2. Technocracy - Establish a ruling class of technologically savvy people (who rightfully deserve it!) to lead the unwashed masses into a glorious enlightened future.
Isn't this exactly what Microsoft is trying to do, and what most slashdotter are fighting tooth and nail against?
No -- Microsoft got the "Establish a ruling class of technologically savvy people" but scrapped the "who rightfully deserve it!" clause.
That said, I'm in favor of the deal, as long as one's Slashdot id directly determines one's status in the new world order -- the lower the better.
Would it really be that hard to disallow scanners that rub against the surface of the book, and probably flash pictures, since they would probably annoy the other patrons, while still allowing picture-taking and flat-bed scanners (which are no more invasive than cramming the book onto a flat-bed photocopier in the first place)?
Seems to me like they're really hard up for the coins they want you to feed into the photocopier at double or triple what you'd pay at an independent copy store.
I think it's best to read what Ballmer says not as, "Linux users don't pay for software", but "Our software is such utter crap that it can't compete with the likes of Abiword and OpenOffice"
I'm tempted to guess Balmer's really saying something more along the lines of, "If we sold Office for Linux, that'd take away the last biggest excuse Windows users have for not switching to Linux, which would horribly kill the other half of our business." Kind of makes you wonder if splitting Microsoft really would be a good idea...
(I, for one, would be inclined to buy Word for Linux, simply because the rest of the world uses it, and said rest of the world seems to think that Absolutly Everyone uses Word. Abiword and OpenOffice usually do a pretty good job of importing, but last time I tried exporting from Abiword to Word, I had to go hunt down a real copy of Word to fix some of the nasty formatting issues.)
Bad idea: the main charcters are watching tv and suddenly, a commercial break appears. And they watch a commercial for $ARBITRARY_PRODUCT_X. No one gets up to go to the bathroom or change the channel. It'd bring unrealistic television to the whole next level...
I remember watching Farscape on the early days of the Sci-Fi Channel when their "we're going to commercial now" clip said, "You are now free to move about the cabin. Farscape will continue."
Apple sucessfully moved their computers to an entirely new processor line ten years ago, when they switched from the 68000 series to the PowerPC. They did exactly what Intel and Microsoft are doing now: including an emulation layer to maintain backwards compatability. x86 programs, to the best of my knowledge, will run on 64-bit Itaniums.
Apple has done plenty of stupid things in the past (read Apple by Jim Carlton if you're curious), but sucessfully switching from 68000 series processors to PowerPC wasn't one of them.
Better ban telephones for personal use, then. I understand employees waste billions of dollars of company money every day because they steal company resources for personal gain. "Honey, can you pick up a carton of milk on the way home?" is entirely responsible for our current economic slump.
I have an (old) digital camera that uses CompactFlash cards. It's pretty painless to pop out the CF card, throw it into a tiny little PC Card adapter, and shove it into the side of my notebook. Sure, I could buy a USB CF reader in a pinch (which I might want to do eventually anyway, since I don't use my ancient notebook as much as I once did).
I guess mac users were never fans of upgradability anyway.
Using the -Wall switch with gcc (and, I assume, dinking with the options on other compilers as well, although I don't have as much experience with them as I do with gcc) will warn you if you try to do something stupid like if(foo = 0). It's not foolproof (it suggests that you can put an extra set of parenthesis around the equality to supress the warning), but every thing you can get to help you out is a good thing.
My all-time favorite bug that ever crept into my code was in a C++ constructor. I wrote something like
MyClass::MyClass(int _blah) : blah(blah) {}
instead of
MyClass::MyClass(int _blah) : blah(_blah) {}
Even with -Wall, gcc still didn't warn me that I was doing something that made no sense at all.
A defense lawyer came to my high school government class to talk about the legal system and its exciting collaries. He told several stories of legal bumblings that let him keep various clients out of jail. At the time, he disgusted me -- he was using the letter of the law to wiggle his clients out of the punishment they deserved for the crimes they comitted.
But then it dawned on me: that defense lawyer was fighting the border war to protect my rights. He reminded the police that they can't do whatever they want -- that the Bill of Rights is important.
The guilty must be punished, but not at the expense of the rights of the people.
