Go ahead, annoy the government. Encourage the government to mandate BSD-style unrestrictive licenses for any project that recieves government funding. Actually, that may actually be a good idea. Companies pay taxes too, at least all those I worked for. I remember some preety cool catalogs from NASA (90s) where things they funded was available to anyone, commercial or not.
Here's the other side of the business case you present.
Not really, it's a straw man.
Also, since you bring up DirectX 10, I'll add that no one is making a case for DX10-only games. DX9.0c will do quite nicely until Vista has been out for years and could reasonably used as a min spec OS.
OpenGL gives you easy porting to Mac, Linux and all the Japanese consoles.
Not a small market, the consoles alone, with two more systems coming Real Soon Now.
I covered ports to Mac and Linux in the original post. Reread for the details. In short Linux gamers are alreay Win32 customers, dual booting or emulating, and for Mac gamers dual boot and emulating are now viable alternatives to native ports. I'm not recommending the later, just pointing out the problem.
You are severely mistaken regarding Japanese consoles. The next gen consoles require highly specialized coding. Numerous "CPUs" performing specialized functions, this is very different from Windows and Mac games. A port would look pretty crappy, a lot of re-writing would be necessary.
"There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot."
Well if they had a clue maybe they'd realize that gamers really couldn't care less what operating system they're using as long as it runs the games. If game companies started basing their products on a stable Linux core instead of that flaky Windoze shit we'd start to see gamers switching overnight.
You are ignoring the point that there is no new money. As gamers do not care what OS they use developers don't care what OS gamers use. The gamers are on Win32, even Linux gamers, so that gives developers the guidance they need. Developers are not OS advocates, they follow the gamers. Why is it their responsibility to move the masses from Win32 to Linux?
I think the Rest Of The World is referring to computing that isn't grey boxes on desktops.
As I said: "you mean the 5% running Mac OS X and Linux?" Sorry, did I miss *BSD, my apologies. I should have known better since actually run BSD. Other *NIX? Noise, not worth discussing in the context of gaming.
Bring back OpenGL? OpenGL is alive and well. It would be great if some of the Windows developers started using it though, since they are in the majority.
If it were in a developer's best interest to use OpenGL they would. OpenGL has a history of having mediocre drivers if you are *not* doing things as Quake does them. In other words OpenGL was of such little interest to ATI and NVIDIA that about all the optimization attention it got was whetever Quake used. Now this was a few years ago and things are better now but developers remembers this and are a little gun shy due to "spotty" support and optimizations. They all know Direct3D will be at the forefront of ATI and NVIDIA's efforts. Now consider the arguments made by other posters where the new features and tools show up first, in Direct3D.
Again, what's in it for developers? Linux gamers? No they dual boot or emulate, they are already Win32/Direct3D customers. There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot. Mac OS X gamers? Well at least they have a history of spending money going for them, at least when emulation and dual boot were not feasable since an emulator had to emulate the CPU not just a gaming API. However with the switch to Intel dual booting is now an option, and to make things more confusing there is Cider for emulation. Write for Win32/Direct3D and link in Cider to translate the Win32 calls to Mac OS X. I like OpenGL, I come from a scientific visualization background, but come on, there is not much of a business case from a developer's perspective "today". It had slightly better case "yesterday"
Please, feel free to join the rest of the world.
Uh, by "rest of the world" you mean the 5% running Mac OS X and Linux? Hey, if you are discussing soccer then phrases like "rest of the world" are meaningful, but in the context of computer gamers it is a joke.
Open source software doesn't work because of subsidies. Everyone who contributes to a software project does so because they feel that the benefits outweigh the costs, whether those benefits come in the form of intellectual pleasure, geek cred, or (increasingly common) direct financial contributions by those who stand to benefit from the software. Open source works because the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and because there is a large community of people who enjoy developing software.
As I said one form of subsidy is someone who volunteers their efforts. You merely explain why they subsidize a project with their time. "Benefit outweighs cost", duh, did you think that IBM subsidizes Linux out their generosity?;-)
You argue that the current style of business organization has developed and thrived because the efficient have driven out the inefficient. I would argue that it's because of self-reinforcement: those who start with more power tend to be able to maintain and reinforce that power in ways that the powerless cannot.
You could argue that but you would be wrong. New more efficient businesses drive out old more powerful businesses, disruptive technologies drive out old businesses at are base upon power rather than efficience,... Investors are always looking for an inefficiently run firm, they are great sources of opportunity. Buy it and clean it up or instroduct a new firm in that market.
