In the beginning, I was telling everybody I know NOT to buy this video game console because it is made by the most evil people on Earth. Then, someone told me that those very same evil people LOSE money on each video game console sold, in the hopes of making it up several times over in sales of video games for the aforementioned machine. Now, suddenly, I think it is a decidedly wonderful idea to buy this product, on one condition--that one does not purchase any video games to go along with it. As a matter of fact, I am now suggesting to everybody that I know that instead of spending two grand on a shiny new computer, they can spend the same amount of money and obtain, oh, six or seven of this machine, onto which they can install and run alternative software, while also doing a good deed by helping to erode the market of the evildoers who manufacture the device to begin with. It is now my firm belief that if an enormous number of good people bought one of these devices every, say, two or three months, then the evildoers can be forced to stop making it altogether, since they cannot possibly force anybody NOT to buy their product, right? Furthermore, any devices built with the intent of protecting the unit from modification can be worked around. So this is a good deal for the whole world.
YES! YES! Nanny nanny boo boo! Hahahahahahah!! Na na!
This is so cool, I am literally jumping for joy! The music industry... Those lying sons of jackals. Those shmucks. Greedy, gray-haired BORING old geezers with no life, looking for ways to USE the general public, to ROB good people of their hard earned money, to make a killing on work they never did. And when their free profits, money that's practically falling out of the sky, start to shrink because consumers can't afford to spend TWENTY DOLLARS on a measly CD containing some measly GARBAGE, they grumble and moan and complain, and point the finger in every direction except at their flawed, greedy, unethical marketing ploy.
I very, VERY strongly hope that this tiny, insignificant, puny little fine, consisting of meager pocket pennies for those evil pieces of TRASH, is only the beginning of the beginning of fines and losses and total, utter, complete failure of their marketing system, leading to the entire recording industry taking a dump, and placing those horrible people back where they belong. I hope this signals the introduction to the COMPLETE AND UTTER CRUMBLING of this evil music industry, which deserves to go out of business for good.
And don't you think for a moment that this will hurt the artists. Those poor artists will find ways to record their music and deliver it to consumers who wish to listen to it, and they will make SIGNIFICANTLY more money when there isn't some enormous bureaucratic music industry ROBBING them of their hard earned money and placing them in the streets. Then, without the caring and nurturing of the EVIL music industry, which has all this time FLAT OUT ROBBED the artists while preaching the gospel, these poor artists won't be so poor anymore. Because they'll find innovative ways to deliver music to consumers at a really low price, without the need to be EVIL like those bad people at the top of the music industry, the artists will prosper and there will be a LOT more money left in consumers' pockets to spend on all sorts of stuff. This will make our economy strong, by circulating the money to people who need it, not to EVIL people in the music industry.
So to the EVIL multinational corporations that make up the EVIL music industry... NANNY NANNY BOO BOO!
They slice a flap out of your eye and flip it open to reveal the material underneath, which they "fix" with the laser. When the flap is closed, it heals almost immediately
Here's the catch: it NEVER heals completely. Think of a deep cut on your skin that looks like it has healed, but breaks open again. The trouble is this: Let's say that ten years after the surgery, you get shot right in the eye with a high-pressure water gun or fire hose or something. Or you get socked in the face in a barroom brawl. Or a ping-pong ball hits you pretty hard. Hell, all it takes is a good smack during a pillow fight. Before LASIK, your eye will likely hurt like hell and the vision will go white for a while, and you'll get a black eye and that sucks. But after LASIK, that flap can break off completely. Obviously, if that happens, you can kiss your vision in that eye goodbye.
And that doesn't account for errors during the surgery. What if the surgery machine runs Windows?
This is my point: BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE. Many people cannot see jack. You at least can see, so yeah, it's a little blurry and glasses tend to fog up and contacts need to be replaced every few days, and it's a real hassle but WHAT IF YOU COULD NOT SEE AT ALL?! I'm sure you'd give give away everything you have to get vision that's half as good as what you have now. Do not be greedy because, yeah, the risks are low but do you really want to take them? I say f.u.c.k. that.
