There's a cyc bot set up. Just email billg@microsoft.com and you'll get a computer generated reply with all the wisdom in the world!
Don't forget: Larry often talks sh*t
on
'Unbreakable Linux'
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Larry Ellison is often treated with a reverence Bill Gates can only dream of. Yet, if you've ever read about him (in say the excellent, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison* by Mike Wilson) you'll discover he his faults (like, allegedly, being a pathalogical liar.)
Anyways, to come back on-topic, Larry talk a lot of sh*t. And he isn't really trying to promote Linux, only to bash IBM DB/2. And the reason he's bash DB/2 is that Oracle has being losing a fair amount of share in the database market, particularly at the high-end.
For the last nine months, Larry's hobby-horse has been 'unbreakable' real-application database clustering. Yet, there has been remarkably little support: partly at least because early point releases of Oracle software have a reputation for instability (and possibly insecurity, too) that make Microsoft look... well only very bad rather than really, really bad. (Take Oracle 11i, their latest application suite; now on 11.5.4 and still not stable, allegedly.)
Anyway, I take anything Larry says with a very large grain of salt.
You might say that - in tenet at least - it is intolerant of homosexuality. But then, last time I checked my Bible or a Torah, so were Christianity and Judaism.
But to accuse it, in general, of supporting Bin Laden is outrageous.
I am the first to say that the 'West' is too tolerant of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
But broadbrushed comparisons are outrageous and racist.
I would be laughed down if I said "If Hitler was a vegetarian, all vegetarians must be out to kill Jews, right?" But somehow, when it comes to Islam, the difference between the particular (a person) and the general (a set of religious beliefs, that - last time I checked - did not believe in the taking of innocent life).
Please, please, please... stop extrapolating from a label.
And the issue is the futility of piracy protection. It only takes one person to rip an MP3 and list it on (say) Audiogalaxy, and the success of the protection is null and void.
The Eminem album is a classic example: it isn't available (ie, people can't rip it) and yet the MP3s are doing the rounds. It just takes one person with a loopback cable and... poof... your copy protection is gone.
The irony is - of course - that copy protection might *harm* sales. If I know I cannot rip a CD and put it on my iPod, I might not bother buying it.
Those people that would never buy and would always find a pirate copy will anyway.
Management fraudulently created more than $500m of revenue.
They bought company, after company after company. They developed zippo of their own technology, bought other companies for their technology and then failed to do anything with them.
They bought Kurzweil, Dragon, Dictaphone, etc. and then ran them into the ground.
Just because Boeing is backing CoolChips plc *doesn't* mean the technology or the company is sound.
Big companies like to throw their money around just to make sure they don't miss the 'next big thing'. Often they make terrible mistakes...
Take Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech recognition software company, which Microsoft invested a ton ($40m?) of money in. The Chairman of MSFT Europe was on the board.
Yet when L&H went belly-up in 2000, it turned out 100s of millions of revenues were fraudulent. MSFT was no better at picking a company with solid speech recognition technology that the rest of us.
So, don't assume that - just 'cause Boeing *appears* to be supporting CoolChips - that the company is a good investment.
Wal-Mart is well known for their globalization tactics
... excuse me???
Their globalisation tactics? Errr... like selling to people?
Or maybe you mean allowing people to buy - say - mangos, or bananas?
There are many reasons not to buy from Wal-Mart. But 'their globalisation tactics', whatever they may be - and they seem hardly different from anyone that either sells into different countries, or sells to different countries - hardly seems one of them.
According to this (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020429/cgm016_1.html) Yahoo! article (read, press release) they are the fastest growing company on the Network World 200 list.
XFree86 is now easy to install. Does anyone remember, back in the early 1990s, going through the agony of trying to get XFree to run on a Linux box? Why it didn't have 'standard' 1024x800 screen mode, I'll never know.
So driver manuals were dug out, guesses made for my monitor maxmum horizontal something rate. Huge configuration files edited. Even though, as a complete newbie, I had no idea what the various things I was changing did.
But! When it worked... I never went back to Windows again...
How different would it be if?
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Question: if you had an 'm' button to announce a mugging, or an 'r' button tell the police abouta rape, would that be OK?
There is a lot written about, is this turning us into an 'informing' society?
Perhaps the right question to ask is, what do we wish to count as illegal?
Is smoking dope illegal?
No. Fine.
What about selling copies of Microsoft Word?
Whatever.
What about copies of 'kiddie porn'?
Most crimes are 'solved' because someone told the authorities about them, not due to some Peter Wimsey-esque effort on behalf of the police.
Ask, what do I believe is the crime?
If you believe it is a crime, perhaps you should tell the powers-that-be.
Quoth the review: It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old mouse... While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off!
