Yeah, mod me down, whatever. Michael Powell is a fucking housenigger if ever I've seen one. Show me one instance where he's stood up for the "little guy" and not sold us out to Big Business.
Sorry to use such harsh language.
In case you're wondering, a house nigger is a slave that got to live in the big house with the master, rathen than in the grubby slave quarters. He had a better life because of this but was thoroughly despised by the other slaves.
Come to think of it, my explanation is probably more offensive than my use of the "n-word." If you're modding me down because you're a historian, then that's okay.
As it is, when your licenses expire, you just don't get any new upgrades. Since there wont be a new server product for like 4 years, when your w2k server licenses expire, just dont renew them. pay full retail for the new shit when it comes out, it will be cheaper.
interestingly, ms has decided to slow down their upgrade speed, right after moving to licensing 6.0. so yeah it was a money grab and will make ms look like a shining star when the rest of the tech sector is so bleak. but it won't last.
windows 2000 will be fully supported until 2005 i think and wont be retired/sunsetted until 2007. in other words, go with win 2000 and youre good for the next five years.
theres no way that this helps ms's bottom line in the long run. well maybe in the very long run, if people arent so frustrated at having to upgrade their os more than three times a decade.
You make a good point -- if there is no profit where is the crime?
Well, unfortunately Congress already thought of that. Under the current laws, which were passed in 1998 I think (around the time of the DMCA), you don't need to be actually selling warez for it to be considered piracy. Simply handing them out is a crime. Burning a CD with warez and passing it out to strangers can get you *20 years.* Really. (Someday, when I come to love Big Brother, I will see how the punishment fits the crime.)
Another thing that got changed with the law: Profitless piracy is a *Federal* *criminal* *offense*, not a civil one. That means that the FBI kicks in your door with guns drawn.
I think most Americans, if the question were put to them, would NOT support the FBI enforcing Sony or Microsoft's EULAs. However, those few Americans with gobs of money who buy and sell congressman ARE in favor of having the government (aka the taxpayer, aka little people, aka 99.9% of people reading this) do that work for them.
It's pretty clever, and it went pretty unnoticed at the time. And the media (surprise) every now and again runs a "success" story, like how warehouse X in LA was raided by the Feds and U.S. Marshalls, and how piracy costs U.S. businesses $billions per year. No mention of the cost to you and I to keep Sony profitable.
While I and many others agree with your point about copyright being a "private" affair, good luck getting a court to look at the issue on the Constitutional merits.
The criminalization of profitless piracy along with the DMCA et al are some scary first steps towards turning the FBI into the Bureau of Thoughtcrime. Think about it, while it's still legal.
Why the expanded *police power* for the Federal Government, swallowing up a legal matter which was historically dealt with in civil law?
I'd ask you to remember this before you vote, but both parties are whistling Walt's tune on this one.
I doubt the computer is the expensive part. 8-bit atari processor, I think those grow on trees nowadays. The expense is mostly the mechanical components and the shipping.
Though, it might be cheaper if the manufacturer has to pay some royalties for those video game titles. But I'm thinking that to produce two series of these units, one as master and other as slave, woulnd't be very cost effective when the master is only twenty bucks. And who wants the lame slave that can't do anything by itself? Maybe it would sell as a package deal, get the maste for $20 or a master and dumb slave for like $30. But who wouldn't spend the extra ten bucks to get the fully functional master unit?
This concludes my nit-picky know-it-all Slashdot post for this hour. Well except for that other one ten lines up.
Actually, it won't be all that "incompatible" if it's off. I used to play the PAL Enduro cartridge (the old Coleco/etc. game) on an NTSC TV and Colecovision. The sunset looked kinda weird, because the CLUT was completely different between PAL and NTSC, but the game played just fine. (By the way, the clever mnemonic for NTSC is Never The Same Color. Guaranteed to annoy those around you.)
Come to think of it I guess it might be different if the console were PAL format too...do they do that? Or is it just the games that are, uh, region-coded (from an era when different TV formats actually represented a technological limitation, not a social DRM content protection scheme.)
That was back in the day when you used to smoke a banana -- Frank Zappa
You can run an app in 1024x768. You can run Word and Outlook. You can play Counterstrike and aim/shoot by tapping the stylus on the screen.
