First, it's not like Microsoft tries to hide that Starter is horribly crippled. You bought the Shit version, and now you're complaining that it's shit?
Second, how did you even buy it? From what I can tell, it's only sold to OEMs, primarily in "emerging markets" (I've never even *seen* a Starter copy in the US - every computer I've checked out had Home Premium or Ultimate). So you bought from a cheap-ass vendor, and then complained that it came with the crappy version of Windows, instead of seeing it as a discount on the Microsoft tax.
Selling a crappy product as the cheap version and charging to upgrade is a dick move, but not illegal, and not really even evil. I can actually see it being beneficial in some circumstances (buying a computer with full intent of slapping Linux on it, primarily).
NDAs are everywhere in business. Everywhere. You can't call a company "evil" for using them without diluting the word "evil" itself.
And, while MS does have a huge patent portfolio which is a significant potential threat, I don't actually know of them *using* it the way you describe. They sue other companies, sure, but I have not yet heard of them suing an open-source project for patent violations.
All evidence points to Microsoft no longer being "evil". At worst, maybe jerks, but not evil:
Internet Explorer is following standards about as well as everyone else Windows is no longer a horrible, bug-ridden mess - the main complaints are "it's too similar to the last one, no need to upgrade" and "they're changing the interface too much AND I DON'T LIKE IT" The 360 is fairly open, by console standards, even with "official" homebrew via XNA (you need to buy a license, but it's not a $100,000 developer's license) They've been submitting a lot of code to open-source, using *actual* open-source licenses Their stuff works well withttp://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/28/142228/microsoft-releases-aspnet-mvc-under-the-apache-license#h virtualization under Linux, and their VM will run Linux (face it, the Old MS would have made it near-impossible to run Windows within Linux)
Now, they're still far from my favorite company, but I for one am willing to reclassify them from "lawful evil" to "lawful neutral".
Note, however, that Nintendo is from a different region of Japan (Kyoto), with a significantly different culture.
Think of the difference between a New York City company, and a Boston company, or perhaps a New Orleans company. It's... something like that.
From what I can tell, Kyoto is much more conservative and traditional, but also more rural and more... relaxed, I suppose. They have a different accent (kansai-ben), which loosely corresponds to either a southern accent, or a boston accent, at least culturally.
There's also the fact that Nintendo is now effectively run by the game developers - Miyamoto is still a Senior Managing Director, and Iwata (the President) worked on Earthbound and Kirby as a programmer. Sony, meanwhile, is run by businessmen, for business.
*ahem* Personally, I've found exploits in the following games: Army Corps of Hell Asphalt Injection BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention Dream Club Zero Portable Dungeon Hunter: Alliance Everybody's Golf 6 F1 2011 Little Deviants Lord of Apocalypse Michael Jackson: The Experience Ridge Racer Shinobido 2: Tales of the Ninja Touch My Katamari Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Uncharted: Golden Abyss Virtua Tennis 4: World Tour Edition Wipeout 2048 Tales of Innocence R A-men Ragnarok Odyssey Gravity Rush Sumioni: Demon Arts FIFA Football Rayman Origins ModNation Racers: Road Trip Lumines Electronic Symphony Hustle Kings Escape Plan Dynasty Warriors Next Super Stardust Delta Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack Ben 10: Galactic Racing Reality Fighters Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus MotorStorm: RC Plants vs. Zombie Top Darts MLB 12: The Show Lego Harry Potter: Years 5–7 Unit 13 Little Busters! Converted Edition
I was trying to bring them down to short, one-sentence descriptions. Most injunctions prevent you from talking about them - the unusual thing about super-injunctions is that they specifically say "do not reveal the existence of this to a parliamentarian", due to a principle that court orders cannot affect MPs, so under a normal injunction you could still go to your representative and reveal... whatever it is.
