Your PirateBay link, that is. Anything you click on at the main page (http://www.thepiratebay.org) takes you to http://thepiratebay.org./ And a lot of the funny legal notices are missing.
Are we sure the right people are running this system, or is it a honeypot to collect IP addresses? The whole site was confiscated a while ago by police. Are we sure who's running it?
to get people motivated to buy the less spyware-prone Vista.
This is theoretical, and very much what Microsoft wants the average user to believe. It may be true. And it may not. Remember that the primary revenue stream for MS is selling operating systems (and MS Office). To sell new OSs, they have to somehow describe a benefit of doing so. This is their angle. So to a certain extent, the malware folks are the ones responsible for maintaining Microsoft's current revenue model.
I personally think that Vista will be just as buggy and spyware laden as XP. Scotty said it best. "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
DX10 adds more triangles and moves some of the physics to the card. Here is some info that says XP won't have it. And I can't find any info to support my backwards compatibility claim, so here is a link to Google so you can go find it.
Then we come up with better ideas than they did. Don't know about AIM, but I do know that it's trivial to hack ICQ. Back in the day I had a utility that would send spoof messages from any user number and a few other goodies like that.
All we need to do is make this system more secure than having a simple open port that anyone can talk to like ICQ has. How about public key encryption? Your account has a keypair. One side is on the server, one side is local. To send a message, you encrypt it with your side of the keypair and the server decrypts it. If the checksum fails, ditch the message - it's bogus.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure someone out there has a better idea.
I've had people get pissed at me when I don't respond to their email. Reason I didn't respond is that it was sitting in a queue somewhere and I hadn't gotten it yet. Plenty of other examples I can think of but that'll do for now.
What we need is a locked out system. Something that doesn't interact with SMTP at all. True, people using that system could only email people in that system, but that wouldn't be a problem once it caught on. If you could guarantee delivery and zero spam, people would flock to it. Google could adapt Gmail to be that system inside of a half a year if they wanted to.
I know people would initially say "No way! How will I communicate with everyone I normally have to email?" Well...it'd be like when my friends discovered ICQ back in the late 90's. Everyone said "Hey...download ICQ and we can talk in real time." And eventually I did. And for a few years, I didn't do email at all (until ICQ died from bloat anyways). This new email system would be adopted just like that. "Hey, I know a messaging system that'll give you something like email, but zero spam and a guaranteed delivery time. Just download the client and make an account. It's great."
Wouldn't be hard to make, either. Just fix things so that you have to log in to send a message, and put something in your TOS that you cannot spam people. Also have an active admin system. Someone does something against the TOS, you yank their account. Maybe have a "report abuse" function built in to the client, or some such. Maybe something like Slashdot Karma. Enough complaints and your account gets locked for admin review.
And ditch relays - they're too hackable. Make each server isolated. We don't need to do the relay thing anymore. It was important "way back then" when you could only send email by queueing them up to transmit at 3am when the grad students finally get off the mainframe, but it's not like that anymore. Make the new system isolated. If you want to send email to someone@someserver.com, you have to have an account on someserver.com. And if you spam someone@someserver.com, they report you and you get locked out.
You could implement all sorts of good ideas into a system like this. Don't allow people to send more than 1 email every minute or two. Don't let people automatically get an account you the system - let them apply and then wait for verification to stop bots from making accounts.
It'd take more thinking and planning than what I've got here, but the point is that something more safe and secure could easily be made. I'd love to see it.
What's the "eye candy" that DX10 offers that DX9 doesn't have? I've seen that referenced here a few times. "Eye Candy". What exactly is it? DX9 is pretty thorough as is. What's added that's worth the bother?
Please show me the spec that says DX10 games will run on DX9 systems. I know a lot of DX9 games won't run on DX8, so this seems like a breakthrough. I'd like to read more about it.
...it doesn't require 300megs of crappy Adobe junk to be installed which hogs your system, installs a printer driver, and adds its toolbars to every fucking application.
There is an easier way. See PDFCreator. It's a simple printer driver, doesn't take up but a meg or two, installs no toolbars or nag crap. It just makes PDF files.
In the business world, I wouldn't doubt it. But they are fuxxoring consumers making DX10 Vista-only, which means if you want to game 'with eye-candy', you need Vista.
They are??? Holy crap!
Makes me wonder how many game developers are currently writing DX10 games.
"Let's see...there are X 100 million DX9-WinXP boxes out there, and a few hundred Vista boxes in beta...and if I write my game for DX10, I lose the X 100 million XP customers....hm...."