Not sure why you'd want to do that (except for the Counterstrike thing, that would be cool.)
The killer app of the tablet pc is supposed to be the "ink" technology that reads your handwritings. The reviews I've read say functionality is mixed...kinda like early voice recognition I guess. Alas I think ink is not as cool as MS does, because who doesn't know graffiti by this point? Or who can't learn graffiti in like thirty minutes? And typing is still way faster than handwriting and requires a lot less cpu...
People who handwrite stuff for a living are reluctant to actually start using a computer. They think it's beneath them (doctors at least feel this way -- to them it's data entry. ewwww.) Also the way business processes have been put together, there's a person whose job it is to take handwritten stuff and convert it to computer text, clean it up and so on. THis devie would force a paradigm shift, and ink isn't probably a compelling enough reason to change.
Being able to rotate the display from landscape to portrait, to set up the device as just a display which is secretly a fully functional computer, all that sounds pretty cool to me. Maybe it will impress clients if your sales team shows up with tablet PCs -- kinda like the receptionist always has a flat panel display. I could see browsing the web as more "fun" on a tablet, but making this slashdot post would kinda suck. (My handwriting is atrocious, by the way. But I also know how to type 40wpm.)
When tablet PCs didn't cathc on five years ago (warning: these thoughts are ripped from the article in WIndows.NET mag a few months back) they supposedly didn't catch on because they were like twice the cost of regular laptops. MS is hoping that vendors can make Tablet PCs cost competitive with (high-end) laptops, and thus at least one barrier to entry will be gone.
Parent should get mad mod points because this little pref bar thingie r0xXx0rz!!!! I just downloaded it and now I'm hoping I can use IE even less than the 2% I have to nowadaws. Thanks User #58365!!!
I have no idea why this is modded down to zero, unless zogger usually posts a lot of penis birds or something...
You raise the biggest objection that I (and all of us should) have to "paperless voting." Where is the accountability? Where is the audit trail? How do we even know how the dang software works?
With paper ballots, you can always go back and do a hand count; and that frequently happens in elections. What do you do with electronic-only votes? And let's say you do re-tally the electronic votes, and you get a different answer... then what?
Sure, paper ballots can be lost, burned, counted improperly, etc. But at least they're tangible things. We don't even know what's in the guts of electronic-only voting machines. What happens when the power goes out? Mabye they have some weird Pentium math error that the coders didn't take into account?
I'm sure many on Slashdot will think I'm some sort of neo-Luddite for not trusting the technology, but DO YOU want to trust code you haven't seen?
I like the voting machines here in Seattle. It's a fill-in-the-bubble ballot, which then gets read by a computer. If they need to do a recount, they can always go back to the paper ballots. What are you going to fall back on in Georgia if, I don't know, lightning hits the voting machine, or evil terrorist somehow hack the central election computer?
Just because there's a new high-tech way to do something doesn't mean it should be done that way. The bread that gramma bakes in the oven is ten times better than the stuff coming from my computerized Zojirushi bread machine.
You had a gripe, you got up on your soapbox in the Town Square and you made it, loud and clear.
Unfortunately, today's soapbox is The Mall, and it's a privately owned space. They can and do regulate what sort of speech/conduct is permitted, and speaking your mind in the Food Court is not allowed.
What should be done is that our local leaders should establish some sort of public use rights for large private establishments, as a way to mitigate their impact. The mall, for example, probably causes traffic problems for the nearby community, and it probably had to get some zoning easements to be built in the first place.
Unfortunately, half the people running our local government are also the people building the mall. They're not participating in local government for the betterment of the citizenry...well they are in the sense that they believe that our interests are best served by acquiescing to whatever the developers want. This just happens to coincide with their interests...
Look at how little participation there is in our local government. Presidential elections get the highest voter turnout, but really so many more tangible things are happening at the local level. The last non-presidential primary I voted in had a turnout of like 11%, and this in civic-minded Seattle.
Democracy doesn't actually work, at least not when monied interests are the only ones who bother to participate. I wonder why so many people claim it's the best form of government? Give me a benevolent despot any day. Either that, or make voting mandatory, with a fine if you don't vote. Just put a "none" box on the ballot for those who don't want to vote.
