Edmund Scientific has Moon Blob Gel which looks just as cool as these squirt guns. And don't forget, they also have fresnel lenses so you can melt concrete!
I seem to remember this company called Zoooom back in the 1980s that was all the rage on Wall Street. It ended up being a front for some big organized crime scam.
They had big press releases, got written up favorably by everyone. Then they got busted and a few folks went to jail.
What really really really bothers me about this is if this LinuxOne outfit pulls a Zooooom (see - I still can't remember how many o's are in the name!) I have a horrid feeling that it is going to come back to haunt all of Linux - not just the investors that get screwed.
I almost feel like it is an essay answer on one of my university finals! Ack!
Anyway, I think that in some cases the judges have a very hard time grasping the situation - the etoy case is a perfect example. If there is nothing as lame brained as this in the world, I don't know what can possibly be.
But, on the other hand, what did the etoy lawyers do? From what I can tell - not much. I don't think they really had a clue what was going on, else the case never would have gotten this far.
Look at the lawyers for Microsoft in the current battle - yes they are loosing - but they are not the ones running around spouting marketing jargon at every chance. MS is doing that themselves. And Judge Jackson seems pretty tech savvy.
But, idiocy in the justice system does not even start with tech stuff - think back to some of the really boneheaded cases that have come up. The CDA was not a tech case, and the judge there tossed it. The lady who spilled coffee on her lap - that was a boneheaded justice system there.
But, if I was going to start pointing fingers and waving them about, then yes, I think there is a problem with the justice system when it comes to laws, and I do not think that it has to do with the speed of laws being made and then outdated. I think it has more to do with the age of the people doing this stuff. They don't have a firm grasp on the clue stick. I don't think I would even want to try to explain to an 80 year old guy how to use a computer, which I think is a lot of what goes on in some of these tech cases when the judge is trying to learn the tech stuff. I mean think about it. Would you want to be the guy to teach Judge Woppner to use the fsck command?
I totally disagree with Kurtz's article because of one main thing - the difference between ignorance and stupidity.
For those of you who are ignorant on the subject, ignorance is that you do not know something because you never learned it. Stupidity is that you did learn it but for some reason you decided not to pay any attention to the subject.
There is also a difference between doing something silly and pulling the most boneheaded stunt in human history. Case in point - someone posted here about a pager battery being in backwards and something about a typo in a line of code. Those are silly. You are looking for things that SHOULD be broken because you just know that everything else is right... right? I have done it, you have done it, everyone has. Hell, I wasted two hours one night trying to figure out why a circuit I built was clobbering the input signal instead of passing it through. Turns out I grabbed the wrong type of transistor. I should have known better, but because I was not paying 100% attention to what I was doing I screwed it up. I put the proper one in and everything started working great.
This is no excuse however, for people who are so fscking dense that they have to have flash cards held up prompting them for everytime they need to take a breath. I am not talking about people who have real problems because of brain trauma, illnesses such as Alzheimer's, or anything like that. I am talking about idiot fscking morons.
A perfect example is this lady who I used to work with. She was 63 at the time. One day I am at my desk with my head deep in some code and my phone rings. She is screaming and hollering for me to get downstairs because of this weird animal. I thought a snake or something had crawled into the building - which had happened a few years before. Instead, she wants me to see these animals out on our front porch. She had nooooo idea what these animals were. She said they were reallly spooky....
What were the animals? They were ducks! I am sorry, but I have yet to know anyone who can go throught 63 years of life and not know what a duck is. Worse yet, she had never heard of a duck before. Pardon me? Ugh....
Everything is running smooth as silk here. The check engine light on my car kicked in about 10:15, but that is because I have a clogged fuel filter I think. Yuck.
One funny thing did happen though... on our ham radio emergency net the guy up at the Independence, MO police station had a bit of a scare. At precisely 12:00am the circuit breaker he was on popped. Guess it could not handle the load from the coffee pot, a computer, and a mobile rig.
I was hoping that the power would at least go out for an hour or so.. would be nice to see the stars without any light pollution.
Last year I ordered some stuff from etoys.com - this was way before their idiocy. But, a year later and I am STILL waiting on them to deliver one of the toys.
