But this is Slashdot, where the motto is "Blame Bush!"
Yeah, there are skeletons in their closet that go all the way back to when Bush senior was the director. To be fair, it goes back further than that. In fact, it was a scandal that led to his appointment to the post.
But he (Bush Senior) is the one who "privatized" the agency. He had learned some valuable lessons on how to not get caught, and how to get away with it if you do.
"...one must honestly be impressed with what they've managed to accomplish. Making computing ubiquitous, and easy to understand-- these aren't things to be taken lightly...."
MS didn't cause those things to happen. They've just been along for the ride. It was cheap hardware that made computers ubiquitous. It was IBM that made the PC the defacto standard microcomputer and, at the same time, turned a smalltime software house into a malevolent behemoth. I'll give MS some points for ease of use, but no more so than some other environments.
Why does clueless sarcasm get modded insightful? The article doesn't say that this is outrageous. It just says what they're doing and why they're doing it. fireboy is trolling.
"Its a big business conspiracy to become an uncompetitive monopoly."
It sounds like you're being facetious, but you must realize that this has happens all the time.
"Just like GM, Ford and Dodge have a monopoly on U.S. Produced cars, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have a complete monopoly on IM services. Just look at how much they charge for their monopoly service!"
When someone buys a Ford, there's nothing preventing his brother from buying a GM. The two cars are not expected to interoperate. Communications devices need to interoperate. The telephone, TV and radio industries each went through a similar immature phase.
"While we're breaking down the IM monopoly, we should also tear drop the fruit monopoly that all those grocery stores have,"
Wow. You're not even on a tangent to the subject of the article.
"This guy is posing his rant in order to generate interest in his company to better secure his job. We should make every car part interoperable between manufacturers, and make every TV the same size so that everyone sees the same picture. I'm sure it won't stifle development."
No, you are the one who's ranting. Your car and fruit metaphors are absurd. I'll use the TV one though and say that it's not important that they all have interchangeable parts, but it's important that they can receive a standardized signal. As for stifling development, they're doing that now by not allowing external messaging.
Techzone and/. both do the community a service by speaking out in favor of open protocols.
"What's the very worst that can happen if the Internet goes down?"
For the sake of argument, let's assume that it wouldn't cost any lives. It could easily cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. This is where logic breaks down for most people. They are unwilling to equate lives to dollars. But lives *are* dollars, and dollars *are* lives. That's the whole purpose of money, to serve as a paper representation of the everything a person needs and can hope to achieve in his life. Dollars buy medicine, food, shelter and clothing. Look at society as a single organism and ask yourself whether it would be better off losing a few fingers, or dying slowly of malnutrition.
9/11 was preventable. We got pwned by leaving the cockpit doors open even though it was "common" knowledge that the most effective way to thwart hijackings was to NEVER let the bad guys take control of the airplane. If they can manage to crash it, or kill every passenger, so be it. El Al figured this out in the 70's, yet the FAA was too fucking stupid to pay attention.
Similarly, the Bush administration ignored the valuable information it received from Richard Clarke and even their own Condoleezza Rice. Their motives are unknown, but it's worth considering that maybe they wanted a war from the beginning. The cost can be measured in the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.
Hurricane Katrina was an act of nature. Maybe it was a side effect of intelligent design, but that doesn't matter. The lesson is that valuable information was ignored. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that category 3 levees won't hold a category 5 storm. A stomping wonder horse could have saved more lives than the horse judge BushCo put in charge of FEMA.
Cybersecurity is nothing to joke about, yet the one company which has been responsible for the most damage has already been given a walk for other serious crimes. This government will do nothing to make them act responsibly. MS isn't the only one, but they are the prime example. Banks are another obvious concern, but I don't think the Feds will keep them in control now any more than they did during the S&L scandal of the 80's. We shouldn't be surprised. Bush is a family man, and his family has historically put their own interests above those of the USA.
"as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer."
