Not saying you are saying this but it reminds me of the ancient joke about how to change the IP or something on different OS'es.
Guess I will just show your post next time some windows fanboy complains about rm -Rf * being so complex.
And your right, I don;t know how to admin a windows network. But I do seem to remember that you can write your own windows install script and tell it not to install games. then again I just laughed at the person explaining how to do it and went back to my graphical linux installer and let him mess with cli on windows.
Gee, fucktards like you are exactly what is wrong with the world. Ooooh the boss is doing exactly what we are not supposed to do but he is the boss so it is alright.
That is why corruption and abuses of power can continue because those below are being spoil sports if they talk about it.
Oh you spot tax payers money being wasted but stay in official channels at all cost, no matter that this means it will never get solved. That is the system and the system must be obeyed.
Just find out where they live and drive around the block with the windows open and the radio turned up and play "how much is that doggie in the window" the dog chorus version. Get a team and take shifts. All perfectly legal. Just an annoyance they got to put up with.
Like a surgeon is a parody of like a virgin, in that he makes fun of madonna by doing the grinding on a operation table like she did on the gondala. BUT it is also a satire of the medical proffesion. Not a very hard and biting one but satire nonetheless.
The starwars song make fun of starwars but far less of the original song. of course humor is really hard to classify as it is to depended on taste. You could even question if the most recent starwars song is a parody or satire at all. It seems closer to a tribute. Meaning he just used the original work to create a new work without any attempt at parody or satire.
These rules are there for good reason as it stops people from taking the law into their own hand. Look at places where people do and it usually are places the UN is called in to try to do something and fail.
So basically you are not allowed to make "hidden" traps or in anyway deliberatly cause injury to a burglar. So you are allowed a spiked fence but you are not allowed to put up spikes behind the fence hidden under tall grass. You are allowed to use plain glass windows (and if he falls and impales himself on a smashed piece of glass that is not your fault) but you better make sure the glass is properly secured. No little trick with making the glass really lightly attached at the top so that when smashed any shard will come plunging down at the lightest touch.
Same with cars. Any car anti-theft device may not make the car dangerous. So no 100.000 volt charges through the seat or disabling the brakes or fun stuff like that.
Why? As said to stop people from taking the law into their own hands. Or would you prefer to go back to the time when all the land belonged to the local lord and he could have you flogged for "stealing" wood?
I worked in a bakery in my younger days (yes we had dinosaurs the little timmy) and we ofcourse had the radio on in the bakery. BUT we had to make sure that the sound would not reach the shop. If it did and customers could hear it then we had to pay a fee to the copyright holders as we were using radio to entertain our customers.
Never mind that in holland everyone who owned a radio receiver needed to pay a license fee already so that everyone in the store was almost 100% certain already paying for the radio program. They wanted us to pay extra just because of it.
Still it might work on those assholes with cheap headphones in public places. Charge them for all the people who can hear their music. That should soon teach them to get some decent ones that keep the music inside.
You don't want to be hauled off by the cops and be faced with charges of being a danger on the road AND copyright infringement. Merely risking killing people in a crash is far less of a crime then having an illegal movie. They may just throw away the key for the last one.
perhaps it was because they could only do very basic animation (in fact really like animation, move images along each other to create motion) that they really had to think about it. But I enjoyed the cut-scenes in X-wing and tie-fighter a hell of a lot more then in later lucasarts games.
Oh well just call me an old dinosaur who can't keep up with modern times. Except one tiny little problem Lucasarts. I BOUGHT all the old games. Now I don't anymore because while I now have far more money coming in I think your games are not worthy of me spending money anymore. Should lucasarts care? Only in so far as any company should care about losing a once loyal customer.
If someone else has to read the code then you got data being manipulated outside the code. I put in A=4 and when I look it says A=6. WTF? BUG BUG BUG. Oh no. Stored procedure. Yippy.
If you really have to figure out undocumented code you are going to follow the path, so if a function is called and you don't know what it does you look up the function and see. It is a nightmare but at least it can be done. Stored procedures add hidding function calls. You don't see it. Sure it can be figured out but I see the world divided in to two groups. Those who use stored procedures and who never have to figure out someone elses code. Those who do. The first like stored procedures. The latter hates them.
I like the three tier approach. Seperate presentation from business logic and storage. It is kinda unixie. Small applications that each do what they are best at. Databases are not programming languages.
