There will be a list of creditors at SCO's Chapter 7 proceedings.
Pick one?
/P
Re:That's just the company
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Can we finally get the criminal case against Darl McBride and the rest of the execs rolling?
Otherwise, they'll just move on to another company, to do mostly the same.
...with a resume' that basically reads: "I wasted a metric ton of shareholder money, industry goodwill, and still my company fell down and went 'splat' "?
Shit, Darl & co. would be lucky to get jobs as janitors in the Tech Industry, let alone anything of any consequence or responsibility. They're pretty much as attractive as a 600lb woman suffering from Tourettes' Syndrome and downing Mezcal by the case.
(well, Maybe Microsoft's hiring or something, but...)
I know it's not technically over and there will be more to slog through, When will it be technically over, and when will there be no more to slog through?
When Darl McBride's impaled body finally rots off the pike planted in front of the Linux Foundation (OSDL)?
...it rains a lot in Oregon, so it shouldn't take too awful long.
Apparently 3d/CG hobbyists either rent, live with their parents perpetually, or just happen to have plenty of cash to buy a nice home outright. Either way, who's ever heard of a 3d/CG hobbyist being interested in buying a house and actually needing a mortgage for it.
You'd be amazed; I bought a house less than two months ago. That said, I didn't rely on a stupid flash animation on a site that had nothing to do with houses to guide my decisions as to which lender I went with.
As it is, 3D/CG hobbyist tools aren't expensive at all nowadays; between Free* Software (e.g. Blender, POV-Ray, DAZ|Studio, Bryce, GIMP), low-cost creation, compositing, render, and workflow tools (Vue d'Esprit, Carrara, Poser, Silo, Rhino, etc), and relatively cheap entry-level points for high-end tools (Maya PLE, Modo, 3D Studio VIZ, etc)? I daresay that I spend less per year on 3D tools and occasional content than the average slashdotter spends on consoles and games. The most expensive bit in my little hobby was the $2000 Power Mac Dual G5 I bought in 2004, which keeps up quite happily, and can be expected to do so for at least the next 2-3 years.
It's actually a lot more affordable (and a whole lot more flexible and powerful) than the half-working bug-laden crap we were all stuck with in 2001, trust me.
Being a grumpy old git there are many businesses whose crappy advertising annoys me. With this new system i can write a script to hit all their websites 50 times a day and it will then cost them money every time i walk past their outlet. I may even go into the shop to say 'muahahahaha, pwned'
Why stop at 50? w/ an unlimited data plan and an appetite for walking-as-exercise, I can blast out thousands of hits per minute that get read by/dev/null as I stroll around downtown... a bicycle and a portable charger can increase the damage almost exponentially.
(besides, it'd be kinda funny to watch some market-prioritied corporation actually pay someone to let me use their bathroom or something w/o buying a thing. Plus, I can use it as a guide to which stores I'd rather avoid spending money at.:) )
But that is not the slashdot way, we want NO adds but still we want our websites to run for free even though these people deticate their lives full time to this and have expenses too. Good targeting means less adds, more revenue to web sites, and less anoyances during the day.
Okay... here's some small tips that may help:
If a website or other media delivery vehicle tends to specialize (e.g./. tends to specialize in IT and geek pr0n), you tailor your advertisements to your primary market. If I go to a 3d/CG hobbyist art website, I expect to see ads for the likes of Poser, Bryce, DAZ, etc, with maybe some low-end Maya, 3DS Max and such thrown in. I don't expect to see mortgage ads in either place. (If I do, then obviously the site owner is operating sans clue, which almost subliminally makes my opinion of the content to be a bit suspect. After all, if they can't grok their audience, then how do I know that they truly grok what they're presenting otherwise?)
This does not require complex GPS tracking, retina scanning, or any other such crap. It merely means that the site owners need to know their primary and secondary readership.
For general purpose websites (like a newspaper, say) you can use cookies based on what type of content the user reads more often than not. Again, no need to an RFID chip in someone's left ear to do that
Even on a mobile scale, the best way to know if an ad works is the old-fashioned way, just updated: Put a friggin' "Save X% off your purchase if you display the linked coupon page on your iPhone/Treo/etc to the server at the counter!" with some unique splotch of numbers and letters on that "coupon" can that can be punched in by the guy taking your money. See? No need to assign facial recognition software to every mobile's camera or something...
