So the idea is that if you can get lots of people to do something wrong along with you, it becomes OK and you feel better about doing it. Mob rules...?
Gee, you think they might be smart enough to use the advanced technology of triangulation to pick one out of the crowd as an example, follow them until they can easily distinguish them and arrest. If they can tell what's in the stream in a crowd of people the glove will fit, but if we get into encryption...
The trail will end at the people who can best prove that they were continually warning people to maintain good ethics in a wise pre-emptive ass-covering. Be sure to flavor your daily conversations at the watercooler from now on with phrases like
-did you see the game and are you helping to artifically inflate the stock price?
-I have my eye on you, boss...I'm this far from squealing! SQUEALING!!
-wow, I just shredded a whole lot of documents, how about you? Speak into the lapel, please.
-Jenny, could you check to see if I have any earning call meetings this week that I need bogus figures for? I need to know if I have to budget in some Arthur Anderson consultants.
They explain that the shell keeps accumulating matter, but they don't explain scenarios such as what happens after the shell is more massive than what it envelopes. Or if there are limits to how massive the shell could be before it collapses on itself, maybe making a larger gravastar? Sounds like the effects are the same, only we get rid of the idea of white holes and wormholes.
Pride cometh before the fall. With arrogance like that, they're bound to slip up, since they start to think they're golden no matter what they do. The key is whether they'll be rock solid after they finally fix these holes, or if we'll continue to see hole after Microsoftian hole.
You're an idiot. The TiVo has been around for close to a couple of years, if not over that, by now. A lifetime subscription was $200, early on, but lets use the current figure of $250. 25 months = 2.08 years. 25 months x $10/month = $250. You break even at 2.08 years, and consider it free service for the next few after that. I know that I would get considerable more use out of my TiVo and I don't watch all that much TV. Going with the monthly fee is just silly. After paying whatever it is that you paid for the unit, 90% of you are going to have it for over two years...think of that old VCR you still have under the TV. The other 10% are early adopters that buy everything new and get rid of their old units in favor of the newer and larger ones.
Of course, not getting a TiVo at all means you save a bit of money of the bat, but if you can afford the convenience, it's a sweet device.
I suspect they plan on springing a surprise on everyone. The S2 launch is a great time to change the service to being also based on capacity. If that is applied across the board, that would make prices for the S1 units go into freefall. If it's only on S2 units, the S1's become much more desirable. And if things like the tivonet cards will still work and larger drives can be added for the next couple of years without being disabled by new services, then the S1 units will also remain high (and possibly rise) while the S2, most likely hack free, will be less desirable to us and won't have such a great auction market value.
Memory: picked up 768MB SDRAM from Crucial for about $100.
Hard drive: 30GB for $100 months ago.
Case, CDROM, floppy and the rest are practically free.
Even a 19".24mm KDS monitor is about $199.
They're all commodities and we should be able to pick up a new fast game machine for $400 next year. No wonder the computer industry is having trouble making money. They're still following the same price plan from the dot-bomb days. If they slow down on the innovation for just a second, they might be able to swing two quarters with the same pricing and product instead of killing themselves with this single-quarter pricing schedule.
Like most people, you are attacking the symptoms and not the problem.
I see a curtain of fly paper surrounding every computer as a good fix. No more fly shit on monitors. Off to ETrade to find a fly paper manufacturer to invest in!
Adshield.org on WinXX. Lets you pick which sites are filtered so that you can still answer surveys at sites that do them through popups (CNN comes to mind) and still see pages at other sites without the bazillion popups. Sites like CNET tend to do very bad when you block because they seem to have tied everything to 3rd party cookies, but there are other sites to see besides theirs.
Yeah, I can't wait for that long eternal period of insanity, staring at nothingness, thinking of how lucky the dead ones are. For beings that can't figure out what the hell to do on a rainy Sunday, we sure are eager to have a whole lot of them. Of course, it's not like many of us are eager to join back with the universe and disperse ourselves among the worms, trees, and air.
