Time to burn a little karma in a futile struggle to bring a modicum intellectual honesty to/.
If Microsoft did this,/.ers would pillory them. Apple does it, and the response is, "well, don't leak trade secrets." Normally,/.ers think information wants to be free and that IP laws stifle innovation. What about the cries and shrieks for "patent reform" I constantly read? But in this case, since it's Apple, it's just fine for them to bring down the almighty wrath of the IP laws upon this guy. Knowing what those contractors make, this guy doesn't have a pot to piss in. Thanks to Apple's pure, unadulterated GREED, this guy will probably end up with a judgment that will follow him for the rest of his life. It will likely keep him from ever having a pot to piss in.
Macaholics, I have news for you. Apple is not pure as the driven snow by a longshot. Apple is no less a Huge Evil Mega-Corp than Microsoft and they behave just as badly, if not worse. This is the latest in the lengthy saga of Apple's trying to win in court what they can't win in the marketplace. For Macaholics with short memories, this is the same Apple that went all the way to the US Supreme Court to stop Microsoft from selling Windows, claiming patent infringement, after Apple stole the idea from Xerox! Such conduct is normally a mortal sin on/. But it's Apple, so it's okay. Hell, as recently as last year, Apple brought in 100 H1-Bs because of the "tight labor market."
Why does Apple use contractors like this guy? Same reason M$ does (and from Volt, the same company M$ uses) - no benefits and zero job security. Were Steve Jobs the great humanitarian you Macaholics make him out to be, he'd hire real employees and pay them a decent, livable wage with honest benefits. In return, Apple would get loyalty and hard work. But like any other "evil corporation," Apple could give a fuck about that. They're only interested in cheap and disposable, all to add a few more zeroes to the end of Steve Jobs' grossly inflated salary.
But, in the Macaholic religious fervor, it's okay.
Using RPM (retch) to install Windows (retch retch) would go something like this (blatantly ripped from a sig I saw):
rpm -i Windows Package Windows already installed
rpm -e Windows Package Windows is not installed
Gentoo's portage tree, on the other hand, goes something like this:
emerge [pkgname]
and it installs. Sure beats dealing with RPM's endless dependency bullshit.
If I wanted to deal with crap like this, I'd just continue signing checks to Lord Bill hoping he won't remotely disable my precious Windows. As long as we have garbage like this, we're opening ourselves up to FUD that will neatly appeal to the PHBs M$ markets to.
I know, and this is exactly what torpedoes stuff like this - standards fights, turf wars, shitty marketing (hello Steve Jobs.) All of this lends credibility to the FUD the other side puts out, and, just like Apple, you end up getting bailed out by the people who destroyed you in the marketplace.
[rushlimbaugh.com] The Rush Limbaugh Show: Excellence in Broadcasting.
Rush Limbaugh?!?!? Surely you jest!
Rush Limbaugh is pro-M$ all the way. He thinks the bad, nasty, evil gub-mint "has destroyed billions in wealth" by going after M$. Every time he opens his mouth, he parrots the M$ line about how they've nothing wrong, that it's just sour grapes from competitors who can't compete, blah blah blah ad nauseam. Hell, he'd probably refer to us Linux folk as "a bunch of maggot-infested, hippie pot-smoking FM types." All of this from a Mac user! Shows you how much Rushie knows about this (and any other) issue.
What Brother Rush and his disciples/lackeys/hangers-on/sycophants don't understand is, the free market cannot work if it's interfered with either by government or by bullies like Lord Bill. Does anyone honestly believe that M$ would be anywhere near as successful if it had to compete on merit? In other words, if there was no Microsoft Tax and you could get whatever OS you wanted with any system you bought, how many people would choose Windows XP in its present form?
(Will probably get modded troll or flamebait, it's not intended that way. Just an attempt to bring some much-needed intellectual honesty to/.)
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. PC Magazine has been doing this since there was a PC Magazine. "You give us beaucoup ad dollars, we give you positive reviews."
Blessedly true with his singing career. Another poster mentioned his butchering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcovering of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." You obviously haven't heard him do "Mr. Tambourine Man," it's way worse. Here's hoping he doesn't sing "Oh Canada."
Ok this is where I lose you. That link says that Mozilla is going to provide spam filters. How is that bloatware? Trolling? Got me.
