"When was the last time Windows gave you a nice error.log when it blue-screened, or how about IIS on a buffer overflow?"
First of all logging in windows pretty much sucks ass no matter what you are dealing with. I suspect this due to sever lack of any decent text tools like awk, grep, tail etc. Windows admins would get too confused with utilities like that.
That aside here are my favorite error messages I deal with pretty routinely.
From Access "there is no message for this error". Oh yea that's real helpful.
When importing data into SQL server "Overflow". No mention of line numbers or data types or field names. All you know is the one line of thousands had some data that SQL server did not like. Good luck finding it. What I do here is to create the same structure in postgres and import it into there. Postgres tells me what line and what data is bad. Postgres is a great debugging tool for SQL server and in many ways much better database.
And in ASP pages sometimes it pukes with a number (no message) a search on this number on the MS web site reveals that the error message means "exception occured". Wow that's real helful huh? A search on google shows many people with this problems with nobody giving solutions. My answer? Re-do the page in php.
Assasination on the other hand seems to be just ducky. This is a great loophole. Let the terrorist leave the country and assinate him there. If it's a poor country just drop bombs otherwise send out an agent or two.
Some people think that the US policies in the middle east have NOTHING to do with the actions on 9-11.
Some people think that the death of THOUSANDS of palestenians in the last year or two have NOTHING to do with the actions of 9-11
Some people think that the fact that over a million iraqis (including appox 500,000 children) due to sanctions imposed by the US have NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
Some people think that the fact that US has bombed iraq whenever it felt like it for the past 5 years has NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
Some people think that the US support for despots like the shah, pinochet or the current ruling class in saudi arabia have NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
These people are thinking very hard about why some people might want to kill americans so bad that they are willing to kill themselves to do it. After deep thought and analysis the best that their feeble minds can come up with is.
"why those ragheads must simply hate freedom and democracy surely we have done nothing wrong ever to anybody". They sincerely believe that the US carries zero percent of the blame and that osama bin laden shares 100% of the blame.
Obviously Noam Chomsky is not one of those people. This in no way indicates that he thinks the people in the building at the time carry 100% of the blame either. He probably is able to understand that the world is not black and white and that there is plenty of blame to go around everywhere.
If this article doesn't point out how morally corrupt MS employees are then nothing will. This guy demeans the lives of 6000 innocent dead people by comparing their trategy to a computer virus. As if profiteering off their death was not enough.
Actually you are wrong. Critizing linux get you modded up more often then down. Praising the stability of windows will always get you modded up as will any pro MS post. Try it sometime.
What boggles my mind are searches for "project mangement" and "intranet". You'd think that people would be better off working on sourceforge itself rather then starting the 500th project management tool. And to be honest most of them suck totaly. In the meantime a comprehensive project management tool like sourceforge is just about impossible to install anywhere.
When you see two evil entitites fighting each other it's a good thing. It weakens both of them. The good side in this case is too weak to fight either one. This is best outcome that can be expected under the circumstances. It's not as good as good triumphing over evil but you gotta take what you can. Two weaker evil companies is better then two stronger evil companies.
Somebody else said it and I'll say it again in case it gets lost in the noise.
Why don't you rail against adobe to open up their file formats so that GIMP can open them. Why don't you complain to these companies to release their patents on color correction and font manipulation so that GIMP can implement them. One of the main reasons why GIMP can't do these things is that it's actually ILLEGAL for them to do it. It's one thing to expect open source developers to implement some feature it's another to expect them to go to jail of face bankrupcy from a lawsuit.
Come now be real.
Do you honestly think that Sen Hollings cares about you, the constitution, the united states, the world, ethics, morals or anything else? He is paid by disney to do this one thing and he is going to do it just like you do things you are paid to do. Yea go to congress.org and bitch if you want it may make you fell better but don't kid your self into thinking Sen Hollings gives a flying donut about you or your rights. Give him some money and he may listen even then you gotta give him more money then disney did.
So let me get this straight.
The corporations are out of control.
The corporations are powerhungry.
The corporations bribe politicians and corrupt democracy.
The corporations are immoral.
The corporations do things that are indefensable.
The corporations do things that are illegal.
Despite all this we should not hold them responsible for their actions because the govt "let them do it".
Yea right! Listen it's not either or OK? You can hold BOTH the govt AND the corporations resposible for their actions.
"I'm not in favor of 'unionizing', but isn't there some kind of way the geeks of the earth could organize (is the eff sufficient?) to prevent this kind of stuff? "
Why not a union? If you feel that the lable union is too blue collar for you then you can do like the doctors did and form an "association". There is no difference between the AMA and a union really. You join, you pay your dues, and the association fights for you. The ACM already exists but I don't think they are too active politically maybe another association.
