I was born in 1964, and that argument of yours is, to put it mildly, pathetic. The 2 million dead civillians was in Vietnam, not Cambodia. To be sure, 2 million or more died in Cambodia, but the war dead in Vietnam didn't die in concentration camps. That was a fairly even toll between the North/Viet Cong and the South/US military. Collateral damage, you would call it today if you weren't too busy making your country more polarised than it already is. Your descriptions of the way the bombing campaigns were run leads me to think that if they had done it your way, that it would have been won. I think, if they had done it your way and invaded North Vietnam, there would have been been a war with China.
And you're still ignoring the war in Iraq. Are you blind? What does healthcare or whatever lunacy you come up with have to do with Iraq?
But whatever, I just realised that, once again, I'm wasting my time.
"America has never said it wants to attack, change the government and own another nation; we don't want more territory- we just want wars there to stop. It's maddening when we take part in a distant war (think Bosnia) where we bombed the Christians and worked for the Muslims, and then come home. But we're not about expansion-for-expansion's sake, many/most of the UN members cannot make such a claim."
You must have just woken up from your nap that started around 1965 when the US got heavily involved in Vietnam after faking the Gulf of Tonkin incident (and after all was told the whole fucking mess lead to some 2 million dead civillians and 50'000 dead Americans) right through 2003, when a certain country's politicians lied to everybody about another, smaller country having big bombs, germs and shit, and invaded that smaller country, which has, up until now, and it hasn't stopped yet, resulted in about 70'000 dead civillians and 3500 dead Americans.
Wake up. It's no longer 1945, and the English have finished paying off their war debts to you. (which went up until right until 2006). Perhaps today is a good day to realise that the world has changed, and that your image of the world is seriously out of wack.
Actually, I don't won any iPods, nor do I own an iPhone. I am also a developer (if you don't call J2EE work for the second largest bank in Switzerland development, then what is?). I prefer Eclipse on Linux or Windows simply because the UI is more responsive on those platforms. The backend is often Linux or Solaris. Macs are my home choice and my choice for graphic design.
Given how this thread has become an anti-Apple bitch fest, as opposed to an anti-iphone bitch fest:
I have three Macs, one PPC Powerbook laptop with Adobe CS2 on it for compatibility with work, where they still use CS2 and two Intel Macs with all my development tools and my Adobe CS3 suite. My Macbook dual boots into Windows where I have Office 2003 pro for compatibility with our customers. I also have a Windows machhine at work with XP, Adobe CS2 and a host of other stuff that is very modern, but which I am using less and less.
Why? I personally am happy with and use Windows, Linux and OSX, so why do I go with the most expensive option?
Mainly, because OSX is, in our design business, the easiest to use, has the least downtime and is technically optimal for certain things. In terms of ease of use, Mac OSX is very simple compared to XP (or Linux). The configurational options are much easier for the majority of our workers, most of whom are designers, compared to Windows. There are many things in OSX that make a designers life easy, such as the Expose feature, the Zeroconf networking, drag and drop in almost every application, built-in spell checking in all text apps, decent built-in font managment and color sync. Added to that is that fact that modern Intel macs run Windows just fine for those of us who need it for office use or 3D work, and Apple's workgroup servers are many more times easier to use and configure than Windows or Linux machines.
Another thing is OSX' memory managment and multi tasking. Linux is excellent in this respect as well but Windows really suffers when RAM is almost full, and page swapping begins, and multitasking in Windows is much less smooth than it is in OSX.
Another thing is that almost all of our fonts are still in the old resource fork format, and although we have some very good font conversion utilities, those fonts often don't work properly on Windows.
I really prefer Windows XP for smaller tasks as the application startup time and general responsiveness of that OS is generally better than OSX in that case.
Winodws Vista, however, is a non starter at the moment, even though it improves many issues, including color synchronisation. Its terrible responsiveness on brand new hardware reminds me of OSX back in 2001. It has a whole load of a way to go.
Linux is still, sadly, a non option in a design agency. Inkscape, the GIMP, Scribus, Blender et al are improving, but until CMYK and color handling are integrated and synchronised, there is no way that they will be of much use there.
If I were doing anythng else, however, I would probably be using Linux and Windows, although even in major development houses, OSX is starting to become mainstream. Apple's Cocoa/ObjC tools are just as propietry as Microsoft's.Net. There are OSS versions of both (Mono and GnuStep), but neither are of production qualiyt which means that in realiyt, if you want to do cross platform stuff you either go with C++, Java or one of the scipting languages like Python.
