> The non-settling states told the judge that > Virginia-based computer testing consultant, James Bach, > had built his modular version of Windows using > Microsoft's own technology. > > Bach, who has worked as a contractor for Microsoft...
... but who will never be allowed to work for them again...
I sure hope this guy has a night job. Pretty ballsy for a Windows programmer to not mind getting blacklisted by Redmond!;^) (obviously the "fame and fortune" from this slick move will be worth quite a bit more, but the MS dev community *is* pretty tight-knit in my experience)
> No! The people who invented P2P apps maybe are > pushing the envelope of what the net can do - but > 95% of the people on the biggest P2P networks are > just downloading free music. They're not pushing > anything other than their luck, because they're > basically massively abusing the system.
Initially I agreed wholeheartedly, but on second thought I think I disagree.
What's being tranfered isn't important -- how is. If people want to download these shows from a cerntralized server, they'd still be pulling down gigs of data. I wonder just how bandwidth intensive the searches are compared to the actual file pulling.
Either way, it's yet another wholly new paradigm; the client is creating the server out of nothing. It's free IT infrastructure created by the same people that are using it. What could be more fair than that? Even if Gnutella's not horribly efficient now, the fact that these "freeloaders" are using p2p on a practical scale has allowed people to study the systems and suggest improvements (eg, http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnutel la-rc.pdf) that will help reduce the overhead for these headless servers (sorry for the pun), making for better p2p advances in the future.
And as sneaky as KaZaa was about adding the "faux-Trojan", using a client's extra bandwidth to serve your ads is a brillant idea that has to be a sign of things to come [that are hopefully a little more straight about what they're doing].
As another poster pointed out, you can put a cap on the problem or the net can evolve to start using itself in a way that meets the proverbial "needs of tomorrow". Thanks to kids downloading mp3s, we're on our way.
> He compared the situation to "proprietary operating > systems that run only on specific hardware designed > and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple > Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. > "Microsoft's Windows operating systems run on > computers manufactured by thousands of different > companies," he stated.
Wow. AMD doesn't see an OS monopoly because of the way such a monopoly keeps their market free of specialized niche competitors?
How about your niche is so large already that *your* "specific hardware" that runs Windows is so ubiquitous you can't tell that in a free and fair market AMD'd be a bit player too, hunting its niche?
What's good for the goose might be good for the gander, but that don't make it right.:^)
It all depends on your definition of turning on a dime. If you need to win the pennant this year, four years is pretty slow. If you're the Pope sitting in the Vatican, changes might take generations and still be considered too fast.
Four years for a company that has revenue to burn isn't long. MS might not have revolutionized the net as quickly as so many dot coms went belly-up, but they certainly -- and very methodically -- went from bit players to the current king of the client, crossplatform (Windows and Mac). Not to mention MS has a title bout with Java and UNIX for the server coming in the next year, or three.
From the article: "When asked about the desire to own Java, IBM's Director for eBusiness Standards Strategy Bob Sutor said 'I don't know about owning it, but we'd sure like to see it open sourced.'"
I think the author's point in the article is that IBM needs to influence control over Java to gain equal footing opposite Microsoft -- the type of control that would come through a hostile takeover. The author delves into what such a fantasy takeover would entail as an extended metaphor for what kind of control [he believes] IBM could have were Java to become open sourced or a true open standard.
The author continues with this point (open source could essentially get IBM what it'd get with a buyout) in this article, in the same series: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/st ories/mai n/0,14179,2860394,00.html
Steven B. Lipner, Microsoft's director of security assurance, responded, saying: "I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
That's not what's there now -- http://www.kazaa.com/en/terms.htm
But the fact that 4.2 isn't even a complete thought....
============== 4.2 We may add, delete or change some or all of the Software's functionality provided in connection with KaZaA at any time. This may include download of necessary software modules. Any new features that augment or enhance [sic] ==============
... makes me wonder if the web-site hasn't been updated. And it basically says the same thing in a little different terms, sans the bit about clauses outliving terminiation (I didn't see that when skimming, at least).
Anyone know where the EULA quoted above came from?
The great thing about Linux is that you can cut out the windowing system altogether and still have a useful, up to date machine. I was only half-way joking with a friend today that I wanted to pick up an old Powerbook 170 off of eBay and slap NetBSD for 68k powered procs on it (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/index.html) to make it a smooth links, elm, vi utilizing geekbox. That's a bit extreme, but conosle-only on my old Motoral StarMax 603e isn't.
