Sure I have, I just don't buy the logic of blaming the tool instead of the tool-user.
I've also had plenty of people ruin movies just because they wouldn't shut the hell up (and a few awful ones rescued by funny hecklers). And many years of driving in Boston taught me that there are more ways to cut people off than you can shake a tire iron at; cell-using drivers can't even make a dent in THAT body count.
I stay out of malls, so I never have the last problem. I just look at the mic users like they are talking to themselves.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
"Breaking the law"? I have a hard time accepting that argument.
The fundamental problem is that instant messaging systems have no way of interoperating so that one system's users can IM with users of other systems. So you are either using someone's system, or you aren't. Compare this to email; you are using SOME resource to which you are authorized. You have paid (or been given by someone who has paid) access to the Internet. The cost of sending an email message is shared between the sender and the receiver. AOL's IM can't do this, so they throw out - and you swallow - the argument that there's nothing to do about it except accept their terms. Thank god their users didn't accept that standard for e-mail or the web.
To fix this situation, there needs to be an open, internet-wide protocol for users to send each other instant messages. EVERYONE would benefit enormously from this. Customers of two-way paging systems, people who hate AOL, AOLusers, EVERYONE.
This protocol would allow the following features:
Global address space
Address designates server to contact via DNS
Server-to-server authentication to protect against spoofing and flooding
Response to "user is online" queries ("must respond" (you can always try sending a message and deal with the error to simulate this)
Selective "user is online" announcements ("should accept": and clients MUST support "is user online" queries
File transfer abilities would change the world (so this won't make it in)
Protocol version and capability queries and announcements (e.g. i don't use color)
ONE STANDARD.
Agreement between AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and some Open Source system
So why doesn't AOL go for this? Because they are going for a naked power grab, and people like you are their patsies. What makes you think you have to bend over for them?
Regardless of what you think, people who don't buy the argument that right makes right, people who hate AOL, people who see the value in a global IM protocl, and people who value openness, freedom, choice, and the Internet itself are going to bitch about this until AOL gets their heads out of their asses.
I have every right to say that AOL are a bunch of evil, corporate, power hungry, internet-wrecking bunch of snivelling shits until they decide to cooperate with the rest of the world..
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Read bugtraq: PHP Nuke has been found with major holes several times due to the way PHP thrusts query string variables straight into the standard namespace. This is convenient and makes learning it easier for people who can't grok how CGI works, but it also makes it easy to "initialize" variables via query strings, which can open holes into databases, filesystem, etc. The featureset may be nice, but this kind of stuff is elementary to avoid, however common it may be in PHP apps. I dumped one PHP app after I found it would barf unless permissions on a file-holding directory were 777!!! Be careful what code you use.
INITIALIZE ALL VARIABLES AND EXAMINE ALL QUERY DATA IN PHP!!! ALWAYS!!! THIS GOES FOR ALL CGI!
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Or else they sieze the basic assets of whomever they suspect of being a big player to put pressure on them; or, to punish the suspect for not rewarding the cops with a bigger bust. "Hey, we didn't get a big fish, so we'll just make this bastard pay. If he knows what's good for him, he'll give up the big fish." What do you think happens when the guy is innocent or has no such information? Bye, bye house, damn the law, screw the constitution. Now, with no house on which to get a second mortgage for a defense attorney, how is he going to prove his innocence and get his house back?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This, like other intelligent comments in this article, has not been modded up.
Doing an x86 oprt is indeed an excellent way to ensure the OS code is kept as hardware independent as possible. It undoes all the lazy things programmers do to get things done on time - they make assumptions and avoid abstractions because it saves time. Once you've ported Darwin to OS X, it can be taken anywhere, which gives Apple real leverage in terms of what chips they intend to use.
That and a few demos of OS X running on PC hardware just to demonstrate its superiority to Other Operating Systems in trade shows and the like. It slices, it dices, it has a BSoD emulator!
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This is true. In NYC, it's long been AT&T that blows chunks, while I occasionally receive calls IN THE SUBWAY with Sprint. Naturally, they break up half the time, and the rest are "I'm in the subway, I'll call you back", but that's what AT&T gets on the street in many neighborhoods.
I hadn't realized there was so much discrepancy nationwide. It's probably much like bus or air routes; lots of tactical decisions about where to spend and where to battle...
