Disclaimer: I work for a small, independent web company in the UK. I have never knowingly had any contact with anyone working at MS, and I have never received any freebie from any company other than the crap that's handed out to everyone at conferences. I have been to two conferences, JavaUK06 (Sun) and XP Day (a bunch of extreme programming advocates). I am neither a shill nor an astroturfer for MS or any other company (Hell, I wouldn't even shill for my own company, and I have shares in it)
I've briefly played with the Vista betas and RCs, and I like it a lot. I didn't find UAC particularly intrusive, and I'm a sucker for eye candy and have a (year old) machine that's perfectly capable of running Aero with all the bells and whistles. I have other stuff I need to buy now, and I'll probably wait for the first service pack in any case, but I fully intend to buy Vista, probably an OEM copy of the Ultimate edition.
Don't let your prejudices blind you to the fact that some people genuinely like things that you do not. The habit of accusing anyone who claims to like $unpopularThing of being a shill is immature and tiresome.
Now, it's true that the IRA used to do something somewhat similar, but what they did was have a small explosion to attract rescue workers & such, then a larger one to kill them.
Are you sure about that? I remember the IRA nail bomb attack on the Horseguards' Parade, the attack on the Tory party conference in Brighton (brought half the hotel down and still missed Maggie...), the Canary Wharf bomb, etc, all of which either did kill or only didn't through blind luck, but I certainly don't remember the tactic you describe. I *do* remember lots of reports of the IRA telling police that they'd planted a bomb in a certain area, giving plenty of time to evacuate people. I also remember the Omagh bomb, when the phoned-in warning deliberately mislead police as to where the bomb was, causing them to evacuate people *to* it, rather than *from* it. However, that was an extreme* splinter group, the "Real IRA", who were pissed at the Provisional IRA for entering in to peace talks with the Brits.
Now I admit that I'm no expert on the matter, but I've lived in the UK all my life, and the IRA was active for a lot of it, and I don't remember any reports detailing the tactic you describe.
(* I appreciate the irony of referring to them as extreme in comparison to the rest of the IRA, but relatively speaking they were)
1. Apps/applets have to be coded for multiple JVMs.
I've just spent two years as part of a team working on a web app that I developed on Windows, built under Sun's JVM, which was then deployed under Linux using BEA's JRockit JVM.
None of us had any cross-platform or cross-JVM issues.
In fact, I've spent most of the last 7 years writing Java under a variety of JVMs, mostly on Windows, that was then deployed to Linux or Solaris machines, often running different JVMs. I've never seen a single environmental issue that was anything to do with Java (the only ones I have seen have been due to issues with/dev/random running out of entropy and lack of an X-server on headless machines breaking certain image manipulation code).
I wouldn't claim to be the world's most experienced Java programmer, but my experience most certainly does not support your assertion. Do you have any supporting evidence for it?
That's not an oxymoron, it's a dilemma. An oxymoron is an apparent contradiction in terms, the classic tongue-in-cheek example being "military intelligence".
The price increase for the various iterations of Vista show that Microsoft is at least aware of Windows' continuing strength.
A few years ago I bought an OEM copy of XP Pro. I don't remember the exact date, but I do know for a fact that it's vanilla, and so pre-dates SP 1. A quick google gives me this article, implying that SP1 was released September 2002, so I bought my copy at least 4.5 years ago.
I do remember that it cost me roughly £120. I priced up an OEM copy of Vista a few days ago; overclockers.co.uk are selling the OEM version of Vista Ultimate for £130. That's just under a 10% increase in 4.5 years, which is more or less consistent with inflation here in the UK (which is 2%-3% per year).
What price increase? The "top of the line" version of Vista costs today roughly what the "top of the line" version of XP would cost if it were released now.
The school still has every right to direct what he teaches at thier institution.
The school does, the IT department does not. According to TFA, it was a "network-security technician" that made the request, accompanied by campus security.
I remember DOS not being done 'til Lotus wouldn't run, although I wasn't actually around to experience it personally; back then I was an Amiga user. I've also never seen any actual evidence of it, other than it being repeated here from time to time.
a) Apple intentionally did not release Vista compatible versions of their software so that their iPod/iTunes masses would have a compelling reason to not buy Vista and consider buying a Mac instead.
I think £1500-2000 for a Mac comparable with my current desktop machine is a touch more expensive than £370 (full retail for Vista Ultimate, I'd actually get an OEM copy for £130 and some cheap bit of hardware if necessary) for a copy of Vista.
