Honestly while that was a good write up you posted from, I would disagree that the US is a facist state. The near-invasion of Mexico into California pretty well proves it, as does the presence of mostly free speech.
The disturbing trend is that certain political parties are starting to align too heavily with religions, and the SCOTUS is not acting like as much of a balancing influence as it used to. I wouldn't argue we're becoming facist, but I would argue that the US is starting to fracture. Pity so much of the world is, too. The UK and EU are prime examples of this. If someone can point out a shining example of good, noble government I'd love to see it.
The concept of removing a word for a thing, and thereby attempting to remove the ability to describe or conceptualize it is not new.
It may not work, but it is currently being tried... on us. When a word becomes "bad", we move on to a new word. When, for example, did "Gifted" come to mean retarded? I tried to sign my kid up for the gifted program (since he is testing 3 years ahead) and they told me that he wasn't the right sort. The right sort were the "type who weren't as able to adjust to classroom education as the other students". It was just for the "Special" kids... you know, the Down syndrome, the mentally retarded, etc.
What I was saying is that the AV companies are trumping this up as "Oh noes! We're at the beginning of a massive onslaught of viruses for cell phones!". I disagree that we are seeing any such thing.
In 1988 things like Stoned came out (as you point out). However, the early viruses propagated mainly via shared files and boot disks. Cell phones by and large share only SMS messages, which go through a centrally controlled server (not a random ad-hoc network like email). SMS is very intolerant of long messages - you would have to create a payload in 254 Unicode characters.
Buffer overflows are no longer "rare". Code written in this day and age should be designed more carefully. I know mine certainly is. Little issues that I wouldn't have even considered in the 80's or early 90's are very much a part of my design and testing now.
Also - *documents* are not stored on phones as we know them. You have an address book? So? It could easily be wiped and re-done. Phone acting weird? You reset it or take it back.
Nothing about phones matches the usage or environment patterns of computers. There are no home-builds. There are no wild-west style networks. The sharing of pictures and like data via Bluetooth and MMS is still very unusual (and many providers charge for it or lock it down). An MMS virus comes out? Easily squashed at the central server.
Bluetooth virus? Bluetooth can be locked down or disabled entirely with no real consequence.
Add to this all that most phones aren't even compatible with other models from the same vendor, let alone other vendors. Add to it the fact that J2ME and the like are tightly locked down on the phones where it is even supported. This isn't 1988 - people are wary now.
So let me sum this up one more time - Different tool, different purpose, different rules. Viruses will exist, but they will be a totally different sort of beast from that which lives on windows.
I think that thinking of this in terms of "PC equiv of 1988" is BS. In 1988 people weren't even sure if the PC was going to last. The world had just gone from dozens of machines which were completely incompatible (Commodore, Apple, Timex etc) to one system emerging as an almost standard. I know that the idea viruses or worms getting to this point was certainly out of my head at that time.
I also don't think anyone expected there to be so many machines attached to each other as we have now.
Basically, I don't think that a cell phone virus would have nearly the impact of even a simple PC virus due to the fact that (as the article states) people just aren't that unprepared anymore. Maybe if we all were given wide open Windows !Smart Phones? Besides - I think my carrier would probably *charge* me to run a virus:D
I would agree, but amend it like this for database stuff:
"Basic Programming -> Data Structures -> intermediate topics: " Here I would add RDBMS concepts since a huge chunk of the work developers do is SQL/DB related code. Many developers (frighteningly enough) do not understand basic RDBMS and SQL stuff, leaving it to people like me to explain to them why certain things are very, very bad.
I totally agree - I had the worst time learning how to skate until I got talked into a game of roller hockey. I obviously got my butt kicked, but I learned to skate better in that hour than the previous 4 trys.
No - it was still daunting to me! I spent 3k on a MacBook Pro, but CS2 is NUTS expensive. Fortunately, I am eligible for upgrade because I already bit that bullet.
I suspect most of that is Windows software... I think that for Mac software it is probably a bit lower. Most Mac users I know are full on legit. There are a couple... but every Windows user I know has TONS of illegal crap. I wonder - is there a bounty?
Ok - that stuck me as odd, so I just checked it by copying an 800MB zip file onto my 1GB SD card (since I don't have one nearly as large a USB device as bmajik). The 800MB zip is coming from a Windows department server share (my "home" drive).
Not especially fast, but no screen paint issues. None of the three windows (source, target, or copy window) are showing any issues with updates. No lurches.
