" because the default config won't block outgoing connections - just like XP's, just like Mandrake's and RedHat's the last time I set up firewalls on them, just like my hardware firewall in fact.
Slashdot has long had a strong anti-MS bias. Fine, they've never made a secret of it. Recently however, they've started to allow it to warp the facts, which is not fine.
Sure, this may well make dual-booting more difficult, in that you won't be able to get at your data. Ever tried getting at data on an NTFS partition with Fedora? ZOMG! Fedora is trying to lock out Windows!
I've been here a long time, and it's sad to see how the site has declined from a site you could trust, to one that will print almost anything as long as it bashes MS or praises FOSS.
once you get the big issues resolved, then you can work on others including symbolic ones.
Unfortunately, while that sounds good in theory, in practice it means that you get as far as banning murder, rape, robbery, etc and then spend the rest of time trying to stamp them out before moving on to the lesser issues.
As another poster points out, banning foie gras doesn't take a lot of effort. Sure, it doesn't make a huge difference to the world either, but it's worth doing the little things as well as the big things, imho.
The theory is that the easier it is to get away with a crime and the less it feels like a crime to the general public, the harsher the sentence needs to be to add in the otherwise missing deterrant.
Taking your example, rape is clearly harmful to the person involved. You have to be pretty seriously twisted to believe that your victim is actually enjoying it, even if you believe that there's no long-term damage done. It's also relatively less likely that you'll get away with it (extremely low conviciton rates notwithstanding) - there's a much higher chance of being caught in the act, the victim can id you, you're extremely likely to leave forensic evidence at the scene (and in/on the victim), etc.
Copyright infringement is a different story. There's no-one right there in front of you suffering because of your actions, so it's very easy to rationalise it away (indeed, it's not entirely clear-cut that low- to moderate levels of copyright infringement *are* harmful, but that's beside the point). It's very unlikely that you'll get caught, unless you start bragging about it, or distributing stuff widely. Finally, a high percentage of the population simply don't see it as being particularly wrong.
As I said, the disparity in sentencing is to try to redress this imbalance, and make an otherwise potentially attractive act much less attractive. Yes, the punishment is out of all proportion to the crime, but that's rather the point.
Note that I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or even that it necessarily works, just that that's the theory behind it, as I understand it.
You already have the link in your homepage URL, there's no need to append it to every message you post as well. (And if you feel you must, making it your signature would be easier for you and more considerate to those who disable signatures in order to avoid that sort of thing)
That's something you'll notice about slashdot if you pay attention. On stories like this, there are lots of comments along the lines of "those specs suck!". On stories about the latest and greatest PC kit, there are lots of comments along the lines of "no-one needs that much power!"
But can they buy them in sufficient quantities? You quote $10 for a Pentium 3, but they no longer manufacture them; how long before the supply dries up? How long before that before people realise that they're suddenly worth something to someone, and jack the price up?
No, *you* can get that stuff for those prices.
Can the Chinese people that this is actually intended for also do so?
I normally would realise just that, but in this case the article isn't about BSG, it's about a planned spin-off. I actually wasn't aware that you guys had already seen the season we're watching now; why would I be? I've not been seeking out information on it on the internet precisely because I've not finished watching it and didn't want to encounter any spoilers!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry, and I don't expect the OP to know that it's still being shown here; I just felt the need to vent at the time. Rest assured that it's already been modded down as overrated (from its default rating, which always makes me smile).
In the finale, literally every main character knows Baltar is wrong... but he's the president, so WTF are you going to do?
Wail like a banshee that you posted a spoiler to a show that's currently running through a season on Sky One in the UK?
WE HAVEN'T HAD THAT EPISODE YET!
Thanks a bunch.
Irregardless of whether children should or should not be able to access such materials, this law does not prevent the SUPPLY of games to underage children. Compare it to the situation with alcohol in the UK - if you are under 18, it is an offence to buy alcohol, to be sold alcohol or to have alcohol procured for you.
Do you have any idea how little effect that law has? It's a speed bump, nothing more; I had no trouble getting served in pubs, clubs and off licences from age 15, and nor did many of my friends. As long as you more or less look old enough and the proprietor hasn't been warned off recently, most places simply don't care.
I'm not entirely sure what point you were trying to make there, but I'm not sure that the UK's attitude towards alcohol and general degree of maturity regarding it is really a shining example...
As a parent who allows a child to play games in moderation, how would it affect you if a game you had forbidden your daughter to play and which she was not legally able to buy had been given it as a gift by a relative? Or had another adult go into the store and buy it for her?
Same with anything else we've told her not to do that she then goes ahead and does anyway - explain to her what she's done wrong, why it's wrong, and dish out a suitable punishment. For what it's worth though, my daughter's only 6, and while she does sometimes watch me playing games, hers are mostly Barbie, Disney and similar. Apart from a brief daliance with Quake 3* she's not really shown any interest in playing any of my games.
(* with the gore switched off, as at the time I played on a rails-only server and the near-constant clouds of blood were a right pain in the arse)
I always come to slashdot with the broad, and sometimes naive assumption that the articles provided will be neutral.
