The quality of trolling on this site has really taken a nosedive over the last few years...
And how do they get paid if anyone can replicate their content for free?
How about payment for work done? You know, like nearly every other industry. Or should plumbers demand a payment every time you have guest use your toilet?
WTF are you talking about? The way the content industry works is you create content and then you sell copies of it for profit. If everybody copies your work and distributes it for free, which is the way you seem to be suggesting the content industry should be working, there is no profit and hence no money to pay people for work done.
Just hope for donations? There's a guy with a guitar on the corner of my street who does that. It doesn't seem to be working all that well for him.
Interesting conclusion you've drawn there - if it wasn't working all that well for him, why does he keep doing it? Have you tried asking him, instead of drawing illogical conclusions?
There is a classic experiment in behavioral science that deals with this. Leave a table at the side of the street. Put a box full of, say, 50 apples on the table along with a sign that reads "For one apple please put 25 cent in the tin." and top the setup off with one of those sealed donation tins. Come back at the end of the day and you will a lot less than the expected $12.50 worth of change in your donation tin and all your apples missing (assuming nobody has stolen the tin... or the table for that matter). The basic conclusion is that most people will take things they can get for free and are not honest enought to leave a payment/donation or what ever you want to call it unless they are forced to so. That's why we have CCTV cameras, anti theft systems and security officers in supermarkets. There is nothing illogical about his conclusion.
You really think that the "freedom" to steal an author's or musician's work is the same as the freedom to criticize government policies?
Mu. This is an old argument, and regardless of how much you want it to be so, sharing is not stealing
So if we had king sized Star Trek type replicators (with built in future tech energy generator providing ample free energy) that we could feed with common waste material (à la Mr. Fusion) and then use them to, say... replicate cars, car manufacturer's coffers would still be filling up to the brim with all the imaginary goodwill dollars they'd be getting from all you and all the other people who pirate-copied their cars in these replicators without paying real world money for the privilege?
Use AD. Even though folks will fuss and whine about AD being not pure LDAP...
You're not a developer, are you? Whether or not AD is a dream to work with depends heavily on what your job description is. If you are simply an administrator plugging random Windows or even Linux and *nix boxes into AD you might find it comparatively easy. If on the other hand you expect to have to develop custom applications of your own on non-Microsoft platforms that authenticate against AD or convert existing ones to use AD then it can be a painful experience to use AD. It's not an unsolvable problem mind you, just a really annoying one.
... It's simple enough that MCSEs can run it.
So is RHDS / Fedora Directory Server. I knew exactly nothing about LDAP or directory servers when I got my first directory server related project years ago. I still I got the thing set up and running inside of a couple of hours. Even an MCSE should be able to manage setting it up, hardening it and administrating it in a very short period of time.
Come back after you've spent a week making a really nice, easy to use, easy on the eyes website to standards, then spent another week making it work in IE7, then another 3 weeks making it work in IE6 (yes lots of people still use that P.OS.)!
Once you've done that, go to a country back east where ALL the banks got suckered into using ActiveX for their online transactions.
THEN you can come back here and ask how bundling IE with windows hurt anyone.
I can understand your frustration, I have been there. While I generally don't think that a company should be forced to bundle a competitor's products. However, Windows has what?... a 90% market share on desktops? When a company has established market dominance to the point where it's OS is practically the only product on the market, it is bundling software with it's OS and it has a history of using bundling to aggressively to kill off it's competition, IMHO the rules change. So perhaps a "ballot screen" option like this isn't such a bad idea.
With Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with Vista, the big question is how many feet they have. If the answer is "two", then windows 7 is their last bullet.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot at some point with Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, various iterations of Windows XP, Windows Vista... the list goes on and those are only their operating system FUBARs. My personal Microsoft Office FUBAR list starts at the "red crosses of death" that fucked up one of my first project reports almost two decades ago and goes on from there. You can probably find a longer list than mine. The only thing that differed from shot to shot was the caliber of bullet they used which so far has been anything from a 22 cal to a 20mm explosive shell. Most other companies in the software business can only afford a limited number of foot-shots before they go bankrupt. Microsoft's saving grace is not an infinite supply of feet but rather a cash money powered ability to heal from shooting them selves in the foot with amazing speed.
