Well, I had enough of CDE a year ago. Had it blow up once too much and refuse to allow me to log in because of something it didnt like in my.profile, and had enough of the annoying 'no middle button paste if scrolled out window', 'you moved mouse while marking something so now im gonna paste this shit into your root dtterm on this production machine for fun', etc. CDE is simply very very annoying. Moved to (and, heeh, ported for some things) GNOME/WindowMaker/Xterm and my relationship with my HPUX machine was vastly improved.
Well, patents should by definition contain innovation, and even this guy probably figured that mentioning Microsoft and innovation together might tip the USPTO off to the scam.
Well, there should be. Actually, there should be a bounty on fraudulent patents. Find and cite prior art, get a patent overturned and collect $50k-$1M, reward (payable by the patent holder) depending on the value of the patent.
Is likely because there are so many unwanted preload (or bundled) copies of Windows floating around that if people started selling them instead of just shelving them, Microsoft would find they could only sell a third of what they do today...
Just imagine when Microsoft goes to sell their annual copies to Dell and Dell says 'Well, we got this really good deal for 200000 copies of w2k from www.LetsSellIt.com'.
No, in fact, music or literature or other works of art _arent_ _yours_. Copyright and intellectual property are late inventions in law, and they are _only_ there because it was thought to benefit the consumer if the reward for creating such works ensured that more were created.
Intellectual property is very very different from physical property. You cannot have the physical property you covet without depriving someone else of it; you _can_ have the intellectual property you covet without depriving someone else of it. Theft includes someone losing the property, copying doesnt (except for the copyright holder, but the copyright holder does not lose anything he originally 'owned' except through a legal construct; Lars can still play his songs, no matter how many copies there are, so he definitely has not been deprived of his property).
So, does the original reason for introducing intellectual property still hold? Does the consumer benefit through valuable art being created that would _not_ have been created otherwise? Would Lars write music if there was no copyright? Does he have something he wants to say to the world, or does he just want money? I dont know... but if I turn on the TV I dont see many worthwhile things.
I have no pity for those who are so eager to reap pretend profits off buying and selling the kind toiletpaper dealt with on NASDAQ.
If the 'hightech economy' cannot handle a single overvalued company being punished for criminal activities, maybe the 'hightech economy' _should_ go down the drain. It isnt exactly a surprise, and anyone who isnt either totally blinded by some rosy pretend reality IPO rush or totally mindbogglingly stupid saw the writing on the wall on this one years ago.
To #3 and #4; this information is downloadable from the I n t e r n e t. That includes countries like china and albania. Click wrap licenses mean nothing there. That means that Microsoft lets people who in no way are bound by the NDA download it without any difficulty. That means there is no basis for trade secret protection.
Has Microsoft done anything bad? (compared to mass marketing deficient and deadly medicine in third world countries) Yes / No
Should Microsoft be broken up? (or should the courts deal with more important things like taking on airlines who skimp on servicing their planes?) Yes / No
Oooo, survey shows Microsoft hasnt done anything bad and they shouldnt be broken up!
Actually, what I think would do a _lot_ more good would be to revoke the boards and CEO's status of being not responsible. The actions of Microsoft as a company are based upon the decisions of those who control the company. Those persons have, for a long time, been very aware that they have been violating the laws, but since they are unlikely to get personally punished for doing so, they do not refrain from doing it.
Actions have consequences. Engaging in criminal activity should have consequences, even when done as a CEO for a large company.
The ethics are simple. An engineer is responsible towards his employer and his employers customers.
An engineers boss, and the bosses boss, etc, are irrelevant. They can say whatever they want and blabber on about 'corporate standards', but in the end, as long as you can justify the products you use with the fact that the 'official' crap Just Does NOT _WORK_, then you are being 'ethical'.
Last time our rogue installation of Samba came up on the discussion the 'bosses' tried to justify using the 'official' product by saying the 'official' support for the 'official' product, well, they were y'know, nice and so and they were really trying. Well, fine, sure they're trying, but for two and a half years their product has been unusable.
If a product works as advertized I have no problems with my company using it, but if the 'official' products do not work, and there are free replacements that _DO_ work, I dont care what the policymakers say. And Im prepared to defend that position as high in the corporate hierarchy as I have to.
Well, the analogy isnt too far off really, but it would be closer if a gun company sold a gun they knew would just go off for no real reason at times. In that case it would be negligent too.
The thing is; the capability to execute content on viewing is not difficult. Yet, a lot of mailers do not include this ability, for the precise reason that it is not a good idea.