But when the workers are also the owners (the sort of system Ted is describing) that antagonistic relationship disappears. The hope is that it is replaced by something where both managers and workers can feel more loyalty to the organization itself, rather than something to be fought over in order to direct as much of its profitability into a given pocket. Because the benefits of any gain in productivity are spread widely, few people have strong incentives to fight real improvements.
Untrue in the sense that workers need to be owners. Incentives are all about getting a workers motivations in line with the firm's goals. One way to do that is to reward for performance and results. This is one of the reasons that workers like strong but fair bosses, it eliminates the slackers who reduce the bonuses. Slackers are always a problem, regardless of whether the firm is investor and employee owned. Southwest Airlines has been studied a bit with respect to successful employee owned firms, it is fun reading.
You seem to be of the opinion that laborers, left to themselves, would stumble around mired in their own lazy inefficiency. Therefore, they need management to help them overcome the vices inherent in their lower-class nature. I think that attitude is both paternalistic...
I would use harsher language than that is someone had presented such an opinion. No one has certainly not I, you are reading/inserting things that are not there. It has nothing to do with class or education, it has everything to do with perspective. A worker's perspective is limited, often myopic, as upper management's perspective is often to broad or shallow. When I refer to workers sometimes being delusional when they think they have a better idea it has nothing to do with their intelligence, it has to do with what information they have available at the time. That broader but shallower perspective of upper management might indicate something more important that what the worker is fixated upon.
... and ignoring where people's self-interest would really lie in such a system. Slackers would be less of a problem, because there is more incentive for "owner-workers" to keep each other in line than there is for "owned-workers."
Workers have solved the slacker problem via bosses. Or are you suggesting vigilante-like actions? In any case, without someone in authority to make a judegement call the firm will be inefficient. "Those who don't understand bosses are do
... a company that has its direction dictated by all of the members that run it...
Open Source works because it is usually subsidized. Volunteers donating their time, academics who have the freedom to work on what interests them, corporations who sponsor some project, etc. If you can find someone to subsidize your open source firm them you might be successful. Otherwise you will most likely fail like any other poorly run firm. Your post suggest that you do not realize that investors and bosses are roles that have developed, evolved, over time because that has proven successful. Business can be a pretty darwinian process.
You need someone to put up the money for a firm, and since it is their money at risk they get to make the decisions. These investors often need help, they hire workers. Workers may or may not share the vision or plan of the investors so bosses are needed to make sure the workers are implementing the correct vision or plan rather than whatever their pet plan or preferrence is. Occasionally workers have a better plan or vision and bosses pass this up to investors and the plan changes. Usually the workes plan is inferior, this is not necessarily self-delusion it may simply be that the worker is unaware of various complications or parallel goals that are not part of their daily experience and knowledge. In this later case this where bosses use authority to make sure workers are working on the correct thing. Oddly enough, bosses are also desired by workers. Whenever there is a group of workers someone will slack off, the non-slackers want good bosses to make sure everyone pulls their own weight (in the right direction too).
An open source firm with too much freedom, too many decision makers, few with authority will just be inefficient and lose to better and more traditionally run firms. Can you get a bunch of volunteers that share a vision, works on the common goal not a personal agenda, contains no slackers? Sure, but not likely. This is why so many open source project die, open source projects probably have a greater mortality rate than new businesses. It's all about a clearly defined shared goal and proper management and incentives. The corporations have an advantage, well, as I said before, unless the open source firm is subsidized.
Your experience doesn't represent how all Apple hardware works. I have a 1Ghz G4 which has only kernel panicked twice and nothing else.
The claims against low end Dells are not accurate either. I've seen dozens of $300-400 boxes that have run just fine for years. Some in low end roles and that have remained as equipped at the factory, RAM upgrade excluded. Other that were essentially purchased as barebones and had RAM and video upgraded, some hard drive too, USB 2.0 added, etc.
"A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN."
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/s tories/main.html
Yes, exactly. Why would software companies build new things for a dead platform?
Actually the marketing types have figured out that 90-something percent of software is sold within the first year of a machine's life. So while PowerPC based Macs may be running and useful (running the software they already have) for many more years they will be dead to developers (who want to sell software) in less than a year. Why less than? The towers are far less popular that iMacs, Minis, and notebooks. All of which have been PowerPC for months.
(http://slashdot.org/)
It's a simple choice on slashdot:
1) You choose to question authority because you understand man's potential for selfish motives especially when man is in positions of power. You choose to look for lies or misinformation in case they are there, not because you "know" they are there.
