> But then again... how smart can they be if they put it into emails.
As Eliot Spitzer (remember him?) once said "Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."
> let alone had their emails all made public...:P
That is a superfluous redundancy;). Email, by definition, involves at least 2 endpoints. It'll be in the recipient's inbox (or recipients' inboxes), and who knows how many other places. Assume that every email you write will end up being splattered on the front page of your local newspaper, regardless of whether or not you're doing anything illegal. Consider the situation of former Enron employees, many of whom knew nothing about the financial shenanigans going on at the top http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/02/05/search-the-enron-email-corpus-online/
If it's a software upgrade, what OS does it require?
Really paranoid vision, or is it merely realistic... what if the the upgrade requires Windows not only to activate, but handshakes with the OS on bootup? Would the upgrade only work under Windows?
> Is there some technical reason most devices *with a radio* lack AM?
A couple, actually...
1) Due to the frequencies used (540 khz to 1600 khz), a minimal *HALF-DECENT* AM antenna is a 5-inch long by 1/2-inch wide cylinder containing a ferrite bar with *A LOT* of wire wound around it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_antenna#Loopstick_antennas Not only is it large for a cellphone, it's heavy, relatively speaking.
2) AM is very susceptable to RF interference. Put your radio next to your desktop computer, and try listening to an AM station, other than a 50,000 watt flamethrower a few miles away. You'll get nothing but static. Now imagine the circuitry for the AM radio being a millimetre away from other active circuitry inside your cellphone. Other than strong local stations, fuggedaboutit.
Because the firefox developers have succumbed to the Microsoft disease. Every optional feature that 10% of users find nice, seems to get incorporated into the base code. At least in the original mozilla 0.9x versions, you could select not to build in certain stuff. Not any more. * spell-checking is *BUILT-IN* * an SQL database (SQLite) is built in. This is a performance-killer in linux. To guarantee database integrity, SQLite does a lot of fsync() calls. In an SQL database, that is a necessity. I'm not bitching about the SQLite developers. They wrote a database to do what a database is supposed to do. I'm bitching about the Mozilla developers' decision to use an SQL database when a textfile will do.
> I think one of my favorite signatures I saw long ago was something like: > "Rome didn't conquer most of the known world by having meetings... >...They did it by KILLING their enemies."
Meetings are inefficient by definition. They consume hours, and generate minutes.
> MPEG-LA isn't some large, evil company. It is just an > organization to protect the rights of the codec owners. > For example, if you want to have VC-1, you contact them too.
Just like the RIAA is a corporate shell front for Sony and friends. The hate is mis-directed at the RIAA, when it should be directed at the individual members thereof. Ditto for the MPAA.
Re:Internet on TV? Really?
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
> For the average consumer, idiot. Reading the whole post > before hitting "reply" -- what's so hard about that?
A) when I get a computer from Dell, I have to hook up cables from the monitor to the video out and from the speakers to the audio out. Does the average consumer call in Geek Squad to make a house call and set up their computer? A monitor is a monitor is a monitor.
B) what about DVD and BluRay players? Again, most consumers hook up their own. You're talking about the same level of complaxity hooking up a player to a TV as hooking up a PC to a TV.
Google is evil to OTA TV viewers
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
First, it was lobbying for unlicenced devices to transmit on TV frequencies ("white spaces"), and then it was outright lobbying to shut down OTA altogether. I happen to be fortunate, living in greater Toronto, 6th-storey condo, clear SSE view. An indoor antenna gets me all of the Toronto digitals and most of the Buffalo digitals. That includes high-def... free... and legal.
Google knows they can't charge for Youtube as long as there is high def free-TV OTA. So they're lobbying to shut down OTA television altogether, so that streaming internet video will become the only game in town. Talk about conflict of interest. I repeat; Google is evil.
Re:Internet on TV? Really?
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
> TV will need to evolve to include the internet
A "modern television" is a flatscreen monitor hooked up to an ATSC tuner (OTA) and a QAM tuner (cable).
A "modern personal computer" is a flatscreen monitor hooked up to a box with CPU, audio, video, keyboard, etc.
Run some cable from your your computer audio+video outputs to the TV's inputs (the same ones you use for DVD, BluRay, etc). You've now "evolved" your TV to include the internet. What's so difficult about it?
