I wonder if copywrite law will become a sizable part of the computer curriculum.
Chapter 1: Understanding the EULA
I could imagine Microsoft supplying textbooks that arrived in sealed envelopes with EULAs on them...
"Timmy, you got a 0 on your test!" "But mom, disclosing any of the information I learned from my Microsoft textbook is a violation of the EULA! I could get in trouble! Microsoft could send people out to remove the part of my brain that retains the disclosed information!"
The iPod is little more than a physically tiny portable hard drive with a user interface. Its method of connecting to other hardware is an IEEE standard. The data on the hard drive is not encrypted in any way. The music that iTunes loads onto the iPod is just stashed in an invisible folder. All the Windows iPod software would have to do is speak HFS+, Apple's file system, and be able to manipulate items within that invisible folder (and to a lesser degree, work flawlessly with as many different makes of FireWire PCI cards as possible). There are other utilities out there that let PCs read and write Mac disks, and AFAIK I don't think the companies that made those had to get a license to use HFS+. To that end, I doubt that Apple will take any legal action to stop someone from making Windows iPod software.
Of course, this situation is different from that situation-- It was in Apple's interest to let companies make stuff so Macs and PCs can better interoperate, but one of the reasons for the iPod's existence is to help sell Macs. Apple may not like that some company is coming in and, to a degree, negating that selling point. Of course, Apple can ensure the iPod will always work best with Macs by refusing to provide support to people syncing their iPod to a non-Mac computer, and by releasing iPod firmware updates (if any) so that they can only be applied to the iPod with a Mac.* We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.
* - Before anyone starts ripping Apple over tactics like that, let me remind you of the countless times I, as a Mac user, have heard, "Well you'll just have to get a PC if you want to do that!" Let me also remind you of products like certain cable/DSL routers whose firmware is a pain in the ass to upgrade if you don't have a PC handy. I for one think it's high time PC users got a little taste of what Mac users have had to put up with for years.
At my last job doing corporate IT support, I formed a number of strong friendships. All my users loved me, and I liked most of them quite a bit as well. The (non-IT) co-workers that were around my age, who were predominantly female, always went out to happy hours and such that I organized and we always had a collective blast at the company Christmas party as well.
My location's department was small-- It was just my then-boss, me, and during the summer of 2000, one intern and we supported about 100 people. I remain good friends with my boss from that job though it's been over a year since he left and almost a year since I left, and I was good friends with the [gorgeous female] intern before she worked in my department-- she had been working in Accounting while going to school for Computer Science. We remain close today.
At the job I took in January, I get along well with everyone but we don't really spend enough time together in the office to really get to know each other well. But that's life a a busy consultant.
This would be an interesting experiment for someone in here with a friend on the opposite side of the country from him/her and a little extra disposable income:
Prepare two identical boxes like this: Put an old Yellow Pages [of a decently-sized city] or something about that heavy into a box just large enough to hold it, seal that box, then pack that inside another, larger box, padded carefully as if it were a stereo component or something.
Mark one box "FRAGILE," and maybe "GLASS" on every side, in huge letters with the thickest, blackest marker you've got. Underline it. Twice. Don't put anything special on the other. Ship them a week apart to your friend across the country via UPS Ground. See if they really do purposely beat the shit out of packages marked "Fragile."
With proper documentation, photos, maybe even video, this could make for an interesting school project/web site/thing to send to your local TV station's "consumer advocate"/thing to send to a network newsmagazine show.
We used to get battered boxes all the time at my old job, once in a while we'd get one that looked like someone took a bat to the side, but none were EVER as bad as the pictures this dude took. Those are unreal.
But I stopped using UPS for a different reason-- because they employ idiots. Whenever I get a 'delivery attempted' note, I immediately call to have them hold the package for me at the depot (nobody is ever home during the day, so 2nd and 3rd attempts would be useless). The last time I did that, I got to the depot only to find that my request had been ignored, the package had gone back out for delivery, and that I would have to wait until I actually got the second 'attempted delivery' note before I could arrange to pick up in person again. And no apology from the woman behind the customer service counter though I was visibly fuming over a wasted trip and having to wait another day for a computer part that I needed badly. Morons!
