Companies like Apple and Commodore started the desktop revolution. IBM thought that there was a worldwide market for maybe 3 computers.
As a desktop computing company, they never really showed leadership. Yeah, they came out with the PC x86 architecture. But it's a crappy architecture.
IBM thought computing on the desktop was so valueless that they allowed anyone who wanted to to clone the hardware, and many companies were able to do so -- and sell for far less than what IBM was charging for their hardware.
If IBM had wanted to be competitive on the desktop, they would have sold their hardware at a more competitive price, and, if not lock other vendors out, then at least try to control their access to the market through leveraging patents.
IBM cared so much about computing on the desktop that they let some tiny, barely competant company called Microsoft deliver what would become the standard OS for the desktop, DOS, and let them have full control over its development without trying to take a piece of their profits.
DOS sucked. If IBM wanted to compete in the desktop market, they would have developed their own OS that didn't suck. And, while they did come up with OS/2, they did so far too late in the game for it to mean anything, after giving far too much away to MSFT.
They had a good business sense for hulking behemoth mainframes and servers and such, but they've never really been a true player on the desktop, even if Wintel machines are commonly called IBM-compatible PCs. The term is one of pure legacy derivation, really. IBM controls nothing relevant to desktop computing these days.
I haven't been modded up for that comment; I start out with 2 points because I have high karma points.
Anyway, I wouldn't say that I *agree* with all the conspiracy theorists. (I happen to think that they have some valid concerns, but that's a different matter.) What I was trying to say was that you *can* take action to try to stop things before they've happened. And that's generally the preferred time to take action.
Why wait for 1984 to come true? Won't it be too late by that time?
And if it doesn't and never will or never can, as perhaps you seem to believe, then what harm is there in some crackpots wasting their energy rallying on about it? Doesn't it essentially become just another trekkie sideshow if Orwell's dark prophecy proves to bear no fruit?
One final correction... I wasn't sneering at anyone. If anything, I was smirking. Didn't mean to make you feel personally disrespected with my comment, there -- sorry.
Yeah, we should wait until Big Brother *exists* before we start doing something about it. Because raising the issues of freedom and rights only makes sense *after* you have been oppressed.
was when Homer was recalling some earlier event, which started out in Moe's Tavern, and Barney, Lenny, and the rest of the Duff gang "discussing Wittgenstein..."
Anyone remember what episode that was? I don't think Wittgenstein's ever been mentioned on American television aside from that one gag.
My favorite games SNK games were for NES...
on
Farewell to SNK
·
· Score: 2
Not NEO GEO. Baseball Stars and Crystalis were two of the very best titles to come out for that system, and rank highly among my all time favorite video games.
Judging on the areas I have to drive through to get to work, I'll be receiving lots and lots of ads for where I can buy the purest heroin and the cheapest automatic weapons...
That's not the Ralph Nader I know. Ralph Nader wants to remove the undue influence that corporations have over the government and return it to a system that answers to the people.
The US government is NOT a corporation. There is very little similarity between how they are structured. Corporations are essentially feudalist, whereas the government is provisionally a democratic republic. The difference in the way power flows in each type of organizational structure is significant.
The US Court ruled that Yahoo isn't bound by the French court's decision...
So, then... is the French court bound by the US court's ruling?
It's a good ruling for information and freedom, but I'm puzzled by the international law ramifications, particularly jurisdiction issues. Maybe someone can help me out...
We need a panel of experts to decide what would be helpfull. And not just FBI or DOJ experts, but ACLU types, and engineering types as well.
As long as the experts don't conduct their discussions in private, and then present their reasoning in an open format that is accessible and understandable to laymen, then I'm OK with it.
If we get a bunch of experts, lock them in a top secret room, and then secretly implement their secret recommendations, we're asking for trouble.
RMS suggests that face recognition software won't be effective and thus should not be implemented. I'm sure that someone, somewhere is going to object to his thinking thusly:
"If you believe that face recognition software won't work, and thus won't prevent terrorism, then what do you have to fear from it? If it doesn't work, then how are they going to infringe on your precious civil liberties with it?"
I think a lot of people will be fooled by such a question into thinking that if present day face recognition doesn't work, maybe if we implement it anyway and incrementally improve it, maybe someday we'll be safe.
But the failures of face recognition software are precisely what a civil libertarian fears. Fingering the wrong guy. Mistaken identity. NOT just failing to correctly ID the bad guys. Don't be fooled...