I have an idea. Let's create a lightweight desktop app that can browse the web and stream audio/video, upload/download files, and submit text for online shopping, and posting to Slashdot. Let's call it web... err... uhmm... web browser. Yeah, that's it. Let's call it a web browser.
If we need to do anything more, develope a "helper application". Even better; an internet-enabled app that avoids screwing around with my browser altogether. I don't know about everybody else here, but I was around in the days of Mozilla 0.9x. It was a big, bloated, slow, joke of an app, even with compiler optimizations. There was lots of joking regarding "about:kitchen sink". People started yelling and screaming for a lightweight web browser, *WITHOUT* email, usenet, webpage developement tools, etc, etc. Thus was Phoenix born, later renamed to Firebird and then Firefox, due to legal issues.
Maybe it's time for a lightweight *WEB BROWSER* version of Firefox. *WHY* the F*** do web browser writers *INSIST* on trying to develope pseudo-operating-systems on top of their web browsers? Are they refugees from the emacs world? Don't they remember what happened when AOL tried to "re-invent the browser" and destroyed Netscape in the process?
If you *REALLY* need to edit a spreadsheet on a remote server, you should be using a VPN. Failing that, howsabout internet-enabled apps like so... excel https://www.bad.example.com/fubar.xls or gnumeric https://www.bad.example.com/fubar.xls Ditto with word-processors etc. And puh-lease keep your hands off my web browser.
Many laptops with webcams also have microphones. so you can do low-quality videoconferencing. I don't know what make/model of laptops were used by the school. But I thought I'd ask... do they also have microphones? This would greatly increase the potential for eavesdropping.
> The way you express it, DEC would have a had a case > against Microsoft for stealing their technology. Are > you aware of any evidence that this happened?
| "So, Cutler walked down the street to Microsoft and offered them | Mica which became NT. Later DEC sued MS and, in an out of court | settlement, got royalties for the filched technology. Part of the | deal included targeting NT (back) onto the Alpha platform."
> Worse, the right wing propaganda machine would attack Google, > claiming it had a liberal bias in its news aggregation, and was > maliciously trying to silence conservative voices.
If Google is smart, they'll wait for the first cease-and-desist letter from Murdoch's lawyers. At that point they can publish the letter and unlink from his sites. If anybody complains, Google merely has to point to the letter.
> Let's continue that line of thought. What will Google News have > if all of the real news corporations go out of business as they > attempt to stay in business by charging for their services? Blogs?
People fail to make a distinction between newspapers and news reporting. *NEWSPAPERS* are doomed because they pay directly and indirectly for...
- forest workers who chop down trees - truck drivers who haul the trees to pulp & paper mills - pulp & paper mill workers who work on converting the trees to paper - truck drivers who haul the paper to printing plants - printing plant employees who print the papers - truck drivers who haul the papers to various drop points - and the kid who picks up the papers at the drop point and delivers them to your doorstep
That's a helluva lot of overhead. In the past, newspapers used to be able to recoup this overhead by soaking advertisers, big and small, because "they were the only game in town". - But now Craigslist has the smaller advertisers, and the big stores have their own websites. - Here in Canada, realestate agents have their own website http://www.mls.ca/ where you can search for the type of home you want, number of bedrooms/bathrooms you want, location you want, etc, etc. I can narrow the results down to a couple of dozen homes in a few minutes. Beats the daylights out of poring through pages of homes for sale ads, 95% of which are totally wrong for me. - If I want the latest sports scores and league standings, I can go to MLB.COM, NFL.COM, NHL.COM, etc. And unlike newspapers, I don't have to wait till Tuesday to see how standings are affected by a west-coast game on Sunday evening.
> But what where will the blogs get the news to rehash if no one is > reporting news because they all went out of business? Crowd-sourced > news? Come on Slashdot, throw the "big media is biased, news sucks, > free news is better" line at me and tell me how much better news will > be after the death of real reporting.
Let me throw a few websites at you... - abc.com, cbs.com, nbc.com, fox.com, cnn.com, etc, etc - bbc.co.uk, cbc.ca, etc, etc.
I repeat, newspapers are the horse+buggy of the 21st century. People didn't stop travelling when the horse faded away, they adopted newer modes of travel. Similarly, people won't stop getting news when newspapers fade away. They'll get it from electronic media instead.
