"With the discovery of the star and its orbital period, scientists are now one step away from measuring the mass of such a black hole, a step which would help verify its existence."
Is it just me or is even science journalism getting sloppy...
It seems to me that measuring the mass of something would not only help verify its existence, but prove it beyond the shadow of doubt.
"I still think a good case can be made for Steve Jobs being the antichrist. Without ever making himself look evil he manages to tempt countless people into sin through techno-lust, and the vitriol exhibited by rabid Mac-lovers towards basically anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest can hardly be thought of as "natural" hatred."
"If Microsoft were smart, they'd be spinning off profitable divisions to focus on their core business and new development."
You put your finger on the problem there. First they have to figure out what their core business is.
They seem to finally be figuring out that JUST doing an operating system won't last as a core business, ditto for and Office suite.
They recently figured out that they don't want to be in the online magazine business. In another year or so they will realize that the game console market is more trouble than it is worth.
They wisely passed up the chance to become a PC "manufacturer", and watching companies like HP, Dell and Gateway struggle will ensure that they don't change their minds about that.
Their anemic online offerings like Hotmail and Passport must have some admins screaming "Do we really HAVE to run this crap on Windows boxes?" and as usage grows for things like Virtual Earth and live.com they'll get slower and slower until the press start making jokes about them. To counter this, MS will run them at a loss (again) if necessary.
A large part of IBM's income comes from consulting services, and Microsoft has been claiming it does this too, but I've never heard of them running the same sort of development efforts that IBM is doing by the thousands, instead they seem to be confined to rescue efforts for projects that are already in failure mode: "You ned to defrag all your disks once a day, that'll be $3000 please."
I think they WILL make a more serious run at consulting services, but once they figure out how much work it is and how thin the margins can be they will slink back to their parents spare room to "think things over some more".
The company was born with a silver spoon in its mouth courtesy of IBM, and it is ironic that they have been chasing that IBM money model ever since. They just want to "be more like Dad." (Except they don't want to have to work as hard as he did).
Well, in the event that your curiosity is sincere, here are some points:
(1) I don't consider just raising taxes to cover every spending spree you go on to be "financial responsibility". Republicans regularly vote for smaller spending increases than Dems. And I can't think of the last time a departments budget was actually cut. ("cut" means CUT, not just reduce the increase).
(2) The reduction in the size of government that Clinton likes to take credit for consists almost entirely of military base closings that were voted into place during the previous Bush administration. How about we do the same thing for domestic departments that have long since outlived their function? I don't hear any of these responsible Democrats calling for such things. If they did, I'd vote for them.
(3) Most Republican voters as well as Democrats are "good" people. What confuses you is that you have been told that all Republicans are evil when in reality most Republicans have a distrust, that is well founded in history of governments that get too big and try to live people's lives for them. There is no instance of government "giving" money to individuals that does not come with strings attached. As "kind hearted" as many of those programs sound, they will, and have largely already, produce a population unable to think for themselves and such a society cannot sustain itself. Never has, never will.
If there were a "Leave me the Hell Alone" party that had electable candidates I would vote for them. Until then, I will continue to vote for the party that comes closest to that philosophy, even if there is only a hairs breadth of difference between the two existing parties.
Here is a quote from Jimmy Carter's new book "Our Endangered Values":
"Soon after arriving in Washington, I was surprised and disappointed when no Democratic member of Congress would sponsor my first series of legislative proposals -- to reorganize parts of the federal bureaucracy -- and I had to get Republicans to take the initiative. Thereafter, my shifting coalitions of support comprised the available members of both parties who agreed with me on specific issues, with my most intense and mounting opposition coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. (One reason for this was the ambition of Senator Ted Kennedy to replace me as president.)"
When Carter took office, even though I hadn't voted for him, I thought he was a nice guy, and his statements on reforming government gave me hope that he would do the right thing. His presidency was one disaster after another, some probably beyond his control (the gas crisis), but his own party sabotaging him is not a reason for me to consider voting for another Democrat until the Democrat party does more to distance itself from people who for all practical purposes are extreme socialists. Again, the problem with the socialist philosophy isn't that the intentions are bad, it is that the system does not work.
