Soon almost all phones will have a camera in them so people won't even be able to go along with the rule if they want to.
Sure they will - they'll just have to leave their phone at home.
I know people who are not allowed camera phones in their place of work. That means they either get a phone without a camera (increasingly rare here in the UK), or don't take their phone to work with them. Simple as that. There are rooms in my building where I can't take a camera, and therefore, my 'phone.
It's not a question of choice, it's a question of "get caught with it and risk getting fired". I work with protectively marked (= government classified) material; I could potentially be prosecuted for taking a photo in the wrong place.
if you're not in the position to be affected by this, shut the hell up
Well, if you take the view that this represents a first step in an erosion of essential freedom, then it affects everyone, whether they're kids now, plan to have kids in the future, or are parents now.
Hell, it potentially even affects me, here in the UK. We tend to follow your lead in a lot of things; if this takes off in the States, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it'll beused as justification for a similar scheme here. I fall into the "have kids now" catergory, by the way.
Seriously, most proponents of RFID technology site its benefits in stock and supply line management only, and keep assurring us that RFID tags embedded in products will never be used to track people. And yet we're now seeing instances of the middleman, i.e the product tag, being bypassed altogether and people being tagged outright. Is this really what RFID was developed for in the first place? Tracking people?
Hhhhmmmmmm, odd that - that there's a product that most people think would be really useful for this one particular (benign) use, but that a minority want to use for bad things. Can't see how that could ever happen with any other technology.
You're right, this is wrong, and no I would not submit my daughter to this sort of treatment (and yes, I do actually have a daughter). But you seem to be implying that
a) this was an inevitable (ab)use of RFID technology b) this one dubious use should see the tech banned/shunned despite all other legitimate uses
As with all things, don't blame the technology itself for the use to which some people put it. Do that, and you'll end up banning all tech, including sharp sticks and fire.
RFID tracking is data rape.
That makes you sound like an extremist; I'd suggest that if you're serious about fighting things like this that you avoid such emotive language. You'll piss off more people than you sway with it.
If that same robot could climb the full distance to a Lagrange point, and all we were now waiting for was the carbon fibre nano-tubes, would you say we'd made progress?
Yes, but it can't, and even assuming that the carbon fibre nano-tubes are "all" we're waiting for, that in itself is going to take a lot of work.
Yes, IIS is included with both Windows 2000 Professional and XP Professional. It's not an install time option (iirc), but it's there on the CD and can be installed using the "Add/Remove Windows Components" part of the "Add/Remove Software" control panel caplet.
Then what, exactly, is it that all the p2p users are sharing?
The problem isn't that nobody likes the product - they demonstrably do - but that now that they can get it for free, a lot of them are going to do just that. Whether that's because they're all protesting against perceived over-charging or not is largely immaterial. There clearly is a demand for the product, just not at *that* price. Whether there would be a demand at *any* price other than free is a different question.
Both come with Win2k and XP Pro (I believe that IIS provides SMTP service support, although I've never used it). It's a separate install, but it's right there on the CD
a complete set of development tools
They're available as a separate download - the vast majority of Windows users neither want nor need them.
cd burner
Integrated into Explorer, as long as all you want to do is burn files to a CD (eg no ISO support).
It's also the fact that spammers are the money behind most of the viruses, spam relays bots, etc, which are jamming the web and costing us billions of dollars.
Now, I'll agree that I've heard rumours that they've paid for some viruses and similar, but "most"? Do you have any figures and references to back up that claim?
For that matter, this is the only place I've actually read that spammers are paying for these things to be written, but it certainly makes sense that they might, so I'll give you that one; it's the use of the word 'most' that I'm queying (especially in relation to viruses, which generally serve little or no purpose).
Just wait til Longhorn comes out. 2GB of RAM and 4Ghz so you can turn on all the eyecandy.
Don't be silly - that's not the required specs, that's the expected average specs by the time Longhorn is released. Or do you really think that they can be adding enough features to require 8-16 times the RAM that XP requires? (XP will run in 128MB, you'll be wanting 256MB if you install a virus checker)
I would be very surprised if Microsoft makes this work with anything other then their products.
Possibly; bear in mind, however, that the standard ASP.NET controls produce HTML and javascript, etc that at least degrades gracefully in browsers other than IE, in the few cases where it doesn't work identically. (And even in these cases, it does still work.)
That doesn't prove anything, of course, but in the past they probably wouldn't have supported anything other than IE.
Have you actually used rdesktop? VNC is essentially just a remote control for a PC - everything you do is visible on any monitor that may be connected to the target PC, and if anyone sits down and tries to use it, you'll fight over cursor and input control.