> Why should anyone have to create a file and add specific > content to it to opt-out of anything? Would make more sense > that one add the file with the line "allow".
"Why should you have to close the curtain if you're screwing your spouse in the living room? Passers-by walking down the public sidewalk on their way to work shouldn't gawk at what they see in the open window." That's what you're saying. If Murdoch doesn't want people to see his sites for free, he shouldn't put them up on the free web, let alone put all the article content in newsreader feeds.
OK, you want to install some useful software... - software 1 requires perl - software 2 requires python - software 3 requires PHP - software 4 requires GTK - software 5 requires DBUS (which earlier versions didn't require) - software 6 requires SQLite (which earlier versions didn't require) - and don't get me started about Java - etc, etc, etc
Soon your hard drive is filled with tons of different libraries which all do very similar stuff.
And special mention goes to Mozilla. I hereby propose the "Mozilla Law"... Every browser with Mozilla source code will attempt to become an operating system. First, AOL attempted to turn Netscape into a "virtual OS". That just about destroyed it, and ceded the browser field to MS for several years. The first cut of the Mozilla browser inspired jokes like "about:kitchen sink". In response to all the yelling and screaming, Mozilla forked Phoenix, aka Firebird, aka Firefox. It was a snappy little browser at the start. It too has become big and bloated. And instead of a simple text or XML file for bookmarks, they've gone to an SQL database which requires SQLite. And the "Abortion Bar" is still crap.
Microsoft would love to rent Windows and Office to you. Remember Microsoft's original "DOT-NET" campaign a few years ago? Everybody would run a thick dumb client (don't ask me to explain), but all the apps would be on MS servers. And if your cheque bounced or your credit card was maxed out, you lost your access (and Word and Excel; sorry I couldn't resist). Over the years MS would make a lot more money from renting than from a one-shot sale.
Even before switched to linux, I was MS' marketing nightmare. By the time I stopped multi-booting linux/Windows, 98SE had been "upgraded" to Windows ME and Windows XP. MS did not get a penny from me for upgrades. I have old Win98SE and Office97 CDs from back in the days when I was still on Windows. If I really needed to, I could get an old PIII, or virtualize one on linux, and load them up. For that matter, I've been able to load up real Win3.1 (gee, I'm a packrat) on DOSBOX under linux, to play Chessmaster 3000. I never could get it to run under WINE.
The point is that you would end up paying a lot more over the years. And MS would make higher profits. Another item that hasn't been considered is the internet bandwidth usage. By the time you finish doing your basic stuff, you've blown your monthly quota, and there's nothing left for P2P. I'm sure the MPAA/RIAA would love that, too. Not to mention the fact that they could ask MS to send monthly reports on who's downloading what. This is a marketer's wet dream, and a consumer's nightmare.
> Nobody broke any standards because they never > agreed to play by them in the first place.
I don't know anout the rest of the planet. but kilo/mega/giga/etc are powers of 10 according to the "Weights and Measures Act" in Canada. See "Part V PREFIXES FOR MULTIPLES AND SUBMULTIPLES OF BASIC, SUPPLEMENTARY AND DERIVED UNITS OF MEASUREMENT" http://laws.justice.gc.ca/PDF/Statute/W/W-6.pdf Anybody else have pointers to equivalant legislation elsewhere?
These prefixes have been powers of 10 ever since France invented the metric system 1791. Powers of 2 as kilo/mega/etc are plain wrong.
> I spent June in Toronto and Ottawa with friends and my family, all of > whom have internet service provided by Rogers. Now I have a bunch of > type-o URLs in FF's history when I'm typing the in the address bar.
When this happens in Firefox 1) down-arrow to the line in the list with the item you don't want 2) hit {DELETE}
> The video memory is now virtualized, just like what people have > been doing to the main memory. No more fighting for video > memories between two directx applications. You don't even have > to reboot after installing the video driver. Aren't that an > important improvement to server especially?
Errrr, uhmmm, WTF ARE YOU DOING RUNNING VIDEOS ON A SERVER??? A server sits in a locked room, and serves out files, runs queries, whatever. Even if it's serving out or streaming video files it doesn't need a GUI.
