It is excellent, scary, and amusing all at the same time. I can't tell you how its just filled with page after page about how X company got Y*100 million in VC, and in Z days/years they were bust. One company had over $300mil in VC money, and Philip Kaplan said, "If they merely partied and blew the money at $1mil/year they would have been in business for over 300 years", yet they went broke in a year or two.
I don't want our government being any more involved in our lives than they are now. They suck at it.
I know of at least two reputable, low turnover, low stress, well paid employers that have, gasp, a doctor on their staff. Employers seem willing to pay for "health benefits", but not a doctor on staff. Take a random product industry, say a beer brewery. Do they have IT people? yup. Maintenance people? yup. Janitors? Yup. Is there a doctor in the house?
I'd say there must be more to the picture. Like any complex system, the health of a nation probably can't be pinned on one single factor.
OK, maybe that is the factor.
How many redheads are there in Japan? Blonds?
Most Americans are more than broke (ie, in debt). Most Americans are cheap. We eat horrible, inexpensive, non-nutritional food. We have to worry about our cars being stolen, or if you get into a fender bender, you better pay that 15-25% of the cost of a (modest) car a year for insurance so you can drive your 4x4 SUV. Even if your a good boy and pay the health insurance extortion racket, I dare you to get sick. I double dare you to find good health care. Remember, most are broke and getting sick or in an accident is a major expense that is not included in our interest payments.
If you own a computer in the US, and you are knowledgeable, you have to be on the alert because people from all over the world are going to try to break into it, or at the least you have to deal with getting a ratio of 100:1 spam:real mail.
Keep in mind that we are broke and cheap, so we're always looking for a deal, right? Well, there is always someone looking to take your money, so those "deals" often don't work out as well as advertised.
Also, we have still have racial tension here. The legal and criminal system here is geared towards "controlling" minorities, but hey, if you're not a 2.1 kid bearing family, you too can be subject to being treated as a minority in the criminal justice system. Being a single, middle aged white guy, I have to pretend to be more "average" so that I can more easily hide myself from the police here.
Also, keep in mind that our legal system also favors businesses and corps over individuals. On average, in a year or two an individual can be sentenced to life in prison or execution. A lawsuit against a business or corp takes years upon years, and in the end its usually the lawyers and the business that benefit.
Well, I bought Windows 95 in August of 1995 when it came out on 13 or so floppies, and it did not come with TCP/IP as a default install. It took me a while and bunches of floppy shuffling and downloading via other means and reading to get native PPP working with a standard ISP. It did not come with a browser.
I was impressed with Windows 95's GUI improvements over 3.x and its multitasking abilities. I didn't like Macs at the time, and Win95 was infinitely better than 3.x by any stretch of the imagination. Win 3.x had TCP/IP support at some level, I don't remember.
Win95 gave a more "Mac like" feel. With the way it probed hardware and had a standardized installer/unistaller, printing was better, etc. Win 3.x was literally a windowing environment for DOS. I know noone that was scared of a DOS prompt that used PCs.
Windows 98 brought USB and FAT32.
FAT32 was introduced in Win95 OSR2, and was/is not that special. Most people don't know what that even is.
USB did not halfway reliably work until Win98 SE.
Windows 2K/XP brought multi-user and NTFS.
I'm fuzzy on the details, but NT based Windows added multi-user much before 2K. Also, NTFS was introduced with NT. Now that I think about it, I would believe that NTFS and NT were multi-user from their inception in the early 90s.
I don't know what Vista will bring. The more they take away features and the more delay the release date, well, maybe one day we will know.
A big question here is.. is the database compromised? From the poking around I've done, it does seem that the only people who have received this message are BlueFrog users.
