Apple Computer Corp. (NASDAQ: APPL) today announced a lawsuit against one Jon Johansen, in which Apple alleges that Mr. Johansen has violated Apple intellectual property.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of attacks by Mr. Johansen on Apple's online music store, iTunes, in which Johansen allegedly removed a special technology called DRM from music downloads. "DRM is a technology applied to music downloads which enhances the value of a music download and facilitates consumer satisfaction with regards to it," stated a Microsoft spokeswoman yesterday. "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions."
Documents related to the lawsuit state that Apple did not want to take legal action against Mr. Johansen, but that Johansen asked Apple, and then begged and pleaded, to sue him. "Customer satisfaction is important to us," stated an Apple representative, "so we feel that the best way to satisfy the defendant in this case is to make him one."
Just kidding... Joking aside, and what's above is made up gibberish, not real press stuff... After buying my third Apple in 2004 and 2005, which follows years of disliking Apple computers due to the old OS, followed by years of trolling the Internet for information about OS X, I am considering investing in an iPod and getting on this iTunes thing. Heck, tcsh and my 1980's era UNIX programs look damn good on this slick, shiny Apple iron. They're doing a damn good job if you ask me... and hey, if you don't like DRM, buy a CD for cryin' out loud. Who cares, dude... people have to get paid for stuff when they work hard to get it on the Internet. Be considerate, and if you don't like that crap, vote against it with your dollars.
And just why in the *F*S*C*K* were records on current, past, prospective, and future students kept on a FOOD SERVICE MACHINE?!?!?! ???!p>When a school is so stupid that it stores information like that on a food service machine, it should be the responsibility of the school to compensate each person whose records were stored thereon with at least $1,000,000,000 dollars. If the school cannot pay, then it should be put out of business, and all of its ex-assets distributed to these people.
The following guide will allow you to master your operating system. Learn how to take your computer from having no operating system to having a full-fledged graphical setup with all the bells and whistles. Your knowledge in these areas will make you the envy of your neighborhood...
(snip)
The guide mentioned instructs the reader on inserting the Windows XP install CD and following the on-screen prompts.
This is a disaster for computer security. It means that all forms of cryptography, which governments, banking systems, businesses, and individuals use to protect online communications, persistent data, and various form of digital assets, will immediately become obsolete, as crackers will now have the ability, using the proof to this theorem, to crack any form of encryption within a matter of seconds, rather than centuries.
However, if you buy Lightning Shadow Software's new product, Vault Protector Pro Gold Platinum Edition, your data will be protected under uncrackable encryption and it will be 100% safe. Simply send an envelope stuffed with cash to my P.O. box address, which I will post here tomorrow, after I file the papers to form Lightning Shadow Software.
I think Microsoft should spend 100 billion dollars to develop a new operating system, codenamed Doors, which will actually be a bug-for-bug duplication of all the functionality of all versions of Windows and DOS going back to the first days of Microsoft, done by programmers writing code in BASIC and having no access whatsoever to the code for any of Microsoft's other products. This operating system would then have flawful technologies hacked into it as an afterthought to limit its functionality, after which it would be offered in Asian markets for 500 times the price of Microsoft's normal software. Obviously, this won't sell at all, which is exactly the point, as Microsoft will be able to point fingers at Linux and software piracy as the reasons for "irreparable harm" to their business, forcing Congress to outlaw these hacker's tools.
In my opinion, Microsoft should make a software activation scheme across all software they make, which would request every imaginable piece of identifying information about a person.
For example, the system could force users to enter: Date of birth, ethnic affiliation, gender, sexual preference, social security number, driver license number, tax documents filed in the last 15 years, criminal records, photocopies of birth certificates, a list of current and past employers, amount of pay over a 10 year period, number of spouse and children, names, genders, social security numbers, and birth certificates of all family members, and the list goes on and on. It would take the average person a week to collect all of the information and to prepare all the documents for submission to Microsoft to activate a piece of software.
This would be good for the economy because companies will pop up everywhere that will file for you, similarly to the way that tax preparation companies exist all over the place.
