Assuming you've had problems with the stability yourself (otherwise you have no right to be pissed) - Have you analyzed the bluescreens? Chances are it's a driver issue. How about patches - are you up to date? If not then who is really to blame here? Can you say that it's false advertising just because you might have a crappy 3rd party driver that bugs out all the time? That's not MS code, that's someone else's fault. And after a crash do you submit the results back via the online crash analysis dialog that pops up after you reboot (i.e. "report this problem to MS")? If not then it's possible that MS hadn't had a report on that crash yet. If they don't know about it they can't fix it and you don't have any right getting pissed. Have your ruled out faulty HW? You didn't say anything to this effect in your post.
Yes I have actually had the problems myself, belive me I wouldn't be getting all worked up over other peoples problems:) I don't have a crappy 3rd party driver running, every driver installed was installed by XP installation and is therefore "signed" by MS. Thats with the exception of the new NVidia drivers, but it was crashing before then. I doubt it's faulty hardware, mainly because it doesn't crash when I'm running linux. Of course the only way to know for sure it to start replacing every bit of hardware individually and I'm not willing to do that. I'll be updrading soon to at least a new MB/CPU/RAM/SOUND so if I'm lucky it will be a hardware fault and it'll be solved.
I moved to XP because I was told it was better for games. Really I only use windows for gaming and some internet stuff so having the compatibility with some older games was important.
I use NT at work and I can't remember the last time I had a crash with it, certainly haven't had anything bring down the system. Then again I do most of my work in telnet sessions to solaris these days...
I'm a professional software developer. I work for a very large computer company (not ms). We all try pretty hard to get rid of bugs in programs, hell as programmers we do care that our code is as bug free as possible, it's a pride thing - as well as being good for business. Unfortunately there's no way to produce software which is bug free, just not possible today. Well perhaps with the exception of hello world:) However it is possible to lower the amount of problems you are willing to invest a lot more money into testing which in turn ends up costing the users a lot more money (yes I'm sure there will be replies saying open source can solve this problem; more eyes find bugs quicker etc etc etc but a lot of people are still not going to consider open source solutions).
I don't think software producers should be responsible unless it's shown they are grossly neglegent and even then they are not neccessarily responsible. Otherwise amer^H^H^H^H people are probably just going to start suing people stupid leading to massive rises in software prices. OTOH when I use windows it pisses me off when it crashes, it I upgraded from 95 to Xp a few months ago. MS says XP is rock stable, hardly ever crashes, bullshit. The lies in advertising piss me off more than the crashes themselves - false advertising that is something I'd like to see them punished for.
It's also important to remember the flip side of this - native English speakers need to be able to understand the heavily accented and mangled English of non-native speakers. In some ways this is harder than learning Int'l English - the non-native speakers only need to learn one language, we have to learn dozens of varients.
Don't forget that a lot of non-native speakers have to learn these accents as well, i.e. any air-traffic controllers in countries which don't have English as their primary language. So in the end I would say it's easier on natural English speakers as opposed to those who don't have English as their first language.
What do you expect? You were giving away these movies ripping the copyright owners off!
I think this article is interesting because it's often fun to see big companies get screwed *legaly*, but you live in a country where the distribution is illegal. You can't just decide which laws you want to obey and which you don't, that's just not how society works.
Note that even though NZ is often quote'd as being against region coding that I have never heard anything done about it here. We still sell coded DVD drives all over the place. Most of the movies in video stores are doubled up with region 1 and region 4 copies because not many people actually have region free DVD drives, and if you use WinDVD or PowerDVD these enforce region codes themselves. (Yes I know I can use DVD Genie but most people won't)
Just because they contain some software elements, that doesn't make them software. If I bought a music CD and it had a data track on it with some pictures/videos of the band I would still consider it a music CD, not software. Why? because the main reason I bought it was the music, why do I consider DVDs to be films and not software because the main reason I bought it was to watch a movie. Adding a level of interactivity doesn't change it into software, hell my TV has menus - guess my TV must really only be a piece of software, fuck look I found a menu on the internet - the Internet must be software then.