This year I did not use them at all, for the obvious reason, but I would not have used them anyway because of the crappy job they did last year.
edmundscientific.com:
Most excellent job. One of the things I ordered was back ordered. However, the item was shipped in plenty of time for Christmas day. Now, if I can get people to order my stuff from them next year, maybe I will finally get one of those lenses so I can melt concrete...
bikeworld.com
Only ordered one thing from them, but they had it to me the next day - and I even ordered it after the fedex cutoff time. Very cool.
netmarket.com
Pretty horrid. I did get the stuff in plenty of time to wrap, but it took them well over a week to get it to me. Not sure that I will buy from them next year for that reason.
knifeoutlet.com
Excellent place. Fastest shipper of the bunch. Not sure I should have bought cooking knives for my dad for Christmas though... he used one of them to cut something and immediately sliced his finger open.:)
Now, where the hell are people getting this "GL says not until x number of players" thing? When all this Star Wars on DVD stuff started way back when, it was "GL and SS are not releasing stuff until there are one million players!" Then it was two million. Then five million. Now it is ten million? My guess is that in a month and a half the number will be raised to 15 million.
In other words, the rumors have been bunk so far, and until there is a press release posted by Fox on their website, they will continue to be bunk.
Ever since DVD has come out, some "person in the know" on USENET has popped up and said "Star Wars in three months!" Then they go on and on about "a warehouse full of boxes" or "their dear, dear friend at Skywalker Ranch said it was so" or some other bunk.
Every time they have said it, it ain't true. I will bet all 51 of my karma points that it ain't true this time either.
Scope it out... they have a patent pending on their "spiral cleaning path." Sorry dudes, but I think this is yet another stupid patent idea. Patently obvious and been done before.
Here is a page at JPL about what starts to happen since the signal is not being heard.
They are still trying to contact the lander on X-Band, but there is still a UHF radio on board and there is still the matter of redundant radios, plus the little matter that the lander will start swapping out it's own components after six days of not getting commands from Earth. There is still a long way to go before one can start being worried.
Very good point! Granted, in CFL, the guys spent a lot of time redrawing a schematic, then drawing it again and making a religious artifact out of it. They had no clue whatsoever of what it was they were copying. They were just doing it.
I think there is always going to be a type of rosetta stone out there. For example, we have dictionaries, and most of them have the history of whatever word it is, which translates to French, Latin, German, etc. So it may take a while, but it could still be figured out. Same with CFL - if they ran across the "Holy Parts Guide" I bet they could figure that out as well. Even two or three thousand years after CFL happened, someone is probably going to discover electricity and start building circuits and someone along the way might say, "Wow! This religious text matches my radio circuit!"
But, all this is quite high on the woe and intrigue meter. I play around a lot with old audio recordings. How does one make sure that the recording will exist way down the road? I have old reel to reel tapes and those were bastards to get converted because I did not have a reel to reel tape deck. Technology has pretty much passed it by. It does not matter if it is digital or analog - if there are no machines around to play it on, it can't be played.
Currently NPR runs a segment on Friday afternoon called "Lost and Found Sound" - they have played lots of things that were recorded back in the 1950s - usually stuff from someones grandmother - but the recordings were made on paper records. That stuff was and is lost to the ages every day. Having the original is good, but it is always good to have other copies of it too. Digital copies just let you send multi-generational versions all over without degradation (provided of course you use lossless methods).
I don't think we are going to see digital copies of actual books until the Holodeck becomes reality - or copies good enough that we can kind of relax some instead of worrying about the originals.
But, back to digital in recordings - I would not trust just one copy. If you make many copies and spread them around all the better. They would all be identical. Say you made 1000 CDs and 100 years from now you want to read them. Even if only 10 of them survived, chances are going to be pretty good that you will be able to reconstruct the data that was on them. And if you got really stingy and said "every 10 years they must have new copies made of them", then you would be even better off. Those copies 10 years from now would contain the same data that you wrote today.
I know, we all love to stamp our feet and jump up and down and say things like we are all saying here. I am as guilty of this as the next guy. But let's think about some things here...
Way back when CD Audio came out. It was cool. However, you could no more make a CD than you could to press your own album. If you wanted to copy it you used crappy analog audio tape and did it that way.
Then along come the CD-ROM drives and the CD-writeables. And minidisc and DAT. And the recording industry comes up with SCMS which is so easy to crack it is not even funny. Actually there is not even anything to crack - you change two bits on the bit stream and everything is cool.
