I work for the government, BTW, so I have a bit of an inside view, here.
The Gov is a big enough purchaser of computers, that this could be feasable - why not build their own? Set up a factory somewhere, and build custom government computers, assembly-line style. Only include hardware and software that's needed, and save money all over the place. Most computer dealers include crap the Gov doesn't need, so it'd work well, probably.
Let's waste more taxpayer dollars, more time, and do absolutely nothing.
Screw suing MS, how about actually DOING something about it? Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court, why not just STOP BUYING THEIR SOFTWARE.
It's too bad the Windows version of Mozilla sucks ass. Now, I'm not trolling here, this is honest.
I've been using Moz since beta v0.6, if I remember correctly - and I switched to using it as my primary browser (no IE at all) at around 0.8. I just recently removed Mozilla entirely from my system, at RC3. Why? Because it SUCKED. Mozilla's windows version has steadily regressed in major areas, due to developers checking in flawed code.
I personally have submitted or commented on a number of major bugs, only to see people trading blame and pushing back fix dates.
A number of MAJOR bugs that appeared in recent versions, and prevented me from using the browser, STILL have not been fixed. Things like the fact that Pipelining is horribly buggy, and corrupts caches, how JPEGs are inexplicably flagged as corrupted by Moz when every other app doesn't mind them, how Moz decides to ignore mouse clicks and key presses at random, all have made me rather upset with the developers. I can list off from memory a number of bugs that a first-year computer science student could have caught, but were not caught before being checked into the source tree, and then caused major screwups.
Moz's developers have done a great job, but the Windows version is horribly screwed up, and needs to be given a thourough once-over. It consumes excessive amounts of RAM, crashes randomly, and is very sluggish in various cases. Compare all this to IE - IE has been fast, and for the post part, stable (though not secure) since 4.0. Mozilla, as far as I know, has never really even gotten close to equaling IE in the reliability department, and only occasionally runs decently fast. I would pass my problems off as due to my machine, but I've run Moz on at least 7 different machines from different companies, with different configs, and they ALL have major issues. I've reinstalled multiple times, reformatted, etc - And yet the problems persist.
I was pretty faithful about submitting bug reports every time I found problems - but apparently spending 2 minutes searching for my bug in the database wasn't enough. I was consistently shamed for not finding some obscure old bug with a weird name and keywords, and also consistently ignored when posting comments about bugs. I finally got tired of being screamed at on Bugzilla, and just decided to screw Moz. I'll let them catch their own bugs.
Perhaps if I ever get a working Linux partition on my home box (I've had bad luck in the past), I can use Mozilla as the kickass browser it's meant to be. Until then, I'll stick to IE.
Well, it'd definitely be easy to set up and cheap to support, but on the downside, most of the programs people are going to want to use (at least average people) are Windows, or maybe Mac, programs. I guess having a well-installed copy of Wine might help with that, but it does seem like a major problem. Also, there would be the small hurdle of the users being a little confused by Linux, but that would go away pretty quickly.
Wait, a news website that's not objective? Call the tabloids, this is big news! It may be a sign of the coming apocalypse, shit like this doesn't happen every day!
Aren't night-vision rifle scopes used to violate people's privacy? The night-time privacy of possible targets, that is. Kinda funny that merchant 'privacy' results in the violation of target 'privacy'. Oh, and then there's the whole taking your CCN/exp date thing - It really seems like credit cards are not secure enough. It seems stupid that they aren't more secure. Why don't they just have a system that, say, requires voice authorization for purchases (stores have a phone, net purchases result in a quick 'did you buy this' phone call), or perhaps a unique Purchase Authorization Number (PAN) that is entered directly by the purchaser, so the merchants never see it. As it is now, the merchants have direct access to your CCN, name, and expiration date - everything they need to ring up charges - and all you can do is trust them.
Credit cards suck, and I don't plan on getting one unless I have to.
Is this related to...
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Aren't I glad I still work for CA. Yet another reason to hurry up and find another job... perhaps because I'm not a full-fledged state worker, they didn't get my info. Oh well, I only have ~$1000 in the bank for them to steal anyway.
Forgive my ignorance, but would someone mind enlightening the stupid as to who she is? What genre, how good is her music, etc? I might just buy the song if it's any good.
Noclip doesn't work! I thought this thing would let me walk through walls... I wonder if God mode works... I could take on the entire police department!
---
Next at eleven: Psychopath challenges entire police department to gunfight. Psychopath dies.