I've come accross people that have lost the root password before, no big deal really. You can boot the system from cdrom and modify the passwd/shadow files from there.
I haven't made this work yet, I live in New Zealand where the mobile phone business isn't as competitive as it might be (read: 2 networks countrywide) so the top-line phones are too expensive to justify at the moment.
what GPS mobile phone(s) offer the ability to automatically SMS a location?
I don't know but I'm assuming (perhaps falsely) that these phones will be somewhat programmable, therefore it may be possible to have a program send the sms.
you don't want your computer to "ring" when someone calls you!
And here I was thinking that would be quite amusing...
I hear you man, sucks when real life gets in the way of your serious gaming doesn't it? And when you finally do get a vacation your wife/girlfriend usually expects you to spent it with them, it would be nice to be unemployed with no friends or family for a couple of weeks per year.
One of my friends takes two weeks off every 6 months to go camping and fishing alone, he likes the change from city life. Me I'm content with the city so mabye I should take a couple of weeks off for a gaming convention;-)
When I was flatting in Dunedin I had my flat NAT'ed on an Ihug satellite account, those guys can be a pain in the arse as far as networking was concerned. Officially you were not allowed to share your Internet connection, however the techie was happy to let me know he used Debian to share it at home. Every time we had a problem they would ask us if we were sharing the connection, officially we had one computer and a firewall, unoficially we had 6pc's and a firewall using DHCP.
I don't know what the fuck the big deal was, I mean we paid for the bandwidth not a flat rate. What did they want us to do get 6 sat dishes, 6 receiver cards and 6 phone lines? Greedy fucks. Anyhow no longer with them since their "ultra" high-bandwidth is now capped at 500MB LOL.
Yeah AppleScript can be more basic than BASIC. Of course no self-respecting programmer would ever code in applscript, not even to see what it was like. Why anyone would like to code like this when they can use more cryptic languages like perl or haskall is beyond me.
The scary thing is I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not at this point.
but I don't believe that anyone who steals my machine is going to care what's on it
Well I'm sure plenty of people would want my massive pr0n collection;-)
Are they any current security programs that do things like this?
Well I looked into this last year when I was flatting with 5 new people. It's not that I didn't trust my roommates but when flatting with so many people they're bound to at least have a couple of pretty dodgy friends amoung them. Linux is pretty straightforward, I mean if your using a dial out you can just use pppup to launch a script to mail you when they're online or whatever. Problem is most theives aren't likely to be able to pring up ppp on my box, oh well. For windows I don't know. But it shouldn't be too hard to set something up like this, even modify back-oriface 2k or something to give you the functionality you need. In the end I decided the best way to do this was to get a prepaid cellphone with GPS (charged by the 5v line with a regulator), have it send an SMS message every day or so. The benefit is it doesn't matter if the machine is dial up/lan, or even if it's not used by the theives. Of course the problem with this system is a GPS cell phone isn't cheap.
What you are saying is that no matter where you put your money you can never be sure it won't devaluate. This is true of course, nothing is guarenteed 100% even if it proposes it is. However when investing in stocks realise that there are two ways of investing, you can invest purely by looking at the trends in stock price ignoring what the ompany is, or you can look closely at the company; how it's structured where the cash flow comes from, fundemental elements of the business, etc. By making a sensible investment in the second way you can help to armour yourself against losses in the stockmarket (often) at the sacrifice of large and quick gains.
not neccesarily, remember there are many places that businesses can go for a hearing of the dispute, WIPO (heard in Switzerland) is a popular one for them because it makes decisions along the lines of: it's possible that a company would like sucks in its domain name, ergo vivendi universal has some claim to the *sucks domain; The owner said he might consider selling the domain, ergo he has given up his right to free speech.
