Don't worry about the fact that the forum post was 4 months before you guys even started work on your project. In your haste to protect your companies IP you didn't realize you were the ones doing the copying.
Then you take a hit for looking incompetent. No one in their right mind wants to trust mission critical stuff to a guy that's proven they're sloppy. Playing "stupid" as you put it makes you look stupid. Plus it's gutless. Think about this: Who wants to promote someone that's gutless and stupid? No. With this kind of thing you either decide to front up with what you've found (and be discrete about it) or discuss it with no one (much less post on/.)
Also if you approach the company don't jump to any conclusions. Just present the facts. For all you know someone at your company asked permission from the author (and though unlikely since there was no attribution, you shouldn't presume the coder's guilt). If you're using a code repository correctly it shouldn't be hard to track down the developer that wrote the code and enquire about it. Make sure you report the problem to the correct person if your company has formal reporting guidelines, but do so informally if possible at first. How things proceed from there is up to your company as laid out by their policies.
I'm guessing that if you're asking on/. you don't feel compelled to become a whistleblower and sacrifice your career, but if you report up the chain a couple of levels and they do nothing you have to decide if it's worth doing just that. You have to pick your battles and live with the consequences of what decisions you make.
If the code's easy to replace (and most 200 line snippets posted on a forum are), there shouldn't be an issue getting someone to write the replacement without seeing the original, the work to do so is not a huge liability to the company. However if your company has publicly released the code in one of their products it could be a much bigger issue because it potentially exposes the company to liability.
Perhaps I've met more losers than you have. I definitely know people who'd say stuff like that seriously and be open about it for shock value/attention. Needless to say once you know someone's like that you avoid them like the plague.
The day I see in a game forum "Use Linux, n00b." as the usual reply to "OMG! Low fps! Getting pwned! HALP!" will set the ten year count to Linux victory over Windows.
Actually that's a sure sign that you need to put down the wacky weed and go to rehab.
Your long winded blog entry is basically saying that if you have zero standards, are willing to use people who find themselves in complete desperation (homeless, drug addicted, low self esteem) without any qualms, are willing to actually leave the house and seek out these people, and so long as you take steps to protect yourself, even a geek can get laid. That isn't news, and I think that while this may be a revelation to you, most geeks are smart enough to have figured that out all on their own. They're just not willing to sink to your level, you condescending fool. Let me assure you I'm no tv superstar, and I can be awkward and geeky but I don't have to resort to crap like that to get laid. If I can find a decent woman anyone can.
You appear to be at least somewhat serious, but I can only hope that no one takes any of your pitiful advice seriously. What's more you seem proud of your behaviour. Get some help. In the meantime, please fasten those condoms extra tight. We don't need the likes of you breeding.
The entire idea that "I got here first, so I own it" is antiquated in the digital age. If someone can reproduce the steps you took to get there, someone will. The whole idea that the creator should continue to control their creation after it is released is just plain counter-productive. The separate issue of whether they should be compensated for their work is another matter entirely.
Then there's the fact that companies spend billions on marketing then try to sue if someone uses the image they intentionally made popular. How asinine is that!
What we need is a change to the law such that anyone may produce their own copies or derivatives once a work is made public BUT if they profit from a copy of someone else's creation, they must pay part (or all) of their revenue back to the copyright holder.
As it stands copyright law is based on an 18th Century world (or rather part of the world) and the unique conditions of that time and place. They don't belong here and now.
Are you just trolling or are you really this dumb?
Sure you can come up with hypothetical situations until the cows come home, but has this feature actually *harmed* anybody?
So if an escaped lunatic is running around your neighborhood weilding a shot gun, and someone suggests calling the police you'd suggest that we give that man the benefit of the doubt until he actually harms someone?
You're absolutely right about one thing. I could come up with hypothetical situations until the cows come home. None of them far fetched. It's VERY easy to see the threat in this kind of marketing. It's trivially easy to understand that people make purchases that are potentially embarassing or damaging, and that those purchases aren't always illegal.
