luxury wooden computers that already have such a tiny market appeal
Considering what the car makers are doing, it wouldn't surprise me to see some wood panelling on computers soon.
Yup, plastic woodgrain accents that make the car look like a welfare family's 1972 station wagon sure do belong on the luxury models! I've even seen the word "sophistication" used in conjunction with this crap.
*shudder*
Then again, I prefer cloth over leather upholstery, so what do I know about being sophisticated.
Perhaps because in relation to the topic at hand, a consumer is precisely what you are. The movie industry doesn't give a flying rat what else you do in your life, because your only relation to it is as one who *consumes* their product. Unless you're involved in the production or distribution, of course. See, using "people" would imply every last person on the planet, and a lot of people don't consume movies at all. "Consumers" makes it clear that we're only talking about those who consume the product in question.
And that's how it should be. Language is dependent on context. When a volunteer organization talks about its people, it will discuss "volunteers", even though surely your only purpose in life is not to be a volunteer. However, in relation to the org, a volunteer is exactly what you are. No more, no less.
Be afraid when you see stories like "49% of consumers voted for Bush in the last election".
Yeah, and with the 2 largest (and for all intents and purposes ONLY) movie chains in Canada merging, this is just the beginning. The only reason I even go to movies anymore is AMA's $7 coupons, good for any show, any time.
Can you spell m-o-n-o-p-o-l-y? I knew you could! Just wait till we have $25 movie tickets, with 20 commercials before the movie (the fact that ad revenues are by far the largest source of income in a theatre these days was one of the reasons for the merger - now a single chain can deal with advertisers).
Canada introduced online filing of income taxes a few years back. Only catch is, you have to submit using "approved" software. So basically, you have to pay $40 for a software package to submit forms for you. There's an exception for people earning less than $20,000 a year.
When this first came out (and I hadn't read the fine print), I thought it was brilliant. Go to SSL website, enter your figures, done. Oh? I have to pay Intuit $40 and have a Windows machine handy? Damn. There simply is no way to hand-calculate your tax forms and submit them online.
So I got bored, and started examining the files that QuickTax produces. They're basically ASCII files with line:value entries, plus a few codes spread about. I was thinking of doing some further analysis of this. It should in theory be easy to set up some simple perl/javascript/whatever, with a form that the user inputs their numbers, and gets this ASCII file in return. I know myself and a bunch of friends would use it, and if I put it online, I could see lots of people using it. Yes, many of us still calculate our taxes by hand instead of paying H&R or using software!
Anyway, I gave up. Seeing as the federal government has never even attempted something as simple as this, I assume Intuit has some powerful lobbying going on. If I tried, I probably would have been put in jail for tax fraud or something.
CO2's heavier than air. Can you actually do hot-air ballooning with just the warmth generated by the Sun? If so, why do balloonists have those immense heat generators on board?
Well, seeing as there's no 100% foolproof method of determining this anyway (your AV could be out of date, or just behind like some vendors seem to be, or you could have a new virus no one else has seen yet)...
It's pretty easy to not get a virus in Windows. How? Well, there are 3 basic ways you get infected:
1. Listening network ports with compromisable services. Solution: install a NAT'ing router with firewall. Paranoid solution: install Zonealarm or one of the dozen other competing offerings as well. Have fun remotely exploiting my machine when you can't connect to it.
2. Opening infected executables. Solution: only install software from trusted sources. Paranoid solution: only use what the standard install comes with. Believe it or not, not everyone installs 50 pieces of extraneous software. On my last remaining Windows box, I think Winamp and a Citrix client for work is about it. These installers have long since been checked for viruses and are installed from known, good, read-only media. Good luck infecting me there.
3. IE, Outlook, or other network-aware application exploits. Solution: turn off activeX, javascript. Paranoid solution: don't use these apps at all. Find small, niche apps that have never been exploited - yes, these do exist.
