It's up to spineless Dell, HP, etc. to stand up to Microsoft and tell them the way it is.
At this level, the relationship between MS and the manufacturer should be no different to, say, the car industry where Company A manufactures a component to go into Company B's car engines.
Windows XP is just a component, albeit a necessary one to a lot of people, of laptops and pre-built desktops, it's up to the builders to take Microsoft to task and demand for XP to continue for OEM.
MS have been allowed to get far too big for their boots over the years, they need to be knocked down to size.
...50,000,000 geeks along the Eastern seaboard of the United States simultaneously switched on and off their home lighting to spell "Linux Rocks" in illuminated 500 mile high letters as Mr Gates passed overhead in the Soyuz 15 spacecraft...
Images of Bill Gates crammed into a tiny capsule drinking his own recycled urine for several days can bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened Linux user.
...following yesterday's tragic news concerning the explosion aboard the Soyuz 15 spacecraft which left only one functional spacesuit for either Commander Bill Gates or his co-pilot Bobo The Chimp to attempt Earth re-entry and splashdown into the Black Sea, the Russian Space Agency has just released some good news and pictures of Bobo happily reunited with his chimp troop in Moscow Zoo...
...kept in static geostationary orbit only by the sheer magical power created in chanting repeatedly the word "developers" while performing an ancient ritualistic dance.
Encryption is not designed to keep a piece of data hidden from prying eyes forever.
Instead, it's about hiding data in such a way that it would take so much time and so much computer resource to break the encryption code to the point where it becomes impractical to even try doing it in the first place. In practical terms, for a specific encryption algorythm, it might, for example, be estimated that it would take 1 man on 1 PC up to 8000 years of continual effort to break a particular encryption algorithm.
However, get 2 men on 2 PCs working together, it'll take up to 4000 years to break it.
4 men on 4 PCs will take about 2000 years to break it.
etc.
Based on that assumption, I give your encryption keys 1 year at the most.
No. Apparently the mission objectives are a dozen orbits around Ballmer's ego while safely retrieving items of loose furniture in unstable orbits around him.
...as he sits there in his spacesuit in his capsule next to the Russian cosmonaut commander as "Soyuz 12 - Powered by Windows Vista" flashes up on the main control screen just before the primary engine ignition sequence...
It's too bad the Principal, and thereby the School Board, feels it's more important to save face than to educate people's children.
Part of educating children is to make them realise that as responsible citizens, they do not have the automatic right to do and say just as they please - in other words, respect for everyone else.
Sure, that teaching process falls on parents shoulders as much as it does the teachers, it is up to adults to "earn" that respect rather than automatically get it and I do feel that in this instance the school in question has gone over the top in countering what was done by the child in question.
But we should also bear in mind that kids these days are much better informed about the world and are fully aware that sometimes they are too young for the law to punish them for things they do - so they do it because they know they can get away with it.
I'm in my mid-40s but something I always remember from my school teaching was "the age of the use of reason" - namely that from about the age of 7, it was expected that you knew the difference between right and wrong and therefore faced the consequences of anything you did wrong.
I don't agree in being over-strict on kids and that corporal punishment should be used only as a last resort. But when kids have no respect for the people and society they live in, then it's about time the lily-livered Liberals shut the hell up and let the responible adults demonstrate to kids what they must and must not do if they themselves want to be responsible adults.
Teachers are not exempt from the 1st Amendment. They cannot be protected from public criticism just as much as I can't do anything about my neighbors posting a blog about how bad of a neighbor I am.
At least here in the UK, we have slander and libel laws to protect respectively against spoken and written defamation of someone's character.
So, yes, you can say or write just about anything you like here but if someone takes offence at what you've said or written and can prove it to be incorrect (or indeed racist), then you can be prosecuted for it.
If you have a problem with a teacher, then it's a matter for you to discuss with your parents and the headmaster ("principal" in US speech) - it has nothing to do with the rest of the world.
How would you feel if you and I knew each other, we had a grievance over something and I went walking around the streets with a megaphone shouting out how much of a jerk you are? It's the same principle...
At the grand old age of 45, I'm now going to give you the best piece of advice you are ever going to hear, as it was told to me by one of my teachers:
"In life, you can do anything you like - but before you do anything, make sure you understand and are prepared to accept the consequences of doing it."
Torrellas believes this would give chips a shorter time to market, saying "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market.""
So the P.O.S. unfinished game I just bought to run on the P.O.S. unfinished operating system I just bought is now expected to run on the P.O.S. unfinished PC I just bought...
If you've half a mind to go into marketing, that's all you need...
See my other post for how I got out of my TalkTalk contract but, in my experience, TalkTalk are in breach of their own contract because the level of service they were providing (at least around October/November last year when I left them) was not an "unlimited" broadband service - it was quite definitely throttled at peak periods to allow for their over-subscription of the service and I suffered a number of 48 hour plus outages while I was using them.
I wrote directly to their MD (Charles Dunstone) declaring my contract null and void due to their breach of contract with not providing the "unlimited" service I'd signed up for. Within 2 weeks I had a MAC code to go elsewhere...
