how are these metorites of 'martian' origin getting to Earth. Realizing of course that they have shown up here over a course of millions of years, how many times can a planet get hit by something big enough to launch chunks of itself in to space and still be round?
I wonder if years from now we will colonize other worlds and find chunks of 'earthian' meteorites on those planets.
I wonder still is it possible that these meteorites might possibly be from something of martian-like consistancy and not actually from mars?
And lastly I wonder WHERES LEANORD NEMOY AND THE IN SEARCH OF TEAM WHEN YOU NEED THEM! Im sure he/they could answer everything in 30 mins or less.
Well, I actually meant my pizza comment as an anology to the average mean. Most people who do the same job everyday get bored with that job fairly quickly. Even if you love your job, it IS possible to get bored with it.
His comment stating his learning to eat all the pizza toppings while at his pizzaria job only show his dedication to getting the job done.
Secondly, due to the shear number of viewers this site has, I'm sure that there were more then a 'couple of thousand people out there honestly intersted' in what CowboyNeal had to say. This site has worldwide readership, and I personally know near a thousand people that wondered what an 'interview with him would be like/who the hell he was'.
Just because only a fraction of them decided to post, and less then that found it interesting is another matter.
Lastly, I'm not asking you to LIKE the guy, I don't give a damn who you like. Just understand that he is only human. IMHO he happens to commend a great deal of respect for his work and insight with/. (and Everything^2), but he is still only human.
If you actually put up your life for worldwide public inspection, how interesting would you be?
Ahh damn, I'm out of steam... Its late, Im tired.
You just have to understand, hes just a guy. A really smart and insightfull guy maybe, but just a guy. Idolize him, hate him, either way just realize HE'S ONLY HUMAN.
man I hate uniformed bias, be it bias on race, creed, color, religon, belief/opinion, show size, etc...
So far I've read a lot of posts saying how boring CowboyNeal is or how lame he is, and I just want to know...
What did you expect?
SuperPowers? (i can see it now, a big L on his chest and hes Linux Man!)
Mad 70 hour hacking binges against Microsoft?
Stories of his brave adventures in outer space, or his wonderous trips to the bottem of the ocean?
You say boring I say busy. Supporting a website of this size/readership takes many people and LOTS of time.
He said he spends half his day clearing out his inbox, and probably the other half Supporting/. for all of our sorry arse's. No big supprise that is isn't really that excited to talk about his job and/. karma, and so on. Its what he has to deal with ALL DAY. I mean, if you work in a pizziaria, you get sick of pizza fast.
Im wondering exactly how exitcing all of the Lame/Boring post writers are themselves.
Anyway, no offense to all of you, but give the guy a break.
I can see it know, some high up motorola sales exec, with his company bought cellphone, an laptop, flying (private company flight of course because he is REALLY important) from the US to say the UK or Aus. is having a critical buisness conversation to some suit in Japan about something. Hes in a good mood, because his company decided to place thier GPS chipslayer on all motorolla based products to increase thier bottem line (aka he gets a fatter check).
Boom, our hapless exec flies across the international date line and suddenly his tech devices magicly turn in to paperweights and coasters. He looses his deal with the suit in Japan, and then suddenly, before he quite realizes what just happend, he dies of a massive heart attack because his company-paid heart surgery last year involved the implanting of the new high tech Moterolla Super Ticker 3000(tm) Pacemaker!
But dont feel bad for him though, because at least he doesnt know his plane is plumeting out of the sky because his company in its ever striving race to market poorly thought-out ideas also made his jets navigation system.
But at least our exec can die happily knowing those 5000 SuperGamingSystem 2 consoles he sold last week will never reach the shady streats of Beijing or Hong Kong, where they might be sold for (heaven forbid) les then maximum market value .
are you kidding, this is the best thing since sliced bread!
I can see yanking it if it violated one/some of the MESA policies. I don't think its fair but after all, school is not now nor has it ever been a democracy.
But somehow I think that the sentence
"We believe that the science fair is not an appropriate forum for such a complex issue."
falls a little short of the mark. Last time I checked, Sociology was still a (complex) science.
Assuming the project conducted fairly and as acuratly as possible, pulling it (IMHO) was a bad idea. This kind of behavior will get a school or organization nothing but bad press everytime. (hey, maybe some good did come out of it after all!)
