Fallout 3 appears to be following in the footsteps of its spiritual predecessor, Wasteland. The Wasteland sequel never got finished, either, but there's still people like me and these folks waiting for it to get finished.
There's folks of a certain age (mine) who would pay more than an average sum of money for a Fallout 3/Wasteland 2 package from an indie company now that they're no longer "profitable". I know exactly which company I wish would do it, too...
There's an easy way to tell if a group is going to use IP BS to screw you over. All we have to do is watch our ass against the *AA groups - RIAA, MPAA, FTAA...
There are a few... the EFF released a position paper two years ago, and there's the Indymedia tech teams, the Shift Control Collective, OPG and others here and there. That said, I'll be going to Miami to participate in anti-FTAA actions when their ministerial meets this November with non-geeks, who are there for their own reasons.
Why is this? I don't think it's politics, because there are both left-wing and right-wing folks against the FTAA. Partially, I think it's because grassroots lobbying doesn't work on trade issues in urban areas where the geeks live. In part because geeks aren't organized around these issues.
Most geeks also seem to think that protesting is a waste of time. In most cases, I agree, but protests in Quebec City against the FTAA two years ago raised the issue's profile in the news. The draft text of the documents, previously secret if you weren't one of the corporate "consultants" to the ministerial, were released as a result of Canadian activists who occupied a goverment building. When they shouted, "This is what democracy looks like!" they weren't engaging in rhetoric - democracy is pointless if you can't see the laws, and their direct action to force openness on the part of their government was crucial.
Wow...I'm totally blown away by this. Thank you! As someone else said, one of the best posts (of thousands and thousands) I've ever read. Wish I had a mod point.
Re:Drop-in replacement?
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
An excellent addition to this list that will (probably) never happen - a TRUE drop-in replacement should be able to communicate with other Exchange servers! My organization has two servers running Exchange - I'd like to be able to change one without the other. Enterprises with Exchange farms won't want to switch 100% of their systems either.
The company that can successfully do this has an Exchange-killer, open source or closed - imagine being able to switch over half a dozen mailboxes transparently to a server and let it run, in a semi-production environment, before committing to it...
This is an interesting classical libertarian philisophical argument, but it's a bit dated...
Arguments such as this originated in pre-Industrial times, when it was presumed that if you didn't want to voluntarily interact with someone, you could head for the colonies, the Western frontier, etc - that there were unused resources that you could mix your labor with and survive on.
Not only was this not true then (colonies have a pesky habit of being inhabited, and unless you use some of Locke's stupider arguments, they're not yours to take), it's certainly not true now.
Since we live in a world where there's not a source of "free" resources, and you need resources (e.g. food, clothing) to survive, you need to enter into a "voluntary" contract with a clothing seller. RFID tags a problem? Oh well - you can always die of exposure, I suppose - that's your voluntary choice. No force involved here, nosirree.
Coercion is real - I suppose a libertarian primitivist might disagree with this argument, but funnily enough, I don't see any on Slashdot:)
I disagree that this reduces browser diversity overall - while it may be one less choice out of many for Mac users, I think that it marks a step towards the end of "You must use IE to browse this site" hegemony. Of course, MS must not think so, or they really think they can't efficiently compete (Nelson: "Ha ha!").
That said, if it IS a step towards the end of IE-only sites, in the end this will increase browser diversity - I could see people building forks/spinoffs/plugins that right now wouldn't because of a "Why bother when major sites FORCE users to use IE anyway?"
It would seem to work that way, and I wish it did. Unfortunately:
a) It takes equipment to start a call center. It can't be paid for in Indian rupees, they're too unstable. The telecoms vendors want American dollars, more than even a wealthy Indian has.
b) So the wealthy Indian (or more likely, the Indian government, which the wealthy Indian has lobbied for subsidies, much like everywhere else) gets a loan in U.S. dollars.
c) American jobs go to India. After a while, these jobs leave for, say, Vietnam. Loans haven't been paid back. Banks (usually the World Bank, often a private lender though) want their dollars back. No money? Tough shit. Good thing we made your government guarantee the loan. Government has no money? Guess you just need to start making scheduled payments, with interest.
Result: A massive amount of the gov't budget in these companies is debt repayment. Their economies are stifled. Quality of life decreases, not increases, and infrastructure crumbles, because money has to go towards paying back private lenders or the World Bank. The country ends up MUCH poorer, because now they have loans in foreign currency.
