One summer a couple of years ago, my then-girlfriend and I were in different towns, so we spent a lot of time talking online, and eventually we got into MUDding together. We each had two characters that would go around gaining experience and wealth together, and we'd joke about sex a lot.
One night we were going around buying equipment, and we kept kissing each other's characters. So we found a room alone, and I signed off one of my guys, and my remaining guy had a threesome with her two characters. A week later one of her characters took on both of mine.
In your opinion, did they (MS) get any exclusive rights from the government or are they the exception of a company which managed to get to this position all by itself?
Well let's see.... does the government use computers? And what operating systems run on those computers?
The US government is larger today than it has ever been. I'd venture that the percentage of government office computers running Windows is roughly equal to the overall percentage of American office computers running Windows - in other words, friggin' huge. So how much of your paycheck goes to Microsoft every month?
What would be the effect on Microsoft's monopoly if every federal and state (since the state governments are the ones complaining now) government office installed Linux or bought a Mac? If you never had to apply for a government job by submitting your resume as a Word document? If every publicly-funded school stopped teaching kids on Windows? If every government web site complied with HTML standards?
The government takes your money to buy from Microsoft, then it takes more to pay lawyers to bring down Microsoft. God bless America.
they were left with no alternative but to use IE for fear of a Microsoft FUD campaign
Oh come ON! Is that what we're resorting to now? Speculating on what MIGHT have happened had a company tried to compete with Microsoft in order to defend a company's failure to innovate? When AOL integrated IE way back in 1996 or 1997, IE was the lesser-used product. Netscape was the de facto standard. And now they're crying because MSIE has improved.
Just as it's not right for media companies to destroy filesharing utilities that make their business model obsolete, it's wrong to sue someone for making a product better than yours.
You're right. I'd say that the mass media are more "democratic" today than they've ever been in the last two centuries. William Randolph Hearst and pals controlled everything you read a hundred years ago, and through most of the twentieth century, you had three TV networks or nothing.
And yet, with all this, people still complain that the media aren't state-controlled enough. And these are the same people who complain that the state is run by Big Evil Corporations. (I'm not saying it isn't.) But if the state runs the media, and the BEC's run the state, how is that a good thing?
Yes, in France they have a shorter work week. In fact, it is illegal for workers of large companies to work more than 35 hours in a week. French government workers have been known to write down license plates of cars in parking lots in the morning, and then come back at night to make sure those cars are gone. There has also been talk of workers' being inspected by government agents to make sure they aren't taking any work home.
It must be wonderful to live in a country where no one is allowed to work harder than anyone else.
You all laugh at that joke, but in my friend's Operating Systems class this fall, the "cheat script" flagged half the students, very few of whom were actually cheating. My friend's group didn't hand in one part of the assignment, and the script detected similarities between the nonexistent file and the whitespace in other groups' code. Duh. And of course, instead of first LOOKING at the similarities, the professors went ahead and accused my friend of cheating, and told him he had to come to an "appeal session" THAT SAME DAY.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
I frown upon the current trend (which is to try and limit students' systems to "consumers" and remove all "server" capability) because this means removing most of the appeal of the internet, which is the ability to distribute information not only top-down but also sideways.
They're only limiting our personal PC's to that paradigm. We still have accounts on Unix boxes that let us make web pages anyone can see. 60 MB is quite a nice quota, too. Anything legal we want to host we can put there.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that security necessitates keeping students' boxes inaccessible from the net. The desktop versions of Windows seem to get less secure with each release. A lot of college students try out alternate operating systems that may have too many features enabled too. It's for the safety of the students, and for the safety of every box on the net which could become a target of a DDOS.
Unless the users stop wanting to use filesharing, there will always be workarounds for all the filtering and blocking you can think of.
Wrong. At my university, they put in place an internal IP system such that dorm computers can ONLY be accessed from other computers inside the university. I can go on Morpheus and download, but anyone who tries to get files from me (and is outside the university) is going to get a failed download.