This is on 10.4.6 on an Intel Macbook Pro 15". I'm attached to the network via switched 100bT. I have OO.o with 5 documents (via X11) running, TextMate with two large Perl scripts, Lotus Notes, CotVNC, FireFox, Safari, iTunes, and two screens running. Also listening to music currently.
Now to be fair, I'm on pretty current hardware, but come on. That was a total troll... I want Vista to be awesome as much as the next guy (maybe more - this is slashdot) but still - that was a random unsubstantiated complaint there.
I also tried doing this copying a 4 GB DMG to my local disk - same results.
There's RTF, and then there's RTF. For example - if I create an RTF on OSX it will use "smart quotes" by default. It will look fine in Word, TextMate, etc. If you open it on a PDA with Pocket Word, however, you will get odd characters.
OS/2 had this issue as well. It used RTF that didn't quite mesh. Everyone seems to use it a little bit differently... even though it is a standard. I'm not sure why, but no two companies seem to have it "down" as a really solid format. At least PDF seems to be pretty consistent. The PDFs I create are correctly readable by everything but the Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC (which just seems to hate everything).
I'm all for a Windows Photo Format, especially since PNG is free, fast, light, and solid. I'd love to have yet another format to have to keep my photos in! Wouldn't that be grand? Something with DRM maybe - something that hopefully will be completely incompatible with OSX and Linux? That'd be the best. Keep those stupid Mac and Linux users from seeing all that great content created by those amazing Windows geniuses. It would be especially great if it tied in with TPCA so only people who were paid up could see the images.
Heh - it's classic. See Weird Al's "It's all about the Pentiums" for an example:D
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique! "
It's probably because most geeks aren't really into sports. You'll see these same discussion with football fans - sometimes to an absurd degree. It's just a "team" or "side" thing.
Me? I like stuff that works, doesn't cost too much, and is likely to keep doing what I bought it for long into the future. Right now I have Apple machines, an XBox 360, a PS2 and a Nintendo 64. Obviously consoles have always switched around for me - I don't play "teams" with them. Desktops are similar, but Apple has held my interest long enough for my PCs to have all found better homes. (4 years now). Don't worry - at some point Linux/MS/NewOS will come along and I'll switch to them. After all, I came to Apple from Debian/RedHat/Windows, and to that from FreeBSD/OS2/DOS, and to that from VMS/Irix.
So you're implying that maybe Leonardo DaVinci should be voiced by Nathan Lane? Too funny!
Re:Pffft...that's why I bought an iRiver.
on
Apple Sues Creative
·
· Score: 1
To me this is pretty funny - I find the whole MP3 player market to be like this, and it amuses me to see people defend Apple or Creative on this one. The comment "general loutishness" I think applies equally to both companies. Apple *loves* to sue people for perceived slights, Creative has an argument that is weak at best, and neither of them are doing this the "right way" by simply being market competitive.
I personally hate Creative's players, but I'm not really a huge iPod fan either. I like the shuffle a lot, and I have the SLVR phone (the first phone player I ever actually liked). Creative pissed me off on their players with a cludgy unpleasent interface, and Apple pissed me off on the SLVR with the stupid "100 song" limit. I have 512MB of storage on the stupid thing, and I can only utilize about 300MB of it for music due to that arbitrary decision.
So - hell with them both. With any luck both will fall.
No kidding - this article is complete crap. Typically when you "analyze" a skeleton, you actually do some real science. You don't just look at Mike Tyson, examine his face, and produce a voice that sounds anything like his.
By all rights, he should sound more like Samuel Jackson:)
Stupid story, stupid stunt, lame page. Thanks, slashdot, for supporting the MPAA.
As a dad who played Pac-Man (and one who has a PS2 with something in the vicinity of 60+ games) I will *not* be buying a PS3.
Sony basically blew this one, but it wasn't about price- that for me is a bit less signifigant than it might be for some. It isn't about blu-ray/hd-dvd (which I couldn't care less about). It's about games. I insist on a console having 5-6 good games before I will buy it, and I need a reasonable number of kid-friendly ones. I haven't seen any PS2 releases I really liked in about a year, so I'd say that platform has really cooled off for me. The PS3 doesn't even have any launch titles I'm interested in, and it doesn't look like it will have any soon.
The Xbox 360, however, has some current titles I'm quite interested in. There are several cool new titles for Xbox or Xbox 360 on the way, and quite a few titles for the old system that I was on the fence for. Basically the momentum under the Xbox 360 was like the PS2. It had a predecessor that I liked, but not quite enough to buy.
