Well, it's almost that simple. The 'team' you're given in Daikatana is probably the reason the game does so badly. IIRC, you couldn't let any member of the team die... you couldn't shoot through them, ala 'No Friendly Fire' in most FPS arenas today... you had to make allowances for the idiot AI behind your team members... you frequently got stuck because your 'teammates' couldn't get out of your way.
More than anything else, reviews of the crappy team system killed Daikatana's sales, and with Daikatana, Ion Storm failed as well.
Just after 9-11, when the Patriot Act bill sailed through congress despite glaring problems, I wrote a letter to Larry Combest, my representitive, detailing what I thought the problems were with the act and my general displeasure with the erosion of civil liberties in the name of war.
Now, the return letter was delayed until just a few days ago simply because congressmen couldn't use DC mail facilities because of the Anthrax scare (My letter was sent before the first anthrax case...), but in the form-letter reply, the congressman claims that he and his comrades are doing their best to balance civil liberties with the rigors of war.
This should tell us a few things:
Our congressmen have had the shit scared out of them. That a form letter directly addresses my complaints about the erosion of civil liberties means that I am one of many who has written in complaint. I live in a *very* conservative part of the country and Combest is a very typical representative of the luddite mindset around here. If he is admitting there is a problem, then you can bet that *every* congressman knows there is a problem wether he will admit it or not. They know that the people are upset and are making noise, and are in the process of trying to quiet that noise.
There is already massive distrust in Washington for George Bush and John Aschroft-- at least toward their war-time policies. If people who are concerned about their rights being taken away continue to hound their congressmen about it, the problems do have a good chance of being addressed rather than being ignored.
Remember that a lot of your congressmen are simply scared, afraid to go against the flow because of the reprecussions. If you show them (with massive amounts of mail) that you want positive change rather than negative change, it might strengthen their spirits a little.
The best part of this is that most congresspeople now prefer email to snail mail because there is no chance of contracting anthrax from Outlook. Of course they could always get Nimda, but I'll give my congressman the benifit of the doubt and assume he patches.
Don't look for neurons to hold 1's and 0's, because you'll probably take up more room with neuron+silicon substrate+implantation technology than you would in plain magnetic or CMOS storage.
Now, silicon subsrtate technology probably does hold great wonders for helping people with sensory disabilities, but don't be looking for Nerual RAM upgrades in the near future.
That's not a bad idea, actually. Try explaining to an insurance company about white-label anime fansubs when you get a renter's contract.
"Excuse me? You want us to insure pirated videos?"
When the time comes, and you have to leave quickly because of fire, flood, or tornado, it will probably be a lot easier to carry your anime collection with you if it can be crammed into a 200-disc folder rather than a bookshelf full of VHS tapes.
I've got a little over 400 hours of stuff I've downloaded off of usenet in Mpeg, ASF, or DivX format. Plug it into the good ol' TV out card, and let play.
Assuming that I can tear my wife's ass away from what ever huggy-feely design crap they're showing on HGTV, I'll be watching the entirety of Noir, Sadamitsu the Destroyer, and Inu Yasha. (There are currently about 50 episodes od IY that have been subbed... so at 24 minutes a piece I may not finish, even if I skip sleeping)
In many cases this was true, but in many cases it had a harmful effect, because the 70's were not the best time to be looking for jobs. It was also about the same time that many companies realized that it was less expensive to hire younger, highly educated, and inexperienced individuals than older, more experienced individuals.
In the 70's, the DOE's Pantex Nuclear Weapons facility in the Texas Panhandle fired dozens of experienced scientists with proven track records... simply because they did not have degrees.
This is a fairly standard practice. It's been used in at least two IT offices I've worked in. It even makes handing out passwords during 'change day' easier, because all the networking and development staff have come to expect a neumonic rather than the password itself:
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us!"
becomes
"aybab2u!"
Another useful password naming procedure is the use of 'l33t speak' inside passwords... especially long ones. On systems that support passphrases or long passwords instead of 8 char strings, this makes creating and remembering passwords quite a bit easier.