Another funny thought: What if Transgaming adds DX10 functionality to their package? The only way to play your new game if you don't have Vista is to switch to Linux! And they said it wasn't ready for the desktop...;^)
You know, across the mall or down the sidewalk? You just catch her out of the corner of your eye. She's got a nice short skirt on and a snug shirt and you just can't help but notice her. She's got really nice legs and you take a moment or two out and just let your gaze linger on them for just a brief before walking on.
Well, you're guilty in spirit of adultery. I'm telling your wife.
MS sells primarily Windows and Office. As I understand it, that's where their primary revenue comes from.
Windows 2000 or XP should be good for a long, long time. Remember Ballmer's famous "developers developers developers"? What's implied in that is that the developers want to reach as wide of a target as they can - that's why they're writing for Windows in the first place. The wider the target, the more software the developers sell. In short, to be operable on all flavors of Windows. Just last year I worked on a product and as part of QA we had to verify that it ran on Win95! Versions A and B!
So IMHO, that pretty much makes Vista optional - and it's going to be for a long, long time. Unless MS figures out some amazing way to get the developers to aim for a smaller locked-in target. I mean, think about how many machines are out there running XP today. How is MS going to tell all of those people to stop it, upgrade, and start paying MS rent?
And as for Office, if it's on a pay-as-you-go model, no business will stand for that for the same reasons. Again, they're competing against earlier releases of Office. And OpenOffice. Soon as a halfway competent accountant runs the numbers, the pay-as-you-go model will be avoided.
I'll betcha Vista and pay-as-you-go winds up being Microsoft's next Windows ME. Nobody will touch either with a ten foot pole.
It's amazing, isn't it? Japan. Gets twice the leave time that US workers get.
And these guys take their work seriously. Do a little Google searching about corporate suicide in Japan. Occasionally, if a Japanese salaryman screws up at work, he'll kill himself for absolution.
These guys take work so seriously they're willing to die for it. And they get twice the vacation time we do.
It's pretty shocking.
Neither. We need more vacation days.
on
On Point On Slacking
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Seriously, we need more vacation. If we got more vacation, we wouldn't need to slack off at work at all. We'd be rested enough to do our jobs. But we don't get nearly enough. We're not slacking - we're dog tired, burnt out, whatever you want to call it. Give us more time off and I'll bet productivity will go up more than enough to compensate.
And cut out PTO while you're at it. Only thing that does is lump your vacation days and your sick days together. It'd be a good idea if we got enough of them but we don't. So every time someone at the office gets the flu, they think "If I take sick days off I'm losing vacation days - and I want to go to the Bahamas this year" and come to the office anyways. And get everybody sick.
Stop treating time off like a loss to the company - it isn't. Healthy and happy workers make for a better company.
Well, you do run into those from time to time. But you can find assholes anywhere - it's just that's how they express themselves in the SCA. Some people who have no influence in the real world will occasionally use a social club as the place to express that angst. I'll bet the Boy Scouts have people who take an unholy joy in pointing out you don't know how to tie all the knots an Eagle Scout is supposed to know. It's human nature.
As for me personally, if anyone gives me any crap about my inaccurate portrayal, I gently remind them that on the battlefield we currently have phalanxes of Romans beside hordes of Vikings fighting units of Normans alongside hired units of Landsknechts. You justify that first, then we'll talk about me. =)
Yeah, I was just kidding. I just thought it was kind of funny that the main page had a pretty clear advertisement on it, which a lot of slashdotters dislike. But the product was open-source friendly. Seemed like a goofy kind of a quandary to me. Sort of like watching a lawyer go off a cliff - but in your car.
Specifically, managers who don't know enough about the project (whatever it may be) and make unreasonable promises to their superiors about shipping dates. It seems that the way most businesses are set up reward managers who complete projects on time or early, rather than the quality of the product. As a result, managers tend to rush development teams through their tasks and the end result is a buggy release. And a manager with a bonus check.
If software shops could change their focus to creating a better release product but with a flexible time schedule...say for instance, rewarding managers for fewer bug reports and service calls rather than completion dates, you'd have an entirely different picture.
Because you're exactly right. Shouldn't we be copying a winning stratety, rather than a losing one? Because PETA hasn't had much success pulling stunts like this. Unless you believe there is no such thing as bad press, anyways.
you cannot defeat the spammers using their own methods.
At the current level of effort. Escalation may be the key. I'll mirror an earlier poster about decentralization. Maybe more servers, or a whole P2P type network bombing these bastards would be more effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Your PirateBay link, that is. Anything you click on at the main page (http://www.thepiratebay.org) takes you to http://thepiratebay.org./ And a lot of the funny legal notices are missing.
Are we sure the right people are running this system, or is it a honeypot to collect IP addresses? The whole site was confiscated a while ago by police. Are we sure who's running it?
I'm not so sure about this statement:
to get people motivated to buy the less spyware-prone Vista.