I am somewhat doubtful that things will go as planned for anyone going back to the moon or to the moon for the first time (or anywhere else in space for that matter).
-The US has had an incredibly rocky ride this decade, with a government that, by any measure, is seriously incompetent and more interested in ideology than real goals. I won't get into the massive amounts of American money and lives wasted in the orgy of death and blood that is Iraq, except to say that the US could have built a whole space fleet with that money. I also seriously doubt that NASA is the same organisation that it was back in the 1960s. The bloated bureaucracy that is now NASA has a major problem with its top heavy structure swallowing more funds than the Chinese even needed to get a man in space. NASA also seems to be far less technically competent than it was back then (Columbia, drunk astronauts, love triangles gone south, political intrigues etc). Added to this is the tendency for big US projects (Space Shuttle, F-22 tec to go massively over budget and time)
There will also probably be a very different kind of person in power in the US in 2009, most likely Hilary Clinton or Mitt Romney (I have no idea how realistic this is, maybe Cheney will run and crazy people will vote him in). One of the biggets problems facing the new US government will be to fix the US economy - the gigantic foreign debt - and the political problems of a decade of war and corruption. It is no small task, and given that the export/import imbalance isn't likely to change soon, it might not happen at all.
All this might mean that priorities could very well be switched away from the manned space programme, again.
-Private enterprise, as someone else here put it, has not yet achieved a man in space. The enormous tasks of building man rated rockets and saftey features is something that I don't think private enterprise, no, not even Google, will achieve soon. Keeping people alive and safe in space is something that requires vast amounts of money. Or else, why do you think the Europeans haven't built their own manned space vehicle yet? They have a successful launcher business in Ariane, but have not allocated the funds for manned vehicles yet.
- The Chinese are much maligned here on Slashdot for, mostly, the wrong reasons. They have the commitment, the will, and approach the whole task of manned space flight very cautiously, and they tend to, as far as is known, stick to their goals. Not only that, but the whole "China copied Russian rockets and manned capsules" is way out of line. Neither the rockets, the Long March, nor the capsules, are Russian. The capsule looks like a Soyuz, and has the same basic format, but it is bigger and all the systems are of modern Chinese design. They most likely chose the Soyuz format because it is a known system that works very well. The Chinese might copy the Apollo system for moon landings, who knows. No, Chinese problems lie in their strict state control, which tends to muzzle real problems, massive pollution which might eventually become so bad as to result in social unrest (this has already happened in some cases) and enormous disparity between the poor and the rich in China, which already results in social unrest.
They might even have a communist revolution there.;-)
But if they want, I'm sure the Chinese will otherwise eventually get to the moon.
-The Russians have the technology, the experience, the know-how, and 40 years of continuous manned space flight. They did design and build a manned lunar programme, which, if it hadn't been for the political intrigues of the Soviet System, might very well have gotten there. They could scale the system up for modern requirements, and they would have a head start on anyone but the US. They had a working shuttle, the Buran, which they gave up when the Soviet Union collapsed. They had a massive, working lift system for their shuttle, Energia, whose manufacturer is still in business and could easily restart the programme. They
Halo is the one Microsoft product that has seriously quality, and, indirectly, they got it from Apple (Bungie used to be a mainly Mac game developer, until Microsoft bought them out in 2000. I bet Steve Jobs is pissed about that one.)
Your post is very possibly an attempt at subterfuge, and thereby trolling. POsting the prices of MS Office for non profits is rather silly when most people work for profit.
I own Windows XP OEM and Office 2003 Professional and I paid around $800 for them here in Switzerland. I only bought Office for the very reason that ODF exists: compatibility with customers and my workplace. It has paid off and I'm not complaining, but I could have used that money on better things. I think ODF and Open Office is a step in the right direction.
I wonder if a class action suit against Microsoft or better, a criminal investigation for (depending on what they exactly did update, and more importantly how they did it, with WUA set to off) maliscious abuse of property or breaking into an electronic device (the same stuff that crackers get charged with) would come out?
