From the article, This virus only affects Microsoft WebTV/MSNTV units. Windows PCs, Macs, Unix, and Linux machines are unaffected.
Huh!? I thought viruses affected EVERY computer and email client the same! I mean they've never suggested anything different on the news before this?!? Do you mean that when checking my email on Red Hat using Pine I won't get klez or code red???
It doesn't make them any money. Right now many WebTV users probably don't consider WebTV to be a computer. Remember, computers are complex, buggy, get hacked, and get viruses therefore if WebTV is suseptible to viruses it is a computer. By sending out an alert to all their subscribers they will alert everybody to the fact that WebTV is a type of computer and will lower its popularity because of that. That being said it is an interesting test to see if M$ will stand to possibly lose a little PR in order to stop a life saving service from being tied up.
I ran across a good cartoon at Strange Matter which seems to have gone down (permenantly?). Either way the caption is something along the lines of "The true cause of the extinction of the neanderthals" and has a group standing arround and one announcing "From now on all our survival decisions will be made by committee.":)
I believe (though I could be wrong) that all 3 have some sort of viewing network on which you can watch content and these are the likely numbers that the article refers to. Considering that Windows Media is pre-installed on all Windows machines their numbers should be much higher than the other 2 which you have to expicitly download.
Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
It depends. If spam is your only method of advertising and/or you're running a scam then spam won't hurt your buisness. On the other hand "legitimate" buisnesses who send spam are probably thinking that more publicity is better and are under the impression that spam sent is really helping them.
What happens when the media giants decide only M$ can legally play the media that they distribute? If the media giants say only M$ can play those formats they have the DRM they've been looking for all along. Of course once this happens as opposed to being less attractive by violating your rights M$ will infact become more attractive because they will be the only ones who are allowed to use the media at all!
From the sounds of the article TurboLinux wasn't doing so well to begin with. Even if this story turns out to be false it might still cause TurboLinux's stock to nosedive completely killing them off for real:(
The risk isn't in the technology itself but in who controls the technology. Sure it is possible to listen to dissention but that is merely because those in power have failed to keep ahead of the curve. Look at the western world now. Information is controlled by a small handfull of media conglomerates, these conglomerates in turn set the political adgenda and present the populace with their own views on the world. The internet is a great source of information but with the exception of google think about where they are going. Remember that the internet is still a somewhat new phenomenon to corporations. People with power and money can already pay to have their sites appear at the top of any search leaving dissenting sites almost impossible to find and litigation can destroy sites critical of them. While we are still in very good shape as far as access to information goes on the web how long is it before ICANN becomes completely dominated by corporate interests and won't accept "unsatisfactory" webpages.
Sure there is a good chance that in the west we may be able to avoid it but that doesn't erease the chance of it happening. I would argue that China is very much becoming 1984 as envisioned. As to fabrication of information just look at the Beijing newspaper's response to finding out The Onion story was false "'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'" Is that bending the truth enough? Add to that blocking certain content from being accessable over the internet, controlling the media, numerous human rights violations, indocternation, spreading false news about "enemies" (Falon Gong), they arn't that far away from reaching Orwell's vision.
Anyway, I'm a little confused as to why he's opposed to pedophilia, yet corresponds with them in prison. Maybe, as you said, he's just trying to gain a look inside their heads and see what makes them tick. Maybe he's just a little off.
Remember that ignoring problems like this is not the way to solve them. From his responses I percieve him as someone who doesn't feel especially bound by social conventions and wants to understand all the sides of an issue. When someone has a problem or a different way of thinking I think shunning them like a virus is about the worst thing we can do. If our points of view are truely better than theirs than we have nothing to fear, if however despite our baises our views are flawed we have everything to gain. I think it is admirable that not only does he communicate with those society has shunned and tries to help/understand them but that he has the guts to admit it publicly of his own free will.
Openoffice is built off of source code released from Sun's Staroffice . OpenOffice.org is not a company, it is the organization managing and developing the free program off of which Sun makes StarOffice so there is no one to sell you a CD. If you want a program on CD you need to buy it from Sun (think it might be about $75) otherwise you're stuck with the 50 mb free download.
