Together with the previous story posted here about the RIAA hitting that consulting firm with a $1M settlement, I see Bad Things (TM) happening.
The first of course, is that regardless of whether or not a company has a blatant-ly piratic MP3 server the typical corporate knee-jerk reaction is going to be "no MP3's". Whatsoever. Forget about P2P, forget about actual piratical behavior (whatever that means). Nope, those MP3s on my hard disk from CD's I own that I listen to all day so as to not go mad? Can't have those, mister. Because they're MP3s. You think we're going to bother checking if you own them? Ha-ha.
Can someone tell me why this is informative? The old, tired we don't have but you don't really need it anyway "argument"? And from a goddamn AC, to boot?
Lesse, I'll post something that mentions squeak, gcc, perl, emacs, apache, etc. And ad nauseaum, too (is that like the yacc parser?). Does that qualify me as informative?
A lady told me after showing her the bug web site that during the 60's when they were developing s/w to monitor the astronaut that a person who prided himself in zero bugs in his s/w had develivered s/w that crashed. In this case the s/w did data reduction of data which and crashed since it didn't take into account the astronaut dying (in which case an astronaut actually did die) and thus the vital sign data was flat lining.
It's interesting the list includes the Denver airport baggage system breakdown but not the Phoenix Sky Harbor one. A system designed by I forget which consulting firm over the course of three years at a cost of millions of dollars finally had to be scrapped and replaced with custom software done by IBM.
It delayed the re-opening of the airport for about seven months or so. After it did finally open the system wasn't working yet so the baggage system had to be operated manually for a couple of months.
This is a very serious vulnerability in Mozilla. Why wasn't it posted as front-page news during the day?
Of course the answer is simple: It's not an IE problem. It's not a chance to bash Microsoft. Yet a lot of people who use Linux also use Mozilla (or variants thereof).
So I ask again, why didn't it make the front page? Nowadays when every scrapping little bug in IE is splashed all over the place and fills up with 400+ posts?
This person is screwed... he's violating the Windows Scripting Host EULA by using it this way. I hope he closed his eyes when he installed that to begin with.
I was born in Mexico and lived there for 26 years. I was an independent consultant for six of those before I moved to the US.
Now, most people posting replies to this story have absolutely no idea of how things in Mexico work. The "concerns" raised by the members of the Mexican Congress are completely invalid for the simple reason that 90% of those "congressmen" can barely read and write, much less have any sort of expertise in the IT field. They are doing this simply to spite president Fox, just like they've been doing ever since he took office. Did anyone say that the Guajardo dude that is "spearheading" the bill to use free software is a member of the left-wing opposition? Nope. These are the same people that denied president Fox's request to travel outside the country a few months ago saying that he'd been traveling "way too much" lately. These are also the people who wanted to impeach him because he married a divorcee. I shit you not.
Also, take a moment and read the NYT article. Where it says that the government valued Microsoft's contribution at $30M, while Microsoft valued it at $6M. Ooops. So the treasury gets charged for 30, the government shells out 6 or 7. Where does the rest go? This is how things get done in Mexico. Do I seem cynical? Sure. I worked the system for 6 years.
Further, there is no such thing as the "mexican software industry". Trust me. Four-fifths of all companies that write software for a living are still stuck in DOS and dBase, and have no intention or desire to change because that would require training or hiring people with expensive skillsets. Can you imagine asking for a web server at a company that rations bottled water to cut costs?
Finally, all this is well and good but it doesn't really make any difference if it's free software or not. 40% of people in Mexico live below the poverty line (and that's lower then the US poverty line, BTW). Just how the government is planning to provide millions of computers is beyond me. But never mind that. Think about internet access. Internet connections require a phone. Phone service in Mexico is metered, which means that if you make more than 100 (or so) calls a month you get charged something called "servicio medido" which screws you in so many interesting ways. To put this in perspective, my average phone bill in Mexico used to be around $30 bucks. That's 300 pesos. Whenever I had trouble with my "ISP" (which was also the government-owned phone company, BTW) dropping connections my bill went up to $150 dollars. That's 1 week's salary for most middle-class Mexicans. And did I mention it's more expensive to call Mexico from the US than it is to call Denmark or Sweden? Also, the price of electricity just went up by around 80% in most areas of the country. Apparently the government was subsidizing power generation and decided to stop doing it. The problem is *why* they were doing that in the first place. Computers run on electricity. Ad nauseaum.