BTW, this is one reason why linux beats the pants off of Windows in the server room. Eye-candy GUIs are resource hogs. That not only applies to Windows, but also to KDE and GNOME on linux. But at least on linux, the GUI is a bolt-on like Windows3.1 on top of DOS, and you have the option of turning it off. Linux as a server runs a lot faster on the same gear if you don't turn on the X Window GUI. And of course it runs faster than a Windows server with eye-candy GUI. That's why you'll always see Microsoft's server benchmarks are jury-rigged and done versus linux with KDE or GNOME active.
Microsoft marketing has usually made up for weaknesses in their programming, but this is on area where marketing destroyed a chance for MS to own the server room. In the mid-1990's linux was in its infancy, and nowhere near ready for prime-time. The traditional unixes were damn expensive. MS hired Cutler away from DEC, and he wrote a damn good CLI operating system. MS could have pitched that to enterprises at well above desktop prices but well below unix server prices. What would've really helped was that NT would run on bog-standard Intel gear, not some low-production, high-cost exotic RISC cpu. If MS had done this, they would've owned the server room by the early 2000's, and linux would be just another wannabe-unix. But no, marketing forced a built-in GUI onto NT. We had an NT 3.1 server at work with the recommended 16 megs of ram (them was the good ole days). Talk about constant swapping.
As long as MS insists on building an eye-candy GUI into their "server OS"... a) they won't be taken seriously b) they'll get whipped in fair benchmarks
>> Snopes posted a couple of purposefully incorrect things once, >> in order to prove a point about not blindly trusting people. >> The fake stories backfired (or worked, depending on your view) >> and became real urban legends. Hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
> But then again... how smart can they be if they put it into emails.
As Eliot Spitzer (remember him?) once said "Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."
> let alone had their emails all made public... :P
That is a superfluous redundancy ;). Email, by definition, involves at least 2 endpoints. It'll be in the recipient's inbox (or recipients' inboxes), and who knows how many other places. Assume that every email you write will end up being splattered on the front page of your local newspaper, regardless of whether or not you're doing anything illegal. Consider the situation of former Enron employees, many of whom knew nothing about the financial shenanigans going on at the top http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/02/05/search-the-enron-email-corpus-online/
If it's a software upgrade, what OS does it require?
Really paranoid vision, or is it merely realistic... what if the the upgrade requires Windows not only to activate, but handshakes with the OS on bootup? Would the upgrade only work under Windows?
> Is there some technical reason most devices *with a radio* lack AM?
A couple, actually...
1) Due to the frequencies used (540 khz to 1600 khz), a minimal *HALF-DECENT* AM antenna is a 5-inch long by 1/2-inch wide cylinder containing a ferrite bar with *A LOT* of wire wound around it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_antenna#Loopstick_antennas Not only is it large for a cellphone, it's heavy, relatively speaking.
2) AM is very susceptable to RF interference. Put your radio next to your desktop computer, and try listening to an AM station, other than a 50,000 watt flamethrower a few miles away. You'll get nothing but static. Now imagine the circuitry for the AM radio being a millimetre away from other active circuitry inside your cellphone. Other than strong local stations, fuggedaboutit.
> Why is it bloated? What makes you say that?
Because the firefox developers have succumbed to the Microsoft disease. Every optional feature that 10% of users find nice, seems to get incorporated into the base code. At least in the original mozilla 0.9x versions, you could select not to build in certain stuff. Not any more.
* spell-checking is *BUILT-IN*
* an SQL database (SQLite) is built in. This is a performance-killer in linux. To guarantee database integrity, SQLite does a lot of fsync() calls. In an SQL database, that is a necessity. I'm not bitching about the SQLite developers. They wrote a database to do what a database is supposed to do. I'm bitching about the Mozilla developers' decision to use an SQL database when a textfile will do.
> Have you tried using a Firefox optimized for your CPU?
Why just Firefox optimized for your CPU? Howsabout EVERY open-source app optimizied for your CPU? It's called Gentoo linux.
> I think one of my favorite signatures I saw long ago was something like: ...They did it by KILLING their enemies."
> "Rome didn't conquer most of the known world by having meetings...
>
Meetings are inefficient by definition. They consume hours, and generate minutes.