This growing attitude of "if you don't run AV software, you're probably infected" is disturbing. Viruses and worms don't just magically appear out of nowhere, they come in through known, predictable routes. Close those routes, and you prevent infection. Well, until virus writers become so sophisticated that they can fake out a TCP/IP stack entirely - in which case they can probably fool your AV software as well.
Insurance likely doesn't cover "acts of god" either.
Except for things like hail, lightning, windstorm...
Many so-called "acts of god" are covered by your insurance. Many aren't. The ones that aren't are often things like overland flooding, where local and/or federal disaster relief will kick in.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that roughly 99.99999% of people buying their movies at Wal-Mart not only don't care about region encoding, they don't even know what it is. It's not like Wal-Mart generally stocks import-only movies.
I'm against region encoding on principle, but quite frankly it's never been an issue with me. I watch a heck of a lot of non-mainstream stuff, but I find it's just easier to download foreign content anyway. And outside of Slashdot, I've never once heard anyone complain about it. Most people I know just keep their old player and buy a power adaptor for it. Maybe I just don't know enough people who move internationally. *shrug*
Very few residents in the most densely populated city in North America get billed for water usage??? Dear god man, what are you people thinking?
I live in Canada where we have some of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world, thousands of large rivers, and millions of small lakes, all unpolluted and ready for the drinking... and we still charge people for their water usage. Partly it's infrastucture costs, and partly it's to encourage people to NOT WASTE.
Where the heck does NYC get the water to supply 10 million people, anyway? I get the impression most of the rivers around there are rather unsafe for drinking, so do they pipe it in from upstate? Who pays for this?
*shakes head*
We're looking at potable water shortages in coming decades, and I hear constantly that the US is looking to import water from us. No wonder, if it's all free for the average user.
Sorry. I should have been a bit less broad in using the term "creationism". The actual "man didn't evolve from monkeys" debate of course started right around Mr. Darwin's time. However, by the middle of the 19th century pretty much everyone agreed that the Earth was at least several million years old thanks to geology.
The recent "Earth is only 6000 years old" movement really needs a better name, because while it's tied to creationism, it isn't exactly the same thing. The fundies started up with the insistence on 6000 years simply because it pretty much dismisses the possibility of any evolutionary processes. By the 60s, with the overwhelming majority of science pointing to evolutionary theory as correct, they needed *something* as evidence against it.
But you're right, by the proper definition of the word, creationism has been around for a long, long time. We really need a term to separate the two. Ussherism, named for the bishop who originally calculated the 6000 years back in the 17th century?
(And no, I didn't see the movie. Maybe it's an American thing only? Got a link?:)
Well said. Further evidence of religions/churches (they're not the same thing) changing: the modern creationist movement.
A century ago, virtually all christian sects had no problem with the scientific conclusion that the Earth is several billion years old.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Sure, religion changes all the time. It's just that science generally changes in response to *evidence*. Religion changes in response to someone's agenda.
Weather is short-term, geographically-isolated environmental effects. Climate is long-term trending over larger areas.
Saying "how can we predict climate when we can't get the weather forecast right" is about as insightful as saying "but it was COLDER than average today! How the hell can we be experiencing global warming???"
Not that I disagree with you in principle, mind you - we seriously lack data to know just what is going to happen long-term. Just keep in mind that through all the talk about cliamte change, no one is claiming that "it will be 5 degrees hotter on July 21, 2007 in Peoria".
Although teorethicaly it is possible to sell OSS, it is not proffitable.
Why would someone want to buy something he can download for free in other place?, if people tend to "download for free" something that they CAN NOT (by law) use for free??
You could always sell your software (like regular closed source shops), and provide your source to your customers only (which is all the GPL requires). I could see an OSS license emerging that basically states "you get the source, but you can't re-distribute our software" - no different than closed source, except the customer has the added benefit of the source code. Handy if a customer is willing/capable of tinkering with it themselves.
Oh, as for your other concern: don't worry the slightest bit about it. Well under 10% of software developers actually work on closed source, sellable software. The overwhelming majority of us develop in-house stuff, and open/closed source isn't an issue.
