The amount of crap that is going to hit the fan when this becomes widely known around the world is directly proprtional to the amount of lost tourist and business income in the US as a result of this.
I wasn't planning on visiting the US in the near future and now I'm definitely not going to visit the US in the near future. I will NOT be treated like a criminal!
My take is that this bullshit has nothing to do with terrorists in any case. I think this is election year garnering of votes from the paranoid ultra conservatives in the US who see the rest of the world through blood red glasses of hatred and fear.
The one thing that always amazes me, is that no matter how bad the news, in fact the worse the better, any article on slashdot about some Apple misfortune or bug or new product regularly gets at least twice, if not three times, the number of posts compared to the usual average of around 200 to 350 posts.
That say to me that, even though there is a fair amount of trolling, that there is an enormous amount of interest in the company and its products. And given that the pro Apple comments are usually modded up, I suspect that:
a). There is a large portion of slashdot readers who use a Mac and OSX. b). That interest translates into the real world in buying terms, and c). That even the MS fanboys and die hard "it's too expensive" or "port it to x86" morons would use a Mac and OSX if they could.
In summary, I think Apple is doing so well with the G5, Powerbooks, OSX and the iPod that they are THE act to follow in the IT world.
I just can't afford a real one. and here I am with a 2.4 Ghz PC I got for 300, playing the living hell out of games that aren't available for the Mac, Photoshopping, Dreamweaving, etc
For crying out loud, you can't a Mac but you can afford Photoshop and Dreamweaver? Unless you're using pirated versions you're lying out of your ass.
My ass. You worked in what "EU government"? How come someone who has supposedly worked in the "EU government", (which is not a government in the sense that your government is) writes and spells like a 15 year old American school-child, i.e. badly?
This interview left me boiling. It is so full of Microsoft PR and empty nothingness that there can be just no way thta this guy is not in this up to his ears.
Quotes: I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies.
Translation: Yeah, Microsoft is behind the lawsuit. Oops I let the cat out the bag, because I hardly mentioned SCO in the article and gushed about Microsoft for most of it. And a little theatening works wonder now and again, doesn't it, nudge ndge, wink wink, say no more.
Since the GPL type license agreements push the liability to the users, who do you go after? I think this is a key problem. Nobody wants to be the ultimate guarantor for software that was free (or close to it). I think the dispute with SCO would have been settled a long time ago if everybody knew this was the last one. The problem is there will probably be hundreds or even thousands of these disputes in the future and the targets will be the companies with the deepest pockets. Even if the large vendors disclaim all responsibility initially, I do not think the customers will accept this from their vendors for very long. In the meantime, I don't see anybody being in a hurry to write the first big check.
Translation: I'm just busy repeating what Darl has been pissing into the winds so I can make people worry more than they are. Yet even I am just too fucking stupid to understand the GPL and still don't get it. (hint to Mike: You and your kind of greedy money grabbing fuckwits deserve to get your assses sued out of existence for your stupidity: If there is no proprietry IP in the Linux kernel then the GPL protects us very well.)
I have also had several long lost friends contact me. I think they thought I might need some support.
Tranlsation: Bill and Darl have been on the phone screaming at me for that leaked letter. They have warned me to only say nice things about Microsoft and SCO. (Hint for Mike: You're gonna need that support mike, because IBM is almost certain to subpoena your ass into court, and if they don't Novell and RedHat will. After that you will know what it's like to get screwed in the butt by a big hairy Convict.)
It is conceivable that Microsoft would enforce licensing terms on the implementation of the APIs that it hasn't submitted to ECMA. In the worst case, says de Icaza, distributors of those APIs would need to pay fees to Microsoft.
If you believe that Microsoft will sit around and blithely let you "copy their ip" then you have another think coming. Take a look at how how much MS spends on anti-Linux FUD alone and I think you're going to be one dumb monkey sometime in the future at Microsoft's choosing, and then the rest of us will laugh at you for having been such an arrogant toss over how "C is dead". We'll be able to say, "Yeah, but MIguel's ass belongs to Microsoft"
Microsoft will do anything to sink Linux if it can and you making statements over having to pay licencing money to microsoft as if it were no problem whatsoever if hugely arrogant and makes me wonder if you're actually that dumb.
Well, if MS can afford to give away thousands of copies of office that supposedly cost $500 retail (and not all that much less OEM), how the hell so they reckon the cost of Office and Windows at those prices? Not only that but MS gets to deduct the whole thing from tax.
