Why the fsck would you not use a Metal Storm Area Denial pod instead? The only reason to use landmines is that you want to maim children 75 years from now.
No, Linksys did it the way they did as a backhanded way to cash in on the Free Software crowd. You can tell because the GL is basically the same hardware as the V4, but they increased the price -- anyone buying a GL is paying more for the same functionality!
Check the MSRP for the Gv4, the Gv5 and the GL. They are exactly the same. Stores may try to cash in, and given the cutthroat nature and razor-thin margins of the hardware biz, I can't say as I blame them.
Linksys expects the Gv5 and the GL to normalize in price after a little while. I think I read that on Linksys' web site.
Also, what about all those other ideas like having two letters assigned to each keyboard button and then having the phone sort it out based on what it thinks you're probably trying to type?
I fix Blackberries for a living. The 7100 series already has that.
Maybe someone somewhere finally figured out that the ??AA can sue whomever it wants, the USGOV can pass whatever brain damaged laws it wants, we will always find a way to share on another port, or on a random port, or to shoehorn our P2P traffic onto port 80, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Maybe bittorrent clued them in, if they try to make the protocol illegal, we write a legal protocol. If they try to attack the protocol's weaknesses, we write a stronger protocol.
The only way to stop P2P is to partition the Internet. Divide and conquer.
What a blinkered opinion. Ever heard of the free market?
The main thing to consider is the economics.
True.
More to the point, how will the existing oil/energy companies financially benefit from such technology?
Who cares if existing oil companies benefit? If they don't, alternative energy startups will.
For if they don't have an interest in this product, it will never come to fruition, regardless of its technical merit.
Nonsense.
If there is demand, you can bet your ass that someone, somewhere will try and supply it.
Other companies will be founded and they will sell it to us instead. If the green energy market continues to grow explosively as petroleum prices continue to rise, Big Oil will have to adapt or die.
The market abhors a vacuum.
I find your knee-jerk surrender to the multinationals Disturbing.
One would have thought they would have matured by now and start to think about what they leave after they die. Why not start doing good things for computing for a change?
Evil never believes it is evil. Evil usually believes itself to be righteous, and it's enemies to be evil.
Microsoft is trying to Save Us From Ourselves. Their vision -- I shit you not, they've actually published this -- is that every computer, and every non-computer device, runs Windows, so they can all talk to each other. They want you to be able to right-click the "My Coffee Machine" icon on your desktop and select "Start Brewing" from the context menu. Seriously.
Therefore, Google, one of the few Serious Threats to Microsoft, is a monkeywrench in that particular plan, so Balmer really does hate them. They're trying to disrupt Microsoft's plans to impose it's architechture on the rest of ITdom, and therefore they are evil.
Isn't ideology wonderful?
Balmer never has to think about whether we want Windows everywhere, it's For Our Own Good. They're trying to rescue us from the oppressive tyranny of incompatibility. And they are genuinely confused by why they're not being greeted as liberators.
MS has been the biggest roadblock in software evolution to date and nothing can change that if Microsoft doesnt start to behaive like grownups.
That's not how they see it at all. They seriously believe that Windows, and MS-DOS singlehandedly catipulted the personal computer into ubiquity, and the world is a much better place because of Windows.
They're here to help us, whether we like it or not, and anything that opposes Micrsoft is The Enemy. To Microsoft, you're either with us or against us.
It's important to understand how these people think. The trick to beating Microsoft, I suspect, lies in understanding it's mindset.
Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox as much as the next Slashdotter, but don't we all want a more secure Internet Explorer for our Windows-using friends as well?
Speaking as a Windows user, no I really don't want a more secure IE.
Here's what I want:
A drastic reduction in Internet Explorer's market share, forcing web developers to stop building "IE only" websites
A complete end to my need for Windows Update
The complete inability to execute VBA and Win32-compiled code, as essentially all current malware takes one of these two forms
The end of Microsoft's web-browser hegemony
A more standards compliant world wide web for the day I switch all my desktops to Linux
The vast majority of my web browsing takes place in Firefox/MacOS, with the minority taking place in a heavily fortified version of Firefox running on a stripped down version of 98SE.
