Sorry if you missed my joke, but Dogbert states that if you want something to be a certain way, be sure to enforce the opposite. Therefore by the DOJ enforcing Longhorn to be quick for MS to change, they will get, in result, a system that is impossible to change. It's the law.
This means it will be difficult for people to mod their Longhorn OS and reap rewards from having a custom system, beyond what the OS offers by default (like the ability to hide certain MS apps in favour of your own fare). Microsoft is being forced to be inflexible to some extent, and that means bad news for customers of the software giant. Bugs will be harder to fix, updates will be slower, response to threats even slower. This will be the repeated excuse while many suffer the wrath of virus programmers abound.
2. Justice Department lawyers would visit Microsoft's headquarters next week to discuss a variety of antitrust compliance issues
Okay, they're going to spend a week at Microsoft. How is that going to solve anything or be effective at all? They'll have a bunch of meetings over Shrimp and Wine coolers, get liquored up and talk about golf.
3. When the government is involved in any project, it's subject to major setbacks, not to mention built in spyware.
These three reasons will force many to the Linux model of computing. Yay!:-)
Perfect!
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
FTA: Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."
Perfect for colonization of other planets. If each human being has their own IP, then we would need to pack a whole bunch of planets to require more than that! They aren't kidding when they say they'll run IPv4 with IPv6 for twenty years. In that time, we won't have used even a fraction of a couple percent of available IPs, even if we assign every human being on the planet with one, and every company with a giant block.
I would have to follow Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, and take full responsibility for the bungle. That way when the next job comes up two or three rungs above me, I'll be at the top of the list of people with actual experience with massive projects, and it won't matter that it was a colossal screw-up because I will have jumped two or three pay-grades. Corporate fall-guys, if they take it right, always end up better off than quiet behind the scenes types.
So my advice is that you should take full responsiblity and sharpen that resume, but be sure to make it known that you have learned from your mistakes and you worked hard to correct them. Nobody gets anywhere without making big blunders along the way. Be a good sport and you'll jump at least two pay grades for this blunder.
Do you call everyone kid? That really rubs me the wrong way. You must work for Microsoft, according to Dogbert's rules of management.
MS Word has always been better than Wordperfect. Those boneheads at Corel couldn't figure out how to design a system if their life depended on it. Why do you think they've been teetering on the brink of corporate destruction for so long? They keep coming back to the edge by sheer luck and by financial injections, but it's only a matter of time. And that's why you must work for Microsoft.
> Hive Societies may be "better" idealistically, but historically have never really worked beyond a certain population level.
There has never been a hive society on Earth that wasn't insectoid. You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design, because there is no leadership beyond that of mere conceptual collaboration; it's a flat architecture where everyone serves the better interest of the whole.
> I think we can safely assume Open Source isn't going to revolutionize the proletariat's desktop any time soon.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory. I think I'll have to remember this so I can laugh about it when MS declares bankruptcy in 2010.
I figured out what was wrong. I just switched to hard thresholds, after never using them before, so the post he was replying to was not visible to me. That's what happened. Ooops.
I don't think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution.
Was Microsoft *ever* the low price solution? I'm sure I'm not the only one who laughed at the whole "they haven't figure that out yet" part. They haven't figured *anything* out yet. That's why we got rid of the feudal system -- because government, on all levels (including corporate management) should be for the people, by the people. My point is that Microsoft, being ruled by King Gates, is behind the times while they are trying to be ahead of the times. They are a working paradox. Open Source is to Closed Source, as Hive Societies are to Kingdoms; one clearly is better than the other and I think we can all agree which one it is.
I worked as the web admin to my student association when I was in college, and a job opening came up to redesign the programmers site, bringing online a bunch of new tools for students of that department. This was basically a summer job, and they had interviews where myself and four other students made it through the selection process to the final interview. The college is very Microsoft-centric, and therefore I should have known better than to pitch PHP & MySQL to them, but I could not pitch anything else because I am a firm believer in the quality of PHP.
I didn't get the job because, as I found out later, they wanted ASP.
