This is real cute, but really if IBM wants to be all evil big brother like they were in WWII, they might as well get rid of cars entirely and provide fully automated vehicles where there is no driver.
Murphy's law is a bitch, especially when you're doing 60km/h in a 1500lb steel coffin. It doesn't matter how well you plan it, it will screw up. If it's not a flaw in the system, then it will be someone sabotaging your system. That's just too much "power" to entrust to a machine, because machines can be reprogrammed.
If Microsoft can't produce a mod-proof gaming console, a relatively simple machine by modern standards, then how can IBM even dream of building a mod-proof car safety device ? This is a PR nightmare waiting to happen. You mess with cars, you mess with people's lives, and as any of the automakers can attest, if your mistake kills more than a dozen people, the class-action lawsuit will kill you. IBM just has that much more to lose, they are a huge target.
Not true anymore. Many of them have been switched to the very restrictive vxWorks platform.
The big problem with GPL violations, and by extension poor customer service, is there is never enough backlash to deter these heinous practices. We can groan until we're blue in the face, Cisco/Linksys will continue to sell flaky hardware and buggy, unmaintained firmware/drivers and endless spin doctoring. These days their business is 90% sales & marketing, 10% development. That's why the router you buy today is no better than the one you bought a decade ago. They don't give a crap, they can just slap a new ugly plastic box around the same cheap old guts and print more money.
Even their enterprise gear has taken a nose-dive. They have about two dozen different 24-port switch SKUs, and they even have the nerve to give you detailed comparison grids, highlightly precisely how little they differ. How many ways can one shuffle managed vs unmanaged (why even bother anymore), and POE vs non-POE ? They need to fire half their marketing staff and beat the other ones until they stop telling the engineers what to build. Having a uniform product line means greater efficiencies in both production and support. Modern business 101, for crying out loud!
At this point, and I am talking out of my ass here, I think it's time public funds were applied to fix this, once and for all. Prosecute any and every executive related to this incident, jail them, seize ALL their assets to recover the public expenses, and call it a day.
They fucked up, they neglected to install proper failsafes, and completely failed to plan and execute a proper cleanup. When you screw up this badly, you don't deserve to ever play the business game again. Do not pass go, do not start a new oil scam, go directly to jail and then die.
If TV networks require it, we'll happily ignore them until their ears bleed. It's not like there aren't other means to watch video online, most of which do not entail draconian DRM.
And the tradesman next door, who followed a one-year apprenticeship and learned on-the-job, makes more money than you do, and thus pays more taxes.
A college education does not get you good jobs. Patience, dedication (read: abuse tolerance) and dumb luck get you good jobs. As long as you pick one thing to do, and do it better than half the rest, you're set.
Skills that above-average minds can master much quicker than most.
I'm sure a lot of us here are highly skilled at more than one thing. The crossover or "hybridization" is what often leads to innovation, as once you master one thing, the next challenge is easier to tackle because your problem-solving skills continually improve. There are things I've learned in psych classes that help me wrap better UIs around my code, and conversely there's stuff I gleaned from years of software development and client feedback that help me cope with fussy musicians and navel-gazing barflies.
Don't even get me started on my theory of the universe...
I don't think my idealism is so far fetched. There are jobs for everyone. The biggest problem might be figuring out what you would enjoy doing for a significant part of your lifetime.
Frankly, if a person can't figure that out, there's always trades, and if trades aren't your bag, well the last resort is to become a parasitic bureaucrat and collect glorified welfare in exchange for your seat-warming skills.
I don't think very small non-profits need much of a CRM to store their contacts. You can get a lot of mileage out of a cheap web host, Gmail and a spreadsheet.
The thing with non-profits, at least from what I've observed, is they eventually reach a tipping point where the management overhead starts growing out of proportion. You find yourself needing to hire more people, these ones are untrained and certainly not as devoted as the founders, they whine and moan about any repetitive work, so you compensate by upgrading your tech. That's where something like these commercial CRMs might start making sense; your options are :
1. pay a contractor to build it = expensive and poor support
2. hire a junior to build it = crap code and NO support when the kid leaves you for a better job halfway through the project
3. buy an off-the-shelf product that already satisfies a large portion of your needs, comes with documentation and even in-person training, and has has a support hotline for when you need it
People tend to think of non-profits as these angelic organisations that don't make money. Non-profit is just a different business model: same game, alternate rules. Just because you don't turn a profit doesn't mean everyone involved is broke. With all the tax breaks, subsidies and sponsors, even though the company itself doesn't make a profit, you can create a bunch of cushy jobs for everyone. I found a tiny bit of information at http://www.nonprofitstaffing.com/Salary-Surveys-(1).aspx . Obviously the laws vary widely, but for the most part, non-profits are just business with no real stakeholders.
