but i think i would rather take my chances with my car losing all power and coasting to a stop than in getting hit with the shockwave from an explosive blast, or the debris from said shockwave from an explosive blast.
the only 'safe' war will be like the one in the mentioned star trek episode, where war and casualties are all logical, rather than physical, events.
>>I am always amazed at how generous liberal politicians are with the taxpayer's money.
Ah, the Rush Limbaugh excuse machine comes to Slashdot. Let me get this straight- you are saying that a good ol' boy, deep in the heart of Texass, is a Liberal?
give me a break. your so called conservatives are nothing of the sort when it comes to skimming large amounts of money from the public drawer. This dates all the way back to Kissinger- the bigger the crime, the bigger the immunity. That is the Republican way- rape what you can, have the gool ol' boys cover your ass (no pun intended, although Deliverance comes to mind).
I live in Chicago, and we fortunately got rid of our so-called Conservatives, because they pretty much robbed the state of Illinois for the past 20 years that they were in charge of the state.
What is their legacy? A huge, staggering debt. Corruption scandals. Croonie-ism and patronage (hell, half the state politician's last names are Ryan).
And my personal favorite is a State funded daily traffic jam that we call our Tollway system. Why anyone would want to PAY to sit in a traffic jam is beyond me. How they can justify it and call it necessary, and at the same time raise how much they charge... well, its criminal, and hopefully some people are going to jail on this one.
Anyway, please dont blame the problems in Texass on 'Liberals'. It makes you sound like a person who has Rush do your thinking for you.
But the important question is....
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 0
Oh my lord. Are you telling me that MS is giving me a free computer? Your point and comparison just suck.
You have to be dumber than you sound if you are trying to say that MS is wrong for giving free software to enhance its operating system.
I am always presenting the same arguement- nobody cried the the makers of terminal emulators and winsocks when Windows 95 was introduced. This is the exact same situation; MS recognized there was a piece of software that was in high demand, enough so that most Windows users were forced to buy it just to get normal use out of their computer.
So, being the great marketing company that they are, they decided to add value to their product by integrating much-demanded features.
Doesnt Linux have a web-browser installable with their OS? How about MacOS and OSX? How about BSD? I dont know from personal experience, but I would imagine that all of these products DO come with a browser. So why the double standard? You are trying to tell me its alright for everyone EXCEPT Microsoft to put a browser into their product?
In my mind, MS won the browser war for me just on the strength of their product alone. There may have been contractual misdoings behind the scenes, but so what? It just sped up a process that was already happening- Netscape lost because they put out an inferior product.
my oh my, this "my business needs to make money" concept just got lost somewhere during the 90s; I dont know how, thats what one would imagine was being taught in business schools (or via common sense).
Oh well, I said before this company would be on www.fuckedcompany.com before, and now I have been proven correct.
Red Hat, you're next!
they should have refered them back to the legislation they passed way back in the day in reference to 'fair use' on both tape players and vcr tapes. it just seems to me this is a recurring problem, and the same industries keep seeking the bad same solution, but later go on the make tons of money once they allow fair usage. sometimes I question how much of an advantage intelligence is in a species.
well, its nice to see Yet Another Useless Mame Article, but I guess its better than seing the Yet Another Useless Linux Article, or the always present Yet Another Petty Microsoft Complaint (see also Yet Another Rank Regarding Microsoft Installed Base Envy).
I think an XBox is more than up to the task of playing a NeoGeo game. I played those things fine on my p2-300, for goodness sake! The only down side was that it took *forever* to load, and there was some minor slowness when there was a lot of action on the screen, but hey, it was a p2-300.
Ever heard the phrase "tyranny of the majority"? Cruel and blatantly odd laws would exist, they'd just be created by the voters rather then the corporations. It's quite possible that we would still have slavery, lynchings, child labor and even worse institutions if the average person could change the law rather then have to open his mind. (Which is just what corporations do.)
thats not strictly true; corporations resist change even more so than people. If government (and Ralph Nader, to a very large extent) hadnt stepped in and imposed safety standards for automobiles, we wouldnt have airbags or even seat belts.