Republicans have never adopted deceit as their technique. Democrats have perfected it to a fine art. Hello?? Iran-Contra anyone??
But I'm not here to play he-said she-said. Your post made a good point, but you're only half-right. In order to be more accurate, you need to make a few changes:
There is a reason all captains of industry, and rich people in general support the democratic and republican two-party system.
Look at the facts at opensecrets.org; the dems. and repubs. clearly play both sides of the field. It is not surprising that the two-party system works to perserve the dominance of the two-party system. Political Darwinism, if you will.
Just don't expect a viable third party anytime soon. The hand-in-glove operations of the media, the mega-corps, and our (s)elected leaders maintain the hegemony very effectively. The only challenge in the past 150 years has come during the Great Depression, when times were so tough that people actually contemplated a (gasp) third alternative!
You know, part of it is the way we are taught (by the media, maybe) to view everything in opposites. For example, "You are either with us or with the terrorists." Our legal system, too, is a two-party adversarial fight-to-the-death; not unlike Street Fighter II in its basic format (just add extra money for an "appeal"). This winner-take-all mentality is assuredly an American Way of Life at this point. Look at how the Electoral College works, with all 25 Florida votes going to a candidate who got a.01% majority. Survivor! is a great example -- it's not just "reality TV," it's a pervasive cultural meme in America.
Most other democratic countries form coalition governments, where the parties are forced to reach some common ground and consensus. Here, the wind starts blowing from a different direction every election cycle.
Yet, all this hubbub about the "differences" between the Democrats and Republicans pulls the wool over our eyes. How were the parties different on NAFTA, on bombing Afghanistan, or passing the DMCA? (They weren't.)
If you think that there's more than minor degrees of separation between the Republicans and Democrats, you need to take a healthy step back, my friend.
Well, they could go out and hire that guy who leaked Doom III...
Seriously, I think SAMBA et. al. is screwed. As punishment for abusing their monopoly power to stifle competition, Microsoft is hereby ordered to continue abusing their monopoly power.
I'm starting to wonder if, when decoded, Microsoft APIs are actually the Secret Formula for Coke.
Everyone seems to be focusing on that "viable business model" thing but I don't think that's what it really means. It means that Microsoft doesn't have to release their API stuff to whoever comes asking. In other words, if your company is named 31117, Inc., your two employees are both under 18, and your Mission Statement is "Information Wants To Be Free!," then Microsoft isn't going to let you see their panties.
On the other hand, if you are an esablished business (let's say RedHat,) with like an accountant and maybe some stock options, and you have a Duns and Bradstreet number, then you are probably good to go. Microsoft would have a hard time arguing that RedHat isn't an "authentic and viable" business in any "reasonable and objective" sense of the words. They can't just say "well, all OS except for Windows are not viable, so take a hike."
I think the bigger issues are:
1. What remedies, if any, address non-compliance?
2. How big is the security carve-out? Is it so big that we'll never know anything about Longhorn/Palladium since they'll implement interprocess crypto (think x-box)? Or is it so small as to basically mean that MS doesn't have to provide info like "The SMB backdoor password is xyzzy?" In one case it covers anything dealing with crypto, in another case only a huge flaw that MS would rather not have public.
I think it's IBM that when you are downloading a new BIOS for your ThinkPad or whatever, you actually have to type "agree" for the installer to make the boot floppy with the new BIOS image on it.
What I'm not understanding is why don't we DOS their lawyers, by asking a LOT of technical questions about this "agreement." Like call the 800 number and tell them you have a question about para. 14, line 8 in the online agreement, and you'd like some clarification. Then send certified mail asking the same thing.
It wouldn't acomplish much, but it would make some poor schmuck's day at the office more miserable. Schadenfeude or whatever you call it. It would also be cool to know if there could be such thing of a write-in slashdot effect.
By the way, did you know that when you call AA to book a flight, you could be talking to a prison inmate? I feel warm and fuzzy just thinking about telling convicted felons the exact dates I won't be in my home.
Well, what's the coolest thing YOU ever put a computer in? The trunk of your car? Bah. Besides, what else are you going to do with the guts from an old HP Pavilion?