Anyway, whether people want to admit it or not society as a whole does have some problems, and sometimes young minds are the ony ones to see them. They should be encouraged to point them out, and try to correct them, not hide ignore them and hope they go away.
if pepsi will pay a near a million dollars to get its product in a key shot in a movie, how much would it(or any company for that matter) pay to have a continious banner streamer on a popular tv show.
money makes the world go round, and it only a matter of time before things like this start happening.
I remember a mod for quake 2 called generations that combined the wolfenstien char, the quake 1 char, and the doom char and Id software threatened to sue the team (to bad too, it was a good mod).
Also, i remember a starwars mod for tribes that was squashed by Lucasarts.
Im sure this happens more then you think.
everyone is patant crazy these days, even if no one was planing on making any money off it in the first place...
there is an international treaty that many nations signed upholding patant rights granted in any of the countries on the list.
i.e. if you get a patant here, and your product is bootlegged in say, the UK, the bootlegger can be prosecuted. very few countries arnt on that treaty. (italy is one, i think new zeland is one, sealand(!) is one, noot sure of the others).
2. make people pay you to test it for you (msdn beta tests)
3. package all the "undocumented features" up in a database, then sell that too (msdn technet)
4. crush anyone who even hints at your product being in any way inferior to any other product.
of course MS told bugtraq to stop, no one is making any money off of it, you just can't respect someone thats just performing a valuable service for free, people like that must be crushed for the good of all capitalism!
if they're not stopped, it will catch on! pretty soon people will be helping other people all over for free! the whole system will break down! it'll be anarchy!!!
this has been a test of the emergency sarcasm system(c) if was an actual rant it would have been followed with a series of flames...
gotta luv MS, just when life is getting dull they do something else worth laughing at.
its been a while since i have been to the site, but from what i remember site patrons, and site controlers (webmasters or whatever) could post bugs that they found on thier own. they might have had to mail them in to Bugtraq for posting or something but i remeber that it could be done.
Does this mean that they aren't allowed to post any MS bugs, sort of like how MS sued that databasing (oracle?) company for publishing test results comparing their product to an MS product?
Or what happens if BugTraq finds publishes a bug, then MS publishes the same bug after words, Is bugtraq at fault for publishing it once MS does so later?
can Bugtraq publish a bug as long as it doesn't publish the exact same document? or does the MS copyright cover like documents under their (IMO rather gray) interpritation of intelectual property laws.
i really don't know the ins and outs of the legal implications of this and I'm curious to see how it applies to other technical consumer watchdog groups.
I support and repect a companies right to profit from things they've made and produced in most cases, but I also think its important for people and groups to be able to criticize a companies product if it is flawed and compare against other similar products by other companies. i suspect its one of the things that drives our countries economic model (im not an economist and dont know for sure) and I think that those watchdog groups are important to keep companies on thier toes.
maybe I'm getting a little extreme in my examples, but can anyone answer my questions?
hmm, for some reason my post is missing some lines. anyway, here is what it should have read.
Make your money the old fashioned way! Sue for it.
everyone is out for the fast buck these days...
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
whine, whine, whine, I'm slighted by the fact that
(insert person/company/organization here)
did the horrible action of
(insert normal harmless action that most people don't mind, and person suing could have easily avoided if they wern't out to make a fast buck)
against me. I fear for my privacy from the mean ol' internet monster, and that fear has left emotionaly scarred. I want 1.7 million for my trouble and, of course, therepy that i'll never go to.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
bah... what a waste. I think I'll go sue the state I live in because trafic lights keep me from getting home in time to catch my favorite tv shows, and then I'll sue McBurgerslingers because they screwed up my order.
Make your money the old fashioned way! Sue for it.
everyone is out for the fast buck these days...
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
whine, whine, whine, I'm slighted by the fact that
did the horrible action of
against me. I fear for my privacy from the mean ol' internet monster, and that fear has left emotionaly scarred. I want 1.7 million for my trouble and, of course, therepy that i'll never go to.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
bah... what a waste. I think I'll go sue the state I live in because trafic lights keep me from getting home in time to catch my favorite tv shows, and then I'll sue McBurgerslingers because they screwed up my order.
