At least copyrighted media and windfall "fat cat" profits ensure lots of money spent on technical development and media development.
What good will the technical development be if it continues trending toward the creation of new devices and media so locked-down by design by the bastard money-hungry corporations that they are damn near useless, and anyone who even thinks of circumventing the encryption/copy protection is dragged off to the pokey or attacked by a pack of rabid corporate lawyers?
...that guy could buy Bill Gates, and still have enough left over to purchase quite a few elected officials.
Does he really think that the beam from the average keychain laser pointer could go 238,000+ miles?
What will his next project be? Hooking his laser pointer up to a car battery, putting a telescopic sight on it, and telling us he's augmented his local Neighborhood Watch with its very own homespun missile defense system?
The government should monitor this "project," round up everyone who participates, and unleash them in Iraq or something.
Dunno about the S-100 thing, but the rest is pretty on-target.
All accounts that I've read have Gates directing the IBM people to Digital Research, because at the time Microsoft did languages and Digital Research did OSes. Unfortunately, when IBM came a-callin' on Digital Research, Gary Kildall was not in the office and his wife refused to sign IBM's NDA.
IBM eventually returned to Microsoft, who reached an aggreement to license DOS to IBM before they secured the rights to it from Seattle Computer.
So, 20 years ago today, IBM started selling a half-assed, piece of shit machine that was slapped together in a hurry from off-the-shelf parts, just so IBM could grab a piece of the Apple II's marketshare. Whoo hoo.
Actually, what I think today should be remembered for is that it's the day IBM essentially handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom. What do we have to show for it? Twenty years later, the world runs on unsecure, virus-friendly bloatware so complex that most of the gains in productivity we've seen along the way have been negated by all the time spent rebooting, reinstalling Windows, and sitting on hold with tech support. It amazes me what people will put up with.
I would think that most of the people who read/. would treat this as a somber occasion, the day that a possible future that held so much promise was extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle.
...which went under many years back, though there are still some people sitting at the gate, waiting for a flight out. They loudly proclaim the greatness of Amiga Air to everyone passing by in the terminal, but everyone just ignores them.
Once in a while another airline takes interest in reviving Amiga Air** and the still-waiting passengers get very excited, but then the other airline's interest wanes, and the Amiga Air passengers remain stuck in the terminal, forever waiting.
* - Several years back, one of the comp.sys.* Usenet groups had a thread asking people to add to the "If OSes were airlines" post. Nobody chose Amiga up to the point that I discovered the thread, so I did. Many thought my post was funny. I have always wanted to get hold of a copy of it, but I can't seem to track it down on Google Groups. I have attempted to recreate it here. If anyone should stumble across the original, I'd love to know about it.
** - This is a reference to Gateway's (it was some major PC manufacturer, anyway, but I'm pretty sure it was Gateway) pondering an acquisition of the Amiga name and and technology and starting to make new, updated Amigas a few years ago. They eventually changed their corporate mind.
...companies making micropayments to people who wear t-shirts with their logo on it?
The shirt could track exactly how long the logo was worn, and you get $.01 per minute or something like that. The current marketing slogan would always be on the shirt.
That might be the one thing that would get me to wear a non-plain shirt.
Of course, how long before people hack the shirts and get Nike to drop $1M into their account? LOL
Considering just how light-polluted the eastern seaboard is, I'm surprised at how much the view improves after a 30-minute drive into the burbs west of Philadelphia or a 40-minute drive to a fairly rural part of southern New Jersey.
~Philly
Fire up the ol' 2600...
on
Quake 4 Announced
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
...if you want to play some titles where gameplay matter, not just all them purty pixchers and the "if it moves, shoot it, you twitchy, been-up-all-night, Red Bull swilling, 13 year-old bastard!" mentality.
I mean really, how much longer will idiots keep buying the same game that DOOM was back in 1993? It was fun for a few weeks in single-player, and a few more weeks after me and some friends cobbled together a few 486/66s and set up a 10Base2 network for deathmatches. After that, yawnsville.