Technology growth requires infrastructure. Mexico does not have the infrastructure, period. So before we all fly into hissy fits bemoaning how the Evil Empire is gobbling yet another third world country, let's remember that the country needs to be attractive for takeover in the first place.
The National Alliance of Spell-Challenged Geeks is seeking donations to fend off an audit from Clippy the Microsoft Dictionary Daemon. Give them a call.
By the time a full-scale war erupts between China and the US, China will have about as many functioning computers and internet backbone connections as PLA soldiers in the beaches of Taiwan - which is to say none. They will also have several other things to worry about, like glowing in the dark.
Oh sure, they can take out Los Angeles. But that will be the end of their country. After that is over, Mongolia will probably invade them again. On horseback.
This is just the usual yelling "fire!" in the burned-out theater. Wake me up when the Marines start landing in Hainan.
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In typical knee-jerk corporate reaction, companies across the country are now going to start forbidding people from having MP3s in their hard drives to listen to while working.
Well I hope not. The only thing that keeps me from going crazy is the fact that I can put on my headphones and drown out everything around me while I try to write code. If I'm going to be forced to buy and lug around an MP3 player... Oh well.
And then they'll ban those as well. Very Dilbertian.
If you insist on spewing your liberal drivel, I must recommend you move to that small town 35 north (or was it south?) of Kabul and join Junis. Maybe he'll lend you his Commodore 64 to play MP3s.
There you'll really find out what it's like to live in a country where you can't complain about anything... because there is nothing to complain about. You'll be busy just finding things to eat each day. And then maybe you'll see that globalization and all that bad stuff is not so bad after all.
The fact that Linux is ostensibly free is also reportedly a hurdle to design-wins in view of Lineo's royalty proposition.
It's said a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple-faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Oh my god, this is so good. Take gun, aim at foot, pull trigger. Repeat as needed. Lunix r00lz homies!!1!! Obviously these people never heard of QNX... oops. Too late.
Although Harris still believes he can attain a Microsoft-like status...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
This is so pathetic it's not even funny. And it comes from a company that that can't balance a checkbook and bounces payroll checks.
Go ahead, mod the hell out of me. I capped last week.
I get the feeling that guys like this start by saying "Well it's not Palm or Wince, therefore I expect it to suck."
I get the feeling the thing uses Linux so you want it to succeed so much. This guy doesn't like it and makes some perfectly valid points as to why not and you're ready to thrash him.
Syncing to Outlook or anything else on a PC is not a pipe dream - it should be the one task this thing does best (I own an iPaq and I hate Microsoft's ActiveSync, yet it does the job). It's not "unreasonable" to expect a PDA to do that at all.
And then they just fulfill their own expectations by being too critical of things that they knew Palm and Wince did better (like the whole sync to Outlook thing).
The dude is thinking as a consumer, because that's what they pay him to do. He's not looking that the PDA from the POV of a 1337 kernel h^xx0r.
Is it possible to look at it from a different angle?
Not really. This is an end-consumer product for people who buy PDAs. There's no "other angle" regardless of how much you want one to exist.
64Meg will allow it to serve as a fair MP3 player. Maybe it's just that a WSJ guy doesn't want one of those.
64MB is pathetic for an MP3 player.
the comparison is becoming more valid because this thing is powerful enough to run Emacs and a Java compiler, so I really can do work on it...
I hope Sharp finds three of four hundred thousand people like you, although finding them among the "I want free everything" crowd and then asking them to shell out north of $500 is going to prove difficult. Otherwise this thing will be DOA.
Consumer embedded Linux has a long way to go to catch up to WinCE and a longer way still to catch up to Palm. It's not going to happen overnight.
we here are veri ecksited at these exiting change. we support this changes holehartedly. plz send more news such as this since we r makin our minds more faster than firends here, much thank 2 u. give us ur ur hands.
Since I couldn't stand not shopping on the web (kewl and all), what I ended up doing was going to my bank and getting a "secured" credit card with a $1000 hard limit on it. That's the only CC I use for shopping online, especially with sites that just absolutely have to store the number "for my convenience".