Of course it is easy to use stored procedures as it enforces database rules, it is much easier to use myscl auto_incremenet feature then to write your own code to make unique ID's. However if you were looking at the code and you are any good at programming you should be wondering were the hell that ID number is filled. As said it is bad for a programmer when variables just change value without it being reflected in the code.
But of course this is just from my experience and from being taught by people who didn't like stored procedures. Others will have been raised differently and be capable of giving excellent reasons for their use. I think the only way to reach a compromise is for the code to reflect exactly via comments when a stored procedure will be called. Comments in code that are usefull. HA, that will be the day.
BSD license is nice if you want to take and give nothing back. the GPL requires you to give back so only companies that want to be part of the community can take part. Now lets have a little check about major companies back Linux vs BSD eh? IBM HP Novell etc etc vs ehm Apple. Oh I am sure there are some BSD users I left out but my excuse for that is that BSD users might never notice as companies that use BSD code never need to tell. Is MS using modified BSD code? Who knows, if they used modified GPL code we would know (MS is a lot of things but would never be stupid enough to set them self up like that, gates is shrewd enough to know wich laws to break and wich not to break)
BSD license has a "nicer" philopsphy behind it. It basically leaves people free to do whatever they want. Problem is that if you allow people to just take without giving that is exactly what they will be doing. The GPL forces people to play nice. Why should you be free to use my code without ever giving back?
BSD is old style logging, chop everything down then move on to the next tree. Linux is sustainable logging. Replace each cut down tree with a new one so the next generation will have a forest as well.
Just send every user a warning about misleading advertising, sue for misleading advertising. Helps frustated customers launch a class action suit against real. DO NOT USE THE DMCA.
That isn't so hard isn't it? Anyway if Apple was that worried about it they wouldn't have a no return policy on hardware you bought from them but wich modified when ordered on their own ordering site.
So I think your argument is crap. Ford has a responsibilty to provide repairs for my vehicle right up to the point that I void my warranty. So just make doing anything with your iPod void your warranty, I think you will find that this is current practice already.
They sell hardware. They have a duty to repair the hardware on warranty and to provide repairs of faulty components. One of the components is the software. They got no rights to tell me what I can and cannot do with it and they got no rights to tell a third party what they can and cannot do with it. Want a clear example? Third party addons for game consoles. Or do you think nintendo/sony/ms like all those "unofficial" cheaper and often better items? Who buys a nintendo GBA cable when the unofficial is better and cheaper? How much succes has nintendo has in banning this? Banning the afterburner for instance? Despite the fact the afterburner clearly eats into the profits as for less money you get a better product.
Sorry but I feel strongly about this subject. Sell the bloody hardware and then get out of my life. What next, the baker deciding what I can put on my bread?
Women making smart relationship decissions?
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This is Sci-Fi not fantasy. We are talking things that are theoretically possible based on what we know now and adding a generous dose of wild speculation and random guesswork.
You are well into the realms of pure fantasy. No basis in real life whatsoever. Women being able to avoid men that are bad for them. Yeah right you are even incapable of it yourselve. You reject him just because of his name. That is rational. We all know you can tell the wifebeaters by their given name.
and there's little alternatives for us.
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Damn to late the future is now. You do use some big words, googled for them? Pity you can't google grammar eh?
Just messing with you, not like I could do much better but then english ain't my first language.
As for advertising and american education, the rest of the world is just a few years behind, I once saw a documentary on kids in an american school being forced to watch commercials. The companies who owned the ads had paid for the lessons so if you didn't watch you were BANNED from class. It was a few years ago and I only saw half of the program so it could have been a spoof. It was supposed to be in one of the more depressed areas of big city.
Anyway we have long since passed the point of sponsored kantines and sponsored school books. We can bitch all we want about it but as long as we allow campaigns that promise tax cuts and don't gas people that vote based on this we can't expect anything else. He who promises the biggest cuts gets the power, to make the cuts he needs to cut money to schools. Then "industry" steps in but they don't do it for free.
Someone else commented how this kinda of future requires a lot of people to overcome their ethics. No it doesn't, it just requires everyone to make a tiny little adjustment of their ethics every couple of years. That is presuming people have ethics anyway. Look at how easily people turn to butchering their neighbours and perhaps the human race has about the same amount of ethics as a cat.
The book review talks about the "hero" having little feelings about his girlfriend dying while he is shopping. But as we shop for candy and luxury goods and speculate on the latest ship or bitch how camera phones are crap PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM HUNGER. Do we give a damn about them? I don't. Oh sure when you corner me on the street and shove a tv-camera in my face I will say I care but really I don't. If I did I would do something about it and I don't. None of us do. Well at least not enough of us to make any difference.
