Well, to be fair, a far larger number of companies have had very lucrative and stable relationships with MS than the converse.
...the major hardware OEMs Compaq, Dell, Gateway and all of the other hundreds of thousands of people around the world who've carved quite a decent living out of the MS umbrella of industry.
Check your recent history a bit closer. As the Microsoft Anit-trust battle started heating up, more and more whispers of discontent could be heard from the otherwise closely closed ranks of Microsoft and its allies. Lucrative? Perhapse. Stable? It would seem unlikely.
Must I remind you that making a profit is the aim of a company?
Whenever abuse of corporate power is mentioned on Slashdot (whether it include Microsoft as the prime subject or not:), this kind of line often shows up somewhere. Its a gem. Apparently there is no moral limit to one's actions as long as "profit" is the ultimate motive.
It might suprise some Slashdot readers to find that monetary success isn't an antithesis to Slashdot popularity. The technology industry is full of corporate giants with deep pockets and little critical focus (can't please everyone) by Slashdot readers. Take Cisco Systems and an example.
Heck, don't expect anything short of a diplomatic incident to change the FBI's mind... they're officers of the law, who's job it is to gather cases against those who break the law.
You are completely right on that statement.
Through chance, one of my old coworkers was an ex-FBI agent who had been investigating Phil Zimmerman over the PGP case. This lead to a really interesting conversation about the moral issues of the law and the case and technology in general (to include observations of how child molesters - an area she later became involved with - used PGP to hide evidense). I was intersted in her view and she was rather suprised and interested in the opinions and ideas the community had on the case.
One of the final statements in the conversation was that, no matter where the moral issues were, the law was the law. Phil had broken it and the agents HAD him. She was actually a bit disappointed the case hadn't gone forward.
Whether or not we agree with their reasoning, (and I do NOT), I hope the industry takes notice at how problems can be solved without resorting to bully tactics.
Interesting observation. Lets extend this idea to a classical "bully" definition.
I go around the school yard and threaten to beat up little kids unless they do what I want. By this rational, I'm not a bully until I actually hit someone. The agreement that the little kid gives me their milk money and in turn I won't put my fist in to their face - well, that's just rational thought.
This round of discussion sponsored by Microsoft has some interesting points, sure (BSDguy: "See man, this is the kind of FREEDOM the BSD license talks about." GPLguy: "See man, this is the kind of THEFT the GPL protects the community from.") But ultimately you have to ask - does Microsoft (and its leading personalities) really care about the GPL?
You can be sure that Microsoft isn't doing the business community a public service. They're not standing up to ring the klaxon to warn their peers of the dangers lurking hidden ahead. The GPL means little to them. Except that its a convenient pawn. A handle. A toe-hold. A way to attack the amorphous phenomenon that is Linux.
We've always said you can't attack Linux like the usual corporate entity. Microsoft knows this. And so they've changed their methods; they attack the concepts that are available with all the usual Microsoft tenacity.
If the GPL is just a pawn - what is the real game about? Cnet (all bashing aside) has an interesting writeup (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6291224.html ?tag=rltdnws). Its all.NET.
To make Microsoft's biggest, most aggressive gamble in its history (or at least what industry analysts like to portray it as) pay off - its going to take Windows servers. Sure, Microsoft will play the "compatibility" card and offer some.NET services on competing platforms. There's even noise about Linux being included. But dollars to donuts, in true Microsoft fashion, the full feature set... all the bells and glossy-pamphlet-gushing whistles will only live within Win2K servers.
Increased popularity in Linux (and *BSD - go, team, go) does not help generate the homogeneous Windows environment that'll make.NET a winner. Open source OS' are also providing an escape route from Microsoft's recent pricing squeezes (also mentioned in the referenced article). Sure, Microsoft may have nobody else but themselves to blame for that. But if you look at their motives a bit closer, you'll see its not marketing dollars they're after but a forced upgrade to technology that closer ties to.NET. The fact that this same squeezing makes *BSD and Linux more attractive is just an ugly side effect. It is also a route that they plan to cut off with smoke and mirrors.
So as a community, the Open Source folk can pat themselves on the back. We've arrived - we're a gen-u-ine threat. A big one. And for all the right reasons (functionality, freedom, etc, etc). But that just means the game now involves higher stakes.
Individual community members can argue / jihad over the finer points of licensing (and whatever will be Microsoft's next move on the board). But eventually all that'll get you is a square and a pawn. If we don't look up from the board once in awhile, we're going to miss the fact that we've been maneuvered out of the game entirely.