Well, I've done all the research I can and here are my results. (Please understand that I do not like Microsoft, but I will try and be objective. Also I do realize that this is only an Option for now.)
OnTopic First: It May be an option now, but do you want to let MS just trend you into submission?
What you really have to ask yourself is do you trust them. Let me present my case.
(Subjective)In the last ten years I have heard a thousand promises from a company that changes its mind on a whim. MS revolutionized the way the world looked at computers, especially for the end user be it business or consumer. But how can you believe a company that has failed to deliver so many times (any programmers remember DX1?).
Some of the problems I see with this company and its policies are:
They always promise big, but deliver small. Windows 95 is so difficult to keep stable that my own mother managed to lock it up every week with out installing anything. Sure it may have been experimental for MS in 95 (*remember plug and pray?*), but should they be able to claim it actually works when they know it only works on a certain 'percent' of the actual users out there?
"Windows Security". Need I say any more?
Hummm... I seem to remember that NSA_KEY thing... Something along the lines of "the reason the NSA_KEY was named in that convention was because it was the key that was sent to the us government for inspection. As long as we and any other company released or encryption techniques to them for inspection we were allowed to export it." (Note: this is not a direct quote, but only what I remember from a MS press release. It is pretty close though.)
I almost forgot about the AWSOME amount of 'undocumented features' that Microsoft allows too be in their programs. Ever tried to call MS support?
This company may have started on good intentions, but good intentions only get so far. Don't get me wrong. They have done a lot of good overall, but only for their own ends. I have worked at companies that choose to go with MS instead of Netscape purely because Internet Explorer was included with windows. (Which I'm sure would have been the opposite if Netscape made OS's, but that is not the point). Microsoft OWNS the most market in history as we stand, and most people don't even know it. Need I site their recent HUGE buy of 25% or so of AT&T stock?
(This is a straight fact) for those who cant draw the line, MS buys 25% of AT&T, who intern owns TCI, who is in a joint venture with Time/Warner (for nationwide broadband market) who is already mergered with AOL. Microsoft publicly still claims that AOL is one reason that MS claims they should not be considered a monopoly.
Is this the company you hope just 'leaves it an option' to restrict an exe (signed or not)?
(Back too subjective) Regardless of what anyone thinks, Microsoft is not going to shoot themselves in the foot. They are very smart, and willing to give the public exactly what it wants as long as it fits in their current company focus.
Even if you don't like what I said here, please research it out for yourselves. Stuff like this is to important to leave your opinions in the hands of others.
Follow the money trail. They wouldn't do anything with out major money backing them.
Listen, I agree that signed drivers are a great boon, but were not talking about video card drivers here. we are talking about EVERY application you use, and EVERY application they use.
From a software development standpoint you can kiss any windows inovation goodbye. You can probably kiss shareware/wareware software goodbuy. For that matter you can probably kiss any independantly developed software goodbye (such as archivers like winzip and browsers like netscape once were.)
It may be an option now, but it raises the bar for other products. Right now its an option, then its a harder to configure option, then its barely an option, then its not an option at all.
that is the grand ability of a company in microsofts position to change things over time.
They don't have any real competition other then linux and with out proper competition, the corperation doesn't have any incentive to care about the end users needs or wants. thus they change things in the direction that best suits themselves, not you or me.
this is also why they stand so fervantly against the open source movement. If they squash Open Source, they squash (or seriously dent) the threat Linux weighs against thier position. I.E. no linux, no competition. No Competiton, no worries.
One thing they will never learn is that they will never win against open source. Open source is an idea that gives the informed (perspectivly) mass populace the ability to handle things themselves. They will never win against an idea like that. Bigger groups have tried, and they have all failed.
in a way it is very much like the social theory of Oppression vs Rebellion that spawns wars and takes down goverments.
You've got to be kidding me.
MS has been trying to unite pc users and buisnesses alike under thier 'one world, one web, one hitlerian software company' thing for years.
hypathetical situation:
Joe kid gets an old copy of Visual Studio from his programmmer friend who just got the new version. (and I don't even know if that is leagal anymore with SW liscencing as it is)
He gets out his new handy dandy learn C++ in 60 secs. "Oh", he says "this hello world program looks nice and easy."