Oh well at least you and I feel torn about it. Better then some of the posters who prefer books that say "everything is going to be alright". We are all consumer slaves but at least some of us are aware of it. Like alcoholism the first step is admitting you got a problem. The real problem is all the steps that come after it. Looks like a long journey, better have a drink first to encourage us.
What do you say? Fuck off ford? Drop dead ford? Who gives a damn what ford would say about what I do with my car. If I setup a business to buy regular cars and hack them and sell them on, or setup a business that sell parts to hack existing cars then that is all 100% legal and is pretty normal business practice. The only people with a right to say what you can and can not do with a car are the people who elected goverment to enforce certain rules. (any car model on the road has to be tested, hack a car enough and you got to have it tested as well)
Similiar Apple has no business controlling what others do with their hardware. If people want to replace the software on it so it can be used with another service then that is their right. Just like ford can't say anything about you converting a petrol powered car to a gas powered car apple should keep it mouth shut. Anyone defending apple is a sucker for advertising. Just because Apple had that 1985 ad doesn't mean it is really a freedom company. Carefully read Mac owners posts and you will see that Apple is just an MS without the money but a "cooler" image.
Just replace apple with MS and see if you think the same about the story.
It has been widely reported that in fact Apple does not make money on iTunes, it makes its money on the iPod. iTunes is there to boost iPod sales not the other way around.
I thought this had been reported often enough by now.
Personally I call your examples examples of unwanted advertising. It is a bit to close to those "welcome cards" you get when you moved house or similar stuff around child births or leaving school. STOP BUGGING ME ALREADY
Then again I just don't like advertising at all, kinda suffering from an allergic reaction after an overdose.
And that is really what has happened. So much unwanted advertising has appeared with so few obeying even the simplest of rules that now though laws have to be enforced. We only have a speed limit because people can't drive at safe speed. We only got advertising laws because companies can't advertise responsibly.
There are still other ways to advertise. Cold calling people no matter how you disguise it has gone. The company you described as being responsible has become the victim of the countless of bad companies. Sad but there are worse things.
Microsoft Wants More Credit for other peoples Inventions
Nothing new here. MS has never invented a single thing they just copied whatever anybody else had done and then marketted it. Sometimes it sold a lot better, often it didn't. (OS and Office sold well, phones/gameconsoles/tv's/movie software/soundcard (remember that MS originally did not support soundblaster out of the box the default soundcard in favor of their own offering?) flightsims and PDA's are kinda undecided along with games.)
But it certainly never invented anything in the old sense of the word. Sadly this is true for the computer as we use it as a whole. There are lots of hardware advances but the desktop we use has pretty much been "invented" by xerox and copied by everyone else.
Funny, xerox executives once owned the "idea" of the current pc. Where are they now?
But gates is nonetheless right, what they are doing, patenting bloody obvious ideas is indeed more important. Cause it don't matter shit if you got tons of prior art. If MS decides to fight you they got billions in the bank to pay an army of lawyers and you got nothing. Only and IBM or Sony can stand up to MS in such a battle. Scary eh? IBM the "bad guy" in the Apple 1985 ad now being the defender against patent suits against linux (on the basis that IBM has got so many patents everyone is infringing them, "Evil patenter: Linux is infringing my patent your honor! IBM: Your honor I got here a list of patents Evil patenter is infringing. Cue entry of dumptruck with list)
Oh well Bill Gates spouting crap. Stop giving press conferences and go tell your people to finish Windows-64, get a move on longhorn, fix the outstanding bugs in IE and just get a bloody move on.
Any user of a 64 bit x86 system should expect all 32 bit applications for that system to "just work".
I smell a troll. If you actually spend any time setting up an AMD-64 with linux you know that it is all still very experimental (and this is clearly told on user forums). Basically it is only for people who really know what they are doing. If anyone told you it was plug and play then go kick them.
As for stability, I have setup up three opteron servers with gentoo (none of that binary crap for me thank you except for some reason I needed the binary of grub) and after the nightmare of installation the machines have behaved perfectly. 100% uptime. Granted nothing unusual there. My joke hardware home linux machines don't crash either once I finished with installation (What I mean is that recently I added an tv-tuner to my linux desktop machine, after the new kernel was installed whenever I used alsamixer to open the line-in or anything else I had a hang. Changed to latest kernel changed some options (had alsa running inside and outside the kernel) and now I have a stable machine again, so plenty of crashes during installation, none once I get it working (I first installed the tv-tuner in my W2k3 game machine and it the view app constanly "hanged" the machine.).