Once upon a time, Microsoft partnered with IBM to try and 'fix' DOS, and the two companies created OS/2, with the much larger IBM shouldering most of the development costs.
Microsoft decided that OS/2 wasn't for them, and left IBM holding the bag. They retained the right to use the OS/2 source, but quietly went away.
IBM went on, developing and marketing an independant version of OS/2 for a while, and suddenly, out of the blue, Microsoft comes out with an All New, All Different, Next Generation OS called Windows NT and proceeded to sanctimoniously kick the crap out of IBM on the market.
Knee-jerk Microsoft bashing aside for a moment, consider: the halloween documents suggest pretty stongly that Microsoft is scared shitless by Linux specifically, and by Open Source in general, wondering aloud how one attacks a process instead of a company.
Doesn't anyone else see this as some kind of a "fishing expidition" on Microsoft's part?
Maybe some kind of credibility bait, as others here have suggested ("See? Even OSDL says that Windows Server 2003 beats Linux in the areas of etc.") or maybe something much much more Dastardly.
Learn the OS/2 lesson that IBM illustrated for us. No matter how amicable the partnership, no matter how shared the initial goals, Microsoft can not be trusted!
Don't kid yourself. While internet access is the lifeblood of any geek, geeks are a underwhelming minority of any general population, particularly among the uneducated [...]
While the personal computer is the lifeblood of any geek, for everyone else...
it's just a tool. A tool that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without knowing how to use.
The same is true of the internet. More and more of the things one needs to do in life are still doable offline, but as more of the services move online their offline equivalents lose traction.
The underclasses need to at least have the opportunity to learn to use it, as a tool, if they want to have any hope of making it, and free wifi is part of that.
For any body who doubts my thesis, next time you call anywhere where you navigate menus via touchtone, try doing nothing... pretend you have a rotary dial or pulse phone. More and more companies and government agencies assume you have a touch tone phone, they throttle back their live voice operators.
The idea that the internet is somehow "optional" is seeming more and more quaint. Maybe it's time we elevated it to the status of "utility".
The V comic book was great -- this film will suck because the Wachowskis are hacks, living it large off one good film (albeit one with an obvious and portentious, pretentious dialofue carried by its special effects).
Why the hell not? Just because the grid is coal and oil and natural gas right now doesn't mean it won't be mostly wind, solar and nuclear in the future.
Creationism is NOT science, it is religion wrapped in a layer of BS. (The "BS" being a disguise to make you think it's science)
Creationism is NOT "religion wrapped in a layer of BS", it is religious doctrine, pure and simple.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, IS religion wrapped in a layer of BS. At least the version presented by the propoents of teaching it in schools is.
I prefer the original version, where God is just as likely an explanation as aliens, Xenu, or the Great Green Arkleseizure.
Or you could stop calling people geeks for being into computers.
What term would be universally preferable to "geek" by all computer enthusiasts everywhere on the planet?
You people might have tried to turn it into a compliment because you were bullied with the term all through school, but for real people, the term is an insult.
I'm not trying to turn anything into a compliment. At my high school, the word geek never had any negative connotations, it was a neutral term used to describe anyone with significant computer ability, it was never an insult. As was the term nerd.
Of course it doesn't hurt MS that they have to keep IE around anyway to run Windows Update [...]
I'm not so sure about that... seems to me well over 90% of the windows updates I download, are to address... Internet Explorer security flaws!
If one were to use Firefox for web, use Thunderbird for mail, and delete the IE icon off their desktop, how often would MSHTML.DLL even see the light of day? Would one really even need Windows Update at all?
Some bright boy at MS has noticed that people cheerfully run SP1 because they know that they can not install SP2 on their pirated copy of XP.
So, this is the mechanism to get everyone back into the fold, and resume their WindowsUpdate takes over the world one PC at a time strategy.
I personally am glad that Kerry has [conceded]. My opinion of him has gone up and I am glad that he will not try to divide the country further by dragging us through a contested election. Mr. Kerry, thank you for that.
This is because Kerry is a man who does what is right for America, even if it costs him personally. He has always done this. He did it in Nam, he did it infront of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he's doing it now. Too bad he's not actuall in your government any more.