If Microsoft could update Windows without your permission, it means there is a backdoor in the OS, put there by Microsoft. Microsoft have done this before, namely back in 2000, there was a backdoor in ASP/IIS with the password "netscapeengineersareweenies", put there by Microsoft. That sort of thing could be incredibly destructive in today's virus/trojan laden internet. In onther words, I don't think it's as clear cut a case for Microsoft as you think. They could get into incredibly steep trouble with this (and since this will automatically come to the attention of the European Commission, there's a chance they might not be too happy about this as well)
While reading TFA, something in TFA caught my attention, here a list of changed components: 1. cdm.dll 2. wuapi.dll 3. wuauclt.exe 4. wuaucpl.cpl 5. wuaueng.dll 6. wucltui.dll 7. wups.dll 8. wups2.dll 9. wuweb.dll
I wonder if Mr. Frattini (who, IIRC, is an arch conservative catholic with an agenda similar to John Ashcroft's) realises what he's asking for there and how extremely difficult that would be to implement with current technology. Banning search terms like Bomb, Gun, Kill and Genocide would automatically end up blocking about 50 percent of Wikipedia alone. Banning them in the wanted context, however is something that even Google, I'm sure, would pay good money for, since the same technique would be excellent in narowing online searches.
But it doesn't and won't work and I suggest to Mr. Frattini that he do a search for Clueless Fundamentalist With An Agenda in the proper context before he gets too carried away.
Miguel, you seem to feel that you can play words one way one minute, then another way the next. My own personal opinion is that you are losing a lot of credibility with your own personal opinions. There is a very good non technical reason to dislike OOXML, just as there's a very good reason to dislike Mono, and your post that it would be best to download silverlight from Novell's servers to avoid patent hassles simply transfers the undesirability target from Microsoft to Novell, because enforcing users to use Novell software is no better than forcing them to use Microsoft software to avoid legal patent threats from Microsoft itself.
I don't know how many hundreds of people posted here warning you about the dangers of using Mono on Linux, the very FUD patent threat statements that Microsoft actually then later made in order to coax people like you and your bosses into becoming even more enslaved to Microsoft's whims than those who use Windows itself.
You don't seem to see Microsoft is more than likely to use OOXML and Silverlight as clubs to threaten people with later on. That's the real reason why OOXML is dangerous.
Like many others here, I learnt Pascal at school in the early 80s before C, then C++ and finally Java became the standard teaching languages. The thing about Pascal, of course, is that it was designed to be a teaching language. All of that verbose syntax is meant to teach good structured programming. While Object Pascal will never reach the mainstream in any way more than Delphi did, it would perhaps have eliminated many of the errors made by coders due to the byzantine complexity of C++. At least thats what I think. That enforced verbosity made the code very readable, in a similar way to the way Java is, except that Pascal is native code.
I look at the crap we have for operating systems and software today, Windows, Linux, OSX, Office, Apache, Firefox, Oracle, and even supposedly expert systems, and I think that the people who are making wild predictions about some imagined singularity are just making a load of hot air. The singularity is not coming any time soon. It MIGHT come one day, just as quantum computing might become practical in say 20 years, or perhaps even 15, but I can almost gurantee you that anything made by man will almost certainly be flawed just like we are (this is NOT an argument for religion btw) and might be very good at everything that we're bad and good at, but it will almost certainly have flaws that the socially alienated nerds who designed it didn't think about, like bad table manners, or built in psycopathy or some or other problem.
My personal prediction is that the real Next Step(TM) (with apologies to Steve Jobs) will be the gradual mixing of humans and bio and cybernetics, with implants etc to enable us to say live in a vacum or have sex on Mars or be resistant to the damage of solar radiation. All of this to the point where we will one day no longer be recognisable as human as we know it today.
Vista is not getting slammed just because of the UAC nonsense (which, btw, is solved pretty well in OSX, which you might know if you had actually TRIED any alternative instead of doing the standard hurt feelings microsoftie routine that is frankly, getting fucking boring). Vista was slammed because it is a satanic resource hog, and I say that as someone who compared them side by side on the same Intel Mac machine. It was slammed because of the shoddy QA which led to network performance issues when playing sound (for god's sake, if that wasn't just a damn poor excuse for a bad coding, then I don't know what is). It got slammed for playing havoc with legacy software. It got slammed for refusing to play non certified HD content.
And last, but not least, BY FAR, is the fact that Microsoft uses Vista, and enforced Vista compatibility, and blatantly corrupt practices such as attempting to buy ISO acceptance in the OOXML debacle.
I don't care about the fact that it is Microsoft, but I am sick and tired of wankers who use or code for Windows here on slashdot crying like little babies every time their momma MS gets taken to task for overt bad practices.