AMD-64 for desktop is definitly still in beta stages (maybe changed now my experience was about half a year ago) and while I messed with it there was/is an awfull lot of stuff not ready. Expecting everything to "just work" shows you are not a real linux user. Go buy an Apple and wait for the next version of Mac OS-X. Apple is the "just work" company and people say they are very good at it. Beta linux is for the geeks who enjoy a challenge. "Just work" is not much fun.
Apply == just work, windows == More choices but more headaches, linux == Do or do not there is no try, BSD == Abandon all hope yea who enter here.
Intel and MS are not all that buddy buddy. Intel does far to much linux stuff for MS liking and MS and AMD have worked together as well. MS might be trying to play them off against each other.
Basically the question is how bad is the beta. We know that SP2 is bad because people who use it say it is. So how is the XP-64 beta holding up? Does it work or not? Is it slow? No support for hardware? If there are real enormous gigantic bugs then MS couldn't release without getting burned once again.
Can MS really be so crap as to take years and years to make a 64 bit version of windows where a bunch of hippies had it ready in days? Well linux runs on real hardware as well, hardware that been 64-bit for ever so they had a head start. As to MS being that crap. I remember Windows 3.0 do you?
You should have been there with the change from floppy to cd. Or how about the number of games nowadays with bog standard sound since very few people have stuff like EAX anymore?
At least most games nowadays support more then one resolution (yes I am talking about you bioware).
64-bit is going to take an awfull lot of time to make it into games. Look for the ID and Epic games to support it first. They are the front runners. Everyone else will be trailing way way behind.
64 bit has perhaps the biggest advantage in games as well as they are about the only application in home PC's that really push a modern machine. Then again just check how many people still game with 128mb memory. 64-bit? Not any time soon.
There is no reason except possibly that there is some urgent need for the result to be known in a few minutes after the ballots close. Media might like this but media also likes to show boobies and goverment doesn't let them do that either.
Another possible idea is that electronic voting is cheaper as it saves on paper. I heard someone suggest this once and wasn't entirely sure if it was serious. Yes a lot of paper is used but compared to the paper used for a simple taxform or indeed any goverment paper it is only 1 big sheet every four years. Can be recycled paper too.
So electronic voting is vaster but who cares, it is once per 2 years in the US I think, do a few extra hours matters to anyone but CNN? It costs in paper but who cares again as you can use recycled paper and at the end all the paper is neatly collected into stacked piles ready to be recycled again.
So there really is no reason. It just looks fancy. India has an electronic system that seems to work. Kinda says it all about america. When a third world country has a better voting system then the US. Anyone know if Pimsleur has a hindi course?
All the friendly fire incidents in the recent wars were not due to faulty gunnery software. THe fire was accurate just wrongly directed. Do not blaim software for stupid users. The US army has a big problem. It can afford the best hardware but it has to put americans in charge of the firing. For some reason americans just seem to have a problem with fire discipline.
And before you mod me down just check the number of friendly fire incidents in other armies. They have their incidents but to a far lesser extent. Somewhere in the US training their is a role that makes americans shoot in situations where they could have made sure of their target.
Of course that is presuming all the incidents were really accidents. If you are paranoid then this could also seen as a weapons test. Is the patriot system capable of downing a low flying tornado, can a britsh tank be destroyed by an A-10?
I am reminded of the incident where an american warship shotdown an civilian iran airliner. The "excuse" was that the captain thought he was under attack from a flight of iran fighters. Makes sense except if you know just the tiniest bit about modern warfar. In the falkland war modern british warships proved extremely vulnarable to argentinian(not sure about the country) air-to-ship missles. So any captain under attack from the air should be extremely worried. Iran had the same kind of missles but with several years more advancement.
So why exactly did the captain only fire 1 missles at what he claimed he thought was a wing of incoming fighters (an airliner has a far bigger radar signature then a fighter). Why were no-other orders given like increasing speed for better manuavrabity, preperation for firefighting, preperation for missle intercepting defences, call for air support etc etc etc. Why when the missles hit was the claim maid "we got him" not them, or any question of "where are the other" why was he totally not looking for a second attack wave? Why was there no suprise when they found the wreckage?
Of course only a paranoid person could possible question the outcome of the hearing that totally failed to ask any of these questions.