Up Your Asteroid Mission to Uranus A Star is Porn Rock-It Ship Moondingo The Legend of Victor Thrust Rock-It Ship 2 - Re-entry Challenger: O-Ring Blowout (sorry) Roving Luna: How to Get Your Rocks Off Snow Blow and the Seven White Dwarves
/. is a journaled website. We can't scratch your previous post. Years from now you will be able to come back and show your grandchildren how silly you were.
"they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating"
The Circuit City DIVX fiasco proved that you're wrong. There was no chance that the studios would leave billions of dollars on the table just to spite the pirates.
MS is like the Titanic. They are unsinkable I tell you, unsinkable. They need not correct course or reduce speed to avoid obstacles. Their sheer weight will carry them through.
Normal people doesn't know/doesn't care about speelling or grammer too/either, but normal people cares about money and not giving it over to the Borg guys. So places that gots lots of intelligint people that school at Harvid and Emitee makes the government stick the Micosoft EULA right up the Borg's shitshoot just like with the english teabaggers.
"We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded, so it was impossible for us to address the issue," [Redhat's] Mr McLaren says.
There was a tv documentary about this several years ago that claimed that "Could you take me off the call list?" is not binding, but "Put me on your do-not-call list" is.
How does that seem reasonable? What's wrong with a policy of paying for what you use?
For that matter, what exactly is tivo providing for this monthly/6-month-minimum service fee? Listings. Listings for what? Listings for programming that you pay for (anything other than OTA broadcast) and that the provider has an incentive for you to know about.
Fuck Tivo and their broken business model. I don't care that it does run on Linux, so does Mythtv. I'll stick with that.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that, some variation of the Chewbacca defense? Innocent by reason of everyone thinking he's guilty. Brilliant.
But this is Slashdot, where the motto is "Blame Bush!"
Yeah, there are skeletons in their closet that go all the way back to when Bush senior was the director. To be fair, it goes back further than that. In fact, it was a scandal that led to his appointment to the post.
But he (Bush Senior) is the one who "privatized" the agency. He had learned some valuable lessons on how to not get caught, and how to get away with it if you do.
"...one must honestly be impressed with what they've managed to accomplish. Making computing ubiquitous, and easy to understand-- these aren't things to be taken lightly...."
MS didn't cause those things to happen. They've just been along for the ride. It was cheap hardware that made computers ubiquitous. It was IBM that made the PC the defacto standard microcomputer and, at the same time, turned a smalltime software house into a malevolent behemoth. I'll give MS some points for ease of use, but no more so than some other environments.
Notation Polish Reverse reading in to help seems.
I dunno, but Bubba's gonna be filling Ralsky's outbox.
Why does clueless sarcasm get modded insightful? The article doesn't say that this is outrageous. It just says what they're doing and why they're doing it. fireboy is trolling.
"Its a big business conspiracy to become an uncompetitive monopoly."
/. both do the community a service by speaking out in favor of open protocols.
It sounds like you're being facetious, but you must realize that this has happens all the time.
"Just like GM, Ford and Dodge have a monopoly on U.S. Produced cars, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have a complete monopoly on IM services. Just look at how much they charge for their monopoly service!"
When someone buys a Ford, there's nothing preventing his brother from buying a GM. The two cars are not expected to interoperate. Communications devices need to interoperate. The telephone, TV and radio industries each went through a similar immature phase.
"While we're breaking down the IM monopoly, we should also tear drop the fruit monopoly that all those grocery stores have,"
Wow. You're not even on a tangent to the subject of the article.
"This guy is posing his rant in order to generate interest in his company to better secure his job. We should make every car part interoperable between manufacturers, and make every TV the same size so that everyone sees the same picture. I'm sure it won't stifle development."
No, you are the one who's ranting. Your car and fruit metaphors are absurd. I'll use the TV one though and say that it's not important that they all have interchangeable parts, but it's important that they can receive a standardized signal. As for stifling development, they're doing that now by not allowing external messaging.
Techzone and
"What's the very worst that can happen if the Internet goes down?"