I use mozilla. It rocks. It has tabs, it has mouse gestures, it's fast and it's really stable. I can theme it any way I want. I of course have IE installed but I never fire it up unless I visit one or two percent of the sites that insist on it.
Besides Mozilla does not leak my personal information, it does not have cryptic option names designed to fool me, it does not keep sending me to MSN, it does not accept activeX controls, it does not execute viruses automatically, and best of all it allows me to turn off popups on page load.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet. This is because it focuses on me. It wants to help me have a better web browsing experience. IE wants to deliver me to advertisers. That's a significant difference.
The number one reason AOL should go with mozilla (or gecko) is because MS is planning to implement smart tags and has already implemented 404 redirects. The last thing AOL wants is for their customers to be redirected to MS sites anytime they click on anything and besides why give aid and comfort to your enemy.
By switching to mozilla AOL will also discourage people from building IE only sites and that will be a good thing for all of us.
The reason you should sell Microsoft is because Microsoft is the number one target for terrorists right not. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and Microsoft represents America's superiority in technology. So far the terrorists have gone after highly visible symbols of american dominance (WTC for economic dominance and the pentagon for military dominance). The remaining two are MS and hollywood.
Not only should you sell Microsoft but you should also move away from Redmond or LA. Those are diffuse targets (I.E they are not single buildings) and the attack is likely to take out a lot of people.
Time to cash in those stock options if you ask me.
Nobody wants to thinks about these things but we have to face reality sooner or later.
MS will most likely lose market share becasue foreign governments are tired of their cash leaving their country and ending up in Bill Gates pocket. Besides they don't trust MS not to sneak in backdoors.
MS will also lose market chare becasue people in third world countries will not be able to pirate their software anymore. This will increase the market share of free and lower cost alternatives.
MS will also lose market share amongst small mom and pop type of operations who can not afford to buy MS software and who will not be able to pirate it anymore.
MS will lose some market share (maybe not a whole lot but some) amongst small to medium size comapnies who will switch to open source software to save money. Retraining is a lot easier when you are a 20 person company then a 20,000 person company and small companies have less money to play with.
Eventually enough people will be using non MS products so that MS will not be able to coerce anybody to do anything. If even 20% of the people of the world use a non MS desktop people will stop sending DOC attachments. If foreign governments only accept non proprietary documents (or even star office documents) then people will make sure they can generate those files.
Eventually MS will have to be compatible with a significan minority of users or their share will slip even further. It's very important for MS to maintain an almost 100% monopoly otherwise they would have to lower prices and they don't want to do that.
As for support other people have pointed out that you are full of shit if you expect to get support from MS because your office keeps crashing or because your PDF files print with garbage on them.
He got a +5 because this is slashdot. Any post critisizing linux will get a +5. Same as any post praising windows 2000 or XP. Try it sometime (not that you need any more karma).
It's because they are a monopoly. Monopolies must act in a more responsible manner then "just another company". They are on trial right now for abusing that monopoly and harming consumers. In fact they have been found guilty of that by two courts. So a company which had been convicted of being an abusive monopoly has to be watched very closely. They have shown themselves to have no ethics or morals and have harmed consumers in the past.
Oh yes those business which fail were very competent and efficient right? Lets face ti businesses are horribly inefficient. Like I said one out of three go under that's a horrible batting record. Imagine if you doctor killed one out of three patients. As for the remaining that make it one third of them are on corporate welfare of some sort or another. And guess what not one of them cares about the public at large or the well being of the citizenry. They just want your money that's all they don;t give a shit if you live or die and certainly don't give a shit if they are killing you by pumping poisons down your wells.
Yes let's turn all of our lives to corporations and give up this silly experiment called representive democracy.
"Domestic violence does not need Black Talons, a gun, or even anything classified as a "weapon" to happen"
His point was that the results are much worse when a gun and/or the black talon is involved. At the trauma center it takes longer to operate on patient that has been shot with a black talon then say stabbed a few times. This causes higher costs which are eventually passed on to the taxpayers.
It depends on the market. In the OS market Gemany has a HUGE trade deficit. If they stop buying MS products AND encourage their citizens not to buy it then they could put a dent in that deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
"When was the last time Windows gave you a nice error.log when it blue-screened, or how about IIS on a buffer overflow?"
First of all logging in windows pretty much sucks ass no matter what you are dealing with. I suspect this due to sever lack of any decent text tools like awk, grep, tail etc. Windows admins would get too confused with utilities like that.
That aside here are my favorite error messages I deal with pretty routinely.
