They even had to set up a committee internally to make sure they didn't break the rules. Surely the DoJ wouldn't have given them such a limp-wristed settlement if it didn't believe they were honest people.
Oh hang on its only George Bush who lives in a 1950s "Wonderful Life" style world.
Is ANYONE suprised by this move ? M$ have also just bought some AV software, umm will they bundle theirs into the OS to drive other people away, its a shot in the dark, and against the DoJ settlement but it might just be true.
M$ know that with the massively pro-business pro-monopoly president there is right now that they have AT LEAST 5 more years before a President who might go after them. Add 5-10 years of DoJ cases and they might get the next numbskull to let them off.
The only hope for the US Software industry is if the EU crackdown.
Al Jazerra is tabloid trash, though among Arab nations' state-controlled media it is rather moderate and progressive--to me demonstrating a failed civilization. Russian "news" is little better. And why is it that North Korean news readers always sound really angry? I guess there are markups around any story about the West.
Ummm welcome to how the rest of the world views CNN.
I would argue that not facing up to problems like this very rarely makes them better
Umm this rings a bit hollow given the Matrix Reloaded is a movie created by Hollywood, a set of companies that rarely portray reality and often produced badly twisted and potentially offensive characterisations.
Lets put it this way, Al Jazerra is pilloried in the US and yet represents the view of the US from the Arab nations. Isn't this abuse of the channel exactly the same as what Egypt is doing here ? Except that what the US aims to do to Al Jazeera is dealing at a much less superficial level than banning a movie.
Maybe, just maybe, for Egypt this film would be considered offensive and this censoring is indicative of the failure of Hollywood to look outside its borders.
No point against 25 year old women and SMS
on
One-Thumb Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
What is the market for this... really. Not mobile phone users as anyone who uses SMS with predictive text is pretty swift on a small keypad, and women aged 15-30 appear to be able to type at 100wpm.
Really in Japan and Europe the SMS speed people get is gobsmacking and technologies like predictive text are probably more effective than keyboard design especially as the software improves.
The postcode for the UK represents the address when combined with the number, so the only additional piece of information is the Country to send a letter.
And who the hell sends a letter to another country without knowing the country they are sending to ?
On the other hand if every address gets an IPv6 address then it needs something else as a name. But I'd prefer a hierachical system like
UK/EC1 2OO to indicate something in the city of London.... oh wait.
The US invade France.... a couple of reasons why not
1) They have nuclear weapons
2) The US doesn't like fighting against decent opposition
3) The US goverment and people won't accept US casualties
4) The Brits, much as we dislike the French, wouldn't support the US in that action.
As a pop-quiz question:
Name the last War that the US fought... and won in which they didn't have the support of the Brits (poxy small countries with no real armies don't count).
The US Army is definately the biggest... but there is no way they would accept the casualties of taking on decent opposition.
This is just a three step process, there are no question marks.
The four step one is the Microsoft DoJ changes
1) Monopoly found guilty by Goverment 2) Monopoly has word with new candidate 3) ??? 4) Goverment lets Monopoly off.
With the Bells the worst thing is that everyone KNOWS how they are getting the money, but its not exactly something we can all reproduce.
Infinite is possible...
on
HTML: Is it Art?
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Of course it bloody is... in maths and in theory. Nice advert for what I assume is a friend's site, but saying this is the only site that says the infinite is possible is
a) Rubbish b) Rubbish
I know thats really only ONE reason but its such a big one I thought I'd say it twice (credits to Red Dwarf).
That would be Halliburton... anyone asking Dick Cheney about that these days ?
To say that Open Source helps terrorists while closed source and big business don't help them is just plain rubbish. Lets play the following game
1) Where does Bin Laden get his money from is it a) Oil b) Sell Red Hat c) Oil
2) Which of the following held senior positions in organisations that were associated with terrorism or "evil" states a) Dick Cheney b) Donald Rumsfeld c) George Bush Sr
Answers are
1) a or c. 2) all have held senior positions with organisations that have either supplied facilities or arms to Iraq. George Bush Sr was also involved in the Iran/Contra scandal.
30% Why would I want to run windows anyway ? 20% Its dreadful they limit it to subscribers for the RPMs 20% This great news, it means I can run X, Y but not Z 10% It sucks because Z doesn't work 10% If you want to run Windows you should install windows.
