I think the inevitable constant "wazzzzupppp" and "how are yoooooouuuuuuu doing?" that's going to happen at my place is going to drive me to drink, er, more.
This is simply awesome... even the lamest computer dork could score with the marketing chick down the hall if he had one of these bad boys on his desk. Who cares if it's impractical, or whether sitting that close will make you go blind or frazzle your DNA? It seems a small price to pay, really.
When the site hosting all your precious data goes kaput, you can always just offer to buy it all back from the 13 year-old h4X0Rs who've undoubtedly broken in and copied it all anyway. I predict that in the 21st century extortion costs will become just another accepted business expense.
I don't think I've personally lost much in the way of time or effort as a result of a virus, although I've seen my employer get burned a few times (notably with the "I Love You" bug).
Mostly I've been losing my freaking sanity from listening to my uber-geeky previous boss trying to "keep on top" of each virus. He does his own insightful analysis of the thing ("a-ha!this attachment is really a VB script!") He scours the web, digging up all the information that's readily available to anyone who wants to look for it, then spams the entire team for days on end with a torrent of "informative" e-mails that put the original virus to shame.
I bet you all have this same guy working in your office. Admit it, it's probably you.
I bet this is what Osama bin-Laden and the other Bad Men use to carry out their dastardly terrorist plots. Ingenious! Their evil plans have been right under our noses all along! Such simple elegance. I really have to hand it to those wacky nutbars!
That whole "free speech" thing applies to everyone, y'know. It seems to me that in the absence of any legally binding obligations preventing you from talking about your previous employer, then you're free to post whatever you like about them on Yahoo (so long as it's not libellous, af course). By the same token, I see nothing preventing your previous employer from making comments about you on the same message board, or to your new employer (so long as their comments aren't libellous or slanderous). Freedom's a two-way street.
Hmmm, I suppose that's true. Maybe they could embed their nefarious plans in a COBOL program or something. Virtually uncrackable that way, since all the COBOL programmers were killed after that whole Y2K debacle.
Forget encryption, even if you could take it away from the bad men they could always just discuss their evil plans in French or some other non-American language.
Your OS and the software you use doesn't generally have the level of language/localization support you need
You're bombarded with an overwhelming majority of MS Word and Excel documents
The web sites you're talking about are optimized for IE.
I'd suggest knocking off the dogmatic adherence to tools that aren't doing the job for you and switch to something that works. Who cares if it's Microsoft? Blasphemy! It's just software, not religion.
This isn't to advocate the use of Microsoft products for every task, across the board. But my philosophy has always been one of using the right tool for the job. That's why I use Oracle as my database, Apache/Linux for my web server, and IE as my browser. If your assortment of Linux, Netscape and various other non-Microsoft software isn't meeting your needs, then you're foolish to boycott the software that does meet them simply out of spite.
The cops were reportedly looking for "the fruits and instrumentalities of a computer crime." I hope those bad boys in the dorm were like me, and took great pains to hide all their fruits and instrumentalities somewhere safe where the campus pigs won't find them.
Also reported, "they were concerned with possible improper use of a computer system." This begs the obvious question "what exactly constitutes proper use?" If they were officials from Microsoft instead of campus police, they'd probably bust my ass for running Linux on my PC. I bet most of the people at Slashdot would do the same to some weenie trying to wire up a bunch of Windows boxes into a Beowulf cluster. It's all a matter of perspective, really.
I'd use an army of those bad boys to conduct covert ops from my cube. Spying on board meetings at the office, gathering incriminating evidence on my enemies, that sort of thing. I bet if you had enough of them you could use them for more insidious purposes, like political assassinations and infiltrating the dread pirate Napster headquarters. That'd be cool. Wrong, somehow, but cool.
Mind control. The truth is out there. I can't believe they actually fooled me about the whole Soviet Union thing. Of course it's all so clear in retrospect, I mean who's really supposed to believe that it just suddenly collapsed? It never existed in the first place, the whole fall of communism was obviously a concerted manipulation of the press to propagate the myth and keep the populace under control.
Is that dread pirate Napster still alive and running? I stopped paying attention, I mean who'd have thought? Well it's only 2001; by 2005 or 2006 it'll be long gone and the flow of all information will be well on its way to being strictly controlled by the appropriate regulatory bodies, as it should be.
OK, so that's a little facetious. But the "chilling" scenarios described in the article are so ridiculously far-fetched that one can't help but laugh at them. The technology will always exist to record and play back sound and video, no matter what new technologies emerge. And people will always do so, because it's easy and natural and overwhelmingly tempting. It's not something that can be stopped, despite the usual lamentations of the paranoid Slashdot-type conspiracy theorists.
Advice to Mr. Lanier: there comes a time in every man's life when you just have to put the crack pipe down and get some help. Seriously.
Bah, this is nonsense. It doesn't require significantly more keyclicks to convey useful information in a non-HTML format.
Active content doesn't enhance the e-mail experience for most users, nor does it increase their productivity to any measurable extent. For most people, what is important is the actual *content*, the presentation is in most real-world cases a secondary, trivial issue.
