Of course part of the reason for that is that it's been so easy to just write your own plugin if you wanted to do anything fancy. But if the "standard" way of attaching plugins suddenly goes away, I expect people to move to Java or ActiveX pretty quickly.
If someone other than Microsoft can get the marketing going to convince average users to install a decent JVM, Java has a chance on the desktop. If not, I expect to see ActiveX-based attacks more virulent and more destructive than anything yet within three months after XP ships.
Microsoft has exactly as much right as anyone else to promote a standard.
Actually, as a confirmed monopoly, they most definitely do not have the same rights as any other company. And until/unless the supreme court overturns the unanimous opinion of the circuit court, that's exactly what they are.
I got the email about superheated water from your microwave, and how it could explode. Wrote back explaining, "No, mom. It's just another one of those hoaxes I keep telling you about." Sheesh, when will she learn.
Fast forward two weeks, I'm watching TV and see this interesting video...
Well damn, how about that. [dial dial dial... ring... ring ]
I once upgraded GroupWise 4.1 to GroupWise 5.0. We figured we could bring people in to the classroom, show them the new frontend, show them how all the detail screens were exactly the same, and we'd be done in an hour.
Instead, we had people who had been using GW4.1 for over a year, who completely forgot how to do anything. They had to be retrained on every single feature in the whole package, even though only one screen had changed.
And over three years after having moved from WordPerfect 5.1 on Windows 3.1 to WP7 on Win95, we still had people saying they could work faster with the old system, and in fact why couldn't we go back to the old DOS network; that one never went down.
The point is, for the people who only memorize their keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks they need to get through the day, they're going to need to be retrained for W2K anyway. And for Office. And for the new versions of every app they use. So why not train them on something better, instead?
And just so I don't have to address the hardware issues in another post, at that same job we had 200 new computers come in on one order, all with the same specs, supposedly identical. But the video cards and NICs and a few other things weren't all identical. We ended up having 7 ghost images to get everything working. Add in the older machines we were still using, plus the next shipment that came in, and we ended up with a library of over two dozen system images, just to try to get everyone to the same desktop.
If the only thing we needed to get working was a network connection, the OS booted from the network, and everything ran from the server, this would have been much easier. But this isn't just an argument in favor of network computing. According to the article, a single Linux server was able to handle the entire city. Doing this with Windows would have required a server farm. You then end up with the maintnence issues of trying to keep the server farm synchronized.
The fact that Linux is designed from the beginning as a multi-user system is what makes network computing feasible. This allows sysadmins to run applications from wherever they make sense. Give developers boxes with some horsepower to run their tools locally, but run the office productivity apps on the server. Give secreteries thin clients and run everything from the server. Give road warriers laptops that boot to the network and run a scripted apt-get from the local server to keep everything up-to-date.
Most of this is probably possible with Windows, but the last time I worked in a Windows shop (just last year) it would have been all-custom and prohibitively expensive.
I think it's safe to call X-files mainstream. They had an episode where remote-contolled nano-bots were injected into... Mulder? Pretty sure it was him. So I think Hollywood has heard of them.
I'm in the process of persuading my ISP to drop everything from cotse.com.
Isn't this exactly what the author said people try to do? Post trash under a cotse name to try to get the site in trouble? Did you consider that you are being used?
How can you reap profits AND corrupt research? I mean, if you get some students to develop something for you, if their research is bogus, then the product's not going to work, is it?
Well, if you had bothered to read the article you would have seen:
Betty Dong at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered data that led her to question the effectiveness of a medication being used daily by millions of people. But when she went to report it, she was blocked for seven years by the company that paid for the study.
David Kahn, another researcher at the same school, was sued last November for $10 million by the company that sponsored his study, after he published a report that the AIDS drug he was testing was ineffective.
So yes, Universities are being forced to stifle information showing that new products and techhnologies are ineffective, or at least less effective than existing ones. The products don't work, but no one's allowed to say anything about it.
Even if he is buying names in bulk - for $10 a piece, that's still 7 large plus hosting - Lets not mention the fact that the legal fees associated with this must of have been quite a nice sum.
Most of the sites point to the discussion boards at sucks.com. So whatever you estimate for hosting, you don't need to multiply it by 700. Besides, I suspect the traffic to the sucks.com discussion fora is negligable next to the bandwidth from his porn properties.
As for this being a vistory for big business: while porn may be a big business, it is hardly in the same class as the corporate intersts that are typically accused of running things.
My first instinct was to respond that that is not what the law is saying. But if politicians have proven anything it's the ability to turn a legitimate problem into an excue to over-reach.
