Now all they need to invent is the Etch-A-Sketch phone, PDA, and laptop, where you turn the device upside down and shake it to erase its memory. It'll be only a short time before everyone gets used to the idea of turning your laptop over and shaking it to erase your private browsing information after making an Internet banking transaction.
Hmmm... A story involving Microsoft. To this, I must add the obligatory "flying chair" comment:
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
This story also mentions Linux. Did I mention that the better company uses Linux extensively? Hmmm... maybe that has something to do with Google being better.
This is excellent news. It is in everyone's best interest that Apple start gaining a significant chunk of the market in every country. (Not because I necessarily adore Apple so much. I mean, yes, their products are amazingly engineered, from Mac OS X with a BSD system at its core to their computer lineup to the iPods, iPhone, iTV, and their software lineup, Apple is a company where people put some serious thinking caps on and do some really wonderful work. But all this said, their products do have shortcomings. For example, X11 in Leopard is totally jacked up now.) Cupertino gaining market share is good because it creates the only "real" competition (in the desktop/laptop space) against that dark cloud from further north up the west coast that Google is a better company than (whoosh; that was a flying chair). Yes, I know that Linux and the BSDs kick the dark cloud's little fanny when it comes to servers, and even when it comes to running hundreds of corporate or government desktops that need a specific setup (which is crafted by a serious sysadmin somewhere) for a bunch of monkeys to run a few specific apps, and yes, especially in the embedded space, the free OSes kick the you-know-what out of the dark cloud's products. But none of this is doing much to get rid of the dark cloud. Apple, on the other hand, can wipe out much of that nasty stuff by getting people used to the idea that computers are actually reliable; that computers are fun again; that shoddy products should be shunned instead of purchased because "there's no other choice", etc., etc., etc. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will open up the market, use, and improvement of the zillions of Linux distros and the several BSDs by a zillion percent.
This is an outrage. Here, we have a case where a person claims she does not know something, but the government is demanding of her to comply. But let's suppose, for a moment, that she is telling the truth and she has no knowledge of these encryption keys. How could she prove it? There is no way to prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that you DON'T have something; you can prove that you DO have it by producing it. There, you see, I have it. But if you don't have it, there's no way to prove it. They should let her go.
Kudos to those who are standing up to the RIAA mafia. Sure, they need to protect copyrights, but they are going about this in the wrong way. They could all but completely eliminate the problem by dropping prices on music recordings. It's akin to the government increasing revenue after taxes are lowered. By lowering the prices of music recordings, the RIAA will create a situation where more people will prefer to buy a clean, high quality recording with the attached artwork and whatnot, because it will provide a higher value than a crappy downloaded version.
Yeah yeah, this is a bit offtopic, but since this is Microsoft we're talking about, I just wanted, for the record, to say that Google is a WAY better company than Microsoft. Hopefully, a chair won't come flying out at me from my computer screen for saying that.:-)
This is excellent since it means that the PHBs at Walmart will notice that this product is a bestseller. That further means more cheap Linux PCs being made available and sold.
All of this serves to bump up the percentage of computers sold with Linux versus Windows PCs and Macs. I imagine that it will serve mostly to take percentage points away from Windows, since the market share of Macs has only increased lately with the availability of Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels.
The extension of the above logic is one small increase in the snowball effect: More Linux PCs sold means pie charts in corporate meetings show less Windows market share coupled with increasing Linux market share. This lends additional credibility to the platform, besides the credibility it already has with support from all major computing companies except a certain behemoth from Washington state, and the reputation it already has as a platform with many choices and possibilities, rock-solid stability, and widespread use in servers. The additional credibility applies to the use of Linux on the desktop. This leads commercial developers to make more Linux software; both in turn lead to higher credibility for the system. Bottom line: Linux is chipping away, slowly but surely, at the market share, power, and revenue of the aforementioned behemoth.
What we need is less government regulation and more freedom. Businesses should duke it out, and consumers should be mindful of what is happening and vote with their dollars when making purchasing decisions for products and services. I know that in many areas, Cable TV is monopolized, but nowadays with DirecTV and whatever satellite services, not to mention the Internet, also not to mention the option to avoid wasting time in front of the television set, it's not so important that the government needs to waste resources regulating this stuff. Remember: Whenever the government does something, it will be more expensive, less efficient, and less effective than if the same thing were done by private citizens or business.
Suppose some evil son of a gun owns a big huge multinational corporation. Suppose said evil son of a gun is yours truly, Mr. 1337z h4x0rz... I could write up a non-compete agreement that every employee had to sign that basically said "All your base are belong to us" in legalese, meaning that anything the person does, for the remainder of their life, is the sole property of ME!!! Bwaaa haaa haa haa haaaahaaahahahahahahahahaha!!!!