~Philly
Chrome, wood, satin...
on
Case Tweaking
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· Score: 1
What is this thing, the PimPC? All it needs are the curb-feelers, the floppy hat with ostrich plume, and, of course, the stable of bitches.
1) Windows weenies must be the biggest fucking hypocrites on the planet... they always deride Apple products as "toy-looking," and then go and stuff a gamerz rig into a G4 case.
2) I'll be more than happy to give a home to that "yucky Mac hardware" that was left when they finished violating the G4.
~Philly
Re:How the hell do yah ping on a mac pre os x?
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 1
Secondly, if you had to "constantly" rebuild desktops and delete preference files and reinstall the OS, you either had some amazingly clueless users, or must have been pretty worthless as a Mac support tech. Having to reinstall the Mac OS on any machine I ever took care of was considered "worst case." The Macs (including servers) at my last job hummed along so well, if they hadn't also had PCs there I probably would've gotten laid off because I had nothing to do.
IME, there are only two things you need to support Macs effectively-- a copy of Norton Utilities, and a book, preferably a thick one, to read between support calls.
The iBook is the perfect balance of size and features, with a full complement of ports. I have found it to be the ideal consultant laptop. It fits in my backpack, inside a great padded case, along with my CD case and tool kit. The battery life is sufficient that I can usually save additional weight by leaving the AC adapter at home.
The iBook's ethernet port auto-senses not only speed, but also whether it is connected to a hub or another computer-- no more carrying around a straight-thru and a crossover cable. Throw in DAVE, and there's practically no network I can't hop onto in a matter of minutes to work at a client site. For good measure, I installed Virtual PC and put Windows 2000 on it. The iBook handles it pretty well with sufficient RAM (I have 320MB).
I love it when my clients suppress a snicker when I pull out my iBook, and then I proceed to astonish them by retrieving data from files that their precious Windows machines choke on, thus saving their asses.
Before that, it was Sliders (though only the shows that had the original cast, and before they just started ripping off movie plots). I know on/. it's heresy to say this, but I find all the Star Trek derivatives to be completely unwatchable dreck. First Wave had me for a little while, but then they had to go and add Traci Lords to the cast as a cheap ratings ploy that reminded me of the "addition" of Kari Wuhrer to the Sliders cast. Like a pair of tits is going to keep me from noticing the show's getting hokey? I couldn't even bear the LEXX commercials. Farscape never really got its hooks into me.
I've always been a huge fan of the Twilight Zone, and other shows of that particular genre of sci-fi, and The Outer Limits has taken up the thread quite admirably, with decent effects, familiar stars, and, oh yeah, interesting plots. They did an adaption of Larry Niven's "Inconstant Moon"-- a great story I had wanted to see on screen since I first read it. I'm still hoping they'll someday find a way to squeeze "Flash Crowd" into an hour.)
The only time I really watch the SciFi Channel anymore is when they have one of those all-day Twilight Zone marathons, a good movie, or The Outer Limits.
And why dosent any one sue M$ over all these security flaws ? I know that if a company made an unsafe tire tbey get sued.. why not M$ for such awful code ?
Because if M$ is like most other software companies, their license agreement says [in legalese], "Here's our software. No matter what our marketing materials say, we don't guarantee it against anything. If a bug or bugs in it causes someone to die, or you or your company to lose a million bucks, you're SOL and we're not liable-- because like we said, there's no guarantee, and frankly, you should have known better than to trust us."
The difference between Microsoft and Firestone is when the weasling-out-of-accountability occurs: Firestone's army of lawyers did it after feces met fan blades by pointing fingers at Ford, Microsoft's did it in advance with the EULA, putting the onus on the hapless sysadmin who had to install that Windows claptrap when the suits ordered him to "make the company compatible with the rest of the world!"
