The MSN search is not necessarily evil, just totally helpless.
Throttling the flow of competitive information is, in fact, evil. If the U.S. government were to regulate what Google could and could not find and return to its users, I think (I hope) that the citizens would be furious. If I'm ignorant and Google has already been regulated, then I have some serious voting to do in coming elections.
This is because the BSD projects are not yet in Microsoft's cross-hairs. I would estimate that they are just out of view of the scope, however.
Even a less-well-known project like OpenBSD is a threat to Microsoft, because OpenBSD doesn't waiver from principle to meet its objectives. I'm sure Microsoft knows that people find the BSDs after being dissatisfied with Windows and a Linux distribution or two. To Microsoft, these people are like communists who escape their country to see overflowing grocery stores and actually-friendly police in non-communist countries (God forbid these people come back to spread the word).
But enough people will still use it because it is the default, and MS will make enough money selling ads to support their continuing to develop it.
So, citizens should support a local drug cartel, because the ring leader used blood money to build a school?
What allowed IE to seize the market share was that Netscape went dormant for a year while MS continued to advance.
No, what really allowed IE's obscene market share was agreements with PC OEMs that made IE the default browser everywhere almost overnight.
Google has a big head start, and I'm sure they will not just lay down and let themselves be run over like Netscape did.
Even though Google is very good and popular, it doesn't change the fact that millions of PC users are receiving Microsoft's propoganda and misinformation via MSN.
They have failed quite a few times.
Optimists also hope for a failure that is the last time.
Guess what: higher ed is expensive. I work at a very expensive private college.
I went to a very expensive private university and saw the campus literally transformed in my years there as spending went through the roof. The university cited a need to remain competitive, etc. etc., but doing so on the backs of students and alumni is just greedy (double-digit tuition increases; begging for almuni donations).
This trend isn't isolated to private universities, either, as state school tuitions have been increasing profanely (I saw 30%+ listed for one school in South Carolina--forget about the Lottery hogwash, too).
Universities will be pricing themselves out of reach of students, who are taking on more debt now than ever before. More and more desparate students will graduate with crushing debt leaving them hating the very system they just left. The fact that Universities admit people independently of financial need is alarming and unsettling amidst this, regardless of the ethics of discrimination.
After what my university did and after how much I have already paid them, I throw away every alumni donation form. They dug themselves into that pit, and there's no way any more of my money is going to them. If they want to have only kids with million-dollar trust funds for students, then that's just fine, but that's an outcome they have to be comfortable with (ironic that they were a Catholic school, to boot).
Why do we call them "Windows" viruses. It isn't a function of Windows, per se, that allows this to happen. It's a function of Outlook and OE that causes the problem.
Then call them Microsoft-software-based viruses. Microsoft is still responsible for their bastard children, whether borne of mutant laboratory experiments or cross-breeding from conquered populations.
all OpenBSD routers on the net can redirect the Windows traffic to windowsupdate.com...?
Perhaps better would be to redirect to a warning page that takes the user to their intended website after a few seconds. Simply going to windowsupdate.com would frustrate people who consciously leave their computers unpatched for various valid reasons (Windows Update is a genuine risk in itself).
I know they have really shitty design interface people, but would someone, for the love of god, tell them that pastels are really bad for eys strain over significant time intervals...
You don't quite understand Microsoft. They don't care about long-term usability. What they care about is that little "click" that happens in people's minds when they see shiney things. It's called making a first impression to make a sale, and leaving the marks to discover the rats under the hood long after they've left the lot.
People no more want to learn to use a computer than learn to build a house, or walk to the store, or a host of other important and healthy activities.
And this attitude will get them raped daily by contractors, salespeople, and marketing. Damn, people anymore are just setting themselve up to get fucked over. And I bet they will cry about it, too, each time it happens.
I read somewhere that Bill Gates had bought a large stake in the shipbuilding company responsible for that famous "divide by zero" fiasco a while back.
If "conflict of interest" doesn't apply, here, then, I really am the walrus!
Don't blame the software companies for the "sh*t quality" of their software...
This is short-sighted. In a hospital setting, any company so unscrupulous as to sell their software as fit for that purpose when it is so blatantly unfit is a company that needs to get dismantled and the executives and salespeople sent to become someones bitch in federal prison.
The people who bought that software still deserve a huge amount of blame, I agree, but there should be no bias away from the manufacturer.
