If you are presently using the software application "Mambo OS" in any release post October 3, 2003, you and your organization are potentially exposed to CIVIL LITIGATION and possibly CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
FUD. More FUD. Even more FUD.
What kind of idiot thinks FUD == Money? Hasn't SCO proven that FUD != Money? *sigh*
I just walked past a copy of WinXP Home Edition in a "Bargain Bin" at Costco, on sale for $299 CAD... so who are the pirates? Linux is free. I could see maybe $99 or something, but it's overpriced and bug ridden. So if you want to know why people are not paying Microsoft, it's a no-brainer. If it's overpriced, loaded with bugs and unstable in any way, paying for it seems like shooting yourself in the foot. Every time XP shows the blue screen of death, I get buyer's remorse.
You've got to be kidding... a 2-digit ID for $115? That's absurd;-)
Maybe for you. But I wanted a piece of slashdot history and a beta acct was worth the money, IMHO. It was a crazy birthday present to myself. Yes it's wacky but think about it pez... you have a two digit uid. If you wouldn't sell it for any price, it's gotta have some value. If not, send over your uname & pass and I'll thank you kindly.
I recently saw someone post with a 1-digit ID... I think it was #7 or something. I wonder how many of us with IDs 100 are still using the site legitimately from the beginning (back in the Chips & Dips days).....
Damn I wish I had seen that. As for who is still left from the beginning -- many were likley scared off by trolls...
The URL was really 1828675309.com That's not resolving and I think I know why... Jenny, I got your number I need to make you mine Jenny, don't change your number 8675309 (8675309) 8675309 (8675309)
There was an interesting comment and rebuttal in the 2003 winners article on Slashdot that basically stated Google was above the other big corporations out to make a buck, because Google makes you feel good for donating time to their cause. Okay that was 2003. My question is that now Google has gone public, has the mood change very much? I still have a good feeling about them, and I use their services every day, including the search engine (GIS, web search) and Gmail. I'm just wondering if coders feel that $10k is enough money now that the profits have grown so much. I could see them offering $100k to the winner without batting an eye. Are they awarding enough to first place?
FTA: During the Challenge Phase, competitors view each other's code and try to "break'" that code by passing test cases through the submitted code, with the hope that the results are not satisfied by the software written. Breaking another developer's code is the most direct form of competition for a programmer. In this phase, points are awarded for successful challenges and deducted for unsuccessful challenges.
To me, it's more important to measure the potential of a programmer, more than the experience of the programmer. Creating new ideas and systems does not require experience alone -- it requires a great deal of potential. Simply breaking and fixing code in a realtime setting is good for the day to day stuff (and that is valuable for Google), but when a customer or boss asks to you build something new and difficult, many experienced programmers answer with, "that can't be done" when less experienced programmers will try to do it, with limited success.
Does anyone know if Jimmy Mardell was hired by Google?
I don't know when the systems of the world shifted to the point where consumers stealing from companies are criminal but companies stealing from consumers is just plain good business
Pretty much every Dilbert comic/episode makes light of this very fact -- businesses became more afraid of going bankrupt than doing evil, and that is when it changed, when businesses lost their fear of consequences. They can always weasel out after the fall.
Geez, if I said things like that about my product, to the extent where I wouldn't even use it because it's so insecure, I'd be shown the door in next to no time.
Yeah, who wants to bet that Stephen Toulouse gets a pink slip? It wasn't long after Salon suggested people switch to Firefox or Mozilla until IE was patched, before we learned that MS was selling the magazine.
> None of his movies lived up to the expectations that naturally came about as a result of the edginess of the original Clerks
I think the budget is the reason. Clerks made it so the talent had to shine through because they had no money. Fans of Kevin Smith will rejoice at this news. If you aren't a Kevin Smith fan, you could quickly become one if you happen to see An Evening With Kevin Smith, where Kevin does hours of Q&A at universities, covering a multitude of topics including his dealings with the religious nut Prince (~Symbol~). Another topic is the strange dealings Kevin had with the creator of one of the Batman movies who kept talking about a huge mechanical spider (who went on to make WWW).
It would be likely much funnier to see "The Passion of the Clerks" stay within the same budget as the first one ($27 k), rather than use up a large studio budget. It's not going to happen, but it would be pretty awesome if they kept the budget low enough to let the talent and quirkiness shine through.