My view is just not to take any sh*t from this big faceless corporations - kick up a stink and tell them the way it is, don't let them bully you.
About six months ago, we got suckered into changing my ADSL service over to the "free unlimited" broadband service offered by Talk Talk (a subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse) over here in the UK. My better half also had a mobile phone contract with them.
To cut a long story short, after 3 months we'd had enough of the endless outages and slowness of the Talk Talk ADSL service, even though we'd signed up for a minimum of a year with them. Having done some research on the web, I realised cancellation of the contract wouldn't be easy - so rather than wasting time with an underling in a call centre, I wrote a letter directly to their managing director, explaining how Talk Talk were in breach of contract for not providing us with the service that they'd advertised. Within 5 days of sending the letter, a senior manager from Talk Talk called me, promised me a £20 credit to my account and my MAC number within 7 days so I could go to another provider - no arguments whatsoever.
I never got the £20 credit but had no problems with changing ISP.
Cut to March of this year, my missus' 12 month mobile contract with Talk Talk ends and she decides to swap provider to a better deal. Talk Talk decide to invoice us £24 upon cessation of the service and when I ring in to their call centre, I'm told £4 is for call charges and £20 is a *LATE PAYMENT CHARGE* on an account we have been paying by monthly Direct Debit from our bank account.
I offer to pay the £4 call charges but tell the agent that if he insists I pay the late payment charge, then I would have to invoice him directly for the £20 ADSL account credit that I never got, along with an additional £20 late payment charge I was adding on top of that.
Suffice it to say, having put the guy in a situation of not being able to read a script from a screen, he accepted the £4 call charge and credited my account with £20 to cover the late payment charge.
The moral of this story is to to give them as good as they give you.
And while they're all busying themselves killing Orcs/living an online life, the rest of the human race should quickly bugger off to a new planet somewhere in a few colony ships.
Re:Importance of the other questions.
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It does tell people something. It tells them, "If you buy a Zune, you're an idiot."
Why do you Apple fanbois constantly make this incorrect assumption that anyone who is anti-Apple is automatically pro-Microsoft?
Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead owning an iPod or a Zune. I have a 2GB £20 (=$35) music player that:
1. Mounts as a USB drive I can read/write files to in both Linux and Windows.
2. Supports MP3 and Ogg - the only two music formats of any importance.
3. Nobody is going to mug me for it.
4. If I leave it on a plane or in a taxi, it's no great loss.
In my 45 years on this earth, I have never found a good reason to own an Apple product - and since I'm now far too old to worry about making fashion statements, I probably never will either...
The attitude you describe is typical of our good old UK politicians these days.
They tell us to fly less in order to be more "carbon neutral" (God, how I'm starting to loathe that phrase!) and, to "encourage" us, they stick an additional environmental tax on the cost of flights.
Yet we still see the likes of Tony Blair and Prince Charles (himself a vocal environmental spokesperson) still jettting around the world in their private planes.
Slashdot Mirror
At this level, the relationship between MS and the manufacturer should be no different to, say, the car industry where Company A manufactures a component to go into Company B's car engines.
Windows XP is just a component, albeit a necessary one to a lot of people, of laptops and pre-built desktops, it's up to the builders to take Microsoft to task and demand for XP to continue for OEM.
MS have been allowed to get far too big for their boots over the years, they need to be knocked down to size.
The oil soaked server runs "Mazola" Firefox with the "Grease" Monkey plugin on "Sunflower" Solaris.
...50,000,000 geeks along the Eastern seaboard of the United States simultaneously switched on and off their home lighting to spell "Linux Rocks" in illuminated 500 mile high letters as Mr Gates passed overhead in the Soyuz 15 spacecraft...
Images of Bill Gates crammed into a tiny capsule drinking his own recycled urine for several days can bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened Linux user.
...following yesterday's tragic news concerning the explosion aboard the Soyuz 15 spacecraft which left only one functional spacesuit for either Commander Bill Gates or his co-pilot Bobo The Chimp to attempt Earth re-entry and splashdown into the Black Sea, the Russian Space Agency has just released some good news and pictures of Bobo happily reunited with his chimp troop in Moscow Zoo...
...and as I recall the jokes told to me by my late Ukrainian father, it's one of the *cleaner* Ukrainian jokes about Russians also!
Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?
A. One's a shit in a capsule... the other relieves constipation.
"Elite" karma? Or am I just showing my age now?
...and he has to wait three months for a patch to fix it?
Don't worry about it - my Slashdot user number is a lot lower than yours... I have been here a LOOOOONG time!
...kept in static geostationary orbit only by the sheer magical power created in chanting repeatedly the word "developers" while performing an ancient ritualistic dance.
Instead, it's about hiding data in such a way that it would take so much time and so much computer resource to break the encryption code to the point where it becomes impractical to even try doing it in the first place. In practical terms, for a specific encryption algorythm, it might, for example, be estimated that it would take 1 man on 1 PC up to 8000 years of continual effort to break a particular encryption algorithm.
However, get 2 men on 2 PCs working together, it'll take up to 4000 years to break it.
4 men on 4 PCs will take about 2000 years to break it.
etc.
Based on that assumption, I give your encryption keys 1 year at the most.