So Joe writes himself up a nice little excecutable and tries to run it.
BOOM - Joe gets a pop up message that says he can't run his new program because it isn't digitally signed, and is potentially dangerous.
"click ok to continue"
poor Joe, just starting out as he is. doesn't even know what a digital signiture is, much less what happened. Joe gets frustrated, Joe quits.
(or better yet, Joe scraps windows and gets Learn Linux in 60 secs...)
Anyway, as a professional programmer myself I have to admit I have manged to compile a countless amount of exe's that locked my system up, or were 'potentially' dangerous due to bugs and such, but I never would have learned the right way to do things, if i hadn't been able to screw up so many times and see the results.
now think of this:
what if this applies to schools. the teacher has to digitally sign every exe that is compiled by his students? Maybe the school will buy 1 'student sig' and let all the students compile under it, potentially having a rogue student reak havok in the schools name.
Worse yet, what if they (they being anyone who would profit from this) put an experation date on that sig. 'uh oh, the time limit on that sig is up, you can't run the application anymore. time to buy a new copy!
I promise you, this is not to protect consumers or make IT jobs easier. If they wanted to make IT jobs easier they would build more stable products, instead of building intentionally faulty products and then packaging the bugs up and selling them to *MS Technet*.
Its a racket and don't let them tell you otherwise.
-
Slashdot Mirror
how are these metorites of 'martian' origin getting to Earth. Realizing of course that they have shown up here over a course of millions of years, how many times can a planet get hit by something big enough to launch chunks of itself in to space and still be round?
I wonder if years from now we will colonize other worlds and find chunks of 'earthian' meteorites on those planets.
I wonder still is it possible that these meteorites might possibly be from something of martian-like consistancy and not actually from mars?
And lastly I wonder WHERES LEANORD NEMOY AND THE IN SEARCH OF TEAM WHEN YOU NEED THEM! Im sure he/they could answer everything in 30 mins or less.
RA7
--
Well, I actually meant my pizza comment as an anology to the average mean. Most people who do the same job everyday get bored with that job fairly quickly. Even if you love your job, it IS possible to get bored with it.
/. (and Everything^2), but he is still only human.
His comment stating his learning to eat all the pizza toppings while at his pizzaria job only show his dedication to getting the job done.
Secondly, due to the shear number of viewers this site has, I'm sure that there were more then a 'couple of thousand people out there honestly intersted' in what CowboyNeal had to say. This site has worldwide readership, and I personally know near a thousand people that wondered what an 'interview with him would be like/who the hell he was'.
Just because only a fraction of them decided to post, and less then that found it interesting is another matter.
Lastly, I'm not asking you to LIKE the guy, I don't give a damn who you like. Just understand that he is only human. IMHO he happens to commend a great deal of respect for his work and insight with
If you actually put up your life for worldwide public inspection, how interesting would you be?
Ahh damn, I'm out of steam... Its late, Im tired.
You just have to understand, hes just a guy. A really smart and insightfull guy maybe, but just a guy. Idolize him, hate him, either way just realize HE'S ONLY HUMAN.
man I hate uniformed bias, be it bias on race, creed, color, religon, belief/opinion, show size, etc...
Goodnight all,
RA7
-
So far I've read a lot of posts saying how boring CowboyNeal is or how lame he is, and I just want to know...
/. for all of our sorry arse's. No big supprise that is isn't really that excited to talk about his job and /. karma, and so on. Its what he has to deal with ALL DAY. I mean, if you work in a pizziaria, you get sick of pizza fast.
What did you expect?
SuperPowers? (i can see it now, a big L on his chest and hes Linux Man!)
Mad 70 hour hacking binges against Microsoft?
Stories of his brave adventures in outer space, or his wonderous trips to the bottem of the ocean?
You say boring I say busy. Supporting a website of this size/readership takes many people and LOTS of time.
He said he spends half his day clearing out his inbox, and probably the other half Supporting
Im wondering exactly how exitcing all of the Lame/Boring post writers are themselves.
Anyway, no offense to all of you, but give the guy a break.
RAL
-
I think this is a GREAT idea!