I have never used a blue frog:)
Seriously, I have never heard of blue frog or blue security until Sunday or Monday when about 10 or so emails escaped my spam filter. I am getting these mails sent to a number of email aliases and even one harvested email address that is not known or valid. Regarding the harvested one, I'm assuming it came from a mailing list or a web archive of a mailing list. The deal is that I'm an admin of a domain, and I have all of the workstations on the domain MX entry pointing to the main mail server. So, its like workstation1.example.com and the MX entry is for mail.example.com. I have been getting spam mails to me@workstation1.example.com for years, yet I have NEVER implicitly or explicitly told or given an email address of me@workstation1.example.com to anybody. me@workstation1.example.com IS listed in some email headers, but never as a From or Reply-To address.
Back to this blue stuff. I have no clue what it is, nor do I care besides the fact that some of the mails are escaping my spam filter. All of the mails I have looked at in detail appear to be coming from compromised Windows machines from around the world. For a full example, see the body of one of the mails below in fixed font. The middle appears to always be the same, but there is random english text at the beginning and end. The subjects appear to be 2 random words.
What a PITA. I cannot tell what the purpose of these mails are. At first, they look like extortion to try to get me to get more spam to stop getting spam. I don't know.
Sometimes a sting can cause a comatose condition which is."He began to laugh then, and her face darkened for the first time since she had come back, and she left the room with the manuscript under her arm..
Hey,
You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).
You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.
How do you make it stop?
Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.
We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.
By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.
Why are we doing this?
Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity. Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did.
If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same.
We are quite sure you will think this will not continue, that we will not continue wasting our resources doing this, feel free to wait out the first 48, or the second, and see whether these stop, you will be quite suprised.
If you have another email under the protection of bluesecurity, and have not recieved this there, do not worry, you will soon enough.
We mightve had your email addresses before in our lists, but now, we are targetting YOU, because YOU are a bluesecurity user.
You might also notice, that the BlueSecurity site(http://www.b
While you are still in school, it might be worthy of learning what "effected" means, so that when you're an adult "in the real world" you won't embarrass yourself.
Perhaps they intend to make torrents a legitimate method of delivery of purchased iTunes songs. So, you purchase an iTunes song, seed it as an 'iTunes torrent.' Then you get some amount of credit for more iTunes songs. Someone else who buys the first song you bought downloads it as a torrent from you (and others).
So if coffee is a yes-drink...and alcohol is a yes-drink...screw pheromones. We need to start buying women coffee martinis. There's the real liquid panty remover.
For example, if I type in stuff like 'wwwww.yahoo.com', that STUPID IE just search for it and with the address bar ending up modifed as "http://sea.search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx?FORM=DNSA S&q=wwwww.yahoo.com".
I will probably never use IE7, but does properly entering www.yahoo.com "search" for it and phone home to MS for every url that you type into the address field?
Actually, I always thought cybersquatting was more like registering a bunch of potentially valuable domain names and doing nothing with them, until whoever would be rightfully interested in registering a name realizes it's taken and offers money to buy it back. It's a form of racket of course. Typosquatting is rather different.
But that was back in 1999, years before 2004 was ever imagined.
I feel that people are confusing "evil" with profit. Google went public. Google is a business. Google now aims (moreso at least) to generate profit for its owners. But doing something that makes money for a company does not make it evil? Who does this hurt?
Answer me that question once you go to a drugstore on Sunday morning, and you're tying to get rid of that hangover before doing your Sunday church appearance. With a splitting headache, then go to the pain relief isle, but B4Y3R aspirin, that looks just like BAYER aspirin minus the chemicals that relieve pain. But, you forgive the company because its now owned by Google and they owe it to their stockholders to put such products on the shelf.
Why is it that common sense and reality go out the window when a computer is involved (patent pending)?
Things with direct analogies to life like email forwarding vs snail mail forwarding don't make sense to people, but things like popup/under advertisements and typosquating makes sense. In the future, will businesses open on 212 Madison Ave when a known company is at 212 Madison St just in case someone gets lost?
Reminds me of when the only people that really profited off of the gold rush were shovel salesmen and prostitutes.
For example, in the mechanical engineering department where I work there's one guy with a really fast PC and a high-end (I think nVidia but I'm not sure) graphics card that does 3-D design and rendering of parts for the automated machine tools on the plant floor.