If you _know_ a feature will cause damage, then it may be negligent to include it without a number of warnings that the action is dangerous and with such easy access. It's like handing out a bunch of grenades to kindergarten kids and say 'hey, they pulled the safety out, not us...'
Im sorry, but since you qualified that with 'opening attachments from people you dont know'...
These virii _WILL_ come from people you _DO_ know. They will come from your friends, from your significant other, from you mom, from your IT helpdesk and from your boss.
The correct phrase is: Smart enough not to EVER EVER open attachments of any kind that can contain ANY sort of executable code, including vbscript, excel, word, etc etc etc.
So, tell me, what exactly do we lose by not allowing any mail clients that have the ability to execute foreign code or launching programs to deal with any type of executable code?
Ok, so, some people who shouldnt be using computers at all wont be able to view attachments because they cant figure out how to use _save attachment_ and how to launch the corresponding program. Who cares?
Apparently their stupidity is so damaging to the rest of the world that the loss caused by catering to the ignorant costs far more than their ability to view pr0n and word documents gives.
These kinds of viruses will continue to proliferate and cause massive disruptions and cost huge amounts of money until several large corporations get together and sue Microsoft (or other mail program manufacturers) for negligence and demand the companys selling the faulty programs pay for the costs.
The dangers of allowing running of attached programs automatically or even easily is guaranteed to cause just this problem. It will happen. It will be repeated. On a yearly basis now, perhaps, but more likely on a monthly or weekly basis in the future. The _only_ way to stop it from happening is to stop the mail program creators from _having_ these 'features'.
Re:All of slashdot insulted by Roblimo AGAIN?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
You know, there are many strategies to go through life without being annoyed by people.
You could, of course, chose not to identify with the targets of snippy comments.
Another way, if you fail on the first, is to only care when you actually respect the person giving the disparaging comment. The problem with that is it leaves you open to insults by people you respect. So, to solve that, temporarily lower the respect rating on the person giving the comment. Since the person is now someone you (currently) do not respect, you can blatantly ignore the comment.
It works very well, and you wont be as easily upset.
If RMS is scary for your customers, how do they feel about those who want to sell them programs that they can install any backdoors they want into, that they can legally terminate access to at any time, and will terminate support for within a few years?
RMS may be the cookie monster of buisness, but corporate software makers are the Aliens. The GPL and the GNU project stands for and protects the freedom of freely distributed and created code, while most ordinary software licenses are written to protect the revenue stream of the company selling the product, to any extent possible, wether or not it is disruptive to the clients actual buisness.
With the result that they are considered liars who are physically unable to ever utter a true word? They do have quite a credibility problem, and I'm not quite sure how the strategy of undermining their already worthless word helps them.
Uhhh. No. My girlfriend installed redhat 6.2 on her computer in less than 30 minutes. Everything autodetected, all drivers installed. No mucking around with mountpoints or anything.
Then I, as a veteran with 15 years of working with computers of almost every kind, including every flavor of windows tried getting Windows working on it. That took about 6 hours, of which 5 were spent getting the network card working, because Windows refused to recognize it when you installed it in any of the ordinary ways, with updated drivers or not. (Oh, yeah, eventually I got it working by mucking around with PCI IRQ's and installing the driver for the network card as an unknown pci device rather than in the network, new hardware or system hardware places).
Just face it, Windows being easy to install is just a myth. The fact is, most 'newbies' would have better luck with Linux.
Go with the Voodoo. I've been down the binary only driver path once, and between total bugfests, X crashes, lockups, lacking features and incompatibility, no way am I doing that again.
NVidia will continue to have crappy performance and unstable drivers in X until they shape up and get with the program. Wether or not they theoretically perform well under some windows benchmark doesnt interest me in the least.
Well, as a former metallica fan, I think Im gonna make nice glittering art by running the CD's I own by them (almost all albums up 'til 91) into nice powder by running them repeatedly through an electric sandpapermachine.
Several ethernet drivers were snarfed from Linux, lilo code(?), maybe some more, if I remember correctly. I think Be fixed the problem there too (pay for, or release out of sympathy?).
Of course, lets just hope someone has time to actually wait for the server to respond...
