Seriously though , why does this meret a slashdot posting?
To justify the "foot" icon, of course!
I have fond memories of sitting in an upscale Japanese hibachi restaurant 15 years ago with a bunch of programmer "nerds" singing the Spam song. That, and an alcohol-induced duet of Sit on My Face with a coworker's wife. Come to think of it, it's surprisingly difficult to get arrested for disturbing the peace.
My God, man, had this not shown up on Slashdot many a fine nerd might have missed Idle's tour. He's no Darl McBride, but he's still pretty damn funny...
Okay, the Slashdot crowd is probably quite a bit more tech-savvy than our old pal Bubba, clicking away at every link that arrives in his inbox and updating his software only when he buys a new machine with it.
But I'm not sure penalizing Bubba is the right answer. Maybe Bubba is ignorant; on the other hand, he might have a legitimate mental handicap. How much responsibility should someone with Alzheimer's disease or a learning disability carry? What about someone who's simply too old or too young to grasp security issues? Where should the line be drawn, and how could we charge according to ability? And how much would it cost to administer such a program?
Couldn't resist the "favorite computer bug" temptation...
In college, around 1982, a friend had a micro by a company called Ohio Scientific, a Challenger something-or-other (I think that's right). The machine was running a BASIC interpreter, and had a character set that supported some simple games. Among the special characters supported were "tanks" in various orientations, so one could write a simple tank hunting game. Which he did.
We noticed when we started playing that we could move the tank offscreen and back, since he hadn't put any bounds checking to constrain the tank movement. When we toured too far offscreen, however, the program crashed.
We typed LIST to have a look at where bounds checking might be added to the code, and we found the runaway tank. Leaving a swath of blank spaces behind it, there was the tank character embedded in a line of BASIC source code...
Sorry, my friend, didn't mean to upset you. As I said, it's been a while (about a year) since I last fooled with a Red Hat distribution and found that cut-and-paste was hit-and-miss, and consistency between apps was, well, lacking, to put it kindly. Glad to hear things have improved for the penguin. Maybe I'll give GTK or QT another look after I grow bored with Cocoa.
KDE and Gnome might look similar enough to seem like a standard desktop to the user, but they sure aren't the same thing to a developer trying to port GUI apps to Linux. The expense of developing support for multiple GUIs makes Linux a much harder sell to companies that produce business applications for Windows. Those apps, in turn, both cement Microsoft's position in the enterprise and give them a foot in the door for displacing Linux.
Sure, users can install both KDE and Gnome libraries and run KDE apps from within Gnome or vice-versa, but as a developer I'd want to be sure that (1) apps look and behave identically in both environments, and conform to behavior the user expects from other "standard" apps; (2) apps can interoperate as expected with first-class cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop support; and (3) there is a minimal chance that my app would fail to run on any given Linux installation. If Linux is there, then it's been too long since I last looked into it and I need to download a current distro; if not, I think the article's author makes some valid points.
"...whats the big deal about cancelling windowsupdate.com? do you think anyone will notice, or care for that matter?"
The virus writers will care. I'd be surprised if a version with a New Improved attack address hadn't already been launched, probably ignoring the semaphore which normally kept the worm from reinstalling itself on an infected machine. If this happens, Microsoft's initial countermeasure won't be worth much for long. Still, it was a necessary and sensible first step.
How much do those vans retrofitted with lifting platforms cost? I see a lot of those around. I think they must be subsidized.
Well, I have a Ford van with a Ricon 6000 wheelchair lift. I bought the van new in 1992 and had it converted; it came it around US$28,000. Subsidized? Well, like most manufacturers, Ford had a US$1,000 credit towards the installation of such equipment, but the rest was out of my paycheck.
Unfortunately, with 150,000 miles on the van its second transmission is now going, and I understand that Ford is an acronym for Found On the Road Dead. So my wife and I are looking at a converted Toyota Sienna from Independent Mobility Systems. We're hoping that'll be a bit more reliable, but it'll set us back around US$40,000. Toyota's mobility program is also good for about US$1,000. Beyond that, well, I'm just hoping to keep my day job.