And this is the NON-manipulative version - there's also the, "You're going to be on the U.S. shit list if you don't take these loans - wanna get invaded? Or have the U.S. support a coup d'etat against you, like in Venezuela?". Or, "So you haven't paid back these loans. Your economy is wrecked by this corporation's behavior. People are starving and you need money so you don't have food riots. Hmm. You want an emergency loan of a few million? You have to agree to sell us your raw resources. And open your markets to our cheap goods, which your local economy can't afford to compete with since they don't have the capital to invest. Which destroys any chance of you having a self-sufficient economy in the future. Don't like it? Food riots for you, I guess."
The U.S. Trade Representative (Robert Zoellick) spends quite a lot of his time talking to multinational corporation's execs, which influences his policy. His policy controls the IMF and World Bank, due to the way they were set up.
I'm not against globalization - we need to move with the times, as another poster said. It's corporate-controlled globalization that gets a bug right up my ass.
MY thought was: 1) Open a store. 2) Walk into people's houses, look under their couches for spare change. 3) Insist that since I found this money they didn't know was there, and unless they spend it it's just useless metal, they're obligated to spend it in my store.
I'll leave out 4, which is that if they spend it in a competitor's store, I launch a missile at their house and send in troops:)
That would be a great answer, if we had an office large enough to justify multiple servers. Since we don't, and we have software that requires Windows that's critical to our organization's functioning, we have one server, and it's a Windows server.
The "home" office in NYC, with its larger staff, has multiple servers. I switched one of them to Linux two years ago, and other than some atrocious Samba bugs, I've had few regrets.
I'm up at 4AM because an MS patch totally broke a production system in our DC office. That patch was NT4 Security Rollup Patch, from eons ago (18 months?).
The system was effectively firewalled (it was an internal file/print server), and didn't really need the patch, but since I thought I knew better it's now a heap of scrap.
My excuse for not patching my software is that patches often break production systems. I'm going to sleep now, since I need to be up at 8AM to deal with the mess.
So, IMO, there is PLENTY of excuse for not patching your software. If you'd like to debate the point, I invite you to first use Google Groups with the words "security rollup ntoskrnl.exe stop 0x1E".
PS to snarky trolls - that's NOT "stop 0xA", I checked for THAT system-stopping patch problem first, so don't go telling me that there's a warning on the MSKB article, thanks anyway.
If you're not running on rails, and you allow someone to shift the POV, then your benchmark doesn't have a consistent basis for comparing one computer to another - your score can be different on the SAME computer from one run to the next, depending on where you point the camera.
The point is that Futuremark HAS the tools to run the demo "off the rails", which is how NVidia was caught. In the same way that some games let you cheat, but won't record your high score if you do (Angband/other roguelikes, and Lode Runner for C64 come to mind), future benchmarks should probably consider running off the rails, but only record the actual score when you let the benchmark follow a specific path(s).
I hope this gets modded up as funny AND insightful.
That said, in fairness to RH, it's pretty darn easy to install it such that it doesn't have QUITE so much bloat, in a way that's impossible to do with XP without a favorable Court of Appeals ruling.
Is Judge Rehnquist, in a Supreme Court brief, declaring that, "Creedence Clearwater Revival...has been recognized as one of the greatest American rock and roll groups of all time".
Almost as good as the old Onion article, "Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules".
Are you sure this is right? In addition to the word "fuck" being pretty obviously in the middle of your number, my friend had a number xxx-AIR-SHIT. I feel like there's got to be quite a few numbers that spell SOMETHING bad...
Is this "News for Nerds" because it's about comic books? Are we going to start reviewing the appropriate Simpsons episodes?
A quick look at alt.binaries.e-books reveals that nerds are heavy into the technical references and Star Wars, with a bit of pr0n. This is closely followed by classic SF, bad fantasy, and Terry Pratchett. An interesting sidenote is that nerds seem to like to read books that come in endless series, Wheel of Time #24 and all that.
I've actually checked the newsgroups for Kavalier & Klay, and it's never been there, along with the vast majority of books on the indie bestseller lists. Or the regular bestseller list, if it's not Grisham/Crichton/King/etc. For a demographic that's so militantly anti-major label drek, we sure do READ a lot of it!
So I guess I'm asking why, this, now. Who cares all of a sudden?
I am employed by an organization with direct links to this case on NOW's side of the fence, but I agree that the Supreme Court was NOT legitimizing coercion. NOW wasn't claiming that coercion took place, even if it did - they were claiming that extortion took place. The reasoning is that if extortion took place, you could get their assets seized through RICO. Proving coercion isn't good for more than the usual small fines.