I recently got one of those friendly letters from Verisign, and I have to agree that they're absurdly misleading, unless you're paying attention and read all the fine print. While this may not be exactly "slamming", it's fairly close.
Probably the best phone company analogy would be for $LONG DISTANCE CARRIER to send out "bills" for long distance service that contain, burried within the fine print, your agreement to switch your service to theirs. If the company were careful, and the customer weren't, they'd likely get plenty of checks from busy people trying to do the right thing. It's not Verisign's fault that the customer is clueless, but they are definatly trying to exploit it. (Letting them get away with claiming that is like Jeff Bezos saying, "The patent system needs to be reformed!" while at the same time suing B&N for infringing their stupid little patent.)
Illegal? Technically not, because the customers are agreeing to transfer their domains. Immoral? Misleading? Definatly. Worth bringing down the wrath of the FTC/BBB/whomever? Most likely.
No, it's just a prediction of the future. "Sure, it may not be selling well now, but just wait until this gets published; then it *will* be a best seller!"
Net admins don't read CNN to learn about virus outbreaks
No, of course not. Real network admins know everything about their networks by watching the link lights on their switches. Since they can see the contents of the packets that are being sent and recieved, all they need to do is decode the packet in real time. Junior admins occassionally have problems mastering the ip checksum algorithms, but well-practiced senior net admins can track thousands of concurrent TCP connections. It's a simple matter to determine what the network is being used for just by watching the blinking lights.
And you thought those light were just to look pretty. Ha!
I'm glad the army of highly-trained rodents that processes Slashdot submissions was able to catch these reduntant stories. We've seen this a few times before:
On my notebook if I boot Linux without my network cable plugged in, it hangs forever during the boot.
I betcha that's because some of your daemons (sendmail is notorious for doing that) are trying to get an ip for your hostname, and are failing because they can't contact the nameserver. (This is a bug, not a feature, but it seems fairly common.) Add a line to/etc/hosts with your ip and hostname and you should be set.
I finally figured out why Intel thinks I need a Pentium 4 to "Unlock the Power of the Internet". I've quickly and effortlessly reduced my US$400 n-GHz Pentium 4 to a US$40 DSP.
I have a great idea -- we can continue this trend into other periphials. Why bother buying a costly GeForce when you can just do all of the 3d rendering on the host processor? It'll save money, and besides, modern processors are overpowered for word processing anyway. If that works well, we can implement software hard drives, too; there's a lot of firmware devoted to the simple business of positioning the head on the drive that could easily be eliminated, thus making the device cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I'm in favor of the deal, as long as one's Slashdot id directly determines one's status in the new world order -- the lower the better.
Would it really be that hard to disallow scanners that rub against the surface of the book, and probably flash pictures, since they would probably annoy the other patrons, while still allowing picture-taking and flat-bed scanners (which are no more invasive than cramming the book onto a flat-bed photocopier in the first place)?
Seems to me like they're really hard up for the coins they want you to feed into the photocopier at double or triple what you'd pay at an independent copy store.
A free copy of MySQL, obviously!
I'm tempted to guess Balmer's really saying something more along the lines of, "If we sold Office for Linux, that'd take away the last biggest excuse Windows users have for not switching to Linux, which would horribly kill the other half of our business." Kind of makes you wonder if splitting Microsoft really would be a good idea...
(I, for one, would be inclined to buy Word for Linux, simply because the rest of the world uses it, and said rest of the world seems to think that Absolutly Everyone uses Word. Abiword and OpenOffice usually do a pretty good job of importing, but last time I tried exporting from Abiword to Word, I had to go hunt down a real copy of Word to fix some of the nasty formatting issues.)
Bad idea: the main charcters are watching tv and suddenly, a commercial break appears. And they watch a commercial for $ARBITRARY_PRODUCT_X. No one gets up to go to the bathroom or change the channel. It'd bring unrealistic television to the whole next level...
I remember watching Farscape on the early days of the Sci-Fi Channel when their "we're going to commercial now" clip said, "You are now free to move about the cabin. Farscape will continue."
Apple sucessfully moved their computers to an entirely new processor line ten years ago, when they switched from the 68000 series to the PowerPC. They did exactly what Intel and Microsoft are doing now: including an emulation layer to maintain backwards compatability. x86 programs, to the best of my knowledge, will run on 64-bit Itaniums.