Your assertion that "people don't want any extra time or hassle in their emails" has some validity. It's unfortunately in direct opposition to your main argument, however. HTML-based e-mail is larger, slower, potentially a hassle across a heterogeneous array of e-mail clients, and subject to security issues that simply aren't present in standard text-only e-mail.
On the other hand, your assertion that "(business types) are not concerned about privacy issues" is simply naive at best. It's a cutthroat world and business users have things like trade secrets and confidential information to worry about. And I would suspect that most people, in a business environment or otherwise, would like to believe that their e-mail correspondance is private. I'd even go so far as to bet that the majority of users actually *believe* their e-mail is private, and would be upset to find out otherwise.
Disabling HTML in e-mails is not the solution to anything, but your original message was so patently silly that it merited a response. People should simply be better informed about their privacy and the implications of using e-mail. E-mail clients should be proactive about incorporating encryption and other privacy-related methods into themselves to make it easier for people to protect themselves. PGP and its ilk are too much work and hassle for the average user.
Slashdot Mirror
My lame site is the #1 google result for freakishly large penises, among other things. Yay me!
robp
robp
robp
*sigh*
omega_rob -- friend of the dread pirate Napster
Mostly I've been losing my freaking sanity from listening to my uber-geeky previous boss trying to "keep on top" of each virus. He does his own insightful analysis of the thing ("a-ha!this attachment is really a VB script!") He scours the web, digging up all the information that's readily available to anyone who wants to look for it, then spams the entire team for days on end with a torrent of "informative" e-mails that put the original virus to shame.
I bet you all have this same guy working in your office. Admit it, it's probably you.
omega_rob -- friend of the bonsai kitten
omega_rob -- friend of the bonsai kitten
omega_rob
In the meantime, pipe down junior and get me a frickin' coffee.
omega_rob
omega_rob
Curses! Foiled again!
omega_rob
Netscape has trouble with your stuff
Your OS and the software you use doesn't generally have the level of language/localization support you need
You're bombarded with an overwhelming majority of MS Word and Excel documents
The web sites you're talking about are optimized for IE.
I'd suggest knocking off the dogmatic adherence to tools that aren't doing the job for you and switch to something that works. Who cares if it's Microsoft? Blasphemy! It's just software, not religion.
This isn't to advocate the use of Microsoft products for every task, across the board. But my philosophy has always been one of using the right tool for the job. That's why I use Oracle as my database, Apache/Linux for my web server, and IE as my browser. If your assortment of Linux, Netscape and various other non-Microsoft software isn't meeting your needs, then you're foolish to boycott the software that does meet them simply out of spite.
blah.
omega_rob
Also reported, "they were concerned with possible improper use of a computer system." This begs the obvious question "what exactly constitutes proper use?" If they were officials from Microsoft instead of campus police, they'd probably bust my ass for running Linux on my PC. I bet most of the people at Slashdot would do the same to some weenie trying to wire up a bunch of Windows boxes into a Beowulf cluster. It's all a matter of perspective, really.
omega_rob
omega_rob
omega_rob
go north
look
You see a mailbox here.
open mailbox
Inside the mailbox is a leaflet.
take leaflet
Taken.
read leaflet
etc.
So that's how they made Zork work! I always wondered about that when I was a kid, I just assumed it was rocket science. Looks like I was right!
omega_rob
OK, so that's a little facetious. But the "chilling" scenarios described in the article are so ridiculously far-fetched that one can't help but laugh at them. The technology will always exist to record and play back sound and video, no matter what new technologies emerge. And people will always do so, because it's easy and natural and overwhelmingly tempting. It's not something that can be stopped, despite the usual lamentations of the paranoid Slashdot-type conspiracy theorists.
Advice to Mr. Lanier: there comes a time in every man's life when you just have to put the crack pipe down and get some help. Seriously.
omega_rob
Active content doesn't enhance the e-mail experience for most users, nor does it increase their productivity to any measurable extent. For most people, what is important is the actual *content*, the presentation is in most real-world cases a secondary, trivial issue.
Your assertion that "people don't want any extra time or hassle in their emails" has some validity. It's unfortunately in direct opposition to your main argument, however. HTML-based e-mail is larger, slower, potentially a hassle across a heterogeneous array of e-mail clients, and subject to security issues that simply aren't present in standard text-only e-mail.
On the other hand, your assertion that "(business types) are not concerned about privacy issues" is simply naive at best. It's a cutthroat world and business users have things like trade secrets and confidential information to worry about. And I would suspect that most people, in a business environment or otherwise, would like to believe that their e-mail correspondance is private. I'd even go so far as to bet that the majority of users actually *believe* their e-mail is private, and would be upset to find out otherwise.
Disabling HTML in e-mails is not the solution to anything, but your original message was so patently silly that it merited a response. People should simply be better informed about their privacy and the implications of using e-mail. E-mail clients should be proactive about incorporating encryption and other privacy-related methods into themselves to make it easier for people to protect themselves. PGP and its ilk are too much work and hassle for the average user.
omega_rob
omega_rob