In short, there are a ton of ways to make your advertising revenue work for you (as a business) and at the same time not have to resort to some bullshit intrusion that only adds bloat and inconvenience to the user's equipment and resources.
The worst part about all of this is the lack of recognition that other parts of the world have been suffering under this very same breed of Jihadist for a lot longer than the US. Both China and Russia have been dealing with this religious nutcases for years prior to 9-11.
Both nations mentioned up there also have legally-sanctioned reactions against such terrorist groups - means that make Guantanamo seem like the near-summer-camp that it is. Usually these are performed without such obstacles as due process and/or trial. Part of the reason such activities remain low-key is because the penalty for screwing with either government in such a manner is usually fatal, and not just to the perpetrator(s).
Well, they had already done it once (replacing the DOS core in 95/98/ME with NT)... I don't see why they can't do a parallel track again, introducing it first to business then gradually pumping it to home use. In an objective business SOB sort of way, there's plenty of BSD-licensed drivers and kernels to rip off legally and incorporate. Yes OSX did the same, but they had just as much hostility to overcome among the Mac developer community as they had involvement (ferinstance, Adobe still has a lot of products that they refused to port over from MacOS). That's why I think that MSFT may not have (yet) squandered their chance - they still have the dough, and they have enough inertia to basically force what they need done... done. Even if gradually.
Now whether or not it would be as high a quality? Not sure... but zealotry aside, they never really shot for quality anyway - they've always strove for usability as their prime goal, filling in the potholes as they could.
Sibling is correct that XP is pretty much what most folks want out of a computer... but then, so was Windows 98. Time has a way of making things obsolete, and the NT microkernel can only take so much change in the industry at large. We're already seeing the stress and strain now w/ Vista's bloat and higher hardware demands. Those two factors will only get worse until/unless MSFT can get in there and re-work things from the ground up.
Sibling is also correct that the individual programmers have skill, but the caveat is that the management does not. Their 'vision' is blurred - abut as much as my physical vision sans contact lenses (it's fairly functional at extremely close range - lousy at distance).
IMHO, they have enough inertia and presence now, that this design cycle can be their chance to pull it off - but I suspect that it would be their last, best chance to do it.
please find me any 2 month period in linux over the past 4 years that has not had a kernel patch? if there are any such periods they are few and far between.
You forget - Linux/BSD kernel patches aren't usually of the big, bad, necessary "oh-shit-we-better-patch-else-we'll-get-pwned" type, unlike, oh, Win2k. I can actually check the release notes and decide whether or not to bother, or simply wait until it affects either security or what I do/want-to-do. Win2k (and even Win2k3 to a large extent) doesn't have that luxury.
Speakin' of ignorance my dear AC, you forget that patching Apache and/or PHP doesn't require a reboot, and as Apache itself is quite stable, it's even rarer that one would require pushing a HUP on the daemon.
Who will HP pick? Madriva or Fedora maybe. If I were HP (I'm only a shareholder), I'd go with Centos and target the enterprise. Fedora (my personal favorite) moves too quickly for that environment.
Yup, it's true. And they all run BSD too. Look a bit further down the list and you'll see Windows battling it out with IRIX (plus a couple of Windows installs in the very high places).
Okay - but there's a problem with this listing being taken as gospel, especially with Windows. If you were running a single Win2k box (see #8 on the list) for more than a month or two without rebooting, you obviously haven't been patching jack shit on it, let alone for over four years straight, so obviously we have something else in play here...
Between clustering and load-balancing, there's little wonder that we see a Windows box claiming four-plus years of continuous uptime (which IMHO is sheer bullshit if that single Win2k site were a single box, as it would've been pwned ages ago).
That, and a quick check of "http://fp002.crayfish.net/" (the Win2k box) shows this:
[{me}@eschaton ~]$ wget http://fp002.crayfish.net/
--08:45:41-- http://fp002.crayfish.net/
=> `index.html'
Resolving fp002.crayfish.net... 210.172.136.46
Connecting to fp002.crayfish.net|210.172.136.46|:80...failed: Connection timed out.