I can see it know, some high up motorola sales exec, with his company bought cellphone, an laptop, flying (private company flight of course because he is REALLY important) from the US to say the UK or Aus. is having a critical buisness conversation to some suit in Japan about something. Hes in a good mood, because his company decided to place thier GPS chipslayer on all motorolla based products to increase thier bottem line (aka he gets a fatter check).
Boom, our hapless exec flies across the international date line and suddenly his tech devices magicly turn in to paperweights and coasters. He looses his deal with the suit in Japan, and then suddenly, before he quite realizes what just happend, he dies of a massive heart attack because his company-paid heart surgery last year involved the implanting of the new high tech Moterolla Super Ticker 3000(tm) Pacemaker!
But dont feel bad for him though, because at least he doesnt know his plane is plumeting out of the sky because his company in its ever striving race to market poorly thought-out ideas also made his jets navigation system.
But at least our exec can die happily knowing those 5000 SuperGamingSystem 2 consoles he sold last week will never reach the shady streats of Beijing or Hong Kong, where they might be sold for (heaven forbid) les then maximum market value .
are you kidding, this is the best thing since sliced bread!
-RA7-
afraid your wrong on this one, any goverment anywhere can legislate anything they damn well want too.
Enforcing it is another matter entirly.
I can see yanking it if it violated one/some of the MESA policies. I don't think its fair but after all, school is not now nor has it ever been a democracy.
But somehow I think that the sentence
"We believe that the science fair is not an appropriate forum for such a complex issue."
falls a little short of the mark. Last time I checked, Sociology was still a (complex) science.
Assuming the project conducted fairly and as acuratly as possible, pulling it (IMHO) was a bad idea. This kind of behavior will get a school or organization nothing but bad press everytime. (hey, maybe some good did come out of it after all!)
Anyway, whether people want to admit it or not society as a whole does have some problems, and sometimes young minds are the ony ones to see them. They should be encouraged to point them out, and try to correct them, not hide ignore them and hope they go away.
When will we ever learn...
RA7
-
Now this may be a dumb question, but what is a zerosum game as opposed to a non-zerosum game?
Hooray! A new potential bioweapon!
If you can't fight your opponent, breed him out of existance.
Wow, there are so many exciting ways to die on this planet.
-
tell me you can't see this one happening.
if pepsi will pay a near a million dollars to get its product in a key shot in a movie, how much would it(or any company for that matter) pay to have a continious banner streamer on a popular tv show.
money makes the world go round, and it only a matter of time before things like this start happening.
"Unless you're running an ad blocker proxy, it's going to get really hard to ignore ads on the web soon."
Like bloody hell.
If there is anything that time has proven with the Internet, its that if it can be done it can be undone.
the day sites start using ads like this, someone will find a way to circumvent them. I'm not worried.
-
I remember a mod for quake 2 called generations that combined the wolfenstien char, the quake 1 char, and the doom char and Id software threatened to sue the team (to bad too, it was a good mod).
Also, i remember a starwars mod for tribes that was squashed by Lucasarts.
Im sure this happens more then you think.
everyone is patant crazy these days, even if no one was planing on making any money off it in the first place...
oh well.
-
there is an international treaty that many nations signed upholding patant rights granted in any of the countries on the list.
i.e. if you get a patant here, and your product is bootlegged in say, the UK, the bootlegger can be prosecuted. very few countries arnt on that treaty. (italy is one, i think new zeland is one, sealand(!) is one, noot sure of the others).
-
Its the perfect buisness model i tell you.
1. quickly through togeather a piece of software
2. make people pay you to test it for you (msdn beta tests)
3. package all the "undocumented features" up in a database, then sell that too (msdn technet)
4. crush anyone who even hints at your product being in any way inferior to any other product.
of course MS told bugtraq to stop, no one is making any money off of it, you just can't respect someone thats just performing a valuable service for free, people like that must be crushed for the good of all capitalism!
if they're not stopped, it will catch on! pretty soon people will be helping other people all over for free! the whole system will break down! it'll be anarchy!!!
this has been a test of the emergency sarcasm system(c) if was an actual rant it would have been followed with a series of flames...
gotta luv MS, just when life is getting dull they do something else worth laughing at.
RA7
-
its been a while since i have been to the site, but from what i remember site patrons, and site controlers (webmasters or whatever) could post bugs that they found on thier own. they might have had to mail them in to Bugtraq for posting or something but i remeber that it could be done.