Oh, and I'd rather blow a goat than use Verizon if I can help it. The only thing they've been good for in the last 10 years is merging and changing all the logos on phone booths (nynex->bell atlantic->verizon: no wonder my bills are so high). Oh, that and screwing up any DSL circuit if the customer is not theirs, and 50% of the time if it is.
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The article also implies that Microsoft has jiggered an API yet again to screw everyone who isn't them. The implication is that the API for reading raw data off a CD-ROM (errorneously written as as "writing" in the article?) has changed. Even the WSJ knew that it was bull when they were told "existing software may need to be 'optimized' for XP". They knew damn well it meant "rescued from a blatant attempt to break it."
It's not unbelievable, either. What applications need lots of fast, raw, error-corrected access to CD-ROMs? CD rippers, and that's about it. The games market, Real Media, etc, can be coerced into "optimizing" for XP.
And despite the "gee, whiz, this shoar will help lee-nux" posts, the only people who can rejoice over this are 1) Fraunhofer and 2) Real Media. I bet that 50% of the CDs out there are Real-Jukebox-ripped. Although proprietary and enshitted formats are the default, most people seem to figger it out and get mp3s (which goes to show how much computer illiteracy goes out the window when "free stuff" is the reward).
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Give me a break. Even the WSJ put the word "optimized" in quotes because it is pure doublespeak. It means "break existing products solely for the purpose of extending the reach of their own product and who gives a fuck about the consumer, they'll take what we give them, the dumb cows."
Everyone knows this except the people on the wrong side of the digital divide - which, increasingly, is no longer made of people too poor to have access to computers, but increasingly refers to those type of person who will say, after using XP, "Gee, I tried recording MP3 and it sounded really bad!!" In other words, the gullible, the old, and the stupid.
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Welcome to the REAL real world, outside your corporate cocoon with IT death nazis dictating whether you can fart with or without noise while reading your email.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked by people in the REAL real world "Hey, so-and-so sent me a file in IMASTUPIDFUCK format and I can't read it! What can I do?" And the answer is ALWAYS the same; "Use RTF." 99% of word documents that real people actually make use nothing that RTF doesn't do. It's a plain text format, so it will never go obsolete. Virtually everyone can read the format. Image files cause the doc to bloat, but that's it. And you can zip the files to fix that (please don't say "stuffit").
In the REAL real world, saying "What, you don't use Microsoft Word?" is not really an option. The only thing that is surprising is how few people know the simple solution that nearly always works. After 10 years of this shit, you'd think they'd catch on. This is not brain surgery, it's more on the order of "Take the express bus, stupid."
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OK, this might be the only time I bring up a grammar/spelling Nazi point; it's "caliber", not "caliper". Whether or not one agrees with your reasoning on teacher quality, you can't deny the results;-)
I had a high school chemistry teacher who was so bad at the subject that after a decade of teaching it, he could barely do the problems. For that reason, he would use the same problems, using the exact same numbers, over and over again. When it came to the final exam, I got 80% of the answers from memory, without even having to do simple multiplication.
But that didn't stop him from getting it wrong all the time anyway. I used to correct him, not because I was being a smartass, but because I thought it was unfair that kids who were trying really hard were getting screwed that way. On at least on occasion, I had to read the formulas from the textbook back to him to convince anyone. Anyway, it must have made some kind of impression on him, because two years later my younger brother did the same thing; he would stutter and call him by *my* name.
The thing was, I saw cars that he restored and even rode in them. He was a very talented mechanic, just a shitty high school chemistry teacher.
I used to think "that's just the way it is" until I got to college and realized that I was hopelessly behind kids who had real educations at private high schools - in subjects I would have been *very* good at. You just can't make it all up in college, not if you really want to excel. It's like asking a rising tennis star to take 4 years off for college; by the time they get back into it, it's too late to be the best.
BTW, high pay tends to preclude the formation of unions.
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Good point. But people using stock distributions would be the most vulnerable, which would really most likely include large corporate installations. They'd get a distribution from vendors, and the vendor contract would probably specify that alterations would fubar the support contract, and a lot of old-school IT guys don't wipe their ass without checking vendor agreements... Which is probably fine for the NSA, since they'd probably rather spy on those folks anyway. Real Administrators would work on their own chain of trust.