If the refuse hits the ventilator and they are hacked, I'm out $1K, tops. I'd rather fight with my bank for a 1K fraudulent charge than a $20K one.
Nice try, but there's a double-double standard here. Minors can be tried as adults in many states (and have been), so I doubt the RIAA or anyone else would think twice about sticking it to a minor that way.
But they can't write code. Yeah, that makes sense.
I have to say, for a 15 year old this guy is more articulate and clear than many 35 year olds with MBAs and PhDs I know.
Hope he's allowed to get back in the fray. His talent should not be wasted by Apple, especially considering he was contributing to their profit for free.
My first ever brush with RH support was during a hardware compatibility problem. I had a Promise IDE controller that RH (older version) would just not see. I had a free support incident so I called it in, hoping that they would save me a couple of days.
The dude referred me to an article in some website, forget where. The first few lines where something along the line of "... you shouldn't do this. But if you were stupid enough to do it, here's how to fix it..."
1337! At least the Microsoft Knowledge base doesn't insult users =)
Excuse me. Excuse me. I would go to Afganistan and walk around, but thanks to punks like you in Washington, I can't go there. Aren't you aware of all the embargos we have against that poor country. How can you tell me to go there, and at the same time support the government that disallows me from going there
It's really too bad you didn't lose a loved one in the WTC or the Pentagon. Really. Things like that sometimes help by snapping xtians like you out of their self-induced flower power dreams.
Also, I'm sorry to inform you that there is no such thing as an embargo against Afghanistan. They were lifted the moment the new government took over. That's one less lame ass intellectual argument you can make.
Empahsis mine. Wrath of God. All I can say. Wrath of God. Watch for it body, cause when it happens, you'll be on the front of the list
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! FOAD, xtian. I've seen your kind before. Fire and brimstone, end of the world, kiss my ass.
I never asked them to do this. They're responsible for violence. I, like any good christian (or person, for that matter), abhor violence. I don't cause violence. They cause violense. Therefore, I abhor them. QED.
Here's a newsflash for you prick - you know the world out there? Outside of Smalltown USA and Downtown USA? It's very different from your pathetic Alice-in-wonderland everybody-happy-clappy xtian alternate reality.
If only they'd back off, it'd be so easy. I'd welcome any ex-military with open arms back into a faithful and god-loving life. While I may dislike them for what they do, I love them as God's children. Don't forget that.
I think they're all doing just fine without your love, but just in case, do book a flight to Afghanistan at your earliest convenience and wander around the countryside looking for a few. You might get a chance to ask them before they they do the honors and send you to your beloved twinky god.
Maybe you think it's funny, and I see the Foot so I must be humor, but this is kind of sickening. Really, how many people (innocents, no less) have been killed by all these uptight, anti-homosexual, redneck, blood-thirsty automatons.
You fucking little asshole. These people exist so you can have your little life, complete with car, house in the suburbs, groceries, TV and a computer, through which you can pretend you're real smart and excercise your "god-given" freedom of speech by posting your useless "humanistic" crackpot POV to the nadir of the world wide web.
Whether you like for stories like these to be posted here (not that I give a fuck if you do), limit yourself to saying so and then positively FOAD.
And while you're at it, go live in Uganda or Croatia or Cambodia. I hear they're taking western idealistic hippies for genetic experiments this month.
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The first of course, is that regardless of whether or not a company has a blatant-ly piratic MP3 server the typical corporate knee-jerk reaction is going to be "no MP3's". Whatsoever. Forget about P2P, forget about actual piratical behavior (whatever that means). Nope, those MP3s on my hard disk from CD's I own that I listen to all day so as to not go mad? Can't have those, mister. Because they're MP3s. You think we're going to bother checking if you own them? Ha-ha.
And so it begins.
Lesse, I'll post something that mentions squeak, gcc, perl, emacs, apache, etc. And ad nauseaum, too (is that like the yacc parser?). Does that qualify me as informative?
Geez, please moderate yourselves moderators.
What you say?
It delayed the re-opening of the airport for about seven months or so. After it did finally open the system wasn't working yet so the baggage system had to be operated manually for a couple of months.
Of course the answer is simple: It's not an IE problem. It's not a chance to bash Microsoft. Yet a lot of people who use Linux also use Mozilla (or variants thereof).