But here's the best part: When the software is activated, Microsoft's systems would automatically verify all of the information with state and federal computer systems. Any incorrect information would be grounds for lawsuit and police action for fraud.
Assuming you're not busted for fraud, Microsoft would then sell complete identifying information to advertisers and businesses of all kinds, especially businesses that nobody's ever heard of, which are not reputable, or businesses which are specifically shady and/or illegal. These businesses could then use the information to specifically target advertisements for individual potential customers. They could also enhance their revenue by stealing the identity of those who do not purchase their products, thereby taking advantage of their government-granted right to guaranteed profits from business activities. Microsoft would collect a 99% tax on these profits, to recompense it for building such a vast and complex system.
Your idea would be truly cool for the next generation MPEG or DVD video format... I am guessing that it would take a tremendous amount of time and processing power to decide which individual pixels to color-code in a given sequence of frames. Perhaps the software could use the equivalent of a Photoshop-style magic wand to figure out which areas of a picture (in 3-d, as we're talking about a 2-d image with a time dimension) match a certain range of color (say, different shades of black) and then code a single pixel somewhere in the middle, with high resolution grayscale coded for the rest.
I am among the crowd that believes that increasing the number of platforms on which a given program runs generally improves the stability and performance of that program.
Bugs that are not apparent under the operating conditions of one platform become very apparent under those of another, for one thing. Also, different timings present in different hardware can uncover the strange situations that result from erroneous multitasking programming. Infrequent intermittant problems become more noticeable, and therefore get fixed.
I hope Debian doesn't choose to drop other architectures.
And software written in the C++ programming language should run faster--"shockingly better" in a few cases.
In the 3.x series of GCC, the output for C language programs has degraded somewhat in terms of execution time and size, while the performance of C++ language programs has improved somewhat.
I hope this apparent tradeoff doesn't go a step further in the 4.x series, as most of my work is still done in C.
This is going to accomplish exactly: Jack Diddly Squat. Yes, the numerical ranking of "Online Poker" might increase somewhat, but all that's going to happen now is that everybody and his mother is going to Googlebomb whatever terms necessary to increase the rating of their particular site. In the end, the rating numbers will mean nothing, and Google will be overloaded with all kinds of Googlebombs.
Justice: 1 (n) By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions. 2 (n) That which provides multinational corporations with profits when provided at the expense of decent hard working people.
Two years ago, I worked for a company that made industrial process control systems. I worked as one of the programmers in the real-time programming department, writing code for processors like the Atmel and Rabbit cores. Some of my work ran on embedded 386 processors and the like.
The working conditions were very good. It was a large industrial warehouse. Our department had rows of long tables running down in four aisles, computers and lab equipment on these rows. I basically had my own table, with lots of additional room for equipment on carts that I rolled from place to place as I tested experimental code, as well as electronic designs. (Though a programmer by trade, I end up doing a lot of electronic design as part of my work.)
The work was relatively interesting, involving various aspects of mechanical, electric, electronic, software, and some really complex math. I got to use quite a few software packages that are quite expensive... Protel, Pro/ENGINEER, and other such programs with five-digit price tags.
To any outside observer, it was a good job. My salary was $147,200 per year, and the company bought four computers, each over $12,000 in price, for my use through the VPN at home. The benefits were quite good, as well. But I quit the job because they wouldn't give me a raise for three straight years, and the bills kept getting bigger. This made a lot of sense in my then-current state of mind. Unfortunately, the job I have now only pays about $60,000 a year... needless to say, I had to refinance and get rid of a lot of "extras" in my life. It doesn't matter... in a few months, I'm getting married, and she makes quite a bit of money.
I hope Microsoft completely falls apart and goes out of business, leaving all businesses that believed their TCO lies in deep doodoo, leaving them only the option of upgrading to free software.
I think Bill Gates is evil, IMHO. Proof: There was a photograph of him talking to the Antichrist himself, Bill Cliton. (No, that is not a typo, there is only one N in Cliton.)
right-wing would be more appropriate, as the 'right' stands for 'conservative,' people who want things to stay as they are
I've got news for you. Your statement is what the left wants you to believe that the right is.