On the flip side, actually doing something useful with this hack would be very difficult. It would be too easy to get caught if someone with the right skills goes poking around binaries and finds something amiss. And it's a fair bet that any NSA-blessed code would get such a close look.
It wouldn't be so easy to hide, either. This is much easier with Microsoft OSes, which have such a large amount of undocumented stuff all over teh place that could be linked together.
Who knows, often things are no more complex than they appear. I bet that the NSA has found that it would be much easier to protect themselves and other government agencies if there were a distribution that THEY could trust without the expense of coding it all themselves. With proprietary software, they are at a slight disadvantage in that cat and mouse game. Maybe the _NSAKEY was a Microsoft trick to backdoor the NSA...
But the lesson from the compiler hack is that you can really only trust it if you've examined it yourself. And a secure linux distrubution would undeniably be of very high utility all on it's own to the NSA.
Now let us have no more curiosity about this bizaare cover-up.
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I've seen this type of argument before on/. It's a weird one - and very, very wrong.
You argue that increased efficiency is BAD for the economy; how will poor Microsoft keep their inflated margins up?! This argument was first memorably made by the Luddites. See, the mechanical looms put weavers out of work, bad for the economy, see? Of course, it's almost too stupid to point out that all that money NOT going into Microsoft goes into the pockets of the owners of businesses that use Microsoft products, and can result in lower prices for *their* customers, and more money all around (that's good for the economy). Just like it was a waste of time explaining to Luddites that while a few people would be out of a job, clothing would become cheap enough for most poor people to afford, even if a few of them lost jobs.
But I guess you're not really into capitalism at all, just Microsoft's bottom line. Your invocation of communism is bizaare once the fallacy of your economic argument is made clear. However, it seems to be common - common enough that I disregarded the possibility that you are trolling. It's like thinking that after eight coin tosses get heads, the ninth is more likely to be tails; it should really be taught in first year econ classes, if it isn't already.
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Netscape did their share - layer tags, blink tags, CSS that doesn't work half the time forcing use of font tags - and actually IE 5 on the Mac is quite standards compliant.
Though, having spent all day dealing with javascript, I'd rather that I could someday, within my lifetime, code to a single standard.
Then all I have to do is fix shitty dreamweaver code.
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No, but selling very dangerous *addictive* products that provide no benefit to the consumer is immoral. The "pleasure" people receive from smoking is an easing of the withdrawal symptoms.
This is how you see it. Many smokers would disagree with you. They would claim that indeed smoking is a pleasurable experience that enriches their lives. What right do you have to force your values on them?
It's not a matter of opinion where the pleasure comes from. It's well understood scientifically. It comes from a deep cellular addiction to nicotene.
Bullshit. It's not a physical dependency like with heroin.
Double bullshit. Nicotine is more addictive than heroin. Aside from numerous studies to that effect, spend a little time around AA meetings, meet ex-junkies, etc. What's the one "habit" they can't kick? Nicotene. Most of them smoke.
Nicotene CAN be consumed in moderate quantities, but the people who can't control their addiction outnumber those who can. The same is true for heroin, although the percentage of people who can consume it in moderation may be higher. I take it you favor legalization?
I agree with you that people need to take more responsibility for their own actions, but you don't help matters by repeating untruths out of a tobacco company PR guide.
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Just as Hollywood today thinks its a God-Given Right to promote sexual promiscuity and open-activity...
Well, I think that's probably more in keeping with what the pron industry does, but in fact sexuality in films was really quite open in early Hollywood - until the decency schoolmarms, fresh out of the job of persecuting consumers of alchohol - turned to a much easier target. Hollywood.
But more to the point - so what? I'm sure there are a lot of very sheltered people and ostrich-like parents screaming about American Pie in the terms you use. My uncle wouldn't let my cousin watch the Breakfast Club because it was "permissive," whatever that means (it's the moralistic equivalent of "inappropriate" - it means, Humpty-Dumpty-in-Wonderland style, whatever the speaker wants it to mean).
But I don't think that American Pie was a success (after the first weekend) because a kid boned a pie; the movie was a relatively fresh and honest portrayal of the confusion, yearning, and emotional turmoil that accompanies peoples' first sexual experiences. Portraying a subject is not the same as glorifying it, as you seem to imply.