So though I'd agree that no author has any obligation to keep hardware requirements down so that they'll run on a P1 133 MHz box and that you can't expect to run tomorrow's GNOME on yesterday's system, one bit of the "beauty" of Linux is that you can still run tomorrow's software without having to make updates to parts of your system you don't want to update -- or, in this case, add the part to your system at all!
The new file system sounds like a smart idea. I'm a MS-SQL Server dba, and have been for years, and let's just say it's a much smarter way than storing all your info in a flatfile well before you get above what you could store on a floppy.;^)
But rewrite Office? I think all that would really need to be written would replacing the bits that handle file I/O with ADO.NET. Every other part of the application would be essentially the same, whether the dll's and ocx's are stored as blobs in a dbms or not.
Well, Apple has hacked on gcc a bit. Looks like the changes aren't exactly cutting edge; they appear to be from nearly two years ago. Not sure how that makes Red Hat on G4 a shoe-in, and I'm sure there's more work to be done. Here's the horse's mouth, so to speak:
http://altivec.org/tools/freeware.cfm#apple
Some quotes: > Apple's Patches > These patches where collected and provided by Sam > Figueroa at Apple. This patch set contains all of > Apple's AltiVec-related changes to gcc-2.95.2. It is > designed to be applied onto the official FSF > distribution of gcc 2.95.2 with no other patches except > for Motorola's AltiVec patches as of Feb. 2000 (In other > words, the patches attached are relative to Motorola's > patches). The attached patches have not been tested, so > use at your own risk.
My questions is whether this RedHat announcement is only for AltiVec enabled processors. The RedHat news release (http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/pres s_motorola.html) seems to suggest this. Guess my iBook will have to learn to live with Yellow Dog after all.
Even if the mcs worked flawlessly, you would barely have begun to have what you needed for Word & Friends. Creating a compiler doesn't mean Mono has ported every namespace in existence. Windows Forms, as the most obviously example, is still going to be a ways behind perfect mcs execution.
Think of a perfectly running mcs as "Java without AWT" or "C without GTK" or what-have-you. Look at gcj (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/), as an example. Java to native compilation might be well on its way towards being useful, but AWT is still a long ways off (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/faq.html#2_4) and Swing? Forget it. mcs will probably be in the same boat for a while (hopefully not quite as long).
Command line apps (think "ANSI C#", as it were), sure. Word? Still got a ways to go.
> (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than > half of all comment posters fall into this 3%)
Stop and think about that, fellow posters. That means comment posters comprise *less than 6%* of slashdot viewers [according to some means of measurement].
What are those other 19 outta 20 people doing? Just reading the articles and surfing to the links? Are they bothering with comments? If so, why are they so interested in reading things but not saying anything?
Seems like you could charge the silent majority, if they're truly surfing the site for content and not merely curious homepage clickers that don't care enough to pay, and still make plenty without bothering to levvy a fee on the people who make the content come proverbially alive.
Mind you, these are this year's models, and are worth a little less.
Main site: http://www.weeforestfolk.com/index2.html
football player mouse, $72: http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/new2000/ms21 _b.jpg
mouse with fairy, $475: http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/1news5.jpg "Little mice who lived in a shoe", $428: http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/new2000 /m189_b.jpg
Purchasing these on eBay and getting scammed -- $175 (article says that's what eBay's insurance pays out if you get scammed).
If we could empower all citizens equally, we'd certainly be on the right track. More people to bribe is great when it means that we're finally all bribed equally, so to speak. That's the equality that our government espouses to create, but it's not what happens in practice.
I think your "mob rule" point plays more along with lightfoot jim's comment about disinterest and lack of education of the voters [on the issues, at least]. One person, one vote doesn't create mob rule, but having the uneducated, politically unsavvy having equal status under the gov't does make for some, um, interesting and less than ideal practical experiences, I'd imagine.
The scariest thing about a true democracy is empowering those who don't seem to be as informed as [the generic] we. We as a country would make critical, uninformed decisions if everyone were heard equally... Luckily the country's too dammed big to ever have a true democracy and apparently too capitalistic to even have a true republic for the masses. That's why I made the point about the dollars -- we're a republic of dollars every bit as much, if not more, than one for people. And those dollars keep voting for quite some time after they leave our hands and enter the coffers of the rich.