Retrying.
--08:48:54-- http://fp002.crayfish.net/
(try: 2) => `index.html'
Connecting to fp002.crayfish.net|210.172.136.46|:80...
(....long, long wait until eventual timeout...)
-and the domain name "crayfish.net" has no records according to the timeout on firefox as well - for a website that was supposedly still up and running "in the past 7 days".
So, I'm guessing either it's uptime is either being gamed to coincide with sampling, or (more likely) something's broke @ Netcraft.
I guess he's no longer best known for being a SCO supporting paided{sic} shill.
Actually, given who it turned out to be, the motives and biases are rather clear in hindsight. I'm almost willing to bet that Steve Ballmer wasn't among the "other CEO voices" Mr. Lyons tried out...
But then, maybe it was a means for ol' Dan to get out his juvenile side?
I dunno - this is starting to sound too much like a flamebait -ish pack of conspiracy theories. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was funny here and there - but seeing who's behind it makes me wonder if it wasn't just a larger propaganda campaign on Lyons' part.
As a fairly passionate Titanophile, I've read a TON of accounts of how the media of the time (in 1912, y'all) did all kinds of crazy shit just to get an exclusive. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the guy who invented wireless radio, haggled with a fairly rabid pack of newspapers - just to rake in a shedload of money for an exclusive story from the one surviving Wireless Operator (one Harold McBride). The whole "guy wearing a dress" thing is credibly rumored to have come from a snubbed reporter - who was pissed at an exhausted survivor that told him to bugger off and let him sleep. Before the Carpathia (the ship that picked-up all of Titanic's survivors) even got fully into New York's harbors, boats loaded with reporters tried to clamber aboard the ship.
This is just a small set of examples among a shedload... and back then, little things like libel and fact weren't really that much of an obstacle set, so long as the headlines sold the paper that day.
"religion" as in: a belief system that represents a fundamental part of being human. Since when is that an agreeable definition of religion? By the way, astrology is religion so there is a direct correlation between the stupidness of the two.
It is merely a rough benchmark of what I was referring to, so as to avoid miscommunication.
It could be considered a religion (and yet at the same time it tends to be practiced across most, if not all religions).
That said, calling it (or even religion) "stupid" would be roughly as apt as calling music in general "stupid", or visual artwork in general "stupid". Just because you or I may not think it to our taste or sensibilities, does not mean that others should automatically follow suit.
The only stupidity in the whole affair is thinking oneself superior in dismissing any obviously subjective belief system as, well... "stupid". IT's far easier to leave well enough alone than to look like you're playing the snob card, no?
Also, while it's true that astrology is an antecedent of much of modern science, it's also true that cave painting was a forerunner to Rembrandt. Most of humanity has made substantial intellectual progress over the intervening time. ...and yet there are still technical/modern equivalents of cave paintings that still sell for quite a lot of money... and receive highly-rated reviews by much of what comprises the art world. *shrug*. Besides, attempts to correlate past events with a cyclic variable, then trying to predict future occurrences based on the projections generated from those correlations? Well, it certainly isn't going to hurt anybody, and if computer modeling concerning Global Warming is any indication, the accuracy is about the same (e.g.: "crap") when you have so many assumptions that you're stuck working with. Granted that with time, climatology can improve and refine enough to eliminate most assumptions, but them's the breaks - and the process of correlation-to-prediction does have a source, no?
If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.
- David Hilbert
Considering that astrology was chief among those ancient endeavors that brought a whole raft of sciences into existence over time, I wouldn't be so quick to call it stupid.
Misguided, perhaps. Base one's life on it? Personal choice... I'll take mine with a block of salt, thanks. Harmless? Certainly in and of itself. Stupid? No, not any more than religion would be considered stupid (before the atheists pipe up, "religion" as in: a belief system that represents a fundamental part of being human.)
Actually, what we really need is centerfold models wrapped in nothing but Cat-6e cable, ads for ladies' underthings while they prance about in a server room, etc etc...
Okay, okay. Before you start thinking "that was pretty fscking easy to predict you perv!", that's not what I meant.