Dont take my word for it, this is all well documented. In fact, I think there was some kind of thing about Nader on the History Channel. But anyway, the real problem is one you touched on slightly- that the role of Government, ideally anyway, is to step in and do what is best for everyone, regardless of opinions (or even costs). They are supposed to take a long term view, but that role has been steadily eroding (and quite visually) over the past few decades.
Corporations and special interests have gained way too much influence in America.
this idea of "Open Source Law" is an extremely intreging one, though...
yes, MS is kind of confusing people already with XP.
I wish I had a dollar every time I was talking about Office XP and someone thought I meant Windows XP.
I think one of the problem is that, honestly, most people DONT know what.NET is. Its really pretty cool, IMO. But as with all technical things, there is a ton of misinformation amongst the tinkerers and charlatans.
Thats ok, because it all just makes me look good when some doofus cant get it to work!
wtf are you talking about? Thats like saying that a car stereo someone gives me isnt free, because I need to have a car to install it in.
Is your point that, for IE to be 'free', they need to make it for other OS's, like Mac? Oops, they already do that.
maybe they need to waste even more money on creating a working, stable browser for the other niche markets, like linux and bsd. Here is a good business model- instead of adding value to the customers of OUR OWN operating system, lets just make free software for other OSs as well.
so go make your own company, and when the bubble bursts, you can crawl back under the rock from whence you came, moron. No wonder all these internet companies wasted so much money, they had unrealist dolts like the slashdot community backing it.
"oh, everything should be free". "oh, Microsoft is evil because they make money". "oh, im gonna move out of my parents basement as soon as I get the IPO on my linux software company".
HAHA, dream on, loser. In case you didnt notice, we are living in a somewhat free market economy, where they MARKETPLACE makes decisions. If companies like MS products, there has to be a compelling reason why. I for one like the support you get, and the fact that their software tends to be tons more stable than the third party shit out there. Netscape lost the battle for me as a customer because it couldnt go five minutes without having some sort of crash or error. IE 3.02 (the first version I used) was pretty rock solid, and aside from being outdated is still a servicable browser.
IBM is a great company, with some of the best technologies out there. This should be a good fit for both AMD and IBM.
I wouldnt call IBM slow. They are really just ultra-conservative; they will not do something unless they know 99.999% that it will work; that is exactly why their mainframes are still being used.
as for their consumer products, I havent really been too impressed, but consumer products from any company are pretty much trash. If I were to buy a packaged solution PC I would either go with Dell or something from Compaq's business line. Sure, its more expensive, but those things last forever (there are still 166MHz Deskpro2000s out there, still working away!).
Because if your $100 sink gives way, you can have $50000+ of water damage to contend with.... whereas on a computer the stakes are usually much lower.
Oh really? So if the database for the payroll department gets trashed, thats low stakes, huh? I think this discussion was pointed toward IT professionals, which you are obviously not.
As for the subject at hand, I whole heartedly agree that there should be some sort of professional accountability. I currently and in the past have unfortunately worked with too many IT charlatans.
Your example of $10k for a $3.5k job sounds all too familiar; I do consulting for the government, and aside from the fact that incompitants become managers, and too many of the ordinary workers are only experts at dodging work and responsibility, they still have the normal problem of nontechnical managers making the technical decisions.
I previously made the suggestion that anyone working in our IT department should be certified, either before being hired or after the fact for existing employees, but dont think it will be considered, at least until somebody makes a high-profile screw-up. So much for being proactive...
Ya, you *supposedly* did tech support for *them* (whatever and whoever you mean by that). If Win2k is based on any code base, it would have been Windows NT, not 95. That is why old Windows 95 programs will not run on Win2k, but NT programs probably will. Also, ALL the networking works pretty much exactly like WinNT- I should know, I work on both WinNT and Win2k servers.
I do network engineering, I am an MCSE, and I am (was?) certified in Windows 95 way back in the day. So as far as being technically qualified to say what the OS is based on, I would definitely put my experience against some guy who did 'tech support' for 'them'.
Also, XP is based on Win2k. It was not written completely by hand. That is why "NT5", aka Windows 2000 (another clue as to the codebase?) had a much longer development cycle than XP (which actually shows up in Server Manager as NT5.1- thats strange...)
So please go peddle your misinformation elsewhere; maybe you can impress your mom with how much you know about computers, but Im not impressed.