This is a good sentiment, but unfortunately in reality it wouldn't matter. Most of the system-critical IE bugs are in MSHTML.DLL, and that's a file that lots and lots of Windows programs use to add Internet objects to their software. Most notably, Outlook does, as well as MAS90, Raiser's Edge 7, Peachtree Complete, and a number of other programs likely to be found at a 50-person non-profit. Replacing IE as the default browser offers minimal protection - Outlook is by far the most common vector for MSHTML.DLL exploits.
To me, replacing IE with Mozilla has its benefits, but security isn't one of them, nor is being able to avoid patching IE every time a critical update comes out (which, as you pointed out, is ALL THE TIME):(
This is an excellent point, but possibly for the wrong reasons. The minimum wage laws may "oppress" teenagers who could use some pocket money, and it means that when I take in one of the MPAA members' fine films, there is no usher.
If these are the greatest social ills inflicted on us by the minimum wage, well, it's not enough for me to turn in my anti-authoritarian membership card, but I think that it's enough that I'll worry about real issues, instead of trying to repeal the minimum wage.
If you calculate the amount of money required to survive, and you calculate how much the minimum wage pays, you'll find that you're going to come up short making the minimum wage at 40 hours/week. If you could pay for food, shelter, transportation, and healthcare at $5.15/hour less taxes, the argument that the minimum wage is wrong would have more weight.
Real quick: $5.15*40*52 = $10,712 less FICA, Social Security, etc. Let's hope one never gets sick, injured, or have to care for a dependent parent...
This argument has been made many times before, and been debunked many times before.
It is true that backing ideologically similar candidates happens, and that this is a single factor in many when corporations make campaign contributions. However, one need look no further than ex-Sen. Bob Dole, who said, "When the Political Action Committees give money, they expext something in return other than good government." Or former Rep. Tony Coelho, a Democrat who voted for a late '80's capital gains tax cut, who said, "It's as simple as he who pays the piper plays the tune....I get elected by voters, I get financed by contributors. Voters don't care about this [capital gains], contributors do."
Alternatively, one need look no further than this CNN article to effectively counter this argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Fallout 3 appears to be following in the footsteps of its spiritual predecessor, Wasteland. The Wasteland sequel never got finished, either, but there's still people like me and these folks waiting for it to get finished.
There's folks of a certain age (mine) who would pay more than an average sum of money for a Fallout 3/Wasteland 2 package from an indie company now that they're no longer "profitable". I know exactly which company I wish would do it, too...
There's an easy way to tell if a group is going to use IP BS to screw you over. All we have to do is watch our ass against the *AA groups - RIAA, MPAA, FTAA...
There are a few... the EFF released a position paper two years ago, and there's the Indymedia tech teams, the Shift Control Collective, OPG and others here and there. That said, I'll be going to Miami to participate in anti-FTAA actions when their ministerial meets this November with non-geeks, who are there for their own reasons.
Why is this? I don't think it's politics, because there are both left-wing and right-wing folks against the FTAA. Partially, I think it's because grassroots lobbying doesn't work on trade issues in urban areas where the geeks live. In part because geeks aren't organized around these issues.
Most geeks also seem to think that protesting is a waste of time. In most cases, I agree, but protests in Quebec City against the FTAA two years ago raised the issue's profile in the news. The draft text of the documents, previously secret if you weren't one of the corporate "consultants" to the ministerial, were released as a result of Canadian activists who occupied a goverment building. When they shouted, "This is what democracy looks like!" they weren't engaging in rhetoric - democracy is pointless if you can't see the laws, and their direct action to force openness on the part of their government was crucial.
Reply to this post if you want to do something.
> 8 Give us a no-images options for the email zone.
This is the default configuration in Outlook 2003...
Again, for non-bike geeks - in OUR parlance, "single speed" refers to fixies, at least here in NYC.
:)
Also for non-bike-geeks - WTF is wrong with you? I went to this today (these photos are from last year).
So tell me why EVERYONE isn't a bike geek?
Wow...I'm totally blown away by this. Thank you! As someone else said, one of the best posts (of thousands and thousands) I've ever read. Wish I had a mod point.
An excellent addition to this list that will (probably) never happen - a TRUE drop-in replacement should be able to communicate with other Exchange servers! My organization has two servers running Exchange - I'd like to be able to change one without the other. Enterprises with Exchange farms won't want to switch 100% of their systems either.
The company that can successfully do this has an Exchange-killer, open source or closed - imagine being able to switch over half a dozen mailboxes transparently to a server and let it run, in a semi-production environment, before committing to it...
This is an interesting classical libertarian philisophical argument, but it's a bit dated...
:)
Arguments such as this originated in pre-Industrial times, when it was presumed that if you didn't want to voluntarily interact with someone, you could head for the colonies, the Western frontier, etc - that there were unused resources that you could mix your labor with and survive on.