The system was not put in place to hurt filesharers, in fact, because we had that under control - if you exceeded 2 gigs a week downstream or 500 MB a week upstream you got shut off for 1 week - but because too many dorm computers were getting h4x0red and used for DDOS attacks, and the university was getting blamed. (Just be glad they did this BEFORE WinXP came out.)
There's a happy ending, though. Somebody set up a Neomodus DirectConnect hub on a dorm computer, and it spread like wildfire. The university only really pays for bandwidth that leaves the university, right? So now we share files to our heart's content, there's no upload or download restrictions, and the downloads are fast as all hell because they're all within the same organization.
I think people who want the Belgian government to install Linux on the machines that their government is paying for does not realize this thing: Windows is on 85% of the world's desktop computers.
I use Windows on all my non-server computers. But I'm worried when I see a government shelling out taxpayer money to Microsoft for millions of copies of Windows. Before long, people will be complaining that MS has a monopoly on the OS market, and asking the government to spend MORE money attacking the monopoly they helped create.
I'm not a Belgian citizen, and they can do what they want. But it really rubs me the wrong way here in the USA when huge government offices buy Windows, and all the while there's endless antitrust litigation going on.
Belgian IT workerss who earn their living doing Linux-related work will be hurt if the government increases MS's market share, and the worst part is they'll be paying for it out of their own taxes.
Hating X10 ads doesn't make you a prude at all. I have no problem with images of scantily clad or nude women, or even with hard-core pornography. What worries me about the X10 ads is the implication (and don't tell me it isn't there) that they can and should be used for voyeurism. The combination of that suggestion with the ubiquitous nature of the ads is truly offensive.
I can't find it either.... and I have yet to see a response here from someone who has. Most just seem to be condemning Yahoo. Can ANYONE tell me which link it is from that US Economy page?
Fall 01 CS 416, they found some students asking for help on rentacoder.com. Pathetic.
Hahahaha! My friend was in that class. Of course, that was also the class where their "cheat script" flagged half the students, very few of whom were actually cheating. My friend's group didn't hand in one part of the assignment, and the script detected similarities between the nonexistent file and the whitespace in other groups' code. Duh. And of course, instead of first LOOKING at the similarities, the professors went ahead and accused my friend of cheating, and told him he had to come to an "appeal session" THAT SAME DAY.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
For Blakemore to have "snipped" parts of that would have been to damage the text severely.
We will, of course, have to agree to disagree about this, but for me, there were parts where I kinda "zoned out" when they were going on about physics. If I thought it was a great play, and there were parts I couldn't follow, then those parts didn't add anything to it for me. Other people (less scientifically inclined than I) told me the same thing.
My dad owns the script. Maybe I'll borrow and reread it this week. (If I can pull myself out of Tolkien.)
My theory on "Copenhagen" (and I've seen both it and "Proof" in NYC) is that it was written for British audiences.
A Briton looks back at the nuclear race of WWII and thinks, "Boy, it's a good thing Hitler never got the bomb, otherwise I would have been toast." Therefore, the question in the play - did Heisenberg really "forget" to try out that one calculation, or was it intentional? - is a major one for the British, because it's the question of why they didn't get destroyed.
To an American (especially one of Japanese descent), it's a less relevant question. Our nuclear researchers (Oppenheimer, Bohr, etc.) DID produce a bomb, and with it they produced all the nuclear questions of the last 60 years. Nuclear warfare is a reality to us, whereas it's a scary fantasy to the British.
So in Frayn's play, when Heisenberg decides to plug in the numbers off the top of his head, and the stage is flooded in the light and sound of a nuclear holocaust, that's the British nightmare. Once I looked at that as the crux of the play, I appreciated it a lot more.
That said, it would be a better play if the director would snip a little bit of the physics out, especially the parts that are repeated several times.
I think every web site owner who reads their logs faithfully can relate a story of users' being referred to the site through a Google search on something completely unrelated. I remember a while back when an entry I had on Diaryland which said something like "Then my drunk girlfriend and her three drunk apartmentmates stopped by" reached Google, I started getting hits literally DAILY referred by a search on "drunk girls."
Diarylanders find the phenomenon so amusing that there's now a site dedicated to it: OddGoogle.