The fine line to tread will IMO hinge on the idea that individuals should have a right to privacy, but corporations shouldn't. Just as commercial speech is secondary to individual speech, commercial privacy -- in the form of anonymous solicitation -- should be secondary to individual privacy.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of faith in our current system recognizing so fine a distinction.
Instead of paper pricetags on the front of the shelves, each item had a small, solar-powered (plus battery backup) LCD pricetag. The tags each had a unique ID, and a receiver on the top.
Price updates could be propogated through the flourescents, and the prices would automatically match what the item would scan for. They estimated the cost savings would pay for the system in less than a year.
One has to wonder which would be more insulting - the notion that Indian culture was worthless and backwards and needed to be subjucated by some western company, or the inability to distinguish between Africa and India.
I deserved that. It seems I need to remove the plank from my own eye.
However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
I thought you were being sarcastic as I started reading this, but after finishing your whole post I think you mean it. The cultural imperialism you have just displayed is astonishing. Those lands weren't primitive. Many African cultures had longer, richer histories than all of western society -- I intentionally didn't use the word "civilization" there. The African cultures were described as primitive simply because they were different from that of the invading armies.
I won't bother to expand on your assumption that introducing taxation was a self-evident improvement, other than to point out that the people suddenly forced to pay the taxes to their new colonial "masters" would probably not have agreed with the assumption.
The difference between England and the U.S.
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 5
England is where they think 100 miles is a long distance.
The U.S. is where they think 100 years is a long time.
What are they supposed to be doing? Install Windows and apps on thousands of machines?
In the original article about the rat out your clients game, there is a link to an article about licensing. In there you will find:
If you got your computer with an OEM license, but you "ghost" the hard disk as most larger companies do to achieve consistency, you have to buy a second Windows license for that computer. Installing this second license voids your OEM license so the OEM no longer provides support. You now have to get that from Microsoft at $350 per incident.
So in short, yes, you are supposed to install all apps individually onto a clean OEM Windows install.
Microsoft isn't going after individual users, they're only after larger customers, corporations and resellers maybe.
I've read the story twice, wait let me triple check it... okay, three times now. I don't see anywhere where it says anything about "individual users."
If you follow the link, you'll see the entire email that started the whole thing. It's pretty clear Microsoft is targeting corporations who are trying to use their site license to load images onto all new boxes. Apparently, that's against the terms of the site license. (Not that the terms are clear enough to read without legal assistance. Hey, the article links to a whole story about that problem, too.)
And in case you missed it, the Register article you seem so fond uf is based on the same article that this Slashdot story is based on!
Oh, and thanks for throwing on your own FUD:
If you buy an OS-less PC and put Linux on it, they won't care, If you're buying 1000 OS-less PC's there's a far greater chance you'll resell them or use an illegal liscense.
Yup, no chance at all someone actually meant to buy all those boxes and put something other than Windows on them. They simply have to be doing something illegal.
If the guy had read the FAQ, he would know that such tricks are not compression
Did the rules as stated say that the solution had to comply with the principle laid out in the FAQ? Not that I can see. If you're going to pup up a $5,000 challenge, you damn well better post all the rules.
For instance: I had a friend who entered a paper airplane contest. He signed up for the "maximum distance" part. The only rules were that the contest organizers supplied the single piece of paper, you had five minutes to fold or tear it however you want to, and then everyone threw them at the same time. The one that stops moving farthest from the launch line wins.
He waited until 4:45 into the time, then crumpled the paper up into a ball and threw it. While everyone else's planes were circling lazily around, his went straight, landed, and rolled several more feet.
While you can debate all you want about whether his wad of paper counted as a "paper airplane" -- and we did debate (hey, it was college) -- he did saitsfy the rules of the contest. Had there been enough money on the line for someone to threaten legal action, I suspect he would have won.
Hell, even the company and business plan mentioned here has been talking about it since at least August 2000. (Search that page for "Angel" or "Raytheon".) Does anyone even bother to check if this stuff is new before posting it? Oh yeah, nevermind.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course part of the reason for that is that it's been so easy to just write your own plugin if you wanted to do anything fancy. But if the "standard" way of attaching plugins suddenly goes away, I expect people to move to Java or ActiveX pretty quickly.
If someone other than Microsoft can get the marketing going to convince average users to install a decent JVM, Java has a chance on the desktop. If not, I expect to see ActiveX-based attacks more virulent and more destructive than anything yet within three months after XP ships.
Microsoft has exactly as much right as anyone else to promote a standard.