Well, doesn't have the kitchen sink yet, but I hear they're working hard on that. What does it have? Let's see here, web browser, email fetching, filtering, and sorting; news client, chat client, HTML design frontend, contacts manager, banner ad blocking, the list goes on. This all culminates in 20MB or so of source that took six and a half hours to compile on my Duron 800.
Last time I checked, all of this comes very close to the textbook definition of feature creep and bloat. And now, coming to a Mozilla near you, spam filters! They're not fixing any of their nearly 12,000 bugs. In other words, yes, it's buggier than Win2K, but by God, it filters spam! I included the spam filters link to illustrate the Bill-worthy feature creep Mozilla suffers from.
Lest you think I'm the only one saying this, JWZ, one of the principal authors of Netscape, resigned from Netscape and Mozilla.org over these very issues.
I've spelled it out for you this far, might as well carry on until the bitter end. My ultimate point was that if Mozilla were a Microsoft product, the righteous wrath of/. would be brought to bear on it for all of these reasons. But since it's not, it can commit all of these Gatesian mortal sins and escape such scrutiny.
Agian ya lost me. I use Mozilla every day. I havent found anything major. Well besides the bug they just fixed.
Read my post - I use it all the time too. And quite often, I find that it doesn't work right. It tries to load forms as perl scripts to save on the HDD. It doesn't handle Java well at all. Plugins take forever to load. It randomly eats my SMTP server entry. My point is, there is much room for improvement. But no, they've taken the Gatesian approach of kludging feature upon feature atop a buggy, marginally-usable codebase.
Ranting??? School? Get a life. At least your school runs opensource. (maybe judging from the rest of your post)
Wrong as usual. My schooldoes notrunopen source. They got taken in by the slick-talking outsourcing salesdroids and are now firmly wedded to His Billness. But what the hell, did you expect anything different just across the bridge from Redmond? Be that as it may, the only reason I brought it up was to say when I intended to nuke Windows from my computer, and that only to show I'm not a trolling Microdroid evangelist.
I really should stop feeding these trolls
Re-read my previous paragraph. Carefully. Again. And again. And think hard before you hit submit next time.
Of course it's a big deal on./ because it's not Microsoft.
It may be a convoluted piece of slow, bug-laden bloatware, but it's not Microsoft, so to the/. crowd, it's God's gift to software. By sheer number of bugs, it's buggier than Win2K!
Before you mod me troll, I'm using Mozilla to type these words. After school is out, I'm going to back up my remaining data and low-level format my existing Win2K partition. Why do I use Mozilla? I use it because there are few alternatives out there. Konqueror? Please. Opera? If I wanted spyware, I'd stick to Windows. Galeon? Then I have to run Gnome, I'll keep my Afterstep, thank you. Chimera? Don't have a Mac (yet - got my eye on a PowerBook G4.) Guess that leaves . . . Lynx. Or (retch) Netscape. Or Mozilla.
First, the study is done by IDC, a company that has repeatedly done M$-funded studies favorable to M$ products. And the timing of the release is highly suspicious - right before the Enterprise Linux Forum. These are the same guys who said W2K had a longer uptime than Linux - setting aside scheduled reboots, of course.
Secondly, it wasn't really a study - it was a survey. There's a difference - if I word a survey right, I can get a group of middle-aged white Republican males to say they will vote Nader in the next election. Let's face it, most PHBs know nothing about technology (or anything else, for that matter) and will reflexively respond, "oh, yeah, we run Windows and it's fine."
Since when hundred-odd does not constitiute a valid sample size by any stretch of the imagination. Who got surveyed? How were they picked? What questions were asked?
Third, the comparisons were invalid. Win2K hasn't been out five years, so much of that time was covered by NT4. Linux has come a long, long way in the last five years (it still has a ways to go before it's a viable desktop solution for most people, but I digress).
Fourth, did that TCO consider such things as Code Red? ILOVEYOU? Nimda? And God-only-knows how many other email worms out there? Speaking of security for those with short memories, Microsoft got hacked at least twice due to well-documented security holes in IIS! I would submit that the 22% "savings" from using Windows would be quickly eaten up by the loss of some important intellectual property.
It is correct on one point - MCSEs are a dime a dozen these days.
Just look at how quickly AT&T went out of business after it was broken up...
It didn't , but AT&T is a shadow of its former self. The almighty Broadband unit, the one that was going to return the company to its old glory, is being spun off after hemmorhaging money for a long time - after the @Home debacle. The wireless unit likely will be sold to T-Mobile or Cingular. That leaves, what, long distance? Hah! There's a money-maker, what with long-distance rates a tenth or so of what they were "back in the day."