I am not a lawyer but I would assume that in the United States, the general viewpoint is that people have a right to work and earn money from their trade. Therefore if you quit or get fired from some company, as long as you're not doing something blatantly evil like copying stuff that you were doing at Company A in order to benefit Company B (or, say, to start your own business that does the same thing), I think it would be up to a court to decide, and it would probably decide that the whole agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Kudos to the RCMP for finally recognizing the obvious. It makes a heck of a lot more sense to go after organized criminals who make zillions of copies of counterfeit content and whatnot, then to go after individuals who have nothing better to do than download something for personal use. This way, you eliminate huge amounts of copyright violations by targeting a small number of arch criminals.
There is a simple solution to problems like this. Whenever you purchase a new (or used?) hard drive, write zeroes to the whole darn thing and then format it with your filesystem of choice. Badda bing batta boom.
According to the then-popular 1980's era film, Back to the Future, flying cars will be here by the year 2015. This leaves us about seven years to get the technology perfected.
However, I doubt flying cars will ever get here. Just think of the danger. The roads are already dangerous enough. Now you want to give drivers the ability to fly as well? If an accident happens, the cars will fall out of the sky and right through your roof. That just ain't funny.
I can't tell whether it was Apple's intention from the beginning to deliver the SDK for 3rd party development or if that's something that happened in response to industry-wide criticism, but either way, it is crucial to the acceptance of the iPhone for large business. A port of Java is icing on the cake, although that may become more important with time.
Speaking of being ready for business, the rhetoric across just about all media is that the Mac is a great computer for home use but isn't ready for business. Can anyone shed some light on why this is the widespread perception? The Mac, coupled with Mac OS X Server, can do just about anything that a Windows or Linux network can do, and even if it can't, you can always install some Windows or Linux servers to take care of whatever loose ends are left over. Couple that with iPhones capable of 3rd party development and Java, and it's a wonderful system for business.
I really think it's a good idea to develop Terminator-style robots that can punch through a brick wall or morph into different shapes, and then program them to vacuum the carpet.
SETI ain't looking for little green men
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 0
There are those who believe that the Lord created the entire universe and put only a single planet in it that hosts life. Those who share this belief will likely think that SETI is a bunch of hogwash that unnecessarily costs a lot of money to run.
On the other hand, there are people like me who believe that SETI isn't really looking for alien life, but is really an early-warning system for a surprise attack from other countries. They tell us they're looking for aliens so we won't know what they're really looking for.
It should be my problem what I decide to do with an Xbox (assuming I owned one, which I don't). What if, say, I have some friends over and they take turns playing games, while I'm finishing up some homework before leaving to go to a party? That will count against my weekly maximum, unfairly!! We, as intelligent human beings, don't need the machines that are our own making to tell us what to do!
If Samba (on his FreeBSD machine) crashed after accepting the data and reporting back to the machine running Leopard that the transfer was completed but BEFORE it flushed it from cache to disk, how is Leopard at fault?
This reminds me of something I read on the Qmail developer's site. He said that when a mail server receives an email, it should write and flush to the disk (NOT do a lazy write) and only then should it report to the sender that the email has been received. He said that some developers disagree. He said that they're wrong.
A perfect example of this happened about two years ago while I was riding a bus. I was sitting in the second row of seats. In the seat in front of me, a lady was speaking on her cell phone. To her credit, she was speaking very quietly. I was sitting within a few feet of her and it didn't bother me. The bus driver, on the other hand, was bothered by her very much. He wanted to listen to the news on the radio, and she was making it difficult for him to hear. He politely asked her to stop speaking on the phone so that he could listen to the news. She started yelling at him at such a high level of decibels that the entire bus could hear what she was saying. Among other things, she said that she could put his job in jeopardy by complaining about him, but that out of the goodness of her heart, she won't take such actions. This ranting and raving continued for fifteen minutes, during which time, the bus driver kept apologizing to her for asking her to stop speaking on the phone. When she was done yelling at him, she called back whomever it was with whom she had spoken earlier, and, in the same loud volume, repeated, almost verbatim, everything she had yelled in the past fifteen minutes.
I don't think Red Hat is tolerating it. They simply have no choice. The OS and most of the components installed with it are licensed under the GPL, which states that exactly this sort of thing can happen.
I don't know the legal perspective on whether or not he has any right to that name, but in my opinion, if he sent a threatening letter, he is an idiot. It accomplished nothing for him. If he had, instead, sent you a polite letter, there might have been some chance of you working with him to come to an agreement amicable to both sides. He should have reserved the threats for much, much later in the process.