The domain play3w.com seems to be involved in the hosting of questionable software in the form of a so-called media player that installs trojans onto ones software. A cursory search on the internet reveals that there are many media files floating around the internet, some legal, some obviously not, which are supposedly encoded with a codec used by this player, called w3player or 3wplayer. The media files seem to only display a message directing one to the site download.play3w.com in order to download the software, which, upon installation throws up warning about a trojan being installed. In light of the current storm botnet growing to enormous proportions it is very likey that the site is involved in this in some way, given the wide distribution and use of bittorrent. This play3w scam seems to be widespread enough in fact, that there are other sites on the net that are also seeming to jump in on the act, such as mindcut.net (see 3wplayer link and almost everything on that site, in fact).
There is probably no better way to spread trojans and viruses these days than by way of bittorrent scams.
I love slashdot. It brings out the burning nationalist in so many little hearts everytime a flamebait article is posted on some or other nation versus the US of Duh.
They were also bragging about how amazing their navy is, veen if they only have about three subs left. In particular, the Akula class subs were designed especially to combat US Navy carrier groups in the Cold War. They are the quietest subs known, AFAIK, can dive extremely deeply, deeper than any other SSN, and they don't have to sneak up to sonar or visual range to attack carrier groups. What they do is close to missile range, and then fire the topredo tube launched SS-N-16 or SS-N-15 anti-ship cruise missiles. The missiles can be topped with anything from nucelar to toprpedo warheads.
If an Akula (or any other modern sub, since they all seem to be headed in that direction), were to launch an attack on a carrier, it would most likely launch a saturation attack against which the chances of succesful defense by point defense weapons like those of the Aegis destroyers or Phalanx gun decrease drastically.
Fortunately, back in reality, Russia and the USA are not likey to go to war any time soon. If Bush and Cheney do start (the third in 8 years) another conflict, it will be against Iran, which has some very good anti-aircraft missiles (Russian S-300 monsters) and some very powerful anti-ship missiles.
But all of this is just lunacy anyway. Haven't enough people died for vague and obscure reasons in recent years?
From TFA (Quote by Rick Rubin, the hippy producer that is supposed to be saving Columbia, discussing a subscription model as a way to combat piracy):...The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now....
It may be news to an internet newbie like Mr. Rubin, but there are and have been many services offering subscription services. None of them has come anywhere near Apple's simplistic method of just sell a song cheaply and its yours. Mr. Rubin talking bootleg recording is laughable because bootlegs were to the music industry then what online piracy is now. It just goes to show that Mr. Rubin, while he may be a good producer, is just as clueless and lost as the rest of the music industry (and the whole American artifical reality show model, if I may say so).
Why don't you actually answer the question? He asked you for a URL, you replied with a nice PR department santised piece of emptiness with words like "triage the feedback". Saying that Apple, OOo and whoever else supports OOXML when all they're doing is trying to insure import/export compatibility is fucking disingenious. You know that no one else will ever use OOXML as a main format.
I honestly don't know what it is with you Americans and your, in my view, totally neurotic fear that Hillary Clinton would be some strange vague, cold, Nazi like feminist who would be the death of your country. Where the fuck have you dumbass fuckers been for the last few centuries? You vote in an utterly corrupt and manipulative criminal (Nixon) whose main claim to fame was getting you out of Vietnam when it became obvious that you were losing and for lying in office and trying to subvert the democratic process, a peanut farmer (Carter) one of the few American presidents with a real set of morals and genuine aspirations of peace yet hated by you overly aggressive gun nut fucks, an has been actor (Reagan) whose administration broke its own laws selling arms to its own enemies - Iran - in order to finance a war against a tiny little country in Central America, a womaniser (Clinton) who was highly popular in spite of that because you all wish you could get what he got, an ex alcoholic coke sniffer failed oilman and reborn nutcase (Bush GW) who got you into two wars both of which are going badly and one of which is basically lost, who, along with his utterly corrupt friends stole billions in uncontested contracts from your government, tried their best to rape your civil liberties, broke the laws on spying more than once (wiretapping and the CIA scandal) and who very possibly stole some elections.
And you're worried about Hillary Clinton?????????? What could she possibly do that your present and past sons of bitches haven't done?
You know what I think, homey? I think you fucks are simply scared of her cause she's a woman.
No fuckhead, those assrapists at waco were part of GWs current voting base: the totally batshit crazy religious nutbags, and murders, since they fucking started the whole fucking thing by shooting at the cops and killing some. Dumbass fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
I was born in 1964, and that argument of yours is, to put it mildly, pathetic. The 2 million dead civillians was in Vietnam, not Cambodia. To be sure, 2 million or more died in Cambodia, but the war dead in Vietnam didn't die in concentration camps. That was a fairly even toll between the North/Viet Cong and the South/US military. Collateral damage, you would call it today if you weren't too busy making your country more polarised than it already is. Your descriptions of the way the bombing campaigns were run leads me to think that if they had done it your way, that it would have been won. I think, if they had done it your way and invaded North Vietnam, there would have been been a war with China.
