...to know his motives, since after RTFA it doesn't seem he even tried to profit from his dastardly deed. Perhaps he read one too many Slashdot anonymous posts defending the right to disseminate protected intellectual information. A confused kid, maybe.
To those of you who post here from the comfort of your aliases - mind your language. A new generation of kids is coming online and learning that stealing is not wrong because it's in PDF format and it happens to live in a computer. I'm sure very few people think of that, but it *is* a responsibility, especially when it's imbued in the flaming gown of open source and free software (yes, maybe *you* can see the disconnect, but a lot of others can't).
How long until we get stories of people getting busted for stealing trade secrets because "information wants to be free"? As in "Quake made me kill my classmates"?
No. "Locale" refers to localization (appropriately enough). It's "where you are". It controls things such as date formatting, currency symbols, etc. Codepage is (mostly) a fancy name for a character set. It defines how code points get translated to glyphs when they're rendered on screen or to a printer.
The language ID (LANGID) is a combination of a primary language ID and a sublanguage ID. It defines one of the known combinations of specific locale/language pairs, like "Spanish [Nicaragua]" or "English [Australian]". Together with the SORTID (sorting identifier) and the LCID (locale ID) you can pretty much tell Windows what country you're in and what language you speak (and optionally if you use a different one for writing, as in EUC or Big5) and have everything look and behave correctly.
I'm not sure how it works on Unix-ish OSes, but I assume it's pretty much the same.
I'm certan microsoft uses this method with their software.
Yes, but they place the resources (strings, icons, bitmaps, etc.) in a "satellite DLL" that is loaded depending on the system's codepage and locale identifier. If you look at an installation of, say, Office or MSDN you'll see subdirectories with the LCIDs (1033, 1054, etc.) and DLLs inside them. Each of them corresponds to a different locale.
Of course it gets complicated with the LANGID, SUBLANGID, whether or not the IME is enabled (W2K and XP) and so on. But that's the technique.
If the HDD manufacturers are thinking that's going to save them, they're in for a surprise. Hard drives (like most other PC hardware) are becoming commodities, and the market is in for a long-due consolidation. IBM is already out of the biz. In a few years (say, end of 2005) there will be just a few companies making them. How many sound card companies existed in the 90s? How many today? Ditto the video card, modem, processor (we hardly knew ya Cyrix) and so on.
Unless of course PVRs suddenly become hotter than DVD players in the consumer market, in which case I suppose demand will work things out. But the PVR is too much of a tech toy right now. I can't see grandma using one day to day to record her soap opera. Remember, millions of people out ther can't get rid of the blinbking 12:00 thing in their VCRs to save their lives.
Noise levels are the least of their problems, I dare say.
That's me, pure and simple, and for what I consider to be good reason [snip]
Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree with most of the points you've made there, but I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. You're entitled to your opinion. Then again, so am I.
They've always been evil, and Commodore was certainly evil too. Apple too. It happens to every company when they pass a certain size. Microsoft didn't have competition, though, and THAT'S why they got where they got.
Well, I think there's more to it than that, but looking at the *why* doesn't change the facts. I really doubt Apple would have been able to get to where Microsoft is today. Their corporate ideals just don't pull that way. Insofar as Microsoft is evil, well, that depends on which side of the fence you're at.
Seriously, after any movement grows above a certain size, it attracts sheep. [...] Or better yet, lead them to where you think the water is.
True, and I do that with alarming precision. Let's be honest, the whole "free vs. free" thing is understood by few people here. Show me the sheep zealot who can explain that rationally and I'll show you flying pigs. They tend to get bogged down in their own philosophical tar pits and when they realize they're stuck, they simply resort to finesse like "fuck off" and so on. Amusing, but to a certain degree sad. It's difficult to ignore the bad when the bad is 3/4ths of the whole, mmmm?
Just try to keep a sense of balance looking at us zealots, some of us try to keep balanced too. I'm admittedly a zealot, and I feel that I have good reasons for it.