Up till now MSNBR has gone out of its way to be tough on MS but this acticle (if it is legit) is by far the easiest one on MS they've done so far. I wonder if now that it is a bigger issue if MSNBC is starting to push MS's agenda, it will be interesting to see their take on it if MS ever really wants good PR.
Prehaps this could indicate that they are interested in getting involved with OpenGL and not just shut it down
Rather I suspect they would take all the IP licenses for OpenGL and incorporate them into DirectX. Then they would tell developers why use OpenGL when you get everything and more with DirectX? They than virtually eliminate OpenGL on windows (expect for John Carmack:) and marginalize the market so nothing worthwhile comes out for Mac or Linux. Personally I see 1:1 as them being able to use 2 technologies about equilalent to the ones they found the rights too. Not as them taking every bit of IP associated with the product.
without the usual expensive startup costs. Oh do you mean the 62 million they paid to SGI for a bunch of 3D graphics patents? I think we're at the point where we KNOW M$ is in this for blood. How many times do we have to watch M$ use whatever unsavory/illegal tactics they want to achieve their ends before we realize that if there is something they can do to squeeze even the smallest advantage or profit out of a situation they WILL do it. We need to realize morals and ethics just don't make enough money for corporations and only PR comes into play ther, and M$ is at the point where it is their playground and no matter how rough they play no one has the power to make them feel any concequences. I basically see this situation as the fox tricking a hen into giving him her eggs than asking to be let in the hen house to give them back. Somebody please prove me wrong.
"If you like torching houses for fun, you don't gain anything from torching somebody's house," he said. "But that homeowner will certainly suffer a material loss."
Perhaps that comparison would kind of work for crackers taking down a webserver (or the/. effect for that matter) but in that case egging the house would be better, however it makes no sense pertaining to software piracy. There is no direct collateral damage to the victems. The only loss is in potential lost sales due to the fact that the product you made is now being offered for free so people may not spend the money to buy your product. Even in this case the majority of the time the people who illegally use your product are very likely not the ones who would be buying it. A better analogy would be if you charged admission for people to walk around your house without disturbing anything and people were sneaking around for free (although this is a pretty contrieved analogy).
I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards. I suspect in many regards there is more in common between us and a baboon than a baboon and a gorilla.
If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!
I agree with another respondant that the first time I read the site the the word server wasn't there, and I seem to recall them indicating that in fact there was no server port and it was just a client port (though my memory could be at fault on this last point). I suspect that this was the result of some miscommunication or just a typo but I suspect the poster had pasted the text as he saw it and it changed since then.
Hopefully many who are blind now won't be for long. Either way it's nice to see technology helping to make the world more hospitable (or at least more fun) for the disabled, as technology improves it will be nice to see if we can reduce the effects of disabilities... Aww. Lets be honest. I just want my teloscopic, infared, super high detail, bionic eyes along with super hearing so I can hear monsters down hallways! C'mon is it so much to ask!!:)
I got the idea in the first one that they didn't work for the government and were autonomous because it asked too many questions. Either way, anyone else find it funny how CmdrTaco simple 3 line review completely contrasts and pretty much cuts down JonKatz's review? Of course the question is which one will/.ers puts more credence in?:)
I can't/am too lazy to find an article now but it's interesting how they set it up so your always on the US army team and the other team is always the terrorists. Intestesting how that actually adds to the realism in a way because in the eyes of both teams they are always the good guys defending their country and their way of life against the evil forgein terrorists.
On a side note I think actually making the game is a brilliant move by the army. From the sounds of it it cost somewhere around 5-7 million which is fairly small compared to most advertising campaigns. Combine that with the fact that it is free HUGE numbers of people will download it and it could easily become the most widely played FPS considering the fact that it is a retail quality game and it's free. Imagine Toyota put out a Need for Speed style racing game like this? Just by putting their name at the begainning like any game company does they will get a lot of loyalty from geeks everywhere which will be certainly be a lot more effective than any ad campaign. People tend to like you a lot more when you are directly giving them something very entertaining for free that usually costs money, than when you are just shoving ads in their face.
Your argument is very eloquent and well thought out. Unfortunatly it's also highly misleading.
