O'Donnell declined to specify the specific changes but said they include measures intended to boost security. "They (Microsoft's Xbox hardware team) know the hacker stuff that's out there, and they're always trying to increase security," she said.
Secure from whom? Secure from consumers. Secure from people doing what they want with the hardware they buy. This trend will get worse.
Please stop buying this product, Slashdotters. Please discourage others from buying it. If people stop buying it, then Microsoft will stop holding the good games hostage and competition will stay alive in the console market. Microsoft will get out of your living room. We don't need a mandated corporate bully in our HOMES for god's sake.
The games simply can't be so good that you're willing to trade all future choice in gaming and home entertainment for a few plays today.
"Frankly, as an HP employee, I am alarmed at all this closeness with Microsoft lately (this, plus the media center PCs....what's next??)."
Let's look at past microsoft buddy-buddy relationships:
Sybase. They promise you access to OS internals in exchange for db internals knowledge, then they steal your product.
Sun. They license your technology in exchange for distribution. As soon as it seems like it is catching on, they try to sabotage it.
Resellers. They allow you to distribute product. If you gain any distribution power, they coerce you into complying.
Visio. They allow you to stay alive. . . as long as you don't expand into the Microsoft Office space and you "donate" technology to Powerpoint and other products. As soon as you get too valuable, they buy you for much less that they would have if they had let you grow unfettered.
IBM. You commision them to write a windowed OS to compete with the Mac. They steal your money and write their own while holding up your project.
Customers. You buy their product in good faith. The change the licensing terms on you (after the sale!) in exchange for fixes to the broken product you originally bought. The only reason you bought it, was because they've killed all competitive products, so you have no choice.
Well. . . from past experience, I think HP should bend over. . . we all know what's next.
The only defence would be to never make any money or headway in the business relationship at all. That way, if they actually kill your business while they are sabotaging it, they won't rob your grave and relabel the loot "innovation."
I feel really bad for Carly Fiorona. She may actually believe that she is digging a foundation for her company. . .
> Yeah, linux has a small bit more performance (less than 1%) for a bit lower price (6%) but these aren't real shocking numbers.
Huh? The cost of the Windows software adds $150K more. That is a lot of money. Think of it this way: if I have two laptops studded with diamonds that cost 2.3 mil each (before the OS is installed), and the OS for one is free while the OS for the other is 150K - the latter seems very expensive when you look at the software budget
I think that you should break out the costs of these systems and look at the hardware and software seperately. "The systems cost the same in hardware, but there is a $150k difference in software." is a much cleaner analysis.
I may be in the minority here, but. . . here goes.
I don't want Joe Windows on Linux and I don't want Linux development coopted by the desire to make it "easy enough for someone's mom to use". I don't want to use the same computer my mother uses because we use them for very different things. She, like most people, want a glorified typewriter. She, like most people's mothers, calls people she knows (like me) to fix her computer or teach her to use various functions(I'm what makes the computer "easy to use").
Maybe there should be a seperate "Glorified Typewriter" edition of Linux, so the rest of us don't have to be bothered.
Here's what it needs: A web browser, open office, an off switch, bookmarks to calendaring and webmail.
interesting pseudonym. . . and very well-written article.
Your writing is great - you can find a compadre or two over at www.e-thepeople.org . There are quite a few folks there who write highly-considered articles and who enjoy real intellectual debate. Of course they have their trolls. . but no too many.
I don't run the site (although I've met those who do). . . it is just a suggestion - you can probably add to an already smart crowd there.
Are you being paid to show product releases like this? I know that traditional news outlets are paid to show stuff like this all the time. Has this practice spread to slashdot?
Because of the closed, proprietary nature of this device, it is of almost no interest to me (or most long-term slashdot readers) whatsoever. If you are paid to do releases of this nature, please come clean and start a new topic heading.
I was at the final "let's get rid of Dick Hardt" board meeting fiasco. What a mess. . . here's what happened.