The ASBO issue is more a matter of perspective. From a US view, it's crazy - a judge can essentially make a law saying "person X cannot do Y", and bam! it's effectively a law. It's not actually all that crazy, and it probably isn't misused all that often, but the US view is that judges only interpret law - they decide if a crime was committed, and apply the routine punishment. Even at the highest level, it's a big deal when they do something besides guilty/innocent and how long in jail.
In the UK, the courts have far, far more power than courts in the US. Stuff like super-injunctions ("you are not allowed to tell a member of parliament about this injunction") or ASBOs ("judges can now basically make up laws and apply them to a case") would never fly in the US - the legislature and executive branches would knock them down faster than you can say "constitutional crisis".
Basically, in the US system of checks and balances, the judiciary has no way to go on the offensive. They can block laws and actions, after they've already been passed, but that's about it. In the UK, the courts can actually be proactive instead of just reacting to what the rest of the "government" (US-sense) does.
There's probably a historic reason for the difference, but I'm not enough of a historian to know exactly what it is.
I'd read a few days ago that there was a lot of stuff going around the Chinese blogosphere about a possible coup or revolt going on in Beijing - armored vehicles in the streets, gunshots, and so on. This is second- or third-hand stuff - bloggers->other bloggers->american news - and until this, I figured it was the rough equivalent of the fake death rumors that go around Twitter sometimes. Even combined with the political infighting news, it was "possible but not probable".
But, in light of this, I'm thinking there might actually be something to it. Probably not a full-fledged revolution, but even violent political maneuverings might be a good thing (if the less-evil faction wins).
Maybe we'll get lucky and the HP-UX team will take care of it. I've never used HP-UX myself, but an acquaintance of mine recently turned into an HP-UX fanboy after getting his hands on one of their servers.
Maybe by combining the divisions, they'll get actual programmers working on the printer drivers instead of whatever they have no (I can only assume semi-trained monkeys).
Doom? Try Mario. Yes, under this bill, every Mario game would get a big scary "CAUSES VIOLENCE" sticker on it. Same for Sonic, or Tetris, or Oregon Trail, or Pong. Same for such nightmarish gore-fests as "Junior Classic Games" (a compilation of checkers, backgammon, etc.), "Nicktoons MLB 3D" (a Nickelodeon-themed basketball game), "Imagine Babyz" (a child-care simulator), "Microsoft Flight" (a flight sim), and "Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster " (a Sesame Street game - need I say more?).
The "E" rating means "Everyone". To quote the ESRB, "Titles rated E (Everyone) have content that may be suitable for ages 6 and older. Titles in this category may contain minimal cartoon, fantasy or mild violence and/or infrequent use of mild language."
Apparently they need to amend that to "suitable for ages 6 and older who are not elected officials or otherwise mentally handicapped".
Look up racetrack memory on Wikipedia. If everything goes as planned, it'll actually out-perform SSDs (and even some DRAM) while having density comparable to hard drives.
While I suspect it'll never scale to mass production at consumer prices, maybe I'll be surprised.
I recently did some calculations off Kryder's Law, and happened to keep the results. We would normally expect (based purely off regular continuous improvement) 6TB hard drives as early as next year, and 60TB hard drives around 2018.
So, while this is undoubtedly an improvement, it's not exactly a revolutionary one. WD et al. are probably at similar stages, either with this technology or with some other technique.
Is there any way in which they can make themselves seem any less sympathetic?
They could do exactly what they're doing, except while wearing Nazi uniforms and kicking puppies. Maybe run over some grandmothers on the way to the press conference.
Interesting idea (not sure it's necessarily a *good* idea, but nevertheless worth consideration), but there's one issue I can foresee:
How do you *find* the things?
Planets don't emit light. They don't really do much of anything to draw our attention. It can be difficult to spot planets even in our own solar system - Neptune, far from the smallest planet, is invisible to the naked eye, and Pluto (a dwarf planet, I know) is extremely tricky for the amateur astronomer to observe due to its distance and, more importantly, its dimness.
All our current methods for finding exoplanets depend on measuring the star it orbits - even direct imaging relies on the planets being illuminated by their star.
What I'm wondering is, how do they propose to even find these things?
