Did Congress always stand opposed to the individual as it does today?
You know the joke - "If PRO is the opposite of CON, what's the opposite of progress?"
IIRC, one of the central issues of debate when The Constitution was drafted was whether the federal limitations specified eventually in The Bill Of Rights should be included explicitly somewhere as part of the document. Many of the states' representatives expected that what they were doing was so obvious that there wasn't any need to clog the thing up with stuff like guarantees that congress wouldn't interfere with free speech or usurp authority that hadn't been explicitly granted elsewhere -- they expected such things to be "understood". Luckily, the other side of the issue (the side that didn't trust themselves with power) was able to negotiate a settlement of sorts and The Bill Of Rights was tacked on to explicitly limit federal power in very general areas.
Personally, I think it would have been nice if they had added "...so don't get any f---ing ideas!" to that last one - you know, make it super-double-extra clear where the boundry is, because they seem to have practically ignored it ever since.:(
Heh, heh. I think everyone that's played their way through the Gran Turismo series can sympathize as well.
I sometimes catch myself taking the corners a little wide walking around the office, and I've already got the ultimate endurance racing track mentally layed out around the cubicles back in accounting. Oh, and I SWEAR our break room looks exacly like the break rooms in Half-Life, freshly-polished floor and all! (You just need to watch out for the head-crabs around Jeanette's desk. [ack!])
Ok, but I'm still waiting on push technology, portals and b2whatever to revolutionize my web 'experience'(*).
I will admit that I don't have any idea whether this makes good business sense, but my gut reaction is that Yahoo! is overpaying. In fact, I expect that this will throw them in the same leaky washbasin with AOL Time Warner, not Google.
(*) Face it -- NONE of this is going to get any better until we stop using words like 'experience' and 'product' to describe this stuff. Marketing is the real evil!
So you argument is that since they are taking a loss on the hardware, it still belongs to them and therefore they can tell me what to do with it?
That's pretty lame-ass weak.
If my friend sold my car which was LENT to him, he would be wrong because the is not his property, since lending != transferring ownership. If he wants to pay my price to buy it, I could sell it to him and then he could do whatever he wanted with it. Otherwise, what he's doing *IS* stealing because the car is mine in the very well-vetted AND traditional ownership-of-property sense.
Further, as long as I'm putting up the cash for the Xbox and I get a bill of sale receipt, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. In my opinion, this includes reselling, disassembling and hacking it. (Yes, I think the DMCA is mostly a crock of overindulgent, SIG stinkycheese, but no I'm not sure I agree that after hacking the XBox, you should be able to provide others the ability to circumvent MS's copyrights, but THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE! We're talking about XBox owners hacking their XBoxen to run Linux, not a pirated copy of Halo!)
If Microsoft doesn't approve, then they should reconsider their business model. There is a VERY REAL LEGAL difference between SELLING XBoxen at WalMart and RENTING them like the cable company does with my cable box, where cracking the seal on the case voids my rental agreement and cancels my account.
I think MS should buy out that company working on that Phantom thingy. That would give them what they actually want.
They are requesting respect for their innovations, huh?
IIRC, the whole idea was to take existing off-the-shelf PC parts that used an existing PC architecture and put them in a box that could easily mass produced with a very short time-to-market and an OS that allowed existing developers to leverage their existing skills.
Hmmm... That sounds familiar... now where have I heard that before?
I'm not against MS wanting to control a closed platform they developed, but I am insulted by their insistance that this is an IP issue. It's not an IP issue, it's a PP (physical property) issue. If they don't like people voiding the warranties on their hardware, they should have made their CDs spin backwards like Nintendo.
Why, oh why, does everything have to come back to testosterone for these people? It is, quite possibly, the most overrated hormone of all time. I believe the results are correct, but this causality argument is total bullstuff.
This has nothing to do with man-juice, and everything to do with the allocation of time. You simply cannot build a successful happy relationship with a woman if you are not willing to put her first in your schedule.
As a single, I had approximately 8 more hours per day of play time when nothing was pre-scheduled for me. THAT'S where my 'research' time went -- yardwork, making dinner together, visiting the in-laws, going to movies. You do the math.
I wouldn't trade it for the world, though - well worth the investment.
So you're saying all I have to do is install one of those screensavers shrouded in four web-site redirections and I can sit back and wait for some pirate in The Phillipines to jack all the 1337 w4r3z and pr0n for me?
Dude! This is better than PointCast **AND** Kazaa -- The stuff just shows up! It's like subscribing to the FBI files-you-shouldn't-have mailing list!