English actually doesn't really have a written Grammar BTW, English was the language of the poor people not of the gentry therefore it evolved as a loosely ruled language rather than as a language with definate constructs like proscribed Latin or modern German.
Basically English is the language of plebs, the rich and diplomats spoke French. The idea of a grammar was retro-fitted by the Victorians who applied Latin rules to English which just don't fit.
Lets put it this way, in English you can screw with the language as much as you want and it continues to change every year. This is fine as it makes it a rich communication tool.
What other languages can use one word to make an entire sentence ?
In fact never. Because while its okay human languages have a few problems
1) Redundancy, far to many ways to say or do one thing
2) Ambiguity, "1 may be equal to x" "Sometimes allow the user to do this if they aren't doing something else that might conflict"
So what you might get is a restricted language with restricted terms that could help. But even these tend to fall down, the first UML spec was written using such a language but this was abandoned for the more formal UML language as the inherent ambiguities of languages couldn't be overcome.
So basically you might have some mechanism of translating from formal into informal but the real work will be done in a formal manner, as now, as ever because at the end of the day....
Who wants to rely on a system that implements "sometimes" ?
Anyone who thinks the smart chip is credit card sized is a moron. My mobile has a smart card inside, its the same size as the smart card in my credit card... BUT NEITHER OF THEM ARE THE SAME SIZE AS THE CONTAINER (i.e. credit card or mobile).
Sheesh, you can get smart cards that need all that space for extra memory, but most are tiny things with the external contacts making up most of the support.
The mobile IS the smart card device that can be carried around as it has all of the required elements
1) Contains a smart card 2) Able to interact with other devices over multilpe mechanisms (GSM, IrDA, Bluetooth etc) 3) Smart card can be replaced as require.
Smart cards are NOT credit card sized, that is the plastic that holds them. Its sort of like saying that starter motors are car sized.
Break through technology.... or same thing ?
on
Roaming WLAN / GPRS
·
· Score: 1
Now I know this is wonderful and amazing, and totally different that today where you can
1) Buy a WLAN card for your laptop 2) Buy a GPRS card for your laptop
Set WLAN to be the default, set GPRS to be "dial when network connection not available"
Which means that a few seconds after moving from WLAN your GPRS connection will become active.
I _know_ they are talking about being a bit smarter than this, but this is what anyone can do today, in fact newer laptop have WLAN built in so all you need to do is buy the GPRS card....
Or have Bluetooth on your mobile, and built in bluetooth on the PC, like the new Sony's, and you have got 80% of the functionality for 20% of the effort.
1) If I create an SDA using PGP this is Open Source Software with a key
2) There are closed source security elements that have put their code out for review, including by the Goverment
3) Red Hat give you a key to access their premium rate support.
4) You made a glib comment that hit the MS Bad, OSS good Slashdot button and got modded up
5) This just means there are lots of people on Slashdot who don't understand this either.
Sheesh, you can have key restricted open source software, that is the idea of privacy and security for starters, the whole aim of VPNs etc etc. The issue here is in part _how_ the key (think private key) is issued. What MS want to do is make it simple for volume installers. Now what they could do is supply a bunch of USB keys to these volume suppliers that must be inserted during install. So give them 20, or 30, or whatever ghosting 30 at a time is a reasonable upgrade plan (no-one in a large company goes overnight for a total upgrade).
The issue is 1) Process 2) The nature of the security.
Slashdot Mirror
They even had to set up a committee internally to make sure they didn't break the rules. Surely the DoJ wouldn't have given them such a limp-wristed settlement if it didn't believe they were honest people.
Oh hang on its only George Bush who lives in a 1950s "Wonderful Life" style world.
Is ANYONE suprised by this move ? M$ have also just bought some AV software, umm will they bundle theirs into the OS to drive other people away, its a shot in the dark, and against the DoJ settlement but it might just be true.
M$ know that with the massively pro-business pro-monopoly president there is right now that they have AT LEAST 5 more years before a President who might go after them. Add 5-10 years of DoJ cases and they might get the next numbskull to let them off.
The only hope for the US Software industry is if the EU crackdown.
Al Jazerra is tabloid trash, though among Arab nations' state-controlled media it is rather moderate and progressive--to me demonstrating a failed civilization. Russian "news" is little better. And why is it that North Korean news readers always sound really angry? I guess there are markups around any story about the West.
Ummm welcome to how the rest of the world views CNN.