And you're still ignoring the war in Iraq. Are you blind? What does healthcare or whatever lunacy you come up with have to do with Iraq?
But whatever, I just realised that, once again, I'm wasting my time.
"America has never said it wants to attack, change the government and own another nation; we don't want more territory- we just want wars there to stop. It's maddening when we take part in a distant war (think Bosnia) where we bombed the Christians and worked for the Muslims, and then come home. But we're not about expansion-for-expansion's sake, many/most of the UN members cannot make such a claim."
You must have just woken up from your nap that started around 1965 when the US got heavily involved in Vietnam after faking the Gulf of Tonkin incident (and after all was told the whole fucking mess lead to some 2 million dead civillians and 50'000 dead Americans) right through 2003, when a certain country's politicians lied to everybody about another, smaller country having big bombs, germs and shit, and invaded that smaller country, which has, up until now, and it hasn't stopped yet, resulted in about 70'000 dead civillians and 3500 dead Americans.
Wake up. It's no longer 1945, and the English have finished paying off their war debts to you. (which went up until right until 2006). Perhaps today is a good day to realise that the world has changed, and that your image of the world is seriously out of wack.
Actually, I don't won any iPods, nor do I own an iPhone. I am also a developer (if you don't call J2EE work for the second largest bank in Switzerland development, then what is?). I prefer Eclipse on Linux or Windows simply because the UI is more responsive on those platforms. The backend is often Linux or Solaris. Macs are my home choice and my choice for graphic design.
You dumbass Fucker.
Given how this thread has become an anti-Apple bitch fest, as opposed to an anti-iphone bitch fest:
.Net. There are OSS versions of both (Mono and GnuStep), but neither are of production qualiyt which means that in realiyt, if you want to do cross platform stuff you either go with C++, Java or one of the scipting languages like Python.
I have three Macs, one PPC Powerbook laptop with Adobe CS2 on it for compatibility with work, where they still use CS2 and two Intel Macs with all my development tools and my Adobe CS3 suite. My Macbook dual boots into Windows where I have Office 2003 pro for compatibility with our customers. I also have a Windows machhine at work with XP, Adobe CS2 and a host of other stuff that is very modern, but which I am using less and less.
Why? I personally am happy with and use Windows, Linux and OSX, so why do I go with the most expensive option?
Mainly, because OSX is, in our design business, the easiest to use, has the least downtime and is technically optimal for certain things. In terms of ease of use, Mac OSX is very simple compared to XP (or Linux). The configurational options are much easier for the majority of our workers, most of whom are designers, compared to Windows. There are many things in OSX that make a designers life easy, such as the Expose feature, the Zeroconf networking, drag and drop in almost every application, built-in spell checking in all text apps, decent built-in font managment and color sync. Added to that is that fact that modern Intel macs run Windows just fine for those of us who need it for office use or 3D work, and Apple's workgroup servers are many more times easier to use and configure than Windows or Linux machines.
Another thing is OSX' memory managment and multi tasking. Linux is excellent in this respect as well but Windows really suffers when RAM is almost full, and page swapping begins, and multitasking in Windows is much less smooth than it is in OSX.
Another thing is that almost all of our fonts are still in the old resource fork format, and although we have some very good font conversion utilities, those fonts often don't work properly on Windows.
I really prefer Windows XP for smaller tasks as the application startup time and general responsiveness of that OS is generally better than OSX in that case.
Winodws Vista, however, is a non starter at the moment, even though it improves many issues, including color synchronisation. Its terrible responsiveness on brand new hardware reminds me of OSX back in 2001. It has a whole load of a way to go.
Linux is still, sadly, a non option in a design agency. Inkscape, the GIMP, Scribus, Blender et al are improving, but until CMYK and color handling are integrated and synchronised, there is no way that they will be of much use there.
If I were doing anythng else, however, I would probably be using Linux and Windows, although even in major development houses, OSX is starting to become mainstream. Apple's Cocoa/ObjC tools are just as propietry as Microsoft's
I am somewhat doubtful that things will go as planned for anyone going back to the moon or to the moon for the first time (or anywhere else in space for that matter).