Unix and closed hardware solutions are a dead end. Linux is today an alternative that is almost always more stable, secure and supported than any randomly picked Unix box.
xcept, of course in this specific case (that you use to illustrate your general point) the 'piracy' was performed by a major player(Edison - believe it) and not joe pirate with... some sort of nifty/cheap 1902-era film copying device.
So it seems to me that your point is that major companies are much more harmful to independents than li'l old pirates.
Not really, my point was to compare the situation at the dawn of the 20th century, when the only one that could do a filmmaker major economic harm by pirating his film was an evil mega-corp like the one run by Thomas Edison, with the movie piracy situation today. The sheet music piracy problem of 1897 is much closer in nature to today's music piracy problem. Both examples, however, illustrate that piracy either by a mega-corp as in Méliès case or a legion of individual pirates as in the case of the sheet music distributers could cause you, the content copyright owner, major economic harm even a century ago. Today, thanks to computers and the internet, pirate users are capable of doing just as much harm to a filmmaker as any evil mega-corp because any tom dick or harry can rip off your movie and make it instantly available to millions of people. Arguably the pirates today cause you more harm because you can sue a corporation for stealing your stuff, there is practically speaking nothing you can do to stop the pirates.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?
It didn't ruin the music industry but it probably ruined any number of small composers and threw them to the mercy of big distributers who were the only ones that had the resources to defend against this sort of thing. Even back then piracy could ruin you or at least cause you significant economic harm. A classic example is the 1902 movie: "A Trip to the Moon" by Georges Méliès. The movie was stolen by agents of Thomas Edison and widely circulated in the US by Edison. This ruined Méliès plans to market his film in the US and Méliès never got a profit from this movie. Eventually Méliès was forced into bankruptcy and although the losses on "A Trip to the Moon" probably didn't help his bankruptcy was mostly due to aggressive anti competitive behavior by the big studios of the period. So perhaps the lesson is that there is not much difference between pirates and evil mega-corps from a small/independent artist's or for that matter a small software developer's point of view. Both cause you economic harm and if you are a small/independent artist or software developer you can therefore feel free to detest both equally.
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is reciever that you need a USB receiver for them.
I won't argue with your comment regarding the form factor of the Mighty Mouse but I still like it because it doesn't take up much space. Also the MM still runs if you only put only one battery in it, none of my Logitech wireless mice did that. The MM can be flaky, my first MM had flaky right button functionality, the replacement worked fine. I like compact Notebooks and ancillary equipment and when it comes to compactness you can either have your cake or eat it, not both.
Regarding whether one should get a USB wireless mouse or a Bluetooth mouse I would without hesitation recommend to Meneguzzi that he get a Bluetooth mouse. I have had two of the Logitech wireless notebook mice with USB receivers that I have used with Macs. When the USB receiver was removed both of them regularly caused kernel panics in OS X and Flaky behavior when used with Windows. The connection reliability of Bluetooth vs. USB-wireless is in my experience about the same. Also it is way to easy to lose the USB key (thus, AFAIK, bricking the mouse) which is a problem you don't have with Bluetooth.
Recommending wireless mice often gets you critical comments from gamers. My answer is simple, if you want to to play a lot of games, especially 1st person shooters get a corded mouse or a game pad. My personal choice when ever rarely I play 1st person shooters is an old corded Logitech "gaming" mouse. Wireless mice are hopeless for anything other than strategy games like Civilization, WOW and I have also heard somewhat unfavorable comments from people who require a high degree of mouse precision in things like CAD and Photo processing apps. If you do use a wireless mouse for "gaming" then do keep an eye on the battery level, you might find your self out of juice at a critical moment and there is nothing more fantastic than the incandescent fury of WOW fanatic who misses an important moment due to equipment failure.
...but didn't Apple successfully pull this off twice?
... Apple doesn't have every IT criminal on the planet gunning for their OS. They are bloody lucky to be in that situation and should IMHO be less smug about Windows security problems in their advertising. On the other hand running the defense grid for one Windows instance was fatiguing enough to persuade me to abandon Windows and become a Linux user and then an Apple customer. I still have to put in work to secure my machine but it is a lot less work than if I was using Windows. If this really means MS is doubling the security workload on each Windows box then.... hell.... I don't even want to think about it.
ah, seriously,/. must learn to separate one of MS employers opinion from the company's opinion. Now, I could say that the Linux community wants more don.net integration just because Icaza, one of the most active contributors to the Linuzz community advocates this on his blog.