One of the ways you can spot a young Windows-only user is that they will use the term "forward slash".
Prior to computers, "/" was called "slash". In Unix, ditto. "\" is called "back slash" to distinguish it. However, I find that younger folks who've grown up on DOS and/or Windows will often call "\" "slash" and use "forward slash" to refer to "/". It makes it really fun when you're dictating out a command over the phone and it refuses to work for them.
Hell, just look at this website. "forwardslashdot.org" just doesn't have the same ring:)
I'd disagree with you on that. I actually learned the DOS/Windows world long before Unix. The first few times I used Solaris and Linux, I didn't even know they *had* a command history! Ever since I started using command history in Windows, it's driven me insane. It's *very* counter-intuitive, even to someone who first learned on it. When someone showed me bash for the first time, I just about wet myself. It just makes more sense, and it's far more consistent.
That being said, you make a good comparison to a text file. One of the reasons MS implemented it this way, I suspect, is so that you could run 5 commands in a row, then do a bunch of other stuff, then re-run those 5 commands again without a LOT of up-arrowing. I can't say I often work this way, however. That's what | and && and scripting in general are for: to combine a bunch of small commands into one. Then you just repeat the one.
This article does a pretty good job at summing up the major issue from the past 5 years in network security. Those of us tasked with watching IDSs and poring through firewall logs sure remember July 2001. Calling it the 9/11 of the Internet is pretty apt, imho - except that it happened again. And again. And again. It sure was easy to sell people on IDSs after Nimda, Slammer and Blaster:)
I think the experience with Win2k has finally turned the tide on shipping insecure default systems. Pre-2000, many (most?) Unix and Linux distros also shipped with a range of listening services by default, but within a couple of years, this all changed. Pretty much anything I try these days is locked down out of the box. Local exploits and user-initiated stuff, sure. But the days of so-called "Warhol worms" will soon be behind us (I hope and pray!).
Even Microsoft FINALLY took the hint. They're still leaving a bunch of things open, but at least XP now has a firewall turned on by default, which stops this nonsense. I'd much prefer they just close the damn ports, as I'd rather trust my system's TCP/IP stack vs. an extra piece of software on top, but it's a good start.
One thing I still chuckle at, however: the market share myth. Other than the Morris worm, I can't think of a single worm that really impacted the Internet to any great extent until 2001. 20 years of everyone running Unix, at least 5 years of (somewhat) widespread Internet use, and Windows NT 5 was the first (and still only) platform to be hit on a large scale. Considering how prevalent Unix was back then, you'd think we would have seen at least a mini Code Red at some point. I guess some people think that a multi-million machine Internet didn't exist until 2001 or so:)
I guess I still think in terms of 1998, where your average home user pretty much only ran Windows (or maybe the odd Appletalk network). Even today, I can't say as I know *anyone* with NFS shares on their home network except for a couple of fellow geeks.
Keep in mind, NFS4 is 5 years old now. Windows shares were accessible without password until nearly that time, as well. 95 and 98 (lord knows if ME fixed this, I never knew anyone who ran it for more than a week:) had a wonderful issue wherein you only needed to guess the first letter of a password to gain access, rendering the password essentially meaningless. This is how worms such as opaserv spread so damn fast.
My other problem is that I still think of Windows as being a home-only OS. I've been admining the stuff for a decade now, but I just can't take it seriously most days:)
Slashdot Mirror
luxury wooden computers that already have such a tiny market appeal
Considering what the car makers are doing, it wouldn't surprise me to see some wood panelling on computers soon.
Yup, plastic woodgrain accents that make the car look like a welfare family's 1972 station wagon sure do belong on the luxury models! I've even seen the word "sophistication" used in conjunction with this crap.
*shudder*
Then again, I prefer cloth over leather upholstery, so what do I know about being sophisticated.