;-)
-The US has had an incredibly rocky ride this decade, with a government that, by any measure, is seriously incompetent and more interested in ideology than real goals. I won't get into the massive amounts of American money and lives wasted in the orgy of death and blood that is Iraq, except to say that the US could have built a whole space fleet with that money. I also seriously doubt that NASA is the same organisation that it was back in the 1960s. The bloated bureaucracy that is now NASA has a major problem with its top heavy structure swallowing more funds than the Chinese even needed to get a man in space. NASA also seems to be far less technically competent than it was back then (Columbia, drunk astronauts, love triangles gone south, political intrigues etc). Added to this is the tendency for big US projects (Space Shuttle, F-22 tec to go massively over budget and time)
There will also probably be a very different kind of person in power in the US in 2009, most likely Hilary Clinton or Mitt Romney (I have no idea how realistic this is, maybe Cheney will run and crazy people will vote him in). One of the biggets problems facing the new US government will be to fix the US economy - the gigantic foreign debt - and the political problems of a decade of war and corruption. It is no small task, and given that the export/import imbalance isn't likely to change soon, it might not happen at all.
All this might mean that priorities could very well be switched away from the manned space programme, again.
-Private enterprise, as someone else here put it, has not yet achieved a man in space. The enormous tasks of building man rated rockets and saftey features is something that I don't think private enterprise, no, not even Google, will achieve soon. Keeping people alive and safe in space is something that requires vast amounts of money. Or else, why do you think the Europeans haven't built their own manned space vehicle yet? They have a successful launcher business in Ariane, but have not allocated the funds for manned vehicles yet.
- The Chinese are much maligned here on Slashdot for, mostly, the wrong reasons. They have the commitment, the will, and approach the whole task of manned space flight very cautiously, and they tend to, as far as is known, stick to their goals. Not only that, but the whole "China copied Russian rockets and manned capsules" is way out of line. Neither the rockets, the Long March, nor the capsules, are Russian. The capsule looks like a Soyuz, and has the same basic format, but it is bigger and all the systems are of modern Chinese design. They most likely chose the Soyuz format because it is a known system that works very well. The Chinese might copy the Apollo system for moon landings, who knows. No, Chinese problems lie in their strict state control, which tends to muzzle real problems, massive pollution which might eventually become so bad as to result in social unrest (this has already happened in some cases) and enormous disparity between the poor and the rich in China, which already results in social unrest.
They might even have a communist revolution there.
But if they want, I'm sure the Chinese will otherwise eventually get to the moon.
-The Russians have the technology, the experience, the know-how, and 40 years of continuous manned space flight. They did design and build a manned lunar programme, which, if it hadn't been for the political intrigues of the Soviet System, might very well have gotten there. They could scale the system up for modern requirements, and they would have a head start on anyone but the US. They had a working shuttle, the Buran, which they gave up when the Soviet Union collapsed. They had a massive, working lift system for their shuttle, Energia, whose manufacturer is still in business and could easily restart the programme. They
Halo is the one Microsoft product that has seriously quality, and, indirectly, they got it from Apple (Bungie used to be a mainly Mac game developer, until Microsoft bought them out in 2000. I bet Steve Jobs is pissed about that one.)
Your post is very possibly an attempt at subterfuge, and thereby trolling. POsting the prices of MS Office for non profits is rather silly when most people work for profit.
I own Windows XP OEM and Office 2003 Professional and I paid around $800 for them here in Switzerland. I only bought Office for the very reason that ODF exists: compatibility with customers and my workplace. It has paid off and I'm not complaining, but I could have used that money on better things. I think ODF and Open Office is a step in the right direction.
Sense of humour left you?
I wonder if a class action suit against Microsoft or better, a criminal investigation for (depending on what they exactly did update, and more importantly how they did it, with WUA set to off) maliscious abuse of property or breaking into an electronic device (the same stuff that crackers get charged with) would come out?