Well, isn't the real definition of a blockbuster a movie that's awful and people still pay tons of money to go to it and buy related merchandise?
I'm sitting at the dr's office with time to kill. I pick up some celeb magazine that features an interview with Jolie. The magazine sets the stage - why Jolie faces a huge challenge tackling one of Hollywood's most ambitious movies. Why so ambitious? Is it a unique story? Is it thrashing against social taboos? Does it push the border of movie technology? No. Its becaues Tomb Raider is the most commercialized movie of its kind - with product tie-ins to an impressive shopping list of high-profile companies and products.
Ambitious indeed.
The article has pushed to my conciousness a realization. I have a confession to make. I take guilty pleasure at seeing critics rip this movie apart. I WANT it to fail. Badly.
Its not Angelina Jolie. Its not the idea of taking a game and trying to stretch the premise into a full feature movie. Its that they're trying to wrap sex, gamer culture, and special effects around an extended commercial and glaze it with the usual "blockbuster must-see" Hollywood hype. Its a bitter pill to swallow. A horse pill, at that.
Yes, I know this is Malda's site. Yes, I know that gives him "creative" rights to do whatever he wants. But come on. Butting in on someone else's review? Ugh.
I can see the point - but the criticism is really how Malda introduced his review. There was no need to refer to it as "butting in".
Slashdot has had multiple reviewers on a single subject - be it movies or books, if I remember right. And the reviewers have had conflicting opinions before. There's already precident for that kind of thing.
What's different this time is the method of introducing the second review. No reason to be all heavy-handed with it. Even if you're just trolling the "slashdot has gone downhill / malda has no journalistic integrety" crowd.:)
You want companies to support Linux? Then there has to be standardization:
The idea of standardization in itself seems sound enough. Standard libraries. Standard file conventions. And all the other standardized environments that makes an OS nice and predictable. But let's not fool ourselves; standardization is no holy grail. Even within "standardized" environments (Microsoft proudly puts forth Windows as a prime example), support is expensive and often difficult.
The window manager, only part of a GUI environment for Linux, has little to do with it. Take a look at what KDE, GNOME, and other toolkits offer. There are common conventions amoung them. Often very simular conventions to Windows, as well as other OS' GUIs.
"Standardization" as a point of weakness in Linux is a red herring. There is already Linux commercial software that doesn't seem to have these issues with standards - StarOffice, Real Player, and Adobe Acrobat Reader as examples. Furthermore, when a company decides it wants to go down the path of "support", they tend to pick a distribution. RedHat seems to be the most popular. Does that mean my Mandrake, Suse, or Debian distro won't run the software? No - but the hack is mine to make and the company doesn't have to spin support cycles on my stuburness.
4. Stop competing with every company that releases a commercial linux product. If a company invests 5 man-years creating an innovative commercial product for Linux, within six months of its release, there will be a GPL copycat program to perform the same function for free.
The only reason this would seem to have merrit is because IT business types often have a hard time understanding the political issues of Open Source (and/or Free) software. The fact that someone would develop competing Free/free software confuses them. That is - unless locking a market and eventual profit is the motive.
Its not unheard of for competing products being developed - for a cost. The software industry is littered with companies that were, at one point, innovative in their field. They put out a product that broke new ground. And then the competition took notice and developed competing products. And either because of more savvy marketing, faster innovation, or cost cutting won, leaving the origional innovator an irrevelent part of industry history.
Sometimes that competition came from the very vendor of the same OS the ground-breaking software was developed, and marketed, towards.
That's usually referred to as "competition". One person has even been noted for calling it "innovation".
What's most interesting about this discussion is that it shows that people are now turning to perfect strangers in how to parent, that most intimate of activities. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing. The action itself isn't harmful, but it does indicate that traditional channels of support for parents are disappearing.
I asked my grandparents for their learned, sage advice on this situation. They looked at me odd and asked "is this one of those computer things you do?"
So I went to my parents. They're cheating a bit. My kid sister is only 4 years older than my own daughter, so they're forced to deal with some of the same current issues. Their solution? "AOL Parent Controls".
There are some areas where traditional support models just don't work. Seeking advice of one's peers is certainly appropriate here.
I got the impression that the whole article was a chance to dig at Russian space control.
From the article:
Given Russian Mission Control's combativeness, the table became "a stealth project," according to Shepherd, a 51-year-old Navy captain.
This is not the first time American astronauts have noted... friction... with Russian Mission Control. Dig around a bit. It might be American-centric media. But then, it might just be Russian Mission Control.