Does this mean that they aren't allowed to post any MS bugs, sort of like how MS sued that databasing (oracle?) company for publishing test results comparing their product to an MS product?
Or what happens if BugTraq finds publishes a bug, then MS publishes the same bug after words, Is bugtraq at fault for publishing it once MS does so later?
can Bugtraq publish a bug as long as it doesn't publish the exact same document? or does the MS copyright cover like documents under their (IMO rather gray) interpritation of intelectual property laws.
i really don't know the ins and outs of the legal implications of this and I'm curious to see how it applies to other technical consumer watchdog groups.
I support and repect a companies right to profit from things they've made and produced in most cases, but I also think its important for people and groups to be able to criticize a companies product if it is flawed and compare against other similar products by other companies. i suspect its one of the things that drives our countries economic model (im not an economist and dont know for sure) and I think that those watchdog groups are important to keep companies on thier toes.
maybe I'm getting a little extreme in my examples, but can anyone answer my questions?
-RA7
guess its not a Buck Rogers reference after all...
oh well.
-
I think this quote is in reference to Buck Rogers.
1999 was the year he was shot in to space and lost/frozen, only to be found/thawed in the 21st century.
-
hmm, for some reason my post is missing some lines. anyway, here is what it should have read.
Make your money the old fashioned way! Sue for it.
everyone is out for the fast buck these days...
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
whine, whine, whine, I'm slighted by the fact that
(insert person/company/organization here)
did the horrible action of
(insert normal harmless action that most people don't mind, and person suing could have easily avoided if they wern't out to make a fast buck)
against me. I fear for my privacy from the mean ol' internet monster, and that fear has left emotionaly scarred. I want 1.7 million for my trouble and, of course, therepy that i'll never go to.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
bah... what a waste. I think I'll go sue the state I live in because trafic lights keep me from getting home in time to catch my favorite tv shows, and then I'll sue McBurgerslingers because they screwed up my order.
Lifes rough, get a f*cking helmet.
-
Make your money the old fashioned way! Sue for it.
everyone is out for the fast buck these days...
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
whine, whine, whine, I'm slighted by the fact that
did the horrible action of
against me. I fear for my privacy from the mean ol' internet monster, and that fear has left emotionaly scarred. I want 1.7 million for my trouble and, of course, therepy that i'll never go to.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
bah... what a waste. I think I'll go sue the state I live in because trafic lights keep me from getting home in time to catch my favorite tv shows, and then I'll sue McBurgerslingers because they screwed up my order.
Lifes rough, get a f*cking helmet.
-
Well, I've done all the research I can and here are my results. (Please understand that I do not like Microsoft, but I will try and be objective. Also I do realize that this is only an Option for now.)
OnTopic First: It May be an option now, but do you want to let MS just trend you into submission?
What you really have to ask yourself is do you trust them. Let me present my case.
(Subjective)In the last ten years I have heard a thousand promises from a company that changes its mind on a whim. MS revolutionized the way the world looked at computers, especially for the end user be it business or consumer. But how can you believe a company that has failed to deliver so many times (any programmers remember DX1?).
Some of the problems I see with this company and its policies are:
They always promise big, but deliver small. Windows 95 is so difficult to keep stable that my own mother managed to lock it up every week with out installing anything. Sure it may have been experimental for MS in 95 (*remember plug and pray?*), but should they be able to claim it actually works when they know it only works on a certain 'percent' of the actual users out there?
"Windows Security". Need I say any more?
Hummm... I seem to remember that NSA_KEY thing... Something along the lines of "the reason the NSA_KEY was named in that convention was because it was the key that was sent to the us government for inspection. As long as we and any other company released or encryption techniques to them for inspection we were allowed to export it." (Note: this is not a direct quote, but only what I remember from a MS press release. It is pretty close though.)
I almost forgot about the AWSOME amount of 'undocumented features' that Microsoft allows too be in their programs. Ever tried to call MS support?
This company may have started on good intentions, but good intentions only get so far. Don't get me wrong. They have done a lot of good overall, but only for their own ends. I have worked at companies that choose to go with MS instead of Netscape purely because Internet Explorer was included with windows. (Which I'm sure would have been the opposite if Netscape made OS's, but that is not the point). Microsoft OWNS the most market in history as we stand, and most people don't even know it. Need I site their recent HUGE buy of 25% or so of AT&T stock?