If Microsoft could update Windows without your permission, it means there is a backdoor in the OS, put there by Microsoft. Microsoft have done this before, namely back in 2000, there was a backdoor in ASP/IIS with the password "netscapeengineersareweenies", put there by Microsoft. That sort of thing could be incredibly destructive in today's virus/trojan laden internet. In onther words, I don't think it's as clear cut a case for Microsoft as you think. They could get into incredibly steep trouble with this (and since this will automatically come to the attention of the European Commission, there's a chance they might not be too happy about this as well)
While reading TFA, something in TFA caught my attention, here a list of changed components:
1. cdm.dll
2. wuapi.dll
3. wuauclt.exe
4. wuaucpl.cpl
5. wuaueng.dll
6. wucltui.dll
7. wups.dll
8. wups2.dll
9. wuweb.dll
1.Iwonder.dll
2.whenmsft.exe
3.willsee.dll
4.youcan.dll
5.usemore.exe
6.than8_3.dll
7.notation.dll
8.innames.exe
9.1984want.scr
10.itsdos.dll
11.back.txt
I wonder if Mr. Frattini (who, IIRC, is an arch conservative catholic with an agenda similar to John Ashcroft's) realises what he's asking for there and how extremely difficult that would be to implement with current technology. Banning search terms like Bomb, Gun, Kill and Genocide would automatically end up blocking about 50 percent of Wikipedia alone. Banning them in the wanted context, however is something that even Google, I'm sure, would pay good money for, since the same technique would be excellent in narowing online searches.
But it doesn't and won't work and I suggest to Mr. Frattini that he do a search for Clueless Fundamentalist With An Agenda in the proper context before he gets too carried away.
(IANALTINLA)
I Am Not A LaTIN LuvA?
That was, by far, I think, the most seasoned post written in this whole topic.
Miguel, you seem to feel that you can play words one way one minute, then another way the next. My own personal opinion is that you are losing a lot of credibility with your own personal opinions. There is a very good non technical reason to dislike OOXML, just as there's a very good reason to dislike Mono, and your post that it would be best to download silverlight from Novell's servers to avoid patent hassles simply transfers the undesirability target from Microsoft to Novell, because enforcing users to use Novell software is no better than forcing them to use Microsoft software to avoid legal patent threats from Microsoft itself.
I don't know how many hundreds of people posted here warning you about the dangers of using Mono on Linux, the very FUD patent threat statements that Microsoft actually then later made in order to coax people like you and your bosses into becoming even more enslaved to Microsoft's whims than those who use Windows itself.
You don't seem to see Microsoft is more than likely to use OOXML and Silverlight as clubs to threaten people with later on. That's the real reason why OOXML is dangerous.
Like many others here, I learnt Pascal at school in the early 80s before C, then C++ and finally Java became the standard teaching languages. The thing about Pascal, of course, is that it was designed to be a teaching language. All of that verbose syntax is meant to teach good structured programming. While Object Pascal will never reach the mainstream in any way more than Delphi did, it would perhaps have eliminated many of the errors made by coders due to the byzantine complexity of C++. At least thats what I think. That enforced verbosity made the code very readable, in a similar way to the way Java is, except that Pascal is native code.
I look at the crap we have for operating systems and software today, Windows, Linux, OSX, Office, Apache, Firefox, Oracle, and even supposedly expert systems, and I think that the people who are making wild predictions about some imagined singularity are just making a load of hot air. The singularity is not coming any time soon. It MIGHT come one day, just as quantum computing might become practical in say 20 years, or perhaps even 15, but I can almost gurantee you that anything made by man will almost certainly be flawed just like we are (this is NOT an argument for religion btw) and might be very good at everything that we're bad and good at, but it will almost certainly have flaws that the socially alienated nerds who designed it didn't think about, like bad table manners, or built in psycopathy or some or other problem.
My personal prediction is that the real Next Step(TM) (with apologies to Steve Jobs) will be the gradual mixing of humans and bio and cybernetics, with implants etc to enable us to say live in a vacum or have sex on Mars or be resistant to the damage of solar radiation. All of this to the point where we will one day no longer be recognisable as human as we know it today.
Beep.
Vista is not getting slammed just because of the UAC nonsense (which, btw, is solved pretty well in OSX, which you might know if you had actually TRIED any alternative instead of doing the standard hurt feelings microsoftie routine that is frankly, getting fucking boring). Vista was slammed because it is a satanic resource hog, and I say that as someone who compared them side by side on the same Intel Mac machine. It was slammed because of the shoddy QA which led to network performance issues when playing sound (for god's sake, if that wasn't just a damn poor excuse for a bad coding, then I don't know what is). It got slammed for playing havoc with legacy software. It got slammed for refusing to play non certified HD content.
And last, but not least, BY FAR, is the fact that Microsoft uses Vista, and enforced Vista compatibility, and blatantly corrupt practices such as attempting to buy ISO acceptance in the OOXML debacle.
I don't care about the fact that it is Microsoft, but I am sick and tired of wankers who use or code for Windows here on slashdot crying like little babies every time their momma MS gets taken to task for overt bad practices.
Fuck off.