My only real complaint is that the country's representatives don't have the guts to admit this failing of the system up front. I also find it interesting that we're so afraid of entrusting those who aren't perceived by us to be as informed as us to be our equals when it comes to creating a government. But, to sum, I never said it's inherently awful that we're a republic of dollars, just that that's not how the country bills itself.
> That's why a military toilet seat costs six hundred bucks. > Because you can at least be sure that your ass will fit, that its > over a latrine and that it will have a hole in it. > > With civilian (mis-)management, they'd skip cutting out the hole > and justify it as cutting out the cost. And there'd be shit > everywhere.
Believe me, as an employee of a gov't contractor the reason a toilet seat costs $600 isn't because it's going to work, it's because the military/gov't will pay that amount. Cash heavy, expertise shy; that's been my second-hand experience of the people that award government contracts.
Naturally we don't make nearly enough where I work.:^)
I envy the order that exists in the military, but they seem to have only [perhaps knowingly] shifted, rather than eliminated, their mismangement from the work that gets done to the amount they're willing to pay for it. In an "economy" that doesn't measure success from the bottom line but also from ensuring every dollar gets spent in order to get funding the next year, "worth" is a very weirded bit of langauge.
To briefly tie back in to the original topic, this is what makes working at a gov't installation so difficult. We can go two years and hundreds of thousands over budget (ie, extra years of funding) if it makes everyone "happy". Form over function. There is no bottom line for the customer [wrt dollars].
The fact that people can deliver a [proverbial] low-bid toilet seat for $300 with no hole shows just how skewed the economics of gov't contracts have become. I hate it when economists say that "the market will sort it out", but the open market is certainly a more efficient, if ultimately horribly more confusing, method of determining worth.
> Update: this doesn't mean all peripherals will be > region encoded. Apparently Joypads will work on > both sides of the pond.
I'm sorry, I thought "the pond" generally was understood to mean the Atlantic, as in, "Tea at 5? Sure, I'll just jump in my Concorde and jump 'cross the pond." So do you mean joypads (or are "Joypads" and "joypads" different pond-jumping beasts?) can be imported to the US from the UK and the rest of the EU but not Japan? Horribly confusing.
And yes, for your crazy peeps down under, the subject meant to say "Isn't the pond on our left?"
The one thing that interested me about the blurb from the Seti@Home site that was linked from this article was the following quote:
> But starting last month (January 2002) the
> bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in
> an unexpected and unexplained way.
I wonder if this isn't a byproduct of the intense bandwidth issues associated with peer to peer apps like Gnutella and Morpheus, popular music "sharing" applications that seem to get a bit of use on college grounds nationwide. I'd guess (if I had to; definitely talking out ye old arse here) the reason bandwidth usage wasn't noticed sooner is that many places (my place of work included -- I'm a gov't contractor) are placing a pretty high priority on "Homeland Security", including taking a fresh look at internet usage.
These things aren't exactly bandwidth friendly (see http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnutel la-rc.pdf for a great discussion on the perils of the flaws in the first generation Gnutella protocol).
Anyhow, that's what came to mind when I read the blurb. I think their best short term solution might be to chase down unattended Gnutella and Morpheus/KaZaA applications and get back that bandwidth.
No, things weren't any better in original Game Boy land. First thing I bought after Super Mario Land was a Nuby "frontlight".
I think the best thing about this portablemonopoly jive is that the light isn't going to burn a hole in your retina, a la the Worm Light.
I'm still getting over the fact that I'm replaying 10 year old games on a brand new system that's designed to play them (which distinguishes it from, say, playing the 2600 on OS X).
After the initial shock of not seeing my comments appear in the final 47 (all listed in entirety: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-major.htm), I noticed some of what the individuals (as opposed to companies) that wrote in really do have great comments.
Here's an example from Mark Alexander, pseudo-randomly chosen b/c he's the first individual listed (http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/major/mt c-00002572.htm):
Mark: 4) The primary beneficiary of the settlement, other than Microsoft, is the OEM rather than the consumer.
Me: Great point. I spent much of my comment saying OEMs should have the right to bundle Java VMs or dual booting machines without penalty. How does giving OEMs the *right* to do this ultimately ensure something positive for the consumer? I don't know that it does. This wasn't just a good comment for the settlement, but even for other comment writers like myself.
Mark: IV - D: Coverage for OEM should not be limited to just the largest volume 20, but should include all the smaller OEM who by nature of their size have less of a bargaining position with Microsoft to begin with and as a group represent a large portion of licenses sold.