For the sake of argument, let's assume that it wouldn't cost any lives. It could easily cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. This is where logic breaks down for most people. They are unwilling to equate lives to dollars. But lives *are* dollars, and dollars *are* lives. That's the whole purpose of money, to serve as a paper representation of the everything a person needs and can hope to achieve in his life. Dollars buy medicine, food, shelter and clothing. Look at society as a single organism and ask yourself whether it would be better off losing a few fingers, or dying slowly of malnutrition.
9/11 was preventable. We got pwned by leaving the cockpit doors open even though it was "common" knowledge that the most effective way to thwart hijackings was to NEVER let the bad guys take control of the airplane. If they can manage to crash it, or kill every passenger, so be it. El Al figured this out in the 70's, yet the FAA was too fucking stupid to pay attention.
Similarly, the Bush administration ignored the valuable information it received from Richard Clarke and even their own Condoleezza Rice. Their motives are unknown, but it's worth considering that maybe they wanted a war from the beginning. The cost can be measured in the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.
Hurricane Katrina was an act of nature. Maybe it was a side effect of intelligent design, but that doesn't matter. The lesson is that valuable information was ignored. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that category 3 levees won't hold a category 5 storm. A stomping wonder horse could have saved more lives than the horse judge BushCo put in charge of FEMA.
Cybersecurity is nothing to joke about, yet the one company which has been responsible for the most damage has already been given a walk for other serious crimes. This government will do nothing to make them act responsibly. MS isn't the only one, but they are the prime example. Banks are another obvious concern, but I don't think the Feds will keep them in control now any more than they did during the S&L scandal of the 80's. We shouldn't be surprised. Bush is a family man, and his family has historically put their own interests above those of the USA.
"as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer."
Up Your Asteroid
Mission to Uranus
A Star is Porn
Rock-It Ship
Moondingo
The Legend of Victor Thrust
Rock-It Ship 2 - Re-entry
Challenger: O-Ring Blowout (sorry)
Roving Luna: How to Get Your Rocks Off
Snow Blow and the Seven White Dwarves
Or RoboCarp.
Let's all try to stop using the term "copy protection". It's "copy prevention".
/. is a journaled website. We can't scratch your previous post. Years from now you will be able to come back and show your grandchildren how silly you were.
"they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating"
The Circuit City DIVX fiasco proved that you're wrong. There was no chance that the studios would leave billions of dollars on the table just to spite the pirates.
It seems to me that regenerative braking and very-low-speed operation are the only compelling arguments for hybrids.
Wide-range transmissions and precise engine controls already do a good job of maximizing joules/gallon throughout most of the performance envelope.
So what about fitting motor/generators to cargo trailers for use in hilly areas?
MS is like the Titanic. They are unsinkable I tell you, unsinkable. They need not correct course or reduce speed to avoid obstacles. Their sheer weight will carry them through.
Full steam ahead!
Normal people doesn't know/doesn't care about speelling or grammer too/either, but normal people cares about money and not giving it over to the Borg guys. So places that gots lots of intelligint people that school at Harvid and Emitee makes the government stick the Micosoft EULA right up the Borg's shitshoot just like with the english teabaggers.
"If the FBI can't spy on every single US resident 24/7, how can they be sure we're not all terrorists?"
OMG, the calls are coming from inside the White House.
Lemme guess. The programs were really slick but tended to freeze.
You fail statistics. Half the people are below the median.
"Maybe he'd even post some of the core dumps."
I doubt that. From the article:
"We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded, so it was impossible for us to address the issue," [Redhat's] Mr McLaren says.
"hamstrung by political agendas"
s/political/religious/
There was a tv documentary about this several years ago that claimed that "Could you take me off the call list?" is not binding, but "Put me on your do-not-call list" is.
"nearly 1400"
Actually, it was only about 700. Not it wasn't! Yes it was!!
"a penalty for people who cancel early"
How does that seem reasonable? What's wrong with a policy of paying for what you use?
For that matter, what exactly is tivo providing for this monthly/6-month-minimum service fee? Listings. Listings for what? Listings for programming that you pay for (anything other than OTA broadcast) and that the provider has an incentive for you to know about.
Fuck Tivo and their broken business model. I don't care that it does run on Linux, so does Mythtv. I'll stick with that.