"The recipient sees only the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Any number works, from nonsense phone numbers like "123 4567" to the number for the White House switchboard."
I think that the people who are going to profit from this the most will be guys like Howard Stern (if he's still on the air). He'll ring up anyone he wants and pretend to be working for some fake government agency while the nimrods on the line will be in fear if they have caller id. Oh the laughs... until the FCC has their way with Stern and shut him down.
How many kids are going to get into serious trouble with this service?
Let's not even start talking about all the wonderful social engineering that can now be performed with this great service. "This is Bill Gates. I forgot my password. Give it to me."
So all ye lawyers, would the owners of Star38.com be in the doghouse for this service when the masses start using it as a launchpad for social engineering? I'm thinking, hell yes (but IANAL).
I've always known instinctively, that if you're going to do a job, do it right from the ground up. There are more secure systems than email for doing absentee ballots that would not take very long to set up, correctly.
In Canada, we have proxy voting. I think if I were a soldier overseas, I would much rather proxy my vote to my wife or someone I trust. That could be handled using snailmail and it would be fine.
I think the point you're missing is that email sniffing is arm's length and can successfully be achieved from anywhere. Therefore an easier action than hacking phone lines, sniffing faxes or gathering intel on snail mail from soldiers. It's not the security level I was talking about, but more the level of criminal commitment. In any of the things you're suggesting, there exists much more perceived danger than simply sniffing email.
"If the soldier is uncomfortable with this process, he or she should not consider this option"
That's the worst excuse for bad security I have ever heard, and I think that if it was applied on all other systems, it would be a huge disaster. Look at the ATM for example. What if instead of a bank card, we shifted to an email scheme for withdrawing and depositing money? Email cheques are fairly secure but they have a password scheme and they don't rely soely on email. There's also no private information being transferred with an email cheque, just a link that requires a password over a secure connection. But what if we just made up email money and passed it around? Huge security flaw there. Take it one step further, why not add salt to the wound, by suggesting that if you don't like the insecure system, don't use it! Duh.
If soldiers send their private info over email, this also produces a security risk if the enemy gathers intel on soldiers to use against their families. Bad bad bad idea.:(
I'm one of the admins of Gmailforthetroops.com and we've had to let everyone know that we only want soldiers to privately provide their.mil or gc.forces.ca email addys to people handing out Gmail invites, to prevent personal info being circulated that could lead down a dangerous path if the enemy decided to look them up. This has been largely difficult to reign in, but for the most part it's a fairly anonymous exchange. No worse than name, rank, serial number. And that's the idea. But if you have to fill out an absentee ballot in this email scheme, it would require much more personal info or it could be easily abused.
Imagine: you're sitting with your family eating a nice dinner when all of a sudden, through your fifth floor window comes crashing in, a drunk/stoned teenager who borrowed daddy's hyperSUV, and forgot to hit the autopilot button when he started rolling another joint. Dead: you. Dead: your spouse. Dead: your children. All because of some inspired auto designer who just *had* to have the 1950's dream of flying cars.
Next chapter: Airlines become extinct, no more waiting in line and subjecting your family to body cavity searches just to fly. No more terrorists hijackings. No more borders. Chaos ensues! (FUD!!)
Seriously though, it's going to be fun and scary at the same time! Wheeeee!!!
Very insightful comments, so I am compelled to respond.
> I think the problem with your idea is that you don't seem to have thought it through completely, and you certainly haven't explained it thoroughly.
Yes, you are correct, so I will elaborate. I think it would be interesting to create a decentralized system of programs that handle the OS components individually, without trying to link with generics. Every program would respond better if they could have their own controls over the computer hardware that runs the show. They wouldn't load in a zillion unused apps because it would impact their own program benchmarks negatively. Computers would be more stable, like consoles. Do you know why consoles are becoming the status quo for gamers? Because the games are written for one specific system and it just works. No patches. People are sick of all the patches for computer software these days.
When you transfer the control of main systems to a program, it makes upgrades much more difficult -- unless you have infrastructure to handle it. Companies could specialize in OS components for software packages they support, or they could do batch replacements on OS components for profit. Instead of having one company in control of it all, this method would decentralize Microsoft's role (because they would no doubt fight this and not adopt it).