And why did all of this happen? Simple - AT&T had to compete when it wasn't "Ma Bell" anymore. It couldn't charge confiscatory rates for awful service (you think it's bad now? Imagine how it was when AT&T was the only game in town anywhere.) Hell, even the much-ballyhooed Lucent was still hawking copper switches as its main product as late as 2000!
I have no reason to believe that a broken-up M$ would not meet with the same fate. First off, the desktop OS unit is keeping it afloat. The server OS doesn't comparatively make them a whole lot, and they're bleeding money on the disaster that is the xBox. M$, like AT&T, had become used to competing on a field where its the only player. M$, like AT&T, is hardly a nimble startup. It is, and has been for a long time, a big company, with all its negative connotations. Just like IBM couldn't, M$ will not be able to turn its ship fast enough when the right competitor comes along. I believe that day to not be very far off.
Probably will get modded troll, but here goes . . .
Of course, probably the only reason we ever saw an anti-trust case brought against Microsoft to begin with was that Gates & co. hadn't wised up to the need to make generous campaign contributions.
What you're really saying is, Microsoft failed to pay their blackmail^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H contribution money to the democrat party during the 1990s. This is what happens when you cross the Clintonistas.
Incidentally, I saw the Green Party link in your sig. Make no mistake about it - the Green Party handed the election to Bush. And don't forget, multi-millionaire Ralph Nader got rich by speculating in stocks of the very corporations he rails against.
You've totally missed the point. Have you forgotten the browser "war" of the late 1990s already?
M$ wanted to control the browser because it represented a competitive threat - a browser could render the underlying OS irrelevant. They spent years and tens of millions to kill off Netscape. And you think they're going to voluntarily give back all of this territory they've already conquered? Are we talking about the same Napoleon Gates, the one bent on world domination? The same one who talks of "knifing the baby" and "cutting off their air supply"? I think not.
The media player represents a new frontier similar to the browser "war." With it, M$ controls how the content on the Internet is delivered, especially when they implement their DRM OS, which they own a patent on.
And the part about XP phoning home. And how when it does, it doesn't transmit any personal information. But it does. Wait, no it doesn't. Well . . . kinda sorta but not really . . . but if you're not running a hacked copy, you've got nothing to worry about.
And the part about how they can audit your data for "compliance."
What's more, M$ can and will break your apps, propagate every virus known to man, and God-only-knows what else.
Uhm, of course they do. Now, when you're in prison, you don't have the same rights as everybody else. When you go to prison, you have demonstrated that you are not capable of handling the freedoms society has given you. Thus, society has the right to take those freedoms away for a period of time.
This will probably get modded flamebait, but here goes . . .
This is a sad day for Seattle. The monorail, like the Link light rail, is a train to nowhere. This is yet another Seattle pipedream that's going to turn into a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle. And it will all be paid for with other people's money.
Don't believe me? Originally, Sound Transit was going to spend ~$2B for a line from the U district to the airport. They've already spent more than $2B and now it's from downtown to one mile from Sea-Tac Airport (i.e., nowhere.) They have not turned a spade of dirt to build this thing. And the monorail buffs think they can build one for what Sound Transit has already blown? Puh-leeeze!
Prediction: When the monorail is several years late and several billion over budget, its route will be shortened from Interbay to Harbor Island, again, from nowhere to nowhere.
The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new [features] that people are asking for.
--Bill Gates.
Looks like Mozilla has adopted the Microsoft philosophy - don't fix bugs, add features. Only difference is, the Mozilla bloatware is more bug-ridden than/.'s favorite whipping boy, Windows. JWZ was right on about them being "asymptotically" closer to releasing an actual end-user product. He said this a year ago. Mozilla.org was two years behind then and they still haven't released a truly stable end-user product. And what do they do? In true Gatesian fashion, they add more features.
Because this post criticizes an open-source project, it will probably get modded down as a troll. Intellectual honesty on Slashdot? Naaa . .
Nobody's gonna buy this damn thing for two reasons.
First off, the economy is in the shitter. IT spending is very slow; most companies have adopted a "fix-it-when-it-breaks" mentality. And geeks do not and never have made purchasing decisions - PHBs do.
Secondly, SGI, while a great product, will probably be remembered as a company driven into the ground by a stupid CEO who wanted to turn it into Dell.