Everything starts out ok. . . typical boring board minutes stuff, somebody announces that we have a special guest and then who walks in? Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Kenneth Lay and the DVD Consortium, trying to jack the whole proceedings! Well, Van Rossum and Wall completely freak out. Wall is like "get out of here you/^(f[uc|rea]k)ing m.*dia.*$/$1 you/" and Rossum starts shouting about how no-one respects his space and how it was time for something completely different, blah, blah, blah. ESR starts mumbling to Guido about how Ovitz is finally going to get whacked, and then it really gets weird. ..
The whole room goes silent, the lights dim, this evil-looking powerpoint starts playing and this menacing voice starts calling for the elimination of Dick Hart. . . When I saw who it was, I couldn't believe it. I always kinda figured Microsoft's investment might sink the company, but I never knew who was behind all of this - most of the other ActiveStaters never would've guessed it either...A cloaked figure emerged from the break-room shadows and revealed himself to be. ..
Cowboy Neal.
(did you guess right?)
Re:No, Apple should continue to heed Intel
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
·
· Score: 2
I hate to be the one to burst the RISC/UNIX bubble (since I'm a fan, but).
64 bit doesn't mean faster. A dual processor 2GHz Xeon machine with a nice wide mobo beats the pants off any 4-processor, 64 -bit Sun sparc machine (name your Sun model, it gets crushed). I know, I take care of them day in and day out. I dream in full-color Xeon-Linux every night after work now. Put it to test in your labs too. . . you'll see what I'm talking about. Hyperthread the Intel chips and Sun starts the bus even earlier. For a 32-bit chipset to whip a 64-bit chipset handily shows an incredible set of optimizations on Intel's part. . . and impending demise on Sun's (a tear rolled down my cheek as I typed that).
Intel's has crushed TI/Sun at the Processor/hardware game - Motorola/IBM is the only real microprocessor variation left out there that you should give a damn about.
I am baffled by the DVD complaints on slashdot. (Before you claim I'm a studio exec - you should know that I'm a [Li|U]nix SA in a different industry)
Do people really think that if you pay a measly 18 bucks for a DVD that you own the unlimited usage rights to a $50million movie? You don't, you only own the right to look at it in a really limited way (hence the discount).
Do you know why they include all the forced-usage and adverts on the DVD? BECAUSE YOU STILL BUY IT. Do you remember how much movies used to cost before DVD? A LOT MORE THAN THEY DO NOW. Why? The advertisements you say you don't want but buy anyway. When you buy a DVD folks, you enter into a bad, limited deal. Enter into a deal, live with the deal. (remember Micro$oft?)
Let me recap: 1) The ads serve to make buying the movies cheap enough that you can rewatch them over and over to save from reading books or spending time with your kids. 2) You oppose the ads and the format but lack any real willpower to NOT make this complete leisure purchase. 3) Because of #1 and #2 you are in a really tough spot because you are too cheap and/or lazy to really do anything but whine. 4) The MPAA execs can't hear your whining over the din of your living-room TV and the constant clanging of the Blockbuster cash-registers.
Translation: Until you make the tough decisions to live without constant video-entertainment the MPAA is a 10t more l33t than you and 0wns your fr33 t1me, d011ars, and your/dev/kids. . . get the point?. It really is that simple - and that difficult.
Java 1.4 has a feature called Generics and it solves the same problem you want to use templates for. It solves the casting issue and is very powerful. Please read the spec (or spec summaries) to learn about generics.
A brief, brief description of generics is: You can programmatically force a collection or set to only deal with one type of object. That collection thereafter will not accept objects that are not of that type and you don't have to explicitly cast the objects you pull out of it.
Generics save a lot of time. Java didn't invent them, but sure has them now, so we should gripe about something else.
"Current high-end SCSI hard drives spin at 15,000RPM, but do so using extremely well-balanced, carefully-produced, expensive solid aluminum platters and motors. And, besides, they're also encased in heavy metal boxes, and don't have a soft plastic face through which to fire shrapnel into the chest of the user."
you can get a brand new retail inkjet printer for less than the upgrade price of $129. Maybe you want a new printer and not the upgrade. Buying a more compatible one this time around should save you headaches down the road.
Why not just use cell-phones and wireless-enabled laptops? That way you don't spread keyboard germs and if there is a wireless link (properly authenticated) at home, you could work/phone there too without any loss of productivity or change in work environment.
