I think the different governments should spend more money on trying to understand the causes of terrorism, and try to eliminate it at the source (which one could argue they already do with the war on terrorism).
For 400 BILLION dollars, the U.S. could probably simply buy the countries in question, send all the suplus corn in Iowa, beef from Texas, pork/chicken from North Carolina, and water from the Coors factory to them (being sensitive to religious preferences, of course), and see how many "terrorists" suddenly develop stupid grins on their faces and quiet down. They're human, after all.
What's Microsoft's stake in NBC? After seeing MSNBC appear and seeing the link between Newsweek and MSN, I'm beginning to worry more and more about the integrity of the media.
I wonder if the DOJ/FTC would ever allow Microsoft to buy out AOL/TW. If that happened, that would clearly and unmistakably mark the peak of the U.S.A. in history (if "Homeland Security" already hasn't)
Apple uses the DMCA to keep other companies from reverse engineering their BIOS though, and creating Mac Clones.
Isn't their "BIOS" really an OpenBoot PROM?
OpenBoot PROM is an IEEE standard, IIRC, and Sun, for example, has used OBP their hardware since the late 80's or early 90's. I haven't used the Mac version, but it is really nifty to plug a serial console into a Sun and do a diagnostics boot. Also, the OBP makes x86-style hacks like lilo unneccessary, thanks to devaliases and persistent NVRAM storage.
A personal laser printer. You can get a good b&w one for about $300, and the toner lasts damn near forever.
Yessiree. I've been using the toner in my Laserjet 6L for a solid five years, now.
I was also pretty suprised that it works just fine hooked up the parallel port of a Sun workstation (have to configure ghostscript as a Solaris print filter, though).
PS2 discs are just regular DVDs and CDs, they work in most normal DVD-ROM drives.
I thought the format was proprietary, but perhaps they are more open than I thought.
Also I don't know of any console that requires registration or anything like that.
It seems some are being proposed or developed. That Phantom console probably gives the BSA and RIAA a hard-on with its central control features. Also, some on-line gaming features, such as those for XBox, appear to be centrally-controlled access points for console games.
I would definitely not buy a console that required a network connection for gaming. Always-on networking is ripe for corporate abuse of consumer trust. This is also why I keep my DirecTV unit disconnected from the phone jack and would never trust Windows XP's built-in firewall to truly protect my privacy.
Given that there is practically no defense being offered for Microsoft nor the Dept. of Homeland Security in the above discussion, one has to wonder why these large contracts keep occurring and occurring and occurring. If they aren't based on merit, then what? What hard arguments do companies provide to keep going along with Microsoft's products? It isn't as if there were no alternatives, historically, and TCO arguments are fallacious at best.
The state of the current software industry makes me feel as if nothing is real and there is no reward for quality. It is really discouraging and makes me wonder if churning out more and more software is becoming counter-productive to the health of our civilization. Add in the recent economy, and I am beginning to see non-software-development and non-systems-administration jobs in my peripheral vision. These jobs are becoming more attractive, and it is almost to a point, where finding a job with no computer in sight is a compelling thought.
This is true for magazine reviews and marketing, but, to the pragmatic consumer, being able to buy PS2 games for $10 at a flea market will be very good.
For example, I am one of the people who has a very hard time justifying $50 for a brand new game, so I wait until it drops to $30, $20, or $15 before buying it. $50 is really only the fair market value for teenagers and hard-core enthusiasts. In fact, there was a while, where I had more PSOne games than PS2 games for my PS2. Only after having the PS2 for about a year and a half did the balance tip in favor of PS2 games.
If the PS3 really does come out without compatibility, and all the new games are $50 to $60, then, I wouldn't even consider buying a PS3 until it is two or more years old and the "greatest hits" games start arriving. I might just end up getting a GameCube to run through Mario, Zelda, and Metroid for a change.
Additionally, if the PS3 doesn't play DVDs and CDs, then, that could be another serious knock against it. When the PS2 came out as a gaming machine and as a DVD/CD player, that was a must-buy for me (very practical for the cost). The other great thing about the PS2 is it hasn't gone overboard with DRM, where the PS2 discs are proprietary but don't require registration or master-server checkups.