The problem with Slashdot is that there are so many privacy zealots on this site that it's basically crying wolf all the time, like with RFID chips in products. It's hard to figure out what's ACTUALLY a threat, and what's plain harmless.
It's all a threat until proven otherwise. It's called being responsible with new technology. Technology is an enabler. It gives people the ability to do things that would otherwise be impossible. What you're proposing is that we just throw new tech around without considering the social implications until AFTER we've opened that pandora's box. That's an insane and indefensible approach. Yeah lets throw caution to the wind and bitch and moan when we do end up part of a draconian society, or discover that the tech is harming or killing us. That'll work.
You make no sense at all. As I said you're either a complete idiot or a complete troll.
Back up a step... how does better-targeted advertising harm you?
Lets say it becomes public knowledge that a school teacher favours a particular brand of sex toy. If it's widely enough publicised in the right kind of community say goodbye to that career. That's just one example. I could name plenty of others. That you don't seem to understand the importance of privacy, EVEN FOR THOSE THAT DO NOTHING WRONG, is scary.
hey have to make money some how and the easiest way to do that is to sell your information on to other people
So you're arguing that if someone gives you something for free, they should be allowed to do you harm in order to recover their costs or make a profit?
Lets take that to the extreme shall we? You'd be okay with a company that hands out free icecreams, then as soon as you accept the icecream shanghais you and illegally forces you to work as a slave?
The law doesn't suddenly stop protecting you if you're given something for free.
Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one.
Intelligent design in that form is a circular argument. Just another variation of "Turtles all the way down". If a designer is required for anything complex to exist, then someone had to design the designer, and that designer's designer must be more complex than the designer. Add, repeat and recurse infinitely. I'd hesitate to call this argument either logical or scientific. Asinine is one word that comes to mind. Superstitious and moronic are two others.
The bottom line is that many people through a combination of upbringing and presumably natural tendencies have trouble coping with the idea of morality or the worth of life without resorting to a God figure and an afterlife. If it were possible to prove God does not exist it wouldn't matter. These people would not allow themselves to believe it. If they ever did believe it they'd have trouble accepting their own moral values with the basis they've spent their whole life adhering to them destroyed. Imagine that capacity for self deception turned outwards. As much as I like to think each individual must be able to freely believe whatever they choose, I've come to think of religion as a cancer - and if you want to save the organism, you don't do it by cutting large vital pieces of its body. You have to slowly remove it bit by bit (in this case through generations), and even so it's going to hurt and there will be setbacks. That means letting people believe whatever the hell they want to but educating them so that they understand the danger of mysticism and the benefit of scientific thought, method and skepticism.
I wonder if with this many clear examples of deceit, whether there may be either a case legal against either individual high profile lawyers or some other kind of action or censure can be taken against them. I'm just thinking off the top of my head about something you do for a living but my first instinct is that if a few of these lawyers were actually disbarred or their reputations were tarnished rather than embellished by working for the RIAA, might that be an effective tool against their using such tactics? At the very least some of the smarter lawyers who use these tactics might deem it not worth the risk?
I also wonder if there might be a way to bring in this evidence at each and every trial. Unfortunately I can think of one very negative side effect for those defending against such tactics - weighing this evidence might make trials more costly (favouring the RIAA's deep pockets). However if it were presented well might it not be the difference between winning and losing? If done right is there any chance that showing this consistent abuse might result in similar actions being thrown out summarily?
Surely there is something in the system that attempts to limit repeated abuse/harassment? Some kind of provision for those who cry wolf and tie the courts up. If not there sure ought to be.
Are these thoughts pure fantasy or might this work in the real world? I defer to your wisdom in this. I am certainly not a lawyer. (I'm not even an American).
The subtext of this article is amazing. Basically, sailors have been out there getting killed by giant waves for decades, but a bunch of scientists decreed that such waves could not exist, and therefor, everything from safety standards, to engineering, to the ships themselves, were all designed in line with what was predicted, but not what was observed. During this entire time, numerous eye witness reports were ignored, and even the odd photograph was dismissed as a fluke.