Re:Buzzwords
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have far less groupware experience than some of the other posters, but I want to share this in hopes that others can confirm or refute my opinion that the VALUE of groupware is overrated for many (if not most) organizations.
I have installed GroupWise and Exchange a couple of times as a consultant, as well as managing a mid-size GroupWise network for three years.
My experience is that everyone uses the group features in the beginning (for scheduling, conferences, etc.), but over time very few stick with it. Most of them just go back to using DayMinder and pocket calendars (or, in my case, POST-ITS!) because that's just the way they are wired, and no amount of Blackberry/VoIP/Web-enablement featurism is going to change that fact.
After a year or so, the only people who were still consistently using the group features are the handful of executives who were shopping for it in the first place.
Probably because of the association with 911 - the US standard emergency telephone number. It's like a distress signal of sorts, like "S-O-S". Read into it what you will.
Oh my gosh!!!
Rolling On The Floor Laughing!!!
I Can't Help But Think You Must Be Some Kind Of Comic Genius!
Your Post Was So Outrageous,..... I Must.... I....
I can't remember the rest... this is stupid. Sorry.
This is easy - if energy were nearly free, the whole world would turn into Las Vegas. Seriously. Because of the Hoover Dam out there, a typical household can run everything including the air conditioner for, like, $15/month. It's sickening.
... and what stops that from frying my credit card? Further, how do they know which card I want to use? If I was a crook, and I managed to sign up as an RFID-enabled vendor, what would stop me from walking around in a crowd (like at a concert) charging people's credit cards to my account, or at least reading their card numbers?
I'd love to see these Adolf Hitler try to run for president today. I imagine he'd hire these very same people to "construct a proactive framework to minimise negatives arising" and try to best pacify the pesky human rights folks...
What stops me from walking through Wal-Mart wearing one of these things zotting tags left and right?
....I mean, other than cancer? [grin](***)
(***) [I am kidding and fully aware that the E/M waves radiated by this thing would be difficult to absorb in sufficient quantity at frequencies that would pose much of a health risk, so please, no flaming the cancer ref.]
Heck no they shouldn't be moving on....
on
.Net:... 3 Years Later
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There are some compelling advantages to.NET -- REAL compelling advantages. The thing is that it's takes a boatload of time for a new development platform to get to the mainstream: You're looking at two or three years to get the developers comfortable enough to start working with it, then another two or three years to get their apps ported over and another year or two to roll those out to customers.
I figure we should start seeing real concrete examples of the advantages of.NET in, like 2005-06.
Don't believe me?
USB.
Or even better, how about Win32? We *still* have at least two industry-specific Win16 apps that are under a current maintenance contract. Hell, most of the non-MSOffice Win16 crap was just replaced around four years ago with the Y2K upgrades, so we're still in the process of depreciating it!
All of MS's apps will be.NET in November, but contrary to what the open source community believes, MS Office will only get you so far -- it is by far not the most important piece of software we run. The developers are the key, and MS understands this. You need to get **THEM** interested in developing on a new platform (.NET, MONO, Java, LAMP, ELF or whatever) about five years before you want anything to happen.
Since every program contains at least one bug,
and further, every program can be reduced by one line.
Therefore, by induction, every program can be reduced to one line which doesn't work.
What bothers me about these articles is that there is more to software quality than the # of flaws-per-unit-"whatever".
Like design.
It seems to me most of the problems with Apache's main competitor in terms of software quality are the result of design and engineering choices made by MS's IIS development team.
In other words, it does exactly what they designed it to do, but what they designed it to do was a very bad idea.
We use RenAttach and I added ZIP files to its list of 'bad' files last week as a precaution.
If you aren't familiar with it, RenAttach processes each email and compares the file extension of each email attachment against a list of "bad" extenstions you've configured. Any files with bad extenstions are renamed: "yourfile.exe" becomes "yourfile_exe.xxx".
This prevents auto-running executable viruses from damaging anything, but still leaves the user in control so they can exchange data. This would not work in some shops where security procedures require that users be treated with suspicion, but for my situation, it's perfect.
It can also run in 'good' mode where it renames everything EXCEPT the extensions of the good list.
Now THAT's a tight budget!
on
RAID for Zero-G?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Boy, those budget cuts at NASA must be getting bad if they're coming to us for advice!
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait, some day it'll be sorry. It'll be time for an upgrade and I'll be all like, Ha ha, no RAM for you funny boy!