I do. Certainly there are zealots and there there are zealots. If anything, I respect someone who believes and fights for a cause. I'd just as soon be extended the same courtesy =)
They must be reading Slashdot too much. Whenever you have headlines touting the latest nasty IE vulnerability that changes your wallpaper at the behest of evil hackers in Lithuania and nothing really comes from it, well, people are bound to be disappointed. Incidents like Klez and the LoveBug come only once in a while, yet if one were to listen to most folks, there's a world-ending and reality-melting TERRIBLE and AMAZING hole found on Microsoft software every other day, nach.
So instead of hyping every 2-bit "hole" in a web browser perhaps stories like these would make it to the front page and keep everyone informed. I may be a bit jaded here, but it seems that a hole, DOS and remote exploit in open source software are not really that. They're just "temporary issues" that are "quickly patched".
Just like "issues" with Microsoft software. Yay open source!
This sudden interest in the W3C and open standards and unencumbered software and patent free and, etc. etc. is quite interesting.
Considering you intentionally block the W3C validator
I can't help but think that's about the stupidest thing/. has ever done (though I may be wrong). I mean, what's the point? Lame jokes about the crappy output of your Perl scripts got you down? How about fixing it instead??
My entire world is computers. Call me stupid, I'll debate you; call me pathetic, I'll whole-heartedly agree.
For the record, it's mine as well.
However, Microsoft has also held the market back in many ways. In many ways, we're still in 1990
I tend to agree with that, to a certain extent. My opinion is that open source was (is) immature, so where would we be today? What would have carried the industry to where it is now? Oracle? Sun? IBM? CA? And do you really think we'd be better off? I think not.
And just as an aside, I think you might be interested in opensource.org; they have some very good, realistic arguments for giving away software.
Oh, I've read them all, trust me =) To date, I haven't seen a way to make money off of something that's free, and making money, unfortunately, is a primary concern of mine. The whole profit model for open source is pretty much flawed, and there's very little room for companies other than the few already there, like RedHat.
OSS is a better solution than CS simply because you can get outside help for free. Problems are common between people and business -- others will help.
FUD =) You can get most of the help you need with CS software, especially Microsoft software, for free. Situations where you need to actually go to the company for help are no different than those you'd be in if you had to go to RedHat or Mandrake or whatever - you'll need to fork out some dough. But most of the time if you know what you're doing, yo don't need to go there at all. In my experience, Microsoft's support is top-notch. But then I know how to deal with them.
As technology advances, and spreads, it's inevitable that prices go down. Microsoft facilitated this, but I think you'd agree that it would likely have happened without them.
Yes, but we go back to *who* would have made that happen. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been open source software. And again, the Evil Empire would have been someone else.
That last point, BTW, is something that without examples and a sound argument, I would consider a troll. Without backup, it would fit into my "anti-OSS arguments based on ignorance." Please prove me wrong, or please look at this from an unbiased point of view and restate what you said. You're a smart guy, there's no harm in changing an opinion (including mine).
It's human nature. Open source used to be a sort of pure, unadulterated fairy tale, and then it collided head-on with the real world. The moment you put economics into the mix, people change. I'm not going to dig up example after example of things like these, but if you've been reading Slashdot for the past four or five years you tend to get the impression that all is not OK in the fairytale. And again, that's normal. I'm not saying open source sucks because of that, not at all. The problem I do have is the whole "everything is OK people. Ohhhhh, look over there! Another IE vulnerability!! Weee!!!" thing that tends to bury the ugly stuff and prevent open discussion.
Windows 2000 is worthy of being called an operating system. I use it for games.
C'mon, W2K is an excellent OS. In many ways it's far better than Linux. If you've ever written system-level stuff like services (daemons) and so on you'd recognize that. I know - I've written stuff for both (Windows and Linux), and to be honest at the kernel level Linux doesn't hold a candle to Windows 2000, period. The technology has been evolving for 10 years, and it took them that long to come up with something worthwhile. But they did.
On the other hand, Linux and BSD are far better at things like running firewalls and high-volume websites (and IIS kinda sucks). The right tool for the job, I say.