This is just another form of disciminatory pricing, like having the Home/Premium/Ultimate split in the first place.
Those extra features cost money to design, develop and test. If you're not willing to pay for them, why should you get to use them?
Look at it this way - if MS only released the Ultimate edition, everyone would be bitching about how people are being forced to pay for features they'll never use. At least this way you have something of a choice.
People here complain about the GPL but at least the GPL does not apply to you if you are merely USING the software.
Indeed, which is why the many open source programs that require you to agree to the GPL on installation (of the binary only release!) really get my goat.
While there certainly is a crisis in the available prison space here in the UK, it's hardly true to say "no-one goes to prison". If that were true, they'd be empty...
The socket with three round pins (possibly in two different sizes!).
I'm 32 years old, I've lived in England all my life, and I have *never* seen a socket (or plug) that matches that description. The only mains sockets I've seen are the three-pin ones (hardly giant, but then I'm used to them I guess) and the shaver socket, and the shaver ones are relatively rare. I can only think of one house that I've lived in that had one (out of 8), although they're more common in commercial buildings (offices, hotels, etc). They're also the only electrical socket legally allowed to be in a bathroom.
I have no direct experience of any of the other examples you cite, but Netscape essentially committed suicide. Netscape Navigator wiped the floor with all versions of IE up to and including 3. NN4 was arguably comparable to IE4. NN4 was a barely usable, slow, crash prone monstrosity compared to IE5, yet rather than make incremental improvements and stay in the game, Netscape decided to throw away their established codebase and restart from scratch. That is what killed them, not IE itself; they were out of the game for far too long, and lost too much ground. Lately they've lost their way; Mozilla and Firefox are what Netscape Communicator/Navigator (respectively) were, and should have remained, but they blew it.
Believe me, I'm no MS/IE fanboy; I have never and likely will never use IE, and stuck with Netscape 4 long past the time almost everyone else had abandoned it, finally moving to Mozilla at around M14 or so. MS had much less to do with Netscape's loss than Netscape itself did, however.
Facts are facts, but this is unsubstantiated opinion:
"The number of sexual assaults committed by illegal immigrants is astonishing."
The implication is that illegal immigrants commit a huge number of sexual assaults; worded that way it sounds as though they commit a disproportionate number, perhaps even the majority of them.
Yet there are no figures given to back up that statement, and "astonishing" is a subjective (and emotive) term. It's FUD at the very least, if not outright racism.
With that attitude, we wouldn't have Firefox, which split off from Mozilla to give users a choice (reinventing much of the wheel as it did so), which in turn was created to fill the vacuum left by Netscape 5 never being released. We also wouldn't have Opera (as both IE and Netscape pre-date it).
In fact, given that Netscape predates all current browsers including (iirc) IE, I'm surprised at your comment. If anything, your preferences are the ones reinventing the wheel.
You can make exactly the same argument about being banned from driving, especially in rural areas with little or no public transport. For me, this falls firmly in the "can't do the time, don't do the crime" category - people who abuse things to do stupid things and make a nuisance or danger of themselves should use access to those things for a period of time.
added Samy as a friend of anyone hit by it used computing resources without permission required human intervention to clean up afterwards (removing the data, not just patching the hole)
Even if you discount the second two points, the first is indisputable - it had a payload. The payload wasn't malicious, but it was still a payload.
It's like trying to rob a bank with an orange water gun.
Depending on the circumstances and how you do it, that could get you shot dead. At the very least, you'll likely be charged with something along the lines of using an imitation firearm to threaten people, attempted robbery, and if it could be demonstrated that you were convincing enough (eg you had the water pistol covered so only the shape was apparent) potentially even with armed robbery.
I assume you're trying to make a pun, but I don't think dismemberment means what you think it does. While the definition doesn't call for it, the word certainly has (for me at least) connotations of a gruesome death.
I'm in the UK and I get 2.92m and 2.93m too. Mind you, Sourceforge's geolocation stuff (that picks the nearest mirror for you) always seems to think that I'm in Germany, so who knows what Google thinks?
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I work for a small, independent web company in the UK. I have never knowingly had any contact with anyone working at MS, and I have never received any freebie from any company other than the crap that's handed out to everyone at conferences. I have been to two conferences, JavaUK06 (Sun) and XP Day (a bunch of extreme programming advocates). I am neither a shill nor an astroturfer for MS or any other company (Hell, I wouldn't even shill for my own company, and I have shares in it)
I've briefly played with the Vista betas and RCs, and I like it a lot. I didn't find UAC particularly intrusive, and I'm a sucker for eye candy and have a (year old) machine that's perfectly capable of running Aero with all the bells and whistles. I have other stuff I need to buy now, and I'll probably wait for the first service pack in any case, but I fully intend to buy Vista, probably an OEM copy of the Ultimate edition.