Note that once all you have to rely on is anecdotal evidence, it's very difficult to get specs to engineer to. These rogue waves haven't been killing people for "decades". More like since people took to the seas. Skepticism is a perfectly acceptable part of the scientific process. As more evidence build and cases are documented and recorded you start to take stories more seriously. It's a triumph for the sophistication and technology that we have that these events have now been recorded and there is no longer any doubt. Now as ocean going vessels have survived some of these monsters we've got more and more reliable data and can do something about it. More ships are surviving so obviously we've been very lucky OR the boats are getting better too.
Also you can't engineer for every possible situation. We know giant squids exists for instance but we don't go around squid monster proofing even small ocean going ships. Whales are seen every day but we don't whale proof our boats nearly enough. Why? The cost are prohibitive and the scenarios where engineering would make a difference are rare. At some point the risks have to be considered acceptable. Increasingly society is losing sight of that.
The company's capabilities are impressive. One of their first products flew across the Atlantic, in 27 hours using 1.5 gallons of gas. Any model plane builder I know would have real trouble doing the same.;-)
Not surprising really. None of the model plane builders I know spend 30k to 1M on an aircraft let alone mass produce them. My only model's worth about $300-400 with all the electronics etc. (but not the radio).
Well the fact that Iran nearly passed a motion to censure Canada for human rights abuses seems to support your hypothesis that the structure of the UN is essentially broke. It's difficult to take that organization seriously.
On the contrary. I think this is one way in which the UN shows that it isn't broken. If you can bring enough evidence against a country to motion to censure, that country should be held accountable regardless of overall record. What this is actually saying is "Hey the Canadians and other western countries repeatedly point out our human rights abuses. They have some of their own. Pot. Kettle. Black".
You wouldn't argue that a police officer who goes around doing good things and one day snaps and murders someone should be let off just because he was caught on video by a convicted mass murderer. (Sure the video evidence would need to come under greater scrutiny). Why then should a country be let off if there are in fact human rights abuses? Even if the accuser has another agenda and has their own abuses that require dealing with. That's a separate matter.
There are many many reasons and ways in which the UN is broken and ineffective. This isn't one of them. This is one you simply don't like.
don't get suckered into believing things like these do not constitute torture. Leaving somebody in the sun of 35C or more for longer periods of time is torture. Sleep derivation is torture. Loud music for long periods of time is torture.
I knew it! Day time outdoors Britney Spears concerts that you have to queue overnight for tickets for are torture!!!!
Excited Delirium is a condition felt by the CEO and other high ranking officials at being able to get away with selling a weapon as it if were just "non-lethal" crowd control in such large numbers and for such large contracts that said executives can each afford their own luxury jet this Christmas.
Oh please exactly how many double blind trials have you done with properly encoded music? At least I pointed you at something. If you wish to criticize my source you're welcome to provide a better one than just your own say so. \At this point of course in an argument with someone like you, the typical answer is "It's not worth my time. Go look it up yourself".
In any case it doesn't matter how scientific a study I point you to, you're clearly a member of the audiophile religion. You'll continue to buy overpriced equipment and encode your music in obscure formats that will be difficult to read in a decade or two because some little club has told you they're better. Do what you have to. The manufacturers love your kind and it subsides moderately priced equipment I'll happily buy. I should be thanking you.
It's a "supposed" straw man because you make it very clear that with no science backing your point of view either you'd be the sort of person who takes a claim about $4000 cables making a big difference seriously. Are you going to tell me otherwise?
You're also quite liberal with the insults and personal attacks, while you have less science backing you than I do. I don't need to wish harm on you or insult you. You're clearly doing a very good job of harming yourself without me adding to your misery or the world's. So instead, have a lovely day.
He is saying that he runs a very demanding sub-set of applications under Vista [PC Games] with no discernible loss of performance....and I say he's running some very specific games because many games do in fact suffer badly under Vista. I'm a huge flight simulator fan and I'm not moving to either Vista or FSX anytime soon. Plenty have reported performance loss of 20% or more in FS2004 or FSX when running the same hardware and Vista instead of XP.