Rdesktop, on the other hand, is a truly multi-user solution - you can have mulitple users rdesktoped into a server at once, all in their own sessions. Meanwhile, the machine itself will be sat at the login prompt, with no activity visible.
Performance-wise, in my experience, rdesktop over a modem beats the snot out of VNC over a 100Mbps LAN. Add to that things like resource sharing, whereby you can access local drives remotely and vice-versa (including copy-paste between machines), access local printers remotely, and so on and it becomes clear that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, there's already search functionality present in Windows 2k and XP - that's not been exploited (afaik). Also, what's to prevent a virus writer from just doing a brute-force scan of the hard drive anyway?
WoW is different because the game itself is online. It is a service with a rather unfair activation fee.
You mean like provision of electricity, running water, telephone, etc is a service? I don't know about the US, but here in the UK you generally have to pay a fee to be connected to such things. Think of the WoW CDs as a connection fee - it takes work (and a physical resource) to get you hooked up. Why *should* that be free?
You could argue that they could roll it into the cost of the service, but then they'd almost certainly want to tie you to a minimum period contract, to make sure they made their money back. Not only that, but it would probably push the monthly fee up for the duration, so you end up paying more than you would have done.
As for activation, you do have a point - at some point in the future, the servers are bound to be switched off for good, and then you have a coaster. That said, I still bought XP Pro - I don't expect to still be using it (or even to want to be using it) by the time MS switch off the servers. Not to mention that they don't need to be there for normal, day to day usage.
Hmm, so you run a pirated copy of Windows XP, then?
You have to pay a monthly fee to run XP? Damn, I'd better get my cheque book, I've been running it for a couple of years and not been paying anything, I must owe MS a packet...
But if you need a job, and jobs are hard to find, what do you do?
Precisely. That's the free market at work right there. What most people advocating the "the market will correct all ills" approach forget is that conditions are also controlled by the market.
Right now, the market (in jobs) is such that EA can afford to act like this. Thus the market cannot correct the behaviour, as it is the market itself that allows it to continue.
At least as far as Word is concerned (the only Office app other than Outlook that I use much at all), go to File -> Properties and you can change/remove the author details.
I assume that they're in there as it's often very useful indeed to be able to track down the original author of a document - after all, they're the one that should know the most about the subject. In the context of business especially this can be critical when trying to discern exactly what was specified, or what was meant by a particular part of the document, etc, and why (often the most critical if you're in a CYA situation).
It's not like the information is hidden, though - it's even visible via explorer. I don't use OpenOffice much, but I'd be amazed if it didn't do similar. Open sauce it may be, but it's still a useful feature.
You just listed 14 vulnerabilities for Applications that just happen to be packaged with RH O/S.
All of which RH *chose* to package as part of their distro, all of which RH have the source available to.
To my mind, they are at least giving a nod in the direction of these things being safe and fit for purpose. If they've not checked (say, because they don't have the necessary resources to check), then perhaps they shouldn't include them.
why must a user be logged in as Administrator to play a game?
Because clueless devs and shitty game copy prevention tools require it.
Ever played a Microsoft game, say Dungeon Siege? Admin rights are not required, and all per-user stuff (save games, settings, etc) go in your own file area (eg C:\Documents and Settings\username\...)
Compare that with most other games, that often require admin access just so they can use some copy prevention mechanism. That was certainly the case with the original Sims - if you used a no-cd crack, it ran fine as a normal user. Without it, it required admin rights, and just silently failed without them.
Don't blame MS for the failings of third party developers. They may not have helped in the past, but that's changed now. If you have an issue with games requiring admin access, take it up with the developers.
There is something about windows that just encourages it.
Two main reasons for that:
1) historical "everyone runs as admin" meant no pesky user permissions getting in the way of what you wanted your software to do
2) orders of magnitude larger install base - you have X amount of time to develop this crap, do you target 95%+ of the market, or just the remaining 5%?
I bet some readers here still print out their emails.
Sure I do, although rarely - I have no other way of reading them on the journey to/from work (eg I'm reading documentation, additional information provided by the client, etc), and I'm not about to spend hundreds of pounds buying one.
Slashdot Mirror
Soon almost all phones will have a camera in them so people won't even be able to go along with the rule if they want to.
Sure they will - they'll just have to leave their phone at home.
I know people who are not allowed camera phones in their place of work. That means they either get a phone without a camera (increasingly rare here in the UK), or don't take their phone to work with them. Simple as that. There are rooms in my building where I can't take a camera, and therefore, my 'phone.