Aaarggghhh. If your keyboard doesn't have an H, it's probably time to upgrade!
You know what the irony is: I had one of those contracts. And when I lost my phone, I didn't bother to renew my contract. So, I have *lost* £7,000. I didn't know this, and I can't believe it...
What happens if you get infected by a trojan/virus?
It's unlikely someone can sneak into your house and use your electricity. It is perfectly possible someone uses your internet connection.
Also, if I decide to 'ping bomb' your box, should you be required to pay?
You can't have electricty forced down your wires if you haven't turned on the lights, you can have bits forced into your PC if you haven't powered up IE.
Sorry. Yes, you're right, I did mean international roaming. And, you are also absolutely correct that GSM hardly works everywhere - Japan has an ungodly mix of systems (PDC, etc), and South Korea is a CDMA-only zone. Large chunks of the are also GSM-free.
Two things, however:
CDMA does not support me taking my phone to South Korea (even though SK uses CDMA) and using it there.
and
All GSM phones continue to have (overtly or not) a smart card, a.k.a. a SIM (Subsciber Indentifier Module). You can take the SIM out of your phone and put it in anyone else's, and *wow* that phone is now yours, with all the contacts, SMSs, etc. So, for example, I have small (chic, almost) phone for evenings (Ericsson's T68); but when I'm on the road working I take my Nokia 9210, which has nice things like email, web browsing. One phone rarely suits all occasions.
But this is by the by.
Does CDMA support SMS? I've looked it up, and yes it does suppport SMS. But there are two problems:
One, many operators (like Sprint) have not chosen to deploy SMS. (Why? Don't ask me.)
Two, even if you have SMS, you can't use it to send a message to someone on another network: even if both of you are using CDMA.
I'm sure, in-time, a CDMAGSM SMS integration server will be created, but in the meantime it is a shame they cannot communicate.
I found the information I'm using here: http://www.mobilesms.com/default.asp?link=1
I speak as a European here, so I may get the technical details wrong.
The Kyocera is a CDMA phone. This brings many advantages (CDMA is a very clever way to design a network, and is very efficient in its use of spectrum.)
But CDMA does not support SMS.
Nor, unfortunately, does it support roaming. A GSM phone may be less technically proficient, but (assuming it is tri-band) it will work - seamlessly! - in Europe, and most of the US and Asia.
So, in short, it is unlikely anyone will be able to hack SMS on this.
Anyone capable of getting Perl working on their PDA is probably quite technologically aware.
Perhaps the Geek Gods should be a little less condecending to us mere mortals.
Facts? You can prove anything with facts...
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
Good old Homer Simpson, he really hit the nail on the head with that one.
Your use of statistics is incredibly partial. You quote an anecdote about the UK, but the UK has a murder, rape and violent assualt rate far below the US.
Likewise, the study you quote (presumably the University of Florida one) is only partially accurate. Earlier this year, the Harvard School of Public Heath found that (in the words of The Economist 28 Feb 2002) "when it comes to killing children, guns do help." And "Before an American child reaches 15, he or she is 12 times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than a child anywhere else in the industrialised world."
Statistics, studies and anecdotes should be used with caution: don't believe that because a gun was good for you, it will be good for society.
Choices are a wonderful thing. Like standards, we have way too many.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between 'uninstall' and simply 'not using'.
I love Opera, it's fast, efficient (and dare I say it, European). 90% of the time I use it for my browsing, and the other 10% I curse the site I am using for their short-sightness. (Plus, being stupid enough to think FrontPage is a worthwhile HTML editing suite.)
But: if I want to use Opera I can. Just as, if I am a Mac user I could use... well, whatever the equivilant Mac package is.
Unistalling is a complete red herring. Why would I want to uninstall something that doesn't harm me (and in some cases is actually benficial)?
We must all ask ourselves what we want MSFT to be. And if we want MSFT to be no more, we must vote with our dollars. Everytime a/. user uses Office because (heck) its got this great spreadsheet we are supporting Redmond and Bill Gates. It's like complaining about the press while buying The Washington Post and subscribing to cable. How can we possibly claim to belive what we write while our dollars tell a different story?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a cyc bot set up. Just email billg@microsoft.com and you'll get a computer generated reply with all the wisdom in the world!
Larry Ellison is often treated with a reverence Bill Gates can only dream of. Yet, if you've ever read about him (in say the excellent, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison* by Mike Wilson) you'll discover he his faults (like, allegedly, being a pathalogical liar.)
Anyways, to come back on-topic, Larry talk a lot of sh*t. And he isn't really trying to promote Linux, only to bash IBM DB/2. And the reason he's bash DB/2 is that Oracle has being losing a fair amount of share in the database market, particularly at the high-end.