As they say, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Maybe that should be the motto for the Democrat party.
I'm glad to hear this. I noticed that since I started typing more about 10 years ago my fingers have gotten stronger, and more flexible, not less. The people I know who have complained of carpel tunnel were almost always fat, mostly women, and were the type of people who always hated their job no matter what they were asked to do. Maybe some of these people can be put back to work now.
Get a desk or other surface where your keyboard and mouse are right over your knees and you don't have to worry about pressing your wrists on the corner of the table for either mouse or keyboard use. If you are forced to work on a desk that is a higher surface, I have found that placing the keyboard in the center of the desk and resting your entire arm on the desk works pretty well, although you probably can't type as fast this way.
No, this is a classic example of an oxymoron (contradiction in terms).
Whereas I am an example of an ordinary moron.
I worked at a very large world-wide shop that saves a whole cycle of hardware upgrades by turning off the screen savers on their servers. Most of the admins were running the fanciest 3D CPU intensive screensavers they could find. When anyone would complain about performance they would go to the server, check task manager and come back with: "well it's only running at 20%". Finally someone thought to check the numbers remotely and discovered that the screensaver was by far the biggest hog. I don't think most Windows users, even the "pros" realize how much resource is involved in something as simple as moving the mouse, moving a window around or resizing it.
They made Windows so "easy" that even an idiot could administer it and...
I don't know about the printer drivers, but for the video, they claimed moving to kernel space made them faster (and did seem to), unfortunately it introduced an unenforced requirement that video drivers be fully debugged, which due to the nature of the business they never were. A once rock stable machine on 3.51 that could not be made stable on 4.00 without switching from ATI to Nvidia video cards is what first gave me doubts about whether I wanted to continue running Windows at home (or ATI video cards for that matter).
The speed boost just wasn't worth it, in the same way that the functionality of run-on-load macros in Word documents aren't worth the trouble they cause. Maybe this is a sign that the true tech types are gaining influence over the marketing types at the company (but somehow I doubt that). For the sake of those still running Windows I hope they take all non-essentials out of kernel space and shoot for stability over speed or features.
Oh haven't you heard? Microsoft is all for open formats now. I'm sure they are planning to release source code for their codecs any day now. Just you watch. Me and the Channel Nine fanboys are holding our breath till then just to hurry them up!
I can't remember ever hearing a shill say "Hey, I'm a shill!", and more importantly, many who act as shills do so without knowing it. As addressed in other parts of the discussion here, there were problems with the study not covered by any of the questions. The researcher may be a nice guy, and his research may have been done in earnest, and it could still be fatally flawed.
I agree that the readership of Slashdot may not be typical. But I still bet that most Slashdot readers are Windows users, not Linux users. If there is a tendency to question such studies here I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that the results defy common sense, and they defy our own experiences.
If I show you a study that demonstrates that SUVs get better gas mileage than small economy cars you are likely to have questions (unless you are extremely gullible). Answering the first round of questions about such a study isn't likely to assuage most peoples skepticism either.
Pardon me for wondering why, if Windows is so secure and easy to maintain, so many, if not all, of the exploits that make the news concern Windows systems. With the exception of physical machines being lost or stolen, and eliminating cases where some careless administrator forgot to set meaningful passwords, almost all occurrences of data being stolen or compromised involve Windows systems.
If the study is flawed, it is a legitimate question as to whether the funding of the study was an influence. Don't expect the recipient of the money to be too useful in figuring this one out. If the study was not flawed (that is, the results match reality) then one has to ask how are users of non-Microsoft systems accomplishing this brilliant cover-up.
I had sent a friend information about this Sony thing last week and it got not a lot of attention. However same friend was trying to de-lous another persons PC yesterday and called me for support (Note: I'm not particularly qualified for Windows support at this point, but I can do Google searches and say things like "hang in there" from time to time). I think by that time I was called many of the virus and spyware elements had been cleaned by conventional means, but there seemed to be some persistent problems. Just in case, I asked whether they had played any of those Sony BMG music discs in the machine. Apparently I was on a speakerphone setup, and I heard several denials of the form "We never use our machine for such things" while my friend asked me what I was talking about.