Next thing you know, the Dept. of Homeland Sec. will issue a regulation requiring the use of Palladium or similar tech. on all computers. After all it is for our 'safety.'
So, this Blaster worm would simply take advantage of a MS-signed Palladium version of the RPC server process and run a downloaded script on the MS-signed Palladium version of the script interpreter?
Whoever decides to run a nuclear plant's safety monitoring system or a civil rail's monitoring and safety system on a Windows platform should be dragged into the street, shot, burned, pissed on, disemboweled and then hanged.
And, the people should drink a lot of beer to celebrate that the MCSE is dead, and, then, piss on him some more. Have dogs sniff the corpse and piss on it, too. This incident at a nuclear facility really cannot be understated!
Yes, and then software liability will be mandated by legislation and then everyone in the software industry will be trouble.
It depends on how it is implemented. There really needs to be a profession of Software Engineer (legislated or not). Right now, "Software Engineer" is a fictional self-made title that doesn't even require a person to have attended high-school. In fact, 99.99% of people writing software today do their jobs quite poorly, because of the ad-hoc code-now-test-later mentality pervasive in nearly every software project's management and programming staff. "Software Engineers" today are not different, in principle, to alchemists and bloodletters of centuries ago. I know I will insult a lot of people by saying this, but, odds are, if you are programmer today, you aren't a very good one.
There should always be plenty of room left for amateur software developers. Video games, for example, should not be regulated. Shareware needs to be allowed to continue (with disclaimer, of course). However, any system in a nuclear power plant should be written as if it were the Space Shuttle. Why they aren't already like that is immensely disappointing.
EVERY OS has its vulnerabilities, and your network security is only as good as your Network Security Administrator.
Actually a nuclear powerplant monitoring system shouldn't need a "Network Security Administrator". It shouldn't need patching. It shouldn't need anything other than basic physical maintainence.
Critical control systems should consist at most of basic programmable logic controllers, sensors, and very simple and well-known software designed and signed-off by highly professional and knowledgable ENGINEERS (Microsoft programmers are NOT engineers, Network Security Administrators are NOT engineers).
This tells me that there were MS systems that were affected on their network segment, but it never says that the safety systems themselves were MS systems.
The systems shouldn't even have been allowed to mix even on a shared Ethernet. Microsoft belongs nowhere inside the perimeter of a nuclear facility. Period.
Who are the retarded idiots that let Microsoft within five miles of nuclear safety equipment? Microsoft's software is not quality controlled to any standard suitable for risking human life, and they even admit that in their EULA (no warranty, no liability).
The idea that if every damn corner has a camera , and it can report to a central database who it sees then it means that every damn step I take is monitored by central government.
The perfectly legal but socially underground porn industry will certainly be a victim of surveillence. Mail-order with credit cards isn't safe from surveillence, and now the "brown bag" stores won't be safe, either.
What if, in a small town, the sherriff learns that Mr. Goodytwoshoes goes to the porn shop twice a week and leaks it to his wife?
People struggling with trans-gender issues will also be victimized. Why does Mr. Manlyman go to the beauty shop on the other side of town?
It seems very clear that people's livlihoods, protected by the Bill of Rights, are very much at stake, here. Non-mainstream lifestyles simply cannot be taken out of the larger social context in the "war on terrorism." If US citizens themselves are afraid to express themselves or conduct their lives, then who are the terrorists, really?
Minor inconveniences are fine. A week in jail while they sort it out is not. Anything on an innocent person's permanent record is not.
False positives should result only in a little embarrasement, at most. If a person is shunned by his community or can't get jobs as a result--that's way past the threshold. Just a single false child porn accusation, for example, can destroy a person's life, especailly if they work with children (doctor, day care, teacher, etc.).
The emphasis should be on law enforcement and not crime detterence, because many laws are themselves the causes of crime (drug prohibition, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
The MSN search is not necessarily evil, just totally helpless.
Throttling the flow of competitive information is, in fact, evil. If the U.S. government were to regulate what Google could and could not find and return to its users, I think (I hope) that the citizens would be furious. If I'm ignorant and Google has already been regulated, then I have some serious voting to do in coming elections.
The first pick is the FBSD project home.
This is because the BSD projects are not yet in Microsoft's cross-hairs. I would estimate that they are just out of view of the scope, however.
