Skywalker Jets, has devised a rocket pack that weighs about 90 pounds and can propel a 200 pound pilot around the air for what is likely the most invigorating [last] 5 minutes of their life.
From the silly article, written by that farce of a company:
we update the client code for Windows Update automatically [even] if the customer did not opt into automatically installing updates without further notice?
Looks to me like they install things without asking, regardless of what the customer says.
The reason given is that they sometimes change their update process, but that makes no sense. Only Microsoft would make a client that can't update itself when the customer asks for updates. I can understand changing update mechanisms, but I can't understand not being able to do so smoothly with user knowledge and consent. Surely, M$ can afford to run more than one server if they can't make a server capable of doing two things at once.
Just to show what great guys they are, they promise to be more "transparent" in the future. That's really cool of them. When they release their source code BSD, GPL or some other free license, I'll consider them less Police State friendly.
Most people do not care about being locked into one music player program. Most people do not own multiple computers or store their music in several places. Most people do not use a lot of music formats. The sound quality argument is a wash,... [more about unwashed ignorance]
The key word missing from your synopsis is "yet". People care, just like you do. They will want flexibility, aka freedom, and music that does not sound like shit. Ipod is good hardware with restrictions that hurt when you get a clue. People eventually get a clue.
AOL and M$ are good examples of clue factor in operation. Most people, you could say, use one of the other if not both. That does not mean that most people are happy with either.
People are mostly happy with their ipods, but they will run into it's limitations.
let me take care of that with this firmware update.
You mean Rockbox? Sounds great. I'm not sure why Apple and other companies bother to reinvent the wheel when such good, free firmware is available. Oh yeah, that's right, digital restrictions. How could I ever forget digital restrictions?
The press release contained some typos. It should have read:
"We want to assure our customer and partner that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations," said Darl McBride.
You know how these commercial software operations like to hype things.
We propose a propellant free, thus contamination free, method that enables ultrahigh precision satellite formation flying with intersatellite distance accuracy of nm (10-9 m) at maximum estimated distances in the order of tens of km. The method is based on ultrahigh precision CW intracavity photon thrusters and tethers. The pushing-out force of the intracavity photon thruster and the pulling-in force of the tether tension between satellites form the basic force structure to stabilize crystalline-like structures of satellites and/or spacecrafts with a relative distance accuracy better than nm. The thrust of the photons can be amplified by up to tens of thousand times by bouncing them between two mirrors located separately
on pairing satellites. For example, a 10 W photon thruster, suitable for micro-satellite applications, is theoretically capable of providing thrusts up to mN, and its weight and power consumption are estimated to be several kgs and tens of W, respectively. The dual usage of photon thruster as a precision laser source for the interferometric ranging system
So you are looking at mN/10W, which is dramatically better than previous power requirements of microN/W. If he's got 30x amplification of this, he's improved things by a factor of 1000.
I'd really like to see the current paper, but the above is interesting enough.
You can slip the product placement in wherever you like, just like they do now. You can put on banner ads, just like you do now. All of the conventional forms of advertising work. The biggest difference is that bandwith is much much cheaper than broadcast and physical media. If you P2P it out, your cost will be that much lower. If that does not add up to profit, I'm not sure what will.
I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, and I'll pay up to a couple bucks a day to get it.
You'll pay that couple of bucks a day, but not directly. Advertising budgets that used to go to broadcasters and printed material are now going to their online equivalents. You get to watch when you want and how you want and the actual artist gets their cut of advertising revenue the way Google does it. Others will do things the same way and everyone will win as things move closer to actual free market worth.
the quality of online video developed under alternative business models will improve. (We hope - most of the YouTube content is either pirate or just awful to watch)
"Awful" is a subjective opinion. What you don't like is something most other people prefer to what's being broadcast. If they did not have that preference, they would still be glued to the tube. Instead, they are taking pot luck from YouTube and being entertained with video picture quality far below ordinary.