Which warrants a $500+ video card and a $2-5k computer because these things used to cost $10k+ 10 years ago.
Again, Word and Office don't need even a $200 video card.
Solitaire and Freecell maybe, but not Office apps.
You might need to lighten up. Not everything anyone ever does needs to be 100% productive to society, you know. Posting on slashdot comes to mind.
I consider posting to slashdot more productive to society than say sending spam, writing and installing rootkits, worms, viruses, ssh dictionary attacks, DDOS attacks, not to mention what people do outside of computers.
There's also the fact that most American business managers consider their employees and customers to be parasites that are bleeding the company dry, and treat them as such.
I must need glasses. Did I read that correctly? Managers consider their employees and customers to be parasites? Employees provide products and services that the manager, uh, manages. And the customers are those that , uh, pay the manager and said employees.
One of the last time I called "tech support" was when a driver would not talk anymore to a piece of hardware. I already know that the driver developers suck at this company and I have had numerous issues with this software and hardware to boot. The application, disguised as an OS X "System Preference" said something to the effect, "Dude, I can't see your hardware". I looked in the system log files, and the driver said that it found the device, and then got some error. Being that I just updated my system from 10.4.4 to 10.4.5, and I've had issues with the driver in the past, I assumed it was due to the upgrade.
I verify this by hooking the device up to my other computer that has the stable 10.3.9 on it, and the device worked fine, so it looks like the 10.4.5 did the trick right?
Well, telling all of this information to "tech support" yielded nothing. The dipshit told me to "reinstall the driver" and reboot a few times. The same stuff they tell me every other time I call due to their horrible software. I asked, "Is this a known issue with 10.4.5?" He said, "No". Within 1 week and updated driver was posted on their website, and magically, my device was working again.
All the guy had to say was, "It does not work on 10.4.5, we will release a driver in a week or two", and I would have been OK with that. But he insulted me, wasted a toll phone call, and wasted my time. Not to include that this is only a hobby for me now, this incident could have cost me thousands of dollars if I were a professional.
Do you have any thoughts on if the US should do anything to prevent Al Qaeda from attaining its stated goal of killing 4,000,000 Americans?
OK. Lets do some research here. Here is some info about Paul Marshall. He's a scary looking American white dude. He is in "frequent demand" to tell people what they should here on such fringe "news" outlets like ABC Evening News; CBS Evening News; CNN; Fox; PBS; the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; and South African Broadcasting Corporation. His work has been the subject of articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, Weekly Standard, First Things, New Republic, Globe and Mail, Christianity Today, Decision, Reader's Digest and several hundred other newspapers and magazines. Not a very impressive list, eh? He also heads this place. Notice the other scary looking American white dude in the middle there.
Paul Marshall also wrote this book, which the book description says, "In an age when the relationship between politics and religion is becoming ever more important--and ever more blurred--both in America and beyond, God and the Constitution is an indispensable guide for Christians interested in exploring how they can interject their religious convictions into their political actions."
Oh, and the 4,000,000 link mentions a guy named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. In case you don't know who he is, look here. Paul Marshall, in the pursuit of journalism objectiveness failed to mention anything beyond his scary name.
Oh, and the picture of the little girl was touching. I'm sure that its worse than any from what good old scary white Americans have done to people in Afghanistan, Iraq, not to mention Abu Ghraib, or Guitmo.
People like this, and this terrify me and others throughout the world. I've never had a beef with an Arab.
I do think that the 9/11 attacks were for this end, being afraid of terrorism, changing what you do in you life is letting the terrorist win; it gives them what they want.
Also, keep in mind that according to the 9/11 report, that the reason there was no warning was because the bad guys did not use any electronic form of communication.
So, either terrorists are now dumber than they used to be, or the American public is.