Of course, the editors claim that Meta-Moderation is the panacea to solve this clear abuse of moderating privledge. But if a Meta Moderator is presented with a list of moderations that they disagree with, such as this targetted 'silencing' mentioned above, they cannot note them as such without in turn becoming an 'Undesirable' themselves, as too many Disagreements with the Moderation groupthink also result in loss of Karma.
You know what I recall very few meta-mods I've done where someone was moderated down for their opinion (a few border-line calls but nothing blatent). The vast majority of times people who are modded down have it done so because they are deliberatly trolling, wrong, offtopic, or the moderator didn't get it (we'll both be modded down, I'll be offtopic and rightly so). The hole in the system is with over/underrated where moderators aren't held accountable but I havn't seen many examples of that. For the most part any relevant, polite, accurate, well thought out argument will be modded up regardless of the views.
Throughout all of this, the Editors have claimed a false level of detachment from the acts of moderation.
From the faq Do editors moderate? The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them. These moderations represent approximately 8% of all moderation, and according to Meta Moderation, the fairness of these comments is statistically indistinguishable from the moderation of non admin users (92-93% of moderations are ruled 'Fair'). You can argue that this is somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits, and this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot Readers, so it will stay this way.
continuing... Throughout the previous 25 years, Microsoft has grown from strength to strength, again possessing shrewd business acumen as well as providing products that people want. This makes them the number one target for the OSS movement.
Umm... I believe it is more the highly monopolistic and unfair buisness practices and the fear over what they will do with their immense amount of power that makes them enemy #1.
Ask yourself why Slashdot flat-out justified the murder of innocents at Columbine.
Justified or looked at the issue from both sides and tried to find the reasons so they could be avoided in the future. Frankly your NAZI analogy makes no sense it's a comparison based on massive stretches of facts reaching invalid conclusions. This is simply an online community presenting a certain set of viewpoints pertaining to certain issues and if I didn't have work to do I would try and show that furthur.
Any political group who has a lot of enemies be it in China, Russia, Afghanistan, or the US. This is simply encryption, sure a form of encryption better prepared against public scrutiny but encryption none the less. It comes down as always to the fundamental question of whether you want to make available these tools to individuals who have legitimate uses with the understanding that they can also be used against you.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article,
This virus only affects Microsoft WebTV/MSNTV units. Windows PCs, Macs, Unix, and Linux machines are unaffected.
Huh!? I thought viruses affected EVERY computer and email client the same! I mean they've never suggested anything different on the news before this?!? Do you mean that when checking my email on Red Hat using Pine I won't get klez or code red???
Why would M$ do this?
It doesn't make them any money. Right now many WebTV users probably don't consider WebTV to be a computer. Remember, computers are complex, buggy, get hacked, and get viruses therefore if WebTV is suseptible to viruses it is a computer. By sending out an alert to all their subscribers they will alert everybody to the fact that WebTV is a type of computer and will lower its popularity because of that. That being said it is an interesting test to see if M$ will stand to possibly lose a little PR in order to stop a life saving service from being tied up.
I ran across a good cartoon at Strange Matter which seems to have gone down (permenantly?). Either way the caption is something along the lines of "The true cause of the extinction of the neanderthals" and has a group standing arround and one announcing "From now on all our survival decisions will be made by committee." :)
It's not a virus!
It's just the poor MSN infected boxes crying out for help!!
I believe (though I could be wrong) that all 3 have some sort of viewing network on which you can watch content and these are the likely numbers that the article refers to. Considering that Windows Media is pre-installed on all Windows machines their numbers should be much higher than the other 2 which you have to expicitly download.
Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
It depends. If spam is your only method of advertising and/or you're running a scam then spam won't hurt your buisness. On the other hand "legitimate" buisnesses who send spam are probably thinking that more publicity is better and are under the impression that spam sent is really helping them.
DeCSS ring a bell?
What happens when the media giants decide only M$ can legally play the media that they distribute?
If the media giants say only M$ can play those formats they have the DRM they've been looking for all along. Of course once this happens as opposed to being less attractive by violating your rights M$ will infact become more attractive because they will be the only ones who are allowed to use the media at all!
