Well Avast! is going to get screwed just like Norton and MacAffee. All those free AV products are going to become a lot less useful when they can't detect unauthorized actions on the kernel.
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. Microsoft hasn't "secured" the kernel from attackers. They've simply removed any way for legitimate non-microsoft software to monitor the kernel. People have already found ways to attack the Vista kernel, and given Microsoft's history with security I don't feel very good about them being my only defense.
I know some people will think it strange, but I buy a lot more music since I got an iPod. I used to buy maybe six new CDs a year. Now I buy a few albums each month on iTunes. I would buy more, but sometimes the music I want isn't available at the Apple store.
The attitude these people have just boggles the mind sometimes.
This kind of topic always gets so many responses... its just crazy! And once again, the "report" that kicked it all off has no information on the methodology used.
*Yawn* As long as Apple stays in business and I can upgrade my machines every 5 years or so, I'm a happy camper. Nobody is forcing the unaquafied masses to buy Macs, so they should all just settle down and reinstall their systems or something.
The problem with your analysis is that, in fact, the board is NOT beholden to the public shareholders. Publicly available Google stock is non-voting stock. You get the same payout as everyone else, but none of the control that company insiders/founders have. On the one hand this might seem unjust to a lot of people, but on the other hand, this goes a long ways to insulating the company directors from the quarter-to-quarter profit pressures by the impatient mobs.
Some people take exception to this, most notably the Anonymous Coward who has written several diatribes, every one of them ending in "short google now". (I wonder if he's holding short positions right now?) Personally, I don't mind so much. If I don't trust those guys to run the company then I don't invest.
The problem with short-selling a stock is that, as another poster mentioned, your losses are theoretically unlimited. As long as the stock keeps going up you keep losing money.
Another route might be to buy put options on the stock. You are more likely to lose your money, but you can invest a lot less of it and still get nearly the same bang for your buck if the stock really does drop in price. Your potential loss is also limited to the amount you invested.
In spite of these advantages you should treat options like any other investment: you shouldn't buy it if you don't understand it.
I don't see bandwidth as the main problem here. Sure, lots of people don't have enough internet bandwidth now for this kind of service, but that will likely change over the next 20 years or so.
What won't change is peoples' preference for owning their favorite content, rather than renting it. If the on-line music battles have taught us anything it is that renting content is fine some of the time, but people don't want to have their collection suddenly stripped from them just because they stopped paying for their subscription service. For most people their selection of art is a personal statement and they aren't comfortable with the thought that it doesn't belong to them. That's one of the great aspects of iTunes and similar services: you pay for your music, you keep it, and you can even burn your own copy onto a CD. Within some fairly acceptable restrictions, you can do what you like with it.
The DVD itself is just a storage mechanism, like the cassettes and 8-tracks and vinyl platters before it. When it is replaced it will be by something that offers cheaper, more convenient storage of more data. It will NOT be replaced by what is essentially a rental service, delivered by broadband internet.
I've done some altivec programming in the past, and discovered it was a very effective use of my time. Since there's no mode-switching penalty for using the vector instructions you can use it for some very trivial-but-common tasks, like replacing strlen(), vector operations on small tables, etc.. I knocked a lot of computation time (25%) from one of my projects just by vectorizing three functions.
Of course there's a hitch: vector processing only works for certain kinds of algorithms and requires a change in mindset. In spite of that it's a great tool to have in your box.
You're both, and you're an effing cheapskate, too. I'm wondering how far out of your way you went to get that oh-so-precious $0.40 per disk savings. You saved a total of maybe 20 bucks, assuming you use all those disks burning backups, pirated music, software, frizbee, brainwave reflectors, or whatever it is you use them for.
Honestly, people act as if it were their GOD GIVEN RIGHT to have the ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICE every time they buy anything. They will wheedle, whine, pout, demand, and otherwise be pains in the ass until they get some kind of concession. They'll drive umpteen miles through traffic jams and basketball-sized hailstones to save that extra $0.081 cents per gallon of gassoline. They'll spend hours calling every store to save $3 on a fitted sheet. They'll get on the freeway and drive 60 miles to the one furniture outlet store that has the laminated fake-wood pencil holder for ten pennies less than the competition. I say "fine! let them!". They'll feel great about themselves afterwards: isn't that what crass consumerism is all about?
But nobody should be surprised when stores think to themselves "Hey, this guy is an asshole and costs us a lot of money. Maybe we should stop selling stuff to him and taking a loss every time he walks through the door." And let's face it, this is a free country. They don't have to sell to you if they don't want to (baring descrimination on race, creed, etc..) Why should they do business with someone they KNOW will cost them money? Why should you, for that matter?