"My Password Rocks" is probably not so good, but
"MyP455w0rdR0X0r5" is a 16 character password with 7 numbers, upper and lower case characters, and no long strings of plain english text to get chewed up in a dictionary attack.
I should have clarified with this information, however:
Intoxicating liquors having 0.5 percent or more alcoholic content are nonmailable. This includes taxable liquors with 3.2 percent or less alcohol, as well as those obtained under a prescription or as a collector's item. The prohibition of the mailing of intoxicating liquors is contained in federal law (18 U.S.C. 1716).
Beer probably does not contain enough alcohol to count as a flammable liquid, but depending on the kind container you send it in (bottles, cans, etc...) you may be required to seal your beer inside plastic bags or foam padding.
I would expect them to pay for the clean up, or for them to do it themselves.
That's what I'm trying to get at. The kids who do this sort of thing need to be punished... mildly. Not sent to prison where they can be ass-raped by their cellmates and/or be transfigured from a loser, messed-up kid into a hardened criminal.
Lost customers == lost $$$.
Because of people and businesses who demand monetary accountability and are not willing to write off the stupidity of those around them, mild punishments are not acceptable, by the lawyers if no one else. Dealing with the rigors of the community is simply one of the costs of doing businesses for most companies. If a vandal spraypaints obscene grafitti on a company's storefront, then that company has to pay to have it repainted that day. If they manage to catch the guy who did it, they'll press charges for the paint and labor they had to buy, not all the estimated 'lost businesses' that any given e-commerce website owner would.
In my community, if a kid commits a crime like vandalism, fighting (assault), shoplifting or loitering, and is caught, he or she is sent to 'Teen Court', and is assigned a small community service penality to attone for his or her misdeeds. If script kiddies would get the same treatment, then they a.) wouldn't become martyrs, inspiring more script kiddies, and b.) would learn that there are better, more profitable ways to spend your time.
Unfortuneately, police don't have the option of giving script kiddies a 'firm talking to', since any kind of computer crime has been labeled 'terrorism' by both our corporate oligarchy and our reactionary government.
If you bust a kid for defacing a website, he'll be lucky not to spend time in jail, along with drug-dealers, murderers, gang-bangers, and child-molestors, when all that should have happened is that his computer should be taken away because he can't use it responisibly.
If you are a company who has been 'defaced', the best thing you can do is to try to identify and locate your vandal yourself, and then talk to his or her parents. If you discover that the person your dealing with is an adult... and this will be the rare case, *then* it's time to call the police and start talking about pressing charges.
Just because I forgot to lock my door doesn't mean I've invited you into my house. Unauthorized access is just that, unauthorized. Once little shit 'kids' recognize that every computer connected to the Internet isn't put there for you to hack into or DOS, the world will be a much better place.
Hmmm.... No, but you're pretty stupid if you don't lock your door... or replace your locks if they're recalled.
You're not considering the relative seriousness of the crimes here. If someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff or kills your pets, then yeah, you wanna press charges. If they spraypaint or break your windows... maybe.
How about if they stomp your flowerbeds? Or rearrange your rock garden to spell out dirty words? How about if they egg your door or toliet-paper your trees?
You need to think about that, because that's the mental level that most kids who vandalize websites are working on. (Show me a person who's never done at least one of these things, and I'll show you someone who was very sheltered as a child.) They're not hurting anyone, at least in their own minds. They're doing the equivalent of dropping a big nasty stink-bomb on your front porch.
You don't put kids in prison because they're being mischevious, regardless of what John Ashcroft tells you. You tell them that what they were doing is wrong, give them incentive not to do it again, and then let them get on with life.
Unfortuneately, police don't have the option of giving script kiddies a 'firm talking to', since any kind of computer crime has been labeled 'terrorism' by both our corporate oligarchy and our reactionary government.
What I am speaking of is investigating and prosecuting the criminal element involved in the act of defacement, root compromise or infection by "worms". In otherwords, companies tend to "fix & forget".
