So what about them sucks? What do you think they suck in comparison to? "They suck" isn't a very useful message.
As I said, I've actually used older versions of those products, and for the most part they didn't seem to suck too badly. In fact, I'd rather have used them than the competing products from Microsoft at that time.
Can you give any kind of comparative analysis as to how they stack up compared to other products out there like StarOffice 5.2, Word Perfect Office Suite 2000, KOffice or are you just some sort of troll?
Your message is so lacking in detail I can't even tell what kind of troll you might be -- rabid Microsoft fanatic, or rabid "everything must be free" fanatic...
I feel like I shouldn't be feeding the trolls here, but maybe someone else has some real answers.
I'd actually not mind seeing those products on Linux. While I haven't used them recently (since 1996 or so), they seemed like fairly reasonable products as far as commercial product go. More options for Linux productivity software could only be a good thing.
True in many cases, but I suspect not all. I think that a lot of people, particularly some of the models may be in it strictly for the money. But if everyone involved does find it fun, it would only make it more of a no-brainer.
Pr0n is a big time money maker. It doesn't cost much to produce, and on the internet the distribution costs are low too, there is a huge demand for it, even though a lot of people don't like to admit it. Even the heavily religious and a lot of women, who are the most publically critical of pr0n are often closet pr0n consumers. The internet is a great outlet for pr0n, especially for the bashful pr0n consumer because people can view it more or less in 'the privacy of their homes' without having to visit some seedy adult book store, receive unusual packages in the mail or confront a cashier at a convenience store who is hostile to a purchase of Hustler magazine or whatnot. Of course as we all know there is not really much true privacy, especially on the internet, but to a certain extent there is strength in numbers, and there are so many pr0n sites and so many people visiting them that it is hard to single an individual out from that.
The business that was raided was not e-gold, but a 'broker' for them which was based in Syracuse. I imagine that the SS is leaning on the broker because they can't easily get to e-gold since they are off-shore.
I think he is trying to find a way to help his employer figure out that spamming doesn't fit with their morals and ethics. If he finds out he is wrong in that assumption, then your statement is valid.
However, contact cards and incident reports (at least in my state) are legally considered to be public records. A police department that doesn't maintain them could face liability.
Ick. What state is that, so I can avoid going there.
In all seriousness though, if these records are considered public, can I go down to the police station and demand to see any such records on a particular individual? If I do so, can I publish that sort of information? Given the fact that for too many people (especially in the case of many police) suspicion == guilt, then this could be very powerful information to use against someone you didn't happen to like for some reason.
A police record (sometimes known as a contact record) is nominally informal. There is absolutely no law that I know of that causes a police record to go away at any time.
What I'm saying is that I think there should be. If, after some period of time, the police can't bring charges, or after charges are resolved in such a way as to not result in a conviction, police should be required to dispose of this sort of data. Why? Because long-term retention of this sort of data really makes the assumption of innocence a difficult thing. This is sort of a similar concept to that of the statute of limitations.
There is a certain method to this madness. If you were to comit a crime the day before your birthday, it would be very wierd for the cops to have to forget that they questioned/suspected you only yesterday. A criminal case, on the other hand, has a sense of closure at the end of the sentance.
People who are very close to their 18th birthday are usually charged as an adult for any sort of serious crime anyway. I think that it would be reasonable for there to be a set length of time in which they could retain information pertinant to a live investigation, but once an investigation is closed or some period of time has passed, they should be forced to dispose of this kind of information.
I believe its controlled in the nic's firmware and can't be overidden.
That would be a bad asumption. There are at least a few systems on which the MAC address can be overridden, including older 32 bit SparcStations at least, where it is stored in an NVRAM that is programmable. Also, on many NIC cards for PC's the MAC address is stored on a PROM which is socketed, and can therefore easily be substituted. Even for those where it is not socketed, it is far from impossible to unsolder and replace the PROM.
A cracker can't make a fake mac wihout his or her own mac address bing automatically sent out.
And that doesn't guarantee much safety given the current price of NICs, a cracker can buy 'throwaway' NICs that he/she uses for only one attack and then disposes of. This approach doesn't allow a cracker to assume someone else's MAC address, but it makes tracking them by a MAC address much more difficult.
What if we modify the tcp/ip stack so it can read mac's and automtically send macs?
That probably won't help much, because you won't be able to trust that nobody has altered the TCP/IP stack code to send fake values. Even in a closed source OS, it wouldn't be impossible for someone to disassemble and patch the code.