The real question is simply if they can do that without alienating their profitable customers. If not, they may just have to put up with you (which I'm sure just makes your day). If going to BestBuy costs you more in time and aggravation than you save by not going elsewhere, DON'T SHOP THERE. If being data-mained really bugs you, PAY IN CASH. Hey, my pet peeve is the zip code. I never tell them, and if they press the matter I just sigh and say that I'm not telling them because I don't want them to have it. My effing zip code, I don't have to give it to you if I don't want to.
Of course, all of the cross-selling BestBuy does can get really annoying. And you ALWAYS have to keep your eye out for the one unscrupulous bastard in the cable isle trying to mercilessly upsell gramps on some $4 piece of crap that was the only thing he wanted that day, no matter where you do your electronics shopping. But that doesn't always happen, and BestBuy is WAY better than the Pit of Vile Evil named "CompUSA". So I won't be giving up on BestBuy just yet.
MacOS X does this today. Installation for darn near any application is just a matter of copying the "Application", really a folder, into the desired location. Updates of most MacOS X software is really easy, too. Just choose "Update" from the app's menu. Most apps check for updates periodically now, too.
Of course, if Rox makes it so you don't have to install the app in the first place then they'll be one-up on Apple.
For the twelve months ending 09/27/03 Apple's operating expenses were $6.2 billion, so their cash reserves represent something like nine months of expenses.
Apple's sales tend to be pretty volatile. In light of that, having large reserves becomes important for several reasons. Wenever Apple has a bad quarter people immediately start predicting The End, but the CEO can just point to the cash reserves and say: we can ride this out for a long time.
Pixar's Animator Row
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
At Pixar many of the animators have little houses instead of cubes. Someone got the bright idea to go to Home Depot or somewhere and buy these large-scale playhouses that are meant to go into your back yard. The facilities people put these things up, then run lights and power into them. Then the animators decorate the houses to their liking and move in.
Everyone's house is very different. So walking into the animation area you get the feeling of entering a village full of very short, very eccentric people.
But when you have former allies of The Evil One wandering around The Shire, throwing their weight around, and spouting socialist slogans, only to be taken down by returning war vets, it's a bit hard to believe that old JRR wasn't grinding any axes
Most oppression is conducted in the name of the common good. It was hardly new in his day. The "collect all resources for the common good" bit is an old favorite of many corrupt states, not just the ones that claim to be Socialist. It is a close cousin of the "trade your civil liberties for the security of all" line of rhetoric that is so popular in the US today. I imagine that 100 years from now those scenes will still seem strangely familiar.
If you view LOTR as a story of the Ring, then it ends when the ring is destroyed and Aragorn takes his throne. Everything after that is pointless. But if you view it as the story of the people who were most personally involved with the unmaking of the ring, a return to the Shire is necessary.
The story began in the Shire, with the hobbits fleeing from a danger they couldn't even comprehend. I think it is fitting that the story ends after they return to the Shire to master a situation their younger selves could not have met.
Doesn't taking aim at BSD put SCO into the position of aiming it's sights at Apple?
Probably, yes. And Apple doesn't roll over very easily.
And as another poster said, this puts all of the other *NIX vendors on alert that they might also be subject to this kind of lawsuit. So now you can add Sun, HP and others to the "Enemies of SCO" register.
I wish SCO would just hurry up and go out of business without involving all the rest of us.
As someone who has read LOTR several times, I'm not too bothered by plot changes: I think most of them are reasonable. Most of my nits are about character changes.
A lot of the extra scenes play up the finer points that you don't really get from the book until the second or third reading (for us thick-headed folks). In fact, much of it draws heavily on the extensive background material provided by Tolkein as indexes in ROTK.
- The extra scenes between Arwen and her father Elrond play up her love and sacrifice, which are only hinted at through most of the book. It also highlights the ending of the Elves' time in Middle Earth, and (I hope eventually) the importance of her decision for the future of humans in Middle-earth.
- I'm not bothered by the preview scene with Aragorn and Eowen. She had the hots for him in the book, but I won't tell you how it is eventually resolved.
- Boromir and Aragorn's last conversation was entirely made up. In the book Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas simply find him shot with arrows with a massive pile or bodies around him. In the movie he gets to vocalize his redemption, because killing a hundred Uruk-hai just isn't enough dammit! The script writer basically said, "that's the converstaion they should have had". The arrogance! But ok, I can hang with it. Writers hate letting a major character die without final words.
- The many extra scenes in Isengard were good, because they better illustrated the depth of Saruman's betrayal, which the reader is mostly left to infer.