Not only was this not true then (colonies have a pesky habit of being inhabited, and unless you use some of Locke's stupider arguments, they're not yours to take), it's certainly not true now.
Since we live in a world where there's not a source of "free" resources, and you need resources (e.g. food, clothing) to survive, you need to enter into a "voluntary" contract with a clothing seller. RFID tags a problem? Oh well - you can always die of exposure, I suppose - that's your voluntary choice. No force involved here, nosirree.
Coercion is real - I suppose a libertarian primitivist might disagree with this argument, but funnily enough, I don't see any on Slashdot
I disagree that this reduces browser diversity overall - while it may be one less choice out of many for Mac users, I think that it marks a step towards the end of "You must use IE to browse this site" hegemony. Of course, MS must not think so, or they really think they can't efficiently compete (Nelson: "Ha ha!").
That said, if it IS a step towards the end of IE-only sites, in the end this will increase browser diversity - I could see people building forks/spinoffs/plugins that right now wouldn't because of a "Why bother when major sites FORCE users to use IE anyway?"
It would seem to work that way, and I wish it did. Unfortunately:
a) It takes equipment to start a call center. It can't be paid for in Indian rupees, they're too unstable. The telecoms vendors want American dollars, more than even a wealthy Indian has.
b) So the wealthy Indian (or more likely, the Indian government, which the wealthy Indian has lobbied for subsidies, much like everywhere else) gets a loan in U.S. dollars.
c) American jobs go to India. After a while, these jobs leave for, say, Vietnam. Loans haven't been paid back. Banks (usually the World Bank, often a private lender though) want their dollars back. No money? Tough shit. Good thing we made your government guarantee the loan. Government has no money? Guess you just need to start making scheduled payments, with interest.
Result: A massive amount of the gov't budget in these companies is debt repayment. Their economies are stifled. Quality of life decreases, not increases, and infrastructure crumbles, because money has to go towards paying back private lenders or the World Bank. The country ends up MUCH poorer, because now they have loans in foreign currency.
And this is the NON-manipulative version - there's also the, "You're going to be on the U.S. shit list if you don't take these loans - wanna get invaded? Or have the U.S. support a coup d'etat against you, like in Venezuela?". Or, "So you haven't paid back these loans. Your economy is wrecked by this corporation's behavior. People are starving and you need money so you don't have food riots. Hmm. You want an emergency loan of a few million? You have to agree to sell us your raw resources. And open your markets to our cheap goods, which your local economy can't afford to compete with since they don't have the capital to invest. Which destroys any chance of you having a self-sufficient economy in the future. Don't like it? Food riots for you, I guess."
The U.S. Trade Representative (Robert Zoellick) spends quite a lot of his time talking to multinational corporation's execs, which influences his policy. His policy controls the IMF and World Bank, due to the way they were set up.
I'm not against globalization - we need to move with the times, as another poster said. It's corporate-controlled globalization that gets a bug right up my ass.
MY thought was:
:)
1) Open a store.
2) Walk into people's houses, look under their couches for spare change.
3) Insist that since I found this money they didn't know was there, and unless they spend it it's just useless metal, they're obligated to spend it in my store.
I'll leave out 4, which is that if they spend it in a competitor's store, I launch a missile at their house and send in troops
That would be a great answer, if we had an office large enough to justify multiple servers. Since we don't, and we have software that requires Windows that's critical to our organization's functioning, we have one server, and it's a Windows server.
The "home" office in NYC, with its larger staff, has multiple servers. I switched one of them to Linux two years ago, and other than some atrocious Samba bugs, I've had few regrets.
I'm up at 4AM because an MS patch totally broke a production system in our DC office. That patch was NT4 Security Rollup Patch, from eons ago (18 months?).
The system was effectively firewalled (it was an internal file/print server), and didn't really need the patch, but since I thought I knew better it's now a heap of scrap.
My excuse for not patching my software is that patches often break production systems. I'm going to sleep now, since I need to be up at 8AM to deal with the mess.
So, IMO, there is PLENTY of excuse for not patching your software. If you'd like to debate the point, I invite you to first use Google Groups with the words "security rollup ntoskrnl.exe stop 0x1E".
PS to snarky trolls - that's NOT "stop 0xA", I checked for THAT system-stopping patch problem first, so don't go telling me that there's a warning on the MSKB article, thanks anyway.
If you're not running on rails, and you allow someone to shift the POV, then your benchmark doesn't have a consistent basis for comparing one computer to another - your score can be different on the SAME computer from one run to the next, depending on where you point the camera.