Apple has done plenty of stupid things in the past (read Apple by Jim Carlton if you're curious), but sucessfully switching from 68000 series processors to PowerPC wasn't one of them.
Americans are used to disposable toasters and cars. Disposable wireless phones are just the next step in the trend.
Better ban telephones for personal use, then. I understand employees waste billions of dollars of company money every day because they steal company resources for personal gain. "Honey, can you pick up a carton of milk on the way home?" is entirely responsible for our current economic slump.
I guess mac users were never fans of upgradability anyway.
Forbin takes Colossus on a "tour" of his house. Forbin: "This is the bed. It's used for sleeping, and ... other things."
I will, but maybe that's just because my fiancée just got accepted into a masters of library science program.
(it was long ago, but I'm still bitter.)
My all-time favorite bug that ever crept into my code was in a C++ constructor. I wrote something like
instead of Even with -Wall, gcc still didn't warn me that I was doing something that made no sense at all.On Handspring's website: SpringPort Wireless Ethernet Module. Not cheap; MSRP US$269, but it looks nice.
A defense lawyer came to my high school government class to talk about the legal system and its exciting collaries. He told several stories of legal bumblings that let him keep various clients out of jail. At the time, he disgusted me -- he was using the letter of the law to wiggle his clients out of the punishment they deserved for the crimes they comitted.
But then it dawned on me: that defense lawyer was fighting the border war to protect my rights. He reminded the police that they can't do whatever they want -- that the Bill of Rights is important.
The guilty must be punished, but not at the expense of the rights of the people.
I recently got one of those friendly letters from Verisign, and I have to agree that they're absurdly misleading, unless you're paying attention and read all the fine print. While this may not be exactly "slamming", it's fairly close.
Probably the best phone company analogy would be for $LONG DISTANCE CARRIER to send out "bills" for long distance service that contain, burried within the fine print, your agreement to switch your service to theirs. If the company were careful, and the customer weren't, they'd likely get plenty of checks from busy people trying to do the right thing. It's not Verisign's fault that the customer is clueless, but they are definatly trying to exploit it. (Letting them get away with claiming that is like Jeff Bezos saying, "The patent system needs to be reformed!" while at the same time suing B&N for infringing their stupid little patent.)
Illegal? Technically not, because the customers are agreeing to transfer their domains. Immoral? Misleading? Definatly. Worth bringing down the wrath of the FTC/BBB/whomever? Most likely.
No, it's just a prediction of the future. "Sure, it may not be selling well now, but just wait until this gets published; then it *will* be a best seller!"
.phd (which I'd like to get, but first I have to get grad schools to accept me) .engr (the people who *really* run the world.)
The narrowly-defined "professionals in good standing" can have all theSlashdot (to MPAA): You fucking fascists. We hate you.
MPAA: But look at these shiny colors!
Slashdot: Oooh! How much?
No, of course not. Real network admins know everything about their networks by watching the link lights on their switches. Since they can see the contents of the packets that are being sent and recieved, all they need to do is decode the packet in real time. Junior admins occassionally have problems mastering the ip checksum algorithms, but well-practiced senior net admins can track thousands of concurrent TCP connections. It's a simple matter to determine what the network is being used for just by watching the blinking lights.
And you thought those light were just to look pretty. Ha!
Does anyone else think that anyone whining "Think of the (children|trees|snail darters|etc)" should be shot on sight?
I'm glad the army of highly-trained rodents that processes Slashdot submissions was able to catch these reduntant stories. We've seen this a few times before:
The first story even included a link to the API page on Google's site.
I finally figured out why Intel thinks I need a Pentium 4 to "Unlock the Power of the Internet". I've quickly and effortlessly reduced my US$400 n-GHz Pentium 4 to a US$40 DSP.
I have a great idea -- we can continue this trend into other periphials. Why bother buying a costly GeForce when you can just do all of the 3d rendering on the host processor? It'll save money, and besides, modern processors are overpowered for word processing anyway. If that works well, we can implement software hard drives, too; there's a lot of firmware devoted to the simple business of positioning the head on the drive that could easily be eliminated, thus making the device cheaper.
(Pardon me while I cower in terror.)