Don't let your prejudices blind you to the fact that some people genuinely like things that you do not. The habit of accusing anyone who claims to like $unpopularThing of being a shill is immature and tiresome.
I've always heard it as elephant repellent; something along the lines of...
"What're you spraying?"
"Elephant repellent."
"But there aren't any elephants around here!"
"I know - it works pretty well, doesn't it?!"
Now, it's true that the IRA used to do something somewhat similar, but what they did was have a small explosion to attract rescue workers & such, then a larger one to kill them.
Are you sure about that? I remember the IRA nail bomb attack on the Horseguards' Parade, the attack on the Tory party conference in Brighton (brought half the hotel down and still missed Maggie...), the Canary Wharf bomb, etc, all of which either did kill or only didn't through blind luck, but I certainly don't remember the tactic you describe. I *do* remember lots of reports of the IRA telling police that they'd planted a bomb in a certain area, giving plenty of time to evacuate people. I also remember the Omagh bomb, when the phoned-in warning deliberately mislead police as to where the bomb was, causing them to evacuate people *to* it, rather than *from* it. However, that was an extreme* splinter group, the "Real IRA", who were pissed at the Provisional IRA for entering in to peace talks with the Brits.
Now I admit that I'm no expert on the matter, but I've lived in the UK all my life, and the IRA was active for a lot of it, and I don't remember any reports detailing the tactic you describe.
(* I appreciate the irony of referring to them as extreme in comparison to the rest of the IRA, but relatively speaking they were)
1. Apps/applets have to be coded for multiple JVMs.
/dev/random running out of entropy and lack of an X-server on headless machines breaking certain image manipulation code).
I've just spent two years as part of a team working on a web app that I developed on Windows, built under Sun's JVM, which was then deployed under Linux using BEA's JRockit JVM.
None of us had any cross-platform or cross-JVM issues.
In fact, I've spent most of the last 7 years writing Java under a variety of JVMs, mostly on Windows, that was then deployed to Linux or Solaris machines, often running different JVMs. I've never seen a single environmental issue that was anything to do with Java (the only ones I have seen have been due to issues with
I wouldn't claim to be the world's most experienced Java programmer, but my experience most certainly does not support your assertion. Do you have any supporting evidence for it?
That's not an oxymoron, it's a dilemma. An oxymoron is an apparent contradiction in terms, the classic tongue-in-cheek example being "military intelligence".
The price increase for the various iterations of Vista show that Microsoft is at least aware of Windows' continuing strength.
A few years ago I bought an OEM copy of XP Pro. I don't remember the exact date, but I do know for a fact that it's vanilla, and so pre-dates SP 1. A quick google gives me this article, implying that SP1 was released September 2002, so I bought my copy at least 4.5 years ago.
I do remember that it cost me roughly £120. I priced up an OEM copy of Vista a few days ago; overclockers.co.uk are selling the OEM version of Vista Ultimate for £130. That's just under a 10% increase in 4.5 years, which is more or less consistent with inflation here in the UK (which is 2%-3% per year).
What price increase? The "top of the line" version of Vista costs today roughly what the "top of the line" version of XP would cost if it were released now.
You put too much faith in Occam's Razor; it is a guiding principle, not a fundamental law.
The school still has every right to direct what he teaches at thier institution.
The school does, the IT department does not. According to TFA, it was a "network-security technician" that made the request, accompanied by campus security.
I remember DOS not being done 'til Lotus wouldn't run, although I wasn't actually around to experience it personally; back then I was an Amiga user. I've also never seen any actual evidence of it, other than it being repeated here from time to time.
a) Apple intentionally did not release Vista compatible versions of their software so that their iPod/iTunes masses would have a compelling reason to not buy Vista and consider buying a Mac instead.
I think £1500-2000 for a Mac comparable with my current desktop machine is a touch more expensive than £370 (full retail for Vista Ultimate, I'd actually get an OEM copy for £130 and some cheap bit of hardware if necessary) for a copy of Vista.
Why is that? Is it illegal to have an open access point?
Today? No.
Tomorrow?