The point is that Futuremark HAS the tools to run the demo "off the rails", which is how NVidia was caught. In the same way that some games let you cheat, but won't record your high score if you do (Angband/other roguelikes, and Lode Runner for C64 come to mind), future benchmarks should probably consider running off the rails, but only record the actual score when you let the benchmark follow a specific path(s).
I hope this gets modded up as funny AND insightful.
That said, in fairness to RH, it's pretty darn easy to install it such that it doesn't have QUITE so much bloat, in a way that's impossible to do with XP without a favorable Court of Appeals ruling.
Is Judge Rehnquist, in a Supreme Court brief, declaring that, "Creedence Clearwater Revival...has been recognized as one of the greatest American rock and roll groups of all time".
Almost as good as the old Onion article, "Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules".
Another voice commending your brilliance.
Some compadres who read /. regularly include: /. reader as well.
www.techcoop.info
www.riseup.net
www.resist.ca
www.tao.ca
The collective I work with:
www.shiftcontrol.org
I know that the editor of anarco-nyc.net is a
Are you sure this is right? In addition to the word "fuck" being pretty obviously in the middle of your number, my friend had a number xxx-AIR-SHIT. I feel like there's got to be quite a few numbers that spell SOMETHING bad...
Try FPort, from http://www.foundstone.com. It's under "Resources", "Free Tools". It will tell you which processes are watching which ports.
Is this "News for Nerds" because it's about comic books? Are we going to start reviewing the appropriate Simpsons episodes?
A quick look at alt.binaries.e-books reveals that nerds are heavy into the technical references and Star Wars, with a bit of pr0n. This is closely followed by classic SF, bad fantasy, and Terry Pratchett. An interesting sidenote is that nerds seem to like to read books that come in endless series, Wheel of Time #24 and all that.
I've actually checked the newsgroups for Kavalier & Klay, and it's never been there, along with the vast majority of books on the indie bestseller lists. Or the regular bestseller list, if it's not Grisham/Crichton/King/etc. For a demographic that's so militantly anti-major label drek, we sure do READ a lot of it!
So I guess I'm asking why, this, now. Who cares all of a sudden?
I am employed by an organization with direct links to this case on NOW's side of the fence, but I agree that the Supreme Court was NOT legitimizing coercion. NOW wasn't claiming that coercion took place, even if it did - they were claiming that extortion took place. The reasoning is that if extortion took place, you could get their assets seized through RICO. Proving coercion isn't good for more than the usual small fines.
This is a good sentiment, but unfortunately in reality it wouldn't matter. Most of the system-critical IE bugs are in MSHTML.DLL, and that's a file that lots and lots of Windows programs use to add Internet objects to their software. Most notably, Outlook does, as well as MAS90, Raiser's Edge 7, Peachtree Complete, and a number of other programs likely to be found at a 50-person non-profit. Replacing IE as the default browser offers minimal protection - Outlook is by far the most common vector for MSHTML.DLL exploits. :(
To me, replacing IE with Mozilla has its benefits, but security isn't one of them, nor is being able to avoid patching IE every time a critical update comes out (which, as you pointed out, is ALL THE TIME)
This is an excellent point, but possibly for the wrong reasons. The minimum wage laws may "oppress" teenagers who could use some pocket money, and it means that when I take in one of the MPAA members' fine films, there is no usher.
If these are the greatest social ills inflicted on us by the minimum wage, well, it's not enough for me to turn in my anti-authoritarian membership card, but I think that it's enough that I'll worry about real issues, instead of trying to repeal the minimum wage.
If you calculate the amount of money required to survive, and you calculate how much the minimum wage pays, you'll find that you're going to come up short making the minimum wage at 40 hours/week. If you could pay for food, shelter, transportation, and healthcare at $5.15/hour less taxes, the argument that the minimum wage is wrong would have more weight.
Real quick: $5.15*40*52 = $10,712 less FICA, Social Security, etc. Let's hope one never gets sick, injured, or have to care for a dependent parent...
This argument has been made many times before, and been debunked many times before.
It is true that backing ideologically similar candidates happens, and that this is a single factor in many when corporations make campaign contributions. However, one need look no further than ex-Sen. Bob Dole, who said, "When the Political Action Committees give money, they expext something in return other than good government." Or former Rep. Tony Coelho, a Democrat who voted for a late '80's capital gains tax cut, who said, "It's as simple as he who pays the piper plays the tune....I get elected by voters, I get financed by contributors. Voters don't care about this [capital gains], contributors do."
Alternatively, one need look no further than this CNN article to effectively counter this argument.