For the last nine months, Larry's hobby-horse has been 'unbreakable' real-application database clustering. Yet, there has been remarkably little support: partly at least because early point releases of Oracle software have a reputation for instability (and possibly insecurity, too) that make Microsoft look... well only very bad rather than really, really bad. (Take Oracle 11i, their latest application suite; now on 11.5.4 and still not stable, allegedly.)
Anyway, I take anything Larry says with a very large grain of salt.
The problem is that they might reconsider employing you: after all, it takes a rare skill to bring your machine down on a regular basis!
There are many reasons to critice Islam:
You might say that - in tenet at least - it is intolerant of homosexuality. But then, last time I checked my Bible or a Torah, so were Christianity and Judaism.
But to accuse it, in general, of supporting Bin Laden is outrageous.
I am the first to say that the 'West' is too tolerant of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
But broadbrushed comparisons are outrageous and racist.
I would be laughed down if I said "If Hitler was a vegetarian, all vegetarians must be out to kill Jews, right?" But somehow, when it comes to Islam, the difference between the particular (a person) and the general (a set of religious beliefs, that - last time I checked - did not believe in the taking of innocent life).
Please, please, please... stop extrapolating from a label.
And the issue is the futility of piracy protection. It only takes one person to rip an MP3 and list it on (say) Audiogalaxy, and the success of the protection is null and void.
The Eminem album is a classic example: it isn't available (ie, people can't rip it) and yet the MP3s are doing the rounds. It just takes one person with a loopback cable and... poof... your copy protection is gone.
The irony is - of course - that copy protection might *harm* sales. If I know I cannot rip a CD and put it on my iPod, I might not bother buying it.
Those people that would never buy and would always find a pirate copy will anyway.
So, that's media industry logic for you...
If you call Electronic Arts and say...
'Hey EA, you know the way that Madden will sell 2m copies whether it's priced at $30 or $50?'
'Yes,' says EA, 'it's because we know this that we are the best video game company in the world.'
'Well, we'd like you to sell it for $30. What do you think? Err, hello? Is anyone there?'
Outrageous. What's so 'troll-y' about this?
Victim!
Management fraudulently created more than $500m of revenue.
They bought company, after company after company. They developed zippo of their own technology, bought other companies for their technology and then failed to do anything with them.
They bought Kurzweil, Dragon, Dictaphone, etc. and then ran them into the ground.
Blame management, not the market.
Just because Boeing is backing CoolChips plc *doesn't* mean the technology or the company is sound.
Big companies like to throw their money around just to make sure they don't miss the 'next big thing'. Often they make terrible mistakes...
Take Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech recognition software company, which Microsoft invested a ton ($40m?) of money in. The Chairman of MSFT Europe was on the board.
Yet when L&H went belly-up in 2000, it turned out 100s of millions of revenues were fraudulent. MSFT was no better at picking a company with solid speech recognition technology that the rest of us.
So, don't assume that - just 'cause Boeing *appears* to be supporting CoolChips - that the company is a good investment.
This is not about the RIAA.
This is not about the RIAA.
Repeat, ad nauseuem.
The only people I wish to benefit from listening to (say) Radiohead are... Radiohead.
Sure, they will have financial backers. But the the 'closed shop' where the RIAA acts as toll-keeper on music is repellent.
Please, please, please can the RIAA put its head back in the sand and shut up.
Wal-Mart is well known for their globalization tactics
... excuse me???
Their globalisation tactics? Errr... like selling to people?
Or maybe you mean allowing people to buy - say - mangos, or bananas?
There are many reasons not to buy from Wal-Mart. But 'their globalisation tactics', whatever they may be - and they seem hardly different from anyone that either sells into different countries, or sells to different countries - hardly seems one of them.
*r
According to this (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020429/cgm016_1.html) Yahoo! article (read, press release) they are the fastest growing company on the Network World 200 list.
Makes you wonder about the rest...
XFree86 is now easy to install. Does anyone remember, back in the early 1990s, going through the agony of trying to get XFree to run on a Linux box? Why it didn't have 'standard' 1024x800 screen mode, I'll never know.
So driver manuals were dug out, guesses made for my monitor maxmum horizontal something rate. Huge configuration files edited. Even though, as a complete newbie, I had no idea what the various things I was changing did.
But! When it worked... I never went back to Windows again...
Question: if you had an 'm' button to announce a mugging, or an 'r' button tell the police abouta rape, would that be OK?
There is a lot written about, is this turning us into an 'informing' society?
Perhaps the right question to ask is, what do we wish to count as illegal?
Is smoking dope illegal?
No. Fine.
What about selling copies of Microsoft Word?
Whatever.
What about copies of 'kiddie porn'?