Microsoft has a habit of releasing beta software and putting security last. They also have a habit of treating bugs like PR problems. I hope what I'm saying is interesting enough that you'll look into it, or expound on this whole issue more, if you are informed. I consider myself a fan of Microsoft news; I track what goes on with them, I keep up to date on their products, etc. I hope that my opinion is qualified, and if not, I hope you can counter my above points.
I'm not going to deny anything you've said here. All of it is true. But the point that you (and most other people miss) is that Microsoft is a *company*. It's not a group of hackers in different parts of the world whose main concern is to churn out good, solid, cool code for the heck of it. The reactions and the modus operandi are invariably different. Microsoft is a *big* company with many customers and their responses to security holes and so on are exactly what I'd expect of them. Slow, sometimes foolish and sometimes even stupid. But the dynamics are not the same. It's not like they can send an email to some dude in Norway and ask him to patch his part of the kernel and have a release ready by 8:00 AM the next day. It just doesn't work that way.
Now, is that enough to condemn the CS model? Or finally validate the OSS one? I think not. The bazaar sometimes is better, but the cathedral has its advantages.
For this lack of morales, I dislike Gates.
Now you're being idealistic =) FWIW, think about it this way - the people who made Microsoft what it is today have a different value system than you. You may not like that, but I think it's fair to say that it falls on you to respect it. Free speech and all that.
Software affects us all more than most think, and much less than some think. However, software affects some of us a lot. I'm one of those people, so this whole thing is a big deal to me. Please understand that and respect it. =)
See, it's like religion [oh boy, here we go!]. I respect people's right to practice religion. I do. But don't even think for a second that I'm going to sit here and calmly take it in the butt when you try to *push* your religion on me. Or when you tell me that you think I'm going to hell because I don't pray to your god - and boy do you feel sorry for me, and would I like a cookie?
If you insult my intelligence, call me a retard and pretty much compare me with navel lint because of the operating system I use, then we're going to have some spirited discussion. And my asbestos suit is *very* thick =)
I hope my reply was intelligent, informed and well thought out. I hope that I took most of the biased slant out of my wording; I'm working on that skill, and Slashdot helps that a ton. Please strive for all the same in your reply so we don't waste time bickering
It was - it's nice to engage in some intelligent discussion for a change =).
the Mexican Army routinely attacks the US Border Patrol to provide protection for the drug runners. Just last week in Arizona a Border Patrol SUV was shot up by a Mexican Army HummVee
Oh, yes. One of these days we're going to cross the Rio Grande and kick your capitalist butts.
We have elite teams of car thiefs that can take the threads and wheels off of a tank in less time than it takes to start the engine, and leave it standing on four cinder blocks. Even if the tank happens to be moving.
We have crack groups of squatters that can invade and occupy any size territory in less time than it takes you to scream "cucaracha".
Our drug dealers have more firepower than the 3rd Marine Division. And they dress better, too.
The only problem right now are our nuclear weapons, since they require a match to activate. But we're working on more advanced technology - Zippo lighters.
We're going to take back California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. And then we'll march up to Chicago to link up with our 2 million-strong sleeper cell there.
In fact, these events should come as no surprise, because in countries like mine, most people can't afford to pay the equivalent to US$15 for a single disk, priced as if it were an imported item, when it could be cheaper because the price markups don't need to be as high as in other countries, where everything from labor to land costs are more expensive. People DO buy and distribute bootlegs, there ARE criminals around here, but this is not the way to handle the situation. This is just a test of RIAA's power.
I agree with what you've said here, but let's be honest. You can walk into Pericoapa or Tepito (for the uninitiated, those are two of the biggest open markets in Mexico City that also happen to be the largest sources of pirated crap in the country) with the equivalent of US$100 (about 980 pesos) and come out with what amounts to roughly ten times that in pirated media. We all did it once or twice. In fact, back in the 80s the only way to get a decent Def Leppard tape was to buy it there because our friends at Fonovisa churned out the most repulsive low quality crap imaginable.