When a party, such as but not limited to a natural person, corporation, nonprofit organization, group of conspirators or any other party, creates a situation in which legal action is occurring or may occur, including but not limited to lawsuits, legal action, legal threats or any other action, and such action affects through means including but not limited to means direct and/or indirect, you or your interests, including but not limited to yourself, your papers and/or effects or any other asset belonging to yourself, it is time to obtain a lawyer.
There is another factor to consider in this story. China, like most other far-eastern countries, is known by the U.S. software industry as a "one disc" country due to alleged piracy of commercial software. If this is true, that would mean that, say, 99% of the Chinese got their copy of Windows for free.
If the Chinese get their Windows for free, but prefer to develop their own chip and run a free operating system on it, imagine what that means: That they'd rather undertake enormous expenses to achieve reliable computing than use Microsoft's garbage for free.
Great! They tried to use some technology to prevent piracy, and they're getting SUED! Bwaaaahaaaahaaahaahahahah!!! That's what the evil recording industry deserves!
Not to put anybody down, but if this is a card that must be installed in a computer, why then isn't the software executed on a small microprocessor on the card, relieving the main processor from having to mess with it? After all, this is how graphics boards are made faster, and come to think of it, even keyboards work this way, so why shouldn't every peripheral do its internal work in the peripheral?
You know, I was about to write some interesting comments I had about VNC, but as I clicked on this story's "Read more" page, I noticed a huge square ad for Microsoft's Visual Studio! What, has Slashdot sold out?!?!? What is going on over here?
Couldn't you just say, "That is irrelevant?" Jeez, why do people use a complicated word when a simpler one will suffice? (It's like the biology book I had back in high school. There was a caption under some picture that said, "The human female reproductive system." I said, "Why couldn't they just say, 'A chick?'"
All software products made by Microsoft have always sucked, currently suck, and will continue to suck forever and ever. That is because at Microsoft, there are about five really excellent programmers who know their stuff, and they are swamped doing 0.000000001% of the work. The remainder of the software is written by 20,000 monkeys sitting at 20,000 keyboards.
Why does this situation exist? It's quite simple: Instead of thoroughly planning and implementing software using good, thorough programming practices and constantly auditing and maintaining that software to the highest standard in the business, Microsoft goes inventing a zillion and one things each day that nobody needs or wants, implements them in a quarter of the time it took for the idea to pass through someone's head, with absolutely
(no) regard for quality, efficiency, reliability, security or size WHATSOEVER. And then, they market it like it's the most secure, stable, feature-packed, inexpensive, high quality piece of software around. And then, it's discovered that the whole software is built like a treehouse attached to a dead tree by a single nail, in a boat in a swimming pool balanced on a tightrope that's held up by two termite-eaten 2x4s which are balancing against a bunch of ping-pong balls stacked on each other 300 high.
Software made by Microsoft is GARBAGE! It's a FACT, not an opinion. DO NOT BUY MICROSOFT'S ERROR-RIDDEN VIRUS-INVITING GARBAGE! USE FREE SOFTWARE INSTEAD!
Listen, folks. The individual is intelligent. People in large numbers are STUPID. But, look at it this way: DIVX. I'm not talking about that new system for video that everyone seems to like. I'm talking about the efforts two or three years ago by a company of lawyers to hijack the growing market for DVD by selling a pay-per-view video disc that you could have on your shelf, but you'd have to pay to watch. Did it take off? Nope. In fact, it was quite a flop, and rightly so. Nobody wants to clutter up their home with discs that they own which contain content they must rent. That's stupid. Just go to the neighborhood video rental joint and pick up whatever movie you want!
DRM is sort of like that. People are gonna get mad... "Why can't I open this stupid file?" Et cetera. And guess what? 99% of the pirates out there are tech-savvy users who know that there are other choices around, like that thing called Linux, and they'll switch from Windows to Linux in a second if it means they can watch the pirated version of whatever for free. And you know what? There won't be any difficulty in obtaining audio, video, pictures or whatever you want. If you can display it on a screen, or play it through speakers, you can record it in whatever format you want. All it takes is for one person in the entire world to do this for a song or movie or whatever and it's out there. DRM is not going to work because it's just plain stupid. We still need to fight, but not against Microsoft. They'll realize the errors of their ways when they're cashing their welfare checks a few years from now. We need to fight against the laws that have already been passed, and those that will be passed, that make copyright, patents and trademark last virtually forever. The limits should be returned to their original values, so that a reasonable number of years after something is published, it becomes public domain so that knowledge and ideas and whatnot in this country can flourish. Not the crap that's going on right now, where the huge crush everybody else, and therefore, widely-used software sucks, because it doesn't have to work properly, and movies suck, because nobody needs to make them intellectually stimulating, etc.