This case is very basic, and I dont see that Sun has an ice-cube's chance on the sun (haha) of winning.
1. Sun prevented MS, in court, of updating their JavaVM to higher versions.
2. MS wanted to get out of the JavaVM business, but wanted to have Sun maintain an install on demand installation. Sun refused.
3. MS then figures "hey, since it seems that Sun doesn't want us making our own JavaVM, and doesn't want to maintain a package for our customers, we may as well just ship IE and WinXP without Java."
You see, what Sun was REALLY after was attempting to get the courts to force MS to include an install of Sun's Java package into the OS, and getting MS to pay a royalty to Sun for it.
This isn't about open standards, because Java was never open. This isn't about technology, because there are alternatives to Java which work much better and do a lot more. This is about money, plain and simple- MS has some, and Sun has their eyes on a cut. Imagine how much money Sun would make if they were receiving a royalty on every Windows license sold! I'm sure this logic is nothing new to Sun.
My own personal feelings on a similiar subject is that personal computing and client/server have pretty much evolved as far as they can go; anything 'new' is either fixing bugs or adding fluff features.
From what I can see, the next big advance in Enterprise computing will be when someone can have an Out-of-Box desktop operating system with distributed computing built into it. Imagine if a company of 500 users could combine their idle computing power (which I would say is 80+ percent of the time) to function as a server. Also, the only way this virtual server would crash is if the entire network went down!
There is still a lot of progress to be made, but it seems everyone is either trying to make their own flavor of Windows 2000 server, or MS trying to make an NDS alternative, or whatever. MS's.NET looks promising as far as interoperability with disepate systems goes, and everyone can agree that letting your systems talk to each other has been the holy grail of networking. So while that is progress of sorts, MS is really just finishing up work that should have been done by the industry over ten years ago. That is really the reason I have no beef with MS; ya, they took other company's innovations, but these companies wanted to just have their one little technology and milk it for what they could; MS was always about building a complete product.
For example, look at Windows 95, perhaps the biggest advance in personal computing since the mouse. They were the first to take virtual memory, terminal emulation, networking, protocol stacks, etc and throw them all into a one-time purchase. AND they didnt stop there, later adding a uniform graphics/sound interface with Direct X and a web browser with Internet Explorer (I for one never liked having to purchase the OS, a WinSock, and Netscape to be able to go on the internet, and IMHO also found IE to be consistenly less crash-prone than Netscape).
The US has never been about free trade, because free trade is opposed to capitalism.
Interestingly enough, capitalism is very much disposed to monopolies, which the US is supposedly against. I am sure we can all agree that while monopolies are 'contained', to a certain extent, they are not really prohibited.
Strictly speaking, Free Trade is essentially the attitude that the marketplace decides the success and failure of products/services. However, there have been countless times when extremely large and influential companies have exerted influence, be it politial, legal, illegal, financial, etc, in order to either prevent a product/service from coming to market, or to cause the product/service to fail in the marketplace in spite of it being the superior product.
this pattern has been repeated ad naseum in the auto industry, software, computer hardware (cough... Apple... cough), oil/gasoline industry, and pretty much any sector you can think of. Heck, even Thomas Edison's dealings with Tesla tended to be more Machiavellian than scientific.
Apple's pricing has always been way over what sensible people will pay. Why else would someone pay $2000 for a 1GHz iLamp, when you can get a PC that is twice as powerful for under $900?
Apple is all about the sizzle, not the steak, all about the alternative lifestyle type thing. Apple and Volkswagon are targetting the same demographic.
>If they have linux versions, why not make them available on their website?
ya, i cant for the life of me figure out why any company would want to make money off something, especially after they invested tons of money into it. those greedy fucks.
well, Sony's business model on PS and PS2 only worked because they ended up having the most popular system. If you have to spend $2B to make a console, it hardly seems like you arent willing to take a loss (even if it isnt, technically, on each machine).
What I guess I am saying is that, no matter how you spin it, you are going to lose money in the short term. But since MS is only losing less than $200mil, as opposed to Sony's first-year loss of $2b for the factory, parts, etc, it seems they are getting off cheap in the short term.