Of course if you want just another inflamatory article on/., just go on...
Stop ruining our Microsoft bashing with sensible comments.
I'm going to sue the governing body responsible for roads. Because most people speed in my city when driving, this will eliminate their ability to do it. Therefore without roads, driving will be safer.
Why don't you sue the people who own your local football stadium while you are at it? They actually have the audacity to charge you money for access to the stadium before you can go there and watch football games. That has to be a blatant violation of your basic human right to freedom of movement!
2) Most of the content accessible through Google is legal, in the sense that the people who own the copyright have shared it explicitly on their website, which is crawled by Google
So are you saying that "making available" information is equivalent to a grant of copyright license when a website does it, but its a copyright violation when TPB does it ?
Yes because what Google facilitates access to is intended for freely accessible by the content creator. If it's systems do facilitate access to copyrighted material, Google will remove references to that material in it's systems on request. TBP on the other hand, unlike Google, deliberately responds with insults and cheesy humor to such requests. Of course this is a gross oversimplification of what the guy was trying to say but hopefully it made things a little clearer for you.
In my experience, it's less common for them to pass a virus in an actual software installer; instead, they slip it into the corresponding keygen. By the time someone has spent an hour installing Photoshop, they usually don't think twice about double-clicking a little keygen.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
Which is why most smart TPB users run the keygens in a virtual Windows instance they keep around just for the occasion. I know viruses, trojans and other malware has been a feature of the Warez scene almost since the beginning but I find it strange if it is true that actually integrating malware into installation packages is something botnet constructors rarely. By the time you have been so clever as to take all that trouble to set up a VM to run you keygen do you think twice about the malware being integrated into the Photoshop installer? I'm sure some security expert can explain why this is a dumb way to spread your malware but at first glance it seems like a pretty obvious way of spreading malware to me.
I suspect that this botnet has been created by a geek that is sick to death of uneducated Mac fanboyism, and in a small way, I have respect for that.
No, it wasn't. This botnet was created by a computer criminal who saw an opportunity to capitalize on people who install pirated software either because they are to clueless to know the risks or because they have deluded them selves into thinking it is riskless act. The lesson we can all learn from this is the following:
"If you download pirated software off the internet and install it on your computer you run the risk of installing along with it carefully crafted malware that your security software or whatever other precautions you are taking may not be able to protect you against."
Note that this basic lesson is true on all incarnations of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or any other network enabled operating system you can download pirated software for.
Now please crawl back under your rock and learn to write better trolls...
All these people with their outdated Microsoft training. Whatever will they do?
You're right!!! We need to wipe Linux off the face of the face of the earth and what better place to begin than by destroying those smug penguins. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage all/. readers with outdated Microsoft training to sign on as commercial Penguin hunters on my upcoming expedition to Antarctica. I need lots of people with deadly chair throwing skills.
That being said, every flavor of Linux I've tried has some different scheme to it, making basic operations unnecessarily complex.
Standardizing basic ops like install/uninstall, media player/ect. would be a good start, but probably terribly unrealistic among mainstream distros.
That's probably true and it will also never happen. For better or for worse the wide and varied world of Linux desktop environment is a polar opposite of the mind numbingly dull, Windows 95 vintage, desktop homogeneity that is apparently one of the strong points of Windows. I do agree with your point about Linux install/uninstall, not that it helps to mention it in the presence of Linux geeks, every time I do that the conversation seems to end in a fierce argument about why on earth an average computer user would probably be defeated the moment he hits the apt-get man page.
I can almost see a case being made for 3 GB of RAM instead of 2 (for folks to run a VM with Windows, perhaps), but if you want higher performing graphics, you're going to see either an increase in weight or a decrease in battery life, neither of which is acceptable in that form factor product.
I suspect that Dell didn't get the memo, which is why theirs is heavier and louder.
Dell has a tradition of making the IT equivalent of industrial machinery. Any company with that sort of tradition will find that making elegant lightweight designs is a tougher proposition than it seems to be at first glance... Lamborghini notwithstanding.
Does that mean they will fix all the bugs that have been found in the past? No. Can someone else fix them? No.