I think the "pro-sumer" market is becoming increasingly important nowadays--to the HUGE advantage of electronic-gizmo and software companies, and seemingly to the disadvantage of the very un-pro "pro-sumer." (As opposed to the yes-pro "pro-sumer"--there is a difference, which I'll explain briefly.)
First, this is because there are a lot of self-proclaimed "experts of everything" out there who follow marketing hype like a dog on a leash. That's what I mean by "un-pro 'pro-sumer.'" You probably know a few in your own neighborhood: They're the kind of person who will state "facts" about any subject, and sound real-darn-confident that their "facts" are as correct as the fabric of space. They're the kind of person who has a copy of every single high-end program there is, don't know how to use it, but convince everybody they know that each of those programs is a critical necessity for enormous success in business (success, that is, that they just don't have, and never will). They're the kind of person who reads PC-World, decides there's some evil sub-organic-half-cyberbeing virus swimming through the Internet, so they install a virus protection program that doesn't work and subsequently firmly believe that they're 100% protected from any and all possible dangers, including blackouts and such. And they read magazines like Entrepreneur and Esquire and consider themselves the world's leading expert on all matters of business, et cetera.
Think I'm making all this up? I happen to know such a person. About five years ago, he tried to convince us that we MUST be on "the Internet" in order to keep our business successful. He went on and on about how our website would advertise our customers and how, by promoting their business, we'd be promoting our own. And he described a system for searching the Internet whereby these dogs run out and fetch the information you're looking for. Yeah. We seated him in front of a computer running Netscape Navigator and asked him to research the subject. He didn't know what to do. So we asked him if he knows how to operate a web browser. He had no idea. In fact, he had never operated any kind of program that communicated with the outside world. Not even gopher, or FTP, or anything! But his lecture sounded SO convincing.
Back to my original point: The "pro-sumer" market is increasingly important for business, especially with the enormous recent growth of the "un-pro expert" high-tech user market (high-tech users, that is, who don't know a "that black screen" from a C-shell).
Another case in point: There are lots of people out there with expensive digital cameras like that Minolta 5.0 megapixel one, who don't know a damn thing about photography and wonder why their pictures of God-knows-what in poor lighting conditions come out fuzzy, or why it's important to prevent shadows from overtaking half of some female's face in a photograph. (Shadows, properly placed on a male's face, and in the proper situation, make him look more masculine, whereas shadows on a female's face always make her look horrible. You don't have to go far to solve this problem--in a sunny outdoor situation, you can even use your camera's built-in flash, at the proper distance, of course. It looks funny, using flash in broad daylight, but it gets rid of the shadows and there's no evidence of flash in the photograph.) They're afraid to "mess up the camera's settings" in fear that all their future pictures will come out weird, and can't figure out why the shutter seemingly clicks twice for a single exposure. And yet, they proudly own the most expensive camera that's in their financial reach. READ: I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THIS! But at least, if you're going to spend $1,000 on Adobe's pro-collection, or $1,200 on a camera, or $999,999,999,999.00 on a Lamborghini Diablo, at least LEARN HOW TO PROPERLY USE WHAT YOU PAID FOR! (On a side note, relating to expensive cameras again: I have an uncle who specified in exacting detail exactly what kind of Nikon camera he needed and which accessories, to open his professional photography business. (Sound familiar?) He dropped something like $4,000 on all the junk, and probably went through two rolls of film in four years.)
I keep digressing from my main point: That the "pro-sumer" market is growing larger with each passing day, because among the five or so real pro-sumers, there are a zillion self-proclaimed experts. That's why companies should continue to make these expensive toys for these folks. So I can laugh when the photographs I take are crystal clear and contain shadows only where I want them, and so I can laugh even more when their "100% protected" computers with Microsoft Outlook on the monitor and angry bulldogs defending the ports (and fetching data) get h4x0rd and my FreeBSD box with the few crappy ipfw rules I slopped together in 30 minutes remains untouched.