Geeks need to learn - the best product doesn't always win. In fact, the best product usually does not win, the best-marketed one does. Anyone who doubts this needs to look no further than/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft.
It's quite simple. It's called the "Greater Fool Theory."
The stock market is largely based on smoke and mirrors. When you buy a stock, you are exchanging real money for a piece of paper that someone has convinced you is worth more than what you paid. And you make money by selling it to somebody else, i.e., a Greater Fool, who thinks the same piece of paper is worth more than what you paid for it. And if you don't think there are any Greater Fools out there, Lesser Fools than yourself will gladly take it off your hands -- for less than what you, the Greater Fool, paid. And so it goes and so it goes.
The dot-com craze of the late 1990s is a perfect illustration. Take amazon.com for example. Seemingly intelligent people foolishly exchanged real money for pieces of paper giving them part ownership of Jeff Bezos' "K-Mart of the Web" money-losing-to-this-very-day mail order empire. Depending on who you ask, these pieces of paper cost $400 a pop at one point, literally more than their weight in pure gold. They did so thinking, hoping, believing, praying that other people would agree that a piece of paper with Jeff Bezos' smirking mug on it was worth more than its weight in gold. In so doing, these people would give them more for the same piece of paper than they paid. For most people, the game is up. Most people have caught on that his funny money isn't worth the paper it's printed on, much less its weight in gold. But, a few stalwart Fools still believe that if Jeff sells a dollar for eighty cents long enough (or gives away $11 every time somebody orders,) he'll make a ton of money on volume eventually.
Let's assume the ship has diesel engines (it probably doesn't, but anyway . . . ) If one of them spins a bearing and fails, it should explode and take the entire ship down with it, right? No?
That is EXACTLY what happens with NT! And it looks like in this case, not only did the database divide-by-zero error take down that box, but all of the NT boxen aboard the ship.
Read the article - European countries made it illegal to install anything but GSM. Hardly a level playing field. In the US, on the other hand, GSM did have a level playing field - and got creamed. Simply put, GSM is TDMA. TDMA is a non-upgradeable, non-scalable technology.
Let us not forget - the only reason the Europeans are "ahead" of us in wireless phone technology is because their wireline phone network is an abomination. Many parts of Europe still pay by the minute with premiums for Internet access. And that's for DIALUP! In America, we bitch if we can't get DSL and take unmetered dialup for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to burn a little karma in a futile struggle to bring a modicum intellectual honesty to /.
If Microsoft did this, /.ers would pillory them. Apple does it, and the response is, "well, don't leak trade secrets." Normally, /.ers think information wants to be free and that IP laws stifle innovation. What about the cries and shrieks for "patent reform" I constantly read? But in this case, since it's Apple, it's just fine for them to bring down the almighty wrath of the IP laws upon this guy. Knowing what those contractors make, this guy doesn't have a pot to piss in. Thanks to Apple's pure, unadulterated GREED, this guy will probably end up with a judgment that will follow him for the rest of his life. It will likely keep him from ever having a pot to piss in.
Macaholics, I have news for you. Apple is not pure as the driven snow by a longshot. Apple is no less a Huge Evil Mega-Corp than Microsoft and they behave just as badly, if not worse. This is the latest in the lengthy saga of Apple's trying to win in court what they can't win in the marketplace. For Macaholics with short memories, this is the same Apple that went all the way to the US Supreme Court to stop Microsoft from selling Windows, claiming patent infringement, after Apple stole the idea from Xerox! Such conduct is normally a mortal sin on /. But it's Apple, so it's okay. Hell, as recently as last year, Apple brought in 100 H1-Bs because of the "tight labor market."
Why does Apple use contractors like this guy? Same reason M$ does (and from Volt, the same company M$ uses) - no benefits and zero job security. Were Steve Jobs the great humanitarian you Macaholics make him out to be, he'd hire real employees and pay them a decent, livable wage with honest benefits. In return, Apple would get loyalty and hard work. But like any other "evil corporation," Apple could give a fuck about that. They're only interested in cheap and disposable, all to add a few more zeroes to the end of Steve Jobs' grossly inflated salary.
But, in the Macaholic religious fervor, it's okay.
On Hotbot's search form, there is a link to Google! Sounds like they're throwing in the towel to me.