Me: Another great point. I'd allowed the presentation of the settlement in the media to greatly influence what I wrote and never bothered to break the whole thing down line by line. Talk about your misinformed and underinformed public (aka "me"). Let's face it, Mark did his homework. I didn't realize smaller OEMs didn't receive similar/the same protections.
Anyhow, I find the individual responses to be quite interesting, moreso than, say, RealNetwork's response which was obviously put together by "real" lawyers (Can't imagine being able to say "IAAL!"). Take a look. Whoever sifted through did very well.
"The only truly effective Campaign Finance Reform is... " to remove the religion of capitalism that subverts the value of the democratic ideal of "one individual, one vote" through a republic based on the substitution of votes with dollars -- which will always give the loudest voice to the richest of the rich.
As long as the US is a capitalistic state, the dollar will be mightier than the individual.
Here's the link:
http://www.flexplay.com/flexplayq&a.htm
Here's one Q/A:
==========
Q: How does the quality compare? Are any features missing in Flexplay discs compared to regular DVDs?
A Flexplay disc is a DVD. Video quality will be the same as from a regular DVD. Anything possible on a DVD will be possible on a Flexplay disc.
==========
Sounds like a pirate's dream. Now instead of having a record of all the DVDs he's rented that the cops can come back to later, he just forks over $5 cash a pop, takes the full DVD home to his PC, rips the 0s & 1s, and is selling untraceable bootlegs before the "consumer edition" is in Wal-Mart. Dead presidents don't talk.
Quotes like this one from the article:
Section 25 of the C# specification says (I quote verbatim): "C# provides the ability to write unsafe code. In unsafe code it is possible to declare and operate on pointers, to perform conversions between pointers and integral types, to take the address of variables, and so forth."
========
... make me wonder if this guy uses C on a daily basis. He seems to have succumbed to the somewhat unconscious connection between two meanings of the word "unsafe". One is that applications that allow for buffer overflows are unsafe. Another is that code that stores a few vars on the stack where nobody's watching is "unsafe" [from the point of view that it could get overwritten]. The fact that you often find you've done the first having tried to perform the second without "proper Jedi training" seems to have strengthened his otherwise unconscious connection between the uses of the word.
Sometimes it's more efficient to write unsafe code. If he hasn't seen those needs, even if the author does use C, he probably could have gotten by just about as easily using VB. To take away the ability to write 0s & 1s however you want when you *do* need to is to, as another poster put it, is a bit pedantic on the part of the people who created the programming language.
Do I want people doing VB tasks to have the ability to write unsafe code, in either sense of the word? Stereotypically speaking probably not. But if you're using C#, I don't see why not.
If Bill telling me to use.doc's for all my word processing needs is bad why isn't Bill allowing me to write code the way that best fits my programming needs A Good Thing?
At first I was amazed by how much people loved the idea of TiVo allowing them to, get this, *tape one show while watching another*!!! The only two real advantages over a VCR seemed to be that you could watch something you taped while taping something else (w/out buying another unit) and fact that the media was digital -- if you really need digital (hey, I love watching Buffy as much as the next guy, but analog does just fine by me).
Now I know the VCR comes out on top. Even if my VCR mfgr included some supra-secret monitoring routines, it'd have a hard time putting together what I was watching in "12:00am, 1/1/1970". *flash flash flash*
What was even better than the Ambrosia article was a link within it to another article entitled, "Why Do People Register, Does Crippling Work, Does Anybody Really Know?"
http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-peop le -register-shareware.html
Here, if you believe all you read, a shareware author created a scheme in a newly released app in order for it to act as "nagware" in 50% of its installs and "crippleware" on the other half, even if the app was uninstalled and reinstalled.
The results were that people were approximately 5 times more likely to register the crippleware than the nagware.
> Assuming that if all copies had been restricted the monthly
> registration count would have risen by the difference between the
> "PoNC" and "Restricted " figures total sales, there has
> effectively been a loss in sales of 685 copies, for a value of
> $17125, which I guess is what the experiment cost to perform.
Though the price of shareware might seem too high, often the price of having shareware that doesn't work due to a crippling routine is even higher.
Slashdot Mirror
> The non-settling states told the judge that
;^) (obviously the "fame and fortune" from this slick move will be worth quite a bit more, but the MS dev community *is* pretty tight-knit in my experience)
> Virginia-based computer testing consultant, James Bach,
> had built his modular version of Windows using
> Microsoft's own technology.