Women, like men, are driven by what they feel to be the socially-accepted ideal. I say this for fear of generalizing, but IMHO women tend to be more influenced by these then guys are, especially teenaged girls who are constantly striving for what is apparently the societal idea of "hot". This is done to attract the opposite sex, lord it over their peers, etc etc etc.
If brains (or at least the perception thereof) is pushed as the 'sexy' thing, and Madison Avenue subtly pushes Nerd Chic as advertisements, then it does two things - first, if encourages young girls and women to get their intelligence on, and pursue the careers that require serious brainpower. Second, it'll be perfectly applauded by nearly every women's group alive (well, not the part about a nude hottie draped suggestively over a tape library, but in all the other stuff).
As a corollary, it'll subtly push the even dumber gender (that's us, campers) to start thinking that they have to get some intelligence in order to attract women (as opposed to the current base requirement of a ripped body complete with six-pack abdomen, an expensive car, and/or a ginormous bank account).
While the changes would be too slow to do anything for those geeks at or around my age (or those already married, like I'm about to be), it's the least we can do for all the little nerdlets out there getting shoved around in elementary/primary school today.
No, "everyone else" doesn't care because whenever their PC's implode due to the sort of crap using programs like msword causes, they just bring them over to my house so I can clean them up for free. Let's just say that among other things, we are all tired of cleaning up after other people's unwillingess to put as much thought into their Computer purchasing decisions as they might put into deciding which detergent to buy.
That's why I started charging $50/hr half a decade ago for any Windows-based tech support -- unless the machine runs Linux, OSX, or *BSD, at which point I do it gratis. I also happily take trades in labor (perfect example: if an auto mechanic friend of mine gets a busted PC, I'm getting a new clutch install in my Jeep out of the deal. He still runs Win2k, so this won't be too long of a wait... I can be patient).
I figure if enough of us do the same, we'll either be swimming in cash, spreading alternative OSes, we get a lot of neat stuff done around the house, or there will be no one to bother us on our free time with such nasty requests.
I didn't realize it was impossible to archive the programs used to read the files as well. I'll make sure to go home and destroy my old copies of Office 4.0, Office 97, and Office 2000. Thanks for the heads up!
It is certainly possible to archive the apps along with the docs, but tell me: How easy is it to load and read a very early Word Perfect doc on a new Core Duo running Vista these days? Word Perfect was/is an abundant format, but app versions of WP earlier than 5.1 is going to be a real joy to load and run. Now let's start delving into the really obscure stuff... as time passes, hardware will slowly become incompatible. Apps in turn will rely on OSes which will become wildly incompatible (anyone try to install Windows 3.0 on something built recently? It can't be fun).
I doubt it will get any easier as time passes.
Point is, over time even the apps that a proprietary format gets chained to will become rather useless. This means you have only one choice: build something that reads it, given whatever published standards of the time can be located. Good luck if those specs are buried or highly obscure due to their being a company trade secret.
Meh - NetBackup (albeit a Veritas-made product) is fairly useful. Not as straightforward and flexible as Bacula, but still fairly useful.
OTOH, their documentation layout and support doc search function... is fucking atrocious. I'd have an easier time trying to find a legal-aged virgin in New York City than in getting even the basic stuff to come up, and if I hadn't stumbled on their FTP server, I think I'd still be in there looking for Maintenance Packs.
Urgh. If they desire to fix something that bad, they can start there.
She still gets her day in court, and a judge and/or jury will determine the punishment. She will probably get a slap on the wrist.
...and a record that will hamper her future career potential. And if it's a felony, she'll likely lose the right to vote, as does every other convicted felon.
Not exactly easy to just walk away unharmed anymore, is it?
All because some semi-anonymous jackass with petty authority and a sense of hyper self-importance had lost all sense of proportion and decided to call the cops.
Fsck that. I haven't been inside a movie theater in well over three years, and now I have one more reason to not want to go. Nope - I don't pirate; it's easier to rent/buy a movie and kick back on the couch w/ friends, than to bother w/ the BS that most movie theaters make you put up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob Nardelli ran Home Depot into the ground, got more than $260 million dollars for walking out and now runs Chrysler
You see, now he is an experienced CEO
True, but Home Depot still, well... exists.