Yeah, I know what you mean, but my PC is a chick, so try getting a straight answer out of her about ANYTHING!
Did Congress always stand opposed to the individual as it does today?
You know the joke - "If PRO is the opposite of CON, what's the opposite of progress?"
IIRC, one of the central issues of debate when The Constitution was drafted was whether the federal limitations specified eventually in The Bill Of Rights should be included explicitly somewhere as part of the document. Many of the states' representatives expected that what they were doing was so obvious that there wasn't any need to clog the thing up with stuff like guarantees that congress wouldn't interfere with free speech or usurp authority that hadn't been explicitly granted elsewhere -- they expected such things to be "understood". Luckily, the other side of the issue (the side that didn't trust themselves with power) was able to negotiate a settlement of sorts and The Bill Of Rights was tacked on to explicitly limit federal power in very general areas.
Personally, I think it would have been nice if they had added "...so don't get any f---ing ideas!" to that last one - you know, make it super-double-extra clear where the boundry is, because they seem to have practically ignored it ever since.
If they were smart, they'd drop this and develop an authentication system that works on swearing -- my computer just isn't that funny.
Heh, heh. I think everyone that's played their way through the Gran Turismo series can sympathize as well.
I sometimes catch myself taking the corners a little wide walking around the office, and I've already got the ultimate endurance racing track mentally layed out around the cubicles back in accounting. Oh, and I SWEAR our break room looks exacly like the break rooms in Half-Life, freshly-polished floor and all! (You just need to watch out for the head-crabs around Jeanette's desk. [ack!])
So, it's all about search engines, now, is it?
Ok, but I'm still waiting on push technology, portals and b2whatever to revolutionize my web 'experience'(*).
I will admit that I don't have any idea whether this makes good business sense, but my gut reaction is that Yahoo! is overpaying. In fact, I expect that this will throw them in the same leaky washbasin with AOL Time Warner, not Google.
(*) Face it -- NONE of this is going to get any better until we stop using words like 'experience' and 'product' to describe this stuff. Marketing is the real evil!
Whaaaa?
So you argument is that since they are taking a loss on the hardware, it still belongs to them and therefore they can tell me what to do with it?
That's pretty lame-ass weak.
If my friend sold my car which was LENT to him, he would be wrong because the is not his property, since lending != transferring ownership. If he wants to pay my price to buy it, I could sell it to him and then he could do whatever he wanted with it. Otherwise, what he's doing *IS* stealing because the car is mine in the very well-vetted AND traditional ownership-of-property sense.
Further, as long as I'm putting up the cash for the Xbox and I get a bill of sale receipt, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. In my opinion, this includes reselling, disassembling and hacking it. (Yes, I think the DMCA is mostly a crock of overindulgent, SIG stinkycheese, but no I'm not sure I agree that after hacking the XBox, you should be able to provide others the ability to circumvent MS's copyrights, but THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE! We're talking about XBox owners hacking their XBoxen to run Linux, not a pirated copy of Halo!)
If Microsoft doesn't approve, then they should reconsider their business model. There is a VERY REAL LEGAL difference between SELLING XBoxen at WalMart and RENTING them like the cable company does with my cable box, where cracking the seal on the case voids my rental agreement and cancels my account.
I think MS should buy out that company working on that Phantom thingy. That would give them what they actually want.
...and best of all, with Linux, you can TRY IT OUT AND SEE IF IT'S GOING TO WORK BEFORE YOU LAY OUT THE CASH for the fully developed system!
They are requesting respect for their innovations, huh?
IIRC, the whole idea was to take existing off-the-shelf PC parts that used an existing PC architecture and put them in a box that could easily mass produced with a very short time-to-market and an OS that allowed existing developers to leverage their existing skills.
Hmmm... That sounds familiar... now where have I heard that before?
Oh, of course! That's what made BG a gazillionaire in the first place!
I'm not against MS wanting to control a closed platform they developed, but I am insulted by their insistance that this is an IP issue. It's not an IP issue, it's a PP (physical property) issue. If they don't like people voiding the warranties on their hardware, they should have made their CDs spin backwards like Nintendo.
Why, oh why, does everything have to come back to testosterone for these people? It is, quite possibly, the most overrated hormone of all time. I believe the results are correct, but this causality argument is total bullstuff.
This has nothing to do with man-juice, and everything to do with the allocation of time. You simply cannot build a successful happy relationship with a woman if you are not willing to put her first in your schedule.