Actually, as a confirmed monopoly, they most definitely do not have the same rights as any other company. And until/unless the supreme court overturns the unanimous opinion of the circuit court, that's exactly what they are.
I got the email about superheated water from your microwave, and how it could explode. Wrote back explaining, "No, mom. It's just another one of those hoaxes I keep telling you about." Sheesh, when will she learn.
Fast forward two weeks, I'm watching TV and see this interesting video ...
Well damn, how about that. [dial dial dial ... ring ... ring ]
Umm yeah, Mom? Sorry. You were right ...
I once upgraded GroupWise 4.1 to GroupWise 5.0. We figured we could bring people in to the classroom, show them the new frontend, show them how all the detail screens were exactly the same, and we'd be done in an hour.
Instead, we had people who had been using GW4.1 for over a year, who completely forgot how to do anything. They had to be retrained on every single feature in the whole package, even though only one screen had changed.
And over three years after having moved from WordPerfect 5.1 on Windows 3.1 to WP7 on Win95, we still had people saying they could work faster with the old system, and in fact why couldn't we go back to the old DOS network; that one never went down.
The point is, for the people who only memorize their keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks they need to get through the day, they're going to need to be retrained for W2K anyway. And for Office. And for the new versions of every app they use. So why not train them on something better, instead?
And just so I don't have to address the hardware issues in another post, at that same job we had 200 new computers come in on one order, all with the same specs, supposedly identical. But the video cards and NICs and a few other things weren't all identical. We ended up having 7 ghost images to get everything working. Add in the older machines we were still using, plus the next shipment that came in, and we ended up with a library of over two dozen system images, just to try to get everyone to the same desktop.
If the only thing we needed to get working was a network connection, the OS booted from the network, and everything ran from the server, this would have been much easier. But this isn't just an argument in favor of network computing. According to the article, a single Linux server was able to handle the entire city. Doing this with Windows would have required a server farm. You then end up with the maintnence issues of trying to keep the server farm synchronized.
The fact that Linux is designed from the beginning as a multi-user system is what makes network computing feasible. This allows sysadmins to run applications from wherever they make sense. Give developers boxes with some horsepower to run their tools locally, but run the office productivity apps on the server. Give secreteries thin clients and run everything from the server. Give road warriers laptops that boot to the network and run a scripted apt-get from the local server to keep everything up-to-date.
Most of this is probably possible with Windows, but the last time I worked in a Windows shop (just last year) it would have been all-custom and prohibitively expensive.
It should exist especially when they find it uncomfortable.
Fallingwater
Built in the '50s. Widely regarded as one of the most reconized private homes in America. (Now a museum, of course, but originally a residence.)
I think it's safe to call X-files mainstream. They had an episode where remote-contolled nano-bots were injected into ... Mulder? Pretty sure it was him. So I think Hollywood has heard of them.
I'm in the process of persuading my ISP to drop everything from cotse.com.
Isn't this exactly what the author said people try to do? Post trash under a cotse name to try to get the site in trouble? Did you consider that you are being used?
what would Linux be like today if it could attract top-tier engineers?
Yes, and what would the Earth be like if it circled a yellow star?
And what would the Pacific Ocean be like if it were really deep?
And what would man be like if he had a network of interconnected neurons at his disposal?
Oh wait, I'm sorry. I lost you on that last one, didn't I?
Nothing to see here, move on.
How can you reap profits AND corrupt research? I mean, if you get some students to develop something for you, if their research is bogus, then the product's not going to work, is it?
Well, if you had bothered to read the article you would have seen:Betty Dong at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered data that led her to question the effectiveness of a medication being used daily by millions of people. But when she went to report it, she was blocked for seven years by the company that paid for the study.
David Kahn, another researcher at the same school, was sued last November for $10 million by the company that sponsored his study, after he published a report that the AIDS drug he was testing was ineffective.
So yes, Universities are being forced to stifle information showing that new products and techhnologies are ineffective, or at least less effective than existing ones. The products don't work, but no one's allowed to say anything about it.
Even if he is buying names in bulk - for $10 a piece, that's still 7 large plus hosting - Lets not mention the fact that the legal fees associated with this must of have been quite a nice sum.
Most of the sites point to the discussion boards at sucks.com. So whatever you estimate for hosting, you don't need to multiply it by 700. Besides, I suspect the traffic to the sucks.com discussion fora is negligable next to the bandwidth from his porn properties.
As for this being a vistory for big business: while porn may be a big business, it is hardly in the same class as the corporate intersts that are typically accused of running things.