Did they ever get screwed. The guy who they hired was a Korean exchange student, who I happen to think was a great choice for the job, but the problems started cropping up with the ASP code. It was buggy as hell. The system took all summer to code out the object oriented code, and it was never opened because it was never quite good enough.
In my opinion, this was not the fault of the guy they hired at all, it's just that ASP takes a lot more time to get together than PHP. You can "know what you're doing" all you want, but when your boss wants you to make changes to core behaviours, there is nothing faster or more efficient than PHP for handling anything web related. It's just easier to whip together any site with any behaviour and get it working and stable.
Now if they had hired me, they would have had a great PHP & MySQL system likely ready in about four weeks for what they were looking for. They paid this other guy at an hourly wage for the summer and the whole school year and they didn't get their site. What they got were a lot of modules and classes that could do different things, but they all were bug-ridden.
Now I think that because PHP is open source, it's much easier to find ready-made source code on the net, without having to pay anything. You obviously have to be selective, yet there are more freely available sources for ideas, as well.
I would recommend to anyone who wants to get ahead with PHP to read O'reilly's PHP Cookbook.
Well, I switched a few years back and I must say Mozilla and I keep telling my organization that it's the same as Netscape but without all the extra AOL crap. They just look at me sideways... *sigh*
It's always the same, I say, "Hey guys look at {technology A}," and they look at me sideways. That's what I get for working for computer peasants.... *sigh*
Maybe if Mozilla shipped standard on IBM computers it'd be easier? (that's all they'll buy)
I went through the whole thing last night and they did a great job on it! The site is really creepy, setting the mood by going full screen flash mode. The music and the information listed there is all quite well put together and interesting. Did 2design do that site? Felt like his work, IMHO.
56 (527333) writes: > Why don't they just give their users the ability to filter by language? If you don't want to see the brazilian posts, you should be able to filter them out.
This would work great, and they might add it. They should also think about separating Orkut into two distinct regions; Brazil, and everwhere else. Clearly Brazil has earned their own version of Orkut.
Furthermore, I think it's cool your name is my UID.:-)
I think this is merely a phase, a cultural identification to a phase of adolescence, where young males feel superior as a method of attracting a mate, and when that fails, they turn to video games and possibly crime (as I think it always does fail most teens today who can't skate like Tony, or roll like Puffy).
Video game designers realize there is a pile of money to be made on criminals, too, because one of their favourite hobbies are console games. I'd wager that most criminals dislike computer games, yet I think with Doom 3 around the corner, this may change.
Thuggin: Spending money like an idiot, drinking to an excess, being only turned on by bimbos with no brains, beating eachother senseless with tire irons or whatever, shooting people you hate, getting shot at by people who hate you, eating only at drive thru, drinking alize and crystal, attending strip clubs like they were the new church, membership at the The Player'S Club, Gucci, bling-bling, busta move on da dance flo, Po Po, bein' Po cuz ya spendt it awl (not the same as Po Po), scrappin, etc.
> "Garbage in, garbage out" isn't just a cute saying.
If you were a programmer, you'd know that the correct phrase is "Garbage doesn't get in."
It's impossible to study violence; there is no way to correctly recreate violent situations and the events leading up to them, without holodeck tech, so any study on the subject proves to be false. I'm certain that if you walked a mile in Klebold or Harris' shoes, you'd find yourself in the same place they did -- have you played the original Doom??? The graphics sucked. If the graphics were better, these guys wouldn't have bothered doing Columbine... they would have put their time into making a killer Doom 3 mod of the massacre, and then found themselves expelled and shipped out of the nasty environment that helped trigger their rage in the first place.
This is bang on the money. Violent Video games give people stress relif; they are good for society. Would you rather someone take their frustrations out on other people, instead of fake people? Let's face it, there are plenty of injustices in the world that require more attention than any injustices proportedly caused by violence in media, be it video games or film.
Did you listen to the whole thing? He's fucking nuts! I guess there is such a thing as being too intelligent. I just thought that if you were intelligent, you'd be smart enough to know where the straw men are. He said the Holocaust was a hoax, among other really scary things.