+1 for open source
Not just for open source but OS market diversity in general. Regardless of whether you are talking about Linux or some commercial *NIX, it is a viable proposition to migrate your software to another OS vendor's Linux or *NIX OS. If Red Hat isn't satisfactory you can migrate to Suse, Ubuntu or any other of a number of other distributions. If you wan't to you can even migrate from Linux to AIX or Solaris. It will require some work in some cases but it is a viable proposition. There are no Windows implementations other than the one from Microsoft. If you are not getting bugs fixed or MS decides to discontinue some legacy OS you aren't planning on abandoning any time soon you can't switch to another supplier that plans to continue supporting a equivalent Windows legacy OS since MS is the only one out there. Migrating from Windows to Linux is impractical in most cases unless you had the forethought to write a cross-platform app so most of the time you are pretty much screwed with MS Windows if you find your self in this particular position.
On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Other than it being an excellent opportunity to kill off a Unix vendor, why would MS merge with Sun? Never mind the consequences an MS take-over of Sun would presumably have for Java. Sun being swallowed up by Hewlett-Packard doesn't sound all that good either. Cisco buying Sun has a better ring to it, at least at first glance. I'll take continued diversity on the OS market over consolidation any day.
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
It is? I thought a proper Enterprise Solution is what you get when you blend your IT infrastructure properly.
If they were trying to make the sale of Vista illegal in Texas, you'd have a stronger case, though probably not strong enough; but exercising budgetary control to not buy something is totally licit.
Right... I don't see the difference between this and, say, the army making the decision not to buy a piece of equipment from a certain manufacturer for the troops because it has found that product to either offer such marginal improvement over existing equipment that the added expense of introducing it isn't justified or simply because they have found the product to be substandard.
...Linux is above criticism. What we actually need is a: "-1, Microsoft fanboy" mod... or how about "-1, Dissing Linux"... or even better "-1, Heresy"...
Only when we as a society can get beyond the Democrat versus Republican myth will we truly start dismantling the subterfuge that is destroying our liberties, our Constitution, and our democracy. If we start looking at every politician based soley on his or her merits alone and ignore his or her political affiliation we would see the enormous "change of course" that we have been promised oh-so-many times and never actually seen.
Slashdot Mirror
3) If you're warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your big mouth shut!
That's what all of Walls Street thought ... next thing they knew their warm pile of shit blew up in their faces.
The quality of trolling on this site has really taken a nosedive over the last few years...
And how do they get paid if anyone can replicate their content for free?
How about payment for work done? You know, like nearly every other industry. Or should plumbers demand a payment every time you have guest use your toilet?
WTF are you talking about? The way the content industry works is you create content and then you sell copies of it for profit. If everybody copies your work and distributes it for free, which is the way you seem to be suggesting the content industry should be working, there is no profit and hence no money to pay people for work done.
Just hope for donations? There's a guy with a guitar on the corner of my street who does that. It doesn't seem to be working all that well for him.
Interesting conclusion you've drawn there - if it wasn't working all that well for him, why does he keep doing it? Have you tried asking him, instead of drawing illogical conclusions?
There is a classic experiment in behavioral science that deals with this. Leave a table at the side of the street. Put a box full of, say, 50 apples on the table along with a sign that reads "For one apple please put 25 cent in the tin." and top the setup off with one of those sealed donation tins. Come back at the end of the day and you will a lot less than the expected $12.50 worth of change in your donation tin and all your apples missing (assuming nobody has stolen the tin... or the table for that matter). The basic conclusion is that most people will take things they can get for free and are not honest enought to leave a payment/donation or what ever you want to call it unless they are forced to so. That's why we have CCTV cameras, anti theft systems and security officers in supermarkets. There is nothing illogical about his conclusion.
You really think that the "freedom" to steal an author's or musician's work is the same as the freedom to criticize government policies?
Mu. This is an old argument, and regardless of how much you want it to be so, sharing is not stealing
So if we had king sized Star Trek type replicators (with built in future tech energy generator providing ample free energy) that we could feed with common waste material (à la Mr. Fusion) and then use them to, say... replicate cars, car manufacturer's coffers would still be filling up to the brim with all the imaginary goodwill dollars they'd be getting from all you and all the other people who pirate-copied their cars in these replicators without paying real world money for the privilege?
Use AD.
Even though folks will fuss and whine about AD being not pure LDAP...
You're not a developer, are you? Whether or not AD is a dream to work with depends heavily on what your job description is. If you are simply an administrator plugging random Windows or even Linux and *nix boxes into AD you might find it comparatively easy. If on the other hand you expect to have to develop custom applications of your own on non-Microsoft platforms that authenticate against AD or convert existing ones to use AD then it can be a painful experience to use AD. It's not an unsolvable problem mind you, just a really annoying one.