How is a device that costs US$2000 supposed to compete with the GameBoy Advanced? M$ had the right formula when they brought out the XBox to compete with PS2 and N64, but somehow they totally lost it when they thought this TabletPC up. Unless they can shave the cost down to 1/20th of this, no kid is going to even be able to think about getting it. At that price you're talking about something that costs as much as a used car and guess which one they'd rather have. There is a very small market that is going to pay $2000 for a handheld PC, but I don't think it will be enough to carry this to the point where it costs $100-200.
Why is it that no one ever seems to notice how much companies like Sony seem to have their fingers in many pies? Just because M$ seems to be the most obvious doesn't mean they're the most dangerous. Considering all the media and markets that Sony controls, be more afraid of their acquisitions, lest you turn around one day and find that the reason M$ looked so dark was that they were in someone's shadow. I'm starting to associate M$ bashing more and more with folks that complain about Da Gummint (TM) and their frequent UFO abductions.
Studies show biting the hand that feeds you leads to starvation. Somewhere in the great economic chain, you're eating windows
Let's hope that the Navy research gets us a step closer to not burning all that Oxygen and Hydrogen to get to space...
Uh huh. And all the electrical power needed to launch a very large mass with maglev will come from where? Maybe from more efficient burning than shuttle engines, but we will still be burning something somewhere else on the planet to take it there. Solar and wind power just doesn't charge quick enough to gather it quick enough for these sorts of ventures. Yet.
There are still other problems to solve before we get to this step.
``We have identified the issue and have developed a resolution that should be deployed in the next day or two,'' AOL's Andrew Weinstein said. ``To our knowledge, this issue has not affected any users.'' ``We'd encourage any software programmer that discovers a vulnerability to bring it to our attention prior to releasing it,'' Weinstein said.
I'd appreciate it if AOL would get their act together and take some responsibility for writing the piece of crap and its corresponding holes. What ever happened to auditing code? This is just plain ignorance on how to deal with buffer overruns. And probably not a little of Window's holes that the programmers take for granted.
I just don't like that AOL wants to buy time to spin the issue to save their face by releasing notice of the hole and the cure at the same time, but I also realise that half the jerks out there are going to run this little tool to blow a bunch of random machines on the Internet. Why exactly didn't AOL respond to messages over the holidays? Surely they were staffed by some. I guess they'll make sure to check to see if "they've got mail" next time.
The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population.
Quick, what's just 1% of a billion...10 million. How many Internet users in the US alone? 100million? How many Internet users outside the U.S.? Another 100 million? How many retailers are smart enough to attract those 10 million customers by styling their pages in Mandarin?
All the telecomm/hi-tech companies making moves into China know that even that 1% with disposable income are enough motivation. With China's recent admission into the WTO they now have to play by new rules that will plunk embargoes no them at the drop of a hat if they even think they're making too many rugs or charging too much for crops, all while opening those markets more. While in India, also having a very wide disparity between the classes, I saw ads for all sorts of cell phones and other items that were obviously beyond all but the wealthiest Indians, since it is estimated half of New Delhi lives in illegal shanty type housing or which I saw covering large expanses of land. The companies that are charging in there with these goods know that just 1% of that market is worth going for. And with such large population numbers, an extra percent of the market is more than just gravy. It's another 10 million customers.
It will be good to know both, so start loading your browsers with the Chinese language fonts and browse a few sites, even with the idea of "knowing your opponent." Get your Chinese language tapes here and start ripping to MP3 so that everyone will benefit. Americans are good at adapting to these things, so let's not fall down on it now. English may be the language of business, but look at what has happened when we ignored Arabic. It has been predicted that within the next 20 years there will be a conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Could be self-fullfilling, but don't be caught sleeping.
Thirdly, as you said, even if some programmers with less than noble intentions did manage to get employed at Microsoft, the chance that they would be able to intentionally slip in a trojan horse without it being caught in testing are pretty low.
And what happens when you have an al-Qaeda member(s) in the bug-catching end of the team? "Habib, you put in the backdoors and I'll OK them." "Osama will love us". "So will my goat!"
Far out or not, I would be rabidly checking code right now if I were Microsoft. Their stock is going to take a nose dive if enough people believe this.
Take a look at Misterhouse at http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net. There is a screen-scraping system for pulling TV show info from Zap2it.com that works pretty well.