Like you said, big median is screwed. The elimination of the last mile problem will really be their end as people actually get choices. Good riddance to corporate controlled news, endless crap sitcoms, laugh tracks, RIAA monopoly music and other shit that's been blasted through a tiny government approved and controlled channel. Most of it has been an embarrassing waste of a scarce public resource. There has been some great content that made it through the restrictions but it was all in spite of the system not because of it. Freedom is better.
I'm just advocating some skepticism about people who may have a grudge against China, or have a good reason to lie about torture back home (so they can get asylum and citizenship here in the United States).
You must realize that the desperation people feel, which you think makes them less than honest, is also an indictment of China. Technicians are comparatively privileged people without economic reasons to immigrate. What grudge can they have that's great enough to make them leave their friends and family forever? What do they fear about going home? Imprisonment, torture and worse? I'll believe news to the contrary when people in China are free to report it without fear or reprisals.
lawyers bother taking on lawsuits under $10 million these days - they can't make enough money
It's sad that justice is only available to people with millions of dollars to burn. Autodesk is sure to run the costs of this trial into multiples of that amount and burn years of many people's career that could be spent doing useful things. You and I pay for all of that waste whenever we do business with a firm that has paid for drafting that uses Autodesk - that is every day.
I could rant on about how Autodesk has used software patents and other anti-competitive practices to keep out competitors and artificially drive up the cost of CAD to such levels that there's virtually no savings from the move to commodity hardware, but that's a different set of rip offs. It all comes back to legal corruption though.
There are some things you can blame on the government. For everything else, there's Microsoft.
How do you tell the difference? The severity of punishment for thought-crime in China makes privacy a very serious matter.
I'd like to make a joke about in how Communist China, you sue the BSA, but it's just not funny. People who look at the wrong web page are put in jail and executed for their organs. Technicians have testified before the US congress that prisoners were skinned alive to better preserve the skin. It should be a crime to do business with China.
I'm sure this is just PR and an attempt to shift blame to M$, but that's the kind of thing you expose yourself when you do business in a country like that.
Indeed, I did and I'd like to thank all of you Assholes Cowards for pointing it out to me. I ordinarily ignore your posts and don't pay much attention to user names. Your "ERRIS is the TWITTER" nonsense finally enticed me to look and I like what I found. Please keep advertising twitter.
Non free software is a vital part of any government's attack on people's liberty. Besides the direct attack on software freedom, non free software is used to keep tabs on citizens and censor their news. Even when it's not directly abused as it is in China, non free software is insecure and presents an unacceptable treat to the free internet and every form of free communication. Twitter points these things out and I'll continue to link to him and others where appropriate.
M$ sucks for all of the things you mention but they are all non free software facts of life. Windoze is insecure because they don't have enough developers to do things right. M$ is evil because they force what's wrong onto the entire industry. Non free auto updates are evil because they have nothing to do with security and everything to do maintaining a monopoly. This is what you have to do if you want to keep users divided and helpless, and that's what non free software is all about.
Uncontrolled updating is crazy. Home users will be angry when things break, as they always do in the clannish non free software world. For IT, this is an unacceptable threat. Business can not tolerate external meddling like that, because it shortcuts testing and will cost real money when hundreds of people come to work and are unable to do their jobs. It's insanely arrogant for them to expect get away with this and that they would try is a sign of their increasing desperation in the face industry revolt. Vista is a failure because non free software works for owners not users. This has always been the case, but auto updates make it obvious. With auto updates, you can never be sure what works today will work tomorrow.
except "terrorist" would be defined as whatever the current politicians in power decide it to mean.
The current terminology is "potential terrorist", a category that includes everyone. The implementers mean it too.
Welcome to the new Constantinople, a power without peers, knowledge without truth, laws without justice and wealth without dignity. With tools like this the current power controls the future and the past. Dissidence will be impossible and change overs will only occur by coup. Without privacy betrayal will be complete and none will be free or safe.