So basically my console budget is spent - I'm not waiting another year plus for a repeat of the PS2 launch fiasco, I'm not waiting to have non-crappy graphics (the PS2 looks just awful on my new screen), and my "first choice" system didn't cut it. I went with the Xbox 360, and the PS2 has now joined the N64 as a "has been" system for me.
As for my kids? I don't buy them consoles - I buy them games for consoles I buy for *me*.
"Hell I even spend more than $100 on dinner at least a few times a week"
You sir, fall under the category of "More money than sense". (or more dollars than sense, which I think is the actual quote). Anyone with the disposable income to blow like that would be unlikely to care about a price hike in Apple's *low-end* laptop.
If I spent more than $300 a month going out to eat I'd be quickly bankrupt. My budget only allows for about $150, and I consider that to be pretty high.
Agreed - I had a couple players before the iPod, and I despised them. They were cludgy, ugly, and difficult to use. I had MusicMatch (paid for) before iTunes, and WinAmp/XAmp before that.
I found that iTunes is a far better tool, the iPod is a far better device (even though my track record with them has been less than perfect) and there is no "fan boy" issue to it. I don't even use the stupid white head phones. I use Grado SR125s, and I usually only listen to AIFF files. To me, the sound quality on the iPod is far superior to anything else in its size/price range, the iTunes interface is far more polished than the competitors, and I found that on either Windows or OSX that I'm happier by far with the solution Apple created.
That being said, I do like the new super-small players. Unfortunately, they all seem to sound like crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly while that was a good write up you posted from, I would disagree that the US is a facist state. The near-invasion of Mexico into California pretty well proves it, as does the presence of mostly free speech.
The disturbing trend is that certain political parties are starting to align too heavily with religions, and the SCOTUS is not acting like as much of a balancing influence as it used to. I wouldn't argue we're becoming facist, but I would argue that the US is starting to fracture. Pity so much of the world is, too. The UK and EU are prime examples of this. If someone can point out a shining example of good, noble government I'd love to see it.
-WS
Yeah - that bit is funny. I think I need to get that CD. Thanks for the link.
Too frikkin true, too.
-WS
The concept of removing a word for a thing, and thereby attempting to remove the ability to describe or conceptualize it is not new.
It may not work, but it is currently being tried... on us. When a word becomes "bad", we move on to a new word. When, for example, did "Gifted" come to mean retarded? I tried to sign my kid up for the gifted program (since he is testing 3 years ahead) and they told me that he wasn't the right sort. The right sort were the "type who weren't as able to adjust to classroom education as the other students". It was just for the "Special" kids... you know, the Down syndrome, the mentally retarded, etc.
Totally freaked me out.
-WS
What exactly is your point?
What I was saying is that the AV companies are trumping this up as "Oh noes! We're at the beginning of a massive onslaught of viruses for cell phones!". I disagree that we are seeing any such thing.
In 1988 things like Stoned came out (as you point out). However, the early viruses propagated mainly via shared files and boot disks. Cell phones by and large share only SMS messages, which go through a centrally controlled server (not a random ad-hoc network like email). SMS is very intolerant of long messages - you would have to create a payload in 254 Unicode characters.
Buffer overflows are no longer "rare". Code written in this day and age should be designed more carefully. I know mine certainly is. Little issues that I wouldn't have even considered in the 80's or early 90's are very much a part of my design and testing now.
Also - *documents* are not stored on phones as we know them. You have an address book? So? It could easily be wiped and re-done. Phone acting weird? You reset it or take it back.
Nothing about phones matches the usage or environment patterns of computers. There are no home-builds. There are no wild-west style networks. The sharing of pictures and like data via Bluetooth and MMS is still very unusual (and many providers charge for it or lock it down). An MMS virus comes out? Easily squashed at the central server.
Bluetooth virus? Bluetooth can be locked down or disabled entirely with no real consequence.
Add to this all that most phones aren't even compatible with other models from the same vendor, let alone other vendors. Add to it the fact that J2ME and the like are tightly locked down on the phones where it is even supported. This isn't 1988 - people are wary now.
So let me sum this up one more time -
Different tool, different purpose, different rules. Viruses will exist, but they will be a totally different sort of beast from that which lives on windows.
