Before I discuss the.Net initiative itself, I didtinctly remember a Ballmer quote (here on/. as well, I think?) stating that MS will use its patents to increase marketshare. At the moment MS will leave.Net alone, for sure, as it is vastly more immature than MS' implementation, but woe betide the day when even one, just one, large Mono application (application server, distributed CRM or ERP app?) gains popularity amongst the many governments and businesses now moving to Linux. That is the day when MS will send its lawyers around for a chat on patent laws.
On the technical side.Net sounds like the fantasy that many VB coders, MS shops and PHB's have had for years: The ability to code an application in a mess of languages (in all probability it will be C++,VB and C#) and actually produce something that is both useful and full of buzzword compliance.
But, it would be good to note that nothing that.Net or Mono does is truly new. They are refinements of current coding practices. You can do exactly the same thing in Java, C++ and Python, just in a longer timeframe. This might be good in terms of productivity but I can almost certainly see this producing yet another generation of VB type coders with little discipline and chaotic understanding of OOP.
My guess is that this is simply what MS is betting the farm on in order to move away from Win32 and at the same time corral developers and customers into staying with Windows. I read the EULA for VS.Net2003 and it seems you can neither publish benchmarks nor develop Office applications with it.
Are you sure you want to go down that road? Hasn't SCO been an eye opener enough?
Look for the prices on iTMS to rise to $1.01 in order to recupe legal expenses. Also, don't bother searching for Beatles music on iTMS in future and for Appple to give a "DRAB" codename for some obscure Cocoa framework, and for word to go around that it actually means, "Dead Rockers Are Bastards".
I read all these posts by angry American men whose sense of patriotism is dented because someone believes that perhaps D Rumsfeld and Co, perhaps were not so interested in WMD as they claimed they were and perhaps not so keen on Iraqis actually ruling themselves.
What a shame.
Wrapping a flag around one's face in blind patriotism and then running into a lamp post is not conducive to clarity of vision.
I haven't bought a CD in over three years. Simple. The reasons are the following: I am gettting older and the vast majority of one hit wonder singers who couldn't write their own music if their lives depended on it simply do not impress me. The fact that most modern "stars" are more important for their looks and their public misbehaviour (Shakira, Spears, Williams) than for their musical ability. The fact that if you're a western minority, blacks, latinos in the US then the role model should be either women who act like sluts or men who abuse women and revel in a life of crime. The fact that sexuality of teens is blatantly exploited for financial purposes.
I'm just sick of it. We already have a porn industry and I don't see why teens should be abused for this. I have nothing against teen sexuality, but I oppose kids getting exploited simply for the fucking money cause they don't know better. I oppose the fact that poverty is exploited to make a life a crime an admirable thing to do. What the hell happened to bands like Livings Colors that could actually make music? Even Public Enemy's radical message got abused by the pimps in the recording industry. I feel anger when I see Robbie Williams blowing $1million in one night in a casino.
And I feel double and treble the anger when the same blood sucking industry starts a campaign to rape their audience of their every last cent so that they can continue to their disgusting lives.
It is a monumental pity that teenagers, the main target group of the recording industry, are mostly incapable of realising what is being done with them.
I would guess that most animals have this response and that most are "wise" enough to then flee. Humans, vastly disconected with their animal past, go to see a shrink or take medication.
Christ on a crutch! Will someone just fucking firebomb their offices and finally get it over with!
Whew, that did me good. The images of McBride, Sonntag and Company running around screaming while they are consumed by fire is somehow satisfying.
Note that I don't advocate the use of fire or bombs in dealing with SCO. Sending Darl and Chris off to Iraq to act as cannon fodder and target drones is a pleasant alternative.
I just wondered while reading this article, for no particular reason, what it would take to make Jupiter (or any massive gas giant circling a star) gain enough mass to ignite into a star? The collision of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with Jupiter? The sum of all the rest mass of all the solar system? I was wondering this as I'm tired as hell and not thinking clearly and came across the thought that that could be how binary and ternary stellar systems are created: With a gas giant gaining enough mass (Jupiter acts as a giant comet screen for the inner planets in any case) to eventually ignite.
What I miss with all these OpenGL 3D games is the incredibly beautiful renderings of the Riven game. I wish it were somehow possible to have interactive raltime renderings of that quality.