> MPEG-LA isn't some large, evil company. It is just an
> organization to protect the rights of the codec owners.
> For example, if you want to have VC-1, you contact them too.
Just like the RIAA is a corporate shell front for Sony and friends. The hate is mis-directed at the RIAA, when it should be directed at the individual members thereof. Ditto for the MPAA.
> For the average consumer, idiot. Reading the whole post
> before hitting "reply" -- what's so hard about that?
A) when I get a computer from Dell, I have to hook up cables from the monitor to the video out and from the speakers to the audio out. Does the average consumer call in Geek Squad to make a house call and set up their computer? A monitor is a monitor is a monitor.
B) what about DVD and BluRay players? Again, most consumers hook up their own. You're talking about the same level of complaxity hooking up a player to a TV as hooking up a PC to a TV.
First, it was lobbying for unlicenced devices to transmit on TV frequencies ("white spaces"), and then it was outright lobbying to shut down OTA altogether. I happen to be fortunate, living in greater Toronto, 6th-storey condo, clear SSE view. An indoor antenna gets me all of the Toronto digitals and most of the Buffalo digitals. That includes high-def... free... and legal.
Google knows they can't charge for Youtube as long as there is high def free-TV OTA. So they're lobbying to shut down OTA television altogether, so that streaming internet video will become the only game in town. Talk about conflict of interest. I repeat; Google is evil.
> TV will need to evolve to include the internet
A "modern television" is a flatscreen monitor hooked up to an ATSC tuner (OTA) and a QAM tuner (cable).
A "modern personal computer" is a flatscreen monitor hooked up to a box with CPU, audio, video, keyboard, etc.
Run some cable from your your computer audio+video outputs to the TV's inputs (the same ones you use for DVD, BluRay, etc). You've now "evolved" your TV to include the internet. What's so difficult about it?
I have an idea. Let's create a lightweight desktop app that can browse the web and stream audio/video, upload/download files, and submit text for online shopping, and posting to Slashdot. Let's call it web... err... uhmm... web browser. Yeah, that's it. Let's call it a web browser.
If we need to do anything more, develope a "helper application". Even better; an internet-enabled app that avoids screwing around with my browser altogether. I don't know about everybody else here, but I was around in the days of Mozilla 0.9x. It was a big, bloated, slow, joke of an app, even with compiler optimizations. There was lots of joking regarding "about:kitchen sink". People started yelling and screaming for a lightweight web browser, *WITHOUT* email, usenet, webpage developement tools, etc, etc. Thus was Phoenix born, later renamed to Firebird and then Firefox, due to legal issues.
Maybe it's time for a lightweight *WEB BROWSER* version of Firefox. *WHY* the F*** do web browser writers *INSIST* on trying to develope pseudo-operating-systems on top of their web browsers? Are they refugees from the emacs world? Don't they remember what happened when AOL tried to "re-invent the browser" and destroyed Netscape in the process?
If you *REALLY* need to edit a spreadsheet on a remote server, you should be using a VPN. Failing that, howsabout internet-enabled apps like so...
excel https://www.bad.example.com/fubar.xls
or
gnumeric https://www.bad.example.com/fubar.xls
Ditto with word-processors etc. And puh-lease keep your hands off my web browser.
Many laptops with webcams also have microphones. so you can do low-quality videoconferencing. I don't know what make/model of laptops were used by the school. But I thought I'd ask... do they also have microphones? This would greatly increase the potential for eavesdropping.
> The way you express it, DEC would have a had a case
> against Microsoft for stealing their technology. Are
> you aware of any evidence that this happened?
As a matter of fact, yes. See http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/07/30/readers-write-how-microsoft-got-windows-nt/#more-3661
| "So, Cutler walked down the street to Microsoft and offered them
| Mica which became NT. Later DEC sued MS and, in an out of court
| settlement, got royalties for the filched technology. Part of the
| deal included targeting NT (back) onto the Alpha platform."
> Worse, the right wing propaganda machine would attack Google,
> claiming it had a liberal bias in its news aggregation, and was
> maliciously trying to silence conservative voices.
If Google is smart, they'll wait for the first cease-and-desist letter from Murdoch's lawyers. At that point they can publish the letter and unlink from his sites. If anybody complains, Google merely has to point to the letter.