- Not wrapping up Saruman's situation in ROTK bothers me some, but isn't a deal-breaker. It oviously leads to some holes, which will likely be dealt with. I guess we'll be left wonding "what ever happened to that guy in the tower"?
For me, the only real problems in Jackson's movie is the *character* changes, which are very disappointing.
- Merry and Pippin come across as utter clowns and bare acquaintances in the movie. In the book they were longtime friends of Sam and Frodo, and conspired with Sam to make sure Frodo didn't leave the Shire alone no matter how hard he tried.
- The movie friendship between Legolas and Gimli is weak. To the repeat reader, it is one of the better rewards of the book.
- Gimli is disappointing, being played for comic relief when we already have the excreble Merry and Pippin. Maybe with M&P away in Fangorn we needed more Dwarf-tossing jokes. On the other hand, his eagreness for battle is undiminished. ("Oh, c'mon! We can take 'em!")
- FARAMIR IS NOT A BAD GUY! In the book he is the smarter, wiser brother who is tragically overlooked by his father (Steward of Gondor) in favor of Boromir. He is perhaps the most insightful human to appear in the entire epic. The movie makes him into power-obsessed idot who comes to his senses sudenly and rather inexplicably. I suppose the writers were trying to play up the corrupting power of the ring, but instead they ruined a great character.
Yeah, those character changes really ticked me off.
If you don't think it is worth the money, then don't buy it. You do have that choice, you know.
Apple users are an odd lot. They generally have no problem with paying for software, but many of them also choose not to upgrade on every release if everything they have works as-is. Heck, I know people who are still using MacOS 8.6 because they refuse to disturb their working environments for features they feel they don't need. Go figure.
They typical/. reader, on the other hand, likes upgrades so much that choosing not to upgrade is tantamount to an insult to the vendor. So it seems onerous to have to pay $129 every 12-18 months. But let's face it, Apple spends big bucks on software development, while their computers have relatively long lifetimes.
I'm fortunate enough to be employed right now and $199 (for five licenses) isn't something to sweat over. But if I didn't have the money I wouldn't feel bad about skipping Panther, nor would I complain about being "left out in the cold".
The definition of "MUST" is "you are not in compliance with this protocol unless you do this". What we have here is a situation where the reporter can do (or not do) anything he wants, and technically be in compliance with the protocol.
If you file an excellent bug report with the vendor and then wait 30 days before telling anyone about it, then you are in compliance. On the other hand, if you create an exploit and release it to the world the first day you discover the bug, then you are technically in compliance with this protocol.
... while reporters literally don't have to do anything to be compliant with the spec. There are no MUSTs for reporters at all, and only one or two for coordinators. There are about a dozen for vendors.
I'm not against vendors taking some responsibility for their products. I work for a vendor, and we take our defects (and trying to prevent them in the first place) very seriously. But if someone is going to poke and prod and pry our product to find vulnerabilities, then they should bear some of the responsibility for responsible disclosure.
Slashdot Mirror
Well Avast! is going to get screwed just like Norton and MacAffee. All those free AV products are going to become a lot less useful when they can't detect unauthorized actions on the kernel.
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. Microsoft hasn't "secured" the kernel from attackers. They've simply removed any way for legitimate non-microsoft software to monitor the kernel. People have already found ways to attack the Vista kernel, and given Microsoft's history with security I don't feel very good about them being my only defense.
The attitude these people have just boggles the mind sometimes.
This kind of topic always gets so many responses ... its just crazy! And once again, the "report" that kicked it all off has no information on the methodology used.
*Yawn* As long as Apple stays in business and I can upgrade my machines every 5 years or so, I'm a happy camper. Nobody is forcing the unaquafied masses to buy Macs, so they should all just settle down and reinstall their systems or something.
This movie is going to make a profit well before it hits DVD. That's pretty good.
I'm still waiting for a lawsuit to be filed saying that Sony has violated the DMCA by hacking into our computers.
Some people take exception to this, most notably the Anonymous Coward who has written several diatribes, every one of them ending in "short google now". (I wonder if he's holding short positions right now?) Personally, I don't mind so much. If I don't trust those guys to run the company then I don't invest.
Another route might be to buy put options on the stock. You are more likely to lose your money, but you can invest a lot less of it and still get nearly the same bang for your buck if the stock really does drop in price. Your potential loss is also limited to the amount you invested.
In spite of these advantages you should treat options like any other investment: you shouldn't buy it if you don't understand it.
Player: I hide in the shadows.
DM: [rolls dice] You think you're hidden.