~Philly
Re:Slashdot is a bunch of bitter geeks!!
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2
"Microsoft CURES AIDS AND CANCER"
Yeah, that would be great. I'm sure everyone with either disease would love to have re-purchase the cure every year or have Microsoft employees come out and re-infect them.
Yes, this is a poke at Microsoft and their ridiculous love of licensing. Why? I just got my MCP "Welcome" info packet yesterday, and the certificate was in an envelope with what was essentially a EULA sticker sealing it shut. I have to agree to some contract to read a piece of paper or hang it on my wall? Pfft!
I can't wait to see how Microsoft deals with people who beat or become bored with X-Box games and try to resell them on eBay or at Funcoland.
~Philly
Re:What PC users have always known, verified
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Heh... yeah, I've always loved hearing people call the Mac "a toy, because it has no good games."
My guess has always been that playing the Monotonous-FPS-of-the Month on a Windows box rots the part of the brain that allows irony to be detected.
As for the XBox, I'm not buying it, or the GameCube, or the PS2. Got enough classic consoles to keep me happy, the ones that were made back when gameplay mattered... not just the same three lame styles of games with purtier and purtier pixchurs every year.
IIRC, Sega began selling its ill-fated Saturn in a surprise, early release before the PlayStation debuted in the U.S. They did this at least in selected markets, because I bought one in Philadelphia the day they went on sale (I really liked Virtua Fighter). It could be argued that Sega, then a reigning home-system champ with the Genesis, was nervous about a newcomer and wanted to grab a market foothold.
Seems like Nintendo is now the nervous incumbent, trying to grab the bucks of people dying for a next-gen system and willing to buy the first one that comes out, and who will be unable to afford to buy a competitor's subsequently-released system.
This is probably one of the two most likely scenarios, the other one being that one of the engines threw and then ate one of its fanblades-- American Airlines reported that one of the engines on the plane was practically brand-new and the other was nearing the 10,000-hour mark at which a major overhaul would be performed.
If eyewitness accounts of both engines being aflame are true, then birds are very likely the cause-- though that must have been one hell of a big flock of them to completely doom the plane to crashing-- because they build thoe engines to withstand some serious shit:
I remember the Discovery Channel documentary about the 777 airliner and the torture tests that they put its engines through: running it non-stop for a full year, IIRC; catapulting frozen turkeys into it while it was running at full-speed; running it while it ingests water equivalent to something like a 12-inches-per-hour-of-rainfall rainstorm; and lastly, deliberately severing one of the turbine blades at its base while it was running to see if the engine casing could withstand the impact (it did, and made for some impressive video in the process).
Likely the most sensitive sites are built on some custom UNIX stuff, but isn't a good portion of the U.S. government simply standardized on Microsoft products?
Well, when you're tapdancing through a minefield, you shouldn't be surprised when you wind up legless.
Since everyone's skittish about postal mail these days, a fax would probably be the best way to give them your opinion-- conventional wisdom seems to be that a politician will pay more attention to one written missive on paper than 1,000 e-mail messages, the phone-answering lackeys can't muddy your words by playing whisper-down-the-lane, and someone will notice if so many people weigh in with their concerns that the office staff can't keep the fax's paper tray full.
Just the thing for the average computer-pr0n viewer.. it includes a special shelf to hold the box of tissues and bottle of lube, and a salad bar-style, er, "sneeze guard" to go over the keyboard. Choose from four delightful colors, or buy one "naked" and stain it yourself!:-)
Back on topic, I too have a computer desk from IKEA. I just waltzed in there and bought the desk with the largest surface area they offered, which was about 63.0" x 29.5". Screwed a couple of the cableways they sell to the underside, and I was in business. I carefully set up all my hardware to minimize the number of cords on the floor, and I've been computing away on it since 1994. I wish it were a little sturdier, though, it needs support in the middle or it bows. Of course, that's with a Power Mac, 17" & 14" monitors and a big old SCSI scanner on it.