Start researching, reading, and taking the time to understand what the right is all about, and you might discover that it's a whole heck of a lot nicer, kinder, and friendlier, not to mention fairer, than the left would have you believe. Unfortunately, people get so used to hearing certain things in the media (which is controlled largely by the left) and in schools (also left) that they have a certain model of the world that says that businesses are evil, etc. Unfortunately, most business owners, who are honest people and who create jobs and really do make a genuine effort to improve the lives of their employees, are adversely affected by the above sentiment and by the legislation that results because of it. For example, higher taxes, increased regulations, and other burdens placed on employers really make their life unnecessarily harder, as if running a business isn't hard enough, and ultimately destroys jobs, causes business failures, unnecessary litigation, and other problems.
The cause? Politics. The left really has nothing to offer. It is misguided. Just look at all the anti-God stuff that was going on before the 2004 election... And a month or two after the election, suddenly the Democratic party, which is mostly left, announces that it is very pro-religion. Why? When months before it was decidedly anti-religion? Because that's the message they think you want to hear... so that's the face (the mask, essentially) that they put on, in order to get your vote, to get into power, so they can do what pleases them.
Once the culprits are found and their computers, chock full of pr0n, are seized, will the police place all the pr0n on the web as a reward to the law-abiding citizens who nark out the crooks?
some things are still permitted in the US that are not elsewhere.
I really think that nothing should be allowed, anywhere. The government should tell each of us exactly how to live our lives. What to do. How to do it. When to do it. When to wake up in the morning. When to go to sleep. When to go to the bathroom. And the government should monitor each of these things so that even the slightest deviation from the government's plans will allow the government to come after you and apply the penalty of death by removal of the head, without the inconvenience of a trial and other administrative problems (from the government's perspective).
Google lost a trademark-infringement case in France.
What else do you expect from a country that is as screwed up as France? France is the worst country in the world.
Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One Frenchman to hold it and all of Europe turns around him.
There are not enough derogatory adjectives in the English language to describe just how plain BAD France is.
Disclaimer: I'm a French citizen. I got out of that stupid place, live in America now, and am awaiting my American citizenship, at which point I will FINALLY renounce my French citizenship, something I don't want people to know I am associated with.
The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's
Of course, those idiots at the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and other left-wing anti-freedom organizations will find ways to make one movie take up a whole disc...
For example, they'll decide that instead of burdening the DVD player with both decompression and unencryption, why not make up an encryption algorithm that is a thousand times as difficult to crack, while placing the movie on the disc uncompressed.
They'll advertise this as providing even higher quality than DVD, which it will when viewing takes place, and they'll sell it to so-called "content providers" as preventing piracy, which it will not do.
Their ulterior motive, as we all know, is to get Congress behind them to allegedly "prevent piracy" when what they actually want to do is prevent Linux software from being capable of playing videos and music. Microsoft wants this because it gains additional power, such as the ability to push its Media Center version of Windows XP without unwanted competition from Linux vendors. The price can be high, the software can be so buggy that it might work, maybe, once in a while, sometimes. But users will pay this price and live with the unreliability and inefficiency of Microsoft's product because they will not know of any alternative (read: Linux) which can do a better job, cheaper, faster, with less hardware, and with higher customer satisfaction.
That is but the short-term goal. The long-term goal of these terrible organizations is to chisel away at our freedoms so they can control our lives and turn the free countries of the world into something that makes the former USSR look like heaven.
Linux would have happened without IBM putting its weight behind it. OS/2 would have grown and become increasingly complicated.