For the U.S. market, for example, Sony had better take a long hard look at the U.S. middle class. These are the people that made Wal-Mart a success. In fact, Sony would probably be smart to team up with Wal-mart for marketing and distribution (as long as the PS3 isn't a big smiley shape!)
It seems the Phantom will have upwards of 32,000 games at launch!
So, 384 versions of Tetris and mandatory phone-home-to-the-mothership capability makes for a winning console? Windows XP is just the icing on the cake!
...I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
Perhaps one of these analogies would work, too:
It's like putting a steel door on a cardboard box.
It's walking into a battlefield backwards.
It's like carrying a tiger-repellant rock.
It's like driving eyes-closed because "God is my pilot (or whatever)"
Basically, Microsoft + Homeland Security = a smoking hole that will become the ocean separating Mexico and Canada.
...more likely for building a PS3 emulator to get into the hands of developers before the actual hardware is ready.
Given that the PSOne still out-sells the XBox in Japan (something like 3 to 1!), Sony would be pretty retarded to not put PSOne and PS2 compatibility into the PS3. By the time the PS3 releases, they could probably put the PS1 and the PS2 onto one chip that shares the PS3's DVD input and graphics output. Even if the compatibility adds $10 per console, they can turn around and say "The PS3: 1543.2 games available from day one!" No other console maker could compete with a statement like that.
Many Americans would also think that a 9-11 holy miracle occurred if they pulled three socks out of their dryer in a red-white-blue order.
I'm not sure why, but humans (not just Americans, to be fair) somehow place importance in chance that isn't warranted. Take gambling, for example. Why the importance of "lucky numbers" or a "lucky streak"? Regardless, an addiction to rushes of brain chemicals or persistant religious deformity keeps people coming back for more.
So, board games enjoyed by average everyday people, by extension, rely heavily on chance for generating "fun".
Hey, even Compaq/HP does not support them anymore!
Looking at Alpha's recent benchmark results, and the fact that its ISA is comprehensible to a human being, I find HP's split between PA-RISC, Alpha, and the almighty Itanium pretty darn confusing.
Perhaps, once an organization spends so much money, the point of no return has been passed regardless where the road ahead leads...
Me thinks Sun should pick up Mozilla as a Sun ONE Browser product or something, so they have a product to bundle with Solaris 10 and Mad Hatter. Solaris 9 got Netscape 6 and Netscape 7, Solaris 8 had Netscape 4.7x, so they will need to have something to give customers as a standard component with the next release.
However, I wonder how many software engineers Sun has left to spare? The number of Sun-branded packages going in their Orion bundling is breath taking at first glance. Sun must be a much bigger company than I thought.
The reason that AOL uses IE is to that MS will have AOL pre-packaged on the computers with a nifty shortcut link to install the software.
Dell looks at MSN...Dell looks at AOL...Dell looks at their lucrative Windows OEM license agreement...
Even though this was a big deal during the anti-trust hearings, I don't think it could have lost its relevance in the minds of OEMs, even today. Why bite the hand that "allowed" an extra $3 margin on each PC sold?
While compiling various software, especially on non-GNU/Linux platforms it seems, I keep running up against these tools. Looking at their executable source code (libtool+configure is approx. 15000 lines of shell script), the absolute paths encoded in many.la files strewn everywhere, and the hidden.lib directories, these tools begin to look as if some Microsoft interns were responsible for them. Any multi-thousand line monolithic shell script should be taken out and shot, regardless of purpose.
The stated goal of these tools is to aid portability, but I can't see how. The complexity they add puts a shadow over the portability problem, forcing software programmers to have to learn even more beyond the already numerous tools, such as sh, make, cc, dbx and cvs, and forcing users to put up with the liklihood that the resulting bundled mess will break. The only thing served appears to be frustration.
I have heard people say how bad portability was "back in the day", and that is fine. However, why does such a highly-automated tool need to be invented, when an equally comprehensive--yet static--make include file would be relatively trivial yet serve the same purpose, for example. Then, when the build breaks, the debugging effort can be traced down to one, and exactly one, environment variable.
It also appears that the prorammers using these tools often shoot themselves in thier feet during their build-tool-buzzword quest. For example, I've seen several software packages that jump through all sorts of hoops with things like autoconf and libtool, yet the makefiles work only with GNU make and bash. It seems it would be better if the programmer aims for POSIX makefiles and vanilla Bourne shell and the remaining small deviations from system to system can be worked around as they are discovered. There are well-known software engineering concepts, such as encapsulation and abstraction, that would get very good milage, here.