The good thing is it will go away when they become adults
It may be 'supposed' to be expunged at a certain time, but in reality, many police agencies retain records of this sort of thing far past when they are supposed to be expunged. Generally, they only get expunged either when the police agency is forced by lack of space to destroy and throw away records, or when one of the officers retires and he throws away his files.
It is not at all uncommon for records of juvenile arrests which never resulted in any sort of actual prosecution, let alone convictions to come up years later in adulthood. For adults it is not uncommon for records of arrests to be used against them years later, even if no prosecution or convictions resulted from them. Unfortunately for some people, they can find themselves suspects in future cases merely because the police believe that they were guilty of previous offenses (even if someone else ends up convicted of that offense) and that their previous arrest matches the profile of some new case.
Many police tend to feel that they are above the law and that their occasional convenience resulting from retention of this sort of data outweighs the bad. And in too many cases the public is unwilling to call them to task for this kind of abuse of authority.
However, that CO2 is largely tapped off and used for production of products such as soft drinks which would otherwise require CO2 produced from fossil fuels.
Also, the plants that are used for the fermentation remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere while they are growing, so alcohol production does not release large amounts of carbon that has been stored deep inside the earth like burning fossil fuels like coal to produce electricity does.
However, electric transmission and storage is still grossly inefficient. Unless your electric power comes from nuclear or hydroelectric, it is probably dirtier for the environment to power cars electrically than with gasoline. There is another choice, however, alcohol burns cleaner, is a renewable energy source, and it's production takes carbon out of the atmosphere unlike burning fossil fuels. It is relatively easy to retrofit gasoline powered cars to run on either ethanol or methanol.
Electric cars also require large amounts of batteries, which are made of toxic materials. Manufacture of electric cars is probably a net negative for the environment as long as we don't have a clean battery technology.
As for converting electric production to sustainable alternatives, the tree-huggers need to rethink their positions on nuclear power.
Maybe just sell the software and source code if they can't untwine the software part of the business from their core business... I just have to think that getting some money back out of it and getting rid of the long-term support commitments would be a good idea for them.
The first thought I had was "Why don't they just sell the division to someone else?". After hearing that it was profitable, I thought "Why don't they just spin it off as a separate company?". Doing one or the other of those two things would seem to be the best choice for their customers, and it would seem to be a preferable alternative to laying off people and closing down an operation, especially when you consider they will still have to support it for a long time this way. If they sold it or spun it off, someone else would have to take over that burden...
Well, well, an admission of being a Microsoft paid troll. Very amusing. Well, I'm unimpressed by your self righteous attitude. You really don't know who I am or what I know or don't know so what room do you have to complain about silly guesses? Taking a couple of what I admit were rather snide remarks about Microsoft not playing nicely with others to "making things up" seems like a bit of a defensive stretch. Obviously huge multinational companies like Microsoft and IBM may work together on some things, and be bitter adversaries in others, but my comment stems from the fact that Microsoft doesn't seem to know how to be loyal to their allies in the long term. The old IBM wasn't much better, but from what I've seen of the new IBM, they have cleaned up their act. At any rate, for someone who lacks interest, I must have struck a nerve for you to bother to reply more than once. I was also curious as to whether Sheldon was replying anonymously to support his position astro-turfily, and you've more or less answered that as well if what you say about not having registered for Slashdot is true.
Who has no idea? You say Microsoft was the "primary contributor" to XML, but Jon Bosak of Sun was the leader of the working group creating XML... Eh? Hey, I never said that Microsoft wasn't involved with the design of SOAP or XML, but really, either its an open protocol or it isn't. I never said IBM's contributors made changes that Microsoft wasn't aware of, but that doesn't mean they were changes that Microsoft would have proposed without prodding by IBM either.
Of course, raving, conspiracy-loving zealots never let little things like facts get in the way of their theories.
Pot, kettle? At least I'm not an Anonymous Coward.
Of course sheldon is a well known Microsoft apologist. Given Microsoft's normal way of doing things them just not getting in the way of IBM's changes would probably be counted as working with IBM.
Sun have blown hot and cold over it for the last 6 months or so.