Went to Afghanistan to sell a warehouse full of C64s, and got stuck there watching all the Baywatch repeats.
I would argue that not facing up to problems like this very rarely makes them better
Umm this rings a bit hollow given the Matrix Reloaded is a movie created by Hollywood, a set of companies that rarely portray reality and often produced badly twisted and potentially offensive characterisations.
Lets put it this way, Al Jazerra is pilloried in the US and yet represents the view of the US from the Arab nations. Isn't this abuse of the channel exactly the same as what Egypt is doing here ? Except that what the US aims to do to Al Jazeera is dealing at a much less superficial level than banning a movie.
Maybe, just maybe, for Egypt this film would be considered offensive and this censoring is indicative of the failure of Hollywood to look outside its borders.
What is the market for this... really. Not mobile phone users as anyone who uses SMS with predictive text is pretty swift on a small keypad, and women aged 15-30 appear to be able to type at 100wpm.
Really in Japan and Europe the SMS speed people get is gobsmacking and technologies like predictive text are probably more effective than keyboard design especially as the software improves.
1) Live in a big city in an apartment block with people who drive BMWs, Mercs etc
2) Buy a WiFi card
3) Use the internet connection of other people in the bulding...
I know of one person who made issues configuring there WiFi card... then realised it was because they were browsing someone elses network.
Is it wrong to take advantaeg of Stupid people ? George Bush does it, Bill Gates does it... why shouldn't we ?
Reader : "I wonder if they've patched the internal servers here at work...."
Types in the slammer code, compiles it and runs it up...
Reader : "Nothing seems to be happening"
Meanwhile in another part of the building
Manager: "What do you mean the whole UAT environment has gone down?"
So right now the system works as follows
Country
Region
Town
Street
Number
The postcode for the UK represents the address when combined with the number, so the only additional piece of information is the Country to send a letter.
And who the hell sends a letter to another country without knowing the country they are sending to ?
On the other hand if every address gets an IPv6 address then it needs something else as a name. But I'd prefer a hierachical system like
UK/EC1 2OO to indicate something in the city of London.... oh wait.
That is what we have today.
The US invade France.... a couple of reasons why not
:
1) They have nuclear weapons
2) The US doesn't like fighting against decent opposition
3) The US goverment and people won't accept US casualties
4) The Brits, much as we dislike the French, wouldn't support the US in that action.
As a pop-quiz question
Name the last War that the US fought... and won in which they didn't have the support of the Brits (poxy small countries with no real armies don't count).
The US Army is definately the biggest... but there is no way they would accept the casualties of taking on decent opposition.
When trying to get to Kew it STILL won't find a cab that is willing to go "south of the river".
Technology is a wonderful thing but solving the aquaphobia of London cabbies is a harder task entirely.
Is now only a few billion years of evolution away...
This is just a three step process, there are no question marks.
The four step one is the Microsoft DoJ changes
1) Monopoly found guilty by Goverment
2) Monopoly has word with new candidate
3) ???
4) Goverment lets Monopoly off.
With the Bells the worst thing is that everyone KNOWS how they are getting the money, but its not exactly something we can all reproduce.
Of course it bloody is... in maths and in theory. Nice advert for what I assume is a friend's site, but saying this is the only site that says the infinite is possible is
a) Rubbish
b) Rubbish
I know thats really only ONE reason but its such a big one I thought I'd say it twice (credits to Red Dwarf).
Microsoft gives George Bush money.
George Bush becomes President
George Bush scraps/tones down DoJ action
US Goverment cuts funding for open source projects.
Microsoft announced as "key partner" for homeland security.
Maybe we should all just donate money towards George's $130m bribe... sorry "campaign" fund.
That would be Halliburton... anyone asking Dick Cheney about that these days ?
To say that Open Source helps terrorists while closed source and big business don't help them is just plain rubbish. Lets play the following game
1) Where does Bin Laden get his money from is it
a) Oil
b) Sell Red Hat
c) Oil
2) Which of the following held senior positions in organisations that were associated with terrorism or "evil" states
a) Dick Cheney
b) Donald Rumsfeld
c) George Bush Sr
Answers are
1) a or c.
2) all have held senior positions with organisations that have either supplied facilities or arms to Iraq. George Bush Sr was also involved in the Iran/Contra scandal.
30% Why would I want to run windows anyway ?