I've only used it on OS X, and here it is a travesty. The GUI doesn't do live resizing (unlike every other OS X app). You often need to do a small resize to persuade the GUI to actually draw in the right place. The widgets don't behave quite like the ones that look the same in other apps. After an hour or so of use, it climbs to over 0.5GB of RAM usage (in-core size, not just VM size). It somehow seems to leak CPU - after a couple of hours it will be using 100% of my CPU for no observable reason.
I am not sure how much of this is due to Azureus and how much to SWT, but whatever the cause the result is a completely unusable product.
I concur. I had the exact same experience and thus concluded that it was unusable.
I get punished all the time around here when I bash Java, but Azureus is yet another example where it just seems to be true that Java for cross platform GUI platform lives up to the saying "write once, debug everywhere". Matlab, SAS, Wordperfect, Oracle Universal Installer, you name it, I get the email or phone call saying "Its broken again...". People defend Java saying that nobody on the planet knows how to do Java correctly, and that is the problem. They are probably correct. Now, mod me down.
The "breakage" charge has been bogus for quite some time. It really applied in the days of actual records, a lot of which wouldn't survive shipment. How many CD's (or tapes for that matter) end up broken per shipment? Definitely not 15%. So far they have been able to make this stick regardless. Now it's just completely ridiculous, versus just mostly.
I love all of those "extra" charges and surcharges and other BS tactics that companies are doing more and more of. I had one of those PODS storage units, and when I set up the account with them, they asked me if I wanted "POD insurance". It was only 5 bucks and I was under duress at the time, so I said "OK". They then billed me that $5 every month, until I asked them to retroactively take it off of my bill.
That is a complete scam. I asked them "What is POD insurance giving me?", and the script said, "Its to insure that the POD will not be damaged, not the contents inside of the POD". To which I replied. "OK, the POD is your property, and its currently being stored on your property. What kind of liability do I have for your property on your property?"
The person immediately took all charges off of my credit card.
I hate assholes like that. Otherwise, I was happy with the POD system, but it was a little pricey...
And especially since the cost of distributing the song over the internet is next to nothing anyway.
How about zero, at least to Sony, et al. In the case of the iTunes store, Apple is the one paying for the bandwidth and the store maintenance, etc. Sony is getting 70% because they suckered some 20 something into a deal 20+ years ago.
From the article, assuming it's accurate and correct, what a staggering number each 99 cent sale of a Cheap Trick song nets Cheap Trick a paltry $.045. That's internet highway robbery.
The FA also says: "Tracks sold over the Internet usually go for about 99 cents. About 70 cents of the sale price goes to Sony. The bands are getting about 4 1/2 cents per song, according to the suit, rather than the approximately 30 cents they claim is rightfully theirs."
I'm not sure if the band's cut is out of the Sony cut or what, but Sony getting 70% of the money seems excessive. Remind me why artists need companies like Sony? Especially known bands.
And? MS does not really make money off of new versions of Windows (AFAIK). Most licenses for Windows are OEM licenses and its just "what comes with the computer".
Office updates, on the other hand, makes MS money. Especially if the file formats change.
Granted, they might make more money off of Vista because people might buy it 2 or 3 times to get the version they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a bass player, I'm concerned about what's left over for the musician. Very concerned.
I hate to break it to you, but odds are very much against you for sitting in a studio for a couple of weeks and making a lifetime's worth of pay.
You have to a) be good, b) play live music, and c) be lucky.
There are _tons_ of musicians that play 60-100+ shows a year. Its a lot of work. And most of those do not "make it big".
As Jerry used to say, "Keep your day job, until your night job pays!".
If it weren't for NDAs, they could probably publish a top selling book with all that rumor-mill information they've got stored away.
3 65480-9092665?v=glance&n=283155
I have the book, you can have it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743228626/103-5
It is excellent, scary, and amusing all at the same time. I can't tell you how its just filled with page after page about how X company got Y*100 million in VC, and in Z days/years they were bust. One company had over $300mil in VC money, and Philip Kaplan said, "If they merely partied and blew the money at $1mil/year they would have been in business for over 300 years", yet they went broke in a year or two.
Amazing.
I don't want our government being any more involved in our lives than they are now. They suck at it.