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Now all they need to invent is the Etch-A-Sketch phone, PDA, and laptop, where you turn the device upside down and shake it to erase its memory. It'll be only a short time before everyone gets used to the idea of turning your laptop over and shaking it to erase your private browsing information after making an Internet banking transaction.
Hmmm... A story involving Microsoft. To this, I must add the obligatory "flying chair" comment:
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
This story also mentions Linux. Did I mention that the better company uses Linux extensively? Hmmm... maybe that has something to do with Google being better.
When can I drop one of these into my laptop?
This is excellent news. It is in everyone's best interest that Apple start gaining a significant chunk of the market in every country. (Not because I necessarily adore Apple so much. I mean, yes, their products are amazingly engineered, from Mac OS X with a BSD system at its core to their computer lineup to the iPods, iPhone, iTV, and their software lineup, Apple is a company where people put some serious thinking caps on and do some really wonderful work. But all this said, their products do have shortcomings. For example, X11 in Leopard is totally jacked up now.) Cupertino gaining market share is good because it creates the only "real" competition (in the desktop/laptop space) against that dark cloud from further north up the west coast that Google is a better company than (whoosh; that was a flying chair). Yes, I know that Linux and the BSDs kick the dark cloud's little fanny when it comes to servers, and even when it comes to running hundreds of corporate or government desktops that need a specific setup (which is crafted by a serious sysadmin somewhere) for a bunch of monkeys to run a few specific apps, and yes, especially in the embedded space, the free OSes kick the you-know-what out of the dark cloud's products. But none of this is doing much to get rid of the dark cloud. Apple, on the other hand, can wipe out much of that nasty stuff by getting people used to the idea that computers are actually reliable; that computers are fun again; that shoddy products should be shunned instead of purchased because "there's no other choice", etc., etc., etc. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will open up the market, use, and improvement of the zillions of Linux distros and the several BSDs by a zillion percent.
This is an outrage. Here, we have a case where a person claims she does not know something, but the government is demanding of her to comply. But let's suppose, for a moment, that she is telling the truth and she has no knowledge of these encryption keys. How could she prove it? There is no way to prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that you DON'T have something; you can prove that you DO have it by producing it. There, you see, I have it. But if you don't have it, there's no way to prove it. They should let her go.
As with any story involving Lord Sauron of Redmond, I have only one thing to say:
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
Kudos to those who are standing up to the RIAA mafia. Sure, they need to protect copyrights, but they are going about this in the wrong way. They could all but completely eliminate the problem by dropping prices on music recordings. It's akin to the government increasing revenue after taxes are lowered. By lowering the prices of music recordings, the RIAA will create a situation where more people will prefer to buy a clean, high quality recording with the attached artwork and whatnot, because it will provide a higher value than a crappy downloaded version.
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
Hey Microsoft: Nanny nanny boo boo! Google is a better company than you!!
/me ducks to avoid being hit by chair.
Yeah yeah, this is a bit offtopic, but since this is Microsoft we're talking about, I just wanted, for the record, to say that Google is a WAY better company than Microsoft. Hopefully, a chair won't come flying out at me from my computer screen for saying that. :-)
This is excellent since it means that the PHBs at Walmart will notice that this product is a bestseller. That further means more cheap Linux PCs being made available and sold.
All of this serves to bump up the percentage of computers sold with Linux versus Windows PCs and Macs. I imagine that it will serve mostly to take percentage points away from Windows, since the market share of Macs has only increased lately with the availability of Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels.
The extension of the above logic is one small increase in the snowball effect: More Linux PCs sold means pie charts in corporate meetings show less Windows market share coupled with increasing Linux market share. This lends additional credibility to the platform, besides the credibility it already has with support from all major computing companies except a certain behemoth from Washington state, and the reputation it already has as a platform with many choices and possibilities, rock-solid stability, and widespread use in servers. The additional credibility applies to the use of Linux on the desktop. This leads commercial developers to make more Linux software; both in turn lead to higher credibility for the system. Bottom line: Linux is chipping away, slowly but surely, at the market share, power, and revenue of the aforementioned behemoth.
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
What we need is less government regulation and more freedom. Businesses should duke it out, and consumers should be mindful of what is happening and vote with their dollars when making purchasing decisions for products and services. I know that in many areas, Cable TV is monopolized, but nowadays with DirecTV and whatever satellite services, not to mention the Internet, also not to mention the option to avoid wasting time in front of the television set, it's not so important that the government needs to waste resources regulating this stuff. Remember: Whenever the government does something, it will be more expensive, less efficient, and less effective than if the same thing were done by private citizens or business.