DVD is retarded. I hate all the politics surrounding DVD. I don't care that it gives you several gigs on a CD-sized disk. DVD sucks. Stick with CD-ROM.
I sincerely hope that in the next two to three years, Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of market share in its operating system ventures, as well as the respect of nearly all users. In addition, I hope they're forced to release Linux versions of all their major applications, with government-mandated fully documented file formats. And I hope nobody buys those defective programs anyway.
Those theiving marketers at Microsoft are getting exactly what they want. Ok, so they can't sell you the priveledge of licensing their crappy software products because you're a Linux geek, so instead, they'll sell you a piece of garbage hardware product. Sure, they might SAY they don't want hackers messing with the software on that thing, but what they really WANT is for hacking X-Boxes to be the next big fad.
Microsoft generates trash products and makes zillions upon zillions of dollars by selling them to people who have no choice because no other system will get the job done, due to the nature of Microsoft's unethical and illegal business practices over the past 20 years or so. The X-Box is a successful attempt at taking over the video game market and putting all the competition out of business. Next, they'll hit up another market, and before you know it, your dishwasher will be made by Microsoft and your money will have In Microsoft We Trust with Bill Gates' picture where George Washington's used to be. Don't support those evil people by installing perfectly good software on their garbage piece of hardware.
I believe that Apple has a working x86 version of Mac OS X, and furthermore, that they should put it on the market. This operating system is a very real, very strong competitor to Windows XP. (I further believe that Windows XP would never have happened if it wasn't for Apple's bitchen new graphics--when someone at Microsoft saw that for the first time, I bet they shit their pants.) If there's a concern over companies porting their software to the PC platform, Apple needs to make all their existing APIs work on the x86, and should offer to outsource, for application developers, the conversion of assembly level code to x86. (They might offer, for a nominal fee, to find and resolve bugs that result from a change in architecture.)
People are sick of Windows. They're sick of the difficulty in using it. They're sick of the bugs, the problems, and the cost. I think Mac OS X has the opportunity to crush Windows XP.
Uh... excuse me? Tabs allow you to put in 8 spaces for the price of one character. Why waste memory and disk space with thousands upon thousands of spaces when you can cut them down to 1/8 by using tabs? I think you aren't using your noggin.
By the way, *BSD is not dying. Last I checked, some folks are making their living entirely from *BSD.
And Mozilla is a lot shittier than you have described.
Slashdot Mirror
In the beginning, I was telling everybody I know NOT to buy this video game console because it is made by the most evil people on Earth. Then, someone told me that those very same evil people LOSE money on each video game console sold, in the hopes of making it up several times over in sales of video games for the aforementioned machine. Now, suddenly, I think it is a decidedly wonderful idea to buy this product, on one condition--that one does not purchase any video games to go along with it. As a matter of fact, I am now suggesting to everybody that I know that instead of spending two grand on a shiny new computer, they can spend the same amount of money and obtain, oh, six or seven of this machine, onto which they can install and run alternative software, while also doing a good deed by helping to erode the market of the evildoers who manufacture the device to begin with. It is now my firm belief that if an enormous number of good people bought one of these devices every, say, two or three months, then the evildoers can be forced to stop making it altogether, since they cannot possibly force anybody NOT to buy their product, right? Furthermore, any devices built with the intent of protecting the unit from modification can be worked around. So this is a good deal for the whole world.
This is so cool, I am literally jumping for joy! The music industry... Those lying sons of jackals. Those shmucks. Greedy, gray-haired BORING old geezers with no life, looking for ways to USE the general public, to ROB good people of their hard earned money, to make a killing on work they never did. And when their free profits, money that's practically falling out of the sky, start to shrink because consumers can't afford to spend TWENTY DOLLARS on a measly CD containing some measly GARBAGE, they grumble and moan and complain, and point the finger in every direction except at their flawed, greedy, unethical marketing ploy.
I very, VERY strongly hope that this tiny, insignificant, puny little fine, consisting of meager pocket pennies for those evil pieces of TRASH, is only the beginning of the beginning of fines and losses and total, utter, complete failure of their marketing system, leading to the entire recording industry taking a dump, and placing those horrible people back where they belong. I hope this signals the introduction to the COMPLETE AND UTTER CRUMBLING of this evil music industry, which deserves to go out of business for good.