Actually, this is probably the stance that every serious IT department out to take. If your website was cracked, then it's almost certainly *your* fault your server was compromised. There just aren't any rootkits out there that don't exploit known buffer-overflows or other bugs. There are a few situations when this is not the case, but it's usually still someone sitting around testing a web application (like Slashcode) for buffer overflows or back doors.
Even if you do prosecute, it's like stomping cockroaches. There will just be more, and if you hadn't left the food out on the counter to rot, they wouldn't have come to your apartment in the first place.
Finally, there's the human element to contemplate. We all did stupid stuff when we were kids, which most website vandals are. I don't know any kid who didn't tresspass or vandalize property at least once during their youth. For many, it was the old junkyard or the cemetary. For these kids, its websites. Are you really going to put them in prison for decades because they're young and stupid? You might as well ruin their lives for experimenting with drugs or sex....
If I play Multiplayer-anything for more than just a few minutes, I plan ahead and pull out my trusty Logitech Trackman Marble FX Optical.
While sucky for art, Trackballs are the bomb for quick precision rail-gun targeting in FPS'ers, group selection in RTS'ers, and action selection in MMORPG's. Using a combination of trackball and keyboard chording, my mild case of RSI has all but dissapeared.
So join him in celebrating his quarter billion lines of his code...
Uhhh... Are you maybe thinking of some other bloatware project? Like Windows XP, maybe?
(All those billions of lines of code must have made it real easy for al Qaeda terrorists to embed the UPNP bug that surfaced a few days ago.)
Seriously, there are between 10 and 15 million lines of code in Windows 95, depending on which version you're describing. Jim Allchin 'guessed' that there were about 18 million lines of code in his court testimony a while back. It's been estimated several places that Win2k contains 35M lines, and XP has probably from half again to twice as much code.
Compare that to the roughly 500K lines in the Linux Kernel. Of course you can't really compare the two, because MS takes 'Monolithic' to entirely new and ridiculous levels. We probably won't be seeing.25 billion lines of code for a few years yet.
You can bet that it will be an MS product that breaks the record, tho...
No mention of the Winter Solstace?
on
Christmas is Coming
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Today is one of the most astronomically, planetary, and mythologically important days of the year, and yet I have heard no one mention the fact that today is the Winter Solstace... the Shortest day of the year in the Norther Hemisphere and the Longest in the Southern.
The Winter Solstace was one of the most important days of the year for the Celts, Germans, Normans, and other European pagans. As a matter of fact, there is significant evidence that Christmas Day was placed where it is now in the calendar in order to supplant the pagan solstace festivals.
So, in honor of the Solstace, I'd like to propose a few changes!
Let's hang sausages from the trees this year instead of garland or glass balls, in remembrance of the ancient warriors who strung the entrails of animals and their enemies (if they were good in battle) all around the ice-covered forest.
Let's build some ripping big bonfires in order to warm the body and get the blood to boiling.
Let's see some virgins 'sacrificed' (nudge nudge, wink wink, if you know what I mean) live on the internet!
Let's also bring out all the old Solstace carols that time has forgot, like these old favorites:
-"Oh, Come all ye Pagans!"
-"Deck the halls with well-tanned Goatskins!"
-"It's beginning to look a lot like Samhain" (A little out of season, but still in the spirit)
"Civil disobedience"? Let's be honest here, people copy songs and movies because they like free stuff, not because of any larger societal implications. You're really comparing a music-swapping college kid to Gandhi? That kind of hyperbole isn't going to help your argument.
And do you really think all of India followed Ghandi because they wanted an end of British oppression and documented freedom?
What the average Indian wanted was for things to be a little better than they were. He or she wanted to not have to pay a pointless tax to Great Britain or see all his opportunities dissapear at the whim of a European.
This is the same thing. Sure, Joe Napster doesn't have a lot of high ideals other than getting the music he wants for free. What he does know is that his culture is being bought and sold, and that it might be nice if that wasn't the case.