After refreshing his memory, and in turn having the family involved talk among themselves for a while, it turned out that some Sony BMG discs HAD been played in that machine, and some of the remaining questionable files had Sony all over them even though the family didn't own a Sony camera, Sony music player or any other Sony device that they could think of. Finally someone remembered that the little girl in the family HAD played, or ripped, or SOMETHING some music CDs in the machine and off they rushed to find them. In the mean time I was looking for the list of Sony BMG discs affected, originally numbered 20 and widely circulated at that count, but subsequently updated to 50, and listed on a Sony website. I found the list of 50 at about the same time that they found their played/ripped/inserted/whatever CDs and sure enough, several of them had the Sony BMG label on them. Now the catch was that (a) none of the CDs they had found were on the list and (b) none of the CDs they had found had the warning that they contained copyright protection software, and my understanding was that the affected discs did contain such a warning.
Well, by getting rid of the Sony BMG stuff they seemed to be back to a clean machine, and they swore to never insert a music CD into their machine again or to buy a CD from Sony. So, congratulations should go out to Sony BMG and First4Internet for accomplishing their objectives. Now to round out the picture:
(1) I suspect that Sony BMG, Sony alone, and BMG alone have in the past used other protection schemes and while they haven't been vocal about it, other companies are doing the same experimentation. All of these programs have their own ways and means of hiding themselves and controlling what YOU do with YOUR PC. But NONE of them have exhaustively looked into the legal, much less technical ramifications of what they do. They think that by merely relying on third party companies like First4Internet they can claim ignorance of the consequences.
(2) Rumor has it that by the time you are asked for your permission to install software when you insert these disks SOME software has already been installed.
(3) Sony/BMG isn't the only company doing this, they are just the only company that has been caught.
(4) These discs have been out for a year, and some people say two years, or maybe more.
(5) There is no quick and easy way to uninstall these programs, either from Sony BMG or the s
Bad combo: Audio content with no transcript; flash presentation (sound only); streaming instead of downloadable; Slashdot.
I wonder who comes up with this stuff. But I know that at least part of the answer is that it is people who should be doing something else (something not involving computers) for a living.
Microsoft intentionally looked the other way regarding piracy, even of their own software. They did not join the BSA (a group that fights piracy) because they only wanted to selectively enforce their license, allowing individuals and small companies to spread the use of and become dependent on their products and then only clamping down once such organizations had full pockets. This is right out of the drug pusher's playbook.
BSA wanted to in fact conduct raids on even small companies engaged in piracy so as to not let them head down the wrong road. BSA's efforts were in fact thwarted by Microsoft who would not participate with them in prosecutions. To do so would have actually slowed the adoption of products such as Word and Excel which were still underdogs to Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
The other thing many people forget is that Microsoft was singing a tune that sounded a lot like open standards back then. Windows was going to make everyone's software work seamlessly together and interface easily to external hardware. This in fact happened to a certain extent, only the interfaces were never fully documented and whenever Microsoft had competitors, the interfaces magically became slower or more buggy for the competing products.
Finally, they did everything they could to slow TCP/IP adoption, preferring instead to push special Microsoft protocols with a view toward being the monopoly for what we now call the Internet.
Fortunately most of their efforts in this regard ultimately failed, but they count on people's short memories, ignorance, and the turnover in staff in the industry to perpetuate their preposterous claim as innovators.
I rooted for Microsoft in the early days. But I also paid enough attention to know when that was no longer appropriate. It's certainly not appropriate now.
As for Google, rich as they are, it is too soon to call them bad guys. Just having a lot of money to spend doesn't make you bad, it's all in how you spend it. My hope is that, due to the nature of their business model, Google will avoid the temptation that Microsoft succumbed to, namely, of getting lazy and attempting to lock-in a captive customer base using underhanded tactics.
"This is a good thing. People are being laid off at some NASA centers, and others are hiring."
Your problem my friend is that you are looking at the big picture instead of just some microscopic Bush-hating sliver of it.