> PCs are more versatile than consoles, and a large part of that (and one of the main advances in operating system technology over the years) is multi-tasking.
Who says you can't have a program running that launches other programs and multitasks them? Why do we depend on unfriendly OSes that take full control of our systems, when our software could do the same and operate independantly?
> Your idea seems to go back to the days when that is impossible.
Maybe it seems that way, but let me put this into perspecitve for you. What was missing when DOS was in its heyday? The internet. Today computing has come lightyears from where we were back when DOS was the OS of choice. Today we could revisit the model and build on the problems from it, and learn from the mistakes that Mac, MS and Linux made by centralizing control of software. Space was a problem then, as memory and hard drives were expensive. Today memory and hard drives are cheap and they are only getting faster and cheaper!
> you will soon discover that there are all of a sudden 5 or 6 or more operating systems running on your machine.
Okay, maybe today that's a problem. But when you look at the size of OSes for only specific programs, I think you see a dramatic savings. Take a browser for example. What if you never print with your browser? You could disable that from the beginning and leave it out. The options are limitless in this kind of model and the memory savings would also create benefits.
Running a video game like Doom 3 would be ideal in this kind of model because you know damn well that John Carmack would streamline the functionality of the game to make maximum use of the system.
Let's face it, there are apps you want to multitask and there are apps you don't. You could have the ability to multitask if you wanted your session that way, or if you just want to focus on one app you could.
Plus software designers may want to support addons to their products in the form of plugins that let you multitask through them. For example, if you find yourself working on a website, you could use a program that lets you utilize photoshop, a text editor, FTP prog and a browser all in one nice little package. That would be totally cool, IMHO. Think of all the open source remedies for software that could exist in this kind of system!!
Okay, so I think you get my point: shift away from an OS model, to a software controlled environment would be useful and interesting. There are many instances when I would rather only load one program than a few, but if I wanted to, plugins could exist that would let me do other things.
Sounds like a great idea. NOT. Sure, *your* idea sounds bad. But your idea lacks vision. I'm talking about decentralizing the classic OS, and decentralizing Microsoft's monopoly. Linus has been doing it for years, but by more or less following the classic design of an OS. I'm suggesting a shift into a more dynamic model. What's wrong with that?
The NEC Versa S3000 will use InterVideo's InstantOn technology to enable users to listen to music, watch DVDs, and more without having to wait for Windows to load.
Could this signal the end of traditional operating systems? My thoughts on the subject are that eventually programs will come with their own OSes and load from a kind of GUI BIOS. And why wouldn't they? Put all the conflicts on hold for a second and think about it. If programmers could select the OS that works best with their application, they would stand to profit. Subsystem patches could batch patch each application's common files intuitively, without the need of expensive Microsoft licenses. Sure right now, we're looking at all the space that would likley be required to do this, but if you gut Windows, for example, and only use the required systems, that would be a savings of about 99% of what 99% of us use regularly. Turn that power over to the applications designers and you get better (open source) components, custom built to suit each program. Yes I do see a small problem with this, in that you have to worry about identifying the end users' system specs to make sure the programs will function properly, but with the rise of web based updating systems, it would be possible to select only the necessary components to wrap with the software, reducing the overall waste on each system and making for a much more stable environment than traditional OSes.
FTA: Sigma and MediaTek make chips to decode the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is the copy-protection system used for DVDs. Their licenses require that they sell only to other CSS-licensed companies.
Let me get this straight. The content scramble system can be disabled with chips sold to companies with licenses to distribute systems with copy-protection? I smell another SCO-styled lawsuit. When will people learn? These chips could be valuable in the development of technology to prevent copy theft, and even then, since these chips are only being sold to licensed distributors, I see that the MPAA, or whoever is in charge of these licenses, could have simply yanked the licenses instead of wasting precious court time and money... that is, unless, the MPAA knew damn well they didn't have a case for revoking these licenses, so they figured they had better make an example of these companies by suing them for lost revenue. It's almost parallel to a police department charging another department for sending drugs or illegal firearms to a third party for analysis. It's totally trumped up! IANAL, but I think with these kinds of cases going around the block, I would like to be one! Lawyers are the only ones who profit from these hyped up dramas!