It's not a question of choice, it's a question of "get caught with it and risk getting fired". I work with protectively marked (= government classified) material; I could potentially be prosecuted for taking a photo in the wrong place.
That's the whole point of open source. As long as they act in accordance with the Firefox licence, there's no problem.
If you do consider this a problem, I can only suggest creating your own licence that prevents this sort of thing.
if you're not in the position to be affected by this, shut the hell up
Well, if you take the view that this represents a first step in an erosion of essential freedom, then it affects everyone, whether they're kids now, plan to have kids in the future, or are parents now.
Hell, it potentially even affects me, here in the UK. We tend to follow your lead in a lot of things; if this takes off in the States, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it'll beused as justification for a similar scheme here. I fall into the "have kids now" catergory, by the way.
Seriously, most proponents of RFID technology site its benefits in stock and supply line management only, and keep assurring us that RFID tags embedded in products will never be used to track people.
And yet we're now seeing instances of the middleman, i.e the product tag, being bypassed altogether and people being tagged outright. Is this really what RFID was developed for in the first place? Tracking people?
Hhhhmmmmmm, odd that - that there's a product that most people think would be really useful for this one particular (benign) use, but that a minority want to use for bad things. Can't see how that could ever happen with any other technology.
You're right, this is wrong, and no I would not submit my daughter to this sort of treatment (and yes, I do actually have a daughter). But you seem to be implying that
a) this was an inevitable (ab)use of RFID technology
b) this one dubious use should see the tech banned/shunned despite all other legitimate uses
As with all things, don't blame the technology itself for the use to which some people put it. Do that, and you'll end up banning all tech, including sharp sticks and fire.
RFID tracking is data rape.
That makes you sound like an extremist; I'd suggest that if you're serious about fighting things like this that you avoid such emotive language. You'll piss off more people than you sway with it.
If that same robot could climb the full distance to a Lagrange point, and all we were now waiting for was the carbon fibre nano-tubes, would you say we'd made progress?
Yes, but it can't, and even assuming that the carbon fibre nano-tubes are "all" we're waiting for, that in itself is going to take a lot of work.
Yes, IIS is included with both Windows 2000 Professional and XP Professional. It's not an install time option (iirc), but it's there on the CD and can be installed using the "Add/Remove Windows Components" part of the "Add/Remove Software" control panel caplet.
What if he was using the Slashdot subscription money to fund his drug habit? Then you'd be okay.
Only if he didn't sue, or sued and you were able to prove your case. Something being true doesn't automatically win you the lawsuit, unfortunately.
Nobody likes you or your product.
Then what, exactly, is it that all the p2p users are sharing?
The problem isn't that nobody likes the product - they demonstrably do - but that now that they can get it for free, a lot of them are going to do just that. Whether that's because they're all protesting against perceived over-charging or not is largely immaterial. There clearly is a demand for the product, just not at *that* price. Whether there would be a demand at *any* price other than free is a different question.
webserver + mail server
Both come with Win2k and XP Pro (I believe that IIS provides SMTP service support, although I've never used it). It's a separate install, but it's right there on the CD
a complete set of development tools
They're available as a separate download - the vast majority of Windows users neither want nor need them.
cd burner
Integrated into Explorer, as long as all you want to do is burn files to a CD (eg no ISO support).
It's also the fact that spammers are the money behind most of the viruses, spam relays bots, etc, which are jamming the web and costing us billions of dollars.
Now, I'll agree that I've heard rumours that they've paid for some viruses and similar, but "most"? Do you have any figures and references to back up that claim?
For that matter, this is the only place I've actually read that spammers are paying for these things to be written, but it certainly makes sense that they might, so I'll give you that one; it's the use of the word 'most' that I'm queying (especially in relation to viruses, which generally serve little or no purpose).
Except it takes 8 Teradata DBAs to manage the 460 TBytes, and 23 Oracle DBAs to manage 1 Gig ;^)
Really? Where I work, we have two dozen or more active Oracle databases, and 2 DBAs.
Just wait til Longhorn comes out. 2GB of RAM and 4Ghz so you can turn on all the eyecandy.
Don't be silly - that's not the required specs, that's the expected average specs by the time Longhorn is released. Or do you really think that they can be adding enough features to require 8-16 times the RAM that XP requires? (XP will run in 128MB, you'll be wanting 256MB if you install a virus checker)
I would be very surprised if Microsoft makes this work with anything other then their products.
Possibly; bear in mind, however, that the standard ASP.NET controls produce HTML and javascript, etc that at least degrades gracefully in browsers other than IE, in the few cases where it doesn't work identically. (And even in these cases, it does still work.)