I'm not saying things like these are justified, and you are right insofar as this is not the way to fight piracy. But compared to the US, piracy in Mexico *is* an organized crime, and yes, it's an organized crime because income is very low. The scale is very different so the legal system is doing only what they consider to be the source of the problem - the media. Cut down all the trees, and presto. No more furniture. In the US or Europe that would be stupid, but down there it makes sense (from their POV).
It's used in Mexico to adorn drug dealer names in news reports. Apparently "NarcoKing" didn't take well. And of course, "CDRPirateMogul" doesn't look well, either.
But seriously, I believe it comes from a term used in Italy to describe crime bosses.
The Mexican recording industry used to be pretty much independent of the big media multinationals. Grupo Televisa essentially owned every single artist that existed in the country, along with their souls, their bodies and the rights to their music. Televisa was (is) a government cheering posse, with strong ties to the then ruling party (the PRI). So it was pretty much impossible to win a court case against them.
As the world has changed, so has Mexico. After 70 years, there's another party in power (the PAN), which, if anything, is far less paternalistic but more business friendly (president Vicente Fox used to be an executive in the Mexican arm of Coca-Cola, something unheard of when the PRI was in power). So, even though Televisa's influence has waned to a certain extent, the circumstances have changed and globalization has expanded the role of the big media companies into the country with the blessing of the business-friendly government.
So, in closing, if you wanted to take anyone to court, you were screwed then and you are screwed today. But for different reasons =)
In any case, if you think the US legal system is bad, you should try Mexico. All you need is enough money to buy a judge, and you're home free. There is no trial by jury, no grand jury, no peer review, very little appeal recourse and virtually no, erm, justice. Unless you happen to be rich. Pretty much the same as the US, except that in Mexico you don't have to maintain appearances - you just pay up!
Just a comment, I'm curious to hear what you think.
Do you really? <g>
I admire people who work on open source projects and the great stuff that has come out of those projects. I think the software world is better off because of that. I do have issues with the whole evangelization thing. OSS folks tend to have that "you're either with us or against us" attitude that pisses me off to no end. Software is just that, software. Computers are just that: computers. Organized jihad around things like that is stupid and useless. 90% of people who bash Microsoft around here do so without really understanding why. It's the flock syndrome. Their whole world revolves around an ill-conceived "hatred" (their words) of a software company. And if that isn't stupid, I don't know what is.
I admire people like Wall, de Raadt, Torvalds, et.al. Their attitude is "There it is, use it. Make it better if you can.". People like RMS or ESR on the other hand, are extremists who would be happy if all the programmers in the world were starving so as to fullfill their feverish visions of Nirvana. I've always found it amusing how RMS can preach from his well-funded pulpit about the virtues of giving away software. Or how ESR can churn out his Halloween documents year after year running whatever OS it is that he runs on a computer that costs $1,000 instead of $10,000 because his hated Microsoft OSes have commoditized hardware to that point in the past 10 years. If anything, the OSS world is as full of hypocrisy, double dealing and backstabbing as the corporate world, except that here those types of discussions are strongly discouraged. And that's OK, because this is not the Microsoft FanClub. But I think we'd all benefit from looking at the negative things as wel as highlighting the positives. In any case, what's a troll to you may be insightful to me (and my signature strikes a balance between the two. Look at the moderation done to some of my posts - people can't decide whether I'm a troll or not. I think that's extremely interesting).
Microsoft is not the most likeable company in the world, and they are a monopoly. They've bought a lot of the technology they sell instead of innovating. But they're in the business of making money, and they make damn good products, regardless of the ignorant "mwahhh, it crashes every ten seconds" posts and lame jokes galore. I've always stated that Microsoft is Microsoft because no other company had the guts and vision to do what they did. Oracle and Sun can take Gates to court all they want, but does anyone think that given the right circumstances, Slashdot would have Larry Ellison or Scott McNealy in a Borg suit now? Except that Gates laughed all the way to the bank. And I respect that. Just as I respect someone like Linus Torvalds. In many ways, they're more alike than they'd probably care to admit.
Sparring here with the living dead is fun, and I do it whenever I have time. But in the end, like I've always said, it's just software. There are better things to fight over.