> Fischer, indicted by a grand jury in 1992, managed to elude authorities and left a tantalizing trail that included radio broadcasts from the Philippines and sightings in Japan.
So Fischer played a 12 year game of chess against the feds and lost, eh? That's the problem when you run from the law... you can't 'mate 'em, but they can 'mate you in 12.
This Fiat/Microsoft article reminded me of an old gem:
For the sake of argument, let's nickname this service Pwn3d-Star, so I guess this is your Fiat updated version!
1. Every time the server-side software is upgraded, you'll have to buy a new car.
2. When your Fiat dies on the freeway randomly, you can now be told by a Pwn3d-Star agent that you have to restart it. They would also say nice things and pepper MS branding through the whole conversation.
3. If your car failed to restart after one weird maneuver (like backing up too quick), the new Pwn3d-Star agents will tell you that they will send a tow-truck to you for an extra surcharge, and that your engine will need to be replaced.
4. You can now have more than one person in the car, but they will all need their own license to use Pwn3d-Star, even if they are dying on the road.
5. Macintosh will not do this, but if they do, it will be 100x better and have a super-iPod built in. You'll be able to download music without leaving your car, which is great for many car geeks, although Fiats aren't that popular among car geeks.
6. (this one didn't change) The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
7. (strangely this one didn't change either) People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
8. We will have to get Microsoft gas to run the vehicle, or a Pwn3d-Star agent will tell us that the gas we are purchasing is not Microsoft Certified, and we may be in violation of our warranty if we continue to use said gas.
9. New seats will force everyone to have the same sized butt. Pwn3d-Star will warn you if someone's butt is too big or small.
10. The airbags will now say "Are you sure?" before deploying. (pretty much the same as the original)
11. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened, but the Pwn3d-Star agent would tell you that techsupport is working on an explanation. Then you would get some excellent elevator music for about a half hour as you cling to life.
The school is feeling embarassed, and vengeful, so they make an example of the students; the students were only hacking the network to produce a news article on the lacklustre security at Oxford. They have a right to obtain evidence to support an article on the security systems, even by showing how the system can be broken into. Students likely have been complaining about it for some time.
From my perspective, the student body has a right to be certain if the use of the school network is going to compromise any of their personal information. Do you know how many students use school networks to check banking information?
These white hat hackers have given the school a present and they are slapped in the face for it. Any action against the journalists will only smear Oxford's reputation further. They should simply thank them and make the necessary changes to improve security.
Shit, if I know this, and some multiple-PHD administrator can't figure it out, what does that say about the level of comprehension at Oxford?
Here's what Ebay should do: take mp3.com's formula for indy music and tweak it; auction off download rates for each artist by the number of songs sold, and start with $0 per song, then start slowly charging more and more until the song reaches a cap of say $1.50 USD that goes directly to the artist. Calculate the popularity of the song by the number of purchases, and raise/lower the cost for the audience. This would be a really good model to make money. I would likely forget about selling RIAA titles because they all sound the same to me, per genre. Indy music is the way to go for me.
> I *love* that they use the word "stealing". No matter what spin they try to put on this issue, spreading and copying music is not stealing.
I have to agree with you. Stealing is when you deprive someone of something they have; copyright infringement is merely making a copy of something and passing it around. It's like cutting the line to pay cover charge at a bar, kinda. But it's not so literal. In Canada, it's legal to do pretty much anything except distribute copies of copyrighted material. But many institutions have a free pass on it, like libraries and museums.
> Oh, I just LOVE this. Yes, BitTorrent (just took over as the leader in P2P traffic) was created for illegal use. I could see Kazaa or Napster, but BitTorrent, no, I just don't believe that.
They are only attacking Bit Torrent because it broke Kazaa's record. Bit Torrent was created as a science project to see if it would work, and when it did, the usefulness of the project became apparent to anyone who wants to pass around large files. Actually the original use was not intended for copyright infringement at all... it was for public projects like games mods and stuff like that. Gamers really pushed its use more than anyone at first.