Now that it's published, they had better hope they never get their way. Bill Gates will pay someone to park some nasty clunker right in front and do various offensive and repulsive things. If you don't believe me, just look at the posts around here.
Reference Crocodile Dundee looking at a TV, "I've seen one of those once." TV is playing "I Love Lucy". CD, "Yep, that's what I saw." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with I Love Lucy, it's just that the first syndicated and most played TV show in existence has surely been broadcast more often than people actually wanted to see it.
a broadcast TV station that can reach a half a million homes, with a few thousand TVs tuned in at any given time. How could "pull" save any spectrum?
Because half a million people don't want to watch 99% of what's broadcast, broadcast is 99% waste. People put up with "I Love Lucy" when there was nothing else. Pull gives people the power to watch what they want, when they want so it can be 100% efficient.
"pull" would be completely impractical for TV and radio broadcasts over-the-air - how would the TV request a particular channel?
The same way you watch YouTube in a coffee shop or on your iPhone. Well, you might want to P2P it out through a mesh or cell system, but the previous examples should demonstrate to you that it's easy enough.
... it would need a powerful, expensive transmitter.
I can't imagine anything more expensive and wasteful than the $500,000 broadcasting license the FCC charges to allow people to pollute precious public spectrum with megawatts worth of "I Love Lucy". The principle is general regardless of media - push is wasteful, pull is better.
Broadcast Glitch? There have been plenty but the next one can be permanent for all I care. Broadcast and all push media is a waste of spectrum, unable to deliver what users actually want like pull media can.
As a side note, someone who does not know the difference between M$ and Google reliability has to be a M$ user.
I will agree with you that having two is suboptimal, but we have to support them both *anyways*, so its not like its a big deal.
No we don't. The whole problem with OOXML is that no one will be able to "support" it but M$, just like their old DOC "standard". Why waste time chasing their tail now?
M$ is weak, so it would be better to break their back and be done with it. There is nothing positive that anyone should say about buying yet another $400 Office Suite that does little more than the old one except open the new "superb" format. People hate having to put out the money and the way everything has changed in the interface. Most of all everyone hates the new format. I can continue in this way, but the bottom line is that Microsoft is an enemy of freedom. They must be destroyed because their goal is domination and they will never stop.
Ever see Bridge Over River KWai? You are building the enemy a better bridge. Sooner or later you will ask yourself about it.
I hope you will be contributing the code to OOo and AbiWord to support this tag [table like word 95] as you seem to care about it so much (it is an optional tag that can be ignored).
Why should he care about M$'s customers or do M$'s work for them? I'm sure that someone might care if M$ provided real specs, but it's asinine to tell someone to get coding without the information. In the mean time, I expect to hear a lot of FUD about OO not being perfectly compatible with M$O.
I'm happier without any of that garbage and dread having to work with people who use it as it slowly trickles out. For some reason, they can forgive M$ when things change, but they get pissy when dealing with people who use things that don't have problems. I've already seen how Office 2007 does an imperfect job of translating from DOCX to DOC and back, so my opinion is that nothing has changed at all. It's the same old M$ with the same old games.
It's a file storage, manager and an editor. That's an operating system to most people. Everything else is part of the machine, like the CPU heat sink, that no one cares about.
Realizing this is part of Google's success. They make it easy for people to store and manipulate their stuff and all they ask in return are text ads.
I prefer "fudgoogle" as a tag for nonsense like this. Lawsuits like this are created to FUD Google's business model and services. Other search engines do the same and worse.
I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform,
Application level quirks like this are a symptom of non free software disease that should not be imitated. If Windoze had decent accessibility built into their OS, this would not be an issue. They don't so every application developer has to reinvent the wheel and build their own. In the free software world, the solution is built into the X display system and revealed by various window managers and applications. Yet another solution to a problem that's been solved dozens of times over is not a big help. Those solutions will be migrated to OO.org to overcome this temporary roadblock until the world realizes that Windoze itself is their problem.