> Let's continue that line of thought. What will Google News have
> if all of the real news corporations go out of business as they
> attempt to stay in business by charging for their services? Blogs?
People fail to make a distinction between newspapers and news reporting. *NEWSPAPERS* are doomed because they pay directly and indirectly for...
- forest workers who chop down trees
- truck drivers who haul the trees to pulp & paper mills
- pulp & paper mill workers who work on converting the trees to paper
- truck drivers who haul the paper to printing plants
- printing plant employees who print the papers
- truck drivers who haul the papers to various drop points
- and the kid who picks up the papers at the drop point and delivers them to your doorstep
That's a helluva lot of overhead. In the past, newspapers used to be able to recoup this overhead by soaking advertisers, big and small, because "they were the only game in town".
- But now Craigslist has the smaller advertisers, and the big stores have their own websites.
- Here in Canada, realestate agents have their own website http://www.mls.ca/ where you can search for the type of home you want, number of bedrooms/bathrooms you want, location you want, etc, etc. I can narrow the results down to a couple of dozen homes in a few minutes. Beats the daylights out of poring through pages of homes for sale ads, 95% of which are totally wrong for me.
- If I want the latest sports scores and league standings, I can go to MLB.COM, NFL.COM, NHL.COM, etc. And unlike newspapers, I don't have to wait till Tuesday to see how standings are affected by a west-coast game on Sunday evening.
> But what where will the blogs get the news to rehash if no one is
> reporting news because they all went out of business? Crowd-sourced
> news? Come on Slashdot, throw the "big media is biased, news sucks,
> free news is better" line at me and tell me how much better news will
> be after the death of real reporting.
Let me throw a few websites at you...
- abc.com, cbs.com, nbc.com, fox.com, cnn.com, etc, etc
- bbc.co.uk, cbc.ca, etc, etc.
I repeat, newspapers are the horse+buggy of the 21st century. People didn't stop travelling when the horse faded away, they adopted newer modes of travel. Similarly, people won't stop getting news when newspapers fade away. They'll get it from electronic media instead.
> Why should anyone have to create a file and add specific
> content to it to opt-out of anything? Would make more sense
> that one add the file with the line "allow".
"Why should you have to close the curtain if you're screwing your spouse in the living room? Passers-by walking down the public sidewalk on their way to work shouldn't gawk at what they see in the open window." That's what you're saying. If Murdoch doesn't want people to see his sites for free, he shouldn't put them up on the free web, let alone put all the article content in newsreader feeds.
OK, you want to install some useful software...
- software 1 requires perl
- software 2 requires python
- software 3 requires PHP
- software 4 requires GTK
- software 5 requires DBUS (which earlier versions didn't require)
- software 6 requires SQLite (which earlier versions didn't require)
- and don't get me started about Java
- etc, etc, etc
Soon your hard drive is filled with tons of different libraries which all do very similar stuff.
And special mention goes to Mozilla. I hereby propose the "Mozilla Law"... Every browser with Mozilla source code will attempt to become an operating system. First, AOL attempted to turn Netscape into a "virtual OS". That just about destroyed it, and ceded the browser field to MS for several years. The first cut of the Mozilla browser inspired jokes like "about:kitchen sink". In response to all the yelling and screaming, Mozilla forked Phoenix, aka Firebird, aka Firefox. It was a snappy little browser at the start. It too has become big and bloated. And instead of a simple text or XML file for bookmarks, they've gone to an SQL database which requires SQLite. And the "Abortion Bar" is still crap.
> They would also be perfectly within their rights to stop making
> Windows altogether and start manufacturing refrigerators...
Knowing Microsoft, it'll probably be their first product that never freezes.
Microsoft would love to rent Windows and Office to you. Remember Microsoft's original "DOT-NET" campaign a few years ago? Everybody would run a thick dumb client (don't ask me to explain), but all the apps would be on MS servers. And if your cheque bounced or your credit card was maxed out, you lost your access (and Word and Excel; sorry I couldn't resist). Over the years MS would make a lot more money from renting than from a one-shot sale.