And don't you think for a moment that this will hurt the artists. Those poor artists will find ways to record their music and deliver it to consumers who wish to listen to it, and they will make SIGNIFICANTLY more money when there isn't some enormous bureaucratic music industry ROBBING them of their hard earned money and placing them in the streets. Then, without the caring and nurturing of the EVIL music industry, which has all this time FLAT OUT ROBBED the artists while preaching the gospel, these poor artists won't be so poor anymore. Because they'll find innovative ways to deliver music to consumers at a really low price, without the need to be EVIL like those bad people at the top of the music industry, the artists will prosper and there will be a LOT more money left in consumers' pockets to spend on all sorts of stuff. This will make our economy strong, by circulating the money to people who need it, not to EVIL people in the music industry.
So to the EVIL multinational corporations that make up the EVIL music industry... NANNY NANNY BOO BOO!
They slice a flap out of your eye and flip it open to reveal the material underneath, which they "fix" with the laser. When the flap is closed, it heals almost immediately
Here's the catch: it NEVER heals completely. Think of a deep cut on your skin that looks like it has healed, but breaks open again. The trouble is this: Let's say that ten years after the surgery, you get shot right in the eye with a high-pressure water gun or fire hose or something. Or you get socked in the face in a barroom brawl. Or a ping-pong ball hits you pretty hard. Hell, all it takes is a good smack during a pillow fight. Before LASIK, your eye will likely hurt like hell and the vision will go white for a while, and you'll get a black eye and that sucks. But after LASIK, that flap can break off completely. Obviously, if that happens, you can kiss your vision in that eye goodbye.
And that doesn't account for errors during the surgery. What if the surgery machine runs Windows?
This is my point: BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE. Many people cannot see jack. You at least can see, so yeah, it's a little blurry and glasses tend to fog up and contacts need to be replaced every few days, and it's a real hassle but WHAT IF YOU COULD NOT SEE AT ALL?! I'm sure you'd give give away everything you have to get vision that's half as good as what you have now. Do not be greedy because, yeah, the risks are low but do you really want to take them? I say f.u.c.k. that.
I use BSD. My programs do not employ a mouse. This technology is useless for my purposes.
I hope this helps.
There is another factor to consider in this story. China, like most other far-eastern countries, is known by the U.S. software industry as a "one disc" country due to alleged piracy of commercial software. If this is true, that would mean that, say, 99% of the Chinese got their copy of Windows for free.
If the Chinese get their Windows for free, but prefer to develop their own chip and run a free operating system on it, imagine what that means: That they'd rather undertake enormous expenses to achieve reliable computing than use Microsoft's garbage for free.
Now THAT is an intelligent choice.
Great! They tried to use some technology to prevent piracy, and they're getting SUED! Bwaaaahaaaahaaahaahahahah!!! That's what the evil recording industry deserves!
Not to put anybody down, but if this is a card that must be installed in a computer, why then isn't the software executed on a small microprocessor on the card, relieving the main processor from having to mess with it? After all, this is how graphics boards are made faster, and come to think of it, even keyboards work this way, so why shouldn't every peripheral do its internal work in the peripheral?
You know, I was about to write some interesting comments I had about VNC, but as I clicked on this story's "Read more" page, I noticed a huge square ad for Microsoft's Visual Studio! What, has Slashdot sold out?!?!? What is going on over here?
Couldn't you just say, "That is irrelevant?" Jeez, why do people use a complicated word when a simpler one will suffice? (It's like the biology book I had back in high school. There was a caption under some picture that said, "The human female reproductive system." I said, "Why couldn't they just say, 'A chick?'"
All software products made by Microsoft have always sucked, currently suck, and will continue to suck forever and ever. That is because at Microsoft, there are about five really excellent programmers who know their stuff, and they are swamped doing 0.000000001% of the work. The remainder of the software is written by 20,000 monkeys sitting at 20,000 keyboards.