I choose my employer and they choose to run Windows. I assure you that no amount of pleading will change my place of employment from a Windows shop. I'm sorry but to suggest that you choose your employer solely based on what OS the company runs is unrealistic and shows priorities that are somewhat out of whack. What you're actually saying is that you've been fortunate in that the employer you chose doesn't run Windows anymore. Good for you but you're in the minority.
I propose the theory be named the "Ostrich Theory of the Universe 2007". Stated simply "If one obtains a physics degree and a bucket of sand, buries his head in a bucket, and gets the attention of a report, the reporter will be easily confused into reporting whatever is said. This instantly propels the physicist to noteeriety at which point the physicist is free to deny, retract or embelish the nonsense that was reported to maximize profit".
Reminds me of a UFO nutter who I encountered on the train last week. This old bloke insisted that I was poluting my brain by using the Internet and computers. This guy had E=mc^2 on his hat and "UFO" in big letters. He also started talking misguided gibberish about matter and energy. Of course trying to reason with him was like trying to reason with paint not to dry, so I didn't try that for long nor did I tell him I had an Astronomy degree. Even an complete crackpot can grasp a single concept and twist it to the ridiculous. If that crackpot happens to be a scientist that's not quite right in the head...well the gibber can be more convincing.
So what you're saying is that you don't care because it's not your primary OS. Those that do care may be thinking of it running as their primary OS. Heck they may be forced to do so at work in a couple of years. Their LIVING may depend on it.
I do use XP as my primary OS at home and at work and you bet I care. It ain't my spare car. It's my primary ride.
How is the parent modded as insightful? He's saying he doesn't give a shit because he hardly uses it.
Given the way you react to a rather benign comment
Dude that did not come across as a benign comment. If that was really your intent I'd advise you to do some work on your communications and interpersonal skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about the fact that the forum post was 4 months before you guys even started work on your project. In your haste to protect your companies IP you didn't realize you were the ones doing the copying.
/.)
/. you don't feel compelled to become a whistleblower and sacrifice your career, but if you report up the chain a couple of levels and they do nothing you have to decide if it's worth doing just that. You have to pick your battles and live with the consequences of what decisions you make.
Then you take a hit for looking incompetent. No one in their right mind wants to trust mission critical stuff to a guy that's proven they're sloppy. Playing "stupid" as you put it makes you look stupid. Plus it's gutless. Think about this: Who wants to promote someone that's gutless and stupid? No. With this kind of thing you either decide to front up with what you've found (and be discrete about it) or discuss it with no one (much less post on
Also if you approach the company don't jump to any conclusions. Just present the facts. For all you know someone at your company asked permission from the author (and though unlikely since there was no attribution, you shouldn't presume the coder's guilt). If you're using a code repository correctly it shouldn't be hard to track down the developer that wrote the code and enquire about it. Make sure you report the problem to the correct person if your company has formal reporting guidelines, but do so informally if possible at first. How things proceed from there is up to your company as laid out by their policies.
I'm guessing that if you're asking on
If the code's easy to replace (and most 200 line snippets posted on a forum are), there shouldn't be an issue getting someone to write the replacement without seeing the original, the work to do so is not a huge liability to the company. However if your company has publicly released the code in one of their products it could be a much bigger issue because it potentially exposes the company to liability.
Man, I'm using IE from now on. It's WAY more secure...
Damn. I thought I was safe. We need a new version of Firefox that dis-allows Quicktime. I vote we call it Pornzilla.
Perhaps I've met more losers than you have. I definitely know people who'd say stuff like that seriously and be open about it for shock value/attention. Needless to say once you know someone's like that you avoid them like the plague.
The day I see in a game forum "Use Linux, n00b." as the usual reply to "OMG! Low fps! Getting pwned! HALP!" will set the ten year count to Linux victory over Windows.
Actually that's a sure sign that you need to put down the wacky weed and go to rehab.
