Heh - I just hope they have some really, really good methane filters in the station's HVAC system.
It won't be the food that'll stink up the place so bad, but the unholy farts that can be generated afterwards.
(The stuff tastes great when it's done right --especially the hotter Winter stuff-- but it damned sure reeks to high Heaven on both ends of the digestive tract...)
Having taught computers to students before, I found quite a few of them.
If it was something dumb and non-harmful, it was good for a laugh... this is where most teachers fail it.
If it damaged an OS install, I'd make the kid stay after school the entire week and re-load every workstation image in the classroom each day.
If it escaped the local network and damaged something else (fortunately I never saw that happen), then the kid gets to face the consequences full-on, and I would've been stuck with preparing a forensics report to show how it happened and what I would do to prevent it in the future.
The point is to make this clear up-front, and if it isn't harmful, use it as a teaching aid. It also helps to know, as a techer, WTF you're doing around the machinery (unlike one Texas teacher who IIRC had a kid arrested for "hacking" because he used Windows Messenger to pass notes in class... can't remember the specifics, but it was a dumb overreaction to say the least).
The bigger concern for the industry though should be where Mr Softy and The Goo go next. Microsoft can buy SAP and Yahoo, its not either/or. Google is likely to buy stuff as well. The same math works for them.
I'm not so sure. MSFT is going into a rather huge debt, and for the first time in its history... just to buy Yahoo. It'll take more than a couple of years to pay that off... unless they can turn a ~90% desktop share into a 150% one.
Now eventually they can, but I'd give it about five years before their budge3t can take that kind of hit, at least at the rate things are going for them. Problem is, five years is almost an eternity in this industry, and a whole bucketload of things can happen between here and there.
Or rather, it confined it's holocausts to the 18th & 19th century
I wouldn't be so sure... Mao managed to wipe out (roughly) 100+ million of his own people during the "Great Leap Forward"... over 10% (at the time) of China's entire population. The USSR comes in at a somewhat close second, and only had a peak population of ~300m during the 1980's. I'd have to go dredging numbers (population vs. deaths during a given Purge or Gulag expansion period, and esp. during the starvations in the Ukraine), but I'm fairly willing to wager that as a percentage of the whole, it was a whole lot safer (odds-wise) to live in 18th/19th century England than it was to live in 20th Century Russia.
It's one thing to get killed due to willingly working under unsafe conditions and the like. It's another entirely to get executed or sent to die in a slave labor camp, just because the neighbor down the street reported you as a 'counter-revolutionary' to the local authorities. You're still perfectly free to walk away from the latter situation with at least a reasonable chance at continued survival...
Now as to whether or not free and open Capitalism would ever get to the point where millions are killed off due to malice on the part of those at the top of said system? Remains to be seen. OTOH, it's a lot harder to pull off than if you were in, say, Stalin's boots...
In practice, can you point to one example where collusion failed and a pick-2 solution arose?
Actually, yes:
The Movie Industry.
No, seriously, the movie industry. Around 1911 or so, the entire movie industry was controlled and locked by Edison and a heavy collusion with manufacturers of motion picture equipment. Every bit of movie equipment (including film(!?), cameras, lighting rigs, and projectors) was to be rented, period. In response, a group of filmmakers ran off to California, built their own equipment, and proceeded to make movies. The result is Hollywood and the MPAA. While we can all appreciate the irony of the MPAA being founded by "pirates" who were "stealing" Mr. Edison's "Intellectual Property", the point is that competitors managed to break a collusion-heavy industry to come up with cheaper, faster, and better movies... a product that the public was more than willing to pay for. Edison eventually had to simply give up trying to contain them.
Want another? How about...
The AFL/CIO, WRT the US Auto Industry.