The domain play3w.com seems to be involved in the hosting of questionable software in the form of a so-called media player that installs trojans onto ones software. A cursory search on the internet reveals that there are many media files floating around the internet, some legal, some obviously not, which are supposedly encoded with a codec used by this player, called w3player or 3wplayer. The media files seem to only display a message directing one to the site download.play3w.com in order to download the software, which, upon installation throws up warning about a trojan being installed. In light of the current storm botnet growing to enormous proportions it is very likey that the site is involved in this in some way, given the wide distribution and use of bittorrent. This play3w scam seems to be widespread enough in fact, that there are other sites on the net that are also seeming to jump in on the act, such as mindcut.net (see 3wplayer link and almost everything on that site, in fact).
There is probably no better way to spread trojans and viruses these days than by way of bittorrent scams.
I love slashdot. It brings out the burning nationalist in so many little hearts everytime a flamebait article is posted on some or other nation versus the US of Duh.
They were also bragging about how amazing their navy is, veen if they only have about three subs left. In particular, the Akula class subs were designed especially to combat US Navy carrier groups in the Cold War. They are the quietest subs known, AFAIK, can dive extremely deeply, deeper than any other SSN, and they don't have to sneak up to sonar or visual range to attack carrier groups. What they do is close to missile range, and then fire the topredo tube launched SS-N-16 or SS-N-15 anti-ship cruise missiles. The missiles can be topped with anything from nucelar to toprpedo warheads.
If an Akula (or any other modern sub, since they all seem to be headed in that direction), were to launch an attack on a carrier, it would most likely launch a saturation attack against which the chances of succesful defense by point defense weapons like those of the Aegis destroyers or Phalanx gun decrease drastically.
Fortunately, back in reality, Russia and the USA are not likey to go to war any time soon. If Bush and Cheney do start (the third in 8 years) another conflict, it will be against Iran, which has some very good anti-aircraft missiles (Russian S-300 monsters) and some very powerful anti-ship missiles.
But all of this is just lunacy anyway. Haven't enough people died for vague and obscure reasons in recent years?
From TFA (Quote by Rick Rubin, the hippy producer that is supposed to be saving Columbia, discussing a subscription model as a way to combat piracy):...The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now....
It may be news to an internet newbie like Mr. Rubin, but there are and have been many services offering subscription services. None of them has come anywhere near Apple's simplistic method of just sell a song cheaply and its yours. Mr. Rubin talking bootleg recording is laughable because bootlegs were to the music industry then what online piracy is now. It just goes to show that Mr. Rubin, while he may be a good producer, is just as clueless and lost as the rest of the music industry (and the whole American artifical reality show model, if I may say so).
Why don't you actually answer the question? He asked you for a URL, you replied with a nice PR department santised piece of emptiness with words like "triage the feedback". Saying that Apple, OOo and whoever else supports OOXML when all they're doing is trying to insure import/export compatibility is fucking disingenious. You know that no one else will ever use OOXML as a main format.
There are days when I want to see the corrupt, lying sons of bitches at Microsoft lined up against the wall and shot.
I honestly don't know what it is with you Americans and your, in my view, totally neurotic fear that Hillary Clinton would be some strange vague, cold, Nazi like feminist who would be the death of your country. Where the fuck have you dumbass fuckers been for the last few centuries? You vote in an utterly corrupt and manipulative criminal (Nixon) whose main claim to fame was getting you out of Vietnam when it became obvious that you were losing and for lying in office and trying to subvert the democratic process, a peanut farmer (Carter) one of the few American presidents with a real set of morals and genuine aspirations of peace yet hated by you overly aggressive gun nut fucks, an has been actor (Reagan) whose administration broke its own laws selling arms to its own enemies - Iran - in order to finance a war against a tiny little country in Central America, a womaniser (Clinton) who was highly popular in spite of that because you all wish you could get what he got, an ex alcoholic coke sniffer failed oilman and reborn nutcase (Bush GW) who got you into two wars both of which are going badly and one of which is basically lost, who, along with his utterly corrupt friends stole billions in uncontested contracts from your government, tried their best to rape your civil liberties, broke the laws on spying more than once (wiretapping and the CIA scandal) and who very possibly stole some elections.
And you're worried about Hillary Clinton?????????? What could she possibly do that your present and past sons of bitches haven't done?
You know what I think, homey? I think you fucks are simply scared of her cause she's a woman.
No fuckhead, those assrapists at waco were part of GWs current voting base: the totally batshit crazy religious nutbags, and murders, since they fucking started the whole fucking thing by shooting at the cops and killing some. Dumbass fuck.