Precedents are only going to work in aa system which is prepared to enforce them. Given the previous outcomes and rediculous arguments made for them I can imagine the court side-stepping the precedent for equally stupid resons, with no recourse for the accused.
This is sort of a good thing in that you can (at least in the future) get your VivendiUniversal.comsucks.com address for free (?) but it doesn't address the underlying issue that these "suck" domains shouldn't have been taken away in the first place. So kudos Ed Harvilla for the idea but it's a workaround for the problem not a solution to it.
Personally if I were to create a parody site in the future I'm going to learn from Jay Sallen's mistake and NOT create a sucks domain. Think: VivendiUniversalBlowsGoats.com how's the WIPO going to award that to them? Actually, perhaps I shouldn't have asked that question...
Well I guess they went for a more stable kernel, personally I haven't had any problem with 2.4 but others have as discussed in the kernal of pain last week.
128MB is a bit low, I'm a bit surprised by this given the price these days.
If there was enough interest in this project I would love to make a
small batch of boards to sell to those interested. But I would need at
least 10 orders, and it may be hard to find 10 people interested in something
like this
Looks like you spoke too soon pal, bet you'll wish you hadn't asked in a few hours;-)
Shameful I know, but I had to move city before that I had 6 months. Should had a UPS;-)
This is pretty much a desktop/development box running postgres, JBoss, tomcat, apache, JBuilder and (occasionally) kylix. No problems so far, touch wood.
I also used to work at the comp-sci department of a university were we had 40 boxes in the linux lab, no real problems except they were running ext2 so only the occasional manual fsck. Now the maclab, that is another story (OS9 not OSX).
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you've had problems with the stability yourself (otherwise you have no right to be pissed) - Have you analyzed the bluescreens? Chances are it's a driver issue. How about patches - are you up to date? If not then who is really to blame here? Can you say that it's false advertising just because you might have a crappy 3rd party driver that bugs out all the time? That's not MS code, that's someone else's fault. And after a crash do you submit the results back via the online crash analysis dialog that pops up after you reboot (i.e. "report this problem to MS")? If not then it's possible that MS hadn't had a report on that crash yet. If they don't know about it they can't fix it and you don't have any right getting pissed. Have your ruled out faulty HW? You didn't say anything to this effect in your post.
:) I don't have a crappy 3rd party driver running, every driver installed was installed by XP installation and is therefore "signed" by MS. Thats with the exception of the new NVidia drivers, but it was crashing before then. I doubt it's faulty hardware, mainly because it doesn't crash when I'm running linux. Of course the only way to know for sure it to start replacing every bit of hardware individually and I'm not willing to do that. I'll be updrading soon to at least a new MB/CPU/RAM/SOUND so if I'm lucky it will be a hardware fault and it'll be solved.
Yes I have actually had the problems myself, belive me I wouldn't be getting all worked up over other peoples problems
I moved to XP because I was told it was better for games. Really I only use windows for gaming and some internet stuff so having the compatibility with some older games was important.
I use NT at work and I can't remember the last time I had a crash with it, certainly haven't had anything bring down the system. Then again I do most of my work in telnet sessions to solaris these days...
I'm a professional software developer. I work for a very large computer company (not ms). We all try pretty hard to get rid of bugs in programs, hell as programmers we do care that our code is as bug free as possible, it's a pride thing - as well as being good for business. :) However it is possible to lower the amount of problems you are willing to invest a lot more money into testing which in turn ends up costing the users a lot more money (yes I'm sure there will be replies saying open source can solve this problem; more eyes find bugs quicker etc etc etc but a lot of people are still not going to consider open source solutions).
Unfortunately there's no way to produce software which is bug free, just not possible today. Well perhaps with the exception of hello world
I don't think software producers should be responsible unless it's shown they are grossly neglegent and even then they are not neccessarily responsible. Otherwise amer^H^H^H^H people are probably just going to start suing people stupid leading to massive rises in software prices. OTOH when I use windows it pisses me off when it crashes, it I upgraded from 95 to Xp a few months ago. MS says XP is rock stable, hardly ever crashes, bullshit. The lies in advertising piss me off more than the crashes themselves - false advertising that is something I'd like to see them punished for.