Perhaps because in relation to the topic at hand, a consumer is precisely what you are. The movie industry doesn't give a flying rat what else you do in your life, because your only relation to it is as one who *consumes* their product. Unless you're involved in the production or distribution, of course. See, using "people" would imply every last person on the planet, and a lot of people don't consume movies at all. "Consumers" makes it clear that we're only talking about those who consume the product in question.
And that's how it should be. Language is dependent on context. When a volunteer organization talks about its people, it will discuss "volunteers", even though surely your only purpose in life is not to be a volunteer. However, in relation to the org, a volunteer is exactly what you are. No more, no less.
Be afraid when you see stories like "49% of consumers voted for Bush in the last election".
Yeah, and with the 2 largest (and for all intents and purposes ONLY) movie chains in Canada merging, this is just the beginning. The only reason I even go to movies anymore is AMA's $7 coupons, good for any show, any time.
Can you spell m-o-n-o-p-o-l-y? I knew you could! Just wait till we have $25 movie tickets, with 20 commercials before the movie (the fact that ad revenues are by far the largest source of income in a theatre these days was one of the reasons for the merger - now a single chain can deal with advertisers).
Canada introduced online filing of income taxes a few years back. Only catch is, you have to submit using "approved" software. So basically, you have to pay $40 for a software package to submit forms for you. There's an exception for people earning less than $20,000 a year.
When this first came out (and I hadn't read the fine print), I thought it was brilliant. Go to SSL website, enter your figures, done. Oh? I have to pay Intuit $40 and have a Windows machine handy? Damn. There simply is no way to hand-calculate your tax forms and submit them online.
So I got bored, and started examining the files that QuickTax produces. They're basically ASCII files with line:value entries, plus a few codes spread about. I was thinking of doing some further analysis of this. It should in theory be easy to set up some simple perl/javascript/whatever, with a form that the user inputs their numbers, and gets this ASCII file in return. I know myself and a bunch of friends would use it, and if I put it online, I could see lots of people using it. Yes, many of us still calculate our taxes by hand instead of paying H&R or using software!
Anyway, I gave up. Seeing as the federal government has never even attempted something as simple as this, I assume Intuit has some powerful lobbying going on. If I tried, I probably would have been put in jail for tax fraud or something.
*sigh*
CO2's heavier than air. Can you actually do hot-air ballooning with just the warmth generated by the Sun? If so, why do balloonists have those immense heat generators on board?
Good thing women aren't property.
Screw all that.
Batman already has OnStar. What more could he need?
We're called "Canadians", thank you very much :)
Well, seeing as there's no 100% foolproof method of determining this anyway (your AV could be out of date, or just behind like some vendors seem to be, or you could have a new virus no one else has seen yet)...
It's pretty easy to not get a virus in Windows. How? Well, there are 3 basic ways you get infected:
1. Listening network ports with compromisable services. Solution: install a NAT'ing router with firewall. Paranoid solution: install Zonealarm or one of the dozen other competing offerings as well. Have fun remotely exploiting my machine when you can't connect to it.
2. Opening infected executables. Solution: only install software from trusted sources. Paranoid solution: only use what the standard install comes with. Believe it or not, not everyone installs 50 pieces of extraneous software. On my last remaining Windows box, I think Winamp and a Citrix client for work is about it. These installers have long since been checked for viruses and are installed from known, good, read-only media. Good luck infecting me there.
3. IE, Outlook, or other network-aware application exploits. Solution: turn off activeX, javascript. Paranoid solution: don't use these apps at all. Find small, niche apps that have never been exploited - yes, these do exist.
This growing attitude of "if you don't run AV software, you're probably infected" is disturbing. Viruses and worms don't just magically appear out of nowhere, they come in through known, predictable routes. Close those routes, and you prevent infection. Well, until virus writers become so sophisticated that they can fake out a TCP/IP stack entirely - in which case they can probably fool your AV software as well.
Because there have been 48,978 unfunny "Cowboy Neal" posts preceding it?
Insurance likely doesn't cover "acts of god" either.
Except for things like hail, lightning, windstorm...