This "case mod" if you can call it that totally rules. The article is thorough and has many pictures, and it's surviving the slashdot effect rather nicely.
I give this one 7 out of 10. I'm deducting a few points because I didn't see the BIOS screen, and because he was too wussy to run StarCraft on it.
That would be fucking awesome. Like when you want to eject the CD, the tray opens and the case jumps up on its little hydraulics, and the CD comes flying out of the cupholder.
The major reason to not install it: How the hell do you make it go away? Why can't I disable it, or get a pop-up "Would you like ot view the Flash content on this webpage?" After installing Flash, I see lots of stupid ads that never bugged me before.
Flash was cool like five years ago when gabocorp.com was making us cream our jeans. Now it's basically a glorified pop-up ad, and I don't have the patience any longer.
What about the Google toolbar? I'm not sure what that thing is all about, BUT...
I was running the Google Toolbar, and I had some un-linked content on our live web server. Then my boss just happened to be searching for some of that info on Google, and bam! The "secret" pages on our web server show up! Content that was indeed on the web but did not have any outside hyperlinks pointing to it was being cached by Google.
How did Google find it? The only thing I can think of is that the Google Toolbar noticed that I went to that unpublished URL and "phoned home." (By the way, the web server is running IIS 5.0/Windows 2000, so I doubt those Apache tricks would work, though there must be similar tricks for IIS.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, mod me down, whatever. Michael Powell is a fucking housenigger if ever I've seen one. Show me one instance where he's stood up for the "little guy" and not sold us out to Big Business.
Sorry to use such harsh language.
In case you're wondering, a house nigger is a slave that got to live in the big house with the master, rathen than in the grubby slave quarters. He had a better life because of this but was thoroughly despised by the other slaves.
Come to think of it, my explanation is probably more offensive than my use of the "n-word." If you're modding me down because you're a historian, then that's okay.
This doesn't really help with that, though.
As it is, when your licenses expire, you just don't get any new upgrades. Since there wont be a new server product for like 4 years, when your w2k server licenses expire, just dont renew them. pay full retail for the new shit when it comes out, it will be cheaper.
interestingly, ms has decided to slow down their upgrade speed, right after moving to licensing 6.0. so yeah it was a money grab and will make ms look like a shining star when the rest of the tech sector is so bleak. but it won't last.
windows 2000 will be fully supported until 2005 i think and wont be retired/sunsetted until 2007. in other words, go with win 2000 and youre good for the next five years.
theres no way that this helps ms's bottom line in the long run. well maybe in the very long run, if people arent so frustrated at having to upgrade their os more than three times a decade.
You make a good point -- if there is no profit where is the crime?
Well, unfortunately Congress already thought of that. Under the current laws, which were passed in 1998 I think (around the time of the DMCA), you don't need to be actually selling warez for it to be considered piracy. Simply handing them out is a crime. Burning a CD with warez and passing it out to strangers can get you *20 years.* Really. (Someday, when I come to love Big Brother, I will see how the punishment fits the crime.)
Another thing that got changed with the law: Profitless piracy is a *Federal* *criminal* *offense*, not a civil one. That means that the FBI kicks in your door with guns drawn.
I think most Americans, if the question were put to them, would NOT support the FBI enforcing Sony or Microsoft's EULAs. However, those few Americans with gobs of money who buy and sell congressman ARE in favor of having the government (aka the taxpayer, aka little people, aka 99.9% of people reading this) do that work for them.
It's pretty clever, and it went pretty unnoticed at the time. And the media (surprise) every now and again runs a "success" story, like how warehouse X in LA was raided by the Feds and U.S. Marshalls, and how piracy costs U.S. businesses $billions per year. No mention of the cost to you and I to keep Sony profitable.
While I and many others agree with your point about copyright being a "private" affair, good luck getting a court to look at the issue on the Constitutional merits.
The criminalization of profitless piracy along with the DMCA et al are some scary first steps towards turning the FBI into the Bureau of Thoughtcrime. Think about it, while it's still legal.
Why the expanded *police power* for the Federal Government, swallowing up a legal matter which was historically dealt with in civil law?