From the sounds of the article TurboLinux wasn't doing so well to begin with. Even if this story turns out to be false it might still cause TurboLinux's stock to nosedive completely killing them off for real :(
I'd want to read every single line of any code given to me to run by the gov't
/. :)
Actually I'd be content to just let you read it and wait for anything suspicious to pop up on
The risk isn't in the technology itself but in who controls the technology. Sure it is possible to listen to dissention but that is merely because those in power have failed to keep ahead of the curve. Look at the western world now. Information is controlled by a small handfull of media conglomerates, these conglomerates in turn set the political adgenda and present the populace with their own views on the world. The internet is a great source of information but with the exception of google think about where they are going. Remember that the internet is still a somewhat new phenomenon to corporations. People with power and money can already pay to have their sites appear at the top of any search leaving dissenting sites almost impossible to find and litigation can destroy sites critical of them. While we are still in very good shape as far as access to information goes on the web how long is it before ICANN becomes completely dominated by corporate interests and won't accept "unsatisfactory" webpages.
Sure there is a good chance that in the west we may be able to avoid it but that doesn't erease the chance of it happening. I would argue that China is very much becoming 1984 as envisioned. As to fabrication of information just look at the Beijing newspaper's response to finding out The Onion story was false "'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'" Is that bending the truth enough? Add to that blocking certain content from being accessable over the internet, controlling the media, numerous human rights violations, indocternation, spreading false news about "enemies" (Falon Gong), they arn't that far away from reaching Orwell's vision.
Anyway, I'm a little confused as to why he's opposed to pedophilia, yet corresponds with them in prison. Maybe, as you said, he's just trying to gain a look inside their heads and see what makes them tick. Maybe he's just a little off.
Remember that ignoring problems like this is not the way to solve them. From his responses I percieve him as someone who doesn't feel especially bound by social conventions and wants to understand all the sides of an issue. When someone has a problem or a different way of thinking I think shunning them like a virus is about the worst thing we can do. If our points of view are truely better than theirs than we have nothing to fear, if however despite our baises our views are flawed we have everything to gain. I think it is admirable that not only does he communicate with those society has shunned and tries to help/understand them but that he has the guts to admit it publicly of his own free will.
Openoffice is built off of source code released from Sun's Staroffice . OpenOffice.org is not a company, it is the organization managing and developing the free program off of which Sun makes StarOffice so there is no one to sell you a CD. If you want a program on CD you need to buy it from Sun (think it might be about $75) otherwise you're stuck with the 50 mb free download.
Up till now MSNBR has gone out of its way to be tough on MS but this acticle (if it is legit) is by far the easiest one on MS they've done so far. I wonder if now that it is a bigger issue if MSNBC is starting to push MS's agenda, it will be interesting to see their take on it if MS ever really wants good PR.
Prehaps this could indicate that they are interested in getting involved with OpenGL and not just shut it down
Rather I suspect they would take all the IP licenses for OpenGL and incorporate them into DirectX. Then they would tell developers why use OpenGL when you get everything and more with DirectX? They than virtually eliminate OpenGL on windows (expect for John Carmack
without the usual expensive startup costs.
Oh do you mean the 62 million they paid to SGI for a bunch of 3D graphics patents? I think we're at the point where we KNOW M$ is in this for blood. How many times do we have to watch M$ use whatever unsavory
the tape seams tend to fray and split after 15 or so passses
Ummm... Perhaps you meant to add, "or so they tell me"
"If you like torching houses for fun, you don't gain anything from torching somebody's house," he said. "But that homeowner will certainly suffer a material loss."
/. effect for that matter) but in that case egging the house would be better, however it makes no sense pertaining to software piracy. There is no direct collateral damage to the victems. The only loss is in potential lost sales due to the fact that the product you made is now being offered for free so people may not spend the money to buy your product. Even in this case the majority of the time the people who illegally use your product are very likely not the ones who would be buying it. A better analogy would be if you charged admission for people to walk around your house without disturbing anything and people were sneaking around for free (although this is a pretty contrieved analogy).
Perhaps that comparison would kind of work for crackers taking down a webserver (or the
I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards. I suspect in many regards there is more in common between us and a baboon than a baboon and a gorilla.
If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!