I'm currently employed at a small local software shop. Closed-source software, but heavily built on open-source frameworks and resources (Linux, Apache, Postgres, PHP, OpenOffice, and so on). That pays the bills.
In my free time, I work on an open-source video game (expect to see a/. story on it as soon as I can kick my artist's ass into gear). Beyond some vague pipe dreams of selling "Limited Edition" boxed sets with all kinds of feelies, I have no plans or expectations of profit. I make it two other reasons: 1) To try to break into the game industry (it would be one hell of a resume if I ever finish it) 2) For fun
So yeah, it's entirely possible to make a living, and also run an open-source project. Not as the same thing (that's possible too), but separately.
Sorry, I still think of the Illustrious as a carrier. And the Brits do have a carrier in production. What with their significantly longer experience running a major navy, I'm willing to bet that they'll have much fewer problems than China.
China's Army and Air Force are doing fine, but their Navy is in relatively poor shape. They're good enough to be a threat to anyone invading them, maybe even a threat to the locals, but even the Royal Navy could take them at this point.
They've got one aircraft carrier. One. Not even a full one. They bought an incomplete and stripped Soviet "carrier-cruiser", and are currently finishing and refurbishing it. It's designed to carry a mere 40 aircraft, mostly helicopters. Compare that to the 90 or so carried on the Enterprise or a Nimitz-class. Now, they somewhat compensate by having quite a few more missiles, including some pretty hefty AA, but they're as outclassed as a PDP11 on the TOP500.
Slashdot Mirror
First, it's not like Microsoft tries to hide that Starter is horribly crippled. You bought the Shit version, and now you're complaining that it's shit?
Second, how did you even buy it? From what I can tell, it's only sold to OEMs, primarily in "emerging markets" (I've never even *seen* a Starter copy in the US - every computer I've checked out had Home Premium or Ultimate). So you bought from a cheap-ass vendor, and then complained that it came with the crappy version of Windows, instead of seeing it as a discount on the Microsoft tax.
Selling a crappy product as the cheap version and charging to upgrade is a dick move, but not illegal, and not really even evil. I can actually see it being beneficial in some circumstances (buying a computer with full intent of slapping Linux on it, primarily).
NDAs are everywhere in business. Everywhere. You can't call a company "evil" for using them without diluting the word "evil" itself.
And, while MS does have a huge patent portfolio which is a significant potential threat, I don't actually know of them *using* it the way you describe. They sue other companies, sure, but I have not yet heard of them suing an open-source project for patent violations.
All evidence points to Microsoft no longer being "evil". At worst, maybe jerks, but not evil:
Internet Explorer is following standards about as well as everyone else
Windows is no longer a horrible, bug-ridden mess - the main complaints are "it's too similar to the last one, no need to upgrade" and "they're changing the interface too much AND I DON'T LIKE IT"
The 360 is fairly open, by console standards, even with "official" homebrew via XNA (you need to buy a license, but it's not a $100,000 developer's license)
They've been submitting a lot of code to open-source, using *actual* open-source licenses
Their stuff works well withttp://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/28/142228/microsoft-releases-aspnet-mvc-under-the-apache-license#h virtualization under Linux, and their VM will run Linux (face it, the Old MS would have made it near-impossible to run Windows within Linux)
Now, they're still far from my favorite company, but I for one am willing to reclassify them from "lawful evil" to "lawful neutral".
Note, however, that Nintendo is from a different region of Japan (Kyoto), with a significantly different culture.
Think of the difference between a New York City company, and a Boston company, or perhaps a New Orleans company. It's... something like that.
From what I can tell, Kyoto is much more conservative and traditional, but also more rural and more... relaxed, I suppose. They have a different accent (kansai-ben), which loosely corresponds to either a southern accent, or a boston accent, at least culturally.
There's also the fact that Nintendo is now effectively run by the game developers - Miyamoto is still a Senior Managing Director, and Iwata (the President) worked on Earthbound and Kirby as a programmer. Sony, meanwhile, is run by businessmen, for business.