-WS
I think that thinking of this in terms of "PC equiv of 1988" is BS. In 1988 people weren't even sure if the PC was going to last. The world had just gone from dozens of machines which were completely incompatible (Commodore, Apple, Timex etc) to one system emerging as an almost standard. I know that the idea viruses or worms getting to this point was certainly out of my head at that time.
:D
I also don't think anyone expected there to be so many machines attached to each other as we have now.
Basically, I don't think that a cell phone virus would have nearly the impact of even a simple PC virus due to the fact that (as the article states) people just aren't that unprepared anymore. Maybe if we all were given wide open Windows !Smart Phones? Besides - I think my carrier would probably *charge* me to run a virus
-WS
More likely they couldn't figure out how to reverse-engineer the products/and or Intel won't cave to them, and therefore they are suing them.
Stands to reason, any country that kills its own populace certainly would do something like this.
-WS
I would agree, but amend it like this for database stuff:
"Basic Programming -> Data Structures -> intermediate topics: " Here I would add RDBMS concepts since a huge chunk of the work developers do is SQL/DB related code. Many developers (frighteningly enough) do not understand basic RDBMS and SQL stuff, leaving it to people like me to explain to them why certain things are very, very bad.
-WS
I totally agree - I had the worst time learning how to skate until I got talked into a game of roller hockey. I obviously got my butt kicked, but I learned to skate better in that hour than the previous 4 trys.
-WS
You can't call bullshit - this was an opinion based on the Mac people I know vs. the Windows people I know.
:D
You can say that you know more pirate Mac users than Win users if you like, but that certainly doesn't change it.
Don't go ruining my perfectly good troll with one of your own
-WS
No - it was still daunting to me! I spent 3k on a MacBook Pro, but CS2 is NUTS expensive. Fortunately, I am eligible for upgrade because I already bit that bullet.
-WS
I suspect most of that is Windows software... I think that for Mac software it is probably a bit lower. Most Mac users I know are full on legit. There are a couple... but every Windows user I know has TONS of illegal crap. I wonder - is there a bounty?
-WS
Nope - now it is PEBSAC - much better :)
(That's obviously "Problem Exists Between Screen And Chair")
-WS
Ok - that stuck me as odd, so I just checked it by copying an 800MB zip file onto my 1GB SD card (since I don't have one nearly as large a USB device as bmajik). The 800MB zip is coming from a Windows department server share (my "home" drive).
Not especially fast, but no screen paint issues. None of the three windows (source, target, or copy window) are showing any issues with updates. No lurches.
This is on 10.4.6 on an Intel Macbook Pro 15". I'm attached to the network via switched 100bT. I have OO.o with 5 documents (via X11) running, TextMate with two large Perl scripts, Lotus Notes, CotVNC, FireFox, Safari, iTunes, and two screens running. Also listening to music currently.
Now to be fair, I'm on pretty current hardware, but come on. That was a total troll... I want Vista to be awesome as much as the next guy (maybe more - this is slashdot) but still - that was a random unsubstantiated complaint there.
I also tried doing this copying a 4 GB DMG to my local disk - same results.
-WS
Not sure - I do know that I exchange PDFs from OO.o on a daily basis - so far only one issue. Some kind of LZW corruption or something.
I'm on OO.o 2.0 on OSX Intel, just so you know.
-WS
There's RTF, and then there's RTF. For example - if I create an RTF on OSX it will use "smart quotes" by default. It will look fine in Word, TextMate, etc. If you open it on a PDA with Pocket Word, however, you will get odd characters.
OS/2 had this issue as well. It used RTF that didn't quite mesh. Everyone seems to use it a little bit differently... even though it is a standard. I'm not sure why, but no two companies seem to have it "down" as a really solid format. At least PDF seems to be pretty consistent. The PDFs I create are correctly readable by everything but the Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC (which just seems to hate everything).
I'm all for a Windows Photo Format, especially since PNG is free, fast, light, and solid. I'd love to have yet another format to have to keep my photos in! Wouldn't that be grand? Something with DRM maybe - something that hopefully will be completely incompatible with OSX and Linux? That'd be the best. Keep those stupid Mac and Linux users from seeing all that great content created by those amazing Windows geniuses. It would be especially great if it tied in with TPCA so only people who were paid up could see the images.
-WS
Heh - it's classic. See Weird Al's "It's all about the Pentiums" for an example :D
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique! "
It's just a fact of life.