Crazy-sounding, I know, but true... the auto unions had a dominant lock on American automobile manufacturing. By the late 1960's, they were pretty much dictating terms to every major US maker out there, and the disproportionately high salaries of auto workers were being passed on as a higher cost to the consumer. Then the Japanese came along with Nissans, Datsuns (Mitsubishi), Toyotas, and Hondas. The Germas showed up with Volkswagens and Audis. The OPEC embargo of 1974 caught the domestic big boys off-guard, while the Japanese and Germans were more than ready to take advantage of it with their existing engineering and dirt-cheap costs. It was such a powerful shift, that the gov't actually intervened to bail out Chrysler at one point. It also broke the Teamsters' back... hard. Now they are forced to play nice, with nowhere near the power they once had.
Okay, if you don't like those two, let's try...
Microsoft.
But, they're still a monopoly, you cry. Yes, for now... and in spite of a practically non-existent governmental punishment (c'mon, seriously... it wasn't jack and didn't even slow 'em down), the likes of Linux and Apple in the marketplace are now climbing at astronomical rates, as people choose to take their money elsewhere. It was certainly enough to get Dell interested in selling Linux gear (and on the business level - HP, and IBM, and...) Yep - it'll take time; exactly however long it takes for consumers to stop funding them and put the money elsewhere.
'course, there is no perfect example, because there is no perfect situation. Capitalism itself is highly imperfect. Someday, hopefully someone can come up with something better. Until they do, it's pretty much the best we got. Ain't much, but it beats everything else we've tried as a species.
It's spelled 'we, the people', dumbass. The 'problem', such as it is, isn't the system, but your particularly shitty implementation of it.
...shitty implementation of which system?
We got to see at least three major (and differing) implementations of Marx' setup. The number of deaths from it climbs up into the hundreds of millions, all told, and in places like North Korea, still climbing at horrific rate. Problem is, too many people are eager to claim their actions in the name of "the people", but the reality ends up being just the opposite. I think the USSR lasted approximately three years before it stopped being about "the people" and started being about "the state" (and yes, there is a distinction).
Capitalism (as practiced) isn't exactly a perfect system either (far, far from it). Quite frankly, it can outright suck at times. OTOH, it does have a tendency to keep its body counts down to a much more acceptable level.
Socialism? Cool... now who gets to fund it all when the majority of a populace figures out that they can do just fine without actually having to work for what they get? Ayn Rand may have been a nut case, but she does have a point - even economics has an ecosystem that requires each part of it to function well enough to survive. Humans are too damned lazy in nature to be eager about providing excessively for others in a system where they objectively don't have to.
Now here's the weak link in your arguments as per the free market... Collusion only works for as long as the people are willing to fund it. If not enough people buy Blu-Ray gear to justify the costs going into it, it eventually dies. If something freer, easier, and cheaper comes along (pick at least two) Last I checked, a lack of Blu-Ray gear won't prevent me from eating tonight, nor will that lack prevent me from drinking clean water, or having a nice warm environment in which to sleep tonight. This in turn leads to apathy among the larger population, which in turns leads to...
...fact is, the problem isn't the system per se - the problem is that too few people actually give a damn enough about forcing a change in the nastier incidents within it, at least not until the impact of any aspect affects them personally.
Two words concerning Xbox 360: Channel Stuffing. Factor that out (and use a halfway accurate chart this time, Sport)*. Now couple it with the device's inability (still) to turn any profit at all?
By the by, Windows Mobile is now being outsold by iPhones in the North American market, and Everyone Else ('cept Palm) in the global markets (ref: Canalys; will dredge up on request).
Microsoft has exactly two main sources of income: Windows licensing, and Office licensing. If they start losing out on those (which looks to be the case as time passes), the whole house of cards will come crashing down on them.
* you used game sales in your chart, not device sales. You also used a single week of game sales as a metric, which is kinda dumb).
Like I said elsewhere, MSFT won't die tomorrow, but I certainly wouldn't count on building an entire career based on 'em...
Microsoft won't die tomorrow morning. It won't die next year.