Why does this situation exist? It's quite simple: Instead of thoroughly planning and implementing software using good, thorough programming practices and constantly auditing and maintaining that software to the highest standard in the business, Microsoft goes inventing a zillion and one things each day that nobody needs or wants, implements them in a quarter of the time it took for the idea to pass through someone's head, with absolutely
(no) regard for quality, efficiency, reliability, security or size WHATSOEVER. And then, they market it like it's the most secure, stable, feature-packed, inexpensive, high quality piece of software around. And then, it's discovered that the whole software is built like a treehouse attached to a dead tree by a single nail, in a boat in a swimming pool balanced on a tightrope that's held up by two termite-eaten 2x4s which are balancing against a bunch of ping-pong balls stacked on each other 300 high.
Software made by Microsoft is GARBAGE! It's a FACT, not an opinion. DO NOT BUY MICROSOFT'S ERROR-RIDDEN VIRUS-INVITING GARBAGE! USE FREE SOFTWARE INSTEAD!
DRM is sort of like that. People are gonna get mad... "Why can't I open this stupid file?" Et cetera. And guess what? 99% of the pirates out there are tech-savvy users who know that there are other choices around, like that thing called Linux, and they'll switch from Windows to Linux in a second if it means they can watch the pirated version of whatever for free. And you know what? There won't be any difficulty in obtaining audio, video, pictures or whatever you want. If you can display it on a screen, or play it through speakers, you can record it in whatever format you want. All it takes is for one person in the entire world to do this for a song or movie or whatever and it's out there. DRM is not going to work because it's just plain stupid. We still need to fight, but not against Microsoft. They'll realize the errors of their ways when they're cashing their welfare checks a few years from now. We need to fight against the laws that have already been passed, and those that will be passed, that make copyright, patents and trademark last virtually forever. The limits should be returned to their original values, so that a reasonable number of years after something is published, it becomes public domain so that knowledge and ideas and whatnot in this country can flourish. Not the crap that's going on right now, where the huge crush everybody else, and therefore, widely-used software sucks, because it doesn't have to work properly, and movies suck, because nobody needs to make them intellectually stimulating, etc.
I think the "pro-sumer" market is becoming increasingly important nowadays--to the HUGE advantage of electronic-gizmo and software companies, and seemingly to the disadvantage of the very un-pro "pro-sumer." (As opposed to the yes-pro "pro-sumer"--there is a difference, which I'll explain briefly.)
First, this is because there are a lot of self-proclaimed "experts of everything" out there who follow marketing hype like a dog on a leash. That's what I mean by "un-pro 'pro-sumer.'" You probably know a few in your own neighborhood: They're the kind of person who will state "facts" about any subject, and sound real-darn-confident that their "facts" are as correct as the fabric of space. They're the kind of person who has a copy of every single high-end program there is, don't know how to use it, but convince everybody they know that each of those programs is a critical necessity for enormous success in business (success, that is, that they just don't have, and never will). They're the kind of person who reads PC-World, decides there's some evil sub-organic-half-cyberbeing virus swimming through the Internet, so they install a virus protection program that doesn't work and subsequently firmly believe that they're 100% protected from any and all possible dangers, including blackouts and such. And they read magazines like Entrepreneur and Esquire and consider themselves the world's leading expert on all matters of business, et cetera.
Think I'm making all this up? I happen to know such a person. About five years ago, he tried to convince us that we MUST be on "the Internet" in order to keep our business successful. He went on and on about how our website would advertise our customers and how, by promoting their business, we'd be promoting our own. And he described a system for searching the Internet whereby these dogs run out and fetch the information you're looking for. Yeah. We seated him in front of a computer running Netscape Navigator and asked him to research the subject. He didn't know what to do. So we asked him if he knows how to operate a web browser. He had no idea. In fact, he had never operated any kind of program that communicated with the outside world. Not even gopher, or FTP, or anything! But his lecture sounded SO convincing.
Back to my original point: The "pro-sumer" market is increasingly important for business, especially with the enormous recent growth of the "un-pro expert" high-tech user market (high-tech users, that is, who don't know a "that black screen" from a C-shell).