Many so-called "acts of god" are covered by your insurance. Many aren't. The ones that aren't are often things like overland flooding, where local and/or federal disaster relief will kick in.
I have to wonder why you bought a TV and VCR in the first place :)
At one point, these were the equivalent of Tivo, media centres, DVD players, cable television, and 42" digital TVs - all of which you deride.
Heh.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that roughly 99.99999% of people buying their movies at Wal-Mart not only don't care about region encoding, they don't even know what it is. It's not like Wal-Mart generally stocks import-only movies.
I'm against region encoding on principle, but quite frankly it's never been an issue with me. I watch a heck of a lot of non-mainstream stuff, but I find it's just easier to download foreign content anyway. And outside of Slashdot, I've never once heard anyone complain about it. Most people I know just keep their old player and buy a power adaptor for it. Maybe I just don't know enough people who move internationally. *shrug*
Very few residents in the most densely populated city in North America get billed for water usage??? Dear god man, what are you people thinking?
I live in Canada where we have some of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world, thousands of large rivers, and millions of small lakes, all unpolluted and ready for the drinking... and we still charge people for their water usage. Partly it's infrastucture costs, and partly it's to encourage people to NOT WASTE.
Where the heck does NYC get the water to supply 10 million people, anyway? I get the impression most of the rivers around there are rather unsafe for drinking, so do they pipe it in from upstate? Who pays for this?
*shakes head*
We're looking at potable water shortages in coming decades, and I hear constantly that the US is looking to import water from us. No wonder, if it's all free for the average user.
Dude. It was funny the first time. Made me smile the second.
It's long since stopped being funny, and just makes stories on Slashdot annoying as hell to read as we scroll past your 8 pages of the same joke.
Remember, breveity is the essence of wit.
Right now, it's beginning to look like nothing more than Windows XP Service Pack 3, just with a new name and bigger price tag
Well, that's precisely what XP was in comparison to 2000, so it's not like they haven't done this before.
Then again, last time it was a year. This time it's *five*.
Sorry. I should have been a bit less broad in using the term "creationism". The actual "man didn't evolve from monkeys" debate of course started right around Mr. Darwin's time. However, by the middle of the 19th century pretty much everyone agreed that the Earth was at least several million years old thanks to geology.
:)
The recent "Earth is only 6000 years old" movement really needs a better name, because while it's tied to creationism, it isn't exactly the same thing. The fundies started up with the insistence on 6000 years simply because it pretty much dismisses the possibility of any evolutionary processes. By the 60s, with the overwhelming majority of science pointing to evolutionary theory as correct, they needed *something* as evidence against it.
But you're right, by the proper definition of the word, creationism has been around for a long, long time. We really need a term to separate the two. Ussherism, named for the bishop who originally calculated the 6000 years back in the 17th century?
(And no, I didn't see the movie. Maybe it's an American thing only? Got a link?
Well said. Further evidence of religions/churches (they're not the same thing) changing: the modern creationist movement.
A century ago, virtually all christian sects had no problem with the scientific conclusion that the Earth is several billion years old.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Sure, religion changes all the time. It's just that science generally changes in response to *evidence*. Religion changes in response to someone's agenda.
Weather is short-term, geographically-isolated environmental effects. Climate is long-term trending over larger areas.
Saying "how can we predict climate when we can't get the weather forecast right" is about as insightful as saying "but it was COLDER than average today! How the hell can we be experiencing global warming???"
Not that I disagree with you in principle, mind you - we seriously lack data to know just what is going to happen long-term. Just keep in mind that through all the talk about cliamte change, no one is claiming that "it will be 5 degrees hotter on July 21, 2007 in Peoria".
Although teorethicaly it is possible to sell OSS, it is not proffitable.
Why would someone want to buy something he can download for free in other place?, if people tend to "download for free" something that they CAN NOT (by law) use for free??