Using RPM (retch) to install Windows (retch retch) would go something like this (blatantly ripped from a sig I saw):
Gentoo's portage tree, on the other hand, goes something like this:
and it installs. Sure beats dealing with RPM's endless dependency bullshit.If I wanted to deal with crap like this, I'd just continue signing checks to Lord Bill hoping he won't remotely disable my precious Windows. As long as we have garbage like this, we're opening ourselves up to FUD that will neatly appeal to the PHBs M$ markets to.
I know, and this is exactly what torpedoes stuff like this - standards fights, turf wars, shitty marketing (hello Steve Jobs.) All of this lends credibility to the FUD the other side puts out, and, just like Apple, you end up getting bailed out by the people who destroyed you in the marketplace.
Plus, I like the idea of a desktop distro, a server distro, etc. . .
[rushlimbaugh.com] The Rush Limbaugh Show: Excellence in Broadcasting.
Rush Limbaugh?!?!? Surely you jest!
Rush Limbaugh is pro-M$ all the way. He thinks the bad, nasty, evil gub-mint "has destroyed billions in wealth" by going after M$. Every time he opens his mouth, he parrots the M$ line about how they've nothing wrong, that it's just sour grapes from competitors who can't compete, blah blah blah ad nauseam. Hell, he'd probably refer to us Linux folk as "a bunch of maggot-infested, hippie pot-smoking FM types." All of this from a Mac user! Shows you how much Rushie knows about this (and any other) issue.
What Brother Rush and his disciples/lackeys/hangers-on/sycophants don't understand is, the free market cannot work if it's interfered with either by government or by bullies like Lord Bill. Does anyone honestly believe that M$ would be anywhere near as successful if it had to compete on merit? In other words, if there was no Microsoft Tax and you could get whatever OS you wanted with any system you bought, how many people would choose Windows XP in its present form?
(Will probably get modded troll or flamebait, it's not intended that way. Just an attempt to bring some much-needed intellectual honesty to /.)
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. PC Magazine has been doing this since there was a PC Magazine. "You give us beaucoup ad dollars, we give you positive reviews."
I thought all them rich folk gave that money outta the goodness of their heart! Whoda thunk they done wanted sumthin' in return??
Blessedly true with his singing career. Another poster mentioned his butchering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcovering of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." You obviously haven't heard him do "Mr. Tambourine Man," it's way worse. Here's hoping he doesn't sing "Oh Canada."
Hey Shatner, how's that stock doing?
All kidding aside, Leonard Nimoy was Star Trek. Shatner wasn't. He isn't even a very good actor.
Well, doesn't have the kitchen sink yet, but I hear they're working hard on that. What does it have? Let's see here, web browser, email fetching, filtering, and sorting; news client, chat client, HTML design frontend, contacts manager, banner ad blocking, the list goes on. This all culminates in 20MB or so of source that took six and a half hours to compile on my Duron 800.
Last time I checked, all of this comes very close to the textbook definition of feature creep and bloat. And now, coming to a Mozilla near you, spam filters! They're not fixing any of their nearly 12,000 bugs. In other words, yes, it's buggier than Win2K, but by God, it filters spam! I included the spam filters link to illustrate the Bill-worthy feature creep Mozilla suffers from.
Lest you think I'm the only one saying this, JWZ, one of the principal authors of Netscape, resigned from Netscape and Mozilla.org over these very issues.
I've spelled it out for you this far, might as well carry on until the bitter end. My ultimate point was that if Mozilla were a Microsoft product, the righteous wrath of /. would be brought to bear on it for all of these reasons. But since it's not, it can commit all of these Gatesian mortal sins and escape such scrutiny.
Read my post - I use it all the time too. And quite often, I find that it doesn't work right. It tries to load forms as perl scripts to save on the HDD. It doesn't handle Java well at all. Plugins take forever to load. It randomly eats my SMTP server entry. My point is, there is much room for improvement. But no, they've taken the Gatesian approach of kludging feature upon feature atop a buggy, marginally-usable codebase.
Wrong as usual. My school does not run open source. They got taken in by the slick-talking outsourcing salesdroids and are now firmly wedded to His Billness. But what the hell, did you expect anything different just across the bridge from Redmond? Be that as it may, the only reason I brought it up was to say when I intended to nuke Windows from my computer, and that only to show I'm not a trolling Microdroid evangelist.
Re-read my previous paragraph. Carefully. Again. And again. And think hard before you hit submit next time.
Of course it's a big deal on ./ because it's not Microsoft.