As a single, I had approximately 8 more hours per day of play time when nothing was pre-scheduled for me. THAT'S where my 'research' time went -- yardwork, making dinner together, visiting the in-laws, going to movies. You do the math.
I wouldn't trade it for the world, though - well worth the investment.
So you're saying all I have to do is install one of those screensavers shrouded in four web-site redirections and I can sit back and wait for some pirate in The Phillipines to jack all the 1337 w4r3z and pr0n for me?
Dude! This is better than PointCast **AND** Kazaa -- The stuff just shows up! It's like subscribing to the FBI files-you-shouldn't-have mailing list!
Spyware and viruses r0ck!
Didn't Sun announce earlier this year that they were dropping their Linux program?
Coincidence?
Dumb-ass pointless crap like this makes me long for the early days of the Internet, when sites like The Hampsterdance were still worth visiting.
(sigh)
Oh, well... at least we still have StrongBad.
I have far less groupware experience than some of the other posters, but I want to share this in hopes that others can confirm or refute my opinion that the VALUE of groupware is overrated for many (if not most) organizations.
I have installed GroupWise and Exchange a couple of times as a consultant, as well as managing a mid-size GroupWise network for three years.
My experience is that everyone uses the group features in the beginning (for scheduling, conferences, etc.), but over time very few stick with it. Most of them just go back to using DayMinder and pocket calendars (or, in my case, POST-ITS!) because that's just the way they are wired, and no amount of Blackberry/VoIP/Web-enablement featurism is going to change that fact.
After a year or so, the only people who were still consistently using the group features are the handful of executives who were shopping for it in the first place.
Has anyone else had experiences like that?
Probably because of the association with 911 - the US standard emergency telephone number. It's like a distress signal of sorts, like "S-O-S". Read into it what you will.
OMG!!! ROTFL!!! ICHBTYMBSCOCG! YPWSO, IMMLMTILDTJLCD! (*)
(*) TRANSLATION FOR THE ACRONYM-IMPAIRED:
Oh my gosh!!!
Rolling On The Floor Laughing!!!
I Can't Help But Think You Must Be Some Kind Of Comic Genius!
Your Post Was So Outrageous,
I can't remember the rest... this is stupid. Sorry.
This is easy - if energy were nearly free, the whole world would turn into Las Vegas. Seriously. Because of the Hoover Dam out there, a typical household can run everything including the air conditioner for, like, $15/month. It's sickening.
Baaaaaaaad mojo, man..... baaad mojo.
I'd love to see these Adolf Hitler try to run for president today. I imagine he'd hire these very same people to "construct a proactive framework to minimise negatives arising" and try to best pacify the pesky human rights folks...
Hell, it worked the first time he did it!
What stops me from walking through Wal-Mart wearing one of these things zotting tags left and right?
(***) [I am kidding and fully aware that the E/M waves radiated by this thing would be difficult to absorb in sufficient quantity at frequencies that would pose much of a health risk, so please, no flaming the cancer ref.]
There are some compelling advantages to
I figure we should start seeing real concrete examples of the advantages of
Don't believe me?
USB.
Or even better, how about Win32? We *still* have at least two industry-specific Win16 apps that are under a current maintenance contract. Hell, most of the non-MSOffice Win16 crap was just replaced around four years ago with the Y2K upgrades, so we're still in the process of depreciating it!
All of MS's apps will be
Except I heard it as:
Since every program contains at least one bug,
and further, every program can be reduced by one line.
Therefore, by induction, every program can be reduced to one line which doesn't work.
The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
What bothers me about these articles is that there is more to software quality than the # of flaws-per-unit-"whatever".
Like design.
It seems to me most of the problems with Apache's main competitor in terms of software quality are the result of design and engineering choices made by MS's IIS development team.
In other words, it does exactly what they designed it to do, but what they designed it to do was a very bad idea.
You leavbe my damn leaf blower out of this!
We use RenAttach and I added ZIP files to its list of 'bad' files last week as a precaution.
If you aren't familiar with it, RenAttach processes each email and compares the file extension of each email attachment against a list of "bad" extenstions you've configured. Any files with bad extenstions are renamed: "yourfile.exe" becomes "yourfile_exe.xxx".
This prevents auto-running executable viruses from damaging anything, but still leaves the user in control so they can exchange data. This would not work in some shops where security procedures require that users be treated with suspicion, but for my situation, it's perfect.
It can also run in 'good' mode where it renames everything EXCEPT the extensions of the good list.
Boy, those budget cuts at NASA must be getting bad if they're coming to us for advice!