Listening to this argument is interesting, because you can see just how much these companies, the Tech giants on one side and the Distribution giants on the other continue to rail against what they call the 'Destruction of the Intellectual Property Industry', at least as what they said in the article.
All I have to say is: The Sooner the Better.
Seriously. These guys are fighting obsolescence. They were obsolete the second the first computer disk was digitally written. That was the shot that killed them. Not Napster... not Gnutella, not Morpheus. Not even DivX or DeCSS. What these industries do not know is that they've been doomed to slow death the second mankind invented digital storage. The ability to store and manipulate data in a digital format is one of those watershed inventions, like fire, the wheel, gunpowder, or the combustion engine. Too much has changed for the existing order to survive. Just like there are no wagon makers any more, there will be no 'content distributors' in the future.
The fact that information can be reproduced endlessly, perfectly and easily by individuals, invalidates all the companies who sprung up in order to fill the gap that existed before digital information storage was possible.
The record industry bitterly, bitterly regrets the invention of the CD. It's very nearly a perfect format for storing audio. The people who make CD's and hardware for and software for creating CD's sure as hell don't, though. Roxio, as well as others like Phillips and Magnavox all have commercials on TV that encourage their customers to make CD's full of 'free' MP3's.
Yeah, right. As if. 'Free'. Sure....
The same thing is going on between the distribution industry and the computer hardware industry. Sure, it's a good thing for hard drives and CPU's to be altered so that information cannot be copied on them. That makes them a lot more expensive to produce, however. Why should one industry suffer because another is obsolete? That's the thought going through the minds of the people at Maxtor, Western Digital, and Iomega. It's also the thought going through the minds of people at Intel and AMD.
For the recording and entertainment industries to survive, they're very literally trying to cripple an entire industry with players from all around the globe. They're buying legislation right now because that's the only chance they have to force companies like ABit and Acer, who aren't even headquartered in the United States to tow the line.
But it's already too late. The first step in any kind of revolution is civil disobedience. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes the flow of ideas is just too powerful to allow the existing order to stay in power. Gandhi believed this when he led India against Britain, and he ended up being right.
Even if the recording and entertainment industries manage to buy all the legislation they want, they're still faced with the daunting task of stopping the civil disobedience they've created. They'll very literally have to march into every home and take away non-DRM compliant computers and TVs.
Here's a quick hint. The U.S. government tried to do this in the 30's with alcohol. It ended up being one of the single greatest failures of the government and has created criminal and social problems that live on today.
So, the long and short is not how long you can hold on to your computers... It's how long the RIAA, MPAA and any other companies that make money by restricting the flow of information can hold on to life.
The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.
This is an important point. Most of the grade school teachers I've ever met who deal with computers have the attitude that anything short of organized for-profit software piracy is okay because they're teachers. They *have* to teach students on a limited budjet, are used to stretching any school supply just as far as it will go, and see copying software they've bought for home use, or ordering only one copy of windows to install on every computer in a lab as a necessity.
This is the same thing as making xerox copies out of a book to hand out to their students, as far as most of them are concenred.
Now, I'm personally inclined to agree with the morality of this little ethical short cut. I have a lot of problems with software licenses, and I think it would be a wonderful thing if being a teacher really meant you were exempt from copyright law for educational purposes.
You can bet that Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, and the other members of the BSA don't agree with me, however.
If you start stressing this fact, Free Software just starts seeming like a better and better idea in the classroom.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's almost that simple. The 'team' you're given in Daikatana is probably the reason the game does so badly. IIRC, you couldn't let any member of the team die... you couldn't shoot through them, ala 'No Friendly Fire' in most FPS arenas today... you had to make allowances for the idiot AI behind your team members... you frequently got stuck because your 'teammates' couldn't get out of your way.
More than anything else, reviews of the crappy team system killed Daikatana's sales, and with Daikatana, Ion Storm failed as well.