Terraserver seems to either be down more than its up or else its just that I never seem to have the free time to click reload until I get an actual response out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I had enough of CDE a year ago. Had it blow up once too much and refuse to allow me to log in because of something it didnt like in my .profile, and had enough of the annoying 'no middle button paste if scrolled out window', 'you moved mouse while marking something so now im gonna paste this shit into your root dtterm on this production machine for fun', etc. CDE is simply very very annoying. Moved to (and, heeh, ported for some things) GNOME/WindowMaker/Xterm and my relationship with my HPUX machine was vastly improved.
Well, patents should by definition contain innovation, and even this guy probably figured that mentioning Microsoft and innovation together might tip the USPTO off to the scam.
Well, there should be. Actually, there should be a bounty on fraudulent patents. Find and cite prior art, get a patent overturned and collect $50k-$1M, reward (payable by the patent holder) depending on the value of the patent.
Is likely because there are so many unwanted preload (or bundled) copies of Windows floating around that if people started selling them instead of just shelving them, Microsoft would find they could only sell a third of what they do today...
Just imagine when Microsoft goes to sell their annual copies to Dell and Dell says 'Well, we got this really good deal for 200000 copies of w2k from www.LetsSellIt.com'.
Nope, that is only for Trademarks. Patents and copyrights are valid wether you enforce them or not.
No, in fact, music or literature or other works of art _arent_ _yours_. Copyright and intellectual property are late inventions in law, and they are _only_ there because it was thought to benefit the consumer if the reward for creating such works ensured that more were created.
Intellectual property is very very different from physical property. You cannot have the physical property you covet without depriving someone else of it; you _can_ have the intellectual property you covet without depriving someone else of it. Theft includes someone losing the property, copying doesnt (except for the copyright holder, but the copyright holder does not lose anything he originally 'owned' except through a legal construct; Lars can still play his songs, no matter how many copies there are, so he definitely has not been deprived of his property).
So, does the original reason for introducing intellectual property still hold? Does the consumer benefit through valuable art being created that would _not_ have been created otherwise? Would Lars write music if there was no copyright? Does he have something he wants to say to the world, or does he just want money? I dont know... but if I turn on the TV I dont see many worthwhile things.
Ok, lets see a show of hands...
Who owns Albanian pyramid scheme shares...?
I have no pity for those who are so eager to reap pretend profits off buying and selling the kind toiletpaper dealt with on NASDAQ.
If the 'hightech economy' cannot handle a single overvalued company being punished for criminal activities, maybe the 'hightech economy' _should_ go down the drain. It isnt exactly a surprise, and anyone who isnt either totally blinded by some rosy pretend reality IPO rush or totally mindbogglingly stupid saw the writing on the wall on this one years ago.
To #3 and #4; this information is downloadable from the I n t e r n e t. That includes countries like china and albania. Click wrap licenses mean nothing there. That means that Microsoft lets people who in no way are bound by the NDA download it without any difficulty. That means there is no basis for trade secret protection.
They'll just do another one of their surveys.
Has Microsoft done anything bad?
(compared to mass marketing deficient and deadly medicine in third world countries)
Yes / No
Should Microsoft be broken up?
(or should the courts deal with more important things like taking on airlines who skimp on servicing their planes?)
Yes / No
Oooo, survey shows Microsoft hasnt done anything bad and they shouldnt be broken up!
Actually, what I think would do a _lot_ more good would be to revoke the boards and CEO's status of being not responsible. The actions of Microsoft as a company are based upon the decisions of those who control the company. Those persons have, for a long time, been very aware that they have been violating the laws, but since they are unlikely to get personally punished for doing so, they do not refrain from doing it.
Actions have consequences. Engaging in criminal activity should have consequences, even when done as a CEO for a large company.
Heehee, which would be rather fun. Here you go Mr. Bill, your 25 cents liquidated worth per $80 stock.
The ethics are simple. An engineer is responsible towards his employer and his employers customers.
An engineers boss, and the bosses boss, etc, are irrelevant. They can say whatever they want and blabber on about 'corporate standards', but in the end, as long as you can justify the products you use with the fact that the 'official' crap Just Does NOT _WORK_, then you are being 'ethical'.
Last time our rogue installation of Samba came up on the discussion the 'bosses' tried to justify using the 'official' product by saying the 'official' support for the 'official' product, well, they were y'know, nice and so and they were really trying. Well, fine, sure they're trying, but for two and a half years their product has been unusable.
If a product works as advertized I have no problems with my company using it, but if the 'official' products do not work, and there are free replacements that _DO_ work, I dont care what the policymakers say. And Im prepared to defend that position as high in the corporate hierarchy as I have to.
Well, the analogy isnt too far off really, but it would be closer if a gun company sold a gun they knew would just go off for no real reason at times. In that case it would be negligent too.