... It's simple enough that MCSEs can run it.
So is RHDS / Fedora Directory Server. I knew exactly nothing about LDAP or directory servers when I got my first directory server related project years ago. I still I got the thing set up and running inside of a couple of hours. Even an MCSE should be able to manage setting it up, hardening it and administrating it in a very short period of time.
Come back after you've spent a week making a really nice, easy to use, easy on the eyes website to standards, then spent another week making it work in IE7, then another 3 weeks making it work in IE6 (yes lots of people still use that P.OS.)!
Once you've done that, go to a country back east where ALL the banks got suckered into using ActiveX for their online transactions.
THEN you can come back here and ask how bundling IE with windows hurt anyone.
I can understand your frustration, I have been there. While I generally don't think that a company should be forced to bundle a competitor's products. However, Windows has what? ... a 90% market share on desktops? When a company has established market dominance to the point where it's OS is practically the only product on the market, it is bundling software with it's OS and it has a history of using bundling to aggressively to kill off it's competition, IMHO the rules change. So perhaps a "ballot screen" option like this isn't such a bad idea.
Just my 0,02€
With Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with Vista, the big question is how many feet they have. If the answer is "two", then windows 7 is their last bullet.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot at some point with Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, various iterations of Windows XP, Windows Vista... the list goes on and those are only their operating system FUBARs. My personal Microsoft Office FUBAR list starts at the "red crosses of death" that fucked up one of my first project reports almost two decades ago and goes on from there. You can probably find a longer list than mine. The only thing that differed from shot to shot was the caliber of bullet they used which so far has been anything from a 22 cal to a 20mm explosive shell. Most other companies in the software business can only afford a limited number of foot-shots before they go bankrupt. Microsoft's saving grace is not an infinite supply of feet but rather a cash money powered ability to heal from shooting them selves in the foot with amazing speed.
Unix and closed hardware solutions are a dead end. Linux is today an alternative that is almost always more stable, secure and supported than any randomly picked Unix box.
LOL
xcept, of course in this specific case (that you use to illustrate your general point) the 'piracy' was performed by a major player(Edison - believe it) and not joe pirate with ... some sort of nifty/cheap 1902-era film copying device.
So it seems to me that your point is that major companies are much more harmful to independents than li'l old pirates.
Not really, my point was to compare the situation at the dawn of the 20th century, when the only one that could do a filmmaker major economic harm by pirating his film was an evil mega-corp like the one run by Thomas Edison, with the movie piracy situation today. The sheet music piracy problem of 1897 is much closer in nature to today's music piracy problem. Both examples, however, illustrate that piracy either by a mega-corp as in Méliès case or a legion of individual pirates as in the case of the sheet music distributers could cause you, the content copyright owner, major economic harm even a century ago. Today, thanks to computers and the internet, pirate users are capable of doing just as much harm to a filmmaker as any evil mega-corp because any tom dick or harry can rip off your movie and make it instantly available to millions of people. Arguably the pirates today cause you more harm because you can sue a corporation for stealing your stuff, there is practically speaking nothing you can do to stop the pirates.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?
It didn't ruin the music industry but it probably ruined any number of small composers and threw them to the mercy of big distributers who were the only ones that had the resources to defend against this sort of thing. Even back then piracy could ruin you or at least cause you significant economic harm. A classic example is the 1902 movie: "A Trip to the Moon" by Georges Méliès. The movie was stolen by agents of Thomas Edison and widely circulated in the US by Edison. This ruined Méliès plans to market his film in the US and Méliès never got a profit from this movie. Eventually Méliès was forced into bankruptcy and although the losses on "A Trip to the Moon" probably didn't help his bankruptcy was mostly due to aggressive anti competitive behavior by the big studios of the period. So perhaps the lesson is that there is not much difference between pirates and evil mega-corps from a small/independent artist's or for that matter a small software developer's point of view. Both cause you economic harm and if you are a small/independent artist or software developer you can therefore feel free to detest both equally.
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is reciever that you need a USB receiver for them.