You want old tech? There ya go. It's even still useful after all these decades, too. Compare that to an old Altair, which is only fit for sitting in a display cabinet.
So I guess you're going to use that old sewing machine often, and to do productive work?
Most of us who collect the older computers and video games do so for nostalgic reasons, not for profit. The new stuff is nice, but nothing takes me back to the good old days like firing up my Atari 2600, ColecoVision, or Commodore 64.
"We've been working closely with Microsoft - BlackIce is widely used inside Microsoft - in order to make sure it works well," Rob Graham, founder of NetworkIce told us.
This article on ZDNet from a few days ago details a disagreement between Kodak and Microsoft over Kodak camera drivers for Windows XP. Seems that Microsoft, who has bolted a lot of digital image features onto XP, refuses to sign Kodak's drivers.
I remember the outcry from some people back when driver signing was first introduced. They said that Microsoft could use driver signing as a weapon, a way of sabotaging their competitors' products to give their own a boost. Now it's starting to look like those predictions are coming true.
Says the article: "Although the driver could be downloaded, a dialog box will appear on the PC stating that the driver has not been tested for use with Windows XP and may not be reliable." And we all know what that means, right? The average non-computer-savvy consumer will be frightened off from installing that evil, evil Kodak software by Microsoft's Warning Dialog of Death (apparently a direct descendant of that old DR-DOS induced "error" in Win 3.1) and will just use Microsoft's built-in stuff. Of course, that's assuming that there will be some non-lazy consumers who won't just use Microsoft's offering without question. Is is those people, after all, who were a major part of how they crushed Netscape.
Looks more affordable as it runs on electrical power.
Electrical power? More affordable? I'm thinking you're not a resident of California.:-)
As for the beer cooler, pretty neat idea, but probably not one you can use if you have neighbors living close by. I'm sure those "no leaf blowers before 9am" ordinances would be quickly amended to include jet-powered beer coolers.
Simply put, Apple's decision to release the iBook before MWNY can only mean one thing now that we know they didn't have something "totally innovative and sexy" around the corner:
Apple needed the money from the new iBooks to show up on last quarter's ledger more than they wanted to wait and have an expo with punch.
Hate to tell you this, but Apple's first responsibilty to their stockholders is not to wow the keynote audience, it's to make money. I'm one of The Faithful, I was lined up today outside the Javits Center at 5:30am to get a good seat, and even I know that. You don't make money by sitting on a ready-to-ship product for two months just because that's when the next big trade show is.
Plus a couple months in the field would expose any minor problems (a la the PB G4's "case flex shutdown" issue) that much sooner, before Apple starts really moving these things by the dozens of thousands to school districts.
Yes, I distinctly remember how Microsoft claimed that a DOJ injunction preventing the release of Win98 on the date Microsoft had set would cause the sun to go supernova, prevent photosynthesis from occurring, tilt the Earth's axis by 2.5 degrees, and cause hamburgers to begin eating people instead of the other way around.
I later recall being quite amused when they themselves missed this ship date and no apocalypse occurred.
...was that the hot water heated the air around it, which rose and exited the shower stall, and that the cooler air being pulled in due to convection caused this.
Then I noticed that even the hottest shower wouldn't cause the sucking in of the curtain unless I had the pressure valve on the shower head open pretty far, so I arrived at the same conclusion as a Ph.D. in about a week, at no cost to anyone, and only thinking about it at all while I was actually in the shower.
I don't know whose $28,000 this guy pissed away to figure this out, but IMHO they ought to garnish his salary until the sum is paid back.
Slashdot Mirror
At least copyrighted media and windfall "fat cat" profits ensure lots of money spent on technical development and media development.
What good will the technical development be if it continues trending toward the creation of new devices and media so locked-down by design by the bastard money-hungry corporations that they are damn near useless, and anyone who even thinks of circumventing the encryption/copy protection is dragged off to the pokey or attacked by a pack of rabid corporate lawyers?