The only justification for this is the high profile FUD M$ spewed in Mass. It's not a technical issue, it's a political one. The ease with which the problem can be dealt with is yet another political victory for free software.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be with the addition of a rocket:
The strong part above is mine. Nothing's perfect.
From the silly article, written by that farce of a company:
we update the client code for Windows Update automatically [even] if the customer did not opt into automatically installing updates without further notice?
Looks to me like they install things without asking, regardless of what the customer says.
The reason given is that they sometimes change their update process, but that makes no sense. Only Microsoft would make a client that can't update itself when the customer asks for updates. I can understand changing update mechanisms, but I can't understand not being able to do so smoothly with user knowledge and consent. Surely, M$ can afford to run more than one server if they can't make a server capable of doing two things at once.
Just to show what great guys they are, they promise to be more "transparent" in the future. That's really cool of them. When they release their source code BSD, GPL or some other free license, I'll consider them less Police State friendly.
Wha... oh wait, you're twitter using a sockpuppet because your main account is in karma hell for trolling.
Really? Then why didn't I link to the Vista is a flop log to make my point, eh smart guy? You idiots just don't learn, do you?
Now go away, or I shall be forced to taunt you a third time.
Most people do not care about being locked into one music player program. Most people do not own multiple computers or store their music in several places. Most people do not use a lot of music formats. The sound quality argument is a wash, ... [more about unwashed ignorance]
The key word missing from your synopsis is "yet". People care, just like you do. They will want flexibility, aka freedom, and music that does not sound like shit. Ipod is good hardware with restrictions that hurt when you get a clue. People eventually get a clue.
AOL and M$ are good examples of clue factor in operation. Most people, you could say, use one of the other if not both. That does not mean that most people are happy with either.
People are mostly happy with their ipods, but they will run into it's limitations.
let me take care of that with this firmware update.
You mean Rockbox? Sounds great. I'm not sure why Apple and other companies bother to reinvent the wheel when such good, free firmware is available. Oh yeah, that's right, digital restrictions. How could I ever forget digital restrictions?
The press release contained some typos. It should have read:
You know how these commercial software operations like to hype things.
This paper gives the basic idea.
So you are looking at mN/10W, which is dramatically better than previous power requirements of microN/W. If he's got 30x amplification of this, he's improved things by a factor of 1000.
I'd really like to see the current paper, but the above is interesting enough.
Eyeballs == Advertising $
You can slip the product placement in wherever you like, just like they do now. You can put on banner ads, just like you do now. All of the conventional forms of advertising work. The biggest difference is that bandwith is much much cheaper than broadcast and physical media. If you P2P it out, your cost will be that much lower. If that does not add up to profit, I'm not sure what will.
I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, and I'll pay up to a couple bucks a day to get it.
You'll pay that couple of bucks a day, but not directly. Advertising budgets that used to go to broadcasters and printed material are now going to their online equivalents. You get to watch when you want and how you want and the actual artist gets their cut of advertising revenue the way Google does it. Others will do things the same way and everyone will win as things move closer to actual free market worth.
the quality of online video developed under alternative business models will improve. (We hope - most of the YouTube content is either pirate or just awful to watch)
"Awful" is a subjective opinion. What you don't like is something most other people prefer to what's being broadcast. If they did not have that preference, they would still be glued to the tube. Instead, they are taking pot luck from YouTube and being entertained with video picture quality far below ordinary.
Like you said, big median is screwed. The elimination of the last mile problem will really be their end as people actually get choices. Good riddance to corporate controlled news, endless crap sitcoms, laugh tracks, RIAA monopoly music and other shit that's been blasted through a tiny government approved and controlled channel. Most of it has been an embarrassing waste of a scarce public resource. There has been some great content that made it through the restrictions but it was all in spite of the system not because of it. Freedom is better.