I had to use Java back in school and I won't touch it unless my superiors threaten the branding iron (again). Java loads too much overhead and it doesn't have the same responsiveness as C based apps, IMHO. I don't think Java is optimized enough, and it shows. All the cross-platform support comes at a price and that price is speed.
Oh The Sims 2 is coming soon? How long before we get The Sims 2: Deluxe Edition, The Sims 2: Makin' Magic, The Sims 2: Vacation, The Sims 2: Hot Date, and The Sims 2: Unleashed? Since Maxis pretty much abandoned fun games after Sim City 2000, it has become painfully obvious that they only want to make money, and it shows. Game designers who know quality will know that money-making schemes tend to conflict customer value. There is of course one exception to that rule: the audience who is unable to defend themselves from marketing departments. Considering that the target audience for The Sims is a bunch of girls, then that would be about right -- they will keep buying The Sims products, along with Bratz, Clickits, Barbies and cute outfits.
I'm not really looking for yet another mmorpg from Turbine. To be blunt, mmorpgs don't interest me because designers create games that have too many players visible, unoptimized city maps, and ugly looking player models. There hasn't been much revolutionary in mmorpg titles since inception and I don't see this changing any time soon. They need to rework the model before I will ever become interested. The very best games are representations of something better, to inspire player imagination and create interesting environs in which stories take place. Now because MMORPGs have so many players running around in them, it's next to impossible to create a cohesive story with actual characters in it. Game designers need to figure out how to include players as part of the story without having generic stories that everyone runs through to get quest items. Game designers need to figure out how to tell a massive story that only includes players as part of the premise and the problem with that is one of control. How can you control such a massive story without involving Tolkien himself? You can't.
It works in their favour, really. They reduced the number of shares and the price lowered. If anything this will be a good buy with solid growth. They went from being a solid investment to a hot ticket, so now news articles will demonstrate the stock going up up up in the next while. Rather than reports of the stock holding at $110 or something.
Once again, Google is flexing their mental might.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If you are presently using the software application "Mambo OS" in any release post October 3, 2003, you and your organization are potentially exposed to CIVIL LITIGATION and possibly CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
FUD. More FUD. Even more FUD.
What kind of idiot thinks FUD == Money? Hasn't SCO proven that FUD != Money? *sigh*
I just walked past a copy of WinXP Home Edition in a "Bargain Bin" at Costco, on sale for $299 CAD... so who are the pirates? Linux is free. I could see maybe $99 or something, but it's overpriced and bug ridden. So if you want to know why people are not paying Microsoft, it's a no-brainer. If it's overpriced, loaded with bugs and unstable in any way, paying for it seems like shooting yourself in the foot. Every time XP shows the blue screen of death, I get buyer's remorse.
You've got to be kidding... a 2-digit ID for $115? That's absurd ;-)
Maybe for you. But I wanted a piece of slashdot history and a beta acct was worth the money, IMHO. It was a crazy birthday present to myself. Yes it's wacky but think about it pez... you have a two digit uid. If you wouldn't sell it for any price, it's gotta have some value. If not, send over your uname & pass and I'll thank you kindly.
I recently saw someone post with a 1-digit ID... I think it was #7 or something. I wonder how many of us with IDs 100 are still using the site legitimately from the beginning (back in the Chips & Dips days).....
Damn I wish I had seen that. As for who is still left from the beginning -- many were likley scared off by trolls...
The URL was really 1828675309.com
That's not resolving and I think I know why...
Jenny, I got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny, don't change your number
8675309 (8675309)
8675309 (8675309)
Want to be a volunteer? Sign up here.
They might *need* crowd control. *cringes*
There was an interesting comment and rebuttal in the 2003 winners article on Slashdot that basically stated Google was above the other big corporations out to make a buck, because Google makes you feel good for donating time to their cause. Okay that was 2003. My question is that now Google has gone public, has the mood change very much? I still have a good feeling about them, and I use their services every day, including the search engine (GIS, web search) and Gmail. I'm just wondering if coders feel that $10k is enough money now that the profits have grown so much. I could see them offering $100k to the winner without batting an eye. Are they awarding enough to first place?
FTA: During the Challenge Phase, competitors view each other's code and try to "break'" that code by passing test cases through the submitted code, with the hope that the results are not satisfied by the software written. Breaking another developer's code is the most direct form of competition for a programmer. In this phase, points are awarded for successful challenges and deducted for unsuccessful challenges.