I'd ask you to remember this before you vote, but both parties are whistling Walt's tune on this one.
The Revolution will be webcast.
It doesn't help if the person trying to explain it is high, too. :-)
WTF is this article about? The "Power of the Interweb" is turning dirt farmers into city slickers?
How did we go from taxpayer-financed broadband to a Hyperlinked Bill Gates Quote?
I think I know what happened between Michael reading the article on NYT and adding this story to slashdot. It's called marijuana. And I'm jealous.
I doubt the computer is the expensive part. 8-bit atari processor, I think those grow on trees nowadays. The expense is mostly the mechanical components and the shipping.
Though, it might be cheaper if the manufacturer has to pay some royalties for those video game titles. But I'm thinking that to produce two series of these units, one as master and other as slave, woulnd't be very cost effective when the master is only twenty bucks. And who wants the lame slave that can't do anything by itself? Maybe it would sell as a package deal, get the maste for $20 or a master and dumb slave for like $30. But who wouldn't spend the extra ten bucks to get the fully functional master unit?
This concludes my nit-picky know-it-all Slashdot post for this hour. Well except for that other one ten lines up.
Actually, it won't be all that "incompatible" if it's off. I used to play the PAL Enduro cartridge (the old Coleco/etc. game) on an NTSC TV and Colecovision. The sunset looked kinda weird, because the CLUT was completely different between PAL and NTSC, but the game played just fine. (By the way, the clever mnemonic for NTSC is Never The Same Color. Guaranteed to annoy those around you.)
Come to think of it I guess it might be different if the console were PAL format too...do they do that? Or is it just the games that are, uh, region-coded (from an era when different TV formats actually represented a technological limitation, not a social DRM content protection scheme.)
That was back in the day when you used to smoke a banana -- Frank Zappa
You can run an app in 1024x768. You can run Word and Outlook. You can play Counterstrike and aim/shoot by tapping the stylus on the screen.
.NET mag a few months back) they supposedly didn't catch on because they were like twice the cost of regular laptops. MS is hoping that vendors can make Tablet PCs cost competitive with (high-end) laptops, and thus at least one barrier to entry will be gone.
Not sure why you'd want to do that (except for the Counterstrike thing, that would be cool.)
The killer app of the tablet pc is supposed to be the "ink" technology that reads your handwritings. The reviews I've read say functionality is mixed...kinda like early voice recognition I guess. Alas I think ink is not as cool as MS does, because who doesn't know graffiti by this point? Or who can't learn graffiti in like thirty minutes? And typing is still way faster than handwriting and requires a lot less cpu...
People who handwrite stuff for a living are reluctant to actually start using a computer. They think it's beneath them (doctors at least feel this way -- to them it's data entry. ewwww.) Also the way business processes have been put together, there's a person whose job it is to take handwritten stuff and convert it to computer text, clean it up and so on. THis devie would force a paradigm shift, and ink isn't probably a compelling enough reason to change.
Being able to rotate the display from landscape to portrait, to set up the device as just a display which is secretly a fully functional computer, all that sounds pretty cool to me. Maybe it will impress clients if your sales team shows up with tablet PCs -- kinda like the receptionist always has a flat panel display. I could see browsing the web as more "fun" on a tablet, but making this slashdot post would kinda suck. (My handwriting is atrocious, by the way. But I also know how to type 40wpm.)
When tablet PCs didn't cathc on five years ago (warning: these thoughts are ripped from the article in WIndows
Jiminy Cricket? The Cricket in Times Square? We still don't get it.
Parent should get mad mod points because this little pref bar thingie r0xXx0rz!!!! I just downloaded it and now I'm hoping I can use IE even less than the 2% I have to nowadaws. Thanks User #58365!!!
I have no idea why this is modded down to zero, unless zogger usually posts a lot of penis birds or something...
You raise the biggest objection that I (and all of us should) have to "paperless voting." Where is the accountability? Where is the audit trail? How do we even know how the dang software works?
With paper ballots, you can always go back and do a hand count; and that frequently happens in elections. What do you do with electronic-only votes? And let's say you do re-tally the electronic votes, and you get a different answer... then what?