From Access "there is no message for this error". Oh yea that's real helpful.
When importing data into SQL server "Overflow". No mention of line numbers or data types or field names. All you know is the one line of thousands had some data that SQL server did not like. Good luck finding it. What I do here is to create the same structure in postgres and import it into there. Postgres tells me what line and what data is bad. Postgres is a great debugging tool for SQL server and in many ways much better database.
And in ASP pages sometimes it pukes with a number (no message) a search on this number on the MS web site reveals that the error message means "exception occured". Wow that's real helful huh? A search on google shows many people with this problems with nobody giving solutions. My answer? Re-do the page in php.
Assasination on the other hand seems to be just ducky. This is a great loophole. Let the terrorist leave the country and assinate him there. If it's a poor country just drop bombs otherwise send out an agent or two.
This is slashdot any post critizing linux or open source get modded up. Where have you been?
how about 97?
MacOSX. Great OS, Geat UI, Office, IE. What else can you ask for? As a bonus you get a standardard hardware platform too.
Some people think that the US policies in the middle east have NOTHING to do with the actions on 9-11.
Some people think that the death of THOUSANDS of palestenians in the last year or two have NOTHING to do with the actions of 9-11
Some people think that the fact that over a million iraqis (including appox 500,000 children) due to sanctions imposed by the US have NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
Some people think that the fact that US has bombed iraq whenever it felt like it for the past 5 years has NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
Some people think that the US support for despots like the shah, pinochet or the current ruling class in saudi arabia have NOTHING to do with the events of 9-11.
These people are thinking very hard about why some people might want to kill americans so bad that they are willing to kill themselves to do it. After deep thought and analysis the best that their feeble minds can come up with is.
"why those ragheads must simply hate freedom and democracy surely we have done nothing wrong ever to anybody". They sincerely believe that the US carries zero percent of the blame and that osama bin laden shares 100% of the blame.
Obviously Noam Chomsky is not one of those people. This in no way indicates that he thinks the people in the building at the time carry 100% of the blame either. He probably is able to understand that the world is not black and white and that there is plenty of blame to go around everywhere.
Damn the complexities of life huh?
If this article doesn't point out how morally corrupt MS employees are then nothing will. This guy demeans the lives of 6000 innocent dead people by comparing their trategy to a computer virus. As if profiteering off their death was not enough.
Makes me sick.
Actually you are wrong. Critizing linux get you modded up more often then down. Praising the stability of windows will always get you modded up as will any pro MS post. Try it sometime.
"Reset your double click speed dumbass."
It's still two clicks. What does the speed matter?
What boggles my mind are searches for "project mangement" and "intranet". You'd think that people would be better off working on sourceforge itself rather then starting the 500th project management tool. And to be honest most of them suck totaly. In the meantime a comprehensive project management tool like sourceforge is just about impossible to install anywhere.
When you see two evil entitites fighting each other it's a good thing. It weakens both of them. The good side in this case is too weak to fight either one. This is best outcome that can be expected under the circumstances. It's not as good as good triumphing over evil but you gotta take what you can. Two weaker evil companies is better then two stronger evil companies.
Somebody else said it and I'll say it again in case it gets lost in the noise.
Why don't you rail against adobe to open up their file formats so that GIMP can open them. Why don't you complain to these companies to release their patents on color correction and font manipulation so that GIMP can implement them. One of the main reasons why GIMP can't do these things is that it's actually ILLEGAL for them to do it. It's one thing to expect open source developers to implement some feature it's another to expect them to go to jail of face bankrupcy from a lawsuit.
Please somebody mod this guy up. His point about the patents should be heard.
"A simple search on "Workflow" revealed many other projects on Sourceforge,"
unfortunately any search on sourceforge reveals a hundred projects that exist in name only. They really ought to do some house clearing.
Come now be real.
Do you honestly think that Sen Hollings cares about you, the constitution, the united states, the world, ethics, morals or anything else? He is paid by disney to do this one thing and he is going to do it just like you do things you are paid to do. Yea go to congress.org and bitch if you want it may make you fell better but don't kid your self into thinking Sen Hollings gives a flying donut about you or your rights. Give him some money and he may listen even then you gotta give him more money then disney did.
So let me get this straight.
The corporations are out of control.
The corporations are powerhungry.
The corporations bribe politicians and corrupt democracy.
The corporations are immoral.
The corporations do things that are indefensable.
The corporations do things that are illegal.
Despite all this we should not hold them responsible for their actions because the govt "let them do it".
Yea right! Listen it's not either or OK? You can hold BOTH the govt AND the corporations resposible for their actions.