Just after 9-11, when the Patriot Act bill sailed through congress despite glaring problems, I wrote a letter to Larry Combest, my representitive, detailing what I thought the problems were with the act and my general displeasure with the erosion of civil liberties in the name of war.
Now, the return letter was delayed until just a few days ago simply because congressmen couldn't use DC mail facilities because of the Anthrax scare (My letter was sent before the first anthrax case...), but in the form-letter reply, the congressman claims that he and his comrades are doing their best to balance civil liberties with the rigors of war.
This should tell us a few things:
Our congressmen have had the shit scared out of them. That a form letter directly addresses my complaints about the erosion of civil liberties means that I am one of many who has written in complaint. I live in a *very* conservative part of the country and Combest is a very typical representative of the luddite mindset around here. If he is admitting there is a problem, then you can bet that *every* congressman knows there is a problem wether he will admit it or not. They know that the people are upset and are making noise, and are in the process of trying to quiet that noise.
There is already massive distrust in Washington for George Bush and John Aschroft-- at least toward their war-time policies. If people who are concerned about their rights being taken away continue to hound their congressmen about it, the problems do have a good chance of being addressed rather than being ignored.
Remember that a lot of your congressmen are simply scared, afraid to go against the flow because of the reprecussions. If you show them (with massive amounts of mail) that you want positive change rather than negative change, it might strengthen their spirits a little.
The best part of this is that most congresspeople now prefer email to snail mail because there is no chance of contracting anthrax from Outlook. Of course they could always get Nimda, but I'll give my congressman the benifit of the doubt and assume he patches.
Don't look for neurons to hold 1's and 0's, because you'll probably take up more room with neuron+silicon substrate+implantation technology than you would in plain magnetic or CMOS storage.
Now, silicon subsrtate technology probably does hold great wonders for helping people with sensory disabilities, but don't be looking for Nerual RAM upgrades in the near future.
That's not a bad idea, actually. Try explaining to an insurance company about white-label anime fansubs when you get a renter's contract.
"Excuse me? You want us to insure pirated videos?"
When the time comes, and you have to leave quickly because of fire, flood, or tornado, it will probably be a lot easier to carry your anime collection with you if it can be crammed into a 200-disc folder rather than a bookshelf full of VHS tapes.
Hehehe...
I've got a little over 400 hours of stuff I've downloaded off of usenet in Mpeg, ASF, or DivX format. Plug it into the good ol' TV out card, and let play.
Assuming that I can tear my wife's ass away from what ever huggy-feely design crap they're showing on HGTV, I'll be watching the entirety of Noir, Sadamitsu the Destroyer, and Inu Yasha. (There are currently about 50 episodes od IY that have been subbed... so at 24 minutes a piece I may not finish, even if I skip sleeping)
"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."
Scary, him not being able to explain exactly how the thing works. Still, any good creation is ultimately the creation of madness.
In many cases this was true, but in many cases it had a harmful effect, because the 70's were not the best time to be looking for jobs. It was also about the same time that many companies realized that it was less expensive to hire younger, highly educated, and inexperienced individuals than older, more experienced individuals.
Here is a real good example...
In the 70's, the DOE's Pantex Nuclear Weapons facility in the Texas Panhandle fired dozens of experienced scientists with proven track records... simply because they did not have degrees.
This is a fairly standard practice. It's been used in at least two IT offices I've worked in. It even makes handing out passwords during 'change day' easier, because all the networking and development staff have come to expect a neumonic rather than the password itself:
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us!"
becomes
"aybab2u!"
Another useful password naming procedure is the use of 'l33t speak' inside passwords... especially long ones. On systems that support passphrases or long passwords instead of 8 char strings, this makes creating and remembering passwords quite a bit easier.
"My Password Rocks" is probably not so good, but
"MyP455w0rdR0X0r5" is a 16 character password with 7 numbers, upper and lower case characters, and no long strings of plain english text to get chewed up in a dictionary attack.