~Philly
Re:Microsoft Lazy, How do you figure?
on
Interview With Linus
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Microsoft works its ass off until it owns a given market, then it gets lazy. Let's look at some of the examples you gave:
Windows XP: Windows 2000 with new applications relevant to markets it wants to control (digital imaging, instant messaging) welded into the OS, along with bugfixes, eye candy, and irritating anti-piracy crap built in so they can squeeze consumers with multiple PCs.
Office XP: Stepping stone towards Office.Net, where if you wanna run the spellchecker, it'll cost ya.:-)
XBox: Sony and Nintendo are splitting a huge pie, Microsoft wants as big a piece of it as they can get.
Pocket PC 2002: Microsoft hasn't killed off Palm yet.
Yet here in these responses I see the simple realization that some idiot made a mistake writing the installation script. Are you sure?
Yes, because on the Mac, the presence of multiple partitions != dual-booting user. OS X will reside quite happily on the same partition as OS 9.x, and you can choose between them with the Startup Disk control panel.
The only advantage I found to putting OS X on a different partition is, you can select which operating system you want to boot in every time you power on the machine, by holding down the Option key until presented with the menu.
My username has no numbers on the end (it's just my first two initals and my last name), and NOBODY has my Hotmail address, and I don't use it-- I only have one because I was forced to take one to be able to use MSN Messenger.
Yet every time I peek in there, even with the Junk Mail filters on, there's tons of spam in my In Box.
....Microsoft calls a settlement "fair," you can be sure said settlement contains an advantageous (to Microsoft) loophole that their opposition's lawyers have not discovered.
Clearly the government will never stop Microsoft. It will be up to the lone nut who assembles a suitcase nuke in his basement, loads it into his Vista Cruiser, and drives to Redmond.
The competing company's CIO settles into the limo for the early-morning ride to the airport to catch his flight to that trade show. Quickly becoming engrossed in some reports on his laptop, he doesn't notice anything amiss until the driver doesn't take the airport exit. As the CIO starts to protest, the door locks slam home and the partition goes up. Then the knockout gas starts coming out of the air vents...
Same things happened at my former employer. Before I started there, a dude posed as a delivery person, carrying a large box. He got someone to open the door for him who then went back to their business without a thought. This guy picked up a few laptops from empty offices (this was at lunchtime one day) and presumably put them in the box and took it back out with him. He also ransacked one woman's purse. He made off with several PowerBooks, and went on a spree at the shopping center across the highway from the corporate park, using that woman's credit cards. This resulted in the company spending thousands on strong magnetic locks for the doors, controlled by numeric keypads that logged our codes.
Fat lot of good those did. While I was still working for that company, someone made off with a brand new combination TV/VCR, probably by waiting until the evening cleaning crew left the door unlocked. After that theft, my boss and I put in a passable security camera system consisting of some dinky yet highly visible cameras trained on the office doors, and one watching the door to our equipment storage and server room, from inside the room. We ran the camera inputs into a 4-way combiner, and then into a spare Mac with a video capture card and running webcam software that snapped a picture when movement was detected during non-business hours. Nothing further disappeared, though the system did catch some amusing photos of me staggering around the halls the morning after my 27th birthday party, when I crashed in my office.
I've been gone from that company for almost a year but I still talk to friends there. I heard that a month or so ago, employees of a different location of the same company (without security cameras) came in one morning to find about 10 Dell laptops were gone, ripped out of their docks by a guy who waited for the cleaning crew to start working and slipped into the offices. The company's solution to that one: All laptops must now be taken home at night.