First of all, the story is mischaracterized here. From one of the articles:
"McGregor said the cuts would include support staff, engineering and technology positions, though she declined to give specifics. Scientist positions "are a little bit different," she said, because most scientists receive grants for their research."
The articles also say that a lot of the cuts will be through attrition (for the not-so-literate: that means normal retirements, job changes etc.), and affects mostly "support" positions and contractors, not scientists. Translation: "the cafeteria will no longer be open until 5PM."
Contrary to popular belief (it would seem), erstwhile rocket scientists are not being deployed to Iraq.
In fact there have been many people for years that have argued that the manned program, PARTICULARLY the Shuttle program took way too much of the NASA budget away from more pure forms of space research, and now, to rescue and re-invent that effort we are doing it again. But many of us have too short an attention span, and had our vision focused to only what it reported in the sensationalist headlines (including the Slashdot ones). Congratulations on being in the well informed minority.
I'll now proceed to view some of the wild and crazy popular-media inspired posts to see what joe-armchair thinks about the world.
Or does this sound like the intro narrative to a horror sci-fi flick...
Yes but, fortunately for most of us, these things always go after Tokyo first. Fortunately they are always able to take care of the situation over there, although we may have to send some B52s to get swatted down while they work on that new ray-gun thing.
I think you meant that the other way around. Normally download is faster than upload (precisely to keep you from using your home computer as a server).
I think the torrent systems are over-hyped as a SPEEDY way to download files. Like the Nutella and clones that followed the primary purpose of these things are (as I understand them):
* Provided a persistent (in the sense of "keeps trying") download for large files, with error correction, restart-ability, multiple sources/paths etc.
* Relative anonymity. The point is to guarantee that the file you end up with is the file you went after... authenticate the data, not you.
* Reduce or eliminate bandwidth cost to original file providers by spreading the workload out to (among others) home users.
* Manage your download and corresponding upload activity so as not to render your web browser useless. In other words there are caps placed on how much of your bandwidth gets used.
* Do all this without human intervention or giant server farm managing it.
You might look for some settings in your client that will speed things up, but depending on who else is downloading and what their limitations are, these adjustments may have little effect, no effect, or may make things worse.
Best bet is to start the download in the background and forget about it for a while (but don't forget so much that you turn your computer off at night). Look for a present under the tree 13 hours from now.
Re:Finally, Google expands into animals
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Google Ant
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I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.
But will it also take a dump on your brand new carpet?
Register for free access to Boston.com
You now have to register to gain complete, uninterrupted access to Boston.com and our features...
Guess they didn't want a million readers looking at their ad-free pages. Good thing there still is mirrordot! [mirrordot.org]"
Interesting thing though... I viewed that page several times to double check things and did not get asked for the registration. Only after the third or fourth time. So there is a bit of a bait and switch going on here as I'm sure some of us would have skipped the/. story completely if we knew it pointed to a registration page.
Yes, what's funny about this is that the few thousand Yahoo beta testers are going on and on about how fast it is. I'll evaluate which is faster after Yahoo has a few million users. I don't know about other folks, but when I click on something in Gmail the response is almost immediate, faster in fact than most of what I used to do with local e-mail programs. Yahoo, which I've been using for years helped (along with MSN) to give a bad name to web mail interfaces, and lately, they have gotten worse, not better, as they tried to keep up with Google in giving space away.
Has everyone forgotten that before Gmail came along you got a whopping big 15M of space from Yahoo unless you wanted to pay after which I think it went up to an astronomical 100M. Gmail made a laughing stock of the other free mail services, and rightly so. It's nice to see Yahoo try and do better, but don't forget they, and Microsoft were resting comfortably on their lazy asses before Google came along.
You mean the first item: "* File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large amounts of files available to third parties." didn't give it away?
Great stuff. Somebody mod-up GP so more people can enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
FTA:
"With the discovery of the star and its orbital period, scientists are now one step away from measuring the mass of such a black hole, a step which would help verify its existence."
Is it just me or is even science journalism getting sloppy...
It seems to me that measuring the mass of something would not only help verify its existence, but prove it beyond the shadow of doubt.