If the issue is centralized management, you could just have a hard-drive duplicator with everyone using the same image (with their home directory mounted from a server based on username/password).
Are the dumb terminals (+ mongo servers + superfast networks) that much cheaper? What happens when people have special needs like Kinesis keyboards, tablets, or speakers? What happens when a server goes down? Is everyone hosed? What happens when the network is down?
Interestingly enough, I was talking to a lawyer that I know to be quite competent, and he explained that it is technically illegal in the US to create and pass unenforceable laws. (It was theorized that California's sweeping no-smoking laws of 6 years ago could have failed this tenet).
In other words, the follow-ons to the DMCA that intend to restrict your personal use of media on computing devices may not be enforceable and hence could be impassable.
Re:How seriously do /. reader's take this.
on
California Hax0red
·
· Score: 2
20 years is 52.56 minutes of penance for each person 's identity they tried to steal. That doesn't sound like much time per crime to me.
Are you suggesting that criminals that steal en-masse should get a "bulk discount?"
How seriously do /. reader's take this.
on
California Hax0red
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm so thoroughly disgusted with this type of crime, I wanted to know. . . how seriously does the average slashdot reader take this.
Personally, I think that crimes like this are _worse_ than grand theft auto (not the game. . . keep up) and much worse than dealing crack for $5 a rock on the street corner. You get serious time for those offenses, but I'm not sure how much you get for this type of hacking theft.
Personally, I'd like to see this type of thing get 20 years or more of some type of community service in conjunction with jail time. I know it sounds harsh, but this just seems to be major theft to me -- and precisely the type of crime that holds back our industry and the potential for us to finally move to reasonable electronic record-keeping.
[Note: For those of you who think that people "deserve" to be hacked and that punitive measures shouldn't be necessary should consider this: Is it ok for people to throw bricks through shopwindows just because the store-owners didn't invest in bullet/bomb/brick-proof glass?
At some point we are part of society, and I think this crime is especially bad and should have especially bad repercussions]
Conexant (formerly Rockwell-and one of the biggest winmodem makers) just released a lot of their drivers for linux with half-source/half-binary drivers for Mandrake and Redhat. (thanks to the hard work of Marc Boucher)
http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/index.html
The whole Winmodem thing isn't all about Microsoft evil, by the way, its about patents (that should be your second guess for sources of evil after M$ by now). My understanding is that Winmodem drivers expose the code for V.92 and other compression/transmission implementations.Because of this, the makers aren't allowed to open-source the code for these patented implementations.Think about it this way, the regular hardware modem makers aren't exactly shipping you microcode and chip diagrams in the back of your manual either.
For the first time, I'm using the modem that came with my 2 year old Vaio at 56K as I type this. (thank God modem/speed technology has-gone/is-going nowhere!)
Why is there an overwhelming sentiment here of "It happens all the time, so Microsoft can't be wrong". This is sad and childish rubbish.
Lying and cheating is still wrong, whether a lot of people are doing it or not. There are still notions of personal and corporate responsibility, and I would hope that we are not so jaded as to think they are impossible to achieve or meaningless.
It would be heartening if people used their discussion energy to encourage other people to ACT BETTER and treat each other with respect and honesty. . . people don't need encouragement the other way.
If a corporation (or a person for that matter) is spending time lying and cheating your fellow citizens, call them on the carpet. . . don't try to justify it !@&?
Interesting that this post should come up at the same time that "Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters
The finding of the Swiss Economists is close to the very premise of pure democracy and why forms of it have by-and-large overcome monarchic states. Combined with the assumption that game theory and John Nash's work is based on(see Beautiful Mind -- or better, read his research) "that equilibrium can be predicted when you take into account that each player acts in his/her own self interest", you have good theoretical evidence supporting the findings of this research.[Actually both Game-theory and Nash tend to start with the presumption that people will act in their own self-interest first and foremost]
In order for the majority to have the power to punish freeloaders, they must first have power to begin with. With majority vote and regular turnover, the opportunity to enact this is provided for. If everyone acts in their own self interest and they have the power to vote, then freeloaders MUST be punished.