2) You wear tinfoil blinders and simply accept what your favorite authority figures tell you because you truly believe they mean the best for you and everyone else. You ignore history and you actually think "These guys, ya, these guys are different.
Make your choice.
You are right, slashdot has the intellectual simplicity of Bush Jr. and most folks around here would think it is that simple.
How many stories have there been in the last year alone about corrupt voting machines and election fraud?
No election is perfect, there have always been irregularities, bad ballots, subjective counting, etc. The dirty little secret is that vote counting has always been +- 1-3%. Republicans were hysterical when it went against them and Kennedy won in 1960, Democrats were hyper hysterical when it went against them and Bush won (yes, won, the newspapers did a recount and found that even using Gore's suggested recount Bush would have won) in 2000. The truth is those elections were essentially statistical ties and the winner is essentially random. In the Bush case the randomness was the Florida ballot layout, thankfully that layout was done by Democrats or the conspiracy theorists would be going absolutely ballistic. I don't recall the random event(s) responsible for the Kennedy win in 1960. In any case my point still stands, when the elections are that close neither party has annoyed the voters enough to motivate them. In 2000 both parties had parity in terms of the BS they were pulling, however not enough to motivate a third party.
I realize you admitted your tinfoil hat is on but you do overstate things a bit too much. For example "the monitoring of telephone calls". The government was not caught doing large scale monitoring of telephone conversations. They were looking at phone records, essentially your phone bill: number dialed, duration of call, etc. It's not even clear that this info is your personal info or if it is a corporation's internal "line switching" logs. "Internet activity", the same info web sites are selling to advertisers?
... a growing theocracy hell-bent (pun intended) on ensuring EVERYONE follows christian beliefs, no matter how whacky...
Sorry, but you're going to have to go find some impressionable young mind that doesn't know any better to buy that. I'm old enough to remember how Reagon was demonized just like Bush Jr., how Reagan/Fallwell were going to turn the US into a theocracy,... I'm old enough to remember how Gore was going to outlaw free speech in music and movies,... I'm old enough to remember how Clinton was demonized, how Clinton was going to turn the US into a socialist state subserviant to the UN,...
The truth is the people, the voters, are in control. Politicians of the left and right are only getting away with what the voters *allow* them to get away with. Stupid crap happens because the irritation level does not rise to a level that motivates enough voters. When politicians do cross that line they get whacked down by the voters.
But a lot of people don't download the updates, which could be the reason for the warning.
The updates are automatic. You have to manually disable that feature. Do you really think the type of person who would manually disable automatic updates is going to run out and do whatever Homeland Security says to do?
What a remarkable commentary on the sad state of affairs in the "Land of the Free" that our government makes a press release regarding patches to our computers and the first thing we think of is that the patch is associated with monitoring us somehow. For the record, I had the exact same thought as the OP and agree 100% with what he said.
Sorry, but these two post really comment on the sad state of affairs on slashdot. Slashdot is a bit heavy with tinfoil hat types. One of the primary rules of espionage is to just blend in, fade into the background, don't call attention to yourself. If the government were to do something like this, and I don't believe they would, it would be quietly slipped into a run of the mill security update. Nothing special, just a routine monthly security update like the ones we have come to expect.
Is Apple going to continue producing PowerPC systems, or are they slated for silicon heaven?
Earlier this week Apple updated the last last two PowerPC product families, upgradable tower and server, to Intel Xeons. The only PowerPC based systems on Apple's online store are old systems that were returned and are now in the refurbished section, "special limited time offers". It's over, PowerPC is officially history.
In order to read information out of my delayed key strokes, you'd have to know the cadence that I'd normally be typing at and then measure the deltas to get the bits.
No, I don't think so. I am just making a guess, I have not read the article, but I think a simple "rounding" of your cadence would be enough. Pick a small time interval, round your actual timing to the nearest interval, done. For discussion purposes let's say the interval is 0.1s, encode a 0 bit as x.x3s and a 1 bit as x.x6s.
See that's the problem. Only one file is found but everyone acts like hackers ALWAYS find the files.
I disagree. Disabled content is found far more often than you claim, however unlike Hot Coffee it was not mainstream news worthy. Hell, most of what is found is not even slashdot worthy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pacifism only works when there are non-pacifists to protect the pacifists."
;-)
Tell that to Ghandi.
Can't, he was murdered. Thank you for the assist.
See Numerical Robustness for Geometric Calculations (aka EPSILON is NOT 0.00001!) from GDC 2005 http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/pubs/
Pacifism only works when there are non-pacifists to protect the pacifists.