I will say this, however: I think X-Box is going to lose just on the weakness of its games lineup. Technologically, I really like the X-Box, and if someone can hack it so that it can be used as a file server or something I would really be tempted to buy one. But as just a games machine, their lineup seems weak. I know for a fact I will be buying a GameCube just for Metroid and Zelda, and I really like a bunch of the games for PS2 (and it will play my old PS games), so I will probably get that eventually. But there just doesnt seem to be a killer, must-have game for the X-Box. Halo is great, but I want to play it on my PC, since it will have better multiplayer support.
Slashdot Mirror
but i think i would rather take my chances with my car losing all power and coasting to a stop than in getting hit with the shockwave from an explosive blast, or the debris from said shockwave from an explosive blast.
the only 'safe' war will be like the one in the mentioned star trek episode, where war and casualties are all logical, rather than physical, events.
Ah, the Rush Limbaugh excuse machine comes to Slashdot. Let me get this straight- you are saying that a good ol' boy, deep in the heart of Texass, is a Liberal?
give me a break. your so called conservatives are nothing of the sort when it comes to skimming large amounts of money from the public drawer. This dates all the way back to Kissinger- the bigger the crime, the bigger the immunity. That is the Republican way- rape what you can, have the gool ol' boys cover your ass (no pun intended, although Deliverance comes to mind).
I live in Chicago, and we fortunately got rid of our so-called Conservatives, because they pretty much robbed the state of Illinois for the past 20 years that they were in charge of the state.
What is their legacy? A huge, staggering debt. Corruption scandals. Croonie-ism and patronage (hell, half the state politician's last names are Ryan).
And my personal favorite is a State funded daily traffic jam that we call our Tollway system. Why anyone would want to PAY to sit in a traffic jam is beyond me. How they can justify it and call it necessary, and at the same time raise how much they charge... well, its criminal, and hopefully some people are going to jail on this one.
Anyway, please dont blame the problems in Texass on 'Liberals'. It makes you sound like a person who has Rush do your thinking for you.
Is Red Hat in F'd Companies part II?
Is Loki in there?
I could go on, but this is getting boring.
You have to be dumber than you sound if you are trying to say that MS is wrong for giving free software to enhance its operating system.
I am always presenting the same arguement- nobody cried the the makers of terminal emulators and winsocks when Windows 95 was introduced. This is the exact same situation; MS recognized there was a piece of software that was in high demand, enough so that most Windows users were forced to buy it just to get normal use out of their computer.
So, being the great marketing company that they are, they decided to add value to their product by integrating much-demanded features.
Doesnt Linux have a web-browser installable with their OS? How about MacOS and OSX? How about BSD? I dont know from personal experience, but I would imagine that all of these products DO come with a browser. So why the double standard? You are trying to tell me its alright for everyone EXCEPT Microsoft to put a browser into their product?
In my mind, MS won the browser war for me just on the strength of their product alone. There may have been contractual misdoings behind the scenes, but so what? It just sped up a process that was already happening- Netscape lost because they put out an inferior product.
my oh my, this "my business needs to make money" concept just got lost somewhere during the 90s; I dont know how, thats what one would imagine was being taught in business schools (or via common sense). Oh well, I said before this company would be on www.fuckedcompany.com before, and now I have been proven correct. Red Hat, you're next!
the testing made the baloon open up a rift in time/space, causing it to travel back in time to july 4, 1947 and crash land near Roswell, New Mexico.
The truth is out there...
they should have refered them back to the legislation they passed way back in the day in reference to 'fair use' on both tape players and vcr tapes.
it just seems to me this is a recurring problem, and the same industries keep seeking the bad same solution, but later go on the make tons of money once they allow fair usage.
sometimes I question how much of an advantage intelligence is in a species.
well, its nice to see Yet Another Useless Mame Article, but I guess its better than seing the Yet Another Useless Linux Article, or the always present Yet Another Petty Microsoft Complaint (see also Yet Another Rank Regarding Microsoft Installed Base Envy).
I think an XBox is more than up to the task of playing a NeoGeo game. I played those things fine on my p2-300, for goodness sake! The only down side was that it took *forever* to load, and there was some minor slowness when there was a lot of action on the screen, but hey, it was a p2-300.