I'm just advocating some skepticism about people who may have a grudge against China, or have a good reason to lie about torture back home (so they can get asylum and citizenship here in the United States).
You must realize that the desperation people feel, which you think makes them less than honest, is also an indictment of China. Technicians are comparatively privileged people without economic reasons to immigrate. What grudge can they have that's great enough to make them leave their friends and family forever? What do they fear about going home? Imprisonment, torture and worse? I'll believe news to the contrary when people in China are free to report it without fear or reprisals.
lawyers bother taking on lawsuits under $10 million these days - they can't make enough money
It's sad that justice is only available to people with millions of dollars to burn. Autodesk is sure to run the costs of this trial into multiples of that amount and burn years of many people's career that could be spent doing useful things. You and I pay for all of that waste whenever we do business with a firm that has paid for drafting that uses Autodesk - that is every day.
I could rant on about how Autodesk has used software patents and other anti-competitive practices to keep out competitors and artificially drive up the cost of CAD to such levels that there's virtually no savings from the move to commodity hardware, but that's a different set of rip offs. It all comes back to legal corruption though.
There are some things you can blame on the government. For everything else, there's Microsoft.
How do you tell the difference? The severity of punishment for thought-crime in China makes privacy a very serious matter.
I'd like to make a joke about in how Communist China, you sue the BSA, but it's just not funny. People who look at the wrong web page are put in jail and executed for their organs. Technicians have testified before the US congress that prisoners were skinned alive to better preserve the skin. It should be a crime to do business with China.
I'm sure this is just PR and an attempt to shift blame to M$, but that's the kind of thing you expose yourself when you do business in a country like that.
You linked to twitter's journal, eh?
Indeed, I did and I'd like to thank all of you Assholes Cowards for pointing it out to me. I ordinarily ignore your posts and don't pay much attention to user names. Your "ERRIS is the TWITTER" nonsense finally enticed me to look and I like what I found. Please keep advertising twitter.
Non free software is a vital part of any government's attack on people's liberty. Besides the direct attack on software freedom, non free software is used to keep tabs on citizens and censor their news. Even when it's not directly abused as it is in China, non free software is insecure and presents an unacceptable treat to the free internet and every form of free communication. Twitter points these things out and I'll continue to link to him and others where appropriate.
M$ sucks for all of the things you mention but they are all non free software facts of life. Windoze is insecure because they don't have enough developers to do things right. M$ is evil because they force what's wrong onto the entire industry. Non free auto updates are evil because they have nothing to do with security and everything to do maintaining a monopoly. This is what you have to do if you want to keep users divided and helpless, and that's what non free software is all about.
Uncontrolled updating is crazy. Home users will be angry when things break, as they always do in the clannish non free software world. For IT, this is an unacceptable threat. Business can not tolerate external meddling like that, because it shortcuts testing and will cost real money when hundreds of people come to work and are unable to do their jobs. It's insanely arrogant for them to expect get away with this and that they would try is a sign of their increasing desperation in the face industry revolt. Vista is a failure because non free software works for owners not users. This has always been the case, but auto updates make it obvious. With auto updates, you can never be sure what works today will work tomorrow.
except "terrorist" would be defined as whatever the current politicians in power decide it to mean.
The current terminology is "potential terrorist", a category that includes everyone. The implementers mean it too.
Welcome to the new Constantinople, a power without peers, knowledge without truth, laws without justice and wealth without dignity. With tools like this the current power controls the future and the past. Dissidence will be impossible and change overs will only occur by coup. Without privacy betrayal will be complete and none will be free or safe.
Now that it's published, they had better hope they never get their way. Bill Gates will pay someone to park some nasty clunker right in front and do various offensive and repulsive things. If you don't believe me, just look at the posts around here.
what do you have against "I Love Lucy?"