This is theoretical, and very much what Microsoft wants the average user to believe. It may be true. And it may not. Remember that the primary revenue stream for MS is selling operating systems (and MS Office). To sell new OSs, they have to somehow describe a benefit of doing so. This is their angle. So to a certain extent, the malware folks are the ones responsible for maintaining Microsoft's current revenue model.
I personally think that Vista will be just as buggy and spyware laden as XP. Scotty said it best. "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
My very thought.
Summarizing your last post:
DX10 adds more triangles and moves some of the physics to the card. Here is some info that says XP won't have it. And I can't find any info to support my backwards compatibility claim, so here is a link to Google so you can go find it.
Thanks.
Well, depends on if Adobe's lawsuit goes forward. If built-in PDF support goes away, this is a nice alternative.
Then we come up with better ideas than they did. Don't know about AIM, but I do know that it's trivial to hack ICQ. Back in the day I had a utility that would send spoof messages from any user number and a few other goodies like that.
All we need to do is make this system more secure than having a simple open port that anyone can talk to like ICQ has. How about public key encryption? Your account has a keypair. One side is on the server, one side is local. To send a message, you encrypt it with your side of the keypair and the server decrypts it. If the checksum fails, ditch the message - it's bogus.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure someone out there has a better idea.
I've had people get pissed at me when I don't respond to their email. Reason I didn't respond is that it was sitting in a queue somewhere and I hadn't gotten it yet. Plenty of other examples I can think of but that'll do for now.
What we need is a locked out system. Something that doesn't interact with SMTP at all. True, people using that system could only email people in that system, but that wouldn't be a problem once it caught on. If you could guarantee delivery and zero spam, people would flock to it. Google could adapt Gmail to be that system inside of a half a year if they wanted to.
I know people would initially say "No way! How will I communicate with everyone I normally have to email?" Well...it'd be like when my friends discovered ICQ back in the late 90's. Everyone said "Hey...download ICQ and we can talk in real time." And eventually I did. And for a few years, I didn't do email at all (until ICQ died from bloat anyways). This new email system would be adopted just like that. "Hey, I know a messaging system that'll give you something like email, but zero spam and a guaranteed delivery time. Just download the client and make an account. It's great."
Wouldn't be hard to make, either. Just fix things so that you have to log in to send a message, and put something in your TOS that you cannot spam people. Also have an active admin system. Someone does something against the TOS, you yank their account. Maybe have a "report abuse" function built in to the client, or some such. Maybe something like Slashdot Karma. Enough complaints and your account gets locked for admin review.
And ditch relays - they're too hackable. Make each server isolated. We don't need to do the relay thing anymore. It was important "way back then" when you could only send email by queueing them up to transmit at 3am when the grad students finally get off the mainframe, but it's not like that anymore. Make the new system isolated. If you want to send email to someone@someserver.com, you have to have an account on someserver.com. And if you spam someone@someserver.com, they report you and you get locked out.
You could implement all sorts of good ideas into a system like this. Don't allow people to send more than 1 email every minute or two. Don't let people automatically get an account you the system - let them apply and then wait for verification to stop bots from making accounts.
It'd take more thinking and planning than what I've got here, but the point is that something more safe and secure could easily be made. I'd love to see it.
Then by all means enlighten me.
What's the "eye candy" that DX10 offers that DX9 doesn't have? I've seen that referenced here a few times. "Eye Candy". What exactly is it? DX9 is pretty thorough as is. What's added that's worth the bother?
Please show me the spec that says DX10 games will run on DX9 systems. I know a lot of DX9 games won't run on DX8, so this seems like a breakthrough. I'd like to read more about it.
There is an easier way. See PDFCreator. It's a simple printer driver, doesn't take up but a meg or two, installs no toolbars or nag crap. It just makes PDF files.
It's simple, clean, accurate and elegant, IMHO.
In the business world, I wouldn't doubt it. But they are fuxxoring consumers making DX10 Vista-only, which means if you want to game 'with eye-candy', you need Vista.
They are??? Holy crap!
Makes me wonder how many game developers are currently writing DX10 games.
"Let's see...there are X 100 million DX9-WinXP boxes out there, and a few hundred Vista boxes in beta...and if I write my game for DX10, I lose the X 100 million XP customers....hm...."
Another funny thought: What if Transgaming adds DX10 functionality to their package? The only way to play your new game if you don't have Vista is to switch to Linux! And they said it wasn't ready for the desktop... ;^)
You know, across the mall or down the sidewalk? You just catch her out of the corner of your eye. She's got a nice short skirt on and a snug shirt and you just can't help but notice her. She's got really nice legs and you take a moment or two out and just let your gaze linger on them for just a brief before walking on.