Next we had MP3 show up. The recording industry again comes up with all these protection methods. None of them lasted. That Microsoft thing lasted what, a day?
DVD is really no different here. It fell and fell fast once MoRE figured it out. Someone else will figure out DVD-Audio. And someone else is gonna figure out whatever other formats show up. They do it for the Playstation by putting in modchips, and I remember a long long time ago in my Atari 800 days there being an addon for the floppy drive to let it write bad tracks so backup copies could be made of the commercial software.
Some little namby-pamby encryption scheme will not stand the test of time. No way, no how. Copy protection is a total joke. So quit worrying.
Same also goes for when all the planets lined up or that one kook who was predicting earthquakes based on "tidal forces".
It totally amazes me how time after time people get in a panic over something, nothing happens, they go about their lives, and then turn right around and get in a panic over the next thing to come along.
Any more I just have fun with these people and make Y2K out to be something just really more horrible than Art Bell and his cronies can come up with. I tell people to make sure their toaster is Y2K compliant or something silly like that. It is amazing how many of them are worried about crap like this - and it is foolish crap too.
I bought it a few weeks ago and although I have not really gotten into the nitty gritty of doing anything with it yet, I think it is probably one of the best books I own.
One thing I was really surprised with was that the authors did not waste the reader's time with explaining every stinking line of code. They show you the example and then let you go do it. I like that.
I think they treat the whole thing like "Okay, so you want to program in PERL? Here we go then!" and off ya run. I can't think of any other books that treat programming this way.
I was sitting here thinking about all this. Just yesterday we got to see the story about the book seller reading everyone's email to find out what they were saying to Amazon.com. Today it is this. Hell, it has not even been a whole year since all the DIVX sites started popping up all over the place.
It is for these reasons I am grateful that Slashdot exists. It is the net.community's way of keeping the bullshit level from the money grubbers to a minimum.
Say that such and such a program comes out in a multiplatform CD. I would think that for the most part everyone is is buying for one platform - but what would tell them for sure? Well, you have feedback cards, but if you are like me you never send them in because all they are is a way to get you on their mailing list. What is another way?
Simple. Call them up with an install question. Even if it is something silly like "I can't find the README file for Linux" or "I bought this game to run under linux - what is this directory marked 'win9x'?" Just a simple easy to answer question.
Course, they would think "gosh, these linux guys are dense!", so maybe it is not a good idea after all.
Microsoft worried about security risks? I don't think so. History has already proven that. If it was not for everyone screaming about stuff, nothing would ever get done.
I do find it quite funny about how AOL is putting an end to this silly war though. MS kept exploiting AOL stuff - now AOL exploits a hole in Windows. Someone has egg on their face and I don't think it is Steve Case....
Okay, I sent CU my comments. Here they are if anyone is interested:
Thank you for your article about e-commerce. It was very insightful and helpful!
However, there is a glaring problem with it. In the article, you mention that consumers should look for the Trust-e symbol.
Based on Trust-e's track record, consumers should do nothing of the sort. They should instead chuckle and giggle at the web site operators who paid them money for the symbol. The symbol does not even hold as much clout as the Better Homes and Gardens symbol which, if I remember correctly, your organization had fun with about 10 years ago in the pages of CR.
Here are two links to articles which are currently appearing on Slashdot.org:
I could point you towards more articles, however I think your network would get overloaded.:)
At any rate, I hope you will find these two articles informative and will be moved towards changing the article to remove the Trust-e comment from it. I think to have it there otherwise just leads consumers who do value their privacy into a dark and murky world of actually having it invaded.
Over on the Consumer Reports site they are running a thing about e-commerce. Well, one of the things they mention is that the consumers should be looking for the trust-e logo. Apparently they are under the mistaken assumption that Trust-e means anything.
I have been wanting to write them a letter as soon as I read this small article, but apparently only members of the CR website can send them email - otherwise you have to send them snail mail.
Now, this leads me to a question - a few months ago someplace somewhere someone put up a note or newsitem or something that talked about somebody and their policy on their website. The trust-e logo was showing up on www.thewebsite.com but they were violating the privacy over on blah.thewebsite.com. Trust-e's response, if I remember correctly was "well, www.thewebsite.com is the site that is licensed, so we don't care about blah.thewebsite.com" or something to that effect. Now I can't find this story or whatever it was. Anyone elese remember this or did I dream it?