> *BARF* You don't have creative products for the most part. You have cookie-cutter talent that you create and promote. You cut their chances at survival by overplaying their one-hit-wonders via your controlled outlets.
Funny you should mention that. Last nite I happened to catch part of the Jessica Simpson show and I was thinking how much she is like a replacement for Britney... like a cutout doll, but not quite as stupid as Britney is. Stupid, but not that stupid.:-)
They are in it for money, and music was never about money... it was once about spreading news and stories all over the land, because music was easier to remember than a long dry tale. Bards intended it to be useful as a way of transfering data between cities. The songs made people want to listen, as a side effect.
Nowadays, the music industry is only an industry.
> "They are havens for pornographers that project their filth into your homes when your kids innocently seek to find their favorite artists."
That's just a way of getting sympathy, they're using. It's nothing new. They'll tell you that child porn is available on these systems and that the systems are to blame. Next they'll say terrorists profit from downloading.
> Do you fairly compensate them? Do you pay taxes like you should? Do you care about anything other than your bottom line? Would you have mentioned your own compensation if you did?
Totally accurate. The industry has been robbing artists blind for decades now! It's a crying shame.
Corporations are never going to support interesting new music. They get a new hot ticket and try to get others to be breadwinners for them. It destroys the music and the life of the artists. Touring also hurts the artists, who are no more than slaves to their creativity until they have to become shitty just to have some peace of mind.
It's just the way it is, and it's always been. Greed ruins everything.
> No, it doesn't sound like gaim or any other client. It sounds like a centralized control center for tighter watching over employee's IM conversations.
I agree. There are plenty of open clients that can do what they're planning on doing. The control center concept seems evil, so it must be true.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry if you missed my joke, but Dogbert states that if you want something to be a certain way, be sure to enforce the opposite. Therefore by the DOJ enforcing Longhorn to be quick for MS to change, they will get, in result, a system that is impossible to change. It's the law.
Why this is kinda bad for the operating system:
:-)
1. Feds want Longhorn to be "difficult to change"
This means it will be difficult for people to mod their Longhorn OS and reap rewards from having a custom system, beyond what the OS offers by default (like the ability to hide certain MS apps in favour of your own fare). Microsoft is being forced to be inflexible to some extent, and that means bad news for customers of the software giant. Bugs will be harder to fix, updates will be slower, response to threats even slower. This will be the repeated excuse while many suffer the wrath of virus programmers abound.
2. Justice Department lawyers would visit Microsoft's headquarters next week to discuss a variety of antitrust compliance issues
Okay, they're going to spend a week at Microsoft. How is that going to solve anything or be effective at all? They'll have a bunch of meetings over Shrimp and Wine coolers, get liquored up and talk about golf.
3. When the government is involved in any project, it's subject to major setbacks, not to mention built in spyware.
These three reasons will force many to the Linux model of computing. Yay!
FTA: Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."
Perfect for colonization of other planets. If each human being has their own IP, then we would need to pack a whole bunch of planets to require more than that! They aren't kidding when they say they'll run IPv4 with IPv6 for twenty years. In that time, we won't have used even a fraction of a couple percent of available IPs, even if we assign every human being on the planet with one, and every company with a giant block.
>"Hive Society", yuck!
All your Borg are belong to us.
> How Would You Handle a $1,000,000 Coding Error?
I would have to follow Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, and take full responsibility for the bungle. That way when the next job comes up two or three rungs above me, I'll be at the top of the list of people with actual experience with massive projects, and it won't matter that it was a colossal screw-up because I will have jumped two or three pay-grades. Corporate fall-guys, if they take it right, always end up better off than quiet behind the scenes types.
So my advice is that you should take full responsiblity and sharpen that resume, but be sure to make it known that you have learned from your mistakes and you worked hard to correct them. Nobody gets anywhere without making big blunders along the way. Be a good sport and you'll jump at least two pay grades for this blunder.
> I think you're behind the times, kid.