To me, it's more important to measure the potential of a programmer, more than the experience of the programmer. Creating new ideas and systems does not require experience alone -- it requires a great deal of potential. Simply breaking and fixing code in a realtime setting is good for the day to day stuff (and that is valuable for Google), but when a customer or boss asks to you build something new and difficult, many experienced programmers answer with, "that can't be done" when less experienced programmers will try to do it, with limited success.
Does anyone know if Jimmy Mardell was hired by Google?
I don't know when the systems of the world shifted to the point where consumers stealing from companies are criminal but companies stealing from consumers is just plain good business
Pretty much every Dilbert comic/episode makes light of this very fact -- businesses became more afraid of going bankrupt than doing evil, and that is when it changed, when businesses lost their fear of consequences. They can always weasel out after the fall.
That was slate.
:(
Geez I feel stupid.
At times I would like to have a delete button on my comments.
Geez, if I said things like that about my product, to the extent where I wouldn't even use it because it's so insecure, I'd be shown the door in next to no time.
Yeah, who wants to bet that Stephen Toulouse gets a pink slip? It wasn't long after Salon suggested people switch to Firefox or Mozilla until IE was patched, before we learned that MS was selling the magazine.
> None of his movies lived up to the expectations that naturally came about as a result of the edginess of the original Clerks
I think the budget is the reason. Clerks made it so the talent had to shine through because they had no money. Fans of Kevin Smith will rejoice at this news. If you aren't a Kevin Smith fan, you could quickly become one if you happen to see An Evening With Kevin Smith, where Kevin does hours of Q&A at universities, covering a multitude of topics including his dealings with the religious nut Prince (~Symbol~). Another topic is the strange dealings Kevin had with the creator of one of the Batman movies who kept talking about a huge mechanical spider (who went on to make WWW).
It would be likely much funnier to see "The Passion of the Clerks" stay within the same budget as the first one ($27 k), rather than use up a large studio budget. It's not going to happen, but it would be pretty awesome if they kept the budget low enough to let the talent and quirkiness shine through.
"The recipient sees only the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Any number works, from nonsense phone numbers like "123 4567" to the number for the White House switchboard."
I think that the people who are going to profit from this the most will be guys like Howard Stern (if he's still on the air). He'll ring up anyone he wants and pretend to be working for some fake government agency while the nimrods on the line will be in fear if they have caller id. Oh the laughs... until the FCC has their way with Stern and shut him down.
How many kids are going to get into serious trouble with this service?
Let's not even start talking about all the wonderful social engineering that can now be performed with this great service. "This is Bill Gates. I forgot my password. Give it to me."
So all ye lawyers, would the owners of Star38.com be in the doghouse for this service when the masses start using it as a launchpad for social engineering? I'm thinking, hell yes (but IANAL).
I've always known instinctively, that if you're going to do a job, do it right from the ground up. There are more secure systems than email for doing absentee ballots that would not take very long to set up, correctly.
In Canada, we have proxy voting. I think if I were a soldier overseas, I would much rather proxy my vote to my wife or someone I trust. That could be handled using snailmail and it would be fine.
I think the point you're missing is that email sniffing is arm's length and can successfully be achieved from anywhere. Therefore an easier action than hacking phone lines, sniffing faxes or gathering intel on snail mail from soldiers. It's not the security level I was talking about, but more the level of criminal commitment. In any of the things you're suggesting, there exists much more perceived danger than simply sniffing email.
"If the soldier is uncomfortable with this process, he or she should not consider this option"
:(
.mil or gc.forces.ca email addys to people handing out Gmail invites, to prevent personal info being circulated that could lead down a dangerous path if the enemy decided to look them up. This has been largely difficult to reign in, but for the most part it's a fairly anonymous exchange. No worse than name, rank, serial number. And that's the idea. But if you have to fill out an absentee ballot in this email scheme, it would require much more personal info or it could be easily abused.
That's the worst excuse for bad security I have ever heard, and I think that if it was applied on all other systems, it would be a huge disaster. Look at the ATM for example. What if instead of a bank card, we shifted to an email scheme for withdrawing and depositing money? Email cheques are fairly secure but they have a password scheme and they don't rely soely on email. There's also no private information being transferred with an email cheque, just a link that requires a password over a secure connection. But what if we just made up email money and passed it around? Huge security flaw there. Take it one step further, why not add salt to the wound, by suggesting that if you don't like the insecure system, don't use it! Duh.
