Anyone who has ever believed any of Slashdot's many conspiracy theories about Microsoft is so naive they shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a minder.
I think that we are FINALLY starting to see all kinds of content, including television content online in some kind of substantial quantity.
I was checking out Comedy Central's clips of the Daily Show like I usually do every few weeks or so, and I was shocked to find that you can stream tons and tons of good content from the Daily Show at a time. I used to have to click and watch an ad for every 1 minute segment, which was almost more trouble than it was worth. Last night, I clicked "play all", and I got several hours worth of Daily Show content, with ads interspersed through out (like TV).
I think it's interesting that TV exceutives are FINALLY starting to notice online viewship. It seems to me that they would've done it much earlier, because tracking advertising online is about one beeellion times more effective than those useless Neilson boxes that give very limited information on a tiny same of the population.
Kiddie porn? Out of control? Don't believe everything the press feeds you.
I was in the porn industry until recently. Pedophiles are actively shunned by the mainstream porn community. In fact, the main stream porn industry regularly reports these people to gov't agencies. I know that I have personally, tipped off the FBI countless times about kiddie porn. There's a lot of it out there.
You don't have a problem with corporation acting as law enforcement?
I would, if that's what was happening in this case. It certainly is NOT what is happening in this case. They're helping out Keystone Kops in this case. They're not prosecuting anybody. They're working within the system.
If you want to get your panties in a bunch over corporations being involved in law enforcement, then you should read a bit more. You should know that many prisons in the United States, are in fact, run by private corporations. THAT is a "corporation acting as law enforcement". MS helping cops to track down phishers is not.
At first, I was reading your explination, and I thought, "Hey, this sounds plausible. This probably is close to correct". Then, I remembered that Slashdot is still running MySQL, and goes down more than a Republican hooker in Washington, DC. So, I think that your premise is plausable, but only if there were some real technical expertise over at the Slashdot offices.
You'd have to be asleep for the past 10 years to not know that crime is absolutely out of control online, in the forms of phishing, spam, kiddie porn, etc. No law enforcement agency on the planet is able to do anything to stop it: All we get is one high profile case every 6 months or so on the major media in some kind of pathetic attempt to show that the law enforcement agencies are on top of it. I think that in this case, law enforcement needs all the help they can get.
Sure, everybody is still entitled to all of their rights (trial by a jury, etc.), but we desperately need more people and companies helping law enforcement in this area, because law enforcement is doing *nothing* right now to stop all of this shit from happening.
How can we communicate to them the fact that living in a groundhog warren is bad not only for the engineers, but also for the organization?"
I would speak to "them" with your voice (mouth, tongue, voal cords, et. al), either in person, or via telephone. Barring that, I would use a written format, such as "email" or "letter", in a lanugage that "them" would readily comprehend.
Are there some other, hidden, secret forms of communication that I'm missing, here?
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Try your local independent stores, jackass. Feeding multinational corporations online doesn't help anybody except for the executives in said multinational corporations, and UPS. Try spending that money locally, with people who actually pay taxes, and contribute back to your community in lots of different ways.
You're 100% right. Hell, look at the words used to describe american football (that idea is from George Carlin). We have a very violent culture.
But, what part of OSS is competitive, at all? It's people making software. The whole idea is that you shouldn't care who is using your product, so there's no competition with commercial software (or there shouldn't be). Where's the competition in OSS?
Say what you want about their products, sony has completely boggled the recent ball. They might have the best system, they might not but the only thing the marketing has done has been to hurt them.
That's not true. You and I have no idea if Sony was at all impacted by the GEEK media. All of the PS3's they made sold out instantly. Unless you can time travel, I certainly wouldn't say that Sony has been hurt. I'm wagering that they'll be just as successful with the PS3 as they were with the PS2, if not more so.
One big problem that I see if the violence inherent in the community. Everything is a "war" or a "Battle". An "OS War", a "browser war". This article is titled "inside the mind of the enemy". Community != War. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the whole OSS movement was being led by our own current war-loving government (war on drugs, war on terrorism). How about dropping the hostility, for starters?
I'm all for the free market, but this isn't free market in action. This is companies trying to get legislation enacted which give some companies and unfair competitive advantage.
Actually, the free market would say that new ISP's would fill the void, offering good service at good prices. If there's money to be made in offering unfettered bandwidth at $xx, then somebody will do it, because demand will be there.
Oh, I'm not saying that MS's framework does everything. I certainly wouldn't try to mess with drivers with plain ol' Win 32 stuff. It's just not made to do that easily. But for what most development consists of (high level stuff, like a front end and a middle tier and a database), nothing beats MS.