Do you call everyone kid? That really rubs me the wrong way. You must work for Microsoft, according to Dogbert's rules of management.
MS Word has always been better than Wordperfect. Those boneheads at Corel couldn't figure out how to design a system if their life depended on it. Why do you think they've been teetering on the brink of corporate destruction for so long? They keep coming back to the edge by sheer luck and by financial injections, but it's only a matter of time. And that's why you must work for Microsoft.
> Hive Societies may be "better" idealistically, but historically have never really worked beyond a certain population level.
There has never been a hive society on Earth that wasn't insectoid. You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design, because there is no leadership beyond that of mere conceptual collaboration; it's a flat architecture where everyone serves the better interest of the whole.
> I think we can safely assume Open Source isn't going to revolutionize the proletariat's desktop any time soon.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory. I think I'll have to remember this so I can laugh about it when MS declares bankruptcy in 2010.
I figured out what was wrong. I just switched to hard thresholds, after never using them before, so the post he was replying to was not visible to me. That's what happened. Ooops.
Wierd. I could have sworn it was inline with my grandparent post. My mistake.
I think you must be replying to a different post than mine. I didn't say anything you quoted there, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution.
Was Microsoft *ever* the low price solution? I'm sure I'm not the only one who laughed at the whole "they haven't figure that out yet" part. They haven't figured *anything* out yet. That's why we got rid of the feudal system -- because government, on all levels (including corporate management) should be for the people, by the people. My point is that Microsoft, being ruled by King Gates, is behind the times while they are trying to be ahead of the times. They are a working paradox. Open Source is to Closed Source, as Hive Societies are to Kingdoms; one clearly is better than the other and I think we can all agree which one it is.
I worked as the web admin to my student association when I was in college, and a job opening came up to redesign the programmers site, bringing online a bunch of new tools for students of that department. This was basically a summer job, and they had interviews where myself and four other students made it through the selection process to the final interview. The college is very Microsoft-centric, and therefore I should have known better than to pitch PHP & MySQL to them, but I could not pitch anything else because I am a firm believer in the quality of PHP.
I didn't get the job because, as I found out later, they wanted ASP.
Did they ever get screwed. The guy who they hired was a Korean exchange student, who I happen to think was a great choice for the job, but the problems started cropping up with the ASP code. It was buggy as hell. The system took all summer to code out the object oriented code, and it was never opened because it was never quite good enough.
In my opinion, this was not the fault of the guy they hired at all, it's just that ASP takes a lot more time to get together than PHP. You can "know what you're doing" all you want, but when your boss wants you to make changes to core behaviours, there is nothing faster or more efficient than PHP for handling anything web related. It's just easier to whip together any site with any behaviour and get it working and stable.
Now if they had hired me, they would have had a great PHP & MySQL system likely ready in about four weeks for what they were looking for. They paid this other guy at an hourly wage for the summer and the whole school year and they didn't get their site. What they got were a lot of modules and classes that could do different things, but they all were bug-ridden.
Now I think that because PHP is open source, it's much easier to find ready-made source code on the net, without having to pay anything. You obviously have to be selective, yet there are more freely available sources for ideas, as well.
I would recommend to anyone who wants to get ahead with PHP to read O'reilly's PHP Cookbook.
Well, I switched a few years back and I must say Mozilla and I keep telling my organization that it's the same as Netscape but without all the extra AOL crap. They just look at me sideways... *sigh*
It's always the same, I say, "Hey guys look at {technology A}," and they look at me sideways. That's what I get for working for computer peasants.... *sigh*
Maybe if Mozilla shipped standard on IBM computers it'd be easier? (that's all they'll buy)
I went through the whole thing last night and they did a great job on it! The site is really creepy, setting the mood by going full screen flash mode. The music and the information listed there is all quite well put together and interesting. Did 2design do that site? Felt like his work, IMHO.
56 (527333) writes: > Why don't they just give their users the ability to filter by language? If you don't want to see the brazilian posts, you should be able to filter them out.