~Philly
...that guy could buy Bill Gates, and still have enough left over to purchase quite a few elected officials.
Does he really think that the beam from the average keychain laser pointer could go 238,000+ miles?
What will his next project be? Hooking his laser pointer up to a car battery, putting a telescopic sight on it, and telling us he's augmented his local Neighborhood Watch with its very own homespun missile defense system?
The government should monitor this "project," round up everyone who participates, and unleash them in Iraq or something.
~Philly
I believe this is the TechTV article referenced in the above post.
~Philly
How do you know that's not his day job already?
~Philly
Dunno about the S-100 thing, but the rest is pretty on-target.
All accounts that I've read have Gates directing the IBM people to Digital Research, because at the time Microsoft did languages and Digital Research did OSes. Unfortunately, when IBM came a-callin' on Digital Research, Gary Kildall was not in the office and his wife refused to sign IBM's NDA.
IBM eventually returned to Microsoft, who reached an aggreement to license DOS to IBM before they secured the rights to it from Seattle Computer.
Read more about it:
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
~Philly
So, 20 years ago today, IBM started selling a half-assed, piece of shit machine that was slapped together in a hurry from off-the-shelf parts, just so IBM could grab a piece of the Apple II's marketshare. Whoo hoo.
/. would treat this as a somber occasion, the day that a possible future that held so much promise was extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle.
Actually, what I think today should be remembered for is that it's the day IBM essentially handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom. What do we have to show for it? Twenty years later, the world runs on unsecure, virus-friendly bloatware so complex that most of the gains in productivity we've seen along the way have been negated by all the time spent rebooting, reinstalling Windows, and sitting on hold with tech support. It amazes me what people will put up with.
I would think that most of the people who read
~Philly
...which went under many years back, though there are still some people sitting at the gate, waiting for a flight out. They loudly proclaim the greatness of Amiga Air to everyone passing by in the terminal, but everyone just ignores them.
Once in a while another airline takes interest in reviving Amiga Air** and the still-waiting passengers get very excited, but then the other airline's interest wanes, and the Amiga Air passengers remain stuck in the terminal, forever waiting.
* - Several years back, one of the comp.sys.* Usenet groups had a thread asking people to add to the "If OSes were airlines" post. Nobody chose Amiga up to the point that I discovered the thread, so I did. Many thought my post was funny. I have always wanted to get hold of a copy of it, but I can't seem to track it down on Google Groups. I have attempted to recreate it here. If anyone should stumble across the original, I'd love to know about it.
** - This is a reference to Gateway's (it was some major PC manufacturer, anyway, but I'm pretty sure it was Gateway) pondering an acquisition of the Amiga name and and technology and starting to make new, updated Amigas a few years ago. They eventually changed their corporate mind.
~Philly
...companies making micropayments to people who wear t-shirts with their logo on it?
The shirt could track exactly how long the logo was worn, and you get $.01 per minute or something like that. The current marketing slogan would always be on the shirt.
That might be the one thing that would get me to wear a non-plain shirt.
Of course, how long before people hack the shirts and get Nike to drop $1M into their account? LOL
~Philly
Considering just how light-polluted the eastern seaboard is, I'm surprised at how much the view improves after a 30-minute drive into the burbs west of Philadelphia or a 40-minute drive to a fairly rural part of southern New Jersey.
~Philly
...if you want to play some titles where gameplay matter, not just all them purty pixchers and the "if it moves, shoot it, you twitchy, been-up-all-night, Red Bull swilling, 13 year-old bastard!" mentality.
I mean really, how much longer will idiots keep buying the same game that DOOM was back in 1993? It was fun for a few weeks in single-player, and a few more weeks after me and some friends cobbled together a few 486/66s and set up a 10Base2 network for deathmatches. After that, yawnsville.
~Philly
What is this thing, the PimPC? All it needs are the curb-feelers, the floppy hat with ostrich plume, and, of course, the stable of bitches.