I don't see bandwidth as the main problem here. Sure, lots of people don't have enough internet bandwidth now for this kind of service, but that will likely change over the next 20 years or so.
What won't change is peoples' preference for owning their favorite content, rather than renting it. If the on-line music battles have taught us anything it is that renting content is fine some of the time, but people don't want to have their collection suddenly stripped from them just because they stopped paying for their subscription service. For most people their selection of art is a personal statement and they aren't comfortable with the thought that it doesn't belong to them. That's one of the great aspects of iTunes and similar services: you pay for your music, you keep it, and you can even burn your own copy onto a CD. Within some fairly acceptable restrictions, you can do what you like with it.
The DVD itself is just a storage mechanism, like the cassettes and 8-tracks and vinyl platters before it. When it is replaced it will be by something that offers cheaper, more convenient storage of more data. It will NOT be replaced by what is essentially a rental service, delivered by broadband internet.
I've done some altivec programming in the past, and discovered it was a very effective use of my time. Since there's no mode-switching penalty for using the vector instructions you can use it for some very trivial-but-common tasks, like replacing strlen(), vector operations on small tables, etc.. I knocked a lot of computation time (25%) from one of my projects just by vectorizing three functions. Of course there's a hitch: vector processing only works for certain kinds of algorithms and requires a change in mindset. In spite of that it's a great tool to have in your box.
You're both, and you're an effing cheapskate, too. I'm wondering how far out of your way you went to get that oh-so-precious $0.40 per disk savings. You saved a total of maybe 20 bucks, assuming you use all those disks burning backups, pirated music, software, frizbee, brainwave reflectors, or whatever it is you use them for.
Honestly, people act as if it were their GOD GIVEN RIGHT to have the ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICE every time they buy anything. They will wheedle, whine, pout, demand, and otherwise be pains in the ass until they get some kind of concession. They'll drive umpteen miles through traffic jams and basketball-sized hailstones to save that extra $0.081 cents per gallon of gassoline. They'll spend hours calling every store to save $3 on a fitted sheet. They'll get on the freeway and drive 60 miles to the one furniture outlet store that has the laminated fake-wood pencil holder for ten pennies less than the competition. I say "fine! let them!". They'll feel great about themselves afterwards: isn't that what crass consumerism is all about?
But nobody should be surprised when stores think to themselves "Hey, this guy is an asshole and costs us a lot of money. Maybe we should stop selling stuff to him and taking a loss every time he walks through the door." And let's face it, this is a free country. They don't have to sell to you if they don't want to (baring descrimination on race, creed, etc..) Why should they do business with someone they KNOW will cost them money? Why should you, for that matter?
The real question is simply if they can do that without alienating their profitable customers. If not, they may just have to put up with you (which I'm sure just makes your day). If going to BestBuy costs you more in time and aggravation than you save by not going elsewhere, DON'T SHOP THERE. If being data-mained really bugs you, PAY IN CASH. Hey, my pet peeve is the zip code. I never tell them, and if they press the matter I just sigh and say that I'm not telling them because I don't want them to have it. My effing zip code, I don't have to give it to you if I don't want to.
Of course, all of the cross-selling BestBuy does can get really annoying. And you ALWAYS have to keep your eye out for the one unscrupulous bastard in the cable isle trying to mercilessly upsell gramps on some $4 piece of crap that was the only thing he wanted that day, no matter where you do your electronics shopping. But that doesn't always happen, and BestBuy is WAY better than the Pit of Vile Evil named "CompUSA". So I won't be giving up on BestBuy just yet.
Of course, if Rox makes it so you don't have to install the app in the first place then they'll be one-up on Apple.
Apple's sales tend to be pretty volatile. In light of that, having large reserves becomes important for several reasons. Wenever Apple has a bad quarter people immediately start predicting The End, but the CEO can just point to the cash reserves and say: we can ride this out for a long time.
Everyone's house is very different. So walking into the animation area you get the feeling of entering a village full of very short, very eccentric people.
Most oppression is conducted in the name of the common good. It was hardly new in his day. The "collect all resources for the common good" bit is an old favorite of many corrupt states, not just the ones that claim to be Socialist. It is a close cousin of the "trade your civil liberties for the security of all" line of rhetoric that is so popular in the US today. I imagine that 100 years from now those scenes will still seem strangely familiar.
If you view LOTR as a story of the Ring, then it ends when the ring is destroyed and Aragorn takes his throne. Everything after that is pointless. But if you view it as the story of the people who were most personally involved with the unmaking of the ring, a return to the Shire is necessary.
The story began in the Shire, with the hobbits fleeing from a danger they couldn't even comprehend. I think it is fitting that the story ends after they return to the Shire to master a situation their younger selves could not have met.