Sneakers was a way cool movie, still very watchable and re-watchable even as it approaches 10 years old. Very entertaining, and has a very low head-shake count (i.e. elements that make you shake your head in disgust because they are ridiculously unfeasible, or where the technology is insultingly dumbed-down so the unwashed masses will 'get' it). An example of a movie with a high head-shake count, BTW, would be Hackers-- because among many other things, I've never met a geek that looked like Angelina Jolie, and never seen a Macintosh PowerBook Duo with an Intel CPU.
This is just plain ridiculous. They steamroll ahead with their monopoly tactics, welding everything they can think of into their OS to kill the competit^H^H^H promote the user experience, but THIS is where they try so hard to play nice and be P.C., it crosses the line into stupidity?
They sure weren't afraid to offend people in 1994, when Bookshelf happily defined such words as "motherfucker," and even provided a recording of someone saying it, lest I be unsure of the pronunciation.
Right now most nations spend billions of dollars every year filling prisons with people who sit in cages all day watching television.
Most nations? I don't think too many inmates in Turkish prisons have basic cable, same for the other countries who run their justice systems the proper way-- by punishing their criminals instead of coddling them in some nice warm jail with plenty of food and TVs. Yeah, prisoners in the U.S. sure learn their lesson by having the state take care of them, and all they do is work in the prison laundry or something a few hours a day.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population was educated.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population (or at least the 1st -degree murderers and habitual felons) was executed. Then my tax dollars might go towards more worthwhile things than feeding, clothing and housing this subhuman trash, like maybe helping the families of their victims.
And none of this 'humane' execution nonsense. Use a wood chipper. Murderers dropped in head-first, and rapists and child molesters lowered in, slowly, feet-first.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if copywrite law will become a sizable part of the computer curriculum.
Chapter 1: Understanding the EULA
I could imagine Microsoft supplying textbooks that arrived in sealed envelopes with EULAs on them...
"Timmy, you got a 0 on your test!"
"But mom, disclosing any of the information I learned from my Microsoft textbook is a violation of the EULA! I could get in trouble! Microsoft could send people out to remove the part of my brain that retains the disclosed information!"
~Philly
The iPod is little more than a physically tiny portable hard drive with a user interface. Its method of connecting to other hardware is an IEEE standard. The data on the hard drive is not encrypted in any way. The music that iTunes loads onto the iPod is just stashed in an invisible folder. All the Windows iPod software would have to do is speak HFS+, Apple's file system, and be able to manipulate items within that invisible folder (and to a lesser degree, work flawlessly with as many different makes of FireWire PCI cards as possible). There are other utilities out there that let PCs read and write Mac disks, and AFAIK I don't think the companies that made those had to get a license to use HFS+. To that end, I doubt that Apple will take any legal action to stop someone from making Windows iPod software.
Of course, this situation is different from that situation-- It was in Apple's interest to let companies make stuff so Macs and PCs can better interoperate, but one of the reasons for the iPod's existence is to help sell Macs. Apple may not like that some company is coming in and, to a degree, negating that selling point. Of course, Apple can ensure the iPod will always work best with Macs by refusing to provide support to people syncing their iPod to a non-Mac computer, and by releasing iPod firmware updates (if any) so that they can only be applied to the iPod with a Mac.* We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.
* - Before anyone starts ripping Apple over tactics like that, let me remind you of the countless times I, as a Mac user, have heard, "Well you'll just have to get a PC if you want to do that!" Let me also remind you of products like certain cable/DSL routers whose firmware is a pain in the ass to upgrade if you don't have a PC handy. I for one think it's high time PC users got a little taste of what Mac users have had to put up with for years.
~Philly
At my last job doing corporate IT support, I formed a number of strong friendships. All my users loved me, and I liked most of them quite a bit as well. The (non-IT) co-workers that were around my age, who were predominantly female, always went out to happy hours and such that I organized and we always had a collective blast at the company Christmas party as well.
My location's department was small-- It was just my then-boss, me, and during the summer of 2000, one intern and we supported about 100 people. I remain good friends with my boss from that job though it's been over a year since he left and almost a year since I left, and I was good friends with the [gorgeous female] intern before she worked in my department-- she had been working in Accounting while going to school for Computer Science. We remain close today.