Let me guess - you hang out in #linux helping newbies, yes?
Who the heck needs a mail client-specific tool? MailWasher is an example of a tool that sits between your POP server and your mail client. That's all you need. I'm sure you know that "TCP/IP" and the "kernel" you're running are so far away from POP or LDAP it's not even funny. So why drop techie terms around unecessarily?
I do hope they focus on the bandwidth problem. We've all seen the recent stories here about the slimeball spammer who's return rate is something to the tune of 0.000001% for 100 million messages. Or some such statistic. And yet he's swimming in $$.
The better spam filters get, the more horsepower these fuckers are going to put into plying their trade. That 100 million herbal viagra batch didn't work? Oh, OK, let's send out 1 billion messages then.
Their capacity to add processing power to their operations will grow exponentially as the efficiency of spam blocks increases. But there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Ergo, suffer the ISP (mine and yours, not theirs). Something's gotta give.
I shudder to even contemplate it, but unless their revenue stream is cut off, this is going to continue. And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM. Until then, well...
Slashdot Mirror
To those of you who post here from the comfort of your aliases - mind your language. A new generation of kids is coming online and learning that stealing is not wrong because it's in PDF format and it happens to live in a computer. I'm sure very few people think of that, but it *is* a responsibility, especially when it's imbued in the flaming gown of open source and free software (yes, maybe *you* can see the disconnect, but a lot of others can't).
How long until we get stories of people getting busted for stealing trade secrets because "information wants to be free"? As in "Quake made me kill my classmates"?
Actually, it's "Laotian villages". Hope that helps.
The language ID (LANGID) is a combination of a primary language ID and a sublanguage ID. It defines one of the known combinations of specific locale/language pairs, like "Spanish [Nicaragua]" or "English [Australian]". Together with the SORTID (sorting identifier) and the LCID (locale ID) you can pretty much tell Windows what country you're in and what language you speak (and optionally if you use a different one for writing, as in EUC or Big5) and have everything look and behave correctly.
I'm not sure how it works on Unix-ish OSes, but I assume it's pretty much the same.
Yes, but they place the resources (strings, icons, bitmaps, etc.) in a "satellite DLL" that is loaded depending on the system's codepage and locale identifier. If you look at an installation of, say, Office or MSDN you'll see subdirectories with the LCIDs (1033, 1054, etc.) and DLLs inside them. Each of them corresponds to a different locale.
Of course it gets complicated with the LANGID, SUBLANGID, whether or not the IME is enabled (W2K and XP) and so on. But that's the technique.
Or was that $200?
Unless of course PVRs suddenly become hotter than DVD players in the consumer market, in which case I suppose demand will work things out. But the PVR is too much of a tech toy right now. I can't see grandma using one day to day to record her soap opera. Remember, millions of people out ther can't get rid of the blinbking 12:00 thing in their VCRs to save their lives.
Noise levels are the least of their problems, I dare say.
Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree with most of the points you've made there, but I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. You're entitled to your opinion. Then again, so am I.
They've always been evil, and Commodore was certainly evil too. Apple too. It happens to every company when they pass a certain size. Microsoft didn't have competition, though, and THAT'S why they got where they got.
Well, I think there's more to it than that, but looking at the *why* doesn't change the facts. I really doubt Apple would have been able to get to where Microsoft is today. Their corporate ideals just don't pull that way. Insofar as Microsoft is evil, well, that depends on which side of the fence you're at.
Seriously, after any movement grows above a certain size, it attracts sheep. [...] Or better yet, lead them to where you think the water is.
True, and I do that with alarming precision. Let's be honest, the whole "free vs. free" thing is understood by few people here. Show me the sheep zealot who can explain that rationally and I'll show you flying pigs. They tend to get bogged down in their own philosophical tar pits and when they realize they're stuck, they simply resort to finesse like "fuck off" and so on. Amusing, but to a certain degree sad. It's difficult to ignore the bad when the bad is 3/4ths of the whole, mmmm?