"IBot will be a huge seller. The government will bear much of the cost as doctors will prescribe them and they will be covered by Medicaid..."
That'd be nice, but I rather doubt it'll be easy to get these expensive monsters approved. My wife has a rather simple electric wheelchair with a joystick control, and even that cost US$8,000. It took me a good bit of arguing with our HMO to get it covered, too, back in the days when my employer's health plan was worth something... these days I'd end up paying most of it out-of-pocket. With luck, it should be another two years or so before it needs to be replaced.
The other thing that will limit the iBot adoption is that it takes an extra amount of coordination to control it safely in its enhanced modes... mostly fine for people with lower spinal cord injuries or spina bifida, but probably less useful in general for cerebral palsy or the later stages of muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis. The people best equipped to make full use of the iBot are also those who can often get by with a manual wheelchair.
Finally, there's the "fear factor"... my wife watched a video of this thing going down stairs and declared that there was no way in hell she'd trust the machine. Her chair weighs in at around 220 pounds; a tumble with such a machine could very easily be fatal.
I do think that advanced machines like the iBot have a future, but I think that future will be a long time in arriving. Meantime, accessibility is improving all the time, and stairs aren't the obstacle they were even ten years ago. By the time a stair climbing wheelchair is widely available, cost effective, and trusted, the problem it solves will have greatly diminished.
"...When leaving the country of New Jersey, you must always pay "export duties" on yourself. This is obviously an attempt by our ruthless dictator..."
Fear not, my friend, your ruthless dictator will be dealt with shortly! I've tipped off the sister-in-law of one of our president's housekeeping staff that New Jersey may be stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
While it's tempting to get a laugh out of a little company handing it to Microsoft for its use of DRM technology, of all things, this is yet another B.S. piece of patent litigation. InterTrust, according to the article, is now nothing more than "a patent portfolio, 30 employees, and this lawsuit." Microsoft, like all other technology corporations, has its own bulky patent portfolio --- which is useless defense against a company that makes no use of its own patents, much less anyone else's.
It'd be funny if Microsoft used its considerable political influence to fix this patent problem, and wound up killing SCO as a side-effect. Hey, it may be cheaper than licensing DRM from InterTrust...
The "coolness" of Apple's service has much more to do with the very relaxed DRM and a polished interface than the percentage of the userbase it reaches. Furthermore, integrating iTMS with iTunes made good sense from a usability standpoint; having a web-based service that makes no attempt to provide any information at all to other web browsers is rather more arbitrary.
These songs are licensed case-by-case and can have different limits set by the publisher as to how many times they can be burned to CD, transferred to a portable music player, etc. And if you lose the music on your primary system, you'd better have made backups: "...Once a song is on your computer, it is your responsibility. If your computer is lost or damaged, BuyMusic.com is not obligated to replace your music after it has been downloaded..." (this from their help page).
Overall, pretty restrictive, and (of course) no iPod support. There seems to be little to differentiate this from previous services, except for the lack of a membership fee and a $40 million budget for an advertising campaign...
Yeah, white Christians are way better than that! No way white Christians would ever launch a brutal armed campaign...
Wait a sec, I'm white, and a Christian... let me check my calendar... nope, sorry, I'm not scheduled to kill anybody at all. No arson or looting coming up, either. Must've missed the memo. I suppose I could skip a Red Cross donation and let someone croak through a sin of omission, but I really, really like that "love your neighbor as yourself" stuff.
Yeah, Islam can and has been twisted, and yeah, Christianity's not immune to it, either. Did someone on Slashdot really not know that? And is religion as a tool for manipulating people really that relevant to a discussion on "soft wall" technology?
...Now when I have access to flat rate broadband, I can get movies for free. Suddenly, it becomes worthwhile to get them and watch them. But I do not represent a lost sale for the studios. [...snip...] And I belive it is not immoral and should not be illegal, because they are not causing any harm to anybody...
You do realize that the movies you're watching for free are paid for by others, right? Well, I think I see what you're saying... the ones you aren't paying for aren't worth much to you, so you wouldn't have given the producers a dime anyway. That's an interesting viewpoint.