It's no wonder that MS is the biggest and richest software company in the world. They've been ripping off everyone for the past two decades.
I was an operator/admin on an archaic Wang 300 mini system back in the 80's on a US air force base. The OS was Wangs multiuser system and, while fantastically old by todays standards, demonstrated something that I not seen in later jobs as admin for on Windows and Novell systems: consistency and simplicity.
The user had access to Wangs text based word processor, spreadsheet, groupware and simple database programmes, of course everything running on a central system and the users only having terminals.
There was far less, and I really mean far less support hassle, especially on the telephone as it was so much easier to understand what the users currently were doing and the users, having a reduced set of commands, could mess up in x number of ways. Added to that the interfaces were consistent and easy to remember. Ironically, all that could today run on a single Unix machine with terminals with ease (about 150 users).
I compare that to the aches of supporting Microsoft office in my last jobs, with users being all over the place and repeatedly not being able to remember the simplest of GUI functionality. Not even younger employees who had grown up with GUIs were confident in what they were doing.
The comment about graphics is valid though. A hybrid CLI with graphics functionality would probably be the best bet for all.
The newsforge story about the SEC finally beginning to investigate both Microsoft and SCO is, if I see this correctly, going to be one of the biggest shakeouts in recent corporate history.
I was one of the people who, last year while no one was taking Microsoft involvement seriously, posted that there was a good chance Microsoft was involved based purely on the case of what the motivation was behind the whole SCO lawsuit. Now that SCO's case has been shown to be a mostly hot air campaign of lies and public FUD, considering that SCO has yet to openly show a single case of obvious infringement in court, I think it might have well gone off along the following lines:
SCO was losing both money and marketshare rapidly up until last year, having failed to persuade IBM to continue on project monterey after Caldera bought the rights from the original SCO, and thereby having no modern product and only an installed base of legacy customers whp were looking for other sources in any case. I think that while the original idea might have come from McBride himself to make a legal case for Linux chaos, I would think that probably, one of the first things he would have done is to approach Microsoft, or else he was approached by Microsoft very early as part of Microsoft's FUD campaign aginst Linux.
The benefits for Microsoft are obvious, as it would bring in, at the very least, doubt into the minds of PHB's who were considering Linux adoption. The fact that the SEC might be investigating Microsoft for funding analysts (something which has been obvious to just about everyone here on/. for years) such as Gartner induces me to think it was probably Microsoft who first approached McBride.
I would think that Microsoft offered SCO and McBride a very Faustian kind of deal: Carry the legal and above all PR campaign against Linux and especially IBM (who has given an enormous amount of credibility to Linux) and Microsoft would save SCO's and McBride's collective asses. The amount of money involved is small change for Microsoft.
The fact that McBride is as stupid as the original Faust character, is easy to spot when one looks at other companies who have trusted or sold their souls to the Microsoft machine. Where are they today?
The reason that I think it might turn into a huge wopper of a case is because, when the threads unravel and Microsoft's tactics are displayed in court, they will not only have been guilty of breaking the antitrust agreements, but also numerous felonies involving the charges mentioned at newsforge. On top of that I can see this one going all the way to the top at Microsoft because I can not see any such huge campaign not being known and sanctioned by Bill and Steve personally.
And when I look at the current legal mood involving Worldcom's Ebbers and Martha Stewart and the punishment handed out, I don't think that there will be the same mercy applied as there was during the anti-trust trials.
As has been shown in Germany, where an injunction effectively nipped their entire FUD campaign in the bud and they are forbidden from making statements they cannot prove without showing evidence, there is a big legal loophole in the US. The fact that SCO can make any wild claim that they want, sue anyone they want on the wildest of baseless claims, and get awaya with not having to produce actual evidence in order to go to court is a real problem.
Many companies who are frightened of getting sued by these bastards have little other legal options. Not many, apart from badly researched ZDNet trashmag articles, believe that SCo has the slightest chance of success, but what about the financial damage to companies that are getting sued from loss in stock value, and the fact that there is no way in hell that SCO could really afford to pay for the damages once IBM, RedHat and Novell have finished with them.
What is to stop the next POS crap company that is going down from sueing everybody left right and centre?
I agree 100% that the GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement but it sure as hell offers a huge amount of features, and finally, a decent GUI, for $0.
I have just waded through about 20 +5 insightful modded posts about how bad GIMP 1.2's GUI was. Sigh, I know this is slashdot, but is even reading the editor's comment to much, even if RTFA is?