:-)
This would work great, and they might add it. They should also think about separating Orkut into two distinct regions; Brazil, and everwhere else. Clearly Brazil has earned their own version of Orkut.
Furthermore, I think it's cool your name is my UID.
I think this is merely a phase, a cultural identification to a phase of adolescence, where young males feel superior as a method of attracting a mate, and when that fails, they turn to video games and possibly crime (as I think it always does fail most teens today who can't skate like Tony, or roll like Puffy).
Video game designers realize there is a pile of money to be made on criminals, too, because one of their favourite hobbies are console games. I'd wager that most criminals dislike computer games, yet I think with Doom 3 around the corner, this may change.
Thuggin: Spending money like an idiot, drinking to an excess, being only turned on by bimbos with no brains, beating eachother senseless with tire irons or whatever, shooting people you hate, getting shot at by people who hate you, eating only at drive thru, drinking alize and crystal, attending strip clubs like they were the new church, membership at the The Player'S Club, Gucci, bling-bling, busta move on da dance flo, Po Po, bein' Po cuz ya spendt it awl (not the same as Po Po), scrappin, etc.
He will say NI all the way to the forrest where he must cut down the largest imaginable tree with...
(wait for it)
A HERRING!!!!
> "Garbage in, garbage out" isn't just a cute saying.
If you were a programmer, you'd know that the correct phrase is "Garbage doesn't get in."
It's impossible to study violence; there is no way to correctly recreate violent situations and the events leading up to them, without holodeck tech, so any study on the subject proves to be false. I'm certain that if you walked a mile in Klebold or Harris' shoes, you'd find yourself in the same place they did -- have you played the original Doom??? The graphics sucked. If the graphics were better, these guys wouldn't have bothered doing Columbine... they would have put their time into making a killer Doom 3 mod of the massacre, and then found themselves expelled and shipped out of the nasty environment that helped trigger their rage in the first place.
This is bang on the money. Violent Video games give people stress relif; they are good for society. Would you rather someone take their frustrations out on other people, instead of fake people? Let's face it, there are plenty of injustices in the world that require more attention than any injustices proportedly caused by violence in media, be it video games or film.
Did you listen to the whole thing? He's fucking nuts! I guess there is such a thing as being too intelligent. I just thought that if you were intelligent, you'd be smart enough to know where the straw men are. He said the Holocaust was a hoax, among other really scary things.
> Fischer, indicted by a grand jury in 1992, managed to elude authorities and left a tantalizing trail that included radio broadcasts from the Philippines and sightings in Japan.
So Fischer played a 12 year game of chess against the feds and lost, eh? That's the problem when you run from the law... you can't 'mate 'em, but they can 'mate you in 12.
This Fiat/Microsoft article reminded me of an old gem:
For the sake of argument, let's nickname this service Pwn3d-Star, so I guess this is your Fiat updated version!
1. Every time the server-side software is upgraded, you'll have to buy a new car.
2. When your Fiat dies on the freeway randomly, you can now be told by a Pwn3d-Star agent that you have to restart it. They would also say nice things and pepper MS branding through the whole conversation.
3. If your car failed to restart after one weird maneuver (like backing up too quick), the new Pwn3d-Star agents will tell you that they will send a tow-truck to you for an extra surcharge, and that your engine will need to be replaced.
4. You can now have more than one person in the car, but they will all need their own license to use Pwn3d-Star, even if they are dying on the road.
5. Macintosh will not do this, but if they do, it will be 100x better and have a super-iPod built in. You'll be able to download music without leaving your car, which is great for many car geeks, although Fiats aren't that popular among car geeks.
6. (this one didn't change) The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
7. (strangely this one didn't change either) People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
8. We will have to get Microsoft gas to run the vehicle, or a Pwn3d-Star agent will tell us that the gas we are purchasing is not Microsoft Certified, and we may be in violation of our warranty if we continue to use said gas.
9. New seats will force everyone to have the same sized butt. Pwn3d-Star will warn you if someone's butt is too big or small.