Brilliant plan.
*ahem* Personally, I've found exploits in the following games:
Army Corps of Hell
Asphalt Injection
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend
Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention
Dream Club Zero Portable
Dungeon Hunter: Alliance
Everybody's Golf 6
F1 2011
Little Deviants
Lord of Apocalypse
Michael Jackson: The Experience
Ridge Racer
Shinobido 2: Tales of the Ninja
Touch My Katamari
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Uncharted: Golden Abyss
Virtua Tennis 4: World Tour Edition
Wipeout 2048
Tales of Innocence R
A-men
Ragnarok Odyssey
Gravity Rush
Sumioni: Demon Arts
FIFA Football
Rayman Origins
ModNation Racers: Road Trip
Lumines Electronic Symphony
Hustle Kings
Escape Plan
Dynasty Warriors Next
Super Stardust Delta
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack
Ben 10: Galactic Racing
Reality Fighters
Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus
MotorStorm: RC
Plants vs. Zombie
Top Darts
MLB 12: The Show
Lego Harry Potter: Years 5–7
Unit 13
Little Busters! Converted Edition
Your move, Sony
Sony goes so far as to require *two* modifiers saying "they're going too far". Just "overzealous" doesn't cut it - they're too overzealous.
I was trying to bring them down to short, one-sentence descriptions. Most injunctions prevent you from talking about them - the unusual thing about super-injunctions is that they specifically say "do not reveal the existence of this to a parliamentarian", due to a principle that court orders cannot affect MPs, so under a normal injunction you could still go to your representative and reveal... whatever it is.
The ASBO issue is more a matter of perspective. From a US view, it's crazy - a judge can essentially make a law saying "person X cannot do Y", and bam! it's effectively a law. It's not actually all that crazy, and it probably isn't misused all that often, but the US view is that judges only interpret law - they decide if a crime was committed, and apply the routine punishment. Even at the highest level, it's a big deal when they do something besides guilty/innocent and how long in jail.
That's true, but there's also another bit:
In the UK, the courts have far, far more power than courts in the US. Stuff like super-injunctions ("you are not allowed to tell a member of parliament about this injunction") or ASBOs ("judges can now basically make up laws and apply them to a case") would never fly in the US - the legislature and executive branches would knock them down faster than you can say "constitutional crisis".
Basically, in the US system of checks and balances, the judiciary has no way to go on the offensive. They can block laws and actions, after they've already been passed, but that's about it. In the UK, the courts can actually be proactive instead of just reacting to what the rest of the "government" (US-sense) does.
There's probably a historic reason for the difference, but I'm not enough of a historian to know exactly what it is.
Then they'll be able to fail *twice* as epically!
Failure, of course, being their core competency.
I know Brutal Killingspree. Helped me plant a vegetable garden once. Great with kids. Hell of a nice guy.
That has happened before, but they usually have it fixed within hours.
Given that it's been hours since it was posted on /. and it still seems to be up, it seems more likely that this is deliberate.
So I'll now reiterate what I say whenever I'm roped into watching a sports match:
Who's playing, who's winning, and who do we want to win?
In other words, what do the two factions stand for, which one is winning, and which one will result in a more free, fair and just China?
I'd read a few days ago that there was a lot of stuff going around the Chinese blogosphere about a possible coup or revolt going on in Beijing - armored vehicles in the streets, gunshots, and so on. This is second- or third-hand stuff - bloggers->other bloggers->american news - and until this, I figured it was the rough equivalent of the fake death rumors that go around Twitter sometimes. Even combined with the political infighting news, it was "possible but not probable".
But, in light of this, I'm thinking there might actually be something to it. Probably not a full-fledged revolution, but even violent political maneuverings might be a good thing (if the less-evil faction wins).
Maybe we'll get lucky and the HP-UX team will take care of it. I've never used HP-UX myself, but an acquaintance of mine recently turned into an HP-UX fanboy after getting his hands on one of their servers.