"I still think a good case can be made for Steve Jobs being the antichrist. Without ever making himself look evil he manages to tempt countless people into sin through techno-lust, and the vitriol exhibited by rabid Mac-lovers towards basically anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest can hardly be thought of as "natural" hatred."
LIAR!
"If Microsoft were smart, they'd be spinning off profitable divisions to focus on their core business and new development."
You put your finger on the problem there. First they have to figure out what their core business is.
They seem to finally be figuring out that JUST doing an operating system won't last as a core business, ditto for and Office suite.
They recently figured out that they don't want to be in the online magazine business. In another year or so they will realize that the game console market is more trouble than it is worth.
They wisely passed up the chance to become a PC "manufacturer", and watching companies like HP, Dell and Gateway struggle will ensure that they don't change their minds about that.
Their anemic online offerings like Hotmail and Passport must have some admins screaming "Do we really HAVE to run this crap on Windows boxes?" and as usage grows for things like Virtual Earth and live.com they'll get slower and slower until the press start making jokes about them. To counter this, MS will run them at a loss (again) if necessary.
A large part of IBM's income comes from consulting services, and Microsoft has been claiming it does this too, but I've never heard of them running the same sort of development efforts that IBM is doing by the thousands, instead they seem to be confined to rescue efforts for projects that are already in failure mode: "You ned to defrag all your disks once a day, that'll be $3000 please."
I think they WILL make a more serious run at consulting services, but once they figure out how much work it is and how thin the margins can be they will slink back to their parents spare room to "think things over some more".
The company was born with a silver spoon in its mouth courtesy of IBM, and it is ironic that they have been chasing that IBM money model ever since. They just want to "be more like Dad." (Except they don't want to have to work as hard as he did).
Wish them luck. They will need it.
You mean like this:
/var/www/html/lanlocked/home.php on line 26
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in
Well, in the event that your curiosity is sincere, here are some points:
r yId=4984885)
(1) I don't consider just raising taxes to cover every spending spree you go on to be "financial responsibility". Republicans regularly vote for smaller spending increases than Dems. And I can't think of the last time a departments budget was actually cut. ("cut" means CUT, not just reduce the increase).
(2) The reduction in the size of government that Clinton likes to take credit for consists almost entirely of military base closings that were voted into place during the previous Bush administration. How about we do the same thing for domestic departments that have long since outlived their function? I don't hear any of these responsible Democrats calling for such things. If they did, I'd vote for them.
(3) Most Republican voters as well as Democrats are "good" people. What confuses you is that you have been told that all Republicans are evil when in reality most Republicans have a distrust, that is well founded in history of governments that get too big and try to live people's lives for them. There is no instance of government "giving" money to individuals that does not come with strings attached. As "kind hearted" as many of those programs sound, they will, and have largely already, produce a population unable to think for themselves and such a society cannot sustain itself. Never has, never will.
If there were a "Leave me the Hell Alone" party that had electable candidates I would vote for them. Until then, I will continue to vote for the party that comes closest to that philosophy, even if there is only a hairs breadth of difference between the two existing parties.
Here is a quote from Jimmy Carter's new book "Our Endangered Values":
"Soon after arriving in Washington, I was surprised and disappointed when no Democratic member of Congress would sponsor my first series of legislative proposals -- to reorganize parts of the federal bureaucracy -- and I had to get Republicans to take the initiative. Thereafter, my shifting coalitions of support comprised the available members of both parties who agreed with me on specific issues, with my most intense and mounting opposition coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. (One reason for this was the ambition of Senator Ted Kennedy to replace me as president.)"
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?sto
When Carter took office, even though I hadn't voted for him, I thought he was a nice guy, and his statements on reforming government gave me hope that he would do the right thing. His presidency was one disaster after another, some probably beyond his control (the gas crisis), but his own party sabotaging him is not a reason for me to consider voting for another Democrat until the Democrat party does more to distance itself from people who for all practical purposes are extreme socialists. Again, the problem with the socialist philosophy isn't that the intentions are bad, it is that the system does not work.
As they say, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Maybe that should be the motto for the Democrat party.