Shack comes from them being a ham radio store. See, when a ham radio operator is talking about his station, he calls it his ham shack. Radio Shack sold lots of ham radio stuff a looong time ago, but they also had cool things like TV kits, stereo receiver kits, etc. So, they just called it Radio Shack. When Tandy bought them in the 1960s (70s?) they kept the name because the Radio Shack name was quite popular with hams and kit builders in those days.
I used to work at "the shack" and was always amazed at the boneheaded things they would come up with. First was DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) which lasted about as long as the VIS (Video Information System - roughly a 286 with a CD and some game controllers running Windows 2.x). Both failed miserably. The only thing RS has ever had in their stores the past few years that did anything was Sprint. They don't have a single thing (except parts - and not a whole lot of those any more) that really excites me in their catalog. I can run down to Best Buy, the higher end AV store, or the local ham radio store and get much better stuff in the long run.
I guess what I am getting to is this - just because it is Radio Shack and their 6000+ stores does not make this a good deal for either party. RS is becomming more and more of a K-mart/TG&Y like place. You ain't gonna find the top quality stuff there, and everybody knows it. If MS wants to be associated with that image, more power to them.
Now, this thing says all these politicos and corp types are all fired up in supporting this, and they give a lot of reasons why - but where are the reasons from the consumer groups and the White House?
Yes, I think digital signatures rule also - but before I run and call my congressman, I want to know what reasons the opponents are giving - just having sound bytes is not enough.
In other words, this news story absolutely blows chunks...
Slashdot Mirror
Edmund Scientific has Moon Blob Gel which looks just as cool as these squirt guns. And don't forget, they also have fresnel lenses so you can melt concrete!
I just love being guilty until proven innocent....
So, I can't buy chemistry lab equipment because I might make drugs....
I can't buy small video cameras because I might put them in a clock....
I can't watch DVDs on Linux because I might make copies....
I can't duplicate a digital audio tape I made of my late grandmother because I might copy N*SYNC's latest album....
I seem to remember this company called Zoooom back in the 1980s that was all the rage on Wall Street. It ended up being a front for some big organized crime scam.
They had big press releases, got written up favorably by everyone. Then they got busted and a few folks went to jail.
What really really really bothers me about this is if this LinuxOne outfit pulls a Zooooom (see - I still can't remember how many o's are in the name!) I have a horrid feeling that it is going to come back to haunt all of Linux - not just the investors that get screwed.
I almost feel like it is an essay answer on one of my university finals! Ack!
Anyway, I think that in some cases the judges have a very hard time grasping the situation - the etoy case is a perfect example. If there is nothing as lame brained as this in the world, I don't know what can possibly be.
But, on the other hand, what did the etoy lawyers do? From what I can tell - not much. I don't think they really had a clue what was going on, else the case never would have gotten this far.
Look at the lawyers for Microsoft in the current battle - yes they are loosing - but they are not the ones running around spouting marketing jargon at every chance. MS is doing that themselves. And Judge Jackson seems pretty tech savvy.
But, idiocy in the justice system does not even start with tech stuff - think back to some of the really boneheaded cases that have come up. The CDA was not a tech case, and the judge there tossed it. The lady who spilled coffee on her lap - that was a boneheaded justice system there.
But, if I was going to start pointing fingers and waving them about, then yes, I think there is a problem with the justice system when it comes to laws, and I do not think that it has to do with the speed of laws being made and then outdated. I think it has more to do with the age of the people doing this stuff. They don't have a firm grasp on the clue stick. I don't think I would even want to try to explain to an 80 year old guy how to use a computer, which I think is a lot of what goes on in some of these tech cases when the judge is trying to learn the tech stuff. I mean think about it. Would you want to be the guy to teach Judge Woppner to use the fsck command?
I totally disagree with Kurtz's article because of one main thing - the difference between ignorance and stupidity.
For those of you who are ignorant on the subject, ignorance is that you do not know something because you never learned it. Stupidity is that you did learn it but for some reason you decided not to pay any attention to the subject.