Meanwhile, I get the feeling that there's gonna be a largish smoldering crater in Lindon, Utah where SCOX HQ once stood.
There will be a list of creditors at SCO's Chapter 7 proceedings.
Pick one?
Otherwise, they'll just move on to another company, to do mostly the same.
Shit, Darl & co. would be lucky to get jobs as janitors in the Tech Industry, let alone anything of any consequence or responsibility. They're pretty much as attractive as a 600lb woman suffering from Tourettes' Syndrome and downing Mezcal by the case.
(well, Maybe Microsoft's hiring or something, but...)
When Darl McBride's impaled body finally rots off the pike planted in front of the Linux Foundation (OSDL)?
You'd be amazed; I bought a house less than two months ago. That said, I didn't rely on a stupid flash animation on a site that had nothing to do with houses to guide my decisions as to which lender I went with.
As it is, 3D/CG hobbyist tools aren't expensive at all nowadays; between Free* Software (e.g. Blender, POV-Ray, DAZ|Studio, Bryce, GIMP), low-cost creation, compositing, render, and workflow tools (Vue d'Esprit, Carrara, Poser, Silo, Rhino, etc), and relatively cheap entry-level points for high-end tools (Maya PLE, Modo, 3D Studio VIZ, etc)? I daresay that I spend less per year on 3D tools and occasional content than the average slashdotter spends on consoles and games. The most expensive bit in my little hobby was the $2000 Power Mac Dual G5 I bought in 2004, which keeps up quite happily, and can be expected to do so for at least the next 2-3 years.
It's actually a lot more affordable (and a whole lot more flexible and powerful) than the half-working bug-laden crap we were all stuck with in 2001, trust me.
*"Free" as in speech and/or beer.
Why stop at 50? w/ an unlimited data plan and an appetite for walking-as-exercise, I can blast out thousands of hits per minute that get read by /dev/null as I stroll around downtown... a bicycle and a portable charger can increase the damage almost exponentially.
(besides, it'd be kinda funny to watch some market-prioritied corporation actually pay someone to let me use their bathroom or something w/o buying a thing. Plus, I can use it as a guide to which stores I'd rather avoid spending money at. :) )
Sure - Disney and lots of smaller outfits have phones that do exactly that - so that parents can track their kids' whereabouts at all times, remotely.
Kinda creepy that corporations want to treat adults in the same manner, ne?
Okay... here's some small tips that may help:
In short, there are a ton of ways to make your advertising revenue work for you (as a business) and at the same time not have to resort to some bullshit intrusion that only adds bloat and inconvenience to the user's equipment and resources.
Both nations mentioned up there also have legally-sanctioned reactions against such terrorist groups - means that make Guantanamo seem like the near-summer-camp that it is. Usually these are performed without such obstacles as due process and/or trial. Part of the reason such activities remain low-key is because the penalty for screwing with either government in such a manner is usually fatal, and not just to the perpetrator(s).
Should we adopt their methods, perhaps?
Now whether or not it would be as high a quality? Not sure... but zealotry aside, they never really shot for quality anyway - they've always strove for usability as their prime goal, filling in the potholes as they could.
Sibling is correct that XP is pretty much what most folks want out of a computer... but then, so was Windows 98. Time has a way of making things obsolete, and the NT microkernel can only take so much change in the industry at large. We're already seeing the stress and strain now w/ Vista's bloat and higher hardware demands. Those two factors will only get worse until/unless MSFT can get in there and re-work things from the ground up.
Sibling is also correct that the individual programmers have skill, but the caveat is that the management does not. Their 'vision' is blurred - abut as much as my physical vision sans contact lenses (it's fairly functional at extremely close range - lousy at distance).
IMHO, they have enough inertia and presence now, that this design cycle can be their chance to pull it off - but I suspect that it would be their last, best chance to do it.
You forget - Linux/BSD kernel patches aren't usually of the big, bad, necessary "oh-shit-we-better-patch-else-we'll-get-pwned" type, unlike, oh, Win2k. I can actually check the release notes and decide whether or not to bother, or simply wait until it affects either security or what I do/want-to-do. Win2k (and even Win2k3 to a large extent) doesn't have that luxury.