Even a less-well-known project like OpenBSD is a threat to Microsoft, because OpenBSD doesn't waiver from principle to meet its objectives. I'm sure Microsoft knows that people find the BSDs after being dissatisfied with Windows and a Linux distribution or two. To Microsoft, these people are like communists who escape their country to see overflowing grocery stores and actually-friendly police in non-communist countries (God forbid these people come back to spread the word).
But enough people will still use it because it is the default, and MS will make enough money selling ads to support their continuing to develop it.
So, citizens should support a local drug cartel, because the ring leader used blood money to build a school?
What allowed IE to seize the market share was that Netscape went dormant for a year while MS continued to advance.
No, what really allowed IE's obscene market share was agreements with PC OEMs that made IE the default browser everywhere almost overnight.
Google has a big head start, and I'm sure they will not just lay down and let themselves be run over like Netscape did.
Even though Google is very good and popular, it doesn't change the fact that millions of PC users are receiving Microsoft's propoganda and misinformation via MSN.
They have failed quite a few times.
Optimists also hope for a failure that is the last time.
there is only one thing that you can give to your children that will last them a lifetime: Education.
What about a postitive attitude and a sense of ethics?
Guess what: higher ed is expensive. I work at a very expensive private college.
I went to a very expensive private university and saw the campus literally transformed in my years there as spending went through the roof. The university cited a need to remain competitive, etc. etc., but doing so on the backs of students and alumni is just greedy (double-digit tuition increases; begging for almuni donations).
This trend isn't isolated to private universities, either, as state school tuitions have been increasing profanely (I saw 30%+ listed for one school in South Carolina--forget about the Lottery hogwash, too).
Universities will be pricing themselves out of reach of students, who are taking on more debt now than ever before. More and more desparate students will graduate with crushing debt leaving them hating the very system they just left. The fact that Universities admit people independently of financial need is alarming and unsettling amidst this, regardless of the ethics of discrimination.
After what my university did and after how much I have already paid them, I throw away every alumni donation form. They dug themselves into that pit, and there's no way any more of my money is going to them. If they want to have only kids with million-dollar trust funds for students, then that's just fine, but that's an outcome they have to be comfortable with (ironic that they were a Catholic school, to boot).
Why do we call them "Windows" viruses. It isn't a function of Windows, per se, that allows this to happen. It's a function of Outlook and OE that causes the problem.
Then call them Microsoft-software-based viruses. Microsoft is still responsible for their bastard children, whether borne of mutant laboratory experiments or cross-breeding from conquered populations.
all OpenBSD routers on the net can redirect the Windows traffic to windowsupdate.com ...?
Perhaps better would be to redirect to a warning page that takes the user to their intended website after a few seconds. Simply going to windowsupdate.com would frustrate people who consciously leave their computers unpatched for various valid reasons (Windows Update is a genuine risk in itself).
I know they have really shitty design interface people, but would someone, for the love of god, tell them that pastels are really bad for eys strain over significant time intervals...
You don't quite understand Microsoft. They don't care about long-term usability. What they care about is that little "click" that happens in people's minds when they see shiney things. It's called making a first impression to make a sale, and leaving the marks to discover the rats under the hood long after they've left the lot.
People no more want to learn to use a computer than learn to build a house, or walk to the store, or a host of other important and healthy activities.
And this attitude will get them raped daily by contractors, salespeople, and marketing. Damn, people anymore are just setting themselve up to get fucked over. And I bet they will cry about it, too, each time it happens.
They don't really care if their hard drive has 8MB of cache and runs at 7200RPMs.
Then why do resellers constantly say their computer has ZYX Gazillahertz CPU with a Radiation 750000 GPU?
Big numbers and branding go hand-in-hand.
Outside of marketing, 400MHz AMD K6-based computers are quite fine for Windows XP.
There's nothing sinister going on there.
I read somewhere that Bill Gates had bought a large stake in the shipbuilding company responsible for that famous "divide by zero" fiasco a while back.
If "conflict of interest" doesn't apply, here, then, I really am the walrus!
Don't blame the software companies for the "sh*t quality" of their software...
This is short-sighted. In a hospital setting, any company so unscrupulous as to sell their software as fit for that purpose when it is so blatantly unfit is a company that needs to get dismantled and the executives and salespeople sent to become someones bitch in federal prison.
The people who bought that software still deserve a huge amount of blame, I agree, but there should be no bias away from the manufacturer.
Next thing you know, the Dept. of Homeland Sec. will issue a regulation requiring the use of Palladium or similar tech. on all computers. After all it is for our 'safety.'