Who knows, this could be the biggest con since Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower (twice), or since Enron anyway.
damn Blockbuster... I cant even rent "Encino Housewife Hookers" there.
thats not strictly true; corporations resist change even more so than people. If government (and Ralph Nader, to a very large extent) hadnt stepped in and imposed safety standards for automobiles, we wouldnt have airbags or even seat belts.
Dont take my word for it, this is all well documented. In fact, I think there was some kind of thing about Nader on the History Channel. But anyway, the real problem is one you touched on slightly- that the role of Government, ideally anyway, is to step in and do what is best for everyone, regardless of opinions (or even costs). They are supposed to take a long term view, but that role has been steadily eroding (and quite visually) over the past few decades.
Corporations and special interests have gained way too much influence in America.
this idea of "Open Source Law" is an extremely intreging one, though...
I wish I had a dollar every time I was talking about Office XP and someone thought I meant Windows XP.
I think one of the problem is that, honestly, most people DONT know what
Thats ok, because it all just makes me look good when some doofus cant get it to work!
Is your point that, for IE to be 'free', they need to make it for other OS's, like Mac? Oops, they already do that.
maybe they need to waste even more money on creating a working, stable browser for the other niche markets, like linux and bsd. Here is a good business model- instead of adding value to the customers of OUR OWN operating system, lets just make free software for other OSs as well.
so go make your own company, and when the bubble bursts, you can crawl back under the rock from whence you came, moron. No wonder all these internet companies wasted so much money, they had unrealist dolts like the slashdot community backing it.
"oh, everything should be free". "oh, Microsoft is evil because they make money". "oh, im gonna move out of my parents basement as soon as I get the IPO on my linux software company".
HAHA, dream on, loser. In case you didnt notice, we are living in a somewhat free market economy, where they MARKETPLACE makes decisions. If companies like MS products, there has to be a compelling reason why. I for one like the support you get, and the fact that their software tends to be tons more stable than the third party shit out there. Netscape lost the battle for me as a customer because it couldnt go five minutes without having some sort of crash or error. IE 3.02 (the first version I used) was pretty rock solid, and aside from being outdated is still a servicable browser.
I wouldnt call IBM slow. They are really just ultra-conservative; they will not do something unless they know 99.999% that it will work; that is exactly why their mainframes are still being used.
as for their consumer products, I havent really been too impressed, but consumer products from any company are pretty much trash. If I were to buy a packaged solution PC I would either go with Dell or something from Compaq's business line. Sure, its more expensive, but those things last forever (there are still 166MHz Deskpro2000s out there, still working away!).
Oh really? So if the database for the payroll department gets trashed, thats low stakes, huh? I think this discussion was pointed toward IT professionals, which you are obviously not.
As for the subject at hand, I whole heartedly agree that there should be some sort of professional accountability. I currently and in the past have unfortunately worked with too many IT charlatans.
Your example of $10k for a $3.5k job sounds all too familiar; I do consulting for the government, and aside from the fact that incompitants become managers, and too many of the ordinary workers are only experts at dodging work and responsibility, they still have the normal problem of nontechnical managers making the technical decisions.
I previously made the suggestion that anyone working in our IT department should be certified, either before being hired or after the fact for existing employees, but dont think it will be considered, at least until somebody makes a high-profile screw-up. So much for being proactive...
I do network engineering, I am an MCSE, and I am (was?) certified in Windows 95 way back in the day. So as far as being technically qualified to say what the OS is based on, I would definitely put my experience against some guy who did 'tech support' for 'them'.
Also, XP is based on Win2k. It was not written completely by hand. That is why "NT5", aka Windows 2000 (another clue as to the codebase?) had a much longer development cycle than XP (which actually shows up in Server Manager as NT5.1- thats strange...)
So please go peddle your misinformation elsewhere; maybe you can impress your mom with how much you know about computers, but Im not impressed.
1. Sun prevented MS, in court, of updating their JavaVM to higher versions.
2. MS wanted to get out of the JavaVM business, but wanted to have Sun maintain an install on demand installation. Sun refused.
3. MS then figures "hey, since it seems that Sun doesn't want us making our own JavaVM, and doesn't want to maintain a package for our customers, we may as well just ship IE and WinXP without Java."