Sure, paper ballots can be lost, burned, counted improperly, etc. But at least they're tangible things. We don't even know what's in the guts of electronic-only voting machines. What happens when the power goes out? Mabye they have some weird Pentium math error that the coders didn't take into account?
I'm sure many on Slashdot will think I'm some sort of neo-Luddite for not trusting the technology, but DO YOU want to trust code you haven't seen?
I like the voting machines here in Seattle. It's a fill-in-the-bubble ballot, which then gets read by a computer. If they need to do a recount, they can always go back to the paper ballots. What are you going to fall back on in Georgia if, I don't know, lightning hits the voting machine, or evil terrorist somehow hack the central election computer?
Just because there's a new high-tech way to do something doesn't mean it should be done that way. The bread that gramma bakes in the oven is ten times better than the stuff coming from my computerized Zojirushi bread machine.
You had a gripe, you got up on your soapbox in the Town Square and you made it, loud and clear.
Unfortunately, today's soapbox is The Mall, and it's a privately owned space. They can and do regulate what sort of speech/conduct is permitted, and speaking your mind in the Food Court is not allowed.
What should be done is that our local leaders should establish some sort of public use rights for large private establishments, as a way to mitigate their impact. The mall, for example, probably causes traffic problems for the nearby community, and it probably had to get some zoning easements to be built in the first place.
Unfortunately, half the people running our local government are also the people building the mall. They're not participating in local government for the betterment of the citizenry...well they are in the sense that they believe that our interests are best served by acquiescing to whatever the developers want. This just happens to coincide with their interests...
Look at how little participation there is in our local government. Presidential elections get the highest voter turnout, but really so many more tangible things are happening at the local level. The last non-presidential primary I voted in had a turnout of like 11%, and this in civic-minded Seattle.
Democracy doesn't actually work, at least not when monied interests are the only ones who bother to participate. I wonder why so many people claim it's the best form of government? Give me a benevolent despot any day. Either that, or make voting mandatory, with a fine if you don't vote. Just put a "none" box on the ballot for those who don't want to vote.
I have not been to DPL lately (for all you non-`troiters, dpl=Detroit Public Library")
Whew!!! for a second there I thought my business model was under attack again!!
Signed,
Steve Ballmer
Republicans have never adopted deceit as their technique. Democrats have perfected it to a fine art. Hello?? Iran-Contra anyone??
.01% majority. Survivor! is a great example -- it's not just "reality TV," it's a pervasive cultural meme in America.
But I'm not here to play he-said she-said. Your post made a good point, but you're only half-right. In order to be more accurate, you need to make a few changes:
There is a reason all captains of industry, and rich people in general support the democratic and republican two-party system.
Look at the facts at opensecrets.org; the dems. and repubs. clearly play both sides of the field. It is not surprising that the two-party system works to perserve the dominance of the two-party system. Political Darwinism, if you will.
Just don't expect a viable third party anytime soon. The hand-in-glove operations of the media, the mega-corps, and our (s)elected leaders maintain the hegemony very effectively. The only challenge in the past 150 years has come during the Great Depression, when times were so tough that people actually contemplated a (gasp) third alternative!
You know, part of it is the way we are taught (by the media, maybe) to view everything in opposites. For example, "You are either with us or with the terrorists." Our legal system, too, is a two-party adversarial fight-to-the-death; not unlike Street Fighter II in its basic format (just add extra money for an "appeal"). This winner-take-all mentality is assuredly an American Way of Life at this point. Look at how the Electoral College works, with all 25 Florida votes going to a candidate who got a
Most other democratic countries form coalition governments, where the parties are forced to reach some common ground and consensus. Here, the wind starts blowing from a different direction every election cycle.
Yet, all this hubbub about the "differences" between the Democrats and Republicans pulls the wool over our eyes. How were the parties different on NAFTA, on bombing Afghanistan, or passing the DMCA? (They weren't.)
If you think that there's more than minor degrees of separation between the Republicans and Democrats, you need to take a healthy step back, my friend.
Well, they could go out and hire that guy who leaked Doom III...
Seriously, I think SAMBA et. al. is screwed. As punishment for abusing their monopoly power to stifle competition, Microsoft is hereby ordered to continue abusing their monopoly power.