So I ask again, why didn't it make the front page? Nowadays when every scrapping little bug in IE is splashed all over the place and fills up with 400+ posts?
It's a chicken and egg problem, really.
No, that wasn't funny. Hmmm.
Now, most people posting replies to this story have absolutely no idea of how things in Mexico work. The "concerns" raised by the members of the Mexican Congress are completely invalid for the simple reason that 90% of those "congressmen" can barely read and write, much less have any sort of expertise in the IT field. They are doing this simply to spite president Fox, just like they've been doing ever since he took office. Did anyone say that the Guajardo dude that is "spearheading" the bill to use free software is a member of the left-wing opposition? Nope. These are the same people that denied president Fox's request to travel outside the country a few months ago saying that he'd been traveling "way too much" lately. These are also the people who wanted to impeach him because he married a divorcee. I shit you not.
Also, take a moment and read the NYT article. Where it says that the government valued Microsoft's contribution at $30M, while Microsoft valued it at $6M. Ooops. So the treasury gets charged for 30, the government shells out 6 or 7. Where does the rest go? This is how things get done in Mexico. Do I seem cynical? Sure. I worked the system for 6 years.
Further, there is no such thing as the "mexican software industry". Trust me. Four-fifths of all companies that write software for a living are still stuck in DOS and dBase, and have no intention or desire to change because that would require training or hiring people with expensive skillsets. Can you imagine asking for a web server at a company that rations bottled water to cut costs?
Finally, all this is well and good but it doesn't really make any difference if it's free software or not. 40% of people in Mexico live below the poverty line (and that's lower then the US poverty line, BTW). Just how the government is planning to provide millions of computers is beyond me. But never mind that. Think about internet access. Internet connections require a phone. Phone service in Mexico is metered, which means that if you make more than 100 (or so) calls a month you get charged something called "servicio medido" which screws you in so many interesting ways. To put this in perspective, my average phone bill in Mexico used to be around $30 bucks. That's 300 pesos. Whenever I had trouble with my "ISP" (which was also the government-owned phone company, BTW) dropping connections my bill went up to $150 dollars. That's 1 week's salary for most middle-class Mexicans. And did I mention it's more expensive to call Mexico from the US than it is to call Denmark or Sweden? Also, the price of electricity just went up by around 80% in most areas of the country. Apparently the government was subsidizing power generation and decided to stop doing it. The problem is *why* they were doing that in the first place. Computers run on electricity. Ad nauseaum.
Technology growth requires infrastructure. Mexico does not have the infrastructure, period. So before we all fly into hissy fits bemoaning how the Evil Empire is gobbling yet another third world country, let's remember that the country needs to be attractive for takeover in the first place.
The National Alliance of Spell-Challenged Geeks is seeking donations to fend off an audit from Clippy the Microsoft Dictionary Daemon. Give them a call.
Oh sure, they can take out Los Angeles. But that will be the end of their country. After that is over, Mongolia will probably invade them again. On horseback.
This is just the usual yelling "fire!" in the burned-out theater. Wake me up when the Marines start landing in Hainan.
Hmmm. How's ASU these days?
Microsoft definitely needs to boldly go where C++0x goes, which will be in part derived from C99. C99 is cool. Can you say "complex"? Yeah =)
I just hope VC++'s next compiler is the last one that is not compliant... it's too freaking painful sometimes.
On the left side as you drive west on I-10, right before the 143 transition. They're on Hohokam drive, IIRC.
Well I hope not. The only thing that keeps me from going crazy is the fact that I can put on my headphones and drown out everything around me while I try to write code. If I'm going to be forced to buy and lug around an MP3 player... Oh well.
And then they'll ban those as well. Very Dilbertian.
There you'll really find out what it's like to live in a country where you can't complain about anything... because there is nothing to complain about. You'll be busy just finding things to eat each day. And then maybe you'll see that globalization and all that bad stuff is not so bad after all.
Whatever happened to good old Junis, BTW?
It's said a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple-faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Oh my god, this is so good. Take gun, aim at foot, pull trigger. Repeat as needed. Lunix r00lz homies!!1!! Obviously these people never heard of QNX... oops. Too late.