At what point does a nation become so weak, so dissipated, that it seeks to answer a declaration of war with a criminal trial?
I'd say a pretty damn strong one. Imagine their country sends tanks and bombers, and our police force is powerful enough to stop them and arrest them without having to resort to killing them! That would be pretty damn powerful.
Good point, but the cost of retraining isn't just the cost of the training. It's also the cost of the lost productivity incurred by having everyone go back to the bottom end of the learning curve and having to figure out how to be efficient again.
Still, it's good to hear stories about M$ losing customers. Having viable alternatives is what the free market is all about.
Elucidate me on what flaunt means and I'll try not to abuse it no more;)
What I mean by when I said that the Internet had a "frontier" period was not that there weren't jurisdictions and laws that applied to the internet. But that the presence of law and enforcement of it was lax and that as often as not people had to resort to taking matters into their own hands.
People typically rely on their own security measures rather than the force of law to keep unwanted people from hacking their systems, for example. And if they do get hacked, more often than not, they have to do the legwork to track the person because the cops sure as hell won't be able to.
I wouldn't say that downloading is a "frontier activity", but perhaps ignoring plausible interpretations of copyright law while downloading a file might be considered "frontier".
And at any rate, although prior laws may apply to the internet, you have to admit that the advent of the net has caused/is causing revolutions in the way people think about law.
The connection providers are increasingly the same company who create the content that's being pirated. You expect they should stand by doing nothing when they can take action?
In the old days of a few years ago, the internet was still a largely lawless frontier. Now that it's gone mainstream, some of that frontier conduct isn't going to work anymore.
Laws must be fitted to the society/culture they are intendted to govern. The internet needs to be a legal jurisdiction if the several hundred million people who use it regularly are to get along, conduct commerce, communicate, etc.
It's no longer the time to flaunt the existing laws by circumventing them with clever hacks. It is now the time to reform the law so that it works for the people.
...new and better techniques will crop up and take its place.
Two responses to this observation come to mind: "Duh." And, "So?"
Obviously, once an encryption scheme is cracked, people will stop using that method and try to find a new method. But this will only happen after it is known that the encryption is being broken. Thus, there is a window of time, however short, during which the encryption cracker will be able to intercept and read encrypted messages as plain text. Therefore, cracking encryption is a useful enterprise. It's stupid to act like it doesn't make any sense to defeat one encryption scheme just because another one will eventually replace it.
Slashdot Mirror
I say kill the fuckers. Just be sure to get it on tape.
Better yet, let's take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Companies like Apple and Commodore started the desktop revolution. IBM thought that there was a worldwide market for maybe 3 computers.
As a desktop computing company, they never really showed leadership. Yeah, they came out with the PC x86 architecture. But it's a crappy architecture.
IBM thought computing on the desktop was so valueless that they allowed anyone who wanted to to clone the hardware, and many companies were able to do so -- and sell for far less than what IBM was charging for their hardware.
If IBM had wanted to be competitive on the desktop, they would have sold their hardware at a more competitive price, and, if not lock other vendors out, then at least try to control their access to the market through leveraging patents.
IBM cared so much about computing on the desktop that they let some tiny, barely competant company called Microsoft deliver what would become the standard OS for the desktop, DOS, and let them have full control over its development without trying to take a piece of their profits.
DOS sucked. If IBM wanted to compete in the desktop market, they would have developed their own OS that didn't suck. And, while they did come up with OS/2, they did so far too late in the game for it to mean anything, after giving far too much away to MSFT.
They had a good business sense for hulking behemoth mainframes and servers and such, but they've never really been a true player on the desktop, even if Wintel machines are commonly called IBM-compatible PCs. The term is one of pure legacy derivation, really. IBM controls nothing relevant to desktop computing these days.
I haven't been modded up for that comment; I start out with 2 points because I have high karma points.
Anyway, I wouldn't say that I *agree* with all the conspiracy theorists. (I happen to think that they have some valid concerns, but that's a different matter.) What I was trying to say was that you *can* take action to try to stop things before they've happened. And that's generally the preferred time to take action.
Why wait for 1984 to come true? Won't it be too late by that time?
And if it doesn't and never will or never can, as perhaps you seem to believe, then what harm is there in some crackpots wasting their energy rallying on about it? Doesn't it essentially become just another trekkie sideshow if Orwell's dark prophecy proves to bear no fruit?
One final correction... I wasn't sneering at anyone. If anything, I was smirking. Didn't mean to make you feel personally disrespected with my comment, there -- sorry.