At the time of the Windows 95 vs. OS/2 Warp, I chose OS/2. First I bought the Red version, or was it the Blue version? I don't remember. One was an "upgrade" to DOS, as I recall, and the other was a "complete" OS. Both were quite slow, big, bulky, and bloated. Not that OS/2 was a bad OS. It was cool. You could run programs made for DOS, OS/2, Presentation Manager (OS/2's GUI), and Windows 3.0/3.1. Windows applications could run in "rootless" mode in the Presentation Manager or in a separate Windows instance. The whole thing was quite fascinating. Since there weren't many Windows 95 programs available at the time anyway, OS/2 fulfilled pretty much all my needs. And to make things fun and interesting, it was a big messy OS and there were lots of places to dig into it and make it do weird things. I only wish it could run UNIX programs too, because that would have made it the ultimate OS of the time. It was relatively unheard of (in the PC realm) for one OS to run another OS's programs back in those days.
I used OS/2 for a long time, even after most people started using Windows 95. I didn't care; all the programs I needed worked on OS/2. By the time Windows 98 came out, I was also using BeOS and playing with other, weirder OSes. BeOS, running on my PC, a 133 MHz Pentium, felt like totally opening up the throttle on a hot rod on the open road, compared to OS/2, which was composed of KSLOCs upon KSLOCs of cruft, beautiful as it was in its own strange way, was slow and felt heavy.
It was right around that time that I started using Linux. I realized the potential, but saw that a lot of work remains to be done. Who cares, I thought... I've been using weird fringe OSes for a long time, let's use this for a while.
Now let's suppose that Windows never ran protected mode programs and that Microsoft didn't kick IBM's ass at the time. OS/2 probably would have remained too damn complicated for the mortal man to use. DOS would have continued in its popularity. Don't even think of Linux. I suppose that Mosaic would have been a DOS based GUI browser, the way that other programs like AutoCAD and who knows what were. It would have taken probably five years longer for people to get used to the GUI concept... right around 2000. I think that by then, there would have been such a variety of console-based interactive programs for Linux, and I don't suppose that so much effort would have gone into making programs for X. If such an effort had taken place, then by 2000, Linux would have been ahead of the pack in terms of GUI usability. But I doubt that would have happened. The computer user community would definitely be a lot smaller than it is today, and most of its members would be powerusers and programmers. There wouldn't need to be such an emphasis on making things "friendly", so more effort and concentration would go into making things "just work." The important things would get done with less emphasis on crap and talking paperclips.
Looking at these predictions for an alternate reality over the past 10 years, I come to the conclusion that Microsoft is largely responsible for the fact that software and computers in general are considered unreliable and this is considered normal. If it weren't for Microsoft, people would not pay for software that does not work properly.
I don't understand why the record companies dropped the suit. Did they suddenly grow a brain that allowed them to correlate between the defendant's being dead and therefore their inability to sue her?
I thought all the people working in all the record companies are totally, completely, utterly, and in all other ways retarded and stupid.
Why haven't they jetisoned the foul beast from Redmond and migrated en mass to the Macintosh or even Linux?
This is why. At a corporate meeting to decide between Windows and Linux for 10,000 new computers, a Windows sales representative and a Linux sales representative both made their cases for why their operating system is better.
The Linux sales rep went first: If you get Linux, you won't have problems with viruses, worms, crackers, and other problems. Plus, your system administrators can manage all your systems from a single location, and the execution of your applications will be reliable and efficient.
The Windows sales rep went next: By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions, reducing TCO for CRM applications, and managing enterprise ERP.
The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left.
I've been hearing this line for, what? Three decades?
The PC as we know it is a PC that crashes and runs software that sucks. This is what I believe: With corporate, government, and personal interests pushing free software, we have seen something interesting:
First, free software has become better on the server side than most commercial offerings, if you exclude things like NFS that work "only" about 99% as well as something commercial.
Second, free software has been playing a game of catch-up on the desktop front. This game began in 1995 or so with what looked like 1980's user interfaces, and has almost reached the level of commercial interfaces in the past year or two. In some areas, free software has better user interfaces, but in most cases, the user interfaces suck not because we're so far behind but because the edge-cases haven't been taken care of or because of small details that confuse people. Heck, when I use the Macintosh I am constantly amazed at the slickness and refinement of the Mac OS X user interface. It is simply unsurpassed in quality, anywhere, period. This refinement is layered on top of free software. How is it, for example, that you plug in a printer, push two buttons, and print? It's stuff like this that puts stuff like Linux distros a little behind.