That doesn't prove anything, of course, but in the past they probably wouldn't have supported anything other than IE.
Remote desktop is just a hack of VNC
Have you actually used rdesktop? VNC is essentially just a remote control for a PC - everything you do is visible on any monitor that may be connected to the target PC, and if anyone sits down and tries to use it, you'll fight over cursor and input control.
Rdesktop, on the other hand, is a truly multi-user solution - you can have mulitple users rdesktoped into a server at once, all in their own sessions. Meanwhile, the machine itself will be sat at the login prompt, with no activity visible.
Performance-wise, in my experience, rdesktop over a modem beats the snot out of VNC over a 100Mbps LAN. Add to that things like resource sharing, whereby you can access local drives remotely and vice-versa (including copy-paste between machines), access local printers remotely, and so on and it becomes clear that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, there's already search functionality present in Windows 2k and XP - that's not been exploited (afaik). Also, what's to prevent a virus writer from just doing a brute-force scan of the hard drive anyway?
WoW is different because the game itself is online. It is a service with a rather unfair activation fee.
You mean like provision of electricity, running water, telephone, etc is a service? I don't know about the US, but here in the UK you generally have to pay a fee to be connected to such things. Think of the WoW CDs as a connection fee - it takes work (and a physical resource) to get you hooked up. Why *should* that be free?
You could argue that they could roll it into the cost of the service, but then they'd almost certainly want to tie you to a minimum period contract, to make sure they made their money back. Not only that, but it would probably push the monthly fee up for the duration, so you end up paying more than you would have done.
As for activation, you do have a point - at some point in the future, the servers are bound to be switched off for good, and then you have a coaster. That said, I still bought XP Pro - I don't expect to still be using it (or even to want to be using it) by the time MS switch off the servers. Not to mention that they don't need to be there for normal, day to day usage.
Hmm, so you run a pirated copy of Windows XP, then?
You have to pay a monthly fee to run XP? Damn, I'd better get my cheque book, I've been running it for a couple of years and not been paying anything, I must owe MS a packet...
Then perhaps the other company has since lost it, and that's why MS are applying for it now?
But if you need a job, and jobs are hard to find, what do you do?
Precisely. That's the free market at work right there. What most people advocating the "the market will correct all ills" approach forget is that conditions are also controlled by the market.
Right now, the market (in jobs) is such that EA can afford to act like this. Thus the market cannot correct the behaviour, as it is the market itself that allows it to continue.
At least as far as Word is concerned (the only Office app other than Outlook that I use much at all), go to File -> Properties and you can change/remove the author details.
I assume that they're in there as it's often very useful indeed to be able to track down the original author of a document - after all, they're the one that should know the most about the subject. In the context of business especially this can be critical when trying to discern exactly what was specified, or what was meant by a particular part of the document, etc, and why (often the most critical if you're in a CYA situation).
It's not like the information is hidden, though - it's even visible via explorer. I don't use OpenOffice much, but I'd be amazed if it didn't do similar. Open sauce it may be, but it's still a useful feature.
You just listed 14 vulnerabilities for Applications that just happen to be packaged with RH O/S.
All of which RH *chose* to package as part of their distro, all of which RH have the source available to.
To my mind, they are at least giving a nod in the direction of these things being safe and fit for purpose. If they've not checked (say, because they don't have the necessary resources to check), then perhaps they shouldn't include them.
why must a user be logged in as Administrator to play a game?
Because clueless devs and shitty game copy prevention tools require it.
Ever played a Microsoft game, say Dungeon Siege? Admin rights are not required, and all per-user stuff (save games, settings, etc) go in your own file area (eg C:\Documents and Settings\username\...)
Compare that with most other games, that often require admin access just so they can use some copy prevention mechanism. That was certainly the case with the original Sims - if you used a no-cd crack, it ran fine as a normal user. Without it, it required admin rights, and just silently failed without them.
Don't blame MS for the failings of third party developers. They may not have helped in the past, but that's changed now. If you have an issue with games requiring admin access, take it up with the developers.
There is something about windows that just encourages it.
Two main reasons for that:
1) historical "everyone runs as admin" meant no pesky user permissions getting in the way of what you wanted your software to do
2) orders of magnitude larger install base - you have X amount of time to develop this crap, do you target 95%+ of the market, or just the remaining 5%?
I bet some readers here still print out their emails.
Sure I do, although rarely - I have no other way of reading them on the journey to/from work (eg I'm reading documentation, additional information provided by the client, etc), and I'm not about to spend hundreds of pounds buying one.
Because they're idiots and you're not?