Wake me when you can find 3.5 million people who agree on something, AND have the spine to actually follow through. A lot of people bitch and moan, but when it's time for action, it's all too easy to spend that $50 and indulge in some ethically-bankrupt console entertainment. For every thousand people who bitch on the internet, maybe one or two will actually put actions to their words.
That's how we wind up with the governments we have. We didn't explicitly want crooked people running our countries, but complacency prevails every time. Why would the comparatively minuscule world of online gaming be any different ?
I'm more concerned about dishonest modifications. Modding is great, but modding in order to cheat just makes me nerd rage like that time they randomly killed Yar. These days you can't play two rounds in a row without some twelve year old breaking the game with a ridiculous aimbot or teleport glitch. It's no longer a game if you don't follow the few rules.
At least on a console, most cheaters are limited to lag hacks and controller mods, which are quite annoying but at least the rep system gets them banned on a regular basis.
We're talking about a product that was purchased. They should, at the very least, allow peer-to-peer multiplayer (private games), so that the multiplayer content can be enjoyed by those who still play and love the game. In this case, shutting down the central lobby system effectively renders the game useless. Meanwhile, one can dig up an ancient copy of Quake, type a friend's IP in the box and get fragging in no time.
So yeah, MS is shafting these people by not releasing a patch or separate tool to support 3rd party servers or at least some form of online play. We still have the internet, and Microsoft is still in business, so why would they need to shut it off ? And frankly, if there's only a few dozen players, even a few hundred, how much could it possibly be costing to keep one or two servers up for these very loyal gamers ? It probably took more time to issue the request to terminate, than it would have to maintain these systems for another few years.
It also raises the question of how long is "long enough" to support a multiplayer lobby. What if they had killed it the day Halo 3 was released ? Or even a week after Halo 2 itself was launched ? They're selling a product that is partially marketed on its multiplayer aspect, so at what point does termination of that advertised service become acceptable ? I don't care what they write in the EULA, I mean as a consumer, what should we reasonably expect ? Is 10 years long enough ? 5 years ? six months ? I dunno, pick a number.
This plague of automatic DLC must be stopped. It has become almost expected of the major game houses to release an incomplete game, then a week or month later they sell a bunch of DLC, which was probably supposed to be part of the game in the first place. Why can I resell the content that's on the disc, but not the stuff I downloaded a week later ? How do I know the DLC wasn't originally part of the game, that some ethically-challenged pencil pusher decided to part out and charge more money ? They're shipping an unlock code, wouldn't that suggest that this content is already in the package, but locked away behind yet another layer of bullshit DRM ?
It used to be, if you wanted to sell an add-on to your game, you had to ship it on a disc so the "barrier to entry" was higher, in the sense that the overhead of distribution and support was too painful to bother shipping $10 worth of content. Gamers would also tear you a shiny new asshole if you dared ship them a CD with only 10mb worth of content (and 600mb of advertising videos). Diablo 2 LOD was a real expansion pack, it added new features, it added a whole new full-length episode, and it was reasonably priced. Despite the dependency on the base game, it provided enough content to stand on its own as a product. In other words, if you took the expansion and subtracted the original content, you were still left with a big slab of entertainment well worth the $35.
Since this is Slashdot, what if you bought a brand new car, and it came with a one-time-use "content access code" for the steering wheel. You key in the code, you get to drive your car all you want. Then after a few years you sell this car to your broke-ass friend, who finds out the thing can only move in a straight line. The dealership wants him to pay another $2000 to unlock the steering wheel. Would you fault your friend for breaking the dealer's front teeth ? I wouldn't. Hell I'd bring brass knuckles, fuck that greedy bastard.
As much as it pains me to say this, at some point there needs to be a class-action lawsuit, brought on by tech-savvy lawyers and consumers, to curb this extremely dishonest practice. This excuse of selling a license to a game is absolute bullshit. You buy the thing, it's yours, end of story.