One month into their 41/2-month mission, Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev began building the table out of aluminum frames that had held solid-fuel oxygen generators, as well as struts and pieces of angled aluminum. The men drilled holes, bolted the pieces together, covered the top with duct tape and, after weeks of working on it a bit at a time, finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work.
Ransom Love is always fun to track in the news. He jumps in to the fray with the enthusiasm of a dog chasing its tail.
ZDNet's reporter, Mary Jo Foley, notes that in line with Microsoft's recent critism:
Caldera has some similar misgivings -- not about the GPL model being the optimal one for open-source development, but about how appropriate the GPL is for open-source software that is sold commercially, Love acknowledged.
Then we go on with:
Caldera is "seriously looking at and considering different licensing models," he said. Caldera is considering BSD and "other licensing models" that "would be truly open source but still allow folks to influence the (development) process," Love added.
Down with the GPL? Well... kinda... not really:
"We would back the GPL as the preferred development-model license," Love said, "but we would back different models for other purposes." At the same time, Love explained, "we would continue to develop and publicly license pieces of technology under the GPL."
Spin, Ransom, spin. You might not ever get that tail, but you're making a lot of noise and putting on a fine show. ZDNet's reporters, with all the technical calibre of Dog Fancy Magazine, must surely appreciate the effort.
And people like to pretend, probably because they enjoy porn and violence, that it doesn't harm people, but anyone who can seriously believe this is quite frankly mad.
Apparently, its just a matter of time before I'm snatched off the street and tossed in to a padded room.
I've had access to erotica and pornography for quite some time. Granted - back in MY day, we didn't have this fancy-smancy internet to click-click for porn. We had to sneak MAGAZINES. But later I got into the BBS scene and eventually stumbled on content of a more adult nature than computer discussions and game software. It doesn't hold a candle to today's high quality stills and Divx movie caps... but it was something for its time.
Nudity and sex wasn't the only thing I managed to find. I made a fair collection of bomb making information. It ranged from the idiotic to some rather interesting and complex formulas. But it was all forbidden knowledge and I had a regular arsenal of it.
I also played video games. Lots of them. Days lost at the local arcade. I played computer games. Lots of those. What the game lacked in visual carnage, I made up in gleefull attempts to rack up more kills.
I played role playing games - lots of those, too. And the grand-daddy of them was Dungeons and Dragons. My grandparents sent concerned letters to my parents chock full of literature from their church warning of the psychopath I was becoming by being exposed to such filth. My parents were concerned. I rolled my eyes and played away.
I had an interest in "gun games". Despite my parent's best attempts to wean me away from any interest in guns... I still found them interesting. I played war games. I organized games of Assasin at my high school. Photon was simply amazing.
I was also a target for ridicule in high school. And I was none too happy with my experience there.
All this has not caused me to lash out in violence of any sort.
Today, I still watch porn (occasionally with my wife). I play video games - to include the violent FPS games that are so popular. I play online RPGs. I play dice-and-paper RPGs. I do both (openrpg.com). I play paintball. I find firearms facinating... though I don't own any.
I am now a husband, a father, and a career professional. I've served in the US military, and I'm a stable citizen in civilian life.
I failed to blow up anything or go on a shooting spree. I forget to treat women as sexual objects. You'll have to forgive me if I've failed to live up to my "conditioning".
People do destructive things. I've known a few in my life. But the vice is often just a symptom of a greater problem.
Actually, a less Slashdot-ish spin on this might be "Microsoft to add support for MP3 encoding to Windows XP".
Sure. If you're generating spin for Microsoft.
Take a look at your own quote. "Under Microsoft's new restrictions... MP3 music 'sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater'..."
. Your point-and-click newbie user will not know that the reason they can't get their music to sound good using "MP3" is because Microsoft's default software is hobbled to specifically generate a poor recording. This is not support for a format, but a bait-and-switch. And you know it.
The sad part here is not the low quality of this troll, but the fact that there are people who will honestly believe this garbage. David Farber was right.
"The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed, and Microsoft and RealNetworks don't want it pushed. The consumer is going to eat what he's given," says David Farber, the former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission.
ok, reading news, whatever, etc, is great on the web, but as it has been discussed w/webpads, it is not a great way to read an entire book.. Sure you can print it out, but that reminds me too much of reading research material for 20 page papers..
OK... so to rehash the usual discussion each time the subject of electronic text rears its head (just in case somebody is new to the discussion:)...