If the majority are freeloaders, then those that contribute least will be punished. (Napster is shut down, but everyone who knows how to contribute still has access by some means). If this "freeloader" society is self-sufficient, it will eventually turn itself around if it is interested in self-survival. In the case of government, democracies turn themselves around because the cost of non-cooperation is death. Napster and p2p are bad examples becase the cost of community-death is not as dire as individual-death.
The summary of this rant: community works if either 1) the act of cooperation is equivalent to the act of acting in the majority's self-interest and/or 2) acting in the majority's self-interest does not lead to the destruction of the community. True democracy allows for consistent societal change in both of these directions.
Their theme-song should be "Dead Man's Party" from Oingo Boingo (popular 80's band similar to Simple Minds and Men at Work). It goes like this:
It's a dead man's party,
Who could ask for more?
Everybody's coming,
Leave your body at the door.
(Leave your body and soul at the door).
Great time to start this. Not only won't they be able to sell the company or IPO it, no one has money to buy the service.
[Can't find the album? rent that 80s movie where Rodney Dangerfield goes back to college - Oingo Boingo is the band he has at the big bash he throws. . . and they sing the song]
I did. In 1995 I had a conversation with Bjarne Stroustrup (inventor of C++) and asked him the obvious layup "Which language should programmers seek out and learn?"
Instead of automatically plugging C++ he suggested something like this:
1. Learn (or read) at least one every year or two so you don't get pigeonholed into the limitations of the language you use every day. Different languages promote different approaches - and different approaches/designs are the toolchest of this industry.
2. At least try out one functional language (Lisp/Scheme), one OOP language(C++/Java), one procedural language. None is better than the other, they have different takes on the world and shine at solving different types of problems.
3. Sticking with one language (at the total exclusion of others)limits your output and stunts your learning curve. Looking at more than one also reminds you what languages are for -- expressing more succinctly and clearly the instructions you want the computer to heed.
This being said, I look at lots of languages and I've learned a lot from using Ruby (and I use it a lot now). The best ideas from Perl, Smalltalk, Python and C/C++ are all there. The downsides are not (Perl - clumsy OO, Smalltalk - high-priced/low acceptance, Python whitespace-significance/non-OO primitives, C/C++ - compilation, etc.). The user community is probably the most helpful and thoughtful I've been a part of as well.
As far as Ruby's success at translating your thoughts to working programs? I read posts where people claimed they wrote less code, got more functionality, and fewer bugs right away. At the same time, they claimed they generally produced cleaner solutions at a faster rate than they ever had before with Perl or Python. Skeptical at first, I tried it out. . . I was shocked to find it was true for me within 2 days - I was sold.(note - I really am baffled by Bruce Eckel's comments on Ruby. ..I respect him as a writer, but I couldn't disagree with him more)
Final note: If you are interested in becoming a better programmer, you should get the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" and read it(It was previously and glowingly reviewed by Slashdot - and no, I'm not the author). Its full of great advice on how to approach new languages and the general art of programming. The authors also wrote the book "Programming Ruby" (The "pickaxe" book) and they are big fans of Ruby as well.
Lotus Notes is heads and shoulders above Exchange and it features Calendaring, Email, Discussion Groups, Document Databases, and shared, simple databases across the WAN (replacement for Access over FileServers for simple brainless db apps). Lotus Notes' back-end server is named "Domino" and even runs on Linux.
The Front-end is either Windows or Web (although I run the client over Wine on Linux and am amazed by how well it works).
Lotus administration is a bit "abstract" and requires a windows app to accomplish all configuration functionality, but the Linux backend server is ROCK SOLID. This is not a one-day install, but is a great product once you get through its unusual administration. The Windows front-end takes a little getting used-to, but that's partly because it does so much and is a little bloated (memory intense).
As long as Lotus Notes exists, I would never, ever try Exchange again. Lotus Domino is so much more stable, so much cheaper (long and short term), and offers so many more features, there is no reason to even consider Exchange.
Give it a try if you want enterprise calendaring in a Windows environment with Linux on the back-end.
(Note: I'm not an IBM/Lotus employee and I don't love "notes" . ..I'm just convinced its best in class, hands down, and "Cool, it runs on Linux!" )
What you need is magicpoint. . . It is a great way to make slides on any *nix. It's format is text (and is easily writable) although its output is as nice/professional as Powerpoint (slide builds, change-effects, backgrounds mid-presentation on-screen marker, etc.) and it allows embeddable X apps in any slide.