Your long winded blog entry is basically saying that if you have zero standards, are willing to use people who find themselves in complete desperation (homeless, drug addicted, low self esteem) without any qualms, are willing to actually leave the house and seek out these people, and so long as you take steps to protect yourself, even a geek can get laid. That isn't news, and I think that while this may be a revelation to you, most geeks are smart enough to have figured that out all on their own. They're just not willing to sink to your level, you condescending fool. Let me assure you I'm no tv superstar, and I can be awkward and geeky but I don't have to resort to crap like that to get laid. If I can find a decent woman anyone can.
You appear to be at least somewhat serious, but I can only hope that no one takes any of your pitiful advice seriously. What's more you seem proud of your behaviour. Get some help. In the meantime, please fasten those condoms extra tight. We don't need the likes of you breeding.
You're arguing a moral point with someone who openly admits to using crack whores and the homeless for sex. Think about it.
What do you expect really.
The entire idea that "I got here first, so I own it" is antiquated in the digital age. If someone can reproduce the steps you took to get there, someone will. The whole idea that the creator should continue to control their creation after it is released is just plain counter-productive. The separate issue of whether they should be compensated for their work is another matter entirely.
Then there's the fact that companies spend billions on marketing then try to sue if someone uses the image they intentionally made popular. How asinine is that!
What we need is a change to the law such that anyone may produce their own copies or derivatives once a work is made public BUT if they profit from a copy of someone else's creation, they must pay part (or all) of their revenue back to the copyright holder.
As it stands copyright law is based on an 18th Century world (or rather part of the world) and the unique conditions of that time and place. They don't belong here and now.
Are you just trolling or are you really this dumb?
Sure you can come up with hypothetical situations until the cows come home, but has this feature actually *harmed* anybody?
So if an escaped lunatic is running around your neighborhood weilding a shot gun, and someone suggests calling the police you'd suggest that we give that man the benefit of the doubt until he actually harms someone?
You're absolutely right about one thing. I could come up with hypothetical situations until the cows come home. None of them far fetched. It's VERY easy to see the threat in this kind of marketing. It's trivially easy to understand that people make purchases that are potentially embarassing or damaging, and that those purchases aren't always illegal.
The problem with Slashdot is that there are so many privacy zealots on this site that it's basically crying wolf all the time, like with RFID chips in products. It's hard to figure out what's ACTUALLY a threat, and what's plain harmless.
It's all a threat until proven otherwise. It's called being responsible with new technology. Technology is an enabler. It gives people the ability to do things that would otherwise be impossible. What you're proposing is that we just throw new tech around without considering the social implications until AFTER we've opened that pandora's box. That's an insane and indefensible approach. Yeah lets throw caution to the wind and bitch and moan when we do end up part of a draconian society, or discover that the tech is harming or killing us. That'll work.
You make no sense at all. As I said you're either a complete idiot or a complete troll.
Back up a step... how does better-targeted advertising harm you?
Lets say it becomes public knowledge that a school teacher favours a particular brand of sex toy. If it's widely enough publicised in the right kind of community say goodbye to that career. That's just one example. I could name plenty of others. That you don't seem to understand the importance of privacy, EVEN FOR THOSE THAT DO NOTHING WRONG, is scary.
information DOES want to be free
Information wants you to stop personifying it already! Anthropomorphism really makes it cranky and it hates that!!!
hey have to make money some how and the easiest way to do that is to sell your information on to other people
So you're arguing that if someone gives you something for free, they should be allowed to do you harm in order to recover their costs or make a profit?
Lets take that to the extreme shall we? You'd be okay with a company that hands out free icecreams, then as soon as you accept the icecream shanghais you and illegally forces you to work as a slave?
The law doesn't suddenly stop protecting you if you're given something for free.
Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one.
Intelligent design in that form is a circular argument. Just another variation of "Turtles all the way down". If a designer is required for anything complex to exist, then someone had to design the designer, and that designer's designer must be more complex than the designer. Add, repeat and recurse infinitely. I'd hesitate to call this argument either logical or scientific. Asinine is one word that comes to mind. Superstitious and moronic are two others.