Well, SOAP started out as an extension to XML-RPC. Sun liked XML-RPC. Sun didn't like the initial version of Microsoft's extensions to XML-RPC because they thought they favored Microsoft (surprise surprise). IBM didn't like the initial version of the SOAP spec either, and proposed some changes, which became SOAP 1.1. Sun likes IBM's revised spec (both Sun and IBM are Java proponents, amongst other things). So Sun really hasn't been terribly inconsistant about things. Also, many people have taken Sun's involvement with other, sometimes similar technologies (like Jini, CORBA, etc) as well as them not dropping RMI as being cold towards SOAP. However, I think Sun is just hedging their bets and trying to embrace as many things as makes sense for them to do.
Currently they say it's a good thing
Like I said, the SOAP spec changed, unless the spec changes again or something else comes along, I wouldn't expect Sun to change their position again.
Bah. Socialist hogwash. The engineering field isn't saturated, except perhaps in comparison to the computer field. The teaching field, particularly in K-12, is facing a crisis due to lack of people. Unions are a crock of excrement, especially for skilled workers. And they can't stop employers for firing or laying off people at the drop of a hat anyway.
What we absolutely don't need is unions or "professional" licensing in the computer business.
There are ways to view MS Word docs without using MS Word, or for that matter any Microsoft products. I do agree though, that this sort of document should be published in a more universal format such as HTML or at least PDF.
...and Bill Gates wanted to make people pay him for it.
Yea, and that wasn't the way things generally worked in those days. His spleen venting rant about it has been legendary during since those homebrew computer days...
I wonder if he offered any of that money back to the actual creators?
Not a snowball's chance in hell. He actively tried to squash their company TrueBasic, actually, as they are clearly a competitor to his products.
"John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964 for use at Dartmouth College. They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers."
Eh? What is Fortran 68? Are you getting it confused with Algol 68? There was a Fortran 66, but it wasn't the "original" Fortran, as its predecessor was Fortran IV (which was in turn preceeded by Fortran I, II and III one would assume). Fortran's original development was in the late 50's, not the late 60's.
Fortran was actually good for its time. COBOL, on the other hand was designed by a committee. Even if all the people on a committee aren't idiots, few good things come out of committee designs.
Slashdot Mirror
So what about them sucks? What do you think they suck in comparison to? "They suck" isn't a very useful message.
As I said, I've actually used older versions of those products, and for the most part they didn't seem to suck too badly. In fact, I'd rather have used them than the competing products from Microsoft at that time.
Can you give any kind of comparative analysis as to how they stack up compared to other products out there like StarOffice 5.2, Word Perfect Office Suite 2000, KOffice or are you just some sort of troll?
Your message is so lacking in detail I can't even tell what kind of troll you might be -- rabid Microsoft fanatic, or rabid "everything must be free" fanatic...
I feel like I shouldn't be feeding the trolls here, but maybe someone else has some real answers.
What is funny about this?
I'd actually not mind seeing those products on Linux. While I haven't used them recently (since 1996 or so), they seemed like fairly reasonable products as far as commercial product go. More options for Linux productivity software could only be a good thing.
True in many cases, but I suspect not all. I think that a lot of people, particularly some of the models may be in it strictly for the money. But if everyone involved does find it fun, it would only make it more of a no-brainer.
Pr0n is a big time money maker. It doesn't cost much to produce, and on the internet the distribution costs are low too, there is a huge demand for it, even though a lot of people don't like to admit it. Even the heavily religious and a lot of women, who are the most publically critical of pr0n are often closet pr0n consumers. The internet is a great outlet for pr0n, especially for the bashful pr0n consumer because people can view it more or less in 'the privacy of their homes' without having to visit some seedy adult book store, receive unusual packages in the mail or confront a cashier at a convenience store who is hostile to a purchase of Hustler magazine or whatnot. Of course as we all know there is not really much true privacy, especially on the internet, but to a certain extent there is strength in numbers, and there are so many pr0n sites and so many people visiting them that it is hard to single an individual out from that.
The business that was raided was not e-gold, but a 'broker' for them which was based in Syracuse. I imagine that the SS is leaning on the broker because they can't easily get to e-gold since they are off-shore.
I think he is trying to find a way to help his employer figure out that spamming doesn't fit with their morals and ethics. If he finds out he is wrong in that assumption, then your statement is valid.
However, contact cards and incident reports (at least in my state) are legally considered to be public records. A police department that doesn't maintain them could face liability.
Ick. What state is that, so I can avoid going there.