I know of at least two reputable, low turnover, low stress, well paid employers that have, gasp, a doctor on their staff. Employers seem willing to pay for "health benefits", but not a doctor on staff. Take a random product industry, say a beer brewery. Do they have IT people? yup. Maintenance people? yup. Janitors? Yup. Is there a doctor in the house?
Oh, those employers are SAS and Google.
I'd say there must be more to the picture. Like any complex system, the health of a nation probably can't be pinned on one single factor.
OK, maybe that is the factor.
How many redheads are there in Japan? Blonds?
Most Americans are more than broke (ie, in debt). Most Americans are cheap. We eat horrible, inexpensive, non-nutritional food. We have to worry about our cars being stolen, or if you get into a fender bender, you better pay that 15-25% of the cost of a (modest) car a year for insurance so you can drive your 4x4 SUV. Even if your a good boy and pay the health insurance extortion racket, I dare you to get sick. I double dare you to find good health care. Remember, most are broke and getting sick or in an accident is a major expense that is not included in our interest payments.
If you own a computer in the US, and you are knowledgeable, you have to be on the alert because people from all over the world are going to try to break into it, or at the least you have to deal with getting a ratio of 100:1 spam:real mail.
Keep in mind that we are broke and cheap, so we're always looking for a deal, right? Well, there is always someone looking to take your money, so those "deals" often don't work out as well as advertised.
Also, we have still have racial tension here. The legal and criminal system here is geared towards "controlling" minorities, but hey, if you're not a 2.1 kid bearing family, you too can be subject to being treated as a minority in the criminal justice system. Being a single, middle aged white guy, I have to pretend to be more "average" so that I can more easily hide myself from the police here.
Also, keep in mind that our legal system also favors businesses and corps over individuals. On average, in a year or two an individual can be sentenced to life in prison or execution. A lawsuit against a business or corp takes years upon years, and in the end its usually the lawyers and the business that benefit.
Yeah, Americans are sick, from the inside out.
Windows 95 brought TCP/IP and a web browser.
Well, I bought Windows 95 in August of 1995 when it came out on 13 or so floppies, and it did not come with TCP/IP as a default install. It took me a while and bunches of floppy shuffling and downloading via other means and reading to get native PPP working with a standard ISP. It did not come with a browser.
I was impressed with Windows 95's GUI improvements over 3.x and its multitasking abilities. I didn't like Macs at the time, and Win95 was infinitely better than 3.x by any stretch of the imagination. Win 3.x had TCP/IP support at some level, I don't remember.
Win95 gave a more "Mac like" feel. With the way it probed hardware and had a standardized installer/unistaller, printing was better, etc. Win 3.x was literally a windowing environment for DOS. I know noone that was scared of a DOS prompt that used PCs.
Windows 98 brought USB and FAT32.
FAT32 was introduced in Win95 OSR2, and was/is not that special. Most people don't know what that even is.
USB did not halfway reliably work until Win98 SE.
Windows 2K/XP brought multi-user and NTFS.
I'm fuzzy on the details, but NT based Windows added multi-user much before 2K. Also, NTFS was introduced with NT. Now that I think about it, I would believe that NTFS and NT were multi-user from their inception in the early 90s.
I don't know what Vista will bring. The more they take away features and the more delay the release date, well, maybe one day we will know.
Finally Homeland security has done something noteworthy. I'm glad this benefits the X11 community.
A) This was _funded_ via the Homeland Security.
B) Still, a good percentage of the spam caught by my spam filter comes via owned Homeland Security Windows boxes.
C) How did they miss the () all this time? Especially on a function as critical as geteuid?
A big question here is.. is the database compromised? From the poking around I've done, it does seem that the only people who have received this message are BlueFrog users.