As much as I'm trying to think of the many idiot parents who would gladly feed their kids cardboard and motor oil, the fact that a school - let me rephrase that: a bunch of idiots who are trying to teach what they can't do - would have any sort of authority over their children and their parents, is one of the most ridiculous concepts in modern society. Treating kids like dogs, rewarding them with a "treat" when they do good, is a fantastic way to perpetuate this extremely deleterious "entitlement generation". Dogs are dogs, they understand two things: getting fed, and not getting kicked. Hell, they might understand more but we don't speak the language... but a child, speaks the same language as we do, so why don't we treat them with the same respect we would a fellow adult ?
Now, don't get me wrong, I hate kids... but that's a personal stance. I don't want any of my own, but I also don't want to live in a world raised by these incompetent power-tripping fools. Let's pay it forward a little, don't you think ?
Because one person's "frittering" is another person's life-long gratifying, technology advancing, society improving, human race evolving career.
The man's a goddamned smoke screen, a smiling face to charm the masses into trusting their government. If blogging and video games are bullshit, then what does that make him ? Meta-bullshit ?
These "ubiquitous gadgets and information" are the driving force behind humankind's emancipation. We are smarter today than we were thirty years ago (MTV excluded). As much as one group is marathoning toward idiocracy, another is on the path to enlightenment, all thanks to the wealth of information and rapid communication. It's like our minds are turning into a beowulf cluster. Yes, there's a bit of pain in the interconnects, and there's a lot of garbage-in/garbage-out, but to dismiss technology as a "distraction" is akin to declaring "I like being stupid". This is precisely the sort of thing USA-haters thrive on, because we (yes, *I*) see this as the fundamental problem with the world's loudest nation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is real cute, but really if IBM wants to be all evil big brother like they were in WWII, they might as well get rid of cars entirely and provide fully automated vehicles where there is no driver.
Murphy's law is a bitch, especially when you're doing 60km/h in a 1500lb steel coffin. It doesn't matter how well you plan it, it will screw up. If it's not a flaw in the system, then it will be someone sabotaging your system. That's just too much "power" to entrust to a machine, because machines can be reprogrammed.
If Microsoft can't produce a mod-proof gaming console, a relatively simple machine by modern standards, then how can IBM even dream of building a mod-proof car safety device ? This is a PR nightmare waiting to happen. You mess with cars, you mess with people's lives, and as any of the automakers can attest, if your mistake kills more than a dozen people, the class-action lawsuit will kill you. IBM just has that much more to lose, they are a huge target.
Not true anymore. Many of them have been switched to the very restrictive vxWorks platform.
The big problem with GPL violations, and by extension poor customer service, is there is never enough backlash to deter these heinous practices. We can groan until we're blue in the face, Cisco/Linksys will continue to sell flaky hardware and buggy, unmaintained firmware/drivers and endless spin doctoring. These days their business is 90% sales & marketing, 10% development. That's why the router you buy today is no better than the one you bought a decade ago. They don't give a crap, they can just slap a new ugly plastic box around the same cheap old guts and print more money.
Even their enterprise gear has taken a nose-dive. They have about two dozen different 24-port switch SKUs, and they even have the nerve to give you detailed comparison grids, highlightly precisely how little they differ. How many ways can one shuffle managed vs unmanaged (why even bother anymore), and POE vs non-POE ? They need to fire half their marketing staff and beat the other ones until they stop telling the engineers what to build. Having a uniform product line means greater efficiencies in both production and support. Modern business 101, for crying out loud!
At this point, and I am talking out of my ass here, I think it's time public funds were applied to fix this, once and for all. Prosecute any and every executive related to this incident, jail them, seize ALL their assets to recover the public expenses, and call it a day.
They fucked up, they neglected to install proper failsafes, and completely failed to plan and execute a proper cleanup. When you screw up this badly, you don't deserve to ever play the business game again. Do not pass go, do not start a new oil scam, go directly to jail and then die.
http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/
Sure, IE doesn't natively support the Canvas tag, but a little bit of Javascript goes a long way toward fixing that.
Maybe the central tenet is wrong...
Just sayin'
If TV networks require it, we'll happily ignore them until their ears bleed. It's not like there aren't other means to watch video online, most of which do not entail draconian DRM.
And the tradesman next door, who followed a one-year apprenticeship and learned on-the-job, makes more money than you do, and thus pays more taxes.
A college education does not get you good jobs. Patience, dedication (read: abuse tolerance) and dumb luck get you good jobs. As long as you pick one thing to do, and do it better than half the rest, you're set.
Skills that above-average minds can master much quicker than most.