Here's a thought, though. Suppose I've seen the trailer for "Finding Nemo" and it looks like the most fantastic film of all time; man, I'd trade my big toes to see that film! $8 to see the film at a local theater? A bargain, for me! Worth a hundred times that! But... waaaait a minute... why should I spend the money? Why, I can just get it free off the Internet, just like you!
Whoops, I just deprived the theater, Pixar, the promoters, and that poor little clownfish of my $8, or perhaps my big toes.
So, how do we craft a law that makes it right for you to watch it for free (because it's not worth more than a cent to you), but makes it wrong for me (because that'd be depriving the whole channel of my money)? And how would it be enforced? I mean, if busted, I could always cross my fingers behind my back and say "Golly, who'd pay to watch a bunch of animated fish?," the judge and I would share a friendly chuckle, and I'd be back on the street.
I think everyone would agree that much of what's out there isn't worth paying for. Does that give consumers the right to set the price of their own choosing, regardless of the wishes of the copyright holder?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me they could only successfully go after people who were sharing files they weren't legally authorized to share. Legitimate users of P2P services should have nothing to worry about. Since claims of legitimate use of these services get repeated quite often, I assume there's either a lot of legitimate use going on, or that "legitimate use" is just a loophole people have been clinging to in order to keep the services afloat.
I'm not defending the RIAA and overpriced music, but I do think that refusing to buy is a more appropriate response to the problem than violating copyright law. It seems to me that the former would force a reduction in prices, whereas the latter would ensure widespread adoption of DRM, harsher laws, etc.
I'd like to see some independently-verified benchmarks before I believe that it's the "Fastest desktop in the world". I seriously doubt ol' bullshitter Stevo would tell the full truth.
Ah, well, remember that Steve Jobs has been known to inhabit his own little world.:)
(Just a good-natured poke from somebody who just loves his little iBook...)
I certainly hope so. I want to get that sucker up on eBay... daddy needs a shiny new iPod.:)
(For those of you who subscribe to MSDN, there are still a few days to take Microsoft up on their Pocket PC giveaway. May as well cut in to those MSDN profit margins as much as we can!)
I suppose it could be useful for an administrator trying to sniff out network vulnerabilities. I know of one large company that's become very paranoid about wireless access points after discovering a few unauthorized installations on the company LAN. There wasn't any plot behind it, just a few employees experimenting, but there were holes that could've been exploited nonetheless.
Other than that, I can think of better uses for my time than trying to spy on my neighbor's network traffic.
What a lovely attitude Microsoft has towards its customers:
...The field of battle is the computer industry and its neighbouring vertical markets. Every person, company, product, etc., on this battlefield that is not a competing platform vendor, is a pawn in the struggle between such vendors.
We win the battle when a critical mass of pawns chose to support our platform, such that the rest will too. We cannot compel this choice at the barrel of a gun. Our weapons are psychological, social, and economic â" not military. Each pawn that choses to support a Microsoft platform, does so as a rational decision to serve its own ends, whatever those may be.
To win, we must understand every relevant fact about the pawns â" their fears and desires; their likes and dislikes; their beliefs and doubts; their motivations and obstacles. We can only win the allegiance of the pawns by understanding what they need, and supplying it; what they fear, and alleviating it; what they believe, and reinforcing it; where they want to go tomorrow, and taking them there...
Not that such an attitude comes as a shock to anyone on Slashdot, of all places... and not that other corporations care much more than Microsoft... but even so, I'll bet Microsoft is less than thrilled with this little bit of PR. I like how he weaves in the "Where do you want to go today?" slogan.
I wonder if Microsoft understands how motivating it is when people to learn it regards them as pawns? In the last couple years Microsoft has succeeded in motivating me to develop software for the Palm OS, and now for OS X...
Slashdot Mirror
I have fond memories of sitting in an upscale Japanese hibachi restaurant 15 years ago with a bunch of programmer "nerds" singing the Spam song. That, and an alcohol-induced duet of Sit on My Face with a coworker's wife. Come to think of it, it's surprisingly difficult to get arrested for disturbing the peace.