I won't argue with your comment regarding the form factor of the Mighty Mouse but I still like it because it doesn't take up much space. Also the MM still runs if you only put only one battery in it, none of my Logitech wireless mice did that. The MM can be flaky, my first MM had flaky right button functionality, the replacement worked fine. I like compact Notebooks and ancillary equipment and when it comes to compactness you can either have your cake or eat it, not both.
Regarding whether one should get a USB wireless mouse or a Bluetooth mouse I would without hesitation recommend to Meneguzzi that he get a Bluetooth mouse. I have had two of the Logitech wireless notebook mice with USB receivers that I have used with Macs. When the USB receiver was removed both of them regularly caused kernel panics in OS X and Flaky behavior when used with Windows. The connection reliability of Bluetooth vs. USB-wireless is in my experience about the same. Also it is way to easy to lose the USB key (thus, AFAIK, bricking the mouse) which is a problem you don't have with Bluetooth.
Recommending wireless mice often gets you critical comments from gamers. My answer is simple, if you want to to play a lot of games, especially 1st person shooters get a corded mouse or a game pad. My personal choice when ever rarely I play 1st person shooters is an old corded Logitech "gaming" mouse. Wireless mice are hopeless for anything other than strategy games like Civilization, WOW and I have also heard somewhat unfavorable comments from people who require a high degree of mouse precision in things like CAD and Photo processing apps. If you do use a wireless mouse for "gaming" then do keep an eye on the battery level, you might find your self out of juice at a critical moment and there is nothing more fantastic than the incandescent fury of WOW fanatic who misses an important moment due to equipment failure.
...but didn't Apple successfully pull this off twice?
... Apple doesn't have every IT criminal on the planet gunning for their OS. They are bloody lucky to be in that situation and should IMHO be less smug about Windows security problems in their advertising. On the other hand running the defense grid for one Windows instance was fatiguing enough to persuade me to abandon Windows and become a Linux user and then an Apple customer. I still have to put in work to secure my machine but it is a lot less work than if I was using Windows. If this really means MS is doubling the security workload on each Windows box then.... hell.... I don't even want to think about it.
ah, seriously, /. must learn to separate one of MS employers opinion from the company's opinion.
Now, I could say that the Linux community wants more don.net integration just because Icaza, one of the most active contributors to the Linuzz community advocates this on his blog.
Of course if you want just another inflamatory article on /., just go on...
Stop ruining our Microsoft bashing with sensible comments.
I'm going to sue the governing body responsible for roads. Because most people speed in my city when driving, this will eliminate their ability to do it. Therefore without roads, driving will be safer.
Why don't you sue the people who own your local football stadium while you are at it? They actually have the audacity to charge you money for access to the stadium before you can go there and watch football games. That has to be a blatant violation of your basic human right to freedom of movement!
2) Most of the content accessible through Google is legal, in the sense that the people who own the copyright have shared it explicitly on their website, which is crawled by Google
So are you saying that "making available" information is equivalent to a grant of copyright license when a website does it, but its a copyright violation when TPB does it ?
Yes because what Google facilitates access to is intended for freely accessible by the content creator. If it's systems do facilitate access to copyrighted material, Google will remove references to that material in it's systems on request. TBP on the other hand, unlike Google, deliberately responds with insults and cheesy humor to such requests. Of course this is a gross oversimplification of what the guy was trying to say but hopefully it made things a little clearer for you.
In my experience, it's less common for them to pass a virus in an actual software installer; instead, they slip it into the corresponding keygen. By the time someone has spent an hour installing Photoshop, they usually don't think twice about double-clicking a little keygen.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
Which is why most smart TPB users run the keygens in a virtual Windows instance they keep around just for the occasion. I know viruses, trojans and other malware has been a feature of the Warez scene almost since the beginning but I find it strange if it is true that actually integrating malware into installation packages is something botnet constructors rarely. By the time you have been so clever as to take all that trouble to set up a VM to run you keygen do you think twice about the malware being integrated into the Photoshop installer? I'm sure some security expert can explain why this is a dumb way to spread your malware but at first glance it seems like a pretty obvious way of spreading malware to me.
I suspect that this botnet has been created by a geek that is sick to death of uneducated Mac fanboyism, and in a small way, I have respect for that.
No, it wasn't. This botnet was created by a computer criminal who saw an opportunity to capitalize on people who install pirated software either because they are to clueless to know the risks or because they have deluded them selves into thinking it is riskless act. The lesson we can all learn from this is the following:
"If you download pirated software off the internet and install it on your computer you run the risk of installing along with it carefully crafted malware that your security software or whatever other precautions you are taking may not be able to protect you against."