You could always sell your software (like regular closed source shops), and provide your source to your customers only (which is all the GPL requires). I could see an OSS license emerging that basically states "you get the source, but you can't re-distribute our software" - no different than closed source, except the customer has the added benefit of the source code. Handy if a customer is willing/capable of tinkering with it themselves.
Oh, as for your other concern: don't worry the slightest bit about it. Well under 10% of software developers actually work on closed source, sellable software. The overwhelming majority of us develop in-house stuff, and open/closed source isn't an issue.
You know, there's one thing I hate even more than popups:
Websites that try to auto-download their software when you visit their page. In a meta-refresh tag, nonetheless.
Asshats.
Heh.
:)
One of the ways you can spot a young Windows-only user is that they will use the term "forward slash".
Prior to computers, "/" was called "slash". In Unix, ditto. "\" is called "back slash" to distinguish it. However, I find that younger folks who've grown up on DOS and/or Windows will often call "\" "slash" and use "forward slash" to refer to "/". It makes it really fun when you're dictating out a command over the phone and it refuses to work for them.
Hell, just look at this website. "forwardslashdot.org" just doesn't have the same ring
I'd disagree with you on that. I actually learned the DOS/Windows world long before Unix. The first few times I used Solaris and Linux, I didn't even know they *had* a command history! Ever since I started using command history in Windows, it's driven me insane. It's *very* counter-intuitive, even to someone who first learned on it. When someone showed me bash for the first time, I just about wet myself. It just makes more sense, and it's far more consistent.
That being said, you make a good comparison to a text file. One of the reasons MS implemented it this way, I suspect, is so that you could run 5 commands in a row, then do a bunch of other stuff, then re-run those 5 commands again without a LOT of up-arrowing. I can't say I often work this way, however. That's what | and && and scripting in general are for: to combine a bunch of small commands into one. Then you just repeat the one.
This article does a pretty good job at summing up the major issue from the past 5 years in network security. Those of us tasked with watching IDSs and poring through firewall logs sure remember July 2001. Calling it the 9/11 of the Internet is pretty apt, imho - except that it happened again. And again. And again. It sure was easy to sell people on IDSs after Nimda, Slammer and Blaster :)
:)
I think the experience with Win2k has finally turned the tide on shipping insecure default systems. Pre-2000, many (most?) Unix and Linux distros also shipped with a range of listening services by default, but within a couple of years, this all changed. Pretty much anything I try these days is locked down out of the box. Local exploits and user-initiated stuff, sure. But the days of so-called "Warhol worms" will soon be behind us (I hope and pray!).
Even Microsoft FINALLY took the hint. They're still leaving a bunch of things open, but at least XP now has a firewall turned on by default, which stops this nonsense. I'd much prefer they just close the damn ports, as I'd rather trust my system's TCP/IP stack vs. an extra piece of software on top, but it's a good start.
One thing I still chuckle at, however: the market share myth. Other than the Morris worm, I can't think of a single worm that really impacted the Internet to any great extent until 2001. 20 years of everyone running Unix, at least 5 years of (somewhat) widespread Internet use, and Windows NT 5 was the first (and still only) platform to be hit on a large scale. Considering how prevalent Unix was back then, you'd think we would have seen at least a mini Code Red at some point. I guess some people think that a multi-million machine Internet didn't exist until 2001 or so
Fair enough.
:) had a wonderful issue wherein you only needed to guess the first letter of a password to gain access, rendering the password essentially meaningless. This is how worms such as opaserv spread so damn fast.
:)
I guess I still think in terms of 1998, where your average home user pretty much only ran Windows (or maybe the odd Appletalk network). Even today, I can't say as I know *anyone* with NFS shares on their home network except for a couple of fellow geeks.
Keep in mind, NFS4 is 5 years old now. Windows shares were accessible without password until nearly that time, as well. 95 and 98 (lord knows if ME fixed this, I never knew anyone who ran it for more than a week
My other problem is that I still think of Windows as being a home-only OS. I've been admining the stuff for a decade now, but I just can't take it seriously most days