You obviously have a lot of faith in IT data security and it's possiblities, but judging from the rest of the article, these servers were probably backed up onto floppy disks, which were then left lying on top of the cabinets.
This would be a good reason to write to Apple and ask them if they have solution or know of one. There might also be some shareware that could help you. Ask on http://forums.macnn.com or http://versiontracker.com
At first I had a bit of a wonder as to what all this assembly code was until I realised that it wasn't actual exploits, but ways to implement an exploit once you got past the vulnerability.
The mere fact that someone has started posting this stuff on the net should be reason for all us OSX fans to rejoice: OSX is now popular enough that script kiddies and security types are starting to take notice of it.
In the linked article on the wired site to the ex-neonazi pushing penis pills, it claimed that 6000 people casually gave their credit card details over a non secure link to a site with no contact address or telephone number. Given this level of stupidity, I can actually see the value of spamming.
Off to start my own business: Auto-Wank, the sucker for suckers!:O
The probability of this one hitting the earth is near to zero, according to the JPL NEO site, but eventually one will turn up with a much higher probability, given that there are many objects that have not yet been discovered and that comets can change their trajectories very rapidly due to outgassing near to the sun.
I think that most space agencies know this, which is why there is a fair amount of observation and research into discovering, predicting and hindering such objects. For instance, it has been discovered that only the high density non porous asteroids can be reliably moved with nuclear explosions. Porous low density asteroids and comets will need completely different technologies in order to change their trajectories, such as solar powered lasers to melt parts of them and ion engines to manouver the probes.
If IBM were to work with Apple and include Objective-C (as a C superset) and Apple were to market this as an alternative compiler on the Mac platform, would that be a good or a bad thing?
A. The companies that include them in their products.
Explanation: Private people who know where to find cracks for products will do so regardless of whether there is PA or not. WinXP, OfficeXP, etc, and pretty soon NAV as well have or will be cracked. Businesses in poorer countries especially, will revolt against PA, not only because at least some of the products they were using were cracks, but because they often installed one product on all the computers in the company in order to save money. With PA and the threat of BSA audits hanging over their heads, they will be enticed to switch to either other non PA software or OSS.
There was an article on slashdot yesterday about MS inroads into schooling and higher education in the US. While it might tend to produce a higher number of people working on MS technologies and get more people and businesses into the old MS rut of paying exhorbitant prices for the annual round of MS software upgrades at the expense of OSS solutions, it is also a very US phenomenon.
The governments and industries of many other countries (with some notorious exeptions in countries where the government is very dependant on the US) have, in all probability, seen the writing on the wall in terms of software development for a while now: Buying Microsoft products "dumbs down" the local software developer base in that the local software developers would then be using high level tools to develop products that run on MS OSes, but would have less freedom and knowledge to make changes on lower level OS internals. Not only this, but a large amount of local hard currency would be leaving those countries borders forever in the direction of the US.
It is in most countries own interest to stimulate local software development, be it closed or open source. Open source is simply easier and the only real alternative to MS as an OS. The Amiga might have had a good go, years ago, but the only real alternative to MS nowadys where there is sufficient local talent to make realistically useful software is in OSS.
And I am willing to bet that no amount of MS bullying or bribing will change those minds in the long run.
On the one hand, since higher education is so desperately dependant on business handouts as funding is being cut, it is good that MS is at least helping out, and since MS products are used in so many areas in modern businesses, if we like it or not, at least the students have a chance to learn what they will be working with later.
On the other hand it is pretty obvious that MS is not doing this soley out of good will. They want research being fed back to MS and PR opportunities.
So while it seems benign, it can also turn out to be a huge pain later on. Things like BSA audits, MS threatening to turn off the tap on hearing some bad PR, and the market being fully controlled by MS in yet another attempt to coopt the market.
I truly wonder what Microsoft would do if it controlled 100% of all computers and digital devices? Would Bill wet himself and start frothing at the mouth claiming that he ownz the world and that everybody should call him "your majesty"? Would he suddenly jack up prices enormously simply because he felt so, or would he try to carry on further until everything and everyone was owned by him, from the vegetables on your plate to the car your drive?
As an ex Windows admin, the thiing that I found most difficult about Windows was not a lack of security by design. Downloading the patches and keeping the AV up to date will suffice normally. No, the problem of windows, to me, lies in that it is a fucking mess.