This is just another form of disciminatory pricing, like having the Home/Premium/Ultimate split in the first place.
Those extra features cost money to design, develop and test. If you're not willing to pay for them, why should you get to use them?
Look at it this way - if MS only released the Ultimate edition, everyone would be bitching about how people are being forced to pay for features they'll never use. At least this way you have something of a choice.
People here complain about the GPL but at least the GPL does not apply to you if you are merely USING the software.
Indeed, which is why the many open source programs that require you to agree to the GPL on installation (of the binary only release!) really get my goat.
While there certainly is a crisis in the available prison space here in the UK, it's hardly true to say "no-one goes to prison". If that were true, they'd be empty...
The socket with three round pins (possibly in two different sizes!).
I'm 32 years old, I've lived in England all my life, and I have *never* seen a socket (or plug) that matches that description. The only mains sockets I've seen are the three-pin ones (hardly giant, but then I'm used to them I guess) and the shaver socket, and the shaver ones are relatively rare. I can only think of one house that I've lived in that had one (out of 8), although they're more common in commercial buildings (offices, hotels, etc). They're also the only electrical socket legally allowed to be in a bathroom.
I have no direct experience of any of the other examples you cite, but Netscape essentially committed suicide. Netscape Navigator wiped the floor with all versions of IE up to and including 3. NN4 was arguably comparable to IE4. NN4 was a barely usable, slow, crash prone monstrosity compared to IE5, yet rather than make incremental improvements and stay in the game, Netscape decided to throw away their established codebase and restart from scratch. That is what killed them, not IE itself; they were out of the game for far too long, and lost too much ground. Lately they've lost their way; Mozilla and Firefox are what Netscape Communicator/Navigator (respectively) were, and should have remained, but they blew it.
Believe me, I'm no MS/IE fanboy; I have never and likely will never use IE, and stuck with Netscape 4 long past the time almost everyone else had abandoned it, finally moving to Mozilla at around M14 or so. MS had much less to do with Netscape's loss than Netscape itself did, however.
If it's any consolation, nor do I. What I normally assume in a case like this is that the mod fat-fingered it, and selected the wrong option.
Facts are facts, but this is unsubstantiated opinion:
"The number of sexual assaults committed by illegal immigrants is astonishing."
The implication is that illegal immigrants commit a huge number of sexual assaults; worded that way it sounds as though they commit a disproportionate number, perhaps even the majority of them.
Yet there are no figures given to back up that statement, and "astonishing" is a subjective (and emotive) term. It's FUD at the very least, if not outright racism.
With that attitude, we wouldn't have Firefox, which split off from Mozilla to give users a choice (reinventing much of the wheel as it did so), which in turn was created to fill the vacuum left by Netscape 5 never being released. We also wouldn't have Opera (as both IE and Netscape pre-date it).
In fact, given that Netscape predates all current browsers including (iirc) IE, I'm surprised at your comment. If anything, your preferences are the ones reinventing the wheel.
I thought choice and competition were supposed to be good things.
You can make exactly the same argument about being banned from driving, especially in rural areas with little or no public transport. For me, this falls firmly in the "can't do the time, don't do the crime" category - people who abuse things to do stupid things and make a nuisance or danger of themselves should use access to those things for a period of time.
Its exactly the opposite. They'll work on ways of making you see more of the stuff you'd like to skip.
But if the shows he wants to watch aren't on, he won't be watching at all and so won't even need to try to skip the ads, will he?
The worm didn't do anything
I was under the impression that it:
added Samy as a friend of anyone hit by it
used computing resources without permission
required human intervention to clean up afterwards (removing the data, not just patching the hole)
Even if you discount the second two points, the first is indisputable - it had a payload. The payload wasn't malicious, but it was still a payload.
It's like trying to rob a bank with an orange water gun.
Depending on the circumstances and how you do it, that could get you shot dead. At the very least, you'll likely be charged with something along the lines of using an imitation firearm to threaten people, attempted robbery, and if it could be demonstrated that you were convincing enough (eg you had the water pistol covered so only the shape was apparent) potentially even with armed robbery.
Don't think you might end up shot? Think again.
I assume you're trying to make a pun, but I don't think dismemberment means what you think it does. While the definition doesn't call for it, the word certainly has (for me at least) connotations of a gruesome death.
I'm in the UK and I get 2.92m and 2.93m too. Mind you, Sourceforge's geolocation stuff (that picks the nearest mirror for you) always seems to think that I'm in Germany, so who knows what Google thinks?