Just try to keep a sense of balance looking at us zealots, some of us try to keep balanced too. I'm admittedly a zealot, and I feel that I have good reasons for it.
I do. Certainly there are zealots and there there are zealots. If anything, I respect someone who believes and fights for a cause. I'd just as soon be extended the same courtesy =)
So instead of hyping every 2-bit "hole" in a web browser perhaps stories like these would make it to the front page and keep everyone informed. I may be a bit jaded here, but it seems that a hole, DOS and remote exploit in open source software are not really that. They're just "temporary issues" that are "quickly patched".
Just like "issues" with Microsoft software. Yay open source!
Considering you intentionally block the W3C validator
I can't help but think that's about the stupidest thing /. has ever done (though I may be wrong). I mean, what's the point? Lame jokes about the crappy output of your Perl scripts got you down? How about fixing it instead??
For the record, it's mine as well.
However, Microsoft has also held the market back in many ways. In many ways, we're still in 1990
I tend to agree with that, to a certain extent. My opinion is that open source was (is) immature, so where would we be today? What would have carried the industry to where it is now? Oracle? Sun? IBM? CA? And do you really think we'd be better off? I think not.
And just as an aside, I think you might be interested in opensource.org; they have some very good, realistic arguments for giving away software.
Oh, I've read them all, trust me =) To date, I haven't seen a way to make money off of something that's free, and making money, unfortunately, is a primary concern of mine. The whole profit model for open source is pretty much flawed, and there's very little room for companies other than the few already there, like RedHat.
OSS is a better solution than CS simply because you can get outside help for free. Problems are common between people and business -- others will help.
FUD =) You can get most of the help you need with CS software, especially Microsoft software, for free. Situations where you need to actually go to the company for help are no different than those you'd be in if you had to go to RedHat or Mandrake or whatever - you'll need to fork out some dough. But most of the time if you know what you're doing, yo don't need to go there at all. In my experience, Microsoft's support is top-notch. But then I know how to deal with them.
As technology advances, and spreads, it's inevitable that prices go down. Microsoft facilitated this, but I think you'd agree that it would likely have happened without them.
Yes, but we go back to *who* would have made that happen. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been open source software. And again, the Evil Empire would have been someone else.
That last point, BTW, is something that without examples and a sound argument, I would consider a troll. Without backup, it would fit into my "anti-OSS arguments based on ignorance." Please prove me wrong, or please look at this from an unbiased point of view and restate what you said. You're a smart guy, there's no harm in changing an opinion (including mine).
It's human nature. Open source used to be a sort of pure, unadulterated fairy tale, and then it collided head-on with the real world. The moment you put economics into the mix, people change. I'm not going to dig up example after example of things like these, but if you've been reading Slashdot for the past four or five years you tend to get the impression that all is not OK in the fairytale. And again, that's normal. I'm not saying open source sucks because of that, not at all. The problem I do have is the whole "everything is OK people. Ohhhhh, look over there! Another IE vulnerability!! Weee!!!" thing that tends to bury the ugly stuff and prevent open discussion.
Windows 2000 is worthy of being called an operating system. I use it for games.
C'mon, W2K is an excellent OS. In many ways it's far better than Linux. If you've ever written system-level stuff like services (daemons) and so on you'd recognize that. I know - I've written stuff for both (Windows and Linux), and to be honest at the kernel level Linux doesn't hold a candle to Windows 2000, period. The technology has been evolving for 10 years, and it took them that long to come up with something worthwhile. But they did.
On the other hand, Linux and BSD are far better at things like running firewalls and high-volume websites (and IIS kinda sucks). The right tool for the job, I say.
Microsoft has a habit of releasing beta software and putting security last. They also have a habit of treating bugs like PR problems. I hope what I'm saying is interesting enough that you'll look into it, or expound on this whole issue more, if you are informed. I consider myself a fan of Microsoft news; I track what goes on with them, I keep up to date on their products, etc. I hope that my opinion is qualified, and if not, I hope you can counter my above points.