I have no problems reading electronic text. I've read quite a few novels via my old Palm Pilot Pro. The only hassles I deal with is occasionally having to reformat the text so its comfortable on the Pilot and dealing with the Pilot Pro's limited memory (which means creating multiple doc files and shuffling out the old for new to keep up with where I am in the story).
I have been suprised to find that I have no problems with the interface. I find myself just as immersed in the text as when I read a traditional paperback book. It is easier to carry the novel around and read it at oportune times. And, as a bonus, I get a book light for reading when it gets dark.
Others report having a hard time reading with this format. Usually the complaints center on the readability of the text rather than the reading tools themselves. After all, the Pilot wasn't designed as an electronic book - so its no suprise that some find the experience unsuitable.
Does that mean the end of paper books? I hope not.
I still like traditional books. There is still something about the experience of a book that can't be replaced by a glossy electronic device. And I like to have my book shelves populated by my favorite works - quite often hard cover copies of series that I particularly liked. Again, its not the same as a directory of file names... even if you do something Nautilus-like with a nice cover art icon.
I would love to buy a book and be able to slip out the included CDROM to load up my Pilot before placing the book in my library. But I suspect publishers would have little incentive to do this. Instead, I suspect the model would be something along the lines of buying hard cover books for my library and (hopefully) a reduced fee to download the electronic text.
This wouldn't be the end of the paper book. But paperbacks may become the casualty in this arangement.
Its a nice little unit, but what is their target market? Aside from geeks, who is going to buy one of these instead of the more standardized palm or wince device?
That was my initial reaction. What a small market to target. And while I think that still has merrit, another bit of history dawns on me.
The Palm Pilot was the first widely successful PDA device (despite the merrits Newton fans like to point out).
Palm didn't spring up in the executive board room. Sure, Palm's own glossy pamphlets showed two business types setting up a meeting on a golf course. But that audience was slow in picking up the devices. Early on, there was strong support from third party developers, tinkerers, and hackers. Geeks.
The Palm device was the geek status symbol. If you were a tech-head, you HAD to get one. Everybody was doing cool, odd things with them. Oh. And while you had it - wow... it WAS usefull for notes and keeping appointments and other mundane activities. But have you seen the cool tricorder simulator? How about that RISK game that makes those meetings you're now remembering to attend actually bearable?
So Agenda might be targeted towards the geek crowd. But then... that might be the right place to start.
Palm's initial design was right. But it was third party developers that made the device fill in niche markets and become indispensible.
It will be interesting to see if Agenda has designed the right platform. And it will be interesting to see if developers (read: hackers) will fix anything Agenda is lacking.
Something tells me this guy wasn't from the USA. Maybe AU? Great stereotyping, though.
Hey... thanks. Stereotyping is hard work. Its also, on rare occasion, a reflection of reality. "If the shoe fits, wear it" and all that.
Sure... the poster didn't mention where he was posting from, so one can't be sure if his post is a reflection of the USA. And I agree, the ratings he mentioned might indicate a different country (or it might indicate the poster just doesn't know what those ratings mean).
But. I live in the USA. And my post is certainly based on the American culture I've observed. Stereotype or not.
Anyone can generate their own SSL certificate, but what assurance does the customer have that you are who you say you are. It doesn't much matter if your transactions are done securely if they aren't go to a legitimate company.
...
The have already done the footwork to ensure that the company you are dealing with is legitimate and not just some scam artist looking to collect credit card numbers.
The implication here is that if a company has a Verisign certificate, there is some kind of certification of their business practices. This is a misconception.
The use of the word "legitimate" in this case refers to the identity of the organization who have recieved the certificate. Verisign has gone to some length to verify that the certificate has been issued to the correct organization. So sure, Versign will ensure that the certificat they issue to Visa is actually being isued to Visa and not some Joe Scamartist looking to fish for credit card accounts.
But once again - this does not mean the business in question has legitimate business practices. Just because the Verisign certificate was issued to Joe's Imports, it doesn't guarantee that Joe's Imports will really honor the order for a PS2 I just placed and paid for with my credit card.
It might be worthwhile to point out that Verisign DOES support an ADDITIONAL program called WebTrust (
http://www.aicpa.org/webtrust/index.htm
). This seems to be a further step to linking a legitimate identity to a legitimate business practice.
Yeah, I thought that the sex scene was a little unneeded.
...
They don't add to the reality and it made me question the "15 [years plus]" rating it got over here. It was explicit enough, I think, that it could have belonged in some adult romantic comedy, et al., but seemed out of place here.