I'm sure a lot of us here are highly skilled at more than one thing. The crossover or "hybridization" is what often leads to innovation, as once you master one thing, the next challenge is easier to tackle because your problem-solving skills continually improve. There are things I've learned in psych classes that help me wrap better UIs around my code, and conversely there's stuff I gleaned from years of software development and client feedback that help me cope with fussy musicians and navel-gazing barflies.
Don't even get me started on my theory of the universe...
Yeap... you damn non-Canadians and your delicious Netflix </jealous>
Now the question is: would you sacrifice all the women in exchange for a world without greedy crooked telcos ?
I don't think my idealism is so far fetched. There are jobs for everyone. The biggest problem might be figuring out what you would enjoy doing for a significant part of your lifetime.
Frankly, if a person can't figure that out, there's always trades, and if trades aren't your bag, well the last resort is to become a parasitic bureaucrat and collect glorified welfare in exchange for your seat-warming skills.
Back when I had an Atari 800XL, installing Atari DOS 4.0 borked my machine.
Die in hell, Jack Tramiel!
Oh, Just sayin'.
I don't think very small non-profits need much of a CRM to store their contacts. You can get a lot of mileage out of a cheap web host, Gmail and a spreadsheet.
The thing with non-profits, at least from what I've observed, is they eventually reach a tipping point where the management overhead starts growing out of proportion. You find yourself needing to hire more people, these ones are untrained and certainly not as devoted as the founders, they whine and moan about any repetitive work, so you compensate by upgrading your tech. That's where something like these commercial CRMs might start making sense; your options are :
1. pay a contractor to build it = expensive and poor support
2. hire a junior to build it = crap code and NO support when the kid leaves you for a better job halfway through the project
3. buy an off-the-shelf product that already satisfies a large portion of your needs, comes with documentation and even in-person training, and has has a support hotline for when you need it
People tend to think of non-profits as these angelic organisations that don't make money. Non-profit is just a different business model: same game, alternate rules. Just because you don't turn a profit doesn't mean everyone involved is broke. With all the tax breaks, subsidies and sponsors, even though the company itself doesn't make a profit, you can create a bunch of cushy jobs for everyone. I found a tiny bit of information at http://www.nonprofitstaffing.com/Salary-Surveys-(1).aspx . Obviously the laws vary widely, but for the most part, non-profits are just business with no real stakeholders.
Wake me when you can find 3.5 million people who agree on something, AND have the spine to actually follow through. A lot of people bitch and moan, but when it's time for action, it's all too easy to spend that $50 and indulge in some ethically-bankrupt console entertainment. For every thousand people who bitch on the internet, maybe one or two will actually put actions to their words.
That's how we wind up with the governments we have. We didn't explicitly want crooked people running our countries, but complacency prevails every time. Why would the comparatively minuscule world of online gaming be any different ?
I'm more concerned about dishonest modifications. Modding is great, but modding in order to cheat just makes me nerd rage like that time they randomly killed Yar. These days you can't play two rounds in a row without some twelve year old breaking the game with a ridiculous aimbot or teleport glitch. It's no longer a game if you don't follow the few rules.
At least on a console, most cheaters are limited to lag hacks and controller mods, which are quite annoying but at least the rep system gets them banned on a regular basis.
We're talking about a product that was purchased. They should, at the very least, allow peer-to-peer multiplayer (private games), so that the multiplayer content can be enjoyed by those who still play and love the game. In this case, shutting down the central lobby system effectively renders the game useless. Meanwhile, one can dig up an ancient copy of Quake, type a friend's IP in the box and get fragging in no time.
So yeah, MS is shafting these people by not releasing a patch or separate tool to support 3rd party servers or at least some form of online play. We still have the internet, and Microsoft is still in business, so why would they need to shut it off ? And frankly, if there's only a few dozen players, even a few hundred, how much could it possibly be costing to keep one or two servers up for these very loyal gamers ? It probably took more time to issue the request to terminate, than it would have to maintain these systems for another few years.
It also raises the question of how long is "long enough" to support a multiplayer lobby. What if they had killed it the day Halo 3 was released ? Or even a week after Halo 2 itself was launched ? They're selling a product that is partially marketed on its multiplayer aspect, so at what point does termination of that advertised service become acceptable ? I don't care what they write in the EULA, I mean as a consumer, what should we reasonably expect ? Is 10 years long enough ? 5 years ? six months ? I dunno, pick a number.