Go ahead, annoy the government. Encourage the government to mandate BSD-style unrestrictive licenses for any project that recieves government funding. Actually, that may actually be a good idea. Companies pay taxes too, at least all those I worked for. I remember some preety cool catalogs from NASA (90s) where things they funded was available to anyone, commercial or not.
Here's the other side of the business case you present.
Not really, it's a straw man.
Also, since you bring up DirectX 10, I'll add that no one is making a case for DX10-only games. DX9.0c will do quite nicely until Vista has been out for years and could reasonably used as a min spec OS.
OpenGL gives you easy porting to Mac, Linux and all the Japanese consoles. Not a small market, the consoles alone, with two more systems coming Real Soon Now.
I covered ports to Mac and Linux in the original post. Reread for the details. In short Linux gamers are alreay Win32 customers, dual booting or emulating, and for Mac gamers dual boot and emulating are now viable alternatives to native ports. I'm not recommending the later, just pointing out the problem.
You are severely mistaken regarding Japanese consoles. The next gen consoles require highly specialized coding. Numerous "CPUs" performing specialized functions, this is very different from Windows and Mac games. A port would look pretty crappy, a lot of re-writing would be necessary.
"There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot."
Well if they had a clue maybe they'd realize that gamers really couldn't care less what operating system they're using as long as it runs the games. If game companies started basing their products on a stable Linux core instead of that flaky Windoze shit we'd start to see gamers switching overnight.
You are ignoring the point that there is no new money. As gamers do not care what OS they use developers don't care what OS gamers use. The gamers are on Win32, even Linux gamers, so that gives developers the guidance they need. Developers are not OS advocates, they follow the gamers. Why is it their responsibility to move the masses from Win32 to Linux?
I think the Rest Of The World is referring to computing that isn't grey boxes on desktops.
As I said: "you mean the 5% running Mac OS X and Linux?" Sorry, did I miss *BSD, my apologies. I should have known better since actually run BSD. Other *NIX? Noise, not worth discussing in the context of gaming.
Bring back OpenGL? OpenGL is alive and well. It would be great if some of the Windows developers started using it though, since they are in the majority.
If it were in a developer's best interest to use OpenGL they would. OpenGL has a history of having mediocre drivers if you are *not* doing things as Quake does them. In other words OpenGL was of such little interest to ATI and NVIDIA that about all the optimization attention it got was whetever Quake used. Now this was a few years ago and things are better now but developers remembers this and are a little gun shy due to "spotty" support and optimizations. They all know Direct3D will be at the forefront of ATI and NVIDIA's efforts. Now consider the arguments made by other posters where the new features and tools show up first, in Direct3D.
Again, what's in it for developers? Linux gamers? No they dual boot or emulate, they are already Win32/Direct3D customers. There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot. Mac OS X gamers? Well at least they have a history of spending money going for them, at least when emulation and dual boot were not feasable since an emulator had to emulate the CPU not just a gaming API. However with the switch to Intel dual booting is now an option, and to make things more confusing there is Cider for emulation. Write for Win32/Direct3D and link in Cider to translate the Win32 calls to Mac OS X. I like OpenGL, I come from a scientific visualization background, but come on, there is not much of a business case from a developer's perspective "today". It had slightly better case "yesterday"
Please, feel free to join the rest of the world.
Uh, by "rest of the world" you mean the 5% running Mac OS X and Linux? Hey, if you are discussing soccer then phrases like "rest of the world" are meaningful, but in the context of computer gamers it is a joke.
Open source software doesn't work because of subsidies. Everyone who contributes to a software project does so because they feel that the benefits outweigh the costs, whether those benefits come in the form of intellectual pleasure, geek cred, or (increasingly common) direct financial contributions by those who stand to benefit from the software. Open source works because the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and because there is a large community of people who enjoy developing software.
;-)
... Investors are always looking for an inefficiently run firm, they are great sources of opportunity. Buy it and clean it up or instroduct a new firm in that market.
...
... and ignoring where people's self-interest would really lie in such a system. Slackers would be less of a problem, because there is more incentive for "owner-workers" to keep each other in line than there is for "owned-workers."
As I said one form of subsidy is someone who volunteers their efforts. You merely explain why they subsidize a project with their time. "Benefit outweighs cost", duh, did you think that IBM subsidizes Linux out their generosity?
You argue that the current style of business organization has developed and thrived because the efficient have driven out the inefficient. I would argue that it's because of self-reinforcement: those who start with more power tend to be able to maintain and reinforce that power in ways that the powerless cannot.