Most crimes are 'solved' because someone told the authorities about them, not due to some Peter Wimsey-esque effort on behalf of the police.
Ask, what do I believe is the crime?
If you believe it is a crime, perhaps you should tell the powers-that-be.
*r
Quoth the review:
It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old mouse... While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off!
Aaarggghhh. If your keyboard doesn't have an H, it's probably time to upgrade!
Video game sales are not really correlated to the economy as a whole: look at the PS1 in Japan despite a decade long recession.
You know what the irony is: I had one of those contracts. And when I lost my phone, I didn't bother to renew my contract. So, I have *lost* £7,000. I didn't know this, and I can't believe it...
There is a difference:
What happens if you get infected by a trojan/virus?
It's unlikely someone can sneak into your house and use your electricity. It is perfectly possible someone uses your internet connection.
Also, if I decide to 'ping bomb' your box, should you be required to pay?
You can't have electricty forced down your wires if you haven't turned on the lights, you can have bits forced into your PC if you haven't powered up IE.
Thoughts, thoughts...
*r
Is this one-way (ie to phone only), or two-way SMS?
Sorry. Yes, you're right, I did mean international roaming. And, you are also absolutely correct that GSM hardly works everywhere - Japan has an ungodly mix of systems (PDC, etc), and South Korea is a CDMA-only zone. Large chunks of the are also GSM-free.
Two things, however:
CDMA does not support me taking my phone to South Korea (even though SK uses CDMA) and using it there.
and
All GSM phones continue to have (overtly or not) a smart card, a.k.a. a SIM (Subsciber Indentifier Module). You can take the SIM out of your phone and put it in anyone else's, and *wow* that phone is now yours, with all the contacts, SMSs, etc. So, for example, I have small (chic, almost) phone for evenings (Ericsson's T68); but when I'm on the road working I take my Nokia 9210, which has nice things like email, web browsing. One phone rarely suits all occasions.
But this is by the by.
Does CDMA support SMS? I've looked it up, and yes it does suppport SMS. But there are two problems:
One, many operators (like Sprint) have not chosen to deploy SMS. (Why? Don't ask me.)
Two, even if you have SMS, you can't use it to send a message to someone on another network: even if both of you are using CDMA.
I'm sure, in-time, a CDMAGSM SMS integration server will be created, but in the meantime it is a shame they cannot communicate.
I found the information I'm using here: http://www.mobilesms.com/default.asp?link=1
Regards,
Robert
I speak as a European here, so I may get the technical details wrong.
The Kyocera is a CDMA phone. This brings many advantages (CDMA is a very clever way to design a network, and is very efficient in its use of spectrum.)
But CDMA does not support SMS.
Nor, unfortunately, does it support roaming. A GSM phone may be less technically proficient, but (assuming it is tri-band) it will work - seamlessly! - in Europe, and most of the US and Asia.
So, in short, it is unlikely anyone will be able to hack SMS on this.
*r
but... surely .jpeg2000 would be more accurate
Anyone capable of getting Perl working on their PDA is probably quite technologically aware.
Perhaps the Geek Gods should be a little less condecending to us mere mortals.
Good old Homer Simpson, he really hit the nail on the head with that one.
Your use of statistics is incredibly partial. You quote an anecdote about the UK, but the UK has a murder, rape and violent assualt rate far below the US.
Likewise, the study you quote (presumably the University of Florida one) is only partially accurate. Earlier this year, the Harvard School of Public Heath found that (in the words of The Economist 28 Feb 2002) "when it comes to killing children, guns do help." And "Before an American child reaches 15, he or she is 12 times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than a child anywhere else in the industrialised world."
Statistics, studies and anecdotes should be used with caution: don't believe that because a gun was good for you, it will be good for society.
*r
Choices are a wonderful thing. Like standards, we have way too many.
/. user uses Office because (heck) its got this great spreadsheet we are supporting Redmond and Bill Gates. It's like complaining about the press while buying The Washington Post and subscribing to cable. How can we possibly claim to belive what we write while our dollars tell a different story?
I'm not sure I understand the difference between 'uninstall' and simply 'not using'.
I love Opera, it's fast, efficient (and dare I say it, European). 90% of the time I use it for my browsing, and the other 10% I curse the site I am using for their short-sightness. (Plus, being stupid enough to think FrontPage is a worthwhile HTML editing suite.)
But: if I want to use Opera I can. Just as, if I am a Mac user I could use... well, whatever the equivilant Mac package is.
Unistalling is a complete red herring. Why would I want to uninstall something that doesn't harm me (and in some cases is actually benficial)?
We must all ask ourselves what we want MSFT to be. And if we want MSFT to be no more, we must vote with our dollars. Everytime a
*r
*r