This kind of sensibility always gets me. Nothing personal, of course - it seems a widespread part of American culture, at the least.
Here we have a movie about one of WWII's most vicious battles. The movie depicts graphic violence in desturbing detail (this is my assumption since I haven't seen the movie, but since such scenes are being compared to Saving Pvt. Ryan - I have seen Saving Pvt. Ryan and found the violence distrubing, although justified and important to the experience). So we have graphic violence. And its the scenes of explicit sex that cause one to wonder whether it is appropriate for a young adult audience.
The kind of lesson this paradox presents, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. But I thought it was a prime example and worthy of note.
In the military, the oft-heard advice is "never volunteer for anything". That's sucker's advice. Do the oposite. Always volunteer - but do it selectively.
Look at existing taks for something you want to do. Can't find any? Come up with new tasks that take advantage of your stronger skills and get whoever is in charge to bless them. Make yourself as busy as you can. You'll end up spending the majority, if not all, your time doing things you like.
And the grunt work? That'll be assigned to the suckers freeing their time by not volunteering.
The main element in any calculation of this kind is "time", which is usually calculated in terms of the amount the company/person would charge to do X number of hours work, for an outside agency.
This assumes, however, that the person is both sitting at their desk doing "regular" work, AND cleaning up the virus.
I would argue the inverse - if a person was able to carry on their "regular" work AND handle the virus incident, you would have an argument for no real cost. But we know that tends not to happen.
Time is a finite resource that is closely linked to productivity. Productivity is linked to the completion of projects. When one's time is taken up by unscheduled workload (ie: the virus incident), current projects tend to suffer. That means the project either slips or more time has to be thrown at it. Where do you get that time? You hire more people to work the project, increasing the available manhours (time) and increasing the cost.
Whether these virus scares SHOULD cause such an impact on an organization's available time is an entirely different matter.
No offense, but the question "Why should anybody use Linux" is legit.
It all depends on context. If this was yet another introduction to Linux article, then that is almost required territory to cover. And there have been a number of good articles that do just that.
This is not one of them.
Linus uses his own brand of humor to take the interviewer to task for following a formulaic press release format. "With questions like that, how are you ever going to write an interesting article?", he laments. He's right. This has already been done. But nevertheless, Linus does give in a bit eventually but skips many of the details. "Where it matters is obviously the technology, and there's a lot of updates. Somebody has made a list of what changed since 2.2.x, but as I haven't used a 2.2.x kernel in a long time, I forget myself."
So why is Linus being so standoffish? There's another telling quote. "I didn't make a press release. I made something quotable instead, and I'll leave the real press releases to the companies and other interested parties. Maybe we'll even see a journalist that makes a story that isn't based on a press-release, but on his or her own digging and ruminations." Linus has already chosen to avoid the press release - and he stands his ground here. Furthermore, he throws down the gauntlet and challenges writers to write an article that isn't just a press release re-hash.
A tech trade article. Based on actual research. Wouldn't that be something?
Actually, the problem is that plants are unexpectedly dropping off the grid, lowering capacity. The most recent 500MW plant to drop out powers a heck of a lot of christmas lights.
The local news had a blurb about this last month. A gov't official noted that capacity was going to drop during the winter months since private power plants take their generators down during this time for maintenance. She then went on to claim that these companies do not coordinate their efforts, thus causing undue hardships on the local power grid. She then made a comment along the lines of "this is what you get when you deregulate power".
I'm watching this whole process happen right now. A big company is officially adopting Linux to add to its list of desktop and server OS choices. They're currently hunting for a support contract and RedHat is amoung those being considered.
Support is expensive and time consuming. Outsourcing makes sense.
I lost count of the number of scenes where normal eyes suddenly got blue.
I believe that was intentional. If you look a bit closer, you'll see that whenever the eyes are exposed to direct light, the glowing blue fades. Any amount of shade over the eyes brings out the glowing effect.
Whether the entire glowing blue effect is the right convention to portray spice addiction is a different argument entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
It might suprise some Slashdot readers to find that monetary success isn't an antithesis to Slashdot popularity. The technology industry is full of corporate giants with deep pockets and little critical focus (can't please everyone) by Slashdot readers. Take Cisco Systems and an example.
Through chance, one of my old coworkers was an ex-FBI agent who had been investigating Phil Zimmerman over the PGP case. This lead to a really interesting conversation about the moral issues of the law and the case and technology in general (to include observations of how child molesters - an area she later became involved with - used PGP to hide evidense). I was intersted in her view and she was rather suprised and interested in the opinions and ideas the community had on the case.