Does anyone with $10/month for a hosted minisite count as able to post "Leahy is really the goatse.cx dude!! Exclusive pictures click here!" or do you have to actually have a registered business? After all, slander is slander, and facts are facts.
The R&D for writing software is not free. Salaries that were paid towards selling a future product are not free. Don't forget to calculate (calculate != pull out of your ass) the figures for that and add it to the cost of CDs. By your argument, Red Hat should be selling their CDs for $.50, which I think we all can admit is not so smart for their bottom line. I've seen copies of Red Hat for $20 on store shelves, so while that is 1/15th the cost of Windows XP Pro, it is still fourty times what you say they should be charging. Even Red Hat has to pay their developers and pay for hardware and equipment they requisitioned.
Does MS win in all this? Of course they do. Some genies cannot be put back in the bottle if the bottle has long since been broken. The alternative? Fine them and wonder where the money disappeared into? This is better.
What could be a step above? Force them to actively support their own product and the computers. That means more jobs for admins. While they're being generous, lets see them provide software for the health industry. How about for international aid organizations? This can be taken pretty far and the anti-MS sentiment runs deep here, so before you go hog wild in flogging them in a blind rage remember that in all of this, Microsoft needs to continue to make money in order to be a viable corporation and it's not a small part of our economy. The death penalty some would ask for them is not appropriate.
This is laughable. Microsoft says they'll give them the hardware and software, which is a great deal. Red Hat will give them just the software; "You figure out how to get your own hardware kids."
You don't understand how far from useful Red Hat's offer is. Every dollar in education is hard earned and hard to replace. Should that money really go towards software that will not provide the learning opportunities that are available for Windows based platforms? Whoever is requisitioning these machines needs to make sure that everything down to 2-button mouse vs 3-button mouse with wheel is properly considered so that every penny is put to something that will be useful. While I advocate Red Hat for server software, I cannot in good faith recommend it as the desktop platform for everyone and certainly will not recommend it for kids to learn on. The introduction of these many thousands of machines into the industry means that someone in the future is going to have to budget some real money to getting more software for them and thus injecting more cash into the economy which it really needs right about now.
It doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft plans to upgrade those machines. The kids are not going to be playing Half-Life or Quake 3. They're going to be using educational software which doesn't require a GeForce card and an Athlon 1800+. This means that whatever they buy will be useful for a longer time without being upgraded. This means that the computers can be cheaper and thus they can get more computers to the kids. Certainly you can argue that Red Hat software is free to get now, so there's nothing magical behind the offer. That's a lot of software, but without the cold cash to buy hardware, these kids, and many around the world for that matter, cannot afford to be smart. By now, we all know what happens in the parts of the world where countries ignore the education of their people and leave them to be ignorants. For the kids that are lucky enough to be getting the computers, the here and now is what is important. I would say that these machines would likely have a 5+ year lifespan and for those kids that is five+ years of exposure to computers that they would not otherwise have. Nothing is perpetual.
If this weren't the punitive solution to the monopoly case against Microsoft, I would tell people to stop knocking Microsoft when they're finally trying to do good. It's just a shame that this is what it took for Microsoft to do something that benificent. Because of the profits that they'll have in five years, it might not be a bad idea to force them to repeat the process in five years. And someone better keep an eye on what they're "charging" for the software since we know that some corporations get a sweet discount on that stuff and these kids deserver no less. They're obviously going to be fined for their monopoly tactics, but what does the government do with that fine? It's nice to see a direct benefit instead of wonder what part of the coffers it disappeared into.
I have an Audrey that I picked up off EBay for $80. With the hacks from the Audrey Hacking site, it has been updated to the latest firmware. Using the pictureframe module from Misterhouse I not only have X10 control of my house accessible from the Audrey, but also as a digital pictureframe when idle. The Audrey also has a high Spouse Acceptibility Factor and looks great when you put three or four around the house. Get the additional supported 3Com 3C19250 USB Ethernet adaptor if you have broadband and it works great as an instant-on fast internet appliance.
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So the idea is that if you can get lots of people to do something wrong along with you, it becomes OK and you feel better about doing it. Mob rules...?