This may sound ludicrous in view of the jungle that one faces when one moves through a *nix directory tree on the command line (e.g. why is there/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin etc, confusing for a newbie), but the fact that Windows has literally tens of dozens of directories that belong to the system, that are both undocumented and not self explanatory, as well as the registery, which is an inconsisten fucking mess if there ever was one are things that make windows a pain.
On top of this there are so many design decisions that are superficially a good idea, but make things hell when one goes beneath the hood. An example is the desktop. From a visual point of view it might make sense to only store data in my documents and below that, which is also encouraged by the open/save dialogue, but the My Documents sits in a deep sub folder in the real directory tree. The actual dialogue boxes of so many system controls are anything but friendly. While the wizards make things simple in a linear way, they are a stop gap measure screwed on top of a system that is anything but consistent and visually well though out otherwise.
To me it seems that MS designs it's system in that the core OS team has first go at making the bitch work, and after they are done, the mess is passed on to the UI team which then has the pleasure of slapping crap like wizards and My Documents and tons of irritating marketing reminders (passport, messanger bla bla bla, hide those icons so you can't find them again) on top of the system so that MS can call it "User friendly".
The fact that there have been a number of article with links to German sites lately has a lot to do with SCO. Heise.de, the German computer publisher of c't and iX, has been following the case closely. Heise is highly regarded and their magazines are world class, as they are very detailed, provide truly unbiased critical reporting (If MS provides an interesting new technology, they report on it, and if MS fucks up they report on that too) and provide details of technologies, programming languages and products that one could only dream of in other tech publications.
Very often, as in the recent SCO articles, they ask questions that no other rag will ask out of fear of losing advertising revenue (I'm thinking CNet here). I translated one of the articles here on slashdot as very often will happen. I've seen people translating spanish articles, and very occaisionally, Japanese one's as well. It helps us understand that there is indeed a world outside of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Before I discuss the .Net initiative itself, I didtinctly remember a Ballmer quote (here on /. as well, I think?) stating that MS will use its patents to increase marketshare. At the moment MS will leave .Net alone, for sure, as it is vastly more immature than MS' implementation, but woe betide the day when even one, just one, large Mono application (application server, distributed CRM or ERP app?) gains popularity amongst the many governments and businesses now moving to Linux. That is the day when MS will send its lawyers around for a chat on patent laws.
.Net sounds like the fantasy that many VB coders, MS shops and PHB's have had for years: The ability to code an application in a mess of languages (in all probability it will be C++,VB and C#) and actually produce something that is both useful and full of buzzword compliance.
.Net or Mono does is truly new. They are refinements of current coding practices. You can do exactly the same thing in Java, C++ and Python, just in a longer timeframe. This might be good in terms of productivity but I can almost certainly see this producing yet another generation of VB type coders with little discipline and chaotic understanding of OOP.
On the technical side
But, it would be good to note that nothing that
My guess is that this is simply what MS is betting the farm on in order to move away from Win32 and at the same time corral developers and customers into staying with Windows. I read the EULA for VS.Net2003 and it seems you can neither publish benchmarks nor develop Office applications with it.
Are you sure you want to go down that road? Hasn't SCO been an eye opener enough?
Use Camino.
Now if only they would actually update the thing.
Look for the prices on iTMS to rise to $1.01 in order to recupe legal expenses. Also, don't bother searching for Beatles music on iTMS in future and for Appple to give a "DRAB" codename for some obscure Cocoa framework, and for word to go around that it actually means, "Dead Rockers Are Bastards".
I read all these posts by angry American men whose sense of patriotism is dented because someone believes that perhaps D Rumsfeld and Co, perhaps were not so interested in WMD as they claimed they were and perhaps not so keen on Iraqis actually ruling themselves.
What a shame.
Wrapping a flag around one's face in blind patriotism and then running into a lamp post is not conducive to clarity of vision.
I haven't bought a CD in over three years. Simple. The reasons are the following:
I am gettting older and the vast majority of one hit wonder singers who couldn't write their own music if their lives depended on it simply do not impress me.
The fact that most modern "stars" are more important for their looks and their public misbehaviour (Shakira, Spears, Williams) than for their musical ability.
The fact that if you're a western minority, blacks, latinos in the US then the role model should be either women who act like sluts or men who abuse women and revel in a life of crime.
The fact that sexuality of teens is blatantly exploited for financial purposes.