So what constitutes distribution ? Obviously a commercially-developed piece of software has a purpose, whether internal or external.
Is the act of deploying an app to corporate desktops considered distribution, in the eyes of the GPL ?
What about software that provides a web interface ? Is that distribution ? In today's fad of SAAS and SAP, the lines are very blurry.
This plague of automatic DLC must be stopped. It has become almost expected of the major game houses to release an incomplete game, then a week or month later they sell a bunch of DLC, which was probably supposed to be part of the game in the first place. Why can I resell the content that's on the disc, but not the stuff I downloaded a week later ? How do I know the DLC wasn't originally part of the game, that some ethically-challenged pencil pusher decided to part out and charge more money ? They're shipping an unlock code, wouldn't that suggest that this content is already in the package, but locked away behind yet another layer of bullshit DRM ?
It used to be, if you wanted to sell an add-on to your game, you had to ship it on a disc so the "barrier to entry" was higher, in the sense that the overhead of distribution and support was too painful to bother shipping $10 worth of content. Gamers would also tear you a shiny new asshole if you dared ship them a CD with only 10mb worth of content (and 600mb of advertising videos). Diablo 2 LOD was a real expansion pack, it added new features, it added a whole new full-length episode, and it was reasonably priced. Despite the dependency on the base game, it provided enough content to stand on its own as a product. In other words, if you took the expansion and subtracted the original content, you were still left with a big slab of entertainment well worth the $35.
Since this is Slashdot, what if you bought a brand new car, and it came with a one-time-use "content access code" for the steering wheel. You key in the code, you get to drive your car all you want. Then after a few years you sell this car to your broke-ass friend, who finds out the thing can only move in a straight line. The dealership wants him to pay another $2000 to unlock the steering wheel. Would you fault your friend for breaking the dealer's front teeth ? I wouldn't. Hell I'd bring brass knuckles, fuck that greedy bastard.
As much as it pains me to say this, at some point there needs to be a class-action lawsuit, brought on by tech-savvy lawyers and consumers, to curb this extremely dishonest practice. This excuse of selling a license to a game is absolute bullshit. You buy the thing, it's yours, end of story.
So instead of actually fixing the weird bottlenecks and sloppy code, they're just painting racing stripes and calling it a day.
Firefox is in dire need of a fork.
I think you're on to something here! Quickly, shove this through congress STAT!
Besides, I look forward to repurposing the wife's plasma TV as my own dedicated Xbox 360 monitor.
As much as I'm trying to think of the many idiot parents who would gladly feed their kids cardboard and motor oil, the fact that a school - let me rephrase that: a bunch of idiots who are trying to teach what they can't do - would have any sort of authority over their children and their parents, is one of the most ridiculous concepts in modern society. Treating kids like dogs, rewarding them with a "treat" when they do good, is a fantastic way to perpetuate this extremely deleterious "entitlement generation". Dogs are dogs, they understand two things: getting fed, and not getting kicked. Hell, they might understand more but we don't speak the language... but a child, speaks the same language as we do, so why don't we treat them with the same respect we would a fellow adult ?
Now, don't get me wrong, I hate kids... but that's a personal stance. I don't want any of my own, but I also don't want to live in a world raised by these incompetent power-tripping fools. Let's pay it forward a little, don't you think ?
Texas: sometimes your only purpose is to serve as a warning to others.
-or-
Texas: Fuck y'all, we gots guns!
Because one person's "frittering" is another person's life-long gratifying, technology advancing, society improving, human race evolving career.
The man's a goddamned smoke screen, a smiling face to charm the masses into trusting their government. If blogging and video games are bullshit, then what does that make him ? Meta-bullshit ?
These "ubiquitous gadgets and information" are the driving force behind humankind's emancipation. We are smarter today than we were thirty years ago (MTV excluded). As much as one group is marathoning toward idiocracy, another is on the path to enlightenment, all thanks to the wealth of information and rapid communication. It's like our minds are turning into a beowulf cluster. Yes, there's a bit of pain in the interconnects, and there's a lot of garbage-in/garbage-out, but to dismiss technology as a "distraction" is akin to declaring "I like being stupid". This is precisely the sort of thing USA-haters thrive on, because we (yes, *I*) see this as the fundamental problem with the world's loudest nation.
This is a press release from Redmond, Washington.
FTFY
A wild SCO appears.
ESR uses FUDaway. It's super effective!
Rev up your legal team and go after the company and/or its board of directors ?