You bastard! We said we'd let you leave the cabal if you promised not to give away our secrets!
You'll pay for this, oh will you pay. We'll see who's laughing when you get arrested and strip-searched by the CIA for stealing secret government documents and hiding them in your anal cavity!
Not to have their bodies exposed to more forces and danger than most astronauts ever experience - if you think about it, the astronauts are safer. The astronauts have teams of medics, special suits, and a large, strong spacecraft around them. Compare this to the average coaster-rider who is sitting in a flimsy piece of metal, or even wood - nothing protecting them from the G-forces, let alone the wind. And most people are going to ride the same coaster multiple times in a row if possible - I know I do.:)
I hope they don't ban Counter-Strike. Without Counter-Strike, I will have no way of procuring an army of children trained well enough to guard my secret, well defendedisland fortress.
Once the hydrogen fuel cell is complete, my plan for world domination will be one step closer to completion! I must only get my secret island stronghold fully operational, then kick off all the islanders, and I can blackmail the United Nations for... 5 BILLION DOLLARS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sounds like a great idea, and it'd most likely result in Verizon and Kazaa being the sole distributor of said licensed music, making them lots of $.
As long as the RIAA doesn't get to do the fucked up stuff it does now, I'm all for it. As long as it's an open market, so we're not just stuck with one distributor.
I agree completely up to the 'star wars tickets' part. That's crossing the line, man... give up your star wars tickets for your freedom? What are you, some sort of patriot? Sheesh.
I'd buy one of these, makes me wish I hadn't just built a desktop system a few months ago for ~$1500. This little thing is COOL. Probably would do wonders for on-the-run workers like salesmen and road/transportation engineers.
I wonder, does the Crusoe have MMX/SSE compatibility, etc? Is it even x86 at all? I don't know much about those chips.
Slashdot Mirror
We can expect to see kernel panics, blue screens of death, and VBScript viruses on cell phones, too. Oh, and 'minesweeper'! :)
Oh, they were found guilty... I didn't see them get punished. Hmm. Interesting.
I work for the government, BTW, so I have a bit of an inside view, here.
The Gov is a big enough purchaser of computers, that this could be feasable - why not build their own? Set up a factory somewhere, and build custom government computers, assembly-line style. Only include hardware and software that's needed, and save money all over the place. Most computer dealers include crap the Gov doesn't need, so it'd work well, probably.
Let's waste more taxpayer dollars, more time, and do absolutely nothing.
Screw suing MS, how about actually DOING something about it? Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court, why not just STOP BUYING THEIR SOFTWARE.
Stupid yuppie government decision-making.
It's too bad the Windows version of Mozilla sucks ass. Now, I'm not trolling here, this is honest.
I've been using Moz since beta v0.6, if I remember correctly - and I switched to using it as my primary browser (no IE at all) at around 0.8. I just recently removed Mozilla entirely from my system, at RC3. Why? Because it SUCKED. Mozilla's windows version has steadily regressed in major areas, due to developers checking in flawed code.
I personally have submitted or commented on a number of major bugs, only to see people trading blame and pushing back fix dates.
A number of MAJOR bugs that appeared in recent versions, and prevented me from using the browser, STILL have not been fixed. Things like the fact that Pipelining is horribly buggy, and corrupts caches, how JPEGs are inexplicably flagged as corrupted by Moz when every other app doesn't mind them, how Moz decides to ignore mouse clicks and key presses at random, all have made me rather upset with the developers. I can list off from memory a number of bugs that a first-year computer science student could have caught, but were not caught before being checked into the source tree, and then caused major screwups.
Moz's developers have done a great job, but the Windows version is horribly screwed up, and needs to be given a thourough once-over. It consumes excessive amounts of RAM, crashes randomly, and is very sluggish in various cases. Compare all this to IE - IE has been fast, and for the post part, stable (though not secure) since 4.0. Mozilla, as far as I know, has never really even gotten close to equaling IE in the reliability department, and only occasionally runs decently fast. I would pass my problems off as due to my machine, but I've run Moz on at least 7 different machines from different companies, with different configs, and they ALL have major issues. I've reinstalled multiple times, reformatted, etc - And yet the problems persist.
I was pretty faithful about submitting bug reports every time I found problems - but apparently spending 2 minutes searching for my bug in the database wasn't enough. I was consistently shamed for not finding some obscure old bug with a weird name and keywords, and also consistently ignored when posting comments about bugs. I finally got tired of being screamed at on Bugzilla, and just decided to screw Moz. I'll let them catch their own bugs.