Another case in point: There are lots of people out there with expensive digital cameras like that Minolta 5.0 megapixel one, who don't know a damn thing about photography and wonder why their pictures of God-knows-what in poor lighting conditions come out fuzzy, or why it's important to prevent shadows from overtaking half of some female's face in a photograph. (Shadows, properly placed on a male's face, and in the proper situation, make him look more masculine, whereas shadows on a female's face always make her look horrible. You don't have to go far to solve this problem--in a sunny outdoor situation, you can even use your camera's built-in flash, at the proper distance, of course. It looks funny, using flash in broad daylight, but it gets rid of the shadows and there's no evidence of flash in the photograph.) They're afraid to "mess up the camera's settings" in fear that all their future pictures will come out weird, and can't figure out why the shutter seemingly clicks twice for a single exposure. And yet, they proudly own the most expensive camera that's in their financial reach. READ: I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THIS! But at least, if you're going to spend $1,000 on Adobe's pro-collection, or $1,200 on a camera, or $999,999,999,999.00 on a Lamborghini Diablo, at least LEARN HOW TO PROPERLY USE WHAT YOU PAID FOR! (On a side note, relating to expensive cameras again: I have an uncle who specified in exacting detail exactly what kind of Nikon camera he needed and which accessories, to open his professional photography business. (Sound familiar?) He dropped something like $4,000 on all the junk, and probably went through two rolls of film in four years.)
I keep digressing from my main point: That the "pro-sumer" market is growing larger with each passing day, because among the five or so real pro-sumers, there are a zillion self-proclaimed experts. That's why companies should continue to make these expensive toys for these folks. So I can laugh when the photographs I take are crystal clear and contain shadows only where I want them, and so I can laugh even more when their "100% protected" computers with Microsoft Outlook on the monitor and angry bulldogs defending the ports (and fetching data) get h4x0rd and my FreeBSD box with the few crappy ipfw rules I slopped together in 30 minutes remains untouched.
SysAdmining is the most fun job in the world. My shop certainly won't install this stupid N1. :)
Chat sucks.
DVD is retarded. I hate all the politics surrounding DVD. I don't care that it gives you several gigs on a CD-sized disk. DVD sucks. Stick with CD-ROM.
I sincerely hope that in the next two to three years, Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of market share in its operating system ventures, as well as the respect of nearly all users. In addition, I hope they're forced to release Linux versions of all their major applications, with government-mandated fully documented file formats. And I hope nobody buys those defective programs anyway.
Microsoft: Nanny nanny boo boo!
If you've got a little time before going to the can, why don't you flee the country?
Read the subject line.
Those theiving marketers at Microsoft are getting exactly what they want. Ok, so they can't sell you the priveledge of licensing their crappy software products because you're a Linux geek, so instead, they'll sell you a piece of garbage hardware product. Sure, they might SAY they don't want hackers messing with the software on that thing, but what they really WANT is for hacking X-Boxes to be the next big fad.
Microsoft generates trash products and makes zillions upon zillions of dollars by selling them to people who have no choice because no other system will get the job done, due to the nature of Microsoft's unethical and illegal business practices over the past 20 years or so. The X-Box is a successful attempt at taking over the video game market and putting all the competition out of business. Next, they'll hit up another market, and before you know it, your dishwasher will be made by Microsoft and your money will have In Microsoft We Trust with Bill Gates' picture where George Washington's used to be. Don't support those evil people by installing perfectly good software on their garbage piece of hardware.
I think they'll go with the $100,000 method, because it'll be more interesting and fun.
I believe that Apple has a working x86 version of Mac OS X, and furthermore, that they should put it on the market. This operating system is a very real, very strong competitor to Windows XP. (I further believe that Windows XP would never have happened if it wasn't for Apple's bitchen new graphics--when someone at Microsoft saw that for the first time, I bet they shit their pants.) If there's a concern over companies porting their software to the PC platform, Apple needs to make all their existing APIs work on the x86, and should offer to outsource, for application developers, the conversion of assembly level code to x86. (They might offer, for a nominal fee, to find and resolve bugs that result from a change in architecture.)
People are sick of Windows. They're sick of the difficulty in using it. They're sick of the bugs, the problems, and the cost. I think Mac OS X has the opportunity to crush Windows XP.
Uh... excuse me? Tabs allow you to put in 8 spaces for the price of one character. Why waste memory and disk space with thousands upon thousands of spaces when you can cut them down to 1/8 by using tabs? I think you aren't using your noggin.
By the way, *BSD is not dying. Last I checked, some folks are making their living entirely from *BSD.
And Mozilla is a lot shittier than you have described.
quantitatively!