Get it at http://www.mew.org/mgp/
Run the sample. . . they have Xclock embedded in one of the slides. ..very slick.
Slashdot Mirror
O'Donnell declined to specify the specific changes but said they include measures intended to boost security. "They (Microsoft's Xbox hardware team) know the hacker stuff that's out there, and they're always trying to increase security," she said.
Secure from whom? Secure from consumers. Secure from people doing what they want with the hardware they buy. This trend will get worse.
Please stop buying this product, Slashdotters. Please discourage others from buying it. If people stop buying it, then Microsoft will stop holding the good games hostage and competition will stay alive in the console market. Microsoft will get out of your living room. We don't need a mandated corporate bully in our HOMES for god's sake.
The games simply can't be so good that you're willing to trade all future choice in gaming and home entertainment for a few plays today.
Let's look at past microsoft buddy-buddy relationships:
Well. . . from past experience, I think HP should bend over. . . we all know what's next.
The only defence would be to never make any money or headway in the business relationship at all. That way, if they actually kill your business while they are sabotaging it, they won't rob your grave and relabel the loot "innovation."
I feel really bad for Carly Fiorona. She may actually believe that she is digging a foundation for her company. . .
> Yeah, linux has a small bit more performance (less than 1%) for a bit lower price (6%) but these aren't real shocking numbers.
Huh? The cost of the Windows software adds $150K more. That is a lot of money. Think of it this way: if I have two laptops studded with diamonds that cost 2.3 mil each (before the OS is installed), and the OS for one is free while the OS for the other is 150K - the latter seems very expensive when you look at the software budget
I think that you should break out the costs of these systems and look at the hardware and software seperately. "The systems cost the same in hardware, but there is a $150k difference in software." is a much cleaner analysis.
I may be in the minority here, but. . . here goes.
I don't want Joe Windows on Linux and I don't want Linux development coopted by the desire to make it "easy enough for someone's mom to use". I don't want to use the same computer my mother uses because we use them for very different things. She, like most people, want a glorified typewriter. She, like most people's mothers, calls people she knows (like me) to fix her computer or teach her to use various functions(I'm what makes the computer "easy to use").
Maybe there should be a seperate "Glorified Typewriter" edition of Linux, so the rest of us don't have to be bothered.
Here's what it needs: A web browser, open office, an off switch, bookmarks to calendaring and webmail.
i18n literally stands for "internationalization".
It is so hard to say repeatedly, that people shortened it to "i" 18 letters then "n". hence i18n.
Tape drives and printers have always been a lousy, nightmarish part of a sysadmin's job.
Now that we have to take care of washers and dryers, too, I may be looking for a career change.
interesting pseudonym. . . and very well-written article.
Your writing is great - you can find a compadre or two over at www.e-thepeople.org . There are quite a few folks there who write highly-considered articles and who enjoy real intellectual debate. Of course they have their trolls. . but no too many.
I don't run the site (although I've met those who do). . . it is just a suggestion - you can probably add to an already smart crowd there.
Are you being paid to show product releases like this? I know that traditional news outlets are paid to show stuff like this all the time. Has this practice spread to slashdot?
Because of the closed, proprietary nature of this device, it is of almost no interest to me (or most long-term slashdot readers) whatsoever. If you are paid to do releases of this nature, please come clean and start a new topic heading.
I was at the final "let's get rid of Dick Hardt" board meeting fiasco. What a mess. . . here's what happened.
/^(f[uc|rea]k)ing m.*dia.*$/$1 you/" and Rossum starts shouting about how no-one respects his space and how it was time for something completely different, blah, blah, blah. ESR starts mumbling to Guido about how Ovitz is finally going to get whacked, and then it really gets weird. . .
.