:)
I have never used a blue frog
Seriously, I have never heard of blue frog or blue security until Sunday or Monday when about 10 or so emails escaped my spam filter. I am getting these mails sent to a number of email aliases and even one harvested email address that is not known or valid. Regarding the harvested one, I'm assuming it came from a mailing list or a web archive of a mailing list. The deal is that I'm an admin of a domain, and I have all of the workstations on the domain MX entry pointing to the main mail server. So, its like workstation1.example.com and the MX entry is for mail.example.com. I have been getting spam mails to me@workstation1.example.com for years, yet I have NEVER implicitly or explicitly told or given an email address of me@workstation1.example.com to anybody. me@workstation1.example.com IS listed in some email headers, but never as a From or Reply-To address.
Back to this blue stuff. I have no clue what it is, nor do I care besides the fact that some of the mails are escaping my spam filter. All of the mails I have looked at in detail appear to be coming from compromised Windows machines from around the world. For a full example, see the body of one of the mails below in fixed font. The middle appears to always be the same, but there is random english text at the beginning and end. The subjects appear to be 2 random words.
What a PITA. I cannot tell what the purpose of these mails are. At first, they look like extortion to try to get me to get more spam to stop getting spam. I don't know.
Sometimes a sting can cause a comatose condition which is."He began to laugh then, and her face darkened for the first time since she had come back, and she left the room with the manuscript under her arm..
Hey,
You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).
You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.
How do you make it stop?
Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.
We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.
By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.
Why are we doing this?
Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity.
Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did.
If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same.
We are quite sure you will think this will not continue, that we will not continue wasting our resources doing this, feel free to wait out the first 48, or the second, and see whether these stop, you will be quite suprised.
If you have another email under the protection of bluesecurity, and have not recieved this there, do not worry, you will soon enough.
We mightve had your email addresses before in our lists, but now, we are targetting YOU, because YOU are a bluesecurity user.
You might also notice, that the BlueSecurity site(http://www.b
From a college student at an effected University
While you are still in school, it might be worthy of learning what "effected" means, so that when you're an adult "in the real world" you won't embarrass yourself.
Perhaps they intend to make torrents a legitimate method of delivery of purchased iTunes songs. So, you purchase an iTunes song, seed it as an 'iTunes torrent.' Then you get some amount of credit for more iTunes songs. Someone else who buys the first song you bought downloads it as a torrent from you (and others).
Wasn't that called Napster?
So if coffee is a yes-drink...and alcohol is a yes-drink...screw pheromones. We need to start buying women coffee martinis. There's the real liquid panty remover.
Actually, they are called Jager bombs.
For example, if I type in stuff like 'wwwww.yahoo.com', that STUPID IE just search for it and with the address bar ending up modifed as "http://sea.search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx?FORM=DNSA S&q=wwwww.yahoo.com".
I will probably never use IE7, but does properly entering www.yahoo.com "search" for it and phone home to MS for every url that you type into the address field?
Here, we call it slashvertisements. I dunno about MSNBC.
Bill has one hell of a homepage: http://www.information-about.org/
And, the security expert(:?s)? at http://www.security-protocols.com/about-us.php are surely up on the game.
I guess its just as stupid as me paying to post here.
Actually, I always thought cybersquatting was more like registering a bunch of potentially valuable domain names and doing nothing with them, until whoever would be rightfully interested in registering a name realizes it's taken and offers money to buy it back. It's a form of racket of course. Typosquatting is rather different.
But that was back in 1999, years before 2004 was ever imagined.
I feel that people are confusing "evil" with profit. Google went public. Google is a business. Google now aims (moreso at least) to generate profit for its owners. But doing something that makes money for a company does not make it evil? Who does this hurt?
Answer me that question once you go to a drugstore on Sunday morning, and you're tying to get rid of that hangover before doing your Sunday church appearance. With a splitting headache, then go to the pain relief isle, but B4Y3R aspirin, that looks just like BAYER aspirin minus the chemicals that relieve pain. But, you forgive the company because its now owned by Google and they owe it to their stockholders to put such products on the shelf.
Why is it that common sense and reality go out the window when a computer is involved (patent pending)?