My God, man, had this not shown up on Slashdot many a fine nerd might have missed Idle's tour. He's no Darl McBride, but he's still pretty damn funny...
Okay, the Slashdot crowd is probably quite a bit more tech-savvy than our old pal Bubba, clicking away at every link that arrives in his inbox and updating his software only when he buys a new machine with it.
But I'm not sure penalizing Bubba is the right answer. Maybe Bubba is ignorant; on the other hand, he might have a legitimate mental handicap. How much responsibility should someone with Alzheimer's disease or a learning disability carry? What about someone who's simply too old or too young to grasp security issues? Where should the line be drawn, and how could we charge according to ability? And how much would it cost to administer such a program?
Couldn't resist the "favorite computer bug" temptation...
In college, around 1982, a friend had a micro by a company called Ohio Scientific, a Challenger something-or-other (I think that's right). The machine was running a BASIC interpreter, and had a character set that supported some simple games. Among the special characters supported were "tanks" in various orientations, so one could write a simple tank hunting game. Which he did.
We noticed when we started playing that we could move the tank offscreen and back, since he hadn't put any bounds checking to constrain the tank movement. When we toured too far offscreen, however, the program crashed.
We typed LIST to have a look at where bounds checking might be added to the code, and we found the runaway tank. Leaving a swath of blank spaces behind it, there was the tank character embedded in a line of BASIC source code...
Sorry, my friend, didn't mean to upset you. As I said, it's been a while (about a year) since I last fooled with a Red Hat distribution and found that cut-and-paste was hit-and-miss, and consistency between apps was, well, lacking, to put it kindly. Glad to hear things have improved for the penguin. Maybe I'll give GTK or QT another look after I grow bored with Cocoa.
KDE and Gnome might look similar enough to seem like a standard desktop to the user, but they sure aren't the same thing to a developer trying to port GUI apps to Linux. The expense of developing support for multiple GUIs makes Linux a much harder sell to companies that produce business applications for Windows. Those apps, in turn, both cement Microsoft's position in the enterprise and give them a foot in the door for displacing Linux. Sure, users can install both KDE and Gnome libraries and run KDE apps from within Gnome or vice-versa, but as a developer I'd want to be sure that (1) apps look and behave identically in both environments, and conform to behavior the user expects from other "standard" apps; (2) apps can interoperate as expected with first-class cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop support; and (3) there is a minimal chance that my app would fail to run on any given Linux installation. If Linux is there, then it's been too long since I last looked into it and I need to download a current distro; if not, I think the article's author makes some valid points.
Funny, it looks to me like Microsoft's security is #2... ;)
Unfortunately, with 150,000 miles on the van its second transmission is now going, and I understand that Ford is an acronym for Found On the Road Dead. So my wife and I are looking at a converted Toyota Sienna from Independent Mobility Systems. We're hoping that'll be a bit more reliable, but it'll set us back around US$40,000. Toyota's mobility program is also good for about US$1,000. Beyond that, well, I'm just hoping to keep my day job.
Stay healthy. It's way cheaper.
The other thing that will limit the iBot adoption is that it takes an extra amount of coordination to control it safely in its enhanced modes... mostly fine for people with lower spinal cord injuries or spina bifida, but probably less useful in general for cerebral palsy or the later stages of muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis. The people best equipped to make full use of the iBot are also those who can often get by with a manual wheelchair.
Finally, there's the "fear factor"... my wife watched a video of this thing going down stairs and declared that there was no way in hell she'd trust the machine. Her chair weighs in at around 220 pounds; a tumble with such a machine could very easily be fatal.
I do think that advanced machines like the iBot have a future, but I think that future will be a long time in arriving. Meantime, accessibility is improving all the time, and stairs aren't the obstacle they were even ten years ago. By the time a stair climbing wheelchair is widely available, cost effective, and trusted, the problem it solves will have greatly diminished.