It may be a convoluted piece of slow, bug-laden bloatware, but it's not Microsoft, so to the /. crowd, it's God's gift to software. By sheer number of bugs, it's buggier than Win2K!
Before you mod me troll, I'm using Mozilla to type these words. After school is out, I'm going to back up my remaining data and low-level format my existing Win2K partition. Why do I use Mozilla? I use it because there are few alternatives out there. Konqueror? Please. Opera? If I wanted spyware, I'd stick to Windows. Galeon? Then I have to run Gnome, I'll keep my Afterstep, thank you. Chimera? Don't have a Mac (yet - got my eye on a PowerBook G4.) Guess that leaves . . . Lynx. Or (retch) Netscape. Or Mozilla.
Uhh, by definition, the "baby bells" can't be as large as AT&T was. Back in the day, AT&T was the phone company period.
Be that as it may, many of the baby bells have done poorly. Qwest, with one foot in Chapter 11, being the most notable example.
First, the study is done by IDC, a company that has repeatedly done M$-funded studies favorable to M$ products. And the timing of the release is highly suspicious - right before the Enterprise Linux Forum. These are the same guys who said W2K had a longer uptime than Linux - setting aside scheduled reboots, of course.
Secondly, it wasn't really a study - it was a survey. There's a difference - if I word a survey right, I can get a group of middle-aged white Republican males to say they will vote Nader in the next election. Let's face it, most PHBs know nothing about technology (or anything else, for that matter) and will reflexively respond, "oh, yeah, we run Windows and it's fine."
Since when hundred-odd does not constitiute a valid sample size by any stretch of the imagination. Who got surveyed? How were they picked? What questions were asked?
Third, the comparisons were invalid. Win2K hasn't been out five years, so much of that time was covered by NT4. Linux has come a long, long way in the last five years (it still has a ways to go before it's a viable desktop solution for most people, but I digress).
Fourth, did that TCO consider such things as Code Red? ILOVEYOU? Nimda? And God-only-knows how many other email worms out there? Speaking of security for those with short memories, Microsoft got hacked at least twice due to well-documented security holes in IIS! I would submit that the 22% "savings" from using Windows would be quickly eaten up by the loss of some important intellectual property.
It is correct on one point - MCSEs are a dime a dozen these days.
It didn't , but AT&T is a shadow of its former self. The almighty Broadband unit, the one that was going to return the company to its old glory, is being spun off after hemmorhaging money for a long time - after the @Home debacle. The wireless unit likely will be sold to T-Mobile or Cingular. That leaves, what, long distance? Hah! There's a money-maker, what with long-distance rates a tenth or so of what they were "back in the day."
And why did all of this happen? Simple - AT&T had to compete when it wasn't "Ma Bell" anymore. It couldn't charge confiscatory rates for awful service (you think it's bad now? Imagine how it was when AT&T was the only game in town anywhere.) Hell, even the much-ballyhooed Lucent was still hawking copper switches as its main product as late as 2000!
I have no reason to believe that a broken-up M$ would not meet with the same fate. First off, the desktop OS unit is keeping it afloat. The server OS doesn't comparatively make them a whole lot, and they're bleeding money on the disaster that is the xBox. M$, like AT&T, had become used to competing on a field where its the only player. M$, like AT&T, is hardly a nimble startup. It is, and has been for a long time, a big company, with all its negative connotations. Just like IBM couldn't, M$ will not be able to turn its ship fast enough when the right competitor comes along. I believe that day to not be very far off.
You've totally missed the point. Have you forgotten the browser "war" of the late 1990s already?
M$ wanted to control the browser because it represented a competitive threat - a browser could render the underlying OS irrelevant. They spent years and tens of millions to kill off Netscape. And you think they're going to voluntarily give back all of this territory they've already conquered? Are we talking about the same Napoleon Gates, the one bent on world domination? The same one who talks of "knifing the baby" and "cutting off their air supply"? I think not.
The media player represents a new frontier similar to the browser "war." With it, M$ controls how the content on the Internet is delivered, especially when they implement their DRM OS, which they own a patent on.
And the part about XP phoning home. And how when it does, it doesn't transmit any personal information. But it does. Wait, no it doesn't. Well . . . kinda sorta but not really . . . but if you're not running a hacked copy, you've got nothing to worry about.
And the part about how they can audit your data for "compliance."