So, this Blaster worm would simply take advantage of a MS-signed Palladium version of the RPC server process and run a downloaded script on the MS-signed Palladium version of the script interpreter?
Palladium is just naive.
Thats why trains have human engineers and brakes.
Mechanically-linked brakes? Or does the engineer push a touch-sensitive screen run by a Windows computer?
Whoever decides to run a nuclear plant's safety monitoring system or a civil rail's monitoring and safety system on a Windows platform should be dragged into the street, shot, burned, pissed on, disemboweled and then hanged.
And, the people should drink a lot of beer to celebrate that the MCSE is dead, and, then, piss on him some more. Have dogs sniff the corpse and piss on it, too. This incident at a nuclear facility really cannot be understated!
Yes, and then software liability will be mandated by legislation and then everyone in the software industry will be trouble.
It depends on how it is implemented. There really needs to be a profession of Software Engineer (legislated or not). Right now, "Software Engineer" is a fictional self-made title that doesn't even require a person to have attended high-school. In fact, 99.99% of people writing software today do their jobs quite poorly, because of the ad-hoc code-now-test-later mentality pervasive in nearly every software project's management and programming staff. "Software Engineers" today are not different, in principle, to alchemists and bloodletters of centuries ago. I know I will insult a lot of people by saying this, but, odds are, if you are programmer today, you aren't a very good one.
There should always be plenty of room left for amateur software developers. Video games, for example, should not be regulated. Shareware needs to be allowed to continue (with disclaimer, of course). However, any system in a nuclear power plant should be written as if it were the Space Shuttle. Why they aren't already like that is immensely disappointing.
What would the Geek interface implement beyond MasterbateVigorouslyInDimlyLitRoom() and DreamAboutCheerleaderProgrammerMutants()?
EVERY OS has its vulnerabilities, and your network security is only as good as your Network Security Administrator.
Actually a nuclear powerplant monitoring system shouldn't need a "Network Security Administrator". It shouldn't need patching. It shouldn't need anything other than basic physical maintainence.
Critical control systems should consist at most of basic programmable logic controllers, sensors, and very simple and well-known software designed and signed-off by highly professional and knowledgable ENGINEERS (Microsoft programmers are NOT engineers, Network Security Administrators are NOT engineers).
This tells me that there were MS systems that were affected on their network segment, but it never says that the safety systems themselves were MS systems.
The systems shouldn't even have been allowed to mix even on a shared Ethernet. Microsoft belongs nowhere inside the perimeter of a nuclear facility. Period.
Who are the retarded idiots that let Microsoft within five miles of nuclear safety equipment? Microsoft's software is not quality controlled to any standard suitable for risking human life, and they even admit that in their EULA (no warranty, no liability).
The idea that if every damn corner has a camera , and it can report to a central database who it sees then it means that every damn step I take is monitored by central government.
The perfectly legal but socially underground porn industry will certainly be a victim of surveillence. Mail-order with credit cards isn't safe from surveillence, and now the "brown bag" stores won't be safe, either.
What if, in a small town, the sherriff learns that Mr. Goodytwoshoes goes to the porn shop twice a week and leaks it to his wife?
People struggling with trans-gender issues will also be victimized. Why does Mr. Manlyman go to the beauty shop on the other side of town?
It seems very clear that people's livlihoods, protected by the Bill of Rights, are very much at stake, here. Non-mainstream lifestyles simply cannot be taken out of the larger social context in the "war on terrorism." If US citizens themselves are afraid to express themselves or conduct their lives, then who are the terrorists, really?
We need to decide if its worth it.
Minor inconveniences are fine. A week in jail while they sort it out is not. Anything on an innocent person's permanent record is not.
False positives should result only in a little embarrasement, at most. If a person is shunned by his community or can't get jobs as a result--that's way past the threshold. Just a single false child porn accusation, for example, can destroy a person's life, especailly if they work with children (doctor, day care, teacher, etc.).
Bush: born with a silver foot in his mouth.
I thought it was a silver spoon up his ass.
A camera can't be racist or sexist. A camera can't plant drugs on someone or entice them to commit a crime.
But the human watching the monitors and the humans called out to the scene are, can, and will.
They are there to deter crime and enforce laws.
The emphasis should be on law enforcement and not crime detterence, because many laws are themselves the causes of crime (drug prohibition, for example).