Things with direct analogies to life like email forwarding vs snail mail forwarding don't make sense to people, but things like popup/under advertisements and typosquating makes sense. In the future, will businesses open on 212 Madison Ave when a known company is at 212 Madison St just in case someone gets lost?
Reminds me of when the only people that really profited off of the gold rush were shovel salesmen and prostitutes.
For example, in the mechanical engineering department where I work there's one guy with a really fast PC and a high-end (I think nVidia but I'm not sure) graphics card that does 3-D design and rendering of parts for the automated machine tools on the plant floor.
Which warrants a $500+ video card and a $2-5k computer because these things used to cost $10k+ 10 years ago.
Again, Word and Office don't need even a $200 video card.
Solitaire and Freecell maybe, but not Office apps.
You might need to lighten up. Not everything anyone ever does needs to be 100% productive to society, you know. Posting on slashdot comes to mind.
I consider posting to slashdot more productive to society than say sending spam, writing and installing rootkits, worms, viruses, ssh dictionary attacks, DDOS attacks, not to mention what people do outside of computers.
Its at least harmless.
There's also the fact that most American business managers consider their employees and customers to be parasites that are bleeding the company dry, and treat them as such.
I must need glasses. Did I read that correctly? Managers consider their employees and customers to be parasites? Employees provide products and services that the manager, uh, manages. And the customers are those that , uh, pay the manager and said employees.
One of the last time I called "tech support" was when a driver would not talk anymore to a piece of hardware. I already know that the driver developers suck at this company and I have had numerous issues with this software and hardware to boot. The application, disguised as an OS X "System Preference" said something to the effect, "Dude, I can't see your hardware". I looked in the system log files, and the driver said that it found the device, and then got some error. Being that I just updated my system from 10.4.4 to 10.4.5, and I've had issues with the driver in the past, I assumed it was due to the upgrade.
I verify this by hooking the device up to my other computer that has the stable 10.3.9 on it, and the device worked fine, so it looks like the 10.4.5 did the trick right?
Well, telling all of this information to "tech support" yielded nothing. The dipshit told me to "reinstall the driver" and reboot a few times. The same stuff they tell me every other time I call due to their horrible software. I asked, "Is this a known issue with 10.4.5?" He said, "No". Within 1 week and updated driver was posted on their website, and magically, my device was working again.
All the guy had to say was, "It does not work on 10.4.5, we will release a driver in a week or two", and I would have been OK with that. But he insulted me, wasted a toll phone call, and wasted my time. Not to include that this is only a hobby for me now, this incident could have cost me thousands of dollars if I were a professional.
Do you have any thoughts on if the US should do anything to prevent Al Qaeda from attaining its stated goal of killing 4,000,000 Americans?
OK. Lets do some research here. Here is some info about Paul Marshall. He's a scary looking American white dude. He is in "frequent demand" to tell people what they should here on such fringe "news" outlets like ABC Evening News; CBS Evening News; CNN; Fox; PBS; the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; and South African Broadcasting Corporation. His work has been the subject of articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, Weekly Standard, First Things, New Republic, Globe and Mail, Christianity Today, Decision, Reader's Digest and several hundred other newspapers and magazines. Not a very impressive list, eh? He also heads this place. Notice the other scary looking American white dude in the middle there.
Paul Marshall also wrote this book, which the book description says, "In an age when the relationship between politics and religion is becoming ever more important--and ever more blurred--both in America and beyond, God and the Constitution is an indispensable guide for Christians interested in exploring how they can interject their religious convictions into their political actions."
Oh, and the 4,000,000 link mentions a guy named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. In case you don't know who he is, look here. Paul Marshall, in the pursuit of journalism objectiveness failed to mention anything beyond his scary name.
Oh, and the picture of the little girl was touching. I'm sure that its worse than any from what good old scary white Americans have done to people in Afghanistan, Iraq, not to mention Abu Ghraib, or Guitmo.
People like this, and this terrify me and others throughout the world. I've never had a beef with an Arab.