Frankly, I think this was the most coherent Katz article I've seen. Those wailing or crowing about "the death of content" would do well to look at the things that are succeeding without judging them or moralizing if they are to understand what forms of entertainment DO work online.
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Wrong. The point is that there is a right way to engineer simplicity, and a wrong way. The right way makes simple things simple, and lets hard things be hard.
OS X is getting closer to this than anything else I've seen. XP takes the same notions, superficially papers them onto Windows ME in a way that only a PHB or software reviewer could love, and totally fucks the end user for ever and ever.
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Very interesting. But frankly, the RIAA monopolizes these rights, and they have no incentive at all to get anything to market as long as A) they keep fantasizing that secure distribution is possible and acceptable to consumers, and B) they know that even if they (the member labels represented through their cartel) aren't making any money, dammit, no one will.
Frankly, Napster is a necessary challenge to their cartel, and I sort of wish that they could find a way to filter out RIAA songs, just so that somone had the chance to create a musical career by completely avoiding the RIAA. Unfortunately, that route is going to be messy, and compulsory licensing is the only way for consumers to buy the majority of their music (any SDMI or secure format amounts to renting) online before 2048.
I do wish Napster had made a better offer that included per-download royalties. Compulsory licensing almost certainly won't be a better deal than one they could have struck on their own (this assumes that the RIAA was negotiating in good faith and a deal could have been struck, which is more than I'm willing to bet on).
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I expect that key developers would leave and restart elsewhere; after a period of chaos, consensus would build behind the biggest grouping of core commiters who agreed to re-form as the new entity.
Now if they managed to crash a plane with most of those commiters, they might get somewhere.
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Silly me, I actually thought that by learning about computers and how to use powerful tools, I was actually working hard and saving time and money by making tools to do my job better, and that people like your friend were lazy, shiftless scam artists (you did say he was in sales) who want to be experts without knowing anything, and who give America a bad name by implying that we only know how to buy stuff and are too lazy to learn how to do stuff.
Your tired arguments about innovation have been refuted too many times for me to stomach. China was too poor to spit long before they were Communist. Your comments about wealth creation are misguided and ignore the creation of aristocracies (something your heroes, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Bill Gates seem to understand quite well, which is why they are against repeal of estate taxes). Since you obviously prefer aristocracies, you are probably a monarchist; I say we throw you out of America before you get King George back in charge.
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boring answers. Very neat, efficient, evasive without being duplicitous, redefines the questions to fit the answers he has, etc. I'm sure this guy is a very effective executive.
But there's really nothing new here at all, except that he got so jizzed up about XP. All available evidence points to XP being another example of Microsoft stealing the innovations of others, badly. XP steals from OS X in this way, only it exemplifies the old saw that if you build something totally idiot proof, only an idiot will be able to use it. OS X at least allows the possibility of expert users. You know already which one of those will never darken my doorstep.
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A) So which is it, a workstation, server, or advanced data center? If you're going to be a good troll, you have to constantly misdirect responses to *new* fallacies, not just keep repeating the oldone.
B) See A). And make sure to hide your head up your ass until after Service Pack 3, then start talking about how Windows Trilennium is gonna fix all the problems with W2K. And, I just use "vi" everywhere, period, without checking to see if it's installed; but I'm still trying to figure out how a lack of alternatives is something for you to be proud about. Though, since every M$ user I know reverts to notepad for simple text, lists, notes, I suppose you must have a good reason to be afraid of alternatives.
C) Ooh, a factory. Gee, it must have been sealed with a kiss by a guy in a white lab coat. From your damaged brain, it's clear you were born and raised in a factory and fed on factory food. Oh, yeah, "make install", jackass. Have fun with those $95 support calls.
D) Yawn.
You bots are all the same, add a little Microsoft Advocacy and out comes the same old tired arguments. I couldn't have said it better myself.
The best argument against Microsoft's long term supremacy is history; not one single technology has been dominated by single players and proprietary mumbo-jumbo variant standards for longer than a few decades. An early lead ALWAYS turns the greed robots to vain attempts to stop the race and freeze time at moment they take the lead. Even with the state backing them up, they can't do it forever. Just look at what happened to telecommunications since the Ma Bell breakup; cellphones and pagers everywhere, an explosion of telecommunications services, the Internet... Back when you were born around 1980 there was a phone (gee, no one had to ask what kind of phone you had, how wonderful!) rented (ooh, a subscription model, how wonderful!) from the telephone company, period, and using any other kind could get you jail time. But that was better, right?