Perhaps if I ever get a working Linux partition on my home box (I've had bad luck in the past), I can use Mozilla as the kickass browser it's meant to be. Until then, I'll stick to IE.
I think they mean they switched from using those blue-silver shiny CD-Rs, to Gold CD-R's. The Gold ones look cooler. :)
Well, it'd definitely be easy to set up and cheap to support, but on the downside, most of the programs people are going to want to use (at least average people) are Windows, or maybe Mac, programs. I guess having a well-installed copy of Wine might help with that, but it does seem like a major problem. Also, there would be the small hurdle of the users being a little confused by Linux, but that would go away pretty quickly.
Wait, a news website that's not objective? Call the tabloids, this is big news! It may be a sign of the coming apocalypse, shit like this doesn't happen every day!
He ordered waffles at a food place in Jordan. Read the effing article. How someone as silly as you got a +2 bonus to all posts is beyond me...
Aren't night-vision rifle scopes used to violate people's privacy? The night-time privacy of possible targets, that is. Kinda funny that merchant 'privacy' results in the violation of target 'privacy'. Oh, and then there's the whole taking your CCN/exp date thing - It really seems like credit cards are not secure enough. It seems stupid that they aren't more secure. Why don't they just have a system that, say, requires voice authorization for purchases (stores have a phone, net purchases result in a quick 'did you buy this' phone call), or perhaps a unique Purchase Authorization Number (PAN) that is entered directly by the purchaser, so the merchants never see it. As it is now, the merchants have direct access to your CCN, name, and expiration date - everything they need to ring up charges - and all you can do is trust them.
Credit cards suck, and I don't plan on getting one unless I have to.
Is this related to the shitty game from Eidos?
This controller is better.
I don't know about you, but i want to be able to *compose* on my x-box.
Does the IBM l33t lunix kernel #4x0r team have any plans to #4x0r the living bejeezus out of Microsoft?
Aren't I glad I still work for CA. Yet another reason to hurry up and find another job... perhaps because I'm not a full-fledged state worker, they didn't get my info. Oh well, I only have ~$1000 in the bank for them to steal anyway.
Forgive my ignorance, but would someone mind enlightening the stupid as to who she is? What genre, how good is her music, etc? I might just buy the song if it's any good.
Noclip doesn't work! I thought this thing would let me walk through walls... I wonder if God mode works... I could take on the entire police department!
---
Next at eleven: Psychopath challenges entire police department to gunfight. Psychopath dies.
You bastard! We said we'd let you leave the cabal if you promised not to give away our secrets!
You'll pay for this, oh will you pay. We'll see who's laughing when you get arrested and strip-searched by the CIA for stealing secret government documents and hiding them in your anal cavity!
Excellent point, I never even thought of that. At least the exposures are short, though.
People ride them to have fun, get a thrill.
:)
Not to have their bodies exposed to more forces and danger than most astronauts ever experience - if you think about it, the astronauts are safer. The astronauts have teams of medics, special suits, and a large, strong spacecraft around them. Compare this to the average coaster-rider who is sitting in a flimsy piece of metal, or even wood - nothing protecting them from the G-forces, let alone the wind. And most people are going to ride the same coaster multiple times in a row if possible - I know I do.
I hope they don't ban Counter-Strike. Without Counter-Strike, I will have no way of procuring an army of children trained well enough to guard my secret, well defendedisland fortress.
Now I'll have to replace the all the fingerprint scanners in my secret island fortress! Damn those meddling kids^H^H^H^Hscientists!
Once the hydrogen fuel cell is complete, my plan for world domination will be one step closer to completion! I must only get my secret island stronghold fully operational, then kick off all the islanders, and I can blackmail the United Nations for... 5 BILLION DOLLARS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sounds like a great idea, and it'd most likely result in Verizon and Kazaa being the sole distributor of said licensed music, making them lots of $.
As long as the RIAA doesn't get to do the fucked up stuff it does now, I'm all for it. As long as it's an open market, so we're not just stuck with one distributor.
I agree completely up to the 'star wars tickets' part. That's crossing the line, man... give up your star wars tickets for your freedom? What are you, some sort of patriot? Sheesh.
I'd buy one of these, makes me wish I hadn't just built a desktop system a few months ago for ~$1500. This little thing is COOL. Probably would do wonders for on-the-run workers like salesmen and road/transportation engineers.
I wonder, does the Crusoe have MMX/SSE compatibility, etc? Is it even x86 at all? I don't know much about those chips.