How on earth can you say that the GIMP 2 is crap unless you've tried it. I can see this working quite well for web graphics and standard home printer stuff, and the new interface with dockable palettes and menus in the image window saving one from having to right-click all the time are fantastic.
I don't know what pisses the PS people off more: the fact that the GIMP is finally improving or that they spent an enormous amount of money on Adobe's tools that they only use for web graphics in the end.
That was porn, because I distinctly heard some journalist sucking a Microsoft yobo's dick.
I mean, please! Was there anything new there? Was there some weird insight that we haven't seen before? Was there a change of heart by a MS drone? Of course not. Microsoft says it is better and Linux sucks.
My fuck, sometimes my blood boils over when I read fascist bullshit like this. The Patriot Act is an excuse to control you Americans. It has nothing to do with the vague War on Terrorism. The War on Terrorism is an excuse, IMO, for a cabal of corrupt bastards to stay in power irrespective of elections and make more money than they already have.
What has this got to do with stupidity? Please, two days ago it was on the news on all across the globe that the German intelligence service had given Marwan al Shehi's name and telephone number to the CIA more than two years before the 2001 attacks. And everyone knows about the FBI field agent who was simply ignored. Not only this but your intelligence agencies ignored Al Qaida until they went ahead and bombed you in your own country, or have you forgotten the bombings of the Tanzanian and Kenian embassies and the USS Cole?
It was almost written in the fucking heavens that someone was gunning for the US badly. Terrorists hadn't stopped at bombing places in Europe before and they had even tried to bomb the WTC in 1993, yet no one gave a damn.
The Patriot Act wouldn't have stopped any of those attacks. A ziny bit of intelligence would.
I'm known for my rather critical attitude towards the US but if there was a general opinion that MS was buying favour with US politicians then I think it will be a lot worse in the international sphere as the price of a third world ignoramus sitting in some UN committe panel is certainly not higher than that of a corrupt US politician.
Since SCO is now openly trying to extort (or claim, depending on your pov) money from end users, be they commercial or not for an operating system which they did not write, doesn't this allow Linus and everbody else who contributed to sue SCO for abusing copyright that they do not own?
I know Linus is everybody's teddybear, but wouldn't this finally be an excellent opportunity for him to get an injunction at the very least?
I am amongst the many people who were quite dissapointed with pattern recognition. One could, however, have seen it coming for quite a while now as his second trilogy, the Bridge series, was quite a step down in terms of interest (who really cared about the bridge), innovation (wow, vr glasses and vrml websites!! how cool) and tension (the pro assassin is sort of like a gap model with a knife).
The things that really made Neuromacer and Count Zero for me (MLO was starting to get boring, somehow) were the grimy, gritty texture of the settings (this got translated marvelously into the matrix), the interesting characters (Case, Molly, the Finn, The Count etc) who were all from a criminal strata, the plot that is extremely well thought out and paced, the AI's (Neuromancer and Wintermute make excellent characters) and his ability to describe minute details in a setting that could conjure up a visible image of the room or place in one's mind.
So what if there weren't any cell-phones. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973 and used musical tech from that era, and I still love it.
Even in the bridge trilogy there were parts which were true Gibson where he was describing the hard luck times of the male hero working for the store as a security man.
I think that what started Gibson off on his journey of boredom is when he had made enough money to no longer have to write at his very best level, in order to survive. He started then writing about rich boring people.
Why even bother to buy a guitar and learn to play it if you can't tune it yourself? I find this pathetic, I'm sorry to say. Just buy a synthesizer and learn to play with that if you can't be bothered to learn to train your ear.
In the article the analyst sleaze peddler whores, IDC and Gartner, talk as if they expect Apple, Jobs and Pixar to collapse any day now, and as if they are still dumb fucking struck that Apple hasn't gone under in the face of Bill G's $$$$.
I AM a Mac fan, I admit it without any hesitation, but I don't cut Apple any slack. But what drives me to rage is that these fucking dick sucking marketing whore sluts from these so called analyst companies still get quoted as if any piece of the shit they had to say had any relevance in the real fucking world.
"Apple's ipod will feel heat from Dell, MS etc in the future", "Pixar will anger Hollywood". Jesus, what do these stupids fucks have against Apple anyway? They were prophecising Apple's death back in 1997, and they are so fucking greedy for Bill G's $$$ and so fucking lazy to do some actual marketing research that they're still doing it today.