>
> Bach, who has worked as a contractor for Microsoft...
... but who will never be allowed to work for them again...
I sure hope this guy has a night job. Pretty ballsy for a Windows programmer to not mind getting blacklisted by Redmond!
> No! The people who invented P2P apps maybe are
l la-rc.pdf) that will help reduce the overhead for these headless servers (sorry for the pun), making for better p2p advances in the future.
> pushing the envelope of what the net can do - but
> 95% of the people on the biggest P2P networks are
> just downloading free music. They're not pushing
> anything other than their luck, because they're
> basically massively abusing the system.
Initially I agreed wholeheartedly, but on second thought I think I disagree.
What's being tranfered isn't important -- how is. If people want to download these shows from a cerntralized server, they'd still be pulling down gigs of data. I wonder just how bandwidth intensive the searches are compared to the actual file pulling.
Either way, it's yet another wholly new paradigm; the client is creating the server out of nothing. It's free IT infrastructure created by the same people that are using it. What could be more fair than that? Even if Gnutella's not horribly efficient now, the fact that these "freeloaders" are using p2p on a practical scale has allowed people to study the systems and suggest improvements (eg, http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnute
And as sneaky as KaZaa was about adding the "faux-Trojan", using a client's extra bandwidth to serve your ads is a brillant idea that has to be a sign of things to come [that are hopefully a little more straight about what they're doing].
As another poster pointed out, you can put a cap on the problem or the net can evolve to start using itself in a way that meets the proverbial "needs of tomorrow". Thanks to kids downloading mp3s, we're on our way.
> He compared the situation to "proprietary operating
:^)
> systems that run only on specific hardware designed
> and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple
> Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris.
> "Microsoft's Windows operating systems run on
> computers manufactured by thousands of different
> companies," he stated.
Wow. AMD doesn't see an OS monopoly because of the way such a monopoly keeps their market free of specialized niche competitors?
How about your niche is so large already that *your* "specific hardware" that runs Windows is so ubiquitous you can't tell that in a free and fair market AMD'd be a bit player too, hunting its niche?
What's good for the goose might be good for the gander, but that don't make it right.
It all depends on your definition of turning on a dime. If you need to win the pennant this year, four years is pretty slow. If you're the Pope sitting in the Vatican, changes might take generations and still be considered too fast.
Four years for a company that has revenue to burn isn't long. MS might not have revolutionized the net as quickly as so many dot coms went belly-up, but they certainly -- and very methodically -- went from bit players to the current king of the client, crossplatform (Windows and Mac). Not to mention MS has a title bout with Java and UNIX for the server coming in the next year, or three.
From the article:
t ories/mai n/0,14179,2860394,00.html
"When asked about the desire to own Java, IBM's Director for eBusiness Standards Strategy Bob Sutor said 'I don't know about owning it, but we'd sure like to see it open sourced.'"
I think the author's point in the article is that IBM needs to influence control over Java to gain equal footing opposite Microsoft -- the type of control that would come through a hostile takeover. The author delves into what such a fantasy takeover would entail as an extended metaphor for what kind of control [he believes] IBM could have were Java to become open sourced or a true open standard.
The author continues with this point (open source could essentially get IBM what it'd get with a buyout) in this article, in the same series:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/s
Very interesting!
Steven B. Lipner, Microsoft's director of security assurance, responded, saying: "I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
"... or even needed to."
That's not what's there now -- http://www.kazaa.com/en/terms.htm
But the fact that 4.2 isn't even a complete thought....
==============
4.2 We may add, delete or change some or all of the Software's functionality provided in connection with KaZaA at any time. This may include download of necessary software modules. Any new features that augment or enhance [sic]
==============
... makes me wonder if the web-site hasn't been updated. And it basically says the same thing in a little different terms, sans the bit about clauses outliving terminiation (I didn't see that when skimming, at least).
Anyone know where the EULA quoted above came from?
The great thing about Linux is that you can cut out the windowing system altogether and still have a useful, up to date machine. I was only half-way joking with a friend today that I wanted to pick up an old Powerbook 170 off of eBay and slap NetBSD for 68k powered procs on it (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/index.html) to make it a smooth links, elm, vi utilizing geekbox. That's a bit extreme, but conosle-only on my old Motoral StarMax 603e isn't.