IMHO, it'll take about a decade to push them down to a 33% desktop market share, so long as things keep trending as they are now. After all, it took 8 years just to push them down below 90%, and a lot of that was Apple's doing in the desktop realm. Ubuntu helped a bit, and it didn't hurt that Windows Vista blew chunks. But... even on a favorable curve, it'll still take awhile to dislodge the monopoly to a point where they're forced to play nice or die... and this depends on things growing as they have so far, for both Linux and Apple alike.
I hope Gates realizes that "The Blue Screen of Death" may have bigger consequences in the Health field than it does in computers...
(and no, I honestly am not sure if I'm joking, being snarky, or am genuinely worried about WTF that idiot egomaniac may end up blundering us all into...)
ISP blocks trojan-infected machines back in 2003? Gee... that's relevant (not).
No actual spammers being cut off then, eh? No suspected spammers being disconnected at the behest of an outside party (which is what you and the IFPI are advocating)? Nothing even remotely relevant at all aside from the fact that if a trojaned machine is sending out spam it therefore gets cut off?
Thought so.
Wow, look at all the "Insightful" comments.
Wow indeed... most of them discussing the current state of ISP abuse desks, I even found this cool comment... think the IFPI would be nearly as kind about assisting users in clearing out any infringing content, or will they just sue/extort the unholy crap out of 'em? I'm thinking the latter, meself.
Oh, and one comment modded up that agreed it was a good idea. I never realized that when it comes to slashdot user opinions, you think that "5 (the poster + mods)" == 10^7.5... so how do the laws of physics work on your planet?;)
Err, you do know that there is a difference between voluntarily downloading something between two consenting parties (P2P user and peer(s)), and blasting unwanted crap out to unwilling recipients (spam), right?
That's nice doublethink you have there.
So in other words, you have no idea.
I didn't realize the RIAA was consenting to your file sharing. Oh, that's right... they aren't.
I don't know or care what the RIAA thinks about the files I share (hint: the only ones I've ever bothered sharing are all CC, copylefted, pub-domain, or GPL-licensed), so how about you not ruin what little credibility you might have by making stupid assumptions like that, m'kay?
Meanwhile, any two points in a P2P session are still made voluntarily. Weasel all you want, but you cannot change that primary fact - and the IFPI affiliate owns neither of those connections, so they don't get any say-so - aside from launching a lawsuit against the distributor once a determination is made that the distribution was an infringement (and even then they must remain within the bounds of law).
Besides, what does the Recording Industry Association of America have to do with asking (let alone demanding) anything from a British ISP, genius?
Just like slashbots would propose that ISPs disconnect anyone suspected of illegally sending unsolicited email.
An example (relevant this time, plz) would be nice. Of course, trying to get you to stop with gross generalizations, and idiotic attempts to prove a flamebaited point with wildly unrelated strawmen arguments? Well, it would be a lost cause, but see if you can overcome them anyway, my dear little troll...
You must be new here. Read all about it. Try the first post, +5 Insightful. Care to make any other ridiculous attempts at an indignant response.
How about some relevant evidence, instead of that half-stuffed strawman you just trotted out? You claimed that, in paraphrase,/. would happily demand that governments destroy ISP users' privacy rights at whim in order to catch spammers. Please show us an example where this allegedly happened.
Err, you do know that there is a difference between voluntarily downloading something between two consenting parties (P2P user and peer(s)), and blasting unwanted crap out to unwilling recipients (spam), right?
One is a normal (albeit sometimes infringing) transaction, while the other is an unwarranted invasion of others' file storage space and bandwidth.
They did test it in.au and even did a survey to see what people thought of it.
Oddly enough everybody thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Little wonder - those who got bit by the bug obviously couldn't respond to the survey.:)
Linux Networx, based in Lindon, Utah (sound familiar?) was one of them thar Canopy/Tarantella -type companies (which SCO happens to be).
BUT... unlike their evil twin sister, LNXI is a pretty cool bunch of folks. I got to tour their facilities once (they were looking to contract some Linux training, and I was looking for a side job at the time. A couple of my former students ended up working there.:) ).