I'm glad to hear this. I noticed that since I started typing more about 10 years ago my fingers have gotten stronger, and more flexible, not less. The people I know who have complained of carpel tunnel were almost always fat, mostly women, and were the type of people who always hated their job no matter what they were asked to do. Maybe some of these people can be put back to work now.
Get a desk or other surface where your keyboard and mouse are right over your knees and you don't have to worry about pressing your wrists on the corner of the table for either mouse or keyboard use. If you are forced to work on a desk that is a higher surface, I have found that placing the keyboard in the center of the desk and resting your entire arm on the desk works pretty well, although you probably can't type as fast this way.
No, this is a classic example of an oxymoron (contradiction in terms).
Whereas I am an example of an ordinary moron.
I worked at a very large world-wide shop that saves a whole cycle of hardware upgrades by turning off the screen savers on their servers. Most of the admins were running the fanciest 3D CPU intensive screensavers they could find. When anyone would complain about performance they would go to the server, check task manager and come back with: "well it's only running at 20%". Finally someone thought to check the numbers remotely and discovered that the screensaver was by far the biggest hog. I don't think most Windows users, even the "pros" realize how much resource is involved in something as simple as moving the mouse, moving a window around or resizing it.
They made Windows so "easy" that even an idiot could administer it and...
Oh, never-mind.
I don't know about the printer drivers, but for the video, they claimed moving to kernel space made them faster (and did seem to), unfortunately it introduced an unenforced requirement that video drivers be fully debugged, which due to the nature of the business they never were. A once rock stable machine on 3.51 that could not be made stable on 4.00 without switching from ATI to Nvidia video cards is what first gave me doubts about whether I wanted to continue running Windows at home (or ATI video cards for that matter).
The speed boost just wasn't worth it, in the same way that the functionality of run-on-load macros in Word documents aren't worth the trouble they cause. Maybe this is a sign that the true tech types are gaining influence over the marketing types at the company (but somehow I doubt that). For the sake of those still running Windows I hope they take all non-essentials out of kernel space and shoot for stability over speed or features.
"How did switching to macs reduce the *spam* you had incoming?"
Maybe he meant outgoing spam as his machines had already been taken over and were slaves to a spammer somewhere.
Oh haven't you heard? Microsoft is all for open formats now. I'm sure they are planning to release source code for their codecs any day now. Just you watch. Me and the Channel Nine fanboys are holding our breath till then just to hurry them up!
Let me in the same room with this guy and I'll show him some breakage!
*puts coke bottle spectacles back on*
I can't remember ever hearing a shill say "Hey, I'm a shill!", and more importantly, many who act as shills do so without knowing it. As addressed in other parts of the discussion here, there were problems with the study not covered by any of the questions. The researcher may be a nice guy, and his research may have been done in earnest, and it could still be fatally flawed.
I agree that the readership of Slashdot may not be typical. But I still bet that most Slashdot readers are Windows users, not Linux users. If there is a tendency to question such studies here I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that the results defy common sense, and they defy our own experiences.
If I show you a study that demonstrates that SUVs get better gas mileage than small economy cars you are likely to have questions (unless you are extremely gullible). Answering the first round of questions about such a study isn't likely to assuage most peoples skepticism either.
Pardon me for wondering why, if Windows is so secure and easy to maintain, so many, if not all, of the exploits that make the news concern Windows systems. With the exception of physical machines being lost or stolen, and eliminating cases where some careless administrator forgot to set meaningful passwords, almost all occurrences of data being stolen or compromised involve Windows systems.
If the study is flawed, it is a legitimate question as to whether the funding of the study was an influence. Don't expect the recipient of the money to be too useful in figuring this one out. If the study was not flawed (that is, the results match reality) then one has to ask how are users of non-Microsoft systems accomplishing this brilliant cover-up.
I had sent a friend information about this Sony thing last week and it got not a lot of attention. However same friend was trying to de-lous another persons PC yesterday and called me for support (Note: I'm not particularly qualified for Windows support at this point, but I can do Google searches and say things like "hang in there" from time to time). I think by that time I was called many of the virus and spyware elements had been cleaned by conventional means, but there seemed to be some persistent problems. Just in case, I asked whether they had played any of those Sony BMG music discs in the machine. Apparently I was on a speakerphone setup, and I heard several denials of the form "We never use our machine for such things" while my friend asked me what I was talking about.