If soldiers send their private info over email, this also produces a security risk if the enemy gathers intel on soldiers to use against their families. Bad bad bad idea.
I'm one of the admins of Gmailforthetroops.com and we've had to let everyone know that we only want soldiers to privately provide their
Happy Birthday to You!
Happy Birthday to You!
Happy Birthday Dear Internet (internet)!
Happy Birthday to You!
> The last thing we need is flying SUVs.
Imagine: you're sitting with your family eating a nice dinner when all of a sudden, through your fifth floor window comes crashing in, a drunk/stoned teenager who borrowed daddy's hyperSUV, and forgot to hit the autopilot button when he started rolling another joint. Dead: you. Dead: your spouse. Dead: your children. All because of some inspired auto designer who just *had* to have the 1950's dream of flying cars.
Next chapter: Airlines become extinct, no more waiting in line and subjecting your family to body cavity searches just to fly. No more terrorists hijackings. No more borders. Chaos ensues! (FUD!!)
Seriously though, it's going to be fun and scary at the same time! Wheeeee!!!
Very insightful comments, so I am compelled to respond.
> I think the problem with your idea is that you don't seem to have thought it through completely, and you certainly haven't explained it thoroughly.
Yes, you are correct, so I will elaborate. I think it would be interesting to create a decentralized system of programs that handle the OS components individually, without trying to link with generics. Every program would respond better if they could have their own controls over the computer hardware that runs the show. They wouldn't load in a zillion unused apps because it would impact their own program benchmarks negatively. Computers would be more stable, like consoles. Do you know why consoles are becoming the status quo for gamers? Because the games are written for one specific system and it just works. No patches. People are sick of all the patches for computer software these days.
When you transfer the control of main systems to a program, it makes upgrades much more difficult -- unless you have infrastructure to handle it. Companies could specialize in OS components for software packages they support, or they could do batch replacements on OS components for profit. Instead of having one company in control of it all, this method would decentralize Microsoft's role (because they would no doubt fight this and not adopt it).
> PCs are more versatile than consoles, and a large part of that (and one of the main advances in operating system technology over the years) is multi-tasking.
Who says you can't have a program running that launches other programs and multitasks them? Why do we depend on unfriendly OSes that take full control of our systems, when our software could do the same and operate independantly?
> Your idea seems to go back to the days when that is impossible.
Maybe it seems that way, but let me put this into perspecitve for you. What was missing when DOS was in its heyday? The internet. Today computing has come lightyears from where we were back when DOS was the OS of choice. Today we could revisit the model and build on the problems from it, and learn from the mistakes that Mac, MS and Linux made by centralizing control of software. Space was a problem then, as memory and hard drives were expensive. Today memory and hard drives are cheap and they are only getting faster and cheaper!
> you will soon discover that there are all of a sudden 5 or 6 or more operating systems running on your machine.
Okay, maybe today that's a problem. But when you look at the size of OSes for only specific programs, I think you see a dramatic savings. Take a browser for example. What if you never print with your browser? You could disable that from the beginning and leave it out. The options are limitless in this kind of model and the memory savings would also create benefits.
Running a video game like Doom 3 would be ideal in this kind of model because you know damn well that John Carmack would streamline the functionality of the game to make maximum use of the system.
Let's face it, there are apps you want to multitask and there are apps you don't. You could have the ability to multitask if you wanted your session that way, or if you just want to focus on one app you could.
Plus software designers may want to support addons to their products in the form of plugins that let you multitask through them. For example, if you find yourself working on a website, you could use a program that lets you utilize photoshop, a text editor, FTP prog and a browser all in one nice little package. That would be totally cool, IMHO. Think of all the open source remedies for software that could exist in this kind of system!!
Okay, so I think you get my point: shift away from an OS model, to a software controlled environment would be useful and interesting. There are many instances when I would rather only load one program than a few, but if I wanted to, plugins could exist that would let me do other things.
Sounds like a great idea. NOT.