In all seriousness though, if these records are considered public, can I go down to the police station and demand to see any such records on a particular individual? If I do so, can I publish that sort of information? Given the fact that for too many people (especially in the case of many police) suspicion == guilt, then this could be very powerful information to use against someone you didn't happen to like for some reason.
A police record (sometimes known as a contact record) is nominally informal. There is absolutely no law that I know of that causes a police record to go away at any time.
What I'm saying is that I think there should be. If, after some period of time, the police can't bring charges, or after charges are resolved in such a way as to not result in a conviction, police should be required to dispose of this sort of data. Why? Because long-term retention of this sort of data really makes the assumption of innocence a difficult thing. This is sort of a similar concept to that of the statute of limitations.
There is a certain method to this madness. If you were to comit a crime the day before your birthday, it would be very wierd for the cops to have to forget that they questioned/suspected you only yesterday. A criminal case, on the other hand, has a sense of closure at the end of the sentance.
People who are very close to their 18th birthday are usually charged as an adult for any sort of serious crime anyway. I think that it would be reasonable for there to be a set length of time in which they could retain information pertinant to a live investigation, but once an investigation is closed or some period of time has passed, they should be forced to dispose of this kind of information.
I believe its controlled in the nic's firmware and can't be overidden.
That would be a bad asumption. There are at least a few systems on which the MAC address can be overridden, including older 32 bit SparcStations at least, where it is stored in an NVRAM that is programmable. Also, on many NIC cards for PC's the MAC address is stored on a PROM which is socketed, and can therefore easily be substituted. Even for those where it is not socketed, it is far from impossible to unsolder and replace the PROM.
A cracker can't make a fake mac wihout his or her own mac address bing automatically sent out.
And that doesn't guarantee much safety given the current price of NICs, a cracker can buy 'throwaway' NICs that he/she uses for only one attack and then disposes of. This approach doesn't allow a cracker to assume someone else's MAC address, but it makes tracking them by a MAC address much more difficult.
What if we modify the tcp/ip stack so it can read mac's and automtically send macs?
That probably won't help much, because you won't be able to trust that nobody has altered the TCP/IP stack code to send fake values. Even in a closed source OS, it wouldn't be impossible for someone to disassemble and patch the code.
The good thing is it will go away when they become adults
It may be 'supposed' to be expunged at a certain time, but in reality, many police agencies retain records of this sort of thing far past when they are supposed to be expunged. Generally, they only get expunged either when the police agency is forced by lack of space to destroy and throw away records, or when one of the officers retires and he throws away his files.
It is not at all uncommon for records of juvenile arrests which never resulted in any sort of actual prosecution, let alone convictions to come up years later in adulthood. For adults it is not uncommon for records of arrests to be used against them years later, even if no prosecution or convictions resulted from them. Unfortunately for some people, they can find themselves suspects in future cases merely because the police believe that they were guilty of previous offenses (even if someone else ends up convicted of that offense) and that their previous arrest matches the profile of some new case.
Many police tend to feel that they are above the law and that their occasional convenience resulting from retention of this sort of data outweighs the bad. And in too many cases the public is unwilling to call them to task for this kind of abuse of authority.
However, that CO2 is largely tapped off and used for production of products such as soft drinks which would otherwise require CO2 produced from fossil fuels.
Also, the plants that are used for the fermentation remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere while they are growing, so alcohol production does not release large amounts of carbon that has been stored deep inside the earth like burning fossil fuels like coal to produce electricity does.
However, electric transmission and storage is still grossly inefficient. Unless your electric power comes from nuclear or hydroelectric, it is probably dirtier for the environment to power cars electrically than with gasoline. There is another choice, however, alcohol burns cleaner, is a renewable energy source, and it's production takes carbon out of the atmosphere unlike burning fossil fuels. It is relatively easy to retrofit gasoline powered cars to run on either ethanol or methanol.
Electric cars also require large amounts of batteries, which are made of toxic materials. Manufacture of electric cars is probably a net negative for the environment as long as we don't have a clean battery technology.
As for converting electric production to sustainable alternatives, the tree-huggers need to rethink their positions on nuclear power.
Maybe just sell the software and source code if they can't untwine the software part of the business from their core business... I just have to think that getting some money back out of it and getting rid of the long-term support commitments would be a good idea for them.