I'm starting to wonder if, when decoded, Microsoft APIs are actually the Secret Formula for Coke.
Well I'm sure some permutation of that question will make it into the list, seeing as everyone's panties are riding so high because of it.
I hereby decree that panties is the appropriate metaphor to understand this whole Section J issue.
Everyone seems to be focusing on that "viable business model" thing but I don't think that's what it really means. It means that Microsoft doesn't have to release their API stuff to whoever comes asking. In other words, if your company is named 31117, Inc., your two employees are both under 18, and your Mission Statement is "Information Wants To Be Free!," then Microsoft isn't going to let you see their panties.
On the other hand, if you are an esablished business (let's say RedHat,) with like an accountant and maybe some stock options, and you have a Duns and Bradstreet number, then you are probably good to go. Microsoft would have a hard time arguing that RedHat isn't an "authentic and viable" business in any "reasonable and objective" sense of the words. They can't just say "well, all OS except for Windows are not viable, so take a hike."
I think the bigger issues are:
1. What remedies, if any, address non-compliance?
2. How big is the security carve-out? Is it so big that we'll never know anything about Longhorn/Palladium since they'll implement interprocess crypto (think x-box)? Or is it so small as to basically mean that MS doesn't have to provide info like "The SMB backdoor password is xyzzy?" In one case it covers anything dealing with crypto, in another case only a huge flaw that MS would rather not have public.
I think it's IBM that when you are downloading a new BIOS for your ThinkPad or whatever, you actually have to type "agree" for the installer to make the boot floppy with the new BIOS image on it.
What I'm not understanding is why don't we DOS their lawyers, by asking a LOT of technical questions about this "agreement." Like call the 800 number and tell them you have a question about para. 14, line 8 in the online agreement, and you'd like some clarification. Then send certified mail asking the same thing.
It wouldn't acomplish much, but it would make some poor schmuck's day at the office more miserable. Schadenfeude or whatever you call it. It would also be cool to know if there could be such thing of a write-in slashdot effect.
By the way, did you know that when you call AA to book a flight, you could be talking to a prison inmate? I feel warm and fuzzy just thinking about telling convicted felons the exact dates I won't be in my home.
Dammit Taco, quit posting anonymously.
If you're modding this down for off-topic, be GRATEFUL that you didn't read the parent.
Well, what's the coolest thing YOU ever put a computer in? The trunk of your car? Bah. Besides, what else are you going to do with the guts from an old HP Pavilion?
This "case mod" if you can call it that totally rules. The article is thorough and has many pictures, and it's surviving the slashdot effect rather nicely.
I give this one 7 out of 10. I'm deducting a few points because I didn't see the BIOS screen, and because he was too wussy to run StarCraft on it.
Keep up the good work, son!
That's funny but a glasspack muffler is actually the cheapest you can get. To put one on my civic would have been about $40.
That would be fucking awesome. Like when you want to eject the CD, the tray opens and the case jumps up on its little hydraulics, and the CD comes flying out of the cupholder.
No, I'm not going to "just install flash"
The major reason to not install it: How the hell do you make it go away? Why can't I disable it, or get a pop-up "Would you like ot view the Flash content on this webpage?" After installing Flash, I see lots of stupid ads that never bugged me before.
Flash was cool like five years ago when gabocorp.com was making us cream our jeans. Now it's basically a glorified pop-up ad, and I don't have the patience any longer.
What about the Google toolbar? I'm not sure what that thing is all about, BUT...
I was running the Google Toolbar, and I had some un-linked content on our live web server. Then my boss just happened to be searching for some of that info on Google, and bam! The "secret" pages on our web server show up! Content that was indeed on the web but did not have any outside hyperlinks pointing to it was being cached by Google.
How did Google find it? The only thing I can think of is that the Google Toolbar noticed that I went to that unpublished URL and "phoned home." (By the way, the web server is running IIS 5.0/Windows 2000, so I doubt those Apache tricks would work, though there must be similar tricks for IIS.)
Was it just me, or did the recording of the spacecraft's exodus from Ganymede's magnetic pole sound a lot like those underwater whale recordings?
At the beginning, I think that was Qo'noS exploding or something. Spilled tea all over my tunic.