It's also important to remember the flip side of this - native English speakers need to be able to understand the heavily accented and mangled English of non-native speakers. In some ways this is harder than learning Int'l English - the non-native speakers only need to learn one language, we have to learn dozens of varients.
Don't forget that a lot of non-native speakers have to learn these accents as well, i.e. any air-traffic controllers in countries which don't have English as their primary language. So in the end I would say it's easier on natural English speakers as opposed to those who don't have English as their first language.
Gee mabye microsoft is rigging the pole, nahhh MS would never do anything that cheap would they?
What do you expect? You were giving away these movies ripping the copyright owners off!
I think this article is interesting because it's often fun to see big companies get screwed *legaly*, but you live in a country where the distribution is illegal. You can't just decide which laws you want to obey and which you don't, that's just not how society works.
Note that even though NZ is often quote'd as being against region coding that I have never heard anything done about it here. We still sell coded DVD drives all over the place. Most of the movies in video stores are doubled up with region 1 and region 4 copies because not many people actually have region free DVD drives, and if you use WinDVD or PowerDVD these enforce region codes themselves. (Yes I know I can use DVD Genie but most people won't)
I'm wondering what the SEC is going to think when their mcwhorlte.com website experiences the slashdot effect?
:-)
They will probably be able to claim that tens of thousands of unsuspecting netziens were educated in a matter of hours
Lets start a fund to hire Jango Fett to assasinate Jar Jar, it's the only way.
Sorry - but it's total crap. DVD's are software
Just because they contain some software elements, that doesn't make them software. If I bought a music CD and it had a data track on it with some pictures/videos of the band I would still consider it a music CD, not software. Why? because the main reason I bought it was the music, why do I consider DVDs to be films and not software because the main reason I bought it was to watch a movie. Adding a level of interactivity doesn't change it into software, hell my TV has menus - guess my TV must really only be a piece of software, fuck look I found a menu on the internet - the Internet must be software then.
I've come accross people that have lost the root password before, no big deal really. You can boot the system from cdrom and modify the passwd/shadow files from there.
One question: assuming you've made this work,
I haven't made this work yet, I live in New Zealand where the mobile phone business isn't as competitive as it might be (read: 2 networks countrywide) so the top-line phones are too expensive to justify at the moment.
what GPS mobile phone(s) offer the ability to automatically SMS a location?
I don't know but I'm assuming (perhaps falsely) that these phones will be somewhat programmable, therefore it may be possible to have a program send the sms.
you don't want your computer to "ring" when someone calls you!
And here I was thinking that would be quite amusing...
I'm an adult with a day job and a family
;-)
I hear you man, sucks when real life gets in the way of your serious gaming doesn't it? And when you finally do get a vacation your wife/girlfriend usually expects you to spent it with them, it would be nice to be unemployed with no friends or family for a couple of weeks per year.
One of my friends takes two weeks off every 6 months to go camping and fishing alone, he likes the change from city life. Me I'm content with the city so mabye I should take a couple of weeks off for a gaming convention
When I was flatting in Dunedin I had my flat NAT'ed on an Ihug satellite account, those guys can be a pain in the arse as far as networking was concerned. Officially you were not allowed to share your Internet connection, however the techie was happy to let me know he used Debian to share it at home. Every time we had a problem they would ask us if we were sharing the connection, officially we had one computer and a firewall, unoficially we had 6pc's and a firewall using DHCP.
I don't know what the fuck the big deal was, I mean we paid for the bandwidth not a flat rate. What did they want us to do get 6 sat dishes, 6 receiver cards and 6 phone lines? Greedy fucks. Anyhow no longer with them since their "ultra" high-bandwidth is now capped at 500MB LOL.
do tell
Yeah AppleScript can be more basic than BASIC. Of course no self-respecting programmer would ever code in applscript, not even to see what it was like. Why anyone would like to code like this when they can use more cryptic languages like perl or haskall is beyond me.