But we have a few years until MS releases a version of Windows that is yet worse than anything they've managed to hack together in the past. In my opinion, we'll be caught up by then, and the game won't be catch-up anymore... it'll be set new standards.
And that means that within the decade, free software will create things that idiots in companies like MS haven't even thought of and won't be able to replicate/buy/embrace & extend/etc. When that happens, yes, the PC as we know it--a device that picks up spyware/adware/viruses/malware/popups/spam and lasts only about a year in terms of usability before the software is so fscked up that most users think it's "broken" and buy another computer--the PC as we know it, will be gone and replaced with something you turn on, use, and turn off without all kinds of crashes and problems in between.
Slashdot Mirror
March 22, 2005
Apple Computer Corp. (NASDAQ: APPL) today announced a lawsuit against one Jon Johansen, in which Apple alleges that Mr. Johansen has violated Apple intellectual property.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of attacks by Mr. Johansen on Apple's online music store, iTunes, in which Johansen allegedly removed a special technology called DRM from music downloads. "DRM is a technology applied to music downloads which enhances the value of a music download and facilitates consumer satisfaction with regards to it," stated a Microsoft spokeswoman yesterday. "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions."
Documents related to the lawsuit state that Apple did not want to take legal action against Mr. Johansen, but that Johansen asked Apple, and then begged and pleaded, to sue him. "Customer satisfaction is important to us," stated an Apple representative, "so we feel that the best way to satisfy the defendant in this case is to make him one."
Just kidding... Joking aside, and what's above is made up gibberish, not real press stuff... After buying my third Apple in 2004 and 2005, which follows years of disliking Apple computers due to the old OS, followed by years of trolling the Internet for information about OS X, I am considering investing in an iPod and getting on this iTunes thing. Heck, tcsh and my 1980's era UNIX programs look damn good on this slick, shiny Apple iron. They're doing a damn good job if you ask me... and hey, if you don't like DRM, buy a CD for cryin' out loud. Who cares, dude... people have to get paid for stuff when they work hard to get it on the Internet. Be considerate, and if you don't like that crap, vote against it with your dollars.
And just why in the *F*S*C*K* were records on current, past, prospective, and future students kept on a FOOD SERVICE MACHINE?!?!?! ???!p>When a school is so stupid that it stores information like that on a food service machine, it should be the responsibility of the school to compensate each person whose records were stored thereon with at least $1,000,000,000 dollars. If the school cannot pay, then it should be put out of business, and all of its ex-assets distributed to these people.
The guide mentioned instructs the reader on inserting the Windows XP install CD and following the on-screen prompts.
However, if you buy Lightning Shadow Software's new product, Vault Protector Pro Gold Platinum Edition, your data will be protected under uncrackable encryption and it will be 100% safe. Simply send an envelope stuffed with cash to my P.O. box address, which I will post here tomorrow, after I file the papers to form Lightning Shadow Software.
I think Microsoft should spend 100 billion dollars to develop a new operating system, codenamed Doors, which will actually be a bug-for-bug duplication of all the functionality of all versions of Windows and DOS going back to the first days of Microsoft, done by programmers writing code in BASIC and having no access whatsoever to the code for any of Microsoft's other products. This operating system would then have flawful technologies hacked into it as an afterthought to limit its functionality, after which it would be offered in Asian markets for 500 times the price of Microsoft's normal software. Obviously, this won't sell at all, which is exactly the point, as Microsoft will be able to point fingers at Linux and software piracy as the reasons for "irreparable harm" to their business, forcing Congress to outlaw these hacker's tools.
For example, the system could force users to enter: Date of birth, ethnic affiliation, gender, sexual preference, social security number, driver license number, tax documents filed in the last 15 years, criminal records, photocopies of birth certificates, a list of current and past employers, amount of pay over a 10 year period, number of spouse and children, names, genders, social security numbers, and birth certificates of all family members, and the list goes on and on. It would take the average person a week to collect all of the information and to prepare all the documents for submission to Microsoft to activate a piece of software.