Note that this basic lesson is true on all incarnations of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or any other network enabled operating system you can download pirated software for.
Now please crawl back under your rock and learn to write better trolls...
All these people with their outdated Microsoft training. Whatever will they do?
You're right!!! We need to wipe Linux off the face of the face of the earth and what better place to begin than by destroying those smug penguins. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage all /. readers with outdated Microsoft training to sign on as commercial Penguin hunters on my upcoming expedition to Antarctica. I need lots of people with deadly chair throwing skills.
How is it a second chance? There so far has been no first chance, since the votes made the first time around don't count.
Think of it as a chance for whoever is in charge of that election *NOT* to misplace 2% of the electorate.
That being said, every flavor of Linux I've tried has some different scheme to it, making basic operations unnecessarily complex.
Standardizing basic ops like install/uninstall, media player/ect. would be a good start, but probably terribly unrealistic among mainstream distros.
That's probably true and it will also never happen. For better or for worse the wide and varied world of Linux desktop environment is a polar opposite of the mind numbingly dull, Windows 95 vintage, desktop homogeneity that is apparently one of the strong points of Windows. I do agree with your point about Linux install/uninstall, not that it helps to mention it in the presence of Linux geeks, every time I do that the conversation seems to end in a fierce argument about why on earth an average computer user would probably be defeated the moment he hits the apt-get man page.
I can almost see a case being made for 3 GB of RAM instead of 2 (for folks to run a VM with Windows, perhaps), but if you want higher performing graphics, you're going to see either an increase in weight or a decrease in battery life, neither of which is acceptable in that form factor product.
I suspect that Dell didn't get the memo, which is why theirs is heavier and louder.
Dell has a tradition of making the IT equivalent of industrial machinery. Any company with that sort of tradition will find that making elegant lightweight designs is a tougher proposition than it seems to be at first glance... Lamborghini notwithstanding.
Does that mean they will fix all the bugs that have been found in the past? No.
Can someone else fix them? No.
+1 for open source
Not just for open source but OS market diversity in general. Regardless of whether you are talking about Linux or some commercial *NIX, it is a viable proposition to migrate your software to another OS vendor's Linux or *NIX OS. If Red Hat isn't satisfactory you can migrate to Suse, Ubuntu or any other of a number of other distributions. If you wan't to you can even migrate from Linux to AIX or Solaris. It will require some work in some cases but it is a viable proposition. There are no Windows implementations other than the one from Microsoft. If you are not getting bugs fixed or MS decides to discontinue some legacy OS you aren't planning on abandoning any time soon you can't switch to another supplier that plans to continue supporting a equivalent Windows legacy OS since MS is the only one out there. Migrating from Windows to Linux is impractical in most cases unless you had the forethought to write a cross-platform app so most of the time you are pretty much screwed with MS Windows if you find your self in this particular position.
On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Other than it being an excellent opportunity to kill off a Unix vendor, why would MS merge with Sun? Never mind the consequences an MS take-over of Sun would presumably have for Java. Sun being swallowed up by Hewlett-Packard doesn't sound all that good either. Cisco buying Sun has a better ring to it, at least at first glance. I'll take continued diversity on the OS market over consolidation any day.
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
It is? I thought a proper Enterprise Solution is what you get when you blend your IT infrastructure properly.
If they were trying to make the sale of Vista illegal in Texas, you'd have a stronger case, though probably not strong enough; but exercising budgetary control to not buy something is totally licit.
Right... I don't see the difference between this and, say, the army making the decision not to buy a piece of equipment from a certain manufacturer for the troops because it has found that product to either offer such marginal improvement over existing equipment that the added expense of introducing it isn't justified or simply because they have found the product to be substandard.
...Linux is above criticism. What we actually need is a: "-1, Microsoft fanboy" mod... or how about "-1, Dissing Linux"... or even better "-1, Heresy"...
Only when we as a society can get beyond the Democrat versus Republican myth will we truly start dismantling the subterfuge that is destroying our liberties, our Constitution, and our democracy. If we start looking at every politician based soley on his or her merits alone and ignore his or her political affiliation we would see the enormous "change of course" that we have been promised oh-so-many times and never actually seen.
What have you been smoking?