Speakin' of ignorance my dear AC, you forget that patching Apache and/or PHP doesn't require a reboot, and as Apache itself is quite stable, it's even rarer that one would require pushing a HUP on the daemon.
Nice try on your part, though... try again?
RHEL don't ;)
Resources, they had more than enough of. Now things like Skill, Insight, Innovation (the real kind), Design Acumen... those were what they lacked.
IMHO, they also lacked the cojones to tear the guts out of the thing and start from scratch, a'la OSX.
Okay - but there's a problem with this listing being taken as gospel, especially with Windows. If you were running a single Win2k box (see #8 on the list) for more than a month or two without rebooting, you obviously haven't been patching jack shit on it, let alone for over four years straight, so obviously we have something else in play here...
Between clustering and load-balancing, there's little wonder that we see a Windows box claiming four-plus years of continuous uptime (which IMHO is sheer bullshit if that single Win2k site were a single box, as it would've been pwned ages ago).
That, and a quick check of "http://fp002.crayfish.net/" (the Win2k box) shows this:
[{me}@eschaton ~]$ wget http://fp002.crayfish.net/
--08:45:41-- http://fp002.crayfish.net/
=> `index.html'
Resolving fp002.crayfish.net... 210.172.136.46
Connecting to fp002.crayfish.net|210.172.136.46|:80...failed: Connection timed out.
Retrying.
--08:48:54-- http://fp002.crayfish.net/
(try: 2) => `index.html'
Connecting to fp002.crayfish.net|210.172.136.46|:80...
(....long, long wait until eventual timeout...)
-and the domain name "crayfish.net" has no records according to the timeout on firefox as well - for a website that was supposedly still up and running "in the past 7 days".
So, I'm guessing either it's uptime is either being gamed to coincide with sampling, or (more likely) something's broke @ Netcraft.
Actually, given who it turned out to be, the motives and biases are rather clear in hindsight. I'm almost willing to bet that Steve Ballmer wasn't among the "other CEO voices" Mr. Lyons tried out...
But then, maybe it was a means for ol' Dan to get out his juvenile side?
I dunno - this is starting to sound too much like a flamebait -ish pack of conspiracy theories. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was funny here and there - but seeing who's behind it makes me wonder if it wasn't just a larger propaganda campaign on Lyons' part.
As a fairly passionate Titanophile, I've read a TON of accounts of how the media of the time (in 1912, y'all) did all kinds of crazy shit just to get an exclusive. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the guy who invented wireless radio, haggled with a fairly rabid pack of newspapers - just to rake in a shedload of money for an exclusive story from the one surviving Wireless Operator (one Harold McBride). The whole "guy wearing a dress" thing is credibly rumored to have come from a snubbed reporter - who was pissed at an exhausted survivor that told him to bugger off and let him sleep. Before the Carpathia (the ship that picked-up all of Titanic's survivors) even got fully into New York's harbors, boats loaded with reporters tried to clamber aboard the ship.
This is just a small set of examples among a shedload... and back then, little things like libel and fact weren't really that much of an obstacle set, so long as the headlines sold the paper that day.
It is merely a rough benchmark of what I was referring to, so as to avoid miscommunication.
It could be considered a religion (and yet at the same time it tends to be practiced across most, if not all religions).
That said, calling it (or even religion) "stupid" would be roughly as apt as calling music in general "stupid", or visual artwork in general "stupid". Just because you or I may not think it to our taste or sensibilities, does not mean that others should automatically follow suit.
The only stupidity in the whole affair is thinking oneself superior in dismissing any obviously subjective belief system as, well... "stupid". IT's far easier to leave well enough alone than to look like you're playing the snob card, no?