Although Harris still believes he can attain a Microsoft-like status...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
This is so pathetic it's not even funny. And it comes from a company that that can't balance a checkbook and bounces payroll checks.
Go ahead, mod the hell out of me. I capped last week.
I get the feeling the thing uses Linux so you want it to succeed so much. This guy doesn't like it and makes some perfectly valid points as to why not and you're ready to thrash him.
Syncing to Outlook or anything else on a PC is not a pipe dream - it should be the one task this thing does best (I own an iPaq and I hate Microsoft's ActiveSync, yet it does the job). It's not "unreasonable" to expect a PDA to do that at all.
And then they just fulfill their own expectations by being too critical of things that they knew Palm and Wince did better (like the whole sync to Outlook thing).
The dude is thinking as a consumer, because that's what they pay him to do. He's not looking that the PDA from the POV of a 1337 kernel h^xx0r.
Is it possible to look at it from a different angle?
Not really. This is an end-consumer product for people who buy PDAs. There's no "other angle" regardless of how much you want one to exist.
64Meg will allow it to serve as a fair MP3 player. Maybe it's just that a WSJ guy doesn't want one of those.
64MB is pathetic for an MP3 player.
the comparison is becoming more valid because this thing is powerful enough to run Emacs and a Java compiler, so I really can do work on it...
I hope Sharp finds three of four hundred thousand people like you, although finding them among the "I want free everything" crowd and then asking them to shell out north of $500 is going to prove difficult. Otherwise this thing will be DOA.
Consumer embedded Linux has a long way to go to catch up to WinCE and a longer way still to catch up to Palm. It's not going to happen overnight.
we here are veri ecksited at these exiting change. we support this changes holehartedly. plz send more news such as this since we r makin our minds more faster than firends here, much thank 2 u. give us ur ur hands.
Sincerely yours,
sataprnamayanapanayama buchanga
sat@hotmail.com
If the refuse hits the ventilator and they are hacked, I'm out $1K, tops. I'd rather fight with my bank for a 1K fraudulent charge than a $20K one.
YMMV.
But they can't write code. Yeah, that makes sense.
Hope he's allowed to get back in the fray. His talent should not be wasted by Apple, especially considering he was contributing to their profit for free.
thanks.... you made my morning =)
My first ever brush with RH support was during a hardware compatibility problem. I had a Promise IDE controller that RH (older version) would just not see. I had a free support incident so I called it in, hoping that they would save me a couple of days.
The dude referred me to an article in some website, forget where. The first few lines where something along the line of "... you shouldn't do this. But if you were stupid enough to do it, here's how to fix it..."
1337! At least the Microsoft Knowledge base doesn't insult users =)
It's really too bad you didn't lose a loved one in the WTC or the Pentagon. Really. Things like that sometimes help by snapping xtians like you out of their self-induced flower power dreams.
Also, I'm sorry to inform you that there is no such thing as an embargo against Afghanistan. They were lifted the moment the new government took over. That's one less lame ass intellectual argument you can make.
Empahsis mine. Wrath of God. All I can say. Wrath of God. Watch for it body, cause when it happens, you'll be on the front of the list
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! FOAD, xtian. I've seen your kind before. Fire and brimstone, end of the world, kiss my ass.
Here's a newsflash for you prick - you know the world out there? Outside of Smalltown USA and Downtown USA? It's very different from your pathetic Alice-in-wonderland everybody-happy-clappy xtian alternate reality.
If only they'd back off, it'd be so easy. I'd welcome any ex-military with open arms back into a faithful and god-loving life. While I may dislike them for what they do, I love them as God's children. Don't forget that.
I think they're all doing just fine without your love, but just in case, do book a flight to Afghanistan at your earliest convenience and wander around the countryside looking for a few. You might get a chance to ask them before they they do the honors and send you to your beloved twinky god.
You fucking little asshole. These people exist so you can have your little life, complete with car, house in the suburbs, groceries, TV and a computer, through which you can pretend you're real smart and excercise your "god-given" freedom of speech by posting your useless "humanistic" crackpot POV to the nadir of the world wide web.
Whether you like for stories like these to be posted here (not that I give a fuck if you do), limit yourself to saying so and then positively FOAD.
And while you're at it, go live in Uganda or Croatia or Cambodia. I hear they're taking western idealistic hippies for genetic experiments this month.