One of the final statements in the conversation was that, no matter where the moral issues were, the law was the law. Phil had broken it and the agents HAD him. She was actually a bit disappointed the case hadn't gone forward.
I go around the school yard and threaten to beat up little kids unless they do what I want. By this rational, I'm not a bully until I actually hit someone. The agreement that the little kid gives me their milk money and in turn I won't put my fist in to their face - well, that's just rational thought.
You can be sure that Microsoft isn't doing the business community a public service. They're not standing up to ring the klaxon to warn their peers of the dangers lurking hidden ahead. The GPL means little to them. Except that its a convenient pawn. A handle. A toe-hold. A way to attack the amorphous phenomenon that is Linux.
We've always said you can't attack Linux like the usual corporate entity. Microsoft knows this. And so they've changed their methods; they attack the concepts that are available with all the usual Microsoft tenacity.
If the GPL is just a pawn - what is the real game about? Cnet (all bashing aside) has an interesting writeup (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6291224.html ?tag=rltdnws). Its all .NET.
To make Microsoft's biggest, most aggressive gamble in its history (or at least what industry analysts like to portray it as) pay off - its going to take Windows servers. Sure, Microsoft will play the "compatibility" card and offer some .NET services on competing platforms. There's even noise about Linux being included. But dollars to donuts, in true Microsoft fashion, the full feature set... all the bells and glossy-pamphlet-gushing whistles will only live within Win2K servers.
Increased popularity in Linux (and *BSD - go, team, go) does not help generate the homogeneous Windows environment that'll make .NET a winner. Open source OS' are also providing an escape route from Microsoft's recent pricing squeezes (also mentioned in the referenced article). Sure, Microsoft may have nobody else but themselves to blame for that. But if you look at their motives a bit closer, you'll see its not marketing dollars they're after but a forced upgrade to technology that closer ties to .NET. The fact that this same squeezing makes *BSD and Linux more attractive is just an ugly side effect. It is also a route that they plan to cut off with smoke and mirrors.
So as a community, the Open Source folk can pat themselves on the back. We've arrived - we're a gen-u-ine threat. A big one. And for all the right reasons (functionality, freedom, etc, etc). But that just means the game now involves higher stakes.
Individual community members can argue / jihad over the finer points of licensing (and whatever will be Microsoft's next move on the board). But eventually all that'll get you is a square and a pawn. If we don't look up from the board once in awhile, we're going to miss the fact that we've been maneuvered out of the game entirely.
Ambitious indeed.
The article has pushed to my conciousness a realization. I have a confession to make. I take guilty pleasure at seeing critics rip this movie apart. I WANT it to fail. Badly.
Its not Angelina Jolie. Its not the idea of taking a game and trying to stretch the premise into a full feature movie. Its that they're trying to wrap sex, gamer culture, and special effects around an extended commercial and glaze it with the usual "blockbuster must-see" Hollywood hype. Its a bitter pill to swallow. A horse pill, at that.
Slashdot has had multiple reviewers on a single subject - be it movies or books, if I remember right. And the reviewers have had conflicting opinions before. There's already precident for that kind of thing.
What's different this time is the method of introducing the second review. No reason to be all heavy-handed with it. Even if you're just trolling the "slashdot has gone downhill / malda has no journalistic integrety" crowd. :)
The window manager, only part of a GUI environment for Linux, has little to do with it. Take a look at what KDE, GNOME, and other toolkits offer. There are common conventions amoung them. Often very simular conventions to Windows, as well as other OS' GUIs.
"Standardization" as a point of weakness in Linux is a red herring. There is already Linux commercial software that doesn't seem to have these issues with standards - StarOffice, Real Player, and Adobe Acrobat Reader as examples. Furthermore, when a company decides it wants to go down the path of "support", they tend to pick a distribution. RedHat seems to be the most popular. Does that mean my Mandrake, Suse, or Debian distro won't run the software? No - but the hack is mine to make and the company doesn't have to spin support cycles on my stuburness.
The only reason this would seem to have merrit is because IT business types often have a hard time understanding the political issues of Open Source (and/or Free) software. The fact that someone would develop competing Free/free software confuses them. That is - unless locking a market and eventual profit is the motive.Its not unheard of for competing products being developed - for a cost. The software industry is littered with companies that were, at one point, innovative in their field. They put out a product that broke new ground. And then the competition took notice and developed competing products. And either because of more savvy marketing, faster innovation, or cost cutting won, leaving the origional innovator an irrevelent part of industry history.