Everything starts out ok. . . typical boring board minutes stuff, somebody announces that we have a special guest and then who walks in? Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Kenneth Lay and the DVD Consortium, trying to jack the whole proceedings! Well, Van Rossum and Wall completely freak out. Wall is like "get out of here you
The whole room goes silent, the lights dim, this evil-looking powerpoint starts playing and this menacing voice starts calling for the elimination of Dick Hart. . . When I saw who it was, I couldn't believe it. I always kinda figured Microsoft's investment might sink the company, but I never knew who was behind all of this - most of the other ActiveStaters never would've guessed it either...A cloaked figure emerged from the break-room shadows and revealed himself to be. .
Cowboy Neal.
(did you guess right?)
I hate to be the one to burst the RISC/UNIX bubble (since I'm a fan, but).
64 bit doesn't mean faster. A dual processor 2GHz Xeon machine with a nice wide mobo beats the pants off any 4-processor, 64 -bit Sun sparc machine (name your Sun model, it gets crushed). I know, I take care of them day in and day out. I dream in full-color Xeon-Linux every night after work now. Put it to test in your labs too. . . you'll see what I'm talking about. Hyperthread the Intel chips and Sun starts the bus even earlier. For a 32-bit chipset to whip a 64-bit chipset handily shows an incredible set of optimizations on Intel's part. . . and impending demise on Sun's (a tear rolled down my cheek as I typed that).
Intel's has crushed TI/Sun at the Processor/hardware game - Motorola/IBM is the only real microprocessor variation left out there that you should give a damn about.
I am baffled by the DVD complaints on slashdot.
/dev/kids. . . get the point?. It really is that simple - and that difficult.
(Before you claim I'm a studio exec - you should know that I'm a [Li|U]nix SA in a different industry)
Do people really think that if you pay a measly 18 bucks for a DVD that you own the unlimited usage rights to a $50million movie? You don't, you only own the right to look at it in a really limited way (hence the discount).
Do you know why they include all the forced-usage and adverts on the DVD? BECAUSE YOU STILL BUY IT. Do you remember how much movies used to cost before DVD? A LOT MORE THAN THEY DO NOW. Why? The advertisements you say you don't want but buy anyway. When you buy a DVD folks, you enter into a bad, limited deal. Enter into a deal, live with the deal. (remember Micro$oft?)
Let me recap:
1) The ads serve to make buying the movies cheap enough that you can rewatch them over and over to save from reading books or spending time with your kids.
2) You oppose the ads and the format but lack any real willpower to NOT make this complete leisure purchase.
3) Because of #1 and #2 you are in a really tough spot because you are too cheap and/or lazy to really do anything but whine.
4) The MPAA execs can't hear your whining over the din of your living-room TV and the constant clanging of the Blockbuster cash-registers.
Translation: Until you make the tough decisions to live without constant video-entertainment the MPAA is a 10t more l33t than you and 0wns your fr33 t1me, d011ars, and your
[This space intentionally left burning]
Guys,
Java 1.4 has a feature called Generics and it solves the same problem you want to use templates for. It solves the casting issue and is very powerful. Please read the spec (or spec summaries) to learn about generics.
A brief, brief description of generics is: You can programmatically force a collection or set to only deal with one type of object. That collection thereafter will not accept objects that are not of that type and you don't have to explicitly cast the objects you pull out of it.
Generics save a lot of time. Java didn't invent them, but sure has them now, so we should gripe about something else.
"Current high-end SCSI hard drives spin at 15,000RPM, but do so using extremely well-balanced, carefully-produced, expensive solid aluminum platters and motors. And, besides, they're also encased in heavy metal boxes, and don't have a soft plastic face through which to fire shrapnel into the chest of the user."
;)
You've convinced me... I'm switching to SCSI.
you can get a brand new retail inkjet printer for less than the upgrade price of $129. Maybe you want a new printer and not the upgrade. Buying a more compatible one this time around should save you headaches down the road.
Why not just use cell-phones and wireless-enabled laptops? That way you don't spread keyboard germs and if there is a wireless link (properly authenticated) at home, you could work/phone there too without any loss of productivity or change in work environment.
If the issue is centralized management, you could just have a hard-drive duplicator with everyone using the same image (with their home directory mounted from a server based on username/password).
Are the dumb terminals (+ mongo servers + superfast networks) that much cheaper? What happens when people have special needs like Kinesis keyboards, tablets, or speakers? What happens when a server goes down? Is everyone hosed? What happens when the network is down?