I gotta give 'em props... they were doing some pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time, and they probably still do. They also went out of their way to not be associated with the McBride gang, so IMHO they deserve to stick around.
That's a hell of a lot to pay for what are essentially academic questions by now (e.g. "is McBride frickin' nuts, or just that incompetent?) I mean, the courts have pretty much started rolling the big ol' legal snowball down a hill that ends in "nope - SCO has no case here".
Unless Linus Torvalds issues a press release with some huge-arsed confession in it, this is pretty much a done deal.
And, whoever ends up owning SCO will still have to face countersuits from both Novell and IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
Number two being that it most likely still relies on that crap Registry schema for all of its settings.
(yes, I know that some Windows admins can use a CLI for nearly anything that'll run on one, but I'm almost willing to wager that the majority do not).
In space, it's denoted by its proper and full title: Fermentation Augmented Rectal Transport System.
(wait for it...)
It won't be the food that'll stink up the place so bad, but the unholy farts that can be generated afterwards.
(The stuff tastes great when it's done right --especially the hotter Winter stuff-- but it damned sure reeks to high Heaven on both ends of the digestive tract...)
If it was something dumb and non-harmful, it was good for a laugh... this is where most teachers fail it.
If it damaged an OS install, I'd make the kid stay after school the entire week and re-load every workstation image in the classroom each day.
If it escaped the local network and damaged something else (fortunately I never saw that happen), then the kid gets to face the consequences full-on, and I would've been stuck with preparing a forensics report to show how it happened and what I would do to prevent it in the future.
The point is to make this clear up-front, and if it isn't harmful, use it as a teaching aid. It also helps to know, as a techer, WTF you're doing around the machinery (unlike one Texas teacher who IIRC had a kid arrested for "hacking" because he used Windows Messenger to pass notes in class... can't remember the specifics, but it was a dumb overreaction to say the least).
I'm not so sure. MSFT is going into a rather huge debt, and for the first time in its history... just to buy Yahoo. It'll take more than a couple of years to pay that off... unless they can turn a ~90% desktop share into a 150% one.
Now eventually they can, but I'd give it about five years before their budge3t can take that kind of hit, at least at the rate things are going for them. Problem is, five years is almost an eternity in this industry, and a whole bucketload of things can happen between here and there.
I hate to break it to you, but no, we didn't. Last I checked, Marx wasn't a big advocate for totalitarianism.
I wouldn't be so sure... Mao managed to wipe out (roughly) 100+ million of his own people during the "Great Leap Forward"... over 10% (at the time) of China's entire population. The USSR comes in at a somewhat close second, and only had a peak population of ~300m during the 1980's. I'd have to go dredging numbers (population vs. deaths during a given Purge or Gulag expansion period, and esp. during the starvations in the Ukraine), but I'm fairly willing to wager that as a percentage of the whole, it was a whole lot safer (odds-wise) to live in 18th/19th century England than it was to live in 20th Century Russia.
It's one thing to get killed due to willingly working under unsafe conditions and the like. It's another entirely to get executed or sent to die in a slave labor camp, just because the neighbor down the street reported you as a 'counter-revolutionary' to the local authorities. You're still perfectly free to walk away from the latter situation with at least a reasonable chance at continued survival...
Now as to whether or not free and open Capitalism would ever get to the point where millions are killed off due to malice on the part of those at the top of said system? Remains to be seen. OTOH, it's a lot harder to pull off than if you were in, say, Stalin's boots...
Actually, yes:
The Movie Industry.
No, seriously, the movie industry. Around 1911 or so, the entire movie industry was controlled and locked by Edison and a heavy collusion with manufacturers of motion picture equipment. Every bit of movie equipment (including film(!?), cameras, lighting rigs, and projectors) was to be rented, period. In response, a group of filmmakers ran off to California, built their own equipment, and proceeded to make movies. The result is Hollywood and the MPAA. While we can all appreciate the irony of the MPAA being founded by "pirates" who were "stealing" Mr. Edison's "Intellectual Property", the point is that competitors managed to break a collusion-heavy industry to come up with cheaper, faster, and better movies... a product that the public was more than willing to pay for. Edison eventually had to simply give up trying to contain them.