(This is a straight fact) for those who cant draw the line, MS buys 25% of AT&T, who intern owns TCI, who is in a joint venture with Time/Warner (for nationwide broadband market) who is already mergered with AOL. Microsoft publicly still claims that AOL is one reason that MS claims they should not be considered a monopoly.
Is this the company you hope just 'leaves it an option' to restrict an exe (signed or not)?
(Back too subjective) Regardless of what anyone thinks, Microsoft is not going to shoot themselves in the foot. They are very smart, and willing to give the public exactly what it wants as long as it fits in their current company focus.
Even if you don't like what I said here, please research it out for yourselves. Stuff like this is to important to leave your opinions in the hands of others.
Follow the money trail. They wouldn't do anything with out major money backing them.
that was supposed to say "You can probably kiss shareware/freeware software goodbuy."
Listen, I agree that signed drivers are a great boon, but were not talking about video card drivers here. we are talking about EVERY application you use, and EVERY application they use.
From a software development standpoint you can kiss any windows inovation goodbye. You can probably kiss shareware/wareware software goodbuy. For that matter you can probably kiss any independantly developed software goodbye (such as archivers like winzip and browsers like netscape once were.)
ILOVEYOU and MELISSA were both visual basic scripts (not exe's). Macro visuses that only ran because outlook runs them automaticly.
-
It may be an option now, but it raises the bar for other products. Right now its an option, then its a harder to configure option, then its barely an option, then its not an option at all.
that is the grand ability of a company in microsofts position to change things over time.
They don't have any real competition other then linux and with out proper competition, the corperation doesn't have any incentive to care about the end users needs or wants. thus they change things in the direction that best suits themselves, not you or me.
this is also why they stand so fervantly against the open source movement. If they squash Open Source, they squash (or seriously dent) the threat Linux weighs against thier position. I.E. no linux, no competition. No Competiton, no worries.
One thing they will never learn is that they will never win against open source. Open source is an idea that gives the informed (perspectivly) mass populace the ability to handle things themselves. They will never win against an idea like that. Bigger groups have tried, and they have all failed.
in a way it is very much like the social theory of Oppression vs Rebellion that spawns wars and takes down goverments.
its all very facinating to me...
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if we were idiots we wouldn't read slashdot.
Personally I refuse to run Windows 2k. I don't trust it. at least with 95/98 I know most of whats going on in my machine.
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You've got to be kidding me. MS has been trying to unite pc users and buisnesses alike under thier 'one world, one web, one hitlerian software company' thing for years. hypathetical situation: Joe kid gets an old copy of Visual Studio from his programmmer friend who just got the new version. (and I don't even know if that is leagal anymore with SW liscencing as it is) He gets out his new handy dandy learn C++ in 60 secs. "Oh", he says "this hello world program looks nice and easy." So Joe writes himself up a nice little excecutable and tries to run it. BOOM - Joe gets a pop up message that says he can't run his new program because it isn't digitally signed, and is potentially dangerous. "click ok to continue" poor Joe, just starting out as he is. doesn't even know what a digital signiture is, much less what happened. Joe gets frustrated, Joe quits. (or better yet, Joe scraps windows and gets Learn Linux in 60 secs...) Anyway, as a professional programmer myself I have to admit I have manged to compile a countless amount of exe's that locked my system up, or were 'potentially' dangerous due to bugs and such, but I never would have learned the right way to do things, if i hadn't been able to screw up so many times and see the results. now think of this: what if this applies to schools. the teacher has to digitally sign every exe that is compiled by his students? Maybe the school will buy 1 'student sig' and let all the students compile under it, potentially having a rogue student reak havok in the schools name. Worse yet, what if they (they being anyone who would profit from this) put an experation date on that sig. 'uh oh, the time limit on that sig is up, you can't run the application anymore. time to buy a new copy! I promise you, this is not to protect consumers or make IT jobs easier. If they wanted to make IT jobs easier they would build more stable products, instead of building intentionally faulty products and then packaging the bugs up and selling them to *MS Technet*. Its a racket and don't let them tell you otherwise. -