Stupid fucks were also as responsible as anyone for the crash of the dotcom fuckout, still praising dead dotbombs after the companies had already gone tits up.
I really have it in for those fucks today: Was it a part of their company rationalisation and down sizing to cut out the actual research in their companies or have they never fucking bothered anyway.
I found the paper interesting if complex, but one thing that struck me is that there is a general trend in indo-european languages (at least) for the languages to simplify drastically over time.
Sanskrit itself might have been an extremely regular language and one that had rules that could have been applied to a computer language, but almost all descendant languages have simplified enormously:
Sanskrit had 8 gramatical cases, and modern Hindi, Urdu and Gudjarati, have fewer. Sanksrit had 3 grammatical genders, and Hindi et al have fewer.
Given that this grammatical simplification applies almost uniformly to indo-european languages, one wonders how the original Sanskrit and indo-european were originally developed in the first place.
When I saw the image of the fingers holding the transparent film, I thought about the holographic RAM devices in the MR movie, which looked like lenses of glass. It is sometimes interesting how technology actually does catch up to some science fiction dream.
My hunch says this is Apple because it would full the niche in their digital media creation software where they are as yet not present and where Apple is sorely lacking: 3D. While there are really nice alternative packages for OSX, such as Cinema 4D, I can see Apple wanting to have some control on where the market in 3D on OSX goes.
From that standpoint, much as Apple's purchase of Logic made sense in that Apple could have a presence in pro Audio, this being Apple would really make sense.
BUt there is something else that I can see Apple really wanting: Alias Sketch. That TabletPC painting software. It has a unique interesting interface, and I am sure Jobs would love to have something like this so as to fill that gap as well.
Don't sell yourselves out for a fistfull of corrupt politicians. Howard is fucking you all over with this one, selling first your independance and then your jobs to the Americans.
This one is a dupe, yet again. Christ, man, use the fucking search feature or hand over the moderator status to someone who will. And yes, you are definitely the worst one when it comes to duplicating stories.
Slashdot Mirror
The amount of crap that is going to hit the fan when this becomes widely known around the world is directly proprtional to the amount of lost tourist and business income in the US as a result of this.
I wasn't planning on visiting the US in the near future and now I'm definitely not going to visit the US in the near future. I will NOT be treated like a criminal!
My take is that this bullshit has nothing to do with terrorists in any case. I think this is election year garnering of votes from the paranoid ultra conservatives in the US who see the rest of the world through blood red glasses of hatred and fear.
The one thing that always amazes me, is that no matter how bad the news, in fact the worse the better, any article on slashdot about some Apple misfortune or bug or new product regularly gets at least twice, if not three times, the number of posts compared to the usual average of around 200 to 350 posts.
That say to me that, even though there is a fair amount of trolling, that there is an enormous amount of interest in the company and its products. And given that the pro Apple comments are usually modded up, I suspect that:
a). There is a large portion of slashdot readers who use a Mac and OSX.
b). That interest translates into the real world in buying terms, and
c). That even the MS fanboys and die hard "it's too expensive" or "port it to x86" morons would use a Mac and OSX if they could.
In summary, I think Apple is doing so well with the G5, Powerbooks, OSX and the iPod that they are THE act to follow in the IT world.
I just can't afford a real one. and here I am with a 2.4 Ghz PC I got for 300, playing the living hell out of games that aren't available for the Mac, Photoshopping, Dreamweaving, etc
For crying out loud, you can't a Mac but you can afford Photoshop and Dreamweaver? Unless you're using pirated versions you're lying out of your ass.
Fuck off and go troll somewhere else.
My ass. You worked in what "EU government"? How come someone who has supposedly worked in the "EU government", (which is not a government in the sense that your government is) writes and spells like a 15 year old American school-child, i.e. badly?
This interview left me boiling. It is so full of Microsoft PR and empty nothingness that there can be just no way thta this guy is not in this up to his ears.
Quotes:
I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies.
Translation: Yeah, Microsoft is behind the lawsuit. Oops I let the cat out the bag, because I hardly mentioned SCO in the article and gushed about Microsoft for most of it. And a little theatening works wonder now and again, doesn't it, nudge ndge, wink wink, say no more.