Apple G5s have bus speeds of 1/2 of the CPU speed. So my 1.8GHz G5 has a bus speed of 900MHz.
Probably, yes. And Apple doesn't roll over very easily.
And as another poster said, this puts all of the other *NIX vendors on alert that they might also be subject to this kind of lawsuit. So now you can add Sun, HP and others to the "Enemies of SCO" register.
I wish SCO would just hurry up and go out of business without involving all the rest of us.
As someone who has read LOTR several times, I'm not too bothered by plot changes: I think most of them are reasonable. Most of my nits are about character changes.
A lot of the extra scenes play up the finer points that you don't really get from the book until the second or third reading (for us thick-headed folks). In fact, much of it draws heavily on the extensive background material provided by Tolkein as indexes in ROTK.
- The extra scenes between Arwen and her father Elrond play up her love and sacrifice, which are only hinted at through most of the book. It also highlights the ending of the Elves' time in Middle Earth, and (I hope eventually) the importance of her decision for the future of humans in Middle-earth.
- I'm not bothered by the preview scene with Aragorn and Eowen. She had the hots for him in the book, but I won't tell you how it is eventually resolved.
- Boromir and Aragorn's last conversation was entirely made up. In the book Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas simply find him shot with arrows with a massive pile or bodies around him. In the movie he gets to vocalize his redemption, because killing a hundred Uruk-hai just isn't enough dammit! The script writer basically said, "that's the converstaion they should have had". The arrogance! But ok, I can hang with it. Writers hate letting a major character die without final words.
- The many extra scenes in Isengard were good, because they better illustrated the depth of Saruman's betrayal, which the reader is mostly left to infer.
- Not wrapping up Saruman's situation in ROTK bothers me some, but isn't a deal-breaker. It oviously leads to some holes, which will likely be dealt with. I guess we'll be left wonding "what ever happened to that guy in the tower"?
For me, the only real problems in Jackson's movie is the *character* changes, which are very disappointing.
- Merry and Pippin come across as utter clowns and bare acquaintances in the movie. In the book they were longtime friends of Sam and Frodo, and conspired with Sam to make sure Frodo didn't leave the Shire alone no matter how hard he tried.
- The movie friendship between Legolas and Gimli is weak. To the repeat reader, it is one of the better rewards of the book.
- Gimli is disappointing, being played for comic relief when we already have the excreble Merry and Pippin. Maybe with M&P away in Fangorn we needed more Dwarf-tossing jokes. On the other hand, his eagreness for battle is undiminished. ("Oh, c'mon! We can take 'em!")
- FARAMIR IS NOT A BAD GUY! In the book he is the smarter, wiser brother who is tragically overlooked by his father (Steward of Gondor) in favor of Boromir. He is perhaps the most insightful human to appear in the entire epic. The movie makes him into power-obsessed idot who comes to his senses sudenly and rather inexplicably. I suppose the writers were trying to play up the corrupting power of the ring, but instead they ruined a great character.
Yeah, those character changes really ticked me off.
Apple users are an odd lot. They generally have no problem with paying for software, but many of them also choose not to upgrade on every release if everything they have works as-is. Heck, I know people who are still using MacOS 8.6 because they refuse to disturb their working environments for features they feel they don't need. Go figure.
They typical /. reader, on the other hand, likes upgrades so much that choosing not to upgrade is tantamount to an insult to the vendor. So it seems onerous to have to pay $129 every 12-18 months. But let's face it, Apple spends big bucks on software development, while their computers have relatively long lifetimes.
I'm fortunate enough to be employed right now and $199 (for five licenses) isn't something to sweat over. But if I didn't have the money I wouldn't feel bad about skipping Panther, nor would I complain about being "left out in the cold".
The definition of "MUST" is "you are not in compliance with this protocol unless you do this". What we have here is a situation where the reporter can do (or not do) anything he wants, and technically be in compliance with the protocol.
If you file an excellent bug report with the vendor and then wait 30 days before telling anyone about it, then you are in compliance. On the other hand, if you create an exploit and release it to the world the first day you discover the bug, then you are technically in compliance with this protocol.
Not really much of a protocol, if you ask me.... while reporters literally don't have to do anything to be compliant with the spec. There are no MUSTs for reporters at all, and only one or two for coordinators. There are about a dozen for vendors.
I'm not against vendors taking some responsibility for their products. I work for a vendor, and we take our defects (and trying to prevent them in the first place) very seriously. But if someone is going to poke and prod and pry our product to find vulnerabilities, then they should bear some of the responsibility for responsible disclosure.