I, unfortunately, will be travelling most of today and tomorrow, so I won't get to see the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci Fi. So all of you need to watch it in honor of me.
What's cool is that instead of doing it strictly in order by episode, they're putting the "classics" on in prime time. Here are the lineups for both nights:
The prime-time lineup: Monday, 8 p.m., "Will the Real Martians Please Stand Up?"; 8:33, "To Serve Man"; 9:05, "The Dummy"; 9:36, "Eye of the Beholder"; 10:09, "The Howling Man."
Tuesday, 8 p.m., "A Penny for Your Thoughts"; 8:33, "The Masks"; 9:06, "The Hitch-Hiker"; 9:37, "It's a Good Life"; 10:09, "The Midnight Sun."
Trivia: Two of the above-mentioned episodes were turned into Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segments - which ones? (Could be more than two, actually, but I know of two for sure.)
I'm not an MS-basher, but I used Mainsoft's port of Visual SourceSafe on Solaris and.... uh, I still have nightmares. Every mouse action took a half-second longer than it should have to register. It was horrendous. And then one day it just stopped working. No error message - I just typed "vss" at the shell prompt and it started the application but no window came up. My boss told me to just start editing the files without any version control. Luckily my time there ended before they got it working again.
They might as well keep their money and just spend it on themselves, and save each other a whole bunch of time.
Which is exactly what my sister and I have taken to doing. Every year we agree to buy ourselves a CD, give it to the other to wrap, and then open it on Christmas morning to please our parents. I love her to death, but she knows as little about the techno I listen to as I do about the indie rock she listens to. If it were up to us, we wouldn't exchange gifts at all.
Well, maybe that's a little strong. I'd like to have a gathering where everybody brings something from a very specific category. Cheese is my favorite food - what if everyone picked out a cheese they'd never heard of and we all shared them? This would work well with beers, wines, cigars....
Yeah, I think that's something a lot of us here can agree on. I'm about to graduate from Rutgers University, and I think they do a really good job forcing science down the throats of humanities people. There's a Quantitative Skills requirement, which says you have to get up to the level of qualifying FOR Calc 1, and then you have to do one course in Math, Logic, or CS. The "CS for Morons" class starts out with "this is a mouse" and stuff like that, but ends up teaching them BASIC, and I know a lot of people who learned the thrill of solving programming problems from that class, even if the problems seemed easy to me (as I was doing my Prolog assignments).
The Natural Science requirement says they have to take two courses in the same discipline. I advise people to do Physics because the department has great teachers and because it can give one a new way of thinking about the world, but a lot of them end up in Geology - "Rocks for Jocks." Nonetheless, when you are doing two courses in the discipline, you're bound to end up with something of a grasp on its concepts, and hopefully it'll make you a slightly more scientific thinker when you graduate.
Slashdot Mirror
One summer a couple of years ago, my then-girlfriend and I were in different towns, so we spent a lot of time talking online, and eventually we got into MUDding together. We each had two characters that would go around gaining experience and wealth together, and we'd joke about sex a lot.
One night we were going around buying equipment, and we kept kissing each other's characters. So we found a room alone, and I signed off one of my guys, and my remaining guy had a threesome with her two characters. A week later one of her characters took on both of mine.
Boy were we a weird couple.
The US government is larger today than it has ever been. I'd venture that the percentage of government office computers running Windows is roughly equal to the overall percentage of American office computers running Windows - in other words, friggin' huge. So how much of your paycheck goes to Microsoft every month?
What would be the effect on Microsoft's monopoly if every federal and state (since the state governments are the ones complaining now) government office installed Linux or bought a Mac? If you never had to apply for a government job by submitting your resume as a Word document? If every publicly-funded school stopped teaching kids on Windows? If every government web site complied with HTML standards?
The government takes your money to buy from Microsoft, then it takes more to pay lawyers to bring down Microsoft. God bless America.
Or you could read The Antitrust Terrible 10: Why the Most Reviled "Anti-competitive" Business Practices Can Benefit Consumers in the New Economy. Note that the 8th section in the PDF deals specifically with tying and bundling. Enjoy!