Assuming your uid accurately reflects how long you've been reading slashdot, then I guess you can be forgiven for that. However, slashdot has never been about balanced, objective reporting. It has always had a very heavy pro-OSS slant; check the FAQ and see for yourself. Not saying that that's a bad thing mind, just that if you're coming here for neutrality in the articles, you're deluding yourself.
(Mind you, people do tend to see agreement with their own views as neutrality...)
That said, I strongly detest the wording of this headline and the tagline below it. Especially from CmdrTaco.
Now, others have pointed out that Taco didn't write the article, but they're forgetting one important thing - he may not have written it, but he certainly chose it. We've been told time and again that slashdot can get literally hundreds of submissions about the same story if it's popular, and judging by recent months, anything at all to do with Vista is incredibly popular. I therefore find it extremely unlikely that this is the only submission that he received, or even the first.
So shame on you CmdrTaco for choosing such an inaccurate, biased and misrepresentative story merely because it's anti-MS, and shame on you UltimaGuy for spinning it that way.
Hell, I can't think of a single Linux distro I've used in the last 9 or so years that didn't configure its firewall in exactly the same way by default.
And btw, Vista's firewall will not be crippled, just configured differently.
That's "differently" as in "identically to the default config for my hardware firewall and the firewall of every single Linux distro I've used in the past 9 years".
the rest came from the lack of unix-level file permissions
1993 called, it wants its meme back.
(Ok, I'll grant you, the Win9x series was a joke, but it's dead now; *please* can we trash MS for things they're doing wrong now, rather than last decade?)
hahaha - turgid (sounds like its written by a 14 y.o - why don't they just say 'erect').
Because turgid in this context means swollen, and so covers semi-erect as well as erect.
(And how many 14 year olds do you know could even spell turgid, let alone use it correctly?)
Speaking as a parent, I'd rather my daughter did it virtually (in moderation, of course), than in reality.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of being at school during play time, at the age of 5 or 6, running around with a bunch of other kids playing war. We divided into two teams, and ran around miming shooting, stabbing and otherwise killing each other, long before you could do the same on a computer. Great fun.
Violent video games don't make kids violent; being human makes kids violent. Some are worse than others, and need special care and attention; despite my favouring violent games, films, etc I've never actually been in a fight in my life.
With all due respect, the market for people who cannot have a camera phone is negligible compared to the market who either want one or simply don't care. The vast majority of people have no such restrictions, and as economies of scale help keep prices down and profits up, there simply isn't much incentive for the manufacturers to cater to people like you.
Besides which, you can't take a camera phone in? Luxury! I can't take *any* mobile phone into our secure room; thankfully, I rarely need to be in there....
(Ironically enough, there is of course a 'normal' phone on every desk)
They purposefully [for instance] use the wrong direction on the slashes to make things incompatible. That's the level of stupidity they stoop to.
/.
/. Thus, they went with the next nearest thing, \.
.NET] within bash or tcsh or whatever. That way you could still use the familiar but then extend into .NET crap if you wanted to.
When MS-DOS was first written, there was no such thing as directories. Everything lived in the root, and there was no need for path names or path separators. It quickly became necessary to pass arguments to commands, and the natural way to do this was to distinguish them from paramters by pre-pending a character. MS chose to use
Time passed, and directories were invented. People started to use / as a path separator, in similar fashion to how references are built up - eg major part/minor part/whatever/etc, say "57b/6". MS obviously had to support directory trees, but didn't want to break backward compatibility (something they are loathe to do to this day), and so could not use
Alternatively, perhaps you're right, and they're petty and stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot by making themselves incompatible with every competing product at a time when they had little or no compelling advantage.
Incidentally, try using / in a path in the address bar of Windows Explorer in a modern Windows (eg >= 2k). You might be surprised.
There is no reason why they couldn't embed C# support [or generically
What familiar? This isn't aimed at Unix admins, this is aimed at Windows admins, and most of them are going to be much more familiar with cmd.exe than with bash, or ksh, or ash, or tsh, zsh or any other of the myriad, subtly-incompatible *nix shells.
Throwing more people at a problem gets it done quicker and better...
Others have pointed out that IE is a loss-leader and worked very well indeed in preventing Netscape and the Internet from making Windows irrelevant.
Why does slashdot persist in giving Dvorak air time (other than the obvious, that he's no fan of MS)? I wonder what worthwhile stories were rejected so this could be posted?
They're offering phone support. You have a problem with the browser, you can phone them about it (as long as you're in the US, Germany or Japan).
They're not supporting some phone or other *in* the browser, or supporting the browser *on* a phone, they're supporting the (beta of the) browser *by* phone.
Do you even know what a beta test is?
Do you know how MS is making this available? Hint: you have to go looking for it, it's not presented to you in Windows Update.
Definitely.
If it really is company policy that you should take those breaks, then not doing so is in fact a violation of company policy. I can't see personnel taking too kindly to your manager trying to fire you for adhering to company policy, or to him trying to coerce you into breaking said policy.
If personnel lied in the interview, then you have an unreasonable manager coupled with a hostile personnel department; you're better off working somewhere else.
It really depends on how you read it. I read it as "1 people's right to own property shall be protected 2 that includes intellectual property".
Don't forget that while we're not all Disneys or Microsofts or IBMs, we all can and do generate intellectual property.