Since the GPL type license agreements push the liability to the users, who do you go after? I think this is a key problem. Nobody wants to be the ultimate guarantor for software that was free (or close to it). I think the dispute with SCO would have been settled a long time ago if everybody knew this was the last one. The problem is there will probably be hundreds or even thousands of these disputes in the future and the targets will be the companies with the deepest pockets. Even if the large vendors disclaim all responsibility initially, I do not think the customers will accept this from their vendors for very long. In the meantime, I don't see anybody being in a hurry to write the first big check.
Translation: I'm just busy repeating what Darl has been pissing into the winds so I can make people worry more than they are. Yet even I am just too fucking stupid to understand the GPL and still don't get it. (hint to Mike: You and your kind of greedy money grabbing fuckwits deserve to get your assses sued out of existence for your stupidity: If there is no proprietry IP in the Linux kernel then the GPL protects us very well.)
I have also had several long lost friends contact me. I think they thought I might need some support.
Tranlsation: Bill and Darl have been on the phone screaming at me for that leaked letter. They have warned me to only say nice things about Microsoft and SCO. (Hint for Mike: You're gonna need that support mike, because IBM is almost certain to subpoena your ass into court, and if they don't Novell and RedHat will. After that you will know what it's like to get screwed in the butt by a big hairy Convict.)
It is conceivable that Microsoft would enforce licensing terms on the implementation of the APIs that it hasn't submitted to ECMA. In the worst case, says de Icaza, distributors of those APIs would need to pay fees to Microsoft.
If you believe that Microsoft will sit around and blithely let you "copy their ip" then you have another think coming. Take a look at how how much MS spends on anti-Linux FUD alone and I think you're going to be one dumb monkey sometime in the future at Microsoft's choosing, and then the rest of us will laugh at you for having been such an arrogant toss over how "C is dead". We'll be able to say, "Yeah, but MIguel's ass belongs to Microsoft"
Microsoft will do anything to sink Linux if it can and you making statements over having to pay licencing money to microsoft as if it were no problem whatsoever if hugely arrogant and makes me wonder if you're actually that dumb.
Well, if MS can afford to give away thousands of copies of office that supposedly cost $500 retail (and not all that much less OEM), how the hell so they reckon the cost of Office and Windows at those prices? Not only that but MS gets to deduct the whole thing from tax.
It's no wonder that MS is the biggest and richest software company in the world. They've been ripping off everyone for the past two decades.
I was an operator/admin on an archaic Wang 300 mini system back in the 80's on a US air force base. The OS was Wangs multiuser system and, while fantastically old by todays standards, demonstrated something that I not seen in later jobs as admin for on Windows and Novell systems: consistency and simplicity.
The user had access to Wangs text based word processor, spreadsheet, groupware and simple database programmes, of course everything running on a central system and the users only having terminals.
There was far less, and I really mean far less support hassle, especially on the telephone as it was so much easier to understand what the users currently were doing and the users, having a reduced set of commands, could mess up in x number of ways. Added to that the interfaces were consistent and easy to remember. Ironically, all that could today run on a single Unix machine with terminals with ease (about 150 users).
I compare that to the aches of supporting Microsoft office in my last jobs, with users being all over the place and repeatedly not being able to remember the simplest of GUI functionality. Not even younger employees who had grown up with GUIs were confident in what they were doing.
The comment about graphics is valid though. A hybrid CLI with graphics functionality would probably be the best bet for all.
The newsforge story about the SEC finally beginning to investigate both Microsoft and SCO is, if I see this correctly, going to be one of the biggest shakeouts in recent corporate history.
/. for years) such as Gartner induces me to think it was probably Microsoft who first approached McBride.
I was one of the people who, last year while no one was taking Microsoft involvement seriously, posted that there was a good chance Microsoft was involved based purely on the case of what the motivation was behind the whole SCO lawsuit. Now that SCO's case has been shown to be a mostly hot air campaign of lies and public FUD, considering that SCO has yet to openly show a single case of obvious infringement in court, I think it might have well gone off along the following lines:
SCO was losing both money and marketshare rapidly up until last year, having failed to persuade IBM to continue on project monterey after Caldera bought the rights from the original SCO, and thereby having no modern product and only an installed base of legacy customers whp were looking for other sources in any case. I think that while the original idea might have come from McBride himself to make a legal case for Linux chaos, I would think that probably, one of the first things he would have done is to approach Microsoft, or else he was approached by Microsoft very early as part of Microsoft's FUD campaign aginst Linux.