Sometimes that competition came from the very vendor of the same OS the ground-breaking software was developed, and marketed, towards.
That's usually referred to as "competition". One person has even been noted for calling it "innovation".
So I went to my parents. They're cheating a bit. My kid sister is only 4 years older than my own daughter, so they're forced to deal with some of the same current issues. Their solution? "AOL Parent Controls".
There are some areas where traditional support models just don't work. Seeking advice of one's peers is certainly appropriate here.
ZDNet's reporter, Mary Jo Foley, notes that in line with Microsoft's recent critism:
Then we go on with: Down with the GPL? Well... kinda... not really: Spin, Ransom, spin. You might not ever get that tail, but you're making a lot of noise and putting on a fine show. ZDNet's reporters, with all the technical calibre of Dog Fancy Magazine, must surely appreciate the effort.I've had access to erotica and pornography for quite some time. Granted - back in MY day, we didn't have this fancy-smancy internet to click-click for porn. We had to sneak MAGAZINES. But later I got into the BBS scene and eventually stumbled on content of a more adult nature than computer discussions and game software. It doesn't hold a candle to today's high quality stills and Divx movie caps... but it was something for its time.
Nudity and sex wasn't the only thing I managed to find. I made a fair collection of bomb making information. It ranged from the idiotic to some rather interesting and complex formulas. But it was all forbidden knowledge and I had a regular arsenal of it.
I also played video games. Lots of them. Days lost at the local arcade. I played computer games. Lots of those. What the game lacked in visual carnage, I made up in gleefull attempts to rack up more kills.
I played role playing games - lots of those, too. And the grand-daddy of them was Dungeons and Dragons. My grandparents sent concerned letters to my parents chock full of literature from their church warning of the psychopath I was becoming by being exposed to such filth. My parents were concerned. I rolled my eyes and played away.
I had an interest in "gun games". Despite my parent's best attempts to wean me away from any interest in guns... I still found them interesting. I played war games. I organized games of Assasin at my high school. Photon was simply amazing.
I was also a target for ridicule in high school. And I was none too happy with my experience there.
All this has not caused me to lash out in violence of any sort.
Today, I still watch porn (occasionally with my wife). I play video games - to include the violent FPS games that are so popular. I play online RPGs. I play dice-and-paper RPGs. I do both (openrpg.com). I play paintball. I find firearms facinating... though I don't own any.
I am now a husband, a father, and a career professional. I've served in the US military, and I'm a stable citizen in civilian life.
I failed to blow up anything or go on a shooting spree. I forget to treat women as sexual objects. You'll have to forgive me if I've failed to live up to my "conditioning".
People do destructive things. I've known a few in my life. But the vice is often just a symptom of a greater problem.
Take a look at your own quote. "Under Microsoft's new restrictions... MP3 music 'sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater'..." . Your point-and-click newbie user will not know that the reason they can't get their music to sound good using "MP3" is because Microsoft's default software is hobbled to specifically generate a poor recording. This is not support for a format, but a bait-and-switch. And you know it.
The sad part here is not the low quality of this troll, but the fact that there are people who will honestly believe this garbage. David Farber was right.
I have no problems reading electronic text. I've read quite a few novels via my old Palm Pilot Pro. The only hassles I deal with is occasionally having to reformat the text so its comfortable on the Pilot and dealing with the Pilot Pro's limited memory (which means creating multiple doc files and shuffling out the old for new to keep up with where I am in the story).
I have been suprised to find that I have no problems with the interface. I find myself just as immersed in the text as when I read a traditional paperback book. It is easier to carry the novel around and read it at oportune times. And, as a bonus, I get a book light for reading when it gets dark.
Others report having a hard time reading with this format. Usually the complaints center on the readability of the text rather than the reading tools themselves. After all, the Pilot wasn't designed as an electronic book - so its no suprise that some find the experience unsuitable.
Does that mean the end of paper books? I hope not.
I still like traditional books. There is still something about the experience of a book that can't be replaced by a glossy electronic device. And I like to have my book shelves populated by my favorite works - quite often hard cover copies of series that I particularly liked. Again, its not the same as a directory of file names... even if you do something Nautilus-like with a nice cover art icon.
I would love to buy a book and be able to slip out the included CDROM to load up my Pilot before placing the book in my library. But I suspect publishers would have little incentive to do this. Instead, I suspect the model would be something along the lines of buying hard cover books for my library and (hopefully) a reduced fee to download the electronic text.