The bottom line is that many people through a combination of upbringing and presumably natural tendencies have trouble coping with the idea of morality or the worth of life without resorting to a God figure and an afterlife. If it were possible to prove God does not exist it wouldn't matter. These people would not allow themselves to believe it. If they ever did believe it they'd have trouble accepting their own moral values with the basis they've spent their whole life adhering to them destroyed. Imagine that capacity for self deception turned outwards. As much as I like to think each individual must be able to freely believe whatever they choose, I've come to think of religion as a cancer - and if you want to save the organism, you don't do it by cutting large vital pieces of its body. You have to slowly remove it bit by bit (in this case through generations), and even so it's going to hurt and there will be setbacks. That means letting people believe whatever the hell they want to but educating them so that they understand the danger of mysticism and the benefit of scientific thought, method and skepticism.
I wonder if with this many clear examples of deceit, whether there may be either a case legal against either individual high profile lawyers or some other kind of action or censure can be taken against them. I'm just thinking off the top of my head about something you do for a living but my first instinct is that if a few of these lawyers were actually disbarred or their reputations were tarnished rather than embellished by working for the RIAA, might that be an effective tool against their using such tactics? At the very least some of the smarter lawyers who use these tactics might deem it not worth the risk?
I also wonder if there might be a way to bring in this evidence at each and every trial. Unfortunately I can think of one very negative side effect for those defending against such tactics - weighing this evidence might make trials more costly (favouring the RIAA's deep pockets). However if it were presented well might it not be the difference between winning and losing? If done right is there any chance that showing this consistent abuse might result in similar actions being thrown out summarily?
Surely there is something in the system that attempts to limit repeated abuse/harassment? Some kind of provision for those who cry wolf and tie the courts up. If not there sure ought to be.
Are these thoughts pure fantasy or might this work in the real world? I defer to your wisdom in this. I am certainly not a lawyer. (I'm not even an American).
The subtext of this article is amazing. Basically, sailors have been out there getting killed by giant waves for decades, but a bunch of scientists decreed that such waves could not exist, and therefor, everything from safety standards, to engineering, to the ships themselves, were all designed in line with what was predicted, but not what was observed. During this entire time, numerous eye witness reports were ignored, and even the odd photograph was dismissed as a fluke.
Note that once all you have to rely on is anecdotal evidence, it's very difficult to get specs to engineer to. These rogue waves haven't been killing people for "decades". More like since people took to the seas. Skepticism is a perfectly acceptable part of the scientific process. As more evidence build and cases are documented and recorded you start to take stories more seriously. It's a triumph for the sophistication and technology that we have that these events have now been recorded and there is no longer any doubt. Now as ocean going vessels have survived some of these monsters we've got more and more reliable data and can do something about it. More ships are surviving so obviously we've been very lucky OR the boats are getting better too.
Also you can't engineer for every possible situation. We know giant squids exists for instance but we don't go around squid monster proofing even small ocean going ships. Whales are seen every day but we don't whale proof our boats nearly enough. Why? The cost are prohibitive and the scenarios where engineering would make a difference are rare. At some point the risks have to be considered acceptable. Increasingly society is losing sight of that.
The company's capabilities are impressive. One of their first products flew across the Atlantic, in 27 hours using 1.5 gallons of gas. Any model plane builder I know would have real trouble doing the same. ;-)
Not surprising really. None of the model plane builders I know spend 30k to 1M on an aircraft let alone mass produce them. My only model's worth about $300-400 with all the electronics etc. (but not the radio).
Well the fact that Iran nearly passed a motion to censure Canada for human rights abuses seems to support your hypothesis that the structure of the UN is essentially broke. It's difficult to take that organization seriously.
On the contrary. I think this is one way in which the UN shows that it isn't broken. If you can bring enough evidence against a country to motion to censure, that country should be held accountable regardless of overall record. What this is actually saying is "Hey the Canadians and other western countries repeatedly point out our human rights abuses. They have some of their own. Pot. Kettle. Black".