The benefits for Microsoft are obvious, as it would bring in, at the very least, doubt into the minds of PHB's who were considering Linux adoption. The fact that the SEC might be investigating Microsoft for funding analysts (something which has been obvious to just about everyone here on
I would think that Microsoft offered SCO and McBride a very Faustian kind of deal: Carry the legal and above all PR campaign against Linux and especially IBM (who has given an enormous amount of credibility to Linux) and Microsoft would save SCO's and McBride's collective asses. The amount of money involved is small change for Microsoft.
The fact that McBride is as stupid as the original Faust character, is easy to spot when one looks at other companies who have trusted or sold their souls to the Microsoft machine. Where are they today?
The reason that I think it might turn into a huge wopper of a case is because, when the threads unravel and Microsoft's tactics are displayed in court, they will not only have been guilty of breaking the antitrust agreements, but also numerous felonies involving the charges mentioned at newsforge. On top of that I can see this one going all the way to the top at Microsoft because I can not see any such huge campaign not being known and sanctioned by Bill and Steve personally.
And when I look at the current legal mood involving Worldcom's Ebbers and Martha Stewart and the punishment handed out, I don't think that there will be the same mercy applied as there was during the anti-trust trials.
As has been shown in Germany, where an injunction effectively nipped their entire FUD campaign in the bud and they are forbidden from making statements they cannot prove without showing evidence, there is a big legal loophole in the US. The fact that SCO can make any wild claim that they want, sue anyone they want on the wildest of baseless claims, and get awaya with not having to produce actual evidence in order to go to court is a real problem.
Many companies who are frightened of getting sued by these bastards have little other legal options. Not many, apart from badly researched ZDNet trashmag articles, believe that SCo has the slightest chance of success, but what about the financial damage to companies that are getting sued from loss in stock value, and the fact that there is no way in hell that SCO could really afford to pay for the damages once IBM, RedHat and Novell have finished with them.
What is to stop the next POS crap company that is going down from sueing everybody left right and centre?
"My Windows XP just crashed. Now I gotta reload it" :D
I agree 100% that the GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement but it sure as hell offers a huge amount of features, and finally, a decent GUI, for $0.
I have just waded through about 20 +5 insightful modded posts about how bad GIMP 1.2's GUI was. Sigh, I know this is slashdot, but is even reading the editor's comment to much, even if RTFA is?
How on earth can you say that the GIMP 2 is crap unless you've tried it. I can see this working quite well for web graphics and standard home printer stuff, and the new interface with dockable palettes and menus in the image window saving one from having to right-click all the time are fantastic.
I don't know what pisses the PS people off more: the fact that the GIMP is finally improving or that they spent an enormous amount of money on Adobe's tools that they only use for web graphics in the end.
That was porn, because I distinctly heard some journalist sucking a Microsoft yobo's dick.
I mean, please! Was there anything new there? Was there some weird insight that we haven't seen before? Was there a change of heart by a MS drone? Of course not. Microsoft says it is better and Linux sucks.
What else is new?
My fuck, sometimes my blood boils over when I read fascist bullshit like this. The Patriot Act is an excuse to control you Americans. It has nothing to do with the vague War on Terrorism. The War on Terrorism is an excuse, IMO, for a cabal of corrupt bastards to stay in power irrespective of elections and make more money than they already have.
What has this got to do with stupidity? Please, two days ago it was on the news on all across the globe that the German intelligence service had given Marwan al Shehi's name and telephone number to the CIA more than two years before the 2001 attacks. And everyone knows about the FBI field agent who was simply ignored. Not only this but your intelligence agencies ignored Al Qaida until they went ahead and bombed you in your own country, or have you forgotten the bombings of the Tanzanian and Kenian embassies and the USS Cole?
It was almost written in the fucking heavens that someone was gunning for the US badly. Terrorists hadn't stopped at bombing places in Europe before and they had even tried to bomb the WTC in 1993, yet no one gave a damn.
The Patriot Act wouldn't have stopped any of those attacks. A ziny bit of intelligence would.
I'm specifically waiting for a G5 Powerbook, and I'll put my OSX against any OS that you can run on your Athlon 64.
I'm known for my rather critical attitude towards the US but if there was a general opinion that MS was buying favour with US politicians then I think it will be a lot worse in the international sphere as the price of a third world ignoramus sitting in some UN committe panel is certainly not higher than that of a corrupt US politician.
Since SCO is now openly trying to extort (or claim, depending on your pov) money from end users, be they commercial or not for an operating system which they did not write, doesn't this allow Linus and everbody else who contributed to sue SCO for abusing copyright that they do not own?