:)
We only need one CowboyNeal
I agree with another respondant that the first time I read the site the the word server wasn't there, and I seem to recall them indicating that in fact there was no server port and it was just a client port (though my memory could be at fault on this last point). I suspect that this was the result of some miscommunication or just a typo but I suspect the poster had pasted the text as he saw it and it changed since then.
Hopefully many who are blind now won't be for long. Either way it's nice to see technology helping to make the world more hospitable (or at least more fun) for the disabled, as technology improves it will be nice to see if we can reduce the effects of disabilities... Aww. Lets be honest. I just want my teloscopic, infared, super high detail, bionic eyes along with super hearing so I can hear monsters down hallways! C'mon is it so much to ask!! :)
Yeah but if all the viruses are gone the spam won't have anything to keep it company :)
working for a super-secret government agency
/.ers puts more credence in? :)
I got the idea in the first one that they didn't work for the government and were autonomous because it asked too many questions. Either way, anyone else find it funny how CmdrTaco simple 3 line review completely contrasts and pretty much cuts down JonKatz's review? Of course the question is which one will
I can't/am too lazy to find an article now but it's interesting how they set it up so your always on the US army team and the other team is always the terrorists. Intestesting how that actually adds to the realism in a way because in the eyes of both teams they are always the good guys defending their country and their way of life against the evil forgein terrorists.
On a side note I think actually making the game is a brilliant move by the army. From the sounds of it it cost somewhere around 5-7 million which is fairly small compared to most advertising campaigns. Combine that with the fact that it is free HUGE numbers of people will download it and it could easily become the most widely played FPS considering the fact that it is a retail quality game and it's free. Imagine Toyota put out a Need for Speed style racing game like this? Just by putting their name at the begainning like any game company does they will get a lot of loyalty from geeks everywhere which will be certainly be a lot more effective than any ad campaign. People tend to like you a lot more when you are directly giving them something very entertaining for free that usually costs money, than when you are just shoving ads in their face.
Your argument is very eloquent and well thought out. Unfortunatly it's also highly misleading.
Of course, the editors claim that Meta-Moderation is the panacea to solve this clear abuse of moderating privledge. But if a Meta Moderator is presented with a list of moderations that they disagree with, such as this targetted 'silencing' mentioned above, they cannot note them as such without in turn becoming an 'Undesirable' themselves, as too many Disagreements with the Moderation groupthink also result in loss of Karma.
You know what I recall very few meta-mods I've done where someone was moderated down for their opinion (a few border-line calls but nothing blatent). The vast majority of times people who are modded down have it done so because they are deliberatly trolling, wrong, offtopic, or the moderator didn't get it (we'll both be modded down, I'll be offtopic and rightly so). The hole in the system is with over/underrated where moderators aren't held accountable but I havn't seen many examples of that. For the most part any relevant, polite, accurate, well thought out argument will be modded up regardless of the views.
Throughout all of this, the Editors have claimed a false level of detachment from the acts of moderation.
From the faq
Do editors moderate?
The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them. These moderations represent approximately 8% of all moderation, and according to Meta Moderation, the fairness of these comments is statistically indistinguishable from the moderation of non admin users (92-93% of moderations are ruled 'Fair'). You can argue that this is somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits, and this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot Readers, so it will stay this way.
continuing...
Throughout the previous 25 years, Microsoft has grown from strength to strength, again possessing shrewd business acumen as well as providing products that people want. This makes them the number one target for the OSS movement.
Umm... I believe it is more the highly monopolistic and unfair buisness practices and the fear over what they will do with their immense amount of power that makes them enemy #1.
Ask yourself why Slashdot flat-out justified the murder of innocents at Columbine.
Justified or looked at the issue from both sides and tried to find the reasons so they could be avoided in the future. Frankly your NAZI analogy makes no sense it's a comparison based on massive stretches of facts reaching invalid conclusions. This is simply an online community presenting a certain set of viewpoints pertaining to certain issues and if I didn't have work to do I would try and show that furthur.
Any political group who has a lot of enemies be it in China, Russia, Afghanistan, or the US. This is simply encryption, sure a form of encryption better prepared against public scrutiny but encryption none the less. It comes down as always to the fundamental question of whether you want to make available these tools to individuals who have legitimate uses with the understanding that they can also be used against you.