Just as it's not right for media companies to destroy filesharing utilities that make their business model obsolete, it's wrong to sue someone for making a product better than yours.
You're right. I'd say that the mass media are more "democratic" today than they've ever been in the last two centuries. William Randolph Hearst and pals controlled everything you read a hundred years ago, and through most of the twentieth century, you had three TV networks or nothing.
Today we've got any number of socialist news sites, right-wing commentary, plus access to everything AP and Reuters put out. Every think tank has the means to get their message to a worldwide audience.
And yet, with all this, people still complain that the media aren't state-controlled enough. And these are the same people who complain that the state is run by Big Evil Corporations. (I'm not saying it isn't.) But if the state runs the media, and the BEC's run the state, how is that a good thing?
I wouldn't call that a fix. It's more like a patch. Plus I'd like to know how "they" would go about doing that in my cube. :)
Yes, in France they have a shorter work week. In fact, it is illegal for workers of large companies to work more than 35 hours in a week. French government workers have been known to write down license plates of cars in parking lots in the morning, and then come back at night to make sure those cars are gone. There has also been talk of workers' being inspected by government agents to make sure they aren't taking any work home.
It must be wonderful to live in a country where no one is allowed to work harder than anyone else.
Can we not talk about this while I am stuck at work far from my girlfriend?
You all laugh at that joke, but in my friend's Operating Systems class this fall, the "cheat script" flagged half the students, very few of whom were actually cheating. My friend's group didn't hand in one part of the assignment, and the script detected similarities between the nonexistent file and the whitespace in other groups' code. Duh. And of course, instead of first LOOKING at the similarities, the professors went ahead and accused my friend of cheating, and told him he had to come to an "appeal session" THAT SAME DAY.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that security necessitates keeping students' boxes inaccessible from the net. The desktop versions of Windows seem to get less secure with each release. A lot of college students try out alternate operating systems that may have too many features enabled too. It's for the safety of the students, and for the safety of every box on the net which could become a target of a DDOS.
The system was not put in place to hurt filesharers, in fact, because we had that under control - if you exceeded 2 gigs a week downstream or 500 MB a week upstream you got shut off for 1 week - but because too many dorm computers were getting h4x0red and used for DDOS attacks, and the university was getting blamed. (Just be glad they did this BEFORE WinXP came out.)
There's a happy ending, though. Somebody set up a Neomodus DirectConnect hub on a dorm computer, and it spread like wildfire. The university only really pays for bandwidth that leaves the university, right? So now we share files to our heart's content, there's no upload or download restrictions, and the downloads are fast as all hell because they're all within the same organization.
I use Windows on all my non-server computers. But I'm worried when I see a government shelling out taxpayer money to Microsoft for millions of copies of Windows. Before long, people will be complaining that MS has a monopoly on the OS market, and asking the government to spend MORE money attacking the monopoly they helped create.
I'm not a Belgian citizen, and they can do what they want. But it really rubs me the wrong way here in the USA when huge government offices buy Windows, and all the while there's endless antitrust litigation going on.
Belgian IT workerss who earn their living doing Linux-related work will be hurt if the government increases MS's market share, and the worst part is they'll be paying for it out of their own taxes.
Hating X10 ads doesn't make you a prude at all. I have no problem with images of scantily clad or nude women, or even with hard-core pornography. What worries me about the X10 ads is the implication (and don't tell me it isn't there) that they can and should be used for voyeurism. The combination of that suggestion with the ubiquitous nature of the ads is truly offensive.
I can't find it either.... and I have yet to see a response here from someone who has. Most just seem to be condemning Yahoo. Can ANYONE tell me which link it is from that US Economy page?
Hahahaha! My friend was in that class. Of course, that was also the class where their "cheat script" flagged half the students, very few of whom were actually cheating. My friend's group didn't hand in one part of the assignment, and the script detected similarities between the nonexistent file and the whitespace in other groups' code. Duh. And of course, instead of first LOOKING at the similarities, the professors went ahead and accused my friend of cheating, and told him he had to come to an "appeal session" THAT SAME DAY.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
We will, of course, have to agree to disagree about this, but for me, there were parts where I kinda "zoned out" when they were going on about physics. If I thought it was a great play, and there were parts I couldn't follow, then those parts didn't add anything to it for me. Other people (less scientifically inclined than I) told me the same thing.