Yeah, we should wait until Big Brother *exists* before we start doing something about it. Because raising the issues of freedom and rights only makes sense *after* you have been oppressed.
He originally wanted to name his company "Syzygy"...
Snowball did it!
Four legs good! Two legs baaaaad!!!
was when Homer was recalling some earlier event, which started out in Moe's Tavern, and Barney, Lenny, and the rest of the Duff gang "discussing Wittgenstein..."
Anyone remember what episode that was? I don't think Wittgenstein's ever been mentioned on American television aside from that one gag.
Not NEO GEO. Baseball Stars and Crystalis were two of the very best titles to come out for that system, and rank highly among my all time favorite video games.
Thanks, SNK for hours and hours of childhood fun.
Judging on the areas I have to drive through to get to work, I'll be receiving lots and lots of ads for where I can buy the purest heroin and the cheapest automatic weapons...
That's not the Ralph Nader I know. Ralph Nader wants to remove the undue influence that corporations have over the government and return it to a system that answers to the people.
The US government is NOT a corporation. There is very little similarity between how they are structured. Corporations are essentially feudalist, whereas the government is provisionally a democratic republic. The difference in the way power flows in each type of organizational structure is significant.
Why? Microsoft isn't the government.
Not yet anyway.
The US Court ruled that Yahoo isn't bound by the French court's decision...
So, then... is the French court bound by the US court's ruling?
It's a good ruling for information and freedom, but I'm puzzled by the international law ramifications, particularly jurisdiction issues. Maybe someone can help me out...
Now all we have to do is get the armies of the world to agree to fight all future wars in these realistic simulated realities.
NO MORE LOSS OF LIFE and destruction of property!!
I have the same combination on my luggage!
So should we expect these features to be incorporated no sooner than Windows 3000 Professional?
Now I've seen everything.
As long as the experts don't conduct their discussions in private, and then present their reasoning in an open format that is accessible and understandable to laymen, then I'm OK with it.
If we get a bunch of experts, lock them in a top secret room, and then secretly implement their secret recommendations, we're asking for trouble.
RMS suggests that face recognition software won't be effective and thus should not be implemented. I'm sure that someone, somewhere is going to object to his thinking thusly:
"If you believe that face recognition software won't work, and thus won't prevent terrorism, then what do you have to fear from it? If it doesn't work, then how are they going to infringe on your precious civil liberties with it?"
I think a lot of people will be fooled by such a question into thinking that if present day face recognition doesn't work, maybe if we implement it anyway and incrementally improve it, maybe someday we'll be safe.
But the failures of face recognition software are precisely what a civil libertarian fears. Fingering the wrong guy. Mistaken identity. NOT just failing to correctly ID the bad guys. Don't be fooled...
Pretty much a realtime conversation right now...
r
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wtcdisaste
I'd say a pretty damn strong one. Imagine their country sends tanks and bombers, and our police force is powerful enough to stop them and arrest them without having to resort to killing them! That would be pretty damn powerful.
Good point, but the cost of retraining isn't just the cost of the training. It's also the cost of the lost productivity incurred by having everyone go back to the bottom end of the learning curve and having to figure out how to be efficient again.
Still, it's good to hear stories about M$ losing customers. Having viable alternatives is what the free market is all about.
What I mean by when I said that the Internet had a "frontier" period was not that there weren't jurisdictions and laws that applied to the internet. But that the presence of law and enforcement of it was lax and that as often as not people had to resort to taking matters into their own hands.
People typically rely on their own security measures rather than the force of law to keep unwanted people from hacking their systems, for example. And if they do get hacked, more often than not, they have to do the legwork to track the person because the cops sure as hell won't be able to.
I wouldn't say that downloading is a "frontier activity", but perhaps ignoring plausible interpretations of copyright law while downloading a file might be considered "frontier".
And at any rate, although prior laws may apply to the internet, you have to admit that the advent of the net has caused/is causing revolutions in the way people think about law.
The connection providers are increasingly the same company who create the content that's being pirated. You expect they should stand by doing nothing when they can take action?
In the old days of a few years ago, the internet was still a largely lawless frontier. Now that it's gone mainstream, some of that frontier conduct isn't going to work anymore.
Laws must be fitted to the society/culture they are intendted to govern. The internet needs to be a legal jurisdiction if the several hundred million people who use it regularly are to get along, conduct commerce, communicate, etc.
It's no longer the time to flaunt the existing laws by circumventing them with clever hacks. It is now the time to reform the law so that it works for the people.