My current project is a middleware piece to connect my point of sale retail system to my web site. There's a little database in the middle to handle all of the extra info that our POS doesn't capture (product images, long descriptions, shipping costs, etc.), and a front end that I slapped together in no time at all, using Windows standard widgets (buttons, windows, treeview, sliders, web browser, FTP, etc.). I can't really say that I'm aware of another product or platform that will allow this to be done as easily and quickly.
You're right. No framework fills every need. It's just that with MS, all of the common stuff that people need to do with their software is there and simple. Sure, if I needed software to say, oh I dunno, run a car, MS doesn't have anything that'll do it. In my case, most of my own development is a fairly in-depth UI tied to a standard database that connects to a proprietary database with a simple COM object, and building flat files. That's all basic stuff that lots of people have to do lots of times every day. It's easy. It's insanely easy. If I tried doing that, say, with Java, my development time would be easily doubled or tripled.
I used to be physically addicted to caffeine. When I went cold turkey, I was sick as a dog for 2 days. I remember, because I was in college, and I had to miss two days of class because my head was splitting, and I was throwing up. Now granted, at that point I was drinking roughly 10-12 cans of Coke a day, but still, caffeine is NOT harmless.
Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things
So what? It's a good thing for developers and users. I wrote a custom app for my business using VB6 to manage some middleware piece. It works fine. I needed a web browser integrated into it to do a few things. I could use IE, which involved dragging an icon into my application, or I could use Firefox which involved... actually, I have no idea how I would do that. IE has a nice simple COM object for me to use. Firefox doesn't. Thus, my app uses IE.
It's high time that OSS people get their heads out of thier asses and realize that THEY need somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs. I love MS stuff because it all works together fairly well, and development is so fucking simple. I see being able to use pieces here and there as a good thing.
The alternative is re-inventing the wheel with every stupid application, and having the end product be an absolutely incomprehensible rat's nest of stuff that doesn't have any consistency of any kind, or work together in any kind of predictable way (Linux, anybody?)
If you enjoy hacking together the same shit time and time out of sheer spite, good for you. For me, life is too short. I'll drag and drop and go onto something more interesting.
"Developers, Developers, Developers" may be a running joke around here, and you may not be a fan of MSDN and the other tool sets, but if you code Windows solutions for pay, fuck you, I'm using them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Part of the reason that MS is successful is because there is nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS. Maybe if some other companies would have somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs, then those companies would be just as successful in this way. MS gives me tools, and makes it EASY. The OSS community tells me to RTFM. I'll give ya' one guess what I use to develop my business tools.
There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations.
"Will ever be able to compete"? MS is STILL eating OSS's lunch everywhere except at the web server. Are you living in some sort of parallel universe where OSS is wildly successful, and MS is trying to enter the market using tried and tested QA methods?
Personally, I think the best thing halo had going for it was it's sound effects.
My girlfriend bought an XBox recently to play a single game. She also bought it to keep me at her place more. So, I decided to go get the Big game, Halo (I got Halo 2... Halo wasn't available used). Holy crap! What a rotten game! I couldn't believe how shitty it was. I played it for 3 hours or so, hoping that it was going to get better.
Oh yeah, my point... I thought that the sound on Halo2 was really terrible. Flat, boring, repetitive, and no music to speak of. Just a lot of "zap zap" sounds. Halo2 went back to the store.
Scientists have been very wrong in the past, look at the cloning in Korea, or Java man, or Piltdown man, even the earth has aged billions of years in the past 100 years.
Yes, out of billions of scientific discoveries, there are occasionally errors. That's very true. Nobody's perfect. But you can't compare that to religions that say that there's an invisible man who lives in the sky who snapped his fingers a few thousand years ago, and invented the whole planet, just because it says so in some book. Nobody is claiming that science is perfect. Science is constantly improving as we learn new things. That in no way, shape, or form compares to religion, which is by definition based on FAITH, which IS A LACK OF FACTS/EVIDENCE.
There are thousands of scientific discoveries just in they keyboard you're using. It's absolutely amazing. Science found oil and made plastic. Science created metallurgy to make the steel. Science discovered electricity. Science invented electric light for your little num lock light. Science created the machines that made your keyboard. Science created the trucks and planes that brought that keyboard to you from China. It goes on and on...
Faith has created: ignorance.
I would argue that a belief system not based on facts is called delusion, and should be treated by mental health professionals.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has ever believed any of Slashdot's many conspiracy theories about Microsoft is so naive they shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a minder.
I think that we are FINALLY starting to see all kinds of content, including television content online in some kind of substantial quantity.