I'm not going to deny anything you've said here. All of it is true. But the point that you (and most other people miss) is that Microsoft is a *company*. It's not a group of hackers in different parts of the world whose main concern is to churn out good, solid, cool code for the heck of it. The reactions and the modus operandi are invariably different. Microsoft is a *big* company with many customers and their responses to security holes and so on are exactly what I'd expect of them. Slow, sometimes foolish and sometimes even stupid. But the dynamics are not the same. It's not like they can send an email to some dude in Norway and ask him to patch his part of the kernel and have a release ready by 8:00 AM the next day. It just doesn't work that way.
Now, is that enough to condemn the CS model? Or finally validate the OSS one? I think not. The bazaar sometimes is better, but the cathedral has its advantages.
For this lack of morales, I dislike Gates.
Now you're being idealistic =) FWIW, think about it this way - the people who made Microsoft what it is today have a different value system than you. You may not like that, but I think it's fair to say that it falls on you to respect it. Free speech and all that.
Software affects us all more than most think, and much less than some think. However, software affects some of us a lot. I'm one of those people, so this whole thing is a big deal to me. Please understand that and respect it. =)
See, it's like religion [oh boy, here we go!]. I respect people's right to practice religion. I do. But don't even think for a second that I'm going to sit here and calmly take it in the butt when you try to *push* your religion on me. Or when you tell me that you think I'm going to hell because I don't pray to your god - and boy do you feel sorry for me, and would I like a cookie?
If you insult my intelligence, call me a retard and pretty much compare me with navel lint because of the operating system I use, then we're going to have some spirited discussion. And my asbestos suit is *very* thick =)
I hope my reply was intelligent, informed and well thought out. I hope that I took most of the biased slant out of my wording; I'm working on that skill, and Slashdot helps that a ton. Please strive for all the same in your reply so we don't waste time bickering
It was - it's nice to engage in some intelligent discussion for a change =).
I have some black helicopters and a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, if you want them.
Oh, yes. One of these days we're going to cross the Rio Grande and kick your capitalist butts.
We have elite teams of car thiefs that can take the threads and wheels off of a tank in less time than it takes to start the engine, and leave it standing on four cinder blocks. Even if the tank happens to be moving.
We have crack groups of squatters that can invade and occupy any size territory in less time than it takes you to scream "cucaracha".
Our drug dealers have more firepower than the 3rd Marine Division. And they dress better, too.
The only problem right now are our nuclear weapons, since they require a match to activate. But we're working on more advanced technology - Zippo lighters.
We're going to take back California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. And then we'll march up to Chicago to link up with our 2 million-strong sleeper cell there.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Eh... what did they use to press CDs back then? Wood?
I agree with what you've said here, but let's be honest. You can walk into Pericoapa or Tepito (for the uninitiated, those are two of the biggest open markets in Mexico City that also happen to be the largest sources of pirated crap in the country) with the equivalent of US$100 (about 980 pesos) and come out with what amounts to roughly ten times that in pirated media. We all did it once or twice. In fact, back in the 80s the only way to get a decent Def Leppard tape was to buy it there because our friends at Fonovisa churned out the most repulsive low quality crap imaginable.
I'm not saying things like these are justified, and you are right insofar as this is not the way to fight piracy. But compared to the US, piracy in Mexico *is* an organized crime, and yes, it's an organized crime because income is very low. The scale is very different so the legal system is doing only what they consider to be the source of the problem - the media. Cut down all the trees, and presto. No more furniture. In the US or Europe that would be stupid, but down there it makes sense (from their POV).
But seriously, I believe it comes from a term used in Italy to describe crime bosses.
Dude, you made my day. Thanks.
As the world has changed, so has Mexico. After 70 years, there's another party in power (the PAN), which, if anything, is far less paternalistic but more business friendly (president Vicente Fox used to be an executive in the Mexican arm of Coca-Cola, something unheard of when the PRI was in power). So, even though Televisa's influence has waned to a certain extent, the circumstances have changed and globalization has expanded the role of the big media companies into the country with the blessing of the business-friendly government.