My first instinct was to respond that that is not what the law is saying. But if politicians have proven anything it's the ability to turn a legitimate problem into an excue to over-reach.
The fine line to tread will IMO hinge on the idea that individuals should have a right to privacy, but corporations shouldn't. Just as commercial speech is secondary to individual speech, commercial privacy -- in the form of anonymous solicitation -- should be secondary to individual privacy.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of faith in our current system recognizing so fine a distinction.
Instead of paper pricetags on the front of the shelves, each item had a small, solar-powered (plus battery backup) LCD pricetag. The tags each had a unique ID, and a receiver on the top. Price updates could be propogated through the flourescents, and the prices would automatically match what the item would scan for. They estimated the cost savings would pay for the system in less than a year.
One has to wonder which would be more insulting - the notion that Indian culture was worthless and backwards and needed to be subjucated by some western company, or the inability to distinguish between Africa and India.
I deserved that. It seems I need to remove the plank from my own eye.
However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
I thought you were being sarcastic as I started reading this, but after finishing your whole post I think you mean it. The cultural imperialism you have just displayed is astonishing. Those lands weren't primitive. Many African cultures had longer, richer histories than all of western society -- I intentionally didn't use the word "civilization" there. The African cultures were described as primitive simply because they were different from that of the invading armies.
I won't bother to expand on your assumption that introducing taxation was a self-evident improvement, other than to point out that the people suddenly forced to pay the taxes to their new colonial "masters" would probably not have agreed with the assumption.
England is where they think 100 miles is a long distance.
The U.S. is where they think 100 years is a long time.
We're all in a field of flowers, but Microsoft is picking them and selling them to folks who are too lazy to come to the countryside.
Too true. And in the process, they first have to destroy that which they are selling us.
No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.
Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...
What are they supposed to be doing? Install Windows and apps on thousands of machines?
In the original article about the rat out your clients game, there is a link to an article about licensing. In there you will find:
If you got your computer with an OEM license, but you "ghost" the hard disk as most larger companies do to achieve consistency, you have to buy a second Windows license for that computer. Installing this second license voids your OEM license so the OEM no longer provides support. You now have to get that from Microsoft at $350 per incident.
So in short, yes, you are supposed to install all apps individually onto a clean OEM Windows install.
Microsoft isn't going after individual users, they're only after larger customers, corporations and resellers maybe.
I've read the story twice, wait let me triple check it ... okay, three times now. I don't see anywhere where it says anything about "individual users."
If you follow the link, you'll see the entire email that started the whole thing. It's pretty clear Microsoft is targeting corporations who are trying to use their site license to load images onto all new boxes. Apparently, that's against the terms of the site license. (Not that the terms are clear enough to read without legal assistance. Hey, the article links to a whole story about that problem, too.)
And in case you missed it, the Register article you seem so fond uf is based on the same article that this Slashdot story is based on!
Oh, and thanks for throwing on your own FUD:
If you buy an OS-less PC and put Linux on it, they won't care, If you're buying 1000 OS-less PC's there's a far greater chance you'll resell them or use an illegal liscense.
Yup, no chance at all someone actually meant to buy all those boxes and put something other than Windows on them. They simply have to be doing something illegal.
There are some prime numbers which can be represented by (2^n)-1 (e.g. 3,7,31 but not 15 or 63)
That sounds like you're saying 15 and 63 are primes. Is that bad grammar or bad math?
If the guy had read the FAQ, he would know that such tricks are not compression
Did the rules as stated say that the solution had to comply with the principle laid out in the FAQ? Not that I can see. If you're going to pup up a $5,000 challenge, you damn well better post all the rules.
For instance: I had a friend who entered a paper airplane contest. He signed up for the "maximum distance" part. The only rules were that the contest organizers supplied the single piece of paper, you had five minutes to fold or tear it however you want to, and then everyone threw them at the same time. The one that stops moving farthest from the launch line wins.
He waited until 4:45 into the time, then crumpled the paper up into a ball and threw it. While everyone else's planes were circling lazily around, his went straight, landed, and rolled several more feet.
While you can debate all you want about whether his wad of paper counted as a "paper airplane" -- and we did debate (hey, it was college) -- he did saitsfy the rules of the contest. Had there been enough money on the line for someone to threaten legal action, I suspect he would have won.
Hell, even the company and business plan mentioned here has been talking about it since at least August 2000. (Search that page for "Angel" or "Raytheon".) Does anyone even bother to check if this stuff is new before posting it? Oh yeah, nevermind.