I'm just sick of it. We already have a porn industry and I don't see why teens should be abused for this. I have nothing against teen sexuality, but I oppose kids getting exploited simply for the fucking money cause they don't know better. I oppose the fact that poverty is exploited to make a life a crime an admirable thing to do. What the hell happened to bands like Livings Colors that could actually make music? Even Public Enemy's radical message got abused by the pimps in the recording industry. I feel anger when I see Robbie Williams blowing $1million in one night in a casino.
And I feel double and treble the anger when the same blood sucking industry starts a campaign to rape their audience of their every last cent so that they can continue to their disgusting lives.
It is a monumental pity that teenagers, the main target group of the recording industry, are mostly incapable of realising what is being done with them.
A voice of reason in the wilderness.
I would guess that most animals have this response and that most are "wise" enough to then flee. Humans, vastly disconected with their animal past, go to see a shrink or take medication.
Christ on a crutch! Will someone just fucking firebomb their offices and finally get it over with!
Whew, that did me good. The images of McBride, Sonntag and Company running around screaming while they are consumed by fire is somehow satisfying.
Note that I don't advocate the use of fire or bombs in dealing with SCO. Sending Darl and Chris off to Iraq to act as cannon fodder and target drones is a pleasant alternative.
I just wondered while reading this article, for no particular reason, what it would take to make Jupiter (or any massive gas giant circling a star) gain enough mass to ignite into a star? The collision of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with Jupiter? The sum of all the rest mass of all the solar system? I was wondering this as I'm tired as hell and not thinking clearly and came across the thought that that could be how binary and ternary stellar systems are created: With a gas giant gaining enough mass (Jupiter acts as a giant comet screen for the inner planets in any case) to eventually ignite.
What I miss with all these OpenGL 3D games is the incredibly beautiful renderings of the Riven game. I wish it were somehow possible to have interactive raltime renderings of that quality.
One can dream, can't one.
His stint at SCO has left him decidedly green, compared to his other positions. Wonder if he'd just been speaking to Darl?
You obviously have a lot of faith in IT data security and it's possiblities, but judging from the rest of the article, these servers were probably backed up onto floppy disks, which were then left lying on top of the cabinets.
Can you then imagine what those same people are gonna say when they learn what Mac OSX is like?
This would be a good reason to write to Apple and ask them if they have solution or know of one. There might also be some shareware that could help you. Ask on http://forums.macnn.com or http://versiontracker.com
At first I had a bit of a wonder as to what all this assembly code was until I realised that it wasn't actual exploits, but ways to implement an exploit once you got past the vulnerability.
The mere fact that someone has started posting this stuff on the net should be reason for all us OSX fans to rejoice: OSX is now popular enough that script kiddies and security types are starting to take notice of it.
Truly a two edged sword.
Yes, me.
You want food in pills?
:)
Solution:
1. A sharp warm knife
2. A bar of chocolate
3. Start cutting
On the other hand you could just buy a bag of M&M's.
In the linked article on the wired site to the ex-neonazi pushing penis pills, it claimed that 6000 people casually gave their credit card details over a non secure link to a site with no contact address or telephone number. Given this level of stupidity, I can actually see the value of spamming.
:O
Off to start my own business: Auto-Wank, the sucker for suckers!
The probability of this one hitting the earth is near to zero, according to the JPL NEO site, but eventually one will turn up with a much higher probability, given that there are many objects that have not yet been discovered and that comets can change their trajectories very rapidly due to outgassing near to the sun.
I think that most space agencies know this, which is why there is a fair amount of observation and research into discovering, predicting and hindering such objects. For instance, it has been discovered that only the high density non porous asteroids can be reliably moved with nuclear explosions. Porous low density asteroids and comets will need completely different technologies in order to change their trajectories, such as solar powered lasers to melt parts of them and ion engines to manouver the probes.
If it had been political, such as the case of the 20 year old with a link to a bomb making site, they would have gone at it like a pack of wolves.
In any case it does at least serve to give you a sense of your true worth to the government.
(Disclaimer: speculation)
If IBM were to work with Apple and include Objective-C (as a C superset) and Apple were to market this as an alternative compiler on the Mac platform, would that be a good or a bad thing?