So though I'd agree that no author has any obligation to keep hardware requirements down so that they'll run on a P1 133 MHz box and that you can't expect to run tomorrow's GNOME on yesterday's system, one bit of the "beauty" of Linux is that you can still run tomorrow's software without having to make updates to parts of your system you don't want to update -- or, in this case, add the part to your system at all!
The new file system sounds like a smart idea. I'm a MS-SQL Server dba, and have been for years, and let's just say it's a much smarter way than storing all your info in a flatfile well before you get above what you could store on a floppy. ;^)
But rewrite Office? I think all that would really need to be written would replacing the bits that handle file I/O with ADO.NET. Every other part of the application would be essentially the same, whether the dll's and ocx's are stored as blobs in a dbms or not.
What am I missing?
Well, Apple has hacked on gcc a bit. Looks like the changes aren't exactly cutting edge; they appear to be from nearly two years ago. Not sure how that makes Red Hat on G4 a shoe-in, and I'm sure there's more work to be done. Here's the horse's mouth, so to speak:
s s_motorola.html) seems to suggest this. Guess my iBook will have to learn to live with Yellow Dog after all.
http://altivec.org/tools/freeware.cfm#apple
Some quotes:
> Apple's Patches
> These patches where collected and provided by Sam
> Figueroa at Apple. This patch set contains all of
> Apple's AltiVec-related changes to gcc-2.95.2. It is
> designed to be applied onto the official FSF
> distribution of gcc 2.95.2 with no other patches except
> for Motorola's AltiVec patches as of Feb. 2000 (In other
> words, the patches attached are relative to Motorola's
> patches). The attached patches have not been tested, so
> use at your own risk.
My questions is whether this RedHat announcement is only for AltiVec enabled processors. The RedHat news release (http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/pre
Even if the mcs worked flawlessly, you would barely have begun to have what you needed for Word & Friends. Creating a compiler doesn't mean Mono has ported every namespace in existence. Windows Forms, as the most obviously example, is still going to be a ways behind perfect mcs execution.
Think of a perfectly running mcs as "Java without AWT" or "C without GTK" or what-have-you. Look at gcj (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/), as an example. Java to native compilation might be well on its way towards being useful, but AWT is still a long ways off (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/faq.html#2_4) and Swing? Forget it. mcs will probably be in the same boat for a while (hopefully not quite as long).
Command line apps (think "ANSI C#", as it were), sure. Word? Still got a ways to go.
> (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than
> half of all comment posters fall into this 3%)
Stop and think about that, fellow posters. That means comment posters comprise *less than 6%* of slashdot viewers [according to some means of measurement].
What are those other 19 outta 20 people doing? Just reading the articles and surfing to the links? Are they bothering with comments? If so, why are they so interested in reading things but not saying anything?
Seems like you could charge the silent majority, if they're truly surfing the site for content and not merely curious homepage clickers that don't care enough to pay, and still make plenty without bothering to levvy a fee on the people who make the content come proverbially alive.
Mind you, these are this year's models, and are worth a little less.
1 _b .jpg
0 /m189_b .jpg
Main site:
http://www.weeforestfolk.com/index2.html
football player mouse, $72:
http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/new2000/ms2
mouse with fairy, $475:
http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/1news5.jpg
"Little mice who lived in a shoe", $428:
http://www.weeforestfolk.com/images/new200
Purchasing these on eBay and getting scammed -- $175 (article says that's what eBay's insurance pays out if you get scammed).
> It just means there's more people to bribe.
If we could empower all citizens equally, we'd certainly be on the right track. More people to bribe is great when it means that we're finally all bribed equally, so to speak. That's the equality that our government espouses to create, but it's not what happens in practice.
I think your "mob rule" point plays more along with lightfoot jim's comment about disinterest and lack of education of the voters [on the issues, at least]. One person, one vote doesn't create mob rule, but having the uneducated, politically unsavvy having equal status under the gov't does make for some, um, interesting and less than ideal practical experiences, I'd imagine.
The scariest thing about a true democracy is empowering those who don't seem to be as informed as [the generic] we. We as a country would make critical, uninformed decisions if everyone were heard equally... Luckily the country's too dammed big to ever have a true democracy and apparently too capitalistic to even have a true republic for the masses. That's why I made the point about the dollars -- we're a republic of dollars every bit as much, if not more, than one for people. And those dollars keep voting for quite some time after they leave our hands and enter the coffers of the rich.