I think I must be missing something.
Interestingly enough, I was talking to a lawyer that I know to be quite competent, and he explained that it is technically illegal in the US to create and pass unenforceable laws. (It was theorized that California's sweeping no-smoking laws of 6 years ago could have failed this tenet).
In other words, the follow-ons to the DMCA that intend to restrict your personal use of media on computing devices may not be enforceable and hence could be impassable.
20 years is 52.56 minutes of penance for each person 's identity they tried to steal. That doesn't sound like much time per crime to me.
Are you suggesting that criminals that steal en-masse should get a "bulk discount?"
I'm so thoroughly disgusted with this type of crime, I wanted to know. . . how seriously does the average slashdot reader take this.
Personally, I think that crimes like this are _worse_ than grand theft auto (not the game. . . keep up) and much worse than dealing crack for $5 a rock on the street corner. You get serious time for those offenses, but I'm not sure how much you get for this type of hacking theft.
Personally, I'd like to see this type of thing get 20 years or more of some type of community service in conjunction with jail time. I know it sounds harsh, but this just seems to be major theft to me -- and precisely the type of crime that holds back our industry and the potential for us to finally move to reasonable electronic record-keeping.
[Note: For those of you who think that people "deserve" to be hacked and that punitive measures shouldn't be necessary should consider this: Is it ok for people to throw bricks through shopwindows just because the store-owners didn't invest in bullet/bomb/brick-proof glass?
At some point we are part of society, and I think this crime is especially bad and should have especially bad repercussions]
Conexant (formerly Rockwell-and one of the biggest winmodem makers) just released a lot of their drivers for linux with half-source/half-binary drivers for Mandrake and Redhat. (thanks to the hard work of Marc Boucher)
http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/index.html
The whole Winmodem thing isn't all about Microsoft evil, by the way, its about patents (that should be your second guess for sources of evil after M$ by now). My understanding is that Winmodem drivers expose the code for V.92 and other compression/transmission implementations.Because of this, the makers aren't allowed to open-source the code for these patented implementations.Think about it this way, the regular hardware modem makers aren't exactly shipping you microcode and chip diagrams in the back of your manual either.
For the first time, I'm using the modem that came with my 2 year old Vaio at 56K as I type this. (thank God modem/speed technology has-gone/is-going nowhere!)
Why is there an overwhelming sentiment here of "It happens all the time, so Microsoft can't be wrong". This is sad and childish rubbish.
Lying and cheating is still wrong, whether a lot of people are doing it or not. There are still notions of personal and corporate responsibility, and I would hope that we are not so jaded as to think they are impossible to achieve or meaningless.
It would be heartening if people used their discussion energy to encourage other people to ACT BETTER and treat each other with respect and honesty. . . people don't need encouragement the other way.
If a corporation (or a person for that matter) is spending time lying and cheating your fellow citizens, call them on the carpet. . . don't try to justify it !@&?
Interesting that this post should come up at the same time that "Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters
The finding of the Swiss Economists is close to the very premise of pure democracy and why forms of it have by-and-large overcome monarchic states. Combined with the assumption that game theory and John Nash's work is based on(see Beautiful Mind -- or better, read his research) "that equilibrium can be predicted when you take into account that each player acts in his/her own self interest", you have good theoretical evidence supporting the findings of this research.[Actually both Game-theory and Nash tend to start with the presumption that people will act in their own self-interest first and foremost]
In order for the majority to have the power to punish freeloaders, they must first have power to begin with. With majority vote and regular turnover, the opportunity to enact this is provided for. If everyone acts in their own self interest and they have the power to vote, then freeloaders MUST be punished.
If the majority are freeloaders, then those that contribute least will be punished. (Napster is shut down, but everyone who knows how to contribute still has access by some means). If this "freeloader" society is self-sufficient, it will eventually turn itself around if it is interested in self-survival. In the case of government, democracies turn themselves around because the cost of non-cooperation is death. Napster and p2p are bad examples becase the cost of community-death is not as dire as individual-death.