The prove? The US goverments has made contributions to opensource itself, the pinko hippies of the NSA for one:P
And if it is such software as used to direct guns I would bloody well hope they check it and check it again. But I would be puzzled why it would be opensource, I never really felt the need for to control a howitzer. Well actually I felt the need but am not allowed to.
Lets not forget that in a not so distant past it was the military that developed computers NOT private companies. The idea of the an army buying its software from the shelf is a rather new idea and not one that makes a lot of sense. Almost everything they use is specially developed on their order, why should software be different?
Can anyone confirm if US army linux use is a "standard" distro or have they rolled their own?
Isn't the NSA (Somekind of security agency of the US don't ask me I am not an american) one of the contributors of the Linux kernel? So presumably the NSA knows a thing or two about code as their code has been accepted into the main kernel. If anything therefore opensource should not be accepted by non-us goverments as IT ABOSLUTLY 100% CERTAIN contains american code:P (Wgat little I know about the NSA is from movies and they are never the good guys)
Anyway you don't need opensource and foreign goverments to include bugs. MS has been doing it for years. They put them in and seem to have the greatest difficulty getting them out.
No these are just the bleatings of a scared CEO worried that opensource will make closed source less and less attractive. What he is saying that the US goverment should buy complete solutions and not worry about the cost or the bugs or that they can't check it or fix it or add things they need.
The US goverment and a lot of others could easily develop their own OS. With opensource they don't have to but I would be extremely suprised if the US military does not have experts in its service who understand every little bit of the linux kernel. The MS kernel is another matter as been proven by the continues delays in XP service packs, even MS doesn't understand its own software. At least with opensource you can always take a look youreselve AND FIX WHAT YOU FIND.
What MS shared source initiative? Well there are plenty of service men around here, anyone ever seen a US-army compiled version of a windows OS? No? So unlike Linux even a giant like the US army can't roll their own Windows version, minus unneeded security risks + extra security, you know like they done with Linux?
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Guess I will just show your post next time some windows fanboy complains about rm -Rf * being so complex.
And your right, I don;t know how to admin a windows network. But I do seem to remember that you can write your own windows install script and tell it not to install games. then again I just laughed at the person explaining how to do it and went back to my graphical linux installer and let him mess with cli on windows.
That is why corruption and abuses of power can continue because those below are being spoil sports if they talk about it.
Oh you spot tax payers money being wasted but stay in official channels at all cost, no matter that this means it will never get solved. That is the system and the system must be obeyed.
Fucking goverment drone.
Just find out where they live and drive around the block with the windows open and the radio turned up and play "how much is that doggie in the window" the dog chorus version. Get a team and take shifts. All perfectly legal. Just an annoyance they got to put up with.
The starwars song make fun of starwars but far less of the original song. of course humor is really hard to classify as it is to depended on taste. You could even question if the most recent starwars song is a parody or satire at all. It seems closer to a tribute. Meaning he just used the original work to create a new work without any attempt at parody or satire.
So basically you are not allowed to make "hidden" traps or in anyway deliberatly cause injury to a burglar. So you are allowed a spiked fence but you are not allowed to put up spikes behind the fence hidden under tall grass. You are allowed to use plain glass windows (and if he falls and impales himself on a smashed piece of glass that is not your fault) but you better make sure the glass is properly secured. No little trick with making the glass really lightly attached at the top so that when smashed any shard will come plunging down at the lightest touch.
Same with cars. Any car anti-theft device may not make the car dangerous. So no 100.000 volt charges through the seat or disabling the brakes or fun stuff like that.
Why? As said to stop people from taking the law into their own hands. Or would you prefer to go back to the time when all the land belonged to the local lord and he could have you flogged for "stealing" wood?
Never mind that in holland everyone who owned a radio receiver needed to pay a license fee already so that everyone in the store was almost 100% certain already paying for the radio program. They wanted us to pay extra just because of it.
Still it might work on those assholes with cheap headphones in public places. Charge them for all the people who can hear their music. That should soon teach them to get some decent ones that keep the music inside.
You don't want to be hauled off by the cops and be faced with charges of being a danger on the road AND copyright infringement. Merely risking killing people in a crash is far less of a crime then having an illegal movie. They may just throw away the key for the last one.
Oh well just call me an old dinosaur who can't keep up with modern times. Except one tiny little problem Lucasarts. I BOUGHT all the old games. Now I don't anymore because while I now have far more money coming in I think your games are not worthy of me spending money anymore. Should lucasarts care? Only in so far as any company should care about losing a once loyal customer.