There is also a difference between doing something silly and pulling the most boneheaded stunt in human history. Case in point - someone posted here about a pager battery being in backwards and something about a typo in a line of code. Those are silly. You are looking for things that SHOULD be broken because you just know that everything else is right... right? I have done it, you have done it, everyone has. Hell, I wasted two hours one night trying to figure out why a circuit I built was clobbering the input signal instead of passing it through. Turns out I grabbed the wrong type of transistor. I should have known better, but because I was not paying 100% attention to what I was doing I screwed it up. I put the proper one in and everything started working great.
This is no excuse however, for people who are so fscking dense that they have to have flash cards held up prompting them for everytime they need to take a breath. I am not talking about people who have real problems because of brain trauma, illnesses such as Alzheimer's, or anything like that. I am talking about idiot fscking morons.
A perfect example is this lady who I used to work with. She was 63 at the time. One day I am at my desk with my head deep in some code and my phone rings. She is screaming and hollering for me to get downstairs because of this weird animal. I thought a snake or something had crawled into the building - which had happened a few years before. Instead, she wants me to see these animals out on our front porch. She had nooooo idea what these animals were. She said they were reallly spooky....
What were the animals? They were ducks! I am sorry, but I have yet to know anyone who can go throught 63 years of life and not know what a duck is. Worse yet, she had never heard of a duck before. Pardon me? Ugh....
Everything is running smooth as silk here. The check engine light on my car kicked in about 10:15, but that is because I have a clogged fuel filter I think. Yuck.
One funny thing did happen though... on our ham radio emergency net the guy up at the Independence, MO police station had a bit of a scare. At precisely 12:00am the circuit breaker he was on popped. Guess it could not handle the load from the coffee pot, a computer, and a mobile rig.
I was hoping that the power would at least go out for an hour or so.. would be nice to see the stars without any light pollution.
etoys.com:
:)
Last year I ordered some stuff from etoys.com - this was way before their idiocy. But, a year later and I am STILL waiting on them to deliver one of the toys.
This year I did not use them at all, for the obvious reason, but I would not have used them anyway because of the crappy job they did last year.
edmundscientific.com:
Most excellent job. One of the things I ordered was back ordered. However, the item was shipped in plenty of time for Christmas day. Now, if I can get people to order my stuff from them next year, maybe I will finally get one of those lenses so I can melt concrete...
bikeworld.com
Only ordered one thing from them, but they had it to me the next day - and I even ordered it after the fedex cutoff time. Very cool.
netmarket.com
Pretty horrid. I did get the stuff in plenty of time to wrap, but it took them well over a week to get it to me. Not sure that I will buy from them next year for that reason.
knifeoutlet.com
Excellent place. Fastest shipper of the bunch. Not sure I should have bought cooking knives for my dad for Christmas though... he used one of them to cut something and immediately sliced his finger open.
Let's say that this is not a fraud. This is going to be the easiest protest ever on the net.
You don't have to worry about flooding an ip - just stick the word Leonardo in the keywords on all your pages!
After all, what would they do? Sue all of us?
Now, where the hell are people getting this "GL says not until x number of players" thing? When all this Star Wars on DVD stuff started way back when, it was "GL and SS are not releasing stuff until there are one million players!" Then it was two million. Then five million. Now it is ten million? My guess is that in a month and a half the number will be raised to 15 million.
In other words, the rumors have been bunk so far, and until there is a press release posted by Fox on their website, they will continue to be bunk.
Ever since DVD has come out, some "person in the know" on USENET has popped up and said "Star Wars in three months!" Then they go on and on about "a warehouse full of boxes" or "their dear, dear friend at Skywalker Ranch said it was so" or some other bunk.
Every time they have said it, it ain't true. I will bet all 51 of my karma points that it ain't true this time either.
Scope it out... they have a patent pending on their "spiral cleaning path." Sorry dudes, but I think this is yet another stupid patent idea. Patently obvious and been done before.
Here is a page at JPL about what starts to happen since the signal is not being heard.
They are still trying to contact the lander on X-Band, but there is still a UHF radio on board and there is still the matter of redundant radios, plus the little matter that the lander will start swapping out it's own components after six days of not getting commands from Earth. There is still a long way to go before one can start being worried.
Very good point! Granted, in CFL, the guys spent a lot of time redrawing a schematic, then drawing it again and making a religious artifact out of it. They had no clue whatsoever of what it was they were copying. They were just doing it.