Practicing your right to assemble is NOT a security risk.
Actually, yes it is. That's why it's protected by the Constitution.
The Constitution is overtly openly hostile toward government.
The right to bear arms (that "well regulated militia" stuff) and the right to peaceably assemble are there specifically to allow the citizens to A) intimidate and B) if necessary forcibly remove, the sitting government.
The writers of the Constitution had just had enough of repressive governmemnt, that's why they declared independance.
IBM needed an OS, and if MS wasn't there, CP/M was. So on that front we'd just have different person reaping the rewards there.
This is a really good point. Additionally, without DOS, there wouldn't have been a perception that it was absolute shit, leading the OS/2 project. Remember, OS/2 happened because it was felt by IBM and Microsoft that DOS was just unfixable, so they started over from scratch. Was CP/M-86 just as brain damaged at it's core? Would it have needed to be scrapped and rewritten (i.e. CPM/2) the way DOS was, or would IBM just have fixed it in a major overhaul release? Without Microsoft, OS/2 would probably not existed... not even as "CPM/2".
Of course, Kildall was a business moron and blew his chance at that time.
He did at that. How do you live that one down? Yikes...
Apple would have risen much more strongly, as well as console/PC makers like Atari and Commodore. We'd probably see computers with more advanced graphics systems, but with less memory and less hard disk space as most media would be self-contained cartridges.
I have to call Bullshit on you here. Software would be on self-contained cartriges? No way! There was a steady move to floppy disks even as far back as the C64 (which I owned), and the first 3.5 that I ever used was on an Apple ][ GS. The hard drive revolution would still have come, and CD-ROMs, as you may recall, were spurred by the penetration of the CD audio format.
It's an interesting idea, 'what would our industry look like if we were all still using carts', but I just don't think it would have happened that way, even without a Microsoft.
We wouldn't have the powerful CPUs that we have now, we'd probably be a couple generations behind as the hardware demands of the software would be much lower.
This is another good point. The CPU arms race may not have happened... then again, it may have been the other big guys in our hypothetical world, Apple and Commodore, who started to ship overdone bloatware OSes... Commodore would, judging by the way the AmigaOS was crafted, probably have endeavoured to keep things lean and tight, but Apple may still have wound up with Scully, and MacOS would still have bloated out of proportion.
Hard disks would be small, memory would be low,
Not sure about that... Moore's Law was proposed long before Microsoft was founded.
and video screens would be optimized to view on both TV and computer monitors.
This is a good point. With Commodore leading the pack, I think there would have been a much stronger push toward TV use, as you suggest, but remember, Apple has from the first Mac had an integrated monitor, so maybe not. It's an interesting thought.
Digital TVs that could display computer video output at high resolutions would be the standard as the console/PCs would have merged the computer into a central position in the home entertainment cabinet.
I disagree with this, but I have nothing solid to buttress my position. I just feel that the PC would stull have catipulted into the desktop, even if the industry was dominated by Apple or Commodore. It might have taken a little more time, maybe a year or so. Or possibly it would have happened faster... remember how Apple used to own the education realm?
Many companies would only just now be moving their businesses to computerized systems. Until now, computers would have been viewed as toys. Without Microsoft, the concept of a computer for business would be unthinkable except for large institutions, so many smaller accounting firms, warehouses, and mom'n'pop stores would still be doing their paperwork by hand.
It is the enemies of free sofware who will purchase licenses. They are the only ones with anything to gain by doing so. Not any direct benefit, but indirectly through the fulfillment of their desire to harm the open source community by lending false credibility to SCO.
A little self-absorbed, aren't we? Why must everything be about killing Open Source?
While I must admit that I do suspect this whole SCO thing is nothing more than a thinly veiled mechanism for Microsoft to attack Linux indirectly[1] so as to minimize risk to itself (or perhaps merely to "test the waters" and make sure it's main attack will succeed), I strongly disagree with the idea that the only companies buying licenses are the Sinister Conspiracy To Kill Open Source.
Remember basic business mechanics: if the projected costs of legal fees for getting dragged into court is more than what SCO wants in licenses, many businesses will just pony up and buy the licenses, even if they don't agree with SCO's position.