Want another? How about...
The AFL/CIO, WRT the US Auto Industry.
Crazy-sounding, I know, but true... the auto unions had a dominant lock on American automobile manufacturing. By the late 1960's, they were pretty much dictating terms to every major US maker out there, and the disproportionately high salaries of auto workers were being passed on as a higher cost to the consumer. Then the Japanese came along with Nissans, Datsuns (Mitsubishi), Toyotas, and Hondas. The Germas showed up with Volkswagens and Audis. The OPEC embargo of 1974 caught the domestic big boys off-guard, while the Japanese and Germans were more than ready to take advantage of it with their existing engineering and dirt-cheap costs. It was such a powerful shift, that the gov't actually intervened to bail out Chrysler at one point. It also broke the Teamsters' back... hard. Now they are forced to play nice, with nowhere near the power they once had.
Okay, if you don't like those two, let's try...
Microsoft.
But, they're still a monopoly, you cry. Yes, for now... and in spite of a practically non-existent governmental punishment (c'mon, seriously... it wasn't jack and didn't even slow 'em down), the likes of Linux and Apple in the marketplace are now climbing at astronomical rates, as people choose to take their money elsewhere. It was certainly enough to get Dell interested in selling Linux gear (and on the business level - HP, and IBM, and...) Yep - it'll take time; exactly however long it takes for consumers to stop funding them and put the money elsewhere.
'course, there is no perfect example, because there is no perfect situation. Capitalism itself is highly imperfect. Someday, hopefully someone can come up with something better. Until they do, it's pretty much the best we got. Ain't much, but it beats everything else we've tried as a species.
Reg'ds,
It's spelled 'we, the people', dumbass. The 'problem', such as it is, isn't the system, but your particularly shitty implementation of it.
We got to see at least three major (and differing) implementations of Marx' setup. The number of deaths from it climbs up into the hundreds of millions, all told, and in places like North Korea, still climbing at horrific rate. Problem is, too many people are eager to claim their actions in the name of "the people", but the reality ends up being just the opposite. I think the USSR lasted approximately three years before it stopped being about "the people" and started being about "the state" (and yes, there is a distinction).
Capitalism (as practiced) isn't exactly a perfect system either (far, far from it). Quite frankly, it can outright suck at times. OTOH, it does have a tendency to keep its body counts down to a much more acceptable level.
Socialism? Cool... now who gets to fund it all when the majority of a populace figures out that they can do just fine without actually having to work for what they get? Ayn Rand may have been a nut case, but she does have a point - even economics has an ecosystem that requires each part of it to function well enough to survive. Humans are too damned lazy in nature to be eager about providing excessively for others in a system where they objectively don't have to.
Now here's the weak link in your arguments as per the free market... Collusion only works for as long as the people are willing to fund it. If not enough people buy Blu-Ray gear to justify the costs going into it, it eventually dies. If something freer, easier, and cheaper comes along (pick at least two) Last I checked, a lack of Blu-Ray gear won't prevent me from eating tonight, nor will that lack prevent me from drinking clean water, or having a nice warm environment in which to sleep tonight. This in turn leads to apathy among the larger population, which in turns leads to...
Suddenly things don't look so good for the 360.
Even worse news? Compare this little puppy for growth rates.
By the by, Windows Mobile is now being outsold by iPhones in the North American market, and Everyone Else ('cept Palm) in the global markets (ref: Canalys; will dredge up on request).
Microsoft has exactly two main sources of income: Windows licensing, and Office licensing. If they start losing out on those (which looks to be the case as time passes), the whole house of cards will come crashing down on them.
* you used game sales in your chart, not device sales. You also used a single week of game sales as a metric, which is kinda dumb).
Like I said elsewhere, MSFT won't die tomorrow, but I certainly wouldn't count on building an entire career based on 'em...