This would be good for the economy because companies will pop up everywhere that will file for you, similarly to the way that tax preparation companies exist all over the place.
But here's the best part: When the software is activated, Microsoft's systems would automatically verify all of the information with state and federal computer systems. Any incorrect information would be grounds for lawsuit and police action for fraud.
Assuming you're not busted for fraud, Microsoft would then sell complete identifying information to advertisers and businesses of all kinds, especially businesses that nobody's ever heard of, which are not reputable, or businesses which are specifically shady and/or illegal. These businesses could then use the information to specifically target advertisements for individual potential customers. They could also enhance their revenue by stealing the identity of those who do not purchase their products, thereby taking advantage of their government-granted right to guaranteed profits from business activities. Microsoft would collect a 99% tax on these profits, to recompense it for building such a vast and complex system.
Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
Your idea would be truly cool for the next generation MPEG or DVD video format... I am guessing that it would take a tremendous amount of time and processing power to decide which individual pixels to color-code in a given sequence of frames. Perhaps the software could use the equivalent of a Photoshop-style magic wand to figure out which areas of a picture (in 3-d, as we're talking about a 2-d image with a time dimension) match a certain range of color (say, different shades of black) and then code a single pixel somewhere in the middle, with high resolution grayscale coded for the rest.
Bugs that are not apparent under the operating conditions of one platform become very apparent under those of another, for one thing. Also, different timings present in different hardware can uncover the strange situations that result from erroneous multitasking programming. Infrequent intermittant problems become more noticeable, and therefore get fixed.
I hope Debian doesn't choose to drop other architectures.
In the 3.x series of GCC, the output for C language programs has degraded somewhat in terms of execution time and size, while the performance of C++ language programs has improved somewhat.
I hope this apparent tradeoff doesn't go a step further in the 4.x series, as most of my work is still done in C.
And that's just not cool.
That said, this is a total bust. Apple rocks. Cheap knockoffs suck.
Justice: 1 (n) By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions. 2 (n) That which provides multinational corporations with profits when provided at the expense of decent hard working people.
Just kidding... I use Opera. BTW, try the new Beta of Opera 8. It's quite nice.
The working conditions were very good. It was a large industrial warehouse. Our department had rows of long tables running down in four aisles, computers and lab equipment on these rows. I basically had my own table, with lots of additional room for equipment on carts that I rolled from place to place as I tested experimental code, as well as electronic designs. (Though a programmer by trade, I end up doing a lot of electronic design as part of my work.)
The work was relatively interesting, involving various aspects of mechanical, electric, electronic, software, and some really complex math. I got to use quite a few software packages that are quite expensive... Protel, Pro/ENGINEER, and other such programs with five-digit price tags.
To any outside observer, it was a good job. My salary was $147,200 per year, and the company bought four computers, each over $12,000 in price, for my use through the VPN at home. The benefits were quite good, as well. But I quit the job because they wouldn't give me a raise for three straight years, and the bills kept getting bigger. This made a lot of sense in my then-current state of mind. Unfortunately, the job I have now only pays about $60,000 a year... needless to say, I had to refinance and get rid of a lot of "extras" in my life. It doesn't matter... in a few months, I'm getting married, and she makes quite a bit of money.
I think Bill Gates is evil, IMHO. Proof: There was a photograph of him talking to the Antichrist himself, Bill Cliton. (No, that is not a typo, there is only one N in Cliton.)
MS SUX. Linux ROOLZ!!!
I've got news for you. Your statement is what the left wants you to believe that the right is.