Microsoft has served their purpose, and now it's time for them to go to the elephants' graveyard to die. Ten years after they slip, the same dumbass commentators on financial news shows will be saying "It's amazing to think that anyone would run a company based on the idea that consumers would only want one choice of operating system. No wonder Microsoft stock has slipped so much. Their new CEO, Steve Jobs*, has got to turn them into a company focused on their customers and offer them the choices and services they need, or the next earnings report will be even worse."
* Sorry about then Jobs thing. Just couldn't resist trolling a little myself.
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No, favoring restrictions on access to technology and favoring the crippling of consumer technology in order to keep consumers safely in their pens is un-American.
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Damn, the Register has a FAQ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15718.html weird, the href won't take) that speculates extensively on the motives. Check items 7 and 8.
Time to send an email to Dave Emory (listen to WFMU).;-)
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That's an interesting question; what's in it for hardware folks, IBM, etc? Is it just cheaper talking about these stupid proposal than sending Steve Case to Aruba to try and close a big contract? Easier than finding a gigolo to service Hillary Rosen on her next Vegas junket?
Methinks there will be more time to ponder this. They will not stop with these schemes until the last dog dies. I loved the line in the article about how "this wasn't the most consumer-friendly of proposals, but there are others." That's the smartest reason to fire any employee of any technology company supporting such schemes is that they are ALL unfriendly to consumers. If they are worth a nickel, they depend on end-to-end control, or else they are trivial to avoid, in varying degrees. If they are end to end, they can't reasonably tell the difference between my home movie and a copy of Crouching Tiger, unless they depend on registering, say, md5s of my home movies automatically, which is unwieldly and the unfriendliest, most privacy invading assault ever wielded by corporations against their CUSTOMERS, who are unlikely to go along.
It won't be easy to cram this down people's throats. Their best hope is to get it built into all hard drives, and over the course of 20 years or more, get all input/output technologies to cooperate. That's a tall task.
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I've also had plenty of people ruin movies just because they wouldn't shut the hell up (and a few awful ones rescued by funny hecklers). And many years of driving in Boston taught me that there are more ways to cut people off than you can shake a tire iron at; cell-using drivers can't even make a dent in THAT body count.
I stay out of malls, so I never have the last problem. I just look at the mic users like they are talking to themselves.
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The fundamental problem is that instant messaging systems have no way of interoperating so that one system's users can IM with users of other systems. So you are either using someone's system, or you aren't. Compare this to email; you are using SOME resource to which you are authorized. You have paid (or been given by someone who has paid) access to the Internet. The cost of sending an email message is shared between the sender and the receiver. AOL's IM can't do this, so they throw out - and you swallow - the argument that there's nothing to do about it except accept their terms. Thank god their users didn't accept that standard for e-mail or the web.
To fix this situation, there needs to be an open, internet-wide protocol for users to send each other instant messages. EVERYONE would benefit enormously from this. Customers of two-way paging systems, people who hate AOL, AOLusers, EVERYONE.
This protocol would allow the following features:
So why doesn't AOL go for this? Because they are going for a naked power grab, and people like you are their patsies. What makes you think you have to bend over for them?
Regardless of what you think, people who don't buy the argument that right makes right, people who hate AOL, people who see the value in a global IM protocl, and people who value openness, freedom, choice, and the Internet itself are going to bitch about this until AOL gets their heads out of their asses.
I have every right to say that AOL are a bunch of evil, corporate, power hungry, internet-wrecking bunch of snivelling shits until they decide to cooperate with the rest of the world..
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
INITIALIZE ALL VARIABLES AND EXAMINE ALL QUERY DATA IN PHP!!! ALWAYS!!! THIS GOES FOR ALL CGI!