My only real complaint is that the country's representatives don't have the guts to admit this failing of the system up front. I also find it interesting that we're so afraid of entrusting those who aren't perceived by us to be as informed as us to be our equals when it comes to creating a government. But, to sum, I never said it's inherently awful that we're a republic of dollars, just that that's not how the country bills itself.
> That's why a military toilet seat costs six hundred bucks.
:^)
> Because you can at least be sure that your ass will fit, that its
> over a latrine and that it will have a hole in it.
>
> With civilian (mis-)management, they'd skip cutting out the hole
> and justify it as cutting out the cost. And there'd be shit
> everywhere.
Believe me, as an employee of a gov't contractor the reason a toilet seat costs $600 isn't because it's going to work, it's because the military/gov't will pay that amount. Cash heavy, expertise shy; that's been my second-hand experience of the people that award government contracts.
Naturally we don't make nearly enough where I work.
I envy the order that exists in the military, but they seem to have only [perhaps knowingly] shifted, rather than eliminated, their mismangement from the work that gets done to the amount they're willing to pay for it. In an "economy" that doesn't measure success from the bottom line but also from ensuring every dollar gets spent in order to get funding the next year, "worth" is a very weirded bit of langauge.
To briefly tie back in to the original topic, this is what makes working at a gov't installation so difficult. We can go two years and hundreds of thousands over budget (ie, extra years of funding) if it makes everyone "happy". Form over function. There is no bottom line for the customer [wrt dollars].
The fact that people can deliver a [proverbial] low-bid toilet seat for $300 with no hole shows just how skewed the economics of gov't contracts have become. I hate it when economists say that "the market will sort it out", but the open market is certainly a more efficient, if ultimately horribly more confusing, method of determining worth.
Sorry man, I don't have any mod points right now. How about a binhexed .mp3 of Take California instead? :^)
> Update: this doesn't mean all peripherals will be
> region encoded. Apparently Joypads will work on
> both sides of the pond.
I'm sorry, I thought "the pond" generally was understood to mean the Atlantic, as in, "Tea at 5? Sure, I'll just jump in my Concorde and jump 'cross the pond." So do you mean joypads (or are "Joypads" and "joypads" different pond-jumping beasts?) can be imported to the US from the UK and the rest of the EU but not Japan? Horribly confusing.
And yes, for your crazy peeps down under, the subject meant to say "Isn't the pond on our left?"
The one thing that interested me about the blurb from the Seti@Home site that was linked from this article was the following quote:
l la-rc.pdf for a great discussion on the perils of the flaws in the first generation Gnutella protocol).
> But starting last month (January 2002) the
> bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in
> an unexpected and unexplained way.
I wonder if this isn't a byproduct of the intense bandwidth issues associated with peer to peer apps like Gnutella and Morpheus, popular music "sharing" applications that seem to get a bit of use on college grounds nationwide. I'd guess (if I had to; definitely talking out ye old arse here) the reason bandwidth usage wasn't noticed sooner is that many places (my place of work included -- I'm a gov't contractor) are placing a pretty high priority on "Homeland Security", including taking a fresh look at internet usage.
These things aren't exactly bandwidth friendly (see http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnute
Anyhow, that's what came to mind when I read the blurb. I think their best short term solution might be to chase down unattended Gnutella and Morpheus/KaZaA applications and get back that bandwidth.
No, things weren't any better in original Game Boy land. First thing I bought after Super Mario Land was a Nuby "frontlight".
I think the best thing about this portablemonopoly jive is that the light isn't going to burn a hole in your retina, a la the Worm Light.
I'm still getting over the fact that I'm replaying 10 year old games on a brand new system that's designed to play them (which distinguishes it from, say, playing the 2600 on OS X).
After the initial shock of not seeing my comments appear in the final 47 (all listed in entirety: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-major.htm), I noticed some of what the individuals (as opposed to companies) that wrote in really do have great comments.
t c-00002572.htm):
Here's an example from Mark Alexander, pseudo-randomly chosen b/c he's the first individual listed (http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/major/m
Mark: 4) The primary beneficiary of the settlement, other than Microsoft, is the OEM rather than the consumer.
Me: Great point. I spent much of my comment saying OEMs should have the right to bundle Java VMs or dual booting machines without penalty. How does giving OEMs the *right* to do this ultimately ensure something positive for the consumer? I don't know that it does. This wasn't just a good comment for the settlement, but even for other comment writers like myself.