This wouldn't be the end of the paper book. But paperbacks may become the casualty in this arangement.
The Palm Pilot was the first widely successful PDA device (despite the merrits Newton fans like to point out).
Palm didn't spring up in the executive board room. Sure, Palm's own glossy pamphlets showed two business types setting up a meeting on a golf course. But that audience was slow in picking up the devices. Early on, there was strong support from third party developers, tinkerers, and hackers. Geeks.
The Palm device was the geek status symbol. If you were a tech-head, you HAD to get one. Everybody was doing cool, odd things with them. Oh. And while you had it - wow... it WAS usefull for notes and keeping appointments and other mundane activities. But have you seen the cool tricorder simulator? How about that RISK game that makes those meetings you're now remembering to attend actually bearable?
So Agenda might be targeted towards the geek crowd. But then... that might be the right place to start.
Palm's initial design was right. But it was third party developers that made the device fill in niche markets and become indispensible.
It will be interesting to see if Agenda has designed the right platform. And it will be interesting to see if developers (read: hackers) will fix anything Agenda is lacking.
Sure... the poster didn't mention where he was posting from, so one can't be sure if his post is a reflection of the USA. And I agree, the ratings he mentioned might indicate a different country (or it might indicate the poster just doesn't know what those ratings mean).
But. I live in the USA. And my post is certainly based on the American culture I've observed. Stereotype or not.
The use of the word "legitimate" in this case refers to the identity of the organization who have recieved the certificate. Verisign has gone to some length to verify that the certificate has been issued to the correct organization. So sure, Versign will ensure that the certificat they issue to Visa is actually being isued to Visa and not some Joe Scamartist looking to fish for credit card accounts.
But once again - this does not mean the business in question has legitimate business practices. Just because the Verisign certificate was issued to Joe's Imports, it doesn't guarantee that Joe's Imports will really honor the order for a PS2 I just placed and paid for with my credit card.
It might be worthwhile to point out that Verisign DOES support an ADDITIONAL program called WebTrust ( http://www.aicpa.org/webtrust/index.htm ). This seems to be a further step to linking a legitimate identity to a legitimate business practice.
Here we have a movie about one of WWII's most vicious battles. The movie depicts graphic violence in desturbing detail (this is my assumption since I haven't seen the movie, but since such scenes are being compared to Saving Pvt. Ryan - I have seen Saving Pvt. Ryan and found the violence distrubing, although justified and important to the experience). So we have graphic violence. And its the scenes of explicit sex that cause one to wonder whether it is appropriate for a young adult audience.
The kind of lesson this paradox presents, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. But I thought it was a prime example and worthy of note.
Look at existing taks for something you want to do. Can't find any? Come up with new tasks that take advantage of your stronger skills and get whoever is in charge to bless them. Make yourself as busy as you can. You'll end up spending the majority, if not all, your time doing things you like.
And the grunt work? That'll be assigned to the suckers freeing their time by not volunteering.
Time is a finite resource that is closely linked to productivity. Productivity is linked to the completion of projects. When one's time is taken up by unscheduled workload (ie: the virus incident), current projects tend to suffer. That means the project either slips or more time has to be thrown at it. Where do you get that time? You hire more people to work the project, increasing the available manhours (time) and increasing the cost.
Whether these virus scares SHOULD cause such an impact on an organization's available time is an entirely different matter.
Oddly enough, there's a well known naming corporation called A Hundred Monkeys. You have to wonder. Simian conspiracy?
This is not one of them.
Linus uses his own brand of humor to take the interviewer to task for following a formulaic press release format. "With questions like that, how are you ever going to write an interesting article?", he laments. He's right. This has already been done. But nevertheless, Linus does give in a bit eventually but skips many of the details. "Where it matters is obviously the technology, and there's a lot of updates. Somebody has made a list of what changed since 2.2.x, but as I haven't used a 2.2.x kernel in a long time, I forget myself."
So why is Linus being so standoffish? There's another telling quote. "I didn't make a press release. I made something quotable instead, and I'll leave the real press releases to the companies and other interested parties. Maybe we'll even see a journalist that makes a story that isn't based on a press-release, but on his or her own digging and ruminations." Linus has already chosen to avoid the press release - and he stands his ground here. Furthermore, he throws down the gauntlet and challenges writers to write an article that isn't just a press release re-hash.
A tech trade article. Based on actual research. Wouldn't that be something?
Support is expensive and time consuming. Outsourcing makes sense.
Whether the entire glowing blue effect is the right convention to portray spice addiction is a different argument entirely.