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Or else they sieze the basic assets of whomever they suspect of being a big player to put pressure on them; or, to punish the suspect for not rewarding the cops with a bigger bust. "Hey, we didn't get a big fish, so we'll just make this bastard pay. If he knows what's good for him, he'll give up the big fish." What do you think happens when the guy is innocent or has no such information? Bye, bye house, damn the law, screw the constitution. Now, with no house on which to get a second mortgage for a defense attorney, how is he going to prove his innocence and get his house back?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Doing an x86 oprt is indeed an excellent way to ensure the OS code is kept as hardware independent as possible. It undoes all the lazy things programmers do to get things done on time - they make assumptions and avoid abstractions because it saves time. Once you've ported Darwin to OS X, it can be taken anywhere, which gives Apple real leverage in terms of what chips they intend to use.
That and a few demos of OS X running on PC hardware just to demonstrate its superiority to Other Operating Systems in trade shows and the like. It slices, it dices, it has a BSoD emulator!
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I hadn't realized there was so much discrepancy nationwide. It's probably much like bus or air routes; lots of tactical decisions about where to spend and where to battle...
Oh, and I'd rather blow a goat than use Verizon if I can help it. The only thing they've been good for in the last 10 years is merging and changing all the logos on phone booths (nynex->bell atlantic->verizon: no wonder my bills are so high). Oh, that and screwing up any DSL circuit if the customer is not theirs, and 50% of the time if it is.
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's not unbelievable, either. What applications need lots of fast, raw, error-corrected access to CD-ROMs? CD rippers, and that's about it. The games market, Real Media, etc, can be coerced into "optimizing" for XP.
And despite the "gee, whiz, this shoar will help lee-nux" posts, the only people who can rejoice over this are 1) Fraunhofer and 2) Real Media. I bet that 50% of the CDs out there are Real-Jukebox-ripped. Although proprietary and enshitted formats are the default, most people seem to figger it out and get mp3s (which goes to show how much computer illiteracy goes out the window when "free stuff" is the reward).
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Everyone knows this except the people on the wrong side of the digital divide - which, increasingly, is no longer made of people too poor to have access to computers, but increasingly refers to those type of person who will say, after using XP, "Gee, I tried recording MP3 and it sounded really bad!!" In other words, the gullible, the old, and the stupid.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Welcome to the REAL real world, outside your corporate cocoon with IT death nazis dictating whether you can fart with or without noise while reading your email.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked by people in the REAL real world "Hey, so-and-so sent me a file in IMASTUPIDFUCK format and I can't read it! What can I do?" And the answer is ALWAYS the same; "Use RTF." 99% of word documents that real people actually make use nothing that RTF doesn't do. It's a plain text format, so it will never go obsolete. Virtually everyone can read the format. Image files cause the doc to bloat, but that's it. And you can zip the files to fix that (please don't say "stuffit").
In the REAL real world, saying "What, you don't use Microsoft Word?" is not really an option. The only thing that is surprising is how few people know the simple solution that nearly always works. After 10 years of this shit, you'd think they'd catch on. This is not brain surgery, it's more on the order of "Take the express bus, stupid."
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Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I had a high school chemistry teacher who was so bad at the subject that after a decade of teaching it, he could barely do the problems. For that reason, he would use the same problems, using the exact same numbers, over and over again. When it came to the final exam, I got 80% of the answers from memory, without even having to do simple multiplication.
But that didn't stop him from getting it wrong all the time anyway. I used to correct him, not because I was being a smartass, but because I thought it was unfair that kids who were trying really hard were getting screwed that way. On at least on occasion, I had to read the formulas from the textbook back to him to convince anyone. Anyway, it must have made some kind of impression on him, because two years later my younger brother did the same thing; he would stutter and call him by *my* name.
The thing was, I saw cars that he restored and even rode in them. He was a very talented mechanic, just a shitty high school chemistry teacher.
I used to think "that's just the way it is" until I got to college and realized that I was hopelessly behind kids who had real educations at private high schools - in subjects I would have been *very* good at. You just can't make it all up in college, not if you really want to excel. It's like asking a rising tennis star to take 4 years off for college; by the time they get back into it, it's too late to be the best.
BTW, high pay tends to preclude the formation of unions.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
On the flip side, actually doing something useful with this hack would be very difficult. It would be too easy to get caught if someone with the right skills goes poking around binaries and finds something amiss. And it's a fair bet that any NSA-blessed code would get such a close look. It wouldn't be so easy to hide, either. This is much easier with Microsoft OSes, which have such a large amount of undocumented stuff all over teh place that could be linked together.