You wouldn't argue that a police officer who goes around doing good things and one day snaps and murders someone should be let off just because he was caught on video by a convicted mass murderer. (Sure the video evidence would need to come under greater scrutiny). Why then should a country be let off if there are in fact human rights abuses? Even if the accuser has another agenda and has their own abuses that require dealing with. That's a separate matter.
There are many many reasons and ways in which the UN is broken and ineffective. This isn't one of them. This is one you simply don't like.
don't get suckered into believing things like these do not constitute torture. Leaving somebody in the sun of 35C or more for longer periods of time is torture. Sleep derivation is torture. Loud music for long periods of time is torture.
I knew it! Day time outdoors Britney Spears concerts that you have to queue overnight for tickets for are torture!!!!
Excited Delirium is a condition felt by the CEO and other high ranking officials at being able to get away with selling a weapon as it if were just "non-lethal" crowd control in such large numbers and for such large contracts that said executives can each afford their own luxury jet this Christmas.
Oh please exactly how many double blind trials have you done with properly encoded music? At least I pointed you at something. If you wish to criticize my source you're welcome to provide a better one than just your own say so. \At this point of course in an argument with someone like you, the typical answer is "It's not worth my time. Go look it up yourself".
In any case it doesn't matter how scientific a study I point you to, you're clearly a member of the audiophile religion. You'll continue to buy overpriced equipment and encode your music in obscure formats that will be difficult to read in a decade or two because some little club has told you they're better. Do what you have to. The manufacturers love your kind and it subsides moderately priced equipment I'll happily buy. I should be thanking you.
It's a "supposed" straw man because you make it very clear that with no science backing your point of view either you'd be the sort of person who takes a claim about $4000 cables making a big difference seriously. Are you going to tell me otherwise?
You're also quite liberal with the insults and personal attacks, while you have less science backing you than I do. I don't need to wish harm on you or insult you. You're clearly doing a very good job of harming yourself without me adding to your misery or the world's. So instead, have a lovely day.
He is saying that he runs a very demanding sub-set of applications under Vista [PC Games] with no discernible loss of performance. ...and I say he's running some very specific games because many games do in fact suffer badly under Vista. I'm a huge flight simulator fan and I'm not moving to either Vista or FSX anytime soon. Plenty have reported performance loss of 20% or more in FS2004 or FSX when running the same hardware and Vista instead of XP.
I choose my employer and they choose to run Windows. I assure you that no amount of pleading will change my place of employment from a Windows shop. I'm sorry but to suggest that you choose your employer solely based on what OS the company runs is unrealistic and shows priorities that are somewhat out of whack. What you're actually saying is that you've been fortunate in that the employer you chose doesn't run Windows anymore. Good for you but you're in the minority.
I propose the theory be named the "Ostrich Theory of the Universe 2007". Stated simply "If one obtains a physics degree and a bucket of sand, buries his head in a bucket, and gets the attention of a report, the reporter will be easily confused into reporting whatever is said. This instantly propels the physicist to noteeriety at which point the physicist is free to deny, retract or embelish the nonsense that was reported to maximize profit".
Reminds me of a UFO nutter who I encountered on the train last week. This old bloke insisted that I was poluting my brain by using the Internet and computers. This guy had E=mc^2 on his hat and "UFO" in big letters. He also started talking misguided gibberish about matter and energy. Of course trying to reason with him was like trying to reason with paint not to dry, so I didn't try that for long nor did I tell him I had an Astronomy degree. Even an complete crackpot can grasp a single concept and twist it to the ridiculous. If that crackpot happens to be a scientist that's not quite right in the head...well the gibber can be more convincing.
Pearls before swine.
So what you're saying is that you don't care because it's not your primary OS. Those that do care may be thinking of it running as their primary OS. Heck they may be forced to do so at work in a couple of years. Their LIVING may depend on it.
I do use XP as my primary OS at home and at work and you bet I care. It ain't my spare car. It's my primary ride.
How is the parent modded as insightful? He's saying he doesn't give a shit because he hardly uses it.
Given the way you react to a rather benign comment
Dude that did not come across as a benign comment. If that was really your intent I'd advise you to do some work on your communications and interpersonal skills.