20% Its dreadful they limit it to subscribers for the RPMs
20% This great news, it means I can run X, Y but not Z
10% It sucks because Z doesn't work
10% If you want to run Windows you should install windows.
Just like Michael Moore has done with Stupid White Men, he moved to Penguin because they gave him the support against the corporate heavyweights.
And of course he could just publish it as an ebook on the internet.
Like Windows for the enterprise.
Its just plain Howard Stern style wrong.
Its one word used in different contexts to produce a sentence, if you allow the definate article as well then you can have
"The F*cking F*ckers F*cking F*cked"
Adjective Noun Adverb Verb
IIRC (and I might well not) which makes "F*ck" a very flexible word.
English actually doesn't really have a written Grammar BTW, English was the language of the poor people not of the gentry therefore it evolved as a loosely ruled language rather than as a language with definate constructs like proscribed Latin or modern German.
Basically English is the language of plebs, the rich and diplomats spoke French. The idea of a grammar was retro-fitted by the Victorians who applied Latin rules to English which just don't fit.
Lets put it this way, in English you can screw with the language as much as you want and it continues to change every year. This is fine as it makes it a rich communication tool.
What other languages can use one word to make an entire sentence ?
F*ck's F*ckers F*cking F*cked
In fact never. Because while its okay human languages have a few problems
1) Redundancy, far to many ways to say or do one thing
2) Ambiguity, "1 may be equal to x" "Sometimes allow the user to do this if they aren't doing something else that might conflict"
So what you might get is a restricted language with restricted terms that could help. But even these tend to fall down, the first UML spec was written using such a language but this was abandoned for the more formal UML language as the inherent ambiguities of languages couldn't be overcome.
So basically you might have some mechanism of translating from formal into informal but the real work will be done in a formal manner, as now, as ever because at the end of the day....
Who wants to rely on a system that implements "sometimes" ?
Sheesh, I'm sitting here with a 64 Way and two 32-way boxes just waiting for decent to run on them.
Does this mean that FINALLY I can shift Quake Server off the clustered S80s in the basement ?
Anyone who thinks the smart chip is credit card sized is a moron. My mobile has a smart card inside, its the same size as the smart card in my credit card... BUT NEITHER OF THEM ARE THE SAME SIZE AS THE CONTAINER (i.e. credit card or mobile).
Sheesh, you can get smart cards that need all that space for extra memory, but most are tiny things with the external contacts making up most of the support.
The mobile IS the smart card device that can be carried around as it has all of the required elements
1) Contains a smart card
2) Able to interact with other devices over multilpe mechanisms (GSM, IrDA, Bluetooth etc)
3) Smart card can be replaced as require.
Smart cards are NOT credit card sized, that is the plastic that holds them. Its sort of like saying that starter motors are car sized.
Now I know this is wonderful and amazing, and totally different that today where you can
1) Buy a WLAN card for your laptop
2) Buy a GPRS card for your laptop
Set WLAN to be the default, set GPRS to be "dial when network connection not available"
Which means that a few seconds after moving from WLAN your GPRS connection will become active.
I _know_ they are talking about being a bit smarter than this, but this is what anyone can do today, in fact newer laptop have WLAN built in so all you need to do is buy the GPRS card....
Or have Bluetooth on your mobile, and built in bluetooth on the PC, like the new Sony's, and you have got 80% of the functionality for 20% of the effort.
A couple of things
1) Open Security != Open Source
2) Open Source != No Key (PGP ring any bells ?)
So just to clarify
1) If I create an SDA using PGP this is Open Source Software with a key
2) There are closed source security elements that have put their code out for review, including by the Goverment
3) Red Hat give you a key to access their premium rate support.
4) You made a glib comment that hit the MS Bad, OSS good Slashdot button and got modded up
5) This just means there are lots of people on Slashdot who don't understand this either.
Sheesh, you can have key restricted open source software, that is the idea of privacy and security for starters, the whole aim of VPNs etc etc. The issue here is in part _how_ the key (think private key) is issued. What MS want to do is make it simple for volume installers. Now what they could do is supply a bunch of USB keys to these volume suppliers that must be inserted during install. So give them 20, or 30, or whatever ghosting 30 at a time is a reasonable upgrade plan (no-one in a large company goes overnight for a total upgrade).
The issue is 1) Process 2) The nature of the security.
NOT whether its open or closed source.