I was checking out Comedy Central's clips of the Daily Show like I usually do every few weeks or so, and I was shocked to find that you can stream tons and tons of good content from the Daily Show at a time. I used to have to click and watch an ad for every 1 minute segment, which was almost more trouble than it was worth. Last night, I clicked "play all", and I got several hours worth of Daily Show content, with ads interspersed through out (like TV).
I think it's interesting that TV exceutives are FINALLY starting to notice online viewship. It seems to me that they would've done it much earlier, because tracking advertising online is about one beeellion times more effective than those useless Neilson boxes that give very limited information on a tiny same of the population.
Kiddie porn? Out of control? Don't believe everything the press feeds you.
I was in the porn industry until recently. Pedophiles are actively shunned by the mainstream porn community. In fact, the main stream porn industry regularly reports these people to gov't agencies. I know that I have personally, tipped off the FBI countless times about kiddie porn. There's a lot of it out there.
You don't have a problem with corporation acting as law enforcement?
I would, if that's what was happening in this case. It certainly is NOT what is happening in this case. They're helping out Keystone Kops in this case. They're not prosecuting anybody. They're working within the system.
If you want to get your panties in a bunch over corporations being involved in law enforcement, then you should read a bit more. You should know that many prisons in the United States, are in fact, run by private corporations. THAT is a "corporation acting as law enforcement". MS helping cops to track down phishers is not.
At first, I was reading your explination, and I thought, "Hey, this sounds plausible. This probably is close to correct". Then, I remembered that Slashdot is still running MySQL, and goes down more than a Republican hooker in Washington, DC. So, I think that your premise is plausable, but only if there were some real technical expertise over at the Slashdot offices.
You'd have to be asleep for the past 10 years to not know that crime is absolutely out of control online, in the forms of phishing, spam, kiddie porn, etc. No law enforcement agency on the planet is able to do anything to stop it: All we get is one high profile case every 6 months or so on the major media in some kind of pathetic attempt to show that the law enforcement agencies are on top of it. I think that in this case, law enforcement needs all the help they can get.
Sure, everybody is still entitled to all of their rights (trial by a jury, etc.), but we desperately need more people and companies helping law enforcement in this area, because law enforcement is doing *nothing* right now to stop all of this shit from happening.
What is so important that a vacation would create a risk/reward ratio that is out of whack?
You obviously have never started your own business. I own a retail business, and turning off my phone is simply not an issue.
and other such real world variables into how it makes judgments.
It also can't take into account stock-pumping spam, which has graced so many of our inboxes lately.
How can we communicate to them the fact that living in a groundhog warren is bad not only for the engineers, but also for the organization?"
I would speak to "them" with your voice (mouth, tongue, voal cords, et. al), either in person, or via telephone. Barring that, I would use a written format, such as "email" or "letter", in a lanugage that "them" would readily comprehend.
Are there some other, hidden, secret forms of communication that I'm missing, here?
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Try your local independent stores, jackass. Feeding multinational corporations online doesn't help anybody except for the executives in said multinational corporations, and UPS. Try spending that money locally, with people who actually pay taxes, and contribute back to your community in lots of different ways.
So then, an inventor has every person on the planet sign a NDA? Brilliant! Now, do you suggest that I do this: via email, fax, or physical mail?
You're 100% right. Hell, look at the words used to describe american football (that idea is from George Carlin). We have a very violent culture.
But, what part of OSS is competitive, at all? It's people making software. The whole idea is that you shouldn't care who is using your product, so there's no competition with commercial software (or there shouldn't be). Where's the competition in OSS?
Say what you want about their products, sony has completely boggled the recent ball. They might have the best system, they might not but the only thing the marketing has done has been to hurt them.
That's not true. You and I have no idea if Sony was at all impacted by the GEEK media. All of the PS3's they made sold out instantly. Unless you can time travel, I certainly wouldn't say that Sony has been hurt. I'm wagering that they'll be just as successful with the PS3 as they were with the PS2, if not more so.
One big problem that I see if the violence inherent in the community. Everything is a "war" or a "Battle". An "OS War", a "browser war". This article is titled "inside the mind of the enemy". Community != War. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the whole OSS movement was being led by our own current war-loving government (war on drugs, war on terrorism). How about dropping the hostility, for starters?
I'm all for the free market, but this isn't free market in action. This is companies trying to get legislation enacted which give some companies and unfair competitive advantage.
Actually, the free market would say that new ISP's would fill the void, offering good service at good prices. If there's money to be made in offering unfettered bandwidth at $xx, then somebody will do it, because demand will be there.