Essentially, my rant is based in a desire for utter simplicity and robustness in software while still serving portability. A gain in simplicity through proper abstractions and straight-forward configuration management is a ten-fold gain in portability, in my opinion, where, if something breaks, fixing it is practical and communicating the fix back to the author is possible. "libtool is broken and I don't know why" is hardly an effective bug report.
A systems analyst focuses on how technology can actually help achieve business objectives - in other words, it involves actually getting out of the cubicle and understanding how the business works and how competitive advantage can be built.
So after the analyst is done recommending $50,000 to $2,000,000 worth of COTS software and integration fees, will the company recognize that all they really needed was a simple PHP website, a five-table database, and two Perl scripts scheduled by cron to run at 2:00am?
It seems the role of "systems analyst" is frought with conflicts of interest, where it is in their advantage to confuse the customer, drive up costs, and ensure recurring maintainence fees. It's sort of a "contractor syndrome".
Analysts will never replace the need for educated PHBs within companies.
My personal prediction is that we will all either be auto mechanics or cell phone salespeople by then.
I just had a thought: eventually, even cars will be almost entirely solid-state except for an electric motor and the wheels, so auto mechanics will become obselete, too. That's it, then, we're all destined to become salespeople, selling eachother cell phones, electric cars, and Amway. Oh boy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the different governments should spend more money on trying to understand the causes of terrorism, and try to eliminate it at the source (which one could argue they already do with the war on terrorism).
For 400 BILLION dollars, the U.S. could probably simply buy the countries in question, send all the suplus corn in Iowa, beef from Texas, pork/chicken from North Carolina, and water from the Coors factory to them (being sensitive to religious preferences, of course), and see how many "terrorists" suddenly develop stupid grins on their faces and quiet down. They're human, after all.
Christian Broadcasting Network
Is that the Al Jazeera of the U.S.?
You forgot that NBC is owned by GE...
What's Microsoft's stake in NBC? After seeing MSNBC appear and seeing the link between Newsweek and MSN, I'm beginning to worry more and more about the integrity of the media.
I wonder if the DOJ/FTC would ever allow Microsoft to buy out AOL/TW. If that happened, that would clearly and unmistakably mark the peak of the U.S.A. in history (if "Homeland Security" already hasn't)
With ink cartridges surpassing the cost of Dom perignon, the rocket fuel just might be cheaper.
I'd argue that champagne provides a better value, too (i.e., you can get a buzz off of it, but the ink would probably just make you sick).
Consider printer ink which you "could" buy by the liter.
I prefer buying it by the keg. The downside is that my tooth-whitening budget has skyrocketed!
Apple uses the DMCA to keep other companies from reverse engineering their BIOS though, and creating Mac Clones.
Isn't their "BIOS" really an OpenBoot PROM?
OpenBoot PROM is an IEEE standard, IIRC, and Sun, for example, has used OBP their hardware since the late 80's or early 90's. I haven't used the Mac version, but it is really nifty to plug a serial console into a Sun and do a diagnostics boot. Also, the OBP makes x86-style hacks like lilo unneccessary, thanks to devaliases and persistent NVRAM storage.
A personal laser printer.
You can get a good b&w one for about $300, and the toner lasts damn near forever.
Yessiree. I've been using the toner in my Laserjet 6L for a solid five years, now.
I was also pretty suprised that it works just fine hooked up the parallel port of a Sun workstation (have to configure ghostscript as a Solaris print filter, though).
PS2 discs are just regular DVDs and CDs, they work in most normal DVD-ROM drives.
I thought the format was proprietary, but perhaps they are more open than I thought.
Also I don't know of any console that requires registration or anything like that.
It seems some are being proposed or developed. That Phantom console probably gives the BSA and RIAA a hard-on with its central control features. Also, some on-line gaming features, such as those for XBox, appear to be centrally-controlled access points for console games.
I would definitely not buy a console that required a network connection for gaming. Always-on networking is ripe for corporate abuse of consumer trust. This is also why I keep my DirecTV unit disconnected from the phone jack and would never trust Windows XP's built-in firewall to truly protect my privacy.