At the job I took in January, I get along well with everyone but we don't really spend enough time together in the office to really get to know each other well. But that's life a a busy consultant.
~Philly
This would be an interesting experiment for someone in here with a friend on the opposite side of the country from him/her and a little extra disposable income:
Prepare two identical boxes like this: Put an old Yellow Pages [of a decently-sized city] or something about that heavy into a box just large enough to hold it, seal that box, then pack that inside another, larger box, padded carefully as if it were a stereo component or something.
Mark one box "FRAGILE," and maybe "GLASS" on every side, in huge letters with the thickest, blackest marker you've got. Underline it. Twice. Don't put anything special on the other. Ship them a week apart to your friend across the country via UPS Ground. See if they really do purposely beat the shit out of packages marked "Fragile."
With proper documentation, photos, maybe even video, this could make for an interesting school project/web site/thing to send to your local TV station's "consumer advocate"/thing to send to a network newsmagazine show.
~Philly
We used to get battered boxes all the time at my old job, once in a while we'd get one that looked like someone took a bat to the side, but none were EVER as bad as the pictures this dude took. Those are unreal.
But I stopped using UPS for a different reason-- because they employ idiots. Whenever I get a 'delivery attempted' note, I immediately call to have them hold the package for me at the depot (nobody is ever home during the day, so 2nd and 3rd attempts would be useless). The last time I did that, I got to the depot only to find that my request had been ignored, the package had gone back out for delivery, and that I would have to wait until I actually got the second 'attempted delivery' note before I could arrange to pick up in person again. And no apology from the woman behind the customer service counter though I was visibly fuming over a wasted trip and having to wait another day for a computer part that I needed badly. Morons!
~Philly
"Microsoft CURES AIDS AND CANCER"
Yeah, that would be great. I'm sure everyone with either disease would love to have re-purchase the cure every year or have Microsoft employees come out and re-infect them.
Yes, this is a poke at Microsoft and their ridiculous love of licensing. Why? I just got my MCP "Welcome" info packet yesterday, and the certificate was in an envelope with what was essentially a EULA sticker sealing it shut. I have to agree to some contract to read a piece of paper or hang it on my wall? Pfft!
I can't wait to see how Microsoft deals with people who beat or become bored with X-Box games and try to resell them on eBay or at Funcoland.
~Philly
Heh... yeah, I've always loved hearing people call the Mac "a toy, because it has no good games."
My guess has always been that playing the Monotonous-FPS-of-the Month on a Windows box rots the part of the brain that allows irony to be detected.
As for the XBox, I'm not buying it, or the GameCube, or the PS2. Got enough classic consoles to keep me happy, the ones that were made back when gameplay mattered... not just the same three lame styles of games with purtier and purtier pixchurs every year.
~Philly
IIRC, Sega began selling its ill-fated Saturn in a surprise, early release before the PlayStation debuted in the U.S. They did this at least in selected markets, because I bought one in Philadelphia the day they went on sale (I really liked Virtua Fighter). It could be argued that Sega, then a reigning home-system champ with the Genesis, was nervous about a newcomer and wanted to grab a market foothold.
Seems like Nintendo is now the nervous incumbent, trying to grab the bucks of people dying for a next-gen system and willing to buy the first one that comes out, and who will be unable to afford to buy a competitor's subsequently-released system.
~Philly
Bill: "I'm Bill S. Preston, Esquire."
Ted: "And I'm Ted "Theodore" Logan."
Bill, Ted: "And together, we're WYLD PHYSICISTS!"
Bill: "Ok, the maintenance dudes are done. I'm gonna refill the water tank."
<cacophony of pops as the light detectors implode>
Ted: "Strange things are afoot at the Super-K."
Rufus: [reassuringly to the camera]: "They do get better."
~Philly
IIRC, the 777 used Pratt & Whitney engines, at least during the prototype construction and testing that the documentary covered.