I know Linus is everybody's teddybear, but wouldn't this finally be an excellent opportunity for him to get an injunction at the very least?
I am amongst the many people who were quite dissapointed with pattern recognition. One could, however, have seen it coming for quite a while now as his second trilogy, the Bridge series, was quite a step down in terms of interest (who really cared about the bridge), innovation (wow, vr glasses and vrml websites!! how cool) and tension (the pro assassin is sort of like a gap model with a knife).
The things that really made Neuromacer and Count Zero for me (MLO was starting to get boring, somehow) were the grimy, gritty texture of the settings (this got translated marvelously into the matrix), the interesting characters (Case, Molly, the Finn, The Count etc) who were all from a criminal strata, the plot that is extremely well thought out and paced, the AI's (Neuromancer and Wintermute make excellent characters) and his ability to describe minute details in a setting that could conjure up a visible image of the room or place in one's mind.
So what if there weren't any cell-phones. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973 and used musical tech from that era, and I still love it.
Even in the bridge trilogy there were parts which were true Gibson where he was describing the hard luck times of the male hero working for the store as a security man.
I think that what started Gibson off on his journey of boredom is when he had made enough money to no longer have to write at his very best level, in order to survive. He started then writing about rich boring people.
Perhaops about the time he became one too.
Why even bother to buy a guitar and learn to play it if you can't tune it yourself? I find this pathetic, I'm sorry to say. Just buy a synthesizer and learn to play with that if you can't be bothered to learn to train your ear.
What ever happened to talent and skill?
In the article the analyst sleaze peddler whores, IDC and Gartner, talk as if they expect Apple, Jobs and Pixar to collapse any day now, and as if they are still dumb fucking struck that Apple hasn't gone under in the face of Bill G's $$$$.
I AM a Mac fan, I admit it without any hesitation, but I don't cut Apple any slack. But what drives me to rage is that these fucking dick sucking marketing whore sluts from these so called analyst companies still get quoted as if any piece of the shit they had to say had any relevance in the real fucking world.
"Apple's ipod will feel heat from Dell, MS etc in the future", "Pixar will anger Hollywood". Jesus, what do these stupids fucks have against Apple anyway? They were prophecising Apple's death back in 1997, and they are so fucking greedy for Bill G's $$$ and so fucking lazy to do some actual marketing research that they're still doing it today.
Stupid fucks were also as responsible as anyone for the crash of the dotcom fuckout, still praising dead dotbombs after the companies had already gone tits up.
I really have it in for those fucks today: Was it a part of their company rationalisation and down sizing to cut out the actual research in their companies or have they never fucking bothered anyway.
FUCK THEM!
I found the paper interesting if complex, but one thing that struck me is that there is a general trend in indo-european languages (at least) for the languages to simplify drastically over time.
Sanskrit itself might have been an extremely regular language and one that had rules that could have been applied to a computer language, but almost all descendant languages have simplified enormously:
Sanskrit had 8 gramatical cases, and modern Hindi, Urdu and Gudjarati, have fewer.
Sanksrit had 3 grammatical genders, and Hindi et al have fewer.
Given that this grammatical simplification applies almost uniformly to indo-european languages, one wonders how the original Sanskrit and indo-european were originally developed in the first place.
When I saw the image of the fingers holding the transparent film, I thought about the holographic RAM devices in the MR movie, which looked like lenses of glass. It is sometimes interesting how technology actually does catch up to some science fiction dream.
My hunch says this is Apple because it would full the niche in their digital media creation software where they are as yet not present and where Apple is sorely lacking: 3D. While there are really nice alternative packages for OSX, such as Cinema 4D, I can see Apple wanting to have some control on where the market in 3D on OSX goes.
From that standpoint, much as Apple's purchase of Logic made sense in that Apple could have a presence in pro Audio, this being Apple would really make sense.
BUt there is something else that I can see Apple really wanting: Alias Sketch. That TabletPC painting software. It has a unique interesting interface, and I am sure Jobs would love to have something like this so as to fill that gap as well.
Don't sell yourselves out for a fistfull of corrupt politicians. Howard is fucking you all over with this one, selling first your independance and then your jobs to the Americans.
This one is a dupe, yet again. Christ, man, use the fucking search feature or hand over the moderator status to someone who will. And yes, you are definitely the worst one when it comes to duplicating stories.