If you really have to figure out undocumented code you are going to follow the path, so if a function is called and you don't know what it does you look up the function and see. It is a nightmare but at least it can be done. Stored procedures add hidding function calls. You don't see it. Sure it can be figured out but I see the world divided in to two groups. Those who use stored procedures and who never have to figure out someone elses code. Those who do. The first like stored procedures. The latter hates them.
I like the three tier approach. Seperate presentation from business logic and storage. It is kinda unixie. Small applications that each do what they are best at. Databases are not programming languages.
Of course it is easy to use stored procedures as it enforces database rules, it is much easier to use myscl auto_incremenet feature then to write your own code to make unique ID's. However if you were looking at the code and you are any good at programming you should be wondering were the hell that ID number is filled. As said it is bad for a programmer when variables just change value without it being reflected in the code.
But of course this is just from my experience and from being taught by people who didn't like stored procedures. Others will have been raised differently and be capable of giving excellent reasons for their use. I think the only way to reach a compromise is for the code to reflect exactly via comments when a stored procedure will be called. Comments in code that are usefull. HA, that will be the day.
BSD license is nice if you want to take and give nothing back. the GPL requires you to give back so only companies that want to be part of the community can take part. Now lets have a little check about major companies back Linux vs BSD eh? IBM HP Novell etc etc vs ehm Apple. Oh I am sure there are some BSD users I left out but my excuse for that is that BSD users might never notice as companies that use BSD code never need to tell. Is MS using modified BSD code? Who knows, if they used modified GPL code we would know (MS is a lot of things but would never be stupid enough to set them self up like that, gates is shrewd enough to know wich laws to break and wich not to break)
BSD license has a "nicer" philopsphy behind it. It basically leaves people free to do whatever they want. Problem is that if you allow people to just take without giving that is exactly what they will be doing. The GPL forces people to play nice. Why should you be free to use my code without ever giving back?
BSD is old style logging, chop everything down then move on to the next tree. Linux is sustainable logging. Replace each cut down tree with a new one so the next generation will have a forest as well.
Right law for the job.
So I think your argument is crap. Ford has a responsibilty to provide repairs for my vehicle right up to the point that I void my warranty. So just make doing anything with your iPod void your warranty, I think you will find that this is current practice already.
They sell hardware. They have a duty to repair the hardware on warranty and to provide repairs of faulty components. One of the components is the software. They got no rights to tell me what I can and cannot do with it and they got no rights to tell a third party what they can and cannot do with it. Want a clear example? Third party addons for game consoles. Or do you think nintendo/sony/ms like all those "unofficial" cheaper and often better items? Who buys a nintendo GBA cable when the unofficial is better and cheaper? How much succes has nintendo has in banning this? Banning the afterburner for instance? Despite the fact the afterburner clearly eats into the profits as for less money you get a better product.
Sorry but I feel strongly about this subject. Sell the bloody hardware and then get out of my life. What next, the baker deciding what I can put on my bread?
You are well into the realms of pure fantasy. No basis in real life whatsoever. Women being able to avoid men that are bad for them. Yeah right you are even incapable of it yourselve. You reject him just because of his name. That is rational. We all know you can tell the wifebeaters by their given name.
Damn to late the future is now. You do use some big words, googled for them? Pity you can't google grammar eh?
Just messing with you, not like I could do much better but then english ain't my first language.
As for advertising and american education, the rest of the world is just a few years behind, I once saw a documentary on kids in an american school being forced to watch commercials. The companies who owned the ads had paid for the lessons so if you didn't watch you were BANNED from class. It was a few years ago and I only saw half of the program so it could have been a spoof. It was supposed to be in one of the more depressed areas of big city.
Anyway we have long since passed the point of sponsored kantines and sponsored school books. We can bitch all we want about it but as long as we allow campaigns that promise tax cuts and don't gas people that vote based on this we can't expect anything else. He who promises the biggest cuts gets the power, to make the cuts he needs to cut money to schools. Then "industry" steps in but they don't do it for free.
Someone else commented how this kinda of future requires a lot of people to overcome their ethics. No it doesn't, it just requires everyone to make a tiny little adjustment of their ethics every couple of years. That is presuming people have ethics anyway. Look at how easily people turn to butchering their neighbours and perhaps the human race has about the same amount of ethics as a cat.