~Philly
This is probably one of the two most likely scenarios, the other one being that one of the engines threw and then ate one of its fanblades-- American Airlines reported that one of the engines on the plane was practically brand-new and the other was nearing the 10,000-hour mark at which a major overhaul would be performed.
If eyewitness accounts of both engines being aflame are true, then birds are very likely the cause-- though that must have been one hell of a big flock of them to completely doom the plane to crashing-- because they build thoe engines to withstand some serious shit:
I remember the Discovery Channel documentary about the 777 airliner and the torture tests that they put its engines through: running it non-stop for a full year, IIRC; catapulting frozen turkeys into it while it was running at full-speed; running it while it ingests water equivalent to something like a 12-inches-per-hour-of-rainfall rainstorm; and lastly, deliberately severing one of the turbine blades at its base while it was running to see if the engine casing could withstand the impact (it did, and made for some impressive video in the process).
~Philly
Likely the most sensitive sites are built on some custom UNIX stuff, but isn't a good portion of the U.S. government simply standardized on Microsoft products?
Well, when you're tapdancing through a minefield, you shouldn't be surprised when you wind up legless.
~Philly
Since everyone's skittish about postal mail these days, a fax would probably be the best way to give them your opinion-- conventional wisdom seems to be that a politician will pay more attention to one written missive on paper than 1,000 e-mail messages, the phone-answering lackeys can't muddy your words by playing whisper-down-the-lane, and someone will notice if so many people weigh in with their concerns that the office staff can't keep the fax's paper tray full.
~Philly
...at AdultDex, the porn stars are being asked to leave their non-AdultDex-issued fun-bags in their rooms!
/. post!
My 200th
~Philly
I finally settled on Ikea's Jerker workstation
:-)
Just the thing for the average computer-pr0n viewer.. it includes a special shelf to hold the box of tissues and bottle of lube, and a salad bar-style, er, "sneeze guard" to go over the keyboard. Choose from four delightful colors, or buy one "naked" and stain it yourself!
Back on topic, I too have a computer desk from IKEA. I just waltzed in there and bought the desk with the largest surface area they offered, which was about 63.0" x 29.5". Screwed a couple of the cableways they sell to the underside, and I was in business. I carefully set up all my hardware to minimize the number of cords on the floor, and I've been computing away on it since 1994. I wish it were a little sturdier, though, it needs support in the middle or it bows. Of course, that's with a Power Mac, 17" & 14" monitors and a big old SCSI scanner on it.
~Philly
Microsoft works its ass off until it owns a given market, then it gets lazy. Let's look at some of the examples you gave:
:-)
Windows XP: Windows 2000 with new applications relevant to markets it wants to control (digital imaging, instant messaging) welded into the OS, along with bugfixes, eye candy, and irritating anti-piracy crap built in so they can squeeze consumers with multiple PCs.
Office XP: Stepping stone towards Office.Net, where if you wanna run the spellchecker, it'll cost ya.
XBox: Sony and Nintendo are splitting a huge pie, Microsoft wants as big a piece of it as they can get.
Pocket PC 2002: Microsoft hasn't killed off Palm yet.
~Philly
Yet here in these responses I see the simple realization that some idiot made a mistake writing the installation script. Are you sure?
Yes, because on the Mac, the presence of multiple partitions != dual-booting user. OS X will reside quite happily on the same partition as OS 9.x, and you can choose between them with the Startup Disk control panel.
The only advantage I found to putting OS X on a different partition is, you can select which operating system you want to boot in every time you power on the machine, by holding down the Option key until presented with the menu.
~Philly
I'd be interested to know the title of this book. The way you describe it, it sounds like a cross between Moonseed and The Andromeda Strain.
~Philly
My username has no numbers on the end (it's just my first two initals and my last name), and NOBODY has my Hotmail address, and I don't use it-- I only have one because I was forced to take one to be able to use MSN Messenger.
Yet every time I peek in there, even with the Junk Mail filters on, there's tons of spam in my In Box.