Given that there is practically no defense being offered for Microsoft nor the Dept. of Homeland Security in the above discussion, one has to wonder why these large contracts keep occurring and occurring and occurring. If they aren't based on merit, then what? What hard arguments do companies provide to keep going along with Microsoft's products? It isn't as if there were no alternatives, historically, and TCO arguments are fallacious at best.
The state of the current software industry makes me feel as if nothing is real and there is no reward for quality. It is really discouraging and makes me wonder if churning out more and more software is becoming counter-productive to the health of our civilization. Add in the recent economy, and I am beginning to see non-software-development and non-systems-administration jobs in my peripheral vision. These jobs are becoming more attractive, and it is almost to a point, where finding a job with no computer in sight is a compelling thought.
...it will all be about the PS3 titles at launch.
This is true for magazine reviews and marketing, but, to the pragmatic consumer, being able to buy PS2 games for $10 at a flea market will be very good.
For example, I am one of the people who has a very hard time justifying $50 for a brand new game, so I wait until it drops to $30, $20, or $15 before buying it. $50 is really only the fair market value for teenagers and hard-core enthusiasts. In fact, there was a while, where I had more PSOne games than PS2 games for my PS2. Only after having the PS2 for about a year and a half did the balance tip in favor of PS2 games.
If the PS3 really does come out without compatibility, and all the new games are $50 to $60, then, I wouldn't even consider buying a PS3 until it is two or more years old and the "greatest hits" games start arriving. I might just end up getting a GameCube to run through Mario, Zelda, and Metroid for a change.
Additionally, if the PS3 doesn't play DVDs and CDs, then, that could be another serious knock against it. When the PS2 came out as a gaming machine and as a DVD/CD player, that was a must-buy for me (very practical for the cost). The other great thing about the PS2 is it hasn't gone overboard with DRM, where the PS2 discs are proprietary but don't require registration or master-server checkups.
For the U.S. market, for example, Sony had better take a long hard look at the U.S. middle class. These are the people that made Wal-Mart a success. In fact, Sony would probably be smart to team up with Wal-mart for marketing and distribution (as long as the PS3 isn't a big smiley shape!)
It seems the Phantom will have upwards of 32,000 games at launch!
So, 384 versions of Tetris and mandatory phone-home-to-the-mothership capability makes for a winning console? Windows XP is just the icing on the cake!
...provide the DHS with 140,000 desktops running Windows XP...
140,000 is big enough to create a custom version of Windows intended to allow Microsoft to spy on the government...
The Homeland Security Advisory System's current threat level has been elevated to 'blue' (Immanent threat of terrorism due to blue screen)
Blue is only the third-highest. The new color system will be: red, green, blue, and yellow. Unfortunately, the colors all mean the same thing, now.
...I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
Perhaps one of these analogies would work, too:
It's like putting a steel door on a cardboard box.
It's walking into a battlefield backwards.
It's like carrying a tiger-repellant rock.
It's like driving eyes-closed because "God is my pilot (or whatever)"
Basically, Microsoft + Homeland Security = a smoking hole that will become the ocean separating Mexico and Canada.
...more likely for building a PS3 emulator to get into the hands of developers before the actual hardware is ready.
Given that the PSOne still out-sells the XBox in Japan (something like 3 to 1!), Sony would be pretty retarded to not put PSOne and PS2 compatibility into the PS3. By the time the PS3 releases, they could probably put the PS1 and the PS2 onto one chip that shares the PS3's DVD input and graphics output. Even if the compatibility adds $10 per console, they can turn around and say "The PS3: 1543.2 games available from day one!" No other console maker could compete with a statement like that.
American board games are generally garbage.
Many Americans would also think that a 9-11 holy miracle occurred if they pulled three socks out of their dryer in a red-white-blue order.
I'm not sure why, but humans (not just Americans, to be fair) somehow place importance in chance that isn't warranted. Take gambling, for example. Why the importance of "lucky numbers" or a "lucky streak"? Regardless, an addiction to rushes of brain chemicals or persistant religious deformity keeps people coming back for more.
So, board games enjoyed by average everyday people, by extension, rely heavily on chance for generating "fun".
Repeat articles on Slashdot are due to a race condition!
Maybe this is Larry Ellison's chance to show us once again how badly he hates Bill Gates.