Who knows, often things are no more complex than they appear. I bet that the NSA has found that it would be much easier to protect themselves and other government agencies if there were a distribution that THEY could trust without the expense of coding it all themselves. With proprietary software, they are at a slight disadvantage in that cat and mouse game. Maybe the _NSAKEY was a Microsoft trick to backdoor the NSA...
But the lesson from the compiler hack is that you can really only trust it if you've examined it yourself. And a secure linux distrubution would undeniably be of very high utility all on it's own to the NSA.
Now let us have no more curiosity about this bizaare cover-up.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I've seen this type of argument before on /. It's a weird one - and very, very wrong.
You argue that increased efficiency is BAD for the economy; how will poor Microsoft keep their inflated margins up?! This argument was first memorably made by the Luddites. See, the mechanical looms put weavers out of work, bad for the economy, see? Of course, it's almost too stupid to point out that all that money NOT going into Microsoft goes into the pockets of the owners of businesses that use Microsoft products, and can result in lower prices for *their* customers, and more money all around (that's good for the economy). Just like it was a waste of time explaining to Luddites that while a few people would be out of a job, clothing would become cheap enough for most poor people to afford, even if a few of them lost jobs.
But I guess you're not really into capitalism at all, just Microsoft's bottom line. Your invocation of communism is bizaare once the fallacy of your economic argument is made clear. However, it seems to be common - common enough that I disregarded the possibility that you are trolling. It's like thinking that after eight coin tosses get heads, the ninth is more likely to be tails; it should really be taught in first year econ classes, if it isn't already.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
- Linux Ultra
- Linux Non Plus Ultra
- Linux Final Conflict
- Linux Meta ('doh!)
- TransMinux (please don't kill me Linus)
- Linux Meta-Mecha
- LinuXtreme
- Omega
- Linux Server Edition
- Linux for Dummies
- Linux X
- LinuXP
- Lucy
- Linux Blue
- Yellow-bellied rat bastard (ok, that one's not so good)
- LinuX-men
- Jurassic Linux
- Episode II
- Linux Classic
- Micro$oft Sux!
- Liquinux
- Quinine (is not a quine)
- Linux Air
- C:\con\con Air
- Evil Dead II
- Linux - Ghost in the Machine
- FreeBSD ('doh! somebody slap me! damn just kidding
;-)
OK, not completely great. There's a reason why I'm not a comedy writer. But it's free. If you don't like it do better.Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Though, having spent all day dealing with javascript, I'd rather that I could someday, within my lifetime, code to a single standard.
Then all I have to do is fix shitty dreamweaver code.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Nicotene CAN be consumed in moderate quantities, but the people who can't control their addiction outnumber those who can. The same is true for heroin, although the percentage of people who can consume it in moderation may be higher. I take it you favor legalization?
I agree with you that people need to take more responsibility for their own actions, but you don't help matters by repeating untruths out of a tobacco company PR guide.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Well, I think that's probably more in keeping with what the pron industry does, but in fact sexuality in films was really quite open in early Hollywood - until the decency schoolmarms, fresh out of the job of persecuting consumers of alchohol - turned to a much easier target. Hollywood.
But more to the point - so what? I'm sure there are a lot of very sheltered people and ostrich-like parents screaming about American Pie in the terms you use. My uncle wouldn't let my cousin watch the Breakfast Club because it was "permissive," whatever that means (it's the moralistic equivalent of "inappropriate" - it means, Humpty-Dumpty-in-Wonderland style, whatever the speaker wants it to mean).
But I don't think that American Pie was a success (after the first weekend) because a kid boned a pie; the movie was a relatively fresh and honest portrayal of the confusion, yearning, and emotional turmoil that accompanies peoples' first sexual experiences. Portraying a subject is not the same as glorifying it, as you seem to imply.
Frankly, I think this was the most coherent Katz article I've seen. Those wailing or crowing about "the death of content" would do well to look at the things that are succeeding without judging them or moralizing if they are to understand what forms of entertainment DO work online.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
OS X is getting closer to this than anything else I've seen. XP takes the same notions, superficially papers them onto Windows ME in a way that only a PHB or software reviewer could love, and totally fucks the end user for ever and ever.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Frankly, Napster is a necessary challenge to their cartel, and I sort of wish that they could find a way to filter out RIAA songs, just so that somone had the chance to create a musical career by completely avoiding the RIAA. Unfortunately, that route is going to be messy, and compulsory licensing is the only way for consumers to buy the majority of their music (any SDMI or secure format amounts to renting) online before 2048.
