"[MS VP Peter] Moore said that the OS landscape is set to undergo a particularly drastic change of face.
'Let's be fair. Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with Windows on it and driving back and popping it in the drive and having your computer pwned within 5 minutes will be ridiculous,' Moore said. 'We'll tell our grandchildren that and they'll laugh at us.'"
I listen to a lot of non-mainstream stuff, including plenty of prentious progressive crap that makes me feel superior to all those mouth-breathers fawning over Mariah Carey and Eminem;-). However, I am of the opinion that a lot of the stuff I listen, could... and would be a lot more popular if the music industry was based on merit, i.e., what people would _really_ like if they were just exposed to it, than the marketing-driven, payola pap machine that it is. Manufactured taste in music has been around since the 50's, but until recently, you could always rely on great DJs and flexible programming directors to expose lots of cool stuff that _wasn't_ coming from the Pop Music Factories. Nowadays, DJ's seem to only exist to irritate you between commercials and programming directors are all playing off of the same script written by some corporate focus-group-weilding weenie with a bad hairpieces, a degree in communication, who spells the word pronounced "looz" as "loose" and who hasn't listened to any music since The New Kids on the Block.
Is music fundamentally worse now than, say, in the 70's? Heck, no. There's more great music coming out now than in any time in my 30 years or so of listening to music, it's just that you don't hear about most of it. Is radio, and music marketing, fundamentally worse now than in the 70's? Absolutely. Newt Minow's "vast wasteland" (or Sideshow Bob's "bottomless chum bucket") is nothing compared to commercial radio since the early 90's.
For homework, I want you to listen to the following songs about the radio and the music industry in general:
Vinyl Kings - Bang Bang Dream Theater - Just Let Me Breathe XTC - Funk-pop-a-roll
ConceptJunkie
NP: Swedish Family (not just prententious self-indulgent 70's crap, but fake pretentious self-iundulgent 70's crap - I love it!)
Re:Of course time travel is possible!
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Unfortunately, "decent" doesn't equal "good" or "qualified".
An investment banker killing a gay a colleague over a promotion isn't going to keep gay people from becoming bankers
No, but it might make his other colleagues leary of getting promotions.
Different circumstances, same result, if you ask me. The "magical" difference in your examples seems to be that "sacred" attribute of being gay.
You can't hate someone for getting a promotion? I don't think so.
You see the problem with "hate crimes" is that some reasons for committing a crime are supposedly worse than other reasons for committing a crime and carry stiffer penalties. If you ask me, murder is murder. The only circumstances that matter are those that distinguish first-degree from second, and so on. But now there's suddenly another extenuating circumstance that exists entirely inside the head of the attacker (above and beyond intent).
In other words, a "hate crime" is a bona fide George Orwell vintage THOUGHTCRIME.
I can commit a "Hate Crime" against a gay person. But what about a straight person? What about a Republican? What about a gun owner? What about a rich person? Just what separates this totally novel kind of crime from all the things people have doing to each other since the founding of the Republic?
Can I commit a hate crime against a random person? If not, why not. How is premeditated murder of a business partner to get his money less bad than premeditated murder against someone who is, say, black, or white, or a Microsoft user or a CEO of SCO?
How long until it's just the thought by itself that's a crime? After all, if you subtract the murders from the two cases above, you still have punishment left over. Punishment for what?
There are a lot of people who would love to expand the idea of "hate crimes" to cover mere thoughts. If that weren't true, hate crimes in and of themselves wouldn't exist. If I assault or even murder someone, does it really make a difference if I did it because of "hate" as opposed to say "anger" or "greed" or "fun"?
Not to take anything away from your list, but at this point in Clinton's administration, a good chunk of his Cabinet was either under investigation, being indicted or had already resigned because of the former two. And a number of these people were bureaucratic hacks who had no business being appointed to their posts (Warren Christopher, anyone?)
Cronyism isn't anything new and isn't any worse now than its ever been.
If anything maybe Microsoft is a bit too thorough with their patches, in some ways at least.
Perhaps the reason for this is that everything in Windows is so grotesquely interdependent that MS is forced to do a full regression test on the entire OS for every little fix. When's the last time replacing your windshield wipers caused your car not to start up?
Yeah, well most drivers do that on a minute by minute basis, so there's no problem. Besides, if you are driving correctly, it's hard for there to be probable cause that you are, in fact, impaired.
the Greeks appeared to have a greater understanding of the concept of love than we do in America
ObSimpsonsQuote: Discus Stu has ouzo for two-zo.
I think we understand it plenty well, we just don't have a bunch of different words for it. On the whole, the language gets bigger all the time. Of course, I would guess that the average American's vocabulary is smaller than 50 years ago, and much smaller than 100 years ago.