-WS
That's it - I totally have to write a BF virus now! I knew the time I spent learning that would eventually come in handy :D
hehehe
-WS
It's probably because most geeks aren't really into sports. You'll see these same discussion with football fans - sometimes to an absurd degree. It's just a "team" or "side" thing.
Me? I like stuff that works, doesn't cost too much, and is likely to keep doing what I bought it for long into the future. Right now I have Apple machines, an XBox 360, a PS2 and a Nintendo 64. Obviously consoles have always switched around for me - I don't play "teams" with them. Desktops are similar, but Apple has held my interest long enough for my PCs to have all found better homes. (4 years now). Don't worry - at some point Linux/MS/NewOS will come along and I'll switch to them. After all, I came to Apple from Debian/RedHat/Windows, and to that from FreeBSD/OS2/DOS, and to that from VMS/Irix.
-WS
So you're implying that maybe Leonardo DaVinci should be voiced by Nathan Lane?
Too funny!
To me this is pretty funny - I find the whole MP3 player market to be like this, and it amuses me to see people defend Apple or Creative on this one. The comment "general loutishness" I think applies equally to both companies. Apple *loves* to sue people for perceived slights, Creative has an argument that is weak at best, and neither of them are doing this the "right way" by simply being market competitive.
I personally hate Creative's players, but I'm not really a huge iPod fan either. I like the shuffle a lot, and I have the SLVR phone (the first phone player I ever actually liked). Creative pissed me off on their players with a cludgy unpleasent interface, and Apple pissed me off on the SLVR with the stupid "100 song" limit. I have 512MB of storage on the stupid thing, and I can only utilize about 300MB of it for music due to that arbitrary decision.
So - hell with them both. With any luck both will fall.
-WS
No kidding - this article is complete crap. Typically when you "analyze" a skeleton, you actually do some real science. You don't just look at Mike Tyson, examine his face, and produce a voice that sounds anything like his.
:)
By all rights, he should sound more like Samuel Jackson
Stupid story, stupid stunt, lame page. Thanks, slashdot, for supporting the MPAA.
-WS
Cause they would have seen American Idol?
-WS
As a dad who played Pac-Man (and one who has a PS2 with something in the vicinity of 60+ games) I will *not* be buying a PS3.
Sony basically blew this one, but it wasn't about price- that for me is a bit less signifigant than it might be for some. It isn't about blu-ray/hd-dvd (which I couldn't care less about). It's about games. I insist on a console having 5-6 good games before I will buy it, and I need a reasonable number of kid-friendly ones. I haven't seen any PS2 releases I really liked in about a year, so I'd say that platform has really cooled off for me. The PS3 doesn't even have any launch titles I'm interested in, and it doesn't look like it will have any soon.
The Xbox 360, however, has some current titles I'm quite interested in. There are several cool new titles for Xbox or Xbox 360 on the way, and quite a few titles for the old system that I was on the fence for. Basically the momentum under the Xbox 360 was like the PS2. It had a predecessor that I liked, but not quite enough to buy.
So basically my console budget is spent - I'm not waiting another year plus for a repeat of the PS2 launch fiasco, I'm not waiting to have non-crappy graphics (the PS2 looks just awful on my new screen), and my "first choice" system didn't cut it. I went with the Xbox 360, and the PS2 has now joined the N64 as a "has been" system for me.
As for my kids? I don't buy them consoles - I buy them games for consoles I buy for *me*.
-WS
"Hell I even spend more than $100 on dinner at least a few times a week"
You sir, fall under the category of "More money than sense". (or more dollars than sense, which I think is the actual quote). Anyone with the disposable income to blow like that would be unlikely to care about a price hike in Apple's *low-end* laptop.
If I spent more than $300 a month going out to eat I'd be quickly bankrupt. My budget only allows for about $150, and I consider that to be pretty high.
-WS
Agreed - I had a couple players before the iPod, and I despised them. They were cludgy, ugly, and difficult to use. I had MusicMatch (paid for) before iTunes, and WinAmp/XAmp before that.
I found that iTunes is a far better tool, the iPod is a far better device (even though my track record with them has been less than perfect) and there is no "fan boy" issue to it. I don't even use the stupid white head phones. I use Grado SR125s, and I usually only listen to AIFF files. To me, the sound quality on the iPod is far superior to anything else in its size/price range, the iTunes interface is far more polished than the competitors, and I found that on either Windows or OSX that I'm happier by far with the solution Apple created.
That being said, I do like the new super-small players. Unfortunately, they all seem to sound like crap.
-WS