Well, you're guilty in spirit of adultery. I'm telling your wife.
MS sells primarily Windows and Office. As I understand it, that's where their primary revenue comes from.
Windows 2000 or XP should be good for a long, long time. Remember Ballmer's famous "developers developers developers"? What's implied in that is that the developers want to reach as wide of a target as they can - that's why they're writing for Windows in the first place. The wider the target, the more software the developers sell. In short, to be operable on all flavors of Windows. Just last year I worked on a product and as part of QA we had to verify that it ran on Win95! Versions A and B!
So IMHO, that pretty much makes Vista optional - and it's going to be for a long, long time. Unless MS figures out some amazing way to get the developers to aim for a smaller locked-in target. I mean, think about how many machines are out there running XP today. How is MS going to tell all of those people to stop it, upgrade, and start paying MS rent?
And as for Office, if it's on a pay-as-you-go model, no business will stand for that for the same reasons. Again, they're competing against earlier releases of Office. And OpenOffice. Soon as a halfway competent accountant runs the numbers, the pay-as-you-go model will be avoided.
I'll betcha Vista and pay-as-you-go winds up being Microsoft's next Windows ME. Nobody will touch either with a ten foot pole.
Another good way of doing this is to use Ghost, and then physically disconnect the drive you back up to. SATA is good for that.
How MS can sell you a product that they admit is broken, then sell you a subscription service to fix it? Those guys are marketing wizards.
If this was any other product in the world people would scream bloody murder.
It's amazing, isn't it? Japan. Gets twice the leave time that US workers get.
And these guys take their work seriously. Do a little Google searching about corporate suicide in Japan. Occasionally, if a Japanese salaryman screws up at work, he'll kill himself for absolution.
Examples here, here, and here.
These guys take work so seriously they're willing to die for it. And they get twice the vacation time we do.
It's pretty shocking.
Seriously, we need more vacation. If we got more vacation, we wouldn't need to slack off at work at all. We'd be rested enough to do our jobs. But we don't get nearly enough. We're not slacking - we're dog tired, burnt out, whatever you want to call it. Give us more time off and I'll bet productivity will go up more than enough to compensate.
And cut out PTO while you're at it. Only thing that does is lump your vacation days and your sick days together. It'd be a good idea if we got enough of them but we don't. So every time someone at the office gets the flu, they think "If I take sick days off I'm losing vacation days - and I want to go to the Bahamas this year" and come to the office anyways. And get everybody sick.
Stop treating time off like a loss to the company - it isn't. Healthy and happy workers make for a better company.
Well, you do run into those from time to time. But you can find assholes anywhere - it's just that's how they express themselves in the SCA. Some people who have no influence in the real world will occasionally use a social club as the place to express that angst. I'll bet the Boy Scouts have people who take an unholy joy in pointing out you don't know how to tie all the knots an Eagle Scout is supposed to know. It's human nature.
As for me personally, if anyone gives me any crap about my inaccurate portrayal, I gently remind them that on the battlefield we currently have phalanxes of Romans beside hordes of Vikings fighting units of Normans alongside hired units of Landsknechts. You justify that first, then we'll talk about me. =)
...but you beat me to it. A nice and fun way to get your crazies out without hurting anyone or getting hurt yourself.
And yeah, you shoulda done heavy. It's a freeking blast. Especially melee.
I think the GP was joking
Yeah, I was just kidding. I just thought it was kind of funny that the main page had a pretty clear advertisement on it, which a lot of slashdotters dislike. But the product was open-source friendly. Seemed like a goofy kind of a quandary to me. Sort of like watching a lawyer go off a cliff - but in your car.
It's clearly a Slashvertisement. But it teaches people how to contribute to open source projects.
Slashdot, help! How do I feel about this?
I haven't been there, so I have no way of actually knowing. But I'm sure it's true.
Managers.
Specifically, managers who don't know enough about the project (whatever it may be) and make unreasonable promises to their superiors about shipping dates. It seems that the way most businesses are set up reward managers who complete projects on time or early, rather than the quality of the product. As a result, managers tend to rush development teams through their tasks and the end result is a buggy release. And a manager with a bonus check.
If software shops could change their focus to creating a better release product but with a flexible time schedule...say for instance, rewarding managers for fewer bug reports and service calls rather than completion dates, you'd have an entirely different picture.
Because you're exactly right. Shouldn't we be copying a winning stratety, rather than a losing one? Because PETA hasn't had much success pulling stunts like this. Unless you believe there is no such thing as bad press, anyways.
you cannot defeat the spammers using their own methods.
At the current level of effort. Escalation may be the key. I'll mirror an earlier poster about decentralization. Maybe more servers, or a whole P2P type network bombing these bastards would be more effective.
BTW, like your sig. =)