What's more, M$ can and will break your apps, propagate every virus known to man, and God-only-knows what else.
I completely agree - it's not worth the risk.
Uhm, of course they do. Now, when you're in prison, you don't have the same rights as everybody else. When you go to prison, you have demonstrated that you are not capable of handling the freedoms society has given you. Thus, society has the right to take those freedoms away for a period of time.
This will probably get modded flamebait, but here goes . . .
This is a sad day for Seattle. The monorail, like the Link light rail, is a train to nowhere. This is yet another Seattle pipedream that's going to turn into a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle. And it will all be paid for with other people's money.
Don't believe me? Originally, Sound Transit was going to spend ~$2B for a line from the U district to the airport. They've already spent more than $2B and now it's from downtown to one mile from Sea-Tac Airport (i.e., nowhere.) They have not turned a spade of dirt to build this thing. And the monorail buffs think they can build one for what Sound Transit has already blown? Puh-leeeze!
Prediction: When the monorail is several years late and several billion over budget, its route will be shortened from Interbay to Harbor Island, again, from nowhere to nowhere.
Looks like Mozilla has adopted the Microsoft philosophy - don't fix bugs, add features. Only difference is, the Mozilla bloatware is more bug-ridden than /.'s favorite whipping boy, Windows. JWZ was right on about them being "asymptotically" closer to releasing an actual end-user product. He said this a year ago. Mozilla.org was two years behind then and they still haven't released a truly stable end-user product. And what do they do? In true Gatesian fashion, they add more features.
Because this post criticizes an open-source project, it will probably get modded down as a troll. Intellectual honesty on Slashdot? Naaa . .
Nobody's gonna buy this damn thing for two reasons.
/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft.
First off, the economy is in the shitter. IT spending is very slow; most companies have adopted a "fix-it-when-it-breaks" mentality. And geeks do not and never have made purchasing decisions - PHBs do.
Secondly, SGI, while a great product, will probably be remembered as a company driven into the ground by a stupid CEO who wanted to turn it into Dell.
Geeks need to learn - the best product doesn't always win. In fact, the best product usually does not win, the best-marketed one does. Anyone who doubts this needs to look no further than
It's quite simple. It's called the "Greater Fool Theory."
The stock market is largely based on smoke and mirrors. When you buy a stock, you are exchanging real money for a piece of paper that someone has convinced you is worth more than what you paid. And you make money by selling it to somebody else, i.e., a Greater Fool, who thinks the same piece of paper is worth more than what you paid for it. And if you don't think there are any Greater Fools out there, Lesser Fools than yourself will gladly take it off your hands -- for less than what you, the Greater Fool, paid. And so it goes and so it goes.
The dot-com craze of the late 1990s is a perfect illustration. Take amazon.com for example. Seemingly intelligent people foolishly exchanged real money for pieces of paper giving them part ownership of Jeff Bezos' "K-Mart of the Web" money-losing-to-this-very-day mail order empire. Depending on who you ask, these pieces of paper cost $400 a pop at one point, literally more than their weight in pure gold. They did so thinking, hoping, believing, praying that other people would agree that a piece of paper with Jeff Bezos' smirking mug on it was worth more than its weight in gold. In so doing, these people would give them more for the same piece of paper than they paid. For most people, the game is up. Most people have caught on that his funny money isn't worth the paper it's printed on, much less its weight in gold. But, a few stalwart Fools still believe that if Jeff sells a dollar for eighty cents long enough (or gives away $11 every time somebody orders,) he'll make a ton of money on volume eventually.
Let's assume the ship has diesel engines (it probably doesn't, but anyway . . . ) If one of them spins a bearing and fails, it should explode and take the entire ship down with it, right? No?
That is EXACTLY what happens with NT! And it looks like in this case, not only did the database divide-by-zero error take down that box, but all of the NT boxen aboard the ship.
This has EVERYTHING to do with NT.
It's funny!
Read the article - European countries made it illegal to install anything but GSM. Hardly a level playing field. In the US, on the other hand, GSM did have a level playing field - and got creamed. Simply put, GSM is TDMA. TDMA is a non-upgradeable, non-scalable technology.
Let us not forget - the only reason the Europeans are "ahead" of us in wireless phone technology is because their wireline phone network is an abomination. Many parts of Europe still pay by the minute with premiums for Internet access. And that's for DIALUP! In America, we bitch if we can't get DSL and take unmetered dialup for granted.