I think there is always going to be a type of rosetta stone out there. For example, we have dictionaries, and most of them have the history of whatever word it is, which translates to French, Latin, German, etc. So it may take a while, but it could still be figured out. Same with CFL - if they ran across the "Holy Parts Guide" I bet they could figure that out as well. Even two or three thousand years after CFL happened, someone is probably going to discover electricity and start building circuits and someone along the way might say, "Wow! This religious text matches my radio circuit!"
But, all this is quite high on the woe and intrigue meter. I play around a lot with old audio recordings. How does one make sure that the recording will exist way down the road? I have old reel to reel tapes and those were bastards to get converted because I did not have a reel to reel tape deck. Technology has pretty much passed it by. It does not matter if it is digital or analog - if there are no machines around to play it on, it can't be played.
Currently NPR runs a segment on Friday afternoon called "Lost and Found Sound" - they have played lots of things that were recorded back in the 1950s - usually stuff from someones grandmother - but the recordings were made on paper records. That stuff was and is lost to the ages every day. Having the original is good, but it is always good to have other copies of it too. Digital copies just let you send multi-generational versions all over without degradation (provided of course you use lossless methods).
I don't think we are going to see digital copies of actual books until the Holodeck becomes reality - or copies good enough that we can kind of relax some instead of worrying about the originals.
But, back to digital in recordings - I would not trust just one copy. If you make many copies and spread them around all the better. They would all be identical. Say you made 1000 CDs and 100 years from now you want to read them. Even if only 10 of them survived, chances are going to be pretty good that you will be able to reconstruct the data that was on them. And if you got really stingy and said "every 10 years they must have new copies made of them", then you would be even better off. Those copies 10 years from now would contain the same data that you wrote today.
Just keep making backups every few years.
I know, we all love to stamp our feet and jump up and down and say things like we are all saying here. I am as guilty of this as the next guy. But let's think about some things here...
Way back when CD Audio came out. It was cool. However, you could no more make a CD than you could to press your own album. If you wanted to copy it you used crappy analog audio tape and did it that way.
Then along come the CD-ROM drives and the CD-writeables. And minidisc and DAT. And the recording industry comes up with SCMS which is so easy to crack it is not even funny. Actually there is not even anything to crack - you change two bits on the bit stream and everything is cool.
Next we had MP3 show up. The recording industry again comes up with all these protection methods. None of them lasted. That Microsoft thing lasted what, a day?
DVD is really no different here. It fell and fell fast once MoRE figured it out. Someone else will figure out DVD-Audio. And someone else is gonna figure out whatever other formats show up. They do it for the Playstation by putting in modchips, and I remember a long long time ago in my Atari 800 days there being an addon for the floppy drive to let it write bad tracks so backup copies could be made of the commercial software.
Some little namby-pamby encryption scheme will not stand the test of time. No way, no how. Copy protection is a total joke. So quit worrying.
Same also goes for when all the planets lined up or that one kook who was predicting earthquakes based on "tidal forces".
It totally amazes me how time after time people get in a panic over something, nothing happens, they go about their lives, and then turn right around and get in a panic over the next thing to come along.
Any more I just have fun with these people and make Y2K out to be something just really more horrible than Art Bell and his cronies can come up with. I tell people to make sure their toaster is Y2K compliant or something silly like that. It is amazing how many of them are worried about crap like this - and it is foolish crap too.
I bought it a few weeks ago and although I have not really gotten into the nitty gritty of doing anything with it yet, I think it is probably one of the best books I own.
One thing I was really surprised with was that the authors did not waste the reader's time with explaining every stinking line of code. They show you the example and then let you go do it. I like that.
I think they treat the whole thing like "Okay, so you want to program in PERL? Here we go then!" and off ya run. I can't think of any other books that treat programming this way.
I like that.
I was sitting here thinking about all this. Just yesterday we got to see the story about the book seller reading everyone's email to find out what they were saying to Amazon.com. Today it is this. Hell, it has not even been a whole year since all the DIVX sites started popping up all over the place.
It is for these reasons I am grateful that Slashdot exists. It is the net.community's way of keeping the bullshit level from the money grubbers to a minimum.
Keep it up folks. I think we all appreciate it.
Excellent point, IMO. Another suggestion also...
Say that such and such a program comes out in a multiplatform CD. I would think that for the most part everyone is is buying for one platform - but what would tell them for sure? Well, you have feedback cards, but if you are like me you never send them in because all they are is a way to get you on their mailing list. What is another way?