So, in closing, if you wanted to take anyone to court, you were screwed then and you are screwed today. But for different reasons =)
In any case, if you think the US legal system is bad, you should try Mexico. All you need is enough money to buy a judge, and you're home free. There is no trial by jury, no grand jury, no peer review, very little appeal recourse and virtually no, erm, justice. Unless you happen to be rich. Pretty much the same as the US, except that in Mexico you don't have to maintain appearances - you just pay up!
"rooted" == arraigo. A term used in Mexican civil and criminal law that pretty much means detention.
Do you really? <g>
I admire people who work on open source projects and the great stuff that has come out of those projects. I think the software world is better off because of that. I do have issues with the whole evangelization thing. OSS folks tend to have that "you're either with us or against us" attitude that pisses me off to no end. Software is just that, software. Computers are just that: computers. Organized jihad around things like that is stupid and useless. 90% of people who bash Microsoft around here do so without really understanding why. It's the flock syndrome. Their whole world revolves around an ill-conceived "hatred" (their words) of a software company. And if that isn't stupid, I don't know what is.
I admire people like Wall, de Raadt, Torvalds, et.al. Their attitude is "There it is, use it. Make it better if you can.". People like RMS or ESR on the other hand, are extremists who would be happy if all the programmers in the world were starving so as to fullfill their feverish visions of Nirvana. I've always found it amusing how RMS can preach from his well-funded pulpit about the virtues of giving away software. Or how ESR can churn out his Halloween documents year after year running whatever OS it is that he runs on a computer that costs $1,000 instead of $10,000 because his hated Microsoft OSes have commoditized hardware to that point in the past 10 years. If anything, the OSS world is as full of hypocrisy, double dealing and backstabbing as the corporate world, except that here those types of discussions are strongly discouraged. And that's OK, because this is not the Microsoft FanClub. But I think we'd all benefit from looking at the negative things as wel as highlighting the positives. In any case, what's a troll to you may be insightful to me (and my signature strikes a balance between the two. Look at the moderation done to some of my posts - people can't decide whether I'm a troll or not. I think that's extremely interesting).
Microsoft is not the most likeable company in the world, and they are a monopoly. They've bought a lot of the technology they sell instead of innovating. But they're in the business of making money, and they make damn good products, regardless of the ignorant "mwahhh, it crashes every ten seconds" posts and lame jokes galore. I've always stated that Microsoft is Microsoft because no other company had the guts and vision to do what they did. Oracle and Sun can take Gates to court all they want, but does anyone think that given the right circumstances, Slashdot would have Larry Ellison or Scott McNealy in a Borg suit now? Except that Gates laughed all the way to the bank. And I respect that. Just as I respect someone like Linus Torvalds. In many ways, they're more alike than they'd probably care to admit.
Sparring here with the living dead is fun, and I do it whenever I have time. But in the end, like I've always said, it's just software. There are better things to fight over.
Where's MiniMe when you need him.
<chuckle> You know exactly what I was talking about, and that's why quoted my post selectively. How about your comment on the "kernel" bit, hmmm?
I was pointing out the ambiguity of the original question.
No, you were being an asshole. A technically-oriented asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.
You merely answered the question as you interpreted it, which isn't necessarily correct, even if the information you provided is accurate.
Wow, that sentence gave me a headache.
your "logic" leaves something to be desired
So does your "help"
Who the heck needs a mail client-specific tool? MailWasher is an example of a tool that sits between your POP server and your mail client. That's all you need. I'm sure you know that "TCP/IP" and the "kernel" you're running are so far away from POP or LDAP it's not even funny. So why drop techie terms around unecessarily?
Yep
The better spam filters get, the more horsepower these fuckers are going to put into plying their trade. That 100 million herbal viagra batch didn't work? Oh, OK, let's send out 1 billion messages then.
Their capacity to add processing power to their operations will grow exponentially as the efficiency of spam blocks increases. But there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Ergo, suffer the ISP (mine and yours, not theirs). Something's gotta give.
I shudder to even contemplate it, but unless their revenue stream is cut off, this is going to continue. And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM. Until then, well...
I'm sorry. I'll never touch your sister again.