But, then, Oracle would have to produce an install program that works.
Hey, even Compaq/HP does not support them anymore!
Looking at Alpha's recent benchmark results, and the fact that its ISA is comprehensible to a human being, I find HP's split between PA-RISC, Alpha, and the almighty Itanium pretty darn confusing.
Perhaps, once an organization spends so much money, the point of no return has been passed regardless where the road ahead leads...
There will not be any more Netscape releases.
Me thinks Sun should pick up Mozilla as a Sun ONE Browser product or something, so they have a product to bundle with Solaris 10 and Mad Hatter. Solaris 9 got Netscape 6 and Netscape 7, Solaris 8 had Netscape 4.7x, so they will need to have something to give customers as a standard component with the next release.
However, I wonder how many software engineers Sun has left to spare? The number of Sun-branded packages going in their Orion bundling is breath taking at first glance. Sun must be a much bigger company than I thought.
The reason that AOL uses IE is to that MS will have AOL pre-packaged on the computers with a nifty shortcut link to install the software.
Dell looks at MSN...Dell looks at AOL...Dell looks at their lucrative Windows OEM license agreement...
Even though this was a big deal during the anti-trust hearings, I don't think it could have lost its relevance in the minds of OEMs, even today. Why bite the hand that "allowed" an extra $3 margin on each PC sold?
Soylent Green is displaced programmers!
(Looks at 2001-2003 stock market graph) We can cure world hunger!
Care to explain that one?
.la files strewn everywhere, and the hidden .lib directories, these tools begin to look as if some Microsoft interns were responsible for them. Any multi-thousand line monolithic shell script should be taken out and shot, regardless of purpose.
While compiling various software, especially on non-GNU/Linux platforms it seems, I keep running up against these tools. Looking at their executable source code (libtool+configure is approx. 15000 lines of shell script), the absolute paths encoded in many
The stated goal of these tools is to aid portability, but I can't see how. The complexity they add puts a shadow over the portability problem, forcing software programmers to have to learn even more beyond the already numerous tools, such as sh, make, cc, dbx and cvs, and forcing users to put up with the liklihood that the resulting bundled mess will break. The only thing served appears to be frustration.
I have heard people say how bad portability was "back in the day", and that is fine. However, why does such a highly-automated tool need to be invented, when an equally comprehensive--yet static--make include file would be relatively trivial yet serve the same purpose, for example. Then, when the build breaks, the debugging effort can be traced down to one, and exactly one, environment variable.
It also appears that the prorammers using these tools often shoot themselves in thier feet during their build-tool-buzzword quest. For example, I've seen several software packages that jump through all sorts of hoops with things like autoconf and libtool, yet the makefiles work only with GNU make and bash. It seems it would be better if the programmer aims for POSIX makefiles and vanilla Bourne shell and the remaining small deviations from system to system can be worked around as they are discovered. There are well-known software engineering concepts, such as encapsulation and abstraction, that would get very good milage, here.
Essentially, my rant is based in a desire for utter simplicity and robustness in software while still serving portability. A gain in simplicity through proper abstractions and straight-forward configuration management is a ten-fold gain in portability, in my opinion, where, if something breaks, fixing it is practical and communicating the fix back to the author is possible. "libtool is broken and I don't know why" is hardly an effective bug report.
A systems analyst focuses on how technology can actually help achieve business objectives - in other words, it involves actually getting out of the cubicle and understanding how the business works and how competitive advantage can be built.
So after the analyst is done recommending $50,000 to $2,000,000 worth of COTS software and integration fees, will the company recognize that all they really needed was a simple PHP website, a five-table database, and two Perl scripts scheduled by cron to run at 2:00am?
It seems the role of "systems analyst" is frought with conflicts of interest, where it is in their advantage to confuse the customer, drive up costs, and ensure recurring maintainence fees. It's sort of a "contractor syndrome".
Analysts will never replace the need for educated PHBs within companies.
My personal prediction is that we will all either be auto mechanics or cell phone salespeople by then.
I just had a thought: eventually, even cars will be almost entirely solid-state except for an electric motor and the wheels, so auto mechanics will become obselete, too. That's it, then, we're all destined to become salespeople, selling eachother cell phones, electric cars, and Amway. Oh boy.