10. The airbags will now say "Are you sure?" before deploying. (pretty much the same as the original)
11. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened, but the Pwn3d-Star agent would tell you that techsupport is working on an explanation. Then you would get some excellent elevator music for about a half hour as you cling to life.
The school is feeling embarassed, and vengeful, so they make an example of the students; the students were only hacking the network to produce a news article on the lacklustre security at Oxford. They have a right to obtain evidence to support an article on the security systems, even by showing how the system can be broken into. Students likely have been complaining about it for some time.
From my perspective, the student body has a right to be certain if the use of the school network is going to compromise any of their personal information. Do you know how many students use school networks to check banking information?
These white hat hackers have given the school a present and they are slapped in the face for it. Any action against the journalists will only smear Oxford's reputation further. They should simply thank them and make the necessary changes to improve security.
Shit, if I know this, and some multiple-PHD administrator can't figure it out, what does that say about the level of comprehension at Oxford?
Here's what Ebay should do: take mp3.com's formula for indy music and tweak it; auction off download rates for each artist by the number of songs sold, and start with $0 per song, then start slowly charging more and more until the song reaches a cap of say $1.50 USD that goes directly to the artist. Calculate the popularity of the song by the number of purchases, and raise/lower the cost for the audience. This would be a really good model to make money. I would likely forget about selling RIAA titles because they all sound the same to me, per genre. Indy music is the way to go for me.
> I *love* that they use the word "stealing". No matter what spin they try to put on this issue, spreading and copying music is not stealing.
:-)
I have to agree with you. Stealing is when you deprive someone of something they have; copyright infringement is merely making a copy of something and passing it around. It's like cutting the line to pay cover charge at a bar, kinda. But it's not so literal. In Canada, it's legal to do pretty much anything except distribute copies of copyrighted material. But many institutions have a free pass on it, like libraries and museums.
> Oh, I just LOVE this. Yes, BitTorrent (just took over as the leader in P2P traffic) was created for illegal use. I could see Kazaa or Napster, but BitTorrent, no, I just don't believe that.
They are only attacking Bit Torrent because it broke Kazaa's record. Bit Torrent was created as a science project to see if it would work, and when it did, the usefulness of the project became apparent to anyone who wants to pass around large files. Actually the original use was not intended for copyright infringement at all... it was for public projects like games mods and stuff like that. Gamers really pushed its use more than anyone at first.
> *BARF* You don't have creative products for the most part. You have cookie-cutter talent that you create and promote. You cut their chances at survival by overplaying their one-hit-wonders via your controlled outlets.
Funny you should mention that. Last nite I happened to catch part of the Jessica Simpson show and I was thinking how much she is like a replacement for Britney... like a cutout doll, but not quite as stupid as Britney is. Stupid, but not that stupid.
They are in it for money, and music was never about money... it was once about spreading news and stories all over the land, because music was easier to remember than a long dry tale. Bards intended it to be useful as a way of transfering data between cities. The songs made people want to listen, as a side effect.
Nowadays, the music industry is only an industry.
> "They are havens for pornographers that project their filth into your homes when your kids innocently seek to find their favorite artists."
That's just a way of getting sympathy, they're using. It's nothing new. They'll tell you that child porn is available on these systems and that the systems are to blame. Next they'll say terrorists profit from downloading.
> Do you fairly compensate them? Do you pay taxes like you should? Do you care about anything other than your bottom line? Would you have mentioned your own compensation if you did?
Totally accurate. The industry has been robbing artists blind for decades now! It's a crying shame.
Corporations are never going to support interesting new music. They get a new hot ticket and try to get others to be breadwinners for them. It destroys the music and the life of the artists. Touring also hurts the artists, who are no more than slaves to their creativity until they have to become shitty just to have some peace of mind.
It's just the way it is, and it's always been. Greed ruins everything.
> No, it doesn't sound like gaim or any other client. It sounds like a centralized control center for tighter watching over employee's IM conversations.
I agree. There are plenty of open clients that can do what they're planning on doing. The control center concept seems evil, so it must be true.