Now I have to get back to deciding if my love of the music of Spock's Beard is agape or eros.
Money comes first. Votes come second, but only because the best way to get votes is money. Image comes third. Paying off your rich friends who got you into office comes 4th. Legislative tasks are somewhere behind "Task #17: Donuts"
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
on
No Anti-Virus in Vista
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· Score: 4, Funny
I don't know either, but I wish/. could let you give a -5 score to any posting with "virii" in it.
Oh, the 19th-century and early 20th were nightmares compared to today, no doubt. You could sell anything for any reason and the only thing people had to go on was if someone keeled over after using the product.
The FDA and other government regulatory bodies are overall a Very Good Thing. The problem is that like any bureaucracy, they succumbs to political and financial pressures. Plus the manufacturers themselves aren't always the most vigilant when it comes to finding problems with products that are (or could be) making them boatloads of cash.
That's not good enough, because the challengers are almost always a member of the Big Duopoly of Republicrats or Democans who will only perpetuate the problem.:-(
Kennedy's opposed to anything unless it gets him re-elected or puts more booze in his voluminous gullet. There are politicians I disagree with but can still respect, but he's nothing but a self-serving drunk.
Contamination is one factor. I bet additives are another huge factor. I bet there are more artificial additives, especially colors and flavors, than there were in the 60's, when things were supposed to be so much worse.
I wouldn't be surprised that the chemicals deliberately added to our food are as bad, or worse, than the chemicals that are contaminating our food from pollution and other factors. And even without things like MSG (under many, many names) and artificial colors, etc, there is the incredible preponderance of sugar (again, under many names), trans fats, and many other ways we are poisoning ourselves (me too, I'm not health food nut even if I try to eat reasonably) because it's cheap, convenient and it tastes good.
Of course, since this is in the UK, maybe it could be from all that kidney pie.
Re:Straight to DVD very common now
on
Toy Story 3 Scrapped
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hollywood has always only been about dead presidents.
Yeah, but they used to be about getting dead presidents by delivering quality entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
"[MS VP Peter] Moore said that the OS landscape is set to undergo a particularly drastic change of face.
'Let's be fair. Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with Windows on it and driving back and popping it in the drive and having your computer pwned within 5 minutes will be ridiculous,' Moore said. 'We'll tell our grandchildren that and they'll laugh at us.'"
Of course it's slow. Turn on the indexing service. Then search will be wicked fast. Of course, everything else will be slow.
I listen to a lot of non-mainstream stuff, including plenty of prentious progressive crap that makes me feel superior to all those mouth-breathers fawning over Mariah Carey and Eminem ;-). However, I am of the opinion that a lot of the stuff I listen, could... and would be a lot more popular if the music industry was based on merit, i.e., what people would _really_ like if they were just exposed to it, than the marketing-driven, payola pap machine that it is. Manufactured taste in music has been around since the 50's, but until recently, you could always rely on great DJs and flexible programming directors to expose lots of cool stuff that _wasn't_ coming from the Pop Music Factories. Nowadays, DJ's seem to only exist to irritate you between commercials and programming directors are all playing off of the same script written by some corporate focus-group-weilding weenie with a bad hairpieces, a degree in communication, who spells the word pronounced "looz" as "loose" and who hasn't listened to any music since The New Kids on the Block.
Is music fundamentally worse now than, say, in the 70's? Heck, no. There's more great music coming out now than in any time in my 30 years or so of listening to music, it's just that you don't hear about most of it. Is radio, and music marketing, fundamentally worse now than in the 70's? Absolutely. Newt Minow's "vast wasteland" (or Sideshow Bob's "bottomless chum bucket") is nothing compared to commercial radio since the early 90's.
For homework, I want you to listen to the following songs about the radio and the music industry in general:
Vinyl Kings - Bang Bang
Dream Theater - Just Let Me Breathe
XTC - Funk-pop-a-roll
ConceptJunkie
NP: Swedish Family (not just prententious self-indulgent 70's crap, but fake pretentious self-iundulgent 70's crap - I love it!)
Unfortunately, "decent" doesn't equal "good" or "qualified".
An investment banker killing a gay a colleague over a promotion isn't going to keep gay people from becoming bankers
No, but it might make his other colleagues leary of getting promotions.
Different circumstances, same result, if you ask me. The "magical" difference in your examples seems to be that "sacred" attribute of being gay.
You can't hate someone for getting a promotion? I don't think so.
You see the problem with "hate crimes" is that some reasons for committing a crime are supposedly worse than other reasons for committing a crime and carry stiffer penalties. If you ask me, murder is murder. The only circumstances that matter are those that distinguish first-degree from second, and so on. But now there's suddenly another extenuating circumstance that exists entirely inside the head of the attacker (above and beyond intent).