The first thought I had was "Why don't they just sell the division to someone else?". After hearing that it was profitable, I thought "Why don't they just spin it off as a separate company?". Doing one or the other of those two things would seem to be the best choice for their customers, and it would seem to be a preferable alternative to laying off people and closing down an operation, especially when you consider they will still have to support it for a long time this way. If they sold it or spun it off, someone else would have to take over that burden...
Well, well, an admission of being a Microsoft paid troll. Very amusing. Well, I'm unimpressed by your self righteous attitude. You really don't know who I am or what I know or don't know so what room do you have to complain about silly guesses? Taking a couple of what I admit were rather snide remarks about Microsoft not playing nicely with others to "making things up" seems like a bit of a defensive stretch. Obviously huge multinational companies like Microsoft and IBM may work together on some things, and be bitter adversaries in others, but my comment stems from the fact that Microsoft doesn't seem to know how to be loyal to their allies in the long term. The old IBM wasn't much better, but from what I've seen of the new IBM, they have cleaned up their act. At any rate, for someone who lacks interest, I must have struck a nerve for you to bother to reply more than once. I was also curious as to whether Sheldon was replying anonymously to support his position astro-turfily, and you've more or less answered that as well if what you say about not having registered for Slashdot is true.
Who has no idea? You say Microsoft was the "primary contributor" to XML, but Jon Bosak of Sun was the leader of the working group creating XML... Eh? Hey, I never said that Microsoft wasn't involved with the design of SOAP or XML, but really, either its an open protocol or it isn't. I never said IBM's contributors made changes that Microsoft wasn't aware of, but that doesn't mean they were changes that Microsoft would have proposed without prodding by IBM either.
Of course, raving, conspiracy-loving zealots never let little things like facts get in the way of their theories.
Pot, kettle? At least I'm not an Anonymous Coward.
Of course sheldon is a well known Microsoft apologist. Given Microsoft's normal way of doing things them just not getting in the way of IBM's changes would probably be counted as working with IBM.
Sun have blown hot and cold over it for the last 6 months or so.
Well, SOAP started out as an extension to XML-RPC. Sun liked XML-RPC. Sun didn't like the initial version of Microsoft's extensions to XML-RPC because they thought they favored Microsoft (surprise surprise). IBM didn't like the initial version of the SOAP spec either, and proposed some changes, which became SOAP 1.1. Sun likes IBM's revised spec (both Sun and IBM are Java proponents, amongst other things). So Sun really hasn't been terribly inconsistant about things. Also, many people have taken Sun's involvement with other, sometimes similar technologies (like Jini, CORBA, etc) as well as them not dropping RMI as being cold towards SOAP. However, I think Sun is just hedging their bets and trying to embrace as many things as makes sense for them to do.
Currently they say it's a good thing
Like I said, the SOAP spec changed, unless the spec changes again or something else comes along, I wouldn't expect Sun to change their position again.
Bah. Socialist hogwash. The engineering field isn't saturated, except perhaps in comparison to the computer field. The teaching field, particularly in K-12, is facing a crisis due to lack of people. Unions are a crock of excrement, especially for skilled workers. And they can't stop employers for firing or laying off people at the drop of a hat anyway.
What we absolutely don't need is unions or "professional" licensing in the computer business.
There are ways to view MS Word docs without using MS Word, or for that matter any Microsoft products. I do agree though, that this sort of document should be published in a more universal format such as HTML or at least PDF.
...and Bill Gates wanted to make people pay him for it.
Yea, and that wasn't the way things generally worked in those days. His spleen venting rant about it has been legendary during since those homebrew computer days...
I wonder if he offered any of that money back to the actual creators?
Not a snowball's chance in hell. He actively tried to squash their company TrueBasic, actually, as they are clearly a competitor to his products.
No... BASIC was designed by two college professors as a dumbed down Fortran for teaching.
You can find these guys now at:
http://www.truebasic.com/
"John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964 for use at Dartmouth College. They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers."
the original Fortran 68
Eh? What is Fortran 68? Are you getting it confused with Algol 68? There was a Fortran 66, but it wasn't the "original" Fortran, as its predecessor was Fortran IV (which was in turn preceeded by Fortran I, II and III one would assume). Fortran's original development was in the late 50's, not the late 60's.
The question would be whether a two year dead and embalmed corpse would be viable as a source for clone DNA. I dunno.
Fortran was actually good for its time. COBOL, on the other hand was designed by a committee. Even if all the people on a committee aren't idiots, few good things come out of committee designs.