~Philly
1) Windows weenies must be the biggest fucking hypocrites on the planet... they always deride Apple products as "toy-looking," and then go and stuff a gamerz rig into a G4 case.
2) I'll be more than happy to give a home to that "yucky Mac hardware" that was left when they finished violating the G4.
~Philly
First off, you ping by downloading MacPing or WhatRoute.
Secondly, if you had to "constantly" rebuild desktops and delete preference files and reinstall the OS, you either had some amazingly clueless users, or must have been pretty worthless as a Mac support tech. Having to reinstall the Mac OS on any machine I ever took care of was considered "worst case." The Macs (including servers) at my last job hummed along so well, if they hadn't also had PCs there I probably would've gotten laid off because I had nothing to do.
IME, there are only two things you need to support Macs effectively-- a copy of Norton Utilities, and a book, preferably a thick one, to read between support calls.
~Philly
I concur.
The iBook is the perfect balance of size and features, with a full complement of ports. I have found it to be the ideal consultant laptop. It fits in my backpack, inside a great padded case, along with my CD case and tool kit. The battery life is sufficient that I can usually save additional weight by leaving the AC adapter at home.
The iBook's ethernet port auto-senses not only speed, but also whether it is connected to a hub or another computer-- no more carrying around a straight-thru and a crossover cable. Throw in DAVE, and there's practically no network I can't hop onto in a matter of minutes to work at a client site. For good measure, I installed Virtual PC and put Windows 2000 on it. The iBook handles it pretty well with sufficient RAM (I have 320MB).
I love it when my clients suppress a snicker when I pull out my iBook, and then I proceed to astonish them by retrieving data from files that their precious Windows machines choke on, thus saving their asses.
~Philly
IMHO, it's the best SciFi around these days.
/. it's heresy to say this, but I find all the Star Trek derivatives to be completely unwatchable dreck. First Wave had me for a little while, but then they had to go and add Traci Lords to the cast as a cheap ratings ploy that reminded me of the "addition" of Kari Wuhrer to the Sliders cast. Like a pair of tits is going to keep me from noticing the show's getting hokey? I couldn't even bear the LEXX commercials. Farscape never really got its hooks into me.
Before that, it was Sliders (though only the shows that had the original cast, and before they just started ripping off movie plots). I know on
I've always been a huge fan of the Twilight Zone, and other shows of that particular genre of sci-fi, and The Outer Limits has taken up the thread quite admirably, with decent effects, familiar stars, and, oh yeah, interesting plots. They did an adaption of Larry Niven's "Inconstant Moon"-- a great story I had wanted to see on screen since I first read it. I'm still hoping they'll someday find a way to squeeze "Flash Crowd" into an hour.)
The only time I really watch the SciFi Channel anymore is when they have one of those all-day Twilight Zone marathons, a good movie, or The Outer Limits.
~Philly
And why dosent any one sue M$ over all these security flaws ? I know that if a company made an unsafe tire tbey get sued.. why not M$ for such awful code ?
Because if M$ is like most other software companies, their license agreement says [in legalese], "Here's our software. No matter what our marketing materials say, we don't guarantee it against anything. If a bug or bugs in it causes someone to die, or you or your company to lose a million bucks, you're SOL and we're not liable-- because like we said, there's no guarantee, and frankly, you should have known better than to trust us."
The difference between Microsoft and Firestone is when the weasling-out-of-accountability occurs: Firestone's army of lawyers did it after feces met fan blades by pointing fingers at Ford, Microsoft's did it in advance with the EULA, putting the onus on the hapless sysadmin who had to install that Windows claptrap when the suits ordered him to "make the company compatible with the rest of the world!"
~Philly
You want old tech? There ya go. It's even still useful after all these decades, too. Compare that to an old Altair, which is only fit for sitting in a display cabinet.
So I guess you're going to use that old sewing machine often, and to do productive work?