I should have clarified with this information, however:
Intoxicating liquors having 0.5 percent or more alcoholic content are nonmailable. This includes taxable liquors with 3.2 percent or less alcohol, as well as those obtained under a prescription or as a collector's item. The prohibition of the mailing of intoxicating liquors is contained in federal law (18 U.S.C. 1716).
Theoretically, but you have to follow all kinds of regulations to do so:
http://new.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/pub52.pdf
Beer probably does not contain enough alcohol to count as a flammable liquid, but depending on the kind container you send it in (bottles, cans, etc...) you may be required to seal your beer inside plastic bags or foam padding.
I would expect them to pay for the clean up, or for them to do it themselves.
That's what I'm trying to get at. The kids who do this sort of thing need to be punished... mildly. Not sent to prison where they can be ass-raped by their cellmates and/or be transfigured from a loser, messed-up kid into a hardened criminal.
Lost customers == lost $$$.
Because of people and businesses who demand monetary accountability and are not willing to write off the stupidity of those around them, mild punishments are not acceptable, by the lawyers if no one else. Dealing with the rigors of the community is simply one of the costs of doing businesses for most companies. If a vandal spraypaints obscene grafitti on a company's storefront, then that company has to pay to have it repainted that day. If they manage to catch the guy who did it, they'll press charges for the paint and labor they had to buy, not all the estimated 'lost businesses' that any given e-commerce website owner would.
In my community, if a kid commits a crime like vandalism, fighting (assault), shoplifting or loitering, and is caught, he or she is sent to 'Teen Court', and is assigned a small community service penality to attone for his or her misdeeds. If script kiddies would get the same treatment, then they a.) wouldn't become martyrs, inspiring more script kiddies, and b.) would learn that there are better, more profitable ways to spend your time.
As I said in a reply to the nay-sayer above:
Unfortuneately, police don't have the option of giving script kiddies a 'firm talking to', since any kind of computer crime has been labeled 'terrorism' by both our corporate oligarchy and our reactionary government.
If you bust a kid for defacing a website, he'll be lucky not to spend time in jail, along with drug-dealers, murderers, gang-bangers, and child-molestors, when all that should have happened is that his computer should be taken away because he can't use it responisibly.
If you are a company who has been 'defaced', the best thing you can do is to try to identify and locate your vandal yourself, and then talk to his or her parents. If you discover that the person your dealing with is an adult... and this will be the rare case, *then* it's time to call the police and start talking about pressing charges.
Just because I forgot to lock my door doesn't mean I've invited you into my house. Unauthorized access is just that, unauthorized. Once little shit 'kids' recognize that every computer connected to the Internet isn't put there for you to hack into or DOS, the world will be a much better place.
Hmmm.... No, but you're pretty stupid if you don't lock your door... or replace your locks if they're recalled.
You're not considering the relative seriousness of the crimes here. If someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff or kills your pets, then yeah, you wanna press charges. If they spraypaint or break your windows... maybe.
How about if they stomp your flowerbeds? Or rearrange your rock garden to spell out dirty words? How about if they egg your door or toliet-paper your trees?
You need to think about that, because that's the mental level that most kids who vandalize websites are working on. (Show me a person who's never done at least one of these things, and I'll show you someone who was very sheltered as a child.) They're not hurting anyone, at least in their own minds. They're doing the equivalent of dropping a big nasty stink-bomb on your front porch.
You don't put kids in prison because they're being mischevious, regardless of what John Ashcroft tells you. You tell them that what they were doing is wrong, give them incentive not to do it again, and then let them get on with life.
Unfortuneately, police don't have the option of giving script kiddies a 'firm talking to', since any kind of computer crime has been labeled 'terrorism' by both our corporate oligarchy and our reactionary government.
Sayeth the article:
What I am speaking of is investigating and prosecuting the criminal element involved in the act of defacement, root compromise or infection by "worms". In otherwords, companies tend to "fix & forget".
Actually, this is probably the stance that every serious IT department out to take. If your website was cracked, then it's almost certainly *your* fault your server was compromised. There just aren't any rootkits out there that don't exploit known buffer-overflows or other bugs. There are a few situations when this is not the case, but it's usually still someone sitting around testing a web application (like Slashcode) for buffer overflows or back doors.