The summary of this rant: community works if either 1) the act of cooperation is equivalent to the act of acting in the majority's self-interest and/or 2) acting in the majority's self-interest does not lead to the destruction of the community. True democracy allows for consistent societal change in both of these directions.
Their theme-song should be "Dead Man's Party" from Oingo Boingo (popular 80's band similar to Simple Minds and Men at Work). It goes like this:
It's a dead man's party,
Who could ask for more?
Everybody's coming,
Leave your body at the door.
(Leave your body and soul at the door).
Great time to start this. Not only won't they be able to sell the company or IPO it, no one has money to buy the service.
[Can't find the album? rent that 80s movie where Rodney Dangerfield goes back to college - Oingo Boingo is the band he has at the big bash he throws. . . and they sing the song]
Good luck Boingo, you're gonna need it.
I did. In 1995 I had a conversation with Bjarne Stroustrup (inventor of C++) and asked him the obvious layup "Which language should programmers seek out and learn?"
.I respect him as a writer, but I couldn't disagree with him more)
Instead of automatically plugging C++ he suggested something like this:
1. Learn (or read) at least one every year or two so you don't get pigeonholed into the limitations of the language you use every day. Different languages promote different approaches - and different approaches/designs are the toolchest of this industry.
2. At least try out one functional language (Lisp/Scheme), one OOP language(C++/Java), one procedural language. None is better than the other, they have different takes on the world and shine at solving different types of problems.
3. Sticking with one language (at the total exclusion of others)limits your output and stunts your learning curve. Looking at more than one also reminds you what languages are for -- expressing more succinctly and clearly the instructions you want the computer to heed.
This being said, I look at lots of languages and I've learned a lot from using Ruby (and I use it a lot now). The best ideas from Perl, Smalltalk, Python and C/C++ are all there. The downsides are not (Perl - clumsy OO, Smalltalk - high-priced/low acceptance, Python whitespace-significance/non-OO primitives, C/C++ - compilation, etc.). The user community is probably the most helpful and thoughtful I've been a part of as well.
As far as Ruby's success at translating your thoughts to working programs? I read posts where people claimed they wrote less code, got more functionality, and fewer bugs right away. At the same time, they claimed they generally produced cleaner solutions at a faster rate than they ever had before with Perl or Python. Skeptical at first, I tried it out. . . I was shocked to find it was true for me within 2 days - I was sold.(note - I really am baffled by Bruce Eckel's comments on Ruby. .
Final note: If you are interested in becoming a better programmer, you should get the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" and read it(It was previously and glowingly reviewed by Slashdot - and no, I'm not the author). Its full of great advice on how to approach new languages and the general art of programming. The authors also wrote the book "Programming Ruby" (The "pickaxe" book) and they are big fans of Ruby as well.
Lotus Notes is heads and shoulders above Exchange and it features Calendaring, Email, Discussion Groups, Document Databases, and shared, simple databases across the WAN (replacement for Access over FileServers for simple brainless db apps). Lotus Notes' back-end server is named "Domino" and even runs on Linux.
.I'm just convinced its best in class, hands down, and "Cool, it runs on Linux!" )
The Front-end is either Windows or Web (although I run the client over Wine on Linux and am amazed by how well it works).
Lotus administration is a bit "abstract" and requires a windows app to accomplish all configuration functionality, but the Linux backend server is ROCK SOLID. This is not a one-day install, but is a great product once you get through its unusual administration. The Windows front-end takes a little getting used-to, but that's partly because it does so much and is a little bloated (memory intense).
As long as Lotus Notes exists, I would never, ever try Exchange again. Lotus Domino is so much more stable, so much cheaper (long and short term), and offers so many more features, there is no reason to even consider Exchange.
Give it a try if you want enterprise calendaring in a Windows environment with Linux on the back-end.
(Note: I'm not an IBM/Lotus employee and I don't love "notes" . .
What you need is magicpoint. . . It is a great way to make slides on any *nix. It's format is text (and is easily writable) although its output is as nice/professional as Powerpoint (slide builds, change-effects, backgrounds mid-presentation on-screen marker, etc.) and it allows embeddable X apps in any slide.
.very slick.
Get it at http://www.mew.org/mgp/
Run the sample. . . they have Xclock embedded in one of the slides. .