My dad owns the script. Maybe I'll borrow and reread it this week. (If I can pull myself out of Tolkien.)
My theory on "Copenhagen" (and I've seen both it and "Proof" in NYC) is that it was written for British audiences.
A Briton looks back at the nuclear race of WWII and thinks, "Boy, it's a good thing Hitler never got the bomb, otherwise I would have been toast." Therefore, the question in the play - did Heisenberg really "forget" to try out that one calculation, or was it intentional? - is a major one for the British, because it's the question of why they didn't get destroyed.
To an American (especially one of Japanese descent), it's a less relevant question. Our nuclear researchers (Oppenheimer, Bohr, etc.) DID produce a bomb, and with it they produced all the nuclear questions of the last 60 years. Nuclear warfare is a reality to us, whereas it's a scary fantasy to the British.
So in Frayn's play, when Heisenberg decides to plug in the numbers off the top of his head, and the stage is flooded in the light and sound of a nuclear holocaust, that's the British nightmare. Once I looked at that as the crux of the play, I appreciated it a lot more.
That said, it would be a better play if the director would snip a little bit of the physics out, especially the parts that are repeated several times.
I think every web site owner who reads their logs faithfully can relate a story of users' being referred to the site through a Google search on something completely unrelated. I remember a while back when an entry I had on Diaryland which said something like "Then my drunk girlfriend and her three drunk apartmentmates stopped by" reached Google, I started getting hits literally DAILY referred by a search on "drunk girls."
Diarylanders find the phenomenon so amusing that there's now a site dedicated to it: OddGoogle.
I, unfortunately, will be travelling most of today and tomorrow, so I won't get to see the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci Fi. So all of you need to watch it in honor of me.
What's cool is that instead of doing it strictly in order by episode, they're putting the "classics" on in prime time. Here are the lineups for both nights:
The prime-time lineup: Monday, 8 p.m., "Will the Real Martians Please Stand Up?"; 8:33, "To Serve Man"; 9:05, "The Dummy"; 9:36, "Eye of the Beholder"; 10:09, "The Howling Man."
Tuesday, 8 p.m., "A Penny for Your Thoughts"; 8:33, "The Masks"; 9:06, "The Hitch-Hiker"; 9:37, "It's a Good Life"; 10:09, "The Midnight Sun."
Trivia: Two of the above-mentioned episodes were turned into Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segments - which ones? (Could be more than two, actually, but I know of two for sure.)
I'm not an MS-basher, but I used Mainsoft's port of Visual SourceSafe on Solaris and.... uh, I still have nightmares. Every mouse action took a half-second longer than it should have to register. It was horrendous. And then one day it just stopped working. No error message - I just typed "vss" at the shell prompt and it started the application but no window came up. My boss told me to just start editing the files without any version control. Luckily my time there ended before they got it working again.
Which is exactly what my sister and I have taken to doing. Every year we agree to buy ourselves a CD, give it to the other to wrap, and then open it on Christmas morning to please our parents. I love her to death, but she knows as little about the techno I listen to as I do about the indie rock she listens to. If it were up to us, we wouldn't exchange gifts at all.
Well, maybe that's a little strong. I'd like to have a gathering where everybody brings something from a very specific category. Cheese is my favorite food - what if everyone picked out a cheese they'd never heard of and we all shared them? This would work well with beers, wines, cigars....
Too bad I'm lazy.
The Natural Science requirement says they have to take two courses in the same discipline. I advise people to do Physics because the department has great teachers and because it can give one a new way of thinking about the world, but a lot of them end up in Geology - "Rocks for Jocks." Nonetheless, when you are doing two courses in the discipline, you're bound to end up with something of a grasp on its concepts, and hopefully it'll make you a slightly more scientific thinker when you graduate.
Is it true that there are now flying vehicles? How did they get away with releasing that after September 11th?