The scary thing is I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not at this point.
but I don't believe that anyone who steals my machine is going to care what's on it
;-)
Well I'm sure plenty of people would want my massive pr0n collection
Are they any current security programs that do things like this?
Well I looked into this last year when I was flatting with 5 new people. It's not that I didn't trust my roommates but when flatting with so many people they're bound to at least have a couple of pretty dodgy friends amoung them.
Linux is pretty straightforward, I mean if your using a dial out you can just use pppup to launch a script to mail you when they're online or whatever.
Problem is most theives aren't likely to be able to pring up ppp on my box, oh well.
For windows I don't know. But it shouldn't be too hard to set something up like this, even modify back-oriface 2k or something to give you the functionality you need.
In the end I decided the best way to do this was to get a prepaid cellphone with GPS (charged by the 5v line with a regulator), have it send an SMS message every day or so. The benefit is it doesn't matter if the machine is dial up/lan, or even if it's not used by the theives. Of course the problem with this system is a GPS cell phone isn't cheap.
What you are saying is that no matter where you put your money you can never be sure it won't devaluate. This is true of course, nothing is guarenteed 100% even if it proposes it is. However when investing in stocks realise that there are two ways of investing, you can invest purely by looking at the trends in stock price ignoring what the ompany is, or you can look closely at the company; how it's structured where the cash flow comes from, fundemental elements of the business, etc. By making a sensible investment in the second way you can help to armour yourself against losses in the stockmarket (often) at the sacrifice of large and quick gains.
Yes, a more accurate name, however the problem with this is it might be shown to be true ;-)
not neccesarily, remember there are many places that businesses can go for a hearing of the dispute, WIPO (heard in Switzerland) is a popular one for them because it makes decisions along the lines of: it's possible that a company would like sucks in its domain name, ergo vivendi universal has some claim to the *sucks domain; The owner said he might consider selling the domain, ergo he has given up his right to free speech.
Precedents are only going to work in aa system which is prepared to enforce them. Given the previous outcomes and rediculous arguments made for them I can imagine the court side-stepping the precedent for equally stupid resons, with no recourse for the accused.
This is sort of a good thing in that you can (at least in the future) get your VivendiUniversal.comsucks.com address for free (?) but it doesn't address the underlying issue that these "suck" domains shouldn't have been taken away in the first place. So kudos Ed Harvilla for the idea but it's a workaround for the problem not a solution to it.
Personally if I were to create a parody site in the future I'm going to learn from Jay Sallen's mistake and NOT create a sucks domain. Think: VivendiUniversalBlowsGoats.com how's the WIPO going to award that to them? Actually, perhaps I shouldn't have asked that question...
Well I guess they went for a more stable kernel, personally I haven't had any problem with 2.4 but others have as discussed in the kernal of pain last week.
128MB is a bit low, I'm a bit surprised by this given the price these days.
I never knew that ran on IIe's, for some reason I always thought it ran on BBC computers, live and learn I suppose.
I still reckon teletext is a pretty good way to get snippets of news, just wish I could get it on a web page some times.
If there was enough interest in this project I would love to make a small batch of boards to sell to those interested. But I would need at least 10 orders, and it may be hard to find 10 people interested in something like this
;-)
Looks like you spoke too soon pal, bet you'll wish you hadn't asked in a few hours
What have your experiences been?
;-)
Well:
8:33pm up 45 days, 5:49,
Shameful I know, but I had to move city before that I had 6 months. Should had a UPS
This is pretty much a desktop/development box running postgres, JBoss, tomcat, apache, JBuilder and (occasionally) kylix. No problems so far, touch wood.
I also used to work at the comp-sci department of a university were we had 40 boxes in the linux lab, no real problems except they were running ext2 so only the occasional manual fsck. Now the maclab, that is another story (OS9 not OSX).