Also, while it's true that astrology is an antecedent of much of modern science, it's also true that cave painting was a forerunner to Rembrandt. Most of humanity has made substantial intellectual progress over the intervening time. ...and yet there are still technical/modern equivalents of cave paintings that still sell for quite a lot of money... and receive highly-rated reviews by much of what comprises the art world. *shrug*. Besides, attempts to correlate past events with a cyclic variable, then trying to predict future occurrences based on the projections generated from those correlations? Well, it certainly isn't going to hurt anybody, and if computer modeling concerning Global Warming is any indication, the accuracy is about the same (e.g.: "crap") when you have so many assumptions that you're stuck working with. Granted that with time, climatology can improve and refine enough to eliminate most assumptions, but them's the breaks - and the process of correlation-to-prediction does have a source, no?Considering that astrology was chief among those ancient endeavors that brought a whole raft of sciences into existence over time, I wouldn't be so quick to call it stupid.
Misguided, perhaps. Base one's life on it? Personal choice... I'll take mine with a block of salt, thanks. Harmless? Certainly in and of itself. Stupid? No, not any more than religion would be considered stupid (before the atheists pipe up, "religion" as in: a belief system that represents a fundamental part of being human.)
Okay, okay. Before you start thinking "that was pretty fscking easy to predict you perv!", that's not what I meant.
Women, like men, are driven by what they feel to be the socially-accepted ideal. I say this for fear of generalizing, but IMHO women tend to be more influenced by these then guys are, especially teenaged girls who are constantly striving for what is apparently the societal idea of "hot". This is done to attract the opposite sex, lord it over their peers, etc etc etc.
If brains (or at least the perception thereof) is pushed as the 'sexy' thing, and Madison Avenue subtly pushes Nerd Chic as advertisements, then it does two things - first, if encourages young girls and women to get their intelligence on, and pursue the careers that require serious brainpower. Second, it'll be perfectly applauded by nearly every women's group alive (well, not the part about a nude hottie draped suggestively over a tape library, but in all the other stuff).
As a corollary, it'll subtly push the even dumber gender (that's us, campers) to start thinking that they have to get some intelligence in order to attract women (as opposed to the current base requirement of a ripped body complete with six-pack abdomen, an expensive car, and/or a ginormous bank account).
While the changes would be too slow to do anything for those geeks at or around my age (or those already married, like I'm about to be), it's the least we can do for all the little nerdlets out there getting shoved around in elementary/primary school today.
Math is hard!
That's why I started charging $50/hr half a decade ago for any Windows-based tech support -- unless the machine runs Linux, OSX, or *BSD, at which point I do it gratis. I also happily take trades in labor (perfect example: if an auto mechanic friend of mine gets a busted PC, I'm getting a new clutch install in my Jeep out of the deal. He still runs Win2k, so this won't be too long of a wait... I can be patient).
I figure if enough of us do the same, we'll either be swimming in cash, spreading alternative OSes, we get a lot of neat stuff done around the house, or there will be no one to bother us on our free time with such nasty requests.
It is certainly possible to archive the apps along with the docs, but tell me: How easy is it to load and read a very early Word Perfect doc on a new Core Duo running Vista these days? Word Perfect was/is an abundant format, but app versions of WP earlier than 5.1 is going to be a real joy to load and run. Now let's start delving into the really obscure stuff... as time passes, hardware will slowly become incompatible. Apps in turn will rely on OSes which will become wildly incompatible (anyone try to install Windows 3.0 on something built recently? It can't be fun).
I doubt it will get any easier as time passes.
Point is, over time even the apps that a proprietary format gets chained to will become rather useless. This means you have only one choice: build something that reads it, given whatever published standards of the time can be located. Good luck if those specs are buried or highly obscure due to their being a company trade secret.
Yes, but will they port Duke Nukem' Forever to it?
OTOH, their documentation layout and support doc search function... is fucking atrocious. I'd have an easier time trying to find a legal-aged virgin in New York City than in getting even the basic stuff to come up, and if I hadn't stumbled on their FTP server, I think I'd still be in there looking for Maintenance Packs.
Urgh. If they desire to fix something that bad, they can start there.
Not exactly easy to just walk away unharmed anymore, is it?
All because some semi-anonymous jackass with petty authority and a sense of hyper self-importance had lost all sense of proportion and decided to call the cops.
Fsck that. I haven't been inside a movie theater in well over three years, and now I have one more reason to not want to go. Nope - I don't pirate; it's easier to rent/buy a movie and kick back on the couch w/ friends, than to bother w/ the BS that most movie theaters make you put up with.