Reference Crocodile Dundee looking at a TV, "I've seen one of those once." TV is playing "I Love Lucy". CD, "Yep, that's what I saw." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with I Love Lucy, it's just that the first syndicated and most played TV show in existence has surely been broadcast more often than people actually wanted to see it.
a broadcast TV station that can reach a half a million homes, with a few thousand TVs tuned in at any given time. How could "pull" save any spectrum?
Because half a million people don't want to watch 99% of what's broadcast, broadcast is 99% waste. People put up with "I Love Lucy" when there was nothing else. Pull gives people the power to watch what they want, when they want so it can be 100% efficient.
"pull" would be completely impractical for TV and radio broadcasts over-the-air - how would the TV request a particular channel?
The same way you watch YouTube in a coffee shop or on your iPhone. Well, you might want to P2P it out through a mesh or cell system, but the previous examples should demonstrate to you that it's easy enough.
I can't imagine anything more expensive and wasteful than the $500,000 broadcasting license the FCC charges to allow people to pollute precious public spectrum with megawatts worth of "I Love Lucy". The principle is general regardless of media - push is wasteful, pull is better.
Broadcast Glitch? There have been plenty but the next one can be permanent for all I care. Broadcast and all push media is a waste of spectrum, unable to deliver what users actually want like pull media can.
As a side note, someone who does not know the difference between M$ and Google reliability has to be a M$ user.
Enough dollar signs there, champ?
I'm going to make one for each dollar M$ has in the bank.
I will agree with you that having two is suboptimal, but we have to support them both *anyways*, so its not like its a big deal.
No we don't. The whole problem with OOXML is that no one will be able to "support" it but M$, just like their old DOC "standard". Why waste time chasing their tail now?
M$ is weak, so it would be better to break their back and be done with it. There is nothing positive that anyone should say about buying yet another $400 Office Suite that does little more than the old one except open the new "superb" format. People hate having to put out the money and the way everything has changed in the interface. Most of all everyone hates the new format. I can continue in this way, but the bottom line is that Microsoft is an enemy of freedom. They must be destroyed because their goal is domination and they will never stop.
Ever see Bridge Over River KWai? You are building the enemy a better bridge. Sooner or later you will ask yourself about it.
I hope you will be contributing the code to OOo and AbiWord to support this tag [table like word 95] as you seem to care about it so much (it is an optional tag that can be ignored).
Why should he care about M$'s customers or do M$'s work for them? I'm sure that someone might care if M$ provided real specs, but it's asinine to tell someone to get coding without the information. In the mean time, I expect to hear a lot of FUD about OO not being perfectly compatible with M$O.
I'm happier without any of that garbage and dread having to work with people who use it as it slowly trickles out. For some reason, they can forgive M$ when things change, but they get pissy when dealing with people who use things that don't have problems. I've already seen how Office 2007 does an imperfect job of translating from DOCX to DOC and back, so my opinion is that nothing has changed at all. It's the same old M$ with the same old games.
It's a file storage, manager and an editor. That's an operating system to most people. Everything else is part of the machine, like the CPU heat sink, that no one cares about.
Realizing this is part of Google's success. They make it easy for people to store and manipulate their stuff and all they ask in return are text ads.
I prefer "fudgoogle" as a tag for nonsense like this. Lawsuits like this are created to FUD Google's business model and services. Other search engines do the same and worse.
I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform,
Application level quirks like this are a symptom of non free software disease that should not be imitated. If Windoze had decent accessibility built into their OS, this would not be an issue. They don't so every application developer has to reinvent the wheel and build their own. In the free software world, the solution is built into the X display system and revealed by various window managers and applications. Yet another solution to a problem that's been solved dozens of times over is not a big help. Those solutions will be migrated to OO.org to overcome this temporary roadblock until the world realizes that Windoze itself is their problem.
The only justification for this is the high profile FUD M$ spewed in Mass. It's not a technical issue, it's a political one. The ease with which the problem can be dealt with is yet another political victory for free software.