~Philly
....Microsoft calls a settlement "fair," you can be sure said settlement contains an advantageous (to Microsoft) loophole that their opposition's lawyers have not discovered.
Clearly the government will never stop Microsoft. It will be up to the lone nut who assembles a suitcase nuke in his basement, loads it into his Vista Cruiser, and drives to Redmond.
~Philly
...designate targets...
I can just see that going too damned far...
The competing company's CIO settles into the limo for the early-morning ride to the airport to catch his flight to that trade show. Quickly becoming engrossed in some reports on his laptop, he doesn't notice anything amiss until the driver doesn't take the airport exit. As the CIO starts to protest, the door locks slam home and the partition goes up. Then the knockout gas starts coming out of the air vents...
~Philly
Same things happened at my former employer. Before I started there, a dude posed as a delivery person, carrying a large box. He got someone to open the door for him who then went back to their business without a thought. This guy picked up a few laptops from empty offices (this was at lunchtime one day) and presumably put them in the box and took it back out with him. He also ransacked one woman's purse. He made off with several PowerBooks, and went on a spree at the shopping center across the highway from the corporate park, using that woman's credit cards. This resulted in the company spending thousands on strong magnetic locks for the doors, controlled by numeric keypads that logged our codes.
Fat lot of good those did. While I was still working for that company, someone made off with a brand new combination TV/VCR, probably by waiting until the evening cleaning crew left the door unlocked. After that theft, my boss and I put in a passable security camera system consisting of some dinky yet highly visible cameras trained on the office doors, and one watching the door to our equipment storage and server room, from inside the room. We ran the camera inputs into a 4-way combiner, and then into a spare Mac with a video capture card and running webcam software that snapped a picture when movement was detected during non-business hours. Nothing further disappeared, though the system did catch some amusing photos of me staggering around the halls the morning after my 27th birthday party, when I crashed in my office.
I've been gone from that company for almost a year but I still talk to friends there. I heard that a month or so ago, employees of a different location of the same company (without security cameras) came in one morning to find about 10 Dell laptops were gone, ripped out of their docks by a guy who waited for the cleaning crew to start working and slipped into the offices. The company's solution to that one: All laptops must now be taken home at night.
~Philly
Sneakers was a way cool movie, still very watchable and re-watchable even as it approaches 10 years old. Very entertaining, and has a very low head-shake count (i.e. elements that make you shake your head in disgust because they are ridiculously unfeasible, or where the technology is insultingly dumbed-down so the unwashed masses will 'get' it). An example of a movie with a high head-shake count, BTW, would be Hackers-- because among many other things, I've never met a geek that looked like Angelina Jolie, and never seen a Macintosh PowerBook Duo with an Intel CPU.
~Philly
This is just plain ridiculous. They steamroll ahead with their monopoly tactics, welding everything they can think of into their OS to kill the competit^H^H^H promote the user experience, but THIS is where they try so hard to play nice and be P.C., it crosses the line into stupidity?
They sure weren't afraid to offend people in 1994, when Bookshelf happily defined such words as "motherfucker," and even provided a recording of someone saying it, lest I be unsure of the pronunciation.
~Philly
Right now most nations spend billions of dollars every year filling prisons with people who sit in cages all day watching television.
Most nations? I don't think too many inmates in Turkish prisons have basic cable, same for the other countries who run their justice systems the proper way-- by punishing their criminals instead of coddling them in some nice warm jail with plenty of food and TVs. Yeah, prisoners in the U.S. sure learn their lesson by having the state take care of them, and all they do is work in the prison laundry or something a few hours a day.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population was educated.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population (or at least the 1st -degree murderers and habitual felons) was executed. Then my tax dollars might go towards more worthwhile things than feeding, clothing and housing this subhuman trash, like maybe helping the families of their victims.
And none of this 'humane' execution nonsense. Use a wood chipper. Murderers dropped in head-first, and rapists and child molesters lowered in, slowly, feet-first.
~Philly