You could argue that but you would be wrong. New more efficient businesses drive out old more powerful businesses, disruptive technologies drive out old businesses at are base upon power rather than efficience,
But when the workers are also the owners (the sort of system Ted is describing) that antagonistic relationship disappears. The hope is that it is replaced by something where both managers and workers can feel more loyalty to the organization itself, rather than something to be fought over in order to direct as much of its profitability into a given pocket. Because the benefits of any gain in productivity are spread widely, few people have strong incentives to fight real improvements.
Untrue in the sense that workers need to be owners. Incentives are all about getting a workers motivations in line with the firm's goals. One way to do that is to reward for performance and results. This is one of the reasons that workers like strong but fair bosses, it eliminates the slackers who reduce the bonuses. Slackers are always a problem, regardless of whether the firm is investor and employee owned. Southwest Airlines has been studied a bit with respect to successful employee owned firms, it is fun reading.
You seem to be of the opinion that laborers, left to themselves, would stumble around mired in their own lazy inefficiency. Therefore, they need management to help them overcome the vices inherent in their lower-class nature. I think that attitude is both paternalistic
I would use harsher language than that is someone had presented such an opinion. No one has certainly not I, you are reading/inserting things that are not there. It has nothing to do with class or education, it has everything to do with perspective. A worker's perspective is limited, often myopic, as upper management's perspective is often to broad or shallow. When I refer to workers sometimes being delusional when they think they have a better idea it has nothing to do with their intelligence, it has to do with what information they have available at the time. That broader but shallower perspective of upper management might indicate something more important that what the worker is fixated upon.
Workers have solved the slacker problem via bosses. Or are you suggesting vigilante-like actions? In any case, without someone in authority to make a judegement call the firm will be inefficient. "Those who don't understand bosses are do
... a company that has its direction dictated by all of the members that run it ...
Open Source works because it is usually subsidized. Volunteers donating their time, academics who have the freedom to work on what interests them, corporations who sponsor some project, etc. If you can find someone to subsidize your open source firm them you might be successful. Otherwise you will most likely fail like any other poorly run firm. Your post suggest that you do not realize that investors and bosses are roles that have developed, evolved, over time because that has proven successful. Business can be a pretty darwinian process.
You need someone to put up the money for a firm, and since it is their money at risk they get to make the decisions. These investors often need help, they hire workers. Workers may or may not share the vision or plan of the investors so bosses are needed to make sure the workers are implementing the correct vision or plan rather than whatever their pet plan or preferrence is. Occasionally workers have a better plan or vision and bosses pass this up to investors and the plan changes. Usually the workes plan is inferior, this is not necessarily self-delusion it may simply be that the worker is unaware of various complications or parallel goals that are not part of their daily experience and knowledge. In this later case this where bosses use authority to make sure workers are working on the correct thing. Oddly enough, bosses are also desired by workers. Whenever there is a group of workers someone will slack off, the non-slackers want good bosses to make sure everyone pulls their own weight (in the right direction too).
An open source firm with too much freedom, too many decision makers, few with authority will just be inefficient and lose to better and more traditionally run firms. Can you get a bunch of volunteers that share a vision, works on the common goal not a personal agenda, contains no slackers? Sure, but not likely. This is why so many open source project die, open source projects probably have a greater mortality rate than new businesses. It's all about a clearly defined shared goal and proper management and incentives. The corporations have an advantage, well, as I said before, unless the open source firm is subsidized.
Your experience doesn't represent how all Apple hardware works. I have a 1Ghz G4 which has only kernel panicked twice and nothing else.
The claims against low end Dells are not accurate either. I've seen dozens of $300-400 boxes that have run just fine for years. Some in low end roles and that have remained as equipped at the factory, RAM upgrade excluded. Other that were essentially purchased as barebones and had RAM and video upgraded, some hard drive too, USB 2.0 added, etc.
"A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN." http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/s tories/main.html
Yes, exactly. Why would software companies build new things for a dead platform?
Actually the marketing types have figured out that 90-something percent of software is sold within the first year of a machine's life. So while PowerPC based Macs may be running and useful (running the software they already have) for many more years they will be dead to developers (who want to sell software) in less than a year. Why less than? The towers are far less popular that iMacs, Minis, and notebooks. All of which have been PowerPC for months.
(http://slashdot.org/) It's a simple choice on slashdot:
1) You choose to question authority because you understand man's potential for selfish motives especially when man is in positions of power. You choose to look for lies or misinformation in case they are there, not because you "know" they are there.