Microsoft won't die tomorrow morning. It won't die next year.
IMHO, it'll take about a decade to push them down to a 33% desktop market share, so long as things keep trending as they are now. After all, it took 8 years just to push them down below 90%, and a lot of that was Apple's doing in the desktop realm. Ubuntu helped a bit, and it didn't hurt that Windows Vista blew chunks. But... even on a favorable curve, it'll still take awhile to dislodge the monopoly to a point where they're forced to play nice or die... and this depends on things growing as they have so far, for both Linux and Apple alike.
(and no, I honestly am not sure if I'm joking, being snarky, or am genuinely worried about WTF that idiot egomaniac may end up blundering us all into...)
Most users OTOH fear those things.
No actual spammers being cut off then, eh? No suspected spammers being disconnected at the behest of an outside party (which is what you and the IFPI are advocating)? Nothing even remotely relevant at all aside from the fact that if a trojaned machine is sending out spam it therefore gets cut off?
Thought so.
Wow, look at all the "Insightful" comments.Wow indeed... most of them discussing the current state of ISP abuse desks, I even found this cool comment... think the IFPI would be nearly as kind about assisting users in clearing out any infringing content, or will they just sue/extort the unholy crap out of 'em? I'm thinking the latter, meself.
Oh, and one comment modded up that agreed it was a good idea. I never realized that when it comes to slashdot user opinions, you think that "5 (the poster + mods)" == 10^7.5 ... so how do the laws of physics work on your planet? ;)
That's nice doublethink you have there.
So in other words, you have no idea.
I didn't realize the RIAA was consenting to your file sharing. Oh, that's right... they aren't.I don't know or care what the RIAA thinks about the files I share (hint: the only ones I've ever bothered sharing are all CC, copylefted, pub-domain, or GPL-licensed), so how about you not ruin what little credibility you might have by making stupid assumptions like that, m'kay?
Meanwhile, any two points in a P2P session are still made voluntarily. Weasel all you want, but you cannot change that primary fact - and the IFPI affiliate owns neither of those connections, so they don't get any say-so - aside from launching a lawsuit against the distributor once a determination is made that the distribution was an infringement (and even then they must remain within the bounds of law).
Besides, what does the Recording Industry Association of America have to do with asking (let alone demanding) anything from a British ISP, genius?
Just like slashbots would propose that ISPs disconnect anyone suspected of illegally sending unsolicited email.An example (relevant this time, plz) would be nice. Of course, trying to get you to stop with gross generalizations, and idiotic attempts to prove a flamebaited point with wildly unrelated strawmen arguments? Well, it would be a lost cause, but see if you can overcome them anyway, my dear little troll...
How about some relevant evidence, instead of that half-stuffed strawman you just trotted out? You claimed that, in paraphrase, /. would happily demand that governments destroy ISP users' privacy rights at whim in order to catch spammers. Please show us an example where this allegedly happened.
One is a normal (albeit sometimes infringing) transaction, while the other is an unwarranted invasion of others' file storage space and bandwidth.
QED, no hypocrisy.
Oddly enough everybody thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Little wonder - those who got bit by the bug obviously couldn't respond to the survey. :)
(yes, I am kidding. Or am I?)
BUT... unlike their evil twin sister, LNXI is a pretty cool bunch of folks. I got to tour their facilities once (they were looking to contract some Linux training, and I was looking for a side job at the time. A couple of my former students ended up working there. :) ).
I gotta give 'em props... they were doing some pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time, and they probably still do. They also went out of their way to not be associated with the McBride gang, so IMHO they deserve to stick around.
Only in Soviet Russia.
(/me ducks and runzlakhell...)
(/me gets a whisper in the ear...)
Umm, err, ahh, I gotta go now.
Unless Linus Torvalds issues a press release with some huge-arsed confession in it, this is pretty much a done deal.
And, whoever ends up owning SCO will still have to face countersuits from both Novell and IBM.
WTF, over?