Start researching, reading, and taking the time to understand what the right is all about, and you might discover that it's a whole heck of a lot nicer, kinder, and friendlier, not to mention fairer, than the left would have you believe. Unfortunately, people get so used to hearing certain things in the media (which is controlled largely by the left) and in schools (also left) that they have a certain model of the world that says that businesses are evil, etc. Unfortunately, most business owners, who are honest people and who create jobs and really do make a genuine effort to improve the lives of their employees, are adversely affected by the above sentiment and by the legislation that results because of it. For example, higher taxes, increased regulations, and other burdens placed on employers really make their life unnecessarily harder, as if running a business isn't hard enough, and ultimately destroys jobs, causes business failures, unnecessary litigation, and other problems.
The cause? Politics. The left really has nothing to offer. It is misguided. Just look at all the anti-God stuff that was going on before the 2004 election... And a month or two after the election, suddenly the Democratic party, which is mostly left, announces that it is very pro-religion. Why? When months before it was decidedly anti-religion? Because that's the message they think you want to hear... so that's the face (the mask, essentially) that they put on, in order to get your vote, to get into power, so they can do what pleases them.
Once the culprits are found and their computers, chock full of pr0n, are seized, will the police place all the pr0n on the web as a reward to the law-abiding citizens who nark out the crooks?
I really think that nothing should be allowed, anywhere. The government should tell each of us exactly how to live our lives. What to do. How to do it. When to do it. When to wake up in the morning. When to go to sleep. When to go to the bathroom. And the government should monitor each of these things so that even the slightest deviation from the government's plans will allow the government to come after you and apply the penalty of death by removal of the head, without the inconvenience of a trial and other administrative problems (from the government's perspective).
What else do you expect from a country that is as screwed up as France? France is the worst country in the world.
Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One Frenchman to hold it and all of Europe turns around him.
There are not enough derogatory adjectives in the English language to describe just how plain BAD France is.
Disclaimer: I'm a French citizen. I got out of that stupid place, live in America now, and am awaiting my American citizenship, at which point I will FINALLY renounce my French citizenship, something I don't want people to know I am associated with.
France... The worst country in the world.
Of course, those idiots at the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and other left-wing anti-freedom organizations will find ways to make one movie take up a whole disc...
For example, they'll decide that instead of burdening the DVD player with both decompression and unencryption, why not make up an encryption algorithm that is a thousand times as difficult to crack, while placing the movie on the disc uncompressed.
They'll advertise this as providing even higher quality than DVD, which it will when viewing takes place, and they'll sell it to so-called "content providers" as preventing piracy, which it will not do.
Their ulterior motive, as we all know, is to get Congress behind them to allegedly "prevent piracy" when what they actually want to do is prevent Linux software from being capable of playing videos and music. Microsoft wants this because it gains additional power, such as the ability to push its Media Center version of Windows XP without unwanted competition from Linux vendors. The price can be high, the software can be so buggy that it might work, maybe, once in a while, sometimes. But users will pay this price and live with the unreliability and inefficiency of Microsoft's product because they will not know of any alternative (read: Linux) which can do a better job, cheaper, faster, with less hardware, and with higher customer satisfaction.
That is but the short-term goal. The long-term goal of these terrible organizations is to chisel away at our freedoms so they can control our lives and turn the free countries of the world into something that makes the former USSR look like heaven.
The first lesson to learn from a Real Programmer, such as Knuth:
It will ship when it's done.
At the time of the Windows 95 vs. OS/2 Warp, I chose OS/2. First I bought the Red version, or was it the Blue version? I don't remember. One was an "upgrade" to DOS, as I recall, and the other was a "complete" OS. Both were quite slow, big, bulky, and bloated. Not that OS/2 was a bad OS. It was cool. You could run programs made for DOS, OS/2, Presentation Manager (OS/2's GUI), and Windows 3.0/3.1. Windows applications could run in "rootless" mode in the Presentation Manager or in a separate Windows instance. The whole thing was quite fascinating. Since there weren't many Windows 95 programs available at the time anyway, OS/2 fulfilled pretty much all my needs. And to make things fun and interesting, it was a big messy OS and there were lots of places to dig into it and make it do weird things. I only wish it could run UNIX programs too, because that would have made it the ultimate OS of the time. It was relatively unheard of (in the PC realm) for one OS to run another OS's programs back in those days.