Simple. Call them up with an install question. Even if it is something silly like "I can't find the README file for Linux" or "I bought this game to run under linux - what is this directory marked 'win9x'?" Just a simple easy to answer question.
Course, they would think "gosh, these linux guys are dense!", so maybe it is not a good idea after all.
Microsoft worried about security risks? I don't think so. History has already proven that. If it was not for everyone screaming about stuff, nothing would ever get done.
I do find it quite funny about how AOL is putting an end to this silly war though. MS kept exploiting AOL stuff - now AOL exploits a hole in Windows. Someone has egg on their face and I don't think it is Steve Case....
Okay, I sent CU my comments. Here they are if anyone is interested:
1 214
4 210&mode=thread
:)
Thank you for your article about e-commerce. It was very insightful and helpful!
However, there is a glaring problem with it. In the article, you mention that consumers should look for the Trust-e symbol.
Based on Trust-e's track record, consumers should do nothing of the sort. They should instead chuckle and giggle at the web site operators who paid them money for the symbol. The symbol does not even hold as much clout as the Better Homes and Gardens symbol which, if I remember correctly, your organization had fun with about 10 years ago in the pages of CR.
Here are two links to articles which are currently appearing on Slashdot.org:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/05/102
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/12/114
I could point you towards more articles, however I think your network would get overloaded.
At any rate, I hope you will find these two articles informative and will be moved towards changing the article to remove the Trust-e comment from it. I think to have it there otherwise just leads consumers who do value their privacy into a dark and murky world of actually having it invaded.
Thank you for your time.
Randy Rathbun
Over on the Consumer Reports site they are running a thing about e-commerce. Well, one of the things they mention is that the consumers should be looking for the trust-e logo. Apparently they are under the mistaken assumption that Trust-e means anything.
I have been wanting to write them a letter as soon as I read this small article, but apparently only members of the CR website can send them email - otherwise you have to send them snail mail.
Now, this leads me to a question - a few months ago someplace somewhere someone put up a note or newsitem or something that talked about somebody and their policy on their website. The trust-e logo was showing up on www.thewebsite.com but they were violating the privacy over on blah.thewebsite.com. Trust-e's response, if I remember correctly was "well, www.thewebsite.com is the site that is licensed, so we don't care about blah.thewebsite.com" or something to that effect. Now I can't find this story or whatever it was. Anyone elese remember this or did I dream it?
Shack comes from them being a ham radio store. See, when a ham radio operator is talking about his station, he calls it his ham shack. Radio Shack sold lots of ham radio stuff a looong time ago, but they also had cool things like TV kits, stereo receiver kits, etc. So, they just called it Radio Shack. When Tandy bought them in the 1960s (70s?) they kept the name because the Radio Shack name was quite popular with hams and kit builders in those days.
I used to work at "the shack" and was always amazed at the boneheaded things they would come up with. First was DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) which lasted about as long as the VIS (Video Information System - roughly a 286 with a CD and some game controllers running Windows 2.x). Both failed miserably. The only thing RS has ever had in their stores the past few years that did anything was Sprint. They don't have a single thing (except parts - and not a whole lot of those any more) that really excites me in their catalog. I can run down to Best Buy, the higher end AV store, or the local ham radio store and get much better stuff in the long run.
I guess what I am getting to is this - just because it is Radio Shack and their 6000+ stores does not make this a good deal for either party. RS is becomming more and more of a K-mart/TG&Y like place. You ain't gonna find the top quality stuff there, and everybody knows it. If MS wants to be associated with that image, more power to them.
I am very disgusted and I find this very ironic, so here is my list of new mottos for Linux in China:
7. Linux will now be called Maonix
6. Linux - the only software we can't pirate!
5. The only thing open about us is our souce code
4. Our operating systems are freer than our people
3. We put the Red in Red Hat
2. Our Linux is not made in prison camps
1. Use Linux - or your family will never see you again!
Now, this thing says all these politicos and corp types are all fired up in supporting this, and they give a lot of reasons why - but where are the reasons from the consumer groups and the White House?
Yes, I think digital signatures rule also - but before I run and call my congressman, I want to know what reasons the opponents are giving - just having sound bytes is not enough.
In other words, this news story absolutely blows chunks...