Why this should NOT be allowed:
Suppose some evil son of a gun owns a big huge multinational corporation. Suppose said evil son of a gun is yours truly, Mr. 1337z h4x0rz... I could write up a non-compete agreement that every employee had to sign that basically said "All your base are belong to us" in legalese, meaning that anything the person does, for the remainder of their life, is the sole property of ME!!! Bwaaa haaa haa haa haaaahaaahahahahahahahahaha!!!!
I am not a lawyer but I would assume that in the United States, the general viewpoint is that people have a right to work and earn money from their trade. Therefore if you quit or get fired from some company, as long as you're not doing something blatantly evil like copying stuff that you were doing at Company A in order to benefit Company B (or, say, to start your own business that does the same thing), I think it would be up to a court to decide, and it would probably decide that the whole agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Kudos to the RCMP for finally recognizing the obvious. It makes a heck of a lot more sense to go after organized criminals who make zillions of copies of counterfeit content and whatnot, then to go after individuals who have nothing better to do than download something for personal use. This way, you eliminate huge amounts of copyright violations by targeting a small number of arch criminals.
There is a simple solution to problems like this. Whenever you purchase a new (or used?) hard drive, write zeroes to the whole darn thing and then format it with your filesystem of choice. Badda bing batta boom.
According to the then-popular 1980's era film, Back to the Future, flying cars will be here by the year 2015. This leaves us about seven years to get the technology perfected.
However, I doubt flying cars will ever get here. Just think of the danger. The roads are already dangerous enough. Now you want to give drivers the ability to fly as well? If an accident happens, the cars will fall out of the sky and right through your roof. That just ain't funny.
Speaking of being ready for business, the rhetoric across just about all media is that the Mac is a great computer for home use but isn't ready for business. Can anyone shed some light on why this is the widespread perception? The Mac, coupled with Mac OS X Server, can do just about anything that a Windows or Linux network can do, and even if it can't, you can always install some Windows or Linux servers to take care of whatever loose ends are left over. Couple that with iPhones capable of 3rd party development and Java, and it's a wonderful system for business.
I really think it's a good idea to develop Terminator-style robots that can punch through a brick wall or morph into different shapes, and then program them to vacuum the carpet.
On the other hand, there are people like me who believe that SETI isn't really looking for alien life, but is really an early-warning system for a surprise attack from other countries. They tell us they're looking for aliens so we won't know what they're really looking for.
It should be my problem what I decide to do with an Xbox (assuming I owned one, which I don't). What if, say, I have some friends over and they take turns playing games, while I'm finishing up some homework before leaving to go to a party? That will count against my weekly maximum, unfairly!! We, as intelligent human beings, don't need the machines that are our own making to tell us what to do!
I know what he did.
He got a Mac.
If Samba (on his FreeBSD machine) crashed after accepting the data and reporting back to the machine running Leopard that the transfer was completed but BEFORE it flushed it from cache to disk, how is Leopard at fault?
This reminds me of something I read on the Qmail developer's site. He said that when a mail server receives an email, it should write and flush to the disk (NOT do a lazy write) and only then should it report to the sender that the email has been received. He said that some developers disagree. He said that they're wrong.
What exactly do you expect from a company called Unsanity and a product named after a close relative of the monkey?
You're right.
A perfect example of this happened about two years ago while I was riding a bus. I was sitting in the second row of seats. In the seat in front of me, a lady was speaking on her cell phone. To her credit, she was speaking very quietly. I was sitting within a few feet of her and it didn't bother me. The bus driver, on the other hand, was bothered by her very much. He wanted to listen to the news on the radio, and she was making it difficult for him to hear. He politely asked her to stop speaking on the phone so that he could listen to the news. She started yelling at him at such a high level of decibels that the entire bus could hear what she was saying. Among other things, she said that she could put his job in jeopardy by complaining about him, but that out of the goodness of her heart, she won't take such actions. This ranting and raving continued for fifteen minutes, during which time, the bus driver kept apologizing to her for asking her to stop speaking on the phone. When she was done yelling at him, she called back whomever it was with whom she had spoken earlier, and, in the same loud volume, repeated, almost verbatim, everything she had yelled in the past fifteen minutes.
I enjoyed that episode.
I don't think Red Hat is tolerating it. They simply have no choice. The OS and most of the components installed with it are licensed under the GPL, which states that exactly this sort of thing can happen.
I don't know the legal perspective on whether or not he has any right to that name, but in my opinion, if he sent a threatening letter, he is an idiot. It accomplished nothing for him. If he had, instead, sent you a polite letter, there might have been some chance of you working with him to come to an agreement amicable to both sides. He should have reserved the threats for much, much later in the process.