Mark: IV - D: Coverage for OEM should not be limited to just the largest volume 20, but should include all the smaller OEM who by nature of their size have less of a bargaining position with Microsoft to begin with and as a group represent a large portion of licenses sold.
Me: Another great point. I'd allowed the presentation of the settlement in the media to greatly influence what I wrote and never bothered to break the whole thing down line by line. Talk about your misinformed and underinformed public (aka "me"). Let's face it, Mark did his homework. I didn't realize smaller OEMs didn't receive similar/the same protections.
Anyhow, I find the individual responses to be quite interesting, moreso than, say, RealNetwork's response which was obviously put together by "real" lawyers (Can't imagine being able to say "IAAL!"). Take a look. Whoever sifted through did very well.
"The only truly effective Campaign Finance Reform is... " to remove the religion of capitalism that subverts the value of the democratic ideal of "one individual, one vote" through a republic based on the substitution of votes with dollars -- which will always give the loudest voice to the richest of the rich.
As long as the US is a capitalistic state, the dollar will be mightier than the individual.
Here's the link:
http://www.flexplay.com/flexplayq&a.htm
Here's one Q/A:
==========
Q: How does the quality compare? Are any features missing in Flexplay discs compared to regular DVDs?
A Flexplay disc is a DVD. Video quality will be the same as from a regular DVD. Anything possible on a DVD will be possible on a Flexplay disc.
==========
Sounds like a pirate's dream. Now instead of having a record of all the DVDs he's rented that the cops can come back to later, he just forks over $5 cash a pop, takes the full DVD home to his PC, rips the 0s & 1s, and is selling untraceable bootlegs before the "consumer edition" is in Wal-Mart. Dead presidents don't talk.
Anyhow, interesting idea.
Quotes like this one from the article:
.doc's for all my word processing needs is bad why isn't Bill allowing me to write code the way that best fits my programming needs A Good Thing?
Section 25 of the C# specification says (I quote verbatim): "C# provides the ability to write unsafe code. In unsafe code it is possible to declare and operate on pointers, to perform conversions between pointers and integral types, to take the address of variables, and so forth."
========
... make me wonder if this guy uses C on a daily basis. He seems to have succumbed to the somewhat unconscious connection between two meanings of the word "unsafe". One is that applications that allow for buffer overflows are unsafe. Another is that code that stores a few vars on the stack where nobody's watching is "unsafe" [from the point of view that it could get overwritten]. The fact that you often find you've done the first having tried to perform the second without "proper Jedi training" seems to have strengthened his otherwise unconscious connection between the uses of the word.
Sometimes it's more efficient to write unsafe code. If he hasn't seen those needs, even if the author does use C, he probably could have gotten by just about as easily using VB. To take away the ability to write 0s & 1s however you want when you *do* need to is to, as another poster put it, is a bit pedantic on the part of the people who created the programming language.
Do I want people doing VB tasks to have the ability to write unsafe code, in either sense of the word? Stereotypically speaking probably not. But if you're using C#, I don't see why not.
If Bill telling me to use
At first I was amazed by how much people loved the idea of TiVo allowing them to, get this, *tape one show while watching another*!!! The only two real advantages over a VCR seemed to be that you could watch something you taped while taping something else (w/out buying another unit) and fact that the media was digital -- if you really need digital (hey, I love watching Buffy as much as the next guy, but analog does just fine by me).
Now I know the VCR comes out on top. Even if my VCR mfgr included some supra-secret monitoring routines, it'd have a hard time putting together what I was watching in "12:00am, 1/1/1970". *flash flash flash*
What was even better than the Ambrosia article was a link within it to another article entitled, "Why Do People Register, Does Crippling Work, Does Anybody Really Know?"
p le -register-shareware.html
http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-peo
Here, if you believe all you read, a shareware author created a scheme in a newly released app in order for it to act as "nagware" in 50% of its installs and "crippleware" on the other half, even if the app was uninstalled and reinstalled.
The results were that people were approximately 5 times more likely to register the crippleware than the nagware.
> Assuming that if all copies had been restricted the monthly
> registration count would have risen by the difference between the
> "PoNC" and "Restricted " figures total sales, there has
> effectively been a loss in sales of 685 copies, for a value of
> $17125, which I guess is what the experiment cost to perform.
Though the price of shareware might seem too high, often the price of having shareware that doesn't work due to a crippling routine is even higher.