I do think that the 9/11 attacks were for this end, being afraid of terrorism, changing what you do in you life is letting the terrorist win; it gives them what they want.
Also, keep in mind that according to the 9/11 report, that the reason there was no warning was because the bad guys did not use any electronic form of communication.
So, either terrorists are now dumber than they used to be, or the American public is.
11,111 attacks that caused 14,602 deaths
So, by my math, thats ~1.3 people killed per "attack". To put that in perspective, Americans have murdered each other the past few years at this rate:
2000 - 15,586 murders
2001 - 16,037 murders
2002 - 16,229 murders
2003 - 16,528 murders
2004 - 16,137 murders
But the average number of people killed was probably closer to 1.0, so that could not be an "attack" or terrorism.
So, the moral of the story is that living in the US is more dangerous than all of the terrorism in the world.
I've only used it on OS X, and here it is a travesty. The GUI doesn't do live resizing (unlike every other OS X app). You often need to do a small resize to persuade the GUI to actually draw in the right place. The widgets don't behave quite like the ones that look the same in other apps. After an hour or so of use, it climbs to over 0.5GB of RAM usage (in-core size, not just VM size). It somehow seems to leak CPU - after a couple of hours it will be using 100% of my CPU for no observable reason.
I am not sure how much of this is due to Azureus and how much to SWT, but whatever the cause the result is a completely unusable product.
I concur. I had the exact same experience and thus concluded that it was unusable.
I get punished all the time around here when I bash Java, but Azureus is yet another example where it just seems to be true that Java for cross platform GUI platform lives up to the saying "write once, debug everywhere". Matlab, SAS, Wordperfect, Oracle Universal Installer, you name it, I get the email or phone call saying "Its broken again...". People defend Java saying that nobody on the planet knows how to do Java correctly, and that is the problem. They are probably correct. Now, mod me down.
The "breakage" charge has been bogus for quite some time. It really applied in the days of actual records, a lot of which wouldn't survive shipment. How many CD's (or tapes for that matter) end up broken per shipment? Definitely not 15%. So far they have been able to make this stick regardless. Now it's just completely ridiculous, versus just mostly.
I love all of those "extra" charges and surcharges and other BS tactics that companies are doing more and more of. I had one of those PODS storage units, and when I set up the account with them, they asked me if I wanted "POD insurance". It was only 5 bucks and I was under duress at the time, so I said "OK". They then billed me that $5 every month, until I asked them to retroactively take it off of my bill.
That is a complete scam. I asked them "What is POD insurance giving me?", and the script said, "Its to insure that the POD will not be damaged, not the contents inside of the POD". To which I replied. "OK, the POD is your property, and its currently being stored on your property. What kind of liability do I have for your property on your property?"
The person immediately took all charges off of my credit card.
I hate assholes like that. Otherwise, I was happy with the POD system, but it was a little pricey...
And especially since the cost of distributing the song over the internet is next to nothing anyway.
How about zero, at least to Sony, et al. In the case of the iTunes store, Apple is the one paying for the bandwidth and the store maintenance, etc. Sony is getting 70% because they suckered some 20 something into a deal 20+ years ago.
From the article, assuming it's accurate and correct, what a staggering number each 99 cent sale of a Cheap Trick song nets Cheap Trick a paltry $.045. That's internet highway robbery.
The FA also says: "Tracks sold over the Internet usually go for about 99 cents. About 70 cents of the sale price goes to Sony. The bands are getting about 4 1/2 cents per song, according to the suit, rather than the approximately 30 cents they claim is rightfully theirs."
I'm not sure if the band's cut is out of the Sony cut or what, but Sony getting 70% of the money seems excessive. Remind me why artists need companies like Sony? Especially known bands.
Vista will be out in 2007
And? MS does not really make money off of new versions of Windows (AFAIK). Most licenses for Windows are OEM licenses and its just "what comes with the computer".
Office updates, on the other hand, makes MS money. Especially if the file formats change.
Granted, they might make more money off of Vista because people might buy it 2 or 3 times to get the version they want.