Gee, you think they might be smart enough to use the advanced technology of triangulation to pick one out of the crowd as an example, follow them until they can easily distinguish them and arrest. If they can tell what's in the stream in a crowd of people the glove will fit, but if we get into encryption...
The trail will end at the people who can best prove that they were continually warning people to maintain good ethics in a wise pre-emptive ass-covering. Be sure to flavor your daily conversations at the watercooler from now on with phrases like
-did you see the game and are you helping to artifically inflate the stock price?
-I have my eye on you, boss...I'm this far from squealing! SQUEALING!!
-wow, I just shredded a whole lot of documents, how about you? Speak into the lapel, please.
-Jenny, could you check to see if I have any earning call meetings this week that I need bogus figures for? I need to know if I have to budget in some Arthur Anderson consultants.
They explain that the shell keeps accumulating matter, but they don't explain scenarios such as what happens after the shell is more massive than what it envelopes. Or if there are limits to how massive the shell could be before it collapses on itself, maybe making a larger gravastar? Sounds like the effects are the same, only we get rid of the idea of white holes and wormholes.
Pride cometh before the fall. With arrogance like that, they're bound to slip up, since they start to think they're golden no matter what they do. The key is whether they'll be rock solid after they finally fix these holes, or if we'll continue to see hole after Microsoftian hole.
Pravin Lal is from the future. Where do you think he got it from?
You're an idiot. The TiVo has been around for close to a couple of years, if not over that, by now. A lifetime subscription was $200, early on, but lets use the current figure of $250. 25 months = 2.08 years. 25 months x $10/month = $250. You break even at 2.08 years, and consider it free service for the next few after that. I know that I would get considerable more use out of my TiVo and I don't watch all that much TV. Going with the monthly fee is just silly. After paying whatever it is that you paid for the unit, 90% of you are going to have it for over two years...think of that old VCR you still have under the TV. The other 10% are early adopters that buy everything new and get rid of their old units in favor of the newer and larger ones.
Of course, not getting a TiVo at all means you save a bit of money of the bat, but if you can afford the convenience, it's a sweet device.
I suspect they plan on springing a surprise on everyone. The S2 launch is a great time to change the service to being also based on capacity. If that is applied across the board, that would make prices for the S1 units go into freefall. If it's only on S2 units, the S1's become much more desirable. And if things like the tivonet cards will still work and larger drives can be added for the next couple of years without being disabled by new services, then the S1 units will also remain high (and possibly rise) while the S2, most likely hack free, will be less desirable to us and won't have such a great auction market value.
They're not cheap enough for you *now*?
.24mm KDS monitor is about $199.
Athlon XP is about $140 for something decent.
Soyo mobo to support it is about the same.
Memory: picked up 768MB SDRAM from Crucial for about $100.
Hard drive: 30GB for $100 months ago.
Case, CDROM, floppy and the rest are practically free.
Even a 19"
They're all commodities and we should be able to pick up a new fast game machine for $400 next year. No wonder the computer industry is having trouble making money. They're still following the same price plan from the dot-bomb days. If they slow down on the innovation for just a second, they might be able to swing two quarters with the same pricing and product instead of killing themselves with this single-quarter pricing schedule.
*sigh*
Like most people, you are attacking the symptoms and not the problem.
I see a curtain of fly paper surrounding every computer as a good fix. No more fly shit on monitors. Off to ETrade to find a fly paper manufacturer to invest in!
Adshield.org on WinXX. Lets you pick which sites are filtered so that you can still answer surveys at sites that do them through popups (CNN comes to mind) and still see pages at other sites without the bazillion popups. Sites like CNET tend to do very bad when you block because they seem to have tied everything to 3rd party cookies, but there are other sites to see besides theirs.
Yeah, I can't wait for that long eternal period of insanity, staring at nothingness, thinking of how lucky the dead ones are. For beings that can't figure out what the hell to do on a rainy Sunday, we sure are eager to have a whole lot of them. Of course, it's not like many of us are eager to join back with the universe and disperse ourselves among the worms, trees, and air.