I do wish Napster had made a better offer that included per-download royalties. Compulsory licensing almost certainly won't be a better deal than one they could have struck on their own (this assumes that the RIAA was negotiating in good faith and a deal could have been struck, which is more than I'm willing to bet on).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Now if they managed to crash a plane with most of those commiters, they might get somewhere.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Your tired arguments about innovation have been refuted too many times for me to stomach. China was too poor to spit long before they were Communist. Your comments about wealth creation are misguided and ignore the creation of aristocracies (something your heroes, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Bill Gates seem to understand quite well, which is why they are against repeal of estate taxes). Since you obviously prefer aristocracies, you are probably a monarchist; I say we throw you out of America before you get King George back in charge.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But there's really nothing new here at all, except that he got so jizzed up about XP. All available evidence points to XP being another example of Microsoft stealing the innovations of others, badly. XP steals from OS X in this way, only it exemplifies the old saw that if you build something totally idiot proof, only an idiot will be able to use it. OS X at least allows the possibility of expert users. You know already which one of those will never darken my doorstep.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
B) See A). And make sure to hide your head up your ass until after Service Pack 3, then start talking about how Windows Trilennium is gonna fix all the problems with W2K. And, I just use "vi" everywhere, period, without checking to see if it's installed; but I'm still trying to figure out how a lack of alternatives is something for you to be proud about. Though, since every M$ user I know reverts to notepad for simple text, lists, notes, I suppose you must have a good reason to be afraid of alternatives.
C) Ooh, a factory. Gee, it must have been sealed with a kiss by a guy in a white lab coat. From your damaged brain, it's clear you were born and raised in a factory and fed on factory food. Oh, yeah, "make install", jackass. Have fun with those $95 support calls.
D) Yawn.
You bots are all the same, add a little Microsoft Advocacy and out comes the same old tired arguments. I couldn't have said it better myself.
The best argument against Microsoft's long term supremacy is history; not one single technology has been dominated by single players and proprietary mumbo-jumbo variant standards for longer than a few decades. An early lead ALWAYS turns the greed robots to vain attempts to stop the race and freeze time at moment they take the lead. Even with the state backing them up, they can't do it forever. Just look at what happened to telecommunications since the Ma Bell breakup; cellphones and pagers everywhere, an explosion of telecommunications services, the Internet... Back when you were born around 1980 there was a phone (gee, no one had to ask what kind of phone you had, how wonderful!) rented (ooh, a subscription model, how wonderful!) from the telephone company, period, and using any other kind could get you jail time. But that was better, right?
Microsoft has served their purpose, and now it's time for them to go to the elephants' graveyard to die. Ten years after they slip, the same dumbass commentators on financial news shows will be saying "It's amazing to think that anyone would run a company based on the idea that consumers would only want one choice of operating system. No wonder Microsoft stock has slipped so much. Their new CEO, Steve Jobs*, has got to turn them into a company focused on their customers and offer them the choices and services they need, or the next earnings report will be even worse."
* Sorry about then Jobs thing. Just couldn't resist trolling a little myself.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, favoring restrictions on access to technology and favoring the crippling of consumer technology in order to keep consumers safely in their pens is un-American.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Time to send an email to Dave Emory (listen to WFMU). ;-)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Methinks there will be more time to ponder this. They will not stop with these schemes until the last dog dies. I loved the line in the article about how "this wasn't the most consumer-friendly of proposals, but there are others." That's the smartest reason to fire any employee of any technology company supporting such schemes is that they are ALL unfriendly to consumers. If they are worth a nickel, they depend on end-to-end control, or else they are trivial to avoid, in varying degrees. If they are end to end, they can't reasonably tell the difference between my home movie and a copy of Crouching Tiger, unless they depend on registering, say, md5s of my home movies automatically, which is unwieldly and the unfriendliest, most privacy invading assault ever wielded by corporations against their CUSTOMERS, who are unlikely to go along.
It won't be easy to cram this down people's throats. Their best hope is to get it built into all hard drives, and over the course of 20 years or more, get all input/output technologies to cooperate. That's a tall task.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.