Sure, *your* idea sounds bad. But your idea lacks vision. I'm talking about decentralizing the classic OS, and decentralizing Microsoft's monopoly. Linus has been doing it for years, but by more or less following the classic design of an OS. I'm suggesting a shift into a more dynamic model. What's wrong with that?
The NEC Versa S3000 will use InterVideo's InstantOn technology to enable users to listen to music, watch DVDs, and more without having to wait for Windows to load.
Could this signal the end of traditional operating systems? My thoughts on the subject are that eventually programs will come with their own OSes and load from a kind of GUI BIOS. And why wouldn't they? Put all the conflicts on hold for a second and think about it. If programmers could select the OS that works best with their application, they would stand to profit. Subsystem patches could batch patch each application's common files intuitively, without the need of expensive Microsoft licenses. Sure right now, we're looking at all the space that would likley be required to do this, but if you gut Windows, for example, and only use the required systems, that would be a savings of about 99% of what 99% of us use regularly. Turn that power over to the applications designers and you get better (open source) components, custom built to suit each program. Yes I do see a small problem with this, in that you have to worry about identifying the end users' system specs to make sure the programs will function properly, but with the rise of web based updating systems, it would be possible to select only the necessary components to wrap with the software, reducing the overall waste on each system and making for a much more stable environment than traditional OSes.
FTA: Sigma and MediaTek make chips to decode the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is the copy-protection system used for DVDs. Their licenses require that they sell only to other CSS-licensed companies.
Let me get this straight. The content scramble system can be disabled with chips sold to companies with licenses to distribute systems with copy-protection? I smell another SCO-styled lawsuit. When will people learn? These chips could be valuable in the development of technology to prevent copy theft, and even then, since these chips are only being sold to licensed distributors, I see that the MPAA, or whoever is in charge of these licenses, could have simply yanked the licenses instead of wasting precious court time and money... that is, unless, the MPAA knew damn well they didn't have a case for revoking these licenses, so they figured they had better make an example of these companies by suing them for lost revenue. It's almost parallel to a police department charging another department for sending drugs or illegal firearms to a third party for analysis. It's totally trumped up! IANAL, but I think with these kinds of cases going around the block, I would like to be one! Lawyers are the only ones who profit from these hyped up dramas!
> Java is anything but terse.
I had to use Java back in school and I won't touch it unless my superiors threaten the branding iron (again). Java loads too much overhead and it doesn't have the same responsiveness as C based apps, IMHO. I don't think Java is optimized enough, and it shows. All the cross-platform support comes at a price and that price is speed.
Oh The Sims 2 is coming soon? How long before we get The Sims 2: Deluxe Edition, The Sims 2: Makin' Magic, The Sims 2: Vacation, The Sims 2: Hot Date, and The Sims 2: Unleashed? Since Maxis pretty much abandoned fun games after Sim City 2000, it has become painfully obvious that they only want to make money, and it shows. Game designers who know quality will know that money-making schemes tend to conflict customer value. There is of course one exception to that rule: the audience who is unable to defend themselves from marketing departments. Considering that the target audience for The Sims is a bunch of girls, then that would be about right -- they will keep buying The Sims products, along with Bratz, Clickits, Barbies and cute outfits.
> Is it time to pay more attention to end-users?(who aren't geeks)
Uhm... No, not really.
I'm not really looking for yet another mmorpg from Turbine. To be blunt, mmorpgs don't interest me because designers create games that have too many players visible, unoptimized city maps, and ugly looking player models. There hasn't been much revolutionary in mmorpg titles since inception and I don't see this changing any time soon. They need to rework the model before I will ever become interested. The very best games are representations of something better, to inspire player imagination and create interesting environs in which stories take place. Now because MMORPGs have so many players running around in them, it's next to impossible to create a cohesive story with actual characters in it. Game designers need to figure out how to include players as part of the story without having generic stories that everyone runs through to get quest items. Game designers need to figure out how to tell a massive story that only includes players as part of the premise and the problem with that is one of control. How can you control such a massive story without involving Tolkien himself? You can't.
It works in their favour, really. They reduced the number of shares and the price lowered. If anything this will be a good buy with solid growth. They went from being a solid investment to a hot ticket, so now news articles will demonstrate the stock going up up up in the next while. Rather than reports of the stock holding at $110 or something.
:-)
Once again, Google is flexing their mental might.