Q. Who really loses out with product activation?
A. The companies that include them in their products.
Explanation: Private people who know where to find cracks for products will do so regardless of whether there is PA or not. WinXP, OfficeXP, etc, and pretty soon NAV as well have or will be cracked. Businesses in poorer countries especially, will revolt against PA, not only because at least some of the products they were using were cracks, but because they often installed one product on all the computers in the company in order to save money. With PA and the threat of BSA audits hanging over their heads, they will be enticed to switch to either other non PA software or OSS.
Simple isn't it?
There was an article on slashdot yesterday about MS inroads into schooling and higher education in the US. While it might tend to produce a higher number of people working on MS technologies and get more people and businesses into the old MS rut of paying exhorbitant prices for the annual round of MS software upgrades at the expense of OSS solutions, it is also a very US phenomenon.
The governments and industries of many other countries (with some notorious exeptions in countries where the government is very dependant on the US) have, in all probability, seen the writing on the wall in terms of software development for a while now: Buying Microsoft products "dumbs down" the local software developer base in that the local software developers would then be using high level tools to develop products that run on MS OSes, but would have less freedom and knowledge to make changes on lower level OS internals. Not only this, but a large amount of local hard currency would be leaving those countries borders forever in the direction of the US.
It is in most countries own interest to stimulate local software development, be it closed or open source. Open source is simply easier and the only real alternative to MS as an OS. The Amiga might have had a good go, years ago, but the only real alternative to MS nowadys where there is sufficient local talent to make realistically useful software is in OSS.
And I am willing to bet that no amount of MS bullying or bribing will change those minds in the long run.
On the one hand, since higher education is so desperately dependant on business handouts as funding is being cut, it is good that MS is at least helping out, and since MS products are used in so many areas in modern businesses, if we like it or not, at least the students have a chance to learn what they will be working with later.
On the other hand it is pretty obvious that MS is not doing this soley out of good will. They want research being fed back to MS and PR opportunities.
So while it seems benign, it can also turn out to be a huge pain later on. Things like BSA audits, MS threatening to turn off the tap on hearing some bad PR, and the market being fully controlled by MS in yet another attempt to coopt the market.
I truly wonder what Microsoft would do if it controlled 100% of all computers and digital devices? Would Bill wet himself and start frothing at the mouth claiming that he ownz the world and that everybody should call him "your majesty"? Would he suddenly jack up prices enormously simply because he felt so, or would he try to carry on further until everything and everyone was owned by him, from the vegetables on your plate to the car your drive?
As an ex Windows admin, the thiing that I found most difficult about Windows was not a lack of security by design. Downloading the patches and keeping the AV up to date will suffice normally. No, the problem of windows, to me, lies in that it is a fucking mess.
/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc, confusing for a newbie), but the fact that Windows has literally tens of dozens of directories that belong to the system, that are both undocumented and not self explanatory, as well as the registery, which is an inconsisten fucking mess if there ever was one are things that make windows a pain.
This may sound ludicrous in view of the jungle that one faces when one moves through a *nix directory tree on the command line (e.g. why is there
On top of this there are so many design decisions that are superficially a good idea, but make things hell when one goes beneath the hood. An example is the desktop. From a visual point of view it might make sense to only store data in my documents and below that, which is also encouraged by the open/save dialogue, but the My Documents sits in a deep sub folder in the real directory tree. The actual dialogue boxes of so many system controls are anything but friendly. While the wizards make things simple in a linear way, they are a stop gap measure screwed on top of a system that is anything but consistent and visually well though out otherwise.
To me it seems that MS designs it's system in that the core OS team has first go at making the bitch work, and after they are done, the mess is passed on to the UI team which then has the pleasure of slapping crap like wizards and My Documents and tons of irritating marketing reminders (passport, messanger bla bla bla, hide those icons so you can't find them again) on top of the system so that MS can call it "User friendly".
Fucking bullshit.
The fact that there have been a number of article with links to German sites lately has a lot to do with SCO. Heise.de, the German computer publisher of c't and iX, has been following the case closely. Heise is highly regarded and their magazines are world class, as they are very detailed, provide truly unbiased critical reporting (If MS provides an interesting new technology, they report on it, and if MS fucks up they report on that too) and provide details of technologies, programming languages and products that one could only dream of in other tech publications.
Very often, as in the recent SCO articles, they ask questions that no other rag will ask out of fear of losing advertising revenue (I'm thinking CNet here). I translated one of the articles here on slashdot as very often will happen. I've seen people translating spanish articles, and very occaisionally, Japanese one's as well. It helps us understand that there is indeed a world outside of the US.