2) You wear tinfoil blinders and simply accept what your favorite authority figures tell you because you truly believe they mean the best for you and everyone else. You ignore history and you actually think "These guys, ya, these guys are different.
Make your choice.
You are right, slashdot has the intellectual simplicity of Bush Jr. and most folks around here would think it is that simple.
How many stories have there been in the last year alone about corrupt voting machines and election fraud?
No election is perfect, there have always been irregularities, bad ballots, subjective counting, etc. The dirty little secret is that vote counting has always been +- 1-3%. Republicans were hysterical when it went against them and Kennedy won in 1960, Democrats were hyper hysterical when it went against them and Bush won (yes, won, the newspapers did a recount and found that even using Gore's suggested recount Bush would have won) in 2000. The truth is those elections were essentially statistical ties and the winner is essentially random. In the Bush case the randomness was the Florida ballot layout, thankfully that layout was done by Democrats or the conspiracy theorists would be going absolutely ballistic. I don't recall the random event(s) responsible for the Kennedy win in 1960. In any case my point still stands, when the elections are that close neither party has annoyed the voters enough to motivate them. In 2000 both parties had parity in terms of the BS they were pulling, however not enough to motivate a third party.
I realize you admitted your tinfoil hat is on but you do overstate things a bit too much. For example "the monitoring of telephone calls". The government was not caught doing large scale monitoring of telephone conversations. They were looking at phone records, essentially your phone bill: number dialed, duration of call, etc. It's not even clear that this info is your personal info or if it is a corporation's internal "line switching" logs. "Internet activity", the same info web sites are selling to advertisers?
... a growing theocracy hell-bent (pun intended) on ensuring EVERYONE follows christian beliefs, no matter how whacky ...
... I'm old enough to remember how Gore was going to outlaw free speech in music and movies, ... I'm old enough to remember how Clinton was demonized, how Clinton was going to turn the US into a socialist state subserviant to the UN, ...
Sorry, but you're going to have to go find some impressionable young mind that doesn't know any better to buy that. I'm old enough to remember how Reagon was demonized just like Bush Jr., how Reagan/Fallwell were going to turn the US into a theocracy,
The truth is the people, the voters, are in control. Politicians of the left and right are only getting away with what the voters *allow* them to get away with. Stupid crap happens because the irritation level does not rise to a level that motivates enough voters. When politicians do cross that line they get whacked down by the voters.
But a lot of people don't download the updates, which could be the reason for the warning.
The updates are automatic. You have to manually disable that feature. Do you really think the type of person who would manually disable automatic updates is going to run out and do whatever Homeland Security says to do?
What a remarkable commentary on the sad state of affairs in the "Land of the Free" that our government makes a press release regarding patches to our computers and the first thing we think of is that the patch is associated with monitoring us somehow. For the record, I had the exact same thought as the OP and agree 100% with what he said.
Sorry, but these two post really comment on the sad state of affairs on slashdot. Slashdot is a bit heavy with tinfoil hat types. One of the primary rules of espionage is to just blend in, fade into the background, don't call attention to yourself. If the government were to do something like this, and I don't believe they would, it would be quietly slipped into a run of the mill security update. Nothing special, just a routine monthly security update like the ones we have come to expect.
Is Apple going to continue producing PowerPC systems, or are they slated for silicon heaven?
Earlier this week Apple updated the last last two PowerPC product families, upgradable tower and server, to Intel Xeons. The only PowerPC based systems on Apple's online store are old systems that were returned and are now in the refurbished section, "special limited time offers". It's over, PowerPC is officially history.
... it sure seems that way and Apple is leading the way ...
Not really, Apple's $2,500 Mac Pro does not come with wireless by default, it is a build to order operation of course.
In order to read information out of my delayed key strokes, you'd have to know the cadence that I'd normally be typing at and then measure the deltas to get the bits.
No, I don't think so. I am just making a guess, I have not read the article, but I think a simple "rounding" of your cadence would be enough. Pick a small time interval, round your actual timing to the nearest interval, done. For discussion purposes let's say the interval is 0.1s, encode a 0 bit as x.x3s and a 1 bit as x.x6s.
To catch students logging into termpapersfor10dollars.com
See that's the problem. Only one file is found but everyone acts like hackers ALWAYS find the files.
I disagree. Disabled content is found far more often than you claim, however unlike Hot Coffee it was not mainstream news worthy. Hell, most of what is found is not even slashdot worthy.