How is a device that costs US$2000 supposed to compete with the GameBoy Advanced? M$ had the right formula when they brought out the XBox to compete with PS2 and N64, but somehow they totally lost it when they thought this TabletPC up. Unless they can shave the cost down to 1/20th of this, no kid is going to even be able to think about getting it. At that price you're talking about something that costs as much as a used car and guess which one they'd rather have. There is a very small market that is going to pay $2000 for a handheld PC, but I don't think it will be enough to carry this to the point where it costs $100-200.
Why is it that no one ever seems to notice how much companies like Sony seem to have their fingers in many pies? Just because M$ seems to be the most obvious doesn't mean they're the most dangerous. Considering all the media and markets that Sony controls, be more afraid of their acquisitions, lest you turn around one day and find that the reason M$ looked so dark was that they were in someone's shadow. I'm starting to associate M$ bashing more and more with folks that complain about Da Gummint (TM) and their frequent UFO abductions.
Studies show biting the hand that feeds you leads to starvation. Somewhere in the great economic chain, you're eating windows
Let's hope that the Navy research gets us a step closer to not burning all that Oxygen and Hydrogen to get to space...
Uh huh. And all the electrical power needed to launch a very large mass with maglev will come from where? Maybe from more efficient burning than shuttle engines, but we will still be burning something somewhere else on the planet to take it there. Solar and wind power just doesn't charge quick enough to gather it quick enough for these sorts of ventures. Yet.
There are still other problems to solve before we get to this step.
``We have identified the issue and have developed a resolution that should be deployed in the next day or two,'' AOL's Andrew Weinstein said. ``To our knowledge, this issue has not affected any users.'' ``We'd encourage any software programmer that discovers a vulnerability to bring it to our attention prior to releasing it,'' Weinstein said.
I'd appreciate it if AOL would get their act together and take some responsibility for writing the piece of crap and its corresponding holes. What ever happened to auditing code? This is just plain ignorance on how to deal with buffer overruns. And probably not a little of Window's holes that the programmers take for granted.
I just don't like that AOL wants to buy time to spin the issue to save their face by releasing notice of the hole and the cure at the same time, but I also realise that half the jerks out there are going to run this little tool to blow a bunch of random machines on the Internet. Why exactly didn't AOL respond to messages over the holidays? Surely they were staffed by some. I guess they'll make sure to check to see if "they've got mail" next time.
The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population.
Quick, what's just 1% of a billion...10 million. How many Internet users in the US alone? 100million? How many Internet users outside the U.S.? Another 100 million? How many retailers are smart enough to attract those 10 million customers by styling their pages in Mandarin?
All the telecomm/hi-tech companies making moves into China know that even that 1% with disposable income are enough motivation. With China's recent admission into the WTO they now have to play by new rules that will plunk embargoes no them at the drop of a hat if they even think they're making too many rugs or charging too much for crops, all while opening those markets more. While in India, also having a very wide disparity between the classes, I saw ads for all sorts of cell phones and other items that were obviously beyond all but the wealthiest Indians, since it is estimated half of New Delhi lives in illegal shanty type housing or which I saw covering large expanses of land. The companies that are charging in there with these goods know that just 1% of that market is worth going for. And with such large population numbers, an extra percent of the market is more than just gravy. It's another 10 million customers.
It will be good to know both, so start loading your browsers with the Chinese language fonts and browse a few sites, even with the idea of "knowing your opponent." Get your Chinese language tapes here and start ripping to MP3 so that everyone will benefit. Americans are good at adapting to these things, so let's not fall down on it now. English may be the language of business, but look at what has happened when we ignored Arabic. It has been predicted that within the next 20 years there will be a conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Could be self-fullfilling, but don't be caught sleeping.
On the other hand, males with extra X's tend towards violent tendencies. Hence, our prison populations are chock full of people with XXY and more.
Thirdly, as you said, even if some programmers with less than noble intentions did manage to get employed at Microsoft, the chance that they would be able to intentionally slip in a trojan horse without it being caught in testing are pretty low.
And what happens when you have an al-Qaeda member(s) in the bug-catching end of the team? "Habib, you put in the backdoors and I'll OK them." "Osama will love us". "So will my goat!"
Far out or not, I would be rabidly checking code right now if I were Microsoft. Their stock is going to take a nose dive if enough people believe this.