Yep, "Bill Shits On Departure".
No. Apparently the mission objectives are a dozen orbits around Ballmer's ego while safely retrieving items of loose furniture in unstable orbits around him.
...as he sits there in his spacesuit in his capsule next to the Russian cosmonaut commander as "Soyuz 12 - Powered by Windows Vista" flashes up on the main control screen just before the primary engine ignition sequence...
Part of educating children is to make them realise that as responsible citizens, they do not have the automatic right to do and say just as they please - in other words, respect for everyone else.
Sure, that teaching process falls on parents shoulders as much as it does the teachers, it is up to adults to "earn" that respect rather than automatically get it and I do feel that in this instance the school in question has gone over the top in countering what was done by the child in question.
But we should also bear in mind that kids these days are much better informed about the world and are fully aware that sometimes they are too young for the law to punish them for things they do - so they do it because they know they can get away with it.
I'm in my mid-40s but something I always remember from my school teaching was "the age of the use of reason" - namely that from about the age of 7, it was expected that you knew the difference between right and wrong and therefore faced the consequences of anything you did wrong.
I don't agree in being over-strict on kids and that corporal punishment should be used only as a last resort. But when kids have no respect for the people and society they live in, then it's about time the lily-livered Liberals shut the hell up and let the responible adults demonstrate to kids what they must and must not do if they themselves want to be responsible adults.
At least here in the UK, we have slander and libel laws to protect respectively against spoken and written defamation of someone's character.
So, yes, you can say or write just about anything you like here but if someone takes offence at what you've said or written and can prove it to be incorrect (or indeed racist), then you can be prosecuted for it.
If you have a problem with a teacher, then it's a matter for you to discuss with your parents and the headmaster ("principal" in US speech) - it has nothing to do with the rest of the world.
How would you feel if you and I knew each other, we had a grievance over something and I went walking around the streets with a megaphone shouting out how much of a jerk you are? It's the same principle...
At the grand old age of 45, I'm now going to give you the best piece of advice you are ever going to hear, as it was told to me by one of my teachers:
"In life, you can do anything you like - but before you do anything, make sure you understand and are prepared to accept the consequences of doing it."
So the P.O.S. unfinished game I just bought to run on the P.O.S. unfinished operating system I just bought is now expected to run on the P.O.S. unfinished PC I just bought...
If you've half a mind to go into marketing, that's all you need...
I wrote directly to their MD (Charles Dunstone) declaring my contract null and void due to their breach of contract with not providing the "unlimited" service I'd signed up for. Within 2 weeks I had a MAC code to go elsewhere...
My view is just not to take any sh*t from this big faceless corporations - kick up a stink and tell them the way it is, don't let them bully you.
To cut a long story short, after 3 months we'd had enough of the endless outages and slowness of the Talk Talk ADSL service, even though we'd signed up for a minimum of a year with them. Having done some research on the web, I realised cancellation of the contract wouldn't be easy - so rather than wasting time with an underling in a call centre, I wrote a letter directly to their managing director, explaining how Talk Talk were in breach of contract for not providing us with the service that they'd advertised. Within 5 days of sending the letter, a senior manager from Talk Talk called me, promised me a £20 credit to my account and my MAC number within 7 days so I could go to another provider - no arguments whatsoever.
I never got the £20 credit but had no problems with changing ISP.
Cut to March of this year, my missus' 12 month mobile contract with Talk Talk ends and she decides to swap provider to a better deal. Talk Talk decide to invoice us £24 upon cessation of the service and when I ring in to their call centre, I'm told £4 is for call charges and £20 is a *LATE PAYMENT CHARGE* on an account we have been paying by monthly Direct Debit from our bank account.
I offer to pay the £4 call charges but tell the agent that if he insists I pay the late payment charge, then I would have to invoice him directly for the £20 ADSL account credit that I never got, along with an additional £20 late payment charge I was adding on top of that.
Suffice it to say, having put the guy in a situation of not being able to read a script from a screen, he accepted the £4 call charge and credited my account with £20 to cover the late payment charge.
The moral of this story is to to give them as good as they give you.
And while they're all busying themselves killing Orcs/living an online life, the rest of the human race should quickly bugger off to a new planet somewhere in a few colony ships.
Why do you Apple fanbois constantly make this incorrect assumption that anyone who is anti-Apple is automatically pro-Microsoft?
Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead owning an iPod or a Zune. I have a 2GB £20 (=$35) music player that:
1. Mounts as a USB drive I can read/write files to in both Linux and Windows.
2. Supports MP3 and Ogg - the only two music formats of any importance.
3. Nobody is going to mug me for it.
4. If I leave it on a plane or in a taxi, it's no great loss.
In my 45 years on this earth, I have never found a good reason to own an Apple product - and since I'm now far too old to worry about making fashion statements, I probably never will either...
They tell us to fly less in order to be more "carbon neutral" (God, how I'm starting to loathe that phrase!) and, to "encourage" us, they stick an additional environmental tax on the cost of flights.
Yet we still see the likes of Tony Blair and Prince Charles (himself a vocal environmental spokesperson) still jettting around the world in their private planes.