The thing is; the capability to execute content on viewing is not difficult. Yet, a lot of mailers do not include this ability, for the precise reason that it is not a good idea.
If you _know_ a feature will cause damage, then it may be negligent to include it without a number of warnings that the action is dangerous and with such easy access. It's like handing out a bunch of grenades to kindergarten kids and say 'hey, they pulled the safety out, not us...'
Im sorry, but since you qualified that with 'opening attachments from people you dont know'...
These virii _WILL_ come from people you _DO_ know. They will come from your friends, from your significant other, from you mom, from your IT helpdesk and from your boss.
The correct phrase is: Smart enough not to EVER EVER open attachments of any kind that can contain ANY sort of executable code, including vbscript, excel, word, etc etc etc.
So, tell me, what exactly do we lose by not allowing any mail clients that have the ability to execute foreign code or launching programs to deal with any type of executable code?
Ok, so, some people who shouldnt be using computers at all wont be able to view attachments because they cant figure out how to use _save attachment_ and how to launch the corresponding program. Who cares?
Apparently their stupidity is so damaging to the rest of the world that the loss caused by catering to the ignorant costs far more than their ability to view pr0n and word documents gives.
These kinds of viruses will continue to proliferate and cause massive disruptions and cost huge amounts of money until several large corporations get together and sue Microsoft (or other mail program manufacturers) for negligence and demand the companys selling the faulty programs pay for the costs.
The dangers of allowing running of attached programs automatically or even easily is guaranteed to cause just this problem. It will happen. It will be repeated. On a yearly basis now, perhaps, but more likely on a monthly or weekly basis in the future. The _only_ way to stop it from happening is to stop the mail program creators from _having_ these 'features'.
You know, there are many strategies to go through life without being annoyed by people.
You could, of course, chose not to identify with the targets of snippy comments.
Another way, if you fail on the first, is to only care when you actually respect the person giving the disparaging comment. The problem with that is it leaves you open to insults by people you respect. So, to solve that, temporarily lower the respect rating on the person giving the comment. Since the person is now someone you (currently) do not respect, you can blatantly ignore the comment.
It works very well, and you wont be as easily upset.
If RMS is scary for your customers, how do they feel about those who want to sell them programs that they can install any backdoors they want into, that they can legally terminate access to at any time, and will terminate support for within a few years?
RMS may be the cookie monster of buisness, but corporate software makers are the Aliens. The GPL and the GNU project stands for and protects the freedom of freely distributed and created code, while most ordinary software licenses are written to protect the revenue stream of the company selling the product, to any extent possible, wether or not it is disruptive to the clients actual buisness.
With the result that they are considered liars who are physically unable to ever utter a true word? They do have quite a credibility problem, and I'm not quite sure how the strategy of undermining their already worthless word helps them.
Uhhh. No. My girlfriend installed redhat 6.2 on her computer in less than 30 minutes. Everything autodetected, all drivers installed. No mucking around with mountpoints or anything.
Then I, as a veteran with 15 years of working with computers of almost every kind, including every flavor of windows tried getting Windows working on it. That took about 6 hours, of which 5 were spent getting the network card working, because Windows refused to recognize it when you installed it in any of the ordinary ways, with updated drivers or not. (Oh, yeah, eventually I got it working by mucking around with PCI IRQ's and installing the driver for the network card as an unknown pci device rather than in the network, new hardware or system hardware places).
Just face it, Windows being easy to install is just a myth. The fact is, most 'newbies' would have better luck with Linux.
Go with the Voodoo. I've been down the binary only driver path once, and between total bugfests, X crashes, lockups, lacking features and incompatibility, no way am I doing that again.
NVidia will continue to have crappy performance and unstable drivers in X until they shape up and get with the program. Wether or not they theoretically perform well under some windows benchmark doesnt interest me in the least.
I saw translucent PC's in 91, at CeBit. They likely existed before that too.
Well, as a former metallica fan, I think Im gonna make nice glittering art by running the CD's I own by them (almost all albums up 'til 91) into nice powder by running them repeatedly through an electric sandpapermachine.
Several ethernet drivers were snarfed from Linux, lilo code(?), maybe some more, if I remember correctly. I think Be fixed the problem there too (pay for, or release out of sympathy?).
Of course, lets just hope someone has time to actually wait for the server to respond...
Terraserver seems to either be down more than its up or else its just that I never seem to have the free time to click reload until I get an actual response out of it.