"I'm not in favor of 'unionizing', but isn't there some kind of way the geeks of the earth could organize (is the eff sufficient?) to prevent this kind of stuff? "
Why not a union? If you feel that the lable union is too blue collar for you then you can do like the doctors did and form an "association". There is no difference between the AMA and a union really. You join, you pay your dues, and the association fights for you. The ACM already exists but I don't think they are too active politically maybe another association.
I use mozilla. It rocks. It has tabs, it has mouse gestures, it's fast and it's really stable. I can theme it any way I want. I of course have IE installed but I never fire it up unless I visit one or two percent of the sites that insist on it.
Besides Mozilla does not leak my personal information, it does not have cryptic option names designed to fool me, it does not keep sending me to MSN, it does not accept activeX controls, it does not execute viruses automatically, and best of all it allows me to turn off popups on page load.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet. This is because it focuses on me. It wants to help me have a better web browsing experience. IE wants to deliver me to advertisers. That's a significant difference.
The number one reason AOL should go with mozilla (or gecko) is because MS is planning to implement smart tags and has already implemented 404 redirects. The last thing AOL wants is for their customers to be redirected to MS sites anytime they click on anything and besides why give aid and comfort to your enemy.
By switching to mozilla AOL will also discourage people from building IE only sites and that will be a good thing for all of us.
Hate to say this but...
The reason you should sell Microsoft is because Microsoft is the number one target for terrorists right not. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and Microsoft represents America's superiority in technology. So far the terrorists have gone after highly visible symbols of american dominance (WTC for economic dominance and the pentagon for military dominance). The remaining two are MS and hollywood.
Not only should you sell Microsoft but you should also move away from Redmond or LA. Those are diffuse targets (I.E they are not single buildings) and the attack is likely to take out a lot of people.
Time to cash in those stock options if you ask me.
Nobody wants to thinks about these things but we have to face reality sooner or later.
What you are not considering are the following.
MS will most likely lose market share becasue foreign governments are tired of their cash leaving their country and ending up in Bill Gates pocket. Besides they don't trust MS not to sneak in backdoors.
MS will also lose market chare becasue people in third world countries will not be able to pirate their software anymore. This will increase the market share of free and lower cost alternatives.
MS will also lose market share amongst small mom and pop type of operations who can not afford to buy MS software and who will not be able to pirate it anymore.
MS will lose some market share (maybe not a whole lot but some) amongst small to medium size comapnies who will switch to open source software to save money. Retraining is a lot easier when you are a 20 person company then a 20,000 person company and small companies have less money to play with.
Eventually enough people will be using non MS products so that MS will not be able to coerce anybody to do anything. If even 20% of the people of the world use a non MS desktop people will stop sending DOC attachments. If foreign governments only accept non proprietary documents (or even star office documents) then people will make sure they can generate those files.
Eventually MS will have to be compatible with a significan minority of users or their share will slip even further. It's very important for MS to maintain an almost 100% monopoly otherwise they would have to lower prices and they don't want to do that.
As for support other people have pointed out that you are full of shit if you expect to get support from MS because your office keeps crashing or because your PDF files print with garbage on them.
He got a +5 because this is slashdot. Any post critisizing linux will get a +5. Same as any post praising windows 2000 or XP. Try it sometime (not that you need any more karma).
It's because they are a monopoly. Monopolies must act in a more responsible manner then "just another company". They are on trial right now for abusing that monopoly and harming consumers. In fact they have been found guilty of that by two courts. So a company which had been convicted of being an abusive monopoly has to be watched very closely. They have shown themselves to have no ethics or morals and have harmed consumers in the past.
Oh yes those business which fail were very competent and efficient right? Lets face ti businesses are horribly inefficient. Like I said one out of three go under that's a horrible batting record. Imagine if you doctor killed one out of three patients. As for the remaining that make it one third of them are on corporate welfare of some sort or another. And guess what not one of them cares about the public at large or the well being of the citizenry. They just want your money that's all they don;t give a shit if you live or die and certainly don't give a shit if they are killing you by pumping poisons down your wells.
Yes let's turn all of our lives to corporations and give up this silly experiment called representive democracy.
"Domestic violence does not need Black Talons, a gun, or even anything classified as a "weapon" to happen"
His point was that the results are much worse when a gun and/or the black talon is involved. At the trauma center it takes longer to operate on patient that has been shot with a black talon then say stabbed a few times. This causes higher costs which are eventually passed on to the taxpayers.
It depends on the market. In the OS market Gemany has a HUGE trade deficit. If they stop buying MS products AND encourage their citizens not to buy it then they could put a dent in that deficit.