It's about paying a small amount now to avert the potential of a larger payout (to one's own lawyers) later, not necessarily about even worrying about whether or not SCO's case holds water and you are liable for damages, and may in fact be entirely unrelated to the corporate position on Open Source, for or against.
Don't buy licesnses, and probably SCO's attempt to sue you will get laughed out of court before you even pay your lawyers a dime. Buy licenses, and you guarantee that SCO can't take you to court for non-compliance. Problem solved, company X can move on with it's business.
Maybe a few companies who pony up are "out to get" Open Source, but most are just paying out a little insurance premium and moving on with their lives.
Remember, Microsoft has the most to lose from widespread adoption of Linux. HP, Dell and Gateway could care less what OS you run on their machines, as long as you keep buying their machines.
-- [1] Did I hullucenate the part where Microsoft invested 100 million in SCO or Caldera or something a little while back?
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Why the fsck would you not use a Metal Storm Area Denial pod instead? The only reason to use landmines is that you want to maim children 75 years from now.
Check the MSRP for the Gv4, the Gv5 and the GL. They are exactly the same. Stores may try to cash in, and given the cutthroat nature and razor-thin margins of the hardware biz, I can't say as I blame them.
Linksys expects the Gv5 and the GL to normalize in price after a little while. I think I read that on Linksys' web site.
I fix Blackberries for a living. The 7100 series already has that.
Maybe killing the Internet is the point.
Maybe someone somewhere finally figured out that the ??AA can sue whomever it wants, the USGOV can pass whatever brain damaged laws it wants, we will always find a way to share on another port, or on a random port, or to shoehorn our P2P traffic onto port 80, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Maybe bittorrent clued them in, if they try to make the protocol illegal, we write a legal protocol. If they try to attack the protocol's weaknesses, we write a stronger protocol.
The only way to stop P2P is to partition the Internet. Divide and conquer.
--
You can't stop the signal.
what that means for non-Windows users is uncertain
That means it's only a matter of time until "unregulated operating system software" like Linux is declared illegal.
Or maybe not illegal, but perhaps anyone running Linux will be viewed by other people with suspicion.
If there is demand, you can bet your ass that someone, somewhere will try and supply it.
Other companies will be founded and they will sell it to us instead. If the green energy market continues to grow explosively as petroleum prices continue to rise, Big Oil will have to adapt or die.
The market abhors a vacuum.
I find your knee-jerk surrender to the multinationals Disturbing.
American Workers && ( lazy | creative) == TRUE;
Is that anything like an ATM machine?
Microsoft is trying to Save Us From Ourselves. Their vision -- I shit you not, they've actually published this -- is that every computer, and every non-computer device, runs Windows, so they can all talk to each other. They want you to be able to right-click the "My Coffee Machine" icon on your desktop and select "Start Brewing" from the context menu. Seriously.
Therefore, Google, one of the few Serious Threats to Microsoft, is a monkeywrench in that particular plan, so Balmer really does hate them. They're trying to disrupt Microsoft's plans to impose it's architechture on the rest of ITdom, and therefore they are evil.
Isn't ideology wonderful?
Balmer never has to think about whether we want Windows everywhere, it's For Our Own Good. They're trying to rescue us from the oppressive tyranny of incompatibility. And they are genuinely confused by why they're not being greeted as liberators. That's not how they see it at all. They seriously believe that Windows, and MS-DOS singlehandedly catipulted the personal computer into ubiquity, and the world is a much better place because of Windows.
They're here to help us, whether we like it or not, and anything that opposes Micrsoft is The Enemy. To Microsoft, you're either with us or against us.
It's important to understand how these people think. The trick to beating Microsoft, I suspect, lies in understanding it's mindset.
The IEview extension for Firefox now keeps an "always views this page in IE" list for you.
Any web site that you must use IE for, need not stop you from doing all your web browsing in Firefox.
Speaking as a Windows user, no I really don't want a more secure IE.