While it's tempting to get a laugh out of a little company handing it to Microsoft for its use of DRM technology, of all things, this is yet another B.S. piece of patent litigation. InterTrust, according to the article, is now nothing more than "a patent portfolio, 30 employees, and this lawsuit." Microsoft, like all other technology corporations, has its own bulky patent portfolio --- which is useless defense against a company that makes no use of its own patents, much less anyone else's.
It'd be funny if Microsoft used its considerable political influence to fix this patent problem, and wound up killing SCO as a side-effect. Hey, it may be cheaper than licensing DRM from InterTrust...
The "coolness" of Apple's service has much more to do with the very relaxed DRM and a polished interface than the percentage of the userbase it reaches. Furthermore, integrating iTMS with iTunes made good sense from a usability standpoint; having a web-based service that makes no attempt to provide any information at all to other web browsers is rather more arbitrary.
These songs are licensed case-by-case and can have different limits set by the publisher as to how many times they can be burned to CD, transferred to a portable music player, etc. And if you lose the music on your primary system, you'd better have made backups: "...Once a song is on your computer, it is your responsibility. If your computer is lost or damaged, BuyMusic.com is not obligated to replace your music after it has been downloaded..." (this from their help page).
Overall, pretty restrictive, and (of course) no iPod support. There seems to be little to differentiate this from previous services, except for the lack of a membership fee and a $40 million budget for an advertising campaign...
"...then I took a dozen rounds in the chest. It was... a bummer..."
Sorry friend, somebody just demonstrated prior art... :)
Yeah, Islam can and has been twisted, and yeah, Christianity's not immune to it, either. Did someone on Slashdot really not know that? And is religion as a tool for manipulating people really that relevant to a discussion on "soft wall" technology?
Oh, wait, I must be new here...
Here's a thought, though. Suppose I've seen the trailer for "Finding Nemo" and it looks like the most fantastic film of all time; man, I'd trade my big toes to see that film! $8 to see the film at a local theater? A bargain, for me! Worth a hundred times that! But... waaaait a minute... why should I spend the money? Why, I can just get it free off the Internet, just like you!
Whoops, I just deprived the theater, Pixar, the promoters, and that poor little clownfish of my $8, or perhaps my big toes.
So, how do we craft a law that makes it right for you to watch it for free (because it's not worth more than a cent to you), but makes it wrong for me (because that'd be depriving the whole channel of my money)? And how would it be enforced? I mean, if busted, I could always cross my fingers behind my back and say "Golly, who'd pay to watch a bunch of animated fish?," the judge and I would share a friendly chuckle, and I'd be back on the street.
I think everyone would agree that much of what's out there isn't worth paying for. Does that give consumers the right to set the price of their own choosing, regardless of the wishes of the copyright holder?
I sort of doubt it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me they could only successfully go after people who were sharing files they weren't legally authorized to share. Legitimate users of P2P services should have nothing to worry about. Since claims of legitimate use of these services get repeated quite often, I assume there's either a lot of legitimate use going on, or that "legitimate use" is just a loophole people have been clinging to in order to keep the services afloat.
I'm not defending the RIAA and overpriced music, but I do think that refusing to buy is a more appropriate response to the problem than violating copyright law. It seems to me that the former would force a reduction in prices, whereas the latter would ensure widespread adoption of DRM, harsher laws, etc.
(Just a good-natured poke from somebody who just loves his little iBook...)
I certainly hope so. I want to get that sucker up on eBay... daddy needs a shiny new iPod. :)
(For those of you who subscribe to MSDN, there are still a few days to take Microsoft up on their Pocket PC giveaway. May as well cut in to those MSDN profit margins as much as we can!)
I suppose it could be useful for an administrator trying to sniff out network vulnerabilities. I know of one large company that's become very paranoid about wireless access points after discovering a few unauthorized installations on the company LAN. There wasn't any plot behind it, just a few employees experimenting, but there were holes that could've been exploited nonetheless.
Other than that, I can think of better uses for my time than trying to spy on my neighbor's network traffic.
"when people to learn"... ugh, sorry about that...
I wonder if Microsoft understands how motivating it is when people to learn it regards them as pawns? In the last couple years Microsoft has succeeded in motivating me to develop software for the Palm OS, and now for OS X...