You see, what Sun was REALLY after was attempting to get the courts to force MS to include an install of Sun's Java package into the OS, and getting MS to pay a royalty to Sun for it.
This isn't about open standards, because Java was never open. This isn't about technology, because there are alternatives to Java which work much better and do a lot more. This is about money, plain and simple- MS has some, and Sun has their eyes on a cut. Imagine how much money Sun would make if they were receiving a royalty on every Windows license sold! I'm sure this logic is nothing new to Sun.
From what I can see, the next big advance in Enterprise computing will be when someone can have an Out-of-Box desktop operating system with distributed computing built into it. Imagine if a company of 500 users could combine their idle computing power (which I would say is 80+ percent of the time) to function as a server. Also, the only way this virtual server would crash is if the entire network went down!
There is still a lot of progress to be made, but it seems everyone is either trying to make their own flavor of Windows 2000 server, or MS trying to make an NDS alternative, or whatever. MS's .NET looks promising as far as interoperability with disepate systems goes, and everyone can agree that letting your systems talk to each other has been the holy grail of networking. So while that is progress of sorts, MS is really just finishing up work that should have been done by the industry over ten years ago. That is really the reason I have no beef with MS; ya, they took other company's innovations, but these companies wanted to just have their one little technology and milk it for what they could; MS was always about building a complete product.
For example, look at Windows 95, perhaps the biggest advance in personal computing since the mouse. They were the first to take virtual memory, terminal emulation, networking, protocol stacks, etc and throw them all into a one-time purchase. AND they didnt stop there, later adding a uniform graphics/sound interface with Direct X and a web browser with Internet Explorer (I for one never liked having to purchase the OS, a WinSock, and Netscape to be able to go on the internet, and IMHO also found IE to be consistenly less crash-prone than Netscape).
anyway, thats all I have to say about that.
Interestingly enough, capitalism is very much disposed to monopolies, which the US is supposedly against. I am sure we can all agree that while monopolies are 'contained', to a certain extent, they are not really prohibited.
Strictly speaking, Free Trade is essentially the attitude that the marketplace decides the success and failure of products/services. However, there have been countless times when extremely large and influential companies have exerted influence, be it politial, legal, illegal, financial, etc, in order to either prevent a product/service from coming to market, or to cause the product/service to fail in the marketplace in spite of it being the superior product.
this pattern has been repeated ad naseum in the auto industry, software, computer hardware (cough... Apple... cough), oil/gasoline industry, and pretty much any sector you can think of. Heck, even Thomas Edison's dealings with Tesla tended to be more Machiavellian than scientific.
Apple's pricing has always been way over what sensible people will pay. Why else would someone pay $2000 for a 1GHz iLamp, when you can get a PC that is twice as powerful for under $900? Apple is all about the sizzle, not the steak, all about the alternative lifestyle type thing. Apple and Volkswagon are targetting the same demographic.
I agree. All Apple products really appeal to alternative lifestyles.
>If they have linux versions, why not make them available on their website? ya, i cant for the life of me figure out why any company would want to make money off something, especially after they invested tons of money into it. those greedy fucks.
google+"nwn mac"=answer.
just goes to show the brainpower of people who use iLamps instead of computers.
well, Sony's business model on PS and PS2 only worked because they ended up having the most popular system. If you have to spend $2B to make a console, it hardly seems like you arent willing to take a loss (even if it isnt, technically, on each machine).
What I guess I am saying is that, no matter how you spin it, you are going to lose money in the short term. But since MS is only losing less than $200mil, as opposed to Sony's first-year loss of $2b for the factory, parts, etc, it seems they are getting off cheap in the short term.
I will say this, however: I think X-Box is going to lose just on the weakness of its games lineup. Technologically, I really like the X-Box, and if someone can hack it so that it can be used as a file server or something I would really be tempted to buy one. But as just a games machine, their lineup seems weak. I know for a fact I will be buying a GameCube just for Metroid and Zelda, and I really like a bunch of the games for PS2 (and it will play my old PS games), so I will probably get that eventually. But there just doesnt seem to be a killer, must-have game for the X-Box. Halo is great, but I want to play it on my PC, since it will have better multiplayer support.