Maybe by combining the divisions, they'll get actual programmers working on the printer drivers instead of whatever they have no (I can only assume semi-trained monkeys).
Doom? Try Mario. Yes, under this bill, every Mario game would get a big scary "CAUSES VIOLENCE" sticker on it. Same for Sonic, or Tetris, or Oregon Trail, or Pong. Same for such nightmarish gore-fests as "Junior Classic Games" (a compilation of checkers, backgammon, etc.), "Nicktoons MLB 3D" (a Nickelodeon-themed basketball game), "Imagine Babyz" (a child-care simulator), "Microsoft Flight" (a flight sim), and "Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster " (a Sesame Street game - need I say more?).
The "E" rating means "Everyone". To quote the ESRB, "Titles rated E (Everyone) have content that may be suitable for ages 6 and older. Titles in this category may contain minimal cartoon, fantasy or mild violence and/or infrequent use of mild language."
Apparently they need to amend that to "suitable for ages 6 and older who are not elected officials or otherwise mentally handicapped".
Look up racetrack memory on Wikipedia. If everything goes as planned, it'll actually out-perform SSDs (and even some DRAM) while having density comparable to hard drives.
While I suspect it'll never scale to mass production at consumer prices, maybe I'll be surprised.
I recently did some calculations off Kryder's Law, and happened to keep the results. We would normally expect (based purely off regular continuous improvement) 6TB hard drives as early as next year, and 60TB hard drives around 2018.
So, while this is undoubtedly an improvement, it's not exactly a revolutionary one. WD et al. are probably at similar stages, either with this technology or with some other technique.
Is there any way in which they can make themselves seem any less sympathetic?
They could do exactly what they're doing, except while wearing Nazi uniforms and kicking puppies. Maybe run over some grandmothers on the way to the press conference.
Interesting idea (not sure it's necessarily a *good* idea, but nevertheless worth consideration), but there's one issue I can foresee:
How do you *find* the things?
Planets don't emit light. They don't really do much of anything to draw our attention. It can be difficult to spot planets even in our own solar system - Neptune, far from the smallest planet, is invisible to the naked eye, and Pluto (a dwarf planet, I know) is extremely tricky for the amateur astronomer to observe due to its distance and, more importantly, its dimness.
All our current methods for finding exoplanets depend on measuring the star it orbits - even direct imaging relies on the planets being illuminated by their star.
What I'm wondering is, how do they propose to even find these things?
Sounds more like evidence that the US needs to sit down, shut up, and take a chill pill. Just mellow out.
I'm currently employed at a small local software shop. Closed-source software, but heavily built on open-source frameworks and resources (Linux, Apache, Postgres, PHP, OpenOffice, and so on). That pays the bills.
In my free time, I work on an open-source video game (expect to see a /. story on it as soon as I can kick my artist's ass into gear). Beyond some vague pipe dreams of selling "Limited Edition" boxed sets with all kinds of feelies, I have no plans or expectations of profit. I make it two other reasons:
1) To try to break into the game industry (it would be one hell of a resume if I ever finish it)
2) For fun
So yeah, it's entirely possible to make a living, and also run an open-source project. Not as the same thing (that's possible too), but separately.
and D) Drain your wallet
Sorry, I still think of the Illustrious as a carrier. And the Brits do have a carrier in production. What with their significantly longer experience running a major navy, I'm willing to bet that they'll have much fewer problems than China.
China's Army and Air Force are doing fine, but their Navy is in relatively poor shape. They're good enough to be a threat to anyone invading them, maybe even a threat to the locals, but even the Royal Navy could take them at this point.
They've got one aircraft carrier. One. Not even a full one. They bought an incomplete and stripped Soviet "carrier-cruiser", and are currently finishing and refurbishing it. It's designed to carry a mere 40 aircraft, mostly helicopters. Compare that to the 90 or so carried on the Enterprise or a Nimitz-class. Now, they somewhat compensate by having quite a few more missiles, including some pretty hefty AA, but they're as outclassed as a PDP11 on the TOP500.