Even if you do prosecute, it's like stomping cockroaches. There will just be more, and if you hadn't left the food out on the counter to rot, they wouldn't have come to your apartment in the first place.
Finally, there's the human element to contemplate. We all did stupid stuff when we were kids, which most website vandals are. I don't know any kid who didn't tresspass or vandalize property at least once during their youth. For many, it was the old junkyard or the cemetary. For these kids, its websites. Are you really going to put them in prison for decades because they're young and stupid? You might as well ruin their lives for experimenting with drugs or sex....
Oh wait. We do that too. Nevermind.
No! That's *hairy* mouse hands...
Any Slashdot readers who don't have them, hold up your hands...
If I play Multiplayer-anything for more than just a few minutes, I plan ahead and pull out my trusty Logitech Trackman Marble FX Optical.
While sucky for art, Trackballs are the bomb for quick precision rail-gun targeting in FPS'ers, group selection in RTS'ers, and action selection in MMORPG's. Using a combination of trackball and keyboard chording, my mild case of RSI has all but dissapeared.
So join him in celebrating his quarter billion lines of his code...
.25 billion lines of code for a few years yet.
Uhhh... Are you maybe thinking of some other bloatware project? Like Windows XP, maybe?
(All those billions of lines of code must have made it real easy for al Qaeda terrorists to embed the UPNP bug that surfaced a few days ago.)
Seriously, there are between 10 and 15 million lines of code in Windows 95, depending on which version you're describing. Jim Allchin 'guessed' that there were about 18 million lines of code in his court testimony a while back. It's been estimated several places that Win2k contains 35M lines, and XP has probably from half again to twice as much code.
Compare that to the roughly 500K lines in the Linux Kernel. Of course you can't really compare the two, because MS takes 'Monolithic' to entirely new and ridiculous levels. We probably won't be seeing
You can bet that it will be an MS product that breaks the record, tho...
Today is one of the most astronomically, planetary, and mythologically important days of the year, and yet I have heard no one mention the fact that today is the Winter Solstace... the Shortest day of the year in the Norther Hemisphere and the Longest in the Southern.
The Winter Solstace was one of the most important days of the year for the Celts, Germans, Normans, and other European pagans. As a matter of fact, there is significant evidence that Christmas Day was placed where it is now in the calendar in order to supplant the pagan solstace festivals.
So, in honor of the Solstace, I'd like to propose a few changes!
Let's hang sausages from the trees this year instead of garland or glass balls, in remembrance of the ancient warriors who strung the entrails of animals and their enemies (if they were good in battle) all around the ice-covered forest.
Let's build some ripping big bonfires in order to warm the body and get the blood to boiling.
Let's see some virgins 'sacrificed' (nudge nudge, wink wink, if you know what I mean) live on the internet!
Let's also bring out all the old Solstace carols that time has forgot, like these old favorites:
-"Oh, Come all ye Pagans!"
-"Deck the halls with well-tanned Goatskins!"
-"It's beginning to look a lot like Samhain" (A little out of season, but still in the spirit)
And
"Let's all Dance Naked 'Round the Old Bonfire"
Any excuse for a party, right?
"Civil disobedience"? Let's be honest here, people copy songs and movies because they like free stuff, not because of any larger societal implications. You're really comparing a music-swapping college kid to Gandhi? That kind of hyperbole isn't going to help your argument.
And do you really think all of India followed Ghandi because they wanted an end of British oppression and documented freedom?
What the average Indian wanted was for things to be a little better than they were. He or she wanted to not have to pay a pointless tax to Great Britain or see all his opportunities dissapear at the whim of a European.
This is the same thing. Sure, Joe Napster doesn't have a lot of high ideals other than getting the music he wants for free. What he does know is that his culture is being bought and sold, and that it might be nice if that wasn't the case.
Keep fighting the good fight, file traders!