After refreshing his memory, and in turn having the family involved talk among themselves for a while, it turned out that some Sony BMG discs HAD been played in that machine, and some of the remaining questionable files had Sony all over them even though the family didn't own a Sony camera, Sony music player or any other Sony device that they could think of. Finally someone remembered that the little girl in the family HAD played, or ripped, or SOMETHING some music CDs in the machine and off they rushed to find them. In the mean time I was looking for the list of Sony BMG discs affected, originally numbered 20 and widely circulated at that count, but subsequently updated to 50, and listed on a Sony website. I found the list of 50 at about the same time that they found their played/ripped/inserted/whatever CDs and sure enough, several of them had the Sony BMG label on them. Now the catch was that (a) none of the CDs they had found were on the list and (b) none of the CDs they had found had the warning that they contained copyright protection software, and my understanding was that the affected discs did contain such a warning.
Well, by getting rid of the Sony BMG stuff they seemed to be back to a clean machine, and they swore to never insert a music CD into their machine again or to buy a CD from Sony. So, congratulations should go out to Sony BMG and First4Internet for accomplishing their objectives. Now to round out the picture:
(1) I suspect that Sony BMG, Sony alone, and BMG alone have in the past used other protection schemes and while they haven't been vocal about it, other companies are doing the same experimentation. All of these programs have their own ways and means of hiding themselves and controlling what YOU do with YOUR PC. But NONE of them have exhaustively looked into the legal, much less technical ramifications of what they do. They think that by merely relying on third party companies like First4Internet they can claim ignorance of the consequences.
(2) Rumor has it that by the time you are asked for your permission to install software when you insert these disks SOME software has already been installed.
(3) Sony/BMG isn't the only company doing this, they are just the only company that has been caught.
(4) These discs have been out for a year, and some people say two years, or maybe more.
(5) There is no quick and easy way to uninstall these programs, either from Sony BMG or the s
HAHAHA!
Very good one.
It is in fact from a Monty Python sketch about candies containing dead frogs, steel spikes, larks vomit and other unpleasant things.
Bad combo: Audio content with no transcript; flash presentation (sound only); streaming instead of downloadable; Slashdot.
I wonder who comes up with this stuff. But I know that at least part of the answer is that it is people who should be doing something else (something not involving computers) for a living.
You have a bad memory.
Microsoft intentionally looked the other way regarding piracy, even of their own software. They did not join the BSA (a group that fights piracy) because they only wanted to selectively enforce their license, allowing individuals and small companies to spread the use of and become dependent on their products and then only clamping down once such organizations had full pockets. This is right out of the drug pusher's playbook.
BSA wanted to in fact conduct raids on even small companies engaged in piracy so as to not let them head down the wrong road. BSA's efforts were in fact thwarted by Microsoft who would not participate with them in prosecutions. To do so would have actually slowed the adoption of products such as Word and Excel which were still underdogs to Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
The other thing many people forget is that Microsoft was singing a tune that sounded a lot like open standards back then. Windows was going to make everyone's software work seamlessly together and interface easily to external hardware. This in fact happened to a certain extent, only the interfaces were never fully documented and whenever Microsoft had competitors, the interfaces magically became slower or more buggy for the competing products.
Finally, they did everything they could to slow TCP/IP adoption, preferring instead to push special Microsoft protocols with a view toward being the monopoly for what we now call the Internet.
Fortunately most of their efforts in this regard ultimately failed, but they count on people's short memories, ignorance, and the turnover in staff in the industry to perpetuate their preposterous claim as innovators.
I rooted for Microsoft in the early days. But I also paid enough attention to know when that was no longer appropriate. It's certainly not appropriate now.
As for Google, rich as they are, it is too soon to call them bad guys. Just having a lot of money to spend doesn't make you bad, it's all in how you spend it. My hope is that, due to the nature of their business model, Google will avoid the temptation that Microsoft succumbed to, namely, of getting lazy and attempting to lock-in a captive customer base using underhanded tactics.