The book review talks about the "hero" having little feelings about his girlfriend dying while he is shopping. But as we shop for candy and luxury goods and speculate on the latest ship or bitch how camera phones are crap PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM HUNGER. Do we give a damn about them? I don't. Oh sure when you corner me on the street and shove a tv-camera in my face I will say I care but really I don't. If I did I would do something about it and I don't. None of us do. Well at least not enough of us to make any difference.
Oh well at least you and I feel torn about it. Better then some of the posters who prefer books that say "everything is going to be alright". We are all consumer slaves but at least some of us are aware of it. Like alcoholism the first step is admitting you got a problem. The real problem is all the steps that come after it. Looks like a long journey, better have a drink first to encourage us.
Similiar Apple has no business controlling what others do with their hardware. If people want to replace the software on it so it can be used with another service then that is their right. Just like ford can't say anything about you converting a petrol powered car to a gas powered car apple should keep it mouth shut. Anyone defending apple is a sucker for advertising. Just because Apple had that 1985 ad doesn't mean it is really a freedom company. Carefully read Mac owners posts and you will see that Apple is just an MS without the money but a "cooler" image.
Just replace apple with MS and see if you think the same about the story.
I thought this had been reported often enough by now.
Then again I just don't like advertising at all, kinda suffering from an allergic reaction after an overdose.
And that is really what has happened. So much unwanted advertising has appeared with so few obeying even the simplest of rules that now though laws have to be enforced. We only have a speed limit because people can't drive at safe speed. We only got advertising laws because companies can't advertise responsibly.
There are still other ways to advertise. Cold calling people no matter how you disguise it has gone. The company you described as being responsible has become the victim of the countless of bad companies. Sad but there are worse things.
Nothing new here. MS has never invented a single thing they just copied whatever anybody else had done and then marketted it. Sometimes it sold a lot better, often it didn't. (OS and Office sold well, phones/gameconsoles/tv's/movie software/soundcard (remember that MS originally did not support soundblaster out of the box the default soundcard in favor of their own offering?) flightsims and PDA's are kinda undecided along with games.)
But it certainly never invented anything in the old sense of the word. Sadly this is true for the computer as we use it as a whole. There are lots of hardware advances but the desktop we use has pretty much been "invented" by xerox and copied by everyone else.
Funny, xerox executives once owned the "idea" of the current pc. Where are they now?
But gates is nonetheless right, what they are doing, patenting bloody obvious ideas is indeed more important. Cause it don't matter shit if you got tons of prior art. If MS decides to fight you they got billions in the bank to pay an army of lawyers and you got nothing. Only and IBM or Sony can stand up to MS in such a battle. Scary eh? IBM the "bad guy" in the Apple 1985 ad now being the defender against patent suits against linux (on the basis that IBM has got so many patents everyone is infringing them, "Evil patenter: Linux is infringing my patent your honor! IBM: Your honor I got here a list of patents Evil patenter is infringing. Cue entry of dumptruck with list)
Oh well Bill Gates spouting crap. Stop giving press conferences and go tell your people to finish Windows-64, get a move on longhorn, fix the outstanding bugs in IE and just get a bloody move on.
I smell a troll. If you actually spend any time setting up an AMD-64 with linux you know that it is all still very experimental (and this is clearly told on user forums). Basically it is only for people who really know what they are doing. If anyone told you it was plug and play then go kick them.
As for stability, I have setup up three opteron servers with gentoo (none of that binary crap for me thank you except for some reason I needed the binary of grub) and after the nightmare of installation the machines have behaved perfectly. 100% uptime. Granted nothing unusual there. My joke hardware home linux machines don't crash either once I finished with installation (What I mean is that recently I added an tv-tuner to my linux desktop machine, after the new kernel was installed whenever I used alsamixer to open the line-in or anything else I had a hang. Changed to latest kernel changed some options (had alsa running inside and outside the kernel) and now I have a stable machine again, so plenty of crashes during installation, none once I get it working (I first installed the tv-tuner in my W2k3 game machine and it the view app constanly "hanged" the machine.).
AMD-64 for desktop is definitly still in beta stages (maybe changed now my experience was about half a year ago) and while I messed with it there was/is an awfull lot of stuff not ready. Expecting everything to "just work" shows you are not a real linux user. Go buy an Apple and wait for the next version of Mac OS-X. Apple is the "just work" company and people say they are very good at it. Beta linux is for the geeks who enjoy a challenge. "Just work" is not much fun.
Apply == just work, windows == More choices but more headaches, linux == Do or do not there is no try, BSD == Abandon all hope yea who enter here.