I used OS/2 for a long time, even after most people started using Windows 95. I didn't care; all the programs I needed worked on OS/2. By the time Windows 98 came out, I was also using BeOS and playing with other, weirder OSes. BeOS, running on my PC, a 133 MHz Pentium, felt like totally opening up the throttle on a hot rod on the open road, compared to OS/2, which was composed of KSLOCs upon KSLOCs of cruft, beautiful as it was in its own strange way, was slow and felt heavy.
It was right around that time that I started using Linux. I realized the potential, but saw that a lot of work remains to be done. Who cares, I thought... I've been using weird fringe OSes for a long time, let's use this for a while.
Now let's suppose that Windows never ran protected mode programs and that Microsoft didn't kick IBM's ass at the time. OS/2 probably would have remained too damn complicated for the mortal man to use. DOS would have continued in its popularity. Don't even think of Linux. I suppose that Mosaic would have been a DOS based GUI browser, the way that other programs like AutoCAD and who knows what were. It would have taken probably five years longer for people to get used to the GUI concept... right around 2000. I think that by then, there would have been such a variety of console-based interactive programs for Linux, and I don't suppose that so much effort would have gone into making programs for X. If such an effort had taken place, then by 2000, Linux would have been ahead of the pack in terms of GUI usability. But I doubt that would have happened. The computer user community would definitely be a lot smaller than it is today, and most of its members would be powerusers and programmers. There wouldn't need to be such an emphasis on making things "friendly", so more effort and concentration would go into making things "just work." The important things would get done with less emphasis on crap and talking paperclips.
Looking at these predictions for an alternate reality over the past 10 years, I come to the conclusion that Microsoft is largely responsible for the fact that software and computers in general are considered unreliable and this is considered normal. If it weren't for Microsoft, people would not pay for software that does not work properly.
Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
I thought all the people working in all the record companies are totally, completely, utterly, and in all other ways retarded and stupid.
This is why. At a corporate meeting to decide between Windows and Linux for 10,000 new computers, a Windows sales representative and a Linux sales representative both made their cases for why their operating system is better.
The Linux sales rep went first: If you get Linux, you won't have problems with viruses, worms, crackers, and other problems. Plus, your system administrators can manage all your systems from a single location, and the execution of your applications will be reliable and efficient.
The Windows sales rep went next: By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions, reducing TCO for CRM applications, and managing enterprise ERP.
The company chose Windows.
I've been hearing this line for, what? Three decades?
The PC as we know it is a PC that crashes and runs software that sucks. This is what I believe: With corporate, government, and personal interests pushing free software, we have seen something interesting:
First, free software has become better on the server side than most commercial offerings, if you exclude things like NFS that work "only" about 99% as well as something commercial.
Second, free software has been playing a game of catch-up on the desktop front. This game began in 1995 or so with what looked like 1980's user interfaces, and has almost reached the level of commercial interfaces in the past year or two. In some areas, free software has better user interfaces, but in most cases, the user interfaces suck not because we're so far behind but because the edge-cases haven't been taken care of or because of small details that confuse people. Heck, when I use the Macintosh I am constantly amazed at the slickness and refinement of the Mac OS X user interface. It is simply unsurpassed in quality, anywhere, period. This refinement is layered on top of free software. How is it, for example, that you plug in a printer, push two buttons, and print? It's stuff like this that puts stuff like Linux distros a little behind.
But we have a few years until MS releases a version of Windows that is yet worse than anything they've managed to hack together in the past. In my opinion, we'll be caught up by then, and the game won't be catch-up anymore... it'll be set new standards.
And that means that within the decade, free software will create things that idiots in companies like MS haven't even thought of and won't be able to replicate/buy/embrace & extend/etc. When that happens, yes, the PC as we know it--a device that picks up spyware/adware/viruses/malware/popups/spam and lasts only about a year in terms of usability before the software is so fscked up that most users think it's "broken" and buy another computer--the PC as we know it, will be gone and replaced with something you turn on, use, and turn off without all kinds of crashes and problems in between.