Take a look at Misterhouse at http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net. There is a screen-scraping system for pulling TV show info from Zap2it.com that works pretty well.
Does anyone with $10/month for a hosted minisite count as able to post "Leahy is really the goatse.cx dude!! Exclusive pictures click here!" or do you have to actually have a registered business? After all, slander is slander, and facts are facts.
The R&D for writing software is not free. Salaries that were paid towards selling a future product are not free. Don't forget to calculate (calculate != pull out of your ass) the figures for that and add it to the cost of CDs. By your argument, Red Hat should be selling their CDs for $.50, which I think we all can admit is not so smart for their bottom line. I've seen copies of Red Hat for $20 on store shelves, so while that is 1/15th the cost of Windows XP Pro, it is still fourty times what you say they should be charging. Even Red Hat has to pay their developers and pay for hardware and equipment they requisitioned.
Does MS win in all this? Of course they do. Some genies cannot be put back in the bottle if the bottle has long since been broken. The alternative? Fine them and wonder where the money disappeared into? This is better.
What could be a step above? Force them to actively support their own product and the computers. That means more jobs for admins. While they're being generous, lets see them provide software for the health industry. How about for international aid organizations? This can be taken pretty far and the anti-MS sentiment runs deep here, so before you go hog wild in flogging them in a blind rage remember that in all of this, Microsoft needs to continue to make money in order to be a viable corporation and it's not a small part of our economy. The death penalty some would ask for them is not appropriate.
This is laughable. Microsoft says they'll give them the hardware and software, which is a great deal. Red Hat will give them just the software; "You figure out how to get your own hardware kids."
You don't understand how far from useful Red Hat's offer is. Every dollar in education is hard earned and hard to replace. Should that money really go towards software that will not provide the learning opportunities that are available for Windows based platforms? Whoever is requisitioning these machines needs to make sure that everything down to 2-button mouse vs 3-button mouse with wheel is properly considered so that every penny is put to something that will be useful. While I advocate Red Hat for server software, I cannot in good faith recommend it as the desktop platform for everyone and certainly will not recommend it for kids to learn on. The introduction of these many thousands of machines into the industry means that someone in the future is going to have to budget some real money to getting more software for them and thus injecting more cash into the economy which it really needs right about now.
It doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft plans to upgrade those machines. The kids are not going to be playing Half-Life or Quake 3. They're going to be using educational software which doesn't require a GeForce card and an Athlon 1800+. This means that whatever they buy will be useful for a longer time without being upgraded. This means that the computers can be cheaper and thus they can get more computers to the kids. Certainly you can argue that Red Hat software is free to get now, so there's nothing magical behind the offer. That's a lot of software, but without the cold cash to buy hardware, these kids, and many around the world for that matter, cannot afford to be smart. By now, we all know what happens in the parts of the world where countries ignore the education of their people and leave them to be ignorants. For the kids that are lucky enough to be getting the computers, the here and now is what is important. I would say that these machines would likely have a 5+ year lifespan and for those kids that is five+ years of exposure to computers that they would not otherwise have. Nothing is perpetual.
If this weren't the punitive solution to the monopoly case against Microsoft, I would tell people to stop knocking Microsoft when they're finally trying to do good. It's just a shame that this is what it took for Microsoft to do something that benificent. Because of the profits that they'll have in five years, it might not be a bad idea to force them to repeat the process in five years. And someone better keep an eye on what they're "charging" for the software since we know that some corporations get a sweet discount on that stuff and these kids deserver no less. They're obviously going to be fined for their monopoly tactics, but what does the government do with that fine? It's nice to see a direct benefit instead of wonder what part of the coffers it disappeared into.
I have an Audrey that I picked up off EBay for $80. With the hacks from the Audrey Hacking site, it has been updated to the latest firmware. Using the pictureframe module from Misterhouse I not only have X10 control of my house accessible from the Audrey, but also as a digital pictureframe when idle. The Audrey also has a high Spouse Acceptibility Factor and looks great when you put three or four around the house. Get the additional supported 3Com 3C19250 USB Ethernet adaptor if you have broadband and it works great as an instant-on fast internet appliance.