"Do you hear that, Mister Andersen?"
Listening to this argument is interesting, because you can see just how much these companies, the Tech giants on one side and the Distribution giants on the other continue to rail against what they call the 'Destruction of the Intellectual Property Industry', at least as what they said in the article.
All I have to say is: The Sooner the Better.
Seriously. These guys are fighting obsolescence. They were obsolete the second the first computer disk was digitally written. That was the shot that killed them. Not Napster... not Gnutella, not Morpheus. Not even DivX or DeCSS. What these industries do not know is that they've been doomed to slow death the second mankind invented digital storage. The ability to store and manipulate data in a digital format is one of those watershed inventions, like fire, the wheel, gunpowder, or the combustion engine. Too much has changed for the existing order to survive. Just like there are no wagon makers any more, there will be no 'content distributors' in the future.
The fact that information can be reproduced endlessly, perfectly and easily by individuals, invalidates all the companies who sprung up in order to fill the gap that existed before digital information storage was possible.
The record industry bitterly, bitterly regrets the invention of the CD. It's very nearly a perfect format for storing audio. The people who make CD's and hardware for and software for creating CD's sure as hell don't, though. Roxio, as well as others like Phillips and Magnavox all have commercials on TV that encourage their customers to make CD's full of 'free' MP3's.
Yeah, right. As if. 'Free'. Sure....
The same thing is going on between the distribution industry and the computer hardware industry. Sure, it's a good thing for hard drives and CPU's to be altered so that information cannot be copied on them. That makes them a lot more expensive to produce, however. Why should one industry suffer because another is obsolete? That's the thought going through the minds of the people at Maxtor, Western Digital, and Iomega. It's also the thought going through the minds of people at Intel and AMD.
For the recording and entertainment industries to survive, they're very literally trying to cripple an entire industry with players from all around the globe. They're buying legislation right now because that's the only chance they have to force companies like ABit and Acer, who aren't even headquartered in the United States to tow the line.
But it's already too late. The first step in any kind of revolution is civil disobedience. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes the flow of ideas is just too powerful to allow the existing order to stay in power. Gandhi believed this when he led India against Britain, and he ended up being right.
Even if the recording and entertainment industries manage to buy all the legislation they want, they're still faced with the daunting task of stopping the civil disobedience they've created. They'll very literally have to march into every home and take away non-DRM compliant computers and TVs.
Here's a quick hint. The U.S. government tried to do this in the 30's with alcohol. It ended up being one of the single greatest failures of the government and has created criminal and social problems that live on today.
So, the long and short is not how long you can hold on to your computers... It's how long the RIAA, MPAA and any other companies that make money by restricting the flow of information can hold on to life.
Die, bitches, die...
Whoohoo!
One wonders what's going to happen when the legion of black-robed LEO ninjas descend en masse to phsyically shut down Kazaa, however.
Actually, all it would take is a court order and a guy with a pair of diagonal cutters at their backbone connection's origin.
Still, it's nice to see that even companies are beginning to realized how screwed and skewed copyright law is.
You don't need the Apollo project. Why, you can get five or six kick-ass spaceships from Galaga alone!
James Hogan's 'Gentle Giants' books do quite a bit with this particular idea.
The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.
This is an important point. Most of the grade school teachers I've ever met who deal with computers have the attitude that anything short of organized for-profit software piracy is okay because they're teachers. They *have* to teach students on a limited budjet, are used to stretching any school supply just as far as it will go, and see copying software they've bought for home use, or ordering only one copy of windows to install on every computer in a lab as a necessity.
This is the same thing as making xerox copies out of a book to hand out to their students, as far as most of them are concenred.
Now, I'm personally inclined to agree with the morality of this little ethical short cut. I have a lot of problems with software licenses, and I think it would be a wonderful thing if being a teacher really meant you were exempt from copyright law for educational purposes.
You can bet that Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, and the other members of the BSA don't agree with me, however.
If you start stressing this fact, Free Software just starts seeming like a better and better idea in the classroom.