Most of us who collect the older computers and video games do so for nostalgic reasons, not for profit. The new stuff is nice, but nothing takes me back to the good old days like firing up my Atari 2600, ColecoVision, or Commodore 64.
~Philly
"We've been working closely with Microsoft - BlackIce is widely used inside Microsoft - in order to make sure it works well," Rob Graham, founder of NetworkIce told us.
/.), I find this quote fscking hilarious. If you're relying on a company that can't keep its own products secure to help you do quality assurance on your company's security-specific product, well...
After reading Steve Gibson's scathing pseudo-review of BlackIce Defender that was part of his Denial of Service article (which was previously covered here on
If there was ever an endorsement for why one shouldn't use BlackIce Defender, this is it!
~Philly
This article on ZDNet from a few days ago details a disagreement between Kodak and Microsoft over Kodak camera drivers for Windows XP. Seems that Microsoft, who has bolted a lot of digital image features onto XP, refuses to sign Kodak's drivers.
I remember the outcry from some people back when driver signing was first introduced. They said that Microsoft could use driver signing as a weapon, a way of sabotaging their competitors' products to give their own a boost. Now it's starting to look like those predictions are coming true.
Says the article: "Although the driver could be downloaded, a dialog box will appear on the PC stating that the driver has not been tested for use with Windows XP and may not be reliable." And we all know what that means, right? The average non-computer-savvy consumer will be frightened off from installing that evil, evil Kodak software by Microsoft's Warning Dialog of Death (apparently a direct descendant of that old DR-DOS induced "error" in Win 3.1) and will just use Microsoft's built-in stuff. Of course, that's assuming that there will be some non-lazy consumers who won't just use Microsoft's offering without question. Is is those people, after all, who were a major part of how they crushed Netscape.
~Philly
Looks more affordable as it runs on electrical power.
:-)
Electrical power? More affordable? I'm thinking you're not a resident of California.
As for the beer cooler, pretty neat idea, but probably not one you can use if you have neighbors living close by. I'm sure those "no leaf blowers before 9am" ordinances would be quickly amended to include jet-powered beer coolers.
~Philly
Actually, I thought the idiocy peaked when they made a video game version of a movie version of a video game.
~Philly
Simply put, Apple's decision to release the iBook before MWNY can only mean one thing now that we know they didn't have something "totally innovative and sexy" around the corner:
Apple needed the money from the new iBooks to show up on last quarter's ledger more than they wanted to wait and have an expo with punch.
Hate to tell you this, but Apple's first responsibilty to their stockholders is not to wow the keynote audience, it's to make money. I'm one of The Faithful, I was lined up today outside the Javits Center at 5:30am to get a good seat, and even I know that. You don't make money by sitting on a ready-to-ship product for two months just because that's when the next big trade show is.
Plus a couple months in the field would expose any minor problems (a la the PB G4's "case flex shutdown" issue) that much sooner, before Apple starts really moving these things by the dozens of thousands to school districts.
Yes, I distinctly remember how Microsoft claimed that a DOJ injunction preventing the release of Win98 on the date Microsoft had set would cause the sun to go supernova, prevent photosynthesis from occurring, tilt the Earth's axis by 2.5 degrees, and cause hamburgers to begin eating people instead of the other way around.
I later recall being quite amused when they themselves missed this ship date and no apocalypse occurred.
~Philly
..."It's a trick... get an ax."
...was that the hot water heated the air around it, which rose and exited the shower stall, and that the cooler air being pulled in due to convection caused this.
Then I noticed that even the hottest shower wouldn't cause the sucking in of the curtain unless I had the pressure valve on the shower head open pretty far, so I arrived at the same conclusion as a Ph.D. in about a week, at no cost to anyone, and only thinking about it at all while I was actually in the shower.
I don't know whose $28,000 this guy pissed away to figure this out, but IMHO they ought to garnish his salary until the sum is paid back.
~Philly