Here's what I want:
- A drastic reduction in Internet Explorer's market share, forcing web developers to stop building "IE only" websites
- A complete end to my need for Windows Update
- The complete inability to execute VBA and Win32-compiled code, as essentially all current malware takes one of these two forms
- The end of Microsoft's web-browser hegemony
- A more standards compliant world wide web for the day I switch all my desktops to Linux
The vast majority of my web browsing takes place in Firefox/MacOS, with the minority taking place in a heavily fortified version of Firefox running on a stripped down version of 98SE.And more to the point, why the hell does everything on slashdot always come down to strained metaphors?
Timba, his arms wide.
Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra. Shaka, when the walls fell.
Once upon a time, Microsoft partnered with IBM to try and 'fix' DOS, and the two companies created OS/2, with the much larger IBM shouldering most of the development costs.
Microsoft decided that OS/2 wasn't for them, and left IBM holding the bag. They retained the right to use the OS/2 source, but quietly went away.
IBM went on, developing and marketing an independant version of OS/2 for a while, and suddenly, out of the blue, Microsoft comes out with an All New, All Different, Next Generation OS called Windows NT and proceeded to sanctimoniously kick the crap out of IBM on the market.
Where are they now? OS/2 is officially done according to IBM, and hackers are clamouring for an open source release, and Windows NT is up to version 5.1 (as Windows XP Professional) and dominating the desktop OS market.
DO NOT TRUST MICROSOFT! THEY ARE UP TO SOMETHING!
Knee-jerk Microsoft bashing aside for a moment, consider: the halloween documents suggest pretty stongly that Microsoft is scared shitless by Linux specifically, and by Open Source in general, wondering aloud how one attacks a process instead of a company.
Doesn't anyone else see this as some kind of a "fishing expidition" on Microsoft's part?
Maybe some kind of credibility bait, as others here have suggested ("See? Even OSDL says that Windows Server 2003 beats Linux in the areas of etc.") or maybe something much much more Dastardly.
Learn the OS/2 lesson that IBM illustrated for us. No matter how amicable the partnership, no matter how shared the initial goals, Microsoft can not be trusted!
Don't kid yourself. While internet access is the lifeblood of any geek, geeks are a underwhelming minority of any general population, particularly among the uneducated [...]
While the personal computer is the lifeblood of any geek, for everyone else...
it's just a tool. A tool that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without knowing how to use.
The same is true of the internet. More and more of the things one needs to do in life are still doable offline, but as more of the services move online their offline equivalents lose traction.
The underclasses need to at least have the opportunity to learn to use it, as a tool, if they want to have any hope of making it, and free wifi is part of that.
For any body who doubts my thesis, next time you call anywhere where you navigate menus via touchtone, try doing nothing... pretend you have a rotary dial or pulse phone. More and more companies and government agencies assume you have a touch tone phone, they throttle back their live voice operators.
The idea that the internet is somehow "optional" is seeming more and more quaint. Maybe it's time we elevated it to the status of "utility".
The V comic book was great -- this film will suck because the Wachowskis are hacks, living it large off one good film (albeit one with an obvious and portentious, pretentious dialofue carried by its special effects).
How was "Bound" carried by it's special effects?
Why the hell not? Just because the grid is coal and oil and natural gas right now doesn't mean it won't be mostly wind, solar and nuclear in the future.
Creationism is NOT "religion wrapped in a layer of BS", it is religious doctrine, pure and simple.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, IS religion wrapped in a layer of BS. At least the version presented by the propoents of teaching it in schools is.
I prefer the original version, where God is just as likely an explanation as aliens, Xenu, or the Great Green Arkleseizure.
When we signed up for our ISPs, many of us were given a "free 10 megs of web space" or what have you that we never use.
I predict that this unused web space will become a tradable commodity.
Additionally, people will switch to ISPs that don't meter throughput and host their own sites.
Free content is here to stay.
What term would be universally preferable to "geek" by all computer enthusiasts everywhere on the planet? I'm not trying to turn anything into a compliment. At my high school, the word geek never had any negative connotations, it was a neutral term used to describe anyone with significant computer ability, it was never an insult. As was the term nerd.
Am I not a real person...?
If one were to use Firefox for web, use Thunderbird for mail, and delete the IE icon off their desktop, how often would MSHTML.DLL even see the light of day? Would one really even need Windows Update at all?