Even before switched to linux, I was MS' marketing nightmare. By the time I stopped multi-booting linux/Windows, 98SE had been "upgraded" to Windows ME and Windows XP. MS did not get a penny from me for upgrades. I have old Win98SE and Office97 CDs from back in the days when I was still on Windows. If I really needed to, I could get an old PIII, or virtualize one on linux, and load them up. For that matter, I've been able to load up real Win3.1 (gee, I'm a packrat) on DOSBOX under linux, to play Chessmaster 3000. I never could get it to run under WINE.
The point is that you would end up paying a lot more over the years. And MS would make higher profits. Another item that hasn't been considered is the internet bandwidth usage. By the time you finish doing your basic stuff, you've blown your monthly quota, and there's nothing left for P2P. I'm sure the MPAA/RIAA would love that, too. Not to mention the fact that they could ask MS to send monthly reports on who's downloading what. This is a marketer's wet dream, and a consumer's nightmare.
> How can you have a "World" series when only
> one country from the "World" competes.
Errrrr, uhmmmm, 1992 and 1993 anybody?
> Nobody broke any standards because they never
> agreed to play by them in the first place.
I don't know anout the rest of the planet. but kilo/mega/giga/etc are powers of 10 according to the "Weights and Measures Act" in Canada. See "Part V PREFIXES FOR MULTIPLES AND SUBMULTIPLES OF BASIC, SUPPLEMENTARY AND DERIVED UNITS OF MEASUREMENT" http://laws.justice.gc.ca/PDF/Statute/W/W-6.pdf Anybody else have pointers to equivalant legislation elsewhere?
These prefixes have been powers of 10 ever since France invented the metric system 1791. Powers of 2 as kilo/mega/etc are plain wrong.
> US government contracts are starting to require IPv6 support.
But do they REALLY want to face the outcry that'll happen when people applying for disaster relief funds can only do so via IPV6-enabled computers? http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/08/1212237
> I spent June in Toronto and Ottawa with friends and my family, all of
> whom have internet service provided by Rogers. Now I have a bunch of
> type-o URLs in FF's history when I'm typing the in the address bar.
When this happens in Firefox
1) down-arrow to the line in the list with the item you don't want
2) hit {DELETE}
and it's gone.
> The video memory is now virtualized, just like what people have
> been doing to the main memory. No more fighting for video
> memories between two directx applications. You don't even have
> to reboot after installing the video driver. Aren't that an
> important improvement to server especially?
Errrr, uhmmm, WTF ARE YOU DOING RUNNING VIDEOS ON A SERVER??? A server sits in a locked room, and serves out files, runs queries, whatever. Even if it's serving out or streaming video files it doesn't need a GUI.
BTW, this is one reason why linux beats the pants off of Windows in the server room. Eye-candy GUIs are resource hogs. That not only applies to Windows, but also to KDE and GNOME on linux. But at least on linux, the GUI is a bolt-on like Windows3.1 on top of DOS, and you have the option of turning it off. Linux as a server runs a lot faster on the same gear if you don't turn on the X Window GUI. And of course it runs faster than a Windows server with eye-candy GUI. That's why you'll always see Microsoft's server benchmarks are jury-rigged and done versus linux with KDE or GNOME active.
Microsoft marketing has usually made up for weaknesses in their programming, but this is on area where marketing destroyed a chance for MS to own the server room. In the mid-1990's linux was in its infancy, and nowhere near ready for prime-time. The traditional unixes were damn expensive. MS hired Cutler away from DEC, and he wrote a damn good CLI operating system. MS could have pitched that to enterprises at well above desktop prices but well below unix server prices. What would've really helped was that NT would run on bog-standard Intel gear, not some low-production, high-cost exotic RISC cpu. If MS had done this, they would've owned the server room by the early 2000's, and linux would be just another wannabe-unix. But no, marketing forced a built-in GUI onto NT. We had an NT 3.1 server at work with the recommended 16 megs of ram (them was the good ole days). Talk about constant swapping.
As long as MS insists on building an eye-candy GUI into their "server OS"...
a) they won't be taken seriously
b) they'll get whipped in fair benchmarks
>> Snopes posted a couple of purposefully incorrect things once,
>> in order to prove a point about not blindly trusting people.
>> The fake stories backfired (or worked, depending on your view)
>> and became real urban legends. Hilarious.
> [citation needed]
http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp and please don't tell me you fell for it.