Basically the question is how bad is the beta. We know that SP2 is bad because people who use it say it is. So how is the XP-64 beta holding up? Does it work or not? Is it slow? No support for hardware? If there are real enormous gigantic bugs then MS couldn't release without getting burned once again.
Can MS really be so crap as to take years and years to make a 64 bit version of windows where a bunch of hippies had it ready in days? Well linux runs on real hardware as well, hardware that been 64-bit for ever so they had a head start. As to MS being that crap. I remember Windows 3.0 do you?
At least most games nowadays support more then one resolution (yes I am talking about you bioware).
64-bit is going to take an awfull lot of time to make it into games. Look for the ID and Epic games to support it first. They are the front runners. Everyone else will be trailing way way behind.
64 bit has perhaps the biggest advantage in games as well as they are about the only application in home PC's that really push a modern machine. Then again just check how many people still game with 128mb memory. 64-bit? Not any time soon.
Another possible idea is that electronic voting is cheaper as it saves on paper. I heard someone suggest this once and wasn't entirely sure if it was serious. Yes a lot of paper is used but compared to the paper used for a simple taxform or indeed any goverment paper it is only 1 big sheet every four years. Can be recycled paper too.
So electronic voting is vaster but who cares, it is once per 2 years in the US I think, do a few extra hours matters to anyone but CNN? It costs in paper but who cares again as you can use recycled paper and at the end all the paper is neatly collected into stacked piles ready to be recycled again.
So there really is no reason. It just looks fancy. India has an electronic system that seems to work. Kinda says it all about america. When a third world country has a better voting system then the US. Anyone know if Pimsleur has a hindi course?
And before you mod me down just check the number of friendly fire incidents in other armies. They have their incidents but to a far lesser extent. Somewhere in the US training their is a role that makes americans shoot in situations where they could have made sure of their target.
Of course that is presuming all the incidents were really accidents. If you are paranoid then this could also seen as a weapons test. Is the patriot system capable of downing a low flying tornado, can a britsh tank be destroyed by an A-10?
I am reminded of the incident where an american warship shotdown an civilian iran airliner. The "excuse" was that the captain thought he was under attack from a flight of iran fighters. Makes sense except if you know just the tiniest bit about modern warfar. In the falkland war modern british warships proved extremely vulnarable to argentinian(not sure about the country) air-to-ship missles. So any captain under attack from the air should be extremely worried. Iran had the same kind of missles but with several years more advancement.
So why exactly did the captain only fire 1 missles at what he claimed he thought was a wing of incoming fighters (an airliner has a far bigger radar signature then a fighter). Why were no-other orders given like increasing speed for better manuavrabity, preperation for firefighting, preperation for missle intercepting defences, call for air support etc etc etc. Why when the missles hit was the claim maid "we got him" not them, or any question of "where are the other" why was he totally not looking for a second attack wave? Why was there no suprise when they found the wreckage?
Of course only a paranoid person could possible question the outcome of the hearing that totally failed to ask any of these questions.
And if it is such software as used to direct guns I would bloody well hope they check it and check it again. But I would be puzzled why it would be opensource, I never really felt the need for to control a howitzer. Well actually I felt the need but am not allowed to.
Lets not forget that in a not so distant past it was the military that developed computers NOT private companies. The idea of the an army buying its software from the shelf is a rather new idea and not one that makes a lot of sense. Almost everything they use is specially developed on their order, why should software be different?
Can anyone confirm if US army linux use is a "standard" distro or have they rolled their own?
Anyway you don't need opensource and foreign goverments to include bugs. MS has been doing it for years. They put them in and seem to have the greatest difficulty getting them out.
No these are just the bleatings of a scared CEO worried that opensource will make closed source less and less attractive. What he is saying that the US goverment should buy complete solutions and not worry about the cost or the bugs or that they can't check it or fix it or add things they need.
The US goverment and a lot of others could easily develop their own OS. With opensource they don't have to but I would be extremely suprised if the US military does not have experts in its service who understand every little bit of the linux kernel. The MS kernel is another matter as been proven by the continues delays in XP service packs, even MS doesn't understand its own software. At least with opensource you can always take a look youreselve AND FIX WHAT YOU FIND.
What MS shared source initiative? Well there are plenty of service men around here, anyone ever seen a US-army compiled version of a windows OS? No? So unlike Linux even a giant like the US army can't roll their own Windows version, minus unneeded security risks + extra security, you know like they done with Linux?