Some bright boy at MS has noticed that people cheerfully run SP1 because they know that they can not install SP2 on their pirated copy of XP. So, this is the mechanism to get everyone back into the fold, and resume their WindowsUpdate takes over the world one PC at a time strategy.
This is because Kerry is a man who does what is right for America, even if it costs him personally. He has always done this. He did it in Nam, he did it infront of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he's doing it now. Too bad he's not actuall in your government any more.
Actually, yes it is. That's why it's protected by the Constitution.
The Constitution is overtly openly hostile toward government.
The right to bear arms (that "well regulated militia" stuff) and the right to peaceably assemble are there specifically to allow the citizens to A) intimidate and B) if necessary forcibly remove, the sitting government.
The writers of the Constitution had just had enough of repressive governmemnt, that's why they declared independance.
This is a really good point. Additionally, without DOS, there wouldn't have been a perception that it was absolute shit, leading the OS/2 project. Remember, OS/2 happened because it was felt by IBM and Microsoft that DOS was just unfixable, so they started over from scratch. Was CP/M-86 just as brain damaged at it's core? Would it have needed to be scrapped and rewritten (i.e. CPM/2) the way DOS was, or would IBM just have fixed it in a major overhaul release? Without Microsoft, OS/2 would probably not existed... not even as "CPM/2".
He did at that. How do you live that one down? Yikes...
I have to call Bullshit on you here. Software would be on self-contained cartriges? No way! There was a steady move to floppy disks even as far back as the C64 (which I owned), and the first 3.5 that I ever used was on an Apple ][ GS. The hard drive revolution would still have come, and CD-ROMs, as you may recall, were spurred by the penetration of the CD audio format.
It's an interesting idea, 'what would our industry look like if we were all still using carts', but I just don't think it would have happened that way, even without a Microsoft.
This is another good point. The CPU arms race may not have happened... then again, it may have been the other big guys in our hypothetical world, Apple and Commodore, who started to ship overdone bloatware OSes... Commodore would, judging by the way the AmigaOS was crafted, probably have endeavoured to keep things lean and tight, but Apple may still have wound up with Scully, and MacOS would still have bloated out of proportion.
Not sure about that... Moore's Law was proposed long before Microsoft was founded.
This is a good point. With Commodore leading the pack, I think there would have been a much stronger push toward TV use, as you suggest, but remember, Apple has from the first Mac had an integrated monitor, so maybe not. It's an interesting thought.
I disagree with this, but I have nothing solid to buttress my position. I just feel that the PC would stull have catipulted into the desktop, even if the industry was dominated by Apple or Commodore. It might have taken a little more time, maybe a year or so. Or possibly it would have happened faster... remember how Apple used to own the education realm?
I disagree. I think we witnesse
A little self-absorbed, aren't we? Why must everything be about killing Open Source?
While I must admit that I do suspect this whole SCO thing is nothing more than a thinly veiled mechanism for Microsoft to attack Linux indirectly[1] so as to minimize risk to itself (or perhaps merely to "test the waters" and make sure it's main attack will succeed), I strongly disagree with the idea that the only companies buying licenses are the Sinister Conspiracy To Kill Open Source.
Remember basic business mechanics: if the projected costs of legal fees for getting dragged into court is more than what SCO wants in licenses, many businesses will just pony up and buy the licenses, even if they don't agree with SCO's position.
It's about paying a small amount now to avert the potential of a larger payout (to one's own lawyers) later, not necessarily about even worrying about whether or not SCO's case holds water and you are liable for damages, and may in fact be entirely unrelated to the corporate position on Open Source, for or against.
Don't buy licesnses, and probably SCO's attempt to sue you will get laughed out of court before you even pay your lawyers a dime. Buy licenses, and you guarantee that SCO can't take you to court for non-compliance. Problem solved, company X can move on with it's business.
Maybe a few companies who pony up are "out to get" Open Source, but most are just paying out a little insurance premium and moving on with their lives. Remember, Microsoft has the most to lose from widespread adoption of Linux. HP, Dell and Gateway could care less what OS you run on their machines, as long as you keep buying their machines.
--
[1] Did I hullucenate the part where Microsoft invested 100 million in SCO or Caldera or something a little while back?