In other words, a "hate crime" is a bona fide George Orwell vintage THOUGHTCRIME.
I can commit a "Hate Crime" against a gay person. But what about a straight person? What about a Republican? What about a gun owner? What about a rich person? Just what separates this totally novel kind of crime from all the things people have doing to each other since the founding of the Republic?
Can I commit a hate crime against a random person? If not, why not. How is premeditated murder of a business partner to get his money less bad than premeditated murder against someone who is, say, black, or white, or a Microsoft user or a CEO of SCO?
How long until it's just the thought by itself that's a crime? After all, if you subtract the murders from the two cases above, you still have punishment left over. Punishment for what?
There are a lot of people who would love to expand the idea of "hate crimes" to cover mere thoughts. If that weren't true, hate crimes in and of themselves wouldn't exist. If I assault or even murder someone, does it really make a difference if I did it because of "hate" as opposed to say "anger" or "greed" or "fun"?
No, I think a lot of their buffer overflows are still done in-house.
They do probably outsource the coding for things that work.
Not to take anything away from your list, but at this point in Clinton's administration, a good chunk of his Cabinet was either under investigation, being indicted or had already resigned because of the former two. And a number of these people were bureaucratic hacks who had no business being appointed to their posts (Warren Christopher, anyone?)
Cronyism isn't anything new and isn't any worse now than its ever been.
If anything maybe Microsoft is a bit too thorough with their patches, in some ways at least.
Perhaps the reason for this is that everything in Windows is so grotesquely interdependent that MS is forced to do a full regression test on the entire OS for every little fix. When's the last time replacing your windshield wipers caused your car not to start up?
Sorry for typo, it is Slackware, there is no "Slashdot" linux :)
./ Linux 1.0 beta 1 (code name "Frost Pist" is coming soon).
I hear
Linus is a reformer whereas RMS is a revolutionary?
Yeah, you can't build a planet unless you can walk on stuff in a vacuum.
Who says God couldn't subcontract to the ambphibians... um... reptiles. Which one are they anyway?
It's not the semantic difference, it's the acromym, which is a very crude slang term for a part of the female anatomy in American English.
And -5 Unfunny if you ask me.
Maybe the geckos are the Intelligent Designers.
You actually have to commit an infraction
Yeah, well most drivers do that on a minute by minute basis, so there's no problem. Besides, if you are driving correctly, it's hard for there to be probable cause that you are, in fact, impaired.
the Greeks appeared to have a greater understanding of the concept of love than we do in America
ObSimpsonsQuote: Discus Stu has ouzo for two-zo.
I think we understand it plenty well, we just don't have a bunch of different words for it. On the whole, the language gets bigger all the time. Of course, I would guess that the average American's vocabulary is smaller than 50 years ago, and much smaller than 100 years ago.
Now I have to get back to deciding if my love of the music of Spock's Beard is agape or eros.
Man, that's the best version of the Latin plural rule I've ever seen.
+1 Funny
Money comes first. Votes come second, but only because the best way to get votes is money. Image comes third. Paying off your rich friends who got you into office comes 4th. Legislative tasks are somewhere behind "Task #17: Donuts"
I don't know either, but I wish /. could let you give a -5 score to any posting with "virii" in it.
Oh, the 19th-century and early 20th were nightmares compared to today, no doubt. You could sell anything for any reason and the only thing people had to go on was if someone keeled over after using the product.
The FDA and other government regulatory bodies are overall a Very Good Thing. The problem is that like any bureaucracy, they succumbs to political and financial pressures. Plus the manufacturers themselves aren't always the most vigilant when it comes to finding problems with products that are (or could be) making them boatloads of cash.
That's not good enough, because the challengers are almost always a member of the Big Duopoly of Republicrats or Democans who will only perpetuate the problem. :-(
Kennedy's opposed to anything unless it gets him re-elected or puts more booze in his voluminous gullet. There are politicians I disagree with but can still respect, but he's nothing but a self-serving drunk.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no mention of "B-movies" before 1998.
Huh? On what do you base this spurious fact?
Contamination is one factor. I bet additives are another huge factor. I bet there are more artificial additives, especially colors and flavors, than there were in the 60's, when things were supposed to be so much worse.
I wouldn't be surprised that the chemicals deliberately added to our food are as bad, or worse, than the chemicals that are contaminating our food from pollution and other factors. And even without things like MSG (under many, many names) and artificial colors, etc, there is the incredible preponderance of sugar (again, under many names), trans fats, and many other ways we are poisoning ourselves (me too, I'm not health food nut even if I try to eat reasonably) because it's cheap, convenient and it tastes good.
Of course, since this is in the UK, maybe it could be from all that kidney pie.
Hollywood has always only been about dead presidents.
Yeah, but they used to be about getting dead presidents by delivering quality entertainment.