"This is a good thing. People are being laid off at some NASA centers, and others are hiring."
Your problem my friend is that you are looking at the big picture instead of just some microscopic Bush-hating sliver of it.
First of all, the story is mischaracterized here. From one of the articles:
"McGregor said the cuts would include support staff, engineering and technology positions, though she declined to give specifics. Scientist positions "are a little bit different," she said, because most scientists receive grants for their research."
The articles also say that a lot of the cuts will be through attrition (for the not-so-literate: that means normal retirements, job changes etc.), and affects mostly "support" positions and contractors, not scientists. Translation: "the cafeteria will no longer be open until 5PM."
Contrary to popular belief (it would seem), erstwhile rocket scientists are not being deployed to Iraq.
In fact there have been many people for years that have argued that the manned program, PARTICULARLY the Shuttle program took way too much of the NASA budget away from more pure forms of space research, and now, to rescue and re-invent that effort we are doing it again. But many of us have too short an attention span, and had our vision focused to only what it reported in the sensationalist headlines (including the Slashdot ones). Congratulations on being in the well informed minority.
I'll now proceed to view some of the wild and crazy popular-media inspired posts to see what joe-armchair thinks about the world.
Or does this sound like the intro narrative to a horror sci-fi flick...
Yes but, fortunately for most of us, these things always go after Tokyo first. Fortunately they are always able to take care of the situation over there, although we may have to send some B52s to get swatted down while they work on that new ray-gun thing.
I think you meant that the other way around. Normally download is faster than upload (precisely to keep you from using your home computer as a server).
I think the torrent systems are over-hyped as a SPEEDY way to download files. Like the Nutella and clones that followed the primary purpose of these things are (as I understand them):
* Provided a persistent (in the sense of "keeps trying") download for large files, with error correction, restart-ability, multiple sources/paths etc.
* Relative anonymity. The point is to guarantee that the file you end up with is the file you went after... authenticate the data, not you.
* Reduce or eliminate bandwidth cost to original file providers by spreading the workload out to (among others) home users.
* Manage your download and corresponding upload activity so as not to render your web browser useless. In other words there are caps placed on how much of your bandwidth gets used.
* Do all this without human intervention or giant server farm managing it.
You might look for some settings in your client that will speed things up, but depending on who else is downloading and what their limitations are, these adjustments may have little effect, no effect, or may make things worse.
Best bet is to start the download in the background and forget about it for a while (but don't forget so much that you turn your computer off at night). Look for a present under the tree 13 hours from now.
I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.
But will it also take a dump on your brand new carpet?
" Or not...
/. story completely if we knew it pointed to a registration page.
Register for free access to Boston.com
You now have to register to gain complete, uninterrupted access to Boston.com and our features...
Guess they didn't want a million readers looking at their ad-free pages. Good thing there still is mirrordot! [mirrordot.org]"
Interesting thing though... I viewed that page several times to double check things and did not get asked for the registration. Only after the third or fourth time. So there is a bit of a bait and switch going on here as I'm sure some of us would have skipped the
"Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you"
Um, shouldn't that be violets are #FF00FF ?
As to the bases, I don't know where they went.
Yes, what's funny about this is that the few thousand Yahoo beta testers are going on and on about how fast it is. I'll evaluate which is faster after Yahoo has a few million users. I don't know about other folks, but when I click on something in Gmail the response is almost immediate, faster in fact than most of what I used to do with local e-mail programs. Yahoo, which I've been using for years helped (along with MSN) to give a bad name to web mail interfaces, and lately, they have gotten worse, not better, as they tried to keep up with Google in giving space away.
Has everyone forgotten that before Gmail came along you got a whopping big 15M of space from Yahoo unless you wanted to pay after which I think it went up to an astronomical 100M. Gmail made a laughing stock of the other free mail services, and rightly so. It's nice to see Yahoo try and do better, but don't forget they, and Microsoft were resting comfortably on their lazy asses before Google came along.
You mean the first item: "* File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large amounts of files available to third parties." didn't give it away?
Great stuff. Somebody mod-up GP so more people can enjoy it.