Oh, I'm not saying that MS's framework does everything. I certainly wouldn't try to mess with drivers with plain ol' Win 32 stuff. It's just not made to do that easily. But for what most development consists of (high level stuff, like a front end and a middle tier and a database), nothing beats MS.
My current project is a middleware piece to connect my point of sale retail system to my web site. There's a little database in the middle to handle all of the extra info that our POS doesn't capture (product images, long descriptions, shipping costs, etc.), and a front end that I slapped together in no time at all, using Windows standard widgets (buttons, windows, treeview, sliders, web browser, FTP, etc.). I can't really say that I'm aware of another product or platform that will allow this to be done as easily and quickly.
You're right. No framework fills every need. It's just that with MS, all of the common stuff that people need to do with their software is there and simple. Sure, if I needed software to say, oh I dunno, run a car, MS doesn't have anything that'll do it. In my case, most of my own development is a fairly in-depth UI tied to a standard database that connects to a proprietary database with a simple COM object, and building flat files. That's all basic stuff that lots of people have to do lots of times every day. It's easy. It's insanely easy. If I tried doing that, say, with Java, my development time would be easily doubled or tripled.
I used to be physically addicted to caffeine. When I went cold turkey, I was sick as a dog for 2 days. I remember, because I was in college, and I had to miss two days of class because my head was splitting, and I was throwing up. Now granted, at that point I was drinking roughly 10-12 cans of Coke a day, but still, caffeine is NOT harmless.
There have been drugs around to do this for hundreds of years, at least. It's called speed.
Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things
So what? It's a good thing for developers and users. I wrote a custom app for my business using VB6 to manage some middleware piece. It works fine. I needed a web browser integrated into it to do a few things. I could use IE, which involved dragging an icon into my application, or I could use Firefox which involved... actually, I have no idea how I would do that. IE has a nice simple COM object for me to use. Firefox doesn't. Thus, my app uses IE.
It's high time that OSS people get their heads out of thier asses and realize that THEY need somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs. I love MS stuff because it all works together fairly well, and development is so fucking simple. I see being able to use pieces here and there as a good thing.
The alternative is re-inventing the wheel with every stupid application, and having the end product be an absolutely incomprehensible rat's nest of stuff that doesn't have any consistency of any kind, or work together in any kind of predictable way (Linux, anybody?)
If you enjoy hacking together the same shit time and time out of sheer spite, good for you. For me, life is too short. I'll drag and drop and go onto something more interesting.
"Developers, Developers, Developers" may be a running joke around here, and you may not be a fan of MSDN and the other tool sets, but if you code Windows solutions for pay, fuck you, I'm using them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Part of the reason that MS is successful is because there is nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS. Maybe if some other companies would have somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs, then those companies would be just as successful in this way. MS gives me tools, and makes it EASY. The OSS community tells me to RTFM. I'll give ya' one guess what I use to develop my business tools.
There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations.
"Will ever be able to compete"? MS is STILL eating OSS's lunch everywhere except at the web server. Are you living in some sort of parallel universe where OSS is wildly successful, and MS is trying to enter the market using tried and tested QA methods?
Personally, I think the best thing halo had going for it was it's sound effects.
My girlfriend bought an XBox recently to play a single game. She also bought it to keep me at her place more. So, I decided to go get the Big game, Halo (I got Halo 2... Halo wasn't available used). Holy crap! What a rotten game! I couldn't believe how shitty it was. I played it for 3 hours or so, hoping that it was going to get better.
Oh yeah, my point... I thought that the sound on Halo2 was really terrible. Flat, boring, repetitive, and no music to speak of. Just a lot of "zap zap" sounds. Halo2 went back to the store.
Scientists have been very wrong in the past, look at the cloning in Korea, or Java man, or Piltdown man, even the earth has aged billions of years in the past 100 years.
Yes, out of billions of scientific discoveries, there are occasionally errors. That's very true. Nobody's perfect. But you can't compare that to religions that say that there's an invisible man who lives in the sky who snapped his fingers a few thousand years ago, and invented the whole planet, just because it says so in some book. Nobody is claiming that science is perfect. Science is constantly improving as we learn new things. That in no way, shape, or form compares to religion, which is by definition based on FAITH, which IS A LACK OF FACTS/EVIDENCE.
There are thousands of scientific discoveries just in they keyboard you're using. It's absolutely amazing. Science found oil and made plastic. Science created metallurgy to make the steel. Science discovered electricity. Science invented electric light for your little num lock light. Science created the machines that made your keyboard. Science created the trucks and planes that brought that keyboard to you from China. It goes on and on...
Faith has created: ignorance.
I would argue that a belief system not based on facts is called delusion, and should be treated by mental health professionals.